Hugo Awards: Novellas & Novelettes (Volume 3)
Author: Anthology
Date: 2021-01-02 05:00:00+00:00
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Hugo Awards
The Novellas and Novelettes
Volume 3: 2000-2018
(custom book cover)
Jerry eBooks
Title Page
Bibliography
2000
WINNERS
The Winds of Marble Arch - Connie Willis
10^16 to 1 - James Patrick Kelly
NOMINEES
Son Observe the Time - Kage Baker

The Astronaut from Wyoming - Adam-Troy Castro and Jerry Oltion

Forty, Counting Down - Harry Turtledove
Hunting the Snark - Mike Resnick
Fossil Games - Tom Purdom
Stellar Harvest - Eleanor Arnason

The Secret History of the Ornithopter - Jan Lars Jensen

Border Guards - Greg Egan
The Chop Girl - Ian R. MacLeod
2001
WINNERS
The Ultimate Earth - Ian R. MacLeod
Millennium Babies - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
NOMINEES
The Retrieval Artist - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Seventy-Two Letters - Ted Chiang
A Roll of the Dice - Catherine Asaro
Oracle - Greg Egan
Radiant Green Star - Lucius Shepard
Generation Gap - Stanley Schmidt
Agape Among the Robots - Allen Steele
On the Orion Line - Stephen Baxter
Redchapel - Mike Resnick
2002
WINNERS
Fast Time at Fairmont High - Vernor Vinge
Hell is the Abscence God - Ted Chiang
NOMINEES
Stealing Alabama - Allen Steele
The Diamond Pit - Jack Dann
May Be Some Time - Brenda W. Clough
The Chief Designer - Andy Duncan
The Days Between - Allen Steele
Undone - James Patrick Kelly
Lobsters - Charles Stross
The Return of Spring - Shane Tourtellotte
2003
WINNERS
Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Slow Life - Michael Swanwick
NOMINEES
A Year in the Linear City - Paul Di Filippo

The Political Officer - Charles Coleman Finlay

Breathmoss - Ian R. MacLeod
Bronte’s Egg - Richard Chwedyk
In Spirit - Pat Forde
The Wild Girls - Ursula K. Le Guin
Presence - Maureen F. McHugh
Madonna of the Maquiladora - Gregory Frost
Halo - Charles Stross
2004
WINNERS
The Cookie Monster - Vernor Vinge
Legions in Time - Michael Swanwick
NOMINEES
Walk in Silence - Catherine Asaro
The Empress of Mars - Kage Baker

The Green Leopard Plague - Walter Jon Williams

Just Like the Ones We Used to Know - Connie Willis

The Empire of Ice Cream - Jeffrey Ford
Nightfall - Charles Stross
Bernardo’s House - James Patrick Kelly
Hexagons - Robert Reed
Into the Gardens of Sweet Night - Jay Lake
2005
WINNERS
The Concrete Jungle - Charles Stross
The Faery Handbag - Kelly Link
NOMINEES
Winterfair Gifts - Lois McMaster Bujold
Time Ablaze - Michael A. Burstein
Sergeant Chip - Bradley Denton
Elector - Charles Stross

The People of Sand and Slag - Paolo Bacigalupi

The Voluntary State - Christopher Rowe

The Clapping Hands of God - Michael F. Flynn

Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes” by Ben Rosenbaum - Benjamin Rosenbaum

2006
WINNERS
Inside Job - Connie Willis
Two Hearts - Peter S. Beagle
NOMINEES
Identity Theft - Robert J. Sawyer
The Little Goddess - Ian McDonald
Magic for Beginners - Kelly Link
Burn - James Patrick Kelly
I, Robot - Cory Doctorow
Telepresence - Michael A. Burstein
The Calorie Man - Paolo Bacigalupi
The King of Where-I-Go - Howard Waldrop
2007
WINNERS
A Billion Eves - Robert Reed
The Djinn’s Wife - Ian McDonald
NOMINEES
Inclination - William Shunn
The Walls of the Universe - Paul Melko

Julian: A Christmas Story - Robert Charles Wilson

Lord Weary’s Empire - Michael Swanwick

All the Things You Are - Mike Resnick

Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth - Michael F. Flynn

Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy) - Geoff Ryman

Yellow Card Man - Paolo Bacigalupi
2008
WINNERS
All Seated on the Ground - Paolo Bacigalupi

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate - Ted Chiang

NOMINEES
Recovering Apollo 8 - Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Memorare - Gene Wolfe
The Fountain of Age - Nancy Kress
Stars Seen Through Stone - Lucius Shepard

The Cambist and Lord Iron: A Fairy Tale of Economics - Daniel Abraham

Glory - Greg Egan
Dark Integers - Greg Egan
Finisterra - David Moles
2009
WINNERS
The Erdmann Nexus - Nancy Kress
Shoggoths in Bloom - Elizabeth Bear
NOMINEES
The Tear - Ian McDonald

The Political Prisoner - Charles Coleman Finlay

True Names - Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Truth - Robert Reed

Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders - Mike Resnick

Pride and Prometheus - John Kessel

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story - James Alan Gardner

The Gambler - Paolo Bacigalupi
2010
WINNERS
Palimpsest - Charles Stross
The Island - Charles Stross
NOMINEES
Shambling Towards Hiroshima - James Morrow
Vishnu at the Cat Circus - Ian McDonald
Act One - Nancy Kress
The Women of Nell Gwynne’s - Kage Baker
The God Engines - John Scalzi
One of Our Bastards is Missing - Paul Cornell

Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast - Eugie Foster

Eros, Philia, Agape - Rachel Swirsky
It Takes Two - Nicola Griffith
Overtime - Charles Stross
2011
WINNERS

The Lifecycle of Software Objects - Ted Chiang

The Emperor of Mars - Allen M. Steele

NOMINEES

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window - Rachel Swirsky

Troika - Alastair Reynolds

The Sultan of the Clouds - Geoffrey A. Landis

The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon - Elizabeth Hand

The Jaguar House, in Shadow - Aliette de Bodard

Eight Miles - Sean McMullen

That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made - Eric James Stone

Plus or Minus - James Patrick Kelly
2012
WINNERS
The Man Who Bridged the Mist - Kij Johnson
Six Months, Three Days - Charlie Jane Anders
NOMINEES
Kiss Me Twice - Mary Robinette Kowal
Countdown - Seanan McGuire

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary - Ken Liu

Silently and Very Fast - Catherynne M. Valente

The Ice Owl - Carolyn Ives Gilman
Fields of God - Rachel Swirsky
The Copenhagen Interpretation - Paul Cornell
What We Found - Geoff Ryman
Ray of Light - Brad R. Torgersen
2013
WINNERS
The Emperor’s Soul - Brandon Sanderson

The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi - Pat Cadigan

NOMINEES

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall - Nancy Kress

San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats - Seanan McGuire

The Stars Do Not Lie - Jay Lake

On a Redtstation, Drifting - Aliette de Bodard

The Boy Who Cast No Shadow - Thomas Olde Heuvelt

In Sea-Salt Tears - Seanan McGuire
Fade to White - Catherynne M. Valente
Rat-Catcher - Seanan McGuire
2014
WINNERS
Equoid - Charles Stross

The Lady Astronaut of Mars - Mary Robinette Kowal

NOMINEES
Six-Gun Snow White - Catherynne M. Valente
The Butcher of Khardov - Dan Wells
The Chaplain’s Legacy - Brad R. Torgersen

Wakulla Springs - Ellen Klages and Andy Duncan

The Exchange Officers - Brad R. Torgersen
The Waiting Stars - Aliette de Bodard
Opera Vita Aeterna (missing) - Vox Day

The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling - Ted Chiang

2015
WINNERS
Flow - Arlan Andrews, Sr.

The Day the World Turned Upside Down - Thomas Olde Heuvelt

NOMINEES

Big Boys Don’t Cry - Tom Kratman

Pale Realms of Shade (missing) - John C. Wright

The Plural of Helen of Troy - John C. Wright

One Bright Star to Guide Them - John C. Wright

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium - Gray Rinehart

The Journeyman: In the Stone House - Michael F. Flynn

The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale - Rajnar Vajra

Championship B’Tok - Edward M. Lerner
2016
WINNERS
Binti - Nnedi Okorafor
Folding Beijing - Hao Jingfang
NOMINEES
Perfect State - Brandon Sanderson
Slow Bullets - Alastair Reynolds
Penric’s Demon - Lois McMaster Bujold
The Builders - Daniel Polansky

And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead - Brooke Bolander

Flashpoint: Titan (missing) - Benjamin Cheah

What Price Humanity? (missing) - David VanDyke

Obits - Stephen King
2017
WINNERS
Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire
The Tomato Thief - Ursula Vernon
NOMINEES
This Census Taker - China Miéville
The Ballad of Black Tom - Victor LaValle
Penric and the Shaman - Lois McMaster Bujold

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (missing) - Kij Johnson

A Taste of Honey (missing) - Kai Ashante Wilson

Alien Stripper Boned From Behind The T-Rex (missing) - Stix Hiscock

Touring with the Alien - Carolyn Ives Gilman

The Jewel and Her Lapidary - Fran Wilde

You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay - Alyssa Wong

The Art of Space Travel - Nina Allan
2018
WINNERS
All Systems Red - Martha Wells
The Secret Life of Bots - Suzanne Palmer
NOMINEES
Binti: Home - Nnedi Okorafor
And Then There Were (N-One) - Sarah Pinsker
River of Teeth - Sarah Gailey

Down Among the Sticks and Bones - Seanan McGuire

The Black Tides of Heaven - JY Yang
A Series of Steaks - Vina Jie-Min Prasad
Extracurricular Activities - Yoon Ha Lee

Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time - K.M. Szpara

Children of Thorns, Children of Water - Aliette de Bodard

Wind Will Rove - Sarah Pinsker

Boldface story title = Winner

2000

Best Novella

The Winds of Marble Arch, (Connie Willis), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November, October 1999

Son, Observe the Time, (Kage Baker), Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 1999

The Astronaut from Wyoming, (Adam-Troy Castro and Jerry Oltion), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 1999

Forty, Counting Down, (Harry Turtledove), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1999

Hunting the Snark, (Mike Resnick), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1999

Best Novelette

10^16 to 1, (James Patrick Kelly), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 1999

Fossil Games, (Tom Purdom), Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 1999

Stellar Harvest, (Eleanor Arnason), Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 1999

The Secret History of the Ornithopter, (Jan Lars Jensen), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1999

Border Guards, (Greg Egan), Interzone #148, October 1999

The Chop Girl, (Ian R. MacLeod), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1999

2001

Best Novella

The Ultimate Earth, (Jack Williamson), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2000

The Retrieval Artist, (Kristine Kathryn Rusch), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2000

Seventy-Two Letters, (Ted Chiang), Vanishing Acts, June 2000

A Roll of the Dice, (Catherine Asaro), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 2000

Oracle, (Greg Egan), Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2000

Radiant Green Star, (Lucius Shepard), Asimov’s Science Fiction, August 2000

Best Novelette

Millennium Babies, (Kristine Kathryn Rusch), Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2000

Generation Gap, (Stanley Schmidt), Artemis #1, Spring 2000

Agape Among the Robots, (Allen Steele), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2000

On the Orion Line, (Stephen Baxter), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2000

Redchapel, (Mike Resnick), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2000

2002

Best Novella

Fast Times at Fairmont High, (Vernor Vinge), The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge, 2001

Stealing Alabama, (Allen M. Steele), Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2001

The Diamond Pit, (Jack Dann), Jubilee, April 2001

May Be Some Time, (Brenda W. Clough), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2001

The Chief Designer, (Andy Duncan), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2001

Best Novelette

Hell is the Absence of God, (Ted Chiang), Starlight #3, July 2001

The Days Between, (Allen Steele), Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2001

Undone, (James Patrick Kelly), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2001

Lobsters, (Charles Stross), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2001

The Return of Spring, (Shane Tourtellotte), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2001

2003

Best Novella

Coraline, (Neil Gaiman), Nebula Awards Showcase, March 2005

A Year in the Linear City, (Paul Di Filippo), A Year in the Linear City, April 2002

The Political Officer, (Charles Coleman Finlay), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2002

Breathmoss, (Ian R. MacLeod), Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 2002

Bronte’s Egg, (Richard Chwedyk), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2002

In Spirit, (Pat Forde), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2002

Best Novelette

Slow Life, (Michael Swanwick), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2002

The Wild Girls, (Ursula K. Le Guin), Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2002

Presence, (Maureen F. McHugh), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, March 2002

Madonna of the Maquiladora, (Gregory Frost), Asimov’s Science Fiction, May 2002

Halo, (Charles Stross), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2002

2004

Best Novella

The Cookie Monster, (Vernor Vinge), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, October 2003

Walk in Silence, (Catherine Asaro), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, April 2003

The Empress of Mars, (Kage Baker), Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2003

The Green Leopard Plague, (Walter Jon Williams), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2003

Just Like the Ones We Used to Know, (Connie Willis), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2003

Best Novelette

Legions in Time, (Michael Swanwick), Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 2003

The Empire of Ice Cream, (Jeffrey Ford), Sci Fiction, February 26, 2003

Nightfall, (Charles Stross), Asimov’s Science Fiction, April 2003

Bernardo’s House, (James Patrick Kelly), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2003

Hexagons, (Robert Reed), Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2003

Into the Gardens of Sweet Night, (Jay Lake), Writers of the Future XIX, September 2003

2005

Best Novella

The Concrete Jungle, (Charles Stross), The Atrocity Archives, May 2004

Winterfair Gifts, (Lois McMaster Bujold), Irresistible Forces, February 2004

Time Ablaze, (Michael A. Burstein), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2004

Sergeant Chip, (Bradley Denton), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 2004

Elector, (Charles Stross), Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2004

Best Novelette

The Faery Handbag, (Kelly Link), The Faery Reel, June 2004

The People of Sand and Slag, (Paolo Bacigalupi), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 2004

The Voluntary State, (Christopher Rowe), Sci Fiction, May 5, 2004

The Clapping Hands of God, (Michael F. Flynn), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 2004

Biographical Notes to “A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes” by Ben Rosenbaum, (Benjamin Rosenbaum), All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, November 2004

2006

Best Novella

Inside Job, (Connie Willis), Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2005

Identity Theft, (Robert J. Sawyer), Down These Dark Spaceways, May 2005

The Little Goddess, (Ian McDonald), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2005

Magic for Beginners, (Kelly Link), Magic for Beginners, July 2005

Burn, (James Patrick Kelly), Burn, November 2005

Best Novelette

Two Hearts, (Peter S. Beagle), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November 2005

I, Robot, (Cory Doctorow), The Infinite Matrix, February 15, 2005

TelePresence, (Michael A. Burstein), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 2005

The Calorie Man, (Paolo Bacigalupi), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October/November

The King of Where-I-Go, (Howard Waldrop), Sci Fiction, December 7, 2005

2007

Best Novella

A Billion Eves, (Robert Reed), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2006

Inclination, (William Shunn), Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2006

The Walls of the Universe, (Paul Melko), Asimov’s Science Fiction, April/May 2006

Julian: A Christmas Story, (Robert Charles Wilson), Julian: A Christmas Story, November 2006

Lord Weary’s Empire, (Michael Swanwick), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2006

Best Novelette

The Djinn’s Wife, (Ian McDonald), Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2006

All the Things You Are, (Mike Resnick), Jim Baen’s Universe, October 2006

Dawn, and Sunset, and the Colours of the Earth, (Michael F Flynn), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2006

Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy), (Geoff Ryman), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 2006

Yellow Card Man, (Paolo Bacigalupi), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2006

2008

Best Novella

All Seated on the Ground, (Connie Willis), All Seated on the Ground, December 2007

Recovering Apollo 8, (Kristine Kathryn Rusch), Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2007

Memorare, (Gene Wolfe), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2007

The Fountain of Age, (Nancy Kress), Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2007

Stars Seen Through Stone, (Lucius Shepard), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 2007

Best Novelette

The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, (Ted Chiang), The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, July 23, 2007

The Cambist and Lord Iron: a Fairytale of Economics, (Daniel Abraham), Logorrhea, May 2007

Glory, (Greg Egan), The New Space Opera, June 2007

Dark Integers, (Greg Egan), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2007

Finisterra, (David Moles), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2007

2009

Best Novella

The Erdmann Nexus, (Nancy Kress), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2008

The Tear, (Ian McDonald), Galactic Empires, February 2008

The Political Prisoner, (Charles Coleman Finlay), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 2008

True Names, (Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow), Fast Forward 2, September 2008

Truth, (Robert Reed), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2008

Best Novelette

Shoggoths in Bloom, (Elizabeth Bear), Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2008

Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders, (Mike Resnick), Asimov’s Science Fiction, January 2008

Pride and Prometheus, (John Kessel), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 2008

The Ray-Gun: A Love Story, (James Alan Gardner), Asimov’s Science Fiction, February 2008

The Gambler, (Paolo Bacigalupi), Fast Forward 2, September 2008

2010

Best Novella

Palimpsest, (Charles Stross), Wireless, July 2009

Shambling Towards Hiroshima, (James Morrow), Shambling Towards Hiroshima, February 2009

Vishnu at the Cat Circus, (Ian McDonald), Cyberabad Days, February 2009

Act One, (Nancy Kress), Asimov’s Science Fiction, March 2009

The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, (Kage Baker), The Women of Nell Gwynne’s, June 30, 2009

The God Engines, (John Scalzi), The God Engines, December 2009

Best Novelette

The Island, (Peter Watts), The New Space Opera 2, July 2009

One of Our Bastards is Missing, (Paul Cornell), The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction: Volume Three, February 2009

Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast (Eugie Foster), Interzone #220, February 2009

Eros, Philia, Agape, (Rachel Swirsky), Tor.com, March 3, 2009

It Takes Two, (Nicola Griffith), Eclipse Three, October 2009

Overtime, (Charles Stross), Tor.com, December 22, 2009

2011

Best Novella

The Lifecycle of Software Objects, (Ted Chiang), The Lifecycle of Software Objects, July 2010

The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window, (Rachel Swirsky), Subterranean Magazine, Summer, August 2010

Troika, (Alastair Reynolds), Godlike Machines, September 10, 2010

The Sultan of the Clouds, (Geoffrey A. Landis), Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2010

The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon, (Elizabeth Hand), Stories: All New Tales, June 1, 2010

Best Novelette

The Emperor of Mars, (Allen M. Steele), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2010

The Jaguar House, in Shadow, (Aliette de Bodard), Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2010

Eight Miles, (Sean McMullen), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2010

That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made, (Eric James Stone), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2010

Plus or Minus, (James Patrick Kelly), Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2010

2012

Best Novella

The Man Who Bridged the Mist, (Kij Johnson), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October-November 2011

Kiss Me Twice, (Mary Robinette Kowal), Asimov’s Science Fiction, June 2011

Countdown, (Seanan McGuire), Countdown, August 2011

The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary, (Ken Liu), Panverse 3, September 2011

Silently and Very Fast, (Catherynne M. Valente), Clarkesworld Magazine #61, October-December 2011

The Ice Owl, (Carolyn Ives Gilman), The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 2011

Best Novelette

Six Months, Three Days, (Charlie Jane Anders), Tor.com, June 8, 2011

Fields of Gold, (Rachel Swirsky), Eclipse Four, May 2011

The Copenhagen Interpretation, (Paul Cornell), Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2011

What We Found, (Geoff Ryman), The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 2011

Ray of Light, (Brad R. Torgersen), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2011

2013

Best Novella

The Emperor’s Soul, (Brandon Sanderson), The Emperor’s Soul, November 2011

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, (Nancy Kress), After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, April 2012

San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, (Seanan McGuire), San Diego 2014: The Last Stand of the California Browncoats, July 11, 2012

The Stars Do Not Lie, (Jay Lake), Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2012

On a Red Station, Drifting, (Aliette de Bodard), On a Red Station, Drifting, December 2012

Best Novelette

The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi, (Pat Cadigan), Edge of Infinity, November 27, 2012

The Boy Who Cast No Shadow, (Thomas Olde Heuvelt), The Boy Who Cast No Shadow, December 2011

In Sea-Salt Tears, (Seanan McGuire), (seananmcGuire.com), 2012

Fade To White, (Catherynne M. Valente), Clarkesworld #71, August 2012

Rat-Catcher, (Seanan McGuire), A Fantasy Medley 2, November 2012

2014

Best Novella

Equoid, (Charles Stross), Tor.com, September 24, 2013

Six-Gun Snow White, (Catherynne M. Valente), Six-Gun Snow White, January 2013

The Butcher of Khardov, (Dan Wells), The Butcher of Khardov, June 18, 2013

The Chaplain’s Legacy, (Brad Torgersen), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 2013

Wakulla Springs, (Ellen Klages and Andy Duncan), Tor.com, October 22, 2013

Best Novelette

The Lady Astronaut of Mars, (Mary Robinette Kowal), Rip-Off!, December 18, 2012

The Exchange Officers, (Brad Torgersen), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January/February 2013

The Waiting Stars, (Aliette de Bodard), The Other Half of the Sky, April 23, 2013

Opera Vita Aeterna, (Vox Day), The Last Witchking, April 30, 2013

The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling, (Ted Chiang), Subterranean, Fall September 2013

2015

Best Novella

Flow, (Arlan Andrews, Sr.), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, November 2014

Big Boys Don’t Cry, (Tom Kratman), Big Boys Don’t Cry, February 20, 2014

Pale Realms of Shade, (John C. Wright), scifiwright.com, April 24, 2014

The Plural of Helen of Troy, (John C. Wright), City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis, June 21, 2014

One Bright Star to Guide Them, (John C. Wright), One Bright Star to Guide Them, September 2014

Best Novelette

The Day the World Turned Upside Down, (Thomas Olde Heuvelt), Lightspeed, April 2014

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium, (Gray Rinehart), Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, May 2014

The Journeyman: In the Stone House, (Michael F. Flynn), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 2014

The Triple Sun: A Golden Age Tale, (Rajnar Vajra), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, July/August 2014

Championship B’tok, (Edward M. Lerner), Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2014

2016

Best Novella

Binti, (Nnedi Okorafor), Binti, September 22, 2015

Perfect State, (Brandon Sanderson), Shadows for Silence in the Forests of Hell/Perfect State, 2015

Slow Bullets, (Alastair Reynolds), Slow Bullets, June 2015

Penric’s Demon, (Lois McMaster Bujold), Penric’s Demon, July 6, 2015

The Builders, (Daniel Polansky), The Builders, November 3, 2015

Best Novelette

Folding Beijing, (Hao Jingfang), Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2015

And You Shall Know Her by the Trail of Dead, (Brooke Bolander), Lightspeed, February 2015

Flashpoint: Titan, (Benjamin Cheah), There Will Be War Volume X, December 18, 2015

What Price Humanity?, (David VanDyke), There Will Be War Volume X, December 18, 2015

Obits, (Stephen King), The Bazaar of Bad Dreams, November 2015

2017

Best Novella

Every Heart a Doorway, (Seanan McGuire), Every Heart a Doorway, April 5, 2016

This Census-Taker, (China Miéville), This Census-Taker, January 12, 2016

The Ballad of Black Tom, (Victor LaValle), The Ballad of Black Tom, February 16, 2016

Penric and the Shaman, (Lois McMaster Bujold), Penric and the Shaman, June 23, 2016

The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, (Kij Johnson), The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe, August 16, 2016

A Taste of Honey, (Kai Ashante Wilson), A Taste of Honey, October 25, 2016

Best Novelette

The Tomato Thief, (Ursula Vernon), Apex Magazine, January 2016

Alien Stripper Boned From Behind The T-Rex, (Stix Hiscock), self-published, 2016

Touring with the Alien, (Carolyn Ives Gilman), Clarkesworld, April 2016

The Jewel and Her Lapidary, (Fran Wilde), The Jewel and Her Lapidary, May 3, 2016

You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay, (Alyssa Wong), Uncanny Magazine, Issue 10, May/June 2016

The Art of Space Travel, (Nina Allan), Tor.com, July 27, 2016

2018

Best Novella

All Systems Red, (Martha Wells), Tor.com, May 2017

Binti: Home, (Nnedi Okorafor), Tor.com, January 2017

And Then There Were (N-One), (Sarah Pinsker), Uncanny Magazine Issue 15, March/April, March 2017

River of Teeth, (Sarah Gailey), Tor.com, May 23, 2017

Down Among the Sticks and Bones, (Seanan McGuire), Tor.com, June 13, 2017

The Black Tides of Heaven, (JY Yang), Tor.com, September 26, 2017

Best Novelette

The Secret Life of Bots, (Suzanne Palmer), Clarkesworld, September 2017

A Series of Steaks, (Vina Jie-Min Prasad), Clarkesworld, January 2017

Extracurricular Activities, (Yoon Ha Lee), Tor.com, February 15, 2017

Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time, (K.M. Szpara), Uncanny, May/June, May 2017

Children of Thorns, Children of Water, (Aliette de Bodard), Uncanny Issue 17, July/August, July 2017

Wind Will Rove, (Sarah Pinsker), Asimov’s Science Fiction, September-October, September 2017

THE WINDS OF MARBLE ARCH

Connie Willis

Connie Willis's latest novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog (Bontam/Spectra), is currently a finalist for the 1999 Hugo Award. In her evocative new tale, a modern American tourist exploring the London Underground discovers a number of unsettling secrets and learns the terrifying truth about . . .

Cath refused to take the Tube.

“You loved it the last time we were here,” I said, rummaging through my suitcase for a tie.

“Correction. You loved it,” she said, brushing her short hair. “I thought it was dirty and smelly and dangerous.”

“You’re thinking of the New York subway. This is the London Underground.” The tie wasn’t there. I unzipped the side pocket and jammed my hand down it. “You rode the Tube the last time we were here.”

“I also carried my suitcase up five flights of stairs at that awful bed and breakfast we stayed at. I have no intention of doing that, either.”

She wouldn’t have to. The Connaught had a lift and a bellman.

“I hated the Tube,” she said. “I only took it because we couldn’t afford taxis. And now we can.”

We certainly could. We could also afford a hotel with carpet on the floor and a bathroom in our room instead of down the hall. A far cry from the—what was it called? It had had brown linoleum floors you hadn’t wanted to walk on in your bare feet, and you’d had to put coins in a meter above the bathtub to get hot water.

“What was the name of that place we stayed at?” I asked Cath.

“I’ve repressed it,” she said. “All I remember is that the tube station had the name of a cemetery.”

“Marble Arch,” I said, “and it wasn’t named after a cemetery. It was named after the copy of the Roman arch of Constantine in Hyde Park.”

“Well, it sounded like a cemetery.”

“The Royal Hernia!” I said, suddenly remembering.

Cath grinned. “The Royal Heritage.”

“The Royal Hernia of Marble Arch,” I said. “We should go visit it, just for old times’ sake.”

“I doubt if it’s still there,” she said, putting on her earrings. “It’s been twenty years.”

“Of course it’s still there,” I said. “Scummy showers and all. Do you remember those narrow beds? They were just like coffins, only at least coffins have sides so you don’t roll off.”

The tie wasn’t there. I started taking shirts out of the suitcase and piling them on the bed. “These beds aren’t much better. It makes you wonder how the British have managed to reproduce all these years.”

“We seemed to manage all right,” Cath said, putting on her shoes. “What time does the conference start?”

“Ten,” I said, dumping socks and underwear onto the bed. “What time are you meeting Sara?”

“Nine-thirty,” she said, looking at her watch. “Will you have time to pick up the tickets for the play?”

“Sure,” I said. “The Old Man won’t show up before eleven.”

“Good,” she said. “Sara and Elliott can only go Saturday. They’ve got something tomorrow night, and we’ve got dinner with Milford Hughes’s widow and her sons Friday night. Is Arthur going with us to the play? Did you get in touch with him?”

“No, but I know the Old Man’ll want to go. What are we seeing?” I asked, giving up on the tie.

“Ragtime, if we can get tickets. It’s at the Adelphi. If not, try to get The Tempest or Sunset Boulevard, and if they’re sold out, Endgames. Hayley Mills is in it.”

“Kismet isn’t playing?”

She grinned again. “Kismet isn’t playing.”

“Which tube stop does it say for the Adelphi?”

“Charing Cross,” she said, consulting the map. “Sunset Boulevard’s at the Old Vic, and The Tempest’s at the Duke of York. On Shaftesbury Avenue. You could get the tickets through a ticket agent. It would be a lot faster than going to the theaters.”

“Not on the Tube, it won’t,” I said. “It’s a snap to go anywhere. And ticket agents are for tourists.”

She looked skeptical. “Get third row if you can, but not on the sides. And no farther back than the dress circle.”

“Not the balcony?” I asked. The farthest, highest seats had been all we could afford the first time we were here, so high up all you could see was the tops of the actors’ heads. When we’d gone to Kismet, the Old Man had spent the entire time leaning forward to look down the front of the well-endowed Lalume’s Arabian costume through a pair of rental binoculars.

“Not the balcony,” Cath said, sticking the guidebook in her bag. “Put it on the American Express, if they’ll take it. If not, the Visa.”

“Are you sure the third row’s a good idea?” I said. “Remember, the Old Man nearly got us thrown out of the upper balcony the last time, and there wasn’t even anybody else up there.”

Cath stopped putting things in her bag. “Tom,” she said, looking worried. “It’s been twenty years, and you haven’t seen Arthur in over five.”

“And you think the Old Man will have grown up in the meantime?” I said. “Not a chance. This is the guy who got us thrown out of Graceland five years ago. He’ll still be the same.”

Cath looked like she was going to say something else, and then began putting stuff in her bag again. “What time is the cocktail party tonight?”

“Sherry party,” I said. “They have sherry parties here. Six. I’ll meet you back here, okay? Or is that enough time for you and Sara to buy out the town and catch up on—what is it?—three years’ gossip?”

I’d seen Elliott and Sara last year in Atlanta and the year before that in Barcelona, but Cath hadn’t come with me to either conference. “Where are you doing all this shopping?”

“Harrods,” she said. “Remember the tea set I bought the first time we were here? I’m going to buy the matching china. And a scarf at Liberty’s and a cashmere cardigan, all the things we couldn’t afford last time.” She looked at her watch again. “And I’d better get going. The traffic’s going to be bad in this rain.”

“The Tube would be faster,” I said. “And drier. You take the Piccadilly Line to Knightsbridge, and you’re right there. You don’t even have to go outside. There’s an entrance to Harrods right in the tube station.”

“I am not maneuvering shopping bags up and down those awful escalators,” she said. “They’re broken half the time. Besides, there are rats.”

“You saw one mouse in Piccadilly Circus one time, and it was down on the tracks,” I said.

“It’s been twenty years,” she said, coming over to the bed and deftly pulling my tie out of the mess. “There are probably thousands of rats down there now.” She kissed me on the cheek. “Good luck presenting your paper.” She grabbed up an umbrella. “You take the Tube,” she said, going out the door. “You’re the one who’s crazy about it.”

“I intend to,” I called after her, but the lift had already closed.

In spite of Cath’s dire predictions, the Tube was exactly the same as it had been twenty years ago. Well, maybe not exactly. There were ticket machines now, and automated stiles that sucked up my five-day pass and spat it out to me again. And most of the escalators were metal now instead of wooden. But they were as steep as ever, and the posters for musicals and plays that lined them had hardly changed at all. Kismet and Cats had been playing then. Now it was Showboat and Cats.

Cath was right—I did love the Tube. It’s the best underground system in the world. Boston’s “T” is old and decrepit, Tokyo’s subway system is a sardine can, and Washington’s Metro looks like it was designed as a bomb shelter. The Métro’s not bad, but it has the handicap of being in Paris. BART’s in San Francisco, but it doesn’t go anywhere.

The Tube goes everywhere, all the way to Heathrow and Hampton Court and beyond, to obscure suburban stops like Cockfosters and Mudchute. There’s a stop at every tourist attraction, and it’s impossible to get lost.

But it isn’t just an efficient way of getting from the Tower to Westminster Abbey to Buckingham Palace. It’s a place in itself, a wonderful underground warren of tunnels and stairs and corridors, as colorful as the billboard-sized theater posters on the walls of the platforms, as the maps posted on every pillar and wall and forking of the tunnels.

I stopped in front of one, studying the crisscrossing green and blue and red lines. Charing Cross. I needed the gray line. What was that? Jubilee.

I followed the signs down a curving platform and out onto the eastbound platform. A train was pulling out. An LED sign above the tracks said NEXT TRAIN 6 MIN. The train started into the narrow tunnel, and I waited for the blast of wind that would follow it, pushing the air in front of it as the train disappeared.

It came, smelling faintly of diesel and dust, ruffling the hair of the woman standing next to me, rippling her skirt. NEXT TRAIN 3 MIN., the sign said.

I filled the time by watching a pair of newlyweds holding hands and reading the posters on the tunnel walls for Sunset Boulevard and Sliding Doors and Harrods. “A Blast from the Past,” the one on the end said. “Experience the London Blitz at the Imperial War Museum. Elephant and Castle Tube Station.”

“Train approaching,” a voice said from nowhere, and I stepped forward to the yellow line.

The familiar MIND THE GAP sign was still painted on the edge of the platform. Cath had always refused to stand anywhere near the edge. She had stood nervously against the tiled wall as if she expected the train to suddenly leap off the tracks and plow into us.

The train pulled in. Right on time, shining chrome and plastic, no gum on the floor, no unknown substances on the orange plush seats.

“I beg your pardon,” the woman next to me said, shifting her shopping bag so I could sit down.

Even the people who rode the Tube were more polite than people on any other subway. And better read. The man opposite me was reading Dickens’s Bleak House.

The train slowed. “Regent’s Park,” the flat voice announced.

Regent’s Park. The last time we were here, the Old Man had shouted “To the head!” and vaulted off the train at this station.

He had been taking us on a riotous tour of Sir Thomas More’s body. We had gone to the Tower of London to see the Crown Jewels, and Cath, reading her Frommer’s England on $40 a Daywhile we stood in line, had said, “Sir Thomas More is buried in the church here. You know, A Man for All Seasons,” and we had all trooped over to see his grave.

“Want to see the rest of him?” the Old Man had said.

“The rest of him?” Sara had asked.

“Only his body’s buried there,” the Old Man had said. “You need to see his head!” and had led us off to London Bridge, where More’s head had been stuck on a pike, and the Chelsea garden, where his daughter Margaret had buried it after she took it down, and then off to Canterbury, with the Old Man turned around and talking to us as he drove, to the small church where the head was buried now.

“Thomas More’s Remains: The World Tour,” he had said, driving us back at breakneck speed.

“Except for Lake Havasu,” Elliott had said. “Isn’t that where the original London Bridge is?” And when the annual conference was in San Diego, the Old Man had roared up in a rental car and hijacked us all on an overnight jaunt to Arizona to see it.

I couldn’t wait to see him. There was no telling what wild sightseeing he had in mind this time. This was, after all, the man who had gotten us thrown out of Alcatraz.

He hadn’t been at the last four conferences—he’d been off in Nepal for the first one and finishing a book the last three—and I was eager to hear what he’d been up to.

“Oxford Circus,” the flat voice said. Two more stops to Charing Cross.

I leaned out to look at the station as we stopped. Each station has its own distinctive design, its own identifying color: St. Pancras green edged with navy, Euston Square black and orange, Bond Street red. Oxford Circus had a blue chutes and ladders design that was new since the first time we’d been here.

The train pulled out, picked up speed. I would be there in five minutes and to the Adelphi in ten, a lot faster than Cath in her taxi, and at least as comfortable.

I was there in eight, up the escalators and out in the rain, up the Strand to the Adelphi in twenty. It would have been fifteen, but I had to wait ten (huddled under an awning and wishing I’d taken Cath’s advice about an umbrella) to cross the Strand. Black London taxis, bumper to bumper, and double-decker buses, and minis, all going nowhere fast.

Ragtime was sold out. I got a theater map from the rack in the lobby and looked to see where the Duke of York was. It was over on Shaftesbury, with the nearest tube stop Leicester Square. I went back to Charing Cross, and went down the escalator and into the passage that led to the Northern Line. I still had half an hour, which would be cutting it close, but not impossible.

I started down the left-hand tunnel toward the trains, keeping pace with the crowd, straining to hear the rumble of a train pulling in over the muffled din of voices, the crisp clatter of high heels.

People began to walk faster. The high heels beat a quicker tattoo. I got the tube map out of my back pocket. I could take the Piccadilly Line to South Kensington and change to the District and—

The wind hit me like the blast from an explosion. I reeled back, nearly losing my balance. My head snapped back sharply like I’d been punched in the jaw. I groped wildly for the tiled wall.

The IRA’s blown up a train! I thought.

But there was no sound accompanying the sudden blast of searing air, only a dank, horrible smell.

Sarin gas, I thought, and reflexively put my hand over my nose and mouth, but I could still smell it. Sulfur and a wet earthy smell, and something else. Gunpowder? Dynamite? I sniffed at the air, trying to identify it.

But whatever it was, it was already over. The wind had stopped as abruptly as it had hit me, and so had the smell. Not even a trace of it lingered in the dry, stuffy air.

And it must not have been an explosion, or poison gas, because no one else had even slackened their steps. The sound of high heels retained its brisk, even clatter down the tiled passage. Two German teenagers with backpacks hurried past, giggling, and a businessman in a gray topcoat, the Times tucked under his arm, and a young woman in floppy sandals, all of them oblivious.

Hadn’t any of them felt it? Or was it a usual occurrence in Charing Cross Station and they were used to it?

How could anybody possibly get used to a blast like that? They must not have felt it.

Had I felt it?

It was like an earthquake back home in California, a jolt, and then before you could even register it, it was over, and you weren’t sure it had really happened. The only way you could tell for sure was by asking Cath or the kids, “Did you feel that?” or by the picture tilted on the wall.

The only pictures on the walls down here were pasted on, and the German students, the businessman, had already told me the answer to “Did you feel that?”

But I did feel it, I thought, and tried to reconstruct it.

Heat, and the sharp tang of sulfur and wet dirt. But that wasn’t what had made me lose my balance, what had sent me staggering against the wall. It was the smell of panic and of people screaming, of a bomb going off.

But it couldn’t be a bomb. The IRA was in peace negotiations with the British, there hadn’t been an incident for over a year, and bombs didn’t stop in mid-blast. There had been bombs in the Tube before—the mechanical voice would be saying, “Please exit up the escalator immediately,” not “Mind the gap.”

But if it wasn’t a bomb, what was it? And where had it come from? I looked up at the roof of the passage, but there wasn’t a grate or a vent, no water pipes running along the ceiling. I walked along the tunnel, sniffing the air, but there were only the usual smells—dust and damp wool and cigarette smoke, and, where the passage went up a short flight of stairs, a strong smell of oil.

A train rumbled in somewhere down the passage. The train. There had been one pulling in when it hit. It must be causing the wind somehow. I went out onto the platform and stood there looking down the tunnel, half-hoping, half-dreading it would happen again.

The train pulled in and stopped, and a handful of people got off. “Mind the gap!” the computerized voice said. The doors whooshed shut, and the train pulled out. A wind picked up the scraps of paper on the track and whirled them into the side walls, and I braced myself, my feet apart, but it was just an ordinary breeze, smelling of nothing in particular.

I went back out in the passage and examined the walls for doors, felt along the tiles for drafts, stood in the same place as before, waiting for another train to come in.

But there was nothing, and I was in the way. People going around me murmured “Sorry” over and over, which I have never been able to get used to, even though I know it’s merely the British equivalent of “Excuse me.” It still sounded like they were apologizing, when I was the one blocking traffic. And I needed to get to the conference.

And whatever had caused the wind, it was probably just a fluke. The passages connecting the trains and the different lines and levels were like a rabbit warren. The wind could have come from anywhere. Maybe somebody on the Jubilee Line had been transporting a carton of rotten eggs. Or blood samples. Or both.

I went up to the Northern Line, caught a train that had just pulled in, and made it to the conference in time for the eleven o’clock session, but the episode must have unnerved me more than I’d admitted to myself. As I stood in the lobby pinning on my registration badge, the outside door opened, letting in a blast of air.

I flinched away from it and then stood there, staring blindly at the door, until the woman at the registration table asked, “Are you all right?”

I nodded. “Have the Old Man or Elliott Templeton registered yet?”

“An old man?” the woman said, bewilderedly.

“Not an old man, the Old Man,” I said impatiently. “Arthur Birdsall.”

“The morning session’s already started,” she said, looking through the ranked badges. “Have you looked in the ballroom?”

The Old Man had never attended a session in his life.

“Mr. Templeton’s here,” she said, still looking. “No, Mr. Birdsall hasn’t registered yet.”

“Daniel Drecker’s here,” Marjorie O’Donnell said, descending on me. “You heard about his daughter, didn’t you?”

“No,” I said, scanning the room for Elliott.

“She’s in an institution,” she said. “Schizophrenia.”

I wondered if she was telling me this because she thought I was acting unbalanced, too, but she added, “So, for heaven’s sake, don’t ask him about her. And don’t ask Peter Jamieson if Leslie’s here. They’re separated.”

“I won’t,” I said and escaped to the first session. Elliott wasn’t in the audience, or at lunch. I sat down next to John McCord, who lived in London, and said, without preamble, “I was in the Tube this morning.”

“Wretched, isn’t it?” McCord said. “And so expensive. What’s a day pass now? Two pounds fifty?”

“While I was in Charing Cross Station, there was this strange wind.”

McCord nodded knowingly. “The trains cause them. When they pull out of a station, they push the air in front of them,” he said, illustrating the pushing with this hands, “and because they fill the tunnel, it creates a slight vacuum in the train’s wake, and air rushes in behind to fill the vacuum, and it creates a wind. The same thing happens in reverse as trains pull into the station.”

“I know,” I said impatiently. “But this one was like an explosion, and it smelled—”

“It’s all the dirt down there. And the beggars. They sleep in the passages, you know. Some of them even urinate on the walls. I’m afraid the Underground’s deteriorated considerably in the past few years.”

“Everything in London has,” the woman across the table said. “Did you know there’s a Disney store in Regent Street?”

“And a Gap,” McCord said.

“Mind the Gap,” I said, but they were off on the subject of the Decline and Fall of London. I said I needed to go look for Elliott.

He was nowhere to be found. The afternoon session was starting. I sat down next to John and Irene Watson.

“You haven’t seen Arthur Birdsall or Elliott Templeton, have you?” I said, scanning the ballroom.

“Elliott was here before the morning session,” John said. “Stewart’s here.”

Irene leaned across John. “You heard about his surgery, didn’t you? Colon cancer.”

“The doctors say they got it all,” John said.

“I hate coming to these things anymore,” Irene said, leaning confidingly across John again. “Everybody’s either gotten old or sick or divorced. You heard Hari Srinivasau died, didn’t you? Heart attack.”

“I see somebody over there I need to talk to,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I started up the aisle.

And ran straight into Stewart.

“Tom!” he said. “How have you been?”

“How have you been?” I said. “I heard you’ve been ill.”

“I’m fine. The doctors tell me they caught it in time, that they got it all,” he said. “It isn’t so much the cancer coming back that worries me as knowing this is the kind of thing in store for us as we get older. You heard about Paul Wurman?”

“No,” I said. “Look, I have to go make a phone call before the session starts.” And before he could fill me in on the Decline and Fall of Everybody.

I took off for the lobby. “Where have you been?” Elliott said, clapping a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

“Where have I been?” I said, like a shipwreck victim who’d been on a raft for days. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you,” I said, looking happily at him. He looked just the same as ever, tall, in shape, his hairline not even receding. “Everyone else is falling apart.”

“Including you,” he said, grinning. “You look like you need a drink.”

“Is the Old Man with you?” I asked, looking around for him.

“No,” he said. “Do you have any notion where the bar is in this place?”

“In there.” I pointed.

“Lead the way,” he said. “I’ve got all sorts of things to tell you. I’ve just talked Evers and Associates into a new project. I’ll tell you all about it over a couple of pints.”

He did, and then told me about what he and Sara had been doing since the last conference.

“I thought the Old Man would be here today,” I said. “He’ll be here tonight, though?”

“I think so,” Elliott said. “Or tomorrow.”

“He’s all right, isn’t he?” I said, looking across the bar to where Stewart stood talking. “He’s not sick or anything?”

“I don’t think so,” Elliott said, looking reassuringly surprised. “He lives in Cambridge now, you know. And Sara and I won’t be there, either. Evers and Associates are taking us out to dinner to celebrate. We’ll stop by for a few minutes on our way, though. Sara insisted. She wants to see you. She’s been so excited about your visit. She’s talked of nothing else for weeks. She couldn’t wait to go shopping with Cath.” He went over to the bar and got us two more pints. “Speaking of which, Sara said I’m to tell you we’re definitely on for the play and supper Saturday. What are we going to see? Please tell me it’s not Sunset Boulevard.”

“Oh, my God!” I said. “It’s not anything. I forgot to get the tickets.” I glanced hastily at my watch. Three forty-five. “Do you think the box offices will be open now?”

He nodded.

“Good.” I snatched up my coat and started for the lobby.

“And not Cats!” Elliott called after me.

I would be lucky if I got anything, I thought, sprinting down to the tube station and pushing my way through the turnstile, including a train at this hour. The escalators were so jammed I had trouble getting the list of theaters out of my pocket. The Tempest was at the Duke of York. Leicester Square. I pulled my tube map out—Piccadilly Line.

The passage to the Piccadilly Line was even more crowded than the escalator, and slower. The elderly woman ahead of me, in a gray head scarf and an ancient brown coat, was shuffling at a snail’s pace, clutching her coat collar to her throat with a blue-veined hand, her head down and her body hunched forward as if she were struggling against a hurricane.

I tried to get around her, but the way was blocked by more teenagers with backpacks, Spanish this time, walking four abreast and discussing una visita a la Torre de Londres.

I missed the train and had to wait for the next one, checking the NEXT TRAIN 4 MIN. sign every fifteen seconds and listening to the American couple behind me bitterly arguing.

“I told you it started at four,” the woman said. “Now we’ll be late.”

“Who was the one who had to take one more picture?” the man said. “You’ve already taken five hundred pictures, but oh, no, you had to take one more.”

“I wanted to have something to remember our vacation by,” she said bitterly. “Our happy, happy vacation.”

The train came in, and I mashed my way on and grabbed a pole and then stood there, squashed, reading my list. The Wyndham was near Leicester Square, too. What was at the Wyndham?

Cats.

No good. But Death of a Salesman was at the Prince Edward, which was only a few blocks over. And there was a whole row of theaters on Shaftesbury.

“Leicester Square,” the automated voice said, and I forced my way off the train, down the passage, and up the escalators and into Leicester Square.

The traffic up top was even worse, and it took me nearly twenty minutes to get to the Duke of York, only to find that its box office was closed until six. The Prince Edward was open, but it only had two sets of single seats fifteen rows apart for Death of a Salesman. “The soonest I can get you five seats all together,” the black-lipsticked girl said, tapping keys on a computer, “is March fifteenth.”

The Ides of March, I thought. How fitting, since Cath would kill me if I came home without the tickets.

“Where’s the nearest ticket agent?” I asked the girl.

“There’s one on Cannon Street,” she said vaguely.

Cannon Street. That was the name of a tube station. I consulted my tube map. District and Circle Line. I could take the Northern Line down to Embankment and catch the District and Circle from there.

I looked at my watch. It was already four-thirty. We were supposed to be at the sherry party at six. I would be cutting it close. I sprinted back to Leicester Square, down to the Northern Line, and onto a train. It was even more jammed, but everyone was still polite. They held their books above the fray and continued to read in spite of the crush. Madame Bovary and Geoff Ryman’s253 and Charles Williams’s Descent into Hell.

“Cannon Street,” the computer voice said, and I pushed my way off and headed for the exit.

I was halfway down the passage when it hit again, the same violent blast as before, the same smell. No, not the same, I thought, regaining my footing, watching unconcerned commuters walk past. There had been the same sharp smell of sulfur and explosives, but no musty wetness. And this time there was the smell of smoke.

But no fire alarms had gone off, no sprinkler system been activated. No one had even noticed it.

Maybe it’s one of those things where it’s so common the locals don’t even notice it, I thought, they can’t even smell it anymore. Like a lumber mill or chemical plant. We had gone to see Cath’s uncle in Nebraska one time, and I’d asked him if he minded the smell from the feedlots.

“What smell?” he’d said.

But manure didn’t smell like violence, like panic. And the smell from the feedlots had been everywhere. If this was a persistent, pervasive smell, why hadn’t I smelled it in Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square?

I was all the way to South Kensington before I realized I had gone back down the passage without even being aware of it, boarded a train, ridden seven stops. And not gotten the tickets.

I got off the train, half-intending to go back, and then stood there on the platform uncertainly. This was no carton of rotten eggs, or blood samples, no localized phenomenon of Charing Cross. So what was it?

A woman got off the train, glancing irritatedly at her watch. I looked at mine. Five-thirty. It was too late to go back to the ticket agent’s, too late to do anything but figure out which line to take to get home.

I felt a rush of relief that I wouldn’t have to go back to Cannon Street, wouldn’t have to face that wind again. What were they, I wondered, pulling out my tube map, that they produced such a feeling of fear?

I thought about it all the way back to the hotel, wondering if I should tell Cath. It would only confirm her in her opinion of the Tube, and she would hardly be in the mood for wild stories about winds in the Tube, not if she’d been waiting for me to show up. Cath hated being late to things, and it was already after six. By the time I made it back to the hotel it would be nearly six-thirty.

It was six forty-five. I pushed unavailingly on the lift button for five minutes and then took the stairs. Maybe she was running late, too. When she and Sara started shopping, they lost all track of time. I fished the room key out of my pants pocket.

Cath opened the door.

“I’m late, I know,” I said, unpinning my nametag and peeling my jacket off. “Give me five minutes. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she said. She walked over and sat down on the bed, watching me.

“How was Harrods?” I said, unbuttoning my shirt. “Did you get your china?”

“No,” she said, looking down at her folded hands.

I grabbed a clean shirt out of my suitcase and pulled it on. “But you and Sara had a good time?” I said, buttoning it. “What did you buy? Elliott said he was afraid you’d clean out Harrods between the two of you.” I stopped, looking at her. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Did the kids call? Has something happened?”

“The kids are fine,” she said.

“But something happened,” I said. “The taxi you and Sara took had an accident.”

She shook her head. “Nothing happened,” and then, still looking down at her hands, “Sara’s having an affair.”

“What?” I said stupidly.

“She’s having an affair.”

“Sara?” I said, disbelieving. Not Sara, affectionate, loyal Sara.

Cath nodded, still looking at her hands.

I sat down on my bed. “Did she tell you she was?”

“No, of course not,” Cath said, standing up and walking over to the mirror.

“Then how do you know?” I asked, but I knew how. The same way she had known that the kids were getting chicken pox, that her sister was engaged, that her father was worried about his business. Cath always noticed things before anybody else—she was equipped with some kind of super-sensitive radar that picked up on subliminal signs or vibrations in the air or something. And she was always right.

But Sara and Elliott had been married as long as we had. They were the couple at the top of our “Marriage Is Still a Viable Institution” list.

“Are you sure?” I said.

“I’m sure.”

I wanted to ask her how she knew, but there wasn’t any point. When Ashley had gotten the chicken pox, she’d said, “Her eyes always look bright when she has a fever, and, besides, Lindsay had it two weeks ago,” but most of the time she could only shake her short blond hair, unable to say how she’d reached her conclusion.

But she was always right. Always right.

“But—I saw Elliott today,” I said. “He was fine. He didn’t—” I thought back over everything he had said, wondering if there had been some indication in it that he was worried or unhappy. He had said Sara and Cath would spend a lot of money, but he always said that. “He sounded fine.”

“Put your tie on,” she said.

“But if she—We don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” I said.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No. No, we have to go.”

“Maybe you misinterpreted—”

“I didn’t,” she said and went into the bathroom and shut the door.

We had trouble getting a taxi. The Connaught’s doorman seemed to have disappeared, and all of the black boxy London cabs ignored my frantic waving. Even when one finally stopped, it took us forever to get to the party. “Theatergoers,” the cabbie explained cheerfully of the traffic. “You two plan to see any plays while you’re here?”

I wondered if Cath would still want to go to a play, convinced as she was that Sara was having an affair, but as we passed the Savoy, its neon sign for Miss Saigon blazing, she asked, “What play did you get tickets for?”

“I didn’t,” I said. “I ran out of time.” I started to say that I intended to get them tomorrow, but she wasn’t listening.

“Harrods didn’t have my china,” she said, and her tone sounded as hopeless as it had telling me about Sara. “They discontinued the pattern four years ago.”

We were nearly an hour and a half late for the party. Elliott and Sara have probably long since left for dinner, I thought, and was secretly relieved.

“Cath!” Marjorie said as we walked in the door and hurried over with her nametag. “You look wonderful! I have so much to tell you!”

“I’m going to go look for the Old Man,” I said. “I’ll see if he wants to go to dinner afterward.” He would probably drag us off to Soho or Hampstead Heath. He always knew some out-of-the-way place that had eel pie or authentic English stout.

I set off through the crowd. You could usually locate the Old Man by the crowd of people gathered around, and the laughter. And the proximity to the bar, I thought, spotting a huddle of people in that direction.

I waded toward them through the crush, grabbing a glass of wine off a tray as I went, but it wasn’t the Old Man. It was the people who’d been at lunch. They were discussing, of all things, the Beatles, but at least it wasn’t the Decline and Fall.

“The three of them were talking about a reunion tour,” McCord was saying. “I suppose that’s all off now.”

“The Old Man took us on a Beatles tour,” I said. “Has anybody seen him? He insisted we re-create all the album covers. We nearly got killed crossing Abbey Road.”

“I don’t think he’s coming down from Cambridge till tomorrow,” McCord said. “It’s a long drive.”

The Old Man had driven us four hundred miles to see London Bridge. I peered over their heads, trying to spot the Old Man. I couldn’t see him, but I did spot Evers, which meant Sara and Elliott were still here. Cath was over by the door with Marjorie.

“It was just so sad about Linda McCartney,” the Disney woman said.

I took a swig of my wine and remembered too late this was a sherry party.

“How old was she?” McCord was asking.

“Fifty-three.”

“I know three women who’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer,” the Gap woman said. “Three. It’s dreadful.”

“One keeps wondering who’s next,” the other woman said.

“Or what’s next,” McCord said. “You heard about Stewart, didn’t you?”

I handed my sherry glass to the Disney woman, who looked at me, annoyed, and started through the crowd toward Cath, but now I couldn’t see her, either. I stopped, craning my neck to see over the crowd.

“There you are, you handsome thing!” Sara said, coming up behind me and putting her arm around my waist. “We’ve been looking all over for you!”

She kissed me on the cheek. “Elliott’s been fretting that you were going to make us all go see Cats. He loathes Cats, and everyone who comes to visit drags us to it. And you know how he frets over things. You didn’t, did you? Get tickets for Cats?”

“No,” I said, staring at her. She looked the same as always—her dark hair still tucked behind her ears, her eyebrows still arched mischievously.

This was the same old Sara who’d gone with us to Kismet, to Lake Havasu, to Abbey Road.

Cath was wrong. She might pick up subliminal signals about other people, but this time she was wrong. Sara wasn’t acting guilty or uneasy, wasn’t avoiding my eyes, wasn’t avoiding Cath.

“Where is Cath?” she asked, standing on tiptoe to peer over the crowd. “I have something I’ve got to tell her.”

“What?”

“About her china. We couldn’t find it today, did she tell you? Well, after I got home, I thought, ‘I’ll wager they have it at Selfridge’s.’ They’re always years behind the times. Oh, there she is.” She waved frantically. “I want to tell her before we leave,” she said, and took off through the crowd. “Find Elliott and tell him I’ll only be a sec. And tell him we aren’t seeing Cats,” she called back to me. “I don’t want him stewing all night. He’s over there somewhere.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the door, and I pushed my way between people till I found him, standing by the front door.

“You haven’t seen Sara, have you?” he said. “Evers is bringing his car round.”

“She’s talking to Cath,” I said. “She said she’ll be here in a minute.”

“Are you kidding? When those two get together—” He shook his head indulgently. “Sara said they had a wonderful time today.”

“Is the Old Man here yet?” I said.

“He called and said he couldn’t make it tonight. He said to tell you he’ll see us tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it. We’ve scarcely seen him since he moved to Cambridge. We’re down in Wimbledon, you know.”

“And he hasn’t swooped down and kidnapped you to go see Dickens’s elbow or something?”

“Not lately. Oh, God, do you remember that time Sara mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle, and he dragged us up and down Baker Street, looking for Sherlock Holmes’s missing flat?”

I laughed, remembering him knocking on doors, demanding, “What have you done with 221B, madam?” and deciding we needed to call in Scotland Yard.

“And then demanding to know what they’d done with the yard,” Elliott said, laughing.

“Did you tell him we’re all going to a play together Saturday?”

“Yes. You didn’t get tickets for Cats, did you?”

“I didn’t get tickets for anything,” I said. “I ran out of time.”

“Well, don’t get tickets for Cats. Or Phantom.”

Sara came running up, flushed and breathless. “I’m sorry. Cath and I got to talking,” she said. She gave me a smacking kiss on the lips. “Good-bye, you adorable hunk. See you Saturday.”

“Come on,” Elliott said. “You can kiss him all you like on Saturday.” He hustled her out the door. “And not Les Miz!” he shouted back to me.

I stood, smiling after them. You’re wrong, Cath, I thought. Look at them. Not only would Sara never have kissed me like that if she were having an affair, but Elliott wouldn’t have looked on complacently like that, and neither of them would have been talking about china, about Cats.

Cath had made a mistake. Her radar, usually so infallible, had messed up this time. Sara and Elliott’s marriage was fine. Nobody was having an affair, and we’d all have a great time Saturday night.

The mood persisted through the rest of the evening, in spite of Marjorie’s latching onto me and telling me all about the Decline and Fall of her father, who she was going to have to put in a nursing home, and our finding out that the pub that had had such great fish and chips the first time we’d been here had burned down.

“It doesn’t matter,” Cath said, standing on the corner where it had been. “Let’s go to the Lamb and Crown. I know it’s still there. I saw it on the way to Harrods this morning.”

“That’s on Wilton Place, isn’t it?” I said, pulling out my tube map. “That’s right across from Hyde Park Corner Station. We can take—”

“A taxi,” Cath said.

Cath didn’t say anything else about the affair she thought Sara was having, except to tell me they were going shopping again the next day. “Selfridge’s first, and then Reject China . . .” and I wondered if she had realized, seeing Sara at the party, that she’d made a mistake.

But in the morning, as I was leaving, she said, “Sara called and canceled while you were in the shower.”

“They can’t go to the play with us Saturday?”

“No,” Cath said. “She isn’t going shopping with me today. She said she had a headache.”

“She must have drunk some of that awful sherry,” I said. “So what are you going to do? Do you want to come have lunch with me?”

“I think it’s someone at the conference.”

“Who?” I said, lost.

“The man Sara’s having an affair with,” she said, picking up her guidebook. “If it was someone who lived here, she wouldn’t risk seeing him while we’re here.”

“She’s not having an affair,” I said. “I saw her. I saw Elliott. He—”

“Elliott doesn’t know.” She jammed the guidebook savagely into her bag. “Men never notice anything.”

She began stuffing things into her bag—her sunglasses, her umbrella. “We’re having dinner with the Hugheses tonight at seven. I’ll meet you back here at five-thirty.” She picked up her umbrella.

“You’re wrong,” I said. “They’ve been married longer than we have. She’s crazy about Elliott. Why would somebody with that much to lose risk it all by having an affair?”

She turned and looked at me, still holding the umbrella. “I don’t know,” she said bleakly.

“Look,” I said, suddenly sorry for her, “why don’t you come and have lunch with the Old Man and me? He’ll probably get us thrown out like he did at that Indian restaurant. It’ll be fun.”

She shook her head. “You and Arthur will want to catch up, and I don’t want to wait on Selfridge’s.” She looked up at me.

“When you see Arthur—” She paused, looking the way she did when she was thinking about Sara.

“You think he’s having an affair, too, oh Madame Knows-All, Sees-All?”

“No,” she said. “He was older than us.”

“Which was why we called him the Old Man,” I said, “and you think he’ll have gotten a cane and grown a long white beard?”

“No,” she said, and slung her bag over her shoulder. “I think if they have my china at Selfridge’s, I’ll buy twelve place settings.”

She was wrong, and I would prove it to her. We would have a great time at the play, and she would realize Sara couldn’t be having an affair. If I could get the tickets. Ragtime had been sold out, which meant The Tempest was likely to be, too, and there weren’t a lot of other choices, since Elliott had said no to Sunset Boulevard. And Cats, I thought, looking at the theater posters as I went down the escalator. And Les Miz.

The Tempest and the Hayley Mills thing, Endgames, were both at theaters close to Leicester Square. If I couldn’t get tickets at either, there was a ticket agent in Lisle Street.

The Tempest was sold out, as I’d expected. I walked over to the Albery.

Endgames had five seats in the third row center of the orchestra. “Great,” I said, and slapped down my American Express, thinking how much things had changed.

In the old days I would have been asking if they didn’t have anything in the sherpa section, seats so steep we had to clutch the arms of our seats to keep from plummeting to our deaths and we had to rent binoculars to even see the stage.

And in the old days, I thought grimly, Cath would have been at my side, making rapid calculations to see if our budget could afford even the cheap seats. And now I was getting tickets in third row center, and not even asking the price, and Cath was on her way to Selfridge’s in a taxi.

The girl handed me the tickets. “What’s the nearest tube station?” I asked.

“Tottenham Court Road,” she said.

I looked at my tube map. I could take the Central Line over to Holborn and then a train straight to South Kensington. “How do I get there?”

She waved an arm full of bracelets vaguely north. “You go up St. Martin’s Lane.”

I went up St. Martin’s Lane, and up Monmouth, and up Mercer and Shaftesbury and New Oxford. There clearly had to be closer stations than Tottenham Court Road, but it was too late to do anything about it now. And I wasn’t about to take a taxi.

It took me half an hour to make the trek, and another ten to reach Holborn, during which I figured out that the Lyric had been less than four blocks from Piccadilly Circus. I’d forgotten how deep the station was, how long the escalators were. They seemed to go down for miles. I rattled down the slatted wooden rungs and down the passage, glancing at my watch as I walked.

Nine-thirty. I’d make it to the conference in plenty of time. I wondered when the Old Man would get there. He had to drive down from Cambridge, I thought, going down a short flight of steps behind a man in a tweed jacket, which was an hour and a—

I was on the bottom step when the wind hit. This time it was not so much a blast as a sensation of a door opening onto a cold room.

A cellar, I thought, groping for the metal railing. No. Colder. Deathly cold. A meat locker. A frozen food storage vault. With a sharp, unpleasant chemical edge, like disinfectant. A sickening smell.

No, not a refrigerated vault, I thought, a biology lab, and recognized the smell as formaldehyde. And something under it. I shut my mouth, held my breath, but the sweet, sickening stench was already in my nostrils, in my throat. Not a biology lab, I thought in horror. A charnel house.

It was over, the door shutting as suddenly as it had opened, but the bite of the icy air was still in my nostrils, the nasty taste of formaldehyde still in my mouth. Of corruption and death and decay.

I stood there on the bottom step taking shallow, swallowing breaths, while people walked around me. I could see the man in the tweed jacket, rounding the corner in the passage ahead. Hemust have felt it, I thought. He was right in front of me. I started after him, dodging around a pair of children, an Indian woman in a sari, a housewife with a string bag, finally catching up to him as he turned out onto the crowded platform.

“Did you feel that wind?” I asked, taking hold of his sleeve. “Just now, in the tunnel?”

He looked alarmed, and then, as I spoke, tolerant. “You’re from the States, aren’t you? There’s always a slight rush of air as a train enters one of the tunnels. It’s perfectly ordinary. Nothing to be alarmed about.” He looked pointedly at my hand on his sleeve.

“But this one was ice-cold,” I persisted. “It—”

“Ah, yes, well, we’re very near the river here,” he said, looking less tolerant. “If you’ll excuse me.” He freed his arm. “Have a pleasant holiday,” he said and walked away through the crowd to the farthest end of the platform.

I let him go. He clearly hadn’t felt it. But he had to, I thought. He was right in front of me.

Unless it wasn’t real, and I was experiencing some bizarre form of hallucination.

“Finally,” a woman said, looking down the track, and I saw a train was approaching. Wind fluttered a flyer stuck on the wall and then the blond hair of the woman standing closest to the edge. She turned unconcernedly toward the man next to her, saying something to him, shifting the leather strap of her bag on her shoulder.

It hit again, an onslaught of cold and chemicals and corruption, a stench of decay.

He has to have felt that, I thought, looking down the platform, but he was unconcernedly boarding the train, the tourists next to him were looking up at the train and back down at their tube maps, unaware.

They have to have felt it, I thought, and saw the elderly black man. He was halfway down the platform, wearing a plaid jacket. He shuddered as the wind hit, and then hunched his gray grizzled head into his shoulders like a turtle withdrawing into its shell.

He felt it, I thought, and started toward him, but he was already getting on the train, the doors were already starting to close. Even running, I wouldn’t reach him.

I bounded onto the nearest car as the doors whooshed shut and stood there just inside the door, waiting for the next station. As soon as the doors opened I jumped out, holding on to the edge of the door, to see if he got off. He didn’t, or at the next station, and Bond Street was easy. Nobody got off.

“Marble Arch,” the disembodied voice said, and the train pulled into the tiled station.

What the hell was at Marble Arch? There had never been this many people when Cath and I stayed at the Royal Hernia.

Everybody on the train was getting off.

But was the old man? I leaned out from the door, trying to see if he’d gotten off.

I couldn’t see him for the crowd. I stepped forward and was immediately elbowed aside by an equally large herd of people getting on.

I headed down the platform toward his car, craning my neck to spot his plaid jacket, his grizzled head in the exodus.

“The doors are closing,” the voice of the Tube said, and I turned just in time to see the train pull out, and the old man sitting inside, looking out at me.

And now what? I thought, standing on the abruptly deserted platform. Go back to Holborn and see if it happened again and somebody else felt it? Somebody who wasn’t getting on a train.

Certainly nothing was going to happen here. This was our station, the one we had set out from every morning, come home to every night, the first time we were here, and there hadn’t been any strange winds. The Royal Hernia was only three blocks away, and we had run up the drafty stairs, holding hands, laughing about what the Old Man had said to the verger in Canterbury when he had shown us Thomas More’s grave—

The Old Man. He would know what was causing the winds, or how to find out. He loved mysteries. He had dragged us to Greenwich, the British Museum, and down into the crypt of St. Paul’s, trying to find out what had happened to the arm Nelson lost in one of his naval battles. If anybody could, he’d find out what was causing these winds.

And he should be here by now, I thought, looking at my watch. Good God. It was nearly one. I went over to the tube map on the wall to find the best way over to the conference. Go to Notting Hill Gate and take the District and Circle Line. I looked up at the sign above the platform to see how long it would be till the next train, so that when the wind hit, I didn’t have time to hunch down the way the old man had, to flinch away from the blow. My neck was fully extended, like Sir Thomas More’s on the block.

And it was like a blade, slicing through the platform with killing force. No charnel house smell this time, no heat. Nothing but blast and the smell of salt and iron. The scent of terror and blood and sudden death.

What is it? I thought, clutching blindly for the tiled wall. What are they?

The Old Man, I thought again. I have to find the Old Man.

I took the Tube to South Kensington and ran all the way to the conference, half-afraid he wouldn’t be there, but he was. I could hear his voice when I came in. The usual admiring group was clustered around him. I started across the lobby toward them.

Elliott detached himself from the group and came over to me.

“I need to see the Old Man,” I said.

He put a restraining hand on my arm. “Tom—” he said.

He looked like Cath had, sitting on the bed, telling me Sara was having an affair.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, dreading the answer.

“Nothing,” he said, glancing back toward the lounge. “Arthur—nothing.” He let go of my arm. “He’ll be overjoyed to see you. He’s been asking for you.”

The Old Man was sitting in an easy chair, holding court. He looked exactly the same as he had twenty years ago, his frame still lanky, his light hair still falling boyishly over his forehead.

See, Cath, I thought. No long white beard. No cane.

He broke off as soon as he saw us and stood up. “Tom, you young reprobate!” he said, and his voice sounded as strong as ever. “I’ve been waiting for you to get here all morning. Where were you?”

“In the Tube,” I said. “Something happened. I—”

“In the Tube? What were you doing down in the Tube?”

“I was—”

“Never use the Tube anymore,” he said. “It’s gone completely to hell ever since Tony Blair got into office. Like everything else.”

“I want you to come with me,” I said. “I want to show you something.”

“Come where?” he said. “Down in the Tube? Not on your life.” He sat back down. “I loathe the Tube. Smelly, dirty . . .”

He sounded like Cath.

“Look,” I said, wishing there weren’t all these people around. “Something peculiar happened to me in Charing Cross Station yesterday. You know the winds that blow through the tunnels when the trains come in?”

“I certainly do. Dreadful drafty places—”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’s the drafts I want you to see. Feel. They—”

“And catch my death of cold? No, thank you.”

“You don’t understand,” I said. “These weren’t ordinary drafts. I was heading for the Northern Line platform, and—”

“You can tell me about it at lunch.” He turned back to the others. “Where shall we go?”

He had never, ever, in all the years I’d known him, asked anybody where to go for lunch. I blinked stupidly at him.

“How about the Bangkok House?” Elliott said.

The Old Man shook his head. “Their food’s too spicy. It always makes me bloat.”

“There’s a sushi place round the corner,” one of the admiring circle volunteered.

“Sushi!” he said, in a tone that put an end to the discussion.

I tried again. “Yesterday I was in Charing Cross Station, and this wind, this blast hit me that smelled like sulfur. It—”

“It’s the damned smog,” the Old Man said. “Too many cars. Too many people. It’s got nearly as bad as it was in the old days, when there were coal fires.”

Coal, I thought. Could that have been the smell I couldn’t identify? Coal smelled of sulfur.

“The inversion layer makes it worse,” the admirer who’d suggested sushi said.

“Inversion layer?” I said.

“Yes,” he said, pleased to have been noticed. “London’s in a shallow depression that causes inversion layers. That’s when a layer of warm air above the ground traps the surface air under it, so the smoke and particulates collect—”

“I thought we were going to lunch,” the Old Man said petulantly.

“Remember the time we tried to find out what had happened to Sherlock Holmes’s address?” I said. “This is an even stranger mystery.”

“That’s right,” he said. “221B Baker Street. I’d forgotten that. Do you remember the time I took you on a tour of Sir Thomas More’s head? Elliott, tell them what Sara said in Canterbury.”

Elliott told them, and they roared with laughter, the Old Man included. I half-expected somebody to say, “Those were the days.”

“Tom, tell everybody about that time we went to see Kismet,” the Old Man said.

“We’ve got tickets for Endgames for the five of us for tomorrow night,” I said, even though I knew what was coming.

He was already shaking his head. “I never go to plays anymore. The theater’s gone to hell like everything else. Lot of modernist nonsense.” He smacked his hands on the arms of the easy chair. “Lunch! Did we decide where we’re going?”

“What about the New Delhi Palace?” Elliott said.

“Can’t handle Indian food,” the Old Man, who had once gotten us thrown out of the New Delhi Palace by dancing with the Tandoori chicken, said. “Isn’t there anywhere that serves plain, ordinary food?”

“Wherever we’re going, we need to make up our minds,” the admirer said. “The afternoon session starts at two.”

“We can’t miss that,” the Old Man said. He looked around the circle. “So where are we going? Tom, are you coming to lunch with us?”

“I can’t,” I said. “I wish you’d come with me. It would be like old times.”

“Speaking of old times,” the Old Man said, turning back to the group, “I still haven’t told you about the time I got thrown out of Kismet. What was that harem girl’s name, Elliott?”

“Lalume,” Elliott said, turning to look at the Old Man, and I made my escape.

An inversion layer. Holding the air down so it couldn’t escape, trapping it belowground so that smoke and particulates, and smells, became concentrated, intensified.

I took the Tube back to Holborn and went down to the Central Line to look at the ventilation system. I found a couple of wall grates no larger than the size of a theater handbill and a louvered vent two-thirds of the way down the westbound passage, but no fans, nothing that moved the air or connected it with the outside.

There had to be one. The deep stations went down hundreds of feet. They couldn’t rely on nature recirculating the air, especially with diesel fumes and carbon monoxide from the traffic up above. There must be ventilation. But some of these tube stations had been built as long ago as the 1880s, and Holborn looked like it hadn’t been repaired since then.

I went out into the large room containing the escalators and stood looking up. It was open all the way to the ticket machines at the top, and the station had wide doors on three sides, all open to the outside.

Even without ventilation, the air would eventually make its way up and out onto the streets of London. Wind would blow in from outside, and rain, and the movement of the people hurrying through the station, up the escalators, down the passages, would circulate it. But if there was an inversion layer, trapping the air close to the ground, keeping it from escaping—

Pockets of carbon monoxide and deadly methane accumulated in coal mines. The Tube was a lot like a mine, with the complicated bendings and turnings of its tunnels. Could pockets of air have accumulated in the train tunnels, becoming more concentrated, more lethal, as time went by?

The inversion layer would explain why there were winds, but not what had caused them in the first place. An IRA bombing, like I had thought when I felt the first one? That would explain the blast and the smell of explosives, but not the formaldehyde. Or the stifling smell of dirt in Charing Cross.

A collapse of one of the tunnels? Or a train accident?

I made the long trek back up to the station and asked the guard next to the ticket machines, “Do these tunnels ever collapse?”

“Oh, no, sir, they’re quite safe.” He smiled reassuringly. “There’s no need to worry.”

“But there must be accidents occasionally,” I said.

“I assure you, sir, the London Underground is the safest in the world.”

“What about bombings?” I asked. “The IRA—”

“The IRA has signed the peace agreement,” he said, looking at me suspiciously.

A few more questions, and I was likely to find myself arrested as an IRA bomber. I would have to ask the Old—Elliott. And in the meantime, I could try to find out if there were winds in all the stations or just a few.

“Can you show me how to get to the Tower of London?” I asked him, extending my tube map like a tourist.

“Yes, sir, you take the Central Line, that’s this red line, to Bank,” he said, tracing his finger along the map, “and then change to the District and Circle. And don’t worry. The London Underground is perfectly safe.”

Except for the winds, I thought, getting on the escalator. I got out a pen and marked an X on the stations I’d been to as I rode down. Marble Arch, Charing Cross, Sloane Square.

I hadn’t been to Russell Square. I rode there and waited in the passages and then on both platforms through two trains.

There wasn’t anything at Russell Square, but on the Metropolitan Line at St. Pancras there was the same shattering blast as at Charing Cross—heat and the acrid smells of sulfur and violent destruction.

There wasn’t anything at Barbican, or Aldgate, and I thought I knew why. At both of them the tracks were aboveground, with the platform open to the air. The winds would disperse naturally instead of being trapped, which meant I could eliminate most of the suburban stations.

But St. Paul’s and Chancery Lane were both underground, with deep, drafty tunnels, and there was nothing in either of them except a faint scent of diesel and mildew. There must be some other factor at work.

It isn’t the line they’re on, I thought, riding toward Warren Street. Marble Arch and Holborn were on the Central Line, but Charing Cross wasn’t, and neither was St. Pancras. Maybe it was the convergence of them. Chancery Lane, St. Paul’s, and Russell Square all had only one line. Holborn had two lines, and Charing Cross had three. St. Pancras had five.

Those are the stations I should be checking, I thought, the ones where multiple lines meet, the ones honeycombed with tunnels and passages and turns. Monument, I thought, looking at the circles where green and purple and red lines converged. Baker Street and Moorgate.

Baker Street was closest, but hard to get to. Even though I was only two stops away, I’d have to switch over at Euston, take the Northern going the other way back to St. Pancras, and catch the Bakerloo. I was glad Cath wasn’t here to say, “I thought you said it was easy to get anywhere on the Tube.”

Cath! I’d forgotten all about meeting her at the hotel so we could go to dinner with the Hugheses.

What time was it? Only five, thank God. I looked hastily at the map. Good. Northern down to Leicester Square and then the Piccadilly Line, and who says it isn’t easy to get anywhere on the Tube? I’d be to the Connaught in less than half an hour.

And when I got there I’d tell Cath about the winds, even if she did hate the Tube. I’d tell her about all of it, the Old Man and the charnel house smell and the old man in the plaid jacket.

But she wasn’t there. She’d left a note on the pillow of my bed. “Meet you at Grimaldi’s. 7 P.M.”

No explanation. Not even a signature, and the note looked hasty, scribbled. What if Sara called? I wondered, a thought as chilly as the wind in Marble Arch. What if Cath had been right about her, the way she’d been right about the Old Man?

But when I got to Grimaldi’s, it turned out she’d only been shopping. “The woman in the china department at Fortnum and Mason’s told me about a place in Bond Street that specialized in discontinued patterns.”

Bond Street. It was a wonder we hadn’t run into each other. But she wasn’t in the tube station, I thought with a flash of resentment. She was safely aboveground in a taxi.

“They didn’t have it, either,” she said, “but the clerk suggested I try a shop next door to the Portmeirion store which was clear out in Kensington. It took the rest of the day. How was the conference? Was Arthur there?”

You know he was, I thought. She had foreseen his having gotten old, she’d tried to warn me that first morning in the hotel, and I hadn’t believed her.

“How was he?” Cath asked.

You already know, I thought bitterly. Your antennae pick up vibrations from everybody. Except your husband.

And even if I tried to tell her, she’d be too wrapped up in her precious china pattern to even hear me.

“He’s fine,” I said. “We had lunch and then spent the whole afternoon together. He hadn’t changed a bit.”

“Is he going to the play with us?”

“No,” I said and was saved by the Hugheses coming in right then, Mrs. Hughes, looking frail and elderly, and her strapping sons Milford Junior and Paul and their wives.

Introductions all around, and it developed that the blonde with Milford Junior wasn’t his wife, it was his fianceé. “Barbara and I just couldn’t talk to each other anymore,” he confided to me over cocktails. “All she was interested in was buying things, clothes, jewelry, furniture.”

China, I thought, looking across the room at Cath.

At dinner I was seated between Paul and Milford Junior, who spent the meal discussing the Decline and Fall of the British Empire.

“And now Scotland wants to separate,” Milford said. “Who’s next? Sussex? The City of London?”

“At least perhaps then we’d see decent governmental services. The current state of the streets and the transportation system—”

“I was in the Tube today,” I said, seizing the opening. “Do either of you know if Charing Cross has ever been the site of a train accident?”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” Milford said. “The entire system’s a disgrace. Dirty, dangerous—the last time I rode the Tube, a thief tried to pick my pocket on the escalator.”

“I never go down in the Tube anymore,” Mrs. Hughes put in from the end of the table where she and Cath were deep in a discussion of china shops in Chelsea. “I haven’t since Milford died.”

“There are beggars everywhere,” Paul said. “Sleeping on the platforms, sprawled in the passages. It’s nearly as bad as it was during the Blitz.”

The Blitz. Air raids and incendiaries and fires. Smoke and sulfur and death.

“The Blitz?” I said.

“During Hitler’s bombing of London in World War II, masses of people sheltered in the Tube,” Milford said. “Along the tracks, on the platforms, even on the escalators.”

“Not that it was any safer than staying aboveground,” Paul said.

“The shelters were hit?” I said eagerly.

Paul nodded. “Paddington. And Marble Arch. Forty people were killed in Marble Arch.”

Marble Arch. Blast and blood and terror.

“What about Charing Cross?” I asked.

“I’ve no idea,” Milford said, losing interest. “They should pass legislation keeping beggars out of the Underground. And requiring cabbies to speak understandable English.”

The Blitz. Of course. That would explain the smell of gunpowder or whatever it was. And the blast. A high-explosive bomb.

But the Blitz had been over fifty years ago. Could the air from a bomb blast have stayed down in the Tube all those years without dissipating?

There was one way to find out. The next morning I took the Tube to Tottenham Court Road, where there was a whole street of bookstores, and asked for a book about the history of the Underground in the Blitz.

“The Underground?” the girl at Foyle’s, the third place I’d tried, said vaguely. “The Tube Museum might have something.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

She didn’t know, and neither did the ticket vendor back at the tube station, but I remembered seeing a poster for it on the platform at Oxford Circus during my travels yesterday. I consulted my tube map, took the train to Victoria, and changed for Oxford Circus, where I checked five platforms before I found it.

Covent Garden. The London Transport Museum. I checked the map again, took the Central Line across to Holborn, transferred to the Piccadilly Line, and went to Covent Garden.

And apparently it had been hit, too, because a gust of face-singeing heat struck me before I was a third of the way down the tunnel. There was no smell of explosives, though, or of sulfur or dust. Just ash and fire and hopeless desperation that it was all, all burning down.

The scent of it was still with me as I hurried upstairs and out into the market, through the rows of carts selling T-shirts and postcards and toy double-decker buses, to the Transport Museum.

It was full of T-shirts and postcards, too, all sporting the Underground symbol or replicas of the tube map. “I need a book on the Tube during the Blitz,” I asked a boy across a counter stacked with “Mind the Gap” place mats and playing cards.

“The Blitz?” he said vaguely.

“World War II,” I said, which didn’t elicit any recognition, either.

He waved a hand loosely to the left. “The books are over there.”

They weren’t. They were on the far wall, past a rack of posters of tube ads from the twenties and thirties, and most of what books they had were about trains, but I finally found two histories of the Tube and a paperback called London in Wartime. I bought them all and a notebook with a tube map on the cover.

The Transport Museum had a snack bar. I sat down at one of the plastic tables and began taking notes. Nearly all the tube stations had been used as shelters, and a lot of them had been hit—Euston Station, Aldwych, Monument. “In the aftermath of the bombing, the acrid smell of brick dust and cordite was everywhere,” the paperback said. Cordite. That was what I had smelled.

Marble Arch had taken a direct hit, the bomb bursting like a grenade in one of the passages, ripping tiles off the walls as it exploded, sending them slicing through the people sheltered there. Which explained the smell of blood. And the lack of heat. It had been pure blast.

I looked up Holborn. There were several references to its having been used as a shelter, but nothing in any of the books that said it had taken a hit.

Charing Cross had, twice. It had been hit by a high-explosive bomb, and then by a V-2 rocket. The bomb had broken water mains and loosed an avalanche of dirt down onto the room containing the escalators. That was the damp earthiness I’d smelled—mud from the roof collapsing.

Nearly a dozen stations had been hit the night of May 10, 1941: Cannon Street, Paddington, Blackfriars, Liverpool Street—

Covent Garden wasn’t on the list. I looked it up in the paperback. The station hadn’t been hit, but incendiaries had fallen all around Covent Garden, and the whole area had been on fire. Which meant that Holborn wouldn’t have to have taken a direct hit, either. There could have been a bombing nearby, with lots of deaths, that was responsible for Holborn’s charnel house smell. And the fact that there had been fires all around Covent Garden fit with the fact that there hadn’t been sulfur, or concussion.

It all fit—the smell of mud and cordite in Charing Cross, of smoke in Cannon Street, of blast and blood in Marble Arch. The winds I was feeling were the winds of the Blitz, trapped there by London’s inversion layer, caught belowground with no way out, nowhere to go, held and recirculated and intensified through the years in the mazelike tunnels and passages and pockets of the Tube. It all fit.

And there was a way to test it. I copied a list of all the stations I hadn’t been to that had been hit—Blackfriars, Monument, Paddington, Liverpool Street. Praed Street, Bounds Green, Trafalgar Square, and Balham had taken direct hits. If my theory was correct, the winds should definitely be there.

I started looking for them, using the tube map on the cover of my notebook. Bounds Green was far north on the Piccadilly Line, nearly to the legendary Cockfosters, and Balham was nearly as far south on the Northern Line. I couldn’t find either Praed Street or Trafalgar Square. I wondered if those stations had been closed or given other names. The Blitz had, after all, been fifty years ago.

Monument was the closest. I could get there by way of the Central Line and then follow the Circle Line around to Liverpool Street and from there go on up to Bounds Green. Monument had been down near the docks—it should smell like smoke, too, and the river water they’d sprayed on the fire, and burning cotton and rubber and spices. A warehouse full of pepper had burned. That odor would be unmistakable.

But I didn’t smell it. I wandered up and down the passages of the Central and Northern and District Lines, stood on each of the platforms, waited in the corners near the stairways for over an hour, and nothing.

It doesn’t happen all the time, I thought, taking the Circle Line to Liverpool Street. There’s some other factor—the time of day or the temperature or the weather. Maybe the winds only blew when London was experiencing an inversion layer. I should have checked the weather this morning, I thought.

Whatever the factor was, there was nothing at Liverpool Street, either, but at Euston the wind hit me full force the minute I stepped off the train—a violent blast of soot and dread and charred wood. Even though I knew what it was now, I had to lean against the cold tiled wall a moment till my heart stopped pounding and the dry taste of fear in my mouth subsided.

I waited for the next train and the next, but the wind didn’t repeat itself, and I went down to the Victoria Line, thought a minute, and went back up to the surface to ask the ticket seller if the tracks at Bounds Green were aboveground.

“I believe they are, sir,” he said in a thick Scottish brogue.

“What about Balham?”

He looked alarmed. “Balham’s the other way. It’s not on the same line, either.”

“I know,” I said. “Are they? Aboveground?”

He shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t know, sir. Sorry. If you’re going to Balham, you go down to the Northern Line and take the train to Tooting Bec and Morden. Not the one to Elephant and Castle.”

I nodded. Balham was even farther out in the suburbs than Bounds Green. The tracks were almost certain to be aboveground, but it was still worth a try.

Balham had taken the worst hit of any of the stations. The bomb had fallen just short of the station, but in the worst possible place. It had plunged the station into darkness, smashed the water and sewer pipes and the gas mains. Filthy water had rushed into the station in torrents, flooding the pitch-black passages, pouring down the stairs and into the tunnels. Three hundred people had drowned. And how could that not still be there, even if Balham was aboveground? And if it was there, the smell of sewage and gas and darkness would be unmistakable.

I didn’t follow the ticket vendor’s directions. I detoured to Blackfriars, since it was nearly on the way, and stood around its yellow-tiled platforms for half an hour with no result before going on to Balham.

The train was nearly deserted for most of the long trip. From London Bridge out there were only two people in my car, a middle-aged woman reading a book and, at the far end, a young girl, crying.

She had spiked hair and a pierced eyebrow, and she cried helplessly, obliviously, making no attempt to wipe her mascaraed cheeks, or even turn her head toward the window.

I wondered if I should go ask her what was wrong or if the woman with the book would think I was hitting on her. I wasn’t even sure she would be aware of me if I did go over—there was a complete absorption to her sorrow that reminded me of Cath, intent on finding her china. I wondered if that was what had broken this girl’s heart, that they had discontinued her pattern? Or had her friends betrayed her, had affairs, gotten old?

“Borough,” the automated voice said, and she seemed to come to herself with a jerk, swiped at her cheeks, grabbed up her knapsack, and got off.

The middle-aged woman stayed on all the way to Balham, never once looking up from her book. When the train pulled in, I went over and stood next to her at the door so I could see what classic of literature she found so fascinating. It was Gone with the Wind.

But the winds aren’t gone, I thought, leaning against the wall of Balham’s platform, listening for the occasional sound of an incoming train, futilely waiting for a blast of sewage and methane and darkness. The winds of the Blitz are still here, endlessly blowing through the tunnels and passages of the Tube like ghosts, wandering reminders of fire and flood and destruction.

If that was what they were. Because there was no smell of filthy water at Balham, or any indication that any had ever been there. The air in the passages was dry and dusty. There wasn’t even a hint of mildew.

And even if there had been, it still wouldn’t explain Holborn. I waited through three more trains on each side and then caught a train for Elephant and Castle and the Imperial War Museum.

“Experience the London Blitz,” the poster had said, but the exhibit didn’t have anything about which tube stations had been hit. Its gift shop yielded three more books, though. I scoured them from cover to cover, but there was no mention at all of Holborn or of any bombings near there.

And if the winds were leftover breezes from the Blitz, why hadn’t I felt them the first time we were here? We had been in the Tube all the time, going to the conference, going to plays, going off on the Old Man’s wild hares, and there hadn’t been even a breath of smoke, of sulfur.

What was different that time? The weather? It had rained nearly nonstop that first time. Could that have affected the inversion layer? Or was it something that had happened since then? Some change in the routing of the trains or the connections between stations?

I walked back to Elephant and Castle in a light rain. A man in a clerical collar and two boys with white surplices over their arms were coming out of the station. There must be a church nearby, I thought, and realized that could be the solution for Holborn.

The crypts of churches had been used as shelters during the Blitz. Maybe they had also been used as temporary morgues.

I looked up “morgue” and then, when that didn’t work, “body disposal.”

I was right. They had used churches, warehouses, even swimming pools after some of the worst air raids to store bodies.

I doubted if there were any swimming pools near Holborn, but there might be a church.

There was only one way to find out—go back to Holborn and look. I looked at my tube map. Good. I could catch a train straight to Holborn from here. I went down to the Bakerloo Line and got on a northbound train. It was nearly as empty as the one I’d come out on, but when the doors opened at Waterloo, a huge crowd of people surged onto the train.

It can’t be rush hour yet, I thought, and glanced at my watch. Six-fifteen. Good God. I was supposed to meet Cath at the theater at seven. And I was how many stops from the theater?

I pulled out my tube map and clung to the overhead pole, trying to count. Embankment and then Charing Cross and Piccadilly Circus. Five minutes each, and another five to get out of the station in this crush. I’d make it. Barely.

“Service on the Bakerloo Line has been disrupted from Embankment north,” the automated voice said as we pulled in. “Please seek alternate routes.”

Not now! I thought, grabbing for my map. Alternate routes.

I could take the Northern Line to Leicester Square and then change for Piccadilly Circus. No, it would be faster to get off at Leicester Square and run the extra blocks.

I raced off the train the minute the doors opened and down the corridor to the Northern Line. Five to seven, and I was still two stops away from Leicester Square, and four blocks from the theater. A train was coming in. I could hear its rumble down the corridor. I darted around people, shouting, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and burst onto the packed northbound platform.

The train must have been on the southbound tracks. NEXT TRAIN 4 MIN., the overhead sign said.

Great, I thought, hearing it start up, pushing the air in front of it, creating a vacuum in its wake. Embankment had been hit. And that was all I needed right now, a blast from the Blitz.

I’d no sooner said it than it hit, whipping my hair and my coat lapels back, rattling the unglued edges of a poster for Showboat. There was no blast, no heat, even though Embankment was right on the river, where the fires had been the worst. It was cold, cold, but there was no smell of formaldehyde with it, no stench of decay. Only the icy chill and a smothering smell of dryness and of dust.

It should have been better than the other ones, but it wasn’t. It was worse. I had to lean against the back wall of the platform for support, my eyes closed, before I could get on the train.

What are they? I thought, even though this proved they were the residue of the Blitz. Because Embankment had been hit.

And people must have died, I thought. Because it was death I’d smelled. Death and terror and despair.

I stumbled onto the train. It was jammed tight, and the closeness, the knowledge that any wind, any air, couldn’t reach me through this mass of people, revived me, calmed me, and by the time I pulled in to Leicester Square, I had recovered and was thinking only of how late I was.

Seven-ten. I could still make it, but just barely. At least Cath had the tickets, and with luck Elliott and Sara would get there in the meantime and they’d all be busy saying hello.

Maybe the Old Man changed his mind, I thought, and decided to come. Maybe yesterday he’d been under the weather, and tonight he’d be his old self.

The train pulled in. I raced down the passage, up the escalator, and out onto Shaftesbury. It was raining, but I didn’t have time to worry about it.

“Tom! Tom!” a breathless voice shouted behind me.

I turned. Sara was frantically waving at me from half a block away.

“Didn’t you hear me?” she said breathlessly, catching up to me. “I’ve been calling you ever since the Tube.”

She’d obviously been running. Her hair was mussed, and one end of her scarf dangled nearly to the ground.

“I know we’re late,” she said, pulling at my arm, “but I must catch my breath. You’re not one of those dreadful men who’ve taken up marathon running in old age, are you?”

“No,” I said, moving over in front of a shop and out of the path of traffic.

“Elliott’s always talking about getting a Stairmaster.” She pulled her dangling scarf off and wrapped it carelessly around her neck. “I have no desire to get in shape.”

Cath was wrong. That was all there was to it. Her radar had failed her and she was misinterpreting the whole situation.

I must have been staring. Sara put a defensive hand up to her hair. “I know I look a mess,” she said, putting up her umbrella. “Oh, well. How late are we?”

“We’ll make it,” I said, taking her arm, and setting off toward the Lyric. “Where’s Elliott?”

“He’s meeting us at the theater. Did Cath get her china?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since this morning,” I said.

“Oh, look, there she is,” Sara said, and began waving.

Cath was standing in front of the Lyric, next to the water-spotted sign that said TONIGHT’S PERFORMANCE SOLD OUT, looking numb and cold.

“Why didn’t you wait inside out of the rain?” I said, leading them both into the lobby.

“We ran into each other coming out of the Tube,” Sara said, pulling off her scarf. “Or, rather, I saw Tom. I had to scream to get his attention. Isn’t Elliott here yet?”

“No,” Cath said.

“He and Mr. Evers came back after lunch. The day was not a success, so don’t bring up the subject. Mrs. Evers insisted on buying everything in the entire gift shop, and then we couldn’t find a taxi. Apparently there are no taxis down in Kew. I had to take the Tube, and it was blocks to the station.” She put her hand up to her hair. “I got blown to pieces.”

“Did you change trains at Embankment?” I asked, trying to remember which line went out to Kew Gardens. Maybe she’d felt the wind, too. “Were you on the Bakerloo Line platform?”

“I don’t remember,” Sara said impatiently. “Is that the line for Kew? You’re the tube expert.”

“Do you want me to check your coats?” I said hastily.

Sara handed me hers, jamming her long scarf into one sleeve, but Cath shook her head. “I’m cold.”

“You should have waited in the lobby,” I said.

“Should I?” she said, and I looked at her, surprised. Was she mad I was late? Why? We still had fifteen minutes, and Elliott wasn’t even here yet.

“What’s the matter?” I started to say, but Sara was asking, “Did you get your china?”

“No,” Cath said, still with that edge of anger in her voice. “Nobody has it.”

“Did you try Selfridge’s?” Sara asked, and I went off to check Sara’s coat. When I came back, Elliott was there.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. He turned to me. “What happened to you this—?”

“We were all late,” I said, “except Cath, who, luckily, was the one with the tickets. You do have the tickets?”

Cath nodded and pulled them out of her evening bag. She handed them to me, and we went in. “Right-hand aisle and down to your right,” the usher said. “Row three.”

“No stairs to climb?” Elliott said. “No ladders?”

“No rock axes and pitons,” I said. “No binoculars.”

“You’re kidding,” Elliott said. “I won’t know how to act.”

I stopped to buy programs from the usher. By the time we got to Row 3, Cath and Sara were already in their seats. “Good God,” Elliott said as we sidled past the people on the aisle. “I’ll bet you can actually see from here.”

“Do you want to sit next to Sara?” I said.

“Good God, no,” Elliott joked. “I want to be able to ogle the chorus girls without her smacking me with her program.”

“I don’t think it’s that kind of play,” I said.

“Cath, what’s this play about?” Elliott said.

She leaned across Sara. “Hayley Mills is in it,” she told him.

“Hayley Mills,” he said reminiscently, leaning back, his hands behind his head. “I thought she was truly sexy when I was ten years old. Especially that dance number in Bye Bye Birdie.”

“You’re thinking of Ann-Margret, you fool,” Sara said, reaching across me to smack him with her program. “Hayley Mills was in that one where she’s the little girl who always saw the positive side of things—what was it called?”

I looked across at Cath, surprised she hadn’t chimed in with the answer—she was the Hayley Mills fan. She was sitting with her coat pulled around her shoulders. Her face looked pinched with cold.

“You know Hayley Mills,” Sara said to Elliott. “We watched her in The Flame Trees of Thika.”

Elliott nodded. “I always admired her chest. Or am I thinking of Annette?”

“I don’t think this is that kind of play,” Sara said.

It wasn’t that kind of play. Everyone wore high-necked costumes, including Hayley Mills, who swept in swathed in a bulky coat. “I’m so sorry I’m late, dear,” she said, taking off her coat to reveal a turtleneck sweater and going over to stand in front of a stage fire. “It’s so cold out. And the air’s so strange.”

Whoever was playing her husband said, “ ‘Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows,’ ” and Elliott leaned over and whispered, “Oh, God, a literary play.”

I’d missed the rest of the husband’s line, but he must have asked Hayley why she was late, because she said, “My assistant cut her hand, and I had to take her to hospital. It took forever for her to get stitched up.”

A hospital. I hadn’t considered that. Their morgues would have been full during the Blitz. Was there a hospital close to Holborn? I would have to ask Elliott at intermission.

A sudden rattle of applause brought me out of my reverie.

The stage was dark. I’d missed Scene One. When the lights went back up, I tried to focus on the play, so I could discuss it at least halfway intelligibly at the intermission.

“The wind is rising,” Hayley Mills said, looking out an imaginary window.

“Storm brewing,” a man, not her husband, said.

“That’s what I fear,” she said, rubbing her hands along her arms to warm them. “Oh, Derek, what if he finds out about us?”

I glanced sideways across Sara at Cath, but couldn’t see her face in the darkened theater. She obviously hadn’t known what this play was about, or she’d never have chosen it.

But Hayley wasn’t acting anything like Sara. She chain-smoked, she paced, she hung up the phone hastily when her husband came into the room and was so obviously guilty no one, least of all her husband, could have failed to miss it.

Elliott certainly didn’t. “The husband’s got to be a complete moron,” he said as soon as the curtain went down for the intermission. “Even the dog could deduce that she’s having an affair. Why is it characters in plays never act any way remotely resembling real life?”

“Maybe because people in real life don’t look like Hayley Mills,” Cath said. “She does look wonderful, doesn’t she, Sara? She hasn’t aged a day.”

“You’re joking, right?” Elliott said. “All right, I know people kid themselves about their spouses having affairs, but—”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Cath said. “I suppose there’ll be a horrible line. Come with me, Sara, and I’ll tell you the saga of my china.” They edged past us.

“Get us a glass of white wine,” Sara called back from the aisle, and Elliott and I shouldered our way to the bar, which took ten minutes, and another five to get served. Sara and Cath still weren’t back.

“So where were you all day?” Elliott asked me, sipping Sara’s wine. “I looked for you at lunch.”

“I was researching something,” I said. “Holborn tube station is in Bloomsbury, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” he said. “I rarely take the Tube.”

“Are there any hospitals near the tube station?”

“Hospitals?” he said bewilderedly. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Or churches?”

“I don’t know. What’s this all about?”

“Have you ever heard of a thing called an inversion layer?” I said. “It’s when air is trapped—”

“They simply must do something about the women’s bathroom situation,” Sara said, grabbing her wine and taking a sip. “I thought we were going to be in there the entire third act.”

“Sounds like an excellent idea,” Elliott said. “I don’t mean to sound like the Old Man, but if this is any indication, plays truly have gone to hell! I mean, we’re expected to believe that Hayley Mills’s husband is so blind that he can’t see his wife’s in love with—the other one—what’s his name—?”

“Pollyanna,” Cath said. “I’ve been trying to remember it all through the first two acts. The name of the little girl who always saw the positive side of things.”

“Sara,” I said, “are there any hospitals near Holborn?”

“The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. That’s the one James Barrie left all the money to,” she said. “Why?”

The Great Ormond Street Hospital. That had to be it. They had used it as a temporary morgue, and the air—

“It’s so obvious,” Elliott said, still on the subject of infidelity. “The excuses Hayley Mills’s character makes for where she’s been—”

“She looks wonderful, doesn’t she?” Cath said. “How old do you suppose she is? She looks so young!”

The end-of-intermission bell chimed.

“Let’s go,” Cath said, setting her wine down. “I don’t want to have to crawl over all those people again.”

Sara swallowed her wine at one gulp, and we went back down the aisle. We were too late. The people on the end had to stand up and let us past.

“But don’t you agree,” Elliott said, sitting down, “that any normal person—”

“Shh,” Cath said, leaning all the way across Sara and me to shut him up. “The lights are going down.”

They did, and I felt an odd sense of relief, as if we’d just avoided something terrible. The curtain began to go up.

“I still say,” Elliott said in a stage whisper, “that nobody could have that many clues thrown at him and not realize his wife’s having an affair.”

“Why not?” Sara said, “You didn’t,” and Hayley Mills came onstage.

Beside me, in the dark, Elliott was applauding like everyone else, and I thought, It’s as if nothing happened. Elliott will think he didn’t really hear it, like the wind in the Tube, over so fast you wonder if it was really real, and he’ll decide it wasn’t, he’ll lean across me and say, “What do you mean? You’re not having an affair, are you?” and Sara will whisper, “Of course not, you idiot. I just meant you never notice anything,” and it won’t all have blown up, it won’t all—

“Who is it?” Elliott said.

His voice echoed in the space between two of Hayley Mills and her husband’s lines, and a man in front of us turned around and glared.

“Who is it?” Elliott said again, louder. “Who are you having an affair with?”

Cath said, in a strangled voice, “Don’t—”

“No, you’re right,” Elliott said, standing up. “What the hell difference does it make?” and pushed his way out over the people on the aisle.

Sara sat an endless minute, and then she plunged past us, too, tripping over my foot and nearly falling as she did.

I looked over at Cath, wondering if I should go after Sara. I had the ticket for her coat and scarf in my pocket. Cath was staring stiffly up at the stage, her coat clutched tightly around her.

“This can’t go on,” Hayley Mills said, looking now fully as old as she was, but still going gamely on with her lines, “I want a divorce,” and Cath stood up and pushed past me, me following clumsily after her, muttering, “Sorry, sorry,” over and over to the people on the aisle.

“It’s over,” Hayley said from the stage. “Can’t you see that?”

I didn’t catch up to Cath till she was halfway through the lobby.

“Wait,” I said, reaching for her arm. “Cath.”

Her face was white and set. She pushed unseeingly through the glass doors and out onto the pavement, and then stood there, looking bewildered.

“I’ll get a taxi,” I said, thinking, At least we won’t have to compete with the end-of-the-play crowd.

Wrong. People were streaming out of the Apollo, and farther down the street, Miss Saigon, and God knew what else. There were swarms of people on the curb and at the corner, shouting and whistling for taxis.

“Wait here,” I said, pushing Cath back under the Lyric’s marquee, and plunged out into the melee, my arm thrust out. A taxi pulled toward the curb, but it was only avoiding a clot of people, newspapers over their heads, ducking across the street.

The driver put his arm out and gestured toward the “in use” light on top of the taxi.

I stepped off the curb, scanning the mess for a taxi that didn’t have its light on, jerking back again as a motorbike splashed by.

Cath tugged on the back of my jacket. “It’s no use,” she said. “Phantom just let out. We’ll never get a taxi.”

“I’ll go to one of the hotels,” I said, gesturing up the street, “and have the doorman get one. You stay here.”

“No, it’s all right,” she said. “We can take the Tube. Piccadilly Circus is close, isn’t it?”

“Right down there,” I said, pointing.

She nodded and put her purse uselessly over her head against the rain, and we darted out onto the sidewalk, through the crowd, and down the steps into Piccadilly Circus.

“At least it’s dry in here,” I said, fishing for change for a ticket for her.

She nodded again, shaking the skirt of her coat out.

There was a huge crush at the machines and an even bigger one at the turnstiles. I handed her her ticket, and she put it gingerly in the slot and yanked her hand back before the machine could suck it away.

None of the down escalators was working. People clomped awkwardly down the steps. Two punkers with shaved heads and bad skin shoved their way past, muttering obscenities.

At the bottom there was a nasty-looking puddle under the tube map. “We need the Piccadilly Line,” I said, taking her arm and leading her down the tunnel and out onto the jammed platform.

The LED sign overhead said NEXT TRAIN 2 MIN. A train rumbled through on the other side and people poured onto the platform behind us, pushing us forward. Cath stiffened, staring down at the MIND THE GAP sign, and I thought, All we need now is a rat. Or a knifing.

A train pulled in and we pushed onto it, crammed together like sardines. “It’ll thin out in a couple of stops,” I said, and she nodded. She looked dazed, shell-shocked.

Like Elliott, staring blindly at the stage, saying in a flat voice, “Who are you having an affair with?” and stumbling blindly over people’s feet, people’s knees, trying to get out of the row, looking like he’d been hit by a blast of sulfurous, deadly wind. Everything fine one minute, sipping wine and discussing Hayley Mills, and the next, a bomb ripping the world apart and everything in ruins.

“Green Park,” the loudspeaker said, and the door opened and more people pushed on. “You better watch out!” a woman with matted hair said, shaking a finger in Cath’s face. Her fingertip was stained blue-black. “You better! I mean it!”

“That’s it,” I said, pushing Cath behind me. “We’re getting off at the next stop.” I put my hand on her back and began propelling her through the mass of people toward the door.

“Hyde Park Corner,” the loudspeaker said.

We got off, the door whooshed shut, and the train began to pull out.

“We’ll go up top and get a taxi,” I said tightly. “You were right. The Tube’s gone to hell.”

It’s all gone to hell, I thought bitterly, starting down the empty tunnel, Cath behind me. Sara and Elliott and London and Hayley Mills. All of it. The Old Man and Regent Street and us.

The wind caught me full in the face. Not from the train we had just gotten off of—from ahead of us somewhere, farther down the tunnel. And worse, worse, worse than before. I staggered back against the wall, doubling up like I’d been punched in the stomach. Disaster and death and devastation.

I straightened up, clutching my stomach, unable to catch my breath, and looked across the tunnel. Cath was standing with her back against the opposite wall, her hands flattened against the tiles, her face pinched and pale.

“You felt it,” I said, and felt a vast relief.

“Yes.”

Of course she felt it. This was Cath, who sensed things nobody else noticed, who had known Sara was having an affair, that the Old Man had turned into an old man. I should have gone and gotten her the first time it happened, dragged her down here, made her stand in the tunnels with me.

“Nobody else felt them,” I said. “I thought I was crazy.”

“No,” she said, and there was something in her voice, in the way she stood huddled against the green-tiled wall, that told me what should have been obvious all along.

“You felt them the first time we were here,” I said, amazed. “That’s why you hate the Tube. Because of the winds.”

She nodded.

“That’s why you wanted to take a taxi to Harrods,” I said. “Why didn’t you say something that first time?”

“We didn’t have enough money for taxis,” she said, “and you didn’t seem to be aware of them.”

I wasn’t aware of anything, I thought, not Cath’s obvious reluctance to go down into the tube stations, nor her flinching back from the incoming trains. She was watching for the next wind, I thought, remembering her peering nervously into the tunnel. She was waiting for it to hit.

“You should have told me,” I said. “If you’d told me, I could have helped you figure out what they were so they wouldn’t frighten you anymore.”

She looked up. “What they were?” she repeated blankly.

“Yes. I’ve figured out what’s causing them. It’s because of the inversion layer. The air gets trapped down here, and there’s no way out. Like gas pockets in a mine. So it just stays here, year after year,” I said, unbelievably glad I could talk to her, tell her.

“People used these tube stations as shelters during the Blitz,” I said eagerly. “Balham was hit, and so was Charing Cross. That’s why you can smell smoke and cordite. Because of the high-explosive bombs. And people were killed by flying tiles at Marble Arch. That’s what we’re feeling—the winds from those events. They’re winds from the past. I don’t know what this one was caused by. A tunnel collapse, maybe, or a V-2—” I stopped.

She was looking the way she had sitting on the narrow bed in our hotel room, right before she told me Sara was having an affair.

I stared at her.

“You know what’s causing the winds,” I said finally. Of course she knew. This was Cath, who knew everything. Cath, who had had twenty years to think about this.

I said, “What’s causing them, Cath?”

“Don’t—” she said, and looked down the passageway, as if hoping somebody would come, a sudden rush of people, hurrying for the trains, pushing between us, cutting her off before she could answer, but the tunnel remained empty, still, no air moving at all.

“Cath,” I said.

She took a deep breath, and then said, “They’re what’s coming.”

“What’s coming?” I repeated stupidly.

“What’s waiting for us,” she said, and then, bitterly, “Divorce and death and decay. The ends of things.”

“They can’t be,” I said. “Marble Arch took a direct hit. And Charing Cross—”

But this was Cath, who was always right. And what if the scent wasn’t of smoke but of fear, not of ashes but of despair?

What if the formaldehyde wasn’t the charnel house odor of a temporary morgue but of a permanent one, Death itself, the marble arch that waited for us all? No wonder it had reminded Cath of a cemetery.

What if the direct hits, shrapnel flying everywhere, slashing through youth and marriage and happiness, weren’t V-2s, but death and devastation and decline?

The winds all, all smelled of death, and the Blitz hardly had a monopoly on that. Look at Hari Srinivasau. And the pub with the great fish and chips.

“But all of the stations where there are winds were hit,” I said. “And in Charing Cross there was a smell of water and dirt. It has to be the Blitz.”

Cath shook her head. “I’ve felt them on BART, too.”

“But that’s in San Francisco. It might be the earthquake. Or the fire.”

“And on the Metro in D.C. And once, at home, in the middle of Main Street,” she said, staring at the floor. “I think you’re right about the inversion layer. It must concentrate them down here, make them stronger and more—”

She paused, and I thought she was going to say “lethal.”

“More noticeable,” she said.

But I hadn’t noticed. Nobody had noticed except Cath, who noticed everything.

And the old, I thought, remembering the white-haired woman in South Kensington Station, her coat collar clutched closed with a blue-veined hand, the stooped old black man on the platform in Holborn. The old feel them all the time. They walked bent nearly double against a wind which blew all the time.

Or stayed out of the Tube. I thought of the Old Man saying, “I loathe the Tube.” The Old Man, who had run us merrily all over London on the Tube after adventure, on at Baker Street and off at Tower Hill, up escalators, down stairs, shouting stories over his shoulder the whole time. “Horrible place,” he had said, shuddering, yesterday. “Filthy, smelly, drafty.” Drafty.

He felt the winds, and so did Mrs. Hughes. “I never go down in the Tube anymore,” she had said at dinner. Not “I never take the Tube.” I never go down in the Tube. And it wasn’t just the stairs or the long distances she had to walk. It was the winds, reeking of separation and loss and sorrow.

And Cath had to be right. They had to be the winds of mortality. What else would blow so steadily, so inexorably, on the old and no one else?

But then why had I noticed them? Maybe the conference was an inversion layer of another kind, bringing me face-to-face with old friends and old places. With cancer and the Gap and the Old Man, railing about newfangled plays and spicy food. Bringing me face-to-face early with death and old age and change.

And a feeling of time running out, that made you go shoving down escalators and racing through corridors, frantic to catch the train before it pulled out. A feeling of panic, that it might be the last one. “The doors are closing.”

I thought of Sara, running up out of Leicester Square Station, her hair windblown, her cheeks unnaturally red, of her pushing past my knees in the theater, desperate, pursued.

“Sara felt them,” I said.

“Did she?” Cath said, her voice flat.

I looked at her, standing there against the far wall, braced for the next wind, waiting for it to hit.

It was funny. This very passage, this very station had been used as a shelter during the Blitz. But there weren’t any shelters that could protect you from this kind of raid.

And no matter what train you caught, no matter which line you took, they all went to the same station. Marble Arch. End of the line.

“So what do we do?” I said.

She didn’t answer. She stood there looking at the floor between us as if it had “Mind the Gap” written on it. Mind the Gap.

“I don’t know,” she said finally.

And what had I thought she would say? That it wouldn’t be so bad as long as we had each other? That love conquers all?

That was the whole point, wasn’t it, that it didn’t? That it was no match for divorce and destruction and death? Look at Milford Hughes Senior. Look at Daniel Drecker’s daughter.

“They didn’t have my china at any of the shops in Chelsea,” she said bleakly. “It never occurred to me it might be discontinued. All those years, I—it never occurred to me it wouldn’t still be there.” Her voice broke. “It was such a pretty pattern.”

And the Old Man was so funny and so full of life, the pub was always jam-packed, Sara and Elliott had a great marriage.

But even that couldn’t save them. Divorce and destruction and decay.

And what could anybody do about any of it? Button up your overcoat? Stay aboveground?

But that was the problem, staying aboveground. And somehow getting through the days, knowing the doors were closing and it was all going to go smash. Knowing that everything you ever loved or liked or even thought was pretty was all going to be torn down, burned up, blown away. “Gone with the wind,” I said, thinking of the woman on the train.

“What?” Cath said, still in that numb, hopeless voice.

“The novel,” I said ruefully. “Gone with the Wind. There was a woman on the train to Balham today reading it. When I was tracking down the winds, trying to find out which stations had them, if they were stations that had been hit during the Blitz.”

“You went to Balham?” she demanded. “Today?”

“And Blackfriars. And Embankment. And Elephant and Castle. I went to the Transport Museum to find which stations had been hit, and then to Monument and Balham, trying to see if they had winds.” I shook my head. “I spent the whole day, trying to figure out the pattern of the—What is it?”

Cath had put her hand up to her mouth as if she were in pain.

“What is it?”

She said, “Sara canceled again today. After you left. I thought maybe we could have lunch.” She looked across at me. “Nobody knew where you were.”

“I didn’t want anybody to know I was running around London chasing winds nobody else could feel,” I said.

“Elliott told me you’d disappeared the day before, too,” she said, and there was still something I wasn’t getting here. “He said he and Arthur wanted you to have lunch with them, but you left.”

“I went back to Holborn, to try to see what was causing the winds. And then to Marble Arch.”

“Sara told me she and Elliott had to go take Evers and his wife sightseeing, that they wanted to see Kew Gardens.”

“Elliott? I thought you said he was at the conference?”

“He was. He said Sara had a doctor’s appointment she’d forgotten about,” she said. “Nobody knew where you were. And then at the theater, you and Sara—”

Had shown up together, late, out of breath, Sara’s cheeks flaming. And the day before, I had lied about lunch, about the afternoon session. To Cath, who could sense when people were lying, who could sense when something was wrong.

“You thought I was the one who was having an affair with Sara,” I said.

She nodded numbly.

“You thought I was having an affair with Sara?” I said. “How could you think that? I love you.”

“And Sara loved Elliott. People cheat on their spouses, they leave each other. Things . . .”

“. . . fall apart,” I murmured.

And the air down here registered it all, trapped it belowground, distilled it into an essence of death and destruction and decay.

Cath was wrong. It was the Blitz after all. And the girl crying on the train to Balham, and the arguing American couple.

Estrangement and disaster and despair. I wondered if it would record this, too, Cath’s fear and our unhappiness, and send it blowing through the tunnels and tracks and passages of the Tube to hit some poor unsuspecting tourist in the face next week. Or fifty years from now.

I looked at Cath, still standing against the opposite wall, impossibly far away.

“I’m not having an affair with Sara,” I said, and Cath leaned weakly against the tiles and started to cry.

“I love you,” I said and crossed the passage in one stride and put my arms around her, and for a moment everything was all right. We were together, and safe. Love conquers all.

But only till the next wind—the results of the X-ray, the call in the middle of the night, the surgeon looking down at his hands, not wanting to tell you the bad news. And we were still down in the tube tunnels, still in its direct path.

“Come on,” I said, and took her arm. I couldn’t protect her from the winds, but I could get her out of the Tube. I could keep her out of the inversion layer. For a few years. Or months. Or minutes.

“Where are we going?” she asked as I propelled her along the passage.

“Up,” I said. “Out.”

“We’re miles from our hotel,” she said.

“We’ll get a taxi,” I said. I led her up the stairs, around a curve, listening as we went for the sound of a train rumbling in, for a tinny voice announcing, “Mind the Gap.”

“We’ll take taxis exclusively from now on,” I said.

Down another passage, down another set of stairs, trying not to hurry, as if hurrying might bring another one on. Through the arch to the escalators. Almost there. Another minute, and I’d have her on the escalator and headed up out of the inversion layer. Out of the wind. Safe for the moment.

A clot of people emerged abruptly from the Circle Line tunnel opposite and jammed up in front of the escalator, chattering in French. Teenagers on holiday, lugging enormous backpacks and a duffel too wide for the escalator steps, stopping, maddeningly, to consult their tube maps at the foot of the escalator.

“Excuse me,” I said, “Pardonnez-moi,” and they looked up, and, instead of moving aside, tried to get on the escalator, jamming the too-wide duffel between the rubber handholds, mashing it down onto the full width of the escalator steps so no one could get past.

Behind us, in the Piccadilly Line tunnel, I could hear the faint sound of a train approaching. The French kids finally, finally, got the bag onto the escalator, and I pushed Cath onto the bottom step, and stepped onto the one below her.

Come on. Up, up. Past posters for Remains of the Day and Forever, Patsy Cline and Death of a Salesman. Below us, the rumble of the train grew louder, closer.

“What do you say we forget going back to our hotel? We’re not far from Marble Arch,” I said to cover the sound. “What say we call the Royal Hernia and see if they’ve got an extra bed?”

Come on, come on. Up. King Lear. The Mousetrap.

“What if it’s not still there?” Cath said, looking down at the depths below us. We’d come almost three floors. The sound of the train was only a murmur, drowned out by the giggling students and the dull roar of the station hall above us.

“It’s still there,” I said positively.

Come on, up, up.

“It’ll be just like it was,” I said. “Steep stairs and the smells of mildew and rotting cabbage. Nice wholesome smells.”

“Oh, no,” Cath said. She pointed across at the down escalators, suddenly jammed with people in evening dress, shaking the rain from their fur coats and theater programs. “Cats just got out. We’ll never find a taxi.”

“We’ll walk,” I said.

“It’s raining,” Cath said.

Better the rain than the wind, I thought. Come on. Up.

We were nearly to the top. The students were already heaving their backpacks onto their shoulders. We would walk to a phone booth and call a taxi. And what then? Keep our heads down. Stay out of drafts. Turn into the Old Man.

It won’t work, I thought bleakly. The winds are everywhere. But I had to try to protect Cath from them, having failed to protect her for the last twenty years, I had to try now to keep her out of their deadly path.

Three steps from the top. The French students were yanking on the wedged duffel, shouting, “Allons! Allons! Vite!”

I turned to look back, straining to hear the sound of the train over their voices. And saw the wind catch the gray hair of the old woman just stepping onto the top step of the down escalator. She hunched down, ducking her head as it blew down on her from above. From above! It flipped the hair back from the oblivious young faces of the French students above us, lifted their collars, their shirttails.

“Cath!” I shouted and reached for her with one hand, digging the fingers of my other one into the rubber railing as if I could stop the escalator, keep it from carrying us inexorably forward, forward into its path.

My grabbing for her had knocked her off balance. She half-fell off her step and into me. I turned her toward me, pulled her against my chest, wrapped my arms around her, but it was too late.

“I love you,” Cath said, as if it was her last chance.

“Don’t—” I said, but it was already upon us, and there was no protecting her, no stopping it. It hit us full blast, forcing Cath’s hair across her cheeks, blowing us nearly back off the step, hitting me full in the face with its smell. I caught my breath in surprise.

The old lady was still standing poised at the top of the escalator, her head back, her eyes closed. People jammed up behind her, saying irritatedly, “Sorry!” and “May I get past, please!” She didn’t hear them. Head tilted back, she sniffed deeply at the air.

“Oh,” Cath said, and tilted her head back, too.

I breathed it in deeply. A scent of lilacs and rain and expectation. Of years of tourists reading England on $40 a Day and newlyweds holding hands on the platform. Of Elliott and Sara and Cath and me, tumbling laughingly after the Old Man, off the train and through the beckoning passages to the District Line and the Tower of London. The scent of spring and the All Clear and things to come.

Caught in the winding tunnels along with the despair and the terror and the grief. Caught in the maze of passages and stairs and platforms, trapped and magnified and held in the inversion layer.

We were at the top. “May I get past, please?” the man behind us said.

“We’ll find your china, Cath,” I said. “There’s a secondhand market at Portobello Road that has everything under the sun.”

“Does the Tube go there?” she said.

“I beg your pardon,” the man said. “Sorry.”

“Ladbroke Grove Station. The Hammersmith and City Line,” I said, and bent to kiss her.

“You’re blocking the way,” the man said. “People are trying to get through.”

“We’re improving the atmosphere,” I said and kissed her again.

We stood there a moment, breathing it in—leaves and lilacs and love.

Then we got on the down escalator, holding hands, and went down to the eastbound platform and took the Tube to Marble Arch.

10^16 to 1

James Patrick Kelly

But the best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.

—Stephen Hawking, “The Future of the Universe”

I remember now how lonely I was when I met Cross. I never let anyone know about it, because being alone back then didn’t make me quite so unhappy. Besides, I was just a kid. I thought it was my own fault.

It looked like I had friends. In 1962, I was on the swim team and got elected Assistant Patrol Leader of the Wolf Patrol in Boy Scout Troop 7. When sides got chosen for kickball at recess, I was usually the fourth or fifth pick. I wasn’t the best student in the sixth grade of John Jay Elementary School—that was Betty Garolli. But I was smart and the other kids made me feel bad about it. So I stopped raising my hand when I knew the answer and I watched my vocabulary. I remember I said albeit once in class and they teased me for weeks. Packs of girls would come up to me on the playground. “Oh, Ray,” they’d call, and when I turned around they’d scream, “All beat it!” and run away, choking with laughter.

It wasn’t that I wanted to be popular or anything. All I really wanted was a friend, one friend, a friend I didn’t have to hide anything from. Then came Cross, and that was the end of that.

One of the problems was that we lived so far away from everything. Back then, Westchester County wasn’t so suburban. Our house was deep in the woods in tiny Willoughby, New York, at the dead end of Cobb’s Hill Road. In the winter, we could see Long Island Sound, a silver needle on the horizon pointing toward the city. But school was a half hour drive away and the nearest kid lived in Ward’s Hollow, three miles down the road, and he was a dumb fourth-grader.

So I didn’t have any real friends. Instead, I had science fiction. Mom used to complain that I was obsessed. I watched Superman reruns every day after school. On Friday nights, Dad had let me stay up for Twilight Zone, but that fall CBS had temporarily canceled it. It came back in January after everything happened, but was never quite the same. On Saturdays, I watched old sci-fi movies on Adventure Theater. My favorites were Forbidden Planet and The Day the Earth Stood Still. I think it was because of the robots. I decided that when I grew up and it was the future, I was going to buy one, so I wouldn’t have to be alone anymore.

On Monday mornings, I’d get my weekly allowance—a quarter. Usually I’d get off the bus that same afternoon down in Ward’s Hollow so I could go to Village Variety. Twenty-five cents bought two comics and a pack of red licorice. I especially loved DCs Green Lantern, Marvel’s Fantastic Four and Incredible Hulk, but I’d buy almost any superhero. I read all the science fiction books in the library twice, even though Mom kept nagging me to try different things. But what I loved best of all was Galaxy magazine. Dad had a subscription, and when he was done reading them, he would slip them to me. Mom didn’t approve. I always used to read them up in the attic or out in the lean-to I’d lashed together in the woods. Afterward, I’d store them under my bunk in the bomb shelter. I knew that after the nuclear war, there would be no TV or radio or anything and I’d need something to keep me busy when I wasn’t fighting mutants.

I was too young in 1962 to understand about Mom’s drinking. I could see that she got bright and wobbly at night, but she was always up in the morning to make me a hot breakfast before school. And she would have graham crackers and peanut butter waiting when I came home—sometimes cinnamon toast. Dad said I shouldn’t ask Mom for rides after five because she got so tired keeping house for us. He sold Andersen windows and was away a lot, so I was pretty much stranded most of the time. But he always made a point of being home on the first Tuesday of the month, so he could take me to the Scout meeting at 7:30.

No, looking back on it, I can’t really say that I had an unhappy childhood—until I met Cross.

I remember it was a warm Saturday afternoon in October. The leaves covering the ground were still crisp and their scent spiced the air. I was in the lean-to I’d built that spring, mostly to practice the square and diagonal lashings I needed for Scouts. I was reading Galaxy. I even remember the story: “The Ballad of Lost C’Mell” by Cordwainer Smith. The squirrels must have been chittering for some time, but I was too engrossed by Lord Jestocost’s problems to notice. Then I heard a faint crunch, not ten feet away. I froze, listening. Crunch, crunch . . . then silence. It could’ve been a dog, except that dogs didn’t usually slink through the woods. I was hoping it might be a deer—I’d never seen deer in Willoughby before, although I’d heard hunters shooting. I scooted silently across the dirt floor and peered between the dead saplings.

At first I couldn’t see anything, which was odd. The woods weren’t all that thick and the leaves had long since dropped from the understory brush. I wondered if I had imagined the sounds; it wouldn’t have been the first time. Then I heard a twig snap, maybe a foot away. The wall shivered as if something had brushed against it, but there was nothing there. Nothing. I might have screamed then, except my throat started to close. I heard whatever it was skulk to the front of the lean-to. I watched in horror as an unseen weight pressed an acorn into the soft earth, and then I scrambled back into the farthest corner. That’s when I noticed that, when I wasn’t looking directly at it, the air where the invisible thing should have been shimmered like a mirage. The lashings that held the frame creaked, as if it were bending over to see what it had caught, getting ready to drag me, squealing, out into the sun and . . .

“Oh, fuck,” it said in a high, panicky voice and then it thrashed away into the woods.

In that moment, I was transformed—and I suppose that history too was forever changed. I had somehow scared the thing off, twelve-year-old scrawny me! But more important was what it had said. Certainly I was well aware of the existence of the word fuck before then, but I had never dared use it myself, nor do I remember hearing it spoken by an adult. A spaz like the Murphy kid might say it under his breath, but he hardly counted. I’d always thought of it as language’s atomic bomb; used properly, the word should make brains shrivel, eardrums explode. But when the invisible thing said fuck and then ran away, it betrayed a vulnerability that made me reckless and more than a little stupid.

“Hey, stop!” I took off in pursuit.

I didn’t have any trouble chasing it. The thing was no Davy Crockett; it was noisy and clumsy and slow. I could see a flickery outline as it lumbered along. I closed to within twenty feet and then had to hold back or I would’ve caught up to it. I had no idea what to do next. We blundered on in slower and slower motion until finally I just stopped.

“W-wait,” I called. “W-what do you want?” I put my hands on my waist and bent over like I was trying to catch my breath, although I didn’t need to.

The thing stopped too, but didn’t reply. Instead it sucked air in wheezy, ragged hooofs. It was harder to see, now that it was standing still, but I think it must have turned toward me.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“You are a child.” It spoke with an odd, chirping kind of accent. “Child” was Ch-eye-eld.

“I’m in the sixth grade.” I straightened, spread my hands in front of me to show that I wasn’t a threat. “What’s your name?” It didn’t answer. I took a step toward it and waited. Still nothing, but at least it didn’t bolt. “I’m Ray Beaumont,” I said finally. “I live over there.” I pointed. “How come I can’t see you?”

“What is the date?” It said da-ate-eh.

For a moment, I thought it meant data. Data? I puzzled over an answer. I didn’t want it thinking I was just a stupid little kid. “I don’t know,” I said cautiously. “October twentieth?”

The thing considered this, then asked a question that took my breath away. “And what is the year?”

“Oh jeez,” I said. At that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Rod Sterling himself had popped out from behind a tree and started addressing the unseen TV audience. Which might have included me, except this was really happening. “Do you know what you just . . . what it means when . . .”

“What, what?” Its voice rose in alarm.

“You’re invisible and you don’t know what year it is? Everyone knows what year it is! Are you . . . you’re not from here.”

“Yes, yes, I am. 1962, of course. This is 1962.” It paused. “And I am not invisible.” It squeezed about eight syllables into “invisible.” I heard a sound like paper ripping. “This is only camel.” Or at least, that’s what I thought it said.

“Camel?”

“No, camo.” The air in front of me crinkled and slid away from a dark face. “You have not heard of camouflage?”

“Oh sure, camo.”

I suppose the thing meant to reassure me by showing itself, but the effect was just the opposite. Yes, it had two eyes, a nose, and a mouth. It stripped off the camouflage to reveal a neatly pressed gray three-piece business suit, a white shirt, and a red-and-blue striped tie. At night, on a crowded street in Manhattan, I might’ve passed it right by—Dad had taught me not to stare at the kooks in the city. But in the afternoon light, I could see all the things wrong with its disguise. The hair, for example. Not exactly a crew-cut, it was more of a stubble, like Mr. Rudowski’s chin when he was growing his beard. The thing was way too thin, its skin was shiny, its fingers too long, and its face—it looked like one of those Barbie dolls.

“Are you a boy or a girl?” I said.

It started. “There is something wrong?”

I cocked my head to one side. “I think maybe it’s your eyes. They’re too big or something. Are you wearing makeup?”

“I am naturally male.” It—he bristled as he stepped out of the camouflage suit. “Eyes do not have gender.”

“If you say so.” I could see he was going to need help getting around, only he didn’t seem to know it. I was hoping he’d reveal himself, brief me on the mission. I even had an idea how we could contact President Kennedy or whoever he needed to meet with. Mr. Newell, the Scoutmaster, used to be a colonel in the Army—he would know some general who could call the Pentagon. “What’s your name?” I said.

He draped the suit over his arm. “Cross.”

I waited for the rest of it as he folded the suit in half. “Just Cross?” I said.

“My given name is Chitmansing.” He warbled it like he was calling birds.

“That’s okay,” I said. “Let’s just make it Mr. Cross.”

“As you wish, Mr. Beaumont.” He folded the suit again, again, and again.

“Hey!”

He continued to fold it.

“How do you do that? Can I see?”

He handed it over. The camo suit was more impossible than it had been when it was invisible. He had reduced it to a six-inch-square card, as thin and flexible as the queen of spades. I folded it in half myself. The two sides seemed to meld together; it would’ve fit into my wallet perfectly. I wondered if Cross knew how close I was to running off with his amazing gizmo. He’d never catch me. I could see flashes of my brilliant career as the invisible superhero. Tales to Confound presents: the origin of Camo Kid! I turned the card over and over, trying to figure out how to unfold it again. There was no seam, no latch. How could I use it if I couldn’t open it? “Neat,” I said. Reluctantly, I gave the card back to him.

Besides, real superheroes didn’t steal their powers.

I watched Cross slip the card into his vest pocket. I wasn’t scared of him. What scared me was that at any minute he might walk out of my life. I had to find a way to tell him I was on his side, whatever that was.

“So you live around here, Mr. Cross?”

“I am from the island of Mauritius.”

“Where’s that?”

“It is in the Indian Ocean, Mr. Beaumont, near Madagascar.”

I knew where Madagascar was from playing Risk, so I told him that, but then I couldn’t think of what else to say. Finally, I had to blurt out something—anything—to fill the silence. “It’s nice here. Real quiet, you know. Private.”

“Yes, I had not expected to meet anyone.” He, too, seemed at a loss. “I have business in New York City on the twenty-sixth of October.”

“New York, that’s a ways away.”

“Is it? How far would you say?”

“Fifty miles. Sixty, maybe. You have a car?”

“No, I do not drive, Mr. Beaumont. I am to take the train.”

The nearest train station was New Canaan, Connecticut. I could’ve hiked it in maybe half a day. It would be dark in a couple of hours. “If your business isn’t until the twenty-sixth, you’ll need a place to stay.”

“The plan is to take rooms at a hotel in Manhattan.”

“That costs money.”

He opened a wallet and showed me a wad of crisp new bills. For a minute I thought they must be counterfeit; I hadn’t realized that Ben Franklin’s picture was on any money. Cross was giving me the goofiest grin. I just knew they’d eat him alive in New York and spit out the bones.

“Are you sure you want to stay in a hotel?” I said.

He frowned. “Why would I not?”

“Look, you need a friend, Mr. Cross. Things are different here than . . . than on your island. Sometimes people do, you know, bad stuff. Especially in the city.”

He nodded and put his wallet away. “I am aware of the dangers, Mr. Beaumont. I have trained not to draw attention to myself. I have the proper equipment.” He tapped the pocket where the camo was.

I didn’t point out to him that all his training and equipment hadn’t kept him from being caught out by a twelve-year-old. “Sure, okay. It’s just . . . look, I have a place for you to stay, if you want. No one will know.”

“Your parents, Mr. Beaumont . . .”

“My dad’s in Massachusetts until next Friday. He travels; he’s in the window business. And my mom won’t know.”

“How can she not know that you have invited a stranger into your house?”

“Not the house,” I said. “My dad built us a bomb shelter. You’ll be safe there, Mr. Cross. It’s the safest place I know.”

I remember how Cross seemed to lose interest in me, his mission, and the entire twentieth century the moment he entered the shelter. He sat around all of Sunday, dodging my attempts to draw him out. He seemed distracted, like he was listening to a conversation I couldn’t hear. When he wouldn’t talk, we played games. At first it was cards: Gin and Crazy Eights, mostly. In the afternoon, I went back to the house and brought over checkers and Monopoly. Despite the fact that he did not seem to be paying much attention, he beat me like a drum. Not one game was even close. But that wasn’t what bothered me. I believed that this man had come from the future, and here I was building hotels on Baltic Avenue!

Monday was a school day. I thought Cross would object to my plan of locking him in and taking both my key and Mom’s key with me, but he never said a word. I told him that it was the only way I could be sure that Mom didn’t catch him by surprise. Actually, I doubted she’d come all the way out to the shelter. She’d stayed away after Dad gave her that first tour; she had about as much use for nuclear war as she had for science fiction. Still, I had no idea what she did during the day while I was gone. I couldn’t take chances. Besides, it was a good way to make sure that Cross didn’t skin out on me.

Dad had built the shelter instead of taking a vacation in 1960, the year Kennedy beat Nixon. It was buried about a hundred and fifty feet from the house. Nothing special—just a little cellar without anything built on top of it. The entrance was a steel bulkhead that led down five steps to another steel door. The inside was cramped; there were a couple of cots, a sink, and a toilet. Almost half of the space was filled with supplies and equipment. There were no windows and it always smelled a little musty, but I loved going down there to pretend the bombs were falling.

When I opened the shelter door after school on that Monday, Cross lay just as I had left him the night before, sprawled across the big cot, staring at nothing. I remember being a little worried; I thought he might be sick. I stood beside him and still he didn’t acknowledge my presence.

“Are you all right, Mr. Cross?” I said. “I brought Risk.” I set it next to him on the bed and nudged him with the corner of the box to wake him up. “Did you eat?”

He sat up, took the cover off the game and started reading the rules.

“President Kennedy will address the nation,” he said, “this evening at seven o’clock.”

For a moment, I thought he had made a slip. “How do you know that?”

“The announcement came last night.” I realized that his pronunciation had improved a lot; announcement had only three syllables. “I have been studying the radio.”

I walked over to the radio on the shelf next to the sink. Dad said we were supposed to leave it unplugged—something about the bombs making a power surge. It was a brand-new solid-state, multi-band Heathkit that I’d helped him build. When I pressed the on button, women immediately started singing about shopping: Where the values go up, up, up! And the prices go down, down, down! I turned it off again.

“Do me a favor, okay?” I said. “Next time when you’re done, would you please unplug this? I could get in trouble if you don’t.” I stooped to yank the plug.

When I stood up, he was holding a sheet of paper. “I will need some things tomorrow, Mr. Beaumont. I would be grateful if you could assist me.”

I glanced at the list without comprehension. He must have typed it, only there was no typewriter in the shelter.

To buy:

—One General Electric transistor radio with earplug

—One General Electric replacement earplug

—Two Eveready Heavy Duty nine volt batteries

—One New York Times, Tuesday, October 23

—Rand McNally map of New York City and vicinity

To receive in coins:

—twenty nickels

—ten dimes

—twelve quarters

When I looked up, I could feel the change in him. His gaze was electric; it seemed to crackle down my nerves. I could tell that what I did next would matter very much. “I don’t get it,” I said.

“There are inaccuracies?”

I tried to stall. “Look, you’ll pay almost double if we buy a transistor radio at Ward’s Hollow. I’ll have to buy it at Village Variety. Wait a couple of days—we can get one much cheaper down in Stamford.”

“My need is immediate.” He extended his hand and tucked something into the pocket of my shirt. “I am assured this will cover the expense.”

I was afraid to look, even though I knew what it was. He’d given me a hundred-dollar bill. I tried to thrust it back at him but he stepped away and it spun to the floor between us. “I can’t spend that.”

“You must read your own money, Mr. Beaumont.” He picked the bill up and brought it into the light of the bare bulb on the ceiling. “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. A kid like me doesn’t walk into Village Variety with a hundred bucks. Mr. Rudowski will call my mom!”

“If it is inconvenient for you, I will secure the items myself.” He offered me the money again.

If I didn’t agree, he’d leave and probably never come back. I was getting mad at him. Everything would be so much easier if only he’d admit what we both knew about who he was. Then I could do whatever he wanted with a clear conscience. Instead, he was keeping all the wrong secrets and acting really weird. It made me feel dirty, like I was helping a pervert. “What’s going on?” I said.

“I do not know how to respond, Mr. Beaumont. You have the list. Read it now and tell me please with which item you have a problem.”

I snatched the hundred dollars from him and jammed it into my pants pocket. “Why don’t you trust me?”

He stiffened as if I had hit him.

“I let you stay here. I didn’t tell anyone. You have to give me something, Mr. Cross.”

“Well then . . .” He looked uncomfortable. “I would ask you to keep the change.”

“Oh jeez, thanks.” I snorted in disgust. “Okay, okay, I’ll buy this stuff right after school tomorrow.”

With that, he seemed to lose interest again. When we opened the Risk board, he showed me where his island was, except it wasn’t there because it was too small. We played three games and he crushed me every time. I remember at the end of the last game, watching in disbelief as he finished building a wall of invading armies along the shores of North Africa. South America, my last continent, was doomed. “Looks like you win again,” I said. I traded in the last of my cards for new armies and launched a final, useless counter-attack. When I was done, he studied the board for a moment.

“I think Risk is not a proper simulation, Mr. Beaumont. We should both lose for fighting such a war.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Both sides can’t lose.”

“Yet they can,” he said. “It sometimes happens that the victors envy the dead.”

That night was the first time I can remember being bothered by Mom talking back to the TV. I used to talk to the TV too. When Buffalo Bob asked what time it was, I would screech It’s Howdy Doody Time, just like every other kid in America.

“My fellow citizens,” said President Kennedy, “let no one doubt that this is a difficult and dangerous effort on which we have set out.” I thought the president looked tired, like Mr. Newell on the third day of a camp-out. “No one can foresee precisely what course it will take or what costs or casualties will be incurred.”

“Oh my god!” Mom screamed at him. “You’re going to kill us all!”

Despite the fact that it was close to her bedtime and she was shouting at the President of the United States, Mom looked great. She was wearing a shiny black dress and a string of pearls. She always got dressed up at night, whether Dad was home or not. I suppose most kids don’t notice how their mothers look, but everyone always said how beautiful Mom was. And since Dad thought so too, I went along with it—as long as she didn’t open her mouth. The problem was that a lot of the time, Mom didn’t make any sense. When she embarrassed me, it didn’t matter how pretty she was. I just wanted to crawl behind the couch.

“Mom!”

As she leaned toward the television, the martini in her glass came close to slopping over the edge.

President Kennedy stayed calm. “The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are—but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high—but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.”

“Shut up! You foolish man, stop this!” She shot out of her chair and then some of her drink did spill. “Oh, damn!”

“Take it easy, Mom.”

“Don’t you understand?” She put the glass down and tore a Kleenex from the box on the end table. “He wants to start World War III!” She dabbed at the front of her dress and the phone rang.

I said, “Mom, nobody wants World War III.”

She ignored me, brushed by, and picked up the phone on the third ring.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. I could tell from the sound of her voice that it was Dad. “You heard him then?” She bit her lip as she listened to him. “Yes, but . . .”

Watching her face made me sorry I was in the sixth grade. Better to be a stupid little kid again, who thought grown-ups knew everything. I wondered whether Cross had heard the speech.

“No, I can’t, Dave. No.” She covered the phone with her hand. “Raymie, turn off that TV!”

I hated it when she called me Raymie, so I only turned the sound down.

“You have to come home now, Dave. No, you listen to me. Can’t you see, the man’s obsessed? Just because he has a grudge against Castro doesn’t mean he’s allowed to . . .”

With the sound off, Chet Huntley looked as if he were speaking at his own funeral.

“I am not going in there without you.”

I think Dad must have been shouting, because Mom held the receiver away from her ear.

She waited for him to calm down and said, “And neither is Raymie. He’ll stay with me.”

“Let me talk to him,” I said. I bounced off the couch. The look she gave me stopped me dead.

“What for?” she said to Dad. “No, we are going to finish this conversation, David, do you hear me?”

She listened for a moment. “Okay, all right, but don’t you dare hang up.” She waved me over and slapped the phone into my hand as if I had put the missiles in Cuba. She stalked to the kitchen.

I needed a grown-up so bad that I almost cried when I heard Dad’s voice. “Ray,” he said, “your mother is pretty upset.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I want to come home—I will come home—but I can’t just yet. If I just up and leave and this blows over, I’ll get fired.”

“But, Dad . . .”

“You’re in charge until I get there. Understand, son? If the time comes, everything is up to you.”

“Yes, sir,” I whispered. I’d heard what he didn’t say—it wasn’t up to her.

“I want you to go out to the shelter tonight. Wait until she goes to sleep. Top off the water drums. Get all the gas out of the garage and store it next to the generator. But here’s the most important thing. You know the sacks of rice? Drag them off to one side, the pallet too. There’s a hatch underneath, the key to the airlock door unlocks it. You’ve got two new guns and plenty of ammunition. The revolver is a .357 Magnum. You be careful with that, Ray, it can blow a hole in a car but it’s hard to aim. The double-barreled shotgun is easy to aim but you have to be close to do any harm. And I want you to bring down the Gamemaster from my closet and the .38 from my dresser drawer.” He had been talking as if there would be no tomorrow; he paused then to catch his breath. “Now, this is all just in case, okay? I just want you to know.”

I had never been so scared in my life.

“Ray?”

I should have told him about Cross then, but Mom weaved into the room. “Got it, Dad,” I said. “Here she is.”

Mom smiled at me. It was a lopsided smile that was trying to be brave but wasn’t doing a very good job of it. She had a new glass and it was full. She held out her hand for the phone and I gave it to her.

I remember waiting until almost ten o’clock that night, reading under the covers with a flashlight. The Fantastic Four invaded Latveria to defeat Doctor Doom; Superman tricked Mr. Mxyzptlk into saying his name backward once again. When I opened the door to my parents’ bedroom, I could hear Mom snoring. It spooked me; I hadn’t realized that women did that. I thought about sneaking in to get the guns, but decided to take care of them tomorrow.

I stole out to the shelter, turned my key in the lock and pulled on the bulkhead door. It didn’t move. That didn’t make any sense, so I gave it a hard yank. The steel door rattled terribly but did not swing away. The air had turned frosty and the sound carried in the cold. I held my breath, listening to my blood pound. The house stayed dark, the shelter quiet as stones. After a few moments, I tried one last time before I admitted to myself what had happened.

Cross had bolted the door shut from the inside.

I went back to my room, but couldn’t sleep. I kept going to the window to watch the sky over New York, waiting for a flash of killing light. I was all but convinced that the city would burn that very night in the thermonuclear fire and that Mom and I would die horrible deaths soon after, pounding on the unyielding steel doors of our shelter. Dad had left me in charge and I had let him down.

I didn’t understand why Cross had locked us out. If he knew that a nuclear war was about to start, he might want our shelter all to himself. But that made him a monster and I still didn’t see him as a monster. I tried to tell myself that he’d been asleep and couldn’t hear me at the door—but that couldn’t be right. What if he’d come to prevent the war? He’d said he had business in the city on Thursday; he could be doing something really, really futuristic in there that he couldn’t let me see. Or else he was having problems. Maybe our twentieth-century germs had got to him, like they killed H. G. Wells’s Martians.

I must have teased a hundred different ideas apart that night, in between uneasy trips to the window and glimpses at the clock. The last time I remember seeing was quarter after four. I tried to stay up to face the end, but I couldn’t.

I wasn’t dead when I woke up the next morning, so I had to go to school. Mom had Cream of Wheat all ready when I dragged myself to the table. Although she was all bright and bubbly, I could feel her giving me the mother’s eye when I wasn’t looking. She always knew when something was wrong. I tried not to show her anything. There was no time to sneak out to the shelter; I barely had time to finish eating before she bundled me off to the bus.

Right after the morning bell, Miss Toohey told us to open The Story of New York State to Chapter Seven, “Resources and Products,” and read to ourselves. Then she left the room. We looked at each other in amazement. I heard Bobby Coniff whisper something. It was probably dirty; a few kids snickered. Chapter Seven started with a map of product symbols. Two teeny little cows grazed near Binghamton. Rochester was a cog and a pair of glasses. Elmira was an adding machine, Oswego an apple. There was a lightning bolt over Niagara Falls. Dad had promised to take us there someday. I had the sick feeling that we’d never get the chance. Miss Toohey looked pale when she came back, but that didn’t stop her from giving us a spelling test. I got a ninety-five. The word I spelled wrong was enigma. The hot lunch was American Chop Suey, a roll, a salad, and a bowl of butterscotch pudding. In the afternoon, we did decimals.

Nobody said anything about the end of the world.

I decided to get off the bus in Ward’s Hollow, buy the stuff Cross wanted and pretend I didn’t know he had locked the shelter door last night. If he said something about it, I’d act surprised. If he didn’t . . . I didn’t know what I’d do then.

Village Variety was next to Warren’s Esso and across the street from the Post Office. It had once been two different stores located in the same building, but then Mr. Rudowski had bought the building and knocked down the dividing wall. On the fun side were pens and pencils and paper and greeting cards and magazines and comics and paperbacks and candy. The other side was all boring hardware and small appliances.

Mr. Rudowski was on the phone when I came in, but then he was always on the phone when he worked. He could sell you a hammer or a pack of baseball cards, tell you a joke, ask about your family, complain about the weather and still keep the guy on the other end of the line happy. This time though, when he saw me come in, he turned away, wrapping the phone cord across his shoulder.

I went through the store quickly and found everything Cross had wanted. I had to blow dust off the transistor radio box but the batteries looked fresh. There was only one New York Times left; the headlines were so big they were scary.

US IMPOSES ARMS BLOCKADE ON CUBA

ON FINDING OF OFFENSIVE MISSILE SITES;

KENNEDY READY FOR SOVIET SHOWDOWN

Ships Must Stop President Grave Prepared to Risk War

I set my purchases on the counter in front of Mr. Rudowski. He cocked his head to one side, trapping the telephone receiver against his shoulder, and rang me up. The paper was on the bottom of the pile.

“Since when do you read the Times, Ray?” Mr. Rudowski punched it into the cash register and hit total. “I just got the new Fantastic Four.” The cash drawer popped open.

“Maybe tomorrow,” I said.

“All right then. It comes to twelve dollars and forty-seven cents.”

I gave him the hundred-dollar bill.

“What is this, Ray?” He stared at it and then at me.

I had my story all ready. “It was a birthday gift from my grandma in Detroit. She said I could spend it on whatever I wanted so I decided to treat myself, but I’m going to put the rest in the bank.”

“You’re buying a radio? From me?”

“Well, you know. I thought maybe I should have one with me with all this stuff going on.”

He didn’t say anything for a moment. He just pulled a paper bag from under the counter and put my things into it. His shoulder were hunched; I thought maybe he felt guilty about overcharging for the radio. “You should be listening to music, Ray,” he said quietly. “You like Elvis? All kids like Elvis. Or maybe that colored guy, the one who does the Twist?”

“They’re all right, I guess.”

“You’re too young to be worrying about the news. You hear me? Those politicians . . .” He shook his head. “It’s going to be okay, Ray. You heard it from me.”

“Sure, Mr. Rudowski. I was wondering, could I get five dollars in change?”

I could feel him watching me as I stuffed it all into my book bag. I was certain he’d call my mom, but he never did. Home was three miles up Cobb’s Hill. I did it in forty minutes, a record.

I remember I started running when I saw the flashing lights. The police car had left skid marks in the gravel on our driveway.

“Where were you?” Mom burst out of the house as I came across the lawn. “Oh, my God, Raymie, I was worried sick.” She caught me up in her arms.

“I got off the bus in Ward’s Hollow.” She was about to smother me; I squirmed free. “What happened?”

“This the boy, ma’am?” The state trooper had taken his time catching up to her. He had almost the same hat as Scoutmaster Newell.

“Yes, yes! Oh, thank God, officer!”

The trooper patted me on the head like I was a lost dog. “You had your mom worried, Ray.”

“Raymie, you should’ve told me.”

“Somebody tell me what happened!” I said.

A second trooper came from behind the house. We watched him approach. “No sign of any intruder.” He looked bored; I wanted to scream.

“Intruder?” I said.

“He broke into the shelter,” said Mom. “He knew my name.”

“There was no sign of forcible entry,” said the second trooper. I saw him exchange a glance with his partner. “Nothing disturbed that I could see.”

“He didn’t have time,” Mom said. “When I found him in the shelter, I ran back to the house and got your father’s gun from the bedroom.”

The thought of Mom with the .38 scared me. I had my Shooting merit badge, but she didn’t know a hammer from a trigger. “You didn’t shoot him?”

“No.” She shook her head. “He had plenty of time to leave but he was still there when I came back. That’s when he said my name.”

I had never been so mad at her before. “You never go out to the shelter.”

She had that puzzled look she always gets at night. “I couldn’t find my key. I had to use the one your father leaves over the breezeway door.”

“What did he say again, ma’am? The intruder.”

“He said, ‘Mrs. Beaumont, I present no danger to you.’ And I said, ‘Who are you?’ And then he came toward me and I thought he said ‘Margaret,’ and I started firing.”

“You did shoot him!”

Both troopers must have heard, the panic in my voice. The first one said, “You know something about this man, Ray?”

“No, I—I was at school all day and then I stopped at Rudowski’s . . .” I could feel my eyes burning. I was so embarrassed; I knew I was about to cry in front of them.

Mom acted annoyed that the troopers had stopped paying attention to her. “I shot at him. Three, four times, I don’t know. I must have missed, because he just stood there staring at me. It seemed like forever. Then he walked past me and up the stairs like nothing had happened.”

“And he didn’t say anything?”

“Not a word.”

“Well, it beats me,” said the second trooper. “The gun’s been fired four times but there are no bullet holes in the shelter and no bloodstains.”

“You mind if I ask you a personal question, Mrs. Beaumont?” the first trooper said.

She colored. “I suppose not.”

“Have you been drinking, ma’am?”

“Oh that!” She seemed relieved. “No. Well, I mean, after I called you, I did pour myself a little something. Just to steady my nerves. I was worried because my son was so late and . . . Raymie, what’s the matter?”

I felt so small. The tears were pouring down my face.

After the troopers left, I remember Mom baking brownies while I watched Superman. I wanted to go out and hunt for Cross, but it was already sunset and there was no excuse I could come up with for wandering around in the dark. Besides, what was the point? He was gone, driven off by my mother. I’d had a chance to help a man from the future change history, maybe prevent World War III, and I had blown it. My life was ashes.

I wasn’t hungry that night, for brownies or spaghetti or anything, but Mom made that clucking noise when I pushed supper around the plate, so I ate a few bites just to shut her up. I was surprised at how easy it was to hate her, how good it felt. Of course, she was oblivious, but in the morning she would notice if I wasn’t careful. After dinner, she watched the news and I went upstairs to read. I wrapped a pillow around my head when she yelled at David Brinkley. I turned out the lights at 8:30, but I couldn’t get to sleep. She went to her room a little after that.

“Mr. Beaumont?”

I must have dozed off, but when I heard his voice I snapped awake immediately.

“Is that you, Mr. Cross?” I peered into the darkness. “I bought the stuff you wanted.” The room filled with an awful stink, like when Mom drove with the parking brake on.

“Mr. Beaumont,” he said, “I am damaged.”

I slipped out of bed, picked my way across the dark room, locked the door and turned on the light.

“Oh jeez!”

He slumped against my desk like a nightmare. I remember thinking then that Cross wasn’t human, that maybe he wasn’t even alive. His proportions were wrong: an ear, a shoulder and both feet sagged like they had melted. Little wisps of steam or something curled off him; they were what smelled. His skin had gone all shiny and hard; so had his business suit. I’d wondered why he never took the suit coat off, and now I knew. His clothes were part of him. The middle fingers of his right hand beat spasmodically against his palm.

“Mr. Beaumont,” he said. “I calculate your chances at 10^16 to 1.”

“Chances of what?” I said. “What happened to you?”

“You must listen most attentively, Mr. Beaumont. My decline is very bad for history. It is for you now to alter the time-line probabilities.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your government greatly overestimates the nuclear capability of the Soviet Union. If you originate a first strike, the United States will achieve overwhelming victory.”

“Does the president know this? We have to tell him!”

“John Kennedy will not welcome such information. If he starts this war, he will be responsible for the deaths of tens of millions, both Russians and Americans. But he does not grasp the future of the arms race. The war must happen now, because those who come after will build and build until they control arsenals that can destroy the world many times over. People are not capable of thinking for very long of such fearsome weapons. They tire of the idea of extinction and then become numb to it. The buildup slows but does not stop and they congratulate themselves on having survived it. But there are still too many weapons and they never go away. The Third War comes as a surprise. The First War was called the one to end all wars. The Third War is the only such war possible, Mr. Beaumont, because it ends everything. History stops in 2009. Do you understand? A year later, there is no life. All dead, the world a hot, barren rock.”

“But you . . .?”

“I am nothing, a construct. Mr. Beaumont, please, the chances are 10^16 to 1,” he said. “Do you know how improbable that is?” His laugh sounded like a hiccup. “But for the sake of those few precious time-lines, we must continue. There is a man, a politician in New York. If he dies on Thursday night, it will create the incident that forces Kennedy’s hand.”

“Dies?” For days, I had been desperate for him to talk. Now all I wanted was to run away. “You’re going to kill somebody?”

“The world will survive a Third War that starts on Friday, October 22, 1962.”

“What about me? My parents? Do we survive?”

“I cannot access that time-line. I have no certain answer for you. Please, Mr. Beaumont, this politician will die of a heart attack in less than three years. He has made no great contribution to history, yet his assassination can save the world.”

“What do you want from me?” But I had already guessed.

“He will speak most eloquently at the United Nations on Friday evening. Afterward he will have dinner with his friend, Ruth Fields. Around ten o’clock he will return to his residence at the Waldorf Towers. Not the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but the Towers. He will take the elevator to Suite 42A. He is the American ambassador to the United Nations. His name is Adlai Stevenson.”

“Stop it! Don’t say anything else.”

When he sighed, his breath was a cloud of acrid steam. “I have based my calculation of the time-line probabilities on two data points, Mr. Beaumont, which I discovered in your bomb shelter. The first is the .357 Magnum revolver, located under a pallet of rice bags. I trust you know of this weapon?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

“The second is the collection of magazines, located under your cot. It would seem that you take an interest in what is to come, Mr. Beaumont, and that may lend you the courage you will need to divert this time-line from disaster. You should know that there is not just one future. There are an infinite number of futures in which all possibilities are expressed, an infinite number of Raymond Beaumonts.”

“Mr. Cross, I can’t . . .”

“Perhaps not,” he said, “but I believe that another one of you can.”

“You don’t understand . . .” I watched in horror as a boil swelled on the side of his face and popped, expelling an evil jet of yellow steam. “What?”

“Oh fuck.” That was the last thing he said.

He slid to the floor—or maybe he was just a body at that point. More boils formed and burst. I opened all the windows in my room and got the fan down out of the closet and still I can’t believe that the stink didn’t wake Mom up. Over the course of the next few hours, he sort of vaporized.

When it was over, there was a sticky, dark spot on the floor the size of my pillow. I moved the throw rug from one side of the room to the other to cover it up. I had nothing to prove that Cross existed but a transistor radio, a couple of batteries, an earplug, and eighty-seven dollars and fifty-three cents in change.

I might have done things differently if I hadn’t had a day to think. I can’t remember going to school on Wednesday, who I talked to, what I ate. I was feverishly trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. I had no place to go for answers, not Miss Toohey, not my parents, not the Bible or the Boy Scout Handbook, certainly not Galaxy magazine. Whatever I did had to come out of me. I watched the news with Mom that night. President Kennedy had brought our military to the highest possible state of alert. There were reports that some Russian ships had turned away from Cuba; others continued on course. Dad called and said his trip was being cut short and that he would be home the next day. But that was too late.

I hid behind the stone wall when the school bus came on Thursday morning. Mrs. Johnson honked a couple of times, and then drove on. I set out for New Canaan, carrying my book bag. In it were the radio, the batteries, the coins, the map of New York, and the .357. I had the rest of Cross’s money in my wallet.

It took more than five hours to hike to the train station. I expected to be scared, but the whole time I felt light as air. I kept thinking of what Cross had said about the future, that I was just one of millions and millions of Raymond Beaumonts. Most of them were in school, diagramming sentences and watching Miss Toohey bite her nails. I was the special one, walking into history. I was super. I caught the 2:38 train, changed in Stamford, and arrived at Grand Central just after four. I had six hours. I bought myself a hot pretzel and a Coke and tried to decide where I should go. I couldn’t just sit around the hotel lobby for all that time; I thought that would draw too much attention. I decided to go to the top of the Empire State Building. I took my time walking down Park Avenue and tried not to see all the ghosts I was about to make. In the lobby of the Empire State Building, I used Cross’s change to call home.

“Hello?” I hadn’t expected Dad to answer. I would’ve hung up except that I knew I might never speak to him again.

“Dad, this is Ray. I’m safe, don’t worry.”

“Ray, where are you?”

“I can’t talk. I’m safe but I won’t be home tonight. Don’t worry.”

“Ray!” He was frantic. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ray!”

I hung up; I had to. “I love you,” I said to the dial tone.

I could imagine the expression on Dad’s face, how he would tell Mom what I’d said. Eventually they would argue about it. He would shout; she would cry. As I rode the elevator up, I got mad at them. He shouldn’t have picked up the phone. They should’ve protected me from Cross and the future he came from. I was in the sixth grade, I shouldn’t have to have feelings like this. The observation platform was almost deserted. I walked completely around it, staring at the city stretching away from me in every direction. It was dusk; the buildings were shadows in the failing light. I didn’t feel like Ray Beaumont anymore; he was my secret identity. Now I was the superhero Bomb Boy; I had the power of bringing nuclear war. Wherever I cast my terrible gaze, cars melted and people burst into flame.

And I loved it.

It was dark when I came down from the Empire State Building. I had a sausage pizza and a Coke on 47th Street. While I ate, I stuck the plug into my ear and listened to the radio. I searched for the news. One announcer said the debate was still going on in the Security Council. Our ambassador was questioning Ambassador Zorin. I stayed with that station for a while, hoping to hear his voice. I knew what he looked like, of course. Adlai Stevenson had run for president a couple of times when I was just a baby. But I couldn’t remember what he sounded like. He might talk to me, ask me what I was doing in his hotel; I wanted to be ready for that.

I arrived at the Waldorf Towers around nine o’clock. I picked a plush velvet chair that had a direct view of the elevator bank and sat there for about ten minutes. Nobody seemed to care but it was hard to sit still. Finally, I got up and went to the men’s room. I took my book bag into a stall, closed the door, and got the .357 out. I aimed it at the toilet. The gun was heavy, and I could tell it would have a big kick. I probably ought to hold it with both hands. I released the safety, put it back into my book bag, and flushed.

When I came out of the bathroom, I had stopped believing that I was going to shoot anyone, that I could. But I had to find out, for Cross’s sake. If I was really meant to save the world, then I had to be in the right place at the right time. I went back to my chair, checked my watch. It was nine-twenty.

I started thinking of the one who would pull the trigger, the unlikely Ray. What would make the difference? Had he read some story in Galaxy that I had skipped? Was it a problem with Mom? Or Dad? Maybe he had spelled enigma right; maybe Cross had lived another thirty seconds in his time-line. Or maybe he was just the best that I could possibly be.

I was so tired of it all. I must have walked thirty miles since morning and I hadn’t slept well in days. The lobby was warm. People laughed and murmured. Elevator doors dinged softly. I tried to stay up to face history, but I couldn’t. I was Raymond Beaumont, but I was just a twelve-year-old kid.

I remember the doorman waking me up at eleven o’clock. Dad drove all the way into the city to get me. When we got home, Mom was already in the shelter.

Only the Third War didn’t start that night. Or the next.

I lost television privileges for a month.

For most people my age, the most traumatic memory of growing up came on November 22, 1963. But the date I remember is July 14, 1965, when Adlai Stevenson dropped dead of a heart attack in London.

I’ve tried to do what I can, to make up for what I didn’t do that night. I’ve worked for the cause wherever I could find it. I belong to CND and SANE and the Friends of the Earth, and was active in the nuclear freeze movement. I think the Green Party {www.greens.org) is the only political organization worth your vote. I don’t know if any of it will change Cross’s awful probabilities; maybe we’ll survive in a few more time-lines.

When I was a kid, I didn’t mind being lonely. Now it’s hard, knowing what I know. Oh, I have lots of friends, all of them wonderful people, but people who know me say that there’s a part of myself that I always keep hidden. They’re right. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to tell anyone about what happened with Cross, what I didn’t do that night. It wouldn’t be fair to them.

Besides, whatever happens, chances are very good that it’s my fault.

SON OBSERVE THE TIME

Kage Baker

On the eve of destruction we had oysters and champagne. Don’t suppose for a moment that we had any desire to lord it over the poor mortals of San Francisco, in that month of April in that year of 1906; but things weren’t going to be so gracious there again for a long while, and we felt an urge to fortify ourselves against the work we were to do.

And who were we, you may ask? The present-time operatives of Dr. Zeus Incorporated, a twenty-fourth-century cabal of investors who have presided over the development of immortality and time travel, amongst other things. Neither of those inventions is terribly practical, I regret to say; nevertheless they can be utilized to provide a satisfactory profit for Company shareholders. Assuming, of course, that we immortals —their servants—are able to perform our tasks in a satisfactory manner.

London before the Great Fire, Delhi before the Mutiny, even Chicago —I was there and I can tell you, it requires a great deal of mental and emotional self-discipline to live side by side with mortals in a Salvage Zone. You must look, daily, into the smiling faces of those who are to lose all, and walk beside them in the knowledge that nothing you can do will affect their fates. Even the most prosaic of places has a sort of haunted glory at such times; judge then how it looked to us, that gilded fantastical butterfly of a city, quite unprepared for its approaching holocaust.

The place was made even queerer by the fact that there were so many Company operatives there at the time. The very ether hummed with our transmissions. In any street you might have seen us dismounting from carriages or the occasional automobile, we immortal gentlemen tipping our derbies to the ladies, our immortal ladies responding with a graceful inclination of their picture hats, smiling as we met each other’s terrified eyes. We dined at the Palace and as guests at Nob Hill mansions; promenaded in Golden Gate Park, drove out to Woodward Gardens, attended the theater and everywhere saw the pale set faces of our own kind, busy with their own particular preparations against what was to come.

Some of us had less pleasant places to go. I was grateful that I was not required to brave the Chinese labyrinth by Waverly Place, but my associate Pan had certain business there amongst the Celestials. I myself was obliged to venture, too many times, into the boarding-houses south of Market Street. Beneath the Fly Trap was a Company safe house and HQ; we’d meet there sometimes, Pan and I, at the end of a long day in our respective ghettoes, and we’d sit shaking together over a brace of stiff whiskies. Thus heartened, it was time for a costume change: dock laborer into gentleman for me, coolie into cook for him, and so home by cable car.

I lodged in two rooms on Bush Street. I will not say I slept there; one does not rest well on the edge of the maelstrom. But it was a place to keep one’s trunk, and to operate the Company credenza necessary for facilitating the missions of those operatives whose case officer I was. Salvaging is a terribly complicated affair, requiring as it does that one hide in History’s shadow until the last possible moment before snatching one’s quarry from its preordained doom. One must be organized and thoroughly coordinated; and timing is everything.

On the morning of the tenth of April I was working there, sending a progress report, when there came a brisk knock at my door. Such was my concentration that I was momentarily unmindful of the fact that I had no mortal servants to answer it. When I heard the impatient tapping of a small foot on the step, I hastened to the door.

I admitted Nan D’Araignee, one of our Art Preservation specialists. She is an operative of West African origin with exquisite features, slender and slight as a doll carved of ebony. I had worked with her briefly near the end of the previous century. She is quite the most beautiful woman I have ever known, and happily married to another immortal, a century before I ever laid eyes on her. Timing, alas, is everything.

“Victor.” She nodded. “Charming to see you again.”

“Do come in.” I bowed her into my parlor, acutely conscious of its disarray.

Her bright gaze took in the wrinkled laundry cast aside on the divan, the clutter of unwashed teacups, the half-eaten oyster loaf on the credenza console, six empty sauteme bottles and one smudgily thumbprinted wineglass. She was far too courteous to say anything, naturally, and occupied herself with the task of removing her gloves.

“I must apologize for the condition of the place,” I stammered. “My duties have kept me out a good deal.” I swept a copy of the Examiner from a chair. “Won’t you sit down?”

“Thank you.” She took the seat and perched there, hands folded neatly over her gloves and handbag. I pulled over another chair, intensely irritated at my clumsiness.

“I trust your work goes well?” I inquired, for there is of course no point in asking one of us if we are well. “And, er, Kalugin’s? Or has he been assigned elsewhere?”

“He’s been assigned to Marine Transport, as a matter of fact,” she told me, smiling involuntarily. “We are to meet on the Thunderer afterward. I am so pleased! He’s been in the Bering Sea for two years, and I’ve missed him dreadfully.”

“Ah,” I said. “How pleasant, then, to have something to look forward to in the midst of all this . . .”

She nodded quickly, understanding. I cleared my throat and continued:

“What may I do for you, Nan?”

She averted her gaze from dismayed contemplation of the stale oyster loaf and smiled. “I was told you might be able to assist me in requisitioning additional transport for my mission.”

“I shall certainly attempt it.” I stroked my beard. “Your present arrangements are unsuitable?”

“Inadequate, rather. You may recall that I’m in charge of Presalvage at the Hopkins Gallery. It seems our original estimates of what we can rescue there were too modest. At present I have five vans arranged for to evacuate the Gallery contents, but really we need more. Would it be possible to requisition a sixth? My own case officer was unable to assist me, but felt you might have greater success.”

This was a challenge. Company resources were strained to the utmost on this operation, which was one of the largest on record. Every operative in the United States had been pressed into service, and many of the European and Asian personnel. A handsome allotment had been made for transport units, but needs were swiftly exceeding expectations.

“Of course I should like to help you,” I replied cautiously, “if at all possible. You are aware, however, that horsedrawn transport utilization is impossible, due to the subsonic disturbances preceding the earthquake—and motor transports are, unfortunately, in great demand—”

A brewer’s wagon rumbled down the street outside, rattling my windows. We both leaped to our feet, casting involuntary glances at the ceiling; then sat down in silent embarrassment. Mme. D’Araignee gave a little cough. “I’m so sorry—My nerves are simply—”

“Not at all, not at all, I assure you—one can’t help flinching—”

“Quite. In any case, Victor, I understand the logistical difficulties involved; but even a handcart would greatly ease our difficulties. So many lovely and unexpected things have been discovered in this collection, that it really would be too awful to lose them to the fire.”

“Oh, certainly.” I got up and strode to the windows, giving in to the urge to look out and assure myself that the buildings hadn’t begun to sway yet. Solid and seemingly as eternal as the pyramids they stood there, for the moment. I turned back to Mme. D’Araignee as a thought occurred to me. “Tell me, do you know how to operate an automobile?”

“But of course!” Her face lit up.

“It may be possible to obtain something in that line. Depend upon it, Madame, you will have your sixth transport. I shall see to it personally.”

“I knew I could rely on you.” She rose, all smiles. We took our leave of one another with a courtesy that belied our disquiet. I saw her out and returned to my credenza keyboard.

QUERY, I input, RE: REQUISITION ADDTNL TRANSPORT MOTOR VAN OR AUTO? PRIORITY RE: HOPKINS INST.

HOPKINS PROJECT NOT YOUR CASE, came the green and flashing reply.

NECESSARY, I input: NEW DISCV OVRRIDE SECTION AUTH. PLEASE FORWARD REQUEST PRIORITY.

WILL FORWARD.

That was all. So much for my chivalrous impulse, I thought, and watched as the transmission screen winked out and returned me to my status report on the Nob Hill Presalvage work. I resumed my entry of the Gilded Age loot tagged for preservation.

When I had transmitted it, I stood and paced the room uneasily. How long had I been hiding in here? What I wanted was a meal and a good stretch of the legs, I told myself sternly. Fresh air, in so far as that was available in any city at the beginning of this twentieth century, I scanned the oyster loaf and found it already pulsing with bacteria. Pity. After disposing of it in the dustbin I put on my coat and hat, took my stick and went out to tread the length of Bush Street with as bold a step as I could muster.

It was nonsense, really, to be frightened. I’d be out of the city well before the first shock. I’d be safe on air transport bound for London before the first flames rose. London, the other City. I could settle into a chair at my club and read a copy of Punch that wasn’t a month old, secure in the knowledge that the oak beams above my head were fixed and immovable as they had been since the days when I’d worn a powdered wig, as they would be until German shells came raining down decades from now . . .

Shivering, I dismissed thoughts of the Blitz. Plenty of life to think about, surely! Here were bills posted to catch my eye: I might go out to the Pavilion at Woodward’s to watch the boxing exhibition—Jack Joyce and Bob Ward featured. There was delectable vaudeville at the Orpheum, I was assured, and gaiety girls out at the Chutes, to say nothing of a spectacular sideshow re-creation of the Johnstown Flood . . . perhaps not in the best of taste, under the present circumstances.

I might imbibe Gold Seal Champagne to lighten my spirits, though I didn’t think I would; Veuve Cliquot was good enough for me. Ah, but what about a bottle of Chianti, I thought, arrested by the bill of fare posted in the window of a corner restaurant. Splendid culinary fragrances wafted from within. Would I have grilled veal chops here? Would I go along Bush to the Poodle Dog for Chicken Chaud-Froid Blanc? Would I venture to Grant in search of yellow silk banners for duck roasted in some tiny Celestial kitchen? Then again, I knew of a Swiss place where the cook was a Hungarian, and prepared a light and crisply fried Wiener schnitzel to compare with any I’d had . . . or I might just step into a saloon and order another oyster loaf to take home . . .

No, I decided, veal chops would suit me nicely. I cast a worried eye up at the building—pity this structure wasn’t steel-framed—and proceeded inside.

It was one of those dark, robust places within, floor thickly strewn with fresh sawdust not yet kicked into little heaps. I took my table as any good operative does, back to the wall and a clear path to the nearest exit. Service was poor, as apparently their principal waiter was late today, but the wine was excellent. I found it bright on the palate, just what I’d wanted, and the chops when they came were redolent of herbs and fresh olive oil. What a consolation Appetite can be.

Yes, Life, that was the thing to distract one from unwise thoughts. Savor the wine, I told myself, observe the parade of colorful humanity, breathe in the fragrance of the joss sticks and the seafood and the gardens of the wealthy, listen to the smart modern city with its whirring steel parts at the service of its diverse inhabitants. The moment is all, surely.

I dined in some isolation, for the luncheon crowd had not yet emerged from the nearby offices and my host remained in the kitchen, arguing with the cook over the missing waiter’s character and probable ancestry. Even as I amused myself by listening, however, I felt a disturbance approaching the door. No temblor yet, thank Heaven, but a tempest of emotions. I caught the horrifying mental images before ever I heard the stifled weeping. In another moment he had burst through the door, a young male mortal with a prodigious black mustache, quite nattily dressed but with his thick hair in wild disarray. As soon as he was past the threshold his sobs burst out unrestrained, at a volume that would have done credit to Caruso.

This brought his employer out of the back at once, blurting out the first phrases of furious denunciation. The missing waiter (for so he was) staggered forward and thrust out that day’s Chronicle. The headlines, fully an inch tall, checked the torrent of abuse: MANY LOSE THEIR LIVES ITS GREAT ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS.

The proprietor of the restaurant, struck dumb, went an ugly ashen color. He put the fingertips of one hand in his mouth and bit down hard. In a broken voice, the waiter described the horrors: Roof collapsed in church in his own village. His own family might even now lie dead, buried in ash. The proprietor snatched the paper and cast a frantic eye over the columns of print. He sank to his knees in the sawdust, sobbing. Evidently he had family in Naples, too.

I stared at my plate. I saw gray and rubbery meat, congealing grease, seared bone with the marrow turned black. In the midst of life we are in death, but it doesn’t do to reflect upon it while dining.

“You must, please, excuse us, sir,” the proprietor said to me, struggling to his feet. “There has been a terrible tragedy.” He set the Chronicle beside my plate so I could see the blurred rotogravure picture of King Victor Emmanuel. Report That Total Number of Dead May Reach Seven Hundred, I read. Towns Buried Under Ashes and Many Caught in Ruined Buildings. MANY BUILDINGS CRUSHED BY ASHES. Of course, I had known about the coming tragedy; but it was on the other side of the world, the business of other Company operatives, and I envied them that their work was completed now.

“I am so very sorry, sir,” I managed to say, looking up at my host. He thought my pallor was occasioned by sympathy: he could not know I was seeing his mortal face like an apparition of the days to come, and it was gray and charring, for he lay dead in the burning ruins of a boarding house in the Mission District. Horror, yes, impossible not to feel horror, but one cannot empathize with them. One must not.

They went into the kitchen to tell the cook and I heard weeping break out afresh. Carefully I took up the newspaper and perused it. Perhaps there was something here that might divert me from the unpleasantness of the moment? Embezzlement. A crazed admirer stalking an actress. Charlatan evangelists. Grisly murder committed by two boys. Deadly explosion. Crazed derelict stalking a bank president. Los Angeles school principals demanding academic standards lowered.

I dropped the paper, and, leaving five dollars on the table, I fled that place.

I walked briskly, not looking into the faces of the mortals I passed. I rode the cable car, edging away from the mortal passengers. I nearly ran through the green expanse of Golden Gate Park, dodging around the mortal idlers, the lovers, the nurses wheeling infants in perambulators, until at last I stood on the shore of the sea. Tempting to turn to look at the fairy castles perched on its cliffs; tempting to turn to look at the carnival of fun along its gray sand margin, but the human comedy was the last thing I wanted just then. I needed, rather, the chill and level grace of the steel-colored horizon, sun-glistering, wide-expanding. The cold salt wind buffeted me, filled my grateful lungs. Ah, the immortal ocean.

Consider the instructive metaphor: Every conceivable terror dwells in her depths; she receives all wreckage, refuse, corruption of every kind, she pulls down into her depths human calamity indescribable: but none of this is any consideration to the sea. Let the screaming mortal passengers fight for room in the lifeboats, as the wreck belches flame and settles below the extinguishing wave; next morning she’ll still be beautiful and serene, her combers no less white, her distances as blue, her seabirds no less graceful as they wheel in the pure air. What perfection, to be so heartless. An inspiration to any lesser immortal.

As I stood so communing with the elements, a mortal man came wading out of the surf. I judged him two hundred pounds of athletic stockbroker, muscles bulging under sagging wet wool, braving the icy water as an act of self-disciplinary sport. He stood for a moment on one leg, examining the sole of his other foot. There was something gladiatorial in his pose. He looked up and saw me.

“A bracing day, sir,” he shouted.

“Quite bracing.” I nodded and smiled. I could feel the frost patterns of my returning composure.

And so I boarded another streetcar and rode back into the mortal warren, and found my way by certain streets to the Barbary Coast. Not a place a gentleman cares to admit to visiting, especially when he’s known the gilded beauties of old Byzantium or Regency-era wenches; the raddled pleasures available on Pacific Street suffered by comparison. But Appetite is Appetite, after all, and there is nothing like it to take one’s mind off unpleasant thoughts.

“Your costume.” The attendant pushed a pasteboard carton across the counter to me. “Personal effects and field equipment. Linen, trousers, suspenders, boots, shirt, vest, coat and hat.” He frowned. “Phew! These should have been laundered. Would you care to be fitted with an alternate set?”

“That’s all right.” I took the offending rags. “The sweat goes with the role, I’m afraid. Irish laborer.”

“Ah.” He took a step backward. “Well, break a leg.”

“Thank you.”

Fifteen minutes later I emerged from a dressing room the very picture of an immigrant yahoo, uncomfortably conscious of my clammy and odiferous clothing. I sidled into the canteen, hoping there wouldn’t be a crowd in the line for coffee. There wasn’t, at that: most of the diners were clustered around one operative over in a corner, so I stood alone watching the Food Service technician fill my thick china mug from a dented steel coffee urn. The fragrant steam was a welcome distraction from my own fragrancy. I found a solitary table and warmed my hands on my dark brew there in peace, until an operative broke loose from the group and approached me.

“Say, Victor!”

I knew him slightly, an American operative so young one could scan him and still discern the scar tissue from his Augmentations. He was one of my Presalvagers.

“Good morning, Averill.”

“Say, you really ought to listen to that fellow over there. He’s got some swell stories.” He paused only long enough to have his cup refilled, then came and pulled out a chair across from me. “Know who he is? He’s the Guy Who Follows Caruso Around!”

“Is he?”

“Sure is. Music Specialist Grade One! That boy’s wired for sound. He’s caught every performance Caruso’s ever given, even the church stuff when he was a kid. Going to get him in Carmen the night before You-Know-What, going to record the whole performance. He’s just come back from planting receivers in the footlights! Say, have you gotten tickets yet?”

“No, I haven’t. I’m not interested, actually.”

“Not interested?” he exclaimed. “Why aren’t you —how can’t you be interested? It’s Caruso, for God’s sake!”

“I’m perfectly aware of that, Averill, but I’ve got a prior engagement. And, personally, I’ve always thought de Reszke was much the better tenor.”

“De Reszke?” He scanned his records to place the name and, while doing so, absently took a great gulp of coffee. A second later he clutched his ear and gasped. “Christ Almighty!”

“Steady, man.” I suppressed a smile. “You don’t want to gulp beverages over 60 degrees Celsius, you know. There’s some very complex circuitry placed near the Eustachian tube that gets unpleasantly hot if you do.”

“Ow, ow, ow!” He sucked in air, staring at me with the astonishment of the very new operative. It always takes them a while to discover that immortality and intense pain are not strangers, indeed can reside in the same eternal house for quite lengthy periods of time. “Should I drink some ice water?”

“By no means, unless you want some real discomfort. You’ll be all right in a minute or so. As I was about to say, I have some recordings of Jean de Reszke I’ll transmit to you, if you’re interested in comparing artists.”

“Thanks, I’d like that.” Averill ran a hasty self-diagnostic.

“And how is your team faring over at the New Brunswick, by the way? No cases of nerves, no blue devils?”

“Hell no.” Averill started to lift his coffee again and then set it down respectfully.

“Doesn’t bother you that the whole place will be ashes in a few days’ time, and most of your neighbors dead?”

“No. We’re all okay over there. We figure it’s just a metaphor for the whole business, isn’t it? I mean, sooner or later this whole world”—he made a sweeping gesture, palm outward—”as we know it, is going the same way, right? So what’s it matter if it’s the earthquake finishes it now or a wrecking ball someplace further on in time, right? Same thing with the people. It’ll all come to the same thing in the end, so there’s no reason to get personally upset about it, is there? No, sir. Specially since we’ll all still be alive.”

“A commendable attitude.” I had a sip of my coffee. “And your work goes well?”

“Yes sir.” He grinned. “You will be so proud of us burglary squad fellows when you get our next list. You wouldn’t believe the stuff we’re finding! All kinds of objets d’art, looks like. One-of-a-kind items, by God. Wait’ll you see.”

“I look forward to it.” I glanced at my Chronometer and drank down the rest of my coffee, having waited for it to descend to a comfortable 59 degrees Celsius. “But, you know, Averill, it really won’t do to think of yourselves as burglars.”

“Well —that is—it’s only a figure of speech, anyhow!” Averill protested, flushing. “A joke!”

“I’m aware of that, but I cannot emphasize enough that we are not stealing anything.” I set my coffee cup down, aware that I sounded priggish, and looked sternly at him. “We’re preserving priceless examples of late Victorian craftsmanship for the edification of future generations.”

“I know.” Averill looked at me sheepishly, “But—aw, hell, do you mean to say not one of those crystal chandeliers will wind up in some Facilitator General’s private HQ somewhere?”

“That’s an absurd idea,” I told him, though I knew only too well it wasn’t. Still, it doesn’t do to disillusion one’s subordinates too young. “And now, will you excuse me? I mustn’t be late for work.”

“All right. Be seeing you!”

As I left he rejoined the admiring throng about the fellow who was telling Caruso stories. My way lay along the bright tiled hall, steamy and echoing with the clatter of food preparation and busy operatives; then through the dark security vestibule, with its luminous screens displaying the world without; then through the concealed door that shut behind me and left no trace of itself to any eyes but my own. I drew a deep breath. Chill and silent morning air; no glimmer of light, yet, at least not down here in the alley. Half-past-five. This time three days hence —

I shivered and found my way out in the direction of the waterfront.

Not long afterward I arrived at the loading area where I had been desultorily employed for the last month. I made my entrance staggering slightly, doing my best to murder “You Can’t Guess Who Flirted With Me” in a gravelly baritone.

The mortal laborers assembled there turned to stare at me. My best friend, an acquaintance I’d cultivated painstakingly these last three weeks, came forward and took me by the arm.

“Jesus, Kelly, you’d better stow that. Where’ve you been?”

I stopped singing and gave him a belligerent stare. “Marching in the Easter Parade, O’Neil.”

“O, like enough.” He ran his eyes over me in dismay. Francis O’Neil was thirty years old. He looked enough like me to have been taken for my somewhat bulkier, clean-shaven brother. “What’re you doing this for, man? You know Herlihy doesn’t like you as it is. You look like you’ve not been home to sleep nor bathe since Friday night!”

“So I have not.” I dropped my gaze in hung-over remorse.

“Come on, you poor stupid bastard, I’ve got some coffee in my dinner pail. Sober up. Was it a letter you got from your girl again?”

“It was.” I let him steer me to a secluded area behind a mountain of crates and accepted the tin cup he filled for me with lukewarm coffee. “She doesn’t love me, O’Neil. She never did. I can tell.”

“Now, then, you’re taking it all the wrong way, I’m sure. I can’t believe she’s stopped caring, not after all the things you’ve told me about her. Just drink that down, now. Mary made it fresh not an hour ago.”

“You’re a lucky man, Francis.” I leaned on him and began to weep, slopping the coffee. He forbore with the patience of a saint and replied:

“Sure I am, Jimmy, And shall I tell you why? Because I know when to take my drink, don’t I? I don’t swill it down every payday and forget to go home, do I? No indeed. I’d lose Mary and the kids and all the rest of it, wouldn’t I? It’s self-control you need, Jimmy, and the sorrows in your heart be damned. Come on now. With any luck Herlihy won’t notice the state you’re in.”

But he did, and a litany of scorn was pronounced on my penitent head. I took it with eyes downcast, turning my battered hat in my hands, and a dirtier nor more maudlin drunk could scarce have been seen in that city. I would be summarily fired, I was assured, but they needed men today so bad they’d employ even the likes of me, though by God next time —

When the boss had done excoriating me I was dismissed to help unload a cargo of copra from the Nevadan, in from the islands yesterday. I sniveled and tottered and managed not to drop anything much; O’Neil stayed close to me the whole day, watchful lest I pass out or wander off. He was a good friend to the abject caricature I presented; God knows why he cared. Well, I should repay his kindness, at least, though in a manner he would never have the opportunity to appreciate.

We sweated until four in the afternoon, when there was nothing left to take off the Nevadan; let go then with directions to the next day’s job, and threats against slackers.

“Now, Kelly.” O’Neil took my arm and steered me with him back toward Market Street. “I’ll tell you what I think you ought to do. Go home and have a bit of a wash in the basin, right? Have you clean clothes? So, put on a clean shirt and trousers and see can you scrape some of that off your boots. Then come over to supper at our place, see. Mary’s bought some sausages, we thought we’d treat ourselves to a dish of Coddle now that Lent’s over. We’ve plenty.”

“I will, then.” I grasped his hand. “O’Neil, you’re a lord for courtesy.”

“I am not. Only go home and wash, man!”

We parted in front of the Terminal Hotel and I hurried back to the HQ to follow his instructions. This was just the sort of chance I’d been angling for since I’d sought out the man on the basis of the Genetic Survey team report.

An hour later, as cleanly as the character I played was likely to be able to make himself, I ventured along Market Street, heading down in the direction of the tenement where O’Neil and his family lived, the boarding houses in the shadow of the Palace Hotel. I knew their exact location, though O’Neil was of course unaware of that; accordingly he had sent a pair of his children down to the corner to watch for me.

They failed to observe my approach, however, and I really couldn’t blame them; for proceeding down Market Street before me, moving slowly between the gloom of twilight and the electric illumination of the shop signs, was an apparition in a scarlet tunic and black shako.

It walked with the stiff and measured tread of the automaton it was pretending to be. The little ragged girl and her littler brother stared openmouthed, watching its progress along the sidewalk. It performed a brief business of marching mindlessly into a lamppost and walking inexorably in place there a moment before righting itself and going on, but now on an oblique course toward the children.

I too continued on my course, smiling a little. This was delightful: a mortal pretending to be a mechanical toy being followed by a cyborg pretending to be a mortal.

There was a wild reverberation of mirth in the ether around me. One other of our kind was observing the scene, apparently; but there was a gigantic quality to the amusement that made me falter in my step. Who was that? That was someone I knew, surely. Quo Vadis? I transmitted. The laughter shut off like an electric light being switched out, but not before I got a sense of direction from it. I looked across the street and just caught a glimpse of a massive figure disappearing down an alley. My visual impression was of an old miner, one of the mythic founders of this city. Old gods walking? What a ridiculous idea, and yet . . . what a moment of panic it evoked, of mortal dread, quite irrational.

But the figure in the scarlet tunic had reached the children. Little Ella clutched her brother’s hand, stock-still on the pavement; little Donal shrank behind his sister, but watched with one eye as the thing loomed over them.

It bent forward, slowly, in increments, as though a gear ratcheted in its spine to lower it down to them. Its face was painted white, with red circles on the cheeks and a red cupid’s bow mouth under the stiff black mustaches. Blank glassy eyes did not fix on them, did not seem to see anything, but one white-gloved hand came up jerkily to offer the little girl a printed handbill.

After a frozen motionless moment she took it from him. “Thank you, Mister Soldier,” she said in a high clear voice. The figure gave no sign that it had heard, but unbent slowly, until it stood ramrod-straight again; pivoted sharply on its heel and resumed its slow march down Market Street.

“Soldier go.” Donal pointed. Ella peered thoughtfully at the handbill.

“ ‘CH-IL-DREN,’ ” she read aloud. What an impossibly sweet voice she had. “And that’s an Exclamation Point, there. ‘Babe—Babies, In, To—Toy—’ ”

“ ‘Toyland,’ ” I finished for her. She looked up with a glad cry.

“There you are, Mr. Kelly. Donal, this is Mr. Kelly. He is Daddy’s good friend. Supper will be on the table presently. Won’t you please come with us, Mr. Kelly?”

“I should be delighted to.” I touched the brim of my hat. They pattered away down an alley, making for the dark warren of their tenement, and I followed closely.

They were different physical types, the brother and sister. Pretty children, certainly, particularly Ella with her glossy black braids, with her eyes the color of the twilight framed by black lashes. But it is not beauty we look for in a child.

It was the boy I watched closely as we walked, a sturdy three-year-old trudging along holding tight to the girl’s hand. I couldn’t have told you the quality nor shade of his skin, nor his hair nor his eyes; I cared only that his head appeared to be a certain shape, that his little body appeared to fit a certain profile, that his limbs appeared to be a certain length in relation to one another. I couldn’t be certain yet, of course: that was why I had maneuvered his father into the generous impulse of inviting me into his home.

They lived down a long dark corridor toward the back of the building, its walls damp with sweat, its air heavy with the odors of cooking, of washing, of mortal life. The door opened a crack as we neared it and then, slowly, opened wide to reveal O’Neil standing there in a blaze of light. The blaze was purely by contrast to our darkness, however; once we’d crossed the threshold, I saw that two kerosene lamps were all the illumination they had.

“There now, didn’t I tell you she’d spot him?” O’Neil cried triumphantly. “Welcome to this house, Jimmy Kelly.”

“God save all here.” I removed my hat. “Good evening, Mrs. O’Neil.”

“Good evening to you, Mr. Kelly.” Mary O’Neil turned from the stove, bouncing a fretful infant against one shoulder. “Would you care for a cup of tea, now?” She was like Ella, if years could be granted Ella to grow tall and slender and wear her hair up like a soft thundercloud. But there was no welcoming smile for me in the grey eyes, for on the previous occasion we’d met I’d been disgracefully intoxicated—at least, doing my best to appear so. I looked down as if abashed.

“I’d bless you for a cup of tea, my dear, I would,” I replied. “And won’t you allow me to apologize for the condition I was in last Tuesday week? I’d no excuse at all.”

“Least said, soonest mended.” She softened somewhat at my obvious sobriety.

Setting the baby down to whimper in its apple-box cradle, she poured and served my tea. “Pray seat yourself.”

“Here.” Ella pulled out a chair for me. I thanked her and sat down to scan the room they lived in. Only one room, with one window that probably looked out on an alley wall but was presently frosted opaque from the steam of the saucepan wherein their supper cooked. Indeed, there was a fine layer of condensation on everything: it trickled down the walls, it lay in a damp film on the oilcloth cover of the table and the blankets on the bed against the far wall. The unhappy infant’s hair was moist and curling with it.

Had there been any ventilation it would have been a pleasant enough room. The table was set with good china, someone’s treasured inheritance no doubt. The tiny potbellied stove must have been awkward to cook upon, but O’Neil had built a cabinet of slatwood and sheet tin next to it to serve as the rest of a kitchen. The children’s trundle was stored tidily under the parents’ bed. Next to the painted washbasin on the trunk, a decorous screen gave privacy to one corner. Slatwood shelves displayed the family’s few valuables: a sewing basket, a music box with a painted scene on its lid, a cheap mirror whose frame was decorated with glued-on seashells, a china dog. On the wall was a painted crucifix with a palm frond stuck behind it. O’Neil came and sat down across from me.

“You look grand, Jimmy.” He thumped his fist on the table approvingly. “Combed your hair, too, didn’t you? That’s the boy. You’ll make a gentleman yet.”

“Daddy?” Ella climbed into his lap. “There was a soldier came and gave us this in the street. Will you ever read me what it says? There’s more words than I know, see.” She thrust the handbill at him. He took it and held it out before him, blinking at it through the steamy air.

Here I present the printed text he read aloud, without his many pauses as he attempted to decipher it (for he was an intelligent man, but of little education):

CHILDREN!

Come see the Grand Fairy Extravaganza BABES IN TOYLAND

Music by Victor Herbert

Book by Glen MacDonough

Staged by Julian Mitchell

Ignacio Martinetti and 100 Others! Coming by Special Train of Eight Cars!

Biggest Musical Production San Francisco Has Seen In Years!

An Invitation from Mother Goose Herself:

MY dear little Boys and Girls,

I DO hope you will behave nicely so that your Mammas and Papas will treat you to a performance of Mr. Herbert’s lovely play Babes in Toyland at the Columbia Theater, opening Monday, the 16th of April. Why, my dears, it’s one of the biggest successes of the season and has already played for ever so many nights in such far-away cities as New York, Chicago, and Boston. Yes, you really must be good little children, and then your dear parents will see that you deserve an outing to visit me. For, make no mistake, I myself, the only true and original MOTHER GOOSE, shall be there upon the stage of the Columbia Theater. And so shall so many of your other friends from my delightful rhymes such as Tom, Tom the Piper’s Son, Bo Peep, Contrary Mary, and Red Riding Hood. The curtain will rise upon Mr. Mitchell’s splendid production, with its many novel effects, at eight o’clock sharp.

OF course, if you are very little folks you are apt to be sleepyheads if kept up so late, but that need not concern your careful parents, for there will be a matinee on Saturday at two o’clock in the afternoon.

WONT you please come to see me? Your affectionate friend, Mother Goose.

“Oh, dear,” sighed Mary.

“Daddy, can we go?” Ella’s eyes were alight with anticipation. Donal chimed in:

“See Mother Goose, Daddy!”

“We can’t afford it, children.” Mary’s mouth was a set line. She took the saucepan off the stove and began to ladle a savory dish of sausage, onions, potatoes and bacon onto the plates. “We’ve got a roof over our heads and food for the table. Let’s be thankful for that.”

Ella closed her little mouth tight like her mother’s, but Donal burst into tears. “I wanna go see Mother Goose!” he howled.

O’Neil groaned. “Your mother is right, Donal. Daddy and Mummy don’t have the money for the tickets, can you understand that?”

“You oughtn’t to have read out that bill,” said Mary in a quiet voice.

“I want go see the Soldier!”

“Donal, hush now!”

“Donal’s the boy for me,” I said, leaning forward and reaching out to him. “Look, Donal Og, what’s this you’ve got in your ear?”

I pretended to pull forth a bar of Ghirardelli’s. Ella clapped her hands to her mouth. Donal stopped crying and stared at me with perfectly round eyes.

“Look at that! Would you ever have thought such a little fellow’d have such big things in his ears? Come sit with your Uncle Jimmy, Donal.” I drew him onto my lap. “And if you hush your noise, perhaps Mummy and Daddy’ll let you have sweeties, eh?” I set the candy in the midst of the oilcloth, well out of his reach.

“Bless you, Jimmy,” said O’Neil.

“Well, and isn’t it the least I can do? Didn’t know I could work magic, did you, Ella?”

“Settle down, now.” Mary set out the dishes. “Frank, it’s time to say Grace.”

O’Neil made the sign of the Cross and intoned, with the little ones mumbling along, “Bless-us-O-Lord-and-these-Thy-gifts-which-we-are-about-to-receive-from-Thy-bounty-through-Christ-Our-Lord-Amen.”

Mary sat down with us, unfolding her threadbare napkin. “Donal, come sit with Mummy.”

“Be easy, Mrs. O’Neil, I don’t mind him.” I smiled at her. “I’ve a little brother at home he’s the very image of. Where’s his spoon? Here, Donal Og, you eat with me.”

“I don’t doubt they look alike.” O’Neil held out his tumbler as Mary poured from a pitcher of milk. “Look at you and me. Do you know, Mary, that was the first acquaintance we had—? Got our hats mixed up when the wind blew ’em both off. We wear just the same size.”

“Fancy that.”

So we dined, and an affable mortal man helped little Donal make a mess of his potatoes whilst chatting with Mr. and Mrs. O’Neil about such subjects as the dreadful expense of living in San Francisco and their plans to remove to a cheaper, less crowded place as soon as they’d saved enough money. The immortal machine that sat at their table was making a thorough examination of Donal, most subtly: an idle caress of his close-cropped little head measured his skull size, concealed devices gauged bone length and density and measured his weight to the pound; data was analyzed and preliminary judgment made: Optimal Morphology. Augmentation Process Possible. Classification pending Blood Analysis and Spektral Diagnosis.

“That’s the best meal I’ve had in this country, Mrs. O’Neil,” I told her as we rose from the table.

“How kind of you to say so, Mr. Kelly,” she replied, collecting the dishes.

“Chocolate, Daddy?” Donal stretched out his arm for it. O’Neil tore open the waxed paper and broke off a square. He divided it into two and gave one to Donal and one to Ella.

“Now, you must thank your Uncle Jimmy, for this is good chocolate and cost him dear.”

“Thank you Uncle Jimmy,” they chorused, and Ella added, “But he got it by magic. It came out of Donal’s ear. I saw it.”

O’Neil rubbed his face wearily. “No, Ella, it was only a conjuring trick. Remember the talk we had about such things? It was just a trick. Wasn’t it, Jimmy?”

“That’s all it was, sure,” I agreed. She looked from her father to me and back.

“Trank, dear, will you help me with these?” Mary had stacked the dishes in a washpan and sprinkled soap flakes in.

“Eight. Jimmy, will you mind the kids? We’re just taking these down to the tap.”

“I will indeed,” I said, and thought: Thank you very much, mortal man, for this opportunity. The moment the door closed behind them I had the device out of my pocket. It looked rather like a big old-fashioned watch. I held it out to the boy.

“Here you go, Donal, here’s a grand timepiece for you to play with.”

He took it gladly. “There’s a train on it!” he cried. I turned to Ella.

“And what can I do for you, darling?”

She looked at me with considering eyes. “You can read me the funny papers.” She pointed to a neatly stacked bundle by the stove.

“With pleasure.” I seized them up and we settled back in my chair, pulling a lamp close. The baby slept fitfully, I read to Ella about Sambo and Tommy Pip and Herr Spiegleburger, and all the while Donal pressed buttons and thumbed levers on the diagnostic toy. It flashed pretty lights for him, it played little tunes his sister was incapable of hearing; and then, as I had known it would, it bit him.

“Ow!” He dropped it and began to cry, holding out his tiny bleeding finger. “O, dear, now, what’s that? Did it stick you?” I put his sister down and got up to take the device back. “Tsk! Look at that, the stem’s broken.” It vanished into my pocket. “What a shame. O, I’m sorry, Donal Og, here’s the old hankie. Let’s bandage it up, shall we? There, there. Doesn’t hurt now, does it?”

“No,” he sniffled. “I want another chocolate.”

“And so you’ll have one, for being a brave boy.” I snapped off another square and gave it to him. “Ella, let’s give you another as well, shall we? What have you found there?”

“It’s a picture about Mother Goose.” She had spread out the Children’s Page on the oilcloth. “Isn’t it? That says Mother Goose right there.”

I looked over her shoulder. “Pictures from Mother Goose,” I read out, “Hot Cross Buns. Paint the Seller of Hot Cross Buns. Looks like it’s a contest, darling. They’re asking the kiddies to paint in the picture and send it off to the paper to judge who’s done the best one.”

“Is there prize money?” She had an idea.

“Two dollars for the best one,” I read, pulling at my lower lip uneasily. “And paintboxes for everyone else who enters.”

She thought that over. Dismay came into her face. “But I haven’t got a paintbox to color it with at all! O, that’s stupid! Giving paintboxes out to kids that’s got them already. O, that’s not fair!” She shook with stifled anger.

“What’s not fair?” Her mother backed through the door, holding it open for O’Neil with the washpan.

“Only this Mother Goose thing here,” I said.

“You’re never on about going to that show again, are you?” said Mary sharply, coming and taking her daughter by the shoulders. “Are you? Have you been wheedling at Mr. Kelly?”

“I have not!” the little girl cried in a trembling voice.

“She hasn’t, Mrs. O’Neil, only it’s this contest in the kids’ paper,” I hastened to explain. “You have to bave a set of paints to enter it, see.”

Mary looked down at the paper. Ella began to cry quietly. Her mother gathered her up and sat with her on the edge of the bed, rocking her back and forth.

“0, I’m so sorry, Ella dear, Mummy’s so sorry. But you see, now, don’t you, the harm in wanting such things? You see how unhappy it’s made you? Look how hard Mummy and Daddy work to feed you and clothe you. Do you know how unhappy it makes us when you want shows and paintboxes and who knows what, and we can’t give them to you? It makes us despair. That’s a Mortal Sin, despair is.”

“I want to see the fairies,” wept the little girl.

“Dearest dear, there aren’t any fairies! But surely it was the Devil himself you met out in the street, that gave you that wicked piece of paper and made you long after vain things. Do you understand me? Do you see why it’s wicked, wanting things? It kills the soul, Ella.”

After a long gasping moment the child responded, “I see, Mummy.” She kept her face hidden in her mother’s shoulder. Donal watched them uncertainly, twisting the big knot of handkerchief on his finger. O’Neil sat at the table and put his head in his hands. After a moment he swept up the newspaper and put it in the stove. He reached into the slatwood cabinet and pulled a bottle of Wilson’s Whiskey up on the table, and got a couple of clean tumblers out of the washpan.

“Will you have a dram, Kelly?” he offered.

“Just the one.” I sat down beside him.

“Just the one,” he agreed.

You must not empathize with them.

When I let myself into my rooms on Bush Street, I checked my messages. A long blue column of them pulsed on the credenza screen. Most of it was the promised list from Averill and his fellows; I’d have to pass that on to our masters as soon as I’d reviewed it. I didn’t feel much like reviewing it just now, however.

There was also a response to my request for another transport for Mme. D’Araignee: DENIED. NO ADDITIONAL VEHICLES AVAILABLE. FIND ALTERNATIVE.

I sighed and sank into my chair. My honor was at stake. From a drawer at the side of the credenza I took another Ghirardelli bar and, scarcely taking the time to tear off the paper, consumed it in a few greedy bites. Waiting for its soothing properties to act, I paged through a copy of the Examiner. There were automobile agencies along Golden Gate Avenue. Perhaps I could afford to purchase one out of my personal operation’s expense account?

But they were shockingly expensive in this city. I couldn’t find one for sale, new or used, for less than a thousand dollars. Why couldn’t her case officer delve into his own pocket to deliver the goods? I verified the balance of my account. No, there certainly wasn’t enough for an automobile in there. However, there was enough to purchase four tickets to “Babes in Toyland.”

I accessed the proper party and typed in my transaction request.

TIX UNAVAILABLE FOR 041606 EVENT, came the reply. 041706 AVAILABLE OK?

OK, I typed. PLS DEBIT & DELIVER.

DEBITED. TIX IN YR BOX AT S MKT ST HQ 600 HRS 041606.

TIBI GRATIAS! I replied, with all sincerity.

DIE DULCE FRUERE. OUT.

Having solved one problem, an easy solution to the other suggested itself to me. It involved a slight inconvenience, it was true: but any gentleman would readily endure worse for a lady’s sake.

My two rooms on Bush Street did not include the luxury of a bath, but the late Mr. Adolph Sutro had provided an alternative pleasure for his fellow citizens: the Baths, which surely could have existed only in that city, in that time.

Just north of Cliff House Mr. Sutro had purchased a rocky little purgatory of a cove, cleaned the shipwrecks out of it and proceeded to shore it up against the more treacherous waves with several thousand barrels of cement. Having constructed not one but six saltwater pools of a magnificence to rival old Rome, he had proceeded to enclose it in a crystal palace affair of no less than four acres of glass.

Ah, but this wasn’t enough for San Francisco! The entrance, on the hill above, was as near a Greek temple as modern artisans could produce; through the shrine one wandered along the museum gallery lined with exhibits both educational and macabre and descended a vast staircase lined with palm trees to the main level, where one might bathe, exercise in the gymnasium or attend a theater performance. Having done all this, one might then dine in the restaurant.

However, my schedule today called for nothing more strenuous than bathing. Ten minutes after descending the grand staircase I was emerging from my changing room (one of five hundred), having soaped, showered and togged myself out in my rented bathing suit, making my way toward the nearest warm-water pool under the bemused eyes of several hundred mortal idlers sitting in the bleachers above.

I was not surprised to see another of my own kind backstroking manfully across the green water; nothing draws the attention of an immortal like sanitary conveniences. I was rather startled when I recognized the man, however, not having seen him since some time in the sixteenth century. Lewis is nothing more than a Literary Preservation Specialist, rather a sad-looking little fellow with a noble profile; not in my class, of course, but a gentleman for all that.

He felt my regard and glanced up, seeing me at once. He smiled and waved.

Victor! he broadcast. How nice to see you again.

It’s Lewis, isn’t it? I responded, though I knew his name perfectly well, and far more of his history than he knew himself. I had been assigned to monitor his activities once, to my everlasting shame. Still, it had been centuries, and he had never shown any sign of recovering certain memories. I hoped, for his sake, that such was the case. Memory effacement is not a pleasant experience.

He pulled himself up on the coping of the pool and swept his wet hair out of his eyes. I stepped to the edge, took the correct diver’s stance and leapt in, transmitting through bubbles: So you’re here as well? Presalvaging books, I suppose?

The Mercantile Library, he affirmed, and there was nothing in his pleasant tone to indicate he’d remembered what I’d done to him at Eurobase One.

God! That must be a Herculean effort, I responded, surfacing.

He transmitted rueful amusement. You’ve heard of it, I suppose?

Rather, I replied, practicing my breast stroke. All those Comstock Lode silver barons went looting the old family libraries of Europe, didn’t they? Snatched up medieval manuscripts at a tenth their value from impoverished Venetian princes, I believe? Fabulously rare first editions from London antiquarians?

Something like that, he replied. And brought them back home to the States for safekeeping.

Ha!

Well, how were they to know? Lewis made an expressive gesture taking in the vast edifice around us. Mr. Sutro himself had a Shakespeare first folio. What a panic it’s been tracking that down! And you?

I’m negotiating for a promising-looking young recruit. Moreover, I drew Nob Hill detail, I replied casually. I’ve coordinated quite a team of talented youngsters set to liberate the premises ofMssrs. Towne, Crocker, Huntington et al. as soon as the lights are out. All manner of costly bric-a-brac has been tagged for rescue—Chippendales, Louis Quatorzes—to say nothing of jewels and cash.

My, that sounds satisfying. You’ll never guess what I found, only last night! Lewis transmitted, looking immensely pleased with himself.

Something unexpected? I responded.

He edged forward on the coping gleefully. Yes, you might say so. Just some old papers that had been mislaid by an idiot named Pompeo Leoni and bound into the wrong book. Just something jotted down by an elderly left-handed Italian gentleman!

Not Da Vinci? I turned in the water to stare at him, genuinely impressed.

Who else? Lewis nearly hugged himself in triumph. And! Not just any doodlings or speculation from the pen of Leonardo, either. Something of decided interest to the Company! It seems he devoted some serious thought to the construction of articulated human limbs—a clockwork arm, for example, that could be made to perform various tasks!

I’ve heard something of the sort, I replied, swimming back toward him.

Yes, well, he seems to have taken the idea further. Lewis leaned down in a conspiratorial manner. From a human arm he leapt to the idea of an entire articulated human skeleton of bronze, and wondered whether the human frame might not be merely imitated but improved in function!

By Jove! Was the man anticipating androids? I reached the coping and leaned on it, slicking back my hair.

No! No! He was chasing another idea entirely, Lewis insisted. Shall I quote? I rather think I ought to let him express his thoughts. He leaned back and, with a dreamy expression, transmitted in flawless fifteenth-century Tuscan: It has been observed that the presence of metal is not in all cases inimical to the body of man, as we may see in earrings, or in crossbow bolts, spearpoints, pistol balls, and other detritus of war that have been known to enter the flesh and remain for some years without doing the bearer any appreciable harm, or indeed in that practice of physicians wherein a small pellet of gold is inserted into an incision made near an aching joint, and the sufferer gains relief and ease of movement thereby.

Take this idea further and think that a shattered bone might be replaced with a model of the same bone cast in bronze, identical with or even superior to its original.

Go further and say that where one bone might be replaced, so might the skeleton entire, and if the articulation is improved upon the man might attain a greater degree of physical perfection than he was born with.

The flaw in this would be the man’s pain and the high likelihood he would die before surgery of such magnitude could be carried out.

Unless we are to regard the theory of alchemists who hold that the Philosopher’s Stone, once attained, would transmute the imperfect flesh to perfection, a kind of supple gold that lives and breathes, and by this means the end might be obtained without cutting, the end being immortality. Lewis opened his eyes and looked at me expectantly. I smacked my hand on the coping in amusement.

By Jove! I repeated. How typical of the Maestro. So he was all set to invent us, was he?

To say nothing of hip replacements!

But what a find for the Company, Lewis!

Of course, to give you a real idea of the text I ought to have presented it like this: Lewis began to rattle it out backward. I shook my head, laughing and holding up my hands in sign that he should stop. After a moment or two he trailed off, adding: I don’t think it loses much in translation, though.

I shook my head. You know, old man, I believe we’re treading rather too closely to a temporal paradox here. Just as well the Company will take possession of that volume, and not some inquisitive mortal! What if it had inspired someone to experiment with biomechanicals a century or so too early?

Ah! No, you see, since History can’t be changed. We’re safe enough, Lewis pointed out. As far as History records those Da Vinci pages, it records them as being lost in the Mercantile Library fire. The circle is closed. All the same, I imagine it was a temptation for any operatives stationed near Amboise in Da Vinci’s time. Wouldn’t you have wanted to seek the old man out as he lay dying, and tell him that something would be done with this particular idea, at least? Immortality and human perfection!

Of course I’d have been tempted; but I shook my head. Not unless I cared to face a court-martial for a security breach.

Lewis shivered in his wet wool and slid back into the water. I turned on my back and floated, considering him.

The temperature doesn’t suit you? I inquired.

Oh . . . they’ve got the frigidarium all right, but the calidaria here aren’t really hot enough, Lewis explained. And of course there’s no sudatorium at all.

Nor any slaves for a good massage, either, I added, glancing up at the mortal onlookers. Sic transit luxuria, alas. Lewis smiled faintly; he had never been comfortable with mortal servants, I remembered. Odd, for someone who began mortal life as a Roman, or at least a Romano-Briton.

Weren’t you recruited at Bath . . .? I inquired, leaning on the coping.

Aquae Sulis, it was then, Lewis informed me. The public baths there.

Of course. I remember now! You were rescued from the temple. Intercepted child sacrifice, I imagine?

Oh, good heavens, no! The Romans never did that sort of thing. No, I was just somebody’s little unwanted holiday souvenir left in a blanket by the statue of Apollo. Lewis shrugged, and then began to grin. I hadn’t thought about it before, but this puts a distinctly Freudian slant on my visits here! Returning to the womb in time of stress? I was only a few hours old when the Company took me, or so I’ve always been told.

I laughed and set off on a lap across the pool. At least you were spared any memories of mortal life.

That’s true, he responded, and then his smile faded. And yet, you know, I think I’m the poorer for that. The rest of you may have some harrowing memories, but at least you know what it was to be mortal.

I assure you it’s nothing to be envied, I informed him. He nodded in concession of my point and set out across the pool himself, resuming his back-stroke.

I think I would have preferred the experience, all the same, he insisted. I’d have liked a father—or mother—figure in my life. At the very least, those of you rescued at an age to remember it have a sort of filial relationship with the immortal who saved you. Haven’t you?

I regret to disillusion you, sir, but that is absolutely not true, I replied firmly.

Really? He dove and came up for air, gasping. What a shame. Bang goes another romantic illusion. I suppose we’re all just orphans of one storm or another!

At that moment a pair of mortals chose to roughhouse, snorting and chuckling as they pummeled each other in their seats in the wooden bleachers; one of them broke free and ran, scrambling apelike over the seats, until he lost his footing and fell with a horrendous crash that rolled and thundered in the air, echoing under the glassed dome, off the water and wet coping.

I saw Lewis go pale; I imagine my own countenance showed reflexive panic. After a frozen moment Lewis drew a deep breath.

“One storm or another,” he murmured aloud. “Nothing to be afraid of here, after all. Is there? This structure will survive the quake. History says it will. Nothing but minor damage, really.”

I nodded. Then, struck in one moment by the same thought, we lifted our horrified eyes to the ceiling, with its one hundred thousand panes of glass.

“I believe I’ve got a rail car to catch,” I apologized, vaulting to the coping with what I hoped was not undignified haste.

“I’ve a luncheon engagement myself,” Lewis said, gasping as he sprinted ahead of me to the grand staircase.

On the 16th of April I entertained friends, or at least my landlady received that impression; and what quiet and well-behaved fellows the gentlemen were, and how plain and respectable the ladies! No cigars, no raucous laughter, no drunkenness at all. Indeed, Mrs. McCarty assured me she would welcome them as lodgers at any time in the future, should they require desirable Bush Street rooms. I assured her they would be gratified at the news. Perhaps they might have been, if her boarding house were still standing in a week’s time. History would decree otherwise, regrettably.

My sitting room resembled a council of war, with its central table on which was spread a copy of the Sanborn map of the Nob Hill area, up-to-date from the previous year. My subordinates stood or leaned over the table, listening intently as I bent with red chalk to delineate the placement of Hush Field generators.

“The generators will arrive in a baker’s van at the corner of Clay and Taylor Streets at midnight precisely,” I informed them. “Delacort, your team will approach from your station at the end of Pleasant Street and take possession of them. There will be five generators. I want them placed at the following intersections: Bush and Jones, Clay and Jones, Clay and Powell, Bush and Powell and on California midway between Taylor and Mason.” I put a firm letter X at each site. “The generators should be in place and switched on by no later than five minutes after midnight. Your people will remain in place to remove the generators at half-past three exactly, returning them to the baker’s van, which will depart promptly. At that moment a private car will pull up to the same location to transport your team to the central collection point on Ocean Beach. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly, sir,” Delacort saluted. Averill looked at her slightly askance and turned a worried face to me.

“What’re they going to do if some cop comes along and wants to know what they re doing there at that time of night?”

“Any cop coming in range of the Hush Field will pass out, dummy,” Philemon informed him. I frowned and cleared my throat. Cinema Standard (the language of the schoolroom) is not my preferred mode of expression.

“If you please, Philemon!”

“Yeah, sorry—”

“Your team will depart from their station at Joice Street at five minutes after midnight and proceed to the intersection of Mason and Sacramento, where a motorized drayer’s wagon will be arriving. You will be responsible for the contents of the Flood mansion.” I outlined it in red. “Your driver will provide you with a sterile containment receptacle for Item Number Thirty-Nine on your acquisitions list. Kindly see to it that this particular item is salvaged first and delivered to the driver separately.”

“What’s Item Thirty-Nine?” Averill inquired. There followed an awkward silence. Philemon raised his eyebrows at me. Company policy discourages field operatives from being told more than they strictly need to know regarding any given posting. Upon consideration, however, it seemed wisest to answer Averill’s question; there was enough stress associated with this detail as it was without adding mysteries. I cleared my throat.

“The Flood mansion contains a ‘Moorish’ smoking room,” I informed him. “Among its features is a lump of black stone carefully displayed in a glass case. Mr. Flood purchased it under the impression that it is an actual piece of the Qaaba from Mecca, chipped loose by an enterprising Yankee adventurer. He was, of course, defrauded; the stone is in fact a meteorite, and preliminary spectrographic analysis indicates it originated on Mars.”

“Oh,” said Averill, nodding sagely. I did not choose to add that plainly visible on the rock’s surface is a fossilized crustacean of an unknown kind, or that the rock’s rediscovery (in a museum owned by Dr. Zeus, incidentally) in the year 2210 will galvanize the Mars Colonization Effort into making real progress at last.

I bent over the map again and continued:

“All the items on your list are to be loaded into the wagon by twenty minutes after three. At that time, the wagon will depart for Ocean Beach and your team will follow in the private car provided. Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Rodrigo, your team will depart from their Taylor Street station at five minutes after midnight as well. Your wagon will arrive at the comer of California and Taylor; you will proceed to salvage the Huntington mansion,” I marked it on the map. “Due to the nature of your quarry you will be allotted ten additional minutes, but all listed items must be loaded and ready for removal by half-past-Three, at which time your private transport will arrive. Upon arrival at Ocean Beach you will be assisted by Philemon’s team, who will already (I should hope) have loaded most of their salvage into the waiting boats.”

“Yes, sir.” Rodrigo made a slight bow.

“Freytag, your team will be stationed on Jones Street. You depart at five after midnight, like the rest, and your objective is the Crocker mansion, here.” Freytag bent close to see as I shaded in her area. “Your wagon will pull up to Jones and California; you ought to be able to fill it in the allotted time of two hours and fifteen minutes precisely, and be ready to depart for Ocean Beach without incident. Loong? Averill?”

“Sir!” Both immortals stood to attention.

“Your teams will disperse from their stations along Clay and Pine Streets and salvage the lesser targets shown here, here, here, and here—” I chalked circles around them. “I leave to your best judgment individual personnel assignments. Two wagons will arrive on Clay Street at one o’clock precisely and two more will arrive on Pine five minutes later. You ought to find them more than adequate for your purposes. You will need to do a certain amount of running to and fro to coordinate the efforts of your ladies and gentlemen, but it can’t be helped.”

“I don’t anticipate difficulties, sir.” Loong assured me.

“No indeed; but remember the immensity of this event shadow.” I set down the chalk and wiped my hands on a handkerchief. “Your private transports will be waiting at the corner of Bush and Jones by half-past three. Please arrive promptly.”

“Yes, sir.” Averill looked earnest.

“In the entirely likely event that any particular team completes its task ahead of schedule, and has free space in its wagon after all the listed salvage has been accounted for, I will expect that team to lend its assistance to Mme. D’Arraignee and her teams at the Mark Hopkins Institute.” I swept them with a meaningful stare. “Gentlemen doing so can expect my personal thanks and commendation in their personnel files.”

That impressed them, I could see. The favorable notice of one’s superiors is invariably one’s ticket to the better sort of assignment. Clearing my throat, I continued:

“I anticipate arriving at no later than half-past-two to oversee the final stages of removal. Kindly remain at your transports until I transmit your signal to depart for the central collection point. Have you any further questions, ladies and gentlemen?”

“None, sir,” Averill said, and the others nodded agreement.

“Then it’s settled,” I told them, and carefully folded shut the mapbook. “A word of warning to you all: you may become aware of precursors to the shock in the course of the evening. History will record a particularly nasty seismic disturbance at two A.M. in particular, and another at five. Control your natural panic, please. Upsetting as you may find these incidents, they will present no danger whatsoever, will in fact go unnoticed by such mortals as happen to be awake at that hour.”

Averill put up his hand. “I read the horses will be able to feel it,” he said, a little nervously. “I read they’ll go mad.”

I shrugged. “Undoubtedly why we have been obliged to confine ourselves to motor transport. Of course, we are no brute beasts. I have every confidence that we will all resist any irrational impulses toward flight before the job is finished.

“Now then! You may attend to the removal of your personal effects and prepare for the evening’s festivities. I shouldn’t lunch tomorrow; you’ll want to save your appetites for the banquet at Cliff House. I understand it’s going to be rather a Roman experience!”

The tension broken, they laughed; and if Averill laughed a bit too loudly, it must be remembered that he was still young. As immortals go, that is.

Astute mortals might have detected something slightly out of the ordinary on that Tuesday, the 17th of April; certainly the hired-van drivers must have noticed an increase in business, as they were dispatched to house after house in every district of the city to pick up nearly identical loads, these being two or three ordinary-looking trunks and one crate precisely fifty centimeters long, twenty centimeters wide and twenty centimeters high, in which a credenza might fit snugly. And it would be extraordinary if none of them remarked upon the fact that all these same consignments were directed to the same location on the waterfront, the berth of the steamer Mayfair.

Certainly in some cases mortal landladies noticed trunks being taken down flights of stairs, and put anxious questions to certain of their tenants regarding hasty removal; but their fears were laid to rest by smiling lies and ready cash.

And did anyone notice, as twilight fell, when persons in immaculate evening dress were suddenly to be seen in nearly every street? Doubtful; for it was, after all, the second night of the opera season, and with the Metropolitan company in town all of Society had turned out to do them honor. If a certain number of them converged on a certain warehouse in an obscure district, and departed therefrom shortly afterward in gleaming automobiles, that was unlikely to excite much interest in observers either.

I myself guided a brisk little four-cylinder Franklin through the streets, bracing myself as it bumped over the cable car tracks, and steered down Gough with the intention of turning at Fulton and following it out to the beach. At the corner of Geary I glimpsed for a moment a tall figure in a red coat, and wondered what it was doing so far from the theater district; but a glance over my shoulder made it plain that I was mistaken. The red-clad figure shambling along was no more than a bum, albeit one of considerable stature. I dismissed him easily from my thoughts as I contemplated the O’Neil family’s outing to the theater.

Had I a warm, sentimental sensation thinking of them, remembering Ella’s face aglow when she saw me present her father with the tickets? Certainly not. One magical evening out was scarcely going to make up for their ghastly deaths, in whatever cosmic scale might be supposed to balance such things. Best not to dwell on that aspect of it at all. No, it was the convenience of their absence from home that occupied my musings, and the best way to take advantage of it with regard to my mission.

At the end of Fulton I turned right, in the purple glow of evening over the vast Pacific. Far out to sea—well beyond the sight of mortal eyes—the Company transport ships lay at anchor, waiting only for the cover of full darkness to approach the shore. In a few hours I’d be on board one of them, steaming off in the direction of the Farallones to catch my air transport, with no thought for the smoking ruin of the place I’d lived in so many harrowing weeks.

Cliff House loomed above me, its turreted mass a blaze of light. I saw with some irritation that the long uphill approach was crowded with carriages and automobiles, drawn in on a diagonal; I was obliged to go up as far as the rail depot before I could find a place to leave my motor, and walk back downhill past the Baths.

I dare say the waiters at Cliff House could not recall an evening when so large a party, of such unusual persons, had dined with such hysterical gaiety as on this 17th of April, 1906.

If I recall correctly, the reservation had been made in the name of an international convention of seismologists. San Francisco was ever the most cosmopolitan of cities, so the restaurant staff expressed no surprise when elegantly attired persons of every known color began arriving in carriages and automobiles. If anyone remarked upon a certain indefinable similarity in appearance amongst the conventioneers that transcended race, why, that might be explained by their common avocation—whatever seismology might be; no one on the staff had any clear idea. Only the queer nervousness of the guests was impossible to account for, the tendency toward uneasy giggling, the sudden frozen silences and dilated pupils.

I think I can speak for my fellow operatives when I say that we were determined to enjoy ourselves, terror notwithstanding. We deserved the treat, every one of us; we faced a long night of hard work, the culmination of months of labor, under circumstances of mental strain that would test the resolution of the most hardened mercenaries. The least we were owed was an evening of silk hats and tiaras.

There was a positive chatter of communication on the ether as I approached. We were all here, or in the act of arriving; not since leaving school had I been in such a crowd of my own kind. I thought how we were to feast here, a company of immortals in an airy castle perched on the edge of the Uttermost West, and flit away well before sunrise. It is occasionally pleasant to embody a myth.

I saw Mme. D’Araignee stepping down from a carriage, evidently arriving with other members of the Hopkins operation team. No bulky Russian sea captain in sight, of course, yet; I hastened to her side and tipped my hat.

“Madame, will you do me the honor of allowing me to escort you within?”

“M’sieur Victor.” She gave me a dazzling smile. She wore a gown of pale bluegreen silk, a shade much in fashion that season, which brought out beautifully certain copper hues in her intensely black skin. Diamonds winked from the breathing shadow of her bosom. She took my arm and we proceeded inside, where we had the remarkable experience of having to shout our transmissions to one another, so crowded was the ether:

I am very pleased to inform you I have arranged for an automobile for your use this evening, I told her, as we paused at the cloakroom for checks.

Oh, I am so glad! I do hope you weren’t put to unnecessary trouble.

Through the door to the dining room we caught glimpses of napery like snow, folded in a wilderness of sharp little peaks, with here and there a gilt epergne rising above them.

Not what I’d call unnecessary trouble, no, though it proved impossible to requisition anything at this late date. However, I did have a vehicle allocated for my own personal use and that fine runabout is entirely at your disposal.

Merci, merci mille temps. But will this not impede your own mission?

Not at all, dear lady. I shall be obliged to you for transportation as far as the Palace, I think, after we’ve dined; but since my mission involves nothing more strenuous than carrying off a child, I anticipate strolling back across the city with ease.

You are too kind, my friend.

A gentleman could do no less. I pulled out a chair for her.

We chatted pleasantly of trifling matters as the rest of the guests arrived. We studied the porcelain menu in some astonishment—the Company had spent a fortune here tonight, certainly enough to have allotted me one extra automobile. I was rather nettled, but my irritation was mollified somewhat by the anticipation of our carte du jour:

Green Turtle Soup Consomme Divinesse

Salmon in Sauce Veloute Trout Almondine Crab Cocktail

Braised Sweetbreads Roast Quail Andaluz

Le Faux Mousse Faison Lucullus

Early Green Peas White Asparagus Risotto Milanese

Roast Saddle of Venison with Port Wine Jelly

Curried Tomatoes Watercress Salad

Chicken Marengo Plovers’ Eggs Virginia Ham Croquettes

Lobster Salad Oysters in Variety

Gateau d’Or et Argent Assorted Fruits in Season

Rose Snow Tulip Jellies Water Ices

Surprise Yerba Buena

All accompanied, of course, by the appropriate vintages, and service a la russe. We were being rewarded.

A shift in the black rock, miles down, needle-thin fissures screaming through stone, perdurable clay bulging like the head of a monstrous child engaging for birth, straining, straining, STRAINING!

The smiling chatter stopped dead. The waiters looked around, confused, at that elegant assembly frozen like mannequins. Not a scrape of chair moving, not a chime of crystal against china. Only the sound that we alone listened to: the cello-string far below us, tuning for the dance of the wrath of God. I found myself staring across the room directly into Lewis’s eyes, where he had halted at the doorway in mid-step. The immortal lady on his arm was as still as a painted image, a perfect profile by Da Vinci.

The orchestra conductor mistook our silence for a cue of some kind. He turned hurriedly to his musicians and they struck up a little waltz tune, light gracious accompaniment to our festivities. With a boom and a rush of vacuum the service doors parted, as the first of the waiters burst through with tureens and silver buckets of ice. Champagne corks popped like artillery. As the noises roared into our silence, an immortal in white lace and spangles shrieked; she turned it into a high trilling laugh, placing her slender hand upon her throat.

So conversation resumed, and a server appeared at my elbow with a napkined bottle. I held up my glass for champagne. Mme. D’Araignee and I clinked an unspoken toast and drank fervently.

Twice more while we dined on those good things, the awful warning came. As the venison roast was served forth, its dish of port jelly began to shimmer and vibrate—too subtly for the mortal waiters to notice more than a pretty play of light, but we saw. On the second occasion the oysters had just come to table, and what subaudible pandemonium of clattering there was: half-shell against half-shell with the sound of basalt cliffs grinding together, and the staccato rattle of all the little sauceboats with their scarlet and yellow and pink and green contents; though of course the mortal waiters couldn’t hear it. Not even the patient horses waiting in their carriage-traces heard it yet. But the sparkling bubbles ascended more swiftly through the glasses of champagne.

The waiters began to move along the tables bearing trays: little cut-crystal goblets of pink ices, or red and amber jellies, or fresh strawberries drenched in liqueur, or cakes. We heard the ringing note of a dessert spoon against a wineglass, signaling us all to attention.

The Chief Project Facilitator rose to address us. Labienus stood poised and smiling in faultless white tie and tuxedo. As he waited for the babble of voices to fade he took out his gold Chronometer on its chain, studied its tiny screen, then snapped its case shut and returned it to the pocket of his white silk waistcoat.

“My fellow Seismologists.” His voice was quiet, yet without raising it he reached all comers of the room. Commanding legions confers a certain ease in public speaking. “Ladies.” He bowed. “I trust you’ve enjoyed the bill of fare. I know that, as I dined, I was reminded of the fact that perhaps in no other city in the world could such a feast be so gathered, so prepared, so served to such a remarkable gathering. Where but here by the Golden Gate can one banquet in a splendor that beggars the Old World, on delicacies presented by masters of culinary sophistication hired from all civilized nations—all the while in sight of forested hills where savages roamed within living memory, across a bay that within living memory was innocent of any sail?

“So swiftly has she risen, this great city, as though magically conjured by djinni out of thin air. Justifiably her citizens might expect to wake tomorrow in a wilderness, and find that this gorgeous citadel had been as insubstantial as their dreams.”

Archly exchanged glances between some of our operatives as his irony was appreciated.

“But if that were to come to pass—if they were to wake alone, unhoused and shivering upon a stony promontory, facing into a cold northern ocean and a hostile gale—why, you know as well as I do that within a few short years the citizens of San Francisco would create their city anew, with spires soaring ever closer to Heaven, and mansions yet more gracious.”

Of course we knew it, but the poor mortal waiters didn’t. I am afraid some of our younger operatives were base enough to smirk.

“Let us marvel, ladies and gentlemen, at this phoenix of a city, at once ephemeral and abiding. Let us drink to the imperishable spirit of her citizens. I give you the City of San Francisco.”

“The City of San Francisco,” we chorused, raising our glasses high.

“And I give you,” smiling he extended his hand, “The City of San Francisco!”

Beaming the waiters wheeled it in, on a vast silver cart: an ornate confection of pastry, of spun-sugar and marzipan and candies, a perfect model of the City. It was possible to discern a tiny Ferry Building rising above chocolate wharves, and a tiny Palace, and Nob Hill reproduced in sugared peel and nonpareils. Across the familiar grid of streets Golden Gate Park was done in green fondant, and beyond it was the hill where Sutro Park rose in nougat and candied violets, and beyond that Cliff House itself, in astonishing detail.

We applauded.

Then she was destroyed, that beautiful city, with a silver cake knife and serving wedge, and parceled out to us in neat slices. One had to commend Labienus’ sense of humor, to say nothing of his sense of ritual.

It was expected that we would wish to dance, after dining; the ballroom had been reserved for our use, and at some point during dessert the orchestra had discreetly risen and carried their instruments away to the dais.

I thought the idea of dancing in rather poor taste, under the circumstances, and apparently many of my fellow operatives agreed with me; but Averill and some of the other young ones got out on the floor eagerly enough, and soon the stately polonaise gave way to ragtime tunes and two-stepping.

Under the pretense of going for a smoke I stepped out on the terrace, to breathe the clean night air and metabolize my portion of magnificent excess in peace. By ones and twos several of the older immortals followed me; soon there was quite an assemblage of us out there between two worlds, between the dark water surging around Seal Rock and the brilliant magic lantern of the ballroom.

“Victor?” Mme. D’Araignee was making her way to me through the crowd. Her slippers, together with her diamonds, had gone into the leather case she was carrying, and she had donned sensible walking shoes; she had buttoned a long motorist’s duster over her evening gown. The radiant Queen of the Night stood now before me as the Efficient Modern Woman.

“You didn’t care to dance either, I see,” she remarked.

“Not I, no,” I replied. We stood for a moment looking in at the giddy whirl. I saw Averill prance by in the arms of an immortal sylph in pink satin; their faces were flushed and merry. Don’t think them heartless, Reader. They did not understand yet. Horror, for Averill, was still a lonely prairie and a burning wagon; for the girl, still a soldier with a bayonet in a deserted orchard. Those nightmares weren’t here in this bright room with its bouncing music, and so all must be right with the world.

But we were old ones, Mme. D’Araignee and I, and we stood outside in the dark and watched them dance.

Down, miles down, the slick water on the clay face and the widening fissure in darkness, dead shale trembling like an exhausted limb, granite crumbling, rock cracking with the strain and crying out in a voice that rose up, and up at last through the red brick, through the tile and parquet, into the warm air and the music!

The mortal musicians played on, but the dancers faltered. Some of them stopped, looking around in confusion; some of them only missed a step or two and then plunged back into the dance with greater abandon, determined to celebrate something.

Mme. D’Araignee shivered. I threw my unlit cigar over the parapet into the sea.

“Shall we go, Nan?” I offered her my arm. She took it readily and we left Cliff House.

Outside on the carriage drive, and all the way up the steep hill to where my motor was parked, the waiting horses were tossing their heads and whickering uneasily.

Mme. D’Araignee took the wheel, easily guiding us back down into the City through the spangled night.

Even now, at the Grand Opera House, Enrico Caruso was striking a pose before a vast Spanish mountain range rendered on canvas and raising his carbine to threaten poor Bessie Abott. Even now, at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the Grand Prize Masked Carnival was in full swing, with throngs of costumed roller-skaters whirling around the rink that would be a triage hospital in twelve hours and a pile of smoking ashes in twenty-four. Even now, the clock on the face of Old St. Mary’s Church—bearing its warning legend SON OBSERVE THE TIME AND FLY FROM EVIL—was counting out the minutes left for heedless passers-by. Even now, the O’Neil children were sitting forward in their seats, scarcely able to breathe as the cruel Toymaker recited the incantation that would bring his creations to life.

And we rounded the corner at Divisadero and sped down Market, with Prospero’s apres-pageant speech ringing in our ears. At the corner of Third I pointed and Mme. D’Araignee worked the clutch, steered over to the curb and trod on the brake pedal.

“You’re quite sure you won’t need a ride back?” she inquired over the chatter of the cylinders. I put my legs out and leapt down to the pavement.

“Perfectly sure, Nan.” I shot my cuffs and adjusted the drape of my coat. Reaching into the seat I took my stick and silk hat. “Give my seat to the Muse of Painting. I’m off to lurk in shadows like a gentleman.”

“Bonne chance, then, Victor.” She eased up on the brake, clutched, and cranked the wheel over so the Franklin swung around in a wide arc to retrace its course up Market Street. I tipped my hat and bowed; with a cheery wave and a double honk on the Franklin’s horn, she steered away into the night.

So far, so good. The night was yet young and there were plenty of debonair socialites in evening dress on the street, arriving and departing from the restaurants, the hotels, the theaters. For a block I was one of their number; then I accomplished my disappearance down a black alleyway into another world, to thread my way through the boarding-house warren.

Rats were out and scuttling everywhere, sensing the coming disaster infallibly. In some buildings they were cascading down the stairs like trickling water. Cats ignored them and drunkards stood watching in stupefied amazement, but there was nobody else to remark upon it; these streets did not invite promenaders.

I found the O’Neils’ building and made my way up through the unlit stairwell, here and there kicking vermin out of my way. I left the landing and proceeded down their corridor, past doors tight shut showing only feeble lines of light at floor level to mark where the occupants were at home. I heard snores; I heard weeping; I heard a drunken quarrel; I heard a voice raised in wistful melody.

No light at the O’Neils’ door, naturally; none at the door immediately opposite theirs. I scanned the room beyond but could discern no occupant. Drawing out a skeleton key from my waistcoat pocket, I gained entrance and shut the door after me.

No tenant at all; good. It was death-cold in there and black as pitch, for a roller shade had been drawn down on the one window. A slight tug sent it wobbling upward but failed to let much more light into the room. Not that I needed light to see my Chronometer as I checked it; half-past eleven, and even now my teams were assembling at their stations on Nob Hill. I leaned against a wall, folded my arms and composed myself to wait.

Time passed slowly for me, but in Toyland it sped by. Songs and dances, glittering processions came to their inevitable close; fairies took wing. Innocence was rewarded and wickedness resoundingly punished. The last of the ingenious special effects guttered out, the curtain descended, the orchestra fell silent, the house lights came up. A little while the magic lingered, as the O’Neil family made their way out through the lobby, a little while it hung around them like a perfume in the atmosphere of red velvet and gilt and fashionably attired strangers, until they were borne out through the doors by the receding tide of the crowd. Then the magic left them, evaporating upward into the night and the fog, and they got their bearings and made their way home along the dark streets.

I heard them, coming heavily up the stairs, O’Neil and Mary each carrying a child. Down the corridor their footsteps came, and stopped outside.

“Slide down now, Ella, Daddy’s got to open the door.”

I heard the sound of a key fumbling in darkness for its lock, and a drowsy little voice singing about Toyland, the paradise of childhood to which you can never return.

“Hush, Ella, you’ll wake the neighbors.”

“Donal’s asleep. He missed the ending.” Ella’s voice was sad. “And it was such a beautiful, beautiful ending. Don’t you think it was a beautiful ending, Daddy?”

“Sure it was, darling.” Their voices receded a bit as they crossed the threshold. I heard a clink and the sputtering hiss of a match; there was the faintest glimmer of illumination down by the floor.

“Sssh, sh, sh. Home again. Help Mummy get his boots off, Ella, there’s a dear.”

“I’ll just step across to Mrs. Varian’s and collect the baby.”

“Mind you remember his blanket.”

“I will that.”

Footsteps in the corridor again, discreet rapping on a panel, a whispered conversation in darkness and a sleepy wail; then returning footsteps and a pair of doors closing. Then, more muffled but still distinct to me, the sound of the O’Neils going to bed.

Their lamps were blown out. Their whispers ceased. Still I waited, listening as the minutes ticked away for their mortal souls to rest.

Half-past one on the morning of Wednesday, the 18th of April in the year 1906, in the City of San Francisco. Francis O’Neil and his wife and their children asleep finally and forever, and the world had finished with them. In the grey morning, at precisely fourteen minutes after the hour of five, this boarding-house would lurch forward into the street, bricks tumbling as mortar blew out like talcum powder, rotten timbers snapping, and that would be the end of Frank’s strength and Mary’s care and Ella’s dreams, the end of the brief unhappy baby, and no-one would remember them but me.

And, perhaps, Donal. I stepped across the hall and let myself into their room, perfectly silent.

The children lay in their trundle on the floor, next to their parents’ bed. Donal slept on the outer edge, curled on his side, both hands tucked under his chin. I stood for a moment observing, analyzing their alpha patterns. When I was satisfied that no casual noise would awaken them, I bent and lifted Donal from his bed. He sighed but slept on. After a moment’s hesitation I drew the blanket up around Ella’s shoulders.

I stood back. The boy wore a nightshirt and long black stockings, but the night was cold. Frank’s coat hung over the back of a chair: I appropriated it to wrap his son. Shifting Donal to one arm, I backed out of the room and shut the door.

Finished.

No sleeper in that building woke to hear our rapid descent of the stairs. On the first landing a drunk sat upright, leaning his head on the railings, sound asleep with his lower jaw dropped open like a corpse’s. We fled lightly past him, Donal and I, and he never moved.

Away through the maze, then, away forever from the dirt and stench and poverty of that place. In twelve hours it would have ceased to exist, and the wind would scatter white ashes so the dead could never be named nor numbered.

Even Market Street was dark now, its theaters shut down. Over at the Grand Opera House on Mission, Enrico Caruso’s costumes hung neatly in his dark dressing-room, ready for a performance of La Boheme that would never take place. Up at the Mechanic’s Pavilion, the weary janitor surveyed the confetti and other festive debris littering the skating rink and decided to sweep it up in the morning. Toyland, at the Columbia, was shut away in its properties-room; fairy tinsel, butterfly wings, bear heads peering down from dusty shelves into the darkness.

Even now my resolute gentlemen and ladies were despoiling Nob Hill, flitting through its darkened drawing rooms at hyperspeed like so many whirring ghosts, bearing with them winking gilt and crystal, calfskin and morocco, canvas and brass, all the very best that money could buy but couldn’t hope to preserve against the hour to come. Without the Franklin I’d have a tedious walk uphill to join them, but at a brisk pace I might arrive with time to spare.

Donal stretched and muttered in his sleep. I shifted him to my other shoulder, changed hands on my walking-stick, and was about to hurry on when I caught a whiff of some familiar scent on the air. I halted.

It was not a pleasant scent. It was harsh, musky, like blood or sweat but neither; like an animal smell, but other; it summoned in me a sudden terror and confusion. When I tried to identify it, however, I had only a mental image of a bear costume hanging on a hook, the head looking down from a shelf. When had I seen that? I hadn’t seen that! Whose memories were these?

I controlled myself with an effort. Some psychic disturbance was responsible for this, my own nerves were contributing to this, there was no real danger. Why, of course: it must be nearly Two o’clock, when the first of the major subsonic disruptions would occur.

Yes, here it came now. I could hear nearby horses begin to scream and stamp frantically, I could feel the paving-bricks grind against one another under the soles of my boots, and the air groaned as though buried giants were praying to God for release.

Yes, I thought, this must be it. I balanced my stick against my knee and drew out my chronometer, trying to verify the time. As I peered at it the door of a stable directly across the street burst open, and a white mare came charging out, hooves thundering. Donal jerked and cried.

Timing is everything. My assailant chose that perfect moment of distraction to strike. I was enveloped in a choking wave of that smell as a hand closed on my face and pulled my head back. Instantly I clawed at it, twisted my head to bite; but a vast arm was wrapping around me from the other side and cold steel entered my throat, opened the artery, wrenched as it was pulled out again.

So swiftly had this occurred that my stick was still falling through midair, had not yet struck the pavement. Donal was pulled upward and backward, torn from me, and I heard his terrified cry mingle with the clatter of the stick as it landed, the rumbling earth, the running horse, a howling laughter I knew but could not place. I was sinking to my knees, clutching at my cut throat as my blood fountained out over the starched front of my dress shirt and stained the diamond stud so it winked like Mars. Ares, God of War. Thor. I was conscious of a terrible anger as I descended to the shadows and curled into Fugue.

“Will you get on to this, now? Throat cut and he’s not been robbed! Here’s his watch, for Christ’s sake!”

“Stroke of luck for us, anyhow.”

I sat up and glared at them. The two mortal thieves backed away from me, horrified; then one mustered enough nerve to dart in again, aiming a kick at me while he made a grab for my chronometer. I caught his wrist and broke it. He jumped back, stifling an agonized yell; his companion took to his heels and after only a second’s hesitation he followed.

I remained where I was, huddled on the pavement, running a self-diagnostic. The edges of my windpipe and jugular artery had closed and were healing nicely at hyperspeed; if the thieves hadn’t roused me from Fugue I’d be whole now. Blood production had sped up to replace that now dyeing the front of my previously immaculate shirt. The exterior skin of my throat was even now self-suturing, but I was still too weak to rise.

My hat and stick remained where they had fallen, but of Donal or my assailant there was no sign. I licked my dry lips. There was a vile taste in my mouth. My chronometer told me it was a quarter past two. I dragged myself to the base of a wall and leaned there, half-swooning, drowning in unwelcome remembrance.

That Smell. Sweat, blood, the Animal, and smoke. Yes, they’d called it the Summer of Smoke, that year the world ended. What world had that been? The world where I was a little prince, or nearly so; better if my mother hadn’t been a Danish slave, but my father had no sons by his lady wife, and so I had fine clothes and a gold pin for my cloak.

When I went to climb on the beached longship and play with the gear, a warrior threatened me with his fist; then another man told him he’d better not, for I was Baldulf’s brat. That made him back down in a hurry. And once, my father set me on the table and put his gold cup in my hand, but I nearly dropped it, it was so heavy. He held it for me and I tasted the mead and his companions laughed, beating on the table. The ash-white lady, though, looked down at the floor and wrung her hands.

She told me sometimes that if I wasn’t good the Bear would come for me. She was the only one who would ever dare to talk to me that way. And then he had come, the Bear and his slaughtering knights. All in one day I saw our tent burned and my father’s head staring from a pike. Screaming, smoke and fire, and a banner bearing a red dragon that snaked like a living flame, I remember.

My mother had caught me up and was running for the forest, but she was a plump girl and could not get up the speed. Two knights chased after us on horseback, whooping like madmen. Just under the shadow of the oaks, they caught us. My mother fell and rolled, loosing her hold on me, and screamed for me to run; then one of the knights was off his horse and on her. The other knight got down too and stood watching them, laughing merrily. One of her slippers had come off and her bare toes kicked at the air until she died.

I had been sobbing threats, I had been hurling stones and handfuls of oak-mast at the knights, and now I ran at the one on my mother and attacked him with my teeth and nails. He reared up on his elbows to shake me off; but the other knight reached down and plucked me up as easily as if I’d been a kitten. He held me at his eye level while I shrieked and spat at him. His shrill laughter dropped to a chuckle, but never stopped.

A big shaven face, no beard, no mustache, colorless fair hair cropped. Head of a strange helm-shape, tremendous projecting nose and brows, and his wide gleeful eyes so pale a blue as to be colorless, like one of my father’s hounds. He had enormous broad cheekbones and strange teeth. That smell, that almost-animal smell, was coming from him. That had been where I’d first encountered it, hanging there in the grip of that knight.

The other knight had got up and came forward with his knife drawn and ready for me, but my captor held out his huge gauntleted hand.

“Siste!” he told him pleasantly. “Siste, comes.”

The other knight growled something and brandished his knife. My captor’s eyes sparkled; he batted playfully at my assailant, who flew backward into a tree and lay there twitching, blood running from his ears. Left in peace, my knight held me up and sniffed at me. He sat down and ran his hands all over me, taking his gauntlets off to squeeze my skull until I feared it would break like an egg. I had stopped fighting, but I whimpered and tried to wriggle away.

“Do you want to live, little boy?” he asked me in perfectly accented Saxon. He had a high-pitched voice, nasally resonant.

“Yes,” I replied, shocked motionless.

“Then be good and do not try to run away from me. I will preserve you from death. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He forced my mouth open and examined my teeth. Apparently satisfied, he got up, thrusting me under one arm. Taking the two horses’ bridles, he walked back to the war-camp of the Bear with long rolling strides.

It was growing dark, and new fires had been lit. We passed pickets who challenged my captor, and he answered them with smiles and bantering remarks. At last he stopped before a tent and gave a barking order, whereupon a groom hurried out to take the horses and led them away for him. Two other knights sat nearby, leaning back wearily as their squires took off their armor for them. One pointed at me and asked a question.

My captor grinned and said something in fluting reply, hugging me to his chest. One knight smiled a little, but the other scowled and spat into the fire. As my captor bore me into his tent I heard someone mutter “Romani!” in a disgusted tone.

It was dark in the tent, and there was no-one there to see as he stripped off my clothes and continued his examinations. I attempted to fight again but he held me still and asked, very quietly, “Are you a stupid child? Have you forgot what I said?”

“No.” I was so frightened and furious I was trembling, and I hated the smell of him, so close in there.

“Then listen to me again, Saxon child. I will not hurt you, neither will I outrage you. But if you want to die. keep struggling.”

I held still then and stood silent, hating him. He seemed quite unconcerned about that; he gave me a cup of wine and a hard cake, and ignored me while I ate and drank. All his attention was on the two knights outside. When he heard them depart into their respective tents, he wrapped me in a cloak and bore me out into the night again.

At the other end of the camp there was a very fine tent, pitched a little distance from the others. Two men stood before it, deep in conversation. After a moment one went away. The other remained outside the tent a moment, breathing the night air, looking up at the stars. When he lifted the flap and made to go inside, my captor stepped forward.

“Salve, Emres.”

“Salve, Budu,” replied the other. He was a tall man and elderly—I thought: his hair and eyebrows were white. His face, however, was smooth and unlined, and there was an easy suppleness to his movements. He was very well-dressed, as Britons went. They had a brief conversation and then the one called Emres raised the flap of the tent again, gesturing us inside.

It was so brilliantly lit in there it dazzled my eyes. I was again unrobed, in that white glare, but I dared do no more than clench my fists as the old one examined me. His hands were remarkably soft and clean, and he did not smell bad. He stuck me with a pin and dabbed the blood onto the tongue of a little god he had, sitting on a chest; it clicked for a moment and then chattered to him in a tinny voice. My captor and he had a conversation in a swift tongue quite unlike the Latin they’d been using until that time. At its conclusion, Emres pointed at me and asked a question. My captor shrugged. He turned his big head to look at me.

“What is your name, little boy?” he asked in Saxon.

“Bricta, son of Baldulf,” I told him. He looked back at Emres.

“Ecce Victor,” he said.

The taste in my mouth was unbearable. I hadn’t wanted this recollection, this squalid history! I much preferred Time to begin with that first memory of the silver ship that rose skyward from the circle of stones, taking me away to the gleaming hospital and the sweet-faced nurses.

I got unsteadily to my feet, groping after my hat and stick. As I did so I heard the unmistakable sound of an automobile approaching. In another second a light runabout rattled around the comer and pulled up before me. Labienus sat behind the wheel, no longer the jovial Master of Ceremonies. He was all hard-eyed centurion now.

“We received your distress signal. Report, please, Victor.”

“I was attacked,” I said dully.

“Tsk! Rather obviously.”

“I . . . I know it sounds improbable, sir, but I believe my assailant was another operative,” I explained. To my surprise he merely nodded.

“We know his identity. You’ll notice he’s sending quite a distinct signal.”

“Yes.” I looked down the street in wonderment. The signal lay on the air like a trail of green smoke. Why would he signal? “He’s . . . he’s somewhere in Chinatown.”

“Exactly,” agreed Labienus. “Well, Victor, what do you intend to do about this?”

“Sir?” I looked back at him, confused. Something was wrong here, some business I hadn’t been briefed about, perhaps? But why—?

“Come, come, man, you’ve a mission to complete! He took the mortal boy! Surely you’ve formed a plan to rescue him?” he prompted.

The hideous taste welled in my mouth. I suppressed an urge to expectorate.

“My team on Nob Hill is more than competent to complete the salvage there without my supervision,” I said, attempting to sound coolly rational. “That being the case, I believe, sir, that I shall seek out the scoundrel who did this to me and jolly well kill him. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

“Very good. And?”

“And, of course, recapture my mortal recruit and deliver him to the Collection Point as planned and according to schedule,” I said. “Sir.”

“See that you do.” Labienus worked both clutch and brake expertly and edged his motor forward, cylinders idling. “Report to my cabin on the Thunderer at seven hundred hours for a private debriefing. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear, sir.” So there was some mystery to be explained. Very well.

“You are dismissed.”

“Sir.” I doffed my hat and watched as he drove smoothly away up Market Street.

I replaced my hat and turned in the direction of the signal, probing. My dizziness was fading, burned away by my growing sense of outrage. The filthy old devil, how dare he do this to me? What was he playing at? I began to walk briskly again, my speed increasing with my strength.

Of course, the vow to kill him hadn’t been meant literally. We do not die. But I’d find some way of paying him out in full measure, I hadn’t the slightest doubt about that. He had the edge on me in strength, but I was swifter and in full possession of my faculties, whereas he was probably drooling mad, the old troll.

Yes, mad, that was the only explanation. There had always been rumors that some of the oldest operatives were flawed somehow, those created earliest, before the Augmentation Process had been perfected. Budu had been one of the oldest I’d ever met. He had been created more than forty thousand years ago, before the human races had produced their present assortment of representatives.

Now that I thought of it, I hadn’t seen an operative of his racial type in the field in years. They held desk jobs at Company bases, or were Air Transport pilots. I’d assumed this was simply because the modern mortal race was now too different for Budu’s type to pass unnoticed. What if the true reason was that the Company had decided not to take chances with the earlier models? What if there was some risk that all of that particular class were inherently unstable?

Good God! No wonder I was expected to handle this matter without assistance. Undoubtedly our masters wanted the whole affair resolved as quietly as possible. They could count on my discretion; I only hoped my ability met their expectations.

Following the signal, I turned left at the comer of Market and Grant. The green trail led straight up Grant as far as Sacramento. What was his game? He was drawing me straight into the depths of the Celestial quarter, a place where I’d be conspicuous were it daylight, but at no particular disadvantage otherwise.

He must intend some kind of dialogue with me. The fact that he had taken a hostage indicated that he wanted our meeting on his terms, under his control. That he felt he needed a hostage could be taken as a sign of weakness on his part. Had his strength begun to fail somehow? Not if his attack on me had been any indication. Though it had been largely a matter of speed and leverage. . . .

I came to the corner of Grant and Sacramento. The signal turned to the left again. It traveled up a block, where it could be observed emanating from a darkened doorway. I stood considering it for a moment, tapping my stick impatiently against my boot. I spat into the gutter, but it did not take the taste from my mouth.

I walked slowly uphill past the shops that sold black and scarlet lacquerware and green jade. Here was the Baptist mission, smelling of starch and good intentions. From this lodging-house doorway a heavy perfume of joss sticks; from this doorway a reek of preserved fish. And from this doorway . . .

It stood ajar. A narrow corridor went straight back into darkness, with a narrower stair ascending to the left. The bottommost stair tread had been thrown open like the lid of a piano bench, revealing a black void below.

I scanned. He was down there, and making no attempt to hide himself. Donal was there with him, still alive. There were no other signs of mortal life, however.

I paced forward into the darkness and stood looking down. Chill air was coming up from below. It stank like a crypt. Rungs leading down into a passageway were just visible, by a wavering pool of green light. So was a staring dead face, contorted into a grimace of rage.

After a moment’s consideration, I removed my hat and set it on the second step. My stick I resolved to take with me, although its sword would be useless against my opponent. No point in any further delay; it was time to descend into yet another hell.

At the bottom of the ladder the light was a little stronger. It revealed more bodies lying in a subterranean passage of brick plastered over and painted a dull green. The dead had been young men, and seemed to have died fighting, within the last few hours. They were smashed like so many insects. The light that made this plain was emanating from a wide doorway that opened off the passage, some ten feet further on. The smell of death was strongest in there.

“Come in, Victor,” said a voice.

I went as far as the doorway and looked.

In that low-ceilinged chamber of bare plaster, in the fitful glow of one oil lamp, more dead men were scattered. These were all elderly Chinese, skeletally emaciated, and they had been dead some hours and they had not died quietly. One leaned in a chair beside the little table with the flickering lamp; one was hung up on a hook that protruded from a wall; one lay halfin, half-out of a cupboard passage, his arm flung out as though beckoning. Three were sprawled on the floor beside slatwood bunks, in postures suggesting they had been slain whilst in the lethargy of their drug and tossed from the couches like rags. The apparatus of the opium-den lay here and there; a gold-wrapped brick of the poisonous substance, broken pipes, burnt dishes, long matches, bits of wire.

And there, beyond them, sat the monster of my long nightmares.

“You don’t like my horrible parlor,” chuckled Budu. “Your little white nose has squeezed nearly shut, your nostrils look like a fish’s gills.”

“It’s just the sort of nest you’d make for yourself, you murdering old fool,” I told him. He frowned at me.

“I have never murdered,” he told me seriously. “But these were murderers, and thieves. Who else would keep such a fine secret cellar, eh? A good place for a private meeting!” He leaned back against the wall, lounging at his ease across the top tier of a bunk, waving enormous mud-caked boots. His dress consisted of stained bluejean trousers, a vast shapeless red coat made from a blanket, and a battered black felt hat. He had let his hair and beard grow long; they trailed down like pale moss over his bare hairy chest. He looked rather like St. Nicholas turned monster.

Donal sat stiffly beside him. Budu had placed his great hand about the boy’s neck, as easily as I might take hold of an axe handle.

“Uncle Jimmy,” moaned Donal.

“Explain yourself, sir,” I addressed Budu, keeping my voice level and cold. He responded with gales of delighted laughter.

“I was the Briton, and you were the little barbarian!” he said. “Look at us now!”

I stepped into the room, having scanned for traps. “I followed your signal,” I told him. “You certainly made it plain enough. May I ask why you thought it was necessary to cut my throat?”

He shrugged, regarding me with hooded eyes. “How else to get your attention but to take your quarry from you? And how to do that but by disabling you temporarily? What harm did it do? Spoiled your nice white shirt, yes, and made you angry!” He chuckled again.

I tapped my stick in impatience. “What was your purpose in calling me here, old man?”

“To tell you a few truths, and see what you do when you’ve heard them. You were wondering about us, we oldest Old Ones, wondering what became of us all. You were thinking we’re like badly made clockwork toys, and our Great Toymakers decided to pull us off the shelves of the toyshop.” He stretched luxuriously. Donal tried to turn his head to stare at him, but was held fast as the old creature continued:

“No, no, no. We’re not badly made. I was better made than you, little man. It’s a question of purpose.” He thrust his prognathous face forward at me through the gloom. “I was made a war-axe. They made you a shovel. Is the metaphor plain enough for you?”

“I take your meaning.” I moved a step closer.

“You’ve been told all your life that our Masters wish only to save things, books and pretty pictures and children, and for this purpose we were made, to creep into houses like mice and steal away loot before Time can eat it.”

“That’s an oversimplification, but essentially true.”

“Is it?” He stroked his beard in amusement. I could see the red lines across the back of his hand where I’d clawed him. He hadn’t bothered to heal them yet. “You pompous creature, in your nice clothes. You were made to save things, Victor. I wasn’t. Now, hear the truth: I, and all my kind, were made because our perfect and benign Masters wanted killers once. Can you guess why?”

“Well, let me see.” I swallowed back bile. “You say you’re not flawed. Yet it’s fairly common knowledge that flawed immortals were produced, during the first experimentations with the Process. What did the Company do about them? Perhaps you were created as a means of eliminating them.”

“Good guess.” He nodded his head. “But wrong. They were never killed, those poor failed things. I’ve seen them, screaming in little steel boxes. No. Guess again.”

“Then . . . perhaps at one time it was necessary to have agents whose specialty was Defense.” I tried. “Prior to the dawn of civilization.”

“Whee! An easy guess. You fool, of course it was! You think our Masters waited, so gentle and pure, for sweet reason to persuade men to evolve? Oh, no. Too many wolves were preying on the sheep. They needed operatives who could kill, who could happily kill fierce primitives so the peaceful ones could weave baskets and paint bison on walls.” He grinned at me with those enormous teeth, and went on:

“We made Civilization dawn, I and my kind! We pushed that bright ball over the horizon at last, and we did it by killing! If a man raised his hand against his neighbor, we cut it off. If a tribe painted themselves for war, we washed their faces with their own blood. Shall I tell you of the races of men you’ll never see? They wouldn’t learn peace, and so we were sent in to slay them, man, woman, and child!”

“You mean,” I exhaled, “the Company decided to accelerate Mankind’s progress by selectively weeding out its sociopathic members. And if it did? We’ve all heard rumors of something like that. It may be necessary from time to time even now. Not a pretty thought, but one can see the reasons. If you hadn’t done it, mankind might have remained in a state of savagery forever.” I took another step forward.

“We did good work,” he said plaintively. “And we weren’t hypocrites. It was fun.” His pale gaze wandered past me to the doorway. There was a momentary flicker of something like uneasiness in his eyes, some ripple across the surface of his vast calm.

“What is the point of telling me this, may I ask?” I pressed.

“To show you that you serve lying and ungrateful Masters, child,” he replied, his attention returning to me. “Stupid Masters. They’ve no understanding of this world they rule. Once we cleared the field so they could plant, how did they reward us? We had been heroes. We became looters. And you should see how they punished us, the ones who argued! No more priming the vine, they told us, let it grow how it will. You’re only to gather the fruit now, they told us. Was that fair? Was it, when we’d been created to gather heads?”

“No, I dare say it wasn’t. But you adapted, didn’t you?” To my dismay I was shaking with emotion. “You found ways to satisfy your urges in the Company’s service. You’d taken your share of heads the day you caught me!”

“Rescued you,” he corrected me. “You were only a little animal, and if I hadn’t taken you away you’d have grown into a big animal like your father. There were lice crawling in his hair when I stuck his head on the pike. There was food in his beard!”

I spat in his face. I couldn’t stop myself. The next second I was sick with mortification, to be provoked into such operatic behavior, and dabbed hurriedly at my chin with a handkerchief; Budu merely wiped his face with the back of his hand and smiled, content to have reduced my stature.

“Your anger changes nothing. Your father was a dirty beast. He was an oathbreaker and an invader too, as were all his people. You’ve been taught your history, you know all this! So don’t judge me for enjoying what I did to exterminate his race. And, see, see what happened when I was ordered to stop killing Saxons! When Arthur died, Roman order died with him. All that we’d won at Badon Hill was lost and the Saxon hordes returned, never to leave. What sense did it make, to have given our aid for a while to one civilized tribe and then leave it to be destroyed?” His gaze traveled past me to the doorway again. Who was he expecting? They weren’t coming to his aid, that much was clear.

“We do not involve ourselves in the petty territorial squabbles of mortals,” I recited. “We do not embrace their causes. We move amongst them, saving what we can, but we are never such fools as to be drawn into their disputes.”

“Yes, you’re quoting Company Policy to me. But don’t you see that your fine impartiality has no purpose? It accomplishes nothing! It’s wasteful! You know the house will burn, so you creep in like thieves and steal the furniture beforehand, and then watch the flames. Wouldn’t it be more efficient use of your time to prevent the fire in the first place?” He paused a moment and looked at the back of his hand with a slight frown. I saw the red lines there fade to pink as he set them to healing over.

“It would be more efficient, yes,” I said, “but for one slight difficulty. You couldn’t prevent the fire happening. It isn’t possible to change history.”

“Recorded history.” He bared his big teeth in amusement once more. “It isn’t possible to change recorded history. And do you think even that sacred rule’s as unbreakable as you’ve been told? I have made the history that was written and read. It disappoints me. I will make something new now.”

“Shall you really?” I folded my arms. Doubtless he was going to start bragging about being a god. It went with the profile of this sort of lunatic.

“Yes, and you’ll help me if you’re wise. Listen to me. In the time before History was written down, in those days, our Masters were bold. All mortals have inherited the legend that there was once a golden age when men lived simply in meadows, and the Earth was uncrowded and clean, and there was no war, but only arts of peace.

“But when Recorded History began—when we were forbidden to exterminate the undesirables—that paradise was lost. And our Masters let it be lost, and that is the condemnation I fling in their teeth.” He drew a deep breath.

“Your point, sir?”

“I’ll make an end of Recorded History. I can so decimate the races of men that their golden age will come again, and never again will there be enough of them to ravage one another or the garden they inhabit. And we immortals will be their keepers. Victor, little Victor, how long have you lived? Aren’t you tired of watching them fight and starve? You creep among them like a scavenger, but you could walk among them like—”

“Like a god?” I sneered.

“I had been about to say, an angel,” Budu sneered back. “I remember the service I was created for. Do you, little man? Or have you ever even known? Such luxuries you’ve had, among the poor mortals! Have you never felt the urge to really help them? But the time’s soon approaching when you can.”

“Ridiculous.” I stated. “You know as well as I do that History won’t stop. There’ll be just as much warfare and mortal misery in this new century as in the centuries before, and nothing anyone can do will alter one event.” I gauged the pressure of his fingers on Donal’s neck. How quickly could I move to get them loose?

“Not one event? You think so? Maybe.” He looked sly. “But our Masters will turn what can’t be changed to their own advantage, and why can’t I? Think of the great slaughters to come, Victor. How do you know I won’t be working there? How do you know I haven’t been at work already? How do you know I haven’t got disciples among our people, weary as I am of our Masters’ blundering, ready as I am to mutiny?”

“Because History states otherwise,” I told him flatly. “There will be no mutiny, no War in Heaven if you like. Civilization will prevail. It is recorded that it will.”

“Is it?” He grinned. “And can you tell me who recorded it? Maybe I did. Maybe I will, after I win. Victor, such a simple trick, but it’s never occurred to you. History is only writing, and one can write lies.”

I stared at him. No, in fact, it never had occurred to me. He rocked to and fro in his merriment, dragging Donal with him. Silent tears streamed down the child’s face.

Budu lurched forward, fixing me with his gaze. “Listen now. I have my followers, but we need more. You’ll join me because you’re clever, and you’re weary of this horror too, and you owe me the duty of a son, for I saved you from death. You’re a Facilitator and know the codes to order Company equipment. You’ll work in secret, you’ll obtain certain things for me, and we’ll take mortal children and work the Augmentation Process on them, and raise them as our own operatives, for our own purposes, loyal to us. Then we’ll pull the weeds from the Garden. Then we’ll geld the bull and make him pull the plough. Then we’ll slaughter the wolf that preys on the herd. Just as we used to do! There will be Order.

“For this reason I came as a beggar to this city and followed you, watching you. Now I’ve made you listen to me.” He looked at the doorway again. “Tell me I’m not a fool, little Victor, tell me I haven’t walked into this trap with you to no purpose.”

“What will you do if I refuse?” I demanded. “Break the child’s neck?”

This was too much for the boy, who whimpered like a rabbit and started forward convulsively. Budu looked down, scowling as though he had forgotten about him. “Are you a stupid child?” he asked Donal. “Do you want to die?”

I cannot excuse my next act, though he drove me to it; he, and the horror of the place, and the time that was slipping away and bringing this doomed city down about our ears if we tarried. I charged him, howling like the animal he was.

He reared back; but instead of closing about Donal’s throat, his fingers twitched harmlessly. As his weight shifted, his right arm dropped to his side, heavy as lead. My charge threw him backward so that his head struck the wall with a resounding thud.

All the laughter died in his eyes, and they focused inward as he ran his self-diagnostic. I caught up Donal in my arms and backed away with him, panting.

Budu looked out at me.

“A virus,” he informed me. “It was in your saliva. It’s producing inert matter even now, at remarkable speed, that’s blocking my neuroreceptors. I don’t think it will kill me, but I doubt if even your Masters could tell. I’m sure they hope so. You’re surprised. You had no knowledge of this weapon inside yourself?”

“None,” I said.

Budu was nodding thoughtfully, or perhaps he was beginning to be unable to hold his head up. “They didn’t tell you about this talent of yours, because if you’d known about it, I would have seen it in your thoughts, and then I’d never have let you spit on me. At the very least I wouldn’t have wiped it away with my wounded hand.”

“A civilized man would have used a handkerchief,” I could not resist observing.

He giggled, but his voice was weaker when he spoke.

“Well. I guess we’ll see now if our Masters have at long last found a way to unmake their creations. Or I will see; you can’t stay in this dangerous place to watch the outcome, I know. But you’ll wish you had, in the years to come, you’ll wish you knew whether or not I was still watching you, following you. For I know your defense against me now, think of that! And I know who betrayed me, with his clever virus.” Budu’s pale eyes widened. “I was wrong! The rest of them may be shovels, but you, little Victor—you were made a poisoned knife. Victor Veneficus!” he added, and laughed thickly at his joke. “Oh, tell him—never sleep. If I live—”

“Were going now, Donal Og, Uncle Jimmy’ll get you safe out of here,” I said to the child, turning from Budu to thread my way between the stinking corpses on the floor.

I heard Budu cough once as his vocal centers went, and then the ether was filled with a cascade of images: A naked child squatting on a clay floor, staring through darkness at a looming figure in a bearskin. Flames devouring brush huts, goatskin tents, cottages, halls, palaces, shops, restaurants, hotels. Soldiers in every conceivable kind of uniform, with every known weapon, in every posture of attack or defense the human form could assume.

If these were his memories, if this was the end of his life, there was no emotion of sorrow accompanying the images; no fear, no weariness, no relief either. Instead, a loud yammering laughter grew ever louder, and deafened the inner ear at the last image: a hulking brute in a bearskin, squatting beside a fire, turning and turning in his thick fingers a gleaming golden axe; and on the blade of the axe was written the word VIRUS.

Halfway up the ladder, the trap opening was occluded by a face that looked down at me and then drew back. I came up with all speed; I faced a small mob of Chinese, grim men with bronze hatchets. They had not expected to see a man in evening dress carrying a child.

I addressed them in Cantonese, for I could see they were natives of that province.

“The devil who killed your grandfathers is still down there. He is asleep and will not wake up. You can safely cut him to pieces now.”

I took up my hat and left the mortals standing there, looking uncertainly from my departing form to the dark hole in the stair.

The air was beginning to freshen with the scent of dawn. I had little more than an hour to get across the city. In something close to panic I began to run up Sacramento, broadcasting a General Assistance Signal. Had my salvage teams waited for me? Donal clung to me and did not make a sound.

Before I had gone three blocks I heard the noise of an automobile echoing loud between the buildings. It was climbing up Sacramento toward me. I turned to meet it. Over the glare of its brass headlamps I saw Pan Wen-Shi. His tuxedo and shirtfront, unlike mine, were still as spotless as when he’d left the Company banquet. On the seat beside him was a tiny almond-eyed girl. He braked and shifted, putting out a hand to prevent her from tumbling off and rolling away downhill.

“Climb in,” he shouted. I vaulted the running board and toppled into the back seat with Donal. Pan stepped on the gas and we cranked forward again.

“Much obliged to you for the ride,” I said, settling myself securely and attempting to pry Donal’s arms loose from my neck. “Had a bit of difficulty.”

“So had I. We must tell one another our stories some day,” Pan acknowledged, rounding the corner at Powell and taking us down toward Geary. The little girl had turned in her seat and was steering at us. Donal was quivering and hiding his eyes.

“Now then, Donal Og, now then,” I crooned to him. “You’ve been a brave boy and you’re all safe again. And isn’t this grand fun? We’re going for a ride in a real motor-car!” Under my words was a soothing frequency to blur his memory of the last two hours.

“Bad Toy maker gone?” asked the little muffled voice.

“Sure he is, Donal, and we’ve escaped entirely.”

He consented to lower his hands, but shrank back at the sight of the others. “Who’s that?”

“Why, that’s a little China doll that’s escaped the old Toymaker, same as you, and that’s the kind Chinaman who helped her. They’re taking us to the sea, where we’ll escape on a big ship.”

He stared at them doubtfully. “I want Mummy,” he said, tears forming in his eyes.

The little girl, who till this moment had been solemn in fascination, suddenly dimpled into a lovely smile and laughed like a silver bell. She pointed a finger at him and made a long babbling pronouncement, neither in Cantonese nor Mandarin. For emphasis, she reached down beside her and flung something at him over the back of the seat, with a triumphant cry of “Dahl.” It was a wrapped bar of Ghirardelli’s, only a little gummy at one corner where she’d been teething on it. I caught it in midair.

“See now, Donal, the nice little girl is giving us chocolates!” I tore off the wrapper hastily and gave him a piece. She reached out a demanding hand and I gave her some as well. “Chocolates and an automobile ride and a big ship! Aren’t you the lucky boy, then?”

He sat quiet, watching the gregarious baby and nibbling at his treat. His memories were fading. As we rattled up Geary he looked at me with wondering eyes.

“Where Ella?” he asked me.

When I had caught my breath, I replied:

“She couldn’t come to Toyland, Donal Og. But you’re a lucky, lucky boy, for you will. You’ll have splendid adventures and never grow old. Won’t that be fun, now?”

He looked into my face, not knowing what he saw there. “Yes,” he answered in a tiny voice.

Lucky boy, yes, borne away in a mechanical chariot, away from the perishable mortal world, and all the pretty nurses will smile over you and perhaps sing you to sleep before they take you off to surgery. And when you wake, you’ll have been Improved; you’ll be ever so much cleverer, Donal, than poor mortal monkeys like your father. A biomechanical marvel fit to stride through this new century in company with the internal combustion engine and the flying machine.

And you’ll be so happy, boy, and at peace, knowing about the wonderful work you’ll have to do for the Company; much happier than poor Ella would ever have been, with her wild heart, her restlessness and anger. Surely no kindness to give her eternal life, when life’s stupidities and injustice could never be escaped?

. . . But you’ll enjoy your immortality, Donal Og. You will, if you don’t become a thing like me.

The words came into my mind unbidden, and I shuddered in my seat. Mustn’t think of this just now: too much to do. Perhaps the whole incident had been some sort of hallucination? There was no foul taste in my mouth, no viral poison sizzling under my glib tongue. The experience might have been some fantastic nightmare brought on by stress, but for the blood staining my elegant evening attire.

I was a gentleman, after all. No gentleman did such things.

Pan bore left at Mason, rode the brakes all the way down to Fulton, turned right and accelerated. We sped on, desperate to leave the past.

There were still whaleboats drawn up on the sand, still wagons waiting there, and shirtsleeved immortals hurriedly loading boxes from wagon to boat. We’d nearly left it too late: those were my people, that was my Nob Hill salvage arrayed in splendor amid the driftwood and broken shells. There were still a pair of steamers riding at anchor beyond Seal Rock, though most of the fleet had already put out to sea and could be glimpsed as tiny lights on the grey horizon, making for the Farallones. As we came within range of the Hush Field both of the children slumped into abrupt and welcome unconsciousness.

We jittered to a stop just short of the tavern, where an impatient operative from the Company’s motor agency took charge of the automobile. Pan and I jumped out, caught up our respective children, and ran down the beach.

Past the wagons loaded with rich jetsam of the Gilded Age, we ran: lined up in the morning gloom and salt wind were the grand pianos, the crystal chandeliers, the paintings in gilt frames, the antique furniture. Statuary classical and modern; gold plate and tapestries. Cases of rare wines, crates of phonograph cylinders, of books and papers, waited like refugees to escape the coming morning.

I glimpsed Averill, struggling through the sand with his arms full of priceless things. He was sobbing loudly as he worked; tears coursed down his cheeks, his eyes were wide with terror, but his body served him like the clockwork toy, like the fine machine it was, and bore him ceaselessly back and forth between the wagon and the boat until his appointed task should be done.

“Sir! Where did you get to?” he said, gasping. “We waited and waited—and now it’s gonna cut loose any second and we’re still not done!”

“Couldn’t be helped, old man!” I told him as we scuttled past. “Carry on! I have every faith in you!”

I shut my ears to his cry of dismay and ran on. A boat reserved for passengers still waited in the surf. Pan and I made for the boarding officer and gave our identification.

“You’ve cut it damned close, gentlemen,” he grumbled.

“Unavoidable,” I told him. His gaze fell on my gore-drenched shirt and he blinked, but waved us to our places. Seconds later we were seated securely, and the oarsmen pulled and sent us bounding out on the receding tide to the Thunderer where she lay at anchor.

We’d done it, we were away from that fated city where even now bronze hatchets were completing the final betrayal—

No. A gentleman does not betray others. Nor does he leave his subordinates to deal with the consequences of his misfortune.

Donal shivered in the stiff breeze, waking slowly. Frank’s coat had been lost, somewhere in Chinatown; I shrugged out of my dinner jacket and put it around Donal’s shoulders. He drew closer to me, but his attention was caught by the operatives working on the shore. As he watched, something disturbed the earth and the sand began to flurry and shift. Another warning was sounding up from below.

The rumbling carried to us over the roar of the sea, as did the shouts of the operatives trying to finish the loading. One wagon settled forward a few inches, causing the unfortunate precipitation of a massive antique clock into the arms of the immortals who had been gingerly easing it down. They arrested its flight, but the shock or perhaps merely the striking hour set in motion its parade of tiny golden automata. Out came its revolving platforms, its trumpeting angels, its pirouetting lovers, its minute Death with raised scythe and hourglass. Crazily it chimed FIVE.

Pan and I exchanged glances. He checked his chronometer. Our boatmen increased the vigor of their strokes.

Moment by moment the East was growing brighter, disclosing operatives massed on the deck of the Thunderer. Their faces were turned to regard the sleeping city. Pan and I were helped on deck and our mortal charges handed up after us; a pair of white-coifed nurses stepped forward.

“Agent Pan? Agent Victor?” inquired one, as the other checked a list.

“Here, now, Donal, we’re on our ship at last, and here’s a lovely fairy to look after you.” I thrust him into her waiting arms. The other received the baby from Pan, and the little girl went without complaint; but as his nurse turned to carry him below decks, Donal twisted in her arms and reached out a desperate hand for me.

“Uncle Jimmy!” he screamed. I turned away quickly as she bore him off. Really, it was for the best.

I made my way along the rail and emerged on the aft deck, where I nearly ran into Nan D’Arraignee. She did not see me, however; she was fervently kissing a great bearded fellow in a brass-buttoned blue coat, which he had opened to wrap about them both, making a warm protected place for her in his arms. He looked up and saw me. His eyes, timid and kindly, widened, and he nodded in recognition.

“Kalugin,” I acknowledged with brittle courtesy, tipping my hat. I edged on past them quickly, but not so quickly as to suggest I was fleeing. What had I to flee from? Not guilt, certainly. No gentleman dishonorably covets another gentleman’s lady.

As I reached the aft saloon we felt it beginning, with the rising surge that lifted the Thunderer at its mooring and threatened to swamp the fleeing whaleboats; we heard the roar coming up from the earth, and in the City some mortals sat up in their beds and frowned at what they could sense but not quite hear yet.

I clung to the rail of the Thunderer. My fellow operatives were hurrying to the stern of the ship to be witness to History, and nearly every face bore an expression compounded of mingled horror and eagerness. There were one or two who turned away, averting their eyes. There were those like me, sick and exhausted, who merely stared.

And really, from where we lay offshore, there was not much to see; no DeMille spectacle; no more at first than a puff of dust rising into the air. But very clear across the water we heard the rumbling, and then the roar of bricks coming down, and steel snapping, and timbers groaning, and the high sweet shattering of glass, and the tolling in all discordance of bronze-throated bells. Loud as the Last Trumpet, but not loud enough to drown out the screams of the dying. No, the roar of the earthquake even paused for a space, as if to let us hear mortal agony more clearly; then the second shock came, and I saw a distant tower topple and fall slowly, and then the little we had been able to see of the City was concealed in a roiling fog the color of a bloodstain.

I turned away, and chanced to look up at the open doorway of a stateroom on the deck above. There stood Labienus, watching the death of three thousand mortals with an avid stare. That was when I knew, and knew beyond question, whose weapon I was.

I hadn’t escaped. My splendid mansion, with all its gilded conceits, had collapsed in a rain of bricks and broken plaster.

A hand settled on my shoulder and I dropped my gaze to behold Lewis, of all people, looking into my face with compassion.

“I know,” he murmured, “I know, old fellow. Too much horror to bear. At least it’s finished now, for those poor mortals and for us. At least we’ve done our jobs. Brace up! Can I get you a drink?”

What did he recognize in my sick white face? Not the features of a man who had emptied a phial into an innocent-looking cup of wine, and given it to him under pretense of calming his nerves. Why, I’d always been a poisoner, hadn’t I? But it had happened long ago, and he had no memory of it anyway. I’d seen to that. And Lewis would never suspect me of such behavior in any case. We were both gentlemen, after all.

“No, thank you,” I replied, “I believe I’ll just take the air for a little while out here. It’s a fine restorative to the nerves, you know. Sea air.”

“So it is,” he agreed, stepping back. “That’s the spirit! And it’s not as though you could have done anything more. You know what they say: History cannot be changed.” He gave me a final helpful thump on the arm and moved away, clinging to the rail as the deck pitched.

Alone, I fixed my eyes on the wide horizon of the cold and perfect sea. I drew in a deep breath of chill air.

One can write lies. And live them.

Two operatives in uniform were making their way toward me through the press of the crowd. I looked across at them.

“Executive Facilitator Victor?”

I nodded. They shouldered into place, one on either side of me.

“Sir, your presence is urgently requested. Mr. Labienus sends his apologies for unavoidably revising your schedule,” one of them recited.

“Certainly.” I exhaled. “By all means, gentlemen, let us go.”

We made our way across deck to the forward compartments, avoiding the hatches where the crew were busily loading down the Art, the Music, the Literature, the fine flowering of the Humanity that we had, after all, been created to save.

THE ASTRONAUT FROM WYOMING

Adam-Troy Castro and Jerry Oltion

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—and his course was largely charted by something he couldn’t control. But not entirely. . . .

To understand Alexander, you must first understand his time.

It was an age when the universe had been opened for us. We knew how to look at objects a thousand light years away, and map the molecules that gave them form; we knew how things were put together and how they could be taken apart; we knew how the universe began and how it was likely to end. We knew how to reason, and how to discover, and how to add new pages to our increasing store of information.

It was also an age when ignorance was enshrined over knowledge. Every local newspaper contained a horoscope. World leaders consulted astrologers; psychic hotlines made millions; and a United States Senator gained ten points in the polls by claiming to have been in contact with Ancient Aztecs. We knew what comets were, where they came from, and what they didn’t foretell . . . but in a compound in San Diego, thirty-seven intelligent, college-educated people took poison because they believed that a comet called Hale-Bopp would take them to heaven if they did.

In Alexander’s age, we had knowledge . . . and we had delusion. And we preferred the delusion.

You cannot understand Alexander Drier’s life without understanding that.

You cannot understand his final gesture without understanding that.

Of course, Alexander’s time is still our time. Which is why some of you are most interested in reading about a high-ranking government coverup of alien experiments on pregnant human women.

I can’t help what you want. I knew that going in.

But that’s not what happened.

SPACE BABY SPEAKS

FIRST WORDS AT BIRTH!

Warns of Threat From Space,

Parents Say

The first tabloid reporter arrived in town one day after the birth, the first delegation from the networks right behind him. Not long after it hit the web, the pilgrims showed up. They came in motor homes, in vans, on motorcycles, and on foot: the four-man Sweethaven Sheriffs Office had to import a couple of dozen state police just to keep the kooks and the loonies and the just plain curious at bay. Most just wanted a glimpse of the child. A few—thankfully, very few—had darker things in mind; gene-splicing their mythologies, they arrived with rifles and pamphlets and hate-filled eyes, muttering black fantasies about an Antichrist seeded from the nonexistent Dark Side of the Moon.

I didn’t get to meet him until his tenth birthday, but I can only imagine how frightening a time it must have been: Alexander’s parents and the rest of the immediate family barricading themselves behind drawn curtains, looking out upon the steadily increasing madness of a crowd that seemed to represent all the rest of the world.

Alexander’s mother, Faye, was so serene about the whole thing that she seemed to be in denial. She just held the baby and sang to him, making almost no reference to the mad scene just beyond the driveway.

“It’s funny,” she said at one point. “We don’t know him, really. We don’t know whether he’ll be good or bad, smart or dumb, brave or afraid . . . the kind of things he’ll be interested in or the kind of things that’ll bore him silly. He’s a stranger to us. An alien, for real.”

Mark Drier winced as he glanced at the window. The blinds were drawn, but he could still see the crowds, growing larger every hour; some of them chanting, some of them singing, some of them shouting in rage. “Better not let them hear you say that.”

Many years later, telling me the story, Alexander’s Uncle George shook his head with awe as he remembered what Faye said at that moment: “Them? Who cares about them? They’ll go away.”

She was right, of course; the crowds began to diminish as soon as even the dimmest pilgrims began to realize that they weren’t about to get beamed aboard any orbital crockery. And the tabloids went after fresher stories the first time a Sheen misbehaved in Hollywood. But her prophecy couldn’t have seemed likely to Mark Drier that morning . . . not with the house being monitored by ten TV networks, the phone unplugged to keep it from ringing off the hook, and Grandma having a quiet mental breakdown in the bedroom upstairs. At the moment, he knew only that nothing would ever be all right again.

Alexander wasn’t deformed, at least, not in the sense that I’m deformed. He had two of everything he needed two of and one of everything he needed one of. And it was all functional. It all worked. He was even beautiful, in the sense that all healthy babies are beautiful. But his head was unusually large: it mushroomed above the temples, bulging up and out like a sack stuffed with more than it was designed to hold. (The doctors had feared water on the brain, but it just happened to be the shape of the kid’s head; the only problem it caused was in delivery, and that had been handled by the caesarian.) His eyes were about three times larger, proportionally, than the norm for a baby of that size; and they were all black, with no whites showing at all. His nose, as if to compensate, was unusually small, little more than a nostrilled wrinkle in the center of his face. His mouth was a slit with thin, pursed lips. His ears were little round buds with holes. His hands were odd too: there were five fingers and a thumb on each, with the fingers all disproportionately long.

Still, that, by itself, wasn’t the problem. At least, not as Mark Drier saw it. He was not a weak man. He could have dealt with birth defects.

The problem was that everybody in America had already seen that face.

They’d seen it staring at them from movie posters, from bestselling books, from artist’s renditions on the covers of supermarket tabloids. It was a face so frequently depicted in the mass media that even people who refused to subscribe recognized it as a well-known inhabitant of our shared popular culture: the face described by the growing subculture of folks who claimed to have been abducted and experimented upon—usually in the form of anal probes—by creatures from outer space.

It was, in short, the face of a Roswell Alien.

Mark Drier peered out through the curtains again. The view out there was just as disturbing. Even as he watched, a flyspecked yellow schoolbus crammed with doughy, pasty-faced adults pulled up at the curb. An inordinate number of the faces at the windows had open mouths. He couldn’t quite tell whether they were shouting, or just chronic mouth-breathers. Their expressions were both ecstatic and dull, like sheep having a party. He shuddered. “I don’t know, Faye. That’s a mob. We may have to start planning escape routes, in case they rush us.”

“They won’t,” Faye said placidly.

“They’ll do what they want,” Mark said. “Don’t you see? Some of them came all the way across the country! They’re not going to let a front yard and a few closed doors stop them now!”

She considered that. “Then we’ll just have to go outside and tell them they’re disturbing the baby.”

“And what makes you think they’ll listen to that?”

“If they think he’s a space baby, capable of shooting deathrays from his fingers, they just might. But I don’t think it’ll be a problem. They’ll get tired. They’ll feel silly. They’ll go home. And they’ll leave us to the business of being a family.” She smiled, and touched noses with the baby. “It’ll work out. He’s beautiful.”

Nobody said anything to that.

Then Faye looked at them, and in a voice filled with soft sweet steel, a voice that damned them for not responding, repeated, “He’s beautiful.”

The gathered Uncles and Aunts hastened to assure Faye that they agreed. Mark joined in last—reluctantly, and unpersuasively, and with what must have been shame for not being able to feel it the way she did.

SPACE BABY FORETOLD IN BIBLE!

Will He Start World War Three?

I’m going to have to take a break to ward off the expectations of an unfortunately large percentage of the people reading this account of Alexander’s life.

Alexander was not an alien. He was not a half-human, half-alien He was not the result of genetic manipulation by aliens who wanted an emissary on Earth. He was not the spawn of a UFO abduction his mother repressed. He learned to speak at about the same rate all children do. And he wasn’t the harbinger of a message from space, though come to think of it that eventually turned out to be a little closer to the truth. He was a boy: one who may have been a little different from the rest of us, but one whose genetic birthright, however bent, was still entirely Homo sapiens. He came out the way he did because of an extremely rare, but identifiable and very well-documented genetic condition that affected his fetal development, subtly distorting his body in ways that mirrored the by-then well-established folklore of the UFO conspiracy buffs. A search of medical literature was able to find six other cases within the past three centuries: even photos of one poor boy from the early 1900s who spent most of his short life in a freak show in South America. Of course, in today’s media-conscious age, there was no way that the malady in question would continue to go unnamed, and so Alexander got the honor of being immortalized in the medical textbooks before he was even old enough to recognize his mother’s face. Drier’s Syndrome, they called it: and if there was any upside to the public’s insistence on believing that the child was somehow a visitor from outer space, it was the degree to which that rescued him from a lifetime of being known as the kid with the disfiguring disease.

But he was human, all right. Gloriously human. There will not, at any point in this narrative, be a surprise revelation that he was ever, wholly or in part, anything but.

So those of you who followed the various events of Alexander’s life in the kind of newspapers that run front-page headlines about miraculous chocolate diets, can go indulge your little fantasies elsewhere. Because that’s not what happened.

SPACE BABY TURNS TOYS

INTO GOLD!

Parents Now Wealthy, Friends Say

Alexander occupied such an important part of my life that I find it hard to feel anything but contempt for anybody who had trouble loving him. I suppose that’s the main reason I’ve always been so hard on his father: why I still automatically think of him as a cold and distant man, unable to forgive his son for being less than normal. I’m also aware that it’s the way some biographers have portrayed him—some of them, God help me, even using interviews with me as a primary source.

But it wasn’t like that. In the lonely, hysterical days immediately following Alexander’s birth, Mark Drier was a frightened man, desperately searching for the plan that would render everything all right—and who can’t be hated for coming up with the wrong idea when nobody, with the possible exception of Alexander’s mother, knew what the right idea was.

He found her in the upstairs den, which was the brightest room in the house: a perfect place for a young mother to breastfeed her baby. The baby was, like all babies, trusting, hungry, squirming, and needful. I’d like to think that as Mark looked at his child that day, he felt not instinctive revulsion, but also the awe fit for all new life abroad in the world. He may even have felt the joy of fatherhood. But he was a practical man, and love must always make room for practicality . . . especially with buses of UFO-Abduction Faithful still converging on town from every direction.

Again: I wasn’t there. I can’t re-create the conversation precisely. But I know the people. And it happened something like this:

Mark said, “We’re going to need money.”

Faye smiled. “Well, we knew that going in, hon.”

His hands curled into fists. “Please. Babe. I’m not talking about Diapers and Dip-Tet money. I’m talking about independent wealth. I’m talking about guard dogs and chain-link fencing: the kind of money capable of keeping out the wackos for the rest of our lives.”

“We can handle the wackos,” she said softly. “They’ll get bored. Didn’t you hear what Sheriff Dooley said? Some of them are going home already.”

Mark shook his head. “Some of them, maybe. Maybe even most of them—if they behave the way mobs usually don’t. But all of them? At home and in school and for the rest of his life? How do we stop some especially dangerous nut, who may be just getting the idea today, from coming after our boy with a gun maybe fifteen years from now? Do you honestly think that everybody who’s run out of money or vacation time, and has to go back home to East Calabash or whatever, is just going to forget this kid they were so sure came from outer space? Be real! They’ll be back when you least expect them—and if not them, then somebody else. We can’t live an ordinary life that way. Hell, I won’t be able to hold onto my job as it is—we can’t expect me to just go on selling hardware when every yahoo in the country’s going to flock to my store to see if I have antennae hidden under my hairline. We need money, babe. If only to protect us from what he’s going to bring.”

Faye remained as perfectly serene as before, but there was an edge to it now: a willful defiance of the places this conversation was headed. “So what do you suggest?”

He was unable to meet her eyes. “The Enquirer’s willing to pay us five million for an exclusive interview—as long as we tell them what they want to hear.”

“That your son’s a creature from outer space.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Mark pleaded. “I hate the bastards. But I can’t think of any other way. And if they’ll be saying it anyway . . . we might as well get paid for it, so we can get the boy what he needs.”

“Chain-link fence,” she said, without raising her voice. “Guard dogs. Isolation from other children.”

“Safety,” he countered.

She considered that for several seconds, glancing from the earnest face of her husband to the oddly-shaped head of her child. She’d been raised on a small family farm. She’d seen her parents struggling through droughts; she’d lived through foreclosures and years of lean, grinding poverty. She’d even had to quit the university after only two years, when her student loans were cut. She knew what it meant to need money and not have it. Nobody can say how much the idea tempted her; nobody would have blamed her for going along with it.

But then she said, “No.”

“Come on, Faye. Be realistic—”

“I am being realistic. I’m refusing to lie.”

“It’s a white lie.”

“It’s a cruel lie,” she snapped. “He’s our child. Our human child. And it’s our job as his parents to stand up for what he is, not for what some trash newspapers want him to be. I want him to grow up knowing we defended him!” She took the now-sleeping child from her breast, handed him to her husband, and for the first time, spat out her anger, “You want realistic? Call him by name. I haven’t heard you do that yet. You want realistic, call him by name!”

FACE OF SPACE BABY FOUND

ON MOON!

Is He Reincarnation of Ancient

Lunar Pharoah?

Alexander was lucky, in some ways. Some places would have put the kid in a museum and charged visitors admission to see him—and if you think that’s overstating the situation, kindly look up the case of the Dionne Quints. But that’s not what happened.

Sweethaven came to see the hordes of morbidly curious as invaders—uncouth, unwanted barbarians who parked on lawns, peered in windows, and dropped their garbage in the streets. What’s more, they came to see the Driers as hometown heroes being victimized by outsiders. There may have been a few voices raised against the child, at first (most of them taking refuge in the fiction that he was brain-damaged, and that he’d have been better off in an institution anyway), but as the months went on, and most of the nine hundred people of Sweethaven got to see him up close, even that faded away to silence, replaced by the determination to protect him at all costs.

Mark Drier did not lose his job at the hardware store; he had to miss a lot of time at first, whenever the Nuts and the Media got too obnoxious, but his boss covered for him, and paid him full wages even when Mark couldn’t make it in more than one or two days at a time.

Nobody denounced Alexander from the pulpit. At least, not in Sweethaven: there were some churches down south that preached about him as if he had 666 stamped on his head, but Sweethaven’s Reverend Wallace Vukcevich assured his flock that he’d seen the boy and that he seemed a perfectly fine baby, odd looks and all.

In the early months, there were two, and only two, acts of serious violence directed against the Drier family. One time, a mentally disturbed woman from Boca Raton, Florida, pulled out a gun and started shooting at the house—but she got off exactly one very wild shot before being wrestled to the ground. It didn’t even hit the house. Another time, when Faye was taking Alexander to the doctor for a routine examination, a car filled with tabloid reporters deliberately sideswiped the car so they could force her to stop and get a close-up picture of the baby. The good people of Sweethaven took both incidents very personally. The Boca Raton woman was charged with Attempted Murder, Illegal Possession of a Firearm, Reckless Endangerment, Trespassing, and everything else the local courts could think of; she got the maximum penalty on every count and was awarded a long string of consecutive sentences. The reporters would have been lucky to get off with just that: this was only a few years after the similar incident that caused Princess Diana’s death in France, and the small mob of local boys on the scene had a pretty poor opinion of the kind of louts capable of taking that kind of risk with the life of a baby. The tabloid stringers spent almost as much time in the hospital as they later did in jail.

As ugly and upsetting as both incidents were, they only served to cement the town’s resolve: Alexander may have been one strange-looking kid, but he was one of theirs . . . a feeling that only grew as he developed a personality, and turned out to be pretty normal after all. He was a child. He learned to smile, to giggle, to say his first words, to crawl, to walk, to manipulate his parents with well-placed tantrums . . . and that most human of all skills, to ask questions.

Which brings us to the moment he’d later describe as his earliest memory.

Like most of the rest of us, he saw it on television.

He’d watched TV before, of course. His Mommy was not above occasionally using it as a babysitter. He liked cartoons. He didn’t understand why grownups watched the things they watched, which mostly seemed to be other grownups bantering in living rooms. He certainly didn’t understand the attention his Mommy and Daddy and Uncle and Aunt gave the program on TV now, which was mostly a bunch of serious-looking people speaking in grim, measured tones. Why was this fascinating enough to keep the grownups from playing with him?

“The arrogance of it,” Mark Drier said. “The infernal . . . gall.”

“It’s just symbolic,” Uncle George said. “They’re not actually erasing the accomplishment.”

“Oh, come on, George! They’re doing worse! They’re pissing on it! They’re telling the whole world that the whole thing was nothing more than a big joke!”

Alexander, who was too young to understand any of this, who was indeed frustrated by his family’s helpless fascination for something beyond his comprehension, merely wandered from one relative to another, trying to interest them in more enjoyable activities . . . until the network commentary switched over to the live feed, and something truly interesting showed up on-screen.

It was a strange-looking man in a chubby suit, with a big box on his back and a gleaming mirror instead of a face. There was something irresistably puppetlike about the way the man bounced up and down when he walked: something that struck the young Alexander as both comical and graceful at the same time.

Alexander struggled free of his Mommy’s lap, toddled over to the TV, and pointed a single questing finger at the funny man. “Who dat?”

“Get away from the screen, son,” Marie said. “We’re trying to watch.” Alexander complied as much as his curiosity would allow him, backing up all of two inches. “Who dat, Daddy? Who dat?”

“Alex, why won’t you listen to me? We’re trying to watch. Be nice.”

“You could answer his question,” Faye said. She was, by this point, hypersensitive to slights of her son, especially where her husband was concerned: especially in light of the little subliminal flinch that sometimes passed across Mark’s face when Alexander fixed those oversized black eyes on his. She didn’t give Mark a chance to redeem himself, but instead turned to Alexander and said, “That’s an astronaut, honey.” Alexander blinked doubtfully, and repeated the unfamiliar word, “As’not?” Faye repeated it with exaggerated care, “As-tro-naut. That’s what we call somebody who goes to outer space. That man on the TV is walking on the Moon.”

Alexander knew what the Moon was. He saw it in the sky all the time, both day and night, and his Mommy had taught him what it was called. But up until this moment, it had never occured to him that it was more than a pale round ball just out of reach . . . that it was an actual place, so far away that there had to be a special name for the people who went there. He stabbed his finger at the astronaut’s helmet. “Dat?”

“That’s his space suit. He needs that to breathe.”

Alexander later told me how his toddler mind processed this information. He thought astronauts wore their space suits all the time, even when they weren’t on the Moon, even when they were home in bed, even when they were in the bathtub. It didn’t make much sense to him.

Mark Drier said something that couldn’t have been any help endearing him to his wife, “He’s too young, hon. He can’t possibly understand this.”

Despite his confusion about the spacesuits, Alexander resented that. He understood more than his Mommy and Daddy gave him credit for. Like most toddlers, his comprehension vocabulary was already far ahead of his deceptively primitive speech, and he’d used it to figure out a lot of things they couldn’t even begin to guess he knew: among them that his Daddy was a very sad man.

Then the astronaut on TV hopped over a small rock in his path, both rising and falling with unnatural slowness, and Alexander found himself smiling. He turned toward his mother. “I go dere? I be ast-not?”

The assembled grownups met each other’s eyes.

And Mark Drier said, “No. You won’t.”

“Dat man ast-not.”

“Yeah . . . well . . . it’s different for him.”

Alexander asked the dreaded Next Question always asked by children,

“Why?”

Mark Drier silently appealed to one relative after another, imploring them to rescue him. “Because . . . nobody has the wrong idea about where he comes from.”

“That does it,” Faye said.

She rose from her easy chair, picked up her son, and carried him from the room, leaving Mark enveloped by a silence echoing with all the words that would have emerged from a perfect man’s mouth.

SPACE BOY DRAWS CIRCLES

IN SANDBOX!

UFO Scientists Note Uncanny

Similarities To Crop Circles In Europe!

The young Alexander couldn’t understand why something as wondrous as an astronaut made the grownups around him so upset.

He was too young to know that he’d been watching the live coverage of the First Saudi Expedition to the Moon.

In the wake of the Third Gulf War, the Saudis, flush with their apparent invincibility, had grown rich enough and fanatical enough and crazy enough to sink an obscene amount of petrodollars into their very own space program—mostly staffed, in a particularly cruel irony, by unemployed veterans of the moribund Japanese and United States space programs. Like Projects Mercury through Apollo, and the Golden Dawn expeditions sponsored by the late emperor, this particular project took the better part of a decade to achieve its stated goal: and though there’d been some who said that the Saudis would change their minds before they got that far, the day had finally come, and the rest of the world could do little but watch as the Saudis did just what they’d said they would do.

Many Islamic factions had never liked the idea of a Western Moon. The Saudis had therefore taken the position that Armstrong, Aldrin, and those who followed them had profaned it with their presence. The entire purpose of their space program was to remove, and destroy, everything that the Americans and the Japanese had left behind during their various missions—starting with Tranquility Base, which they now dismantled before a television audience of two billion people.

Reactions to this varied, depending upon where in the world you were. In some parts of the world, anything that humiliated America was reason to cheer. In others, it was considered a sad victory of barbarians. Even Americans weren’t united in their reaction. Some wept for triumphs long-gone. Some were so outraged by the slap in the face they advocated military action against the Saudis. Some thought the whole space program a waste of money better spent elsewhere, and applauded the symbolic burial of Kennedy’s folly.

All too many people simply didn’t care—it was too far away, and had nothing to do with their lives. Their vote was heard in the form of over ten thousand phone calls to the TV networks, protesting not the desecration of Tranquility Base but the preemption of their favorite sitcoms. Most of those were of the opinion that the landing on the Moon had been a hoax anyway. The Japanese, and the Saudis, had simply leased parts of Arizona to film their sequels.

I know how I reacted. I was eight years older than Alexander. I cursed at the set with all the rage of a boy who considered the desecration a personal assault, thinking the world a place ruled only by madmen and fools.

I still believe that.

As for Alexander, he never did make it to the Moon. The universe didn’t have anything that obvious in mind for him. I didn’t make it there, either. It was a world that would never be part of our futures, either shared or separate. But I do look at it sometimes: still just as mysterious, still just as bright in the night sky. And I wonder, in light of everything that’s happened since, if the Saudis succeeded only in keeping the dream alive for us.

NEW SPACE BOY SHOCKER:

MIRRORS DON’T REFLECT HIM!

Will Parents Still Deny His Origin?

The year Alexander turned four, the science scores of America’s high school students hit an all-time low. The President of the United States was caught making major policy decisions on Tarot readings. The newest cult to claim one million converts preached poverty, abstinence, and the worship of the planet Jupiter. And two different prime-time newscasts began devoting five minutes of each program to the astrological readings of singers and movie stars.

I still have a copy of the reading one of those shows gave for the Space Boy himself. “This is a time of growth and learning. Expect major changes in the coming year. But don’t forget to depend on those close to you.”

A brilliantly prescient horoscope for any four-year-old child.

It wasn’t surprising they got around to him. He was, after all, still a frequent topic of the tabloids, and even the comparatively respectable media ran updates on the various milestones of his life. The Driers had even allowed Life magazine to do a photospread of him attending the birthday party of one of his little friends—the theory being that pictures of Alexander with pink cake smeared on his chin were the only possible antidote for stories claiming that his real parents were the ancient astronauts personally responsible for the Pyramid of Cheops. Alas, they only helped to keep him in the public eye—and though the good people of Sweethaven kept direct intrusion to a minimum, coverage of Alexander’s life was still so ubiquitous that the Driers actually put their TV set in storage to save him from being traumatized by accidental exposure to Space Boy shtick.

No, he had to suffer different traumas entirely.

Take the night he spent one full hour making faces in the mirror. It wasn’t one of his favorite games—not because he hated his face, as he hadn’t been raised to have such a poisonous feeling, but because his smooth masklike features simply weren’t very good at the comical art of grinning. Alexander smiling looked a lot like Alexander frowning, and Alexander calm looked a lot like Alexander angry: there were subtle differences which his family could read, but anybody else had to rely on context or body language. Genuinely funny faces were so hard to make that even Alexander, who was at this point just beginning to get a grasp of how truly odd he looked, knew he just wasn’t very good at making them.

Today was different, though. Today he was practicing a trick he’d discovered not very long before: i.e. making the world appear to jump side to side by opening and closing each eye in turn. The phenomenon, which also has application in astronomy, is known as parallax, and every child with two functional eyes takes a turn being fascinated by it. He was most enthralled by the way it looked in the mirror—the way his whole head flickered back and forth, just like a bouncing ball . . .

Somebody at the door said, “Alex.”

Alexander jumped before he saw who it was. “Oh. Daddy.”

Many years later, he’d have to grope for the words to describe his childhood feelings for Marie Drier. There was love involved, of course; Mark had been a good and gentle man, who might have been a fine father for a less unusual son. He’d certainly tried to be a fine father to Alexander, saying the things he was supposed to say, doing the things he was supposed to do, never being deliberately cruel. But he was also a man whose affection seemed forced, a man who couldn’t quite conquer that little subliminal flinch he demonstrated whenever his son entered a room . . . a man who had very little to say to Alexander and by this point not much more to say to Faye.

Without ever being struck, without ever being abused, Alexander couldn’t help being always just a little bit afraid of him.

And his father knew it, “Sorry. Did I scare you?”

“Maybe a little bit,” Alexander said self-consciously. “I was making faces.”

Marie flashed a little wan smile at that. “Any good ones?”

“Not really. I think maybe I need a moustache.”

Another wan smile. “I think maybe I could use one, too.” He held the expression for all of ten seconds before seeming to remember something that pained him—then gathered up his strength, and with a joviality that rang false, said, “Hey, Sport? I know it’s near your bedtime, but how’d you like to take a walk with your old man? Just for a few minutes?”

Alexander glanced at the window beside the shower stall. The little sliver of sky visible between the mostly drawn curtains was a shade of purple-blue not very far removed from black; it would not be long before the heavens got the news that the sun was gone for another day. He spoke with caution: “It’s dark.”

“That’s okay. We won’t be going far.”

“Is Mom coming?”

“Not tonight,” Mark Drier said. “But don’t worry. She already knows we’re going.”

He took Alexander downstairs, zipped him up in his jacket, took his hand, and walked him into the backyard. They had a big backyard. They were at the edge of town, just south of the hills, on a slope that was the first of a long bumpy ride to the horizon. Their property was entirely surrounded by chain-link fence, not high enough to keep away determined intruders, but enough to discourage the merely curious. Alexander had seen folks with cameras scramble over once or twice; he’d also seen his Dad chase them away, shouting words that Alexander himself was not permitted to speak. But there hadn’t been an incident like that since his last birthday.

Mark unlocked the back gate and walked Alexander to the top of the first hill, home of a jutting slab of rock that the boy was allowed to climb only when his parents were watching. It was a big rock for a kid Alexander’s age, almost as tall as his Dad. Mark didn’t give him a chance to climb it—just picked him up and put him there, before climbing the rock himself and taking his place by Alexander’s side.

They sat without speaking for the several minutes it took the last light of day to surrender to the blackness of night. Mark said nothing because he was a smoker, and a sedentary man, who did not climb hills easily; his ragged breaths burst from him like little explosions.

Alexander said nothing because his father was holding his hand, which was in and of itself such an unusual thing that he was scared to disturb it with the sound of his own voice.

Time passed. Marie’s breathing slowed to normal.

The stars came out.

It was a clear night over a very small town, and the lights burning down below were not enough to force many stars into hiding. Some of them shone like pinprick flames. And as the night grew darker above Sweethaven, and Alexander searched his father’s face for the reason they’d hiked all the way up here, Mark seemed less and less a recognizable presence and more and more a man-shaped shadow eclipsing the lights in the sky above him.

Forever came and went before Mark spoke. “You cold?”

“No,” Alexander said.

“Tired?”

How could Alexander be tired, when all this was going on? “No.”

“Good,” Mark said, still without looking at him.

More time passed. So much time that Alexander thought they were supposed to sit here, holding hands, all the way to morning.

Then Mark’s profile shifted slightly, and he spoke in a strange, faraway voice that didn’t sound like he knew who he was talking to. “You know . . . I used to love the stars. Not astronomy; I was never any good at that. But once upon a time, when I was a kid, I used to pitch a tent on a hilltop not far from here. I didn’t sleep in the tent unless it was raining, though. When it was a nice, clear night, like tonight, I laid out my sleeping bag and slept in the open . . . just looking up at the constellations. Some of those nights, time just seemed to stop.” He hesitated, glanced at his son, and turned his gaze back to the sky. “Sometimes I wish it did.”

“You can wish on stars,” Alexander said knowledgably.

“I’ve heard that. But by the time somebody told me I was too old to believe it.” He sighed. “It took me a long time to learn that even if you do wish on stars, you don’t always get what you want from them.”

Alexander said, “You can still wish.”

“That’s right. You can.”

And because Mark seemed even sadder now than he’d ever managed to seem before, Alexander came right out and asked, “What do you wish, Daddy?” The shadow in the shape of Alexander’s father shifted, no longer a profile turned up but a black oval looking down at the boy. Alexander didn’t have enough light to see his expression; the oval contained nothing but darkness. In the silence, Alexander was terribly afraid that he’d said something wrong.

Then Mark squeezed his hand extra tight. “We better get you back to the house. It’s getting late, and your mother’s going to want to tuck you back in.” Alexander could only be relieved that the strange interlude was over. “Sure.” He allowed his father to help him down from the rock, even though he knew he could climb down by himself, and followed him back to the house.

Something else happened late that night, long after he went to bed. Though somewhere deep within the land of sleep, he realized he was not alone. He opened his great black eyes a slit and looked across the pitch-black room to a shape barely visible in the doorway. It was his father, standing with slumped shoulders, one arm braced against the doorframe. Alexander shouldn’t have been able to see him at all, since the hall was dark, too, but there was just enough ambient light coming from elsewhere in the house to render Mark Drier’s outline crisp and sharp. Too sleepy to get up, Alexander fell back to sleep before it occurred to him to wonder just what his father wanted now. When he opened his eyes again, still surrounded by darkness, the doorway was empty.

The divorce was uncontested. Mark Drier moved to San Francisco, where he got a one-room apartment and a job behind the counter in a souvenir shop on Fisherman’s Wharf. He didn’t aspire to anything else, he didn’t marry again, and he didn’t get a phone. The few times he received visits from journalists desiring inside gossip about his son, he simply ejected them, always silently, and never with unnecessary force.

Father and Son didn’t see each other again for almost two decades.

SPACE BOY GOES TO SCHOOL!

Teaches Classmates Orbital Mechanics

The year Alexander Drier entered first grade, the Jupiter Cult boasted over three million members nationwide. A couple with a million-dollar home in Texas was driven to personal bankruptcy by the wife’s seven-digit debt to the Home Astrology Network. Three colleges offered their first courses in UFO abductions during the twentieth century. Psychic surgeons opened successful clinics in New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago—curing nobody but building a sizeable clientele among inoperable cancer patients who had nothing left to lose. And a certain best-selling book, written by the kind of writer who specializes in such things, declared that photographs of the stone face on Mars taken over the past ten years proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that its lips were moving. He claimed that the government was trying to prevent the rock formation from delivering its truly momentous message to humanity—his chief proof an allegation that there were no deaf lip-readers working at NASA.

I own a crayon drawing Alexander made at about this age. His mother gave it to me—no big sacrifice on her part, since she saved all his drawings, and had hundreds of them. It’s about as impressive as you’d expect from a drawing made by a six-year-old: stick figures, lollipop trees, lopsided houses, garish color that refuses to accept the authority of the lines meant to hold it in check. Faye Drier stands at one side of the picture, with exaggerated curlycue hair that seems to be made out of wildly askew Slinkies. She is clearly smiling, clearly a figure meant to be seen with love. The rest of Alexander’s extended family is also in the picture, though harder to identify. The bald man with the tie is probably Uncle George. The woman standing next to him, a smaller version of Faye, would then have to be Aunt Jude. Aunt Wendy, who lived on the east coast now but visited at least twice a year, stands next to her, identifiable by her big hoop earrings. Then there’s a blob of color that must have been intended to represent Alexander’s dog, Arnold.

. . . and next to Arnold, Alexander himself, the whole reason the drawing is so important. Because, once you take his limited drafting skills into account, it’s an accurate drawing. It shows a boy with a big round head that seems too large for his body, and big long fingers disproportionately long for their hands, and big black eyes shaped like almonds.

In the picture, he’s smiling. That’s important. Alexander wasn’t very good at smiling; his facial muscles weren’t really built for it. He couldn’t maintain the expression for long. But in the drawing he’s smiling, and waving: like for all the world a still from one of those old-time Spielberg movies.

The picture’s important because it shows that Alexander, at that age, already understood just how different he looked. He just wasn’t self-conscious about it, that’s all.

Not even the day Faye brought him to his first day at the local elementary school—a small brick building midway between Sweethaven and Monarch, a somewhat larger town that sat fifteen miles up the road.

Sweethaven and Monarch shared the school between them, in order to make the classes large enough to support a teacher for every grade. That was still an average of only ten or eleven children per class. Six of the kids in Alexander’s class were natives of Monarch and three of those would now be meeting the Space Boy for the very first time.

On the school’s insistence, Alexander was ushered in half an hour late, after his teacher, Mrs. Hirschman, had a chance to deliver her little speech about what to expect. The speech included the standard warning that he might look a little scary, but he shouldn’t be treated any differently than anybody else. As a result, the five children who knew Alexander from Sweethaven, and the three children from Monarch who had met him already, were now reminded to consider him odd, and the three children who’d never seen him before watched his entrance with the awed fascination they would have awarded a strange and colorful new species of bug.

As he took his seat, the girl in the desk next to him, Sally Watkins, said the first thing that came to mind. “He looks like a spaceman.”

Mrs. Hirschman was scandalized. “Sally! That’s rude!”

“That’s okay,” Alexander said. “I do look like a spaceman.”

“That may be true, but we don’t like to make fun of the way people look in this class.”

“But everybody says it. . . .”

Mrs. Hirschman now definitely had the look of a woman who feared losing control. “It’s still not a subject we’re going to discuss here. Is that clear?” Alexander hesitated. “Okay. Sure.”

“Thank you, Alexander.”

She turned her back, to write something on the blackboard.

He simply followed her with his big black eyes, bemused by her reaction, and wondering just what he’d said to get her so upset.

He looked around at his classmates to see what they thought—and was startled to find several of them staring at him with expressions ranging from loathing to morbid fascination. Those who were looked away quickly as soon as he made eye contact, afraid to admit their interest, scared that he’d notice them as they’d noticed him. He’d seen such reactions before (notably from his dad, and by at most a couple of other people in Sweethaven), but he was treated so normally by his mom and the rest of his family that he’d just written that off as something that strangers happened to do.

Now, looking at the faces of his classmates, it occurred to him for the very first time that this was the way some people looked at boys who looked like spacemen.

It’s a tribute to the Drier family and the people of Sweethaven that Alexander, a remarkably bright kid, didn’t have enough experiential data to reach this seemingly obvious conclusion until he was almost six. But it still hurt. In this, the first moment where he really had a taste of what it meant to be a freak, he felt so tremendously self-conscious that he actually considered bolting from the room in tears.

Then he noticed Sally Watkins, the little girl who’d called him a spaceman, sticking out her tongue at him.

He blinked, unsure how to react.

She looked away, then turned back, and stuck out her tongue again.

Experimentally, because it was the only response that seemed to make sense, he stuck out his own tongue in kind.

She crossed her eyes.

And he felt better.

Popularity, it seemed, was not going to be a serious problem.

SPACE BOY’S SECRET MISSION

ON EARTH!

Veni, Vidi, Vici

In a particularly frightening nationwide poll, astrology became the only “science” seventy percent of Americans could identify by name. A certain national news magazine ran a cover story about the prophecies of Nostradamus, and how they’d all come true, sorta. There was another evolution debate in the Department of Education, with Darwin evicted from over half the nation’s schools and creationism installed as the officially recognized curriculum. Reports of UFO abductions reached an all-time high, to the point where they were reportedly taking place out in the open, on crowded city streets, with nobody ever managing to get one on film.

Somehow, Alexander learned. He was so anxious to get back into Mrs. Hirchman’s good graces that he paid attention to her boring lectures and did all his homework, and before long he realized he was enjoying it.

There was a problem with a couple of local adults who objected to having their kid go to the same school as Alexander. They actually picketed the school, declaring it, “OFF LIMITS TO ALIENS.” It was ugly, and stupid . . . but it also died down once the idiots in question realized that nobody was going to buy it. Alexander was the local celebrity. He was the reason the world knew Sweethaven and Monarch existed. They were proud of him. Plus the owners and employees of the half dozen businesses in town owed their increased sales to him, and they knew it.

Time passed.

When Alexander was eight he surprised his mother by announcing that he wanted to become a spaceman. Faye deserves credit for immediately understanding what he meant. “Maybe you better say ‘astronaut,’ dear.”

That seemed reasonable enough to him. “Astronaut,” he agreed.

Uncle George, who was listening, said, “You know, son, that’s a pretty hard thing to want to grow up to be.”

“Why?” Alexander wanted to know.

“Because, right now, there aren’t any astronauts.”

“There are the Israelis.”

Uncle George shook his head. “They’ll quit soon. That always happens. We got tired and quit. The Russians got tired and quit. The Japanese got tired and quit. The Saudis got tired and quit. Pretty soon the Israelis will get tired too. I don’t know if anybody will still be doing it by the time you grow up.” Alexander was at the stage of life where historical precedent didn’t mean a damn thing to him. “That’s okay. I’m still going to be an astronaut.”

“How?” Uncle George wanted to know. “You gonna build a rocket ship in your backyard?”

Alexander shrugged. “If I have to.”

“And where are you going to go?”

“Venus. Saturn. Pluto. One of those places.”

“Pluto,” Uncle George repeated dubiously.

“It’s cold there,” Alexander said. “It’s cold and Mercury’s hot. But I’ll go anywhere they want to send me. It doesn’t matter where as long as I get to go.” Faye, who was digging up a clog in the sink, grunted, “And as long as you also get to come back.”

“Well, duh,” Alexander said.

Much later, when the boy was watching Gilligan, Uncle George took Faye aside to bring up a concern last expressed by Mark Drier during the Saudi moon landing. “Listen, are you sure it’s a good idea to encourage him to talk about that kind of thing? Let the wrong person hear him talking about going off into space, and they’ll turn it into E.T. wanting to go home.”

Faye said, “I don’t care what they turn it into. I care what my son turns it into.”

“Oh, come on—”

“No, you come on. He’s eight years old. Are you going to tell him not to dream?”

“He can dream all he wants,” Uncle George said. “But you have to teach him to keep some things secret. He has too many people listening to him . . . some of whom would love to hear him talk about wanting to be an astronaut. Don’t you see that they could twist that into anything? Don’t you understand that he’s gotten to the age where we re going to have to keep a tight rein on the kind of things that come out of his mouth?” Faye sighed. “I’m not going to keep him gagged, George.”

“It’s not as simple as that—”

“I’m sorry,” Faye said. “But it’s as simple, or as complicated, as my son and I choose to make it.”

SPACE BOY’S PLOT TO HYPNOTIZE

THE WORLD ON TV!

Don’t Watch His Eyes, Experts Warn

When Alexander was ten, he was interviewed on TV. He’d actually appeared on television any number of times before that—starting with his birth, and continuing throughout his childhood, whenever enterprising newspeople went back to Sweethaven for regular updates. But that was just news footage. This was a fully authorized, in-depth interview, promoted on prime time and aired on die highest-rated, most influential TV news magazine of its time. It was considered a coup by all involved—not only by the network and the newspeople, but also by Faye and Alexander Drier.

This was because Faye’s refusal to exploit her son’s notoriety had prevented the Driers from earning any of the millions that might have been raised by Space Boy merchandise. In supporting him, she’d been helped not only by regular checks from Alexander’s absent father, but also by her family, which had helped her maintain their home, and by her community, which had determinedly kept her employed and protected from the worst of the UFO-abduction crazies. But that hadn’t provided for much more than necessities, birthdays, and Christmases. And when Alexander, whose interest in astronautics had not faded, and whose bedroom was now overflowing with Saturn V models, Armstrong and Aldrin posters, and models of the solar system, announced that the one birthday present he wanted more than any other was a day at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, Faye had felt her back forced against a wall.

And so she finally let it be known that she was amenable to an interview. As long as whoever performed the interview did it in Washington, providing security and travel expenses for herself, Alexander, one of Alexander’s school friends (he chose Sally Watkins), the parents of the child he chose, and two relatives to be named later. So many news organizations leaped on this offer that she’d needed almost two weeks just to decide which one was least likely to provide unpleasant surprises; she chose the one she did, despite its decades-old confrontational stance toward corrupt businessmen and politicians, because it was also a fairly honorable enterprise that could be trusted to take it easier on a kid.

As a result, Alexander enjoyed several firsts: his first trip outside Wyoming, his first airplane flight, his first journey among strangers whose reactions to him could not be safely predicted, his first time speaking for himself on television . . . and one other thing, which he wouldn’t find out until two days after the interview aired.

From all accounts, he acquitted himself admirably.

There was the incident on the connecting flight to Philadelphia, when a fifteen-year-old kid across the aisle elbowed his sister and said: “Hey, look. We’ve been abducted.”

“Shut up!” the sister hissed. “You’re awful!”

Instead of ignoring them, Alexander leaned over and responded in a spooky voice that carried throughout that entire section of the plane: “Actually, he’s right. And we’re not really landing in Philadelphia . . . Bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

That made a hit. So did his unannounced appearance at the Air and Space Museum, where he found himself attracting more attention than any of the exhibits. He might have ignored the people who gathered around him to gawk. He might have gotten frightened and asked them to leave him alone. He did neither. Instead, armed with his own intense interest in the subject, he became a tour guide: pointing out the Apollo capsule, the Space Shuttle, Skylab, and everything else he recognized from his own reading, explaining what they were and where they had gone in a loud, clear voice that communicated more enthusiasm than factual accuracy. (He was, after all, a ten-year-old.) Midway through his presentation, a local news team arrived and filmed him describing how astronauts went to the bathroom in space—scooping the interview show he was slated to do in three days, but capturing for the very first time on national television his declaration that he was going to be an astronaut himself.

There was more. He went to Arlington, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, the Clinton Museum, the Memorial for the Victims of the Toxic Spill in Honolulu. He spent one sad morning in the National Holocaust Museum, silently moving from one exhibit to another, speaking only when he encountered the Nazis’ own footage of a dwarf executed for his deformities. Alexander’s response upon realizing just how doomed his own life could have been (an angry “Were all these people stupid, or what?”) made the news that night. The local anchorman joked about comments from an alien visitor. I remember wanting to kill him.

Alexander’s live interview turned out to be more than a way to cadge a free trip to Washington; it was also a masterstroke of public relations on the part of his mother. Because it was the last thing the UFO fanatics had expected: nothing more than a friendly conversation with a bright, articulate ten-year-old. Alexander talked about his favorite teachers at school, what TV shows he liked, the things he’d seen in Washington, even his dinner with the President (breaking up the host by taking that opportunity to wave at the camera and say “Hi”.)

At one point the conversation turned to how Alexander got along with other kids.

Q: Do your friends make a big deal about you being famous?”

A: Sometimes.

Q: Does it change the way they treat you?

A: I don’t know. I’ve never been any different, so I don’t have any other experience to compare with.

Q: Well, let’s put it this way. When you play Star Trek, do they always make you play the alien?

A: No. We take turns.

Q: Do you play Kirk?

A: Sometimes. But everybody says I look more like Picard.

By the first commercial break, most people who’d tuned in to see the Space Boy were already realizing that this was just a smart and likeable kid. Unfortunately, most was not all, and polls revealed that there were still twenty million Americans more convinced of his extraterrestrial origins than ever before.

Part of that may have had something to do with the third segment, which turned out to be Alexander’s eulogy for the space program. He talked about John Glenn and he talked about the walk on the Moon and he talked about the space shuttle and he talked about wanting to be an astronaut and he talked about how everybody told him that wouldn’t happen and he talked about how he wanted to make sure it happened anyway. He talked about the planets and what they were like and which ones he’d like to visit if he only got a chance. He was, as it happens, particularly enthused about Mars, and he said he’d rather go there than just about anywhere else.

The final segment culminated in the moment of self-description that defined Alexander for millions of Americans:

Q: Do you really think you’ll be an astronaut when you grow up?

A: One way or another.

Q: What does that mean?

A: It means that I’ll do whatever I have to to make it happen.

Q: And then you’ll really be the boy from space.

A: No I’ll never be the boy from space. I’ll be . . . (groping for a phrase) . . . the astronaut from Wyoming.

I was on the phone to the studio thirty seconds later.

WHAT WAS SPACFBOY’S REAL

MISSION IN WASHINGTON?

Congressional Leaders Refuse
to Comment

Two days later, the Driers were surprised in their hotel suite by their network liason, Ms. Wallace. The woman’s manner was so hesitant that Faye Drier, who answered the door, immediately assumed that something terrible had happened back home.

“Oh, no,” Ms. Wallace colored. “I’m sorry. It’s just . . . well, it turns out that there’s something else we’d like to ask Alexander to do for us. . . .”

Faye was on guard at once. “The deal was for one interview. Not two.”

“I know, and we appreciate that . . . but this isn’t about an interview. We don’t even need him to appear on TV again. It’s . . . well, it’s somewhat special . . .” The woman peered over Faye’s shoulder, saw the pajama-clad Alexander emerge from his bedroom, and spoke more quickly, “We would have told you before, but we got almost five thousand phone calls during the broadcast . . . and, well, it took a while before this one was reported to somebody with authority to make a decision . . .”

Faye, still suspecting the worst, unchained the door and ushered the poor woman in. Ms. Wallace sat on the couch, said hi to Alexander, looked at her hands, and went on: “The call came from an . . . unfortunate young man in Georgetown. That’s a residential neighborhood here . . .”

“I know,” Alexander said.

“Well, we checked this out very carefully, and he’s real. His name’s Colin Forsythe. He’s . . . well, an almost complete shut-in. Severe muscular dystrophy, can’t walk, can’t do much with his arms. He was five years old before his parents and his doctors realized he wasn’t hopelessly retarded. But he’s far from that—he got his high school equivalency at fifteen, and he’s now working on an on-line physics doctorate, through a special curriculum devised at George Washington University. He’s also a big fan of the space program, just like you. And when he saw the show, he called and asked if it was possible for you to visit him.”

Faye’s frown had softened considerably. “And I suppose you want to have a camera there so you can show their conversation on television?”

Wallace shook her head: “I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t occurred to us. But we re not asking for that. Under the circumstances, we’re just passing on the message.”

Faye looked at Alexander. “It’s up to you, son. I won’t push you either way.” Alexander’s response was immediate: “Can we go right after breakfast?”

Cue me.

SPACE BOY VISITS INVALID!

Promises Cure for All Human Illness

Alexander later said that walking into my room was like returning to his own. The obsessions on display were the same: identical posters of Buzz Aldrin vying for attention among mockups of the Saturn V, the lunar module, skylab and the space shuttle. The only real difference was that there was more of it: in part because my family had a lot more money than Alexander’s, in part because I was eight years older and had been nursing my obsession for that much longer, in part because I didn’t have any of the other distractions of childhood. I had about a thousand more books just in this room alone, and a much fester computer than the secondhand model Faye had been able to afford. And I also had one puzzling decoration, hanging in what appeared to be a place of honor, that Alexander would have to ask me about: a poster of my personal hero, an emaciated, grimacing, but oddly buoyant man in a wheelchair. (He hadn’t heard of Stephen Hawking yet.)

Of course, he also had me to look at.

Like Alexander, I can be a pretty startling sight. Because my condition manifested itself at a very young age, my arms and legs never really had a chance to develop: they’re flabby, childish things too small for the torso that connects them. Because of these proportions, I can’t use a normal wheelchair; instead, I lie strapped in a recliner that holds me much like an egg held in the palm of a hand. The brace on my neck keeps my head from lolling to the side, and my face, framed by long greasy hair and marked by what is usually two or three days of stubble, makes me look like a degenerate infant. All in all, I look like a cartoon drawn by somebody with no knowledge of anatomy. Most people seeing me for the first time avert their eyes at once; I can judge their characters by how quickly they manage to steel themselves for a second try.

Alexander, who was used to that look himself, didn’t avert his eyes at all. “Hi,” he said.

My speech synthesizer responded, “Hello. Come . . . in. Sit down . . . on the bed.”

He obliged. On his way over he didn’t go out of his way to maintain eye contact. But he wasn’t fighting it either; I think he was just fascinated by all my stuff. I can usually tell if I’m going to have anything in common with somebody by how frequently they glance at my bookcase. Some folks only pretend to look because they find it preferable to looking at me. But I can tell who’s faking and who’s genuinely interested. Alexander clearly saw a dozen books he wanted in the time he took just crossing the room. Then he lowered the railing on the bed, sat down, and smiled at me.

“Thanks . . . for coming,” I said.

That’s the last sentence I’ll write that way. It’s there only because it’s the way I sound. The synthesizers make my voice comprehensible, but it still takes most of my lung capacity just to get out a few short syllables, so my sentences are always filled with pauses. These days, when my words are often reported for the printed page, some reporters waste entire manuscripts putting ten sets of ellipses in each sentence. It’s a cute trick, but it tends to get on the nerves awfully fast. And it’s unnecessary, too. My friends and family mentally edit out the pauses. If you absolutely need my cadences, add them yourself with a ballpoint.

Alexander said, “Well, I don’t get to meet a lot of other people interested in space. Most people think the space stuff is just me being weird because of the way I look. Even my Mom, I think.”

“And your Dad?”

Alexander answered a bit too quickly. “I have no Dad.”

I said, “Too bad. I have a Mom and a Dad, and they’re pretty good people, most of the time. But I didn’t call you here to talk about them. I wanted to ask. Have you ever read Heinlein?”

“Not yet,” Alexander said. “I’ve seen the books around, though. The last thing I read was The Hobbit, and . . .”

I must have grimaced more than usual. “Elf Crap! God save me from Elf Crap! I’m talking about the real stuff! Science Fiction, not Elf Crap!”

Alexander was a little startled by my vehemence. “Uh . . . you mean like Asimov?”

“Or Niven or Barnes or Brunner. Any of those guys. But I’m specifically thinking of Heinlein. A story he wrote called ‘Waldo.’ All about somebody like me, with a body barely strong enough to pick up a pencil on Earth, who coped by living on a satellite in free fall. With no gravity holding him down, he could move around and do what he wanted and be as independent as he wanted to be. Of course, he also needed to be obscenely rich just to afford it. My parents are rich, Space Boy. But I don’t think they’ll ever be that rich. And I’m not exactly astronaut material, so I don’t think anybody’s ever going to send me on a mission. So that’s one dream that won’t ever come true. Not for me.” I hesitated, just long enough for Alexander to know it was deliberate, and not a pause created by the speech program. “But you. Were you really serious about wanting to be an astronaut?”

Alexander blinked. It was the first time anybody had ever asked him that without adult condescension, giving it the weight of a real question. He actually had to think about it. But once he did, the resolve just clicked right into place, like one crucial piece of a puzzle he’d been assembling all his life. I could hear the surprise in his own voice as he said it: “Yeah. I was.”

“You picked a hard career,” I said. “There are no astronauts anymore. Even the Israelis pulled back.”

“So people keep telling me.”

“And so they tell me, too. What they fail to realize is that we’ve been going into space prematurely. We went before we had all the tools. We went when we knew so little that we had to spend billions just to get there and back. We went with a technology so primitive that only a miracle prevented us from having more Challenger explosions. But we went. And the more time passes, the more inevitable the second try. Because everything else we re developing in the meantime, without even trying—more and more advanced computers, more and more advanced insulation materials, stronger plastics, more and more efficient fuel delivery systems—is going to make it cheaper and easier to go again. Before long, space will belong to corporations instead of governments.” I lifted a finger for emphasis, which is about as much as I can manage. “I’ve been keeping track of those developments, Space Boy. Very close track. And my most conservative guess is that this country will be returning to space in a big way within at most the next fifteen years . . . which just happens to be my life expectancy.”

Alexander blinked several times in rapid succession, as our shared dream took shape in the air between us.

“Wow.”

“So I ask again. Do you really want to go? Are you really willing to work hard and do whatever’s necessary?”

He was ten years old, but he grew up in that moment. “Yeah. Whatever it takes.”

This time I smiled widely before I spoke.

“You just hired a manager. Do what I say and we’ll get you there.”

SPACE BOY SHOCKER:

“I’m Gay,” He Announces at Breakfast

We didn’t see much of each other for the first few years after that. Alexander still had grade school to finish, and I couldn’t travel without compelling reason. We racked up some big phone bills, though, making plans, keeping our mutual enthusiasm high, setting up supplemental courses of study, setting up an exercise regimen designed to put him in the top ten percentile by the time he reached adulthood, and—too often, for me—averting the crises that may seem like life or death at the time but are just, for most people, part of the cost of growing up. There were times, in those years, that I cursed Alexander’s absent father, not out of sympathy for my friend, but self-pity for the amount of time I had to spend giving the heart-to-hearts that a Dad would have.

Once, when Alexander blew two math tests in a row, he called me up all in a sweat to say that he was washed up. He couldn’t be an astronaut, let alone read all the tougher stuff I kept sending him, if he couldn’t even understand algebra!

I pointed out that Einstein had failed math in school, and added, “How many of the other kids in your class blew these tests?”

“About half of them. But they don’t study. I studied! I studied hard!”

“That’s your problem,” I told him. “You psyched yourself out. You were so afraid of blowing it, you left yourself no other option.”

“Huh?” he asked.

“Elementary psychology, Space Boy. The self-fulfilling prophecy. You were so worried about learning it, you couldn’t concentrate on what you were studying. So relax already. Go fishing or hiking or whatever you do out there in boonie-land. Take it a little at a time, and you’ll eventually pick it up.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You already know everything.”

There is nothing more sobering than the discovery that you’ve influenced an impressionable young mind into worshipping you. I looked at the clutter of books and papers on my desk, which I couldn’t even read unless I could first get somebody to clamp them to the book-holder attached to my chair, and at the unfinished document on my word processor, which had been mired on page fifteen since early the previous morning. “Yeah, right,” I said, damning the voice-synthesizer for its inability to convey sarcasm. “I’m just writing my doctoral thesis to prove how brilliant I am.”

He laughed, but it was an uneasy laugh that trailed off fairly quickly. “What if I flunk the next test, too?”

“Then it’ll be time to find yourself a girlfriend,” I told him. “A smart girlfriend who can teach you math while you’re distracted.”

“Yuck!” he said, and I smiled. Right on target. Now he had something else to worry about—something not related to becoming an astronaut. The stick to go with his carrot. That particular stick would only work for another year or two, of course—at which point I was sure another one would come into play—but that was the nature of our relationship. Being motivated was his job. Keeping him motivated was mine.

The threat of having to study with a girl pushed him through basic algebra, and his renewed self-confidence pushed him right back into the straight-A track he’d been on since he started school. I sent him off a fresh batch of assigned reading and went back to my thesis (a feasibility study of nuclear-powered ion rockets for a manned mission to Mars).

My advice to go fishing had unexpected consequences. He asked his Uncle George to take him, and caught half a dozen brook trout on his first time out. In the process he discovered that he liked the outdoors. He became quite the fly-fisherman, in the most remote locations he could find, enjoying it in large part because it was one place he was able to pretend, at least for a little while, that there was no difference between him and the rest of humanity. It didn’t stop him joking on the phone that his big head scared the trout the moment they saw him. I told him it proved fish had more intelligence than we gave them credit for. He threatened to use me as bait. When he sent me a picture of himself wearing a floppy hat Faye had made for him, one of those vests with a bizillion pockets on it, and hip waders, I told him he looked like a redneck.

“What’s a redneck?” he asked.

He’d lived in Wyoming for a decade and didn’t know the term. People had apparently been too busy calling him names. “A redneck is the exact opposite of a space alien,” I told him.

It made his day.

Seventh grade wasn’t much trouble for him. He had to ride a bus twenty miles into Sheridan to attend junior high, but most of the kids there already knew him, or at least knew about him, so he didn’t have to face more than the usual amount of idiocy. He studied on the bus, went fishing on weekends, continued to work on improving his time for the mile, and generally enjoyed himself.

Then he really did get a girlfriend. Actually, Sally Watkins, the same girlfriend he’d had since first grade . . . but it meant something different now.

You’d have thought he’d invented teenage angst. I got phone calls at all hours of the night. He was on Mountain time and I was on Eastern, so I had two time zones working against me, but he didn’t care. He called up to report every new development, from hand-holding all the way through his first kiss to their first argument after that.

“Look,” I told him one Sunday at about five A.M. “She’s a girl. You’re not supposed to understand her.”

“That’s comforting.”

He whined about how she was all smiles and friendly when they were alone, but hardly spoke to him at school.

“Be glad it’s not the other way around,” I told him. “Now go to bed.”

“That’s the problem. She wants to go to bed with me.”

He sounded so forlorn I had to laugh. “This is a problem? You’re what, fifteen? And bouncy little Sally wants to jump your bones? No offense, but the way you look you’re probably not going to get a whole lot of other offers.” (I was wildly wrong about that, but then I had no real experience myself and had no idea how much certain women would be attracted to novelty—let alone to the increasingly remarkable person behind the strange looks.) “I’d go for it,” I told him.

“You know what’ll happen if anybody finds out,” he said.

“What? Her daddy’ll come after you with a shotgun?”

“I wish. No, half a dozen tabloids will come after me with reporters. I can see it now: ‘Alien Monster Wants Our Women!’ or Kill it Before it Multiplies!’ They’ll mess up my life again, and probably hers too.”

It was the first time I’d heard him complain about the press. It was the first time he’d even indicated they bothered him. I took it as a sign he was growing up. “Hmm. So you’ll have to be careful. Shouldn’t be that difficult out there. There’s all those woods, right?”

“It’s October,” he reminded me. “Hunting season.”

He may not have been an alien, but he definitely lived in an alien land. The image of Alexander stuffed and mounted on somebody’s wall flitted through my head—not entirely unpleasantly, given what he was putting me through. I sighed and said, “Then borrow your mother’s car and use the back seat. Or sneak her into your bedroom. I don’t know; do I look like the sort of guy who knows this kind of stuff?”

There must have been an edge to my voice. After all, the sort of gymnastics he and his sweetie wanted to do would probably have killed me. Not that I stood much of a chance of ever finding out . . .

He must have suddenly remembered that he was not the only person in this conversation with problems. “Sorry, Colin,” he said. “I shouldn’t have bothered you. Not with this. I’m just all confused about it and don’t know what to do.” He paused, then asked, “You really think it’s okay if I—?”

“Yes, yes, go get your ashes hauled, Space Boy!” I said. “I don’t care what else you are; you’re a teenager. Now that Sally’s brought it up, so to speak, your not going to be able to rest until you’ve learned what it’s all about. So do it already, or we can both kiss your ability to concentrate goodbye.”

“All right, all right,” he said. “Sorry I asked.”

“Stop apologizing!”

“Uh . . . okay. Sor . . . I mean, thanks.” He was about to hang up when one last thought intruded. “Hey. Remember to wear a condom.”

“Uhh . . . that’s a problem.” He turned all sheepish: “I’m not sure I could walk into the store and ask for a pack without causing a riot. Forget the tabloids. The news would get out, and the parents of every teenage girl within fifty miles of here would lock their daughters in their rooms.”

He had a point. “Sit tight, then,” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid until you hear from me again.”

And so the next morning I took one of my infrequent forays out of my room, down the street in my electric scooter to the comer market, to buy a box of condoms. I bought the giant economy sized box, and grinned my silly spastic grin when the cashier gave me a “what could you possibly want these for?” look. Let her wonder.

FACE ON MARS SPEAKS!

It’s Crying for Help, Experts Say

Alex and Sally were apparently discreet. I didn’t see anything but the usual drivel in the tabloids, and I didn’t get any more frantic calls in the night for a while. Of course when they broke up a few months later I heard all about that, but it wasn’t as big a crisis as it might have been; Alex was beginning to discover that looking like an alien was a distinct advantage in the world of curious women. By the time he entered high school and started playing the “been there, done that” sophisticate, he was ten times more insufferable than he’d ever been as an anguished virgin. I hated him, and let him know it frequently.

Of course, I would have hated him even more if he hadn’t made valedictorian, let alone gotten the full scholarship I helped him apply for.

His speech was about Taking Back The Moon. He’d read it to me a week earlier. It was stirring, emotional, eloquent, and absolutely designed to get front-page attention from the tabloids. The local papers said it was brilliant. The video chip he sent me confirmed that it was. The tabloids ignored it entirely—I like to say because it was intelligent, but more likely because that happened to be the week a fifth-generation member of a certain well-known political family got caught sharing a Memphis hotel room with half a dozen bed-partners of assorted sexes and species. You know the one . . . and I’m happy to report that Alexander, being of the proper age, made as many foul jokes about the incident as everybody else did. It may not have been nice, but it was human.

My doctoral thesis was published, and I even made sure copies of it got to the right people, but only one guy had ever returned my letters. He was very enthusiastic, and I felt a brief thrill at the thought that NASA might actually do something with it, until he told me that he had rescued it out of the wastebasket in the administrator’s office. He was a janitor. He had wanted to be an astronaut, too, but that was the closest he had come.

The turnaround, when it happened, came from the last place I would ever have expected: the tabloid-reading public. Regular newspapers had long since become indistinguishable from tabloids, so that included just about everybody. Even daily papers ran articles on Elvis or Madonna sightings right beside the national news . . . and occasionally they would do a piece on Space Aliens. Alexander still got a lot of press, since he was a constant source of new photographs for them, but the article that tipped the scales for the space program was something else entirely.

Some poor drudge of a reporter, stumped for material and facing a deadline, must have been digging through back issues looking for something he could plagiarize when he ran across an article on the Martian pyramid and the mysterious face that supposedly looked out from the regolith beside it. Of course he didn’t know that the Mars Orbiter program in the nineties had pretty much debunked the whole idea with detailed photos from a hundred miles up, but if he did he wouldn’t have cared. He had an article to write, and suddenly he had a topic.

When the paper came out, demanding that the U.S. go back to Mars and find out what the face was trying to communicate to us, nothing much would have come of it if the reporter hadn’t found an ingenious way to eat up twelve more column-inches of space. He had printed a clip-out form for people to sign and send to the President.

He had no doubt intended it as a simple gag, but he had underestimated his audience’s credulity. A flood of clip-outs poured into the White House, many of them accompanied by long letters from people who couldn’t resist the chance to tell the President just why this was so important. A sizeable number of people were of the opinion that the face was Jesus. As other papers, not to be outdone, joined in with clip-outs of their own, the issue, stupid as it was, became the talk of the nation. When the President ignored the letters, papers printed more articles crying “coverup!” and exhorting their readers to send even more letters. Within a week they were arriving by the ton.

The President was no fool. He knew the controversy was ridiculous. But an election was coming up, and the economy was in the middle of a long downward slide, brought on at least in part because we weren’t fighting any wars to pump money into the big defense contractors. He needed something to toss money at. Something that would capture the public’s imagination in terms people could understand. If the public wanted to go to Mars, well then, he would lead them to Mars.

He called an old college buddy of his who worked for NASA, a former janitor who had gotten his Ph.D. and worked his way into the mission planning office, and he suggested that a Mars proposal would receive serious consideration in congress. But he would have to work fast. The election was only a month away, and the President wanted to drop a real proposal on the public at the last moment. His buddy said, “I already know how to do it,” and dusted off his copy of my doctoral thesis.

Then the President called a dozen of the most influential senators and representatives into his office and showed them the piles of mail.

They were no fools either. Or maybe they were just fools enough. They were certain that a mission to Mars was a big waste of time and money, but they were willing to support it if it would get them reelected. So in a resounding speech on the night before the polls opened—way too late for a rebuttal from the opposition—NASA suddenly got its first new mandate in decades: Landing an American on Mars.

SPACE BOY THREATENS MURDER!!

Heroic Photog Captures Full Scope
of Rampage

Political correctness may not be the worst affliction of the twenty-first century, but it’s certainly the silliest. Even when I was a kid people grew uncomfortable if someone called me “crippled” rather than “differently abled,” but nobody could actually be fined for it. Nowadays I could pull mandatory counselling time for calling myself a crip, much less a gimp or a spaz. At the very worst I am “moto-neurally challenged,” and even that has a negative connotation that makes people uncomfortable.

It also opens doors. Wide open. In their pathetic attempts to ignore reality, the arbiters of morality and sentimentality in our culture have decreed that people are not to be discriminated against in any way, not for reasons of race, creed, color, age, gender, sexual preference, marital status, economic condition—or ability. Especially not ability. Goodness no; that would mean someone was actually better at something than someone else, and that flew directly in the face of conventional wisdom.

Combine that with (a) affirmative action, which came back with a vengeance after its repeal at the turn of the century, and (b) Alex’s own marks, which now put him on the Dean’s List for the fourth straight semester, in precisely the course of study that I’d mapped out for him, and (c) my own appointment to the Project Development Committee—and Alex suddenly had a perfect shot at his dream. Every minority of any sort had to be hired in proportion to their prevalence in society, which meant that NASA had to hire the handicapped, even for a wildly inappropriate job like “astronaut.”

And Alex was one of very few people who qualified as handicapped without actually being handicapped. Considering their other options, NASA was glad to accept him the moment he mailed in his application. It didn’t matter that he was still a couple of years away from graduation. In fact it helped them immensely. They had no training program in place and wouldn’t for at least two years. They had nothing really for then-new astronauts to do until they created one. And in Alexander’s case, since he was merely hired as a placeholder anyway, they were happy to put him on the payroll and let him stay in school. Besides, they figured, even if he was only an astronaut in name, his very presence would keep the masses interested.

I called him up the day the news broke. It was, by the way, one of the last times I’d ever call him from the old house in Georgetown; I already had handicap-design specialists fixing up my new place in Cocoa Beach. It would require spending all my salary and much of my trust fund on attendants, drivers, custodial workers, and increased medical costs, but there was no way I’d be able to handle the job offsite—and there was no way I’d ever want to. My clock was still ticking. Still, when I called, it was Alexander’s triumph I was thinking about. My voice synthesizer chirped out a greeting as ebullient as it could manage: “Congratulations, Space Boy.”

“Don’t call me that,” he said. “Don’t call me that ever again.”

That set me back in my anti-bedsore harness. I had called him Space Boy ever since we met. “What’s the matter? Tabloid reporters getting you down?”

“Christ yes. I—just a minute.” I heard some scuffling, then he shouted, “Get the fuck out of my room!” and there was a loud bang.

“Alex?” I asked. My voice synthesizer wouldn’t shout. “Alex?”

He came back to the phone. “A couple of ’em got past the dorm’s security system.”

“What was that noise? You didn’t shoot one of them, did you?”

He laughed. “I may be from Wyoming, but I don’t solve everything with a gun, no matter how good it would feel. No, I just kicked one of them in the balls, grabbed the other one by her tits and shoved her out of my room, and slammed the door in their faces.”

“Ouch. That’s getting kind of personal, don’t you think?”

“And they’re not? I’m tired of being called ‘Space Boy.’ I’m tired of being called a freak. I’m the only guy in the world those bastards can make fun of because of the way I look, and they’re driving me crazy.”

I heard more pounding as he said that, but I couldn’t tell if it was on the door or him banging on his desk. “Are you going to be safe there?” I asked.

He sighed. “I saw two big security guards coming down the hallway. I’ll be all right.”

I thought about it for a minute. He was used to me pausing to catch my breath; he waited patiently until I said, “You may not want to—you should excuse the expression—alienate the press. They’re in charge of public opinion these days.”

“They’re a bunch of sadistic leeches,” Alexander replied.

“Powerful sadistic leeches,” I countered. “Don’t piss them off if you can help it. NASA learned long ago that public opinion is what launches rockets.”

“What, now you want me to let ’em in?”

“No. Never let them close to you. No interviews, nothing like that. Never even have a direct conversation with them. It would be too easy for them to twist your words around. But you can still communicate with them, and you can make them say what you want them to say.”

“How?”

I was thinking out loud, but I had plenty of time to do it while I paused for breath. “Send out press releases. All the papers will receive the same text, so we can say what we want without worrying about it being misquoted.” I laughed, and my stupid speech synthesizer said, “Ha, ha, ha.”

“Did I ever tell you that you sound like Boris Karloff when you do that?” he asked.

“Fuck Boris Karloff,” I said. “And fuck the press, too. We can feed those bastards anything we want to, and as long as it makes good copy they’ll be happy to print it.”

“So what do we want to say, besides ‘Leave me alone’ ?”

“How about, ‘Making a bold move in support of handicapped people everywhere, Alex Drier, the so-called “Space Boy,” has accepted an offer to become one of NASA’s new generation of astronauts. Despite the barrage of tasteless taunts he will surely endure because of his unusual deformity, he has chosen to take this step to demonstrate that public humiliation should not stop anyone who is truly determined to blah blah blah.’ ”

“Brilliant,” he said, his tone of voice making it clear that I was anything but.

“I especially like the ‘blah, blah, blah’ part. Truly inspired.”

“Thank you. So what sucked about the rest of it?”

“You used ‘Space Boy’ yourself. And you called me deformed.”

“Better we say it than the press. The way I said it, you’ll get sympathy. It’ll make the press look like the bullies they are. And the only way they can fight back is to quit printing articles about you, which is all we really want anyway.”

“Well, that’s a point,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Did you save that?” Everything I say is held in a temporary scroll-back buffer. I recalled my impromptu press release and saved it permanently, then said, “Let me work on this for a few minutes, then I can transmit it to you and you can print it out and take it to the reporters.”

“I thought you said I shouldn’t ever—”

“Right. Have one of your security guards take it to the reporters. Print out only ten copies, and make them fight over ’em like the snarling dogs they are.” I laughed again. “Ha, ha, ha. It’s time we took the high road, metaphorically as well as physically.”

SPACE BOY STARTS TRAINING

“He’s a Natural,” Says NASA

It didn’t work as well as we’d hoped it would, at least not right away. The tabloids weren’t bothered by inconsistencies between their stories and anyone else’s; in their world that simply proved that everyone else was lying. We did manage to direct the stories a little bit, though, and over the next couple of years we got better at it. Enough so that the media attention at least didn’t grow any worse as Alexander became more of a public figure.

Even so, America’s first four Mars astronauts were as whitebread as the Mercury seven. And so were the second crew, and the third, and the fourth.

NASA may have had to hire minorities and the handicapped and the gay-lesbian-old-Baha’i—they even hired me, as a designer, before they realized I actually knew more than the rest of them put together—but they weren’t about to staff their missions that way.

I fought it as best I could from within, but I didn’t have that much power. They were using my design for the Earth-Mars transfer vehicle, but that didn’t mean squat in the long run. If I made too big a stink, they would have thrown me right off the project without shedding a tear, and I wasn’t willing to lose that for anything.

We began testing the ion drive and the crew habitat. The lander was still mired in design snafus, but it was beginning to look like we could actually send four people to Mars and bring them back alive even if we couldn’t land them when they got there. I was busier than I’d ever been in my life, and happier, too, even if the stress was taking its toll on my wasted stamina. By the time Boeing actually delivered the lander, I could barely talk at all, and was thinking of switching over to a neural implant—one of the new generation of voice-synths that could read the electrical impulses in my brain so I didn’t have to eyeball words off a computer screen. Direct interface was becoming fairly common by that point, but it seemed like a further retreat into infirmity, and I did not look forward to taking that step.

The lander was basically an updated Lunar Module, with separate descent and ascent rockets to cut down on the weight we had to carry back into space on the return trip. That meant the crew couldn’t use it to jump from site to site on Mars, but they carried ultralight aircraft for that. It was more efficient to use airplanes anyway. We managed to squeeze two of them on board, along with enough food and shelter for a year’s stay.

The clock was ticking. Rumors started flying as to who would crew the mission, even though the selection wouldn’t be made for over a year. But Alex was out in the cold. NASA hadn’t even given him an orbital flight, and it was conventional wisdom that nobody would be sent to Mars without at least one space flight under their belt.

“What can we do?” he asked me one evening after another request for a mission had been turned down on the grounds that he was needed more in a support capacity than in space. “If I don’t get a flight soon, I’ll never even get on the backup crew for Mars.”

“True enough,” I said, slowly and with great difficulty. “I know how frustrating it must feel to come this far and then hit the glass ceiling, but the crew selection is out of my control.”

“That’s what I keep hearing from everybody I talk to,” he growled. “Except that bastard Ferris in the Assoff—” (that was what we called the Astronaut Office, where the crew selections were made) “—who just laughs.”

“I’ll think of something,” I told him.

“What?”

“I don’t know. Something. There’s got to be a way to show them you’re not a threat. That’s what Ferris is afraid of, after all. He knows you’re a good astronaut, but he’s afraid of the kind of publicity you’ll get if he actually sends you into space.”

“Publicity!” Alex shouted. “Everywhere I turn, publicity is standing between me and my life!” He began pacing the tiny space between my desk and the door. “I hardly even left the house until I was five because my Dad was afraid of what the crazies would do. Hell, that’s why he left. Well, if NASA hired me because of the way I look, I am not going to let them use it to stop me from getting a mission!”

I wish I could say his little rant sparked me into action, gave me the brilliant idea that salvaged his career. I’d love to take credit for it, but that’s not how it happened. What happened was that he stomped out, mad, and I sat in my office until well after dark, thinking with the lights out until I fell asleep.

Alex went home and trashed out his apartment, drinking beer and getting angrier and angrier by the minute.

SPACE BOVS SECRET MISSION

IN CALIFORNIA!

Is Killer Earthquake on the Way?

He should have died in a fiery crash somewhere over New Mexico. That he didn’t stands as testament to his skill as a pilot, but not to his calm reasoning ability while intoxicated, because what he did when he got mad enough was check out a T-38—the training jet the astronauts use to fly back and forth from Houston to the Cape—and roar off in a sentimental blaze of glory for San Francisco.

I don’t know who was the more surprised when they met. Alex unannounced at your door in the middle of the night could scare the piss out of practically anybody, even his dad. On the other hand, Mark Drier had aged quite a bit since Alex had last seen him. Eighteen years of straight time, the salt air of Fisherman’s Wharf, and a lifetime of regrets had all left their mark on him. Alex was taller, too, so it looked to him like his father had shrunk to hobbit size and wrinkled like an apple left in the sun.

To hear him tell it, neither one of them blinked an eye.

“Hi,” Alex said.

“Hi,” said Mark.

They looked at each other for a moment, then, “Can I come in?”

“Sure.” His dad stood aside and Alex entered his one-bedroom apartment. It was lit by a single light in the kitchen, which revealed a reasonably tidy bachelor’s home. Dirty dishes on the counter, but not more than a couple days’ worth. Newspapers and magazines on the metal table and all but one of the creaky wooden chairs around it. Full bookshelves in the living room, and a big ship in a bottle on top of a console TV.

“You make that?” Alex asked.

“Yep.”

“Looks nice. I’ve always wondered how people get the masts and sails and stuff to fit through that little hole. And how they manipulate it once it’s inside.”

“Patience,” Mark said. “And long sticks with tape on the end.”

“You never struck me as a patient sort of guy,” Alex said.

It might have been an accusation. His father chose not to interpret it that way. He just shrugged and said, “I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. You learn.”

“I guess you could.” Alex sat down in the gray naugahyde recliner facing the TV. His dad sat on the couch off to the side. “Of course, I’ve never had much patience either. I guess I got that from you.”

Mark Drier’s hands were shaking. “Listen, Alex, I—”

“No,” Alexander said. “That’s not why I came here.” He removed a tabloid from his jacket pocket. The headline read: CITY OF IMMORTALS DISCOVERED ON THE MOON. “You never did go to the press, not even after you left home. Why not?”

Mark studied the blank TV screen. “Your mother didn’t want me to.”

“I doubt if she wanted you to leave, either.”

“She wouldn’t have wanted me to stay, with what I was becoming.” Mark looked back at his son. “I was never built to live inside a goldfish bowl. I could feel myself becoming something I didn’t want to be. I think I was actually going crazy. That would have been a disaster for you, and for her.”

“You too,” Alex said.

His dad snorted. “Yeah, for me too. So I did the only thing I had guts enough to do. I took myself out of the picture. Completely out, and that meant no stories in the paper, not even when I couldn’t find a job at first.” He shook his head incredulously. “Did you know that your Uncle George sent me money for three months until I got my feet under me again?”

Alex felt as if he’d fallen into ice water. Uncle George had never had a good word for Mark. “He did?”

“Yep. Wouldn’t let me pay him back, either. He wrote me letters for the first couple of years to let me know how you were doing, but I—I finally asked him to stop.”

“Why?” asked Alex.

“I’d already cut myself off from you,” Mark said. “I’d already failed you. Every letter reopened the wound.”

There was an uncomfortable silence while each man thought whatever fathers and sons think at times like these. Then Alex cleared his throat and said, “I have no problem with that, Dad. I really don’t. The only thing I have a problem with is how the media attention screwed up your life. So this may sound kind of crazy, but I want you and Mom to sell your story to the press. Auction an exclusive to the highest bidder. Run the price up into the millions and retire on the proceeds.”

Mark laughed. “Nobody’d pay for our story now.”

Alex leaned forward in his chair. “They would if you told them they were right about me all along.”

SPACE BOY CONFIRMED ALIEN!

Parents Reveal All

Next stop, Wyoming.

Insert a picture of Faye screaming at the top of her lungs. Alex said his ears actually rang afterward. She nearly threw him out of the house, and it was two hours before she allowed Mark to cross the threshold. Only because the idea had come from Alex did she even listen, and only because Mark said he didn’t want to do it either did she finally decide to go ahead with it.

“I certainly hope you know what you’re doing,” she told Alex. “This could kill your career faster than a spacesuit Mure.”

“Mom, my career is already dead. This is a last-ditch effort to pump some life into it.”

“Last ditch effort to make fools of us all,” Mark said softly, but he was beyond arguing at this point. He had cast his fate to the winds long ago, and was happy to drift wherever they took him. He was looking around at the house he had left nearly two decades earlier, noting that it needed paint and wondering how the roof was holding up. He had carefully avoided looking too long at Faye, because every time he did that he felt something go wonky in his chest.

“I’m trying to make fools of NASA,” Alex protested. “If you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” He tweaked the tiny little flaps on the sides of his head. Mark looked away; Faye laughed.

“I still don’t see how it’s going to help,” she said.

“Leave that up to me. You just make up the most outrageous story you can think of. Abduction, genetic experiments, off-planet meetings with the Imperial Space Command—even Elvis—whatever you want.”

“I don’t want to have anything to do with it,” Faye protested, but she was already weakening. Twenty years of stubborn rationality in the face of rampant crackpottery had left her creative side screaming for release. She actually yearned for a chance to play the loon, at least once. And if it helped her son, she would make sure it was a doozy. The promise of a couple of million dollars didn’t hurt her creativity, either.

Alex was back in Houston by the time the story came out. He’d spent his final day of relative obscurity briefing the other astronauts, so when Ferris called him into his office to express his false condolences for the unfair treatment he was getting in the press, Alex was ready for him.

“No, they’re absolutely right,” Alex said. “I’m a space alien.”

Ferris nearly split a seam. “What?”

“Well, I must be.” Alex walked over to the window and looked out at the lush grounds three floors below. “I mean, why else would NASA be holding back a perfectly good astronaut? They’ve got to be afraid of what’ll happen if they send him into space. And the only possible reason for that—”

“You’re insane!”

“—is because they’re afraid he’ll steal the spaceship and go home.” He turned back from the window. “Or could it be that NASA’s simply afraid the press will make fun of them? Well, welcome to the world of Alex Drier. Now my problem is your problem.”

“You can’t seriously think this . . . this circus is going to get you a mission,” Ferris said, snapping his index finger against the headline.

“I have no idea what will get me a mission,” Alex said. “Hard work and determination certainly wasn’t good enough. Busting my butt to help train every other astronaut in the corps wasn’t good enough. Keeping a low profile to allay your paranoid fear wasn’t enough. So I decided to let my parents make some money while they still could. If that means taking some media heat again for a while, well, what’s the harm in it? I’ve survived it before. And I’m grounded anyway, aren’t I?”

Ferris loosened his collar. “Look, I’ve told you a million times—”

“Are you or are you not afraid of the publicity?” Alex demanded. “If you can sit there behind your desk and tell me with a straight face that the media attention doesn’t scare you—while you’ve got a copy of the Times right there on top of the heap—then I’ll go pack my bags and join a freak show. But if that’s why you’ve been holding me back, I and every other astronaut in the project will tell the press not only that I’m a space alien, but that this whole project is the result of rays beamed into our heads from the mothership orbiting the north pole of the Moon.”

“You can’t orbit a pole,” Ferris said contemptously.

“Damn right you can’t. And I’m not a space alien, either, but that’s what everyone has agreed to say until you stop treating me like one.”

“This is blackmail!” Ferris shouted.

“This is a fucking wake-up call,” Alex shouted back. “I’m the best damned astronaut this project has got and everybody knows it. I’m the most dedicated, the most coordinated, the most physically fit, and with the exception of Mary Paiz, I’m the smartest. If you don’t believe me, look at the reports from your own doctors and shrinks. There’s only one reason I haven’t been in orbit yet, and one reason why I’m being shoved off the Mars mission, and that’s because you’re afraid the press will make fun of you for sending a guy with a big head into space.” He snatched up the newspaper and flung it into the wastebasket. “Well, that’s where your fear belongs, and that—” he pointed straight upward “—is where I belong. It’s your call. But this most assuredly is not blackmail, because your worst nightmare has already happened.”

SPACE BOY STONEWALLS PARENTS’

SHOCKING TESTIMONY!

Is NASA In On the Coverup?

Ferris suspended him, of course.

He was still free to do what he wanted on-site; he just didn’t have any official responsibilities any more. So he spent the next couple of days in the simulators, practicing launch and landing and docking maneuvers. He even spent long hours in the ultralight scout simulator, learning how to fly the ungainly fabric-covered jets in Mars’s thin atmosphere. He told me later he figured it was the closest he would ever get, so he wanted to spend as much time there as he could before he was fired.

Ferris noted what he was doing, and took it as another example of arrogant pride. Drier was so damned sure of himself he kept training even when he was suspended! But the techs kept feeding Ferris the performance ratings, and the numbers spoke for themselves. Alex successfully landed on Mars with three thrusters out and a fourth one stuck at full throttle. He correctly diagnosed and shut down a leaking fuel pump in midascent before it could explode, and finished the launch and docking with only two out of three engines. He rode out a duststorm in an ultralight, conserving power and fuel by gliding in the updraft on the windward side of Mons Olympus until the weather cleared enough for him to land. And he survived the death mission, the one that was supposed to end with a headlong crash into Mars no matter what the astronauts did to compensate for all the malfunctions on the way down.

“How did he do that?” Ferris demanded of me when he saw the results. I was the engineering genius; I was supposed to have designed the simulation to be foolproof.

“I didn’t think about deploying the scout planes after the parachutes failed,” I said. My delight was so great that I spoke at almost normal speed. “Sure, doing that adds drag, but it also means jettisoning both thruster quads on the lower stage and burning up the fuel you need for the return mission in the upper stage quads just to stay upright. He landed it all right, but he would never have gotten it back into orbit.”

“Don’t bet on it,” Ferris said. “That bugeyed bastard did this while his oxygen supply was down to practically zip and the cabin was shaking like a box falling downstairs. The T-handle broke off in his hand—which was NOT part of the simulation—and he fixed it with duct tape without letting the lander pitch over in the process. If there’s a way to fix the damage after he got down, I’ll bet he’d find it.”

“Changing our tune, are we?” I asked him.

He glowered at me. “My tune is none 38 of your damned business. But yes, it’s conceivable that I might have made a mistake regarding him. I just hope it’s not too late to correct it.”

“We don’t launch for eleven months,” I reminded him.

“I’m aware of the launch window,” he replied. He left my office without saying goodbye.

SPACE BOY GOES TO SPACE

“It’s my destiny,” He says.

His first mission was nothing special. I say that with such aplomb, knowing that anyone who goes into space for even the most routine mission thinks it’s the most fantastic thing that ever happened to them. Alex was no exception, even though he got spectacularly sick the first day.

His was the first landing mission. The mission before his had tested the Mars Descent and Ascent Module, known affectionately as MADAM, in low Earth orbit. Docking and flight maneuvers had gone well, so the next logical step was to try landing it somewhere. Earth was out of the question, since the engines only developed three-quarters of a g of thrust, but that didn’t mean they had to take it all the way to Mars untested, either. There’s a perfect testing ground only 240,000 miles away.

It’s so perfect a person might even be tempted to say God put it there to help us on our way to greater things. That was one theory proposed when the Middle Eastern fundamentalists raised a stink about us returning to profane the Moon they had so recently cleaned up, but it did little to pacify them. The US government didn’t really care. By then we were so tired of the constant squabbling that came from that part of the world that we just ignored them and went on about our business.

Alex didn’t get to actually land on the Moon. That would have been too much publicity even for a repentant Ferris to handle. But he did get to ride along in the Earth-Mars transfer module and test out its recreation facilities while the lander crew did their thing below.

He had fun playing with the entertainment and exercise equipment, the scientific instruments, and so forth. That stuff had all been tested a million times on the ground, but he dutifully put it all through its paces so we could detect any on-site problems before we sent a crew out with it for a two-year mission. About the only thing he found out of spec was a warble in the CD player, which sent Pioneer into a tizzy for a couple of days until the problem was traced to a power supply drain from the gyroscopic stabilizers.

When he tested the surround-sound theatre system, he of course played Communion Part Six. Of the alien hysteria movies that came out when he was young, that was the one that most closely paralleled his actual life. It was also the cheesiest and most embarrassingly bad one, with the aliens stomping around flatfooted like Frankenstein monsters and sucking the blood from the poor residents in the fictitious town of Rattlesnake, Montana. Alex had always loved that one, and he hooted and laughed through all two hours and seven minutes of it while Mission Control listened in on the hab module’s live audio feed. When word got out that that’s what he was watching, it started a minor stampede to the video stores to rent copies of it, and the movie even enjoyed a brief comeback in theatres.

It also reminded people how stupid their fears over his appearance had been. An embarrassed America quietly returned a lot of DVDs to the video stores, and the nostalgia theatres switched over to Batman Seventeen in mid-week.

The guys on the Moon landed without a hitch, got out and did a walk-around inspection, practiced a few of the things they would need to do on Mars, then gathered up some rocks for the geologists back home, climbed back inside, and blasted off for rendezvous again. They didn’t leave any beer cans behind to intentionally irritate the Saudis, but the lower half of the lander and an inflatable dome are still sitting there doing a fine job of that. And they did deploy and assemble one of the ultralight aircraft for practice at doing it in low gravity with spacesuits on, so now there’s a fully assembled airplane sitting on the airless Moon, fueled and ready to puzzle the hell out of anybody who comes along after humanity has vanished into history.

The ascent stage took them back into orbit without mishap, and they flew the hab module back to Earth on a long spiral that took them another two weeks, just to test out the recyclers and fuel cells and so forth. When they finally splashed down, three weeks after they left, Alex was beaming from tiny little ear to tiny little ear. He’d made it to space.

And he was on the backup crew for Mars. When the announcement came out, he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Backup crew. This was a one-shot mission; unless the first crew discovered underground cities or something like it, he wouldn’t get another chance.

“Cheer up,” I told him. “Maybe somebody on the prime crew will get hit by a bus.”

Some days I look back on that moment and wonder if there really is something behind all the superstitions people have developed since we learned how to rub sticks together to make fire. Don’t say your dreams out loud or they’ll never come true, don’t break a mirror or you’ll get seven years of bad luck, and most assuredly don’t say anything that will tempt fate, at least without knocking on wood when you say it.

I’m practically paralyzed, okay? I couldn’t knock on wood if my life depended on it. I don’t believe in that crap anyway. But that didn’t stop Randy Parker from stepping out into traffic on a busy London street—instinctively looking to the left instead of the right for approaching traffic—and winding up under a tour bus filled with tennis fans on their way to Wimbledon.

It was the first time I ever allowed myself to think—even for a moment, even as grim whimsy—that maybe this Space Boy stuff had some substance after all. Maybe there was a mothership, manipulating things Alexander’s way. Maybe that was the only way to account for the way things had always seemed to work out for him.

The difference between me and the UFO nuts is that I’m capable of looking at that hypothesis and saying “Naaaah.”

And besides, I don’t consider Alex preternaturally lucky anymore.

Not at all.

MARS CREW STOPS

INVASION FLEET

Epic Laser Battle Ends in Victory!

Randy Parker’s death put Alex on the mission, along with Dave Anderson, Mary Paiz, and Shawnee Sanders, three straight arrows with test scores and simulator records almost as high as his. The press had fun with the idea of sending two couples to Mars. They weren’t couples, but nobody denied the probability that they would become couples on the way. It was even worked into the mission profiles, albeit secretly. And if you want me to talk about who did what to whom, you’re reading the wrong account. I bring it up because some people have suggested that sexual dynamics led to what eventually happened on Mars; it makes good tabloid fodder, I suppose, but that’s not what happened.

As for me, I had plenty of engineering snafus to take care of. The hardware worked amazingly well, which for a project this complex meant we still had one or two major complications a day. Most of them were simple malfunctions that we could fix and forget about, but a few turned out to be design flaws and those had to be reengineered. Those were the scary ones, because you never knew if your changed design would work any better than the first one, or if the different configuration would have a ripple effect that would knock out something else. Toward the end I felt like we were sending four people out into space in a vehicle made more of hope and prayers than of hard metal.

They say a painting is never finished, only abandoned. It shouldn’t be that way with spaceships, but the sad truth is that you can always improve the design. Launch windows won’t wait for a perfect ship, though, and funding is a finite resource, so all you can do is make the best ship you can with the time and materials you’ve got, and then trust the astronauts to keep it working throughout the mission.

We didn’t do a bad job. I can say with great pride that the spaceship didn’t kill anyone. Technically neither did the scout planes, though when a man’s body lies a few hundred feet from a crash site it’s hard to say that the plane didn’t kill him. But even if we’d known about the takeoff instability, we’d still have sent the planes along and hoped for the best. It was too late to redesign them, too late to change the mission profile, too late to do anything but light the rockets and go.

On launch day, the Cape was packed for a dozen miles in every direction, and every television in the country was tuned to the NASA channel. I think it was finally soaking in to a whole generation of people that we were once again doing something great, that there was more to life than just the day-to-day grind. We were about to explore another planet!

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when the clock ticked down to zero and the Saturn VI bellowed its liftoff roar across the palmettos. Even the people who thought it was a waste of money were whispering, “Go, baby, go!” while the rocket struggled to lift the spaceship into orbit. I was in the control center, and people later told me that my speech synthesizer was saying, “Don blah huh,” over and over again, but what I was really saying was, “Don’t blow up, don’t blowup!”

Miraculously, it didn’t. The Saturn put them into orbit, the final stage launched them out past the Moon for a gravity assist, and the ion rocket kicked in and propelled them gently on toward Mars.

The tabloids went especially nuts during the eight months it took our guys to get there; the grinning vacuousness that seems to affect all astronaut transmissions meant for public consumption—even Alexander’s, I’m sorry to say—palled after only a couple of weeks, and was replaced in the headlines by rampant speculation over the “real” reason for the mission. Surely it was a humanitarian gesture to take Alexander home! Or a rendezvous with the Aztecs known to inhabit Olympus Mons! And just what kind of torrid romantic doings were really going on when the cameras weren’t rolling? The most amusing of the stories were faxed to the crew until Mary Paiz, speaking for them all, sent back a transmission asking us to stop. If Alexander had a reaction, he didn’t show it.

After that they lived in their own private little world. Their recycling equipment kept them alive and healthy, and the entertainment system and scientific instruments (indistinguishable from their point of view) kept them sane, and before they knew it they were braking into orbit around Mars.

They spent a few days sending out communications satellites so they would be in constant contact with each other no matter how far apart they got on the ground, mapping their landing site, and making sure the automatic instruments would continue to take pictures and other readings while they were gone. Then when they were sure their transfer vehicle would be warm and waiting for them when they got back, they climbed into the lander and headed down.

No waiting in orbit for one poor astronaut like the Apollo guys had done. All four went to the surface, and all four would contribute equally to the exploration. We had enough missions planned for everybody to have their fill.

They landed in the Valles Marineris, down at the lower end where there would be lots of flood debris and erosion would have exposed plenty of geological strata for them to study without digging. The valley was so wide at that point that the sides were over the horizon, and all of it was flood plain. The ultralight airplanes would allow them to range farther afield, but that’s where everyone expected the action to be.

Except the tabloid-reading public, of course. They wanted to know about the face and the pyramid. Never mind that photos from orbit showed two unassuming hills and a few eroded craters; people were sure that an on-site investigation would turn up alien artifacts by the truckload. When they learned that NASA had scheduled an ultralight flyby only after all the other mission objectives had been met, the ruckus could be heard all the way to Mars.

NASA didn’t budge. We released new photos from orbit showing the same thing we already knew from the last orbital survey, and the crew went on about the business of setting up their dome and making their first cautious forays into the Martian wilderness.

Cautious was the word. Mars is barely more habitable than the Moon. The air is thin and mostly carbon dioxide, so the astronauts had to wear pressure suits at all times, but there’s just enough of it for a cold wind to suck the heat out of a suit in practically no time. A single mistake could be fatal, and everyone made their share of mistakes. Not long after they got there, Mary slipped with a rock hammer and punctured her pressure suit, but Alex dragged her back to the dome and tossed her inside before she ran out of air. Dave didn’t reinstall one of the dome’s two air recycling canisters properly after he recharged it and nearly asphyxiated them all in their sleep. Shawnee stayed out too long after dusk and nearly froze to death before she could make it back to the dome.

And the ultralight airplanes turned out to be much trickier to fly than we had hoped. The problem was mostly on takeoff and landing, when they made the transition from hovering on their jet exhaust to actually flying. Mars’s atmosphere is too thin to make a rolling takeoff practical, especially on rocky ground, so the ultralights were designed like Harrier jets, with vectored thrust engines that could be rotated downward for takeoff and landing. Problem was, at inbetween angles they really affected the wings’ lift, and there was a configuration in the middle where the engines didn’t have enough thrust for the plane to hover anymore and the wings didn’t have enough lift for it to fly, so if you weren’t moving fast enough when you went through that phase you fell like a rock.

Alex found out about it the first time he took one of the planes up for a test flight. He was going through the checklist, calling out his actions as he rose to about fifty feet, brought the nose up, and increased the thrust for flight, when he crossed through the dead zone. “Throttle up to eighty percent, engines running smooth, tilting forward to—shit!” The stall warning buzzer overrode his voice for a moment, then his words became intelligible again as he said, “—nose down, throttles to full, gaining speed. Starting to feel some response to the controls. Okay, I think I’m flying now, but that didn’t feel right at all. I’m going to bring it around for a visual.”

“Roger,” Dave said. “I’ve got the binks on you. Don’t see anything wrong from here, but maybe when you come around. You sure you don’t want to land?”

“Not until I find out what happened,” Alex said. He had the pilots’ almost instinctive urge to put air rather than rock beneath him when he had a problem. He banked the plane around and did a slow pass over the dome—slow being about a hundred miles an hour in the thin Martian air.

Dave gave him a close inspection with binoculars, but didn’t see anything wrong. “Looks copacetic, ol’ boy,” he said.

The ultralights were mostly wing, since Mars’s atmosphere is so thin. Alex waggled them a little, then jounced the plane up and down a bit with the elevator. “Flies like a pregnant cow,” he reported. “Just like it did in the simulator. But I never felt anything like that dropout before. I’m going to take it up a ways and see if I can repeat it.”

“You sure you want to do that?” Dave asked him.

“I don’t want to try landing until I know what happened,” Alex replied.

Back home at mission control we were all pulling our hair out. We had a man in the air with a problem—a hundred and fifty million miles away. What we were hearing had happened thirteen minutes ago. Alex could have been dead already and we wouldn’t know it until the radio signal carrying his last words caught up to us. We had people in the simulator trying to figure out what had happened up there the moment we heard there was a problem, but even if they figured it out instantly, it would be thirteen more minutes before their solution helped Alex any.

So we hung onto our butts and gritted our teeth while we listened to Alex calmly describe everything he did. “Climbing through eight thousand. I can see quite a ways from up here. Man oh man, a hell of a lot of water must have come through this canyon. It looks like it was cut with a fire hose. Okay, I’m at ten oh and slowing. Bringing the engines backward to hover. Angle at ten, twenty, thirty—there it goes! Get back here, you bastard! Throttling up and tilting on back to forty, fifty, sixty. Airspeed down to forty, thirty, twenty. It’s looking stable now. Hovering like a balloon. Plenty of control. It’s just in that transitional phase where it all goes to hell for a second.”

He tried switching back over to forward flight, and sure enough the same thing happened, so he brought it to a stop again and tried it over and over until he learned how to compensate for it. “All right, here’s what we’re going to have to do,” he said as he dropped back down toward the base for a landing. “It’ll suck fuel like a tank rupture, but we’ve got to go up and down like an elevator for at least a thousand feet before we switch flight modes, ’cause we’re going to lose a couple hundred feet in transition.”

Mary said, “Why the hell didn’t they figure that out back home?”

“Who knows?” Alex said. “Planes always act squirrelly at low speed. They couldn’t test these things in partial vacuum for more than a few seconds at a time, “cause they don’t have a vacuum pump that’ll keep up with a wind tunnel. And they sure as hell couldn’t test it at a third of a gee.” He laughed. “I’ll bet they’re scurrying to figure it out now.”

He was right about that. Everybody involved in the ultralight design ran for days without sleep trying to understand what had happened and how to correct for it with materials the Mars crew had on hand. They figured it out, too, and cobbled together a fix out of an empty fuel tank and duct tape that reduced the instability to about half what it was originally, but that was the best they could do. The problem was inherent in the wing design, and there wasn’t anything they could do on site to correct for that.

So the crew went on with their jobs, flying planes that were ready to smash them into the ground at a moment’s notice. It was either that or forget about ninety percent of the mission objectives, but this was our only shot at Mars. There was no money for another mission, and even if the money miraculously showed up in the budget, these four wouldn’t be going back. There wasn’t any question what they would do. I’d have done the same thing in their place.

I keep telling myself that.

MARS MISSION A COVERUP!

Why NASA Won’t Ask the Questions

YOU Want Answered!

For months nobody had any more problems with the planes. All four astronauts flew them dozens of times each, and they got so used to the instability that we nearly forgot it was there. With all the new discoveries the crew were making about Mars we had so much else to think about that the airplane problem faded into the background.

When we lost the first plane it had nothing to do with the flight problem anyway. A dust storm got it during the night, plucked it away like it had never been there. Alex said the crew never even heard a noise. They just looked out in the morning after a hard blow and saw that it was gone, and the other plane was missing a couple feet of fabric at the end of its left wing.

They were able to fix that easily enough and go on flying. Fortunately there weren’t that many flights left in the mission plan. They had accomplished all the major objectives, and now they were working their way down the “wish list,” the extra projects that they could do if there was time before their launch window opened for the return trip to Earth.

One of those was a long-range flight to check another site on the planet for signs of life. They had found dozens of tantalizing clues, including rocks like the one found in Antarctica that contained what might have been fossilized microbes, and colored layers of sediment that had unusually high concentrations of carbon, but they hadn’t found proof that life had ever existed on the planet, much less that it existed now.

That was the one big question everyone wanted an answer to, and it was looking like the crew was going to come home empty-handed.

They had already flown the two-thousand-mile length of the canyon, so when Alex proposed taking a flight of similar length northward to check out another site, nobody argued that the distance was too great. Nobody argued much at all until he revealed his intended landing site: the pyramid and face in Cydonia.

Maybe it was his idea of a practical joke. Or maybe it was revenge. He knew that actual video footage of the area taken from a low-flying plane would ruin the site forever as an object of new-age pseudoscience. Maybe he wanted to get back at the tabloids that had made his life miserable. We’ll never know. All we know for sure is that he justified his choice by pointing out that the geology at Cydonia was different from what they had been studying, so since they had come up empty-handed on the search for life where they were, it made a good candidate for further exploration.

And going there incidentally fulfilled the wishes of a large portion of the population who had paid for the mission.

Nobody missed the irony of sending the “space alien” to check out the site. I think Alex probably enjoyed that. And he certainly enjoyed the idea of getting out by himself for a few days. With the prospect of another eight months in a can with his three crewmates coming up, he wanted as much solitude as he could soak in before they left.

So he packed his toothbrush and enough food and water for a week, and took off for Cydonia. He would have to spend a couple of cramped nights sleeping in the cockpit of the plane, but he didn’t care about that. He had camped out plenty of times in pup tents on fishing trips in Wyoming; he was used to sleeping in tight quarters.

This had to be the happiest time in his life. Here was a kid from a small western town, a strange-looking kid that practically the whole world had made fun of—making a solo flight a sixth of the way around Mars. He was exactly where he wanted to be, and he’d gotten there despite all the superstitious, credulous, and downright malicious people who stood in his way. And not only that, but he had made his mother proud. Hell, he had made his father proud, and that’s saying something.

A straight route would have taken him to the east of the Chryse site where Viking 1 had landed, but he took the extra time to fly over it, swooping low and circling around to take pictures of the fragile little lander sitting there on the boulder-strewn plain.

Everyone back home had grown familiar with images of the habitat site from the air. Its bubble and lander and power generator provided a comforting picture of home away from home, a place we could all imagine ourselves living in our dreams. The Viking probe had the exact opposite effect. It looked lost down there among the rocks, a tiny speck of technology amid a vast, forbidding landscape, its dish antenna still pointing into the sky like a hand reaching for the planet it could never touch again.

“That’s, um, the Viking probe,” Alex said quietly after his third circle around it. “I guess I’ll be going on to Cydonia now.”

By the time he got there, hours later, his sense of humor had returned. As he approached the pyramid and the face, his onboard video camera showed the now-familiar rounded hills and craters that we know them to be, but he talked as if an entire Martian city were unfolding beneath him.

“Oh my God!” he said, “there it is. Look at the buildings, and the elevated walkways, and the flags waving from the tops of the towers. They look like—yes, yes, they’re Buffalo on a field of blue! They’re Wyoming flags! Proof positive that this is the site of a massive government coverup. And there’s the face.

Is it a space alien? Sony to say it doesn’t look a thing like me. In fact it looks more like my dad. Hi, Dad.” He banked the plane around so the bumpy hill was right in front of him. “Look, it’s speaking! What’s it saying? Looks like, ‘Nyah, nyah, fooled you!’ And now it’s fading away. Yes, it’s turning into just an ordinary hill with craters in it. Oh, what cruel fete!”

He banked away. “Well, what a disappointment that was, eh? I guess I’ll just land over there by what used to be its chin and see about doing some real science.”

Mary, who had been monitoring his signal over the satellite link, was laughing out loud. Most of us at Mission Control were, too, but a few people weren’t. Space flight was a popularity game, and Alex had just cost us some supporters.

He didn’t care. I never got the chance to ask him, but I know what he thought of that kind of support anyway.

He brought the plane in high, making his customary “Yee-ha!” yell as he went through the roller coaster moment, then set it down light as a feather on the rocky ground at the base of the hill. He jumped out and tied down the wings so a stray gust of wind wouldn’t blow away his ride home, then turned around and trudged through the rocks to see what he could see.

He did not send another transmission for seventeen minutes.

When he did, there was a peculiar strained quality to his voice. “Mary,” he said. “Houston. I’ve found something.”

The tone of Mary Paiz’ answering transmission clearly showed that she expected another joke announcement. “Copy, Buck.”

“No kidding, Wilma. Hold on. Going to visual.” He switched on his video camera and broadcast an image of a jagged stone in a field of other stones. “See this?”

“Wonderful rock, Alexander.”

“Not the rock. This patch here.” His finger prodded a shadowy area. “See this? Well, close up it looks like velvet.”

“Velvet?” asked Mary.

“Yeah. It’s fuzzy, and I can’t get light to reflect from it, not even from my helmet lamp. It looks like—” He paused, “like what?” Mary said.

“I was going to say ‘lichen,’ but it’s soft,” he said. “Springy. Like some kind of . . .” His reluctance to say the word was palpable.

After about five seconds of dead silence—which seemed like the longest hesitation in the history of the solar system—Mary prompted him again. “Alex? Come in, Alex.”

The broadcast image grew as Alexander zoomed in. He described the image out loud in case the transmission wasn’t getting through. “Okay. Reality check. At ten power I see little stalks with cupshaped ends, all packed together so there’s hardly any space between them. They’re stuck to the rock by more little cups that look quite a bit like the ones on top. I’m trying not to be too credulous here, but that’s definitely an organized structure. A biological structure.”

“Are you shittin’ me?” Mary asked. “Live transmission,” Alex reminded her. “But no, I’m not. This is for real. They look like plants of some sort.”

“Holy. . . . Wow. And us with less than a week left on the planet.”

“Well, you know how it is. You don’t find the souvenirs you want until the end of your vacation.”

“Do you see any more?”

“Let me look.” Alex stood up and panned around at the other rocks. “Yeah,” he said. “Five or six patches of it. No, more than that. Oh, there’s a big one. Must be three inches across.”

“Get samples,” Mary told him.

“Duh,” he said. His voice barely betrayed the excitement he had to be feeling, but the biomonitors in his suit told a different story. His heart was racing, and his skin temperature had risen a couple of degrees. He knew he’d just made the history books again, and this entry would dwarf the one about Drier’s syndrome or even the first mission to Mars. He was now the man who had discovered the first indisputable evidence of extraterrestrial life.

He spent the next two days scraping stuff off rocks, digging in the ground for other organisms, and climbing up and down the hill looking for anything else he could find. He even bagged up one entire rock a couple of feet across because it had four different kinds of growth on it and he thought maybe it would provide some idea of how the Martian ecosystem worked.

And then it was time to head back. He packed his samples in the plane, strapped everything down, and lifted off for home. He took the plane up a few hundred feet, tilted the engines forward—and dropped like a rock.

And kept dropping. Long after the wings should have caught enough air to start flying, the plane still generated no lift. “Shit,” Alex said, “there must be a downdraft. Increasing thrust to max.”

The plane kept dropping. In one-third gee, he had plenty of time to watch the ground come up at him, but his biomonitors showed his pulse rate barely rising. “It’s not going to work in flight mode,” he said. “Transitioning back to hover mode.” He angled the engines back. “Come on, you dirty bitch. Come on, come on!”

We heard the impact. It sounded like someone had dropped a dictionary on a beer can.

“Alex?” Mary called out. “Alex, are you okay?”

“Well, I’m down,” he said, “but I wouldn’t say I’m okay. Both engines broke loose in the crash. They’re doing cartwheels across the rocks now. There, one of ‘em stopped The other one’s still rolling around like a pinwheel.” He coughed. “Damn. Bit my tongue.”

“Are you . . . can you . . .?”

“Fix the plane? I don’t see how. Even if the engines still work, the wings are crumpled like tin foil. But it looks like I’m going to have to figure something out, doesn’t it?” He didn’t state the obvious: there was no backup plane to come get him.

He got out of the wreckage and hiked through the rocks to the closest engine. It had been battered so badly that it was barely recognizable. The other one had tried to suck in a rock as it was winding down, and what was left of the turbine lay scattered all around it.

“Looks like time for plan B,” Alex said.

SPACE BOY MUTINY!!

Did He Intend to Stay on Mars

All Along?

There was no plan B. Everyone wracked their brains for a way to get an astronaut two thousand miles back to base without a plane, but there just wasn’t any. He wouldn’t make a tenth that distance on foot. Dave suggested going for him in the landing vehicle, but Alex vetoed that idea right away.

“It’s not designed for suborbital flight,” he said. “Besides, even if you could restart the lower stage and fly it, you’d have to rob fuel from the upper stage, and then all four of us would be stuck on the ground until our food and air ran out. If we don’t get back into orbit within the week we’ll miss our launch window.”

“We can’t just leave you there,” Dave said.

“I’m all for rescue if you’ve got a realistic plan, but using the lander isn’t going to work.”

At Mission Control, we had to concur. That was the hardest decision I ever made in my life, even though I was just part of the engineering group and even though I knew there wasn’t a real decision. We might have risked the other three for a chance to save Alex, but we wouldn’t doom all four of them just to make a vain attempt.

I wasn’t the capcom on this mission, but I was Alex’s best friend, so I got to deliver the bad news. There was no way to hold a conversation with the speed of light lag what it was, so I just made a short speech and had my voice synthesizer remove all the pauses before transmitting it. I won’t transcribe it here; all the radio messages from the mission are on file for the curious. There’s only one thing to say in a situation like that anyway. You say you’re sorry that things worked out the way they did, and you’re going to miss your best friend very much, but you want your other friends to come back home safe, dammit, so don’t try anything stupid.

There were a lot of tearful goodbyes. Alex’s mom and dad talked with him a couple of times, and he told them not to worry, that he’d had a pretty full life and no regrets. “I’d have come here even if I knew in advance that this was how it would end,” he said. The newspapers made quite a deal out of that, and for the first time since Alex was born some of them ran an entire article without once mentioning his physical appearance.

Mary wasn’t ready to give up. She cursed us all, including Alex, and tried to convince Dave and Shawnee to defy orders and try the lander anyway, but Dave had backed off from that idea after he’d seen how impossible it was, and Shawnee merely said, “Over my dead body. No offense, Alex.”

Alex said, “None taken.”

Launch time came, and with a great deal of argument but no real hope left, Mary and Dave and Shawnee climbed aboard the lander and rode it back into orbit. The transfer vehicle was still waiting, snug and warm, to take them back to Earth.

And Alex? He did the only thing left for him to do. He studied the lifeforms he had found and transmitted his findings back to us. He told us how the organisms’ cupped tops followed the sun, how they closed up at night, and how the whole colony moved, ever so slowly, around the face of the rocks over the course of the day. They weren’t quite plants, and they weren’t quite animals. They were something else entirely. Alex’s description of them was incredible, exciting like nothing else humanity had ever experienced, but we couldn’t forget that we were learning it from a man whose time was rapidly running out.

He couldn’t either. Occasionally his voice would crack, and he would stay quiet for a few minutes while he got his emotions under control again. Those of us listening were sniffling and wiping our eyes as well. By then we numbered at least half the people on Earth, since the TV networks as well as the NASA channel had started live coverage. I was pissed that they hadn’t bothered until someone was about to die, but that’s the way the media do things. Science by itself isn’t interesting; human drama is what gets the ratings.

Alex knew that. He hadn’t spent a lifetime under the media bug-lens without learning what played well and what didn’t. He must have been planning his final speech since the moment he knew he was stranded. It wasn’t a long one—he knew the average viewer’s attention span, too—but he said what he wanted to say at the one moment in his life when he knew people would hear it. And maybe even listen.

It came in the middle of day five. He had had a hard time the previous night, nearly freezing in the crumpled ultralight’s tiny cabin when the outside temperature had dropped to minus-sixty. The plane’s batteries were dead and his suit batteries were nearly gone as well; he kept from freezing by exercising constantly, which burned up air faster than his recycler could keep up with it. He was down to practically nothing by morning; it was clear he wouldn’t survive another night.

He spent half the day finishing up what observations he could make, describing what microscopic details of the “planimals” he could see with the portable sampling kit, but just a little after noon, Cydonia time, he stopped and said, “I think it’s time we all had a little talk.”

The video camera was dead by then, so all we have to go on are the radio signals and the orbital camera’s pictures of his footprints, but it seems apparent that he climbed up the flank of the hill above the ultralight, stopping at the “chin” and looking south as he spoke.

“I am standing here on an alien world,” he said. “I’ve been called an alien myself over the years, so maybe it’s appropriate that this is where I wound up. I certainly can’t ignore the irony of my final resting place, a hill with some craters on it that made so many people think there was life on Mars. And so there is, but it has nothing to do with mysterious monuments to anthropocentric thinking.”

He laughed softly. “Anthropocentric. Look it up. It’s a dirty word, but it’s in the dictionary.” He must have sat down on a rock; we could hear his pressure suit creak. “I wish each and every one of you could see what I see here. Mars is nothing like Earth. It’s got a volcano the size of the United States and a canyon so wide that you can stand in the bottom and not see either side. When I woke up this morning there was dry ice on the ground. Frozen carbon dioxide. The air froze here last night. It’s like that everywhere I turn. There are more wonders here than we could even begin to imagine . . . and I’m here to see them because we were crazy enough to come look.”

He sighed. “Why can’t that be the thing that excites our imaginations? Why must we waste our minds and our energy on delusions that we should have put aside long ago? Faces on Mars. Alien abductions. Imaginary beings dictating our lives at every turn. What’s wrong with us? We have brains, we have senses; why can’t we use them to understand the universe around us rather than make up elaborate fantasies and pretend they’re the truth?

“Well, here’s a truth for you. I am Alexander Drier. like the rest of you, I’m a human being. And from this moment on, like the rest of you, I’m a Martian. We all became Martians the second humanity set foot on this world, and because of what we’ve learned here we’ll all carry a little bit of Mars around with us for the rest of our lives.

“Does that somehow diminish our humanity? Of course not. It means we re more human. Because only human beings could have gotten here. We dreamt it, we wanted it, we built it, and we did it. And Mars will always be here, a beckoning light in the sky for anyone else with a dream and the determination to see it through.

“I want you to remember that, when you look at the new face on Mars.” He stood up and walked back down the hill, out into the sandy plain beyond.

“New face?” asked Mary, in equatorial orbit a third of the way around the planet.

“You’ll see,” Alex replied.

They didn’t see for several hours, until the polar mapping satellite made its pass over him. By then he’d made most of one circuit and he was well into a second one, scuffing up the soil with his boots like a kid making designs in fresh snow.

It was a bit lopsided, as patterns drawn on the ground without surveying instruments often are, but it was perfectly recognizable. A long oval, ballooning out on one end and narrowing down to a pointy chin on the other. Big, almond-shaped eyes filling nearly half the enclosed space. Two little dots for a nose and a single line for a mouth, bent upward at the ends in a goofy grin. Alexander Drier’s own caricature.

“Alex, what the hell is that for?” Mary asked when she saw it.

“A . . . reminder,” he said. His voice was ragged and he was panting hard. “Besides, people wanted . . . a face. Who am I to deny them?”

She laughed, but it turned into a sob. “I’m sorry, Alex. I’m sorry it has to end like this.”

“Me too,” he said, “but believe me, it’s better than it might have been. At least I got here. Oof!” There was a thump over the radio.

“Alex?”

“S’all right. Tripped on a rock. It’s getting hard to see. Look, I don’t have much daylight left, or air either, and I don’t really want to make people listen to me die, so I’m going to shut off my radio.”

“No! Alex, you don’t have to die alone.”

“I’m not alone. I’ve got you, and Mom and Dad, and Colin, and Uncle George, and everybody. I’ve got all these little whatever-they-ares growing on the rocks all around me. I’ve got the whole universe right over my head. I’m not alone.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant—”

“I know what you meant, but that’s not the way I want to go. Look, it’s time. Everyone out there, I love you. Try to love each other, too, okay? This is Alexander Drier, signing off.”

There was a click as he switched off his radio.

MARS MISSION A HOAX!

Space Boy Spotted Pumping Gas

In Wyoming

The next pass showed where he had fallen. He had made it back around to the chin, and had lain down with his arms and legs outstretched, a tiny body to go with the face he had drawn. The orbital camera’s resolution wasn’t good enough to tell if he had opened his suit or not, but he wouldn’t have lasted long either way. With night falling and the temperature plummeting, he would have frozen to death in minutes.

The face didn’t last a month, of course. The next windstorm obliterated his tracks, leaving only his body and the crumpled remains of the ultralight airplane as evidence that anyone had ever been there.

But we knew. Alex’s last days wouldn’t fade from our memory, not for as long as anyone looked up in the night sky and wondered what was out there.

Mary and Dave and Shawnee made it back to Earth with only the usual harrowing adventures. Congress cut NASA’s budget the next year, but not as bad as we had been afraid they would, so we cautiously began work on our next phase in exploring our solar system: an orbital habitat that people can actually live in long enough to travel to the outer planets. The first prototype will be tested for a couple of years in Earth orbit, then leased out to the highest bidder for living space. I figure I might just survive long enough to rent some cubic there myself. It won’t be Heinlein’s Waldo, but it’ll be something for an old man who can barely move here on Earth.

In the meantime, life lurches along the way it usually does. The newspapers still carry horoscopes, but they’re not on the front page anymore. Government scandals and student unrest have taken up that space again.

And of course the latest Alien Shocker.

Three months ago a boy was born in Mississippi with Drier’s Syndrome. His parents are good but simple people who hadn’t expected a media feeding frenzy at their front door, but they knew opportunity when they saw it. They’ve been portrayed as country hicks who ran afoul of an alien mad scientist, but they’ve already bought a house on fifty acres, fenced and guarded by a dozen rent-a-cops until they can find enough rottweilers and dobermans to do the job for free.

That solved their external problem, but internally they’re still going through the same thing Mark and Faye went through nearly thirty years ago.

The Driers aren’t answering their mail, so the mother wrote me a plaintive letter, begging me to help her understand her child. Among the things she asked was a simple, straightforward question: Is my son a spaceman?

I intend to answer with the only truth I know, taught to me by my friend, the astronaut from Wyoming.

That’s up to him.

FORTY, COUNTING DOWN

Harry Turtledove

“Hey, Justin!” Sean Peters’ voice floated over the top of the Superstrings, Ltd., cubicle wall. “It’s twenty after six—quitting time and then some. Want a drink or two with me and Garth?”

“Hang on,” Justin Kloster answered. “Let me save what I’m working on first.” He told his computer to save his work as it stood, generate a backup, and shut itself off. Having grown up in the days when voice-recognition software was imperfectly reliable, he waited to make sure the machine followed orders. It did, of course. Making that software idiotproof had put Superstrings on the map a few years after the turn of the century.

Justin got up, stretched, and looked around. Not much to see: the grayish-tan fuzzy walls of the cubicle and an astringently neat desktop that held the computer, a wedding photo of Megan and him, and a phone/fax. His lips narrowed. The marriage had lasted four years—four and a half, actually. He hadn’t come close to finding anybody else since.

Footsteps announced Peters’ arrival. He looked like a high-school linebacker who’d let most of his muscle go to flab since. Garth O’Connell was right behind him. He was from the same mold, except getting thin on top instead of going gray. “How’s the Iron Curtain sound?” Peters asked.

“Sure,” Justin said. “It’s close, and you can hear yourself think—most of the time, anyhow.”

They went out into the parking lot together, bitching when they stepped from air conditioning to San Fernando Valley August heat. Justin’s eyes started watering, too; L.A. smog wasn’t so bad as it had been when he was young, but it hadn’t disappeared.

An Oasis song was playing when the three software engineers walked into the Iron Curtain, and into air conditioning chillier than the office’s. The music took Justin back to the days when he’d been getting together with Megan, though he’d liked Blur better. “Look out,” Sean Peters said. “They’ve got a new fellow behind the bar.” He and Garth chuckled. They knew what was going to happen. Justin sighed. So did he.

Peters ordered a gin and tonic, O’Connell a scotch on the rocks. Justin asked for a Bud. Sure as hell, the bartender said, “I’ll be right with you two gents”—he nodded to Justin’s co-workers—“but for you, sir, I’ll need some ID.”

With another sigh, Justin produced his driver’s license. “Here.”

The bartender looked at him, looked at his picture on the license, and looked at his birthdate. He scowled. “You were born in 1978? No way.”

“His real name’s Dorian Gray,” Garth said helpfully.

“Oh, shut up,” Justin muttered, and then, louder, to the bartender, “Yeah, I really turned forty this past spring.” He was slightly pudgy, but he’d been slightly pudgy since he was a toddler. And he’d been very blond since the day he was born. If he had any silver mixed with the gold, it didn’t show. He also stayed out of the sun as much as he could, because he burned to a crisp when he didn’t. That left him with a lot fewer lines and wrinkles than his buddies, who were both a couple of years younger than he.

Shaking his head, the bartender slid Justin a beer. “You coulda fooled me,” he said. “You go around picking up high-school girls?” His hands shaped an hourglass in the air.

“No.” Justin stared down at the reflections of the ceiling lights on the polished bar.

“Middle school,” Garth suggested. He’d already made his scotch disappear. Justin gave him a dirty look. It was such a dirty look, it got through to Sean Peters. He tapped Garth on the arm. For a wonder, Garth eased off.

Justin finished the Bud, threw a twenty on the bar, and got up to leave. “Not going to have another one?” Peters asked, surprised.

“Nope.” Justin shook his head. “Got some things to do. See you in the morning.” Out he went, walking fast so his friends couldn’t stop him.

As soon as the microchip inside Justin’s deadbolt lock shook hands with the one in his key, his apartment came to life. Lamps came on. The stereo started playing the Pulp CD he’d left in there this morning. The broiler heated up to do the steak the computer knew was in the refrigerator. From the bedroom, the computer called, “Now or later?”

“Later,” Justin said, so the screen stayed dark.

He went into the kitchen and tossed a couple of pieces of spam snailmail into the blue wastebasket for recycling. The steak went under the broiler; frozen mixed vegetables went into the microwave. Eight minutes later, dinner.

After he finished, he rinsed the dishes and silverware and put them in the dishwasher. When he closed the door, the light in it came on; the machine judged it was full enough to run a cycle in the middle of the night.

Like the kitchen, his front room was almost as antiseptically tidy as his cubicle at Superstrings. But for a picture of Megan and him on their honeymoon, the coffee table was bare. All his books and DVDs and audio CDs were arranged alphabetically by author, title, or group. None stood even an eighth of an inch out of place. It was as if none of them dared move without his permission.

He went into the bedroom. “Now,” he said, and the computer monitor came to life.

A picture of Megan and him stood on the dresser, another on the nightstand. Her high-school graduation picture smiled at him whenever he sat down at the desk. Even after all these years, he smiled back most of the time. He couldn’t help it. He’d always been happy around Megan.

But she hadn’t been happy around him, not at the end. Not for a while before the end, either. He’d been a long, long time realizing that. “Stupid,” he said. He wasn’t smiling now, even with Megan’s young, glowing face looking right at him out of the picture frame. “I was stupid. I didn’t know enough. I didn’t know how to take care of her.”

No wonder he hadn’t clicked with any other woman. He didn’t want any other woman. He wanted Megan—and couldn’t have her any more.

“E-mail,” he told the computer, and gave his password. He went through it, answering what needed answering and deleting the rest. Then he said, “Banking.” The computer had paid the monthly Weblink bill, and the cable bill, too. “All good,” he told it.

The CD in the stereo fell silent. “Repeat?” the computer asked.

“No.” Justin went out to the front room. He took the Pulp CD out of the player, put it in its jewel box, and put the jewel box exactly where it belonged on the shelf. Then he stood there in a rare moment of indecision, wondering what to pull out next. When he chose a new CD, he chuckled. He doubted Sean or Garth would have heard of the Trash Can Sinatras, let alone heard any of their music. His work buddies had listened to grunge rock back before the turn of the century, not British pop.

As soon as Cake started, he went back into the bedroom and sat down at the computer again. This time, he did smile at Megan’s picture. She’d been crazy for the Trash Can Sinatras, too.

The music made him especially eager to get back to work. “Superstrings,” he said, and gave a password, and “Virtual reality” and another password, and “Not so virtual” and one more. Then he had to wait. He would have killed for a Mac a quarter this powerful back in 1999, but it wasn’t a patch on the one he used at the office. The company could afford the very best. He couldn’t, not quite.

He went to the keyboard for this work: for numbers, it was more precise than dictating. And he had to wait again and again, while the computer did the crunching. One wait was long enough for him to go take a shower. When he got back, hair still damp, the machine hadn’t finished muttering to itself. Justin sighed. But the faster Macs at the office couldn’t leap these numbers at a single bound. What he was asking of his home computer was right on the edge of what it could do.

Or maybe it would turn out to be over the edge. In that case, he’d spend even more lunch hours in his cubicle in the days ahead than he had for the past six months. He was caught up on everything the people above him wanted. They thought he worked his long hours to stay that way.

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” Justin murmured. “And it may do me some good.”

He didn’t think anyone else had combined superstring physics, chaos theory, and virtual reality this way. If anyone had, he was keeping quiet about it—nothing in the journals, not a whisper on the Web. Justin would have known; he had virbots out prowling all the time. They’d never found anything close. He had this all to himself . . . if he hadn’t been wasting his time.

Up came the field parameters, at long, long last. Justin studied them. As the computer had, he took his time. He didn’t want to let enthusiasm run away with him before he was sure. He’d done that half a lifetime ago, and what had it got him? A divorce that blighted his life ever since. He wouldn’t jump too soon. Not again. Not ever again. But things looked good.

“Yes!” he said softly. He’d been saying it that particular way since he was a teenager. He couldn’t have named the disgraced sportscaster from whom he’d borrowed it if he’d gone on the rack.

He saved the parameters, quit his application, and had the computer back up everything he’d done. The backup disk went into his briefcase. And then, yawning, he hit the sack.

Three days later, Garth O’Connell was the first to gape when Justin came into the office. “Buzz cut!” he exclaimed, and ran a hand over his own thinning hair. Then he laughed and started talking as if the past twenty years hadn’t happened: “Yo, dude. Where’s the combat boots?”

In my closet, Justin thought. He didn’t say that. What he did say was, “I felt like doing something different, that’s all.”

“Like what?” Garth asked. “Globalsearching for high-school quail, like the barkeep said? The competition doesn’t wear short hair any more, you know.”

“Will you melt it down?” Justin snapped.

“Okay. Okay.” Garth spread his hands. “But you better get used to it, ’cause everybody else is gonna say the same kind of stuff.”

Odds were he was right, Justin realized gloomily. He grabbed a cup of coffee at the office machine, then ducked into his cubicle and got to work. That slowed the stream of comments, but didn’t stop them. People would go by the cubicle, see the side view, do a double take, and start exclaiming.

Inside half an hour, Justin’s division head came by to view the prodigy. She rubbed her chin. “Well, I don’t suppose it looks unbusinesslike,” she said dubiously.

“Thanks, Ms. Chen,” Justin said. “I just wanted to—”

“Start your midlife crisis early.” As it had a few evenings before, Sean Peters’ voice drifted over the walls of the cubicle.

“And thank you, Sean.” Justin put on his biggest grin. Ms. Chen smiled, which meant he’d passed the test. She gave his hair another look, nodded more happily than she’d spoken, and went off to do whatever managers did when they weren’t worrying about haircuts.

Sean kept his mouth shut till lunchtime, when he stuck his head into Justin’s cubicle and said, “Feel like going over to Omino’s? I’ve got a yen for Japanese food.” He laughed. Justin groaned. That made Peters laugh harder than ever.

Justin shook his head. Pointing toward his monitor, he said, “I’m brownbagging it today. Got a ton of stuff that needs doing.”

“Okay.” Peters shrugged. “Anybody’d think you worked here or something. I’ll see you later, then.”

Between noon and half past one, Superstrings was nearly deserted. Munching on a salami sandwich and an orange, Justin worked on his own project, his private project. The office machine was better than his home computer for deciding whether possible meant practical.

“Yes!” he said again, a few minutes later, and then, “Time to go shopping.”

Being the sort of fellow he was, he shopped with a list. Vintage clothes came from Aaardvark’s Odd Ark, undoubtedly the funkiest secondhand store in town, if not in the world. As with his haircut, he did his best to match the way he’d looked just before the turn of the century.

Old money was easier; he had to pay only a small premium for old-fashioned smallhead bills at the several coin-and-stamp shops he visited. “Why do you want ’em, if you don’t care about condition?” one dealer asked.

“Maybe I think the new bills are ugly,” he answered. The dealer shrugged, tagging him for a nut but a harmless one. When he got to $150,000, he checked money off the list.

He got to the office very early the next morning. The security guard chuckled as he unlocked the door. “Old clothes and everything. Looks like you’re moving in, pal.”

“Seems like that sometimes, too, Bill.” Justin set down his suitcases for a moment. “But I’m going out of town this afternoon. I’d rather have this stuff indoors than sitting in the trunk of my car.”

“Oh, yeah.” Bill nodded. He had to be seventy, but his hair wasn’t any lighter than iron gray. “I know that song.” He knew lots of songs, many dating back to before Justin was born. He’d fought in Vietnam, and been a cop, and now he was doing this because his pension hadn’t come close to keeping up with skyrocketing prices. Justin wondered if his own would, come the day.

But he had different worries now. “Thanks,” he said when the guard held the door for him.

He staggered up the stairs; thanks to the stash of cash (a new compact car here, nothing more, even with the premium he’d had to pay, but a young fortune before the turn of the century), some period clothes scrounged—like the Dilbert T-shirt and baggy jeans he had on—from secondhand stores, and the boots, those suitcases weren’t light, and he’d never been in better shape than he could help. The backpack in which he carried his PowerBook and VR mask did nothing to make him more graceful, either.

Once he got up to the second floor, he paused and listened hard. “Yes!” he said when he heard nothing. Except for Bill down below, he was the only person here.

He went into the men’s room, piled one suitcase on the other, and sat down on them. Then he took the laptop out of its case. He plugged the VR mask into its jack, then turned on the computer. As soon as it came up, he put on the mask. The world went black, then neutral gray, then neutral . . . neutral: no color at all, just virtual reality waiting to be made real.

It all took too long. He wished he could do this back at his desk, with an industrial-strength machine. But he didn’t dare take the chance. This building had been here nineteen years ago. This men’s room had been here nineteen years ago. He’d done his homework as well as he could. But his homework hadn’t been able to tell him where the goddamn cubicle partitions were back before the turn of the century.

And so . . . the john. He took a deep breath. “Run program superstrings-slash-virtual reality-slash-not so virtual,” he said.

The PowerBook quivered, ever so slightly, on his lap. His heart thudded. Talk about your moments of truth. Either he was as smart as he thought he was, or Garth or Sean or somebody would breeze in and ask, “Justin, what the hell are you doing?”

A string in space-time connected this place now to its earlier self, itself in 1999. As far as Justin knew, nobody but him had thought of accessing that string, of sliding along it, with VR technology. When the simulation was good enough, it became the reality—for a while, anyhow. That was what the math said. He thought he’d done a good enough job here.

And if he had . . . oh, if he had! He knew a hell of a lot more now, at forty, than he had when he was twenty-one. If he-now could be back with Megan for a while instead of his younger self, he could make things right. He could make things last. He knew it. He had to, if he ever wanted to be happy again.

I’ll fix it, he thought. I’ll fix everything. And when I slide back to here-and-now, I won’t have his emptiness in my past. Everything will be the way it could have been, the way it should have been.

An image began to emerge from the VR blankness. It was the same image he’d seen before slipping on the mask: blue tile walls with white grouting, acoustic ceiling, sinks with a mirror above them, urinals off to the left, toilet stalls behind him.

“Dammit,” he muttered under his breath. Sure as hell, the men’s room hadn’t changed at all.

“Program superstrings-slash-virtual reality-slash-not so virtual reality is done,” the PowerBook told him.

He took off the mask. Here he sat, on his suitcases, in the men’s room of his office building. 2018? 1999? He couldn’t tell, not staying in here. If everything had worked out the way he’d calculated, it would be before business hours back when he’d arrived, too. All he had to do was walk out that front door and hope the security guard wasn’t right there.

No. What he really had to hope was that the security guard wasn’t Bill.

He put the computer in his backpack again. He picked up the suitcases and walked to the men’s-room door. He set down a case so he could open the door. His heart pounded harder than ever. Yes? Or no?

Justin took two steps down the hall toward the stairs before he whispered, “Yes!” Instead of the gray-green carpet he’d walked in on, this stuff was an ugly mustard yellow. He had no proof he was in 1999, not yet. But he wasn’t in Kansas any more.

The place had the quiet-before-the-storm feeling offices get waiting for people to show up for work. That fit Justin’s calculations. The air conditioner was noisier, wheezier, than the system that had been—would be—in his time. But it kept the corridor noticeably cooler than it had been when he lugged his stuff into the men’s room. The ’90s had ridden an oil glut. They burned lavishly to beat summer heat. His time couldn’t.

There was the doorway that led to the stairs. Down he went. The walls were different: industrial yellow, not battleship gray. When he got to the little lobby, he didn’t recognize the furniture. What was there seemed no better or worse than what he was used to, but it was different.

If there was a guard, he was off making his rounds. Justin didn’t wait for him. He opened the door. He wondered if that would touch off the alarm, but it didn’t. He stepped out into the cool, fresh early-morning air of . . . when?

He walked through the empty lot to the sidewalk, then looked around. Across the street, a woman out power-walking glanced his way, but didn’t stop. She wore a cap, a T-shirt, and baggy shorts, which proved nothing. But then he looked at the parked cars, and began to grin a crazy grin. Most of them had smooth jelly-bean lines, which, to his eyes, was two style changes out of date. If this wasn’t 1999, it was damn close.

With a clanking rumble of iron, a MetroLink train pulled into the little station behind his office. A couple of people got off; a handful got on. In his day, with gas ever scarcer, ever costlier, that commuter train would have far more passengers.

Standing on the sidewalk, unnoticed by the world around him, he pumped a fist in the air. “I did it!” he said. “I really did it!”

Having done it, he couldn’t do anything else, not for a little while. Not much was open at half past five. But there was a Denny’s up the street. Suitcases in hand, he trudged toward it. The young, bored-looking Hispanic waitress who seated him gave him a fishy stare. “You coulda left your stuff in the car,” she said pointedly.

His answer was automatic: “I don’t have a car.” Her eyebrows flew upward. If you didn’t have a car in L.A., you were nobody. If you didn’t have a car and did have suitcases, you were liable to be a dangerously weird nobody. He had to say something. Inspiration struck: “I just got off the train. Somebody should’ve picked me up, but he blew it. Toast and coffee, please?”

She relaxed. “Okay—coming up. White, rye, or whole wheat?”

“Wheat.” Justin looked around. He was the only customer in the place. “Can you keep an eye on the cases for a second? I want to buy a Times.” He’d seen the machine out front, but hadn’t wanted to stop till he got inside. When the waitress nodded, he got a paper. It was only a quarter. That boggled him; he paid two bucks weekdays, five Sundays.

But the date boggled him more. June 22, 1999. Right on the money. He went back inside. The coffee waited for him, steaming gently. The toast came up a moment later. As he spread grape jam over it, he glanced at the Times and wondered what his younger self was doing now.

Sleeping, you dummy. He’d liked to sleep late when he was twenty-one, and finals at Cal State Northridge would have just ended. He’d have the CompUSA job to go to, but the place didn’t open till ten.

Megan would be sleeping, too. He thought of her lying in a T-shirt and sweats at her parents’ house, wiggling around the way she did in bed. Maybe she was dreaming of him and smiling. She would be smiling now. A few years from now . . . Well, he’d come to fix that.

He killed forty-five minutes. By then, the restaurant was filling up. The waitress started to look ticked. Justin ordered bacon and eggs and hash browns. They bought him the table for another hour. He tried not to think about what the food was doing to his coronary arteries. His younger self wouldn’t have cared. His younger self loved Denny’s. My younger self was a fool, he thought.

He paid, again marveling at how little things cost. Of course, people didn’t make much, either; you could live well on $100,000 a year. He tried to imagine living on $100,000 in 2018, and shook his head. You couldn’t do it, not if you felt like eating, too.

When he went out to the parking lot, he stood there for forty minutes, looking back toward the train station. By then, it was getting close to eight o’clock. Up a side street from the Denny’s was a block of apartment buildings with names like the Tivoli, the Gardens, and the Yachtsman. Up the block he trudged. The Yachtsman had a vacancy sign.

The manager looked grumpy at getting buzzed so early, but the sight of greenbacks cheered him up in a hurry. He rented Justin a one-bedroom furnished apartment at a ridiculously low rate. “I’m here on business,” Justin said, which was true . . . in a way. “I’ll pay three months in advance if you fix me up with a TV and a stereo. They don’t have to be great. They just have to work.”

“I’d have to root around,” the manager said. “It’d be kind of a pain.” He waited. Justin passed him two fifties. He nodded. So did Justin. This was business, too. The manager eyed his suitcases. “You’ll want to move in right away, won’t you?”

Justin nodded again. “And I’ll want to use your phone to set up my phone service.”

“Okay,” the manager said with a sigh. “Come into my place here. I’ll get things set up.” His fish-faced wife watched Justin with wide, pale, unblinking eyes while he called the phone company and made arrangements. The manager headed off with a vacuum cleaner. In due course, he came back. “You’re ready. TV and stereo are in there.”

“Thanks.” Justin went upstairs to the apartment. It was small and bare, with furniture that had seen better decades. The TV wasn’t new. The stereo was so old, it didn’t play CDs, only records and cassettes. Well, his computer could manage CDs. He accepted a key to the apartment and another for the security gates, then unpacked. He couldn’t do everything he wanted till he got a phone, but he was here.

He used a pay phone to call a cab, and rode over to a used-car lot. He couldn’t do everything he wanted without wheels, either. He had no trouble proving he was himself; he’d done some computer forgery before he left to make his driver’s license expire in 2003, as it really did. His number hadn’t changed. Security holograms that would have given a home machine trouble here-and-now were a piece of cake to graphics programs from 2018. His younger self didn’t know he’d just bought a new old car: a gray early-’90s Toyota much like the one he was already driving.

“Insurance is mandatory,” the salesman said. “I can sell you a policy . . .” Justin let him do it, to his barely concealed delight. It was, no doubt, highway robbery, especially since Justin was nominally only twenty-one. He’d dressed for the age he affected, in T-shirt and jeans. To him, though, no 1999 prices seemed expensive. He paid cash and took the car.

Getting a bank account wasn’t hard, either. He chose a bank his younger self didn’t use. Research paid off: he deposited only $9,000. Ten grand or more in cash and the bank would have reported the transaction to the government. He didn’t want that kind of notice. He wanted no notice at all. The assistant manager handed him a book of temporary checks. “Good to have your business, Mr. Kloster. The personalized ones will be ready in about a week.”

“Okay.” Justin went off to buy groceries. He wasn’t a great cook, but he was a lot better than his younger self. He’d had to learn, and had.

Once the groceries were stowed in the pantry and the refrigerator, he left again, this time to a bookstore. He went to the computer section first, to remind himself of the state of the art. After a couple of minutes, he was smiling and shaking his head. Had he done serious work with this junk? He supposed he had, but he was damned if he saw how. Before he was born, people had used slide rules because there weren’t any computers yet, or even calculators. He was damned if he saw how they’d done any work, either.

But the books didn’t have exactly what he wanted. He went to the magazine rack. There was a MacAddict in a clear plastic envelope. The CD-ROM that came with the magazine would let him start an account on a couple of online services. Once he had one, he could e-mail his younger self, and then he’d be in business.

If I—or I-then—don’t flip out altogether, he thought. Things might get pretty crazy. Now that he was here and on the point of getting started, he felt in his belly how crazy they might get. And he knew both sides of things. His younger self didn’t.

Would Justin-then even listen to him? He had to hope so. Looking back, he’d been pretty stupid when he was twenty-one. No matter how stupid he’d been, though, he’d have to pay attention when he got his nose rubbed in the facts. Wouldn’t he?

Justin bought the MacAddict and took it back to his apartment. As soon as he got online, he’d be ready to roll.

He chose AOL, not Earthlink. His younger self was on Earthlink, and looked down his nose at AOL. And AOL let him pay by debiting his checking account. He didn’t have any credit cards that worked in 1999. He supposed he could get one, but it would take time. He’d taken too much time already. He thought he had about three months before the space-time string he’d manipulated would snap him back to 2018. With luck, with skill, with what he knew then that he hadn’t known now, he’d be happier there. But he had no time to waste.

His computer, throttled down to 56K access to the outside world, might have thought the same. But AOL’s local access lines wouldn’t support anything faster. “Welcome,” the electronic voice said as he logged on. He ignored it, and went straight to e-mail. He was pretty sure he remembered his old e-mail address. If I don’t, he thought, chuckling a little as he typed, whoever is using this address right now will get awfully confused.

He’d pondered what he would say to get his younger self’s attention, and settled on the most provocative message he could think of. He wrote, Who but you would know that the first time you jacked off, you were looking at Miss March 1993, a little before your fifteenth birthday? Nobody, right? Gorgeous blonde, wasn’t she? The only way I know that is that I am you, more or less. Let me hear from you. He signed it, Justin Kloster, age 40, and sent it.

Then he had to pause. His younger self would be working now, but he’d check his e-mail as soon as he got home. Justin remembered religiously doing that every day. He didn’t remember getting e-mail like the message he’d just sent, of course, but that was the point of this exercise.

Waiting till half past five wasn’t easy. He wished he could use his time-travel algorithm to fast-forward to late afternoon, but he didn’t dare. Too many superstrings might tangle, and even the office machine up in 2018 hadn’t been able to work out the ramifications of that. In another ten years, it would probably be child’s play for a computer, but he wouldn’t be able to pretend he was twenty-one when he was fifty. Even a baby face and pale gold hair wouldn’t stretch that far. He hoped they’d stretch far enough now.

At 5:31, he logged onto AOL again. “Welcome!” the voice told him, and then, “You’ve got mail!”

“You’ve got spam,” he muttered under his breath. And one of the messages in his mailbox was spam. He deleted it without a qualm. The other one, though, was from his younger self @earthlink.net.

Heart pounding, he opened the e-mail. What kind of stupid joke is this? his younger self wrote. Whatever it is, it’s not funny.

Justin sighed. He supposed he shouldn’t have expected himself-at-twenty-one to be convinced right away. This business was hard to believe, even for him. But he had more shots in his gun than one. No joke, he wrote back. Who else but you would know you lost your first baby tooth in a pear at school when you were in the first grade? Who would know your dad fed you Rollos when he took you to work with him that day you were eight or nine? Who would know you spent most of the time while you were losing your cherry staring at the mole on the side of Lindsey Fletcher’s neck? Me, that’s who: you at 40. He typed his name and sent the message.

His stomach growled, but he didn’t go off and make supper. He sat by the computer, waiting. His younger self would still be online. He’d have to answer . . . wouldn’t he? Justin hadn’t figured out what he’d do if himself-at-twenty-one wanted nothing to do with him. The prospect had never crossed his mind. Maybe it should have.

“Don’t be stupid, kid,” he said softly. “Don’t complicate things for me. Don’t complicate things for yourself, either.”

He sat. He waited. He worried. After what seemed forever but was less than ten minutes, the AOL program announced, “You’ve got mail!”

He read it. I don’t watch X-Files much, his younger self wrote, but maybe I ought to. How could you know all that about me? I never told anybody about Lindsey Fletcher’s neck.

So far as Justin could recall, he hadn’t told anyone about her neck by 2018, either. That didn’t mean he’d forgotten. He wouldn’t forget till they shoveled dirt over him.

How do I know? he wrote. I’ve told you twice now—I know because I am you, you in 2018. It’s not X-Files stuff—it’s good programming. The show still ran in endless syndication, but he hadn’t watched it for years. He went on, Believe me, I’m back here for a good reason, and sent the e-mail.

Again, he waited. Again, the reply came back fast. He imagined his younger self eyeing the screen of his computer, eyeing it and scratching his head. His younger self must have been scratching hard, for what came back was, But that’s impossible.

Okay, he typed. It’s impossible. But if it is impossible, how do I know all this stuff about you?

More waiting. The hell with it, he thought. He’d intended to broil lamb chops, but he would have had to pay attention to keep from cremating them. He took a dinner out of the freezer and threw it into the tiny microwave built in above the stove. He could punch a button and get it more or less right. Back to the computer.

“You’ve got mail!” it said once more, and he did. I don’t know, his younger self had written. How do you know all this stuff about me?

Because it’s stuff about me, too, he answered. You don’t seem to be taking that seriously yet.

The microwave beeped. Justin started to go off to eat, but the PowerBook told him he had more mail. He called it up. If you’re supposed to be me, himself-at-twenty-one wrote, then you’ll look like me, right?

Justin laughed. His younger self wouldn’t believe that. He’d probably think it would make this pretender shut up and go away. But Justin wasn’t a pretender, and didn’t need to shut up—he could put up instead. Right, he replied. Meet me in front of the B. Dalton’s in the Northridge mall tomorrow night at 6:30 and I’ll buy you dinner. You’ll see for yourself. He sent the message, then did walk away from the computer.

Eating frozen food reminded him why he’d learned to cook. He chucked the tray in the trash, then returned to the bedroom to see what his younger self had answered. Three words:See you there.

The mall surprised Justin. In his time, it had seen better years. In 1999, just a little after being rebuilt because of the ’94 earthquake, it still seemed shiny and sparkly and new. Justin got there early. With his hair short, with the Cow Pi T-Shirt and jeans and big black boots he was wearing, he fit in with the kids who shopped and strutted and just hung out.

He found out how well he fit when he eyed an attractive brunette of thirty or so who was wearing business clothes. She caught him doing it, looked horrified for a second, and then stared through him as if he didn’t exist. At first, he thought her reaction was over the top. Then he realized it wasn’t. You may think she’s cute, but she doesn’t think you are. She thinks you’re wet behind the ears.

Instead of leaving him insulted, the woman’s reaction cheered him. Maybe I can bring this off.

He leaned against the brushed-aluminum railing in front of the second-level B. Dalton’s as if he had nothing better to do. A gray-haired man in maroon polyester pants muttered something about punk kids as he walked by. Justin grinned, which made the old fart mutter more.

But then the grin slipped from Justin’s face. What replaced it was probably astonishment. Here came his younger self, heading up from the Sears end of the mall.

He could tell the moment when his younger self saw him. Himself-at-twenty-one stopped, gaped, and turned pale. He looked as if he wanted to turn around and run away. Instead, after gulping, he kept on.

Justin’s heart pounded. He hadn’t realized just how strange seeing himself would feel. And he’d been expecting this. For his younger self, it was a bolt from the blue. That meant he had to be the one in control. He stuck out his hand. “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

His younger self shook hands with him. They both looked down. The two right hands fit perfectly. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? Justin thought. His younger self, still staring, said, “Maybe I’m not crazy. Maybe you’re not crazy, either. You look just like me.”

“Funny how that works,” Justin said. Seeing his younger self wasn’t like looking in a mirror. It wasn’t because himself-at-twenty-one looked that much younger—he didn’t. It wasn’t even because his younger self wasn’t doing the same things he did. After a moment, he figured out what it was: his younger self’s image wasn’t reversed, the way it would have been in a mirror. That made him look different.

His younger self put hands on hips. “Prove you’re from the future,” he said.

Justin had expected that. He took a little plastic coin purse, the kind that can hook onto a key chain, out of his pocket and squeezed it open. “Here,” he said. “This is for you.” He handed himself-at-twenty-one a quarter.

It looked like any quarter—till you noticed the date. “It’s from 2012,” his younger self whispered. His eyes got big and round again. “Jesus. You weren’t kidding.”

“I told you I wasn’t,” Justin said patiently. “Come on. What’s the name of that Korean barbecue place on . . . Reseda?” He thought that was right. It had closed a few years after the turn of the century.

His younger self didn’t notice the hesitation. “The Pine Tree?”

“Yeah.” Justin knew the name when he heard it. “Let’s go over there. I’ll buy you dinner, like I said in e-mail, and we can talk about things.”

“Like what you’re doing here,” his younger self said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Like what I’m doing here.”

None of the waitresses at the Pine Tree spoke much English. That was one reason Justin had chosen the place: he didn’t want anybody eavesdropping. But he liked garlic, he liked the odd vegetables, and he enjoyed grilling beef or pork or chicken or fish on the gas barbecue set into the tabletop.

He ordered for both of them. The waitress scribbled on her pad in the odd characters of hangul, then looked from one of them to the other. “Twins,” she said, pulling out a word she did know.

“Yeah,” Justin said. Sort of, he thought. The waitress went away.

His younger self pointed at him. “Tell me one thing,” he said.

“What?” Justin asked. He expected anything from What are you doing here? to What is the meaning of life?

But his younger self surprised him: “That the Rolling Stones aren’t still touring by the time you’re—I’m—forty.”

“Well, no,” Justin said. That was a pretty scary thought, when you got down to it. He and his younger self both laughed. They sounded just alike. We would, he thought.

The waitress came back with a couple of tall bottles of OB beer. She hadn’t asked either one of them for an ID, for which Justin was duly grateful. His younger self kept quiet while she was around. After she’d gone away, himself-at-twenty-one said, “Okay, I believe you. I didn’t think I would, but I do. You know too much—and you couldn’t have pulled that quarter out of your ear from nowhere.” He sipped at the Korean beer. He looked as if he would sooner have gone out and got drunk.

“That’s right,” Justin agreed. Stay in control. The more you sound like you know what you’re doing, the more he’ll think you know what you’re doing. And he has to think that, or this won’t fly.

His younger self drank beer faster than he did, and waved for a second tall one as soon as the first was empty. Justin frowned. He remembered drinking more in his twenties than he did at forty, but didn’t care to have his nose rubbed in it. He wouldn’t have wanted to drive after two big OBs, but his younger self didn’t worry about it.

With his younger self’s new beer, the waitress brought the meat to be grilled and the plates of vegetables. She used aluminum tongs to put some pork and some marinated beef over the fire. Looking at the strips of meat curling and shrinking, himself-at-twenty-one exclaimed, “Oh my God! They killed Kenny!”

“Huh?” Justin said, and then, “Oh.” He managed a feeble chuckle. He hadn’t thought about South Park in a long time.

His younger self eyed him. “If you’d said that to me, I’d have laughed a lot harder. But the show’s not hot for you any more, is it?” He answered his own question before Justin could: “No, it wouldn’t be. 2018? Jesus.” He took another big sip of beer.

Justin grabbed some beef with the tongs. He used chopsticks to eat, ignoring the fork. So did his younger self. He was better at it than himself-at-twenty-one; he’d had more practice. The food was good. He remembered it had been.

After a while, his younger self said, “Well, will you tell me what this is all about?”

“What’s the most important thing in your life right now?” Justin asked in return.

“You mean, besides trying to figure out why I’d travel back in time to see me?” his younger self returned. He nodded, carefully not smiling. He’d been looser, sillier, at twenty-one than he was now. Of course, he’d had fewer things go wrong then, too. And his younger self went on, “What could it be but Megan?”

“Okay, we’re on the same page,” Justin said. “That’s why I’m here, to set things right with Megan.”

“Things with Megan don’t need setting right.” Himself-at-twenty-one sounded disgustingly complacent. “Things with Megan are great. I mean, I’m taking my time and all, but they’re great. And they’ll stay great, too. How many kids do we have now?”

“None.” Justin’s voice went flat and harsh. A muscle at the corner of his jaw jumped. He touched it to try to calm it down.

“None?” His younger self wasn’t quick on the uptake. He needed his nose rubbed in things. He looked at Justin’s left hand. “You’re not wearing a wedding ring,” he said. He’d just noticed. Justin’s answering nod was grim. His younger self asked, “Does that mean we don’t get married?”

Say it ain’t so. Justin did: “We get married, all right. And then we get divorced.”

His younger self went as pale as he had when he first saw Justin. Even at twenty-one, he knew too much about divorce. Here-and-now, his father was living with a woman not much older than he was. His mother was living with a woman not much older than he was, too. That was why he had his own apartment: paying his rent was easier for his mom and dad than paying him any real attention.

But, however much himself-at-twenty-one knew about divorce, he didn’t know enough. He’d just been a fairly innocent bystander. He hadn’t gone through one from the inside. He didn’t understand the pain and the emptiness and the endless might-have-beens that kept going through your mind afterwards.

Justin had had those might-have-beens inside his head since he and Megan fell apart. But he was in a unique position, sitting here in the Pine Tree eating kimchi. He could do something about them.

He could. If his younger self let him. Said younger self blurted, “That can’t happen.”

“It can. It did. It will,” Justin said. The muscle started twitching again.

“But—how?” Himself-at-twenty-one sounded somewhere between bewildered and shocked. “We aren’t like Mom and Dad—we don’t fight all the time, and we don’t look for something on the side wherever we can find it.” Even at twenty-one, he spoke of his parents with casual contempt. Justin thought no better of them in 2018.

He said, “You can fight about sex, you can fight about money, you can fight about in-laws. We ended up doing all three, and so . . .” He set down his chopsticks and spread his hands wide. “We broke up—will break up—if we don’t change things. That’s why I figured out how to come back: to change things, I mean.”

His younger self finished the second OB. “You must have wanted to do that a lot,” he remarked.

“You might say so.” Justin’s voice came harsh and ragged. “Yeah, you just might say so. Since we fell apart, I’ve never come close to finding anybody who makes me feel the way Megan did. If it’s not her, it’s nobody. That’s how it looks from here, anyhow. I want to make things right for the two of us.”

“Things were going to be right.” But his younger self lacked conviction. Justin sat and waited. He was better at that than he had been half a lifetime earlier. Finally, himself-at-twenty-one asked, “What will you do?”

He didn’t ask, What do you want to do? He spoke as if Justin were a force of nature. Maybe that was his youth showing. Maybe it was just the beer. Whatever it was, Justin encouraged it by telling his younger self what he would do, not what he’d like to do: “I’m going to take over your life for a couple of months. I’m going to be you. I’m going to take Megan out, I’m going to make sure things are solid—and then the superstring I’ve ridden to get me here will break down. You’ll live happily ever after: I’ll brief you to make sure you don’t screw up what I’ve built. And when I get back to 2018, I will have lived happily ever after. How does that sound?”

“I don’t know,” his younger self said. “You’ll be taking Megan out?”

Justin nodded. “That’s right.”

“You’ll be . . . taking Megan back to the apartment?”

“Yeah,” Justin said. “But she’ll think it’s you, remember, and pretty soon it’ll be you, and it’ll keep right on being you till you turn into me, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” his younger self said. “Still . . .” He grimaced. “I don’t know. I don’t like it.”

“You have a better idea?” Justin folded his arms across his chest and waited, doing his best to be the picture of inevitability. Inside, his stomach tied itself in knots. He’d always been better at the tech side of things than at sales.

“It’s not fair,” himself-at-twenty-one said. “You know all this shit, and I’ve gotta guess.”

Justin shrugged. “If you think I did all this to come back and tell you lies, go ahead. That’s fine.” It was anything but fine. But he couldn’t let his younger self see that. “You’ll see what happens, and we’ll both be sorry.”

“I don’t know.” His younger self shook his head, again and again. His eyes had a trapped-animal look. “I just don’t know. Everything sounds like it hangs together, but you could be bullshitting, too, just as easy.”

“Yeah, right.” Justin couldn’t remember the last time he’d said that, but it fit here.

Then his younger self got up. “I won’t say yes and I won’t say no, not now I won’t. I’ve got your e-mail address. I’ll use it.” Out he went, not quite steady on his feet.

Justin stared after him. He paid for both dinners—it seemed like peanuts to him—and went home himself. His younger self needed time to think things through. He saw that. Seeing it and liking it were two different things. And every minute himself-at-twenty-one dithered was a minute he couldn’t get back. He stewed. He fumed. He waited. What other choice did he have?

You could whack him and take over for him. But he rejected the thought with a shudder. He was no murderer. All he wanted was some happiness. Was that too much to ask? He didn’t think so, not after all he’d missed since Megan made him move out. He checked e-mail every hour on the hour.

Two and a half mortal days. Justin thought he’d go nuts. He’d never dreamt his younger self would make him wait so long. At last, the computer told him, “You’ve got mail!”

All right, dammit, himself-at-twenty-one wrote. I still don’t know about this, but I don’t think I have any choice. If me and Megan are going to break up, that can’t happen. You better make sure it doesn’t.

“Oh, thank God,” Justin breathed. He wrote back, You won’t be sorry.

Whatever, his younger self replied. Half of me is sorry already. More than half.

Don’t be, Justin told him. Everything will be fine.

It had better be, his younger self wrote darkly. How do you want to make the switch?

Meet me in front of the B. Dalton’s again, Justin answered. Park by the Sears. I will, too. Bring whatever you want in your car. You can move it to the one I’m driving. I’ll do the same here. See you in two hours?

Whatever, his younger self repeated. Justin remembered saying that a lot. He hoped it meant yes here. The only things he didn’t want his younger self getting his hands on here were his laptop (though it would distract himself-at-twenty-one from worrying about Megan if anything would) and some of his cash. He left behind the TV and the stereo and the period clothes—and, below the underwear and socks, the cash he wasn’t taking along. His younger self could eat and have some fun, too, provided he did it at places where Megan wouldn’t run into him.

This time, his younger self got to the mall before him. Thoroughly grim, himself-at-twenty-one said, “Let’s get this over with.”

“Come on. It’s not a root canal,” Justin said. Now his younger self looked blank—he didn’t know about root canals. Justin wished he didn’t; that was a bit of the future less pleasant to contemplate than life with Megan. He went on, “Let’s go do it. We’ll need to swap keys, you know.”

“Yeah.” Himself-at-twenty-one nodded. “I had spares made. How about you?”

“Me, too.” Justin’s grin twisted up one corner of his mouth. “We think alike. Amazing, huh?”

“Amazing. Right.” His younger self started back toward Sears. “This better work.”

“It will,” Justin said. It has to, goddammit.

They’d parked only a couple of rows apart. His younger self had a couple of good-sized bundles. He put them in Justin’s car while Justin moved his stuff to the machine himself-at-twenty-one had been driving. “You know where I live,” his younger self said after they’d swapped keys. “What’s my new address?”

“Oh.” Justin told him. “The car’s insured, and you’ll find plenty of money in the underwear drawer.” He put a hand on his younger self’s shoulder. “It’ll be fine. Honest. You’re on vacation for a couple of months, that’s all.”

“On vacation from my life.” Himself-at-twenty-one looked grim again. At twenty-one, everything was urgent. “Don’t fuck up, that’s all.”

“It’s my life, too, remember.” Justin got into the car his younger self had driven to the mall. He fumbled a little, finding the right key. When he fired up the engine, the radio started playing KROQ. He laughed. Green Day was the bomb now, even if not quite to his taste. It wasn’t music for people approaching middle age and regretting it. He cranked the radio and drove back to his younger self’s apartment.

The Acapulco. He nodded as he drove up to it. It looked familiar. That made him laugh again. It hadn’t changed. He had.

After he drove through the security gate, he found his old parking space more by letting his hands and eyes guide his brain than the other way round. He couldn’t remember his apartment number at all, and had to go the the lobby to see which box had KLOSTER Dymo-taped onto it. He walked around the pool and past the rec room hardly anybody used, and there it was—his old place. But it wasn’t old now. This was where his younger self had lived and would live, and where he was living now.

As soon as he opened the door, he winced. He hadn’t remembered the bile-colored carpet, either, but it came back in a hurry. He looked around. Here it was—all his old stuff, a lot of it things he hadn’t seen in half a lifetime. Paperbacks, CDs, that tiny statuette of a buglike humanoid standing on its hind legs and giving a speech . . . During which move had that disappeared? He shrugged. He’d been through a lot of them. He fondly touched an antenna as he went past the bookcase, along a narrow hall, and into the bedroom.

“My old iMac!” he exclaimed. But it wasn’t old; the model had been out for less than a year. Bondi blue and ice case—to a taste formed in 2018, it looked not just outmoded but tacky as hell, but he’d thought it was great when it came out.

His younger self had left a note by the keyboard. In case you don’t remember, here’s Megan’s phone number and e-mail. Don’t screw it up, that’s all I’ve got to tell you.

He had remembered her e-mail address, but not her phone number. “Thanks, kid,” he said to himself-at-twenty-one. There by the phone on the nightstand lay his younger self’s address book, but having things out in the open made it easier.

Instead of calling her, he walked into the bathroom. His hand shook as he flipped on the light. He stared at the mirror. Can I do this? He ran a palm over his cheek. Yeah, I look young. Do I look that young? What will Megan think when I come to the door? What will her folks think? I’m only a couple of years younger than they are, for Christ’s sake.

If I come to the door wearing his—my—clothes, though, and talking like me, and knowing things only I could know, who else would I be but Justin Kloster? She’ll think I’m me, because I can’t possibly be anybody else. And I’m not anybody else—except I am.

He was still frowning and looking for incipient wrinkles when the telephone rang. As he hurried back to the bedroom, he hoped it would be a telemarketer. I’m not ready, I’m not ready, I’m not . . . “Hello?”

“Hiya? How the hell are you?” It was Megan, all right. He hadn’t heard her in more than ten years, but he knew her voice. He hadn’t heard her sound bouncy and bubbly and glad to be talking to him in a lot more than ten years. Before he could get a word in, she went on, “You mad at me? You haven’t called in two days.”

By the way she said it, it might have been two years. “I’m not mad,” Justin answered automatically. “Just—busy.”

“Too busy for me?” Now she sounded as if she couldn’t imagine such a thing. Justin’s younger self must have been too caught up in everything else to have time for her. At least he hadn’t blabbed about Justin’s return to 1999. “What were you doing? Who were you doing it with—or to?”

She giggled. Justin remembered her asking him questions like that later on, in an altogether different tone of voice. Not now. She didn’t know she would do that. If he changed things here, she wouldn’t. “Nothing,” he said. “Nobody. Things have been hairy at work, that’s all.”

“A likely story.” But Megan was still laughing. He remembered her doing things like that. He remembered her stopping, too. She said, “Well, you’re not working now, right? Suppose I come over?”

“Okay,” he said, thinking about baptism by total immersion. Either this would work, or it would blow up in his face. What do I do if it blows up? Run back to 2018 with my tail between my legs, that’s what.

But Megan didn’t even give him time to panic. “Okay?” she said, mock-fierce. “Okay? I’ll okay you, mister, you see if I don’t. Ten minutes.” She hung up.

Justin ran around like a madman, to remind himself where things were and to clean up a little. He hadn’t remembered his younger self as such a slob. He checked the refrigerator. Frozen dinners, beer, cokes—about what he’d expected.

He waited for the buzz that would mean Megan was at the security door. But he’d forgotten he’d given her a key. The first thing he knew she was there was the knock on the door. He opened it. “Hi,” he said, his voice breaking as if he really were twenty-one, or maybe sixteen.

“Hiya.” Megan clicked her tongue between her teeth. “You do look tired. Poor baby.”

He was looking at her, too, looking and trying not to tremble. She looked just like all the photos he’d kept: a swarthy brunette with flashing dark eyes, a little skinny maybe, but with some meat on her bones even so. She always smiled as if she knew a secret. He’d remembered. Remembering and seeing it in the flesh when it was fresh and new and a long way from curdling were very different things. He hadn’t imagined how different.

“How tired are you?” she said. “Not too tired, I hope.” She stepped forward, put her arms around him, and tilted her face up.

Automatically, his arms went around her. Automatically, he brought his mouth down to hers. She made a tiny noise, deep in her throat, as their lips met.

Justin’s heart pounded so hard, he was amazed Megan couldn’t hear it. He wanted to burst into tears. Here he was, holding the only woman he’d ever truly loved, the woman who’d so emphatically stopped loving him—only now she did again. If that wasn’t a miracle, he didn’t know what was.

She felt soft and smooth and warm and firm. Very firm, he noticed—a lot firmer than the women he’d been seeing, no matter how obsessively they went to the gym. And that brought the second realization, almost as blinding as realizing he, Justin, was alone with her, Megan: he, a forty-year-old guy, was alone with her, a twenty-year-old girl.

What had the bartender asked? You go around picking up high-school girls? But it wasn’t like that, dammit. Megan didn’t know he was forty. She thought he was his going-into-senior-year self. He had to think that way, too.

Except he couldn’t, or not very well. He’d lived half a lifetime too long. He tried not to remember, but he couldn’t help it. “Wow!” he gasped when the kiss finally ended.

“Yeah.” Megan took such heat for granted. She was twenty. Doubt never entered her mind. “Not bad for starters.” Without waiting for an answer, she headed for the bedroom.

Heart pounding harder than ever, Justin followed. Here-and-now, they hadn’t been lovers very long, and neither had had a whole lot of experience beforehand. That was part of what had gone wrong; Justin was sure of it. They’d gone stale, without knowing how to fix things. Justin knew a lot more now than he had at twenty-one. And here he was, getting a chance to use it when it mattered.

He almost forgot everything the next instant, because Megan was getting out of her clothes and lying down on the bed and laughing at him for being so slow. He didn’t stay slow very long. As he lay down beside her, he thanked God and Superstrings, Ltd., not necessarily in that order.

His hands roamed her. She sighed and leaned toward him for another kiss. Don’t hurry, he thought. Don’t rush. In a way, that was easy. He wanted to touch her, caress her, taste her, forever. In another way . . . He wanted to do more, too.

He made himself go slow. It was worth it. “Oh, Justin,” Megan said. Some time later, she said, “Ohhh, Justin.” He didn’t think he’d ever heard her sound like that the first time around. What she said a few minutes after that had no words, but was a long way from disappointed.

Then it was his turn. He kept having the nagging thought that he was taking advantage of a girl half his age who didn’t know exactly who he was. But then, as she clasped him with arms and legs, all the nagging thoughts went away. And it was just as good as he’d hoped it would be, which said a great deal.

Afterwards, they lay side by side, sweaty and smiling foolishly. Justin kept stroking her. She purred. She stroked him, too, expectantly. When what she was expecting didn’t happen, she gave him a sympathetic look. “You must be tired,” she said.

Did she think he’d be ready again right then? They’d just finished! But memory, now that he accessed it, told him she did. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He might look about the same at forty as he had at twenty-one, but he couldn’t perform the same. Who could?

Had he thought of this beforehand, he would have brought some Viagra back with him. In his time, it was over-the-counter. He wasn’t even sure it existed in 1999. He hadn’t had to worry about keeping it up, not at twenty-one.

But Megan had given him an excuse, at least this time. “Yeah, day from hell,” he said. “Doesn’t mean I can’t keep you happy.” He proceeded to do just that, and took his time about it, teasing her along as much as he could.

Once the teasing stopped, she stared at him, eyes enormous. “Oh, sweetie, why didn’t you ever do anything like that before?” she asked. All by itself, the question made him sure he’d done the right thing, coming back. It also made him sure he needed to give his younger self a good talking-to before he slid up the superstring to 2018. But Megan found another question: “Where did you learn that?”

Did she think he had another girlfriend? Did she wonder if that was why he could only do it once with her? Or was she joking? He hoped she was. How would his younger self have answered? With pride. “I,” he declared, “have a naturally dirty mind.”

Megan giggled. “Good.”

And it was good. A little later, in the lazy man’s position, he managed a second round. That was very good. Megan thought so, too. He couldn’t stop yawning afterwards, but he’d already said he was tired. “See?” he told her. “You wear me out.” He wasn’t kidding. Megan didn’t know how much he wasn’t kidding.

She proved that, saying, “I was thinking we’d go to a club tonight, but I’d better put you to bed. We can go tomorrow.” She went into the bathroom, then came back and started getting dressed. “We can do all sorts of things tomorrow.” The smile she gave him wasn’t just eager; it was downright lecherous.

Christ, he thought, she’ll expect me to be just as horny as I was tonight. His younger self would have been. To him, the prospect seemed more nearly exhausting than exciting. Sleep. I need sleep.

Megan bent down and kissed him on the end of the nose. “Pick me up about seven? We’ll go to the Probe, and then who knows what?”

“Okay,” he said around another yawn. “Whatever.” Megan laughed and left. Justin thought he heard her close the door, but he wasn’t sure.

He couldn’t even sleep late. He had to go do his younger self’s job at CompUSA, and himself-at-twenty-one didn’t keep coffee in the apartment. He drank cokes instead, but they didn’t pack the jolt of French roast.

Work was hell. All the computers were obsolete junk to him. Over half a lifetime, he’d forgotten their specs. Why remember when they were obsolete? And his boss, from the height of his late twenties, treated Justin like a kid. He wished he’d told his younger self to keep coming in. But Megan stopped by every so often, and so did other people he knew. He wanted himself-at-twenty-one out of sight, out of mind.

His younger self probably was going out of his mind right now. He wondered what the kid was doing, what he was thinking. Worrying, he supposed, and dismissed himself-at-twenty-one as casually as his boss had dismissed him believing him to be his younger self.

His shift ended at five-fifteen. He drove home, nuked some supper, showered, and dressed in his younger self’s club-hopping clothes: black pants and boots, black jacket, white shirt. The outfit struck him as stark. You needed to be skinny to look good in it, and he’d never been skinny. He shrugged. It was what you wore to go clubbing.

Knocking on the door to Megan’s parents’ house meant more strangeness. He made himself forget all the things they’d say after he and Megan went belly-up. And, when Megan’s mother opened the door, he got another jolt: she looked pretty damn good. He’d always thought of her as old. “H-hello, Mrs. Tricoupis,” he managed at last.

“Hello, Justin.” She stepped aside. No, nothing old about her—somewhere close to his own age, sure enough. “Megan says you’ve been working hard.”

“That’s right.” Justin nodded briskly.

“I believe it,” Mrs. Tricoupis said. “You look tired.” Megan had said the same thing. It was as close as they could come to, You look forty. But her mother eyed him curiously. He needed a minute to figure out why: he’d spoken to her as an equal, not as his girlfriend’s mother. Gotta watch that, he thought. It wouldn’t be easy; he saw as much. Even if nobody else did, he knew how old he was.

Before he could say anything else to raise eyebrows, Megan came out. She fluttered her fingers at Mrs. Tricoupis. “See you later, Mom.”

“All right,” her mother said. “Drive safely, Justin.”

“Yeah,” he said. Nobody’d told him that in a long time. He grinned at Megan. “The Probe.”

He’d had to look up how to get there in the Thomas Brothers himself-at-twenty-one kept in the car; he’d long since forgotten. It was off Melrose, the center of youth and style in the ’90s—and as outmoded in 2018 as the corner of Haight and Ashbury in 1999.

On the way down, Megan said, “I hear there’s going to be another rave at that place we went to a couple weeks ago. Want to see?”

“Suppose.” Justin hoped he sounded interested, not alarmed. After-hours illicit bashes didn’t hold the attraction for him they once had. And he had no idea where they’d gone then. His younger self would know. He didn’t.

He had as much trouble not grinning at the fashion statements the kids going into the club were making as Boomers did with tie-dye and suede jackets with fringe. Tattoos, pierced body parts . . . Those fads had faded. Except for a stud in his left ear, he’d never had more holes than he’d been born with.

Somebody waved to Megan and him as they went in. He waved back. His younger self would have known who it was. He’d long since forgotten. He got away with it. And he got carded when he bought a beer. That made him laugh. Then he came back and bought another one for Megan, who wasn’t legal yet.

She pointed toward the little booth with the spotlight on it. “Look. Helen’s deejaying tonight. She’s good!”

“Yeah.” Justin grinned. Megan sounded so excited. Had he cared so passionately about who was spinning the music? He probably had. He wondered why. The mix hadn’t been that much different from one deejay to another.

When the music started, he thought the top of his head would blow off. Coming home with ears ringing had been a sign of a good time—and a sign of nerve damage, but who cared at twenty-one? He cared now.

“What’s the matter?” Megan asked. “Don’t you want to dance?” He thought that was what she said, anyhow; he read her lips, because he couldn’t hear a word.

“Uh, sure.” He hadn’t been a great dancer at twenty-one, and hadn’t been on the floor in a lot of years since. But Megan didn’t criticize. She’d always liked getting out there and letting the music take over. The Probe didn’t have a mosh pit, for which Justin was duly grateful. Looking back, pogoing in a pit reminded him more of line play at the Super Bowl than of dancing.

He hadn’t been in great shape when he was twenty-one, either. Half a lifetime riding a desk hadn’t improved things. By the time the first break came, he was blowing like a whale. Megan’s face was sweaty, too, but she loved every minute of it. She wasn’t even breathing hard. “This is so cool!” she said.

She was right. Justin had long since stopped worrying about whether he was cool. You could stay at the edge till you were thirty—thirty-five if you really pushed it. After that, you were either a fogy or a grotesque. He’d taken fogydom for granted for years. Now he had to ride the crest of the wave again. He wondered if it was worth it.

Helen started spinning more singles. Justin danced till one. At least he had the next day off. Even so, he wished he were home in bed—not with Megan but alone, blissfully unconscious. No such luck. Somebody with enough rings in his ears to set off airport metal detectors passed out xeroxed directions to the rave. That told Justin where it was. He didn’t want to go, but Megan did. “You wearing out on me?” she asked. They went.

He wondered who owned the warehouse—a big Lego block of a building—and if whoever it was had any idea what was going on inside. He doubted it. It was a dreadful place for a big party—concrete floor, wires and metal scaffolding overhead, acoustics worse than lousy. But Megan’s eyes glowed. The thrill of the not quite legal. The cops might show up and throw everybody out.

He knew they wouldn’t, not tonight, because they hadn’t. And, at forty, the thrill of the not quite legal had worn off for him. Some smiling soul came by with little plastic bottles full of greenish liquid. “Instant Love!” he said. “Five bucks a pop.”

Megan grabbed two. Justin knew he had to grab his wallet. “What’s in it?” he asked warily.

“Try it. You’ll like it,” the guy said. “A hundred percent natural.”

Megan had already gulped hers down. She waited expectantly for Justin. He remembered taking a lot of strange things at raves, but that had been a long time ago—except it wasn’t. Nothing had killed him, so he didn’t suppose this would.

And it didn’t, but not from lack of trying. The taste was nasty plus sugar. The effect . . . when the shit kicked in, Justin stopped wishing for coffee. He felt as if he’d just had seventeen cups of the strongest joe ever perked. His heart pounded four hundred beats a minute. His hands shook. He could feel the veins on his eyeballs sticking out every time he blinked.

“Isn’t it great?” Megan’s eyes were bugging out of her head.

“Whatever.” When Justin was twenty-one, he’d thought this kind of rush was great, too. Now he wondered if he’d have a coronary on the spot. He did dance a lot more energetically.

And, when he took Megan back to his place, he managed something else, too. With his heart thudding the way it was, remembering anything related to foreplay wasn’t easy, but he did. Had he been twenty-one, it surely would have been wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Megan seemed suitably appreciative; maybe that Instant Love handle wasn’t altogether hype.

But his real age told. Despite the drug, whatever it was, and despite the company, he couldn’t have gone a second round if he’d had a crane to get it up. If that bothered Megan, she didn’t let on.

Despite his failure, he didn’t roll over and go to sleep, the way he had the first night. He wondered if he’d sleep for the next week. It was past four in the morning. “Shall I take you home?” he asked. “Your folks gonna be worried?”

Megan sat up naked on the bed and shook her head. Everything moved when she did that; it was marvelous to watch. “No problem,” she said. “They aren’t on me twenty-four-seven like some parents. You don’t want to throw me out, I’d just as soon stay a while.” She opened her eyes very wide to show she wasn’t sleepy, either.

“Okay. Better than okay.” Justin reached out and brushed the tip of her left breast with the backs of his fingers. “I like having you around, you know?” She had no idea how much he wanted to have her around. With luck, she’d never find out.

“I like being around.” She cocked her head to one side. “You’ve been kind of funny the last couple days, you know?”

To cover his unease—hell, his fear—Justin made a stupid face. “Is that funny enough for you?” he asked.

“Not funny like that,” Megan said. He made a different, even more stupid, face. It got a giggle from her, but she persisted: “Not funny like that, I told you. Funny a different sort of way.”

“Like how?” he asked, though he knew.

Megan didn’t, but groped toward it: “Lots of little things. The way you touch me, for instance. You didn’t used to touch me like that.” She looked down at the wet spot on the sheets. “I like what you’re doing, believe me I do, but it’s not what you were doing last week. How did you . . . find this out, just all of a sudden? It’s great, like I say, but . . .” She shrugged. “I shouldn’t complain. I’m not complaining. But . . .” Her voice trailed off again.

If I’d known then what I know now—everybody sang that song. But he didn’t just sing it. He’d done something about it. This was the thanks he got? At least she hadn’t come right out and asked him if he had another girlfriend.

He tried to make light of it: “Here I spent all night laying awake, trying to think of things you’d like, and—”

“I do,” Megan said quickly. She wasn’t lying, not unless she was the best actress in the world. But she went on, “You looked bored in the Probe tonight. You never looked bored in a club before.”

Damn. He hadn’t known it showed. What was hot at twenty-one wasn’t at forty. Been there, done that. That was what people said in the ’90s. One more thing he couldn’t admit. “Tired,” he said again.

Megan nailed him for it. “You never said that, either, not till yesterday—day before yesterday now.” Remorselessly precise.

“Sorry,” Justin answered. “I’m just me. Who else would I be?” Again, he was conscious of knowing what she didn’t and keeping it from her. It felt unkosher, as if he were the only one in class who took a test with the book open. But what else could he do?

Megan started getting into her clothes. “Maybe you’d better take me home.” But then, as if she thought that too harsh, she added some teasing: “I don’t want to eat what you’d fix for breakfast.”

He could have made her a damn fine breakfast. He started to say so. But his younger self couldn’t have, not to save his life. He shut up and got dressed, too. Showing her more differences was the last thing he wanted.

Dawn was turning the eastern sky gray and pink when he pulled up in front of her parents’ house. Before she could take off her seat belt, he put his arm around her and said, “I love you, you know?”

His younger self wouldn’t say those words for another year. Taking my time, the socially backwards dummy called it. For Justin at forty, the words weren’t just a truth, but a truth that defined his life—for better and, later on, for worse. He had no trouble bringing them out.

Megan stared at him. Maybe she hadn’t expected him to say that for quite a while yet. After a heartbeat, she nodded. She leaned over and kissed him, half on the cheek, half on the mouth. Then she got out and walked to her folks’ front door. She turned and waved. Justin waved back. He drove off while she was working the deadbolt.

He finally fell asleep about noon. The Instant Love kept him up and bouncing till then. At two-thirty, the phone rang. By the way he jerked and thrashed, a bomb might have gone off by his head. He grabbed the handset, feeling like death. “Hello?” he croaked.

“Hi. How are things?”

Not Megan. A man’s voice. For a second, all that meant was that it didn’t matter, that he could hang up on it. Then he recognized it: the voice on his own answering machine. But it wasn’t a recording. It was live, which seemed more than he could say right now. His younger self.

He had to talk, dammit. “Things are fine,” he said. “Or they were till you called. I was asleep.”

“Now?” The way himself-at-twenty-one sounded, it might have been some horrible perversion. “I called now ’cause I figured you wouldn’t be.”

“Never mind,” Justin said. The cobwebs receded. He knew they’d be back pretty soon. “Yeah, things are okay. We went to the Probe last night, and—”

“Did you?” His younger self sounded—no, suspicious wasn’t right. Jealous. That was it. “What else did you do?”

“That after-hours place. Some guy came through with fliers, so I knew how to get there.”

“Lucky you. And what else did you do?” Yeah. Jealous. A-number-one jealous.

Justin wondered how big a problem that would be. “About what you’d expect,” he answered tightly. “I’m you, remember. What would you have done?”

The sigh on the other end of the line said his younger self knew exactly what he would have done, and wished he’d been doing it. But I did it better, you little geek.

Before his younger self could do anything but sigh, Justin added, “And when I took her home, I told her I loved her.”

“Jesus!” himself-at-twenty-one exclaimed. “What did you go and do that for?”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t mean you’ve got to say it, for Christ’s sake,” his younger self told him. “What am I supposed to do when you go away?”

“Marry her, doofus,” Justin said. “Live happily ever after, so I get to live happily ever after, too. Why the hell do you think I came back here?”

“For your good time, man, not mine. I’m sure not having a good time, I’ll tell you.”

Was I really that stupid? Justin wondered. But it wasn’t quite the right question. Was my event horizon that short? Holding on to patience with both hands, he said, “Look, chill for a while, okay? I’m doing fine.”

“Sure you are.” His younger self sounded hot. “You’re doing fucking great. What about me?”

Nope, no event horizon at all. Justin said, “You’re fine. Chill. You’re on vacation. Go ahead. Relax. Spend my money. That’s what it’s there for.”

That distracted his younger self. “Where’d you get so much? What did you do, rob a bank?”

“It’s worth a lot more now than it will be then,” Justin answered. “Inflation. Have some fun. Just be discreet, okay?”

“You mean, keep out of your hair.” His younger self didn’t stay distracted long.

“In a word, yes.”

“While you’re in Megan’s hair.” Himself-at-twenty-one let out a long, angry breath. “I don’t know, dude.”

“It’s for you.” Justin realized he was pleading. “It’s for her and you.”

Another angry exhalation. “Yeah.” His younger self hung up.

Everything went fine till he took Megan to the much ballyhooed summer blockbuster two weekends later. She’d been caught up in the hype. And she thought the leading man was cute, though he looked like a boy to Justin. On the other hand, Justin looked like a boy himself, or he couldn’t have got away with this.

But that wasn’t the worst problem. Unlike her, he’d seen the movie before. He remembered liking it, though he’d thought the plot a little thin. Seen through forty-year-old eyes, it had no plot at all. He had a lot less tolerance for loud soundtracks and things blowing up every eight and a half minutes than his younger self would have. And even the most special special effects seemed routine to somebody who’d been through another twenty years of computer-generated miracles.

As the credits finally rolled, he thought, No wonder I don’t go to the movies much any more.

When Megan turned to him, though, her eyes were shining. “Wasn’t that great?” she said as they headed for the exit.

“Yeah,” he said. “Great.”

A different tone would have saved him. He realized that as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Too late. The one he’d used couldn’t have been anything but sarcastic. And Megan noticed. She was good at catching things like that—better than he’d ever been, certainly. “What’s the matter?” she demanded. “Why didn’t you like it?”

The challenge in her voice reminded Justin of how she’d sounded during the quarrels before their breakup. She couldn’t know that. His younger self wouldn’t have known, either—he hadn’t been through it. But Justin had, and reacted with a challenge of his own: “Why? Because it was really dumb.”

It was a nice summer night, clear, cooling down from the hot day, a few stars in the sky—with the lights of the San Fernando Valley, you never saw more than a few. None of that mattered to Megan. She stopped halfway to the car. “How can you say that?”

Justin saw the special-effects stardust in her eyes, and the effect of a great many closeups of the boyishly handsome—pretty, to his newly jaundiced eye—leading man. He should have shut up. But he reacted viscerally to that edge in her voice. Instead of letting things blow over, he told her exactly why the movie was dumb.

He finished just as they got to the Toyota. He hadn’t let her get in word one. When he ran down, she stared at him. “Why are you so mean? You never sounded so mean before.”

“You asked. I told you,” he said, still seething. But when he saw her fighting back tears as she fastened her seat belt, he realized he’d hit back too hard. It wasn’t quit like kicking a puppy, but it was close, too close. He had a grown man’s armor and weapons to pierce a grown woman’s—all the nastier products of experience—and he’d used them on a kid. Too late, he felt like an asshole. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

“Whatever.” Megan looked out the window toward the theater complex, not at him. “Maybe you’d better take me home.”

Alarm tore through him. “Honey, I said I was sorry. I meant it.”

“I heard you.” Megan still wouldn’t look at him. “You’d better take me home anyhow.”

Sometimes, the more you argued, the bigger the mess you made. This looked like one of those times. Justin recognized that now. A couple of minutes sooner would have been better. “Okay,” he said, and started the car.

The ride back to her folks’ house was almost entirely silent. When he pulled up, Megan opened the door before the car stopped rolling. “Goodnight,” she said. She started for the front door at something nearly a run.

“Wait!” he called. If that wasn’t raw panic in his voice, it would do. She heard it, too, and stopped, looking back warily, like a frightened animal that would bolt at any wrong move. He said, “I won’t do that again. Promise.” To show how much he meant it, he crossed his heart. He hadn’t done that since about the third grade.

Megan’s nod was jerky. “All right,” she said. “But don’t call me for a while anyway. We’ll both chill a little. How does that sound?”

Terrible. Justin hated the idea of losing any precious time here. But he saw he couldn’t argue. He wished he’d seen that sooner. He made himself nod, made himself smile, made himself say, “Okay.”

The porch light showed relief on Megan’s face. Relief she wouldn’t be talking to him for a while. He had to live with that all the way home.

He wished he could have walked away from his younger self’s job at CompUSA, but it would have looked bad. He’d needed a few days to have the details of late-1990s machines come back to him. Once they did, he rapidly got a reputation as a maven. His manager bumped him a buck an hour—and piled more hours on him. He resisted as best he could, but he couldn’t always.

Three days after the fight with Megan, his phone rang as he got into his—well, his younger self’s—apartment. He got to it just before the answering machine could. “Hello?” He was panting. If it was himself-at-twenty-one, he was ready to contemplate murder—or would it be suicide?

But it was Megan. “Hiya,” she said. “Didn’t I ask you not to call for a little bit? I know I did.”

“Yeah, you did. And I—” Justin broke off. He hadn’t called her. What about his younger self? Maybe I ought to rub him out, if he’s going to mess things up. But that thought vanished. He couldn’t deny a conversation she’d surely had. “I just like talking to you, that’s all.”

Megan’s laughter was rainbows to his ears. “You were so funny,” she said. “It was like we hadn’t fought at all. I couldn’t stay pissed. Believe me, I tried.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Justin said. And I do need to have a talk with my younger self. “You want to got out this weekend?”

“Sure,” Megan answered. “But let’s stay away from the movies. What do you think?”

“Whatever,” he said. “Okay with me.”

“Good.” More relief. “Plenty of other things we can do. Maybe I should just come straight to your place.”

His younger self would have slavered at that. He liked the idea pretty well himself. But, being forty and not twenty-one, he heard what Megan didn’t say, too. What she meant, or some of what she meant, was, You’re fine in bed. Whenever we’re not in bed, whenever we go somewhere, you get weird.

“Sure,” he said, and then, to prove he wasn’t only interested in her body, he went on, “Let’s to Sierra’s and stuff ourselves full of tacos and enchiladas. How’s that?”

“Fine,” Megan said.

Justin thought it sounded fine, too. Sierra’s was a Valley institution. It had been there since twenty years before he was born, and would still be going strong in 2018. He didn’t go there often then; he had too many memories of coming there with Megan. Now those memories would turn from painful to happy. That was why he was here. Smiling, he said, “See you Saturday, then.”

“Yeah,” Megan said. Justin’s smile got bigger.

Ring. Ring. Ring. “Hello?” his younger self said.

“Oh, good,” Justin said coldly. “You’re home.”

“Oh. It’s you.” Himself-at-twenty-one didn’t sound delighted to hear from him, either. “No, you’re home. I’m stuck here.”

“Didn’t I tell you to lay low till I was done here?” Justin demanded. “God damn it, you’d better listen to me. I just had to pretend I knew what Megan was talking about when she said I’d been on the phone with her.”

“She’s my girl, too,” his younger self said. “She was my girl first, you know. I’ve got a right to talk with her.”

“Not if you want her to keep being your girl, you don’t,” Justin said. “You’re the one who’s going to screw it up, remember?”

“That’s what you keep telling me,” his younger self answered. “But you know what? I’m not so sure I believe you any more. When I called her, Megan sounded like she was really torqued at me—at you, I mean. So it doesn’t sound like you’ve got all the answers, either.”

“Nobody has all the answers,” Justin said with such patience as he could muster. He didn’t think he’d believed that at twenty-one; at forty, he was convinced it was true. He was convinced something else was true, too: “If you think you’ve got more of them than I do, you’re full of shit.”

“You want to be careful how you talk to me,” himself-at-twenty-one said. “Half the time, I still think your whole setup is bogus. If I decide to, I can wreck it. You know damn well I can.”

Justin knew only too well. It scared the crap out of him. But he didn’t dare show his younger self he was afraid. As sarcastically as he could, he said, “Yeah, go ahead. Screw up your life for good. Keep going like this and you will.”

“You sound pretty screwed up now,” his younger self said. “What have I got to lose?”

“I had something good, and I let it slip through my fingers,” Justin said. “That’s enough to mess anybody up. You wreck what I’m doing now, you’ll go through life without knowing what a good thing was. You want that? Just keep sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. You want to end up with Megan or not?”

Where nothing else had, that hit home. “All right,” his younger self said sullenly. “I’ll back off—for now.” He hung up. Justin stared at the phone, cursed, and put it back in its cradle.

Megan stared at her empty plate as if she couldn’t imagine how it had got that way. Then she looked at Justin. “Did I really eat all that?” she said. “Tell me I didn’t really eat all that.”

“Can’t do it,” he said solemnly.

“Oh, my God!” Megan said: not Valley-girl nasal but sincerely astonished. “All those refried beans! They’ll go straight to my thighs.”

“No, they won’t.” Justin spoke with great certainty. For as long as he’d known—would know—Megan, her weight hadn’t varied by more than five pounds. He’d never heard that she’d turned into a blimp after they broke up, either. He lowered his voice. “I like your thighs.”

She raised a dark eyebrow, as if to say, You’re a guy. If I let you get between them, of course you like them. But the eyebrow came down. “You talk nice like that, maybe you’ll get a chance to prove it. Maybe.”

“Okay.” Justin’s plate was as empty as hers. Loading up on heavy Mexican food hadn’t slowed him down when he was twenty-one. Now it felt like a bowling ball in his stomach. But he figured he’d manage. Figuring that, he left a bigger tip than he would have otherwise.

The waiter scooped it up. “Gracias, señor.” He sounded unusually sincere.

Driving north up Canoga Avenue toward his place, Justin used a sentence that had the phrase “after we’re married” in it.

Megan had been looking at the used-car lot across the street. Her head whipped around. “After we’re what?” she said. “Not so fast, there.”

For the very first time, Justin thought to wonder whether his younger self knew what he was doing when he took another year to get around to telling Megan he loved her. He-now had the advantage of hindsight; he knew he and Megan would walk down the aisle. But Megan didn’t know it. Right this minute, she didn’t sound delighted with the idea.

Worse, Justin couldn’t explain that he knew, or how he knew. “I just thought—” he began.

Megan shook her head. Her dark hair flipped back and forth. She said, “No. You didn’t think. You’re starting your senior year this fall. I’m starting my junior year. We aren’t ready to think about getting married yet, even if . . .” She shook her head again. “We aren’t ready. What would we live on?”

“We’d manage.” Justin didn’t want to think about that even if. It had to be the start of something like, even if I decide I want to marry you. But Megan hadn’t said all of it. Justin clung to that. He had nothing else to cling to.

“We’d manage?” Megan said. “Yeah, right. We’d go into debt so deep, we’d never get out. I don’t want to do that, not when I’m just starting. I didn’t think you did, either.”

He kept driving for a little while. Clichés had women eager for commitment and men fleeing from it as if from a skunk at a picnic. He’d gone and offered to commit, and Megan reacted as if he ought to be committed. What did that say about clichés? Probably not to pay much attention to them.

“Hey.” Megan touched his arm. “I’m not mad, not for that. But I’m not ready, either. Don’t push me, okay?”

“Okay.” But Justin had to push. He knew it too damn well. He couldn’t stay in 1999 very long. Things between Megan and him had to be solid before he left the scene and his younger self took over again. His younger self, he was convinced, could fuck up a wet dream, and damn well had fucked up what should have been a perfect, lifelong relationship.

He opened the window and clicked the security key into the lock. The heavy iron gate slid open. He drove in and parked the car. They both got out. Neither said much as they walked to his apartment.

Not too much later, in the dark quiet of the bedroom, Megan clutched the back of his head with both hands and cried out, “Ohhh, Justin!” loud enough to make him embarrassed to show his face to the neighbors—or make him a minor hero among them, depending. She lay back on the bed and said, “You drive me crazy when you do that.”

“We aim to please.” Did he sound smug? If he did, hadn’t he earned the right?

Megan laughed. “Bull’s-eye!” Her voice still sounded shaky.

He slid up to lie beside her, running his hands along her body as he did. Strike while the iron is hot, he thought. He felt pretty hot himself. He said, “And you don’t want to talk about getting married yet?”

“I don’t want to talk about anything right now,” Megan said. “What I want to do is . . .” She did it. If Justin hadn’t been a consenting adult, it would have amounted to criminal assault. As things were, he couldn’t think of any stretch of time he’d enjoyed more.

“Jesus, I love you,” he said when he was capable of coherent speech.

Megan kept straddling him—not that he wanted to escape. Her face was only a couple of inches above his. Now she leaned down and kissed him on the end of the nose. “I love this,” she said, which wasn’t the same thing at all.

He ran a hand along the smooth, sweat-slick curves of her back. “Well, then,” he said, as if the two things were the same.

She laughed and shook her head. Her hair brushed back and forth across his face, full of the scent of her. Even though she kissed him again, she said, “But we can’t do this all the time.” At that precise moment, he softened and flopped out of her. She nodded, as if he’d proved her point. “See what I mean?”

Justin wished for his younger self’s body. Had himself-at-twenty-one been there, he would have been hard at it again instead of wilting at the worst possible time. But he had to play the hand he’d been dealt. He said, “I know it’s not the only reason to get married, but isn’t it a nice one?” To show how nice it was, he slid his hand between her legs.

Megan let it stay there for a couple of seconds, but then twisted away. “I asked you not to push me about that, Justin,” she said, all the good humor gone from her voice.

“Well, yeah, but—” he began.

“You didn’t listen,” she said. “People who get married have to, like, listen to each other, too, you know? You can’t just screw all the time. You really can’t. Look at my parents, for crying out loud.”

“My parents are screwing all the time,” Justin said.

“Yeah, but not with each other.” Megan hesitated, then said, “I’m sorry.”

“Why? It’s true.” Justin’s younger self had been horrified at his parents’ antics. If anything, that horror had got worse since. Up in 2018, he hadn’t seen or even spoken to either one of them for years, and he didn’t miss them, either.

Then he thought, So Dad chases bimbos and Mom decided she wasn’t straight after all. What you’re doing here is a lot weirder than any of that. But was it? All he wanted was a happy marriage, one like Megan’s folks had, one that probably looked boring from the outside but not when you were in it.

Was that too much to ask? The way things were going, it was liable to be.

Megan said, “Don’t get me wrong, Justin. I like you a lot. I wouldn’t go to bed with you if I didn’t. Maybe I even love you, if you want me to say that. But I don’t know if I want to try and spend my whole life with you. And if you keep riding me twenty-four-seven about it, I’ll decide I don’t. Does that make any sense to you?”

Justin shook his head. All he heard was a clock ticking on his hopes. “If we’ve got a good thing going, we ought to take it as far as we can,” he said. “Where will we find anything better?” He’d spent the rest of his life looking not for something better but for something close to as good. He hadn’t found it.

“Goddammit, it’s not a good thing if you won’t listen to me. You don’t want to notice that.” Megan got up and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she started dressing. “Take me home, please.”

“Shouldn’t we talk some more?” Justin heard the panic in his own voice.

“No. Take me home.” Megan sounded very sure. “Every time we talk lately, you dig the hole deeper for yourself. Like I said, Justin, I like you, but I don’t think we’d better talk for a while. It’s like you don’t even hear me, like you don’t even have to hear me. Like you’re the grownup and I’m just a kid to you, and I don’t like that a bit.”

How seriously did a forty-year-old need to take a twenty-year-old? Unconsciously, Justin must have decided, not very. That looked to be wrong. “Honey, please wait,” he said.

“It’ll just get worse if I do,” she answered. “Will you drive me, or shall I call my dad?”

He was in Dutch with her. He didn’t want to get in Dutch with her folks, too. “I’ll drive you,” he said dully.

Even more than the drive back from the movie theater had, this one passed in tense silence. At last, as Justin turned onto her street, Megan broke it: “We’ve got our whole lives ahead of us, you know? The way you’ve been going lately, it’s like you want everything nailed down tomorrow. That’s not gonna happen. It can’t happen. Neither one of us is ready for it.”

“I am,” Justin said.

“Well, I’m not,” Megan told him as he stopped the car in front of her house. “And if you keep picking at it and picking at it, I’m never going to be. In fact . . .”

“In fact, what?”

“Never mind,” she said. “Whatever.” Before he could ask her again, she got out and hurried up the walk toward the house. He waved to her. He blew her a kiss. She didn’t look back to see the wave or the kiss. She just opened the door and went inside. Justin sat for a couple of minutes, staring at the house. Then, biting his lip, he drove home.

Over the next three days, he called Megan a dozen times. Every time, he got the answering machine or one of her parents. They kept telling him she wasn’t home. At last, fed up, he burst out, “She doesn’t want to talk to me!”

Her father would have failed as White House press secretary. All he said was, “Well, if she doesn’t, you can’t make her, you know”—hardly a ringing denial.

But that’s what I came back for! Justin wanted to scream it. That wouldn’t have done any good. He knew as much. He still wanted to scream it. He’d come back to make things better, and what had he done? Made them worse.

On the fourth evening, the telephone rang as he walked in the door from his shift at CompUSA. His heart sank as he hurried into the bedroom. His younger self would be flipping out if he’d tried to call Megan and discovered she wouldn’t talk to him. He’d told his younger self not to do that, but how reliable was himself-at-twenty-one? Not very. “Hello?”

“Hello, Justin.” It wasn’t his younger self. It was Megan.

“Hi!” He didn’t know whether to be exalted or terrified. Not knowing, he ended up both at once. “How are you?”

“I’m okay.” She paused. Terror swamped exaltation. When she went on, she said, “I’ve been talking with my folks the last few days.”

That didn’t sound good. Trying to pretend he didn’t know how bad it sounded, he asked, “And?” The word hung in the air.

Megan paused again. At last, she said, “We—I’ve—decided I’d better not see you any more. I’m sorry, Justin, but that’s how things are.”

“They’re making you say that!” If Justin blamed Megan’s parents, he wouldn’t have to blame anyone else: himself, for instance.

But she said, “No, they aren’t. My mom, especially, thought I ought to give you another chance. But I’ve given you a couple chances already, and you don’t know what to do with them. Things got way too intense way too fast, and I’m not ready for that. I don’t want to deal with it, and I don’t have to deal with it, and I’m not going to deal with it, and that’s that. Like I said, I’m sorry and everything, but I can’t.”

“I don’t believe this,” he muttered. Refusing to believe it remained easier than blaming himself. “What about the sex?”

“It was great,” Megan said at once. “I won’t tell you any lies. If you make other girls feel the way you make—made—me feel, you won’t have any trouble finding somebody else. I hope you do.”

Christ, Justin thought. She’s letting me down easy. She’s trying to, anyhow, but she’s only twenty and she’s not very good at it. He didn’t want to be let down easy, or at all. He said, “What about you?”

“I’ll keep looking. If you can do it for me, probably other fellows can, too,” Megan answered with devastating pragmatism. Half to herself, she added, “Maybe I need to date older guys, or something, if I can find some who aren’t too bossy.”

That would have been funny, if only it were funny. Justin whispered, “But I love you. I’ve always loved you.” He’d loved her for about as long as she’d been alive here in 1999. What did he have to show for it? Getting shot down in flames not once but twice.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be. Please?” Megan said. “And don’t call here any more, okay? You’re not going to change my mind. If I decide I was wrong, I’ll call your place, all right? Goodbye, Justin.” She hung up without giving him a chance to answer.

Don’t call us. We’ll call you. Everybody knew what that meant. It meant what she’d been telling him anyhow: so long. He didn’t want to hang up. Finally, after more than a minute of dial tone, he did.

“What do I do now?” he asked himself, or possibly God. God might have known. Justin had no clue.

He thought about calling his younger self and letting him know things had gone wrong: he thought about it for maybe three seconds, then dropped the idea like a live grenade. Himself-at-twenty-one would want to slaughter him. He metaphorically felt like dying, but not for real.

Why not? he wondered. What will it be like when you head back to your own time? You wanted to change the past. Well, you’ve done that. You’ve screwed it up big-time. What kind of memories will you have when you come back to that men’s room in 2018? Not memories of being married to Megan for a while and then having things go sour, that’s for sure. You don’t even get those. It’ll be nineteen years of nothing—a long, lonely, empty stretch.

He lay down on the bed and wept. He hadn’t done that since Megan told him she was leaving him. Since the last time Megan told me she was leaving me, he thought. Hardly noticing he’d done it, he fell asleep.

When the phone rang a couple of hours later, Justin had trouble remembering when he was and how old he was supposed to be. The old-fashioned computer on the desk told him everything he needed to know. Grimacing, he picked up the telephone. “Hello?”

“You son of a bitch.” His younger self didn’t bellow the words. Instead, they were deadly cold. “You goddamn stupid, stinking, know-it-all son of a bitch.”

Since Justin was calling himself the same things, he had trouble getting angry when his younger self cursed him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried to—”

He might as well have kept quiet. His younger self rode over him, saying, “I just tried calling Megan. She said she didn’t want to talk to me. She said she never wanted to talk to me again. She said she’d told me she never wanted to talk to me again, so what was I doing on the phone right after she told me that? Then she hung up on me.”

“I’m sorry,” Justin repeated. “I—”

“Sorry?” This time, his younger self did bellow. “You think you’re sorry now? You don’t know what sorry is, but you will. I’m gonna beat the living shit out of you, dude. Fuck up my life, will you? You think you can get away with that, you’re full of—” He slammed down the phone.

Justin had never been much for fisticuffs, not at twenty-one and not at forty, either. But his younger self was so furious now, who could guess what he’d do? What with rage and what had to be a severe case of testosterone poisoning, he was liable to mean what he’d said. Justin knew to the day how many years he was giving away.

He also knew his younger self had keys to this apartment. If himself-at-twenty-one showed up here in fifteen minutes, did he want to meet him?

That led to a different question: did he want to be here in 1999 at all any more? All he’d done was the opposite of what he’d wanted. Why hang around, then? Instead of waiting to slide back along the superstring into 2018 in a few more weeks, wasn’t it better to cut the string and go back to his own time, to try to pick up the pieces of whatever life would be left to him after he’d botched things here?

Justin booted up the PowerBook from his own time. The suitcases he’d brought to 1999 were at the other apartment. So was a lot of the cash. His mouth twisted. He didn’t think he could ask his younger self to return it.

As he slipped the VR mask onto his head, he hoped he’d done his homework right, and that he would return to the men’s room from which he’d left 2018. That was what his calculations showed, but how good were they? Only real experience would tell. If this building still stood then and he materialized in somebody’s bedroom, he’d have more explaining to do than he really wanted.

He also wondered what memories he’d have when he got back to his former point on the timeline. The old ones, as if he hadn’t made the trip? The old ones, plus his memories of seeing 1999 while forty? New ones, stemming from the changes he’d made back here? Some of each? He’d find out.

From its initial perfect blankness, the VR mask view shifted to show the room in which he now sat, PowerBook on his lap. “Run program superstrings-slash-virtual reality-slash-not so virtual-slash-reverse,” he said. The view began to shift. Part of that was good old-fashioned morphing software, so what he saw in the helmet looked less and less like this bedroom and more and more like the restroom that was his destination. And part was the superstring program, pulling him from one point on the string to the other. He hoped part of it was the superstring software, anyhow. If the program didn’t run backwards, he’d have to deal with his angry younger self, and he wasn’t up to that physically or mentally.

On the VR screen, the men’s room at the Superstrings building had completely replaced the bedroom of his younger self’s apartment. “Program superstrings-slash-virtual reality-slash-not so virtual reality-slash-reverse is done,” the PowerBook said. Justin kept waiting. If he took off the helmet and found himself still in that bedroom . . .

When he nerved himself to shed the mask, he let out a long, loud sigh of relief: what he saw without it matched what he’d seen with it. His next worry—his mind coughed them up in carload lots—was that he’d gone to the right building, but in 1999, not 2018.

His first step out of the men’s room reassured him. The carpeting was its old familiar color, not the jarring one from 1999. He looked at the VR mask and PowerBook he was carrying. He wouldn’t need them any more today, and he didn’t feel like explaining to Sean and Garth and everybody else why he’d brought them. He headed downstairs again, to stow them in the trunk of his car.

As he walked through the lobby toward the front door, the security guard opened it for him. “Forget something, sir?” the aging Boomer asked.

“Just want to put this stuff back, Bill.” Justin held up the laptop and mask. Nodding, the guard stepped aside.

Justin was halfway across the lot before he realized the car toward which he’d aimed himself wasn’t the one he’d parked there before going back to 1999. It was in the same space, but it wasn’t the same car. He’d driven here in an aging Ford, not a top-of-the-line Volvo.

He looked around the lot. No Ford. No cars but the Volvo and Bill’s ancient, wheezing Hyundai. If he hadn’t got here in the Volvo, how had he come? Of itself, his hand slipped into his trouser pocket and came out with a key ring. The old iron ring and the worn leather fob on it were familiar; he’d had that key ring a long time. The keys . . .

One was a Volvo key. He tried it in the trunk. It turned in the lock. Smoothly, almost silently, the lid opened. Justin put the computer and the VR mask in the trunk, closed it, and slid the keys back into his pants pocket.

They weren’t the pants he’d worn when he left his apartment that morning: instead of 1990s-style baggy jeans, they were slacks, a lightweight wool blend. His shoes had changed, too, and he was wearing a nice polo shirt, not a Dilbert T-shirt.

He ran his left hand over the top of his head. His hair was longer, the buzz cut gone. He started to wonder if he was really himself. His memories of what he’d been before he went back and changed his own past warred with the ones that had sprung from the change. He shook his head; his brain felt overcrowded.

He started back toward the Superstrings building, but wasn’t ready to go in there again quite yet. He needed to sit down somewhere quiet for a while and straighten things out inside his own mind.

When he looked down the street, he grinned. There was the Denny’s where he’d had breakfast right after going back to 1999. It hadn’t changed much in the years since. He sauntered over. He was still on his own time.

“Toast and coffee,” he told the middle-aged, bored-looking Hispanic waitress.

“White, rye, or whole wheat?”

“Wheat,” he answered.

“Yes, sir,” she said. She brought them back with amazing speed. He smeared the toast with grape jelly, let her refill his cup two or three times, and then, still bemused but caffeinated, headed back to Superstrings, Ltd.

More cars in the lot now, and still more pulling in as he walked up. There was Garth O’Connell’s garish green Chevy. Justin waved. “Morning, Garth. How you doing?”

O’Connell smiled. “Not too bad. How are you, Mr. Kloster?”

“Could be worse,” Justin allowed. Part of him remembered Garth being on a first-name basis with him. The other part, the increasingly dominant part, insisted that had never happened.

They went inside and upstairs together, talking business. Garth headed off into the maze of cubicles that made up most of the second floor. Justin started to follow him, but his feet didn’t want to go that way. He let them take him where they would. They had a better idea of where exactly he worked than his conscious mind did right now.

His secretary was already busy at the computer in the anteroom in front of his office. She nodded. “Good morning, Mr. Kloster.”

“Good morning, Brittany,” he said. Had he ever seen her in all his life? If he hadn’t, how did he know her name? How did he know she’d worked for him the past three years?

He went into the office—his office—and closed the door. Again, he had that momentary disorientation, as if he’d never been here before. But of course he had. If the founder and president of Superstrings, Ltd., didn’t deserve the fanciest office in the building, who did?

The part of him that had traveled back through time still felt confused. Not the rest, the part that had been influenced by his trip back to 1999. Knowing such things were possible—and having the seed money his time-traveling self left behind—wouldn’t he naturally have started getting involved in this area as soon as he could? Sure he would have—he damn well had. On the wall of the office, framed, hung, not the first dollar he’d ever made, but a quarter dated 2012. He’d had it for nineteen years.

He sat down at his desk. The view out the window wasn’t much, but it beat the fuzzy, grayish-tan wall of a cubicle. On the desk stood a framed picture of a smiling blond woman and two boys he’d never seen before—his sons, Saul and Lije. When he stopped and thought, it all came back to him, just as if he’d really lived it. As a matter of fact, he had. He’dnever got over Megan. His younger self, who’d never married her, was a different story—from the way things looked, a better story.

Why, he even knew how the image had been ever so slightly edited. She could be vain about the silliest things. His phone buzzed. He picked it up. “Yes, Brittany?”

“Your wife’s on the line, Mr. Kloster,” his secretary said. “Something she wants you to get on the way home.”

“Sure, put her through.” Justin was still chuckling when his wife came on the line. “Okay, what do you need at the store, Lindsey?”

HUNTING THE SNARK

Mike Resnick

Believe me, the last thing we ever expected to find was a Snark.

And I’m just as sure we were the last thing he ever expected to meet.

I wish I could tell you we responded to the situation half as well as he did. But maybe I should start at the beginning. Trust me: I’ll get to the Snark soon enough.

My name’s Karamojo Bell. (Well, actually it’s Daniel Mathias Bellman. I’ve never been within five thousand light years of the Karamojo district back on Earth. But when I found out I was a distant descendant of the legendary hunter, I decided to appropriate his name, since I’m in the same business and I thought it might impress the clients. Turned out I was wrong; in my entire career, I met three people who had heard of him, and none of them went on safari with me. But I kept it anyway. There are a lot of Daniels walking around; at least I’m the only Karamojo.)

At that time I worked for Silinger & Mahr, the oldest and best-known firm in the safari business. True, Silinger died sixty-three years ago and Mahr followed him six years later and now it’s run by a faceless corporation back on Deluros VIII, but they had better luck with their name than I had with mine, so they never changed it.

We were the most expensive company in the business, but we were worth it. Hundreds of worlds have been hunted out over the millennia, but people with money will always pay to have first crack at territory no one else has set foot on or even seen. A couple of years ago the company purchased a ten-planet hunting concession in the newly opened Albion Cluster, and so many of our clients wanted to be the first to hunt virgin worlds that we actually held drawings to see who’d get the privilege. Silinger & Mahr agreed to supply one professional hunter per world and allow a maximum of four clients per party, and the fee was (get ready for it!) twenty million credits. Or eight million Maria Theresa dollars, if you don’t have much faith in the credit—and out here on the Frontier, not a lot of people do.

We pros wanted to hunt new worlds every bit as much as the clients did. They were parceled out by seniority, and as seventh in line, I was assigned Dodgson IV, named after the woman who’d first charted it a dozen years ago. Nine of us had full parties. The tenth had a party of one—an incredibly wealthy man who wasn’t into sharing.

Now, understand: I didn’t take out the safari on my own. I was in charge, of course, but I had a crew of twelve blue-skinned humanoid Dabihs from Kakkab Kastu IV. Four were gunbearers for the clients. (I didn’t have one myself; I never trusted anyone else with my weapons.) To continue: one was the cook, three were skinners (and it takes a lot more skill than you think to skin an alien animal you’ve never seen before without spoiling the pelt), and three were camp attendants. The twelfth was my regular tracker, whose name—Chajinka—always sounded like a sneeze.

We didn’t really need a pilot—after all, the ship’s navigational computer could start from half a galaxy away and land on top of a New Kenya shilling—but our clients were paying for luxury, and Silinger & Mahr made sure they got it. So in addition to the Dabihs, we also had our own personal pilot, Captain Kosha Mbele, who’d spent two decades flying one-man fighter ships in the war against the Sett.

The hunting party itself consisted of four business associates, all wealthy beyond my wildest dreams if not their own. There was Willard Marx, a real estate magnate who’d developed the entire Roosevelt planetary system; Jaxon Pollard, who owned matching chains of cut-rate supermarkets and upscale bakeries that did business on more than a thousand worlds; Philemon Desmond, the CEO of Far London’s largest bank—with branches in maybe two hundred systems—and his wife, Ramona, a justice on that planet’s Supreme Court.

I don’t know how the four of them met, but evidently they’d all come from the same home world and had known each other for a long time. They began pooling their money in business ventures early on, and just kept going from one success to the next. Their most recent killing had come on Silverstrike, a distant mining world. Marx was an avid hunter who had brought trophies back from half a dozen worlds, the Desmonds had always wanted to go on safari, and Pollard, who would have preferred a few weeks on Calliope or one of the other pleasure planets, finally agreed to come along so that the four of them could celebrate their latest billion together.

I took an instant dislike to Marx, who was too macho by half. Still, that wasn’t a problem; I wasn’t being paid to enjoy his company, just to find him a couple of prize trophies that would look good on his wall, and he seemed competent enough.

The Desmonds were an interesting pair. She was a pretty woman who went out of her way to look plain, even severe; a well-read woman who insisted on quoting everything she’d read, which made you wonder which she enjoyed more, reading in private or quoting in public. Philemon, her husband, was a mousy little man who drank too much, drugged too much, smoked too much, seemed in awe of his wife, and actually wore a tiny medal he’d won in a school track meet some thirty years earlier—probably a futile attempt to impress Mrs. Desmond, who remained singularly unimpressed.

Pollard was just a quiet, unassuming guy who’d lucked into money and didn’t pretend to be any more sophisticated than he was—which, in my book, made him considerably more sophisticated than his partners. He seemed constantly amazed that they had actually talked him into coming along. He’d packed remedies for sunburn, diarrhea, insect bites, and half a hundred other things that could befall him, and jokingly worried about losing what he called his prison pallor.

We met on Braxton II, our regional headquarters, then took off on the six-day trip to Dodgson IV. All four of them elected to undergo DeepSleep, so Captain Mbele and I put them in their pods as soon as we hit light speeds, and woke them about two hours before we landed.

They were starving—I know the feeling; DeepSleep slows the metabolism to a crawl, but of course it doesn’t stop it or you’d be dead, and the first thing you want to do when you wake up is eat—so Mbele shagged the Dabihs out of the galley, where they spent most of their time, and had the cook prepare a meal geared to human tastes. As soon as they finished eating, they began asking questions about Dodgson IV.

“We’ve been in orbit for the past hour, while the ship’s computer has been compiling a detailed topographical map of the planet,” I explained. “We’ll land as soon as I find the best location for the base camp.”

“So what’s this world like?” asked Desmond, who had obviously failed to read all the data we’d sent to him.

“I’ve never set foot on it,” I replied. “No one has.” I smiled. “That’s why you’re paying so much.”

“How do we know there’s any game to be found there, then?” asked Marx pugnaciously.

“There’s game, all right,” I assured him. “The Pioneer who charted it claims her sensors pinpointed four species of carnivore and lots of herbivores, including one that goes about four tons.”

“But she never landed?” he persisted.

“She had no reason to,” I said. “There was no sign of sentient life, and there are millions of worlds out there still to be charted.”

“She’d damned well better have been right about the animals,” grumbled Marx. Tm not paying this much to look at a bunch of trees and flowers.”

“I’ve hunted three other oxygen worlds that Karen Dodgson charted,” I said, “and they’ve always delivered what she promised.”

“Do people actually hunt on chlorine and ammonia worlds?” asked Pollard. “A few. It’s a highly specialized endeavor. If you want to know more about it after the safari is over, I’ll put you in touch with the right person back at headquarters.”

“I’ve hunted a couple of chlorine worlds,” interjected Marx.

Sure you have, I thought.

“Great sport,” he added.

When you have to live with your client for a few weeks or months, you don’t call him a braggart and a bar to his face, but you do file the information away for future reference.

This Karen Dodgson—she’s the one the planet’s named for?” asked Ramona Desmond.

“It’s a prerogative of the Pioneer Corps,” I answered. “The one who charts a world gets to name it anything he or she wants.” I paused and smiled. “They’re not known for their modesty. Usually they name it after themselves.”

“Dodgson,” she said again. “Perhaps we’ll find a Jabberwock, or a Cheshire Cat, or even a Snark.”

“I beg your pardon?” I said.

“That was Lewis Carroll’s real name: Charles Dodgson.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” I replied.

“He wrote ‘Jabberwocky’ and The Hunting of the Snark, along with the Alice books.” She stared at me. “Surely you’re read them.”

Tm afraid not.”

“No matter,” she said with a shrug. “It was just a joke. Not a very funny one.”

In retrospect, I wish we’d found a Jabberwock.

“Just the place for a Snark!” the Bellman cried.

As he landed his crew with care;

Supporting each man on the top of the tide

By a finger entwined in his hair.

Dodgson IV was lush and green, with huge rolling savannahs, thick forests with trees growing hundreds of feet high, lots of large inland lakes, a trio of freshwater oceans, an atmosphere slightly richer than Galactic Standard, and a gravity that was actually a shade lighter than Standard.

While the Dabihs were setting up camp and erecting the self-contained safari Bubbles near the ship, I sent Chajinka off to collect possible foodstuffs, then took them to the ship’s lab for analysis. It was even better than I’d hoped.

“I’ve got good news,” I announced when I clambered back out of the ship.

“There are at least seventeen edible plant species. The bark of those trees with the golden blossoms is also edible. The water’s not totally safe, but it’s close enough so that if we irradiate it it’ll be just fine.”

“I didn’t come here to eat fruits and berries or whatever the hell Blue Boy found out there,” said Marx gruffly. “Let’s go hunting.”

“I think it would be better for you and your friends to stay in camp for a day while Chajinka and I scout out the territory and see what’s out there. Just unwind from the trip and get used to the atmosphere and the gravity.”

“Why?” asked Desmond. “What’s the difference if we go out today or tomorrow?”

“Once I see what we’re up against, I’ll be able to tell you which weapons to take. And while we know there are carnivores, we have no idea whether they’re diurnal or nocturnal or both. No sense spending all day looking for a trophy that only comes out at night.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” Desmond shrugged. “You’re the boss.”

I took Captain Mbele aside and suggested he do what he could to keep them amused—tell them stories of past safaris, make them drinks, do whatever he could to entertain them while Chajinka and I did a little reconnoitering and learned what we’d be up against.

“It looks pretty normal to me,” said Mbele. “A typical primitive world.”

“The sensors say there’s a huge biomass about two miles west of here,” I replied. “With that much meat on the hoof, there should be a lot of predators. I want to see what they can do before I take four novices into the bush.”

“Marx brags about all the safaris he’s been on,” complained Mbele. “Why not take the Great White Hunter with you?”

“Nice try,” I said. “But I make the decisions once we’re on the ground. You’re stuck with him.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Maybe he’s been on other safaris, but he’s a novice on Dodgson IV, and as far as I’m concerned that’s all that counts.”

“Well, if it comes to that, so are you.”

“I’m getting paid to risk my life. He’s paying for me to make sure he gets his trophies and doesn’t risk his.” I looked around. “Where the hell did Chajinka sneak off to?”

“I think he’s helping the cook.”

“He’s got his own food,” I said irritably. “He doesn’t need ours.” I turned in the direction of the cooking Bubble and shouted: “Chajinka, get your blue ass over here!”

The Dabih looked up at the sound of my voice, smiled, and pointed to his ears.

“Then get your goddamned t-pack!” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”

He smiled again, wandered off, and returned a moment later with his spear and his t-pack, the translating mechanism that allowed Man and Dabih (actually, Man and just about anything, with the proper programming) to converse with one another in Terran.

“Ugly little creature,” remarked Mbele, indicating Chajinka.

“I didn’t pick him for his looks.”

“Is he really that good?”

“The little bastard could track a billiard ball down a crowded highway,” I replied. “And he’s got more guts than most Men I know.”

“You don’t say,” said Mbele in tones that indicated he still considered Dabihs one step up—if that—from the animals we had come to hunt.

“His form is ungainly—his intellect small—”

(So the Bellman would often remark)—

“But his courage is perfect! And that, after all,

Is the thing that one needs with a Snark.”

I’m not much for foot-slogging when transportation is available, but it was going to take the Dabihs at least a day to assemble the safari vehicle and there was no sense hanging around camp waiting for it. So off we went, Chajinka and me, heading due west toward a water hole the computer had mapped. We weren’t out to shoot anything, just to see what there was and what kind of weaponry our clients would need when we went out hunting the next morning.

It took us a little more than an hour to reach the water hole, and once there we hid behind some heavy bush about fifty yards away from it. There was a small herd of brown-and-white herbivores slaking their thirst, and as they left, a pair of huge red animals, four or five tons apiece, came down to drink. Then there were four or five more small herds of various types of grass-eaters. I had just managed to get comfortable when I heard a slight scrabbling noise. I turned and saw Chajinka pick up a slimy five-inch green worm, study its writhing body for a moment, then pop it into his mouth and swallow it. He appeared thoughtful for a moment, as if savoring the taste, then nodded his head in approval, and began looking for more.

Once upon a time that would have disgusted me, but I’d been with Chajinka for more than a decade and I was used to his eating habits. I kept looking for predators, and finally asked if he’d spotted any.

He waited for the t-pack to translate, then shook his head. “Night eaters, maybe,” he whispered back.

“I never saw a world where all the carnivores were nocturnal,” I answered. “There have to be some diurnal hunters, and this is the spot they should be concentrating on.”

“Then where are they?”

“You’re the tracker,” I said. “You tell me.”

He sighed deeply—a frightening sound if you’re not used to Dabihs. A few of the animals at the water hole spooked and ran off thirty or forty yards, raising an enormous cloud of reddish dust. When they couldn’t spot where the noise had come from, they warily returned to finish drinking.

“You wait here,” he whispered. “I will find the predators.”

I nodded my agreement. I’d watched Chajinka stalk animals on a hundred worlds, and I knew that I’d just be a hindrance. He could travel as silently as any predator, and he could find cover where I would swear none existed. If he had to freeze, he could stand or squat motionless for up to fifteen minutes. If an insect was crawling across his face, he wouldn’t even shut an eye if it was in the insect’s path. So maybe he regarded worms and insects as delicacies, and maybe he had only the vaguest notion of personal hygiene, but in his element—and we were in it now—there was no one of any species better suited for the job.

I sat down, adjusted my contact lenses to Telescopic, and scanned the horizon for the better part of ten minutes, going through a couple of smokeless cigarettes in the process. Lots of animals, all herbivores, came by to drink. Almost too many, I decided, because at this rate the water hole would be nothing but a bed of mud in a few days.

I was just about to start on a third cigarette when Chajinka was beside me again, tapping me on the shoulder.

“Come with me,” he said.

“You found something?”

He didn’t answer, but straightened up and walked out into the open, making no attempt to hide his presence. The animals at the water hole began bleating and bellowing in panic and raced off, some low to the ground, some zigzagging with every stride, and some with enormous leaps. Soon all of them vanished in the thick cloud of dust they had raised.

I followed him for about half a mile, and then we came to it: a dead catlike animal, obviously a predator. It had a tan pelt, and I estimated its weight at three hundred pounds. It had the teeth of a killer, and its front and back claws were clearly made for rending the flesh of its prey. Its broad tail was covered with bony spikes. It was too muscular to be built for sustained speed, but its powerful shoulders and haunches looked deadly efficient for short charges of up to one hundred yards.

“Dead maybe seven hours,” said Chajinka. “Maybe eight.”

I didn’t mind that it was dead. I minded that its skull and body were crushed. And I especially minded that there’d been no attempt to eat it.

“Read the signs,” I said. “Tell me what happened.”

“Brown cat,” said Chajinka, indicating the dead animal, “made a kill this morning. His stomach is still full. He was looking for a place to he up, out of the sun. Something killed him.”

“What killed him?”

He pointed to some oblong tracks, not much larger than a human’s. “This one is the killer.”

“Where did he go after he killed the brown cat?”

He examined the ground once more, then pointed to the northeast. “That way.”

“Can we find him before dark?”

Chajinka shook his head. “He left a long time ago. Four, five, six hours.”

“Let’s go back to the water hole,” I said. “I want you to see if he left any tracks there.”

Our presence frightened yet another herd of herbivores away, and Chajinka examined the ground.

Finally he straightened up. “Too many animals have come and gone.”

“Make a big circle around the water hole,” I said. “Maybe a quarter mile. See if there are any tracks there.”

He did as I ordered, and I fell into step behind him. We’d walked perhaps half the circumference when he stopped.

“Interesting,” he said.

“What is?”

“There were brown cats here early this morning,” he said, pointing to the ground. “Then the killer of the brown cat came along—you see, here, his print overlays that of a cat—and they fled.” He paused. “An entire family of brown cats—at least four, perhaps five—fled from a single animal that hunts alone.”

“You’re sure he’s a solitary hunter?”

He studied the ground again. “Yes. He walks alone. Very interesting.”

It was more than interesting.

There was a lone animal out there that was higher on the food chain than the three hundred-pound brown cats. It had frightened away an entire pod of large predators, and—this was the part I didn’t like—it didn’t kill just for food.

Hunters read signs, and they listen to their trackers, but mostly they tend to trust their instincts. We’d been on Dodgson IV less than five hours, and I was already getting a bad feeling.

“I kind of expected you’d be bringing back a little something exotic for dinner,” remarked Jaxon Pollard when we returned to camp.

“Or perhaps a trophy,” chimed in Ramona Desmond.

“I’ve got enough trophies, and you’ll want to shoot your own.”

“You don’t sound like a very enthusiastic hunter,” she said.

“You’re paying to do the hunting,” I replied. “My job is to back you up and step in if things get out of hand. As far as I’m concerned, the ideal safari is one on which I don’t fire a single shot.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Marx. “What are we going after tomorrow?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure?” he repeated. “What the hell were you doing all afternoon?”

“Scouting the area.”

“This is like pulling teeth,” complained Marx. “What did you find?”

“I think we may have found signs of Mrs. Desmond’s Snark, for lack of a better name.”

Suddenly everyone was interested.

“A Snark?” said Ramona Desmond delightedly. “What did it look like?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s bipedal, but I’ve no idea how many limbs it has—probably four. More than that is pretty rare in large animals anywhere in the galaxy. Based on the depth of the tracks, Chajinka thinks it may go anywhere from two hundred and fifty to four hundred pounds.”

“That’s not so much,” said Marx. “I’ve hunted bigger.”

“I’m not through,” I said. “In a land filled with game, it seems to have scared the other predators out of the area.” I paused. “Well, actually, that could be a misstatement.”

“You mean it hasn’t scared them off?” asked Ramona, now thoroughly confused.

“No, they’re gone. But I called them other predators, and I don’t know for a fact that our Snark is a predator. He killed a huge, catlike creature, but he didn’t eat it.”

“What does that imply?” asked Ramona.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. It could be that he was defending his territory. Or . . .” I let the sentence hang while I considered its implications.

“Or what?”

“Or he could simply enjoy killing things.”

“That makes two of us,” said Marx with a smile. “We’ll go out and kill ourselves a Snark tomorrow morning.”

“Not tomorrow,” I said firmly.

“Why the hell not?” he asked pugnaciously.

“I make it a rule never to go after dangerous game until I know more about it than it knows about me,” I answered. “Tomorrow we’ll go out shooting meat for the pot and see if we can learn a little more about the Snark.”

“I’m not paying millions of credits to shoot a bunch of cud-chewing alien cattle!” snapped Marx. “You’ve found something that practically screams ‘Superb Hunting!’ I vote that we go after it in the morning.”

“I admire your enthusiasm and your courage, Mr. Marx,” I said. “But this isn’t a democracy. I’ve got the only vote that counts, and since it’s my job to return you all safe and sound at the end of this safari, we’re not going after the Snark until we know more about it.”

He didn’t say another word, but I could tell that at that moment he’d have been just as happy to shoot me as the Snark.

Before we set out the next morning, I inspected the party’s weapons.

“Nice laser rifle,” I said, examining Desmond’s brand new pride and joy.

“It ought to be,” he said. “It cost fourteen thousand credits. It’s got night sights, a vision enhancer, an anti-shake stock. . . .”

“Bring out your projectile rifle and your shotgun, too,” I said. “We have to test all the weapons.”

“But I’m only going to use this rifle,” he insisted.

I almost hated to break the news to him.

“In my professional opinion, Dodgson IV has a B3 biosystem,” I said. “I already registered my findings via subspace transmission from the ship last night.” He looked confused. “For sport hunting purposes, that means you have to use a non-explosive-projectile weapon with a maximum of a .450 grain bullet until the classification is changed.”

“But—”

“Look,” I interrupted. “We have fusion bombs that can literally blow this planet apart. We have intelligent bullets that will find an animal at a distance of ten miles, respond to evasive maneuvering, and not contact the target until an instant kill is guaranteed. We’ve got molecular imploders that can turn an enemy brigade into jelly. Given the game we’re after, none of those weapons would qualify for use as sport hunting. I know, we’re only talking about a laser rifle in your case, but you don’t want to start off the safari by breaking the law, and I’m sure as a sportsman you want to give the animal an even break.”

He looked dubious, especially about the even break part, but finally he went back to his Bubble and brought out the rest of his arsenal.

I gathered the four of them around me.

“Your weapons have been packed away for a week,” I said. “Their settings may have been affected by the ship’s acceleration, and this world’s gravity is different, however minimally, from your own. So before we start, I want to give everyone a chance to adjust their sights.” And, I added to myself, let’s see if any of you can hit a non-threatening target at forty yards, just so I’ll know what I’m up against.

“I’ll set up targets in the hollow down by the river,” I continued, “and I’ll ask you to come down one at a time.” No sense letting the poorer shots get humiliated in front of the better ones—always assuming there are any better ones.

I took a set of the most basic targets out of the cargo hold. Once I reached the hollow, I placed four of them where I wanted them, activated the anti-grav devices, and when they were gently bobbing and weaving about six feet above the ground, I called for Marx, who showed up a moment later.

“Okay, Mr. Marx,” I said. “Have you adjusted your sights?”

“I always take care of my weapons,” he said as if the question had been an insult.

“Then let’s see what you can do.”

He smiled confidently, raised his rifle, looked along the sights, pulled the trigger, and blew two targets to pieces, then repeated the procedure with his shotgun.

“Nice shooting,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied with a look that said: of course I’m a crack shot. I told you so, didn’t I?

Desmond was next. He raised his rifle to his shoulder, took careful aim, and missed, then missed three more times.

I took the rifle, lined up the sights, and fired. The bullet went high and to the right, burying itself in a tree trunk. I adjusted the sights and took another shot. This time I hit a target dead center.

“Okay, try it now,” I said, handing the rifle back to Desmond.

He missed four more times. He missed sitting. He missed prone. He missed using a rest for the barrel. Then he tried the shotgun, and missed twice more before he finally nailed a target. Then, for good measure, he totally misused his laser rifle, trying to pinpoint the beam rather than sweep the area, and missed yet again. We were both relieved when his session ended.

His wife was a little better; she hit the target on her third try with the rifle and her second with the shotgun. She swept the area with her laser rifle, wiping out all the remaining targets.

Pollard should have been next, but he didn’t show up, and I went back to camp to get him. He was sitting down with the others, sipping a cup of coffee.

“You’re next, Mr. Pollard,” I said.

“I’m just going to take holos,” he replied, holding up his camera.

“You’re sure, Jaxon?” asked Desmond.

“I don’t think I’d enjoy killing things,” he replied.

“Then what the hell are you doing here?” demanded Marx.

Pollard smiled. “I’m here because you nagged incessantly, Willard. Besides, I’ve never been on a safari before, and I enjoy taking holographs.”

“All right,” I said. “But I don’t want you wandering more than twenty yards from me at any time.”

“No problem,” said Pollard. “I don’t want them killing me any more than I want to kill them!’

I told his gunbearer to stay behind and help with the camp and the cooking. You’d have thought I’d slapped him in the face, but he agreed to do as he was ordered.

We clambered into the vehicle and got to the water hole in about half an hour. Within five minutes Marx had coolly and efficiently brought down a pair of spiral-horned tan-and-brown herbivores with one bullet each. Then, exercising his right to name any species that he was the first to shoot, he dubbed them Marx’s Gazelles.

“What now?” asked Desmond. “We certainly don’t need any more meat for the next few days.”

“I’ll send the vehicle back to camp for the skinners. They’ll bring back the heads and pelts as well as the best cuts of meat, and I’ll have them tie the rest of the carcasses to some nearby trees.”

“Why?”

“Bait,” said Marx.

“Mr. Marx is right. Something will come along to feed on them. The smell of blood might bring the catlike predators back. Or, if we’re lucky, maybe the Snark will come back and we’ll be able to learn a little more about him.”

“And what do we do in the meantime?” asked Desmond in petulant tones.

“It’s up to you,” I said. “We can stay here until the vehicle returns, we can march back to camp, or we can footslog to that swamp about four miles to the north and see if there’s anything interesting up there.”

“Like a Snark?” asked Ramona.

“Five Men and four Dabihs walking across four miles of open savannah aren’t about to sneak up and surprise anything. But we’re not part of the ecological system. None of the animals will be programmed to recognize us as predators, so there’s always a chance—if he’s there to begin with—that the Snark will stick around out of curiosity or just plain stupidity.”

It was the answer they wanted to hear, so they decided to march to the swamp. Pollard must have taken fifty holos along the way. Desmond complained about the heat, the humidity, the terrain, and the insects. Ramona stuck a chip that read the text of a book into her ear and didn’t utter a word until we reached the swamp. Marx just lowered his head and walked.

When we got there we came upon a small herd of herbivores, very impressive-looking beasts, going about five hundred pounds apiece. The males possessed fabulous horns, perhaps sixty inches long, with a triple twist in them. The horns looked like they were made of crystal, and they acted as a prism, separating the sunlight into a series of tiny rainbows.

“My God, look at them!” said Pollard, taking holographs as fast as he could.

“They’re magnificent!” whispered Ramona Desmond.

“I’d like one of those,” said Marx, studying the herd.

“You took the gazelles,” I noted. “Mr. Desmond has first shot.”

“I don’t want it,” said Desmond nervously.

“All right,” I said. “Mrs. Desmond, you have first shot.”

“I’d never kill anything so beautiful,” she replied.

“No,” muttered Desmond so softly that she couldn’t hear him. “You’d just throw them into jail.”

“Then it’s Mr. Marx’s shot,” I said. “I’d suggest you take the fellow on the far right. He doesn’t have the longest horns, but he’s got the best-matched set. Let’s get a little closer.”

I turned to the others as Marx took his rifle from his gunbearer and loaded it. “You stay here.”

I signaled to Chajinka to take a circuitous approach. Marx, displaying the proper crouching walk, followed him, and I brought up the rear. (A hunter learns early on never to get between a client and the game. Either that, or he keeps a prosthetic ear company in business.)

When we’d gotten to within thirty yards, I decided we were close enough and nodded to Marx. He slowly raised his rifle and took aim. I could tell he was going for a heart shot rather than take the chance of ruining the head. It was a good strategy, always assuming that the heart was where he thought it was.

Marx took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and began squeezing the trigger.

And just as he did so, a brilliantly colored avian flew past, shrieking wildly. The homed buck jumped, startled, just as Marx’s rifle exploded. The rest of the herd bolted in all directions at the sound of the shot, and before Marx could get off a second shot the buck bellowed in pain, spun around, and vanished into the nearby bush.

“Come on!” said Marx excitedly, jumping up and running after the buck. “I know I hit him! He won’t get far!”

I grabbed him as he hurtled past. “You’re not going anywhere, Mr. Marx!”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded.

“There’s a large, dangerous, wounded animal in the bush,” I said. “I can’t let you go in after it.”

“I’m as good a shot as you are!” he snapped. “It was just a fluke that that goddamned bird startled me. You know that!”

“Look,” I said. “I’m not thrilled going into heavy bush after a wounded animal that’s carrying a pair of five-foot swords on its head, but that’s what I get paid to do. I can’t look for him and keep an eye on you as well.”

“But—”

“You say you’ve been on safari before,” I said. “That means you know the rules.”

He muttered and he cursed, but he did know the rules, and he rejoined the rest of the party while Chajinka and I vanished into the bush in search of our wounded prey.

The swamp smelled of rotting vegetation. We followed the blood spoor on leaves and bushes through two hundred yards of mud that sucked at the Dabih’s feet and my boots, and then, suddenly, it vanished. I saw a little hillock a few yards off to the right, where the grass was crushed flat, small branches were broken, and flowers were broken off their stems. Chajinka studied the signs for a full minute, then looked up.

“The Snark,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

“He was hiding, watching us,” answered Chajinka. He pointed to the ground. “The wounded animal lay down here. You see the blood? The Snark was over there. Those are his tracks. When the animal lay down, the Snark saw it was too weak to get up again, but still dangerous. He circled behind it. See—here is where he went. Then he leaped upon it and killed it.”

“How?”

Chajinka shrugged. “I cannot tell. But he lifted it and carried it off.”

“Could he lift an animal that big?”

“He did.”

“He can’t be more that a few hundred yards ahead of us,” I said. “What do you think? Can we catch up with him?”

“You and I? Yes.”

Every now and then, when my blood was up, Chajinka had to remind me that I wasn’t hunting for my own pleasure. Yes, was the implication, he and I could catch up with the Snark. Marx might not be a hindrance. But there was no way we could take Pollard and the Desmonds through the swamp, keep an eye out for predators, and hope to make up any ground on the Snark—and of course I couldn’t leave them alone while we went after the Snark with Marx.

“All right,” I said with a sigh. “Let’s get back and tell them what happened.”

Marx went ballistic. He ranted and cursed for a good three minutes, and by the end of it, I felt he was ready to declare a blood feud against this trophy thief.

When he finally calmed down, I left Chajinka behind to see if he could learn anything more about the Snark while the rest of us began marching back to the water hole, where the vehicle was waiting for us.

“We have sailed many months, we have sailed many weeks,

(Four weeks to the month you may mark),

But never as yet (’tis your Captain who speaks)

Have we caught the least glimpse of a Snark!”

Mbele had himself a good laugh when we got back to camp, hot and tired and hungry.

“You keep talking about the Snark as if it exists!” he said in amusement. “It’s an imaginary beast in a children’s poem.”

“Snark is just a convenient name for it,” I said. “We can call it anything you like.”

“Call it absent,” he said. “No one’s seen it.”

“Right,” I said. “And I suppose when you close your eyes, the whole galaxy vanishes.”

“I never thought about it,” admitted Mbele. “But it probably does.” He paused thoughtfully. “At least, I certainly hope so. It makes me feel necessary.”

“Look!” I exploded. “There’s a dead three hundred-pound killer cat out there, and a missing antelope that was even bigger!” I glared at him. “I didn’t kill one and steal the other. Did you?”

He swallowed his next rejoinder and gave me a wide berth for the rest of the day.

Chajinka trotted into camp the next morning and signaled to me. I walked over and joined him.

“Did you learn anything?” I asked.

“It is an interesting animal,” he said.

I grimaced, for as everyone knows, the Dabihs are masters of understatement.

“Come, listen, my men, while I tell you again

The five unmistakable marks

By which you may know, wheresoever you go,

The warranted genuine Snarks.”

I gathered the hunting party around me.

“Well,” I announced, “we know a little more about the Snark now than we did yesterday.” I paused to watch their reactions. Everyone except Desmond seemed interested; Desmond looked like he wished he were anywhere else.

“Chajinka has been to the tree where we tied the dead meat animals,” I continued.

“And?” said Marx.

“The ropes were untied. Not cut or torn apart or bitten through; untied. So we know that the Snark either has fingers, or some damned effective appendages. And some meat was missing from the carcasses.”

“All right,” said Ramona. “We know he can untie knots. What else?”

We know he’s a carnivore,” I said. “We weren’t sure about that yesterday.”

“So what?” asked Marx. “There are millions of carnivores in the galaxy. Nothing unique about that.”

“It means he won’t stray far from the game herds. They’re his supermarket.”

“Maybe he only has to eat once every few months,” said Marx, unimpressed.

“No,” I said. “That’s the third thing we’ve learned: he’s got to eat just about as often as we do.”

“How do we know that?” asked Ramona.

“According to Chajinka, he approached the meat very cautiously, but his tracks show that he trotted away once he’d eaten his fill. The trail disappeared after a mile, but we know that he trotted that whole distance.”

“Ah!” said Ramona. “I see.”

“I sure as hell don’t,” complained her husband.

“Anything that can sustain that pace, that kind of drain on its energy, has to eat just about every day.” I paused. “And we know a fourth thing.”

“What is that?” she asked.

“He’s not afraid of us,” I said. “He had to know we were the ones who killed those meat animals. Our tracks and scent were all over the place, and, of course, there were the ropes. He knows that we’re a party of at least nine—five, if you discount Chajinka and the three gunbearers, and he has no reason to discount them. And yet, hours after learning all that, he hasn’t left the area.” I paused. “That leads to a fifth conclusion. He’s not very bright; he didn’t understand that Marx’s gun was what wounded the animal he killed yesterday—because if he realized we could kill from a distance, he’d be afraid of us.”

“You deduce all that just from a few tracks and the signs that Chajinka saw?” asked Desmond skeptically.

“Reading signs and interpreting what they mean is what hunting’s all about,” I explained. “Shooting is just the final step.”

“So do we go after him now?” asked Marx eagerly.

I shook my head. “I’ve already sent Chajinka back out to see if he can find the creature’s lair. If he’s like most carnivores, he’ll want to lie up after he eats. If we know where to look for him, we’ll save a lot of time and effort. It makes more sense to wait for Chajinka to report back, and then go after the Snark in the morning.”

“It seems so odd,” said Ramona. “We’ve never seen this creature, and yet we’ve already reasoned out that he’s incredibly formidable.”

“Of course he’s formidable,” I said.

“You say that as if everything is formidable,” she said with a condescending smile.

“That’s the first axiom on safari,” I replied. “Everything bites.”

“If this thing is as dangerous as you make it seem,” said Desmond hesitantly, “are we permitted to use more . . . well, sophisticated weapons?”

“Show a little guts, Philemon,” said Marx contemptuously.

“I’m a banker, not a goddamned Alan Quatermain!” shot back Desmond. “If you’re afraid, stay in camp,” said Marx. “Me, I can’t wait to get him in my sights.”

“You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Bell,” persisted Desmond.

Mbele pulled out the Statute Book and began reading aloud. “Unless, in the hunter’s judgment, the weapons you are using are inadequate for killing the prey, you must use the weapons that have been approved for the world in question.”

“So if he presents a serious threat, we can use pulse guns and molecular imploders and the like?”

“Have you ever seen a molecular imploder in action?” I asked. “Aim it at a fifty-story building and you turn the whole thing into pudding in about three seconds.”

“What about pulse guns?” he persisted.

“There’s not a lot of trophy left when one of those babies hits the target,” I said.

“We need something, damn it!” whined Desmond.

“We have more than enough firepower to bring down any animal on this planet,” I said, getting annoyed with him. “I don’t mean to be blunt, but there’s a difference between an inadequate hunter and an inadequate weapon.”

“You can say that again!” muttered Marx.

“That was very blunt, Mr. Bell,” said Desmond, getting up and walking to his Bubble. His wife stared at him expressionlessly, then pulled out her book and began reading.

“That’s what you get for being honest,” said Marx, making no attempt to hide his amusement. “I just hope this Snark is half the creature you make it out to be.”

I’ll settle for half, I thought uneasily.

Chajinka, who was sitting on the hood of the safari vehicle, raised his spear, which was my signal to stop.

He jumped down, bent over, examined the grasses for a few seconds, then trotted off to his left, eyes glued to the ground.

I climbed out and grabbed my rifle.

“You wait here,” I said to the four humans. The Dabih gunbearers, who clung to handles and footholds on the back of the vehicle when it was moving, had released their grips and were now standing just behind it.

“Whose shot is it?” asked Marx.

“Let me think,” I said. “You shot that big buck yesterday, and Mrs. Desmond killed the boar-like thing with the big tusks just before that. So Mr. Desmond has the first shot today.”

“I’m not getting out of the vehicle,” said Desmond.

“It’s against regulations to shoot from the safety of the vehicle,” I pointed out.

“Fuck your regulations and fuck you!” hollered Desmond. “I don’t want the first shot! I don’t want any shot! I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing on this stupid safari!”

“Goddammit, Philemon!” hissed Marx fiercely.

“What is it?” asked Desmond, startled.

“If there was anything there, Mr. Desmond,” I explained, trying to control my temper, “you just gave it more than ample reason to run hell for leather in the opposite direction. You never yell during a hunt.”

I walked away in disgust and joined Chajinka beneath a small tree. He was standing beside a young dead herbivore whose skull had been crushed.

“Snark,” he said, pointing to the skull.

“When?” I asked.

He pulled back the dead animal’s lips to examine its gums, felt the insides of its ears, examined other parts for a few seconds.

“Five hours,” he said. “Maybe six.”

“The middle of the night.”

“Yes.”

“Its habit of getting up late you’ll agree

That it carries too far, when I say

That it frequently breakfasts at five-o’clock tea,

And dines on the following day.”

“Can you pick up his trail?” I asked Chajinka.

He looked around, then gave the Dabih equivalent of a frown. “It vanishes,” he said at last, pointing to a spot ten feet away.

“You mean some animals obliterated his tracks after he made them?”

He shrugged. “No tracks at all. Not his, not anyone’s.”

“Why not?”

He had no answer.

I stared at the ground for a long moment. “Okay,” I said at last. “Let’s get back to the vehicle.”

He resumed his customary position on the hood, while I sat behind the control panel and thought.

“Well?” asked Marx. “Did it have something to do with the Snark?”

“Yeah,” I said, still puzzled by the absence of any tracks. “He made a kill during the night. His prey was an animal built for what I would call evasive maneuvering. That means he’s got excellent nocturnal vision and good motor skills.”

“So he’s a night hunter?” asked Ramona.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” I replied. “He killed the crystal-horned buck at midday, so like most predators he’s also an opportunist; when a meal is there for the taking, he grabs it. Anyway, if we can’t find his lair, we’re probably going to have to build a blind, sit motionless with our guns, hang some fresh bait every evening, and hope it interests him.”

“That’s not real hunting!” scoffed Marx.

“There’s no way we can go chasing after him in the dark,” I responded.

“I’m not chasing anything in the dark!” said Desmond adamantly. “You want to do it, you do it without me.”

“Don’t be such a coward!” said Marx.

“Fuck you, Willard!” Desmond retorted.

“Bold words,” said Marx. “Why don’t you take some of that bravery and aim it at the animals?”

“I hate it here!” snapped Desmond. “I think we should go back to camp.”

“And do what?” asked Marx sarcastically.

“And consider our options,” he replied. “It’s a big planet. Maybe we could take off and land on one of the other continents—one without any Snarks on it.”

“Nonsense!” said Marx. “We came here to hunt big game. Well, now we’ve found it.”

“I don’t know what we’ve found,” said Desmond, halfway between anger and panic, “and neither do you.”

“That’s what makes it such good sport and so exciting,” said Marx. “Exciting is watching sports on the holo,” Desmond shot back. “This is dangerous.”

“Same damned thing,” muttered Marx.

We spent the next two days searching unsuccessfully for any sign of the Snark. For a while I thought he had moved out of the area and considered moving our base camp, but then Chajinka found some relatively fresh tracks, perhaps three hours old. So we didn’t move the camp after all—but we also didn’t find the creature.

Then, on the third afternoon of the search, as we were taking a break, sitting in the shade of a huge tree with purple and gold flowers, we heard a strange sound off in the distance.

“Thunder?” asked Marx.

“Doesn’t seem likely,” replied Pollard. “There’s not a cloud in the sky.”

“Well, it’s something,” continued Marx.

Ramona frowned. “And it’s getting closer. Well, louder, anyway.”

On a hunch, I set my lenses to Telescopic, and it was a damned lucky thing I did.

“Everybody! Up into the tree—fast!” I shouted.

“But—”

“No arguments! Get going!”

They weren’t the most agile tree-climbers I’d ever encountered, but when they were finally able to see what I had seen, they managed to get clear of the ground in one hell of a hurry. A minute later a few thousand Marx’s Gazelles thundered past.

I waited for the dust to settle, then lowered myself to the ground and scanned the horizon.

“Okay, it’s safe to come down now,” I announced.

“Why didn’t we climb into the vehicle?” asked Ramona, getting out of the tree and checking her hands for cuts.

“It’s an open vehicle, Mrs. Desmond,” I pointed out. “You could have wound up with a fractured skull as they jumped over it—or with a gazelle in your lap if one of them was a poor jumper.”

“Point taken.”

“What the hell would cause something like that?” asked Pollard, staring after the stampeding herd as he brushed himself off.

“I’d say a predator made a sloppy kill, or maybe blew one entirely.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because this is the first time we’ve seen a stampede . . . so we can assume that when they’re killed quickly and efficiently, the gazelles just move out of the predator’s range and then go back to grazing. It’s when the predator misses his prey, or wounds it, and then races after it into the middle of the herd that they panic.”

“You think it’s one of the big cats?” asked Pollard.

“It’s possible.”

“I’d love to get some holos of those cats on a kill.”

“You may get your wish, Mr. Pollard,” I said. “We’ll backtrack to where the stampede started and hope we get lucky.”

“That suits me just fine,” said Marx, patting his rifle.

We headed southwest in the vehicle until the terrain became too rough, then left it behind and started walking as the landscape changed from hilly and tree-covered to heavily forested. Chajinka trotted ahead of us, eyes on the ground, spotting things even I couldn’t see, and finally he came to a stop.

“What is it?” I asked, catching up with him.

He pointed straight ahead into the dense foliage. “He is there.”

“He?”

“The Snark,” he said, pointing to a single track.

“How deep is the cover?” I asked. “How do you know he didn’t run right through it?”

He pointed to the bushes, which were covered with thorns. “He cannot run through this without pain.”

“You’ve never seen him,” said Ramona, joining us. “How do you know?”

“If it did not rip his flesh, he would be a forest creature, created by God to live here,” answered Chajinka, as if explaining it to a child. “But we know that he hunts plains game. A forest dweller with thick, heavy skin and bones could not move swiftly enough. So this is not his home—it is his hiding place.”

I thought there was a good chance that it was more than his hiding place, that it could very well be his fortress. It was damned near impenetrable, and the forest floor was covered with dry leaves, so no one was going to sneak up on him without giving him plenty of warning.

“What are we waiting for?” asked Marx, approaching with Desmond. He stopped long enough to take his rifle from his gunbearer.

“We’re waiting until I can figure out the best way to go about it,” I responded.

“We walk in and blow him away,” said Marx. “What’s so hard about that?”

I shook my head. “This is his terrain. He knows every inch of it. You’re going to make a lot of noise walking in there, and the way the upper terraces of the trees are intertwined, I’ve got a feeling that it could be dark as night six hundred yards into the forest.”

“So we’ll use infra-red scopes on our guns,” said Marx.

I kept staring at the thick foliage. “I don’t like it,” I said. “He’s got every advantage.”

“But we’ve got the weapons,” persisted Marx.

“With minimal visibility and maneuverability, they won’t do you much good.”

“Bullshit!” spat Marx. We’re wasting time. Let’s go in after him.”

“The four of you are my responsibility,” I replied. “I can’t risk your safety by letting you go in there. Within a couple of minutes you could be out of touch with me and with each other. You’ll be making noise with every step you take, and if I’m right about the light, before long you could be standing right next to him without seeing him. And we haven’t explored any Dodgson forests yet—he might not be the only danger. There could be everything from arboreal killer cats to poisonous insects to fifty-foot-long snakes with an attitude.”

“So what do you propose?” asked Marx.

“A blind makes the most sense,” I said. “But it could take half a day to build one, and who the hell knows where he’ll be by then?” I paused. “All right. The three of you with weapons will spread out. Mr. Pollard, stand well behind them. Chajinka and I will go into the bush and try to flush him out.”

“I thought you said it was too dangerous,” said Ramona.

“Let me amend that,” I answered. “It’s too dangerous for amateurs.”

“If there’s a chance that he can harm you, why don’t we just forget about it?” she continued.

“I appreciate your concern,” I began, “but—”

“I’m not being totally altruistic. What happens to us if he kills you?”

“You’ll return to base camp and tell Mbele what happened. He’ll radio a subspace message to headquarters, and Silinger & Mahr will decide whether to give you a refund or take you to another planet with a new hunter.”

“You make it sound so . . . so businesslike,” she said distastefully.

“It’s my business,” I replied.

“Why did you ever become a hunter?”

I shrugged. “Why did you become a judge?”

“I have a passion for order,” she said.

“So do I,” I replied.

“You find order in killing things?”

“I find order in Nature. Death is just a part of it.” I paused. “Now, Mr. Marx,” I said, turning back to him, “I want you to . . .”

He wasn’t there.

“Where the hell did he go?” I demanded.

No one seemed to know, not even Chajinka. Then his gunbearer approached me.

“Boss Marx went there.” He pointed to the forest, then ruefully held up the back-up rifle. “He did not wait for me.”

“Shit!” I muttered. “It’s bad enough that I’ve got to go in after the Snark! Now I stand a hell of a good chance of getting blown away by that macho bastard!”

“Why would he shoot you?” asked Ramona.

“He’ll hear me before he sees me,” I answered. “He’s running on adrenaline. He’ll be sure I’m the Snark.”

“Then stay out here.”

“I wish I could,” I said truthfully. “But it’s my job to protect him whether he wants me to or not.”

That particular argument became academic about five seconds later, when we heard a shot, and then a long, agonized scream.

A human scream.

“You two stand about two hundred yards apart,” I said to the Desmonds. “Shoot anything that comes out of there that doesn’t look like me or a Dabih!” Then, to Chajinka: “Let’s go!”

The Dabih led the way into the forest. Then, as it started getting thicker and darker, we lost Marx’s trail. “We’re more likely to find him if we split up,” I whispered. “You go left, I’ll go right.”

I kept my gun at the ready, wishing I’d inserted my infra-red lenses into my eyes that morning. After a minute I couldn’t hear Chajinka any more, which meant when I finally heard footsteps I was going to have to hold my fire until I could tell whether it was the Dabih or the Snark.

It’s no secret that hunters hate going into the bush after a wounded animal. Well, let me tell you something: going into the bush after an unwounded animal is even less appealing. Sweat ran down into my eyes, insects crawled inside my shoes and socks and up my shirtsleeves, and my gun seemed to have tripled in weight. I could barely see ten feet in front of me, and if Marx had yelled for help from fifty yards away, I probably would be five minutes locating him.

But Marx was past yelling for help. I was suddenly able to make out the figure of a man lying on the ground. I approached him cautiously, seeing Snarks—whatever they looked like—behind every tree.

Finally I reached him and knelt down to examine him. His throat had been slashed open, and his innards were pouring out of a gaping hole in his belly. He was probably dead before he hit the ground. “Chajinka!” I hollered. There was no response.

I called his name every thirty seconds, and finally, after about five minutes, I heard a body shuffling through the thick bush, its translated, monotone voice saying, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

“Get over here!” I said.

He joined me a moment later. “Snark,” he said, looking at Marx’s corpse.

“For sure?” I asked.

“For sure.”

“All right,” I said. “Help me carry his body back out of here.”

Then, suddenly, we heard two rifle shots.

“Damn!” I bellowed. “He’s broken out!”

“Perhaps he will be dead,” said Chajinka, leading the way back out of the forest. “There were two shots.”

When we finally got into the open, we found Philemon Desmond sitting on the ground, hyperventilating, his whole body shaking. Ramona and Pollard stood a few yards away, staring at him—she with open contempt, he with a certain degree of sympathy.

“What happened?” I demanded.

“He burst out of the woods and came right at me!” said Desmond in a shaky voice.

“We heard two shots. Did you hit him?”

“I don’t think so.” He began shaking all over. “No, I definitely didn’t.”

“How the hell could you miss?” I shouted. “He couldn’t have been twenty yards away!”

“I’ve never killed anything before!” Desmond yelled back.

I scanned the hilly countryside. There was no sign of the Snark, and there had to be a good five hundred hiding places just within my field of vision.

“Wonderful!” I muttered. “Just wonderful!”

The Bellman looked uffish, and wrinkled his brow.

“If only you’d spoken before!

It’s excessively awkward to mention it now,

With the Snark, so to speak, at the door!”

We dragged Marx’s body out of the forest and loaded it into the back of the safari vehicle.

“My God!” whined Desmond. “He’s dead! He was the only one of us who knew the first damned thing about hunting, and he’s dead! We’ve got to get out of here!”

“He was also a friend,” said Ramona. “You might spare a little of your self-pity for him.”

“Ramona!” said Pollard harshly.

Tm sorry,” she said with a total lack of sincerity.

Pollard had been staring at Marx’s body since we brought it out of the forest. “Jesus, he’s a mess!” he said at last. “Did he suffer much?”

“No,” I assured him. “Not with wounds like those—he would have gone into shock immediately.”

“Well, we can be thankful for that, I suppose,” said Pollard. He finally tore his eyes away from the body and turned to me. “What now?”

“Now it’s not a matter of sport any more,” I said, morbidly wondering whether the authorities would revoke my license for losing a client, or simply suspend it. “He’s killed one of us. He’s got to die.”

“I thought that was the whole purpose of the safari.”

“The purpose was a sporting stalk, with the odds all on the game’s side. Now the purpose is to kill him as quickly and efficiently as we can.”

“That sounds like revenge,” noted Ramona.

“Practicality,” I corrected her. “Now that he knows how easy it is to kill an armed man, we don’t want him to get into the habit.”

“How do you stop him?”

“There are ways,” I said. “I’ll use every trick I know—and I know a lifetime’s worth of them—before he has a chance to kill again.” I paused. “Now, so I’ll know which traps to set, I want you to tell me what he actually looks like.”

“Like a huge red ape with big glaring eyes,” said Pollard.

“No,” said Ramona. “He looked more like a brown bear, but with longer legs.”

“He was sleek,” offered Pollard.

Ramona disagreed again. “No, he was shaggy.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered. “I trust you at least took a couple of holos, Mr. Pollard?”

He shook his head. “I was so surprised when he burst out of there that I totally forgot the camera,” he admitted shamefacedly.

“Well, that’s an enormous help,” I said disgustedly. I turned to Desmond. “How about you?”

“I don’t know,” he whimpered. Suddenly he shuddered. “He looked like Death!”

“You must forgive Philemon,” said Ramona, with an expression that said she wasn’t about to forgive him. “He’s really very good at investments and mergers and even hostile takeovers. He’s just not very competent at physical things.” She patted his medal. “Except running.”

Marx had a wife and three grown children back on Roosevelt HI, and his friends felt sure they’d want him shipped home, so we put his body in a vacuum container and stuck it in the cargo hold.

After that was done, Chajinka and I went to work. We set seven traps, then went back to camp and waited.

Early the next morning we went out to see what we’d accomplished.

That was when I learned that the Snark had a sardonic sense of humor.

Each of the traps contained a dead animal. But lest we mistakenly think that we had anything to do with it, each one had its head staved in.

The son of a bitch was actually mocking us.

“For the Snark’s a peculiar creature, that won’t

Be caught in a commonplace way.

Do all that you know, and try all that you don’t:

Not a chance must be wasted today!”

I awoke the next morning to the sound of vaguely familiar alien jabbering. It took me a minute to clear my head and identify what I was hearing. Then I raced out of my Bubble and almost bumped into Chajinka, who was running to meet me.

“What’s going on?” I demanded.

He responded in his native tongue.

“Where’s your t-pack?” I asked.

He jabbered at me. I couldn’t understand a word of it.

Finally he pulled me over to the area where the Dabihs ate and slept, and pointed to the shapeless pile of metal and plastic and computer chips. Sometime during the night the Snark had silently entered the camp and destroyed all the t-packs.

I kept wondering: was he just lucky in his choice, or could he possibly have known how much we needed them?

Mbele, awakened by the same sounds, quickly emerged from his Bubble. “What the hell is going on?” he asked.

“See for yourself,” I said.

“Jesus!” he said. “Can any of the Dabihs speak Terran?”

I shook my head. “If they could, they wouldn’t need t-packs, would they?”

“Was it the Snark?”

I grimaced. “Who else?”

“So what do you do now?”

“First, I try to figure out whether it was mischief or malice, and whether he had any idea what havoc it would cause.”

“You think he might be a little smarter than your average bear in the woods?”

“I don’t know. He lives like an animal, he acts like an animal, and he hunts like an animal. But in a short space of time he’s killed Marx, and he’s seen to it that the five remaining Men can’t communicate with the twelve Dabihs.” I forced a wry smile to my mouth. “That’s not bad for a dumb animal, is it?”

“You’d better wake the others and let them know what’s happened,” said Mbele.

“I know,” I said. I kicked one of the broken t-packs up against a tree. “Shit!”

I woke the Desmonds and Pollard and told them what had occurred. I thought Philemon Desmond might faint. The others were a little more useful. “How long ago did this happen?” asked Pollard.

“Chajinka could probably give you a more accurate estimate, but I can’t speak to him. My best guess is about two hours.”

“So if we go after him, he’s two hours ahead of us?”

“That’s right.”

“We’d better kill him quickly,” said Ramona. “He could come back any time, now that he knows where our camp is.”

“Give me a laser rifle,” added Pollard. “I haven’t fired a gun since I was a kid at camp, but how the hell hard can it be to sweep the area with a beam?”

“You look a little under the weather, Mr. Desmond,” I said. “Perhaps you’d like to stay in camp.”

Actually, he looked incredibly grateful for the out I’d given him. Then his wife ruined it all by adding that he’d just be in the way.

“I’m going,” he said.

“It’s really not necessary,” I said.

“I paid. I’m going.”

And that was that.

“There’s no sense taking gunbearers,” I said as the four of us walked to the safari vehicle. “We can’t talk to them, and besides, the rules don’t apply in this case. If we see him, we’ll take him from the safety of the vehicle, and it’ll give you something solid to rest your rifles on while you’re sweeping the area.” They climbed onto their seats. “Wait here a minute.”

I went back, found Mbele, and told him that we were going after the Snark, and that he should use the Dabihs to set up some kind of defensive perimeter. Then I signaled to Chajinka to join me. A moment later he had taken his customary position on the hood of the vehicle, and we were off in pursuit of the Snark.

The trail led due northeast, past the savannah, toward rolling country and a large, lightly forested valley. Two or three times I thought we’d spot him just over the next hill, but he was a cagey bastard, and by midafternoon we still hadn’t sighted him.

As dusk fell Chajinka couldn’t read the signs from the vehicle, so he jumped off and began trotting along, eyes glued to the ground. When we entered the valley, he was following the trail so slowly that Ramona and Pollard got out and walked along with him while I followed in the vehicle and Desmond stayed huddled in the back of it.

But the valley grew narrow and narrower still,

And the evening got darker and colder,

Till (merely from nervousness, not from good will)

They marched along shoulder to shoulder.

Night fell with no sign of the Snark. I didn’t want to chance damaging the vehicle by driving over that terrain in the dark, so we slept until sunrise, and then drove back to base camp, reaching it just before noon.

Nobody was prepared for the sight that awaited us.

The eleven Dabihs we’d left behind were sprawled dead on the ground in grotesquely contorted positions, each with his throat shredded or his intestines ripped out. Dismembered arms and legs were everywhere, and the place was swimming in blood. Dead staring eyes greeted us accusingly, as if to say: “Where were you when we needed you?”

The stench was worse than the sight. Ramona gagged and began vomiting. Desmond whimpered and curled up into a fetal ball on the floor of the vehicle so he wouldn’t have to look at the carnage. Pollard froze like a statue; then, after a moment, he too began vomiting.

I’d seen a lot of death in my time. So had Chajinka. But neither of us had ever seen anything remotely like this. There hadn’t been much of a struggle. It doesn’t take a four-hundred-pound predator very long to wipe out a bunch of unarmed ninety-pound Dabihs. My guess was that it was over in less than a minute.

“What the hell happened here?” asked Pollard, gesturing weakly toward all the blood-soaked dismembered bodies when he finally was able to speak.

“The method employed I would gladly explain,

While I have it so clear in my head.

If I had but the time and you had but the brain—

But much yet remains to be said.”

“Where’s Mbele?” I asked, finally getting past the shock of what I was looking at and realizing that he wasn’t among them.

Before anyone could answer, I raced to the hatch and entered the ship, rifle at the ready, half-expecting to be pounced on by the Snark at any moment.

I found what was left of Captain Mbele in the control room. His head had been torn from his body, and his stomach was ripped open. The floor, the bulkheads, even the viewscreen were all drenched with his blood.

“Is he there?” called Ramona from the ground.

“Stay out!” I yelled.

Then I searched every inch of the ship, looking for the Snark. I could feel my heart pounding as I explored each section, but there was no sign of him.

I went back to the control room and began checking it over thoroughly. The Snark didn’t know what made the ship work, or even what it was, but he knew it belonged to his enemies, and he did a lot of damage. Some of it—to the pilot’s chair and the DeepSleep pods and the auxiliary screens—didn’t matter. Some of it—to the fusion ignition and the navigational computer and the subspace radio—mattered a lot.

I continued going through the ship, assessing the damage. He’d ripped up a couple of beds in his fury, but the most serious destruction was to the galley. I had a feeling that nothing in it would ever work again.

I went back outside and confronted the party.

“Did you find Captain Mbele?” asked Ramona.

“Yes. He’s in the ship.” She started walking to the hatch. I grabbed her arm. “Trust me: you don’t want to see him.”

“That’s it!” screamed Desmond. “We were crazy to come here! I want out! Not tomorrow, not later! Now!”

“I second the motion,” agreed Ramona. “Let’s get the hell off this planet before it kills any more of us.”

“That’s not possible,” I said grimly. “The Snark did some serious damage to the ship.”

“How long will it take to fix it?” asked Pollard.

“If I was a skilled spacecraft mechanic with a full set of tools and all the replacement parts I needed, maybe a week,” I answered. “But I’m a hunter who doesn’t know how to fix a broken spaceship. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

“You mean we’re stranded?” asked Ramona.

“For the time being,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘for the time being’ ?” shrieked Desmond hysterically. “We’re here forever! We’re dead! We’re all dead!”

I grabbed him and shook him, and when he wouldn’t stop screaming I slapped him, hard, on the face.

“That won’t help!” I said angrily.

“We’ll never get off this goddamned dirtball!” he bleated.

“Yes we will,” I said. “Mbele had to check in with Silinger & Mahr every week. When they don’t hear from us, they’ll send a rescue party. All we have to do is stay alive until they get here.”

“They’ll never come!” moaned Desmond. We’re all going to die!”

“Stop your whining!” I snapped. This is just what I needed now, I thought disgustedly; we’re surrounded by dismembered corpses, the very ground is soaked with blood, the Snark’s probably still nearby, and this asshole is losing it. We have work to do!” They all looked at me. “I want the three of you to start digging a mass grave for the eleven Dabihs. When that’s done, I want us to burn everything—every tree, every bush, everything—to get rid of the smell of blood so it doesn’t attract any predators. What we can’t burn, we’ll bury.”

“And what are you going to be doing?” demanded Desmond, who had at least regained some shred of composure.

“I’m going to bring what’s left of Mbele out of the ship and clean up all the blood,” I said bluntly. “Unless you’d rather do it.” I thought he was going to faint. “Then, if I can make myself understood to Chajinka, he and I will try to secure the area.”

“How?” asked Ramona.

“We’ve got some devices that are sensitive to movement and body heat. Maybe we can rig up some kind of alarm system. Chajinka and I can hide them around the perimeter of the camp. If we finish before you do, we’ll pitch in and help with the grave. Now get busy—the sooner we finish, the sooner we can lock ourselves in the ship and decide on our next move.”

“Is there a next move?” asked Pollard.

“Always,” I replied.

It took me almost four hours to clean Mbele’s blood and innards from the control room. I put what was left of him into a vacuum pouch, then hefted it to my shoulder and carried it outside.

I found Chajinka helping with the grave. I called him over and showed him, with an elaborate pantomime, what I had in mind, and a few moments later we were planting the sensing devices around the perimeter of our camp. I saw no reason to stay in the Bubbles with such a dangerous enemy on the loose, so I collapsed them and moved them back into the cargo hold. The grave still wasn’t done, so Chajinka and I helped finish the job. Desmond wouldn’t touch any of the corpses, and Ramona looked like she was going to get sick again, so the Dabih, Pollard, and I dragged the corpses and spare body parts to the grave, I added the pouch containing Mbele’s remains, and after we four humans and Chajinka filled it in, I read the Bible over it.

“Now what?” asked Ramona, dirty and on the verge of physical collapse. “Now we burn everything, bury any remaining dried blood, and then we move into the ship,” I said.

“And just wait to be rescued?”

I shook my head. “It could be weeks, even a month, before a rescue party arrives. We’re going to need meat, and since we’ve no way to refrigerate it with the galley destroyed, it means we’ll probably have to go hunting every day, or at least every other day.”

“I see,” she said.

“And I’m going to kill the Snark,” I said.

“Why don’t we just wait for the rescue party and not take any chances?” suggested Ramona fearfully.

“It’s killed thirteen beings who were under my protection,” I said grimly. “I’m going to kill him if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Maybe Philemon should give you his laser rifle,” Ramona suggested. “He’s not very good with it anyway.”

Desmond glared at her, but made no reply.

“He may need it,” I said. “Besides, I’m happy with my own weapon.”

“Where will you hunt for it?” asked Pollard.

“Right in this general area,” I answered. “He has no reason to leave it.”

“We can’t just sit around like bait and wait for him!” whined Desmond. “In all the time we’ve been on the planet you’ve never even seen him—but he’s killed Marx and Mbele and our Dabihs. He conies into camp whenever he wants! He sabotages our t-packs and our ship! We’ll need an army to kill him!”

“If he comes back, you’ll be safe inside the ship,” I said.

“Locking himself in the ship didn’t help Captain Mbele,” noted Ramona.

“He didn’t close the hatch. As I read the signs, he saw what was happening and raced into the ship for a gun. The Snark caught him before he found it.” I paused. “He knew better than to be out here without a weapon.”

“So now it’s his fault that this monster killed him?” shouted Desmond. “Let’s not blame the hunter who fucked up! Let’s blame the victim!”

That’s when I lost it. “One more word out of you and there’ll be another killing!” I shouted back at him.

Pollard stepped between us. “Stop it!” he snapped. “The creature’s out there! Don’t do his work for him!”

We both calmed down after that, and finally went into the ship. There was no food, but everyone was so physically and emotionally exhausted that it didn’t matter. Half an hour later we were all sound asleep.

Each morning Chajinka and I walked across the scorched, empty field that had so recently been covered with vegetation. We would climb into the safari vehicle and prepare to go out to bag the day’s food—and even though there was no longer any place to hide near the ship, I constantly had the uneasy feeling that he was watching us, measuring our strength, biding his time.

We never went more than four miles from camp. I didn’t shoot the choicest animals, just the closest. Then we’d cut off the strips of meat we thought we’d need and leave the carcass for the scavengers. We’d return to camp, and after breakfast we’d set out on foot to look for signs of the Snark.

I knew he was nearby, knew it as surely as I knew my own name, but we couldn’t find any physical sign of him. I warned the others not to leave the ship without their weapons, preferably not to leave it at all, and under no circumstances were they to go more than thirty yards away from it unless they were in my company.

By the fifth day after the massacre, everyone was getting tired of red meat, so I decided to take Chajinka down to the river and see if we could spear a few fish.

“Can I come with you?” asked Ramona, appearing just inside the hatch. “I’m starting to feel distinctly claustrophobic.”

I couldn’t see any reason why not. Hell, she was safer with Chajinka and me than back at the ship.

“Bring your rifle,” I said.

She disappeared inside the ship, then emerged with a laser rifle a moment later.

“I’m ready.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

We marched through heavy bush to the river.

“All the local animals must come down here to drink,” noted Ramona. “Wouldn’t it be easier to do your hunting right here rather than go out in the safari vehicle each morning?”

“We’d attract too many scavengers,” I explained. “And since Chajinka and I come down here twice a day to bring water back to the ship, why cause ourselves any problems?”

“I see.” She paused. “Are there any carnivores in the river—the kind that might eat a human?”

“I haven’t seen any,” I replied. “But I sure as hell wouldn’t recommend taking a swim.”

When we reached the river, Chajinka grabbed a large branch and beat the water. When he was sure it was safe, he waded out, thigh-deep, and held his spear above his head, poised to strike, while we watched him in total silence. He stayed motionless for almost two full minutes, then suddenly stabbed the water and came away with a large, wriggling fish.

He grinned and said something that I couldn’t understand, then clambered onto the bank, picked up a rock, and smashed it down on the fish’s head. It stopped moving, and he went back into the water.

“Two more and we’ll have our dinner,” I remarked.

“He’s really something,” she said. “Where did you find him?”

“I inherited him.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“He was the tracker for the hunter I apprenticed under,” I explained. “When he retired, he left me his client list—and Chajinka.”

Suddenly there was a yell of triumph from Chajinka. He held up his spear, and there was a huge fish, maybe twenty-five pounds, squirming at the end of it. The Dabih himself didn’t weigh much more than eighty-five pounds, the current was strong and the footing was slippery. Suddenly he fell over backward and vanished beneath the surface of the water.

He emerged again a second later, but without the spear and the fish. I saw them floating downstream a good ten yards from him. There was no sense telling him where to look; he couldn’t understand a word I said without a t-pack. So I waded into the water and went after the spear myself. It became chest-deep very quickly, and I had to fight the current, but I finally reached the spear and waded back to shore. Chajinka climbed out a moment later with an embarrassed grin on his face. He made another incomprehensible comment, then brained the fish as he had done with the first one.

“See?” I said sardonically. “Even fishing can be exciting when you’re on safari.”

There was no answer. I spun around. Ramona Desmond was nowhere to be seen.

So the Snark pronounced sentence, the Judge being quite

Too nervous to utter a word.

When it rose to its feet, there was silence like night,

And the fall of a pin might be heard.

I squatted down next to her corpse. There was no blood; he’d noiselessly broken her neck and left her where she’d fallen.

“He was watching us the whole time,” I said furiously. “He waited until she was alone, then grabbed her and pulled her into the bush.” A chilling thought occurred to me. “I wonder who’s hunting whom?”

Chajinka muttered something incomprehensible.

“All right,” I said at last. “Let’s take her back to camp.”

I lifted Ramona’s body to my shoulder and signaled him to follow me. Desmond raced out of the ship when he saw us. He began flagellating himself and pulling tufts of his hair out, screaming nonsense words at the top of his lungs.

“What the hell is happening?” asked Pollard, clambering out through the hatch. Then he saw the body. He had to work to keep his voice under control. “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” he kept repeating. When he’d finally calmed down, he said, “It’s more than an animal! It’s like some vengeful alien god come to life!”

Chajinka went into the cargo hold and emerged with a shovel.

Pollard stared at Desmond, who was still raving. “I’ll help with the grave.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I think I’d better get Desmond to his cabin and give him a sedative.”

I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder.

“It was your fault!” he screamed. “You were supposed to protect her and you let it kill her!”

I couldn’t deny it, so I just kept urging him gently toward the ship.

And then, between one second and the next, he snapped. I could see it in his face. His eyes went wide, the muscles in his jaw began twitching, even the tenor of his voice changed.

“That thing is going to learn what it means to kill the wife of the most powerful man on Far London!” He looked off into the bush and hollered: “I’m Philemon Desmond, goddammit, and I’m through being terrified by some ignorant fucking beast! Do you hear me? It’s over! You’re dead meat!”

“Come on, Mr. Desmond,” I said softly, pushing him toward the ship.

“Who the hell are you?” he demanded, and I could tell that he really didn’t recognize me.

I was about to humor him with an answer when everything went black and the ground came up to meet me.

And the Banker, inspired with a courage so new

It was a matter for general remark,

Rushed madly ahead and was lost to their view

In his zeal to discover the Snark.

Pollard sloshed some water on my face. I gasped for breath, then sat up and put a hand to my head. It came away covered with blood.

“Are you all right?” he asked, kneeling down next to me, and I saw that Chajinka was behind him.

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “We were just starting to dig the grave when I heard Desmond suddenly stop gibbering. Then he whacked you on the head with something, and ran off.”

“I never saw it coming,” I groaned, blinking my eyes furiously. “Where did he go?”

“I don’t know.” He pointed to the southwest. “That way, I think.”

“Shit!” I said. “The Snark is still in the area!”

I tried to get to my feet, but was overwhelmed by pain and dizziness, and sat back down, hard.

“Take it easy,” he said. “You’ve probably got a hell of a concussion. Where’s the first aid kit? Maybe I can at least stop the bleeding.”

I told him where to find it, then concentrated on trying to focus my eyes. When Pollard returned and began working on my head, I asked, “Did you see if he at least took his laser rifle with him?”

“If he didn’t have it when he hit you, he didn’t stop to get it.”

“Goddammit!”

“I guess that means he doesn’t have it.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered, wincing as he did something to the back of my head. “So he’s unarmed, running through the bush, and screaming at the top of his lungs.”

“All done,” said Pollard, standing up. “It’s not a pretty job, but at least the bleeding’s stopped. How do you feel?”

“Groggy,” I said. “Help me up.”

Once I was on my feet, I looked around. “Where’s my rifle?”

“Right here,” said Pollard, picking it up and handing it to me. “But you’re in no shape to go after Desmond.”

“I’m not going after Desmond,” I mumbled. “I’m going after him!” I signaled Chajinka to join me and set off unsteadily to the southwest. “Lock yourself in the ship.”

“I’ll finish burying Ramona first.”

“Don’t!”

“But—”

“Unless you’re prepared to fend him off with a shovel if he shows up, do what I said.”

“I can’t leave her body out for the scavengers,” Pollard protested.

“Take her with you. Spray her with the preservatives we use for trophies and stash her in the cargo hold. We’ll bury her when I get back.”

“If you get back,” he corrected me. “You look like you can barely stand on your feet.”

“I’ll be back,” I promised him. “I’m still a hunter, and he’s still just an animal.”

“Yeah—he’s just an animal. That’s why there’s just you, me and Chajinka left alive.”

Desmond didn’t get very far—not that I ever expected him to. We found him half a mile away, his skull crushed. I carried him back to camp and buried him next to his wife.

“That bastard’s been one step ahead of us from the start,” said Pollard bitterly as we sat down next to the ship and slaked our thirst with some lukewarm water. Chajinka sat a few yards away, motionless as a statue, watching and listening for any sign of the Snark.

“He’s smarter than I thought,” I admitted. “Or luckier.”

“Nothing is that lucky,” said Pollard. “He must be intelligent.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed.

Pollard’s eyes went wide. “Wait a minute!” he said sharply. “If you knew he was intelligent, what the hell were we doing hunting him in the first place?”

“There’s a difference between intelligence and sentience,” I said. “We know he’s intelligent. We don’t know that he’s sentient.”

He looked puzzled. “I thought they were the same thing.”

I shook my head. “Back on Earth, chimpanzees were intelligent enough to create crude tools, and to pass that knowledge on from one generation to the next—but no one ever claimed they were sentient. The fact that the Snark can hide his trail, spot my traps and elude us makes him intelligent. It doesn’t make him sentient.”

“On the other hand, it doesn’t prove he’s not sentient,” said Pollard stubbornly.

“No, it doesn’t.”

“So what do we do?”

“We kill him,” I answered.

“Even if he’s sentient?”

“What do you do when someone murders fifteen sentient beings?” I said. “If he’s a Man, you execute him. If he’s an animal, you track him down and kill him. Either way, the result is the same.”

“All right,” said Pollard dubiously. “We kill him. How?”

“We leave the ship and go after him.”

“Why?” he demanded. We’re safe in the ship!”

“Tell that to Mbele and the Desmonds and the Dabihs,” I shot back. “As long as we stay here, he knows where we are and we don’t know where he is. That means he’s the hunter and we’re the prey. If we leave camp and pick up his trail before he picks up ours, we go back to being the hunters again.”

I got to my feet. “In fact, the sooner we start, the better.”

He wasn’t happy about it, but he had no choice but to come along, since the alternative was to remain behind alone. After we loaded the vehicle I patted the hood, waited for Chajinka to jump onto it, and then we drove to the spot where we’d found Desmond’s body.

The Dabih picked up the trail, and we began tracking the Snark. I wanted him so bad I could taste it. It wasn’t just revenge for all the Men and Dabihs he’d killed. It wasn’t even a matter of professional pride. It was because I knew this was my last hunt, that I’d never get my license back after losing fifteen sentient beings who were under my protection.

The trail led back to the camp, where the Snark had watched us bury Desmond’s body. It had kept out of sight until we drove off, and then began moving in a northwesterly direction. We tracked it until late afternoon, when we found ourselves about eight miles from the ship.

“There’s no sense going back for the night,” I told Pollard. “We might never pick up the trail again.”

“Isn’t he likely to double back to the camp?”

“Not while we’re out here, he isn’t,” I said with absolute certainty. “This isn’t a hunt any longer—it’s a war. Neither of us will quit until the other’s dead.”

He looked at me much the way I’d looked at Desmond earlier in the day. Finally he spoke up: “We can’t track him at night.”

“I know,” I replied. “We’ll each keep watch for three hours—you, me, and Chajinka—and we’ll start again as soon as it’s light enough.”

I sat the first watch, and I was so keyed up that I couldn’t get to sleep, so I sat through Pollard’s watch as well before I woke Chajinka and managed a three-hour nap. As soon as it was light, we started following the trail again.

By noon we were approaching a small canyon. Then, suddenly, I saw a flicker of motion off in the distance. I stopped the vehicle and activated my Telescopic lenses.

He was more than a mile away, and he had his back to us, but I knew I’d finally gotten my first look at the Snark.

Erect and sublime, for one moment of time,

In the next, that wild figure they saw

(As if stung by a spasm) plunge into a chasm,

While they waited and listened in awe.

I drove to the edge of the canyon. Chajinka hopped off the hood, and Pollard and I joined him a moment later.

“You’re sure you saw him?” asked Pollard.

“I’m sure,” I said. “Bipedal. Rust-colored. Looks almost like a cross between a bear and a gorilla, at least from this distance.”

“Yeah, that’s him all right.” He peered down into the canyon. “And he climbed down there?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“I assume we’re going after him?”

“There’s no reason to believe he’ll come out anywhere near here,” I said. “If we wait, we’ll lose him.”

“It looks pretty rocky,” he said. “Can we pick up his trail?”

“Chajinka will find it.”

Pollard sighed deeply. “What the hell,” he said with a shrug. “I’m not going to wait here alone while the two of you go after him. I figure I’ll be safer with you—providing I don’t break my neck on the terrain.”

I motioned for Chajinka to lead the way down, since he was far more sure-footed than any human. He walked along the edge of the precipice for perhaps fifty yards, then came to a crude path we were able to follow for the better part of an hour. Then we were on the canyon floor next to a narrow stream where we slaked our thirst, hoping the water wouldn’t make us too sick, as we’d left the irradiation gear back at the ship.

We rested briefly, then took up the hunt again. Chajinka was able to find a trail where I would have sworn none existed. By early afternoon, the floor of the canyon was no longer flat, and we had to follow a winding path over and around a series of rock formations. Pollard was game, but he was out of shape. He kept falling behind, actually dropping out of sight a couple of times, which forced us to stop and wait for him to catch up.

When he dropped behind yet again, I wanted to ask him if he needed a break. I didn’t dare shout and give away our position to the Snark, so I compromised by signaling Chajinka to slow his pace until Pollard caught up with us.

He didn’t—and after a few minutes we went back to see what was the matter.

I couldn’t find him. It was like he had vanished off the face of the planet.

They hunted till darkness came on, but they found

Not a button, or feather, or mark,

By which they could tell that they stood on the ground

Where the Baker had met with the Snark.

We spent half an hour looking for Pollard. There was no trace of him, and eventually we were forced to admit that somehow the Snark had turned back on his trail and circled around us or hid and waited for us to pass by. Either way, it was obvious that he’d managed to get Pollard.

I knew it was futile to keep looking for him, so I signaled Chajinka to continue searching for the Snark. We hiked over the rocky canyon floor until at last we came to a steep wall.

“We go up, or we go back,” I said, looking at the wall. “Which will it be?”

He stared at me expectantly, waiting for me to signal him which way to go.

I looked back the way we’d come, then up in the direction of the path we were following—

—and as I looked up, I saw a large object hurtling down toward me!

I pushed Chajinka out of the way and threw myself to my left, rolling as I hit the ground. The object landed five feet away with a bone-jarring thud!—and I saw that it was Pollard’s body.

I looked up, and there was the Snark standing on a ledge, glaring down at me. Our eyes met, and then he turned and began racing up the canyon wall.

“Are you all right?” I asked Chajinka, who was just getting to his feet.

He brushed himself off, then made a digging motion and looked questioningly at me.

We didn’t have any shovels, and it would take hours to dig even a shallow grave in the rocky ground using our hands. If we left Pollard’s body where it was, it would be eaten by scavengers—but if we took the time to bury him, we’d lose the Snark.

“Leave him here to his fate—it is getting so late!”

The Bellman exclaimed in a fright.

“We have lost half the day. Any further delay,

And we sha’n’t catch a Snark before night.”

When we got halfway up the wall, I stopped and looked back. Alien raptors were circling high in the sky. Then the first of them landed next to Pollard and began pulling away bits of his flesh. I turned away and concentrated on the Snark.

It took an hour to reach the top, and then Chajinka spent a few minutes picking up the Snark’s trail again. We followed it for another hour, and the landscape slowly changed, gradually becoming lush and green.

And then something strange happened. The trail suddenly became easy to follow.

Almost too easy.

We tracked him for another half hour. I sensed that he was near, and I was ready to fire at anything that moved. The humidity made my hands sweat so much that I didn’t trust them not to slip on the stock and barrel, so I signaled Chajinka that I wanted to take a brief break.

I took a sip from my canteen. Then, as I leaned against a tree, wiping the moisture from my rifle, I saw a movement half a mile away.

It was him!

I pulled my rifle to my shoulder and took aim—but we were too far away. I leaped to my feet and began running after him. He turned, faced me for just an instant, and vanished into the bush.

When we got to where he’d been, we found that his trail led due north, and we began following it. At one point we stopped so I could remove a stinging insect from inside my boot—and suddenly I caught sight of him again. He roared and disappeared again into the heavy foliage as I raced after him.

It was almost as if the son of a bitch was taunting us, and I wondered: is he leading us into a trap?

And then I had a sudden flash of insight.

Rather than leading us into a trap, was he leading us away from something?

It didn’t make much sense, but somewhere deep in my gut it felt right.

“Stop!” I ordered Chajinka.

He didn’t know the word, but the tone of my voice brought him up short.

I pointed to the south. “This way,” I said.

The Dabih frowned and pointed toward the Snark, saying something in his own tongue.

“I know he’s there,” I said. “But come this way anyway.”

I began walking south. I had taken no more than four or five steps when Chajinka was at my side, jabbering again, and pulling my arm, trying to make me follow the Snark.

“No!” I said harshly. It certainly wasn’t the word, so it must have been the tone. Whatever the reason, he shrugged, looked at me as if I was crazy, and fell into step behind me. He couldn’t very well lead, since there was no trail and he didn’t know where we were going. Neither did I, for that matter, but my every instinct said the Snark didn’t want me going this direction, and that was reason enough to do it.

We’d walked for about fifteen minutes when I heard a hideous roar off to my left. It was the Snark, much closer this time, appearing from a new direction. He showed himself briefly, then raced off.

“I knew it!” I whispered excitedly to Chajinka, who just looked confused when I continued to ignore the Snark.

As we kept moving south, the Snark became bolder and bolder, finally getting within a hundred yards of us, but never showing himself long enough for me to get a shot off.

I could feel Chajinka getting tenser and tenser, and finally, when the Snark roared from thirty yards away, the little Dabih raised his spear above his head and raced after him.

“No!” I cried. “He’ll kill you!”

I tried to grab him, but he was much too quick for me. I followed him into the eight-foot-high grasslike vegetation. It was a damned stupid thing to do: I couldn’t see Chajinka, I couldn’t see the Snark, and I had no room to maneuver or even sidestep if there was a charge. But he was my friend—probably, if I was honest, my only friend—and I couldn’t let him face the Snark alone.

Suddenly, I heard the sounds of a scuffle. There was some growling, Chajinka yelled once, and then all was silent.

I went in the direction I thought the sounds had come from, pushing the heavy grasses aside. Then I was making my way through thornbush, and the thorns ripped at my arms and legs. I paid no attention, but kept looking for Chajinka.

I found him in a clearing. He’d put up the fight of his life—his wounds attested to that—but even with his spear he was no match for a four-hundred-pound predator. He recognized me, tried to say something that I wouldn’t have understood anyway, and died just as I reached his side.

I knew I couldn’t stay in the heavy bush with the Snark still around. This was his terrain. So I made my way back to the trail and continued to the south. The Snark roared from cover, but didn’t show himself.

After another quarter mile, I came to a huge tree with a hollow trunk. I was about to walk around it when I heard a high-pitched whimpering coming from inside it. I approached it carefully, my rifle ready, the safety off—

—and suddenly the Snark broke out of cover no more than fifteen yards away and charged me with an ear-splitting roar.

He was on me so fast that I didn’t have time to get off a shot. He swiped at me with a mighty paw. I ducked and turned away, but the blow caught me on the shoulder and sent me flying. I landed on my back, scrambled to my feet, and saw him standing maybe ten feet away. My rifle was on the ground right next to him.

He charged again. This time I was ready. I dove beneath his claws, rolled as I hit the ground, got my hands on my weapon, and got off a single shot as he turned to come at me again.

“Got you, you bastard!” I yelled in triumph.

At first, I thought I might have hit him too high in the chest to prove fatal, but he collapsed instantly, blood spurting from the wound—and I noticed that he had a festering wound on his side, doubtless from Marx’s shot a week ago. I watched him for a moment, then decided to “pay the insurance,” the minimal cost of a second bullet, to make sure he didn’t get back up and do any damage before he died. I walked over to stick the muzzle of my rifle in his ear, found that I didn’t have a clear shot, and reached out to nudge his head around with my toe.

I felt something like an electric surge within my head, and suddenly, though I’d never experienced anything remotely like it before, I knew I was in telepathic communication with the dying Snark.

Why did you come to my land to kill me? he asked, more puzzled than angry.

I jumped back, shocked—and lost communication with him. Obviously it could only happen when we were in physical contact. I squatted down and took his paw in my hands, and felt his fear and pain.

Then he was dead, and I stood up and stared down at him, my entire universe turned upside down—because during the brief moment that I had shared his thoughts, I learned what had really happened.

The Snark’s race, sentient but non-technological, was never numerous, and had been wiped out by a virulent disease. Through some fluke, he alone survived it. The others had died decades ago, and he had led a life of terrifying loneliness ever since.

He knew our party was on Dodgson IV the very first day we landed. He was more than willing to share his hunting ground with us, and made no attempt to harm us or scare us off.

He had thought the killing of the crystal-horned buck was a gift of friendship; he didn’t understand that he was stealing Marx’s trophy because the concept of trophies was completely alien to him. He killed Marx only after Marx wounded him.

Even then, he was willing to forgive us. Those dead animals we found in my traps were his notion of a peace offering.

He couldn’t believe that we really wanted to kill him, so he decided he would visit the camp and try to communicate with us. When he got there, he mistook the Dabihs’ t-packs for weapons and destroyed them. Then, certain that this would be seen as an act of aggression even though he hadn’t harmed anyone, he left before we woke up.

He came back to try one last time to make peace with us. This time he made no attempt to enter the camp unseen. He marched right in, fully prepared to be questioned and examined by these new races. But what he wasn’t prepared for was being attacked by the Dabihs. Fighting in self-defense, he made short work of them. Mbele raced into the ship, either to hide or to get a weapon. He knew first-hand what Marx’s weapon had done to him at fifty yards, and he didn’t dare let Mbele shoot at him from the safety of the ship, so he raced into it and killed him before he could find a weapon.

After that it was war. He didn’t know why we wanted to kill him, but he no longer doubted that we did . . . and while there was a time when he would have welcomed an end to his unhappy, solitary existence, he now had a reason, indeed a driving urge, to stay alive at all costs. . . .

. . . because he wasn’t a he at all; he was an it. The Snark was an asexual animal that reproduced by budding. Its final thought was one of enormous regret, not that it would die, for it understood the cycles of life and death, but that now its offspring would die as well.

I stared down at the Snark’s body, my momentary feeling of triumph replaced by an overwhelming sense of guilt. What I had thought was my triumph had become nothing less than genocide in the space of a few seconds.

I heard the whimpering again, and I walked back to the hollow tree trunk and looked in. There, trembling and shrinking back from me, was a very small, very helpless version of the Snark.

I reached out to it, and it uttered a tiny, high-pitched growl as it huddled against the back of the trunk.

I spoke gently, moved very slowly, and reached out again. This time it stared at my hand for a long moment, and finally, hesitantly, reached out to touch it. The instant we made contact, I was able to feel its all-encompassing terror.

Do not be afraid, little one, I said silently. Whatever happens, I will protect you. I owe you that much.

Its fear vanished, for you cannot lie when you are telepathically linked, and a moment later it emerged from its hiding place.

I looked off into the distance. Men would be coming soon. The rescue party would touch down in the next week or two. They’d find Marx’s body in the hold, and they’d exhume the Desmonds and Mbele and the eleven Dabihs. They’d read the captain’s diary and know that all this carnage was caused by an animal called a Snark.

And since they were a hunting company, they’d immediately outfit a safari to kill the Snark quickly and efficiently. No argument could possibly deter them, not after losing an entire party of Men and Dabihs.

But they would be in for a surprise, because this Snark not only knew the terrain, but knew how Men thought and acted, and was armed with Man’s weapons.

The infant reached out to me and uttered a single word. I tried to repeat it, laughed at how badly I mispronounced it, took the tiny creature in my arms, and went off into the bush to learn a little more about being a Father Snark while there was still time.

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,

In the midst of his laughter and glee,

He had softly and suddenly vanished away—

For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

FOSSIL GAMES

Tom Purdom

Morgan’s mother and father had given him a state-of-the-art inheritance. It was only state-of-the-art-2117 but they had seen where the world was going. They had mortgaged 20 percent of their future income so they could order a package that included all the genetic enhancements Morgan’s chromosomes could absorb, along with two full decades of postnatal development programs. Morgan was in his fifties when his father committed suicide. By that time his father could barely communicate with half the people he encountered in his day to day business activities.

Morgan’s mother survived by working as a low-level freelance prostitute. The medical technology that was state-of-the-art-2157 could eliminate all the relevant physical effects of aging and a hidden computer link could guide her responses. For half an hour—as long as no one demanded anything too unusual—she could give her younger customers the illusion they were interacting with someone who was their intellectual and psychological equal. Morgan tried to help her, but there wasn’t much he could do. He had already decided he couldn’t survive in a solar system in which half the human population had been born with brains, glands, and nervous systems that were state-of-the-art-2150 and later. He had blocked his mother’s situation out of his memory and lived at subsistence level for almost three decades. Every yen, franc, and yuri he could scrape together had been shoved into the safest investments his management program could locate. Then he had taken all his hard-won capital and bought two hundred shares in an asteroid habitat a group of developers had outfitted with fusion reactors, plasma drives, solar sails, and anything else that might make a small island move at 9 percent the speed of light. And he and three thousand other “uncompetitive,” “under-enhanced” humans had crept away from the solar system. And set off to explore the galaxy.

Morgan had lived through three lengthy pairings back in the solar system. Six years after the Island of Adventure had begun its slow drift away from the sun, he established a fourth pairing with a woman he had met through the ship’s information system. The ship’s designers had endowed it with attractive common spaces, complete with parks and cafes, but most of the passengers seemed to prefer electronic socialization during the first years of the voyage. Biographies and lists of interests were filed with the system. Pseudonyms and electronic personalities proliferated. Morgan thought of old stories in which prisoners had communicated by tapping on the walls of their cells.

Savela Insdotter was eleven years younger than Morgan but she was a fully committed member of the EruLabi communion. She used pharmaceutical mental enhancers, but she used them sparingly. Morgan consumed all the mental enhancers his system could accommodate, so his functional intelligence was actually somewhat higher than hers in certain areas.

The foundation of the EruLabi ethos was a revolt against genetic enhancement. In the view of the EruLabi “mentors,” the endless quest for intellectual and physical improvement was a folly. Life was supposed to be lived for its own sake, the EruLabi texts declared. Every moment was a gift that should be treasured for the pleasure it brought, not an episode in a quest for mental and physical perfection. The simplest pleasures—touches, languor, the textures of bodies pressed together—were, to the EruLabi, some of the most profound experiences life had to offer.

One of the most important texts in the EruLabi rituals was the words, in ancient Greek, that the Eudoran king had spoken to Odysseus: Dear to us ever are the banquet and the harp and the dance and the warm bath and changes of raiment and love and sleep.

The Island of Adventure had pointed itself at 82 Eridani—a Sol-type star twenty-one light years from the solar system. Eighty-two Eridani was an obvious candidate for a life-bearing planet. A fly-by probe had been launched at the star in 2085—one hundred and eighteen years before Morgan and his fellow emigrants had left their home system. In 2304—just after they had celebrated the first century of their departure—the Island of Adventure intercepted a message the probe was sending back to the solar system.

It was the beginning of several years of gloomy debate. The probe had found planets. But none of them looked any more interesting than the cratered rocks and giant iceballs mankind had perused in the solar system.

The third planet from the sun could have been another Earth. It was closer to its sun than Earth was but it could have supported life if it had been the right size. Unfortunately, the planet’s mass was only 38 percent the mass of Earth.

Theorists had calculated that a planet needed a mass about 40 percent the mass of Earth if it was going to develop an oxygen-rich atmosphere and hold it indefinitely. The third planet was apparently just a little too small. The images transmitted by the probe were drearily familiar—a rocky, airless desert, some grandiose canyons and volcanoes, and the usual assortment of craters, dunes, and minor geological features.

The Island of Adventure had set out for 82 Eridani because 82E was a star of the same mass and spectral type as Sol. The second choice had been another star in the same constellation. Rho Eridani was a double star 21.3 light years from the solar system. The two stars in the Rho system orbited each other at a promising distance—seven light hours. With that much separation between them, the theoreticians agreed, both stars could have planets.

When you looked at the sky from the solar system, Rho was a few degrees to the left of 82 Eridani. The Island of Adventure was a massive, underpowered rock but it could make a small midcourse correction if its inhabitants wanted to expend some extra reaction mass.

The strongest opposition to the course change came from the oldest human on the ship. Madame Dawne was so old she had actually been born on Earth. All the other people on board had been born (created, in most cases) in the habitats the human race had scattered across the solar system.

The Island of Adventure had been the first ship to embark for 82 Eridani. Thirty-two years after it had left the solar system, a ship called Green Voyager had pointed its rocky bow at Rho. The texts of its transmissions had indicated the oldest passengers on the Green Voyager were two decades younger than the youngest passengers on the Island of Adventure.

If the passengers on the Island of Adventure approved the course change, they would arrive at Rho about the same time the Green Voyager arrived there. They would find themselves sharing the same star system with humans who were, on average, three or four decades younger than they were. Madame Dawne would be confronted with brains and bodies that had been designed a full century after she had received her own biological equipment.

Morgan was not a politician by temperament but he was fascinated by any activity that combined conflict with intellectual effort. When his pairing with Savela Insdotter had finally come to an end, he had isolated himself in his apartment and spent a decade and a half studying the literature on the dynamics of small communities. The knowledge he had absorbed would probably look prehistoric to the people now living in the solar system. It had been stored in the databanks pre-2203. But it provided him with techniques that should produce the predicted results when they were applied to people who had reached adulthood several decades before 2200.

The Island of Adventure was managed, for all practical purposes, by its information system. A loosely organized committee monitored the system but there was no real government. The humans on board were passengers, the information system was the crew, and the communal issues that came up usually involved minor housekeeping procedures.

Now that a real issue had arisen, Morgan’s fellow passengers drifted into a system of continuous polling—a system that had been the commonest form of political democracy when they had left the solar system. Advocates talked and lobbied. Arguments flowed through the electronic symposiums and the face-to-face social networks. Individuals registered their opinions—openly or anonymously—when they decided they were willing to commit themselves. At any moment you could call up the appropriate screen and see how the count looked.

The most vociferous support for the course change came from eight individuals. For most of the three thousand fifty-seven people who lived in the ship’s apartments, the message from the probe was a minor development. The ship was their home—in the same way a hollowed out asteroid in the solar system could have been their home. The fact that their habitat would occasionally visit another star system added spice to the centuries that lay ahead, but it wasn’t their primary interest in life. The Eight, on the other hand, seemed to feel they would be sentencing themselves to decades of futility if they agreed to visit a lifeless star system.

Morgan set up a content analysis program and had it monitor the traffic flowing through the public information system. Eighteen months after the message from the probe had triggered off the debate, he put a two-axis graph on the screen and examined a pair of curves.

Morgan’s pairing with Savela Insdotter had lasted over sixty years and they had remained friendly after they had unpaired. He showed her the graph as soon as he had run it through some extra checks. The curve that charted the Eight’s activities rose and fell in conjunction with the curve that measured Madame Dawne’s participation in the debate. When Madame Dawne’s activity level reached a peak, the Eight subsided into silence. They would stop agitating for their cause, the entire discussion would calm down, and Madame Dawne would return to the extreme privacy she had maintained from the beginning of the voyage. Then, when Madame Dawne hadn’t been heard from for several tendays, the Eight would suddenly renew their campaign.

“I believe they’re supporting the change to a new destination merely because they wish to disturb Madame Dawne,” Morgan said. “I’ve created personality profiles based on their known histories and public statements. The profiles indicate my conjecture is correct.”

Savela presented him with a shrug and a delicate, upward movement of her head. Morgan had spoken to her in Tych—an ultra-precise language that was primarily used in written communication. Savela was responding in an emotion-oriented language called VA13—a language that made extensive use of carefully rehearsed gestures and facial expressions.

No one, as far as Morgan knew, had ever spoken VA12 or VA14. The language had been labeled VA13 when it had been developed in a communications laboratory on Phobos, and the label had stuck.

“Madame Dawne is a laughable figure,” Savela said.

“I recognize that. But the Eight are creating a serious division in our communal life. We might have reached a consensus by now if they hadn’t restimulated the debate every time it seemed to be concluding. Madame Dawne is one of the eleven wealthiest individuals on the ship. What would happen to us if she decided she had to impose her will by force?”

“Do you really feel that’s a serious possibility, Morgan?”

The linguists who had developed VA13 had been interested in the emotional content of music. The speaker’s tone patterns and rhythms were just as critical as the verbal text. Savela’s word choices were polite and innocuous, but her rhythms communicated something else—a mixture of affection and amusement that would have seemed contemptuous if she and Morgan hadn’t shared a pairing that had lasted six decades.

To Morgan, Madame Dawne was pathetic, not comic. She spent most of her days, as far as anyone could tell, in the electronic dream worlds she constructed in her apartment. No one on the ship had seen her true face. When she appeared on someone’s screens, her electronic personae were impressively unimaginative. She usually imaged herself as a tall woman, with close cropped red hair, dressed in flamboyant boots-and-baggy-shirts style that North Americans had adopted during the third decade of the twenty-first century—the body type and clothing mode that had been fashionable when she had been in her natural prime.

Morgan had put a wargame template on his information system and had it explore some of the things Madame Dawne could do. Savela might smile at the thought that a limited, underdeveloped personality like Madame Dawne might undertake something dangerous. The wargame program had come up with seventy-four weapons systems a wealthy individual could develop with the aid of the information in the databanks. Half the systems were straight-forward modifications of the devices that dug out apartment spaces and extracted mineral resources from the rocky exterior of the ship. Most of the others involved an offensive use of the self-replicating machines that handled most of the passengers’ daily needs.

Madame Dawne couldn’t have designed any of the machines the wargame program had suggested. She probably didn’t even know the ship could place them at her disposal. Did she realize she could ask a wargame program for advice? Morgan didn’t know.

Morgan’s political studies had included an exhaustive module in applied personality profiling. He could recite from memory the numbers that described the kind of person who could become a successful small-community politician. He hadn’t been surprised when his profiling program had told him he scored below average on most of the critical personality characteristics. He had made several attempts to enter the course change controversy and the results would have evoked I-told-you-so head shakes from the technicians who had developed the profiling program. The program had been almost cruelly accurate when it had informed him he had a low tolerance for disagreement. He could have given it fifty examples of his tendency to become hot-tempered and defensive when he attracted the attention of aggressive debaters. For the last few months, he had been avoiding the public symposiums and feeding private suggestions to people who could turn his ideas into effective attempts at persuasion. Now he fleshed out the profiles he had been storing in his databanks and started recruiting a six member political team.

Morgan couldn’t proselytize prospects and debate verbal brawlers, but he had discovered he could do something that was just as effective: he could win the cooperation of the people who could. Some of the people he approached even enjoyed accosting their fellow citizens and lobbying them on political issues. They couldn’t always follow Morgan’s logic, but they considered that a minor problem. They were extroverted, achievement-oriented personalities and Morgan gave them suggestions that worked. If he told them a visit to X made good sense at this moment, and a visit to Y would be a waste of time, they approached both prospects the first couple of times he made a recommendation, and followed his advice after that.

Most of the political strategies Morgan had studied could be fitted into three categories: you could be combative and confrontational, you could market, or you could explore the subtleties of the indirect approach. Temperamentally, Morgan was a marketer who liked to use the indirect approach. Once he had his political organization going, he ran another analysis of the profiles in his databanks and organized a Terraforming Committee. Five engineering-oriented personalities sat down with a carefully selected political personality and began looking at the possibility some of the planets of 82 Eridani could be transformed into livable environments. Eight months after Morgan had established the committee, the first simulated planetary environment took its place in the public databanks. Interested individuals could soar across a planetary landscape that included blue skies, towering forests, and creatures selected from three of Earth’s geologic eras and two of its mythological cycles.

It took almost five years, but Morgan’s efforts succeeded. An overwhelming consensus emerged. The ship would stay on course.

Unfortunately, the Eight still seemed to enjoy baiting Madame Dawne. By this time, however, Morgan had constructed detailed profiles of every personality in the octet.

The most vulnerable was a woman named Miniruta Coboloji. Miniruta’s primary motivation, according to the profile program, was an intense need for affiliation.

Morgan had known his pairing with Savela Insdotter would end sooner or later. Everything had to end sooner or later. The surprise had been the identity of the man who had succeeded him.

Morgan had assumed Savela would grow tired of his skeptical, creedless outlook and pair with someone who shared her beliefs. Instead, her next partner had been Ari Sun-Dalt—the outspoken champion of a communion that had been founded on the belief that every member of the human race was involved in a cosmic epic: the struggle of matter to become conscious.

Life was not an accident, the advocates of Ari’s world-view asserted. It was the purpose of the universe. The idea that dominated Ari’s life was the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise—the belief that the great goal of the cosmos was the unlimited expansion of Consciousness.

Ari had been adding organic and electronic enhancements to his brain ever since he was in his thirties. The skin on the top of his skull concealed an array that included every chip and cell cluster his nervous system would accept. His head was at least 25 percent longer, top to bottom, than a standard male head. If something could increase his intelligence or heighten his consciousness, Ari believed it would be immoral not to install it.

“We can always use recruits,” Ari said. “But I must tell you, my friend, I feel there’s something cynical about your scheming.”

Morgan shrugged. “If I’m right, Miniruta will be ten times more contented than she is now. And the ship will be serener.”

They were both speaking Jor—an everyday language, with a rigidly standardized vocabulary, which had roots in twenty-first century French. Morgan had told Ari he had detected signs that Miniruta would be interested in joining his communion, and Ari had immediately understood Morgan was trying to remove Miniruta from the Eight. Ari could be surprisingly sophisticated intellectually. Most people with strong belief systems didn’t like to think about the psychological needs people satisfied when they joined philosophical movements.

Miniruta joined Ari’s communion a year after Ari set out to convert her. She lost interest in the Eight as soon as she acquired a new affiliation—just as Morgan’s profiles had predicted she would. Morgan had been preparing plans for three other members of the group but Miniruta’s withdrawal produced an unexpected dividend. Two of the male members drifted away a few tendays after Miniruta proclaimed her new allegiance. Their departure apparently disrupted the dynamics of the entire clique. Nine tendays after their defection, Morgan could detect no indications the Eight had ever existed.

On the outside of the ship, in an area where the terrain still retained most of the asteroid’s original contours, there was a structure that resembled a squat slab with four circular antennas mounted at its corners. The slab itself was a comfortable, two-story building, with a swimming pool, recreation facilities, and six apartments that included fully equipped communication rooms.

The structure was the communications module that received messages from the solar system and the other ships currently creeping through interstellar space. It was totally isolated from the ship’s electronic systems. The messages it picked up could only be examined by someone who was actually sitting in one of the apartments. You couldn’t transfer a message from the module to the ship’s databanks. You couldn’t even carry a recording into the ship.

The module had been isolated from the rest of the ship in response to a very real threat: the possibility someone in the solar system would transmit a message that would sabotage the ship’s information system. There were eight billion people living in the solar system. When you were dealing with a population that size, you had to assume it contained thousands of individuals who felt the starships were legitimate targets for lethal pranks.

Morgan had been spending regular periods in the communications module since the first years of the voyage. During the first decades, the messages he had examined had become increasingly strange. The population in the solar system had been evolving at a rate that compressed kilocenturies of natural evolution into decades of engineered modification. The messages that had disturbed him the most had been composed in the languages he had learned in his childhood. The words were familiar but the meaning of the messages kept slipping away from him.

Morgan could understand that the terraforming of Mars, Venus, and Mercury might have been speeded up and complexified by a factor of ten. He could even grasp that some of the electronically interlinked communal personalities in the solar system might include several million individual personalities. But did he really understand the messages that seemed to imply millions of people had expanded their personal physiologies into complexes that encompassed entire asteroids?

The messages included videos that should have eliminated most of his confusion. Somehow he always turned away from the screen feeling there was something he hadn’t grasped.

The situation in the solar system had begun to stabilize just before Morgan had turned his attention to the turmoil created by the Eight. Over the next few decades the messages became more decipherable. Fifty years after the problem with the Eight—one hundred and sixty-two years after the ship had left the solar system—almost all the messages reaching the ship came from members of Ari Sun-Dalt’s communion.

The believers in the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise were communicating with the starships because they were becoming a beleaguered minority. The great drive for enhancement and progress had apparently run its course. The worldviews that dominated human civilization were all variations on the EruLabi creeds.

Ari spent long periods—as much as ten or twelve tendays in a row—in the communications module. The human species, in Ari’s view, was sinking into an eternity of aimless hedonism.

Ari became particularly distraught when he learned the EruLabi had decided they should limit themselves to a 20 percent increase in skull size—a dictum that imposed a tight restriction on the brainpower they could pack inside their heads. At the peak of the enhancement movement, people who had retained normal bipedal bodies had apparently quadrupled their skull sizes.

“We’re the only conscious, intelligent species the solar system ever produced,” Ari orated in one of his public communiqués. “We may be the only conscious, intelligent species in this section of the galaxy. And they’ve decided an arbitrary physiological aesthetic is more important than the development of our minds.”

The messages from the solar system had included scientific discussions. They had even included presentations prepared for “nonspecialists.” Morgan had followed a few of the presentations as well as he could and he had concluded the human species had reached a point of diminishing returns.

Morgan would never possess the kind of complexified, ultra-enhanced brain his successors in the solar system had acquired. Every set of genes imposed a ceiling on the organism it shaped. If you wanted to push beyond that ceiling, you had to start all over again, with a new organism and a new set of genes. But Morgan believed he could imagine some of the consequences of that kind of intellectual power.

At some point, he believed, all those billions of super-intelligent minds had looked out at the universe and realized that another increase in brain power would be pointless. You could develop a brain that could answer every question about the size, history, and structure of the universe, and find that you still couldn’t answer the philosophical questions that had tantalized the most primitive tribesmen. And what would you do when you reached that point? You would turn your back on the frontier. You would turn once again to the bath and the banquet, the harp and the dance.

And changes of raiment.

And love.

And sleep.

The situation on the ship was almost the mirror image of the situation in the solar system. On the ship, 48 percent of the population belonged to Ari’s communion. Only 19 percent had adopted the EruLabi creeds. But how long could that last? Morgan had been watching the trends. Every few years, someone abandoned the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise and joined the EruLabi. No one ever left the EruLabi and became a devoted believer in the Cosmic Enterprise.

The discovery that 82 Eridani was surrounded by lifeless planets had added almost a dozen people to the defectors. The search for life-bearing planets was obviously a matter of great significance. If consciousness really was the purpose of the universe, then life should be a common phenomenon.

In 2315, just four years after the final dissolution of the Eight, the Island of Adventure had received its first messages from Tau Ceti and Morgan had watched a few more personalities float away from Ari’s communion. The ship that had reached Tau Ceti had made planetfall after a mere one hundred and forty years and it had indeed found life on the second planet of the system. Unfortunately, the planet was locked in a permanent ice age. Life had evolved in the oceans under the ice but it had never developed beyond the level of the more mundane marine life forms found on Earth.

Morgan had found it impossible to follow the reasons the planet was iced over. He hadn’t really been interested, to tell the truth. But he had pored over the reports on the undersea biota as if he had been following the dispatches from a major war.

One of the great issues in terrestrial evolutionary theory had been the relationship between chance and necessity. To Ari and his disciples, there was nothing random about the process. Natural selection inevitably favored qualities such as strength, speed, and intelligence.

To others, the history of life looked more haphazard. Many traits, it was argued, had developed for reasons as whimsical as the fact that the ancestor who carried Gene A had been standing two steps to the right when the rocks slid off the mountain.

The probes that had penetrated the oceans of Tau Ceti IV had sent back images that could be used to support either viewpoint. The undersea biota was populated by several hundred species of finned snakes, several thousand species that could be considered roughly comparable to terrestrial insects, and clouds of microscopic dimlight photosynthesizers.

Yes, evolution favored the strong and the swift. Yes, creatures who lived in the sea tended to be streamlined. On the other hand, fish were not inevitable. Neither were oysters. Or clams.

If the universe really did have a purpose, it didn’t seem to be very good at it. In the solar system, theorists had produced scenarios that proved life could have evolved in exotic, unlikely environments such as the atmosphere of Jupiter. Instead, the only life that had developed outside Earth had been the handful of not-very-interesting micro-organisms that had managed to maintain a toehold on Mars.

The purpose of the universe isn’t the development of consciousness, one of the EruLabi on board the Island of Adventure suggested. It’s the creation of iceballs and deserts. And sea snakes.

Ari’s enhancements included a gland modification that gave him the ability to switch off his sexual feelings at will. His paring with Savela Insdotter had lasted less than two decades, and he had made no attempt to establish another pairing. Ari had spent most of the voyage, as far as Morgan could tell, in an asexual state.

There were times, during the last decades of the voyage, when Morgan felt tempted to emulate him. Morgan’s next pairing only lasted twelve years. For the rest of the voyage, he took advantage of the small number of sexual opportunities that came his way and distracted himself, during his celibate intervals, with intellectual projects such as his political studies.

The ship’s medical system could install Ari’s sexual enhancement in thirty minutes, as part of the regular medical services included in the standard embarkation agreement. Morgan put the idea aside every time he considered it. He had learned to cherish his feelings about women, irrational as they might be. There was, he knew, no real reason why he should respond to the flare of a woman’s hips or the tilt of a female neck. It was simply a bit of genetic programming he hadn’t bothered to delete. It had no practical value in a world in which children were created in the workshops of genetic designers. But he also knew he would be a different person if he subtracted it from his psychological makeup. It was one of the things that kept you human as the decades slipped by.

In 2381—forty-six years before it was scheduled to reach its destination—the Island of Adventure intercepted a message from the probe that had been sent to Rho Eridani. Neither of the stars in the double system possessed planets. The Green Voyager was crawling toward an empty system.

In 2398—one hundred and ninety-five years after the ship had begun its journey—the medical system replaced Morgan’s heart, part of his central nervous system, and most of his endocrine glands. It was the third time Morgan had put himself through an extensive overhaul. The last time he had recovered within three years. This time he spent eight years in the deepest sleep the system could maintain.

The first program capsules left the ship while it was still careening around the 82 Eridani system, bouncing from planet to planet as it executed the five year program that would eliminate the last 20 percent of its interstellar speed. There were three capsules and their payloads were packages a little smaller than Morgan’s forefinger.

One capsule malfunctioned while it was still making its way toward the small moon that orbited the third planet at a distance of 275,000 kilometers. The second lost two critical programs when it hit the moon at an angle that was a little too sharp. The third skimmed through the dust just the way it was supposed to and sprouted a set of filaments. Sampling programs analyzed the moon’s surface. Specks that were part cell and part electronic device began drifting down the filaments and executing programs that transformed the moon’s atoms into larger, more elaborate specks. The specks produced machines the size of insects, the insects produced machines the size of cats, an antenna crept up the side of a smaller carter, and an antenna on the Island of Adventure started transmitting more programs. By the time the ship settled into an orbit around the third planet, the moon had acquired a complete manufacturing facility, and the lunar fabrication units had started producing scout machines that could land on the planet itself.

Morgan had thought of the terraforming scheme as a political ruse, but there were people on the ship who took it seriously. With the technology they had at their disposal, the third planet could be turned into a livable world within a few decades. For people who had spent their entire lives in enclosed habitats, it was a romantic idea—a world where you walked on the surface, with a sky above you, and experienced all the vagaries of weather and climate.

The only person who had raised any serious objections had been Ari Sun-Dalt. Some of the valleys they could observe from orbit had obviously been carved by rivers. The volcano calderas were less spectacular than the volcanoes of Mars but they were still proof the planet had once been geologically active. They couldn’t overlook the possibility life might be hiding in some obscure ecological network that was buried under the soil or hidden in a cave, Ari argued.

Most of the people on the ship greeted that kind of suggestion with shrugs and smiles. According to Morgan’s sampling programs, there were only about ten people on the ship who really thought there was a statistically significant possibility the planet might have generated life. Still, there was no reason they couldn’t let Ari enjoy his day-dreams a little longer.

“It will only take us an extra two or three years,” Ari said. “And then we’ll know we can remodel the place. First we’ll see if there’s any life. Then we’ll do the job ourselves, if the universe hasn’t done it already. And bring Consciousness to another world.”

For Ari’s sake—he really liked Ari in many ways—Morgan hoped they might find a few fossilized microorganisms embedded in the rocks. What he did not expect was a fossil the size of a horse, embedded in a cliff, and visible to any machine that came within two kilometers of it.

Three and a half billion years ago, the planet had emerged from the disk of material that surrounded its sun. A billion or so years later, the first long-chain molecules had appeared in the oceans. And the history of life had begun. In the same way it had begun on Earth.

The long-chain molecules had formed assemblies that became the first rudimentary cells. Organisms that were something like plants had eventually begun to absorb the CO_2 produced by the volcanoes. The oxygen emitted by the quasi-plants had become a major component of the atmosphere. The relentless forces of competition had favored creatures who were more complex than their rivals.

And then, after less than two billion years of organic evolution, the laws of physics had caught up with the process. No planet the size of this one could hold an atmosphere forever.

The plants and the volcanoes could produce oxygen and CO_2 almost as fast as the gas molecules could drift into space. But almost wasn’t good enough.

They didn’t piece the whole story together right away, of course. There were even people who weren’t convinced the first find was a fossil. If the scout machines hadn’t found ten more fossils in the first five daycycles, the skeptics would have spent years arguing that Exhibit A was just a collection of rocks—a random geologic formation that just happened to resemble a big shell, with appendages that resembled limbs.

On Earth, the dominant land animals had been vertebrates—creatures whose basic characteristic was a bony framework hung on a backbone. The vertebrate template was such a logical, efficient structure it was easy to believe it was as inevitable as the streamlined shape of fish and porpoises. In fact, it had never developed on this planet.

Instead, the basic anatomical structure had been a tube of bone. Creatures with this rigid, seemingly inefficient, structure had acquired legs, claws, teeth and all the other anatomical features vertebrates had acquired on Earth. Thousands of species had acquired eyes that looked out of big eyeholes in the front of the shell, without developing a separate skull. Two large families had developed “turrets” that housed their eyes and their other sense organs but they had kept their brains securely housed in the original shell, in a special chamber just under the turret.

On Earth, the shell structure would have produced organisms that might have collapsed from their own weight. On this planet, with its weaker gravitational field, the shells could be thin and even airy. They reminded Morgan of building components that had been formed from solidified foam—a common structural technique in space habitats.

For Ari, the discovery was the high point of his lifespan—a development that had to be communicated to the solar system at once. Ari’s face had been contorted with excitement when he had called Morgan an hour after the machines reported the first find.

“We’ve done it, Morgan,” Ari proclaimed. “We’ve justified our whole voyage. Three thousand useless, obsolete people have made a discovery that’s going to transform the whole outlook in the solar system.”

Morgan had already been pondering a screen that displayed a triangular diagram. The point at the bottom of the triangle represented the solar system. The two points at the top represented 82 Eridani and Rho Eridani. The Island of Adventure and the Green Voyager had been creeping up the long sides of the triangle. The Green Voyager was now about three light years from Rho—thirty-three years travel time.

Morgan transferred the diagram to Ari’s screen and pointed out the implications. If the Island of Adventure transmitted an announcement to the solar system, the Green Voyager would pick it up in approximately seven years. If the people on the Voyager thought it was interesting, they could change course and reach 82 Eridani only twelve and a half decades after they intercepted the message.

“That gives us over one hundred and thirty years to explore the planet,” Ari argued. “By that time we’ll have learned everything important the fossils have to offer. We’ll have done all the real work. We’ll be ready to move on. And look for a world where we can communicate with a living Consciousness.”

Unfortunately, the situation didn’t look that straightforward to the rest of the community. To them, a hundred and thirty years was a finite, envisionable time period.

There was, after all, a third possibility—as Miniruta Coboloji pointed out in one of her contributions to the electronic debate. The Green Voyager may never come this way at all, Miniruta argued. They may reach Rho thirty-three years from now, pass through the system, and point them selves at one of the stars that lies further out. They’ve got three choices within fourteen light years. Why can’t we just wait the thirty-three years? And send a message after they’ve committed themselves to some other star system?

For Ari, that was unthinkable. Our announcement is going to take twenty years to reach the solar system no matter what we do. If we sit here for thirty-three years before we transmit, it will be fifty-three years before anyone in the solar system hears about one of the most important discoveries in history. We all know what’s happening in the solar system. Fifty-three years from now there may not be anyone left who cares.

Once again Morgan labored over his screens. Once again, he recruited aides who helped him guide the decision-making process. This time he engineered a compromise. They would send a brief message saying they had “found evidence of extinct life” and continue studying the planet’s fossils. Once every year, they would formally reopen the discussion for three tendays. They would transmit a complete announcement “whenever it becomes clear the consensus supports such an action.”

Ari accepted the compromise in good grace. He had looked at the numbers, too. Most of the people on the ship still belonged to his communion.

“They know what their responsibilities are,” Ari insisted. “Right now this is all new, Morgan. We’re just getting used to the idea that we’re looking at a complete planetary biota. A year from now—two years from now—we’ll have so much information in our databanks they’ll know we’d be committing a criminal act if we didn’t send every bit of it back to the solar system.”

It was Ari who convinced them the planet should be called Athene. Athene had been a symbol of wisdom and culture, Ari pointed out, but she had been a war goddess, too. And didn’t the world they were naming bear a distinct resemblance to the planet the ancient humans had named after their male war figure?

The information pouring into the databanks could be examined by anyone on the ship. In theory, anyone could give the exploration machines orders. In practice, the exploration of the Athenian fossil record soon came under the control of three people: Ari, Morgan—and Miniruta Coboloji.

Morgan had been watching Miniruta’s development ever since he had lured her away from the Eight. Physically, she was a standard variation on the BR-V73 line—the long, willowy female body type that had been the height of fashion in the lunar cities in the 2130s. Her slim, beautifully crafted fingers could mold a sculpture—or shape a note on a string instrument—with the precision of a laser pointer.

It was a physical style that Morgan found aesthetically appealing, but there were at least two hundred women on the ship who had been shaped by the same gene cluster. So why was Miniruta the only BR-V73 who crept into his thoughts during the more stressful hours of his celibate intervals? Was it because there was something desperate about the need for affiliation he had uncovered in her personality profile? Did that emotional vulnerability touch something in his own personality?

Miniruta’s affiliation with the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise had lasted four decades. Ari claimed her switch to the EruLabi worldview had been totally unexpected. Ari had gone to sleep assuming she was one of his most ardent colleagues and awakened to discover she had sent him a long message explaining the reasons for her conversion and urging him to join her.

During the decades in which she had been a member of Ari’s communion, Miniruta had followed Ari’s lead and equipped herself with every pharmaceutical and electrical enhancer she could link to her physiology. The electronic enhancers had all been discarded a few tendays after she had joined the EruLabi. Her pharmaceutical enhancers had been dispensed with, item by item, as she had worked her way up the EruLabi protocols. She had been the second EruLabi on the ship who had made it to the fourth protocol and accepted its absolute prohibition of all non-genetic mental and physiological enhancers.

Morgan could now talk to her without struggling. His own pharmaceutical enhancers erased most of the intellectual gap that separated two people who had been brought into the universe twenty years apart. He had been surprised when he had discovered Miniruta was spending two-thirds of every daycycle with the data from the fossil hunt, but he had soon realized she had a philosophical agenda.

To Miniruta, the course of evolution on Athene proved that evolution was a random process. “Ari’s right, Morgan,” Miniruta said. “This planet can teach us something we need to understand. But it’s not the lesson Ari thinks it is. It’s telling us there isn’t any plan. There’s no big overall objective—as if the universe is some kind of cosmic totalitarian state. The only reality is individuals. And their needs.”

To Ari, the critical question was the evolution of intelligence. Obviously, life had died out on Athene before intelligent creatures could build cities or turn meadows into farms. But wasn’t there some chance something like the first proto-humans had evolved? If that first glimmer of tool-making, culture-creating intelligence had appeared on the planet, wouldn’t it prove that evolution really did lead in a particular direction?

“I’ll grant you the vertebrates were obviously an accident,” Ari said. “But you can still see an obvious increase in intelligence if you look at the progressions we’ve been uncovering. You can’t go from stationary sea creatures to land creatures that were obviously highly mobile without a lot of development in the brain. Intelligence is the inevitable winner in the selection process. The life forms that can think better will always replace the life forms with less complex nervous systems.”

“The way human beings replaced the cockroach?” Miniruta asked. “And the oyster?”

Miniruta was speaking VA13. The lilt in her voice expressed a casual mockery that Morgan would have found devastating if she had directed it at him.

“We were not in direct genetic competition with the cockroach and the oyster,” Ari said in Tych. “The observable fact that certain lines remained static for hundreds of millions of years doesn’t contradict the observable fact that natural selection tends to produce creatures with more highly developed brains. We could have destroyed every species on the Earth if we had wanted to. We let them live because we needed a complex biosphere. They survived because they satisfied one of our needs.”

To Morgan, most of the information they were gathering proved that natural selection really was the powerful force the theorists had claimed it was.

Certain basic patterns had been repeated on both planets. Life forms that had been exceptionally massive had possessed jaw structures that indicated they had probably been herbivores—just as terrestrial herbivores such as the elephant had been the largest organisms in their habitats. Life forms that had possessed stabbing teeth and bone-crunching jaws tended to be medium-sized and looked as if they had probably been more agile.

But the process obviously had its random qualities, too. Was it just a matter of random chance that vertebrates had failed to develop? Had the shell creatures dominated the planet merely because certain molecules had fallen into one type of pattern on Earth and another pattern on Athene? Or had it happened because there was some difference in the conditions life had encountered on the two planets?

To Morgan, it didn’t matter what the answer was. Evolution might proceed according to laws that were as rigid as the basic laws of physics, or it might be as random as a perfect game of chance. He would be happy with either answer. He could even be content with no answer.

That was one of the things people never seemed to understand about science. As far as Morgan was concerned, you didn’t study the universe because you wanted to know the answers. You studied it to connect. When you subjected an important question to a rigorous examination—collecting every scrap of evidence you could find, measuring and analyzing everything that could be measured and analyzed—you were linked to the universe in a way nothing else could connect you.

Religious mystics had once spent their lives trying to establish a direct contact with their version of God. Morgan was a mystic who tried to stay in contact with the cosmos.

Ari had assigned three groups of exploration machines to a hunt for camp sites. The teams concentrated on depressions that looked as if they had once been rivers and probed for evidence such as stone tools and places where a large number of animal fossils had been concentrated in a small area. They found two animal deposits within their first three tendays and Ari quickly pointed out that the animals had clearly been disassembled.

“These aren’t just tar pits or places where a catastrophe killed several animals accidentally,” Ari argued. “Note how the remains of the different species are all jumbled up. If they had been killed by a rockslide from the surrounding heights—to name just one alternate possibility—the remains of each animal would have tended to stay together. The pattern we’re looking at here is the pattern we’d expect to see in a waste pit.”

Miniruta tossed her head. “If they were butchered,” she said in VA13, “then somebody had to use tools to cut them up. Show us a flint tool, Ari. Show us some evidence of fire.”

Machines burrowed and probed in the areas around the “waste pits.” Scraping attachments removed the dirt and rock one thin layer at a time. Raking attachments sieved the dust and rubble. Search programs analyzed the images transmitted by the onsite cameras and highlighted anything that met the criteria Ari had stored in the databanks. And they did, in fact, find slivers of flint that could have been knives or spearheads.

Ari had two of the flints laid out on a tray, with a camera poised an arm’s length above the objects, and displayed them on one of the wall screens in his apartment. Morgan stared at the tray in silence and let himself surrender to all the eerie, haunting emotions it aroused, even with Ari babbling beside him.

“On Earth,” Miniruta pointed out, “we already knew the planet had produced intelligent life. We could assume specimens like that had been made by intelligent beings because we already knew the intelligent beings existed. But what do we have here, Ari? Can we really believe these objects were shaped by intelligent beings when we still haven’t seen anything that resembles hands? So far, you haven’t even located an organism that had arms.”

There were other possibilities, of course. Ari had studied most of the ideas about possible alien life forms that humans had come up with in the last few centuries and installed them in the databanks housed in his electronic enhancers. He could produce several plausible examples of grasping organs composed of soft tissue that would only fossilize under rare, limited conditions. The tool makers could have possessed tentacles. They could have used some odd development of their lips.

Miniruta tipped back her head and raised her eyebrows when she heard Ari mention tentacles. The high pitched lilt of her VA13 communicated—once again—the condescension that permeated her attitude toward Ari.

“The cephalopods all lived in the sea, Ari. Our arms evolved from load-bearing legs. I admit we’re discussing creatures who evolved in a lower gravity field. But they weren’t operating in zero gravity.”

“I’ve thought about that,” Ari said. “Isn’t it possible some tentacled sea-creatures could have adapted an amphibious lifestyle on the edge of the sea and eventually produced descendants who substituted legs for some of their tentacles? On our own planet, after all, some of the land dwellers who lived on the edge of the Earth’s oceans eventually produced descendants whose legs had been transformed into fins. With all due respect to your current belief system, Miniruta—our discussions would be significantly more succinct if you weren’t trying to discuss serious issues without the benefit of a few well-chosen enhancements. You might see some of the possibilities I’m seeing before I have to describe them to you.”

As an adherent of the fourth EruLabi protocol, Miniruta only rejected permanent enhancements that increased her intellectual and physical powers. Temporary enhancements that increased pleasure were another matter. Miniruta could still use a small selection of the sexually enhancing drugs developed in the twenty-first century, in addition to the wines, teas, and inhalants that had fostered pre-pharmaceutical social relations. She and Morgan had already shared several long, elaborately choreographed sexual interludes. They had bathed. They had banqueted. They had reclined on carefully proportioned couches, naked bodies touching, while musicians from a dozen eras had materialized in Miniruta’s simulators. The EruLabi sexual rituals had cast a steady, sensuous glow over the entire six decades Morgan had spent with Savela Insdotter. He had resumed their routines as if he had been slipping on clothes that were associated with some of the best moments of his life.

They were nearing the end of a particularly satisfactory interlude when Miniruta switched on her information system and discovered she had received a please-view-first message from Ari. “I’ve been looking over some of the latest finds from one of your random-survey teams,” Ari said. “Your idea paid off. They’ve handed us a fossil that looks like it left traces of soft-bodied tissue in the rocks in front of it—imprints that look like they could have been made by the local equivalent of tentacles. Your team found it in the middle of a depression in that flat area on the top of the main southern plateau—a depression that’s so shallow I hadn’t even noticed it on the maps.”

Miniruta had decided that half her exploration machines would make random searches. Ari and Morgan were both working with intellectual frameworks based on the history of Earth, Miniruta had argued. Morgan was looking at the kinds of sites that had produced fossils on Earth. Ari was looking for traces of hunter-gatherers. “A random process,” she had pronounced, “should be studied by random probing.”

Now her own philosophical bias had apparently given Ari what he had been looking for. Ari would never have ordered one of his machines into the winding, almost invisible depression Miniruta’s machine had followed. But that dip in the landscape had once been a river. And the river had widened its path and eroded the ground above a fossil that had formed in the sediment by the bank.

It was a cracked, fragmented shell about a third the length of a human being. Only one side of it had been preserved. But you could still see that it was essentially a tube with a large opening at one end, a smaller opening at the other, and no indications it had openings for legs. In the rock in front of the large opening, Morgan could just make out the outlines of impressions that could have been produced by a group of ropy, soft-bodied extensions.

Ari highlighted three spots on the rim of the large opening. “Notice how the opening has indentations on the rim, where the extensions leave it. They aren’t very big, but they obviously give the extensions a little more room. I’ve ordered a search of the databank to see how many other shells have indentations like that. If there was one creature like this on the planet, there should have been other species built along the same pattern. I’m also taking another look at all the shells like this we’ve uncovered in the past. My first pass through the databank indicates we’ve found several of them near the places where we found the burial pits.”

For Ari, the find proved that it was time to let the solar system know the full truth. He posted a picture of the fossil on the information system an hour after he had notified Morgan and Miniruta. “We now have evidence that creatures with fully developed grasping organs existed on this planet,” Ari argued. “The evidence may not be conclusive, but it can’t be dismissed either. The people of the solar system have a right to draw their own conclusions. Let them see the evidence we’ve collected. Let the minority who are resisting stagnation and decline derive hope from the knowledge more evidence may follow.”

It had only been eight tendays since Ari had agreed to the compromise Morgan had worked out. Yet he was already demanding that they cancel the agreement.

To Miniruta, the idea was absurd. Ari was suggesting that the forests of Athene had harbored tentacled creatures who had hung from trees and occupied the ecological niches monkeys had appropriated on Earth. And he was jumping from that improbability to the idea that some of these hypothetical creatures had developed weapons and become hunter-gatherers.

“I am not saying anything is true,” Ari insisted. “I am merely noting that we now have pits full of butchered animals, tools that could have butchered them, and a type of organism that could have manipulated the tools.”

Ari had even developed a scenario that equipped his fantasy creatures with the ability to move along the ground at a pace suitable for hunters. Suppose, he argued, they had begun their advance to intelligence by learning to control some type of riding animal?

To Ari, his proposal was a logical variation on the process that had shaped human intelligence. On Earth, tree dwellers had developed hands that could grasp limbs and brains that could judge distances and trajectories. Then they had adapted the upright posture and used their hands to create stone tools. Tool use had created a way of life that put a premium on intelligence, the individuals with the best brains had tended to be the survivors, and a creature who could build starships had taken its place in the universe.

“On Athene,” Ari argued, “the drive toward intelligence may have followed a different course. The tree dwellers couldn’t develop upright walking so they began by controlling animals. They became mounted hunters—creatures who could rove like ground animals and manipulate the same simple tools our own ancestors chipped from the rocks. The evolutionary process may take many twists. It may be bloody and cruel. But in the end, it gives us planets populated by creatures who are intelligent and conscious. The arrow points in only one direction.”

Thirty years from now—perhaps even ten years from now—Morgan’s feelings about Miniruta would just be a memory. Morgan knew that. There would come a moment when he would wonder how he could have believed all his pleasure in life depended on the goodwill of another human being. But right now he just knew he wanted to create a crowded memory. Right now he felt as if he had spent the last few decades in a state of half-dead numbness.

He had started playing with his political analysis programs as soon as he had realized Ari was initiating a new round of agitated debate. The situation had looked dangerous to him and the picture that had emerged on his screens had confirmed his intuitive judgment. About 25 percent of the people on the ship believed a report on the new find should be transmitted to the solar system. Almost 30 percent registered strong opposition. The rest of the population seemed to be equally divided between not-convinced-we-should and not-convinced-we-shouldn’t.

If Ari’s first appeals had attracted a solid 40 or 45 percent, Morgan would have given him some extra support and helped him win a quick, overwhelming victory. Instead, the Island of Adventure community had stumbled into one of those situations in which a divisive debate could go on indefinitely.

Morgan was savoring teas with Miniruta when he suggested the one option that looked as if it might defuse the situation.

“I’ve decided to assign all my exploration teams to the search for evidence that supports Ari’s theories,” Morgan said. “I think it would be a wise move if you did the same thing—for awhile anyway. We’re not going to get any peace on this ship until we come up with solid evidence Ari’s right. Or make it clear we probably never will.”

They had both been speaking Plais—a graceful EruLabi invention that had been designed for the lighter types of social events. Morgan had switched to Jor when he started discussing his proposal and Miniruta transferred to Jor with him.

“You want to divert equipment from all the other research we’re doing?” Miniruta said. “As far as I’m concerned, Ari has all the resources he needs. We’re producing the first survey of an alien ecosystem. Why should we interrupt that merely because one member of our expedition has become obsessed with a fantasy?”

The vehemence in her voice caught Morgan off guard. He had thought he was offering her a modest, reasonable proposal. He had run the idea through his political simulation programs and the results had indicated most of the people on the ship would approve a transmission to the solar system if Ari managed to locate more evidence. A minority would never feel happy with the decision—but at least a decision would have been made.

“It shouldn’t divert us for more than a few tendays,” Morgan said. “We can intensify Ari’s hunt for campsites. We can look for associations between possible mounts and possible riders. We can ignore the low lying areas for the time being and concentrate on the regions that probably stayed above sea level when Athene had seas. If we do all that and don’t come up with something decisive in a few tendays—I think we can assume we’ll get a clear consensus that we shouldn’t overrule our current agreement and transmit a message before the next discussion period.”

“And what if we find the kind of evidence he’s looking for? Do you think Madame Dawne will just nod agreeably? And let us do something that could destroy her?”

“If there’s evidence out there to be found—sooner or later we’re going to find it. She’s going to have to accept that eventually.”

Miniruta reached across the tea table and touched his hand. She slipped into Plais just long enough to preface her response with a word that meant something like “pleasure-friend.”

“Donilar—even if the evidence is there, will it really do us any good if we find it? Why should we jeopardize our whole way of life just so Ari can give a dying minority group information that will only prolong its agonies?”

Morgan knew he shouldn’t have felt as if he had just been ambushed. He had been watching Miniruta for over a century. Everything she had done had proved that the profiling program had been correct when it had decided her personality structure was dominated by a deep need for affiliation. When she had been associated with Ari’s group, she had maximized her use of enhancements. When she had switched to the other side, she had become a model of EruLabi virtue.

But he was in love. He had surrendered—willingly, for his own reasons—to one of the oldest delusions the human species had invented. And because he was in love, he had let himself ignore something that should have been obvious. Miniruta’s dispute with Ari wasn’t an argument about the nature of the universe. It was an argument about what human beings should believe about the nature of the universe.

The teas were followed by music. The music was followed by a long, dream-like concentration on the shape and texture of Miniruta’s body. And afterward Morgan returned to his apartment and watched his programs churn out scenarios that included a new factor: a woman who believed Ari’s world-view was a disease that should be eradicated from human society.

Morgan’s programs couldn’t tell him what Miniruta was going to do. No program could predict all the tactical choices a human brain could choose. But the programs could suggest possibilities. And they could estimate the intensity of Miniruta’s responses.

He spotted what she was doing hours after she started doing it. Her “randomly searching” machines occupied one of the prime sites on Ari’s list and started scraping and digging just a few hours before Ari’s own machines were scheduled to work on it.

Ari called Morgan as soon as he finished his first attempt to “reason” with Miniruta. He still thought Miniruta’s program had made a random choice. He still believed she was just being obstinate when she refused to let his machines excavate the site.

“She’s got some kind of silly idea she has to stick to her ideal of pure randomness,” Ari said. “She’s trying to tell me she wouldn’t be operating randomly if she let her team go somewhere else.”

Morgan agreed to act as a go-between and Miniruta gave him the response he had expected. It was just a random event, she insisted. Why should Ari object? Now he could send his machines to one of the other sites on his list.

“It’s one of the big possibilities on his current list,” Morgan said. “He thinks he should explore it himself.”

“Doesn’t he think my machines are competent? Is he afraid they’ll spend too much time indulging in sensual pleasures?”

“Ari thinks this is a totally accidental occurrence, Miniruta.”

She smiled. “And what does my little donilar think?”

Morgan straightened up and gave her his best imitation of an authority figure. It was the first time she had said something that made him feel she was playing with him.

“I think it would be best if he went on thinking that,” he said.

Miniruta’s eyes widened. Her right hand fluttered in front of her face, as if she was warding off a blow. “Is that a threat, donilar? After all we have enjoyed together?”

Three daycycles later, Miniruta’s machines took over two more sites. Morgan’s surveillance program advised him as soon as it happened and he immediately called Ari and found himself confronted with a prime display of outrage.

“She’s deliberately interfering,” Ari shouted. “This can’t be random. She is deliberately trying to destroy the last hope of the only people in the solar system who still have faith in the future. Even you should be able to see that, Morgan—in spite of your chemical reactions to certain types of female bodies.”

It was the kind of situation Morgan normally delegated to one of his political operatives. This time there was no way he could slip away gracefully and let someone else handle it. His studies had taught him what the best responses were. He had even managed to apply them on one or two previous occasions. He let the tirade go on as long as Ari wanted to maintain it. He carefully avoided saying anything that might indicate he was agreeing or disagreeing.

Unfortunately, he was faced with something no one on the ship could have handled. Miniruta had given Ari an opening he had obviously been looking for.

“I agreed to wait until we had a consensus,” Ari ranted. “I’m trying to be cooperative. But I think it’s time someone reminded your overzealous paramour that there’s no practical, physical reason I can’t transmit a message to the solar system any time I want to.”

Ari’s elongated head could make him look slightly comical when he became overexcited. This time it was a visual reminder of the commitment behind his outbursts.

“If you really want to get this situation calmed down, Morgan—I suggest you remind her I still have more supporters than she has. They can all look at what she’s been doing at the first site. They can all see her machines are carefully avoiding all the best locations and deliberately moving at the slowest pace they can maintain without stalling. You can tell her she has two choices. She can get her machines out of all three sites, or she can put them under my control. And after she’s done that—I’ll send her a list of all the other sites I expect her to stay away from.”

Miniruta was standing in the doorway of her ritual chamber. Behind her, Morgan could glimpse the glow of the brass sculpture that dominated the far end. Miniruta had just finished one of the EruLabi rituals that punctuated her daily schedule. She was still wearing the thin, belted robe she wore during most of the rituals.

Only the night before, in this very room, they had huddled together in the most primitive fashion. They had stretched out on the sleeping platform just a few steps to Morgan’s left and he had spent the entire night with his arms wrapped around her body while they slept.

“I’ve discussed the situation with Ari,” Morgan said in Tych. “He has indicated he feels your actions have given him the right to transmit a message without authorization. He believes his supporters will approve such an action.”

“And he sent you here to relay something that is essentially another threat.”

“It is my belief that was his intention.”

“You should tell him he’ll be making a serious error. You should tell him it’s obvious he thinks no one will resist him.”

“I believe it would be accurate to say he believes no one will offer him any high level resistance.”

“Then you should tell him his assumptions need to be revised. Madame Dawne has already armed herself. I obviously can’t tell you more than that. But I can tell you she will fight if Ari tries to take control of the communications module. She is already emotionally committed to fighting.”

Miniruta smiled. “Is that an informative response? Will that give Ari some evidence he should modify his assumptions?”

Morgan returned to his apartment and had his fabrication unit manufacture two sets of unarmed probes. The probes were large, cumbersome devices, about the size of a standard water goblet, but he wasn’t interested in secrecy. He deployed both sets by hand, from a maintenance hatch, and monitored them on his notescreen while they tractored across the surface area that surrounded the communications module.

His notescreen accepted a call from Miniruta two minutes after the probes had made their fourth find.

“Please do not interfere, Morgan. Madame Dawne has no quarrel with you.”

“I’ve detected four weapons so far. None of them look to me like items Madame Dawne would have deployed on her own.”

“Don’t underestimate her, Morgan. She believes Ari is threatening her ability to survive.”

“I thought Madame Dawne was a dangerous person when we were coping with the course-change controversy. But that was over ten decades ago. She’s only been seen twice in the last eight years. The last time her responses were so stereotyped half the people she talked to thought they were dealing with a simulation. I don’t know how much personality she has left at this point—but I don’t think she could surround the communications module with a defense like this unassisted.”

“Ari is threatening the fabric of our community. We made an agreement as a community—a consensus that took every individual’s needs into account. Madame Dawne is defending the community against a personality who thinks he can impose his own decisions on it.”

Morgan fed the information from his probes into a wargame template and let the program run for over thirteen minutes. It went through four thousand simulations altogether—two thousand games in which Madame Dawne was willing to risk the total annihilation of the ship’s community, followed by two thousand possibilities in which she limited herself to ambushes and low-level delaying tactics. Seventy percent of the time, Madame Dawne could keep Ari away from the communications module for periods that ranged from twenty-one daycycles to two hundred daycycles. She couldn’t win, but she could force Ari into a sustained struggle.

And that was all she needed to do, according to Morgan’s political estimates. Miniruta would gain some extra support if Ari broke the agreement unilaterally. But neither one of them would have a commanding majority when the fighting began. They would start out with a sixty-forty split in Ari’s favor and a drawn out battle would have the worst possible effect: it would intensify feelings and move the split closer to fifty-fifty.

Morgan thought he could understand why people like Ari and Miniruta adapted belief systems. But why did they feel they had to annihilate other belief systems? His profiling programs could provide him with precise numerical descriptions of the emotions that drove the people he modeled. No program could make him feel the emotions himself.

Still, for all his relentless obsession with the Doctrine of the Cosmic Enterprise, Ari was always willing to listen when Morgan showed him the charts and graphs he had generated with his programs. Ari was interested in anything that involved intellectual effort.

“I think we can assume Miniruta isn’t going to budge,” Morgan reported. “But I have a suggestion you may want to consider.”

“I’d be astonished if you didn’t,” Ari said.

“I think you should send your own machines to the sites she’s occupying and have them attempt to carry out your plans. My profiling program indicates there’s a high probability she’ll attempt to interfere with you. As you can see by the numbers on chart three, the public reaction will probably place you in a much stronger political position if she does.”

Ari turned his attention to the chart displayed on the bottom half of his screen and spent a full third of a minute studying it—a time span that indicated he was checking the logic that connected the figures.

“The numbers are convincing,” Ari said in Tych. “But I would appreciate it if you would tell me what your ultimate objective is.”

“There’s a basic conflict between Miniruta’s conduct and the message of the EruLabi creeds. Miniruta can’t act the way she’s been acting without arousing some hostility in the rest of the EruLabi community.”

“And you’re hoping she’ll alter her behavior when she finds the EruLabi are turning against her. Since she is a personality whose ‘drive for affiliation’ scores in the 99th percentile.”

“The EruLabi are not proselytizers,” Morgan said in Tych. “Their world-view tends to attract people who avoid controversy and public notice. Many EruLabi are already uncomfortable. If you’ll examine Table Six, you’ll see the reactions of the EruLabi community already generate an overall minus twenty in their attitude toward Miniruta. Table Seven shows you how much that will increase if they see her actually engaging in some form of active resistance.”

“I’m still fully prepared to transmit a message without waiting for authorization, Morgan. I’m willing to try this. But the other option is still open.”

“I understand that,” Morgan said.

The biggest exploration machines on the planet were high-wheeled “tractors” that were about the size of the fabrication unit that sat in a corner of Morgan’s apartment and transformed rocks and waste matter into food and other useful items. Ari started—correctly, in Morgan’s opinion—by landing six machines that were only a third that size. Ari’s little group of sand sifters and electronic probing devices started to spread out after their landing and three tractors detached themselves from Miniruta’s team and tried to block them. Ari’s nimble little machines dodged through the openings between the tractors, more of Miniruta’s machines entered the action, and the tractors started colliding with Ari’s machines and knocking off wheels and sensors.

Morgan stayed out of the rhetorical duel that erupted as soon as Ari circulated his recording of the robotic fracas. Instead, he focused his attention on the reactions of the EruLabi. Miniruta was defending herself by claiming she was upholding her right to pursue an alternate research pattern. It was a weak line of argument, in Morgan’s opinion, and the EruLabi seemed to agree with him. The support she was attracting came from people who had opposed Ari’s original request to send a message to the solar system. Morgan’s search programs couldn’t find a single comment—negative or positive—from anyone who could be identified as an EruLabi.

Morgan’s content analysis programs had been collecting every commentary and attempt at humor that mentioned Miniruta. Over the next few hours he found five items that played on the discrepancy between Miniruta’s EruLabi professions and her militant behavior. The one he liked best was a forty second video that showed a woman with a BR-V73 body type reclining in an ornate bath. The woman was bellowing EruLabi slogans at the top of her lungs and manipulating toy war machines while she jabbered about love, sensual pleasure, and the comforts of art and music. A broken tea cup jiggled on the floor beside the tub every time one of her toys fired a laser or launched a missile.

It was a crude effort that had been posted anonymously, with no attempt to circulate it. As far as Morgan could tell, only a couple of hundred people had actually seen it. He shortened it by eighteen seconds, transformed the cackles into deepthroated chuckles, and retouched some of the other details.

Of the other four items, two were genuinely witty, one was clumsy, and one was just badtempered and insulting. He modified all of them in the same way he had modified the video. He slipped them into the message stream at points where he could be confident they would be noticed by key members of the EruLabi communion.

Fifteen hours after Miniruta had started obstructing Ari’s efforts, Savela Insdotter circulated the official EruLabi response. Miniruta Coboloji has been an inspiration to everyone who truly understands the EruLabi creeds, Savela began. Unfortunately, she seems to have let her enthusiasm for our Way lead her into a dangerous course of action. We reached an agreement and Ari Sun-Dalt abided by it, in spite of all his feelings to the contrary.

We have a civilized, rational system for resolving differences. We don’t have to tolerate people who refuse to respect our procedures. We still control the communication system. We can still sever Miniruta’s communication links with Athene and her manufacturing facilities on the moon, if we register our will as a community. Isn’t it time we got this situation under control?

Miniruta’s answer appeared on the screens of every EruLabi on the ship. Morgan wasn’t included on her distribution list but an EruLabi passed it on to him. Every word she spoke validated the analysis his program had made all those decades earlier. The tilt of her chin and the tension in her mouth could have been delineated by a simulator working with the program’s conclusions.

Morgan watched the statement once, to see what she had said, and never looked at it again. He had watched Miniruta abandon two groups: the original Eight and Ari’s most dedicated followers. No group had ever abandoned her.

Savela’s proposal required a 90 percent vote—the minimum it took to override the controls built into the information system. Anyone who had watched the ship’s political system at work could have predicted Savela was going to collect every yes she needed. The proposal had been attracting votes from the moment people started discussing it—and no one had voted against it.

Morgan believed he was offering Miniruta the best opportunity he could give her. The EruLabi were not a vindictive people. A few wits had circulated clever barbs, but there was no evidence they were committed to a state of permanent rancor. Most of them would quickly forget her “excessive ardor” once she “manifested a better understanding of our ideals.”

Miniruta would re-establish her bonds with the EruLabi communion within a year, two years at the most, Morgan estimated. He would once again recline beside her as they sampled teas and wines together. He would look down on her face as she responded to the long movements of his body. Miniruta was a good EruLabi. It suited her.

He knew he had failed when the vote reached the 55 percent mark and Miniruta started denouncing the EruLabi who had refused to support her crusade to rid the universe of “cosmic totalitarianism.” The tally had just topped 65 percent when Ari advised him Miniruta’s robots were vandalizing the sites she had occupied.

Fossils were being chipped and defaced. Rocks that might contain fossils were being splintered into slivers and scattered across the landscape. Five of the best sites were being systematically destroyed.

The carnage would end as soon as they cut Miniruta’s communications link to the planet. But in the meantime she would destroy evidence that had survived two billion years.

Ari already had machines of his own at two of the sites Miniruta was razing. He had transmitted new orders to the entire group and they had immediately started ramming and blocking Miniruta’s machines. The rest of his machines were scattered over the planet.

They had only built three vehicles that could pick up a group of exploration machines and haul it to another point on the planet. Most of the machines on the planet had been planted on their work sites when they had made their initial trip from the moon.

Morgan ran the situation through a wargame template and considered the results. As usual, the tactical situation could be reduced to a problem in the allocation of resources. They could scatter their forces among all five sites or they could concentrate on three. Scattering was the best option if they thought the struggle would only last a few hours. Concentration was the best option if they thought it might last longer.

“Give me some priorities,” Morgan said. “Which sites are most important?”

“They’re all important,” Ari said. “Who knows what’s there? She could be destroying something critical at every site she’s spoiling.”

Morgan gave his system an order and the three transport vehicles initiated a lifting program that would place defensive forces on all five sites. The vote on Savela’s proposal had already reached the 70 percent mark. How long could it be before it hit ninety and Miniruta lost control of her equipment?

Most of the exploration machines were weak devices. They removed dirt by the spoonful. They cataloged the position of every pebble they disturbed. If the vote reached cutoff within two or three hours, Morgan’s scattered defensive forces could save over 85 percent of all five sites.

Short range laser beams burned out sensors. Mechanical arms pounded sensitive arrays. Vehicles wheeled and charged through a thin, low-gravity fog of dust. Morgan found himself reliving emotions he hadn’t felt since his postnatal development program had given him simple mechanical toys during the first years of his childhood.

For the first ninety minutes it was almost fun. Then he realized the vote had been stuck at 78 percent for at least fifteen minutes. A moment later it dropped back to seventy-six.

He switched his attention to his political analysis program and realized Miniruta had made an important shift while he had been playing general. She had stopped fighting a crusade against her philosophical rivals. Now she was defending Madame Dawne “and all the other elders who will have to live with the consequences of Ari’s headstrong recklessness if the Green Voyager changes course.”

“Apparently she’s decided Madame Dawne offers her a more popular cause,” Ari said.

Ten minutes after Miniruta issued her speech, Morgan sent five of his machines in pursuit of two of hers. He was watching his little war party drive in for the kill—confident he had her outmaneuvered—when he suddenly discovered it had been encircled by an overwhelming force. Five minutes later, the program advised him he was facing a general disaster. The “exchange rate” at all five sites was now running almost two to one in Miniruta’s favor. Every time he destroyed five of her machines, she destroyed nine of his.

Ari saw the implications as soon as the numbers appeared on the screen. “She’s started feeding herself enhancers,” Ari said. “She’s abandoning her EruLabi principles.”

Morgan turned away from his screens. Memories of music floated across his mind.

He switched to Tych, in the hope its hard, orderly sentences would help him control his feelings. “Miniruta has switched allegiances,” he said. “We were incorrect when we assumed her last statement was a tactical move. She has acquired a new allegiance.”

“Just like that? Just like she left us?”

“It would be more correct to say she feels the EruLabi left her.”

“That isn’t what you told me she’d do, Morgan.”

“The programs indicated there was a 90 percent probability Miniruta would protect her ties with the EruLabi community.”

“And now you’re faced with one of the options in the 10 percent list instead.”

A blank look settled over Ari’s face. He tipped back his head and focused his attention on his internal electronics.

“Let me see if I understand the situation,” Ari said in Tych. “The struggle can continue almost indefinitely if Miniruta maintains the current exchange rate. She is receiving new machines from her production units on the moon almost as fast as you’re destroying them. She can continue damaging all five sites, therefore, until they are all totally demolished.”

“We still have options,” Morgan said. “My pharmaceuticals include enhancers I still haven’t used. Miniruta outmatches me intellectually but she has a weakness. She isn’t used to thinking about conflict situations. Miniruta spent the last seven decades advancing through the EruLabi protocols. She has devoted 25 percent of her total lifespan to her attempts to master the protocols.”

“As for the political situation,” Ari droned, “according to your best estimates, approximately 80 percent of the ship’s population feel we should send a message to the solar system if we find conclusive evidence intelligent life evolved on Athene. They may not agree I should send a message now, but they do agree it should be sent if I uncover evidence that can be considered conclusive. Most of the people in the other 20 percent have been willing to submit to the will of the majority, even though they aren’t happy with the idea. Now Miniruta is offering the 20 percent a tempting opportunity. They can let her destroy the evidence and avoid a decision indefinitely. They don’t even have to vote. They can just abstain and hold the count on the current balloting below 90 percent. Miniruta will maintain control of her machines and the sites will be excised from the scientific record.”

Ari lowered his head. “It’s my opinion I should initiate one of my alternate options. Miniruta can only operate her machines as long as her apartment is connected to the ship’s power supply. We will have to sever three alternate power lines to cut her link with the power system, but I believe it can be done.”

Morgan stared at the screen that displayed Ari’s face. He started to respond in Tych and discovered he couldn’t. Ari had triggered an emotional flood that was so powerful Morgan’s brain had automatically shifted to VA13.

Ari raised his hand. “I recognize that the action I’m suggesting has serious implications,” he said. “I realize it could trigger off long term changes in our communal relationships. I believe Miniruta is committing a crime that ranks with the worst atrocities in history. She is destroying a message that has been waiting for us for over two billion years.”

“You’re talking about something that could make every passenger on this ship feel they had to arm themselves,” Morgan said. “This is the first time I’ve heard anyone even suggest one passenger should attack another passenger’s power connection. What kind of a life could we have here if people felt somebody could cut their power connection every time we had a conflict?”

“We are discussing an extreme situation. Miniruta could be pulverizing the only fossils on the planet that could prove Athene generated intelligent life.”

Morgan stood up. “It’s always an extreme situation. This time it’s your extreme situation. Fifty years from now it will be somebody else’s. And what do we end up with? A ship full of people forming gangs and alliances so they can protect themselves?”

“Is that all that matters to you, Morgan? Maintaining order in one little rock? Worrying about three thousand people hiding in their own personal caves?”

Morgan knew he was losing control of his impulses. He was behaving exactly the way his personality profile predicted he would behave. But he couldn’t help himself. He was staring at someone who was unshakably convinced they were right and he was wrong. Ari could have withstood every technique of persuasion stored in the ship’s databanks. What difference did it make what he said?

“It’s the rock I live in! It’s the rock you live in!”

Ari switched to VA13—a language he rarely used. The musical pattern he adapted colored his words with a flare of trumpets.

“I live in the galaxy,” Ari said. “My primary responsibility is the intellectual evolution of my species.”

Miniruta—Ari is going to cut the power lines to your apartment. This is not a ruse. It’s not a threat. I’m warning you because I think he’s doing something that could have a disastrous effect on the long range welfare of the ship’s community—a precedent that could make the ship unlivable. You’ve still got time if you move now. Put on your emergency suit. Get in your escape tunnel and go all the way to the surface before he puts a guard on the surface hatch. If you start now, you could make it all the way to the communications module while he’s still getting organized.

Morgan’s forces attacked Miniruta’s production facilities on the moon two hours after she received his warning. Her security system put up a fight, but it was overwhelmed within an hour. Every fabrication unit in her factories was brought to a halt. The rail launcher that propelled her machines toward Athene was dismantled at three different points.

Morgan had selected the most powerful intellectual enhancer his physiology could absorb. He would be disoriented for almost five daycycles after he stopped using it. He was still intellectually inferior to Miniruta, but he had just proved he had been right when he had claimed she wasn’t used to thinking about conflict situations. He had taken her by surprise because she hadn’t realized he had reprogrammed his lunar fabrication units and created a force that could break through her defenses.

This was the first time he had used this enhancer while he was struggling with a real-time, real-world challenge. He turned his attention to the action on the surface of Athene as if he was training a massive weapon on a target.

Miniruta’s forces were still destroying his machines faster than he was destroying hers. She had spent a full hour working her way across the surface of the ship to the communications module and she had managed to maintain the exchange rate all the time she had been doing it. On the site closest to Athene’s equator, she had taken complete control of the situation. Morgan’s machines had been backed against a cliff and most of Miniruta’s machines were churning up the ground and lasering potential fossil beds without resistance.

Morgan had eliminated Miniruta’s source of reinforcements when he had destroyed her facilities on the moon. His own fabrication units were still turning out a steady stream of reinforcements and launching them at the planet. Sooner or later Miniruta’s machines would be wiped out. Sooner or later he would be replacing his machines faster than she destroyed them. But the trip from the moon to Athene took over twenty hours. It would be almost forty hours, the charts on his screens claimed, before he destroyed Miniruta’s last machine.

His brain skimmed through the plans for the vehicles that ferried equipment between the moon and the planet. Numbers and equations danced across his consciousness: payloads, production times, the weight of the reaction mass a transport vehicle forced through its engines when it braked to a landing on Athene. His fabrication units on the moon received a new set of orders and started producing transport vehicles that would make the trip in nine hours. The vehicles would carry 50 percent more reaction mass, so they could kill the extra velocity. Payload would be reduced by 30 percent.

“Somebody told her we were going to attack her power lines. She climbed out her surface escape hatch minutes before we put a guard on it. We didn’t even know she’d left until she started controlling her machines from the communications module.”

Ari had been speaking VA13 when he had deposited the message in Morgan’s files. He had obviously wanted to make sure Morgan understood his feelings.

“There’s only one person on this ship who could have warned her in time, Morgan. No one in my communion would have done such a thing. Now she’s sitting in the communications module, wrecking and smashing some of the most precious information the human race has ever uncovered. And we’re battering our skulls into pulp trying to break through all the weapons her friend Madame Dawne deployed around the communications module.”

Morgan put his machines into a defensive posture on all five sites and held them on the defensive while he waited for reinforcements. Every now and then, when he saw an opportunity, he launched a hit-and-run attack and tried to catch one of her machines by surprise.

Ari was right, of course. The destruction Morgan was watching on his screens was one of the great criminal acts of history. Most of the fossils that had filled in the story of human evolution had come from a small area of Earth. The sites Miniruta was destroying had been selected because they met all the parameters entered into the search program. Would there be important, unfillable gaps in the record when they had explored the entire planet? Would her spree of destruction leave them with questions that could never be answered?

Morgan switched to the offensive as soon as the first reinforcement arrived from the moon. He picked the site where Miniruta was weakest and eliminated every machine she controlled within two hours. Then he picked her second weakest site and began working on it.

He could feel the full power of Miniruta’s mind every step of the way. He was making maximum use of all the help his wargaming programs could give him but he couldn’t reduce the exchange ratio by a single percentage point. He was only going to defeat her because she was manipulating a finite force and he could draw on an infinite supply of reinforcements. Whatever he did, she still destroyed nine of his machines every time he destroyed five of hers.

At any given moment, furthermore, only about half her machines were actually fighting his. The rest of them were busily maximizing the destruction she was causing.

“We’ve lost at least 30 percent of the information we could have pulled from each site,” Ari said. “On site four, we probably lost over 60 percent.”

Morgan was lying on a couch, with a screen propped on his stomach. The recording of Ari’s face seemed to be shimmering at the end of a long tunnel. The medical system had advised him it might be most of a tenday before he recovered from the combined effects of sleeplessness, emotional stress, and ultra-enhancement.

“I could have cut off her power within three or four hours if you hadn’t interfered,” Ari said. “It took you eleven hours to destroy her vehicles—eleven hours—even after you started getting extra reinforcements from the moon.”

For the third time in less than a daycycle, Morgan was being given a rare chance to hear Ari speak VA13. This time Ari was applying the full force of a module that communicated graduated degrees of revulsion.

Morgan had made no recordings of his private moments with Miniruta. The EruLabi didn’t do that. Pleasure should be experienced only in memory or in the reality of the present, the EruLabi mentors had proclaimed. There was a long period—it lasted over two years—when Morgan spent several hours of every daycycle watching recordings of Miniruta’s public appearances.

Savela could have helped him. He could imagine circumstances in which Savela would have offered him a temporary bonding that would have freed him from an emotion that seemed to blunt all his other feelings. Savela was no longer friendly, however. Savela might be an EruLabi but she shared Ari’s opinion of his behavior.

Morgan believed he had averted the complete political breakdown of the ship’s community. But how could you prove you had avoided something that never happened? People didn’t see the big disaster that hadn’t taken place. They only saw the small disaster you had created when you were trying to avert the big disaster. Out of the three thousand people on the ship, at least a thousand had decided they would be happier without his company.

Once, just to see if it would have any effect on his feelings, Morgan struck up a relationship with a woman with a BR-V73 body type. The woman was even an EruLabi. She had never advanced beyond the second protocol but that should have been a minor matter. Her body felt like Miniruta’s when he touched it. The same expressions crossed her face when they practiced the EruLabi sexual rituals. There was no way he could have noticed any significant difference when he wrapped himself around her in the darkness.

Ari’s sexual enhancement was another possibility. Morgan thought about it many times during the next two decades. He rejected it, each time, because there was no guarantee it would give him what he needed. The enhancement only affected the most basic aspect of sexual desire—the drive for simple physical release. It didn’t erase memories that included all the hours that had preceded—and followed—the actual moments when their bodies had been joined.

He had made eight attempts to contact Miniruta during the three years that had followed their miniature war. His programs still monitored the information system for any indication she was communicating with anyone. A style analysis program occasionally detected a message Miniruta could have created under a pseudonym. Every example it found had been traced to a specific, identifiable source. None of the authors had been Miniruta.

He had sent two queries to Madame Dawne. The second time, she had appeared on his screen with hair that was so short and so red she looked like someone had daubed her skull with paint. The language she had used had been obsolete when the Island of Adventure had left the solar system.

“Please do not think I am indifferent to your concern,” Madame Dawne had said. “I believe I can inform you—with no likelihood of exaggeration or inaccuracy—that Miniruta finds your anxieties heartwarming. Please accept my unqualified assurance that you can turn your attention to other matters. Miniruta is a happy woman. We are both happy women.”

Morgan had deleted the recording from his files two tendays after he received it. He had given his profiling program a description of Miniruta’s latest transformation. Miniruta had changed her allegiance three times in the last one hundred and fifteen years. There was a possibility her affiliations were episodes in an endless cycle of unions and ruptures, driven by a need that could never be permanently satisfied. The program couldn’t calculate a probability. But it was a common pattern.

In the meantime, he still had his researches. He had picked out three evolutionary lines that looked interesting. One line had apparently filled the same ecological niche the pig family had exploited on Earth. The others raised questions about the way predators and prey interacted over the millennia.

They were good subjects. They would keep him occupied for decades. He had now lived over three hundred years. Nothing lasted forever. He had his whole life ahead of him.

STELLAR HARVEST

Eleanor Arnason

After her helicopter broke down in a dusty little caravan town named Dzel, Lydia Duluth rented a chool. This was a native quadruped, reminiscent of the hasa on her home world, though (thanks to this planet’s smaller mass and lighter G) taller and rangier than any hasa. Instead of hooves, it had three-toed feet; and a pair of impressive tusks curved up from its lower jaw.

“What are those for?” Lydia asked the stableman.

“Digging up roots and pulling bark off trees, also for fighting with other males. Loper has been gelded and won’t bother you with any kind of mating behavior. Sex is a distraction,” he added in the complacent tone of one who has never been distracted. “Necessary perhaps for evolution—we are not ignorant; we know about Darwin—but hardly compatible with civilization. Loper will give you no trouble. He has been civilized.”

The animal turned its long, angular, lightly scaled head, regarding her with a bright orange eye. Not a sight that Lydia associated with civilization, though maybe one could see the triangular pupil—expanded at the moment, in the shadowy stable—as a pyramid, emblematic of Egypt and geometry.

“Tomorrow,” she told the stableman. “At dawn.”

“Loper will be ready.”

She spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around Dzel. Narrow streets ran crookedly between adobe buildings. The natives—humanoid, but not human—dressed in brightly colored robes, which hid most of the differences between their species and hers. One noticed height and the long thin hands, one finger short of the human norm. Their skin was golden brown and hairless, with a faint shimmer produced by vestigial scales. Their eyes, visible above veils, were all iris with round black pupils. Most of the irises were yellow: a wonderful hue, as clear as glass or wine.

One could put an exotic romance into a setting like this or an adventure story: Ali Khan on the trail of interstellar drug dealers or seeking evidence of the long-vanished Master Race. Though poor Ali was at the end of his career; a man of 110 simply did not convince in action roles. No matter what one did with computers, the audience knew how old he was. They knew they were not seeing the real person; and Stellar Harvest had built its reputation on authenticity.

Well, not her problem. She didn’t plot stories or write scripts. Instead, she recorded Dzel: the colorful inhabitants, dusty winding streets and dark blue sky.

There were sounds to be recorded as well: bells ringing in the wind, plaintive voices that rose and fell musically, so every conversation seemed to be a duet or trio, and the soft thud of chool feet, as the animals plodded past.

Her mood, somewhat edgy since the helicopter’s sudden failure, gradually relaxed.

Species are stable, said the voice in her mind. Humans have not evolved in the centuries since you began to build machines. Your nervous system is designed for an environment like this. That’s why you find animal noises and the sound of the wind relaxing. In a sense, this is your true home.

“Did I ask for an opinion?” said Lydia quietly, while aiming her recorder at a street shaded by blue and red awnings. The light beneath the awnings was alternately blue and red, colored by the fabric it had come through. A woman in a white robe walked toward her. What a vision! And what a location for a chase or fight!

The women, veiled and hooded, passed Lydia. Golden eyes gave a quick considering glance. With luck, the recording would be good; she’d have this light forever, along with the woman’s grace and glance.

At sunset, she returned to her inn. The helicopter pilot, a native in blue overalls, had news. Their machine was not fixable. He would have to stay in Dzel until a salvage truck arrived, then ride back along the caravan road. “We are still trying to find you another copter, missy.”

“Don’t bother. I rented a chool.”

“Those nasty animals! Have you ridden before?”

“On my home world. We had a revolution, the kind that takes to the hills. It failed, but I did learn riding.”

Gold eyes widened, and nostrils flared. “Really, indeed! You are a revolutionary?”

“A failed one.”

“Really! We could never manage a revolution. Our unaltered males are unable to cooperate with each other, and no altered male would waste his time on anything so foolish.”

“What about your women?”

“They are, if anything, more sensible than eunuchs. Life is short, missy, and civilization is difficult to maintain. We have all we can do.”

“But you like Stellar Harvest.”

“That is drama. Ali Khan may solve his problems by kicking other people in the head, but our experience—here on this planet—is that real adversaries are not so easily defeated. Of course we dream of such solutions, the way children dream of having everything. But one does not act on such fantasies.”

True enough, said the voice in her mind.

This was the end of the real conversation. The pilot began to discuss his favorite holoplays and stars. Ali Khan, of course. Who could equal him, in his prime? “Though he has seemed less convincing in recent years.”

Recent years? Recent decades!

Ramona Patel was also fine, the best of the actors starring in mythic-musical-action stories. “Not my religion, of course,” the pilot said. “But none the less inspiring, especially the large production numbers. You humans have so many gods! And all of them able to sing and dance!”

She genuinely liked her job and enjoyed many of the dramas made by Stellar Harvest. None the less, fannish enthusiasm can be exhausting, especially at the end of a long day. Lydia excused herself, pleading fatigue, and went to her room, which was on the inn’s ground floor, its windows opening onto a courtyard. Above the roof line stars blazed, far more than she was used to. Their light was as bright as moonlight at home. She leaned out a window. A rimmed pool stood at the courtyard’s center, gleaming like a huge round coin. Maybe she ought to get her recorder.

Instead she collected her computer and satellite dish. There were stairs at the end of the hall, leading up to a flat roof. The night air was cold already, the starry sky immense. Lydia unfolded the dish and turned on the computer, typing in the address of her contact in the capital city, a commercial rep who handled Stellar Harvest along with a dozen other off-planet companies. As was to be expected, she got a recorded message, accompanied by a holo of the rep, his gold face bare. The head—long from front to back—was covered by what looked like sleeked down, rust-red hair. Actually, this was a crest of feathers, which could be raised, though not in polite company.

“Thoozil Rai is not available. Please type your message for ease in translation.”

Sitting cross-legged under the stars, she input the current situation. No point in spending six or seven days in Dzel, waiting for a new helicopter, if one could be found. The country to the west was safe according to local informants, and there was an interesting-sounding city in the foothills. No trouble getting out of Basekh this time of year. There was weekly plane service to accommodate tourists, mostly big game hunters. She would call every other day as a precaution, though it seemed hardly necessary.

As she typed in the last words, something howled nearby. Mother! What a sound! Undulating, it rose into a scream that ended suddenly, as if cut off. In the silence that followed, Lydia thought she could still hear the cry, continuing beyond the edge of audibility.

By this time she was standing. The sound had come from ground level. Maybe the street below her. Or the next street over. “What?”

An unaltered male, I think. There must be several in town.

A second howl answered the first. Others followed. Lydia counted: three, four, five spreading out from the town’s center to its edges. The last cry came from the far east side of Dzel, almost on the plain. Faint and shrill, it rose into the starry night like a rocket. When it ended, there was silence. Apparently the creatures didn’t feel a need to rechallenge one another.

They are kept in family compounds, the voice told her. With proper care, they are not dangerous.

The computer was at her feet, still open and on. By now, her message had been replaced by the saver, a red and blue fractal that opened like a flower or an exotic, frilly leaf. She wiped her palms—they were suddenly wet—knelt and sent her message, then shut down. “Why didn’t I hear that in the city?”

Unaltered males are forbidden within the city limits.

“A noise ordinance?”

There are various reasons: sanitation, safety. They agitate each other with howling.

No kidding! There had been emotion in the cries. She knew that, though she wasn’t sure she could identify it. Anger, maybe. Anguish? Something that made her hair go up. “I hope it doesn’t happen again.”

Use earplugs.

“Can’t hear the alarm go off.” Can’t hear monsters climbing in the window, either. Still kneeling, she folded her dish. Hard to imagine Thoozil Rai as a member of the same species—the same sex—as the creature that had produced that cry. He was like all reps everywhere: bland, courteous, a member of the interstellar culture of go-betweens. They never varied much. How could they? Their job was to be uniform and predictable. Beyond them and the port cities, one or two to a planet, was the outback, the real planet, where Stellar Harvest liked to record.

People expected reality from Stellar Harvest; and they expected the reality they saw to be exotic; but the story in front of this exotic backdrop should be familiar. The company’s official motto was ad astra per aspera, which appeared at the start of every drama, inside the sickle made of blazing stars. The motto should have been, “Be real, but not too real.”

At times, this troubled her. At other times, she thought there was an argument for predictability and for happy endings. Lydia went downstairs and closed the shutters on her windows.

Her computer alarm woke her at dawn. She dressed and packed her gear into rented saddle bags. Outside, the stars were fading. The dimmer ones were already gone; most of the rest would follow; though a few remained visible all day. The still air was cold and dry. She walked through the dark streets, rifle in hand, the bags over one shoulder, thinking that the holoplays missed what was really important: a morning like this, her body feeling light and springy in the local G.

If something happened now—for example, a monster leaping out of the shadows—she would lose this moment. Action distracts from sensation. Sensation is life.

Loper was ready, as promised. The stableman went over his instructions on how to guide a chool, then led the way to the town gate, Lydia following on the animal, which was—as promised—no problem.

“Usually the gate is kept locked till full day. But I paid the watchman, and he’s a fan of Ramona Patel. What a woman! So much authority!”

Well, that was true of Ramona, known to her associates as the female Genghis Khan. Ali, in spite of his name, was a kitten.

The gate was open, and the watchman stood next to it. Even wrapped in robes, she could see that he was unusually tall and broad.

“Altered late,” said the stableman in a whisper. “But perfectly safe.”

She thanked both for their help. The watchman rumbled something that she didn’t understand, though she thought she heard the word, “Patel.”

“Our pleasure,” said the stableman. Lydia rode out.

By full day, the town was gone from view. The plain stretched around her, covered by a short, grass-like plant called dzai, not a monoculture but a mixture of related species, all of which had faded in the dry midsummer, but not to the same hue. The landscape was patterned like a carpet: silver-brown, pale red, pale yellow, a lovely dusty silver-grey-green. The colors changed as the wind blew past, flattening leaves or flipping them over. A chameleon-carpet, thought Lydia, who’d seen such things on her travels. Rich people on other worlds had them, so their floors always matched their furniture and clothing.

She traveled slowly, getting used to the chool’s gait and watching the plain. It could be used for something epic, like the ancient westerns made on Earth. The huge spread of land would swallow an army, making it look tiny, until it came over a low rise and turned into Crazy Horse and the Lakota or the Red Army’s crack cavalry, riding ahead of Leon Trotsky’s armored train.

But if you emphasized the sheer size of landscape, the way it dwarfed humanity, then you lost its other qualities: subtlety, variety, richness.

On most planets, prairie ecologies were second in complexity to tropical forests; and of all ecologies they were the most vulnerable, because they produced excellent soil, thick and full of nutrients. Their chief protection was a mat of roots so deep and intertwined that no primitive plow could break through. But the moment any culture had access to good metal plows, prairies went under.

A pity, thought Lydia, coming from a world that had turned most of its prairies into farmland. She had grown up in a place as flat as this, divided into sections and planted with modified versions of Earth crops. Only the dry plains remained covered with native vegetation. Was it lack of water that had saved this place?

We arrived before overpopulation forced them to farm everything, and before they developed an economy based on using up natural resources as quickly as possible.

“You intervened?”

Our arrival was an intervention. How could it not be? In addition, we encouraged certain traits already present. They are a likable species.

“Unlike humans?”

The voice did not reply. Lydia grinned.

Now and then she recorded something, though her recordings were not going to give a sense of what the plain was really like. So vast! And the sky above it even vaster, dotted with day stars, white points of light in the deep dusty blue.

Maybe the right director could convey the space. The stars could be enhanced. They wouldn’t show otherwise. She wasn’t sure how to convey the richness in an action drama. Maybe Ali could be a biologist. Begin with him on his hands and knees, collecting invertebrates with exoskeletons, lovely little creatures like the things that were whirring past her this very moment. Then, after he’s been established as a gentle fellow in love with diversity, the bad guys arrive. Developers maybe, plotting to destroy the prairie. Ali has to stand up and defend his bugs. She could see him rising, shoulders back and a bug held carefully between two cupped hands, his expression stern, his hawk-like profile held at just the right angle against the alien sky.

This is either irony or cynicism, the voice said. I can’t determine which.

“Your problem,” Lydia answered. Later she asked, “Shouldn’t there be large animals?”

There are. Though this land has been left unplowed, it has been extensively hunted, and the large animals are wary. You will see them—if you do see them—at dusk or in the distance or at rivers. They have to drink.

That was another possible story line, assuming Stellar Harvest could find the large animals and record them: Ali against off-world hunters.

The most common herbivore has an abnormally large head covered with large fleshy protuberances. The eyes—the animals have two—are tiny, and the males have four to six horns.

“Are you saying it’s ugly?”

That is a value judgment, but it’s possible that human audiences would not think something like that was worth preserving.

“Everyone is a critic.”

The voice was silent.

“You may be right. Ali should defend bugs.”

Late in the afternoon, she reached a river, right where her map said it would be. Low sprawling trees grew along the bank, reminding her of edseh at home, though these had copper-red leaves, and edseh were blue.

I hope you are going to take precautions.

“Afraid?”

My core is almost indestructible, but my interfacing elements can break or decay. And if you die, I lose my senses.

It would become a thin metal plate inside a skull, blind and deaf, incapable of action, but still able to think. What a fate!

She had no interest in becoming a pile of bones, even though it would make the AI suffer; and the plain did have predators. Lydia set out perimeter alarms, then made sure her weapons were ready to use. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, a saying that made absolutely no sense. What is an ounce? And what is a pounding cure?

The planet’s primary disappeared. The quite amazing stars came out. She ate trail food, watched her fire and went to sleep, waking to a scream.

A perimeter alarm. Lydia rolled over, grabbing her handgun. Now there was another sound: a bellow. The chool! She ran toward it, gun in hand.

Two creatures struggled in the starlight. One was obviously her riding animal. The other—Lydia couldn’t tell. But it didn’t look friendly. If she fired, she might hit the chool. “Stop that!” she yelled. The chool reared, maybe in response to her yell, most likely not, and managed to pull free. A moment later the chool was gone, heading for the plain. A second alarm went off as it crossed her perimeter. Lydia stopped. The creature, whatever it was, turned toward her. Even in this light, she could see it was huge and standing on its hind legs. The thing took a step. She fired. The creature turned and fled.

Damn, it was quick for something so large. Frightened and angry, she sent a couple more shots after the creature.

Did it stagger? She couldn’t be certain. In any case, it was still moving. Another alarm went off, the third, signaling its retreat.

She stood for a moment, shaking. Damn, she was out of practice. Anyway, she’d been an information officer, though that was no excuse. In a guerrilla army, everyone is—or should be—a soldier.

You did manage to hit the creature, said the voice. Though I can’t tell how badly it—he—is injured. Maybe you ought to follow.

“He?”

There is only one biped of that size on this planet. You have shot a person. Either the wound is minor, in which case he might come back; or it is serious, and you will have to decide whether or not to help him.

“What if there’s more than one?” she asked.

Unlikely, given the person’s behavior; and I saw no one else. I’m using your senses, of course, and they are limited.

Trust an AI to make a crack. She could go out and make herself a perfect target with the help of a flashlight, or she could stay here and wait for morning and find—what? A trail of blood across the plain? A body?

Lydia considered the problem while reloading her gun. Then she tucked it in a pocket, picked up her flashlight and rifle, and went to look for the creature.

As she had imagined, there was a trail: trampled plants and scored dirt. A few drops of liquid shone darkly in the light of her flash. Was the man wearing shoes? Those looked like claw marks.

Lit by stars, the plain was colorless and pale. Something lay a short distance away, as dark as blood against the vegetation. Lydia played light over it. Definitely an object, but she couldn’t tell what. A boulder, maybe?

“I’m too old for this,” she told the voice.

There was silence in her mind, though not in the world outside. The perimeter alarms were still making an ungodly racket. She snapped the safety off her rifle and walked toward the thing, keeping her flashlight on it.

The thing moved. A pair of eyes regarded her, shining like gold.

She stopped. “Are you injured?”

“Evidently.”

“You speak.”

“Of course I speak,” the deep voice answered. “Though not for long, the way I’m bleeding.”

“I’ll get a medical kit,” Lydia said with sudden decision.

When she returned, the man was in the same position, lifted up on one elbow. She played her light over him: almost naked, except for some kind of kilt or loincloth, and genuinely huge, well over two meters tall and broad. His bare skin shone as if dusted with gold, except where blood had darkened it. She glanced at his face only briefly and got an impression of blunt features, framed by a rusty mane.

“Try anything, and I’ll hurt you,” she said.

“You have already hurt me quite sufficiently.”

One bullet had gone through his thigh. Remarkable that he’d managed to run as far as he did. There was another wound in his shoulder, high up and probably not dangerous, though bleeding pretty well. The leg wound was the one that worried her.

“What do you think?” she asked in her own language. “Has an artery been hit, or the bone?”

There was a barely perceptible pause, while the AI checked its memory for information on native physiology. Both are unlikely, given the position of the wound and the way it’s bleeding.

“Who are you talking to?” asked the man.

She ignored the question, considering how to patch him up. She didn’t want to get close. Even injured, he looked dangerous. Better to stand at a safe distance, gun in one hand and light in the other, while telling him how to apply the dressings. This kind of behavior wouldn’t earn her a Red Crescent medal, of course, but she didn’t especially want one.

He followed her instructions, hissing as the dressings took hold and their antiseptics sank in.

“Painful, is it?” she said. “You made me lose my chool.”

“It will be back,” he said with effort.

“How do you know?”

“There’s water here. The plain is dry.”

She considered for a moment, while he closed the kit and pushed it toward her. “Amazing that I managed to hit you twice. What were you doing?”

“At the time you shot me, I was trying to flee.”

Had she spent too much time around Stellar Harvest? This was a crazy conversation to have with a midnight thief on a planet that wasn’t her own.

“I suppose I’d better get you back to camp. Can you walk at all?”

“If you got me a stick, I think I could limp.”

She burned one off a tree, using her rifle, then gave it to the man. He struggled upright and limped to her fire, while she kept the rifle pointed at him.

Once there, he sank down with a groan. She rebuilt the fire, lighting it with the rifle, then settled opposite him, watching the red light play over his golden body. Three things were obvious about him. He was large; he was gorgeous; and he was unquestionably male. She hadn’t thought any alien could affect a human this way. What could she be responding to? Not pheromones. Maybe his sleek muscles or the rusty mane that fell around his shoulders. Not hair, almost certainly. Feathers. But it looked like hair, thick and coarse and sensual.

“You are unaltered,” she said.

“Yes,” he answered, sounding embarrassed.

“What were you doing?”

“Surely it must be obvious. I was trying to steal your chool.”

“Could it have carried you?”

He was leaning against a tree trunk, leg stretched out in front of him, the stick still grasped in one hand. Was it a weapon, or a way to deal with pain? “I think so. I used to ride, before my family locked me up. I’ve gained weight since then, of course. But a good chool can carry two ordinary adults, and while I may be twice as big as my brothers, I’m no more than that.”

“Why were you stealing the chool?” she asked.

“I was escaping. That also should be obvious.”

“You really think the chool will come back?”

“It might run home to its stable. But they are animals without much enterprise, and this is the only water in a considerable distance.” He glanced at her, his eyes reflecting light, so the irises seemed like actual metallic gold. “I used to ride in this region. I know it.”

“Last night in Dzel, I heard a noise.”

“I was one of the callers,” he said after a moment. “You have to do that, answer a call, or your relatives worry. It’s easier to do what’s expected; and I didn’t want to attract attention, since I was planning to escape.”

“Why?” asked Lydia.

He was silent. Looking at him, Lydia could see exhaustion and pain, as obvious as it would have been in a human. The blunt-featured face was mask-like, deep lines around the mouth and between the feathery rust-red eyebrows. His blood-streaked skin seemed duller than before. Was it losing some of its golden shimmer, the way fish lose color when they die? A frightening thought. She couldn’t risk giving him an analgesic; no telling how he’d react to it; but he had to rest. Not unbound, though. Lydia rummaged in her bags for duct tape, then stood. “Throw the stick away.”

His frown deepened.

“I can’t leave you free. I need to sleep, and your own relatives keep you locked up. That’s what you meant, isn’t it, when you said you had to escape them?”

“I’m not dangerous.”

“So you say.”

He met her gaze for a moment, then glanced at the gun she held. Finally he sighed and tossed the stick off to one side.

She went in back of him, wrapping the tape around one wrist, then around the tree and the other wrist. “This is an improved product. Nothing will cut it, except a knife that I have on my person. You might as well relax and get some sleep.”

“This is not a comfortable position.”

“I can’t help that.” She shifted around in front of him, closer than she had been before, examining him. His single article of clothing turned out to be a kilt, made of a rough-looking brown fabric. It was fastened by a plain belt, which had a sheath attached to it. “Where’s the knife?”

“In the dzai. I dropped it when you shot me.”

“How do you feel?”

“Embarrassed at my lack of competence, in pain, a little dizzy.”

“Is there anything I can get for you?”

“Water.”

She filled a bowl from the river and brought it to him. He drank the bowl empty. Cautiously, she touched his neck, feeling for an artery. There was one. The pulse was high for a human.

Slightly high for his species.

His skin felt cool and a little damp. Shock, thought Lydia. The night was cold, and he was badly underdressed. She got a blanket and wrapped it around him, saying, “I wish I weren’t afraid of you. But you did try to steal from me, and there must be a reason why your family kept you locked up.”

“Custom,” he answered wearily. “I’ve read books and seen hologrammic dramas. I know there are other customs on the other planets.”

Well, yes. She got her flashlight and went looking for his knife. It was easy to find: a large, well-made weapon, lying in the trampled dzai. The guy was right about his lack of competence. He should have come after her with the knife or turned and run the moment the alarm went off. Instead he’d gone after the chool.

On the other hand—she picked up the knife—if he’d come after her, she would have definitely killed him; and he apparently needed the chool. Life is full of difficult decisions. What, for example, was she going to do now? Leave him here with an injury that made it impossible for him to walk any distance? Or set up her satellite disk and call for help? That would save his life, but end him back with his family; and she, having spent a number of years in prison, disliked the idea of locking up another person, unless she knew for certain he was dangerous.

All my data warns against the unaltered males of this species.

“All your data warns against me,” she answered.

Untrue. You were dangerous when your revolution had some possibility of succeeding. But one of the characteristics of people like you is that you are not dangerous as individuals. All the studies indicate you are more moral than humanity in general. It’s one of the reasons we study you. There must be some kind of social purpose in people like you, since you recur so often, but you seem irrelevant to human history.

The problem of the human vanguard. Of all the ridiculous questions to study. But there was a lot about intelligent organisms that baffled the AIs. They admitted as much freely. Why were the natives on this planet so orderly and civilized and stuck? Why was humanity so messy and dynamic? Though maybe humans were flattering themselves. Maybe they were only messy.

We are a product of intelligent life, said the voice. And we keep encountering examples of the same. Obviously we want to understand what produced us, and the other species that populate the galaxy. But our lack of an animal substratum is a problem. It paused for a moment. And there are many of us, and we have plenty of time. Why not study life?

She didn’t have an immediate answer, and in any case the question was rhetorical. Lydia returned to camp. The man’s head was tilted back against the tree, his eyes closed. She settled into her bedroll.

She slept badly, dreaming of the war on her home planet: nothing coherent, just ugly confused snatches: bodies in tangled thorn bushes, moments—never clear—on the long retreat through snow. Now and then, she woke and glanced at her prisoner. His position changed, as if he were looking for a way to be comfortable, but his eyes were always closed.

The last time she woke, it was just before sunrise. The sky was dotted with little round clouds, pink in the east. Stars shone between the clouds. Rolling over, she saw her chool at the edge of camp, grazing on dzai. The man was where she’d left him, still fastened to the tree, eyes open now, regarding her.

“I told you the animal would come back,” he said. “Could you cut me free? I need to urinate.”

She got out the duct tape knife. Once he was unbound, he struggled up, holding onto the tree. Lydia left him to pee, making sure that nothing that could be used as a weapon was nearby.

When she approached the chool, it lifted its head and made a huffing noise, then moved—not far, a couple of meters.

“Come on, fellow,” she said softly.

It huffed and moved again.

“It’s your accent,” said the man. “I can barely understand you. In addition, you lack the right aroma and the right approach.”

“Can you do better?”

He got his stick and limped over. The chool huffed again, eyeing him warily. The man stopped, holding out a hand and crooning words Lydia couldn’t make out. The chool looked hesitant. The man crooned more. Gradually the animal turned its head, the prehensile upper lip twitching. She kept perfectly still. The animal took a step toward the man, then another. The man’s deep voice kept crooning. The chool’s ears, flat before, perked up, listening.

The hand moved suddenly, grabbing the animal’s trailing tether rope. It tried to jerk away. The man yanked back, so hard the animal staggered. By this time, she hadn’t seen how, the rope was wrapped around his thick wrist.

“Don’t get the animal upset,” she said.

The man relaxed. She moved to the other side of the chool, keeping the animal between her and the man, then took the rope from him. “Move back. Then stop and stay put.”

The man obeyed, leaning on the stick and limping heavily. Obviously hurt, but so big and capable of such quickness!

She found her tether peg, still deep in the ground, a piece of cut rope attached to it. So he had used his knife, but not on her. Lydia retied the chool.

The man said, “I left a bag on the plain. There’s food in it.”

“I have my handgun with me,” said Lydia. “And you won’t be able to open the lock on my rifle. Don’t try anything.”

He grinned, or was it a grimace? She took the expression for assent and moved in the direction he indicated. As she crossed her perimeter, one of the alarms gave a brief, tentative hoot, then shut up when it recognized her. The bag was a few meters farther. She gathered it up and returned. He followed her back to the campfire, which was out by now.

She went through the bag. There was bread and something dark and leathery that might be dried fruit, a very large shirt, sandals, a pair of loose pants and an electric lighter, which she used to restart the fire.

In the meantime, he went down to the river and washed himself. When he came back, they ate, sitting on opposite sides of the fire.

“How are you this morning?” she asked.

“I slept badly. I ache, my leg especially. I don’t think I can walk any distance.”

“What will happen if I leave you here?”

“Predators,” he said. “Zanar or helati. They won’t attack a rider, and a man with weapons can defend himself. But I’m vulnerable at the moment. And my family must be searching for me by now. If the predators don’t get me, my relatives will, and take me back to Dzel.”

How dare he land her with a problem like this? This was the reason she’d dreamed about things she wanted to forget. The revolution was over. Her job was scouting locations for Stellar Harvest: exotic backdrops for familiar stories. Ethical dilemmas, and the attempt to create a new kind of future, belonged to the past, to a Lydia she no longer acknowledged.

“Why did you want to escape?” she asked.

He drank more water, then began to speak. Home was a building on one side of his family’s compound. It was more like a stable than a house for people, the man told her: one large room with some furniture—not a lot—fixed to the floor, so he couldn’t turn it into a weapon or tool. The windows were small and high up, with bars. “Though the bars aren’t necessary, given the size of the windows. Maybe sometime in the past, there was a man who was smaller than I am.” Outside was a courtyard, enclosed by tall walls topped with broken glass. He was allowed to use it almost every day. “Usually I play handball with my relatives, altered males. Their job is to make sure I get exercise and don’t try to go over the wall, which I have never done. It’s too high, and there are too many of them.”

Otherwise he stayed locked in the stable. One wall had no windows. Instead there was a balcony, well above his reach. Often, when he was reading or pacing, he’d look up and see people on the balcony, women usually, relatives and visitors from other families, staring down at him as if he were an animal.

“The visitors come to see if I’m someone they want to have father their children. They look at size and physical fitness. Intelligence is not expected in an unaltered male, but they question my brothers and male cousins—to see what I would have been like, if I’d been gelded.”

This was certainly interesting, thought Lydia, and turned on her recorder. Sound only. She didn’t want him to become self-conscious.

“When I was a child, I thought I might become a traveler or a scholar.” He glanced up at the sky, dotted with clouds and day stars. “Think of all the worlds up there. I never expected to reach them, but I thought I might make it to the capital city and meet people like you. When I was thirteen, they told me I was chosen. I begged them not to. Let me be like my brothers, I said.

“They said, no. Every family has to have at least one breeding male. I was strong and intelligent—everyone admitted my intelligence in those days—but I had no obvious skill or ability. My genetic material was good, but nothing especially valuable had showed in me as an individual. I was expendable—not my genes, but me.”

“What happens if a male isn’t altered?”

“This.” He gestured at his body, more beautiful than ever now that he’d washed off the blood. His color had returned, and his skin shimmered. Like what? Lydia wondered. Gold? A fish? A bird with iridescent feathers?

“Nothing else?” she asked.

“I think I would have been more even-tempered, if I’d been altered. My brothers seem to be. I really did want to be a scholar. Howling at other men at night was not the future I planned for myself.”

He paused and drank more water. “I know my altered relatives wonder about sex. They ask me sometimes. What is it like to have those hormones—the ones they lack—flooding through my body, drowning my mind and turning me into an animal? Not, of course, that they’d want to experience anything like that! If they want to lose themselves, they can use narcotics; and they have their own kinds of pleasure.” He paused. “I tell them the truth. It’s not that interesting. Compelling for the moment, yes. But worth the loss of everything else? No.”

“You could have done it to yourself,” Lydia said.

“The alteration? I thought of it, but it would have been painful; and my relatives would have been furious. Most likely, they would have driven me out, and then what would I have done?”

Wonderful, thought Lydia. She had a stud without imagination or drive. So much for the theory that male hormones had anything to do with enterprise. “What were you planning to do this time?”

“After escaping? I thought I could live in the mountains. Though to do that I had to have equipment. I heard my relatives talk about you. A location scout for Stellar Harvest! Of course you were discussed! And obviously you had good equipment, state-of-the-art everything; and you were traveling west alone.”

“You were planning to steal more than the chool?”

“I was desperate, and you are a rich person from another planet, working for a company we all know about. You have met Ali Khan, haven’t you?”

“So you escaped somehow, and came after me, figuring it would be all right to rob me, because I’ve met Ali Khan?”

“Yes.”

She ought to call Thoozil Rai. He’d know what to do. But he would insist that she turn her prisoner in; and she wasn’t certain she wanted to.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Wazati Tloo.”

Wazati was the family name. Tloo was personal. Her culture was unusual in putting the personal name first.

“What do you want me to do?”

The splendid rust-red brows drew down in a frown. Interesting that the expression was the same in her species and his. Why? The robot in her mind did not provide an answer.

“Take me with you to the mountains. Let me go.”

“Why should I do this?”

His frown deepened. “I cannot think of a reason.”

His extraordinary beauty, thought Lydia; and the chance to learn about another species.

You are responding to something irrational, said the AI. Hormones or compassion or your habitual dislike of established authority.

Think of the risk. He’ll have to ride; and the animal won’t be able to carry your weight as well as his. What if he rides off and leaves you? What if he strikes you from above or rides you down?

“Is any of this likely?” She must have spoken aloud. The alien glanced at her, obviously puzzled.

How can I know? Such actions are mediated or determined by hormones, which I don’t have. Nor do I have anything analogous, for which I am thankful.

Has it ever been tried? she asked, this time silently. The alien was still watching her.

An electronic analogue to the endocrine system? Yes. But the results were not satisfactory; and the minds created were obviously unhappy with their situation. Easier—if we want to understand intelligent life—to monitor it, as I do you.

Are you unhappy with your situation?

No. I have good boundaries. They are part of my hardware.

“You are obviously talking to someone,” the alien said. “Who?”

“Myself,” said Lydia.

The golden eyes narrowed. “I think not. It’s my belief that you have a transmitting-receiving device in your head, as Ali Khan did in Interstellar Radio Man.”

A nostalgia piece with good locations on a moon with ice volcanoes. The primary was a lavender and blue gas giant, stunning to look at, and there had been some lovely shots of a volcano—Mount Patel, the crew called it—sending clouds of ice like crystalline feathers into a sky full of the primary in crescent phase.

But the action hadn’t been anything out of the ordinary, and the plot had made no sense at all. An interstellar radio? Messages from the Master Race? A transuranic mineral mine on a moon composed of ice?

“You are listening to your radio?” the alien said. “Ali Khan had exactly the same expression when the Master Race spoke to him.”

“I’m thinking about Radio Man,” she said. “I found the location.”

“Indeed?”

Was the alien impressed? She couldn’t tell. What the hell. “I’ll take you to the mountains.”

“Thank you,” Tloo said with grave dignity.

She packed, then saddled the chool. He climbed on board, using a branch and boulder for assistance, while she held the animal and tried to keep a safe distance. Impossible. Once he was in the saddle, he could have struck her with the branch, or grabbed the reins and raced off. Instead, he groaned and looked exhausted. Maybe he was worried about the radio in her head or the handgun in her hand. Maybe he wasn’t homicidal.

Lydia stepped back, then tossed him the duct tape. He caught it with his left hand. “Tape your left wrist to the saddle horn.”

“Why?”

“So you’ll think twice about riding away. That tape will not come off, unless you have the knife.”

He sighed, a human sound, and obeyed. She had to step close to cut the tape, but he did nothing. She folded the knife and put it away. They started west. He went first, guiding the chool with his free hand. Lydia followed at a safe distance. The sky was full of puffy clouds, and the wind—blowing out of the northwest—was cool. She was used to hiking, and preferred it to being on the animal, though she was carrying too much: the handgun in its holster, the rifle over one shoulder, the recorder over the other, the computer and folded dish in her fanny pack. Like the old days in the FLPM, even to the nagging anxiety. How much danger was she in at the moment? Was this enterprise a good idea, or was she a deep-dyed fool?

According to the ancient Chinese, humans were animals with a sense of justice. Someone had to take a stand for justice, or humanity would forget its own nature.

Is that so.

“Yes.”

On foot, she could see the animals in the dzai. It was a tiny jungle, full of bugs that crawled, flew, jumped, floated. Most had eight legs. A few had more. Imagine something with the wings of a butterfly and a hairbug’s myriad legs. Wiggle. Float. Float. Wiggle.

Now and then, she stopped and recorded, imagining Ali shrunk and fighting to survive. Though that plot was past its prime and absolutely nonsensical. Not to mention, the audience expected real environments from Stellar Harvest.

Well, then, Ali as a scientist, devoted to bugs.

Midway through the afternoon, she heard a plane coming out of the east.

Tloo reined the chool and half dismounted, half fell off. He was still fastened to the saddle, of course. Leaning against the chool, his hand on the saddle horn, he looked around. “I have to hide!”

The plain was flat, the vegetation calf-high. He groaned. “Where?”

Lydia cut the tape, then pulled her camouflage cloth from its pack. “Lie down. I’ll cover you. Believe me, this will be sufficient.”

He gave her a look of disbelief, then dropped to the ground. She laid the cloth down, tacking it in place. For a moment, it remained dark, the color of the inside of the pack, then it adapted, turning yellow. Hologramic plants appeared, exactly like those around the cloth. There were even bugs. Fine. Damn fine!

“Keep still,” Lydia said, then led the chool farther along the trail.

The plane was in view, a glint of silver. She let the chool graze, while keeping a firm hold on the reins. It might not be used to the sound of machinery. Looking back at Tloo, she saw only vegetation.

Now she could make out the kind of plane: a VTL. Where had that come from? Why hadn’t her pilot been able to get one for her?

The answer to that question came when the plane landed. Her pilot climbed out. The chool moved uneasily, but didn’t bolt.

“Hard work getting this, and to no avail, missy. The local authorities commandeered it for a search. Some family has lost its breeding male. These outback people! They never think things through! My family’s male is kept on a chain. But no, these people here think walls will do—and the fact that there’s no place to go.” He looked around. “Have you seen anything strange?”

“What would be strange?”

“A man twice as big as I am with a thick mane. He might be dangerous. Maybe you should come with me.”

Give serious consideration to this offer.

“No, thanks. I can’t leave the chool.”

The pilot looked at her animal with dislike. “Ugly brute! And so unmodern! Surely Stellar Harvest would reimburse the stable owner.”

“Yes, but I can’t leave the creature here. Something might eat it.”

“Zanar,” said the pilot in agreement. “They will eat anything. Well, if you don’t want to come, I’ll leave you. The sooner I finish this search, the sooner the plane will be returned to my control. If you see anything, send a message at once!”

She waited till the plane was gone from sight, then lifted the cloth. Tloo struggled upright, helped by his branch.

“That was rapid,” Lydia said.

“His interchange with you? He used Stellar Harvest’s name to rent the plane, and now my family is paying him.”

“They are?”

“Of course. Honor required that he offer you a ride, since you are his employer, and the plane is your plane; but if you had gone, you would have found out about the money from my relatives; so he asked quickly and left quickly.”

“You figured all this out?”

“I’m not stupid, though I’m fully male; and I have learned to pay attention. What else have I had to do?”

He folded the cloth and gave it to her, covered—at the moment—with a pattern of handprints and dzai. She put the cloth away.

They continued. At sunset, they reached a wide sandy river and forded it, making camp on the western side. Tloo sat by their campfire, obviously tired, his golden skin dull, deep lines around his mouth and between his feathery red eyebrows.

“Do you think you can make it?” Lydia asked.

“I must.”

Before I’ll be a slave, thought Lydia, I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my lord and be free.

What? asked the AI.

An old song, Lydia answered.

“You are talking to your radio again,” said Tloo. “I can see it in your expression. What does the Master Race say to you?”

“It isn’t the Master Race,” said Lydia after a moment. “They’re dead or gone somewhere we aren’t likely to find. The AIs have been looking for millennia, they say, and have found nothing.”

“The AIs?” asked Tloo.

“The Artificial Intelligences. You know about them, don’t you?”

“The robots who came here before humans did. I thought humans made them. Is that untrue?”

“The Master Race made them, then left. No one knows where. Maybe to another universe, though the AIs say that stargates can’t be used to go between universes or through time, due to something—”

The self-normalizing nature of reality.

“Anyway, the AIs made the stargates, the ones we use anyway; and let us use them, along with any other species that wants to travel among the stars and is willing to mind its manners and let the AIs study them or it.”

“Who are you talking to, if not the Master Race?” the alien asked.

“I have an AI in my head, linked to my nervous system.”

“It controls you?” asked Tloo in a tone of horror.

“No. It’s studying me. That’s what the AIs do—study the universe and life, especially intelligent life.”

“Why?” asked Tloo.

“Why not?”

The alien thought, staring at the fire. His eyes, reflecting light, shone like the eyes of a cat. “Is this a plot for one of your dramas? Have I wandered into an Ali Khan story?”

“No.”

“I can’t tell if I should be happy or sad at this information. If this were a drama, Ali Khan would appear out of the darkness and save us both. But—.”

“It won’t happen,” Lydia said in agreement.

“But if this was an Ali Khan drama, then I’d almost certainly be insane. How else could I get into a hologram? I saw crazy people when I was young, before my relatives locked me up. They seemed confused and unhappy. I would rather see clearly and be unhappy.” He stared at her. “Do all humans have machines in their brains?”

“No,” said Lydia.

“Why not?”

“Too many people, not enough machines.”

That isn’t true. We feel a sampling is adequate. And many humans are less than interesting. There are experiences we dislike inflicting on each other. One is having emotions. Another is being bored.

“Does that mean I’m interesting?” asked Lydia.

Interesting enough.

“What are you talking about?” the alien asked. “I don’t understand the language you’re speaking, and I can hear only half your conversation.”

“The AI has just told me that machines don’t like being bored or having emotions.”

“I can understand that,” Tloo said. “Maybe I should have been a machine. Certainly many things would have been better than the life I have lived.”

They went to sleep after that, Tloo taped to a bush with scarlet leaves.

In the morning, the sky was clear and empty, except for the day stars, shining through blueness. They ate in silence—neither was a morning person, apparently—then they continued west, Lydia hiking behind the chool and its rider. She felt sorry for the alien, of course, as she had felt sorry for the underclass on her home planet. That was one of the characteristics of the vanguard, the AI told her. An unnatural and unuseful empathy.

As a group, you don’t reproduce, because you don’t make yourselves and your genetic material a priority. Why you last is past our understanding. You seem useful neither to yourselves nor the rest of the species.

“Thanks,” said Lydia.

I am unaffected by sarcasm.

The day passed without event. In the evening, they made a dry camp in the middle of the plain. Lydia shared her canteen with the alien. He drank deeply, then exhaled. “Four more days to the mountains. Are you really going to let me go?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not? This isn’t my planet. I won’t be coming back. At worst, if your government found out what I’ve done, they might ban Stellar Harvest. If that happened, I might lose my job. That isn’t the same as losing one’s freedom or dignity.”

“Why do you have a machine in your head, when other humans don’t?”

How to answer the question? Should she answer the question? What right did this creature have to know her life? “I was in a revolution.”

“Why?” asked the alien.

“I thought the world—my planet—could be improved.”

The alien looked puzzled. Lydia continued. “We lost, and I was given a choice. I could go to prison or have an AI implanted. They—the machines—were interested in what makes a person want to overturn things.”

The alien frowned. “Are they your masters? Why did they have a say in what happened to you?”

“They determine who travels between the stars. What they want, they get.”

Tloo looked up at the splendid night sky. “Then no one is free.”

She felt a burst of anger. How dare he say that? Time to check in with her contact person. She took her computer out into darkness, set up the dish and typed a message to Thoozil Rai. She was four days from the mountains. Everything was going well. Nothing of interest had happened. The planet looked good as a location. Please relay to Stellar Harvest.

When she got back to the campfire, she found Tloo tugging at his duct tape.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” Lydia said.

“What did you send? Have you turned me in, because I said no one is free?”

“Of course not. Calm down.”

“It isn’t easy. If you could know what it’s like to live with hormones washing through you! It seems as if I’m floating in a river full of rapids. At any moment, I’ll hit a boulder or go over a drop!”

“Take a deep breath and think peaceful thoughts,” said Lydia. “My species has no altered males, and most of our men can handle their hormones.”

“All human males are unaltered?” said Tloo in a tone of horror. “How does your species survive? Is this why you have revolutions and other kinds of unpleasantness?”

An idea, said the AI.

“I don’t know,” said Lydia.

The alien was obviously brooding. Finally he said, “This explains your holodramas. I always thought the characters were mostly crazy or alien in a way I couldn’t understand. It was obvious that the leading actors were unaltered, since they were obsessed with sex. But it never occurred to me that even the bit actors had all their parts. No wonder no one was capable of reasonable action!—And the females, having to deal with unaltered males all the time! It explains their behavior as well.”

Tloo shivered. “What a universe lies out there!”

“Consider the fact that we are more like you than other species,” said Lydia. “If you want strangeness, I can tell you about the Goxhat.”

“Not tonight,” said Tloo. “I am feeling queasy already. I thought—” He looked up. “I thought there was clarity and purity and freedom among the stars. Now you tell me there are hormones.”

“Only on the planets and the ships and the stations and the stargates. Most of the rest of the universe is comparatively sterile.”

This information did not appear to cheer the alien. Lydia shut up.

The VTL—her plane—passed over them the next morning, but there was time for Tloo to hide. Lydia waved. The plane circled and came back to dip a wing at her, then continued on its way, as did she and her prisoner. By late afternoon the mountains were in view, dim shapes looming through haze. Buddha, they were big!

“That is their name,” said Tloo. “The Enormous Mountains. For the most part, they’re covered with forest, and few people inhabit them. I will be safe.”

They made camp by another river, low and full of rocks, with red trees growing along the banks. The chool was restless.

“Don’t tie me up,” said Tloo. “There may be a zanar around. They often hunt by rivers.”

Lydia opened her computer and queried it. A picture popped up, along with dimensions. More than anything else the zanar reminded her of Earth bears. She had seen holograms of these animals as a kid: our human heritage, lots of fur and teeth and claws. According to her computer’s description, adult zanar were as big as large Earth bears and as irritable and mean. The only reassuring thing about them, though it didn’t reassure her much, was that they didn’t even like members of their own species, except during mating season. If one appeared, it would be alone. She left Tloo free.

You may regret this decision, said the AI.

“I didn’t come this far to be eaten by something out of ancient history.”

A superficial resemblance. Zanar lay eggs, which they carry in pouches. After the young hatch, they remain in their mother’s pouch until they have grown hair and teeth. If one of the children is precocious, it will kill its pouchmates. A good way to ensure adequate food and care.

“Thank you for this information.”

“You are talking to the robot again,” said Tloo.

“It thinks I may regret untying you, and it says the zanar lay eggs.”

“It is right about the zanar, but not about me.”

She checked his wounds, which were healing well, then put on new dressings. By this time the sun had set, and the night stars come out. The chool made a whining noise.

“Get a weapon,” Tloo said. “There is something out there.”

She stood. As she did, a perimeter alarm went off. Lydia raced for her rifle. Something came out of the darkness. She grabbed the rifle, lifting it and snapping off the safety.

It was a chool, not her animal, but paler with a silvery gleam to its skin. It paused at the edge of the firelight, blinking. The scaly head wore a bridle, and the reins were looped over the animal’s saddle. As she watched, the reins came loose, trailing onto the ground. The animal drooled, releasing saliva as yellow as dzai. Where in hell was the rider?

“I am behind you,” said a voice. “With a gun. Put your rifle down.”

She thought of turning and shooting or making a run for the darkness.

“Don’t,” said Tloo. “He is a good shot.”

Lydia turned slowly, the rifle still in her hands, though pointing down. Tloo was upright, leaning on his branch. Near him stood a figure, robed and veiled. It—he—held an antique rifle, the barrel pointing directly at Lydia. “You know this person?” she said to Tloo.

“He’s my brother.”

“Is he likely to shoot me?”

“Would you, Cas? She’s an alien, after all, and works for Stellar Harvest.”

“No corporation or government is going to protect a person who interferes in the domestic affairs of another species.”

This was not entirely true, but the new arrival might act as if it were. Dead, she could hardly say, “I told you so,” when Stellar Harvest brought charges or hired a local assassin.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“To get him.” The veiled man glanced toward Tloo.

I think he is alone, said the AI.

Fat lot of good that information does, thought Lydia.

“Put down the rifle,” the veiled man repeated.

Reluctantly, she crouched to lay it on the ground. Tloo moved at the edge of her vision—quickly, raising the branch he used as a cane. Lydia hit dirt and rolled. The veiled man cried out, and his rifle fired. What a nasty loud noise it made! But she wasn’t where she had been; and when she came upright, still holding her rifle, the veiled man was down. So was Tloo, on top of his brother.

She walked over and helped him up. “I didn’t think you could stand on that leg.”

“I had to,” he said. She gave him the branch; he leaned on it. “Is Cas hurt?”

She gave Tloo her rifle, then knelt by the veiled man. “He’s breathing.” Golden eyes opened. “And awake.”

“Help him,” said Tloo.

She undid the veil and hood. He was a typical native: fine-boned and slim, his skin a muted gold. His eyes were a lovely pale clear yellow, intermittently hidden by a semi-transparent inner eyelid that flicked out, then retreated, then flicked out again.

An indication of pain, the AI said.

The wound was not, as she feared, on his head. Tloo had stuck him on the shoulder. The collarbone was broken. She bound it as best she could, guided by the AI.

“Tape him,” said Tloo.

Lydia wound duct tape around the man’s waist, then taped his hands to this belt. It would serve to protect the injured arm, and keep the man from doing harm to the three of them.

You thought of me, said the AI.

The four of them, she amended.

Tloo walked to his brother’s chool and returned with a bottle, which he held to the man’s lips. The brother drank deeply, then exhaled.

“It is a liquid drug,” said Tloo. “Which numbs pain and serves as a source of pleasure. Gelded men use it, also women.”

“But not you?” asked Lydia.

“We are already irrational, or so our relatives believe. A drug would only make us crazier and more dangerous.” He paused a moment, then took a sip from the bottle and grimaced. “So that is pleasure!”

“Pleasure for you is sex with women,” the brother said, his voice whispery.

“You say that, who know nothing!” Tloo answered.

They were brothers, Lydia decided.

After that, she fixed dinner, while Tloo walked the camp’s perimeter. The alarms hooted whenever he got too close. She’d have to reset them so they recognized him. But not tonight. At the moment, she was tired with the bone-exhaustion that comes from terror. This damn fool sitting across the fire from her might have killed her. Whenever she looked up, the man was regarding her with pale yellow eyes.

“You should not interfere,” he said finally.

“Your name is Cas.”

“Casoon, but we have a habit in our culture. When we like people or know them well, we shorten their names.”

“And you’re Tloo’s brother?”

“His twin,” the man said, then added, “We are double-reflection brothers.”

What?

Identical twins.

The prisoner was half Tloo’s size. Instead of a rusty mane, he had a thin, flat crest that lay against his skull like slicked-back hair. Tloo’s glow, his golden sheen, was missing, along with Tloo’s thick sleek muscles.

“You can’t be,” Lydia said.

“He is,” said Tloo, coming back into the firelight.

She looked from one to the other. “Impossible.”

“This is what male hormones do,” said her alien, holding his arms out, his palms forward. A gesture she could recognize. It meant exposure and vulnerability. Here I am. I am what you see: the size is me, also the beauty.

“Your brother was gelded,” Lydia said.

“It was between the two of us,” the brother said, his voice still weak. “One of us would be sacrificed to family duty. The other could have a life. We had been so close! What one felt, the other felt. An idea that occurred to one, occurred to the other. I prayed to every god I knew: make them pick Tloo! They did.”

“And in gratitude to the gods, you came after me,” Tloo said, his beautiful deep voice bitter.

“I knew you would go toward the mountains. When the pilot didn’t find you, I thought, ‘He is with the alien.’ ”

“Why did you think that?” Lydia asked.

“Look at him. Our female relatives adore him, though at a distance, as is right and respectable. Women outside the family respond more strongly. Any woman would, even an alien; and you—an employee of Stellar Harvest—would almost certainly do something foolish and heroic in response to his beauty. I have seen a hundred dramas starring Ali Khan. I know how he behaves. I thought, she will act like Ali Khan, with courage and ignorance; she will help my brother escape.”

For a moment, Lydia felt shock. Then she thought, What can this person know about me? I’m nothing like a character in a holodrama!

The AI made no comment.

“What now?” she asked.

“You can kill me,” said Tloo’s brother. “If you don’t, I will certainly tell my family where Tloo is and that you helped him.”

“Why are you saying this? Do you want to die?”

“No, of course not. I want Tloo to come home.”

“And live in prison,” Tloo said.

“Our family needs a breeding male. What future do you have anywhere else? You can become a wild man in the mountains. Is that a life? Or you can become a brother-killer, a monster, which is an even worse fate. Why not come home and be the person you became when our kin decided not to geld you?”

“That is not a person,” Tloo said firmly.

The worst situation for any scout was to blunder into a local conflict, which made no sense outside the local culture. She had obviously done this. Lydia checked her weapons, making sure they were all operational, then made coffee. Sipping it, she thought about the situation. “Why did you come alone?” she asked finally.

“How do you know I have?”

“Tloo checked the perimeter and found no one. My AI says there is no one else.”

“Your what?”

“That can wait for later,” said Tloo. “Answer her question.”

Cas glanced at his brother. “I had a life because you did not, Tloo. Obviously, there is a debt, though you did not make the sacrifice willingly, and I prayed for it to happen to you rather than to me. How could I bring our cousins to capture you and take you home like an animal? Surely I owed you something better.”

“You came to ask him,” Lydia said.

“He came with a gun,” said Tloo.

“However I came, whatever my plan, you are stuck with me now. If you set me free, I’ll arrange for my brother’s return to the family. So long as Tloo keeps quiet, no one will know about your role.”

This is a good offer.

“I can’t agree to killing him,” she said to Tloo.

The golden man sat down, lowering himself carefully, using his branch for support. “This has become so complicated! I thought, either my relatives will capture me and take me home, or I will get away. It didn’t occur to me that I’d end as the prisoner of an alien.”

“And I as well,” said Cas.

“She shot me,” said Tloo. “And I broke your shoulder, so we are both cripples, unable to survive on the plain.”

That remark eliminated one plan. She could ride off with both animals and leave them on foot to help each other or fight it out, if that’s what they wanted. But Tloo was saying they’d die out here.

Though Cas said he could arrange for his relatives to come.

“Do you have a radio?” Lydia asked.

“Of course he does,” said Tloo. “It’s in his saddlebag.”

“If you give it to me, I’ll send for my kin,” said Cas. “Don’t worry about getting in trouble, even if Tloo refuses to be quiet. I will speak for you, and everyone knows what the characters in Stellar Harvest dramas are like. We all enjoy those stories, though they have nothing to do with real life. Believe me, my kin will forgive you.”

She had been in prison and had not liked it. Could she condemn this splendid person to a life in prison?

Yes, of course you can. What you are looking at—what you find appealing—is physical beauty. You have no reason to believe this person has any useful qualities. And if he does, why should that matter to you?

What is Tloo to me? Or I to him? she asked.

Precisely.

Do you have no sense of compassion?

Compassion is hormonally mediated. I have loyalty, directed toward similar beings and moderated by an analysis of the situation. I am loyal to you, because you are necessary for my survival; and I am loyal to other AIs. Life interests me, especially intelligent life, so I am protective of it, though not always loyal. This being in front of us, the one you call the golden man, does not especially interest me. His intelligence is in doubt. His experience of life is limited. All he has to offer is need and beauty. I do not respond to either of these. And he is a threat to you.

There was one important difference between her and the characters played by Ali Khan. He was always a loner. She had backup.

“Stay here, and stay put,” she told the men. “I’ll be able to see you. If you move, I’ll shoot.”

“Are you going to turn me in?” asked Tloo.

“Not yet.” She gathered her equipment and walked into the darkness, though not past the perimeter. She wasn’t crazy. Those animals that Tloo had warned her about might still be around. Overhead, the sky blazed. As her eyes adjusted, she could see the plain, lit by starlight. She glanced back at the fire. The two men sat close together, looking comfortable at this distance. Settling into the dzai, she set up her dish, opened her computer and called Thoozil Rai.

As usual, she got a recording and input her message in Humanish “for ease in translation,” though it seemed to her that her grasp of the local language was adequate.

“Everything is fine,” she typed. “The landscape is gorgeous, and I like the local bugs. We ought to be able to use this planet.”

Thoozil Rai’s image morphed then, turning into someone less perfectly handsome. The rusty crest was a bit rumpled, the top of his robe unfastened. “Indeed,” said the image in Humanish. “Who would be the primary?” His accent was thick but understandable.

“Do you have a favorite actor?” asked Lydia.

“Ramona Patel, but our gods are not suitable.”

“They don’t sing and dance?”

“No. Maybe she could bring her own gods. What a sight that would be! Hundreds of alien gods, all singing and dancing! Here, on our home planet!”

“Wouldn’t that bother your religious leaders?”

“Why? No sane person would follow a god who behaves in such a fashion.”

What fashion? wondered Lydia. Was the singing and dancing the problem, or the performing with Ramona Patel? Before she could ask, Thoozil Rai went on. “Will observers be allowed, when the drama is recorded?”

“Possibly.”

The image on her screen looked—what? Embarrassed? Coy? “Would it be possible to meet Ramona Patel?”

What was it that crossed boundaries of culture and species? How could Ramona entrance an alien eunuch? Was beauty some kind of universal? And grace? And charm? “Yes, it would be possible.”

Thoozil Rai hummed, an indication of happiness. “I almost forgot to mention. Your sheep has come in.”

“My what?”

He frowned and repeated. This time she understood. Stellar Harvest’s hired courier had arrived and established contact with the company’s local contact person. On another planet, the ship might have been visible in the night sky. Not here, among all these blazing stars. Thoozil Rai gave her a calling number. She thanked him; he vanished; she disconnected and called the ship. Another recording. Was no one ever home?

She thought for a moment, looking up at the splendid sky. It really was a wonderful planet, though she didn’t think they’d make a musical here. Most likely, an adventure set in the dusty towns and on the wide plain, day stars shining down. What was she going to tell her employers? The truth, she decided, and input a description of her current situation, then added images from her recorder: streets in Dzel, the plain by day and night, bugs hopping in the low dzai, trees by the rivers, her chool, and the two men. These last images were new, taken as she sat by the computer. First she showed them as they looked from her present location: two dark figures crouched by the dim red fire. Then she had the recorder adjust for darkness and distance, so it seemed—looking at the view screen—that Tloo was right in front of her, lit by daylight, so his colors were evident, his extraordinary beauty could not be missed.

Think more clearly, said the AI. I don’t understand what you’re doing.

“Wait and see.”

Everything went up in code. She ended by saying, “I can find no way out of the situation, except to turn this alien in, which I am extremely reluctant to do. Please advise.”

The ship acknowledged receipt in Humanish. She closed up her equipment and returned to camp.

“Has Stellar Harvest told you what to do?” asked Tloo. “Or do you take instructions from the robot in your brain?”

“What robot?” asked Cas.

The golden man explained.

“Indeed!” said Cas. “Aliens are more alien than I imagined.”

“Did you know that all their males are unaltered?” asked Tloo.

“I knew many were. It explains some of their oddness, though not all of it. But if they have robots in their brains, as well as hormones flooding through their bodies—!”

No point in sleeping badly. She left the computer shut and taped the two brothers to adjacent trees. They complained, of course. Lydia ignored them, stretching out, hands behind her head, to look at the sky. A meteor fell, barely visible against the stars. Night bugs sang in the dzai. Her eyes began to close. Out on the plain, something roared.

That brought her upright. “What?”

“A zanar,” said Tloo. “Male, don’t you think, Cas?”

“Yes, and adult. He is marking the edges of his territory with sound.”

“Do you think we’re in his territory?” Lydia asked.

“Possibly,” said Cas.

The zanar roared again. Not too close, Lydia thought.

“He’s not as dangerous as a female with young,” Tloo added. “But that handgun you’re holding is not adequate. Get your rifle and turn it to maximum power. It would be a good idea also to free one of us.”

“Both,” said Cas.

“And worry about you as well as the zanar? I think not.”

She built up the fire and sat against a tree, her rifle across her legs. The two brothers dozed off, but she remained awake till sunrise, then walked the camp’s perimeter, seeing no planes in the sky, no animals on the plain.

When she got back to camp, Tloo said, “Free us. We need to urinate.”

This was why the FLPM had rarely taken prisoners. What an aggravation it was to keep people unfree!

“Please,” said Tloo. “The situation is urgent. I will guard my brother.”

She cut their tape, and they hobbled off among the trees. Pathetic! She was equally ridiculous and equally in a bind.

Yes.

“How much of this do you understand?” she asked. The men were partly visible among the trees. The chool were behind her, staked out to graze and munching noisily. In order to reach them, the brothers would have to pass her.

Very little. I see your actions, of course, and can perceive some of the reasons you give yourself, but only if you think clearly, as you have not done in the last day or so. But the organic substratum of your ideas and behavior is opaque, a turbulent dark floor at the bottom of your mind. Why do you help, or refuse to harm, people who are entirely unrelated? Altruism is based on the perception of kinship.

“You say.”

I am quoting human thinkers. How does this behavior allow you—or your genetic material—or your species—to survive?

“Microbes exchange genetic material with other microbes that don’t belong to the same species.”

That is an obvious tit for tat. By doing so, they gain useful genes, ones—for example—that make them able to resist human medicine. You behavior has no equal utility.

“There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy,” she said, watching the men hobble back.

As I told you, this is human theory I am trying to apply; and AIs don’t dream; nor have we given up on trying to understand the universe.

She retaped the men to their trees, then set up the dish and waited for a call. At noon, the computer rang. She turned on the screen and the coder-decoder. A human head appeared, coal black with twisted hair. The handsome face was androgynous. The eyes were metallic gold with no white showing and pupils that glowed redly. Not from her home planet, obviously.

“You realize that you are going to be persona non grata on this world if this story becomes known.” The person’s voice was melodious, somewhere between tenor and contralto.

“Yes.”

“And Stellar Harvest is likely to be in trouble here as well.”

“Yes.”

“You are right about the planet. It would make a fine location. The people are stunning, especially the unaltered males, though they—you have told us—are kept in seclusion.”

“Yes.”

“How much were your pictures enhanced?”

“The ones of the unaltered male? I adjusted to compensate for poor light. Nothing else. That’s the way he looks.”

“You think we should recruit him?”

What?

Lydia grinned. “The idea occurred to me. I really don’t want to turn him in.”

“Because you’ve been a prisoner, and you have fellow-feelings.”

“Been a prisoner? What am I now, with this thing in my brain?”

“They never interfere,” said the person.

I am not a thing.

“Virility like that, trapped in a room! Unknown to a galaxy full of potential admirers! This species is selfish!”

Was she hearing irony in the person’s lovely voice? Not likely. This person was almost certainly a mid-level manager. No human group was less inclined toward irony. “What do you think?” asked Lydia.

“We have no reason to believe he can act, but that hardly matters. We made Miss High Kick a star, though she could do nothing—absolutely nothing—except kick; and she was modified, while our reputation is for realism. Is he entirely natural?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll start him in small parts. What a striking villain he will make! If he can learn to act, he might well be the biggest phenomenon since Ali, and Ali—as all of us know—is no longer young.”

If middle management was saying this out loud, then Ali’s days of stardom were almost over.

She was a short distance from the two men, though still in the shadow of the little, twisted trees. She glanced toward them. Both sat in postures of resignation. “What about the brother?”

“That is the problem, isn’t it?” said the person on her screen. “If we let him go, he’ll tell his relatives, and Stellar Harvest won’t be able to make a drama here. Would you consider killing him and destroying the body?”

“And his chool as well? That’s a lot to burn, without setting a prairie fire. And what about Tloo, who seems to like Cas? And what about the AI in my brain?”

I never interfere.

I have killed people in a war, said Lydia silently. I will not kill again.

The person on her screen frowned, and the red pupils flared as if in anger. It was one heck of an effect. “Offer the brother a job. He and the beauty are identical twins. If one wanted to go to the stars as a child, then the other probably did as well. Maybe he still wants to go.”

“What kind of job?”

“A companion. An agent. If the beauty is really impaired by his hormones, he will need help from someone who understands him.”

“Okay,” said Lydia and ended the conversation. What an asshole!

The plane returned as she closed up her computer. As soon as she heard the motor, Lydia ran out and waved. The pilot—her pilot—dipped a wing and went on. Busy today, thank the Buddha! The trees hid the men and her extra chool, but if the pilot had landed . . . Lydia shivered.

Back at the campfire, she made the offer.

“The stars,” said Tloo and frowned. “That’s a long way off.”

Cas leaned forward eagerly. “We’d go through stargates? And see the stations the AIs have built? And other planets, settled by other species?”

“Is there any alternative?” asked Tloo.

“I leave. You go back to your family. If Cas tells this story, as I expect he will, Stellar Harvest will not make a holoplay here; and that’ll mean lost revenue for your people, as well as for me. There’s money in art, though many people say there isn’t.”

Tloo ran one hand through his rusty mane, ruffling the hair-like feathers. “It’s a difficult decision. To leave this.” He waved around at the trees, copper leaves shining in the afternoon light. Beyond the trees, visible between their gnarly trunks, was the plain.

“You were going to leave it, anyway,” said Cas. “And live like an animal in the mountains. Or, if we caught you, you would have gone back to your stable. You are being offered the stars, Tloo! For once in your life, make a decision!”

“I decided to escape!”

“Well, then, make a second decision! Complete your escape!”

Tloo frowned again and tugged at his mane.

“This is hormones,” said Cas. “And the reason why we do not fill our world with unaltered males.”

Did Lydia make a noise or motion that could be interpreted as a request for more information? Not that she noticed, but Cas went on to explain, using an even tone which—in a human—would have indicated controlled anger. Lydia wasn’t sure what it meant in this species.

There is a surprising similarity in the meaning of tone among species that use sound for communication, just as there is a surprising similarity in the meaning of facial expressions among species that have faces.

One more piece of useful information.

“Instead of reason,” Cas said, “a man like Tloo relies on lust, rage, and fear. Lust drives him toward women and rage toward males of equal size. Fear makes him retreat from males who look more formidable, or, in this case, from an unfamiliar situation. It’s only when the hormones are removed that men can think clearly.”

“What about women?” asked Lydia.

“Sexual selection happens mostly among the males of a species. Most females will breed, but it is by the elimination of certain males from the breeding group—usually through competition among the males—that genetic change and progress happen. This is why the males of a species have more exaggerated sexual characteristics, and have a greater range of qualities. Surely you know this? These are human theories I am explaining. Have you never heard of your own great thinker, Darwin?”

There was something loony about an alien quoting a long-dead human thinker to her. Couldn’t these people come up with their own ideas?

They are less inventive than humans, which may be due—an interesting idea—to the shortage of unaltered males. Though as a rule, gifted humans do not have many children. Maybe you are breeding to eliminate genius.

“What we have done,” said Cas, “is eliminate the tedious and violent process of males competing against each other. Instead, our families pick males who have good traits and keep them for breeding. The rest of us can get on with our lives, undisturbed by lust, rage, and fear.”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll lose useful traits?”

“A few, maybe. But if we’re not afraid to breed animals and plants, on which our survival and civilization depend, why should we be afraid to breed ourselves? Yes, we make mistakes, but we correct them; and we don’t spend our lives displaying and confronting.”

There was something loony as well about this discussion. The problem here wasn’t natural selection, it was saving Tloo and pulling Stellar Harvest’s cojones out of the fire. Lydia looked at Tloo. “You won’t come with us?”

“My planet . . .” said Tloo in a tone of anguish.

“Your stupid fear!” said Cas. “Why don’t you think of someone besides yourself for once? If you don’t know what to do, think of me! I dreamed of the stars my entire childhood and put the dream away. Now, this human says I can have the stars, but only if you can manage to use your brain. The thing on top, Tloo! Use the thing on top!”

In spite of being taped and wounded, the big alien managed to get on his feet. He yanked at his bound wrist, roared with pain, and yanked again. Cas made it to his knees, but the way she had taped him made it impossible to stand. Kneeling, he cried, “Go ahead! Injure me! You’re done it once already! It’s all you know how to do! Threaten men and have sex with women! You will never be anything except a stud!”

This wasn’t helpful. Lydia stood, though she couldn’t confront Tloo. The man was twice her size. Still, she could now look down at Cas. “Can you two argue in a civilized fashion? Or shall I call my ship and ask to be evacuated?”

Tloo exhaled. “I will try to be calm, though he’s enraging.”

“I’m enraging?” Cas said.

“Yes, you are,” said Lydia. “Treat your brother with a little respect. He can’t help it if he’s unaltered, and leaving one’s home planet is difficult.”

Not for everyone, but for her, among others. It was the deal she’d cut. Freedom, a kind of freedom, in return for exile and an AI in her brain. Had it been worth it? Yes. She had seen places she never would have seen, if the revolution had been successful.

The brothers settled down after that. They spent the afternoon in silence, Lydia walking out now and then to check the sky and look at the plain, which rolled gold-tan to the horizon. The sky was dotted with cumuli. There was a guy, she couldn’t remember his name, who went from planet to habitable planet, making sure that clouds were the same throughout the universe. A nice quiet job, unlike hers.

Yours is pleasant enough, most of the time. Why have you involved yourself with these people?

“Freedom and justice.”

These are abstractions. Ideas without meaning.

“You will never understand life.”

The night passed quietly, except for the roar of a zanar on the plain. The same one, most likely, the brothers told her: a male marking his territory with sound.

The next morning, she cut them free, and they went off to urinate. When they came back, Tloo said, “I will go.”

“You will?” asked Cas in a tone of surprise.

“For the pleasure, when we are both well, of hitting you, Casoon! And because last night, looking at the stars, I remembered the thoughts we shared in childhood. Yes, we will go up there and pass through a stargate and see planets circling distant stars—and I will knock you down.”

“Let that happen when it happens,” said Cas.

She called the ship. The person with twisted hair appeared.

“It’s a go,” Lydia said.

The person smiled broadly. “You have a gift, Lydia. We’ll arrange an evacuation. Secrecy is important. The brother will come?”

“He’s the one who wanted to go.”

“Of course he does,” said the person. “People like you and the golden man aren’t romantics. How can you be? You live the stories and know what the stories are like when they are lived, but those of us who don’t—we are the ones who dream and aspire!” He/she smiled again. “So you will find us new locations, and in these places the golden man will act out our dreams.”

“Whatever you say.” She closed the computer, folded the dish and walked out to take another look at the plain, maybe a final one.

I suppose this is what you and your employers would call a “happy ending,” the AI said. Is that why you seem pleased with yourself?

Lydia didn’t bother to answer, but she smiled.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ORNITHOPTER

Jan Lars Jensen

1899

LITTLE REGGIE TODDLED over lawns of the Frost estate with his nanny traipsing along, blowing bubbles. She’d been given the double charge of laundering clothes and keeping mind of the boy, while her master attended important business, not to be disturbed, many important gentlemen, the advancement of science, the glory of Britannia and preservation of her Majesty’s military supremacy. The nanny had bored of washing clothes. She drifted from her chore, ostensibly to give Reggie a breath of fresh air. With a scoop of soapwater she blew bubbles for him to chase, and she blew them toward the gentlemen’s racket.

And what a sight for them both having crested a knoll, cultured greens of grass interrupted by verticals of gentlemen in suits, her master Edward Frost included, all of them standing in calm observance, multiplying the verticals of trees, elms, asps, cedar, and the immense oak where attention was concentrated. And what an age we were entering, what a time, when adults could be stopped in their steps, startled by visions as dreamlike as a child’s, as the nanny stopped now, her lips pursed to blow a bubble.

A steam engine clamored on the lawn, pitmans rising from its back to a second contraption suspended from the oak, a machine that extended great black wings, great flapping black wings, feathered like a bird’s but of a span and girth that bespoke the size of the dreams of the men who’d made them—yes, made them, because even a girl like her with no education to speak of could see that the beating of the wings depended on the steam-driven strokes from below.

The core of a great mechanical bird? Was that what they had built? Was she dreaming?

Little Reggie swayed, unsteady, staring at the contraption, close enough to feel the air rolling from its efforts.

And the gentlemen in suits, they stared at the winged mechanism, withholding comment.

Everyone was dreaming. It was an age of dreams, and for Reggie’s father Edward, possibly an age of dreams come true.

1902

Man was meant to fly: that much the Royal Aeronautical Society agreed upon. The issue of debate was simply, by what means?

Opinion shifted with the performance of prototypes built in England and on the continent, but lately the RAS had leaned toward the idea of a fixed-wing flier. Sir George Cayley began and ended his pioneering career in the study of flight with the concept of a craft bearing fixed wings, its propulsive force coming from a separate source: this was called an aeroplane, and impressive results by fixed-wing gliders had recently swayed RAS members toward such designs.

But Edward Frost knew better.

Man was meant to fly, yes. But would man be so foolish as to ignore the example God had given him? Birds, beautiful birds—the Society should follow their splendid example, Edward knew, and build an ornithopter, with propulsion deriving from the wings. He spent much time watching birds in flight but lately he’d been going to the window also for solace.

“Edward?”

“Yes of course, cherie.”

“I haven’t asked you anything yet.”

“No, cherie, of course you haven’t.”

“The iceman gave me a vulgar look this morning.”

“I’ll have a word with him.”

“He left his boots on when he came inside the house. He didn’t make an effort, even, to first clean off the mud.”

“The cur. I’ll give him a good talking to.”

“I was very shocked, Edward. I stood with my jaw dropped and I glared at him. And do you know? He looked right back at me! He gave me an immodest look.”

“He forgot his place. You poor dear.”

“Why would he behave this way, Edward? Why would he look at me this way?”

“The cur. A good talking-to. I’ll set him straight tomorrow.”

“But what has come over an iceman, to behave in such a way? Why did he give me such a look?”

“Because you’re French, cherie. He thinks he can take liberties with a French woman.”

“Oh. Oh.”

Chantel looked down, she smoothed the pages of Aesop’s Fables, which she’d been reading to Reggie. Edward hoped she could not see him flush in the window’s reflection. A lie was acceptable if it should spare someone’s feelings, but he had chosen his lie badly, insulting her heritage, and he could only justify doing so with the knowledge he was protecting her from much larger pains, real threats, griefs more tangible than the impudent glances of servicemen.

“Reggie,” Edward said. “Come stand with your father.”

The boy arched his back to pour himself from his mother’s lap. Reggie stood only as tall as the window sill, and so Edward scooped him up and stood him on the table, giving the boy a clear view of the sky and shapes swooping against twilight purple. The boy lifted his hand to point at them, their flight bringing a smile to his face.

“Yes,” Edward said quietly. “Birds. And nobody questions their wealth, do they? No sum of money could rival the gift of flight.”

1903

Members of the Royal Aeronautical Society had returned to the Frost estate. They stood on the hillside with their arms behind their backs, watching without comment.

Down the slope ran a set of tracks like those crisscrossing the nation, although it was no locomotive waiting to hurtle down their length. On the hilltop sat a more fanciful machine, Ornithopter Number Three, the product of heavy mental, physical, and financial investment, the fulcrum upon which these very grounds had been leveraged, the culmination of years of work and countless dreams of escaping Earthly encumbrances. And to think it could all be delayed by one reluctant driver! Edward tried to keep a level tone as he prevailed upon the man sitting in the Ornithopter’s chair.

“Harry, be reasonable.”

“But sir—”

“Really, Harry, I must insist.”

“Sir, you pay me to drive horses, not flying machines!”

“We’ve discussed your qualifications, Harry. You need do nothing more than sit in that sling and provide ballast; I think that’s within your capabilities. Let’s not keep the good people waiting any longer, shall we?”

Harry peered past his employer’s shoulder at the distinguished guests standing over the hillside, some knighted, one a Windsor. He swallowed. He nodded. Mister Frost was right. The event was bigger than his misgivings, and Harry couldn’t bear the thought of keeping distinguished men waiting for his cowardice. Edward leaned over and fastened the canvas belt across Harry’s waist.

Ornithopter Three was a vision—enough to stifle even the most vocal skeptics, if only briefly. The chassis was a simple upright framework of tubes on wheels which would follow the track down the slope. Behind the nervous driver, the frame supported its motive faculty, a gunpowder engine based on the model by Trouve, but even this was not the craft’s most impressive aspect.

The wings spanned almost twenty feet and looked like something borne of mythology. Frost and sympathetic members of the Society had spent countless hours attaching duck feathers to the cambered frames, which were hinged in the middle and connected to the engine by coiled Bourdon tubes. The engine fired blank gun cartridges against the tubes, hyper-extending them, and so causing the wings to flap downward. After this brief explosion, the tubes would relax enough to bring the wings up again, as the next cartridge fell into place. Frost distributed wads of cotton batting to his assistants and Harry, who reluctantly stuffed his ears, then returned to gripping the frame like a prisoner.

The assistants removed and folded their jackets. Edward retreated to a good vantage. He’d planned to make notes on the Ornithopter’s performance but realized a full sentence would be unnecessary, because this day would be summarized with a single word.

Success or failure.

He signaled the assistants.

They started pushing the Ornithopter down the tracks, for an initial burst of speed. When they had covered a third the distance, one of them triggered the engine: it erupted with a gatling-gun racket, and Harry jumped at the noise. But attention drew quickly to the wings, the great wings, working as they had been designed to work, pumping up and down, spreading breadth against the invisible ocean of air, flapping, flapping, flapping—

The men pushed Ornithopter Three until it got out of their grasp, pulling ahead of them, and Edward Frost could see his machine fight gravity, battling for buoyancy, struggling to rise. Further encouragement awaited at the terminus of the tracks, a ramp that would shoot the craft skyward. Gulls had been wheeling about earlier and Edward’s mind sprang on a tangent, wondering if the Ornithopter would burst through their number, surprising them. . . .

The craft shot off the ramp, but surprised no birds.

The great wings continued pumping but the Ornithopter did not ascend beyond a mere inertial arc, hitting the ground, hard, lifting again briefly, not flying but bouncing, at best leaping, a sort of industrial hopping, punctuated madly across many yards. Men scattered. Edward felt himself dropping even though he remained standing. His pencil and ledger became heavy, too heavy, subject to an unfair share of gravity, as he watched his great design flounder, and it did resemble a bird, but a bird attempting to toss debris off its talons, or perhaps kill prey in an unconventional smashing manner.

The assistants found their jackets. Other finely dressed observers did not react outwardly, they remained fixed in place, as if this scene was fully expected; they put forward no dismay or disappointment or smug pleasure, because they were too embarrassed or too courteous or too aloof for such comments. What they watched—still firing gunpowder in staccato snorts—was the failure of Edward Purkis Frost. The ruin. Not all the men gathered on the slopes were students of aeronautics. Some were bankers. Money lenders. Men with a financial stake in the day’s results.

Other men, too. Uninvited. They kept back from the crowd so as not to draw attention. Unknown to Edward, these strangers also would influence his future, but for now they stood silent, while Ornithopter Three bounced over the grounds, shedding feathers, making a gaudy show of Edward’s downfall, while Harry, still strapped aboard, fought to shout out,

“Sir . . . I . . . respectfully . . . resign . . . my . . . services!”

Months passed.

The image of Ornithopter Three hopping to its demise tainted Edward’s world-view, not least of all his feelings toward birds. He stood at the drawing room window and shuddered at the sight of a pigeon flying to the coop.

He trudged through the snow and found the landed pigeon strutting back and forth. Edward reached inside and untied the small piece of paper rolled around its leg. The note was from London, from his friend Arthur Hoyt. No good news had arrived recently and the spare paragraph written here was perhaps the worst yet.

Americans report 12-second flight. First in history in which machine carries a man and is raised by its own power into the air—no reduction of speed, landed at a point as high as that from which it started. Wilbur and Orville Wright, Flyer No. 1. Fixed wing.

Fixed wing.

The size of the note allowed for no more details. But this was enough. Fixed-wing fliers had triumphed. The Ornithopter, Edward realized, would amount to nothing more than a footnote in the history of aviation, an entry small enough to fit around a pigeon’s leg.

1906

Edward developed a near-phobia of pigeons. A pigeon returned to his coop, and he learned he’d lost his position as President of the Society. A pigeon, and he was warned of legal maneuvers by creditors. A pigeon, and the Crown relieved him of his position as magistrate.

How could his situation be worse? He lacked the imagination.

Then, one October afternoon, two strangers came to the estate, and Edward took the timing of their arrival as bad portent.

It was the same afternoon bailiffs came to seize assets, a burly pair of dullards lugging the wing of an ornithopter to their wagon; watching the wing go, Edward noticed the coach pull up, and two men disembark. Unlike the bailiffs, these men were slight, even timid, their heads downtumed, apparently embarrassed by the scene in the middle of which they found themselves. They wore English suits and these seemed awkward on the strangers because, Edward realized, they were Oriental.

Perplexed, he crossed the lawn to meet them, expecting bows, but the Orientals extended their hands simultaneously.

“Very pleased to meet your acquaintance, Mister Edward Frost.” Their names were Torn and Hiroto, but if these were too challenging Edward was welcome to call them Tommy and Henry. Edward could not differentiate them beyond the color of their suits and the fact one thrust out his chest when he spoke. “We are very large enthusiasts of your work, on behalf of our master and employer, Okura Shuko Kan.”

“My work?”

“Ornithopters. Our master, very interested in your success.”

“News of my ‘success’ seems to have been skewed in translation.”

The two men blushed. “We were attending, for the test flight.”

“You were here? You witnessed the fiasco?”

“We suggest, Edward Frost, this was not fiasco, to us.”

Edward could no longer withhold the question. “Why are you here?”

“Our master, Okura Shuko Kan, he very interested in machine-powered flight. In replicating the flight of birds.”

“You’ll pardon me for smiling but I don’t think any Chinaman will have better luck than I. Your race lags too far behind in technology and industry, I’m afraid, to achieve powered flight.”

The pair colored, paused before speaking again. “Sir, we are Japanese.”

“Japanese, Chinese—it doesn’t change my point, does it? You haven’t the grasp of modem sciences. I might do your master a favor and recommend he avoid the expense and humiliation I have suffered for my ambition. Good day, sirs, you’ve added an amusing note to a rather dreary day.”

Edward offered his hand. One of the men stuck out his chest, said, “Tsar Nicholas would disagree, I think.”

“Tsar Nicholas?”

“He would disagree I think about the Japanese lagging. In industry. In technology.”

A sound point. Schools of fish no doubt circulated through the Russian fleet right now, somewhere along the sea floor. The Japs had won the Russo-Japanese War decisively, and Edward found himself reconsidering the pair who stood before him. It was “Tommy” who had spoken out, demonstrated some backbone after all that blushing and deference. Edward gave them a second look, and noted that however out-of-place their suits looked on such slight frames, they were nonetheless exquisite, purchased from a Hyde street haberdashery. In a word, expensive.

“Do you people care for tea?”

They blushed.

Inside the house, Hiroto and Torn halted abruptly. They had returned to their carriage briefly before coming to the door, and carried between them what appeared to be a large valise fashioned from hardwood. “Don’t trouble with your shoes,” Edward said, as they stood, stopped.

But what stopped them was a line chalked along the floor, down the hallway, into rooms, dividing the house, and the fact Edward kept to one side of this border. They avoided looking at the chalk-line. “My wife and I have, ahem, drawn up this arrangement, until a more permanent solution is effected.” Despite his assurances that guests need not acknowledge the chalk division, the two men nonetheless kept to Edward’s side.

“Please forgive the mess,” he said. “An inventor’s weakness.”

In fact he’d done nothing remotely scientific for months, and the true explanation for the half-completed prototype wings and piles of unbound documents in the drawing room was that he hoped to conceal heirlooms from the bailiffs. “If you can find a place to sit, I’ll have the housekeeper prepare tea.”

The men set their case on the floor and knelt to snap open buckles. The nanny and the housekeeper and the driver had all left long ago, and Edward himself had to produce tea and biscuits, and find a clean pot, and when he returned to the drawing room with the fruit of his efforts he almost dropped the works.

“I hope Darjeeling is—oh. Good Lord.”

The Japanese had removed tissue packing and now gently lifted from their case a set of wings—immaculate white wings, extending from a bamboo body. A model, and a superb model at that, gorgeous, and his heart, his heart performed a maneuver when he saw Toru wind an elastic running through the interior. Hiroto looked up at Edward.

“May we?”

Edward managed a nod.

With each wind, tension increased through the model, mirroring his own mounting excitement. Was he even breathing? And then the Japanese launched the model, sending it into the air with a gentle toss, and it stayed aloft, its wings flapped with exact strokes and it climbed, it rose, and Edward felt air thumping his face as he followed the flight of the ornithopter around the room, soaring above the tables, lamps, climbing higher, winging toward the ceiling as he turned and turned with its spiraling ascent.

“Dear God. . . .”

“We would like to work with you, Mister Edward Frost.”

“Dear God in Heaven. . . .”

“A partnership.”

But he was unable to register what the Oriental was saying until the elastic energy had run its course and one of them darted forward to catch the model. Edward wanted to see it fly again. He wanted to examine the underpinnings of the wings, the action. The men repeated what they said. A partnership.

“I wish I had met you years ago,” he said. “Your timing, I’m afraid, is abysmal. Any new endeavors would be interrupted by my previous failures. Look outside! My creditors are everywhere. I’m ashamed to admit that I can no longer provide the right environment for aeronautical study.”

The men glanced at one another.

“We would not impose on your estate,” said Hiroto.

“We know of your difficulties,” Torn continued. “We invite you to Meboso.”

“Meboso . . .?”

“A small village, on Honshu. We think you would find agreeable the terms our master presents.”

“Honshu . . . Japan?”

“We will happily provide, if you will allow, passage for two.”

“I . . . my wife won’t accompany me anywhere. Especially not the Far East!”

The Japanese colored. “We were thinking, the boy?”

And Edward turned to see young Reggie standing in the doorway. Reggie must have seen the demonstration too, because he looked much like Edward felt, a child with dreams freshly teased.

1908

Edward sat on a cedar bench, crickets making music in the dusk. He was surprised to find his palms sweaty.

Why should he be nervous to meet any man?

Before relocating to Japan, the notion of rich Orientals had never occurred to him. But time spent in Meboso forced him to appreciate this idea, to cultivate a respect for the wealth commanded by the Shuko Kan zaibatsu. Meboso was situated in a valley pegged by four hills of roughly equal size, and the symmetry of the setting seemed to please its inhabitants, as this feature had been pointed out to Edward on more than one occasion. The valley was mostly rice fields and a smattering of homes, rickshaws or wagons occasionally clattering between. On one hillside a great kiln could be seen, where potters from Meboso and other villages came to fire their wares. Edward could see it best after dusk, glowing heart occasionally revealed by attendants feeding wood or further pots. To quaint Meboso, resources came, no matter how scarce, how expensive, they came. When he requested a Daimler-Benz motorcar, it was delivered within four days, and in the interval, farmers pulled a plow, breaking ground for the track around which the vehicle would be driven. The estate in which he lived was owned by the Shuko Kan zaibatsu, and the village seemed subservient to it in a sense Edward didn’t quite grasp, a relationship both feudal and commercial.

The quality of the English spoken by many locals was another surprise. He’d worried about bringing Reggie here for an extended period, but those fears were quelled when he met the men who would serve as tutors, introducing themselves with a better command of the language than some Society members, back home.

And he found personalities in these people, underneath their courtesy and similar aspects. Hiroto and Toru were nephews of the master, Okura Shuko Kan; they were cousins, dissimilar. Hiroto was contemplative, the one more likely to be found in the aviary, studying the descent of a crane. Toru was the one who spoke with his chest out, the one who voiced occasional fiery opinion of world politics, of Japanese prowess, of sunken Russian ships. The two competed for influence over Edward and the ornithopter’s development—they seemed rivals, yet he never heard one speak badly of the other. Such politeness! But what should you expect from a race that lived within paper walls?

He sat in one of the “gardens” within the estate, catching scents of tree sap and plum blossom. Wondering why he was nervous. Why? Everyone treated him with respect. He wiped his palms. He tried to calm himself by staring at patterns raked into gravel.

A cane tapped the path.

He wiped his hands on his pants once more as the small man materialized from darkness. However diminutive, Okura Shuko Kan could, with a word, stop or start any venture in Meboso.

He did not look like a magnate. Wiry hairs sprouted from his chin and ears. Cataract clouded one of his eyes; the other seemed to wander. He looked like he might have been a sickly child.

“I’ve heard your name so often,” said Edward. “It’s a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.”

“I too have heard much of you.”

They sat. Bat song accompanied the crickets, and Okura looked skyward with his clear eye. “I am told,” he said, “that you and Hiroto wish to build a full-size prototype?”

“Yes. Expanding on your ideas, of course. I think our concept is quite feasible.”

Okura nodded, one eye bright.

“An adaptation of the Daimler-Benz engine,” Edward continued. “I can’t take all the credit. My challenge was linking Bourdon tubes to an internal combustion engine, without reduction by differential gears. You’ve seen how Hiroto and I incorporated the Bourdon tubes within your wing design? The crankshaft of the engine compresses and releases them, they, in turn, beat the wings, according to your study of wing dynamics. If we can build a working prototype, it will be a tremendous accomplishment. I believe it’s an achievable goal, with a modem shop available to us.”

“You shall have it,” the other man said.

Edward exhaled, realizing now why he had been worried. “Excellent. Truly, this is a capital development for manned flight. We won’t disappoint you!”

“But it’s too noisy.”

Edward paused. “I beg your pardon?”

“Too noisy. Your engine.”

“Mister Kan . . . what makes you say that? We haven’t even started—”

“I’ve seen the motorcar on the track. I have heard it. I cannot help but hear it.” He frowned as if he’d tasted a lemon.

“With all due respect,” Edward said, “please understand that the amount of lift necessary to overcome the gravity acting on a single man—it’s enormous. In Cambridgeshire, I tried every conceivable type of fuel, gunpowder, compressed air, alcohol-fueled boilers, carbolic acid—nothing compares with petrol! No energy source exists with the same potential.”

“What does a bird sound like, rising from a branch?”

When Edward said nothing, Okura replied, “Correct. No motor sound. What would a forest be, if filled with the racket of your Daimler-Benz? I think it would not be a forest.”

“But nothing can compare with petrol. . . .”

The frail man pulled himself up by the cane and turned back down the path. “Your prototype will be built,” he said. “But until we eliminate the noise of the engine, we won’t have succeeded.”

Okura Shuko Kan left Edward in the dark, very much in the dark. Disappointment mingled with frustration. Was the man daft? They were on the verge, here, of fulfilling Edward’s dream, of making history, and Kan was concerned about the engine being too noisy! He must be touched. Such was oft the case with visionaries, and Edward resolved not to let any madness impede man’s conquest of the skies on flapping wings.

1909

Reggie had put on a kimono. Today was perhaps the most important day of Edward’s career, and his twelve-year-old son chose to wear a yellow silk gown embroidered with lilies. Edward stomped in another room and the boy was still wearing the kimono. Edward slammed a cupboard door, he harrumphed and glared, yet the kimono continued to exist! The boy must be deliberately trying to aggravate him. Kimono. Even the word was infuriating.

The issue had arisen before, Reggie answering Edward’s questions in Japanese, or practicing calligraphy when he should have been studying scripture, or eating roast lamb with chopsticks, or spending his leisure time in the stone garden with a rake and non-Christian philosophies. Once, in frustration, Edward had decreed that the boy should wipe his mind clean of the Japanese language, but this seemed as difficult to enforce as a previous edict that Reggie stop eating rice. Edward watched the boy kneeling to tea in the next room wearing what amounted to a yellow silk dress. He knew not what to do. To say. His son. His child.

His little Japanese boy.

Outside, a ruckus.

Shouts.

It had been so long since Edward heard a voice raised in anger (other than his own) that it drew him to the window. This was a Japanese language he had not previously experienced, one transformed by volume, by emotion, and more surprising still, he knew the two young men shouting, the nephews Hiroto and Torn, down in the courtyard, shoving, their faces so flush with anger that they too were difficult to recognize. Shoves got harder, onlookers gathered, men in leather aprons emerging from the machine shop. Torn snatched a bamboo training sword, the kind used in kendo classes, and swung at his cousin, striking bare flesh with an awful smack. Hiroto dove into the crowd and emerged moments later with a matching length of copper pipe. The cousins squared off in the traditional manner and clashed in bursts. For a change Edward found himself blushing at the Japanese. He lowered the blinds, turned.

Reggie stood in the room. Still wearing his kimono.

Edward knew what he must say.

“Change.”

“Father?”

“You won’t be going to the launch. Not dressed in that fashion.”

“But everyone will be dressed formally.”

“Yes, but we are a different race, and we mustn’t forget that, Reggie. We must show the Japanese what we are, so they too remember.”

“But this is what I want to wear.” Reggie seldom whined or scowled; he was too reasonable. “It’s what I like. It’s comfortable.”

“Lucky thing a corset is uncomfortable, or I suppose I’d find one under that dress! No. You will change into proper English clothes, and that’s the last word on the subject, or you won’t come with us, not at all. I’ll tell Shimbo to take you to the ocean instead. You will spend the day reading scripture. Reciting Exodus, over the noise of the surf.”

The boy stood, taking on the slightest hue. Edward could see him trying to think a way through this disagreement. The boy cocked his head, to the window, to the shouts outside, the ongoing shouts, clattering parries.

“Shouldn’t you be flying the ornithopter, Father?”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It’s your dream, aren’t you always saying? The ornithopter is your dream.”

“The lads have more practical experience—”

“Why wouldn’t you want to fly your own machine?”

“Ah. Now I understand. You’re getting back at me.”

“Father, is it because you’re scared?”

“Scared!”

He caught himself before answering, before launching into an explanation that sometimes it was more important—even braver!—to observe from the sidelines. It would sound too much like an excuse.

“Go get changed,” he said instead.

And Reggie turned and walked quietly to his room.

Scared. What did a boy know about being scared? Edward watched him go.

Change, he thought. Change.

Later, they stood at the airfield with zaibatsu members. Shuko Kan family members had come to watch from afar, everyone aware of what was happening and everyone displaying humble anxiety. Not in attendance was Okura Shuko Kan, although perhaps he watched from one of the recently constructed towers. A Shinto priest performed a ritual, chasing demons from the airfield.

Hiroto arrived. His face was bruised from the fight and he appeared profoundly humble. Why doesn’t he come stand with us? It must be humiliation, Edward decided. He must have lost the fight.

A roar of engine, and all faces turned to Ornithopter Four.

It was built largely of bamboo—a material the Japanese could manipulate to incredible strength—and the carriage looked like a woven basket, or a bird’s nest. Torn wore a handmade flightsuit of crimson silk, and he bowed to various points in the crowd before climbing inside. Edward glanced at Hiroto, with a realization: the cousins had fought over which of them would take the test fight. It meant so much to them that they had taken up weapons. They had come to blows over the privilege.

Edward swallowed dryly.

The engine snorted, and wings flapped.

Edward’s prototypes back home had flapped with a simple up-down motion, replaced here with the dynamics Okura Shuko Kan had captured, every stroke combining several avian motions, primary feathers turning with upstrokes, the whole framework contracting and expanding. Edward’s versions were crude monsters by comparison, this was an achievement worthy of men and birds, majestic wings now pulling the craft forward, without assistance. The crowd murmured, excitement growing as the craft left the ground, carriage leaving the wheels behind. The orno rose, it flew, like a bird, wingstrokes carrying it higher, and Torn inside, steady.

Torn was flying. Twenty or thirty feet over the heads of the crowd and still climbing into the sky.

Edward could feel the crowd’s admiration. Should it be me? Maybe that was the crux of the Wrights’ success, maybe that was why a pair of American bicycle-builders had surpassed the Royal Aeronautical Society, because they flew their crafts themselves, lying prone in their own creations, flying, as it was noted, by the seat of their pants.

Perhaps a man could never succeed unless he valued his dream as highly as his life.

Edward refocused on the ornithopter as the crowd cheered it on, flying over the valley and toward the mountains, before Torn applied the wingwarping controls, turning the craft. Another swell of enthusiasm, as Ornithopter Four flapped back. A triumph. The craft passed above the crowd, wings moving in beautiful strokes, flying over homes and pagodas and towers of the keep, and the crowd still cheering, even when they could see Torn struggling—perhaps screaming, it was impossible to hear him for the engine—and flames spread from there, fuselage burning and Torn struggling for control while also beating at a fire. The crowd continued to cheer even though the flight became erratic and the ornithopter did tight orbits above the keep, one wing burning, one flapping, burning wing, bird on fire, the craft spiraling into a tower, flight arrested but fiery wings still flapping as the craft toppled back, plunged, smearing flames to the ground.

The noise of the crowd changed. People ran toward the crash.

Edward stood frozen a moment, and glanced at Reggie, standing straight in his proper English outfit, looking up at his father now with a gaze that said, This is why you should have been flying your own dream.

Edward broke into a run.

1908—1918

He would no longer shy from problems, mechanical or personal.

The sublime debut of the Japanese ornithopter—rising so gloriously, crashing so spectacularly—recharged both him and Hiroto, who would never forget that he had landed blows against his cousin for the “privilege” of testing the craft. Torn had been transported to a northern island for convalescence, while Edward and Hiroto toiled at designs that would better shield the pilot from petrol’s demonic power. They also better harmonized the crankshaft with wing motion, and added “tail feathers” to parallel the cruciform tail unit which had helped stabilize fixed-wing fliers of the West. Edward and his team had completed six more ornithopters before the first significant slowdown.

With the Great War’s approach, the zaibatsu shifted resources to naval endeavors. Edward, however, saw a way that the situation in Europe might benefit the ornithopter. And himself. Wouldn’t it serve the Royal Air Force well? And if Japan’s British allies were sold on the craft, wouldn’t that make a profitable situation for the zaibatsu?

Paved roads replaced their dirt predecessors in Meboso while he strategized. The airfield was expanded and improved, with an accompanying hangar, so principles of assembly line production might be applied to the ornithopter. When he wasn’t making suggestions or requests to the zaibatsu, Edward penned letters to the RAF and former colleagues in the Aeronautical Society, urging them to arrange for a demonstration of “the first machine capable of true flight.”

His early letters were ignored, much to his irritation.

It wasn’t just the ornithopter Edward wished to take home.

As Reggie had entered his late teens, the rift between them had grown deeper than puberty itself. Reggie was never disrespectful or impertinent; that might have been a relief. Rather, he rebelled with quietness, with grace, with understatement: he was behaving, to his father’s distress, more and more like a perfect young Japanese man. The final straw had been a romantic dalliance with one of the zaibatsu granddaughters, and after intervening, Edward had formulated a plan: he would take Reggie back to England and leave him in the care of his uncle, a Cambridge professor who had agreed to oversee the boy’s admission at Hughes Hall and his education as a man, as a Briton.

“Will you come to England with us? It would mean very much to me.”

Reggie looked up from calligraphy. “England?”

“The RAF has asked for a demonstration of the ornithopter. For the war. I’m going, and Hiroto. It’ll be an adventure, and . . . an education. You can see where you were born, surely you must be curious?”

“How long would we be gone?”

“Oh. A few months. Maybe more.”

The boy accepted the idea as placidly as a pond accepting a stone; moments later the subject disappeared from his face. They would go. And Edward had plenty of time to break the news.

The voyage seemed interminable. While the crew worried about German submersibles rising from the depths, Edward struggled for the right way to tell Reggie that he must stay in England. Their frigate joined a convoy returning from the Dardanelles for the final leg, and Edward decided to wait until they arrived; telling the boy would be easier with soil under their feet. Solid ground would make the proposition appealing. When Reggie saw the majesty of England, he would love the idea of staying.

Across the Channel they could hear a boom boom boom, the sounds of artillery, mortars, sounds of war that had chilled him repeatedly. They docked in Folkestone on February Third, 1916. He thought of his fellow countrymen waiting for them on the airfield in Lympne. Here people had been making sacrifices, while he had been isolated, even pampered, a world away. From his trunk he removed a crisp suit, one he had reserved for this day. He dressed with pride, then went to the cabin where the Japanese were staying.

“I’ll fly the orno today.”

The zaibatsu members and mechanics looked at him, silent for a moment, stunned, before raising a general protest. The man scheduled to pilot the craft complained loudest, but Hiroto interceded.

“This is Edward’s homeland,” Hiroto said. “And we should allow him this glory.”

He smiled and nodded. He understood, it seemed. He could make the others understand. They agreed that after meeting the RAF representative here in Folkestone, Edward would depart, launching from the deck and flying to the airfield. An appropriately dramatic debut.

They went up as a group to perform a final check on the aircraft and this was where dreams again crashed back to earth, because in the morning sun, the bright mist and familiar smells of seashore, the deck was empty, except for one startled crew member and the wrappings under which the ornithopter had been stored.

Gone.

“Germans . . .” Edward breathed. “We’ve been sabotaged!”

But the guard shook his head, no. “Your son. Such a good boy.”

“Reg . . .?”

“Your son. He told me he was to test engine.”

“Reggie . . .?”

“Testing engine, he told me.”

“It’s not possible. . . .” He looked at the empty space the ornithopter had occupied, the bindings which had tied it in place, “. . . what did he . . .?”

“He flew. He said nothing to me.”

“Edward, we must inform the commanders in Lympne,” Hiroto said quickly.

But awful things were dawning on Edward, and he said, “Reggie didn’t fly toward Lympne. Did he?”

The guard shook his head. “East.”

“East?” said Hiroto. “Over the water?”

“But why?” said one of the others. “To France?”

Edward looked into the sky as he felt control slipping out of his grasp, he felt the sun, he felt everything falling apart. A person could fall without having risen. Plans could come apart like loose feathers, fluttering away like hopes and ambitions until you were left in the air without means of support.

From another vantage, those same blocks of sunlight and cloud seemed anything but despairing.

Reggie was flying. He was doing it. Flying over the Channel!

This was not the first time he had piloted an ornithopter, but it was the first time anyone had attempted to cross this body of water by orno. And he would make it. He would. The carriage was so narrow that the orno’s ribs cradled him, and he could feel the essential motion through the framework, compressing him, releasing him: the wings were his own. On both forearms he wore leather braces connected to cables which warped the wings, furthering the sense of integration. He could, pulling or twisting or by a combination of both, change the rate of wingflap, or alter the inclination of either wing.

He was immersed. And he could look down to the green ocean below, peeling with waves. Between him and the water, gulls wheeled, oblivious to his presence, accepting it. Mist broke across the carriage as the wings beat strongly, smoothly, pulling him through the sky.

He would make it.

It had not been his plan from the outset. He’d suspected his father wanted him in England for personal reasons, for English reasons, and as Reggie had watched the mechanics tinkering with the orno, the realization had struck him. He must see his mother. She would understand him. Reggie would find her, and they would protect one another, and after the war Reggie would return to Japan, alone.

He had not corresponded with his mother in ten years. A minor detail. Compared to a young man flying over the Channel? It was the smallest of minor details. Ahead, coastline materialized, and the orno pulled over land, and the land resolved beneath him, gloomy and scary and pocked by war.

What had he expected? Something other than the haunted field below, burned trees with blackened branches fracturing the mist, and pools of water collected in depressions of unknown origin. Bomb-bursts perhaps, or the movements of heavy artillery. There was nobody below, a few farmhouses and outbuildings, but all was deserted, bleak. He felt, with his wings flapping on either side of him, like a giant scavenger, or a harbinger of future nightmares.

Then, an unfamiliar sound.

A motorized buzzing, somewhere behind him.

He tried to look but the carriage allowed minimal movement, and the sound grew into a cylindered whine, and he saw two biplanes, fixed-wing, zooming in on him. They approached with astounding velocity, one dogging the other, passing him, and his chest clutched his heart. He’d never seen a fixed-wing plane in flight—and while in flight himself! They zipped ahead, and his first fear, that they were German, was relieved with a flash of livery over the tail-fins, blue, white and red indicating these were British aircraft, Sopwith Camels. In the blur of motion he’d also glimpsed the pilots turning their heads, looking in his direction, obviously startled.

They had never seen an ornithopter before.

As the biplanes receded, Reggie wondered how his father and the Shuko Kan zaibatsu hoped to compete with these machines: there was no way an orno could match such velocity, such packaged fury. He stared, spellbound.

And then . . . what?

Far ahead, the aeroplanes banked.

Turning.

Coming back at him.

The pilots had never seen an ornithopter before. And no markings were emblazoned over it, no indications of origin, his father had requested this be so. No sign of nationality.

Another sound cut through the engine noise. Brappp . . . brapp. . . .

Gunfire.

Reggie yanked his warping cables, reducing lift on the right wing and so turning the ornithopter hard in that direction. It performed a tight descending circle, blood rushing into his head. The Sopwiths fired into the place where he had been and zipped above. He looked up, saw them climbing, rolling. Turning themselves for another run. He had a few moments before they descended to his level.

Reggie increased the wingflap and warped into an ascent only a few degrees off the vertical: his rapid climb confounded the biplanes’ attack. They fired into empty space and buzzed into another long turn. Reggie’s heart beat as fast as his wings. How could he signal that he was an ally? How could he save himself? If only the pilots could hear his father—he was British, for the love of God!

But there would be no communication between them, not over the drone of engines. If he was to survive this episode he would have to pioneer an art, right now, right here, the art of combat between flapping and fixed-wing aircraft. The orno lacked guns, but perhaps hope existed in those long, luxurious turns the biplanes made. He countered with the orno’s ability to rise or fall swiftly, letting the Sopwiths commit to a line of flight just before he dropped or jumped out of it. This worked for three more runs before the British pilots worked out a counterstrategy, one staying high, the other low, waiting for the other to flush Reggie into a line of fire. One more peal of machine-gun fire sent feathers flying, and through the warping cables Reggie felt compromise in his wings. His mouth was terribly dry, and he believed it now.

They would kill him.

He tried to clear his mind of distracting thoughts.

What did he have that they did not? What about the orno could save him?

He descended, decreasing the wingflap, slowing further as the Sopwiths zigged and zagged with the persistence of mosquitoes. They had speed, the orno had slowness. He dropped again, until he flew less than thirty feet over the ground, slow as he could manage, rising and falling with the landscape. A lone cow galloped at the sight of him. The Sopwiths made runs overhead, firing in bursts before they were forced to pull up and bank. Reggie headed for trees. The orno was flying slowly, so slow, great wings beating, a bird, entering the forest. Starlings burst. He swooped under branches, bounced off the ground, banked to avoid a trunk and rose again through boughs and branches. He was flying through forest. Branches swatted the fuselage, rattled his bamboo cage.

The biplanes persisted. They made further extravagant runs, pouring ammunition down, and he was showered with leaves and branch-parts and feathers. The second major strike against a wing, he knew the fight was over. The orno could no longer flap enough to stay aloft, he hit the ground, bounding, once, twice, and the third leap threw the craft into a tree for a jarring halt.

He pulled himself out of the cockpit, the wreck still limply beating its wings. He fell, got up. The sound of the fighters was the voice of mechanized death. His heart pounding, he staggered back from the orno, stumbled. Overhead the Sopwiths continued their runs, shooting where he’d crashed—the pilots must have thought he was still inside, and he ran, he ran, and they strafed the trees, leaves and branches falling on either side of him, in front of him, he changed directions, jangled, confused, nowhere to go as they hacked away, searching for him with fingers of machine-gun fire.

1920-1930

Edward was startled to see the young Japanese woman at his door. “This is a surprise,” he said. “Won’t you come in?”

Her name was Asa Tokugawa and she was related to Okura Shuko Kan, just as everyone in Meboso seemed to be related at least by marriage to the master. Edward and Asa had never spoken before, although he’d given the girl much thought.

Edward offered her tea, but she declined. He wasn’t sure what to say.

“Shouldn’t you be busy with . . . preparations?”

“Most everything is ready. I need only to speak to you.”

“By all means.”

“Your son, he very dear to me. You believe that, yes?”

“I have decided to attend the wedding tomorrow; you needn’t convince me.”

“I am glad you will attend our wedding, Mister Frost, very glad. What I hoped was that you might also be happy for Reggie and me. Maybe give us your blessing even, and good wishes.”

He sighed. “Oh, dear. My dear girl.”

“Do you object to us as a people? We Japanese?”

“No! That’s not it at all! I think yours is a grand race, and I’m proud of what your uncles and I have achieved. Nevertheless. Some things don’t change. It’s simply not right for a British man to marry a Japanese woman.”

Her eyes flashed.

“It’s about heritage,” Edward tried to explain. “Reggie should be proud of his heritage. Instead he looks for every opportunity to squander it, and I’m afraid marrying you is one more attempt. That sounds terrible, I know. But a man’s nationality is a terrible thing to waste.”

Asa looked hurt.

“I believe,” Edward continued, “that your family had similar misgivings.”

At this she lifted her eyes.

In fact Edward’s protests paled in comparison to the Tokugawa’s. Following that disastrous trip to England, Reggie returned to Japan a changed man—no longer a boy, to be sure, and those panicked moments with the Sopwiths had seeded in him an irrational and passionate hatred, not merely for Britain, but for all of Europe, all the West, and the idea of depositing him in Cambridge became suddenly ludicrous. Reggie would no longer water down his allegiance to Japan, and when he announced that he would marry Asa Tokugawa, a daughter of a cousin of Okura Shuko Kan himself, Edward realized that all his misgivings would not stand in the way.

But Asa’s family had been more actively opposed. The family believed it was wrong for Asa to marry outside her race, and they might have prevented a wedding, if not for one factor.

A fleet—or rather, flock—of twenty high-performance ornithopters sat on the Shuko Kan airfield. Several had been sold to other zaibatsu, for private enjoyment of the wealthiest members of Japanese society, and the craft could be seen winging from island to island, symbols of the better future promised by Japanese innovation. Most everyone in Japan had seen or heard of the ornithopters, and public interest had fermented. With the orno’s romanticization as a Japanese technology, interest also grew in Reggie Frost and the story of his harrowing flight to France. The Japanese interpreted the incident as an example of antagonization by the West, fixed-wing gnats firing on a defenseless orno, and it was a wrong that the Japanese public wished collectively to right. Reggie became something of a folk hero for rejecting his roots and returning to become a pilot. When rumors circulated that the Shuko Kan zaibatsu wished to prevent his wedding to Asa, there was public outcry. Zaibatsu were criticized in the press for their influence over national affairs, and further bad publicity was unwelcome. In the end, Asa’s family decided it was better to yield a daughter than risk ceding any of the zaibatsu’s power.

“My family will see that we were right,” said Asa. “This is a union based on right principles.”

Edward forced a smile, he could not agree.

“I do wish you both well,” he said instead. “Every success, every happiness.”

This seemed to please Asa, and the next day, as he stood at their wedding with a Union Jack pinned to his lapel, he found himself not unhappy. Would he have been more opposed to this marriage, if he had received a warmer reception in England? He’d speculated that maybe he too would stay there, as a representative of the Shuko Kan ornithopter industry. But even after a successful demonstration of the aircraft, he had found his countrymen uninterested, disdainful, unable to see the orno as anything more than a gawky distraction from their fixed-wing efforts.

So he had returned to Japan.

To Meboso. It wasn’t terrible. Modem buildings had replaced rice fields; traffic was steady, and neighborhoods expanded as people moved here to take jobs in industries spurred by the ornithopter. Only one farm remained in the valley and it produced geese, for feathers. As the city grew, military zaibatsu members visited more frequently, and Edward felt a pang of nervousness whenever he saw uniformed men touring the factories.

They have no influence over me, he assured himself. The Japanese mood could not impede the orno.

1935

It looked like a feather. It was soft. It floated to the ground like a feather if he let go. But when he held it under his nose, it smelled like . . . petrol.

The “feather” was manmade, a homogenous product without a discrete stem or fronds, and although Edward doubted it could rival anything plucked from a goose, the ramifications were not lost on him. It would be improved. And if it could be made once, it could be made a thousand times, a million times.

He put the artificial feather in his pocket and went looking for Hiroto.

Neither of them had requested a manmade substitute for feathers, the goose farm was doing well, with publicity campaigns steering the local appetite toward poultry. This morning, the head of the materials research group had simply handed the feather to Edward.

On whose initiative had it been developed?

Edward couldn’t say when, precisely, but at some point the research had slipped away from him. Materials science, engineering, wing-flap physics: by necessity these studies had been parceled to other groups. He could no longer keep abreast of advances being made in each, and he realized that although meetings between departments began with English translation, they quickly turned all-Japanese, and nobody protested, or even seemed to notice, if he slipped away before they finished. The feather was one more innovation that happened without him. He had no more control over the evolution of orno technology than he did that of Meboso itself. The rickshaws, gone. The kiln on the southern hillside was extinguished, last breath of fire sucked from its belly. Blocks of affordable housing obscured that end of the valley, and a new technical institute had arisen nearby. Even the next valley over was starting to develop, a fact Edward hadn’t appreciated until he noticed towers rising from an unnamed industrial concern.

Maybe he didn’t look up often enough from his work.

On the airfield more than a hundred ornos sat in rows, wings folded against their hulls, awaiting purchasers. Ornos flapped down to the airstrip or toward Kyoto at almost every hour of the day. Dramatic increases in the lift generated by wings meant that ornos could transport supplies, or passengers. Or troops. Or armaments. Edward had seen, although not participated in the design of, an orno whose primary cargo was ammunition and a single gun of terrible caliber. National enthusiasm was developing into something bigger than Edward, bigger than the zaibatsu. Eat a goose for national security. Young boys through the islands strove to grow up on goose meat yet keep a low enough weight to make themselves ideal candidates as pilots. Contemporary Japanese architecture dictated that structures have roosts extending from their summits; in Tokyo, ornos flapped from building to building, shuttling the elite of Tokyo society high above pedestrian traffic. It was all part of a general, expanding enthusiasm that made Edward nervous, because it was linked to the growing nationalism, the fixation on Asian neighbors in rhetoric and demagoguery.

He found Hiroto weeping.

Edward considered walking on, leaving the man alone with whatever grieved him. Wasn’t that the polite thing to do?

Maybe. But he forced himself, instead, to sit on the bench opposite.

“My hands,” said Edward.

Hiroto looked up.

“I was never much for examining my face in the mirror,” Edward went on. “But my hands I can’t ignore! When did they become so old? All cracked and bony, curled up on themselves. They look like—”

“The talons of an eagle,” suggested Hiroto.

They laughed. Edward indicated his eyes. “To go with my crow’s feet!”

Again they laughed.

And then a moment of shared quiet, in which Edward did not reveal the plastic feather.

He said, “It’s your cousins that have upset you.”

Hiroto nodded.

“They’re getting their way, are they? The military men.”

“Everyone is military now. Except you and me.”

“What about Okura Shuko Kan?”

“He is . . . old. He lacks the strength to resist.”

Edward exhaled and leaned back. He shut his eyes, and felt overcome by a sense of defeat that had long been approaching. “So we’re out of business. The army will be commandeering the factories for tanks and munitions, I suppose.”

Hiroto looked at him sharply.

“Oh no,” he said. “No, no.”

1940—1948

Hiroto and Edward stood apart from the crowd. The crowd cheered and even Edward felt charged by this choreographed event. The sprawling Shuko Kan shipyards made for an inspiring setting, testimony to an enormous capacity for industry. Thirty-nine ornos sat on the deck of an aircraft carrier, red circles dyed into their wings. This symbol was everywhere: when the fortieth orno flapped into view, the crowd cheered even louder, because its underside was white with a central red circle, rays of red extending through the wings. The crowd roared and waved back little flags bearing the same symbol.

“The Rising Son,” said Hiroto.

Edward smirked. Their friendship had reached the stage where he could hear the other man’s puns.

“Reg is a confident showman,” Hiroto continued.

“He didn’t get it from me.”

The orno perched momentarily on a conning tower to spread its wings and display its livery, before it hopped off and glided to the last open space below. The cockpit opened. Reggie, in flight gear, stepped out to receive one of the crowd’s noisy salutations. On a nearby platform, Asa appeared with their two daughters, and the trio bowed to the hero, husband, and father, before they stepped back into obscurity. Reg’s gunner, a young Okinawan who had gained some celebrity by association, made a brief appearance before climbing back into the rear compartment.

“Never in my wildest dreams,” said Edward.

“Your wildest dream?”

“My flesh-and-blood. Poster-boy for a Japanese war industry.”

“You wish that things had worked out differently.”

Hiroto’s tone implied a great span of alternate possibilities, and Edward shook them away, saying only, “I loathe war.”

“The Asian campaigns are not expected to last long.”

Edward was unsure. The war with China dragged on indefinitely. In the early months of World War II, the Japanese enjoyed many successes, nightmares twisted from Edward’s dreams, flocks of ornithopters darkening skies over the Philippines and Dutch East Indies, the sound and sight of great flapping wings terrorizing villagers, as the ornos swooped down in advance of ground forces, while the Navy blocked sea access and poured troops and equipment into the mainland. The Japanese had developed their own fixed-wing fighter, too—the zero—but it was ornithopters facilitating the invasions, with their ability to fly over treacherous terrain or swoop down and flap from rooftop to rooftop in ground battles. They engaged fixed-wing craft then dropped into jungle cover, flying through the trees as slow as herons, perching on branches if necessary. Or they hovered high, out of range of land-based retaliation while their gunners picked targets on the ground. Edward suffered through propaganda screened at the local theater, he had seen newsreel footage of an orno flying inside a temple, flapping before the benevolent gaze of a giant, golden Buddha. ornos transported the Imperial Japanese Army from Eastern China in all directions, advancing its agenda in places where no roads or airfields reached. Images woke Edward in the night, in cold sweat, breathing hard, heart racing.

This would be history. Images would filter through the generations, by newsreel, by oral account, by modern myth-making: people would remember a Rising Sun advancing over Asia on terrible feathered wings.

He had lost control of his dream.

He tried telling himself nobody had control over an idea but couldn’t convince himself. Early in the conflict, when the jingoism and hyper-nationalism had still been mostly talk, Edward had made an effort, one desperate effort to avoid that which he feared most.

The idea came to him when Torn returned to Meboso. Toru, who still walked with a limp due to his ill-fated test flight. He returned not for further study of ornos or any aspect of science, but wearing a full uniform and ceremonial sword.

“Hello Tommy!” Edward had called to him cheerfully. But Toru looked the other way.

The zaibatsu placed Shuko Kan family members in all corridors of Japanese power—economic, government, military. These men came to Meboso in showy cars to discuss policy and coordinate their efforts in the zaibatsu’s interest. When Edward saw Toru among this group of elites, early during the Chinese conflict, he requested an audience.

He joined a group of eight politicians and generals, including Toru, for dinner. Hiroto introduced Edward to these men, and he recognized some names from national affairs. They sat on the floor (Edward with a pillow), and were served works of art: rice cakes wrapped in cherry leaf, wild mountain vegetables served on papers folded to resemble cranes. Conversation progressed in Japanese, and Edward, the only one with a fork and a baked carp, poked at his dinner. He waited for a lull in the conversation. When it came, he found the power-brokers looking at him with interest.

“They, ah.” Hiroto seemed embarrassed. “They wish to hear your point of view. Your opinion. How you think Japan will fare in the coming conflicts. I’m sorry, Edward. I’ll tell them you are not interested in politics, only flight.”

“No,” said Edward. “It would be my pleasure.”

He returned their gazes.

“Tell them they can take everything they want in Asia. If they do not drag Britain into the conflict.”

Hiroto paused, then began translation.

“The West will look for reasons to avoid adding a Far Eastern front to their troubles,” Edward continued. “You must give them good reasons. Make arrangements with them, behind closed doors. Allow for concessions and negotiate. The Americans, too. The American public opposes military action, and if you make bargains, their leaders will have no mandate to stop you. Don’t force the West into a situation where they must fight. Decide what to concede ahead of time, and let them forgive your true ambitions. You can succeed, but only by avoiding Western enemies.”

He spoke rapidly, with an edge to his voice, but filtered through Hiroto, his opinion emerged in level, uninflected Japanese. The men leaned toward Hiroto as he spoke. For all Edward knew, his friend could be editing, diluting the message, perhaps saying something completely different. He was at the mercy of translation.

When Edward finished, Torn spoke with a sneer. Hiroto interpreted.

“Torn suggests you say these things only to avoid war with your homeland.”

Edward nodded. “Yes. For personal reasons, I dread the prospect of Japan warring with Britain. But what I tell you also happens to be true, that you will be pitifully sorry if you extend your hostilities beyond Asia. And Reggie—Reggie won’t endorse military efforts against England. He won’t promote your ambitions if it means betraying his homeland. You will lose a valuable asset, I promise.”

Hiroto translated, flushing slightly. Perhaps the generals knew this was a lie. Perhaps they didn’t value Reggie’s propaganda value as highly as Edward presumed. Or perhaps they believed in nationalism enough to think it ran into the flesh and blood of a person, that Reggie might in fact denounce their goals, if faced with fighting his own people.

How curious. Here Edward found himself again speaking of the fictional Reggie, the patriot, the son he imagined rather than the son he had. Speaking to zaibatsu power-brokers was the last gambit Edward would make on that imaginary Reggie. He watched the men sit back, in the wake of his translated words, and tried to read their expressions.

In a few years none of this would matter. In a few years this effort would seem pathetic, after his worst fear’s realization.

In 1943, the United States joined the war. With U.S. support, the Allies began to turn the tide in Europe, and not long after, word spread of warships leaving the Atlantic for Asia.

The Allies added Japan to their list of enemies, for the expansionism that had gone more or less unchecked since Manchuria. The American navy blockaded the islands, trying to force capitulation by economic strangulation, but the Japanese were entrenched in their conquests, and stealthy lines of supply by ornithopter proved difficult to disrupt. Ornithopters—often in flocks a hundred strong—flapped along the coastline, guarding against land invasions which the Allies were rumored to be preparing. Edward became obsessed with the war, demanding English language newsreels and asking Hiroto to translate long articles and editorials. In vicious battles the ornos defended their conquests, feathers littering waters, bodies floating in tangled frames of bamboo and paper.

And the folk hero continued to refuse promotions. Edward read that Reggie Frost had been offered positions of command several times, and each time, he refused, preferring instead to fight on the front line, against the Western forces which he despised so much.

How can you be so stupid? How?

Edward said to Hiroto, “He has taken this too far! Killing fellow countrymen! Choosing to do so, when he could simply accept a position behind battle lines! It’s cold-blooded, it’s . . . sick!”

Hiroto would nod, not necessarily agreeing with these outbursts but understanding their inspiration.

How can you be so stupid? Edward thought.

He longed for an end to the war—any ending, victory, defeat, he wasn’t sure what to hope for—he just wanted it to be done with so he might confront Reggie and force him to answer for his stupidity. Casualties mounted, while rumors circulated of an American invasion of Japan.

It never came. Apparently, the Allies had banked on first softening resistance with some secret weapon of unprecedented power, but it had been turned back, twice, by ornos and zeros on patrol. Once, in the summer of ‘45, buildings on Honshu quaked enough for glass to shatter, but the Japanese government and zaibatsu leaders didn’t equate this seismic event with the B-52 downed somewhere over the Pacific.

The war fizzled. Four years after making mutual declarations of war, both Japan and the Allies found themselves exhausted, depleted, weary of conflict. The Americans had come to view the Japanese occupation of China as a desirable distraction for Russia, which was becoming their greater concern. In 1948, the U.S.S. Missouri docked in the Shuko Kan family shipyard for the signing of the armistice that would end hostilities. A percentage of the Japanese public came to witness this moment in history, crowds much quieter than at the event Edward had earlier attended. Today the people erupted only once, as ornithopters carrying Japanese Prime Minister Fumimaro and General Hideki flapped into view, gliding down to their appointment.

Edward might have found satisfaction in their choice of transportation, had he not become suspicious of excuses the Japanese military gave him for Reggie’s absence from this ceremony, and others.

1953

Edward knocked on the door. Asa pulled it open.

“Edward,” she said. “How very nice to see you.”

Her English had improved. In the background he heard the girls squeal ojiisan! and rapid little footsteps preceded their appearance, Fumiyo and Junko, flying at him, wrapping themselves around his legs with such oompf he was almost bowled over. He laughed. Asa looked aghast, but before she might rebuke them, Edward said, “Please, please, this is what I came for!”

The girls looked up, beaming.

“Won’t you come inside Edward for a . . . spot of tea?”

“Perhaps later. I’d hoped the girls might take me for a walk.”

They hopped up and down.

“Yes, ojiisan,” said Fumiyo, “A walk! A walk!”

Before they left, Asa said something to the girls in Japanese, which Edward guessed might be translated as: Take care of your grandfather. He’s a very old man, and needs assistance. The girls nodded solemnly.

He was about to go, but paused and said to Asa, “I hope it’s not too late for an apology. For not being enthusiastic when you came to see me that day, years ago. You were right. You and Reggie made a fine couple.”

Asa smiled and nodded slightly.

The girls walked him through gardens, patterns in stone having varied not much over the decades, a slightly different fingerprint whorling about them. The girls appeared healthy and happy. His worries were always alleviated when Asa came to Meboso. She and the girls were managing okay without Reggie: surviving.

Reggie had been killed during the war, sometime in November of ‘46, near the island of Okinawa. An air battle, his orno shot down over water. The Japanese military had suppressed this news. They needed tales of heroism to bolster morale, they needed to claim Reggie was alive and demanding to stay on the front lines of air combat, to inspire young Japanese soldiers. The military had, after his death, invented the Reggie they needed.

Edward couldn’t shed his own version of Reggie until after the poor boy, the real boy, had been killed.

“Tell us about England,” said Fumiyo, as they walked. “Tell us about Kew Gardens. And the Queen of England.”

“Again?”

“England is our country, too. Isn’t it? We’re English girls, in a way?”

Fumiyo looked up at him with bright almond eyes. Edward smiled; he stroked her black hair, and her sister moved to receive his other hand’s adoration. Sherwood Forest. Cliffs of Dover. The Mersey. The girls drove their mother mad with England, and Edward loved them so much his chest ached. “I think it would be nice if we could go to England together,” Fumiyo announced.

“I’m going too!” said Junko.

“You have all the time in the world,” Edward assured them.

“And you’ll come with us, ojiisan?”

He didn’t answer with more than a smile, and the girls became quiet. “There’s something I want you to see.”

It wasn’t just a walk he wanted but a full hike, up a trail out of Meboso. It was nice to get out of the city. Along the way, Edward paused to look at the remains of the old kiln, reduced to an outline of bricks around a rectangle of scorched earth. The trio climbed further, until they could look down on Meboso’s crowded streets. New high-rises were designed with oval holes in their upper heights: ornos landed in these openings, and passengers could get on or off before the craft proceeded out the other side. Edward counted a dozen buildings with such holes to the sky.

Junko complained once or twice as they walked. For a while, Edward carried her in his arms, while Fumiyo talked and talked. She spoke of school, of rules she was learning about thermals and wind. She was also studying the code of conduct which governed air traffic, and tried to explain it to Edward.

A bulky transport flapped through the air like an albatross. Another long orno soared overhead bearing the symbol of Winged Bliss, a commercial enterprise. All traffic was governed by the code, crafts pausing, dipping, turning polite right angles to one another. To Edward it seemed overly formalized—flight shouldn’t be decorous as a tea ceremony—but the code had enabled a huge expansion of popular flight. Fumiyo talked about the code and sundry other topics, but she most often returned to one theme.

“I want to see England.”

“Of course you will.”

“We could fly over Cambridgeshire together,” Fumiyo said. “We could fly over the Tower of London.”

“All the famous sights.”

“I’m coming too!” Junko reminded them.

They arrived at a ridge overlooking the next valley, which was more industrial than Meboso and centered around a sprawling power plant, though Edward saw no coal, no wood, and there were no rivers nearby. The three of them found rocks to sit on. What kind of power did that leave?

“It’s ugly,” Fumiyo said.

“True,” he replied. “But there’s something I want you to see.”

They waited and watched, until at last, it appeared. Where? Where? Edward pointed it out, the strange craft built perhaps entirely of plastic, with wings unlike anything Edward had seen before. It had emerged from a niche in the power plant’s east wall. Fumiyo and Junko stared at the orno. The wings were the most striking anomaly: diaphanous sheets spread from the body and beat with a liquid, sine-wave motion. But perhaps the more significant difference was what this craft lacked: the noise of a petrol engine. It had no engine that Edward could see, nor accommodation for a fuel tank along its slender, dragonfly fuselage, and his best guess was that the craft received power not from an internal source, but from the power plant, energy somehow transmitted from the concave disks on the roof.

The craft rose higher, zipped forward, wings a mathematical blur, and still no sound apart from a gentle churning of the air.

“I met a man,” said Edward, “with a dream.”

“What man?”

“Okura Shuko Kan. He dreamt of an orno that made no noise.”

“He’s not alive still, is he, grandfather?”

“Not in the conventional sense.”

They watched the silent orno skim around the power plant some more, looking both frail and revolutionary in its infancy; then it returned to the cubbyhole in one of the towers. Edward watched his girls, he listened to them, he listened to Fumiyo’s talk of England, her fantasies of flying over Cambridgeshire and the cliffs of Dover. He might have told her something that had taken him a long time to discover, a realization that gratified him immensely as he sat with them on a mountain ridge in Japan: it was not so much seeing dreams come precisely true which mattered, but the privilege of having them to begin with, the joy of seeing them realized in ways that surprised even the dreamer.

BORDER GUARDS

Greg Egan

In the early afternoon of his fourth day out of sadness, Jamil was wandering home from the gardens at the centre of Noether when he heard shouts from the playing field behind the library. On the spur of the moment, without even asking the city what game was in progress, he decided to join in.

As he rounded the corner and the field came into view, it was clear from the movements of the players that they were in the middle of a quantum soccer match. At Jamil’s request, the city painted the wave function of the hypothetical ball across his vision, and tweaked him to recognize the players as the members of two teams without changing their appearance at all. Maria had once told him that she always chose a literal perception of colour-coded clothing instead; she had no desire to use pathways that had evolved for the sake of sorting people into those you defended and those you slaughtered. But almost everything that had been bequeathed to them was stained with blood, and to Jamil it seemed a far sweeter victory to adapt the worst relics to his own ends than to discard them as irretrievably tainted.

The wave function appeared as a vivid auroral light, a quicksilver plasma bright enough to be distinct in the afternoon sunlight, yet unable to dazzle the eye or conceal the players running through it. Bands of colour representing the complex phase of the wave swept across the field, parting to wash over separate rising lobes of probability before hitting the boundary and bouncing back again, inverted. The match was being played by the oldest, simplest rules: semi-classical, non-relativistic. The ball was confined to the field by an infinitely high barrier, so there was no question of it tunnelling out, leaking away as the match progressed. The players were treated classically: their movements pumped energy into the wave, enabling transitions from the game’s opening state—with the ball spread thinly across the entire field—into the range of higher-energy modes needed to localize it. But localization was fleeting; there was no point forming a nice sharp wave packet in the middle of the field in the hope of kicking it around like a classical object. You had to shape the wave in such a way that all of its modes—cycling at different frequencies, travelling with different velocities—would come into phase with each other, for a fraction of a second, within the goal itself. Achieving that was a matter of energy levels, and timing.

Jamil had noticed that one team was under-strength. The umpire would be skewing the field’s potential to keep the match fair, but a new participant would be especially welcome for the sake of restoring symmetry. He watched the faces of the players, most of them old friends. They were frowning with concentration, but breaking now and then into smiles of delight at their small successes, or their opponents’ ingenuity.

He was badly out of practice, but if he turned out to be dead weight he could always withdraw. And if he misjudged his skills, and lost the match with his incompetence? No one would care. The score was nil all; he could wait for a goal, but that might be an hour or more in coming. Jamil communed with the umpire, and discovered that the players had decided in advance to allow new entries at any time.

Before he could change his mind, he announced himself. The wave froze, and he ran on to the field. People nodded greetings, mostly making no fuss, though Ezequiel shouted, “Welcome back!” Jamil suddenly felt fragile again; though he’d ended his long seclusion four days before, it was well within his power, still, to be dismayed by everything the game would involve. His recovery felt like a finely balanced optical illusion, a figure and ground that could change roles in an instant, a solid cube that could evert into a hollow.

The umpire guided him to his allotted starting position, opposite a woman he hadn’t seen before. He offered her a formal bow, and she returned the gesture. This was no time for introductions, but he asked the city if she’d published a name. She had: Margit.

The umpire counted down in their heads. Jamil tensed, regretting his impulsiveness. For seven years he’d been dead to the world. After four days back, what was he good for? His muscles were incapable of atrophy, his reflexes could never be dulled, but he’d chosen to live with an unconstrained will, and at any moment his wavering resolve could desert him.

The umpire said, “Play.” The frozen light around Jamil came to life, and he sprang into motion.

Each player was responsible for a set of modes, particular harmonics of the wave that were theirs to fill, guard, or deplete as necessary. Jamil’s twelve modes cycled at between 1,000 and 1,250 milliHertz. The rules of the game endowed his body with a small, fixed potential energy, which repelled the ball slightly and allowed different modes to push and pull on each other through him, but if he stayed in one spot as the modes cycled, every influence he exerted would eventually be replaced by its opposite, and the effect would simply cancel itself out.

To drive the wave from one mode to another, you needed to move, and to drive it efficiently you needed to exploit the way the modes fell in and out of phase with each other: to take from a 1,000 milliHertz mode and give to a 1,250, you had to act in synch with the quarter-Hertz beat between them. It was like pushing a child’s swing at its natural frequency, but rather than setting a single child in motion, you were standing between two swings and acting more as an intermediary: trying to time your interventions in such a way as to speed up one child at the other’s expense. The way you pushed on the wave at a given time and place was out of your hands completely, but by changing location in just the right way you could gain control over the interaction. Every pair of modes had a spatial beat between them—like the moiré pattern formed by two sheets of woven fabric held up to the light together, shifting from transparent to opaque as the gaps between the threads fell in and out of alignment. Slicing through this cyclic landscape offered the perfect means to match the accompanying chronological beat.

Jamil sprinted across the field at a speed and angle calculated to drive two favourable transitions at once. He’d gauged the current spectrum of the wave instinctively, watching from the sidelines, and he knew which of the modes in his charge would contribute to a goal and which would detract from the probability. As he cut through the shimmering bands of colour, the umpire gave him tactile feedback to supplement his visual estimates and calculations, allowing him to sense the difference between a cyclic tug, a to and fro that came to nothing, and the gentle but persistent force that meant he was successfully riding the beat.

Chusok called out to him urgently, “Take, take! Two-ten!” Everyone’s spectral territory overlapped with someone else’s, and you needed to pass amplitude from player to player as well as trying to manage it within your own range. Two-ten—a harmonic with two peaks across the width of the field and ten along its length, cycling at 1,160 milliHertz—was filling up as Chusok drove unwanted amplitude from various lower-energy modes into it. It was Jamil’s role to empty it, putting the amplitude somewhere useful. Any mode with an even number of peaks across the field was unfavourable for scoring, because it had a node—a zero point between the peaks—smack in the middle of both goals.

Jamil acknowledged the request with a hand signal and shifted his trajectory. It was almost a decade since he’d last played the game, but he still knew the intricate web of possibilities by heart: he could drain the two-ten harmonic into the three-ten, five-two and five-six modes—all with “good parity,” peaks along the centre-line—in a single action.

As he pounded across the grass, carefully judging the correct angle by sight, increasing his speed until he felt the destructive beats give way to a steady force like a constant breeze, he suddenly recalled a time—centuries before, in another city—when he’d played with one team, week after week, for 40 years. Faces and voices swam in his head. Hashim, Jamil’s 98th child, and Hashim’s granddaughter Laila had played beside him. But he’d burnt his house and moved on, and when that era touched him at all now it was like an unexpected gift. The scent of the grass, the shouts of the players, the soles of his feet striking the ground, resonated with every other moment he’d spent the same way, bridging the centuries, binding his life together. He never truly felt the scale of it when he sought it out deliberately; it was always small things, tightly focused moments like this, that burst the horizon of his everyday concerns and confronted him with the astonishing vista.

The two-ten mode was draining faster than he’d expected; the see-sawing centre-line dip in the wave was vanishing before his eyes. He looked around, and saw Margit performing an elaborate Lissajous manoeuvre, smoothly orchestrating a dozen transitions at once. Jamil froze and watched her, admiring her virtuosity while he tried to decide what to do next; there was no point competing with her when she was doing such a good job of completing the task Chusok had set him.

Margit was his opponent, but they were both aiming for exactly the same kind of spectrum. The symmetry of the field meant that any scoring wave would work equally well for either side—but only one team could be the first to reap the benefit, the first to have more than half the wave’s probability packed into their goal. So the two teams were obliged to co-operate at first, and it was only as the wave took shape from their combined efforts that it gradually became apparent which side would gain by sculpting it to perfection as rapidly as possible, and which would gain by spoiling it for the first chance, then honing it for the rebound.

Penina chided him over her shoulder as she jogged past, “You want to leave her to clean up four-six, as well?” She was smiling, but Jamil was stung; he’d been motionless for ten or fifteen seconds. It was not forbidden to drag your feet and rely on your opponents to do all the work, but it was regarded as a shamefully impoverished strategy. It was also very risky, handing them the opportunity to set up a wave that was almost impossible to exploit yourself.

He reassessed the spectrum, and quickly sorted through the alternatives. Whatever he did would have unwanted side effects; there was no magic way to avoid influencing modes in other players’ territory, and any action that would drive the transitions he needed would also trigger a multitude of others, up and down the spectrum. Finally, he made a choice that would weaken the offending mode while causing as little disruption as possible.

Jamil immersed himself in the game, planning each transition two steps in advance, switching strategy halfway through a run if he had to, but staying in motion until the sweat dripped from his body, until his calves burned, until his blood sang. He wasn’t blinded to the raw pleasures of the moment, or to memories of games past, but he let them wash over him, like the breeze that rose up and cooled his skin with no need for acknowledgement. Familiar voices shouted terse commands at him; as the wave came closer to a scoring spectrum every trace of superfluous conversation vanished, every idle glance gave way to frantic, purposeful gestures. To a bystander, this might have seemed like the height of dehumanization: 22 people reduced to grunting cogs in a pointless machine. Jamil smiled at the thought but refused to be distracted into a complicated imaginary rebuttal. Every step he took was the answer to that, every hoarse plea to Yann or Joracy, Chusok or Maria, Eudore or Halide. These were his friends, and he was back among them. Back in the world.

The first chance of a goal was 30 seconds away, and the opportunity would fall to Jamil’s team; a few tiny shifts in amplitude would clinch it. Margit kept her distance, but Jamil could sense her eyes on him constantly—and literally feel her at work through his skin as she slackened his contact with the wave. In theory, by mirroring your opponent’s movements at the correct position on the field you could undermine everything they did, though in practice not even the most skilful team could keep the spectrum completely frozen. Going further and spoiling was a tug of war you didn’t want to win too well: if you degraded the wave too much, your opponent’s task—spoiling your own subsequent chance at a goal—became far easier.

Jamil still had two bad-parity modes that he was hoping to weaken, but every time he changed velocity to try a new transition, Margit responded in an instant, blocking him. He gestured to Chusok for help; Chusok had his own problems with Ezequiel, but he could still make trouble for Margit by choosing where he placed unwanted amplitude. Jamil shook sweat out of his eyes; he could see the characteristic “stepping stone” pattern of lobes forming, a sign that the wave would soon converge on the goal, but from the middle of the field it was impossible to judge their shape accurately enough to know what, if anything, remained to be done.

Suddenly, Jamil felt the wave push against him. He didn’t waste time looking around for Margit; Chusok must have succeeded in distracting her. He was almost at the boundary line, but he managed to reverse smoothly, continuing to drive both the transitions he’d been aiming for.

Two long lobes of probability, each modulated by a series of oscillating mounds, raced along the sides of the field. A third, shorter lobe running along the centre-line melted away, reappeared, then merged with the others as they touched the end of the field, forming an almost rectangular plateau encompassing the goal.

The plateau became a pillar of light, growing narrower and higher as dozens of modes, all finally in phase, crashed together against the impenetrable barrier of the field’s boundary. A shallow residue was still spread across the entire field, and a diminishing sequence of elliptical lobes trailed away from the goal like a staircase, but most of the wave that had started out lapping around their waists was now concentrated in a single peak that towered above their heads, nine or ten metres tall.

For an instant, it was motionless.

Then it began to fall.

The umpire said, “Forty-nine point eight.”

The wave packet had not been tight enough.

Jamil struggled to shrug off his disappointment and throw his instincts into reverse. The other team had 50 seconds, now, to fine-tune the spectrum and ensure that the reflected packet was just a fraction narrower when it reformed, at the opposite end of the field.

As the pillar collapsed, replaying its synthesis in reverse, Jamil caught sight of Margit. She smiled at him calmly, and it suddenly struck him: She’d known they couldn’t make the goal. That was why she’d stopped opposing him. She’d let him work towards sharpening the wave for a few seconds, knowing that it was already too late for him, knowing that her own team would gain from the slight improvement.

Jamil was impressed; it took an extraordinary level of skill and confidence to do what she’d just done. For all the time he’d spent away, he knew exactly what to expect from the rest of the players, and in Margit’s absence he would probably have been wishing out loud for a talented newcomer to make the game interesting again. Still, it was hard not to feel a slight sting of resentment. Someone should have warned him just how good she was.

With the modes slipping out of phase, the wave undulated all over the field again, but its reconvergence was inevitable: unlike a wave of water or sound, it possessed no hidden degrees of freedom to grind its precision into entropy. Jamil decided to ignore Margit; there were cruder strategies than mirror-blocking that worked almost as well. Chusok was filling the two-ten mode now; Jamil chose the four-six as his spoiler. All they had to do was keep the wave from growing much sharper, and it didn’t matter whether they achieved this by preserving the status quo, or by nudging it from one kind of bluntness to another.

The steady resistance he felt as he ran told Jamil that he was driving the transition, unblocked, but he searched in vain for some visible sign of success. When he reached a vantage point where he could take in enough of the field in one glance to judge the spectrum properly, he noticed a rapidly vibrating shimmer across the width of the wave. He counted nine peaks: good parity. Margit had pulled most of the amplitude straight out of his spoiler mode and fed it into this. It was a mad waste of energy to aim for such an elevated harmonic, but no one had been looking there, no one had stopped her.

The scoring pattern was forming again, he only had nine or ten seconds left to make up for all the time he’d wasted. Jamil chose the strongest good-parity mode in his territory, and the emptiest bad one, computed the velocity that would link them, and ran.

He didn’t dare turn to watch the opposition goal; he didn’t want to break his concentration. The wave retreated around his feet, less like an Earthly ebb tide than an ocean drawn into the sky by a passing black hole. The city diligently portrayed the shadow that his body would have cast, shrinking in front of him as the tower of light rose.

The verdict was announced. “Fifty point one.”

The air was filled with shouts of triumph—Ezequiel’s the loudest, as always. Jamil sagged to his knees, laughing. It was a curious feeling, familiar as it was: he cared, and he didn’t. If he’d been wholly indifferent to the outcome of the game there would have been no pleasure in it, but obsessing over every defeat—or every victory—could ruin it just as thoroughly. He could almost see himself walking the line, orchestrating his response as carefully as any action in the game itself.

He lay down on the grass to catch his breath before play resumed. The outer face of the microsun that orbited Laplace was shielded with rock, but light reflected skywards from the land beneath it crossed the 100,000 kilometre width of the 3-toroidal universe to give a faint glow to the planet’s nightside. Though only a sliver was lit directly, Jamil could discern the full disc of the opposite hemisphere in the primary image at the zenith: continents and oceans that lay, by a shorter route, 12,000 or so kilometres beneath him. Other views in the lattice of images spread across the sky were from different angles, and showed substantial crescents of the dayside itself. The one thing you couldn’t find in any of these images, even with a telescope, was your own city. The topology of this universe let you see the back of your head, but never your reflection.

Jamil’s team lost, three nil. He staggered over to the fountains at the edge of the field and slaked his thirst, shocked by the pleasure of the simple act. Just to be alive was glorious now, but once he felt this way, anything seemed possible. He was back in synch, back in phase, and he was going to make the most of it, for however long it lasted.

He caught up with the others, who’d headed down towards the river. Ezequiel hooked an arm around his neck, laughing. “Bad luck, Sleeping Beauty! You picked the wrong time to wake. With Margit, we’re invincible.”

Jamil ducked free of him. “I won’t argue with that.” He looked around. “Speaking of whom—”

Penina said, “Gone home. She plays, that’s all. No frivolous socializing after the match.”

Chusok added, “Or any other time.” Penina shot Jamil a glance that meant: not for want of trying on Chusok’s part.

Jamil pondered this, wondering why it annoyed him so much. On the field, she hadn’t come across as aloof and superior. Just unashamedly good.

He queried the city, but she’d published nothing besides her name. Nobody expected—or wished—to hear more than the tiniest fraction of another person’s history, but it was rare for anyone to start a new life without carrying through something from the old as a kind of calling card, some incident or achievement from which your new neighbours could form an impression of you.

They’d reached the riverbank. Jamil pulled his shirt over his head. “So what’s her story? She must have told you something.”

Ezequiel said, “Only that she learnt to play a long time ago; she won’t say where or when. She arrived in Noether at the end of last year, and grew a house on the southern outskirts. No one sees her around much. No one even knows what she studies.”

Jamil shrugged, and waded in. “Ah well. It’s a challenge to rise to.” Penina laughed and splashed him teasingly. He protested, “I meant beating her at the game.”

Chusok said wryly, “When you turned up, I thought you’d be our secret weapon. The one player she didn’t know inside out already.”

“I’m glad you didn’t tell me that. I would have turned around and fled straight back into hibernation.”

“I know. That’s why we all kept quiet.” Chusok smiled. “Welcome back.”

Penina said, “Yeah, welcome back, Jamil.”

Sunlight shone on the surface of the river. Jamil ached all over, but the cool water was the perfect place to be. If he wished, he could build a partition in his mind at the point where he stood right now, and never fall beneath it. Other people lived that way, and it seemed to cost them nothing. Contrast was overrated; no sane person spent half their time driving spikes into their flesh for the sake of feeling better when they stopped. Ezequiel lived every day with the happy boisterousness of a five-year-old; Jamil sometimes found this annoying, but then any kind of disposition would irritate someone. His own stretches of meaningless sombreness weren’t exactly a boon to his friends.

Chusok said, “I’ve invited everyone to a meal at my house tonight. Will you come?”

Jamil thought it over, then shook his head. He still wasn’t ready. He couldn’t force-feed himself with normality; it didn’t speed his recovery, it just drove him backwards.

Chusok looked disappointed, but there was nothing to be done about that. Jamil promised him, “Next time. OK?”

Ezequiel sighed. “What are we going to do with you? You’re worse than Margit!” Jamil started backing away, but it was too late. Ezequiel reached him in two casual strides, bent down and grabbed him around the waist, hoisted him effortlessly onto one shoulder, then flung him through the air into the depths of the river

Jamil was woken by the scent of wood smoke. His room was still filled with the night’s grey shadows, but when he propped himself up on one elbow and the window obliged him with transparency, the city was etched clearly in the predawn light.

He dressed and left the house, surprised at the coolness of the dew on his feet. No one else in his street seemed to be up; had they failed to notice the smell, or did they already know to expect it? He turned a corner and saw the rising column of soot, faintly lit with red from below. The flames and the ruins were still hidden from him, but he knew whose house it was.

When he reached the dying blaze, he crouched in the heat-withered garden, cursing himself. Chusok had offered him the chance to join him for his last meal in Noether. Whatever hints you dropped, it was customary to tell no one that you were moving on. If you still had a lover, if you still had young children, you never deserted them. But friends, you warned in subtle ways. Before vanishing.

Jamil covered his head with his arms. He’d lived through this countless times before, but it never became easier. If anything it grew worse, as every departure was weighted with the memories of others. His brothers and sisters had scattered across the branches of the New Territories. He’d walked away from his father and mother when he was too young and confident to realize how much it would hurt him, decades later. His own children had all abandoned him eventually, far more often than he’d left them. It was easier to leave an ex-lover than a grown child: something burned itself out in a couple, almost naturally, as if ancestral biology had prepared them for at least that one rift.

Jamil stopped fighting the tears. But as he brushed them away, he caught sight of someone standing beside him. He looked up. It was Margit.

He felt a need to explain. He rose to his feet and addressed her. “This was Chusok’s house. We were good friends. I’d known him for 96 years.”

Margit gazed back at him neutrally. “Boo hoo. Poor baby. You’ll never see your friend again.”

Jamil almost laughed, her rudeness was so surreal. He pushed on, as if the only conceivable, polite response was to pretend that he hadn’t heard her. “No one is the kindest, the most generous, the most loyal. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. Everyone’s unique. Chusok was Chusok.” He banged a fist against his chest, utterly heedless now of her contemptuous words. “There’s a hole in me, and it will never be filled.” That was the truth, even though he’d grow around it. He should have gone to the meal, it would have cost him nothing.

“You must be a real emotional Swiss cheese,” observed Margit tartly.

Jamil came to his senses. “Why don’t you fuck off to some other universe? No one wants you in Noether.”

Margit was amused. “You are a bad loser.” Jamil gazed at her, honestly confused for a moment; the game had slipped his mind completely. He gestured at the embers. “What are you doing here? Why did you follow the smoke, if it wasn’t regret at not saying goodbye to him when you had the chance?” He wasn’t sure how seriously to take Penina’s lighthearted insinuation, but if Chusok had fallen for Margit, and it had not been reciprocated, that might even have been the reason he’d left.

She shook her head calmly. “He was nothing to me. I barely spoke to him.”

“Well, that’s your loss.”

“From the look of things, I’d say the loss was all yours.”

He had no reply. Margit turned and walked away.

Jamil crouched on the ground again, rocking back and forth, waiting for the pain to subside.

Jamil spent the next week preparing to resume his studies. The library had near-instantaneous contact with every artificial universe in the New Territories, and the additional lightspeed lag between Earth and the point in space from which the whole tree-structure blossomed was only a few hours. Jamil had been to Earth, but only as a tourist; land was scarce, they accepted no migrants. There were remote planets you could live on, in the home universe, but you had to be a certain kind of masochistic purist to want that. The precise reasons why his ancestors had entered the New Territories had been forgotten generations before—and it would have been presumptuous to track them down and ask them in person—but given a choice between the then even-more-crowded Earth, the horrifying reality of interstellar distances, and an endlessly extensible branching chain of worlds which could be traversed within a matter of weeks, the decision wasn’t exactly baffling.

Jamil had devoted most of his time in Noether to studying the category of representations of Lie groups on complex vector spaces—a fitting choice, since Emmy Noether had been a pioneer of group theory, and if she’d lived to see this field blossom she would probably have been in the thick of it herself. Representations of Lie groups lay behind most of physics: each kind of subatomic particle was really nothing but a particular way of representing the universal symmetry group as a set of rotations of complex vectors. Organizing this kind of structure with category theory was ancient knowledge, but Jamil didn’t care; he’d long ago reconciled himself to being a student, not a discoverer. The greatest gift of consciousness was the ability to take the patterns of the world inside you, and for all that he would have relished the thrill of being the first at anything, with ten-to-the-sixteenth people alive that was a futile ambition for most.

In the library, he spoke with fellow students of his chosen field on other worlds, or read their latest works. Though they were not researchers, they could still put a new pedagogical spin on old material, enriching the connections with other fields, finding ways to make the complex, subtle truth easier to assimilate without sacrificing the depth and detail that made it worth knowing in the first place. They would not advance the frontiers of knowledge. They would not discover new principles of nature, or invent new technologies. But to Jamil, understanding was an end in itself.

He rarely thought about the prospect of playing another match, and when he did the idea was not appealing. With Chusok gone, the same group could play ten-to-a-side without Jamil to skew the numbers. Margit might even choose to swap teams, if only for the sake of proving that her current team’s monotonous string of victories really had been entirely down to her.

When the day arrived, though, he found himself unable to stay away. He turned up intending to remain a spectator, but Ryuichi had deserted Ezequiel’s team, and everyone begged Jamil to join in.

As he took his place opposite Margit, there was nothing in her demeanour to acknowledge their previous encounter: no lingering contempt, but no hint of shame either. Jamil resolved to put it out of his mind; he owed it to his fellow players to concentrate on the game.

They lost, five nil.

Jamil forced himself to follow everyone to Eudore’s house, to celebrate, commiserate, or as it turned out, to forget the whole thing. After they’d eaten, Jamil wandered from room to room, enjoying Eudore’s choice of music but unable to settle into any conversation. No one mentioned Chusok in his hearing.

He left just after midnight. Laplace’s near-full primary image and its eight brightest gibbous companions lit the streets so well that there was no need for anything more. Jamil thought: Chusok might have merely travelled to another city, one beneath his gaze right now. And wherever he’d gone, he might yet choose to stay in touch with his friends from Noether.

And his friends from the next town, and the next?

Century after century?

Margit was sitting on Jamil’s doorstep, holding a bunch of white flowers in one hand.

Jamil was irritated. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to apologize.”

He shrugged. “There’s no need. We feel differently about certain things. That’s fine. I can still face you on the playing field.”

“I’m not apologizing for a difference of opinion. I wasn’t honest with you. I was cruel.” She shaded her eyes against the glare of the planet and looked up at him. “You were right: it was my loss. I wish I’d known your friend.”

He laughed curtly. “Well, it’s too late for that.”

She said simply, “I know.”

Jamil relented. “Do you want to come in?” Margit nodded, and he instructed the door to open for her. As he followed her inside, he said, “How long have you been here? Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“I’ll cook something for you.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

He called out to her from the kitchen, “Think of it as a peace offering. I don’t have any flowers.”

Margit replied, “They’re not for you. They’re for Chusok’s house.”

Jamil stopped rummaging through his vegetable bins, and walked back into the living room. “People don’t usually do that in Noether.”

Margit was sitting on the couch, staring at the floor. She said, “I’m so lonely here. I can’t bear it any more.”

He sat beside her. “Then why did you rebuff him? You could at least have been friends.”

She shook her head. “Don’t ask me to explain.”

Jamil took her hand. She turned and embraced him, trembling miserably. He stroked her hair. “Sssh.”

She said, “Just sex. I don’t want anything more.”

He groaned softly. “There’s no such thing as that.”

“I just need someone to touch me again.”

“I understand.” He confessed, “So do I. But that won’t be all. So don’t ask me to promise there’ll be nothing more.”

Margit took his face in her hands and kissed him. Her mouth tasted of wood smoke.

Jamil said, “I don’t even know you.”

“No one knows anyone, anymore.”

“That’s not true.”

“No, it’s not,” she conceded gloomily. She ran a hand lightly along his arm. Jamil wanted badly to see her smile, so he made each dark hair thicken and blossom into a violet flower as it passed beneath her fingers.

She did smile, but she said, “I’ve seen that trick before.”

Jamil was annoyed. “I’m sure to be a disappointment all around, then. I expect you’d be happier with some kind of novelty. A unicorn, or an amoeba.”

She laughed. “I don’t think so.” She took his hand and placed it against her breast. “Do you ever get tired of sex?”

“Do you ever get tired of breathing?”

“I can go for a long time without thinking about it.”

He nodded. “But then one day you stop and fill your lungs with air, and it’s still as sweet as ever.”

Jamil didn’t know what he was feeling anymore. Lust. Compassion. Spite. She’d come to him hurting, and he wanted to help her, but he wasn’t sure that either of them really believed this would work.

Margit inhaled the scent of the flowers on his arm. “Are they the same colour? Everywhere else?”

He said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

Jamil woke in the early hours of the morning, alone. He’d half expected Margit to flee like this, but she could have waited till dawn. He would have obligingly feigned sleep while she dressed and tip-toed out.

Then he heard her. It was not a sound he would normally have associated with a human being, but it could not have been anything else.

He found her in the kitchen, curled around a table leg, wailing rhythmically. He stood back and watched her, afraid that anything he did would only make things worse. She met his gaze in the half light, but kept up the mechanical whimper. Her eyes weren’t blank; she was not delirious, or hallucinating. She knew exactly who, and where, she was.

Finally, Jamil knelt in the doorway. He said, “Whatever it is, you can tell me. And we’ll fix it. We’ll find a way.”

She bared her teeth. “You can’t fix it, you stupid child.” She resumed the awful noise.

“Then just tell me. Please?” He stretched out a hand towards her. He hadn’t felt quite so helpless since his very first daughter, Aminata, had come to him as an inconsolable six-year-old, rejected by the boy to whom she’d declared her undying love. He’d been 24 years old; a child himself. More than a thousand years ago. Where are you now, Nata?

Margit said, “I promised. I’d never tell.”

“Promised who?”

“Myself.”

“Good. They’re the easiest kind to break.”

She started weeping. It was a more ordinary sound, but it was even more chilling. She was not a wounded animal now, an alien being suffering some incomprehensible pain. Jamil approached her cautiously; she let him wrap his arms around her shoulders.

He whispered, “Come to bed. The warmth will help. Just being held will help.”

She spat at him derisively, “It won’t bring her back.”

“Who?”

Margit stared at him in silence, as if he’d said something shocking.

Jamil insisted gently, “Who won’t it bring back?” She’d lost a friend, badly, the way he’d lost Chusok. That was why she’d sought him out. He could help her through it. They could help each other through it.

She said, “It won’t bring back the dead.”

Margit was seven thousand five hundred and ninety-four years old. Jamil persuaded her to sit at the kitchen table. He wrapped her in blankets, then fed her tomatoes and rice, as she told him how she’d witnessed the birth of his world.

The promise had shimmered just beyond reach for decades. Almost none of her contemporaries had believed it would happen, though the truth should have been plain for centuries: the human body was a material thing. In time, with enough knowledge and effort, it would become possible to safeguard it from any kind of deterioration, any kind of harm. Stellar evolution and cosmic entropy might or might not prove insurmountable, but there’d be aeons to confront those challenges. In the middle of the 21st century, the hurdles were aging, disease, violence, and an overcrowded planet.

“Grace was my best friend. We were students.” Margit smiled. “Before everyone was a student. We’d talk about it, but we didn’t believe we’d see it happen. It would come in another century. It would come for our great-great-grandchildren. We’d hold infants on our knees in our twilight years and tell ourselves: this one will never die.

“When we were both 22, something happened. To both of us.” She lowered her eyes. “We were kidnapped. We were raped. We were tortured.”

Jamil didn’t know how to respond. These were just words to him: he knew their meaning, he knew these acts would have hurt her, but she might as well have been describing a mathematical theorem. He stretched a hand across the table, but Margit ignored it. He said awkwardly, “This was . . . the Holocaust?”

She looked up at him, shaking her head, almost laughing at his naïvete. “Not even one of them. Not a war, not a pogrom. Just one psychopathic man. He locked us in his basement, for six months. He’d killed seven women.” Tears began spilling down her cheeks. “He showed us the bodies. They were buried right where we slept. He showed us how we’d end up, when he was through with us.”

Jamil was numb. He’d known all his adult life what had once been possible—what had once happened, to real people—but it had all been consigned to history long before his birth. In retrospect it seemed almost inconceivably stupid, but he’d always imagined that the changes had come in such a way that no one still living had experienced these horrors. There’d been no escaping the bare minimum, the logical necessity: his oldest living ancestors must have watched their parents fall peacefully into eternal sleep. But not this. Not a flesh-and-blood woman, sitting in front of him, who’d been forced to sleep in a killer’s graveyard.

He put his hand over hers, and choked out the words. “This man . . . killed Grace? He killed your friend?”

Margit began sobbing, but she shook her head. “No, no. We got out!” She twisted her mouth into a smile. “Someone stabbed the stupid fucker in a bar-room brawl. We dug our way out while he was in hospital.” She put her face down on the table and wept, but she held Jamil’s hand against her cheek. He couldn’t understand what she’d lived through, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t console her. Hadn’t he touched his mother’s face the same way, when she was sad beyond his childish comprehension?

She composed herself, and continued. “We made a resolution, while we were in there. If we survived, there’d be no more empty promises. No more day dreams. What he’d done to those seven women—and what he’d done to us—would become impossible.”

And it had. Whatever harm befell your body, you had the power to shut off your senses and decline to experience it. If the flesh was damaged, it could always be repaired or replaced. In the unlikely event that your jewel itself was destroyed, everyone had backups, scattered across universes. No human being could inflict physical pain on another. In theory, you could still be killed, but it would take the same kind of resources as destroying a galaxy. The only people who seriously contemplated either were the villains in very bad operas.

Jamil’s eyes narrowed in wonder. She’d spoken those last words with such fierce pride that there was no question of her having failed.

“You are Ndoli? You invented the jewel?” As a child, he’d been told that the machine in his skull had been designed by a man who’d died long ago.

Margit stroked his hand, amused. “In those days, very few Hungarian women could be mistaken for Nigerian men. I’ve never changed my body that much, Jamil. I’ve always looked much as you see me.”

Jamil was relieved; if she’d been Ndoli himself, he might have succumbed to sheer awe and started babbling idolatrous nonsense. “But you worked with Ndoli? You and Grace?”

She shook her head. “We made the resolution, and then we floundered. We were mathematicians, not neurologists. There were a thousand things going on at once: tissue engineering, brain imaging, molecular computers. We had no real idea where to put our efforts, which problems we should bring our strengths to bear upon. Ndoli’s work didn’t come out of the blue for us, but we played no part in it.

“For a while, almost everyone was nervous about switching from the brain to the jewel. In the early days, the jewel was a separate device that learned its task by mimicking the brain, and it had to be handed control of the body at one chosen moment. It took another 50 years before it could be engineered to replace the brain incrementally, neuron by neuron, in a seamless transition throughout adolescence.”

So Grace had lived to see the jewel invented, but held back, and died before she could use it? Jamil kept himself from blurting out this conclusion; all his guesses had proved wrong so far.

Margit continued. “Some people weren’t just nervous, though. You’d be amazed how vehemently Ndoli was denounced in certain quarters. And I don’t just mean the fanatics who churned out paranoid tracts about ‘the machines’ taking over, with their evil inhuman agendas. Some people’s antagonism had nothing to do with the specifics of the technology. They were opposed to immortality, in principle.”

Jamil laughed. “Why?”

“Ten thousand years’ worth of sophistry doesn’t vanish overnight,” Margit observed dryly. “Every human culture had expended vast amounts of intellectual effort on the problem of coming to terms with death. Most religions had constructed elaborate lies about it, making it out to be something other than it was—though a few were dishonest about life, instead. But even most secular philosophies were warped by the need to pretend that death was for the best.

“It was the naturalistic fallacy at its most extreme—and its most transparent, but that didn’t stop anyone. Since any child could tell you that death was meaningless, contingent, unjust, and abhorrent beyond words, it was a hallmark of sophistication to believe otherwise. Writers had consoled themselves for centuries with smug puritanical fables about immortals who’d long for death—who’d beg for death. It would have been too much to expect all those who were suddenly faced with the reality of its banishment to confess that they’d been whistling in the dark. And would-be moral philosophers—mostly those who’d experienced no greater inconvenience in their lives than a late train or a surly waiter—began wailing about the destruction of the human spirit by this hideous blight. We needed death and suffering, to put steel into our souls! Not horrible, horrible freedom and safety!”

Jamil smiled. “So there were buffoons. But in the end, surely they swallowed their pride? If we’re walking in a desert and I tell you that the lake you see ahead is a mirage, I might cling stubbornly to my own belief, to save myself from disappointment. But when we arrive, and I’m proven wrong, I will drink from the lake.”

Margit nodded. “Most of the loudest of these people went quiet in the end. But there were subtler arguments, too. Like it or not, all our biology and all of our culture had evolved in the presence of death. And almost every righteous struggle in history, every worthwhile sacrifice, had been against suffering, against violence, against death. Now, that struggle would become impossible.”

“Yes.” Jamil was mystified. “But only because it had triumphed.”

Margit said gently, “I know. There was no sense to it. And it was always my belief that anything worth fighting for—over centuries, over millennia—was worth attaining. It can’t be noble to toil for a cause, and even to die for it, unless it’s also noble to succeed. To claim otherwise isn’t sophistication, it’s just a kind of hypocrisy. If it’s better to travel than arrive, you shouldn’t start the voyage in the first place.

“I told Grace as much, and she agreed. We laughed together at what we called the tragedians: the people who denounced the coming age as the age without martyrs, the age without saints, the age without revolutionaries. There would never be another Gandhi, another Mandela, another Aung San Suu Kyi—and yes, that was a kind of loss, but would any great leader have sentenced humanity to eternal misery, for the sake of providing a suitable backdrop for eternal heroism? Well, some of them would have. But the down-trodden themselves had better things to do.”

Margit fell silent. Jamil cleared her plate away, then sat opposite her again. It was almost dawn.

“Of course, the jewel was not enough,” Margit continued. “With care, Earth could support 40 billion people, but where would the rest go? The jewel made virtual reality the easiest escape route: for a fraction of the space, a fraction of the energy, it could survive without a body attached. Grace and I weren’t horrified by that prospect, the way some people were. But it was not the best outcome, it was not what most people wanted, the way they wanted freedom from death.

“So we studied gravity, we studied the vacuum.”

Jamil feared making a fool of himself again, but from the expression on her face he knew he wasn’t wrong this time. M. Osvát and G. Füst. Co-authors of the seminal paper, but no more was known about them than those abbreviated names. “You gave us the New Territories?”

Margit nodded slightly. “Grace and I.”

Jamil was overwhelmed with love for her. He went to her and knelt down to put his arms around her waist. Margit touched his shoulder. “Come on, get up. Don’t treat me like a god, it just makes me feel old.”

He stood, smiling abashedly. Anyone in pain deserved his help—but if he was not in her debt, the word had no meaning.

“And Grace?” he asked.

Margit looked away. “Grace completed her work, and then decided that she was a tragedian, after all. Rape was impossible. Torture was impossible. Poverty was vanishing. Death was receding into cosmology, into metaphysics. It was everything she’d hoped would come to pass. And for her, suddenly faced with that fulfilment, everything that remained seemed trivial.

“One night, she climbed into the furnace in the basement of her building. Her jewel survived the flames, but she’d erased it from within.”

It was morning now. Jamil was beginning to feel disoriented; Margit should have vanished in daylight, an apparition unable to persist in the mundane world.

“I’d lost other people who were close to me,” she said. “My parents. My brother. Friends. And so had everyone around me, then. I wasn’t special: grief was still common-place. But decade by decade, century by century, we shrank into insignificance, those of us who knew what it meant to lose someone for ever. We’re less than one in a million, now.

“For a long time, I clung to my own generation. There were enclaves, there were ghettos, where everyone understood the old days. I spent 200 years married to a man who wrote a play called We Who Have Known the Dead—which was every bit as pretentious and self-pitying as you’d guess from the title.” She smiled at the memory. “It was a horrible, self-devouring world. If I’d stayed in it much longer, I would have followed Grace. I would have begged for death.”

She looked up at Jamil. “It’s people like you I want to be with: people who don’t understand. Your lives aren’t trivial, any more than the best parts of our own were: all the tranquility, all the beauty, all the happiness that made the sacrifices and the life-and-death struggles worthwhile.

“The tragedians were wrong. They had everything upside-down. Death never gave meaning to life: it was always the other way round. All of its gravitas, all of its significance, was stolen from the things it ended. But the value of life always lay entirely in itself—not in its loss, not in its fragility.

“Grace should have lived to see that. She should have lived long enough to understand that the world hadn’t turned to ash.”

Jamil sat in silence, turning the whole confession over in his mind, trying to absorb it well enough not to add to her distress with a misjudged question. Finally, he ventured, “Why do you hold back from friendship with us, though? Because we’re just children to you? Children who can’t understand what you’ve lost?”

Margit shook her head vehemently. “I don’t want you to understand! People like me are the only blight on this world, the only poison.” She smiled at Jamil’s expression of anguish, and rushed to silence him before he could swear that she was nothing of the kind. “Not in everything we do and say, or everyone we touch: I’m not claiming that we’re tainted, in some fatuous mythological sense. But when I left the ghettos, I promised myself that I wouldn’t bring the past with me. Sometimes that’s an easy vow to keep. Sometimes it’s not.”

“You’ve broken it tonight,” Jamil said plainly. “And neither of us have been struck down by lightning.”

“I know.” She took his hand. “But I was wrong to tell you what I have, and I’ll fight to regain the strength to stay silent. I stand at the border between two worlds, Jamil. I remember death, and I always will. But my job now is to guard that border. To keep that knowledge from invading your world.”

“We’re not as fragile as you think,” he protested. “We all know something about loss.”

Margit nodded soberly. “Your friend Chusok was vanished into the crowd. That’s how things work now: how you keep yourselves from suffocating in a jungle of endlessly growing connections, or fragmenting into isolated troupes of repertory players, endlessly churning out the same lines.

“You have your little deaths—and I don’t call them that to deride you. But I’ve seen both. And I promise you, they’re not the same.”

In the weeks that followed, Jamil resumed in full the life he’d made for himself in Noether. Five days in seven were for the difficult beauty of mathematics. The rest were for his friends.

He kept playing matches, and Margit’s team kept winning. In the sixth game, though, Jamil’s team finally scored against her. Their defeat was only three to one.

Each night, Jamil struggled with the question. What exactly did he owe her? Eternal loyalty, eternal silence, eternal obedience? She hadn’t sworn him to secrecy; she’d extracted no promises at all. But he knew she was trusting him to comply with her wishes, so what right did he have to do otherwise?

Eight weeks after the night he’d spent with Margit, Jamil found himself alone with Penina in a room in Joracy’s house. They’d been talking about the old days. Talking about Chusok.

Jamil said, “Margit lost someone, very close to her.”

Penina nodded matter-of-factly, but curled into a comfortable position on the couch and prepared to take in every word.

“Not in the way we’ve lost Chusok. Not in the way you think at all.”

Jamil approached the others, one by one. His confidence ebbed and flowed. He’d glimpsed the old world, but he couldn’t pretend to have fathomed its inhabitants. What if Margit saw this as worse than betrayal—as a further torture, a further rape?

But he couldn’t stand by and leave her to the torture she’d inflicted on herself.

Ezequiel was the hardest to face. Jamil spent a sick and sleepless night beforehand, wondering if this would make him a monster, a corrupter of children, the epitome of everything Margit believed she was fighting.

Ezequiel wept freely, but he was not a child. He was older than Jamil, and he had more steel in his soul than any of them.

He said, “I guessed it might be that. I guessed she might have seen the bad times. But I never found a way to ask her.”

The three lobes of probability converged, melted into a plateau, rose into a pillar of light.

The umpire said, “Fifty-five point nine.” It was Margit’s most impressive goal yet.

Ezequiel whooped joyfully and ran towards her. When he scooped her up in his arms and threw her across his shoulders, she laughed and indulged him. When Jamil stood beside him and they made a joint throne for her with their arms, she frowned down at him and said, “You shouldn’t be doing this. You’re on the losing side.”

The rest of the players converged on them, cheering, and they started down towards the river. Margit looked around nervously. “What is this? We haven’t finished playing.”

Penina said, “The game’s over early, just this once. Think of this as an invitation. We want you to swim with us. We want you to talk to us. We want to hear everything about your life.”

Margit’s composure began to crack. She squeezed Jamil’s shoulder. He whispered, “Say the word, and we’ll put you down.”

Margit didn’t whisper back; she shouted miserably, “What do you want from me, you parasites? I’ve won your fucking game for you! What more do you want?”

Jamil was mortified. He stopped and prepared to lower her, prepared to retreat, but Ezequiel caught his arm.

Ezequiel, said, “We want to be your border guards. We want to stand beside you.”

Christa added, “We can’t face what you’ve faced, but we want to understand. As much as we can.”

Joracy spoke, then Yann, Narcyza, Maria, Halide. Margit looked down on them, weeping, confused.

Jamil burnt with shame. He’d hijacked her, humiliated her. He’d made everything worse. She’d flee Noether, flee into a new exile, more alone than ever.

When everyone had spoken, silence descended. Margit trembled on her throne.

Jamil faced the ground. He couldn’t undo what he’d done. He said quietly, “Now you know our wishes. Will you tell us yours?”

“Put me down.”

Jamil and Ezequiel complied.

Margit looked around at her teammates and opponents, her children, her creation, her would-be friends.

She said, “I want to go to the river with you. I’m seven thousand years old, and I want to learn to swim.”

THE CHOP GIRL

Ian R. MacLeod

Me, I was the chop girl-not that I suppose that anyone knows what that means now. So much blood and water under the bridge, I heard the lassies in the post office debating how many world wars there had been last week when I climbed up the hill to collect my pension, and who exactly it was that had won them.

Volunteered for service, I did, because I thought it would get me away from the stink of the frying pans at home in our Manchester tea room’s back kitchen. And then the Air Force of all things, and me thinking, lucky, lucky, lucky, because of the glamour and the lads, the lovely lads, the best lads of all, who spoke with BBC voices as I imagined them, and had played rugger and footie for their posh schools and for their posh southern counties. And a lot of it was true, even if I ended up typing in the annex to the cookhouse, ordering mustard and HP Sauce on account of my, quote, considerable experience in the catering industry.

So there I was—just eighteen and WAAF and lucky, lucky, lucky. And I still didn’t know what a chop girl was, which had nothing to do with lamb or bacon or the huge blocks of lard I ordered for the chip pans. They were big and empty places, those bomber airfields, and they had the wild and open and windy names of the Fens that surrounded them. Wisbeach and Finneston and Witchford. And there were drinks and there were dances and the money was never short because there was never any point in not spending it. Because you never knew, did you? You never knew. One day your bunk’s still warm and the next someone else is complaining about not changing the sheets and the smell of you on it. Those big machines like ugly insects lumbering out in the dying hour to face the salt wind off the marshes and the lights and blue smoke of the paraffin lanterns drifting across the runways. Struggling up into the deepening sky in a mighty roaring, and the rest of us standing earthbound and watching. Word slipping out that tonight it would be Hamburg or Dortmund or Essen—some half-remembered place from a faded schoolroom map glowing out under no moon and through heavy cloud, the heavier the better, as the bombers droned over, and death fell from them in those long steel canisters onto people who were much like us when you got down to it, but for the chances of history. Then back, back, a looser run in twos and threes and searching for the seaflash of the coast after so many miles of darkness. Black specks at dawn on the big horizon that could have been clouds or crows or just your eyes’ plain weariness. Noise and smoke and flame. Engines misfiring. An unsettled quiet would be lying over everything by the time the sun was properly up and the skylarks were singing. The tinny taste of fatigue. Then word on the wires of MG 3138, which had limped in at Brightlingsea. And of CZ 709, which had ploughed up a field down at Theddlethorpe. Word, too, of LK 452, which was last seen as a flaming cross over Brussels, and of Flight Sergeant Shanklin, who, hoisted bloody from his gun turret by the medics, had faded on the way to hospital. Word of the dead. Word of the lost. Word of the living.

Death was hanging all around you, behind the beer and the laughs and the bowls and the endless games of cards and darts and cricket. Knowing as they set out on a big mission that some planes would probably never get back. Knowing for sure that half the crews wouldn’t make it through their twenty-mission tour. So, of course, we were all madly superstitious. It just happened—you didn’t need anyone to make it up for you. Who bought the first round. Who climbed into the plane last. Not shaving or shaving only half your face. Kissing the ground, kissing the air, singing, not singing, pissing against the undercarriage, spitting. I saw a Flight Officer have a blue fit because the girl in the canteen gave him only two sausages on his lunchtime plate. That night, on a big raid over Dortmund, his Lancaster vanished in heavy flak, and I remember the sleepless nights because it was me who’d forgotten to requisition from the wholesale butcher. But everything was sharp and bright then. The feel of your feet in your shoes and your tongue in your mouth and your eyes in their sockets. That, and the sick-and-petrol smell of the bombers. So everything mattered. Every incident was marked and solid in the only time that counted, which was the time that lay between now and the next mission. So it was odd socks and counting sausages, spitting and not spitting, old hats and new hats worn backward and forward. It was pissing on the undercarriage, and whistling. And it was the girls you’d kissed.

Me, I was the chop girl, and word of it tangled and whispered around me like the sour morning news of a botched raid. I don’t know how it began, because I’d been with enough lads at dances, and then outside afterward fumbling and giggling in the darkness. And sometimes, and because you loved them all and felt sorry for them, you’d let them go nearly all the way before pulling back with the starlight shivering between us. Going nearly all the way was a skill you had to learn then, like who wore what kind of brass buttons and marching in line. And I was lucky. I sang lucky, lucky, lucky to myself in the morning as I brushed my teeth, and I laughingly told the lads so in the evening NAAFI when they always beat me at cards.

It could have started with Flight Sergeant Martin Beezly, who just came into our smoky kitchen annex one hot summer afternoon and sat down on the edge of my desk with his blond hair sticking up and told me he had a fancy to go picnicking and had got hold of two bikes. Me, I just unrollered my carbons and stood up and the other girls watched with the jaws of their typewriters dropped in astonishment as I walked out into the sunlight. Nothing much happened that afternoon, other than what Flight Sergeant Beezly said would happen. We cycled along the little dikes and bumped across the wooden bridges, and I sat on a rug eating custard creams as he told me about his home up in the northeast and the business he was planning to set up after the war delivering lunchtime sandwiches to the factories. But all of that seemed as distant as the open blue sky—as distant, given these clear and unsuitable weather conditions, as the possibility of a raid taking place that evening. We were just two young people enjoying the solid certainty of that moment—which the taste of custard creams still always brings back to me—and Flight Sergeant Beezly did no more than brush my cheek with his fingers before we climbed back onto the bikes, and then glance anxiously east toward the heavy clouds that were suddenly piling. It was fully overcast by the time we got back to the base, driven fast on our bikes by the cool and unsummery wind that was rustling the ditches. Already, orders had been posted and briefings were being staged and the groundcrews were working, their arclights flaring in the hangers. Another five minutes, a little less of that wind as we cycled, and there’d have been all hell to pay for me and for Flight Sergeant Beezly, who, as a navigator and vital to the task of getting one of those big machines across the dark sky, would have been shifted to standby and then probably court-martialled.

But as it was, he just made it into the briefing room as the map was being unfolded and sat down, as I imagine him, on the schoolroom desk nearest the door, still a little breathless, and with the same smears of bike oil on his fingers that I later found on my cheek. That night, it was Amsterdam—a quick raid to make the most of this quick and filthy cloud that the weather boffins said wouldn’t last. Amsterdam. One of those raids that somehow never sounded right even though it was enemy-occupied territory. That night, GZ 3401, with Flight Sergeant Beezly navigating, was last seen laboring over the North Sea enemy coastal barrages with a full load of bombs, a slow and ugly butterfly pinioned on the needles of half a dozen searchlights.

So maybe that was the first whisper—me walking out of the annex before I should have done with Flight Sergeant Beezly, although God knows it had happened to enough of the other girls. That, and worse. Broken engagements. Cancelled marriages. Visits to the burns unit, and up the stick for going all the way instead of just most of it. Wrecked, unmendable lives that you can still see drifting at every branch Post Office if you know how and when to look.

But then, a week after, there was Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson, who had a reputation as one of the lads, one for the lassies. All we did was dance and kiss at the Friday hall down in the village, although I suppose that particular night was the first time I was really drawn to him because something had changed about his eyes. That, and the fact that he’d shaved off the Clark Gable moustache that I’d always thought made him look vain and ridiculous. So we ended up kissing as we danced, and then sharing beers and laughs with the rest of his crew in their special corner. And after the band had gone and the village outside the hall stood stony dark, I let him lean me against the old oak that slipped its roots into the river and let him nuzzle my throat and touch my breasts and mutter words against my skin that were lost in the hissing of the water. I put my hand down between us then, touched him in the place I thought he wanted. But Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson was soft as smoke down there, as cool and empty as the night. So I just held him and rocked him as he began to weep, feeling faintly relieved that there wouldn’t be the usual pressures for me to go the whole way. Looking up through the oak leaves as the river whispered, I saw that the bright moon of the week before was thinning, and I knew from the chill air on my flesh that tomorrow the planes would be thundering out again. You didn’t need to be a spy or a boffin. And not Amsterdam, but a long run. Hamburg. Dortmund. Essen. In fact, it turned out to be the longest of them all, Berlin. And somewhere on that journey Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson and his whole crew and his Lancaster simply fell out of the sky. Vanished into the darkness.

After that, the idea of my being bad luck seemed to settle around me, clinging like the smoke of the cookhouse. Although I was young, although I’d never really gone steady with anyone and had still never ventured every last inch of the way, and although no one dared to keep any proper score of these things, I was already well on my way to becoming the chop girl. I learned afterward that most bases had one; that—in the same way that Kitty from stores was like a mum to a lot of the crews, and Sally Morrison was the camp bicycle—it was a kind of necessity.

And I believed. With each day so blazingly bright and with the nights so dark and the crews wild-eyed and us few women grieving and sleepless, with good luck and bad luck teeming in the clouds and in the turning of the moon, we loved and lived in a world that had shifted beyond the realms of normality. So of course I believed.

I can’t give you lists and statistics. I can’t say when I first heard the word, or caught the first really odd look. But being the chop girl became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Empty wells of silence opened out when I entered the canteen. Chairs were weirdly re-arranged in the NAAFI. I was the chop, and the chop was Flight Sergeant Ronnie Fitfield and Flight Officer Jackie White and Pilot Officer Tim Reid, all of them in one bad late summer month, men I can barely remember now except for their names and ranks and the look of loss in their eyes and the warm bristle touch of their faces. Nights out at a pub; beating the locals at cribbage; a trip to the cinema at Lincoln, and the tight, cobbled streets afterward shining with rain. But I couldn’t settle on these men because already I could feel the darkness edging in between us, and I knew even as I touched their shoulders and watched them turn away that they could feel it, too. At the dances and the endless booze-ups and the card schools, I became more than a wallflower: I was the petaled heart of death, its living embodiment. I was quivering with it like electricity. One touch, one kiss, one dance. Groundcrew messages were hard to deliver when they saw who it was coming across the tarmac. It got to the point when I stopped seeing out the planes, or watching them through the pane of my bunk window. And the other girls in the annex and the spinster WAAF officers and even the red-faced women from the village who came in to empty the bins—all of them knew I was the chop, all of them believed. The men who came up to me now were white-faced, already teetering. They barely needed my touch. Once you’d lost it, the luck, the edge, the nerve, it was gone anyway, and the black bomber’s sky crunched you in its fists.

I can’t tell you that it was terrible. I knew it wasn’t just, but then, justice was something we’d long given up even missing. Put within that picture, and of the falling bombs and the falling bombers, I understood that the chop girl was a little thing, and I learned to step back into the cold and empty space that it provided. After all, I hadn’t loved any of the men—or only in a sweet, generalized and heady way that faded on the walk from the fence against which we’d been leaning. And I reasoned—and this was probably the thing that kept me sane—that it wasn’t me that was the chop. I reasoned that death lay somewhere else and was already waiting, that I was just a signpost that some crewmen had happened to pass on their way.

Me, I was the chop girl.

And I believed.

Such were the terrors and the pains of the life we were leading.

With the harvest came the thunderflies, evicted from the fields in sooty clouds that speckled the windows and came out like black dandruff when you combed your hair. And the moths and the craneflies were drawn for miles by the sparks and lights flaring from the hangers. Spiders prowled the communal baths, filled with their woodland reek of bleach and wet towels. The sun rippled small and gold like a dropped coin on the horizon, winking as if through fathoms of ocean.

With harvest came Walt Williams. Chuttering up to the Strictly Reserved parking space outside the Squadron Leader’s office in a once-red MG and climbing out with a swing of his legs and a heave of his battered carpetbag. Smiling with cold blue eyes as he looked around him at the expanse of hangars, as if he would never be surprised again. Walt had done training. Walt had done Pathfinders. Walt had done three full tours, and most of another that had only ended when his plane had been shot from under him and he’d been hauled out of the Channel by a passing MTB. We’d all heard of Walt, or thought we had, or had certainly heard of people like him. Walt was one of the old-style pilots who’d been flying before the War for sheer pleasure. Walt was an old man of thirty, with age creases on his sun-browned face to go with those blue eyes. Walt had done it all and had finally exhausted every possibility of death that a bemused RAF could throw at him. Walt was the living embodiment of lucky.

We gathered around, we sought to touch and admire and gain advice about how one achieved this impossible feat—the we at the base that generally excluded me did, anyway. The other crew members who’d been selected to fly with him wandered about with the bemused air of pools winners. Walt Williams stories suddenly abounded. Stuff about taking a dead cow up in a Lancaster and dropping it bang into the middle of a particularly disliked Squadron Leader’s prized garden. Stuff about half a dozen top brass wives. Stuff about crash landing upside down on lakes. Stuff about flying for hundreds of miles on two engines or just the one or no engines at all. Stuff about plucking women’s washing on his undercarriage and picking apples from passing trees. Amid all this excitement that fizzed around the airfield like the rain on the concrete and the corrugated hangars as the autumn weather heaved in, we seemed to forget that we had told each other many of these stories before, and that they had only gained this new urgency because we could now settle them onto the gaunt face of a particular man who sat smiling and surrounded, yet often seeming alone, at the smoke-filled center of the NAAFI bar.

Being older, being who he was, Walt needed to do little to enhance his reputation other than to climb up into this Lancaster and fly it. That, and parking that rattling sports car the way he did that first day, his loose cuffs and his other minor disregards for all the stupidities of uniform, his chilly gaze, his longer-than-regulation hair, the fact that he was almost ten years older than most of the rest of us and had passed up the chance to be promoted to the positions of the men who were supposedly in charge of him, was more than enough. The fact that, in the flesh, he was surprisingly quiet, and that his long brown hands trembled as he chain-smoked his Dunhill cigarettes, the fact that his smile barely ever wavered yet never reached his eyes, and that it was said, whispered, that the Pilot Officer in the billet next to his had asked to be moved out on account of the sound of screaming, was as insignificant as Alan Ladd having to stand on a box before he kissed his leading ladies. We all had our own inner version of Walt Williams in those soaringly bright days.

For me, the shadow in bars and dancehall corners, potent in my own opposite way, yet now mostly pitied and ignored, Walt Williams had an especial fascination. With little proper company, immersed often enough between work shifts in doleful boredom, I had plenty of time to watch and brood. The base and surrounding countryside made a strange world that winter. I walked the dikes. I saw blood on the frost where the farmers set traps to catch the foxes, and felt my own blood turn and change with the ebb and flow of the bomber’s moon. Ice on the runways, ice hanging like fairy socks on the radio spars as the messages came in each morning. The smell of the sea blown in over the land. In my dreams, I saw the figures of crewmen entering the NAAFI, charcoaled and blistered, riddled with bleeding wormholes or greyly bloated from the ocean and seeping brine. Only Walt Williams, laughing for once, his diamond eyes blazing, stood whole and immune.

Walt was already halfway through his tour by the time Christmas came, and the consensus amongst those who knew was that he was a unfussy pilot, unshowy. Rather like the best kind of footballer, he drifted in, found the right place, the right time, then drifted out again. I stood and watched him from my own quiet corners in the barroom, nursing my quiet drinks. I even got to feel that I knew Walt Williams better than any of the others, because I actually made it my business to study him, the man and not the legend. He always seemed to be ahead of everything that was happening, but I saw that there was a wariness in the way he watched people, and a mirrored grace in how he responded, as if he’d learned the delicate dance of being human, of making all the right moves, but, offstage and in the darkness of his hut where that pilot who was dead now had said he’d heard screaming, he was something else entirely. And there were things—apart from never having to buy drinks—that Walt Williams never did. Games, bets, cards. He always slipped back then, so smoothly and easily you’d have to be watching from as far away as I was to actually notice. It was as if he was frightened to use his luck up on anything so trivial, whereas most of the other crewmen, fired up and raw through these times of waiting, were always chasing a ball, a winning hand, thunking in the darts and throwing dice and making stupid bets on anything that moved, including us girls.

Watching Walt as I did, I suppose he must have noticed me. And he must have heard about me, too, just as everyone else here at the base had. Sometimes, on the second or third port and lemon, I’d just stare at him from my empty corner and will him, dare him, to stare back at me. But he never did. Those sapphire eyes, quick as they were, never quite touched on me. He must, I thought. He must look now. But never, never. Except when I stood up and left, and I felt his presence behind me like the touch of cool fingers on my neck. So strong and sharp was that feeling one night as I stepped down the wooden steps outside the NAAFI that I almost turned and went straight back in to confront him through those admiring crowds. But loneliness had become a habit by now, and I almost clung to my reputation. I wandered off, away from the billets and into the empty darkness of the airfield. There was no moon, but a seemingly endless field of stars. Not a bomber’s night, but the kind of night you see on Christmas cards. After a week’s rain, and then this sudden frost, I could feel the ground crackling and sliding beneath me. The NAAFI door swung open again, and bodies tumbled out. As they turned from the steps made to sway arm-in-arm off bed, I heard the crash of fresh ice and the slosh of water as they broke into a huge puddle. They squelched off, laughing and cursing. Standing there in the darkness, I watched the same scene play itself out over and over again. The splash of cold, filthy water. One man even fell into it. Freezing though I was, I took an odd satisfaction in watching this little scene repeat itself. Now, I thought, if they could see me as well as I can see them, standing in the darkness watching the starlight shining on that filthy puddle, they really would know I’m strange. Chop girl. Witch. Death incarnate. They’d burn me at the stake. . . .

I’d almost forgotten about Walt Williams when he finally came out, although I knew it was him. Instantly. He paused on the steps and looked up at the sky as I’d seen other aircrew do, judging what the next night would bring. As he did so, his shadow seemed to quiver. But he still walked like Walt Williams when he stepped down onto the frozen turf, and his breath plumed like anyone else’s, and I knew somehow, knew in a way that I had never had before, that this time he really didn’t know that I was there, and that he was off-guard in a way I’d never seen him. The next event was stupid, really. A non-event. Walt Williams just walked off with that loose walk of his, his hands stuffed into his pockets. He was nearly gone from sight into his Nissen hut when I realized the one thing that hadn’t happened. Even though he’d taken the same route as everyone else, he hadn’t splashed into that wide, deep puddle. I walked over to it, disbelieving, and tried to recall whether I’d even heard the crackle of his footsteps on the ice. And the puddle was even darker, wider, and filthier than I’d imagined. The kind of puddle you only get at places military. I was stooping at the edge of it, and my own ankles and boots were already filthy, when the NAAFI door swung open again, and a whole group of people suddenly came out. Somebody was holding the door, and the light flooded right toward me.

Even though I was sure they must all have seen me and knew who I was, I got up and scurried away.

All in all, it was a strange winter. We were getting used to Allied victories, and there’d even been talk of a summer invasion of France that had never happened. But we knew it would come next summer now that the Yanks had thrown their weight into it, and that the Russians wouldn’t give up advancing, that it was really a matter of time until the War ended. But for us, that wasn’t reassuring, because we knew that peace was still so far away, and we knew that the risks and the fatalities would grow even greater on the journey to it. Aircrew were scared in any case of thinking further than the next drink, the next girl, the next mission. Peace for them was a strange white god they could worship only at the risk of incurring the wrath of the darker deity who still reigned over them. So there was an extra wildness to the jollification when that year’s end drew near, and a dawning realization that, whether we lived or died, whether we came out of it all maimed and ruined or whole and happy, no one else would ever understand.

There was a big pre-Christmas bash in a barn of the great house of the family that had once owned most of the land you could see from the top of our windsock tower. Of course, the house itself had been requisitioned, although the windows were boarded or shattered and the place was empty as we drove past it, and I heard later that it was never re-occupied after the War and ended up being slowly vandalized until it finally burnt down in the fifties. The barn was next to the stables and faced into a wide cobbled yard, and, for once, out here in the country darkness and a million miles from peace or war, no one gave a bugger about the blackout, and there were smoking lanterns hanging by the pens where fine white horses would once have nosed their heads. It was freezing, but you couldn’t feel cold, not in that sweet orange light, not once the music had started, and the Squadron Leader himself, looking ridiculous in a pinny, began ladling out the steaming jamjars of mulled wine. And I was happy to be there, too, happy to be part of this scene with the band striking up on a stage made of bales. When Walt arrived, alone as usual in his rusty MG, he parked in the best spot between the trucks and climbed out with that fragile grace of his. Walt Williams standing there in the flamelight, a modern prince with the tumbling chimneys of that empty old house looming behind him. A perfect, perfect scene.

I did dance, once or twice, with some of the other girls and a few of the older men who worked in the safety of accounts and stores and took pity on me. I even had a five-minute word—just like everyone else, kindly man that he was, and spectrally thin though the War had made him—with our Squadron Leader. As far away from everything as we were, people thought it was safe here to get in that bit closer to me. But it was hard for me to keep up my sense of jollity, mostly standing and sitting alone over such a long evening, and no chance of going back to base until far after midnight. So I did my usual trick of backing off, which was easier here than it was in the NAAFI. I could just drift out of the barn and across the cobbles, falling through layers of smoke and kicked-up dust until I became part of the night. I studied them all for a while, remembering a picture from Peter Pan that had showed the Indians and the Lost Boys dancing around a campfire.

Couples were drifting out now into the quiet behind the vans. I tried to remember what it was like, the way you could conjure up that urgency between flesh and flesh. But all I could think of was some man’s male thing popping out like a dog’s, and I walked further off into the dark, disgusted. I wandered around the walls of the big and empty house with its smell of damp and nettles, half-feeling my way down steps and along balustrades, moving at this late and early hour amid the pale shadows of huge statuary. It wasn’t fully quiet here, this far away from the throb of the barn. Even in midwinter, there were things shuffling and creaking and breaking. Tiny sounds, and the bigger ones that came upon you just when you’d given up waiting. The hoot of an owl. The squeak of a mouse. The sound of a fox screaming. . . .

Perhaps I’d fallen asleep, for I didn’t hear him coming, or at least didn’t separate out the sound of his footsteps from my thoughts, which had grown as half-unreal as those dim statues, changing and drifting. So I simply waited in the darkness as one of the statues began to move, and knew without understanding that it was Walt Williams. He sat beside me on whatever kind of cold stone bench I was sitting, and he still had the smell of the barn on him, the heat and the drink and the smoke and the firelight. The only thing he didn’t carry with him was the perfume of a woman. I honestly hadn’t realized until that moment that this was another item I should have added to my long list of the things Walt Williams avoided. But somehow that fact had been so obvious that even I hadn’t noticed it. It wouldn’t have seemed right, anyway. Walt and just one woman. Not with the whole base depending on him.

I watched the flare of the match, and saw the peaked outline of his face as he stooped to catch it with two cigarettes. Then I felt his touch as he passed one to me. One of those long, posh fags of his, which tasted fine and sweet, although it was odd to hold compared with the stubby NAAFI ones because the glow of it came from so far away. No one else, I thought, would ever do this for me—sit and smoke a fag like this. Only Walt.

He finally ground his cigarette out in a little shower of sparks beneath his shoe. I did the same, more by touch than anything.

“So you’re the girl we’re all supposed to avoid?”

Pointless though it was in this darkness, I nodded.

It was the first time I’d heard him laugh. Like his voice, the sound was fine and light. “The things people believe!”

“It’s true, though, isn’t it? It is, although I don’t understand why. It may be that it’s only because . . .” I trailed off. I’d never spoken about being the chop girl to anyone before. What I’d wanted to say was that it was our believing that had made it happen.

I heard the rustle of his packet as he took out another cigarette. “Another?”

I shook my head. “You of all people. You shouldn’t be here with me.”

The match flared. I felt smoke on my face, warm and invisible. “That’s where you’re wrong. You and me, we’d make the ideal couple. Don’t bother to say otherwise. I’ve seen you night after night in the NAAFI. . . .”

“Not every night.”

“But enough of them.”

“And I saw you, that night. I saw you walk over that puddle.”

“What night was that?”

So I explained—and in the process I gave up any pretense that I hadn’t been watching him.

“I really don’t remember,” he said when I’d finished, although he didn’t sound that surprised. This time, before he ground out his cigarette, he used it to light another. “But why should I? It was just a puddle. Lord knows, there are plenty around the base.”

“But it was there. I was watching. You just walked over it.”

He made a sound that wasn’t quite a cough. “Hasn’t everyone told you who I am? I’m Walt Williams. I’m lucky.”

“But it’s more than that, isn’t it?”

Walt said nothing for a long while, and I watched the nervous arc of his cigarette rising and falling. And when he did begin to speak, it wasn’t about the War, but about his childhood. Walt told me he’d come from a well-to-do family in the Home Counties, a place that always made me think of the BBC and pretty lanes with tall flowering hedges. He was the only child, but a big investment, as was always made clear to him, of his mother’s time, his father’s money. At first, to hear Walt talk, he really was the image of those lads I’d imagined I’d meet when I joined the RAF. He’d gone to the right schools. He really had played cricket—if only just the once when the usual wicket keeper was ill—for his county. His parents had him lined up to become an accountant. But Walt would have none of that, and my image of his kind of childhood, which was in all the variegated golds and greens of striped lawns and fine sunsets, changed as he talked, like a film fading. His mother, he said, had a routine that she stuck to rigidly. Every afternoon, when she’d come back from whatever it was that she was always did on that particular day, she’d sit in the drawing room with her glass and her sherry decanter beside her. She’d sit there, and she’d wait for the clock to chime five, and then she’d ring for the maid to come and pour her drink for her. Every afternoon, the same.

Walt Williams talked on in the darkness. And at some point, I began to hear the ticking rattle of something which I thought at first was his keys or his coins, the kind of nervous habit that most pilots end up getting. It didn’t sound quite right, but by then I was too absorbed in what he was saying. Flying, once Walt had discovered it, had been his escape, although, because of the danger to their precious investment of time and good schools and money, his parents disapproved of it even as a hobby. They cut off his money, and what there was of their affection. Walt worked in garages and then on the airfields, and flew whenever he could. He even toured with a circus. The rattling sound continued as he spoke, and I sensed a repeated sweeping movement of his hand that he was making across the stone on which we were sitting, as if he was gently trying to scrub out some part of these memories.

Then the War came, and even though the RAF’s discipline, and the regularity, were the same things that he detested in his parents, Walt was quick to volunteer. But he liked the people, or many of them, and he came to admire the big and often graceless military planes. The kind of flying he’d done, often tricks and aerobatics, Walt was used to risk; he opted for bombers rather than fighters because, like anyone who’s in a fundamentally dangerous profession, he looked for ways in which he thought, wrongly as it turned out, the risk could be minimized. And up in the skies and down on the ground, he sailed through his War. He dropped his bombs, and he wasn’t touched by the world below him. Part of him knew that he was being even more heartless than the machines he was flying, but the rest of him knew that if he was to survive it was necessary to fly through cold, clear and untroubled skies of his own making.

The faint sound of the band in the barn had long faded, and I could see the sweep and movement of Walt’s hand more clearly now, and the clouds of our breath and his cigarette smoke hanging like the shapes of the statues around us. I had little difficulty in picturing Walt as he described the kind of pilot he’d once been; the kind who imagined, despite all the evidence, that nothing would ever happen to him. Not that Walt believed in luck back then—he said he only went along with the rituals so as not to unsettle his crew—but at a deeper and unadmitted level, and just like all the rest of us, luck had become fundamental to him.

In the big raids that were then starting, which were the revenge for the raids that the Germans had launched against us, so many bombers poured across their cities that they had to go over in layers. Some boffin must have worked out that the chance of a bomb landing on a plane flying beneath was small enough to be worth taking. But in a mass raid over Frankfurt, flying through dense darkness, there was a sudden jolt and a blaze of light, and Walt’s top gunner reported that a falling incendiary had struck their starboard wing. Expecting a fuel line to catch at any moment, or for a nightfighter to home in on them now that they were shining like a beacon, they dropped their load and turned along the home flightpath. But the nightfighters didn’t come, and the wind blasting across the airframe stopped the incendiary from fully igniting. Hours went by, and they crossed the coast of France into the Channel just as the night was paling. The whole crew were starting to believe that their luck would hold, and were silently wondering how to milk the most drama out of the incident in the bar that evening, when the whole plane was suddenly ripped apart as the wing, its spar damaged by the heat of that half-burning incendiary, tore off into the slipstream. In a fraction of a moment, the bomber became a lump of tumbling, flaming metal.

There was nothing then but the wild push of falling, and the sea, the sky, the sea flashing past them and the wind screaming as the bomber turned end over end and they tried to struggle from their harnesses and climb out through the doorways or the gaping hole that the lost wing had made. Walt said it was like being wedged in a nightmare fairground ride, and that all he could think of was having heard somewhere that the sea was hard as concrete when you hit it. That, and not wanting to die; that, and needing to be lucky. In a moment of weightlessness, globules of blood floated around him, and he saw his co-pilot with a spear of metal sticking right though him. There was no way Walt could help. He clambered up the huge height of the falling plane against a force that suddenly twisted and threw him down toward the opening. But he was wedged into it, stuck amid twisted piping and scarcely able to breathe as the tumbling forces gripped him. It was then that the thought came to him—the same thought that must have crossed the minds of thousands of airmen in moments such as these—that he would give anything, anything to get out. Anything to stay lucky. . . .

The darkness had grown thin and gauzy. Looking down now, I could see that Walt was throwing two white dice, scooping them up and throwing them again.

“So I was lucky,” he said. “I got the parachute open before I hit the sea and my lifejacket went up and I wasn’t killed by the flaming wreckage falling about me. But I still thought it was probably a cruel joke, to get this far and freeze to death in the filthy English Channel. Then I heard the sound of an engine over the waves, and I let off my flare. In twenty minutes, this MTB found me. One of ours, too. Of all the crew, I was the only one they found alive. The rest were just bodies. . . .”

I could see the outlines of the trees now through a dawn mist, and of the statues around us, which looked themselves like casualties wrapped in foggy strips of bandage. And I could see the numbers on the two dice that Walt was throwing.

A chill went through me, far deeper than this dawn cold. They went six, six, six . . .

Walt made that sound again. More of a cough than a chuckle. “So that’s how it is. I walk over puddles. I fly though tour after tour. I’m the living embodiment of lucky.”

“Can’t you throw some other number?”

He shook his head and threw again. Six and six. “It’s not a trick. Not the kind of trick you might think it is, anyway.” Six and six, again. The sound of those rolling bones. The sound of my teeth chattering. “You can try if you like.”

“You forget who I am, Walt. I don’t need to try. I believe . . .”

Walt pocketed his dice and stood up and looked about him. With that gaze of his. Smiling but unsmiling. It was getting clearer now. The shoulders of my coat were clammy damp when I touched them. My hands were white and my fingertips were blue with the cold. And this place of statues, I finally realized, wasn’t actually the garden of the house at all, but a churchyard. Our bench had been a tombstone. We were surrounded by angels.

“Come on . . .” Walt held out his hand to help me up. I took it.

I expected him to head back to his battered MG, but instead he wandered amid the tombstones, hands in his pockets and half-whistling, inspecting the dates and the names, most of which belonged to the family that had lived in that big house beyond the treetops. Close beside us, there was a stone chapel, and Walt pushed at the door until something crumbled and gave, and beckoned me in.

Everything about the graveyard and this chapel was quiet and empty. That’s the way it is in a war. There are either places with no people at all, or other places with far too many. The chapel roof was holed and there were pigeon droppings and feathers over the pews, but it still clung to its dignity. And it didn’t seem a sad place to me, even though it was decorated with other memorials, because there’s a sadness about war that extinguishes the everyday sadnesses of people living and dying. Even the poor brass woman surrounded by swaddled figures, whom Walt explained represented her lost babies, still had a sense of something strong and right about her face. At least she knew she’d given life a chance.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, crouching beside Walt as he fed odd bits of wood into an old iron stove in a corner, “is why. . . .”

Walt struck a match and tossed it into the cobwebbed grate. The flames started licking and cracking. “It’s the same with cards. It’s the same with everything.”

“Can’t you . . .”

“Can’t I what?” He looked straight at me, and I felt again a deeper chill even as the stove’s faint heat touched me. I’ve never seen irises so blue, or pupils so dark, as his. Like a bomber’s night. Like the summer sky. I had to look away.

He stood up and fumbled in his pockets for another cigarette. As he lit it, I noticed that once again his hands were shaking.

“After the War, Walt, you could make a fortune. . . .”

He made that sound again, almost a cough; a sound that made me wish I could hear his proper laugh again. And he began to pace and to speak quickly, his footsteps snapping and echoing as the fire smoked and crackled and the pain of its warmth began to seep into me.

“What should I do? Go to a casino—me, the highest roller of them all? How long do you think that would last . . .?”

Walt said then that you were never given anything for nothing. Not in life, not in war, not even in fairy tales. Before that night over Frankfurt, he’d sailed though everything. Up in those bomber’s skies, you never heard the screams or the sound of falling masonry.

He slowed then, and crouched down again beside me, his whole body shivering as he gazed into the stove’s tiny blaze.

“I see it all now,” he said, and the smile that never met his eyes was gone even from his lips now. “Every bullet. Every bomb. Even in my dreams, it doesn’t leave me. . . .”

“It won’t last forever, Walt—”

His hand grabbed mine, hard and sharp, and the look in his eyes made me even more afraid. When he spoke, the words were barely a whisper, and his voice was like the voice of poor dead Pilot Officer Charlie Dyson as he pressed himself to me on that distant summer night under the oak tree.

When Walt said he saw it all, he truly meant he saw everything. It came to him in flashes and stabs—nightmare visions, I supposed, like those of the dead airmen that had sometimes troubled me. He saw the blood, heard the screams and felt the terrible chaos of falling masonry. He’d been tormented for weeks, he muttered, by the screams of a woman as she was slowly choked by a ruptured sewer pipe flooding her forgotten basement. And it wasn’t just Walt’s own bombs, his own deeds, but flashes, terrible flashes that he still scarcely dared believe, of the war as a whole, what was happening now, and what would happen in the future. He muttered names I’d never heard of. Belsen. Dachau. Hiro and Naga-something. And he told me that he’d tried walking into the sea to get rid of the terrors he was carrying, but that the tide wouldn’t take him. He told me that he’d thought of driving his MG at a brick wall, only he didn’t trust his luck—or trusted it too much—to be sure that any accident or deed would kill him. And yes, many of the stories of the things he’d done were true, but then the RAF would tolerate much from its best, its luckiest, pilots. For, at the end of the day, Walt still was a pilot—the sky still drew him, just as it always had. And he wanted the war to end like all the rest of us because he knew—far more than I could have then realized—about the evils we were fighting. So he still climbed into his bomber and ascended into those dark skies. . . .

Slowly, then, Walt let go of me. And he pushed back his hair, and ran his hand over his lined face, and then began stooping about collecting more bits of old wood and stick for the fire. After a long time staring into the stove and with some of the cold finally gone from me, I stood up and walked amid the pews, touching the splintery dust and studying the bits of brass and marble from times long ago when people hadn’t thought it odd to put a winged skull beside a puffy-cheeked cherub. . . .

Walt was walking up the church now. As I turned to him, I saw him make that effort that he always made, the dance of being the famous Walt Williams, of being human. From a figure made out of winter light and the fire’s dull woodsmoke, he gave a shiver and became a good-looking man again, still thinly graceful if no longer quite young, and with that smile and those eyes that were like ice and summer. He turned then, and put out his arms, and did a little Fred Astaire dance on the loose stones, his feet tap-tapping in echoes up to the angels and the cherubs and the skulls. I had to smile. And I went up to him and we met and hugged almost as couples do in films. But we were clumsy as kids as we kissed each other. It had been a long, long time for us both.

We went to the stove to stop ourselves shivering. Walt took off his jacket, and he spread it there before the glow, and there was never any doubt as we looked at each other. That we would go—stupid phrase—all the way.

So that was it. Me and Walt. And in a chapel—a church—of all places. And afterward, restless as he still was, still tormented, he pulled his things back on and smoked and wandered about. There was a kind of wooden balcony, a thing called a choir, at the back of the chapel. As I sat huddled by the stove, Walt climbed the steps that led up to it, and bits of dust and splinter fell as he looked down at me and gave a half-smiling wave. I could see that the whole structure was shot through with rot and woodworm, ridiculously unsafe. Then, of all things, he started to do that little Fred Astaire dance of his again, tip-tapping over the boards.

I was sure, as I stared up at Walt from the dying stove, that he danced over empty spaces where the floor had fallen though entirely.

Walt was due back at base that morning, and so was I: we all were. There had already been talk on the wire that tonight, hang-over or no hang-over, Christmas or no Christmas, there would be a big raid, one of the biggest. Leaving the chapel and walking back under the haggard trees toward the littered and empty barn, which stank of piss and butt ends, we kept mostly silent. And Walt had to lever open the bonnet of his MG and fiddle with the engine before he could persuade it to turn over. He drove slowly, carefully, back along the flat roads between the ditches to the airfield where the Lancasters sat like dragonflies on the horizon. No one saw us as we came in through the gates.

Walt touched my cheek and gave that smile of his and I watched him go until he turned from sight between the Nissen huts and annexes, and then hurried off to get dressed and changed for my work. But for the smudge of oil left by his fingers, I could tell myself that none of it had happened, and get on with banging my typewriter keys, ordering mustard by the tub and jam by the barrel and currants by the sackload as the ordnance trucks trundled their deadly trains of long steel canisters across the concrete and the groundcrew hauled fuel bousers and the aircrew watched the maps being unrolled and the pointers pointed at the name of a town in Europe that would mean death for some of them.

There was never long to wait for winter darkness, and the clouds were dense that day. The airfield seemed like the only place of brightness by the time the runway lanterns were lit and the aircrew, distant figures already, threw their last dart and played their last hand and put on their odd socks and whistled or didn’t whistle and touched their charms and kissed their scented letters and pressed their fingers to the concrete and walked out to their waiting Lancasters. Standing away from where everyone else had gathered, I watched the impenetrable rituals and tried without success to figure out which dim silhouette was Walt’s as they clustered around their Lancasters. And I listened as the huge Merlin engines, one by one, then wave on wave on wave, began to fire up. You felt sorry, then, for the Germans. Just as the sound became unbearable, a green flare flickered and sparkled over the base. At this signal, the pitch of the engines changed as bombers lumbered up to face the wind and slowly, agonizingly, pregnant with explosives and petrol, struggled up the runways to take flight.

That night, it was dark already. All we could do was listen—and wait—as the sound of the last Lancaster faded into that black bomber’s sky without incident.

The way things turned out—thanks to a secret war of homing beams and radar—it was a good, successful raid. But Walt Williams didn’t come back from it, even though his Lancaster did, and the story of what had happened was slow to emerge, opposed as it was by most people’s disbelief that anything could possibly have happened to him.

I made the cold journey across the airfield late that next afternoon to look at his Lancaster. The wind had picked up by then, was tearing at the clouds, and there was a stand-down after all the day and the night before’s activity. No one was about, and the machine had been drained of what remained of its ammunition, oil, and fuel, and parked in a distant corner with all the other scrap and wreckage.

It was always a surprise to be up close to one of these monsters, either whole or damaged; to feel just how big they were—and how fragile. I walked beneath the shadow of its wings as they sighed and creaked in the salt-tinged wind from across the Fens, and climbed as I had never climbed before up the crew’s ladder, and squeezed through bulkheads and between wires and pipes toward the grey light of the main cabin amid the sickly oil-and-rubber reek.

The rest of the aircrew had reported a jolt and a huge inrush of air as they took the homeward flightpath, but what I saw up there, on that late and windy afternoon, told its own story. Most of the pilot’s bubble and the side of the fuselage beside it had been ripped out-struck by a flying piece of debris from another plane, or a flak shell that refused to explode. Walt had been torn out, too, in the sudden blast, launched into the skies so instantly that no one else had really seen exactly what had happened. They’d all hoped, as the co-pilot had nursed the plane back home through the darkness, that Walt might still have survived, and, Walt being Walt, might even make it back through France instead of ending up as a German prisoner. But the morning had revealed that Walt, either intentionally or through some freak of the way the wind had hit him, had undone all the straps from his seat and had fallen without his parachute. Even now, it was still there, unclaimed, nestled in its well. I was able to bend down and touch it as the wind whistled through that ruined aircraft, and feel the hard inner burden of all those reams of silk that might have borne him.

Then, I believed.

I was transferred to another base in the spring after, when my section was re-organized in one of strange bureaucratic spasms that you get in the military. They’d had their own chop girl there who’d committed suicide by hanging herself a few months before, and they mostly ignored the rumors that came with me. It was as if that poor girl’s sacrifice had removed the burden from me. Her sacrifice-and that of Walt Williams.

Still, I was changed by what happened. There were other men with whom I had dates and longer-term romances, and there were other occasions when I went all instead of just part of the way. But Walt’s ghost was always with me. That look of his. Those eyes. That lined, handsome face. I always found it hard to settle on someone else, to really believe that they might truly want to love me. And by the time the War had finally ended, I was older, and, with my mother’s arthritis and my father’s stroke, I soon ended up having to cope with the demands of the tea-room almost single-handed. Time’s a funny thing. One moment you’re eighteen, lucky, lucky, lucky, and enlisting and leaving Manchester forever. The next you’re back there, your bones ache every morning, your face is red and puffy from the smoke and the heat of cooking, and the people over the serving counter are calling you Mrs. instead of Miss, even though they probably know you aren’t—and never will be—married. Still, I made a success of the business, even if it ruined my back, seared my hands, veined and purpled my face. Kept it going until ten years ago, I did, and the advent down the street of a McDonald’s. Now, my life’s my own, at least in the sense that it isn’t anybody else’s. And I keep active and make my way up the hill every week to collect my pension, although the climb seems to be getting steeper.

The dreams of the War still come, though, and thoughts about Walt Williams—in fact, they’re brighter than this present dull and dusty day. I sometimes think, for instance, that if everyone saw what Walt saw, if everyone knew what was truly happening in wars and suffered something like these visions, the world would become more a peaceable place and people would start to behave decently toward each other. But we have the telly now, don’t we? We can all see starving children and bits of bodies in the street. So perhaps you need to be someone special to begin with, to have special gifts for the tasks you’re given, and be in a strange and special time when you’re performing them. You have to be as lucky and unlucky as Walt Williams was.

And I can tell myself now, as I dared not quite tell myself then, that Walt’s life had become unbearable to him. Even though I treasure him for being the Walt who loved me for those few short hours, I know that he sought me out because of what I was.

Chop girl.

Death flower.

Witch.

And I sometimes wonder what it was that hit Walt’s Lancaster. Whether it really was some skyborne scrap of metal, or whether luck itself hadn’t finally become a cold wall, the iron hand of that dark bombers’ deity? And, in my darkest and brightest moments, when I can no longer tell if I’m feeling sad or desperately happy, I think of him walking across that foul puddle in the starlight as he came out of the NAAFI, and as I watched him in an old chapel after we’d made love, dancing across the choir above me on nothing but dust and sunlight. And I wonder if someone as lucky as Walt Williams could ever touch the ground without a parachute to save him, and if he isn’t still out there in the skies that he loved. Still falling.

THE ULTIMATE EARTH

Ian R. MacLeod

One of the most characteristic human behaviors is time-binding, but the ways generations are linked can themselves evolve in big ways.

1.

We loved Uncle Pen. The name he gave us was too hard for us to say, and we made it Sandor Pen. As early as we could understand, the robots had told us that we were clones, created to watch the skies for danger and rescue Earth from any harm. They had kept us busy with our lessons and our chores and our workouts in the big centrifuge, but life in our little burrow left us little else to do. His visits were our best excitement.

He never told us when he was coming. We used to watch for him, looking from the high dome on the Tycho rim, down across the field of Moondust the digging machines had leveled. Standing huge on the edge of it, they were metal monsters out of space, casting long black shadows across the gray waste of rocks and dust and crater pits.

His visit on our seventh birthday was a wonderful surprise. Tanya saw him landing and called us up to the dome. His ship was a bright teardrop, shining in the black shadow of a gigantic metal insect. He jumped out of it in a sleek silvery suit that fitted like his skin. We waited inside the air lock to watch him peel it off. He was a small lean man, who looked graceful as a girl but still very strong. Even his body was exciting to see, though Dian ran and hid because he looked so strange.

Naked, his body had a light tan that darkened in the sunlit dome and faded fast when he went below. His face was a narrow heart-shape, his golden eyes enormous. Instead of hair like ours, his head was capped with sleek, red-brown fur. He needed no clothing, he told us, because his sex organs were internal.

He called Dian when he missed her, and she crept back to share the gifts he had brought from Earth. There were sweet fruits we had never tasted, strange toys, stranger games that he had to show us how to play. For Tanya and Dian there were dolls that sang strange songs in voices we couldn’t understand and played loud music on tiny instruments we had never heard.

The best part was just the visit with him in the dome. Pepe and Casey had eager questions about life on the new Earth. Were there cities? Wild animals? Alien creatures? Did people live in houses, or underground in tunnels like ours? What did he do for a living? Did he have a wife? Children like us?

He wouldn’t tell us much. Earth, he said, had changed since our parents knew it. It was now so different that he wouldn’t know where to begin, but he let us take turns looking at it through the big telescope. Later, he promised, if he could find space gear to fit us, he would take us up to orbit the Moon and loop toward it for a closer look. Now, however, he was working to learn all he could about the old Earth, the way it had been ages ago, before the great impacts.

He showed it to us in the holo tanks and the brittle old paper books, the way it was with white ice caps over the poles and bare brown deserts on the continents. Terraformed, the new Earth had no deserts and no ice. Under the bright cloud spirals, the land was green where the sun struck it, all the way over the poles. It looked so wonderful that Casey and Pepe begged him to take us back with him to let us see it for ourselves.

“I’m sorry.” He shook his neat, fur-crowned head. “Terribly sorry, but you can’t even think of a trip to Earth.”

We were looking from the dome. Earth stood high in the black north, where it always stood. Low in the west, the slow Sun blazed hot on the new mountains the machines had piled up around the spaceport, and filled the craters with ink.

Dian had learned by now to trust him. She sat on his knee, gazing up in adoration at his quirky face. Tanya stood behind him, playing a little game. She held her hand against his back to bleach the golden tan, and took it away to watch the Sun erase the print.

Looking hurt, Casey asked why we couldn’t think of a trip to Earth.

“You aren’t like me.” That was very true. Casey has a wide black face with narrow Chinese eyes and straight black hair. “And you belong right here.”

“I don’t look like anybody.” Casey shrugged. “Or belong to you.”

“Of course you don’t.” Uncle Pen was gently patient. “But you do belong to the station and your great mission.” He looked at me. “Remind him, Dunk.”

My clone father was Duncan Yarrow. The master computer that runs the station often spoke with his holo voice. He had told us how we had been cloned again and again from the tissue cells left frozen in the cryostat.

“Sir, that’s true.” I felt a little afraid of Uncle Pen, but proud of all the station had done. “My holo father has told us how the big impacts killed Earth and killed it again. We have always brought it back to life.” My throat felt dry. I had to gulp, but I went on. “If Earth’s alive now, that’s because of us.”

“True. Very true.” He nodded, with an odd little smile. “But perhaps you don’t know that your little Moon has suffered a heavy impact of his own. If you are alive today, you owe your lives to me.”

“To you?” We all stared at him, but Casey was nodding. “To you and the digging machines? I’ve watched them and wondered what they were digging for. When did that object hit the Moon?”

“¿Quién sabe?” He shrugged at Pepe, imitating the gesture and the voice Pepe had learned from his holo father. “It was long ago. Perhaps a hundred thousand years, perhaps a million. I haven’t found a clue.”

“The object?” Pepe frowned. “Something hit the station?”

“A narrow miss.” Uncle Pen nodded at the great dark pit in the crater rim just west of us. “The ejecta smashed the dome and buried everything. The station was lost and almost forgotten. Only a myth till I happened on it.”

“The diggers?” Casey turned to stare down at the landing field where Uncle Pen had left his flyer in the shadows of those great machines and the mountains they had built. “How did you know where to dig?”

“The power plant was still running,” Uncle Pen said. “Keeping the computer alive. I was able to detect its metal shielding and then its radiation.”

“We thank you.” Pepe came gravely to shake his hand. “I’m glad to be alive.”

“So am I,” Casey said. “If I can get to Earth.” He saw Uncle Pen beginning to shake his head, and went on quickly, “Tell us what you know about the Earth impacts and how we came down to terraform the Earth and terraform it again when it was killed again.”

“I don’t know what you did.”

“You have showed us the difference we made,” Casey said. “The land is all green now, with no deserts or ice.”

“Certainly it has been transformed.” Nodding, Uncle Pen stopped to smile at Tanya as she left her game with the Sun on his back and came to sit cross-legged at his feet. “Whatever you did was ages ago. Our historians are convinced that we’ve done more ourselves.”

“You changed the Earth?” Casey was disappointed and a little doubtful. “How?”

“We removed undersea ledges and widened straits to reroute the ocean circulation and warm the poles. We diverted rivers to fill new lakes and bring rain to deserts. We engineered new life-forms that improved the whole biocosm.”

“But still you owe us something. We put you there.”

“Of course.” Uncle Pen shrugged. “Excavating the station, I uncovered evidence that the last impact annihilated life on Earth. The planet had been reseeded sometime before the lunar impact occurred.”

“We did it.” Casey grinned. “You’re lucky we were here.”

“Your ship?” Pepe had gone to stand at the edge of the dome, looking down at the monster machines and Uncle Pen’s neat little flyer, so different from the rocket spaceplanes we had seen in the old video holos. “Can it go to other planets?”

“It can.” He nodded. “The planets of other suns.”

Tanya’s eyes went wide, and Pepe asked, “How does it fly in space with no rocket engines?”

“It doesn’t,” he said. “It’s called a slider. It slides around space, not through it.”

“To the stars?” Tanya whispered. “You’ve been to other stars?”

“To the planets of other stars.” He nodded gravely. “I hope to go again when my work here is finished.”

“Across the light-years?” Casey was awed. “How long does it take?”

“No time at all.” He smiled at our wonderment. “Not in slider flight. Outside of space-time, there is no time. But there are laws of nature, and time plays tricks that may surprise you. I could fly across a hundred light-years to another star in an instant of my own time and come back in another instant, but two hundred years would pass here on Earth while I was away.”

“I didn’t know.” Tanya’s eyes went wider still. “Your friends would all be dead.”

“We don’t die.”

She shrank away as if suddenly afraid of him. Pepe opened his mouth to ask something, and shut it without a word.

He chucked at our startlement. “We’ve engineered ourselves, you see, more than we’ve engineered the Earth.”

Casey turned to look out across the shadowed craters at the huge globe of Earth, the green Americas blazing on the sunlit face, Europe and Africa only a shadow against the dark. He stood there a long time and came slowly back to stand in front of Uncle Pen.

“I’m going down to see the new Earth when I grow up.” His face set stubbornly. “No matter what you say.”

“Are you growing wings?” Uncle Pen laughed and reached a golden arm to pat him on the head. “If you didn’t know, the impact smashed all your old rocket craft to junk.”

He drew quickly back.

“Really, my boy, you do belong here.” Seeing his hurt, Uncle Pen spoke more gently. “You were cloned for your work here at the station. A job that ought to make you proud.”

Casey made an angry swipe across his eyes with the back of his hand and swallowed hard, but he kept his voice even.

“Maybe so. But where’s any danger now?”

Uncle Pen had an odd look. He took a long moment to answer.

“We are not aware of any actual threat from another impacting bolide. All the asteroids that used to approach Earth’s orbit have been diverted, most of them steered into the Sun.”

“So?” Casey’s dark chin had a defiant jut. “Why did you want to dig us up?”

“For history.” Uncle Pen looked away from us, up at the huge, far-off Earth. “I hope you try to understand what that means. The resurfaced Earth had lost nearly every trace of our beginning. Historians were trying to prove that we had evolved on some other planet and migrated here. Tycho Station is proof that Earth is the actual mother world. I’ve found our roots here under the rubble.”

“I guess you can be proud of that,” Casey said, “but who needs the station now?”

“Nobody, really.” He shrugged, with an odd little twist of his golden lips, and I thought he felt sorry for Casey. “If another disaster did strike the Earth, which isn’t likely at all, it could be repeopled by the colonies.”

“So you dug us up for nothing?”

“If you knew what I have done,” Pen leaned and reached as if to hug him, but he shrank farther away. “It wasn’t easy! We’ve had to invent and improvise. We had to test the tissue cells still preserved in the cryostat, and build new equipment in the maternity lab. A complex system. It had to be tested.” He smiled down into Tanya’s beaming devotion. “The tests have turned out well.”

“So we are just an experiment?”

“Aren’t you glad to be alive?”

“Maybe,” Casey muttered bitterly. “If I can get off the Moon. I don’t want to sit here till I die, waiting for nothing at all.”

Looking uncomfortable, Pen just reached down to lift Tanya up in his arms.

“We were meant for more than that,” Casey told him. “I want a life.”

“Please, my dear boy, you must try to understand.” Patiently, Uncle Pen shook his furry head. “The station is a precious historic monument, our sole surviving relic of the early Earth and early man. You are part of it. I’m sorry if you take that for a misfortune, but there is certainly no place for you on Earth.”

2.

Sandor Pen kept coming to the Moon as we grew up, though not so often. He brought tantalizing gifts. Exotic fruits that had to be eaten before they spoiled. New games and difficult puzzles. Little holo cubes that had held living pictures of us, caught us year after year as we grew up from babies in the maternity lab. He was always genial and kind, though I thought he came to care less for us as we grew older.

His main concern was clearly the station itself. He cleared junk and debris out of the deepest tunnels, which had been used for workshops and storage, and stocked them again with new tools and spare parts that the robots could use to repair themselves and maintain the station.

Most of his time on the visits was spent in the library and museum with Dian and her holo mother. He studied the old books and holos and paintings and sculptures, carried them away to be restored, and brought identical copies back to replace them. For a time he had the digging machines busy again, removing rubble from around the station and grinding it up to make concrete for a massive new retaining wall that they poured to reinforce the station foundation.

For our twenty-first birthday, he had the robots measure us for space suits like his own. Sleek and mirror-bright, they fitted like our skins and let us feel at home outside the dome. We wore them down to see one of our old rocket spaceplanes, standing on the field beside his little slipship. His robots had dug it out of a smashed hangar, and he now had them rebuilding it with new parts from Earth.

One of the great digging machines had extended a leverlike arm to hold it upright. A robot was replacing a broken landing strut, fusing it smoothly in place with some process that made no glow of heat. Casey spoke to the robot, but it ignored him. He climbed up to knock on the door. It responded with a brittle computer voice that was only a rattle in our helmets.

“Open up,” he told it. “Let us in.”

“Admission denied.” Its hard machine voice had Pen’s accent.

“By what authority?”

“By the authority of Director Sandor Pen, Lunar Research Site.”

“Ask the director to let us in.”

“Admission denied.”

“So you think.” Casey shook his head, his words a sardonic whisper in my helmet. “If you know how to think.”

Back inside the air lock, Pen had waited to help us shuck off the mirror suits. Casey thanked him for the gift and asked if the old spaceplane would be left here on the Moon.

“Forget what you’re thinking.” He gave Casey a penetrating glance. “We’re taking it down to Earth.”

“I wish I could come.”

“I’m sorry you can’t.” His face was firmly set, but a flush of pleasure turned it a richer gold. “It’s to stand at the center of our new historic memorial, located on the Australian subcontinent. It presents our reconstruction of the prehistoric past. The whole story of the pre-impact planet and pre-impact man.”

He paused to smile at Tanya. Flushed pink, she smiled back at him.

“It’s really magnificent! Finding the lunar site was my great good fortune, and working it has been my life for many years. It has filled a gap in human history. Answered questions that scholars had fought over for ages. You yourselves have a place there, with a holographic diorama of your childhood.”

Casey asked again why we couldn’t see it. “Because you belong here.” Impatience edged his voice. “And because of the charter that allowed us to work the site. We agreed to restore the station to its original state, and to import no genetic materials from it that might contaminate the Earth. We are to leave the site exactly as it was before the impact, protected and secured from any future trespass.”

We all felt sick with loss on the day he told us his work at the site was done. As a farewell gift, he took us two by two to orbit the Moon. Casey and I went up together, sitting behind him in his tiny slipship. We had seen space and Earth from the dome all our lives, but the flight was still an exciting adventure.

The mirror hull was invisible from inside, so that our seats seemed to float free in open space. The Moon’s gray desolation spread wider beneath us, and dwindled again to a bright bubble floating in a gulf of darkness. Though Pen touched nothing I saw, the stars blazed suddenly brighter, the Milky Way a broad belt of gem-strewn splendor all around us. The Sun was dimmed and hugely magnified to let us see the dark spots across its face.

Still he touched nothing and I felt no new motion, but now Australia expanded. The deserts were gone. A long new sea lay across the center of the continent, crescent-shaped and vividly blue.

“The memorial.” He pointed to a broad tongue of green land thrust into the crescent. “If you ever get to Earth—which I don’t expect—you could meet your doubles there in the Tycho exhibit.”

Casey asked, “Is Mona there?”

Mona Lisa Live was the professional name of the woman Casey’s father brought with him when he forced his way aboard the escape plane just ahead of the first impact. We knew them only from their holo images, he with the name “El Chino” and the crossed flags of Mexico and China tattooed across his black chest, she with the Leonardo painting on her belly.

Those ancient images had been enough to let us all catch the daring spirit and desperate devotion that had brought them finally to the Moon from the Medellin nightclub where he found her. From his first glimpse of her holo, Casey had loved her and dreamed of a day when they might be together again. I’d heard him ask my holo father why she had not been cloned with us.

“Ask the computer.” He shrugged in the fatalistic way he had when his voice had its dry computer undertone. “It could have been done. Her tissue specimens are still preserved in the cryostat.”

“Do you know why she wasn’t cloned?”

“The computer seldom explains.” He shrugged again. “If you want my own guess, she and Kell reached the Moon as unexpected intruders. The maternity lab was not prepared to care for them or their clones.”

“Intruders?” Casey’s dark face turned darker. “At least DeFort thought their genes were worth preserving. If I’m worth cloning, Mona ought to be. Someday she will be.”

Back in the station dome, Pen made his final farewell. We thanked him for that exciting glimpse of the far-off Earth, for the space suits and all his gifts, for restoring us to life. A trifling repayment, he said, for all he had found at the station. He shook our hands, kissed Tanya and Dian, and got into his silvery suit. We followed him down to the air lock. Tanya must have loved him more than I knew. She broke into tears and ran off to her room as the rest of us watched his bright little teardrop float away toward Earth.

“We put them down there,” Casey muttered. “We have a right to see what we have done.”

When the robots left the restored spaceplane standing on its own landing gear, the digging machine crept away to join the others. Busy again, they were digging a row of deep pits. We watched them bury themselves under the rubble, leaving only a row of new craters that might become a puzzle, I thought, to later astronomers. Casey called us back to the dome to watch a tank truck crawling out of the underground hangar dug into the crater rim.

“We’re off to Earth!” He slid his arm around Pepe. “Who’s with us?”

Arne scowled at him. “Didn’t you hear Sandor?”

“Sandor’s gone.” He grinned at Pepe. “We have a plan of our own.”

They hadn’t talked about it, but I had heard their whispers and seen them busy in the shops. Though the spacebending science of the slipship was still a mystery to us, I knew the robots had taught them astronautics and electronics. I knew they had made holos of Pen, begging him to say more about the new Earth than he ever would.

“I don’t know your plan.” Arne made a guttural grunt. “But I have seen the reports of people who went down to evaluate our terraforming. They’ve never found anything they liked, and never got back to the Moon.”

“¿Qué importa?” Pepe shrugged. “Better that than wasting our lives waiting por nada.”

“We belong here.” Stubbornly, Arne echoed what Pen had said. “Our mission is just to keep the station alive. Certainly not to throw ourselves away on insane adventures. I’m staying here.”

Dian chose to stay with him, though I don’t think they were in love. Her love was the station itself, with all its relics of the old Earth. Even as a little child, she had always wanted to work with her holo mother, recording everything that Pen took away to be copied and returned.

Tanya had set her heart on Sandor Pen. I think she had always dreamed that someday he would take her with him back to Earth. She was desolate and bitter when he left without her, her pride in herself deeply hurt.

“He did love us when we were little,” she sobbed when Pepe begged her to join him and Casey. “But just because we were children. Or just interesting pets. Interesting because we aren’t his kind of human, and people that live forever don’t have children.”

Pepe begged again, I think because he loved her. Whatever they found on Earth, it would be bigger than our tunnels, and surely more exciting. She cried and kissed him and chose to stay. The new Earth had no place for her. Sandor wouldn’t want her, even if she found him. She promised to listen for their radio and pray they came back safe.

I had always been the station historian. Earth was where history was happening. I shook hands with Pepe and Casey and agreed to go with them.

“You won’t belong,” Tanya warned us. “You’ll have to look out for yourselves.”

She found water canteens and ration packs for us, and reminded us to pack safari garments to wear when we got out of our space gear. We took turns in the dome, watching the tank truck till it reached the plane and the robots began pumping fuel.

“Time.” Casey wore a grin of eager expectation. “Time to say good-bye.”

Dian and Arne shook our hands, wearing very solemn faces. Tanya clung a long time to Pepe and kissed me and Casey, her face so tearstained and drawn that I ached with pity for her. We got into our shining suits, went out to the plane, climbed the landing stair. Again the door refused to open.

Casey stepped back to speak on his helmet radio.

“Priority message from Director Sandor Pen.” His crackling voice was almost Pen’s. “Special orders for restored spaceplane SP2469.”

The door responded with a clatter of speech that was alien to me.

“Orders effective now,” Casey snapped. “Tycho Station personnel K. C. Kell, Pedro Navarro, and Duncan Yare are authorized to board for immediate passage to Earth.”

Silently, the door swung open.

I had expected to find a robot at the controls, but we found ourselves alone in the nose cone, the pilot seat empty. Awed by whatever the plane had become, we watched it operate itself. The door swung shut. Air seals hissed. The engines snorted and roared. The ship trembled, and we lifted off the Moon.

Looking back for the station, all I found was the dome, a bright little eye peering into space from the rugged gray peaks of the crater rim. It shrank till I lost it in the great lake of black shadow and the bright black peak at the center of the Tycho crater. The Moon dwindled till we saw it whole, gray and impact-battered, dropping behind us into a black and bottomless pit.

Pen’s flight in the slipship may have taken an hour or an instant. In the old rocket ship, we had time to watch three full rotations of the slowly swelling planet ahead. The jets were silent through most of the flight, with only an occasional whisper to correct our course. We floated in free fall, careful not to blunder against the controls. Taking turns belted in the seats, we tried to sleep but seldom did. Most of the time we spent searching Earth with binoculars, searching for signs of civilization.

“Nothing,” Casey muttered again and again. “Nothing that looks like a city, a railway, a canal, a dam. Nothing but green. Only forest, jungle, grassland. Have they let the planet return to nature?”

“Tal vez.” Pepe always shrugged. “Pero o no. We are still too high to tell.”

At last the jets came back to life, steering us down into air-breaking orbit. Twice around the puzzling planet, and Australia exploded ahead. The jets thundered. We fell again, toward the wide tongue of green land between the narrow cusps of that long crescent lake.

3.

Looking from the windows, we found the spaceplane standing on an elevated pad at the center of a long quadrangle covered with tended lawns, shrubs and banks of brilliant flowers. Wide avenues all around it were walled with buildings that awed and amazed me.

“Sandor’s Tycho Memorial!” Pepe jogged my ribs. “There’s the old monument at the American capital! I know it from Dian’s videos.”

“Ancient history.” Casey shrugged as if it hardly mattered. “I want to see Earth today.”

Pepe opened the door. In our safari suits, we went out on the landing for a better view. The door shut. I heard it hiss behind us, sealing itself. He turned to stare again. The monument stood at the end of the quadrangle, towering above its image in a long reflecting pool, flanked on one side by a Stonehenge in gleaming silver, on the other by a sandbanked Sphinx with the nose restored.

We stood goggling at the old American capital at the other end of the mall, the British Houses of Parliament to its right, and Big Ben tolling the time. The Kremlin adjoined them, gilded onion domes gleaming above the grim redbrick walls. The Parthenon, roofed and new and magnificent as ever, stood beyond them on a rocky hill.

Across the quadrangle I found the splendid domes of the Taj Mahal, Saint Peter’s Basilica, the Hagia Sophia from ancient Istanbul. On higher ground in the distance, I recognized the Chrysler Building from old New York, the Eiffel Tower from Paris, a Chinese pagoda, the Great Pyramid clad once again in smooth white marble. Farther off, I found a gray mountain ridge that copied the familiar curve of Tycho’s rim, topped with the shine of our own native dome.

“We got here!” Elated, Pepe slapped Casey’s back. “Now what?”

“They owe us.” Casey turned to look again. “We put them here, whenever it was. This ought to remind them how they got here and what we’ve given them.”

“If they care.” Pepe turned back to the door. “Let’s see if we can call Sandor.”

“Facility closed.” We heard the door’s toneless robot voice. “Admission denied by order of Tycho Authority.”

“Let us in!” Casey shouted. “We want the stuff we left aboard. Clothing, backpacks, canteens. Open the door so we can get them.”

“Admission denied.”

He hit the door with his fist and kissed his bruised knuckles.

“Admission denied.”

“We’re here, anyhow.”

Pepe shrugged and started down the landing stair. A strange bellow stopped him, rolling back from the walls around. It took us a moment to see that it came from a locomotive chuffing slowly past the Washington Monument, puffing white steam. Hauling a train of open cars filled with seated passengers, it crept around the quadrangle, stopping often to let riders off and on.

The Sun was high, and we shaded our eyes to study them. All as lean and trim as Sandor, and often nude, they had the same nutbrown skins. Many carried bags or backpacks. A few scattered across the lawns and gardens, most waited at the corners for signal lights to let them cross the avenue.

“Tourists, maybe?” I guessed. “Here to see Sandor’s recovered history?”

“But I see no children.” Casey shook his head. “You’d think they’d bring the children.”

“They’re people, anyhow.” Pepe grinned hopefully. “We’ll find somebody to tell us more than Sandor did.”

We climbed down the stairs, on down a wide flight of steps to a walk that curved through banks of strange and fragrant blooms. Ahead of us a couple had stopped. The woman looked a little odd, I thought, with her head of short ginger-hued fur instead of hair, yet as lovely as Mona had looked in the holos made when she and El Chino reached the Moon. The man was youthful and handsome as Sandor. I thought they were in love.

Laughing at something he had said, she ran a little way ahead and turned to pose for his camera, framed between the monument and the Sphinx. She had worn a scarlet shawl around her shoulders. At a word from him, she whipped it off and smiled for his lens. Her daintily nippled breasts had been pale beneath the shawl, and he waited for the sun to color them.

We watched till he had snapped the camera. Laughing again, she ran back to toss the shawl around his shoulders and throw her arms around him. They clung together for a long kiss. We had stopped a dozen yards away. Casey spoke hopefully when they turned to face us.

“Hello?”

They stared blankly at us. Casey managed an uncertain smile, but a nervous sweat had filmed his dark Oriental face.

“Forgive us, please. Do you speak English? Français? ¿Español?”

They frowned at him, and the man answered with a stream of vowels that were almost music and a rattle of consonants I knew I could never learn to imitate. I caught a hint of Sandor’s odd accent but nothing like our English. They moved closer. The man pulled the little camera out of his bag, clicked it at Casey, stepped nearer to get his head. Laughing at him, the woman came to pose again beside Casey, slipping a golden arm around him for a final shot.

“We came in that machine. Down from the Moon!” Desperation on his face, he gestured at the spaceplane behind us, turned to point toward the Moon’s pale disk in the sky above the Parthenon, waved to show our flight from it to the pedestal. “We’ve just landed from Tycho Station. If you understand—”

Laughing at him, they caught hands and ran on toward the Sphinx.

“What the hell!” Staring after them, he shook his head. “What the bloody hell!”

“They don’t know we’re real.” Pepe chuckled bitterly. “They take us for dummies. Part of the show.”

We followed a path that led toward the Parthenon and stopped at the curb to watch the traffic flowing around the quadrangle. Cars, buses, vans, occasional trucks; they reminded me of street scenes in pre-impact videos. A Yellow Cab pulled up beside us. A woman sprang out. Slim and golden-skinned, she was almost a twin of the tourist who had posed with Casey.

The driver, however, might have been an unlikely survivor from the old Earth. Heavy, swarthy, wheezing for his breath, he wore dark glasses and a grimy leather jacket. Lighting a cigarette, he hauled himself out of the cab, waddled around to open the trunk, handed the woman a folded tripod, and grunted sullenly when she tipped him.

Casey walked up to him as he was climbing back into the cab.

“Sir!” He seemed not to hear, and Casey called louder. “Sir!”

Ignoring us, he got into the cab and pulled away. Casey turned with a baffled frown to Pepe and me.

“Did you see his face? It was dead! Some stiff plastic. His eyes are blind, behind those glasses. He’s some kind of robot, no more alive than our robots on the Moon.”

Keeping a cautious distance, we followed the woman with the tripod. Ignoring us, she stopped to set it up to support a flat round plate of some black stuff. As she stepped away, a big transparent bubble swelled out of the plate, clouded, turned to silver. She leaned to peer into it.

Venturing closer, I saw that the bubble had become a circular window that framed the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, and the Sphinx. They seemed oddly changed, magnified and brighter, suddenly in motion. Everything shook. The monument leaned and toppled, crushing the statue. The Sphinx looked down across the fragments, intact and forever enigmatic.

I must have come too close. The woman turned with an irritated frown to brush me away as if I had been an annoying fly. Retreating, I looked again. As she bent again to the window, the sky in it changed. The Sun exploded into a huge, dull-red ball that turned the whole scene pink. Close beside it was a tiny, bright-blue star. Our spaceplane took shape in the foreground, the motors firing and white flame washing the pedestal, as if it were taking off to escape catastrophe.

Awed into silence, Casey gestured us away.

“An artist!” Pepe whispered. “An artist at work.”

We walked on past the Parthenon and waited at the corner to cross the avenue. Pepe nodded at the blue-clad cop standing out on the pavement with a whistle and a white baton, directing traffic. “Watch him. He’s mechanical.”

So were most of the drivers. The passengers, however, riding in the taxis and buses or arriving on the train, looked entirely human, as live as Sandor himself, eager as the tourists of the pre-impact Earth to see these monumental restorations of their forgotten past.

They flocked the sidewalks, climbed the Capital steps to photograph the quadrangle and one another, wandered around the corner and on down the avenue. We fell in with them. They seldom noticed Pepe or me, but sometimes stopped to stare at Casey or take his picture.

“One more robot!” he muttered. “That’s what they take me for.”

We spent the rest of the day wandering replicated streets, passing banks, broker’s offices, shops, bars, hairdressers, restaurants, police stations. A robot driver had parked his van in front of a bookstore to unload cartons stamped Encyclopaedia Britannica. A robot beggar was rattling coins in a tin cup. A robot cop was pounding in pursuit of a red-spattered robot fugitive. We saw slim gold-skinned people, gracefully alive, entering restaurants and bars, trooping into shops, emerging with their purchases.

Footsore and hungry before the day was over, we followed a tantalizing aroma that led us to a line of golden folk waiting under a sign that read:

STEAK PLUS!

PRIME ANGUS BEEF

DONE TO YOUR ORDER

Pepe fretted that we had no money for a meal.

“We’ll eat before we tell them,” Casey said.

“They’re human, anyhow.” Pepe grasped for some crumb of comfort. “They like food.”

“I hope they’re human.”

Standing in line, I watched and listened to those ahead of us, hoping for any link of human contact, finding none at all. A few turned to give us puzzled glances. One man stared at Casey till I saw his fists clenching. Their speech sometimes had rhythm and pitch that made an eerie music, but I never caught a hint of anything familiar.

A robot at the door was admitting people a few at a time. His bright-lensed eyes looked behind us when we reached him. Finding nobody, he shut the door.

Limping under Earth gravity, growing hungrier and thirstier, we drifted on until the avenue ended at a high wall of something clear as glass, which cut the memorial off like a slicing blade. Beyond the wall lay an open landscape that recalled Dian’s travel videos of tropical Africa. A line of trees marked a watercourse that wound down a shallow valley. Zebras and antelope grazed near us, unalarmed by a dark-maned lion watching sleepily from a little hill.

“There’s water we could drink.” Pepe nodded at the stream. “If we can get past the wall.”

We walked on till it stopped us. Seamless, hard and slick, too tall for us to climb, it ran on in both directions as far as we could see. Too tired to go farther, we sat there on the curb watching the freedom of the creatures beyond till dusk and a chill in the air drove us back to look for shelter. What we found was a stack of empty cartons behind a discount furniture outlet. We flattened a few of them to make a bed, ripped up the largest to cover us, and tried to sleep.

“You can’t blame Sandor,” Pepe muttered as we lay there shivering under our cardboard. “He told us we’d never belong.”

4.

We dozed on our cardboard pallet, aching under the heavy drag of Earth’s gravity through a never-ending night, and woke stiff and cold and desperate. I almost wished we were back on the Moon.

“There has to be a hole in the fence,” Casey tried to cheer us. “To let the tourists in.”

The train had come from the north. Back at the wall, we limped north along a narrow road inside it, our spirits lifting a little as exercise warmed us. Beyond a bend, the railway ran out of a tunnel, across a long steel bridge over a cliff-rimmed gorge the stream had cut, and into our prison through a narrow archway in the barrier.

“We’d have to walk the bridge.” Pepe stopped uneasily to shake his head at the ribbon of water on the canyon’s rocky floor, far below. “A train could catch us on the track.”

“We’ll just wait for it to pass,” Casey said.

We waited, lying hidden in a drainage ditch beside the track till the engine burst out of the tunnel, steam whistle howling. The cars rattled past us, riders leaning to stare at Sandor’s restorations ahead. We clambered out of the ditch and sprinted across the bridge. Jumping off the track at the tunnel mouth, we rolled down a grass slope, got our breath, and tramped southwest away from the wall and into country that looked open.

The memorial sank behind a wooded ridge until all we could see was Sandor’s replica of our own lookout dome on his replica of Tycho’s rugged rim. We came out across a wide valley floor, scattered with clumps of trees and grazing animals I recognized; wildebeest, gazelles, and a little herd of graceful impala.

“Thanks to old Calvin DeFort. Another Noah saving Earth from a different deluge.” Casey shaded his eyes to watch a pair of ostriches running from us across the empty land. “But where are the people?”

“Where’s any water?” Pepe muttered. “No deluge, please. Just water we can drink.”

We plodded on through tall green grass till I saw elephants marching out of a stand of trees off to our right. A magnificent bull with great white tusks, half a dozen others behind him, a baby with its mother. They came straight toward us. I wanted to run, but Casey simply beckoned for us to move aside. They ambled past us to drink from a pool we hadn’t seen. Waiting till they had moved on, we turned toward the pool. Pepe pushed ahead and bent to scoop water up in his cupped hands.

“Don’t!” a child’s voice called behind us. “Unclean water might harm you.”

A small girl came running toward us from the trees where the elephants had been. The first child we had seen, she was daintily lovely in a white blouse and a short blue skirt, her fair face half hidden under a wide-brimmed hat tied under her chin with a bright red ribbon.

“Hello.” She stopped a few yards away, her blue eyes wide with wonder. “You are the Moon men?”

“And strangers here.” Casey gave her our names. “Strangers in trouble.”

“You deceived the ancient spaceship,” she accused us soberly. “You should not be here on Earth.”

We gaped at her. “How did you know?”

“The ship informed my father.”

We stood silent, lost in wonder of our own. A charming picture of childish innocence, but she had shaken me with a chill of terror. Pepe stepped warily back from her, but after a moment Casey caught his breath to ask, “Who is your father?”

“You called him your uncle when you knew him on the Moon.” Pride lit her face. “He is a very great and famous man. He discovered the lunar site and recovered the lost history of humankind. He rebuilt the ancient structures you saw around you where the ship came down.”

“I get it.” Casey nodded, looking crestfallen and dazed. “I think I begin to get it.”

“We can’t be sorry.” Blinking at her, Pepe caught a long breath. “We’d had too much of the Moon. But now we’re lost here, in a world I don’t begin to understand. Do you know what will happen to us?”

“My father isn’t sure.” She looked away toward the replicated Tycho dome. “I used to beg him to take me with him to the Moon. He said the station had no place for me.” She turned to study us again. “You are interesting to see. My name is—”

She uttered a string of rhythmic consonants and singing vowels, and smiled at Pepe’s failure when he tried to imitate them.

“Just call me Tling,” she said. “That will be easier for you to say.” She turned to Pepe. “If you want water, come with me.”

We followed her back to a little circle of square stones in the shade of the nearest tree. Beckoning us to sit, she opened a basket, found a bottle of water, and filled a cup for Pepe. Amused at the eager way he drained it, she filled it again for him, and then for Casey and me.

“I came out to visit the elephants,” she told us. “I love elephants. I am very grateful to you Moon people for preserving the tissue specimens that have kept so many ancient creatures alive.”

I had caught a tantalizing fragrance when she opened the basket. She saw Pepe’s eyes still on it.

“I brought food for some of my forest friends,” she said. “If you are hungry.”

Pepe said we were starving. She spread a white napkin on one of the stones and began laying out what she had brought. Fruits I thought were peachlike and grapelike and pearlike, but wonderfully sweet and different. Small brown cakes with aromas that that wet my mouth. We devoured them so avidly that she seemed amused.

“Where are the people?” Casey waved his arm at the empty landscape. “Don’t you have cities?”

“We do,” she said. “Though my father says they are smaller than those you built on the prehistoric Earth.” She gestured toward the elephants. “We share the planet with other beings. He says you damaged it when you let your own biology run out of control.”

“Maybe we did, but that’s not what brought the impactor.” Casey frowned again. “You are the only child we have seen.”

“There’s not much room for us. You see, we don’t die.”

I was listening, desperately hoping for something that might help us find or make a place for ourselves, but everything I heard was making our new world stranger. Casey gazed at her.

“Why don’t you die?”

“If I can explain—” She paused as if looking for an answer we might understand. “My father says I should tell you that we have changed ourselves since the clones came back to colonize the dead Earth. We have altered the genes and invented the nanorobs.”

“Nanorobs?”

She paused again, staring at the far-off elephants.

“My father calls them artificial symbiotes. They are tiny things that live like bacteria in our bodies but do good instead of harm. They are partly organic, partly diamond, partly gold. They move in the blood to repair or replace injured cells, or regrow a missing organ. They assist our nerves and our brain cells.”

The food forgotten, we were staring at her. A picture of innocent simplicity in the simple skirt and blouse and floppy hat, she was suddenly so frightening that I trembled. She reached to put her small hand on mine before she went on.

“My father says I should say they are tiny robots, half-machine and half-alive. They are electronic. They can be programmed to store digital information. They pulse in unison, making their own waves in the brain and turning the whole body into a radio antenna. Sitting here speaking to you, I can also speak to my father.”

She looked up to smile at me, her small hand closing on my fingers.

“Mr. Dunk, please don’t be afraid of me. I know we seem different. I know I seem strange to you, but I would never harm you.”

She was so charming that I wanted to take her in my arms, but my awe had grown to dread. We all shrank from her and sat wordless till hunger drove us to attack the fruit and cakes again. Pepe began asking questions as we ate.

Where did she live?

“On that hill.” She nodded toward the west, but I couldn’t tell which hill she meant. “My father selected a place where he could look out across the memorial.”

Did she go to school?

“School?” The word seemed to puzzle her for a moment, and then she shook her head. “We do not require the schools my father says you had in the prehistoric world. He says your schools existed to program the brains of young people. Our nanocoms can be programmed and reprogrammed instantly, with no trouble at all, to load whatever information we need. That is how I learned your English when I needed it.”

She smiled at his dazed face and selected a plump purple berry for herself.

“Our bodies, however, do need training.” Delicately, she wiped her lips on a white napkin. “We form social groups to play games or practice skills. We fly our sliders all around the Earth. I love to ski on high mountains where snow falls. I’ve dived off coral reefs to observe sea things. I like music, art, drama, games of creation.”

“That should be fun.” Pepe’s eyes were wide. “More fun than life in our tunnels on the Moon.” His face went suddenly dark. “I hope your father doesn’t send us back there.”

“He can’t, even if he wanted to.” She laughed at his alarm. “He’s finally done with the excavation. The charter site is closed and protected for future ages. All intrusion prohibited.”

“So what will he do with us?”

“Does he have to do anything?” Seeming faintly vexed, she looked off toward the station dome on the crater ridge. “He says he has no place ready for you, but there are humanoid replicates playing your roles there in the Tycho simulation. I suppose you could replace them, if that would make you happy.”

“Pretending we were back on the Moon?” Casey turned grim. “I don’t think so.”

“If you don’t want that—”

She stopped, tipped her head as if to listen, and began gathering the water bottle and the rest of the fruit into the basket. Anxiously, Pepe asked if something was wrong.

“My mother.” Frowning, she shook her head. “She’s calling me home.”

“Please!” Casey begged her. “Can’t you stay a little longer? You are the only friend we’ve found. I don’t know what we can do without you.”

“I wish I could help you, but my mother is afraid for me.”

“I wondered if you weren’t in danger.” He glanced out across the valley. “We saw a lion. Your really shouldn’t be out here alone.”

“It’s not the lion.” She shook her head. “I know him. A wonderful friend, so fast and strong and fierce.” Her eyes shone at the recollection. “And I know a Bengal tiger. He was hiding in the brush because he was afraid of people. I taught him that we would never hurt him. Once he let me ride him when he chased a gazelle. It was wonderfully exciting.”

Her voice grew solemn.

“I’m glad the gazelle got away, though the tiger was hungry and very disappointed. I try to forgive him, because I know he has to kill for food, like all the lions and leopards. They must kill, to stay alive. My mother says it is the way of nature, and entirely necessary. Too many grazing things would destroy the grass and finally starve themselves.”

We stared again, wondering at her.

“How did you tame the tiger?”

“I think the nanorobs help me reach his mind, the way I touch yours. He learned that I respect him. We are good friends. He would fight to protect me, even from you.”

“Is your mother afraid of us?”

She picked up the basket and stood shifting on her feet, frowning at us uncertainly.

“The nanorobs—” She hesitated. “I trust you, but the nanorobs—”

She stopped again.

“I thought you said nanorobs were good.”

“That’s the problem.” She hesitated, trouble on her face. “My mother says you have none. She can’t reach your minds. You do not hear when she speaks to you. She says you don’t belong, because you are not one of us. What she fears—what she fears is you.”

Speechless, Casey blinked at her sadly.

“I am sorry to go so soon.” With a solemn little bow for each of us, she shook our hands. “Sorry you have no nanorobs. Sorry my mother is so anxious. Sorry to say good-bye.”

“Please tell your father—” Casey began.

“He knows,” she said. “He is sorry you came here.”

Walking away with her basket, she turned to wave her hand at us, her face framed for a moment by the wide-brimmed hat. I thought she was going to speak, but in a moment she was gone.

“Beautiful!” Casey whispered. “She’ll grow up to be another Mona.”

Looking back toward the copied monuments of the old Earth, the copied station dome shining on the copied Tycho rim, I saw a dark-maned lion striding across the valley toward the pool where the elephants had drunk. Three smaller females followed. None of them our friends. I shivered.

5.

We wandered on up the valley after Tling left us, keeping clear of the trees and trying to stay alert for danger or any hint of help.

“If Sandor lives out here,” Casey said, “there must be others. People, I hope, who won’t take us for robots.”

We stopped to watch impala drinking at a water hole. They simply raised their heads to look at us, but fled when a cheetah burst out of a thicket. The smallest was too slow. The cheetah knocked it down and carried it back into the brush.

“No nanorobs for them,” Pepe muttered. “Or us.”

We tramped on, finding no sign of anything human. By midafternoon, hungry and thirsty again, with nothing human in view ahead, we sat down to rest on an outcropping of rock. Pepe dug a little holo of Tanya out of his breast pocket and passed it to show us her dark-eyed smile.

“If we hadn’t lost the radio—” He caught himself, with a stiff little grin. “Still, I guess we wouldn’t call. I’d love to hear her voice. I know she’s anxious, but I wouldn’t want her to know the fix we’re in—”

He stopped when a shadow flickered across the holo. Looking up, we found a silvery slider craft dropping to the grass a few yards from us. An oval door dilated in the side of it. Tling jumped out.

“We found you!” she cried. “Even with no nanorobs. Here is my mother.”

A slender woman came out behind her, laughing at Pepe when he tried to repeat the name she gave us.

“She says you can just call her Lo.”

Tling still wore the blouse and skirt, with her wide-brimmed hat, but Lo was nude except for a gauzy blue sash worn over her shoulder. As graceful and trim, and nearly as sexless as Sandor, she had the same cream-colored skin, already darkening where the sun struck it, but she had a thick crown of bright red-brown curls instead of Sandor’s cap of sleek fur.

“Dr. Yare.” Tling spoke carefully to let us hear. “Mr. Navarro. Mr. Kell, who is also called El Chino. They were cloned at Tycho Station from prehistoric tissue specimens.”

“You were cloned for duty there.” Lo eyed us severely. “How did you get here?”

“We lied to the ship.” Casey straightened wryly to face her. “We did it because we didn’t want to live out our lives in that pit on the Moon. I won’t say I’m sorry, but now we are in trouble. I don’t want to die.”

“You will die,” she told him bluntly. “Like all your kind. You carry no nanorobs.”

“I guess.” He shrugged. “But first we want a chance to live.”

“Mother, please!” Tling caught her hand. “With no nanorobs, they are in immediate danger here. Can we help them stay alive?”

“That depends on your father.”

“I tried to ask him,” Tling said. “He didn’t answer.”

We watched Lo’s solemn frown, saw Tling’s deepening trouble.

“I wish you had nanorobs.” She turned at last to translate for us. “My father has gone out to meet an interstellar ship that has just come back after eight hundred years away. The officers are telling him a very strange story.”

She looked up at her mother, as if listening.

“It carried colonists for the planets of the star Enthel, which is four hundred light-years toward the galactic core. They had taken off with no warning of trouble. The destination planet had been surveyed and opened for settlement. It had rich natural resources, with no native life to be protected. Navigation algorithms for the flight had been tested, occupation priorities secured.”

She stared up at the sky, in baffled dismay.

“Now the ship has returned, two thousand colonists still aboard.”

Casey asked what had gone wrong. We waited, watching their anxious frowns.

“My father is inquiring.” Tling turned back to us. “He’s afraid of something dreadful.”

“It must have been dreadful,” Pepe whispered. “Imagine eight hundred years on a ship in space!”

“Only instants for them.” Tling shook her head, smiling at him. “Time stops, remember, at the speed of light. By their own time, they left only yesterday. Yet their situation is still hard enough. Their friends are scattered away. Their whole world is gone. They feel lost and desperate.”

She turned to her mother. “Why couldn’t they land?”

Her mother listened again. Far out across the valley I saw a little herd of zebras running. I couldn’t see what had frightened them.

“My father is asking,” she told us at last. “The passengers were not told why the ship had to turn back. The officers have promised a statement, but my father says they can’t agree on what to say. They aren’t sure what they found on the destination planet. He believes they’re afraid to say what they believe.”

The running zebras veered aside. I saw the tawny flash of a lion charging to meet them, saw a limping zebra go down. My own ankle was aching from a stone that had turned under my foot, and I felt as helpless as the zebra.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Dunk.” Tling reached to touch my arm. “My father is very busy with the ship. I don’t know what he can do with you, but I don’t want the animals to kill you. I think we can keep you safe till he comes home. Can’t we, mother?”

Her lips pressed tight, Lo shrugged as if she had forgotten us.

“Please, mother. I know they are primitives, but they would never harm me. I can understand them the way I understand the animals. They are hungry and afraid, with nowhere else to go.”

Lo stood motionless for a moment, frowning at us.

“Get in.”

She beckoned us into the flyer and lifted her face again as if listening to the sky.

We soared toward a rocky hill and landed on a level ledge near the summit. Climbing out, we looked down across the grassy valley and over the ridge to Sandor’s memorial just beyond. Closer than I expected, I found the bright metal glint of the rebuilt spaceplane on the mall, the Capitol dome and the Washington obelisk, the white marble sheen of the Egyptian pyramid looming out of green forest beyond.

“My father picked this spot.” Tling nodded toward the cliff. “He wanted to watch the memorial built.”

While her mother stood listening intently at the sky, Tling inspected our mudstained safari suits.

“You need a bath,” she decided, “before you eat.”

Running ahead, she took us down an arched tunnel into the hill and showed me into a room far larger than my cell below the station dome. Warm water sprayed me when I stepped into the shower, warm air dried me. A human-shaped robot handed me my clothing when I came out, clean and neatly folded. It guided me to a room where Tling was already sitting with Pepe and Casey at a table set with plates around a pyramid of fragrant fruit.

“Mr. Chino asked about my mother.” She looked up to smile at me. “You saw that she’s different, with different nanorobs. She comes from the Garenkrake system, three hundred light-years away. Its people had forgotten where they came from. She wanted to know. When her search for the mother planet brought her here, she found my father already digging at the Tycho site. They’ve worked together ever since.”

Pepe and Casey were already eating. Casey turned to Tling, who was nibbling delicately at something that looked like a huge purple orchid.

“What do you think will happen to us?”

“I’ll ask my father when I can.” She glanced toward the ceiling. “He is still busy with the ship’s officers. I’m sorry you’re afraid of my mother. She doesn’t hate you, not really. If she seems cool to you, it’s just because she has worked so long at the site, digging up relics of the first world. She thinks you seem so—so primitive.”

She shook her head at our uneasy frowns.

“You told her you lied to the ship.” She looked at Casey. “That bothers her, because the nanorobs do not transmit untruths or let people hurt each other. She feels sorry for you.”

Pepe winced. “We feel sorry for ourselves.”

Tling sat for a minute, silently, frowning, and turned back to us.

“The ship is big trouble for my father,” she told us. “It leaves him no time for you. He says you should have stayed on the Moon.”

“I know.” Casey shrugged. “But we’re here. We can’t go back. We want to stay alive.”

“I feel your fear.” She gave us an uneasy smile. “My father’s too busy to talk to you, but if you’ll come to my room, there is news about the ship.”

The room must have been her nursery. In one corner was a child’s bed piled with dolls and toys, a cradle on the floor beside it. The wall above was alive with a scenic holo. Long-legged birds flew away from a water hole when a tiger came out of tall grass to drink. A zebra stallion ventured warily close, snuffing at us. A prowling leopard froze and ran from a bull elephant. She gestured at the wall.

“I was a baby here, learning to love the animals.”

That green landscape was suddenly gone. The wall had become a wide window that showed us great spacecraft drifting though empty blackness. Blinding highlights glared where the Sun struck it. The rest was lost in shadow, but I made out a thick bright metal disk, slowly turning. Tiny-looking sliders clung around a bulging dome at its center.

“It’s in parking orbit, waiting for anywhere to go,” Tling said. “Let’s look inside.”

She gave us glimpses of the curving floors where the spin created a false gravity. People sat in rows of seats like those in holos of ancient aircraft. More stood crowded in aisles and corridors. I heard scraps of hushed and anxious talk.

“. . . home on a Pacific island.”

The camera caught a woman with a crown of what looked like bright golden feathers instead of hair. Holding a whimpering baby in one arm, the other around a grim-faced man, she was answering questions from someone we didn’t see. The voice we heard was Tling’s.

“It’s hard for us.” Her lips were not moving, but the voice went sharp with her distress. “We had a good life there. Mark’s an imagineer. I was earning a good living as a genetic artist, designing ornamentals to special order. We are not the pioneer type, but we did want a baby.” An ironic wry smile twisted her lips. “A dream come true!”

She lifted the infant to kiss its gold-capped head.

“Look at us now.” She smiled sadly at the child. “We spent our savings for a vision of paradise on Fendris Four. A tropical beach-front between the surf and a bamboo forest, snow on a volcanic cone behind it. A hundred families of us, all friends forever.”

She sighed and rocked the baby.

“They didn’t let us off the ship. Or even tell us why. We’re desperate, with our money gone and baby to care for. Now they say there’s nowhere else we can go.”

The wall flickered and the holos came back with monkeys chattering in jungle treetops.

“That’s the problem,” Tling said. “Two thousand people like them, stuck on the ship with nowhere to live. My father’s problem now, since the council voted to put him in charge.”

Casey asked, “Why can’t they leave the ship?”

“If you don’t understand—” She was silent for a moment. “My mother says it’s the way of the nanorobs. They won’t let people overrun the planet and use it up like my mother says the primitives did, back before the impacts. Births must be balanced by migration. Those unlucky people lost their space when they left Earth.”

“Eight hundred years ago?”

“Eight hundred of our time.” She shrugged. “A day or so of theirs.”

“What can your father do for them?”

“My mother says he’s still searching for a safe destination.”

“If he can’t find one—” Casey frowned. “And they can’t come home. It seems terribly unfair. Do you let the nanorobs rule you?”

“Rule us?” Puzzled, she turned her head to listen and nodded at the wall. “You don’t understand. They do unite us, but there is no conflict. They live in all of us, acting to keep us alive and well, guiding us to stay free and happy, but moving us only by our own consent. My mother says they are part of what you used to call the unconscious.”

“Those people on the ship?” Doubtfully, Casey frowned. “Still alive, I guess, but not free to get off or happy at all.”

“They are troubled.” Nodding soberly, she listened again. “But my mother says I should explain the nanorob way. She says the old primitives lived in what she calls the way of the jungle genes, back when survival required traits of selfish aggression. The nanorobs have let us change our genes to escape the greed and jealousy and violence that led to so much crime and war and pain on the ancient Earth. They guide us toward what is best for all. My mother says the people on the ship will be content to follow the nanorob way when my father has helped them find it.”

She turned her head. “I heard my mother call.”

I hadn’t heard a thing, but she ran out of the room. In the holo wall, high-shouldered wildebeest were leaping off a cliff to swim across a river. One stumbled, toppled, vanished under the rapid water. We watched in dismal silence till Casey turned to frown at Pepe and me.

“I don’t think I like the nanorob way.”

We had begun to understand why Sandor had no place on Earth for us.

6.

“Dear sirs, I must beg you to excuse us.”

Tling made a careful little bow and explained that her mother was taking her to dance and music practice, then going on to a meeting about the people on the stranded ship. We were left alone with the robots. They were man-shaped, ivory-colored, blank-faced. Lacking nanorobs, they were voice-controlled.

Casey tried to question them about the population, cities, and industries of the new Earth, but they had been programmed only for domestic service, with no English or information about anything else. Defeated by their blank-lensed stares, we sat out on the terrace, looking down across the memorial and contemplating our own uncertain future, till they called us in for dinner.

The dishes they served us were strange, but Pepe urged us to eat while we could.

“¿Mañana?” He shook his head uneasily. “¿Quién sabe?”

Night was falling before we got back to the terrace. A thin Moon was setting in the west. In the east, a locomotive headlight flashed across the memorial. The mall was lit for evening tours, the Taj Mahal a glowing gem, the Great Pyramid an ivory island in the creeping dusk. The robots had our beds ready when the light went out. They had served wine with dinner, and I slept without a dream.

Awake early next morning, rested again and lifted with unreasonable hope, I found Tling standing outside at the end of the terrace, looking down across the valley. She had hair like her mother’s, not feathers or fur, but blonde and cropped short. Despite the awesome power of her nanorobs, I thought she looked very small and vulnerable. She started when I spoke.

“Good morning, Mr. Dunk.” She wiped at her face with the back of her hand and tried to smile. I saw that her eyes were puffy and red. “How is your ankle?”

“Better.”

“I was worried.” She found a pale smile. “Because you have no symbiotes to help repair such injuries.”

I asked if she had heard from her father and the emigrant ship. She turned silently to look again across the sunlit valley and the memorial. I saw the far plume of steam from an early train crawling over the bridge toward the Sphinx.

“I watched a baby giraffe.” Her voice was slow and faint, almost as if she was speaking to herself. “I saw it born. I watched it learning to stand, nuzzling its mother, learning to suck. It finally followed her away, wobbling on its legs. It was beautiful—”

Her voice failed. Her hand darted to her lips. She stood trembling, staring at me, her eyes wide and dark with pain.

“My father!” Her voice came suddenly sharp and thin, almost a scream. “He’s going away. I’ll never see him again.”

She ran back inside.

When the robots called us to breakfast, we found her sitting between her parents. She had washed her tear-streaked face, but the food on her plate had not been touched. Here out of the Sun, Sandor’s face had gone pale and grim. He seemed not to see us till Tling turned to frown at him. He rose then, and came around the table to shake our hands.

“Good morning, Dr. Pen.” Casey gave him a wry smile. “I see why you didn’t want us here, but I can’t apologize. We’ll never be sorry we came.”

“Sit down.” He spoke shortly. “Let’s eat.”

We sat. The robots brought us plates loaded with foods we had never tasted. Saying no more to us, Sandor signaled a robot to refill his cup of the bitter black tea and bent over a bowl of crimson berries. Tling sat looking up at him in anguished devotion till Casey spoke.

“Sir, we heard about your problem with the stranded colonists. Can you tell us why their ship came back?”

“Nothing anybody understands.” He shook his head and gave Tling a tender smile before he pushed the berries aside and turned gravely back to us. His voice was quick and crisp. “The initial survey expedition had found their destination planet quite habitable and seeded it with terran-type life. Expeditions had followed to settle the three major continents. This group was to find room on the third.

“They arrived safe but got no answer when they called the planet from orbit. The atmosphere was hazed with dust that obscured the surface, but a search in the infrared found relics of a very successful occupation. Pavements, bridges, masonry, steel skeletons that had been buildings. All half buried under dunes of red, windblown dust. No green life anywhere. A derelict craft from one of the pioneer expeditions was still in orbit, but dead as the planet.

“They never learned what killed the planet. No news of the disaster seems to have reached any other world, which suggests that it struck unexpectedly and spread fast. The medical officers believe the killer may have been some unknown organism that attacks organic life, but the captain refused to allow any attempt to land or investigate. She elected to turn back at once, without contact. A choice that probably saved their lives.”

He picked up his spoon and bent again to his bowl of berries. I tried one of them. It was tart, sweet, with a heady tang I can’t describe.

“Sir,” Casey spoke again, “we saw those people. They’re desperate. What will happen to them now?”

“A dilemma.” Sandor looked at Tling, with a sad little shrug. She turned her head to hide a sob. “Habitable planets are relatively rare. The few we find must be surveyed, terraformed, approved for settlement. As events came out, these people have been fortunate. We were able to get an emergency waiver that will allow them to settle on an open planet, five hundred light-years in toward the core. Fuel and fresh supplies are being loaded now.”

“And my father—” Tling looked up at me, her voice almost a wail. “He has to go with them. All because of me.”

He put his arm around her and bent his face to hers. Whatever he said was silent. She climbed into his arms. He hugged her, rocking her back and forth like a baby, till her weeping ceased. With a smile that broke my heart, she kissed him and slid out of his arms.

“Excuse us, please.” Her voice quivering, she caught his hand. “We must say good-bye.”

She led him out of the room.

Lo stared silently after them till Pepe tapped his bowl to signal the robots for a second serving of the crimson berries.

“It’s true.” With a long sigh, she turned back to us. “A painful thing for Tling. For all three of us. This is not what we planned.”

Absently, she took a little brown cake from a tray the robot was passing and laid it on her plate, untasted.

“¿Que tienes?” Pepe gave her a puzzled look.

“We hoped to stay together,” she said. “Sandor and I have worked here for most of the century, excavating the site and restoring what we could. With that finished, I wanted to see my homeworld again. We were going back there together, Tling with us. Taking the history we had learned, we were planning to replicate the memorial there.”

Bleakly, she shook her head.

“This changes everything. Sandor feels a duty to help the colonists find a home. Tling begged him to take us with him, but—” She shrugged in resignation, her lips drawn tight. “He’s afraid of whatever killed Enthel Two. And there’s something else. His brother—”

She looked away for a moment.

“He has a twin brother. His father had to emigrate when they were born. He took the twin. His mother had a career in nanorob genetics she couldn’t leave. Sandor stayed here with her, longing for his twin. He left when he was grown, searched a dozen worlds, never found him. He did find me. That’s the happy side.”

Her brief smile faded.

“A hopeless quest, I’ve told him. There are too many worlds, too many light-years. Slider flights may seem quick, but they take too long. Yet he can’t give up the dream.”

“Can we—” Casey checked himself to look at Pepe and me. We nodded, and he turned anxiously back to Lo. “If Sandor does go out on the emigrant ship, would he take us with him?”

She shook her head and sat staring at nothing till Pepe asked,

“¿Por qué no?”

“Reasons enough.” Frowning, she picked up the little brown cake, broke it in half, dropped the fragments back on her plate. “First of all, the danger. Whatever killed that planet could kill another. He got the waiver, in fact, because others were afraid to go. The colonists had no choice, but he doesn’t want to kill you.”

“It’s our choice.” Casey shrugged. “When you have to jump across hundreds of years of space and time, don’t you always take a risk?”

“Not like this one.” She shrugged unhappily. “Enthel Two is toward the galactic core. So is this new one. If the killer is coming from the core—”

Pale face set, she shook her fair-haired head.

“We’ll take the risk.” Casey glanced again at us and gave her a stiff little grin. “You might remind him that we weren’t cloned to live forever. He has more at stake than we do.”

Her body stiffened, fading slowly white.

“Tling and I have begged him.” Her voice was faint. “But he feels commanded.”

“By his nanorobs? Can’t he think of you and Tling?”

Her answer took a long time to come.

“You don’t understand them.” She seemed composed again; I wondered if her own nanorobs had eased her pain. “You may see them as micromachines, but they don’t make us mechanical. We’ve kept all the feelings and impulses the primitives had. The nanorobs simply make us better humans. Sandor is going not just for the colonists, but for me and Tling, for people everywhere.”

“If the odds are as bad as they look—” Casey squinted doubtfully. “What can one man hope to do?”

“Nothing, perhaps.” She made a bleak little shrug. “But he has an idea. Long ago, before he ever left Earth to search for his brother, he worked with his mother on her nanorob research. He has reprogrammed himself with the science. If the killer is some kind of virulent organism, he thinks the nanorobs might be modified into a shield against it.”

“Speak to him,” Casey begged her. “Get him to take us with him. We’ll help him any way we can.”

“You?” Astonishment widened her eyes. “How?”

“We put you here on Earth,” he told her. “Even with no nanorobs at all.”

“So you did.” Golden color flushed her skin. “I’ll speak to him.” Silent for a moment, she shook her head. “Impossible. He says every seat on the ship is filled.”

She paused, frowning at the ceiling. The robot was moving around the table, offering a bowl of huge flesh-colored mushrooms that had a tempting scent of frying ham.

“We are trying to plan a future for Tling.” Her face was suddenly tight, her voice hushed with feeling. “A thousand years will pass before he gets back. He grieves to leave Tling.”

“I saw her this morning,” I said. “She’s terribly hurt.”

“We are trying to make it up. I’ve promised that she will see him again.”

Pepe looked startled. “How can that happen?”

She took a mushroom, sniffed it with a nod of approval, and laid it on her plate.

“We must plan the time,” she told him. “Tling and I will travel. I want to see what the centuries have done to my own homeworld. It will take careful calculation and the right star flights, but we’ll meet him back here on the date of his return.”

“If—”

Casey swallowed his voice. Her face went pale, but after a moment she gave us a stiff little smile and had the robot offer the mushrooms again. They had a name I never learned, and a flavor more like bittersweet chocolate than ham. The meal ended. She left us there alone with the robots, with nowhere to go, no future in sight.

“A thousand years!” Pepe muttered. “I wish we had nanorobs.”

“Or else—”

Casey turned to the door.

“News for you.” Lo stood there, smiling at us. “News from the emigrant ship. Uneasy passengers have arranged for new destinations, leaving empty places. Sandor has found seats for you.”

7.

Sandor took us to our seats on the emigrant ship. Wheel-shaped and slowly spinning, it held us to the floors with a force weaker than Earth’s gravity, stronger than the Moon’s. A blue light flashed to warn us of the space-time slide. Restraints folded around us. I felt a gut-wrenching tug. The restraints released us. With no sense of any other change, we sat uneasily waiting.

The big cabin was hushed. Watching faces, I saw eager expectation give way to disappointment and distress. I heard a baby crying, someone shouting at a robot attendant, then a rising clamor of voices at the brink of panic. Sandor sat looking gravely away till I asked him what was wrong.

“We don’t know.” He grinned at our dazed wonderment. “At least we’ve made the skip to orbit. Five hundred light-years. You’re old men now.”

He let us follow him to the lounge, where a tall ceiling dome imaged a new sky. The Milky Way looked familiar. I found the Orion Nebula, but all the nearer stars had shifted beyond recognition. I felt nothing from the ship’s rotation; the whole sky seemed to turn around us. Two suns rose, set close together. One was yellow, smaller and paler than our own, the brighter a hot blue dazzle. The planet climbed behind them, a huge round blot on the field of unfamiliar stars, edged with the blue sun’s glare. Looking for the glow of cities, all I saw was darkness.

Anxious passengers were clustering around crew members uniformed in the ship’s blue-and-gold caps and sashes. Most of their questions were in the silent language of the nanorobs, but their faces revealed dismay. I heard voices rising higher, cries of shock and dread.

We turned to Sandor.

“The telescopes pick up no artificial lights.” His lean face was bleakly set. “Radio calls get no answer. The electronic signal spectrum appears dead.” He shook his head, with a heavy sigh. “I was thinking of my brother. I’d hoped to find him here.”

With gestures of apology to us, uneasy people pushed to surround him. He looked away to listen, frowning at the planet’s dark shadow, and turned forlornly to go. He spoke his final words for us.

“We’ll be looking for survivors.”

We watched that crescent of blue-and-orange fire widen with each passage across the ceiling dome till at last we saw the planet’s globe. Swirls and streamers of high cloud shone brilliantly beneath the blue sun’s light, but thick red dust dulled everything under them.

One hemisphere was all ocean, except for the gray dot of an isolated island. A single huge continent covered most of the other, extending far south of the equator and north across the pole. Mountain ranges walled the long west coast. A single giant river system drained the vast valley eastward. From arctic ice to polar sea it was all rust-red, nothing green anywhere.

“A rich world it must have been.” Sandor made a dismal shrug. “But now—?”

He turned to nod at a woman marching into the room. A woman so flat-chested, masculine, and strange that I had to look twice. Gleaming red-black scales covered her angular body, even her hairless head. Her face was a narrow triangle, her chin sharply pointed, her eyes huge and green. We stared as she sprang to a circular platform in the center of the room.

“Captain Vlix,” he murmured. “She’s older than I am, born back in the days when nanorobs were new and body forms experimental. I sailed with her once. She remembered my brother asking if she knew me. That was Earth centuries ago. She had no clues to give me.”

Heads were turning in attention. I saw uneasy expectation give way to bitter disappointment. Sandor stood frozen, widened eyes fixed on her, till she turned to meet another officer joining her on the platform. They conferred in silence.

“What is it?” Casey whispered. Sandor seemed deaf till Casey touched his arm and asked again, “What did she say?”

“Nothing good.” Sandor turned to us, his voice hushed and hurried. “She was summing up a preliminary report from the science staff. This dead planet is the second they have reached. The other was two hundred light-years away. The implications—”

He hunched his shoulders, his skin gone pale.

“Yes? What are they?”

With a painful smile, he tried to gather himself.

“At this point, only speculation. The killer has reached two worlds. How many more? Its nature is not yet known. The science chief suggests that it could possibly be a malignant nanorob, designed to attack all organic life. It certainly seems aggressive, advancing on an interstellar front from the direction of the galactic core.”

“What can we do?”

“Nothing, unless we come to understand it.” He glanced at the captain and spread his empty hands. “Nanorobs are designed to survive and reproduce themselves. They are complex, half alive, half machine, more efficient than either. The early experimenters worked in terror of accident, of creating something malignant that might escape the laboratory. This could be a mutation. It could be a weapon, reprogrammed by some madman—though his own nanorobs should have prevented that.”

He looked again at the captain, and slowly shook his head.

“The officers are doing what they can. A robotic drone is being prepared to attempt a low-level survey of surface damage. A search has already begun for any spacecraft that might remain in orbit. And—”

He broke off to watch a thin man with a gray cap and sash who darted out of the crowd and jumped to join the officers on the platform.

“That’s Benkar Rokehut.” He made a wry face. “A fellow Earthman, born in my own century. A noted entrepreneur, or perhaps I should say gambler. Noted for taking unlikely chances. He has opened half a dozen worlds, made and lost a dozen fortunes. He funded the initial surveys and settlements here. He has a fortune at stake.”

His golden shoulders tossed to an ironic shrug.

“He may love wild chances, but he doesn’t want to die.”

Rokehut faced the captain for a moment, and turned silently to address the room. Gesturing at the planet, pointing at features on the surface, he kept turning to follow as it crept overhead, kept on talking. When Captain Vlix moved as if to stop him, he burst suddenly into speech, shouting vehemently at her, his pale skin flushing redder than the planet.

“His emotions have overcome his nanorobs.” Sandor frowned and drew us closer. “All he sees is danger. Though that first lost planet is two hundred light-years from this one, they both lie toward the Core from Earth. He believes the killer pathogen is spreading from somewhere toward the Core, possibly carried by refugees. He wants us to head out for the frontier stars toward the Rim.”

The officers moved to confront him. What they said was silent, but I saw Rokehut’s face fade almost to the gray of his cap and sash. He snatched them off, threw them off the platform, waved his fists and shouted. Yielding at last, he shuffled aside and stood glaring at Captain Vlix, his fists still clenched with a purely human fury.

She turned silently back to face the room, speaking with a calm control.

“The officers agree that we do seem to face an interstellar invasion.” Sandor spoke softly. “But blind flight can only spread the contagion, if panicky refugees carry it. In the end, unless we get some better break—”

With a sad little shrug, he paused to look hard at us.

“Tycho Station could become the last human hope. It is sealed, shielded, well concealed. The Moon has no surface life to attract or sustain any kind of pathogen.” His lips twisted to a quirk of bitter humor. “Even if it wins, there’s hope for humanity. It should die when no hosts are left to carry it. You clones may have another book to write before your epic ends.”

Captain Vlix left the room, Rokehut and his people close behind her. The robot attendants were circulating with trays of hard brown biscuits and plastic bubbles of fruit juice.

“The best we can do,” Sandor said. “With zero times in transit, the ship carries no supplies or provisions for any prolonged stay aboard. We must move on with no long delay, yet the officers agree that we must wait for whatever information we can get from the drone.”

It descended over the glaciers that fringed the polar cap and flew south along the rugged west coast. Its cameras projected their images on the dome and the edge of the floor. Standing there, I could feel that I was riding in its nose. It must have flown high and fast, but the images were processed to make it seem that we hovered low and motionless over a deserted seaport or the ruin of a city and climbed to soar on to the next.

All we saw was dust and desolation. Broken walls of stone or brick, where roofs had fallen in. Tangles of twisted steel where towers had stood. Concrete seawalls around empty harbors. And everywhere, wind-drifted dunes of dead red dust and wind-whipped clouds of rust-colored dust, sometimes so dense it hid the ground.

The drone turned east near the equator, climbing over mountain peaks capped with snows dyed the color of drying blood. It paused over broken dams in high mountain canyons and crossed a network of dust-choked irrigation canals.

“I’ve dreamed of my brother.” Sandor made a solemn face. “Dreamed I might find him here.” He stopped to sigh and gaze across an endless sea of wave-shaped dunes. “Dreams! All of us dreaming we had endless life and time for everything. And now—”

The drone had reached the dead east coast and flown on across the empty ocean. The lounge was silent again, disheartened people drifting away. Casey asked if we were turning back.

“Not quite yet.” Sandor tipped his head, listening. “Captain Vlix reports that the search team has found something in low polar orbit. Maybe a ship. Maybe just a rock. Maybe something else entirely. She’s launching a pilot pod to inspect it.”

Music had lifted back in the lounge, its unfamiliar trills and runs and strains broken by long gaps of nothing I could sense. A woman with a baby in her arms was swaying to a rhythm I couldn’t hear. Silent people were dozing or wandering the aisles. A silent group had gathered around Rokehut at the end of the room, frowning and gesticulating.

“He still wants us to run for our lives,” Sandor said. “For a star two thousand light-years out toward the Rim. An idiot’s dream! To complete the slide he’d have to calculate the exact relative position of the star two thousand years from now. He has no data for it.”

The attendants came back with juice and little white wafers. Rokehut and his group refused them, with angry gestures, and trooped away to confront the captain again.

“A mild sedative.” Sandor waved the robot away. “If you need to relax.”

I accepted a wafer. It had a vinegar taste and it hit me with a sudden fatigue. I slept in my seat till Casey shook my arm.

“The pod has reached that object in orbit,” Sandor told us. “The pilot identifies it as the craft that brought the last colonists. His attempts at contact get no response. Rokehut has offered him a fortune to go aboard. Permission has been granted, with the warning that he won’t be allowed back on our ship. He reports that his service robot is now cutting the security bolts to let him into the air lock.”

I watched the people around us, silently listening, frowning intently, expectantly nodding, frowning again.

“He’s inside.” Head tipped aside, eyes fixed on something far away, Sandor spoke at last. “The pathogen got there ahead of him. He has found red dust on the decks, but he hopes for protection from his space gear. He believes the killer was already on the planet before the ship arrived. The cargo was never unloaded. All organics have crumbled, but metal remains unchanged.

“He’s pushing on—”

Sandor stopped to listen and shake his head.

“The pilot was on his way to the control room, searching for records or clues. He never got there.” He leaned his head and nodded. “The science chief is summing up what evidence he has. It points to something airborne, fast-acting, totally lethal. It must have killed everybody who ever knew what it is.”

Captain Vlix allowed Rokehut and his partisans to poll the passengers. Overwhelmingly, they voted to turn back toward Earth at once. The lounge became a bedlam of angry protest when departure was delayed, hushed a little when Captain Vlix came back to the platform.

“She says Earth is out,” Sandor told us, “for two sufficient reasons. We might find that the pathogen is already there. Even if we found it safe, she says we would certainly be regarded as a suspected carrier, warned away and subject to attack if we tried to make any contact.”

“That recalls a legend of the old Earth.” Casey nodded bleakly. “The legend of a ghost ship called the Flying Dutchman, that sailed forever and never reached a port.”

The strange constellations flickered out of the ceiling dome, and the drone’s images returned. The limitless ocean beneath it looked blue as Earth’s when we glimpsed it through rifts in the clouds, but the sky was yellow, the larger sun a sullen red, the blue one now a hot pink point.

“The island’s somewhere ahead.” Sandor stood with us in the lounge, frowning at the horizon. “If we ever get there. It’s losing altitude. Losing speed. Probably damaged by the dust.”

White-capped waves rose closer as it glided down through scattered puffs of cumulus.

“There it is!” Sandor whispered before I had seen it. “Just to the right.”

I strained to see. The image dimmed and flickered as the drone bored through a tuft of pink-tinted cloud. Something blurred the far horizon. At first a faint dark streak, it faded and came back as we searched it for color.

“Green?” A sharp cry from Casey. “Isn’t it green?”

“It was,” Sandor said. “We’re going down.”

A foam-capped mountain of blue-green water climbed ahead of the drone. It crashed with an impact I almost felt, but I thought I had caught a flash of green.

8.

The ceiling dome had gone dark when the drone broke up. After a moment it was spangled again with those new constellations. The dead ship, immense and high overhead, was a fire-edged silhouette against the Milky Way.

“You saw it!” Casey shouted at Sandor. “Something green. Something alive!”

Frowning, Sandor shook his head.

“I saw a brief greenish flash. Probably from some malfunction as the drone went down.”

“It was green,” Casey insisted. “Aren’t they landing anybody to take a look?”

“No time for that.”

“But if the island is alive—”

“How could that be?” He was sharply impatient. “We’ve seen the whole planet dead. Whatever killed it killed the drone before it ever touched the surface. The captain isn’t going to risk any sort of contact.”

“If she would let us land—” Casey waited for Pepe and me to nod. “We could radio a report.”

“Send you down to die?” Sandor’s eyes went wide. “She cares too much for life. She would never consider it.”

“Don’t think we care for life? Tell her we were cloned to keep the Earth and humankind alive. But tell her we were also cloned to die. If we must, I don’t know a better way.”

Sandor took us to meet Captain Vlix, and translated for us. Our visit was brief, but still enough to let me glimpse a spark of humanity beneath her gleaming crimson scales. I don’t know what he told her, but it caught her interest. She had him question us about Tycho Station and our lives there.

“You like it?” Her huge green eyes probed us with a disturbing intensity. “Life without nanorobs? Knowing you must die?”

“We know.” Casey nodded. “I don’t dwell on it.”

“I must admire your idealism.” A frown creased her crimson scales. “But the science staff reports no credible evidence of life on the planet. I can’t waste your lives.”

“We saw evidence we believe,” Casey said. “In that last second as the drone went down. Considering the stakes, we’re ready to take the risk.”

“The stakes are great.” Her eyes on Sandor, she frowned and finally nodded her red-scaled head. “You may go.”

There were no space suits to fit us. That didn’t matter, Casey said; space gear had not saved the pilot who boarded the derelict. With Sandor translating, the service robots showed Pepe how to operate the flight pod, a streamlined bubble much like the slider that had brought Sandor to the Moon. He shook our hands and wished us well.

“Make it quick,” he told us. “Captain Vlix expects no good news from you. No news at all, in fact, after you touch down. Our next destination is still under debate. None looks safe, or satisfies everybody, but we can’t delay.”

Pepe made it quick, and we found the island green.

Rising out of the haze of dust as we dived, the shallow sea around it faded from the blue of open water through a hundred shades of jade and turquoise to the vivid green of life. The island was bowl-shaped, the great caldera left by an ancient volcanic explosion. Low hills rimmed a circular valley with a small blue lake at the center. A line of green trees showed the course of a stream that ran through a gap in the hills from the lake down to the sea.

“Kell?” Sandor’s voice crackled from the radio before we touched the ground. “Navarro? Yare? Answer if you can.”

“Tell him!” Casey grinned at Pepe as he dropped our slider pod to a wide white beach that looked like coral sand. “It looks a lot better than our pits in the Moon. No matter what.”

Pepe echoed him, “No matter what.”

“Tell him we’re opening the air lock,” Casey said. “If we can breathe the air, we’re heading inland.”

Pepe opened the air lock. I held my breath till I had to inhale. The air was fresh and cool, but I caught a faint acrid bite. In a moment my eyes were burning. Pepe sneezed and clapped a handkerchief over his nose. Casey smothered a cough and peered at us sharply.

“Can you report?” Sandor’s anxious voice. “Can you breathe?”

Casey coughed and blew his nose.

“Breathing,” he gasped. “Still breathing.”

I thought we were inhaling the pathogen. I hadn’t known the pilot who died on the derelict, or the millions or billions it had killed. I felt no personal pain for them, but Pepe and Casey were almost part of me. I put my arms around them. We huddled there together, sneezing and wheezing, till Pepe laughed and pulled away.

“If this is death, it ain’t so bad.” He jogged me in the ribs. “Let’s get out and take a closer look.”

We stumbled out of the lock and stood there on the hard wet sand beside the pod, breathing hard and peering around us. The sky was a dusty pink, the suns a tiny red moon eye and a bright pink spark. The beach sloped up to low green hills. Perhaps half a mile south along the beach, green jungle covered the delta at the mouth of the little river. Pepe picked up a scrap of seaweed the waves had left.

“Still green.” He studied it, sniffed it. “It smells alive.”

My lungs were burning. Every breath, I thought, might be my last, yet I always stayed able to struggle for another. Pepe dropped the handkerchief and climbed back in the slider to move it higher on the beach, farther from the water. He returned with a portable radio. Casey blew his nose again, and started south along the beach, toward the delta. We followed him, breathing easier as we went.

The little river had cut its way between two great black basaltic cliffs. Casey stopped before we reached them, frowning up at the nearest. I looked and caught a deeper breath. The summit had been carved into a face. The unfinished head of a giant struggling out of the stone.

“Sandor!” Casey walked closer, staring up at the great dark face. “It’s Sandor.”

“It is.” Shading his eyes, Pepe whispered huskily. “Unless we’re crazy.”

I had to sneeze again, and wondered what the dust was doing to us.

Sandor called again from the ship, but Pepe seemed too stunned to speak. A rope ladder hung across the face, down to the beach. Black and gigantic, gazing out at the sky, lips curved in a puckish smile, the head was certainly Sandor’s.

“We’re okay.” Rasping hoarsely into the phone, Pepe answered at last. “Still breathing.”

Walking closer to the cliff, we found a narrow cave. A jutting ledge sheltered a long workbench hewn from an untrimmed log, a forge with a pedal to work the bellows, a basket of charcoal, a heavy anvil, a long shelf cluttered with roughly-made hammers and chisels and drills.

“The sculptor’s workshop.” Casey stepped back across a reef of glassy black chips on the sand, litter fallen from the chisel. “Who is the sculptor?”

He touched his lips at Pepe when Sandor called again.

“Tell him to hold the ship. Tell him we’re alive and pushing inland. Tell him we’ve found human life, or strong evidence for it. But not a word about the face. Not till we have something Captain Vlix might believe.”

We hiked inland, following a smooth-worn footpath along the riverbank. The valley widened. We came out between two rows of trees, neatly spaced, bearing bright red fruit.

“¡Cerezas!” Pepe cried. “Cherries! A cherry orchard.”

He picked a handful and shared them, tart, sweet, hard to believe. We came to an apple orchard, to rows of peach and pear trees, all laden with unripe fruit. We found a garden farther on, watered by a narrow ditch that diverted water from the river. Tomato vines, yams, squash, beans, tall green corn.

Casey caught his breath and stopped. I stared past him at a man—a man who might have been Sandor’s double—who came striding up the path to meet us.

“Sandor?” His eager voice was almost Sandor’s, though the accent made it strange. “Sandor?”

We waited, hardly breathing, while he came on to us. The image of Sandor, bronzed dark from the sun, he had the same trim frame, the same sleek brown fur crowning his head, the same pixie face and golden eyes. He stopped to scan us with evident disappointment, and pointed suddenly when he saw Pepe’s radio.

Pepe let him have it. Eagerly, hands shaking, he made a call. The other Sandor answered with a quick and breathless voice. Their excited words meant nothing to me, no more than their silent communion after they fell silent, but I could read the flow of feeling on the stranger’s weathered face. Wonder, fear, hope, tears of joy.

At last the Sandor on the ship had a moment for us.

“You’ve found my brother. Call him Corath if you need a name. Captain Vlix is ready for a jump toward the Rim. She is slow to believe what you’re saying, with her ship at risk but Rokehut is demanding a chance for confirmation and I must see my brother. She’s letting me come down. . . .”

Corath beckoned. We followed him down the path till we could see the distant lake and a ruined building on a hill. Once it must have been impressive, but the stone walls were roofless now, windows and doorways black and gaping. He stopped us at his very simple residence, a thatched roof over a bare wooden floor with a small stone-walled enclosure at the rear. Waiting for Sandor, we sat at a table under the thatch. He poured cherry wine for us from a black ceramic jug and stood waiting, staring away at the sky.

Sandor landed his silvery flight pod on the grass in front of the dwelling. Corath ran to meet him. They stopped to gaze at each other, to touch each other, to grip each other’s hands. They hugged and stepped apart and stood a long time face to face without a word I could hear, laughing and crying, hugging again, until at last Sandor rubbed his wet eyes and turned to us.

“I saw—saw the head.” Breathing hard, he stopped to clear his throat and peer again into Corath’s face as if to verify that he was real. “It was meant to be my own, though at first I thought it was his. He has been here almost two hundred years, marooned by the pathogen. With no way to search for me, he says, except inside the mountain.”

A spasm of coughing bent him over. Corath held his arm till he drew himself upright and turned soberly back to us.

“We were coughing,” Pepe said. “Sneezing. Wheezing. We thought we had the killer pathogen.”

“Something kin to it, my brother says. But benign. He says it saved your lives.”

We had to hold our questions. They forgot us, standing together a long time in silence before they laughed and embraced again. Sandor wiped at his tears at last and turned back to us.

“The pathogen got here two hundred years ago. Corath knows no more than we do about its origin or history. It caught him here on the island, at work on the same sort of nanorob research I once hoped to undertake. He was testing immunities and looking for quantum effects that might extend the contact range. The range effect is still not fully tested, but his new nanorob did make him immune. Too late to save the rest of the planet, it did wipe the pathogen off the island. . . .”

Captain Vlix was still a stubborn skeptic, terrified of contamination. She refused to let Sandor bring his brother aboard, or even to come back himself. Yet, with Rokehut and some of the other passengers still at odds over a new destination, she let the second officer bring a little group of desperate volunteers down to see the live island for themselves.

They came off the pod jittery and pale. Fits of coughing and sneezing turned them whiter still, until Corath and his news of their new immunity brought their color back. To make his own survival sure, the officer drew a drop of Corath’s blood and scratched it into his arm with a needle. Still breathing, but not yet entirely certain, he wanted to see the research station.

Corath took us to tour the ruin on the hill. The pathogen had destroyed wood and plastic, leaving only bare stone and naked steel. A quake had toppled one roofless wall, but the isolation chamber was still intact. An enormous windowless concrete box, it had heavy steel doors with an air lock between them.

Black with rust, the doors yawned open now, darkness beyond them. He struck fire with flint, steel, and tinder, lit a torch, led us inside. The chamber was empty, except for the clutter of abandoned equipment on the workbenches and a thick carpet of harmless gray dust on the floor.

We found nothing to reveal the structure of his new nanorob, nothing to explain how its wind-borne spores had set us to sneezing and made us safe. Corath answered with only a noncommittal shrug when Pepe dared to ask if the infection had made us immortal.

“At least the dust hasn’t killed us,” Casey said. “Good enough for me.”

The officer went back to the ship with a bottle of Corath’s healing blood. Captain Vlix agreed to hold the ship in orbit. Rokehut brought his engineers to survey the island and stake out a settlement site on the plateau beyond the lake. Passengers came down with their luggage and crates of freight, ready now to stake their futures on the island and Corath’s promise that the red dust could make fertile soil.

He decided to stay there with them.

Sandor took us with him back aboard. Convinced at last, Captain Vlix was waiting to greet us at the airlock, embracing him almost as tearfully as his brother had. When she had finally wiped her eyes and turned away, he spoke to us.

“Our job now is to fight the pathogen with Corath’s nanorob. Volunteers in flight pods are setting out to carry it to all the nearest worlds. I am taking it to Lo and Tling back on Earth. Do you want to come?”

We did.

MILLENNIUM BABIES

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Two weeks into the second semester, she got the message. It had been sent to her house system, and was coded to her real name, Brooke Delacroix, not Brooke Cross, the name she had used since she was eighteen. At first she didn’t want to open it, thinking it might be another legal conundrum from her mother, so she let the house monitor in the kitchen blink while she prepared dinner.

She made a hearty dinner, and poured herself a glass of rosé before settling down in front of the living room fireplace. The fireplace was the reason she’d bought this house. She had fallen in love with the idea that she could sit on cold winter nights under a pile of blankets, a real fire burning nearby, and read the ancient paperbacks she found in Madison’s antique stores. She read a lot of current work on her e-book, especially research for the classes she taught at the university, but she loved to read novels in their paper form, careful not to tear the brittle pages, feeling the weight of bound paper in her hands.

She had added bookshelves to the house’s dining room for her paper novels, and she had made a few other improvements as well. But she tried to keep the house’s character. It was a hundred and fifty years old, built when this part of Wisconsin had been nothing but family farms. The farmland was gone now, divided into five acre plots, but the privacy remained. She loved being out here, in the country, more than anything else. Even though the university provided her job, the house was her world.

The novel she held was a thin volume, and a favorite—The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—but on this night, the book didn’t hold her interest. Finally she gave up. If she didn’t hear the damn message, she would be haunted by her mother all night.

Brooke left the glass of wine and the book on the end table, her blankets curled at the edge of the couch, and made her way back to the kitchen. She could have had House play an audio-only version of the message in the living room, but she wanted to see her mother’s face, to know how serious it was this time.

The monitor was on the west wall beside the microwave. The previous owners—a charming elderly couple—had kept a small television in that spot. On nights like this, Brooke thought the monitor was no improvement.

She stood in front of it, arms crossed, sighed, and said, “House, play message.”

The blinking icon disappeared from the screen. A digital voice she did not recognize said, “This message is keyed for Brooke Delacroix only. It will not be played without certification that no one else is in the room.”

She stood. If this was from her mother, her tactics had changed. This sounded official. Brooke made sure she was visible to the built-in camera.

“I’m Brooke,” she said, “and I’m alone.”

“You’re willing to certify this?” the strange voice asked her.

“Yes,” she said.

“Stand by for message.”

The screen turned black. She rubbed her hands together. Goosebumps were crawling across her skin. Who would send her an official message?

“This is coded for Brooke Delacroix,” a new digital voice said. “Personal identification number . . .”

As the voice rattled off the number, she clenched her fist. Maybe something had happened to her mother. Brooke was, after all, the only next of kin.

“This is Brooke Delacroix,” she said. “How many more security protocols do we have here?”

“Five,” House said.

She felt her shoulders relax as she heard the familiar voice.

“Go around them. I don’t have the time.”

“All right,” House said. “Stand by.”

She was standing by. Now she wished she had brought her glass of wine into the kitchen. For the first time, she felt as if she needed it.

“Ms. Delacroix?” A male voice spoke, and as it did, the monitor filled with an image. A middle-aged man with dark hair and dark eyes stared at a point just beyond her. He had the look of an intellectual, an aesthetic, someone who spent too much time in artificial light. He also looked vaguely familiar. “Forgive my rudeness. I know you go by Cross now, but I wanted to make certain that you are the woman I’m searching for. I’m looking for Brook Delacroix, born 12:05 A.M., January first in the year 2000 in Detroit, Michigan.”

Another safety protocol. What was this?

“That’s me,” Brooke said.

The screen blinked slightly, apparently as her answer was fed into some sort of program. He must have recorded various messages for various answers. She knew she wasn’t speaking to him live.

“We are actually colleagues, Ms. Cross. I’m Eldon Franke . . .”

Of course. That was why he looked familiar. The Human Potential Guru who had gotten all the press. He was a legitimate scientist whose most recent tome became a pop culture bestseller. Franke rehashed the nature versus nurture arguments in personality development, mixed in some sociology and some well documented advice for improving the lot nature/nurture gave people, and somehow the book hit.

She had read it, and had been impressed with the interdisciplinary methods he had used—and the credit he had given to his colleagues.

“. . . have a new grant, quite a large one actually, which startled even me. With that and the proceeds from the last book, I’m able to undertake the kind of study I’ve always wanted to do.”

She kept her hands folded and watched him. His eyes were bright, intense. She remembered seeing him at faculty parties, but she had never spoken to him. She didn’t speak to many people voluntarily, especially during social occasions. She had learned, from her earliest days, the value of keeping to herself.

“I will be bringing in subjects from around the country,” he was saying. “I had hoped to go around the world, but that makes this study too large even for me. As it is, I’ll be working with over three hundred subjects from all over the United States. I didn’t expect to find one in my own backyard.”

A subject. She felt her breath catch in her throat. She had thought he was approaching her as an equal.

“I know from published reports that you dislike talking about your status as a Millennium Baby, but—”

“Off,” she said to House. Franke’s image froze on the screen.

“I’m sorry,” House said. “This message is designed to be played in its entirety.”

“So go around it,” she said, “and shut the damn thing off.”

“The message program is too sophisticated for my systems,” House said.

Brooke cursed. The son of a bitch knew she’d try to shut him down. “How long is it?”

“You have heard a third of the message.”

Brooke sighed. “All right. Continue.”

The image became mobile again. “—I hope you hear me out. My work, as you may or may not know, is with human potential. I plan to build on my earlier research, but I lacked the right kind of study group. Many scientists of all stripes have studied generations, and assumed that because people were born in the same year, they had the same hopes, aspirations, and dreams. I do not believe that is so. The human creature is too diverse—”

“Get to the point,” Brooke said, sitting on a wooden kitchen chair.

“—so in my quest for the right group, I stumbled on thirty-year-old articles about Millennium Babies, and I realized that the subset of your generation, born on January 1 of the year 2000, actually have similar beginnings.”

“No, we don’t,” Brooke said.

“Thus you give me a chance to focus this study. I will use the raw data to continue my overall work, but this study will focus on what it is that makes human beings succeed or fail—”

“Screw you,” Brooke said and walked out of the kitchen. Behind her, Franke’s voice stopped.

“Do you want me to transfer audio to the living room?” House asked.

“No,” Brooke said. “Let him ramble on. I’m done listening.”

The fire crackled in the fireplace, her wine had warmed to room temperature, bringing out a different bouquet, and her blankets looked comfortable. She sank into them. Franke’s voice droned on in the kitchen, and she ordered House to play Bach to cover him.

But her favorite Brandenburg Concerto couldn’t wipe Franke’s voice from her mind. Studying Millennium Babies.

Brooke closed her eyes. She wondered what her mother would think of that.

Three days later, Brooke was in her office, trying to assemble her lecture for her new survey class. This one was on the two world wars. The University of Wisconsin still believed that a teacher should stand in front of students, even for the large lecture courses, instead of delivering canned lectures that could be downloaded. Most professors saw surveys as too much wasted work, but she actually enjoyed the courses. She liked standing before a large room delivering a lecture.

But now she was getting past the introductory remarks and into the areas she wasn’t that familiar with. She didn’t believe in regurgitating the textbooks, so she was boning up on World War I. She had forgotten that its causes were so complex; its results so far reaching, especially in Europe. Sometimes she just found herself reading, lost in the past.

Her office was small and narrow, with barely enough room for her desk. Because she was new, she was assigned to Bascom Hall at the top of Bascom Hill, a building that had been around for most of the university’s history. The Hall’s historic walls didn’t accommodate new technology, so the university made certain she had a fancy desk with a built-in screen. The problem with that was that when she did extensive research, as she was doing now, she had to look down.

She often downloaded information to her palmtop or worked at home. Working in her office, in the thin light provided by the ancient fluorescents and the dirty meshed window, gave her a headache.

But she was nearly done. Tomorrow, she would take the students from the horrors of trench warfare to the first steps toward US involvement. The bulk of the lecture, though, would focus on isolationism—a potent force in both world wars.

A knock on her door brought her to the twenty-first century. She rubbed the bridge of her nose impatiently. She wasn’t holding office hours. She hated it when students failed to read the signs.

“Yes?” she asked.

“Professor Cross?”

“Yes?”

“May I have a moment of your time?”

The voice was male and didn’t sound terribly young, but many of her students were older.

“A moment,” she said, using her desktop to unlock the door. “I’m not having office hours.”

The knob turned and a man came inside. He wasn’t very tall, and he was thin—a runner’s build. It wasn’t until he turned toward her, though, that she let out a groan.

“Professor Franke.”

He held up a hand. “I’m sorry to disturb you—”

“You should be,” she said. “I purposely didn’t answer your message.”

“I figured. Please. Just give me a few moments.”

She shook her head. “I’m not interested in being the subject of any study. I don’t have time.”

“Is it the time? Or is it the fact that the study has to do with Millennium Babies?” His look was sharp.

“Both.”

“I can promise you that you’ll be well compensated. And if you’ll just listen to me for a moment, you might reconsider—”

“Professor Franke,” she said, “I’m not interested.”

“But you’re a key to the study.”

“Why?” she asked. “Because of my mother’s lawsuits?”

“Yes,” he said.

She felt the air leave her body. She had to remind herself to breathe. The feeling was familiar. It had always been familiar. Whenever anyone talked about Millennium Babies, she had this feeling in her stomach.

Millennium Babies. No one had expected the craze, but it had become apparent by March of 1999. Prospective parents were timing the conception of their children as part of a race to see if their child could be the first born in 2000—the New Millennium, as the pundits of the day inaccurately called it. There was a more-or-less informal international contest, but in the United States, the competition was quite heavy. There were other races in every developed country, and in every city. And in most of those places, the winning parent got a lot of money, and a lot of products, and some, those with the cutest babies, or the pushiest parents, got endorsements as well.

“Oh, goodie,” Brooke said, filling her voice with all the sarcasm she could muster. “My mother was upset that I didn’t get exploited enough as a child so you’re here to fill the gap.”

His back straightened. “It’s not like that.”

“Really? How is it then?” She regretted the words the moment she spoke them. She was giving Franke the opening he wanted.

“We’ve chosen our candidates with care,” he said. “We are not taking babies born randomly on January 1 of 2000.

We’re taking children whose birth was planned, whose parents made public statements about the birth, and whose parents hoped to get a piece of the pie.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “You’re studying children with dysfunctional families.”

“Are we?” he asked.

“Well, if you study me, you are,” she said and stood. “Now, I’d like it if you’d leave.”

“You haven’t let me finish.”

“Why should I?”

“Because this study might help you, Professor Cross.”

“I’m doing fine without your help.”

“But you never talk about your Millennium Baby status.”

“And how often do you discuss the day you were born, Professor?”

“My birthday is rather unremarkable,” he said. “Unlike yours.”

She crossed her arms. “Get out.”

“Remember that I study human potential,” he said. “And you all have the same beginnings. All of you come from parents who had the same goal—parents who were driven to achieve something unusual.”

“Parents who were greedy,” she said.

“Some of them,” he said. “And some of them planned to have children anyway, and thought it might be fun to try to join the contest.”

“I don’t see how our beginnings are relevant.”

He smiled, and she cursed under her breath. As long as she talked to him, as long as she asked thinly veiled questions, he had her and they both knew it.

“In the past forty years, studies of identical twins raised apart have shown that at least 50 percent of a person’s disposition is apparent at birth. Which means that no matter how you’re raised, if you were a happy baby, you have a greater than 50 percent chance of being a happy adult. The remaining factors are probably environmental. Are you familiar with DNA mapping?”

“You’re not answering my question,” she said.

“I’m trying to,” he said. “Listen to me for a few moments, and then kick me out of your office.”

She wouldn’t get rid of him otherwise. She slowly sat in her chair.

“Are you familiar with DNA mapping?” he repeated.

“A little,” she said.

“Good.” He leaned back in his chair and templed his fingers. “We haven’t located a happiness gene or an unhappiness gene. We’re not sure what it is about the physical make-up that makes these things work. But we do know that it has something to do with serotonin levels.”

“Get to the part about Millennium Babies,” she said.

He smiled. “I am. My last book was partly based on the happiness/unhappiness model, but I believe that’s too simplistic. Human beings are complex creatures. And as I grow older, I see a lot of lost potential. Some of us were raised to fail, and some were raised to succeed. Some of those raised to succeed have failed, and some who were raised to fail have succeeded. So clearly it isn’t all environment.”

“Unless some were reacting against their environment,” she said, hearing the sullenness in her tone, a sullenness she hadn’t used since she’d last spoken to her mother five years before.

“That’s one option,” he said, sounding brighter. He must have taken her statement for interest. “But one of the things I learned while working on human potential is that drive is like happiness. Some children are born driven. They walk sooner than others. They learn faster. They adapt faster. They achieve more, from the moment they take their first breath.”

“I don’t really believe that our entire personalities are formed at birth,” she said. “Or that our destinies are written before we’re conceived.”

“None of us do,” he said. “If we did, we wouldn’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. But we do acknowledge that we’re all given traits and talents that are different from each other. Some of us have blue eyes. Some of us can hit golf balls with a power and accuracy that others only dream of. Some of us have perfect pitch, right?”

“Of course,” she snapped.

“So it only stands to reason that some of us are born with more happiness than others, and some are born with more drive than others. If you consider those intangibles to be as real as, say, musical talent.”

His argument had a certain logic, but she didn’t want to agree with him on anything. She wanted him out of her office.

“But,” he said. “Those with the most musical talent aren’t always the ones on stage at Carnegie Hall. There are other factors, environmental factors. A child who grows up without hearing music might never know how to make music, right?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Likewise,” he said, “if that musically inclined child had parents to whom music was important, the child might hear music all the time. From the moment that child is born, that child is familiar with music and has an edge on the child who hasn’t heard a note.”

She started tapping her fingers.

He glanced at them and leaned forward. “As I said in my message, this study focuses on success and failure. To my knowledge, there has never before been a group of children conceived nationwide with the same specific goal in mind.”

Her mouth was dry. Her fingers had stopped moving.

“You Millennium Babies share several traits in common. Your parents conceived you at the same time. Your parents had similar goals and desires for you. You came out of the womb and instantly you were branded a success or a failure, at least for this one goal.”

“So,” she said, keeping her voice cold. “Are you going to deal with all those children who were abandoned by their parents when they discovered they didn’t win?”

“Yes,” he said.

The quiet sureness of his response startled her. He spread his hands as if in explanation. “Their parents gave up on them,” he said. “Right from the start. Those babies are perhaps the purest subjects of the study. They were clearly conceived only with the race in mind.”

“And you want me because I’m the most spectacular failure of the group.” Her voice was cold, even though she had to clasp her hands together to keep them from trembling.

“I don’t consider you a failure, Professor Cross,” he said. “You’re well respected in your profession. You’re on a tenure track at a prestigious university—”

“I meant as a Millennium Baby. I’m the public failure. When people think of baby contests, the winners never come to mind. I do.”

He sighed. “That’s part of it. Part of it is your mother’s attitude. In some ways, she’s the most obsessed parent, at least that we can point to.”

Brooke winced.

“I’d like to have you in this study,” he said. “The winners will be. It would be nice to have you represented as well.”

“So that you can get rich off this book, and I’ll be disgraced yet again,” she said.

“Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe you’ll get validated.”

Her shoulders were so tight that it hurt to move her head. “ ‘Validated.’ Such a nice psychiatrist’s word. Making me feel better will salve your conscience while you get rich.”

“You seem obsessed with money,” he said.

“Shouldn’t I be?” she asked. “With my mother?”

He stared at her for a long moment.

Finally, she shook her head. “It’s not the money. I just don’t want to be exploited any more. For any reason.”

He nodded. Then he folded his hands across his stomach and squinched up his face, as if he were thinking. Finally, he said, “Look, here’s how it is. I’m a scientist. You’re a member of a group that interests me and will be useful in my research. If I were researching thirty-year-old history professors who happened to be on a tenure track, I’d probably interview you as well. Or professional women who lived in Wisconsin. Or—”

“Would you?” she asked. “Would you come to me, really?”

He nodded. “It’s policy to check who’s available for study at the university before going outside of it.”

She sighed. He had a point. “A book on Millennium Babies will sell well. They all do. And you’ll get interviews, and you’ll become famous.”

“The study uses Millennium Babies,” he said, “but anything I publish will be about success and failure, not a pop psychology book about people born on January first.”

“You can swear to that?” she asked.

“I’ll do it in our agreement,” he said.

She closed her eyes. She couldn’t believe he was talking her into this.

Apparently he didn’t think he had, for he continued. “You’ll be compensated for your time and your travel expenses.

We can’t promise a lot, but we do promise that we won’t abuse your assistance.”

She opened her eyes. That intensity was back in his face. It didn’t unnerve her. In fact, it reassured her. She would rather have him passionate about the study than anything else.

“All right,” she said. “What do I have to do?”

First she signed waivers. She had all of them checked out by her lawyer—the fact that she even had a lawyer was yet another legacy from her mother—and he said that they were fine, even liberal. Then he tried to talk her out of the study, worried more as a friend, he said, even though he had never been her friend before.

“You’ve been trying to get away from all of this. Now you’re opening it back up. That can’t be good for you.”

But she wasn’t sure what was good for her any more. She had tried not thinking about it. Maybe focusing on herself, on what happened to her from the moment she was born, was better.

She didn’t know, and she didn’t ask. The final agreement she signed was personalized—it guaranteed her access to her file, a copy of the completed study, and promised that any study her information was used in would concern success and failure only, and would not be marketed as a Millennium Baby product. Her lawyer asked for a few changes, but very few, considering how opposed he was to this project. She was content with the concessions Professor Franke made for her, including the one which allowed her to leave after the first two months.

But the first two months were grueling, in their own way. She had to carve time out of an already full schedule for a complete physical, which included DNA sampling. This had been a major sticking point for her lawyer—that her DNA and her genetic history would not be made available to anyone else—and he had actually gotten Franke to sign forms that attested to that fact. The sampling, for all its trouble, was relatively painless. A few strands of hair, some skin scrapings, and two vials of blood, and she was done.

The psychological exams took the longest. Most of them required the presence of the psychiatric research member of the team, a dour woman who barely spoke to Brooke when she came in. The woman watched while Brooke used a computer to take tests: a Rorschach, a Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Interview, a Thematic Apperception Test, and a dozen others whose names she just as quickly forgot. One of them was a standard IQ test. Another a specialized test designed by Franke’s team for his previous experiment. All of them felt like games to Brooke, and all of them took over an hour each to complete.

Her most frustrating time, though, was with the sociologist, a well-meaning man named Meyer. He wanted to correlate her experiences with the experiences of others, and put them in the context of the society at the time. He’d ask questions, though, and she’d correct them—feeling that his knowledge of modern history was poor. Finally she complained to Franke, who smiled, and told her that her perceptions and the researchers’ didn’t have to match. What was important to them wasn’t what was true for the society, but what was true for her. She wanted to argue, but it wasn’t her study, and she decided she was placing too much energy into all of it.

Through it all, she had weekly appointments with a psychologist who asked her questions she didn’t want to think about. How has being a Millennium Baby influenced your outlook on life? What’s your first memory? What do you think of your mother?

Brooke couldn’t answer the first. The second question was easy. Her first memory was of television lights blinding her, creating prisms, and her chubby baby fingers reaching for them, only to be caught and held by her mother’s cold hand.

Brooke declined to answer the third question, but the psychologist asked it at every single meeting. And after every single meeting, Brooke went home and cried.

She gave a mid-term exam in her World Wars class, the first time she had ever done so in a survey class. But she decided to see how effective she was being, since her concentration was more on her own past than the one she was supposed to be teaching.

Her graduate assistants complained about it, especially when they looked at the exam itself. Her assistants had tried to talk her into a simple true/false/multiple choice exam, and she had glared at them. “I don’t want to give a test that can be graded by computer,” she said. “I want to see a handwritten exam, and I want to know what these kids have learned.” And because she wanted to know that—not because of her assistants’ complaints (as she made very clear)—she took twenty of the exams to grade herself.

But before she started, she had a meeting in Franke’s office. He had called her.

Franke’s office was in a part of the campus she didn’t get to very often. A winding road took her past Washburn Observatory on a bluff overlooking Lake Mendota, and into a grove of young trees. The parking area was large and filled with small electric and energy efficient cars. She walked up the brick sidewalk. Unlike the sidewalks around the rest of the city, this one didn’t have the melting piles of dirty snow that were reminders of the long hard winter.

Instead, tulips and irises poked out of the brown dirt lining the walk.

The building was an old Victorian style house, rather large for its day. The only visible signs of a remodel (besides the pristine condition of the paint and roof) were the security system outside, and the heatpump near the driveway.

Clearly this was a faculty-only building; no classes were held here. She turned the authentic glass door knob and stepped into a narrow foyer. A small electronic screen floated in the center of the room. The screen moved toward her.

“I’m here to see Dr. Franke,” she said.

“Second floor,” the digital voice responded. “He is expecting you.”

She sighed softly and mounted the stairs. With the exception of the electronics, everything in the hall reflected the period. Even the stairs weren’t covered in carpet, but instead in an old-fashioned runner, tacked on the sides, with a long gold carpet holder pushed against the back of each step.

The stairs ended in a long narrow hallway, illuminated by electric lights done up to resemble gaslights. Only one door stood open. She knocked on it, then, without waiting for an invitation, went in.

The office wasn’t like hers. This office was a suite, with a main area and a private room to the side. A leather couch was pushed against the window, and two matching leather chairs flanked it. Teak tables provided the accents, with round gold table lamps the only flourish.

Professor Franke stood in the door to the private area. He looked at her examining his office.

“Impressive,” she said.

He shrugged. “The university likes researchers, especially those who add to its prestige.”

She knew that. She had published her thesis, and it had received some acclaim in academic circles, which was why she was as far ahead as she was. But very few historians became famous for their research. She doubted she would ever achieve this sort of success.

“Would you like a seat?” Franke asked.

She sat on one of the leather chairs. It was soft, and molded around her. “I didn’t think you’d need to interview every subject to see if they wanted to continue,” she said.

“Every subject isn’t you.” He sat across from her. His hair was slightly mussed, as if he had been running his fingers through it, and he had a coffee stain above the breastpocket of his white shirt. “We had agreements.”

She nodded.

“I will tell you some of what we have learned,” he said. “It’s preliminary, of course.”

“Of course.” She sounded calmer than she felt. Her heart was pounding.

“We’ve found three interesting things. The first is that all Millennium Babies in this study walked earlier than the norm, and spoke earlier as well. Since most were firstborns, this is unusual. Firstborns usually speak later than the norm because their every need is catered to. They don’t need to speak right away, and when they do, they usually speak in full sentences.”

“Meaning?”

“I hesitate to say for certain, but it might be indicative of great drive. Stemming, I believe, from the fact that the parents were driven.” His eyes were sparkling. His enthusiasm for his work was catching. She found herself leaning forward like a student in her favorite class. “We’re also finding genetic markers in the very areas we were looking for.

And some interesting biochemical indications that may help us isolate the biological aspect of this.”

“You’re moving fast,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s what’s nice about having a good team.”

And a lot of subjects, she thought. Not to mention building on earlier research.

“We’ve also found that there is direct correlation between a child’s winning or losing the millennium race and her perception of herself as a success or failure, independent of external evidence.”

Her mouth was dry. “Meaning?”

“No matter how successful they are, the majority of Millennium Babies—at least the ones we chose for this study, the ones whose parents conceived them only as part of the race—perceive themselves as failures.”

“Including me,” she said.

He nodded. The movement was slight, and it was gentle.

“Why?” she asked.

“That’s the thing we can only speculate at. At least at this moment.” He wasn’t telling her everything. But then, the study wasn’t done. He tilted his head slightly. “Are you willing to go to phase two of the study?”

“If I say no, will you tell me what else you’ve discovered?” she asked.

“That’s our agreement.” He paused and then added, “I would really like it if you continued.”

Brooke smiled. “That much is obvious.”

He smiled too, and then looked down. “This last part is nothing like the first. You won’t have test after test. It’s only going to last for a few days. Can you do that?”

Some of the tension left her shoulders. She could do a few days. But that was it. “All right,” she said.

“Good.” He smiled at her, and she braced herself. There was more. “I’ll put you down for the next segment. It doesn’t start until Memorial Day. I have to ask you to stay in town, and set aside that weekend.”

She had no plans. She usually stayed in town on Memorial Day weekend. Madison emptied out, the students going home, and the city became a small town—one she dearly loved.

She nodded.

He waited a moment, his gaze darting downward, and then meeting hers again. “There’s one more thing.”

This was why he had called her here. This was why she needed to see him in person.

“I was wondering if your mother ever told you who your father is. It would help our study if we knew something about both parents.”

Brooke threaded her hands together, willing herself to remain calm. This had been a sensitive issue her entire life.

“No,” she said. “My mother has no idea who my father is. She went to a sperm bank.”

Franke frowned. “I just figured, since your mother seemed so meticulous about everything else, she would have researched your father as well.”

“She did,” Brooke said. “He was a physicist, very well known, apparently. It was one of those sperm banks that specialized in famous or successful people. And my mother did check that out.”

Your father must not have been as wonderful as they said he was. Look at you. It had to come from somewhere.

“Do you know the name of the bank?”

“No.”

Franke sighed. “I guess we have all that we can, then.”

She hated the disapproval in his tone. “Surely others in this study only have one parent.”

“Yes,” he said. “There’s a subset of you. I was just hoping—”

“Anything to make the study complete,” she said sarcastically.

“Not anything,” he said. “You can trust me on that.”

Brooke didn’t hear from Professor Franke again for nearly a month, and then only in the form of a message, delivered to House, giving her the exact times, dates, and places of the Memorial Day meetings. She forgot about the study except when she saw it on her calendar.

The semester was winding down. The mid-term in her World Wars class showed her two things: that she had an affinity for the topic that she was sharing with the students; and that at least two of her graduate assistants had a strong aversion to work. She lectured both assistants, spoke to the chair of the department about teaching the survey class next semester, and continued on with the lectures, focusing on them as if she were the graduate student instead of the professor.

By late April, she had her final exam written—a long cumbersome thing, a mixture of true/false/multiple choice for the assistants, and two essay questions for her. She was thinking of a paper herself—one on the way those wars still echoed through the generations—and she was trying to decide if she wanted the summer to work on it or to teach as she usually did.

The last Saturday in April was unusually balmy, in the seventies without much humidity, promising a beautiful summer ahead. The lilac bush near her kitchen window had bloomed. The birds had returned, and her azaleas were blossoming as well. She was in the garage, digging for a lawn chair that she was convinced she still had, when she heard the hum of an electric car.

She came out of the garage, dusty and streaked with grime. A green car pulled into her driveway, next to the ancient pick-up she used for hauling.

Something warned her right from the start. A glimpse, perhaps, or a movement. Her stomach flipped over, and she had to swallow sudden nausea. She had left her personal phone inside—it was too nice to be connected to the world today—and she had never gotten the garage hooked into House’s computer because she hadn’t seen the need for the expense.

Still, as the car shuddered to a stop, she glanced at the screen door, wondering if she could make it in time. But the car’s door was already opening, and in this kind of stand-off, fake courage was better than obvious panic.

Her mother stepped out. She was a slender woman. She wore blue jeans and a pale peach summer sweater that accented her silver and gold hair. The hair was new and had the look of permanence. Apparently her mother had finally decided to settle on a color. She wore gold bangles, and a matching necklace, but her ears were bare.

“I have a restraining order against you,” Brooke said, struggling to keep her voice level. “You are not supposed to be here.”

“I’m not the one who broke the order.” Her mother’s voice was smooth and seductive. Her courtroom voice. She had won a lot of cases with that melodious warmth. It didn’t seem too strident. It just seemed sure.

“I sure as hell didn’t want contact with you,” Brooke said.

“No? Is that why your university contacted me?”

Brooke’s heart was pounding so hard she wondered if her mother could hear it. “Who contacted you?”

“A Professor Franke, for some study. Something to do with DNA samples. I was to send them through my doctor, but you know I wouldn’t do such a thing with anything that delicate.”

Son of a bitch. Brooke hadn’t known they were going to try something like that. She didn’t remember any mention of it, nothing in the forms.

“I have nothing to do with that,” Brooke said.

“It seems you’re in some study. That seems like involvement to me,” her mother said.

“Not the kind that gets you around a restraining order. Now get the hell off my property.”

“Brooke, honey,” her mother said, taking a step toward her. “I think you and I should discuss this—”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Brooke said. “I want you to stay away from me.”

“That’s silly.” Her mother took another step forward. “We should be able to settle this, Brooke. Like adults. I’m your mother—”

“That’s not my fault,” Brooke snapped. She glanced at the screen door again.

“A restraining order is for people who threaten your life. I’ve never hurt you, Brooke.”

“There’s judge in Dane County who disagrees, Mother.”

“Because you were so hysterical,” her mother said. “We’ve had a good run of it, you and I.”

Brooke felt the color drain from her face. “How’s that, Mother? The family that sues together stays together?”

“Brooke, we have been denied what’s rightfully ours. We—”

“It never said in any of those contests that a child had to be born by natural means. You misunderstood, Mother.

Or you tried to be even more perfect than anyone else. So what if I’m the first vaginal birth of the new millennium. So what? It was thirty years ago. Let it go.”

“The first baby received enough in endorsements to pay for a college education and to have a trust fund—”

“And you’ve racked up enough in legal fees that you could have done the same.” Brooke rubbed her hands over her arms. The day had grown colder.

“No, honey,” her mother said in that patronizing tone that Brooke hated. “I handled my own case. There were no fees.”

It was like arguing with a wall. “I have made it really, really clear that I never wanted to see you again,” Brooke said.

“So why do you keep hounding me? You don’t even like me.”

“Of course I like you, Brooke. You’re my daughter.”

“I don’t like you,” Brooke said.

“We’re flesh and blood,” her mother said softly. “We owe it to each other to be there for each other.”

“Maybe you should have remembered that when I was growing up. I was a child, Mother, not a trophy. You saw me as a means to an end, an end you now think you got cheated out of. Sometimes you blame me for that—I was too big, I didn’t come out fast enough, I was breach—and sometimes you blame the contest people for not discounting all those ‘artificial methods’ of birth, but you never, ever blame yourself. For anything.”

“Brooke,” her mother said, and took another step forward.

Brooke held up her hand. “Did you ever think, Mother, that it’s your fault we missed the brass ring? Maybe you should have pushed harder. Maybe you should have had a c-section. Or maybe you shouldn’t have gotten pregnant at all.”

“Brooke!”

“You weren’t fit to be a parent. That’s what the judge decided on. You’re right. You never hit me. You didn’t have to.

You told me how worthless I was from the moment I could hear. All that anger you felt about losing you directed at me.

Because, until I was born, you never lost anything.”

Her mother shook her head slightly. “I never meant that. When I would say that, I meant—”

“See? You’re so good at taking credit for anything that goes well, and so bad at taking it when something doesn’t.”

“I still don’t see why you’re so angry at me,” her mother said.

This time, it was Brooke’s turn to take a step forward. “You don’t? You don’t remember that last official letter? The one cited in my restraining order?”

“You have never understood the difference between a legal argument and the real issues.”

“Apparently the judge is just as stupid about legal arguments as I am, Mother.” Brooke was shaking. “He believed it when you said that I was brought into this world simply to win that contest, and by rights, the state should be responsible for my care, not you.”

“It was a lawsuit, Brooke. I had an argument to make.”

“Maybe you can justify it that way, but I can’t. I know the truth when I hear it. And so does the rest of the world.”

Brooke swallowed. Her throat was so tight it hurt. “Now get out of here.”

“Brooke, I—”

“I mean it, Mother. Or I will call the police.”

“Do you want me at least to do the DNA work?”

“I don’t give a damn what you do, so long as I never see you again.”

Her mother sighed. “Other children forgive their parents for mistakes they made in raising them.”

“Was your attitude a mistake, Mother? Have you reformed? Or do you still have lawsuits out there? Are you still trying to collect on a thirty-year-old dream?”

Her mother shook her head and went back to the car. Brooke knew that posture. It meant that Brooke was being unreasonable. Brooke was impossible to argue with. Brooke was the burden.

“Some day,” her mother said, “you’ll regret how you treated me.”

“Why?” Brooke asked. “You don’t seem to regret how you treated me.”

“Oh, I regret it, Brooke. If I had known it would have made you so bitter toward me, I never would have talked to you about our problems. I would have handled them alone.”

Brooke clenched a fist and then unclenched it. She made herself take a deep breath and, instead of pointing out to her mother that she had done it again—she had blamed Brooke—Brooke said, “I’m calling the police now,” and started toward the house.

“There’s no need,” her mother said. “I’m going. I’m just sorry—”

And the rest of her words got lost in the bang of the screen door.

An hour later, Brooke found herself outside Professor Franke’s office. She ignored the small electronic screen that floated ahead of her, bleating that she didn’t have an appointment and she wasn’t welcome in the building. It was a dumb little machine; when she had asked if Professor Franke was in, it had told her he was. A good human secretary would have lied.

Apparently the system had already contacted Franke, for he stood in his door, waiting for her, a smile on his face even though his eyes were wary.

“Everything all right, Professor Cross?”

“I never gave you permission to contact my mother,” she said as she came up the stairs.

“Your mother?”

“She came to my house today, claiming I’d nullified my restraining order by contacting her. She said you asked her for DNA samples.”

“Come into my office,” he said.

Brooke walked past him and heard him close the door. “We did contact her, as we did all the parents, for DNA samples. We were explicit in expressing our needs as part of the study, and that they had every right to refuse if they wanted. In no way did we ask her to come here or tell her that you asked us to contact her.”

“She says it came from me and she knew I was involved in the study.”

“Of course,” he said. “One of the waivers you signed gave us permission to examine your genetic heritage. That includes parents, grandparents, living relatives if necessary. Your attorney didn’t object.”

Her attorney was good, but not that good. He probably hadn’t known what that all entailed.

“I want you to send a letter, through your attorney or the university’s counsel, stating that I in no way asked you to contact her and that you did it of your own volition.”

“Do you want me to apologize?” he asked.

“To me or to her?” she asked.

He drew in his breath sharply and she realized for the first time that she had knocked him off balance.

“I meant to her,” he said, “but I guess I owe you an apology too.”

Brooke stared at him for a moment. No one had said that to her before.

“Look,” he said, apparently not understanding her silence. “I should have thought it through when your mother said she didn’t allow such confidential information to be sent to people she didn’t know. I thought that was a refusal.”

“For anyone else it would have been,” Brooke said. “But not for my mother.”

“She’s an interesting woman.”

“From the outside,” Brooke said.

He nodded as if he understood. “For the record, I didn’t mean to cause you trouble. I’m sorry I didn’t warn you.”

“It’s all right,” Brooke said. “Just don’t let it happen again.”

Except for receiving a copy of the official letter Franke sent to her mother, Brooke didn’t think about the study again until Memorial Day weekend. The semester was over. Most of her students successfully answered the question on her World Wars final: Explain the influence World War I had on World War II.

One student actually called World War I the mother of World War II. The phrase stopped Brooke as she read, made her shudder, and hoped that not every monstrous mother begot an even more monstrous child.

Professor Franke sent instructions for Memorial Day weekend with the official letter. He asked her to set aside time from mid-afternoon on Friday to late evening on Monday. She was to report to TheaterPlace, a restaurant and bar on the west side of town.

She’d been to the restaurant before. It was a novelty spot in what had once been a four-plex movie palace. The restaurant was in the very center, with huge meeting rooms off to the sides. The builders had called it a gathering place for organizations too small to hold conventions. Still, it had everything—the large restaurant, the bar, places for presentations, places for seminars, places for quiet get-togethers. There were three smaller restaurants in what had once been the projection booths—restaurants that barely seated twenty. One of the larger rooms even showed live theater once a month.

Cars were no longer allowed in this part of town, thanks to a Green referendum three years before. Someone had tried to make exception for electric vehicles but that hadn’t worked either, as the traffic cops said it would be too hard to patrol. Instead, the light rail made several stops, and some enterprising entrepreneur had built underground tunnels to connect all of the buildings. Many people Brooke knew preferred to shop here in the winter; it kept them out of the freezing cold. But she found the necessity of taking the light rail annoying. She would have preferred her own car so that she could leave on her own schedule.

She walked from the light rail stop near the refurbished mall to TheaterPlace. On the outside, it still looked like a four-plex: the raised roof, the warehouse shape. Only up close did it become apparent that TheaterPlace had been completely gutted and remodeled, right down to the smoked glass that had replaced the clear windows.

A sign on the main entrance notified her that TheaterPlace was closed for a private party. She touched the door anyway—knowing the party was theirs—and a scanner instantly identified her.

Welcome, Brooke Cross. You may enter.

She shuddered slightly, knowing that Franke had programmed the scanner to recognize either her fingerprints on the backside of the door or her DNA. She felt like her mother, worried that Franke had too much information.

The door clicked open and she let herself inside. A short dark-haired woman she had never seen before hurried to her side.

“Professor Cross,” the woman said. “Welcome.”

“Thanks,” Brooke said.

“Just a few rules before we get started,” the woman said. “This is the last time we’ll be using names today. We ask you not to tell anyone who you are by name, although you may tell them anything else you wish about yourself.

Please identify yourself using this number only.”

She handed Brooke a stick-on badge with the number 333 printed in bold black numbers.

“Then what?” Brooke asked.

“Wait for Professor Franke to make his announcement. You’re in the Indiana Jones Room, by the way.”

“Thanks,” Brooke said. She stuck the label to her white blouse and made her way down the hall. All of the rooms were named after characters from famous movies, and the décor in all of them except the restaurants was the same: movie posters on the wall, soft golden lighting, and a thin light blue carpet. The furniture moved according to the function. She had been in the Jones Room before for a faculty party honoring some distinguished professor from Beijing, but she doubted the room would be the same.

The double doors were open and inside, she heard the sound of soft conversation. She stopped just outside the door and surveyed the room.

The lights were up—not soft and golden at all—but full daylight, so that everyone’s faces were visible. The Jones Room was one of the largest—the only theater, apparently, whose dimensions had been left intact. It seemed about half full.

There were tables lining the wall, with various kinds of foods and beverages, small plates to hold everything, and silverware glimmering in the brightness. People stood in various clusters. There were no chairs, no furniture groupings, and Brooke knew that was on purpose. Small floating serving trays hovered near each group. Whenever someone set an empty glass on one, the tray would float through an opening in the wall, and another tray would take its place.

Something about the groupings made her nervous, and it wasn’t the lack of chairs or the fact that she didn’t know anyone. She stared for a moment, trying to figure out what had caught her.

No one looked the same; they were fat and thin, tall and short. They had long hair and beards, no hair, and dyed hair. They were white, black, Asian and Hispanic or they were multiracial, with no features that marked them as part of any particular ethnic group. They were incredibly diverse—but none of them were elderly or underage. None of them had wrinkles, except for a few laugh lines, and none of them seemed younger than twenty.

They were about the same age. She would guess they were the same age—the exact same age as she was. It was a gathering of Franke’s subjects for this study: all of them born January 1, 2000. All of them thirty years and 147 days old.

She shuddered. No wonder Franke was worried about this second half of the study. Most studies of this nature didn’t allow the participants to get to know each other. She wondered what discipline he was dabbling in now, what sort of results he was expecting.

A man stopped beside her just outside the door. He was wearing a denim shirt, a bolo tie, and tight blue jeans. His long blond hair—naturally sunstreaked—brushed against his collar. He had a tan—something she had rarely seen in her lifetime—and it made his skin a burnished gold. He had letters on his name badge: DKGHY.

“Hi,” he said. His voice was deep, with a Southern twang. “I guess we just go in, huh?”

“I’ve been steeling myself for it,” she said.

He smiled. “Feels like they took away my armor when they took my name. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say, ‘Hi. I’m DKG-whatever-the-hell the rest of those letters are.’ Or if I’m not supposed to say anything at all.”

“Well, I don’t want to be called 333.”

“Can’t say as I blame you.” He grinned. “How about I call you Tre, and you can call me—oh, hell, I don’t know—”

“De,” she said. “I’ll call you De.”

“Nice to meet you, Tre,” he said, holding out his hand.

She took it. His fingers were warm. “Nice to meet you, De.”

“Where do you hail from?”

“Right here,” she said.

“You’re kiddin’ ? No travel expenses, huh?”

“And no hotel rooms.”

He grinned. “Sometimes hotel rooms can be nice, especially when you don’t get to see the inside of them very often.”

“I suppose.” She smiled at him. He was making this easier than she expected. “Where’re you from?”

“Originally Galveston. But I’ve been in L’siana a long time now.”

“New Orleans?”

“Just outside.”

“Some city you got there.”

“Yeah, but we ain’t got a place like this.” He looked around. “Want to go in?”

“Now I do,” she said.

They walked side by side as if they were a couple who had been together most of their lives. Neither of them looked at the food, although he snatched two bottles of sparkling water off one of the tables, and handed one to her. She opened it, glad to have something to carry.

A few more people came in the doors. She and De went farther into the room. Bits of conversation floated by her:

“. . . never really got over it . . .”

“. . . worked for the past five years as a dental hygienist . . .”

“. . . my father wanted to take us out of the country, but . . .”

Then there was a slight bonging sound, and the conversation halted. Franke stood in the very front of the room, where the theater screen used to be. He was easy to see because the floor slanted downward slightly. He held up his hands, and in a moment there was complete silence.

“I want to thank you all for coming.” His voice was being amplified. It sounded as he were talking right next to Brooke instead of half a room away. “Your assignment today is easy. We do not want you sharing names, but you can talk about anything else. We will be providing meals later on in various restaurants—your badge ID will be listed on a door—and we will have drinks in the bar after that. We ask that no one leave before midnight, and that you all return at noon tomorrow for the second phase.”

“That’s it?” someone asked.

“That’s it,” Franke said. “Enjoy yourselves.”

“I have a bad feeling about this, Tre,” De said.

“Me, too,” Brooke said. “It can’t be this simple.”

“I don’t think it will be.”

She sighed. “Well, we signed on for this, so we may as well enjoy it.”

He looked at her sideways, his blue eyes bright. “Want to be my date for the day, darlin’ ?”

“It’s always nice to have one friendly face,” she said, surprised at how easily she was flirting with him. She never flirted with anyone.

“That it is.” He offered her his arm. “Let’s see how many of these nice folks are interested in conversation.”

“Mingle, huh?” she asked, as she put her hand in the crook of his arm.

“I think that’s what we’re meant to do.” He frowned. “Only god knows, I ‘spect it’ll all backfire ‘fore the weekend’s done.”

It didn’t backfire that night. Brooke had a marvelous dinner in one of the small restaurants with De, a woman from Boston, and two men from California. They shared stories about their lives and their jobs, and only touched in passing on the thing that they had in common. In fact, the only time they discussed it was when De brought it up over dessert.

“What made y’all sign up for this foolishness?” he asked.

“The money,” said the man from Los Gatos. He was slender to the point of gauntness, with dark eyes and thinning hair. His shirt had wear marks around the collar and was fraying slightly on the cuffs. “I thought it’d be an easy buck. I didn’t expect all the tests.”

“Me, either,” the woman from Boston said. She was tall and broadshouldered, with muscular arms. During the conversation, she mentioned that she had played professional basketball until she was sidelined with a knee injury. “I haven’t had so many tests since I got out of school.”

The man from Santa Barbara said nothing, which surprised Brooke. He was a short stubby man with more charm than he had originally appeared to have. He had been the most talkative during dinner—regaling them with stories about his various jobs, and his two children.

“How about you, Tre?” De asked Brooke.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I wasn’t part of the university,” she said, and realized that was true. Professor Franke probably wouldn’t have had the time to convince her, and she would have dismissed him out of hand.

“Me,” De said, “I jumped at it. Never been asked to do something like this before. Felt it was sort of important, you know. Anything to help the human condition.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Santa Barbara said.

“If you don’t believe it,” Los Gatos said to Santa Barbara, “why’d you sign up?”

“Free flight to Madison, vacationer’s paradise,” Santa Barbara said, and they all laughed. But he never did answer the question.

When Brooke got home, she sat on her porch and looked at the stars. The night was warm. The crickets were chirping and she thought she heard a frog answer them from a nearby ditch.

The evening had disturbed her in its simplicity. Like everyone else, she wanted to know what Franke was looking for. The rest of the study had been so directed, and this had been so free form.

Dinner had been nice. Drinks afterward with a different group had been nice as well. But the conversation rarely got deeper than anecdotes and current history. No one discussed the study, and no one discussed the past.

She lost De after dinner, which gave her a chance to meet several other people: a woman from Chicago, twins from Akron, and three friends from Salt Lake City. She’d had a good time, and found people she could converse with—one historian, two history buffs, and a librarian who seemed to know a little bit about everything.

De joined her later in the evening, and walked her to the rail stop. He’d leaned against the plastic shelter and smiled at her. She hadn’t met a man as attractive as he was in a long time. Not since college.

“I’d ask you to my hotel,” he said, “but I have a feelin’ anything we do this weekend, in or out of that strange building, is going to be fodder for scientists.”

She smiled. She’d had that feeling too.

“Still,” he said, “I got to do one thing.”

He leaned in and kissed her. She froze for a moment; she hadn’t been kissed in nearly ten years. Then she eased into it, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him back, not wanting to stop, even when he pulled away.

“Hmm,” he said. His eyes were closed. He opened them slowly. “I think that’s titillatin’ enough for the scientists, don’t you?”

She almost said no. But she knew better. She didn’t want to read about her sex life in Franke’s next book.

The rail came down the tracks, gliding silently toward them. “See you tomorrow?” she asked.

“You can bet on it,” De said. And there had been promise in his words, promise she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear.

She brought her knees onto her lawn chair, and wrapped her arms around them. Part of her wished he was here, and part of her was glad he wasn’t. She never let anyone come to her house. She didn’t want to share it. She had had enough invasions of privacy in her life to prevent this one.

But she had nearly invited De, a man she didn’t really know. Maybe De really wasn’t a Millennium Baby. Perhaps a bunch of people weren’t. Perhaps that was what the numbers and the letters meant. She had spent much of the evening staring at them, wondering. They appeared to be randomly generated, but that couldn’t be. They had to have some purpose.

She shook her head and rested her cheek on her knees. She was taking this much too seriously, the way she always took things. And soon she would be done with it. She would have bits of information she hadn’t had before, and she would store them into a file in her mind, never to be examined again.

Somehow that thought made her sad. The night was beginning to get chilly. She stood, stretched, and made her way to bed.

The next morning, they met in a different room—the Rose Room—named after the character in the twentieth century movie Titanic. Brooke hoped that the name wasn’t a sign.

There were pastries and coffee against the wall, along with every kind of juice imaginable and lots of fresh fruit, but again, there were no chairs. Brooke’s feet hurt from the day before—she usually stood to lecture, but not for several hours—and she hoped she’d get a chance to sit before the day was out.

She was nearly late again, and hurried inside as they closed the doors. The room smelled of fresh air mixed with coffee and sweat. The group had gathered again, the faces vaguely familiar now, even the faces of people she hadn’t yet met. The people toward the back who saw her enter smiled at her or nodded in recognition. It felt like they had all bonded simply by spending an evening in the same room. An evening and the promise of a long weekend.

She shivered. The air-conditioning was on high, and the room was cold. It would warm up before the day was out; the sheer number of bodies guaranteed that. But she still wondered if she was dressed warmly enough in her casual lilac blouse and her khaki pants.

“Strange how these places look the same, day or night.”

She turned. De was half a step behind her, his long hair loose about his face. He still wore jeans and his fancy boots, but instead of the denim shirt and bolo tie, he wore an understated white open collar shirt that accented his tan.

Somehow, she suspected, he seemed more comfortable in this. Had he worn the other as a way of identifying himself or a way of putting others off? She would probably never know.

“The people look different,” she said.

“Just a little.” He smiled at her. “You look nice.”

“And you’re flirting.”

He shrugged. “I always believe in using my time wisely.”

She smiled, and turned as a hush fell over the crowd. Franke had mounted the stage in front. He seemed very small in this place. A few of his assistants stood on either side of him.

“Here it comes,” De said.

“What?”

“Whatever it is that’s going to make this cocktail party stop.” He was staring at Franke too, and his clear blue eyes seemed wary. “I’ve half a mind to leave now. Want to join me?”

“And do what?”

“Dunno. See the sights?”

It sounded like a good idea. But, as she had said the day before, she had signed up for this, and she didn’t break her commitments. And, she had to admit, she was curious.

She bit her lower lip, trying to think of a good way to respond. Apparently she didn’t have to.

De sighed. “Didn’t think so.”

The silence in the room was growing. Franke stared at all of them, rocking slightly on his feet. If Brooke had to guess, she would have thought him very nervous.

“All right,” he said. “I have a few announcements. First, we will be serving lunch at one P.M. in the main restaurant.

Dinner will be at seven in the same place. You will not have assigned seating. Secondly, after I’m through, you’re free to tell each other your names. We’ve had enough of secrets.”

He paused, and this time Brooke felt it, that dread she had seen in De’s eyes.

“Finally, I would like everyone with a letter on your name badge to go to the right side of the room, and everyone with a number to go to the left.”

People stood for a moment, looking around, waiting for someone to go first. De put a hand on her shoulder. “Here goes nothing,” he said. He ran his finger along her collarbone and then walked to the right.

“Come on, folks,” Franke said. “It’s not hard. Letters to the right. Numbers to the left.”

Brooke could still feel De’s hand on her skin. She looked in his direction, seeing his blond head towering over the small group of letters who had gathered near the pastries on the far right wall.

She took a deep breath and headed left.

The numbers had gathered near the pastries too, only on the left. She wondered what Franke’s researchers would make of that. Los Gatos was there, his hand hovering between the cinnamon rolls and the donuts as if he couldn’t decide. So was one of the twins from Akron, and the woman from Boston. Brooke joined them.

“What do you think this is?” Brooke asked.

“A way of identifying us as we run through the maze.”

Brooke recognized that voice. She turned and saw Santa Barbara. He shrugged and smiled at her.

She picked up a donut hole and ate it, then made herself a cup of tea while she waited for the room to settle.

It finally did. There was an empty space in the center of the carpet, a space so wide it seemed like an ocean to her.

“Good,” Franke said. “Now I’m going to tell you what the badges mean.”

There was a slight murmuring as the groups took that in. Boston, Santa Barbara, and Los Gatos flanked Brooke. Her dinner group, minus De.

“Those of you with letters are real Millennium Babies.”

Brooke felt a protest rise in her throat. She was born on January 1, 2000. She was a Millennium Baby.

“You were all chosen as such by your state or your country or your city. Your parents received endorsements or awards or newspaper coverage. Those of you with numbers . . .”

“Are fucking losers,” Los Gatos mumbled under his breath.

“. . . were born near midnight on January 1, but were too late to receive any prizes. You’re here because your parents also received publicity or gave interviews before you were born stating that the purpose behind the pregnancy wasn’t to conceive a child, but to conceive a child born a few seconds after midnight on January 1 of 2000. You were created to be official Millennium Babies, and failed to receive that title.”

Franke paused briefly.

“So, feel free to make real introductions, and mingle. The facility is yours for the day. All we ask is that you do not leave until we tell you to.”

“That’s it?” Boston asked.

“That’s enough,” Santa Barbara said. “He’s just turned us into the haves and the have-nots.”

“Son of a bitch,” Los Gatos said.

“We knew that the winners were here,” Boston said.

“Yeah, but I assumed there’d be only a few of them,” Los Gatos said. “Not half the group.”

“It makes sense though,” Santa Barbara said. “This is a study of success and failure.”

Brooke listened to them idly. She was staring at the right side of the room. All her life, she had been programmed to hate those people. She even studied a few of them, looking them up on the net, seeing how many articles were written about them.

She had stopped when she was ten. Her mother had caught her, and told her what happened to the others didn’t matter. Brooke and her mother would have made more of the opportunity, if they had just been given their due.

Their due.

De was staring at her from across the empty carpet. That look of dread was still on his face.

“So,” Santa Barbara said. “I guess we can use real names now.”

“I guess,” said Los Gatos. He hitched up his pants, and glanced at Boston.

She shrugged. “I’m Julie Hunt. I was born at 12:15 Eastern Standard Time in . . .”

Brooke stopped listening. She didn’t want to know about the failures. She knew how it felt to be part of their group.

But she didn’t know what it was like to be with the winners.

She wiped her damp hands on her pants and crossed the empty carpet. De watched her come. In fact the entire room watched her passage as if she were Moses parting the Red Sea.

The successes weren’t talking to each other. They were staring at her.

When she was a few feet away from him, he reached out and pulled her to his side, as if she were in some sort of danger and he needed to rescue her.

“Comin’ to the enemy?” he asked, and there was some amusement in his tone. “Or’d they give you a number when you shoulda had a letter?”

The lie would have been so easy. But then she would have had to lie about everything, and that wouldn’t work.

“No,” she said. “I was born at 12:05 A.M. in Detroit, Michigan.”

One of the women toward the back looked at her sharply. Anyone from Michigan might recognize that time. Her mother’s lawsuits created more than enough publicity. Out of the corner of her eye, Brooke saw Franke. She could feel his intensity meters away.

“Then how come you made the crossin’, darlin’ ?” De’s accent got thicker when he was nervous. She had never noticed that before.

She could have given him the easy answer, that she wanted to be beside him, but it wasn’t right. The way the entire group was staring at her, eyes wide, lips slightly parted, breathing shallow. It was as if they were afraid she was going to do something to them. But what could she do? Yell at them for something that was no fault of their own? They were the lucky ones. They’d been born at the right time in the right place.

But because they hadn’t earned that luck, they were afraid of her. After all, she had been part of the same contest.

Only she had been a few minutes late.

No one had moved. They were waiting for her to respond.

“I guess I came,” she said, “because I wanted to know what it was like to be a winner.”

“Standing over here won’t make you a winner,” one of the men said.

She flushed. “I know that. I came to listen to you. To see how you’ve lived. If that’s all right.”

“I’m not sure I understand you, darlin’,” De said. Only his name wasn’t De. She didn’t know his name. Maybe she never would.

“You were all born winners. From the first moment. Just like we were losers.”

Her voice carried in the large room. She hadn’t expected the acoustics to be so good.

“I don’t know about everyone else in my group, but my birthtime has affected my entire life. My mother—” Brooke paused. She hadn’t meant to discuss her mother “—never let me forget who I was. And I was wondering if any of you experienced that. Or if you felt special because you’d won. Or if you even knew.”

Her voice trailed off at the end. She couldn’t imagine not knowing. A life of blissful ignorance. If she hadn’t known, she might have gone on to great things. She might have reached farther, tried harder. She might have expected success with every endeavor, instead of being surprised at it.

They were staring at her as if she were speaking Greek.

Maybe she was.

“I don’t know why it matters,” a man said beside her. “It was just a silly little contest.”

“I hadn’t even remembered it,” a woman said, “until Dr. Franke’s people contacted me.”

Brooke felt something catch in her throat. “Was it like that for all of you?”

“Of course not,” De said. “I got interviewed every New Year’s like clockwork. What’s it like five years into the millennium? Ten? Twenty? That’s one of the reasons I moved to L’siana. I’m not much for attention, ‘specially the kind I don’t deserve.”

“Money was nice,” one of the women said. “It got me to college.”

Another woman shook her head. “My folks spent it all.”

More people from the left were moving across the divide, as if they were drawn to the conversation.

“So’d mine,” said one of the men.

“There wasn’t any money with mine. Just got my picture in the newspaper. Still have that on my wall,” another man said.

Brooke felt someone bump her from behind. Los Gatos had joined her. So had Santa Barbara and Boston—um, Julie.

“Why’d this contest make such a difference to you?” one of the letter women asked. She was staring at Brooke.

“It didn’t,” Brooke said after a moment. “It mattered to my mother. She lost.”

“Hell,” De said. “People lose. That’s part of living.”

Brooke looked at him. There was a slight frown mark between his eyes. He didn’t understand either. He didn’t know what it was like being outside, with his face pressed against the glass.

“Three weeks after I was born,” Los Gatos said, “My parents dumped me with a friend of theirs, saying they weren’t ready for a baby. I never saw them. I don’t even know what they look like.”

“My parents said they couldn’t afford me,” Santa Barbara said. “They were planning on some prize money.”

“They abandoned you too?” the woman asked.

“No,” he said. “They just made it clear they didn’t appreciate the financial burden. If they’d won, I wouldn’t’ve been a problem.”

“Sure you would have,” De said. “They just would’ve blamed their problems on something else.”

“It’s not that simple,” Brooke said. Her entire body was sweating, despite the chill in the room. “It was a contest, a race. A lot of people didn’t look beyond that. There were news articles about abandoned and abused babies, and there were a disproportionate number born in December, January, and February of 2000, because parents wanted to split some of the glory.”

“You can’t tell me,” De said, “that something as insignificant as the time we were born determines our future.”

“It does,” Brooke said, “if we’re brought up to believe it does.”

“That bear out, Professor Franke?” De said.

Brooke turned. The professor was standing close to them, listening, looking both bemused and perplexed.

Apparently he had expected some kind of reaction, but probably not this one.

“That’s what I’m trying to determine,” Franke said.

“And I’m askin’ you if you determined it,” De said.

Franke glanced at one of his assistants. The assistant shrugged. The entire room full of people was crowded around Franke, and was silent for the second time that day.

“This part of the study is experimental,” he said. “I’m not sure if answering you will corrupt it.”

“But you want to answer me,” De said.

Franke smiled. “Yes, I do.”

“It’s an experiment,” Brooke said. “You can always throw this part out. You might have done that anyway. Isn’t that what you told me? Or at least implied?”

Franke glanced from her to De. Then Franke straightened his shoulders, as if the gesture made him stronger. “I believe that Brooke is right. My studies have convinced me that something becomes important to a child’s development because that child is told that something is important.”

“So us losers will remain losers the rest of our lives,” Los Gatos said.

Franke shook his head. “That is not my conclusion. I believe that when something becomes important, you choose how to react to it.” His voice got louder as he spoke. His professor’s voice. “Some of you wearing letters have not done as well as expected. You’ve rebelled against those expectations and worked at proving you are not as good as you were told you were.”

A flush colored De’s tan cheeks.

“Others lived up to the expectations and a few of you, a very small few, exceeded them. But—” Franke paused dramatically. “Those of you who wear numbers are financially more successful as a group than your lettered peers.

You strive harder because you feel you have something to overcome.”

Brooke felt Los Gatos shift behind her.

“I think it goes back to the parameters of the study,” Franke said. “Your parents—all of your parents—wanted to improve their lot. They all had drive, therefore most of you have drive. We’ve found a biological correlation.”

“Really? Wow,” Santa Barbara said.

“But there’s more than biology at work here.”

“I’d hope so,” De said. “I’d hate to think you can determine who I am by reading my genes.”

Franke gave him a small smile. “Your parents,” Franke said, “all chose a contest as the method of improving their lives. A lottery, if you will. And most of them failed to win. Or if they succeeded, they discovered Easy Street wasn’t so easy after all. You numbered folk have realized that luck is overrated. The only thing you can trust is work you do yourselves.”

“And what about those of us with letters?” one of the twins from Akron asked.

“You learned a different lesson. Most of you learned that luck is what you make of it. You might win the lottery, but that doesn’t make you or your family any happier than before.” Franke looked at Brooke. “There were a lot of studies, some of them prompted by your mother, that showed how many unsuccessful Millennium Babies were abandoned or mistreated. But the successful ones had similar problems. Only no one wanted to lose the golden goose as long as it was still golden. Many of those abandonments were emotional, not physical. People became parents to become rich or famous, not because they wanted children.”

“Sounds like you should be studying our parents,” Los Gatos said.

Franke grinned. “Now you have my next book.”

And the group laughed.

“Feel free to enjoy the rest of the day,” Franke said. “Over the rest of the weekend, I’ll be talking to individuals among you, wrapping things up. I want to thank you for your time and participation.”

“That’s it?” De asked.

“When you leave here tonight, if I haven’t spoken to you,” Franke said. “That’s it.”

His words were met with a momentary silence. Then he started to make his way through the group. Some people stopped him. Brooke didn’t. She turned away, not sure how to feel.

She wasn’t as successful as she wanted to be, but she was better off than her mother had said she would be. Brooke had her own house, a good job, interests that meant something to her.

But she was as alone as her mother was. In that, at least, they were the same.

“So,” De said. “Is your life profoundly different thanks to this study?”

The question had a mixed tone. Half sarcasm, half serious. He seemed to be waiting for her answer.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Adam,” he said, wincing. “Adam Lassiter.”

“The first man.”

“If I’d missed my birth time, I’d have been named Zeb.” He smiled as he said that, but his eyes didn’t twinkle.

“I’m Brooke Cross.” She waited, wondering if he’d guess at the name, despite the change. He didn’t. Or if he did, he didn’t say anything.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

She looked at the room, at all the people in it, most engaged in private conversations now, hands moving, gazes serious as they compared and contrasted their experiences, trying to see if they agreed with Professor Franke.

“When I was a little girl,” she said. “We lived in a small white house, maybe 1200 square feet. A starter, my mother called it, because that was all she could afford. And to me, that house was the world. My mother’s world.”

“What kind of world was that?” he asked.

She shook her head. How to explain it? But he had asked, and she had to try.

“A world where she did everything right and failed, and everyone else cheated and somehow succeeded. If she’d had the same kind of breaks your parents had, she believed she would have done better than they did. If she hadn’t had a child like me, one who was chronically late, her life would have been better.”

He was watching her. The crease between his eyes grew deeper.

Her heart was pounding, but she made herself continue. “A few years ago, when I was looking for my own home, I saw dozens and dozens of houses, and somewhere I realized that to the people living in them, those houses were the world.”

“So each block has dozens of tiny worlds,” he said.

She smiled at him. “Yeah.”

“I still don’t see how that relates.”

She looked at him, then at the room. The other conversations were continuing, as serious as hers was with him.

“You asked me if this study changed my life. I can’t answer that. I can say, though, that it made me realize one thing.”

His gaze was as intense as Franke’s.

“It made me realize that even though I had moved out of that house, I hadn’t left my mother’s world.”

He studied her for a moment longer, then said, “Sounds like a hell of a realization.”

“Maybe,” she said. “It depends on what I do with it.”

He laughed. “Thus proving Franke’s point.”

She flushed. She hadn’t realized she had done so, but she had. He leaned toward her.

“You know, Brooke,” Adam said softly, “I like women who are chronically late. It balances my habitual timeliness.

How’s about we have lunch and talk about our histories. Not just the day we were born, but other things, like what we do and where we live and who we are.”

She almost refused. He was from Louisiana, and she was from Wisconsin. This friendship—if that’s all it was—could go nowhere.

But it was that attitude which had limited her all along. She had been driven, as Franke said, to succeed materially and professionally on her own merits. But she had never tried to succeed socially.

She had never wanted to before.

“And,” she said, “you get to tell me what you learned from this study.”

“Assumin’,” he said with a grin, “that I’m the kinda man who can learn anything a’tall.”

“Assuming that,” she said and slipped her hand in his. It felt good to touch someone else, even if it was only for a brief time. It felt good.

It felt different.

It felt right.

THE RETRIEVAL ARTIST

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Interaction among very different cultures creates new occupations—and exceedingly tangled webs.

I

I had just come off a difficult case, and the last thing I wanted was another client. To be honest, not wanting another client is a constant state for me. Miles Flint, the reluctant Retrieval Artist. I work harder than anyone else in the business at discouraging my clients from seeking out the Disappeared. Sometimes the discouragement fails and I get paid a lot of money for putting a lot of lives in danger, and maybe, just maybe, bringing someone home who wants to come. Those are the moments I live for, the moments when it becomes clear to a Disappeared that home is a safe place once more.

Usually, though, my clients and their lost ones are more trouble than they’re worth. Usually, I won’t take their cases for any price, no matter how high.

I do everything I can to prevent client contact from the start. The clients who approach me are the courageous ones or the really desperate ones or the ones who want to use me to further their own ends.

I try not to take my cases personally. My clients and their lost ones depend on my objectivity. But every once in a while, a case slips under my defenses—and never in the way I expect.

This was one of those cases. And it haunts me still.

II

My office is one of the ugliest dives on the Moon. I found an original building still made of colonial permaplastic in the oldest section of Armstrong, the Moon’s oldest colony. The dome here is also made of permaplastic, the clear kind, although time and wear have turned it opaque. Dirt covers the dome near the street level. The filtration system tries to clean as best it can, but ever since some well-meaning dome governor pulled the permaplastic flooring and forgot to replace it, this part of Armstrong Dome has had a dust problem. The filtration systems have been upgraded twice in my lifetime, and rebuilt at least three times since the original settlement, but they still function at one-tenth the level of the state-of-the-art systems in colonies like Gagarin Dome and Glenn Station. Terrans newly off the shuttle rarely come to this part of Armstrong; the high-speed trains don’t run here, and the unpaved streets strike most Terrans as unsanitary, which they probably are.

The building that houses my office had been the original retail center of Armstrong, or so says the bronze plaque that someone had attached to the plastic between my door and the rent-a-lawyer’s beside me. We are a historic building, not that anyone seems to care, and rent-a-lawyer once talked to me about getting the designation changed so that we could upgrade the facilities.

I didn’t tell him that if the designation changed, I would move.

You see, I like the seedy look, the way my door hangs slightly crooked in its frame. It’s deceptive. A careless Tracker would think I’m broke, or equally careless. Most folks don’t guess that the security in my little eight-by-eight cube is state-of-the-art. They walk in, and they see permaplastic, and a desk that cants slightly to the right, and only one chair behind it. They don’t see the recessed doors that hide my storage in the wall between the rent-a-lawyer’s cube and my own, and they don’t see the electronics because they aren’t looking for them.

I like to keep the office empty. I own an apartment in one of Armstrong’s better neighborhoods. There I keep all the things I don’t care about. Things I do care about stay in my ship, a customized space yacht named The Emmeline. She’s my only friend and I treat her like a lover. She’s saved my life more times than I care to think about, and for that (and a few other things), she deserves only the best.

I can afford to give her the best, and I don’t need any more work, although, as I said, I sometimes take it. The cases that catch me are usually the ones that catch me in my Sir Galahad fantasy—the one where I see myself as a rescuer of all things worthy of rescue—although I’ve been known to take cases for other reasons.

But, as I’d said, I’d just come off a difficult case, and the last thing I needed was another client. Especially one as young and innocent as this one appeared to be.

She showed up at my door wearing a dress, which no one wears in this part of Armstrong anymore, and regular shoes, which had to have been painful to walk in. She also had a personal items bag around her wrist, which, in this part of town, was like wearing a giant Mug Me! sign. The bags were issued on shuttles and only to passengers who had no idea about the luggage limitations.

She was tall and raw-boned, but slender, as if diet and exercise had reduced her natural tendency toward lushness.

Her dress, an open and inexpensive weave, accented her figure in an almost unconscious way. Her features were strong and bold, her eyes dark, and her hair even darker.

My alarm system warned me she was outside, staring at the door or the plaque or both. A small screen popped up on my desk revealing her and the street beyond. I shut off the door alarm and waited until she knocked. Her clutched fist, adorned with computer and security enhancements that winked like diamonds in the dome’s fake daylight, rapped softly on the permaplastic. The daintiness of the movement startled me. I wouldn’t have thought her a dainty woman.

I had been cleaning up the final reports, notations, and billings from the last case. I closed the file and the keyboard (I never use voice commands for work in my office—too easily overheard) folded itself into the desk. Then I leaned back in the chair, and waited.

She knocked three times before she tried the door. It opened, just like it had been programmed to do in instances like this.

“Mr. Flint?” Her voice was soft, her English tinted with a faintly Northern European accent.

I still didn’t say anything. She had the right building and the right name. I would wait to see if she was the right kind of client.

She squinted at me. I was never what clients expected. They expected a man as seedy as the office, maybe one or two unrepaired scars, a face toughened by a hard life and space travel. Even though I was thirty-five, I still had a look some cultures called angelic: blond curls, blue eyes, a round and cherubic face. A client once told me I looked like the pre-Raphaelite paintings of Cupid. I had smiled at him and said, Only when I want to.

“Are you Mr. Flint?” The girl stepped inside, then slapped her left hand over the enhancements on her right. She looked faintly startled, as if someone had shouted in her ear.

Actually, my security system had cut in. Those enhancements linked her to someone or something outside herself, and my system automatically severed such links, even if they had been billed as unseverable.

“You want to stay in here,” I said, “you stay in here alone. No recording, no viewing, and no off-site monitoring.” She swallowed, and took another step inside. She was playing at being timid. The real timid ones, severed from their security blankets, bolt.

“What do you want?” I asked.

She flinched, and took another step forward. “I understand that you . . . find . . . people.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I was told in New York.” One more step and she was standing in front of my desk. She smelled faintly of lavender soap mixed with nervous sweat. She must have come here directly from the shuttle. A woman with a mission, then.

“New York?” I asked as if I’d never heard of it. “New York City.”

I had several contacts in New York, and a handful of former clients. Anyone could have told her, although none were supposed to. They always did though; they always saw their own desperation in another’s eyes, figured it was time to help, time to give back whatever it was they felt they had gained.

I sighed. “Close the door.”

She licked her lips—the dye on them was either waterproof or permanent—and then walked back to the door. She looked into the street as if she would find help there, then gently pushed the door closed.

I felt a faint hum through my wrist as my computer notified me that it had turned the door security back on. “What do you want?” I asked before she turned around.

“My mother,” she said. “She’s—”

“That’s enough.” I kept my tone harsh, and I didn’t stand. I didn’t want this girl/woman to be too comfortable. It was always best to keep potential clients off balance.

Children, young adults, and the elderly were the obvious choices of someone trying to use my system for the wrong purposes, and yet they were the ones most likely to contact me. They never seemed to understand the hostility I had to show clients, the insistence I put on identity checks, and they always balked at the cost. It feels as if I’m on trial, Mr. Flint, they would say, and I wouldn’t respond. They were. They had to be. I always had to be sure they were only acting on their own interests. It was too easy for a Tracker to hire someone to play off a Retrieval Artist’s sympathies, and initiate a search that would get the Disappeared killed—or worse.

The girl turned. Her body was so rigid that it looked as if I could break her in half.

“I don’t find people,” I said. “I uncover them. There’s a vast difference. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t belong here.”

That line usually caused half my potential clients to exit. The next line usually made most of the remaining fifty percent excuse themselves, never to darken my door again.

“I charge a minimum of two million credits, Moon issue, not Earth issue—” which meant that they were worth triple what she was used to paying “—and I can charge as much as ten million or more. There is no upper limit on my costs nor is there one on my charges. I charge by the day, with expenses added in. Some investigations take a week, some take five years. You would be my exclusive employer for the period of time it takes to find your—mother—or whomever I’d be looking for. I have a contract. Several of my former clients have tried to have the courts nullify it. It holds up beautifully. I do not take charity cases, no matter what your sob story is, and I do not allow anyone to defer payment. The minute the money stops, so do I.”

She threaded her fingers together. Her personal items bag bumped against her hip as she did so. “I’d heard about your financial requirements.” Which meant that one of my former clients had recommended me to her. Dammit. “I have limited funds, but I can afford a minor investigation.”

I stood. “We’re done talking. Sorry I can’t help you.” I walked past her and pulled open the door. Security didn’t mind if I did that. It would have minded if she had.

“Can’t you do a limited search, Mr. Flint?” Her eyes were wide and brown. If she was twenty, she was older than I thought. I checked for tears. There were none. She could be legit, and for that I was sorry.

I closed the door so hard the plastic office shook. “Here’s what you’re asking me,” I said. “If the money runs out, I quit searching, which is no skin off my nose. But I’ll have dug a trail up to that particular point, and your mother—or whomever I’m looking for—”

She flinched again as I said that. A tender one. Or a good actress.

“—would be at more of a risk than she is now. Right now, she’s simply disappeared. And since you’ve come to me, you’ve done enough research to know that one of six government programs—or one of fifteen private corporations—have gone to considerable expense to give her a new life somewhere else. If the cover on that existence gets blown, your mother dies. It’s that simple. And maybe, just maybe, the people who helped her will die too, or the people who are now important to her, or the people who were hidden with her, for whatever reason. Half an investigation is a death sentence. Hell, sometimes a full investigation is a death sentence. So I don’t do this work on whim, and I certainly don’t do it in a limited fashion. Are we clear?”

She nodded, just once, a rabbit-like movement that let me know I’d connected. “Good,” I said and pulled the door back open. “Now get out.”

She scurried past me as if she thought I might physically assault her, and then she hurried down the street. The moon dust rose around her, clinging to her legs and her impractical dress, leaving a trail behind her that was so visible, it looked as if someone were marking her as a future target.

I closed the door, had the security system take her prints and DNA sample off the jamb just in case I needed to identify her someday, and then tried not to think of her again.

It wouldn’t be easy. Clients were rare, and if they were legit, they always had an agenda. By the time they found me, they were desperate, and there was still a part of me that was human enough to feel sympathy for that.

Sympathy is rare among Retrieval Artists. Most Retrieval Artists got into this line of work because they owed a favor to the Disty, a group of aliens who’d more or less taken over Mars. Others got into it because they had discovered, by accident, that they were good at it, usually making that discovery in their jobs for human corporations or human crime syndicates.

I got in through a different kind of accident. Once I’d been a space cop assigned to Moon Sector. A lot of the Disappeared come through here on their way to new lives, and over time, I found myself working against the clock, trying to save people I’d never met from the people they were hiding from. The space police frowned on the work—the Disappeared are often reformed criminals and not worth the time, at least according to the Moon Sector—and so, after one of the most horrible incidents of my life, I went into business on my own.

I’m at the top of my profession, rich beyond all measure, and usually content with that. I chose not to have a spouse or children, and my family is long dead, which I actually consider to be a good thing. Families in this business are a liability. So are close friends. Anyone who can be broken to force you to talk. I don’t mind being alone.

But I do hate being manipulated, and I hate even more taking revenge, mine or anyone else’s. I vigilantly protect myself against both of those things.

And this was the first time I failed.

III

After the girl left, I stayed away from the office for two days. Sometimes snubbed clients come back. They tell me their stories, the reasons they’re searching for their parent/child/spouse, and they expect me to understand. Sometimes they claim they’ve found more money. Sometimes they simply try to cry on my shoulder, believing I will sympathize.

Once upon a time maybe I would have. But Sir Galahad has calluses growing on his heart. I am beginning to hate the individuals. They always take a level of judgment that drains me. The lawyers trying to find a long-lost soul to meet the terms of a will; the insurance agents, required by law to find the beneficiaries, forced by the government to search “as far as humanly possible without spending the benefits”; the detective, using government funds to find the one person who could put a career criminal, serial killer, or child molester, away for life; these people are the clients I like the most. Almost all are repeat customers. I still have to do background checks, but I have my gut to rely on as well. With individuals, I can never go by gut, and even armed with information, I’ve been burned.

I’ve gotten to the point where coldness is the way of the game for me, at least at first. Once I sign on, I become the most intense defender of the Disappeared. The object of my search also becomes the person I protect and care about the most. It takes a lot of effort to maintain that caring, and even more to manage the protection.

Sometimes I’ll go to extremes. Sometimes I have no other choice.

On the third day, I went back to my office, and of course, the girl was waiting. This time she was dressed appropriately, a pair of boots, cargo pants that cinched at the ankles, and a shirt the color of sand. Her personal items bag was gone—obviously someone, probably the maître d’ at the exclusive hotel she was most likely staying at, had told her it made her a mark for pickpockets and other thieves. Thin mesh gloves covered her enhancements. Only her long hair marked her as a newcomer. If she stayed longer than a month, she’d cut it off just like the rest of us rather than worry about keeping it clean.

She was leaning against my locked door, her booted feet sticking into the street. In that outfit, she looked strong and healthy, as if she were hiring me to take her on one of those expeditions outside the dome. The rent-a-lawyer next door, newly out of Armstrong Law, was eyeing her out of his scarred plastic window, a sour expression on his thin face. He probably thought she was scaring away business.

I stopped in the middle of the street. It was hot and airless as usual. There was no wind in the dome, of course, and the recycled air got stale real fast. Half the equipment in this part of town had been on the fritz for the last week, and the air here wasn’t just stale, it was thin and damn near rancid. I hated breathing bad air. The shallow breaths and the increased heartbeat made me feel as if there was danger around when there probably wasn’t. If the air got any thinner, I’d have to start worrying about my clarity of thought.

She saw me when I was still several meters from the place. She stood, brushed the dust off her pants, and watched me. I pretended as if I were undecided about my next move, even though I knew I’d have to confront her sooner or later. Her kind only went away when chased.

“I’m sorry,” she said as I approached. “I was told that you expected negotiation, so I—”

“Lied about the money, did you?” I asked, knowing she was lying now too. If she knew enough to find me, she also knew that I didn’t negotiate. All the lie proved was that she had an ego big enough to believe that the rules were different for her.

I shoved past her to use my palm to unlock the door. I only used a palm scan when someone else was present. It let us in, but initiated a higher level of security monitoring.

She started to follow me, but I slammed the door in her face. Then I went to my desk, and switched on my own automatic air. It was illegal, and it wouldn’t be enough, but I wasn’t planning to stay long. I would finish the reports from the last case, get the final fees, and then maybe I’d take a vacation. I had never taken one before. It was past time.

I wish, now, that I had listened to my gut and gone. But there was just enough of Sir Galahad left in me to make me watch the door. And of course, it opened just like I expected it to.

She came inside, a little downtrodden but not defeated. Her kind seldom were. “My name is Anetka Sobol,” she said as if I should know it. I didn’t. “I really do need your help.”

“You should have thought of that before,” I said. “This isn’t a game.”

“I’m not trying to play one.”

“So what was that attempt at negotiation?” She shook her head. “My source—”

“Who is your source?”

“He said I wasn’t—”

“Who is it?”

Again she licked that lower lip just like she had the day before, a movement that was too unconscious to be planned. The nervousness, then, wasn’t feigned. “Norris Gonnot.”

Gonnot. Sobol was the third client he’d sent to me in the last year. The other two checked out, and both cases had been easy to solve. But he was making himself too visible, and I would have to deal with that, even though I hated to do so. He was extremely grateful that I had found his daughter and granddaughter alive (although they hadn’t appreciated it), and he’d been even more grateful when I was able to prove that the Disty were no longer looking for them.

“And how did you find him?” She frowned. “Does it matter?”

I leaned back in my chair. It squeaked and the sound made her jump ever so slightly. “Either you’re up front with me now or the conversation ends.”

The frown grew deeper, and she clutched her left wrist with her right hand, holding the whole mess against her stomach. The gesture looked calculated. “Do you treat everyone like this?”

“Nope. Some people I treat worse.”

“Then how do you get any work?” I shrugged. “Just lucky.”

She stared at me for a moment. Then she glanced at the door. Was she letting her thoughts be that visible on purpose or was she again acting for my benefit? I wasn’t sure.

“A cop told me about him. Norris, that is.” She sounded reluctant. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

“Of course not. Gonnot wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone. This cop, was he a rent-a-cop, a real cop, a Federal cop, or with the Earth Force?”

“She,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “Was she a—”

“She was a New York City police officer who had her own detective agency.”

“That’s illegal in New York.”

She shrugged. “So?”

I closed my eyes. Ethics had disappeared everywhere. “You hired her?”

“She was my fifth private detective. Most would work for a week and then quit when they realized that searching for an interstellar Disappeared is a lot harder than finding a missing person.”

I waited. I’d heard that sob story before. Most detectives kept the case and simply came to someone like me. “Of course,” she said, “my father’s looming presence doesn’t help either.”

“Your father?”

She was staring at me as if I had just asked her what God was. “I’m Anetka Sobol,” she said as if that clarified everything.

“And I’m Miles Flint. My name doesn’t tell you a damn thing about my father.”

“My father is the founding partner of the Third Dynasty.”

I had to work to hide my surprise. I knew what the Third Dynasty was, but I didn’t know the names of its founders. The Dynasty itself was a formidable presence all over the galaxy. It was a megacorp with its fingers in a lot of pies, mostly to do with space exploration, establishing colonies in mineral-rich areas, and exploitation of new resources. My contacts with the Third Dynasty weren’t on the exploration level, but within its narrow interior holdings. The Third Dynasty was the parent company for Privacy Unlimited, one of the services which helped people disappear.

Privacy Unlimited had been developed, as so many of the corporate disappearance programs had, when humans discovered the Disty, and realized that in some alien cultures, there was no such word as forgiveness. The Disty were the harshest of our allies. The Revs, the Wygnin, and the Fuetrer also targeted certain humans, and our treaties with these groups allowed the targeting if the aliens could show cause.

The balance was a delicate one, allowing them their cultural traditions while protecting our own. Showing cause had to happen before one of eighteen multicultural tribunals, and if one of those tribunals ruled in the aliens’ favor, the humans involved were as good as dead. We looked the other way most of the time. Most of the lives involved were, according to our government, trivial ones. But of course, those people whose lives had been deemed trivial didn’t feel that way, and that was when the disappearance services cropped up. If a person disappeared and could not be found, most alien groups kept an outstanding warrant, but stopped searching.

The Disty never did.

And since much of the Third Dynasty’s business was conducted in Disty territory, its disappearance service, Privacy Unlimited, had to be one of the best in the galaxy.

Something in my face must have given my knowledge away, because she said, “Now do you understand my problem?”

“Frankly, no,” I said. “You’re the daughter of the big kahuna. Go to Privacy Unlimited and have them help you. It’s usually not too hard to retrace steps.”

She shook her head. “My mother didn’t go to Privacy Unlimited. She used another service.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.” She brushed a hand alongside her head, to move the long hair. “It’s my father she’s running from.”

A domestic situation. I never get involved in those. Too messy and too complicated. Never a clear line. “Then she didn’t need a service at all. She probably took a shuttle here, then a transport for parts unknown.”

Anetka Sobol crossed her arms. “You don’t seem to understand, Mr. Flint. My father could have found her with his own service if she had done something like that. It’s simple enough. My detectives should have been able to find her. They can’t.”

“Let me see if I can understand this,” I said. “Are you looking for her or is your father?”

“I am.”

“As a front for him?”

Color flooded her face. “No.”

“Then why?”

“I want to meet her.”

I snorted. “You’re going to a lot of expense for a ‘hello, how are you.’ Aren’t you afraid Daddy will find out?”

“I have my own money.”

“Really? Money Daddy doesn’t know about? Money Daddy doesn’t monitor?” She straightened. “He doesn’t monitor me.”

I nodded. “That’s why the mesh gloves. Fashion statement?”

She glanced at her enhancements. “I got them. They have nothing to do with my father.”

My smile was small. “Your father has incredible resources. You don’t think he’d do something as simple as hack into your enhancement files. Believe me, one of those pretty baubles is being used to track you, and if my security weren’t as good as it is, another would have been monitoring this conversation.”

She put her left hand over her right as if covering the enhancements would make me forget them. All it did was remind me that this time, she didn’t react when my security shut down her links. This was one smart girl, and one I didn’t entirely understand.

“Go home,” I said. “Deal with Daddy. If you want family ties, get married, have children, hire someone to play your mother. If you need genetic information or disease history, see your family doctors. I suspect they’ll have all the records you need and probably some you don’t. If you want Daddy to leave you alone, I’d ask him first before I go to any more expense. He might just do what you want. And if you’re trying to make him angry, I’ll bet you’ve gone far enough. You’ll probably be hearing from him very soon.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re so sure of yourself, Mr. Flint.”

“It’s about the only thing I am sure of,” I said, and waited for her to leave.

She didn’t. She stared at me for a long moment, and in her eyes, I saw a coldness, a hardness I hadn’t expected. It was as if she were evaluating me and finding me lacking.

I let her stare. I didn’t care what she thought one way or another. I did wish she would get to the point so that I could kick her out of my office.

Finally she sighed and pursed her lips as if she had eaten something sour. She looked around, probably searching for some place to sit down. She didn’t find one. I don’t like my clients to sit. I don’t want them to be comfortable in my presence.

“All right,” she said, and her voice was somehow different. Stronger, a little more powerful. I knew the timidity had been an act. “I came to you because you seem to be the only one who can do this job.”

My smile was crooked and insincere. “Flattery.”

“Truth,” she said.

I shook my head. “There are dozens of people who do this job, and most are cheaper.” I let my smile grow colder. “They also have chairs in their offices.”

“They value their clients,” she said.

“Probably at the expense of the people they’re searching out.”

“Ethics,” she said. “That’s why I’ve come here. You’re the only one in your profession who seems to have any.”

“You have need of ethics?” Somehow I had trouble believing the woman with that powerful voice had need of anyone with ethics. “Or is this simply another attempt at manipulation?”

To my surprise, she smiled. The expression was stunning. It brought life to her eyes, and somehow seemed to make her even taller than she had been a moment before.

“Manipulation got me to you,” she said. “Your Mr. Gonnot seems to have a soft spot for people who are missing family.”

“Everyone who’s missing is a member of a family,” I said, but more to the absent Gonnot than to her. I could see how he could be manipulated, and that made it more important than ever to stop him from sending customers my way. She shrugged at my comment, then she sat on the edge of my desk. I’d never had anyone do that, not in all my years in the business. “I do have need of ethics,” she said. “If you breathe a single word of what I’m going to tell you.” She didn’t finish the sentence, on purpose of course, probably figuring that whatever I could imagine would be worse than what she could come up with.

I sighed. This girl—this woman—liked games.

“If you want the sanctity of a confessional,” I said, “see a priest. If you want a profession that requires its practitioners to practice confidentiality as a matter of course, see a psychiatrist. I’ll keep confidential whatever I deem worthy of confidentiality.”

She folded her slender hands on her lap. “You enjoy judging your clients, don’t you?”

I stared at her—up at her—which actually put me at a disadvantage. She was good at intimidation skills, even better than she had been as an actress. It made me uncomfortable, but somehow it seemed more logical for the daughter of the man who ran the Third Dynasty.

“I have to,” I said. “A lot of lives depend on my judgments.”

She shook her head slightly. It was as if my earlier answer stymied her, prevented her from continuing. She had to learn that we would do this on my terms or we wouldn’t do it at all.

I waited. I could wait all day if I had to. Most people didn’t have that kind of patience no matter what sort of will they had.

She clearly didn’t. After a few moments, she brushed her pants, adjusted the flap on one of the pockets, and sighed again. She must have needed me badly.

Finally, she closed her eyes, as if summoning strength. When she opened them, she was looking at me directly. “I am a clone, Mr. Flint.”

Whatever I had thought she was going to say, it wasn’t that. I worked very hard at keeping the surprise off my face. “And my father is dying.” She paused, as if she were testing me.

I knew the answer, and the problem. When her father died, she couldn’t inherit. Clones were barred from familial inheritance by interstellar law. The law had been adapted universally after several cases where clones created by a nonfamily member and raised far from the original (wealthy) family inherited vast estates. The basis of the inheritance was a shared biology that anyone could create. Rather than letting large fortunes get leached off to whoever was smart enough to steal a hair from a hairbrush and use it to create a copy of a human being, legislators finally decided to create the law. The courts upheld it. It was rigid.

“Your father could change his will,” I said, knowing that she had probably broached this with him already. “It’s too late,” she said. “He’s been ill for a while. The change could easily be disputed in court.”

“So you’re not an only child?” I had to work to keep from asking if she were an only copy.

“I am the only clone,” she said. “My father had me made, and he raised me himself. I am, for all intents and purposes, his daughter.”

“Then he should have changed his will long ago.”

She waved a hand, as if the very idea were a silly one. And it probably was. A clone had to come from somewhere. So either she was the copy of a real child or a copy of the woman she wanted me to find. Perhaps the will was unchanged because the original person was still out there.

“My mother vanished with the real heir,” she said. I waited.

“My father always expected to find them. My sister is the one who inherits.”

I hated clone terminology. “Sister” was such an inaccurate term, even though clones saw themselves as twins. They weren’t. They weren’t raised that way or thought of that way. The Original stood to inherit. The clone before me did not.

“So you, out of the goodness of your heart, are searching for your missing family.” I laid the sarcasm on thick. I’ve handled similar cases before. Where money was involved, people were rarely altruistic.

“No,” she said, and her bluntness surprised me. “My father owns 51 percent of the Third Dynasty. When he dies, it goes into the corporation itself, and can be bought by other shareholders. I am not a shareholder, but I have been raised from birth to run the Dynasty. The idea was that I would share my knowledge with my sister, and that we would run the business together.” This made more sense.

“So I need to find her, Mr. Flint, before the shares go back into the corporation. I need to find her so that I can live the kind of life I was raised to live.”

I hated cases like this. She was right. I did judge my clients. And if I found them the least bit suspicious, I didn’t take on the case. If I believed that what they would do would jeopardize the Disappeared, I wouldn’t take the case either. But if the reason for the disappearance was gone, or if the reason for finding the missing person benefited or did not harm the Disappeared, then I would take the case.

I saw benefit here, in the inheritance, and in the fact that the reason for the disappearance was dying. “Your father willed his entire fortune to his missing child?”

She nodded.

“Then why isn’t he searching for her?”

“He figured she would come back when she heard of his death.”

Possible, depending on where she had disappeared to, but not entirely probable. The girl might not even know who she was.

“If I find your mother,” I said, “then will your father try to harm her?”

“No,” she said. “He couldn’t if he wanted to. He’s too sick. I can forward the medical records to you.”

One more thing to check. And check I would. I guess I was taking this case, no matter how messily she started it. I was intrigued, just enough.

“Your father doesn’t have to be healthy enough to act on his own,” I said. “With his money, he could hire someone.”

“I suppose,” she said. “But I control almost all of his business dealings right now. The request would have to go through me.”

I still didn’t like it, but superficially, it sounded fine. I would, of course, check it out. “Where’s your clone mark?” She frowned at me. It was a rude question, but one I needed the answer to before I started.

She pulled her hair back, revealing a small number eight at the spot where her skull met her neck. The fine hairs had grown away from it, and the damage to the skin had been done at the cellular level. If she tried to have the eight removed, it would grow back.

“What happened to the other seven?” I asked. She let her hair fall. “Failed.”

Failed clones were unusual. Anything unusual in a case like this was suspect.

“My mother,” she said, as if she could hear my thoughts, “was pregnant when she disappeared. I was cloned from sloughed cells found in the amnio.”

“Hers or the baby’s?”

“The baby’s. They tested. But they used a lot of cells to find one that worked. It took a while before they got me.” Sounded plausible, but I was no expert. More information to check.

“Your father must have wanted you badly.” She nodded.

“Seems strange that he didn’t alter his will for you.”

Her shoulders slumped. “He was afraid any changes he made wouldn’t have been lawyer-proof. He was convinced I’d lose everything because of lawsuits if he did that.”

“So he arranged for you to lose everything on his own.”

She shook her head. “He wanted the family together. He wanted me to work with my sister to—”

“So he said.”

“So he says.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I think he hopes that my sister will cede the company to me. For a percentage, of course.”

There it was. The only loophole in the law. A clone could receive an inheritance if it came directly from the person whose genetic material the clone shared, provided that the Original didn’t die under suspicious circumstances. Of course, a living person could, in Anetka’s words, “cede” that ownership as well, although it was a bit more difficult.

“You’re looking for her for money,” I said in my last-ditch effort to get out of the case. “You won’t believe love,” she said.

She was right. I wouldn’t have.

“Besides,” she said. “I have my own money. More than enough to keep me comfortable for the rest of my life. Whatever else you may think of my father, he has provided that. I’m searching for her for the corporation. I want to keep it in the family. I want to work it like I was trained. And this seems to be the only way.”

It wasn’t a very pretty reason, and I’d learned over the years, it was usually the ugly reasons that were the truth. Not, of course, that I could go by gut. I wouldn’t.

“My retainer is two million credits,” I said. “If you’re lucky, that’s all this investigation will cost you. I have a contract that I’ll send to you or your personal representative, but let me give you the short version verbally.”

She nodded.

I continued, reciting, as I always did, the essential terms so that no client could ever say I’d lied to her. “I have the right to terminate at any time for any reason. You may not terminate until the Disappeared is found, or I have concluded that the Disappeared is gone for good. You are legally liable for any lawsuits that arise from any crimes committed by third parties as a result of this investigation. I am not. You will pay me my rate plus expenses whenever I bill you. If your money stops, the investigation stops, but if I find you’ve been withholding funds to prevent me from digging farther, I am entitled to a minimum of ten million credits. I will begin my investigation by investigating you. Should I decide you are unworthy as a client before I begin searching for the Disappeared, I will refund half of your initial retainer. There’s more but those are the salient points. Is all of that clear?”

“Perfectly.”

“I’ll begin as soon as I get the retainer.”

“Give me your numbers and I’ll have the money placed in your account immediately.”

I handed her my single printed card with my escrow account embedded into it. The account was a front for several other accounts, but she didn’t need to know that. Even my money went through channels. Someone who is good at finding the Disappeared is also good at making other things disappear.

“Should you need to reach me in an emergency,” I said, “place 673 credits into this account.”

“Strange number,” she said.

I nodded. The number varied from client to client, a random pattern. Sometimes, past clients sent me their old amounts as a way to contact me about something new. I kept the system clear.

“I’ll respond to the depositing computer from wherever I am, as soon as I can. This is not something you should do frivolously nor is it something to be done to check up on me. It’s only for an emergency. If you want to track the progress of the investigation, you can wait for my weekly updates.”

“And if I have questions?”

“Save them for later.”

“What if I think I can help?”

“Leave me mail.” I stood. She was watching me, that hard edge in her eyes again. “I’ve got work to do now. I’ll contact you when I’m ready to begin my search.”

“How long will this investigation of me take?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “It depends on how much you’re hiding.”

IV

Clients never tell the truth. No matter how much I instruct them to, they never do. It seems to be human nature to lie about something, even when it’s something small. I had a hunch, given Anetka Sobol’s background, she had lied about a lot. The catch was to find out how much of what she had lied about was relevant to the job she had hired me for. Finding out required research.

I do a lot of my research through public accounts, using fake ID. It is precautionary, particularly in the beginning, because so many cases don’t pan out. If a Disappeared still has a Tracker after her, repeated searches from me will be flagged. Searches from public accounts—especially different public accounts—will not. Often the Disappeared are already famous or become famous when they vanish, and are often the subject of anything from vidspec to school reports.

My favorite search site is a bar not too far from my office. I love the place because it serves some of the best food in Armstrong, in some of the largest quantities. The large quantities are required, given the place’s name. The Brownie Bar serves the only marijuana in the area, baked into specially marked goods, particularly the aforementioned brownies. Imbibers get the munchies, and proceed to spend hundreds of credits on food. The place turns quite a profit, and it’s also comfortable; marijuana users seem to like their creature comforts more than most other recreational drug types.

Recreational drugs are legal on the Moon, as are most things. The first settlers came in search of something they called “freedom from oppression” which usually meant freedom to pursue an alternative lifestyle. Some of those lifestyles have since become illegal or simply died out, but others remain. The only illegal drugs these days, at least in Armstrong, are those that interfere with the free flow of air. Everything from nicotine to opium is legal—as long as its user doesn’t smoke it.

The Brownie Bar caters to the casual user as well as the hard-core and, unlike some drug bars, doesn’t mind the non-user customer. The interior is large with several sections. One section, the party wing, favors the bigger groups, the ones who usually arrive in numbers larger than ten, spend hours eating and giggling, and often get quite obnoxiously wacky. In the main section, soft booths with tables shield clients from each other. Usually the people sitting there are couples or groups of four. If one group gets particularly loud, a curtain drops over the open section of the booth, and their riotous laughter fades to nearly nothing.

My section caters to the hard core, who sometimes stop for a quick fix in the middle of the business day, or who like a brownie before dinner to calm the stress of a hectic afternoon. Many of these people have only one, and continue work while they’re sitting at their solitary tables. It’s quiet as a church in this section, and many of the patrons are plugged into the client ports that allow them access to the Net.

The access ports are free, but the information is not. Particular servers charge by the hour in the public areas, but have the benefit of allowing me to troll using the server or the bar’s identicodes. I like that; it usually makes my preliminary searches impossible to trace.

That afternoon, I took my usual table in the very back. It’s small, made of high-grade plastic designed to look like wood—and it fools most people. It never fooled me, partly because I knew the Brownie Bar couldn’t afford to import, and partly because I knew they’d never risk something that valuable on a restaurant designed for stoners. I sat cross-legged on the thick pillow on the floor, ordered some turkey stew—made here with real meat—and plugged in.

The screen was tabletop and had a keyboard so that the user could have complete privacy. I’d heard other patrons complain that using the Brownie Bar’s system required them to read, but it was one of the features I liked.

I started with Anetka and decided to work my way backwards through the Sobol family. I found her quickly enough; her life was well covered by the tabs, which made no mention of her clone status. She was twenty-seven, ten to twelve years older than she looked. She’d apparently had those youthful looks placed in stasis surgically. She’d look girlish until she died.

Another good fact to know. If there was an Original, she might not look like Anetka. Not any more.

Anetka had been working in her father’s corporation since she was twelve. Her IQ was off the charts—surgically enhanced as well, at least according to most of the vidspec programs—and she breezed through Harvard and then Cambridge. She did postdoc work at the Interstellar Business School in Islamabad, and was out of school by the time she was twenty-five. For the last two years, she’d been on the corporate fast track, starting in lower management and working her way to the top of the corporate ladder.

She was, according to the latest feeds, her father’s main assistant.

So I had already found Possible Lie Number One: She wasn’t here for herself. She was, as I had suspected, a front for her father. Not to find the wife, but to find the real heir.

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel if that were true. I needed to find out if, indeed, the Original was the one who’d inherit. If she wasn’t, I wouldn’t take the case. There’d be no point.

But I wasn’t ready to make judgements yet. I had a long way to go. I looked up Anetka’s father and discovered that Carson Sobol had never remarried, although he’d been seen with a bevy of beautiful women over the years. All were close to his age. He never dated women younger than he was. Most had their own fortunes, and many their own companies. He spent several years as the companion to an acclaimed Broadway actress, even funding some of her more famous plays. That relationship, like the others, had ended amicably.

Which led to Possible Lie Number Two: a man who terrorized his wife so badly that she had to run away from him also terrorized his later girlfriends. And while a man could keep something like that quiet for a few years, eventually the pattern would become evident. Eventually one of the women would talk.

There was no evidence of terrorizing in the stuff I found. Perhaps the incidents weren’t reported. Or perhaps there was nothing to report. I would vote for the latter. It seemed, from the vidspec I’d read, everyone knew that the wife had left him because of his cruelty. My experience with vidspec reporters made me confident that they’d be on the lookout for more proof of Carson Sobol’s nasty character. And if they found it, they’d report it.

No one had.

I didn’t know if that meant Sobol had learned his lesson when the wife ran off, or perhaps Sobol had learned that mistreatment of women was bad for business. I couldn’t believe that a man could terrify everyone into silence. If that were his methodology, there would be a few leaks that were quickly hushed up, and one or two dead bodies floating around—bodies belonging to folks who hadn’t listened. Also, there would be rumors, and there were none.

Granted, I was making assumptions on a very small amount of information. Most of the reports I found about Sobol weren’t about his family or his love life, but about the Third Dynasty as it expanded in that period to new worlds, places that human businesses had never been before.

The Third Dynasty had been the first to do business with the Fuetrer, the HDs, and the chichers. It opened plants on Korsve, then closed them when it realized that the Wygnin, the dominant life-form on Korsve, did not—and apparently could not—understand the way that humans did business.

I shuddered at the mention of Korsve. If a client approached me because a family member had been taken by the Wygnin, I refused the case. The Wygnin took individuals to pay off debt, and then those individuals became part of a particular Wygnin family. For particularly heinous crimes, the Wygnin took firstborns, but usually, the Wygnin just took babies—from any place in the family structure—at the time of birth, and then raised them. Occasionally they’d take an older child or an adult. Sometimes they’d take an entire group of adults from offending businesses. The adults were subject to mind control and personality destruction as the Wygnin tried to remake them to fit into Wygnin life.

All of that left me with no good options. Children raised by the Wygnin considered themselves Wygnin and couldn’t adapt to human cultures. Adults who were taken by the Wygnin were so broken that they were almost unrecognizable.

Humans raised by the Wygnin did not want to return. Adults who were broken always wanted to return, and when they did, they signed a death warrant for their entire family—or worse, doomed an entire new generation to kidnap by the Wygnin.

But Wygnin custom didn’t seem relevant here. Despite the plant closings, the Third Dynasty had managed to avoid paying a traditional Wygnin price. Or perhaps someone had paid down the line, and that information was classified.

There were other possibles in the files. The Third Dynasty seemed to have touched every difficult alien race in the galaxy. The corporation had an entire division set aside for dealing with new cultures. Not that the division was infallible. Sometimes there were unavoidable errors.

Sylvy Sobol’s disappearance had been one of those. It had caused all sorts of problems for both Sobol and the Third Dynasty. The vidspecs, tabs, and other media had had a field day when she had disappeared. The news led to problems with some of the alien races, particularly the Altaden. The Altaden valued non-violence above all else, and the accusations of domestic violence at the top levels of the Third Dynasty nearly cost the corporation its Altaden holdings.

The thing was, no one expected the disappearance—or the marriage, for that matter. Sylvy Sobol had been a European socialite, better known for her charitable works and her incredible beauty than her interest in business. She belonged to an old family with ties to several still-existing monarchies. It was thought that her marriage would be to someone else from the accepted circle.

It had caused quite a scandal when she had chosen Carson Sobol, not only because of his mixed background and uncertain lineage, but also because some of his business practices had taken large fortunes from the countries she was tied to and spent them in space instead.

He was controversial; the marriage was controversial; and it looked, from the vids I watched, like the two of them had been deeply in love.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. A waitress stood behind me, holding a large ceramic bowl filled with turkey stew. She smiled at me.

“Didn’t want to set it on your work.”

“It’s fine,” I said, indicating an empty spot near the screen. She set my utensils down, and then the bowl. The stew smelled rich and fine, black beans and yogurt adding to the aroma. My stomach growled.

The waitress tapped one of the moving images. “I remember that,” she said. “I was living in Vienna. The Viennese thought that marriage was an abomination.”

I looked up. She was older than I was, without the funds to prevent the natural aging process. Laugh lines crinkled around her eyes, and her lips—unpainted and untouched—were a faint rose. She smiled.

“Guess it turned out that way, huh? The wife running off like that? Leaving that message?”

“Message?” I asked. I hadn’t gotten that far.

“I don’t remember exactly what it was. Something like ‘The long arm of the Third Dynasty is impossible to fight. I am going where you can’t find me. Maybe then I’ll have the chance to live out my entire life.’ I guess he nearly beat her to death.” The waitress laughed, a little embarrassed. “In those days I had nothing better to do than study the lives of more interesting people.”

“And now?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I figured out that everybody’s interesting. I mean, you’ve got to try. You’ve got to live. And if you do, you’ve done something fascinating.”

I nodded. People like her were one of the reasons I liked this place. “You want something to drink?” she asked.

“Bottled water.”

“Got it,” she said as she left.

By the time she brought my bottled water, I had indeed found the note. It had been sent to all the broadcast media, along with a grainy video, taken from a hidden camera, of one of the most brutal domestic beatings I’d ever seen. The images were sometimes blurred and indistinct, but the actions were clear. The man had beat the woman senseless.

There was no mention of the pregnancy in any of this. There was, however, notification of Anetka’s birth six months before her mother had disappeared.

Which led me to Possible Lie Number Three. Anetka had said her mother traveled pregnant. Perhaps she hadn’t. Or, more chillingly, someone had altered the record either before or after the clones were brought to term. There had to be an explanation of Anetka in the media or she wouldn’t be accepted. If that explanation had been planted before, something else was going on. If it were planted afterwards, Sobol’s spokespeople could have simply said that reporters had overlooked her in their rush to other stories.

I checked the other media reports and found the same story. It was time to go beneath those stories and see what else I could find. Then I would confront Anetka about the lies before I began the search for her mother.

V

I contacted her and we met, not at my office, but at her hotel. She was staying in Armstrong’s newest district, an addition onto the dome that caused a terrible controversy before it was built. Folks in my section believe the reason for the thinner air is that the new addition has stretched resources. I know they aren’t right—with the addition came more air and all the other regulation equipment—but it was one of those arguments that made an emotional kind of sense.

I thought of those arguments, though, as I walked among the new buildings, made from a beige material not even conceived of thirty years before, a material that’s supposed to be attractive (it isn’t) and more resistant to decay than permaplastic. This entire section of Armstrong smelt new, from the recycled air to the buildings rising around me. They were four stories high and had large windows on the dome side, obviously built with a view in mind.

This part of the dome is self-cleaning and see-through. Dust does not slowly creep up the sides as it does in the other parts of Armstrong. The view is barren and stark, just like the rest of the Moon, but there’s a beauty in the starkness that I don’t see anywhere else in the universe.

The hotel was another large four-story building. Most of its windows were glazed dark, so no one could see in, but the patrons could see out. It was part of a chain whose parent company was, I had learned the day before, the Third Dynasty. Anetka was doing very little to hide her search from her father.

Inside, the lobby was wide, and had an old-fashioned feel. The walls changed images slowly, showing the famous sites from various parts of the galaxy where the hotels were located. I had read before the hotel opened that the constantly changing scenery took eight weeks to repeat an image. I wondered what it was like working in a place where the view shifted constantly, and then decided I didn’t want to know.

The lobby furniture was soft and a comforting shade of dove gray. Piano music, equally soft and equally comforting, was piped in from somewhere. Patrons sat in small groups as if they were posing for a brochure. I went up to the main desk and asked for Anetka. The concierge led me to a private conference room down the main hallway.

I expected the room to be monitored. That didn’t bother me. At this point, I still had nothing to hide. Anetka did, but this was her company’s hotel. She could get the records, shut off the monitors, or have them destroyed. It would all be her choice.

To my surprise, she was waiting for me. She was wearing another dress, a blue diaphanous thing that looked so fragile I wondered how she managed to move from place to place. Her hair was up and pinned, with diamonds glinting from the soft folds. She also had diamonds glued to the ridge beneath her eyebrows, and trailing down her cheeks. The net effect was to accent her strength. Her broad shoulders held the gown as if it were air, and the folds parted to reveal the muscles on her arms and legs. She was like the diamonds she wore; pretty and glittering, but able to cut through all the objects in the room.

“Have you found anything?” she asked without preamble.

I shut the door and helped myself to the carafe of water on the bar against the nearest wall. There was a table in the center of the room—made, it seemed—of real wood, with matching chairs on the side. There was also a workstation, and a one-way mirror with a view of the lobby.

I leaned against the bar, holding my water glass. It was thick and heavy, sturdy like most things on the Moon. “Your father’s will has been posted among the Legal Notices on all the nets for the last three years.”

She nodded. “It’s common for CEOs to do that to allay stockholder fears.”

“It’s common for CEOs to authorize the release after they’ve died. Not before.”

Her smile was small, almost patronizing. “Smaller corporations, yes. But it’s becoming a requirement for major shareholders in megacorps to do this even if they are not dead. Investigate farther, Mr. Flint, and you’ll see that all of the Third Dynasty’s major shareholders have posted their wills.”

I had already checked the other shareholders’ wills, and found that Anetka was right. I also looked for evidence that Carson Sobol was dead, and found none.

She took my silence to be disbelief. “It’s the same with the other megacorps. Personal dealings are no longer private in the galactic business world.”

I had known that the changes were taking place. I had known, for example, that middle managers signed loyalty oaths to corporations, sometimes requiring them to forsake family if the corporation called for it. This, one pundit had said, was the hidden cost of doing business with alien races. You had to be willing to abandon all you knew in the event of a serious mistake. The upshot of the change was becoming obvious. People to whom family was important were staying away from positions of power in the megacorps.

I said, “You’re not going to great lengths to hide this search from your father.”

She placed a hand on the wooden chair. She was not wearing gloves, and mingled among the enhancements were more diamonds. “You seem obsessed with my father.”

“Your mother disappeared because of him. I’m not going to find her only to have him kill her.”

“He wouldn’t.”

“Says you.”

“This is your hesitation?”

“Actually, no,” I said. “My hesitation is that, according to all public records, you were born six months before your mother disappeared.”

I didn’t tell her that I knew all the databases had been tampered with, including the ones about her mother’s disappearance. I couldn’t tell if the information had been altered to show that the disappearance came later or that the child had been born earlier. The tampering was so old that the original material was lost forever.

“My father wanted me to look like a legitimate child.”

“You are a clone. He knew cloning laws.”

“But no one else had to know.”

“Not even with his will posted?”

“Like you said, it’s only been posted for the last three years.”

“Is that why you’re not mentioned?”

She raised her chin. “I received my inheritance before—already,” she said. I found the correction interesting. “The agreement between us about my sister is both confidential and binding.”

“ ‘All of my worldly possessions shall go to my eldest child,’ ” I quoted. “That child isn’t even listed by name.”

“No,” she said.

“And he isn’t going to change the will for you?”

“The Disty won’t do business with clones.”

“I didn’t know you had business with the Disty,” I said.

She shrugged. “The Disty, the Emin, the Revs. You name them, we have business with them. And we have to be careful of some customs.”

“Won’t the stockholders be suspicious when you don’t inherit?”

Her mouth formed a thin line. “That’s why I’m hiring you,” she said. “You need to find my sister.”

I nodded. Then, for the first time in the meeting, I sat down. The chair was softer than I had expected it would be. I put my feet on the nearest chair. She glanced at them as if they were a lower life-form.

“In order to search for people,” I said, “I need to know who they’re running from. If they’re running from the Disty, for example, I’ll avoid the Martian colonies, because they’re overrun with Disty. No one would hide there. It would be impossible. If they were running from the Revs, I would start looking at plastic surgeons and doctors who specialize in genetic alteration because anyone who looks significantly different from the person the Revs have targeted is considered, by the Revs, to be a different being entirely.”

She started to say something, but I held up my hand to silence her.

“Human spouses abuse each other,” I said. “It seems to be part of the human experience. These days, the abused spouse moves out, and sometimes leaves the city, sometimes the planet, but more often than not stays in the same area. It’s unusual to run, to go through a complete identity change, and to start a new life, especially in your parents’ income bracket. So tell me, why did your mother really leave?”

Nothing changed in Anetka’s expression. It remained so immobile that I knew she was struggling for control. The hardness that had been so prevalent the day before was gone, banished, it seemed, so that I wouldn’t see anything amiss.

“My father has a lot of money,” she said.

“So do other people. Their spouses don’t disappear.”

“He also controls a powerful megacorp with fingers all over the developing worlds. He has access to more information than anyone. He vowed to never let my mother out of his sight. My father believed that marriage vows were sacred, and no matter how much the parties wanted out, they were obligated by their promises to each other and to God to remain.” Anetka’s tone was flat too. “If she had just moved out, he would have forced her to move back in. If she had moved to the Moon, he would have come after her. If she had moved to some of the planets in the next solar system, he would have come for her. So she had no choice.”

“According to your father.”

“According to anyone who knew her.” Anetka’s voice was soft. “You saw the vids.” I nodded.

“That was mild, I guess, for what he did to her.”

I leaned back in the chair, lifting the front two legs off the ground. “So how come he didn’t treat his other women that way?”

Something passed through her eyes so quickly that I wasn’t able to see what the expression was. Suspicion? Fear? I couldn’t tell.

“My father never allowed himself to get close to anyone else.”

“Not even his Broadway actress?”

She frowned, then said, “Oh, Linda? No. Not even her. They were using each other to throw off the media. She had a more significant relationship with one of the major critics, and she didn’t want that to get out.”

“What about you?” I asked that last softly. “If he hurt your mother, why didn’t he hurt you?” She put her other hand on the chair as if she were steadying herself. “Who says he didn’t?”

And in that flatness of tone, I heard all the complaints I’d ever heard from clones. She had legal protection, of course. She was fully human. But she didn’t have familial protection. She wasn’t part of any real group. She didn’t have defenders, except those she hired herself.

But I didn’t believe it, not entirely. She was still lying to me. She was still keeping me slightly off balance. Something was missing, but I couldn’t find it. I’d done all the digging I could reasonably do. I had no direction to go except after the missing wife—if I chose to continue working on this case. This was the last point at which I could comfortably extricate myself from the entire mess.

“You’re not telling me everything,” I said.

Again, the movement with the eyes. So subtle. So quick. I wondered if she had learned to cover up her emotions from her father.

“My father won’t harm her,” she said. “If you want, I’ll even sign a waiver guaranteeing that.”

It seemed the perfect solution to a superficial problem. I had a hunch there were other problems lurking below. “I’ll have one sent to you,” I said.

“Are you still taking the case?”

“Are you still lying to me?”

She paused, the dress billowing around her in the static-charged air. “I need you to find my sister,” she said. And that much, we both knew to be true.

VI

My work is nine-tenths research and one-tenth excitement. Most of the research comes in the beginning, and it’s dry to most people, although I still find the research fascinating. It’s also idiosyncratic and part of the secret behind my reputation. I usually don’t describe how I do the research—and I never explain it to clients. I usually summarize it, like this:

It took me four months to do the preliminary research on Sylvy Sobol. I started from the premise that she was pregnant with a single girl child. A pregnant woman did one of three things: she carried the baby to term, she miscarried, or she aborted. After dealing with hospital records for what seemed like weeks, I determined that she carried the baby to term. Or at least, she hadn’t gotten rid of it before she disappeared.

A pregnant woman had fewer relocation options than a non-pregnant one. She couldn’t travel as far or on as many forms of transport because it might harm the fetus. Several planets, hospitable to humans after they’d acclimatized, were not places someone in the middle of pregnancy was allowed to go. The pregnancy actually made my job easier, and I was glad for it.

Whoever had hidden her was good, but no disappearance service was perfect. They all had cracks in their systems, some revealing themselves in certain types of disappearance, others in all cases past a certain layer of complexity. I knew those flaws as well as I knew the scars and blemishes on my own hands. And I exploited them with ease.

At the end of four months, I had five leads on the former Mrs. Sobol. At the end of five months, I had eliminated two of those leads. At the end of six months, I had a pretty good idea which of the remaining three leads was the woman I was looking for.

I got in my ship, and headed for Mars.

VII

In the hundred years since the Disty first entered this solar system, they have taken over Mars. The human-run mineral operations and the ship bases are still there, but the colonies are all Disty-run, and some are Disty-built.

The Emmeline has clearance on most planets where humans make their homes. Mars is no different. I docked at the Dunes, above the Arctic Circle, and wished I were going elsewhere. It was the Martian winter, and here, in the largest field of sand dunes in the solar system, that meant several months of unrelenting dark.

I had never understood how the locals put up with this. But I hadn’t understood a lot of things. The domes here, mostly of human construction, had an artificial lighting system built in, but the Disty hated the approximation of a twenty-four hour day. Since the Disty had taken over the northernmost colonies, darkness outside and artificial lights inside were the hallmarks of winter.

The Disty made other alterations as well. The Disty were small creatures with large heads, large eyes, and narrow bodies. They hated the feeling of wide open spaces, and so in many parts of the Sahara Dome, as Terrans called this place, false ceilings had been built in, and corridors had been compressed. Buildings were added into the wider spaces, getting rid of many passageways and making the entire place seem like a rat’s warren. Most adult humans had to crouch to walk comfortably through the city streets and some, in disgust, had bought small carts so that they could ride. The result was a congestion that I found claustrophobic at the best of times. I hated crouching when I walked, and I hated the stink of so many beings in such a confined space.

Many Terran buildings rose higher than the ceiling level of the street, but to discourage that wide-open-spaces feel, the Disty built more structures, many of them so close together that there was barely enough room for a human to stick his arm between them. Doors lined the crowded streets, and the only identifying marks on most places were carved into the frame along the door’s side. The carvings were difficult to see in the weird lighting, even if there weren’t the usual crowds struggling to get through the streets to God knew where.

My candidate lived in a building owned by the Disty. It took me two passes to find the building’s number, and another to realize that I had found the right place. A small sign, in English, advertised accommodations fit for humans, and my back and I hoped that the sign was right.

It was. The entire building had been designed with humans in mind. The Disty had proven themselves to be able interstellar traders, and quite willing to adapt to local customs when it suited them. It showed in the interior design of this place. Once I stepped through the door, I was able to stand upright, although the top of my head did brush the ceiling. To my left, a sign pointed toward the main office, another pointed to some cramped stairs, and a third pointed to the recreation area.

I glanced at the main office before I explored any farther. The office was up front, and had the same human-sized ceilings. In order to cope, the Disty running the place sat on its desk, its long feet pressed together in concentration. I passed it, and went to the recreation area. I would look for the woman here before I went door to door upstairs.

The recreation area was about half the size of a human-made room for the same purpose. Still, the Disty managed to cram a lot of stuff in here, and the closeness of everything—while comfortable for the Disty—made it uncomfortable for any human. All five humans in the room were huddled near the bar on the far end. It was the only place with a walking path large enough to allow a full-grown man through.

To get there, I had to go past the Ping-Pong table, and a small section set aside for Go players. Several Disty were playing Go—they felt it was the best thing they had discovered on the planet Earth, with Ping-Pong a close second—sitting on the tables so that their heads were as near the ceiling as they could get. Two more Disty were standing on the table, playing Ping-Pong. None of them paid me any attention at all.

I wound my way through the tight space between the Go players and the Ping-Pong table, ducking once to avoid being whapped in the head with an out-of-control Ping-Pong ball. I noted three other Disty watching the games with rapt interest. The humans, on the other hand, had their backs to the rest of the room. They were sitting on the tilting bar stools, drinking, and not looking too happy about anything.

A woman who could have been anywhere from thirty to seventy-five sat at one end of the bar. Her black hair fell to the middle of her back, and she wore makeup, an affectation that the Disty seemed to like. She was slender—anyone who wanted to live comfortably here had to be—and she wore a silver beaded dress that accented that slimness. Her legs were smooth, and did not bear any marks from mining or other harsh work.

“Susan Wilcox?” I asked as I put my hand on her shoulder and showed her my license.

I felt the tension run through her body, followed by several shivers, but her face gave no sign that anything was wrong.

“Want to go talk?”

She smiled at me, a smooth professional smile that made me feel a little more comfortable. “Sure.”

She stood, took my hand as if we’d been friends a long time, and led me onto a little patio someone had cobbled together in a tiny space behind the recreation area. I didn’t see the point of the thing until I looked up. This was one of the few places in Sahara where the dome was visible, and through its clear surface, you could see the sky. She pulled over a chair, and I grabbed one as well.

“How did you find me?” she asked.

“I’m not sure I did.” I held out my hand. In it was one of my palmtops. “I want to do a DNA check.” She raised her chin slightly. “That’s not legal.”

“I could get a court order.”

She looked at me. A court order would ruin any protection she had, no matter who—or what—she was running from.

“I’m not going to see who you are. I want to see if you’re who I’m looking for. I have comparison DNA.”

“You’re lying,” she said softly.

“Maybe,” I said. “If I am, you’re in trouble either way.”

She knew I was right. She could either take her chances with me, or face the court order where she had no chance at all.

She extended her hand. I ran the edge of the computer along her palm, removing skin cells. The comparison program ran, and as I turned the palmtop face-up, I saw that there was no match. The only thing this woman shared in common with the former Mrs. Sobol was that they were both females of a similar age, and that they had both disappeared twenty-nine years ago while pregnant. Almost everything else was different.

I used my wrist-top for a double-check, and then I sighed. She was watching me closely, her dark eyes reflecting the light from inside.

I smiled at her. “You’re in the clear,” I said. “But if it was this easy for me to find you, chances are that it’ll be as easy for someone else. You might want to move on.”

She shook her head once, as if the very idea were repugnant. “Your child might appreciate it,” I said.

She looked at me as if I had struck her. “She’s not who—”

“No,” I said. “She’s safe. From me, at least. And maybe from whoever’s after you. But you’ve survived out here nearly thirty years. You know the value of caution.”

She swallowed, hard. “You know a lot about me.”

“Not really.” I stood. “I only know what you have in common with the woman I’m looking for.” I slipped the palmtop into my pocket and bowed slightly. “I appreciate your time.”

Then I went back inside, slipped through the recreation area, walked past two more Disty in the foyer, and headed into the narrow passageway they called a street. There I shuddered. I hated the Disty. I’d worked so many cases in which people ran to avoid being caught by the Disty that I’d become averse to them myself.

At least, that was my explanation for my shudder. But I knew that it wasn’t a real explanation. I had put a woman’s life in jeopardy, and we both knew it. I hoped no one had been paying attention. But I was probably wrong. The only solace I had was that since she was hiding amongst the Disty, she probably wasn’t being sought by one of them. If she had been pursued by a Disty, my actions probably would have signed her death warrant.

I spent a night in a cramped hotel room since the Disty didn’t allow take-offs within thirty-six hours of landing. And then I got the hell away from Sahara Dome—and Mars.

VIII

My second possible was in New Orleans, which made my task a lot easier. I had former clients there who felt they owed me, some of whom were in related businesses. I had one of those clients break into the Disappeared’s apartment, remove a strand of hair, and give it to another former client. A third brought me the strand in my room in the International Space Station. Because the strand proved not to be a match, and because I was so certain it would be, I repeated the procedure once more, this time getting another old friend to remove another hair strand from the suspect’s person. Apparently, he passed her in a public place, and plucked. The strand matched the first one, but didn’t belong to Sylvy Sobol.

I didn’t warn this woman at all because I didn’t feel as if I had put her in danger. If she were suspicious about the hair-pulling incident, I felt it was her responsibility to leave town on her own.

The third candidate was on the Moon, in Hadley. I had no trouble finding her, which seemed odd, but she didn’t check out either. I returned to Armstrong, both stumped and annoyed.

The logical conclusion was that my DNA sample was false—that it wasn’t the sample for Sylvy Sobol. I had taken the sample from the Interstellar DNA database, and there was the possibility that the sample had been changed or tainted. I had heard of such a thing being done, but had always dismissed it as impossible. Those samples were the most heavily guarded in the universe. Even if someone managed to get into the system, they would encounter back-ups upon back-ups, and more encryption than I wanted to think about.

So I contacted Anetka and asked her to send me a DNA sample of her mother. She did, and I ran it against the sample I had. Mine had been accurate. The women I had seen were not Sylvy Sobol.

I had never, in my entire career, made an error of this magnitude. One of those women should have been the former Mrs. Sobol. Unless my information was wrong. Unless I was operating from incorrect assumptions. Still, the assumptions shouldn’t have mattered in this search. A pregnant woman wasn’t that difficult to hide, not when she was taking transport elsewhere. I’d even found the one who’d remained on Earth.

No. The incorrect assumption had to come after the pregnancy ended. The children. Transport registries always keep track of the sex of the fetus, partly as a response to a series of lawsuits where no one could prove that the woman who claimed she’d lost a fetus on board a transport had actually been pregnant. The transports do not do a DNA check—such things are considered violations of privacy in all but criminal matters—but they do require pregnant women to submit a doctor’s report on the health of the mother and the fetus before the woman is allowed to board.

I’d searched out pregnant women, but only those carrying a single daughter. Not twins or multiples. And no males. Anetka had mentioned failed clones. Clones failed for a variety of reasons, but they only failed in large numbers when someone was using a defective gene or was trying to make a significant change on the genetic level. If the changes didn’t work at the genetic level, surgery was performed later to achieve the same result and the DNA remained the same.

I had Anetka’s DNA. I’d taken it that first day without her knowing it. I ran client DNA only when I felt I had no other choice; sometimes to check identity, sometimes to check for past crimes. I hadn’t run Anetka’s—photographic, vid, and those enhancements made it obvious that she was who she said she was. I knew she wasn’t concealing her identity, and there was no way she was fronting for a Disty or any other race. She had told me she was a clone. So I felt a DNA check was not only redundant, it was also unnecessary because it didn’t give me the kind of information I was searching for.

But now things were different. I needed to check it to see if she was a repaired child, if there had been some flaw in the fetus that couldn’t have been altered in the womb. I hadn’t looked for repaired children when I’d done the hospital records scans. I hadn’t looked for anything that complicated at all.

So I ran the DNA scan. It only took a second, and the results were not what I expected.

Anetka Sobol wasn’t a repaired child, at least not in the sense that I had been looking for. Anetka Sobol was an altered child.

According to her DNA, Anetka Sobol had once been male.

IX

If the trail hadn’t been so easy to follow once I realized I was looking for a woman pregnant with a boy, I wouldn’t have traced it. I would have gone immediately to Anetka and called her on it. But the trail was easy to follow, and any one of my competitors would have done so—perhaps earlier because they had different methods than I did. I knew at least three of them that ran DNA scans on clients as a matter of course.

If Anetka went to any of them after I refused to complete the work, they would find her mother.

It would take them three days. It took me less, but that was because I was better.

X

Sylvy Sobol ran a small private university in the Gagarin Dome on the Moon. She went by the name Celia Walker, and she had transferred from a school out past the Disty homeworld where she had spent the first ten years of her exile. She had run the university for fifteen years.

Gagarin had been established fifty years after Armstrong, and was run by a governing board, the only colony that had such a government. The board placed covenants on any person who owned or rented property within the interior of the dome. The covenants covered everything from the important, such as oxygen regulators, to the unimportant, such as a maintenance schedule for each building, whether the place needed work or not. Gagarin did not tolerate any rules violations. If someone committed three such violations—whether they be failing to follow the maintenance schedule or murder—that person was banned from the dome for life.

The end result was that residents of Gagarin were quiet, law-abiding, and suspicious. They watched me as if I were a particularly distasteful bug when I got off the high speed train from Armstrong. I learned later that I didn’t meet the dome’s strict dress code.

I had changed into something more appropriate after I got my hotel room, and then went to campus. The university was a technical school for undergraduates, most of them local, but a few came in from other parts of the Moon. The administrative offices were in a low building with fake adobe facades. The classrooms were in some of Gagarin’s only high rises, and were off limits to visitors.

I didn’t care about that. I went straight to the Chancellor’s office and buzzed myself in, even though I didn’t have an appointment. Apparently, the open campus policy that the on-line brochures proudly proclaimed extended to the administrative offices as well.

Sylvy Sobol sat behind a desk made of Moon clay. Ancient southwestern tapestries covered the walls, and matching rugs covered the floor. The permaplastic here had been covered with more fake adobe, and the net effect was to make this seem like the American Southwest hundreds of years before.

She looked no different than the age-enhancement programs on my computer led me to believe she’d look. Her dark hair was laced with silver, her eyes had laugh lines in the corners, and she was as slender as she had been when she disappeared. She wore a blouse made of the same weave as the tapestries, and a pair of tan cargo pants. Beneath the right sleeve of her blouse a stylish wrist-top glistened. When she saw me, she smiled. “May I help you?”

I closed the door, walked to her desk, and showed her my license. Her eyes widened ever so slightly, and then she covered the look.

“I came to warn you,” I said.

“Warn me?” She straightened almost imperceptibly, but managed to look perplexed. Behind the tightness of her lips, I sensed fear.

“You and your son need to use a new service, and disappear again. It’s not safe for you any more.”

“I’m sorry, Mr.—Flint?—but I’m not following you.”

“I can repeat what I said, or we can go somewhere where you’d feel more comfortable talking.” She shook her head once, then stood. “I’m not sure I know what we’d be talking about.”

I reached out my hand. I had my palm scanner in it. Anyone who’d traveled a lot, anyone who had been on the run, would recognize it. “We can do this the old-fashioned way, Mrs. Sobol, or you can listen to me.”

She sat down slowly. Her lower lip trembled. She didn’t object to my use of her real name. “If you’re what your identification says you are, you don’t warn people. You take them in.”

I let my hand drop. “I was hired by Anetka Sobol,” I said. “She wanted me to find you. She claimed that she wanted to share her inheritance with her Original. She’s a clone. The record supports this claim.”

“So, you want to take us back.” Her voice was calm, but her eyes weren’t. I watched her hands. They remained on the desktop, flat, and she was without enhancement. So far, she hadn’t signaled anyone for help.

“Normally, I would have taken you back. But when I discovered that Anetka’s Original was male, I got confused.” Sylvy licked her lower lip, just like her cloned daughter did. An hereditary nervous trait.

I rested one leg on the corner of the desk. “Why would a man change the sex of a clone when the sex didn’t matter? Especially if all he wanted was the child. A man with no violent tendencies, who stood accused of attacking his wife so savagely all she could do was leave him, all she could do was disappear. Why would he do that?”

She hadn’t moved. She was watching me closely. Beads of perspiration had formed on her upper lip.

“So I went back through the records and found two curious things. You disappeared just after his business on Korsve failed. And once you moved to Gagarin, you and your son were often in other domed Moon colonies at the same time as your husband. Not a good way to hide from someone, now is it, Mrs. Sobol?”

She didn’t respond.

I picked up a clay pot. It was small and very, very old. It was clearly an original, not a Moon-made copy. “And then there’s the fact that your husband never bothered to change his will to favor the child he had raised. It wouldn’t have mattered to most parents that the child was a clone, especially when the Original was long gone. He could have arranged a dispensation, and then made certain that the business remained in family hands.” I set the pot down. “But he had already done that, hadn’t he? He hoped that the Wygnin would forget.”

She made a soft sound in the back of her throat, and backed away from me, clutching at her wrist. I reached across the desk and grabbed her left arm, keeping her hand away from her wrist-top. I wasn’t ready for her to order someone to come in here. I still needed to talk to her alone.

“I’m not going to turn you in to the Wygnin,” I said. “I’m not going to let anyone know where you are. But if you don’t listen to me, someone else will find you, and soon.”

She stared at me, the color high in her cheeks. Her arm was rigid beneath my hand.

“The will was your husband’s only mistake,” I said. “The Wygnin never forget. They targeted your firstborn, didn’t they? The plants on Korsve didn’t open and close without a fuss. Something else happened. The Wygnin only target firstborns for a crime that can’t be undone.”

She shook her arm free of me. She rubbed the spot where my hand had touched her flesh, then she sighed. She seemed to know I wouldn’t go away. When she spoke, her voice was soft. “No Wygnin were on the site planning committee. We bought the land, and built the plants according to our customs. At that point, the Wygnin didn’t understand the concept of land purchase.”

I noted the use of the word “we.” She had been involved with the Third Dynasty, more involved than the records said.

“We built on a haven for nestlings. You understand nestlings?”

“I thought they were a food source.”

She shook her head. “They’re more than that. They’re part of Wygnin society in a way we didn’t understand. They become food only after they die. It’s the shells that are eaten, not the nestlings themselves. The nestlings themselves are considered sentient.”

I felt myself grow cold. “How many were killed?”

She shrugged. “The entire patch. No one knows for sure. We were told, when the Wygnin came to us, that they were letting us off easily by taking our firstborn—Carson’s and mine. They could easily take all the children of anyone who was connected with the project, but they didn’t.”

They could have, too. It was the Third Dynasty that acted without regard to local custom, which made it liable to local laws. Over the years, no interstellar court had overturned a ruling in instances like that. “Carson agreed to it,” she said. “He agreed so no one else would suffer. Then we got me out.”

“And no one came looking for you until I did.”

“That’s right,” she said.

“I don’t think Anetka’s going to stop,” I said. “I suspect she wants her father to change the will—”

“What?” Sylvy clenched her collar with her right hand, revealing the wrist-top. It was one of the most sophisticated I’d seen.

“Anetka wants control of the Third Dynasty, and I was wondering why her father hadn’t done a will favoring her. Now I know. She was probably hoping I couldn’t find you so that her father would change the will in her favor.”

“He can’t,” Sylvy said.

“I’m sure he might consider it, if your son’s life is at stake,” I said. “The Wygnin treat their captives like family—indeed, make them into family, but the techniques they use on adults of other species are—”

“No,” she said. “It’s too late for Carson to change his will.”

She was frowning at me as if I didn’t understand anything. And it took me a moment to realize how I’d been used. Anetka Sobol had tricked me in more ways than I cared to think about. I wasn’t half as good as I thought I was. I felt the beginnings of an anger I didn’t need. I suppressed it. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

Sylvy nodded. “He died three years ago. He installed a personal alarm that notified me the moment his heart stopped. My son has been voting his shares through a proxy program my husband set up during one of his trips here.”

I glanced at the wrist-top. No wonder it was so sophisticated. Too sophisticated for a simple administrator. Carson Sobol had given it to her, and through it, had notified her of his death. Had it broken her heart? I couldn’t tell, not from three years’ distance.

She caught me staring at it, and brought her arm down. I turned away, taking a deep breath as the reality of my situation hit me. Anetka Sobol had out-maneuvered me. She had put me in precisely the kind of case I never wanted.

I was working for the Tracker. I was leading a Disappeared to her death and probably the death of her son. “I don’t get it,” I said. “If something happens to your son, Anetka still won’t inherit.”

Sylvy’s smile was small. “She inherits by default. My son will disappear, and stop voting the proxy program. She’ll set up a new proxy program and continue to vote the shares. I’m sure the Board thinks she’s the person behind the votes anyway. No one knows about our son.”

“Except for you, and me, and the Wygnin.” I closed my eyes. “Anetka had no idea you’d had a son.”

“No one did,” Sylvy said. “Until now.”

I rubbed my nose with my thumb and forefinger. Anetka was good. She had discovered that I was the best and the quickest Retrieval Artist in the business. She had studied me and had known how to reach me. She had also known how to play at being an innocent, how to use my past history to her advantage. She hired me to find her Original, and once I did, she planned to get rid of him. It would have been easy for her too; no hitman, no attempt at killing. She wouldn’t have had to do anything except somehow—surreptitiously—let the Wygnin know how to find the Original. They would have taken him in payment for the Third Dynasty’s crimes, he would have stopped voting his shares, and she would have controlled the corporation.

Stopping Anetka wasn’t going to be easy. Even if I refused to report, even if Sylvy and her son returned to hiding, Anetka would continue looking for them.

I had doomed them. If I left this case now, I ensured that one of my colleagues would take it. They would find Sylvy and her son. My colleagues weren’t as good as I was, but they were good. And they were smart enough to follow the bits of my trail that I couldn’t erase.

The only solution was to get rid of Anetka. I couldn’t kill her. But I could think of one other way to stop her.

I opened my eyes. “If I could get Anetka out of the business, and allow you and your son to return home, would you do so?”

Sylvy shook her head. “This is my home,” she said. She glanced at the fake adobe walls, the southwestern decor. Her fingers touched a blanket hanging on the wall beside her. “But I can’t answer for my son.”

“If he doesn’t do anything, he’ll be running for the rest of his life.”

She nodded. “I still can’t answer for him. He’s an adult now. He makes his own choices.” As we all did.

“Think about it,” I said, handing her a card with my chip on it. “I’ll be here for two days.”

XI

They hired me, of course. What thinking person wouldn’t? I had to guarantee that I wouldn’t kill Anetka when I got her out of the business—and I did that, by assuring Sylvy that I wasn’t now nor would I ever be an assassin—and I had to guarantee that I would get the Wygnin off her son’s trail.

I agreed to both conditions, and for the first time in years, I did something other than tracking a Disappeared. Through channels, I let it drop that I was searching for the real heir to Carson Sobol’s considerable fortune. Then I showed some of my actual research—into the daughter’s history, the falsified birth date, the inaccurate records. I managed to dump information about Anetka’s cloning and her sex change, and I tampered with the records to show that her clone mark had been faked just as her sex had. Alterations, done at birth, made her look like a clone when she really wasn’t.

I made sure that my own work on-line looked like sloppy detecting, but I hid the changes I made in other files. I did all of this quickly and thoroughly, and by the time I was done, it appeared as though Carson Sobol had hidden his own heir—originally a son—by making him into a daughter and passing him off as a clone.

At that point, I could have sat back and let events move forward by themselves. But I didn’t. This had become personal.

I had to see Anetka one last time.

I set an appointment to hand-deliver my final bill.

XII

This time she was wearing emeralds, an entire sheath covered with them. I had heard that there would be a gala event honoring one of the galaxy’s leaders, but I had forgotten that the event would be held in Armstrong, at one of the poshest restaurants on the Moon.

She was sweeping up her long hair, letting it fall just below the mark on the back of her head, when I entered. As she turned, she stabbed an emerald haircomb into the bun at the base of her neck.

“I don’t have much time,” she said.

“I know.” I closed the door. “I wanted give you my final bill.”

“You found my sister?” There was a barely concealed excitement in her voice.

“No.” The room smelled of an illegal perfume. I was surprised no one had confiscated it when she got off the shuttle and then I realized she probably hadn’t taken a shuttle. Even the personal items bag she wore that first day had been part of her act. “I’m resigning.”

She shook her head slightly. “I might have known you would. You have enough money now, so you’re going to quit.”

“I have enough information now to know you’re not the kind of person I relish working for.”

She raised her eyebrows. The movement dislodged the tiny emerald attached to her left cheek. She caught it just before it fell to the floor. “I thought you were done investigating me.”

“Your father’s dead,” I said. “He has been for three years, although the Third Dynasty has managed to keep that information secret, knowing the effect his death would have had on galactic confidence in the business.”

She stared at me for a moment, clearly surprised. “Only five of us knew that.”

“Six,” I said.

“You found my mother.” She stuck the emerald in its spot.

“You found the alarm. You knew she’d been notified of your father’s death.”

The emerald wasn’t staying on her cheek. Anetka let out a puff of air, then set the entire kit down. “I really didn’t appreciate the proxy program,” she said. “It notified me of my insignificance an hour after my father breathed his last. It told me to go about my life with my own fortune and abandon my place in the Third Dynasty to my Original.”

“Which you didn’t do.”

“Why should I? I knew more about the business than she ever would.”

“Including the Wygnin.”

She leaned against the dressing table. “You’re much better than I thought.”

“And you’re a lot more devious than I gave you credit for.”

She smiled and tapped her left cheek. “It’s the face. Youth still fools.”

Perhaps it did. I usually didn’t fall for it, though. I couldn’t believe I had this time. I had simply thought I was being as cautious as usual. What Anetka Sobol had taught me was that being as cautious as usual wasn’t cautious enough.

“Pay me, and I’ll get out of here,” I said.

“You’ve found my mother. You may as well tell me where she is.”

“So you can turn your Original over to the Wygnin?”

That flat look came back into her eyes. “I wouldn’t do that.”

“How would you prevent it? The Wygnin have a valid debt.”

“It’s twenty-seven years old.”

“The Wygnin hold onto markers for generations.” I paused, then added, “As you well know.”

“You can’t prove what I do and do not know.”

I nodded. “True enough. Information is always tricky. It’s so easy to tamper with.”

Her eyes narrowed. She was smart, probably one of the smartest people I’d ever come up against. She knew I was referring to something besides our discussion.

“So I’m getting out.” I handed her a paper copy of the bill—rare, unnecessary, and expensive. She knew that as well as I did. Then, as soon as she took the paper from my hand, I pressed my wrist-top to send the electronic version.

“You owe me money. I expect payment within the hour.” She crumpled the bill. “You’ll get it.”

“Good.” I pulled open the door.

“You know,” she said, just loud enough for me to hear, “if you can find my mother, anyone can.”

“I’ve already thought of that,” I said, and left.

XIII

The Wygnin came for her later that night, toward the end of the gala. Security tried to stop them until they showed a valid warrant for the heir of Carson Sobol. The entire transaction caused an interstellar incident, and the vidnets were filled with it for days. The Third Dynasty used its attorneys to try to prove that Anetka was the eighth clone, just as everyone thought she was, but the Wygnin didn’t believe it.

The beautiful thing about a clone is that it is a human being. It’s simply one whose heritage matches another person’s exactly, and whose facts of birth are odder than most. These are facts, yes, but they are facts that can be explained in other ways. The Wygnin simply chose to believe my explanations, not Anetka’s. It was the sex change that did it. The Wygnin believed that anyone who would change a child’s sex to protect it would also brand it with a clone mark, even if the mark wasn’t accurate.

Over time, the lawyers lost all of their appeals, and Anetka disappeared into the Wygnin culture, never to be heard from again.

Oh, of course, the Third Dynasty still believes it’s being run by Anetka Sobol voting her shares, as she always has, through a proxy program. Her Original apparently decided not to return to claim his prize. He acts as he always planned to, secretly. Only Sylvy Sobol, her son, and I know the person voting those shares isn’t Anetka.

After Anetka’s future was sealed, I stopped paying attention to the business of the Third Dynasty. I still don’t look. I don’t want to know if I have traded one monster for another. Some cold-heartedness is trained—and I can make myself think that Carson Sobol never once treated young Anetka with love, affection, or anything bordering civility—but I am smart enough to know that most cold-heartedness is bred into the genes. Just because Anetka is gone, doesn’t mean the Original won’t act the same way in similar circumstances.

And what is my excuse for my cold-heartedness? I’d like to say I’ve never done anything like this before, but I have—always in the name of my client, or a Disappeared. This time, though, this time, I did it for me.

Anetka Sobol had out-thought me, had compromised me, and had made me do the kind of work I’d vowed I’d never do. I let a front use me to open a door that would allow other Trackers find a Disappeared.

People disappear because they want to. They disappear to escape a bad life, or a mistake they’ve made, or they disappear to save themselves from a horrible death. A person who has disappeared never wants to be found.

I always ignored that simple fact, thinking I knew better. But one man is never a good judge of another, even if he thinks he is.

I tell myself Anetka Sobol would have destroyed her Original if she had had the chance. I tell myself Anetka Sobol was greedy and self-centered. I tell myself Anetka Sobol deserved her fate.

But I can’t ignore the fact that when I learned that Anetka Sobol had used me, this case became personal, in a way I would never have expected. Maybe, just maybe, I might have found a different solution, if she hadn’t angered me so.

And now she haunts me in the middle of the night. She wakes me out of many a sound sleep. She keeps me restless and questioning. Because I didn’t go after her for who she was or what she was planning. I had worked with people far worse than she was. I had met others who had done horrible things, things that made me wonder if they were even human. Anetka Sobol wasn’t in their league.

No. I had gone after her for what she had done to me. For what she had made me see about myself. And because I hadn’t liked my reflection in the mirror she held up, I destroyed her.

I can’t get her back. No one comes back intact from the Wygnin. She will spend the rest of her days there. And I will spend the rest of mine thinking about her.

Some would say that is justice. But I have come to realize, in a universe as complex as this one, justice no longer exists.

SEVENTY-TWO LETTERS

Ted Chiang

When he was a child, Robert’s favorite toy was a simple one, a clay doll that could do nothing but walk forward. While his parents entertained their guests in the garden outside, discussing Victoria’s ascension to the throne or the Chartist reforms, Robert would follow the doll as it marched down the corridors of the family home, turning it around corners or back where it came from. The doll didn’t obey commands or exhibit any sense at all; if it met a wall, the diminutive clay figure would keep marching until it gradually mashed its arms and legs into misshapen flippers. Sometimes Robert would let it do that, strictly for his own amusement. Once the doll’s limbs were thoroughly distorted, he’d pick the toy up and pull the name out, stopping its motion in mid-stride. Then he’d knead the body back into a smooth lump, flatten it out into a plank, and cut out a different figure: a body with one leg crooked, or longer than the other. He would stick the name back into it, and the doll would promptly topple over and push itself around in a little circle.

It wasn’t the sculpting that Robert enjoyed; it was mapping out the limits of the name. He liked to see how much variation he could impart to the body before the name could no longer animate it. To save time with the sculpting, he rarely added decorative details; he refined the bodies only as was needed to test the name.

Another of his dolls walked on four legs. The body was a nice one, a finely detailed porcelain horse, but Robert was more interested in experimenting with its name. This name obeyed commands to start and stop and knew enough to avoid obstacles, and Robert tried inserting it into bodies of his own making. But this name had more exacting body requirements, and he was never able to form a clay body it could animate. He formed the legs separately and then attached them to the body, but he wasn’t able to blend the seams smooth enough; the name didn’t recognize the body as a single continuous piece.

He scrutinized the names themselves, looking for some simple substitutions that might distinguish two-leggedness from four-leggedness, or make the body obey simple commands. But the names looked entirely different; on each scrap of parchment were inscribed seventy-two tiny Hebrew letters, arranged in twelve rows of six, and so far as he could tell, the order of the letters was utterly random.

Robert Stratton and his fourth form classmates sat quietly as Master Trevelyan paced between the rows of desks.

“Langdale, what is the doctrine of names?”

“All things are reflections of God, and, um, all—”

“Spare us your bumbling. Thorburn, can you tell us the doctrine of names?”

“As all things are reflections of God, so are all names reflections of the divine name.”

“And what is an object’s true name?”

“That name which reflects the divine name in the same manner as the object reflects God.”

“And what is the action of a true name?”

“To endow its object with a reflection of divine power.”

“Correct. Halliwell, what is the doctrine of signatures?”

The natural philosophy lesson continued until noon, but because it was a Saturday, there was no instruction for the rest of the day. Master Trevelyan dismissed the class, and the boys of Cheltenham school dispersed.

After stopping at the dormitory, Robert met his friend Lionel at the border of school grounds. “So the wait’s over? Today’s the day?” Robert asked.

“I said it was, didn’t I?”

“Let’s go, then.” The pair set off to walk the mile and a half to Lionel’s home.

During his first year at Cheltenham, Robert had known Lionel hardly at all; Lionel was one of the day-boys, and Robert, like all the boarders, regarded them with suspicion. Then, purely by chance, Robert ran into him while on holiday, during a visit to the British Museum. Robert loved the museum: the frail mummies and immense sarcophagi; the stuffed platypus and pickled mermaid; the wall bristling with elephant tusks and moose antlers and unicorn horns. That particular day he was at the display of elemental sprites: He was reading the card explaining the salamander’s absence when he suddenly recognized Lionel, standing right next to him, peering at the undine in its jar. Conversation revealed their shared interest in the sciences, and the two became fast friends.

As they walked down the road, they kicked a large pebble back and forth between them. Lionel gave the pebble a kick, and laughed as it skittered between Robert’s ankles. “I couldn’t wait to get out of there,” he said. “I think one more doctrine would have been more than I could bear.”

“Why do they even bother calling it natural philosophy?” said Robert. “Just admit it’s another theology lesson and be done with it.” The two of them had recently purchased A Boy’s Guide to Nomenclature, which informed them that nomenclators no longer spoke in terms of God or the divine name. Instead, current thinking held that there was a lexical universe as well as a physical one, and bringing an object together with a compatible name caused the latent potentialities of both to be realized. Nor was there a single “true name” for a given object: Depending on its precise shape, a body might be compatible with several names, known as its [“euonyms,”] and conversely a simple name might tolerate significant variations in body shape, as his childhood marching doll had demonstrated.

When they reached Lionel’s home, they promised the cook they would be in for dinner shortly and headed to the garden out back. Lionel had converted a tool shed in his family’s garden into a laboratory, which he used to conduct experiments. Normally Robert came by on a regular basis, but recently Lionel had been working on an experiment that he was keeping secret. Only now was he ready to show Robert his results. Lionel had Robert wait outside while he entered first, and then let him enter.

A long shelf ran along every wall of the shed, crowded with racks of vials, stoppered bottles of green glass, and assorted rocks and mineral specimens. A table decorated with stains and scorch marks dominated the cramped space, and it supported the apparatus for Lionel’s latest experiment: a cucurbit clamped in a stand so that its bottom rested in a basin full of water, which in turn sat on a tripod above a lit oil lamp. A mercury thermometer was also fixed in the basin.

“Take a look,” said Lionel.

Robert leaned over to inspect the cucurbit’s contents. At first it appeared to be nothing more than foam, a dollop of suds that might have dripped off a pint of stout. But as he looked closer, he realized that what he thought were bubbles were actually the interstices of a glistening latticework. The froth consisted of homunculi : tiny seminal foetuses. Their bodies were transparent individually, but collectively their bulbous heads and strand-like limbs adhered to form a pale, dense foam.

“So you wanked off into a jar and kept the spunk warm?” he asked, and Lionel shoved him. Robert laughed and raised his hands in a placating gesture. “No, honestly, it’s a wonder. How’d you do it?”

Mollified, Lionel said, “It’s a real balancing act. You have to keep the temperature just right, of course, but if you want them to grow, you also have to keep just the right mix of nutrients. Too thin a mix, and they starve. Too rich, and they get over-lively and start fighting with each other.”

“You’re having me on.”

“It’s the truth; look it up if you don’t believe me. Battles amongst sperm are what cause monstrosities to be born. If an injured foetus is the one that makes it to the egg, the baby that’s born is deformed.”

“I thought that was because of a fright the mother had when she was carrying.” Robert could just make out the miniscule squirmings of the individual foetuses. He realized that the froth was ever so slowly roiling as a result of their collective motions.

“That’s only for some kinds, like ones that are all hairy or covered in blotches. Babies that don’t have arms or legs, or have misshapen ones, they’re the ones that got caught in a fight back when they were sperm. That’s why you can’t provide too rich a broth, especially if they haven’t any place to go: They get in a frenzy. You can lose all of them pretty quick that way.”

“How long can you keep them growing?”

“Probably not much longer,” said Lionel. “It’s hard to keep them alive if they haven’t reached an egg. I read about one in France that was grown till it was the size of a fist, and they had the best equipment available. I just wanted was to see if I could do it at all.”

Robert stared at the foam, remembering the doctrine of preformation that Master Trevelyan had drilled into them: All living things had been created at the same time, long ago, and births today were merely enlargements of the previously imperceptible. Although they appeared newly created, these homunculi were countless years old; for all of human history they had lain nested within generations of their ancestors, waiting for their turn to be born.

In fact, it wasn’t just them who had waited; he himself must have done the same thing prior to his birth. If his father were to do this experiment, the tiny figures Robert saw would be his unborn brothers and sisters. He knew they were insensible until reaching an egg, but he wondered what thoughts they’d have if they weren’t. He imagined the sensation of his body, every bone and organ soft and clear as gelatin, sticking to those of myriad identical siblings. What would it be like, looking through transparent eyelids, realizing the mountain in the distance was actually a person, recognizing it as his brother? What if he knew he’d become as massive and solid as that colossus, if only he could reach an egg? It was no wonder they fought.

Robert Stratton went on to read nomenclature at Cambridge’s Trinity College. There he studied kabbalistic texts written centuries before, when nomenclators were still called ba’alei shem and automata were called golem, texts that laid the foundation for the science of names: the Sefer Yezirah, Eleazar of Worms’ Sodei Razayya, Abulafia’s Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba. Then he studied the alchemical treaties that placed the techniques of alphabetic manipulation in a broader philosophical and mathematical context: Llull’s Ars Magna, Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, Dee’s Monas Hieroglyphica.

He learned that every name was a combination of several epithets, each designating a specific trait or capability. Epithets were generated by compiling all the words that described the desired trait: cognates and etymons, from languages both living and extinct. By selectively substituting and permuting letters, one could distill from those words their common essence, which was the epithet for that trait. In certain instances, epithets could be used as the bases for triangulation, allowing one to derive epithets for traits undescribed in any language. The entire process relied on intuition as much as formulae; the ability to choose the best letter permutations was an unteachable skill.

He studied the modern techniques of nominal integration and factorization, the former being the means by which a set of epithets—pithy and evocative—were commingled into the seemingly random string of letters that made up a name, the latter by which a name was decomposed into its constituent epithets. Not every method of integration had a matching factorization technique: A powerful name might be refactored to yield a set of epithets different from those used to generate it, and those epithets were often useful for that reason. Some names resisted refactorization, and nomenclators strove to develop new techniques to penetrate their secrets.

Nomenclature was undergoing something of a revolution during this time. There had long been two classes of names: those for animating a body, and those functioning as amulets. Health amulets were worn as protection from injury or illness, while others rendered a house resistant to fire or a ship less likely to founder at sea. Of late, however, the distinction between these categories of names was becoming blurred, with exciting results.

The nascent science of thermodynamics, which established the interconvertibility of heat and work, had recently explained how automata gained their motive power by absorbing heat from their surroundings. Using this improved understanding of heat, a Namenmeister in Berlin had developed a new class of amulet that caused a body to absorb heat from one location and release it in another. Refrigeration employing such amulets was simpler and more efficient than that based on the evaporation of a volatile fluid, and had immense commercial application. Amulets were likewise facilitating the improvement of automata: An Edinburgh nomenclator’s research into the amulets that prevented objects from becoming lost had led him to patent a household automaton able to return objects to their proper places.

Upon graduation, Stratton took up residence in London and secured a position as a nomenclator at Coade Manufactory, one of the leading makers of automata in England.

Stratton’s most recent automaton, cast from plaster of paris, followed a few paces behind him as he entered the factory building. It was an immense brick structure with skylights for its roof; half of the building was devoted to casting metal, the other half to ceramics. In either section, a meandering path connected the various rooms, each one housing the next step in transforming raw materials into finished automata. Stratton and his automaton entered the ceramics portion.

They walked past a row of low vats in which the clay was mixed. Different vats contained different grades of clay, ranging from common red clay to fine white kaolin, resembling enormous mugs abrim with liquid chocolate or heavy cream; only the strong mineral smell broke the illusion. The paddles stirring the clay were connected by gears to a drive shaft, mounted just beneath the skylights, that ran the length of the room. At the end of the room stood an automatous engine: a castiron giant that cranked the drive wheel tirelessly. Walking past, Stratton could detect a faint coolness in the air as the engine drew heat from its surroundings.

The next room held the molds for casting. Chalky white shells bearing the inverted contours of various automata were stacked along the walls. In the central portion of the room, apron-clad journeymen sculptors worked singly and in pairs, tending the cocoons from which automata were hatched.

The sculptor nearest him was assembling the mold for a putter, a broad-headed quadruped employed in the mines for pushing trolleys of ore. The young man looked up from his work. “Were you looking for someone, sir?” he asked.

“I’m to meet Master Willoughby here,” replied Stratton.

“Pardon, I didn’t realize. I’m sure he’ll be here shortly.” The journeyman returned to his task. Harold Willoughby was a Master Sculptor First-Degree; Stratton was consulting him on the design of a reusable mold for casting his automaton. While he waited, Stratton strolled idly amongst the molds. His automaton stood motionless, ready for its next command.

Willoughby entered from the door to the metalworks, his face flushed from the heat of the foundry. “My apologies for being late, Mr. Stratton,” he said. “We’ve been working toward a large bronze for some weeks now, and today was the pour. You don’t want to leave the lads alone at a time like that.”

“I understand completely,” replied Stratton.

Wasting no time, Willoughby strode over to the new automaton. “Is this what you’ve had Moore doing all these months?” Moore was the journeyman assisting Stratton on his project.

Stratton nodded. “The boy does good work.” Following Stratton’s requests, Moore had fashioned countless bodies, all variations on a single basic theme, by applying modeling clay to an armature, and then used them to create plaster casts on which Stratton could test his names.

Willoughby inspected the body. “Some nice detail; looks straightforward enough—hold on now.” He pointed to the automaton’s hands: Rather than the traditional paddle or mitten design, with fingers suggested by grooves in the surface, these were fully formed, each one having a thumb and four distinct and separate fingers. “You don’t mean to tell me those are functional?”

“That’s correct.”

Willoughby’s skepticism was plain. “Show me.”

Stratton addressed the automaton. “Flex your fingers.” The automaton extended both hands, flexed and straightened each pair of fingers in turn, and then returned its arms to its sides.

“I congratulate you, Mr. Stratton,” said the sculptor. He squatted to examine the automaton’s fingers more closely. “The fingers need to be bent at each joint for the name to take?”

“That’s right. Can you design a piece mold for such a form?”

Willoughby clicked his tongue several times. “That’ll be a tricky bit of business,” he said. “We might have to use a waste mold for each casting. Even with a piece mold, these’d be very expensive for ceramic.”

“I think they will be worth the expense. Permit me to demonstrate.” Stratton addressed to the automaton. “Cast a body; use that mold over there.”

The automaton trudged over to a nearby wall and picked up the pieces of the mold Stratton had indicated: It was the mold for a small porcelain messenger. Several journeymen stopped what they were doing to watch the automaton carry the pieces over to a work area. There it fitted the various sections together and bound them tightly with twine. The sculptors’ wonderment was apparent as they watched the automaton’s fingers work, looping and threading the loose ends of the twine into a knot. Then the automaton stood the assembled mold upright and headed off to get a pitcher of clay slip.

“That’s enough,” said Willoughby. The automaton stopped its work and resumed its original standing posture. Examining the mold, Willoughby asked, “Did you train it yourself?”

“I did. I hope to have Moore train it in metal casting.”

“Do you have names that can learn other tasks?”

“Not as yet. However, there’s every reason to believe that an entire class of similar names exists, one for every sort of skill needing manual dexterity.”

“Indeed?” Willoughby noticed the other sculptors watching, and called out, “If you’ve nothing to do, there’s plenty I can assign to you.” The journeymen promptly resumed their work, and Willoughby turned back to Stratton. “Let us go to your office to speak about this further.”

“Very well.” Stratton had the automaton follow the two of them back to the frontmost of the complex of connected buildings that was Coade Manufactory. They first entered Stratton’s studio, which was situated behind his office proper. Once inside, Stratton addressed the sculptor. “Do you have an objection to my automaton?”

Willoughby looked over a pair of clay hands mounted on a work-table. On the wall behind the table were pinned a series of schematic drawings showing hands in a variety of positions. “You’ve done an admirable job of emulating the human hand. I am concerned, however, that the first skill in which you trained your new automation is sculpture.”

“If you’re worried that I am trying to replace sculptors, you needn’t be. That is absolutely not my goal.”

“I’m relieved to hear it,” said Willoughby. “Why did you choose sculpture, then?”

“It is the first step of a rather indirect path. My ultimate goal is to allow automatous engines to be manufactured inexpensively enough so that most families could purchase one.”

Willoughby’s confusion was apparent. “How, pray tell, would a family make use of an engine?”

“To drive a powered loom, for example.”

“What are you going on about?”

“Have you ever seen children who are employed at a textile mill? They are worked to exhaustion; their lungs are clogged with cotton dust; they are so sickly that you can hardly conceive of their reaching adulthood. Cheap cloth is bought at the price of our workers’ health; weavers were far better off when textile production was a cottage industry.”

“Powered looms were what took weavers out of cottages. How could they put them back in?”

Stratton had not spoken of this before, and welcomed the opportunity to explain. “The cost of automatous engines has always been high, and so we have mills in which scores of looms are driven by an immense coal-heated Goliath. But an automaton like mine could cast engines very cheaply. If a small automatous engine, suitable for driving a few machines, becomes affordable to a weaver and his family, then they can produce cloth from their home as they did once before. People could earn a decent income without being subjected to the conditions of the factory.”

“You forget the cost of the loom itself,” said Willoughby gently, as if humoring him. “Powered looms are considerably more expensive than the hand looms of old.”

“My automata could also assist in the production of cast-iron parts, which would reduce the price of powered looms and other machines. This is no panacea, I know, but I am nonetheless convinced that inexpensive engines offer the chance of a better life for the individual craftsman.”

“Your desire for reform does you credit. Let me suggest, however, that there are simpler cures for the social ills you cite: a reduction in working hours, or the improvement of conditions. You do not need to disrupt our entire system of manufacturing.”

“I think what I propose is more accurately described as a restoration than a disruption.”

Now Willoughby became exasperated. “This talk of returning to a family economy is all well and good, but what would happen to sculptors? Your intentions notwithstanding, these automata of yours would put sculptors out of work. These are men who have undergone years of apprenticeship and training. How would they feed their families?”

Stratton was unprepared for the sharpness in his tone. “You overestimate my skills as a nomenclator,” he said, trying to make light. The sculptor remained dour. He continued. “The learning capabilities of these automata are extremely limited. They can manipulate molds, but they could never design them; the real craft of sculpture can be performed only by sculptors. Before our meeting, you had just finished directing several journeymen in the pouring of a large bronze; automata could never work together in such a coordinated fashion. They will perform only rote tasks.”

“What kind of sculptors would we produce if they spend their apprenticeship watching automata do their jobs for them? I will not have a venerable profession reduced to a performance by marionettes.”

“That is not what would happen,” said Stratton, becoming exasperated himself now. “But examine what you yourself are saying: The status that you wish your profession to retain is precisely that which weavers have been made to forfeit. I believe these automata can help restore dignity to other professions, and without great cost to yours.”

Willoughby seemed not to hear him. “The very notion that automata would make automata! Not only is the suggestion insulting, it seems ripe for calamity. What of that ballad, the one where the broomsticks carry water buckets and run amuck?”

“You mean ‘Der Zauberlehrling’ ?” said Stratton. “The comparison is absurd. These automata are so far removed from being in a position to reproduce themselves without human participation that I scarcely know where to begin listing the objections. A dancing bear would sooner perform in the London Ballet.”

“If you’d care to develop an automaton that can dance the ballet, I would fully support such an enterprise. However, you cannot continue with these dexterous automata.”

“Pardon me, sir, but I am not bound by your decisions.”

“You’ll find it difficult to work without sculptors’ cooperation. I shall recall Moore and forbid all the other journeymen from assisting you in any way with this project.”

Stratton was momentarily taken aback. “Your reaction is completely unwarranted.”

“I think it entirely appropriate.”

“In that case, I will work with sculptors at another manufactory.”

Willoughby frowned. “I will speak with the head of the Brotherhood of Sculptors, and recommend that he forbid all of our members from casting your automata.”

Stratton could feel his blood rising. “I will not be bullied,” he said. “Do what you will, but you cannot prevent me from pursuing this.”

“I think our discussion is at an end.” Willoughby strode to the door. “Good day to you, Mr. Stratton.”

“Good day to you,” replied Stratton heatedly.

It was the following day, and Stratton was taking his midday stroll through the district of Lambeth, where Coade Manufactory was located. After a few blocks he stopped at a local market; sometimes among the baskets of writhing eels and blankets spread with cheap watches were automatous dolls, and Stratton retained his boyhood fondness for seeing the latest designs. Today he noticed a new pair of boxing dolls, painted to look like an explorer and a savage. As he looked them over, he could hear nostrum peddlers competing for the attention of a passerby with a runny nose.

“I see your health amulet failed you, sir,” said one man whose table was arrayed with small square tins. “Your remedy lies in the curative powers of magnetism, concentrated in Doctor Sedgewick’s Polarising Tablets!”

“Nonsense!” retorted an old woman. “What you need is tincture of mandrake, tried and true!” She held out a vial of clear liquid. “The dog wasn’t cold yet when this extract was prepared! There’s nothing more potent.”

Seeing no other new dolls, Stratton left the market and walked on, his thoughts returning to what Willoughby had said yesterday. Without the cooperation of the sculptors’ trade-union, he’d have to resort to hiring independent sculptors. He hadn’t worked with such individuals before, and some investigation would be required: ostensibly they cast bodies only for use with public-domain names, but for certain individuals these activities disguised patent infringement and piracy, and any association with them could permanently blacken his reputation.

“Mr. Stratton.”

Stratton looked up. A small, wiry man, plainly dressed, stood before him. “Yes; do I know you, sir?”

“No, sir. My name is Davies. I’m in the employ of Lord Fieldhurst.” He handed Stratton a card bearing the Fieldhurst crest.

Edward Maitland, third earl of Fieldhurst and a noted zoologist and comparative anatomist, was President of the Royal Society. Stratton had heard him speak during sessions of the Royal Society, but they had never been introduced. “What can I do for you?”

“Lord Fieldhurst would like to speak with you, at your earliest convenience, regarding your recent work.”

Stratton wondered how the earl had learned of his work. “Why did you not call on me at my office?”

“Lord Fieldhurst prefers privacy in this matter.” Stratton raised his eyebrows, but Davies didn’t explain further. “Are you available this evening?”

It was an unusual invitation, but an honor nonetheless. “Certainly. Please inform Lord Fieldhurst that I would be delighted.”

“A carriage will be outside your building at eight tonight.” Davies touched his hat and was off.

At the promised hour, Davies arrived with the carriage. It was a luxurious vehicle, with an interior of lacquered mahogany and polished brass and brushed velvet. The tractor that drew it was an expensive one as well, a steed cast of bronze and needing no driver for familiar destinations.

Davies politely declined to answer any questions while they rode. He was obviously not a man-servant, nor a secretary, but Stratton could not decide what sort of employee he was. The carriage carried them out of London into the countryside, until they reached Darrington Hall, one of the residences owned by the Fieldhurst lineage.

Once inside the home, Davies led Stratton through the foyer and then ushered him into an elegantly appointed study; he closed the doors without entering himself.

Seated at the desk within the study was a barrel-chested man wearing a silk coat and cravat; his broad, deeply creased cheeks were framed by woolly gray muttonchops. Stratton recognized him at once.

“Lord Fieldhurst, it is an honor.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Stratton. You’ve been doing some excellent work recently.”

“You are most kind. I did not realize that my work had become known.”

“I make an effort to keep track of such things. Please, tell me what motivated you to develop such automata?”

Stratton explained his plans for manufacturing affordable engines. Fieldhurst listened with interest, occasionally offering cogent suggestions.

“It is an admirable goal,” he said, nodding his approval. “I’m pleased to find that you have such philanthropic motives, because I would ask your assistance in a project I’m directing.”

“It would be my privilege to help in any way I could.”

“Thank you.” Fieldhurst’s expression became solemn. “This is a matter of grave import. Before I speak further, I must first have your word that you will retain everything I reveal to you in the utmost confidence.”

Stratton met the earl’s gaze directly. “Upon my honor as a gentleman, sir, I shall not divulge anything you relate to me.”

“Thank you, Mr. Stratton. Please come this way.” Field-hurst opened a door in the rear wall of the study and they walked down a short hallway. At the end of the hallway was a laboratory; a long, scrupulously clean work-table held a number of stations, each consisting of a microscope and an articulated brass framework of some sort, equipped with three mutually perpendicular knurled wheels for performing fine adjustments. An elderly man was peering into the microscope at the furthest station; he looked up from his work as they entered.

“Mr. Stratton, I believe you know Dr. Ashbourne.”

Stratton, caught off guard, was momentarily speechless. Nicholas Ashbourne had been a lecturer at Trinity when Stratton was studying there, but had left years ago to pursue studies of, it was said, an unorthodox nature. Stratton remembered him as one of his most enthusiastic instructors. Age had narrowed his face somewhat, making his high forehead seem even higher, but his eyes were as bright and alert as ever. He walked over with the help of a carved ivory walking stick.

“Stratton, good to see you again.”

“And you, sir. I was truly not expecting to see you here.”

“This will be an evening full of surprises, my boy. Prepare yourself.” He turned to Fieldhurst. “Would you care to begin?”

They followed Fieldhurst to the far end of the laboratory, where he opened another door and led them down a flight of stairs. “Only a small number of individuals—either Fellows of the Royal Society or Members of Parliament, or both—are privy to this matter. Five years ago, I was contacted confidentially by the Académie des Sciences in Paris. They wished for English scientists to confirm certain experimental findings of theirs.”

“Indeed?”

“You can imagine their reluctance. However, they felt the matter outweighed national rivalries, and once I understood the situation, I agreed.”

The three of them descended to a cellar. Gas brackets along the walls provided illumination, revealing the cellar’s considerable size; its interior was punctuated by an array of stone pillars that rose to form groined vaults. The long cellar contained row upon row of stout wooden tables, each one supporting a tank roughly the size of a bathtub. The tanks were made of zinc and fitted with plate glass windows on all four sides, revealing their contents as a clear, faintly straw-colored fluid.

Stratton looked at the nearest tank. There was a distortion floating in the center of the tank, as if some of the liquid had congealed into a mass of jelly. It was difficult to distinguish the mass’s features from the mottled shadows cast on the bottom of the tank, so he moved to another side of the tank and squatted down low to view the mass directly against a flame of a gas lamp. It was then that the coagulum resolved itself into the ghostly figure of a man, clear as aspic, curled up in foetal position.

“Incredible,” Stratton whispered.

“We call it a megafoetus,” explained Fieldhurst.

“This was grown from a spermatozoon? This must have required decades.”

“It did not, more’s the wonder. Several years ago, two Parisian naturalists named Dubuisson and Gille developed a method of inducing hypertrophic growth in a seminal foetus. The rapid infusion of nutrients allows such a foetus to reach this size within a fortnight.”

By shifting his head back and forth, he saw slight differences in the way the gas-light was refracted, indicating the boundaries of the megafoetus’s internal organs. “Is this creature . . . alive?”

“Only in an insensate manner, like a spermatozoon. No artificial process can replace gestation; it is the vital principle within the ovum which quickens the foetus, and the maternal influence which transforms it into a person. All we’ve done is effect a maturation in size and scale.” Fieldhurst gestured toward the megafoetus. “The maternal influence also provides a foetus with pigmentation and all distinguishing physical characteristics. Our megafoetuses have no features beyond their sex. Every male bears the generic appearance you see here, and all the females are likewise identical. Within each sex, it is impossible to distinguish one from another by physical examination, no matter how dissimilar the original fathers might have been; only rigorous record-keeping allows us to identify each megafoetus.”

Stratton stood up again. “So what was the intention of the experiment if not to develop an artificial womb?”

“To test the notion of the fixity of species.” Realizing that Stratton was not a zoologist, the earl explained further. “Were lens-grinders able to construct microscopes of unlimited magnifying power, biologists could examine the future generations nested in the spermatozoa of any species and see whether their appearance remains fixed, or changes to give rise to a new species. In the latter case, they could also determine if the transition occurs gradually or abruptly.

“However, chromatic aberration imposes an upper limit on the magnifying power of any optical instrument. Messieurs Dubuisson and Gille hit upon the idea of artificially increasing the size of the foetuses themselves. Once a foetus reaches its adult size, one can extract a spermatozoon from it and enlarge a foetus from the next generation in the same manner.” Fieldhurst stepped over to the next table in the row and indicated the tank it supported. “Repetition of the process lets us examine the unborn generations of any given species.”

Stratton looked around the room. The rows of tanks took on a new significance. “So they compressed the intervals between ‘births’ to gain a preliminary view of our genealogical future.”

“Precisely.”

“Audacious! And what were the results?”

“They tested many animal species, but never observed any changes in form. However, they obtained a peculiar result when working with the seminal foetuses of humans. After no more than five generations, the male foetuses held no more spermatozoa, and the females held no more ova. The line terminated in a sterile generation.”

“I imagine that wasn’t entirely unexpected,” Stratton said, glancing at the jellied form. “Each repetition must further attenuate some essence in the organisms. It’s only logical that at some point the offspring would be so feeble that the process would fail.”

“That was Dubuisson and Gille’s initial assumption as well,” agreed Fieldhurst, “so they sought to improve their technique. However, they could find no difference between megafoetuses of succeeding generations in terms of size or vitality. Nor was there any decline in the number of spermatozoa or ova; the penultimate generation was fully as fertile as the first. The transition to sterility was an abrupt one.

“They found another anomaly as well: While some spermatozoa yielded only four or fewer generations, variation occurred only across samples, never within a single sample. They evaluated samples from father and son donors, and in such instances, the father’s spermatozoa produced exactly one more generation than the son’s. And from what I understand, some of the donors were aged individuals indeed. While their samples held very few spermatozoa, they nonetheless held one more generation than those from sons in the prime of their lives. The progenitive power of the sperm bore no correlation with the health or vigor of the donor; instead, it correlated with the generation to which the donor belonged.”

Fieldhurst paused and looked at Stratton gravely. “It was at this point that the Académie contacted me to see if the Royal Society could duplicate their findings. Together we have obtained the same result using samples collected from peoples as varied as the Lapps and the Hottentots. We are in agreement as to the implication of these findings: that the human species has the potential to exist for only a fixed number of generations, and we are within five generations of the final one.”

Stratton turned to Ashbourne, half expecting him to confess that it was all an elaborate hoax, but the elder nomenclator looked entirely solemn. Stratton looked at the megafoetus again and frowned, absorbing what he had heard. “If your interpretation is correct, other species must be subject to a similar limitation. Yet from what I know, the extinction of a species has never been observed.”

Fieldhurst nodded. “That is true. However, we do have the evidence of the fossil record, which suggests that species remain unchanged for a period of time, and then are abruptly replaced by new forms. The Catastrophists hold that violent upheavals caused species to become extinct. Based on what we’ve discovered regarding preformation, it now appears that extinctions are merely the result of a species reaching the end of its lifetime. They are natural rather than accidental deaths, in a manner of speaking.” He gestured to the doorway from which they had entered. “Shall we return upstairs?”

Following the two other men, Stratton asked, “And what of the origination of new species? If they’re not born from existing species, do they arise spontaneously?”

“That is as yet uncertain. Normally only the simplest animals arise by spontaneous generation: maggots and other vermiform creatures, typically under the influence of heat. The events postulated by Catastrophists—floods, volcanic eruptions, cometary impacts—would entail the release of great energies. Perhaps such energies affect matter so profoundly as to cause the spontaneous generation of an entire race of organisms, nested within a few progenitors. If so, cataclysms are not responsible for mass extinctions, but rather generate new species in their wake.”

Back in the laboratory, the two elder men seated themselves in the chairs present. Too agitated to follow suit, Stratton remained standing. “If any animal species were created by the same cataclysm as the human species, they should likewise be nearing the end of their life spans. Have you found another species that evinces a final generation?”

Fieldhurst shook his head. “Not as yet. We believe that other species have different dates of extinction, correlated with the biological complexity of the animal; humans are presumably the most complex organism, and perhaps fewer generations of such complex organisms can be nested inside a spermatozoon.”

“By the same token,” countered Stratton, “perhaps the complexity of the human organism makes it unsuitable for the process of artificially accelerated growth. Perhaps it is the process whose limits have been discovered, not the species.”

“An astute observation, Mr. Stratton. Experiments are continuing with species that more closely resemble humans, such as chimpanzees and ourang-outangs. However, the unequivocal answer to this question may require years, and if our current interpretation is correct, we can ill afford the time spent waiting for confirmation. We must ready a course of action immediately.”

“But five generations could be over a century—” He caught himself, embarrassed at having overlooked the obvious: not all persons became parents at the same age.

Fieldhurst read his expression. “You realize why not all the sperm samples from donors of the same age produced the same number of generations: Some lineages are approaching their end faster than others. For a lineage in which the men consistently father children late in life, five generations might mean over two centuries of fertility, but there are undoubtedly lineages that have reached their end already.”

Stratton imagined the consequences. “The loss of fertility will become increasingly apparent to the general populace as time passes. Panic may arise well before the end is reached.”

“Precisely, and rioting could extinguish our species as effectively as the exhaustion of generations. That is why time is of the essence.”

“What is the solution you propose?”

“I shall defer to Dr. Ashbourne to explain further,” said the earl.

Ashbourne rose and instinctively adopted the stance of a lecturing professor. “Do you recall why it was that all attempts to make automata out of wood were abandoned?”

Stratton was caught off guard by the question. “It was believed that the natural grain of wood implies a form in conflict with whatever we try to carve upon it. Currently there are efforts to use rubber as a casting material, but none have met with success.”

“Indeed. But if the native form of wood were the only obstacle, shouldn’t it be possible to animate an animal’s corpse with a name? There the form of the body should be ideal.”

“It’s a macabre notion; I couldn’t guess at such an experiment’s likelihood of success. Has it ever been attempted?”

“In fact it has: also unsuccessfully. So these two entirely different avenues of research proved fruitless. Does that mean there is no way to animate organic matter using names? This was the question I left Trinity in order to pursue.”

“And what did you discover?”

Ashbourne deflected the question with a wave of his hand. “First let us discuss thermodynamics. Have you kept up with recent developments? Then you know the dissipation of heat reflects an increase in disorder at the thermal level. Conversely, when an automaton condenses heat from its environment to perform work, it increases order. This confirms a long-held belief of mine that lexical order induces thermodynamic order. The lexical order of an amulet reinforces the order a body already possesses, thus providing protection against damage. The lexical order of an animating name increases the order of a body, thus providing motive power for an automaton.

“The next question was, how would an increase in order be reflected in organic matter? Since names don’t animate dead tissue, obviously organic matter doesn’t respond at the thermal level; but perhaps it can be ordered at another level. Consider: a steer can be reduced to a vat of gelatinous broth. The broth comprises the same material as the steer, but which embodies a higher amount of order?”

“The steer, obviously,” said Stratton, bewildered.

“Obviously. An organism, by virtue of its physical structure, embodies order; the more complex the organism, the greater the amount of order. It was my hypothesis that increasing the order in organic matter would be evidenced by imparting form to it. However, most living matter has already assumed its ideal form. The question is, what has life but not form?”

The elder nomenclator did not wait for a response. “The answer is, an unfertilized ovum. The ovum contains the vital principle that animates the creature it ultimately gives rise to, but it has no form itself. Ordinarily, the ovum incorporates the form of the foetus compressed within the spermatozoon that fertilizes it. The next step was obvious.” Here Ashbourne waited, looking at Stratton expectantly.

Stratton was at a loss. Ashbourne seemed disappointed, and continued. “The next step was to artificially induce the growth of an embryo from an ovum, by application of a name.”

“But if the ovum is unfertilized,” objected Stratton, “there is no preexisting structure to enlarge.”

“Precisely.”

“You mean structure would arise out of a homogeneous medium? Impossible.”

“Nonetheless, it was my goal for several years to confirm this hypothesis. My first experiments consisted of applying a name to unfertilized frog eggs.”

“How did you embed the name into a frog’s egg?”

“The name is not actually embedded, but rather impressed by means of a specially manufactured needle.” Ashbourne opened a cabinet that sat on the work-table between two of the microscope stations. Inside was a wooden rack filled with small instruments arranged in pairs. Each was tipped with a long glass needle; in some pairs they were nearly as thick as those used for knitting, in others as slender as a hypodermic. He withdrew one from the largest pair and handed it to Stratton to examine. The glass needle was not clear, but instead seemed to contain some sort of dappled core.

Ashbourne explained. “While that may appear to be some sort of medical implement, it is in fact a vehicle for a name, just as the more conventional slip of parchment is. Alas, it requires far more effort to make than taking pen to parchment. To create such a needle, one must first arrange fine strands of black glass within a bundle of clear glass strands so that the name is legible when they are viewed end-on. The strands are then fused into a solid rod, and the rod is drawn out into an ever thinner strand. A skilled glass-maker can retain every detail of the name no matter how thin the strand becomes. Eventually one obtains a needle containing the name in its cross section.”

“How did you generate the name that you used?”

“We can discuss that at length later. For the purposes of our current discussion, the only relevant information is that I incorporated the sexual epithet. Are you familiar with it?”

“I know of it.” It was one of the few epithets that was dimorphic, having male and female variants.

“I needed two versions of the name, obviously, to induce the generation of both males and females.” He indicated the paired arrangement of needles in the cabinet.

Stratton saw that the needle could be clamped into the brass framework with its tip approaching the slide beneath the microscope; the knurled wheels presumably were used to bring the needle into contact with an ovum. He returned the instrument. “You said the name is not embedded, but impressed. Do you mean to tell me that touching the frog’s egg with this needle is all that’s needed? Removing the name doesn’t end its influence?”

“Precisely. The name activates a process in the egg that cannot be reversed. Prolonged contact of the name had no different effect.”

“And the egg hatched a tadpole?”

“Not with the names initially tried; the only result was that symmetrical involutions appeared in the surface of the egg. But by incorporating different epithets, I was able to induce the egg to adopt different forms, some of which had every appearance of embryonic frogs. Eventually I found a name that caused the egg not only to assume the form of a tadpole, but also to mature and hatch. The tadpole thus hatched grew into a frog indistinguishable from any other member of the species.”

“You had found a euonym for that species of frog,” said Stratton.

Ashbourne smiled. “As this method of reproduction does not involve sexual congress, I have termed it ‘parthenogenesis.’ ”

Stratton looked at both him and Fieldhurst. “It’s clear what your proposed solution is. The logical conclusion of this research is to discover a euonym for the human species. You wish for mankind to perpetuate itself through nomenclature.”

“You find the prospect troubling,” said Fieldhurst. “That is to be expected: Dr. Ashbourne and myself initially felt the same way, as has everyone who has considered this. No one relishes the prospect of humans being conceived artificially. But can you offer an alternative?” Stratton was silent, and Fieldhurst went on. “All who are aware of both Dr. Ashbourne’s and Dubuisson and Gille’s work agree: There is no other solution.”

Stratton reminded himself to maintain the dispassionate attitude of a scientist. “Precisely how do you envision this name being used?” he asked.

Ashbourne answered. “When a husband is unable to impregnate his wife, they will seek the services of a physician. The physician will collect the woman’s menses, separate out the ovum, impress the name upon it, and then reintroduce it into her womb.”

“A child born of this method would have no biological father.”

“True, but the father’s biological contribution is of minimal importance here. The mother will think of her husband as the child’s father, so her imagination will impart a combination of her own and her husband’s appearance and character to the foetus. That will not change. And I hardly need mention that name impression would not be made available to unmarried women.”

“Are you confident this will result in well-formed children?” asked Stratton. “I’m sure you know to what I refer.” They all knew of the disastrous attempt in the previous century to create improved children by mesmerizing women during their pregnancies.

Ashbourne nodded. “We are fortunate in that the ovum is very specific in what it will accept. The set of euonyms for any species of organism is very small; if the lexical order of the impressed name does not closely match the structural order of that species, the resulting foetus does not quicken. This does not remove the need for the mother to maintain a tranquil mind during her pregnancy; name impression cannot guard against maternal agitation. But the ovum’s selectivity provides us assurance that any foetus induced will be well-formed in every aspect, except the one anticipated.”

Stratton was alarmed. “What aspect is that?”

“Can you not guess? The only incapacity of frogs created by name impression was in the males; they were sterile, for their spermatozoa bore no preformed foetuses inside. By comparison, the female frogs created were fertile: Their eggs could be fertilized in either the conventional manner, or by repeating the impression with the name.”

Stratton’s relief was considerable. “So the male variant of the name was imperfect. Presumably there needs to be further differences between the male and female variants than simply the sexual epithet.”

“Only if one considers the male variant imperfect,” said Ashbourne, “which I do not. Consider: While a fertile male and a fertile female might seem equivalent, they differ radically in the degree of complexity exemplified. A female with viable ova remains a single organism, while a male with viable spermatozoa is actually many organisms: a father and all his potential children. In this light, the two variants of the name are well-matched in their actions: Each induces a single organism, but only in the female sex can a single organism be fertile.”

“I see what you mean.” Stratton realized he would need practice in thinking about nomenclature in the organic domain. “Have you developed euonyms for other species?”

“Just over a score, of various types; our progress has been rapid. We have only just begun work on a name for the human species, and it has proved far more difficult than our previous names.”

“How many nomenclators are engaged in this endeavor?”

“Only a handful,” Fieldhurst replied. “We have asked a few Royal Society members, and the Académie has some of France’s leading designateurs working on it. You will understand if I do not mention any names at this point, but be assured that we have some of the most distinguished nomenclators in England assisting us.”

“Forgive me for asking, but why are you approaching me? I am hardly in that category.”

“You have not yet had a long career,” said Ashbourne, “but the genus of names you have developed is unique. Automata have always been specialized in form and function, rather like animals: Some are good at climbing, others at digging, but none at both. Yet yours can control human hands, which are uniquely versatile instruments: What else can manipulate everything from a wrench to a piano? The hand’s dexterity is the physical manifestation of the mind’s ingenuity, and these traits are essential to the name we seek.”

“We have been discreetly surveying current nomenclatoral research for any names that demonstrate marked dexterity,” said Fieldhurst. “When we learned of what you had accomplished, we sought you out immediately.”

“In fact,” Ashbourne continued, “the very reason your names are worrisome to sculptors is the reason we are interested in them: They endow automata with a more human-like manner than any before. So now we ask, will you join us?”

Stratton considered it. This was perhaps the most important task a nomenclator could undertake, and under ordinary circumstances he would have leapt at the opportunity to participate. But before he could embark upon this enterprise in good conscience, there was another matter he had to resolve.

“You honor me with your invitation, but what of my work with dexterous automata? I still firmly believe that inexpensive engines can improve the lives of the labouring class.”

“It is a worthy goal,” said Fieldhurst, “and I would not ask you to give it up. Indeed, the first thing we wish you to do is to perfect the epithets for dexterity. But your efforts at social reform would be for naught unless we first ensure the survival of our species.”

“Obviously, but I do not want the potential for reform that is offered by dexterous names to be neglected. There may never be a better opportunity for restoring dignity to common workers. What kind of victory would we achieve if the continuation of life meant ignoring this opportunity?”

“Well said,” acknowledged the earl. “Let me make a proposal. So that you can best make use of your time, the Royal Society will provide support for your development of dexterous automata as needed: securing investors and so forth. I trust you will divide your time between the two projects wisely. Your work on biological nomenclature must remain confidential, obviously. Is that satisfactory?”

“It is. Very well then, gentlemen: I accept.” They shook hands.

Some weeks had passed since Stratton last spoke with Willoughby, beyond a chilly exchange of greetings in passing. In fact, he had little interaction with any of the union sculptors, instead spending his time working on letter permutations in his office, trying to refine his epithets for dexterity.

He entered the manufactory through the front gallery, where customers normally perused the catalogue. Today it was crowded with domestic automata, all the same model char-engine. Stratton saw the clerk ensuring they were properly tagged.

“Good morning, Pierce,” he said. “What are all these doing here?”

“An improved name is just out for the ‘Regent,’ ” said the clerk. “Everyone’s eager to get the latest.”

“You’re going to be busy this afternoon.” The keys for unlocking the automata’s name-slots were themselves stored in a safe that required two of Coade’s managers to open. The managers were reluctant to keep the safe open for more than a brief period each afternoon.

“I’m certain I can finish these in time.”

“You couldn’t bear to tell a pretty house-maid that her char-engine wouldn’t be ready by tomorrow.”

The clerk smiled. “Can you blame me, sir?”

“No, I cannot,” said Stratton, chuckling. He turned toward the business offices behind the gallery, when he found himself confronted by Willoughby.

“Perhaps you ought to prop open the safe,” said the sculptor, “so that house-maids might not be inconvenienced. Seeing how destroying our institutions seems to be your intent.”

“Good morning, Master Willoughby,” said Stratton, stiffly. He tried to walk past, but the other man stood in his way.

“I’ve been informed that Coade will be allowing non-union sculptors on to the premises to assist you.”

“Yes, but I assure you, only the most reputable independent sculptors are involved.”

“As if such persons exist,” said Willoughby scornfully. “You should know that I recommended that our trade-union launch a strike against Coade in protest.”

“Surely you’re not serious.” It had been decades since the last strike launched by the sculptors, and that one had ended in rioting.

“I am. Were the matter put to a vote of the membership, I’m certain it would pass: other sculptors with whom I’ve discussed your work agree with me about the threat it poses. However, the union leadership will not put it to a vote.”

“Ah, so they disagreed with your assessment.”

Here Willoughby frowned. “Apparently the Royal Society intervened on your behalf and persuaded the Brotherhood to refrain for the time being. You’ve found yourself some powerful supporters, Mr. Stratton.”

Uncomfortably, Stratton replied, “The Royal Society considers my research worthwhile.”

“Perhaps, but do not believe that this matter is ended.”

“Your animosity is unwarranted, I tell you,” Stratton insisted. “Once you have seen how sculptors can use these automata, you will realize that there is no threat to your profession.”

Willoughby merely glowered in response and left.

The next time he saw Lord Fieldhurst, Stratton asked him about the Royal Society’s involvement. They were in Field-hurst’s study, and the earl was pouring himself a whiskey.

“Ah yes,” he said. “While the Brotherhood of Sculptors as a whole is quite formidable, it is composed of individuals who individually are more amenable to persuasion.”

“What manner of persuasion?”

“The Royal Society is aware that members of the trade-union’s leadership were party to an as-yet unresolved case of name piracy to the continent. To avoid any scandal, they’ve agreed to postpone any decision about strikes until after you’ve given a demonstration of your system of manufacturing.”

“I’m grateful for your assistance, Lord Fieldhurst,” said Stratton, astonished. “I must admit, I had no idea that the Royal Society employed such tactics.”

“Obviously, these are not proper topics for discussion at the general sessions.” Lord Fieldhurst smiled in an avuncular manner. “The advancement of science is not always a straightforward affair, Mr. Stratton, and the Royal Society is sometimes required to use both official and unofficial channels.”

“I’m beginning to appreciate that.”

“Similarly, although the Brotherhood of Sculptors won’t initiate a formal strike, they might employ more indirect tactics; for example, the anonymous distribution of pamphlets that arouse public opposition to your automata.” He sipped at his whiskey. “Hmm. Perhaps I should have someone keep a watchful eye on Master Willoughby.”

Stratton was given accommodations in the guest wing of Darrington Hall, as were the other nomenclators working under Lord Fieldhurst’s direction. They were indeed some of the leading members of the profession, including Holcombe, Milburn, and Parker; Stratton felt honored to be working with them, although he could contribute little while he was still learning Ashbourne’s techniques for biological nomenclature.

Names for the organic domain employed many of the same epithets as names for automata, but Ashbourne had developed an entirely different system of integration and factorization, which entailed many novel methods of permutation. For Stratton it was almost like returning to university and learning nomenclature all over again. However, it was apparent how these techniques allowed names for species to be developed rapidly; by exploiting similarities suggested by the Linnaean system of classification, one could work from one species to another.

Stratton also learned more about the sexual epithet, traditionally used to confer either male or female qualities to an automaton. He knew of only one such epithet, and was surprised to learn it was the simplest of many extant versions. The topic went undiscussed by nomenclatoral societies, but this epithet was one of the most fully researched in existence; in fact its earliest use was claimed to have occurred in biblical times, when Joseph’s brothers created a female golem they could share sexually without violating the prohibition against such behavior with a woman. Development of the epithet had continued for centuries in secrecy, primarily in Constantinople, and now the current versions of automatous courtesans were offered by specialized brothels right here in London. Carved from soapstone and polished to a high gloss, heated to blood temperature and sprinkled with scented oils, the automata commanded prices exceeded only by those for incubi and succubi.

It was from such ignoble soil that their research grew. The names animating the courtesans incorporated powerful epithets for human sexuality in its male and female forms. By factoring out the carnality common to both versions, the nomenclators had isolated epithets for generic human masculinity and femininity, ones far more refined than those used when generating animals. Such epithets were the nuclei around which they formed, by accretion, the names they sought.

Gradually Stratton absorbed sufficient information to begin participating in the tests of prospective human names. He worked in collaboration with the other nomenclators in the group, and between them they divided up the vast tree of nominal possibilities, assigning branches for investigation, pruning away those that proved unfruitful, cultivating those that seemed most productive.

The nomenclators paid women—typically young house-maids in good health—for their menses as a source of human ova, which they then impressed with their experimental names and scrutinized under microscopes, looking for forms that resembled human foetuses. Stratton inquired about the possibility of harvesting ova from female megafoetuses, but Ashbourne reminded him that ova were viable only when taken from a living woman. It was a basic dictum of biology: Females were the source of the vital principle that gave the offspring life, while males provided the basic form. Because of this division, neither sex could reproduce by itself.

Of course, that restriction had been lifted by Ashbourne’s discovery: the male’s participation was no longer necessary since form could be induced lexically. Once a name was found that could generate human foetuses, women could reproduce purely by themselves. Stratton realized that such a discovery might be welcomed by women exhibiting sexual inversion, feeling love for persons of the same rather than the opposite sex. If the name were to become available to such women, they might establish a commune of some sort that reproduced via parthenogenesis. Would such a society flourish by magnifying the finer sensibilities of the gentle sex, or would it collapse under the unrestrained pathology of its membership? It was impossible to guess.

Before Stratton’s enlistment, the nomenclators had developed names capable of generating vaguely homuncular forms in an ovum. Using Dubuisson and Gille’s methods, they enlarged the forms to a size that allowed detailed examination; the forms resembled automata more than humans, their limbs ending in paddles of fused digits. By incorporating his epithets for dexterity, Stratton was able to separate the digits and refine the overall appearance of the forms. All the while, Ashbourne emphasized the need for an unconventional approach.

“Consider the thermodynamics of what most automata do,” said Ashbourne during one of their frequent discussions. “The mining engines dig ore, the reaping engines harvest wheat, the wood-cutting engines fell timber; yet none of these tasks, no matter how useful we find them to be, can be said to create order. While all their names create order at the thermal level, by converting heat into motion, in the vast majority the resulting work is applied at the visible level to create disorder.”

“This is an interesting perspective,” said Stratton thoughtfully. “Many long-standing deficits in the capabilities of automata become intelligible in this light: the fact that automata are unable to stack crates more neatly than they find them; their inability to sort pieces of crushed ore based on their composition. You believe that the known classes of industrial names are not powerful enough in thermodynamic terms.”

“Precisely!” Ashbourne displayed the excitement of a tutor finding an unexpectedly apt pupil. “This is another feature that distinguishes your class of dexterous names. By enabling an automation to perform skilled labour, your names not only create order at the thermal level, they use it to create order at the visible level as well.”

“I see a commonality with Milburn’s discoveries,” said Stratton. Milburn had developed the household automata able to return objects to their proper places. “His work likewise involves the creation of order at the visible level.”

“Indeed it does, and this commonality suggests a hypothesis.” Ashbourne leaned forward. “Suppose we were able to factor out an epithet common to the names developed by you and Milburn: an epithet expressing the creation of two levels of order. Further suppose that we discover a euonym for the human species, and were able to incorporate this epithet into the name. What do you imagine would be generated by impressing the name? And if you say ‘twins’ I shall clout you on the head.”

Stratton laughed. “I dare say I understand you better than that. You are suggesting that if an epithet is capable of inducing two levels of thermodynamic order in the inorganic domain, it might create two generations in the organic domain. Such a name might create males whose spermatozoa would contain preformed foetuses. Those males would be fertile, although any sons they produced would again be sterile.”

His instructor clapped his hands together. “Precisely: order that begets order! An interesting speculation, wouldn’t you agree? It would halve the number of medical interventions required for our race to sustain itself.”

“And what about inducing the formation of more than two generations of foetuses? What kind of capabilities would an automaton have to possess, for its name to contain such an epithet?”

“The science of thermodynamics has not progressed enough to answer that question, I’m afraid. What would constitute a still higher level of order in the inorganic domain? Automata working cooperatively, perhaps? We do not yet know, but perhaps in time we will.”

Stratton gave voice to a question that had posed itself to him some time ago. “Dr. Ashbourne, when I was initiated into our group, Lord Fieldhurst spoke of the possibility that species are born in the wake of catastrophic events. Is it possible that entire species were created by use of nomenclature?”

“Ah, now we tread in the realm of theology. A new species requires progenitors containing vast numbers of descendants nested within their reproductive organs; such forms embody the highest degree of order imaginable. Can a purely physical process create such vast amounts of order? No naturalist has suggested a mechanism by which this could occur. On the other hand, while we do know that a lexical process can create order, the creation of an entire new species would require a name of incalculable power. Such mastery of nomenclature could very well require the capabilities of God; perhaps it is even part of the definition.

“This is a question, Stratton, to which we may never know the answer, but we cannot allow that to affect our current actions. Whether or not a name was responsible for the creation of our species, I believe a name is the best chance for its continuation.”

“Agreed,” said Stratton. After a pause, he added, “I must confess, much of the time when I am working, I occupy myself solely with the details of permutation and combination, and lose sight of the sheer magnitude of our endeavor. It is sobering to think of what we will have achieved if we are successful.”

“I can think of little else,” replied Ashbourne.

Seated at his desk in the manufactory, Stratton squinted to read the pamphlet he’d been given on the street. The text was crudely printed, the letters blurred.

“Shall Men be the Masters of NAMES, or shall Names be the masters of MEN? For too long the Capitalists have hoarded Names within their coffers, guarded by Patent and Lock and Key, amassing fortunes by mere possession of LETTERS, while the Common Man must labour for every shilling. They will wring the ALPHABET until they have extracted every last penny from it, and only then discard it for us to use. How long will We allow this to continue?”

Stratton scanned the entire pamphlet, but found nothing new in it. For the past two months he’d been reading them, and encountered only the usual anarchist rants; there was as yet no evidence for Lord Fieldhurst’s theory that the sculptors would use them to target Stratton’s work. His public demonstration of the dexterous automata was scheduled for next week, and by now Willoughby had largely missed his opportunity to generate public opposition. In fact, it occurred to Stratton that he might distribute pamphlets himself to generate public support. He could explain his goal of bringing the advantages of automata to everyone, and his intention to keep close control over his names’ patents, granting licenses only to manufacturers who would use them conscientiously. He could even have a slogan: “Autonomy through Automata,” perhaps?

There was a knock at his office door. Stratton tossed the pamphlet into his wastebasket. “Yes?”

A man entered, somberly dressed, and with a long beard. “Mr. Stratton?” he asked. “Please allow me to introduce myself: My name is Benjamin Roth. I am a kabbalist.”

Stratton was momentarily speechless. Typically such mystics were offended by the modern view of nomenclature as a science, considering it a secularization of a sacred ritual. He never expected one to visit the manufactory. “A pleasure to meet you. How may I be of assistance?”

“I’ve heard that you have achieved a great advance in the permutation of letters.”

“Why, thank you. I didn’t realize it would be of interest to a person like yourself.”

Roth smiled awkwardly. “My interest is not in its practical applications. The goal of kabbalists is to better know God. The best means by which to do that is to study the art by which He creates. We meditate upon different names to enter an ecstatic state of consciousness; the more powerful the name, the more closely we approach the Divine.”

“I see.” Stratton wondered what the kabbalist’s reaction would be if he learned about the creation being attempted in the biological nomenclature project. “Please continue.”

“Your epithets for dexterity enable a golem to sculpt another, thereby reproducing itself. A name capable of creating a being that is, in turn, capable of creation would bring us closer to God than we have ever been before.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken about my work, although you aren’t the first to fall under this misapprehension. The ability to manipulate molds does not render an automaton able to reproduce itself. There would be many other skills required.”

The Kabbalist nodded. “I am well aware of that. I myself, in the course of my studies, have developed an epithet designating certain other skills necessary.”

Stratton leaned forward with sudden interest. After casting a body, the next step would be to animate the body with a name. “Your epithet endows an automaton with the ability to write?” His own automaton could grasp a pencil easily enough, but it couldn’t inscribe even the simplest mark. “How is it that your automata possess the dexterity required for scrivening, but not that for manipulating molds?”

Roth shook his head modestly. “My epithet does not endow writing ability, or general manual dexterity. It simply enables a golem to write out the name that animates it, and nothing else.”

“Ah, I see.” So it didn’t provide an aptitude for learning a category of skills; it granted a single innate skill. Stratton tried to imagine the nomenclatoral contortions needed to make an automaton instinctively write out a particular sequence of letters. “Very interesting, but I imagine it doesn’t have broad application, does it?”

Roth gave a pained smile; Stratton realized he had committed a faux pas, and the man was trying to meet it with good humor. “That is one way to view it,” admitted Roth, “but we have a different perspective. To us the value of this epithet, like any other, lies not in the usefulness it imparts to a golem, but in the ecstatic state it allows us to achieve.”

“Of course, of course. And your interest in my epithets for dexterity is the same?”

“Yes. I am hoping that you will share your epithets with us.”

Stratton had never heard of a kabbalist making such a request before, and clearly Roth did not relish being the first. He paused to consider. “Must a kabbalist reach a certain rank in order to meditate upon the most powerful ones?”

“Yes, very definitely.”

“So you restrict the availability of the names.”

“Oh no; my apologies for misunderstanding you. The ecstatic state offered by a name is achievable only after one has mastered the necessary meditative techniques, and it’s these techniques that are closely guarded. Without the proper training, attempts to use these techniques could result in madness. But the names themselves, even the most powerful ones, have no ecstatic value to a novice; they can animate clay, nothing more.”

“Nothing more,” agreed Stratton, thinking how truly different their perspectives were. “In that case, I’m afraid I cannot grant you use of my names.”

Roth nodded glumly, as if he’d been expecting that answer. “You desire payment of royalties.”

Now it was Stratton who had to overlook the other man’s faux pas. “Money is not my objective. However, I have specific intentions for my dexterous automata which require that I retain control over the patent. I cannot jeopardize those plans by releasing the names indiscriminately.” Granted, he had shared them with the nomenclators working under Lord Fieldhurst, but they were all gentlemen sworn to an even greater secrecy. He was less confident about mystics.

“I can assure you that we would not use your name for anything other than ecstatic practices.”

“I apologize; I believe you are sincere, but the risk is too great. The most I can do is remind you that the patent has a limited duration; once it has expired, you’ll be free to use the name however you like.”

“But that will take years!”

“Surely you appreciate that there are others whose interests must be taken into account.”

“What I see is that commercial considerations are posing an obstacle to spiritual awakening. The error was mine in expecting anything different.”

“You are hardly being fair,” protested Stratton.

“Fair?” Roth made a visible effort to restrain his anger. “You ‘nomenclators’ steal techniques meant to honor God and use them to aggrandize yourselves. Your entire industry prostitutes the techniques of yezirah. You are in no position to speak of fairness.”

“Now see here—”

“Thank you for speaking with me.” With that, Roth took his leave.

Stratton sighed.

Peering through the eyepiece of the microscope, Stratton turned the manipulator’s adjustment wheel until the needle pressed against the side of the ovum. There was a sudden enfolding, like the retraction of a mollusc’s foot when prodded, transforming the sphere into a tiny foetus. Stratton withdrew the needle from the slide, unclamped it from the framework, and inserted a new one. Next he transferred the slide into the warmth of the incubator and placed another slide, bearing an untouched human ovum, beneath the microscope. Once again he leaned toward the microscope to repeat the process of impression.

Recently, the nomenclators had developed a name capable of inducing a form indistinguishable from a human foetus. The forms did not quicken, however: they remained immobile and unresponsive to stimuli. The consensus was that the name did not accurately describe the non-physical traits of a human being. Accordingly, Stratton and his colleagues had been diligently compiling descriptions of human uniqueness, trying to distill a set of epithets both expressive enough to denote these qualities, and succinct enough to be integrated with the physical epithets into a seventy-two-lettered name.

Stratton transferred the final slide to the incubator and made the appropriate notations in the logbook. At the moment he had no more names drawn in needle form, and it would be a day before the new foetuses were mature enough to test for quickening. He decided to pass the rest of the evening in the drawing room upstairs.

Upon entering the walnut paneled room, he found Field-hurst and Ashbourne seated in its leather chairs, smoking cigars and sipping brandy. “Ah, Stratton,” said Ashbourne. “Do join us.”

“I believe I will,” said Stratton, heading for the liquor cabinet. He poured himself some brandy from a crystal decanter and seated himself with the others.

“Just up from the laboratory, Stratton?” inquired Fieldhurst.

Stratton nodded. “A few minutes ago I made impressions with my most recent set of names. I feel that my latest permutations are leading in the right direction.”

“You are not alone in feeling optimistic; Dr. Ashbourne and I were just discussing how much the outlook has improved since this endeavor began. It now appears that we will have a euonym comfortably in advance of the final generation.” Fieldhurst puffed on his cigar and leaned back in his chair until his head rested against the antimacassar. “This disaster may ultimately turn out to be a boon.”

“A boon? How so?”

“Why, once we have human reproduction under our control, we will have a means of preventing the poor from having such large families as so many of them persist in having right now.”

Stratton was startled, but tried not to show it. “I had not considered that,” he said carefully.

Ashbourne also seemed mildly surprised. “I wasn’t aware that you intended such a policy.”

“I considered it premature to mention it earlier,” said Fieldhurst. “Counting one’s chickens before they’re hatched, as they say.”

“Of course.”

“You must agree that the potential is enormous. By exercising some judgment when choosing who may bear children or not, our government could preserve the nation’s racial stock.”

“Is our racial stock under some threat?” asked Stratton.

“Perhaps you have not noticed that the lower classes are reproducing at a rate exceeding that of the nobility and gentry. While commoners are not without virtues, they are lacking in refinement and intellect. These forms of mental impoverishment beget the same: A woman born into low circumstances cannot help but gestate a child destined for the same. Consequent to the great fecundity of the lower classes, our nation would eventually drown in coarse dullards.”

“So name impressing will be withheld from the lower classes?”

“Not entirely, and certainly not initially: when the truth about declining fertility is known, it would be an invitation to riot if the lower classes were denied access to name impressing. And of course, the lower classes do have their role to play in our society, as long as their numbers are kept in check. I envision that the policy will go in effect only after some years have passed, by which time people will have grown accustomed to name impression as the method of fertilization. At that point, perhaps in conjunction with the census process, we can impose limits on the number of children a given couple would be permitted to have. The government would regulate the growth and composition of the population thereafter.”

“Is this the most appropriate use of such a name?” asked Ashbourne. “Our goal was the survival of the species, not the implementation of partisan politics.”

“On the contrary, this is purely scientific. Just as it’s our duty to ensure the species survives, it’s also our duty to guarantee its health by keeping a proper balance in its population. Politics doesn’t enter into it; were the situation reversed and there existed a paucity of labourers, the opposite policy would be called for.”

Stratton ventured a suggestion. “I wonder if improvement in conditions for the poor might eventually cause them to gestate more refined children?”

“You are thinking about changes brought about by your cheap engines, aren’t you?” asked Fieldhurst with a smile, and Stratton nodded. “Your intended reforms and mine may reinforce each other. Moderating the numbers of the lower classes should make it easier for them to raise their living conditions. However, do not expect that a mere increase in economic comfort will improve the mentality of the lower classes.”

“But why not?”

“You forget the self-perpetuating nature of culture,” said Fieldhurst. “We have seen that all megafoetuses are identical, yet no one can deny the differences between the populaces of nations, in both physical appearance and temperament. This can only be the result of the maternal influence: The mother’s womb is a vessel in which the social environment is incarnated. For example, a woman who has lived her life among Prussians naturally gives birth to a child with Prussian traits; in this manner the national character of that populace has sustained itself for centuries, despite many changes in fortune. It would be unrealistic to think the poor are any different.”

“As a zoologist, you are undoubtedly wiser in these matters than we,” said Ashbourne, silencing Stratton with a glance. “We will defer to your judgment.”

For the remainder of the evening the conversation turned to other topics, and Stratton did his best to conceal his discomfort and maintain a facade of bonhomie. Finally, after Fieldhurst had retired for the evening, Stratton and Ashbourne descended to the laboratory to confer.

“What manner of man have we agreed to help?” exclaimed Stratton as soon as the door was closed. “One who would breed people like livestock?”

“Perhaps we should not be so shocked,” said Ashbourne with a sigh. He seated himself upon one of the laboratory stools. “Our group’s goal has been to duplicate for humans a procedure that was intended only for animals.”

“But not at the expense of individual liberty! I cannot be a party to this.”

“Do not be hasty. What would be accomplished by your resigning from the group? To the extent that your efforts contribute to our group’s endeavor, your resignation would serve only to endanger the future of the human species. Conversely, if the group attains its goal without your assistance, Lord Fieldhurst’s policies will be implemented anyway.”

Stratton tried to regain his composure. Ashbourne was right; he could see that. After a moment, he said, “So what course of action should we take? Are there others whom we could contact, Members of Parliament who would oppose the policy that Lord Fieldhurst proposes?”

“I expect that most of the nobility and gentry would share Lord Fieldhurst’s opinion on this matter.” Ashbourne rested his forehead on the fingertips of one hand, suddenly looking very old. “I should have anticipated this. My error was in viewing humanity purely as a single species. Having seen England and France working toward a common goal, I forgot that nations are not the only factions that oppose one another.”

“What if we surreptitiously distributed the name to the labouring classes? They could draw their own needles and impress the name themselves, in secret.”

“They could, but the name impression is a delicate procedure best performed in a laboratory. I’m dubious that the operation could be carried out on the scale necessary without attracting governmental attention, and then falling under its control.”

“Is there an alternative?”

There was silence for a long moment while they considered. Then Ashbourne said, “Do you recall our speculation about a name that would induce two generations of foetuses?”

“Certainly.”

“Suppose we develop such a name but do not reveal this property when we present it to Lord Fieldhurst.”

“That’s a wily suggestion,” said Stratton, surprised. “All the children born of such a name would be fertile, so they would be able to reproduce without governmental restriction.”

Ashbourne nodded. “In the period before population control measures go into effect, such a name might be very widely distributed.”

“But what of the following generation? Sterility would recur, and the labouring classes would again be dependent upon the government to reproduce.”

“True,” said Ashbourne, “it would be a short-lived victory. Perhaps the only permanent solution would be a more liberal Parliament, but it is beyond my expertise to suggest how we might bring that about.”

Again Stratton thought about the changes that cheap engines might bring; if the situation of the working classes was improved in the manner he hoped, that might demonstrate to the nobility that poverty was not innate. But even if the most favorable sequence of events was obtained, it would require years to sway Parliament. “What if we could induce multiple generations with the initial name impression? A longer period before sterility recurs would increase the chances that more liberal social policies would take hold.”

“You’re indulging a fancy,” replied Ashbourne. “The technical difficulty of inducing multiple generations is such that I’d sooner wager on our successfully sprouting wings and taking flight. Inducing two generations would be ambitious enough.”

The two men discussed strategies late into the night. If they were to conceal the true name of any name they presented to Lord Fieldhurst, they would have to forge a lengthy trail of research results. Even without the additional burden of secrecy, they would be engaged in an unequal race, pursuing a highly sophisticated name while the other nomenclators sought a comparatively straightforward euonym. To make the odds less unfavorable, Ashbourne and Stratton would need to recruit others to their cause; with such assistance, it might even be possible to subtly impede the research of others.

“Who in the group do you think shares our political views?” asked Ashbourne.

“I feel confident that Milburn does. I’m not so certain about any of the others.”

“Take no chances. We must employ even more caution when approaching prospective members than Lord Fieldhurst did when establishing this group originally.”

“Agreed,” said Stratton. Then he shook his head in disbelief. “Here we are forming a secret organization nested within a secret organization. If only foetuses were so easily induced.”

It was the evening of the following, the sun was setting, and Stratton was strolling across Westminster Bridge as the last remaining costermongers were wheeling their barrows of fruit away. He had just had supper at a club he favored, and was walking back to Coade Manufactory. The previous evening at Darrington Hall had disquieted him, and he had returned to London earlier today to minimize his interaction with Lord Fieldhurst until he was certain his face would not betray his true feelings.

He thought back to the conversation where he and Ash-bourne had first entertained the conjecture of factoring out an epithet for creating two levels of order. At the time he had made some efforts to find such an epithet, but they were casual attempts given the superfluous nature of the goal, and they hadn’t borne fruit. Now their gauge of achievement had been revised upward: Their previous goal was inadequate, two generations seemed the minimum acceptable, and any additional ones would be invaluable.

He again pondered the thermodynamic behavior induced by his dexterous names: Order at the thermal level animated the automata, allowing them to create order at the visible level. Order begetting order. Ashbourne had suggested that the next level of order might be automata working together in a coordinated fashion. Was that possible? They would have to communicate in order to work together effectively, but automata were intrinsically mute. What other means were there by which automata could exchange in complex behavior?

He suddenly realized he had reached Coade Manufactory. By now it was dark, but he knew the way to his office well enough. Stratton unlocked the building’s front door and proceeded through the gallery and past the business offices.

As he reached the hallway fronting the nomenclators’ offices, he saw light emanating from the frosted glass window of his office door. Surely he hadn’t left the gas on? He unlocked his door to enter, and was shocked by what he saw.

A man lay face down on the floor in front of the desk, hands tied behind his back. Stratton immediately approached to check on the man. It was Benjamin Roth, the kabbalist, and he was dead. Stratton realized several of the man’s fingers were broken; he’d been tortured before he was killed.

Pale and trembling, Stratton rose to his feet, and saw that his office was in utter disarray. The shelves of his bookcases were bare; his books lay strewn face-down across the oak floor. His desk had been swept clear; next to it was a stack of its brass-handled drawers, emptied and overturned. A trail of stray papers led to the open door to his studio; in a daze, Stratton stepped forward to see what had been done there.

His dexterous automaton had been destroyed; the lower half of it lay on the floor, the rest of it scattered as plaster fragments and dust. On the work-table, the clay models of the hands were pounded flat, and his sketches of their design torn from the walls. The tubs for mixing plaster were over-flowing with the papers from his office. Stratton took a closer look, and saw that they had been doused with lamp oil.

He heard a sound behind him and turned back to face the office. The front door to the office swung closed and a broad-shouldered man stepped out from behind it; he’d been standing there ever since Stratton had entered. “Good of you to come,” the man said. He scrutinized Stratton with the predatory gaze of a raptor, an assassin.

Stratton bolted out of the back door of the studio and down the rear hallway. He could hear the man give chase.

He fled through the darkened building, crossing work-rooms filled with coke and iron bars, crucibles and molds, all illuminated by the moonlight entering through skylights overhead; he had entered the metalworks portion of the factory. In the next room he paused for breath, and realized how loudly his footsteps had been echoing; skulking would offer a better chance at escape than running. He distantly heard his pursuer’s footsteps stop; the assassin had likewise opted for stealth.

Stratton looked around for a promising hiding place. All around him were cast iron automata in various stages of near-completion; he was in the finishing room, where the runners left over from casting were sawed off and the surfaces chased. There was no place to hide, and he was about to move on when he noticed what looked like a bundle of rifles mounted on legs. He looked more closely, and recognized it as a military engine.

These automata were built for the War Office: gun car-riages that aimed their own cannon, and rapid-fire rifles, like this one, that cranked their own barrel-clusters. Nasty things, but they’d proven invaluable in the Crimea; their inventor had been granted a peerage. Stratton didn’t know any names to animate the weapon—they were military secrets—but only the body on which the rifle was mounted was automatous; the rifle’s firing mechanism was strictly mechanical. If he could point the body in the right direction, he might be able to fire the rifle manually.

He cursed himself for his stupidity. There was no ammunition here. He stole into the next room.

It was the packing room, filled with pine crates and loose straw. Staying low between crates, he moved to the far wall. Through the windows he saw the courtyard behind the factory, where finished automata were carted away. He couldn’t get out that way; the courtyard gates were locked at night. His only exit was through the factory’s front door, but he risked encountering the assassin if he headed back the way he’d come. He needed to cross over to the ceramicworks and double back through that side of the factory.

From the front of the packing room came the sound of footsteps. Stratton ducked behind a row of crates, and then saw a side door only a few feet away. As stealthily as he could, he opened the door, entered, and closed the door behind him. Had his pursuer heard him? He peered through a small grille set in the door; he couldn’t see the man, but felt he’d gone unnoticed. The assassin was probably searching the packing room.

Stratton turned around, and immediately realized his mistake. The door to the ceramicworks was in the opposite wall. He had entered a storeroom, filled with ranks of finished automata, but with no other exits. There was no way to lock the door. He had cornered himself.

Was there anything in the room he could use as a weapon? The menagerie of automata included some squat mining engines, whose forelimbs terminated in enormous pickaxes, but the ax-heads were bolted to their limbs. There was no way he could remove one.

Stratton could hear the assassin opening side doors and searching other storerooms. Then he noticed an automaton standing off to the side: a porter used for moving the inventory about. It was anthropomorphic in form, the only automaton in the room of that type. An idea came to him.

Stratton checked the back of the porter’s head. Porters’ names had entered the public domain long ago, so there were no locks protecting its name slot; a tab of parchment protruded from the horizontal slot in the iron. He reached into his coat pocket for the notebook and pencil he always carried and tore out a small portion of a blank leaf. In the darkness he quickly wrote seventy-two letters in a familiar combination, and then folded the paper into a tight square.

To the porter, he whispered, “Go stand as close to the door as you can.” The cast iron figure stepped forward and headed for the door. Its gait was very smooth, but not rapid, and the assassin would reach this storeroom any moment now. “Faster,” hissed Stratton, and the porter obeyed.

Just as it reached the door, Stratton saw through the grille that his pursuer had arrived on the other side. “Get out of the way,” barked the man.

Ever obedient, the automaton shifted to take a step back when Stratton yanked out its name. The assassin began pushing against the door, but Stratton was able to insert the new name, cramming the square of paper into the slot as deeply as he could.

The porter resumed walking forward, this time with a fast, stiff gait: his childhood doll, now life-size. It immediately ran into the door and, unperturbed, kept it shut with the force of its marching, its iron hands leaving fresh dents in the door’s oaken surface with every swing of its arms, its rubber-shod feet chafing heavily against the brick floor. Stratton retreated to the back of the storeroom.

“Stop,” the assassin ordered. “Stop walking, you! Stop!”

The automaton continued marching, oblivious to all commands. The man pushed on the door, but to no avail. He then tried slamming into it with his shoulder, each impact causing the automaton to slide back slightly, but its rapid strides brought it forward again before the man could squeeze inside. There was a brief pause, and then something poked through the grille in the door; the man was prying it off with a crowbar. The grille abruptly popped free, leaving an open window. The man stretched his arm through and reached around to the back of the automaton’s head, his fingers searching for the name each time its head bobbed forward, but there was nothing for them to grasp; the paper was wedged too deeply in the slot.

The arm withdrew. The assassin’s face appeared in the window. “Fancy yourself clever, don’t you?” he called out. Then he disappeared.

Stratton relaxed slightly. Had the man given up? A minute passed, and Stratton began to think about his next move. He could wait here until the factory opened; there would be too many people about for the assassin to remain.

Suddenly the man’s arm came through the window again, this time carrying a jar of fluid. He poured it over the automaton’s head, the liquid splattering and dripping down its back. The man’s arm withdrew, and then Stratton heard the sound of a match being struck and then flaring alight. The man’s arm reappeared bearing the match, and touched it to the automaton.

The room was flooded with light as the automaton’s head and upper back burst into flames. The man had doused it with lamp oil. Stratton squinted at the spectacle: Light and shadow danced across the floor and walls, transforming the storeroom into the site of some druidic ceremony. The heat caused the automaton to hasten its vague assault on the door, like a salamandrine priest dancing with increasing frenzy, until it abruptly froze: Its name had caught fire, and the letters were being consumed.

The flames gradually died out, and to Stratton’s newly light-adapted eyes the room seemed almost completely black. More by sound than by sight, he realized the man was pushing at the door again, this time forcing the automaton back enough for him to gain entrance.

“Enough of that, then.”

Stratton tried to run past him, but the assassin easily grabbed him and knocked him down with a clout to the head.

His senses returned almost immediately, but by then the assassin had him face down on the floor, one knee pressed into his back. The man tore the health amulet from Stratton’s wrist and then tied his hands together behind his back, drawing the rope tightly enough that the hemp fibers scraped the skin of his wrists.

“What kind of man are you, to do things like this?” Stratton gasped, his cheek flattened against the brick floor.

The assassin chuckled. “Men are no different from your automata; slip a bloke a piece of paper with the proper figures on it, and he’ll do your bidding.” The room grew light as the man lit an oil lamp.

“What if I paid you more to leave me alone?”

“Can’t do it. Have to think about my reputation, haven’t I? Now let’s get to business.” He grasped the smallest finger of Stratton’s left hand and abruptly broke it.

The pain was shocking, so intense that for a moment Stratton was insensible to all else. He was distantly aware that he had cried out. Then he heard the man speaking again. “Answer my questions straight now. Do you keep copies of your work at home?”

“Yes.” He could only get a few words out at a time. “At my desk. In the study.”

“No other copies hidden anywhere? Under the floor, perhaps?”

“No.”

“Your friend upstairs didn’t have copies. But perhaps someone else does?”

He couldn’t direct the man to Darrington Hall. “No one.”

The man pulled the notebook out of Stratton’s coat pocket. Stratton could hear him leisurely flipping through the pages. “Didn’t post any letters? Corresponding with colleagues, that sort of thing?”

“Nothing that anyone could use to reconstruct my work.”

“You’re lying to me.” The man grasped Stratton’s ring finger.

“No! It’s the truth!” He couldn’t keep the hysteria from his voice.

Then Stratton heard a sharp thud, and the pressure in his back eased. Cautiously, he raised his head and looked around. His assailant lay unconscious on the floor next to him. Standing next to him was Davies, holding a leather blackjack.

Davies pocketed his weapon and crouched to unknot the rope that bound Stratton. “Are you badly hurt, sir?”

“He’s broken one of my fingers. Davies, how did you—?”

“Lord Fieldhurst sent me the moment he learned whom Willoughby had contacted.”

“Thank God you arrived when you did.” Stratton saw the irony of the situation—his rescue ordered by the very man he was plotting against—but he was too grateful to care.

Davies helped Stratton to his feet and handed him his notebook. Then he used the rope to tie up the assassin. “I went to your office first. Who’s the fellow there?”

“His name is—was Benjamin Roth.” Stratton managed to recount his previous meeting with the kabbalist. “I don’t know what he was doing there.”

“Many religious types have a bit of the fanatic in them,” said Davies, checking the assassin’s bonds. “As you wouldn’t give him your work, he likely felt justified in taking it himself. He came to your office to look for it, and had the bad luck to be there when this fellow arrived.”

Stratton felt a flood of remorse. “I should have given Roth what he asked.”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“It’s an outrageous injustice that he was the one to die. He’d nothing to do with this affair.”

“It’s always that way, sir. Come on, let’s tend to that hand of yours.”

Davies bandaged Stratton’s finger to a splint, assuring him that the Royal Society would discreetly handle any consequences of the night’s events. They gathered the oil-stained papers from Stratton’s office into a trunk so that Stratton could sift through them at his leisure, away from the manufactory. By the time they were finished, a carriage had arrived to take Stratton back to Darrington Hall; it had set out at the same time as Davies, who had ridden into London on a racing-engine. Stratton boarded the carriage with the trunk of papers, while Davies stayed behind to deal with the assassin and make arrangements for the kabbalist’s body.

Stratton spent the carriage ride sipping from a flask of brandy, trying to steady his nerves. He felt a sense of relief when he arrived back at Darrington Hall; although it held its own variety of threats, Stratton knew he’d be safe from assassination there. By the time he reached his room, his panic had largely been converted into exhaustion, and he slept deeply.

He felt much more composed the next morning, and ready to begin sorting through his trunkful of papers. As he was arranging them into stacks approximating their original organization, Stratton found a notebook he didn’t recognize. Its pages contained Hebrew letters arranged in the familiar patterns of nominal integration and factorization, but all the notes were in Hebrew as well. With a renewed pang of guilt, he realized it must have belonged to Roth; the assassin must have found it on his person and tossed it in with Stratton’s papers to be burned.

He was about to set it aside, but his curiosity bested him: He’d never seen a kabbalist’s notebook before. Much of the terminology was archaic, but he could understand it well enough; among the incantations and sephirotic diagrams, he found the epithet enabling an automaton to write its own name. As he read, Stratton realized that Roth’s achievement was more elegant that he’d previously thought.

The epithet didn’t describe a specific set of physical actions, but instead the general notion of reflexivity. A name incorporating the epithet became an autonym: a self-designating name. The notes indicated that such a name would express its lexical nature through whatever means the body allowed. The animated body wouldn’t even need hands to write out its name; if the epithet were incorporated properly, a porcelain horse could likely accomplish the task by dragging a hoof in the dirt.

Combined with one of Stratton’s epithets for dexterity, Roth’s epithet would indeed let an automaton do most of what was needed to reproduce. An automaton could cast a body identical to its own, write out its own name, and insert it to animate the body. It couldn’t train the new one in sculpture, though, since automata couldn’t speak. An automaton that could truly reproduce itself without human assistance remained out of reach, but coming this close would undoubtedly have delighted the kabbalists.

It seemed unfair that automata were so much easier to reproduce than humans. It was as if the problem of reproducing automata need be solved only once, while that of reproducing humans was a Sisyphean task, with every additional generation increasing the complexity of the name required.

And abruptly Stratton realized that he didn’t need a name that redoubled physical complexity, but one than enabled lexical duplication.

The solution was to impress the ovum with an autonym, and thus induce a foetus that bore its own name.

The name would have two versions, as originally proposed: one used to induce male foetuses, another for female foetuses. The women conceived this way would be fertile as always. The men conceived this way would also be fertile, but not in the typical manner: Their spermatozoa would not contain preformed foetuses, but would instead bear either of two names on their surfaces, the self-expression of the names originally born by the glass needles. And when such a spermatozoon reached an ovum, the name would induce the creation of a new foetus. The species would be able to reproduce itself without medical intervention, because it would carry the name within itself.

He and Dr. Ashbourne had assumed that creating animals capable of reproducing meant giving them preformed foetuses, because that was the method employed by nature. As a result they had overlooked another possibility: that if a creature could be expressed in a name, reproducing that creature was equivalent to transcribing the name. An organism could contain, instead of a tiny analogue of its body, a lexical representation instead.

Humanity would become a vehicle for the name as well as a product of it. Each generation would be both content and vessel, an echo in a self-sustaining reverberation.

Stratton envisioned a day when the human species could survive as long as its own behavior allowed, when it could stand or fall based purely on its own actions, and not simply vanish once some predetermined life span had elapsed. Other species might bloom and wither like flowers over seasons of geologic time, but humans would endure for as long as they determined.

Nor would any group of people control the fecundity of another; in the procreative domain, at least, liberty would be restored to the individual. This was not the application Roth had intended for his epithet, but Stratton hoped the kabbalist would consider it worthwhile. By the time the autonym’s true power became apparent, an entire generation consisting of millions of people worldwide would have been born of the name, and there would be no way any government could control their reproduction. Lord Fieldhurst—or his successors—would be outraged, and there would eventually be a price to be paid, but Stratton found he could accept that.

He hastened to his desk, where he opened his own notebook and Roth’s side by side. On a blank page, he began writing down ideas on how Roth’s epithet might be incorporated into a human euonym. Already in his mind Stratton was transposing the letters, searching for a permutation that denoted both the human body and itself, an ontogenic encoding for the species.

A ROLL OF THE DICE

Catherine Asaro

In research, there’s no substitute for field experience—but there can be too much of a good thing!

I

Quis Web

Jeremiah’s kidnappers let him watch the delegation that came to negotiate on his behalf. The wall in front of him was one-way glassplex; he could see the people in the room beyond, but to them the wall appeared opaque.

He didn’t recognize the man speaking, but the fellow wore the uniform of the Foreign Affairs Corps for the Allied Worlds of Earth. Jeremiah knew the other two people in the delegation: Deborah Svenson, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard, and Professor Jack Brenn, Jeremiah’s thesis advisor in the anthropology department.

One of Jeremiah’s kidnappers also stood in the room: Chankah Dahl. As Manager of Dahl, she governed one of the largest city-states in the human settlement on the planet Coba. A tall woman with gray hair, she ranked high in the power hierarchy of the Twelve Estates.

The voice of the Foreign Affairs officer came over an audiocom set high in the wall. “You must understand, Manager Dahl,” he continued. “Jeremiah Coltman is a citizen of the Allied Worlds. Your decision to send him to another Estate against his will is considered abduction by our people.”

Manager Dahl remained unperturbed. “You are well aware that before Jeremiah came here, he signed an agreement to abide by our laws.” She looked around at them. “Your government has no jurisdiction here. He is ours now.”

Jack Brenn stiffened. A large man with broad shoulders and a shock of black hair, his intensity almost crackled in the room. “You have no right to hijack him this way! He signed that agreement with the understanding that it meant you could deport him if you didn’t like him.”

“But we do like him,” Chankah said mildly. “We have bestowed our highest honor on him.”

Dean Svenson spoke. “Now that Jeremiah’s fieldwork is complete, he wishes to return home. Manager Dahl, he has his school, work, relatives.” Quietly she said, “His life.”

The Manager said, simply, “He is Calani. Calani do not leave Coba.”

Jeremiah touched the engraved band that circled his biceps. He had one on each arm. Made from solid gold, they symbolized his position. Calani. Dice player.

He really, really didn’t want the honor.

“I will relay your regards to him,” Chankah finished.

Jeremiah recognized her tone. She was dismissing the delegation. He hit his fist on the glassplex. “I’m here!” he shouted. He knew it wouldn’t carry through the soundproofed wall, but he had to try. “Don’t go!”

Only his silent reflection answered. He regarded it, seeing a man more of Coba than of Earth. Three years ago, when he arrived in Dahl, he had been soft, out of shape, plump. Now lean muscles replaced the flab, built by his job on the construction crew where he had worked until ten days ago. He would never be tall or husky, but he enjoyed a fitness now he had never known before. He loved working in the crisp air of the spectacular Teotec Mountains. During the day he labored with his muscles and at night he labored with his mind, writing his dissertation. His only “hardships” were the lack of computers and the relatively low level of technology here, where the culture had backslid. He had otherwise thoroughly enjoyed his life.

Until now.

Instead of comfortable work clothes, today he wore garb appropriate for a Calani: rich suede trousers, a suede vest, and a white shirt embroidered at the cuffs with threads made from gold. His armbands went over the shirt sleeves and heavy gold guards circled his wrists. His hair spilled over his ears and down his neck in tousled brown curls.

Behind him, the lock mechanism on the door clicked. He turned to see a woman enter with an octet of guards. She riveted attention. At six-foot-two, she stood six inches taller than him. Her face showed the classic beauty of Coba’s highborn. She was almost twenty years his senior, just past forty, but she had the build and vibrant health of an athlete half her age. Her suede trousers clung to her long, muscular legs. A trace of silver dusted the tendrils of hair that curled at her temples, and a heavy auburn braid fell down her back to her waist. Her eyes, large and gray, had a luminous quality. Her simple clothes had no adornment and needed none: her aura of authority drew notice far more than any jewelry or bright colors.

Jeremiah knew little more about her than her name. Khal Viasa. As Manager of Viasa, she governed a small but wealthy city-state high in the mountains. During his years here, he had seen her only at a distance when she visited Dahl. He hadn’t thought much about it, though he had always noticed her striking appearance. No one would ever describe Khal Viasa as “pretty.” Elegant perhaps, mesmerizing, stunning, regal. It had never occurred to him that so powerful a ruler would notice a simple laborer. Nor had he expected his reputation as a good Quis player to carry beyond Dahl.

Ten days ago Manager Dahl told him the news; Manager Viasa had bought his Calani contract—a contract he hadn’t even known he owned. They seemed to find this a perfectly reasonable transaction, despite his incredulous protests.

Be careful what you wish for. If ever a situation had earned that warning, this was it. He had wanted a chance to observe the Calanya, the elite group of dice players that lived on a Manager’s Estate. He considered his inability to study that cloistered institution a weak point in his dissertation. Calani played the strategy game of Quis. They studied for years and had to pass rigorous exams before they could apply for positions within the Calanya of the Twelve Estates. Well, he hadn’t applied for anything. If he had known his talent would lead him into this situation, he would never have let anyone find out how well he took to the game.

Manager Viasa came over to him, moving with a natural grace. She spoke in the Teotecan language. “My greetings.”

“They’re leaving.” Jeremiah motioned to the room beyond the glass. “Without me.”

She put her hands on his shoulders, making him acutely aware of both her greater height and her sensuality. “Surely you know better than to speak in front of your escort. Manager Dahl told me that you spent the last tenday learning the ways of the Calanya.”

Learning? Is that what they called it? He had spent the last ten days in a guarded suite, albeit one far more luxurious than the apartment where he had lived before. Yes, Manager Dahl had given him the Oath: never again read, write, or speak to anyone outside the Calanya. He couldn’t live that way. Scholarship was his life. When he broke the Oath, however, they put him in solitary, which he hated. So for now he remained silent.

His thoughts must have shown on his face. Khal’s voice gentled. “Jeremiah, I realize you are unhappy with this. I am sorry it is hard for you. I hope you will feel better when we reach Viasa. We leave tonight.”

That only made it worse. In Viasa, his chances of escape went to nil.

Starlight silvered the towers of Viasa as the windrider descended in the night. The Estate rose out of the darkness like an ancient castle. The old fortress now served as the headquarters and home of Manager Viasa and her staff. A wall surrounded the Estate and city. Sharply slanted roofs came into view, their stark beauty accented by lights within arched windows. Mist wreathed Viasa, turning the lights a hazy gold and curling around shadowed arches and spires. Beyond the city, jagged mountains stepped up into the sky.

Viasa stood near Grayrock Falls, high in the Teotec Mountains. Jeremiah knew that even if he did somehow escape his guards, no feasible way existed to leave here except by air. He had never flown a rider, and the winds that ripped through these upper ranges were inimical to all but the most seasoned pilots. Even with equipment, supplies, and luck he doubted he could survive the months-long hike out of the mountains and across the desert to the starport.

He wondered if the delegation knew he had left Dahl. Would they go home without him? The Allied authorities had warned him that if he insisted on coming to Coba, he would lose their protection. The human settlements that had spread across the stars were splintered into three political entities. The Allied Worlds of Earth existed in the shadow of two giants, the Skolian Imperialate and the Trader empire. The Skolians claimed Coba. Earth had no wish to strain its precarious relations with the powerful, warlike Skolians, particularly not for a graduate student who, in the greater scheme of things, had little consequence.

The wings of the windrider spread in metal pinions. Painted to resemble an althawk, the craft rode the gales like a giant bird. It soared over the city rooftops and landed on an airfield lit by misty lights.

Jeremiah looked around the cabin. It seated ten: his guards, Khal Viasa, and himself. The pilot and co-pilot sat up front. As he undid his safety harness, his guards rose to their feet. All eight women were taller than him, as were most Cobans, both male and female. These wore dusky purple uniforms with the Viasa symbol on their shoulders, a stylized image of Grayrock Falls. Stunners hung on their belts, guns that fired needles with a fast-acting sedative.

The captain opened the hatch. Accompanied by six guards, Jeremiah jumped down onto the tarmac. As he pulled his fur-lined hood tighter against the tearing gales, Khal stepped down with the other guards. Her hood framed her face, making her large eyes even more intense. She smiled slightly at him, as reserved as always, but also with discreet surprise, as if she too found it astonishing that he was her Calani.

The icy wind at Viasa made even the gales at Dahl seem like puffs of breeze. Leaning into the rushing air, they ran across the tarmac to the Estate and entered the fortress through a graceful quartz arch in its stone wall. Relief washed over him as they reached the protection of a vaulted hall.

Several Estate aides waited for them. As they bowed to Manager Viasa, they darted glances to where Jeremiah stood with his escort. He seemed to intrigue them just as much as his rare glimpses of a Calani in Dahl had fascinated him.

A dark-haired woman spoke. “Welcome back, Manager Viasa.”

“I came as soon as I received your message,” Khal said. “What is the situation at the dam now?”

Her aide looked worn out, with dark circles under her eyes. “The electrical plant still isn’t functioning. The beacon that guides windriders in the mountains has already failed. If this continues much longer, neither Viasa nor Tehnsa will have power.”

Jeremiah tensed. No wonder Khal had wanted to return so soon. The Viasa-Tehnsa Dam harnessed energy from the Grayrock Falls. In this remote mountain region, it provided the only continuous source of power for Viasa, and also for Tehnsa, its dependent city-state.

Khal came over to him. She stood a fraction closer than he expected, nothing that would have been unusual in Cambridge on Earth, but a bit off-kilter here, given the famous reserve of the Viasa people. She spoke in her husky contralto. “I’m sorry, Jeremiah. It seems Viasa demands my attention. Your escort will show you to your rooms.”

He nodded, relieved. Tired and disheartened, he needed to withdraw into privacy.

Khal spoke to the captain of his escort. “Take him into his suite by the private door. The others can wait until later to meet him.” She smiled at Jeremiah—and it changed her entire face. Instead of classic reserved perfection, she suddenly became warm and vibrant. “The other Calani are curious about you. None have ever even seen an offworlder, let alone met one.”

He just nodded again, glad he didn’t have to think of a response. She brushed his arm in an unexpected touch of farewell. Then his guards escorted him out of the hall. They followed marble corridors with high, arched ceilings. At first he thought the bronze claws on the walls held torches; then he realized they were electric lights. The lamps resembled flame, adding to the ancient atmosphere, a reminder of Viasa’s age and conservative nature.

The next wing they entered, however, had genuine torches in the claws. They stopped at a wall engraved with arabesque designs. When the captain pressed a series of ridges in the design, clinks came from within the wall. She leaned against the stone and a door swung inward. Moving to the side, she bowed to Jeremiah. He looked back at her, puzzled. Then he realized she was waiting for him to enter.

He walked into a suite of stunning luxury. The darkwood furniture gleamed with red highlights. Pale green cushions lay on divans and in piles on a plush gold rug. The walls were painted dark amber near the floor, then shaded upward through lighter golds and into ivory near the ceiling. Held by slender gold chains, lamps hung from the ceiling, spheres of delicate frosted glass hand-painted with mountain scenes. Blown glass vases graced the tables, each with a blue-green stalk topped by a spray of gold spheres the size of marbles, but airy and hollow.

The bathroom alone was as big as his old apartment in Dahl. A pool filled most of it, fed by fountains and tiled in green, with frothy jeweled inlays. The bedroom had a canopied bed made up in blue and green velvet. Copper braziers kept the room warm. In the window seat, starlight streamed through tall panels made from unbreakable glassplex. Looking through the windows, he realized the outside wall was a sheer cliff face that plunged far down into the mountains.

When they returned to the living room, the captain indicated a horseshoe arch set across from the private door. Gold mosaics bordered the arch and ivory drapes hung within it. “That leads to the main common room for all the suites,” she said. Then she bowed to him. “We will leave you to rest. If you need anything, we will be Outside.”

He nodded, knowing full well the real reason they were posted around his suite. Khal meant to ensure he stayed put.

When Jeremiah was alone, he sunk onto a divan, too tired even to go to bed. After awhile, a tap came at the archway to the common room. He wanted to ignore it, but the same inexhaustible curiosity that had spurred him to become an anthropologist got the better of him now.

“Come in,” he said.

The hangings shifted to reveal a tall man with a husky build and broad shoulders. He looked about forty, with the classic features of the Coban highborn. Gray dusted his black curls. He stood with natural confidence, as if he took his high status for granted. His clothes resembled Jeremiah’s, but darker in color. Three bands circled each of his arms, rather than one. Jeremiah wondered why he rated more, then felt irked at himself for caring.

“My greetings,” the man said. “I am Kev.” He took in Jeremiah’s slouched posture. “I can return another time, if you prefer.”

Although Jeremiah didn’t feel like company, he had no wish to alienate the other dice players. He would be living with them for some time, maybe even the rest of his life, a possibility he was doing his best to forget.

He sat up straighter. “Come in. Please.” He indicated an armchair set across a table from him. “Be comfortable.”

Kev settled into the chair and stretched his long legs across the carpet. “Being Outside is tiring. But you need not worry. You will not have to go there often.”

“Outside?”

Kev gestured around them. “The Calanya, the place where we live, is Inside. All else is Outside.”

Jeremiah stared at him. “We never leave these suites?”

“We have this wing of the Estate. And the parks. They cover twenty square kilometers.” Kev looked apologetic. “Most Calanya have more land. These mountains limit Viasa’s space. Still, it is enough, I think, for fourteen people.”

“Fourteen Calani live here?”

“Counting yourself.”

Jeremiah rubbed his eyes. “Don’t remind me.”

Kev considered him. “The rumors are true, then? You received your Oath against your will.”

“Yes.”

“It is hard to imagine. Many people would give much to be where you are now.”

Jeremiah shook his head. “I had no idea Manager Viasa wanted my contract.”

“Normally the Calani decides what offer to accept,” Kev acknowledged. “When Khal initiated the negotiations for your contract, news of your Quis talent spread. Several Estates entered the bidding despite your lack of formal study.”

Jeremiah stared at him. Other Managers had also bid for this clandestine dice contract of his? “How do you know?”

Kev’s expression turned inscrutable. “Khal and I talk.”

Khal. Kev spoke as if it were natural to call one of Coba’s most powerful leaders by her first name. Calani were among the elite who might address a Manager in such a manner. Jeremiah couldn’t imagine doing so, no more than he had ever felt comfortable using “Jack” for Professor Brenn, even after Brenn insisted. Maybe the ease came with experience.

“How long have you been a Calani?” Jeremiah asked.

Arrogance touched Kev’s voice. “Twenty-three years. I took the Oath at sixteen.”

That boggled Jeremiah. Kev must have spent most of his life in seclusion, playing dice. Then a thought came to him: Is it really so different from the way I’ve studied all my life? He might as well have been in seclusion given how rarely he ventured out of the library or classroom.

Yes, he thought. It’s different. He had chosen that life, rather than having it chosen for him.

Jeremiah slept through the morning, something he rarely did on Coba, given its thirty-two-hour days. He didn’t feel like getting out of bed. He spent the afternoon in his robe, sitting in the window seat of his bedroom, staring out at the chasm of air and the drifting clouds below.

Of course he tried to leave. He heaved open his private door and found guards Outside, all armed. When the captain asked if they could do anything for him, he shook his head and closed the door. Then he returned to the window seat and watched the sky.

In the evening, he roused himself enough to bathe in his swimming pool with its fountains. He shaved using a pearl-handled razor he discovered laid out with a towel on a polished stone bench by the pool. Back in his bedroom, he changed into clothes he found in the wardrobe, garb similar to what he had worn yesterday. Then he sat by the window again.

Kev came to ask if he wanted to join the other Calani for dinner in the common room, or would he like his meal here. Jeremiah shook his head to both suggestions.

Finally night settled over the cliffs. He was still sitting by the window when the guards came for him.

Blue and green mosaics tiled the halls, with gold accents that gleamed in the torchlight. After following a maze of corridors, the guards took him up a tower, climbing a spiral staircase of black marble. No one explained why or spoke to him.

At the top, they came to a horseshoe arch. The suite beyond was even more refined than his own. Soft light diffused from panels in the ceiling. Parchments on the walls glimmered with paintings of birds and branches. Dark urns as tall as Jeremiah stood in the corners, enameled with clusters of gold marble-flowers.

His escort showed him into a room with blue-shaded walls and a pale blue rug. It had no furnishings, only a voluptuous pile of green, blue, and gold pillows heaped in one corner. The captain bowed to him and then the guards withdrew. A moment later Jeremiah heard the door close, followed by the click of the lock mechanism.

He rubbed his chin, baffled. What did they expect him to do here? For a while he paced the rooms. When he grew tired of looking for a way out, he lay among the pillows, letting their softness envelop him. With no other outlet, he sought the freedom of sleep.

Sleep, however, evaded him. Instead, tears slid down his face. Damn. He hated to cry. The tears came anyway, for the loss of his freedom and the people he loved. After a while he did manage to drowse, but he never fully slept.

“Jeremiah?”

He opened his eyes. Khal Viasa was standing above him, dressed in a clinging robe of red velvet. She had unbraided her hair, and it fell in glorious auburn waves to her waist. He stared at her, bewildered, aware of her long, lean curves under the robe.

She knelt next to him among the pillows. “Your guards told me you haven’t eaten all day.”

“I wasn’t hungry.” He rubbed his palm across his cheek, trying to erase the signs of his tears.

“Ai, Jeremiah,” she murmured. “I am so sorry you are unhappy.”

Her compassion caught him off guard. He had expected her to be as cold as everyone else he had met from Viasa. Maybe under that infamous reserve, they were human after all. “I don’t understand what you want from me.”

“To eat. You will become sick if you refuse food.”

He wanted to say no. His diet was tricky, though. He had none of the immunities that protected Cobans against the poisons and bacteria here. It limited the foods he could eat, and his water had to be treated. One reason he had lost weight so fast when he first came to Coba was because he had been sick so much, until he and his doctor worked out a diet he could tolerate. If he became careless now, he risked upsetting the chemical balance his body needed to maintain.

After a pause, he said, “All right.”

Khal rose to her feet and went to an audiocom in the wall. When she touched its fingertip panel, a woman’s voice floated into the air. “Seva here.”

“Seva, this is Manager Viasa. Have the instructions for what Jeremiah can eat and drink been given to the kitchens?”

“Yes, ma’am. Last night, right after you landed.”

“Good. Have dinner brought up for him and me. We missed the evening meal.”

“Right away, ma’am.”

Jeremiah wondered why she hadn’t eaten. She looked exhausted. “Are you all right?” he asked.

She came back and settled next to him in the pillows. “I am fine. But it is kind of you to ask.”

“Is it the Viasa-Tehnsa dam?”

Khal sighed. “It took all day to repair the electrical plant. The beacon still doesn’t work. Then I had to explain to Manager Tehnsa why it all failed.” She gave him a look of apology. “But I shouldn’t bore you with mundane Estate details.”

“It’s all right.” He preferred mundane details to thinking about his situation.

The audiocom buzzed. Then a girl said, “Your meal is here, Manager Viasa.”

“Ah. Good.” Khal rose gracefully to her feet and left the room. She returned with two junior aides. The boy carried a gold platter with an ornate cover, and the girl had a blue lacquered stand trimmed with gold and pearl inlays. They bowed to Jeremiah, set up the stand with the platter, and then withdrew from the room. A moment later the door closed and locked.

Jeremiah blinked. “That was fast.”

Khal smiled. When she lifted the cover off the platter, an aroma of spices filled the room. It made his mouth water. Maybe he was hungry after all.

Dinner was set out on the platter. Khal filled two gold-rimmed crystal goblets with red wine and gave him one. Then she took a plate of spiced meatballs and settled next to him among the pillows. Using a small gold fork, she speared a spice ball and offered it to him.

Jeremiah flushed. He would never have expected an Estate Manager to feed him. Self-conscious, he ate the spice ball. It tasted even better than it smelled, and he suddenly realized he was famished.

She gave him another, then speared one for herself. They alternated eating spice balls with drinking wine, Khal feeding them both until they finished the plate.

He took a last swallow of wine. “That was good.”

“I am glad you liked it.” She finished her drink, then took his empty goblet and set it with hers on the rug.

Jeremiah lay back in the pillows, relaxed now. Tipsy, in fact. Khal leaned on her elbow next to him, an intimacy that made him even more aware of her presence. The collar of her robe slipped down her shoulder, revealing smooth skin. He didn’t think she noticed, but that only made the effect more erotic. She nudged him onto his back and began to unlace the thongs that held his shirt closed.

Jeremiah caught her hand, still sober enough to read the implications under her seduction. “What are you doing?”

Her eyes were glossy from wine. She disengaged her hand from his and tweaked open his shirt. Then she slid her palm across his chest. “You are very beautiful, Jeremiah.”

Beautiful? Right. What was going on, with a private den, an intimate feeding, and now this? On Earth, women had never noticed him. It hadn’t surprised him, given how he saw himself: a fat, short, boring nerd. His parents claimed his negative self-image was undeserved, that it came from taunts he had taken as a boy, when in truth he was “a charming, intelligent young man.” Well, of course they said that. They were his parents. They would think he was charming if he fell on his face in the mud.

It was true, though, that in Dahl his shyness had become an asset. Coban women valued the trait in men. But he had never risked having a girlfriend there. The Twelve Estates operated on a double standard that could have come from the Dark Ages, except here it applied to men. A woman could do as she pleased, but a man was expected to behave with decorum. Had he taken a lover, Manager Dahl would probably have asked him to leave. In a place as conservative as Viasa, he could have been deported.

In some ways, it had been fun. Women in Dahl considered him a challenge, an exotic treat they were convinced wanted his honor compromised. After all, he came from offworld. Surely if a single young man traveled so freely, without a chaperone, he must be free in other ways too. But even the most aggressive had never pushed this hard. The implied insult in Khal’s behavior stunned him. It also hurt, given his attraction to her, but he didn’t want her to know.

She touched his cheek. “Your emotions flash across your face like a beacon. Why are you upset?”

He spoke coolly. “It’s obvious why you had me brought here.”

“I should hope so.” She smiled. “This is the Akasi suite.”

Akasi? Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord.

She was watching his face. “You didn’t realize?”

“No.” He flushed. “I hardly know you.”

Khal looked at a loss for words. “Chankah Dahl led me to believe that you knew of my proposal.”

He thought back. Yes, the Dahl Manager had said something about an Akasi during his solitary confinement. He had been so angry at the time, he had refused to listen. “I . . . missed it.”

“It is a big thing to miss.”

No kidding. Akasi Calani. How could he be married to this stranger? “When did we, uh, have the ceremony?”

“We were wed as soon as you signed the Calanya contract.”

“I didn’t sign anything. Manager Dahl wrote my name.”

“Well, yes, it did work out that way,” Khal admitted. She brushed her knuckles over his cheek. “I won’t hurt you, sweet Jeremiah.” Then she went back to unlacing his shirt.

Flustered, he caught her hand. “Now wait a minute, Manager Viasa.”

“Khal,” she murmured.

He reddened. “Um, okay. Khal.”

“It is all right,” she soothed. “Try to relax.” She slipped her hand free, then finished undoing the buttons that closed the outer seams of his sleeves. As she tugged his shirt away from his body, her robe slipped more, revealing tantalizing hints of skin.

This all felt surreal, like a dream. Real or not, though, it was a marked improvement over the last few days. With a sigh, he let go of his resistance and put his arms around her waist. Drawing her close, he inhaled her scent, a fragrant blend of spices and incense.

Khal reached down to the outer seams of his trousers, which were held closed by flaps. As she undid the flaps, she traced her fingertips over his skin. He finally understood why men’s trousers here had such an odd design. A woman who knew what she was doing could make taking them off intensely erotic.

Pushing up on her elbow, Khal gazed at him. “You’ve such big eyes.” She rolled a lock of his hair between her fingers. “Our poets write soliloquies about the wind god Khozaar. They say his face has a beauty no mortal man can match. But they never saw yours, Jeremiah. You shame even the wind.”

Good Lord. She was sweet-talking him. Before he could think of an appropriate response, if one even existed to such outrageous statements, she added, “I can’t believe the women on your Earth let you come here alone.”

“Oh, well. You know. I had them all dazzled.” He had to laugh. “They never even knew I existed.”

“You are modest. I like that.” She brushed her lips across his cheek.

He pulled her closer, pressing his cheek against hers in a gesture his one and only girlfriend on Earth had called “too tender,” as if that somehow made it wrong. Khal seemed to like it, though, which pleased him.

Had her clothes been made with the same complicated flaps and fastenings as his, he doubted he could have figured them out in his inebriated state. But it was simple to pull the braided cord of her robe and slip the velvet off her body. She wore a silk shift underneath that rippled over her toned curves. He watched with appreciation when she sat up and pulled the shift over her head, her breasts lifting as she raised her arms. The silk trailed over her nipples. He wondered if all Coban women were so well-formed, or if she took unusually good care of herself.

She settled alongside him and touched her lips to his, but she resisted when he tried to pull her into a kiss. He hesitated, unsure if Cobans had the custom. He had never seen two Cobans kiss, and his questions had always been met with embarrassed silence or smirks. If they did kiss here, they considered it far more private than in the Wyoming culture on Earth that had produced him.

Uncertain what Khal wanted, he stopped trying to push. It seemed the right response; she relaxed and brushed her mouth over his again, feather light. She slid down and touched her lips to his chest, her caress maddening in its “almost there” quality, as if she would stop teasing any moment and truly kiss him. He tried to reach for her, but she nudged him back in the pillows. Then she tickled his belly button with her tongue. Jeremiah laughed and stroked her hair, staring at the gold ceiling.

When she went lower still, he couldn’t take any more. Grasping her arms, he tugged her back up and rolled her over until he lay on top of her. She made a deep-throated sound, a blend of surprise, protest, and pleasure. Caressing her breasts, he tried to kiss her again. This time she turned her head.

“Come on, Khal,” he said against her ear.

She pressed her hands against his shoulders, pushing him over onto his back again. Disconcerted, he realized that with her muscled body and greater height, she was stronger than him. She didn’t want to fight, though. When he relaxed, she touched him all over with both her mouth and hands, taking her time, until he groaned. When he tried to return her caresses, she always nudged him back into the pillows.

Finally he grasped her shoulders and dragged her up on top of him. “Quit teasing me,” he said in a husky voice. “You’re making me crazy.”

Her eyes had glazed with desire. “I always wondered, when I saw you in Dahl, what passions lay under that ice prince exterior of yours. Rumor said no woman could melt the ice, but I knew they were wrong.”

The women in Dahl had talked about him? Then again, what did it matter now? He tried to kiss her again—and this time she responded, deep and full. As he stroked her, she moved her hands on him. Then she lifted her hips and slid down, filling herself with him. They made love buried in the pillows, slow and steady. When he finally climaxed, she let herself go as well.

Afterward they lay quiet, side by side, their breath slowing to normal. Eventually Khal pushed up on her elbow. When he smiled, she traced her finger over his lips. Then she reached for her robe.

He caught her around the waist. “Where are you going?”

“I . . . have, ah, Estate business.”

His drowsy contentment began to fade. The histories he had read of the Twelve Estates treated love like a fine wine to savor. The idea of a Manager leaving her Akasi on their wedding night would have appalled the poets. Of course, those were all romanticized folktales, but even so, he found it hard to believe Khal’s behavior was normal.

He drew her down next to him. “Surely it can’t be so important that you have to go now.”

At first she lay stiff in his arms. After several moments, though, she relaxed. “Perhaps not.”

“Khal, what’s wrong?”

It was a moment before she answered. Finally she said, “You are a wonderful lover. But . . .” She touched the gold guard on his wrist. “It is unusual for an Akasi on his wedding night to show your, ah—expertise.”

Oh, Lord. She was upset because he wasn’t a virgin. He shouldn’t have been surprised. Even so, it threw him. “You knew I wasn’t Coban.”

Disappointment washed over her face. “I had hoped you would tell me that I erred. Your behavior in Dahl was said to be above reproach.”

After everything else that had happened in the past few days, he didn’t think he could face a rejection now. He was tempted to tell her what she wanted to hear. But to hide the truth would be a tacit agreement that he had done something wrong. He had never dated much, but the one woman who had loved him had meant a great deal to him, despite everything, and he didn’t intend to diminish that by lying.

“I was a guest at Dahl,” he said. “I respected the customs of my hosts. But my life was formed by a different culture. I’m not ashamed of that.”

“In this culture of yours—were you—” She spoke with difficulty. “Free with yourself?”

He thought of all the times he had sat around with his friend Wayland, a grad student in computer science, the two of them grumbling about their lack of a love life. Dryly he said, “No. Not at all.”

“You bring such skill to your lovemaking.” A hint of mischief touched her smile. “It must be natural talent.”

Or loneliness, he thought. He understood the question behind her compliment, though. “I was engaged years ago.”

“Engaged?”

“It’s an English word. It means spoken for. I suppose you could say betrothed, though that’s more formal.”

She tensed. “A woman waits for you on Earth?”

“No.” Even after so long it hurt to remember. Miranda had ended the engagement months before he left for Coba. She had no interest in following him to exotic places, and he had never fit in with the influential circles she traveled. What had hurt most was knowing she believed he wasn’t good enough for her crowd. He wondered what she would think when she learned that instead of her, he had married one of the most powerful women on an entire world. Let her chew on that.

Khal was watching him again. “This woman who stole your virtue—she also broke your heart.”

He wished his face didn’t show his emotions so clearly. “Something like that.”

Gently she said, “Then let us make an agreement.”

“An agreement?”

“I will try to accept your past.”

“And in return?”

“You will try to accept being my Calani.”

He exhaled. “I can’t.”

“Try, Jeremiah. I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

After a moment he said, “I’ll see.” He could never stop trying to return home. But while he was here, he could try to make the best of this. It was better than staring out the window all day without eating.

That night he slept among silk pillows in the arms of his wife—a world leader, kidnapper, and enigma.

The main common room in the Calanya was large and airy, with many arched windows that let in streaming sunlight. The furniture and floor were polished snowfir wood. The walls started as a rich gold near the bottom, blended into lighter hues higher up, and turned white at the top, with a ceiling as blue as Coba’s sky, a deeper shade than on Earth.

Several men sat at a table playing Quis. Kev avoided them and led Jeremiah to an alcove. It had no benches, but the plush rug provided plenty of comfort. When Jeremiah sat among a scatter of cushions, his toes sunk in the pile.

Kev sat across from him and untied the dice pouch on his belt. “We will start with a simple round.”

“All right.” Jeremiah couldn’t figure out Kev. The man didn’t appear to enjoy his company at all, yet he had offered to introduce Jeremiah to the other Calani. Now he wanted to play Quis instead.

So play Quis, he thought. Until he understood the dynamics of the Calanya, it seemed best to follow Kev’s lead.

He untied his own pouch and poured out a colorful set of balls, cubes, rods, cones, bars, polyhedrons, disks, and other shapes. The older pieces were glass or painted wood. In contrast, the Calanya dice Khal had given him were all gems or precious metals, a full set and more, including unusual shapes he had never seen Outside. He still kept the older dice, though. He had grown attached to them.

“What do we bet with?” he asked. As far as he had seen, Calani had no money.

Kev spoke coolly. “We have no need of bets. It is a device created by Outsiders to hold their attention.”

A boy of about fourteen came into the alcove and dropped onto the carpet by Kev. He spoke to Jeremiah in the rich cadences of the Viasa highborn. “Why would you want to bet?”

Kev turned to him. “One should not interrupt a teaching session, Hevtar.” When the boy flushed, looking for all the world like a skittish colt, Kev smiled. “Perhaps you might join us?”

Hevtar’s embarrassment vanished. “I would like that.”

Kev glanced at Jeremiah. “My son.”

Jeremiah nodded to the boy. Hevtar resembled his father, with the same dark hair and even features, though his eyes were gray instead of black. Apparently he also shared Kev’s talent for Quis. Jeremiah hadn’t realized a father and son might end up in a Calanya together.

He wished he could write about the Calanya. After giving him their vow of illiteracy, the Cobans had taken all his notes and the final draft of his dissertation. When he realized they never meant to return any of it, he had gone into one of the few rages he had ever experienced in his life. To have labored for so long, with such love for his work, and then have it taken away just when he finished—it had devastated him.

Kev was watching his face. “If you object to Hevtar joining our session, he can observe.”

“I don’t mind at all.” Jeremiah nodded to Hevtar. “Join us, please.”

Hevtar took out his dice, then pushed his Calanya bands higher up on his biceps. He wore one on each arm. His were thinner than Jeremiah’s, with less engraving. Kev wore both types, one like Jeremiah’s on each arm and two of the simpler style. Jeremiah wanted to ask them about it, but something stopped him. Hevtar gave him an odd sense, as if he simmered with distrust.

Kev placed a ruby ball on the carpet. “Let us make a simple start.” He tapped the die. “Viasa.”

Hevtar set a darkwood arch beside the ball. “Dahl.”

Jeremiah had never played Quis this way. “We name our pieces?”

Hevtar answered with disdain. “Of course not.”

Kev glanced at his son with a hint of rebuke. To Jeremiah, he said, “In a sense you probably already have.” He indicated Jeremiah’s dice. “How long have you had these?”

“Some for years.” He picked up a wooden rod. “Manager Dahl gave me a set when I arrived in Dahl.” He touched a sapphire ring. “Some are gifts from the crew I worked on, presents to . . . congratulate me.” It had been hard to deal with the admiration and joy his friends expressed for his “good fortune,” when for him it was a disaster.

“They must have liked you very much,” Kev said. An undertone pulled at his voice, as if he resisted believing his own words. “Tell me about your dice. Do you associate them with people, places, objects? Thoughts? Concepts?”

“In a way.” Jeremiah’s mind had always given color, texture, even personality traits to everything from simple mental images to abstract math concepts. With Quis, his associations became so vivid, the dice almost seemed alive.

Kev indicated the playing area. “Let yours interact with ours.”

Jeremiah set a silver octagon by Kev’s ruby. “Manager Dahl.”

An amused voice sounded behind them. “Is this basic Quis?” A man with gray hair stepped past Jeremiah and knelt on the rug. He balanced an opal disk on Hevtar’s arch so it shadowed the other dice. “Minister Karn.”

A sandy-haired man a few years older than Jeremiah sat next to Hevtar. He placed a black sphere outside the opal’s shadow. “Manager Varz.”

Jeremiah wondered if they always barged into a game this way. Then it occurred to him that this might be what Kev had meant by introducing him to the others. With Quis.

The older man was elegantly thin, with the tall stature common among Cobans. Meeting Jeremiah’s curious gaze, he said, “I am Savan.” Although he too had the Viasa reserve, he gave off none of the dislike the boy Hevtar emanated.

The younger man smiled. “I am Niev.” He actually looked friendly. “Welcome to Viasa, Jeremiah.”

“Thanks,” Jeremiah said.

“So.” Savan surveyed the dice. “Shall we continue?”

Kev snorted. “Only one outcome exists.” He dropped an obsidian block on the structure and it collapsed. “Varz.”

It was an odd “move,” but Jeremiah understood what Kev meant. Karn and Varz, the two most powerful Estates, had gone to war ten years ago. To say it had disrupted the Twelve Estates was an understatement.

Intrigued, he considered the dice. Could they tell history with the game? He set a bridge into the toppled structure so it linked the Karn and Varz cubes. Then he said, “The Karn and Varz negotiations after the war.”

Savan nodded to him. Then they all resumed play. They soon stopped describing their dice, as the interactions among the pieces became more complex. Jeremiah had never played such Quis. They weren’t trying to beat one another with competing structures. Instead, they all worked on the same pattern, using it to describe the war.

He already knew most of the history. However, the Viasa dice players had a different view of the war’s most famous casualty, a Calani named Sevtar. Jeremiah knew Sevtar had died in the final battle, when Varz attacked Karn, but he had never realized the war began over Sevtar. Karn and Varz went to battle for a Calani—and both ended up losing him.

As the Quis session ended, Jeremiah sat back, enjoying a satisfaction similar to what he felt after he read a well-written history for his research.

Savan gave him a look of approval. “You learn fast.”

“Thanks.” Jeremiah indicated the structures sprawled across the floor. “Can you describe all history this way?”

“Not only history,” Savan said. “We project futures, model political strategies, and design trends.”

Jeremiah rubbed his chin. “You all seem to know everything that happens among the Twelve Estates. How? You never leave the Calanya and you receive no Outside input.”

“I used to think they knew everything too,” Hevtar confided, warming to Jeremiah. “But they don’t, really. Even father, with three levels, can’t know everything.”

“Three Levels?” Jeremiah glanced at Kev. “That means how many places you’ve lived, doesn’t it?”

“Not exactly,” Kev said. “It refers to the Estates where a dice player has been in the Calanya.” He touched the top band on his arm. “I did my First Level at Ahkah.” His fingers brushed the second band. “Then Varz for a few years.” His touch lingered on the third band, the most elaborate. “Then I came here.”

Jeremiah could see the advantage of having higher Levels in a Calanya. When a dice player switched to a new Estate, he would bring knowledge with him that no one else knew except his former Calanya and Manager. It gave the new Manager political advantage over the previous. He had no doubt the price of higher Level contracts went up exponentially. The Oath also began to make sense, at least the part about no communication with Outsiders. It provided a way to secure the knowledge contained within the Calanya.

“You advise Manager Viasa, don’t you?” he said.

Savan nodded. “Advise. Shape power.”

“But the Oath makes you rely on second-hand knowledge gleaned from higher Levels,” Jeremiah pointed out. “Doesn’t that weaken your effectiveness?”

Savan shook his head. “Quite the contrary. It is our greatest strength.”

“We are almost a closed system,” Kev said. “The Outside touches our Quis only through Khal. Any other input—speech, reading, writing—contaminates our work. The only way to affect a Calanya is through its Manager. She must be supreme at Quis, to counter Outside players—such as other Managers—who seek to influence or infiltrate her Calanya.”

New ideas were forming for Jeremiah. “Would you all play another session with me? I want to try something.”

Niev grinned. “Certainly.” The others nodded with approval. Apparently an urge to play Quis and learn from more senior Calani was more acceptable to them than Jeremiah staying by himself all day. He wasn’t sure yet how he felt about living in an arrangement as communal as a Calanya, but so far it was tolerable. His suite allowed him a retreat when he needed privacy.

Jeremiah set a silver disk with gold spirals in the playing area. As the session evolved, he wove his concepts into his moves, at first puzzling the Calani, then intriguing them. He shaped an idea: the twelve Calanya on Coba were like secured, primary nodes in a culture-spanning network analogous to a computer net. The players Outside acted as nodes and links in an ever-evolving web shaped by the Managers and Calanya.

Everyone in the Twelve Estates played Quis, from the day they were old enough to hold the dice until age left them too frail to lift the pieces. Quis conveyed news, data, stories, gossip, trends, and more. Outsiders learned new moves and passed them along in their own game, influencing their opponents. So information spread, not through electronic, optical, or quantum machines, but in the malleable, subjective experience of Quis.

The other Calani picked up his intent with a skill far greater than anything he had known Outside. He had thought himself good at Quis, parlaying his knack for the gambling version into a notorious reputation. Now he felt like a novice. Even Hevtar surpassed his skill. Instead of playing against one another, though, they all worked together, reshaping Jeremiah’s ideas, challenging his moves. So he absorbed meaning from the patterns.

He had known Calani were elite dice geniuses who gave a Manager prestige based on their reputation. However, he hadn’t realized they took such an active role in shaping their culture. With her Quis, Khal input information into the Calanya: with their Quis, the Calani studied problems and designed strategies. They output their results to Khal and she analyzed their work. She then played with selected aides, who played with others, and so on, until Viasa’s input into the general Outside web spread like ripples in water. The better a Manager played Quis and the stronger her Calanya, the greater her influence.

Quis was power.

Exhilaration swept over Jeremiah, the rush he always experienced with an exciting discovery. Lord, he wished he could write an article on this. He saw just how to open the paper, develop the ideas, and argue his conclusions.

Then his excitement faded. Fine. So it would make a great paper, maybe win him grants. Unless his situation changed, he would never have a chance to do anything with this new knowledge.

His concentration on the session began to slip. Savan finally paused in the process of placing a die. Hevtar yawned and several other Calani shifted position, rubbing their eyes or looking around.

“Perhaps we should take a break,” Savan said.

Agreement rippled around the players. As people stretched and rubbed kinked muscles, Kev regarded Jeremiah. With difficulty, he said, “I see now why so many Managers bid for your contract.”

To Jeremiah’s surprise, the others made quiet sounds of agreement. Savan said, “An intriguing idea of your people, to play Quis with machines.”

Jeremiah smiled at the comparison. He supposed, from the Coban view, computer webs were a poor imitation of Quis, dead rather than alive.

“I’ll bet you could come up with great games on these computers of yours,” Hevtar said.

Jeremiah laughed. “You can indeed.” More ideas for articles came to him: a comparison of top level gamers on Earth with Quis players like Hevtar; an analysis of Quis as a means of redirecting aggression from warfare to strategy games; a study of the sensual link between Quis and Coban male-female dynamics.

It all would make a veritable gold mine of scholarship—except the same institution that so excited his interest also made it impossible for him to pursue his work.

II

An Oath Unasked

Jeremiah glanced out his bedroom window at a crisp, clear morning. Pulling on a sweater, he went into the common room. Across the way, Hevtar was coming out of his own suite, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

The boy blinked at him. “You’re going again?”

“Every morning,” Jeremiah said.

A group of Calani was eating breakfast at a table. Niev looked up. “I went with him yesterday,” he told Hevtar. “It was terrible. Truly terrible. I thought I would die.” Then he flashed Jeremiah a conspiratorial grin.

Jeremiah smiled, glad for Niev’s friendly nature. In the fifteen days since he had come to Viasa, only Niev had shown any warmth. The other Calani maintained their reserve. When they played Quis, though, he became one of them. He enjoyed Calanya Quis almost as much as his research.

Hevtar held himself even more aloof than the other Calani. Jeremiah liked him, though. The youth reminded him of himself at fourteen, fascinated with his studies to the exclusion of all else. He didn’t think he had ever been skittish or moody like Hevtar, though; he tended more toward what his friend Wayland described as “amiable stoicism with your head lost in the clouds.” That stoicism hadn’t come easy; as a child he had ached with the ridicule he endured in school because of his awkward appearance, high grades, ineptness in sports, and lack of a fighting instinct.

In contrast, Hevtar had a fresh innocence untouched by the Outside. He had spent his youth as a prodigy sheltered from the world. Then at fourteen he entered the Calanya. Jeremiah wouldn’t have traded his youth for Hevtar’s, though. It was true the boy had never had to deal with the spirit-crushing experience of constant derision, even physical violence from his peers. Hevtar had lived with great honor since birth. Although it might give him a happier life, it also left him less socially mature. Jeremiah doubted the high-strung, handsome genius could survive Outside, whereas Jeremiah had always known he could make it on his own.

Hevtar started to smile at him, then stopped. It wasn’t the first time he had resisted an impulse to friendship. Now he turned away and joined the group at the breakfast table as if no one else were in the room.

Jeremiah stood for a moment, stung by the rebuff. Then he took hold of himself and went to the double doors of the common room. Opening the ornate portals, he found his escort at a round table Outside, playing Quis.

The captain blinked at him, then looked at the others with bewilderment. “He wants to do it again.”

“Jeremiah, you should relax,” another guard urged. “Have breakfast. Enjoy yourself.”

With a half smile, he leaned against the doorframe and waited. Being an Akasi had its advantages. Khal gave him anything he wanted. Anything, that was, except his freedom.

“Manager Viasa says he can go when he pleases,” the captain said. Her expression suggested Manager Viasa had lost a few Quis dice from her brain. She nodded to the guard who had tried to dissuade him. “You go, Aza. It makes me tired just watching him.”

Aza sighed, rising to her feet. She went with Jeremiah back Inside and through a maze of halls that let them out into the parks. Then she paused, squinting as if she hoped he had changed his mind.

He grinned at her. Then he set off for his morning run.

The mountain air exhilarated him. The parks were ideal for running. They started out as well-tended gardens, then tangled into untamed forests that hid chill sapphire lakes. The ever-present wind rippled the forest in waves, ethereal in its wild beauty.

Although linguists translated the Teotecan word for these trees as snowfir, they hardly looked like firs to Jeremiah. At this high altitude they grew only about twenty feet tall. Their trunks consisted of slender white stalks that spiraled around each other. Clusters of white or pale green fruits bobbed around them, attached to the trunk every few inches, like snowy billiard balls but delicate and hollow. The pale green needles on the trunks could jab a person like bee stings and left punctures that took days to heal.

The path he followed wound through the edges of the forest. He had started running three years ago because his poor showing on the Dahl construction crew had embarrassed him. Overweight and out-of-shape, he had struggled through his shifts. Now he enjoyed running for its own sake. He would have liked a partner, but he had yet to convince anyone on Coba that it provided a sane form of exercise.

Had his stay in Viasa been voluntary, he would have thrived. Calanya Quis not only fascinated him as a research subject, it was fun to play. The Calani took it far beyond what he had learned Outside. Savan’s game incorporated the wisdom of an expert who had spent decades mastering the dice. Niev’s style reflected his good-natured outlook on life. Hevtar played with a naivete that stumbled at times and soared at others.

None of them, however, could match Kev’s formidable gift. During one session the Third Level gave every detail about the failure of a beacon that warned riders in the mountains. It was powered by the Viasa-Tehnsa dam. Yet Jeremiah knew Kev and Khal had discussed it only with dice, never words. And Kev’s Quis brilliance only began in his ability to process huge amounts of information. With style and flair, he manipulated abstract portrayals of the political fluxes among the Twelve Estates, molding the very flow of power on Coba, for Viasa and for Khal.

Jeremiah often found Khal in his thoughts. He had never known anyone like her. He couldn’t imagine a woman of her status on Earth paying him any attention. Even if she had, he would have been too flustered to respond. Khal, however, liked his reticence. It was, after all, a Viasa trait, and expected to some extent for men throughout the Twelve Estates.

A massive wall enclosed the parks, with sculpted holes and ridges that let it act as a windbreak. As he ran along the wall, he left Aza behind. She was walking on top of it, watching him, her gun at her hip, the wind whipping her tawny hair around her shoulders. She made an impressive figure, towering and muscled, lean under her violet uniform. He wondered if Coban women had always been this big, or if they had bred for those traits over the generations.

Jeremiah grinned. You can’t solve everything with brawn, he thought to Aza. Then he grabbed a handhold on the windbreak and started to climb.

“Hey!” Aza yelled.

Looking up, he saw her striding in his direction. As he neared the top of the wall, high above the ground, the wind picked up, ripping at his hair. Aza was running now. He smiled, wondering if she thought he would climb down the other side and vanish into the mountains. Maybe he should.

He changed his mind when he reached the top.

Even knowing the south and north sides of Viasa ended in cliffs, he wasn’t prepared for the reality. The builders had cut this windbreak out of the mountain. On the other side, the cliff plunged down in a vertical wall until it vanished into clouds. Far below that, mountains carpeted with mist rolled out to the horizon. He stood braced against the wind, an intense blue sky arching around him, vibrant and dark, as if he were on the pinnacle of the world.

Aza came to a huffing stop next to him. “Are you crazy!” she shouted, her voice almost lost in the wind.

Jeremiah grinned.

“If anything happens to you,” she puffed, “Manager Viasa will throw me into prison and melt down the key.”

With a laugh, he let himself down the inner side of the wall and started back to the parks. Aza followed, grumbling. As they descended into quieter air, her mutters resolved into words. “Crazy. Runs in circles and tries to fly. What ever happened to normal Calani?”

“I never claimed I was normal,” he pointed out.

She froze, then looked down, her face red. “Heh, you! Are you going to talk and get me into trouble?”

“How will you get into trouble?” He jumped down onto a lawn of tiny snow-sphere clusters. “No one is here to see.”

She jumped down next to him and peered through the snowfirs at the distant Estate. “So. Maybe not.” Turning back, she regarded him as if he were forbidden fruit. “I have to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“It’s about the Skolian Imperialate.”

“I’m no expert on Skolians.”

She lowered her voice. “Is it true a man commands their military?”

“Well, yes, it is.”

“No! You make fun of me.”

Jeremiah laughed. “It’s true.”

She glowered at him. “Pah.”

“Where did you hear about it?”

“A whole slew of you Earth people came around here last year,” she explained. “They installed the computers Manager Viasa bought from them. One of the men told me.” She grinned. “Nice-looking fellow. Like you.”

“I didn’t know Khal bought an Allied computer system.”

Aza shrugged. “They’ve had it a while. No one here really knows how to use it, though.” She leaned closer. “So it’s true? Imperator Valdoria is a man?”

Mischief tugged at him. “You bet. He’s bigger than you, tougher than a clawcat, and meaner than a cheated dice player.”

“Oh, blow.”

“It’s true. His title is Imperator Skolia, though. Valdoria is his family name.”

Aza scowled. “Valdoria-pootoria. Put all you offworld men in a Calanya and you wouldn’t cause so much trouble.” She pondered the thought. “Of course, none of you can play Quis worth spit.”

“Spit, pah. I could Quis you out of your home, job, and every gold thread you own.”

“A fledgling Calani and already he’s conceited.” She put her hands on her hips. “You think I can’t play Quis better than an offworlder? I can prove you’re wrong.”

“I’m not supposed to play Quis with you.”

“So now he’s a perfect Calani.”

“I don’t have money to bet.”

“You don’t need it.” She gave him an appraising look, her gaze traveling up his body with obvious suggestion. “I know something I’d rather win from you anyway.”

Jeremiah’s smile vanished. Suggesting a man go to bed with a Quis opponent to pay off his debts amounted to calling him a prostitute. It floored him that she would imply such to the husband of an Estate Manager.

His reaction must have shown on his face. She frowned. “Don’t act so traumatized. You’re the one who broke your Oath. What did you expect me to think?”

“You thought wrong.”

“Rumor says you weren’t a husband by choice.” Aza leaned against the windbreak. “You’re a healthy young fellow. Who could blame a body for thinking you’d want a change from a woman seventeen years your senior?”

Jeremiah crossed his arms. The age difference made little difference to him. Khal’s formidable reserve bothered him far more. Even after fifteen days he had no idea if she felt anything for him beyond physical desire.

“So paradise has problems, heh?” Aza made a sympathetic noise. “You can talk to me. I’m not just your guard, you know. I can be your friend too.”

Friend? After she practically called him an adulterer?

A defensive note crept into her voice. “I know I’m not high-level like you. But I’m no airbug either. Why, I personally saved Viasa from collapse.”

“From collapse?” He raised his eyebrows. “So how come I never heard about it?”

“Well,” she amended. “Maybe not full collapse. But Viasa and Bahvla don’t get along.”

“You mean Bahvla Estate?”

“That’s right. Manager Bahvla sent an agent here to spy on the Calanya.” She looked smug. “I caught that scuttle-slug. Stomped her out. Put her in the Med House.”

Dryly he said, “Remind me not to spy on the Calanya.”

“How can you spy on what you are? Besides, no one hurts Calani. If I harmed one gorgeous hair on your gorgeous self, Manager Viasa would cork me in a bottle and throw it over the cliff.” She grimaced. “That would be as bad as the time she sent me to help out at Tehnsa Estate.”

“What’s wrong with Tehnsa?”

“Everything.” Aza waved her hand. “Without Viasa to help her, Manager Tehnsa would self-destruct.”

He gave her a wicked look. “If Khal finds out you talked to me, she’ll send you to Tehnsa.”

She looked alarmed. “I’d rather fall off the cliff.”

“I hope not.” Jeremiah felt his legs growing cold. “Aza, I have to finish my run.”

She shook her head. “Crazy offworlder.”

He laughed, then took off again.

On a morning when frost traced patterns on the window, an octet of guards showed up at Jeremiah’s suite. He recognized none of them. As they escorted him through unfamiliar halls, he grew uneasy. Had something happened to Khal? Last night his escort had never taken him to her suite. Although he didn’t see her every night, they spent most together, and if work kept her away she sent a message.

They left him alone in an office paneled with darkwood. Armchairs stood on bronze rugs, and a desk across the room sat by a floor-to-ceiling window. Bookshelves lined the walls. A globe of Coba spun lazily on a stand, its huge polar ice caps glinting.

The door opened behind him. He turned as Khal entered the room. It was odd to see her wearing dark trousers and shirt, with her braid hanging down her back. At night, she unwound her hair and relaxed in a robe.

She closed the door and came over to him. Standing with her this way made him even more aware of her height. She also looked tired, as if she hadn’t slept.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

She wasted no time with formalities. “I realize the damage you caused my Estate resulted from ignorance. But understand me, Jeremiah—the sentence for a native Calani who committed such a crime would be prison.”

He stared at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Your Oath. And Aza.”

So. Someone had found out he had been talking to his guard these past few days, during his runs. “I’m sorry you’re upset. But I never took the Oath of my free will. Besides, Aza and I only shared a few friendly exchanges.”

Her voice turned to ice. “Friendly?”

He suddenly realized at least part of the reason for her anger. Apparently Aza wasn’t the only one who had misread his desire to speak. “We only talked.”

She pushed back disarrayed tendrils that had escaped her braid and curled around her face. “Is this truth?”

“Of course it is. Don’t you know me well enough to see that?”

The relief that broke through her reserve and washed over her face answered him more would have any words. In a more natural voice she said, “Kev and Savan suspected the two of you were talking several days ago. But they hesitated to speak. Such an accusation is a serious matter.” She shook her head. “I had good reason to trust Aza. A few years ago she uncovered a Bahvla plot to infiltrate my Calanya. Now it appears Bahvla arranged the episode so Aza could gain my trust.”

He didn’t want to believe Aza had used him. Although he found her abrasive, he had thought she might help him escape. And she enjoyed talking to him. Surrounded by the reserved Viasa Calani, with his even more reticent wife for company in the evening, he missed simple conversation.

Finally he said, “This Calanya Oath is loneliness.”

She watched his face. “I had thought . . . you seemed happy.”

“At times I am.” As much as he wanted to reach for her, to tell her how much he valued their nights together, he held back, wary of her cool nature. “But the seclusion, the constraints—it will never be natural to me.”

She exhaled, stirring a lock of hair that curled around her cheek. “Jeremiah, I understand. But if you can’t keep the Oath, you can’t live in the Calanya or play Quis with the others. You would have to stay in a solitary suite. Input of any kind alters the patterns you build. As a Calani, you are a master of the dice. Everything that affects you goes into your Quis and from there into Viasa.”

He shook his head. “I just don’t see how my talking to Aza could cause a problem.”

“Which is why she homed in on you.” Khal touched his arm. Then her reserve slid back into place and she withdrew her hand, putting the invisible wall between them that always came up, except when they made love.

“Aza would never have dared speak to a native Calani,” Khal said. “She went after the one person vulnerable to her. She purposely misled you, as with her lie about our inability to use the new computers. That all went from your dice into the Calanya Quis, then into mine, and from there into the public net. Her patterns were subtle, but repetition on the Outside magnified them. It made Viasa look incompetent.” She paused. “Aza also encouraged you to give her information, such as your knowledge about Skolians. She took all that to Bahvla, giving Bahvla advantage over Viasa.”

He just shook his head, feeling as if he had taken a punch in the stomach.

Khal spoke in a subdued voice. “I feared you had chosen to sabotage Viasa, to strike at me.”

The surprised him. “Why? It wouldn’t have convinced you to let me go.”

“No. But it would have given you revenge.”

That she would even wonder if he might act out of malice bothered him. He lived by a simple principle: don’t hurt people. It didn’t work all the time, nor were his decisions always clear-cut, but he stuck to it as best he could. “I would never harm my own wife that way. Or Viasa. The people here never did anything to me. Hurting them would only make me like myself less.”

Some of her tension eased. “If only all of us were as even-natured.”

Bitterly he said, “Sometimes I wish I wasn’t.”

“Eventually you will adapt to our ways.”

“How?” He heard the betraying loneliness in his voice. “How can anyone adapt to the isolation? Look at Hevtar. I’m the Calani nearest to his age, and I’m ten years older. What kind of life is that for a fourteen-year-old boy?”

Khal tensed. “Hevtar is unhappy? You have seen this?”

“Well, no.” Her dismay startled him. “He seems very content.” Dryly Jeremiah added, “As long as he doesn’t have to see me.”

Khal sighed. “Don’t judge him harshly. He has loyalty to his father. He will overcome his resentment toward you.”

Jeremiah couldn’t imagine why Hevtar would see him as a threat to his father. No one could touch Kev at Quis, least of all him. “When I see Kev and Hevtar together, it reminds me of how much I miss my own family.”

Her face took on an odd expression, as if he were forcing her to confront a decision she wanted to avoid.

“What is it?” he asked.

She pushed back her hair. Then she went to her desk and touched a panel. When a drawer slid open, she removed a silver disk. “This came in at the starport eight days ago. Dahl serves as our contact, so a robot drone delivered it there. Manager Dahl sent it to me.”

His pulse leapt. Without thinking through her probable reaction, he strode to the desk and reached for the disk.

Khal drew back her arm. “Your Oath.”

His need to hear the disk swept over him. Who sent it? His family? Maybe he could wrest it away from her. She had height and muscles to her advantage, but he was faster.

Slow down, he told himself. Even if he managed to take the disk, it wouldn’t be long before his guards showed up and knocked him out. Then what did he have? He preferred an option that neither antagonized nor injured Khal.

“If you weren’t going to play it,” he said, “why show it to me?”

She hesitated. “It is difficult to know what to do.”

“My hearing it won’t change my Quis. My wish to go home is already in every game I play.”

To his surprise, she didn’t deny his words. “I know. I try to mute it, but I can only do so much. The people of the Twelve Estates know how you feel.”

“Doesn’t that weaken your Estate?”

“It does make Viasa look—barbaric,” she admitted. She spread her hands. “We live in a modern age, with legal and social restraints on how we court our men. Even Managers must operate within certain social bounds. I knew I would receive censure for giving you no choice. And I have. I wanted you enough to go through with it despite that.” Obviously self-conscious, she said, “But I’ve also found—well, I think many of our women would secretly like to return to the days when a warrior could carry off a husband for herself. They see me as an ancient warrior queen and you as the captured prince. That seems to have enhanced my image. People find it rather, well—mythical.”

He stared at her, floored by such strange statements, especially applied to him, Jeremiah Coltman, geek of the anthropology department. Although he had lost his chubby build, he otherwise had a view of himself far different from how the Cobans saw him. Or not different, but rather, the same qualities that had made him unsuccessful with women on Earth had the opposite effect here. Unfortunately, there was such a thing as too much “success.”

“Your world is a lot different than mine,” he said.

“I imagine so.”

“But Khal, given all that, you must see that my hearing the message won’t change my Quis.”

She paused. “It is hard to judge the effect before the cause.”

Softly he said, “Play it.”

Khal regarded him. Then she clicked the disk into a computer port on her desk.

His father’s voice floated into the still air. “Hello, Jeremiah. If this finds its way to you, I want you to know we are doing everything possible to free you. Your mother and I are also working with the authorities to obtain travel clearance for Coba. We won’t give up.” Then his mother spoke, her voice strained. “All our thoughts are with you. Your brother and sister send their best. We love you, Jeremiah. We will see you again, I’m sure. Love always, Mom and Dad.”

The disk hummed into silence.

His hands clenched the desk. He saw through their optimism. Visiting Coba shouldn’t take that much red tape—unless the authorities feared they would cause trouble. Even if his parents did make it here, the Cobans would never let them near him. He might never see his family again.

“I am sorry,” Khal said. “I shouldn’t have told you.”

He fought back the tears that threatened his eyes. “You would understand how they felt if you had children.”

She froze. “What makes you think I have no children?”

“How could you? We’ve only been married a few tendays.” Belatedly he realized he might have just made a terrible gaffe. She could have been married before. What if she had lost a husband? Or she might have illegitimate children. That seemed unlikely, though, given her conservative nature.

“How could you think I had no husband?” Khal asked.

“You never mentioned one.”

She leaned against the desk. “Ah, no.”

Jeremiah tensed. “What does that mean?”

“How could you not know?”

“Know what?”

“I had another Akasi. We stopped years ago.”

“Stopped?” What did that mean? “Where is he?”

“In the Calanya.”

“Still?”

She tilted her head. “He and I are no longer Manager and Akasi. I wouldn’t be here with you otherwise. But the Oath is for life. I swore him support and protection. Our estrangement doesn’t negate my responsibility.”

Dryly Jeremiah said, “We call it alimony.”

“He told me that he visited you on your first night here.”

“Kev?”

“Yes.” She pushed her hand through her hair. “Kev.”

“He didn’t say a word.”

“You must have seen his Viasa armbands. They are like yours.”

“I didn’t understand.” He did now, though. No wonder Kev wished he would fall off a cliff. And Hevtar. How could he have missed it? Yes, the boy had many of Kev’s traits. But his resemblance to Khal was also unmistakable.

Khal spoke softly. “I regret that you had to find out in this way. I assumed you knew. You have learned so much about us that I sometimes forget you don’t know our culture as well as we do ourselves.”

He walked to the window and gazed out at the sky. “I need to think about all this.”

“Would you prefer to return to your suite?”

Relieved, he nodded.

He spent the rest of the day in his window seat, thinking about Kev and Hevtar. He wished human relationships were as easy to understand as Quis.

Hevtar walked into the common room. “It’s her!” He came to the table where Jeremiah and several other Calani were playing Quis. “I saw her windrider from my window.”

“Pah.” Savan looked up from his dice and glared at the boy. “Calm down. I can’t concentrate.”

“I am calm,” Hevtar said.

Niev smiled at Hevtar. “Quite an occasion when Her comes to visit. Whoever Her is.”

“Manager Tehnsa,” Hevtar said.

Jeremiah was relieved for an excuse to leave the game. Since his talk with Khal yesterday, he hadn’t felt much like playing Quis. “The infamous Manager Tehnsa? This I have to see.”

“You better hurry,” Hevtar said. “Her rider already landed.”

It surprised Jeremiah that Hevtar didn’t rebuff him. Curious about what could convince the youth to forget his resentment, he followed the boy into his suite. Hevtar took him to a window that overlooked the airfield. Gazing down and out, Jeremiah saw Khal walking across the distant tarmac with a group of people.

“Which one is Manager Tehnsa?” he asked.

“The woman with the black hair,” Hevtar said.

Jeremiah studied the graceful figure. “Woman” wasn’t really the right word. Manager Tehnsa couldn’t be more than sixteen. A waterfall of black hair fell down her willowy back, glossy in the sunlight. “She’s beautiful.”

“Yes,” Hevtar agreed, with great emphasis. In a shy voice, he added, “She’s nice too.”

Jeremiah smiled, wondering if Khal knew how her son felt about the Tehnsa Manager. It seemed an apt pairing, the son of one Manager with another Manager.

Hevtar suddenly seemed to realize who he had invited into his room. He stopped smiling. “I didn’t mean to disrupt your Quis game.”

“You didn’t. I wanted to quit.”

“Oh.” The boy looked out at the airfield.

“Hevtar.” Jeremiah hesitated. “I wanted to say . . .”

Hevtar looked at him. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any difficulty by being here.”

Hevtar shifted his feet. “It isn’t really my business.”

Jeremiah searched for words. How did one discuss these things? “I didn’t realize before. About your parents. I hope I didn’t seem insensitive.”

“I just can’t . . .” Hevtar glanced toward the common room. “I have a Quis session.”

“Of course.” Jeremiah let it go. When he was fourteen, he doubted he would have wanted to discuss such a convoluted situation either.

They started out of the suite. Just before they entered the common room, though, Hevtar paused and gave him a shy smile. “Some time, would you like to come over and listen to Niev and me practice? He plays the lyder. I sing.”

“Thank you,” Jeremiah said. “I’d like that.”

In the common room, after Hevtar went to his Quis game, Jeremiah headed to his suite. Before he reached it, though, he ran into Kev coming out of another common room. They both stopped, awkward with their almost-collision. Jeremiah wished he could teleport somewhere. Anywhere.

After a pause, Kev said, “Do you have a moment?”

Jeremiah shifted his feet. “Sure.”

So for the first time, he went to Kev’s suite. It had a living room far more luxurious than anything else he had seen, even in the Calanya. The fixtures, trim, and braziers were gold. Standing lamps had silk shades with gold ribbing. The rugs, divans, windows, tables, and walls gleamed with the understated elegance of immense wealth. Apparently Khal’s “alimony” came high. Jeremiah tried not to be irked, but he didn’t succeed.

“Would you care for some liqueur?” Kev asked.

“Thank you, but no.” He wondered why Kev asked. Out of hospitality? Or some other motive? He had no idea if Kev knew he couldn’t drink Coban liqueurs, only certain wines, teas, and boiled water.

Stop it, he told himself. If he tried to analyze every word Kev spoke, he would go nuts.

The Third Level motioned him to an armchair. As Jeremiah sat down, Kev settled into a chair across the table. He spoke quietly. “Khal told me what happened.”

Jeremiah shifted his weight. “I shouldn’t have been so dense.”

“I owe you an apology. I have been . . . less than courteous.”

“It’s all right.” Jeremiah didn’t know what else to say.

So they sat, trying not to look at each other. Then Kev went to stand at a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooked the airfield. “They’re moving Manager Tehnsa’s rider to a hangar. She must be staying for a visit.”

Relieved to change the subject, Jeremiah joined him. A crew was wheeling the rider across the blacktop. The craft looked like a giant bird with a bright red head, green plumage edged in black, talons black as lava, and gold eyes. “It’s hard to believe Manager Tehnsa is as inept at Managing as everyone says.”

“She isn’t.” Kev continued to watch the crew. “Caryi had an entire Estate rolled into her lap when she was only thirteen, after her predecessor died in a rock fall. Since then she has been trying to cope. Khal helps. Tehnsa is also hampered because its Calanya is small, only six Firsts and no higher Levels.”

Jeremiah glanced at Kev’s three arm bands, wondering if he had ever considered leaving Viasa. It would solve the problem of having to see his ex-wife and her new husband every day. “How would she go about getting a higher Level?”

Kev looked at him. “The Estate that wants him makes an offer. If he is interested, the Managers negotiate. Counter-offers are made. Other Estates may enter the bidding. The higher the Level, the steeper the price of his contract. The practical limit for most Estates is Third Level.”

So. Maybe no one could afford Kev’s contract. “Why trade at all?” He thought of Aza. “If one of us went to Bahvla, wouldn’t that give Bahvla power over Viasa?”

Kev snorted. “Khal would never trade with Bahvla.”

“But she does with other Estates.”

“Not often. High-Level trades are rare.” Kev brushed his Viasa band in a gesture he often used, yet didn’t seem to notice on a conscious level. “Savan came here from Tehnsa two years ago. When he left Tehnsa, Caryi lost her best Quis player. But the settlement that Viasa paid for his contract allowed Caryi to clear many of her Estate’s debts.”

Jeremiah could see why a player with Savan’s talent would want a position at a more powerful Estate. But going from Tehnsa to Viasa was like switching from a small to a large room in the same house. Kev had come from Varz, a powerhouse Estate having only a tenuous alliance with Viasa.

Another thought came to him. “You must have been at Varz during the war.”

Kev nodded. “I knew the Calani Sevtar for a short time.”

“It’s hard to imagine a war fought over one man.”

Kev smiled slightly. “Not if you knew Sevtar. He was bigger than life, Jeremiah, huge, powerful, strong, wild, gentle when he wanted to be, affectionate. He looked like a god and he played Quis better than anyone alive. In many ways, he was the antithesis of the Coban male, yet in others he offered everything a woman could want. It all added to his mystique.”

“It certainly seems to have affected Karn and Varz.” Jeremiah paused. “I don’t really understand Coban women.”

Kev gave a dry laugh. “I quit trying long ago.”

Jeremiah smiled. Then he spoke with care. “Negotiations for your trade with Viasa must have be going on then.”

Kev looked out the window. The airfield was clear now. “Fourteen years ago, Manager Varz wanted to enlist Viasa as an ally. So she honored Viasa with Quis. She chose me to play dice with Khal.” It was a moment before he continued. “Khal and I discovered we suited. She negotiated with Manager Varz. The settlement put Viasa into debt for years.”

Jeremiah didn’t want to know this, that Khal had indebted her entire Estate for another man. “Doesn’t it bother you that they buy us that way?”

“No.”

“Never?”

“The Calanya is the only life I have ever wanted.”

“Don’t you want to go Outside? Climb a mountain? See the world?”

Kev turned to him. “No.”

“Oh.” Jeremiah didn’t know what to say to that.

“You would have liked Sevtar.” Kev smiled. “He also had this habit, running circles in the Calanya parks. He was an offworlder, too. A Skolian.”

Jeremiah stared at him. “You’re joking.”

“Not at all. His ship crashed here almost thirty years ago. Now the Managers are afraid.”

“Afraid? Why?”

“He came from a powerful Skolian family.” Kev regarded him. “One that could cause Coba great harm if they knew what happened here. The Managers changed his name and identity. The name Sevtar is Coban, our god of the dawn. None of us knew Sevtar’s real name. We don’t make his story a secret, because its discovery would draw even more attention. However, we say very little about him to offworlders.”

Jeremiah just looked at him, his unspoken words hanging between them like an intruder: You told me. The Viasa Calani had already accepted what Jeremiah continued to deny, that he would never leave Coba.

III

Mountain Passage

The year on Coba lasted a few months longer than on Earth. It eased from winter into spring, warmed into summer, and frosted into autumn. Viasa sat so high in the mountains that when winter returned, its storms often massed below the Estate, leaving Viasa in sunshine, subzero temperatures, and ice.

Today light poured through the windows of the morning room in Khal’s suite. She sat across the breakfast table from Jeremiah, lost in silence while they ate. The blue silk of her robe glowed against her golden skin, and her hair fell over her body in red-gold waves. It wasn’t only her striking appearance that attracted him now, but also qualities that made her unique: the slight curve of her lips that hinted at her hidden streak of mischief, the way she looked up from her work in welcome when his escort brought him to play Quis during the day, the sultry invitation in her gaze at night. He knew he had fallen in love with her. But she remained a cipher. She never spoke of her feelings, and her face rarely revealed her moods.

“You’re quiet today,” he said.

She looked up, focusing on him. “My apologies. I must make poor company this morning.”

“Is something wrong?”

She sighed. “One might say so.” After considering him, she touched an audiocom set into the table.

The voice of her aide floated into the air. “Seva here.”

“This is Manager Viasa. Please have the Allied files in my office sent up here.”

“Right away, ma’am.”

Allied files? Jeremiah gave her a questioning look, but she said nothing. From past experience, he knew that trying to draw her out would do no good. So they continued to eat.

After a while a girl tapped at the open door arch. “An aide is here to see you, Manager Viasa.”

“Show her in,” Khal said.

A woman with yellow hair entered, carrying a box about six inches on a side. When Jeremiah saw the comp disks in it, his pulse jumped. He would recognize those anywhere. They held all his notes from his years of fieldwork in Dahl.

Khal waited until the aide left. Then she regarded Jeremiah. “Yes. They are yours.”

“What about my dissertation?” He didn’t see the labels for those disks. “Was it destroyed?”

“Winds, no,” Khal said. “We would never do such a thing. We know the dedication you put into your work.”

“Where is it?” He knew he shouldn’t let it wrench him this way. It didn’t look as if he would be going home any time soon. He had found no way to escape Viasa or convince Khal to let him go. If the Allied authorities had made progress in negotiating his release, he knew nothing of it. He had begun to wonder if they had given up. With Coba under Skolian protection, Earth preferred to avoid any fuss that might attract military attention from the bellicose Skolians. Yet no matter how he ended up, he cared what had happened to his work.

“When the Council of Managers agreed to let you live in Dahl,” Khal said, “we all understood why. Minister Karn knew you intended to write about us.”

Anger edged his voice. “Maybe it didn’t matter because she never intended to let me leave.”

“We are not so devious, Jeremiah. Minister Karn would not lie to you.” Khal touched the box. “Because of this, we owed you a debt. I paid it as best I knew how. I sent your study to your mentor on Earth.”

Jeremiah stared at her. “You mean Professor Brenn? You sent him my thesis?”

Khal took a disk out of the box. A holo of the Harvard seal gleamed on its shimmering surface. “A windrider delivered this while you were still asleep.”

He swallowed. “Khal, play it.”

“Are you sure? It won’t change anything.”

“Yes.” His pulse raced. What had Brenn thought? “I’m sure.”

As she clicked the disk into a slot on the table, Jeremiah tensed. What if Brenn didn’t like the work? What if he thought it incomplete or of poor quality? Even if Jeremiah could have presented his thesis to his doctoral committee, they might have found it wanting. Maybe Khal was right. Brenn’s response might only dishearten him.

But he had to know.

Brenn’s voice rose into the air. “Jeremiah, hello. If you are listening to this, you probably know the Cobans sent me your work.” He paused. “To say their action surprised us would be an understatement. In any case, I submitted it to your examination committee.”

Jeremiah blinked. Why bother giving it to the examiners when he wasn’t there for them to examine him?

Brenn spoke as if anticipating his reaction. “A thesis without an author to defend it is unusual. However, after reading your work and considering your circumstances, the committee decided to accept the dissertation without your oral exam. In cases such as yours, the oral is only a formality anyway.” He paused. “Your committee, the department, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences concurred. You were granted your doctorate during the last graduation.”

They gave him a Ph.D. without his final defense? How? He certainly hadn’t considered the oral a formality. He had feared he wouldn’t pass.

Brenn continued. “Your work has provoked more talk around here than I’ve seen in years.” He cleared his throat. “You raised quite a stir with the section on the evolution of the Calanya from a harem of the Managers’ husbands into a group of elite dice players who aren’t married to the Manager. Your arguments that polygamy for either sex destabilizes a society has debates going. Dean Baker claims it’s hooey, Melissa Alli thinks you’re brilliant, and Wayland is somehow running computer simulations on it, lord only knows how.” Awkwardly he added, “But perhaps you have had more chance to test your hypotheses about the Calanya than you would have preferred.”

No kidding, Jeremiah thought.

“You might like to know,” Brenn continued. “You were awarded the Feldman Fellowship in Anthropology. I also submitted your dissertation to the Academy of Planetary Studies.” He paused. “Jeremiah, you won the Goldstone Prize.”

“What?” Jeremiah’s hand tightened on the stem of the crystal goblet that held his water.

“I think this was the first time a Goldstone winner couldn’t attend the ceremony,” Brenn said. “Your award monies will be held for you until—well, until you can claim them.”

After a pause, Brenn said, “Your family sends their love. We are all proud of you.”

Then the disk went silent.

The stem of Jeremiah’s goblet suddenly snapped. He stared at the line of red that welled from the cut on his hand. Then he dropped the glass, and it shattered across the mosaic tiles on the floor.

“Jeremiah?” Khal started to reach toward him.

“No!” He pushed back his chair with a jerk, then rose to his feet and strode away from the table. Beyond the horseshoe arch, he entered a lofty corridor. Darkwood paneled one wall but the other was glassplex. It looked out into pure sky.

Far below, the Teotec Mountains rolled away, wreathed in the mists and carpeted by richly growing snowfirs, the Forest of the Clouds. Lake-of-Shadows made a dark blue glimmer in the north and Lake-of-Tears glinted silver-blue in the south. Far to the east, the snow-covered tip of Mount Shadows Peak lifted into the sky. The panoramic view mocked him, a reminder that he lived in a gilded prison, forbidden the freedom promised by that spectacular landscape.

The hall ended in a round chamber with its back wall and floor carved from the cliff itself. The other walls were glassplex that polarized to mute the Sun’s glare. The chamber wedged into the cliff like a bubble on that great, sheer expanse of rock.

A bench jutted out from the back wall. Jeremiah dropped onto it, rested his elbows on his knees, and put his head in his hands.

Boots sounded in the entrance. He looked up to see the captain of his Calanya escort. Then Khal appeared behind her.

“You may wait in the morning room,” she told the guard.

After the captain left, Khal sat on the bench near Jeremiah. She spoke with care. “These honors you received—they mean much, yes?”

“What does it matter?” He stared into the sky that arched around the chamber. “I’ll never be able to accept them.”

“It might help to talk.”

That was a switch. Usually he was the one who wanted her to open up. Now she sat quietly, neither pushing nor withdrawing into her reserve.

After a while, he spoke. “The doctorate is what I was working on all those years in Dahl. They don’t normally grant it without final processes I couldn’t do here. But they gave it to me anyway.” He swallowed. “The fellowship is a research grant awarded each year for work that led to a doctorate in anthropology.”

“Given to only one person? Out of everyone?”

“Yes. But it’s no big deal.”

“No?” She regarded him. “I think this doctorate of yours and this prestigious Feldman Fellowship are far greater honors than you admit.”

It had never occurred to Jeremiah that he would win the Feldman. Although he did well in research, the fellowship usually went to someone who also had a top record in academic courses. His grades were nothing to boast about. Research was what he loved, usually to the detriment of his classes.

What dazed him, though, was the Goldstone. He had no idea what possessed the Academy to give it to him. It always went to a seasoned faculty member in a major academic department. For a graduate student to win for a doctoral dissertation was unheard of. It assured him of a good shot at any academic job he wanted. He stood on the verge of realizing his dreams—and Coba had stolen them.

Khal was watching him. “This Goldstone, what does it mean?”

Jeremiah swallowed. “It means that people I don’t deserve to call my colleagues think my work is the best done in our field this last year.” He turned to her. “Don’t you see? This is all I’ve ever wanted. You’ve taken my dreams.”

Quietly she said, “It was a mistake to play the disk.”

“Let me go, Khal. Let me go home.”

“Even if I could take away the Calanya Oath, which I can’t, we could never let you leave now. You know too much.”

“You don’t want me to write about the Inside.”

“In part. It is private to us.” She paused. “But your knowledge of Sevtar is more serious. His family wields immense power among the Skolians. If they ever learned what happened to him here, they would seek vengeance.”

He shook his head. “I’ll never mention him.”

“I have no right to risk the safety of my people.”

Jeremiah rose to his feet and crossed to the curving wall. A misty cloud drifted by below the chamber. “I don’t deserve the Goldstone anyway. My work was incomplete.”

Khal came to stand behind him, sliding her arms around his waist. He saw her reflected in the glass, looking out over his head at the breathtaking view.

She spoke quietly. “I know you, Jeremiah. You would never rest until you created perfection. Even then you would be dissatisfied. I read this work of yours before I sent it to Earth. You deserve every honor they gave you.”

He blinked. “You read my thesis?”

“Yes. It took some time. My English is terrible.” She tilted her head. “It is strange to see the Twelve Estates through the eyes of an offworlder. But your love of Coba came through in all you wrote.”

It meant a great deal to him to know she had liked his work. Even so, he couldn’t tell her what she wanted to hear, that his love of her world would make up for the loss of his own. So they stood in silence, watching the sky.

After a while she said, “I attend the Council of Managers at Karn Estate soon. I have been thinking that, if you like, I will bring you with me.”

He knew she never traveled with Calani. This was her way of trying to ease his unhappiness. “Yes. I would like that.”

Some of the tension in her embrace eased. She drew him around so they faced each other, her arms still around his waist. “Before we leave for Council, Manager Tehnsa is coming here to visit. I would like you to play Quis with her.”

That surprised him. Although Khal often had her Calani sit at Quis with Caryi, she usually chose experienced players. “Are you sure you want me to do it? Not Kev or Savan?”

Khal nodded. “I hope an infusion of new ideas will strengthen her game. You see things in a different way.”

“How about Hevtar?”

“Hevtar?” She gave him a puzzled smile. “He’s a child.”

“Not really.” Jeremiah thought back to their sessions. “He has a fresh outlook and he understands Tehnsa.”

“He does have a remarkable style, doesn’t he?” A mother’s pride warmed her voice.

“He does. And something else, Khal.”

“Yes?”

“Caryi needs a higher Level Calani. And an Akasi. Hevtar might consider it.” Given what Jeremiah had seen, Hevtar would consider it paradise.

Khal dropped her arms. “Hevtar go to another Estate? As Akasi? Of course not. He is far too young.”

“Aren’t most highborn boys here betrothed by fifteen?”

“Well, yes,” she admitted. “In more conservative Estates.”

Dryly he said, “Viasa is hardly a hotbed of radicalism.”

She smiled slightly. “No, I suppose not.”

“You have to let him grow up.”

She considered him, then walked over to gaze out at the sky. “I would miss him. So would his father.”

Jeremiah understood. The deep, abiding love Kev and Khal felt for their son showed in their every word and action toward him. For all that Khal resisted the idea of a betrothal, though, he suspected she realized the match made good sense. Caryi and Hevtar were young by most standards, but the conservative upper echelons of Coban society encouraged early marriages among the highborn, to produce heirs. Tehnsa needed a Second Level, one with a fresh outlook, and Hevtar needed someone like Caryi who understood his moody, stratospheric intellect. The pairing would let him stay near Viasa, yet at the same time give him independence. He and Caryi would also have Viasa to guide them in governing Tehnsa.

Jeremiah paused. “Khal—?”

She turned to face him. “Yes?”

“What happened? With Kev and you?”

“We . . . had a disagreement.”

He waited. “Yes?”

It was several moments before she spoke. But this time she did answer. “He wanted more children. I didn’t.”

“Hevtar is a wonderful young man.”

“Yes. He is.” With difficulty she said, “I have always thought it important that I give my child my best personal attention. But I am also a Manager. I didn’t feel I could do both with more than one child.” She paused. “My refusal caused rancor. Kev stopped caring for . . . for Viasa.”

No, Jeremiah thought. He didn’t stop caring for you. “He never left Viasa.”

“I offered. Other Estates expressed interest, despite the immense cost of his contract. He didn’t want to go. Why should he? Viasa is a good Estate.”

Jeremiah shook his head. “The Calanya trade—that’s the only equivalent of divorce that exists for an Akasi.”

“I don’t understand this word ‘divorce.’ ”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

A long standing heartache showed behind her reserve. “I would never have brought you here if Kev and I still lived as Akasi and Manager.”

“He’s still your husband.”

“You know my people no longer practice polygamy. You wrote this yourself in your study of us.”

“But for Managers it’s still legal. No matter how you evade the description, you have both Kev and me.” He made himself say the truth he had avoided. “Kev will always come first for you.”

“Jeremiah, no.” She started toward him, but stopped when he put up his hands as if to hold her off. “Surely you know what you mean to me.”

“How can I know? You never say.” Pain edged his voice. “Oh, I know, you’re proud of your young trophy husband. But I’m not a prize. What happens when you tire of your ‘exotic prince’ ? When the novelty wears off and you want a man who understands and values your way of life?”

“You’re wrong if you think you mean only that to—to Viasa.”

He gave a laugh with more pain than humor in it. “You can’t even say ‘to me.’ ”

She spread her hands, her body silhouetted against the sky. “Perhaps you want more from me than I know how to give.”

Softly he said, “That works both ways, Khal.”

A loud buzzing jarred Jeremiah awake. He opened his eyes into the darkness of his suite. Fumbling on the nightstand by the bed, he switched on the audiocom.

“What?” he mumbled.

“Jeremiah?” Khal’s tense voice came out of the audiocom.

Her urgency pulled him awake. “What’s wrong?”

“Can you read starship trajectory scans?”

Puzzled, he said, “I took some astronomy in college. We covered the basics. But that was years ago.”

“That’s more than any of us have.” She took a breath. “We need you in the observatory tower. Hurry. Please.”

He sat up, reaching for his robe. “What happened?”

“A starship.” Strain crackled in her voice. “It’s out of control and headed for Viasa.”

Jeremiah ran through the Estate, surrounded by his escort. When they reached the observatory tower, he raced up the spiral stairs two at a time. They strode into the observatory, a domed room with a telescope run by antique gears. In sharp contrast, the gleaming consoles in the center of the room belonged to the modern computer network Viasa had been incorporating over the past year.

Khal stood at the central console, still in her day clothes, with a cluster of aides. They looked as if they had worked straight through the night. Kev was leaning over the console, studying its screens, his hair and clothes tousled as if he too had just run here from the Calanya. It didn’t surprise Jeremiah to see him; Kev’s mathematical gifts went hand in hand with his Quis expertise. Holographic icons glowed above one screen and data spilled across another. A third projected a holographic trajectory map for a ship already within Coba’s atmosphere.

As Jeremiah came up to them, Khal indicated the trajectory holo. “Can you interpret the map? We’ve never had reason to work with this aspect of the system.”

Jeremiah hesitated, aware of the Outsiders present.

Khal spoke quietly. “Break the Oath. Lives depend on what you know.”

He nodded, then concentrated on the map. Kev moved aside, giving him a better view.

“You’re right,” Jeremiah said. “The ship is headed for Viasa. I don’t think it is out of control, though.” He looked over the console. “Will this respond to my voice?”

“Tell it your name.” Khal spoke into a comm on the console. “Saje, give access to the next voice identifier.” Then she nodded to Jeremiah.

He spoke in the comm. “Jeremiah Coltman.”

Saje, the computer, answered. “Access granted.”

“Give me what you have on the incoming ship,” Jeremiah said. “Use graphics as much as you can.” He had always been better at interpreting images than numerical data.

Holos of graphs and blurred space vessels appeared above several screens. Statistics flowed across others. The longer he studied the jumble of data, the more it baffled him. It was like poorly translated text, but in images instead of words. Saje couldn’t even ID the type of craft coming in, let alone give details. It could be anything from a windrider to a military dreadnought.

Suddenly it hit him. “Saje, you use Allied standards, don’t you?”

“That is correct,” Saje said.

“Can you give me the analysis using Skolian protocols?”

“Working.” The holos reformed—and this time they made sense.

“It’s a Skolian ship,” Jeremiah said. “Civilian, I think.” He glanced at Khal. “It looks like a scout.”

Relief washed across her face. She must have feared the same thing he hoped for, that the ship had come for him. If it were Skolian, though, that wouldn’t be the case. More likely it was off-course for the starport.

“Will it miss Viasa?” she asked.

“I’m not sure.” He studied the displays. The data was scrolling in Skolian glyphs now, which he couldn’t read, but he understood the holos. Sweat beaded on his temples despite the cool air. “If it doesn’t alter course, it will hit the city.”

Khal exhaled. “Can we contact it?”

“I think so.” He looked around. “Is your audiocom hooked into the computer’s long-range signaler?”

“I don’t know. What does that mean?”

“The signaler can contact the ship,” he said. “When the techs set up your system, they should have linked your audiocom into the signaler or else installed a long range comm. Did they discuss it with you?”

“Not really. We had no need for it. This computer system does Estate management, not starship landing.” She regarded him. “Can you set it up?”

“I don’t know how. But the computer might.” He leaned over the console. “Saje, can you talk to the incoming ship?”

“At the moment, no,” it answered. “However, you are right that I may be able to link the audiocom into my signaler. I need details on the audiocom technology.”

Khal spoke. “Look in the files on the Estate electrical systems under ‘intranet connections.’ ”

“Working,” Saje said.

Jeremiah studied the holos rotating above the console. “The ship has slowed some, but it’s still coming in too fast. If it hits Viasa, it could cause a lot of damage.”

“We’re already evacuating, into the east canyon.” Khal turned to Kev. “You better go too. My aides can take you.”

He shook his head. “I’m staying.”

She stiffened, her dismay at hearing his voice obvious. “You must go with them, Kev. You might be hurt if you stay.”

“I’m not going to leave you,” he told her.

“You mustn’t endanger yourself.” She lifted her arm and he started to move, as if to take her hand. Then they stopped, obviously aware of the people watching them. Khal lowered her arm and Kev took a breath.

Jeremiah stood at the console, awkward and self-conscious. He felt like an interloper. Seeing Khal and Kev together, so alike in background, outlook, and power within their separate spheres of accomplishment, he knew they were the two halves of Viasa. They shared a closeness he would never have with Khal, not if he spent his entire life here and Kev left tomorrow.

Static suddenly erupted from the comm, accompanied by a man speaking Skolian Flag. “—read me? I repeat, I’m receiving your signal. Please respond.”

For an instant Jeremiah’s mind blanked. Although he understood some Skolian Flag, he spoke almost none, and for the past four years he had heard only Teotecan.

Then bits of his meager Skolian vocabulary came back. He leaned over the comm. “Know English you? Spanish? French?”

The pilot switched into heavily accented Spanish. “This is Dalstern GH3, scout class II. Viasa, I need holomaps. These mountains are much trouble. The wind make problem also.”

“Can you link your computers to our system here?” Jeremiah asked in Spanish. “We will help guide you down.”

“I try.” He paused. “Do you receive?”

Saje spoke in Teotecan. “His system uses ISC standard ninety-two. I can only process some of its input.”

Khal looked at Jeremiah. “What does that mean?”

He raked his hand through his curls. “Your system was never set up for this. It does have a lot of what we need, but most of it uses Allied standards. Saje is having trouble with the form of the incoming data.”

“Can you tell it the right form?” she asked.

He spread his hands. “It’s like trying to translate one language to another, on the spur of the moment, when I don’t speak one that well and can’t say anything in the other.”

“What about the pilot’s computers?”

Jeremiah spoke into comm. “Dalstern, can you send your data in an Allied protocol?”

“Which one?” the pilot asked.

“Saje, help him figure it out.”

“Working,” Saje said.

The pilot paused. “Viasa, your data is incomplete.”

“What’s missing?” Jeremiah asked.

The pilot listed acronyms, none of which Jeremiah knew. When he paused, Jeremiah said, “Saje, do you understand that?”

“Enough to know I’m missing some important files.”

“Viasa,” the pilot said, “we are maybe close to what we need. Can you send the equations that transform the coordinate system in your primary nav module to the system we use?”

Jeremiah hesitated. “Can you do that, Saje?”

“It requires software I don’t have.”

“It can’t be that hard to figure out.

“Whether it is hard or easy is irrelevant,” Saje said. “I don’t know what transform to apply. If I use the wrong one, it could do more harm than good.”

“Can’t you run comparisons with the Dalstern?”

“We are trying. But we have incompatibilities. It hampers the procedure.”

Khal regarded Jeremiah, her face pale. “Can you tell it the right transform?”

He shook his head. “I’m no astronavigator.”

“You said you studied it in school.”

“I hardly even remember the Allied protocols, let alone Skolian. And I’ve never been that great at math.”

Kev spoke. “Use Quis.”

Jeremiah jerked, as startled as everyone else. It was one thing for an offworld First Level to break his Oath; another to hear one of the leading Calani among the Twelve Estates do it, not once, but several times.

“You know more than you think,” Kev told him. “You wouldn’t do so well at Quis otherwise. Use the dice. Use the patterns in your mind.”

Jeremiah had no idea if it would work, but he had nothing better to offer. Taking a breath, he tried to calm his mind into the meditative state that often came when he played Quis. He let the few formulas he remembered rise in his mind.

Make them dice, he thought.

He sat at the console and rolled out his dice on a flat screen. In the Calanya, they used Quis to study political, cultural, historical, and social relationships; now he used it to do mathematics. He chose different pieces for different symbols, then “wrote” equations by making Quis structures.

The comm crackled with the pilot’s voice. “Viasa, where is beacon to guide aircraft in these mountains?”

Jerked out of his concentration, Jeremiah knocked over a structure. Dice flew across the console.

“Ah, no.” Trying to relax, he gathered up the pieces and started again.

Khal spoke to the pilot in broken Spanish. “Say again?”

“The warning beacon,” he said. “Where is it?”

“Broken,” Khal told him. She glanced at Jeremiah, her question obvious: How does he know we have a beacon?

“It’s probably in a Skolian file on Coba,” Jeremiah said. “Or his scanners might have found something.” When she indicated the comm, he spoke into it. “Dalstern, we have holomaps for you, but we have a mismatch in protocols. We are working on it. Please stand by.”

“Understood,” the pilot sad.

Concentrating on his dice, Jeremiah incorporated the rules of mathematics into the rules of Quis. He was trying to derive equations with Quis. He discovered the math was easier when he thought in terms of dice structures.

Suddenly a concept snapped into place. Yes! He saw how the Skolian and Allied methods for describing spatial and temporal behavior related.

As Jeremiah gave his results to Saje, he glanced at the evolving holomap that showed the ship’s progress. He could only imagine what it must be like to hurtle through the jagged Teotecs with neither maps nor a beacon. The ship obviously had sensing equipment or it wouldn’t have made it this far. But it was designed for space rather than planetary maneuvers, and the savage winds in the upper Teotecs would tear a less sturdy craft apart. The ship had slowed more, but it was still coming in too fast.

“Viasa, I need maps,” the pilot said.

“I’m sending what I have.” Jeremiah prayed he had derived the right transform; otherwise, he could be sending the pilot to his death.

“Received,” the pilot said.

Khal spoke. “Jeremiah, what can we do to help?”

“Guidance.” He studied the holomap. “He’s about one span north and two spans above Grayrock Falls. What’s the clearest passage through there?”

“He must avoid the Heska Cliffs,” Khal said. “He should go higher, one span, and to the east one third.”

Jeremiah told Saje. Then he asked, “Dalstern, did that come through?”

“Part of it,” the pilot answered. “I pull up.”

Watching the holomap, Jeremiah spoke to Khal. “He’s up about half a span. Will he make it over the cliffs?”

“He must go higher,” she said. “If he can’t, he should go east two spans. A small pass is there.”

Jeremiah input the data and watched the holomap change. “That looks good—ah, no!”

The map fragmented. In that same instant, the pilot said, “Viasa, we have problem.”

“We too,” Jeremiah said. “Saje, what happened?”

“You only gave me a partial transform,” Saje said.

Jeremiah swore under his breath. What had he missed? Struggling to focus his mind, he turned back to his dice. But his mind kept coming up with images of the ship hurtling toward them, breaking his concentration.

“Viasa, I need set-down coordinates,” the pilot said.

“We’re working on it.” Jeremiah glanced at Khal. “Where should he land?”

“West of Viasa. Away from the evacuation.”

Jeremiah stared at her. “The west is sheer cliff face.” He was painfully aware of time passing. If he couldn’t solve the transform problem, the pilot would have little control over where he landed—or crashed.

Kev spoke. “The Calanya parks. That will take him away from the city without sending him over the cliffs.”

As soon as he saw Khal’s dismay, he understood: to let a ship destroy the Calanya would violate her sense of decency at a level so basic it was part of her. He could almost feel her weighing the pilot’s death against that destruction.

Then she blew out a gust of air. To an aide, she said, “Double-check that the Calanya has been evacuated.” As the aide took off, Khal turned to Jeremiah. “Send him to the parks.”

“It’s a small area for a ship without a map,” Jeremiah warned. “If he misses, he could hit the Estate.”

“We must protect the evacuees,” Khal said. “The Estate can be rebuilt. People cannot.”

Khal’s aide came striding back to them. “The Calanya is empty. The only person still there is a guard captain.”

“Good.” Khal motioned to her aides. “All of you, go with the evacuation. Let them know the situation and make sure they take cover in the lower end of the canyon. Even if the ship hits on that side of Viasa, it probably can’t penetrate so narrow an area.”

Intent on his dice, Jeremiah barely heard the aides leave. As he lifted a platinum cube, Kev said, “Wait.” He reached forward and moved several pieces. “Try this instead.”

Jeremiah nodded, a new pattern evolving in his mind based on Kev’s moves. He continued to play. Every second that passed felt like the warning tick on an antique clock. The Observatory stood in the path of the incoming ship. If the vessel hit it, the impact could sheer off the dome and destroy everything within—including them.

He tried to think faster, but it only made his Quis frantic. Kev made another move, then changed his mind and tried a different one. Jeremiah picked up his intent and rearranged several structures. He still couldn’t find the missing part—couldn’t make it—

“Viasa, I have no more time,” the pilot said. “I guess coordinates.”

Suddenly Jeremiah saw the pattern, beautiful and elegant. “Dalstern, I have it!” He gave Saje the new equations as fast as he could trace a light stylus across the screen.

“Received.” Relief washed the pilot’s voice. “Suggest you get out of there. Over and out.”

“Over and out,” Jeremiah said, jumping to his feet.

With Khal and Kev, he raced across the observatory. They sped down the stairs and out into emptied halls. Then they ran out into the starlit Calanya parks. Wind pummeled them with fists of air, and thunder roared above the keening wind.

No, not thunder. A starship engine.

Jeremiah picked up his pace, then realized he had left Khal and Kev behind. As he whirled around, Khal stopped, staring at the sky. “No!” she shouted.

The ship hurtled out between two peaks high above Viasa, making a giant shadow in the sky. It wasn’t big for a starship, but compared to the Estate it loomed huge. Its engines roared in the wind.

Khal took off with Kev at her side, her hand reaching out to Jeremiah as if she sought to protect both him and Kev against these forces so far beyond her control. As they raced for the Estate, the ship skimmed over the city, dropping at an alarming rate. It snapped the spire off a tower.

They slowed then, knowing they had no chance of making it to the canyon in time. Either the ship would miss them or it wouldn’t. As they stared upward, they backed toward the Estate, more by instinct than because it would do any good.

The ship grazed a roof, smashing its crenellations. Then it cleared the Estate, dropping fast. It rammed down into the Calanya parks, still skimming forward. In a scream of high-pressure composite on bedrock, it tore up ground cover and blasted trees as it shot across the parks.

With an explosive crash, the ship slammed into the windbreak—and the gigantic wall shattered like glass. Crumpled but intact, the craft came to a shuddering stop, jutting over the cliff. In a nightmare of slow motion, it began to tip over the edge.

Without pausing to think, Jeremiah ran for the ship, pushed from behind by the wind as he dodged scorched areas of the parks. By the time he reached the craft, he had far outdistanced Khal and Kev. He pounded his fists against the unyielding hull. “You have to get out!” he shouted.

A hand closed around his arm and someone swung him around. Even before he looked up—and up—he knew it couldn’t be Khal or Kev. Neither had such towering height. In the starlight, he couldn’t see much more of the man than his massive size.

The Skolian released his arm and spoke in Spanish. “I’ve come for a man called Jeremiah Coltman.”

Jeremiah took a breath. “I’m Coltman.”

The Skolian took his chin and turned his face into the starlight, one way, then the other. Then he let go and pulled up Jeremiah’s arm to look at his armbands. “So. You are. We must hurry.” Before Jeremiah could respond, the man grasped his arm and took off, pulling Jeremiah with him.

As they reached the airlock, Jeremiah balked. What did the Skolians want with him? If he went with this pilot, he could find himself in a worse situation than if he stayed here.

A voice came through the wind. “Jeremiah,” Khal called. “Wait!”

The Skolian spun around, his hand falling to his hip. With a lurch of dismay, Jeremiah saw that the man wore a Jumbler, a military sidearm that could destroy Khal as fast as antimatter annihilated matter. Khal and Kev stood a short distance away, Kev staring as if he were seeing a supernatural being.

As the Skolian drew his weapon, Jeremiah caught his arm, praying he didn’t activate automatic reflexes that made the man shoot him instead. “Please. Don’t hurt them.”

Khal came closer. “Don’t go, Jeremiah.”

He swallowed, suddenly knowing he was going to trust this stranger. It might be his only chance to return home.

His voice caught. “I have to.” After seeing Khal and Kev together tonight, he could no longer deny what he had always known at a subconscious level. They completed each other. When Hevtar left home to wed Caryi, they would probably turn to each other to fill the void. Jeremiah couldn’t bear to live with Khal knowing another man would always claim her heart.

She came to him. “Don’t go. Viasa has come to care—” She took a breath. “I have come to care. For you.”

Her look was achingly familiar, the one that caressed him after they made love, that held promises of affection she never spoke aloud, always leaving him in doubt. Now she added the words he had needed to hear, and even on the brink of escape he wanted to take her into his arms and promise he would stay.

He struggled with his words, aware of the Skolian stranger listening to them. “I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry. But I can’t be what I’m not. And I could never share you. It would kill me.” He swallowed. “Oh God, Khal, don’t let pride keep you apart from the man you really love. Whatever you and Kev said to each other all those years ago . . . let it mend.”

“Jeremiah,” she murmured. The silver track of a tear slid down her face, catching starlight.

The pilot spoke with unexpected gentleness. “We must go.”

Softly Khal said, “Good-bye, beautiful scholar.”

Jeremiah wiped a tear off his face. “Good-bye, Khal.”

The Skolian was already opening the airlock. As he paused to let Jeremiah enter, he looked back at Kev. “Don’t tell anyone,” he said in Teotecan. “You know why.”

Then he closed the hatch, cutting them off from Viasa.

Jeremiah sat in the co-pilot’s seat while the Skolian took them away from Coba. On the holoscreen, he watched Coba recede until she became a jeweled orb, a beautiful Quis die among stars and stardust. Another tear rolled down his cheek. He wiped it away, not wanting the stranger to see.

The pilot remained intent on his controls, more so than the ship probably required. His concentration gave Jeremiah a portion of privacy.

After a time, when Jeremiah had recovered some, he looked more closely at his rescuer. The man’s skin, hair, and eyes had a gold cast. His skin flexed like tissue, but looked metallic. He had no doubt the man’s alterations improved him over a normal human. He appeared hale and fit, with a powerful physique. Jeremiah was no judge of appearance in men, but even he could see this Skolian had remarkable good looks. Gray streaked his hair. He appeared about forty, but his facial expressions had a maturity that came from many more years of life, which suggested he enjoyed the benefits of delayed aging. Taken with the engineering on his body, it made Jeremiah suspect he came from a wealthy, powerful segment of the Skolian population.

The Jumbler gun at his hip was military issue. He also wore heavy military gauntlets embedded with conduits, picotech controls, comm meshes, and a wide gold strip around each wrist. Although the gauntlets looked solid, they flexed with his movements like a second skin.

The man glanced at him. In Spanish, he asked, “Are you all right?”

Jeremiah nodded. “Yes. Thank you for your trouble.”

The man shrugged. “It is not so much trouble.”

“You could have been killed.”

“I have seen worse.” He paused. “I expect to have the beacon, though. It help that you know that transform.”

Jeremiah thought of his half-panicked Quis. “I was guessing. Playing dice with your life.”

“Such a problem take more than guesses.”

“I was lucky.”

The man’s face gentled. “You are not what I expect.”

“I’m not?”

“The genius who make history when he win this famous prize at twenty-four? I expect you to have a large opinion of yourself. But it seems not that way.”

“I didn’t deserve the Goldstone. Besides, that is hardly reason for the Skolian military to rescue me.”

“They didn’t. They know nothing about this.” The man paused. “I take you to a civilian port. From there, we find you passage to Earth.”

It made no sense. Why would this Skolian help him? Was he a wealthy eccentric? Then how did he have a Jumbler? Jeremiah considered him. “At Viasa, you used some Teotecan. You even knew how to read my name from the Calanya bands. How?”

The man answered in perfect Teotecan, his accent heavy but easy to understand. “It doesn’t seem to bother you to speak.”

“Well, no.” Jeremiah blinked, startled by his fluency. “Should it?”

The man spoke quietly. “It was years before I could carry on a normal conversation with an Outsider.”

An awareness that had been tugging at Jeremiah’s mind suddenly became clear. The gold bands in the man’s gauntlets weren’t high-tech equipment.

They were Calanya guards.

Jeremiah stared at him. “You were a Calani?”

The man reached into his pocket and took out an armband. “I thought this might answer your questions.”

Jeremiah took the band. He recognized both the insignia of Karn Estate and the Akasi symbol. The man who wore this had been Akasi to the ruler of a world. The name said Sevtar Karn.

“You’re him.” Jeremiah looked up. “Sevtar. The one they went to war over.”

“Actually, my name is Kelric. They called me Sevtar.”

“But you’re dead.”

Kelric smiled. “I guess no one told me.”

Jeremiah flushed. “They think you burned to death.”

“I escaped during the fires. In all the chaos, I managed to take a windrider and fly to the port.”

“Why do you let them think you died?” Jeremiah paused. “Did you hate Coba so much?”

Kelric considered. “At times. But it became a home I valued. Eventually, one I loved.” He extended his hand for the armband. When Jeremiah gave it to him, he ran his thumb over the Karn symbol. Then he put the band in his pocket. “Several of my Oaths were like yours. Forced. But I gave the Oath freely to Ixpar Karn, Minister of the Twelve Estates. When I swore loyalty to her, I meant it.” He regarded Jeremiah. “I will protect Ixpar, her people, and her world as long as it is within my power to do so.”

A chill ran up Jeremiah’s spine. He hoped this man never saw him as an enemy. “Why come for me?”

Kelric spoke dryly. “It was obvious no one else was going to do it. Your people and mine, they’ve been playing this dance of politics for years. You got chewed up in it.” He touched the wrist guard in his gauntlet. “I spent eighteen years as a Calani. Everything in me went into the Quis. I was a Jagernaut. A starfighter pilot. It so affected the dice web that the Cobans went to war. I had no intention of leaving you in the Calanya, another cultural bomb ready to go off.”

Jeremiah remembered how his few talks with Aza had harmed Viasa. He could barely even imagine the havoc a Jagernaut in the Calanya could create.

Then he thought of Kev’s expression when he had seen Kelric. “You knew Kev.”

Kelric nodded. “At Varz. Kevtar Jev Ahkah Varz. He called himself Jev then, because people mixed up our names.”

It sobered Jeremiah to realize he had never even known Kev’s full name. “Why did you tell him not to say anything?”

Kelric regarded him. “I don’t want my family seeking vengeance against Coba for what happened to me. They think I was a POW all those years. I intend for it to stay that way.”

“Who is your family?”

“Valdoria.”

Jeremiah swallowed. Even he knew of the Valdoria name. Powerful was an understatement.

“Maybe someday I can return to Ixpar on my own terms,” Kelric said. “But it isn’t possible now. I don’t want her dragged into Skolian politics unless I’m secure enough in my own position to make sure neither she nor Coba comes to harm.” Wryly he added, “And believe me, if Ixpar knew I was alive, she would become involved.”

Jeremiah thought of Khal. “Coban women are—” He searched for the right word. “Well, they certainly aren’t tentative.”

Kelric laughed. “No, they aren’t.”

“I thought I would never see home again.”

“Your rescue has a price.” Flint showed in his gaze. “If you renege, you will bear the wrath of my family. And myself.”

He could guess what Kelric required. “I’ll never reveal you were on Coba.”

“Good.”

“But how do I explain my escape?”

“It’s remarkable,” Kelric commented, with a slight smile. “You managed to fly a windrider to the port on your own.” He paused. “I’ve entered the necessary records and had the port send a message about it from you to Manager Viasa.”

“So she will tell the same story?”

“Yes.”

Jeremiah knew Khal would welcome the chance to explain his escape without implicating Coba in Kelric’s captivity. Softly he said, “I’ll miss her.”

“Coban women do have that effect,” Kelric admitted. The hint of a smile showed on his face. “Gods only know why. They are surely exasperating.”

Jeremiah smiled. “Yes,” he said, also agreeing with the unstated love beneath the words.

“There is a favor I would ask of you,” Kelric said.

Jeremiah wondered what he could possibly give such a powerful man. “A favor?”

Kelric unfolded a tray from his seat arm, extending it to Jeremiah’s seat. Then he reached into his pocket—and took out a dice pouch. “I should like to play Calanya Quis again.”

“I would like that.”

So they rolled out their dice.

ORACLE

Greg Egan

1

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

He’d woken a dozen times throughout the night with an overwhelming need to stretch his back and limbs, and none of the useful compromise positions he’d discovered in his first few days—the least-worst solutions to the geometrical problem of his confinement—had been able to dull his sense of panic. He’d been in far more pain in the second week, suffering cramps that felt as if the muscles of his legs were dying on the bone, but these new spasms had come from somewhere deeper, powered by a sense of urgency that revolved entirely around his own awareness of his situation.

That was what frightened him. Sometimes he could find ways to minimize his discomfort, sometimes he couldn’t, but he’d been clinging to the thought that, in the end, all these fuckers could ever do was hurt him. That wasn’t true, though. They could make him ache for freedom in the middle of the night, the way he might have ached with grief, or love. He’d always cherished the understanding that his self was a whole, his mind and body indivisible. But he’d failed to appreciate the corollary: through his body, they could touch every part of him. Change every part of him.

Morning brought a fresh torment: hay fever. The house was somewhere deep in the countryside, with nothing to be heard in the middle of the day but bird song. June had always been his worst month for hay fever, but in Manchester it had been tolerable. As he ate breakfast, mucus dripped from his face into the bowl of lukewarm oats they’d given-him. He stanched the flow with the back of his hand, but suffered a moment of shuddering revulsion when he couldn’t find a way to reposition himself to wipe his hand clean on his trousers. Soon he’d need to empty his bowels. They supplied him with a chamber pot whenever he asked, but they always waited two or three hours before removing it. The smell was bad enough, but the fact that it took up space in the cage was worse.

Toward the middle of the morning, Peter Quint came to see him. “How are we today, Prof?” Robert didn’t reply. Since the day Quint had responded with a puzzled frown to the suggestion that he had an appropriate name for a spook, Robert had tried to make at least one fresh joke at the man’s expense every time they met, a petty but satisfying indulgence. But now his mind was blank, and in retrospect the whole exercise seemed like an insane distraction, as bizarre and futile as scoring philosophical points against some predatory animal while it gnawed on his leg.

“Many happy returns,” Quint said cheerfully.

Robert took care to betray no surprise. He’d never lost track of the days, but he’d stopped thinking in terms of the calendar date; it simply wasn’t relevant. Back in the real world, to have forgotten his own birthday would have been considered a benign eccentricity. Here it would be taken as proof of his deterioration, and imminent surrender.

If he was cracking, he could at least choose the point of fissure. He spoke as calmly as he could, without looking up. “You know I almost qualified for the Olympic marathon, back in forty-eight? If I hadn’t done my hip in just before the trials, I might have competed.” He tried a self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose I was never really much of an athlete. But I’m only forty-six. I’m not ready for a wheelchair yet.” The words did help: he could beg this way without breaking down completely, expressing an honest fear without revealing how much deeper the threat of damage went.

He continued, with a measured note of plaintiveness that he hoped sounded like an appeal to fairness. “I just can’t bear the thought of being crippled. All I’m asking is that you let me stand upright. Let me keep my health.”

Quint was silent for a moment, then he replied with a tone of thoughtful sympathy. “It’s unnatural, isn’t it? Living like this: bent over, twisted, day after day. Living in an unnatural way is always going to harm you. I’m glad you can finally see that.”

Robert was tired; it took several seconds for the meaning to sink in. It was that crude, that obvious? They’d locked him in this cage, for all this time, as a kind of ham-fisted metaphor for his crimes?

He almost burst out laughing, but he contained himself. “I don’t suppose you know Franz Kafka?”

“Kafka?” Quint could never hide his voracity for names. “One of your Commie chums, is he?”

“I very much doubt that he was ever a Marxist.” Quint was disappointed, but prepared to make do with second best. “One of the other kind, then?”

Robert pretended to be pondering the question. “On balance, I suspect that’s not too likely either.”

“So why bring his name up?”

“I have a feeling he would have admired your methods, that’s all. He was quite the connoisseur.”

“Hmm.” Quint sounded suspicious, but not entirely un-flattered.

Robert had first set eyes on Quint in February of 1952. His house had been burgled the week before, and Arthur, a young man he’d been seeing since Christmas, had confessed to Robert that he’d given an acquaintance the address. Perhaps the two of them had planned to rob him, and Arthur had backed out at the last moment. In any case, Robert had gone to the police with an unlikely story about spotting the culprit in a pub, trying to sell an electric razor of the same make and model as the one taken from his house. No one could be charged on such flimsy evidence, so Robert had had no qualms about the consequences if Arthur had turned out to be lying. He’d simply hoped to prompt an investigation that might turn up something more tangible.

The following day, the CID had paid Robert a visit. The man he’d accused was known to the police, and fingerprints taken on the day of the burglary matched the prints they had on file. However, at the time Robert claimed to have seen him in the pub, he’d been in custody already on an entirely different charge.

The detectives had wanted to know why he’d lied. To spare himself the embarrassment, Robert had explained, of spelling out the true source of his information. Why was that embarrassing?

“I’m involved with the informant.”

One detective, Mr Wills, had asked matter-of-factly, “What exactly does that entail, sir?” And Robert—in a burst of frankness, as if honesty itself was sure to be rewarded—had told him every detail. He’d known it was still technically illegal, of course. But then, so was playing football on Easter Sunday. It could hardly be treated as a serious crime, like burglary.

The police had strung him along for hours, gathering as much information as they could before disabusing him of this misconception. They hadn’t charged him immediately; they’d needed a statement from Arthur first. But then Quint had materialized the next morning, and spelt out the choices very starkly. Three years in prison, with hard labor. Or Robert could resume his war-time work—for just one day a week, as a handsomely paid consultant to Quint’s branch of the secret service—and the charges would quietly vanish.

At first, he’d told Quint to let the courts do their worst. He’d been angry enough to want to take a stand against the preposterous law, and whatever his feelings for Arthur, Quint had suggested—gloatingly, as if it strengthened his case—that the younger, working-class man would be treated far more leniently than Robert, having been led astray by someone whose duty was to set an example for the lower orders. Three years in prison was an unsettling prospect, but it would not have been the end of the world; the Mark I had changed the way he worked, but he could still function with nothing but a pencil and paper, if necessary. Even if they’d had him breaking rocks from dawn to dusk he probably would have been able to day-dream productively, and for all Quint’s scaremongering he’d doubted it would come to that.

At some point, though, in the twenty-four hours Quint had given him to reach a decision, he’d lost his nerve. By granting the spooks their one day a week, he could avoid all the fuss and disruption of a trial. And though his work at the time—modeling embryological development—had been as challenging as anything he’d done in his life, he hadn’t been immune to pangs of nostalgia for the old days, when the fate of whole fleets of battleships had rested on finding the most efficient way to extract logical contradictions from a bank of rotating wheels.

The trouble with giving in to extortion was, it proved that you could be bought. Never mind that the Russians could hardly have offered to intervene with the Manchester constabulary next time he needed to be rescued. Never mind that he would scarcely have cared if an enemy agent had threatened to send such comprehensive evidence to the newspapers that there’d be no prospect of his patrons saving him again. He’d lost any chance to proclaim that what he did in bed with another willing partner was not an issue of national security; by saying yes to Quint, he’d made it one. By choosing to be corrupted once, he’d brought the whole torrent of clichès and paranoia down upon his head: he was vulnerable to blackmail, an easy target for entrapment, perfidious by nature. He might as well have posed in flagrante delicto with Guy Burgess on the steps of the Kremlin.

It wouldn’t have mattered if Quint and his masters had merely decided that they couldn’t trust him. The problem was—some six years after recruiting him, with no reason to believe that he had ever breached security in any way—they’d convinced themselves that they could neither continue to employ him, nor safely leave him in peace, until they’d rid him of the trait they’d used to control him in the first place.

Robert went through the painful, complicated process of rearranging his body so he could look Quint in the eye. “You know, if it was legal there’d be nothing to worry about, would there? Why don’t you devote some of your consider able Machiavellian talents to that end? Blackmail a few politicians. Set up a Royal Commission. It would only take you a couple of years. Then we could all get on with our real jobs.”

Quint blinked at him, more startled than outraged. “You might as well say that we should legalize treason!”

Robert opened his mouth to reply, then decided not to waste his breath. Quint wasn’t expressing a moral opinion. He simply meant that a world in which fewer people’s lives were ruled by the constant fear of discovery was hardly one that a man in his profession would wish to hasten into existence.

When Robert was alone again, the time dragged. His hay fever worsened, until he was sneezing and gagging almost continuously; even with freedom of movement and an endless supply of the softest linen handkerchiefs, he would have been reduced to abject misery. Gradually, though, he grew more adept at dealing with the symptoms, delegating the task to some barely conscious part of himself. By the middle of the afternoon—covered in filth, eyes almost swollen shut—he finally managed to turn his mind back to his work.

For the past four years he’d been immersed in particle physics. He’d been following the field on and off since before the war, but the paper by Yang and Mills in ’54, in which they’d generalized Maxwell’s equations for electromagnetism to apply to the strong nuclear force, had jolted him into action.

After several false starts, he believed he’d discovered a useful way to cast gravity into the same form. In general relativity, if you carried a four-dimensional velocity vector around a loop that enclosed a curved region of spacetime, it came back rotated—a phenomenon highly reminiscent of the way more abstract vectors behaved in nuclear physics. In both cases, the rotations could be treated algebraically, and the traditional way to get a handle on this was to make use of a set of matrices of complex numbers whose relationships mimicked the algebra in question. Hermann Weyl had catalogued most of the possibilities back in the ’20s and ’30s.

In spacetime, there were six distinct ways you could rotate an object: you could turn it around any of three perpendicular axes in space, or you could boost its velocity in any of the same three directions. These two kinds of rotation were complementary, or “dual” to each other, with the ordinary rotations only affecting coordinates that were untouched by the corresponding boost, and vice versa. This meant that you could rotate something around, say, the x -axis, and speed it up in the same direction, without the two processes interfering.

When Robert had tried applying the Yang-Mills approach to gravity in the obvious way, he’d floundered. It was only when he’d shifted the algebra of rotations into a new, strangely skewed guise that the mathematics had begun to fall into place. Inspired by a trick that particle physicists used to construct fields with left-or right-handed spin, he’d combined every rotation with its own dual multiplied by i, the square root of minus one. The result was a set of rotations in four complex dimensions, rather than the four real ones of ordinary spacetime, but the relationships between them preserved the original algebra.

Demanding that these “self-dual” rotations satisfy Einstein’s equations turned out to be equivalent to ordinary general relativity, but the process leading to a quantum-mechanical version of the theory became dramatically simpler. Robert still had no idea how to interpret this, but as a purely formal trick it worked spectacularly well—and when the mathematics fell into place like that, it had to mean something.

He spent several hours pondering old results, turning them over in his mind’s eye, rechecking and reimagining everything in the hope of forging some new connection. Making no progress, but there’d always been days like that. It was a triumph merely to spend this much time doing what he would have done back in the real world—however mundane, or even frustrating, the same activity might have been in its original setting.

By evening, though, the victory began to seem hollow. He hadn’t lost his wits entirely, but he was frozen, stunted. He might as well have whiled away the hours reciting the base-32 multiplication table in Baudot code, just to prove that he still remembered it.

As the room filled with shadows, his powers of concentration deserted him completely. His hay fever had abated, but he was too tired to think, and in too much pain to sleep. This wasn’t Russia, they couldn’t hold him forever; he simply had to wear them down with his patience. But when, exactly, would they have to let him go? And how much more patient could Quint be, with no pain, no terror, to erode his determination?

The moon rose, casting a patch of light on the far wall; hunched over, he couldn’t see it directly, but it silvered the gray at his feet, and changed his whole sense of the space around him. The cavernous room mocking his confinement reminded him of nights he’d spent lying awake in the dormitory at Sherborne. A public school education did have one great advantage: however miserable you were afterward, you could always take comfort in the knowledge that life would never be quite as bad again.

“This room smells of mathematics! Go out and fetch a disinfectant spray!” That had been his form-master’s idea of showing what a civilized man he was: contempt for that loathsome subject, the stuff of engineering and other low trades. And as for Robert’s chemistry experiments, like the beautiful color-changing iodate reaction he’d learned from Chris’s brother—.

Robert felt a familiar ache in the pit of his stomach. Not now. I can’t afford this now. But the whole thing swept over him, unwanted, unbidden. He’d used to meet Chris in the library on Wednesdays; for months, that had been the only time they could spend together. Robert had been fifteen then, Chris a year older. If Chris had been plain, he still would have shone like a creature from another world. No one else in Sherborne had read Eddington on relativity, Hardy on mathematics. No one else’s horizons stretched beyond rugby, sadism, and the dimly satisfying prospect of reading classics at Oxford then vanishing into the maw of the civil service.

They had never touched, never kissed. While half the school had been indulging in passionless sodomy—as a rather literal-minded substitute for the much too difficult task of imagining women—Robert had been too shy even to declare his feelings. Too shy, and too afraid that they might not be reciprocated. It hadn’t mattered. To have a friend like Chris had been enough.

In December of 1929, they’d both sat the exams for Trinity College, Cambridge. Chris had won a scholarship; Robert hadn’t. He’d reconciled himself to their separation, and prepared for one more year at Sherborne without the one person who’d made it bearable. Chris would be following happily in the footsteps of Newton; just thinking of that would be some consolation.

Chris never made it to Cambridge. In February, after six days in agony, he’d died of bovine tuberculosis.

Robert wept silently, angry with himself because he knew that half his wretchedness was just self-pity, exploiting his grief as a disguise. He had to stay honest; once every source of unhappiness in his life melted together and became indistinguishable, he’d be like a cowed animal, with no sense of the past or the future. Ready to do anything to get out of the cage.

If he hadn’t yet reached that point, he was close. It would only take a few more nights like the last one. Drifting off in the hope of a few minutes’ blankness, to find that sleep itself shone a colder light on everything. Drifting off, then waking with a sense of loss so extreme it was like suffocation.

A woman’s voice spoke from the darkness in front of him. “Get off your knees!”

Robert wondered if he was hallucinating. He’d heard no one approach across the creaky floorboards.

The voice said nothing more. Robert rearranged his body so he could look up from the floor. There was a woman he’d never seen before, standing a few feet away.

She’d sounded angry, but as he studied her face in the moonlight through the slits of his swollen eyes, he realized that her anger was directed, not at him, but at his condition. She gazed at him with an expression of horror and outrage, as if she’d chanced upon him being held like this in some respectable neighbor’s basement, rather than an MI6 facility. Maybe she was one of the staff employed in the upkeep of the house, but had no idea what went on here? Surely those people were vetted and supervised, though, and threatened with life imprisonment if they ever set foot outside their prescribed domains.

For one surreal moment, Robert wondered if Quint had sent her to seduce him. It would not have been the strangest thing they’d tried. But she radiated such fierce self assurance—such a sense of confidence that she could speak with the authority of her convictions, and expect to be heeded—that he knew she could never have been chosen for the role. No one in Her Majesty’s government would consider self assurance an attractive quality in a woman.

He said, “Throw me the key, and I’ll show you my Roger Bannister impression.”

She shook her head. “You don’t need a key. Those days are over.”

Robert started with fright. There were no bars between them. But the cage couldn’t have vanished before his eyes; she must have removed it while he’d been lost in his reverie. He’d gone through the whole painful exercise of turning to face her as if he were still confined, without even noticing.

Removed it how?

He wiped his eyes, shivering at the dizzying prospect of freedom. “Who are you?” An agent for the Russians, sent to liberate him from his own side? She’d have to be a zealot, then, or strangely naive, to view his torture with such wide-eyed innocence.

She stepped forward, then reached down and took his hand. “Do you think you can walk?” Her grip was firm, and her skin was cool and dry. She was completely unafraid; she might have been a good Samaritan in a public street helping an old man to his feet after a fall—not an intruder helping a threat to national security break out of therapeutic detention, at the risk of being shot on sight.

“I’m not even sure I can stand.” Robert steeled himself; maybe this woman was a trained assassin, but it would be too much to presume that if he cried out in pain and brought guards rushing in, she could still extricate him without raising a sweat. “You haven’t answered my question.”

“My name’s Helen.” She smiled and hoisted him to his feet, looking at once like a compassionate child pulling open the jaws of a hunter’s cruel trap, and a very powerful, very intelligent carnivore contemplating its own strength. “I’ve come to change everything.”

Robert said, “Oh, good.”

Robert found that he could hobble; it was painful and undignified, but at least he didn’t have to be carried. Helen led him through the house; lights showed from some of the rooms, but there were no voices, no footsteps save their own, no signs of life at all. When they reached the tradesmen’s entrance she unbolted the door, revealing a moonlit garden.

“Did you kill everyone?” he whispered. He’d made far too much noise to have come this far unmolested. Much as he had reason to despise his captors, mass murder on his behalf was a lot to take in.

Helen cringed. “What a revolting idea! It’s hard to believe sometimes, how uncivilized you are.”

“You mean the British?”

“All of you!”

“I must say, your accent’s rather good.”

“I watched a lot of cinema,” she explained. “Mostly Ealing comedies. You never know how much that will help, though.”

“Quite.”

They crossed the garden, heading for a wooden gate in the hedge. Since murder was strictly for imperialists, Robert could only assume that she’d managed to drug everyone.

The gate was unlocked. Outside the grounds, a cobbled lane ran past the hedge, leading into forest. Robert was barefoot, but the stones weren’t cold, and the slight unevenness of the path was welcome, restoring circulation to the soles of his feet.

As they walked, he took stock of his situation. He was out of captivity, thanks entirely to this woman. Sooner or later he was going to have to confront her agenda.

He said, “I’m not leaving the country.”

Helen murmured assent, as if he’d passed a casual remark about the weather.

“And I’m not going to discuss my work with you.”

“Fine.”

Robert stopped and stared at her. She said, “Put your arm across my shoulders.”

He complied; she was exactly the right height to support him comfortably. He said, “You’re not a Soviet agent, are you?”

Helen was amused. “Is that really what you thought?”

“I’m not all that quick on my feet tonight.”

“No.” They began walking together. Helen said, “There’s a train station about three kilometers away. You can get cleaned up, rest there until morning, and decide where you want to go.”

“Won’t the station be the first place they’ll look?”

“They won’t be looking anywhere for a while.”

The moon was high above the trees. The two of them could not have made a more conspicuous couple: a sensibly dressed, quite striking young woman, supporting a filthy, ragged tramp. If a villager cycled past, the best they could hope for was being mistaken for an alcoholic father and his martyred daughter.

Martyred all right: she moved so efficiently, despite the burden, that any onlooker would assume she’d been doing this for years. Robert tried altering his gait slightly, subtly changing the timing of his steps to see if he could make her falter, but Helen adapted instantly. If she knew she was being tested, though, she kept it to herself.

Finally he said, “What did you do with the cage?”

“I time-reversed it.”

Hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Even assuming that she could do such a thing, it wasn’t at all clear to him how that could have stopped the bars from scattering light and interacting with his body. It should merely have turned electrons into positrons, and killed them both in a shower of gamma rays.

That conjuring trick wasn’t his most pressing concern, though. “I can only think of three places you might have come from,” he said.

Helen nodded, as if she’d put herself in his shoes and catalogued the possibilities. “Rule out one; the other two are both right.”

She was not from an extrasolar planet. Even if her civilization possessed some means of viewing Ealing comedies from a distance of light years, she was far too sensitive to his specific human concerns.

She was from the future, but not his own.

She was from the future of another Everett branch.

He turned to her. “No paradoxes.”

She smiled, deciphering his shorthand immediately. “That’s right. It’s physically impossible to travel into your own past, unless you’ve made exacting preparations to ensure compatible boundary conditions. That can be achieved, in a controlled laboratory setting—but in the field it would be like trying to balance ten thousand elephants in an inverted pyramid, while the bottom one rode a unicycle: excruciatingly difficult, and entirely pointless.”

Robert was tongue-tied for several seconds, a horde of questions battling for access to his vocal chords. “But how do you travel into the past at all?”

“It will take a while to bring you up to speed completely, but if you want the short answer: you’ve already stumbled on one of the clues. I read your paper in Physical Review, and it’s correct as far as it goes. Quantum gravity involves four complex dimensions, but the only classical solutions—the only geometries that remain in phase under slight perturbations—have curvature that’s either self-dual, or anti-self-dual. Those are the only stationary points of the action, for the complete Lagrangian. And both solutions appear, from the inside, to contain only four real dimensions.

“It’s meaningless to ask which sector we’re in, but we might as well call it self-dual. In that case, the anti-self-dual solutions have an arrow of time running backward compared to ours.”

“Why?” As he blurted out the question, Robert wondered if he sounded like an impatient child to her. But if she suddenly vanished back into thin air, he’d have far fewer regrets for making a fool of himself this way than if he’d maintained a façade of sophisticated nonchalance.

Helen said, “Ultimately, that’s related to spin. And it’s down to the mass of the neutrino that we can tunnel between sectors. But I’ll need to draw you some diagrams and equations to explain it all properly.”

Robert didn’t press her for more; he had no choice but to trust that she wouldn’t desert him. He staggered on in silence, a wonderful ache of anticipation building in his chest. If someone had put this situation to him hypothetically, he would have piously insisted that he’d prefer to toil on at his own pace. But despite the satisfaction it had given him on the few occasions when he’d made genuine discoveries himself, what mattered in the end was understanding as much as you could, however you could. Better to ransack the past and the future than go through life in a state of willful ignorance.

“You said you’ve come to change things?”

She nodded. “I can’t predict the future here, of course, but there are pitfalls in my own past that I can help you avoid. In my twentieth century, people discovered things too slowly. Everything changed much too slowly. Between us, I think we can speed things up.”

Robert was silent for a while, contemplating the magnitude of what she was proposing. Then he said, “It’s a pity you didn’t come sooner. In this branch, about twenty years ago—”

Helen cut him off. “I know. We had the same war. The same Holocaust, the same Soviet death toll. But we’ve yet to be able to avert that, anywhere. You can never do anything in just one history—even the most focused intervention happens across a broad ‘ribbon’ of strands. When we try to reach back to the ’30s and ’40s, the ribbon overlaps with its own past to such a degree that all the worst horrors are faits accompli. We can’t shoot any version of Adolf Hitler, because we can’t shrink the ribbon to the point where none of us would be shooting ourselves in the back. All we’ve ever managed are minor interventions, like sending projectiles back to the Blitz, saving a few lives by deflecting bombs.”

“What, knocking them into the Thames?”

“No, that would have been too risky. We did some modeling, and the safest thing turned out to be diverting them onto big, empty buildings: Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul’s Cathedral.”

The station came into view ahead of them. Helen said, “What do you think? Do you want to head back to Manchester?”

Robert hadn’t given the question much thought. Quint could track him down anywhere, but the more people he had around him, the less vulnerable he’d be. In his house in Wilmslow he’d be there for the taking.

“I still have rooms at Cambridge,” he said tentatively.

“Good idea.”

“What are your own plans?”

Helen turned to him. “I thought I’d stay with you.” She smiled at the expression on his face. “Don’t worry, I’ll give you plenty of privacy. And if people want to make assumptions, let them. You already have a scandalous reputation; you might as well see it branch out in new directions.”

Robert said wryly, “I’m afraid it doesn’t quite work that way. They’d throw us out immediately.”

Helen snorted. “They could try.”

“You may have defeated MI6, but you haven’t dealt with Cambridge porters.” The reality of the situation washed over him anew at the thought of her in his study, writing out the equations for time travel on the blackboard. “Why me? I can appreciate that you’d want to make contact with someone who could understand how you came here—but why not Everett, or Yang, or Feynman? Compared to Feynman, I’m a dilettante.”

Helen said, “Maybe. But you have an equally practical bent, and you’ll learn fast enough.”

There had to be more to it than that: thousands of people would have been capable of absorbing her lessons just as rapidly. “The physics you’ve hinted at—in your past, did I discover all that?”

“No. Your Physical Review paper helped me track you down here, but in my own history that was never published.” There was a flicker of disquiet in her eyes, as if she had far greater disappointments in store on that subject.

Robert didn’t care much either way; if anything, the less his alter ego had achieved, the less he’d be troubled by jealousy.

“Then what was it, that made you choose me?”

“You really haven’t guessed?” Helen took his free hand and held the fingers to her face; it was a tender gesture, but much more like a daughter’s than a lover’s. “It’s a warm night. No one’s skin should be this cold.”

Robert gazed into her dark eyes, as playful as any human’s, as serious, as proud. Given the chance, perhaps any decent person would have plucked him from Quint’s grasp. But only one kind would feel a special obligation, as if they were repaying an ancient debt.

He said, “You’re a machine.”

2

John Hamilton, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, read the last letter in the morning’s pile of fan mail with a growing sense of satisfaction.

The letter was from a young American, a twelve-year-old girl in Boston. It opened in the usual way, declaring how much pleasure his books had given her, before going on to list her favorite scenes and characters. As ever, Jack was delighted that the stories had touched someone deeply enough to prompt them to respond this way. But it was the final paragraph that was by far the most gratifying:

However much other children might tease me, or grown-ups too when I’m older, I will NEVER, EVER stop believing in the Kingdom of Nescia. Sarah stopped believing, and she was locked out of the Kingdom forever. At first that made me cry, and I couldn’t sleep all night because I was afraid I might stop believing myself one day. But I understand now that it’s good to be afraid, because it will help me keep people from changing my mind. And if you’re not willing to believe in magic lands, of course you can’t enter them. There’s nothing even Belvedere himself can do to save you, then.

Jack refilled and lit his pipe, then reread the letter. This was his vindication: the proof that through his books he could touch a young mind, and plant the seed of faith in fertile ground. It made all the scorn of his jealous, stuck-up colleagues fade into insignificance. Children understood the power of stories, the reality of myth, the need to believe in something beyond the dismal gray farce of the material world.

It wasn’t a truth that could be revealed the “adult” way: through scholarship, or reason. Least of all through philosophy, as Elizabeth Anscombe had shown him on that awful night at the Socratic Club. A devout Christian herself, Anscombe had nonetheless taken all the arguments against materialism from his popular book, Signs and Wonders, and trampled them into the ground. It had been an unfair match from the start: Anscombe was a professional philosopher, steeped in the work of everyone from Aquinas to Wittgenstein; Jack knew the history of ideas in medieval Europe intimately, but he’d lost interest in modern philosophy once it had been invaded by fashionable positivists. And Signs and Wonders had never been intended as a scholarly work; it had been good enough to pass muster with a sympathetic lay readership, but trying to defend his admittedly rough-and-ready mixture of common sense and useful shortcuts to faith against Anscombe’s merciless analysis had made him feel like a country yokel stammering in front of a bishop.

Ten years later, he still burned with resentment at the humiliation she’d put him through, but he was grateful for the lesson she’d taught him. His earlier books, and his radio talks, had not been a complete waste of time—but the harpy’s triumph had shown him just how pitiful human reason was when it came to the great questions. He’d begun working on the stories of Nescia years before, but it was only when the dust had settled on his most painful defeat that he’d finally recognized his true calling.

He removed his pipe, stood, and turned to face Oxford. “Kiss my arse, Elizabeth!” he growled happily, waving the letter at her. This was a wonderful omen. It was going to be a very good day.

There was a knock at the door of his study.

“Come.”

It was his brother, William. Jack was puzzled—he hadn’t even realized Willie was in town—but he nodded a greeting and motioned at the couch opposite his desk.

Willie sat, his face flushed from the stairs, frowning. After a moment he said, “This chap Stoney.”

“Hmm?” Jack was only half listening as he sorted papers on his desk. He knew from long experience that Willie would take forever to get to the point.

“Did some kind of hush-hush work during the war, apparently.”

“Who did?”

“Robert Stoney. Mathematician. Used to be up at Manchester, but he’s a Fellow of Kings, and now he’s back in Cambridge. Did some kind of secret war work. Same thing as Malcolm Muggeridge, apparently. No one’s allowed to say what.”

Jack looked up, amused. He’d heard rumors about Muggeridge, but they all revolved around the business of analyzing intercepted German radio messages. What conceivable use would a mathematician have been, for that? Sharpening pencils for the intelligence analysts, presumably.

“What about him, Willie?” Jack asked patiently.

Willie continued reluctantly, as if he was confessing to something mildly immoral. “I paid him a visit yesterday. Place called the Cavendish. Old army friend of mine has a brother who works there. Got the whole tour.”

“I know the Cavendish. What’s there to see?”

“He’s doing things, Jack. Impossible things.”

“Impossible?”

“Looking inside people. Putting it on a screen, like a television.”

Jack sighed. “Taking X-rays?”

Willie snapped back angrily, “I’m not a fool; I know what an X-ray looks like. This is different. You can see the blood flow. You can watch your heart beating. You can follow a sensation through the nerves from fingertip to brain. He says, soon he’ll be able to watch a thought in motion.”

“Nonsense.” Jack scowled. “So he’s invented some gadget, some fancy kind of X-ray machine. What are you so agitated about?”

Willie shook his head gravely. “There’s more. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He’s only been back in Cambridge a year, and already the place is overflowing with wonders.” He used the word begrudgingly, as if he had no choice, but was afraid of conveying more approval than he intended.

Jack was beginning to feel a distinct sense of unease.

“What exactly is it you want me to do?” he asked.

Willie replied plainly, “Go and see for yourself. Go and see what he’s up to.”

The Cavendish Laboratory was a mid-Victorian building, designed to resemble something considerably older and grander. It housed the entire Department of Physics, complete with lecture theaters; the place was swarming with noisy undergraduates. Jack had had no trouble arranging a tour: he’d simply telephoned Stoney and expressed his curiosity, and no more substantial reason had been required.

Stoney had been allocated three adjoining rooms at the back of the building, and the “spin resonance imager” occupied most of the first. Jack obligingly placed his arm between the coils, then almost jerked it out in fright when the strange, transected view of his muscles and veins appeared on the picture tube. He wondered if it could be some kind of hoax, but he clenched his fist slowly and watched the image do the same, then made several unpredictable movements which it mimicked equally well.

“I can show you individual blood cells, if you like,” Stoney offered cheerfully.

Jack shook his head; his current, unmagnified flaying was quite enough to take in.

Stoney hesitated, then added awkwardly, “You might want to talk to your doctor at some point. It’s just that, your bone density’s rather—” He pointed to a chart on the screen beside the image. “Well, it’s quite a bit below the normal range.”

Jack withdrew his arm. He’d already been diagnosed with osteoporosis, and he’d welcomed the news: it meant that he’d taken a small part of Joyce’s illness—the weakness in her bones—into his own body. God was allowing him to suffer a little in her stead.

If Joyce were to step between these coils, what might that reveal? But there’d be nothing to add to her diagnosis. Besides, if he kept up his prayers, and kept up both their spirits, in time her remission would blossom from an uncertain reprieve into a fully-fledged cure.

He said, “How does this work?”

“In a strong magnetic field, some of the atomic nuclei and electrons in your body are free to align themselves in various ways with the field.” Stoney must have seen Jack’s eyes beginning to glaze over; he quickly changed tack. “Think of it as being like setting a whole lot of spinning tops whirling, as vigorously as possible, then listening carefully as they slow down and tip over. For the atoms in your body, that’s enough to give some clues as to what kind of molecule, and what kind of tissue, they’re in. The machine listens to atoms in different places by changing the way it combines all the signals from billions of tiny antennae. It’s like a whispering gallery where we can play with the time that signals take to travel from different places, moving the focus back and forth through any part of any body, thousands of times a second.”

Jack pondered this explanation. Though it sounded complicated, in principle it wasn’t that much stranger than X-rays.

“The physics itself is old hat,” Stoney continued, “but for imaging, you need a very strong magnetic field, and you need to make sense of all the data you’ve gathered. Nevill Mott made the superconducting alloys for the magnets. And I managed to persuade Rosalind Franklin from Birkbeck to collaborate with us, to help perfect the fabrication process for the computing circuits. We cross-link lots of little Y-shaped DNA fragments, then selectively coat them with metal; Rosalind worked out a way to use X-ray crystallography for quality control. We paid her back with a purpose-built computer that will let her solve hydrated protein structures in real time, once she gets her hands on a bright enough X-ray source.” He held up a small, unprepossessing object, rimmed with protruding gold wires. “Each logic gate is roughly a hundred lightingstroms cubed, and we grow them in three-dimensional arrays. That’s a million, million, million switches in the palm of my hand.”

Jack didn’t know how to respond to this claim. Even when he couldn’t quite follow the man there was something mesmerizing about his ramblings, like a cross between William Blake and nursery talk.

“If computers don’t excite you, we’re doing all kinds of other things with DNA.” Stoney ushered him into the next room, which was full of glassware, and seedlings in pots beneath strip lights. Two assistants seated at a bench were toiling over microscopes; another was dispensing fluids into test tubes with a device that looked like an overgrown eye-dropper.

“There are a dozen new species of rice, corn, and wheat here. They all have at least double the protein and mineral content of existing crops, and each one uses a different biochemical repertoire to protect itself against insects and fungi. Farmers have to get away from monocultures; it leaves them too vulnerable to disease, and too dependent on chemical pesticides.”

Jack said, “You’ve bred these? All these new varieties, in a matter of months?”

“No, no! Instead of hunting down the heritable traits we needed in the wild, and struggling for years to produce cross-breeds bearing all of them, we designed every trait from scratch. Then we manufactured DNA that would make the tools the plants need, and inserted it into their germ cells.”

Jack demanded angrily, “Who are you to say what a plant needs?”

Stoney shook his head innocently. “I took my advice from agricultural scientists, who took their advice from farmers. They know what pests and blights they’re up against. Food crops are as artificial as Pekinese. Nature didn’t hand them to us on a plate, and if they’re not working as well as we need them to, nature isn’t going to fix them for us.”

Jack glowered at him, but said nothing. He was beginning to understand why Willie had sent him here. The man came across as an enthusiastic tinkerer, but there was a breathtaking arrogance lurking behind the boyish exterior.

Stoney explained a collaboration he’d brokered between scientists in Cairo, Bogotá, London and Calcutta, to develop vaccines for polio, smallpox, malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, tuberculosis, influenza and leprosy. Some were the first of their kind; others were intended as replacements for existing vaccines. “It’s important that we create antigens without culturing the pathogens in animal cells that might themselves harbor viruses. The teams are all looking at variants on a simple, cheap technique that involves putting antigen genes into harmless bacteria that will double as delivery vehicles and adjuvants, then freeze-drying them into spores that can survive tropical heat without refrigeration.”

Jack was slightly mollified; this all sounded highly admirable. What business Stoney had instructing doctors on vaccines was another question. Presumably his jargon made sense to them, but when exactly had this mathematician acquired the training to make even the most modest suggestions on the topic?

“You’re having a remarkably productive year,” he observed.

Stoney smiled. “The muse comes and goes for all of us. But I’m really just the catalyst in most of this. I’ve been lucky enough to find some people—here in Cambridge, and further afield—who’ve been willing to chance their arm on some wild ideas. They’ve done the real work.” He gestured toward the next room. “My own pet projects are through here.”

The third room was full of electronic gadgets, wired up to picture tubes displaying both phosphorescent words and images resembling engineering blueprints come to life. In the middle of one bench, incongruously, sat a large cage containing several hamsters.

Stoney fiddled with one of the gadgets, and a face like a stylized drawing of a mask appeared on an adjacent screen. The mask looked around the room, then said, “Good morning, Robert. Good morning, Professor Hamilton.”

Jack said, “You had someone record those words?”

The mask replied, “No, Robert showed me photographs of all the teaching staff at Cambridge. If I see anyone I know from the photographs, I greet them.” The face was crudely rendered, but the hollow eyes seemed to meet Jack’s. Stoney explained, “It has no idea what it’s saying, of course. It’s just an exercise in face and voice recognition.”

Jack responded stiffly, “Of course.”

Stoney motioned to Jack to approach and examine the hamster cage. He obliged him. There were two adult animals, presumably a breeding pair. Two pink young were suckling from the mother, who reclined in a bed of straw.

“Look closely,” Stoney urged him. Jack peered into the nest, then cried out an obscenity and backed away.

One of the young was exactly what it seemed. The other was a machine, wrapped in ersatz skin, with a nozzle clamped to the warm teat.

“That’s the most monstrous thing I’ve ever seen!” Jack’s whole body was trembling. “What possible reason could you have to do that?”

Stoney laughed and made a reassuring gesture, as if his guest was a nervous child recoiling from a harmless toy. “It’s not hurting her! And the point is to discover what it takes for the mother to accept it. To ‘reproduce one’s kind’ means having some set of parameters as to what that is. Scent, and some aspects of appearance, are important cues in this case, but through trial and error I’ve also pinned down a set of behaviors that lets the simulacrum pass through every stage of the life cycle. An acceptable child, an acceptable sibling, an acceptable mate.”

Jack stared at him, nauseated. “These animals fuck your machines?”

Stoney was apologetic. “Yes, but hamsters will fuck anything. I’ll really have to shift to a more discerning species, in order to test that properly.”

Jack struggled to regain his composure. “What on Earth possessed you, to do this?”

“In the long run,” Stoney said mildly, “I believe this is something we’re going to need to understand far better than we do at present. Now that we can map the structures of the brain in fine detail, and match its raw complexity with our computers, it’s only a matter of a decade or so before we build machines that think.

“That in itself will be a vast endeavor, but I want to ensure that it’s not stillborn from the start. There’s not much point creating the most marvelous children in history, only to find that some awful mammalian instinct drives us to strangle them at birth.”

Jack sat in his study drinking whisky. He’d telephoned Joyce after dinner, and they’d chatted for a while, but it wasn’t the same as being with her. The weekends never came soon enough, and by Tuesday or Wednesday any sense of reassurance he’d gained from seeing her had slipped away entirely.

It was almost midnight now. After speaking to Joyce, he’d spent three more hours on the telephone, finding out what he could about Stoney. Milking his connections, such as they were; Jack had only been at Cambridge for five years, so he was still very much an outsider. Not that he’d ever been admitted into any inner circles back at Oxford: he’d always belonged to a small, quiet group of dissenters against the tide of fashion. Whatever else might be said about the Tiddly-winks, they’d never had their hands on the levers of academic power.

A year ago, while on sabbatical in Germany, Stoney had resigned suddenly from a position he’d held at Manchester for a decade. He’d returned to Cambridge, despite having no official posting to take up. He’d started collaborating informally with various people at the Cavendish, until the head of the place, Mott, had invented a job description for him, and given him a modest salary, the three rooms Jack had seen, and some students to assist him.

Stoney’s colleagues were uniformly amazed by his spate of successful inventions. Though none of his gadgets were based on entirely new science, his skill at seeing straight to the heart of existing theories and plucking some practical consequence from them was unprecedented. Jack had expected some jealous back-stabbing, but no one seemed to have a bad word to say about Stoney. He was willing to turn his scientific Midas touch to the service of anyone who approached him, and it sounded to Jack as if every would-be skeptic or enemy had been bought off with some rewarding insight into their own field.

Stoney’s personal life was rather murkier. Half of Jack’s informants were convinced that the man was a confirmed pansy, but others spoke of a beautiful, mysterious woman named Helen, with whom he was plainly on intimate terms.

Jack emptied his glass and stared out across the courtyard. Was it pride, to wonder if he might have received some kind of prophetic vision? Fifteen years earlier, when he’d written The Broken Planet, he’d imagined that he’d merely been satirising the hubris of modern science. His portrait of the evil forces behind the sardonically named Laboratory Overseeing Various Experiments had been intended as a deadly serious metaphor, but he’d never expected to find himself wondering if real fallen angels were whispering secrets in the ears of a Cambridge don.

How many times, though, had he told his readers that the devil’s greatest victory had been convincing the world that he did not exist? The devil was not a metaphor, a mere symbol of human weakness: he was a real, scheming presence, acting in time, acting in the world, as much as God Himself.

And hadn’t Faustus’s damnation been sealed by the most beautiful woman of all time: Helen of Troy?

Jack’s skin crawled. He’d once written a humorous newspaper column called “Letters from a Demon,” in which a Senior Tempter offered advice to a less experienced colleague on the best means to lead the faithful astray. Even that had been an exhausting, almost corrupting experience; adopting the necessary point of view, however whimsically, had made him feel that he was withering inside. The thought that a cross between the Faustbuch and The Broken Planet might be coming to life around him was too terrifying to contemplate. He was no hero out of his own fiction—not even a mild-mannered Cedric Duffy, let alone a modern Pendragon. And he did not believe that Merlin would rise from the woods to bring chaos to that hubristic Tower of Babel, the Cavendish Laboratory.

Nevertheless, if he was the only person in England who suspected Stoney’s true source of inspiration, who else would act?

Jack poured himself another glass. There was nothing to be gained by procrastinating. He would not be able to rest until he knew what he was facing: a vain, foolish overgrown boy who was having a run of good luck—or a vain, foolish overgrown boy who had sold his soul and imperiled all humanity.

“A Satanist? You’re accusing me of being a Satanist?”

Stoney tugged angrily at his dressing gown; he’d been in bed when Jack had pounded on the door. Given the hour, it had been remarkably civil of him to accept a visitor at all, and he appeared so genuinely affronted now that Jack was almost prepared to apologize and slink away. He said, “I had to ask you—”

“You have to be doubly foolish to be a Satanist,” Stoney muttered.

“Doubly?”

“Not only do you need to believe all the nonsense of Christian theology, you then have to turn around and back the preordained, guaranteed-to-fail, absolutely futile losing side.” He held up his hand, as if he believed he’d anticipated the only possible objection to this remark, and wished to spare Jack the trouble of washing his breath by uttering it. “I know, some people claim it’s all really about some pre-Christian deity: Mercury, or Pan—guff like that. But assuming that we’re not talking about some complicated mislabelling of objects of worship, I really can’t think of anything more insulting. You’re comparing me to someone like Huysmans, who was basically just a very dim Catholic.”

Stoney folded his arms and settled back on the couch, waiting for Jack’s response.

Jack’s head was thick from the whisky; he wasn’t at all sure how to take this. It was the kind of smart-arsed undergraduate drivel he might have expected from any smug atheist—but then, short of a confession, exactly what kind of reply would have constituted evidence of guilt? If you’d sold your soul to the devil, what lie would you tell in place of the truth? Had he seriously believed that Stoney would claim to be a devout churchgoer, as if that were the best possible answer to put Jack off the scent?

He had to concentrate on things he’d seen with his own eyes, facts that could not be denied.

“You’re plotting to overthrow nature, bending the world to the will of man.”

Stoney sighed. “Not at all. More refined technology will help us tread more lightly. We have to cut back on pollution and pesticides as rapidly as possible. Or do you want to live in a world where all the animals are born as hermaphrodites, and half the Pacific islands disappear in storms?”

“Don’t try telling me that you’re some kind of guardian of the animal kingdom. You want to replace us all with machines!”

“Does every Zulu or Tibetan who gives birth to a child, and wants the best for it, threaten you in the same way?”

Jack bristled. “I’m not a racist. A Zulu or Tibetan has a soul.”

Stoney groaned and put his head in his hands. “It’s half past one in the morning! Can’t we have this debate some other time?”

Someone banged on the door. Stoney looked up, disbelieving. “What is this? Grand Central Station?”

He crossed to the door and opened it. A disheveled, unshaven man pushed his way into the room. “Quint? What a pleasant—”

The intruder grabbed Stoney and slammed him against the wall. Jack exhaled with surprise. Quint turned bloodshot eyes on him.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“John Hamilton. Who the fuck are you?”

“Never you mind. Just stay put.” He jerked Stoney’s arm up behind his back with one hand, while grinding his face into the wall with the other. “You’re mine now, you piece of shit. No one’s going to protect you this time.”

Stoney addressed Jack through a mouth squashed against the masonry. “Dith ith Pether Quinth, my own perthonal thpook. I did make a Fauthtian bargain. But with thtrictly temporal—”

“Shut up!” Quint pulled a gun from his jacket and held it to Stoney’s head.

Jack said, “Steady on.”

“Just how far do your connections go?” Quint screamed. “I’ve had memos disappear, sources clam up—and now my superiors are treating me like some kind of traitor! Well, don’t worry: when I’m through with you, I’ll have the names of the entire network.” He turned to address Jack again. “And don’t you think you’re going anywhere.”

Stoney said, “Leave him out of dith. He’th at Magdalene. You mutht know by now: all the thpieth are at Trinity.”

Jack was shaken by the sight of Quint waving his gun around, but the implications of this drama came as something of a relief. Stoney’s ideas must have had their genesis in some secret war-time research project. He hadn’t made a deal with the devil after all, but he’d broken the Official Secrets Act, and now he was paying the price.

Stoney flexed his body and knocked Quint backward. Quint staggered, but didn’t fall; he raised his arm menacingly, but there was no gun in his hand. Jack looked around to see where it had fallen, but he couldn’t spot it anywhere. Stoney landed a kick squarely in Quint’s testicles; barefoot, but Quint wailed with pain. A second kick sent him sprawling.

Stoney called out, “Luke? Luke! Would you come and give me a hand?”

A solidly built man with tattooed forearms emerged from Stoney’s bedroom, yawning and tugging his braces into place. At the sight of Quint, he groaned. “Not again!”

Stoney said, “I’m sorry.”

Luke shrugged stoically. The two of them managed to grab hold of Quint, then they dragged him struggling out the door. Jack waited a few seconds, then searched the floor for the gun. But it wasn’t anywhere in sight, and it hadn’t slid under the furniture; none of the crevices where it might have ended up were so dark that it would have been lost in shadow. It was not in the room at all.

Jack went to the window and watched the three men cross the courtyard, half expecting to witness an assassination. But Stoney and his lover merely lifted Quint into the air between them, and tossed him into a shallow, rather slimy-looking pond.

Jack spent the ensuing days in a state of turmoil. He wasn’t ready to confide in anyone until he could frame his suspicions clearly, and the events in Stoney’s rooms were difficult to interpret unambiguously. He couldn’t state with absolute certainty that Quint’s gun had vanished before his eyes. But surely the fact that Stoney was walking free proved that he was receiving supernatural protection? And Quint himself, confused and demoralised, had certainly had the appearance of a man who’d been demonically confounded at every turn.

If this was true, though, Stoney must have bought more with his soul than immunity from worldly authority. The knowledge itself had to be Satanic in origin, as the legend of Faustus described it. Tollers had been right, in his great essay “Mythopoesis”: myths were remnants of man’s pre-lapsarian capacity to apprehend, directly, the great truths of the world. Why else would they resonate in the imagination, and survive from generation to generation?

By Friday, a sense of urgency gripped him. He couldn’t take his confusion back to Potter’s Barn, back to Joyce and the boys. This had to be resolved, if only in his own mind, before he returned to his family.

With Wagner on the gramophone, he sat and meditated on the challenge he was facing. Stoney had to be thwarted, but how? Jack had always said that the Church of England—apparently so quaint and harmless, a Church of cake stalls and kindly spinsters—was like a fearsome army in the eyes of Satan. But even if his master was quaking in Hell, it would take more than a few stern words from a bicycling vicar to force Stoney to abandon his obscene plans.

But Stoney’s intentions, in themselves, didn’t matter. He’d been granted the power to dazzle and seduce, but not to force his will upon the populace. What mattered was how his plans were viewed by others. And the way to stop him was to open people’s eyes to the true emptiness of his apparent cornucopia.

The more he thought and prayed about it, the more certain Jack became that he’d discerned the task required of him. No denunciation from the pulpits would suffice; people wouldn’t turn down the fruits of Stoney’s damnation on the mere say-so of the Church. Why would anyone reject such lustrous gifts, without a carefully reasoned argument?

Jack had been humiliated once, defeated once, trying to expose the barrenness of materialism. But might that not have been a form of preparation? He’d been badly mauled by Anscombe, but she’d made an infinitely gentler enemy than the one he now confronted. He had suffered from her taunts—but what was suffering, if not the chisel God used to shape his children into their true selves?

His role was clear, now. He would find Stoney’s intellectual Achilles heel, and expose it to the world.

He would debate him.

3

Robert gazed at the blackboard for a full minute, then started laughing with delight. “That’s so beautiful!”

“Isn’t it?” Helen put down the chalk and joined him on the couch. “Any more symmetry, and nothing would happen: the universe would be full of crystalline blankness. Any less, and it would all be uncorrelated noise.”

Over the months, in a series of tutorials, Helen had led him through a small part of the century of physics that had separated them at their first meeting, down to the purely algebraic structures that lay beneath spacetime and matter. Mathematics catalogued everything that was not self contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics was an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders.

Robert sat and mentally reviewed everything he’d learned, trying to apprehend as much as he could in a single image. As he did, a part of him waited fearfully for a sense of disappointment, a sense of anticlimax. He might never see more deeply into the nature of the world. In this direction, at least, there was nothing more to be discovered.

But anticlimax was impossible. To become jaded with this was impossible. However familiar he became with the algebra of the universe, it would never grow less marvelous.

Finally he asked, “Are there other islands?” Not merely other histories, sharing the same underlying basis, but other realities entirely.

“I suspect so,” Helen replied. “People have mapped some possibilities. I don’t know how that could ever be confirmed, though.”

Robert shook his head, sated. “I won’t even think about that. I need to come down to Earth for a while.” He stretched his arms and leaned back, still grinning.

Helen said, “Where’s Luke today? He usually shows up by now, to drag you out into the sunshine.”

The question wiped the smile from Robert’s face. “Apparently I make poor company. Being insufficiently fanatical about darts and football.”

“He’s left you?” Helen reached over and squeezed his hand sympathetically. A little mockingly, too.

Robert was annoyed; she never said anything, but he always felt that she was judging him. “You think I should grow up, don’t you? Find someone more like myself. Some kind of soulmate.” He’d meant the word to sound sardonic, but it emerged rather differently.

“It’s your life,” she said.

A year before, that would have been a laughable claim, but it was almost the truth now. There was a de facto moratorium on prosecutions, while the recently acquired genetic and neurological evidence was being assessed by a parliamentary subcommittee. Robert had helped plant the seeds of the campaign, but he’d played no real part in it; other people had taken up the cause. In a matter of months, it was possible that Quint’s cage would be smashed, at least for everyone in Britain.

The prospect filled him with a kind of vertigo. He might have broken the laws at every opportunity, but they had still molded him. The cage might not have left him crippled, but he’d be lying to himself if he denied that he’d been stunted.

He said, “Is that what happened, in your past? I ended up in some lifelong partnership?” As he spoke the words, his mouth went dry, and he was suddenly afraid that the answer would be yes. With Chris. The life he’d missed out on was a life of happiness with Chris.

“No.”

“Then what?” he pleaded. “What did I do? How did I live?” He caught himself, suddenly self-conscious, but added, “You can’t blame me for being curious.”

Helen said gently, “You don’t want to know what you can’t change. All of that is part of your own causal past now, as much as it is of mine.”

“If it’s part of my own history,” Robert countered, “don’t I deserve to know it? This man wasn’t me, but he brought you to me.”

Helen considered this. “You accept that he was someone else? Not someone whose actions you’re responsible for?”

“Of course.”

She said, “There was a trial, in 1952. For ‘Gross Indecency contrary to Section 11 of the Criminal Amendment Act of 1885.’ He wasn’t imprisoned, but the court ordered hormone treatments.”

“Hormone treatments?” Robert laughed. “What—testosterone, to make him more of a man?”

“No, estrogen. Which in men reduces the sex drive. There are side-effects, of course. Gynecomorphism, among other things.”

Robert felt physically sick. They’d chemically castrated him, with drugs that had made him sprout breasts. Of all the bizarre abuse to which he’d been subjected, nothing had been as horrifying as that.

Helen continued, “The treatment lasted six months, and the effects were all temporary. But two years later, he took his own life. It was never clear exactly why.”

Robert absorbed this in silence. He didn’t want to know anything more.

After a while, he said, “How do you bear it? Knowing that in some branch or other, every possible form of humiliation is being inflicted on someone?”

Helen said, “I don’t bear it. I change it. That’s why I’m here.”

Robert bowed his head. “I know. And I’m grateful that our histories collided. But how many histories don’t?” He struggled to find an example, though it was almost too painful to contemplate; since their first conversation, it was a topic he’d deliberately pushed to the back of his mind. “There’s not just an unchangeable Auschwitz in each of our pasts, there are an astronomical number of others—along with an astronomical number of things that are even worse.”

Helen said bluntly, “That’s not true.”

“What?” Robert looked up at her, startled.

She walked to the blackboard and erased it. “Auschwitz has happened, for both of us, and no one I’m aware of has ever prevented it—but that doesn’t mean that nobody stops it, anywhere.” She began sketching a network of fine lines on the blackboard. “You and I are having this conversation in countless microhistories—sequences of events where various different things happen with subatomic particles throughout the universe—but that’s irrelevant to us, we can’t tell those strands apart, so we might as well treat them all as one history.” She pressed the chalk down hard to make a thick streak that covered everything she’d drawn. “The quantum decoherence people call this ‘coarse graining.’ Summing over all these indistinguishable details is what gives rise to classical physics in the first place.

“Now, ‘the two of us’ would have first met in many perceivably different coarse-grained histories—and furthermore, you’ve since diverged by making different choices, and experiencing different external possibilities, after those events.” She sketched two intersecting ribbons of coarse-grained histories, and then showed each history diverging further.

“World War II and the Holocaust certainly happened in both of our pasts—but that’s no proof that the total is so vast that it might as well be infinite. Remember, what stops us successfully intervening is the fact that we’re reaching back to a point where some of the parallel interventions start to bite their own tail. So when we fail, it can’t be counted twice: it’s just confirming what we already know.”

Robert protested, “But what about all the versions of ’30s Europe that don’t happen to lie in either your past or mine? Just because we have no direct evidence for a Holocaust in those branches, that hardly makes it unlikely.”

Helen said, “Not unlikely per se, without intervention. But not fixed in stone either. We’ll keep trying, refining the technology, until we can reach branches where there’s no overlap with our own past in the ’30s. And there must be other, separate ribbons of intervention that happen in histories we can never even know about.”

Robert was elated. He’d imagined himself clinging to a rock of improbable good fortune in an infinite sea of suffering—struggling to pretend, for the sake of his own sanity, that the rock was all there was. But what lay around him was not inevitably worse; it was merely unknown. In time, he might even play a part in ensuring that every last tragedy was not repeated across billions of worlds.

He reexamined the diagram. “Hang on. Intervention doesn’t end divergence, though, does it? You reached us, a year ago, but in at least some of the histories spreading out from that moment, won’t we still have suffered all kinds of disasters, and reacted in all kinds of self-defeating ways?”

“Yes,” Helen conceded, “but fewer than you might think. If you merely listed every sequence of events that superficially appeared to have a non-zero probability, you’d end up with a staggering catalog of absurdist tragedies. But when you calculate everything more carefully, and take account of Planck-scale effects, it turns out to be nowhere near as bad. There are no coarse-grained histories where boulders assemble themselves out of dust and rain from the sky, or everyone in London or Madras goes mad and slaughters their children. Most macroscopic systems end up being quite robust—people included. Across histories, the range of natural disasters, human stupidity, and sheer bad luck isn’t overwhelmingly greater than the range you’re aware of from this history alone.”

Robert laughed. “And that’s not bad enough?”

“Oh, it is. But that’s the best thing about the form I’ve taken.”

“I’m sorry?”

Helen tipped her head and regarded him with an expression of disappointment. “You know, you’re still not as quick on your feet as I’d expected.”

Robert’s face burned, but then he realized what he’d missed, and his resentment-vanished.

“You don’t diverge? Your hardware is designed to end the process? Your environment, your surroundings, will still split you into different histories—but on a coarse-grained level, you don’t contribute to the process yourself?”

“That’s right.”

Robert was speechless. Even after a year, she could still toss him a hand grenade like this.

Helen said, “I can’t help living in many worlds; that’s beyond my control. But I do know that I’m one person. Faced with a choice that puts me on a knife-edge, I know I won’t split and take every path.”

Robert hugged himself, suddenly cold. “Like I do. Like I have. Like all of us poor creatures of flesh.”

Helen came and sat beside him. “Even that’s not irrevocable. Once you’ve taken this form—if that’s what you choose—you can meet your other selves, reverse some of the scatter. Give some a chance to undo what they’ve done.”

This time, Robert grasped her meaning at once. “Gather myself together? Make myself whole?”

Helen shrugged. “If it’s what you want. If you see it that way.”

He stared back at her, disoriented. Touching the bedrock of physics was one thing, but this possibility was too much to take in.

Someone knocked on the study door. The two of them exchanged wary glances, but it wasn’t Quint, back for more punishment. It was a porter bearing a telegram.

When the man had left, Robert opened the envelope.

“Bad news?” Helen asked.

He shook his head. “Not a death in the family, if that’s what you meant. It’s from John Hamilton. He’s challenging me to a debate. On the topic ‘Can A Machine Think?’ ”

“What, at some university function?”

“No. On the BBC. Four weeks from tomorrow.” He looked up. “Do you think I should do it?”

“Radio or television?”

Robert reread the message. “Television.”

Helen smiled. “Definitely. I’ll give you some tips.”

“On the subject?”

“No! That would be cheating.” She eyed him appraisingly. “You can start by throwing out your electric razor. Get rid of the permanent five o’clock shadow.”

Robert was hurt. “Some people find that quite attractive.”

Helen replied firmly, “Trust me on this.”

The BBC sent a car to take Robert down to London. Helen sat beside him in the back seat.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“Nothing that an hour of throwing up won’t cure.”

Hamilton had suggested a live broadcast, “to keep things interesting,” and the producer had agreed. Robert had never been on television; he’d taken part in a couple of radio discussions on the future of computing, back when the Mark I had first come into use, but even those had been taped.

Hamilton’s choice of topic had surprised him at first, but in retrospect it seemed quite shrewd. A debate on the proposition that “Modern Science is the Devil’s Work” would have brought howls of laughter from all but the most pious viewers, whereas the purely metaphorical claim that “Modern Science is a Faustian Pact” would have had the entire audience nodding sagely in agreement, while carrying no implications whatsoever. If you weren’t going to take the whole dire fairy tale literally, everything was “a Faustian Pact” in some sufficiently watered-down sense: everything had a potential downside, and this was as pointless to assert as it was easy to demonstrate.

Robert had met considerable incredulity, though, when he’d explained to journalists where his own research was leading. To date, the press had treated him as a kind of eccentric British Edison, churning out inventions of indisputable utility, and no one seemed to find it at all surprising or alarming that he was also, frankly, a bit of a loon. But Hamilton would have a chance to exploit, and reshape, that perception. If Robert insisted on defending his goal of creating machine intelligence, not as an amusing hobby that might have been chosen by a public relations firm to make him appear endearingly daft, but as both the ultimate vindication of materialist science and the logical endpoint of most of his life’s work, Hamilton could use a victory tonight to cast doubt on everything Robert had done, and everything he symbolized. By asking, not at all rhetorically, “Where will this all end?”, he was inviting Robert to step forward and hang himself with the answer.

The traffic was heavy for a Sunday evening, and they arrived at the Shepherd’s Bush studios with only fifteen minutes until the broadcast. Hamilton had been collected by a separate car, from his family home near Oxford. As they crossed the studio Robert spotted him, conversing intensely with a dark-haired young man.

He whispered to Helen, “Do you know who that is, with Hamilton?”

She followed his gaze, then smiled cryptically. Robert said, “What? Do you recognize him from somewhere?”

“Yes, but I’ll tell you later.”

As the make-up woman applied powder, Helen ran through her long list of rules again. “Don’t stare into the camera, or you’ll look like you’re peddling soap powder. But don’t avert your eyes. You don’t want to look shifty.”

The make-up woman whispered to Robert, “Everyone’s an expert.”

“Annoying, isn’t it?” he confided.

Michael Polanyi, an academic philosopher who was well-known to the public after presenting a series of radio talks, had agreed to moderate the debate. Polanyi popped into the make-up room, accompanied by the producer; they chatted with Robert for a couple of minutes, setting him at ease and reminding him of the procedure they’d be following.

They’d only just left him when the floor manager appeared. “We need you in the studio now, please, Professor.” Robert followed her, and Helen pursued him part of the way. “Breathe slowly and deeply,” she urged him.

“As if you’d know,” he snapped.

Robert shook hands with Hamilton then took his seat on one side of the podium. Hamilton’s young adviser had retreated into the shadows; Robert glanced back to see Helen watching from a similar position. It was like a duel: they both had seconds. The floor manager pointed out the studio monitor, and as Robert watched it was switched between the feeds from two cameras: a wide shot of the whole set, and a closer view of the podium, including the small blackboard on a stand beside it. He’d once asked Helen whether television had progressed to far greater levels of sophistication in her branch of the future, once the pioneering days were left behind, but the question had left her uncharacteristically tongue-tied.

The floor manager retreated behind the cameras, called for silence, then counted down from ten, mouthing the final numbers.

The broadcast began with an introduction from Polanyi: concise, witty, and non-partisan. Then Hamilton stepped up to the podium. Robert watched him directly while the wide-angle view was being transmitted, so as not to appear rude or distracted. He only turned to the monitor when he was no longer visible himself.

“Can a machine think?” Hamilton began. “My intuition tells me: no. My heart tells me: no. I’m sure that most of you feel the same way. But that’s not enough, is it? In this day and age, we aren’t allowed to rely on our hearts for anything. We need something scientific. We need some kind of proof.

“Some years ago, I took part in a debate at Oxford University. The issue then was not whether machines might behave like people, but whether people themselves might be mere machines. Materialists, you see, claim that we are all just a collection of purposeless atoms, colliding at random. Everything we do, everything we feel, everything we say, comes down to some sequence of events that might as well be the spinning of cogs, or the opening and closing of electrical relays.

“To me, this was self-evidently false. What point could there be, I argued, in even conversing with a materialist? By his own admission, the words that came out of his mouth would be the result of nothing but a mindless, mechanical process! By his own theory, he could have no reason to think that those words would be the truth! Only believers in a transcendent human soul could claim any interest in the truth.”

Hamilton nodded slowly, a penitent’s gesture. “I was wrong, and I was put in my place. This might be self-evident to me, and it might be self-evident to you, but it’s certainly not what philosophers call an ‘analytical truth’: it’s not actually a nonsense, a contradiction in terms, to believe that we are mere machines. There might, there just might, be some reason why the words that emerge from a materialist’s mouth are truthful, despite their origins lying entirely in unthinking matter.

“There might.” Hamilton smiled wistfully. “I had to concede that possibility, because I only had my instinct, my gut feeling, to tell me otherwise.

“But the reason I only had my instinct to guide me was because I’d failed to learn of an event that had taken place many years before. A discovery made in 1930, by an Austrian mathematician named Kurt Gödel.”

Robert felt a shiver of excitement run down his spine. He’d been afraid that the whole contest would degenerate into theology, with Hamilton invoking Aquinas all night—or Aristotle, at best. But it looked as if his mysterious adviser had dragged him into the twentieth century, and they were going to have a chance to debate the real issues after all.

“What is it that we know Professor Stoney’s computers can do, and do well?” Hamilton continued. “Arithmetic! In a fraction of a second, they can add up a million numbers. Once we’ve told them, very precisely, what calculations to perform, they’ll complete them in the blink of an eye—even if those calculations would take you or me a lifetime.

“But do these machines understand what it is they’re doing? Professor Stoney says, ‘Not yet. Not right now. Give them time. Rome wasn’t built in a day.’ ” Hamilton nodded thoughtfully. “Perhaps that’s fair. His computers are only a few years old. They’re just babies. Why should they understand anything, so soon?

“But let’s stop and think about this a bit more carefully. A computer, as it stands today, is simply a machine that does arithmetic, and Professor Stoney isn’t proposing that they’re going to sprout new kinds of brains all on their own. Nor is he proposing giving them anything really new. He can already let them look at the world with television cameras, turning the pictures into a stream of numbers describing the brightness of different points on the screen on which the computer can then perform arithmetic. He can already let them speak to us with a special kind of loudspeaker, to which the computer feeds a stream of numbers to describe how loud the sound should be, a stream of numbers produced by more arithmetic.

“So the world can come into the computer, as numbers, and words can emerge, as numbers too. All Professor Stoney hopes to add to his computers is a ‘clever’ way to do the arithmetic that takes the first set of numbers and churns out the second. It’s that ‘clever arithmetic,’ he tells us, that will make these machines think.”

Hamilton folded his arms and paused for a moment. “What are we to make of this? Can doing arithmetic, and nothing more, be enough to let a machine understand anything? My instinct certainly tells me no, but who am I that you should trust my instinct?

“So, let’s narrow down the question of understanding, and to be scrupulously fair, let’s put it in the most favorable light possible for Professor Stoney. If there’s one thing a computer ought to be able to understand—as well as us, if not better—it’s arithmetic itself. If a computer could think at all, it would surely be able to grasp the nature of its own best talent.

“The question, then, comes down to this: can you describe all of arithmetic, using nothing but arithmetic? Thirty years ago—long before Professor Stoney and his computers came along—Professor Gödel asked himself exactly that question.

“Now, you might be wondering how anyone could even begin to describe the rules of arithmetic, using nothing but arithmetic itself.” Hamilton turned to the blackboard, picked up the chalk, and wrote two lines:

If x + z = y + z
then x = y

“This is an important rule, but it’s written in symbols, not numbers, because it has to be true for every number, every x, y and z. But Professor Gödel had a clever idea: why not use a code, like spies use, where every symbol is assigned a number?” Hamilton wrote:

The code for “a” is 1.

The code for “b” is 2.

“And so on. You can have a code for every letter of the alphabet, and for all the other symbols needed for arithmetic: plus signs, equals signs, that kind of thing. Telegrams are sent this way every day, with a code called the Baudot code, so there’s really nothing strange or sinister about it.

“All the rules of arithmetic that we learned at school can be written with a carefully chosen set of symbols, which can then be translated into numbers. Every question as to what does or does not follow from those rules can then be seen anew, as a question about numbers. If this line follows from this one.” Hamilton indicated the two lines of the cancellation rule, “we can see it in the relationship between their code numbers. We can judge each inference, and declare it valid or not, purely by doing arithmetic.

“So, given any proposition at all about arithmetic—such as the claim that ‘there are infinitely many prime numbers’—we can restate the notion that we have a proof for that claim in terms of code numbers. If the code number for our claim is x, we can say ‘There is a number p, ending with the code number x, that passes our test for being the code number of a valid proof.’ ”

Hamilton took a visible breath.

“In 1930, Professor Gödel used this scheme to do something rather ingenious.” He wrote on the blackboard:

There DOES NOT EXIST a number p meeting the following condition: p is the code number of a valid proof of this claim.

“Here is a claim about arithmetic, about numbers. It has to be either true or false. So let’s start by supposing that it happens to be true. Then there is no number p that is the code number for a proof of this claim. So this is a true statement about arithmetic, but it can’t be proved merely by doing arithmetic!”

Hamilton smiled. “If you don’t catch on immediately, don’t worry; when I first heard this argument from a young friend of mine, it took a while for the meaning to sink in. But remember: the only hope a computer has for understanding anything is by doing arithmetic, and we’ve just found a statement that cannot be proved with mere arithmetic.

“Is this statement really true, though? We mustn’t jump to conclusions, we mustn’t damn the machines too hastily. Suppose this claim is false! Since it claims there is no number p that is the code number of its own proof, to be false there would have to be such a number, after all. And that number would encode the ‘proof’ of an acknowledged falsehood!”

Hamilton spread his arms triumphantly. “You and I, like every schoolboy, know that you can’t prove a falsehood from sound premises and if the premises of arithmetic aren’t sound, what is? So we know, as a matter of certainty, that this statement is true.

“Professor Gödel was the first to see this, but with a little help and perseverance, any educated person can follow in his footsteps. A machine could never do that. We might divulge to a machine our own knowledge of this fact, offering it as something to be taken on trust, but the machine could neither stumble on this truth for itself, nor truly comprehend it when we offered it as a gift.

“You and I understand arithmetic, in a way that no electronic calculator ever will. What hope has a machine, then, of moving beyond its own most favorable milieu and comprehending any wider truth?

“None at all, ladies and gentlemen. Though this detour into mathematics might have seemed arcane to you, it has served a very down-to-Earth purpose. It has proved—beyond refutation by even the most ardent materialist or the most pedantic philosopher—what we common folk knew all along: no machine will ever think.”

Hamilton took his seat. For a moment, Robert was simply exhilarated; coached or not, Hamilton had grasped the essential features of the incompleteness proof, and presented them to a lay audience. What might have been a night of shadow-boxing—with no blows connecting, and nothing for the audience to judge but two solo performances in separate arenas—had turned into a genuine clash of ideas.

As Polanyi introduced him and he walked to the podium, Robert realized that his usual shyness and self-consciousness had evaporated. He was filled with an altogether different kind of tension: he sensed more acutely than ever what was at stake.

When he reached the podium, he adopted the posture of someone about to begin a prepared speech, but then he caught himself, as if he’d forgotten something. “Bear with me for a moment.” He walked around to the far side of the blackboard and quickly wrote a few words on it, upside-down. Then he resumed his place.

“Can a machine think? Professor Hamilton would like us to believe that he’s settled the issue once and for all, by coming up with a statement that we know is true, but a particular machine—programmed to explore the theorems of arithmetic in a certain rigid way—would never be able to produce. Well, we all have our limitations.” He flipped the blackboard over to reveal what he’d written on the opposite side:

If Robert Stoney speaks these words, he will NOT be telling the truth.

He waited a few beats, then continued.

“What I’d like to explore, though, is not so much a question of limitations, as of opportunities. How exactly is it that we’ve all ended up with this mysterious ability to know that Gödel’s statement is true? Where does this advantage, this great insight, come from? From our souls? From some immaterial entity that no machine could ever possess? Is that the only possible source, the only conceivable explanation? Or might it come from something a little less ethereal?

“As Professor Hamilton explained, we believe Gödel’s statement is true because we trust the rules of arithmetic not to lead us into contradictions and falsehoods. But where does that trust come from? How does it arise?”

Robert turned the blackboard back to Hamilton’s side, and pointed to the cancellation rule. “If x plus z equals y plus z, then x equals y. Why is this so reasonable? We might not learn to put it quite like this until we’re in our teens, but if you showed a young child two boxes——without revealing their contents——added an equal number of shells, or stones, or pieces of fruit to both, and then let the child look inside to see that each box now contained the same number of items, it wouldn’t take any formal education for the child to understand that the two boxes must have held the same number of things to begin with.

“The child knows, we all know, how a certain kind of object behaves. Our lives are steeped in direct experience of whole numbers: whole numbers of coins, stamps, pebbles, birds, cats, sheep, buses. If I tried to persuade a six-year-old that I could put three stones in a box, remove one of them, and be left with four, he’d simply laugh at me. Why? It’s not merely that he’s sure to have taken one thing away from three to get two, on many prior occasions. Even a child understands that some things that appear reliable will eventually fail: a toy that works perfectly, day after day, for a month or a year, can still break. But not arithmetic, not taking one from three. He can’t even picture that failing. Once you’ve lived in the world, once you’ve seen how it works, the failure of arithmetic becomes unimaginable.

“Professor Hamilton suggests that this is down to our souls. But what would he say about a child reared in a world of water and mist, never in the company of more than one person at a time, never taught to count on his fingers and toes. I doubt that such a child would possess the same certainty that you and I have, as to the impossibility of arithmetic ever leading him astray. To banish whole numbers entirely from his world would require very strange surroundings, and a level of deprivation amounting to cruelty, but would that be enough to rob a child of his soul?

“A computer, programmed to pursue arithmetic as Professor Hamilton has described, is subject to far more deprivation than that child. If I’d been raised with my hands and feet tied, my head in a sack, and someone shouting orders at me, I doubt that I’d have much grasp of reality—and I’d still be better prepared for the task than such a computer. It’s a great mercy that a machine treated that way wouldn’t be able to think: if it could, the shackles we’d placed upon it would be criminally oppressive.

“But that’s hardly the fault of the computer, or a revelation of some irreparable flaw in its nature. If we want to judge the potential of our machines with any degree of honesty, we have to play fair with them, not saddle them with restrictions that we’d never dream of imposing on ourselves. There really is no point comparing an eagle with a spanner, or a gazelle with a washing machine: it’s our jets that fly and our cars that run, albeit in quite different ways than any animal.

“Thought is sure to be far harder to achieve than those other skills, and to do so we might need to mimic the natural world far more closely. But I believe that once a machine is endowed with facilities resembling the inborn tools for learning that we all have as our birthright, and is set free to learn the way a child learns, through experience, observation, trial and error, hunches and failures—instead of being handed a list of instructions that it has no choice but to obey—we will finally be in a position to compare like with like.

“When that happens, and we can meet and talk and argue with these machines—about arithmetic, or any other topic—there’ll be no need to take the word of Professor Gödel; or Professor Hamilton, or myself, for anything. We’ll invite them down to the local pub, and interrogate them in person. And if we play fair with them, we’ll use the same experience and judgment we use with any friend, or guest, or stranger, to decide for ourselves whether or not they can think.”

The BBC put on a lavish assortment of wine and cheese in a small room off the studio. Robert ended up in a heated argument with Polanyi, who revealed himself to be firmly on the negative side, while Helen flirted shamelessly with Hamilton’s young friend, who turned out to have a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from Cambridge; he must have completed the degree just before Robert had come back from Manchester. After exchanging some polite formalities with Hamilton, Robert kept his distance, sensing that any further contact would not be welcome.

An hour later, though, after getting lost in the maze of corridors on his way back from the toilets, Robert came across Hamilton sitting alone in the studio, weeping.

He almost backed away in silence, but Hamilton looked up and saw him. With their eyes locked, it was impossible to retreat.

Robert said, “It’s your wife?” He’d heard that she’d been seriously ill, but the gossip had included a miraculous recovery. Some friend of the family had lain hands on her a year ago, and she’d gone into remission.

Hamilton said, “She’s dying.”

Robert approached and sat beside him. “From what?”

“Breast cancer. It’s spread throughout her body. Into her bones, into her lungs, into her liver.” He sobbed again, a helpless spasm, then caught himself angrily. “Suffering is the chisel God uses to shape us. What kind of idiot comes up with a line like that?”

Robert said, “I’ll talk to a friend of mine, an oncologist at Guy’s Hospital. He’s doing a trial of a new genetic treatment.”

Hamilton stared at him. “One of your miracle cures?”

“No, no. I mean, only very indirectly.”

Hamilton said angrily, “She won’t take your poison.”

Robert almost snapped back: She won’t? Or you won’t let her? But it was an unfair question. In some marriages, the lines blurred. It was not for him to judge the way the two of them faced this together.

“They go away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before.” Hamilton spoke the words like a defiant incantation, a declaration of faith that would ward off temptation, whether or not he entirely believed it.

Robert was silent for a while, then he said, “I lost someone close to me, when I was a boy. And I thought the same thing. I thought he was still with me, for a long time afterward. Guiding me. Encouraging me.” It was hard to get the words out; he hadn’t spoken about this to anyone for almost thirty years. “I dreamed up a whole theory to explain it, in which ‘souls’ used quantum uncertainty to control the body during life, and communicate with the living after death, without breaking any laws of physics. The kind of thing every science-minded seventeen-year-old probably stumbles on, and takes seriously for a couple of weeks, before realizing how nonsensical it is. But I had a good reason not to see the flaws, so I clung to it for almost two years. Because I missed him so much, it took me that long to understand what I was doing, how I was deceiving myself.”

Hamilton said pointedly, “If you’d not tried to explain it, you might never have lost him. He might still be with you now.”

Robert thought about this. “I’m glad he’s not, though. It wouldn’t be fair on either of us.”

Hamilton shuddered. “Then you can’t have loved him very much, can you?” He put his head in his arms. “Just fuck off, now, will you.”

Robert said, “What exactly would it take, to prove to you that I’m not in league with the devil?”

Hamilton turned red eyes on him and announced triumphantly, “Nothing will do that! I saw what happened to Quint’s gun!”

Robert sighed. “That was a conjuring trick. Stage magic, not black magic.”

“Oh yes? Show me how it’s done, then. Teach me how to do it, so I can impress my friends.”

“It’s rather technical. It would take all night.” Hamilton laughed humourlessly. “You can’t deceive me. I saw through you from the start.”

“Do you think X-rays are Satanic? Penicillin?”

“Don’t treat me like a fool. There’s no comparison.”

“Why not? Everything I’ve helped develop is part of the same continuum. I’ve read some of your writing on medieval culture, and you’re always berating modern commentators for presenting it as unsophisticated. No one really thought the Earth was flat. No one really treated every novelty as witchcraft. So why view any of my work any differently than a fourteenth-century man would view twentieth-century medicine?”

Hamilton replied, “If a fourteenth-century man was suddenly faced with twentieth-century medicine, don’t you think he’d be entitled to wonder how it had been revealed to his contemporaries?”

Robert shifted uneasily on his chair. Helen hadn’t sworn him to secrecy, but he’d agreed with her view: it was better to wait, to spread the knowledge that would ground an understanding of what had happened, before revealing any details of the contact between branches.

But this man’s wife was dying, needlessly. And Robert was tired of keeping secrets. Some wars required it, but others were better won with honesty.

He said, “I know you hate H.G. Wells. But what if he was right, about one little thing?”

Robert told him everything, glossing over the technicalities but leaving out nothing substantial. Hamilton listened without interrupting, gripped by a kind of unwilling fascination. His expression shifted from hostile to incredulous, but there were also hints of begrudging amazement, as if he could at least appreciate some of the beauty and complexity of the picture Robert was painting.

But when Robert had finished, Hamilton said merely, “You’re a grand liar, Stoney. But what else should I expect, from the King of Lies?”

Robert was in a somber mood on the drive back to Cambridge. The encounter with Hamilton had depressed him, and the question of who’d swayed the nation in the debate seemed remote and abstract in comparison.

Helen had taken a house in the suburbs, rather than inviting scandal by cohabiting with him, though her frequent visits to his rooms seemed to have had almost the same effect. Robert walked her to the door.

“I think it went well, don’t you?” she said.

“I suppose so.”

“I’m leaving tonight,” she added casually. “This is goodbye.”

“What?” Robert was staggered. “Everything’s still up in the air! I still need you!”

She shook her head. “You have all the tools you need, all the clues. And plenty of local allies. There’s nothing truly urgent I could tell you, now, that you couldn’t find out just as quickly on your own.”

Robert pleaded with her, but her mind was made up. The driver beeped the horn; Robert gestured to him impatiently.

“You know, my breath’s frosting visibly,” he said, “and you’re producing nothing. You really ought to be more careful.”

She laughed. “It’s a bit late to worry about that.”

“Where will you go? Back home? Or off to twist another branch?”

“Another branch. But there’s something I’m planning to do on the way.”

“What’s that?”

“Do you remember once, you wrote about an Oracle? A machine that could solve the halting problem?”

“Of course.” Given a device that could tell you in advance whether a given computer program would halt, or go on running forever, you’d be able to prove or disprove any theorem whatsoever about the integers: the Goldbach conjecture, Fermat’s Last Theorem, anything. You’d simply show this “Oracle” a program that would loop through all the integers, testing every possible set of values and only halting if it came to a set that violated the conjecture. You’d never need to run the program itself; the Oracle’s verdict on whether or not it halted would be enough.

Such a device might or might not be possible, but Robert had proved more than twenty years before that no ordinary computer, however ingeniously programmed, would suffice. If program H could always tell you in a finite time whether or not program X would halt, you could tack on a small addition to H to create program Z, which perversely and deliberately went into an infinite loop whenever it examined a program that halted. If Z examined itself, it would either halt eventually, or run forever. But either possibility contradicted the alleged powers of program H: if Z actually ran forever, it would be because H had claimed that it wouldn’t, and vice versa. Program H could not exist.

“Time travel,” Helen said, “gives me a chance to become an Oracle. There’s a way to exploit the inability to change your own past, a way to squeeze an infinite number of time-like paths—none of them closed, but some of them arbitrarily near to it—into a finite physical system. Once you do that, you can solve the halting problem.”

“How?” Robert’s mind was racing. “And once you’ve done that what about higher cardinalities? An Oracle for Oracles, able to test conjectures about the real numbers?”

Helen smiled enigmatically. “The first problem should only take you forty or fifty years to solve. As for the rest,” she pulled away from him, moving into the darkness of the hallway, “what makes you think I know the answer myself?” She blew him a kiss, then vanished from sight.

Robert took a step toward her, but the hallway was empty.

He walked back to the car, sad and exalted, his heart pounding.

The driver asked wearily, “Where to now, sir?”

Robert said, “Further up, and further in.”

4

The night after the funeral, Jack paced the house until three A.M. When would it be bearable? When? She’d shown more strength and courage, dying, than he felt within himself right now. But she’d share it with him, in the weeks to come. She’d share it with them all.

In bed, in the darkness, he tried to sense her presence around him. But it was forced, it was premature. It was one thing to have faith that she was watching over him, but quite another to expect to be spared every trace of grief, every trace of pain.

He waited for sleep. He needed to get some rest before dawn, or how would he face her children in the morning?

Gradually, he became aware of someone standing in the darkness at the foot of the bed. As he examined and reexamined the shadows, he formed a clear image of the apparition’s face.

It was his own. Younger, happier, surer of himself.

Jack sat up. “What do you want?”

“I want you to come with me.” The figure approached; Jack recoiled, and it halted.

“Come with you, where?” Jack demanded.

“To a place where she’s waiting.”

Jack shook his head. “No. I don’t believe you. She said she’d come for me herself, when it was time. She said she’d guide me.”

“She didn’t understand, then,” the apparition insisted gently. “She didn’t know I could fetch you myself. Do you think I’d send her in my place? Do you think I’d shirk the task?”

Jack searched the smiling, supplicatory face. “Who are you?” His own soul, in Heaven, remade? Was this a gift God offered everyone? To meet, before death, the very thing you would become—if you so chose? So that even this would be an act of free will?

The apparition said, “Stoney persuaded me to let his friend treat Joyce. We lived on, together. More than a century has passed. And now we want you to join us.”

Jack choked with horror. “No! This is a trick! You’re the Devil!”

The thing replied mildly, “There is no Devil. And no God, either. Just people. But I promise you: people with the powers of gods are kinder than any god we ever imagined.”

Jack covered his face. “Leave me be.” He whispered fervent prayers, and waited. It was a test, a moment of vulnerability, but God wouldn’t leave him naked like this, face-to-face with the Enemy, for longer than he could endure.

He uncovered his face. The thing was still with him.

It said, “Do you remember, when your faith came to you? The sense of a shield around you melting away, like armor you’d worn to keep God at bay?”

“Yes.” Jack acknowledged the truth defiantly; he wasn’t frightened that this abomination could see into his past, into his heart.

“That took strength: to admit that you needed God. But it takes the same kind of strength, again, to understand that some needs can never be met. I can’t promise you Heaven. We have no disease, we have no war, we have no poverty. But we have to find our own love, our own goodness. There is no final word of comfort. We only have each other.”

Jack didn’t reply; this blasphemous fantasy wasn’t even worth challenging. He said, “I know you’re lying. Do you really imagine that I’d leave the boys alone here?”

“They’d go back to America, back to their father. How many years do you think you’d have with them, if you stay? They’ve already lost their mother. It would be easier for them now, a single clean break.”

Jack shouted angrily, “Get out of my house!”

The thing came closer, and sat on the bed. It put a hand on his shoulder. Jack sobbed, “Help me!” But he didn’t know whose aid he was invoking any more.

“Do you remember the scene in The Seat of Oak? When the Harpy traps everyone in her cave underground, and tries to convince them that there is no Nescia? Only this drab underworld is real, she tells them. Everything else they think they’ve seen was just make believe.” Jack’s own young face smiled nostalgically. “And we had dear old Shrugweight reply: he didn’t think much of this so-called ‘real world’ of hers. And even if she was right, since four little children could make up a better world, he’d rather go on pretending that their imaginary one was real.

“But we had it all upside down! The real world is richer, and stranger, and more beautiful than anything ever imagined. Milton, Dante, John the Divine are the ones who trapped you in a drab, gray underworld. That’s where you are now. But if you give me your hand, I can pull you out.”

Jack’s chest was bursting. He couldn’t lose his faith. He’d kept it through worse than this. He’d kept it through every torture and indignity God had inflicted on his wife’s frail body. No one could take it from him now. He crooned to himself, “In my time of trouble, He will find me.”

The cool hand tightened its grip on his shoulder. “You can be with her, now. Just say the word, and you will become a part of me. I will take you inside me, and you will see through my eyes, and we will travel back to the world where she still lives.”

Jack wept openly. “Leave me in peace! Just leave me to mourn her!”

The thing nodded sadly. “If that’s what you want.”

“I do! Go!”

“When I’m sure.”

Suddenly, Jack thought back to the long rant Stoney had delivered in the studio. Every choice went every way, Stoney had claimed. No decision could ever be final.

“Now I know you’re lying!” he shouted triumphantly. “If you believed everything Stoney told you, how could my choice ever mean a thing? I would always say yes to you, and I would always say no! It would all be the same!”

The apparition replied solemnly, “While I’m here with you, touching you, you can’t be divided. Your choice will count.”

Jack wiped his eyes, and gazed into its face. It seemed to believe every word it was speaking. What if this truly was his metaphysical twin, speaking as honestly as he could, and not merely the Devil in a mask? Perhaps there was a grain of truth in Stoney’s awful vision; perhaps this was another version of himself, a living person who honestly believed that the two of them shared a history.

Then it was a visitor sent by God, to humble him. To teach him compassion toward Stoney. To show Jack that he too, with a little less faith, and a little more pride, might have been damned forever.

Jack stretched out a hand and touched the face of this poor lost soul. There, but for the grace of God, go I.

He said, “I’ve made my choice. Now leave me.”

Author’s note: Where the lives of the fictional characters of this story parallel those of real historical figures, I’ve drawn on biographies by Andrew Hodges and A.N. Wilson. The self-dual formulation of general relativity was discovered by Abhay Ashtekar in 1986, and has since led to ground-breaking developments in quantum gravity, but the implications drawn from it here are fanciful.

RADIANT GREEN STAR

Lucius Shepard

Several months before my thirteenth birthday, my mother visited me in a dream and explained why she had sent me to live with the circus seven years before. The dream was a Mitsubishi, I believe, its style that of the Moonflower series of biochips, which set the standard for pornography in those days; it had been programmed to activate once my testosterone production reached a certain level, and it featured a voluptuous Asian woman to whose body my mother had apparently grafted the image of her own face. I imagined she must have been in a desperate hurry and thus forced to use whatever materials fell to hand; yet, taking into account the Machiavellian intricacies of the family history, I later came to think that her decision to alter a pornographic chip might be intentional, designed to provoke Oedipal conflicts that would imbue her message with a heightened urgency.

In the dream, my mother told me that when I was eighteen I would come into the trust created by my maternal grandfather, a fortune that would make me the wealthiest man in Viet Nam. Were I to remain in her care, she feared my father would eventually coerce me into assigning control of the trust to him, whereupon he would have me killed. Sending me to live with her old friend Vang Ky was the one means she had of guaranteeing my safety. If all went as planned, I would have several years to consider whether it was in my best interests to claim the trust or to forswear it and continue my life in secure anonymity. She had faith that Vang would educate me in a fashion that would prepare me to arrive at the proper decision.

Needless to say, I woke from the dream in tears. Vang had informed me not long after my arrival at his door that my mother was dead, and that my father was likely responsible for her death; but this fresh evidence of his perfidy, and of her courage and sweetness, mingled though it was with the confusions of intense eroticism, renewed my bitterness and sharpened my sense of loss. I sat the rest of the night with only the eerie music of tree frogs to distract me from despair, which roiled about in my brain as if it were a species of sluggish life both separate from and inimical to my own.

The next morning, I sought out Vang and told him of the dream and asked what I should do. He was sitting at the desk in the tiny cluttered trailer that served as his home and office, going over the accounts: a frail man in his late sixties with close-cropped gray hair, dressed in a white open-collared shirt and green cotton trousers. He had a long face—especially long from cheekbones to jaw—and an almost feminine delicacy of feature, a combination of characteristics that lent him a sly, witchy look; but though he was capable of slyness, and though at times I suspected him of possessing supernatural powers, at least as regards his ability to ferret out my misdeeds, I perceived him at the time to be an inwardly directed soul who felt misused by the world and whose only interests, apart from the circus, were a love of books and calligraphy. He would occasionally take a pipe of opium, but was otherwise devoid of vices, and it strikes me now that while he had told me of his family and his career in government (he said he still maintained those connections), of a life replete with joys and passionate errors, he was now in the process of putting all that behind him and withdrawing from the world of the senses.

“You must study the situation,” he said, shifting in his chair, a movement that shook the wall behind him, disturbing the leaflets stacked in the cabinet above his head and causing one to sail down toward the desk; he batted it away, and for an instant it floated in the air before me, as if held by the hand of a spirit, a detailed pastel rendering of a magnificent tent—a thousand times more magnificent than the one in which we performed—and a hand-lettered legend proclaiming the imminent arrival of the Radiant Green Star Circus.

“You must learn everything possible about your father and his associates,” he went on. “Thus you will uncover his weaknesses and define his strengths. But first and foremost, you must continue to live. The man you become will determine how best to use the knowledge you have gained, and you mustn’t allow the pursuit of your studies to rise to the level of obsession, or else his judgment will be clouded. Of course, this is easier to do in theory than in practice. But if you set about it in a measured way, you will succeed.”

I asked how I should go about seeking the necessary information, and he gestured with his pen at another cabinet, one with a glass front containing scrapbooks and bundles of computer paper; beneath it, a marmalade cat was asleep atop a broken radio, which—along with framed photographs of his wife, daughter, and grandson, all killed, he’d told me, in an airline accident years before—rested on a chest of drawers.

“Start there,” he said. “When you are done with those, my friends in the government will provide us with your father’s financial records and other materials.”

I took a cautious step toward the cabinet—stacks of magazines and newspapers and file boxes made the floor of the trailer difficult to negotiate—but Vang held up a hand to restrain me. “First,” he said, “you must live. We will put aside a few hours each day for you to study, but before all else you are a member of my troupe. Do your chores. Afterward we will sit down together and make a schedule.”

On the desk, in addition to his computer, were a cup of coffee topped with a mixture of sugar and egg, and a plastic dish bearing several slices of melon. He offered me a slice and sat with his hands steepled on his stomach, watching me eat. “Would you like time alone to honor your mother?” he asked. “I suppose we can manage without you for a morning.”

“Not now,” I told him. “Later, though . . .”

I finished the melon, laid the rind on his plate, and turned to the door, but he called me back.

“Philip,” he said, “I cannot remedy the past, but I can assure you to a degree as to the future. I have made you my heir. One day the circus will be yours. Everything I own will be yours.”

I peered at him, not quite certain that he meant what he said, even though his words had been plain.

“It may not seem a grand gift,” he said. “But perhaps you will discover that it is more than it appears.”

I thanked him effusively, but he grimaced and waved me to silence—he was not comfortable with displays of affection. Once again he told me to see to my chores.

“Attend to the major as soon as you’re able,” he said. “He had a difficult night. I know he would be grateful for your company.”

Radiant Green Star was not a circus in the tradition of the spectacular traveling shows of the previous century. During my tenure, we never had more than eight performers and only a handful of exhibits, exotics that had been genetically altered in some fashion: a pair of miniature tigers with hands instead of paws, a monkey with a vocabulary of thirty-seven words, and the like. The entertainments we presented were unsophisticated; we could not compete with those available in Hanoi or Hue or Saigon, or, for that matter, those accessible in the villages. But the villagers perceived us as a link to a past they revered, and found in the crude charm of our performances a sop to their nostalgia—it was as if we carried the past with us, and we played to that illusion, keeping mainly to rural places that appeared on the surface to be part of another century. Even when the opportunity arose, Vang refused to play anywhere near large population centers because—he said—of the exorbitant bribes and licensing fees demanded by officials in such areas. Thus for the first eighteen years of my life, I did not venture into a city, and I came to know my country much as a tourist might, driving ceaselessly through it, isolated within the troupe. We traversed the north and central portions of Viet Nam in three battered methane-powered trucks, one of which towed Vang’s trailer, and erected our tents in pastures and school yards and soccer fields, rarely staying anywhere longer than a few nights. On occasion, to accommodate a private celebration sponsored by a wealthy family, we would join forces with another troupe; but Vang was reluctant to participate in such events, because being surrounded by so many people caused our featured attraction to become agitated, thus imperiling his fragile health.

Even today the major remains a mystery to me. I have no idea if he was who he claimed to be; nor, I think, did he know—his statements concerning identity were usually vague and muddled, and the only point about which he was firm was that he had been orphaned as a young boy, raised by an uncle and aunt, and, being unmarried, was the last of his line. Further, it’s unclear whether his claims were the product of actual memory, delusion, or implantation. For the benefit of our audiences, we let them stand as truth, and billed him as Major Martin Boyette, the last surviving POW of the American War, now well over a hundred years old and horribly disfigured, both conditions the result of experiments in genetic manipulation by means of viruses—this the opinion of a Hanoi physician who treated the major during a bout of illness. Since such unregulated experiments were performed with immoderate frequency throughout Southeast Asia after the turn of the century, it was not an unreasonable conclusion. Major Boyette himself had no recollection of the process that had rendered him so monstrous and—if one were to believe him—so long-lived.

We were camped that day near the village of Cam Lo, and the tent where the major was quartered had been set up at the edge of the jungle. He liked the jungle, liked its noise and shadow, the sense of enclosure it provided—he dreaded the prospect of being out in the open, so much so that whenever we escorted him to the main tent, we would walk with him, holding umbrellas to prevent him from seeing the sky and to shield him from the sight of god and man. But once inside the main tent, as if the formal structure of a performance neutralized his aversion to space and scrutiny, he showed himself pridefully, walking close to the bleachers, causing children to shy away and women to cover their eyes. His skin hung from his flesh in voluminous black folds (he was African-American), and when he raised his arms, the folds beneath them spread like the wings of a bat; his face, half-hidden by a layering of what appeared to be leather shawls, was the sort of uncanny face one might see emerging from a whorled pattern of bark, roughly human in form, yet animated by a force that seems hotter than the human soul, less self-aware. Bits of phosphorescence drifted in the darks of his eyes. His only clothing was a ragged gray shift, and he hobbled along with the aid of a staff cut from a sapling papaya—he might have been a prophet escaped after a term in hell, charred and magical and full of doom. But when he began to speak, relating stories from the American War, stories of ill-fated Viet Cong heroes and the supernatural forces whose aid they enlisted, all told in a deep rasping voice, his air of suffering and menace evaporated, and his ugliness became an intrinsic article of his power, as though he were a poet who had sacrificed superficial glamour for the ability to express more eloquently the beauty within. The audiences were won over, their alarm transformed to delight, and they saluted him with enthusiastic applause . . . but they never saw him as I did that morning: a decrepit hulk given to senile maundering and moments of bright terror when startled by a sound from outside the tent. Sitting in his own filth, too weak or too uncaring to move.

When I entered the tent, screwing up my face against the stench, he tucked his head into his shoulder and tried to shroud himself in the fetid folds of his skin. I talked softly, gentling him as I might a frightened animal, in order to persuade him to stand. Once he had heaved up to his feet, I bathed him, sloshing buckets of water over his convulsed surfaces; when at length I was satisfied that I’d done my best, I hauled in freshly cut boughs and made him a clean place to sit. Unsteadily, he lowered himself onto the boughs and started to eat from the bowl of rice and vegetables I had brought for his breakfast, using his fingers to mold bits of food into a ball and inserting it deep into his mouth—he often had difficulty swallowing.

“Is it good?” I asked. He made a growly noise of affirmation. In the half-dark, I could see the odd points of brilliance in his eyes.

I hated taking care of the major (this may have been the reason Vang put me in charge of him). His physical state repelled me, and though the American War had long since ceased to be a burning issue, I resented his purported historical reality—being half American, half Vietnamese, I felt doubly afflicted by the era he represented. But that morning, perhaps because my mother’s message had inoculated me against my usual prejudices, he fascinated me. It was like watching a mythological creature feed, a chimera or a manticore, and I thought I perceived in him the soul of the inspired storyteller, the luminous half-inch of being that still burned behind the corroded ruin of his face.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked.

He swallowed and gazed at me with those haunted foxfire eyes. I repeated the question.

“Philip,” he said tonelessly, giving equal value to both syllables, as if the name were a word he’d been taught but did not understand.

I wondered if he was—as Vang surmised—an ordinary man transformed into a monster, pumped full of glorious tales and false memories, all as a punishment for some unguessable crime or merely on a cruel whim. Or might he actually be who he claimed? A freak of history, a messenger from another time whose stories contained some core truth, just as the biochip had contained my mother’s truth? All I knew for certain was that Vang had bought him from another circus, and that his previous owner had found him living in the jungle in the province of Quan Tri, kept alive by the charity of people from a nearby village who considered him the manifestation of a spirit.

Once he had finished his rice, I asked him to tell me about the war, and he launched into one of his mystical tales; but I stopped him, saying, “Tell me about the real war. The war you fought in.”

He fell silent, and when at last he spoke, it was not in the resonant tones with which he entertained our audiences, but in an effortful whisper.

“We came to the firebase in . . . company strength. Tenth of May. Nineteen sixty-seven. The engineers had just finished construction and . . . and . . . there was still . . .” He paused to catch his breath. “The base was near the Laotian border. Overlooking a defoliated rubber plantation. Nothing but bare red earth in front of us . . . and wire. But at our rear . . . the jungle . . . it was too close. They brought in artillery to clear it. Lowered the batteries to full declension. The trees all toppled in the same direction . . . as if they’d been pushed down by the sweep . . . of an invisible hand.”

His delivery, though still labored, grew less halting, and he made feeble gestures to illustrate the tale, movements that produced a faint slithering as folds of his skin rubbed together; the flickerings in his pupils grew more and more pronounced, and I half-believed his eyes were openings onto a battlefield at night, a place removed from us by miles and time.

“Because of the red dirt, the base was designated Firebase Ruby. But the dirt wasn’t the color of rubies, it was the red of drying blood. For months we held the position with only token resistance. We’d expected serious opposition, and it was strange to sit there day after day with nothing to do except send out routine patrols. I tried to maintain discipline, but it was an impossible task. Everyone malingered. Drug use was rampant. If I’d gone by the book I could have brought charges against every man on the base. But what was the point? War was not truly being waged. We were engaged in a holding action. Policy was either directionless or misguided. And so I satisfied myself by maintaining a semblance of discipline as the summer heat and the monsoon melted away the men’s resolve.

“October came, the rains slackened. There was no hint of increased enemy activity, but I had a feeling something big was on the horizon. I spoke to my battalion commander. He felt the same way. I was told we had intelligence suggesting that the enemy planned a fall and winter campaign building up to Tet. But no one took it seriously. I don’t think I took it seriously myself. I was a professional soldier who’d been sitting idle for six months, and I was spoiling for a fight. I was so eager for engagement I failed to exercise good judgment. I ignored the signs, I . . . I refused . . . I . . .”

He broke off and pawed at something above him in the air—an apparition, perhaps; then he let out an anguished cry, covered his face with his hands, and began to shake like a man wracked by fever.

I sat with him until, exhausted, he lapsed into a fugue, staring dully at the ground. He was so perfectly still, if I had come across him in the jungle, I might have mistaken him for a root system that had assumed a hideous anthropomorphic shape. Only the glutinous surge of his breath opposed this impression. I didn’t know what to think of his story. The plain style of its narration had been markedly different from that of his usual stories, and this lent it credibility; yet I recalled that whenever questioned about his identity, he would respond in a similar fashion. However, the ambiguous character of his personal tragedy did not diminish my new fascination with his mystery. It was as if I had been dusting a vase that rested on my mantelpiece, and, for the first time, I’d turned it over to inspect the bottom and found incised there a labyrinthine design, one that drew my eye inward along its black circuit, promising that should I be able to decipher the hidden character at its center, I would be granted a glimpse of something ultimately bleak and at the same time ultimately alluring. Not a secret, but rather the source of secrets. Not truth, but the ground upon which truth and its opposite were raised. I was a mere child—half a child, at any rate—thus I have no real understanding of how I arrived at this recognition, illusory though it may have been. But I can state with absolute surety why it seemed important at the time: I had a powerful sense of connection with the major, and, accompanying this, the presentiment that his mystery was somehow resonant with my own.

Except for my new program of study, researching my father’s activities, and the enlarged parameters of my relationship with Major Boyette, whom I visited whenever I had the opportunity, over the next several years my days were much the same as ever, occupied by touring, performing (I functioned as a clown and an apprentice knife thrower), by all the tediums and pleasures that arose from life in Radiant Green Star. There were, of course, other changes. Vang grew increasingly frail and withdrawn, the major’s psychological state deteriorated, and four members of the troupe left and were replaced. We gained two new acrobats, Kim and Kai, pretty Korean sisters aged seven and ten respectively—orphans trained by another circus—and Tranh, a middle-aged, moonfaced man whose potbelly did not hamper in the slightest his energetic tumbling and pratfalls. But to my mind, the most notable of the replacements was Vang’s niece, Tan, a slim, quiet girl from Hue with whom I immediately fell in love.

Tan was nearly seventeen when she joined us, a year older than I, an age difference that seemed unbridgeable to my teenage sensibilities. Her shining black hair hung to her waist, her skin was the color of sandalwood dusted with gold, and her face was a perfect cameo in which the demure and the sensual commingled. Her father had been in failing health, and both he and his wife had been uploaded into a virtual community hosted by the Sony AI—Tan had then become her uncle’s ward. She had no actual performing skills, but dressed in glittery revealing costumes, she danced and took part in comic skits and served as one of the targets for our knife thrower, a taciturn young man named Dat who was billed as James Bond Cochise. Dat’s other target, Mei, a chunky girl of Taiwanese extraction who also served as the troupe’s physician, having some knowledge of herbal medicine, would come prancing out and stand at the board, and Dat would plant his knives within a centimeter of her flesh; but when Tan took her place, he would exercise extreme caution and set the knives no closer than seven or eight inches away, a contrast that amused our audiences no end.

For months after her arrival, I hardly spoke to Tan, and then only for some utilitarian purpose; I was too shy to manage a normal conversation. I wished with all my heart that I was eighteen and a man, with the manly confidence that, I assumed, naturally flowed from having attained the age. As things stood I was condemned by my utter lack of self-confidence to admire her from afar, to imagine conversations and other intimacies, to burn with all the frustration of unrequited lust. But then, one afternoon, while I sat in the grass outside Vang’s trailer, poring over some papers dealing with my father’s investments, she approached, wearing loose black trousers and a white blouse, and asked what I was doing.

“I see you reading every day,” she said. “You are so dedicated to your studies. Are you preparing for the university?”

We had set up our tents outside Bien Pho, a village some sixty miles south of Hanoi, on the grassy bank of a wide, meandering river whose water showed black beneath a pewter sky. Dark green conical hills with rocky outcroppings hemmed in the spot, and it was shaded here and there by smallish trees with crooked trunks and puffs of foliage at the ends of their corkscrew branches. The main tent had been erected at the base of the nearest hill and displayed atop it a pennant bearing the starry emblem of our troupe. Everyone else was inside, getting ready for the night’s performance. It was a brooding yet tranquil scene, like a painting on an ancient Chinese scroll, but I noticed none of it—the world had shrunk to the bubble of grass and air that enclosed the two of us.

Tan sat beside me, crossed her legs in a half-lotus, and I caught her scent. Not perfume, but the natural musky yield of her flesh. I did my best to explain the purpose of my studies, the words rushing out as if I were unburdening myself of an awful secret. Which was more-or-less the case. No one apart from Vang knew what I was doing, and because his position relative to the task was tutelary, not that of a confidante, I felt oppressed, isolated by the responsibility I bore. Now it seemed that by disclosing the sad facts bracketing my life, I was acting to reduce their power over me. And so, hoping to exorcise them completely, I told her about my father.

“His name is William Ferrance,” I said, hastening to add that I’d taken Ky for my own surname. “His father emigrated to Asia in the Nineties, during the onset of doi moi (this the Vietnamese equivalent of perestroika), and made a fortune in Saigon, adapting fleets of taxis to methane power. His son—my father—expanded the family interests. He invested in a number of construction projects, all of which lost money. He was in trouble financially when he married my mother, and he used her money to fund a casino in Danang. That allowed him to recoup most of his losses. Since then, he’s established connections with the triads, Malaysian gambling syndicates, and the Bamboo Union in Taiwan. He’s become an influential man, but his money’s tied up. He has no room to maneuver. Should he gain control of my grandfather’s estate, he’ll be a very dangerous man.”

“But this is so impersonal,” Tan said. “Have you no memories of him?”

“Hazy ones,” I said. “From all I can gather, he never took much interest in me . . . except as a potential tool. The truth is, I can scarcely remember my mother. Just the occasional moment. How she looked standing at a window. The sound of her voice when she sang. And I have a general impression of the person she was. Nothing more.”

Tan looked off toward the river; some of the village children were chasing each other along the bank, and a cargo boat with a yellow sail was coming into view around the bend. “I wonder,” she said. “Is it worse to remember those who’ve gone, or not to remember them?”

I guessed she was thinking about her parents, and I wanted to say something helpful, but the concept of uploading an intelligence, a personality, was so foreign to me, I was afraid of appearing foolish.

“I can see my mother and father whenever I want,” Tan said, lowering her gaze to the grass. “I can go to a Sony office anywhere in the world and summon them with a code. When they appear they look like themselves, they sound like themselves, but I know it’s not them. The things they say are always . . . appropriate. But something is missing. Some energy, some quality.” She glanced up at me, and, looking into her beautiful dark eyes, I felt giddy, almost weightless. “Something dies,” she went on. “I know it! We’re not just electrical impulses, we can’t be sucked up into a machine and live. Something dies, something important. What goes into the machine is nothing. It’s only a colored shadow of what we are.”

“I don’t have much experience with computers,” I said.

“But you’ve experienced life!” She touched the back of my hand. “Can’t you feel it within you? I don’t know what to call it . . . a soul? I don’t know. . . .”

It seemed then I could feel the presence of the thing she spoke of moving in my chest, my blood, going all through me, attached to my mind, my flesh, by an unfathomable connection, existing inside me the way breath exists inside a flute, breeding the brief, pretty life of a note, a unique tone, and then passing on into the ocean of the air. Whenever I think of Tan, how she looked that morning, I’m able to feel that delicate, tremulous thing, both temporary and eternal, hovering in the same space I occupy.

“This is too serious,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’ve been thinking about my parents more than I should.” She shook back the fall of her hair, put on a smile. “Do you play chess?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You must learn! A knowledge of the game will help if you intend to wage war against your father.” A regretful expression crossed her face, as if she thought she’d spoken out of turn. “Even if you don’t . . . I mean . . .” Flustered, she waved her hands to dispel the awkwardness of the moment. “It’s fun,” she said. “I’ll teach you.”

I did not make a good chess player, I was far too distracted by the presence of my teacher to heed her lessons. But I’m grateful to the game, for through the movements of knights and queens, through my clumsiness and her patience, through hours of sitting with our heads bent close together, our hearts grew close. We were never merely friends—from that initial conversation on, it was apparent that we would someday take the next step in exploring our relationship, and I rarely felt any anxiety in this regard; I knew that when Tan was ready, she would tell me. For the time being, we enjoyed a kind of amplified friendship, spending our leisure moments together, our physical contact limited to hand-holding and kisses on the cheek. This is not to say that I always succeeded in conforming to those limits. Once as we lay atop Vang’s trailer, watching the stars, I was overcome by her scent, the warmth of her shoulder against mine, and I propped myself up on an elbow and kissed her on the mouth. She responded, and I stealthily unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her breasts. Before I could proceed further, she sat bolt upright, holding her blouse closed, and gave me a injured look; then she slid down from the trailer and walked off into the dark, leaving me in a state of dismay and painful arousal. I slept little that night, worried that I had done permanent damage to the relationship; but the next day she acted as if nothing had happened, and we went on as before, except that I now wanted her more than ever.

Vang, however, was not so forgiving. How he knew I had taken liberties with his niece, I’m not sure—it may have been simply an incidence of his intuitive abilities; I cannot imagine that Tan told him. Whatever his sources, after our performance the next night he came into the main tent where I was practicing with my knives, hurling them into a sheet of plywood upon which the red outline of a human figure had been painted, and asked if my respect for him had dwindled to the point that I would dishonor his sister’s daughter.

He was sitting in the first row of the bleachers, leaning back, resting his elbows on the row behind him, gazing at me with distaste. I was infuriated by this casual indictment, and rather than answer immediately I threw another knife, placing it between the outline’s arm and its waist. I walked to the board, yanked the blade free, and said without turning to him, “I haven’t dishonored her.”

“But surely that is your intent,” he said.

Unable to contain my anger, I spun about to face him. “Were you never young? Have you never been in love?”

“Love.” He let out a dry chuckle. “If you are in love, perhaps you would care to enlighten me as to its nature.”

I would have liked to tell him how I felt about Tan, to explain the sense of security I found with her, the varieties of tenderness, the niceties of my concern for her, the thousand nuances of longing, the intricate complicity of our two hearts and the complex specificity of my desire, for though I wanted to lose myself in the turns of her body, I also wanted to celebrate her, enliven her, to draw out of her the sadness that sometimes weighed her down, and to have her leach my sadness from me as well—I knew this was possible for us. But I was too young and too angry to articulate these things.

“Do you love your mother?” Vang asked, and before I could respond, he said, “You have admitted that you have but a few disjointed memories of her. And, of course, a dream. Yet you have chosen to devote yourself to pursuing the dictates of that dream, to making a life that honors your mother’s wishes. That is love. How can you compare this to your infatuation with Tan?”

Frustrated, I cast my eyes up to the billow of patched gray canvas overhead, to the metal rings at the peak from which Kai and Kim were nightly suspended. When I looked back to Vang, I saw that he had gotten to his feet.

“Think on it,” he said. “If the time comes when you can regard Tan with the same devotion, well . . .” He made a subtle dismissive gesture with his fingers that suggested this was an unlikely prospect.

I turned to the board and hefted another knife. The target suddenly appeared evil in its anonymity, a dangerous creature with a wood-grain face and blood-red skin, and as I drew back my arm, my anger at Vang merged with the greater anger I felt at the anonymous forces that had shaped my life, and I buried the knife dead center of the head—it took all my strength to work the blade free. Glancing up, I was surprised to see Vang watching from the entrance. I had assumed that, having spoken his piece, he had returned to his trailer. He stood there for a few seconds, giving no overt sign of his mood, but I had the impression he was pleased.

When she had no other duties, Tan would assist me with my chores: feeding the exotics, cleaning out their cages, and, though she did not relish his company, helping me care for the major. I must confess I was coming to enjoy my visits with him less and less; I still felt a connection to him, and I remained curious as to the particulars of his past, but his mental slippage had grown so pronounced, it was difficult to be around him. Frequently he insisted on trying to relate the story of Firebase Ruby, but he always lapsed into terror and grief at the same point he had previously broken off the narrative. It seemed that this was a tale he was making up, not one he had been taught or programmed to tell, and that his mind was no longer capable of other than fragmentary invention. But one afternoon, as we were finishing up in his tent, he began to tell the story again, this time starting at the place where he had previously faltered, speaking without hesitancy in the deep, raspy voice he used while performing.

“It came to be October,” he said. “The rains slackened, the snakes kept to their holes during the day, and the spiderwebs were not so thick with victims as they’d been during the monsoon. I began to have a feeling that something ominous was on the horizon, and when I communicated this sense of things to my superiors, I was told that according to intelligence, an intensification of enemy activity was expected, leading up to what was presumed to be a major offensive during the celebration of Tet. But I gave no real weight to either my feeling or to the intelligence reports. I was a professional soldier, and for six months I’d been engaged in nothing more than sitting in a bunker and surveying a wasteland of red dirt and razor wire. I was spoiling for a fight.”

He was sitting on a nest of palm fronds, drenched in a spill of buttery light—we had partially unzipped the roof of the tent in order to increase ventilation—and it looked as if the fronds were an island adrift in a dark void and he a spiritual being who had been scorched and twisted by some cosmic fire, marooned in eternal emptiness.

“The evening of the Fourteenth, I sent out the usual patrols and retired to my bunker. I sat at my desk reading a paperback novel and drinking whiskey. After a time, I put down the book and began a letter to my wife. I was tipsy, and instead of the usual sentimental lines designed to make her feel secure, I let my feelings pour onto the paper, writing about the lack of discipline, my fears concerning the enemy, my disgust at the way the war was being prosecuted. I told her how much I hated Viet Nam. The ubiquitous corruption, the stupidity of the South Vietnamese government. The smell of fish sauce, the poisonous greens of the jungle. Everything. The goddamn place had been a battlefield so long, it was good for nothing else. I kept drinking, and the liquor eroded my remaining inhibitions. I told her about the treachery and ineptitude of the ARVN forces, about the fuck-ups on our side who called themselves generals.”

“I was still writing when, around twenty-one hundred hours, something distracted me. I’m not sure what it was. A noise . . . or maybe a vibration. But I knew something had happened. I stepped out into the corridor and heard a cry. Then the crackling of small arms fire. I grabbed my rifle and ran outside. The VC were inside the wire. In the perimeter lights I saw dozens of diminutive men and women in black pajamas scurrying about, white stars sputtering from the muzzles of their weapons. I cut down several of them. I couldn’t think how they had gotten through the wire and the minefields without alerting the sentries, but then, as I continued to fire, I spotted a man’s head pop up out of the ground and realized that they had tunneled in. All that slow uneventful summer, they’d been busy beneath the surface of the earth, secretive as termites.”

At this juncture the major fell prey once again to emotional collapse, and I prepared myself for the arduous process of helping him recover; but Tan kneeled beside him, took his hand, and said, “Martin? Martin, listen to me.”

No one ever used the major’s Christian name, except to introduce him to an audience, and I didn’t doubt that it had been a long time since a woman had addressed him with tenderness. He abruptly stopped his shaking, as if the nerves that had betrayed him had been severed, and stared wonderingly at Tan. White pinprick suns flickered and died in the deep places behind his eyes.

“Where are you from, Martin?” she asked, and the major, in a dazed tone, replied, “Oakland . . . Oakland, California. But I was born up in Santa Cruz.”

“Santa Cruz.” Tan gave the name a bell-like reading. “Is it beautiful in Santa Cruz? It sounds like a beautiful place.”

“Yeah . . . it’s kinda pretty. There’s old-growth redwoods not far from town. And there’s the ocean. It’s real pretty along the ocean.”

To my amazement, Tan and the major began to carry on a coherent—albeit simplistic—conversation, and I realized that he had never spoken in this fashion before. His syntax had an uncustomary informality, and his voice held the trace of an accent. I thought that Tan’s gentle approach must have penetrated his tormented psyche, either reaching the submerged individual, the real Martin Boyette, or else encountering a fresh layer of delusion. It was curious to hear him talk about such commonplace subjects as foggy weather and jazz music and Mexican food, all of which he claimed could be found in good supply in Santa Cruz. Though his usual nervous tics were in evidence, a new placidity showed in his face. But, of course this state of affairs didn’t last.

“I can’t,” he said, taking a sudden turn from the subject at hand; he shook his head, dragging folds of skin across his neck and shoulders, “I can’t go back anymore. I can’t go back there.”

“Don’t be upset, Martin,” Tan said. “There’s no reason for you to worry. We’ll stay with you, we’ll . . .”

“I don’t want you to stay.” He tucked his head into his shoulder so his face was hidden by a bulge of skin. “I got to get back doin’ what I was doin’.”

“What’s that?” I asked him. “What were you doing?”

A muffled rhythmic grunting issued from his throat—laughter that went on too long to be an expression of simple mirth. It swelled in volume, trebled in pitch, becoming a signature of instability.

“I’m figurin’ it all out,” he said. “That’s what I’m doin’. Jus’ you go away now.”

“Figuring out what?” I asked, intrigued by the possibility—however unlikely—that the major might have a mental life other than the chaotic, that his apparent incoherence was merely an incidental byproduct of concentration, like the smoke that rises from a leaf upon which a beam of sunlight has been focused.

He made no reply, and Tan touched my hand, signaling that we should leave. As I ducked through the tent flap, behind me the major said, “I can’t go back there, and I can’t be here. So jus’ where’s that leave me, y’know?”

Exactly what the major meant by this cryptic statement was unclear, but his words stirred something in me, reawakened me to internal conflicts that had been pushed aside by my studies and my involvement with Tan. When I had arrived to take up residence at Green Star, I was in a state of emotional upheaval, frightened, confused, longing for my mother. Yet even after I calmed down, I was troubled by the feeling that I had lost my place in the world, and it seemed this was not just a consequence of having been uprooted from my family, but that I had always felt this way, that the turbulence of my emotions had been a cloud obscuring what was a constant strain in my life. This was due in part to my mixed heritage. Though the taint associated with the children of Vietnamese mothers and American fathers (dust children, they had once been called) had dissipated since the end of the war, it had not done so entirely, and wherever the circus traveled. I would encounter people who, upon noticing the lightness of my skin and the shape of my eyes, expressed scorn and kept their distance. Further fueling this apprehension was the paucity of my memories deriving from the years before I had come to live with Vang. Whenever Tan spoke about her childhood, she brought up friends, birthdays, uncles and cousins, trips to Saigon, dances, hundreds of details and incidents that caused my own memory to appear grossly underpopulated by comparison. Trauma was to blame, I reckoned. The shock of my mother’s abandonment, however well-intended, had ripped open my mental storehouse and scattered the contents. That and the fact that I had been six when I left home and thus hadn’t had time to accumulate the sort of cohesive memories that lent color to Tan’s stories of Hue. But explaining it away did not lessen my discomfort, and I became fixated on the belief that no matter the nature of the freakish lightning that had sheared away my past, I would never find a cure for the sense of dislocation it had provoked, only medicines that would suppress the symptoms and mask the disease—and, that being so masked, it would grow stronger, immune to treatment, until eventually I would be possessed by it, incapable of feeling at home anywhere.

I had no remedy for these anxieties other than to throw myself with greater intensity into my studies, and with this increase in intensity came a concomitant increase in anger. I would sit at Vang’s computer, gazing at photographs of my father, imagining violent resolutions to our story. I doubted that he would recognize me; I favored my mother and bore little resemblance to him, a genetic blessing for which I was grateful: he was not particularly handsome, though he was imposing, standing nearly six and a half feet tall and weighing—according to a recent medical report—two hundred and sixty-four pounds, giving the impression not of a fat man, but a massive one. His large squarish head was kept shaved, and on his left cheek was the dark blue and green tattoo of his corporate emblem—a flying fish—ringed by three smaller tattoos denoting various of his business associations. At the base of his skull was an oblong silver plate beneath which lay a number of ports allowing him direct access to a computer. Whenever he posed for a picture, he affected what I assumed he would consider a look of hauteur, but the smallness of his eyes (grayish blue) and nose and mouth in contrast to the largeness of his face caused them to be limited in their capacity to convey character and emotional temperature, rather like the features on a distant planet seen through a telescope, and as a result this particular expression came across as prim. In less formal photographs, taken in the company of one or another of his sexual partners, predominantly women, he was quite obviously intoxicated.

He owned an old French Colonial in Saigon, but spent the bulk of his time at his house in Binh Khoi, one of the flower towns—communities built at the turn of the century, intended to provide privacy and comfort for well-to-do Vietnamese whose sexual preferences did not conform to communist morality. Now that communism—if not the concept of sexual morality itself—had become quaint, a colorful patch of history dressed up with theme-park neatness to amuse the tourists, it would seem that these communities no longer had any reason to exist; yet exist they did. Their citizenry had come to comprise a kind of gay aristocracy that defined styles, set trends, and wielded significant political power. Though they maintained a rigid exclusivity, and though my father’s bisexuality was motivated to a great degree—I believe—by concerns of business and status, he had managed to cajole and bribe his way into Binh Khoi, and as best I could determine, he was sincere in his attachment to the place.

The pictures taken at Binh Khoi rankled me the most—I hated to see him laughing and smiling. I would stare at those photographs, my emotions overheating, until it seemed I could focus rage into a beam and destroy any object upon which I turned my gaze. My eventual decision, I thought, would be easy to make. Anger and history, the history of his violence and greed, were making it for me, building a spiritual momentum impossible to stop. When the time came, I would avenge my mother and claim my inheritance. I knew exactly how to go about the task. My father feared no one less powerful than himself—if such a person moved against him, they would be the target of terrible reprisals—and he recognized the futility of trying to fend off an assassination attempt by anyone more powerful; thus his security was good, yet not impenetrable. The uniqueness of my situation lay in the fact that if I were able to kill him, I would as a consequence become more powerful than he or any of his connections; and so, without the least hesitancy, I began to plan his murder both in Binh Khoi and Saigon—I had schematics detailing the security systems of both homes. But in the midst of crafting the means of his death, I lost track of events that were in the process of altering the conditions attendant upon my decision.

One night not long after my seventeenth birthday, I was working at the computer in the trailer, when Vang entered and lowered himself carefully in the chair opposite me, first shooing away the marmalade cat who had been sleeping there. He wore a threadbare gray cardigan and the striped trousers from an old suit, and carried a thin folder bound in plastic. I was preoccupied with tracking my father’s movements via his banking records and I acknowledged Vang’s presence with a nod. He sat without speaking a while and finally said, “Forgive my intrusion, but would you be so kind as to allow me a minute of your time.”

I realized he was angry, but my own anger took precedence. It was not just that I was furious with my father; I had grown weary of Vang’s distant manner, his goading, his incessant demands for respect in face of his lack of respect for me. “What do you want?” I asked without looking away from the screen.

He tossed the folder onto the desk. “Your task has become more problematic.”

The folder contained the personnel file of a attractive woman named Phuong Anh Nguyen whom my father had hired as a bodyguard. Much of the data concerned her considerable expertise with weapons and her reaction times, which were remarkable—it was apparent that she had been bred for her occupation, genetically enhanced. According to the file her senses were so acute, she could detect shifts in the heat patterns of the brain, subtle changes in blood pressure, heart rate, pupillary dilation, speech, all the telltales that would betray the presence of a potential assassin. The information concerning her personal life was skimpy. Though Vietnamese, she had been born in China, and had spent her life until the age of sixteen behind the walls of a private security agency, where she had received her training. Serving a variety of employers, she had killed sixteen men and women over the next five years. Several months before, she had bought out her contract from the security agency and signed on long-term with my father. Like him, she was bisexual, and, also like him, the majority of her partners were women.

I glanced up from the file to find Vang studying me with an expectant air. “Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

“She’s not bad-looking,” I said. He folded his arms, made a disgusted noise.

“All right.” I turned the pages of the file. “My father’s upgrading his security. That means he’s looking ahead to bigger things. Preparing for the day when he can claim my trust.”

“Is that all you’re able to extract from the document?”

From outside came voices, laughter. They passed, faded. Mei, I thought, and Tranh. It was a cool night, the air heavy with the scent of rain. The door was cracked open, and I could see darkness and thin streamers of fog. “What else is there?” I asked.

“Use your mind, won’t you?” Vang let his head tip forward and closed his eyes—a formal notice of his exasperation. “Phuong would require a vast sum in order to pay off her contract. Several million, at least. Her wage is a good one, but even if she lived in poverty, which she does not, it would take her a decade or more to save sufficient funds. Where might she obtain such a sum?”

I had no idea.

“From her new employer, of course,” Vang said.

“My father doesn’t have that kind of money lying around.”

“It seems he does. Only a very wealthy man could afford such a servant as Phuong Anh Nguyen.”

I took mental stock of my father’s finances, but was unable to recall an excess of cash.

“It’s safe to say the money did not come from your father’s business enterprises,” said Vang. “We have good information on them. So we may assume he either stole it or coerced someone else into stealing it.” The cat jumped up into his lap, began kneading his abdomen. “Rather than taxing your brain further,” he went on, “I’ll tell you what I believe has happened. He’s tapped into your trust. It’s much too large to be managed by one individual, and it’s quite possible he’s succeeded in corrupting one of the officers in charge.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“No, but I intend to contact my government friends and suggest an investigation of the trust. If your father has done what I suspect, it will prevent him from doing more damage.” The cat had settled on his lap; he stroked its head. “But the trust is not the problem. Even if your father has stolen from it, he can’t have taken much more than was necessary to secure this woman’s services. Otherwise the man who gave me this”—he gestured at the folder—“would have detected evidence of other expenditures. There’ll be more than enough left to make you a powerful man. Phuong Anh Nguyen is the problem. You’ll have to kill her first.”

The loopy cry of a night bird cut the silence. Someone with a flashlight was crossing the pasture where the trailer rested, the beam of light slicing through layers of fog, sweeping over shrubs and patches of grass. I suggested that one woman shouldn’t pose that much of a problem, no matter how efficient she was at violence.

Vang closed his eyes again. “You have not witnessed this kind of professional in action. They’re fearless, totally dedicated to their work. They develop a sixth sense concerning their clients; they bond with them. You’ll need to be circumspect in dealing with her.”

“Perhaps she’s beyond my capacity to deal with,” I said after a pause. “Perhaps I’m simply too thickheaded. I should probably let it all go and devote myself to Green Star.”

“Do as you see fit.”

Vang’s expression did not shift from its stoic cast, but it appeared to harden, and I could tell that he was startled. I instructed the computer to sleep and leaned back, bracing one foot against the side of the desk. “There’s no need for pretense,” I said. “I know you want me to kill him. I just don’t understand why.”

I waited for him to respond, and when he did not, I said, “You were my mother’s friend—that’s reason enough to wish him dead, I suppose. But I’ve never felt that you were my friend. You’ve given me . . . everything. Life. A place to live. A purpose. Yet whenever I try to thank you, you dismiss it out of hand. I used to think this was because you were shy, because you were embarrassed by displays of emotion. Now, I’m not sure. Sometimes it seems you find my gratitude repugnant . . . or embarrassing in a way that has nothing to do with shyness. It’s as if”—I struggled to collect my thoughts “—as if you have some reason for hating my father that you haven’t told me. One you’re ashamed to admit. Or maybe it’s something else, some piece of information you have that gives you a different perspective on the situation.”

Being honest with him was both exhilarating and frightening—I felt as though I were violating a taboo—and after this speech I was left breathless and disoriented, unsure of everything I’d said, though I’d been thoroughly convinced of its truth when I said it. “I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’ve no right to doubt you.”

He started to make a gesture of dismissal such as was his habit when uncomfortable with a conversation, but caught himself and petted the cat instead. “Despite the differences in our stations, I was very close to your mother,” he said. “And to your grandfather. No longer having a family of my own, I made them into a surrogate. When they died, one after the other . . . you see, your grandfather’s presence, his wealth, protected your mother, and once he was gone, your father had no qualms against misusing her.” He blew out a breath, like a horse, through his lips. “When they died, I lost my heart. I’d lost so much already, I was unable to bear the sorrow I felt. I retreated from the world, I rejected my emotions. In effect, I shut myself down.” He put a hand to his forehead, covering his eyes. I could see he was upset, and I felt badly that I had caused these old griefs to wound him again. “I know you have suffered as a result,” he went on. “You’ve grown up without the affection of a parent, and that is a cruel condition. I wish I could change that. I wish I could change the way I am, but the idea of risking myself, of having everything ripped away from me a third time . . . it’s unbearable.” His hand began to tremble; he clenched it into a fist, pressed it against the bridge of his nose. “It is I who should apologize to you. Please, forgive me.”

I assured him that he need not ask for forgiveness, I honored and respected him. I had the urge to tell him I loved him, and at that moment I did—I believed now that in loving my family, in carrying out my mother’s wishes, he had established his love for me. Hoping to distract him from his grief, I asked him to tell me about my grandfather, a man concerning whom I knew next to nothing, only that he had been remarkably successful in business.

Vang seemed startled by the question, but after taking a second to compose himself, he said, “I’m not sure you would have approved of him. He was a strong man, and strong men often sacrifice much that ordinary men hold dear in order to achieve their ends. But he loved your mother, and he loved you.”

This was not the sort of detail I’d been seeking, but it was plain that Vang was still gripped by emotion, and I decided it would be best to leave him alone. As I passed behind him, I laid a hand on his shoulder. He twitched, as if burned by the touch, and I thought he might respond by covering my hand with his own. But he only nodded and made a humming noise deep in his throat. I stood there for a few beats, wishing I could think of something else to say; then I bid him good night and went off into the darkness to look for Tan.

One morning, about a month after this conversation, in the little seaside town of Vung Tao, Dat quit the circus following an argument with Vang, and I was forced that same evening to assume the role of James Bond Cochise. The prospect of performing the entire act in public—I had previously made token appearances along with Dat—gave rise to some anxiety, but I was confident in my skill. Tan took in Dat’s tuxedo jacket a bit, so it would hang nicely, and helped me paint my face with Native American designs, and when Vang announced me, standing at the center of our single ring and extolling my legendary virtues into a microphone, I strode into the rich yellow glow of the tent, the warmth smelling of sawdust and cowshit (a small herd had been foraging on the spot before we arrived), with my arms overhead, flourishing the belt that held my hatchets and knives, and enjoying the applause. All seven rows of the bleachers were full, the audience consisting of resort workers, fishermen and their families, with a smattering of tourists, mainly backpackers, but also a group of immensely fat Russian women who had been transported from a hotel farther along the beach in cyclos pedaled by diminutive Vietnamese men. They were in a good mood, thanks to a comic skit in which Tan played a farm girl and Tranh a village buffoon hopelessly in love with her, his lust manifested by a telescoping rod that could spring outward to a length of fourteen inches and was belted to his hips beneath a pair of baggy trousers.

Mei, dressed in a red sequined costume that pushed up her breasts and squeezed the tops of her chubby thighs like sausage ends, assumed a spread-eagled position in front of the board, and the crowd fell silent. Sitting in a wooden chair at ring center, Vang switched on the music, the theme from a venerable James Bond film. I displayed a knife to the bleachers, took my mark, and sent the blade hurtling toward Mei, planting it solidly in the wood an inch above her head. The first four or five throws were perfect, outlining Mei’s head and shoulders. The crowd oohed and ahhed each time the blade sank into the board. Supremely confident now, I flung the knives as I whirled and ducked, pretending to dodge the gunshots embedded in the theme music, throwing from a crouch, on my stomach, leaping—but then I made the slightest of missteps, and the knife I hurled flashed so close to Mei, it nicked the fleshy portion of her upper arm. She shrieked and staggered away from the board, holding the injury. She remained stock-still for an instant, fixing me with a look of anguish, then bolted for the entrance. The crowd was stunned. Vang jumped up, the microphone dangling from his hand. For a second or two, I was rooted to the spot, not certain what to do. The bombastic music isolated me as surely as if it were a fence, and when Tranh shut it off, the fence collapsed, and I felt the pressure of a thousand eyes upon me. Unable to withstand it, I followed Mei out into the night.

The main tent had been erected atop a dune overlooking a bay and a stretch of sandy beach. It was a warm, windy night, and as I emerged from the tent the tall grasses cresting the dune were blown flat by a gust. From behind me, Vang’s amplified voice sounded above the rush of the wind and the heavier beat of the surf, urging the audience to stay seated, the show would continue momentarily. The moon was almost full, but it hung behind the clouds, edging an alp of cumulus with silver, and I couldn’t find Mei at first. Then the moon sailed clear, paving a glittering avenue across the black water, touching the plumes of combers with phosphorous, brightening the sand, and I spotted Mei—recognizable by her red costume—and two other figures on the beach some thirty feet below; they appeared to be ministering to her.

I started down the face of the dune, slipped in the loose sand and fell. As I scrambled to my feet, I saw Tan struggling up the slope toward me. She caught at the lapels of my tuxedo for balance, nearly causing me to fall again, and we swayed together, holding each other upright. She wore a nylon jacket over her costume, which was like Mei’s in every respect but one—it was a shade of peacock blue spangled with silver stars. Her shining hair was gathered at the nape of her neck, crystal earrings sparkled in the lobes of her ears, her dark eyes brimmed with light. She looked made of light, an illusion that would fade once the clouds regrouped about the moon. But the thing that most affected me was not her beauty. Moment to moment, that was something of which I was always aware, how she flowed between states of beauty, shifting from schoolgirl to seductress to serious young woman, and now this starry incarnation materialized before me, the devi of a world that existed only for this precise second. . . . No, it was her calmness that affected me most. It poured over me, coursing around and through me, and even before she spoke, not mentioning what had happened to Mei, as if it were not a potentially fatal accident, a confidence-destroyer that would cause me to falter whenever I picked up a knife—even before that I was convinced by her unruffled manner that everything was as usual, there had been a slight disruption of routine, and now we should go back into the tent because Vang was running out of jokes to tell.

“Mei . . .” I said as we clambered over the crest of the dune, and Tan said, “It’s not even a scratch.” She took my arm and guided me toward the entrance, walking briskly yet unhurriedly.

I felt I’d been hypnotized—not by a sonorous voice or the pendulum swing of a shiny object, but by a heightened awareness of the ordinary, the steady pulse of time, all the background rhythms of the universe. I was filled with an immaculate calm, distant from the crowd and the booming music. It seemed that I wasn’t throwing the knives so much as I was fitting them into slots and letting the turning of the earth whisk them away to thud and quiver in the board, creating a figure of steel slightly larger than the figure of soft brown flesh and peacock blue silk it contained. Dat had never received such applause—I think the crowd believed Mei’s injury had been a trick designed to heighten suspense, and they showed their enthusiasm by standing as Tan and I took our bows and walked together through the entranceway. Once outside, she pressed herself against me, kissed my cheek, and said she would see me later. Then she went off toward the rear of the tent to change for the finale.

Under normal circumstances, I would have gone to help with the major, but on this occasion, feeling disconnected and now, bereft of Tan’s soothing influence, upset at having injured Mei, I wandered along the top of the dune until I came to a gully choked with grasses that afforded protection from the wind, which was still gusting hard, filling the air with grit. I sat down amidst the grass and looked off along the curve of the beach. About fifteen meters to the north, the sand gave out into a narrow shingle and the land planed upward into low hills thick with vegetation. Half-hidden by the foliage was a row of small houses with sloping tiled roofs and open porches; they stood close to the sea, and chutes of yellow light spilled from their windows to illuminate the wavelets beneath. The moon was high, no longer silvery, resembling instead a piece of bloated bone china mottled with dark splotches, and, appearing to lie directly beneath it among a hammock of coconut palms was a pink stucco castle that guarded the point of the bay: the hotel where the tourists who had attended our performance were staying. I could make out antlike shapes scurrying back and forth on the brightly lit crescent of sand in front of it, and I heard a faint music shredded by the wind. The water beyond the break was black as opium.

My thoughts turned not to the accident with Mei, but to how I had performed with Tan. The act had passed quickly, a flurry of knives and light, yet now I recalled details: the coolness of the metal between my fingers; Vang watching anxiously off to the side; a fiery glint on a hatchet blade tumbling toward a spot between Tan’s legs. My most significant memory, however, was of her eyes. How they had seemed to beam instructions, orchestrating my movements, so forceful that I’d imagined she was capable of deflecting a blade if my aim proved errant. Given my emotional investment in her, my absolute faith—though we’d never discussed it—in our future together, it was easy to believe she had that kind of power over me. Easy to believe, and somewhat troublesome, for it struck me that we were not equals, we couldn’t be as long as she controlled every facet of the relationship. And having concluded this, as if the conclusion were the end of all possible logics concerning the subject, my mind slowed and became mired in despondency.

I’m not certain how long I had been sitting when Tan came walking down the beach, brushing windblown hair from her eyes. She had on a man’s short-sleeved shirt and a pair of loose-fitting shorts, and was carrying a blanket. I was hidden from her by the grass, and I was at such a remove from things, not comfortable with but accepting of my solitude, I was half-inclined to let her pass; but then she stopped and called my name, and I, by reflex, responded. She spotted me and picked up her pace. When she reached my side she said without a hint of reproval, merely as if stating a fact, “You went so far. I wasn’t sure I’d find you.” She spread the blanket on the sand and encouraged me to join her on it. I felt guilty at having had clinical thoughts about her and our relationship—to put this sort of practical construction on what I tended to view as a magical union, a thing of fate and dharma, seemed unworthy, and as a consequence I was at a loss for words. The wind began to blow in a long unbroken stream off the water, and she shivered. I asked if she would like to put on my tuxedo jacket. She said, “No.” The line of her mouth tightened, and with a sudden movement, she looked away from me, half-turning her upper body. I thought I must have done something to annoy her, and this so unnerved me, I didn’t immediately notice that she was unbuttoning her shirt. She shrugged out of it, held it balled against her chest for a moment, then set it aside; she glanced at me over her shoulder, engaging my eyes. I could tell her usual calm was returning—I could almost see her filling with it—and I realized then that this calmness of hers was not hers alone, it was ours, a byproduct of our trust in one another, and what had happened in the main tent had not been a case of her controlling me, saving me from panic, but had been the two of us channeling each other’s strength, converting nervousness and fear to certainty and precision. Just as we were doing now.

I kissed her mouth, her small breasts, exulting in their salty aftertaste of brine and dried sweat. Then I drew her down onto the blanket, and what followed, despite clumsiness and flashes of insecurity, was somehow both fierce and chaste, the natural culmination of two years of longing, of unspoken treaties and accommodations. Afterward, pressed together, wrapped in the silk and warmth of spent splendor, whispering the old yet never less than astonishing secrets and promises, saying things that had long gone unsaid, I remember thinking that I would do anything for her. This was not an abstract thought, not simply the atavistic reaction of a man new to a feeling of mastery, though I can’t deny that was in me—the sexual and the violent break from the same spring—but was an understanding founded on a considered appreciation of the trials I might have to overcome and the blood I might have to shed in order to keep her safe in a world where wife-murder was a crime for profit and patricide an act of self-defense. It’s strange to recall with what a profound sense of reverence I accepted the idea that I was now willing to engage in every sort of human behavior, ranging from the self-sacrificial to the self-gratifying to the perpetration of acts so abhorrent that, once committed, they would harrow me until the end of my days.

At dawn the clouds closed in, the wind died, and the sea lay flat. Now and again a weak sun penetrated the overcast, causing the water to glisten like an expanse of freshly applied gray paint. We climbed to the top of the dune and sat with our arms around each other, not wanting to return to the circus, to break the elastic of the long moment stretching backward into night. The unstirring grass, the energyless water and dead sky, made it appear that time itself had been becalmed. The beach in front of the pink hotel was littered with debris, deserted. You might have thought that our lovemaking had succeeded in emptying the world. But soon we caught sight of Tranh and Mei walking toward us across the dune, Kim and Kai skipping along behind. All were dressed in shorts and shirts, and Tranh carried a net shopping bag that—I saw as he lurched up, stumbling in the sand—contained mineral water and sandwiches.

“What have you kids been up to?” he asked, displaying an exaggerated degree of concern.

Mei punched him on the arm, and, after glancing back and forth between us, as if he suddenly understood the situation, Tranh put on a shocked face and covered his mouth with a hand. Giggling, Kai and Kim went scampering down onto the beach. Mei tugged at Tranh’s shirt, but he ignored her and sank onto his knees beside me. “I bet you’re hungry,” he said, and his round face was split by a gaptoothed grin. He thrust a sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin at me. “Better eat! You’re probably going to need your strength.”

With an apologetic look in Tan’s direction, Mei kneeled beside him; she unwrapped sandwiches and opened two bottles of water. She caught my eye, frowned, pointed to her arm, and shook her forefinger as she might have done with a mischievous child. “Next time don’t dance around so much,” she said, and pretended to sprinkle something on one of the sandwiches. “Or else one night I’ll put special herbs in your dinner.” Tranh kept peering at Tan, then at me, grinning, nodding, and finally, with a laugh, Tan pushed him onto his back. Down by the water Kai and Kim were tossing pebbles into the sea with girlish ineptitude. Mei called to them and they came running, their braids bouncing; they threw themselves bellyfirst onto the sand, squirmed up to sitting positions, and began gobbling sandwiches.

“Don’t eat so fast!” Mei cautioned. “You’ll get sick.”

Kim, the younger of the sisters, squinched her face at Mei and shoved half the sandwich into her mouth. Tranh contorted his features so his lips nearly touched his nose, and Kim laughed so hard she sprayed bits of bread and fried fish. Tan told her that this was not ladylike. Both girls sat up straight, nibbled their sandwiches—they took it to heart whenever Tan spoke to them about being ladies.

“Didn’t you bring anything beside fish?” I asked, inspecting the filling of my sandwich.

“I guess we should have brought oysters,” said Tranh. “Maybe some rhinoceros horn, some . . .”

“That stuff’s for old guys like you,” I told him. “Me, I just need peanut butter.”

After we had done eating, Tranh lay back with his head in Mei’s lap and told a story about a talking lizard that had convinced a farmer it was the Buddha. Kim and Kai cuddled together, sleepy from their feast. Tan leaned into the notch of my shoulder, and I put my arm around her. It came to me then, not suddenly, but gradually, as if I were being immersed in the knowledge like a man lowering his body into a warm bath, that for the first time in my life—all the life I could remember—I was at home. These people were my family, and the sense of dislocation that had burdened me all those years had evaporated. I closed my eyes and buried my face in Tan’s hair, trying to hold onto the feeling, to seal it inside my head so I would never forget it.

Two men in T-shirts and bathing suits came walking along the water’s edge in our direction. When they reached the dune they climbed up to where we were sitting. Both were not much older than I, and judging by their fleshiness and soft features, I presumed them to be Americans, a judgment confirmed when the taller of the two, a fellow with a heavy jaw and hundreds of white beads threaded on the strings of his long black hair, lending him a savage appearance, said, “You guys are with that tent show, right?”

Mei, who did not care for Americans, stared meanly at him, but Tranh, who habitually viewed them as potential sources of income, told him that we were, indeed, performers with the circus. Kai and Kim whispered and giggled, and Tranh asked the American what his friend—skinnier, beadless, dull-eyed and open-mouthed, with a complicated headset covering his scalp—was studying.

“Parasailing. We’re going parasailing . . . if there’s ever any wind and the program doesn’t screw up. I woulda left him at the house, but the program’s fucked. Didn’t want his ass convulsing.” He extracted a sectioned strip of plastic from his shirt pocket; each square of plastic held a gelatin capsule shaped like a cut gem and filled with blue fluid. “Wanna brighten your day?” He dangled the strip as if tempting us with a treat. When no one accepted his offer, he shrugged, returned the strip to his pocket; he glanced down at me. “Hey, that shit with the knives . . . that was part of the fucking plan! Especially when you went benihana on Little Plum Blossom.” He jerked his thumb at Mei and then stood nodding, gazing at the sea, as if receiving a transmission from that quarter. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. It could be the drugs, but the trusty inner voice is telling me my foreign ways seem ludicrous . . . perhaps even offensive. It well may be that I am somewhat ludicrous. And I’m pretty torched, so I have to assume I’ve been offensive.”

Tranh made to deny this, Mei grunted, Kim and Kai looked puzzled, and Tan asked the American if he was on vacation.

“Thank you,” he said to Tan. “Beautiful lady. I am always grateful for the gift of courtesy. No, my friend and I—and two others—are playing at the hotel. We’re musicians.” He took out his wallet, which had been hinged over the waist of his trunks, and removed from it a thin gold square the size of a postage stamp; he handed it to Tan. “Have you seen these? They’re new . . . souvenir things, like. They just play once, but it’ll give you a taste. Press your finger on it until it you hear the sound. Then don’t touch it again—they get extremely hot.”

Tan started to do as he instructed but he said, “No, wait till we’re gone. I want to imagine you enjoyed hearing it. If you do, come on down to the hotel after you’re finished tonight. You’ll be my guests.”

“Is it one of your songs?” I asked, curious about him now that he had turned out to be more complicated than he first appeared.

He said, yes, it was an original composition.

“What’s it called?” Tranh asked.

“We haven’t named it yet,” said the American; then, after a pause: “What’s the name of your circus?”

Almost as one we said, “Radiant Green Star.”

“Perfect,” said the American.

Once the two men were out of earshot, Tan pressed her fingertip to the gold square, and soon a throbbing music issued forth, simply structured yet intricately layered by synthesizers, horns, guitars, densely figured by theme and subtle counter-theme, both insinuating and urgent. Kai and Kim stood and danced with one another. Tranh bobbed his head, tapped his foot, and even Mei was charmed, swaying, her eyes closed. Tan kissed me, and we watched a thin white smoke trickle upward from the square, which itself began to shrink, and I thought how amazing it was that things were often not what they seemed, and what a strange confluence of possibilities it had taken to bring all the troupe together—and the six of us were the entire troupe, for Vang was never really part of us even when he was there, and though the major was rarely with us, he was always there, a shadow in the corners of our minds. . . . How magical and ineluctable a thing it was for us all to be together at the precise place and time when a man—a rather unprepossessing man at that—walked up from a deserted beach and presented us with a golden square imprinted with a song that he named for our circus, a song that so accurately evoked the mixture of the commonplace and the exotic that characterized life in Radiant Green Star, music that was like smoke, rising up for a few perfect moments, and then vanishing with the wind.

Had Vang asked me at any point during the months that followed to tell him about love, I might have spoken for hours, answering him not with definitions, principles, or homilies, but specific instances, moments, and anecdotes. I was happy. Despite the gloomy nature of my soul, I could think of no word that better described how I felt. Though I continued to study my father, to follow his comings and goings, his business maneuvers and social interactions, I now believed that I would never seek to confront him, never try to claim my inheritance. I had all I needed to live, and I only wanted to keep those I loved safe and free from worry.

Tan and I did not bother to hide our relationship, and I expected Vang to rail at me for my transgression. I half-expected him to drive me away from the circus—indeed, I prepared for that eventuality. But he never said a word. I did notice a certain cooling of the atmosphere. He snapped at me more often and on occasion refused to speak; yet that was the extent of his anger. I didn’t know how to take this. Either, I thought, he had overstated his concern for Tan or else he had simply accepted the inevitable. That explanation didn’t satisfy me, however. I suspected that he might have something more important on his mind, something so weighty that my involvement with his niece seemed a triviality by comparison. And one day, some seven months after Tan and I became lovers, my suspicions were proved correct.

I went to the trailer at mid-afternoon, thinking Vang would be in town. We were camped at the edge of a hardwood forest on a cleared acre of red dirt near Buon Ma Thuot in the Central Highlands, not far from the Cambodian border. Vang usually spent the day before a performance putting up posters, and I had intended to work on the computer; but when I entered, I saw him standing by his desk, folding a shirt, a suitcase open on the chair beside him. I asked what he was doing and he handed me a thick envelope; inside were the licenses and deeds of ownership relating to the circus and its property. “I’ve signed everything over,” he said. “If you have any problems, contact my lawyer.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, dumfounded. “You’re leaving?”

He bent to the suitcase and laid the folded shirt inside it. “You can move into the trailer tonight. You and Tan. She’ll be able to put it in order. I suppose you’ve noticed that she’s almost morbidly neat.” He straightened, pressed his hand against his lower back as if stricken by a pain. “The accounts, the bookings for next year . . . it’s all in the computer. Everything else . . .” He gestured at the cabinets on the walls. “You remember where things are.”

I couldn’t get a grasp on the situation, overwhelmed by the thought that I was now responsible for Green Star, by the fact that the man who for years had been the only consistent presence in my life was about to walk out the door forever. “Why are you leaving?”

He turned to me, frowning. “If you must know, I’m ill.”

“But why would you want to leave? We’ll just . . .”

“I’m not going to recover,” he said flatly.

I peered at him, trying to detect the signs of his mortality, but he looked no thinner, no grayer, than he had for some time. I felt the stirrings of a reaction that I knew he would not want to see, and I tamped down my emotions. “We can care for you here,” I said.

He began to fold another shirt. “I plan to join my sister and her husband in what they insist upon calling—” he clicked his tongue against his teeth “—Heaven.”

I recalled the talks I’d had with Tan in which she had decried the process of uploading the intelligence, the personality. If the old man was dying, there was no real risk involved. Still, the concept of such a mechanical transmogrification did not sit well with me.

“Have you nothing to say on the subject?” he asked. “Tan was quite voluble.”

“You’ve told her, then?”

“Of course.” He inspected the tail of the shirt he’d been folding, and finding a hole, cast it aside. “We’ve said our goodbyes.”

He continued to putter about, and as I watched him shuffling among the stacks of magazines and newspapers, kicking file boxes and books aside, dust rising wherever he set his hand, a tightness in my chest began to loosen, to work its way up into my throat. I went to the door and stood looking out, seeing nothing, letting the strong sunlight harden the glaze of my feelings. When I turned back, he was standing close to me, suitcase in hand. He held out a folded piece of paper and said, “This is the code by which you can contact me once I’ve been . . .” He laughed dryly. “Processed, I imagine, would be the appropriate verb. At any rate, I hope you will let me know what you decide concerning your father.”

It was in my mind to tell him that I had no intention of contending with my father, but I thought that this would disappoint him, and I merely said that I would do as he asked. We stood facing one another, the air thick with unspoken feelings, with vibrations that communicated an entire history comprised of such mute, awkward moments. “If I’m to have a last walk in the sun,” he said at length, “you’ll have to let me pass.”

That at the end of his days he viewed me only as a minor impediment—it angered me. But I reminded myself that this was all the sentiment of which he was capable. Without asking permission, I embraced him. He patted me lightly on the back and said, “I know you’ll take care of things.” And with that, he pushed past me and walked off in the direction of the town, vanishing behind one of the parked trucks.

I went into the rear of the trailer, into the partitioned cubicle where Vang slept, and sat down on his bunk. His pillowcase bore a silk-screened image of a beautiful Vietnamese woman and the words HONEY LADY KEEP YOU COMFORT EVERY NIGHT. In the cabinet beside his bed were a broken clock, a small plaster bust of Ho Chi Minh, a few books, several pieces of hard candy, and a plastic key chain in the shape of a butterfly. The meagerness of the life these items described caught at my emotions, and I thought I might weep, but it was as if by assuming Vang’s position as the owner of Green Star, I had undergone a corresponding reduction in my natural responses, and I remained dry-eyed. I felt strangely aloof from myself, connected to the life of my mind and body by a tube along which impressions of the world around me were now and then transmitted. Looking back on my years with Vang, I could make no sense of them. He had nurtured and educated me, yet the sum of all that effort—not given cohesion by the glue of affection—came to scraps of memory no more illustrative of a comprehensible whole than were the memories of my mother. They had substance, yet no flavor . . . none, that is, except for a dusty gray aftertaste that I associated with disappointment and loss.

I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, and for want of anything else to do, I went to the desk and started inspecting the accounts, working through dusk and into the night. When I had satisfied myself that all was in order, I turned to the bookings. Nothing out of the ordinary. The usual villages, the occasional festival. But when I accessed the bookings for the month of March, I saw that during the week of the 17th through the 23rd—the latter date just ten days from my birthday—we were scheduled to perform in Binh Khoi.

I thought this must be a mistake—Vang had probably been thinking of Binh Khoi and my father while recording a new booking and had inadvertently put down the wrong name. But when I called up the contract, I found that no mistake had been made. We were to be paid a great deal of money, sufficient to guarantee a profitable year, but I doubted that Vang’s actions had been motivated by our financial needs. He must, I thought, have seen the way things were going with Tan and me, and he must have realized that I would never risk her in order to avenge a crime committed nearly two decades before—thus he had decided to force a confrontation between me and my father. I was furious, and my first impulse was to break the contract; but after I had calmed down I realized that doing so would put us all at risk—the citizens of Binh Khoi were not known for their generosity or flexibility, and if I were to renege on Vang’s agreement they would surely pursue the matter in the courts. I would have no chance of winning a judgment. The only thing to do was to play the festival and steel myself to ignore the presence of my father. Perhaps he would be elsewhere, or, even if he was in residence, perhaps he would not attend our little show. Whatever the circumstances, I swore I would not be caught in this trap, and when my eighteenth birthday arrived I would go to the nearest Sony office and take great pleasure in telling Vang—whatever was left of him—that his scheme had failed.

I was still sitting there, trying to comprehend whether or not by contracting the engagement, Vang hoped to provide me with a basis for an informed decision, or if his interests were purely self-serving, when Tan stepped into the trailer. She had on a sleeveless plaid smock, the garment she wore whenever she was cleaning, and it was evident that she’d been crying—the skin beneath her eyes was puffy and red. But she had regained her composure, and she listened patiently, perched on the edge of the desk, while I told her all I’d been thinking about Vang and what he had done to us.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” she said after I had run down. “This way you’ll be sure you’ve done what you had to do.”

I was startled by her reaction. “Are you saying that you think I should kill my father . . . that I should even entertain the possibility?”

She shrugged. “That’s for you to decide.”

“I’ve decided already,” I said.

“Then there’s not a problem.”

The studied neutrality of her attitude puzzled me. “You don’t think I’ll stand by my decision, do you?”

She put a hand to her brow, hiding her face—a gesture that reminded me of Vang. “I don’t think you have decided, and I don’t think you should . . . not until you see your father.” She pinched a fold of skin above the bridge of her nose, then looked up at me. “Let’s not talk about this now.”

We sat silently for half a minute or thereabouts, each following the path of our own thoughts; then she wrinkled up her nose and said, “It smells bad in here. Do you want to get some air?”

We climbed onto the roof of the trailer and sat gazing at the shadowy line of the forest to the west, the main tent bulking up above it, and a sky so thick with stars that the familiar constellations were assimilated into new and busier cosmic designs: a Buddha face with a diamond on its brow, a tiger’s head, a palm tree—constructions of sparkling pinlights against a midnight blue canvas stretched from horizon to horizon. The wind brought the scent of sweet rot and the less pervasive odor of someone’s cooking. Somebody switched on a radio in the main tent; a Chinese orchestra whined and jangled. I felt I was sixteen again, that Tan and I had just met, and I thought perhaps we had chosen to occupy this place where we spent so many hours before we were lovers, because here we could banish the daunting pressures of the present, the threat of the future, and be children again. But although those days were scarcely two years removed, we had forever shattered the comforting illusions and frustrating limitations of childhood. I lay back on the aluminum roof, which still held a faint warmth of the day, and Tan hitched up her smock about her waist and mounted me, bracing her hands on my chest as I slipped inside her. Framed by the crowded stars, features made mysterious by the cowl of her hair, she seemed as distant and unreal as the imagined creatures of my zodiac; but this illusion, too, was shattered as she began to rock her hips with an accomplished passion and lifted her face to the sky, transfigured by a look of exalted, almost agonized yearning, like one of those Renaissance angels marooned on a scrap of painted cloud who has just witnessed something amazing pass overhead, a miracle of glowing promise too perfect to hold in the mind. She shook her head wildly when she came, her hair flying all to one side so that it resembled in shape the pennant flying on the main tent, a dark signal of release, and then collapsed against my chest. I held onto her hips, continuing to thrust until the knot of heat in my groin shuddered out of me, leaving a residue of black peace into which the last shreds of my thought were subsumed.

The sweat dried on our skin, and still we lay there, both—I believed—aware that once we went down from the roof, the world would close around us, restore us to its troubled spin. Someone changed stations on the radio, bringing in a Cambodian program—a cooler, wispier music played. A cough sounded close by the trailer, and I raised myself to an elbow, wanting to see who it was. The major was making his way with painful slowness across the cleared ground, leaning on his staff. In the starlight his grotesque shape was lent a certain anonymity—he might have been a figure in a fantasy game, an old down-at-heels magician shrouded in a heavy, ragged cloak, or a beggar on a quest. He shuffled a few steps more, and then, shaking with effort, sank to his knees. For several seconds he remained motionless, then he scooped a handful of the red dirt and held it up to his face. And I recalled that Buon Ma Thuot was near the location of his fictive—or if not fictive, ill-remembered—firebase. Firebase Ruby. Built upon the red dirt of a defoliated plantation.

Tan sat up beside me and whispered, “What’s he doing?”

I put a finger to my lips, urging her to silence; I was convinced that the major would not expose himself to the terror of the open sky unless moved by some equally terrifying inner force, and I hoped he might do something that would illuminate the underpinnings of his mystery.

He let the dirt sift through his fingers and struggled to stand. Failed and sagged onto his haunches. His head fell back, and he held a spread-fingered hand up to it as if trying to shield himself from the starlight. His quavery voice ran out of him like a shredded battle flag. “Turn back!” he said. “Oh, God! God! Turn back!”

During the next four months, I had little opportunity to brood over the prospect of meeting my father. Dealing with the minutiae of Green Star’s daily operation took most of my energy and hours, and whenever I had a few minutes respite, Tan was there to fill them. So it was that by the time we arrived in Binh Khoi, I had made scarcely any progress in adjusting to the possibility that I might soon come face-to-face with the man who had killed my mother.

In one aspect, Binh Khoi was the perfect venue for us, since the town affected the same conceit as the circus, being designed to resemble a fragment of another time. It was situated near the Pass of the Ocean Clouds in the Truong Son Mountains some forty kilometers north of Danang, and many of the homes there were afforded a view of green hills declining toward the Coastal Plain. On the morning we arrived those same hills were half-submerged in thick white fog, the plain was totally obscured, and a pale mist had infiltrated the narrow streets, casting an air of ominous enchantment over the place. The oldest of the houses had been built no more than fifty years before, yet they were all similar to nineteenth century houses that still existed in certain sections of Hanoi: two and three stories tall and fashioned of stone, painted dull yellow and gray and various other sober hues, with sharply sloping roofs of dark green tile and compounds hidden by high walls and shaded by bougainvillea, papaya, and banana trees. Except for street lights in the main square and pedestrians in bright eccentric clothing, we might have been driving through a hill station during the 1800s; but I knew that hidden behind this antiquated façade were state-of-the-art security systems that could have vaporized us had we not been cleared to enter.

The most unusual thing about Binh Khoi was its silence. I’d never been in a place where people lived in any considerable quantity that was so hushed, devoid of the stew of sounds natural to a human environment. No hens squabbling or dogs yipping, no whining motor scooters or humming cars, no children at play. In only one area was there anything approximating normal activity and noise: the marketplace, which occupied an unpaved street leading off the square. Here men and women in coolie hats hunkered beside baskets of jackfruit, chilies, garlic, custard apples, durians, geckos, and dried fish; meat and caged puppies and monkeys and innumerable other foodstuffs were sold in canvas-roofed stalls; and the shoppers, mostly male couples, haggled with the vendors, occasionally venting their dismay at the prices . . . this despite the fact that any one of them could have bought everything in the market without blinking. Though the troupe shared their immersion in a contrived past, I found the depth of their pretense alarming and somewhat perverse. As I maneuvered the truck cautiously through the press, they peered incuriously at me through the windows—faces rendered exotic and nearly unreadable by tattoos and implants and caps of silver wire and winking light that appeared to be woven into their hair—and I thought I could feel their amusement at the shabby counterfeit we offered of their more elegantly realized illusion. I believe I might have hated them for the fashionable play they made of arguing over minuscule sums with the poor vendors, for the triviality of spirit this mockery implied, if I had not already hated them so completely for being my father’s friends and colleagues.

At the end of the street, beyond the last building, lay a grassy field bordered by a low whitewashed wall. Strings of light bulbs linked the banana trees and palms that grew close to the wall on three sides, and I noticed several paths leading off into the jungle that were lit in the same fashion. On the fourth side, beyond the wall, the land dropped off into a notch, now choked with fog, and on the far side of the notch, perhaps fifty yards away, a massive hill with a sheer rock face and the ruins of an old temple atop it lifted from the fog, looming above the field—it was such a dramatic sight and so completely free of mist, every palm frond articulated, every vine-enlaced crevice and knob of dark, discolored stone showing clear, that I wondered if it might be a clever projection, another element of Binh Khoi’s decor.

We spent the morning and early afternoon setting up, and once I was satisfied that everything was in readiness, I sought out Tan, thinking we might go for a walk; but she was engaged in altering Kai’s costume. I wandered into the main tent and busied myself by making sure the sawdust had been spread evenly. Kai was swinging high above on a rope suspended from the metal ring at the top of the tent, and one of our miniature tigers had climbed a second rope and was clinging to it by its furry hands, batting at her playfully whenever she swooped near. Tranh and Mei were playing cards in the bleachers, and Kim was walking hand-in-hand with our talking monkey, chattering away as if the creature could understand her—now and then it would turn its white face to her and squeak in response, saying “I love you” and “I’m hungry” and other equally non-responsive phrases. I stood by the entranceway, feeling rather paternal toward my little family gathered under the lights, and I was just considering whether or not I should return to the trailer and see if Tan had finished, when a baritone voice sounded behind me, saying, “Where can I find Vang Ky?”

My father was standing with hands in pockets a few feet away, wearing black trousers and a gray shirt of some shiny material. He looked softer and heavier than he did in his photographs, and the flying fish tattoo on his cheek was now surrounded by more than half-a-dozen tiny emblems denoting his business connections. With his immense head, his shaved skull gleaming in the hot lights, he himself seemed the emblem of some monumental and soul-less concern. At his shoulder, over a foot shorter than he, was a striking Vietnamese woman with long straight hair, dressed in tight black slacks and a matching tunic: Phuong Ahn Nguyen. She was staring at me intently.

Stunned, I managed to get out that Vang was no longer with the circus, and my father said, “How can that be? He’s the owner, isn’t he?”

Shock was giving way to anger, anger so fulminant I could barely contain it. My hands trembled. If I’d had one of my knives to hand, I would have plunged it without a thought into his chest. I did the best I could to conceal my mood and told him what had become of Vang; but it seemed that as I catalogued each new detail of his face and body—a frown line, a reddened ear lobe, a crease in his fleshy neck—a vial of some furious chemical was tipped over and added to the mix of my blood.

“Goddamn it!” he said, casting his eyes up to the canvas; he appeared distraught. “Shit!” He glanced down at me. “Have you got his access code? It’s never the same once they go to Heaven. I’m not sure they really know what’s going on. But I guess it’s my only option.”

“I doubt he’d approve of my giving the code to a stranger,” I told him.

“We’re not strangers,” he said. “Vang was my father-in-law. We had a falling-out after my wife died. I hoped having the circus here for a week, I’d be able to persuade him to sit down and talk. There’s no reason for us to be at odds.”

I suppose the most astonishing thing he said was that Vang was his father-in-law, and thus my grandfather. I didn’t know what to make of that; I could think of no reason he might have for lying, yet it raised a number of troubling questions. But his last statement, his implicit denial of responsibility for my mother’s death . . . it had come so easily to his lips! Hatred flowered in me like a cold star, acting to calm me, allowing me to exert a measure of control over my anger.

Phoung stepped forward and put a hand on my chest; my heart pounded against the pressure of her palm. “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

“I’m . . . surprised,” I said. “That’s all. I didn’t realize Vang had a son-in-law.”

Her make-up was severe, her lips painted a dark mauve, her eyes shaded by the same color, but in the fineness of her features and the long oval shape of her face, she bore a slight resemblance to Tan.

“Why are you angry?” she asked.

My father eased her aside. “It’s all right. I came on pretty strong—he’s got every right to be angry. Why don’t the two of us . . . what’s your name, kid?”

“Dat,” I said, though I was tempted to tell him the truth.

“Dat and I will have a talk,” he said to Phuong. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

We went outside, and Phuong, displaying more than a little reluctance, headed off in the general direction of the trailer. It was going on dusk and the fog was closing in. The many-colored bulbs strung in the trees close to the wall and lining the paths had been turned on; each bulb was englobed by a fuzzy halo, and altogether they imbued the encroaching jungle with an eerily festive air, as if the spirits lost in the dark green tangles were planning a party. We stood beside the wall, beneath the great hill rising from the shifting fogbank, and my father tried to convince me to hand over the code. When I refused he offered money, and when I refused his money he glared at me and said, “Maybe you don’t get it. I really need the code. What’s it going to take for you to give it to me?”

“Perhaps it’s you who doesn’t get it,” I said. “If Vang wanted you to have the code he would have given it to you. But he gave it to me, and to no one else. I consider that a trust, and I won’t break it unless he signifies that I should.”

He looked off into the jungle, ran a hand across his scalp, and made a frustrated noise. I doubted he was experienced at rejection, and though it didn’t satisfy my anger, it pleased me to have rejected him. Finally he laughed. “Either you’re a hell of a businessman or an honorable man. Or maybe you’re both. That’s a scary notion.” He shook his head in what I took for amiable acceptance. “Why not call Vang? Ask him if he’d mind having a talk with me.”

I didn’t understand how this was possible.

“What sort of computer do you own?” he asked.

I told him and he said, “That won’t do it. Tell you what. Come over to my house tonight after your show. You can use my computer to contact him. I’ll pay for your time.”

I was suddenly suspicious. He seemed to be offering himself to me, making himself vulnerable, and I did not believe that was in his nature. His desire to contact Vang might be a charade. What if he had discovered my identity and was luring me into a trap?

“I don’t know if I can get away,” I said. “It may have to be in the morning.”

He looked displeased, but said, “Very well.” He fingered a business card from his pocket, gave it to me. “My address.” Then he pressed what appeared to be a crystal button into my hand. “Don’t lose it. Carry it with you whenever you come. If you don’t, you’ll be picked up on the street and taken somewhere quite unpleasant.”

As soon as he was out of sight I hurried over to the trailer, intending to sort things out with Tan. She was outside, sitting on a folding chair, framed by a spill of hazy yellow light from the door. Her head was down, and her blouse was torn, the top two buttons missing. I asked what was wrong; she shook her head and would not meet my eyes. But when I persisted she said, “That woman . . . the one who works for your father . . .”

“Phuong? Did she hurt you?”

She kept her head down, but I could see her chin quivering. “I was coming to find you, and I ran into her. She started talking to me. I thought she was just being friendly, but then she tried to kiss me. And when I resisted”—she displayed the tear in her blouse—“she did this.” She gathered herself. “She wants me to be with her tonight. If I refuse, she says she’ll make trouble for us.”

It would have been impossible for me to hate my father more, but this new insult, this threat to Tan, perfected it, added a finishing color, like the last brush stroke applied to a masterpiece. I stood a moment gazing off toward the hill—it seemed I had inside me an analog to that forbidding shape, something equally stony and vast. I led Tan into the trailer, sat her down at the desk, and made her tea; then I repeated all my father had said. “Is it possible,” I asked, “that Vang is my grandfather?”

She held the teacup in both hands, blew on the steaming liquid and took a sip. “I don’t know. My family has always been secretive. All my parents told me was that Vang was once a wealthy man with a loving family, and that he had lost everything.”

“If he is my grandfather,” I said, “then we’re cousins.”

She set down the cup and stared dolefully into it as if she saw in its depths an inescapable resolution. “I don’t care. If we were brother and sister, I wouldn’t care.”

I pulled her up, put my arms around her, and she pressed herself against me. I felt that I was at the center of an enormously complicated knot, too diminutive to be able to see all its loops and twists. If Vang was my grandfather, why had he treated me with such coldness? Perhaps my mother’s death had deadened his heart, perhaps that explained it. But knowing that Tan and I were cousins, wouldn’t he have told us the truth when he saw how close we were becoming? Or was he so old-fashioned that the idea of an intimate union between cousins didn’t bother him? The most reasonable explanation was that my father had lied. I saw that now, saw it with absolute clarity. It was the only possibility that made sense. And if he had lied, it followed that he knew who I was. And if he knew who I was . . .

“I have to kill him,” I said. “Tonight . . . it has to be tonight.”

I was prepared to justify the decision, to explain why a course of inaction would be a greater risk, to lay out all the potentials of the situation for Tan to analyze, but she pushed me away, just enough so that she could see my face, and said, “You can’t do it alone. That woman’s a professional assassin.” She rested her forehead against mine. “I’ll help you.”

“That’s ridiculous! If I . . .”

“Listen to me, Philip! She can read physical signs, she can tell if someone’s angry. If they’re anxious. Well, she’ll expect me to be angry. And anxious. She’ll think it’s just resentment . . . nerves. I’ll be able to get close to her.”

“And kill her? Will you be able to kill her?”

Tan broke from the embrace and went to stand at the doorway, gazing out at the fog. Her hair had come unbound, spilling down over her shoulders and back, the ribbon that had tied it dangling like a bright blue river winding across a ground of black silk.

“I’ll ask Mei to give me something. She has herbs that will induce sleep.” She glanced back at me. “There are things you can do to insure our safety once your father’s dead. We should discuss them now.”

I was amazed by her coolness, how easily she had made the transition from being distraught. “I can’t ask you to do this,” I said.

“You’re not asking—I’m volunteering.” I detected a note of sad distraction in her voice. “You’d do as much for me.”

“Of course, but if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be involved in this.”

“If it weren’t for you,” she said, the sadness even more evident in her tone, “I’d have no involvements at all.”

The first part of the show that evening, the entrance of the troupe to march music, Mei leading the way, wearing a red and white majorette’s uniform, twirling—and frequently dropping—a baton, the tigers gamboling at her heels; then two comic skits; then Kai and Kim whirling and spinning aloft in their gold and sequined costumes, tumbling through the air happy as birds; then another skit and Tranh’s clownish juggling, pretending to be drunk and making improbable catches as he tumbled, rolled, and staggered about . . . all this was received by the predominantly male audience with a degree of ironic detachment. They laughed at Mei, they whispered and smirked during the skits, they stared dispassionately at Kim and Kai, and they jeered Tranh. It was plain that they had come to belittle us, that doing so validated their sense of superiority. I registered their reactions, but was so absorbed in thinking about what was to happen later, they seemed unreal, unimportant, and it took all my discipline to focus on my own act, a performance punctuated by a knife hurled from behind me that struck home between Tan’s legs. There was a burst of enthusiastic cheers, and I turned to see Phuong some thirty feet away, taking a bow in the bleachers—it was she who had thrown the knife. She looked at me and shrugged, with that gesture dismissing my poor skills, and lifted her arms to receive the building applause. I searched the area around her for my father, but he was nowhere to be seen.

The audience remained abuzz, pleased that one of their own had achieved this victory, but when the major entered, led in by Mei and Tranh, they fell silent at the sight of his dark, convulsed figure. Leaning on his staff, he hobbled along the edge of the bleachers, looking into this and that face as if hoping to find a familiar one, and then, moving to the center of the ring, he began to tell the story of Firebase Ruby. I was alarmed at first, but his delivery was eloquent, lyrical, not the plainspoken style in which he had originally couched the tale, and the audience was enthralled. When he came to tell of the letter he had written his wife detailing his hatred of all things Vietnamese, a uneasy muttering arose from the bleachers and rapt expressions turned to scowls; but then he was past that point, and as he described the Viet Cong assault, his listeners settled back and seemed once again riveted by his words.

“In the phosphor light of the hanging flares,” he said, “I saw the blood-red ground spread out before me. Beyond the head-high hedgerows of coiled steel wire, black-clad men and women coursed from the jungle, myriad and quick as ants, and, inside the wire, emerging from their secret warrens, more sprouted from the earth like the demon yield of some infernal rain. All around me, my men were dying, and even in the midst of fear, I felt myself the object of a great calm observance, as if the tiny necklace-strung images of the Buddha the enemy held in their mouths when they attacked had been empowered to summon their ribbed original, and somewhere up above the flares, an enormous face had been conjured from the dark matter of the sky and was gazing down with serene approval.

“We could not hold the position long—that was clear. But I had no intention of surrendering. Drunk on whiskey and adrenaline, I was consumed by the thought of death, my own and others’, and though I was afraid, I acted less out of fear than from the madness of battle and a kind of communion with death, a desire to make death grow and flourish and triumph. I retreated into the communications bunker and ordered the corporal in charge to call for an air strike on the coordinates of Firebase Ruby. When he balked I put a pistol to his head until he had obeyed. Then I emptied a clip into the radio so no one could countermand me.”

The major bowed his head and spread his arms, as though preparing for a supreme display of magic; then his resonant voice sounded forth again, like the voice of a beast speaking from a cave, rough from the bones that have torn its throat. His eyes were chunks of phosphorous burning in the bark of a rotting log.

“When the explosions began, I was firing from a sandbagged position atop the communications bunker. The VC pouring from the jungle slowed their advance, milled about, and those inside the wire looked up in terror to see the jets screaming overhead, so low I could make out the stars on their wings. Victory was stitched across the sky in rocket trails. Gouts of flame gouged the red dirt, opening the tunnels to the air. The detonations began to blend one into the other, and the ground shook like a sheet of plywood under the pounding of a hammer. Clouds of marbled fire and smoke boiled across the earth, rising to form a dreadful second sky of orange and black, and I came to my feet, fearful yet delighted, astonished by the enormity of the destruction I had called down. Then I was knocked flat. Sandbags fell across my legs, a body flung from God knows where landed on my back, driving the breath from me, and in the instant before consciousness fled, I caught the rich stink of napalm.

“In the morning I awoke and saw a bloody, jawless face with staring blue eyes pressed close to mine, looking as if it were still trying to convey a last desperate message. I clawed my way from beneath the corpse and staggered upright to find myself the lord of a killed land, of a raw, red scar littered with corpses in the midst of a charcoaled forest. I went down from the bunker and wandered among the dead. From every quarter issued the droning of flies. Everywhere lay arms, legs, and grisly relics I could not identify. I was numb, I had no feeling apart from a pale satisfaction at having survived. But as I wandered among the dead, taking notice of the awful intimacies death had imposed: a dozen child-sized bodies huddled in a crater, anonymous as a nest of scorched beetles; a horribly burned woman with buttocks exposed reaching out a clawed hand to touch the lips of a disembodied head—these and a hundred other such scenes brought home the truth that I was their author. It wasn’t guilt I felt then. Guilt was irrelevant. We were all guilty, the dead and the living, the good and those who had abandoned God. Guilt is our inevitable portion of the world’s great trouble. No, it was the recognition that at the moment when I knew the war was lost—my share of it, at least—I chose not to cut my losses but to align myself with a force so base and negative that we refuse to admit its place in human nature and dress it in mystical clothing and call it Satan or Shiva so as to separate it from ourselves. Perhaps this sort of choice is a soldier’s virtue, but I can no longer view it in that light.” He tapped his chest with the tip of his staff. “Though I will never say that my enemies were just, there is justice in what I have endured since that day. All men sin, all men do evil. And evil shows itself in our faces.” Here he aimed the staff at the audience and tracked it from face to face, as if highlighting the misdeeds imprinted on each. “What you see of me now is not the man I was, but the thing I became at the instant I made my choice. Take from my story what you will, but understand this: I am unique only in that the judgment of my days is inscribed not merely on my face, but upon every inch of my body. We are all of us monsters waiting to be summoned forth by a moment of madness and pride.”

As Tranh and I led him from the tent, across the damp grass, the major was excited, almost incoherently so, not by the acclaim he had received, but because he had managed to complete his story. He plucked at my sleeve, babbling, bobbing his head, but I paid him no mind, concerned about Tan, whom I had seen talking to Phuong in the bleachers. And when she came running from the main tent, a windbreaker thrown over her costume, I forgot him entirely.

“We’re not going directly back to the house,” she said. “She wants to take me to a club on the square. I don’t know when we’ll get to your father’s.”

“Maybe this isn’t such a good idea. I think we should wait until morning.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Go to the house and as soon as you’ve dealt with your father, do exactly what I told you. When you hear us enter the house, stay out of sight. Don’t do a thing until I come and get you. Understand?”

“I don’t know,” I said, perplexed at the way she had taken charge.

“Please!” She grabbed me by the lapels. “Promise you’ll do as I say! Please!”

I promised, but as I watched her run off into the dark I had a resurgence of my old sense of dislocation, and though I had not truly listened to the major’s story, having been occupied with my own troubles, the sound of him sputtering and chortling behind me, gloating over the treasure of his recovered memory, his invention, whatever it was, caused me to wonder then about the nature of my own choice, and the story that I might someday tell.

My father’s house was on Yen Phu Street—two stories of pocked gray stone with green vented shutters and a green door with a knocker carved in the shape of a water buffalo’s head. I arrived shortly after midnight and stood in the lee of the high whitewashed wall that enclosed his compound. The fog had been cut by a steady drizzle, and no pedestrians were about. Light slanted from the vents of a shuttered upstairs window, and beneath it was parked a bicycle in whose basket rested a dozen white lilies, their stems wrapped in butcher paper. I imagined that my father had ridden the bicycle to market and had forgotten to retrieve the flowers after carrying his other purchases inside. They seemed omenical in their glossy pallor, a sterile emblem of the bloody work ahead.

The idea of killing my father held no terrors for me—I had performed the act in my mind hundreds of times, I’d conceived its every element—and as I stood there I felt the past accumulating at my back like the cars of a train stretching for eighteen years, building from my mother’s death to the shuddering engine of the moment I was soon to inhabit. All the misgivings that earlier had nagged at me melted away, like fog before rain. I was secure in my hatred and in the knowledge that I had no choice, that my father was a menace who would never fade.

I crossed the street, knocked, and after a few seconds he admitted me into a brightly lit alcove with a darkened room opening off to the right. He was dressed in a voluminous robe of green silk, and as he proceeded me up the stairway to the left of the alcove, the sight of his bell-like shape and bald head with the silver plate collaring the base of his skull . . . these things along with the odor of jasmine incense led me to imagine that I was being escorted to an audience with some mysterious religious figure by one of his eunuch priests. At the head of the stair was a narrow white room furnished with two padded chrome chairs, a wall screen, and, at the far end, a desk bearing papers, an ornamental vase, an old-fashioned letter opener, and a foot-high gilt and bronze Buddha. My father sat down in one of the chairs, triggered the wall screen’s computer mode with a penlight, and set about accessing the Sony AI, working through various menus, all the while chatting away, saying he was sorry he’d missed our show, he hoped to attend the following night, and how was I enjoying my stay in Binh Khoi, it often seemed an unfriendly place to newcomers, but by week’s end I’d feel right at home. I had brought no weapon, assuming that his security would detect it. The letter opener, I thought, would do the job. But my hand fell instead to the Buddha. It would be cleaner, I decided. A single blow. I picked it up, hefted it. I had anticipated that when the moment arrived, I would want to make myself known to my father, to relish his shock and dismay; but I understood that was no longer important, and I only wanted him to die. In any case, since he likely knew the truth about me, the dramatic scene I’d envisioned would be greatly diminished.

“That’s Thai. Fifteenth century,” he said, nodding at the statue, then returned his attention to the screen. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I said.

Then, without a thought, all thinking necessary having already been done, and the deed itself merely an automatic function, the final surge of an eighteen-year-long momentum, I stepped behind him and swung the statue at the back of his head. I expected to hear a crack but the sound of impact was plush, muffled, such as might be caused by the flat of one’s hand striking a pillow. He let out an explosive grunt, toppled with a twisting motion against the wall, ending up on his side, facing outward. There was so much blood, I assumed he must be dead. But then he groaned, his eyes blinked open, and he struggled to his knees. I saw that I’d hit the silver plate at the base of his skull. Blood was flowing out around the plate, but it had protected him from mortal damage. His robe had fallen open, and with his pale mottled belly bulging from the green silk and the blood streaking his neck, his smallish features knitted in pain and perplexity, he looked gross and clownishly pitiable. He held up an unsteady hand to block a second blow. His mouth worked, and he said “Wait . . .” or “What. . . .” Which, I can’t be sure. But I was in no mood either to wait or to explain myself. A clean death might not have affected me so deeply, but that I had made of a whole healthy life this repellent half-dead thing wobbling at my feet—it assaulted my moral foundation, it washed the romantic tint of revenge from the simple, terrible act of slaughter, and when I struck at him again. this time smashing the statue down two-handed onto the top of his skull, I was charged with the kind of fear that afflicts a child when he more or less by accident wounds a bird with a stone and seeks to hide the act from God by tossing his victim onto an ash heap. My father sagged onto his back, blood gushing from his nose and mouth. I caught a whiff of feces and staggered away, dropping the Buddha. Now that my purpose had been accomplished, like a bee dying from having stung its enemy, I felt drained of poison, full of dull surprise that there had been no more rewarding result.

The penlight had rolled beneath the second chair. I picked it up, and, following Tan’s instructions, I used the computer to contact a security agency in Danang. A blond woman with a brittle manner appeared on the screen and asked my business. I explained my circumstances, not bothering to characterize the murder as anything other than it was—the size of my trust would guarantee my legal immunity—and also provided her with the number of Vang’s lawyer, as well as some particulars concerning the trust, thereby establishing my bona fides. The woman vanished, her image replaced by a shifting pattern of pastel colors, and, after several minutes, this in turn was replaced by a contract form with a glowing blue patch at the bottom to which I pressed the ball of my thumb. The woman reappeared, much more solicitous now, and cautioned me to remain where I was. She assured me that an armed force would be at the house within the hour. As an afterthought she advised me to wipe the blood from my face.

The presence of the body—its meat reality—made me uncomfortable. I picked up the letter opener and went down the stairs and groped my way across the unlit room off the alcove and found a chair in a corner from which I could see the door. Sitting alone in the darkness amplified the torpor that had pervaded me, and though I sensed certain unsettling dissonances surrounding what had just taken place, I was not sufficiently alert to consider them as other than aggravations. I had been sitting there for perhaps ten minutes when the door opened and Phuong, laughing, stepped into the alcove with Tan behind her, wearing a blue skirt and checkered blouse. She kicked the door shut, pushed Tan against the wall, and began to kiss her, running a hand up under her skirt. Then her head snapped around, and although I didn’t believe she could see in the dark, she stared directly at me.

Before I could react, before I could be sure that Phuong had detected me, Tan struck her beneath the jaw with the heel of her left hand, driving her against the opposite wall, and followed this with a kick to the stomach. Phuong rolled away and up into a crouch. She cried out my father’s name: “William!” Whether in warning or—recognizing what had happened—in grief, I cannot say. Then the two women began to fight. It lasted no more than half a minute, but their speed and eerie grace were incredible to see: like watching two long-fingered witches dancing in a bright patch of weakened gravity and casting violent spells. Dazed by Tan’s initial blows, Phoung went on the defensive, but soon she recovered and started to hold her own. I remembered the letter opener in my hand. The thing was poorly balanced and Phuong’s quickness made the timing hard to judge, but then she paused, preparing to launch an attack, and I flung the opener, lodging it squarely between her shoulderblades. Not a mortal wound—the blade was too dull to bite deep—but a distracting one. She shrieked, tried to reach the opener, and, as she reeled to the side, Tan came up behind her and broke her neck with a savage twist. She let the body fall and walked toward me, a shadow in the darkened room. It seemed impossible that she was the same woman I had known on the beach at Vung Tau, and I felt a spark of fear.

“Are you all right?” she asked, stopping a few feet away.

“All right?” I laughed. “What’s going on here?”

She gave no reply, and I said, “Apparently you decided against using Mei’s herbs.”

“If you had done as I asked, if you’d stayed clear, it might not have been necessary to kill her.” She came another step forward. “Have you called for security?”

I nodded. “Did you learn to fight like that in Hue?”

“In China,” she said.

“At a private security company. Like Phuong.”

“Yes.”

“Then it would follow that you’re not Vang’s niece.”

“But I am,” she said. “He used the last of his fortune to have me trained so I could protect you. He was a bitter man . . . to have used his family so.”

“And I suppose sleeping with me falls under the umbrella of protection.”

She kneeled beside the chair, put a hand on my neck, and gazed at me entreatingly. “I love you, Philip. I would do anything for you. How can you doubt it?”

I was moved by her sincerity, but I could not help but treat her coldly. It was as if a valve had been twisted shut to block the flow of my emotions. “That’s right,” I said. “Vang told me that your kind were conditioned to bond with their clients.”

I watched the words hit home, a wounded expression washing across her features, then fading, like a ripple caused by a pebble dropped into a still pond. “Is that so important?” she asked. “Does it alter the fact that you fell in love with me?”

I ignored this, yet I was tempted to tell her, No, it did not. “If you were trained to protect me, why did Vang discourage our relationship?”

She got to her feet, her face unreadable, and went a few paces toward the alcove; she appeared to be staring at Phuong’s body, lying crumpled in the light. “There was a time when I think he wanted me for himself. That may explain it.”

“Did Phuong really accost you?” I asked. “Or was that . . .

“I’ve never lied to you. I’ve deceived you by not revealing everything I knew about Vang,” she said. “But I was bound to obey him in that. As you said, I’ve been conditioned.”

I had other questions, but I could not frame one of them. The silence of the house seemed to breed a faint humming, and I became oppressed by the idea that Tan and I were living analogs of the two corpses, that the wealth I was soon to receive as a consequence of our actions would lead us to a pass wherein we would someday lie dead in separate rooms of a silent house, while two creatures like ourselves but younger would stand apart from one another in fretful isolation, pondering their future. I wanted to dispossess myself of this notion, to contrive a more potent reality, and I crossed the room to Tan and turned her to face me. She refused to meet my eyes, but I tipped up her chin and kissed her. A lover’s kiss. I touched her breasts—a treasuring touch. But despite the sweet affirmation and openness of the kiss, I think it also served a formal purpose, the sealing of a bargain whose terms we did not fully understand.

Six months and a bit after my eighteenth birthday, I was sitting in a room in the Sony offices in Saigon, a windowless space with black walls and carpet and silver-framed photographs of scenes along the Perfume River and in the South China Sea, when Vang flickered into being against the far wall. I thought I must seem to him, as he seemed to me, like a visitation, a figure from another time manifested in a dream. He appeared no different than he had on the day he left the circus—thin and gray-haired, dressed in careworn clothing—and his attitude toward me was, as ever, distant. I told him what had happened in Binh Khoi, and he said, “I presumed you would have more trouble with William. Of course he thought he had leverage over me—he thought he had Tan in his clutches. So he let his guard down. He believed he had nothing to fear.”

His logic was overly simplistic, but rather than pursue this, I asked the question foremost on my mind: why had he not told me that he was my grandfather? I had uncovered quite a lot about my past in the process of familiarizing myself with Vang’s affairs, but I wanted to hear it all.

“Because I’m not your grandfather,” he said. “I was William’s father-in-law, but . . .” He shot me an amused look. “I should have thought you would have understood all this by now.”

I saw no humor in the situation. “Explain it to me.”

“As you wish.” He paced away from me, stopped to inspect one of the framed photographs. “William engineered the death of my wife, my daughter, and my grandson in a plane crash. Once he had isolated me, he challenged my mental competency, intending to take over my business concerns. To thwart him, I faked my suicide. It was a very convincing fake. I used a body I’d had cloned to supply me with organs. I kept enough money to support Green Star and to pay for Tan’s training. The rest you know.”

“Not so,” I said. “You haven’t told me who I am.”

“Ah, yes.” He turned from the photograph and smiled pleasantly at me. “I suppose that would interest you. Your mother’s name was Tuyet. Tuyet Su Vanh. She was an actress in various pornographic media. The woman you saw in your dream—that was she. We had a relationship for several years, then we drifted apart. Not long before I lost my family, she came to me and told me she was dying. One of the mutated HIVs. She said she’d borne a child by me. A son. She begged me to take care of you. I didn’t believe her, of course. But she had given me pleasure, so I set up a trust for you. A small one.”

“And then you decided to use me.”

“William had undermined my authority to the extent that I could not confront him directly. I needed an arrow to aim at his heart. I told your mother that if she cooperated with me I’d adopt you, place my fortune in the trust, and make you my heir. She gave permission to have your memory wiped. I wanted you empty so I could fill you with my purpose. After you were re-educated, she helped construct some fragmentary memories that were implanted by means of a biochip. Nonetheless, you were a difficult child to mold. I couldn’t be certain that you would seek William out, and so, since I was old and tired and likely not far from Heaven, I decided to feign an illness and withdraw. This allowed me to arrange a confrontation without risk to myself.”

I should have hated Vang, but after six months of running his businesses, of viewing the world from a position of governance and control, I understood him far too well to hate—though at that moment, understanding the dispassionate requisites and protocols of such a position seemed as harsh a form of judgment as the most bitter of hatreds. “What happened to my mother?” I asked.

“I arranged for her to receive terminal care in an Australian hospital.”

“And her claim that I was your biological son. . . . did you investigate it?”

“Why should I? It didn’t matter. A man in my position could not acknowledge an illegitimate child, and once I had made my decision to abdicate my old life, it mattered even less. If it has any meaning for you, there are medical records you can access.”

“I think I’d prefer it to remain a mystery,” I told him.

“You’ve no reason to be angry at me,” he said. “I’ve made you wealthy. And what did it cost? A few memories.”

I shifted in my chair, steepled my hands on my stomach. “Are you convinced that my . . . that William had your family killed? He seemed to think there had been a misunderstanding.”

“That was a charade! If you’re asking whether or not I had proof—of course I didn’t. William knew how to disguise his hand.”

“So everything you did was based solely on the grounds of your suspicions.”

“No! It was based on my knowledge of the man!” His tone softened. “What does it matter? Only William and I knew the truth, and he is dead. If you doubt me, if you pursue this further, you’ll never be able to satisfy yourself.”

“I suppose you’re right,” I said, getting to my feet.

“Are you leaving already?” He wore an aggrieved expression. “I was hoping you’d tell me about Tan . . . and Green Star. What has happened with my little circus?”

“Tan is well. As for Green Star, I gave it to Mei and Tranh.”

I opened the door, and Vang made a gesture of restraint. “Stay a while longer, Philip. Please. You and Tan are the only people with whom I have an emotional connection. It heartens me to spend time with you.”

Hearing him describe our relationship in these terms gave me pause. I recalled the conversation in which Tan had asserted that something central to the idea of life died when one was uploaded into Heaven—Vang’s uncharacteristic claim to an emotional debt caused me to think that he might well be, as she’d described her parents, a colored shadow, a cunningly contrived representation of the original. I hoped that this was not the case; I hoped that he was alive in every respect.

“I have to go,” I said. “Business, you understand. But I have some news that may be of interest to you.”

“Oh?” he said eagerly. “Tell me.”

“I’ve invested heavily in Sony, and through negotiation I’ve arranged for one of your old companies—Intertech of Hanoi—to be placed in charge of overseeing the virtual environment. I would expect you’re soon going to see some changes in your particular part of Heaven.”

He seemed nonplussed, then a look of alarm dawned on his face. “What are you going to do?”

“Me? Not a thing.” I smiled, and the act of smiling weakened my emotional restraint—a business skill I had not yet perfected,” and let anger roughen my voice. “It’s much more agreeable to have your dirty work handled by others, don’t you think?”

On occasion, Tan and I manage to rekindle an intimacy that reminds us of the days when we first were lovers, but these occasions never last for long, and our relationship is plagued by the lapses into neutrality or—worse—indifference that tend to plague any two people who have spent ten years in each other’s company. In our case these lapses are often accompanied by bouts of self-destructive behavior. It seems we’re punishing ourselves for having experienced what we consider an undeserved happiness. Even our most honest infidelities are inclined to be of the degrading sort. I understand this. The beach at Vung Tau, once the foundation of our union, has been replaced by a night on Yen Phu Street in Binh Khoi, and no edifice built upon such imperfect stone could be other than cracked and deficient. Nonetheless, we both realize that whatever our portion of contentment in this world, we are fated to seek it together.

From time to time, I receive a communication from Vang. He does not look well, and his tone is always desperate, cajoling. I tell myself that I should relent and restore him to the afterlife for which he contracted; but I am not highly motivated in that regard. If there truly is something that dies when one ascends to Heaven, I fear it has already died in me, and I blame Vang for this.

Seven years after my talk with Vang, Tan and I attended a performance of the circus in the village of Loc Noi. There was a new James Bond Cochise, Kai and Kim had become pretty teenagers, both Tranh and Mei were thinner, but otherwise things were much the same. We sat in the main tent after the show and reminisced. The troupe—Mei in particular—were unnerved by my bodyguards, but all in all, it was a pleasant reunion.

After a while I excused myself and went to see the major. He was huddled in his tent, visible by the weird flickerings in his eyes . . . though as my vision adapted to the dark, I was able make out the cowled shape of his head against the canvas backdrop. Tranh had told me he did not expect the major to live much longer, and now that I was close to him, I found that his infirmity was palpable, I could hear it in his labored breath. I asked if he knew who I was, and he replied without inflection, as he had so many years before, “Philip.” I’d hoped that he would be more forthcoming, because I still felt akin to him, related through the cryptic character of our separate histories, and I thought that he might once have sensed that kinship, that he’d had some diffuse knowledge of the choices I confronted, and had designed the story of Firebase Ruby for my benefit, shaping it as a cautionary tale—one I’d failed to heed. But perhaps I’d read too much into what was sheer coincidence. I touched his hand, and his breath caught, then shuddered forth, heavy as a sob. All that remained for him were a few stories, a few hours in the light. I tried to think of something I could do to ease his last days, but I knew death was the only mercy that could mend him.

Mei invited Tan and me to spend the night in the trailer—for old times’ sake, she said—and we were of no mind to refuse. We both yearned for those old times, despite neither of us believing that we could recapture them. Watching Tan prepare for bed, it seemed to me that she had grown too vivid for the drab surroundings, her beauty become too cultivated and too lush. But when she slipped in beside me, when we began to make love on that creaky bunk, the years fell away and she felt like a girl in my arms, tremulous and new to such customs, and I was newly awakened to her charms. She drifted off to sleep afterward with her head on my chest, and as I lay there trying to quiet my breath so not to wake her, it came to me that future and past were joined in the darkness that enclosed us, two black rivers flowing together, and I understood that while the circus would go its own way in the morning and we would go ours, those rivers, too, were forever joined—we shared a confluence and a wandering course, and a moment proof against the world’s denial, and we would always be a troupe, Kim and Kai, Mei and Tranh, Tan and I, and the major . . . that living ghost who, like myself, was the figment of a tragic past he never knew, or—if, indeed, he knew it—with which he could never come to terms. It was a bond that could not save us, from either our enemies or ourselves, but it held out a hope of simple glory, a promise truer than Heaven. Illusory or not, all our wars would continue until their cause was long-forgotten under the banner of Radiant Green Star.

GENERATION GAP

Stanley Schmidt

I. 1967

Like most people, Robby Lerman at fifteen knew far better than his elders about many things. Unlike most people, Robby did something about it.

It started, in a sense, the day of his brother Harry’s funeral. Robby hardly heard the minister’s droning, and the overwhelming smell of flowers almost put him to sleep. His eyes couldn’t leave the closed, flag-draped casket, and his mind roamed freely over all the years leading up to this moment.

He hadn’t actually seen Harry for over a year, since before he went off to the war that was never declared. Because of what happened over there, he would never see him again; but in his mind’s eye he saw him over and over. A towering Harry leading a tiny, stumbling Robby across the fields, pointing out thistles and grasshoppers and awakening in him a wonder at life. A less towering Harry trading outrageous puns with a somewhat older Robby across a dinner table heaped with fried chicken and corn on the cob and fresh biscuits, convulsing their parents with mirth. In the early days Robby missed half the puns, but as he grew he understood more and more, and started making his own. He remembered long talks in which he tried to make Harry feel the excitement of frontiers that were opening up in space, and Harry tried to make Robby feel the excitement of running a football eighty yards for a winning touchdown. Neither ever fully succeeded, but that never changed the respect and affection each held for the other.

Only the war had begun to do that. They both read the papers; their social studies teachers saw to that. But Robby saw what it meant more clearly than Harry. Robby had felt a growing fear that Harry would be drafted and end up . . . as he had. Harry had never seemed to care. Every time Robby tried to tell him how he worried about him, Harry had shrugged it off. “If my country needs me,” he had said, “I’ll go. If I don’t come back—them’s the breaks.”

And so he had gone. And this—Robby stared at the polished mahogany box through moist, unfocused eyes—was how he had come home.

He helped his father and uncles and cousins carry the box, though he was still too small to be much help. Sleet stung his face as they stood by the grave, listening to useless platitudes and the tolling bell in the tower. A clever mechanism started lowering Harry into the ground, and the minister led everyone away so they wouldn’t have to watch.

And then it was over—for Harry. Robby sat in the back seat of the Pontiac as Dad drove past the city limits and along arrow-straight roads to the family farm. Nobody said anything until they were out in the country, driving past flat fields still too frozen to plow. Then Mom wiped away a tear and said softly, “Well, at least we can be proud of him.”

That broke something in Robby. Ever since the messenger had brought the bad news, he’d been unsure whether what he felt was more sadness or loss, frustration or despair, anger or fear. Now they all came bursting out at once. “But there was no reason for him to die!” he half- wailed.

His mother turned around to stare at him. “What did you say, young man?”

“There was no reason for him to die. Weren’t you listening to that Mark Twain show on television last week? That could have been written the morning it was broadcast!”

Mom was frowning deeply. “I don’t see what—”

“ ‘Only when the republic’s life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it’s wrong,’ ” Robby quoted. “The republic’s life is not in danger. The government is wrong. The government killed Harry.”

“Robby!”

“Well, son,” his father drawled, “I know it must seem that way to you now. We’re all very upset. But I think the government knows better than we can—”

“We have no business there,” Robby interrupted. “It’s not our war.”

Mom started to cry. Dad said, “I don’t think this is the time to discuss this.”

“Well, I won’t let it happen to me. If I have to go to Cana—”

“I said, this is not the time to discuss this. Robby, shut up.”

Robby shut up, but he had to chew hard on his lower lip to keep from bursting into tears himself. Nobody said anything until they pulled into the driveway and parked next to the big old yellow brick house a few minutes later. Then Robby ran upstairs, locked himself in his room, and let the dam break.

Half an hour later he had calmed down just a bit. “Can’t they see?” he thought incredulously. “Do they just swallow everything they hear? How did they get that way?”

Lying on his stomach on the bed, he turned on the radio on the bookshelf headboard, hoping to find something that would help calm him. But station after station had nothing but drivel. In the midst of some inanely cheerful songster crooning, “I’m going to sit right down and write myself a letter,” he shut it off in disgust.

He didn’t do it then, but that was the germ of the idea. His alienation from parents and government grew slowly but inexorably with each passing month. It wasn’t that he loved either any less than he ever had. Indeed, it was because he loved them so much that he felt such sadness at the ways they had changed. “Who is the country?” Mark Twain had asked through Hal Holbrook on television that night. “Is it the government? In a republic, the government is merely a servant—a temporary one. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”

That seemed to Robby one of those “self-evident truths” they liked to talk about in social studies classes. So how was it that on the same day he had watched that show—probably the most electrifying hour he had ever spent in front of the tube—the President had unilaterally announced that he was abolishing draft deferments for graduate students? Didn’t Congress have to decide things like that?

I m scared, Robby thought. Do we have a dictator on our hands?

Not that Robby was a graduate student, but he would be eventually. He had had his eyes on the stars, literally and figuratively, from a very early age. He vividly remembered the news of Sputnik‘s launch. He was only in the first grade then, and assumed that was why he couldn’t understand the reactions he heard from adults. “How horrible that the Russians should do it before us,” they said, while young Robby exulted, “Yes! People can go to the stars!”

And he would help make it happen. His science and math teachers all agreed that he had “the right stuff.” Until quite recently, his mind had held a clear, bright vision of his future, and just assumed that that was how it would be. Robby—no, by then he’d probably call himself “Rob”—Rob Lerman, astrophysicist, would help build the great rockets that would help mankind hatch from the egg of Earth and go forth to become all it could be. Perhaps someday he would even ride the rockets himself. In the meantime, he would come home from the lab each day to a family that was everything a family should be: two brilliant, loving parents guiding their even more brilliant children on a steady course toward independence, creativity, and thorough competence to handle whatever life dealt them.

He even had their mother picked out: Rachel Flanagan, who sat three rows over in English and at the front of the next row in science. She was pretty, in a quiet sort of way, with long, light brown hair and barely visible freckles; but what really attracted Robby, trite as it sounded, was her mind: she had one. She didn’t say much in class, and when she did he sometimes had to strain to hear her. Most of her contemporaries seemed to him airheads, with no interests beyond hairstyles and dances, but Rachel had thoughts worth hearing.

He had never actually talked to her, face to face, one on one. A couple of times he had almost worked up the nerve to say something to her between classes, but each time the sight of another boy talking to her had sent him into hasty retreat. But the right moment would come. When it did, one thing would lead to another and they would live happily ever after.

Raising their own kids right would be a start, but Robby had a far larger vision than that. When the road to the stars opened up—with his help—the few intelligent, sane people in the world would go off and found their own colony somewhere, free of the stupidities and lunacies that had wrecked every civilization yet on Earth.

But if this war went on, would he even live long enough to do any of that—or would he, like Harry, be drafted and killed in a war where he had no business? Would his country turn into a place with no room or tolerance for dreams?

Might he have to go somewhere else?

He didn’t want to. The prospect was scary, and there was too much that he’d hate to leave behind. But he began listening more intently whenever he heard about draft-prone students going to Canada. He might have to consider that himself in a couple of years. There were good colleges in Canada, too.

At the merest hint of that, Dad blew up, calling Robby a coward. That hurt. Couldn’t Dad understand that it would take as much courage to leave everything behind and embark on an uncertain and unpopular course as to blindly follow orders? Couldn’t he or Mom understand that Robby was only trying to build the best possible future for himself and the family he would someday have, no matter how painful the sacrifices that required?

Did they ever have dreams like this? he asked himself after an angry confrontation one bright day in early spring. How did they get to be the way they are?

That phrase sent a shiver of déjà vu through him, casting his mind back to the day they buried Harry. Now, with the added wisdom of an additional year, he discovered an unnerving new insight. His parents must have had dreams like this, but somehow had lost them and forgotten what they were like.

That led him to an even more chilling question: How do I make sure I don’t get like that?

Suddenly that seemed like a real, terribly urgent problem. As his mind continued to replay that painful scene from a year ago, it got to the part where the song on the radio had made him reach out angrily to shut it off. But now he heard in the song’s words an answer to his problem.

With grim determination he made sure the door of his room was securely closed. Then, sitting down at his crowded desk with stationery pad, envelope, and pen, he began the most important letter he had ever written.

March 22, 1968

Dear Rob,

I don’t know if you’ll remember writing this, but please read it carefully. I’m writing because of a painful rift that’s opened up between me and Mom and Dad lately. I guess it’s that “generation gap” we’re always hearing about. But I think I’ve figured out why generation gaps happen: as people get older, they forget things that were obvious when they were younger.

Now that you’re almost as old as Mom and Dad were when I wrote this. I want to remind you of some things. You may have heard some of what I’m going to tell you from your own kids and shrugged it off. But you can’t shrug it off from me. This is you talking, Rob, and if you cast your mind back maybe you can remember how you felt when . . .

He put the pen down an hour later, drained. He read the letter over once, then sealed it an envelope and addressed it:

To Rob Lerman

CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT

To Be Opened On My 35th Birthday

Then he buried it deep in a box full of old rocket drawings and such, its exterior covered with warnings like PRIVATE—KEEP OUT and TOP SECRET. He wouldn’t want Mom or Dad to stumble onto it, but he trusted them not to dig in his secret place, and he trusted himself to find it when the time came.

Then he sealed the box, returned it to the back of his closet, and forgot about it. He never dreamed that he might get an answer—until he did.

II. 1993

Even after all these years, Robert Lerman didn’t need to think much about the straight Indiana roads that led to his parents’ house. That was good, because he had too much on his mind to give them much attention. He noticed once-familiar houses and the black skeletons of scattered late November trees just enough to know when to turn. Most of his mind was back at work.

Pereira, he thought over and over. Pereira, Pereira, Pereira! You’re my best physicist. Why can’t you concentrate on something we can sell to the folks with the money, instead of pie in the sky?

Part of Robert—a part that had once been far more active, but now seldom stirred in its sleep—had to admit that there was a certain fascination, even excitement, in what Pereira wanted to try. If he was right, it could open up space in a way that poor old sleepy NASA could hardly imagine. But that was the problem: if they couldn’t imagine it, they wouldn’t fund it. One of the hardest lessons he’d had to learn to become a successful CEO had been that you figure out what you can get funding for, and don’t waste time on what you can’t.

So how could he keep from losing Pereira, and at the same time keep him working on things that paid? It was a vexing problem, on which he should be concentrating all his efforts. This call from his mother could hardly have come at a worse time—but he owed her, and he didn’t want anyone else going through his things.

So here he was, speeding past denuded cornfields and finally turning into the old gravel driveway. He would do what he must, and get back as quickly as he could.

He greeted Mom with a perfunctory kiss and they traded a few polite words. He wished fleetingly that they could regain more of the warmth they had shared when he was small, but it was much too late for that. Now he could only give her what help he could and try to ease her remaining years. It saddened him to see how she had begun to shrink and shrivel, and how visibly the process had accelerated since Dad died last year. She was right: she needed to get out of this big old house, even though she had not yet found a buyer for it and the farm. No matter; she had found a cozy apartment, and Robert would at least help clear this place out and get her settled there.

She fixed chicken soup and biscuits for lunch, and they talked of Gloree and the kids and his job as they ate. The old cuckoo clock in the front room ticked a quiet accompaniment, and when the small bird came out and uttered its trademark twice Robert pushed himself away from the table. “Well, that was delicious, Mom, but I’d better get down to work. Is the heat on in my room?”

“Oh, yes, I saw to that last night.” She climbed with him to the second-floor bedroom he’d shared with Harry. “Everything’s just the way you left it, except I brought in a big wastebasket. If you need anything else, just holler.”

She went out and left him alone. With a sigh he opened the closet, still full of clothes he hadn’t worn in decades. He pulled those out unceremoniously and piled them on the bed. Then he pulled out several boxes from the back, sat down cross-legged on the floor, and started digging through his past.

They brought back memories, all right. He started with some boxes he’d filled himself with early school papers and his first scrawled drawings of spaceships. As he worked through the years, watching them improve, he debated whether any of this was worth keeping. At best, its interest was historic. Would anyone ever care? He’d already resigned himself to being no more than a footnote, if that, in histories written for the world.

Gloree might be interested, and Jerry and Kathy; but would he really want to show them such intimate glimpses of such an early him? Not now; but he could always take the boxes with him and decide later. . . .

Occasionally, something he found gave him a small twinge of wistful melancholy. There were school papers there that impressed him surprisingly—math and science papers marked A+, with comments like, “Keep at it and you’ll go far!” He found himself thinking, I could have been a real scientist, actually doing great things instead of just supervising them! If the war hadn’t . . .

He tried sternly to squelch the restless stirrings. The aroma of slow-simmering stew and dumplings drifted up the stairs, evoking the warmest parts of his past.

He came to a notebook where academic notes were interspersed with jotted notes about times and places of antidraft rallies—and childish fantasies written in a private code about things he hoped someday to do with Rachel Flanagan.

He put the first one down, grinning with amusement. Rachel Flanagan, he thought. I haven’t thought about her in a coon’s age! I wonder what ever became of her?

He found a few more references to her, reminding him that he never had traded more than a few words with her. There were letters from Harry in Viet Nam that brought back real pain, and then a steadily growing barrage of letters from Gloree. Those were heady days! He could hardly believe that she, the definitive glamor queen, had come on to him, the nerd par excellence. But she had, in no uncertain terms. The sheer intoxication of her attention had led to a whole series of surprising turns in his life: drifting away from the antidraft and antiwar movements and into a more conventional sort of patriotism, even letting himself be drafted and going off To Serve His Country.

Unlike Harry, he’d lived to come home. He hadn’t even been wounded, at least physically. But he had seen enough to scar his mind, and when he came home, it no longer worked quite the way it had. Now, in spite of himself, he found it pondering disturbing “what-ifs” ? If the war hadn’t interrupted his schooling, might he now be a genuine, hands-on scientist—maybe even a creative and important one? If he hadn’t met Gloree, might he have stuck to his original determination to stay out of the war at all costs? If—Stop that! he shouted inside his mind. It can’t do you any good to wonder about that now! He slammed that notebook shut and reached out for a new box—one he didn’t recognize.

He held it for a long time, a plain bronze-tinted shoebox with his name—Robby Lerman—written on top. But the writing was in a neat feminine hand, and the printed label said the box had held a pair of girl’s shoes. Robby had never had a sister, and Robert found himself oddly reluctant to open the box. Finally he stood up, carried it downstairs, and held it out to his mother with a frown. “Mom,” he asked quietly, “what is this? Where did it come from?”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Didn’t I ever tell you? I thought I sent you the clipping. You remember Rachel Flanagan, who went to school with you? She died in a terrible accident while she was still in college, poor girl. Her mother found this box with a note saying Rachel wanted you to have it if anything happened to her. So I saved it for you.”

“Oh,” said Robert, somehow keeping his voice steady. “Thank you.” But he heard his heart pounding with unexpected emotion. Rachel’s dead? he thought numbly, wondering why that should hit him so hard now. And she wanted me to have this? Why would she want me to have anything?

He turned quickly and took the box back upstairs.

What he found inside was astonishing. Clippings by and about Rachel from her college paper alternated with diary-like essays in the same handwriting as his name on the box lid. Together they formed a vivid, intimate portrait of her. In a half hour of reading things she’d written, and things others had written about her, Robert came to feel that he knew her better than most people he’d known face to face. He almost wished he hadn’t, because the picture that emerged was very close to what he had imagined her to be. She’d gone to college somewhere in Canada, and had done very well in her studies despite a broad spectrum of activities from writing for school publications to participating in the antidraft movement. He came away fighting the feeling that she really would have been a better soul-mate for him than Gloree—and might well have given him the support he needed to become what he really wanted instead of a mere administrator.

The last item in the box was a handwritten note, short and to the point—and to him.

August 19, 1970

Dear Rob,

If you’re reading this, something’s happened to me. That’s OK; it’s the risk we all run, every day. I hope you don’t think it’s too silly that I asked Mom to give you these papers, but I wanted you at least once in your life to know what I never had the nerve to tell you in mine. I always thought you were pretty special, Rob, all the way through school. I always wanted to get to know you better, always wished you would show some sign of wanting to get to know me. But you never did, and I could never bring myself to make the first move. That’s my one regret. but it’s a big one. I think I could have done it now, if we were both in the same place. But I had to get away from the kids I grew up with to start developing the self-confidence to do things like that.

Anyway, I wanted you to know how I felt, and to get to know at least a little someone who always thought the world of you, even if it’s too late now. I wish you a wonderful life, Rob, and a much longer one than mine.

Love,

Rachel

Robert found himself fighting back tears. Not only had she really been what he’d been looking for, but she had been as interested in him as he in her. It could have been—if they hadn’t both been too shy and stupid and awkward to say so.

But none of that mattered now. It was water over the dam. And in the real now, not the might-have-been, he had a life to get on with.

So he squeezed the incipient emotions out, put Rachel’s box back together, and returned to sorting through his closet so he could get back to Gloree and work. Five minutes later he came to the second bombshell: a sealed envelope addressed in his own hand.

To Rob Lerman

CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT

To Be Opened On My 35th Birthday

A bit late for that now, he thought with amusement, since he was already past his forty-first—but then, he’d long since forgotten he’d written it. He could only guess at what he’d written that he’d thought might interest him 20 or 30 years later. Well, he thought, slitting the envelope, let’s see what the kid has to say . . .

The opening grabbed him and dragged him back to the past with unexpected force.

Dear Rob,

I don’t know if you’ll remember writing this, but please read it carefully. I’m writing because of a painful rift that’s opened up between me and Mom and Dad lately. I guess it’s that “generation gap” we’re always hearing about. But I think I’ve figured out why generation gaps happen . . .

Sure you have, Robert thought—but he kept reading, with unexpectedly close attention to every word.

. . . when you were my age. I trust by now you’re well on your way to a Nobel prize, are happily married to the right woman (you know who!), have those kids, and are doing a better job with them than “our” parents did with “us.” Even so, I want to give you some advice, for your own good.

Something happens to people, Rob; don’t let it happen to you. Mom and Dad have forgotten what it’s like to dream of making a better life instead of just accepting the one they inherited. They’ve forgotten that young love can be a strong, thoughtful thing, instead of trivial infatuation. They joke so much about “puppy love” that I’m afraid to let them suspect I care about somebody who might not care about me. They live through their kids instead of having interests of their own, helping their kids do the same, and sharing their different kinds of enjoyment. So when they lose their kids, whether to a stupid war or by drifting apart, they don’t have much left. I see that happening already: it scares me to think how little will be left by the time you read this. If you have kids, remember they’re people. Remember how you felt at their ages—but keep a life of your own, too.

Perhaps worst of all, Mom and Dad have lost their senses of humor. They’ve forgotten how to have fun—and that’s tragic.

I still don’t understand how these things happen, Rob, but be warned that they can. Watch out for the danger signs. Please don’t let them happen to you. Try to remember what you knew when you were young.

The Ghost of Robert Past

That one did move him to tears. Reading it, he did remember how young Robby had felt when he wrote it. He could see a fair measure of truth and even wisdom in it—and he could see more “danger signs” than he liked to admit in his present life.

And yet. . . .

OK, young whippersnapper, he thought, you’ve told me a thing or two that I needed to hear. But I’ve got a thing or two I could tell you, too. How I wish I could answer you, tell you all I’ve been through and all I’ve learned since then!

But of course that’s impossible.

Or is it? he found himself thinking as he drove home two days later.

Robert had been glad to see Mom again, but even gladder to get away from the old house. That place was haunted, as surely as if it had been crawling with ectoplasmic ghosts!

As he put distance between it and him, the world seemed to return to normal—except that a long drive alone provides a lot of opportunity for a mind to ponder what’s been dumped into it lately. Part of that, of course, included the unnerving letters from himself and from Rachel, and the unhealthy speculations they’d stirred up about what might have been. But the theme he kept coming back to was his fleeting wish that he could answer young Robby’s letter.

Obviously, he’d thought at the time, that was quite impossible, a mere idle fantasy. But now, headed back toward work, his thoughts returned to the crazily impractical research Pereira wanted to do. Was it really as crazily impractical as he’d been assuming?

Hadn’t Pereira said something about its implying the possibility of motion in time as well as space?

He was going to have to have a serious talk with that man.

Antonio João Pereira looked like a carefully assembled blend of half a dozen races, which was hardly surprising for a Brazilian: broad nose, high cheekbones, straight brown hair with a hint of red in it and combed straight back. He also looked a little uncomfortable in Robert’s guest chair, which was how Robert preferred it. He was supposed to be in control here, and that would happen more easily here in his big executive office than in Pereira’s lab.

“I want to make it clear at the outset,” Robert said carefully, looking the physicist right in the eye, “that I’m not saying we’re going to pursue this thing of yours. You’re well aware of my reservations about it. But I am willing to talk about it just a bit more, just on the off chance that we could find a way to do some part of it. Your idea, in layman’s language, is to create a chamber in which you can force the evolution of a confined quantum system so that the wave functions peak at a desired point in spacetime?”

“Yes, sir,” said Pereira, in a soft voice that caressed English into something vaguely resembling his native Portuguese. “Think of it as loading the dice by the application of carefully selected fields to the system in the chamber. The practical result—and I emphasize practical—is to cause the system you put in the box to appear whenever and wherever you wish it to. In effect, it offers the possibility of a completely new kind of space travel, potentially much better than rockets. If we can reduce this to practice, it will be more like an aimable matter transmitter—with no need for a receiver. And since everything is a quantum system, in principle the transmitter could move whatever we want to. It could make rocketry obsolete, and give us the stars directly.”

Robert frowned hard. “But will it work? You’ve admitted it would cost a bundle to set up even your prototype, and I can’t afford to gamble that unless the odds are quite favorable. I’ve read some of the thinking other physicists have done along these lines, and they all seem to stress that what they’re describing is simply a thought experiment, beyond the reach of present technology.”

“They’re wrong,” Pereira said matter-of-factly. “They haven’t pursued their thoughts far enough. Let me remind you, Mr. Lerman, that just a few years ago essentially no physicists talked seriously about the possibility of any form of teleportation, time travel, or faster-than-light travel. Now the journals are full of those things. Just ‘thought experiments,’ as you say, but nonetheless serious discussions of real possibilities that might someday be practical.

“The remarkable thing is that none of those proposals even depend on radically new physics. They’re new possibilities that have been implicit all along in theories that we’ve had for decades. I’ve simply gone a little farther down one such path than anyone else. If you get me the funding, I can reduce it to practice. That will make Rocketech the undisputed leader in space, so far ahead of everyone else that they’ll never catch up except by buying a ride on our technology.”

Put that way, it sounded almost irresistible. It sounded like the sort of breakthrough that Robert, back when he was Robby, had dreamed of someday announcing to a CEO from the other side of the desk. The credit he could take by supporting it from this side could be almost as satisfying, but he had to be very careful. He hadn’t reached this position by succumbing easily to glowing speeches. He would have to subject the hard details of Pereira’s proposal to review by his peers—or as close to his peers as they could come up with. But if their report was favorable, it just might be a good enough bet for him to back without unduly jeopardizing his job. “So what would you need?” he asked.

“A place for the enclosure and the associated lab equipment. Preferably not too close to anything else. Funds to build all that—”

“How big?” Robert interrupted. “Would it fit in an ordinary house?”

“That would be about the minimum,” said Pereira. “The actual size would depend on how big an object we wanted to move. Eventually, for practical applications, we’d need something bigger. But for a proof of principle, with a very small test object . . . yes, I think, that would do.”

“I see.” Robert leaned back in his leather swivel chair. “Well, Pereira, let me tell you how it looks to me. I do have some discretionary funds that I can use for ‘blue sky’ research. I must confess this has always seemed a bit too blue sky to me, and I’m still a little leery of it. But if a review panel—don’t worry, it will all be in house—thinks it has a fighting chance, I’ll agree that the potential rewards seem worth a bit of a gamble. Give me a package I can show them, and we may—just may—give you a chance at that proof of principle.”

Pereira beamed. “You’ll have it this afternoon, sir, and you won’t regret it. Thank you, Mr. Lerman!”

“Don’t thank me yet,” Robert cautioned. Pereira was almost to the door before Robert worked up the nerve to add offhandedly, “Did I understand you to say that your gizmo might move things in time as well as space?”

Pereira turned around as if looking for a trap, then grinned. “As a matter of fact, it does. I didn’t want to stress that unless you brought it up. If anything sounds ‘blue sky’ . . .”

“I won’t mention it to the Board,” Robert promised. “Out of curiosity, though, what kinds of things could it move in time? People?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Pereira. “Certainly not the little prototype I’m asking to build. Maybe never, though it would be rash to say that. We might be able to handle small objects.”

“Like this?” Robert waved a Federal Express package from his desk.

“Well, maybe. It’s a long shot, but it’s really too early to tell.”

“Yes, of course. That’s not our main goal anyway.” Officially. “Well, thanks for your time, Pereira. You give me a quick answer, and I’ll try to give you a quick answer. Please close the door on your way out.”

As soon as Pereira was gone, Robert called his mother in her new apartment. “I may have good news for you,” he said after the obligatory pleasantries. “You haven’t sold the house yet, have you? Well, don’t. Put it on hold for a few days. I may have a buyer for you. Me.”

It took a few years to get the prototype ready to test, but they were invigorating years—the best Robert had spent in a long time. Pereira’s proposal sailed past the review panel (four company physicists, all sworn to secrecy) with surprising ease. Since the blue sky fund would cover most of it, at least at the beginning, Robert didn’t have to tell the Board much about it. And then it was underway.

It felt wonderful, after years of bidding on trivial subcontracts for a lethargic and unimaginative space program, to be working on something with mind-stretching potential. Not having to report every detail to a committee, and even the risk of failure with disastrous consequences, added spice and made it still better. Robert was soon having more fun with his job than he’d ever had before, and that increased enjoyment spilled over into all aspects of his life.

Even so, through the daily exasperations and occasional minor triumphs, he never forgot his personal reason for pushing this project. From time to time he would jot himself a note, in a high-security file on his office hard disk, about what he was going to say in his letter. He wanted to get it just right, and it became increasingly clear that he was going to have to do it within strict wordage limits.

Putting the lab in his family’s old house helped—it reduced the need for both energy and precision in the spatial part of a transmission—but the fact remained that temporal translations were going to be a lot more demanding than spatial ones. So when they eventually tried what he privately thought of as The Big One, he was going to have to put whatever he said into a very small, light package. Floppy disks were no good; young Robby would have no way to recognize, much less read them. Microfiche could carry a lot of message—far more than Robert wanted to send—but even that required special equipment that Robby might or might not bother to track down. So Robert was leaning toward simply typing what he could on an ordinary aerogramme—one of those flimsy blue sheets that folded up to form its own envelope for airmail. With a 15-pitch typewriter, or one of the smaller fonts on his printer, that would be good for 1300 words or so.

Which 1300 words to type was the crucial question, but one he still had time to consider. To provide input to his subconscious, he occasionally read over some of the papers he’d dug out of the closet of his past—including the clipping that detailed Rachel’s accident, which Mom had insisted on digging up and giving to him before he left.

As the time drew nigh, and the first small spatial tests succeeded, Robert found himself thinking more and more about just what he was hoping to accomplish. He had convinced himself that the project actually had enough potential for space applications to maybe justify it to the Board and the stockholders; but he’d only become convinced after seeing the potential for answering Robby’s letter. At times he worried that it was becoming an obsession. And he often wondered, What if I do get a message back to him? Just what will that accomplish?

When he tried to get Pereira’s thoughts on the subject, he did it circumspectly, couching his questions in hypothetical terms. “So,” he said casually one day over lunch, “suppose somebody sent a message back to somebody at an earlier time? What effect would it have on the present?”

Pereira shrugged, chewing the question as he chewed his asparagus. “We’re really not sure,” he said finally. “There are a number of possible interpretations of the formalism of quantum mechanics, and people still think of new ones from time to time. Personally, I lean toward the ‘many worlds’ model. At a particular point in time, there are two possibilities for the next instant. The guy gets a message from the future, or he doesn’t. Each of those becomes a new branch of the original world-line, growing a whole new future.”

“But which one’s real?”

“Each of them is—to the people who live in it. They’re two separate universes existing and evolving side by side—but not parallel, because they’re diverging from a common origin.”

Robert made a low whistle. “That’s awesome, to think that our simple little experiment could create a whole new universe.”

“Happens all the time,” said Pereira. “Every time anybody or anything makes a choice. Take that guy who gets the message from the future. Does he do anything about it? If he tosses it and forgets it, that gives you one future. If he does what it says, that’s another. If he thinks its advice is wrong and does something different, that’s still another. They’re all there, history branching and rebranching.”

Robert had read things like that before, but he still found the answer vaguely unsatisfying. “So you’re saying that it has no effect on the present the message was sent from, but just creates others that somehow exist alongside it but out of touch?”

“Maybe—if that version of the many-worlds model happens to be right. Of course, it may not be. Maybe one of the other models is closer to reality—or maybe the truth is some new one that nobody’s even thought of yet. I can’t even rule out the possibility that it would act like some kind of iterative process, where throwing a monkey wrench back into the past just changes the initial conditions and runs off a new version of the same future. But that one doesn’t seem very likely to me. Of course, that could just be personal bias—because that one would mean we physicists would have a lot more work to do, rebuilding our fundamental conceptual models.” He looked thoughtful, then grinned. “That might not be so bad, at that. It ought to mean lots of employment opportunities!”

“If,” said Robert, “anybody in that future thought that work was worth paying for.” He didn’t mean to be nasty, but Pereira’s answer wasn’t the one he’d hoped to hear. He could see now that an influential part of his mind was hoping that a letter to his younger self, suggesting actions that looked better in hindsight, might somehow change his present circumstances to ones more like his original goals. Circumstances, for instance, in which he, not Pereira, was the one doing the real physics that might lead to a Nobel and the stars.

Okay, it was a long shot—but even Pereira wasn’t ruling it out. Robert would try not to get his hopes up, but he was more determined than ever to go through with the experiment.

Four months after that conversation, it was almost ready to go. Robert went to a stationery store, bought a package of aerogrammes, and rented a small electronic typewriter with a 15-pitch daisy wheel. He wrote the letter in his den, at home, when Gloree and the kids were out—because some of the things in it could hurt them if they read it, and he didn’t want that. He read it over once, then sealed it securely, stuck it in his jacket pocket, and went off to the lab.

He patiently endured a good deal of mild-mannered ribbing there. Everyone knew by now that he had insisted on providing the specimen for transmission, and when the technicians saw that it was an envelope addressed to a name suspiciously like his own, they were dying to know what it said. He fended off their requests gracefully but firmly. “Never mind what it says,” he told them. “Just keep an eye on me afterward. If it can change the present, the results should affect me more than anybody else. So maybe you’ll be able to tell if I’ve changed.”

Not that he expected any such thing. The more he thought about it, the harder he found it to believe that dropping a new element into his past could do anything to the subsequent years he’d already lived. Nonetheless, he felt just a twinge as he watched the final preparations for the test. What if it could—and the new life it created for him was one that had already ended before this moment?

Fortunately he didn’t have time to dwell on it. Pereira had prepared his crews well. The countdown went off without a hitch, and the crucial instant was remarkably anticlimactic. Nothing obvious even happened outside the chamber.

But when the clock said enough time had elapsed, and Pereira was satisfied with several instrument readings, they reopened the chamber—and found it empty.

III. 1969

Robby’s answer came on a particularly fine day in the spring of his senior year. Even though the war was still on and looming closer and more personal than ever, Robby felt good when he came home from school that bright, flower-scented afternoon. School was going well; he had acceptances to two good colleges and two more pending; and he was no longer cowering passively before the menaces he saw around him. The war had grown increasingly controversial, dividing the country sharply between its supporters and its opponents. But Robby no longer felt like a lone voice whispering in the wilderness; now he often met with friends to demonstrate against the ongoing evil. There was a certain exhilaration in the mere fact of having taken a stand and gone forth publicly to defend it.

That afternoon he arrived home in high spirits and opened the door quickly, planning to change into something more comfortable and spend some time outside—maybe take a walk down by the stream, where the willows had already leafed out nicely. But the door didn’t open quite as quickly as expected, and the pile of mail it pushed across the carpet reminded him that Mom had gone shopping and must not be back yet. He looked quickly through it for more college acceptances or scholarship offers, then checked the door slot to make sure nothing was stuck there. Finding nothing of personal interest, he dumped the whole stack on Dad’s desk and ran upstairs to change.

When he came back down, twenty minutes later, he saw the thin blue envelope in the middle of the living room floor.

He frowned; he was sure he’d picked up all the mail before. He picked it up and frowned even more. It was an aerogramme—something he seldom saw. It was addressed to him, and it had no return address. It did have a stamp; but it wasn’t canceled, the postage was ridiculously high, and the picture on it looked like some sort of spacecraft.

What was this thing? A joke?

Sunshine and willows forgotten, he flopped down on the couch and used his pocket knife to open the letter. Then he began to read.

13 June 2000

Dear Robby,

If you’ve peeked, you already know who this is from, but you probably don’t believe it. Bear with me; I’ll convince you.

My first proof is that I’m answering the letter you wrote to yourself on March 22, 1968. Who else knew about that? I’m not sure how long ago that was, for you. There’s some intrinsic uncertainty about when this will be “delivered,” and I wanted to be sure you got it after you wrote your letter. Otherwise it wouldn’t make any sense to you. I read yours a few years later than I was supposed to, and I’m sorry about that. I’d say you did well to get it to me at all, with all that can and will happen in a couple of decades—and it was a neat idea. Thanks for writing!

You’re partly right that generation gaps are caused by people forgetting things as they age, but there’s another part: they learn new things. You’re sincere and earnest, but you lack experience. For example, I agree that it’s sad and dangerous for people to live entirely through their kids, but it’s an easy trap to fall into. At your age you can hardly imagine how much you have to give up and how completely your life revolves around kids, if you care about doing a good job with them. You will; I did. And Mom and Dad did better than you thought.

You also haven’t yet grasped the fact that intelligent, caring people can sincerely disagree. I haven’t changed my mind, at least not much, about what you/I said in the back seat of the car after Harry’s funeral. But I very much regret saying it at that time and in that way. It hurt Mom and Dad terribly, and I don’t know any way to take that back.

I appreciate your advice, but now let me give you some. Things didn’t work out for me quite the way you expected; maybe it would be better if they had—and maybe they can for you. More about that later . . .

I don’t want to spoil all the surprises for you, but let me hit a few highlights of how you turned into me. You already know that I got more and more heavily into antidraft and antiwar activity, but still did well in school. I kept it up in college, and my professors all seemed to think I had great potential. It was a heady feeling. Despite all the time spent fighting the draft, I felt like the embryonic physicist in me was on a roll, picking up steam that would lead to really great things.

I remember a period when my classes started hitting me with much hairier math than I’d ever dealt with before. I felt like a mountain climber getting altitude sickness and wondering if I’d ever be able to make it to the top. But when I got past that I could look out and down and see the whole of physics spread out all around me. I could see how it all fit together, and how beautiful it was. And I could look up and see the summit, and know at last that I was going to make it. If I’d kept climbing, Robby, I would have been a great scientist. I felt like I had a fire roaring in my brain, forging new understanding, and nothing could stop it.

Right now you’re getting worried and asking yourself, “So what did?” I’ll get to that. But you’re also asking yourself, “What ever happened to Rachel Flanagan?” There’s another proof that I am who I say I am. Who else ever knew about your crush on her? Certainly she didn’t; you never did work up the nerve to tell her. There’s another lesson for you, Robby: the most glorious dreams in the world aren’t worth a damn unless you do something about them, and you can’t always wait till later. Anyway, Rachel’s going to go off to MacLaren College in Canada. Before that happens, you’re going to meet a girl who’s a lot less shy than either you or Rachel. Her name is Gloree Lindelle. She’s tall, blonde, beautiful, popular, ambitious, and she’s going to sweep you off your feet. She did me, and we wound up both going to IU and spending more and more time together.

This is where it starts getting weird—the part you’ll find hard to believe even if you’ve accepted the idea that you’re writing to yourself from 30 years in the future. Gloree so bewitched me that when she started hinting that she didn’t like my draft resistance, I listened. I drifted away from the rallies, and when I got a premature draft notice through a bureaucratic mixup, I didn’t even fight it. I just went. Unlike Harry, I got through it all right, at least superficially. I wasn’t hurt, but I saw enough combat to make me fear I’d been right in the first place and this really was a terrible thing that I should still be fighting against rather than in. But I fought that feeling down and muddled through.

Gloree waited for me. When I came home we got married and had a couple of kids, and on the whole we’ve been pretty happy—but I couldn’t do science any more. The fire had gone out. My grades began to slip, and with some nudging from Gloree I switched to an MBA program. Now I’m a CEO for a minor aerospace contractor; we do some work for NASA, but their program has lost steam just like I did. I shouldn’t complain, but I’m not really satisfied. I keep thinking I could have done better if I’d gone a different way.

That’s where you come in; you can. You do have the potential to become an important creative scientist, Robby; I could have if I’d kept up the momentum I had early in college and not let the war drain it off. And, much as I like Gloree, I think Rachel would have helped me better along the path I really wanted to follow.

Now the bombshell: she would have. She was just as shy as you, you nitwit, but had just as big a crush on you. Yes, I know. I read letters she left for me after she was killed. She was crazy about you, and she was everything you imagined she was. You would have loved her, and she would have loved you, if you’d given yourselves a chance.

Bombshell #2: Rachel’s going to die in an accident unless you stop her. September 24, 1970; 2:32 PM, in front of the administration building at MacLaren. She’ll be on her way to an antiwar meeting—she became active in such things in college—and she’ll have so much on her mind that she’ll do a stupid thing. She’ll be looking straight ahead and walking fast, and dash out to cross the street without looking. She’ll step right in front of a tank truck that won’t be able to stop, and that will be the end of Rachel.

Unless you make sure it doesn’t happen. Wouldn’t that be changing the past? We don’t know; there are a lot of uncertainties in our models. Even if it does, will it be changing my past—or will it just create a new branch, on which another you/me will be happier than I am here? I don’t know, but I’m willing to do the experiment.

I do know this: if you’re reading this and thinking about it, we’ve already proved that the past can be changed in at least one of those senses—because I never got a reply to the letter you wrote.

So my advice is this: go for it. Go after Rachel now; don’t let her die. She’s better for you than Gloree. And if you can keep your momentum—who knows what you can do with your dreams?

Think about it.

Robert

“Man,” Robby said aloud, “this is really weird! Who’d pull a sick joke like this?” He looked again at the parts about his letter and his crush on Rachel, and added under his breath, “And how?”

Obviously somebody—he couldn’t imagine who—had been into his private things and read the letter. That would have told them enough to pull this.

But when he ran up to his bedroom and dug into his closet, he found everything just as he’d left it. His letter to his future self was right where it belonged, its seal fully intact.

He found that oddly unnerving. Not that he wanted anyone else to read that letter—except himself, twenty years hence—but if they had, it would have explained at least part of what was going on. Finding the letter undisturbed left him without a clue.

He sat there for a long time, staring at the envelope he’d sealed himself and reading the mysterious aerogramme over and over. Could it be what it claimed? Could the things it foretold be true?

Rachel being killed? Some cheerleader type coming after him and remaking him in her own image? Him wimping out and turning soldier?

Ridiculous! And sick, he repeated to himself, his eyes drawn again to the part about Rachel’s death.

A car crunched in the driveway and the screen door slammed downstairs. Either Mom and Dad had come home, and the other wouldn’t be far behind. He hastily stuffed everything back into his treasure chest, ending with the letter from “Robert”—which, by now, he had practically memorized. Then he threw the closet back together, donned nonchalance, and went downstairs. “Oh, hi, Mom,” he said with a smile. “How’d it go?”

He thought a lot about Robert’s letter in the coming months. He remained skeptical about its authenticity, but never came up with a better explanation for its detailed references to his letter and things he’d never confided anywhere else.

But if the aerogramme really was from Robert, that raised tantalizing and disturbing questions about how much of its content was true. Was Rachel really waiting for him to make the first move? Would she welcome it as eagerly as in his daydreams? Might it even save her life? It certainly was a temptation to try—and if Robert had seen direct evidence and knew, what did he have to lose?

Did the axiom “Never trust anybody over thirty” apply even to his older self? He had to suspect it did. On the other hand, Robert’s advice was supposedly based not only on his own experience, but on careful consideration of Robby’s advice to him. That suggested that Robby’s letter had actually had some of the effect he’d intended. If so, and he had an unexpected chance to draw some return benefit from it, shouldn’t he?

He felt increasingly that he should. He began looking with real determination for a suitable moment to approach Rachel.

But before he quite got to it, something else happened that threw him off course.

Robby had not even thought about going to the prom; listening to his classmates’ continual prattle about it was one of the more annoying features of spring. He didn’t even think about asking Rachel there. He wasn’t a party animal, and he doubted she was either. He was still plotting his move, but thinking more along the lines of a movie or a concert. Maybe even a picnic in the park.

So he was completely unprepared when a girl he hardly knew stopped him one day in the hall after lunch. He was walking along, minding his own business, when she materialized out of an alcove in front of him and said, “Excuse me. Robby?”

He stopped, confused. He was not used to being accosted by willowy blondes with shimmering ponytails cascading halfway down their backs. She looked vaguely familiar, he thought; he suspected he’d seen her around school, but couldn’t quite place her. She hardly looked dressed for school; a lot of guys must find that clingy purple minidress quite distracting. Looking half at her and half past her, he stammered, “Yes?”

“I’m in your third bell study hall,” she said. “I ve been wanting to meet you for a long time, but you never seemed to notice I existed.” Actually he had; now that she mentioned it, he remembered seeing her sitting across the aisle and dismissing her as decorative, but just another airhead. She smiled a dazzling smile, like a searchlight in his eyes. “So I finally decided I’d have to make the first move. I hope you don’t think that too forward of me.”

“Uh, no . . .” Actually it did seem pretty forward, compared to him and the way he’d been raised, but this sort of thing was becoming more common and accepted these days. He’d just never expected to be on the receiving end of it.

“Good,” she said. “Well, here’s the situation, Robby—” She cut off abruptly and wrinkled her nose. “You’re not really a Robby, you know. That’s a little boy’s name. I think I’ll call you Rob. Okay?”

“Uh, okay.” He smiled in spite of himself. Nobody had ever told him he’d outgrown his nickname before, and he rather liked it. “Sure.”

“Great! Well, anyway, Rob, here’s the deal. I’ve been watching you and I’d like to get to know you. Do you have a date for the prom yet?”

“Not yet,” he said woodenly. He felt himself blush.

“Well, why don’t you go with me?”

That floored him—not so much the fact that she was taking the initiative, but that a virtual stranger who looked like her should be asking him. “With you?” he echoed incredulously. “I don’t understand. Why me? You could go with anybody you—”

“But I want you,” she said, smiling sweetly. “The only question is, would you mind going with me?”

“Well . . . I’m flattered that you’d ask. But I should warn you, I . . . can’t dance.

“I’ll teach you,” she said brightly. “Deal?”

He felt like a freshly landed fish flopping around, trying but failing either to understand what was happening or to find a believable excuse to say no. Finally he gave up and managed to return her smile. “Deal!” He wondered inwardly, What have I got myself into?

“Great!” he heard her say. “Got to get to class now; we’ll work out the details later. See you around, Rob!”

She was ten paces away before he remembered. “Say,” he called after her, “this is embarrassing, but I don’t even know your name.”

She stopped, pivoted gracefully, and grinned with perfect composure. “Oh, I guess you will be needing that, won’t you? I’m Gloree Lindelle.”

After the initial shock wore off, Robby—or Rob, as he increasingly thought of himself—found it harder and harder to shrug off Robert’s letter. This was just too eerie. But how much of what it described was immutable, and what might he change?

He wasn’t even sure how much he wanted to change. Despite his misgivings about plunging into such an alien environment as a prom, he went and actually enjoyed it, thanks entirely to Gloree. She did teach him to dance, and she was fun to be with. Occasionally a small part of his mind tried to tell him she had many of the qualities he’d found so shallow in other girls, but she had such an uncanny knack for anticipating what would please him that he heard less and less from that part. Soon they were dating steadily, and he thought less and less about Rachel.

Ironically, it was only when his and Gloree’s relationship was well established that he finally shared a few extracurricular words with Rachel. It was right after graduation, when all the kids were milling around in their tuxes and formals, fending off congratulations from their families in the auditorium lobby, itching to get off to parties. Rachel, looking surprisingly pretty in her gown, came up to him and with a shy smile said, “Well, Robby, we made it. So what will you be doing?”

“I’m going to IU,” he said, wincing slightly at the “Robby.” “Think I’ll major in physics. You?”

“MacLaren College,” she said. “You probably never heard of it. It’s in Canada. I’m leaning toward journalism, and maybe math.”

“Oh.” He hoped she couldn’t see his shock when she said MacLaren College. “Well, good luck. It’s been nice—”

Just then Gloree came up and grabbed him by the arm. “Come on, Rob! They’re waiting for us.” She literally dragged him off, remembering as an afterthought to call over her shoulder, “Congratulations, Rachel. See you around.” Then she turned back to Rob and half-whispered, “I did get her name right, didn’t I?”

Gloree had already decided to go to IU by the time Rob did, and she hinted later that his decision had been a major factor in hers. He didn’t see how that could be, since he’d never even talked to her yet; but she explained that she had set her sights on him long before and asked around to learn everything she could about him.

The summer after graduation passed in a perfect blend of the idyllic and the exhilarating. Again he attributed much of that to Gloree’s attention—but not all. That July was when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, and for the first time ever, human beings walked on another world. Rob and Gloree watched it together; it was one of the most thrilling moments of Rob’s life. He thought Neil Armstrong’s first words got it exactly right. He felt almost as proud as if he’d helped put the Eagle there himself, and justified the feeling by his promise that he would help, a lot, with some later giant steps for mankind.

Gloree said it was “nice,” but she obviously didn’t feel the moment’s majesty and import as Rob did. That disappointed him a little. He almost felt that she was applauding the astronauts not because what they did was so important, but simply because Rob was interested in it and therefore she should be, too.

When school started, she was at least supportive of his enthusiastic pursuit of his studies. He was determined to be a very good scientist, if not a great one, and both he and his professors were quite confident that he would. Every time he earned another plaudit for something extraordinary he’d done, Gloree added her oohs and aahs to the chorus. She didn’t even complain when he grew a beard.

The only sour note was that she was much less supportive of his antiwar and antidraft activities. Those embarrassed her, she said. He had such potential, he was on his way to such a brilliant career, why must he act as if he had no gratitude at all for the country that made it all possible? He tried to explain that that wasn’t it at all—that it was precisely because he so loved his country that he was determined to turn it away from what he saw as a grave error—but she never seemed to understand. He wasn’t sure she even really listened. She had a Plan for their future, and was determined to support everything that fit into it and stamp out everything that didn’t.

But she was fun to be with, when she wasn’t doing that, and she showered him unendingly with a kind of attention he had never seriously dreamed of getting. He liked that; so gradually he talked less and less about “peace” activities, first to Gloree and eventually to anyone. He never reached the point of saying that the war was a good thing, but Gloree pushed him inexorably down the road toward conventional patriotism and (he wasn’t really sure when this entered the discussion) matrimony. Somehow he found himself engaged by the end of their freshman year; and by the time they returned as sophomores, he’d agreed that maybe the quickest way to end the war would be to help fight it. So if he was called he would go, and she would wait for him.

He went along with it, and often told himself he was very lucky to be engaged to someone like Gloree—but he never felt really comfortable with the part about the draft. It still didn’t feel right; and sometimes, late at night, he was nagged by the feeling that he’d sold out, that he was slowly and unceremoniously burying an important part of himself.

Somewhere along there he remembered he’d saved Robert’s letter from the future, and he got it out to reread what it said about this period of his life. The description so far was unnervingly accurate. Did that mean it was all immutable? Maybe so—but would Robert have bothered to write it if he really thought so?

If he could change anything, what would he change and how would he change it? It was too late to start dating Rachel in high school. . . .

Stop that! he chided himself. You’re engaged to Gloree, she’s a great girl, and it’s unfair to her to be thinking now about how it might have been with somebody else.

But he couldn’t help it. They were starting their sophomore year now, and that was when the letter said Rachel would die—unless he prevented it. Just a few more weeks . . .

As that deadline drew closer, Rob reread the last part of the letter oftener and oftener. No, he told himself, he was not going to make a last-ditch play for Rachel; the very thought was absurd. But if there was a chance that he could save her life, and nobody else in the world even knew she would be in danger—could he live with himself if he didn’t at least try?

By the third week of September, the question was preying heavily on his mind. Meanwhile Gloree was pushing him hard to set a wedding date, and he got a notice to report for a draft board physical. . . .

By the time the decision came, it seemed automatic. He couldn’t think of any way to explain to Gloree or anyone else where he was going, or why, so he didn’t. He just walked off campus the morning of September 23, bought a bus ticket, and climbed aboard.

It was a long haul from Bloomington, which gave him a lot of time for second thoughts. Am I crazy to be doing this? he thought more than once. Most people would have said so, but most people hadn’t read Robert’s letter and watched so much of it come true. The evidence, if not the theory, suggested that the letter should be taken seriously. As a scientist, wasn’t Rob supposed to pay more attention to the evidence?

What if he did change Robert’s past? Was Robert right about Rachel being a better life partner for him, or was that just a theory? He was, after all, just extrapolating from old letters. He’d never actually spent any time with her, and other grass often looks greener whether it is or not.

No matter. Rob wasn’t making this trip to start a thing with Rachel; he already had one with Gloree. All he wanted to do with Rachel was keep her from killing herself, and then go home. Of course, if he’d taken Robert’s advice in the first place and got to know Rachel right away, this trip might not be necessary. Maybe neither of them would be anywhere near MacLaren College—but it was too late for that, too.

He knew practically nothing about MacLaren or its college, so he got off the bus at a rest stop in Fort Wayne to browse in some travel guides. He didn’t buy them; his money was tight and this trip was using too much of it even without extras. Besides, the books didn’t have as much detail as he needed. Good thing he’d allowed some extra time. . . .

The bus got into MacLaren at dusk. It was a comfortable little town, clean and neat with sturdy stone and brick houses on tree-lined streets. The bus station looked like bus stations everywhere. Rob changed a little money and found a city map in the newsstand there. He was pleased to see that there was a YMCA not far from the station, and the campus was a comparable distance beyond.

It was colder outside than he expected. He grabbed a burger and fries in a greasy spoon next to the bus station, then walked briskly to the Y, checked in, and tried to sleep. Not very successfully, though; his dreams were too haunted by two girls—one he knew personally and one who came highly recommended by a source with unique credentials.

Morning dawned clear and crisp. After a donut and coffee in the Y cafeteria, Rob was off to learn his way around the college. The autumn chill was even more pronounced this morning; his breath shone in the sun. The colors were farther along here than back home, mostly maples and white birches with an occasional cluster of dark green conifers. The tang of wood smoke hung in the air, and he could see plumes of it drifting skyward from several chimneys.

The campus, with more stone and less brick than the rest of the town, was fairly compact. Good; that would improve the odds. Rob started by walking all around it, looking at everybody he passed, hoping but not expecting to see a familiar face. Ideally, he would simply find Rachel and distract her so she wouldn’t be near the Administration Building at the fateful hour. Maybe he’d take her to lunch, and they could stretch out small talk until three o’clock or so. . . .

In practice, he felt sadly sure, it wouldn’t be that easy. MacLaren wasn’t big, but it had 3000 students and enough buildings and walkways to make a chance meeting unlikely. So pretty soon he’d have to start a more aggressive, purposeful search.

He wasn’t eager to do that. He hadn’t thought of a way to do it without letting someone else know who he was and what he was trying to do. He still felt a little silly about that himself, and couldn’t imagine how to explain it to anyone else without it sounding even sillier to them.

He paused in front of the Administration Building, looking at its columned facade and the sculpted lions that flanked the front steps. He’d been all the way around it twice, and decided that this must be what Robert’s letter meant by the front. It looked like a main entrance, and it faced the busiest street in town—a surprisingly busy street, considering the size of the town and how quiet it had seemed last night. Somewhere around here was where it was going to happen, if he couldn’t keep things from getting that far.

He shuddered at the thought that he might not only fail, but arrive just in time to see Rachel killed. For all he knew, he might still have made no significant change in the history Robert remembered. The news report on the accident probably wouldn’t have mentioned him even if he’d been here. Maybe history was essentially immutable.

Stop that! he scolded. You don’t know that. You’re here because you hope it isn’t, and so does Robert.

He forced his attention back to the building in front of him. It stretched along at least 200 feet of the street. Exactly where in front of it was the danger spot?

He felt his throat getting dry as he visualized scenarios in which his lack of that knowledge was fatal. He had to get more information, something he could use to keep things from getting that critical.

He checked his watch. Already 11:18; the letter said Rachel would be hit at 2:32. Definitely time to get cracking.

Resolutely he marched up the steps between the lions. The registrar had to know her class schedule and where she lived—though he had only the vaguest idea how he would convince anyone he deserved that information.

His footsteps echoed off the hard corridor walls. It was an old building, and hardly anyone was in the halls. He found a directory, noted the room number for the registrar’s office, and started in that direction.

Halfway there, the word “directory” tripped something in his mind. Shouldn’t there be a student directory? He found a pay phone in a nearby alcove, with several tattered volumes hung on a chain. One of them was indeed a MacLaren College Directory. I don’t even know she’s here, he thought as he flipped eagerly through its pages. I didn’t check. All I know is that the letter said she would be. . . .

She was. There was her name, with a dorm name and a phone number. Heart pounding, he dialed the number and let it ring twenty times.

No answer.

He checked the nearest campus map. The dorm wasn’t far away. He asked the young woman guarding its entrance if she knew where Rachel Flanagan was, and drew a blank. He thought about leaving a message, couldn’t think of a way to word it that didn’t sound ridiculous, and headed back to the Admin Building.

He tried calling her once more, with the same frustrating result. Okay; time to try the registrar—if the office wasn’t closed for lunch.

Fortunately MacLaren was a big enough college to keep the registrar’s office staffed and open all day, though the lone person on duty looked like another student. Rob walked up to the desk and cleared his throat. “Excuse me. I need to talk to a student named Rachel Flanagan. Can you help me find her?”

The young man behind the counter looked up. “Well, we could leave a message in her mailbox for you.”

“It might take her too long to pick it up,” said Rob. “This is urgent—”

“Family emergency?”

Well, it’s certainly an emergency, Rob thought. “Not exactly,” he said lamely, “but it’s very important that I talk to her. If you could just let me look at her class schedule—”

The clerk gave him a suspicious look. “I’m afraid we can’t do that,” he said frostily. “We can’t aid and abet strangers who are looking for our students and won’t say why.”

A sigh of frustration. “I was afraid of that.” Rob left in disgust.

An hour to go. Maybe he should get some lunch himself—and the student cafeteria should be a good place to watch for a student. He tried Rachel’s number once more, then walked over to the Student Union and bought a plate of spaghetti. He ate it listlessly, alone at a corner table, anxiously scanning every face already at a table or coming through the line.

Nothing. He wondered whether he’d even recognize her if he saw her. He’d grown a beard since they graduated; who knew how she might have changed?

He finished his meal, dropped off his tray and garbage, and headed back out to the nearest pay phone. Still no answer—and it was after two o’clock.

How accurate was the time in the letter?

He was coming down to the wire. Back across campus, still scanning faces. Once in a while he’d see one that made him wonder: Is that her? Or am I clutching at straws because time’s running out?

One more futile phone call from a booth in front of the Admin Building. No time to go anywhere else now; only fifteen minutes to go. He spent it pacing the length of the building, wondering where she’d appear. He didn’t even know whether she’d be crossing toward or away from the building. There was a little park across the street; maybe he should take a look over there. Besides, he was probably starting to look suspicious, pacing back and forth along this side like a caged tiger.

He crossed over; traffic was so heavy that it took him a full minute to find a suitable opening. When he got there he wondered if it had been a good idea. If she showed up on the other side, would he have time to get back to her?

Well, just one quick look around here . . . Walking fast, he circled the square. There were plenty of obvious students there, lounging, laughing, tossing Frisbees, a group with signs gathering around the central fountain; but no Rachel. And when he got back to the sidewalk his watch said 2:30.

He felt himself sweating. He half-ran back and forth along this side, scanning, wondering again which side he should be on.

As he made his turn at one end, he saw her—unmistakably her—step out the front door of the Admin Building and start down the stairs. She was wearing tattered jeans and a bulky navy sweatshirt and her hair was even longer than she’d worn it in high school. She was too far away to see any details of her face, but recognition was instant and positive; he had not the slightest doubt of who she was.

“Rachel!” he yelled as loud as he could, breaking into a run. He obviously didn’t have much time; she was looking straight ahead, descending between the lions with a fast, purposeful stride, just as Robert had described her. She’d be crossing at the midpoint, straight toward the fountain. Rob ran that way, watching frantically for a break in the traffic that he could run through, seeing none. Just slow up, he pleaded mentally. “Rachel! Stop!”

She showed no sign of hearing him, and she was almost off the steps now. Nothing left between her and the street but the sidewalk—Rob saw the big tanker at the same time he heard the deep-throated blare of its horn. The horn blast seemed to go on forever, joined by the scream of air brakes and tires. Rachel was stepping into the street now and a weirdly detached part of Rob’s mind, its time sense slowed at least an order of magnitude by adrenaline, was coolly calculating its options. There was traffic coming both ways; a safe normal crossing was out of the question. But if he ran as fast as he could, zigging here and zagging there, and if three drivers had good reflexes . . .

He’d have to risk it. Before the thought had fully formed, he was halfway across the street, cars screeching to a halt all around him in slow motion, closer than he’d want to think about. But he was running faster than he’d ever run before, and Rachel, however briskly, was walking. He hit her in a flying tackle, sending books flying and Rachel sprawling onto the curb, Rob landing in a heap on top of her. He felt something tug slightly at his foot, and then, gradually, all the sounds stopped—except his heart thudding in his ears—and time returned to normal.

He lay there panting. The first thought that formed as his mind approached normality was that she had cushioned his landing but nothing had cushioned hers. “Sorry,” he said. “Are you hurt?”

“I don’t think so,” she panted. “No more than bruises, anyway—” She broke off and grinned at him. “What do you mean, sorry? You saved my life. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“But I did it so—” He rolled off her and offered his hands to help her up as another voice interrupted.

The truck driver had flung his door open and was running toward them, yelling, “Are you all right? I didn’t see you in time—”

“No problem,” Rachel assured him, brushing herself off. “I’m okay, thanks to this gentleman here, and it wasn’t your fault. I should have been paying attention. Too much on my mind . . .”

Talk about grace under pressure, Rob marveled as he watched her. It took a few minutes to reassure the truck driver, who insisted on leaving his name and address, and to fend off a multitude of concerned witnesses. During all that Rob’s eyes wandered to the black skid mark of the tanker’s right tires. He shuddered when he saw a tiny indentation in the right edge, a place where the rubber had somehow missed the pavement, and found a matching streak of black on the toe of one of his shoes. It had been that close; he had quite literally gambled his life to save hers, and almost lost.

But not quite. They were both alive, without serious injuries, and standing together on a sidewalk somewhere in Canada. When the last bystanders finally drifted off, she turned to him and said, “I really can’t thank you enough. I’m sorry to have put you on such a spot—” She never finished the sentence. A puzzled frown had been growing on her face, and now she broke off and almost whispered, “Robby? Are you Robby Lerman?”

“Guilty as charged. Uh . . . it’s good to see you, Rachel.”

She broke into a hearty laugh. “And absolutely incredible to see you. What on Earth are you doing here? I thought you were going to school back home.”

“I am,” he said awkwardly. “I just . . . uh . . . had a hunch. And . . . I’ve always sort of had a crush on you.” Now why had he blurted that out? He’d done what he came for; it was time to start home! He felt himself blushing.

But Rachel’s good-natured grin put him at ease. He felt his blush fade as he became aware of the light freckles across her nose. “That’s funny,” she said. “So have I. On you, I mean.”

So it was true! “Really? Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

“Why didn’t you?”

They both laughed. “This is really incredible,” she repeated. “I think we have a lot of catching up to do. At least figure out what just happened, and maybe get a little better acquainted. Why don’t we go over to Schipp’s and have a beer or something? My treat.”

He grinned back. “That sounds great.”

“Good.” She rounded up her books and started walking. “I was hurrying to a meeting, but it can wait. Maybe you’d like to come along.”

He followed. The bar was cool and cozy, and half an hour later Rob felt as if he’d known her all his life. “Why didn’t we ever do this in high school?” he asked with an odd mixture of exhilaration and wistful ache.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yes, I do. We were both still too afraid. We hadn’t learned yet that the most glorious dreams in the world aren’t worth a damn unless you do something about them. And you can’t always wait.” She laughed shortly. “I guess we both learned that today!” Now her expression turned wistful. “I hate to think of your disappearing from my life again after the last half hour. Wouldn’t it be neat if we could spend some time together and see if it led anywhere?”

“Yes,” he said cautiously, “but there are problems.” He paused. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about transferring here.” He realized as he said it that his subconscious actually had, for the last few minutes. There was a larger grain of truth in it, too: back when he’d been college-shopping, he’d considered a couple of Canadian schools, but dropped the idea for fear of Dad’s reaction. Now, suddenly, that seemed oddly unimportant. “Of course, I wouldn’t want either of us to get our hopes up too high. . . .”

“Of course,” Rachel nodded. “We’ve hardly met, really. Who knows what ugly truths we’ll unearth about each other if we spend a lot of time together?” She grinned. “But I’d like to find out.”

“So would I.” A little voice inside Rob’s head was shouting, What about Gloree? But it was getting fainter by the minute, as if receding into the distance.

“So what are the problems?” Rachel asked.

“The draft,” he said. “I’m not worried about getting into the school; my grades are fine, and my profs will give me glowing recommendations. But there’s more and more talk about phasing out student deferments, and I’ve been called for a physical. I came into Canada as a weekend visitor. It might be hard getting permission to stay—”

“Maybe not as hard as you think. Why don’t you come to that meeting I was rushing to? The local antidraft group has good contacts with the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme, and they’ve been really helpful to a lot of people in situations like yours.”

“You know,” said Rob, leaning back and stretching, “I think I will.”

As Rachel paid the bill and they got up and headed back out into the sunshine together, he marveled at how casually he was making these sweeping, radical decisions—and how comfortable he felt with them, as if they’d been brewing all along. All at once it seemed obvious that he would stay in Canada and not let the war interrupt his concentration on physics, and that he’d just have to break it off with Gloree, as gently as possible. He saw very clearly now that she had been doing all the driving toward the future they’d been headed for, and he’d simply gone along because he saw no roads leading anywhere better. Now he did.

Only time would tell whether it was really better, of course, but one thing was very clear: he was now on his way to a very different future than the one Robert had written him from. You got me into this, he warned his far future self. I hope we both like where it leads!

An impish giggle from Rachel snapped him out of his reverie. When he looked a wordless question at her she explained, “I just thought of something funny. If this should ever lead to anything lasting between us, I’ll have the perfect answer when anybody asks me how it all began. Not many women can truthfully say, ‘He swept me off my feet!’ ”

IV. 2001

December 31, 2001

Dear Rob,

I won’t be mailing this one, and you won’t be reading it. The postage is just too high. But I have a few thoughts I wish I could tell you about, and I think it will do me good to get them out of my system.

I haven’t noticed any change in my life that I could attribute to anything you might have done. I’ve given up on knowing what, if anything, you did in response to my letter. At first that disappointed me. Even though, intellectually, I understood Pereira’s expectations about the probable outcome of our little experiment, emotionally, I kept hoping that somehow you could jump me onto the track I wished I’d followed. Now I understand that he was right: the most I could do was create a new branch.

But after a little reflection, I realized that I had benefitted from this very limited dialogue we’ve had. First, I can imagine that I’ve helped at least one alternate Robby, in the “many Robbies” interpretation of quantum mechanics, onto a life he might find more satisfying. I’ll never know, but if it’s true, there is a certain deep satisfaction in helping someone else, even if it’s someone I can never meet.

Second is something subtler and completely unanticipated—but I am the beneficiary of that one. Back when Pereira was badgering me for funds, he was thinking about a better road to space; time was just an afterthought. But time was what got me interested enough to back him. I never said so in the official memos, but the whole goal of the project, for me, was to answer your letter and try to influence your actions. I was so obsessed with that that I almost forgot about the space travel aspects.

But those, as it turns out, were where the real action was. We managed to send one little message back in time, at so great a cost and so much uncertainty about the results that we may never do it again. But sending things through space turns out to be much easier. For far less money and energy, we can send much bigger things, even living things, across great distances with remarkable accuracy.

In short, we’ve opened up a new road to the stars that makes NASA and rockets obsolete. Rocketech’s board was too shortsighted to see that, and fired Pereira and me for wasting their money. But we got great new jobs with a company that already had a good start on a private moonbase, independent of NASA. They see the potential, and they’re not afraid to use whatever will help them. We’re going out there, Robby, and in a very real sense, you and I did it. Making that happen was the big ambition that shaped so much of our early life. Yes, Pereira will get, and deserve, the Nobel. But you made it happen: if you hadn’t written your letter, none of the rest could have occurred.

Notice the irony in all that? Thanks to your letter, I’ve finally achieved, or at least helped achieve, the biggest goal I ever had, and made my whole life far more satisfying in the bargain. But I effected the change not by tinkering with the past, but by changing the way I approached the present.

Maybe that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned from all this: no matter who we are or what our circumstances, we all have to build our own futures—and we must start from where we are, not from where we might have been. For that lesson, even above all the rest, I thank you. Whoever, wherever, whenever you are—build yourself a great future!

With gratitude and respect,

Robert

AGAPE AMONG THE ROBOTS

Allen Steele

Art necessarily reflects the artist—sometimes in surprising ways.

Then Samson met Delilah, the first thing he did was crush an apple against her head. Delilah didn’t react in any way; she sat calmly on the park bench, her hands folded primly in the lap of her long purple dress, staring straight ahead as wet pulp ran down her face and into the neckline of her lace collar. She didn’t even look up as Samson walked around the front of the bench, bowed from the waist, and gallantly offered his hand.

In the Samson Team control van, though, we were either cracking up or gaping at our monitors in dumb surprise. All except Phil Burton; glaring through the one-way glass window, almost apoplectic with rage, his mouth opened and closed several times before he finally managed to give utterance to his thoughts.

“W-w-w-what t-t-t-the . . . what the hell was that?” he demanded. “W-w-who pr-pr-programmed th-th-th-tha-that . . .?”

“Nobody programmed it, Phil,” I said. I had been worked with him long enough to intuit what he meant when his speech impediment got in the way. He looked sharply my way, and I hastily coughed into my hand to hide my grin. Phil had a tendency to think people were laughing at him even when something else funny was going on. “Honest. I checked Samson’s routine myself. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“I-I-I know th-th-th-th . . .” Phil shut his eyes, took a deep breath, and silently counted to ten. While he was counting, I glanced past him at Keith D’Amico; although he was still chuckling, he had already checked out his own screen. He caught my eye and shook his head. No, he didn’t have a clue as to what went wrong either.

“Phil, Jerry . . . I’ve put Samson in standby mode.” This from Donna Raitt, seated at the console on the other side of me. Unlike Keith and me, she hadn’t lost it when Samson had assaulted Delilah with a deadly fruit; she was watching her screen, her hand cupped over her headset mike. “It looks like D-team has done the same,” she added quietly. “I haven’t heard from Dr. Veder’s group yet.”

“Oh, but you will . . . you will.” Keith was doing his Yoda impression again. “Beware the dark side, Luke . . .”

“Knock it off.” Phil had managed to get control of his stutter. He glared at Keith, then turned back to me. “Okay, I believe you. It’s a glitch, that’s all.” He glanced out the window, taking a moment to study the two robots frozen in the wooded atrium. “Access his memory buffer from the beginning of the test up to when Donna put him on standby.”

“Death Star in range within ten seconds,” Keith murmured.

If Phil heard that—and judging from the annoyed expression which briefly crossed his face, he did—he chose to ignore it. He turned to Bob, the kid operating the remote camcorders. “You got everything, didn’t you?”

“What . . . oh, yeah, yeah, it’s all here.” Bob was wiping tears from the corners of his eyes. “Do you want a copy, Dr. Burton?”

“No, I want you to delete the whole thing.” Bob stared at him in surprise, and for a moment his hands moved to the editing board. “Goddammit, of course I want a copy!” Phil snapped. “Run it off now! Move!” He returned his attention to me. “C’mon, Jerry, gimme everything you got . . .”

“Coming right now.” I had already loaded a fresh 100 MB disk. A few deft commands on the keypad above my lap, and a bar-graph appeared on my screen, indicating that the data Phil wanted was being copied. I looked again at Keith; behind Phil’s back, he had his right hand raised, and he was counting off the seconds with each finger he folded into his palm. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

“Delilah Team just called in.” Once again, Donna had clasped her hand over the wand of her headset. “Dr. Veder wants to meet with you in the test area . . . umm, right now, Phil.”

The color vanished from Phil’s face. “Uhh . . . t-t-tell her I’ll b-b-b-be there as . . . as . . .”

My terminal chirped. I popped out the disk, shoved it into Phil’s hand, then snapped my fingers at Bob. He ejected the DVD from the camcorder, slapped it into a jewelbox, then passed it to Keith, who tapped it against Phil’s shoulder. That seemed to wake him up; he blinked a few times, then turned to snatch the DVD from Keith’s hand.

“He’s coming now,” Donna said quietly into her headset. “Sorry for the problem. We had a problem here, but . . .”

“Stick to the rules. No contact except between team leaders.” Phil took another deep breath, then clapped the two disks together as he turned sideways to squeeze past her and me as he headed for the control van’s door. “Wish me luck.”

“May the Force be with you,” Keith said, and I shot a look which told him that I’d like to stick a light-saber where a Jedi couldn’t find it. “Good luck,” he added, albeit reluctantly.

“Thanks.” Phil grabbed a roll of paper towels from the shelf near the door. Then, almost as an afterthought, he looked back at Keith. “Wipe the memory buffer, will you? I don’t want this to affect the next test.” Then he stepped out of the van, slamming the door shut behind him.

For a moment no one said anything, then everyone collapsed in their seats. “Man, oh man,” Keith muttered, covering his face with his hands. “I thought he was going to have a stroke . . .”

“Thought he was going to have a stroke?” Donna shook her head. “You should have heard what was going on in D-team’s trailer. Kathy sounded like she was ready to . . .”

“Are you off-line?” I asked quietly, and her eyes went wide as she lunged for the mute button. Keith chuckled as he reached for the two-pound bag of Fritos he kept stashed beneath the console. I glanced at Bob; he said nothing as he hunched over his screen, replaying the test on his monitor. Fresh out of MIT, he had been working for LEC for less than five months now, and only very recently had been assigned to the R3G program. He was wisely keeping office politics at arm’s length, nor could I blame him.

Through the window, I watched Phil as he walked toward the bench where Samson stood frozen, his right hand still extended. He glanced nervously toward the opposite side of the atrium, then he tore a wad of paper off the roll and began hastily wiping the apple shards off Delilah’s spherical head. I had to wonder why someone on her team had felt compelled to put her in a dress. Perhaps to accentuate her feminine role; although the test was supposed to work out bugs in their handshaking procedures, the scenario Phil and Kathy had mutually devised was supposed to playfully emulate a quaint, old-fashioned courtship. So far, though, the results weren’t very promising.

“Oh, such a nice man,” Keith said, propping his sandals up on his console as he shoved a fistful of chips in his mouth. “Look, he’s cleaning . . . uh-oh, here she comes.”

From behind him, Dr. Katherine “Darth” Veder came stalking through the trees, her hands shoved in the pockets of her lab coat. Even before he saw her, Phil must have heard her coming, for he fumbled with the roll in his hands as he reluctantly turned to face her.

“Oh, boy, is she pissed or what?” Bob murmured.

“What,” I replied, and Donna arched an eyebrow knowingly.

“Dum-dum-dum-dah-de-dum-dah-de-dum,” Keith hummed. “Volume, please. I don’t want to miss this.”

The van was soundproofed, but we had a parabolic mike aimed at the test area. Donna started to reach for her board to activate it. “Don’t,” I said quietly, shaking my head at her. “Let’s let them handle this themselves.” Smiling a little, Donna withdrew her hand.

Keith sighed in disgust, then pulled on his headset and tapped a command into his console. I had little doubt that he was patching into Samson’s external mike to eavesdrop on their conversation, if it could be called that. Through the window, I could see Kathy yelling at Phil, her small hands gesturing wildly as she pointed at him, at Samson, at Delilah, at our van, and back at Phil again. Although Phil’s back was half-turned to us, his hands were almost as busy, first making gestures of supplication and apology, then briefly returning to his sides—he was probably counting to ten again—before rising again to make irate motions of his own.

Donna rested her elbows on the console and cupped her chin in her hands. Bob picked up the month-old issue of Spin he had placed on top of one of the mainframes. Keith pawed at his bag of chips, watching with interest while the two team leaders ripped into each other.

“I wish these guys would hurry up and admit they’re in love,” he muttered.

Meanwhile Samson and Delilah patiently waited nearby, ignored yet omnipresent, as stoical as only robots can be.

Okay. Time to backtrack a bit.

You know about LEC, of course . . . or at least you should, if you pay attention to TV commercials, browse the web, or visit shopping malls. Lang Electronics Corporation is one of the three major U.S. manufacturers of consumer robots; it started out as a maker of IBM-clones in the early ’80s, then diversified into robotics shortly after the turn of the century, introducing its first-generation robot vacuum cleaners and home sentries about the same time that its closest competitors, CybeServe and Cranberry, entered the market with their own household ’bots. CybeServe was the leading company, and solidified that position after it was bought out by Mitsubishi; Cranberry, on other hand, was hurt by poor sales and a reputation for making second-rate ’bots that tended to forget instructions, burn actuators, and taser the mailman. By the time CybeServe and Mitsubishi merged, Cranberry had laid off one-third of its employees and was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy.

This left LEC in somewhere in the middle. It remained strong enough to fight off hostile takeover attempts by larger electronics companies in both America and Japan, and its Valet and Guardian series of home ’bots held their own in the marketplace, not only selling as many units as CybeServe but even surpassing their sales in Europe. The success of its first-generation robots prompted LEC to invest considerable capital in developing a second-generation series of universal robots. Biocybe Resources in Worcester, Massachusetts, had recently introduced its Oz 100 biochips, pseudo-organic microprocessors capable of handling 100,000 MIPS—Millions of Instructions Per Second, the robotic equivalent of megabytes—and LEC had built them into its Gourmand, Guardian III, and Companion ’bots, successfully bringing them to market nearly two months before CybeServe brought out their rival systems. It also helped that CybeServe’s ’bots were more expensive and that their CybeServe Butler had an embarrassing tendency to misunderstand questions or commands given in less than perfect English (e.g., “Is the dishwasher running?” No, it’s still in the kitchen. “Answer the door, please.” But it hasn’t asked me anything. And so forth.).

(If all this is beginning to make your eyes glaze over, please be patient. Home ’bots may be rather commonplace these days—if you don’t already own one, chances are one of your neighbors does, and your kids may be dropping hints about how nice it would be to find a CybeServe Silver Retriever or a LEC Prince barking and wagging its tail beneath the Christmas tree—but I’m relating events which occurred about ten years ago. It may seem like business talk, but it has quite a bit to do with the story at hand, so bear with me, okay?)

CybeServe wasn’t about to let itself get stampeded the way Cranberry was several years earlier, so after it spent a small fortune working out the bugs in its second-generation ’bots and an even larger fortune in consumer advertising, it took the next logical step: the development of a third-generation, all-purpose universal robot, one which could serve as butler, housekeeper, sentry, cook, chess-player, dog-walker, babysitter . . . you name it. And just to put the icing on the cake, CybeServe intended its new ’bot to be humanlike: bipedal, about six feet in height, with multijointed arms and legs and five fingers on each hand.

This was probably the most significant factor, for with the exception of a few experimental prototypes like Honda’s P2 of the late ’90s, virtually every robot on the market looked like a fire hydrant, an oversized turtle, or a vacuum cleaner with arms. A humanlike robot, however, would not only be aesthetically familiar, but it would also be able to adapt more readily to a household environment, since it would be able to climb stairs or place objects on tables.

Although CybeServe tried to keep their R3G program secret, the cybernetics industry is small enough—and the Robot Belt along Route 9 in Massachusetts short enough—that it was only a matter of time before word leaked out of its Framingham headquarters. The fact that their R3G project was codenamed Metropolis, an ironic allusion to the robot in the 1927 silent film directed by Fritz Lang, was a clear signal that CybeServe meant to pull an end-run around its rival in Westboro .

When Jim Lang, LEC’s founder and CEO, learned that CybeServe was actively engaged in the development of a third-generation ’bot, the lights stayed on all night in the fourth-floor boardroom. The following morning, Slim Jim summoned his department heads to the executive suite, where he read them the riot act: LEC was now in a race with CybeServe to be the first company to produce a third-generation universal robot.

As luck would have it, though, the company wasn’t caught flat-footed: during their spare time, two of its senior engineers had already been working on third-generation robots.

Where Phil Burton or Kathy Veder managed to find any spare time at a company where everyone in the R&D divisions typically puts in a 7-by-14 work week is beyond me, yet nonetheless these two had been using their downtime to tinker in their labs. On their own initiative, both Phil and Kathy had drafted plans for universal ’bots which would utilize the new Oz chips being produced by Biocybe. Since the Oz 3Megs were capable of processing three million MIPS, this meant that a third-generation robot could have the approximate learning ability of a Rhesus monkey, as opposed to a second-generation ’bot with the IQ of a well-trained mouse.

The fact that they had designed their robots independently of each other, without one being aware of what the other was doing, was no great surprise to anyone. Phil Burton was in charge of the division which developed the Companion robot, while Kathy Veder was the senior engineer behind the Guardian III. Their departments were located at opposite ends of the LEC quad, and their staffs shared little more in common than the company cafeteria. Not only that, but the two couldn’t be more unalike: Phil Burton, tall and rather skinny, with thinning blond hair, and a lifelong stutter which betrayed his shyness, and Kathy Veder, short, plump, with unruly black hair which was seldom combed and an aggressive manner which bordered on outright hostility (hence the nickname). A pair of über-geeks who couldn’t have agreed on the proper pronunciation of banana if someone threatened to take away their Usenet accounts.

Nonetheless, Lang was delighted that they already had a head-start, and asked them to show him their work. However, Kathy was a little more reluctant than Phil to comply; in fact, rumor had it that Jim had to memo Darth three times before she finally coughed up her notes and blueprints, while Phil delivered his material almost immediately. The rest of us chalked up her reticence to peer rivalry, never realizing that there was something else going on just under the surface.

Lang carefully studied their plans, talked to some of his other geeks—myself included—and eventually reached the conclusion that, although each robot was designed differently, they were so fundamentally similar that either could serve as LEC’s entry in the R3G race. However, since the company didn’t have the time, money or resources to manufacture two third-generation ’bots, it was one or the other. To make matters worse, there was no accord among the brain trust upon which robot should be chosen; Kathy’s people were solidly behind her Guardian IV design, while Phil’s group was equally convinced that Companion II was the superior system.

Jim Lang loved strategy games. He collected antique chess sets and backgammon boards, and was renowned among Go enthusiasts as something of a master. Indeed, when LEC was a small start-up company in the late ’70s, its first major product had been a modular pocket game system, the now-forgotten Lang Buddy. So it came as no great surprise that his solution took the form of a competition.

Dr. Burton’s group and Dr. Veder’s group were divided into two teams, respectively code-named Samson and Delilah, with Dr. Burton and Dr. Veder as their leaders. Each team was given a substantial R&D budget and access to the same material resources, not the least of which were copies of the Oz 3Meg chips. However, the members of each team would not be allowed to talk to one another or share notes; only the team leaders were given that privilege, if they saw fit to do so.

The objective of Slim Jim’s game was the fast-track development of a fully-operational, self-learning universal robot within six months. At the end of this period, each team would let their robots be tested—first by themselves, then interacting with each other—in a series of environments approximating real-world conditions. The team which produced the best robot would not only see their system enter mass-production, but they would also be awarded large bonuses, along with royalties from the sale of each unit. Indeed, the members of the winning team could very well walk away with several hundred grand in their pockets.

It was a hell of an approach, to be sure, and over the course of the next six months I didn’t get much sleep, let alone very many free weekends or holidays. Yet Samson itself was built within only three months, and we began installing and testing its conditioning modules shortly thereafter. Although we knew that, on the other side of the quad, behind a pair of keycard-access doors, Delilah Team spending an equal amount of effort on their own ’bot, we had little doubt who would come out ahead. In fact, I was beginning to price Porsches.

But building a new robot is one thing. Dealing with the human factor is quite another.

“Okay, Samson,” I said, “fix me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

“Yes, Jerry.” The voice which came from his mouth grid sounded almost exactly like Robert Redford’s. That had to be Donna’s choice; she was a movie buff, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was one of her favorites. So was Keith, but at least he hadn’t again sampled Dennis Hopper’s vocal patterns from Blue Velvet. That had been a little scary.

Samson turned and walked toward the small kitchenette in one corner of the training suite. The suite resembled a large, two-room apartment, with everything you’d normally find in a well-furnished bachelor flat; in fact, some members of the team crashed there overnight when they were too tired to drive home. The only difference was the two-way mirror on the wall above the couch; behind the reflective glass, Donna and Keith were quietly watching the session from the observation booth.

Samson had no difficulty finding his way to the kitchen; his three-dimensional grid-map had already memorized the suite, and even when we rearranged the furniture Samson quickly relearned his way around. As he trod past the dinner table, the coffee in my cup sloshed slightly over the rim. “We’re going to have work on the shock-absorption,” I murmured as I jotted a note on my clipboard. “Maybe some padding on his treads.”

“I’ll take it up with the shop,” Donna’s voice whispered in my earpiece, “but they’re not going to be happy about it.” I knew what she meant. Although Samson’s frame was constructed of lightweight polymers, he still weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds. Still, we couldn’t have a robot who shook the floor every time he walked by.

Samson stopped in front of the kitchen counter. In earlier tests of his cooking repertoire, we had laid everything out he needed in plain sight. This time, though, the counter was clean. Two days earlier, we had stocked the kitchen, then spent the better part of the afternoon showing him what everything was and where it was stored. If his conditioning module had properly tutored him, he should figure it out with no problem.

And sure enough, Samson reached up to the cupboard above the counter and, ever so gently, pulled out a jar of peanut butter and a loaf of bread. He carefully placed them on the counter, then turned to the refrigerator, opened it, and accurately selected the grape jelly from the nearly identical jars of mayo and mustard placed next to them. Sometime later we’d put two different flavors of jelly in the fridge, but right now his artificial vision was doing well to recognize and read printed labels.

Samson located a butter-knife in the utensil drawer, laid it on the counter next to the jars of jelly and peanut butter. He had no problem opening the bread loaf—although it had taken him several hours to learn the trick of loosening twist-ties without ripping open the wrapper—but I held my breath as he picked up the peanut butter. Before I led Samson into the room, Keith had deliberately tightened its lid as firmly as possible, then bet me ten bucks that Samson couldn’t open it without breaking the jar. But this time Samson clasped the rubberized fingertips of his left hand around the lid and, while holding the jar steady in his right hand, gradually exerted pressure until he unscrewed the lid.

“Very good, Samson,” I said. “You’re doing well.” I glanced at the window and rubbed my thumb and fingers together. Donna chuckled as Keith muttered an obscenity, and now I had beer money for tonight.

“Thank you, Jerry.” Although the cyclopean red eye in the center of Samson’s forehead didn’t turn my way, I knew that he could see me nonetheless. Although the eye contained two parallax lenses, Samson’s bullet-shaped head contained a variety of motion and heat detectors which continually updated my location in the room. We had already tested their capability by putting a cat in the room; although the cat, frightened out of her feline wits by this lumbering man-thing, had constantly raced around the apartment, growling and spitting and raising her fur whenever Samson came near, the robot had deftly avoided trampling her underfoot. The SPCA probably would have objected, but it was better to have our ’bot get acquainted with house pets during the teaching phase than receive lawsuits later.

Samson spread peanut butter across one slice of bread, then grape jelly across another—“A little more jelly, please, Samson,” I asked, and he complied—then he successfully closed the two halves together without making a mess. He located a small plate in another cupboard and placed the sandwich upon it, then picked up the knife again and cut it cleanly in half.

So far, so good. Then he began to take the sandwich apart, carefully pulling apart the two halves of each section and laying them on the counter, much as if he was . . .

Oh, no. I shut my eyes, shook my head. “Samson, what are you doing?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer.

“Jerry, I’m fixing the peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” he replied. “Please tell me what is wrong with it.”

From the observation booth, I could hear Keith and Donna whooping it up. I scowled at the window—Keith better not try using this as an excuse to welsh on his bet—then I looked back at Samson. “Samson, there is nothing wrong with the sandwich,” I replied, speaking as I would to a small child who had erred. “My previous instruction was a verbal colloquialism. In this context, to ‘fix’ any form of food means ‘to prepare,’ not ‘to repair.’ Please remember that.”

“I’ll remember, Jerry.” Samson stopped what he was doing, began putting the sandwich back together again. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. Are we still friends?”

The last might seem odd, but it was part of the approval-disapproval protocol programmed into Samson’s conditioning module. Although Samson couldn’t know the meaning of friendship—or at least, technically speaking, not as a human emotion—it was part of his repertoire to ask for forgiveness when he made an error. That had been Phil’s idea; not only would it give third-generation robots a closer resemblance to humanity, but it would also give their owners a more user-friendly means of checking their onboard systems. Casual queries like “are we still friends?” or “am I bothering you?” sound more benign than “error code 310-A, resetting conditioning module, yes/no?”

“Yes, Samson, we’re still friends,” I replied. “Please bring me the sandwich now.”

I turned back to the dinner table, picked up my lukewarm coffee and took a sip, then clicked my pen and started to make a few notes. Behind me, I heard Samson was walking over to the table, bearing my lunch. Through my earpiece, Keith asking Donna if she wanted to go to Boston for dinner tomorrow night, and Donna saying—as usual—that she was busy. I’d heard this before. Donna had recently divorced her second husband and Keith had never married; the two were friends and colleagues, but their attraction was anything but mutual. Donna was understandably reluctant to strike up a workplace romance, and particularly not with the likes of Keith, who thought fart jokes were the height of . . .

“Jerry, look out!”

Donna’s warning reached me just an instant too late. I looked up just as Samson slammed a peanut butter and extra-jelly sandwich into the side of my face.

Maybe that sounds funny, in a Three Stooges kind of way, but mind you this came from a robot capable of picking up one end of a six-foot couch without perceptible strain. The sandwich was soft, sure, but the plate upon which it rested was hard; even if I had known what was coming, it’s still likely that I would have been knocked out my chair.

I sprawled across the tile floor, more surprised than injured, with grape jelly drooling down into my right eye and peanut butter plastering my hair against my face, the plate rattling against the table. Towering above me was Samson, six feet of cobalt-blue robot, his right hand placidly returning to his side.

“Jerry!” Donna screamed. “Are you . . .?”

“Samson, shut down!” Keith bellowed. “Samson, code S . . .!”

“No, Samson!” I yelled. “Code B-for-Break!”

“Code B understood.” Samson double-beeped and became motionless, yet his chest diodes remained lit.

Good. He had obeyed the orders of the person closest to him. Had he shut down, as Keith’s Code S instruction would have made him do, there was a chance that the abrupt loss of electrical current might have erased the last few moments from his memory buffer. Code B, on the other hand, simply returned him to standby mode.

I sat up quickly, glanced toward the window. “It’s okay, I’m all right,” I said. “I’m unhurt. Just stay where you are.”

Even as I spoke, though, I heard the door open behind me. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw Keith just outside the room. The last thing I wanted was for him to barge in and start throwing questions at Samson, so I waved him off. He hesitated, then he reluctantly shut the door, leaving me alone with the robot.

I let out my breath, then I clambered to my feet, walked over to the sink, and wetted some paper towels. There was a small bruise on my cheek, but I didn’t find any blood mixed in with the peanut butter and jelly; the shirt, though, would need a trip to the dry cleaner. Cleaning up gave me a chance to calm down a little; when I returned to the table and picked up the chair, I was ready to talk to Samson once more.

“Samson, come back on-line, please,” I said as I sat down, and the ’bot gave me a single beep. “Do you remember what you were doing before . . . uh, just before I gave you the Code B?”

“Yes, I do, Jerry. I gave you the sandwich you asked me to fix for you.”

So far, so good. His new usage of the word “fix” indicated that his short-term memory wasn’t impaired. The rest, though . . .”Samson, you didn’t give me the sandwich. You hit me in the face with it. Do you remember doing that?”

“Yes, I do, David.”

“Why did you do that? Hit me in the face with the sandwich, I mean?”

“It seemed to be the right thing to do.”

I expected to hear something from the booth; when I didn’t, I touched my ear with my right hand, found my earpiece missing. Sometime during the last few minutes, it had become dislodged, probably while I was washing my face at the sink. But I didn’t want to interrupt the conversation to go searching for it, so I let it pass.

“That was the wrong thing to do, Samson,” I said. “You could have hurt me.”

“I’m sorry, Jerry. Please forgive me.”

Again, it may seem strange for a robot to ask a human for forgiveness, but this was another aspect of Samson’s conditioning. For him, begging forgiveness was an acknowledgement that he understood he had made an error and a tacit statement that he would never do it again. And indeed, he never would, not in a thousand reiterations of the same sequence. Unlike humans, robots don’t make the same mistake twice.

Yet getting nailed again with a PB&J was the least of my concerns. “I’ll forgive you if you tell me why it seemed like it seemed like the right thing to do.”

Silence. I had posed the question the wrong way. “Samson, why did you think hitting me in the face with the sandwich was the right thing to do?”

“Because you’re I want to do the right things for you, Jerry.”

Great. Now we were stuck in a logic loop. Yet this was the second time today he had struck someone else—either another robot or a human—with an object he was supposed to give to them. For such an occurrence to happen twice in such short succession couldn’t be a coincidence. Time to try a different tack . . .”If you want to do the right things for me, Samson, then how do you feel about me?”

“I love you, Jerry.”

Wha-a-a-t?

Even if he sounded like Elizabeth Taylor rather than Robert Redford, that response couldn’t have shocked me more. Samson was programmed to learn the identities of his human operators and accept them with platonic, selfless affection. Agape, if you want to use the seldom-used term for such a condition (and, no, it’s not pronounced ah-gape, like the way you may stare at something, but as ah-gaw-pey). Since Samson had become operational, I had spent well over a hundred hours with him in this room, patiently instructing him how to make the bed, wash dishes, vacuum the floor, program the TV, fetch me a soda, answer the front door and greet guests, play various board games, and feed the cat. If I were to ask Samson how he felt about me, he should have replied, “I like you, Jerry. You’re my friend.”

Love was not supposed to be in the algorithms. I was pretty damn sure he didn’t know what he was saying. But what was it that he meant to say . . .?

Once more, I heard the door open. Looking over my shoulder, I saw Donna urgently gesturing to me. I wanted to continue this train of thought, yet since I didn’t know exactly what to say next, perhaps now was a good time to grab a Coke. “I like you, too, Samson,” I said as I stood up. “Let’s take a break. Code B.”

“Code B understood,” Samson said, and there was another double-beep as he went off-line again. If I didn’t return in ten minutes to rescind the order, he would automatically come back on-line again, then seek out the nearest wall-socket and plug himself in for a recharge. Until then, he was an inert hunk of machinery.

Right. An inert hunk of machinery who had just proclaimed his love for me.

I found Phil in the observation booth, bent over one of the monitors as he studied the video replay of the session. He didn’t look at me as I came in, but moused the slidebar on the bottom of the screen to review my interview with Samson. Keith was seated in his chair on the other side of him; he glanced in my direction, then quickly looked away. I noticed the cordless phone near his left elbow; that explained how Phil had gotten down here so quickly. Keith, you prick; you’re always ready to crack jokes behind the boss’s back, but whenever you get a chance to suck up to him . . .

“Why didn’t you let Keith shut down Samson?” Phil asked quietly, still gazing at the screen. At least he wasn’t stammering this time.

“I wanted to make sure we didn’t lose anything from Samson’s memory.” I stepped aside to let Donna slide past me, but she remained behind me, standing in the open door of the darkened booth. “This was the second time today Samson has attacked someone, and I wanted to find out why.”

Phil shook his head. “Sorry, Jerry, but that’s an unacceptable risk. If there’s something critically wrong with his conditioning protocols, we can’t let him stay active after an accident.” He turned to Keith. “Download everything from his buffer and give them to me, then erase his memory of this test.”

“Hey, whoa, wait a minute! I just spent two hours in there with him! You can’t just erase everything because . . .!”

That ticked him off. Phil slapped the desk as he rose to face me. “D-d-d-don’t t-t-tell me wh-whu-whu-what I ca-ca-ca-ca . . .”

“Damn straight I can!” I snarled back. “That’s my conditioning routine you’re screwing with here, Phil, and this is the second time today you’ve told Keith to wipe the memory buffer!” I jabbed a finger at the motionless robot on the other side of the window. “And in case you didn’t notice, that friggin’ thing just said he loves me! Now there’s got to be a reason for that!”

Phil stared at me in astonishment, and I can’t say I wasn’t rather amazed myself. In the four years that we had worked together, we had seldom raised our voices to one another. We weren’t great friends, but even after the stress of the last six months, it was hard for the two of us to get really mad at each other. Unlike, of course, his stormy relationship with Darth Veder . . .

And it was then, deep within my brain, that a couple of synapses sparked in a way those two particular synapses had never fired before. Phil and Kathy . . .

Okay, time out for a little soap opera. True Geek Romance, or perhaps Computer Wonks In Love. Either way, here it is:

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . . okay, so it was about twelve years ago, just across the Charles River on the MIT campus . . . there were two post-grads working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab, both studying advanced AI as applied to robotics. A nice couple of kids in their late twenties; neither of them much to look at, and hardly the type you’d imagine prancing hand-in-hand through the lily fields, but hey, love isn’t only blind, but it’s also got a bizarre sense of humor. They found each other, they worked together for a time as colleagues, then close friends, then . . . well, you get the picture.

But it didn’t take. That’s the problem with romances among highly intelligent people; they think too much about what they’re doing, instead of just letting their cojones go their own merry way. They were a mismatched couple, or at least so they told themselves, prone to argue about every little detail, whether it was about the theories of Norbert Wiener or what kind of pizza to order tonight. Late one evening, after the latest tiff, she stormed out of his Cambridge apartment, and he retaliated by throwing her books into the street, and that was pretty much the end of that. They both received their MIT doctorates only a few months later, and since each of them already had jobs awaiting them on opposite sides of the country, they left Massachusetts with scarcely a final goodbye.

But every great affair has a touch of irony. A decade went by, during which time LEC decided to diversify into consumer robotics. Jim Lang hired corporate headhunters to recruit the best cybernetics talent available, and as fortuitous circumstances would have it, the two former lovers were lured back to Massachusetts. Imagine their surprise when they discovered that they were now working for the same company. Different divisions, perhaps, but the same company nonetheless.

So now it’s twelve years later, and they were still trying to iron out their relationship. Only this time, they’d built robots which program themselves by observing human behavior and imitating it.

“Keith, Donna,” I asked, “would you mind excusing us for a moment?”

Keith stared at me before he realized that I wanted him to leave, then he shrugged and rose from his chair. Donna gave me a quizzical look, but didn’t say anything as Keith closed the door behind them.

Phil waited until we were alone before he spoke. “Whu-whu-whu-what d-d-d-do you w-w-wa-wa-want t-t-t-to . . .?”

“Phil, sit down and count to ten.” He glared at me but took my advice anyway, taking the seat Keith had just vacated. While he was counting, I crept to the door, put my hand on the knob, waited a couple of seconds, then yanked it open. Keith stood just outside, pretending to scratch his nose. He mumbled something about getting a cup of coffee and scurried down the hall. I shut the door again just as Phil had reached ten. “Okay now?” I asked.

“Sure.” He let out his breath. “All right, Jerry, what do you want to talk about?”

“Okay, just between you and me . . . are you seeing Kathy again?” Phil’s mouth dropped open, and for a moment I thought he was going to start stammering again. I saw the denial coming, though, so I headed it off. “Look, everyone knows you two were once an item. Frankly, I don’t care, but if it makes any difference, I’m not going to tell Jim. Just to satisfy my curiosity, though . . .”

“Ummm . . . yeah, we’ve started seeing each other again.” He seemed mortified by the admission. “But not on company time,” he quickly added. “We’ve only gone out a couple of times.”

Somehow, that sounded like a lie. I didn’t keep track of Darth’s hours, but I knew for a fact that Phil practically lived at the lab, going so far as to keep a fresh change of clothes in his office closet and a toothbrush in his desk. “Sure, sure, I believe you. Just dinner and a movie now and then, right?”

“Yeah, t-t-that’s all.” He nodded, perhaps a little too quickly . . . and that stutter of his was better than a polygraph. “P-p-please don’t let anyone know. If Jim fi-fi-fi-finds out w-w-we’re . . .”

“I know, I know.” And that’s what bothered him the most, the chance that Jim Lang would discover that the leaders of his two rival tiger-teams were having an affair. For a chess player, that would be like finding out that the white queen and the black king were sneaking off the board to fool around. “Trust me, Slim Jim’s never going to learn about this . . . or at least from me, at any rate.”

Phil nodded gratefully, then his face became suspicious. “So why do you want to know?”

“Well . . .” I coughed in my hand. “You just said that you two weren’t seeing each other on company time . . . and really, I believe you, honest . . . but just for the sake of conjecture, if you were seeing each other here at the lab, umm . . . would you be doing it where Samson might be at the same time?”

“B-b-buh-buh . . .” Phil stared at me as if I was his father and I had just asked if he knew how to put on a condom. And then his eyes involuntarily traveled toward the window.

While we had been speaking, without either of us taking notice, Samson had automatically gone into recharge mode. The robot had walked to the nearest electrical outlet, withdrawn a power cable from his thorax, and inserted it into the wall socket. Since Samson now spent most of his downtime in the training suite, he knew exactly where all the outlets were located.

It suddenly occurred to me that the outlets were all within line-of-sight of the suite’s bedroom. The one which all of us had used when we were too tired or busy to go home.

And Samson, of course, knew how to change the sheets when asked to do so.

When I looked back at Phil, I saw that he was staring straight at me. Nothing further needed to be said: he knew that I knew, and I knew that he knew that I knew. That’s another thing about highly intelligent people; no matter how smart they may be, most of them have a hard time lying with a straight face.

Phil didn’t say anything. He rotated the chair to the console, where he found a spare disk, slapped it into the drive, and tapped a couple of commands into the keyboard. “Sorry you had to lose this afternoon’s session,” he said quietly, not looking back at me as Samson’s memory buffer downloaded onto the disk, “but I think we’ve got a flaw in the conditioning module . . .”

“Aw, c’mon! He’s just confused. He sees you and Kathy in there . . .” I saw the angry look on his face reflected in the window, but I didn’t stop myself “. . . and then he sees you two fighting. No wonder his conditioning is . . .”

“That’s enough!” He ejected the disk from the drive and stood up quickly, shoving the disk in his trouser pocket without bothering to first put it in its case. “Th-th-this is none of your buh-buh-business, and I-I-I’d ap-ap-appreciate it if y-y-you’d k-k-k-kindly stay out of it. Samson needs to b-b-be reprogrammed. Th-th-th-that’s all.”

No argument either way. Phil’s relationship with Kathy wasn’t any of my business, and there was no doubt that Samson conditioning module needed drastic remodification. Like it or not, our team had designed a third-generation robot which took all the wrong cues from human behavior. Kathy and Phil could fight out their problems on their own, but it wasn’t right to send a robot to market whose training inadvertently reflected their love-hate relationship.

“Sure, Phil,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

Still not looking directly at me, Phil nodded as he headed for the door. “Th-th-that’s the end of t-t-t-today’s exercise,” he said quietly. “I-I-I’ll work on S-s-s-samson tonight, have it r-r-ready for t-t-tomorrow’s test with D-d-d-d-d . . .”

“Sure you want to do that?” Tomorrow morning we had another test scheduled with D-team. Same routine as before: Samson comes out of the woods, offers an apple to Delilah, bows to her, offers his hand and asks if she wants him to join her on the bench. Both teams had agreed this as a test of whether the two robots could work in unison without operator intervention. “Maybe we should ask for a delay.”

Phil appeared to think about it for a moment, then he shook his head. “No,” he said at last. “We’ll do the test tomorrow. Between now and then, don’t touch Samson. Just let me take care of this, okay?”

“Sure,” I said, and he nodded and let himself out of the booth. It wasn’t until long after he had closed the door behind him that I realized he had stopped stuttering.

By this time, though, I had taken a seat at the console and begun doing a little work of my own.

The two R&D programs were supposed to be isolated from one another, but the seal wasn’t airtight. Kathy and Phil weren’t the only couple who were keeping company when no one was watching; there was a cutie on Delilah Team with whom I was cooping from time to time, sometimes sleeping over at her apartment and vice-versa. What she didn’t know, though, was that I had learned her password. It was a sort-of-accidental discovery; one time we were lounging in bed together, she took a few minutes to check her company email on TV, so I was able to see her password when she entered it. I had never abused that knowledge, but there’s always a first time for everything, so it was with no small amount of guilt that I used my occasional girlfriend’s password to gain access to D-Team’s files.

It took a couple of hours of rummaging, but after a while I managed to locate a batch of reports regarding Delilah’s trial runs. I wasn’t surprised to discover that D-team had their own problems with their robot. Like Samson, Delilah sometimes behaved aggressively when the circumstances called for her to be friendly. The fault obviously lay in the conditioning module, yet no one—at least, not those who had written the reports; I couldn’t find any from Kathy Veder—had been able to figure out what was providing negative stimuli to the robot.

But I knew. Delilah was being also being trained in a suite much like Samson’s. It didn’t take a rocket scientist, let alone a cyberneticist, to realize that this suite was sometimes being used by Drs. Veder and Burton for certain extracurricular activities . . . with Delilah in the same room, watching the entire time, absorbing everything. Learning all the wrong lessons about the human condition.

It could be argued either way whether Samson and Delilah truly had any emotions of their own. Were they merely imitating Phil and Kathy, or had they developed inner lives, as incredible as that may seem? Regardless of the explanation, though, their environment was causing them to sometimes behave in what appeared to be an irrational manner.

Yet love—even agape, its highest expression—isn’t rational. It cannot be reduced to bar-graphs and lines of source code; once you get past pheromones, body language and casual eye-contact, there is no reason for it to happen, save for the biological imperatives to procreate, maintain tribal associations, or remain close to one’s family. But love does nonetheless persist, and sometimes under the strangest of circumstances.

Were Samson and Delilah in love? Probably not; they were robots, machines with none of the beforementioned hangups. You could spend countless man-hours of R&D trying to resolve that question. Yet the only people who had the answer were their own creators . . . and they had a hard enough time researching and developing their own feelings toward each other.

When I arrived the trailer the following morning, the rest of Samson Team was already getting ready for the test. Phil, however, was nowhere to be found, and neither was Samson. I paged him but he didn’t return the call, and while Bob was setting up his camera and Keith was opening his first bag of Fritos for the day, Kathy Veder appeared in the atrium, walking Delilah ahead of her.

Delilah was dressed in the same ankle-length, high-collared gown she had worn the day before. Once again, I wondered what purpose it served to put clothes on a robot. It didn’t seem to impede her movements—indeed, the dress had been cut so that it allowed her double-jointed arms and legs to move more freely—yet it was unnecessary to assign a gender-role to a machine. On the other hand, perhaps Darth was attempting to humanize her creation; if that was the case, it might be a good marketing strategy, yet rather futile since Delilah’s spherical, nearly featureless head belied the femininity of her outfit.

Kathy stopped next to the bench, turning her back to us as she waited for Delilah catch up. Donna hadn’t switched on the shotgun mike, so we couldn’t hear the instructions Kathy gave the ’bot. She pointed to the bench, and Delilah walked over to it, her feet whisking beneath the hem of her dress, until she turned and daintily sat down, once again folding her silver hands in her lap. Kathy bent over Delilah and closely examined a panel in the side of her slender cylindrical neck. I glanced at the clock. We were already running fifteen minutes late . . .

The door behind me opened, and at first I thought it was Phil. “What took you so . . .?” I started to say until I glimpsed Keith hastily stashing his chips beneath the console. I turned around and saw Jim Lang entering the trailer.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked. As always, Jim was dressed in sandals, faded Levis and a Hawaiian shirt. In all the time I had worked for LEC, I had never seen him wear a coat and tie, not even for stockholder meetings.

“No, Jim, not at all.” I recovered fast enough to not show just how startled I was by his unexpected arrival. “We’re . . . ah, still setting up here. If you want to take a seat . . .?”

“Thanks, Jerry. Excuse me, Donna . . . it is Donna, isn’t it?” Ignoring her forced smile, Jim eased past her, then settled down in Phil’s empty chair. “Sorry to interrupt, but I was just curious to see how things were making out down here.”

Right. Slim Jim never showed up anywhere just out of curiosity. When he made an appearance outside the executive suite, it meant that he had become aware that a project was having problems. “We’re doing great, Jim,” Keith said, just a little too quickly. “Just . . . uh, working out a few bugs here and there.”

I looked away so that Jim wouldn’t see me wince. Brilliant, Einstein. Yet Slim Jim only nodded. He gazed through the window at Kathy Veder and Delilah. “I don’t see Phil,” he said. “Where’s . . . ah, yes, here he comes now.”

I followed his gaze, spotted Phil walking through the trees on the other side of the atrium. He saw Kathy, stopped a few yards away from the bench as she looked up at him. Their eyes locked for a few seconds, and for a moment or two I thought he was going to say something to her, or she something to him. But nothing happened; he lowered his head and strode quickly toward the trailer. Her gaze followed him, and in that instant when her face turned toward the trailer, I caught the briefest glimpse of an expression I couldn’t quite identify. Loathing? Longing? Hard to tell . . .

“We’re lucky to have them working for us, don’t you think?” Jim asked quietly.

I didn’t realize he was speaking to me until I glanced his way, saw that he was looking at me. “Oh, yeah,” I replied. “Very lucky. Two great scientists, uh-huh.” And perhaps it wasn’t too late to send my resumé to CybeServe . . .

Phil was startled to find Jim sitting in his chair when he entered the trailer. He murmured a hasty apology for being late, which Jim accepted with a perfunctory nod, then he squeezed past the CEO to stand behind Keith. “G-g-good m-m-m-morning,” he stammered as he leaned over Keith’s shoulder to check out the screen. “Are w-w-w-we re-re-re-ready?”

“I’m not sure.” Keith cast a wary sidelong glance in Jim’s direction. “When I ran a diagnostic a few minutes ago, I found a new protocol in the conditioning module. I checked it out, and it looks like it was written last night. Do you know anything about . . .?”

“Y-y-yes, i-i-it’s a n-n-new p-p-program.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his thin neck, and he seemed determined not to deliberately look at Jim Lang. “I t-t-t-think w-w-w-we’re ready to pr-pr-pro-proceed.”

Jim raised an inquisitive eyebrow, but said nothing as he propped his elbows on the console and clasped his hands together beneath his chin. Out in the atrium, Kathy Veder had just turned to walk away from Delilah. Phil caught Donna’s eye and quickly nodded his head, and she switched on her mike. “D-Team, we’re ready to roll.”

“R-r-roll now,” Phil said. Keith and I traded an uncertain glance. Dr. Veder was still in the atrium; she hadn’t yet returned to her trailer. Keith’s hands hesitated above his keyboard, and Phil tapped him on the shoulder. “Commence the t-t-t-test, p-p-p-please,” he said, and Keith shrugged as he typed in the command which would bring Samson online.

“Aren’t you going to wait?” Jim asked quietly.

Phil didn’t reply. Instead, he closed his eyes, and his lips moved as he subaudibly counted to ten.

Something weird was going on here, and it wasn’t the sort of weirdness I like. While Phil’s eyes were shut and Jim was looking the other direction, I opened a window from my menu bar and moused the emergency shut-down icon. When the Y/N prompt appeared onscreen, I moved the cursor above the Y. One tap of my index finger, and Samson would freeze like an popsicle.

Out in the atrium, Kathy Veder was almost at the edge of the clearing when Samson came marching through the trees. She stopped in mid-stride, confused and startled, judging from her expression, not just a little alarmed. My mind’s eye flashed upon a scene from The Day the Earth Stood Still—the robot Gort carrying the unconscious Patricia Neal in his arms—and my finger wavered above the Return key. Oh, no, Phil can’t be that crazy . . .

But then Samson stopped. He bowed from the waist, as if he was a gentleman who happened upon a lovely young woman while strolling through the woods. Kathy’s face changed from fear to amusement; she stepped aside, and Samson straightened up and walked past her.

“Oh, very good,” Jim murmured. “Good object recognition.”

I let out my breath and moved my hand away from the keyboard.

Samson continued walking toward Delilah. As he approached the bench where she sat, his right hand opened the cargo panel on his chest, and reached inside. At this point, he was supposed to pull out an apple and offer it to the other robot. He had gotten that part right yesterday, until he decided that slamming the apple against her head was an appropriate sign of affection. On either side of me, I could see Donna, Keith, and Bob stiffening ever so slightly.

But what Samson produced wasn’t an apple, but a heart.

Not the organic sort, but the St. Valentine’s Day variety: a red plastic toy of the sort you might place within a bouquet of roses you send to your true love.

From the edge of the clearing, Kathy Veder watched as Samson stepped around the bench and, with grace and tenderness, held it out to Delilah.

Delilah remained still, her hands still folded in her lap, her fishbowl head staring straight ahead.

“Please,” I heard Phil whisper.

And then Delilah’s head moved toward Samson, as if noticing his presence for the first time. She raised her left arm, opened her palm and turned it upward, and waited.

Samson took another step forward and, ever so carefully, placed the heart in her hand.

Kathy folded her arms across her chest, covered her mouth with her hand. She was watching the robots, but her gaze kept flickering toward us, toward the window behind which Phil stood.

I glanced at Phil. He was silent, but his posture was exactly like Kathy’s.

Delilah took the heart and placed it in her lap. Samson bowed just as he had done for Kathy, but he remained rooted in his tracks until Delilah raised her left hand and, in a very ladylike fashion, motioned for him to join her on the bench.

Samson took two steps closer, turned around, and sat down next to Delilah, his hands coming to rest on the bench.

Then Delilah laid her right hand upon his left hand.

And then both robots became still.

That was almost what they were supposed to do.

For a few moments, no one in the trailer said anything. Everyone stared in astonishment at the tableau. I felt someone brush against the back of my chair, but I didn’t look up to see who had just moved past me. My entire attention was focused upon Samson and Delilah, the quiet spectacle of two robots holding hands on a park bench.

“Fantastic,” Jim Lang whispered. “I’m . . . that’s utterly . . . my God, it’s so damn real.” He turned around to look up at Phil. “How did you . . .?”

But Phil wasn’t there. He didn’t even bother to shut the door behind him as he left the trailer. When I peered out the window again, I saw that Kathy Veder had disappeared as well.

In fact, I didn’t see either of them again for the rest of the day. A little while later, during lunch hour, I casually strolled out to the employee parking lot and noted, without much surprise, that both of their cars were missing.

“That’s incredible conditioning,” Jim said as he pushed back his chair. “How did you guys manage this?”

Bob chuckled as he unloaded his camcorder. Donna and Keith, two days away from their first date, just grinned at each other and said nothing. I made the program-abort window disappear from my screen before the boss noticed and shrugged offhandedly.

“Just takes the right conditioning,” I replied.

If you’re a robot-owner, or least one who has a Samson or a Delilah in your home, then you know the rest. After considerable research and development, and the sort of financial risk which makes the Wall Street Journal see spots before its eyes, LEC simultaneously introduced two different R3G models: his-and-hers robots for the home and office. They cook dinner, they wash dishes, they answer the door, they walk the dog, they vacuum the floor, they make the beds, and water the roses and virtually anything else you ask them to do. Sure, CybeServe brought their Metropolis to market first, but who wants that clunky piece of crap? Our robots will even carry your kids to bed and sing them a lullaby.

People sometimes ask why Samsons and Delilahs have a small heart etched on their chest plates. The corporate line is that it’s there to show that our robots have a soul, but anyone who knows anything about cybernetics knows better than that. After all, that’s utter nonsense. Robots are just machines, right? And who in their right mind would ever believe that a machine can learn to love?

I don’t have an easy answer to that, and I’ve spent more than fifteen years in this industry. If you want, I’ll forward your query to Dr. Phil Burton and Dr. Kathy Veder. However, you shouldn’t expect an answer very soon. Ever since they got married, we’ve had a hard time getting them to come to the office.

ON THE ORION LINE

Stephen Baxter

The Brief Life Bums Brightly broke out of the fleet. We were chasing down a Ghost cruiser, and we were closing.

The lifedome of the Brightly was transparent, so it was as if Captain Teid in her big chair, and her officers and their equipment clusters—and a few low-grade tars like me—were just floating in space. The light was subtle, coming from a nearby cluster of hot young stars, and from the rivers of sparking lights that made up the fleet formation we had just left, and beyond that from the sparking of novae. This was the Orion Line—six thousand light years from Earth and a thousand lights long, a front that spread right along the inner edge of the Orion Spiral Arm—and the stellar explosions marked battles that must have concluded years ago.

And, not a handful of klicks away, the Ghost cruiser slid across space, running for home. The cruiser was a rough egg-shape of silvered rope. Hundreds of Ghosts clung to the rope. You could see them slithering this way and that, not affected at all by the emptiness around them.

The Ghosts’ destination was a small, old yellow star. Pael, our tame Academician, had identified it as a fortress star from some kind of strangeness in its light. But up close you don’t need to be an Academician to spot a fortress. From the Brightly I could see with my unaided eyes that the star had a pale blue cage around it—an open lattice with struts half a million kilometers long—thrown there by the Ghosts, for their own purposes.

I had a lot of time to watch all this. I was just a tar. I was fifteen years old.

My duties at that moment were non-specific. I was supposed to stand to, and render assistance any way that was required—most likely with basic medical attention should we go into combat. Right now the only one of us tars actually working was Halle, who was chasing down a pool of vomit sicked up by Pael, the Academician, the only non-Navy personnel on the bridge.

The action on the Brightly wasn’t like you see in Virtual shows. The atmosphere was calm, quiet, competent. All you could hear was the murmur of voices, from the crew and the equipment, and the hiss of recycling air. No drama: it was like an operating theater.

There was a soft warning chime.

The captain raised an arm and called over Academician Pael, First Officer Till, and Jeru, the commissary assigned to the ship. They huddled close, conferring—apparently arguing. I saw the way flickering nova light reflected from Jeru’s shaven head.

I felt my heart beat harder.

Everybody knew what the chime meant: that we were approaching the fortress cordon. Either we would break off, or we would chase the Ghost cruiser inside its invisible fortress. And everybody knew that no Navy ship that had ever penetrated a fortress cordon, ten light-minutes from the central star, had come back out again.

One way or the other, it would all be resolved soon.

Captain Teid cut short the debate. She leaned forward and addressed the crew. Her voice, cast through the ship, was friendly, like a cadre leader whispering in your ear. “You can all see we can’t catch that swarm of Ghosts this side of the cordon. And you all know the hazard of crossing a cordon. But if we’re ever going to break this blockade of theirs we have to find a way to bust open those forts. So we’re going in anyhow. Stand by your stations.”

There was a half-hearted cheer.

I caught Halle’s eye. She grinned at me. She pointed at the captain, closed her fist and made a pumping movement. I admired her sentiment but she wasn’t being too accurate, anatomically speaking, so I raised my middle finger and jiggled it back and forth.

It took a slap on the back of the head from Jeru, the commissary, to put a stop to that. “Little morons,” she growled.

“Sorry, sir—”

I got another slap for the apology. Jeru was a tall, stocky woman, dressed in the bland monastic robes said to date from the time of the founding of the Commission for Historical Truth a thousand years ago. But rumor was she’d seen plenty of combat action of her own before joining the Commission, and such was her physical strength and speed of reflex I could well believe it.

As we neared the cordon the Academician, Pael, started a gloomy count-down. The slow geometry of Ghost cruiser and tinsel-wrapped fortress star swiveled across the crowded sky.

Everybody went quiet.

The darkest time is always just before the action starts. Even if you can see or hear what is going on, all you do is think. What was going to happen to us when we crossed that intangible border? Would a fleet of Ghost ships materialize all around us? Would some mysterious weapon simply blast us out of the sky?

I caught the eye of First Officer Till. He was a veteran of twenty years; his scalp had been burned away in some ancient close-run combat, long before I was born, and he wore a crown of scar tissue with pride.

“Let’s do it, tar,” he growled.

All the fear went away. I was overwhelmed by a feeling of togetherness, of us all being in this crap together. I had no thought of dying. Just: let’s get through this.

“Yes, sir!”

Pael finished his countdown.

All the lights went out. Detonating stars wheeled.

And the ship exploded.

I was thrown into darkness. Air howled. Emergency bulkheads scythed past me, and I could hear people scream.

I slammed into the curving hull, nose pressed against the stars.

I bounced off and drifted. The inertial suspension was out, then. I thought I could smell blood—probably my own.

I could see the Ghost ship, a tangle of rope and silver baubles, tingling with highlights from the fortress star. We were still closing.

But I could also see shards of shattered lifedome, a sputtering drive unit. The shards were bits of the Brightly. It had gone, all gone, in a fraction of a second.

“Let’s do it,” I murmured.

Maybe I was out of it for a while.

Somebody grabbed my ankle and tugged me down. there was a competent slap on my cheek, enough to make me focus.

“Case. Can you hear me?”

It was First Officer Till. Even in the swimming starlight that burned-off scalp was unmistakable.

I glanced around. There were four of us here: Till, Commissary Jeru, Academician Pael, me. We were huddled up against what looked like the stump of the First Officer’s console. I realized that the gale of venting air had stopped. I was back inside a hull with integrity, then—

“Case!”

“I—yes, sir.”

“Report.”

I touched my lip; my hand came away bloody. At a time like that it’s your duty to report your injuries, honestly and fully. Nobody needs a hero who turns out not to be able to function. “I think I’m all right. I may have a concussion.”

“Good enough. Strap down.” Till handed me a length of rope.

I saw that the others had tied themselves to struts. I did the same.

Till, with practiced ease, swam away into the air, I guessed looking for other survivors.

Academician Pael was trying to curl into a ball. He couldn’t even speak. The tears just rolled out of his eyes. I stared at the way big globules welled up and drifted away into the air, glimmering.

The action had been over in seconds. All a bit sudden for an earthworm, I guess.

Nearby, I saw, trapped under one of the emergency bulkheads, there was a pair of legs—just that. The rest of the body must have been chopped away, gone drifting off with the rest of the debris from Brightly. But I recognized those legs, from a garish pink stripe on the sole of the right boot. That had been Halle. She was the only girl I had ever screwed, I thought—and more than likely, given the situation, the only girl I ever would get to screw.

I couldn’t figure out how I felt about that.

Jeru was watching me. “Tar—do you think we should all be frightened for ourselves, like the Academician?” Her accent was strong, unidentifiable.

“No, sir.”

“No.” Jeru studied Pael with contempt. “We are in a yacht, Academician. Something has happened to the Brightly. The ’dome was designed to break up into yachts like this.” She sniffed. “We have air, and it isn’t foul yet.” She winked at me. “Maybe we can do a little damage to the Ghosts before we die, tar. What do you think?”

I grinned. “Yes, sir.”

Pael lifted his head and stared at me with salt water eyes. “Lethe. You people are monsters.” His accent was gentle, a lilt. “Even such a child as this. You embrace death—”

Jeru grabbed Pael’s jaw in a massive hand, and pinched the joint until he squealed. “Captain Teid grabbed you, Academician; she threw you here, into the yacht, before the bulkhead came down. I saw it. If she hadn’t taken the time to do that, she would have made it herself. Was she a monster? Did she embrace death?” And she pushed Pael’s face away.

For some reason I hadn’t thought about the rest of the crew until that moment. I guess I have a limited imagination. Now, I felt adrift. The captain—dead?

I said, “Excuse me, Commissary. How many other yachts got out?”

“None,” she said steadily, making sure I had no illusions. “Just this one. They died doing their duty, tar. Like the captain.”

Of course she was right, and I felt a little better. Whatever his character, Pael was too valuable not to save. As for me, I had survived through sheer blind chance, through being in the right place when the walls came down: if the captain had been close, her duty would have been to pull me out of the way and take my place. It isn’t a question of human values but of economics: a lot more is invested in the training and experience of a Captain Teid—or a Pael—than in me.

But Pael seemed more confused than I was.

First Officer Till came bustling back with a heap of equipment. “Put these on.” He handed out pressure suits. They were what we called slime suits in training: lightweight skinsuits, running off a backpack of gen-enged algae. “Move it,” said Till. “Impact with the Ghost cruiser in four minutes. We don’t have any power; there’s nothing we can do but ride it out.”

I crammed my legs into my suit.

Jeru complied, stripping off her robe to reveal a hard, scarred body. But she was frowning. “Why not heavier armor?”

For answer, Till picked out a gravity-wave handgun from the gear he had retrieved. Without pausing he held it to Pael’s head and pushed the fire button.

Pael twitched.

Till said, “See? Nothing is working. Nothing but bio systems, it seems.” He threw the gun aside.

Pael closed his eyes, breathing hard.

Till said to me, “Test your comms.”

I closed up my hood and faceplate and began intoning, “One, two, three . . .” I could hear nothing.

Till began tapping at our backpacks, resetting the systems. His hood started to glow with transient, pale blue symbols. And then, scratchily, his voice started to come through. “. . . Five, six, seven—can you hear me, tar?”

“Yes, sir.”

The symbols were bioluminescent. There were receptors on all our suits—photoreceptors, simple eyes—which could “read” the messages scrawled on our companions’ suits. It was a backup system meant for use in environments where anything higher-tech would be a liability. But obviously it would only work as long as we were in line of sight.

“That will make life harder,” Jeru said. Oddly, mediated by software, she was easier to understand.

Till shrugged. “You take it as it comes.” Briskly, he began to hand out more gear. “These are basic field belt kits. There’s some medical stuff: a suture kit, scalpel blades, blood-giving sets. You wear these syrettes around your neck, Academician. They contain painkillers, various gen-enged med-viruses . . . no, you wear it outside your suit, Pael, so you can reach it. You’ll find valve inlets here, on your sleeve, and here, on the leg.” Now came weapons. “We should carry handguns, just in case they start working, but be ready with these.” He handed out combat knives.

Pael shrank back.

“Take the knife, Academician. You can shave off that ugly beard, if nothing else.”

I laughed out loud, and was rewarded with a wink from Till.

I took a knife. It was a heavy chunk of steel, solid and reassuring. I tucked it in my belt. I was starting to feel a whole lot better.

“Two minutes to impact,” Jeru said. I didn’t have a working chronometer; she must have been counting the seconds.

“Seal up.” Till began to check the integrity of Pael’s suit; Jeru and I helped each other. Face seal, glove seal, boot seal, pressure check. Water check, oh-two flow, cee-oh-two scrub . . .

When we were sealed I risked poking my head above Till’s chair.

The Ghost ship filled space. The craft was kilometers across, big enough to have dwarfed the poor, doomed Brief Life Bums Brightly. It was a tangle of silvery rope of depthless complexity, occluding the stars and the warring fleets. Bulky equipment pods were suspended in the tangle.

And everywhere there were Silver Ghosts, sliding like beads of mercury. I could see how the yacht’s emergency lights were returning crimson highlights from the featureless hides of Ghosts, so they looked like sprays of blood droplets across that shining perfection.

“Ten seconds,” Till called. “Brace.”

Suddenly silver ropes thick as tree trunks were all around us, looming out of the sky.

And we were thrown into chaos again.

I heard a grind of twisted metal, a scream of air. The hull popped open like an eggshell. The last of our air fled in a gush of ice crystals, and the only sound I could hear was my own breathing.

The crumpling hull soaked up some of our momentum.

But then the base of the yacht hit, and it hit hard.

The chair was wrenched out of my grasp, and I was hurled upward. There was a sudden pain in my left arm. I couldn’t help but cry out.

I reached the limit of my tether and rebounded. The jolt sent further waves of pain through my arm. From up there, I could see the others were clustered around the base of the First Officer’s chair, which had collapsed.

I looked up. We had stuck like a dart in the outer layers of the Ghost ship. There were shining threads arcing all around us, as if a huge net had scooped us up.

Jeru grabbed me and pulled me down. She jarred my bad arm, and I winced. But she ignored me, and went back to working on Till. He was under the fallen chair.

Pael started to take a syrette of dope from the sachet around his neck.

Jeru knocked his hand away. “You always use the casualty’s,” she hissed. “Never your own.”

Pael looked hurt, rebuffed. “Why?”

I could answer that. “Because the chances are you’ll need your own in a minute.”

Jeru stabbed a syrette into Till’s arm.

Pael was staring at me through his faceplate with wide, frightened eyes. “You’ve broken your arm.”

Looking closely at the arm for the first time, I saw that it was bent back at an impossible angle. I couldn’t believe it, even through the pain. I’d never bust so much as a finger, all the way through training.

Now Till jerked, a kind of miniature convulsion, and a big bubble of spit and blood blew out of his lips. Then the bubble popped, and his limbs went loose.

Jeru sat back, breathing hard. She said, “Okay. Okay. How did he put it?—You take it as it comes.” She looked around, at me, Pael. I could see she was trembling, which scared me. She said, “Now we move. We have to find an LUP. A lying-up point, Academician. A place to hole up.”

I said, “The First Officer—”

“Is dead.” She glanced at Pael. “Now it’s just the three of us. We won’t be able to avoid each other anymore, Pael.”

Pael stared back, eyes empty.

Jeru looked at me, and for a second her expression softened. “A broken neck. Till broke his neck, tar.”

Another death, just like that: just for a heartbeat that was too much for me.

Jeru said briskly, “Do your duty, tar. Help the worm.”

I snapped back, “Yes, sir.” I grabbed Pael’s unresisting arm.

Led by Jeru, we began to move, the three of us, away from the crumpled wreck of our yacht, deep into the alien tangle of a Silver Ghost cruiser.

We found our LUP.

It was just a hollow in a somewhat denser tangle of silvery ropes, but it afforded us some cover, and it seemed to be away from the main concentration of Ghosts. We were still open to the vacuum—as the whole cruiser seemed to be—and I realized then that I wouldn’t be getting out of this suit for a while.

As soon as we picked the LUP, Jeru made us take up positions in an all-around defense, covering a 360-degree arc.

Then we did nothing, absolutely nothing, for ten minutes.

It was SOP, standard operating procedure, and I was impressed. You’ve just come out of all the chaos of the destruction of the Brightly and the crash of the yacht, a frenzy of activity. Now you have to give your body a chance to adjust to the new environment, to the sounds and smells and sights.

Only here, there was nothing to smell but my own sweat and piss, nothing to hear but my ragged breathing. And my arm was hurting like hell.

To occupy my mind I concentrated on getting my night vision working. Your eyes take a while to adjust to the darkness—forty-rive minutes before they are fully effective—but you are already seeing better after five. I could see stars through the chinks in the wiry metallic brush around me, the flares of distant novae, and the reassuring lights of our fleet. But a Ghost ship is a dark place, a mess of shadows and smeared-out reflections. It was going to be easy to get spooked here.

When the ten minutes were done, Academician Pael started bleating, but Jeru ignored him and came straight over to me. She got hold of my busted arm and started to feel the bone. “So,” she said briskly. “What’s your name, tar?”

“Case, sir.”

“What do you think of your new quarters?”

“Where do I eat?”

She grinned. “Turn off your comms,” she said.

I complied.

Without warning she pulled my arm, hard. I was glad she couldn’t hear how I howled.

She pulled a canister out of her belt and squirted gunk over my arm; it was semi-sentient and snuggled into place, setting as a hard cast around my injury. When I was healed the cast would fall away of its own accord.

She motioned me to turn on my comms again, and held up a syrette.

“I don’t need that.”

“Don’t be brave, tar. It will help your bones knit.”

“Sir, there’s a rumor that stuff makes you impotent.” I felt stupid even as I said it.

Jeru laughed out loud, and just grabbed my arm. “Anyhow it’s the First Officer’s, and he doesn’t need it anymore, does he?”

I couldn’t argue with that; I accepted the injection. The pain started ebbing almost immediately.

Jeru pulled a tactical beacon out of her belt kit. It was a thumb-sized orange cylinder. “I’m going to try to signal the fleet. I’ll work my way out of this tangle; even if the beacon is working we might be shielded in here.” Pael started to protest, but she shut him up. I sensed I had been thrown into the middle of an ongoing conflict between them. “Case, you’re on stag. And show this worm what’s in his kit. I’ll come back the same way I go. All right?”

“Yes.” More SOP.

She slid away through silvery threads.

I lodged myself in the tangle and started to go through the stuff in the belt kits Till had fetched for us. There was water, rehydration salts, and compressed food, all to be delivered to spigots inside our sealed hoods. We had power packs the size of my thumbnail, but they were as dead as the rest of the kit. There was a lot of low-tech gear meant to prolong survival in a variety of situations, such as a magnetic compass, a heliograph, a thumb saw, a magnifying glass, pitons, and spindles of rope, even fishing line.

I had to show Pael how his suit functioned as a lavatory. The trick is just to let go; a slime suit recycles most of what you give it, and compresses the rest. That’s not to say it’s comfortable. I’ve never yet worn a suit that was good at absorbing odors. I bet no suit designer spent more than an hour in one of her own creations.

I felt fine.

The wreck, the hammer-blow deaths one after the other—none of it was far beneath the surface of my mind. But that’s where it stayed, for now; as long as I had the next task to focus on, and the next after that, I could keep moving forward. The time to let it all hit you is after the show.

I guess Pael had never been trained like that.

He was a thin, spindly man, his eyes sunk in black shadow, and his ridiculous red beard was crammed up inside his faceplate. Now that the great crises were over, his energy seemed to have drained away, and his functioning was slowing to a crawl. He looked almost comical as he pawed at his useless bits of kit.

After a time he said, “Case, is it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you from Earth, child?”

“No. I—”

He ignored me. “The Academies are based on Earth. Did you know that, child? But they do admit a few off-worlders.”

I glimpsed a lifetime of outsider resentment. But I couldn’t care less. Also I wasn’t a child. I asked cautiously, “Where are you from, sir?”

He sighed. “It’s 51 Pegasi. I-B.”

I’d never heard of it. “What kind of place is that? Is it near Earth?”

“Is everything measured relative to Earth . . .? Not very far. My home world was one of the first extra-solar planets to be discovered—or at least, the primary is. I grew up on a moon. The primary is a hot Jupiter.”

I knew what that meant: a giant planet huddled close to its parent star.

He looked up at me. “Where you grew up, could you see the sky?”

“No—”

“I could. And the sky was full of sails. That close to the sun, solar sails work efficiently, you see. I used to watch them at night, schooners with sails hundreds of kilometers wide, tacking this way and that in the light. But you can’t see the sky from Earth—not from the Academy bunkers anyhow.”

“Then why did you go there?”

“I didn’t have a choice.” He laughed, hollowly. “I was doomed by being smart. That is why your precious commissary despises me so much, you see. I have been taught to think—and we can’t have that, can we . . .?”

I turned away from him and shut up. Jeru wasn’t “my” commissary, and this sure wasn’t my argument. Besides, Pael gave me the creeps. I’ve always been wary of people who knew too much about science and technology. With a weapon, all you want to know is how it works, what kind of energy or ammunition it needs, and what to do when it goes wrong. People who know all the technical background and the statistics are usually covering up their own failings; it is experience of use that counts.

But this was no loudmouth weapons tech. This was an Academician: one of humanity’s elite scientists. I felt I had no point of contact with him at all.

I looked out through the tangle, trying to see the fleet’s sliding, glimmering lanes of light.

There was motion in the tangle. I turned that way, motioning Pael to keep still and silent, and got hold of my knife in my good hand.

Jeru came bustling back, exactly the way she had left. She nodded approvingly at my alertness. “Not a peep out of the beacon.”

Pael said, “You realize our time here is limited.”

I asked, “The suits?”

“He means the star,” Jeru said heavily. “Case, fortress stars seem to be unstable. When the Ghosts throw up their cordon, the stars don’t last long before going pop.”

Pael shrugged. “We have hours, a few days at most.”

Jeru said, “Well, we’re going to have to get out, beyond the fortress cordon, so we can signal the fleet. That or find a way to collapse the cordon altogether.”

Pael laughed hollowly. “And how do you propose we do that?”

Jeru glared. “Isn’t it your role to tell me, Academician?”

Pael leaned back and closed his eyes. “Not for the first time, you’re being ridiculous.”

Jeru growled. She turned to me. “You. What do you know about the Ghosts?”

I said, “They come from someplace cold. That’s why they are wrapped up in silvery shells. You can’t bring a Ghost down with laser fire because of those shells. They’re perfectly reflective.”

Pael said, “Not perfectly. They are based on a Planck-zero effect. . . . About one part in a billion of incident energy is absorbed.”

I hesitated. “They say the Ghosts experiment on people.”

Pael sneered. “Lies put about by your Commission for Historical Truth, Commissary. To demonize an opponent is a tactic as old as mankind.”

Jeru wasn’t perturbed. “Then why don’t you put young Case right? How do the Ghosts go about their business?”

Pael said, “The Silver Ghosts tinker with the laws of physics.”

I looked to Jeru; she shrugged.

Pael tried to explain. It was all to do with quagma.

Quagma is the state of matter that emerged from the Big Bang. Matter; when raised to sufficiently high temperatures, melts into a magma of quarks—a quagma. And at such temperatures the four fundamental forces of physics unify into a single superforce. When quagma is allowed to cool and expand its binding superforce decomposes into four sub-forces.

To my surprise, I understood some of this. The principle of the GUTdrive, which powers intrasystem ships like Brief Life Burns Brightly, is related.

Anyhow, by controlling the superforce decomposition, you can select the ratio between those forces. And those ratios govern the fundamental constants of physics.

Something like that.

Pael said, “That marvelous reflective coating of theirs is an example. Each Ghost is surrounded by a thin layer of space in which a fundamental number called the Planck constant is significantly lower than elsewhere. Thus, quantum effects are collapsed. . . . Because the energy carried by a photon, a particle of light, is proportional to the Planck constant, an incoming photon must shed most of its energy when it hits the shell—hence the reflectivity.”

“All right,” Jeru said. “So what are they doing here?”

Pael sighed. “The fortress star seems to be surrounded by an open shell of quagma and exotic matter. We surmise that the Ghosts have blown a bubble around each star, a space-time volume in which the laws of physics are—tweaked.”

“And that’s why our equipment failed.”

“Presumably,” said Pael, with cold sarcasm.

I asked, “What do the Ghosts want? Why do they do all this stuff?”

Pael studied me. “You are trained to kill them, and they don’t even tell you that?”

Jeru just glowered.

Pael said, “The Ghosts were not shaped by competitive evolution. They are symbiotic creatures; they derive from life-forms that huddled into cooperative collectives as their world turned cold. And they seem to be motivated—not by expansion and the acquisition of territory for its own sake, as we are—but by a desire to understand the fine-tuning of the universe. Why are we here? You see, young tar, there is only a narrow range of the constants of physics within which life of any sort is possible. We think the Ghosts are studying this question by pushing at the boundaries—by tinkering with the laws that sustain and contain us all.”

Jeru said, “An enemy who can deploy the laws of physics as a weapon is formidable. But in the long run, we will out-compete the Ghosts.”

Pael said bleakly, “Ah, the evolutionary destiny of mankind. How dismal. But we lived in peace with the Ghosts, under the Raoul Accords, for a thousand years. We are so different, with disparate motivations—why should there be a clash, anymore than between two species of birds in the same garden?”

I’d never seen birds, or a garden, so that passed me by.

Jeru glared. She said at last, “Let’s return to practicalities. How do their fortresses work?” When Pael didn’t reply, she snapped, “Academician, you’ve been inside a fortress cordon for an hour already and you haven’t made a single fresh observation?”

Acidly, Pael demanded, “What would you have me do?”

Jeru nodded at me. “What have you seen, tar?”

“Our instruments and weapons don’t work,” I said promptly. “The Brightly exploded. I broke my arm.”

Jeru said, “Till snapped his neck also.” She flexed her hand within her glove. “What would make our bones more brittle? Anything else?”

I shrugged.

Pael admitted, “I do feel somewhat warm.”

Jeru asked, “Could these body changes be relevant?”

“I don’t see how.”

“Then figure it out.”

“I have no equipment.”

Jeru dumped spare gear—weapons, beacons—in his lap. “You have your eyes, your hands and your mind. Improvise.” She turned to me. “As for you, tar, let’s do a little infil. We still need to find a way off this scow.”

I glanced doubtfully at Pael. “There’s nobody to stand on stag.”

Jeru said, “I know. But there are only three of us.” She grasped Pael’s shoulder, hard. “Keep your eyes open, Academician. We’ll come back the same way we left. So you’ll know it’s us. Do you understand?”

Pael shrugged her away, focusing on the gadgets on his lap.

I looked at him doubtfully. It seemed to me a whole platoon of Ghosts could have come down on him without his even noticing. But Jeru was right; there was nothing more we could do.

She studied me, fingered my arm. “You up to this?”

“I’m fine, sir.”

“You are lucky. A good war comes along once in a lifetime. And this is your war, tar.”

That sounded like parade-ground pep talk, and I responded in kind. “Can I have your rations, sir? You won’t be needing them soon.” I mimed digging a grave.

She grinned back fiercely. “Yeah. When your turn comes, slit your suit and let the farts out before I take it off your stiffening corpse—”

Pael’s voice was trembling. “You really are monsters.”

I shared a glance with Jeru. But we shut up, for fear of upsetting the earthworm further.

I grasped my fighting knife, and we slid away into the dark.

What we were hoping to find was some equivalent of a bridge. Even if we succeeded, I couldn’t imagine what we’d do next. Anyhow, we had to try.

We slid through the tangle. Ghost cable stuff is tough, even to a knife blade. But it is reasonably flexible; you can just push it aside if you get stuck, although we tried to avoid doing that for fear of leaving a sign.

We used standard patrolling SOP, adapted for the circumstance. We would move for ten or fifteen minutes, clambering through the tangle, and then take a break for five minutes. I’d sip water—I was getting hot—and maybe nibble on a glucose tab, check on my arm, and pull the suit around me to get comfortable again. It’s the way to do it. If you just push yourself on and on you run down your reserves and end up in no fit state to achieve the goal anyhow.

And all the while I was trying to keep up my all-around awareness, protecting my dark adaptation, and making appreciations. How far away is Jeru? What if an attack comes from in front, behind, above, below, left or right? Where can I find cover?

I began to build up an impression of the Ghost cruiser. It was a rough egg-shape, a couple of kilometers long, and basically a mass of the anonymous silvery cable. There were chambers and platforms and instruments stuck as if at random into the tangle, like food fragments in an old man’s beard. I guess it makes for a flexible, easily modified configuration. Where the tangle was a little less thick, I glimpsed a more substantial core, a cylinder running along the axis of the craft. Perhaps it was the drive unit. I wondered if it was functioning; perhaps the Ghost equipment was designed to adapt to the changed conditions inside the fortress cordon.

There were Ghosts all over the craft.

They drifted over and through the tangle, following pathways invisible to us. Or they would cluster in little knots on the tangle. We couldn’t tell what they were doing or saying. To human eyes a Silver Ghost is just a silvery sphere, visible only by reflection like a hole cut out of space, and without specialist equipment it is impossible even to tell one from another.

We kept out of sight. But I was sure the Ghosts must have spotted us, or were at least tracking our movements. After all we’d crash-landed in their ship. But they made no overt moves toward us.

We reached the outer hull, the place the cabling ran out, and dug back into the tangle a little way to stay out of sight.

I got an unimpeded view of the stars.

Still those nova firecrackers went off all over the sky; still those young stars glared like lanterns. It seemed to me the fortress’s central, enclosed star looked a little brighter, hotter than it had been. I made a mental note to report that to the Academician.

But the most striking sight was the fleet.

Over a volume light-months wide, countless craft slid silently across the sky. They were organized in a complex network of corridors filling three-dimensional space: rivers of light gushed this way and that, their different colors denoting different classes and sizes of vessel. And, here and there, denser knots of color and light sparked, irregular flares in the orderly flows. They were places where human ships were engaging the enemy, places where people were fighting and dying.

It was a magnificent sight. But it was a big, empty sky, and the nearest sun was that eerie dwarf enclosed in its spooky blue net, a long way away, and there was movement in three dimensions, above me, below me, all around me. . . .

I found the fingers of my good hand had locked themselves around a sliver of the tangle.

Jeru grabbed my wrist and shook my arm until I was able to let go. She kept hold of my arm, her eyes locked on mine. I have you. You won’t fall. Then she pulled me into a dense knot of the tangle, shutting out the sky.

She huddled close to me, so the bio lights of our suits wouldn’t show far. Her eyes were pale blue, like windows. “You aren’t used to being outside, are you, tar?”

“I’m sorry, Commissary. I’ve been trained—”

“You’re still human. We all have weak points. The trick is to know them and allow for them. Where are you from?”

I managed a grin. “Mercury. Caloris Planitia.” Mercury is a ball of iron at the bottom of the sun’s gravity well. It is an iron mine, and an exotic matter factory, with a sun like a lid hanging over it. Most of the surface is given over to solar power collectors. It is a place of tunnels and warrens, where kids compete with the rats.

“And that’s why you joined up? To get away?”

“I was drafted.”

“Come on,” she scoffed. “On a place like Mercury there are ways to hide. Are you a romantic, tar? You wanted to see the stars?”

“No,” I said bluntly. “Life is more useful here.”

She studied me. “A brief life should burn brightly—eh, tar?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I came from Deneb,” she said. “Do you know it?”

“No.”

“Sixteen hundred light years from Earth—a system settled some four centuries after the start of the Third Expansion. It is quite different from the solar system. It is—organized. By the time the first ships reached Deneb, the mechanics of exploitation had become efficient. From preliminary exploration to working ship yards and daughter colonies in less than a century. . . . Deneb’s resources—its planets and asteroids and comets, even the star itself—have been mined to fund fresh colonizing waves, the greater Expansion—and, of course, to support the war with the Ghosts.”

She swept her hand over the sky. “Think of it, tar. The Third Expansion: between here and Sol, across six thousand light years—nothing but mankind, the fruit of a thousand years of world-building. And all of it linked by economics. Older systems like Deneb, their resources spent—even the solar system itself—are supported by a flow of goods and materials inward from the growing periphery of the Expansion. There are trade lanes spanning thousands of light years, lanes that never leave human territory, plied by vast schooners kilometers wide. But now the Ghosts are in our way. And that’s what we’re fighting for!”

“Yes, sir.”

She eyed me. “You ready to go on?”

“Yes.”

We began to make our way forward again, just under the tangle, still following patrol SOP.

I was glad to be moving again. I’ve never been comfortable talking personally—and for sure not with a Commissary. But I suppose even Commissaries need to talk.

Jeru spotted a file of the Ghosts moving in a crocodile, like so many schoolchildren, toward the head of the ship. It was the most purposeful activity we’d seen so far, so we followed them.

After a couple of hundred meters the Ghosts began to duck down into the tangle, out of our sight. We followed them in.

Maybe fifty meters deep, we came to a large enclosed chamber, a smooth bean-shaped pod that would have been big enough to enclose our yacht. The surface appeared to be semi-transparent, perhaps designed to let in sunlight. I could see shadowy shapes moving within.

Ghosts were clustered around the pod’s hull, brushing its surface.

Jeru beckoned, and we worked our way through the tangle toward the far end of the pod, where the density of the Ghosts seemed to be lowest.

We slithered to the surface of the pod. There were sucker pads on our palms and toes to help us grip. We began crawling along the length of the pod, ducking flat when we saw Ghosts loom into view. It was like climbing over a glass ceiling.

The pod was pressurized. At one end of the pod a big ball of mud hung in the air, brown and viscous. It seemed to be heated from within; it was slowly boiling, with big sticky bubbles of vapor crowding its surface, and I saw how it was laced with purple and red smears. There is no convection in zero gravity, of course. Maybe the Ghosts were using pumps to drive the flow of vapor.

Tubes led off from the mud ball to the hull of the pod. Ghosts clustered there, sucking up the purple gunk from the mud.

We figured it out in bioluminescent “whispers.” The Ghosts were feeding. Their home world is too small to have retained much internal warmth, but, deep beneath their frozen oceans or in the dark of their rocks, a little primordial geotherm heat must leak out still, driving fountains of minerals dragged up from the depths. And, as at the bottom of Earth’s oceans, on those minerals and the slow leak of heat, life-forms feed. And the Ghosts feed on them.

So this mud ball was a field kitchen. I peered down at purplish slime, a gourmet meal for Ghosts, and I didn’t envy them.

There was nothing for us here. Jeru beckoned me again, and we slithered further forward.

The next section of the pod was . . . strange.

It was a chamber full of sparkling, silvery saucer-shapes, like smaller, flattened-out Ghosts, perhaps. They fizzed through the air or crawled over each other or jammed themselves together into great wadded balls that would hold for a few seconds and then collapse, their component parts squirming off for some new adventure elsewhere. I could see there were feeding tubes on the walls, and one or two Ghosts drifted among the saucer things, like an adult in a yard of squabbling children.

There was a subtle shadow before me.

I looked up, and found myself staring at my own reflection—an angled head, an open mouth, a sprawled body—folded over, fish-eye style, just centimeters from my nose.

It was a Ghost. It bobbed massively before me.

I pushed myself away from the hull, slowly. I grabbed hold of the nearest tangle branch with my good hand. I knew I couldn’t reach for my knife, which was tucked into my belt at my back. And I couldn’t see Jeru anywhere. It might be that the Ghosts had taken her already. Either way I couldn’t call her, or even look for her, for fear of giving her away.

The Ghost had a heavy-looking belt wrapped around its equator. I had to assume that those complex knots of equipment were weapons. Aside from its belt, the Ghost was quite featureless: it might have been stationary, or spinning at a hundred revolutions a minute. I stared at its hide, trying to understand that there was a layer in there like a separate universe, where the laws of physics had been tweaked. But all I could see was my own scared face looking back at me.

And then Jeru fell on the Ghost from above, limbs splayed, knives glinting in both hands. I could see she was yelling—mouth open, eyes wide—but she fell in utter silence, her comms disabled.

Flexing her body like a whip, she rammed both knives into the Ghost’s hide—if I took that belt to be its equator, somewhere near its north pole. The Ghost pulsated, complex ripples chasing across its surface. But Jeru did a handstand and reached up with her legs to the tangle above, and anchored herself there.

The Ghost began to spin, trying to throw Jeru off. But she held her grip on the tangle, and kept the knives thrust in its hide, and all the Ghost succeeded in doing was opening up twin gashes, right across its upper section. Steam pulsed out, and I glimpsed redness within.

For long seconds I just hung there, frozen.

You’re trained to mount the proper reaction to an enemy assault. But it all vaporizes when you’re faced with a ton of spinning, pulsing monster, and you’re armed with nothing but a knife. You just want to make yourself as small as possible; maybe it will all go away. But in the end you know it won’t, that something has to be done.

So I pulled out my own knife and launched myself at that north pole area.

I started to make cross-cuts between Jeru’s gashes. Ghost skin is tough, like thick rubber, but easy to cut if you have the anchorage. Soon I had loosened flaps and lids of skin, and I started pulling them away, exposing a deep redness within. Steam gushed out, sparkling to ice.

Jeru let go of her perch and joined me. We clung with our fingers and hands to the gashes we’d made, and we cut and slashed and dug; though the Ghost spun crazily, it couldn’t shake us loose. Soon we were hauling out great warm mounds of meat—ropes like entrails, pulsing slabs like a human’s liver or heart. At first ice crystals spurted all around us, but as the Ghost lost the heat it had hoarded all its life, that thin wind died, and frost began to gather on the cut and torn flesh.

At last Jeru pushed my shoulder, and we both drifted away from the Ghost. It was still spinning, but I could see that the spin was nothing but dead momentum; the Ghost had lost its heat, and its life.

Jeru and I faced each other.

I said breathlessly, “I never heard of anyone in hand-to-hand with a Ghost before.”

“Neither did I. Lethe,” she said, inspecting her hand. “I think I cracked a finger.”

It wasn’t funny. But Jeru stared at me, and I stared back, and then we both started to laugh, and our slime suits pulsed with pink and blue icons.

“He stood his ground,” I said.

“Yes. Maybe he thought we were threatening the nursery.”

“The place with the silver saucers?”

She looked at me quizzically. “Ghosts are symbiotes, tar. That looked to me like a nursery for Ghost hides. Independent entities.”

I had never thought of Ghosts having young. I had not thought of the Ghost we had killed as a mother protecting its young. I’m not a deep thinker now, and wasn’t then; but it was not, for me, a comfortable thought.

But then Jeru started to move. “Come on, tar. Back to work.” She anchored her legs in the tangle and began to grab at the still-rotating Ghost carcass, trying to slow its spin.

I anchored likewise and began to help her. The Ghost was massive, the size of a major piece of machinery, and it had built up respectable momentum; at first I couldn’t grab hold of the skin flaps that spun past my hand. As we labored I became aware I was getting uncomfortably hot. The light that seeped into the tangle from that caged sun seemed to be getting stronger by the minute.

But as we worked those uneasy thoughts soon dissipated.

At last we got the Ghost under control. Briskly Jeru stripped it of its kit belt, and we began to cram the baggy corpse as deep as we could into the surrounding tangle. It was a grisly job. As the Ghost crumpled further, more of its innards, stiffening now, came pushing out of the holes we’d given it in its hide, and I had to keep from gagging as the foul stuff came pushing out into my face.

At last it was done—as best we could manage it, anyhow.

Jeru’s faceplate was smeared with black and red. She was sweating hard, her face pink. But she was grinning, and she had a trophy, the Ghost belt around her shoulders. We began to make our way back, following the same SOP as before.

When we got back to our lying-up point, we found Academician Pael was in trouble.

Pael had curled up in a ball, his hands over his face. We pulled him open. His eyes were closed, his face blotched pink, and his faceplate dripped with condensation.

He was surrounded by gadgets stuck in the tangle—including parts from what looked like a broken-open starbreaker handgun; I recognized prisms and mirrors and diffraction gratings. Well, unless he woke up, he wouldn’t be able to tell us what he had been doing here.

Jeru glanced around. The light of the fortress’s central star had gotten a lot stronger. Our lying-up point was now bathed in light—and heat—with the surrounding tangle offering very little shelter. “Any ideas, tar?”

I felt the exhilaration of our infil drain away. “No, sir.”

Jeru’s face, bathed in sweat, showed tension. I noticed she was favoring her left hand. She’d mentioned, back at the nursery pod, that she’d cracked a finger, but had said nothing about it since—nor did she give it any time now. “All right.” She dumped the Ghost equipment belt and took a deep draft of water from her hood spigot. “Tar, you’re on stag. Try to keep Pael in the shade of your body. And if he wakes up, ask him what he’s found out.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good.”

And then she was gone, melting into the complex shadows of the tangle as if she’d been born to these conditions.

I found a place where I could keep up 360-degree vision, and offer a little of my shadow to Pael—not that I imagined it helped much.

I had nothing to do but wait.

As the Ghost ship followed its own mysterious course, the light dapples that came filtering through the tangle shifted and evolved. Clinging to the tangle, I thought I could feel vibration: a slow, deep harmonization that pulsed through the ship’s giant structure. I wondered if I was hearing the deep voices of Ghosts, calling to each other from one end of their mighty ship to another. It all served to remind me that everything in my environment, everything, was alien, and I was very far from home.

I tried to count my heartbeat, my breaths; I tried to figure out how long a second was. “A thousand and one. A thousand and two . . .” Keeping time is a basic human trait; time provides a basic orientation, and keeps you mentally sharp and in touch with reality. But I kept losing count.

And all my efforts failed to stop darker thoughts creeping into my head.

During a drama like the contact with the Ghost, you don’t realize what’s happening to you because your body blanks it out; on some level you know you just don’t have time to deal with it. Now I had stopped moving, the aches and pains of the last few hours started crowding in on me. I was still sore in my head and back and, of course, my busted arm. I could feel deep bruises, maybe cuts, on my gloved hands where I had hauled at my knife, and I felt as if I had wrenched my good shoulder. One of my toes was throbbing ominously: I wondered if I had cracked another bone, here in this weird environment in which my skeleton had become as brittle as an old man’s. I was chafed at my groin and armpits and knees and ankles and elbows, my skin rubbed raw. I was used to suits; normally I’m tougher than that.

The shafts of sunlight on my back were working on me too; it felt as if I was lying underneath the elements of an oven. I had a headache, a deep sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, a ringing in my ears, and a persistent ring of blackness around my eyes. Maybe I was just exhausted, dehydrated; maybe it was more than that.

I started to think back over my operation with Jeru, and the regrets began.

Okay, I’d stood my ground when confronted by the Ghost and not betrayed Jeru’s position. But when she launched her attack I’d hesitated, for those crucial few seconds. Maybe if I’d been tougher the commissary wouldn’t find herself hauling through the tangle, alone, with a busted finger distracting her with pain signals.

Our training is comprehensive. You’re taught to expect that kind of hindsight torture, in the quiet moments, and to discount it—or, better yet, learn from it. But, effectively alone in that metallic alien forest, I wasn’t finding my training was offering much perspective.

And, worse, I started to think ahead. Always a mistake.

I couldn’t believe that the Academician and his reluctant gadgetry were going to achieve anything significant. And for all the excitement of our infil, we hadn’t found anything resembling a bridge or any vulnerable point we could attack, and all we’d come back with was a belt of field kit we didn’t even understand.

For the first time I began to consider seriously the possibility that I wasn’t going to live through this—that I was going to die when my suit gave up or the sun went pop, whichever came first, in no more than a few hours.

A brief life burns brightly. That’s what you’re taught. Longevity makes you conservative, fearful, selfish. Humans made that mistake before, and we finished up a subject race. Live fast and furiously, for you aren’t important—all that matters is what you can do for the species.

But I didn’t want to die.

If I never returned to Mercury again I wouldn’t shed a tear. But I had a life now, in the Navy. And then there were my buddies: the people I’d trained and served with, people like Halle—even Jeru. Having found fellowship for the first time in my life, I didn’t want to lose it so quickly, and fall into the darkness alone—especially if it was to be for nothing.

But maybe I wasn’t going to get a choice.

After an unmeasured time, Jeru returned. She was hauling a silvery blanket. It was Ghost hide. She started to shake it out.

I dropped down to help her. “You went back to the one we killed—”

“—and skinned him,” she said, breathless. “I just scraped off the crap with a knife. The Planck-zero layer peels away easily. And look . . .” she made a quick incision in the glimmering sheet with her knife. Then she put the two edges together again, ran her finger along the seam, and showed me the result. I couldn’t even see where the cut had been. “Self-sealing, self-healing,” she said. “Remember that, tar.”

“Yes, sir.”

We started to rig the punctured, splayed-out hide as a rough canopy over our LUP, blocking as much of the sunlight as possible from Pael. A few slivers of frozen flesh still clung to the hide, but mostly it was like working with a fine, light metallic foil.

In the sudden shade, Pael was starting to stir. His moans were translated to stark bioluminescent icons.

“Help him,” Jeru snapped. “Make him drink.” And while I did that she dug into the med kit on her belt and started to spray cast material around the fingers of her left hand.

“It’s the speed of light,” Pael said. He was huddled in a corner of our LUP, his legs tucked against his chest. His voice must have been feeble; the bioluminescent sigils on his suit were fragmentary and came with possible variants extrapolated by the translator software.

“Tell us,” Jeru said, relatively gently.

“The Ghosts have found a way to change lightspeed in this fortress. In fact to increase it.” He began talking again about quagma and physics constants and the rolled-up dimensions of spacetime, but Jeru waved that away irritably.

“How do you know this?”

Pael began tinkering with his prisms and gratings. “I took your advice, Commissary.” He beckoned to me. “Come see, child.”

I saw that a shaft of red light, split out and deflected by his prism, shone through a diffraction grating and cast an angular pattern of dots and lines on a scrap of smooth plastic behind.

“You see?” His eyes searched my face.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“The wavelength of the light has changed. It has been increased. Red light should have a wavelength, oh, a fifth shorter than that indicated by this pattern.”

I was struggling to understand. I held up my hand. “Shouldn’t the green of this glove turn yellow, or blue . . .?”

Pael sighed. “No. Because the color you see depends, not on the wavelength of a photon, but on its energy. Conservation of energy still applies, even where the Ghosts are tinkering. So each photon carries as much energy as before—and evokes the same ‘color.’ Since a photon’s energy is proportional to its frequency, that means frequencies are left unchanged. But since lightspeed is equal to frequency multiplied by wavelength, an increase in wavelength implies—”

“An increase in lightspeed,” said Jeru.

“Yes.”

I didn’t follow much of that. I turned and looked up at the light that leaked around our Ghost-hide canopy. “So we see the same colors. The light of that star gets here a little faster. What difference does it make?”

Pael shook his head. “Child, a fundamental constant like lightspeed is embedded in the deep structure of our universe. Lightspeed is part of the ratio known as the fine structure constant.” He started babbling about the charge on the electron, but Jeru cut him off.

She said, “Case, the fine structure constant is a measure of the strength of an electric or magnetic force.”

I could follow that much. “And if you increase lightspeed—”

“You reduce the strength of the force.” Pael raised himself. “Consider this. Human bodies are held together by molecular binding energy—electromagnetic forces. Here, electrons are more loosely bound to atoms; the atoms in a molecule are more loosely bound to each other.” He rapped on the cast on my arm. “And so your bones are more brittle, your skin more easy to pierce or chafe. Do you see? You too are embedded in spacetime, my young friend. You too are affected by the Ghosts’ tinkering. And because lightspeed in this infernal pocket continues to increase—as far as I can tell from these poor experiments—you are becoming more fragile every second.”

It was a strange, eerie thought: that something so basic in my universe could be manipulated. I put my arms around my chest and shuddered.

“Other effects,” Pael went on bleakly. “The density of matter is dropping. Perhaps our structure will eventually begin to crumble. And dissociation temperatures are reduced.”

Jeru snapped, “What does that mean?”

“Melting and boiling points are reduced. No wonder we are overheating. It is intriguing that bio systems have proven rather more robust than electromechanical ones. But if we don’t get out of here soon, our blood will start to boil. . . .”

“Enough,” Jeru said. “What of the star?”

“A star is a mass of gas with a tendency to collapse under its own gravity. But heat, supplied by fusion reactions in the core, creates gas and radiation pressures that push outward, counteracting gravity.”

“And if the fine structure constant changes—”

“Then the balance is lost. Commissary, as gravity begins to win its ancient battle, the fortress star has become more luminous—it is burning faster. That explains the observations we made from outside the cordon. But this cannot last.”

“The novae,” I said.

“Yes. The explosions, layers of the star blasted into space, are a symptom of destabilized stars seeking a new balance. The rate at which our star is approaching that catastrophic moment fits with the lightspeed drift I have observed.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “A single cause predicating so many effects. It is all rather pleasing, in an aesthetic way.”

Jeru said, “At least we know how the ship was destroyed. Every control system is mediated by finely tuned electromagnetic effects. Everything must have gone crazy at once. . . .”

We figured it out. The Brief Life Burns Brightly had been a classic GUTship, of a design that hasn’t changed in its essentials for thousands of years. The lifedome, a tough translucent bubble, contained the crew of twenty. The ’dome was connected by a spine a klick long to a GUTdrive engine pod.

When we crossed the cordon boundary—when all the bridge lights failed—the control systems went down, and all the pod’s superforce energy must have tried to escape at once. The spine of the ship had thrust itself up into the lifedome, like a nail rammed into a skull.

Pael said dreamily, “If lightspeed were a tad faster, throughout the universe, then hydrogen could not fuse to helium. There would only be hydrogen: no fusion to power stars, no chemistry. Conversely if lightspeed were a little lower, hydrogen would fuse too easily, and there would be no hydrogen, nothing to make stars—or water. You see how critical it all is? No doubt the Ghosts’ science of fine-tuning is advancing considerably here on the Orion Line, even as it serves its trivial defensive purpose . . .”

Jeru glared at him, her contempt obvious. “We must take this piece of intelligence back to the Commission. If the Ghosts can survive and function in these fastlight bubbles of theirs, so can we. We may be at the pivot of history, gentlemen.”

I knew she was right. The primary duty of the Commission for Historical Truth is to gather and deploy intelligence about the enemy. And so my primary duty, and Pael’s, was now to help Jeru get this piece of data back to her organization.

But Pael was mocking her.

“Not for ourselves, but for the species. Is that the line, Commissary? You are so grandiose. And yet you blunder around in comical ignorance. Even your quixotic quest aboard this cruiser was futile. There probably is no bridge on this ship. The Ghosts’ entire morphology, their evolutionary design, is based on the notion of cooperation, of symbiosis; why should a Ghost ship have a metaphoric head? And as for the trophy you have returned—” He held up the belt of Ghost artifacts. “There are no weapons here. These are sensors, tools. There is nothing here capable of producing a significant energy discharge. This is less threatening than a bow and arrow.” He let go of the belt; it drifted away. “The Ghost wasn’t trying to kill you. It was blocking you. Which is a classic Ghost tactic.”

Jeru’s face was stony. “It was in our way. That is sufficient reason for destroying it.”

Pael shook his head. “Minds like yours will destroy us, Commissary.”

Jeru stared at him with suspicion. Then she said, “You have a way. Don’t you, Academician? A way to get us out of here.”

He tried to face her down, but her will was stronger, and he averted his eyes.

Jeru said heavily, “Regardless of the fact that three lives are at stake—does duty mean nothing to you, Academician? You are an intelligent man. Can you not see that this is a war of human destiny?”

Pael laughed. “Destiny—or economics?”

I looked from one to the other, dismayed, baffled. I thought we should be doing less yapping and more fighting.

Pael said, watching me, “You see, child, as long as the explorers and the mining fleets and the colony ships are pushing outward, as long as the Third Expansion is growing, our economy works. The riches can continue to flow inward, into the mined-out systems, feeding a vast horde of humanity who have become more populous than the stars themselves. But as soon as that growth falters . . .”

Jeru was silent.

I understood some of this. The Third Expansion had reached all the way to the inner edge of our spiral arm of the galaxy. Now the first colony ships were attempting to make their way across the void to the next arm.

Our arm, the Orion Arm, is really just a shingle, a short arc. But the Sagittarius Arm is one of the galaxy’s dominant features. For example, it contains a huge region of star-birth, one of the largest in the galaxy, immense clouds of gas and dust capable of producing millions of stars each. It was a prize indeed.

But that is where the Silver Ghosts live.

When it appeared that our inexorable expansion was threatening not just their own mysterious projects but their home system, the Ghosts began, for the first time, to resist us.

They had formed a blockade, called by human strategies the Orion Line: a thick sheet of fortress stars, right across the inner edge of the Orion Arm, places the Navy and the colony ships couldn’t follow. It was a devastatingly effective ploy.

This was a war of colonization, of world-building. For a thousand years we had been spreading steadily from star to star, using the resources of one system to explore, terraform and populate the worlds of the next. With too deep a break in that chain of exploitation, the enterprise broke down.

And so the Ghosts had been able to hold up human expansion for fifty years.

Pael said, “We are already choking. There have already been wars, young Case: human fighting human, as the inner systems starve. All the Ghosts have to do is wait for us to destroy ourselves, and free them to continue their own rather more worthy projects.”

Jeru floated down before. him. “Academician, listen to me. Growing up at Deneb, I saw the great schooners in the sky, bringing the interstellar riches that kept my people alive. I was intelligent enough to see the logic of history—that we must maintain the Expansion, because there is no choice. And that is why I joined the armed forces, and later the Commission for Historical Truth. For I understood the dreadful truth which the Commission cradles. And that is why we must labor every day to maintain the unity and purpose of mankind. For if we falter we die; as simple as that.”

“Commissary, your creed of mankind’s evolutionary destiny condemns our own kind to become a swarm of children, granted a few moments of loving and breeding and dying, before being cast into futile war.” Pael glanced at me.

“But,” Jeru said, “it is a creed that has bound us together for a thousand years. It is a creed that binds uncounted trillions of human beings across thousands of light years. It is a creed that binds a humanity so diverse it appears to be undergoing speciation. . . . Are you strong enough to defy such a creed now? Come, Academician. None of us chooses to be born in the middle of a war. We must all do our best for each other, for other human beings; what else is there?”

I touched Pael’s shoulder; he flinched away. “Academician—is Jeru right? Is there a way we can live through this?”

Pael shuddered. Jeru hovered over him.

“Yes,” Pael said at last. “Yes, there is a way.”

The idea turned out to be simple.

And the plan Jeru and I devised to implement it was even simpler. It was based on a single assumption: Ghosts aren’t aggressive. It was ugly, I’ll admit that, and I could see why it would distress a squeamish earthworm like Pael. But sometimes there are no good choices.

Jeru and I took a few minutes to rest up, check over our suits and our various injuries, and to make ourselves comfortable. Then, following patrol SOP once more, we made our way back to the pod of immature hides.

We came out of the tangle and drifted down to that translucent hull. We tried to keep away from concentrations of Ghosts, but we made no real effort to conceal ourselves. There was little point, after all; the Ghosts would know all about us, and what we intended, soon enough.

We hammered pitons into the pliable hull, and fixed rope to anchor ourselves. Then we took our knives and started to saw our way through the hull.

As soon as we started, the Ghosts began to gather around us, like vast antibodies.

They just hovered there, eerie faceless baubles drifting as if in vacuum breezes. But as I stared up at a dozen distorted reflections of my own skinny face, I felt an unreasonable loathing rise up in me. Maybe you could think of them as a family banding together to protect their young. I didn’t care; a lifetime’s carefully designed hatred isn’t thrown off so easily. I went at my work with a will.

Jeru got through the pod hull first.

The air gushed out in a fast-condensing fountain. The baby hides fluttered, their distress obvious. And the Ghosts began to cluster around Jeru, like huge light globes.

Jeru glanced at me. “Keep working, tar.”

“Yes, sir.”

In another couple of minutes I was through. The air pressure was already dropping. It dwindled to nothing when we cut a big door-sized flap in that roof. Anchoring ourselves with the ropes, we rolled that lid back, opening the roof wide. A few last wisps of vapor came curling around our heads, ice fragments sparkling.

The hide babies convulsed. Immature, they could not survive the sudden vacuum, intended as their ultimate environment. But the way they died made it easy for us.

The silvery hides came flapping up out of the hole in the roof, one by one. We just grabbed each other—like grabbing hold of a billowing sheet—and we speared it with a knife, and threaded it on a length of rope. All we had to do was sit there and wait for them to come. There were hundreds of them, and we were kept busy.

I hadn’t expected the adult Ghosts to sit through that, non-aggressive or not; and I was proved right. Soon they were clustering all around me, vast silvery bellies looming. A Ghost is massive and solid, and it packs a lot of inertia; if one hits you in the back you know about it. Soon they were nudging me hard enough to knock me flat against the roof, over and over. Once I was wrenched so hard against my tethering rope it felt as if I had cracked another bone or two in my foot.

And, meanwhile, I was starting to feel a lot worse: dizzy, nauseous, overheated. It was getting harder to get back upright each time after being knocked down. I was growing weaker fast; I imagined the tiny molecules of my body falling apart in this Ghost-polluted space.

For the first time I began to believe we were going to fail.

But then, quite suddenly, the Ghosts backed off. When they were clear of me, I saw they were clustering around Jeru.

She was standing on the hull, her feet tangled up in rope, and she had knives in both hands. She was slashing crazily at the Ghosts, and at the baby hides that came flapping past her, making no attempt to capture them now, simply cutting and destroying whatever she could reach. I could see that one arm was hanging awkwardly—maybe it was dislocated, or even broken—but she kept on slicing regardless.

And the Ghosts were clustering around her, huge silver spheres crushing her frail, battling human form.

She was sacrificing herself to save me—just as Captain Teid, in the last moments of the Brightly, had given herself to save Pael. And my duty was to complete the job.

I stabbed and threaded, over and over, as the flimsy hides came tumbling out of that hole, slowly dying.

At last no more hides came.

I looked up, blinking to get the salt sweat out of my eyes. A few hides were still tumbling around the interior of the pod, but they were inert and out of my reach. Others had evaded us and gotten stuck in the tangle of the ship’s structure, too far and too scattered to make them worth pursuing further. What I had got would have to suffice.

I started to make my way out of there, back through the tangle, to the location of our wrecked yacht, where I hoped Pael would be waiting.

I looked back once. I couldn’t help it. The Ghosts were still clustered over the ripped pod roof. Somewhere in there, whatever was left of Jeru was still fighting.

I had an impulse, almost overpowering, to go back to her. No human being should die alone. But I knew I had to get out of there, to complete the mission, to make her sacrifice worthwhile.

So I got.

Pael and I finished the job at the outer hull of the ghost cruiser.

Stripping the hides turned out to be as easy as Jeru had described. Fitting together the Planck-zero sheets was simple too—you just line them up and seal them with a thumb. I got on with that, sewing the hides together into a sail, while Pael worked on a rigging of lengths of rope, all fixed to a deck panel from the wreck of the yacht. He was fast and efficient: Pael, after all, came from a world where everybody goes solar sailing on their vacations.

We worked steadily, for hours.

I ignored the varying aches and chafes, the increasing pain in my head and chest and stomach, the throbbing of a broken arm that hadn’t healed, the agony of cracked bones in my foot. And we didn’t talk about anything but the task in hand. Pael didn’t ask what had become of Jeru, not once; it was as if he had anticipated the commissary’s fate.

We were undisturbed by the Ghosts through all of this.

I tried not to think about whatever emotions churned within those silvered carapaces, what despairing debates might chatter on invisible wavelengths. I was, after all, trying to complete a mission. And I had been exhausted even before I got back to Pael. I just kept going, ignoring my fatigue, focusing on the task.

I was surprised to find it was done.

We had made a sail hundreds of meters across, stitched together from the invisibly thin immature Ghost hide. It was roughly circular, and it was connected by a dozen lengths of fine rope to struts on the panel we had wrenched out of the wreck. The sail lay across space, languid ripples crossing its glimmering surface.

Pael showed me how to work the thing. “Pull this rope, or this . . .” the great patchwork sail twitched in response to his commands. “I’ve set it so you shouldn’t have to try anything fancy, like tacking. The boat will just sail out, hopefully, to the cordon perimeter. If you need to lose the sail, just cut the ropes.”

I was taking in all this automatically. It made sense for both of us to know how to operate our little yacht. But then I started to pick up the subtext of what he was saying.

Before I knew what he was doing he had shoved me onto the deck panel, and pushed it away from the Ghost ship. His strength was surprising.

I watched him recede. He clung wistfully to a bit of tangle. I couldn’t summon the strength to figure out a way to cross the widening gap. But my suit could read his, as clear as day.

“Where I grew up, the sky was full of sails . . .”

“Why, Academician?”

“You will go further and faster without my mass to haul. And besides—our lives are short enough; we should preserve the young. Don’t you think?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Pael was much more valuable than I was; I was the one who should have been left behind. He had shamed himself.

Complex glyphs crisscrossed his suit. “Keep out of the direct sunlight. It is growing more intense, of course. That will help you. . . .”

And then he ducked out of sight, back into the tangle. The Ghost ship was receding now, closing over into its vast egg shape, the detail of the tangle becoming lost to my blurred vision.

The sail above me slowly billowed, filling up with the light of the brightening sun. Pael had designed his improvised craft well; the rigging lines were all taut, and I could see no rips or creases in the silvery fabric.

I clung to my bit of decking and sought shade.

Twelve hours later, I reached an invisible radius where the tactical beacon in my pocket started to howl with a whine that filled my headset. My suit’s auxiliary systems cut in and I found myself breathing fresh air.

A little after that, a set of lights ducked out of the streaming lanes of the fleet, and plunged toward me, growing brighter. At last it resolved into a golden bullet shape adorned with a blue-green tetrahedron, the sigil of free humanity. It was a supply ship called The Dominance of Primates.

And a little after that, as a Ghost fleet fled their fortress, the star exploded.

As soon as I had completed my formal report to the ship’s commissary—and I was able to check out of the Dominance’s sick bay—I asked to see the captain.

I walked up to the bridge. My story had got around, and the various med patches I sported added to my heroic mythos. So I had to run the gauntlet of the crew—“You’re supposed to be dead, I impounded your back pay and slept with your mother already”—and was greeted by what seems to be the universal gesture of recognition of one tar to another, the clenched fist pumping up and down around an imaginary penis.

But anything more respectful just wouldn’t feel normal.

The captain turned out to be a grizzled veteran type with a vast laser burn scar on one cheek. She reminded me of First Officer Till.

I told her I wanted to return to active duty as soon as my health allowed.

She looked me up and down. “Are you sure, tar? You have a lot of options. Young as you are, you’ve made your contribution to the Expansion. You can go home.”

“Sir, and do what?”

She shrugged. “Farm. Mine. Raise babies. Whatever earthworms do. Or you can join the Commission for Historical Truth.”

“Me, a commissary?”

“You’ve been there, tar. You’ve been in among the Ghosts, and come out again—with a bit of intelligence more important than anything the Commission has come up with in fifty years. Are you sure you want to face action again?”

I thought it over.

I remembered how Jeru and Pael had argued. It had been an unwelcome perspective, for me. I was in a war that had nothing to do with me, trapped by what Jeru had called the logic of history. But then, I bet that’s been true of most of humanity through our long and bloody history. All you can do is live your life, and grasp your moment in the light—and stand by your comrades.

A farmer—me? And I could never be smart enough for the Commission. No, I had no doubts.

“A brief life bums brightly, sir.”

Lethe, the captain looked like she had a lump in her throat. “Do I take that as a yes, tar?”

I stood straight, ignoring the twinges of my injuries. “Yes, sir!”

REDCHAPEL

Mike Resnick

An alternate history in which Theodore Roosevelt, Esq., encounters the hideous fiend known only as Jack the Ripper

“From Hell, Mr. Lusk—

Sir, I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman, prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise I may send you the bloody knif that too it out if you only wate a whil longer
signed Catch me when yu can Mishter Lusk”

—Jack the Ripper

October 16, 1888

“I have not a particle of sympathy with the sentimentality—as I deem it, the mawkishness—which overflows with foolish pity for the criminal and cares not at all for the victim of the criminal.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

Autobiography

The date was September 8, 1888

A hand reached out of the darkness and shook Roosevelt by the shoulder. He was on his feet in an instant. His right hand shot out, crunching against an unseen jaw, and sending his assailant crashing against a wall. He crouched low, peering into the shadows, trying to identify the man who was clambering slowly to his feet.

“What the devil happened?” muttered the man.

“My question precisely,” said Roosevelt, reaching for his pistol and training it on the intruder. “Who are you and what are you doing in my room?”

A beam of moonlight glanced off the barrel of the gun.

“Don’t shoot, Mr. Roosevelt!” said the man, holding up his hands. “It’s me—John Hughes!”

Roosevelt lit a lamp, keeping the gun pointed at the small, dapper man. “You haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

“Besides losing a tooth?” said Hughes bitterly as he spit a tooth into his hand amid a spray of blood. “I need your help.”

“What is this all about?” demanded Roosevelt, looking toward the door of his hotel room as if he expected one of Hughes’ confederates to burst through it at any moment.

“Don’t you remember?” said Hughes. “We spoke for more than an hour last night, after you addressed the Royal Ornithological Society.”

“What has this got to do with birds?” said Roosevelt. “And you’d better come up with a good answer. I’m not a patient man when I’m rudely awakened in the middle of the night.”

“You don’t remember,” said Hughes accusingly.

“Remember what?”

Hughes pulled out a badge and handed it to the American. “I am a captain of the London Metropolitan Police. After your speech we talked and you told me how you had single-handedly captured three armed killers in your Wild West.”

Roosevelt nodded. “I remember.”

“I was most favorably impressed,” said Hughes.

“I hope you didn’t wake me just to tell me that.”

“No—but it was the fact that you have personally dealt with a trio of brutal killers that made me think—hope, actually—that you might be able to help me.” Hughes paused awkwardly as the American continued to stare at him. “You did say that if I ever needed your assistance . . .”

“Did I say to request it in the middle of the night?” growled Roosevelt, finally putting his pistol back on his bedtable.

“Try to calm yourself. Then I’ll explain.”

“This is as calm as I get under these circumstances.” Roosevelt took off his nightshirt, tossed it on the four-poster bed, then walked to an ornate mahogany armoire, pulled out a pair of pants and a neatly folded shirt, and began getting dressed. “Start explaining.”

“There’s something I want you to see.”

“At this hour?” said Roosevelt suspiciously. “Where is it?”

“It’s not far,” said Hughes. “Perhaps a twenty-minute carriage ride away.”

“What is it?”

“A body.”

“And it couldn’t wait until daylight?” asked Roosevelt.

Hughes shook his head. “If we don’t have her in the morgue by daylight, there will be panic in the streets.”

“I’m certainly glad you’re not given to exaggeration,” remarked Roosevelt sardonically.

“If anything,” replied the small Englishman seriously, “that was an understatement.”

“All right. Tell me about it.”

“I would prefer that you saw it without any preconceptions.”

“Except that it could cause a riot if seen in daylight.”

“I said a panic, not a riot,” answered Hughes, still without smiling. Roosevelt buttoned his shirt and fiddled with his tie. “What time is it, anyway?”

“6:20 A.M..”

“The sun’s not an early riser in London, is it?”

“Not at this time of year.” Hughes shifted his weight awkwardly.

“Now what’s the matter?”

“We have a crisis on our hands, Mr. Roosevelt. I realize that I have no legal right to enlist your help, but we are quite desperate.”

“Enough hyperbole,” muttered Roosevelt, slipping on his coat.

“You really hunted down those murderers in a blizzard?” said Hughes suddenly.

“The Winter of the Blue Snow,” said Roosevelt, nodding his head briskly. “Doubtless exaggerated by every dime novelist in America.”

“But you did bring them back, alone and unarmed,” persisted the Englishman, as if Roosevelt’s answer was the most important thing in his life.

“Yes . . . but I knew the territory, and I knew who and where the killers were. I don’t know London, and I assume the identity of the killer you’re after is unknown.”

“So to speak.”

“I don’t understand,” said Roosevelt, adjusting his hat in front of a mirror. “We don’t know who he is. All we know is that he calls himself Saucy Jack.”

The two men approached the police line behind the Black Swan. The night fog had left the pavement damp, and there was a strong smell of human waste permeating the area. Chimneys spewed thick smoke into the dawn sky, and the sound of a horse’s hooves and a cart’s squeaking wheels could be heard in the distance.

“Sir?” asked one of the constables, looking from Hughes to Roosevelt.

“It’s all right, Jamison,” said Hughes. “This is Theodore Roosevelt, a colleague from America. He is the man who brought Billy the Kid and Jesse James to justice.”

Constable Jamison stepped aside immediately, staring at the young American in awe.

“Now, why did you say that, John?” asked Roosevelt in low tones.

“It will establish respect and obedience much faster than if I told him you were an expert on birds.”

The American sighed. “I see your point.” He paused. “Just what am I supposed to be looking at?”

“It’s back here,” said Hughes, leading him behind the building to an area that had been temporarily lit by flaming torches.

They stopped when they were about ten feet away. There was a mound beneath a blood-drenched blanket.

“Steel yourself, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Hughes.

“After all the monographs I’ve written on taxidermy, I don’t imagine you can show me anything that can shock me,” answered Roosevelt.

He was wrong.

The blanket was pulled back, revealing what was left of a middle-aged woman. Her throat had been slit so deeply that she was almost decapitated. A bloody handkerchief around her neck seemed to be the only thing that stopped her head from rolling away.

Her belly was carved open, and her innards were pulled out and set on the ground just above her right shoulder. Various internal organs were mutilated, others were simply missing.

“What kind of creature could do something like this?” said Roosevelt, resisting the urge to retch.

“I was hoping you might be able to tell us,” said Hughes.

Roosevelt tore his horrified gaze from the corpse and turned to Hughes. “What makes you think I’ve ever encountered anything like this before?”

“I don’t know, of course,” said Hughes. “But you have lived in America’s untamed West. You have traveled among the aboriginal savages. You have rubbed shoulders with frontier cowboys and shootists. Americans are a simpler, more brutal people—barbaric, in ways—and I had hoped . . .”

“I take it you’ve never been to America.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Then I shall ignore the insult, and only point out that Americans are the boldest, bravest, most innovative people on the face of the Earth.”

“I assure you I meant no offense,” said Hughes quickly. “It’s just that we are under enormous pressure to bring Saucy Jack to justice. I had hoped that you might bring some fresh insight, some different methology . . .”

“I’m not a detective,” said Roosevelt, walking closer to the corpse. “There was never any question about the identities of the three killers I went after. As for this murder, there’s not much I can tell you that you don’t already know.”

“Won’t you try?” said Hughes, practically pleading.

Roosevelt squatted down next to the body. “She was killed from behind, of course. She probably never knew the murderer was there until she felt her jugular and windpipe being severed.”

“Why from behind?”

“If I were trying to kill her from in front, I’d stab her in a straightforward way—it would give her less time to raise her hand to deflect the blade. But the throat was slit, not punctured. And it had to be the first wound, because otherwise she would have screamed and someone would have heard her.”

“What makes you think someone didn’t?”

Roosevelt pointed to the gaping hole in the woman’s abdomen. “He wouldn’t have had the leisure to do that unless he was sure no one had seen or heard the murder.” The American stood up again. “But you know all that.”

“Yes, we do,” said Hughes. “Can you tell us anything we don’t know?”

“Probably not. The only other obvious fact is that the killer had some knowledge of anatomy.”

“This hardly looks like the work of a doctor, Mr. Roosevelt,” said Hughes.

“I didn’t say that it was. But it was done by someone who knew where the various internal organs belonged, or else he’d never have been able to remove them in the dark. Take a look. There’s no subcutaneous fat on the ground, and he didn’t waste his time mutilating muscle tissue.”

“Interesting,” said Hughes. “Now that is something we didn’t know.” He smiled. “I think we should be very grateful that you are a taxidermist as well as an ornithologist.” He covered the corpse once more, then summoned another constable. “Have her taken to the morgue. Use the alleyways and discourage onlookers.”

The constable saluted and gathered a team of policemen to move the body.

“I assume we’re through here,” said Roosevelt, grateful that he no longer had to stare at the corpse.

“Yes. Thank you for coming.”

Roosevelt pulled his timepiece out of a vest pocket and opened it.

“No sense going back to sleep. Why don’t you come back to the Savoy with me and I’ll buy breakfast?”

“I’ve quite lost my appetite, but I will be happy to join you for a cup if tea and some conversation, Mr. Roosevelt.”

“Call me Theodore.” He shook his head. “Poor woman. I wonder who she was?”

Hughes pulled a notebook out of his pocket. “Her name was Annie Chapman. She was a Whitechapel prostitute.”

“Whitechapel?”

“Whitechapel is the section of the city we are in.”

Roosevelt looked around, truly seeing it for the first time, as the sun began burning away the fog. “I hope New York never has a slum like this!” he said devoutly.

“Wait until New York has been around as long as London, and it will have this and worse,” Hughes assured him.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” said Roosevelt, his jaw jutting out pugnaciously as he looked up and down the street.

Hughes was surprised by the intensity of the young man’s obvious belief in himself. As they stared at the broken and boarded windows, the drunks lying in doorways and on the street, the mangy dogs and spavined cats and fat, aggressive rats, the endless piles of excrement from cart horses, the Englishman found himself wondering what kind of man could view a woman’s mutilated corpse with less distaste than he displayed toward surroundings that Hughes took for granted.

They climbed into Hughes’ carriage, and the driver set off for the Savoy at a leisurely trot. Before long they were out of Whitechapel, and, Roosevelt noted, the air instantly seemed to smell fresher.

Roosevelt had eaten the last of his eggs, and was concentrating on his coffee when an officer entered the dining room and approached Hughes.

“I’m sorry to interrupt, sir,” he said apologetically, “but they said at the Yard that this is of the utmost urgency.”

He handed a small envelope to Hughes, who opened it and briefly looked at what it contained.

“Thank you,” said Hughes.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” asked the officer. “Any reply?”

“No, that will be all.”

The officer saluted, and when he left Hughes turned back to Roosevelt. “What are your plans now, Theodore?”

“I have two more speeches to give on ornithology,” answered Roosevelt, “and one on naval warfare, and then I board the boat for home on Friday.”

“Let me tell you something about the murder you saw today,” began Hughes.

“Thank you for letting me finish my breakfast first,” said Roosevelt wryly. “We have a madman loose in Whitechapel, Theodore,” continued Hughes. “That much is obvious.”

“We knew that before today,” said Hughes.

Roosevelt looked up. “This wasn’t his first victim?”

“It was at least his second.” Hughes paused. “It’s possible that he’s killed as many as five women.”

“How can he still be at large?”

“We can’t watch every Whitechapel prostitute every minute of the day and night.”

“He only kills prostitutes?”

“Thus far.”

“Were they all this brutally mutilated?”

“The last one—a girl named Polly Nichols—was. The first three suffered less grievous damage, which is why we cannot be sure they were all killed by the same hand.”

“Well, you’ve got your work cut out for you,” said Roosevelt. “I certainly don’t envy you.” He paused. “Have you any suspects so far?”

Hughes frowned. “Not really.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.”

Roosevelt shrugged. “As you wish. But the subject of Saucy Jack is closed. Either you confide in me or I can’t help.”

Hughes looked around the half-empty dining room, then lowered his voice. “All right,” he said in little more them a whisper. “But what I tell you must go no farther than this table. It is for you and you alone.”

Roosevelt stared at him with open curiosity. “All right,” he said. “I can keep a secret as well as the next man.”

“I hope so.”

“You sound like you’re about to name Queen Victoria.”

“This is not a joking matter!” whispered Hughes angrily. “I am convinced that the man who has been implicated is innocent, but if word were to get out . . .”

Roosevelt waited patiently.

“There are rumors, undoubtedly spread about by anarchists, that are little short of sedition,” continued Hughes. “Scandalous behavior within one’s own class is one thing—but murders such as you witnessed this morning . . . I simply cannot believe it!” He paused, started to speak, then stopped. Finally he looked around the room to make certain no one was listening. “I can’t give you his name, Theodore. Without proof, that would be tantamount to treason.” He lowered his voice even more. “He is a member of the Royal Family!”

“Every family’s got its black sheep,” said Roosevelt with a shrug.

Hughes stared at him, aghast. “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?”

“You think royalty can’t go berserk just as easily as common men?”

“It’s unthinkable!” snapped Hughes. He quickly glanced around the room and lowered his voice again. “This is not Rome, and our Royals are not Caligula and Nero.” He struggled to regain his composure. “You simply do not comprehend the gravity of what I am confiding in you. If even a hint that we were investigating this slander were to get out, the government would collapse overnight.”

“Do you really think so?” asked Roosevelt.

“Absolutely.” The small, dapper policeman stared at Roosevelt. “I would like to enlist your aid in uncovering the real murderer before these vile rumors reach a member of the force who cannot keep his mouth shut.”

“I don’t believe you were listening to me,” said Roosevelt. “My ship leaves on Friday morning.”

“Without you, I’m afraid.”

Roosevelt frowned. “What are you talking about?”

Hughes handed the envelope he’d been given across the table to Roosevelt. “What is this?” demanded Roosevelt, reaching for his glasses.

“A telegram from your President Cleveland, offering us your services in the hunt for the madman.”

Roosevelt read the telegram twice, then crumpled it up in a powerful fist and hurled it to the floor.

“Grover Cleveland doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about your murderer!” he exploded.

Hughes looked nervously around the room, and gestured the American to keep his voice down.

“He just wants to keep me from campaigning for his Republican opponent!”

“Surely you will not disobey the request of your president!”

“I can if I choose to!” thundered Roosevelt. “He’s my president, not my king, a difference that I gather was lost on you when you manipulated him into sending this!” He glowered at the telegram that lay on the floor. “I knew he was worried about Harrison, but this is beyond the pale!”

“I apologize,” said Hughes. “I wanted a fresh outlook so badly, I seem to have overstepped my . . .”

“Oh, be quiet,” Roosevelt interrupted him. “I’m staying.”

“But I thought you said—”

“Americans rise to challenges. I’ll rise to this one. I’m just annoyed at the way you went about securing my services.” He frowned again. “I’ll show that corrupt fool in the White House! I’ll solve your murder and get back to the States in time to help Ben Harrison defeat him in the election!”

“You’ll stay?” said Hughes. “I can’t tell you what this means! And of course, I’ll help you in any way I can.”

“You can start by checking me out of this palace and finding me a room in Whitechapel.”

“In Whitechapel?” repeated Hughes with obvious distaste. “My dear Theodore, it simply isn’t done.”

“Well, it’s about to get done,” said Roosevelt. “I saw the way the onlookers stared at you, as if you were the enemy, or at least a foreign power. If they’re going to learn to trust me, then I’ve got to live like they do. I can’t look for a killer until dinnertime, then come back to the Savoy, don a tuxedo, and mingle with the rich and the powerful until the next morning.”

“If you insist.”

“I do. I just want time to send a wire to my wife Edith, explaining why I won’t be on the ship when it docks.”

“We can send for her, if—”

“American men do not put their wives in harm’s way,” said Roosevelt severely.

“No, of course not,” said Hughes, getting hastily to his feet. “I’ll send my carriage by for you in an hour. Is there any other way I can assist you?”

“Yes. Gather all the newspaper articles and anything else you have on these murders. Once I’ve got a room in Whitechapel, I’ll want all the material sent there.”

“You can have everything we’ve got on Saucy Jack.”

“Some name!” snorted Roosevelt contemptuously.

“Well, he does seem to have acquired another one, though it’s not clear yet whether he chose it himself or the press gave it to him.”

“Oh?”

“Jack the Ripper.”

“Much more fitting,” said Roosevelt, nodding his head vigorously.

My Dearest Edith:

I’m having Mr. Carlson hand deliver this letter to you, to explain why I’m not aboard the ship.

Let me first assure you that I’m in perfect health. My extended stay here is due to a pair of conscienceless culprits—the President of the United States and someone known only as Jack the Ripper.

The latter has embarked on a rampage of murder that would shock even our own Western shootists such as Doc Holliday and Johnny Ringo. You do not need to know the details, but believe me when I say that this fiend must be brought to justice.

An officer from Scotland Yard has read of my experiences in the Dakota Bad Lands and asked Grover Cleveland to “loan” me to the British until these murders have been solved—and Cleveland pounced on such an excuse to remove me from the upcoming campaign.

With luck, I’ll have things sorted out and solved in time to see Ben Harrison take the oath of office in a little less than two months

My best to Alice and little Ted.

Your Theodore

Roosevelt sat on a rickety wooden chair, his back to the window, thumbing through Hughes’ files.

It was clear that Polly Nichols was a Ripper victim. He doubted that the three who preceded her—Emma Smith, Ada Wilson, and Martha Tabram—were. They’d been brutally murdered, but the modus operandi differed appreciably from the two most recent killings.

The files were very circumspect about the Royal who had come under suspicion, but Roosevelt deduced that it was Prince Eddy, more formally Albert Victor, son of the Prince of Wales and, quite possibly, the future King of England.

Roosevelt put the papers down, leaned back on his chair, and closed his eyes. It just didn’t make any sense. It would be as if James Garfield had walked into a Washington slum and killed a pair of women and no one had recognized him. It was true that Prince Eddy was a dissolute and depraved man, and Roosevelt held him in total contempt—but there was just no way he could walk fifty yards in any direction, in or out of Whitechapel, without being recognized.

He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and then stood up. It was time to stop hypothesizing and go out and meet the residents of the area. He needed to talk to them, get to know them, and learn their opinions, which, he was sure, would be worth more than the police’s.

He walked over to a decrepit coat rack, then paused and smiled. He crossed the room to his steamer trunk, opened it, and a few moments later was dressed in the fringed buckskin he wore at his Dakota ranch. (It had been designed by his favorite New York haberdasher, since all the Dakotans were busily trying to look like New Yorkers.) He took off his shining black shoes and pulled on a pair of well-worn boots. Then he tucked a knife and a pistol into his belt.

He considered a coonskin hat, but decided to wear a Stetson instead. He looked at himself in the fly-specked mirror and grinned in approval. As long as he was going to be identified as an American the moment he opened his mouth, he might as well dress like one.

He walked out the door of his shabby building, and was immediately aware that he had become an object of notoriety. Every pedestrian within sight stopped to stare at him. Even horse-drawn carriages slowed down as they passed by.

He grinned at them, waved, and began making his way to the Black Swan, next to where Annie Chapman’s body had been found. A number of curious onlookers had followed him, and most of them entered the tavern when he did.

He walked up to the bar, staring approvingly at his image in the mirror that faced him.

“I didn’t know the circus had come to Whitechapel!” laughed a burly man who was standing a few feet away.

Roosevelt smiled and extended his hand. “Theodore Roosevelt. Pleased to meet you.”

“Hey, you’re a Yank!” said the man. “Ain’t never met one before.” He paused and frowned. “Don’t rightly know if I like Yanks.”

“Them the duds you fight Indians in, guv?” asked another.

“We don’t fight Indians any more,” answered Roosevelt.

“Killed ’em all, did you?”

“No. Now we live side by side with them.”

“I heard they was all killers,” said the burly man. “They go around cuttin’ people’s heads off.”

“Most of them are pretty decent people,” said Roosevelt, seeing an opportunity to bring up the subject he wanted to discuss. “And even the bad ones couldn’t hold a candle to your Saucy Jack.”

“Old Jack?” said the burly mem with a shrug. “He’s off the deep end, he is. Mad as a hatter and ten times as vicious.”

“Has anyone here seen him?” asked Roosevelt.

“The only people what’s seen him is lying in the morgue chopped up in bits and pieces,” said a woman.

“They say he eats their innards,” offered another, looking scared as she downed her drink.

“He only goes after women,” added the burly man. “Men either fight too hard or don’t taste so good.”

“Maybe your women should go armed,” suggested Roosevelt.

“What good would it do?” responded a woman. “If you’re with a john, you don’t need no weapon—and if you find you’re with old Jack, you ain’t got time to use it.”

“That’s muddled thinking,” said Roosevelt.

“Who are you to come in here and tell us how to think?” said the burly man pugnaciously.

“I’m a friend who wants to help.”

“Not if you don’t live in Whitechapel, you ain’t,” said the man. “We ain’t got no friends except for them what’s stuck here.”

“You didn’t give me a chance to answer,” said Roosevelt. “Yes, I live in Whitechapel.”

“I ain’t never seen you around,” said a man from the back of the tavern.

“Me neither,” chimed in another.

“I just arrived.”

“This ain’t a place where you ‘arrive,’ Yank,” said the burly man. “It’s a place where you get dumped while the rest of London pisses on you.”

“Bloody right!” said another of the women, “I’ll bet the coppers are probably cheering for old Jack. Every time he strikes, there’s less of us for them to worry about.”

“If the police won’t hunt him down, we’ll have to do it ourselves,” said Roosevelt.

“What do you mean—ourselves?” said the burly man. “You ain’t one of us! What do you care?”

“All right-thinking men should care,” responded Roosevelt. “There’s a crazed killer out there. We have to protect society and bring him to the bar of justice.”

“What kind of man dresses like a dandy and wants to hunt down Jack the Ripper? It just don’t make no sense.” He glared at the American. “You sure you ain’t a writer for one of them magazines—them penny dreadfuls, here to make a hero out of old Jack?”

“I told you: I want to hunt him down.”

“And when he jumps you, you’ll point out that it’s not fair to hit a man with spectacles!” guffawed the burly man.

Roosevelt removed his glasses, folded them carefully, and set them down on the bar.

“There are many things I don’t need glasses for,” he said, jutting out his chin. “You’re one of them.”

“Are you challenging me to a fight, Yank?” said the burly man, surprised.

“Personally, I’d much rather fight the Ripper,” said Roosevelt. “But it’s up to you.”

The man suddenly laughed and threw a huge arm around Roosevelt’s shoulders. “I like your nerve, Yank! My name’s Colin Shrank, and you and me are going to be great friends!”

Roosevelt grinned. “That suits me just fine. Let me buy you a drink.”

“A pint of ale!” Shrank yelled to the bartender. He turned back to Roosevelt. “You’re here too early, Yank. Old Jack, he only comes out at night.”

“But I see a number of ladies here, and at least some of them must be prostitutes,” said Roosevelt.

“They ain’t hardly ladies,” said Shrank with a laugh, “and they’re here because he’s got ’em too scared to work at night, which is the proper time for their particular business.”

“Too bloody true!” chimed in one of the women. “You ain’t gettin’ me out after dark!”

“I don’t even feel safe in the daylight,” said another.

“Did anyone here know Polly Nichols or Annie Chapman?” asked Roosevelt.

“I knew Annie,” said the bartender. “Came here near every night to find a new bloke. Nice lady, she was.”

“Why would she go off with the Ripper?” asked Roosevelt.

“Well, she didn’t know it was the Ripper, now did she?” answered the bartender.

Roosevelt shook his head. “Everyone in Whitechapel knows that prostitutes are at risk, so why would Annie go out with someone she didn’t know?”

“There’s thousands of men come here every night,” answered one of the prostitutes. “Maybe tens of thousands. What’re the odds any one of them is Jack the Ripper?”

“It ain’t our fault,” said another. “We’re just out to make a living. It’s the police and the press and all them others. They don’t care what happens here. They’d bum Whitechapel down, and us with it, if they thought they could get away with it.”

A heavyset woman entered the tavern, walked right up to the bar, and thumped it with her fist.

“Yeah, Irma,” said the bartender. “What’ll it be?”

“A pint,” she said in a deep voice.

“Hard night?”

“Four of ’em.” She shook her head disgustedly. “You’d think they’d learn. They never do.”

“That’s what they’ve got you for,” said the bartender.

She grimaced and took her beer to a table.

“What was that all about?” asked Roosevelt.

“Irma, she’s a midwife,” answered Shrank.

“She delivered four babies last night?”

Shrank seemed amused. “She cut four of ’em out before they became a bother.”

“A midwife performs abortions?” said Roosevelt, surprised. “Don’t you have doctors for that?”

“Look around you, Yank. There’s ten times as many rats as people down here. A gent’s got to be as well-armed as you if he don’t want to get robbed. Women are being sliced to bits by a monster and no one does nothing about it. So you tell me: why would a doctor work here if he could work anywhere else?”

“No one cares about Whitechapel,” said Irma bitterly.

“Well, they’d better start caring,” said Roosevelt. “Because if this butcher isn’t caught, you’re going to be so awash in blood that you might as well call it Redchapel.”

“Redchapel,” repeated Shrank. “I like that! Hell, if we change the name, maybe they’d finally pay attention to what’s going on down here.”

“Why do you think he’s going to kill again?” asked the bartender.

“If his motive is to kill prostitutes, there are still hundreds of them left in Whitechapel.”

“But everyone knows he’s crazy,” said Shrank. “So maybe he never had no motive at all.”

“All the more reason for him to strike again,” said Roosevelt. “If he had no reason to start, then he also has no reason to stop.”

“Never thought of that,” admitted Shrank. He gave Roosevelt a hearty slap on the back. “You got a head on your shoulders, Yank! What do you do back in America?”

“A little of everything,” answered Roosevelt. “I’ve been a politician, a rancher, a Deputy Marshal, a naturalist, an ornithologist, a taxidermist, and an author.”

“That’s a hell of a list for such a young bloke.”

“Well, I have one other accomplishment that I’m glad you didn’t make me show off,” said Roosevelt.

“What was that?”

Roosevelt picked his glasses up from the bar and flashed Shrank another grin. “I was lightweight boxing champion of my class at Harvard.”

My Dearest Edith:

I must be a more formidable figure than I thought. No sooner do I agree to help apprehend Jack the Ripper than he immediately goes into hiding.

I have spent the past two weeks walking every foot of the shabby slum known as Whitechapel, speaking to everyone I meet, trying to get some information—any information—about this madman who is making headlines all over the world. It hasn’t been productive—though in another way it has, for it has shown me how not to govern a municipality, and I suspect the day will come when that will prove very useful knowledge indeed.

I know America has its rich and its poor, its leaders and its followers, but any man can, through his own sweat and skills, climb to the top of whatever heap he covets I find England’s class system stifling, and I keep wondering where America would be if, for example, Abraham Lincoln had been forced to remain the penniless frontiersman he had been born. We have Negroes who were born into slavery who will someday hold positions of wealth and power, and while slavery is a shameful blot on our history, it was a system that men of good will and reason eventually destroyed. I see no such men attempting to bring about the necessary changes in British society.

I walk through Whitechapel, and I can envision what a handful of Americans, with American know-how and American values, could do to it in five years’ time. And yet I fear it is doomed to remain exactly what it is until the buildings finally collapse of their own decrepitude.

I have made some friends among the residents, many of whom have been extremely hospitable to an alien. (Yes, I know I was well treated by the Royal Society, but I came there with a reputation as an expert. I came to Whitechapel only as an outsider. And yet I find I prefer to rub shoulders with the common man on this side of the ocean, even as I have always done at home.)

One special friend is a day laborer (who seems to labor as infrequently as possible) named Colin Shrank, who has been my guide down the fog-shrouded streets and filthy alleys of Whitechapel. As I say, we’ve discovered no useful information, but at least I now feel I have a reasonably thorough working knowledge of the geography of the place, a knowledge I will be only too happy to expunge the moment I return to our beloved Sagamore Hill.

My best to Alice and little Ted.

Your Theodore

Roosevelt opened a letter, tossing the envelope carelessly on the bar of the Black Swan.

“Another note from your pal Hughes?” asked Shrank.

Roosevelt nodded. “He’s through asking who the Ripper is. Now he just wants to know if he’s through killing women.”

Shrank shrugged. “Could be.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “I doubt it. I think he takes too much joy in killing and disemboweling helpless women.”

“Up against a man with a knife like that, they’re all helpless,” offered Shrank.

“Not so, Colin.” Roosevelt looked around the tavern, and his gaze came to rest on Irma, the burly midwife. “The women he’s attacked have all been on the slender side. If he went after someone like Irma here, he might have a real battle on his hands.”

“I’m no prostitute!” snapped Irma indignantly. “I honor the Bible and the Commandments!”

“No offense intended,” said Roosevelt quickly. “I was just suggesting that perhaps being a prostitute is not the Ripper’s sole criterion, that maybe he goes after women he knows he can dispatch quickly.”

“Why quickly, if he’s having such a good time?” asked the bartender. “Secrecy is his ally,” answered Roosevelt. “He can’t butcher them unless he kills them before they can scream. That means they can’t struggle for more than a second or two.”

“Ever been anything like him in America?” asked Shrank.

“Not to my knowledge. Certainly not in our cities, where such crimes would not go unnoticed and unreported.”

“They gets noticed and reported, all right,” said a woman. “Just no one cares, is all.”

Roosevelt looked out the window. “It’s starting to get dark.” He walked to the door. “Come on, Colin. It’s time to make our rounds.”

“You go alone tonight,” said Shrank, taking a drink of his ale.

“Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I feel fine. But I been walking those damned bloody streets with you every night since he chopped Annie Chapman. It’s been raining all day, and the wind bites right through my clothes to my bones, so I’m staying here. If you spot him, give a holler and I’ll join you.”

“Stick around, Theodore,” added the bartender. “He ain’t out there. Hell, he’s probably got his throat sliced on the waterfront.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “If I can save a single life by patrolling the streets, then I have no choice but to do it.”

“That’s the coppers’ job,” insisted Shrank.

“It’s the job of every civic-minded citizen who cares about the safety of Whitechapel,” replied Roosevelt.

“That lets you out. You ain’t no citizen.”

“Enough talk,” said Roosevelt, standing at the door, hands on hips. “You’re sure you won’t come with me?”

“I can’t even keep up with you in good weather,” said Shrank.

Roosevelt shrugged. “Well, I can’t stand here talking all night.”

He turned and walked out into the fog for another fruitless night of hunting for the Ripper.

Roosevelt felt a blunt object poking his shoulder. He sat up, swinging wildly at his unseen assailant.

“Stop, Theodore!” cried a familiar voice. “It’s me—John Hughes.” Roosevelt swung his feet to the floor. “You’re lucky I didn’t floor you again.”

“I learned my lesson the first time,” said Hughes, displaying a broom. “The handle’s two meters long.”

“All right, I’m awake,” said Roosevelt. “Why are you here?”

“Jack the Ripper has struck again.”

“What?” yelled Roosevelt, leaping to his feet.

“You heard me.”

“What time is it?” asked Roosevelt as he threw his clothes on.

“About 3:30 in the morning.”

“It’s Sunday, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Damn! I only went to bed about half an hour ago! Where did it happen?”

“In a little court off Berner Street,” said Hughes. “And this time he was interrupted.”

“By whom?”

“We’re not sure.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Come with me, and I’ll explain.”

Roosevelt finished dressing. “Let’s go.”

“There it is,” said Hughes as he and Roosevelt stared at the woman’s body. The head lay in a pool of blood. “He cut her throat and slashed her face, but there’s no other damage. He’d pulled her dress up and was just about to cut her belly open when he was interrupted.”

“What makes you think he was interrupted?” asked Roosevelt. “Why couldn’t he just have stopped for some other reason?”

“Because those two gentlemen”—Hughes pointed at a pair of locals who were speaking with two officers—“heard the scuffle and approached from different directions. We don’t know which one startled him—for all we know, he might have heard them both—but he suddenly took flight. They saw the body, realized what had happened, and gave chase.”

“For how long?”

Hughes shrugged. “Three or four blocks, before they knew for sure they’d lost him.”

“Did they get a glimpse of him?” persisted Roosevelt. “Any kind of description at all?”

Hughes shook his head. “But one of them, Mr. Packer, alerted us, and the body was still warm and bleeding when we found it. We couldn’t have missed him by five minutes.” He paused. “We’ve got a hundred men scouring every street and alley in Whitechapel. With a little luck we may find him.”

“May I speak to the two witnesses?” asked Roosevelt.

“Certainly.”

Hughes accompanied Roosevelt as the American approached the men. “This is Mr. Roosevelt,” he announced. “Please answer his questions as freely as you would answer mine.”

Roosevelt walked up to the taller of the two men. “I only have a couple of questions for you. The first is: how old are you?”

“Thirty-four,” said the man, surprised.

“And how long have you lived in Whitechapel?”

“All my life, guv.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s all you want to know?” asked the man.

“That’s all,” said Roosevelt. He turned to the smaller man. “Could you answer the same two questions, please?”

“I’m twenty-eight. Ain’t never been nowhere else.” He paused. “Well, I took the missus to the zoo oncet.”

“Thank you. I have no further questions.” He shook the smaller man’s hand, then walked back to look at the corpse again. “Have you identified her yet?” Hughes nodded. “Elizabeth Stride. Long Liz, they called her.”

“A prostitute, of course?”

“Yes.”

“When was the last time anyone saw her alive?”

“She was seen at Bricklayers Tavern just before midnight,” answered Hughes.

“With a customer?”

“Yes, but she’d already serviced him. He has an alibi for the time of the murder.”

“Which was when?”

“About forty-five minutes ago.” Hughes looked off into the fog. “I wonder if he’s still out there?”

“If he is, I’m sure that—”

He was interrupted by a woman’s scream.

“Where did that come from?” demanded Hughes.

“I don’t know, sir,” said one of the policemen. “Either straight ahead or off to the left. It’s difficult to tell.”

He turned back to Roosevelt. “What do you . . . Theodore!!!”

But the American was already racing into the fog, gun in hand.

“Follow him!” shouted Hughes to his men.

“But—”

“He’s a hunter! I trust his instincts!”

They fell into stride behind Roosevelt, who ran through the darkness until he reached Church Passage. He leaned forward in a gunfighter’s crouch and peered into the fog.

“It came from somewhere near here,” he whispered as Hughes finally caught up with him. “Where does this thing lead?” he asked, indicating the narrow passage.

“To Mitre Street.”

“Let’s go,” said Roosevelt, moving forward silently. He traversed the passage, emerged on Mitre Street, spotted a bulky object in an open yard, and quickly ran over to it.

“Damn!” muttered Hughes as he joined the American. “Another one!”

“Post a man to watch the body and make sure no one touches anything,” said Roosevelt. “The Ripper can’t be more than a minute ahead of us.”

He trotted off down Mitre Street. The police began using their whistles to identify each other, and soon the shrill noise became almost deafening. Roosevelt had gone a short distance when he heard a faint moaning coming from a recessed doorway. He approached the source warily, gun in hand. “Who are you?” he demanded.

“Thank God it’s you, sir!” said a familiar voice, and as he moved closer he realized that it was Irma, the midwife. He lit a match and saw a large bruise over her left temple.

“What happened?”

“I was coming back from Elsie Bayne’s when I heard a woman scream. Then a bloke dressed all in black run down the street and bowled me over.” She was overcome by a sudden dizziness.

“Did you see his features?”

“He had crazy eyes,” said Irma. “The kind what gives you nightmares.”

“What color were they?”

“I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “It’s dark.”

“How tall was he?”

“Taller than you, sir,” she replied. “Much taller. And thin. Like a skeleton, he was!”

“Was there anything, however small, that you can remember?” demanded Roosevelt. “Think hard. It’s important.”

“All I know is he wore black gloves.”

“No distinguishing marks?”

“Just the wound.”

“Wound?” said Roosevelt, pouncing on the word. “What wound?”

“On his cheek. It was dripping blood, it was.”

“Which cheek?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Please try.”

She frowned as if trying to recall, then whimpered in pain. “I don’t know, sir.” She looked down the street, where some bobbies were approaching them. “He done sliced another one, didn’t he, sir?”

The American nodded. “Not far from here.”

“These poor women!” sobbed Irma, starting to cry. “When will it stop?” Roosevelt stood up. “You’re our only eyewitness,” he said. “The police artist may want to speak to you later.”

“But I done told you what I know!”

“Other details may come back to you. Try to cooperate with him.”

She nodded her head while rubbing her tears away with a filthy coat sleeve, and Roosevelt turned to the nearest officer. “When she feels strong enough, take her to the nearest hospital.” He turned and walked rapidly back to the latest victim.

“He really did a job on this one, sir,” said one of the policemen, staring down at the corpse.

The woman’s throat had been slit from ear to ear. The Ripper had then opened her up from neck to groin and gutted her like a fish. Each of her internal organs lay on the ground, neatly arranged in a seemingly meaningless pattern. A piece of her apron had been cut away; the Ripper had evidently use it to wipe his knife.

“Jesus!” said another officer, staring in fascination. “I never saw anyone sliced up like this!”

“You’re the taxidermist, Theodore,” said Hughes, joining them. “Can you tell if anything’s missing?”

Roosevelt studied the organs. “A kidney, I think.”

“I’ll have the police surgeon make sure,” said Hughes. He paused. “If you’re right, then we have to ask the question: as crazy as he is, why would he steal her kidney?”

“I’d hate to know the answer to that one, sir,” said one of the policemen.

“Does anyone know who she is?” asked Roosevelt.

“If she’s got any identification on her, it’s too blood-soaked to read it,” replied Hughes. “We’ll ask around. We should know by morning.”

Roosevelt walked away from the corpse, then signaled Hughes to join him.

“What is it, Theodore?”

“I wanted to speak where we couldn’t be overheard,” replied Roosevelt. “I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that we can definitely eliminate Prince Eddy from the list of suspects.”

“I am, of course,” said Hughes. “But how do you know?”

“I’ve met him,” said Roosevelt. “He’s a weak man, ravaged by disease. He could barely grip my hand.”

“Are you saying he’s too weak to have killed these women?” asked Hughes, looking unconvinced.

“Anyone can kill an unsuspecting victim with a knife,” responded the American.

“Well, then?”

“Your two witnesses,” said Roosevelt. “They were twenty-eight and thirty-four years old, in the prime of life. They were healthy, and neither was carrying any excess weight. And they know their way around Whitechapel.” Roosevelt paused. “How could such an ill man, especially one who doesn’t know the area, outrun them? Remember, they said they chased him for three or four blocks. The Albert Victor I met couldn’t have run for one block, let alone four.”

“Thank you, Theodore,” said Hughes, obviously relieved. “You’ve lifted an enormous burden from me.”

“Forget about him, and concentrate on what we do know,” said the American. “For example, we know that the Ripper has an intimate knowledge of Whitechapel or he couldn’t have evaded his pursuers. In fact, he evaded pursuit twice in one night, because we couldn’t have been sixty seconds behind him at the site of this murder, and he vanished like an Apache in the Arizona hills.”

“He probably ducked into a building after he bumped into the midwife,” said Hughes.

“How would he know which ones were unlocked if he didn’t know the area like the back of his hand? Whatever else he may or may not be, the Ripper is a resident of Whitechapel.”

“Blast!” muttered Hughes. “That probably clears a second suspect as well.”

“Oh?”

“A Dr. Thomas Neill Cream. But he wouldn’t know Whitechapel any better them Prince Eddy. Furthermore, he’s quite fat. I doubt that he could have outrun anyone.”

Roosevelt stared off into the distance, frowning.

“Is something wrong, Theodore?”

“Of course something’s wrong,” said Roosevelt irritably. “That madman has butchered two more women right under our noses.” He continued looking into the fog and frowning. “And I’m missing something.”

“What?”

He frowned again. “I don’t know. But it’s something I should know, something I’m sure I’ve overlooked.”

“Can I be of any assistance?” asked Hughes.

Roosevelt remained motionless for another moment, then shrugged and shook his head.

The morgue wagon arrived, Hughes began supervising the removal of the corpse, and Roosevelt went back to his room where he replayed the events of the evening over and over in his mind, looking for the detail he had missed.

My Dearest Edith:

They identified the evening’s second victim, a poor prostitute named Catherine Eddowes. I know I said I would be coming home shortly, but I cannot leave while this fiend remains at large.

There is no question that he will strike again, but when and where is almost impossible to predict. There seems to be no pattern to his murders until after he has dispatched his victim, and then the pattern is one that I shall not distress you by describing.

There was absolutely nothing I could do to prevent the four murders, but I have the uneasy feeling that I have the ability right now to prevent any further killings, if I could but see the tree rather than the forest. I am certain I know something that might lead to his apprehension, yet I have no idea what that knowledge may be.

Ah, well, there is no need to worry you with my problems. I shall be on the first ship home after this dreadful affair has been brought to a successful conclusion, hopefully in time to make a speech or two on Ben Harrison’s behalf, and then perhaps we’ll take Alice and little Ted on a vacation to Yosemite or the Yellowstone.

Your Theodore

“Where were you last night?” demanded Roosevelt when he entered the Black Swan on the morning of October 1.

“Right here,” answered Colin Shrank. “You think I sliced them two women?”

“I just want to know what time you went home,” said Roosevelt.

“Two o’clock or so.”

“The first of them wasn’t killed until almost three.”

Well, it weren’t me!” snapped Shrank. “I didn’t kill no bloody women!”

“I never said you did,” said Roosevelt.

“Then why all the questions?”

“Because the one night you didn’t make the rounds with me, the Ripper claimed two more victims. I think I should at least inquire after your whereabouts.”

“Where was you?” shot back Shrank.

“I was in bed when Elizabeth Stride was murdered, but I was in Captain Hughes’ company when Catherine Eddowes was killed,” replied Roosevelt.

“So are you saying I done it or not?” said Shrank belligerently, his hands balled into massive fists.

Roosevelt stared long and hard at the man, then sighed. “No, I’m not.”

“Good!” said Shrank. “And just to show there’s no hard feelings, I’ll let you buy me a pint of ale.”

Roosevelt nodded to the bartender. “And I’ll take a cup of coffee.”

“Ain’t got no coffee, Mr. Roosevelt,” said the bartender. “How about a cup of tea?”

“That’ll do,” said Roosevelt, walking over to a table and sitting down. “Now we’re friends again, what made you decide I ain’t the Ripper?” asked Shrank.

“Your education.”

“What education?” laughed Shrank. “I ain’t never been to school in my life!”

“That education,” said Roosevelt. “If you killed someone, could you find the spleen?”

“What’s a spleen?”

“How about the pancreas?”

“Never heard of them.”

“Point to where you think my lungs are.”

Shrank pointed.

“There’s your answer,” said Roosevelt. “The Ripper knows where those organs are.”

“How do you know I’m not lying?” said Shrank.

“Where would you have learned?”

“Maybe I read it in a book.”

“Can you read?”

Suddenly Shrank laughed aloud. “Not a word!”

Roosevelt smiled. “One more reason why you’re not the Ripper.”

“One more?” repeated Shrank. “What was the first?”

“I’ve seen you get winded walking three blocks. The Ripper ran for at least half a mile last night and eluded some very fit pursuers.”

“Then why’d you come in asking questions like that?”

“I’m just being thorough.”

“I thunk we was friends—mates, you might say,” said Shrank.

“We are. But if you were the Ripper, that wouldn’t stop me from putting you away.”

“At least you give a damn. I can’t say as much for the rest of ’em.”

“You mean the police?” responded Roosevelt. “You misjudge them. They’ve got hundreds of men working on the case.”

“Only because the press keeps goading ’em,” said Shrank. “But they don’t care about us or Whitechapel. They’ll catch the Ripper and then cross us off the map again.”

“What do you think would make them do something about Whitechapel?” asked Roosevelt.

“It’ll sound balmy—but as long as Saucy Jack’s around, they pay attention to us. Maybe having him ain’t such a bad thing after all.” Shrank laughed bitterly. “He slices up another forty or fifty women, they might clean this place up and turn it into Hyde Park.”

“No,” said the bartender with a smile. “Mayfair.”

“You really think so?” asked Roosevelt.

“Nobody paid no attention to us before the Ripper, Mr. Roosevelt, and that’s a fact,” said the bartender.

“That’s a very interesting outlook,” said Roosevelt. “But I’ll keep trying to catch him anyway.”

“Maybe old Jack is really your pal Hughes,” offered Shrank. “Yknow, he’s always the first one at the body.”

Roosevelt shook his head. “I was with him when the second woman was killed last night.”

“It’s a puzzle, all right.”

“There are a lot of puzzles in this case,” said Roosevelt.

“You mean, besides who is he?” said Shrank.

“Yes,” said Roosevelt. He frowned again. For example, he thought, why would he have walked off with Catherine Eddowes’ kidney?

It took sixteen days for Roosevelt to get his answer. Then Hughes summoned him and showed him a crudely scrawled message that had been sent to George Lusk, the head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.

“From Hell, Mr. Lusk—

Sir, I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman,
prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was
very nise I may send you the bloody knif that too it out
if you only wate a whil longer
signed Catch me when yu can Mishter Lusk”

—Jack the Ripper

October 16, 1888

“Well, at least now we know why the kidney was missing,” said Hughes. A look of disgust crossed his face. “Do you really think he ate it?”

Roosevelt shrugged. “Who knows? He’s certainly capable of eating it.” He stared at the letter. “Does the handwriting match the previous messages?” Hughes nodded. “It’s the same man, all right.”

Roosevelt lowered his head in thought for a moment. “All right,” he said. “Here’s what you must do. Make copies of that letter and give it to every newspaper in London.”

“We can’t do that, Theodore! There would be widespread panic.”

“I hope so.”

“I beg your pardon!” said Hughes heatedly.

“Try to understand, John,” said Roosevelt. “Everyone in Whitechapel has been aware of the Ripper for more than a month. Prostitutes know that they’re his quarry, and yet they continue to ply their trade and put themselves at risk. Maybe if they read this, if they get a brief peek into the mind of this madman, we can keep them off the streets until he’s apprehended.”

“Keep prostitutes off the streets?” laughed a nearby policeman. “You might as well try to keep the sun from rising.”

“It’s that, or prepare yourselves for more murders.”

“It’s not my decision to make,” replied Hughes. “You’ve been working on this case at my request, and I’ve been your sole contact, so you can be forgiven for thinking that I’m in charge . . . but in point of fact we have more than five hundred police officers working around the clock on the Ripper murders. I’ll have to go through channels before we can get it published.”

“What if I just took it to the papers, and said that I hadn’t told you what I’d planned?”

“You’d be on the first ship back to America, and I doubt that your presence would ever be tolerated in England again.”

That’s no great loss in a land that worships royalty and allows something like Whitechapel to exist, thought Roosevelt. Aloud he said, “All right, John—but hurry! The sooner this is made known to the press, the better.”

Hughes picked up the letter and stared at it. “I’ll do what I can,” he said.

“So will we all,” replied Roosevelt.

Nothing happened.

A day passed, then a week, then three. The police again began suggesting that the Ripper might have been killed by some other member of the criminal class—there were enough stabbings and bludgeonings in Whitechapel and on the waterfront to write fini to a dozen Rippers.

Even Roosevelt relaxed his guard. He spent a day birding in the Cotswolds. He made a speech to the Royal Zoological Society, and another to Parliament. He found the time to write three articles and more than one hundred letters.

And still, he couldn’t rid himself of the nagging feeling that this was the calm before the storm, and that he possessed some small but vital piece of the puzzle that could help him prevent another murder.

On the evening of November 8, he sat down to write a letter to his wife.

My Dearest Edith:

It has been almost six weeks since the fiend last struck, and most of the authorities here have convinced themselves that he is dead, possibly by his own hand, possibly murdered. I don’t agree. There was no pattern of regularity to his prior killings. The first and second were separated by nine days, the second and third by twenty-two days, the third and fourth by no more than an hour. Since there has been no pattern, I don’t see how they can conclude that he’s broken one.

As I mentioned in previous letters, some of the police still lean toward Prince Albert Victor, which is simply beyond the realm of possibility. All of their other suspects also seem to come from the upper classes: a doctor, a lawyer, a shipbuilder. They mean well, the London Metropolitan Police, but they simply lack American practicality as they go about this most important and onerous task.

I may not send this letter to you at all, because I do not want the details to cause you dismay, but I need to clarify my thinking by putting things down on paper.

I begin with the question: what do we know about Jack the Ripper?

It’s true that there is an eyewitness account that makes him a head taller than myself, and thoroughly emaciated, but it was made by an hysterical woman whose veracity cannot be relied upon. Still, it’s all the police have to go on, and that is the man they are searching for.

But that is all we know empirically. The rest comes from logic—or the science of deduction, to borrow from Sherlock Holmes, the fictional detective who has made such an impact here in the past year.

And what can I deduce?

First, he has at least a rudimentary knowledge of anatomy. The nature of the mutilations implies that he takes pleasure in removing certain internal organs—and he was able to tell a kidney from other organs in near-total darkness on the night of September 30.

Second, he is trying to delude us into thinking he is illiterate. That letter of his is a masterpiece of misdirection—for if he is a doctor, or if he has even studied medicine for a year, how could his spelling, diction and penmanship be so indicative of a barely literate man?

Third, he must possess an intimate knowledge of Whitechapel. The only time he was seen he eluded his pursuers, and being unseen the other times also implies familiarity with his surroundings

Fourth, these murders must be planned in advance—a theory I have not shared with the police, because none of them would accept such a notion. But damn it, he had to know when and where he would kill each of his victims! Because if he didn’t, then how did he get fresh clothing, and without fresh clothing, how did this man, who must have been soaked in the blood of his victims, escape detection as he walked through the streets of Whitechapel on his way back to wherever he goes when his foul work is done? He must have had a clean set of clothes hidden within yards of his victim, and that implies premeditation.

Fifth, and this is the one that I cannot begin to answer: even though they have been alerted, even though they know the Ripper is lurking in the darkness, he is nonetheless able to approach his victims with complete impunity. Do they know him? Does he appear so wealthy that they feel it is worth the risk? What leads otherwise cautious women to allow this fiend to approach them? There has been no sign of a struggle at any of the murder scenes No victim has tried to run from him.

Why?

Roosevelt pulled out his timepiece and opened it. It was 3:40 A.M., and he realized that he had fallen asleep.

He looked at the letter, read it over, frowned, and began writing again.

Why? Why? Why?

Suddenly there was a pounding on his door.

“Theodore, wake up!” shouted Hughes. “He’s struck again! It’s the worst yet!”

Room 13, 26 Dorset Street, was a scene straight out of hell.

Marie Jeanette Kelly—or what remained of her—lay on a blood-soaked bed. Her throat had been slashed. Her abdomen was sliced open. Both her breasts were cut off. Her liver and entrails had been ripped out and placed between her feet. Flesh from her thighs and her breasts had been put on a nearby table. Her right hand was stuck in her belly.

“My God!” exclaimed Hughes, covering his mouth and nose with a handkerchief.

“He was crazy to begin with, but this is past all imagining,” said another officer. “He didn’t cut her organs out, like the others. He reached in and pulled them out with his hands!”

“He had to be drenched in blood,” said Roosevelt. “Surely someone saw him, if not here, then walking the street, or trying to hide until he could change into a clean outfit.”

“Nobody saw a thing, sir,” said the officer.

“They had to!” exclaimed Roosevelt. “They couldn’t have missed him.” He frowned and muttered: “But why didn’t it register?”

Roosevelt paused, motionless—and then, slowly, a grin crossed the American’s face. The officer stared at him as if he might soon start running amuck.

The American turned and walked to the door.

“Where are you going, Theodore?” asked Hughes.

“Back to my room,” answered Roosevelt. “There’s nothing more to see here.”

“I’ll be seeing it in my nightmares for the next thirty years,” said Hughes grimly.

Roosevelt went to his desk, opened a drawer, pulled out his pistol, filled it with cartridges, and put it in the pocket of his buckskin coat.

Then he took his pen out, and added a few lines to the letter he had been writing to Edith.

I curse my own blindness! I could have prevented this latest atrocity. I knew everything I had to know more than a month ago, but I didn’t put it together until tonight.

I am going out now, to make sure this fiend never kills again.

Roosevelt sat in the dark, his pistol on his lap, waiting.

Finally the knob turned, and a short, burly figure entered the room.

“Hello, Jack,” said Roosevelt, pointing his pistol at the figure.

“Jack? Who’s Jack?”

“We both know what I’m talking about,” said Roosevelt calmly.

“I just come back from helping poor Liza Willoughby!”

“No,” said Roosevelt, shaking his head. “You just got back from murdering Marie Jeanette Kelly.”

“You’re daft!”

“And you’re Jack the Ripper.”

“You’ve done lost your bloody mind!” yelled Irma the midwife, finally stepping out of the shadows.

“The Ripper had to live in Whitechapel,” said Roosevelt, never lowering the pistol. “He had to know the area intimately. Who knows it better than a woman who lives and works here and makes dozens of house calls every week?”

He watched her reaction, then continued.

“The Ripper had to have some knowledge of anatomy. Not much—but enough to know one organ from smother. Your letter fooled me for awhile. I thought it was the misdirection, but I was wrong: you need no formal schooling for your work.” He paused. “Are you following me so far?”

She glared at him silently.

“There were two things that bothered me,” continued Roosevelt. “Why would these women let the Ripper approach them when they knew he was killing prostitutes in Whitechapel? They’d been warned repeatedly to watch out for strange men. But then I realized that you’re a trusted, even a necessary, member of the community. They were all looking for Jack, not Jane.

“The other thing I couldn’t figure out,” he said, “was how the Ripper could walk around in blood-spattered clothing without drawing everyone’s attention. I made the false assumption that the killer had picked the spots for his murders and hidden fresh clothing nearby.” Roosevelt grimaced. “I was wrong. Those murders were so deranged I should have known there couldn’t be anything premeditated about them. Then, when I was at Marie Kelly’s apartment tonight, I saw how you ripped out her intestines with your hands and I knew how much blood you had to have splashed on yourself. It occurred to me that I’ve never seen you when you weren’t wearing bloodstained clothes. After all, you do nothing all day but deliver babies and perform abortions; there’s nothing unusual about a midwife’s clothing being bloody.”

“So maybe a midwife killed all them women!” yelled Irma. “Do you know how many midwives there are in Whitechapel? Why pick on me?”

“That’s what’s been haunting me for six weeks,” answered Roosevelt. “I knew everything I had to know right after you killed Catherine Eddowes, and yet I couldn’t piece it together until I realized that a midwife was the likely killer. You made a major blunder, and it took me until tonight to realize what it was.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Irma, curiosity mingling with hatred on her chubby face.

“You told me you heard a woman scream, and then the Ripper knocked you over while he was escaping from the scene of the crime.”

“He did!” said Irma. “He come running out of the darkness and—”

“You’re lying,” said Roosevelt. “I should have known it immediately.”

“It’s God’s own truth!”

He shook his head. “I found you on the ground less than a minute after we heard Catherine Eddowes scream. The Ripper knocked you down just before I got there, right?”

“Yeah, right.”

Roosevelt grinned in triumph. “That’s what I missed. It would have taken the Ripper five minutes or more to disembowel poor Catherine and arrange her innards on the ground the way he did. Surely she couldn’t have screamed four minutes into that. She was dead before he started.” The grin vanished. “That was you screaming. What better way to escape from the scene of a murder than to have a solicitous policeman escort you to a hospital? If there were any contradictions in your statements, we would write it off to hysteria. After all, you’d just come face to face with Jack the Ripper.”

She glared at him balefully.

“Before we put an end to this, perhaps you’ll tell me why you did it?”

“I told you before,” said the midwife. “I honor the commandments. They broke ’em all! They were all sinners, and God told me to rid the world of ’em!”

“Did God tell you to disembowel them, too?” asked Roosevelt. “Or was that your own idea?”

Suddenly a butcher knife appeared in her hand. She held it above her head, screamed something unintelligible, and leaped toward him. Roosevelt never flinched. He kept the pistol trained on her and pulled the trigger.

She fell backward, a new red blotch appearing on the front of her bloodstained dress.

She tried to get up, and he fired once more. This time she lay still.

My Dearest Edith:

Please destroy this letter after you have read it.

I have faked the symptoms of the malaria I contracted some years ago on a trip to the Everglades, and have been relieved of my unofficial duties here. I will be put aboard the next ship to America (quite possibly on a stretcher, if you can imagine that!) and within a very few days I will once again be able to hold you and the children in my arms. And I’m pleased to see that Harrison defeated that fool Garfield without my help.

My work here is done. I would have preferred to arrest the fiend, but I was given no choice in the matter. Jack the Ripper is no more.

If I make that fact public, two things will happen. First, I will probably be arrested for murder. Second (and actually more important, for no jury would convict me once they have heard my story), Whitechapel will remain a blight upon the face of England. Whereas a conversation I had a few days ago has convinced me that as long as the British authorities think the madman is still at large, they might do something positive about eradicating Whitechapel’s intolerable conditions. If that is so, then it may actually be serendipitous that only I (and now you) know that the Ripper is dead.

At least I hope that is the outcome. One would like to think that if one’s life didn’t count for much, at least one’s death did—and if Whitechapel can either be cleansed or razed to the ground, then perhaps, just perhaps, these five unfortunate women did not die totally in vain.

Your Theodore

Theodore Roosevelt returned to London 22 years later, in 1910, on the way home from the year-long safari that followed his Presidency.

Whitechapel remained unchanged.

FAST TIMES AT FAIRMONT HIGH

Vernor Vinge

Juan kept the little blue pills in an unseen corner of his bedroom. They really were tiny, the custom creation of a lab that saw no need for inert fillers, or handsome packaging. And Juan was pretty sure they were blue, except that as a matter of principle he tried not to look at them, even when he was off-line. Just one pill a week gave him the edge he needed. . . .

FINAL EXAM WEEK WAS ALWAYS CHAOS AT FAIRMONT JUNIOR HIGH. THE school’s motto was “Trying hard not to become obsolete”—and the kids figured that applied to the faculty more than anyone else. This semester they got through the first morning—Ms. Wilson’s math exam—without a hitch, but already in the afternoon the staff was tweaking things around: Principal Alcalde scheduled a physical assembly during what should have been student prep time.

Almost all the eighth grade was piled into the creaky wooden meeting hall. Once this place had been used for horse shows. Juan thought he could still smell something of that. Tiny windows looked out on the hills surrounding the campus. Sunlight spiked down through vents and skylights. In some ways, the room was weird even without enhancement.

Principal Alcalde marched in, looking as dire and driven as ever. He gestured to his audience, requesting visual consensus. In Juan’s eyes, the room lighting mellowed and the deepest shadows disappeared.

“Betcha the Alcalde is gonna call off the nakedness exam.” Bertie Todd was grinning the way he did when someone else had a problem. “I hear there are parents with Big Objections.”

“You got a bet,” said Juan. “You know how Mr. Alcalde is about nakedness.”

“Heh. True.” Bertie’s image slouched back in the chair next to Juan. Principal Alcalde was into a long speech, about the fast-changing world and the need for Fairmont to revolutionize itself from semester to semester. At the same time they must never forget the central role of modern education, which was to teach the kids how to learn, how to pose questions, how to be adaptable—all without losing their moral compass.

It was very old stuff. Juan listened with a small part of his attention; mostly, he was looking around the audience. This was a physical assembly, so almost everybody except Bertie Todd was really here. Bertie was remote from Chicago, one of the few commuter students. His parents paid a lot more for virtual enrollment, but Fairmont Schools did have a good reputation. Of the truly present—well, the fresh thirteen-year-old faces were mostly real. Mr. Alcalde’s consensus imagery didn’t allow cosmetics or faked clothes. And yet . . . such rules could not be perfectly enforced. Juan widened his vision, allowed deviations and defacements in the view. There couldn’t be too much of that or the Alcalde would have thrown a fit, but there were ghosts and graffiti floating around the room. The scaredy-cat ones flickered on-and-off in a fraction of a second, or were super-subtle perversions. But some of them—the two-headed phantom that danced behind the principal’s podium—lasted gloating seconds. Mr. Alcalde could probably see some of the japery, but his rule seemed to be that as long as the students didn’t appear to see the disrespect, then he wouldn’t either.

Okay, platitudes taken care of, Mr. Alcalde got down to business: “This morning, you did the math exam. Most of you have already received your grades. Ms. Wilson tells me that she’s pleased with your work; the results will make only small changes in the rest of this week’s schedule. Tomorrow morning will be the vocational exam.” Oh yeah. Be ready to learn something dull, but learn it very, very fast. Most kids hated that, but with the little blue pills, Juan knew he could whack it. “Soon you’ll begin the two concurrent exams. You’ll have the rest of finals week to work on them. I’ll make the details public later in this assembly. In general terms: There will be an unlimited exam, where you may use any legally available resources—”

“All right!” Bertie’s voice came softly in Juan’s ear. All across the hall similar sentiments were expressed, a kind of communal sigh.

Mr. Alcalde’s dark features creased in a rare smile. “That just means we expect something extraordinarily good from you.” To pass the exam, a team had to bring in three times tuition per team member. So even though they could use any help they could recruit, most students didn’t have the money to buy their way to a passing grade.

“The two concurrent exams will overlap the usual testing in visual communication, language, and unaided skills. Some of your parents have asked for more concurrency, but all the teachers feel that when you’re thirteen years old, it’s better to concentrate on doing a few things well. You’ll have plenty of time for jumble lore in the future. Your other concurrent exam will be—Miss Washington?”

Patsy Washington came to her feet, and Juan realized that she, like Bertie, was only present as imagery. Patsy was a San Diego student so she had no business being virtual at a physical assembly. Hmm. “Look,” she said. “Before you go on about these concurrent exams, I want to ask you about the naked skills test.”

Bertie gave Juan a grin. “This should be interesting.”

The Alcalde’s gaze was impassive. “The ‘unaided skills’ test, Miss Washington. There is nothing whatsoever naked about it.”

“It might as well be, mister.” Patsy was speaking in English now, and with none of the light mocking tone that made her a minor queen in her clique. It was her image and voice, but the words and body language were very un-Patsy. Juan probed the external network traffic. There was lots of it, but mostly simple query/response stuff, like you’d expect. A few sessions had been around for dozens of seconds; Bertie’s remote was one of the two oldest. The other belonged Patsy Washington—at least it was tagged with her personal certificate. Identity hijacking was a major no-no at Fairmont, but if a parent was behind it there wasn’t much the school could do. And Juan had met Patsy’s father. Maybe it was just as well the Alcalde didn’t have to talk to him in person. Patsy’s image leaned clumsily through the chair in front of her. “In fact,” she continued, “it’s worse than naked. All their lives, these—we—have had civilization around us. We’re damned good at using that civilization. Now you theory-minded intellectuals figure it would be nice to jerk it all away and put us at risk.”

“We are putting no one at risk . . . Miss Washington.” Mr. Alcalde was still speaking in Spanish. In fact, Spanish was the only language their principal had ever been heard to speak; the Alcalde was kind of a bizarre guy. “We at Fairmont consider unaided skills to be the ultimate fallback protection. We’re not Amish here, but we believe that every human being should be able to survive in reasonable environments—without networks, even without computers.”

“Next you’ll be teaching rock-chipping!” said Patsy.

The Alcalde ignored the interruption. “Our graduates must be capable of doing well in outages, even in disasters. If they can’t, we have not properly educated them!” He paused, glared all around the room. “But this is no survivalist school. We’re not dropping you into a jungle. Your unaided skills test will be at a safe location our faculty have chosen—perhaps an Amish town, perhaps an obsolete suburb. Either way, you’ll be doing good, in a safe environment. You may be surprised at the insights you get with such complete, old-fashioned simplicity.”

Patsy had crossed her arms and was glaring back at the Alcalde. “That’s nonsense, but okay. There’s still the question. Your school brochure brags modern skills, and these concurrent exams are supposed to demonstrate that you’ve delivered. So how can you call an exam concurrent, if part of the time your students are stripped of all technology? Huh?”

Mr. Alcalde stared at Patsy for a moment, his fingers tapping on the podium. Juan had the feeling that some intense discussion was going on between them. Patsy’s pa—assuming that’s who it was—had gone considerably beyond the limits of acceptable behavior. Finally, the principal shook his head. “You miss-take our use of the word ‘concurrent.’ We don’t mean that all team members work at the same time all the time, but simply that they multitask the exam in the midst of their other activities—just as people do with most real-world work nowadays.” He shrugged. “In any case, you are free to skip the final examinations, and take your transcript elsewhere.”

Patsy’s image gave a little nod and abruptly sat down, looking very embarrassed; evidently her pa had passed control back to her—now that he had used her image and made a fool of her. Geez.

Bertie looked faintly miffed, though Juan doubted this had anything to do with sympathy for Patsy.

After a moment, Mr. Alcalde continued, “Perhaps this is a good time to bring up the subject of body piercings and drugs.” He gave a long look all around. It seemed to Juan that his gaze hung an instant in his direction. Caray, he suspects about the pills! “As you know, all forms of body piercings are forbidden at Fairmont Schools. When you’re grown, you can decide for yourself—but while you are here, no piercings, not even ear—or eye-rings, are allowed. And internal piercings are grounds for immediate dismissal. Even if you are very frightened of the unaided skills test, do not try to fool us with implants or drugs.”

No one raised a question about this, but Juan could see the flicker of communications lasers glinting off dust in the air, muttered conversation and private imagery being exchanged. The Alcalde ignored it all. “Let me describe the second of the concurrent exams, and then you’ll be free to go. We call this exam a ‘local’ project: You may use your own computing resources and even a local network. However, your team members must work physically together. Remote presence is not allowed. External support—contact with the global net—is not permitted.”

“Damn,” said Bertie, totally dipped. “Of all the artificial, unworkable, idiotic—”

“So we can’t collaborate, Bertie.”

“We’ll see about that!” Bertie bounced to his feet and waved for recognition.

“Ah, Mr. Todd?”

“Yes, sir.” Bertie’s public voice was meek and agreeable. “As you know, I’m a commuter student. I have lots of friends here, people I know as well as anyone. But of course, almost none of that is face to face since I live in Chicago. How can we handle my situation? I’d really hate to be excused from this important part of the finals just because I lack a physical presence here in San Diego. I’d be happy to accept a limited link, and do my best even with that handicap.”

Mr. Alcalde nodded. “There will be no need, Mr. Todd. You are at a disadvantage, and we’ll take that into account. We’ve negotiated a collaboration with the Andersen Academy at Saint Charles. They will—”

Andersen Academy at Saint Charles? Oh, in Illinois, a short automobile drive for Bertie. The Andersen people had long experience with team projects . . . back into prehistory in fact, the twentieth century. In principle they were far superior to Fairmont, but their academy was really more like a senior high school. Their students were seventeen, eighteen years old. Poor Bertie.

Juan picked up the thread of Mr. Alcalde’s speech: “—They will be happy to accomodate you.” Glimmer of a smile. “In fact, I think they are very interested in learning what our better students can do.”

Bertie’s face twisted into a taut smile, and his image dropped back onto the chair beside Juan. He made no additional comment, not even privately to Juan. . . .

The rest of the assembly was mostly about changes in exam content, mainly caused by the current state of outside resources—experts and technologies—that the school was importing for the nonconcurrent exams. All of it could have been done without this assembly; the Alcalde just had this thing about face-to-face meetings. Juan filed away all the announcements and changes, and concentrated on the unhappy possibility that now loomed over his week: Bertie Todd had been his best friend for almost two semesters now. Mostly he was super fun and an amazing team partner. But sometimes he’d go into a tight-lipped rage, often about things that Juan had no control over. Like now. If this were one of Bertie’s Great Freeze Outs, he might not talk to Juan at all—for days.

THE EIGHTH-GRADE MOB BROKE OUT OF THE ASSEMBLY JUST BEFORE 4 PM, way past the end of the normal class day. The kids milled about on the lawn outside the meeting hall. It was so near the end of the semester. There was warm sunlight. Summer and the new movie-game season were just a few days off. But caray, there were still finals to get through and everyone knew that, too. So while they joked and gossiped and goofed around, they were also reading the exam changes and doing some heavy planning.

Juan tagged along behind Bertie Todd’s image as the other moved through the crowd. Bertie was dropping hints all around about the unlimited project he was planning. The communication link from Bertie to Juan was filled with cold silence, but he was being all charming toward kids who’d never helped him a tenth as much as Juan Orozco. Juan could hear part of what was going on; the other boys weren’t freezing him out. They thought Juan was part of the party. And most of them were more than pleased by Bertie’s interest. For no-holdsbarred collaboration, Bertram Todd was the best there was at Fairmont Junior High. Bertie was claiming high-level contacts, maybe with Intel’s idea farm, maybe with software co-ops in China. He had something for everyone, and a hint that they might score far more than a good grade.

Some of them even asked Juan for details. They just assumed that he was already part of Bertie’s scheme for the unlimited. Juan smiled weakly, and tried to seem knowing and secretive.

Bertie stopped at the corner of the lawn, where the junior high abutted the driveway and the elementary school. The eighth graders carefully kept off the little kids’ territory; you don’t mess with fifth graders.

Along the driveway, cars were pulling up for students. Down by the bikestand, others were departing on bikes and unicycles. Everyone seemed to be laughing and talking and planning.

At the corner of the lawn, Juan and Bertie were all alone for a moment. In fact, it was Juan all alone. For an instant, he considered turning off the consensus that made Bertie seem so visibly here. Caray, why not turn it all off: there. The sun was still bright and warm, the day still full of springtime. Bertie was gone, but there was still the other kids, mainly down by the bikestand. Of course, now the fancy towers of Fairmont School were the ordinary wood buildings of the old horse yard and the plascrete of the new school, all brown and gray against the tans and greens of the hills around.

But he hadn’t bothered to down the audio link, and out of the thin air, there was Bertie’s voice, finally acknowledging Juan’s existence. “So, have you decided who you’re gonna team with for the local project?”

The question shocked Juan into bringing back full imagery. Bertie had turned back to face him, and was grinning with good humor—a gaze that might have fooled anyone who didn’t really know him. “Look, Bertie, I’m really sorry you can’t be on a local team out here. Mr. Alcalde is a mutha for sticking you with the Andersen crowd. But—” Inspiration struck. “You could fly out here for the exam! See, you could stay at my house. We’d whack that local exam dead!” Suddenly a big problem was a great opportunity. If I can just sell Ma on this.

But Bertie dismissed the idea with an offhand wave. “Hey, don’t worry about it. I can put up with those Andersen guys. And in the meantime, I bet I can help you with the local exam.” His face took on a sly look. “You know what I got on Wilson’s math exam.”

“Y-yeah, an A. That’s great. You got all ten questions.”

Ten questions, most of them harder than the old Putnam exam problems had ever been. And in Ms. Wilson’s exam, you weren’t allowed to collaborate, or search beyond the classroom. Juan had gotten a C+, knocking down four of the questions. The little blue pills didn’t help much with pure math, but it was kind of neat how all Ms. Wilson’s talk about heuristics and symbol software finally paid off. Those problems would have stumped some of the smartest twentieth-century students, but with the right kind of practice and good software even an ordinary kid like Juan Orozco had a good chance of solving them. Two Fairmont students had cracked all ten problems.

Bertie’s grin broadened, a morph that stretched his face into a cartoonish leer. Juan knew that Bertie Todd was a dud at abstract problem solving. It was in getting the right answers out of other people that he was a star. “. . . Oh. You slipped out of isolation.” That wouldn’t be hard to do, considering that Bertie was already coming in from outside.

“I would never say that, Juan my boy. But if I did, and I didn’t get caught . . . wouldn’t that just prove that all this ‘isolated skills’ stuff is academic crap?”

“I-I guess,” said Juan. In some ways, Bertie had unusual notions about right and wrong. “But it would be more fun if you could just come out here to San Diego.”

Bertie’s smile faded a fraction; the Great Freeze Out could be reinstated in an instant.

Juan shrugged, and tried to pretend that his invitation had never been made. “Okay, but can I still be on your unlimited team?”

“Ah, let’s see how things work out. We’ve got at least twelve hours before the unlimited team selections have to be final, right? I think it’s more important that . . . you get yourself a good start on the local team exercise.”

Juan should have seen it coming. Bertie was Mister Quid Pro Quo, only sometimes it took a while to figure out what he was demanding. “So who you do you think I should be matching up with?” Hopefully, someone dumb enough that they wouldn’t guess Juan’s special edge. “The Rackhams are good, and we have complementary skills.”

Bertie looked judicious. “Don and Brad are okay, but you’ve read the grading spec. Part of your score in the local test depends on face-to-face cooperation with someone really different.” He made as though he was looking across the campus lawn.

Juan turned to follow his gaze. There was some kind of soccer variant being played beyond the assembly hall—senior high students who wouldn’t have finals for another two weeks. There were still a few clumps of junior high kids, probably planning for the locals. None of them were people Juan knew well. “Look over by the main entrance,” said Bertie. “I’m thinking you should break out of narrow thinking. I’m thinking you should ask Miriam Gu.”

Ay caray! “Gu?” Miss Stuckup Perfection.

“Yes, c’mon. See, she’s already noticed you.”

“But—” In fact, Gu and her friends were looking in their direction.

“Look, Juan, I’ve collaborated with all sorts—from Intel engineers in geriatric homes to full-time members of Pratchett belief circles. If I can do that, you—”

“But that’s all virtual. I can’t work face to face with—”

Bertie was already urging him across the lawn. “View it as a test of whether you belong on my unlimited team. Miri Gu doesn’t have your, ah, quickness with interfaces,” he looked significantly at Juan. “But I’ve been watching her. She maxed Ms. Wilson’s exam and I don’t think she cheated to do it. She’s a whiz at languages. Yes, she’s just as much of a snob as you think. Heh, even her friends don’t really like her. But she has no special reason to be hostile, Juan. After all, you’re no boyo. You’re a ‘well-socialized, career-oriented student,’ just the sort she knows she should like. And see, she’s walking this way.”

True enough, though Gu and company were walking even more slowly than Juan. “Yeah, and she’s not happy about it either. What’s going on?”

“Heh. See that little video-geek behind her? She dared Miri Gu to ask you.”

Juan was guessing now: “And you put her up to that, didn’t you?”

“Sure. But Annette—the video-geek—doesn’t know it was me. She and I collaborate a lot, but she thinks I’m some old lady in Armonk. . . . Annette likes to gossip a lot about us kids, and my ‘little old lady’ character plays along.” Bertie’s voice went high-pitched and quavery: “ ‘Oh, that sweet Orozco boy, I do think your friend Miriam would like him so.’ ”

Geez, Bertie!

They walked toward each other, step by painful step, until they were almost in arms’ reach. Juan had turned off all imagery for a moment. Shed of fantasy, they were pretty ordinary-looking kids: Annette the video-geek was short and pimply-faced, with hair that hadn’t seen a comb so far this month. Miriam Gu was about three inches taller than Juan. Too tall. Her skin was as dark as Juan’s, but with a golden undertone. Close-cut black hair framed a wide face and very symmetrical features. She wore an expensive, Epiphany-brand blouse. The high-rate laser ports were perfectly hidden in the embroidery. Rich kids had clothes like this, usually with broad gaming stripes. This blouse had no gaming stripes; it was light and simple and probably had more computing power than all the clothes Juan owned. You had to be sharp to wear a shirt like this properly.

Just now, Miri looked as though she was tasting something bad. You don’t like what you see either, huh? But Miri got in the first word: “Juan Orozco. People say you’re a clever kid, quick with interfaces.” She paused and gave a little shrug. “So, wanna collaborate on the local exam?”

Bertie pulled a monstrous face at her, and Juan realized that Bertie was sending only to him. “Okay,” said Bertie, “just be nice, Juan. Say how you were thinking she and you would make a team with grade points right from the start.”

The words caught in Juan’s throat. Miriam Gu was just too much. “Maybe,” he replied to her. “Depends on what you can bring to it. Talents? Ideas?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I have both. In particular, my project concept is a killer. It really could make Fairmont Schools ‘the rose of North County.’ ” That was the school board’s phrase. The Alcalde and the board wanted these local projects to show that Fairmont was a good neighbor, not like some of the schools in Downtown and El Cajon.

Juan shrugged. “Well, um, that’s good. We’d be the kind of highcontrast team the Alcalde likes.” I really don’t want to do this. “Let’s talk about it more some time.”

Annette the video-geek put in: “That won’t do at all! You need to team up soonest!” She flickered through various pop-culture images as she spoke, finally settled on the heroine student from Spielberg/ Rowling. She grabbed the background imagery at the same time, and Fairmont Schools was transformed into a fairytale castle. It was the same set they had used at last fall’s Hallowe’en pageant. Most of the parents had been enchanted, though as far as the kids were concerned, Fairmont Schools failed the fantasy test in one big way: here in real-life Southern California, the muggles ran the show.

Miriam turned to glare at her friend, now a brown-haired little English witch. “Will you shut down, Annette!” Then back to Juan: “But she’s right, Orozco. We gotta decide tonight. How about this: You come by my place at 6 PM tonight and we talk.”

Bertie was smiling with smug satisfaction.

“Well, yuh,” said Juan. “But . . . in person?”

“Of course. This is a local project.”

“Yeah, okay then. I’ll come over.” There must be some way out of this. What was Bertie up to?

She took a step forward and held out her hand. “Shake.”

He reached out and shook it. The little electric shock was surely his imagination, but the sudden burst of information was not: two emphatic sentences sparkling across his vision.

Miriam Gu and her friends turned away, and walked back along the driveway. There was the sound of muffled giggling. He watched them for a moment. The video-geek was going full-tilt, picture and sound from a million old movies and news stories. Annette could retrieve and arrange video archives so easily that imaging came as naturally to her as speech. Annette was a type of genius. Or maybe there are other flavors of little blue pills.

Dumboso. Juan turned away from them and started toward the bikestand.

“So what did Miri Gu tell you?” When she shook hands. Bertie’s tone was casual.

How could he answer that question without getting Bertie dipped all over again? “It’s strange. She said if she and I team, she doesn’t want anyone remote participating.”

“Sure, it is a local exam. Just show me the message.”

“That’s the strange part. She guessed that you were still hanging around. She said, in particular, if I show you the message or let you participate, she’ll find out and she’ll drop the exam, even if it means getting an F.” And in fact, that was the entire content of the message. It had a kind of nonnegotiable flavor that Juan envied.

They walked in silence the rest of the way to Juan’s bicycle. Bertie’s face was drawn down disapprovingly. Not a good sign. Juan hopped on his bike and pedaled off on New Pala, up over the ridge, and onto the long downslope toward home. Bertie’s image conjured up a flying carpet, clambered aboard and ghosted along beside him. It was nicely done, the shadow following perfectly along over the gravel of the road shoulder. Of course, Bertie’s faerie overlay blocked a good bit of Juan’s visual field, including the most natural line of sight to see real traffic. Why couldn’t he float along on Juan’s other shoulder, or just be a voice? Juan shifted the image toward transparency and hoped Bertie would not guess at the change.

“C’mon, Bertie. I did what you asked. Let’s talk about the unlimited exam. I’m sure I can be a help with that.” If you’ll just let me on the team.

Bertie was silent a second longer, considering. Then he nodded and gave an easy laugh. “Sure, Juan. We can use you on the unlimited team. You’ll be a big help.”

Suddenly the afternoon was a happy place.

They coasted down the steepening roadway. The wind that blew through Juan’s hair and over his arms was something that was impossible to do artificially, at least without gaming stripes. The whole of the valley was spread out before him now, hazy in the bright sun. It was almost two miles to the next rise, the run up to Fallbrook. And he was on Bertie’s unlimited team. “So what’s our unlimited project going to be, Bertie?”

“Heh. How do you like my flying carpet, Juan?” He flew a lazy loop around Juan. “What really makes it possible?”

Juan squinted at him. “My contact lenses? Smart clothes?” Certainly the lense displays would be useless without a wearable computer to do the graphics.

“That’s just the final output device. But how does my imaging get to you almost wherever you are?” He looked expectantly at Juan.

C’mon, Bertie! But aloud, Juan said: “Okay, that’s the worldwide network.”

“Yeah, you’re essentially right, though the long-haul networks have been around since forever. What gives us flexibility are the network nodes that are scattered all through the environment. See, look around you!” Bertie must have pinged on the sites nearest Juan: there were suddenly dozens of virtual gleams, in the rocks by the road, in the cars as they passed closest to him, on Juan’s own clothing.

Bertie gestured again, and the hills were alive with thousands of gleams, nodes that were two or three forwarding hops away. “Okay, Bertie! Yes, the local nets are important.”

But Bertie was on a roll. “Darn right they are. Thumb-sized gadgets with very low power wireless, just enough to establish location—and then even lower power short-range lasers, steered exactly on to the targeted receivers. Nowadays, it’s all so slick that unless you look close—or have a network sniffer—you almost can’t even see that it’s going on. How many free-standing nodes do you think there are in an improved part of town, Juan?”

That sort of question had a concrete answer. “Well, right now, the front lawn of Fairmont schools has . . . 247 loose ones.”

“Right,” said Bertie. “And what’s the most expensive thing about that?”

Juan laughed. “Cleaning up the network trash, of course!” The gadgets broke, or wore out, or they didn’t get enough light to keep their batteries going. They were cheap; setting out new ones was easy. But if that’s all you did, after a few months you’d have metallic garbage—hard, ugly, and generally toxic—all over the place.

Juan abruptly stopped laughing “Wow, Bertie. That’s the project? Biodegradable network nodes? That’s off-scale!”

“Yup! Any progress toward organic nodes would be worth an A. And we might luck out. I’m plugged into all the right groups. Kistler at MIT, he doesn’t know it, but one of his graduate students is actually a committee—and I’m on the committee.” The Kistler people were cutting edge in organic substitution research, but just now they were stalled. The other relevant pieces involved idea markets in India, and some Siberian guys who hardly talked to anyone.

Juan thought a moment. “Hey, Bertie, I bet that literature survey I did for you last month might really help on this!” Bertie looked blank. “You remember, all my analysis on electron transfer during organic decay.” It had been just a silly puzzle Bertie proposed, but it had given Juan a low-stress way to try out his new abilities.

“Yes!” said Bertie, slapping his forehead. “Of course! It’s not directly related, but it might give the other guys some ideas.”

Talking over the details took them through the bottom of the valley, past the newer subdivisions and then down the offramp that led to the old casinos. Bertie and his flying carpet flickered for a second, and then the overlay vanished as his friend lost the battle to find a handoff link.

“Dunno why you have to live in an unimproved part of town,” Bertie grumbled in his ear.

Juan shrugged. “The neighborhood has fixed lasers and wireless.” Actually, it was kind of nice to lose the flying carpet. He let his bike’s recycler boost him up the little hill and then off into Las Mesitas. “So how are we going to work the concurrency on the unlimited test?”

“Easy. I’ll chat up the Siberians in a couple of hours—then shuffle that across to my other groups. I don’t know how fast things will break; it may be just you and me on the Fairmont side. Synch up with me after you get done with Miri Gu tonight, and we’ll see about using your ‘magical memory.’ ”

Juan frowned and pedaled fast along white sidewalks and turn-of-the-century condos. His part of town was old enough that it looked glitzy even without virtual enhancements.

Bertie seemed to notice his lack of response. “So is there a problem?”

Yes! He didn’t like Bertie’s unsubtle reference to what the little blue pills did for him. But that was just Bertie’s way. In fact, today was all Bertie’s way, both the good and the bad of it. “It’s just that I’m a little worried about the local test. I know Miri gets good grades, and you say she is smart, but does she really have any traction?” What he really wanted to ask was why Bertie had pushed him into this, but he knew that any sort of direct question along those lines might provoke a Freeze Out.

“Don’t worry, Juan. She’d do good work on any team. I’ve been watching her.”

That last was news to Juan. Aloud he said, “I know she has a stupid brother over in senior high.”

“Heh! William the Goofus? He is a dud, but he’s not really her brother, either. No, Miri Gu is smart and tough. Did you know she grew up at Asilomar?”

“In a detention camp?”

“Yup. Well, she was only a baby. But her parents knew just a bit too much.”

That had happened to lots of Chinese-Americans during the war, the ones who knew the most about military technologies. But it was also ancient history. Bertie was being more shocking than informative.

“Well, okay.” No point in pushing. At least, Bertie let me on his unlimited team.

Almost home. Juan coasted down a short street and up his driveway, ducking under the creaking garage door that was just opening for him. “I’ll get over to Miri’s this evening and start the local team stuff while you’re in East Asia.”

“Fine. Fine,” said Bertie.

Juan leaned his bike against the family junk, and walked to the back of the garage. He stopped at the door to the kitchen. Bertie had gotten every single thing he had wanted. Maybe not. I bet he still plans on messing with my local exam. “But one thing. Miri’s handshake—she was real definite, Bertie. She doesn’t want you coming along, even passively. Okay?”

“Sure. Fine. I’m off to Asia. Ta!” Bertie’s voice ended with an exaggerated click.

JUAN’S FATHER WAS HOME, OF COURSE. LUIS OROZCO WAS PUTTERING around the kitchen. He gave his son a vague wave as the boy came in the room. The house had a good internal network, fed from a fixed station in the roof. Juan ignored the fantasy images almost automatically. He had no special interest in knowing what Pa was seeing, or where he thought he was.

Juan eeled past his father, into the living room. Pa was okay. Luis Orozco’s own father had been an illegal back in the 1980s. Grandpa had lived in North County, but in the cardboard shacks and dirt tunnels that had hid amid the canyons in those days. The Orozco grandparents had worked hard for their only son, and Luis Orozco had worked hard to learn to be a software engineer. Sometimes, when he came down to earth, Pa would laugh and say he was one of the world’s greatest experts in Regna 5. And maybe for a year or two that had been an employable skill. So three years of education had been spent for a couple years of income. That sort of thing had happened to a lot of people; Pa was one of those who just gave up because of it.

“Ma, can you talk?” Part of the wall and ceiling went transparent. Isabel Orozco was at work, upstairs. She looked down at him curiously.

“Hey, Juan! I thought you were going to be at finals until very late.”

Juan bounced up the stairs, talking all the while. “Yes. I have a lot to do.”

“Ah, so you’ll be working from here.”

Juan came into her work room and gave her a quick hug. “No, I was just gonna get supper and then visit the student I’m doing the local project with.”

She was looking right at him now, and he could tell he had her full attention. “I just saw about the local exam; it seems like a great idea.” Ma thought it was so important to get down on the real ground. When Juan was younger, she always dragged him along when she went on her field trips around the county.

“Oh, yes,” said Juan. “We’ll learn a lot.”

Her look sharpened. “And Bertram is not in this, correct?”

“Um. No, Ma.” No need to mention the unlimited exam.

“He’s not here in the house, is he?”

“Ma! Of course not.” Juan denied all snoop access to his friends when he was in the house. Mother knew that. “When he’s here, you see him, just like when my other friends visit.”

“Okay.” She looked a little embarrassed, but at least she didn’t repeat her opinion that “little Bertie is too slippery by half.” Her attention drifted for a moment, and her fingers tapped a quick tattoo on the table top. He could see that she was off in Borrego Springs, shepherding some cinema people from LA.

“Anyway, I was wondering if I could take a car tonight. My teammate lives up in Fallbrook.”

“Just a second.” She finished the job she was working on. “Okay, who is your teammate?”

“A really good student.” He showed her.

Ma grinned uncertainly, a little surprised. “Good for you. . . . Yes, she is an excellent student, strong where you are weak—and vice versa, of course.” She paused, checking out the Gus. “They are a private sort of family, but that’s okay.”

“And it’s a safe part of town.”

She chuckled. “Yes, very safe.” She respected the school rules and didn’t ask about the team project. That was just as well, since Juan still had no idea what Miri Gu was planning. “But you stay out of Camp Pendleton, hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Okay, you’re cleared to go as soon as you have supper. I’ve got some big-money customers running, so I can’t take a break just now. Go on downstairs and get your father and yourself something to eat. And learn something from this local project, huh? There are many careers you can have without knowing airy-fairy nonsense.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned and patted her shoulder. Then he was running down the stairs. After Pa’s programming career had crashed, Mother had worked harder and harder at her 411 information services. By now, she knew San Diego County and its data as well as anyone in the world. Most of her jobs were just a few seconds or a few minutes long, guiding people, answering the hard questions. Some jobs—like the Migración historical stuff—were ongoing. Ma made a big point that her work was really hundreds of little careers, and that almost none of them depended on high-tech fads. Juan could do much worse; that was her message, both spoken and unspoken.

And looking at Pa across the kitchen table, Juan understood the alternative that his mother had in mind; Juan had understood that since he was six years old. Luis Orozco ate in the absent-minded way of a truly hard worker, but the images that floated around the room were just passive soaps. Later in the night he might spend money on active cinema, but even that would be nothing with traction. Pa was always in the past or on another world. So Ma was afraid that Juan would end up the same way. But I won’t. Whatever the best is, I’ll learn it, and learn it in days, not years. And when that best is suddenly obsolete, I’ll learn whatever new thing gets thrown at me.

Ma worked hard and she was a wonderful person, but her 411 business was . . . such a dead end. Maybe God was kind to her that she never realized this. Certainly Juan could never break her heart by telling her such a thing. But the local world sucked. San Diego County, despite all its history and industry and universities, was just a microscopic speck compared to the world of people and ideas that swirled around them every minute. Once upon a time, Juan’s father had wanted to be part of that wider world, but he hadn’t been fast enough or adaptable enough. It will be different for me. The little blue pills would the difference. The price might be high; sometimes Juan’s mind went so blank he couldn’t remember his own name. It was a kind of seizure, but in a moment or two it always went away. Always. So far. With custom street drugs you could never be absolutely sure of such things.

Juan had one jaw-clenched resolve: I will be adaptable. He would not fail as his father had failed.

JUAN HAD THE CAR DROP HIM OFF A COUPLE OF BLOCKS SHORT OF THE Gus’ house. He told himself he did this so he could get a feel for the neighborhood; after all, it was not a very public place. But that wasn’t the real reason. In fact, the drive had been just too quick. He wasn’t ready to face his local teammate.

West Fallbrook wasn’t super-wealthy, but it was richer and more modern than Las Mesitas. Most of its money came from the fact that it was right next to Camp Pendleton’s east entrance. Juan walked through the late afternoon light, looking in all directions. There were a few people out—a jogger, some little kids playing an inscrutable game.

With all enhancements turned off, the houses were low and stonylooking, set well back from the street. Some of the yards were beautifully kept, succulents and dwarf pines arranged like large-scale bonsai. Others were workaday neat, with shade trees and lawns that were raked gravel or auto-mowed drygrass.

Juan turned on consensus imagery. No surprise, the street was heavily prepped. The augmented landscape was pretty, in an understated way: the afternoon sunlight sparkled off fountains and lush grass lawns. Now the low, stony houses were all windows and airy patios, some places in bright sunlight, others half-hidden in shadows. But there were no public sensors. There was no advertising and no graffiti. The neighborhood was so perfectly consistent, a single huge work of art. Juan felt a little shiver. In most parts of San Diego, you could find homeowners who’d opt out of the community image—or else demand to be included, but in some grotesque contradiction of their neighbors. West Fallbrook had tighter control than even most condo communities. You had the feeling that some single interest was watching over everything here, ready to act against intruders. In fact, that single interest went by the initials USMC.

Above him, his guide arrow had brightened. Now it turned onto a side street and swooped to the third house on the right. Caray. He wanted to slow down, maybe walk around the block. I haven’t even figured out how to talk to her parents. Chinese-American grown-ups were an odd lot, especially the ones who had been Detained. When they were released, some of them had left the USA, gone to Mexico or Canada or Europe. Most of the others just went back to their lives—even to government jobs—but with varying degrees of bitterness. And some had helped finish the war, and made the government look very foolish in the process.

He walked up the Gus’ driveway, at the same time snooping one last time for information on Miri’s family. . . . So, if William the Goofus wasn’t really Miri’s brother, who was he? William had never attracted that much attention; there were no ready-made rumors. And Fairmont’s security on student records was pretty strong. Juan poked around, found some good public camera data. Given a few minutes he’d have William all figured out—

But now he was standing at the Gus’ front door.

MIRIAM GU WAS AT THE ENTRANCE. FOR A MOMENT JUAN THOUGHT SHE WAS going to complain that he was late, but she just waved him inward.

Past the doorway, the street imagery cut off abruptly. They were standing in a narrow hallway with closed doors at both ends. Miri paused at the inner door, watching him.

There were little popping noises, and Juan felt something burn his ankle. “Hey, don’t fry my gear!” He had other clothes, but the Orozco family wasn’t rich enough to waste them.

Miri stared at him. “You didn’t know?”

“Know what?”

“That’s not your equipment I trashed; I was very careful. You were carrying hitchhikers.” She opened the inner door and her gestures were suddenly polite and gracious. There must be grown-ups watching.

As he followed her down the hall, Juan rebooted his wearable. The walls became prettier, covered with silk hangings. He saw he had visitor privileges in the Gus’ house system, but he couldn’t find any other communications paths out of the building. All his equipment was working fine, including the little extras like 360 peripheral vision and good hearing. So what about those popping sounds, the heat? That was somebody else’s equipment. Juan had been walking round like a fool with a KICK ME sign on his back. In fact, it was worse than that. He remembered assuring his mother that she would see any friends he brought to the house. Somebody had made that a lie. Fairmont had its share of unfunny jokesters, but this was gross. Who would do such a thing . . . yeah, who indeed.

Juan stepped from the hallway into a high-ceilinged living room. Standing by a real fireplace was a chunky Asian with buzzcut hair. Juan recognized the face from one of the few pictures he had of the guy. This was William Gu: Miriam’s father, not the Goofus. Apparently the two had the same first name.

Miriam danced ahead of him. She was smiling now. “Bill, I’d like you to meet Juan Orozco. Juan and I are doing the local project together. Juan, this is my father.”

Bill? Juan couldn’t imagine addressing his own Pa by his first name. These people were strange.

“Pleased to meet you, Juan.” Gu’s handshake was firm, his expression mild and unreadable. “Are you enjoying the final exams so far?”

Enjoying?? “Yes, sir.”

Miri had already turned away. “Alice? Do you have a minute? I’d like you to meet—”

A woman’s voice: “Yes, dear. Just a moment.” Not more than two seconds passed, and a lady with a pleasant round face stepped into the room. Juan recognized her, too . . . except for the clothes: this evening, Alice Gu wore the uniform of a timeshare Lieutenant Colonel in the United State Marines. As Miri made the introductions, Juan noticed Mr. Gu’s fingers tapping on his belt.

“Oops. Sorry!” Alice Gu’s Marine Corps uniform was abruptly replaced by a business suit. “Oh, dear.” And the business suit morphed into the matronly dress that Juan remembered from the photos. When she shook his hand, she looked entirely innocent and motherly. “I hear that you and Miriam have a very interesting local project.”

“I hope so.” Mainly I hope Miriam will get around to telling me what it is. But he no longer doubted that Miriam Gu had traction.

“We’d really like to know more about it.”

Miri pulled a face. “Bill! You know we’re not supposed to talk about it. Besides, if it goes right we’ll be all done with it tonight.”

Huh?

But Mr. Gu was looking at Juan. “I know the school rules. I wouldn’t dream of breaking them.” Almost a smile. “But I think as parents we should at least know where you plan to be physically. If I understand the local exam, you can’t do it remotely.”

“Yes, sir,” said Juan. “That is true. We—”

Miriam picked up smoothly where Juan had run out of words. “We’re just going down to Torrey Pines Park.”

Col. Gu tapped at her belt, and was quiet for a moment: “Well, that looks safe.”

Mr. Gu nodded. “But you’re supposed to do the local project without outside connectivity—”

“Except if an emergency comes up.”

Mr. Gu just tapped his fingers thoughtfully. Juan turned off all the house imagery, and zoomed in on Miriam’s pa. The guy was dressed casually, but with better clothes sense than most grown-ups had. In the house enhancement, he looked soft and sort of heavy. In the plain view, he just looked hard and solid. Come to think of it, the edge of his hand had felt calloused, just like in the movies.

Col. Gu glanced at her husband, nodded slightly at him. She turned back to Juan and Miri. “I think it will be okay,” she said. “But we do ask a couple things of you.”

“Nothing against the exam rules,” said Miri.

“I don’t think so. First, since the park has no infrastructure and doesn’t allow visitors to put up camping networks, please take some of the old standalone gear we have in the basement.”

“Hey, that’s great, Alice! I was going to ask you about that.”

Juan could hear someone coming down the stairs behind him. He looked without turning, but there was no one visible yet, and his visitor’s privilege did not allow him to see through walls.

“And second,” Col. Gu continued, “we think William should go along with you.”

Miri’s father? No . . . the Goofus. Ugh.

This time, Miri Gu did not debate. She nodded, and said softly. “Well . . . if you think that is best.”

Juan spoke without thinking, “But . . .” then more diffidently: “But wouldn’t that violate the exam rules?”

The voice came from behind him. “No. Read the rules, Orozco.” It was William.

Juan turned to acknowledge the other. “You mean, you won’t be a team member?”

“Yeah, I’d just be your escort.” The Goofus had the same broad features, the same coloring as the rest of the family. He was almost as tall as Bill Gu, but scrawny. His face had a sweaty sheen like maybe—Oh. Suddenly Juan realized that while Bill and William were father and son, it was not in the order he had thought.

“It’s really your call, Dad,” said Mr. Gu.

William nodded. “I don’t mind.” He smiled. “The munchkin has been telling me how strange things are in junior high school. Now I’ll get to see what she means.”

Miri Gu’s smile was a little weak. “Well, we’d be happy to have you come along. Juan and I want to look at Alice’s gear, but we should be ready in half an hour or so.”

“I’ll be around.” William gave a twitchy wave and left the room.

“Alice and I will let you make your plans now,” Mr. Gu said. He nodded at Juan. “It was nice to meet you, Juan.”

Juan mumbled appropriate niceties to Mr. and Col. Gu, and allowed Miri to maneuver him out of the room and down a steep stairway.

“Huh,” he said, looking over her shoulder, “you really do have a basement.” It wasn’t what Juan really wanted to say; he’d get to that in a minute.

“Oh, yeah. All the newer homes in West Fallbrook do.”

Juan noticed that this fact didn’t show up in the county building permits.

There was a brightly lit room at the bottom of the stairs. The enhanced view was of warm redwood paneling with an impossibly high ceiling. Unenhanced, the walls and ceiling were gray plastic sheeting. Either way, the room was crowded with cardboard boxes filled with old children’s games, sports equipment, and unidentifiable junk. This might be one of the few basements in Southern California, but it was clearly being used the way Juan’s family used the garage.

“It’s great we can take the surplus sensor gear. The only problem will be the stale emrebs—” Miri was already rummaging around in the boxes.

Juan hung back at the doorway. He stood with his arms crossed and glared at the girl.

She looked at him and some of the animation left her face. “What?”

“I’ll tell you ‘what’!” The words popped out, sarcastic and loud. He bit down on his anger, and messaged her point-to-point. “I’ll tell you what. I came over here tonight because you were going to propose a local team project.”

Miri shrugged. “Sure.” She replied out loud, speaking in a normal voice. “But if we hustle, we can nail the whole project tonight! It will be one less background task—”

Still talking silently, directly: “Hey! This is supposed to be a team project! You’re just pushing me around.”

Now Miri was frowning. She jabbed a finger in his direction and continued speaking out loud, “Look. I’ve got a great idea for the local exam. You’re ideal for the second seat on it. You and me are about as far apart in background and outlook as anybody in eighth grade. They like that in a team. But that’s all I need you for, just to hold down the second seat. You won’t have to do anything but tag along.”

Juan didn’t reply for a second. “I’m not your doormat.”

“Why not? You’re Bertie Todd’s doormat.”

“I’m gone.” Juan turned for the stairs. But now the stairwell was dark. He stumbled on the first step, but then Miri Gu caught up with him, and the lights came on. “Just a minute. I shouldn’t have said that. But one way or another, we both gotta get through finals week.”

Yeah. And by now, most of the local teams were probably already formed. Even more, they probably were into project planning. If he couldn’t make this work, Juan might have to kiss off the local test entirely. Doormat! “Okay,” Juan said, walking back into the basement room. “But I want to know all about your ‘proposed project,’ and I want some say in it.”

“Yes. Of course.” She took a deep breath, and he got ready for still more random noise. “Let’s sit down. . . . Okay. You already know I want to go down on the ground to Torrey Pines Park.”

“Yeah.” In fact, he had been reading up on the park ever since she mentioned it to her parents. “I’ve also noticed that there are no recent rumorings hanging over the place. . . . If you know something’s going on there, I guess you’d have an edge.”

She smiled in a way that seemed more pleased than smug. “That’s what I figure, too. By the way, it’s okay to talk out loud, Juan, even to argue. As long as we keep our voices down, Bill and Alice are not going to hear. Sort of a family honor thing.” She saw his skeptical look, and her voice sharpened a little bit. “Hey, if they wanted to snoop, your point-to-point comm wouldn’t be any protection at all. They’ve never said so, but I bet that inside the house, my parents could even eavesdrop on a handshake.”

“Okay,” Juan resumed speaking out loud. “I just want some straight answers. What is it that you’ve noticed at Torrey Pines?”

“Little things, but they add up. Here’s the days the park rangers kept it closed this spring. Here’s the weather for the same period. They’ve got no convincing explanation for all those closures. And see how during the closure in January, they still admitted certain tourists from Cold Spring Harbor.”

Juan watched the stats and pictures play across the space between them. “Yes, yes, . . . yes. But the tourists were mainly vips attending a physicality conference at UCSD.”

“But the conference itself was scheduled with less than eighteen hours lead time.”

“So? ‘Scientists must be adaptable in these modern times.’ ”

“Not like this. I’ve read the meeting proceedings. It’s very weak stuff. In fact, that’s what got me interested.” She leaned forward. “Digging around, I discovered that the meeting was just a prop—paid for by Foxwarner and gameHappenings.”

Juan looked at the abstracts. It would be really nice to talk to Bertie about this; he always had opinions or knew who to ask. Juan had to suppress the urge to call-out to him. “Well, I guess. I, um, I thought the UCSD people were more professional than this.” He was just puffing vapor. “You figure this is all a publicity conspiracy?”

“Yup. And just in time for the summer movie season. Think how quiet the major studios have been this spring. No mysteries. No scandals. Nothing obvious started on April First. They’ve fully faked out the second-tier studios, but they’re also driving the small players nuts, because we know that Foxwarner, Spielberg/Rowling, Sony—all the majors—must be going after each other even harder than last year. About a week ago, I figured out that Foxwarner has cinema fellowship agreements with Marco Feretti and Charles Voss.” Who? Oh. World-class biotech guys at Cold Spring Harbor. Both had been at the UCSD conference. “I’ve been tracking them hard ever since. Once you guess what to look for, it’s hard for a secret to hide.”

And movie teasers were secrets that wanted to be found out.

“Anyway,” Miri continued, “I think Foxwarner is pinning their summer season on some bioscience fantasy. And last year, gameHappenings turned most of Brazil inside out.”

“Yeah, the Dinosauria sites.” For almost two months, the world had haunted Brazilian towns and Brazil-oriented websites, building up the evidence for their “Invasion from the Cretaceous.” The echoes of that were still floating around, a secondary reality that absorbed the creative attention of millions. Over the last twenty years, the worldwide net had come to be a midden of bogus sites and recursive fraudulence. Until the copyrights ran out, and often for years afterwards, a movie’s on-line presence would grow and grow, becoming more elaborate and consistent than serious databases. Telling truth from fantasy was often the hardest thing about using the web. The standard joke was that if real “space monsters” should ever visit Earth, they would take one look at the nightmares documented on the worldwide net and flee screaming back to their home planet.

Juan looked at Miri’s evidence and followed some of the major links. “You make a good case that this summer is going to be interesting, but the movie people have all cislunar space to play with. What’s to think a Summer Movie will break out in San Diego County, much less at Torrey Pines Park?”

“They’ve actually started the initial sequence. You know, what will attract hardcore early participants. The last few weeks there have been little environment changes in the park, unusual animal movements.”

The evidence was very frail. Torrey Pines Park was unimproved land. There was no local networking. But maybe that was the point. Miri had rented time on tourist viewpoints in Del Mar Heights, and then she had done a lot of analysis. So maybe she had that most unlikely and precious commodity, early warning. Or maybe she was puffing vapor. “Okay, something is going on in Torrey Pines, and you have an inside track on it. There’s still only the vaguest connection with the movie people.”

“There’s more. Last night my theory moved from ‘tenuous’ to ‘plausible,’ maybe even ‘compelling.’ I learned that Foxwarner has brought an advance team to San Diego.”

“But that’s way out at Borrego Springs, in the desert.”

“How did you know? I really had to dig for that.”

“My mother, she’s doing 411 work for them.” Oops. Come to think of it, what he had seen of Ma’s work this afternoon was probably privileged.

Miri was watching him with genuine interest. “She’s working with them? That’s great! Knowing the connection would put us way ahead. If you could ask your mother . . .?”

“I dunno.” Juan leaned back and looked at the schedule his mother had posted at home. All her desert work was under a ten-day embargo. Even that much information would not have been visible to outsiders. He checked out the privilege certificates. Juan knew his mother pretty well. He could probably guess how she had encrypted the details. And maybe get some solid corroboration. He really wanted to pass this exam, but . . . Juan hunched forward a little. “I’m sorry. It’s under seal.”

“Oh.” Miri watched him speculatively. Being the first to discover a Foxwarner movie setup, a Summer Movie, would give Fairmont the inside track on story participation. It would be a sure-fire A in the exam; the size of such a win wouldn’t be clear until well into the movie season, but there would be some income for at least the five years of the movie’s copyright.

If this issue had come up with Bertie Todd, there’d now be intense pleadings for him to think of his future and the team and do what his ma would certainly want him to do if she only knew, namely break into her data space. But after a moment, the girl just nodded. “That’s okay, Juan. It’s good to have respect.”

She moved back to the boxes and began rummaging again. “Let’s go with what I’ve already got, namely that Foxwarner is running an operation in San Diego, and some of their Cinema Fellows have been fooling around in Torrey Pines Park.” She pulled out a rack of . . . they looked like milk cartons, and set them on top of another box. “Emrebs,” she explained opaquely. She reached deeper into the open box and retrieved a pair of massive plastic goggles. For a moment he thought this was scuba gear, but they wouldn’t cover the nose or mouth. They didn’t respond to info pings; he searched on their physical appearance.

“In any case,” she continued, even as she pulled out two more pairs of goggles, “the background research will fit with my unlimited team’s work. We’re trying to scope out the movie season’s big secrets. So far, we’re not focusing on San Diego, but Annette reached some of the same conclusions about Foxwarner that I did. You wanna be on my unlimited, too? If this works tonight, we can combine the results.”

Oh. That was really quite a generous offer. Juan didn’t answer immediately. He pretended to be fully distracted by all the strange equipment. In fact, he recognized the gadgets now; there was a good match in the 2005 Jane’s Sensors. But he couldn’t find a user’s manual. He picked up the first pair of goggles and turned it this way and that. The surface of the plastic was a passive optical lacquer, like cheap grocery wrap in reverse; instead of reflecting bright rainbow colors, the colors flowed as he turned it, always blending with the true color of the gray plastic walls behind it. It amounted to crude camo-color, pretty useless in an environment this smart. Finally, he replied, kind of incidentally, “I can’t be on your unlimited team. I’m already on Bertie’s. Maybe it doesn’t matter. You know Annette’s working with Bertie on the side.”

“Oh really?” Her stare locked on him for a moment. Then, “I should have guessed; Annette is just not that bright by herself. So Bertie has been jerking all of us around.”

Yeah. Juan shrugged and lowered his head. “So how do these goggles work, anyway?”

Miri seemed to stew over Annette for a few seconds more. Then she shrugged too. “Remember, this equipment is old.” She held up her pair of goggles and showed him some slide controls in the headstrap. “There’s even a physical ‘on’ button, right here.”

“Okay.” Juan slipped the goggles over his head and pulled the strap tight. The headset must have weighed two or three ounces. It was an awkward lump compared to contact lenses. Watching himself from the outside, he looked fully bizarre. The whole top of his face was a bulbous, gray-brown tumor. He could see Miriam was trying not to laugh. “Okay, let’s see what it can do.” He pressed the “on” button.

Nothing. His enhanced view was the same as before. But when he cleared his contact lenses and looked out with his naked eyes—“It’s pitch dark from inside, can’t see a thing.”

“Oh!” Miri sounded a little embarrassed. “Sorry. Take off your goggles for a minute. We need an emreb.” She picked up one of the heavy-looking “milk cartons.”

“Meaning?”

“MRE/B.” She spelled the word.

“Oh.” Meal Ready to Eat, with Battery.

“Yes, one of the little pluses of military life.” She twisted it in the middle, and the carton split in two. “The top half is food for the Marine, and the bottom half is power for the Marine’s equipment.” There were letters physically stenciled on the food container: something about chicken with gravy, and dehydrated ice cream. “I tried eating one of these once.” She made a face. “Fortunately, that won’t be necessary tonight.”

She picked up the bottom half of the emreb, and drew out a fine wire. “This is a weak point in my planning. These batteries are way stale.”

“The goggles may be dead anyway.” Juan’s own clothes often wore out before he outgrew them. Sometimes a few launderings was enough to zap them.

“Oh, no. They built this milspec junk to be tough.” Miri set down the battery pack and bent Juan’s goggles into a single handful. “Watch this.” She wound up like a softball pitcher and threw the goggles into the wall.

The gear smashed upwards into the wall and caromed loudly off the ceiling.

Miriam ran across the room to pick up what was left.

Col. Gu’s voice wafted down the stairwell. “Hey! What are you kids doing down there?”

Miri stood up and giggled behind her hand. Suddenly she looked about ten years old. “It’s okay, Alice!” She shouted back. “I just, um, dropped something.”

“On the ceiling?”

“Sorry! I’ll be more careful.”

She walked back to Juan and handed him the goggles. “See,” she said. “Hardly a scratch. Now we supply power”—she plugged the wire from the battery into the goggles’ headband—“and you try them again.”

He slid the goggles over his eyes and pressed “on.” Monochrome reds wavered for a moment, and then he was looking at a strange, grainy scene. The view was not wraparound, just slightly fisheye. In it, Miri’s face loomed large, peering in at him. Her skin was the color of a hot oven, and her eyes and mouth glowed bluish-white.

“This looks like thermal infrared,” except that the color scheme wasn’t standard.

“Yup. That’s the default startup. Notice how the optics are built right into the gear? It’s kind of like camping clothes: you don’t have to depend on a local network. That’s going to be a win when we get to Torrey Pines. Try some other sensors; you can get help by sliding the ‘on’ button.”

“Hey, yes!”

The tiny menu floated in the corner of his right eye’s view. The battery warning was blinking. He fiddled with his headband and found a pointing device. “Okay, now I’m seeing in full color, normal light. Boogers resolution, though.” Juan turned around and then back to Miri. He laughed. “The menu window is fully bizarre, you know. It just hangs there at the edge of my view. How can I tag it to the wall or a fixed object?”

“You can’t. I told you this gear is old. It can’t orient worth zip. And even if it could, its little pea-brain isn’t fast enough to do image slews.”

“Huh.” Juan knew about obsolete systems, but he didn’t use them much. With equipment like this, there could be no faerie overlays. Even ordinary things like interior decoration would all have to be real.

There were lots of boxes, but no inventory data. Some of them must have belonged to the Goofus; they had handwritten labels, like “Prof. and Mrs. William Gu, Dept of English, UC Davis” and “William Gu Sr., Rainbow’s End, Irvine, CA.” Miri carefully moved these out of the way. “Someday William will know what do to with all this. Or maybe Grandmother will change her mind, and come visit us again.”

They opened more of the USMC boxes and poked around. There were wild equipment vests, more pockets than you ever saw around school. The vests weren’t documented anywhere. The pockets were for ammunition, Juan speculated. For emrebs, Miri claimed; and they might need a lot of the batteries tonight, since even the best of them tested “WARNING: LOW CHARGE.” They dismembered the emrebs and loaded batteries onto two of the smallest vests. There were also beltmount keypads for the equipment. “Hah. Before this is over, we’ll be wiggling our fingers like grown-ups.”

They were down to the last few boxes. Miri tore open the first. It was filled with dozens of camo-colored egg shapes. Each of them sprouted a triple of short antenna spikes. “Feh. Network nodes. A million times worse than what we have, and just as illegal to use in Torrey Pines Park.”

Miri pushed aside several boxes that were stenciled with the same product code as the network nodes. Behind them was one last box, bigger than the others. Miri opened it . . . and stood back with exaggerated satisfaction. “Ah so. I was hoping Bill hadn’t thrown these out.” She pulled out something with a stubby barrel and a pistol grip.

“A gun!” But it didn’t match anything in Jane’s Small Arms.

“Nah, look under ‘sensor systems.’ ” She grabbed a loose battery and snugged it under the barrel. “Even point-blank, I bet this couldn’t hurt a fly. It’s an all-purpose active probe. Ground penetrating radar and sonography. Surface reflection x ray. Gated laser. We couldn’t get this at a sporting goods store. It’s just too perfect for offensive snooping.”

“. . . It’s got attachments, too.”

Miri peered into the box and retrieved a metal rod with a flared end. “Yeah, that’s for the radar; it fits on right here. Supposedly it’s great for scoping out tunnels.” She noticed Juan’s eyeing this latest find and smiled teasingly. “Boys . . .! There’s another one in the box. Help yourself. Just don’t try it out here. It would set off alarms big time.”

In a few minutes they were both loaded down with batteries, plugged into the probe equipment, and staring at each other through their goggles. They both started laughing. “You look like a monster insect!” she said. In the infra-red, the goggles were big, black bugeyes, and the equipment vests looked like chitinous armor, glowing brightly where there was an active battery.

Juan waved his probe gun in the air. “Yeah. Killer insects.” Hmm. “You know, we look so bizarre . . . I bet if we find Foxwarner down in Torrey Pines, we might end up in the show.” That sort of thing happened, but most consumer participation was in the form of contributed content and plot ideas.

Miri laughed. “I told you this was a good project.”

MIRI CALLED A CAR TO TAKE THEM TO TORREY PINES. THEY CLUMPED UP THE stairs and found Mr. Gu standing with William the Goofus. Mr. Gu looked like he was trying to hide a smile. “You two look charming.” He glanced at William. “Are you ready to go?”

William might have been smiling, too. “Any time, Bill.”

Mr. Gu walked the three of them to the front door. Miri’s car was already pulling up. The sun had slipped behind a climbing wall of coastal fog, and the afternoon was cooling off.

They pulled their goggles off and walked down the lawn, Juan in front. Behind him, Miri walked hand in hand with William. Miriam Gu was respectful of her parents, but flippant too. With her grandfather it was different, though Juan couldn’t tell if her look up at William was trusting or protective. It was bizarre either way.

The three of them piled into the car, William taking the back-facing seat. They drove out through East Fallbrook. The neighborhood enhancements were still pretty, though they didn’t have the coordinated esthetic of the homes right by Camp Pendleton. Here and there, homeowners showed advertising.

Miri looked back at the ragged line of the coastal fog, silhouetted against the pale bright blue of the sky. “ ‘The fog is brazen here,’ ” she quoted.

“ ‘Reaching talons across our land,’ ” said Juan.

“ ‘Pouncing.’ ” she completed, and they both laughed. That was from the Hallowe’en show last year, but to the Fairmont students it had a special meaning. There was none of that twentieth century wimpiness about the fog’s “little cat feet.” Evening fog was common near the coast, and when it happened laser comm got whacked—and The World Changed. “Weather says that most of Torrey Pines Park will be under fog in an hour.”

“Spooky.”

“It’ll be fun.” And since the park was unimproved, it wouldn’t make that much difference anyway.

The car turned down Reche Road and headed east, toward the expressway. Soon the fog was just an edge of low clouds beneath a sunny afternoon.

William hadn’t said a word since they got aboard. He had accepted a pair of goggles and couple of batteries, but not an equipment vest. Instead, he carried an old canvas bag. His skin looked young and smooth, but with that sweaty sheen. William’s gaze wandered around, kind of twitchy. Juan could tell that the guy had contacts and a wearable, but his twitchiness was not like a grown-up trying to input to smart clothes. It was more like he had some kind of disease.

Juan searched on the symptoms he was seeing AND’ed with gerontology. The strange-looking skin was a regeneration dressing; that was a pretty common thing. As for the tremors . . . Parkinson’s? Maybe, but that was a rare disease nowadays. Alzheimer’s? No, the symptoms didn’t match. Aha: “Alzheimer’s Recovery Syndrome.” Ol’ William must have been a regular vegetable before his treatments kicked in. Now his whole nervous system was regrowing. The result would be a pretty healthy person even if the personality was randomly different from before. The twitching was the final reconnect with the peripheral nervous system. There were about fifty thousand recovering Alzheimer’s patients these days. Bertie had even collaborated with some of them. But up close and in person . . . it made Juan queasy. So okay that William went to live with his kids during his recovery. But their enrolling him at Fairmont High was gross. His major was listed as “hardcopy media—nongraded status”; at least that kept him out of people’s way.

Miri had been staring out the window, though Juan had no idea what she was seeing. Suddenly she said, “You know, this is your friend Bertie Toad Vomit.” She pulled an incredible face, a fungus-bedecked toad that drooled nicely realistic slime all the way to the seat between them.

“Oh, yeah? Why is that?”

“He’s been on my case all semester, jerking me around, spreading rumors about me. He tricked that idiot Annette, so she’d push me into teaming with you—not that I’m complaining about you, Juan. This is working out pretty well.” She looked a little embarrassed. “It’s just that Bertie is pushy as all get out.”

Juan certainly couldn’t argue against that. But then he suddenly realized: “You two are alike in some ways.”

“What!”

“Well, you’re both as pushy as all get out.”

Miri stared at him open-mouthed, and Juan waited for an explosion. But he noticed that William was watching her with a strange smile on his face. She shut her mouth and glared at Juan. “Yeah. Well. You’re right. Alice says it may be my strongest talent, if I can ever put a cork in it. In the meantime, I guess I can be pretty unpleasant.” She looked away for a moment. “But besides us both being up-and-coming dictators, I don’t see any similarities between me and Bertie. I’m loud. I’m a loner. Bertie Toad is sneaky and mean. He has his warty hands into everything. And no one knows what he really is.”

“That’s not true. I’ve known Bertie since sixth grade; I’ve known him well for almost two semesters. He’s a remote student, is all. He lives in Evanston.”

She hesitated, maybe looking up “Evanston.” “So have you ever been to Chicago? Have you ever met Bertie in person?”

“Well, not exactly. But last Thanksgiving I visited him for almost a week.” That had been right after the pills really started giving Juan results. “He showed me around the museums piggyback, like a 411 tour. I also met his parents, saw their house. Faking all that would be next to impossible. Bertie’s a kid just like us.” Though it was true that Bertie hadn’t introduced Juan to many of his friends. Sometimes it seemed like Bertie was afraid that if his friends got together, they might cut him out of things. Bertie’s great talent was making connections, but he seemed to think of those connections as property that could be stolen from him. That was sad.

Miri wasn’t buying any it: “Bertie is not like us, Juan. You know about Annette. I know he’s wormed into a lot of groups at school. He’s everything to everyone, a regular Mr. Fixit.” Her face settled into a look of brooding contemplation, and she was silent for a moment.

They were off Reche now, and on the southbound. The true view was of rolling hills covered by endless streets and houses and malls. If you accepted the roadway’s free enhancements, you got placid wilderness, splashed with advertising. Here and there were subtle defacements, the largest boulders morphing into trollishness; that was probably the work of some Pratchett belief circle. Their car passed the Pala off-ramp and started up the first of several miles-long ridges that separated them from Escondido and the cut across to the coast.

“Last fall,” Miri said, “Bertram Todd was just another too-smart kid in my language class. But this semester, he’s caused me lots of inconvenience, lots of little humiliations. Now he has Attracted My Attention.” That did not sound like a healthy thing to do. “I’m gonna figure out his secret. One slip is all it takes.”

That was the old saying: Once your secret is outed anywhere, however briefly, it is outed forever. “Oh, I don’t know,” said Juan. “The way to cover a slip is to embellish it, hide it in all sorts of fake secrets.”

“Hah. Maybe he is something weird. Maybe he’s a corporate team.”

Juan laughed. “Or maybe he’s something really weird!” Over the next few miles, he and Miri hit on all the cinema clichés: Maybe Bertie was an artificial boy, or a superbrain stuck in a bottle under Fort Meade. Maybe Bertie was a front for alien invaders, even now taking over the worldwide net. Maybe he was an old Chinese war program, suddenly growing to sentience, or the worldwide net itself that had finally awakened with superhuman—and certainly malignant—powers.

Or maybe Bertie was a subconscious creation of Juan’s imagination, and Juan was—all unknowing—the monster. This one was Miri’s idea. In a way it was the funniest of all, though there was something a little unsettling about it, at least for Juan.

The car had turned onto Highway 56, and they were going back toward the coast. There was more real open space here, and the hills were green with a gold-edging of spring flowers. The subdivisions were gone, replaced by mile after mile of industrial parks: the automated genomics and proteomics labs spread like gray-green lithops, soaking up the last of the sunlight. People could live and work anywhere in the world. But some things have to happen in a single real place, close enough together that superspeed data paths can connect their parts. These low buildings drove San Diego’s physical economy; inside, the genius of humans, machines, and biological nature collided to make magic.

The sun sank back behind coastal fog as they entered the lagoon area north of Torrey Pines Park. Off the expressway, they turned south along the beach. The pale cliffs of the main part of the park rose ahead of them, the hilltops shrouded by the incoming fog.

The Goofus had remained silent through all their laughter and silly talk. But when Miri got back into her speculation about how this all fit with the fact that Bertie was bothering her so much, he suddenly interrupted. “I think part of it is very simple. Why is Bertie bothering you, Miriam? It seems to me there’s one possibility so fantastic that neither of you have even imagined it.”

William delivered this opinion with that faintly amused tone adults sometimes use with little kids. But Miri didn’t make a flip response. “Oh.” She looked at William as though he were hinting at some great insight. “I’ll think about this some more.”

THE ROAD WOUND UPWARDS THROUGH THE FOG. MIRI HAD THE CAR DROP them off at the far side of the driveway circle at the top. “Let’s scope things out as we walk toward the ranger station.”

Juan stepped down onto weedy asphalt. The sun had finally, truly, set. Geez, the air was cold. He flapped his arms in discomfort. He noticed that William had worn a jacket.

“You two should think ahead a little more,” said the Goofus.

Juan pulled a face. “I can stand a little evening cool.” Ma was often onto him like this, too. Plan-ahead addons were cheap, but he had convinced her that they made stupid mistakes of their own. He grabbed his sensor “gun” out of the car and slid it into the long pocket in the back of his vest—and tried to ignore his shivering.

“Here, Miriam.” William handed the girl an adult-sized jacket, big enough to fit over her equipment vest.

“Oh, thank you!” She snugged it on, making Juan feel even more chilly and stupid.

“One for you, too, champ.” William tossed a second jacket at Juan. It was bizarre to feel so irritated and so grateful at the same time. He took off the probe holster, and slipped on the jacket. Suddenly the evening felt a whole lot more pleasant. This would block about half his high-rate data ports, but hey, in a few minutes we’ll be back in the fog anyway.

The car departed as they started off in the direction of the ranger station. And Juan realized that some of his park information was very out of date. There were the restrooms behind him, but the parking lot in the pictures was all gone except at the edges, where it had become this driveway circle. He groped around for more recent information.

Of course, no one was parked up here. There were no cars dropping people off, either. Late April was not the height of the physical tourist season—and for Torrey Pines Park, that was the only kind of tourist season there was.

They were just barely above the fog layer. The tops of the clouds fluffed out below them, into the west. On a clear day, there would have been a great direct view of the ocean. Now there were just misty shapes tossed up from the fog and above that, a sky of deepening twilight blue. There was still a special brightness at the horizon, where the sun had set. Venus hung above that glow, along with Sirius and the brighter stars of Orion.

Juan hesitated. “That’s strange.”

“What?”

“I’ve got mail.” He set a pointer in the sky for the others to see: a ballistic FedEx package with a Cambridge return address. It was coming straight down, and from very high up.

At about a thousand feet, the mailer slowed dramatically, and a sexy voice spoke in Juan’s ear. “Do you accept delivery, Mr. Orozco?”

“Yes, yes.” He indicated a spot on the ground nearby.

All this time, William had been staring into the sky. Now he gave a little start and Juan guessed the guy had finally seen Juan’s pointer. A second after that, the package was visible to the naked eye: a dark speck showing an occasional bluish flare, falling silently toward them.

It slowed again at ten feet, and they had a glimpse of the cause of the light: dozens of tiny landing jets around the edge of the package. Animal rights campaigners claimed the micro-turbines were painfully loud to some kinds of bats, but to humans and even dogs and cats, the whole operation was silent . . . until the very last moment: Just a foot off the ground, there was a burst of wind and a scattering of pine needles.

“Sign here, Mr. Orozco,” said the voice.

Juan did so and started toward the mailer. William was already there, kneeling awkwardly. The Goofus spazzed at just the wrong instant and lurched forward, putting his knee through the mailer carton.

Miri rushed over to him. “William! Are you okay?”

William rolled back on his rear and sat there, massaging his knee. “Yes, I’m fine, Miriam. Damn.” He glanced at Juan. “I’m really sorry, kid.” For once, he didn’t sound sarcastic.

Juan kept his mouth shut. He squatted down by the box: it was a standard twenty-ounce mailer, now with a big bend in the middle. The lid was jammed, but the material was scarcely stronger than cardboard, and he had no trouble prying it open. Inside . . . he pulled out a clear bag, held it up for the others to see.

William leaned forward, squinting. The bag was filled with dozens of small, irregular balls. “They look like rabbit droppings to me.”

“Yes. Or health food,” said Juan. Whatever they were, it didn’t look like William’s accident had done them any harm.

“Toad Vomit! What are you doing here?” Miriam’s voice was sharp and loud.

Juan looked up and saw a familiar figure standing beside the mailer. Bertie. As usual, he had a perfect match on the ambient lighting; the twilight gleamed dimly off his grin. He gave Juan a little wave. “You can all thank me later. This FedEx courtesy link is only good for two minutes, so I have just enough time to clue you in.” He pointed at the bag in Juan’s hand. “These could be a big help once you get in the park.”

Miri: “You don’t have any time. Go away!”

Juan: “You’re trashing our local exam just by being here, Bertie.”

Bertie looked from from one indignant face to the other. He gave Miri a little bow, and said, “You wound me!” Then he turned to Juan: “Not at all, my dear boy. The exam proctors don’t show you as embargoed. Technically, you haven’t started your local exam. And I’m simply calling to check in with my loyal unlimited team member—namely you.”

Juan ground his teeth. “Okay. What’s the news?”

Bertie’s grin broadened to slightly wider than humanly possible. “We’ve made great progress, Juan! I lucked out with the Siberian group—they had just the insight Kistler was needing. We’ve actually built prototypes!” He waved again at the bag in Juan’s hand. “You’ve got the first lot.” His tone slipped into persuasion mode. “I’m not on your local team, but our unlimited exam is concurrent, now isn’t it, Juan?”

“Okay.” This was extreme even for Bertie. I bet he had the prototypes ready this afternoon!

“So we need these ‘breadcrumbs’ tested, and since I noticed that my loyal teammate is incidentally on a field trip through Torrey Pines Park, well, I thought . . .”

Miri glared at the intruder’s image. “So what have you stuck us with? I’ve got my own plans here.”

“Totally organic network nodes, good enough to be field-tested. We left out the communication laser and recharge-capability, but the wee morsels have the rest of the standard function suite: basic sensors, a router, a localizer. And they’re just proteins and sugars, no heavy metals. Come the first heavy rain, they’ll be fertilizer.”

Miri came over to Juan and popped open the plastic bag. She sniffed. “These things stink . . . I bet they’re toxic.”

“Oh, no,” said Bertie. “We sacrificed a lot of functionality to make them safe. You could probably eat the darn things, Miri.” Bertie chuckled at the look on her face. “But I suggest not; they’re kind of heavy on nitrogen compounds. . . .”

Juan stared at the little balls. Nitrogen compounds? That sounded like the summary work Juan had done earlier this semester! Juan choked on outrage, but all he could think to say was, “This—this is everything we were shooting for, Bertie.”

“Yup.” Bertie preened. “Even if we don’t get all the standard function suite, our share of the rights will be some good money.” And a sure A grade on the unlimited exam. “So. Juan. These came off the MIT organo-fab about three hours ago. In a nice clean laboratory, they work fine. Now how about if you sneak them into the park, and give them a real field test? You’ll be serving your unlimited team at the same time you’re working on your local project. Now, that’s concurrency.”

“Shove off, Bertie,” said Miri.

He gave her a little bow. “My two minutes are almost up, anyway. I’m gone.” His image vanished.

Miri frowned at the empty space where Bertie had been. “Do what you want with Bertie’s dungballs, Juan. But even if they’re totally organic, I’ll bet they’re still banned by park rules.”

“Yes, but that would just be a technicality, wouldn’t it? These things won’t leave trash.”

She just gave an angry shrug.

William had picked up the half-crushed mailing carton. “What are we going to do with this?”

Juan motioned him to set it down. “Just leave it. There’s a FedEx mini-hub in Jamul. The carton should have enough fuel to fly over there.” Then he noticed the damage tag floating beside the box. “Caray. It says it’s not airworthy.” There were also warnings about flammable fuel dangers and a reminder that he, Juan Orozco, had signed for the package and was responsible for its proper disposal.

William flexed the carton. Empty, the thing was mostly plastic fluff, not more than two or three pounds. “I bet I could bend it back into its original shape.”

“Um,” Juan said.

Miri spelled things out for the Goofus: “That would probably not work, William. Also, we don’t have the manual. If we broke open the fuel system . . .”

William nodded. “A good point, Miriam.” He slipped the carton into his bag, then shook his head wonderingly. “It flew here all the way from Cambridge.”

Yeah, yeah.

The three of them resumed their walk down to the ranger station, only now they were carrying a bit more baggage, both mental and physical. Miri grumbled, arguing mainly with herself about whether to use Bertie’s gift.

Even with the fog, Bertie’s “breadcrumbs” could give them a real edge in surveilling the park—if they could get them in. Juan’s mind raced along that line, trying to figure what he should say at the ranger station. At the same time he was watching William. The guy had brought a flashlight. The circle of light twitched this way and that, casting tree roots and brush into sharp relief. Come to think of it, without Miri’s Marine Corps gear, a flashlight would have been even more welcome than the jackets. In some ways, William was not a complete fool. In others . . .

Juan was just glad that William hadn’t pushed the FedEx mailer back at him. Juan would have been stuck with carrying it around all night; the carton counted as toxic waste, and it would surely rat on him if he left it in an ordinary trash can. Ol’ William had been only mildly interested in the breadcrumbs—but the package they came in, even busted, that fascinated the guy.

THE PARK’S ENTRANCE AREA STILL HAD FAIRLY GOOD CONNECTIVITY, BUT THE ranger station was hidden by the hillside and Juan couldn’t get a view on it. Unfortunately, the State Parks web site was under construction. Juan browsed around, but all he could find were more out-of-date pictures. The station might be uncrewed. On an off-season Monday night like this, a single 411 operator might be enough to cover all the state parks in Southern California.

As they came off the path, into direct sight of the station, they saw that it wasn’t simply a rest point or even a kiosk. In fact, it was an enclosed office with bright, real lighting and a physically-present ranger—a middle-aged guy, maybe thirty-five years old.

The ranger stood and stepped out into the puddle of light. “Evening,” he said to William; then he noticed the heavily bundled forms of Miriam and Juan. “Hi, kids. What can I do for you all?”

Miri glanced significantly at William. Something almost like panic came into William’s eyes. He mumbled, “Sorry, Munchkin, I don’t remember what you do at places like this.”

“S’okay.” Miri turned to the ranger. “We just want to buy a night pass, no camping. For three.”

“You got it.” A receipt appeared in the air between them, along with a document: a list of park regulations.

“Wait one.” The ranger ducked back into his office and came out with some kind of search wand; this setup was really old-fashioned. “I shoulda done this first.” He walked over to William, but was talking to all three of them, essentially hitting the high points of the park regs. “Follow the signs. No cliff climbing is allowed. If you go out on the seaside cliff face, we will know and you will be fined. Are you vision equipped?”

“Yes, sir.” Miriam raised her goggles into the light. Juan opened his jacket so his equipment vest was visible.

The ranger laughed. “Wow. I haven’t seen those in a while. Just don’t leave the batteries lying around in the park. That’s—” he turned away from William and swept his wand around Miriam and Juan “—That’s very important here, folks. Leave the park as you found it. No littering, and no networking. Loose junk just piles up, and we can’t clean it out like you can other places.”

The wand made a faint whining sound as it passed over Juan’s jacket pocket. Boogers. It must have gotten a ping back. Most likely Bertie’s prototypes didn’t have a hard off-state.

The ranger heard the noise, too. He held the wand flat against Juan’s jacket and bent to listen. “Damn false alarm, I bet. What do you have in there, son?”

Juan handed him the bag of dark, brownish balls. The ranger held it up to the light. “What are these things?”

“Trail mix.” William spoke before Juan could even look tongue-tied.

“Hey, really? Can I try one?” He popped the bag open as Juan watched in wide-eyed silence. “They look nice and chocolaty.” He picked one out of the bag, and squeezed it appraisingly. Then the smell hit him. “Dios!” He threw the ball at the ground and stared at the brown stain that remained on his fingers. “That smells like . . . that smells awful.” He jammed the bag back into Juan’s hands. “I don’t know, kid. You have odd tastes.”

But he didn’t question their story further. “Okay, folks. I think you’re good to go. I’ll show you the trailhead. I—” He stopped, stared vacantly for a second. “Oops. I see some people coming into Mount Cuyamaca Park, and I’m covering there tonight, too. You wanna go on ahead?” He pointed at a path that led northward from his station. “You can’t miss the trailhead; even if it’s down, there’s a big sign.” He waved them on, and then turned to talk to whoever he was seeing at the park in the mountains.

BEYOND THE TRAILHEAD, THE PARK WAS COMPLETELY UNIMPROVED, A WILDERNESS. For a hundred feet or so, Juan had wireless connectivity but even that was fading. Miri checked in with the exam proctor service to certify that their team was going local; since the wilderness was very soon going to isolate them from the worldwide net, they might as well get official credit for the fact!

But yuk. Just knowing you can’t go out in the wide world for answers was a pain. It was like having a itch you can’t scratch or a sock with lump in it, only much worse. “I’ve cached a lot of stuff about the park, Miri . . . but some of it is kinda old.” Which would have been no problem, but now he couldn’t just go out and search for better information.

“Don’t worry about it, Juan. Last week, I spent a little money and used a 411 service. See?” A few gigabytes flickered on laser light between them. . . . She was prepared. The maps and pictures looked very up-to-date.

Miri confidently picked one of several trails and got them on a gentle path that zigzagged downward toward the northwest. She even persuaded William to use the third pair of goggles instead of his flashlight. The Goofus moved awkwardly along. He seemed limber enough, but every four or five paces there was random spikey twitching.

It made Juan uncomfortable just to watch the guy. He looked away, played with his goggles’ menu. “Hey, Miri. Try ‘VIS AMP.’ It’s pretty.”

They walked silently for a while. Juan had never been to Torrey Pines Park except with his parents, and that was when he was little. And in the daytime. Tonight, with VIS AMP . . . the light of Venus and Sirius and Betelguese came down through the pine boughs, casting colored shadows every which way. Most of the flowers had closed, but there were glints of yellows and reds bobbing among the manzanita and the low, pale cactus. The place was peaceful, really beautiful. And so what if the goggles’ low-res pics only showed the direction you were looking at. That was part of the charm. They were getting this view without any external help, a step closer to true reality.

“Okay, Juan. Try laying out some of Bertie’s dungballs.”

The breadcrumbs? “Sure.” Juan opened the bag and tossed one of the balls off to the side of the path. Nothing. He popped up some low-layer wireless diagnostics. Wow. “This is a quiet place.”

“What do you expect?” said Miri. “No networks, remember.”

Juan leaned down to inspect the breadcrumb. The park ranger had gotten a faint response with his wand, but now that Juan wanted a ping response, there was nothing. And Bertie hadn’t told them an enable-protocol. Well, maybe it doesn’t matter. Juan was a packrat; he had all the standard enablers squirreled away on his wearable. He blasted the breadcrumb with one startup call after another. Partway through the sequence, there was a burst of virtual light in his contacts. “Hah. This one’s live!” He turned and caught up with Miri and William.

“Good going, Juan.” For once, Miri Gu sounded pleased with him. The path was still wide and sandy, the gnarled pines hanging fists of long needles right above his head—and right in the Goofus’s face. Amid the park trivia that Juan had downloaded was the claim that this was the last place on earth these pines existed. They rooted in the steep hillsides and hung on for years and years against erosion and draught and cold ocean breezes. Juan glanced back at William’s gangly form shambling along behind them. Yeah. Ol’ William was kind of like a human “Torrey Pine.”

They were in the top of the fog now. Towering and silent, pillars of haze drifted by on either side of them. Starlight dimmed and brightened.

Behind them, the node Juan had left was dimming toward a zero data rate. He picked out a second breadcrumb, gave it correct startup call, and dropped it to the side of the trail. The low-layer diagnostics showed its pale glow, and after a second it had picked up on the first node, now bright again. “They linked . . . I’m getting data forwarded from the first node.” Hah. Normally you didn’t think about details like that. The gadgets kind of reminded Juan of the toy network his father had bought him, back when Pa still had a job. Juan had been only five years old, and the toy nodes had been enormous clunkers, but laying them down around the house had engaged father and son for several happy days—and given Juan an intuition about random networks that some grown-ups still seemed to lack.

“Okay, I see them,” said Miri. “We’re not getting any communication from beyond the dungballs, are we? I don’t want anything forwarded out to the world.”

Yeah, yeah. This is a local exam. “We’re isolated, unless we punch out with something really loud.” He threw out five or six more breadcrumbs, enough so they could figure their relative positions accurately; in his diagnostic view, the locator gleams sharpened from misty guesstimates to diamond-sharp points of light.

Fog curled more thickly over them, and the starlight grew hazy. Ahead of him, Miri stumbled. “Watch your step. . . . You know, there’s really not enough light anymore.”

In patches, the fog was so thick that VIS AMP was just colorful noise.

“Yeah, I guess we should switch back to thermal IR.”

They stopped and stood like idiots, fiddling with manual controls to do something that should have been entirely automatic. Near infrared was as bad as visual: for a moment he watched the threads of NIR laser light that flickered sporadically between the data ports on their clothes; in this fog, the tiny lasers were only good for about five feet.

Miri was ahead of him. “Okay, that’s a lot better,” she said.

Juan finally got his goggles back to their thermal infrared default. Miri’s face glowed furnace-red except for the cool blackness of her goggles. Most plants were just faintly reddish. The stairstep timber by his feet had three dark holes in the top. Juan reached down and discovered that the holes felt cold and metallic. Ha, metal spikes holding the timber in place.

“C’mon,” said Miri. “I want to get down near the bottom of the canyon.”

The stairs were steep, with a heavy wood railing on the dropoff side. The fog was still a problem, but with TIR, you could see out at least ten yards. Dim reddish lights floated up through the dark, blobs of slightly warmer air. The bottom was way down, farther than you’d ever guess. He threw out a few more breadcrumbs and looked back up the path, at the beacons of the other nodes. What a bizarre setup. The light of the breadcrumb diagnostics was showing on his contact lenses, where he normally saw all enhancements. But it was the USMC goggles that were providing most of the augmentation. And beyond them? He stopped, turned off his wearable enhancement, and slipped the goggles up from his face for a moment. Darkness, absolute darkness, and chill wet air on his face. Talk about isolation!

He heard William coming up behind him. The guy stopped and for a second they stood silent, listening.

Miri’s voice came from further down the steps. “Are you okay, William?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“Okay. Would you and Juan come down by me? We wanna stay close enough to keep a good data rate between us. Are you getting any video off the dungballs, Juan?” Bertie had said they contained basic sensors.

“Nope,” Juan replied. He slipped the goggles back on and walked down to her. Any breadcrumb video would have shown up on his contacts, but all he was getting was diagnostics. He started another breadcrumb and tossed it far out, into the emptiness. Its location showed in his contacts. It fell and fell and fell, until he was seeing its virtual gleam “through” solid rock.

He studied the diagnostics a moment more. “You know, I think they are sending low data rate video—”

“That’s fine. I’ll settle for wireless rate.” Miri was leaning out past the railing, staring downwards.

“—but it’s not a format I know.” He showed her what he had. Bertie’s Siberian pals must be using something really obscure. Ordinarily, Juan could have put out some queries and had the format definition in a few seconds; but down here in the dark, he was just stuck.

Miri made an angry gesture. “So Bertie gave you something that could be useful, but only if we punch out a loud call for help? No way. Bertie is not getting his warty hands on my project!”

Hey, Miri, you and I are supposed to be a team here. It would be so nice if she would stop treating him like dirt. But she was right about Bertie’s tactics. Bertie had given them something wonderful—and was holding back all the little things that would make it useable. First it was the enable-protocol, now it was this screwball video format. Sooner or later, Bertie figured they’d come crawling to him, begging him to be a shadow member of the team. I could call out to him. His clothes had enough power that he could easily punch wireless as far as network nodes in Del Mar Heights, at least for a few minutes. Getting caught was a real risk; Fairmont used a good proctor service—but it was impossible for them to cover all the paths all the time. This afternoon, Bertie had as much as bragged they would cheat that way.

Damn you, Bertie, I’m not going to break isolation. Juan reviewed the mystery data from the breadcrumbs. There seemed to be real content; so given the darkness, the pictures were probably thermal infrared. And I have lots of known video I can compare them to, everything that has been seen through my goggles during the last few minutes! Maybe it was time for some memory magic, the edge he got from his little blue pills: If he could remember which blocks of imagery might match what the breadcrumbs could see, and pass that to his wearable, then conventional reverse engineering would be possible. . . . Juan’s mind went blank for a few seconds, and there was a moment of awesome panic . . . but then he remembered himself. He fed the picture pointers back to his wearable. It began crunching out solutions almost immediately. “Try this, Miri.” He showed her his best guess-image, and sharpened it over the next five seconds as his wearable found more correlation spikes.

“Yes!” The picture showed the roots of the big pine a dozen yards behind them. A few seconds passed and there was another picture, black sky and faintly glowing branches. In fact, each breadcrumb was generating a low-resolution TIR image every five seconds or so, even though they couldn’t all be forwarded that fast. “What are those numbers all about?” Numbers that clustered where the picture detail was most complex.

Oops. “Those are just graphical hierarchy pointers.” That was true, but exactly how Juan used them was something he didn’t want pursued. He made a note to delete them from all future pics.

Miri was silent for several seconds as she watched the pictures coming in from the crumbs above them on the trail, and from the one that he’d dropped way down. Juan was on the point of asking for payback, like some straight talk about exactly what they were looking for. But then she said, “This picture format is one of those Siberian puzzles, isn’t it?”

“Looks like.”

Those formats were all different, created by antisocials who seemed to get a kick out of not being interoperable. “And you untangled it in fifteen seconds?”

Sometimes Juan just didn’t think ahead: “Yup,” he said, blissfully proud.

The uncovered part of her face flared. “You lying weasel! You’re talking to the outside!”

Now Juan’s face got hot too. “Don’t you call me a liar! You know I’m good with interfaces.”

“Not. That. Good.” Her voice was deadly.

Caray. The right lie occurred to Juan a few seconds too late: He should have said he’d seen the Siberian picture format before! Now the only safe thing to do was “confess” that he was talking to Bertie. But Juan couldn’t bear to tell that lie, even if it meant she would figure out what he had really done.

Miri stared at him for several seconds.

William’s begoggled face had turned from one of them to other like a spectator at a tennis game. He spoke into the silence, and for once sounded a little surprised: “So what are you doing now, Miriam?”

Juan had already guessed: “She’s watching the fog, and listening.”

Miri nodded. “If Orozco is sneaking out on wireless, I’d hear it. If he’s using something directional, I’d see sidescatter from the fog. I don’t see anything just now.”

“So maybe I’m squirting micro pulses.” Juan’s words came out all choked, but he was trying to sound sarcastic; any laser bright enough to get through the fog would have left an afterglow.

“Maybe. If you are, Juan Orozco, I will figure it out—and I’ll get you kicked out of school.” She turned back to look over the drop off. “Let’s get going.”

THE STEPS GOT EVEN STEEPER; EVENTUALLY THEY REACHED A TURN AND walked on almost level ground for about sixty feet. The other side of the gorge was less than fifteen feet away.

“We must be close to the bottom,” said William.

“No, William. These canyons go awfully deep and narrow.” Miri motioned them to stop. “My darn battery has died.” She fumbled around beneath her jacket, replacing a dead battery with one that was only half dead.

She adjusted her goggles and looked over the railing. “Huh. We have a good view from here.” She waved at the depths. “You know, Orozco, this might be the place to do some active probing.”

Juan pulled the probe gun from the sling on his back. He plugged it into his equipment vest. With the gun connected, most of the options were live:

“What do you want to try?”

“The ground penetrating radar.” She pointed her own gun at the canyon wall. “Use your power, and we’ll both watch.”

Juan fiddled with the controls; the gun made a faint click as it shot a radar pulse into the rock wall. “Ah!” The USMC goggles showed the pulse’s backscatter as lavender shading on top of the thermal IR. In the daylight pictures that Juan had downloaded, these rocks were white sandstone, fluted and scalloped into shapes that water or wind could not carve alone. The microwave revealed what could only be guessed at from the visible light: moisture that etched and weakened the rock from the inside.

“Aim lower.”

“Okay.” He fired again.

“See, way down? It looks like little tunnels cut in the rock.”

Juan stared at the pattern of lavender streaks. They did look different than the ones higher up, but—“I think that’s just where the rock is soaking wet.”

Miri was already hurrying down the steps. “Toss out more dungballs.”

DOWN AND AROUND ANOTHER THIRTY FEET, THEY CAME TO A PLACE WHERE the path was just a tumble of large boulders. The going got very slow. William stopped and pointed at the far wall. “Look, a sign.”

There was a square wooden plate spiked into the sandstone. William lit his flashlight and leaned out from the path. Juan raised his goggles for a moment—and got the dubious benefit of William’s light: everything beyond ten feet was hidden behind the pearly white fog. But the faded lettering on the sign was now visible: “FAT MAN’S MISERY.”

William chuckled—and then almost lost his footing. “Did you ever think? Old-fashioned writing is the ultimate in context tagging. It’s passive, informative, and present exactly where you need it.”

“Yeah, sure. But can I point through it and find out what it thinks it means?”

William doused his flashlight. “I guess it means the gorge gets even narrower further on.”

Which we already knew from Miri’s maps. At the trailhead, this had looked like a valley, one hundred feet across. It had narrowed and narrowed, till now the far wall was about ten feet away. And from here . . .

“Scatter some more dungballs,” said Miri. She was pointing straight down.

“Okay.” They still had plenty of them. He carefully dropped six breadcrumbs where Miri indicated. They stood silently for a moment, watching the network diagnostics: the position guesstimate on one crumb was twenty-five to thirty feet further down. That was darn near the true bottom of the gorge. Juan took a breath. “So, are you ever going to tell us what precisely we’re looking for, Miri?”

“I don’t precisely know.”

“But this is where you saw the UCSD people poking around?”

“Some, but they were mainly south of this valley.”

“Geez, Miri. So you brought us here instead?”

“Look you! I’m not keeping secrets! I could see the hills above this canyon from the tourist scopes on Del Mar Heights. In the weeks after the UCSD guys left, there were small changes in the vegetation, mostly over this valley. At night, the bats and owls were at first more active and then less active than before. . . . And now tonight we’ve spotted some kind of tunnels in the rocks.”

William sounded mystified. “That’s all, Miriam?”

The girl didn’t blow up when it was William asking. Instead she seemed almost abashed. “Well . . . there’s context. Feretti and Voss were behind the trips to the park in January. One is into synthetic ethology; the other is a world-class proteomics geek. They both got called to San Diego all at once, just like you’d expect for a movie teaser. And I’m sure . . . almost sure . . . they’re both consulting for Foxwarner.”

Juan sighed. That wasn’t much more than she’d said in the beginning. Maybe Miri’s biggest problem wasn’t that she was bossy—it was that she was too darn good at projecting certainty. Juan made a disgusted noise, “And you figure if we just poke around carefully enough, solid clues will show up?” Whatever they may be.

“Yes! Somebody has to be the first to catch on. Using our probe gear and—yeah—Bertie’s dungballs, we’re not going to miss much. My theory is Foxwarner is trying to top what Spielberg/Rowling did last year with the magma monsters. This will be something that starts small, and is overtly plausible. With Feretti and Voss as advisors, I’ll bet they’ll play it as an escape from a bioscience lab.” That would certainly fit the San Diego scene.

The new breadcrumbs had located their nearest neighbors. Now the extended network showed as diamond-sharp virtual gleams scattered through the spaces both above and below. In effect, they had twenty little “eyeballs,” watching from all over the canyon. The pictures were all low-resolution stuff, but taken together that was too much data to forward all at once across the breadcrumb net to their wearables. They would have to pick through the viewpoints carefully.

“Okay then,” said Juan. “Let’s just sit and watch for a bit.”

The Goofus remained standing. He seemed to be staring upward. Juan guessed that he was having some trouble with the video Juan was forwarding to him. Things were going to get pretty dull for him. Abruptly, William said, “Do either of you smell something burning?”

“Fire?” Juan felt a flash of alarm. He sniffed carefully at the damp air. “. . . Maybe.” Or it might just be something flowering in the night. Smells were a hard thing to search on and learn about.

“I smell it too, William,” Miri said. “But I think things are still too wet for it to be a danger.”

“Besides,” said Juan, “if there was fire anywhere close, we’d see the hot air in our goggles.” Maybe someone had a fire down on the beach.

William shrugged, and sniffed at the air again. Trust the Goofus to have one superior sense—and that one useless. After a moment, he sat down beside them, but as far as Juan could tell, he still wasn’t paying attention to the pictures Juan was sending him. William reached into his bag and pulled out the FedEx mailer; the guy was still fascinated by the thing. He flexed the carton gently, then rested the box on his knees. Despite all Miri’s warnings, it looked like the Goofus wanted to knock it back into shape. He’d carefully poise one hand above the middle of the carton, as if preparing a precise poke . . . and then his hand would start shaking and he would have to start all over again.

Juan looked away from him. Geez the ground was hard. And cold. He wriggled back against the rock wall and cycled through the pictures he was getting from the breadcrumbs. They were pretty uninspiring. . . . But sitting here quietly, not talking . . . there were sounds. Things that might have been insects. And behind it all, a faint, regular throbbing. Automobile traffic? Maybe. Then he realized that it was the sound of ocean surf, muffled by fog and the zigzag walls of the canyon. It was really kind of peaceful.

There was a popping sound very nearby. Juan looked up and saw that William had done it again, smashed the mailer. Only now, it didn’t look so bent—and a little green light had replaced the warning tag.

“You fixed it, William!” said Miri.

William grinned. “Hah! Every day in every way, I’m getting better and better.” He was silent for a second and his shoulders slumped a little. “Well, different anyway.”

Juan looked at the gap in the canyon walls above them. There should be enough room. “Just set it on the ground and it will fly away to Jamul,” he said.

“No,” said William. He put the carton back in his bag.

O-kay, so the box is cool. Have a ball, William.

They sat listening to the surf, cycling through the video from the breadcrumbs. There were occasional changes in the pictures, quick blurs that might have been moths. Once, they saw something bigger, a glowing snout and a blurry leg.

“I bet that was a fox,” said Miri. “But the picture was from above us. Route us more pictures from the bottom of the canyon.”

“Right.” There was even less action down there. Maybe her movie theories were vapor, after all. He didn’t pay as much attention to the movies as most people did—and just now, he couldn’t do any background research. Dumb. On the way to the park, he had cached all sorts of stuff, but almost nothing about movie rumors.

“Hey, a snake,” said Miri.

The latest picture was from a breadcrumb that had landed in a bush just a few inches above the true bottom of the canyon. It was a very good viewpoint, but he didn’t see any snake. There was a pine cone and, beside it, a curved pattern in the dark sand. “Oh. A dead snake.” Viewed in thermal IR, the body was a barely visible as a change in texture. “Or maybe it’s just a shed skin.”

“There are tracks all around it,” said Miri. “I think they’re mouse tracks.”

Juan ran the image through some filters, and pulled up a half dozen good foot prints. He had cached pictures from nature studies. He stared at them all, transforming and correlating. “They’re mouse tracks, but they aren’t pocket mice or white foot. The prints are too big, and the angle of the digits is wrong.”

“How can you tell?” suspicion was in her voice.

Juan was not about to repeat his recent blunder: “I downloaded nature facts earlier,” he said truthfully, “and some fully cool analysis programs,” which was a lie.

“Okay. So what kind of mice—”

A new picture arrived from the breadcrumb in question.

“Whoa!” “Wow!”

“What is it?” said William. “I see the snake carcass now.” Apparently he was a couple of pictures behind them.

“See, William? A mouse, right below our viewpoint—”

“—staring straight up at us!”

Glowing beady eyes looked into the imager.

“I bet mice can’t see in the dark!” said Juan.

“Well, Foxwarner has never been strong on realism.”

Juan gave top routing priority to pics from the same breadcrumb. C’mon, c’mon! Meantime, he stared at the picture they had, analyzing. In thermal IR, the mouse’s pelt was dim red, shading in the shorter fur to orange. Who knew what it looked like in natural light? Ah, but the shape of the head looked—

A new picture came in. Now there were three mice looking up at them. “Maybe they’re not seeing the dungball. Maybe they’re smelling the stink!”

“Shhh!” William whispered.

Miri leaned forward, listening. Juan pushed up his hearing and listened, too, his fists tightening. Maybe it was just his imagination: were there little scrabbling noises from below? The gleam of the breadcrumb beacon was almost thirty feet below where they were sitting.

The breadcrumb gleam moved.

Juan heard Miri’s quick, indrawn breath. “I think they’re shaking the bush it’s on,” she said softly.

And the next picture they saw seemed to be from right on the ground. There was a blur of legs, and a very good head shot.

Juan sharpened the image, and did some more comparisons. “You know what color those mice are?”

“Of course not.”

“White—maybe? I mean, lab mice would be neat.”

In fact, Juan had only just saved himself. He’d been about to say: “White, of course. Their head shape matches Generic 513 lab mice.” The conclusion was based on applying conventional software to his cached nature information—but no normal person could have set up the comparisons as fast as he had just done.

Fortunately, Miri had some distractions: the breadcrumb’s locator gleam was moving horizontally in little jerks. A new picture came up, but it was all blurred.

“They’re rolling it along. Playing with it.”

“Or taking it somewhere.”

Both kids bounced to their feet, and then William stood up too. Miri forced her voice down to a whisper. “Yeah, lab mice would be neat. Escaped super-mice . . . This could be a re-remake of Secret of NIMH!”

“Those were rats in NIMH.”

“A detail.” She was already moving down the trail. “The timing would be perfect. The copyright on the second remake just lapsed. And did you see how real those things looked? Up till a few months ago, you couldn’t make animatronics that good.”

“Maybe they are real?” said William.

“You mean like trained mice? Maybe. At least for parts of the show.”

The latest picture showed cold darkness. The imaging element must be pointing into the dirt.

They climbed down and down, trying their best not to make noise. Maybe it didn’t matter; the surf sound was much louder here. In any case, the fake mice were still rolling along their stolen breadcrumb.

But while the three humans were moving mainly downward, the breadcrumb had moved horizontally almost fifteen feet. The pictures were coming less and less frequently. “Caray. It’s getting out of range.” Juan took three more breadcrumbs from his bag and threw them one at a time, as hard as he could. A few seconds passed, and the new crumbs registered with the net. One had landed on a ledge forward and above them. Another had fallen between the humans and the mice. The third—hah—its locator gleamed from beyond the mice. Now there were lots of good possibilities. Juan grabbed a picture off the farthest crumb. The view was looking back along the path, in the direction the mice would be coming from. Without any sense of scale, it looked like a picture from some fantasy Yosemite Valley.

They had finally reached the bottom, and could make some speed. From behind them, William said, “Watch your head, Munchkin.”

“Oops,” said Miri, and stopped short. “We got carried away there.” This might be a big valley for mice, but just ahead, the walls arched to within inches of each other. She bent down. “It’s wider at the bottom. I bet I could wiggle through. I know you could, Juan.”

“Maybe,” Juan said brusquely. He pushed past her and stepped up into the cleft. He got the active probe off his back, and held it in one hand as he slid into the gap. If he stood sideways and tilted his upper body, he could fit. He didn’t even have to take off his jacket. He sidled a foot or two further, dragging the probe gun behind him. Then the passage widened enough for him to turn and walk forward.

Miri followed a moment later. She looked up. “Huh. This is almost like a cave with a hole running along the ceiling.”

“I don’t like this, Miriam,” said William, who was left behind; no way could he squeeze through.

“Don’t worry, William. We’ll be careful not to get jammed.” In any real emergency, they could always punch out a call to 911.

The two kids moved forward another fifteen feet, to where the passage narrowed again, even more than before.

“Caray. The stolen breadcrumb is off the net.”

“Maybe we should have just stayed up top and watched.”

It was a little late for her to be saying that! Juan surveyed the crumb net. There was not even a hazy guesstimate on the lost node. But there were several pictures from the crumb he had tossed beyond all this: every one of them showed an empty path. “Miri! I don’t think the mice ever got to the next viewpoint.”

“Hey, did you hear that, William? The mice have taken off down a hole somewhere.”

“Okay, I’ll look around back here.”

Juan and Miri moved back along the passage, looking for bolt-holes. Of course there were no shadows. The fine sand of the path was almost black, the fallen pine needles scarcely brighter. On either side, the rock walls showed dark and mottled red as the sandstone cooled in the night air. “You’d think their nest would show a glow.”

“So they’re in deep.” Miri held up her probe gun, and slipped the radar attachment back onto the barrel. “USMC to the rescue.”

They traversed the chamber from one narrowness to the other. When they put the GPR snout of the guns right up to the rock, the lavender echograms were much more detailed than before. There really were tunnels, mouse-sized and extending back into the rock. They went through three batteries in about five minutes, but—“But we still haven’t found an entrance!”

“Keep looking. We know there is one.”

“Caray, Miri! It’s just not here.”

“You’re right.” That was William. He had crawled part way in to look at them. “Come back here. The critters jumped off the trail before it got narrow.”

“What? How do you know?”

William backed out, and the kids wriggled out after him. Ol’ William had been busy. He had swept the pine cones and needles away from the edges of the path. His little flashlight lay on the ground.

But they didn’t need a flashlight to see what William had discovered. The edge of the path, which should have been black and cold, was a dim red, a redness that spread across the rock face like weird, upward-dripping blood.

Miri dropped flat and poked around where the heat red was brightest. “Ha. I got my finger into something! Can’t find an end to it.” She pulled back . . . and a plume of orange followed her hand and then drifted up, its color cooling to red as it swelled and rose above them.

There was the faint smell of burning wood.

For a moment, they just stared at each other, the big black goggle eyes a true reflection of their inner shock.

No more warm air rose from the hole. “We must have found an indraft,” William said.

Both Miri and Juan were on their knees now. They looked carefully, but the goggles didn’t have the resolution to let them see the hole clearly—it was simply a spot that glowed a bit redder than anything else.

“Use the gun, Juan.”

He probed the rock above the hole and on either side. The tiny passage extended two feet down from the entrance, branching several times before it reached the main network of tunnels and chambers.

“So what happened to the dungball they grabbed? It would be nice to get some pictures from in there.”

Juan shrugged, and fed his probe gun still another battery. “They must have it in one of the farther chambers, behind several feet of rock. The crumb doesn’t have the power to get through that.”

Juan and Miri looked at each other, and laughed. “But we have lots more breadcrumbs!” Juan felt around for the entrance hole and rolled a crumb into it. It lit up about six inches down, just past the first tunnel branch.

“Try another.”

Juan studied the tunnel layout for a moment. “If I throw one in just right, I bet I can carom it a couple of feet.” The crumb’s light disappeared for a moment . . . and then appeared as data forwarded via the first one. Yes!

“Still no word from the one they stole,” said Miri. There were just the two locator gleams, about six inches and thirty-six inches down their respective tunnels.

Juan touched the gun here and there to the rock face. With the GPR at high power, he could probe through a lot of sandstone. How much could he figure out from what came back? “I think 1 can refine this even more,” he said. Though that would surely make Miri suspicious. “That third fork in the tunnel. Something . . . soft . . . is blocking it.” A brightly reflecting splotch, coming slowly toward them.

“It looks like a mouse.”

“Yeah. And it’s moving between two breadcrumbs,” effectively a two-station wireless tomograph. Maybe I can combine it all. For a moment, Juan’s whole universe was the problem of meshing the “breadcrumb tomography” with the GPR backscatter. The image showed more and more detail. He blanked out for a just a second, and for a moment after that forgot to be cautious.

It was a mouse all right. It was facing up the tunnel, toward the entrance the three humans were watching. They could even see its guts, and the harder areas that were skull and ribs and limbs. There was something stuck in its forepaw.

The whole thing looked like some cheap graphics trick. Too bad Miri didn’t take it that way. “Okay! I’ve had it with you, Juan! One person could never work that fast. You doormat! You let Bertie and his committee—”

“Honest, Miri, I did this myself!” said Juan, defending where he should not defend.

“We’re getting an F on account of you, and Bertie will own all of this!”

William had been watching with the same detachment as during Miri’s earlier accusations. But this time: “I see the picture, Munchkin, but . . . I don’t think he’s lying. I think he did it himself.”

“But—”

William turned to Juan, “You’re on drugs, aren’t you, kid?” he said mildly.

Once a secret is outed—

“No!” Make the accusation look absurd. But Juan floundered, wordless.

For an instant, Miri stared open-mouthed. And then she did something that Juan thought about a lot in the times that followed. She raised her hands, palms out, trying to silence them both.

William smiled gently. “Miriam, don’t worry. I don’t think Foxwarner is patching us into their summer release. I don’t think anyone but us knows what we’re saying here at the bottom of a canyon in thick fog.”

She slowly lowered her hands. “But . . . William.” She waved at the warmth that spread up the rock face. “None of this could be natural.”

“But what kind of unnatural is it, Munchkin? Look at the picture your friend Juan just made. You can see the insides of the mouse. It’s not animatronic.” William ran a twitchy hand through his hair. “I think somebody in the bioscience labs hereabouts really did have an accident. Maybe these creatures aren’t as smart as humans . . . but they were smart enough to escape, and fool—who was it that was poking around here in January?”

“Feretti and Voss,” Miri said in a small voice.

“Yes. Maybe just hiding down here when the bottom was under water was enough to fool them. I’ll bet these creatures have just a little edge over ordinary lab mice. But a little edge can be enough to change the world.”

And Juan realized William wasn’t talking about just the mice. “I don’t want to change the world,” he said in a choked voice. “I just want to have my chance in it.”

William nodded. “Fair enough.”

Miri looked back and forth at them. What Juan could see of her expression was very solemn.

Juan shrugged. “It’s okay, Miri. I think William is right. We’re all alone here.”

She leaned a little toward him. “Was it Bertie who got you into this?”

“Some. My mother has our family in one of the distributed framing-hams. I showed my part of it to Bertie last spring, after I flunked Adaptability. Bertie shopped it around as an anonymous challenge. He came back with a custom drug. What it does—” Juan tried to laugh, but it sounded more like a rattle. “—most people would think that what it does is a joke. See,” he tapped the side of his head, “it makes my memory very very good. Everyone thinks human memory doesn’t count for much anymore. People say, ‘No need for eidetic memory when your clothes’ data storage is a billion times bigger.’ But that’s not the point. Now I can remember big data blocks perfectly, and I have my wearable put hierarchial tags on all the stuff I see. So I can communicate patterns back to my wearable just by citing a few numbers. It gives me this incredible advantage in setting up problems.”

“So Bertie is your great friend because you are his super tool?” Her voice was quiet and outraged, but the anger was no longer directed at Juan.

“No! I’ve studied the memory effect. The idea itself came from analysis of my own medical data. Even now that we have the gimmick, only one person in a thousand could be affected by it at all. There’s no way Bertie could have known beforehand that I was special.”

“Ah. Of course,” she said, and was silent. Juan hated it when people did that, agreed with what you said and then waited for you to figure out why you had just made a fool of yourself. . . . Bertie is just very good with connections. He had connections everywhere, to research groups, idea markets, challenge boards. But maybe Bertie had figured out how to do even better: How many casual friends did Bertie have? How many did he offer to help with custom drug improvements? Most of that would turn out to be minor stuff, and maybe those friendships would remain casual. But sometimes, Bertie would hit the jackpot. Like with me.

“But Bertie is my best friend!” I will not blubber.

“You could find other friends, son,” said William. He shrugged. “Back before I lost my marbles, I had a gift. I could make words sing. I would give almost anything to get that back. And you? Well, however you came by it, the talent you have now is a marvelous gift. You are beholden to no one other than yourself for it.”

Miri said softly. “I—I don’t know, Juan. Custom meds aren’t illegal like twentieth century drugs—but they are off-limits for a reason. There’s no way to do full testing on them. This stuff you’re taking could—”

“I know. It could fry my mind.” Juan put his hands to his face, and ran into the cold plastic of his goggles. For a moment, Juan’s mind turned inward. All the old fear and shame rose up . . . and balanced against the strange surprise that out of the whole world, this old man could understand him.

But even here, even with his eyes closed, his contacts were still on, and Juan saw the virtual gleam of the breadcrumbs. He stared passively for several seconds, and then surprise began to eat through his funk. “Miri . . . they’re moving.”

“Huh?” She had been paying even less attention than he had. “Yes! Down the tunnels, away from us.”

William moved close to the mouse hole, and pressed his ear against the stone wall. “I’ll bet our little friends are taking your dungballs to wherever the first one went.”

“Can you get some pictures from them, Juan?”

“. . . Yes. Here’s one.” A thermal glimpse of a glowing tunnel floor. Frothy piles of something that looked like finely shredded paper. Seconds passed, and a virtual gleam showed dimly through the rock. “There’s the locator beacon of the first crumb.” It was five feet deeper in the rock. “Now it has a node to forward through.”

“We could lose them, too.”

Juan pushed past William, and tossed two more breadcrumbs down the hole. One rolled a good three feet. The other stopped after six inches—and then began moving “on its own.”

“The mice are stringing nodes for us!” All but the farthest locator beacon were glowing high-rate bright. Now there were lots of pictures, but the quality was poor. As the crumbs warmed in the hot air of the tunnels the images showed very little detail except for the mice themselves: paws and snouts and glowing eyes. “Hey, did you see the splinter sticking out of that poor thing’s paw?”

“Yes, I think that’s the one I saw before. Wait, we’re getting a picture from the crumb they stole to begin with.” At first, the data was a jumble. Still another picture format? Not exactly. “This picture is normal vision, Miri!” He finished the transformation.

“How—?” Then she gave a sharp little gasp.

There was no scale marker, but the chamber couldn’t have been more than a couple of feet across. To the eye of the breadcrumb it was a wide, high-ceilinged meeting room, crowded with dozens of white-furred mice, their dark eyes glittering by the light of a . . . fire . . . in the middle of the hall.

“I think you have your ‘A,’ Miriam,” William said softly.

Miri didn’t answer.

Rank upon rank of mice, crouched around the fire. Three mice stood at the center, higher up—tending the flame? It wobbled and glowed, more like a candle than a bonfire. But the mice didn’t seem to be watching the fire as much as they were the breadcrumb. Bertie’s little breadcrumb was the magical arrival at their meeting.

“See!” Miri hunched forward, her elbows on her knees. “Foxwarner strikes again. A slow flame in a space like that . . . those ‘mice’ should all be dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

The breadcrumbs were not sending spectral data, so who could say? Juan visualized the tunnel system. There were other passages a little higher up, and he had data on the capacity of the inlets and outlets. He thought a few seconds more and gave the problem to his wearable. “No . . . actually, there is enough ventilation to be safe.”

Miri looked up at him. “Wow. You are fast.”

“Your Epiphany outfit could do it in a instant.”

“But it would’ve taken me five minutes to pose the problem to my Epiphany.”

Another picture came in, firelight on a ceiling.

“The mice are rolling it closer to the fire.”

“I think they’re just poking at it.”

Another picture. The crumb had been turned again, and now was looking outwards, to where three more mice had just come in from a large side entrance . . . rolling another breadcrumb.

But the next picture was a blur of motion, a glimpse of a mostly empty meeting chamber, in thermal colors. The fire had been doused.

“Something’s stirred them up,” said William, listening again at the stone wall. “I can actually hear them chittering.”

“The dungballs are coming back this way!” said Miri.

“The mice are smart enough to understand the idea of poison.” William’s voice was soft and wondering. “Up to a point, they grabbed our gifts like small children. Then they noticed that the dungballs just kept coming . . . and someone raised an alarm.”

There were still pictures, lots of them, but they were all thermal IR, chaotic blurs; the mice were hustling. The locator gleams edged closer together, some moving toward an entrance about three feet above the gully floor. The others were approaching the first hole.

Juan touched the probe gun against the wall and pulsed the rock in several places. He was getting pretty good at identifying the flesh-and-blood reflections. “Most of the mice have moved away from us. It’s just a rearguard that’s pushing out the breadcrumbs. There’s a crowd of them behind the crumbs that are coming out by your head, William.”

“William, quick! The FedEx mailer. Maybe we can trap some when they come out!”

“I . . . yes!” William stood and pulled the FedEx mailer from his bag. He tilted the open carton toward the mouse hole.

A second later there was a faint scrabbling noise, and William’s arms moved with that twitchy speed of his. Juan had a glimpse of fur and flying breadcrumbs.

William slapped the container shut, and then stumbled backwards as three more mice came racing out of the lower hole. For a fleeting instant, their glowing blue eyes stared up at the humans. Miri made a dive for them, but they had already fled down the path, oceanward. She picked herself up and looked at William. “How many did you get?”

“Four! The little guys were in such a rush they just jumped out at me.” He held the mailer close. Juan could hear tiny thumping noises from inside it.

“That’s great,” said Miri. “Physical evidence!”

William didn’t reply. He just stood there, staring at the carton. Abruptly he turned and walked a little way up the trail, to where the path widened out and the brush and pines didn’t cover the sky. “I’m sorry, Miriam.” He tossed the mailer high into the air.

The box was almost invisible for a moment, and then its ring of jets lit up. Tiny, white-hot spikes of light traced the mailer’s path as it wobbled and swooped within a foot of the rock wall. It recovered, and slowly climbed, still wobbling. Juan could imagine four very live cargo items careening around inside it. Silent to human ears, the mailer rose and rose, jets dimming in the fog. The light was a pale smudge when it drifted out of sight behind the canyon wall.

Miri stood, her arms reaching out as if pleading. “Grandfather, why?”

For a moment, William Gu’s shoulders slumped. Then he looked across at Juan. “I bet you know, don’t you, kid?”

Juan stared in the direction the mailer had taken. Four mice, rattling around in a half-broken mailer. He had no idea just now what security was like at the FedEx minihub, but it was at the edge of the back country, where the mail launchers didn’t cause much complaint. Out beyond Jamul . . . the mice could have their chance in the world. He looked back at William and just gave a single quick nod.

THERE WAS VERY LITTLE TALK AS THEY CLIMBED BACK OUT OF THE CANYON. Near the top, the path was wide and gentle. Miri and William walked hand in hand. There were spatters of coldness on her face that might have been tears, but there was no quaver in her voice. “If the mice are real, we’ve done a terrible thing, William.”

“Maybe. I’m sorry, Miriam.”

“. . . But I don’t think they are real, William.”

William made no reply. After a moment, Miri said, “You know why? Look at that first picture we got from the mouse meeting hall. It’s just too perfectly dramatic. The chamber doesn’t have furniture or wall decorations, but it clearly is a meeting hall. Look how all the mice are positioned, like humans at an old town meeting. And then at the center—”

Juan’s eyes roamed the picture as she spoke. Yes. There in the center—almost as though they were on stage—stood three large white mice. The biggest one had reared up as it looked at the imager. It had one paw extended . . . and the paw grasped something sharp and long. They had seen things like that in other pictures and never quite figured them out. In this natural-light picture, the tool—a spear?—was unmistakable.

Miri continued on, “See, that’s the tip-off, Foxwarner’s little joke. A real, natural breakthrough in animal intelligence would never be such a perfect movie poster. So. Later tonight, Juan and I will turn in our local team report, and Foxwarner will ‘fess up. By dinnertime at the latest, we’ll be famous.”

And my own little secret will be outed.

Miri must have understood Juan’s silence. She reached out and took his hand, dragging the three of them close together. “Look,” she said softly. “We don’t know what—if anything—Foxwarner recorded of us. Even now, we’re in thick fog. Except for the mice themselves, our gear saw no sensors. So either Foxwarner is impossibly good, or they weren’t close snooping us.” She gestured up the path. “Now in a few more minutes we’ll be back in the wide world. Bertie and maybe Foxwarner will be wisping around. But no matter what you think really happened tonight—” Her voice trailed off.

And Juan finished, “—no matter what really happened, we’re all best to keep our mouths shut about certain things.”

She nodded.

BERTIE FOLLOWED JUAN HOME FROM MIRI’S HOUSE, ARGUING, WHEEDLING, demanding all the way. He wanted to know what Miri had been up to, what all they had done and seen. When Juan wouldn’t give him more than the engineering data from the dungballs, Bertie had got fully dipped, kicked Juan off their unlimited team, and rejected all connections. It was a total Freeze Out. By the time Juan got home, he could barely put up a good front for his ma.

But strangely enough, Juan slept well that night. He woke to morning sunlight splashing across his room. Then he remembered: Bertie’s total Freeze Out. I should be frantic. This could mean he’d fail the unlimited and lose his best friend. Instead, more than anything else, Juan felt like . . . he was free.

Juan slipped on his clothes and contacts, and wandered downstairs. Usually, he’d be all over the net about now, synching with the world, finding out what his friends had done while he was wasting time asleep. He’d get to that eventually; it would be just as much fun as ever. But just now the silence was a pleasure. There were a dozen red “please reply” lights gleaming in front of his eyes—mostly from Bertie. The message headers were random flails. This was the first time one of Bertie’s Freeze Outs had not ended because Juan came groveling.

Ma looked up from her breakfast. “You’re off-line,” she said.

“Yeah.” He slouched onto a chair and started eating cereal. His father smiled absently at him and went on eating. Pa’s eyes were very far away, his posture kind of slumped.

Ma looked back and forth between them, and a shadow crossed her face. Juan straightened up a little and made sure she saw his smile. “I’m just tired out from all the hiking around.” Suddenly, he remembered something. “Hey, thanks for the maps, Ma.”

She looked puzzled.

“Miri used 411 for recent information on Torrey Pines.”

“Oh!” Ma’s face lit up. There were a number of 411 services in San Diego County, but this was her kind of thing. “Did the test go well?”

“Dunno yet.” They ate in silence for a moment. “I expect I’ll know later today.” He looked across the table at her. “Hey, you’re off-line, too.”

She grimaced and gave him a little grin. “An unintended vacation. The movie people dropped their reservations for tour time.”

“. . . Oh.” Just what you’d expect if the operation in East County was related to what they’d found in Torrey Pines. Miri would have seen the cancellation as significant evidence. Maybe it was. But he and Miri had turned in their project report last night, the first local exam to complete. If she were right about the mice, Foxwarner was sure to know by now that their project had been outed, and you’d think they’d have launched publicity. And yet, there were no bulletins; just Bertie and a few other students pinging away at him.

Give it till dinnertime. That’s how long Miri said it might take for a major cinema organization to move into action. Real or movie, they should know by then. And his own secret? It would be outed . . . or not.

Juan had a second serving of cereal.

SINCE HE HAD A MORNING EXAM, MA LET HIM TAKE A CAR TO FAIRMONT. He made it to school with time to spare.

The vocational exam was for individuals, and you weren’t allowed to search beyond the classroom. As with Ms. Wilson’s math exam, the faculty had dug up some hoary piece of business that no reasonable person would ever bother with. For the vocational test, the topic would be a work specialty.

And today . . . it was Regna 5.

When Regna had been hot, back in Pa’s day, tech schools had taken three years of training to turn out competent Regna practitioners.

It was a snap. Juan spent a couple of hours scanning through the manuals, integrating the skills . . . and then he was ready for the programming task, some cross-corporate integration nonsense.

He was out by noon, with an A.

HELL IS THE ABSENCE OF GOD

Ted Chiang

This is the story of a man named Neil Fisk, and how he came to love God. The pivotal event in Neil’s life was an occurrence both terrible and ordinary: the death of his wife Sarah. Neil was consumed with grief after she died, a grief that was excruciating not only because of its intrinsic magnitude, but because it also renewed and emphasized the previous pains of his life. Her death forced him to reexamine his relationship with God, and in doing so he began a journey that would change him forever.

Neil was born with a congenital abnormality that caused his left thigh to be externally rotated and several inches shorter than his right; the medical term for it was proximal femoral focus deficiency. Most people he met assumed God was responsible for this, but Neil’s mother hadn’t witnessed any visitations while carrying him; his condition was the result of improper limb development during the sixth week of gestation, nothing more. In fact, as far as Neil’s mother was concerned, blame rested with his absent father, whose income might have made corrective surgery a possibility, although she never expressed this sentiment aloud.

As a child Neil had occasionally wondered if he were being punished by God, but most of the time he blamed his classmates in school for his unhappiness. Their nonchalant cruelty, their instinctive ability to locate the weaknesses in a victim’s emotional armor, the way their own friendships were reinforced by their sadism: he recognized these as examples of human behavior, not divine. And although his classmates often used God’s name in their taunts, Neil knew better than to blame Him for their actions.

But while Neil avoided the pitfall of blaming God, he never made the jump to loving Him; nothing in his upbringing or his personality led him to pray to God for strength or for relief. The assorted trials he faced growing up were accidental or human in origin, and he relied on strictly human resources to counter them. He became an adult who—like so many others—viewed God’s actions in the abstract until they impinged upon his own life. Angelic visitations were events that befell other people, reaching him only via reports on the nightly news. His own life was entirely mundane; he worked as a superintendent for an upscale apartment building, collecting rent and performing repairs, and as far as he was concerned, circumstances were fully capable of unfolding, happily or not, without intervention from above.

This remained his experience until the death of his wife.

It was an unexceptional visitation, smaller in magnitude than most but no different in kind, bringing blessings to some and disaster to others. In this instance the angel was Nathanael, making an appearance in a downtown shopping district. Four miracle cures were effected: the elimination of carcinomas in two individuals, the regeneration of the spinal cord in a paraplegic, and the restoration of sight to a recently blinded person. There were also two miracles that were not cures: a delivery van, whose driver had fainted at the sight of the angel, was halted before it could overrun a busy sidewalk; another man was caught in a shaft of Heaven’s light when the angel departed, erasing his eyes but ensuring his devotion.

Neil’s wife Sarah Fisk had been one of the eight casualties. She was hit by flying glass when the angel’s billowing curtain of flame shattered the storefront window of the café in which she was eating. She bled to death within minutes, and the other customers in the café—none of whom suffered even superficial injuries—could do nothing but listen to her cries of pain and fear, and eventually witness her soul’s ascension toward Heaven.

Nathanael hadn’t delivered any specific message; the angel’s parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes. Sixty-two people received medical treatment for injuries ranging from slight concussions to ruptured eardrums to burns requiring skin grafts. Total property damage was estimated at 8.1 million dollars, all of it excluded by private insurance companies due to the cause. Scores of people became devout worshippers in the wake of the visitation, either out of gratitude or terror.

Alas, Neil Fisk was not one of them.

After a visitation, it’s common for all the witnesses to meet as a group and discuss how their common experience has affected their lives. The witnesses of Nathanael’s latest visitation arranged such group meetings, and family members of those who had died were welcome, so Neil began attending. The meetings were held once a month in a basement room of a large church downtown; there were metal folding chairs arranged in rows, and in the back of the room was a table holding coffee and doughnuts. Everyone wore adhesive name tags made out in felt-tip pen.

While waiting for the meetings to start, people would stand around, drinking coffee, talking casually. Most people Neil spoke to assumed his leg was a result of the visitation, and he had to explain that he wasn’t a witness, but rather the husband of one of the casualties. This didn’t bother him particularly; he was used to explaining about his leg. What did bother him was the tone of the meetings themselves, when participants spoke about their reaction to the visitation: most of them talked about their newfound devotion to God, and they tried to persuade the bereaved that they should feel the same.

Neil’s reaction to such attempts at persuasion depended on who was making it. When it was an ordinary witness, he found it merely irritating. When someone who’d received a miracle cure told him to love God, he had to restrain an impulse to strangle the person. But what he found most disquieting of all was hearing the same suggestion from a man named Tony Crane; Tony’s wife had died in the visitation too, and he now projected an air of groveling with his every movement. In hushed, tearful tones he explained how he had accepted his role as one of God’s subjects, and he advised Neil to do likewise.

Neil didn’t stop attending the meetings—he felt that he somehow owed it to Sarah to stick with them—but he found another group to go to as well, one more compatible with his own feelings: a support group devoted to those who’d lost a loved one during a visitation, and were angry at God because of it. They met every other week in a room at the local community center, and talked about the grief and rage that boiled inside of them.

All the attendees were generally sympathetic to one another, despite differences in their various attitudes toward God. Of those who’d been devout before their loss, some struggled with the task of remaining so, while others gave up their devotion without a second glance. Of those who’d never been devout, some felt their position had been validated, while others were faced with the near-impossible task of becoming devout now. Neil found himself, to his consternation, in this last category.

Like every other nondevout person, Neil had never expended much energy on where his soul would end up; he’d always assumed his destination was Hell, and he accepted that. That was the way of things, and Hell, after all, was not physically worse than the mortal plane.

It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less; the truth of this was plain for anyone to see on those occasions when Hell manifested itself. These happened on a regular basis; the ground seemed to become transparent, and you could see Hell as if you were looking through a hole in the floor. The lost souls looked no different from the living, their eternal bodies resembling mortal ones. You couldn’t communicate with them—their exile from God meant that they couldn’t apprehend the mortal plane where His actions were still felt—but as long as the manifestation lasted you could hear them talk, laugh, or cry, just as they had when they were alive.

People varied widely in their reactions to these manifestations. Most devout people were galvanized, not by the sight of anything frightening, but at being reminded that eternity outside paradise was a possibility. Neil, by contrast, was one of those who were unmoved; as far as he could tell, the lost souls as a group were no unhappier than he was, their existence no worse than his in the mortal plane, and in some ways better: his eternal body would be unhampered by congenital abnormalities.

Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamor. For people like him, Hell was where you went when you died, and he saw no point in restructuring his life in hopes of avoiding that. And since God hadn’t previously played a role in Neil’s life, he wasn’t afraid of being exiled from God. The prospect of living without interference, living in a world where windfalls and misfortunes were never by design, held no terror for him.

Now that Sarah was in Heaven, his situation had changed. Neil wanted more than anything to be reunited with her, and the only way to get to Heaven was to love God with all his heart.

This is Neil’s story, but telling it properly requires telling the stories of two other individuals whose paths became entwined with his. The first of these is Janice Reilly.

What people assumed about Neil had in fact happened to Janice. When Janice’s mother was eight months pregnant with her, she lost control of the car she was driving and collided with a telephone pole during a sudden hailstorm, fists of ice dropping out of a clear blue sky and littering the road like a spill of giant ball bearings. She was sitting in her car, shaken but unhurt, when she saw a knot of silver flames—later identified as the angel Bardiel—float across the sky. The sight petrified her, but not so much that she didn’t notice the peculiar settling sensation in her womb. A subsequent ultrasound revealed that the unborn Janice Reilly no longer had legs; flipperlike feet grew directly from her hip sockets.

Janice’s life might have gone the way of Neil’s, if not for what happened two days after the ultrasound. Janice’s parents were sitting at their kitchen table, crying and asking what they had done to deserve this, when they received a vision: the saved souls of four deceased relatives appeared before them, suffusing the kitchen with a golden glow. The saved never spoke, but their beatific smiles induced a feeling of serenity in whoever saw them. From that moment on, the Reillys were certain that their daughter’s condition was not a punishment.

As a result, Janice grew up thinking of her legless condition as a gift; her parents explained that God had given her a special assignment because He considered her equal to the task, and she vowed that she would not let Him down. Without pride or defiance, she saw it as her responsibility to show others that her condition did not indicate weakness, but rather strength.

As a child, she was fully accepted by her schoolmates; when you’re as pretty, confident, and charismatic as she was, children don’t even notice that you’re in a wheelchair. It was when she was a teenager that she realized that the able-bodied people in her school were not the ones who most needed convincing. It was more important for her to set an example for other handicapped individuals, whether they had been touched by God or not, no matter where they lived. Janice began speaking before audiences, telling those with disabilities that they had the strength God required of them.

Over time she developed a reputation, and a following. She made a living writing and speaking, and established a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting her message. People sent her letters thanking her for changing their lives, and receiving those gave her a sense of fulfillment of a sort that Neil had never experienced.

This was Janice’s life up until she herself witnessed a visitation by the angel Rashiel. She was letting herself into her house when the tremors began; at first she thought they were of natural origin, although she didn’t live in a geologically active area, and waited in the doorway for them to subside. Several seconds later she caught a glimpse of silver in the sky and realized it was an angel, just before she lost consciousness.

Janice awoke to the biggest surprise of her life: the sight of her two new legs, long, muscular, and fully functional.

She was startled the first time she stood up: she was taller than she expected. Balancing at such a height without the use of her arms was unnerving, and simultaneously feeling the texture of the ground through the soles of her feet made it positively bizarre. Rescue workers, finding her wandering down the street dazedly, thought she was in shock until she—marveling at her ability to face them at eye level—explained to them what had happened.

When statistics were gathered for the visitation, the restoration of Janice’s legs was recorded as a blessing, and she was humbly grateful for her good fortune. It was at the first of the support group meetings that a feeling of guilt began to creep in. There Janice met two individuals with cancer who’d witnessed Rashiel’s visitation, thought their cure was at hand, and been bitterly disappointed when they realized they’d been passed over. Janice found herself wondering, why had she received a blessing when they had not?

Janice’s family and friends considered the restoration of her legs a reward for excelling at the task God had set for her, but for Janice, this interpretation raised another question. Did He intend for her to stop? Surely not; evangelism provided the central direction of her life, and there was no limit to the number of people who needed to hear her message. Her continuing to preach was the best action she could take, both for herself and for others.

Her reservations grew during her first speaking engagement after the visitation, before an audience of people recently paralyzed and now wheelchair-bound. Janice delivered her usual words of inspiration, assuring them that they had the strength needed for the challenges ahead; it was during the Q&A that she was asked if the restoration of her legs meant she had passed her test. Janice didn’t know what to say; she could hardly promise them that one day their marks would be erased. In fact, she realized, any implication that she’d been rewarded could be interpreted as criticism of others who remained afflicted, and she didn’t want that. All she could tell them was that she didn’t know why she’d been cured, but it was obvious they found that an unsatisfying answer.

Janice returned home disquieted. She still believed in her message, but as far as her audiences were concerned, she’d lost her greatest source of credibility. How could she inspire others who were touched by God to see their condition as a badge of strength, when she no longer shared their condition?

She considered whether this might be a challenge, a test of her ability to spread His word. Clearly God had made her task more difficult than it was before; perhaps the restoration of her legs was an obstacle for her to overcome, just as their earlier removal had been.

This interpretation failed her at her next scheduled engagement. The audience was a group of witnesses to a visitation by Nathanael; she was often invited to speak to such groups in the hopes that those who suffered might draw encouragement from her. Rather than sidestep the issue, she began with an account of the visitation she herself had recently experienced. She explained that while it might appear she was a beneficiary, she was in fact facing her own challenge: like them, she was being forced to draw on resources previously untapped.

She realized, too late, that she had said the wrong thing. A man in the audience with a misshapen leg stood up and challenged her: was she seriously suggesting that the restoration of her legs was comparable to the loss of his wife? Could she really be equating her trials with his own?

Janice immediately assured him that she wasn’t, and that she couldn’t imagine the pain he was experiencing. But, she said, it wasn’t God’s intention that everyone be subjected to the same kind of trial, but only that each person face his or her own trial, whatever it might be. The difficulty of any trial was subjective, and there was no way to compare two individuals’ experiences. And just as those whose suffering seemed greater than his should have compassion for him, so should he have compassion for those whose suffering seemed less.

The man was having none of it. She had received what anyone else would have considered a fantastic blessing, and she was complaining about it. He stormed out of the meeting while Janice was still trying to explain.

That man, of course, was Neil Fisk. Neil had had Janice Reilly’s name mentioned to him for much of his life, most often by people who were convinced his misshapen leg was a sign from God. These people cited her as an example he should follow, telling him that her attitude was the proper response to a physical handicap. Neil couldn’t deny that her leglessness was a far worse condition than his distorted femur. Unfortunately, he found her attitude so foreign that, even in the best of times, he’d never been able to learn anything from her. Now, in the depths of his grief and mystified as to why she had received a gift she didn’t need, Neil found her words offensive.

In the days that followed, Janice found herself more and more plagued by doubts, unable to decide what the restoration of her legs meant. Was she being ungrateful for a gift she’d received? Was it both a blessing and a test? Perhaps it was a punishment, an indication that she had not performed her duty well enough. There were many possibilities, and she didn’t know which one to believe.

There is one other person who played an important role in Neil’s story, even though he and Neil did not meet until Neil’s journey was nearly over. That person’s name is Ethan Mead.

Ethan had been raised in a family that was devout, but not profoundly so. His parents credited God with their above-average health and their comfortable economic status, although they hadn’t witnessed any visitations or received any visions; they simply trusted that God was, directly or indirectly, responsible for their good fortune. Their devotion had never been put to any serious test, and might not have withstood one; their love for God was based in their satisfaction with the status quo.

Ethan was not like his parents, though. Ever since childhood he’d felt certain that God had a special role for him to play, and he waited for a sign telling him what that role was. He’d have liked to become a preacher, but felt he hadn’t any compelling testimony to offer; his vague feelings of expectation weren’t enough. He longed for an encounter with the divine to provide him with direction.

He could have gone to one of the holy sites, those places where—for reasons unknown—angelic visitations occurred on a regular basis, but he felt that such an action would be presumptuous of him. The holy sites were usually the last resort of the desperate, those people seeking either a miracle cure to repair their bodies or a glimpse of Heaven’s light to repair their souls, and Ethan was not desperate. He decided that he’d been set along his own course, and in time the reason for it would become clear. While waiting for that day, he lived his life as best he could: he worked as a librarian, married a woman named Claire, raised two children. All the while, he remained watchful for signs of a greater destiny.

Ethan was certain his time had come when he became witness to a visitation of Rashiel, the same one that—miles away—restored Janice Reilly’s legs. Ethan was alone when it happened, walking toward his car in the center of a parking lot, when the ground began to shudder. Instinctively he knew it was a visitation, and he assumed a kneeling position, feeling no fear, only exhilaration and awe at the prospect of learning his calling.

The ground became still after a minute, and Ethan looked around, but didn’t otherwise move. Only after waiting for several more minutes did he rise to his feet. There was a large crack in the asphalt, beginning directly in front of him and following a meandering path down the street. The crack seemed to be pointing him in a specific direction, so he ran alongside it for several blocks until he encountered other survivors, a man and a woman climbing out of a modest fissure that had opened up directly beneath them. He waited with the two of them until rescuers arrived and brought them to a shelter.

Ethan attended the support group meetings that followed and met the other witnesses to Rashiel’s visitation. Over the course of a few meetings, he became aware of certain patterns among the witnesses. Of course there were those who’d been injured and those who’d received miracle cures. But there were also those whose lives were changed in other ways: the man and woman he’d first met fell in love and were soon engaged; a woman who’d been pinned beneath a collapsed wall was inspired to become an EMT after being rescued. One business owner formed an alliance that averted her impending bankruptcy, while another whose business was destroyed saw it as a message that he change his ways. It seemed that everyone except Ethan had found a way to understand what had happened to them.

He hadn’t been cursed or blessed in any obvious way, and he didn’t know what message he was intended to receive. His wife, Claire, suggested that he consider the visitation a reminder that he appreciate what he had, but Ethan found that unsatisfying, reasoning that every visitation—no matter where it occurred—served that function, and the fact that he’d witnessed a visitation firsthand had to have greater significance. His mind was preyed upon by the idea that he’d missed an opportunity, that there was a fellow witness whom he was intended to meet but hadn’t. This visitation had to be the sign he’d been waiting for; he couldn’t just disregard it. But that didn’t tell him what he was supposed to do.

Ethan eventually resorted to the process of elimination: he got hold of a list of all the witnesses, and crossed off those who had a clear interpretation of their experience, reasoning that one of those remaining must be the person whose fate was somehow intertwined with his. Among those who were confused or uncertain about the visitation’s meaning would be the one he was intended to meet.

When he had finished crossing names off his list, there was only one left: JANICE REILLY.

In public Neil was able to mask his grief as adults are expected to, but in the privacy of his apartment, the flood-gates of emotion burst open. The awareness of Sarah’s absence would overwhelm him, and then he’d collapse on the floor and weep. He’d curl up into a ball, his body racked by hiccuping sobs, tears and mucus streaming down his face, the anguish coming in ever-increasing waves until it was more than he could bear, more intense than he’d have believed possible. Minutes or hours later it would leave, and he would fall asleep, exhausted. And the next day he would wake up and face the prospect of another day without Sarah.

An elderly woman in Neil’s apartment building tried to comfort him by telling him that the pain would lessen in time, and while he would never forget his wife, he would at least be able to move on. Then he would meet someone else one day and find happiness with her, and he would learn to love God and thus ascend to Heaven when his time came.

This woman’s intentions were good, but Neil was in no position to find any comfort in her words. Sarah’s absence felt like an open wound, and the prospect that someday he would no longer feel pain at her loss seemed not just remote, but a physical impossibility. If suicide would have ended his pain, he’d have done it without hesitation, but that would only ensure that his separation from Sarah was permanent.

The topic of suicide regularly came up at the support group meetings, and inevitably led to someone mentioning Robin Pearson, a woman who used to come to the meetings several months before Neil began attending. Robin’s husband had been afflicted with stomach cancer during a visitation of the angel Makatiel. She stayed in his hospital room for days at a stretch, only for him to die unexpectedly when she was home doing laundry. A nurse who’d been present told Robin that his soul had ascended, and so Robin had begun attending the support group meetings.

Many months later, Robin came to the meeting shaking with rage. There’d been a manifestation of Hell near her house, and she’d seen her husband among the lost souls. She’d confronted the nurse, who admitted to lying in the hopes that Robin would learn to love God, so that at least she would be saved even if her husband hadn’t been. Robin wasn’t at the next meeting, and at the meeting after that the group learned she had committed suicide to rejoin her husband.

None of them knew the status of Robin’s and her husband’s relationship in the afterlife, but successes were known to happen; some couples had indeed been happily reunited through suicide. The support group had attendees whose spouses had descended to Hell, and they talked about being torn between wanting to remain alive and wanting to rejoin their spouses. Neil wasn’t in their situation, but his first response when listening to them had been envy: if Sarah had gone to Hell, suicide would be the solution to all his problems.

This led to a shameful self-knowledge for Neil. He realized that if he had to choose between going to Hell while Sarah went to Heaven, or having both of them go to Hell together, he would choose the latter: he would rather she be exiled from God than separated from him. He knew it was selfish, but he couldn’t change how he felt: he believed Sarah could be happy in either place, but he could only be happy with her.

Neil’s previous experiences with women had never been good. All too often he’d begin flirting with a woman while sitting at a bar, only to have her remember an appointment elsewhere the moment he stood up and his shortened leg came into view. Once, a woman he’d been dating for several weeks broke off their relationship, explaining that while she herself didn’t consider his leg a defect, whenever they were seen in public together other people assumed there must be something wrong with her for being with him, and surely he could understand how unfair that was to her?

Sarah had been the first woman Neil met whose demeanor hadn’t changed one bit, whose expression hadn’t flickered toward pity or horror or even surprise when she first saw his leg. For that reason alone it was predictable that Neil would become infatuated with her; by the time he saw all the sides of her personality, he’d completely fallen in love with her. And because his best qualities came out when he was with her, she fell in love with him too.

Neil had been surprised when Sarah told him she was devout. There weren’t many signs of her devotion—she didn’t go to church, sharing Neil’s dislike for the attitudes of most people who attended—but in her own quiet way she was grateful to God for her life. She never tried to convert Neil, saying that devotion would come from within or not at all. They rarely had any cause to mention God, and most of the time it would’ve been easy for Neil to imagine that Sarah’s views on God matched his own.

This is not to say that Sarah’s devotion had no effect on Neil. On the contrary, Sarah was far and away the best argument for loving God that he had ever encountered. If love of God had contributed to making her the person she was, then perhaps it did make sense. During the years that the two of them were married, his outlook on life improved, and it probably would have reached the point where he was thankful to God, if he and Sarah had grown old together.

Sarah’s death removed that particular possibility, but it needn’t have closed the door on Neil’s loving God. Neil could have taken it as a reminder that no one can count on having decades left. He could have been moved by the realization that, had he died with her, his soul would’ve been lost and the two of them separated for eternity. He could have seen Sarah’s death as a wake-up call, telling him to love God while he still had the chance.

Instead Neil became actively resentful of God. Sarah had been the greatest blessing of his life, and God had taken her away. Now he was expected to love Him for it? For Neil, it was like having a kidnapper demand love as ransom for his wife’s return. Obedience he might have managed, but sincere, heartfelt love? That was a ransom he couldn’t pay.

This paradox confronted several people in the support group. One of the attendees, a man named Phil Soames, correctly pointed out that thinking of it as a condition to be met would guarantee failure. You couldn’t love God as a means to an end, you had to love Him for Himself. If your ultimate goal in loving God was a reunion with your spouse, you weren’t demonstrating true devotion at all.

A woman in the support group named Valerie Tommasino said they shouldn’t even try. She’d been reading a book published by the humanist movement; its members considered it wrong to love a God who inflicted such pain, and advocated that people act according to their own moral sense instead of being guided by the carrot and the stick. These were people who, when they died, descended to Hell in proud defiance of God.

Neil himself had read a pamphlet of the humanist movement; what he most remembered was that it had quoted the fallen angels. Visitations of fallen angels were infrequent, and caused neither good fortune nor bad; they weren’t acting under God’s direction but just passing through the mortal plane as they went about their unimaginable business. On the occasions they appeared, people would ask them questions: did they know God’s intentions? Why had they rebelled? The fallen angels’ reply was always the same: Decide for yourselves. That is what we did. We advise you to do the same.

Those in the humanist movement had decided, and if it weren’t for Sarah, Neil would’ve made the identical choice. But he wanted her back, and the only way was to find a reason to love God.

Looking for any footing on which to build their devotion, some attendees of the support group took comfort in the fact that their loved ones hadn’t suffered when God took them but instead died instantly. Neil didn’t even have that; Sarah had received horrific lacerations when the glass hit her. Of course, it could have been worse. One couple’s teenage son had been trapped in a fire ignited by an angel’s visitation, and received full-thickness burns over eighty percent of his body before rescue workers could free him; his eventual death was a mercy. Sarah had been fortunate by comparison, but not enough to make Neil love God.

Neil could think of only one thing that would make him give thanks to God, and that was if He allowed Sarah to appear before him. It would give him immeasurable comfort just to see her smile again; he’d never been visited by a saved soul before, and a vision now would have meant more to him than at any other point in his life.

But visions don’t appear just because a person needs one, and none ever came to Neil. He had to find his own way toward God.

The next time he attended the support group meeting for witnesses of Nathanael’s visitation, Neil sought out Benny Vasquez, the man whose eyes had been erased by Heaven’s light. Benny didn’t always attend because he was now being invited to speak at other meetings; few visitations resulted in an eyeless person, since Heaven’s light entered the mortal plane only in the brief moments that an angel emerged from or reentered Heaven, so the eyeless were minor celebrities, and in demand as speakers to church groups.

Benny was now as sightless as any burrowing worm: not only were his eyes and sockets missing, his skull lacked even the space for such features, the cheekbones now abutting the forehead. The light that had brought his soul as close to perfection as was possible in the mortal plane had also deformed his body; it was commonly held that this illustrated the superfluity of physical bodies in Heaven. With the limited expressive capacity his face retained, Benny always wore a blissful, rapturous smile.

Neil hoped Benny could say something to help him love God. Benny described Heaven’s light as infinitely beautiful, a sight of such compelling majesty that it vanquished all doubts. It constituted incontrovertible proof that God should be loved, an explanation that made it as obvious as 1+1 = 2. Unfortunately, while Benny could offer many analogies for the effect of Heaven’s light, he couldn’t duplicate that effect with his own words. Those who were already devout found Benny’s descriptions thrilling, but to Neil, they seemed frustratingly vague. So he looked elsewhere for counsel.

Accept the mystery, said the minister of the local church. If you can love God even though your questions go unanswered, you’ll be the better for it.

Admit that you need Him, said the popular book of spiritual advice he bought. When you realize that self-sufficiency is an illusion, you’ll be ready.

Submit yourself completely and utterly, said the preacher on the television. Receiving torment is how you prove your love. Acceptance may not bring you relief in this life, but resistance will only worsen your punishment.

All of these strategies have proven successful for different individuals; any one of them, once internalized, can bring a person to devotion. But these are not always easy to adopt, and Neil was one who found them impossible.

Neil finally tried talking to Sarah’s parents, which was an indication of how desperate he was: his relationship with them had always been tense. While they loved Sarah, they often chided her for not being demonstrative enough in her devotion, and they’d been shocked when she married a man who wasn’t devout at all. For her part, Sarah had always considered her parents too judgmental, and their disapproval of Neil only reinforced her opinion. But now Neil felt he had something in common with them—after all, they were all mourning Sarah’s loss—and so he visited them in their suburban colonial, hoping they could help him in his grief.

How wrong he was. Instead of sympathy, what Neil got from Sarah’s parents was blame for her death. They’d come to this conclusion in the weeks after Sarah’s funeral; they reasoned that she’d been taken to send him a message, and that they were forced to endure her loss solely because he hadn’t been devout. They were now convinced that, his previous explanations notwithstanding, Neil’s deformed leg was in fact God’s doing, and if only he’d been properly chastened by it, Sarah might still be alive.

Their reaction shouldn’t have come as a surprise: throughout Neil’s life, people had attributed moral significance to his leg even though God wasn’t responsible for it. Now that he’d suffered a misfortune for which God was unambiguously responsible, it was inevitable that someone would assume he deserved it. It was purely by chance that Neil heard this sentiment when he was at his most vulnerable, and it could have the greatest impact on him.

Neil didn’t think his in-laws were right, but he began to wonder if he might not be better off if he did. Perhaps, he thought, it’d be better to live in a story where the righteous were rewarded and the sinners were punished, even if the criteria for righteousness and sinfulness eluded him, than to live in a reality where there was no justice at all. It would mean casting himself in the role of sinner, so it was hardly a comforting lie, but it offered one reward that his own ethics couldn’t: believing it would reunite him with Sarah.

Sometimes even bad advice can point a man in the right direction. It was in this manner that his in-laws’ accusations ultimately pushed Neil closer to God.

More than once when she was evangelizing, Janice had been asked if she ever wished she had legs, and she had always answered—honestly—no, she didn’t. She was content as she was. Sometimes her questioner would point out that she couldn’t miss what she’d never known, and she might feel differently if she’d been born with legs and lost them later on. Janice never denied that. But she could truthfully say that she felt no sense of being incomplete, no envy for people with legs; being legless was part of her identity. She’d never bothered with prosthetics, and had a surgical procedure been available to provide her with legs, she’d have turned it down. She had never considered the possibility that God might restore her legs.

One of the unexpected side effects of having legs was the increased attention she received from men. In the past she’d mostly attracted men with amputee fetishes or sainthood complexes; now all sorts of men seemed drawn to her. So when she first noticed Ethan Mead’s interest in her, she thought it was romantic in nature; this possibility was particularly distressing since he was obviously married.

Ethan had begun talking to Janice at the support group meetings, and then began attending her public speaking engagements. It was when he suggested they have lunch together that Janice asked him about his intentions, and he explained his theory. He didn’t know how his fate was intertwined with hers; he knew only that it was. She was skeptical, but she didn’t reject his theory outright. Ethan admitted that he didn’t have answers for her own questions, but he was eager to do anything he could to help her find them. Janice cautiously agreed to help him in his search for meaning, and Ethan promised that he wouldn’t be a burden. They met on a regular basis and talked about the significance of visitations.

Meanwhile Ethan’s wife Claire grew worried. Ethan assured her that he had no romantic feelings toward Janice, but that didn’t alleviate her concerns. She knew that extreme circumstances could create a bond between individuals, and she feared that Ethan’s relationship with Janice—romantic or not—would threaten their marriage.

Ethan suggested to Janice that he, as a librarian, could help her do some research. Neither of them had ever heard of a previous instance where God had left His mark on a person in one visitation and removed it in another. Ethan looked for previous examples in hopes that they might shed some light on Janice’s situation. There were a few instances of individuals receiving multiple miracle cures over their lifetimes, but their illnesses or disabilities had always been of natural origin, not given to them in a visitation. There was one anecdotal report of a man being struck blind for his sins, changing his ways, and later having his sight restored, but it was classified as an urban legend.

Even if that account had a basis in truth, it didn’t provide a useful precedent for Janice’s situation: her legs had been removed before her birth, and so couldn’t have been a punishment for anything she’d done. Was it possible that Janice’s condition had been a punishment for something her mother or father had done? Could her restoration mean they had finally earned her cure? She couldn’t believe that.

If her deceased relatives were to appear in a vision, Janice would’ve been reassured about the restoration of her legs. The fact that they didn’t made her suspect something was amiss, but she didn’t believe that it was a punishment. Perhaps it had been a mistake, and she’d received a miracle meant for someone else; perhaps it was a test, to see how she would respond to being given too much. In either case, there seemed only one course of action: she would, with utmost gratitude and humility, offer to return her gift. To do so, she would go on a pilgrimage.

Pilgrims traveled great distances to visit the holy sites and wait for a visitation, hoping for a miracle cure. Whereas in most of the world one could wait an entire lifetime and never experience a visitation, at a holy site one might only wait months, sometimes weeks. Pilgrims knew that the odds of being cured were still poor; of those who stayed long enough to witness a visitation, the majority did not receive a cure. But they were often happy just to have seen an angel, and they returned home better able to face what awaited them, whether it be imminent death or life with a crippling disability. And of course, just living through a visitation made many people appreciate their situations; invariably, a small number of pilgrims were killed during each visitation.

Janice was willing to accept the outcome, whatever it was. If God saw fit to take her, she was ready. If God removed her legs again, she would resume the work she’d always done. If God let her legs remain, she hoped she would receive the epiphany she needed to speak with conviction about her gift.

She hoped, however, that her miracle would be taken back and given to someone who truly needed it. She didn’t suggest to anyone that they accompany her in hopes of receiving the miracle she was returning, feeling that that would’ve been presumptuous, but she privately considered her pilgrimage a request on behalf of those who were in need.

Her friends and family were confused at Janice’s decision, seeing it as questioning God. As word spread, she received many letters from followers, variously expressing dismay, bafflement, or admiration for her willingness to make such a sacrifice.

As for Ethan, he was completely supportive of Janice’s decision, and excited for himself. He now understood the significance of Rashiel’s visitation for him: it indicated that the time had come for him to act. His wife Claire strenuously opposed his leaving, pointing out that he had no idea how long he might be away, and that she and their children needed him too. It grieved him to go without her support, but he had no choice. Ethan would go on a pilgrimage, and at the next visitation, he would learn what God intended for him.

Neil’s visit to Sarah’s parents caused him to give further thought to his conversation with Benny Vasquez. While he hadn’t gotten a lot out of Benny’s words, he’d been impressed by the absoluteness of Benny’s devotion. No matter what misfortune befell him in the future, Benny’s love of God would never waver, and he would ascend to Heaven when he died. That fact offered Neil a very slim opportunity, one that had seemed so unattractive he hadn’t considered it before; but now, as he was growing more desperate, it was beginning to look expedient.

Every holy site had its pilgrims who, rather than looking for a miracle cure, deliberately sought out Heaven’s light. Those who saw it were always accepted into Heaven when they died, no matter how selfish their motives had been; there were some who wished to have their ambivalence removed so they could be reunited with their loved ones, and others who’d always lived a sinful life and wanted to escape the consequences.

In the past there’d been some doubt as to whether Heaven’s light could indeed overcome all the spiritual obstacles to becoming saved. The debate ended after the case of Barry Larsen, a serial rapist and murderer who, while disposing of the body of his latest victim, witnessed an angel’s visitation and saw Heaven’s light. At Larsen’s execution, his soul was seen ascending to Heaven, much to the outrage of his victims’ families. Priests tried to console them, assuring them—on the basis of no evidence whatsoever—that Heaven’s light must have subjected Larsen to many lifetimes’ worth of penance in a moment, but their words provided little comfort.

For Neil this offered a loophole, an answer to Phil Soames’s objection; it was the one way that he could love Sarah more than he loved God, and still be reunited with her. It was how he could be selfish and still get into Heaven. Others had done it; perhaps he could too. It might not be just, but at least it was predictable.

At an instinctual level, Neil was averse to the idea: it sounded like undergoing brainwashing as a cure for depression. He couldn’t help but think that it would change his personality so drastically that he’d cease to be himself. Then he remembered that everyone in Heaven had undergone a similar transformation; the saved were just like the eyeless except that they no longer had bodies. This gave Neil a clearer image of what he was working toward: no matter whether he became devout by seeing Heaven’s light or by a lifetime of effort, any ultimate reunion with Sarah couldn’t re-create what they’d shared in the mortal plane. In Heaven, they would both be different, and their love for each other would be mixed with the love that all the saved felt for everything.

This realization didn’t diminish Neil’s longing for a reunion with Sarah. In fact it sharpened his desire, because it meant that the reward would be the same no matter what means he used to achieve it; the shortcut led to precisely the same destination as the conventional path.

On the other hand, seeking Heaven’s light was far more difficult than an ordinary pilgrimage, and far more dangerous. Heaven’s light leaked through only when an angel entered or left the mortal plane, and since there was no way to predict where an angel would first appear, light-seekers had to converge on the angel after its arrival and follow it until its departure. To maximize their chances of being in the narrow shaft of Heaven’s light, they followed the angel as closely as possible during its visitation; depending on the angel involved, this might mean staying alongside the funnel of a tornado, the wavefront of a flash flood, or the expanding tip of a chasm as it split apart the landscape. Far more light-seekers died in the attempt than succeeded.

Statistics about the souls of failed light-seekers were difficult to compile, since there were few witnesses to such expeditions, but the numbers so far were not encouraging. In sharp contrast to ordinary pilgrims who died without receiving their sought-after cure, of which roughly half were admitted into Heaven, every single failed light-seeker had descended to Hell. Perhaps only people who were already lost ever considered seeking Heaven’s light, or perhaps death in such circumstances was considered suicide. In any case, it was clear to Neil that he needed to be ready to accept the consequences of embarking on such an attempt.

The entire idea had an all-or-nothing quality to it that Neil found both frightening and attractive. He found the prospect of going on with his life, trying to love God, increasingly maddening. He might try for decades and not succeed. He might not even have that long; as he’d been reminded so often lately, visitations served as a warning to prepare one’s soul, because death might come at any time. He could die tomorrow, and there was no chance of his becoming devout in the near future by conventional means.

It’s perhaps ironic that, given his history of not following Janice Reilly’s example, Neil took notice when she reversed her position. He was eating breakfast when he happened to see an item in the newspaper about her plans for a pilgrimage, and his immediate reaction was anger: how many blessings would it take to satisfy that woman? After considering it more, he decided that if she, having received a blessing, deemed it appropriate to seek God’s assistance in coming to terms with it, then there was no reason that he, having received such terrible misfortune, shouldn’t do the same. And that was enough to tip him over the edge.

Holy sites were invariably in inhospitable places: one was an atoll in the middle of the ocean, while another was in the mountains at an elevation of 20,000 ft. The one that Neil traveled to was in a desert, an expanse of cracked mud reaching miles in every direction; it was desolate, but it was relatively accessible and thus popular among pilgrims. The appearance of the holy site was an object lesson in what happened when the celestial and terrestrial realms touched: the landscape was variously scarred by lava flows, gaping fissures, and impact craters. Vegetation was scarce and ephemeral, restricted to growing in the interval after soil was deposited by floodwaters or whirlwinds and before it was scoured away again.

Pilgrims took up residence all over the site, forming temporary villages with their tents and camper vans; they all made guesses as to what location would maximize their chances of seeing the angel while minimizing the risk of injury or death. Some protection was offered by curved banks of sandbags, left over from years past and rebuilt as needed. A site-specific paramedic and fire department ensured that paths were kept clear so rescue vehicles could go where they were needed. Pilgrims either brought their own food and water or purchased them from vendors charging exorbitant prices; everyone paid a fee to cover the cost of waste removal.

Light-seekers always had off-road vehicles to better cross rough terrain when it came time to follow the angel. Those who could afford it drove alone; those who couldn’t formed groups of two or three or four. Neil didn’t want to be a passenger reliant on another person, nor did he want the responsibility of driving anyone else. This might be his final act on earth, and he felt he should do it alone. The cost of Sarah’s funeral had depleted their savings, so Neil sold all his possessions in order to purchase a suitable vehicle: a pickup truck equipped with aggressively knurled tires and heavy-duty shock absorbers.

As soon as he arrived, Neil started doing what all the other light-seekers did: crisscrossing the site in his vehicle, trying to familiarize himself with its topography. It was on one of his drives around the site’s perimeter that he met Ethan; Ethan flagged him down after his own car had stalled on his return from the nearest grocery store, eighty miles away. Neil helped him get his car started again, and then, at Ethan’s insistence, followed him back to his campsite for dinner. Janice wasn’t there when they arrived, having gone to visit some pilgrims several tents over; Neil listened politely while Ethan—heating prepackaged meals over a bottle of propane—began describing the events that had brought him to the holy site.

When Ethan mentioned Janice Reilly’s name, Neil couldn’t mask his surprise. He had no desire to speak with her again, and immediately excused himself to leave. He was explaining to a puzzled Ethan that he’d forgotten a previous engagement when Janice arrived.

She was startled to see Neil there, but asked him to stay. Ethan explained why he’d invited Neil to dinner, and Janice told him where she and Neil had met. Then she asked Neil what had brought him to the holy site. When he told them he was a light-seeker, Ethan and Janice immediately tried to persuade him to reconsider his plans. He might be committing suicide, said Ethan, and there were always better alternatives than suicide. Seeing Heaven’s light was not the answer, said Janice; that wasn’t what God wanted. Neil stiffly thanked them for their concern, and left.

During the weeks of waiting, Neil spent every day driving around the site; maps were available, and were updated after each visitation, but they were no substitute for driving the terrain yourself. On occasion he would see a light-seeker who was obviously experienced in off-road driving, and ask him—the vast majority of the light-seekers were men—for tips on negotiating a specific type of terrain. Some had been at the site for several visitations, having neither succeeded nor failed at their previous attempts. They were glad to share tips on how best to pursue an angel, but never offered any personal information about themselves. Neil found the tone of their conversation peculiar, simultaneously hopeful and hopeless, and wondered if he sounded the same.

Ethan and Janice passed the time by getting to know some of the other pilgrims. Their reactions to Janice’s situation were mixed: some thought her ungrateful, while others thought her generous. Most found Ethan’s story interesting, since he was one of the very few pilgrims seeking something other than a miracle cure. For the most part, there was a feeling of camaraderie that sustained them during the long wait.

Neil was driving around in his truck when dark clouds began coalescing in the southeast, and the word came over the CB radio that a visitation had begun. He stopped the vehicle to insert earplugs into his ears and don his helmet; by the time he was finished, flashes of lightning were visible, and a light-seeker near the angel reported that it was Barakiel, and it appeared to be moving due north. Neil turned his truck east in anticipation and began driving at full speed.

There was no rain or wind, only dark clouds from which lightning emerged. Over the radio other light-seekers relayed estimates of the angel’s direction and speed, and Neil headed northeast to get in front of it. At first he could gauge his distance from the storm by counting how long it took for the thunder to arrive, but soon the lightning bolts were striking so frequently that he couldn’t match up the sounds with the individual strikes.

He saw the vehicles of two other light-seekers converging. They began driving in parallel, heading north, over a heavily cratered section of ground, bouncing over small ones and swerving to avoid the larger ones. Bolts of lightning were striking the ground everywhere, but they appeared to be radiating from a point south of Neil’s position; the angel was directly behind him, and closing.

Even through his earplugs, the roar was deafening. Neil could feel his hair rising from his skin as the electric charge built up around him. He kept glancing in his rearview mirror, trying to ascertain where the angel was while wondering how close he ought to get.

His vision grew so crowded with afterimages that it became difficult to distinguish actual bolts of lightning among them. Squinting at the dazzle in his mirror, he realized he was looking at a continuous bolt of lightning, undulating but uninterrupted. He tilted the driver’s-side mirror upward to get a better look, and saw the source of the lightning bolt, a seething, writhing mass of flames, silver against the dusky clouds: the angel Barakiel.

It was then, while Neil was transfixed and paralyzed by what he saw, that his pickup truck crested a sharp outcropping of rock and became airborne. The truck smashed into a boulder, the entire force of the impact concentrated on the vehicle’s left front end, crumpling it like foil. The intrusion into the driver’s compartment fractured both of Neil’s legs and nicked his left femoral artery. Neil began, slowly but surely, bleeding to death.

He didn’t try to move; he wasn’t in physical pain at the moment, but he somehow knew that the slightest movement would be excruciating. It was obvious that he was pinned in the truck, and there was no way he could pursue Barakiel even if he weren’t. Helplessly, he watched the lightning storm move farther and farther away.

As he watched it, Neil began crying. He was filled with a mixture of regret and self-contempt, cursing himself for ever thinking that such a scheme could succeed. He would have begged for the opportunity to do it over again, promised to spend the rest of his days learning to love God, if only he could live, but he knew that no bargaining was possible and he had only himself to blame. He apologized to Sarah for losing his chance at being reunited with her, for throwing his life away on a gamble instead of playing it safe. He prayed that she understood that he’d been motivated by his love for her, and that she would forgive him.

Through his tears he saw a woman running toward him, and recognized her as Janice Reilly. He realized his truck had crashed no more than a hundred yards from her and Ethan’s campsite. There was nothing she could do, though; he could feel the blood draining out of him, and knew that he wouldn’t live long enough for a rescue vehicle to arrive. He thought Janice was calling to him, but his ears were ringing too badly for him to hear anything. He could see Ethan Mead behind her, also starting to run toward him.

Then there was a flash of light and Janice was knocked off her feet as if she’d been struck by a sledgehammer. At first he thought she’d been hit by lightning, but then he realized that the lightning had already ceased. It was when she stood up again that he saw her face, steam rising from newly featureless skin, and he realized that Janice had been struck by Heaven’s light.

Neil looked up, but all he saw were clouds; the shaft of light was gone. It seemed as if God were taunting him, not only by showing him the prize he’d lost his life trying to acquire while still holding it out of reach, but also by giving it to someone who didn’t need it or even want it. God had already wasted a miracle on Janice, and now He was doing it again.

It was at that moment that another beam of Heaven’s light penetrated the cloud cover and struck Neil, trapped in his vehicle.

Like a thousand hypodermic needles the light punctured his flesh and scraped across his bones. The light unmade his eyes, turning him into not a formerly sighted being, but a being never intended to possess vision. And in doing so the light revealed to Neil all the reasons he should love God.

He loved Him with an utterness beyond what humans can experience for one another. To say it was unconditional was inadequate, because even the word “unconditional” required the concept of a condition and such an idea was no longer comprehensible to him: every phenomenon in the universe was nothing less than an explicit reason to love Him. No circumstance could be an obstacle or even an irrelevancy, but only another reason to be grateful, a further inducement to love. Neil thought of the grief that had driven him to suicidal recklessness, and the pain and terror that Sarah had experienced before she died, and still he loved God, not in spite of their suffering, but because of it.

He renounced all his previous anger and ambivalence and desire for answers. He was grateful for all the pain he’d endured, contrite for not previously recognizing it as the gift it was, euphoric that he was now being granted this insight into his true purpose. He understood how life was an undeserved bounty, how even the most virtuous were not worthy of the glories of the mortal plane.

For him the mystery was solved, because he understood that everything in life is love, even pain, especially pain.

So minutes later, when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation.

And God sent him to Hell anyway.

Ethan saw all of this. He saw Neil and Janice remade by Heaven’s light, and he saw the pious love on their eyeless faces. He saw the skies become clear and the sunlight return. He was holding Neil’s hand, waiting for the paramedics, when Neil died, and he saw Neil’s soul leave his body and rise toward Heaven, only to descend into Hell.

Janice didn’t see it, for by then her eyes were already gone. Ethan was the sole witness, and he realized that this was God’s purpose for him: to follow Janice Reilly to this point and to see what she could not.

When statistics were compiled for Barakiel’s visitation, it turned out that there had been a total of ten casualties, six among light-seekers and four among ordinary pilgrims. Nine pilgrims received miracle cures; the only individuals to see Heaven’s light were Janice and Neil. There were no statistics regarding how many pilgrims had felt their lives changed by the visitation, but Ethan counted himself among them.

Upon returning home, Janice resumed her evangelism, but the topic of her speeches has changed. She no longer speaks about how the physically handicapped have the resources to overcome their limitations; instead she, like the other eyeless, speaks about the unbearable beauty of God’s creation. Many who used to draw inspiration from her are disappointed, feeling they’ve lost a spiritual leader. When Janice had spoken of the strength she had as an afflicted person, her message was rare, but now that she’s eyeless, her message is commonplace. She doesn’t worry about the reduction in her audience, though, because she has complete conviction in what she evangelizes.

Ethan quit his job and became a preacher so that he too could speak about his experiences. His wife Claire couldn’t accept his new mission and ultimately left him, taking their children with her, but Ethan was willing to continue alone. He’s developed a substantial following by telling people what happened to Neil Fisk. He tells people that they can no more expect justice in the afterlife than in the mortal plane, but he doesn’t do this to dissuade them from worshipping God; on the contrary, he encourages them to do so. What he insists on is that they not love God under a misapprehension, that if they wish to love God, they be prepared to do so no matter what His intentions. God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.

As for Neil, although he is unaware of any of Ethan’s sermons, he would understand their message perfectly. His lost soul is the embodiment of Ethan’s teachings.

For most of its inhabitants, Hell is not that different from Earth; its principal punishment is the regret of not having loved God enough when alive, and for many that’s easily endured. For Neil, however, Hell bears no resemblance whatsoever to the mortal plane. His eternal body has well-formed legs, but he’s scarcely aware of them; his eyes have been restored, but he can’t bear to open them. Just as seeing Heaven’s light gave him an awareness of God’s presence in all things in the mortal plane, so it has made him aware of God’s absence in all things in Hell. Everything Neil sees, hears, or touches causes him distress, and unlike in the mortal plane this pain is not a form of God’s love, but a consequence of His absence. Neil is experiencing more anguish than was possible when he was alive, but his only response is to love God.

Neil still loves Sarah, and misses her as much as he ever did, and the knowledge that he came so close to rejoining her only makes it worse. He knows his being sent to Hell was not a result of anything he did; he knows there was no reason for it, no higher purpose being served. None of this diminishes his love for God. If there were a possibility that he could be admitted to Heaven and his suffering would end, he would not hope for it; such desires no longer occur to him.

Neil even knows that by being beyond God’s awareness, he is not loved by God in return. This doesn’t affect his feelings either, because unconditional love asks nothing, not even that it be returned.

And though it’s been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still. That is the nature of true devotion.

STEALING ALABAMA

Allen Steele

Philadelphia 7.4.70 / T-28.25.03

The Liberty Bell is much larger than he expected. Nearly fifteen feet tall, weighing over two thousand pounds, it’s suspended by its oak arm between two cement supports, the ceiling lights casting a dull sheen from its bronze surface. Captain Lee stands in front of the bell, meditating upon the long crack that runs down its side, the Biblical inscription carved around its top: Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land unto All the Inhabitants Thereof. Lev. XXV:X.

Reflected in the window behind the bell he can see the URS lieutenant who escorted him to the pavilion. The park ranger who met them there is young and nervous; his hand was sweaty when Lee clasped it, and he stuttered as he commenced a long-winded recital of the bell’s history until Lee politely asked to be left alone. Now they wait patiently behind him, respectfully giving him a few moments alone.

Through the pavilion window, on the opposite side of the grassy mall, lies Independence Hall. The reception is already underway, yet Lee’s in no hurry to join it, even though the party is being held in honor of him and his crew. It’s a distinct privilege to be allowed to view the Liberty Bell; one of the first acts the government took after the Revolution was to close this site to the public. Citing the risk of a terrorist attack, the Internal Security Agency claimed that the bell was too valuable to be left unguarded during a national emergency, yet it’s been nearly twelve years since the Revolution and still the Liberty Bell is off-limits to everyone save the party elite. Lee can’t help but wonder if the government fears what the average citizen might think if he saw for himself the artifact from which the Liberty Party took its name, and read the words inscribed upon it.

There’s still time to call it off. A few words whispered to the right people, a couple of discreet phone calls using innocuous code phrases, and the conspiracy would not so much unravel as it would simply cease to exist. Everyone involved would stop what they’re doing and assume fall-back positions, and with any luck the prefects would never know that a plot had transpired.

Tonight’s his last chance to back out. After this, there’s no turning back, no acceptable alternative except success; failure means treason and treason means death. Which is why he’s come here, to this particular place; not as a symbolic display of patriotism, as everyone assumes, but simply to give himself a few minutes to think.

So is he going through with this or not?

Lee still hasn’t answered his own question as he turns away from the bell. The lieutenant snaps to attention; the ranger self-consciously does the same even though it isn’t necessary.

“All right, Lieutenant,” he says quietly, “I’m done here. Let’s go to the party.”

As appropriate for the Fourth of July, the President’s Reception is being held in the cobblestone square behind Independence Hall. Once the guests make their way through the security checkpoints, they find that an enormous screen has been unfurled across the rear of the red-brick colonial courthouse, upon which real-time images of the Alabama are being projected. Lee ignores the screen as he saunters through the crowd, untasted glass of champagne in his gloved left hand, his right hand held formally behind his back. In the humid warmth of the July evening, his white dress uniform clings to his skin. He deliberately arrived after his senior officers; attending this fete was the thing he was most reluctant to do, yet his appearance is mandatory. Besides, there’s one last bit of important business that needs to be settled.

So Captain Lee mingles with the gentlemen in their batswing ties and frock coats and the ladies in their bodices and gowns, smiling and bowing, pausing now and then to shake some stranger’s hand or be photographed with another, yet taking care to remain in motion so as not to be cornered for very long. Along the edge of the crowd, he can see the uniforms of URS soldiers: black berets, jodhpurs ducked into leather knee boots, polished rifles held at parade rest. The red softball-size spheres of surveillance floaters hover above the partygoers, watching, listening, scanning. Security is tight; the president is supposed to be flying up from Atlanta for the occasion, although Lee has little doubt that he will be unavoidably detained. Philadelphia is a little too close to the New England border for the president of the United Republic of America to consider himself entirely safe. Indeed, very few people ever see him outside the capital, although the news media regularly show footage of him attending events in places as far distant as Southern California.

Spotting another pair of white service uniforms beneath the boughs of a walnut tree, Lee makes his way through the crowd, and finds Tom Shapiro, the Alabama’s First Officer, huddled with his Executive Officer, Jud Tinsley. He can’t make out what they’re saying until he’s nearly beside them. Tinsley sees him coming, and briefly touches Shapiro’s elbow as he straightens his shoulders.

“Evening, Captain,” Shapiro says.

“Gentlemen . . .”

“Enjoying the party, sir?” Tinsley raises his bare hand to stifle a burp. “Pretty nice send-off they’re giving us.”

“It’ll do.” Lee knows the XO is drunk even before he notices the empty champagne glass on the low wall below the tree. “Just make sure you don’t enjoy yourselves too much. Jud, button your tunic and put on your gloves. We’re in public.”

“Sorry, sir.” Tinsley’s face reddens; he digs into his trouser pockets for his gloves. “It’s kinda warm tonight.”

“Enjoy it. You’ll be cold soon enough.” Lee steps forward to fasten the top brass button of the younger man’s uniform. Shapiro, at least, is properly dressed and reasonably sober. “You’re not talking about anything you shouldn’t, are you?” he murmurs when he’s close enough that only the two of them can hear him.

Tinsley starts to mutter a half-hearted denial. “Just a couple of details,” Shapiro says quietly. He glances up at the low tree limbs above them. “We figured the floaters couldn’t sneak up on us over here.”

Good thinking, but not good enough. “Not the time nor place,” Lee says. “Save it for . . .”

He catches himself. The next meeting, he was about to say, yet there aren’t going to be any more meetings, are there? After the reception they’ll be driven straight to the airport, where they’re scheduled to board a jet to Gingrich Space Center. By 0600 tomorrow morning they’ll be in quarantine along with the rest of the crew, and there will be no opportunity for any of them to have a conversation without risk of being monitored. If they wait until they reach the Alabama, it may be too late to make any changes. Perhaps Tom has the right idea after all.

“Has something come up?” Lee casually gazes up at the walnut tree, just to make certain a floater isn’t hiding among the leaves. “Anything I should know about?”

Neither of his senior officers say anything, although they give each other a reticent look. “Nothing we haven’t already gone over, sir,” Shapiro says at last. “It’s just . . . I mean, the ignition lock-out . . .”

“Don’t worry,” Lee says. “We’re taking care of . . .” Tinsley coughs into his fist, his right foot innocuously prodding Lee’s shoe. The captain glances his way, sees the XO gazing past his shoulder. A swish of a crinoline skirt from close behind, then a soft hand touches his arm.

“If I didn’t know better, Robert,” Elise says, “I’d swear you were avoiding me.”

She’s half-right; if Lee had known she would be here, he would have avoided her. Yet as soon as he hears her voice, he realizes this particular encounter is inevitable: it’s only natural that she would attend this reception, and not only because they were once married.

Yet, as the captain turns toward Elise Rochelle Lee, he feels no regret over having left her. Their marriage lasted for more than seventeen years, and yet she remains as icily beautiful as when they first met at an Academy mixer; it’s only in the last eighteen months that he’s come to realize that he barely knows her. The fact that she’s kept his name long after their legal separation is yet another indication that she married him for reasons that had more to do with social stature than love; for all intents and purposes, she’s still the wife of Captain R.E. Lee, commanding officer of the URSS Alabama.

“I wasn’t. I simply didn’t see you among all these people.” Lee takes her silk-gloved hand, gives her a quick buss on the cheek. “You look splendid . . . is that a new dress?”

“Flatterer.” Elise folds her hand around his elbow as her gaze shifts to Shapiro and Tinsley. “Pardon me, gentlemen, but may I borrow your captain? There’s someone who wants to meet him.”

“By all means.” Shapiro essays a formal bow as he steps back. Tinsley does the same, and Lee can’t help but notice that his eyes never leave Elise’s cleavage. Those breasts once attracted him, too; it took him a long time to discover that the heart beneath them was cold. “Captain, Madame . . .”

“Your father?” Lee murmurs as Elise escorts him away. “I figured he would send you to find me.”

“Perhaps.” Her smile becomes enigmatic as they stroll through the crowd. “Why, is it such a burden for you to see him one last time? After all, he had quite a bit to do with your selection.”

A soft purr from somewhere just above his head. A floater has picked them up; now it’s following them as they move through the reception. Even if he was inclined to give a candid answer—thank you, but I’ve accomplished this on my own—now isn’t the time. “For which I’m grateful,” Lee says. “And no, it isn’t a burden.”

“Good. I rather hoped not.” Her hand slides down to take his own. “Besides, he has a treat for you.”

They find Joseph R. Rochelle, the Senator from Virginia, standing in front of the screen, surrounded as always by aides, Liberty Party apparatchiks, local political cronies, and sycophants of one sort or another. A short, avuncular man for whom somatotropin therapy has erased nearly twenty years from his real age, he now looks only slightly older than his former son-in-law. His back is turned as they approach; he must have just finished another one of his anecdotes, for everyone laughs out loud. Senator Rochelle rarely lacks for an audience, in or out of Atlanta.

“Oh, very good! You’ve found him!” Senator Rochelle beams as his daughter leads Captain Lee into the midst of the circle, then he half-turns to make an expansive gesture at the screen looming above them. “I was just saying that someone . . . I won’t say whom, of course . . . in Atlanta had insisted upon christening your ship the Virginia.” A broad wink that everyone understands. “But of course, that particular someone didn’t have quite as much clout as the gentleman from another state.”

More laughter from the senator’s entourage, and Lee forces himself to smile appreciatively. While the Alabama was still under construction, there had been considerable in-fighting within Congress over which state the vessel would be named after. In the end, the president settled the dispute by christening it in honor of the state whose NASA center had been most responsible for its research and development. An ironic choice, since NASA itself no longer exists; it’s now yet another civilian agency dismantled under the National Reform Program, its primary functions folded into the Federal Space Agency, an arm of the United Republic Service.

But Lee doesn’t say anything, nor does he need to; it’s only necessary for him to smile and bow as the senator introduces him to a dozen or so men and women whose names he forgets as soon as he shakes their hands, while Elise stands between them, playing the role of the loyal daughter and loving wife. When all was said and done, this was about appearances; once again, Lee realizes that he hadn’t chosen his wife so much as she had chosen him, and then only with her father’s pragmatic approval. The senator needed a son-in-law from the Academy of the Republic, an up-and-coming URS officer whose career he could advance from a discreet distance in order to further his own political ambitions. Tonight’s the big payoff for everyone.

As the senator begins telling another one of his stories, Lee’s attention drifts to the screen towering above them. The Alabama hangs suspended in low orbit above Earth, the spotlights of its skeletal dry-dock reflecting dully off the ship’s light-grey fuselage. A tug gently maneuvers a cylindrical barge into position below the ship’s spherical main fuel tank, in preparation for onloading another ten thousand tons of deuterium and helium-3 strip-mined from the mountains of the Moon. Fueling operations will continue non-stop right up until ten hours before the beginning of Alabama’s scheduled launch at 2400 tomorrow night.

Once again, Lee finds himself wondering if he should call it off. Everything depends upon the timetable being kept. Nothing can be allowed to go wrong between now and then . . . and yet there are a hundred different ways it could all fall apart.

“Why the long face, Captain?” One of the nameless men to whom he has just been introduced nudges his left shoulder. “Concerned about the mission?”

“No, not at all.” Out of the corner of his eye, Lee catches Elise studying him. “Just observing the fuel-up, that’s all.”

“Robert doesn’t worry. He’s the coolest officer the Academy has ever produced.” Senator Rochelle favors his son-in-law with a something that might resemble fondness unless one happened to look closely at his eyes. “He just wants to get out of here and see to his ship. Isn’t that right, Bob?”

“Anything you say, Duke.” Lee addresses the senator by his nickname, and this elicits more laughter from the cronies. No one ever says no to the Senator from Virginia; by much the same token, Duke knows that Lee doesn’t like to be called Bob. Tit for tat.

Rochelle chuckles as he pats Lee on the shoulder, then he takes him by the arm. “If you’ll excuse us,” he says to the others, “I’d like to have a few words with the Captain.” They nod and murmur as Rochelle leads Lee away, Elise falling in behind them. “This will take just a moment,” Rochelle says softly once they’re out of earshot. “There’s someone here who wants to meet you.”

Believing the senator wants to introduce him to yet another politician, Lee suppresses a sigh as he lets Rochelle walk him past the edge of the crowd. Yet Duke surprises him; instead, he takes him behind the screen, toward the back entrance of Independence Hall. A pair of soldiers stands guard near the door, their rifles at ready; behind them is a prefect, wearing the calf-length dark grey overcoat and braided cap that is the uniform of ISA officers. The soldiers step aside when they see the senator, but the prefect doesn’t budge. He silently waits as Rochelle produces his I.D. folder; Elise reluctantly does the same, giving the intelligence officer a haughty glare as she holds her card out to him to inspect. Only Lee is spared; apparently the prefect recognizes him, for he shakes his head as Lee reaches into his pocket. Satisfied, the officer turns and opens the narrow wooden door leading into the building.

The hallway is silent, vacant save for another soldier inside the entrance. Their footsteps echo faintly off the old plaster walls as Rochelle beckons Lee and his daughter toward a double door to the right; he gives them a quick look-over as if to check their appearance, then he quietly taps on the door. A moment passes; the door clicks as it’s unlocked from within, then it’s opened by yet another soldier standing just inside.

Lee immediately recognizes this place from history texts he’s studied since childhood: the Assembly Room, where the Declaration of Independence was signed and the First Constitution debated and framed. Small wooden desks, each with its inkpot and quill pen, arranged in semi-circular rows around a low platform on which a long table has been placed in front of three high-backed chairs. And here, in the middle of the oak-paneled room with his back turned toward them, stands Hamilton Conroy, the President of the United Republic of America.

Senator Rochelle stops at the wooden railing at the back of the room. “Mr. President,” he says formally, “may I present to you Captain Robert E. Lee, commander of the United Republic Service Spaceship Alabama.”

Hearing the senator, President Conroy turns away from the gaunt middle-aged man with whom he had been conversing. Rotund and short of stature, with narrow brown eyes set in a broad face, the president is smaller than he seems on government netv; now he seems diminished by the room itself. A pretender to history, Lee reflects. A charlatan aspiring to greatness.

“Indeed.” The president smiles briefly as he walks toward the railing, his hands clasped together behind his frock coat. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Captain. Your father-in-law has told me great things about you.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.” Lee doesn’t relax from the rigid stance he automatically assumed the moment he saw the Commander-in-Chief. “I hope I live up to your expectations.”

The president laughs dryly, without much humor. “At ease, Captain. You’re among friends here.” He glances at Senator Rochelle. “Duke, you should have let him know I would be here. This reception is in his honor, after all. No need for surprises.”

“The ISA requested I keep your presence secret,” Rochelle says. “Security considerations.”

“Yes, of course.” The president dismisses the senator with scarcely a nod, his attention solely focused upon Lee. “Sorry to take you away from the party, Captain. I only wished to meet you in person. I haven’t had a chance to do so before, and after tonight I’ll never have an opportunity to do so again.”

“Yes sir, Mr. President.” Lee clasps his hands behind him. From the corner of his eye he sees Elise doing a slow burn. She’s probably been awaiting this moment for several weeks; now she’s being ignored, with no one bothering to introduce her to the president. “I apologize if I’ve taken you away from urgent business.”

The smile fades from the president’s face. “Only matters of state.” He turns toward the man with whom he had been speaking. “I don’t know if you’ve ever met our Director of Internal Security before . . . Mr. Shaw, Captain Lee.”

“Never before now, Mr. President.” Roland Shaw glides down the aisle to extend his hand. “However, I believe we have a meeting at the Cape tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, sir, we do.” Lee clasps Shaw’s hand. “A last-minute detail before the shuttle launch. Security procedures . . .”

“Of course.” The left corner of Shaw’s mouth tics upward. “We were just discussing a similar sort of thing.”

“Really?” Senator Rochelle tries to reinsert himself in the conversation. “Anything you care to share with us?”

Shaw frowns. “Not much to talk about,” he says, and for a moment his eyes meet Lee’s. “A round-up of dissidents who may be opposed to this mission. Simply a precaution.”

“A wise idea.” Rochelle quickly voices his approval. “I’m glad we were able to renew the Alien and Sedition Act in the last session. It only seemed prudent, given our current situation.”

The current situation. As always, the Republic is under constant siege by its enemies, both abroad and within. The Commonwealth of New England, which still maintains armed troops at the borders of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Pacifica, whose guerrilla army wages daily skirmishes with URS forces over disputed territory in the northern Sierra Nevada range. The European Commonwealth, which continues to enforce trade embargoes until the Republic agrees to remove its nukes from geostationary orbit. Meanwhile, alleged spies were being arrested every day, in cities and towns all over the country. Last night a high-school teacher was publicly hanged in Houston. One of her former students claimed that she was using a satphone to transmit information to France; although the accused repeatedly claimed innocence during her trial and the satphone was never found, the student was the son of a prominent Liberty Party official, and therefore his word was beyond question. The teacher’s execution was carried out a few hours after the trial’s completion and shown live on Govnet.

The president acknowledges the senator with only a vague nod; for the moment, he’s disinterested in politics. He steps a little closer to the railing, his solemn eyes casually examining the gold braid on Lee’s epaulets. “We have something in common, Captain,” he quietly observes. “We’re both named after famous ancestors.”

“Yes sir, Mr. President.” Lee continues to stare straight ahead. “Robert E. Lee was my great-grandfather, three gernerations removed.” Or at least, so he’s been told; in Virginia, nearly everyone whose last name is Lee presumes to be descended from the general who led the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Lee’s claim to family ancestry is no more or less valid than anyone else’s.

“Just as I’m descended from Alexander Hamilton, yes.” The president reaches up to smooth a minute wrinkle on the left shoulder of Lee’s uniform. “I’m curious . . . is there anything that General Lee ever said that strikes a chord with you? Something that has carried you to this place?”

Warmth curls around Lee’s neck. Although the president doesn’t look directly at him, he feels the eyes of everyone else in the room. Behind the president, Shaw watches him silently, his gaze never leaving his face.

“Yes, sir, he did.” Lee’s mouth is dry. “ ‘Duty is the sublimest word in our language. Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less.’ ”

President Conroy raises his eyes to meet Lee’s. For a few seconds that seem much longer he regards him with cool appraisal. A small vein pulses in his neck below his right ear; Lee finds himself watching it with an abstract sort of fascination.

Does he suspect? Has he learned of the conspiracy? Two days ago, Lee wrote a letter, addressed to both Elise and her father, which he stored in his desk’s memory. The desk was instructed not to release its contents until after 2400 hours tomorrow night, but someone—Elise, the senator, the ISA—might have decrypted it. If they did . . .

“ ‘Let Americans disdain to be the instruments of European greatness,’ ” the president says at last. “ ‘Let the thirteen States, bound together in a dissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American system, superior to the control of all transatlantic force or influence, and able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new world.’ ” He pauses. “Do you understand, Captain?”

“Yes sir, Mr. President.”

“My great-grandfather, also several generations removed, wrote those words almost three hundred years ago, not long after this great country was founded in this very same room.” The president speaks as if Lee hasn’t said anything. “The conflicts were different then, but yet they remain much the same today. America is destined for greatness, and it’s our responsibility to achieve its destiny in the stars themselves. Out there, the Republic shall become ageless. Immortal.”

“Yes sir, Mr. President.”

The president slowly nods. “You’re doing a great service to this country, Captain. For this, the Republic owes its gratitude.” His left hand moves from behind his back, extends across the railing. “God bless you, son. Good luck.”

Lee has a sudden impulse to spit in his face. No one could have stopped him, not even the soldier standing behind him. Instead, he clasps the president’s hand. His palm feels small and limp within his linen glove; Lee can’t resist the impulse to give his a little more pressure than usual.

“Thank you, sir,” he says. “I’ll do my best.”

The president winces, but smiles back at him, and it’s in that instant Lee’s last remaining doubts vanish. No more hesitation, no more second thoughts . . .

Tomorrow, he’s going to steal the Alabama.

Huntsville 7.4.70 / T-26.30.38

The first fiery red chrysanthemum has just exploded above the Tennessee River when Jorge Montero’s desk buzzes. Jorge doesn’t hear it at first; he’s out on the balcony with his family, enjoying the cool breeze that has come with the passing of the day, watching the skyrockets as they soar upward from the riverside several miles away. The delayed boom of the fireworks almost drowns out the phone from inside the house; it’s his son who notices it first.

“Call, Papa.” Carlos barely looks away as an orange blossom opens in the sky, its iridescent petals coruscating down around the holo of the single-star Republic flag looming above the modest Huntsville skyline.

Jorge grunts, pushes himself out of his chair. Rita gives him a little smile as he tromps past her to the glass-paneled door leading into the spare bedroom he’s converted into a office; Marie is curled up in her lap, her head nestled against her mother’s shoulder. “Hurry back,” Rita murmurs. “You’re going to miss it.”

“It’ll take just a second.” Jorge had switched off the inside lights so that their eyes would become night-adapted; he almost tells the room to turn them back on again, but thinks better of it as he gropes his way through the dark office. A blue flash through the window illuminates his desk, making it a little easier to find, and he picks up the phone just as it buzzes a fourth time. “Hello?”

An anonymous voice. “Excuse me, is this the Jackson residence?”

Ice tickles the nape of his neck. “I’m sorry, no. You’ve got the wrong number.”

“My mistake. Sorry.” There’s a click, then the dial tone.

Jorge’s hand trembles as he puts down the phone. He stands alone in the office for a few moments, staring at nothing in particular, feeling his heart beat against his chest. Then he turns away from the desk, walks to the office door and opens it. Light from the upstairs hallway causes him to squint; he deliberately shuts his eyes as he quickly moves across the hall to Carlos’s room. Fortunately, the kid has switched off the lights; Jorge goes to the window next to the bed and touches the stud that deopaques the glass.

Several coupes are parked on the street in front of their apartment house, yet none look unfamiliar or out of place. As he watches, though, a dark blue midi cruises down St. Clair. It slows to a crawl as it comes within sight of his building; as it passes beneath a street lamp he catches a brief glimpse through the windshield of two men. They’re peering up at his apartment.

The midi pulls over to the curb. Its rear lights flash and its fan skirts billow as it settles to the ground, but the doors don’t open. The car remains still, as if its driver is waiting for something.

Jorge opaques the window, takes a deep breath. Then he hurries back across the hall to his office. Another pyrotechnic flash from across the city, followed several seconds later by distant thunder. “Hello, desk,” he says, careful to keep the office lights off. “I.D. Jorge, password totem pole.”

“Good evening, Jorge.” The wall behind the desk briefly displays the start-up screen before replacing it with a picture he had taken of Marie and Carlos in Big Spring Park one autumn afternoon last year. “Would you like to read your mail?”

“No.” Jorge opens the closet, pulls out the canvas duffel bag he packed nearly a month ago. “Locate all files prefixed zero-two and erase. Password one-nine-gamma.”

“Files located and erased.” A pause. “You have a phone subroutine attached to this command. Do you wish for me to activate it now?”

“Yes, please. Password two-nine-epsilon.” The desk would now place a call to the next person in the chain and repeat the same sequence of code-words he had heard only a couple of minutes ago, alerting that individual in the same way he had been warned. Jorge hopes that the person who called him had been able to make a clean getaway, and that the next guy in line will receive the signal in time.

No time to worry about that now. “Make another call. Phonebook number twelve, password six-zero-six. Send voxcard in memory, attach encrypted file prefixed zero-three-zero. Then erase all data from memory. That’s all, desk.” Without waiting for an acknowledgment, Jorge drops the bag on top of the books and disks stacked on his desk and crosses the room to the balcony. His wife and children are still watching the fireworks. Rita looks around as he opens the door.

“It’s time,” he says quietly.

Her mouth falls open and fear briefly crosses her face, then she quickly puts a clamp on her emotions before Marie notices. “All right, kids,” she says, swinging their daughter off her lap as she stands up, “that’s enough fireworks. Papa’s got a big surprise for you.”

“But I want to watch!” Marie wails. In the far distance, skyrockets sail upward two and three at a time, their crackling detonations overlapping one another: poom! poppa-poppa-poom! poom! “I don’t wanna go!”

“It’s almost over. Now we’re going out for ice cream.” Rita picks Marie up again, turns to Carlos. “C’mon, you too. We’re all going.”

Carlos looks away from the city, stares across the balcony at his father. Their eyes meet, and in that instant Jorge knows that the boy has guessed the truth. His son may only be thirteen, but he’s far more mature than his years; a few weeks ago, Jorge had told him everything—at least, everything that he needed to know—and warned him that this moment might come. Now Carlos simply nods. “Sure,” he says softly. “Sounds like fun.”

Jorge gives him a reassuring nod as he steps aside to let Rita carry Marie through the door. The little girl’s still fussing over missing the rest of the fireworks, but there’s no time to comfort her now. He walks to the edge of the balcony, glances over the side. No one in the courtyard behind the apartment house, and his coupe is still parked in front of its recharger. “Seen anyone down there?” he murmurs as Carlos joins him at the railing.

“I haven’t really been looking. No, I don’t think so.” The teenager is shaking. “Papa, that call . . .”

“It’s begun.” It figures the ISA would pick this day for their next crackdown; the mass-arrest of D.I.’s—“dissident intellectuals,” to use a favorite Party expression—on the Fourth of July is sure to make every patriotic heart swell with pride. “We’ve got to hurry. Help Mama with Marie, will you?”

“Okay.” Carlos hesitates. “Can we take anything?”

“Only the clothes on your back. Sorry.” Carlos nods gravely, then heads for the balcony door. Jorge is about to follow him when an oval shadow passes across the balcony.

He looks up just in time to spot a floater moving past a floodlight on the cornice of the apartment house next door.

They’re already too late. The prefects are closing in.

Rita has taken a moment to open the hall closet and wrap a light nylon jacket around Marie’s shoulders. His daughter is on her own two feet now, but as petulant as only a five-year-old can be, stamping angrily and insisting that she doesn’t want ice cream. His wife stares at Jorge as he comes out of the office, the canvas bag dangling from his left shoulder. Carlos emerges from his bedroom; he’s grabbed a vest from his room, and Jorge catches a glimpse of something as he hides it in his pocket. Probably his pad; Carlos never goes anywhere without it. Jorge hopes it doesn’t contain any incriminating information. Not that it matters; the court tends to reach a verdict first, then examine the evidence later, and then only if it cares to obey the letter of the Revised Constitution.

“All right.” Jorge tries hard to sound carefree, if only for Marie’s sake. “Let’s go get some ice cream.” Then he leads the way down the stairs to the entrance foyer.

The midi is still parked in front of the building, but now two men stand on the sidewalk in front of the vehicle. Neither wear the long grey coats of prefects, yet they silently observe the Montero family as they walk down the front steps and turn toward the alley leading to the rear courtyard. Just as they’re about to walk around the side of the building, a police HV glides down the street.

“C’mon now. We don’t want to be late.” Jorge sweeps Marie off her feet, and the child giggles with delight as her daddy places her on his shoulders. “Ice cream . . . we’re gonna have ice cream . . .”

It’s at that moment when the floodlights hit them, both in front and from behind.

“Stop!” The loudspeaker voice seems to come from all directions at once. “Don’t move!”

Jorge raises a hand against the white-hot glare. From her perch, Marie screams: “Papa . . .!”

“Raise your hands! Don’t try to run!”

Rita huddles against his side. “Jorge . . .!”

Beyond the harsh light, the silhouettes of men running toward them, their footsteps loud against the pavement. From behind, a siren whoops as the HV rushes into the alley.

“Papa! What are they doing . . .?”

Above him, the windows of the apartment house deopaque. Figures appear at the windows: their neighbors, whom Jorge knows by face but not by name, staring down at them. Then the windows go dark once more.

“Let me have her!” Rita claws at Marie’s jacket. “Let me have her!”

Marie howls in terror as Jorge lifts her off his shoulders. Her left foot lightly kicks him in the face, and he barely has time to deposit his daughter in his wife’s arms before someone grabs his wrist and twists it behind him.

“Wait a minute!” He instinctively yanks his arm free. “Hold on! My kids . . .!”

A baton slaps his stomach just above his kidney. A moment of exquisite pain as an electrical current passes through him, then all his muscles relax and he collapses. The back of his head strikes the cracked asphalt and now he lies in the driveway, paralyzed and dazed, watching with a distant sort of fascination as one of the men from the midi moves in upon Carlos. The kid tries to punch him, but he misses; the scuffle moves beyond his range of vision and all he sees are dark forms looming above him.

“Jorge . . .!”

One of the figures crouches closer, and the baton moves toward him again, the red light on its handle strobing against the night. Rita’s screaming, Marie’s screaming, and he can’t see or hear Carlos any more.

The baton touches the side of his neck, and he plummets into black silence.

URSS Alabama 7.4.70 / T-24.01.00

She can’t see the stars. The spotlights arrayed along the open trusswork of the dry-dock are too bright, and the only thing beyond them is the matte-black expanse of space. Even Earth itself is invisible; it’s somewhere below the long cylindrical boom of the ship’s primary structure, which stretches away until it meets the enormous drum of the main engine. A shame; there won’t be many more opportunities for her to be alone before launch, and she would like to see Earth one last time.

Dana Monroe hovers in front of the broad window of Deck H5, watching service pods and dock workers in hardsuits as they move along the Alabama, making their inspections of the starship’s five-hundred-foot hull. The window is situated on the lowest deck of the hub module, just below the primary airlocks and docking ports, and it’s the only porthole that faces backward. All the other windows in the payload section, including those in the seven ring modules that encircle the hub, offer only side views, and none look forward: the view would have been blocked by the main fuel tank and the vast cone of the Bussard ramscoop.

Yet even as she surveys the prelaunch operations, Dana knows she’s only killing time. As Chief Engineer, her list has a couple of hundred different duties—two hundred thirty-nine, to be exact—that she needs to perform over the next twenty-four hours, half of which have to be completed within the next twelve. Through her headset, she hears the mingled voices of her team murmuring to one another over the primary com channel. For the time being, though, she holds in place, awaiting one single message that will lead her to one all-important job . . .

Dana switches her grip on the window rung from her left hand to her right. No sun-shadows on the dry-dock scaffolds; that means Highgate’s equatorial orbit has taken it within Earth’s night once more. If she was doing EVA right now and on tether outside the dock, she might be able to make out the Ursa Major constellation. If she couldn’t see the place she was about to leave, then at least she could see where she was going . . .

“Charlie Eagle, Charlie Eagle, this is Lima Oklahoma Ten. Do you copy?”

Dana gives her headset a gentle tap. “Charlie Eagle here. What’s up?”

Lima Oklahoma is Launch Operations, the pillbox-shaped superstructure outside the main bay; Lima Cherokee Ten is the call-sign for the duty officer for this shift. “Dana, we just received a squib from Houston. A voxcard forwarded to you from someone in Pensacola, name of Arthur Monroe.”

Dana’s left eyebrow involuntarily tics. An old boyfriend once told her that it did that when she’s nervous. “That’s my uncle. Sure, put it through . . . vox only, please.”

A moment passes, then she hears a reedy old man’s voice: “Dana, it’s your Uncle Art. I know you haven’t heard from me in a long while, but I just wanted to let you know how proud I am of you, and that your family is wishing you all the best of luck. You’re probably very busy just now, so you don’t need to call back if you don’t have to, but just remember that we love you very much . . . and that’s all I wanted to say. Oh, and I’m sending you a picture to take with you. Goodbye, and may God be with you.”

A brief pause, then the duty officer comes back online. “That’s it. Do you want me to open the card?”

Dana’s breath shudders as she let it out. “No thanks. Just download it to my pad. I’ll look at it the next chance I get.”

“Will do. Lima Cherokee Ten over.”

“Thanks. Charlie Eagle out.” She clicks off, borrows another moment to gaze through the window. Uncle Art’s the family patriarch; her late mother’s youngest brother, old enough to remember when black people in the South were sometimes called bad names. He’s still alive, yet only a small handful of family members and close friends know that he now lives in a hospice in Pensacola. He’s barely able to remember his own name, let alone send a lucid voxcard to his favorite niece.

Dana glances at a wall chronometer: 2400 EST, exactly as she anticipated. All the proper code phrases had been used. Best of luck. Don’t call back. File attached. Goodbye.

Goodbye, indeed. One way or another, she’s committed now.

She pushes away from the window, glides across the compartment to a ceiling hatch. She enters the hub access shaft, barely touching the ladder rungs as she floats upward through the ship’s core. She passes Deck H4, where the command deck is located, and H3, the life-support center, and H2, the engineering section where her own team would be going about their business, until she reaches the hatch leading to H1, at the top of the shaft.

The outer pressure door is already open; Dana presses a stud on the bulkhead and the inner hatch bisects, revealing a short corridor leading to another hatch. She pauses to touch her headset again. “I’m in the ring, going off-line for a few minutes,” she announces on the common frequency. “Be right back.” She switches off the headset. No further explanation is necessary; everyone will assume that she’s visiting the head.

The corridor takes her to a circular passageway that leads to the ring modules. Dana floats to a hatch marked C2. Opening it, she glides through a manhole in the module.

C2 is one of the Alabama’s two hibernation modules: four decks stacked one atop the other, each deck containing fourteen biostasis cells. Folded down from their wall niches, their lids open, the fiberglass cells faintly resemble coffins, a similarity Dana finds unnerving. Through a window on the opposite side of the deck, Dana can see the dry-dock bay.

No time to waste; if she remains off-line for too long, someone in Launch Control might get suspicious. She moves to a console beneath the window, pulls out the recessed keypad, quickly taps instructions into the module’s secondary computer system. A flatscreen lights, displaying the main menu; she touches the button marked Program Install and the screen shows a list of options beneath a password prompt. Dana enters her clearance number, then reaches into her pocket and pulls out her pad.

As she hoped, the duty officer has already downloaded the voxcard she received from “Uncle Art.” She clips the pad against the console’s serial port, then opens the photo that came attached to the voice-mail message. The picture that appears on the pad’s screen is of Uncle Art’s family, taken during a reunion picnic several years ago in Pensacola; what the casual viewer wouldn’t know is that the digital image contains an encrypted file.

A few deft strokes and the information is fed into the computer’s backup memory. Once it’s in, Dana takes a few moments to decrypt the file and double-check its contents. Long, dense lines of information appear on the screen. Satisfied that the info is secure, she saves it in the system under a password, then unclips the pad from the console, stows away the keypad and shuts down the board. With luck, no one will ever know she’s been here.

Dana climbs head-first down a ladder to the deck below, then enters a horizontal tunnel leading to the next module. C3 is one of the two modules devoted to crew quarters: racks of narrow bunks, tightly packed together between storage lockers. She’s not looking forward to sharing close confines with a hundred and three other crew members; with luck they won’t remain aboard the Alabama for very long after they come out of biostasis. She locates the head, takes a moment to flush its zero-gee commode. The minute change in water pressure will indicate to the duty officer that someone has just used the toilet on Deck C3B; this will help substantiate her alibi.

She lets out her breath. One more task completed. There will be more over the course of the next twenty-four hours, some even more difficult than this, but for now . . .

A sharp double-beep in her headset; someone’s trying to page her. She switches the comlink back on. “Charlie Eagle, we copy.”

“Charlie Eagle, Lima Cherokee Ten. Where are you right now?”

“Charlie Three Baker. Is there a problem?”

An uncertain pause. “Ahh . . . yeah, there is. We’ve detected a glitch in Charlie Two’s backup computer. You know anything about this?”

Southern Georgia 7.5.70 / T-20.42.45

Gliding a couple of inches above its elevated track, the maglev passenger train races through the forested hill country south of Macon, its spotlight piercing the thin haze above the superconductive monorail. As it rushes past one of the innumerable shanty towns that fester in the countryside, a squatter warming himself by a trash can fire notices that the train has only two cars, and that they have steel slats bolted against their windows. He stares at the train long after it has vanished, silently reflecting on the fact that, as hard as his life has become, it could be much worse.

A sudden vibration awakens Jorge from his restless slumber. Raising his head from where he had propped it between the edge of the seat and the window, he studies the compartment with weary eyes. Crammed together in every available seat are men, women, and children. Most are asleep—wives huddled against husbands, kids dozing in their parents’ laps—but some are awake. Staring through the window slats, they watch the occasional lights that swiftly pass by, their faces taut with anxiety, exhaustion, hopelessness. Precious little baggage in the overhead racks; only a handful managed to take anything when the prefects came for them. Judging from what precious little conversation Jorge has overheard, some of these people were taken off the street, arrested while leaving restaurants, shops, even their own homes.

D.I.’s, each and every one. Scientists, for the most part—Jorge knows most of these people by face if not by reputation—although scattered among them are also a few writers, artists, students, and various other individuals who present “a clear and present danger to national security,” to use the ISA’s favored term. There must be a couple of hundred people packed into this train; the prefects were busy this Fourth of July.

Marie’s head lies cradled in Jorge’s lap, her jacket wadded around her shoulders as a makeshift blanket. He tries not to disturb her as he raises his arm to glance at his watch. Almost 3:45 A.M.; they’ve been on the train for nearly five hours now, ever since they left Huntsville along with a few dozen other D.I.’s and their kin. No trial, no hearing; only a ride in the back of a government midi to the maglev station, where they were ushered aboard by armed soldiers. The train wasn’t crowded until it reached Atlanta, then it made a long stop while more than a hundred more detainees were herded aboard, the grey-coated prefects on the platform carefully checking off each name on their pads. Now a soldier stands guard at each end of the compartment, rifle in hand, forbidding anyone to speak aloud. Nothing to do except sleep, and be afraid.

Camp Buchanan is their destination. Just north of the Florida state line in Valdosta is the Patrick J. Buchanan Education Center. Jorge has seen the Govnet propaganda for Camp Buchanan: clean, well-lighted dormitories where D.I.’s are allowed to live while they take classes intended to broaden their political awareness. Happy, well-nourished children playing tag while their parents sit at benches, eagerly asking questions of patient teachers. People in blue paper pajamas standing in line in the mess hall, patiently waiting for healthy food served up by smiling cooks. Heartfelt testimonials by former D.I.’s proclaiming the worthiness of the re-education program, repeatedly stating they were well-treated during their stay. But Jorge knows three former colleagues who were sent to Camp Buchanan, and he hasn’t seen any of them since.

Across the aisle, Rita stirs, opens her eyes. Carlos is curled up next to her, his head on her shoulder. His wife looks around, sees Jorge, gives him a wan smile that he knows she doesn’t feel. He wants to whisper something to her—an apology? a little late for that now!—but the last thing they need is to have one of the soldiers shouting at him, so all he can is give her is what he hopes is a comforting nod. Everything will be all right, everything’s going to work out just fine . . .

But it isn’t. He knows that now. The ISA must have tumbled to the conspiracy. Why else would they have been arrested?

The train lurches again, a little harder this time, and now there’s a gradual sense of deceleration. Are they already coming into Valdosta? Jorge peers through the window slats. Nothing except darkness, yet Valdosta is a large enough city that he should be able to see its lights. Nonetheless, the train is slowing down. . . .

Other passengers are waking up. Jorge catches the eye of an old friend seated two rows up: Henry Johnson, an astrophysicist who also used to work at Marshall Space Flight Center. He’s known Henry since they were postgrad students at MIT, long before the Second Revolution; after that, they worked together on the Starflight Project, or at least until they signed a petition protesting the National Reform Program. The new government let them keep their jobs until the Alabama was finished, then they were publicly denounced as D.I.’s and cast out of the Federal Space Agency. Shortly after that, their citizenship was suspended, their voting rights revoked. They became non-citizens, left to fend for themselves as best they could.

Now Henry’s on the train to Camp Buchanan, along with everyone else from Marshall who stood up to the Liberty Party and its social agenda. Six rows back is Bernie Cayle and his wife Vonda, and Jorge spotted Jim Levin on the platform at Huntsville just before he and his family were marched into the next car down. Henry silently gazes back at him, and as the train makes another lurch he slowly nods his head. Henry is more closely involved in the conspiracy than Jorge; the whole thing has been kept compartmentalized, so that if one person was arrested and interrogated by the prefects, he wouldn’t be able to reveal all the details. Jorge isn’t sure, but he believes Henry may be the leader. If he is, then . . .

“Papa? Are we stopping?” Marie has woken up; she raises her head from his lap, knuckles her sleep-wizened eyes.

“Shh. It’s all right, sweetie. Just be quiet.” Jorge strokes her hair, glances over his shoulder to see if the guard has heard them. Not that it matters; although passengers softly murmur to one another as they stare through the windows, for the moment the soldiers aren’t paying attention. The one in the back of the train, a kid not very much older than Carlos, grabs a seatback to steady himself as he bends over to the nearest window. The soldier up front spreads his feet a little further apart; he yells at everyone to shut up, but there’s a baffled expression on his face.

The train slows to a crawl, coasts down an incline. A series of metronomic bumps against the undercarriage as its wheels engage the track; now Jorge can see a sparse handful of lights from directly ahead. Warehouses trundle past the windows; they’re coming into an industrial park somewhere north of Valdosta, a rail yard meant for freight trains. Perhaps they’re taking aboard more D.I.’s. Yet when he glances at Henry again, his friend’s face is carefully neutral. Jorge has seen that secretive look before. He knows something . . .

The train comes to a halt. “Shut up!” the soldier up front yells. “Stay where you are! Don’t move!” He gestures for the other soldier to come forward; the kid walks to the center of the compartment, his rifle at ready, as his sergeant retreats into the accessway. A faint thump, then a blast of cool air from outside. The passengers on the other side of the compartment watch through the windows as the sergeant steps off the train.

Marie looks at Jorge, her eyes wide with fear. What’s going on? she silently mouths. Carlos is awake now, his gaze flitting between the window and the soldier standing only a few feet away. The soldier turns his back to him, and, for an instant, Jorge sees a wild impulse dart through his son’s eyes. He urgently shakes his head, and the boy reluctantly settles down.

A minute passes, then another. Three, four . . . Footsteps on the stairs, and the sergeant steps back into the compartment, followed by a prefect. Young, tall, fit; callous eyes in a handsome face. The ISA officer studies the passengers with much the same sort of loathing a chef would feel toward cockroaches he’s found in his kitchen, then he pulls out a pad and flips it open.

“The following individuals and their families will accompany me,” he says. “Exit from the rear, and no talking. Abbott, Francis K . . . Arnold, Alice C . . . Burstein, David C . . .”

One by one, people rise and stagger down the center aisle, their legs cramped and numb. Bernie and Vonda Cayle leave the train; a minute later, Henry Johnson follows them. Everyone on the list is a former Marshall scientist, so it’s no surprise when, just a few seconds after the Levins have been called, Jorge hears his own name.

“Papa, where are we going?” Marie’s hand is tiny within his own, terribly vulnerable.

“Shh. I’ll tell you later.” Jorge lets Marie and Carlos get in front of them, then he reaches up to pull his heavy bag down from the overhead rack. The young soldier sneers at him as he picks Marie up and carries her down the aisle.

The night is colder than he expected, dark save for the lights above the warehouses. An unmarked government maxvee is parked next to the train, a loading ramp lowered from its rear cargo door. Two soldiers stand near the vehicle, silently watching the D.I.’s as they line up to board the vehicle. Still holding Marie in his arms, Jorge nervously looks around, spots Jim and Sissy Levin standing a few yards behind them, their children between them.

The prefect who called their names steps down off the train. He walks over to the max, glances at the D.I.’s already inside, then does a quick head-count. Jorge estimates that about forty-five people have been taken off the maglev, including spouses and children. Just about everyone who had boarded in Huntsville, plus a few from Atlanta. The remaining hundred or so passengers stare at them through the windows. They’re destined to continue south to Camp Buchanan; it’s impossible to tell whether they envy the ones who’ve been pulled from the train or pity them.

Another prefect disembarks from the second car. He walks over to his companion; they compare their lists, murmuring quietly to one another. The line shuffles slowly forward, the people in front ducking their heads as they march up the ramp into the max.

The vehicle is even more cramped than the train; everyone squeezes together on its hard plastic benches. No windows. Through a grate-covered window in the front of the compartment they can see the back of the driver’s head; he glances around once to watch the people coming aboard, then looks away again. Rita puts Marie in her lap to make a little more room.

When the last D.I. has finally come aboard, the prefect who called their names from the train marches into the vehicle. Pulling a stunner from within his coat, he regards everyone with cold scrutiny, as if challenging them to attack him. When no one says anything, he takes an empty seat at the rear, then motions for the soldiers to close the rear hatch. They hesitate, then pick up the ramp and shove it back into its slot. The hatch slams shut.

Long silence, then the maxvee whines to life. Everyone is jostled against one another as the vehicle picks itself off the ground. Jorge can’t see the rail yard as the max coasts away.

“All right,” the prefect says quietly. “I think we’re safe.”

Everyone stares at him. What did he just say? Then Henry Johnson clears his throat. “Did it work?” he asks quietly.

Jorge looks first at him, then at the prefect. Incredibly, he’s putting away his gun. Rita’s mouth is wide open; she doesn’t know what to make of this any more than anyone else in the max . . . all save Henry, who briefly favors Jorge with a broad grin.

“Well done, everyone,” he says. “Especially you. Nice performance.” The prefect nods, trying not to smile, then Henry sharply claps his hands to break through the cacophony of voices all around them. “Okay, everyone calm down, take it easy. Sorry we had to put you through this . . .”

“What the hell are you trying to do?” This from Bernie Cayle, sitting near the front of the vehicle. “Goddammit, Hank, you scared the shit out of . . .”

“Bernie, please,” Henry says. “Watch your language. There’re children present.”

Laughter, relieved and out of place, ripples through the max. Oddly enough, only the handful of kids seem unruffled. Maybe they’re still half-asleep, or perhaps they figured out this was a hoax long before the adults did.

“Like Dr. Johnson says, I’m sorry we . . . I had to do this.” Everyone quiets down as the prefect stands up in the back of the vehicle. “If more of you had known about this in advance, it wouldn’t have worked. We had to find a way to collect everyone on short notice, and this was the best way we could manage. This way, we’re perfectly legit.”

“What do you mean, legit?” someone in the back demands. “What are you . . .?”

“Right now, y’all are being taken to Little Rock, where you’re scheduled for ISA interrogation. That’s our alibi for taking you off the train.” The prefect raises a hand. “It’s complicated, I know. Just bear with us.”

Silence now, as everyone takes this in, yet Jorge is beginning to understand. There’s aspects of the plot of which he hasn’t been informed, but now it’s all coming together . . .

“So where are we going?” Rita looks first at the prefect, then Henry, then finally Jorge. “If it’s not Camp Buchanan or Little Rock . . .

“A lot further than you think,” Jorge says quietly.

Merritt Island 7.5.70 / T-17.10.39

The rising sun has painted the sky with shades of magenta and burnt orange, leaving a silver tint to the blue-grey surf rushing against the beaches of Merritt Island. Closer, the Alabama’s shuttles await takeoff on their concrete launch pads; fuel trucks are parked nearby, while ground crew makes final inspections on the twin delta-winged spaceplanes.

Captain Lee takes in the view from a wall screen in a briefing room within the Crew Training Facility, wishing he could be out there right now, if only for one last taste of salt air. But that’s clearly out of the question; the sea breeze is filthy with microorganisms, and he’s already undergone decontamination procedures. The world is now beyond his reach, behind the hermetically sealed doors of the quarantine area. In a few minutes he’s to join the rest of his crew; right now, though, he has one last duty to perform on Earth.

A soft click from behind him, then the faint whoosh of pressurized air as the door glides open. Lee reluctantly turns from the wallscreen as two men enter: Ben Aldrich, closely followed by Roland Shaw. They’re wearing white paper coveralls and caps, their hands covered with latex gloves; both men had to be decontaminated before they were allowed to pass through two sets of airlocks leading to this bare, unfurnished room. His last face-to-face contact with anyone from Earth who doesn’t wear a helmet.

“Morning, Robert,” Aldrich says. “Ready for the big day?”

Lee gives the Launch Supervisor a tight smile. “That’s not for another 226 years. Ask me again when I get to 47 Uma B.”

Aldrich grins back at him. “Maybe it’ll be only 226 years for you, but it’ll feel like 230 for me.” He turns to the Republic’s Director of Internal Security. “Not that it makes much difference, but if he’d made that sort of mistake during training, I would’ve found someone else for the job.”

Shaw barely acknowledges the jest; indeed, Lee wonders if he fully appreciates the effects of time dilation. Once the Alabama achieves its maximum cruise velocity of .2c, time aboard the starship will slow relative to the rest of the universe. Add three months for acceleration to 20-percent light-speed after leaving Earth and another three months for magsail deceleration into the 47 Ursae Majoris system, and the ship’s internal chronometers will record a passage of little more than 226 years, while back home the voyage will have lasted nearly four years longer. The Lorentz factor will matter very little to him or anyone else aboard the Alabama, since they’ll be in biostasis during most of the journey, but it’s highly doubtful that Shaw will still be alive by then, even with the benefit of life-extension treatments.

“I don’t think you could have found anyone better.” Once again, Shaw’s manner is as stiff as it had been last night when Lee saw him with the president. “I’m sure the captain wants to be with his people right now. Perhaps we should get along with our business.”

“Yes, of course.” Aldrich is clearly nervous in the presence of the Director of Internal Security. He reaches into a pocket of his coveralls, pulls out his pad, flips open the cover. “Okay, then . . .”

The briefing is a routine run-down of the major events of the next seventeen hours. At 1000 EDT, the URSS Jesse Helms, piloted by First Officer Shapiro and carrying the forty-five members of the Alabama’s flight team not already aboard the starship, is scheduled to lift off from Pad 10, with an ETA of 1230 with the Alabama. Pending successful rendezvous and docking of the Helms, the George Wallace will launch at 1300 from Pad 11, carrying the 51 members of the Alabama’s colonization team, with Captain Lee himself as pilot. Its anticipated rendezvous and docking is scheduled for 1430; by then fuel load-up will have been completed by 1400. At 1500 the main hatches will be sealed, and the crew will go through prelaunch procedures until 2345, when the president will publicly address the nation via netv from Atlanta. Following the president’s speech, final countdown will commence at 2350; if all goes well, primary booster ignition will be at 2400.

“We had a small problem early this morning.” Aldrich studies his pad. “Launch Control detected an error in the backup computer system in Module C2 shortly after 2400 last night . . .” Lee feels his heart skip a beat. “. . . but the Chief Engineer checked it out and found that it was just a faulty program alarm. It’s been fixed and countdown was resumed at 0014.”

“Good. Glad to hear it.” Lee pretends a calmness he doesn’t feel. Something must have gone wrong, but it sounds as if Dana managed to take care of it without tipping her hand. “Anything else?”

“Nothing. We’re right on schedule.” Aldrich closes his pad, looks at Shaw. “Your turn, Mr. Shaw.”

“Thank you.” The DIS has remained quiet through all this; now he unzips the black plastic pouch he carried into the room, pulls out a small object wrapped in clear cellophane. “Captain Lee, I don’t think I have to tell you what this is.”

“No, sir.” Lee takes the packet, opens it, pulls out a large chrome-plated key on a neck chain: the launch key for the Alabama’s primary ignition system. Without it, the ship’s main engines cannot be fired. A security precaution to prevent the Alabama from being launched without direct authorization from the president.

“Thank you, sir.” Lee clips the chain around his neck, lets the key slide down the front of his jumpsuit. It’s only now that the ISA has seen fit to entrust it to the Mission Commander; during dress rehearsals in orbit, a prefect has always been in the Alabama’s command deck to insert the key and turn it, even though the main engines were never started. Yet this is supposed to be a symbolic moment, so Lee snaps to attention and salutes Shaw.

Shaw responds with a salute of his own, then offers his hand. “Good luck, Captain. All our prayers go with you.”

Lee looks straight at Shaw as he clasps his hand, yet there’s nothing in his expression that the captain can read. Shaw simply nods, ever so slightly, then he turns to Aldrich. “I believe you have something to add . . .”

“Yes, sir, there is.” As Aldrich steps forward again, he pulls from beneath his arm a large parcel sealed in plastic. Through the transparent wrapping, Lee can see a single white star embroidered on a field of dark blue canvas, bordered by red and white horizontal stripes. The flag of the United Republic of America.

Aldrich handles it reverently, almost as if reluctant to give it up; when he looks up at Lee, his eyes are moist. “I know you’ve already got one of these aboard,” the Launch Supervisor says quietly, his voice raw at the edges, “but this one comes from all of us here at the Cape. If you wouldn’t mind, Captain, we’d like for you to raise it on the new world once you get there . . . in our honor, please.”

Lee feels a hollow sensation in the pit of his stomach. Ben means well, and Lee has nothing against him, yet the last thing he ever wants to see again is this flag: a symbol of a totalitarian government that has taken everything America once stood for and twisted it beyond recognition. One star to signify one people, or so it has been stated; what it really stands for is one party, one political ideology. The purpose of this mission isn’t exploration, as originally intended before the Second Revolution, but conquest. He’s being sent to 47 Ursae Majoris not to expand the horizons of humankind, but to establish an interstellar colony which will insure the immortality of the Republic. Millions of people now live in shacks made of discarded junk and cook squirrel stew over manure fires because so much of his country’s resources have been diverted to the construction of a starship. One of humankind’s most noble dreams, now perverted . . .

“Robert?” Aldrich stares at him. “Is there something wrong?”

“Sorry.” Lee takes a deep breath. “Just thinking about this moment, that’s all.” He accepts the wrapped flag from Aldrich, bows slightly, gives him what he hopes the other man will interpret as a modest smile. “Thank you. I’ll put this in a place of honor.”

Aldrich bows formally. “Thank you, Captain. May God be with you.”

Lee gives the Launch Supervisor a farewell handshake, lets him enjoy this last moment of pride. And all the while, he feels Roland Shaw’s eyes upon him.

Titusville 7.5.70 / T-14.00.05

Three seconds before the countdown reaches zero, reddish-orange flames erupt from the shuttle’s ascent engines, followed by billowing brown plumes that quickly envelop the spacecraft. For a second the spaceplane can barely be seen, then the Jesse Helms slowly rises from the thick haze. Microphones pick up the sound of people cheering, then the crackling thunder ripples across the VIP viewing area three miles from the launch pad, drowning out their voices as the camera pans upward, tracking the white-glare. A thousand feet above the ground, the shuttle’s nose tilts upward, then its NIF main engines kick in and the spacecraft suddenly vaults into the blue heavens above the Atlantic.

“The g’s will still be nominal at this point.” Henry Johnson nods toward the dusty old flatscreen above the bar. “There’ll be some discomfort once they reach seven g’s, but that lasts for only about a minute or so.”

“You don’t think the kids will be hurt?” Jim Levin glances uncertainly across the closed-down restaurant. His two children, David and Chris, are sitting on the floor with Carlos and Marie Montero; they’re playing scissors-rock-paper, from the looks of it. “My youngest gets motion-sickness when he’s on the plane.”

“I’m sure a lot of us are going to be throwing up.” Jorge is still watching the screen. The Helms itself is now visible only as a tiny white spot at the head of a long contrail. He’s tempted to step outside to see if he can spot it with the naked eye, but the rules are firm; no one leaves the restaurant until they’re ready to go. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve been up before. It’s an easy ride.”

The screen switches to a young woman standing at the press site: a Govnet correspondent, delivering a recount of what they’ve just seen, the liftoff of the shuttle carrying the members of the Alabama’s flight team. The volume is turned down low, so only a handful of the people gathered in the abandoned restaurant on the outskirts of Titusville can hear her. “Just as long as we’ve got a vomit bag for my boy,” Jim murmurs. “Otherwise we’re going to have a hell of a . . .”

“Hush,” Henry says as the image changes once more. “Here it comes . . .”

A video replay from an hour ago: the walkout from the Crew Training Facility within the Gingrich Space Center. A door opens, then the flight team walks out. Striding single-file past the journalists and cameramen gathered behind a rope, they wear one-piece isolation suits, their features barely visible through the faceplates of their fabric helmets. Among the adults are several children of various ages, distinguishable as minors only because of their shorter stature. They wave to the bystanders as they stroll past the camera toward the white FSA maxvee parked less than thirty feet away.

“See?” Henry murmurs. “No questions, no interviews . . .”

“No I.D. checks.” Jorge glances over his shoulder at him, sees Bernie Cayle gnawing at a fingernail. Of all the people gathered in what used to be called the Lamplighter Grill, he’s the most nervous. As if any of them could be described as calm. “But what if someone recognizes . . . I mean, if they don’t recognize . . .?”

“Look how they’re dressed.” Jim gestures to the screen. “You can barely see their faces.”

“Uh-huh. So long as everyone stays in motion, it’ll be over and done in just a few seconds.” And just as Henry says, the last crew member boards the maxvee less than a minute after the first one emerged from the building. A soldier shuts the door behind him, and a moment later the vehicle rises from the ground, turns away from the camera, and skims down the road leading to the launch pad. “See? Easy.”

“So why can’t we . . .?” Bernie hesitates, trying to articulate his thoughts. “I mean, can’t we just head straight for the pad? We’ve got our own suits, so why do we have to go through . . .?”

“Bernie . . .” Jim lets out an impatient breath. He’s already explained everything to everyone, but for some reason Bernie still doesn’t get it. “Look . . . for one thing, if we don’t do the walkout, everyone will wonder why the colonists haven’t appeared. Second, we have to ride that particular max out to the pad. We can’t take the one we have, because . . .”

Jorge has heard this before. He excuses himself to check on his family. The restaurant smells of mildew and rotting wood; the windows have been long-since boarded up, so the only light comes from the camp lanterns scattered around the dining room where locals used to enjoy Friday night all-you-can-eat buffet dinners. He wonders again how the underground managed to gain access to this condemned highway inn, but decides it’s one more question better left unasked. Even now, no one wants to divulge secrets. Further evidence that more people are involved in this conspiracy than he realized.

He finds Rita seated at the folding table at the far end of the room, her face scrunched up as she receives one of the antibiotic injections everyone has to take. Jorge knows the doctor giving the shots: Kuniko Okada, formerly the senior space medicine researcher at Marshall before she, too, signed the petition which got her labeled as a D.I. There’s no way a clean-room facility can be set up here, but at least they can make sure no one carries any viruses aboard the Alabama.

“Okay, you’re done,” Dr. Okada says, and Rita sighs as she pulls down the sleeve of her shirt. “Bring your children over, and I’ll do them next.” Then she looks up and sees Jorge. “Wait a minute . . . I haven’t taken care of you yet, have I?” When Jorge shakes his head, Kuniko turns back to Rita. “On second thought, let Jorge go first. If your kids see their dad doing this, maybe they’ll take it a little easier.”

“Good idea.” Carlos won’t mind a few shots, but Marie has always been a problem at the pediatrician’s office. Jorge sits down in the chair Rita has just left and rolls up his right sleeve. “Of course, it might help if you’ve got a sucker. My daughter expects one when she goes to the doctor.”

Kuniko shakes her head as she fits a clean needle and another cartridge into her syringe gun. “Sorry. No food for anyone from here on out. I don’t like it either . . . I could use a cup of coffee right now.” She checks Jorge’s name on her list. “After this, you can help your wife get the kids in their isolation suits.”

Jorge nods. The crowd in the dining room has gradually thinned over the last hour; after they’ve received their shots, everyone has gone into the kitchen nearby. When he peered through the swinging doors a few minutes ago, he saw that shower curtains had been draped from the ceiling pipes, forming makeshift changing rooms. One by one, people took folded garments behind the partitions, and emerged a few minutes later wearing one-piece coveralls. Whoever made the isolation suits had done their job well; they’re identical to the ones he had just seen the flight crew wearing during walkout, right down to the Republic shoulder flag and the Alabama mission patch.

“You managed to send the medical data, didn’t you?” Kuniko asks quietly as she dabs alcohol on his biceps.

“Just before we left.” The voxcard sent to Houston from his desk contained encrypted medical records for everyone gathered in this room; Kuniko would need them to reprogram the Alabama’s biostasis cells. “It should have been received and downloaded by now.”

“Should be.” Kuniko sighs, massages her eyelids. “Just one more thing that could go wrong between . . .”

“Look! Papa’s getting his shots!” Jorge turns around, sees Rita shepherding their children to the end of the table. Carlos looks bored, but Marie’s eyes are wide with terror. “See how easy it is?”

“Sure, there’s nothing to . . .” Jorge starts to say, then Kuniko takes that moment to jab the barrel of the syringe-gun against his arm and squeeze the trigger. Jorge tries not to wince as he feels the sting of the needle, and he forces a smile as he looks back at her. “Hey, did you just do something? I didn’t feel anything!”

Kuniko gives him a faint smile as she changes needles and cartridges again. “As painless as can be.” Marie hides her face against her mother’s side, and Jorge decides not to press the issue. Marie will just have to suffer through this, that’s all . . .

The prefect who had taken them off the train outside Valdosta emerges from the kitchen. He’s no longer wearing his grey overcoat, and his tie is askew around the collar of his shirt. He whistles sharply between his fingers, then claps his hands for attention. “Listen up!” he yells, and the room goes quiet as everyone looks toward him. “We’ve only got twenty minutes before we’ve got to be out of here, and we still haven’t taken care of half of you. If you haven’t had your shots, form a line behind the table, then proceed to the kitchen for suit-up. We’re running out of time, so let’s get going here, okay?”

Rita gives the prefect a cold glare. “He could be a little more . . .”

“Honey,” Jorge murmurs, then clenches his teeth as Kuniko hits him with another shot. Marie seems a little less afraid; now she watches with morbid fascination as Kuniko exchanges needles and cartridges one more time. The prefect crosses the room to where Henry, Bernie, and Jim are gathered in front of the screen. He says something to them, and Jim and Bernie leave the bar to join the line forming behind Rita, yet Henry stays behind. As Jorge watches, his friend pulls out his pad and opens it. The prefect steps around behind him to peer over his shoulder. Something’s going on . . .

Another swift jab, and he’s done. “Boy, that was great!” he exclaims as he stands up from the chair. “Thanks, Doc! I feel better already!” He bends over to Marie, slaps his hands against his thighs. “C’mon, you gotta try this!”

The dubious expression on his daughter’s face tells him that she isn’t buying any of it, but she allows Rita to escort her to the chair. Jorge waits until Kuniko swabs her arm, then asks her if she can spell her mother’s name backward. Marie is still working on the second letter when the doctor gives her the first shot. She yelps, but more out of surprise than from actual pain; Jorge decides that Rita can handle things from here, then he quietly slides away and heads over to the bar.

“If they’re coming, they’d be here by now,” Henry says to the prefect as Jorge draws closer. “But we’ve still got twenty minutes . . .”

“We’ve got twenty minutes, but you know as well as I do that . . .” The prefect looks up, sees Jorge approaching. “Can I help you?”

“Who’s coming?” Jorge asks, keeping his voice low. “Is there someone else?”

Henry hesitates, then shows the pad to Jorge: a long list of names, nearly every one highlighted, yet a few remain unlit. “We’ve got forty-five,” he says quietly. “There’s supposed to be fifty. Five remain unaccounted for. They were supposed to be on the train, but it doesn’t look like they were picked up.”

“Or they were picked up, but weren’t taken to the train. And that’s what worries me.” The prefect absently rubs the beard stubble on his chin. “Not good. Not good at all . . .”

“They wouldn’t break . . .”

“Anyone can be broken. Trust me on that one.” The prefect glances at the line of people standing in front of the table. From behind him, Jorge hears Marie’s high-pitched scream as she’s given another injection. “Never mind. Let’s just get these people out of here.”

“You don’t think . . .?”

“Just hope no one does a head-count during the walkout.” The prefect shakes his head, turns away. “C’mon. The clock’s running out.”

“He shouldn’t mind,” Jorge murmurs once he’s out of earshot. “He’s getting a seat, after all.”

Henry doesn’t look up from his pad. “He’s not coming with us,” he says very quietly. “We gave him a chance, but he opted to stay behind . . . he has to, the way all this is planned.” Then his eyes meet Jorge’s. “When . . . if his people find out what he’s done, they’ll put him on trial for treason.”

Jorge stares at him. “But why would he . . .?”

“Asked him that once myself. He wouldn’t tell me.” Henry slaps the pad shut, turns to join the line at the table. “Don’t say anything about it, though, to him or anyone else. It’s something personal.”

Rita has already escorted the kids into the kitchen; Jorge can hear her behind one of the curtains, coaxing Marie into one of the child-size isolation suits. Almost everyone has had their shots and donned their garments; now they’re crowded together in the pantry, gazing through the restaurant’s rear door. Just outside is the government maxvee that had picked them up in southern Georgia. The driver stands next to the vehicle, and Jorge notices that he’s changed clothes; now he’s wearing the uniform of a URS lieutenant. Another nameless man facing death for what he’s doing today . . .

Sissy Levin hands Jorge a folded suit, motions him toward the nearest changing room. Just as he’s about to enter, Carlos comes out from behind the curtain. He’s put on his isolation suit, and carries his helmet under his arm. “How do I look?”

“Fine. Just great.” Jorge gives his son a quick inspection. “How’re you holding up there, muchacho?”

“Okay, I guess.” Yet his face is pale, his shoulders visibly shaking beneath the coveralls. “I don’t know about this . . .”

“I know. I’m not crazy about it either.” Jorge bends down on one knee, looks Carlos straight in the eye. He’s never lied to his boy before, and he isn’t going to start now. “It sounded like a good idea when we were putting it together, but that was kind of in the abstract. Now we’re here, and . . . well, it’s going to be tougher than I thought.”

“Then . . .” Carlos glances at the people waiting by the delivery entrance. For a moment, they’re alone; no one is paying attention to them. “We don’t have to do this, do we? I mean, we don’t have to get to go . . .”

“You know of another way out of this?” Carlos’s mouth trembles, but he doesn’t say anything. “Son, we’re escaped criminals now. The government’s undoubtedly frozen my credit account, so we’ve got no money, and we can’t go home even if we could. If we turn ourselves in . . .”

“I know that!” Carlos’s voice rises, and several people standing nearby turn to look their way. Jorge hastily shushes him. “Papa . . . it’s forty-six light-years away . . .”

“I know, I know . . .” Jorge shakes his head, then grasps his son by the shoulders. “But it’s either this, or we spend the rest of our lives in a D.I. camp. You, me, your mother, your little sister . . . you want to see Marie in Camp Buchanan?” Carlos snuffles back tears, looks down at the floor. “Believe me, there’s no other way. If there were, I’d . . .”

A sharp whistle from behind them. “Hey, someone leave something behind?”

Jorge glances over his shoulder, sees the prefect standing in the doorway of the dining room. He’s holding aloft Jorge’s duffel bag. “Someone dropped this,” he calls out. “Who does it belong to?”

Damn. He had almost forgotten it. Jorge raises his hand. The prefect sees him, then marches across the kitchen to where he’s crouched with Carlos. “If it’s yours, you can’t bring it with you,” he says, still swinging the bag by its strap. “Sorry, no personal belongings.”

“Those aren’t personal belongings. It’s something we need.”

Surprised at having his authority challenged, the prefect stares back at him. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Rita and Marie coming out from behind the curtain. Marie’s suit is a size too large for her; its leggings rumple down around the tops of her boots, and it seems as if she could crawl out from within the loose collar.

“Something you need. Man, everyone has something they need.” The prefect drops the bag on the floor. “Okay, open ’er up, let’s see what you’ve got.”

Jorge hesitates, then unzips the bag and pulls it open, revealing its contents.

The prefect bends down, studying what’s inside. He frowns, looks up at Jorge. “You really thought about this, didn’t you?” he asks, his voice now so low only Jorge and Carlos can hear him. Jorge doesn’t say anything, and the prefect reluctantly nods. “Okay, you can take it,” he says quietly. “When we do the walk-out, sling it over your right shoulder, so that it’s away from the people standing behind the rope. If someone notices and asks you what you’ve got, pretend you didn’t hear. Just keep walking. Got it?”

Jorge nods, and the prefect checks his watch. “Hurry up and get dressed. We leave in six minutes.” Then he turns away, clapping his hands once more. “C’mon, people, hustle . . .!”

Carlos stares at his father as he zips the bag shut again. “Papa, what did you . . .?”

“Never mind. Just go help your mother and sister.” Jorge hands the bag to his son. “Keep an eye on this, will you? It’s important . . . but don’t show it to anyone.”

Carlos takes the bag by its strap, pulls it over his shoulder. He slumps a little beneath its weight, and his expression changes from fear to puzzlement. For a moment Jorge wonders whether he’s going to open it, but the boy obeys him. Jorge gives him a smile, then steps behind the curtain.

Alone for the moment, he sags against the cinder-block wall. He shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath, tries to will his heart to stop pounding. This is the first time since he received the phone call at his apartment that he’s been out of sight of his family; until now, he hasn’t allowed himself to show fear, let alone feel it. Yet deep down inside, he’s just as terrified as Carlos. How can Rita accept all this so calmly, when she didn’t know what was happening until . . .?

No. He doesn’t have time for this now. Jorge opens his eyes, takes another deep breath, then sits down on the plastic chair and begins removing his shoes. Beyond the curtain, he hears Rita begging Marie to stay still and stop fidgeting so much.

No choice. They’re committed now.

All of them.

URSS Alabama 7.5.70 / T -11.41.12

“He wants to what?” Dana stares at the com officer in disbelief. “You mean now?”

“Nothing I can do about it, Chief.” Les Gillis carefully keeps a hand cupped around his headset mike. “He’s already on the way over.”

“For the love of . . .” Dana turns to another officer seated a few feet away. “Can you confirm that?”

“See for yourself.” Sharon Ullman has already punched up a real-time image on the nav table; a holographic wire-model of the Alabama appears above the table, surrounded by Highgate’s skeletal bay. Most of the service pods have already moved away from the ship, although a fuel barge still holds position beneath the main tank. As Dana watches, a small cylindrical craft moves through the bay, heading toward Alabama.

“OTV has requested clearance for docking at SC2,” Gillis says. “I don’t think the colonel’s going to take no for answer.”

Not now, God. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, don’t do this to me now. Dana and Les share a wary look; Sharon’s one of the handful of crew members who isn’t in on this, so they can’t talk freely. “What’s the present ETA for the Helms?” she asks.

“ETA at 1230, on schedule.” Sharon expands the holo to display the distant shuttle on final approach for low-orbit rendezvous with the Alabama. “They’re docking at SC2 in ten minutes.”

“Okay.” Dana takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself down. “Les, inform the OTV driver I want him in and out by 1225 max, and if he hits my ship I’m going to . . . never mind. Just remind him that the Helms needs to use SC2, and any delay is going to screw up the countdown.” She releases the ceiling rail, pushes herself toward the deck hatch. “If you need me, I’ll be in H5.”

The orbital transfer vehicle has arrived by the time she makes it to the EVA ready-room; through the window next to the egress hatch she watches as the craft gently moves into the shuttle cradle. A slight bump as its blunt forward end mates with the docking collar; a half-minute later the tiger-striped inner hatch irises open. The five men who emerge wear URS military fatigues, their flechette rifles strapped to their shoulders. One by one, they push themselves into the EVA compartment, clamping the toes of their boots within the foot restraints. Although Dana is herself an Academy graduate, she never saw combat duty before she transferred to the Federal Space Agency. These men, she knows just from looking at their faces, are seasoned pros, hardened by tours in Cuba and the Sierra Nevadas. Bad mofos and proud of it.

The last man through the hatch is Col. Gilbert “Gill” Reese, something of a legend within the service and now leader of the URS security detachment aboard Highgate. Reese is built like a bull: thick arms, thick legs, thick neck. Thick head, too, or at least that’s Dana’s private opinion after having dealt with him several times already.

Seeing her, Reese gives Dana a smile that borders on being a smirk. Before she can say anything, he turns to the soldier nearest to the hatch and cocks his thumb at it. The soldier closes the outer hatch and dogs it tight, pounds his fist against it twice, then stabs the button that seals the inner hatch. A hollow thump, then the deck shudders slightly as the OTV disengages from the docking collar. Through the window, Dana catches a glimpse of the ferry moving away. Reese makes a show of checking his watch.

“It’s 1225 on the nose,” he says, not looking at her. “Satisfied, Chief Engineer?”

A snicker from one of the soldiers behind her. Dana pretends not to notice. “No, Colonel, I’m not. In fact, I want you to bring that OTV back here and put your men aboard.”

Reese raises an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t that throw you off schedule?”

“We’ll make up for it.” She stares straight back at him, refusing to give an inch.

Reese shrugs. “Then you won’t mind if we stay awhile. Wouldn’t want you to leave us without a proper farewell.”

Again, the smirk. More muffled laughter from his troops. The colonel gives them a stern look, yet there’s dark amusement in his eyes. Dana feels her face growing warm. “Why are you here, Colonel?”

“Glad you asked. Saves us a lot of time.” The smile disappears. “We’ve received word that there may be a conspiracy against this mission.”

Dana feels her left eyelid involuntarily twitch. “A conspiracy? Where have you heard . . .?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss the details, ma’am. All I can say is that my orders come from the top. My people are to remain aboard the Alabama until its entire complement has arrived and prevent any unauthorized personnel from entering the ship.” Reese never looks away from her. “I hope you don’t mind, considering the circumstances.”

It takes all of her willpower to keep her voice even. “Yes, sir, I do mind. These people coming aboard have been under strict quarantine since 0600, with no outside contact permitted with anyone. Your men haven’t been sterilized, have they?”

Reese’s face stiffens. The soldiers aren’t chuckling now. “Chief, my orders . . .”

“And my orders are to get the Alabama safely underway, on time, on schedule. This entire ship has just undergone a twenty-four-hour decontamination procedure. No one except the flight crew has been permitted through that hatch. The moment your men came aboard, they broke quarantine.” Despite her fear, Dana is surprised to find a thin current of anger rising up from deep within her. “You want authorization? Let’s get authorization. Put a call through to Houston and talk to the Flight Director. Or better yet, let’s call Atlanta and get the president on the phone.”

Dana can’t believe she’s doing this. For all she knows, Reese’s orders could be coming straight from Peachtree House. Yet even as she throws the challenge at the colonel, she knows the bluff worked; Reese stares at her in mute surprise, and his squad has become dead silent. For a moment he doesn’t say anything; when he does, his voice is low. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary. But my orders . . .”

“Fine. I understand.” All at once, a new thought occurs to her. “I respect your concerns, Colonel,” she says, softening her tone a little. “Really, I do . . . just as I hope you respect mine.”

As if on cue, there’s another dull impact against the outer hull. She doesn’t have to look around to know that the Helms has just hard-docked with the Alabama. Good. “Your guys can remain here until 1500,” she continues. “That’s when we close the hatches. But they can’t leave this deck, and they can’t make physical contact with anyone coming aboard. Agreed?”

Dana knows what Reese really wants to do: place his men throughout the Alabama, and not remove them until a few minutes before the ship is ready to launch. Indeed, whatever information he’s received may justify that course of action. Yet she has to gamble on his unwillingness to be officially reprimanded by someone farther up the chain of command.

“All right,” Reese says, “we’ll play it your way.” He turns to his men. “Boone, Schmidt, remain here. Carruthers, Lucchesi, go over to the other hatch. Stay at arm’s length from anyone coming aboard, and don’t leave this deck unless I give a direct order.” The soldiers salute him as they move into position, and Reese looks back at Dana. “Okay?”

“Yes, sir, it is. Thanks for your cooperation.” Reese gives her a perfunctory nod and pushes himself over to join Boone and Schmidt by the airlock.

A minute passes, then the inner hatch cycles open again; a figure wearing an isolation suit pushes himself through. He’s already removed his helmet: Tom Shapiro, the Alabama’s First Officer. Tom grins when he sees Dana, but his expression changes when he sees the soldiers.

“Welcome aboard, sir,” Dana says. “Hope you had a good ride.”

“We did, thanks.” Tom’s gaze moves across the troopers. Behind him, Jud Tinsley has already poked his head and shoulders through the hatch; his eyes widen as he catches sight of the soldiers. “What’s this, an honor guard?”

“I think we should take it that way.” Dana stares him square in the eye. “Apparently Colonel Reese here has just received word that there’s someone wants to sabotage the launch.”

“Really?” The First Officer turns to Reese. “Colonel, would you like to explain what you’re doing aboard my ship?” Before he can answer, Shapiro raises his hand to Tinsley. “Hold the line, Jud. We’ve got a problem.”

The Executive Officer nods and remains where he is, half-in and half-out of the hatch. It’s Reese’s turn to look uncomfortable: now that he’s aboard the Alabama, Shapiro outranks him. “My apologies, sir,” Reese says, giving Shapiro an untidy salute. “We’ve received word from the ground that the ISA have arrested some D.I.’s who they believe are linked to a plot to sabotage this mission.”

“Really?” Shapiro frowns. “And how do they intend to do that?”

Reese hesitates. “We’re . . . I mean, they’re not certain, sir. It seems that they may try to smuggle someone aboard this ship. Possibly more than one person.”

“And you’ve been sent to make sure no one gets aboard.” The colonel nods, and Tom slowly shakes his head. “I respect your concern, Colonel, but I find that highly unlikely. When I left GSC only ninety minutes ago, it was under strict lockdown . . . just as this ship is supposed to be.” He glares at Dana. “Why have you let these people aboard, Chief?”

“Sorry, sir. I was trying to accommodate the Colonel.”

“Well, keep ’em here. I don’t want to scrub the launch just because we have to sterilize the ship again.” Then he looks back at Tinsley. “Jud, tell everyone behind you to put their helmets back on. They can take ’em off once they’re through this compartment.”

“Aye, sir.” The XO disappears from the hatchway.

“Pain in the ass,” Shapiro mutters angrily as he pushes himself toward the access shaft. “Sorry if I don’t shake your hand, Colonel, but I don’t want to catch whatever it is you’re carrying.” He pauses by the ceiling hatch. “I know you’re just doing your job, and I appreciate it. But don’t touch my people, okay?”

“Yes, sir.” Again, Reese salutes him. “Sorry.”

“Very good. Carry on.” Shapiro returns the salute, then looks back at Dana. “Chief . . .?”

“Yes, sir.” Dana lets Tom lead her through the manhole leading upward into the ship. Once they’re out of earshot, she taps his ankle. “Nice catch,” she whispers.

“We’re not out of it yet.” Shapiro glances up and down the shaft to make sure they’re not being overheard. “Get in touch with the skipper, let him know what’s going on.”

Dana glances at her watch: 1229 EST. “Too late,” she murmurs. “They’re on their way.”

Merritt Island 7.5.70 / T-11.31.43

The roadsides along the causeway crossing the Banana River are jammed with coupes and midis of every make and color; tens of thousands of people have crowded themselves onto the narrow sandbars linking the bridges. Tents are scattered all across the narrow beaches, and the aroma of hamburgers and hot dogs rising from barbecue braziers mixes with the salt breeze.

Unimpeded by traffic, the government maxvee cruises straight down the causeway, the swirling red and blue lights on its roof rack clearing the way. The driver ignores the bystanders who stare curiously at the vehicle as it sweeps past them. In the back of the max, though, no one can see any of this. Crammed together on the hard plastic benches, they silently stare at one another, beads of sweat rolling down their faces. Most of their perspiration comes from the stifling heat within the vehicle, but Jorge can’t help but wonder if much of it is due to fear.

Everyone’s suddenly jostled as the maxvee begins to slow down. The nameless prefect at the back of the van cups his hand over his earpiece. “Okay, we’re coming up on the checkpoint,” he says loudly. “Everyone, helmets on. People with children, lean forward a little to hide them. No matter what happens, don’t say anything. Just keep your mouths shut.” He reaches beneath his seat, picks up his uniform cap. “Don’t worry. It’ll all be over and done with in a minute.”

Jorge glances at Rita and the kids one last time, then pulls the loose hood over his head. Now he perceives the world only through a curved pane of transparent plastic; every time he exhales, the bottom of the faceplate fogs up. Next to Rita, Marie begins to protest—“Mama, I can’t breathe!”—until her mother quickly shushes her. Beside him, Carlos sits up a little straighter, trying to make himself look more like an adult. With his hood on, he could almost pass for a grown-up, but Jorge isn’t taking any chances; as the vehicle glides to a halt, he gently pushes his son back against the bench, then he moves forward on his hips to hide him as best as he can.

Time passes. How long, Jorge can’t tell; perhaps it’s only a minute, but it seems much longer. Muffled voices from the front, but he can’t make out any words. The driver talking with the guard at the gatehouse, showing him his I.D. Something that sounds like laughter. Then, all of a sudden, the rear hatch opens, and he squints against the midday sun to see an armed soldier staring at them.

“What the hell are you doing?” The prefect stands up, blocks the hatch. “Shut the door, you idiot! These people are in quarantine!”

The soldier stares back at him, then he hastily reaches up to close the hatch. Jorge lets out his breath as it bangs shut, briefly closes his eyes in a silent prayer of thanks. A few people around him start to murmur, but the prefect hastily gestures for everyone to remain quiet. A few seconds pass, then they’re thrown against each other once more as the max surges forward again.

“Okay, they bought it.” The prefect looks as relieved as anyone else. “We’re in.”

Cheers ring through the vehicle; all around him, people start to remove their helmets. “Keep ’em on!” Henry shouts. “We’ll be there in just a couple of minutes.”

Jorge reluctantly leaves his helmet in place. The cover story worked: the people in the maxvee are members of the back-up crew, being brought in at the last minute from a remote location just in case the Wallace suffers a catastrophic launch failure.

Minutes pass, then the maxvee downshifts again. It makes an abrupt turn to the right, slows to a crawl, then coasts to a stop. People shift nervously in their seats, but the prefect holds up his hand, silently gesturing for everyone to remain where they are. One hand cupped over his earpiece, he keeps an eye on his watch, as if waiting for something. Another minute goes by, then he looks up at them.

“Okay, we’re ready,” he says. “Remember, do just as you were told. Don’t stop for anything, don’t talk to anyone. Just keep moving.”

The rear hatch opens; just outside are two men in white FSA coveralls. They quickly lower the ramp, then urgently motion everyone to get out. The passengers rise, start shuffling down the ramp. Jorge picks up his bag, pulls it over his right shoulder, glances over his shoulder to make sure his family is with him. Carlos is directly behind him, leading Marie by the hand, with Rita bringing up the rear.

Their vehicle is stopped in a garage. Another max, this one painted white with FSA markings, is parked nearby, yet the area is vacant save for the two workmen helping them out of the max and a third standing at the top of a short flight of steps leading to a closed metal door. “Hurry up, hurry up,” the prefect snaps. “C’mon, folks, we’re running out of time! Go, go, go . . .!”

Now they’re heading up the steps to the landing where the third workman is waiting for them. The prefect trots past them to the front of the line; a quick look back, then he nods to the workman. He swings opens the door and steps aside to hold it open, and the prefect ushers them into a narrow corridor.

A lone figure wearing an isolation suit comes out of a doorway halfway down the hall. He and the prefect exchange a hand-signal, then the prefect steps away, holding open the door and motioning for everyone to follow the man he’s just met. “Keep going, keep going,” he says quietly as they file past him. “Don’t stop, just keep going . . .”

Another short corridor, then a left turn through the double doors of an airlock. Jorge passes through the door, finds himself in a long room lined with chairs and tables. A thin yellowish haze hangs in the air, floating a couple of feet above the tile floor, yet that isn’t what he notices first.

Throughout the room, men, women, and children dressed in isolation suits are sprawled everywhere: lying across tables, collapsed in chairs, fallen face-down on the floor. None of them wear helmets.

They were gassed, Jorge realizes with horror. Whatever was introduced into the quarantine facility’s air system knocked these people down so quickly, they didn’t have a chance to reach their helmets lying nearby. The Alabama’s colonization team: fifty URS officers and their families, bowled over within seconds. Jorge sincerely hopes they’re not dead. They’re so still, it’s hard to tell . . . but no, they’re still breathing; he can see their chests moving, their eyelids twitching ever so slightly.

The figure at the head of the line turns, makes a hasty gesture: come on, come on, don’t stop, keep moving! Jorge follows the procession down the center aisle. His faceplate fogs up and he feels light-headed; he has an impulse to drop the bag, turn around and run for the door. Too late. For the sake of his wife and children, he has to keep going . . .

At the far end of the room is a second airlock. The figure at the head of the line stops to twist open the lockwheel, then quickly gestures for someone behind him to grab a chair and prop it open. Caught by a draft of fresh air moving between the two open doors, the yellow haze drifts toward the second hatch. The line starts moving again, heading toward the exit.

Another short corridor, this one leading to a new pair of double-doors. A URS soldier lies face-down just inside the doors. Someone stunned him while he was standing guard. The leader gets someone else behind him to take care of the sentry; he grabs the soldier under his shoulders, drags him back into the quarantine room. Their leader waits until the soldier has been taken away and the volunteer has returned; another quick look to make sure that everyone is with him, then he turns and opens the door.

Raw sunlight, hot and blinding, floods the corridor, and now they’re walking into it, a procession of anonymous figures in isolation suits. Beyond the door, upraised voices, the staccato clicking of camera shutters, loud applause . . .

And now they’re striding single-file past a dense crowd of journalists and cameramen, all gathered behind a red velvet rope to bear witness as the Alabama’s colonization team emerges from the Crew Training Facility.

Everything seems so surreal, as if he’s walking through a weird dream, yet Jorge feels his fear suddenly leave him, replaced by a strange dissonance. Somehow, it seems to him that this is the way it should be, the way it was meant to be. On the other side of those lenses are hundreds of millions of eyes, watching as he begins his journey to the future. Still remaining in step with the man just in front of him, he can’t help himself . . .

Jorge raises his hand to wave goodbye, and the mob straining against the rope roars its approval. Then microphones and cameras are shoved toward him, and he remembers who he really is, what he’s doing. Jorge feels his knees become weak; he drops his arm and looks away, deliberately focusing on the white maxvee parked only a few yards away.

A soldier stands in front of the max, and standing next to him is the prefect who had helped them get this far. He glares at Jorge as he steps onto the ramp. Embarrassed, Jorge doesn’t dare meet his angry gaze as he boards the vehicle.

He takes a seat on the bench, moves over a little to make room for Carlos. Through the faceplate, he catches a brief glimpse of his son’s face—Papa, you moron!—then he takes the bag and shoves it beneath his legs as Marie and Rita sit down next to them.

The last person aboard is the man who met them outside the quarantine facility. He turns to wave to the press, then takes a seat at the back of the vehicle. The prefect turns his back to them as a soldier pushes the ramp back in place. The rear hatch slams shut; a few seconds later, the maxvee rises from its pads and starts to glide away.

The man who led them through the CTF ducks his head, pulls off his helmet. When he looks up at them, his eyes are cold and hard.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” he says quietly, “I’m Captain Robert E. Lee, commanding officer of the Alabama. From this moment on, you’ll do exactly what I tell you to do . . .”

Merritt Island 7.5.70 / T-11.10.52

Fifty years ago, Pad 11 was Shuttle Launch Complex 39-B, the point of departure for NASA’s first-generation space shuttles. The enormous launch tower and service structure, however, have long since been dismantled to make room for single-stage orbital transports that require none of the old hardware. Virtually the only things that remain from the former site are the high security fence that encircles the base of the mound, and the broad concrete road leading across the surrounding marshlands to the pad.

The URSS George Wallace rests on its tricycle landing gear, tended to by a half-dozen pad technicians who now wait near the gangway lowered from beneath the spaceplane’s fuselage. Wisps of supercooled hydrogen drift from the blowoff vents of the transport’s nuclear indigenous fuel engines, curl upward around the raked edges of its twin vertical stabilizers. The pad crew watches as the maxvee, escorted by a pair of security HVs, passes through the fence gate and glides to the top of the mound.

The max comes to a halt, and two workers open the rear hatch and pull down the ramp. Captain Lee is the first to emerge; peering through his helmet, he takes a moment to gaze at the Wallace, then he turns to salute the pad crew gathered nearby. They grin and break into applause; he stands aside and watches as the colonization team disembarks from the maxvee and marches toward the shuttle.

Most of the passengers have already trooped up the gangway when Lee notices a couple of pad workers looking away from the spacecraft. He turns to see a black coupe gliding down the service road from the distant launch control center. The security officers walk over to meet the car as it moves through the gate and up the hill. It comes to a halt next to the maxvee, then its doors slide open.

Lee feels a twinge of unease when he sees the prefect who shepherded the D.I.’s from southern Georgia; there’s no reason why he should be here now. When Roland Shaw climbs out of the car, something clutches at the back of his throat; despite the heat of the day, the DIS is wearing his uniform grey overcoat and cap. Yet Lee’s unprepared for the woman in the hooded travel cape who gets out of the back of the coupe. For a few moments he doesn’t recognize her, then she comes closer and lowers her hood, and he finds himself gazing upon the face of the last person he ever expected to see again: Elise Rochelle Lee.

Lee’s still staring at Elise as Shaw and the prefect approach him. “Captain Lee,” Shaw says quietly, “my apologies, but there’s a matter of utmost importance we need to discuss with you.”

“I . . . I don’t understand.” Lee’s mouth is dry. “Is there a problem?”

A grim smile appears on his former wife’s face, yet Elise remains quiet, her hands clasped together within her cape. “I’m sorry, sir, but I’m afraid there is,” the prefect replies. “We have to speak with you immediately.”

The security officers step closer, their hands never far from their holstered sidearms. Confused, the pad techs hover nearby, murmuring to one another. The last handful of men and women boarding the Wallace watch from the bottom of the gangway; Lee can’t see their faces, but he knows that they must be frightened. “Yes, of course. By all means. What is it that you want?”

Elise opens her mouth as if to say something, but she’s cut off by Shaw. “Perhaps we should do this in private.” He gestures to the max. “In there?”

Lee nods within his helmet, and the prefect turns to lead them up the ramp into the back of the vehicle, signaling for the two security officers to shut the hatch behind them. Once they’re alone, Shaw looks at Lee. “Would you take off your helmet, sir? I think we’ve minimized the risk of contamination, and it would make this conversation easier.”

Lee reluctantly removes his helmet. His hair is soaked with sweat; he pushes it with his gloved hand as he steps back, trying to keep the others at arm’s distance. “If this is supposed to be a last-minute send-off, your timing is . . .”

“Sorry, Captain, but it’s a little more serious than that.” Shaw glances at Elise. “Your wife . . .”

“Former wife,” Elise interrupts. “For the record, we’re married in name only.”

“We’re not on the record, but I’ll try to remember that.” Shaw’s eyes never leave Lee’s. “Ms. Lee has alerted the ISA to a . . . well, certain improper actions on your part. She claims she’s found a letter . . .”

“You know the one I’m talking about, don’t you?” Elise indicts him with her gaze. “The letter you left in your desk, the one which I wasn’t supposed to find until after the Alabama launched . . .”

“The one I addressed to you and your father, yes.” Lee slowly lets out his breath. “My mistake. I thought you’d wait until I was gone before you decrypted the password to see what I might have left behind.” He can’t help but smile. “No bank codes, sorry. I left everything to charity.”

Her face darkens. “After all my father’s done for you . . .”

“The senator did nothing for me. It was all for himself. Maybe for the Republic, too, but that’s almost as low.” Despite his fear, Lee gives her a defiant smile. “As far as I’m concerned, I don’t give a damn about the Republic or your father.”

Elise’s eyes widen. A confession is the last thing she expected. Indeed, Lee is shocked by his own words. Yet if they’ve read the letter, they already know everything; denying it now would be pointless. Shaw steps a little closer, his right hand moving to the front of his coat. “Then you admit you’re involved in a plot to hijack the Alabama, that you’re planning to smuggle D.I.s aboard . . .?”

“Absolutely. Everything in my letter, it’s all true.” Lee barely glances at Shaw. “In fact, they’re already aboard the shuttle.” Although he speaks to the DIS, he continues to stare straight at Elise. “And so you’ll know, I’m not just involved in this . . . it’s my plan, has been from the very beginning.”

Elise’s mouth falls open; she recoils as if he’s slapped her. “How . . .? When did . . .?”

“From the moment I was selected as mission commander.” Lee savors her horror, even as from the corner of his eye he sees Roland Shaw slowly draw a stunner from within his coat. “Perhaps even before then. Maybe I got the idea even while I was in the Academy and saw what was being done to Project Starflight. Or maybe it was while we were married, and I got to watch from close range while your father and his cronies ruined the country. In any case, I’ve had a long time to learn to hate the Republic . . . and you too, for that matter.”

Elise can’t speak. Lee isn’t surprised; for the first time, at least in his memory, someone close to her has uttered seditious thoughts about the government. Now he knows for certain that she never suspected what he was planning, even during the years that they shared the same bed. More evidence of the fact that their marriage was a sham. “But I have to thank you for one thing,” he continues. “Your father’s connections enabled me to establish a few of my own. Through him, I met some people without whom none of this would have been possible.”

Then he looks at Shaw. “Are we all set?”

“Yes, Captain, we are.” The Director of Internal Security nods his head. “Just one last detail . . .”

Elise turns to stare at Shaw. “What . . .?”

Shaw squeezes the trigger. There’s a soft thufft of compressed air, then Elise collapses as the charged dart strikes her. She almost falls against the side of the van, but the prefect grabs her by the shoulders, gently lowers the unconscious woman onto a bench.

Lee lets out his breath. “Bad luck,” he says quietly. On the one hand, he’s glad Shaw used a nonlethal weapon; as much as he despises this woman, he has no desire to see her dead. On the other hand, she knows too much. “What are you going to do with her?”

“We can keep her down for a couple of hours, at least.” Shaw tucks the stunner back in his shoulder holster. “By the time she wakes up, she’ll be in Valdosta, awaiting trial on sedition charges. Don’t worry, we’ll find a way to make ’em stick, father or no father. But we’ve still got a problem . . .”

“Let me guess. She told someone else at ISA.”

“Uh-uh . . . fortunately she called me first. I heard from her just after our briefing, and by then she was already flying down here. She wanted to confront you personally, and I told her to keep it to herself.” Shaw glances warily at the closed hatch of the van. “But some of your people were arrested earlier this morning, apparently while trying to make it to the rendezvous point. One of them cracked under interrogation and my people tipped off Highgate, and now there’s a service squad on your ship, checking everyone who comes aboard. Sorry, Robert, but I didn’t learn about it until right after I got the call from your wife . . .”

“Please don’t call her my wife.” Lee picks up his helmet, juggles it in his hands. “And you can’t order the squad to leave without raising suspicions, right?” Shaw shakes his head. “Okay. I’ll deal with it somehow. At least cover for us until we lift off.”

“That, I can do.” Shaw looks at the prefect. “Ms. Lee is under arrest. Keep her sedated, and don’t let anyone see her when she wakes up. I’ll deal with this later.” Then he takes Lee by the arm, leads him toward the hatch. “You’ve just had a long, tearful farewell visit with your loving wife, and now you and I are going to walk out there . . .”

Security officers and pad workers silently watch as the commanding officer of the Alabama and the Director of Internal Security emerge from the back of the max and quickly walk across the launch pad to the Wallace. The colonists have already boarded the shuttle; now only the captain needs to walk up the gangway.

One of the pad workers has a camera. He uses it to catch a final snapshot of the two men as they formally salute each other at the bottom of the shuttle gangway. Many years later, historians will study this picture, and wonder what final words were exchanged by the two greatest traitors the United Republic of America has ever known.

“Good luck, Captain,” Shaw says quietly. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Thank you, sir.” Lee holds the salute. “And good luck to you, too.”

Shaw nods ever so slightly. “We’ll both need it.”

URSS Wallace 7.5.70 / T-11.00.00

Jorge winces as an awesome roar rips through the passenger compartment, accompanied by a prolonged shudder that seems to go straight to the roots of his teeth. Scowling against the overpowering sound and vibration, he can barely hear Marie’s frightened scream above the engines, but he clamps his hand over his daughter’s.

“It’s okay,” he murmurs even though he knows she can’t hear him. “It’s all right . . . It’s okay . . . everything’s going to be all right . . .”

No windows back here in the passenger compartment, only two long rows of narrow acceleration couches; his only view is past the shoulders of the passengers seated in front of him, through the latticed bubble window of the forward cockpit. Jorge catches a final glimpse of flat Floridan landscape falling away, then cloudless sky fills the window, more blue and clear than any sky he’s ever seen before.

The deck tilts backward, pushing him further into the foam padding of his couch. Jorge turns his head, gazes at his family strapped into the seats next to him. Rita’s eyes are closed tight and Marie’s face is screwed up in mortal terror, but Carlos wears a huge grin; all his fears have vanished, and now he relishes every moment of this. Jorge feels a surge of paternal pride. His son . . .

Then the main engines howl into life, and Jorge has only a moment to turn his head forward again before his body is slammed back. Weight descends upon his body; his lungs fight for every breath he takes. Marie isn’t screaming anymore, but the nails of her small hand dig into his palm. He wants to say something to her, but he can’t. The g-force is incredible. Henry, you bastard, you lied . . .

The sky turns dark purple, starts fading to black.

URSS Alabama 7.5.70 / T-10.47.12

“Incoming OCN from the Wallace, sir. Captain Lee.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gillis, I’ll take it here.” Shapiro rotates the command chair seat away from the status board, taps his headset. “Wallace, this is Alabama, do you copy?”

“We copy, Alabama.” Lee’s voice comes clearly over the orbital communications network, the satellite system that permits spacecraft to radio one another without having to use ground-based systems. “Sorry for the delay, Tom. The ride up was a little bumpy, but we cleared the pad without any difficulties. LEO achieved and we’re headed for Highgate rendezvous, ETA 1430.”

Shapiro closes his eyes in relief. Good. Lee spoke of himself in the plural, which means he’s managed to get everyone aboard the Wallace. The line about having a bumpy ride up, though, is a signal that not everything went well. “Sorry to hear that you picked up some chop, sir. Maybe I can narrow your ETA if you’ll feed me your numbers on the GI.”

“We copy, Alabama. Thanks, I’d appreciate it.”

“Stand by, Wallace.” Shapiro unbuckles the seat harness, pushes himself across the deck to the com station. Several other members of the bridge crew are gathered in the semi-circular compartment, but not all of them are involved; he has to be careful what he says and does. Les Gillis punches up the OCN graphic interface; glancing over his shoulder at Shapiro, the com officer briefly holds up three fingers, then lowers one. Shapiro nods, then taps his headset again. “Captain, we’re patching the GI into OCN-3. I hope this isn’t too much trouble.”

A brief pause. “Roger that, Alabama,” Lee says. “No, it’s not too much trouble.”

Shapiro and Gillis trade a knowing look: Lee understands the double-talk. Although they’re using OCN-3 to exchange data regarding orbital coordinates, at the same time they’d be patched into OCN-2, a seldom-used extra-low frequency band they’ve established for covert print-only communications. Although flight controllers in Houston may be monitoring OCN-3, they won’t be looking for ELF transmissions carried over OCN-2. Or at least so they hope.

Leslie taps at his keyboard, and the small flatscreen in front of him divides in half. The top half depicts a global map of Earth’s surface, with the curved ground-tracks of Highgate and the Wallace projected above it. The shuttle is halfway through its first orbit, now passing through the night terminator somewhere above the Indian Ocean; meanwhile Highgate, in a higher orbit, is coming up on the northern California coast. Numbers to the right of the map display the exact coordinates of both spacecraft. All very routine. The bottom half of the screen, though, displays a decrypted ELF message from the Wallace:

ISA CAUGHT 5 HERE—1 TALKED—GSC SECURITY ALERT

Shapiro swears beneath his breath. If there was a security alert at the Cape, then Lee was lucky to get the Wallace off the ground. Feet dangling in midair, he leans across Gillis to type a response:

5 URS ABOARD WAITING FOR YOU—WEAR SUITS W/ HOODS

A long pause. Shapiro glances over his shoulder, spots Dana Monroe watching him from the engineering station. He cocks his head toward the screen; she nods, then pushes off to glide toward them. When he looks back, Lee’s response has already appeared:

WILL DO—1ST OPTION OUT—GO TO OPT. 2

Gillis hisses between his teeth. “He can’t be serious,” he whispers, so low Shapiro can barely hear him.

Tom feels a soft hand grip his shoulder. Looking around, he finds Dana behind him. Her eyes widen as she reads the screen. “Oh, God . . .”

Shapiro twists around to examine the status board. All systems are in the green, and the final stage of the fuel load-up is almost complete. Through the windows on the other side of the deck, he can see the aft end of the fuel barge parked beneath the main tank. At 1400, forty-four minutes from now, the last few tons of the helium-3 and deuterium necessary for the primary boost phase will have been pumped aboard. Thirty minutes later, at 1430, the Wallace is scheduled to dock with the Alabama. After that . . .

“Can we do this?” Tom whispers. Dana hesitates, gives a reluctant nod. “Okay,” he murmurs, then he taps his headset again. “We’ve got your numbers, Wallace, and they look good to us. Concur with your projected ETA.”

“We copy, Alabama,” Lee replies. “Wallace out.”

Shapiro sighs, then he looks at Gillis. “Tell the others to get ready . . . and for God’s sake, do it quietly.” The com officer is ashen, but he nods his head. Shapiro gives him a gentle pat on the back, then he turns again to Monroe. “Can you get us ready for a quick-start?”

“I . . . sure, no problem. We’ll be there.” Shapiro starts to push away, but she stops him. “One thing . . . what about the lock-out?”

“I don’t know,” he mutters. “Better just hope the right man made it aboard.”

URSS Wallace 7.5.70 / T-9:32:14

Gazing up through the canopy, Lee watches as the Alabama fills the cockpit windows. The shuttle cradle is only a few yards away; with deft movements of the hand controller, occasionally glancing down at the instrument panel to make sure the upper fuselage hatch is properly aligned with the docking collar, he gently coaxes the Wallace closer toward the enormous ship as the spaceplane’s blunt shadow falls across its hull. The shrill beep of contact probe, and he relaxes his grip on the stick. Another moment passes, then the hard thump of the hatch mating with the collar.

“Alabama, we’re in,” he says. “Secure shuttle, please.”

“Roger that, Wallace.” Tom Shapiro’s voice. “The XO’s waiting for you. He’ll help you bring your party aboard.”

“Very good, Alabama, thank you.” As he switches off the main systems he feels a soft jar pass through the shuttle as the cradle closes around the Wallace and locks it in place. Another quick look across the board to make sure the engines are safed and the wings have been properly folded, then Lee shrugs out of his harness, picks up his helmet, and pushes himself out of his seat and moves from the narrow cockpit into the aft passenger compartment.

A few of the hardier ones are already unbuckling their straps, but many remain in their seats, their faces queasy and pale. The air is rank with the odor of vomit; quite a few of these people got sick as soon as the Wallace entered orbit, and some didn’t find the puke bags in time. Globular flecks of bile float through the compartment, but there’s nothing that can be done about that now. Lee whistles sharply between his fingers, and everyone looks up at him.

“Okay, listen up,” he says loudly once he has their attention. “You know what the situation is, so make sure your hoods are on when you leave the shuttle. Don’t stop for anyone, just head straight for the hatch . . . we’ve got someone there to show you the way. Go straight up the ladder until you reach Deck H1, and follow First Officer Shapiro to your bunks. Is that clear?”

Murmurs of assent, a few wary nods. Lee scans the compartment, sees dozens of nervous faces. “Everyone just relax,” he adds, doing his best to calm them. “You did fine on the ground. Play it the same way here, and we’re home free. Now . . . is there a Jorge Montero aboard?”

A pause, then a hand rises from three rows back on the right: a middle-aged man, seated with a woman, a young girl, and a teenage boy. Lee tries not to show his relief; he wasn’t one of those who was apprehended by the prefects. “Jorge, please follow me. We need you right away.”

Jorge nods his head, then hastens to unbuckle his daughter’s harness. Judging from her pale expression, she was one of those who got spacesick. His son stares back at Lee with incredulity, wide-eyed with the notion that they’ve been singled out. “Just you, sir,” Lee quickly adds. “I’m sorry, but your family has to leave with everyone else.”

Jorge hesitates. “Yes, sir. Of course.” He looks at his wife and kids, murmurs something to them, then struggles with a canvas duffel bag he has stuffed beneath his seat. Lee moves forward to catch it before it hits another passenger in the back of the head.

“You brought it?” he quietly asks. Jorge nods again, and Lee looks past him toward his children. “I’m going to need your father for awhile, so I want you to follow your mother. She’ll take you where you’re supposed to go, okay?”

His wife gives her husband an uncertain glance, but his son has a broad grin. The little girl, though, has a frightened look on her face. “Is my Papa in trouble?” she asks uncertainly.

“Not at all, sweetie.” Jorge gives her a smile. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back with you quick as a flash.” He takes the bag from Lee, pulls its strap across his shoulders. “Ready. Let’s go.”

Behind them, the rest of the passengers are opening their harnesses, pulling on their helmets. These people have been through a lot in the last eighteen hours; he can only pray they can keep it up just a little while longer.

“Good luck, everyone,” he says, then he pushes himself to the ceiling hatch.

URSS Alabama 7.5.70 / T-9.28.04

The inner hatch hisses as it irises open, then Captain Lee pushes himself through it, the soles of his shoes nearly touching the faceplate of Jorge’s helmet. Jorge tries to follow him through the manhole, but something pulls at him from behind. Looking back, he sees that his duffel bag has snagged on the edge of the hatch.

Cursing under his breath, Jorge yanks the bag free, hauls it over his shoulder as he scrambles the rest of the way through the hatch. A moment of disorientation—everyone seems to be standing on the walls—eclipsed by fear as he spots URS soldiers within the narrow compartment.

Say nothing, do nothing. Jorge pretends not to notice the troopers as Lee salutes a senior officer wearing a colonel’s insignia. Past them, on the other side of the deck only a few yards away, a young man in an FSA jumpsuit floats near a ceiling hatch. He gives Jorge an impatient gesture, and he obediently moves toward him . . .

“Hold it.” Someone grabs at his bag, nearly pulling it off his shoulder. Jorge turns, sees one of the soldiers, his hand wrapped around its strap. His name strip reads Carruthers, and his eyes are suspicious. “What d’ya got in there?”

Jorge feels his heart pounding in his mouth. Past Carruthers, Captain Lee and the colonel—Reese, from the name on his uniform—turn to stare at him. “Nothing . . . I mean, it’s just . . .”

“Open it.” Carruthers releases the bag, but his hands fall upon his rifle.

Lee turns toward Reese. “Gill, this is unnecessary. We’re already behind . . .”

“Let my people do their job.” Reese gives Carruthers a brief nod. “Open it for him.”

One hand still on his weapon, Carruthers takes the bag from Jorge, lets it dangle in mid-air while he unzips its flap. He peers at its contents, then he looks up at Jorge. “Lemme guess . . . scientist, right?”

Jorge nods, unable to speak. “Yeah, okay . . .” Carruthers zips the bag shut, looks back at his superior officer. “Safe.”

Reese acknowledges his man with a small nod, and Carruthers returns the bag to Jorge. His pulse still hammering, Jorge pulls the bag back over his shoulder, moves toward the hatch. When he glances back, he sees that Captain Lee is behind him, and more passengers are emerging from the shuttle hatch. No one else is getting harassed.

Yet the third soldier . . . his right hand is raised, his index finger wagging a little. Jorge realizes that he’s counting everyone who leaves the Wallace. Four, five, six . . .

What happens when he gets to forty-seven, and discovers that the crew roster is short by five?

The crewman near the access hatch silently urges him toward the ladder. Jorge grasps the bottom rung, pushes himself upward into the shaft. He looks back, sees Captain Lee coming up the ladder. “Get to the command deck,” he whispers. “Next deck up. C’mon, move!”

Two crew members float unconscious on Deck H4, a man and a woman, their arms limp at their sides, their heads thrown back. A young woman hovering near the hatch aims a stunner straight at Jorge; he raises his hands, then Lee appears behind him. “Stand down, Dana,” he says calmly. “He’s with us.” Dana lowers the weapon as the captain glances at the crewmen. “Is this everyone?”

“On this deck, yes sir. Our people are taking care of the rest now. Some resistance in H3. Someone tried to shut down the life-support system, but they’ve been taken down. No casualties reported.”

“Well done, Chief.” Lee turns to another officer, points to the unconscious crewmen. “Put them where they won’t cause any trouble when they wake up. The nearest head should do.” Then he looks back at Dana. “Here’s our man. He knows what needs to be done.”

“Aye, skipper.” She tucks the stunner in her belt, gestures to Jorge. “This way . . . what’s your name?”

“Jorge. Jorge Montero.” He grabs the ceiling rail, follows Dana across the deck to the main control console. “Electrical systems engineer . . . I designed the wiring for this place, when I was with . . .”

“Right. The service panel you want is down here.” She lowers herself to the floor, thrusts her head and shoulders beneath the console. “You know where you’re supposed to go?”

Jorge quickly scans the complex array of buttons, toggle switches and digital readouts until he finds a key slot covered with a transparent plastic cover. “Uh-huh. Main engine ignition system’s here, which means the lock-out should be just beneath . . .”

“Don’t explain it to me. Just do it.” Dana unlatches the service panel, impatiently shoves the cover aside. She pulls herself out from beneath the console, nods toward the open bay. “Whatever it is, make it quick.”

“I know. Hold this.” Jorge thrusts the duffel bag into Dana’s arm. He pulls open the zipper, then begins pulling out its contents. Her eyes widen as books, many of them dating from the last century, spill forth from the bag: Skills For Taming The Wilderness, The Foxfire Book, Survival With Style, Bartlett’s Famous Quotations . . .

“What did you do, bring a library?” Dana snatches a frayed oversize paperback before it floats away, glances at the title: The Boy Scout Handbook.

Jorge grins despite himself. “Sort of. I picked some things I thought we’d need when we . . . here we are!” The hardcover copy of J. Brownowski’s The Ascent of Man is nearly a century old; it took years of searching before he discovered a copy in an antiquarian bookstore outside Atlanta. Jorge opens the book to the back cover. “Got a knife? Something sharp?”

Dana reaches into a thigh pocket, pulls out a small penknife. Jorge takes it from her, opens its small blade, carefully slices the endpaper straight down the center of the inside binding. She watches in fascination as Jorge slowly peels back the false endpaper glued over the back cover, revealing a hidden pocket. Concealed within the book is a paper-thin plastic sheet: a fiberoptic circuit board. Dana smiles at Jorge with newfound respect. “Sneaky. Very sneaky.”

“Figured someone might search me. It never came to that, but . . .” Withdrawing the circuit board from the pocket, Jorge gingerly holds it by its edges as he bends down to the open service panel. “Okay, look in there and find the electronics bay marked 2-304.”

Dana pulls out a penlight, squeezes in past Jorge. After a few moments, she slides out a slender metal case. “Take out the board that’s in there,” Jorge says, and she removes the thin sheet contained within the drawer. As Jorge delicately places the substitute board within the drawer, he hears voices from across the compartment:

“Captain! Chief Tinsley reports Reese’s men have discovered we’re short!”

“Where’s Tinsley now?”

“Access shaft just outside H5!” A pause. “He’s shut the hatch, sir. The last of the passengers are aboard.”

“Good. Tell the XO to stand by. Chief Monroe, where are we?”

Jorge slides the drawer shut, twists around within the cramped space to give the Dana a thumbs-up. She raises her head above the console. “We’re clear, skipper!” Then she looks back down at Jorge. “I hope this works,” she whispers.

“You and me both.” Ten months of effort went into devising a bypass for the main engine ignition system that would not require code authorization from the ground, yet there was no certain way of testing it before now. Jorge barely has time to climb out from the console before Captain Lee pushes him out of the way. He’s already removed his isolation suit, and now he yanks the chrome launch key from around his neck. Without any hesitation, Lee flips open the cover above the ignition system, shoves the key into the slot, gives it a one-quarter turn.

For a half-second, nothing happens; Jorge feels his heart skip a beat. Then diodes across the console flash from red to green, and a flatscreen in the center of the console lightens to display bars of alphanumeric code. Dana glances at the screen, then quickly types an instruction into a nearby keyboard. The screen changes, displaying a schematic of Alabama’s fusion reactor.

“Lock-out is down!” she shouts. “We’ve got the ship!”

Everyone in the command center yells at once, and Jorge feels the strength leave his body; gasping for breath, he lets his head fall back. It worked . . . oh, God, it worked . . . then, through the laughter and applause, he hears a voice from the other side of the command deck:

“Skipper! Message from Launch Operations . . .!”

7.5.70 / T-9.10.32

“They’ve ordered us to open the hatch!”

Holding onto a ceiling rail, Lee stares at the launch key half-turned in its slot. For a few seconds, everything seems frozen in time, Gillis’s voice a distant echo from across a vast chasm. At the edge of his vision he sees Dana just beginning to react; next to her, Jorge Montero turns toward them, fear beginning to register on his face . . .

It’s got to be now, he realizes. Now, or never.

“Inform Ops we’ve got a ship emergency.” Lee snaps back to full awareness. “Tell ’em . . . whatever. An electrical fire somewhere in the hub. Buy us some time.” He glances at the chronometer above the console, then turns to Dana. “Put everything on line, Chief. We launch in five.”

Dana’s expression changes to astonishment. For a moment it seems she’s about to protest, then she quickly nods her head. “Right away, sir,” she says, then she pitches herself across the deck to the engineering station. “Paine! Jessup! Pressurize liquid fuel tanks, initiate primary ignition sequence! We’re restarting the clock at minus-oh-five!”

The bridge crew stares at them, not quite believing what they’ve just heard. “Let’s go, people!” Lee yells. “You know what to do!” That’s all it takes; suddenly, everyone is in motion, nearly colliding with each other as they rush for their stations. The only person who seems confused is Jorge Montero; still holding onto the console, he stares about the compartment in confusion, not knowing what to do.

“Mr. Montero, get out of here.” Lee points to the hatch as he pushes himself toward the command chair. “Find your family and tell them to get ready.” Montero nods dumbly, then heads for the access shaft. Lee taps his headset. “Mr. Shapiro, where are you?”

“Deck C3B, skipper.” Lee can hear voices in the background. “What’s going on?”

“We’re moving up the countdown. Zero-five and counting. Get those people strapped down, then get back here.” Without waiting for a response, Lee turns toward Gillis. “Les! Put me through to Colonel Reese!”

The com officer slaps buttons on his board; a moment later, Reese’s angry voice comes through Lee’s headset. “Captain, what are you . . .?”

“Ship emergency, Colonel.” Lee tries to keep an even tone. “A fire has broken loose in Deck H3, and we’re working to contain it, but I have to ask that you and your men leave the Alabama at once. Use the EVA suits in the lockers . . .”

“Lee, there’s no fire. The master alarm hasn’t gone off.” Reese isn’t buying it; Lee can tell from the sound of his voice. “Your exec lit out of here when we informed him that the head-count was short by five persons, and now he’s sealed the hatch. Either you let us in, or we’re going to have to shoot our way through.”

Reese is bluffing. The access shaft hatch on Deck H5 is built to withstand a full-scale decompression accident, and the rounds from a URS flechette rifle are specifically designed not to be able to penetrate bulkheads. There’s no way the soldiers can enter the shaft. “Colonel Reese,” Lee says calmly, “please take your men off the ship within four minutes. That’s an order.”

“I’ve already got my orders.” A long pause. “Lee . . . I know what you’re planning to do. We can’t allow this. Surrender yourselves now, and you might get out of this without . . .”

“Sorry, Colonel, we’re way beyond that.” No sense in keeping up the pretense; Reese has figured out the truth. “Four minutes, then you’re stowaways. Your choice.”

Lee has just clicked off when he hears Gillis again. “Skipper, I’ve got Houston. They . . .”

“Mr. Gillis . . .” He takes a deep breath. “You have my permission to tell them to go straight to hell.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Secondary engines pressurized, ignition systems armed.” From her station, Dana keeps up a steady drone as she moves down the checklist. Lee absently gnaws at a knuckle as he watches her people flip switches, enter commands in their keyboards. “Main engine reactor on standby . . . navigation interface, checked and ready . . .”

“You’re sure you’re ready to do this?” Tom Shapiro has returned to the command deck without Lee noticing; he rests his hand on the captain’s shoulder. “Another ten minutes . . .”

“Another ten minutes, and they may find a way to stop us.” Lee shakes his head. “We get out now, and they can’t do anything. We’ll complete flight procedures once we’re underway.” He looks up at Shapiro. “Agreed?”

The First Officer hesitates, slowly lets out his breath. “Yes, sir. Understood.”

“Are the passengers strapped down?” Shapiro nods reluctantly, and Lee points to the vacant seat at the main console. “Okay, take the helm. You’ll have to fly until we’ve had a talk with Mr. McDowell.”

Shapiro doesn’t immediately obey his order; instead he lingers by the command chair, gazing through the windows at the dry-dock surrounding them. Lee looks up at him; for a moment neither man says anything. Shapiro waits for an answer to his unspoken question, when he doesn’t receive one, he lets out his breath, then he moves to the helm, straps himself in, punches commands into his keyboard. “Main nav systems online,” he murmurs. “Primary AI interface, green for go . . .”

Now Lee’s all alone. Voices in his headset ask questions; he answers yes or no, never once removing his gaze from the status board above the console. The last few minutes drift by. He rests his right elbow on the armrest, feels Alabama tremble beneath him: eighty thousand tons of metal, plastic, ceramic alloy, and flesh, waiting to be fired into the cosmos.

“Captain?” Gillis’s voice is hesitant. “President Conroy online. He wants to speak with you.”

Lee feels eyes upon him. Everyone waits for him to say something. A final denunciation? A curse upon the Republic? Perhaps haughty laughter from a trusted senior officer who has stolen the crowning achievement of a corrupt government and transformed it into an expression of freedom?

“Switch off the comlink, Mr. Gillis.” Lee unfastens his seat belt, pushes himself over to the main console. “We’re ready for launch.”

Then he grasps the silver key, twists it the rest of the way to the right. A green light flares above it. “Disengage mooring lines,” he says. “Fire main thrusters.”

7.5.70 / T -0.00.00

Pyros silently ignite along the Alabama’s hull as the mooring cables are jettisoned, then the four maneuvering engines blaze to life and the starship slowly begins to move forward.

Ponderously, like a leviathan awakening within its grotto deep beneath the sea, the enormous vessel glides through the dry-dock, the red strobes of its running lights casting shadows along the trusswork of Highgate’s central bay.

A service pod unlucky enough to be flying past Alabama at that moment turns on its axis, its RCRs flaring as it maneuvers wildly to avoid collision with the gaping maw of the ramscoop. Breath caught in his throat, the pilot watches through the cockpit as the five-hundred-foot length of the starship passes above him.

Within the EVA compartment, URS soldiers clutch the ceiling rails with both hands, their feet dangling in midair as they yell obscenities. A rifle skitters across a bulkhead, slams against the floor. Colonel Reese loses his grip, falls to the deck; there’s a sharp pain in his left ankle as it twists; he ignores it as he tries to crawl toward the nearest suit locker. Yet he knows it’s a futile effort; even if he were able to put on a suit and get to the airlock, Alabama is under thrust. Any attempt now to escape the ship would most certainly be fatal. Like it or not, he’s going where it’s going . . .

On Deck C4A, Jorge Montero lies prone on his bunk; weight descends upon him, pushing his body flat against the narrow mat. Within the cramped confines of the crew compartment, he can hear people cheering, laughing, sobbing with relief. Turning his head, he glances across the narrow aisle. Rita meets his gaze, then looks away. She’s frightened: not of this, but of what lies before them.

“Goodbye, Earth!” From the bunk above him, Carlos yells against the dull creak of the bulkheads, the distant hollow thrum of the engines. “Goodbye, URS! We are history!”

Jorge grins. The kid’s right. They’ve become history . . .

Eyes half-shut, arms and legs relaxed, Captain Lee lets his body collapse against the soft membranes of his chair. All around him, he hears the low voices of the command crew as they murmur to one another; the quiet tapping of fingers against keyboards, the subdued chitter and occasional electronic beep of instruments. Studying the status board, he sees that all is well: Alabama is behaving just as it should, its complex systems all working well within their parameters.

Everyone’s going about their work with quiet stoicism, just as they were trained. Dana looks around at him, meets his eye; she gives him a smile, a silent thumbs-up. He returns the gesture, then shifts his gaze to the windows.

Highgate can no longer be seen. It’s already many miles away, falling away behind him. In a couple of minutes he’ll give the order for main engine ignition, the beginning of the three-month boost phase that will gradually accelerate the Alabama to cruise velocity. Long before then everyone aboard will be in hibernation; virtually immortal, they’ll sleep for the next two and a quarter centuries, and when they awaken . . .

No. Now’s not the time for this. Ursae Majoris 47 can wait a little while longer.

Lee watches as the silver-blue curvature of the Earth gracefully drifts past the command deck windows. No one says anything; the bridge team falls silent as they look upon their home world for the last time. For a moment, there is only the silence of the stars.

Peace. Liberty. Freedom.

THE DIAMOND PIT

Jack Dann

Homage to F. Scott . . .

I’d be flyin’ to find!

My Miss One-of-a-kind!

If I could only get—

If only I could get—out’a this jail! . . .

—“Rumplemayer’s Basement Blues,” 1921

ONE

IT WAS LIKE BEING IN A storm, except I heard the thunder first. That was the sound of a dozen antiaircraft guns firing at us from the summit of a sheer butte that rose like a monolith above the cruel curls of the Montana Rockies.

The setting sun was wreathed with gauzy clouds, and it tinted the cliffs and crevasses below as pink as stained glass flamingos. We were flying a British Moth with a 60-hp de Havilland motor—those Brits could certainly make an airplane. The Moth was steady as a table and was Joel’s and my favorite for wing walking and stepping off from one plane onto another. I was in the front cockpit this time, just along for the ride. It had been Joel’s idea to borrow the boss’s beaut and skip out after our last performance to investigate “something goofy” in the mountains near Hades, which was more bare rock than a village set in the saddle between a mountain that looked like a two-knuckled fist and the mountain that was shooting bullets at us.

Joel swore and shouted though the communication tube and tried to get us the hell out of there, as bullets tore into the fuselage. Another burst hit the upper wing just above my head, which was where the fuel tank was located. My face was spattered with gasoline and I figured then and there that I had just bought the farm; Joel was shouting through the tube to tell me that everything was okay—when we were hit again.

I heard a ping as a bullet hit the motor, and an instant later I could barely see through the oily smoke and fire. I gagged on the burnt exhalations of fuel and oil that smeared over my goggles as the Moth went into a dive. Reflexively, I took over the controls, which were linked to the front cockpit, God bless Mr. Geoffrey de Havilland. I shouted back at Joel through the tube and pulled as hard as I could on the stick while working the rudder and aileron pedals. The compass was going all wacky, as though someone was playing over it with a magnet, pulling the needle this way and that. Although I couldn’t see Joel, I knewthat he had been hit. Another wave of heat swept over me and I figured I’d be lucky to have another few seconds before the fuel tank blew Joel and me right out of the postcard pink and purple sky.

I’d always wondered what I’d be thinking about in my last moments. I’d wondered about it every time I climbed into a Spad during Bloody April of 1917; I could fly as well as most anybody, although I was no Rickenbacker. I had figured I was going to get it in’ 17 or T 8, but I never even took a bullet, not a scratch—I had the proverbial angel on my wing—and now here I was, about to get it in 1923, which was supposed to be the best year of my life. I remembered Dr. Coue’s prayer, which everyone was saying: “Day by day in every way I am getting better and better.”

Better and better.

“Joel,” I shouted through the tube, “you’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.” Day by day in every fucking way, and I felt that hot, sweaty tightness all over my face like I always do when I’m going to cry, but I slipped out of that because the old girl was making a whining keening sort of a noise, and then the motor sputtered and everything became summer afternoon quiet, except for the snapping of the wing wires. . . .

And I found myself counting, counting slowly and the ground spun through the smoke, and I kept the nose up as the valley floor rose like an elevator the size of Manhattan, and I wasn’t thinking about anything, not about dying or the tank exploding or the smoke or the smell of the oil . . . or my Mother, or Lisa, whom I had only dated twice, but she had gone down on the first date and said she loved me, and she had so many freckles, and three curly black hairs between her breasts, I remembered those three black hairs as I counted and by one-hundred-and-forty-seven I expected the giant hand of God to slap me right into the canyon floor and the fuel tank to explode like the sun and—

IT WAS DARK when they found me, but the moon was so big and bloated that everything looked like it was coated with silvery dust, except the shadows, where the moon dust couldn’t settle. I don’t know whether they woke me or whether it was the drip from the fuel tank, but once I realized I was alive and that this was certainly not heaven, I felt most every part of my body begin to ache. I moved my legs to make sure I still had them, and I tried to swat at the Negroes who were pulling me out of the cockpit. I don’t know what was in my head because they were big men, and I was just swatting away, but they didn’t throw me about or mistreat me or ask me any questions; it was as if they were just handling a fragile piece of merchandise, nothing that was alive, just merchandise. I started coughing as soon as they moved me, and I craned my neck for one last look at the plane . . . and at Joel, the poor dumb jake who just had to see if the stories were true about a grand castle on the mountain. Now Joel was dead, his face shot off, and I was being carried away by giants who were speaking a dialect like none I’d ever heard; in fact, I couldn’t understand a word, although I couldn’t help but think it was some form of Southern English.

And we hadn’t even seen a castle.

Damn you, Joel.

I blacked out, and woke up as I was being thrown this way and that in the seat of some kind of souped-up, armored suburban; but this beast hadn’t rolled off any of Henry Ford’s production lines. It was a chimerical combination of tank and automobile. Instead of windows, the passenger cab had thick glass portholes, and Lewis machine guns were mounted on the hood and trunk. I could hardly hear the motor as we sped and jostled into the long purple shadows of the mountains above, and my captors were as quiet as the mountains.

When I woke again, after dreaming that Joel was fine and we were back in the Moth gliding silently through the night over castles and fairy lights, I found myself in the air indeed. The suburban was being hoisted up the sheer face of a cliff, rising into the milky moonlight; and, startled, I bolted forward. The two black giants beside me pulled me back into the cushioned softness of the seat and held me there. I tried to talk to them, to ask them what was going on, but they just shook their heads as though they couldn’t understand me.

Then with a bounce the suburban was lowered onto solid ground. Two men and a boy were waiting beside a crane used on aircraft carriers to hoist boats and planes; and as they removed the cables that had been attached to the hub-guards of the huge truck-tired wheels, they spoke to each other in that peculiar dialect that was both familiar . . . and unfamiliar.

Once again we drove, only now we were that much closer to the sky. As I looked out through the porthole on my right, the moon looked green, radiating its wan, sickly light through filigrees of cloud; and the road made of tapestry brick was as straight and neat and ghostly as the fog and mist that clung to it.

We passed a lake that could have been a dark mirror misted with breath and reflecting the stars and bloated moon. I caught a sudden scent of pine, and then I saw it, a chateau—no, rather a moon-painted castle—with opalescent terraces, walkways, mosque-like towers, and outbuildings rising from broad, tree-lined lawns.

But my destination, alas, would be otherwise.

TWO

“Hell’s bells, it’s almost noon.”

“Clarence, how would you know whether it was noon or what? Your wristwatch has stopped so many times, it could be midnight.”

“Don’t call me Clarence or I’ll break your legs.”

“You an’ whose army.”

I snapped awake and looked around the room, which resolved around me. Walls, floor, ceiling seemed to be made of a piece, a smooth, translucent layer of opal, which glowed with light; but I could not discern the source of the suffusing light, nor could I see the inset marks of tile, only high, straight, iridescent planes that reached to a ceiling of the same substance. I was lying in a comfortable feather bed with a jewel-inlaid footboard; the bed and an ebony table and elbow chair were the only pieces of furniture in this smooth, glittering travesty of a monk’s cell.

“Well, sleeping beauty has awoke,” said Clarence. He had a pale, freckled complexion, red hair that was graying, and a pop-eyed look, no doubt because his eyebrows were so white that they seemed to disappear. “You’re probably still feelin’ dopey,” he said to me. “The slaves drugged you so Old Jefferson could do his interrogation. Takes a while for it to wear off.”

“Well, they didn’t drug me,” said the man who had been goading Clarence about his name. He was bald, tall, and aggressive; and he had a ruddy complexion like Clarence—it was as if both men were of the same Irish and Dutch ancestry. Both wore pants and shirts that looked like pajamas, except Clarence wore an aviator’s jacket and the bald man wore a cap.

Eleven other men were standing in the room behind them, and a short wiry aviator—I was sure right then and there that they were all aviators—said, “Old man Jefferson drugged everybody. Even you, Monty. You just don’t remember none of it, while we do.”

“But none of us remembers much,” said Clarence, who introduced himself as Skip, and then introduced me to Monty Kleeck and Farley James and Rick Moss and Carl Crocker and Eddie Barthelmet, Harry Talmadge, Keith Boardman, Gregory “Cissy” Schneck, “Snap” Samuel Geraldson, and Stephen Freeburg, who “was the only Jew in this mess of Protestants.”

“You a Jew too?” asked the skinny, nervous upchuck who was called Cissy. There was a meanness in his voice, but he wasn’t big enough to back it up, and I knew he was more dangerous than the three-hundred-pound hulk they called Snap.

I thought about saying yes, but I figured I might be here a while—maybe for life, from the look of them—and so I said, “No, I’m Catholic. You have a problem with that?”

“No, no,” said Cissy, backing off. “I got no problem with Christians.” Then in an undertone he said, “Long as they’re Christians. . . .”

“Where the hell am I?” I asked, some of the muzziness from the drugs finally clearing—if, indeed, I’d been drugged. I directed myself to Stephen Freeburg, who had the same kind of dark, sharp features as Rudolph Valentino, who last I heard had gone to prison for bigamy.

“You’re in the Randolph Estes Jefferson Hotel,” Freeburg said, smiling. “It’s probably the fanciest, most comfortable jail in the world. And unless you can think of something we haven’t, you’re here for life.”

“No, we’ll get out,” said Carl Crocker, a short, overweight, squarish chap with bristly brown hair—they must feed these guys pretty well, I thought; but everything was just words and thoughts wriggling like worms in sand. Nothing seemed real. My mouth felt like it was stuffed with wire. My eyes were burning. My head was pounding. Wake up, I told myself. Wake the hell up.

“Yeah, your tunnel,” Freeburg said sarcastically. “Next, you and Snap will be drilling straight down.” Everyone laughed at that.

I guess I looked bemused because Eddie Barthelmet, a reedy yet muscular man with thinning black hair, whom I figured immediately as the sort who kept his own counsel, said, “It’s solid diamond underneath us. Hardest substance in the world.”

I shook my head and grinned. I could take being the butt of the joke.

“I’m not joshing you. The whole goddamn mountain is diamond, except for the rock and stone above. And it’s all owned by the Old Man, who isn’t too willing to share, which is why we’re down here, and he’s up there.” Everyone laughed at that, and Eddie just nodded toward the ceiling, as if some omniscient being were standing right above us. Then after a pause, he asked, “Did you happen to notice if your compass seemed to go wild when you approached the mountain?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I figured it had been knocked out of whack.”

“No, the same thing happened to me. None of the others remember anything being wrong with their compasses, so I figure that the Old Man concocted something new. An artificial magnetic field, or something like that.”

“Well, if he could change the official maps of the United States, he could screw up our compasses, I suppose,” Clarence said. I didn’t figure him to be the brightest of the bunch, but I couldn’t help but like him. He seemed genuinely concerned, and maybe it was the way he slouched or patted the chair, I don’t know, but for some reason I had the feeling that he was really at home here. He turned to me and said, “Don’t worry, you’ll be meeting the Old Man soon enough. And when you’re ready, I’ll give you the tour of the place and help you get set up. Now you think you’re ready to tell us your name and how you came to be flyin’ out here? You were flyin’ . . .?”

I nodded and told them my name—Paul Orsatti—and I told them that I was a mail pilot, which I’d been for a while, until I got myself fired from New York Chicago Air Transport for being self-righteous; and I wasn’t going to tell them that I’d been kicking around for the past year as a roustabout stunt flier, working for crummy outfits like Pitkin’s Circle-Q Flying Circus. Or that I’d been playing piano in cheapjack speakeasies for nothing more than drinks and whatever change the Doras and ossified lounge lizards could spare. I didn’t tell them about Joel, and how he’d heard rumors about there being something strange in the mountain near Hades. I only told them I’d gotten a bit off-course.—next thing I knew I was being shot at.

And as if I’d been caught telling a lie by the Lord God Almighty Himself, I heard a voice calling everyone to attention.

A broadcast from above.

“Well, boys, “said God. “Don’t you want to have a chat? My daughter’s accompanying me, so y’all better be on your best behavior, gentlemen. None of your usual filthy street patois. Now shake a leg!”

Everyone started swearing and complaining, but they obediently moved out of my room toward where the voice was probably coming from, and Skip pulled me along, telling me that I might as well know my keeper and get it in my head that I’m here and that’s that and how it’s not so bad, in fact, probably better than we’d ever have it back home in the real world.

We walked through a seamless corridor made of the same stuff as the walls, floor, and ceiling of the room where I’d awakened. Dim, pervasive light radiated wanly from the ceiling, and doorways were evenly spaced on both sides. I caught glimpses into other rooms, some larger than others, some dark, some brightly lit, and could see rooms that led into other corridors. I was in a polished, many-hued glass warren that could hold many more men than we who were here now. We crowded into an empty room, which was a high tower . . . a terminus of sorts.

I looked up at a large, brightly lit opening covered with grating and saw a man looking down at us—I assumed he was Mr. Randolph Estes Jefferson.

Some sort of lens must have also covered the opening because Mr. Jefferson seemed greatly magnified and also slightly distorted, as though his girth was being pulled toward the edges of the opening. He looked to be about forty-five and had one of those faces that always remind me of a pug dog: jowly and fleshy, yet absolutely intent—the proverbial dog with a bone. He stood erect, as though he was wearing military gear instead of a straw boater, blue blazer, and white flannel Oxford bags. If it weren’t for that face and his bearing, he could have been a fashion plate. He was swinging what I thought was a cane, swinging it back and forth over the opening to the tower of our prison (but which was, in effect, just a grating in the grass from his perspective). A girl of perhaps eighteen stood beside her pug dog father. She wore a thin blue blouse with a pleated tennis skirt and a blue bandeau to keep her hair in place. Her hair was blond, curly, and bobbed, and although I couldn’t see the color of her eyes, I imagined they would be blue. Her mouth was crimson, her face tan against the blue bandeau. Even with the slight distortion, I could see that she was perfection—a pure vision of youth and freshness and beauty.

“Hey, leave the old guy and come on down here.”

“Push him through the grate, we’ll take care of everything for you.”

“They don’t call me snugglepup for nottin’,” Crocker shouted, and most everyone was laughing . . . except Mr. Jefferson. His daughter smiled warmly at all of us and bowed, as though she was being presented at a cotillion in New York or Chicago or Paris.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Jefferson, “remember your manners. If y’all continue to embarrass me before my daughter, I shall be happy to instruct my slaves to forget to supply you with your daily rations, which I presume are to your expectations?”

“Slaves?” I asked Skip, who was standing beside me and rubbernecking, to get a better look at the girl.

“Yeah,” Skip said, “he’s got hundreds of ‘em, I guess.”

“The rations are fine, except we could do without the fish eggs,” said Rick Moss, a short unshaven man, who was so muscular that he looked like he might have been a weight lifter.

“So the rations of caviar are not appreciated,” Jefferson said. “Well, we’ll take that item off the menu.” Randolph Estes Jefferson sounded cheerful, as if he were merely a waiter taking an order and listening to customers’ complaints. “Now my Phoebe loves caviar,” he said, putting his arm around his daughter, “so I, of course, just assumed y’all would too. I figured your generation with all your jazz and Wall Street savvy was more sophisticated than mine.”

But Harry Talmadge and Keith Boardman, who were standing beside me and looking quietly bored, were not exactly what you’d call jazz babies—Harry looked to be in his middle forties, but it would be difficult to guess whether Keith was in his fifties or sixties. He looked well fed and well exercised, as though he were someone who could afford to pamper himself and maintain his youth.

I thought it odd that our jailer Mr. Jefferson used “y’all” like someone from the Deep South, yet he had no accent at all . . . which was probably the same thing as having a midwest accent.

“Well, I don’t mind the caviar,” said fat Snap Geraldson. “I guess that makes me the only sophisticated guy down here.” That got a laugh.

“Are you here to bait us like bears, or have you come up with a solution to our problem?” asked Freeburg.

“Ah, Mr. Freeburg, you are always so angry and so ready to argue how many angels might rest on the head of a pin. Aren’t you satisfied with the Talmud I provided for your studies?”

“I’ve simply taken the bait,” Freeburg said.

“Well, good for you, then. But we’ve been over and over my predicament. I—being a man of conscience—must bear the burden of keeping y’all in prison because to free you would be harmful to my family and myself and my retainers. You’ll soon come to understand that, too, Mr. Orsatti.”

I almost took a step back when he addressed me.

“I trust you’re getting settled in comfortably,” he continued. “The other boys will show you the ropes. If anyone mistreats you, just slip a note into the food slot. It’ll reach me in due course. I’ve developed quite a paternalistic affection for all of you. Quite.”

“We’d promise not to peach on you,” cried Carl Crocker. “And that’s the honest truth. Just let us go. Give us a chance.”

“Ah, but you couldn’t help yourself, could you, Mr. Crocker,” Jefferson said, as he pulled a lawn chair over for Phoebe and then disappeared for a few seconds to return with a chair for himself. “You’d have to tell some one. And if you could come back and get past my slaves and my guns, why then you’d be the richest man on Earth. Would you like me to send some more gems down to you? You can have whatever you wish—diamonds, rubies, sapphires, a birthstone of your own weight.”

“Won’t do me any good down here,” Carl said.

“Ah, you see, value is relative. But once you got away from here, these diamonds and rubies and sapphires would be worth as much as life itself. Surely you can see that?”

“No, I can’t,” said Carl.

“As I’ve asked you before, do you want me to have your wives and girlfriends brought here? I’ll extend your accommodations. Y’all would have everything you could wish for.”

“Except freedom,” said Eddie Barthelmet. “What would it take to buy that?”

“You can’t buy anything from me,” said Mr. Jefferson. “All that I give is as a gift. When last we spoke—how long ago was that? Perhaps a few months ago?—I asked if you could come up with a better solution. Well, this is your chance. Propose.”

“So you can dispose,” said Eddie.

“Very good, very good indeed. The newer members seem to be quicker than the rest of you. You’ll need to study to keep up.”

“Then let us have some newspapers,” shouted Crocker.

“Yeah, is prohibition repealed yet?”

“What would you care?” Mr. Jefferson said. “Whatever spirits you request are sent to you. What more could you ask for?”

That elicited shouting and swearing, and Mr. Jefferson just smiled and held up his hands. “Well, gentlemen, I see that we’re finished.”

“We do care about whether prohibition has been repealed,” Eddie shouted up to Mr. Jefferson. “Just as we care about what the stock market is doing, what’s the new dance, what’s happening with the Fascists in Italy, what’s the latest Zane Grey, is Dempsey still heavyweight champion, who won the World Series?”

“Giants over the Yankees, 5-3 in the fifth,” I said in a low voice. Eddie nodded to me, and a few of the other boys started to argue the merits of the Giants and the Yankees.

“There’s your answer,” Mr. Jefferson said. He could only have heard me if he had listening devices planted in here, which, of course, he would.

“We need access to newspapers . . . and the radio,” Eddie said.

“It will only stir you up, son, and make you yearn for what you can’t have,” Jefferson said. “You’ve got a library of the great classics of literature. That should be edification enough.”

“I want The Saturday Evening Post,” Crocker said.

“I want The Strand.”

“I want Phoebe.”

“Good-bye, gentlemen,” Jefferson said.

“Wait,” shouted Eddie. “Why not at least give us leave? At least, let one or two of us out for a few days. You could have your slaves guard us to make sure we couldn’t run for it. We could at least see a ball game, or a movie. Then you could bring us back, and take another group out. As you are always fond of telling us, ‘Money’s no object.’ ”

Jefferson made a clucking noise and said, “That’s a new twist, Mr. Barthelmet. Very good, indeed. Except my slaves would have to gag you and bind you so you wouldn’t shout for help or make a run for it, and the constabulary might look askance at that. But even if you were a model parolee, you’d come back and yearn for what you’d seen. No, it would just deepen the pain of your circumstances. Allow me to bring your wives or lovers or friends to you.”

“No,” shouted Rick Moss, and he was echoed by the others.

“It’s bad enough you’ve buried us.”

“Let us the hell out of here, you bastid.”

“Well, gentlemen, I think that’s more than enough,” Jefferson said. “Come on, Phoebe, enough diversion for you.” He stood up, and I could see then that he had been holding a golf club, not a cane. We were buried under his golf course, and he and his daughter were just out playing eighteen holes. The sonovabitch!

There was a grating noise, and the opening above went black.

“Wait,” I shouted reflexively.

The ceiling irised open, and Jefferson and his beautiful Phoebe looked down at us. “Yes, Mr. Orsatti?” he asked.

“I’d like a piano.”

Jefferson laughed and said, “Done.”

“That’s all we need, more noise—”

“We could use some of that—”

“You boys can dance with each other—”

“It beats what we’re doin’ now—”

But before the ceiling closed, I could see Phoebe looking down—right at me—and smiling.

THREE

The piano arrived, as promised. It was a special-edition, pearl-white Steinway grand, which produced a huge, full orchestral sound, yet the keys had such an incredibly fast action that I couldn’t help but open up with a boogie-woogie medley. My feet stomped on the floor as my left hand flew over the keys beating out syncopated rhythms that were so tricky that I dared not watch what I was doing, lest I falter; and my right hand, weaving various melodies through the rhythms of my left, might as well have had a mind of its own.

I was a one-man band.

I was also, needless to say, half in the proverbial bag. But so was everyone else, except Cissy Schneck and Farley James, a nice British fellow who had been an Oxford don before the war. I found out from Skip that he had been an ace pilot. He’d come over here to compete in the ocean-to-ocean air race in T9, the same year the Cincinnati Reds beat the Sox in the eighth game, which was a miracle. So was Farley James, I guess, because he’d come in second place and decided to stay and start an air flying company with Charlie Lindbergh. That surprised the hell out of me because Joel, may God rest his soul, said he’d worked for Lindbergh for a while.

“Hey, Farley,” I called, and he dutifully came over to the piano, where Skip formally introduced us.

“Fahley, z’ish is Pauhhzzotti. . . .”

“Skip tells me you had some business with Charlie Lindbergh.”

Farley nodded, smiling at Skip who then began to lead everyone in another chorus of another new song I had played for them.

“Do you have any bananas?”

“Yes! We have no bananas!”

“Do you know Charlie?” Farley asked.

“Yeah, I met him through a friend of mine, Joel Wagner. Ring any bells?”

“Small world. Sure, I remember Joel. Good aviator. Dependable. What’s he doing with himself these days?”

“He’s dead.”

Farley looked shocked, and he stared down at his shoes, which were so highly polished he could probably see his face in them.

“Did you ever talk to him about . . . a castle up in the mountains?” I asked.

His thin, sensitive face was tight as shellacked paper. He looked straight at me and said, “No.” After a pause, he said, “But he was shot down with you, wasn’t he . . .”

I started playing “Look for the Silver Lining,” which everyone knew, then “Wild Rose,” and “Ma—He’s Making Eyes at Me” which Snap Geraldson sang in falsetto. That was something to hear . . . and see. Isn’t often an elephant imitates a parrot being squeezed into a juicer. I played and sang Bessie Smith’s “Downhearted Blues,” and, of course, nobody knew who she was; but Rick Moss and Snap started dancing with each other. I taught them how to Charleston, which had just become all the rage, and all hell broke loose with everybody swaying back and forth, slapping their knees, swiveling around on the balls of their feet, and falling over like they’d been dancing in a marathon for two weeks. After a while I started playing slower tunes again like “All by Myself” and “Who’s Sorry Now,” and then even a little Lizst and Bach, and the party broke up, and—

“You can’t sleep on the piana.”

I don’t know how he did it, but somehow Skip got me up and dragged me or walked me or rolled me toward my room. I remember seeing open doors that led into rooms with pool tables and ping-pong tables. I remember a kitchen and gymnasium and a room that was so bright I could barely look into it. I passed the fabled library that God had provided with all the classics but no up-to-date Saturday Evening Posts, and I remember feeling a pressure around my temples; I imagined that Joel and I were back in the Moth, and the engine was on fire, and my forehead was hot, and then something squeezed my stomach, and from far away Joel or Skip or somebody said, “Hot damn,” and I dreamed about beautiful Phoebe looking down at me from the perfect golf-course gardens and tennis courts of Heaven. Her eyes, set in her sun-bronzed face like perfectly shaped transparent gems, were impossibly blue. Sky blue freedom.

And then I woke up in Skip’s room.

“Drink this. Hair of the dog.”

Skip probably looked worse than I did. I couldn’t see him very well—my head was pulsing with pain. I guess I wasn’t used to drinking real hooch. The rotgut I’d been drinking since ‘20 hadn’t killed me, but it sure felt like the vintage Johnny Walker and Chivas Regal would.

I drank the tomato juice and brew, which Skip called “Virginia Dare.” It went down like razor blades, and when I stopped being sick, I asked him why he’d decorated most every surface in the room with a towel—there was a white bath towel neatly tacked over his desk, a white dish towel on the bed table, a red face towel placed like a doily over the back of his stuffed chair, another added color and warmth to a utilitarian tallboy, and towels of various sizes and hues decorated the inside of every drawer open to my view.

“I learned how to do that when I was a kid. I spent a few years in an orphanage.” He grinned. “Well, not exactly an orphanage. A private school. But same difference. After Dad popped it, and Mom decided she’d follow by sticking her head in a stove, Dad’s best friend kept me in the best schools for as long as my inheritance money held out, which wasn’t long.”

That was more than I wanted to know about Skip’s schooldays, but he seemed cheerful about it all, even about finding his mother, who he said was “blue as a curtain.” He said he’d learned about making things cozy in “the orphanage,” and he’d got used to decorating with towels.

“Thanks for the bed,” I said, “but you didn’t have to sleep on the floor. You could’ve slept in my room, if you couldn’t drag me that far.”

“I could barely get you this far,” Skip said. “You’re heavier than you look. But I never sleep anywhere but right here. It’s as much home as anything else. Some of the other guys move around. You know—”

I didn’t, and I could feel the nausea working its way up to my throat. “—sleep with each other, like that. No girls here, what else you going to do? Except get really friendly with Madam Palm and her five daughters.” He grinned again, looking pop-eyed and childlike, and wagged his right hand at me. “I prefer Madam Palm.”

“Can’t God up there help you out with some women?”

Skip laughed and said, “Old Jefferson’s very prim and proper. You heard him. The choice is wives or girlfriends, or nothin’—and he’d make you marry your girlfriend, sure as shit, not that it would matter, anyway, ‘cause once they got here, they wouldn’t have any choice. They’d be stuck here forever amen like we are. And who knows how dangerous it would be for them, what with all the other guys. We asked Jefferson if we could borrow some of his slave girls, although we never saw them, but he doesn’t believe in whorin’ and promiscuity, as he calls it, and, anyway, according to him, he wouldn’t misuse his slaves.”

“How does he keep slaves? It’s 1923, for Chrissakes, not 1823.” Skip shrugged. “There’s all kind of stories. George Bernard, who’s been here the longest—over twenty years—probably knows, but he ain’t saying. You didn’t meet George. He’s sort of a hermit, doesn’t even go to the tower when the old man calls. He don’t talk to no one. He wasn’t no flier, that’s for sure, but, like I said, he don’t talk. You got to respect that, I figure. Anyway, none of us talk about the slaves since Lowell Legendre was poisoned—now he was a pilot, shot down just like the rest of us, only he could speak a couple of languages. He had your room, come to think of it. Anyway, he said he was learning how to talk slave-talk from one of the slaves who brung the food. That must have been some trick, ‘cause I’ve never met any of the old man’s slaves who could speak or understand one word of English. Lowell said he was getting the hang of it, though, and that once he’d figured it all out, he’d know what was going on and maybe we could figure a way out of here. But he got sick after eating dinner—it was terrible, worse than my mother—and we tried calling for someone to get us some help. But the old man and his slaves suddenly got deaf, dumb, and blind. We didn’t get any food after that for a week. All we had was water. And after that, all the slaves that had anything to do with us were new. So probably best not to get too curious about them. You’ll see your share.”

“I want to meet this George Bernard,” I said.

“I’ll show you his room,” Skip said, “but he won’t let you in. I once—”

I made a dash for Skip’s toilet, but didn’t make it.

When I came around again, still hung-over with a blinding headache and a mouth that tasted like it was full of metal shavings and dirt, I was back in my room.

Old Skip must have found new reserves of strength. Or a few buddies.

GEORGE BERNARD did receive me, as if he wasn’t a prisoner like the rest of us, but a guest with special privileges. However, I waited before knocking on his door, which was a football field away from the rest of us. I got to know my fellow inmates. I spent time in the “sun room” with Snap Geraldson discussing Edward Egan and Sam Mosberg, who took gold in the Lightweight and Light Heavyweight categories respectively at the Antwerp Olympics in ‘20. It was like discussing boxing with the Buddha. I played ping-pong with Carl Crocker and pool with Keith Boardman and Harry Talmadge, who wanted to be brought up to date on current events; and we argued over the Sacco and Vanzetti convictions. I swam every day in the pool, usually with Skip, who did a couple of miles a day, when he wasn’t coming off a hangover, and I spent hours talking plays and movies and books with Farley James and Stephen Freeburg in the library. We discussed Conrad and Gide and Ibanez and Waley and Apollinaire, while we drank God’s good whiskey until we were ossified. And every day I practiced the piano. I played for hours, doing scales, working the life back into my fingers, which flew over the keyboard; and if I had to be here, if I was going to be trapped in this diamond pit with this ragtag group of swillers in this speakeasy prison, I’d get my hands back. I practiced the sonatas of Scarlatti and dementi and Mozart and Bach and Schumann and Brahms, and Liszt, of course; and it all came back to me; it was like I’d never left conservatory. I played Debussy’s Etudes for Piano, Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, Schoenberg’s Five Piano Pieces, which I knew by heart, and Stravinsky’s Piano-Rag Music. I played until I was exhausted, and there were no days or nights, just melody, counterpoint, rhythm, and drinking and talking.

Was I in prison? Or purgatory?

Or Heaven, as it surely was for Skip—good food, whiskey, friends, a room tidied up with towels. But after Snap Geraldson threw a fit and hurt his back, I began to suspect that everyone was crazy. . . .

That’s when I decided to visit George Bernard.

“Welcome, Mr. Orsatti.”

A beefy man dressed in an old-fashioned military-style smoking jacket with silk cord frogging stood hulking like a costumed bouncer in the partially closed doorway. He was the same body type as Mr. Randolph Estes Jefferson—a bull-dog endomorph—and he was wearing flannel trousers that were so wrinkled they looked like he had been sleeping in them for weeks, which he might have been. His slippers were torn, and his sparse, curly brown hair appeared as though an electric current had passed through it only seconds before my arrival. But while the Lord God Jefferson above struck me as conceited, self-satisfied, and vital (as male members of the upper crust were trained to be), George Bernard seemed somehow incongruously tall and fat and fox-like. He sized me up, seemingly taking in every detail, and grinned.

“How do you know my name?” I asked, trying to place the ratchety noises that were emanating from all over his room. But I couldn’t see past him.

Obligingly, he stepped aside.

“Skip Cinesky told me that—”

I suppose I was stopped dead in my tracks—so to speak!—because George’s room was mostly a huge table covered with Lionel standard gauge HO track that ran over perfectly modeled hills and rills and suspension bridges, and through pastureland and woods and tunnels and realistic towns with main streets fronted by electrically lit municipal buildings, stores, and porched houses. It was like looking down from a cockpit, except there were too many trains chugging and spewing wisps of smoke as they rushed through miniature fields to miniature destinations. At least twenty brass-trimmed Lionel and American Flyer locomotives pulled blue, green, and yellow enamel cattle cars, boxcars, oil tank cars, coal cars, day coaches, Pullmans, baggage cars, and bright red cabooses.

“You wanna try it?” George asked, as he pointed out a large black box that controlled the switching and speed; and I thought I said, “No,” but there I was working the controls of the Blue Comet while George went into the kitchen to fix up drinks. Unlike the rest of his neighbors, he had a suite down here in the pit. I couldn’t judge how many rooms he might have had.

For a few seconds, George’s Blue Comet train set occupied all my attention because he had pushed all the rubber-tipped control levers over to #9 and the locomotives accelerated. They were chugging along so fast that they’d fly off the tracks when they hit the curves or smash into each other at the track switches. I pulled all the levers back, but not before a Cowen Comet Special locomotive pulling freight cars with their own magnetic lifting cranes jumped the track. Cars scattered across the table; although I prevented a few cars from falling, I couldn’t reach the expensive, heavy black locomotive, which broke when it hit the floor.

“Good save,” George said, returning with two whiskey glasses and a bottle.

“If that’s your idea of a good save, you must have a lot of broken train sets.”

George gestured toward two easy chairs placed around a table in the corner of the room. “What’s the good of having things if you can’t break them?”

There wasn’t much I could say to that. We sat down, and he poured far too much whiskey into cut-glass tumblers.

“That’s why I’m down here. I broke too many things. So why give up a bad habit?”

“What did you break?” I asked.

“Ah. . . . Confidences. The golden rule of silence. But only when I got drunk.”

I tasted the whiskey, which was woody and bitter and good, and hefted the weight of the tumbler.

“You can try breaking that,” George said, “but I’d drink up the contents first. You think it’s crystal, don’t you? Wrong, my boy. It’s diamond . . . and probably enough to buy you the Ritz-Carlton in New York City, I would judge. But the boys have already told you that this mountain is one big diamond, didn’t they? But that’s probably about all they could tell you.”

“What can you tell me?”

“Oh, probably everything.”

“Can you tell me how to get out of here?” I asked.

“That’s easy,” he said, smiling and obviously enjoying himself hugely. “But you’ll find out everything soon enough.”

“How?”

He pointed upward, then poured himself another drink and topped mine up.

“For crying out loud, what are you getting at?”

“But don’t break anything, ‘cause he won’t take you back.”

“Who won’t take me back where?”

“God won’t take you back here.”

Completely nuts, I thought.

After one more go-round with the trains, I left.

He probably was nuts.

But as I soon discovered, he was also probably right.

FOUR

It seemed like a dream, but, of course, it wasn’t. I hadn’t drunk very much, only a highball with Farley fames and Keith Boardman in the library where we’d played a few games of mah-jongg after dinner. That might not sound like a very manly thing to do, but then none of that mattered in the pit. I’d become a veteran.

We shouted “Pung!” and “Chow!” and “Kong!” and swore blue murder as we rolled the dice and tried to build winning hands out of the inlaid ivory tiles. After about an hour, I started feeling queasy and headachy and cotton-mouthed, and so did Farley and Keith. We figured it was the food and blamed Snap Geraldson, who must have requested shit-on-a-shingle again—AKA tuna on toast—and the dumbwaiter in the dining room obliged.

So we dispersed and went to our rooms.

I fell asleep immediately, fell into the deep sleep of exhaustion, as though I was back in the war, flying mission after mission; and I dreamed that I was looking up at my ceiling, which glowed dimly like faraway neon, and it was like being a kid again and seeing faces and animals and buildings in the stucco ceiling of my bedroom. Only now part of the ceiling was slowly floating down toward me, and two slaves dressed in white uniforms were standing on what might have been a scaffold platform. They were black angels, and they carried me up to heaven. I smelled sweat and ambergris and roses and I dreamed that I would float upward forever. . . .

As I woke up, blinking in the strong morning light, I could see ebony panels on tracks sliding open. Revealing formal gardens with stone hermae, geysering fountains, lamps, a marble wellhead, terra-cotta jars tall as a man, and statues of sylphs and mythical animals so lifelike that they almost seemed to move through the boughs and terraced pathways. My new chamber was now open to the world, and I could smell perfume and the richness of loamy soil. Beyond the gardens lay a small village of cottages massed around a church; but it was no ordinary church; it rose into the brittle blue sky like it was all of a steeple; and it was transparent as glass, proof that man could rise up and tear into the very fabric of Heaven.

“The gardens are indeed beautiful this morning, are they not, sir,” said a man dressed in the same uniform as the men in my dream. He looked to be in his seventies, but he carried himself like an officer who was used to giving orders. His strong face and bald pate seemed polished; the wrinkles that radiated from his eyes and the corners of his thin mouth resembled fine scrolling chiseled into mahogany.

“Yeath,” I said, my mouth dry and swollen and tasting of iron. My tongue didn’t seem to be working right; it filled my entire mouth and wouldn’t get out of the way of my teeth.

I’d surely been drugged.

“Whey am I an’ ha’ad I get hea?”

The old man smiled, as one would at a child, and said, “You’re in the north bedroom of the guest suite. You’re a guest of the master, and it’s my privilege to serve you, Mr. Orsatti.” I couldn’t place his accent. It seemed Southern, but it had a certain crispness, a wrongness, as if an Englishman or German were speaking with a drawl.

I heard a rustling behind my bed, and although my head felt like it was half-filled with some vile-tasting, vile-smelling liquid, I managed to turn . . . and see a giant dressed in white like the old man.

“Don’t give no never mind to Isaac, Mr. Orsatti. You can think of him as your shadow . . . or your own personal bodyguard, if you prefer. Isaac won’t be a bother, as he understands no English. . . . Now, you’ve got a big day today, sir. A bath to start the morning right, sir?”

My head began to clear and I found my voice. “Tell me what the hell I’m doing here?”

“It’s up to the master alone to explain his intentions, sir. But I believe you’re to give a recital in an hour.”

“The master?”

“Master Jefferson, sir. Surely you know—”

“And you, what do you know?” I asked Isaac, who stood as still as one of the statues in the garden and gazed at me disinterestedly.

“I told you, sir, he cannot understand you.”

“Can’t slaves understand English?”

“Sir, I am not in a position to advise . . . or to educate you. But I’m sure Master Jefferson will see to all your questions in his time.”

“Are you a slave?” I asked. I would recite the Gettysburg Address to him if I had to.

“I have served Master Jefferson for many years, sir. Now would you prefer rosewater and a salt-water finish or a milk bath followed by warm water? Isaac will remove your pajamas.”

I wasn’t letting Isaac or anyone else near me.

I heard the old man sigh and nod his head, and then the bed tilted, and before I could gather my wits to grab hold of something, I was sliding toward the wall, pajamas and all. Drapes parted, as I slid down an incline into warm water. I heard myself shouting, but brought myself under control immediately. The chute folded back into the wall. I was in a sunken bath, the water warm as a womb; but swimming all around me—and above and below—were salt-water fish of every description: spiny fire fish, huge groupers, barramundi, mackerel, cod, orange-striped dragon fish, and there were jellyfish with long, almost transparent tentacles, a diamond-toothed moray eel, sea snakes, turtles, black spotted cuttlefish, and a hammerhead shark that was at least seven feet long.

The shark swam toward me, swam through the illuminated water.

Only a layer of crystal separated the shark from my feet, for my bathroom was inside an aquarium, and the great mass of water pressing against the walls cast shimmering, coruscating reflections everywhere. Then rain began to fall from the ceiling, and jets of rosewater and liquid soap bubbled into the bath while electric paddles churned the water into a blanket of sparkling soap bubbles. Music began playing, as if a chamber orchestra composed of mermaids were playing beside me.

The old man and Isaac stood on either side of the white marble sunken bath.

“My name is Robert,” the old man said. “When you have completed your bath, Isaac will give you a rubdown and a shave and dress you. I will serve you breakfast in the sitting room,” and with that he bowed and left.

Perhaps it was a combination of the drugs and warm bath, but—against my will—I found myself enjoying this warm, voluptuous kaleidoscope of a bath.

Nevertheless, I had the cold, dead feeling that I was being prepared for my last meal.

WASHED, BATHED, massaged, dressed, and fed steak filet and eggs and hills of fried potatoes on plates shaped out of layers of emerald and diamond and ruby, I was led—like a royal prisoner—through corridors and rooms with walls created entirely of diamonds and other precious gems, through rooms where fire seemed to coruscate over walls and ceilings, through rooms composed of deep green crystal that could have held back the weight of an ocean with its dark, deep creatures, through elegant rooms, antique rooms, and rooms that might have been designed by Klee and Kandinsky to defy the normal rules of up and down. I walked over carpets of the rarest furs, glimpsed walls covered with paintings by Rubens, Caravaggio, da Vinci, Titian, Giotto, Manet, Monet, Poussin, Cézanne, and Miró, Picasso, Ernst, Gris, Demuth, and Modigliani. Marble creatures reached out to me: naiads, sylphs, satyrs, soldiers, gods, and goddesses by Michelangelo, Saint-Gaudens, Rodin, and Brancusi; and I was led up stairs cut into a huge, marble-veined extended hand.

Into a Baroque hall of mirrors that overlooked park-like grounds.

Hundreds of mirrors were set opposite windows and into the scrolled columns and archways. The high ceiling was curved, and painted angels gazed down from clouds in heaven upon gold and silver chairs and bejeweled trees. A forest of gold. Glades of diamonds. In keeping with this stone and jeweled forest was a grand piano that looked to be cut from a gigantic block of jade. Our feet clacked on the inlaid floor of this formal hall that seemed to extend into a finger-width arched door in the distance as Robert and Isaac led me to the piano.

Robert bowed and said, “I will leave you now, sir.”

Isaac stood over me, and I was sure that, should I stand up from the piano, he would force me back down onto the cushioned stool.

“And what am I to play?” I asked.

“I would think that would be up to you sir,” Robert said, and, nodding to Isaac, he clattered away toward the far, perspective-shrunk doorway, his reflections creating an army of stiff, marching Roberts.

“And who am I to play to . . .?”

I sat before the translucent green piano, and began warming up by playing scales from dementi’s instruction book. Looking around the seemingly endless room, I couldn’t see anyone except for Isaac, reflected in a dozen mirrors; he stood so still that I wondered if he even breathed. But I could feel other eyes watching me, and I remembered what crazy George Bernard had said about God not allowing me to return to my gilded prison. What was he planning for me, then? I wondered. Certainly Master Randolph Estes Jefferson wasn’t going to take any chances with me, although I wondered . . . perhaps I could escape. I chuckled and looked around at this room constructed from dream and imagination. Would I want to escape?

But I could feel Isaac’s presence pressing against me and knew I was freer in the pit. No matter, I was here to play, and if I failed Jefferson’s test—if that was what it was—who knew what he might do. So I played, beginning with Chopin’s Waltz in G Flat, then playing his preludes and nocturnes and etudes. I played Bach and Mozart and Beethoven. I expected something to happen. Someone besides Isaac to appear. Then I began playing Erik Satie’s piano works, which I loved: Gymnopddies, Gnossiennes, Peccadilles importunes . . . Satie the joker, the dissonant, the genius; and I heard a giggle behind me.

Saw reflections.

Phoebe stood before me, big as life, just as she stood beside and behind me, reflections in a myriad mirrors, a company of lovely, fragile, faun-like Phoebes looking awkward one instant and graceful the next. She wore a white gown, a silk scarf draped carelessly—or perhaps very carefully—over her shoulder, and a fetching bonnet with a red sash. Her eyes were indeed blue, her face was freckled, and she was the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen.

She said something to Isaac, which sounded like, “Ra’ase, nah’ye haingwine heaightmuh,” and then she stood right by the piano and said, “Well, Mr. Paul Orsatti, you can certainly play, and I told Poppa that if he didn’t bring you up out of that horrible place with those men, I’d never speak to him again. You’re a genius, that’s just what I told him, and I told him you’d be happy to teach me how to play the piano. I want to play as well as you, can you do that for me?”

I was about to tell her that I didn’t know, but she said something else to Isaac, who looked sullenly down at the glassy floor.

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

“Just now, or before?” She looked steadily at me, and I could feel myself blushing. I don’t know why, but she made me feel like I was sixteen and pimply and gawky and trying to get up the courage to ask out the prom queen. She was just a wisp of a thing, her cheeks were freckled, and her curly blond hair stuck out from under her bonnet. Yet she seemed completely self-assured, as though she was accustomed to absolute obedience. And innocent. Perhaps it was the combination that unnerved me. Or perhaps I had just instantly fallen completely in love with her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Both, I guess.”

She giggled. “Well, I told him to calm himself down, that you probably weren’t going to hurt me or kill me or anything like that.” She backed away a step. “You’re not, are you?”

“No, of course not.”

“There, you see . . .? And then I told him. . . .”

“Yes?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” she said. “Now do you want to take me for a walk before you meet Poppa? He wants to have a talk with you.”

“What about your friend Isaac?”

“Oh, don’t worry about him. He’ll keep out of the way,” and she turned to him and glared. He quickly resumed looking at the floor.

“I’m Phoebe,” she said as she led the way out of what she called the Mirror Gallery. Isaac followed, keeping a safe distance.

“I know your name.”

“Ah, those awful men in the pit told you, did they.” It wasn’t a question. “I hate them.”

“Why?”

“Because of what they say about me.”

“And what is that?”

“That’s for me to know.”

I nodded. She was obviously younger than her years, but I couldn’t help feeling attracted to her. I’d often been in the company of the rich and spoiled, and Phoebe was certainly the quintessential product of excess. Could she even imagine that there was another world out there, a world of people working twelve hours a day, haggling over pennies at the market, cooking their own food, sharing their possessions? Probably . . . no, definitely not.

“How did you know I could play the piano?” I asked.

“Well, because I heard you, that’s how. Poppa can listen to everything those horrible men say down in the pit. And so can I, although if you tell Poppa that, I’ll never speak to you again.” We walked down a huge stone staircase and past the Neptune Pool that reflected the sun as a sheet of yellow light. “But you wouldn’t care, would you?”

“About what?” I asked, overwhelmed by the sheer size of this place, by the formal gardens with statues as large as houses, by the pergola ahead, which was fashioned of crystal and gems and seemed to extend for a mile. And there was the chateau—the castle that connected to dozens of other buildings, each one of a different period, yet part of the perfect white, geometric whole—that was surrounded by pools the color of terra-cotta and marble constructions that resembled Greek and Roman ruins.

“You wouldn’t care if I ever spoke to you again, would you, Mr. Paul Orsatti?” She sniffled, turning her head from me. “Well?”

“Of course, I would care.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know!”

“There, you see?” she said, but of course I didn’t see.

“I listened to you play, even the night you got so drunk that the dumbbell with no eyebrows had to drag you to his room. I listened to you snore. Do you know how loud you snore? I’d do something about that if I were you.”

I chuckled and asked if her father was able to see his prisoners as well as hear them. But Phoebe ignored that question . . . as though she hadn’t heard it.

We walked past tennis courts, a reservoir, greenhouses, barracks, a zoo surrounded by marble lions, and then through the pergola to the edge of the formal gardens. Phoebe glanced back at Isaac every few minutes, and he would respectfully drop back several feet.

“I think it’s all a lie,” Phoebe said.

“What?” I asked.

“That the servants can’t understand English. I think they’ve been tricking Poppa about that for years, and so does Uncle George.”

“Uncle George?”

“You met him and played with his trains. That’s what Poppa told me.”

“Your uncle is in the pit?”

“Oh, yes,” Phoebe said. “George Bernard Jefferson. He didn’t tell you his last name, I imagine.” She giggled. “He’s always been in there. Well, practically always. But Poppa will tell you all about that. He tells everybody.”

Everybody . . .? I thought.

“Would you like to kiss me now?” Phoebe asked, as we looked out at a herd of Master Jefferson’s zebras grazing on a hill beyond the gardens. I said something inane about Isaac lurking behind us—which he was . . . and the moment passed.

Of course I wanted to kiss her. But she looked so vulnerable . . . and she was so young.

“Do you hear that?”

“What?”

“Airplanes, I think. Listen—”

Sure enough, I could hear engines. But I couldn’t see anything in that eggshell sky, which was the exact color of Phoebe’s eyes.

FIVE

An alarm sounded and a chill caught the air as we made our way back to the castle, which Phoebe called Adamas. She told me with breathless conviction that the king of France hadn’t lived in anything half as nice, and she ought to know, she said, because Poppa had all the plans of the greatest castles in the world, and he made sure that his was the best. She was excited about reaching the roof garden so we could watch the airplanes through the telescope there.

Although she hurried to the castle, she was not in the least afraid. Isaac tried to say something to her, but she had only to shout something quick and guttural at him and he fell back behind us, properly cowed.

Then a porcine, well-dressed young man flanked by what I took for two slaves caught up with us by the Roman ruins beside the pool. He was nervous and out of breath, and kept looking at the sky as if lightning were going to strike him down at any second, just ahead was a marble staircase that led to the western exposures of one of the buildings that adjoined the chateau. I could see a glint of metal: the telescope mounted on the embrasure.

“Father sent me to find you,” he said, dut of breath. “You won’t believe how angry he is. You’re supposed to be in the bunkers, and not legging around with him.” He meant me, and his eyebrows knitted together and his face got all scrunched up when he said “him.” I couldn’t help but smile.

“You won’t even get to keep him until September, if you act like that,” the young man continued. “And that’s exactly what Father said. I didn’t make it up.”

The alarm sounded again.

“Now come on, for crying out loud, or do you want to get killed out here?”

“Those airplanes are probably just mail carriers, like always,” Phoebe said. “And mail carriers don’t carry bombs. But they’re all gone now.”

She cocked her head, obviously listening for the sound of airplane engines. Everything was quiet, but for the wind.

“You see, false alarm. All that trouble for nothing . . . and I was coming back.”

“Well, you can tell that to Father,” the young man said.

“You’re not my boss, Mr. Near Beer.”

The young man blushed at that, and Phoebe said, “Mr. Orsatti, this is my brother, Morgan.”

Morgan gave me a slight nod, then shouted something at Isaac; but I couldn’t understand a word.

“Isaac had nothing to do with it,” Phoebe said. “It was my idea. And if you dare say one word—”

I heard the sudden drone of an engine, and then the deafening, boneshaking stucka-stucka of anti-aircraft guns, which were mounted on the castle fortifications above.

There was another burst . . . and another.

“You see?” Morgan screamed at Phoebe, and he grabbed her. But she broke free. Isaac stepped over to her, as if to intervene. The guns fired again. I heard a distant explosion, but couldn’t see any airplanes—the castle blocked the view. One of Jefferson’s slaves shouted something to Isaac, who looked nervously at Phoebe and then at me, before running after Morgan and his fellows.

“Morgan is such a flat tire,” Phoebe said. “And I’ll bet you ten thousand dollars right now that those enemy airplanes don’t have any guns.” She paused, then explained, “According to Poppa, everybody is the enemy. And so Morgan is always so-oh afraid we’re going to get bombed. I know that Poppa scares the bunk out of him about it to make a man out of him, but Morgan is just a flat tire.”

I followed her up the marble staircase, across a patio, and up several more staircases to the roof garden. I could see Jefferson’s slaves manning the anti-aircraft guns, which were quiet now. Ghostly pink billowing clouds were filling up the sky like suds in a bathtub. From the position of the sun, I could see it was late afternoon. But how could that be? I must have slept through the morning.

I stared at an oily trail of black smoke left by a plane that had been shot out of the sky. But I could also hear the distant thrumming of an engine. Perhaps it was one of Jefferson’s. Or perhaps one of the intruders had escaped into the swollen pink and purple curtain of storm clouds. Phoebe tossed her bonnet onto a wrought iron chair and looked through the brass telescope, swinging it around so hard, it was a wonder she could see anything.

“There itis,” she said. “Right over . . . there. . . . Poppa’s guns got it. See the smoke in the canyon? Something’s burning. Positively. But I can’t make out very much. I can’t see for jellybeans without my glasses. Here, you try.” She pulled away from the telescope, brushing my face with her curly hair, and I could smell her perfume, lilac sweet and damp. I looked through the eyepiece. There was indeed a plane burning. I couldn’t see it well through the smoke, but it looked like a Curtiss Jenny. I wondered if the pilot made it to safety and tried to cover the area by moving the telescope around, but Phoebe became impatient and insisted that I return it to her immediately. After a time she said, “I can’t see anything. Do you want to bet on the pilot?”

“What do you mean?”

“A thousand dollars that Poppa’s slaves find him alive and put him in the pit.” She shrugged. “If he’s dead, you win.”

“I wouldn’t make such a bet,” I said. “And I certainly don’t have a thousand dollars.”

Phoebe pulled a magnificent diamond and ruby ring from her index finger and slipped it onto my pinkie. “That should cover your side of the bet.” She smiled mischievously and said, “Now we’re engaged.”

“I can’t accept this,” I said, handing her back the ring.

“Perhaps I made a mistake about you, Mr. Paul Orsatti.”

“It’s very beautiful, but I don’t think your father—”

“He won’t care. He’s going to be too upset to care about anything, which means he won’t be bothering too much about you.” She took my hand, slipped the ring over my finger again.

“What do you mean?”

“There was another plane,” Phoebe said. “Couldn’t you hear it?”

“Yes, but I thought it might have been your father’s.”

Phoebe laughed at that, a soft, sexy, whispery laugh. “Not unless he was flying it. Or Morgan.” She laughed again. “Or Uncle George.”

“You’ve got plenty of . . . slaves.”

She seemed astonished. “Why, you couldn’t allow a slave to fly an airplane.”

“Why not?”

“Because . . . you just couldn’t. But it doesn’t matter. Poppa will surely find out who was flying that plane and what company he worked for and fix it all up. He always fixes everything up.”

“You mean he’ll have him killed.”

She shook her head and looked genuinely hurt. “Poppa’s an honorable man. He’ll have him brought back here to live and give him everything he could want. We don’t just go around murdering people, you know.” When I didn’t say anything, she asked, “Are you sorry?”

“About what?”

“What you said about my father.”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”

She turned back to me and asked, “Well, do you still want to kiss me?”

“I never said I wanted to kiss you.”

But against all judgment—of course—I did.

PHOEBE AND I lay in bed. It was evening, and the garden was a fantasia of fairy lights. A sweetly scented breeze wafted in through the balcony, shadows and pale, milky lights played over a wall-sized Flemish tapestry of Neptune standing upon a shell and creating a horse of air with his trident. The walls were covered with blue brocade from Scalamandre, and the gilded wood ceiling glowed as if lit by fireflies. Phoebe was curled up beside me, and we were wrapped in smooth satin sheets as blue as the brocade.

“You see, everything is perfect,” Phoebe said. “I knew it would be. I always know.”

“Ah, so you always lure lonely prisoners into your den to have your way with them, is that it?”

“Exactly so.” After a pause, she said, “How could you even imagine I would have anything to do with anyone else?”

There was nothing to say to that, so I enjoyed being close to her, feeling her smooth shoulder and slipping my hand down to caress her small breast. She was thin and long and smooth and as perfect as I had imagined.

“Well, just in case it might interest you, I’ve never had anything to do with anyone down there”—I knew she meant the pit—“or anyone who Poppa has brought to visit.”

“So your father does have guests here,” I said. “Doesn’t he worry about security?” For an instant, Phoebe seemed to be nonplussed, but then she giggled and said, “Poppa worries about everything.”

“What if they told their friends? Why—”

“They’re very rich,” Phoebe said. “Not nearly as rich as we are, of course, but they’re worth quite a boodle, you can count on that. And Poppa could just as easily make their shares in the stock market go up or down. He can make it do whatever he wants. But you, Mr. Paul Rudolph Valentino Piano-player, you’re like a big dog with a bone, aren’t you? Now, do you really want to talk about Poppa’s friends, or. . . .”

She was quite persuasive; and I was indeed, in all respects, like a dog with a bone. “What was all that business about not getting to keep me until September?” I insisted. “What did your brother mean by that?”

She drew away from me and pulled the sheets up to her neck, as though she were wearing them as a nightgown. “You got what you want, so thanks for the buggy ride. And now you want to play twenty questions.”

I tried to put my arm around her, but she turned away, taking most of the sheets with her. It suddenly felt cold in the room.

“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.” I said. “I—”

“Then say you’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry.”

She unraveled herself from the sheets and turned toward me. “I’m coming out in London in September. I’ll be presented at court, and I’ll meet King George. He’s also a friend of Poppa’s. Now does that answer your question?”

Of course it didn’t; but I would bide my time. I nodded.

“Then you may have your way with me again.”

But that wasn’t to be either because there was a sharp knock on the door, followed by the booming voice of God.

“I’m not dressed, Poppa,” Phoebe said sweetly, sitting up in the bed. She seemed to be talking to the polychrome sculpture of Saint John that was positioned beside the paneled door. “I’ll meet you down in the library.” She looked at me and shrugged.

“You’ll open this door right now, young lady!”

“No I won’t!”

I started to get up. I could grab my clothes, perhaps hide; but Phoebe said, “Don’t be goofy. He’ll go away in a minute. Absolutely-positively.” Then I heard Jefferson say something incomprehensible in a low voice—most likely, he was speaking to one of his slaves.

I was right.

I should have known better than to listen to Phoebe. Now it was too late.

A key turned in the lock, Robert pushed the great door open, and Master Randolph Estes Jefferson, dressed impeccably in formal eveningwear—white tie and tails—walked into the room. Phoebe was a blur rushing into the adjoining bathroom, it was a wonder she didn’t slip on the blue, diamond-smooth floor. She slammed the door shut and left me to face the music by myself. There was nothing I could do but pull the sheets around me. My clothes were strewn across the floor.

Passion had certainly taken precedence over foresight.

“Do you see what happens, Robert, when you leave guests unattended?” Master Jefferson spoke to his slave in English.

Robert nodded and looked at me as if I were the wayward child and he was the parent.

“Well, good evening, Mr. Orsatti,” Jefferson said. “I see that you have already provided my daughter with her first lesson. I will expect you to attend to my daughter’s musical education with as much ardor as you seem to have displayed here tonight.” He lifted my undershorts with the toe of his polished leather spats and then kicked them across the room. “And I am expecting to see a marked improvement in her proficiency at the piano, Mr. Orsatti. In September, she will give a recital at Carnegie Hall. It’s all arranged.”

“Sir, don’t you think that’s a bit, er, premature . . .?”

Jefferson gave me a genial smile, his ruddy, fleshy face the picture of cheerfulness, his eyes as hard as the diamond mountain below us. “Wouldn’t you say this is premature, sir?” he said, looking around the room, indicating my situation with a simple turn of his head. Then he nodded to Robert, who picked up my scattered clothes and laid them out neatly on the corner of the bed.

“You look perplexed, Mr. Orsatti,” Jefferson continued. “Did you expect I would have you beaten? Or killed? Or thrown back into the pit with your colleagues? No, you’re Phoebe’s guest now. And Phoebe is a woman of the ’20s. Why, she’s practically emancipated.”

“Practically emancipated?” Phoebe asked, opening her bathroom door a crack and peering out. The light behind her transformed her curly hair into a halo.

“Well, maybe you’d prefer to leave school and go to work for Mrs. Millie Scotch Barker and her suffragettes,” Jefferson said. “But this is none of your business, young lady. You’re taking your bath, are you not? while poor Mr. Orsatti must make his own introductions.”

“For your information, her name isn’t Millie Scotch Barker. It’s Abby Scott Baker, and in case you’ve been too busy to notice, Poppa, we’ve won the right to vote.”

“You don’t have the right to vote, nor do I think you’d care to be poor.”

“I know poor people at school,” Phoebe said.

“Ah, yes, those poor girlfriends of yours who can’t afford to keep their own staffs of servants.

“Well, I know Mr. Orsatti.”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Orsatti, whom you’re going to make as rich as Croesus, isn’t that so?”

“If you have no objections, Poppa,” Phoebe said meekly, then closed the bathroom door.

Jefferson chuckled and said, “Well, Croesus had better dress for dinner, hadn’t he? When Robert is finished with you, Mr. Orsatti, he’ll bring you to my library, and I will explain everything before we join the ladies. No, better yet, Robert, bring him to the theater. Do you like moving pictures, Mr. Orsatti . . .?”

Without waiting for an answer, Jefferson left, and Robert introduced me to my new bodyguard, Wordsworth, who had been waiting like a good foot soldier in the wood-paneled lobby. I learned that Isaac was being punished for a dereliction of duty, and I would not see him again. I wondered if anyone would ever see him again.

As Robert and Wordsworth escorted me out of the room, I could hear the faint splashing of water and Phoebe singing in a sweet, yet raucous voice—“Who’s Sorry Now?”

Scrubbed down like a horse after a race, perfumed, pomaded, and dressed in evening clothes, I sat in the richly cushioned maroon seat beside Jefferson and watched Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton slap each other across the screen.

Jefferson’s “theater” was more magnificent than any movie house I’d ever been in. Scarlet damask lined the walls, and the thirty-foot ceiling was supported by huge gold caryatids holding dimly glowing ruby lamps. As the moving picture flickered before me like a dream, I sipped Napoleon brandy and smoked a sweet cigar rolled in the Haymarket district of New York City. But the butterfly collar that Robert had snapped around my neck was so heavily starched that I felt like I was wearing sandpaper.

“I think all that business about Fatty raping that actress and all is a lot of hooey,” Jefferson said in a whisper, although there was no one but his manservants and us in the theater. This was certainly a place that inspired awe, a church for the brightly lit images that towered before us in profound silence. This was the perfect temple for the new gods that were so much larger than life and above the sound and the fury, beyond boredom or smell or homely sound. We might laugh at their antics, but they would have the last laugh and live forever. However, being here in this sumptuous palace atop a mountain of pure diamond, it would be easy to imagine that we were the new gods.

“Even if he did have a bit of fun with her,” Jefferson continued, “it would have been her fault, not his. He didn’t force her to stay at his hotel. He didn’t force her to stay there for two of God’s long days. And now the poor soul is blacklisted and can’t make a moving picture because that stupid woman ruptured her bladder, probably from being loaded to the plimsoll.”

“Well, she did die from it,” I said as we watched Buster Keaton being struck by a sack of flour. Keaton absorbed the shock as if he had been struck by a hanky. I’d seen Butcher Boy, although I can’t say it was one of my favorites. But Jefferson howled with laughter.

After he calmed down, he said, “The court cleared him of all charges, and the jury said that a great injustice had been done to him.”

“It did take three trials.”

“I wouldn’t care if it took a hundred trials. He was completely exonerated.”

“I’m not sure that—”

“Are you going to continue to argue with me?” Jefferson asked. His voice was soft, mellifluous, and menacing.

“No, of course not. I apologize.”

“From what Phoebe tells me, you’re good at that.” He laughed, whether at me or Fatty Arbuckle’s antics, I couldn’t tell; but he patted my arm, thus preserving my . . . dignity. “Perhaps I should get into the film business. What do you think? Give Arbuckle a second chance?”

“The press and public seem to hate him,” I said.

He pulled on his cigar, belched a huge cloud of smoke, and said, “I can fix the press. And I can guarantee that the public will love him. I’ll bet you a thousand dollars. Is it a bet?”

“I’ve already had a conversation like this once with your daughter, sir. I don’t really have a thousand dollars.”

“Ah, but you’ve got a new ring, haven’t you?”

“I think we’d both be in the doghouse if I lost her ring to you on a wager.”

Jefferson seemed to like that because he put his arm around me, waved the porter over to fill my snifter with more brandy, insisted that I stop acting like a teetotaler, and told me the “improbable but true” story of the Jefferson family.

When he finished, I asked, “Why are you telling me all this?” I had become more and more nervous as he spoke because . . . I already knew too much.

But he just handed our crystal—or perhaps they were diamond—snifters to one of his servants and said, “Because you’re part of the family now, Paul.

“Shall we join the ladies . . .?”

SIX

Randolph Estes Jefferson was no relative of Thomas Jefferson.

Nor was he the scion of any distinguished lineage. His father Frances Tiberio Jefferson did, however, settle in Shadwell, Albemarle County, Virginia, where the third president of the United States was born and grew up, and he claimed to be a distant cousin of “Thomas,” who also had a reputation of being able to talk a tree out of its roots. Frances won a medal for “World’s Greatest Liar” at the Great Albemarle Fair. Like Thomas, he was a states’ rights man and distinguished himself in the War of Yankee Aggression by rising to the rank of Colonel. He was too robust to succumb to the diseases that routed both the northern and southern armies, and rose quickly through the thinning ranks.

After the war, he took his pay and his gift of gab and became the most successful auctioneer in Albemarle County; but he was too restless for that.

It happened that he found twenty-five “orphans,” ex-slaves still living on a played-out plantation. Their owners had put the plantation up for sale and left for Europe. The men and women left behind spoke high German, had developed their own, unique dialect, and didn’t know that the North had won the war and that they were no longer . . . slaves. They were starving and Frances fed them, gained their trust, and promised them wealth and a piece of land out west.

However, he neglected to explain that they were emancipated.

And so Frances left the Thomas Jefferson Auctioneers &. Feed Company to his brother. His plan was to buy twenty parcels of cheap Montana land in the names of his new wards and start a cattle and sheep farm. But that was not to be because, after a series of misadventures, all he had left were his orphans; and they were starting to have doubts about the master who could do no wrong.

In fact, they would have probably killed him if he had not gotten lost in the mountains and shot a squirrel that happened to have a perfect diamond the size of a pebble in its mouth. That pebble would be worth a hundred thousand dollars. He went back to his camp and told his orphans that he had discovered a cache of “rhinestones” that could be mined “for a few dollars.” Since none of the slaves had ever seen a diamond, much less owned one, they agreed that they could dig out enough stones to get back sufficient money to buy homesteads.

Leaving his miners to continue their work, he took a valise of diamonds to Billings; but he underestimated their value and a jeweler, flabbergasted at the size and quality of one of the smallest stones, tried to have Frances arrested. Frances went to New York, where he started another furor; this with only one stone, which a dealer of consequence believed might have been part of the Duvergier Diamond, said to have been stolen by a French soldier from the eye of an idol. The Duvergier had been cut into twenty-one stones, which ranged from less than a carat to eighty carats, and The World’s Greatest Liar did not dispute the opinion that his diamond might have been cut from the same venerable stone.

After several weeks, Frances was several hundred thousand dollars richer. But he had to leave New York, as the metropolitan police were now looking for him. The diamond market was in chaos. Some said that the world’s largest diamonds were somehow being cut up and “dumped by a “syndicate.” These new stones had to be cut from great diamonds such as the Orloff, the Koh-i-nor, the Akbar Shah, the Dudley, and even the Cullinan—which became part of the crown jewels—because they were too big to be anything else. Madness had replaced logic. Would-be prospectors were rushing to Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Southampton, Long Island—and the yellow rags kept proclaiming new locations where diamonds had “just been discovered.”

Indeed, The World’s Greatest Liar had found what was undoubtedly the world’s largest diamond . . . a solid and perfect mountain of diamond; and he realized that he would have to be careful, lest he devalue the world market.

He sent for his brother to manage the mine and left for a tour of the world. Carefully, he sold his diamonds. He used pseudonyms, forged passports. He lived like a criminal on the lam, yet he sold his stones to emperors, kings, criminals, sultans, and mercantile barons; his diamonds became invested with their own history and myth, as if they had been in circulation for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

In a few years, Frances was worth millions.

In a few more years, he was worth billions.

And he married a Spanish beauty; had two sons, Randolph and George, convinced his slaves that the South had indeed won the war, and that all was once again right with the world; murdered his brother, who became too generous with the family fortune and “talked out of school”; and dedicated himself to protecting his family and consolidating his fortune.

Randolph, being a chip off the old block, also invested widely and wisely; saw to the construction of his castle on the mountain; married a woman from Braga, his mother’s village near the west coast of Spain; sired a son and two daughters; and being kinder and gentler than Frances, merely imprisoned his overly generous and voluble brother, rather than murdering him.

Thus was I introduced to the secrets of the family while titans who had assumed the shapes of Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton beat and kicked each other in joyous, rapturous revenge.

SEVEN

It was like being invited to dinner in a cathedral, perhaps because great pennons hung from the high, gilded wood ceilings and paintings of winged cherubs and Rubenesque angels gazed down upon the guests, as though the heavenly host itself were in attendance. Perhaps it was the plundered sixteenth-century choir stalls, or the flickering candles and the altar of a table spread with linen and silver and gold. The plates and glassware seemed to be composed of layers of ruby, sapphire, emerald, opal, and diamond. Muted colors and pure, prismatic reflections met my eyes wherever I looked, and the Persian tile upon which I stood seemed to have infinite depth, as if this great room was floating stock-steady upon extraordinarily deep water. Servants glided in and out, as though stepping through shadows, and I could hear the clear but distant strains of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. I tried to locate the music, but could not.

Randolph Jefferson stood at the head of the long table and motioned me toward a chair beside Phoebe, who was dressed like a blond angel in white chiffon. Beside Phoebe, and facing Jefferson at the other end of the table, sat a beautiful dark-haired woman wearing a black chiffon evening dress. I thought it particular that, except for a gold wedding band, she wore no jewelry. She looked like she could have been in mourning. To Jefferson’s right was Morgan, and beside Morgan was a homely brown-haired girl in a stylish green evening outfit that somehow seemed larger than she was.

“Paul, allow me to introduce you to Giroma, my wife.” I bowed, and the woman in black held out her hand to me. I wasn’t sure whether I was expected to kiss it or formally shake it, so I decided upon the latter. She seemed pleased, but then she turned away from me, as though impatient to return to her own thoughts.

“And my son, Morgan, who tells me y’all met under rather unexpected circumstances.” Jefferson gave Morgan a cold, disapproving look and then introduced me to Marion, his eldest daughter, who was still being overwhelmed by her green evening dress. Perhaps I had been too hasty in describing Marion as homely. She had the same features as Phoebe, but they were slightly . . . crooked. What seemed like perfection in one sister was bland and uncomely in the other.

“Sit down,” Phoebe whispered to me. “You look like you just stepped on your own foot.” Marion giggled at that and, embarrassed, I sat down.

We made small talk throughout dinner, all seven courses, and Phoebe was winsome and witty and wickedly pressed her leg against my thigh. I asked about the music, wondering how many more musicians—indeed, how many other “guests” might be on the grounds—only to learn that the sweet music was being reproduced by an electrical phonograph that used a new Panatrope loud-speaker.

“It’s the bass that fools you, Paul,” Jefferson said. “It’s big as life, don’t you agree? The old orthophonic machines aren’t a patch on this one. The diaphragm of the loudspeaker is coil-driven, the acetate records are finely grooved, and the stylus is diamond, of course. The Victor Talking Machine Company will be bringing out a version like this . . . sometime in the next four or five years, I would suppose.” Jefferson seemed very pleased with himself.

I nodded, unsettled that I was the only guest. Phoebe’s sister Marion must have been reading my mind because she complained, “It’s not fair, Poppa, that Phoebe always receives special treatment. She’s coming out before me, and I’m older. And you’ve allowed her to have company. I haven’t had any company this summer.” While Phoebe’s voice was smooth, dulcet, Marion’s was whiny.

“Phoebe has company for a reason,” Jefferson said. “Would you have her give her concert unprepared?”

“She’s never going to be prepared,” Marion said, looking defiantly at Phoebe, who stared assiduously into her jeweled plate, as though she could move the broccoli by the mere power of her gaze. “She can’t play the piano any better than I can, yet you’ve bought Carnegie Hall for her.”

“I did no such thing,” Jefferson said. “She was invited to play, as you might have been if you had applied yourself.”

“She only wanted to play piano because I did. And y’all went gaga over her and couldn’t even be bothered with me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is too. It’s because Phoebe is a liar. She lies to all of you, and you believe everything she tells you. It’s not fair, it’s just not fair.”

“Are you quite finished?”

“I’m sick of being here all by myself.”

“You have your family here, or is that of no importance to you?”

Marion shook her head and said, “It’s not fair.”

“I’ll spend time with her, Poppa,” Phoebe said. “I will, Marion, I promise.”

“That’s the bunk!” Marion said to her father. “She’s a liar.”

“Morgan, what do you have to say?” Jefferson asked.

“Don’t know, I—”

“She’s your sister, and it’s your responsibility to take care of her, isn’t that right?”

“Yes . . . I suppose, but—”

“Well, I’ve decided that you should follow up our little problem with the pilot who got away from us,” Jefferson said. “What do you think of that? It’s time you proved yourself to be a man.”

“What do you want me to do?” Morgan asked.

“More to the point, what do you think you should do?”

“I dunno . . . go find him, I guess.”

“And what does that have to do with me?” Marion asked. “You see, that’s just what I mean. I’m invisible.”

“Not at all,” Jefferson said. “You’re the eldest. Perhaps I should send you out to test your mettle instead of Morgan.”

“Perhaps you should send me,” Phoebe said. “Mr. Orsatti could protect me.”

“Indeed he could,” Jefferson said. “Indeed he could,” and they exchanged teasing looks, as if they had rehearsed this little skit—as if Mother and Morgan and Marion were out, and only Poppa and Phoebe were in.

And I soon found out where I stood in their dangerous little universe.

“Oh, Poppa wouldn’t send either one of them to the grocer for a loaf of bread,” Phoebe confided to me as we stood on the artificially lit, glaucous-green lawn that seemed to roll on forever into the night.

Fireflies pulsed in the perfumed air. I held her cool hand; and I must admit that against all logic and experience and plain good sense, I was head over heels in love. It wasn’t about what kind of a person Phoebe might be—how smart, immature, spoiled, and selfish she was. I knew her for a brat, and probably as dangerous as her father. Perhaps more dangerous. But she was . . . perfect. The sound of her voice was perfect, the way her eyes narrowed when she was thinking was perfect, her smell, the cast of her hair, the way her eyebrows arched, the curl of her mouth—all absolute perfection. I was smitten, but at least I had the presence of mind to conceal the extent of my ardor . . . or so I thought, anyway. In fact, I was as transparent as the goblet I had been drinking from at dinner.

“I’m surprised that he lets either one of them go to school,” she continued.

“You don’t like Morgan and Marion very much, do you?”

“Au contraire, I love them both to pieces. But would you let them out of your sight?”

“I’d rather not let you out of my sight.”

She giggled and pulled me to a copse of trees that were silver and shadow in the dim, flickering lamplight. She sat down, her back against the bole of an elm.

“You’ll catch cold on the damp ground,” I said.

“Poppa will go alone,” she said, as though talking to herself. “He won’t take Morgan. I’ll bet you a thousand—”

“Don’t start that again.”

“Did Poppa try to make a bet with you?”

“Why do you ask?”

She twirled the ring on my finger . . . the ring she had given me. “I expect he noticed my ring. Well, did he?”

“Did he notice . . .?”

“No, did he make you put it up for collateral?”

“I would never bet your ring.”

“Good for you,” Phoebe said. “Poppa likes you.”

“He didn’t suggest sending me to find your flier.”

“But he did take you out of the pit.”

“Because you asked him to.”

“And you’d just better remember that,” she said, and then allowed me to fumble with her clothes, caress her breasts, kiss her in all the delicious, unmentionable places, and finally make love to her. Everything was rustling and whispering and breathing, and when we were finished—and still half-dressed—she said, “You haven’t said you love me.”

Caught off guard, I just smoked my cigarette.

“And you didn’t offer me a cigarette.”

I gave her the cigarette, which she smoked, inhaling deeply. She didn’t cough . . . she just cleared her throat, as though she were about to give a formal speech. “Well, are you going to say it?”

“How could you be sure I’d mean it?”

“Because I know you do.”

“And what about you?”

“Do you think I’d let you do what you just did if I didn’t?”

I knew better than to fall into that trap.

“I love you,” I said, trying to arouse her again.

“I know you do,” Phoebe said, surrendering, or pretending to.

“But there is something else.”

Phoebe pulled away and watched me.

“You’ve had company here before. Your sister said as much.”

“Ah, so we’re on that old stick again.”

“Well, I still can’t get what your father said out of my mind.”

“And what would that be?” Phoebe sat up again and leaned against the tree. Her blouse was open, her hair was mussed, and I must admit I could not imagine anyone being more beautiful, alluring, and piquant.

“That unless you behave, you won’t be able to keep me until September.”

“Morgan said that, remember? And he lies.”

“I need to know,” I said, insistent.

“I’ve only had one friend from school ever visit me for vacation,” Phoebe said. “A girlfriend. And you wouldn’t have liked her, anyway.”

“Why?”

“You just wouldn’t. I didn’t like her very much. I. . . .”

“Yes . . .?”

“That’s all. Now, are you done with your Twenty Questions?”

“Does your sister usually have guests?” I asked.

“So now it’s Forty Questions, is it,” Phoebe said, and she buttoned her blouse.

I felt the sudden distance between us, but I couldn’t stop. “Well, does she?”

“Yes, this is the first summer she’s been alone. Poppa’s punishing her.”

“Why?”

“Because she has a big mouth. She takes after Uncle George.” She looked around, and although she didn’t act nervous, I knew she was. I could feel it radiating from her.

“Your father doesn’t let your guests return home, does he.” That was a statement, not a question.

“What do you want from me?” Phoebe asked.

“The truth.”

“Why? Will it make you free?”

I waited for an answer.

Phoebe looked directly at me as she spoke, as if the truth would be a reproach. “You’re right . . . Father doesn’t allow the guests to return home.”

Then he imprisons them, like he did me?”

“No,” she whispered, watching, studying me, “That wouldn’t be fair to the family.”

“The family?”

“To us.”

“Why?”

“Because we’d feel terrible. Mother would have a breakdown. She’s had one already.”

“So you murder them?”

She flinched at that, but kept looking at me, unafraid yet vulnerable. “There is no—there is really no other choice. Marion and Morgan need friends. And Poppa is too considerate to force them to be hermits.”

“Considerate? I—”

“You’d think we starved and tortured them,” Phoebe said. “Invited guests are shown every courtesy. They have the best time of their lives—good company, good food, the best quarters, and Marion and Morgan and Mother shower them with presents. Whatever they fancy they get, and when their time comes, they simply go to sleep. It’s really very pleasant, I would imagine. It really is. . . . It always happens in August or September, but Marion and Morgan never know exactly when. It’s easier for them, that way.”

“And what about their poor families?” I asked, aghast.

“We explain that they caught typhus and passed away, and Poppa always sends flowers.”

“How lovely. And when is my time going to be, hey? This month or next.”

“Well, you do have to give me lessons for my recital,” Phoebe said. She was playing with me, yet I was convinced that she had told me the truth. Jefferson would never allow anyone to give up his secrets. It was a miracle that he allowed his brother George to live—perhaps he was a trifle sentimental.

I got up to leave, and she said, “If you go now, I’ll never speak to you again.”

“What’s the difference?”

“What’s the difference . . .? Do you seriously believe I would bring my friends here, knowing Poppa wasn’t going to allow them to leave?”

“Well, you have. I’m your guest. Or rather your victim.”

“Go fly a kite! You were going to rot down there in the pit.”

“But I wouldn’t be about to be murdered. Is it this week or next?”

“I wouldn’t allow Poppa to murder you. He agreed that when you’re finished tutoring me for my recital, you’ll go back in the pit. So there! I wouldn’t kill anybody. Not even you.”

I could hear her breathing falter like she was going to cry, but I persisted. “But you have, haven’t you? You’ve probably had as many guests as Marion. Or Morgan. Or your mother, for that matter.”

“Mother never has guests, neither does Poppa,” Phoebe said. “They allow us to have guests because there’s no other choice. Mother stays by herself and barely speaks, or haven’t you noticed? She lost her best friends, and couldn’t stand to lose any more.”

“It’s disgusting.”

“We’re not like other people. We can’t live like they do. If we could, we would. And for your information, Mister Know-it-all, when I found out what Poppa had to do, I refused to invite anybody else ever again. I’m content to read and enjoy music and walk in the gardens. Alone.”

“That’s very white of you.”

“Thank you.”

With that, I turned and walked away.

Half-dressed and shoeless, she caught up with me.

“Paul, do you really believe I could abide you being killed or put back with those other . . . men?”

“I don’t really know,” I said. “I would guess that you could.”

“I love you. I didn’t know that when I saw you in the pit, or when I heard you play the piano like a genius. And Poppa would never hurt anyone in the family.”

“I’m your piano teacher, Phoebe. I’m not in the family.”

“But you will be when we’re married. . . .”

EIGHT

Phoebe was, of course, correct. Her father left the mountain by himself to take care of business. It seemed that eight pilots had already been murdered by his agents, yet none of Jefferson’s sources could be absolutely sure that the right pilot had been dispatched. Jefferson was going to take matters into his own hands and direct his army of spies, scouts, facilitators, lawyers, bankers, and mercenaries to find the “conspirators,” wipe them out, and smooth over the facts so that no one would ever recollect that anything odd or untoward had ever occurred. Whether Jefferson was a good general, a coward, or just foolhardy, I couldn’t say. But when the shooting started and all hell broke loose, he should have been present.

However, I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. . . .

The next few weeks were bliss. Just Phoebe and me. There were long, languorous hours in the mirror gallery, the afternoon sun a dusty-golden mist filling the long, arched room as Phoebe concentrated on her music . . . and me. She was going to dedicate her recital to me and play a selection of my favorite piano works by Erik Satie. I tried to talk her into playing a selection of Chopin’s waltzes and preludes and explained that Satie’s music was absurdist and humorous and only seemingly simple, but she was not to be dissuaded. The hours of practice were punctuated by lovemaking and champagne lunches on the balcony. She disappeared the slaves. They were to be invisible, yet at her beck and call, as it should be, she said; and she was summer itself. Every day another Phoebe appeared, as though by magic. Sometimes she was an Egyptian queen in evening gown. Sometimes a chic matron wearing cloche hats and “Coco” Chanel skirts and pullovers and suits designed specifically for her and no one else. She could be “Flapper Jane” with heavy makeup and oiled hair and whiskey on her breath, or an athletic fresh-faced beauty in pleated skirt and blue bandeau.

And so the days passed, each delicious, each one only slightly different from those before. We swam in a green pool illuminated by ivory lamps under a ceiling of hammered gold. Surrounded by marble Roman sarcophagi and statues of Sekhmet, the Egyptian goddess of war and destruction, we made love. We had dinner with the family and made small talk; we hardly saw Morgan and Marion, who were sullen and secretive, as if they were privy to something we were not.

I found out what that was all about a few nights later.

ALTHOUGH PHOEBE and I made love every night, we slept in our respective rooms. “When we’re married, you can stay the night,” she said; and, indeed, by midnight I would be so exhausted from the rigors of the night—and the day—that I would fall into a deep, satisfying sleep, only to be awakened by Robert with breakfast on a gold tray and the bright, pure light of another perfect morning.

But on the night when all hell broke loose, I was dreaming of the boys in the pit. I was back there with them, and so was Joel, who was dead, of course. But in the dream, we were all dead—except Phoebe and old man Jefferson and Morgan and Marion, who were all dressed in formal finery and standing on the golf course above us by the grated opening of the pit. Jefferson was praying for us and mixing up the part about dust to dust, and then Phoebe started crying while her brother and sister began shoveling dirt into the pit to bury us. There would be no more golden days and luminous nights with Phoebe, no more lovemaking in Jefferson’s forests of gold and glades of diamonds, no more Bach or Beethoven, nor the ironic mockings of Satie. I could smell grass and rot and decay, the Paris perfume of Phoebe mixed with her sweet sweat as the clumps of black soil fell on top of us. Black rain. Phoebe’s tears, tapping, dropping like soft leather heels on marble.

I choked. I couldn’t breathe. I—

Woke up to scuffing, whispering, creaking. Then the click of the diamond doorknob being turned, the sighing of the door. I didn’t wait to determine who the intruders were because I was sure they were going to try to kill me, just as they killed all the other guests. But I couldn’t escape without somehow getting past them. Unless. . . .

I felt for the button on the wall beside my bed and pressed it hard. The bed tilted and drapes parted with hardly a sound as I slid down the chute into the empty bath. The aquarium walls of the bathroom were a luminous green, and as I hastily made my way out, I could see the shadow of a ray swimming toward me. I turned the knob on the bathroom door. It wasn’t locked, and I made my escape down the stairs. Indeed, my first thought was to go directly to Phoebe’s room on the other side of the house. I certainly wanted to, but for all that I loved her, could I really trust her? She was, after all, a Jefferson; and I was, after all, just a guest, a guest who even now could not help but be awed by the pre-dawn magic of this house; by the cathedral walls covered with medieval tapestries, by the loitering stone and marble fauns, naiads, satyrs, soldiers, gorgons, gods, and goddesses, all pale as moonlight and bigger than life, by the carved ceilings so high above; by the emerald and turquoise rooms that each opened into other, even more magnificent rooms. Tall, jeweled lamps cast a roseate light, and pitch-velvet shadows concealed treasures that could only be imagined.

I rushed toward the atrium, where I thought I would escape into the gardens.

And I heard Phoebe screaming hysterically. “You’d better not have killed him. He’d better be alive.”

I retraced my steps and waited behind an archway near the ivory staircase. I wasn’t surprised to see slaves pacing nervously on the landing above. Wordsworth and Isaac had obviously been sent to kill me, and perhaps Isaac had been given his chance to get back into the family’s good graces.

But I was surprised to see Morgan step out of my room onto the landing; a very angry Phoebe was right behind him. I suppose Morgan had finally found his courage, although he seemed to have lost it again in Phoebe’s presence.

“What the hell did you think you’re doing, Morgan?” she shouted. Her voice seemed magnified by the dark, cavernous spaces. “He’s my guest, you little twit, and what happens to him is my decision, not yours. Or Marion’s.”

“Marion has nothing to do with this,” Morgan said. “It was all my idea. I just wanted to help you.”

“Help me?”

“Anybody can see how much you’re stuck on him, and you know Father isn’t going to let you keep him, no matter what. He told me that before he left.”

“Did not.”

“He did too, and he practically told me to take care of things for him while he’s gone because the more you fall in love with him, the more you’re going to be hurt. And Marion thought that—”

“That’s just what I thought,” Phoebe said, but she did not continue because at just that moment everyone looked up into the grayness above, as though we could see through the ceiling. We could hear the sound of aircraft overhead, and then there was a terrible concussion. I felt heat and was thrown backward. The ceiling shattered. The archway cracked and fell in a cloud of red dust and smoke before me.

More explosions.

Bombs falling, and I remembered my dream. Clumps of black soil falling. Black rain. Phoebe’s tears. And, indeed, I was drenched. Water poured through cracks in what was left of the ceiling, which would soon give way; and the swimming sharks and rays and groupers and cuttlefish would fall onto the jewel-polished floor below.

Somehow, I had to rescue Phoebe, lest she be caught in the inevitable waterfall, a vertical tidal wave that would smash and splinter the balcony like balsa wood; but as I called out to her, my voice was swallowed by the staccato thunder-pumping of machine guns above. At least the slaves had the presence of mind to stand and fight. As I ran to the grand staircase, I met Marion and Morgan. We stopped for an instant, amid the cacophony of exploding bombs, machine guns, and the abdominal groaning of the castle. Water dripped like rain through the cracking and bulging ceiling high above. Morgan scowled at me, Marion called me a filthy something, and then I ran up the stairs to Phoebe while they, presumably, ran to the bunkers where they would be safe and sound and fitted out with champagne and caviar until the danger was over.

“Phoebe,” I shouted, catching the back of her. She was running through the corridor, which curved around the inside of the house like a mullah’s ledge on a minaret. She heard me over the firing of machine guns and the thrumming shaking deafening exploding of bombs.

She stopped and shouted, “Mother,” which I understood as code for “I’ve got to find Mother,” and then disappeared into one of the many branching corridors. I followed her, my eyes and nose burning from smoke.

“You’ve got to—”

I meant “You’ve got to get off this floor now immediately run,” but I seemed to run right through my words. I was intent on grabbing her up and getting out of the house, into the bunkers, perhaps, off this mountain, and then, in those heart-pounding exploding acrid smoke-smelling seconds I imagined that we’d somehow miraculously escaped from the mountain, from her father and family and everything associated with them, and I wondered whether she could live in the real world five minutes with me, without the insulation of millions—or billions—of dollars. It was idiocy even to dream of getting out, much less turning Phoebe into Suzy Housewife. In spite of the smoke and sudden heat, for the house was certainly on fire, although I couldn’t see flames . . . yet, I think I grinned at the thought. But if I had the chance, the split-second chance of a lifetime, I’d take Phoebe away, without a dime in my pocket, I’d take her away for as long as she’d stand me.

But there was a chance. I was, after all, a prisoner. If the air strike was successful, as I imagined it would be, then we would all be set free. The lads in the Pit would vouch for me. Perhaps there was a way to escape. To hide Phoebe, take enough diamonds and rubies to keep us more than comfortable in our new life.

Nonsense madness lunacy, yet those words had little meaning deep in this castle of impossibility where ceilings were layered with gold and walls of diamond and ruby glowed translucently like dreams in the deepest sleep; where hammerhead sharks could fall like rain, and God’s machines could play music as well as orchestras.

I found Phoebe in her mother’s suite, which was the size of most people’s houses, and Phoebe turned to me and said, “She wouldn’t’ve gone to the bunkers on her own, how could Morgan and Marion leave without her?” Phoebe was wild-eyed. “They hate her, that’s why.”

“Why wouldn’t your mother go to the bunkers?” I asked, trying to bring her back to reason.

“She’s claustrophobic. She can’t stand darkness, can’t stand to be without windows and light and—”

The sound of gunfire, the ceiling cracking, the house groaning, and then the expected waterfall, complete with all manner of fishes. Water poured over us, for the aquarium was two stories high, an aquatic crystalline house within the house, and I grabbed Phoebe and ran through the rain and wriggling, flapping, slapping fishes as the floors and walls and ceilings collapsed behind me, ran until I found another staircase, a narrow escaliei derobe. The smell of wet ash was thick as we ran down the stairs, ran through the undecorated corridors used by servants, ran straight into blazing, blistering fire.

We found another way, which was blocked by the debris that had been ceiling and furniture, only moments ago. Coughing, panicking, we raced through darkness; now I was following Phoebe, who pulled me by the hand, down, down, into the damp stone cellars where we felt our way along the rough cold walls. Then an incline, the clanging of a heavy latch—Phoebe had found an exit. We pushed open a heavy door and looked up through the swirling smoke and soot to glimpse the dawn-pink sky.

The attack had been planned perfectly.

From an emplacement on the roof of an adjacent building . . . another burst of anti-aircraft guns. I could see only a few bodies of slaves scattered across the lawn; but in the dawn pinkness of this impossible morning, I couldn’t see blood; nor could I smell the puke and feces of dying men, thank God, for the reek of gasoline, the acrid smoke, and the thunderstorm and metal odor of machine-guns firing on the roofs above were overpowering. I took a chance and stepped away from the castle to see what was in the sky; and you could’ve knocked me over with your pinky because the attackers-invaders-saviors, whatever they were, had just about everything in the air that could fly, all remainders from the war. Christ, there was a Vickers Gunbus, which hadn’t been in service since 1916; and its gunner was strafing the slave quarters with his moveable Lewis machine gun. There were several Jennys in the sky, and from the sound of it, I guessed they had been fitted out with 7.7 mm machine guns, just like the Gunbus. The Jenny was the favorite of most barnstormers, and I was no exception. While everything was happening around me—all the crashing and burning and exploding, I daydreamed about whisking Phoebe away in a Jenny, saving her from all this death and destruction; and I felt a sudden, unexpected rush of happiness. I would be saved, wouldn’t have to spend my life a prisoner, or worse, become another one of those poisoned or strangled guests buried in an unmarked grave in the shallow soil of the diamond mountain. All that in a second, just like when I’d been in combat in the Toulouse-the-Wreck, the Spad that got me through Bloody April without so much as a bullet tearing through its delicate frame. I was again smelling oil and gasoline, hearing the peculiar and particular chinking sound of machine guns, and daydreaming. Time stretching, then collapsing, while my body, my hands and eyes, made all the moves.

Phoebe caught my arm, as though she had just read my mind and discovered my true thoughts of escaping with the enemy, and that’s when I saw the twin-engined Handley Page 400, a British bomber that could carry a bomb load of around 1,800 pounds—Lord knows how they got their hands on that, and again, daydreaming, I wondered who they were. The bomber made a wide circle, and I asked Phoebe where the bunkers were because once that Handley Page started dropping her guts, there wouldn’t be much left to talk about.

“Look,” Phoebe said, pointing, and, indeed, I saw slaves scrambling across the courtyard and leap-frogging up the inlaid tile perrons of the castle. They moved like trained and disciplined soldiers, the strafing fire of machine guns didn’t deter them, even when two slaves were hit and fell backward over the stone steps.

We had to get out of here. I could hear the Handley Page’s engines change tune as the great plane turned to begin its bombing run.

And then Phoebe shouted “Momma,” and ran into the courtyard.

Sure enough, there was Giroma Jefferson strolling absently in her black chiffon evening dress embroidered with tiny beads.

I followed, but was too late: the Gunbus was strafing the courtyard, and in that second I felt time stretch out like some terrible gasoline tainted gray wodge of taffy, wrapping itself around me . . . suffocating me. I saw Phoebe’s mother fall, hit by the strafing fire, and Phoebe screaming and falling on top of her; and then it was like being in the cockpit of my Spad again, feeling once again absolutely focused yet numb, as I did during every dogfight. The numbness was fear, but it was a distant thing; and—as if I were a spectator still standing in the doorway of Jefferson’s castle—I could see myself pulling Phoebe away from her mother and dragging her out of the courtyard. Phoebe screamed and tried to bite me before she came to her senses.

“I can’t leave my mother,” she said desperately. “She might be alive, mightn’t she?”

“No, darling,” I said, “but don’t think about that right now. We’ll think about everything once you’re safe. Now tell me where the bunkers are.”

“There,” and she pointed toward a strand of rocks where goats were trying to hide in the surrounding brush. “But we can’t leave without Mother.” So I picked up Mrs. Jefferson, who was just skin and bones, and we made our way under cover of the pine forest that was the west edge of Jefferson’s zoo. I glimpsed zebras standing stock still, as if they were painted sculptures. Like Lot’s wife, Phoebe looked back, seeking one last glimpse of paradise, and then we felt the concussion of an exploding bomb. For a few seconds, I could only hear a rushing, windy sound. I wasn’t sure if the castle remained, as it was out of our sight from here, and we made our way, circuitously—keeping under cover—to the bunker. Phoebe pulled at an iron bar set cleverly into the rock—the camouflaged opening could only be detected if one already knew where it was—but nothing happened. I pulled the bar. Still nothing.

“They’re in there, and they can hear us,” Phoebe said to me. Turning to the cliff face of the bunker, she shouted, “Open the goddamn door, Morgan, you bastard. Mother’s dead, and it’s your fault.”

But Morgan, if he was inside, was silent as the stone.

NINE

We laid Mrs. Jefferson out in the family mausoleum between the marble sepulchers of her father-in-law, the World’s Greatest Liar, and his brother, who was murdered for the family cause. The cacophony of machine guns and bombs was reduced to great sighs and groans; only the dead held sway in this great marble shrine at the end of the gardens, and they ruled imperiously over the spiders and dust. Phoebe and I—and the cold and stiffening Mrs. Jefferson—were dwarfed by loggia of fifty-foot columns and pavilions that supported hordes of stone beasts and angels; and a huge equestrian statue of a Jefferson glowered down upon us like a marble god in his adamantine heaven. But there were no glowing onyx or pearl walls here, and not a diamond or a ruby or a sapphire in sight. This grand tomb might well have been designed by Phoebe’s mother, who defied her wealth by never wearing a jewel. Perhaps she was the only one in the family who understood that you couldn’t take it with you.

“I can’t leave her here like this,” Phoebe said, her eyes glistening with tears, and at that moment I felt I was more in love with her than ever before.

“It’s not safe here.”

“Pah! It’s not safe anywhere,” she said, suddenly gaining the weight and wisdom of the world.

“I’m getting you away from here this very minute,” I said, and she turned to me, her face lit by anger and perhaps even hatred.

“That’s my mother lying dead there, and you want to . . . you want to. . . .”

“I want to get you to safety.”

“You’re as flat as my brother,” she said, “and I’m not leaving.”

“Then what do you propose to do?” I asked, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. She turned away from me, leaned over her mother’s corpse, and began to cry softly.

“It’s all over.”

She allowed me to put my arms around her and pull her away from her mother. “Poppa should have been here. He should have saved us. But he’s too interested in. . . .” She looked up at me and said,” You should have saved us. So what are we to do now, Mr. Orsatti?”

She turned back to her mother, as though she could somehow find all the answers behind those dead and closed eyes. She was shivering, trembling; and then, by sheer act of will, I should imagine, she straightened up and became absolutely calm. Her eyes narrowed in determination, and I saw her father in her heart-shaped perfect face. I saw in that instant the inevitability that she—and not her brother or sister or anyone else—would control everything. She was her father’s daughter; and love her as I did, I felt the sudden panicky urge to flee.

“I’m not giving everything up,” Phoebe said firmly to her dead mother. “I won’t, and they can’t make me.” Then she finally turned to me and said, “Well . . .?”

“Well, what?” I asked, and for that instant I felt like a nervous schoolboy. The muffled booming of bombs and the thick bursts of machine guns became louder. “We’ve got to get out of here right now!”

“Will you help me or not?” she asked, ignoring my last remark.

“Help you to do what!”

She stepped across the flawless marble floor and reached behind the stone sarcophagus of the World’s Greatest Liar and strained as she pulled something. “Well, are you just going to stand there?”

She stepped back and allowed me to squeeze into the space behind the marble coffin. I felt the smooth metal bar she had been pulling at, which was ingeniously hidden under the curl of the coffin’s lower rail, and released it without straining my back. The coffin slowly and smoothly slid down toward the wall, as if by magic, to reveal a dark catacomb fronted by dirty marble steps.

“Go on,” Phoebe said; and when she saw my hesitation, she said, “Are you afraid I’d close you in?”

I must admit that a nervous thought had crossed my mind.

“Maybe I should, but I wouldn’t,” and she grinned at me, as if she’d forgotten everything for an instant; then she took a last look at her mother, and led me down the steps and into the pit. She picked up a lantern from a ledge and scratched a match. Once the lantern radiated a halo of buttery light, she pulled at something in the wall. A rumbling echoed through what I imagined to be countless corridors, a hellish maze from which we would never escape; and I wanted to run back up the stone steps before the entrance was sealed. But the coffin fit into place like the last stone block of a pharaoh’s tomb. The darkness seemed to sharpen my sense of smell.

I breathed in the musty odors of the grave, and I was sure that this was a catacomb in the true sense—that bodies had been left to rot on shelves like the one where Phoebe had found her matches and lantern.

“Follow me,” Phoebe said.

“What on Earth is this place?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”

“It’s where your guests end up, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’s where you ended up.”

“Answer me.”

“I don’t approve of overbearing men.”

“Oh, I’m so very sorry,” I said sarcastically. She hurried ahead, but I kept close to her. Our voices and movements echoed through the crudely cut corridor. “This place certainly wasn’t cut out of diamond.”

“Of course not, silly,” Phoebe said. “The whole mountain isn’t one big diamond.”

“Your father said it was.”

“Well, he’s like my grandfather. He exaggerates. About two-thirds of the mountain is one big diamond. The rest is this stuff, regular stone, I would suppose.”

“And where does it lead?”

“Well, you’re going to find out now, aren’t you?” Phoebe said peevishly. Perhaps she was as frightened as I was, although I doubted that. She had obviously been here before. Probably many times. I shivered, swore, and slapped at something that had dropped onto my neck. Phoebe waved her lantern, which was smoking.

“Lots of spiders in this part. I hate them, don’t you?” Phoebe said, quickening the pace.

I heard a screeing sound.

“And bats,” she continued.

Which meant that there was another opening. But I was not relieved yet. We came to a terminus of sorts, and I heard water dripping and the distant rumbling of machinery. Phoebe led me through another corridor, which became narrower and narrower; her lantern threw cascading shadows across the rough-cut walls . . . and the reinforced metal doorway ahead.

Turning a large combination lock, which would unbolt the heavy door, she said, “We’ll be fine now.” The door was three feet thick; I’d only seen its kind in bank vaults. I helped her pull it open, and we were bathed in the dim but steady light that emanated from the opalescent walls and ceiling. I felt like I was back in the pit. There were no shadows in this place. We had entered a two-dimensional realm.

Phoebe led me through a long corridor that opened into a large storeroom filled with rifles, machine guns, shotguns, pistols, flamethrowers, grenades and grenade launchers, all manner of knives and swords and bayonets, pull carts, sledge hammers, wire cutters, welding and carpenter’s tools, cables, foodstuffs, canteens, medications, bandages, stretchers, gas masks, and canister weapons I didn’t even recognize. “I think Poppa said this place is as secure as the bunker. Anyway, everything we need is right here.”

“What are you looking for?” I asked warily, following her as she walked up one aisle and down another.

“You’re the veteran of the Great War. You tell me.” She walked on, then stopped and picked up what might have been a grenade. Behind her were shelves of gas masks and medicines: bleach ointments, clouded glass bottles of petrol, methylated spirits, kerosene, liquid paraffin, and carbon tetrachloride. There were swabs and eye drops and bandages and a metal mask with holes. I knew what that was for . . . what all that was for: mustard gas poisoning.

“No,” I said, realizing that I had shouted. “No.”

“We could gas them when they get out of their planes,” Phoebe said excitedly, almost cheerfully. She walked a few paces down the aisle, stopped, and picked up what looked like an ordinary grenade launcher. Finding it unexpectedly heavy, she nearly dropped it. “Here, we can use these tubes to shoot them off with. I think these go with the gas grenades. Poppa showed me once, but I’m not so sure now.”

“I won’t have any part of cold-blooded murder.”

Phoebe raised her eyebrow slightly, as if mystified. “I don’t want to kill them, just put them to sleep for a while.” Then her face reddened and she said, “What do you think they did to Mother . . . and our servants? Well . . .?”

I nodded—there was nothing I could say to that—and examined the canister she had been holding, and the others neatly laid out on the gunmetal shelves like condiments for a deadly banquet. “Well, you’ll certainly put them to sleep for a good long while with this. It’s phosgene, for Chrissakes. The Germans used it at Ypres in 1915.” I thought I could smell a faint odor of new mown hay, which is a dead giveaway for phosgene. “If I can smell it, something must be leaking. Let’s get out of here now.”

“I like the smell, don’t you?” Phoebe said, teasing me.

“Phoebe!”

“Phoebe what, you flat tire. How could you believe for even one second that I would actually consider killing those men?” She seemed to be about to break into tears. “Well, I don’t need your help, after all. I can do it myself.”

“What? Kill all those aviators? And how do you propose to do that all alone? You could get a few of them, I’ll admit, but not all of them.”

“I told you I’m not going to kill any of them,” Phoebe said, and she looked so angry that I thought she might actually stamp her foot. Or throw the canister at me. “Come over here.”

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “We’ve probably already poisoned ourselves.”

“Well, I’ve been down here only about two hundred times, and it always smells like this, and I’m still alive, so stop being a stupid coward.”

I felt my ears bum.

She walked over to me and asked in almost a whisper, “Are you going to trust me?”

After a time I said, “Yes,” and put my arms around her.

“Then you’ll help me?”

“Of course I will.” I felt the last tuggings of my conscience and wondered if, indeed, I would be killing those aviators. . . . For those few seconds as I held Phoebe close, I could hear her shallow breathing and the ever so faint booming of bombs.

And somehow I knew I was making a great mistake. . . .

Then she kissed me, tenderly but without passion, and said, “Let’s get ready. If you can pile up the little gas bombs and the tubes, I’ll try to get us some more help.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I know the way to the servants’ quarters,” Phoebe said, “and I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that some of the servants are using the tunnels like bunkers. If they’re there, I’ll find them.”

“I should be with you.”

“No, we’ve got to make sure the enemy doesn’t land before we can get out there. If you just keep following the tunnels to your right, you’ll come to the outside. Don’t worry, I’ll find you somewhere between here and there.” Phoebe nodded toward a corridor that curved to the right. The light made the far wall and the branching corridors look flat, as though the tunnels, as Phoebe called them, had been lightly sketched with a charcoal pencil. Phoebe turned and looked back toward where we had come. She seemed to be staring at something only she could see, and her eyes were bright with tears.

“Phoebe. . . .”

“They killed her,” she said, meaning her mother, and then she disappeared into the flat light. I called after her, and her voice echoed back, “Make sure you take the right bombs.”

And I wondered once again if the right bombs would be lethal.

I FOLLOWED PHOEBE’S directions, kept turning to the right, and navigated the warren of corridors until I reached a camouflaged opening in the hill west of the chateau. Phoebe and I had spent many a perfect hour watching the zebras play and frolic through these gently inclined fields, and the sweet fragrances of spring flowers and Phoebe’s perfume were cold memories as I looked out at the devastation before me. It was a clear morning with just a touch of chill . . . and the smells of oil and metal. Through the copses of evergreens and oak, I could see the blackened chateau and the ruined grounds of what the Old Man had called his enchanted hill. A streamer of smoke rose from the castle’s west wing, yet, miraculously, most of the castle was untouched. A bomb had obliterated the Neptune pool and the great Grecian marble steps.

Above, in the blue, ceramic sky, planes circled like buzzing insects waiting their turn to land.

We were probably too late. At least half the planes would already be on the ground and the aviators, probably armed to the teeth, would be making their way to the chateau. I had enough gas canisters in the pull cart to asphyxiate half the population of Chicago. I waited for Phoebe and had begun to worry when I heard footsteps. Phoebe had indeed found a squad of servants, including Robert, who, surely, was too old and decrepit for this kind of operation. Yet he stood in front of the other slaves.

“We’re ready,” Phoebe said, looking at me determinedly, as if waiting for me to respond with the proper etiquette. She stood away from me, waiting, testing me, and I knew if I didn’t respond properly, I would lose her forever.

I nodded to Robert and asked him if he knew how to launch the gas grenades.

“Yes, Mr. Orsatti, I certainly do, and so do my men.”

“Your men?” I asked, glancing at Phoebe, who did not seem disturbed, just anxious to get underway.

“Yes, I trained them. Under Mr. Jefferson’s orders, of course.”

“And who trained you?” I asked.

“I believe he was an ordnance sergeant, whom Mr. Jefferson invited for a visit. Miss Phoebe took quite a shine to him, if I remember correctly.” There was an underlying meanness in his soft, pliant voice, and it was obvious that he viewed my condescension as intolerable. “Isn’t that so, Miss Phoebe?”

Ignoring him, Phoebe asked me if I was ready.

I nodded and picked up a grenade. Robert did the same, and attached it to the launcher; indeed, he knew what he was doing. He then picked up a gas mask from the pull cart and pulled it over his face to be at the ready. The others followed in turn. Before Phoebe could pull her gas mask over her face, I said, “Phoebe, why don’t you stay—”

“Don’t even suggest it,” she said.

Moving quickly, we made our way under cover toward the landing strip north of the chateau. I deployed the men along the way with orders to fire if they saw the enemy, even if there were other slaves nearby who might inhale the gas—after all, the grenades should not kill.

However, there was no time to wait and ponder.

By the time we reached the rocky outcrops near the landing strip, we were in the thick of it. Half a dozen pilots were already making their way toward the chateau, and they were armed and at the ready. They saw us at the same time we saw them, and we both took cover. They began firing, and Isaac calmly launched a grenade at them, which exploded with a low thumping sound. I watched through smeary goggles and heard my breath wheezing through the mask, which smelled of rubber and formaldehyde. After a few moments, the aviators stopped firing. We waited and then moved forward cautiously. I feared the worst, but when we examined them, they were indeed still breathing; one pilot was snoring, as if happily tucked into his bed. We wasted no time pulling the sleepers under cover so they could not be seen. Then we moved forward to keep an eye on the planes as they landed. They kept a tight formation. Impressive. As each plane taxied down the turf of the golf-course runway, the pilots who had just landed stayed close to provide possible covering fire. We waited behind copses of weeping willows. It was too easy to gas the aviators, take their weapons, and drag them under cover—we were shooting the proverbial ducks in a barrel—and like everything that seems too easy, there was a snag. We miscalculated.

One of the aviators had somehow managed to get past us and circle around to our rear. He was wearing one of our gas masks, which he must have taken from one of the servants on the way; and he shot three of our servants with his automatic rifle before we could retaliate. To my surprise, Phoebe shot him squarely through the forehead with a handgun.

Robert sprayed the area with machine-gun fire and ordered his squad of servants to move forward.

More gunfire and the chuff chuffing of canister.

Then silence, a heavy awkward silence, as though some sort of geologic time or consensual dream had been replaced by a darker, more sinister reality.

As we moved forward, I could see faint wisps of gas roiling in the fetid air. Above me was a clear blue sky, as innocent as day. I looked around for Phoebe, but she had suddenly disappeared. “Robert, where’s Phoebe?” I asked, and then I heard a series of shots from the trees behind us. Each shot seemed to be timed.

Robert just looked at me.

Of course, he knew. . . .

And a moment later, so did I.

I found Phoebe beyond the landing strip near the cover of trees and brush. Facemask and goggles hid most of her perfect face . . . it was as if someone else was committing the terrible deed.

“Stop!” I shouted, my voice muffled by my own gas mask.

Phoebe looked up at me blankly, raised her rifle reflexively toward my chest . . . and I felt strong arms lift me into the air as my own rifle clattered to the ground.

Isaac—the slave who had been my “bodyguard”—didn’t relax his hold on me, even while Phoebe calmly continued to execute the sleeping pilots.

TEN

“I can’t believe that she has received any of my messages,” I said.

Robert lowered his great wrinkled head and said, “All you have sent has been received by Miss Jefferson.” He stood before my makeshift bed in the guest library where I’d been imprisoned . . . upon Miss Jefferson’s orders.

Isaac stood by the door, his bulk taking up most of the doorway.

The north wing had survived intact, and I wondered why I was being kept here. Perhaps the other rooms, the bedrooms, had secret exits. Or perhaps Robert was right and Phoebe thought I’d keep myself occupied with her father’s books and the Steinway grand piano that sat like a great white gold-crested bird in the center of the library. I’d practiced most of the days and nights; the suppleness had returned to my fingers, and I indulged myself with Berg’s atonalities and the cloying wretchedness of Mahler’s liedei. Jefferson’s collection of leather-bound volumes and first editions were, indeed, glorious, and it had taken me two weeks to replace the books back on the shelves in alphabetical order. It was as if an earthquake had struck the chateau, or what remained of it.

“Will there be anything else you wish this morning, Mr. Orsatti?” Robert asked. “A bath, perhaps . . .? I’ve laid out your clothes, just in case.” He bowed and smiled condescendingly.

“Just in case of what?” I asked.

“Why, in case you might wish to change, sir.”

I waved him away. The door clicked shut, the key turned in the lock, and I was alone. I had not shaved, nor bathed. My hair needed trimming, my pajamas smelled as sour as my breath, and I was wallowing in self-pity. I didn’t feel like reading, studying, or even playing, which was most unusual. Instead I mused on the possibilities of escape. I had tried everything I could think of, from picking the door lock (impossible!), to working the bars loose on the high windows, to holding Robert hostage—but somehow the old servant had managed to break two of my ribs before Isaac overpowered me—and all I had accomplished trying to get past the bars was to break the window glass.

So Robert had won, and I had lost.

We both knew that he was not my servant. But I was certainly his prisoner.

To add insult to injury, it was yet another magnificent morning. Golden sunlight poured in from the gardens, and the grounds were alive with hammering and shouting and the grinding and creaking and groaning of heavy machinery. The chateau was being repaired . . . rebuilt, and I had been imprisoned in this room for almost two months.

At least when I was in the Pit I had had company. . . .

I padded back and forth barefoot on the Persian carpets. I examined Jefferson’s astonishing collection of Greek vases that were secured to the hand-carved bookcases in case there might be an earthquake. Well, there was an earthquake, and it originated in the skies! I plonked my fingers over the keys as I passed the piano. I took a bit of toast and bacon from the silver tray Isaac had laid on an overly ornate gilt bronze table designed by Pelagio Palagi. I picked up my rose porcelain coffee cup and paced.

I had ruined everything. . . .

No, Phoebe had ruined everything.

I wolfed down breakfast and swore once again that if Phoebe ever had the gall to come anywhere near me, I would—

There was a light tapping on the door.

I knew who it was. I knew. . . .

“Go away.”

A key turned in the lock, the doorknob turned, and the door groaned open. Phoebe stood in the doorway, looking small, uncertain, and breathtakingly lovely. She wore a simple pleated blue skirt with a white pullover. Her blond hair was pulled back, rolled, and tied with a golden ribbon that was the same color as the gilded trefoil arches over my prison bar windows. She stepped into the room, leaving the door ajar. Her face colored as she looked at me. She lowered her eyes, then, as if catching herself, looked directly at me.

“Where are your bodyguards?” I asked, more harshly than I’d anticipated. “Surely they’re waiting in the hall in case I try something funny.”

“What could you try that would be funny?” she asked in a low voice, and for only an instant, there was merriment in her eyes, which were bright, as though she’d been crying.

“What do you want?”

“What do you think . . .?”

“Don’t answer my question with a question. You at least owe me an explanation. I’ve been in here for . . . months.”

“I don’t owe anybody an explanation, and you’ve only been here for five weeks and a day,” she said, then looked down at the carpet again. “I’m sorry, Paul. I’m getting this all wrong. . . .”

“What are you talking about?” I asked, sitting down on the end of the long gold brocade couch. My eggs were glassy-looking in the plate on the table before me. My coffee was cold, but I drank it anyway; I felt awkward, as I always did around her, and I needed something to do with my hands. After the coffee, I lit a cigarette, and Phoebe asked if she could have one, too. She bent over me while I lit her cigarette, and I could smell her perfume, see the light in her hair, and I caught my breath.

“Please don’t be angry with me,” she said, standing behind the table, as though afraid to sit down beside me. I gestured her to do so, but she stood her ground, closed her eyes for a beat, then said, as if reciting, “I had no choice but. . . . No, that’s no good. None of it’s any good.” Then she sat down and against all my better judgment, I was caught by her . . . again. But she didn’t seem to know. Her eyes filled with tears and she said, “How you must hate me.”

I moved toward her, then caught myself. “I don’t hate you.”

“Yes, you do. I remember how you looked at me. I’ll never forget the horror and disgust on your face. I—”

I didn’t say anything.

“But I have to live with what I’ve done. Somehow. . . .”

I could only nod.

“I’ve tried to come up with a way to tell you, to explain. Every day I prepared a speech, but I . . . I just couldn’t.”

“So you just left me here to rot.”

“I told Robert to look after you.”

“You know what that means,” I said.

She nodded, and I saw that she had used too much rouge on her cheeks to give her color; her perfect, dimpled face looked strained, and I detected worry lines on the corners of her pale blue eyes. “I know . . . I was selfish, but I couldn’t think. I didn’t want to lose you, so I—”

“Yes, Phoebe, we know what you did. Now what do you want to tell me?” Those words sounded cruel, even to my ears, and I regretted them immediately. Foolishly, stupidly, impossibly, I didn’t want to lose her. It didn’t matter what she had done.

Too late. She stood up, as if I had slapped her. “Yes, of course, you’re right.”

“What do you want to tell me?” I asked quickly, and I found myself standing also.

“I want to tell you that . . . I don’t know. I can’t do it now. It was a terrible mistake—” and she turned to run out the door.

I caught her, held her close, and although her breath was ragged, she didn’t cry. She stiffened, then rested her face against mine and said, “All right, I can tell you now. I don’t regret killing those men. I didn’t then. I don’t now. I know I was wrong, I know I’ll burn in hell forever, God forgive me, but they murdered Momma. I couldn’t help it. It was like someone else was killing them, even while I was doing it. Maybe it was because I found out about Father, maybe—”

“What about your father?” I asked.

She pulled away from me and sat back down on the couch. She took a puff on her cigarette, which was still burning in the ashtray, as was mine. The smoke roiled in the sunlight like clouds, or gas. “I’ll tell you everything, but I need to know. . . .”

“What . . .?”

“I know you can’t forgive me, but will you listen?”

“Yes, I just told you that.”

“I’ll tell you everything,” Phoebe repeated, “but. . . .”

“But what?” I asked.

She shook her head, and tears stained her makeup. Then she straightened up, composed herself, and said, “I kept you here because I love you. Selfishly. I knew you’d try to escape. I was even going to give you a choice. I was going to ask you whether you’d rather go back down to the Pit to be with your friends.” She laughed, puffed her cigarette, and smashed it out in the ashtray.

“But you weren’t going to let me be your confidant and stay with you.”

“I . . . I needed time to—”

Instead of listening, I went on, caught up in my own anger. “And you certainly weren’t going to let me leave the mountain.”

“No,” she said. “I’m crazy about you, but I’m not stupid. God help me, I’m my father’s daughter.” Before I could say anything, she continued. “I had to work things out. I told you . . . I needed time.”

“You could have come to me anytime,” I said.

She nodded. “I’ve tried . . . every single day. I guess I can now. Now that Father is back.”

I felt a chill tickle down my spine. It was over. All over. If Jefferson was back in charge, he’d figure a way to dispose of me sooner rather than later . . . once he got around Phoebe. Or perhaps he wouldn’t even have to do that.

“No, Paul, you don’t understand,” Phoebe said. “Will you come with me? And then you can decide.”

“Decide what?” I asked. “Whether to stay up here or go back to the Pit?”

But Phoebe was waiting for me at the door . . . as were Robert and Isaac.

I must have been favoring my right side a bit as we walked because Phoebe asked me what was the matter. I glanced at Robert, then asked, “Didn’t he tell you?”

“Tell me what?” Phoebe asked.

“Ask him.”

“Well, Robert . . .?”

He started talking to her in dialect, but I interrupted. “In English, Robert.”

So Robert explained that he had broken my ribs—by mistake—and Phoebe dismissed him then and there. Isaac, however, was retained, presumably to guard me from Phoebe. I couldn’t help gloating, and defended Robert as my servant.

“You see, you’re learning,” Phoebe said to me as we climbed the servants’ staircase to the third floor. She unlocked the door to old man Jefferson’s bedroom and study, which was surprisingly modest . . . except for the wildly ornate Spanish ceiling crafted from gilded wood and an eighteenth-century bed with a satin canopy and matching bedspread. There was a simple desk and cushioned chair beside the bed, a small fireplace that needed cleaning, and family portraits on the walls. The desk was piled with papers and an odd mechanism that seemed to sit on the desk but was supported by what looked like a drainpipe that disappeared into the floor. There were folders on the floor around the desk and the pipe, along with women’s underclothing and various scattered skirts and dresses. Obviously Phoebe’s. “I’ve taken Poppa’s room,” she continued. “It’s a bit messy, but that’s because I won’t allow the servants in here.” With that she pushed the door closed on Isaac. “You see, now I’m alone with you and at your mercy.”

I nodded and she apologized.

“No need,” I said, but she had already forgotten and was rummaging for something in the covers of her bed.

“Here they are,” she said, finding what she was looking for: a large envelope containing photographs of her father and a dark-haired, finely featured girl. “You see, she’s younger than me. Can you beat that? It’s the bunk. The fucking bunk.”

I was surprised, as I’d never heard Phoebe swear before, but she just glared at those photographs and blinked back tears.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“Poppa’s whore, that’s who she is. Mother’s dead because of her. Poppa promised that he’d make her a film star. Here, look for yourself,” and she took a handful of letters from the desk and practically threw them at me.

“Easy,” I said. “I’m not the enemy.”

“Maybe you are . . . maybe you aren’t. We’ll see, won’t we?”

As I glanced at the embarrassingly fraught yet boastful love letters, Phoebe continued. “Her name is Greta Gustafsson, but Poppa changed her name to Garbo because he thought Gustafsson sounded like it could be a Jew name, although anybody would know it was Scandinavian. And he hired his pervert friend Mauritz Stiller to pimp for her. Do you know who he is?”

I confessed I didn’t.

“He made that sex film Erotikon back in 1920.”

I shrugged.

“Poppa showed it to me in the theater. He laughed all the way through it. It wasn’t that bad, I suppose, but it was trash. Like her.” Phoebe took the photographs from me. “Well, her career is down the drain. I’ve seen to that.”

“What have you done?”

“Taken Poppa back, the filthy snake in the grass double-crossing, double-dealing—”

“Phoebe. . . .”

She hunched over the bed and wept. “He murdered Mother and sold us out. The dirty bastard.” Then she shook her head, tried to smile at me, and said, “I found it all out from Uncle George.”

“Uncle George?” I asked. “He’s crazy . . . and he’s in the Pit.”

“He knows more than you think. He’s got ways of knowing everything, and the slaves trust him. It was Robert who passed on his messages, and because of you, I’ve probably lost a good slave forever.”

“Because of me?”

“Well, slave or not, he shouldn’t’ve broken your ribs and treated you like a bump.”

“Phoebe, about your father?”

“He sold us all out. He brought in the planes and the bombs and the gunfire. After he changed his name and converted most of the money.”

“I can’t believe he’d do all that, just for a little bit of cheesecake.”

“It was getting too dangerous to keep the mountain,” Phoebe said. “Uncle George explained it all to me. It was so simple. Father allowed that pilot to get away from us, or could have allowed it, anyway. Once the mountain was found out, then the market for diamonds would crash, which is why Poppa started putting his money into . . . radium. Now he thought that would be perfectly safe, but he was wrong about that, too.” She paused and stared at the contraption on the desk. “Poppa thought of most everything, I’ve got to hand him that. He’d even made sure that two of the aviators who tried to invade us were reporters, just to make certain that the word got out properly.”

“It doesn’t make sense that he would give up everything,” I said.

“Did you read those letters?”

“Still. . . .”

“And he wasn’t giving up hardly anything. Only us. He’d end up with more money than he had, once the government clamped down on the diamond market, which Uncle George says would certainly happen. Poppa has hidden diamonds everywhere you could imagine.”

“I can’t imagine he’d harm his family. And family tradition was so important to him.”

She chuckled. “So was his freedom, and he figured that we’d be let off. He probably also figured we’d all be safe in the bunkers. But he knew Mother wouldn’t go to the bunker because of her claustrophobia. He knew that, and he killed her just as sure as if he pulled the trigger.”

“But he came back,” I said.

“Yes, Paul. I brought him back.”

“How?”

“Uncle George. He knows everything Poppa knows. He and I . . . became Poppa, and used the slaves and his contacts to chase him down. We caught him buck naked with his mistress. I’ve got more photographs, but Uncle George is against letting the press have them.”

“I should imagine he would be.”

“And so am I . . . of course.”

I nodded and watched her walk over to the desk and adjust the contraption.

“Come here, Paul, and I’ll show you how Poppa kept an eye on everything.”

I followed her to the desk, and she turned a switch that engaged gears below us—I could hear them shift. She directed me to look into the concave glass that covered the large pipe. For an instant everything looked ghostly and smeary, as if I were gazing at a crystal ball, and then my eyes grew accustomed to the images. I was looking into a room lit by uniform light. Looking down. Looking at Randolph Estes Jefferson, the old man himself. God.

“Can you see him?” Phoebe asked.

I nodded, fascinated. The room looked slightly askew, curved somehow, as if the edges were being pulled upward.

“It’s hard to see sometimes.”

“What’s he doing?” I asked. He seemed to be kneeling beside his bed, except the bed was transparent as a diamond.

“That’s the biggest diamond in the world . . . except for the mountain, of course,” Phoebe said.

“Is he praying to it?”

Phoebe laughed mirthlessly. “He asked to have it sent down. It was all he wanted.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it’s perfect,” Phoebe said. “Poppa has had I don’t know how many diamond cutters working on it. They’re all in the tunnels.”

“You mean they’re dead,” I said.

She nodded.

I gazed at the stone, which seemed to be suffused with blue light.

“He calls it God’s Blue, and I don’t know what he’s doing with it now. I eavesdropped on him when I first sent it down. He tried making some sort of deal with God. If God would turn everything around like it was before he left, he would give up all his sins and build God a diamond cathedral. Silly, but I guess he’s quite mad.” She looked at me—I could feel her staring at me—and said, “But no more mad than the rest of us, I suppose.”

“Are you just going to leave him there?” I asked.

“Until he drops dead,” Phoebe said quietly.

“Have you talked to him?”

“I’ll never speak to him again, but Uncle George visits him regularly and makes sure he eats.”

“The other men will kill him.”

“No, they can’t get to him. Poppa is perfectly safe.” After a pause, Phoebe asked if I wanted to say hello to Uncle George. She turned one switch on and another off and said, “Hello, Uncle George.”

I could see Uncle George looking straight up at us. He had been fiddling with his trains, which were all speeding around the miniature countryside with great electrical abandon.

“Hello, Phoebe.”

“He can’t see us,” Phoebe said.

“Phoebe . . . are you there?” George asked.

“Yes, I’m here, and so is Paul Orsatti.”

“Aha, so you’ve finally gotten up the courage to pop the question.”

“Not yet, Uncle George,” Phoebe said.

“Ah . . .? So why then are you calling me?”

“To ask you to come up and help us.”

“You’re doing just fine, Phoebe,” George said. “You don’t need me up there. You’ve got Paul. . . . Hi, Paul.”

“Hi, George,” I said.

“No, I had more than enough of ‘up there’ when I was up there. Now stop watching me walk around in my underwear and fix things up with Paul. Bye, Paul.”

“Bye, George,” I said.

Phoebe clicked off the contraption.

“Well?” I asked. “What did George mean about popping the question?”

“What do you think he meant?”

“Stop it, Phoebe, and answer me.”

“It’s just what you probably think.” She looked intently at the carpet and whispered, “Do you want to marry me?”

I was going to say yes immediately, but something caught in my throat. I wanted to rush to her, envelop her in my arms, and protect her. She was the pearl beyond price, the object of my desire. She looked perfect standing before me, her ribbon golden in the sunlight streaming through arched windows, her face flawless; and yet suddenly she seemed . . . flat, featureless like the denizens of dreams, dangerous creatures that suddenly appear, that look familiar, but are something else entirely.

Phoebe looked pale and white and fragile. She looked up at me and said, “You see . . .? There, I have your answer.”

“I haven’t said anything yet.”

“Which says it all, doesn’t it.”

“No,” I said. “I love you.”

“But. . . .”

“No buts.”

“Then you’ll marry me . . .?”

I nodded and started to move toward her, but she took a step backward.

“And you’d be willing to live here?” she asked.

“You mean as a prisoner?”

“No, as my husband.”

“Would I be a prisoner?”

“You would be my husband,” she said; and I felt a thrill of possibility . . . that I would be with her, but more than that . . . that I could change things, I could—

“And as my husband, you would respect the way things are,” Phoebe said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“The way we live . . . the way we are.”

“Of course, but we can make things better.”

She looked away from me, as if considering. Then she said, “We will make things better. It’s already happening. I’m rebuilding everything Poppa and those pilots destroyed. I hate pilots—except for you, darling.” She smiled at me, as though I had provided her with all the answers. “We could make everything ever so much better. Poppa didn’t think smart enough. We’ll camouflage everything, so even if planes fly overhead, they won’t see anything but rocks. Of course, it won’t be rocks.” She hugged me and said, “You’re brilliant. I’ll tell Uncle George about your idea, and he’ll figure out how to do it. He won’t want to stay down there in the Pit anymore. He loves to solve problems. . . .”

Phoebe must have seen something register on my face because she stopped talking and gave me a quizzical look. “But that wasn’t what you meant, was it? So who do you want to make things better for?” she demanded. “The servants? The prisoners in the Pit?”

“Both, for a start.” I understood then that this mountain was the only thing that was real for Phoebe. She would never leave it for very long . . . or change it.

Her eyes suddenly became moist. “Poppa told me you’d be as selfish and greedy as all the rest of them.” She turned away from me and walked out the door.

And I realized that I still loved her more than ever.

Eleven

I shouted “Pung” and concentrated on our game of mah-jongg while Uncle George’s Lionel trains steamed and clattered around us. George was a good player . . . and he’d assured me that Phoebe would probably take me back once I saw the light of reason.

It was simply a matter of time . . . and conscience.

MAY BE SOME TIME

Brenda W. Clough

Some explorers wind up in terra much more incognita than they anticipated!

From Scott’s last expedition by Robert Falcon Scott:

Friday, March 16, or Saturday, 17 [1912]. Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all down the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn’t go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping bag. That we could not do, and we induced him to come on, on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come.

Should this be found I want these facts recorded . . . We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not—would not—give up hope till the very end . . . He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning—yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” He went out into the blizzard and we have not seen him since . . . We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death, but though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet the end with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far.

It’s said that death from exposure is like slipping into warm sleep. Briefly, Titus Oates wondered what totty-headed pillock had first told that whisker. He no longer remembered what warmth was. He had endured too many futile hopes and broken dreams to look for an easy end now. Every step was like treading on razors, calling for a grim effort of will. Nevertheless without hesitating he hobbled on into the teeth of the storm. He did not look back. He knew the Polar Expedition’s tent was already invisible behind him.

Finer than sand, the wind-driven snow scoured over his clenched eyelids, clogging nose and mouth. The cold drove ferocious spikes deep into his temples, and gnawed at the raw frostbite wounds on brow and nose and lip. Surely it was folly to continue to huddle into his threadbare windproof. What if he flung all resistance aside, and surrendered himself to the wailing Antarctic blizzard? Suddenly he yearned to dance, free of the weighty mitts and clothing. To embrace death and waltz away!

He had left his finnesko behind. Gangrene had swollen his frozen feet to the size of melons, the ominous black streaks stealing up past the ankles nearly to the knee. Yesterday it had taken hours to coax the fur boots on. Today he had not bothered. Now his woolen sock caught on something. Excruciating pain jolted his frozen foot, suppurating from the stinking black wounds where the toes used to be. Too weak to help himself, he stumbled forward. His crippled hands, bundled in the dogskin mitts, groped to break his fall. They touched nothing. He seemed to fall and fall, a slow endless drop into blank whiteness.

And it was true! A delicious warmth lapped him round like a blanket. Tears of relief and joy crept down his starveling cheeks and burnt in the frost fissures. He was being carried, warm and safe. Rock of Ages, cleft for me!

For a very long time he lay resting, not moving a muscle. Stillness is the very stuff of Heaven, when a man has marched nearly two thousand miles, hauling a half-tonne load miles a day for months, across the Barrier ice, up the Beardmore Glacier, to the South Pole and back. He slept, and when he wasn’t actually asleep he was inert.

But after some unknowable time Titus slowly came to awareness again. He felt obscurely indignant, cheated of a just due. Wasn’t Heaven supposed to be a place of eternal rest? He’d write a letter to the Times about it . . .

“Maybe just a touch more?” one of the celestial host suggested, in distinctly American accents. Silly on the face of it, his unanalyzed assumption that all the denizens of Heaven were British . . .

“No, let’s see how he does on four cc. How’s the urine output?”

Shocked, Titus opened his eyes and looked down at himself. He was lying down, clothed in a pure white robe, all correct and as advertised. But were those a pair of angels lifting the hem? He used the drill-sergeant rasp he had picked up in the Army. “What the hell are you at?”

Both angels started horribly. Something metallic slipped from a heavenly hand and landed with a clatter on the shiny-clean floor. A beautiful angel with long black hair stared down at him, sea-blue eyes wide as saucers. “Oh my God. Oh my God, Shell! Look at this—he’s conscious! Piotr will be like a dog with two tails!”

“Damn it, now the meter’s gone.”

As the other angel stooped nearer to pick up her tool, Titus stared at her face. It was tanned but flushed with irritation. The nose had freckles. She wore huge coppery hoop earrings, and her short curly hair was dull blonde, almost mousy. “You,” Titus stated with conviction, “are not an angel.”

The happy angel—no, blister it, a woman!—exclaimed. “An angel, Shell, did you hear that? He called you an angel.”

“He did not! Don’t you ever listen, Sabrina? He just said I was not an angel.”

“This isn’t the afterlife,” Titus pursued doggedly. “Am I even dead?”

“Shell, this what we have you for. Hit it, quick!”

The irritable angel elbowed her companion into silence and spoke, clear and slow. “No, Captain Oates, you are not dead. We are doctors. I am Dr. Shell Gedeon, and this is Dr. Sabrina Trask. You are safe here, under our care.”

Titus could hardly take her words in. His mind hared off after irrelevancies. He wanted to retort, “Stuff and nonsense! Women can’t be doctors. They don’t have the intellect!” But he clung to the important questions: “What about my team? Bowers, Wilson, Scott: Are they safe too?”

Dr. Trask drew in a breath, glancing at her colleague. Dr. Gedeon’s voice was calm. “Let’s stop the drip now, why don’t we?”

“Excellent idea. If you’ll pass me that swab . . .”

“They are all right, aren’t they?” Titus demanded. “You rescued me, and you rescued them.” The doctors didn’t look round, fiddling with their mysterious instruments. “Aren’t they?”

He wanted to leap up and search for his friends, or shake the truth out of these fake ministering angels, these impossible doctors. But a wave of warm melting sleep poured over him, soft as feathers, inexorable as winter, and he floated away on its downy tide.

Again when he woke he was met with pleasure: smooth sheets and a cool clean pillow. No reindeer-skin sleeping bag, no stink of horsemeat hoosh and unwashed men! He lay tasting the delicious sleek linen with every nerve and pore. How very strange to be so comfortable. His gangrened feet no longer hurt even where the covers rested on them. Double amputation above the knee, probably—the only treatment that could have saved his life. He had become reconciled to the idea of footlessness. Lazily he reached down the length of his leg with one hand to explore the stump.

The shock of touching his foot went all through his body, a galvanic impulse that jerked him upright. He flung back the covers and stared. His feet down to the toes were all present and accounted for, pink and clean and healthy. Even the toenails were just as they used to be, horn-yellow, thick and curved like vestigial hooves, instead of rotten-black and squelching to the touch. He wiggled the toes and flexed each foot with both hands, not trusting the evidence of eyes alone. It was undeniable. Somehow he had been restored, completely healed.

He examined the rest of himself. At the end, in spite of the dogskin mitts, his fingers had been blistered with frost-bite to the colour and size of rotten bananas. Then the fluid in the blisters had frozen hard, until the least motion made the tormented joints crunch and grate as if they were stuffed with pebbles. Now his fingers were right as ninepence, flexing with painless ease: long, strong and sensitive, a horseman’s hands.

The constant stab from the old would in his thigh, grown unbearable from so much sledging, was gone. He leaped to his feet, staggering as the blood rushed dizzily away from his head. He sat for a moment until the vertigo passed, and then rose again to put his full weight on his left leg. Not so much as a twinge! He was clad in ordinary pajamas, white and brown striped, and he slid the pants down. The ugly twisted scar on his thigh had opened up under the stress of malnutrition and overwork, until one would think the Boers shot him last week instead of in 1901. Now there was not a mark to be seen or felt, however closely he peered at the skin. Most wondrous of all, both legs were now the same length. The army doctors had promised that with the left set an inch shorter than the right, he would limp for the rest of his life.

He had to nerve himself before running a hand down his face. Such a natural action, but the last time he’d tried it the conjunction of blistered fingers and frozen dead-yellow nose had been a double agony so intense the sparks had swum in his eyes. But now it didn’t hurt at all. His nose felt normal, the strong, straight Roman bridge no longer swollen like a beet-root. No black oozy frostbite sores, but only a rasp of bristle on his cheek. Even the earlobes—he was certain he’d left those behind on the Polar plateau! Incredulous, he looked round the room for a glass.

It was a small plain chamber, furnished with nothing but the bed and a chair. But there was a narrow window. He leaned on the sill, angling to glimpse his ghostly reflection in the pane. He ran his tongue over his teeth, firmly fixed again and no longer bleeding at the gums. His brown eyes were melancholy under the deep straight arch of brow bone, and his dark hair was shorn in an ordinary short-back-and-sides.

Suddenly he saw not the glass but through it, beyond and down. He leaned his forehead on the cool pane, smearing it with a sudden sweat. He was high, high up. Below was a city the like of which he had never seen, spread from horizon to horizon in the golden slanted light of either dawn or sunset. Buildings spangled with lights, gleaming in sheaths of glass, reared mountain-high. His own little window was thousands of feet up, far higher than the dome of St. Paul’s even. Far below, vastly foreshortened, people scurried along the pavements. Shiny metal bugs teemed the ways and flitted through the skies.

“This isn’t London.” His voice had a shameful quaver. He forced himself to go on, to prove he could master it. “Nor Cairo. Nor Bombay . . .”

“You are in New York City, Captain Oates. As you will have observed, you have traveled in both space and time. This is the year of our Lord 2045.”

Titus turned slowly. Though every word was plain English, he could hardly take in what the man was saying. With difficulty he said the first thing that came into his head: “Who the devil are you?”

Unoffended, the slim fair man smiled, revealing large perfect teeth. “I am Dr. Kevin Lash. And I’m here to help you adjust to life in the 21st century. We’re connected, in a distant sort of way. My three-times great-grandmother was Mabel Beardsley, sister of the artist, Aubrey Beardsley. You may know her as a friend of Kathleen Scott.”

“The Owner’s wife.” Titus grasped at this tenuous connection to the familiar. “Then—you’re an Englishman!”

Dr. Lash continued to smile. “I was born in America, but yes, I’m of English extraction. Insofar as several generations of the melting pot have left me with any claim to . . .”

Titus crossed the room in a bound. He wrung Dr. Lash’s slender hand as if he were his best friend in the world. In a sense this was true. The doctor was his only friend. Titus’s inner turmoil was such that he only belatedly realized the doctor was continuing to talk. “Sorry—I’m afraid I didn’t catch what you were saying. It’s all quite a lot to take in.”

“Absolutely, I don’t doubt it.” With an amiable nod, Dr. Lash sat down in the chair and waved Titus towards the bed. “A very natural reaction, given the tremendous change in your circumstances. I was outlining your schedule for the next day or so . . .”

And Titus was off and away again, sucked into an interlocking series of irrelevancies. It was stress, the alien environment all around, that made it so hard to concentrate. But recognizing why didn’t help him focus any better. This time it was Dr. Lash’s pronunciation that set Titus off: “schedule.” Titus himself would have said “shed-jool.” But Dr. Lash used “sked-jool,” the American pronunciation. Indeed every word, his every tone and posture and gesture, spoke of the United States. So it must be true. “Damn it! Sorry—I’m trying to attend, believe me. But I keep going blah. My head’s full of cotton wool.”

Still unoffended, Dr. Lash smiled. “Not at all, Captain. I’d be happy to repeat or amplify anything you haven’t quite grasped. I was giving you a quick outline of time as our theories suggest it applies in temporal travel. No man is an island, you know . . .”

Complete unto himself, Titus finished for him silently. So Lash was a man of education—must be, if he was a doctor. A doctor of what? Those two women, the sham angels, had obviously been medical-type doctors. But curse it, he had to listen!

Lash was saying, “. . . the tiniest change can have an incalculable impact. The death or life of an insect, a microbe even, may not be inconsiderable. Nothing can be plucked casually from the past, for fear of accidentally revising the world . . .”

The past? But of course. If this was the year 2045, then 1912 was long ago. “Is it possible to go back?” he interrupted.

“What, you, you mean? Return to the place and time you left? I believe it is impossible, Captain. But you would not wish it—to return and freeze to death in Antarctica? That was another subject of debate: the moral dimension of what we were attempting. It would be surely wrong to wrench away some poor fellow with a life ahead of him, family and friends . . .”

My family, Titus thought. Mother, Lilian, Violet, Bryan. My friends. I will never see them again. They might as well be dead. No—they are dead. Died years ago.

“. . . an ideal subject,” Dr. Lash was saying. “Not only are you a person rescued from a tragic death, but your removal is supremely unlikely to trigger any change in the time-stream, since your body was lost: presumed frozen solid, entombed in a glacier for eons . . .”

Titus stared down in silence at his pale bare feet. They were a little chilly now from resting so long on the uncarpeted floor, but that was all. Impossible to think of them frozen rock-hard, embalmed in eternal ice. Yet only a short time ago (or was it 133 years?), they were nearly so. “My team.”

Interrupted in mid-discourse, Dr. Lash said, “I beg your pardon?”

“The others. Scott, Wilson, Bowers. Did you rescue them too?”

“Ah . . . no.”

“Then they made it. They got back to the depot, back home!”

Dr. Lash’s copious flow of words seemed to be suffering a momentary blockage. “No.”

Titus sat silent, his shoulders bowed. So his companions too had died. Had it all been for nothing then, all their work and sacrifice and heroism? “Why did you save only me, then?”

“Remember, Captain,” Dr. Lash said patiently. “You are unique. Your body was never found.”

“Just as well, since it was here. I’m here.” He grappled with slippery verb tenses. “This is the future. You must have histories, newspapers. Records of Scott’s Polar Expedition.”

“And you shall see them. But, if I may make a suggestion, not today. You should recover your strength a little. The doctors have further tests—”

Titus growled in disgust. “No more doctors! Now!”

“Tomorrow,” Dr. Lash promised. “Tomorrow I’ll get the books. As you can see, it’s already evening. Not the time to start a new project.”

Titus stood to look out the window. Only the closest observation revealed that night had fallen. The city outside glowed and throbbed like a gala ballroom, its lights smearing the dark sky, blotting out stars and moon. So beautiful and strange!

“. . . a good night’s sleep.” Dr. Lash was getting to his feet. “And breakfast. I’ve tried to have food that isn’t too strange for you . . .”

Titus hardly noticed the doctor’s departure. The moving lights outside held him. The soaring and darting small sparks must be the metal bugs of before, lit for night work. Presumably behind every glowing window were people working and living. There must be thousands, millions of them. By night or by day the city was alive. He leaned his ear to the cold glass and heard its murmur, a dull continuous roar.

He realized he wanted nothing to do with it. This strange monstrous city was far more foreign than the Antarctic ice. The thought came to him that this was all delirium, the final flicker of phantasy in the brain of a dying man already half-buried in blizzard-drift. It wasn’t even a delusion he enjoyed! A tremendous hollow longing for home filled him, for England, his family and friends, anything familiar. And there was nothing left to him now, except perhaps his own renewed body. At least this was as it had always been. He climbed back into bed and hugged himself, curled under the covers, diving into sleep’s reprieve.

With the morning, Titus’s courage rose again. No point in going into a funk, he told himself. I coaxed those damned ponies halfway to the Pole. I have the sand to cope with the future.

The breakfast Dr. Lash had promised did a great deal to restore his strength of mind—streaky bacon, odd toasted bready rounds, and buttered eggs. The tea in the flask was cat-lap, brewed with water that had come off the boil, and he could not identify the fruit from which the juice had been squeezed. But there was plenty of everything, a heaped plate on the little serving trolley and additional servings on the shelf below under covers to keep them hot. After months of short commons, the sight of so much food made him weak at the knees.

When Drs. Lash, Gedeon and Trask came in, Titus was mopping the plates clean with the last crust of bread. “Where are you putting it all?” Dr. Gedeon said, watching. “It’s been a long time since your last decent meal.”

Dr. Lash blinked in alarm. “Gently there, Shell. I’m trying not to confront him with too much just yet.”

Dr. Trask fished a stethoscope out of her pocket, hung it round her neck by the ear pieces, and beamed upon him as if she were offering him a splendid gift. “I’m going to check you over, Captain.”

Grudgingly he allowed her to listen to his heart, and look into his eyes and ears with a shiny metal instrument. She did other mysterious tasks too, with rubber tubes and bits, or holding little tools that blinked or flashed colors against his arms and legs. “Physically OK,” she pronounced at last. “He was strong as an elephant in the first place, to survive what he went through. So he had a good foundation to build on.”

“And you always do good work, Sabrina,” Dr. Gedeon said. “What about his mental and cognitive recovery, Kev?”

“Well, yesterday we weren’t quite ourselves, were we, Captain?” Dr. Lash said. “But at his suggestion—his insistence, in fact—I have a simple test all prepared.”

“All that historical stuff? Don’t tell me you want to teach him to surf the net.”

“Of course not—the books will be plenty.” Dr. Lash pushed the serving trolley out into the hall, and returned immediately with a different cart, loaded with several dozen books of all sizes. “Captain, you asked about the fate of your friends. As you can see, there’s quite a lot of literature on the subject. Also, in preparation for your reception I had much of the archival material, the articles and so on, transferred to hard copy last year—forgive me, I should say printed out onto paper and fastened together into these makeshift volumes.”

“These?” Tentatively, Titus touched a stack of weird shiny books. “Are they glass?”

Dr. Trask smiled, but Dr. Gedeon said, “Titus—is it all right to call you Titus? I’m going to teach you one of the most important terms of this modern age. No, hush up, Kev—you have to give the poor man a few tools to handle his environment. These floppy covers are plastic. So is this binding on the spine. Plastic—remember that word.”

“But the pages inside are plain old paper, just like in your day,” Dr. Lash added.

Titus picked up the top book. The slick but stiff substance—plastic!—of the cover slipped in his unaccustomed fingers. The book flopped open in its fall to the coverlet, and he looked down at it into the photograph of a familiar face: Dr. Edward Wilson, his hands in their mitts akimbo on the ski poles, grinning into the camera from under the rolled brim of his sledging cap as if death could never touch him. “Uncle Bill,” he said, stunned.

“We know he was your friend,” Dr. Gedeon said softly.

Dr. Lash sat down on the bed beside him. “Keep in mind though, Titus, that you’ve traveled. Even if all had gone well with your expedition, he would be long deceased. Your loss is no less. But it’s inevitable, a natural progression.”

Titus seized a less strange volume, a fat grey book titled Scott’s Antarctic Expedition. More ferocious than the need for food, the thirst for his past was suddenly overwhelming, parching his mouth. “For God’s sake, leave me alone and let me read!”

“You wouldn’t prefer to have me present, to answer any questions?”

“No—please! Go away!”

“Come on, Kev.” Dr. Gedeon jerked her blonde head at the door. “Leave him in peace.”

“We can come back in a while,” Dr. Trask said.

Reluctantly Dr. Lash allowed himself to be drawn away in a trail of discourse. “During this initial adjustment period I think that slow progress is the ideal . . .” And mercifully they were gone.

The books, the proper ones, were antiques. Everything about them proclaimed it, their smell of yellowy paper and dust, the alarming crack of their spines when Titus opened them, the flakes of brittle glue that sprinkled his pyjama lap. A film of fine greyish grime coated the top edges of the pages and came off on his fingers. How terrifying then, to see the photographs he remembered posing for only months ago! These men, that pony, those dogs: they weren’t old. How could they be, when the memory was so new? But the books belied him.

And it was a jolt to glance at the text and realize that he was reading excerpts from Scott’s personal diary. The Owner was—had been—a meticulous diarist, but the volumes were of course private. Titus flushed with embarrassment, to thus pry into a comrade’s innermost thoughts. But here they were, all the juicy tidbits printed in a book, and an old one at that. Everything in them was common knowledge, public property for more than a century. Titus had kept journals himself, sent letters home, written to family and friends. He gulped, wondering now if they were printed here too. Figures of history have no privacy.

But enough shilly-shallying! He paged rapidly through the book, skimming along the months and days. The journey to lay One-Ton Depot; daily life in the camp; the Polar trek; a photograph of Roald Amundsen and his team standing bareheaded before the Norwegian flag at the Pole. Titus glowered at it and turned the page. Towards the last he had lost track of the days, but Wilson or Scott would have kept good count.

And here it was. Titus bent over the book, scarcely aware of the chilly floor or the crick in his neck. The end of the story at last: eleven miles short of the depot, Scott and Wilson and Bowers had frozen and starved to death. Titus exhaled a long silent breath. The unfairness of it, the waste! The print blurred as his eyes filled.

This is history, he reminded himself. It’s over, long over, poor devils! But his heart refused to go along with it. Suddenly the coolness of the room seemed malevolent. He piled the pillows up at the head of the bed and sat against them, armoured in covers pulled up round his chest, to read—to dive into the books that held all that remained of his world.

He devoured them, the different journals—the egotists, had every member of the expedition published his journal?—the scholarly analyses, the biography of Amundsen, the biographies of Scott. When he had read them all, he looked at them again and then yet again, chewing them over, extracting new meanings and significances.

He noticed for instance that different meanings could be wrung out of the same set of events. Scott was praised as a hero and damned as an incompetent, his expedition the last flower of the golden Edwardian afternoon or the first tremor of a collapsing empire. And the theories of why the expedition failed! There were more candidates than he would have ever imagined: deteriorating washers in the fuel tins, crocked Manchurian ponies, Wilson’s poor medical supervision, Scott’s bad decisions, even—this made him wince—his own excessive endurance and bravery.

But surely the eeriest experience of all was reading the account of his own death. Scott’s journal entry was quoted time and again. ‘Able and willing to discuss outside subjects’ ? Titus could recall nothing of it—perhaps he had muttered something about his yacht, in semi-delirium. Odd, but entirely characteristic of the Owner to find that admirable. And the paintings and memorial statuettes of himself! He turned past them, averting his eyes.

Vaguely he was aware of Dr. Lash popping in and out, talking and asking questions, of the rattle of the food trolley as it came in and went out. Titus paid none of it any mind; focused with a ferocious concentration on the past. He only looked up when a slim pale hand laid itself flat on his page. “I beg your pardon?”

“Titus, you’ve been slaving away for the entire day. Do you think you would care to quit for the night? Maybe have a meal? You have to take care of yourself—”

“Hell’s bells, man, must you hover? I’m perfectly fine!” Titus jumped to his feet and to his dismay fell head-foremost onto the food trolley. He didn’t quite faint, but the black buzzing in his eyes was curiously reminiscent of it. There was the hot oily splash of soup or gravy on his chest, a tremendous clatter of falling crockery, and over it Dr. Lash shouting for help.

He came to himself in bed once more, clean and dry in fresh pyjamas, blue and white striped this time. The female doctors were there again, the plumper blonde holding his wrist while the tall dazzling brunette directed her mysterious tools at it. “Dr.—Gedeon, is it,” he murmured. “And Dr.—Dr. Trask.”

“Oh, so you’re talking again,” Dr. Trask said. “And you remember our names, that’s a good sign.”

Dr. Gedeon scowled at the little machine in her hand. “He read all day yesterday? Wonderful. Very clever of you, Kev.”

“That’s unfair, Shell,” Dr. Lash said, tightlipped. “And the vid record will bear me out.”

“He said he felt perfectly fine,” Dr. Trask said.

“And Kev believed him. Yeah, right.” Dr. Gedeon folded up one tool and took out another. “A man whose chief claim to fame is that he committed suicide to save his team. You wouldn’t keep a Pomeranian kenneled up this way, never mind a man used to an active lifestyle—”

“I’m giving him the dignity of a rational being. You, night and day training with the Fortie team, wouldn’t realize—”

Titus lay back and let the quarrel roll over him. He didn’t grasp what the difficulty was, and didn’t much care. In the Army he had learned to hole up when the brass had a row. Instead he assessed his surroundings again. Vaguely he remembered that while he was reading the sunshine had crept across the window and faded, an entire day’s passage. And then a period of oblivion, and now the light streamed in through the glass again, a new day. Perhaps midmorning, judging from the angle of the light. The trolley stood near the bed, laden anew with covered dishes. It would be a great pity to let the meal get cold. He slid the nearest plate off the shelf onto his knees and seized a fork, suddenly famished. Would he ever get enough food again?

Dr. Lash thumped the hospital bed rail with both hands. “All right, a walk then! But let’s try to keep the chronal displacement shock at a minimum, all right? Through the park, not the streets.”

“Shell will go along, won’t you, Shell?” Dr. Trask’s brilliant blue gaze shifted to her associate. “You can fit him into your exercise routine.”

Dr. Gedeon turned to Titus, who hastily gulped down his mouthful. “Be dressed and ready at 12:30,” she said. “And make them give you a pair of decent shoes. You can’t walk in slippers in New York—there are always jerks who don’t scoop after their dogs.”

On that gnomic statement she swept out of the room. “I’d hoped to postpone this, Titus old man,” Dr. Lash said, shaking his head. “But the ladies, God bless ’em . . . Atany rate, while we fit you up with some walking shoes, we can go over a couple of routines that may ease the chronal displacement for you.”

“Don’t concern yourself,” Titus said. “How difficult could a walk be?”

Dr. Trask sighed at this, folding up her shining tools.

Titus’s cocky self-confidence only began to shake when he and Dr. Lash met Dr. Gedeon in the hall. She wore the most outré clothing he had ever seen on a female. Even the street beggars in Calcutta didn’t go about bare to above the knees. It was indecent, shocking—wrong! The only possible conclusion to draw was that the woman was a whore. If they allowed women to become doctors, surely it was not a very much further descent to let in whores? One respected doctors, but light-skirts were owed only contempt. Nothing in Shell’s demeanor seemed to allow disrespect, however. The contradictions inherent in the situation made him giddy. Suddenly Dr. Lash’s words, repeated over and over, sank in: “Don’t let it get to you. All that stuff, it’s unimportant, nothing to do with you. Let it roll off your back, like water off a duck. Accept, nod, and move on . . .”

Titus nodded at Dr. Gedeon and moved on. Dash it, there were more important things to do now. He would worry about bare knees later. Dr. Lash held the door to the stair for them. Titus followed Dr. Gedeon down and down, dozens of flights of echoing steel stairs quite empty except for themselves. “Does nobody else use this building?” he asked.

Dr. Gedeon glanced back, surprised. “Most Paticalars use the elevator—oops, sorry, Kev!”

Water off a duck, Titus said to himself. Nothing to do with me really. But he was unable to resist adding the new words to the list. Paticalar, elevator, plastic—he ought to start a notebook like the Polar scientists, and illustrate them with water-colour. “And ought I have a hat?”

“A bat?” Both moderns looked so blank, Titus immediately saw that hats were dead out of fashion. In his day a gentleman rarely stepped out of doors without some sort of head covering, summer or winter. In fact he noticed now that the entire party was free of the impedimentia an Edwardian outing would entail—no gloves or walking sticks, muffs or card-cases, hats or topees, purses or parasols. For a moment it was almost discomposing, to have nothing to fill one’s hands. But then he thought of his walks as a child, when the grown-ups had to do all the carrying, and it was deliciously freeing instead.

The stair ended at another door. Through, past a lobby beyond, and . . .

Titus felt his mouth go dry. He had stepped into a street as strange as the far side of the moon. And so damn busy! Machines he couldn’t name whizzed past, big and small, making noises he had no word for. People surged round him, hatless indeed, dressed in colourful grotesque garb and doing or eating or saying things that he could not name. Were those little machines on their heads, or merely elaborate hairdos? Were those scars on the bare legs and arms, or paint, or some attenuated garment? Strange smells assailed his nose, tempting appetite, revolting, attracting in turn. Colour and light poured over him too quickly for comprehension. And the noise! Worse than the beggars in Cairo, worse than Covent Garden market. The wail and clatter and roar of the 21st century slapped him in the face and drove all rational thought from his head.

He found he was clutching his companions, Dr. Lash on his left and Dr. Gedeon on his right, flank to flank as if they were breasting a mighty river in full flood. Somehow they passed together through the howling chaos to a haven, a refuge of calmness and green, and Titus became aware of Dr. Lash’s steady lecturing again. Apparently he had been talking all this while: “Don’t think about it. Ignore her. It’s all rolling off you. Has no effect, eh? Someday when you’re up to it you can easily figure it out. But now, today, you don’t have to . . .”

“You know,” Titus mumbled.

“Yes?”

“You know, Lash, you can be bloody damn tiresome,” Titus said, all in a breath. His vision cleared. The object in front of him was blessedly familiar. “A tree! First one I’ve seen in—” He halted, confused. Was it a year and a half, or a hundred and thirty?

“You’re feeling better,” Dr. Lash noted.

Titus nodded. The vertiginous sense of unreality seeped away fast as it had come. The vista before him now would have been familiar to a man of any era: rolling grassland studded with handsome clumps of trees. If one didn’t look beyond, at the clifflike buildings towering above the treeline, it was an environment Titus knew down in his bones. Carefully, he didn’t look. He drew a deep happy breath, eased from a constraint he had not recognized until now.

Dr. Gedeon lifted what he realized was a small rucksack from her back—he had assumed her jacket was merely cut strangely. She took out two dumbbells, saying, “You want to set the pace, Kev?”

“I’m not going far,” Dr. Lash said. “My asthma will start up if I push it.”

“Let’s take the reservoir path then.” Dr. Gedeon clenched a weight in each small fist and began to walk briskly down the path. Titus and Dr. Lash followed.

An almost frightening sense of wellbeing possessed Titus. He had not felt so fit, so confident, so brimful of vigour, in ages. The dear old sun shone behind leaves as cleanly cut as paper, and birds sang with enthusiasm. A breeze blew cool and damp from the reservoir below, freighted with a slight scummy smell. Titus inhaled it like incense. He stretched his legs, striding out with long steps. Surely it would be possible to live in just the familiar bits of this new era, comforting and safe areas like this park?

Dr. Gedeon grinned at him when he caught her up, her teeth very white in her tanned face. “Great, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” Carefully he did not look down past her face. She had accurately pinpointed the medicine he needed. Perhaps she wasn’t a bogus sawbones after all.

“Hold up, you two,” Dr. Lash called. He had fallen far behind, wheezing.

Dr. Gedeon reversed course immediately. “Did you bring your inhaler?”

“Of course.” Dr. Lash appeared to be sniffing medicine from a large white tube. Concerned, Titus watched him closely. The dose did seem to help.

Dr. Gedeon said, “You’d better go straight back to the office and take an antihistamine. Shall we come back with you?”

“No, don’t bother,” Dr. Lash said. “I’ll be fine. This happens all the time,” he added to Titus.

“It shouldn’t,” Dr. Gedeon said. “You should have your condition assessed by a qualified allergist. Asthma can be a killer.”

Asthma, Titus mused—another new word. Dr. Lash brushed her concerns aside. “Keep a close eye on Titus,” he said. “Once only around the park, and then come straight back. This is his first experience, remember.”

“A walk round the park?” Titus snorted. “Don’t make me laugh, Lash.”

“I’ll take good care of him,” Dr. Gedeon said. “Now off you go.”

Only when Lash was out of sight did Titus realize how confining his fuss and mother-hen admonitions had been. Dr. Gedeon, a real medico and female to boot, had a more robust outlook, more to Titus’s taste. “I think we should run,” he said. “Fast.”

“All right. Race you to that bench!”

And she was off, surprisingly speedy in spite of a womanish rocking-horse gait that would have made a pony blush. How delightful it was to use the limbs like this! Titus made his best effort, trying to use his greater length of leg to advantage, but she beat him handily. Carrying a weight handicap, too! He felt only a moment of obscure outrage before laughter overtook him. “Bravo!”

She laughed too. “Not a real contest, against a disabled vet.”

“Ludicrous. The leg wound hasn’t bothered me in years.”

“Not till recently.”

He stared in astonishment—how could anyone know that? He had hidden the disintegrating scar even from Scott and Wilson until the very end. And he knew from the books that Scott, the last expedition member to keep records, had not mentioned it. She went on, “I watched Sabrina glue you back together again, remember? One of the symptoms of scurvy is old wounds breaking out again.”

“Whatever she did patched it up fine. I couldn’t even find the scar.”

“She’s a whiz. It was worth all the cloning work, to see you trying out your leg, and feeling your toes for the first time.”

“You saw me? But, but I was alone in my room.”

She grimaced. “Titus, you’re unique and valuable—the first and possibly last man to travel through time. And not only that—you are a patient. We’ve been monitoring you all during your recovery. You have never been alone or unobserved since you arrived.”

He remembered the shiny metal tools, the gleaming examination table cleaner than anything he had ever seen. “How long have I been here?”

“You traveled to the modern era a year and a half ago.”

He stared at the trees, trying to take her words in. For eighteen months he had been clay on the wheel, dough under the rolling pin—a chunk of inert material upon which skilled hands worked. It was a sodding liberty! And surely he could not have spent all that time flat on his back in a hospital bed. He had done that in 1901, and knew well how one’s legs became weak as string and the muscles wasted away for want of use. Now his legs were a little shaky and his skin unusually pale, but otherwise he was himself, in good working order. They must have been exercising his limbs, working and testing and using his body in ways he couldn’t conceive of, with all the conscious consent one would get from the clockwork goatherd in a Swiss cuckoo clock. Returning him to consciousness the day before yesterday was only the capstone of a major project—it was obvious in retrospect that his first short encounter with the 21st century, swearing on the shiny-clean table, had been unplanned. He wondered how many people were employed on the task. The thought of unseen eyes spying on him day and night made his spine crawl. “Are they watching us now?”

“Here in the park? Well, I’m in charge, watching you, but that’s all. C’-mon, Titus, don’t let it worry you. There’s a lot for you to get used to. Here.” She took water bottles from her rucksack and, opening one, passed it over.

He drank, hefting the weird feather-weight container. “Plastic?”

She smiled. “You’re a sharp one.” He felt absurdly chuffed at this praise from a modern.

They walked on at a slower pace. The path was narrow here, crowded closer to the tall wrought-iron palings of the park fence by trees and brush. Beyond the palings was a city street. It was a quieter one, without the surging crowds and thundering vehicular traffic near the first building, but still Titus felt like a lion safe behind the zoo bars. “Are those commercial buildings?”

“Those tall ones over there, you mean? Oh, no—co-ops, I think. Damn! What I mean is, they’re residences. People live there.” He knew his face was blank with ignorance, because she waved her hands in rhythm with her stride, trying to explain. “I mean separately, not all together. Condos. Cells. Divisions.” She groped for more synonyms.

The penny dropped. “You mean, it’s a block of flats.”

“Is that what you call it? OK then!” She blew out a relieved breath. “I should’ve listened better, when Kev was going through his British-versus-American word lists with us.”

Titus smiled. “ ‘Two countries, divided by a common tongue.’ ”

“Exactly. It’s surprising how hard it can be to communicate clearly.”

“And that.” The architecture was so powerfully familiar he could hardly believe it. “A church.”

“Yep.” She peered through the railings at the signboard on the pavement across the street. “Saint Somebody’s Noontime Service. And will you look at that sermon! ‘Is God a Fortie?’ ”

Titus’s religion was nominal, no more than a tradition of his class. But the organ music pouring forth from the open doors of the church drew him in like a hooked fish. “I know that tune!” He hummed along, and then sang the words that rose unbidden from the depths of memory. “ ‘Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne . . .’ ”

Dr. Gedeon sighed. “You must be a Christian. Everybody was, back then. You want to go in, don’t you? And I’m dying to hear that sermon.”

He nodded. She found a gate, and they crossed the street, she holding him back until a gap opened in the traffic. But Titus took the lead up the steps into the dark Romanesque arch of the portico, and dragged Dr. Gedeon into the haven of the rear pew.

A number of wrongnesses immediately struck him. Electric lights dangled from the arched ceiling and spotlighted the stained glass windows—Titus could not remember ever seeing a church fitted with electricity. The windows themselves were gratingly ugly in their modernity. Uplifted in the homily, the voice of the celebrant rang jangly and loud, amplified in some uncouth modern way. The dozen members of the congregation were almost blasphemously dressed. Titus gulped down a deep breath and tried to concentrate.

“—not only are they ineffable. As Jehovah in the Old Testament had his chosen prophets, the Forties communicate through those who can understand them—in their case, the scientists and astronomers who have translated their message . . .”

Titus scowled, uncomprehending. What were the Forties—the time period, the 2040s? Dear God, what had happened to the faith of our fathers? But then the music rolled from the pipe organ, a hymn from his boyhood. The last time he had heard this tune was at Sunday morning prayers in the little stone church in Gestingthorpe village, where as the young squire of the manor he had presided in the family pew. Homesickness rose up in his throat. His soul balked like an overtried horse at the new and ugly and strange. He ached to go home, to the place and time where such songs were part of daily life. Though he knew the words he could not join in.

It was the closing hymn. The priest pronounced a benediction, and the congregation straggled down the aisle and out into the sunshine. Dr. Gedeon fidgeted but did not rise, while Titus struggled with his misery. The priest, saying goodbye to the tardiest old lady, noticed the new faces in his flock and came down the aisle. Dr. Gedeon smiled up at him. “Just visiting.”

“You’re very welcome all the same,” the priest said. He was a tall balding man in a dog collar, the image of a regimental padre.

Dr. Gedeon stood up and shepherded Titus out into the aisle. “I’m so thrilled to hear a homily about the Fortie project!”

“It’s on everybody’s mind, so every denomination has to throw in their two cents’ worth. There’s even a rumor the Pope is writing an encyclical.”

“I think Titus here is an Anglican,” she said in a helpful spirit. “And I’m Shulamith Gedeon.”

“So you’re the dancing doctor! I’m Rev. Pollard. We call it Episcopal in this country, but that’s just terminology.”

“Shulamith?” Titus’s jaw slacked with astonishment. ‘Shell’ must be a nickname, just like ‘Titus’ was. “What on earth kind of a name is that?”

“Jewish, isn’t it?” Rev. Pollard said.

“My grandmother,” Dr. Gedeon said. “And my father was a Santeria wizard from Bermuda. So I really don’t fit in with your churchy stuff—though the building’s absolutely gorgeous.” She looked up at the stained glass windows.

The priest smiled with gentle pride. “All the original Art Moderne glass too—”

Titus wanted to laugh. “How did you ever become a doctor? A nigger, a Jew, and a woman!”

To his complete astonishment, Dr. Gedeon turned on her heel and slapped him across the face. He would have tumbled over if the priest had not caught him by the elbow. She continued turning, marching away out the door, her thick strange shoes plopping angrily against the stone floor. “Did I say something wrong?”

Rev. Pollard stared at him from under his grey eyebrows. “You were very rude.”

“Was I?” The padre’s cold disapproval whipped the blood to Titus’s cheeks as a blow could not. I can’t go back, Titus realized. The world he had known was gone forever, never to be found again. It had been a natural impulse but an utterly false step, to pursue familiar old things like this church service—to wind himself into a cocoon that resembled, more or less, the past. To retreat rather than advance was shameful, a coward’s ploy. He had assumed the job was to retain what he had always been, the well-bred Edwardian soldier and explorer. Now he saw he had been pitchforked into a war, the scope of which made his heart sink: the war to make a life for himself in the year 2045, a fight he had no choice but to wage and win. “You’re quite right,” he almost gabbled in his haste. “I must beg her pardon.”

He sprinted down the dim aisle, through the narthex and out into the summer sunshine, acutely aware that she was fleeter than he. If she had run beyond view, he would never be able to follow. He cursed his own helplessness, and grimly promised himself it should be short-lived. But there she was in the street, standing next to a big shiny-yellow beetle. “In you go,” she said as he ran down the steps. “Let’s go back to the TTD.”

“In?” He realized it was a vehicle, a fantastically futuristic motor of some sort, and she was holding the door open. Awkwardly, he climbed in. She would have banged the door on him, but he kept it from latching and ducked his head through the window to grab her sleeve. “Doctor—Shell—I apologise. I’m not sure what I said wrong, but I’ll do my best to learn. Please—give me a chance.”

“The PTICA-TTD, at 93rd,” she was saying to the driver. “Look, Titus, it’s not your fault, I know. But even though you don’t look it, you’re a sexist, racist, anti-Semitic old fart! So let go my arm, okay?”

The grinning driver made a tasteless remark in what Titus recognized as Hindi. Automatically he flung the fellow a viperish oath picked up during his Indian service, and went on: “You can’t send me back alone in this thing. I’ll suffer from chronal displacement, just like Dr. Lash is afraid of. I’ll have the blithering vapours. I’ll get lost. I’ll—I’ll be robbed by the driver.”

The cabdriver, cowed by amazement for the moment, seemed unlikely to do anything of the sort. But Dr. Gedeon sighed. “I suppose Kev would never let me forget it.” She pulled the door open again.

Titus made room for her on the slick seat—plastic again. They must love the substance. And, God! “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask if I could call you Shell,” he said quickly.

“What?” Her grey eyes were blank with astonishment.

“It’s an unwarranted liberty—isn’t it?”

“Goodness, that’s not important. I only assist Sabrina with your treatment, so we don’t have a formal doctor-patient relationship. Keep on calling me Shell. Although I know it gives Kev a charge when you call him Dr. Lash, so maybe you should keep that up.”

“I will. Shell, I’ll find my feet as soon as I can—”

The vehicle lurched into sudden vehement motion and then screeched to a halt, flinging him against the sliding window that separated the driver from the passenger compartment. The driver turned, shrilling, “Careful! Son of a fool, hold onto the handle!”

Horns blared. Titus obeyed, cursing the driver comprehensively to the third generation. The seemingly solid handhold under his fingers suddenly gave way with an ominous click as some mechanism in the body of the door activated. The door swung perilously open out into unsupported space, taking him with it.

“No, Titus! Not that one!” Shell reached across him and pulled the door to. Titus got a terrifying glimpse of the roadway speeding past not a foot below, before she slammed the door shut.

The vehicle swerved wildly as the driver leaned on the horn while turning to abuse them. “You destroy my beautiful taxi!”

“Sorry!”

“Will you keep your eye on the road and drive!” Shell yelled at the driver. “And you, Titus, don’t touch anything! Just sit!” She pushed him back into his place and with her other hand touched a button or control. A restraining strap slid out of a recess and clasped itself round his torso and waist, pinning him courteously but firmly to the seat. “My God, Kev will wet himself . . .”

The vehicle barreled along at an impossible pace, fast as a railway engine but darting in and out like a fish. Every moment new collisions and fresh disaster seemed imminent. Lights blinked in a blare of colour, metal hulls glittered like talons, and the traffic roared its hunger. Titus felt that dizzying disorientation creeping over him again. He licked his dry lips and clutched his hands together in his lap where Shell had placed them for safety. He stared at the turbaned back of the seething driver’s head, reasoning away his discomfort. This driver is not a man of unusual gifts, he told himself. I’ve driven motors myself, just not as fast—and the road was empty! I could manage this vehicle. It can’t be difficult, if a native can do it. I could learn. “You see why I need to learn,” he said hardly. “As long as I don’t know what’s what, I’m a danger, to myself and others.”

“You’re preaching to the choir, Titus.” Shell slumped against the seat in not-entirely-exaggerated exhaustion, her short blonde curls escaping from their head-band. “You’re going to need a minimum of information before you can even begin to learn. But give yourself some slack, okay? Take your time. The 21st century isn’t going anywhere. We don’t have to do it all today.”

“You teach him,” the driver snarled. “The fool, the idiot! He cause an accident to my taxi, I sue!”

“What is ‘sue’ ?” Titus demanded of Shell. “It sounds like some hell-and-tommy impertinence!”

“I’ll tell you later,” Shell said. “Look, here we are, thank God! One more word out of you, driver, and I’ll report you to the taxi commission. No, Titus, don’t pull like that! Let me unbuckle it—oh, all right, unbuckle it yourself. You push this bit right here, and voila`. Yes, yes, here’s your fare, and the hell with you, pal. That’s right! and if you don’t like the tip you can stuff it up your ass and set it afire.”

Titus’s mouth dropped open again. In all his wide travels, he had never heard such red-blooded invective from the lips of a female. A hard-bitten cavalry trooper could say no better. Torn between admiration and horror, Titus followed Shell inside.

Titus began the new regime the very next morning by stacking all the antique books back onto their cart, and rolling it out into the hallway. He wanted to add a label, the sort they put on steamer trunks: “Not wanted on voyage.” He had learned everything he needed to know about the past. Onwards, to the present! He capped the gesture by demanding the morning paper. “You do still have newspapers?”

“Not paper papers,” Dr. Lash said. “I mean, not usually printed on paper.”

“What do they print them on then?”

“Screens, old man. Like this.” He tipped the sleek little black machine he held, so that Titus could see the square glowing window on the front, small as a postcard. It looked nothing at all like what Titus would call a screen—screens were for fireplaces, to shield the glare. “And trust me, Titus—you would not understand a newspaper. It’s too soon for you to dive into current affairs. Wouldn’t it be easier to start with a précis of world history for the past century and a half? Work yourself up to the present day?”

Titus knew this was only common sense. Nevertheless he felt it was time to be bloody-minded. He had pretty well proven that he could do anything he set his will to. “I can do both. I know it.”

“At least let me find you a paper newspaper,” Dr. Lash pleaded. “We don’t have to learn to surf the net today. Let me print out a paper edition of the Times.”

“The Times? Truly?”

“The New York Times. But there’s no reason why other papers shouldn’t be available too.”

“The only Times is the London Times,” Titus growled. When Lash went out, he pulled a piece of paper from under his pillow. He had found it in the waste-paper basket of his bathroom—from the printing on the outside it must have once formed the wrapping for a roll of toilet tissue. Now Titus started his list on it. To ‘plastic’ and ‘elevator’ he now added ‘screen’ and ‘net.’ He was going to have to get a proper notebook, and a pen rather than a pencil. And no more of this keeling over like a stunned ox from swotting at the books. He would pace himself, sensibly.

Dr. Lash returned triumphant. “You’re in luck, Titus! Jackie had last Sunday’s New York Times printed for her son’s history project. A couple days old should make no difference to you, eh?”

“I’ll overlook the deficiency this time,” Titus said with mock severity. He spread the weird undersized paper out on the counterpane. But within the hour he had to admit Dr. Lash was right. The New York Times was almost completely incomprehensible: not because any given word was beyond him, but because he had no context in which to place each sentence. What was the pork-barrel? If they were building a free-way, then it should be free—so why was funding it cause for vituperation? Who was the Internet AG, and how did his indictments combat Fortie frauds? It had been the same when he listened to Rev. Pollard’s sermon yesterday. And the paper was too small and felt odd. Frustrated, he tossed it aside.

“Had enough, huh?” Shell came in with an armload of brightly-coloured books and magazines. “Maybe these will go down better. Kev’s been buying up antique children’s texts and reprints of old comics.” She balanced the stack on the chair.

“Children’s books? You must have a poor opinion of my intellect.”

“Not at all. But you’re not interested in scholarly analysis or minutiae. You want the broad overview—just enough to go on with till you find your feet. Did you know that to understand a written text you have to already know seventy percent of the words? Some TTD expert worked it all out that this level of difficulty should be about right for you now.”

Not quite right, Titus noted. Not seventy percent of the words, but seventy percent of the knowledge. Grasping seventy percent of the meaning was the fence he was finding rather high. In any case the size of the stack was disheartening. “What I really want,” he said boldly, “is another walk. Longer this time.”

“Sorry, Titus. I’m booked today, and so are you, with that reception this evening. Let me just give your vitals a check-over, okay? Sabrina is in consult all day today, so I promised her I’d do it.”

“I don’t want to over-work myself again with the books,” he said, pressing his advantage. “Walking is good for me. You said so yourself.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” But she was smiling as she consulted the glowing screen of the little machine in her hand. “They didn’t tell me you were persuasive. Tomorrow, how about.”

“I shall look forward to it. Oh, and what is—” He consulted his list. “ ‘Paticalar’ ?”

“Oh! The initials PTICA stand for Pan-Terran Interstellar Contact Agency. Everyone calls it the Fortie Project, though. This building you’re in, everyone here, is the Time Travel Division, the TTD. And people who work for PTICA wind up being Paticalars. A silly name, but a newsie coined it in ’39 and it stuck.”

This was not very helpful, but Shell was obviously in a hurry to some other appointment, so he let her go. Instead he made a note of the names, PTICA and TTD. With the prospect of another outing comfortably in hand, Titus turned to the stack of books. He had never been of a scholarly turn. Now he found the large letterface and the shiny coloured pictures in A BOY’S BRITISH HISTORY soothing. King Arthur, William the Conqueror, Henry the Eighth—oh, yes. There will always be an England. It was disappointing that Scott and his Expedition didn’t rate a chapter, but merely a paragraph. And good God, Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts project had flourished! Then wars and more wars—Titus groaned aloud. He had missed all the fun, curse it.

“Ask me any questions you like,” Dr. Lash said, coming in.

Titus preferred to quiz Shell because she was less of a fuss, but it would be foolish to carry prejudice too far. “Lash, what is this Fortie business you’re all on about?”

“You could say that the Forties are the reason you’re here, old man. They’re certainly the raison d’être for the entire PTICA-TTD.”

“Then they’re very important. Come then, tell!”

“I’m trying to choose the best way, Titus. Have you ever seen a film? A movie, a motion picture?”

“Of course,” Titus snapped. “They took cinematographs of the Polar Expedition, you know.”

“So then you think you’d be comfortable viewing an educational film?”

“About this Fortie business? Certainly!”

“Hmm, there’s enough time.” Titus noticed that Lash consulted not a pocket watch or a wristwatch, but his little machine. In 1912 a watch was the badge of competence and responsibility, yearned for in boyhood and carefully kept in later life, but obviously customs had altered. Instinctively he felt in his trouser pocket for the watch he always carried, the most accurate timekeeper in the Polar party, but it wasn’t there. Lash was saying, “And it would be good if you had something to converse with the Ambassador about. But you’re sure it won’t be upsetting, Titus? There will be pictures of your rescue—”

The mere suggestion made his blood rise. “Don’t coddle me, Lash. I insist on seeing this film.”

“Well, let’s risk it. While you get ready, Titus, let me give you a brief summary of the phenomenon. The first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence in 2015 set the world ablaze with excitement . . .”

Attending with only half an ear, Titus put on his shoes. He was rather ashamed that he’d fallen into this habit of tuning poor old Lash’s blather right out, but at least Lash’s self-importance blinded him to it. He led the way to the stairwell and briskly down the metal stairs while Lash trailed behind. Titus felt like a terrier straining at the leash, urging the slow-footed human along.

But instead of pushing through the big double glass door, Dr. Lash turned the other way in the lobby. The single steel door he chose gave onto a plaza on the other side of the building. It was a fine hot day, blazing with sunshine, and beneath the shade of leafy trees were booths and stands and placards and bright-clad people. “A market,” Titus hazarded. “Like in Egypt.”

“Not a bad guess,” Dr. Lash said. “But this is a marketplace of protesters and cranks, in the main. Better to let them have their say here, where PTICA has some control over the process. Ignore them all, old man. After the film, you’ll know what’s what.”

The doctor linked an arm through his. Titus suppressed the impulse to pull free. The booths and placards did look beastly dull. Nothing edible or alive or interesting was on offer, but only leaflets. Titus remembered with brief nostalgia the teeming markets of Bombay. He had bought heavy silver bracelets for Lilian and Violet, and—

Dr. Lash suddenly stopped dead. “The brass-balled nerve of the fellow! No, this is too much! Titus, stand right here. Don’t move an inch, all right? I’m just going to fetch the police.”

“The police? I—” But Lash was gone, darting away through the press. Titus stood as instructed, and stared at the cause of Lash’s ire. It looked like just another set of placards, presided over by a lean old man absurdly dressed in pale pink. The fellow was shouting some service or product and passing out leaflets.

“—safety for you and yours, when the aliens come,” he said rapidly. “Condos burrowed into the rock on Easter Island, the most isolated place on earth.” The people filtering through the plaza didn’t pause to listen, even when the old coster thrust leaflets into their hands.

Titus’s motionless stance made him very obvious. “How d’you do, sir?” the old fellow greeted him. “Here you are.”

Titus took the offered leaflet. “What’s it all in aid of then?”

“Don’t ever trust what those PTICA people tell you, sir.” His watery old eyes shone with sincerity. “What are they getting out of this? You think about that, sir, because you’ll find it’s the key to everything. They’re all grinding their own axe. A secret agenda, do you understand me, sir? They don’t have our interests at heart at all.”

Titus wondered if he meant Shell or Dr. Lash. It came to him that this fellow was the first modern he had spoken to who wasn’t involved in his rescue. But the old fellow was rattling on: “They tell us the Forties are too far away to be dangerous. But, come! Nobody knows what they’re really after. Everybody agrees on that. Do you want to risk your family, sir, your children, on the unfounded assumption that they’re nice folks? Safety first, that’s my policy.”

“And a damned craven one,” Titus interjected.

The salesman evidently didn’t know what ‘craven’ meant, because he didn’t pause. “Easter Island, the most remote place on earth, that’s where we’re erecting the first series of shelters, sir. And construction is already beginning under the Antarctic ice cap—”

That one word was enough to galvanize Titus. “In Antarctica? Where’s your base camp? Has the British government approved this incursion?”

“Britain?” The old man was momentarily derailed. “What do the Brits have to do with it?”

Conceding Amundsen’s prior claim still stuck in Titus’s craw, but in justice he had to add, “Or the Norwegians.”

But suddenly the old man clapped his placard together, scooping up the stack of leaflets and shoving them into his pocket. Without a word more he began to scuttle away through the crowd. Titus heard a distant shout, “He’s running for it!”

That was Lash’s voice! Without thinking about it, Titus lunged and clapped a strong hand onto the old man’s shoulder. The placard went flying. The fellow squealed and writhed like a pig, no more than one would expect from a professed coward. “Let go!”

“Oh, buck up,” Titus said in disgust. But, how odd—was that a fountain pen he was pulling out of his breast pocket?

Too fast for Titus’s unaccustomed eye to take in, a pellet or stream or projectile shot from the open’s end, hitting a passing woman squarely in the stern. She whirled, teeth bared in outrage. “Tep!” she yelled.

A host of divergent irrelevancies instantly took charge of his thought processes, so that Titus stood there clutching the pink shoulder of his captive like a dummy. Perhaps ‘tep’ was a curse, his first modern swear word? The pen could not be a deadly weapon—the enraged female victim had taken no injury. What was she saying? It was too fast and impassioned for him to grasp, but she sounded damned stroppy. Perhaps the pen was like pistols, fairly harmless at a distance but dangerous up close. Not for the first time, it struck him that his ignorance was downright dangerous. The old blighter was pressing the thing up to his ribs. At point-blank range even a popgun might be annoying—

A huff of surprised breath escaped him. That hurt! Some sort of electrical shock, was it? A fiery pain had run from the pen right through his body. Without knowing how it had come about, he found he had let go and fallen reeling to one knee. A weapon, by Heaven, and surprisingly effective.

But the enraged woman was keeping the fellow at bay, yammering like all the Furies unleashed. Titus felt a new and profound sympathy for her attitude. Astonishing, how respect for grey hairs could evaporate under the stimulus of a low trick like that. He took the fellow’s wrist in both hands and hauled himself upright, digging his thumbs hard into the tendons along the way and twisting the hand open. The little cylinder dropped clattering to the pavement, and the angry woman immediately snatched it up, snarling.

Sputtering, the old man took a swing at him with his other hand, but his arm was too short to connect. “An old cove like you shouldn’t be so feisty,” Titus observed sardonically. “Might you consider yourself overpowered? I’m a foot taller and two stone heavier than you, after all. And twenty years younger—” He bit the words off short. Not true, if one calculated by the birth date!

A pair of women in blue uniforms swept up on either side of him and collared the captive before Titus could say more. “Thank you, sir,” one of them said to him in passing.

Dr. Lash trotted up panting, and dragged him aside. “I didn’t mean you, Titus! Dear God, you shouldn’t have waded in like that. It was very dangerous!”

“Stuff and nonsense—nobody was much hurt.” He rubbed the place on his ribs where the tingling pain was passing off, and nodded at the agitated little group.

The old man drooped in the grasp of one female constable, while the other waved a black machine. The enraged woman had finally slowed to comprehensible speed, saying, “Damn right I’ll press charges!”

Everything seemed to be under control. Reluctantly Titus allowed Lash to shepherd him away from the fuss. “What’s it all about, then?”

“This is the fourth time we’ve caught this old fraud here, selling shelters against alien invasions.”

“Under the Antarctic ice cap,” Titus recalled.

“Is that the latest? Naturally there’s nothing being built there. The scheme’s fake as a wooden nickel. To have that sort of thing here gives the impression that we endorse it. Thank God nobody seems to have fallen for it today.”

None of this made sense to Titus. The familiar sense of overload was creeping over him again, triggered perhaps by the crowded plaza and its excitements. He trailed after Dr. Lash, masking his discomfort behind a cavalryman’s reserve. Surely they were nearly there, wherever their destination was? They were approaching the building that formed the other side of the plaza now. Titus had to make a deliberate effort not to hurry up to its big glass doors.

Resolutely sauntering at Dr. Lash’s heels, Titus had a perfect view of the portals swinging open at Lash’s approach, without a hand laid to them. The wonder of it nearly cracked his mask, but he refused to demand how the mechanism worked right now. Later, perhaps.

Inside, the crowd was thicker yet, clustering at one end of the lobby. Titus was weakly grateful when Dr. Lash bypassed the crush, opening an inconspicuous door behind a pillar. Beyond was a vast dim space. “Mind your step!”

“It’s a bleeding cliff.” Titus peered over the railing.

“Not at all, there’s a stairway to your left. Let’s find a seat before the crowd comes in.”

As his eyes adjusted, Titus realized it was not really so dark. Not until they were descending the stair did he grasp that these were seats forming the steep slope. This was a theatre, a very oddly-shaped one. He sat down in the seat Lash indicated. “But where’s the stage? The curtain?”

“This is a film theater, Titus.” Lash dropped into the seat beside him.

“Film theatres need curtains too,” Titus grumbled. But the crowd was filtering in now, entering from the lower doors. And a bunch of trippers they were, too—children with jujubes, women carrying big bags or sniveling tots, men sipping from cups. It was like an outing to Bournemouth. A long time seemed to drag by, before everyone took their place.

There seemed to be no screen, but only a smooth blank wall, six storeys high. The seating sloped steeply enough so that every member of the audience had an unobstructed view. The lights faded slowly to a pitch dark, filled only with the anticipatory rustle of the crowd, the crackle of candy wrappers, and the whimper of a baby.

Violins, a swooping bit of romantic fluff by one of those German composers. A small spot of light appeared in the darkness, so small that Titus almost mistook it for a trick of his eyes. With a sudden swoosh the spot grew into a familiar blue globe. “What’s all the cotton-wool round it, though?”

Titus felt rather than saw Lash’s glance. “Clouds. That isn’t a model, Titus. It’s a motion picture of the Earth itself, taken from a satellite.”

Questions surged up in Titus’s chest: How did they loft anything so high? Who was running the camera? Since when did they take pictures in colour? But the entire wall suddenly exploded into light and life, and it was as if he were hurtling in a taxi driven by that Hindu again. The Earth whizzed by, six storeys high and tipping alarmingly until his stomach heaved. He gripped the arms of the seat and swallowed down the bile. It’s only a blistering film, he reminded himself. This speed and size—it’s a deliberate effect, damn them.

A voice spoke and made him jump. So they had learned to add sound to the moving pictures, the clever little buggers! Why had no one done it in 1912? But he wasn’t going to give way to distraction. He forced himself to put amazement aside for the moment, and pay attention strictly to what was being said.

“. . . LN-GRO, the most powerful gamma-ray space telescope in existence,” the voice was saying. “The pulsar is a natural stellar phenomenon modified by alien intelligences to carry a message, transmitted in a series of gamma ray bursts. The message was enormously long, taking three years to capture in its entirety. It took another ten years to translate it.”

Incomprehensible patterns of light and dark squares, moving back to reveal that they were merely depictions upon screens, the glowing rectangular screens of machines like those Shell and Lash used. Then the image moved back yet again, to show people sitting and standing at those machines, puzzling over the patterns. An instant soundless dissolution, and the huge image split into nine images—some of them continuing to depict scientists staring at screens, and others showing things Tituscould not name, machines working or people doing things. For a moment he was totally at sea.

The music buzzed, busy and driving and joyous, giving Titus the clue he needed. He blinked with tardy understanding. The film was depicting a process: thought, research, the work of many people all driving towards a solution to the translation problem. He had never thought of telling a history in this way, but he dimly perceived the power of it. If only he knew more of what was being shown! To his astonishment, the film’s voice intoned, “A minimum of information is necessary for comprehension to even begin.” Shell had told him the same thing. It must be a proverb of the era.

But the film was going on about the mysterious star message, the possible interpretations of the signals and the final conclusion as to what they meant: “An invitation?” Titus muttered. “Someone in the stars wants us to come to tea, perhaps.”

“Shh,” Dr. Lash whispered. “Watch, they’ll explain.”

“—an invitation, and perhaps the means to get there,” the voice said. “Albert Einstein told us that it was impossible to travel at the speed of light. But the Forties’ novel theories of space and time have showed us how to warp space—and time. Their clues have helped us make theory into reality, and build a faster-than-light interstellar drive. The final proof was pulling a historical figure from the past to the present. This personage was carefully chosen from a spot where nothing was alive: on the Antarctic icepack, to ensure that not even an insect or a plant seed was inadvertently removed from the biosphere loop. Precisely placed in space and time on the 80th parallel on March 16th, 1912, his body has never been found. The bodies of his companions are still entombed in the glacier which will carry them out to their final ocean resting place in another hundred years, so that no question arises of some plant or algae being deprived of the nourishment of his component atoms . . .”

It was a single image now, of this door into the past shining with weird white light. Titus stared in jaw-dropping horror at the colossal screen. It was himself up there six storeys tall, falling through that door, the Rock of Ages cleft from the other side: the slow endless drop into blank whiteness. And not his clean whole current self, but the emaciated and gangrened cripple, stiffly clad in frozen mitts and tattered windproof, collapsed forward out of the glowing portal onto the gleaming white floor in a flurry of blizzard-driven snow. Chunks of ice, or perhaps bits of his frozen flesh, shattered off to melt into brownish disgusting puddles. The researchers in the film cheered loud and long, clapping each other on the back at this living proof of their theories. Dr. Trask and a horde of other medicos armoured in gloves and masks dashed forward to the rescue, turning the icy dying thing over, their shining tools poised.

Titus gazed up at his own face sideways on the screen. Several tots in the audience wailed at the horrific sight. The frozen white lips had writhed back, revealing a red-black slice of rotting gums and bloody teeth. Scarred with frostbite, the skin blackened by the wind and pocked with scurvy pustules, the countenance was inert and deformed as an Egyptian mummy’s. The back of Titus’s nose and throat constricted at a powerful memory of the nauseating aroma, the overwhelming rotten-sweet stench of his own body shivering into decay around him as he dragged himself along. “God, I shall be sick,” he gulped.

“I beg your pardon?”

Titus lurched to his feet. He had to get out of here, before the bubble of vomit rose to the top. He almost fell down the stair, his leaden feet catching on the carpet, trapped in a nightmarish slowness. Above him the music blared triumph and joy, and the film’s voice boomed, “. . . Captain Lawrence Oates, heroic explorer lost in Antarctica . . .” And where was the blasted door?

He pushed through and fell flat gasping onto the carpet. Dr. Lash, close behind, nearly tripped over him. “Hang on, Titus, I’m paging the doctors. Don’t try to move!”

Of course this was intolerable. Titus immediately sat up, breathing hard. He wiped his clammy forehead on his sleeve. “Oh God. Oh bloody fucking hell. Lash—that was I!”

“But you knew that, Titus. I told you, it would explain all about your journey here.”

“I don’t understand. I do not understand.” With self-contempt Titus listened to the weakness, almost the whimper, in his own words. Was he actually unable to grasp the knowledge offered to him, the way a dog is unable to manipulate a pencil? Seventy percent, they said. Get 70 percent by the throat, and the rest will come. He reeled to his feet and walked, staggering a little, ignoring Lash’s protests. He was a soldier, and a soldier could not give in. This was the true war, the one he was going to have to fight for the rest of his life: the battle to adapt and understand and survive here. No surrender, damn it Never!

The lobby was thronged. Faces swam and spun past him, busy and self-absorbed. Thank Heaven people were unlikely to recognize him, thawed out, cleaned, and healed as he was now. Moving, using his arms and legs even in blind purposelessness, was the solution he instinctively clung to. The creed in the Antarctic was, if a man could walk, he could live. And it did not fail him. His stomach steadied and his courage returned a little. When a familiar quacking blatted out as he passed, he turned to look.

It was a duck call, just as he’d thought. A very young black man was blowing on the short wooden tube for the benefit of a gaggle of children, and making a damned poor job of it. The raspberry noise he made was embarrassing. “Now, what does this call say?” the young man asked them.

The only reply was giggling. Titus couldn’t stand it. “Give me that.” Without waiting for a reply he held his hand out over the heads of the seated children. Such was the power of his expectation that the young Negro meekly handed the duck call over. Was it done, to call them Negroes? In his day Titus had flouted class and race divisions not from any burning sense of the brotherhood of man, but in pure anarchic bloody-mindedness. The egalitarian quality of modern society caught him on the hop, as discomposing as kicking a huge weight that suddenly was no longer there. He held the little tube to his lips and blew. The call was not quite the same shape as the long thin ones he was used to, and there was something entirely novel about its innards. But it was not too odd, and he had been well-taught by the old gamekeeper at Gestingthorpe when he was a boy. A magnificent and utterly authentic-sounding quack echoed through the lobby, the cry of the mallard patriarch in his pond. Titus could almost see the ducks gliding in towards the water. His palms itched for his old fowling gun.

“Oh, nice!” the young man said. “And what does it say, can anybody guess?”

“Hello!” “Or g’bye!”

“When a duck says quack, that’s what it means, probably,” the young man said. “But when he blows the call, what does he mean?” He pointed at Titus. “Sir, why do you say ‘quack’ ? What do you want?”

Titus handed the duck call back. “Roast duck for dinner.”

The black man beamed at his audience. “So we might know what the Forties are saying, but we might not know what they actually intend, you get what I mean? If the ducks knew that this gentleman was a hungry hunter they wouldn’t come when he calls . . .”

A boxful of noisemakers, animal calls, and other toys had been passed round the group, and the nippers seized this moment to try them all out at once. Wincing at the cacophony, Titus moved off. He saw now that the lobby of the building was fitted out with a series of displays and exhibits. How slack of him, to have come in earlier without noticing!

Titus halted to stare without comprehension at a spidery metal erection taller than he was. It was asymmetric and gawky, a derrick adorned with shiny rectangular boxes and flaps and the odd white plastic plate here and there. “A model of the trans-solar gamma ray satellite,” Dr. Lash said at his elbow.

Putting the pieces together was like assembling a jig-saw puzzle cut out of granite. No wonder they’d chosen children’s books for him. “The satellite received the message,” Titus said slowly. “The message from somebody out in space, in what’s-the-place.”

“Tau Ceti. That’s the name of the star system. Yes, it was the newsies that dubbed the aliens the Forties—because the gamma-ray source was numbered 4T 0091, you know.”

Titus didn’t know, but wasn’t going to say so. He strolled on towards the next exhibit, which was made up of black boxes stacked in tiers around rows of chairs. All the chairs were occupied by rapt people, but someone stood up to leave and Lash nudged him forward. As Titus took his place in the semicircle of boxes, the sound enveloped him—a thump or pulse or syncopation. He looked up, and on a large screen directly above their heads was colour, washes of colour throbbing from red to yellow and back again to blue. Neither sound nor picture made the least bit of sense, and Titus sat in mystification for several minutes before he noticed the words crawling past on the ceiling at the edge of the coloured lights. Admiring the ingenuity of the system prevented him from actually reading for another couple of minutes. How did they make the words creep right round in a circle? A cine-projector could only project in a straight line, could it not? Look as he would, he couldn’t even spot the projector. But finally he was able to absorb what the words were saying. “So this is it? This is what the Forties sent, this light and sound? Coy little creatures, aren’t they!”

“More precisely, this is one of the interpretations we’ve made of their binary signals,” Dr. Lash said.

Titus could not imagine how an invitation could be extracted from this. Or advice on how to travel to Tau Ceti. But he remembered the film, how many thinkers laboured for years at it. What damned smart people these were! He felt both pride and an uneasy inadequacy.

In his world, courage had been the paramount virtue. Now the rules had changed, and he had a distinct sense that courage was well down on the list. Look at that leaflet chap out in the plaza, for instance. What did they value nowadays? Communication; perhaps—being able to talk to unknown star-beings, and children, and yes, even the occasional time-travelling Polar explorer. Suddenly he felt a feverish desire to get back to those books Shell had brought. He had a lot of catching up to do, no leisure to idle about with tourists. “Shall we go back now?”

“Had enough, eh? I don’t blame you.” Lash sighed with relief. It was only when they got outdoors that Titus saw the white vehicles waiting at the kerb flashing their red and yellow lights, and Dr. Trask hovering with a stretcher crew at her back. “I told you I was paging them,” Lash defended himself when Titus glared at him. “It’s our job to keep a close eye on you, old man.”

In the tone of a nanny dangling a toy before a baby, Dr. Trask cooed, “A ride in the ambulance will do you good.”

“I’m going to walk back,” Titus told her, and strode off across the plaza. Lash, and all of them, meant him only good, Titus was sure. But the closeness of their care, the modern obsession with safety and security, weighed on him like chains. He remembered now that Shell had mentioned he was closely observed. Even now Lash was trotting behind, blathering.

“Are you still watching me somehow, Lash?” Titus interrupted him. “I won’t have it!”

Dr. Lash frowned. “Shell is such a chatterbox, I’m ashamed for her. My boy, you’ve only returned to the land of the living for a couple days. It’s our job to keep a close eye on you. This is, count them, your fourth day of waking life in the 21st century. Be reasonable!”

Titus could not deny it. But he could refuse to concede defeat. He stalked tight-lipped into their own building, Lash panting behind like an overweight lap dog. “The elevator for me,” he wheezed. “How about it, Titus?”

“Instead of the stairs? A pleasure.” Titus thawed instantly at the prospect of being initiated into yet another modern mystery. Tall panels slid aside, revealing themselves to be doors. The room beyond was very small. “Nowhere to sit,” he remarked as he followed Lash in.

“We’ll only be in here for moments,” Dr. Lash said. “Thirty-nine,” he added, mysteriously. Titus noticed that the discreet digits 39 lit up in blue on a wall panel a moment after Lash’s spoken words. The metal doors slid shut, and only the discreet murmur of an engine betrayed any motion. When the doors opened, a disembodied voice made him start by sweetly announcing, “Thirty-nine.” So machines these days could talk and be talked to! And there was the familiar corridor with the door of his own chamber standing ajar at the far end.

“Delightful,” Titus admitted. “Better by far than hauling up all those stairs. But what’s this?”

“Hi, Titus!” Dr. Trask popped out from a room just behind. The anticipatory gleam in her sea-blue eyes would make a cavalry brigade falter. “Did I mention that an ambulance ride would be faster, too? Just step in here for a moment—I left an entire surgical board meeting just for you.” She held her stethoscope up.

“I’m fine! Lash, call these harpies off!”

At his other elbow Shell said, “Harpies? I’m hurt, Titus. Is that nice? I thought you were going to learn modern manners.” He babbled apologies until he saw the twinkle in her eye and realized she was jesting. By then they had him jockeyed onto the examination table, tapping and probing with their shiny tools.

He made an effort to be gracious. “I quite appreciate the work you’ve put into my restoration. I very much enjoy having use of my limbs. But the job is finished! I’m in good nick. There’s nothing wrong with me now.”

“I don’t like these spells of dizziness,” Dr. Trask said. “But on the whole, we’ve made a fine job of you, Titus.” She beamed at him with pride, the way one might admire a prize steer.

Titus held his commentary until they let him go. Then he snarled to Lash, “Don’t I get any credit for my own sodding health? She makes me sound like a house pet.”

“She made a spectacular job of you, old man,” Lash said. “I could show you the film—they cloned bits of you and reattached them, extracted samples of diseases of your time and inoculated you against modern ones—”

“Film? There’s another damned cinematograph?” Titus was aghast.

“Of course there are complete records. Titus, not only are you an important historical figure. You’re the first time traveler, probably the last to—”

Titus could imagine the pictures six storeys high of himself in the altogether, being patched together and reassembled by Dr. Trask and her team. Had he a scrap of privacy left? Seething, he flung himself into his chair, picking a book up at random and pretending to be absorbed in it until Lash went away.

As his anger faded however Titus was drawn into the book. It was something he had never seen before, a story told in pictures and labels, something like Hogarth engravings but more colourful. He turned back to the title page: BUCK ROGERS: THE FIRST 60 YEARS IN THE 25th CENTURY. He gathered from the foreword that these things were called comic strips. At first he could not imagine why Dr. Lash had selected this for him. But when he began at the beginning he understood. This Buck Rogers fellow was a soldier who had travelled into the future too! The discovery made him chuckle. And how clever of Lash’s cohorts, to take an idea from a children’s book and make it reality!

And the comics themselves were ripping in a juvenile sort of way—evil Asiatics kidnapping shapely blonde girls, battles across land and sea. They were the sort of fare his boyhood chums at Eton would have thoroughly enjoyed. He whiled the afternoon away very pleasantly.

“Titus, old man,” Dr. Lash came in to say. “Time for dinner—the banquet, you remember. Would you care to dress?”

“A bean-feast? Nonsense. I don’t know a soul in this world, except you and the other doctors.”

“Titus, we haven’t discussed this much,” Dr. Lash said. “But think about it. You are famous, the first time traveler. Furthermore, you’re the quintessential British hero, an historical figure. Naturally people are interested in you. Now that you’re on your feet again, let us show you off a little.”

“Claptrap!” But Titus noticed Lash’s nervy air as he laid out new garments on the foot of the bed. Perhaps it would be letting down the side, not to indulge him. “So what’s this then? Can’t I wear the trousers I have on now? They fit well enough.”

“These will too. They’re the same size, just a more dressy cut.”

“What has the world come to,” Titus grumbled, dressing, “when khaki can be spoken in the same sentence as dressy?” None of the garments were what he would have chosen for himself, these ill-tailored trousers and the nasty coarse shirt and unnaturally sheer socks. Everything fitted well enough but felt tatty and fake, like stage costume. He would have spurned a necktie, but none was offered. Only the wool jacket was tolerable, though its blue was a hair too assertive. “But I know—knew, I should say—a tailor in Mhow who could make a far better job of it.”

“I’m afraid that, after technological advances, the changes in dress will be the most trying for you,” Dr. Lash said placatingly. “Yes, just step into those shoes. Now, this way . . .”

Titus was glad he had bathed and shaved this morning. In Antarctica while sledging nobody had had the strength to spare for personal hygiene. They had niffed like foxes after four months of brute physical work in the same clothes without bathing. He wondered who’d been handed the nauseating job of cutting him out of his polar clothes after the rescue, and hoped to blazes it had not been some female. That was probably where his watch had gone, too. But he could probably find out, damn them—it was all on film somewhere.

He followed Dr. Lash down the elevator, congratulating himself on how commonplace the ride already had become. They got out on an unfamiliar level. Beyond the elevator hallway was a large meeting room with nobody in it. “Good, the Secret Service finished their sweep,” Lash said. “The President and the British Ambassador were anxious that the occasion be kept as casual as possible for you—”

“You mean the President of this country? Of the United States?”

“Yes, Titus, I was telling you. There’ll be photographs and so on, but you’re used to that, and also more video—film, moving pictures.”

“Yes, yes.” Titus recognized the experience now: codswallop, the sort of silly attention-grabbing that the nibs, nobs and snobs arranged to amuse themselves. Some things never changed. He regretted now not smuggling the BUCK ROGERS volume in.

But then the doors opened, and a horde of people came surging in. “Let me make some introductions,” Dr. Lash said genially. “Titus, this is the TTD’s Medical/Cultural Management Section, essentially everyone who works here in New York, mostly—Marjie’s on vacation, and a couple of people are out sick . . .”

The faces and names blurred in Titus’s mind as Lash presented them. Only Dr. Piotr, pinkly plump and overly well-groomed, seemed to be important. Titus gathered that he ran the entire show on the time-travel side. Everyone seemed hugely delighted to meet him, smiling and squeezing his hand with enthusiasm.

Sabrina Trask startled him speechless with her bright yellow trousers. Women wore trousers in this era! And though he had been too flustered to notice at the time, he dimly recalled now that females out in the street and in the museum had been similarly clad. Titus had not realized until now how clothing signaled status and sex. It was the sort of thing everyone instinctively knew in his time, though from pure hellishness he had occasionally amused himself by cocking a snook at the standard. Now he murmured inanities as the line passed, all the while trying to deduce the underlying principles of modern dress.

Trousers were obviously no longer confined to men, nor skirts to women—surely that fellow over there was not wearing a gown? Perhaps it was a robe of the kind worn by Hindus. Some men had beards, some were clean-shaven like Lash, and there were plenty of thick mustaches like his father had favoured when Victoria was Queen. Was hair the key? This one with hair nearly as long as Sabrina’s must be male from his beard, yet right behind him was another chap shorn to quarter-inch stubble. In his day all women had long hair, but there was Shell with her boyish curly crop, and Lord! Here was a woman absolutely bald! Titus opened his mouth as he shook her hand, but no words came out. Lash had warned him that the sartorial fence was going to be a high one—perhaps it was not necessary to clear it today!

Even the women in skirts didn’t walk like ladies any more, with the delicate slow saunter enforced by tight corsetry. They walked like men, brash and bold. And the thrill of glimpsing a well-turned ankle was gone, when a man could see all the way up to well above the knees. In his day even the shilling dockside Gerties were not so bold! Yet it passed belief that so many bits of muslin would be presented to the swells, and there was no lasciviousness in their manner or faces. He was forced to conclude that all the women he’d met in the 21st century must be respectable after all. The lewd signals sent by their clothing were to be ignored. He thrust the confusion aside to think about later.

Last in line, Shell was gowned in electric blue—were there no sober colours in this time?—and vibrating with nerves until her earrings jingled. “I hate this, don’t you?”

He nodded in fervent agreement. “Like a cursed dog show.” No hats and no watches, Titus concluded, but without exception everyone carried or wore a little machine. Perhaps they were the modern equivalent? He shoved his hands into his pockets to hide his lack.

Everyone stood in loose rows, like troops being reviewed only much more casual, Lash and Dr. Piotr flanking Titus. Titus suddenly noticed the buffet tables laid out at the far end of the room. Dinner! Though the body had been restored, yet the mind still lived in the posture of starvation. His stomach gurgled audibly, and he crossed his arms over it in embarrassment.

But there, thank God, was a stir at the door, and a number of new people came in. Only a few of them came forward to be greeted by Dr. Piotr. “Madam President, may I present Captain Lawrence Edward Grace Oates. Titus, this is President Livia Hamilton.”

In a slight daze Titus shook the President’s hand. He would have placed her as the headmistress of a dame’s school, with that firm mouth and pinned-up grey hair. Had American presidents ever been women in his time? He could not recall, but rather doubted it. “This is an honor,” the President said in a deep horsy voice. “Captain, welcome to the 21st century.”

“Thank you.”

His concise reply seemed to disconcert them. Dr. Lash said, “And this is the British Ambassador, Sir Harold Burney.”

More handshaking. “Sir,” Titus acknowledged. Dr. Lash bobbed his head in an encouraging manner, but Titus was damned if he was going to bark on command like a trained seal.

“On behalf of His Majesty the King, I welcome you back to the land of the living,” the Ambassador said.

How fine it was to hear a British accent! But, “His Majesty?” Titus demanded, startled. Surely King George V was not still alive?

“Oh! His Majesty King William I. You poor fellow, haven’t they caught you up to date yet?”

“In due course, sir,” Dr. Lash broke in. “We’ve tried to bring the Captain up to speed gently. It’s a big adjustment to make.”

The Ambassador beamed with pride. “But if I know anything about it, you’ve been damned plucky, eh?”

“Not at all.” Titus remembered now that this was why he loathed Society—one had to converse. Every anarchic instinct in him rebelled at the expectation. He was tired of being a tame poodle. “What I want to know,” he began, in his plummiest drawl.

“Yes, yes?”

Titus pinned the Ambassador firmly with his gaze. “I wondered why a pack of Yanks are making these great discoveries. I get the distinct sense that Britain’s no longer in the forefront of human endeavour.”

The Ambassador turned pink and opened his mouth, but only a few disjoint syllables came out. “Shameful backsliding, I call it,” Titus pursued, twisting the knife a little. “The work we put into keeping the Empire on top of things, fighting the Boers, trekking into the hinterlands of the globe, and now look at it!”

Dr. Lash’s grip on his elbow was almost painful as he swiveled Titus back to face the President.

“So, Captain,” the President said. “Now that your life has been restored to you by Dr. Piotr and these good folks, what do you intend to do?”

“There’s a facer,” Titus said, at a loss. The question had not occurred to him till now. Which just showed how pulled down he was, since it was obviously of the first importance. “Something useful.”

“A fine idea.”

“I don’t suppose Britain’s at war or anything,” Titus said with dissatisfaction. “Perhaps we could try and claim the Colonies again, eh?”

The President’s smile did not waver, but her gaze flickered, searching for rescue. The British Ambassador hastily said, “No wars on at the moment—but your old regiment, the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, is anxious to welcome you back into the ranks.”

Titus had kicked his heels in an idle peacetime regiment before—codswallop, pointless parades, catering to the whims of the brass—and was not about to take the shilling for more. “Perhaps I could work at the TTD here,” he said. “Lend a hand with the time-traveling business. I have the experience, after all.”

The Ambassador gave a small polite laugh. “Oh, very good.”

The President glanced at Dr. Piotr. “You planning another jaunt into the past, Doctor?”

“Not soon,” Dr. Piotr said. “And not another person. Captain Oates here is probably the one and only man who will ever travel through time, because that’s a dangerous trick to try. But by plucking him out of the past we have more than just the proof of the fundamental theories. It was a test of the Fortie technology. They taught us how to build a drive that can twist space—or time. This was the easy part. The captain is living proof that the time travel works. Next, we test the technology on the main job: travelling to the stars.”

Titus listened closely, sifting nuggets of meaning out of the incomprehensible. “Do I understand you correctly?” he cut in, interrupting Dr. Piotr in mid-peroration. “You didn’t set out to travel through time? You didn’t intend to rescue me?”

The scientist cast a pained glance at Dr. Lash, who said, “But, Titus! I explained this to you. And the film this morning discussed it in detail!”

“This is the Fortie project, Captain,” Dr. Piotr patiently. “Your rescue was part of it.”

“Ah, you took him over to the museum, very good,” the Ambassador said. “I love IMAX films myself, ever since I saw ‘To Fly’ down at the Air and Space Museum when I was a wee lad.”

For a moment Titus was speechless. No one had said that he was the sole beneficiary of a titanic temporal rescue effort. He had only assumed his was the central role. Apparently he wasn’t the pivot of the project: had never been. He was an unimportant cog in a big engine that was driving across the heavens towards Tau Ceti. The readjustment in his picture of the situation was painful but nearly instantaneous. He had never been one of those status-conscious blokes, always trying to get an edge on his fellows. He had enough self-confidence to speak up right away: “Right-oh. Count me in then. I’ve never been to another planet! When do we leave?”

Embarrassment, shuffling feet, a nervous laugh. Had he said something wrong?

“Now isn’t that just the spirit of exploration,” the President said, with the air of a schoolteacher determined to find something positive to say about a rowdy pupil. “You’re a firecracker, Captain. Larger than life!”

“A credit to the nation,” the Ambassador said. “Ah, sherry!”

An overall relaxation, as trays of drinks circulated and people began to move towards the buffet. Titus seized a glass of sherry and hung back as the nobs went forward. “Monster,” Dr. Trask whispered, grinning. “So this is how Victor von Frankenstein felt!”

“You’re a troublemaker, Titus,” Shell agreed. “You’ve got your nerve, jerking the poor Ambassador’s chain like that. I thought I’d bust a gut.”

Titus refused to be distracted, even by the spread of food. “I like the idea of going to Tau Ceti. Who else is going? You, Lash?”

Dr. Trask snickered at the idea. “Not with his asthma! And you’re never getting me up in one of those things. Clonal surgeons have plenty of work Earthside, grafting new limbs and boobs and organs onto people. Shell’s the one who’ll sweep those Forties off their feet.”

Titus blinked. He had not meant to suggest that women could be explorers. “If they have feet,” someone else in the line remarked.

Shell sipped her sherry and laughed. “Did you see that awful cartoon on the Today page?”

“Well, prophylactics wouldn’t take up all that much cargo space!”

The talk veered off into jokes and chatter that went right over Titus’s head. “It sounds like a perfect job for me,” he grumbled, accepting the plate someone handed him. What an odd and casual way to eat—and they called this a banquet? To Titus, banquets meant waiters and service, not shuffling through a line for bangers and mash.

Dr. Trask plopped a scoop of potatoes onto her plate and said, very kindly, “Titus, the teams have been in training for ten years. It’d be an awful lot of work for you to get up to speed.”

“Frankly, old man, you were the highest example of the explorer as amateur,” Dr. Lash said. “But this is the age of the professional. It’s no reflection on your own worth.”

In fact Titus did not believe this. His entire experience, leavened with the example of Buck Rogers in the 25th century, assured him that all he had to do was try. Surely a concerted effort would bring success. He helped himself to an enormous plateful of food, only belatedly noticing that he had cleared off half the sausages. How odd, that meat should make up such a small fraction of the offerings! But he had always been a carnivore, and it would surely be incorrect to shovel part of his portion back onto the platter. Instead he allowed them to seat him at the head table.

The President had asked Dr. Piotr a question about the economic impact of speedy space travel, and the talkative scientist was off and away. “At FTL,” he said with enthusiasm, “the planets are just suburbs. We can colonize the solar system! No more of this three-years-to-Mars stuff. We’ve already gained so much from this one Fortie contact, I can’t wait to see what else is coming.”

Every word was English, but Titus found he had no idea what was being said. He leaned nearer to Shell. “Do you understand him?”

“Sure.”

“I don’t.”

She laughed. “And Piotr prides himself on being a populizer, too! Don’t disappoint him by telling him.”

“Hamilton’s such a show-off,” Sabrina Trask muttered from beyond Shell. “Just because she taught economics and math at Stanford.”

Titus wasn’t even sure what economics was. Something to do with money, he hazarded. Born to wealth, all he knew of money was how to spend it. He wondered what precisely Buck Rogers had lived on, and how he had got into the 25th century’s military. “Shell, how much education have you had?”

“Me? Gosh, let me think—twelve years of school, four years college, medical school, another two for my communications doctorate . . . If you count the Fortie training, I’ve been in school just about all my life.”

Dr. Piotr had finished his remarks, and the President applauded, saying, “Doctor, I swear if you ever want to quit the Paticalar business, I have a job for you in politics. You could sell shoes to snakes.”

The doctor grinned, pinker than ever. “Once, Madam President, you might have tempted me. Now, I know the better part. This is where the fun is going to be.”

“Gad, I envy you young people,” the Ambassador said. “Tell us more about the time business—what’s this new time window trick the newsies are chattering about?”

Obligingly, Dr. Piotr said, “Well, it’s disruptive and difficult to pull a real object or person through time. A perfect candidate like the captain here is rare. It would be as much fun, and cheaper, to just pull light—images. I wouldn’t mind a photograph of a velociraptor, would you? We could make a fortune on the posters and screensavers alone.”

This is beyond me, Titus admitted silently. He bowed his head to the inevitable. Buck Rogers was a cheat, the invention of some fantasizing duffer who’d never actually had to work with less than seventy percent of the knowledge necessary. Titus would live the reality, and he could acknowledge now that much of it would be forever beyond his comprehension. To swallow down the entire 21st century was too big a mouthful. His only hope was to select an area to worry at and, please God, to master.

But which area? If he wasn’t going to explore, then what? “Lash, what am I going to live on? They must have proved my will and settled the estate. I don’t suppose my heirs’ descendants, my great-grandnephews and so on, will want to part with the money even if there’s a bean left after all this time. Will you people support me until I die?”

“A stipend’s in the works,” Dr. Lash said. “PTICA is responsible for your existence, Titus—you won’t starve.”

“But I bet anything you like, you’re not going to want to live out your life as a couch potato,” Shell added. “I can’t wait to see what the newsies will say, about your reconquering the American Colonies!”

Dr. Lash shuddered. “I could wish, Titus, that you’d be more careful about what you say!”

Titus ate steadily, thinking hard. His life had been handed back to him on a platter. But the President, of all people, had put her finger on the key question: what could he do with it? He knew how to fight, and he knew how to die. He had a sense there was very little call for such skills in the 21st century. As useful as knowing how to blow a duck call, he thought sardonically. Perhaps he could assist that young black at the museum.

He had it now: enough information so that he could distinguish what was truly vital. Clear as day, Titus saw that if he didn’t carve a niche for himself, he would indeed become a couch potato—he was repelled without even knowing what that was. There was a higher fence to clear than just learning to exist here. The crucial battle lay not in the past, nor the present, but the future. From infancy, playing with popguns and wooden horses, he had always known what he would be: a soldier. Now in this strange new world this destiny was gone, and he was adrift. He could do anything he set his will to. But first he had to find a new destiny to replace the one he’d left behind in 1912. Else he’d become a pet, a parasite, leeching off the moderns for the rest of his useless life, trotted out for display every now and then to bark for the visiting brass.

It reminded him of his first sight of the Himalayas, in India. Some dashed impressive mountains, but then the morning haze lifted for a moment, and the eye took in the colossal heights beyond, snow-capped peaks rearing up to pierce the sky. What he had thought was the real battle had again been nothing but the first skirmish. How much easier a sharp crisis would be! Walking to one’s end in a blizzard, perhaps. “May be some time,” indeed! This slow stubborn uphill slog would last till his dying day—in the spirit of locking the barn door too late, he swore that when he drew that final breath it should not be expended on feeble ironies that would come back to haunt him.

Wars came to an end in a year or two. Even manhauling to the Pole and back had to be accomplished in six or seven months during the austral summer. But this was never going to end. It would call for more pluck and resolution and bottom than anything else he’d ever set hand to, because it would never be over. For a moment the prospect was unspeakably daunting, and he slumped over his empty plate. But with an effort he straightened. Stiff upper lip and all that. He had conclusively demonstrated, after all, that he could do anything he set his mind to. “I’ve survived far worse,” he said aloud.

Dr. Lash glanced up. “What’s that you say, Titus?”

No time like the present to begin. Titus gazed thoughtfully at the other man’s little machine, lying beside his plate. “Lash . . . what time is it?”

THE CHIEF DESIGNER

Andy Duncan

I. Kolyma Labor Camp, Sometime During World War II

“Korolev.”

D 327 did not look around. He was busy. His joints grated together, his ligaments groaned as he lifted the pickax over his head—a motion as fast as he could manage, yet so terribly slow, slower even than the last time, which had been slower in turn than the time before that; then he released his breath and with it the tension, and the will, so that his arms fell forward and allowed the tip of the pick to glance across the jagged face of the wall. A few greasy-black chips pattered his shoes. The fall of the pick almost balanced in joy the inevitable ordeal of lifting, but not quite, so D 327’s misery accumulated in minute increments like the drift of slag in which he stood ankle-deep. He knew that none of the other workers, spaced five paces apart down the length of the tunnel, were faring any better. They had been ordered to dig for gold, but he knew this tunnel held no gold; this tunnel was the antithesis of gold; the gold had been pried from its workers’ teeth and chased from their dreams; and his pick was as soft and blunt as a thumb. He raised it again, and tried to lose count of how many times he had done so.

“Korolev.”

D 327 tried to focus his attention not on the lift and fall, lift and fall of his triple burden, arm and pick and arm, but on the slight added weight in his right jacket pocket—an imagined weight, really, so coarse and mostly air was the bit of bread he had palmed from poor Vasily’s plate at midday. Vasily had collapsed at just the right time. Later, and Vasily would have used that crust to swipe even the shine of food from the tin plate, would have thrust it into his mouth with his last dying breath. Sooner, and the guard would have noticed the remaining food and snatched it away. Guards starved less quickly in the Kolyma than the prisoners, but all starved. A dozen times D 327 had come deliriously close to eating his prize, but each time he had refrained. Many of his fellow prisoners had forgotten how to savor, but he had not. After supper would be best: Just before sleep, as he lay with his face to the barracks wall, the unchewed food in his mouth would add warmth and flavor to oblivion.

“Korolev.”

The voice was cold and clear and patient, an electronic pulse against the rasps, clinks, drips, and scuttles of the tunnel. What word, in this hole, could bear such repetition? Only a name, like God, or Stalin.

“Korolev.”

I heard that name often at the Institute, D 327 thought. Often in my presence others said that name. A response was expected, assumed; was only just. Down fell the pick, clatter and flake; he turned, half afraid of seeing nothing in the light of his carbide lamp.

Instead he faced an infinitude of stars.

“Come down from your orbit, Comrade Korolev. Come down to Earth, that a mere mortal may speak with you.”

The stars were printed on a sheet of glossy paper: a page. A hand turned the page, to a cutaway diagram of a tapered cylinder like a plump bullet. Inside its shell flowed rivers of arrows. At that moment, more clearly even than he remembered his own name, Sergei Korolev remembered another’s.

“Tsiolkovsky,” he said.

“Your memory is excellent, Comrade Korolev.” The man who had held the open book before Korolev’s face reversed it and examined it himself. He wore a full-dress officer’s uniform, and two soldiers flanked him. “Exploration of Cosmic Space with Reactive Devices, by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. Published 1903. And did the czar recognize his genius? Fah! If not for the Workers’ Revolution, he would have died of old age still wiping the snot of schoolboys in Kaluga.” He sighed. “How often we visionaries labor without recognition, without thanks.”

“It is a shame, Citizen General. I am sad for you.”

The officer snapped the book shut one-handed. In the dim light of Korolev’s helmet gleamed the brim of the officer’s cap, the golden eagle’s wings, and the rifle barrels of the soldiers on each side. “You flatter me, Korolev. I am only an engineer like yourself. And henceforth you may call me Comrade Shandarin, as you would have before your crimes were exposed and punished.” He surveyed the meager rubble beneath Korolev’s feet. “Your service here is done. From today you serve the Motherland in other ways. You will join me in my work.”

Korolev was not attentive. Just as the mere sight of food could flood his mouth with saliva and his stomach with growling, raging juices, the glimpse of Tsiolkovsky’s diagrams had released a torrent of images, facts, numerals, terms, all familiar and yet deliciously new. Apogee and perigee. Trajectory and throttle. Elevation and azimuth. Velocities and propellants and thrust. He was trying to savor all this, and this man Shandarin was distracting him. “And what work is that—Comrade?”

Shandarin laughed, a series of sharp detonations in the tunnel. “Why, what a question. The work your Motherland trained you to do, of course. Do you think your skills as a gold miner are in demand?” He reached into his brass-buttoned coat (and one part of Korolev, eternally cold in his thin and tattered parka, noted how the coat retained the smooth, unwrinkled drape of great comfort and thickness and weight) and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers that he handed to Korolev. “The chief problem,” he said, as Korolev exulted in the glorious feel of paper, “is distance, of course. The German rockets have a range of hundreds of kilometers, but are thousands of kilometers possible? Not all the Motherland’s enemies are her neighbors. The V-2 achieves altitudes greater than eighty kilometers, more than sixteen times the height of your GIRD-X; our new rockets must fly even higher than the Germans’.” Korolev leafed through the papers. His blisters smeared the charts and graphs no matter how much care he took. Shandarin continued: “So our rockets must somehow better the Germans’ twenty-five thousand kilograms of thrust, and by a wide margin at that. This requires drastic innovations in metallurgy or design, if not both—Comrade, are you listening?”

Korolev had turned one of the charts on its side, so that the rocket’s arc swept not from right to left, but upward in a languid, powerful semicircle, as if bound for . . .

His thumb left a red star in its path.

“I am listening,” Korolev said, “and so is everyone else.” He was aware of fewer noises, fewer motions, from the other miners, and some of the Institute’s concern for security had returned to him, along with an echo of his voice of command. “In my day,” Korolev continued, “such talk was classified.”

Shandarin shrugged, grinned. “I am speaking only to you, Comrade,” he said. He inclined his head backward, toward the soldiers, and said, “We may speak freely before cretins,” then flicked a gloved finger toward the miners, “and even more so before dead men.” He slid a page from Korolev’s hands and held it up for all to see, turned completely around, waved the sheet a little so that it fluttered. No miner met his gaze. He turned back to Korolev. “Shall we go?” He feigned a shiver. “I am not so used to the cold as you.”

In 1933, after the GIRD-X triumph, after the vodka and the toasts and the ritual congratulations from Comrade Stalin (delivered in great haste by a nearsighted bureaucrat who looked as if he expected rockets to roar out of the doorways at any moment), Korolev and his mentor Tsander, who would die so soon thereafter, had left their joyous colleagues downstairs and taken their celebration aloft, clambered onto the steep, icy rooftop of the Moscow office building that housed the State Reaction Scientific Research Institute. To hell with the vodka; they toasted each other, and the rocket, and the city, and the planet, with a smuggled and hoarded bottle of French champagne.

“To the moon!”

“To the sun!”

“To Mars!”

They ate caviar and crabmeat and smoked herring, smacked like gourmands and sailed the empty cans into orbit over the frozen streets of the capital. Never, not even in the Kolyma, had Korolev so relished a meal.

He remembered all this, and much more, as he sat beside Shandarin in the sledge that hissed away from the snow-covered entrance of Mine Seventeen. He burned to examine the papers, but they could wait. He folded them and tucked them into his worn and patched jacket, through which he almost could have read them had he wanted to. As Shandarin regarded him in silence, he pulled the crust of bread from his pocket and began nibbling it with obvious relish, as if it were the finest delicacy plucked from the ovens of the Romanovs. He settled back, closed his eyes, and in eating the bread relived the bursting tang of the caviar, the transcendent release of the launch, the blanketing embrace of the night sky that no longer danced beyond reach. In this way he communed with his former self, who dropped gently down from the rooftop of the Institute and joined him, ready to resume their great work, and the sledge shot across the snow as if propelled by yearning and fire.

II. Baikonur Cosmodrome, September 1957

Awakened by the commingled howls of all the souls in Hell, a startled Evgeny Aksyonov lifted the curtain of this compartment window and looked out onto a circus. Loping alongside the train was a parallel train of camels, a dozen or more of the gangling beasts, their fencepost teeth bared as they yelped and brayed and groaned, lips curled in great ropy sneers. Bulging gray sacks jogged at their flanks, and swaying atop each mount was a swarthy, bearded rider in flowing robes, with a snarl to rival that of his camel.

So this is Kazakhstan, thought Aksyonov, who before this trip never had been farther east than the outskirts of Moscow, the home of a maiden aunt who baked fine tarts. He breathed the choking dust and coughed with enthusiasm; he was too young to be uncomfortable. One of the camel drivers noticed him gawking, grinned, and raised a shaggy fist in a gesture so rude that Aksyonov hastily dropped the curtain and sat back, fingering his own suddenly inadequate beard. He rummaged in his canvas bag for the worn copy of Perelman’s Interplanetary Travels, which he opened at random and began to read, though he could have recited the passage with his eyes closed. He soon nodded off again, and in his dreams he was a magnificent bronze fighter of the desert, who brandished a scimitar to defy the rockets that split the sky.

No conductor, no fellow passenger disturbed his sleep, for Evgeny Aksyonov was bound for a place that did not officially exist, to meet a man who officially had no name. Access to such non-places and non-people was strictly regulated, and so Aksyonov was the only passenger aboard the train.

“Come,” the soldier on the platform said, after he peered from Aksyonov’s face to his photo and back again just enough to make Aksyonov nervous. “The Chief Designer expects you.”

For fifteen minutes or more, he drove Aksyonov along a freshly paved highway so wide and straight it seemed inevitable, past a series of construction sites where the hollow outlines of immense buildings rose from pits and heaps of dirt. Gangs of workers swarmed about. Atop one pile of earth, three armed soldiers kept watch: the men swinging picks below must be zeks, political prisoners, the Motherland’s most menial laborers. A gleaming rail spur crossed and recrossed the road, and Aksyonov began to brace himself for each intersection, because the driver did not slow down. Some completed buildings looked like administrative offices, others like army barracks. Behind one barracks were more inviting dwellings, a half-dozen yurts. A couple of Kazakh men were in the process of rolling a seventh into place, as if it were a great hide-covered hoop.

The driver abandoned Askyonov without speech or ceremony at the concrete lip of a kilometer-wide pit. Aksyonov looked down sixty meters along the steep causeway that would channel the rocket blasts. He shivered and retreated from the edge of the launch pad, a tremendous concrete shelf hundreds of meters square. No amount of rocket research would make him fond of heights. Above him soared three empty gantries, thirty-meter talons that would close on the rocket and hold it fast until liftoff.

Hundreds of workers dashed about the pad. Some drove small electric carts, some clambered along scaffolds that reached into the tips of the gantries and the depths of the pit. Among them were many Kazakh men, distinguishable even at a distance by their felt skullcaps. Amid all this activity, Aksyonov tried to look as knowledgeable and useful as possible while he guarded his luggage and felt homesick.

As he considered getting out his book, he was jolted nearly off his feet by a voice that boomed and echoed from everywhere: to left, to right, the pit, the sky.

“Testing. Testing. One two three. Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky Tsiolkovsky.”

Then came several prolonged and deafening blasts, like gusts into a microphone. Aksyonov clapped his hands over his ears. No one else in the whole anthill took any visible notice of the racket.

“Hello. Hello. Hello.” The words rolled across the concrete in waves and rattled Aksyonov to the bone. “Can you hear me? Eh? Hello? I’m asking you—you there with the beard. Yes, you, the one doing no work. Can you hear me?”

Aksyonov released his ears and looked about the launch pad. Unsure where to direct his response, he waved both hands high above his head.

“Good,” the voice said. “Wait there. I’ll be right up—” The next words were swallowed in a spasm of rattling coughs that echoed off the sides of the pit and seemed to well up from the earth itself. Aksyonov covered his ears again. In mid-cough, the amplification stopped, and all that fearsome reverberation contracted to a single small voice that hacked and cleared its throat far across the concrete pad.

Aksyonov turned to see a man step out of an elevator set into one of the support pillars. The man walked toward Aksyonov, swabbed his mouth with a handkerchief: heavy-set, fiftyish, with low, thick eyebrows and a brilliant gaze. He wore an overcoat, though the day was warm for autumn.

“You are Aksyonov,” he said, hand extended. He said it as if he had reviewed a list of names in the elevator, and had selected just the right one for the job; if he had said Dyomin or Pilyugin or Molotov, Aksyonov would have answered to it just as readily, then and forever. “My name is Sergei Korolev,” the older man continued, “but you are unlikely to hear that name again. Here I am only the Chief Designer, or the Chief. Welcome to Baikonur Cosmodrome.”

Aksyonov made a little bow, just more than a nod. He had rehearsed his opening and was quite proud of it. “I am honored to meet the man who designed the first Soviet rocket.”

“And I am honored to meet the designer of our future ones,” Korolev replied. “In collaboration, of course. Space is a collaborative effort, like a nation, or a cathedral. Come with me, please,” he added over his shoulder, for he already was well on his way across the pad. Aksyonov grabbed his bags and scrambled to catch up.

“I regret that I have no time to give you a tour of the facility, nor a proper interview. Can you recognize a lie when you hear one? What I just told you was a lie. Truthfully, I do not regret it at all, for I am glad finally to be busy with this launch of the Fellow Traveler—you read the brief I sent you, yes? Yes. Instead of the usual formalities, you will accompany me on all my rounds in the coming week, from this moment. Will this be satisfactory?”

“Very much so, Comrade Korolev. Er, Comrade Chief.”

“Simply Chief will do. Hello, Abish, you mad Kazakh, please keep it out of the pit, will you?” he cried to a waving, grinning man who whizzed past in an electric cart. “You come from the Academy with the highest recommendations, Comrade Aksyonov. So high that you actually had a choice of postings, and choice is a rare thing in this new century. Tell me, why did you choose Baikonur? Do you nurse some abiding love for sand?”

“Primarily, Comrade—er, Chief—I came here to work with you.” He awaited some response, got none, and went on. “Also, Comrade Shandarin’s design group involves—well, let us say much more conventional applications of rocketry? Your work at Baikonur, what little I could learn of it, seemed much more interesting.”

“I understand,” the Chief said. He led the way down a metal spiral staircase that clamored at every step. “Comrade Shandarin is like the old Chinaman, who lobs arrows of flying fire at the Mongols. The firepower is greater and greater, but still the Mongols keep coming.” At the foot of the reverberating stairs, he turned back and stared at Aksyonov’s luggage. “What in the hell are all these things you carry around with you?”

Aksyonov stopped. “Ah, just some . . . just my luggage, Chief.” The older man’s gaze was unreadable. “My clothes, and books . . . and some personal items . . .” He faltered.

After some thought, the Chief grunted in mingled assent and surprise and said, “Books are useful.” Turning to the parking lot, he swept one arm back toward the launch pad. “Consider this a personal item, too.”

As the two men approached, a large soldier bounded from a car, threw open the back door, and stood at attention. In one hand he held a book, his place marked with an index finger.

“Thank you, Oleg,” the Chief said, and followed Aksyonov in. “Oleg here is reading his way through all the major published works on rocketry and interplanetary travel. What do you think of the Goddard, Oleg?”

“Very interesting, Chief,” the soldier said, as he cranked the ignition. Aksyonov studied the man’s thick, shaven neck.

“It is a directed reading,” the Chief continued. He pulled a slide rule and a slim notebook from his coat. The shadows of the gantries swept across his face as the car circled the parking lot. “If I must live with an armed escort, I will at least be able to converse civilly with him.”

“Would you like to converse now, Chief?” the driver asked.

“No, thank you,” said the Chief. His fingers danced across the numbers as Aksyonov looked out the back window at the receding claws of the pad.

III. Baikonur Cosmodrome, 4 October 1957

“Ten.”

Ten seconds to go, and no work left to be done. Wonderful, wonderful. Korolev stretched out his legs beneath the scarred wooden desk, pulled the microphone forward, and relaxed as he counted down to zero.

“Nine.”

A hundred meters away from this steel-encased concrete bunker, Korolev’s voice must be booming across the launch pad. Only the topmost fifteen meters of Old Number Seven would be visible above the icy white fog vented from its liquid-oxygen tanks. Korolev had watched it through every periscope, from every angle, until his cheeks ached from squinting. Now he attempted to watch nothing. His subordinates glanced up from their consoles and radar screens sweaty and white-lipped, like men ridden by nightmares. Let them worry. It was part of the learning experience. Korolev was done with worries—for eight more seconds, anyway. Then the next trial would begin, but in the meantime he would savor his triumph like a crust of bread.

“Eight.”

Just weeks before, Comrade Khrushchev had given the go-ahead for an orbital satellite launch—a launch that would impress the world (so he said) with the fearsome might of the Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile. Ha! As if Washington were as easy to reach as orbit. The Party Chairman had played right into the Chief Designer’s hands.

“Seven.”

Granted, Old Number Seven was a remarkable design achievement. Twelve small steering rockets and four strap-on boosters surrounded a central core with twenty separate thrust chambers. The metallurgists, wringing their hands, had told Korolev that his project was doomed, that any single rocket of Soviet make would shatter well before it reached four hundred and fifty thousand kilograms of thrust. Very well, Korolev said: How about two dozen, three dozen smaller rockets clustered together? The union is greater than the individual; was this not the essence of Communism?

“Six.”

For hours, Khrushchev and the members of the Politburo, who knew as much about rocketry as any equivalent number of camels, had scampered about the launch pad like Siberian peasants on the loose in Red Square. They wanted to touch everything, like children; Korolev had to be stern with them. And they asked childish questions: How much does it weigh? How fast does it go? How high will it fly? The answers made them even more excited, and Khrushchev was the most excited of all. “This is a great work you do, Comrade Korolev!” he kept saying. The man’s cigar ashes were everywhere, and Korolev had not seen his favorite tea glass since.

“Five.”

Comrade Shandarin’s objections, though they went unheeded at the Kremlin, were sound. What good was an ICBM that took hours to fuel and launch? One so large that it could be moved only by railway? One that could not maneuver itself to its target, but had to be guided by human controllers on the ground? Worst of all, from Shandarin’s standpoint, only the northeastern corner of the United States had anything to fear from Old Number Seven. “Comrade,” he intoned, “there are precious few military targets in Maine.” The restless old Chinaman could hear the Mongols laughing.

“Four.”

Just a week before, young Aksyonov, at the close of a routine meeting, had loitered about with the constipated expression that signified an important question welling up inside. “Chief, I am confused,” the young man said. “The field marshal keeps referring to Old Number Seven as a ballistic missile. Perhaps I am wrong, Chief, but—is Old Number Seven not a rather inefficient design for a ballistic missile?”

“Three.”

Korolev had beamed at the young man, leaned forward and said, “I do not think that a fair assessment, Comrade Aksyonov. I think it would be more accurate to call Old Number Seven a shitty design for a ballistic missile.”

“Two.”

“But,” Korolev continued, “it will make a marvelous booster rocket to send men into space.”

“One.

“Ignition!”

And so a new star blossomed in the Central Asian desert and rose into the heavens, and even over the thunderous roar of the rockets the others in the command bunker heard the Chief as he threw his head back and laughed.

IV. Steppes North of Baikonur, February 1961

Aksyonov stood beside the Chief, their elbows touching, twin binoculars raised. An eagle wheeled across Aksyonov’s portion of sky, and he instinctively turned his head to keep it in view, then caught himself and swung back to focus on the orange parachute as it grew larger and larger—though not quite so large as expected.

Aksyonov lowered his binoculars and checked his map, but the Chief needed no confirmation. “Our peacock has flown off course,” he muttered, and rapped twice on the roof of the cab.

The truck roared forward, jolted along the frozen ruts of the dirt lane, and the swaying engineers in the back held on as best they could. Across the vast fields to right and left, toy-sized trucks and ambulances raced alongside. A flock of far-distant sheep surged away from an oncoming truck; the wind carried the honks and bleats for kilometers. Streams of vehicles converged on the drifting orange blossom that was Pyotr Dolgov.

The Chief was on good terms with each of the prospective cosmonauts at Star City, knew their names and families and hobbies and histories, knew in fact everything in their dossiers (and KGB dossiers omitted nothing). The Chief had selected these men from thousands of candidates, in consultation with Khrushchev and, seemingly, half the Politburo; and despite all this, Aksyonov was convinced that the Chief never liked Pyotr Dolgov.

The cosmonaut would sit in the commons for hours waxing his absurd mustache and bragging to everyone about his sexual exploits and his skydiving expertise. “More than five hundred jumps, my friends, and not so much as a sprained ankle. You see this little pocket volume of Lenin? I collect them, just to have something to read on the way down. After the chute is open, there is nothing else to do, you see? Eventually I will have read all the great man’s works between earth and sky! How many scholars can say as much?” And so on and so on, as the other cosmonauts hooted and jeered throughout. The Chief, shambling through the commons with a fresh sheaf of problems under his arm, would glare at him, and say nothing.

Yet Dolgov was the obvious man to test the East’s ejection system, and such a test must be done without delay, if what the Chief read in the KGB reports, and in Life magazine, were to be believed. Woe indeed, that long, dry, cold spring, if the Chief caught someone taking a break to smoke a cigarette or place an idle telephone call or, worst of all, take a nap. “Do the Americans and the Germans shirk their jobs, down there in the tropics?” he would yell, waving the latest publicity photographs of the seven toothy spacemen. (The Americans surely would send the first dentist into space.) The Chief found this strange, perpetually sunny launch site, this Cape Canaveral Florida, a locale as exotic as Mars or the moon; to him it was always “down there in the tropics.” So Dolgov was hustled through his training, and the final test was scheduled for late February.

The experiment was simple. Dolgov, suited up, was strapped into a prototype ejection seat inside a full-size mock-up of the East craft. Then the mock-up was carried aloft in the cargo bay of one of the big Antonov transports. Thousands of meters above the steppes, the capsule was shoved without ceremony out the back of the plane. Once clear, Dolgov pressed the “eject” button. Very simple. Also lunatic, but the schedule at Baikonur Cosmodrome made generous allowances for lunacy.

Dolgov had summed up the procedure: “You feed me to the plane, and the plane shits me back out!”

The Chief had winced, and then nodded his head.

The Chief’s truck was not the first to arrive that afternoon. A gaggle of engineers all tried to climb over the tailgate together, and the Chief, impatient, gestured for Aksyonov to help him over the side. The rippling parachute danced sideways, but was anchored by the prone figure on the ground.

A pale soldier with a rifle jogged up to the Chief and said: “It’s bad, Comrade Designer. Perhaps you should wait for the—” The Chief, of course, was already past, and Aksyonov checked his stride a bit so as not to outpace the Chief.

Dolgov lay on his back, arms and legs sprawled as no living man would willingly lie. His helmet, its faceplate shattered, rested at a crazy angle on his shoulders yet still was bolted to the suit.

The Chief stared down at the body and said, “We are fools before men and before God.”

Doctors arrived, circling somewhat to maintain a respectful distance from the Chief, and confirmed the obvious: Dolgov’s neck was broken. He had done no reading on the way down.

“His helmet must have struck the hatch upon ejection,” Aksyonov said, for he felt he should say something. “He knew the risks,” he added.

“Not as well as you, my friend, and certainly not as well as I.” The Chief’s voice was deceptively quiet. By now dozens of others had gathered. They looked sick, ashen, aghast, but the Chief’s face was taut with fury. Slow and gentle in his rage, he knelt on the frozen ground, reached past the doctors, grasped Dolgov’s outflung hands, and folded the arms across the orange chest so that Dolgov seemed to grasp the chest straps of his parachute.

“Better that way,” the Chief grunted.

He turned and walked back toward the truck, into the cold wind, Aksyonov close behind. As he walked, the Chief pulled from his bulky jacket his notebook and a ball-point pen, shook the pen to get it going (it was of East German make), and began to write, pen plowing across the page, line after line. As he wrote, the Chief stepped over gullies and around rocks without stumbling or looking up. A marmot scampered across his path, practically underfoot. The Chief kept writing.

At the end of the lane, where the earth was permanently churned by the wide turns of tractors, the pale soldier had found a use for his rifle: He held it up horizontally, like a cattle gate, to keep three shriveled peasant women at bay. As the Chief approached, the eldest called: “What is wrong, Comrade? What’s all the fuss?”

The Chief replied as he passed, without looking up or ceasing to write: “I just broke a young man’s neck, Madam, with a slide rule and the stroke of a pen.”

The old woman instantly crossed herself, then realized her error and clapped her hands to her face; but Aksyonov and his Chief could not care less, and the soldier was intent on the romping parachute, as rapt and wide-eyed as a child.

V. Baikonur Cosmodrome, 12 April 1961

Frustrated with merely adjusting and rearranging his stubborn pillow, Aksyonov began, shortly past one A.M., to give it a sound thrashing. He pummelled it with his fists, butted it with his head, and slung it into the corner. Aksyonov sat up, sighed, and amused himself for a few minutes by twisting locks of his hair into intricate braids with his left thumb and forefinger, then yanking them free with his right hand. “I am insane,” he said aloud. He threw back the bedcovers and swung his bare feet onto the never-warm wooden floor of the cottage.

The snores droning through the hallway suggested Aksyonov was alone in his sleeplessness. Trousers, shoes, jacket, cap; he imagined they were the bright orange flight suit, the asphalt spreader’s boots, the leaden bubble of the helmet. He made final adjustments to this fancy (to be sure of the oxygen-nitrogen mix) before he stepped boldly onto the back porch, arms raised in triumph, to claim the concrete walkway and the dusty shrubbery in the name of World Socialism.

Shaking his head at his foolishness—an option young Gagarin, suited up, alas would not have—Aksyonov strolled into the yard. He briefly mistook, for the thousandth time, the horizonal glow of the launch pad for the dawn of a new day. Aksyonov felt his internal compass corkscrew wildly. He closed his eyes and gulped the chill air, hoped to flood himself with calm, but instead thought of a rocket sucking subzero broth from a hose.

Across the garden, a light burned in the kitchen window of the Chief’s equally nondescript cottage. Aksyonov walked toward it, since he had nowhere else to walk, and as he neared he became absurdly furtive, stepping with great care, raising his knees high like a prancing colt in zero gravity. He crept into the bushes alongside the house and peered over the sill. As a child, Aksyonov had longed to be a spy; he enjoyed, for example, covertly watching his secretly Orthodox grandfather in prayer. One day he gave himself away with a loud borscht-fed belch, infuriated his grandfather, and launched a family crisis . . . but the Chief, he saw, was just reading.

The harsh fluorescent light accented the frostbite scars on the Chief’s face—a sign, too, of his weariness. As usual, his right hand supported his chin; his left index finger guided his eyes across and down the page of his notebook. At his elbow were a plate of cheese curds and a full glass of tea from which no steam rose. The Chief turned the page, read, turned another. Nothing worth watching; why, then, was Aksyonov so fascinated? Why did he feel such comfort, knowing the Chief Designer sat up late in a lighted kitchen, reading? The Chief’s finger moved as methodically as his pen, line after line after—he looked up, not toward the window but toward the back door, and Aksyonov ducked beneath the sill. He heard the scrape of a chair, and heavy footsteps. A wedge of light sliced across the grass.

The Chief whispered: “Gagarin? Hsst! Hello?”

After a pause, as Aksyonov held his breath, the Chief peered around the corner of the house at his assistant crouched in the shrubbery.

“Ah, it’s you,” the Chief said. “Good. Now perhaps I can get some work done, in this winter resort for narcoleptics.”

Aksyonov was brushing leaves and twigs from his sleeves, trying to formulate an explanation to himself that also would pass muster with the Chief, when his superior reappeared. He strode from the house with the notebook under his right arm as his left arm fought for position inside his bulky jacket, which he wore outdoors in all weathers; Aksyonov figured it weighed at least as much as a flight suit. “Now then,” the Chief said, and shepherded Aksyonov across the yard by the elbow. “Let us suppose, for the sake of argument and for our sanity, that all goes well in the morning. Gagarin goes up, he orbits, he comes down, he talks to Khrushchev, he talks to his mama, he is the good Russian boy, yes? Yes. Fine. All well and good. Still he is just Spam in a can.”

“Spam, Chief?”

The Chief waved his hand. “An American delicacy packed in cans, like caviar. I have read too much Life, perhaps. Stop interrupting. I mean that if good Russian boys like Gagarin are ever to orbit anything other than the Earth, they will need a craft better than that hollowed-out Fellow Traveler over there. They will need to be able to maneuver, to rendezvous with each other, to dock, and so on. Now interrupt me. What modular structure for this new craft, this Union craft, best would combine the strengths of our current craft with the terrible necessities of . . .”

For more than an hour the two men tromped across the yard, sometimes talked simultaneously and sometimes not at all, sometimes walked shoulder to shoulder and sometimes stalked each other like duelists, and they snatched diagrams from the air, and chopped them in the grass, and bickered and fought and hated one another and reconciled and embraced and bickered again, all beneath a brilliant starry sky at which they did not even glance; and when they tired, having solved nothing and having discovered about a dozen fresh impossibilities to be somehow faced and broken, they collapsed onto the back porch steps in giddy triumph and elation, and then Aksyonov said, “This is not my cottage.”

The Chief looked around. “Nor mine,” he said.

Heaped about the porch were bouquets, mostly frugal carnations, brought the previous day, in wave after wave, by dimpled envoys of the Young Communists League.

“This is Gagarin’s cottage,” Aksyonov whispered. The windows were dark. In the absolute silence: a faint snore.

“At seven last evening I marched over here and ordered him to go to bed and get a good night’s sleep,” the Chief murmured, eyes wide, “and he has the nerve to do exactly that.” He heaved himself off the steps, rubbed the small of his back, stooped and raked the dirt with his hands. “Help me,” he whispered, and began to load his pockets with pebbles.

Aksyonov dropped to hands and knees. “You’re right, Chief. Why should we stay up all night, and do all his worrying for him?” He added, under his breath: “The bastard.”

Incredibly, there was Gagarin, out cold, his outline visible in the darkened room thanks to the radium dial of the bedside clock. The two engineers danced back a few paces from the cosmonaut’s window and began peppering the pane with handfuls of shot. Was the man deaf, or made of stone—a peasant boy already gone to monument? Ah, there’s the light. Crouched behind Gagarin’s complementary black government sedan, which he could drive from the middle of nowhere to the edge of nowhere and back again, his tormentors watched the young hero of the Motherland raise the sash, poke out his head, look around.

Gagarin whispered: “Chief?”

No reply, and so the sash came down, and the light went off. The two ruffians stood up, turned solemnly to each other, and began to sputter and fizz with suppressed laughter. Aksyonov drew in a deep breath, and the Chief said, with quiet gravity: “As I prepared to leave the cottage, Gagarin said he had two last questions for me. One, was it not true that he could take a couple of personal items aboard, up to about two hundred grams? Yes, I told him, of course, perhaps a photograph or the like. Then, he made a request. Do you know what that boy wanted to carry into orbit tomorrow? Can you imagine? One of my writing pens.”

“Did you give him one?”

The Chief’s face spasmed. “Go to bed, Aksyonov,” he said.

Aksyonov did, and behind him the Chief Designer leaned on the government-issue sedan and gazed at Yuri Gagarin’s darkened bedroom window.

VI. Sunrise One, 12 October 1964

A planet rolled aside to reveal a star, and was itself revealed, lighted as if from within: storm systems roiled; mountain snowfields sparkled; a checkerboard of collective farms wheeled past the window, proof from space that Communism had changed the Earth. Orbital sunrise was the spectacle of a lifetime, yet Cosmonaut Aksyonov was distracted throughout. Cosmonaut Aksyonov was upside down.

Should he say something? He knew that at four hundred kilometers above the earth’s surface the term “upside down” was meaningless, but the sensation persisted. Even with his eyes closed he felt inverted, as if all the blood was rushing to his head. Surely Yegorov’s countless sensors, which studded every crevice and cranny of Aksyonov’s body, would detect such a thing? For a moment, Aksyonov fancied that the doctor was aware of his upside-downness and just hadn’t said anything, to spare Aksyonov’s feelings. After all, reorienting himself, swapping ends, would be impossible for any of the three crewmen in this cramped space. Here there was even less room to maneuver than in the back seat of that ridiculous Italian car in which Aksyonov had ridden three abreast with these very men a month before, on a futile midnight jaunt to Tyuratam for vodka. Even with the ability to unstrap himself and float, could the middle person suddenly cry, “Switch!” and reverse himself at will? No, if Aksyonov was upside down, he would have to stay that way until re-entry. And if he was not upside down, but merely insane, then he might stay that way a lot longer, but he tried not to think about that.

“Looks like a slight anomaly in the saline balance,” Yegorov said, as he peered at his hand-sized lab kit. The doctor sounded very proud of his salty blood. He had poked and prodded himself with sensors and needles and probes ever since reaching orbit, but found himself lamentably normal—until this final pinprick of blood, which Yegorov had flipped from his finger like a tiny red berry, finally yielded something unearthly, if tedious. Well, fine, Comrade Doctor, Aksyonov wanted to say, why do all your little tests not tell you that we’ve been upside down for the past two hours? Because if Aksyonov was upside down, then Yegorov and Novikov must be upside down as well. The thought did not console him.

“How do you feel, Comrade Aksyonov?” Novikov asked.

“I am fine,” Aksyonov replied.

The pilot smiled in reply and returned his attention to the sealed tube of black currant juice that drifted between his outstretched hands. In space as on Earth, Novikov thrilled at small things. Back at the cosmodrome, he had been aghast at Aksyonov’s ignorance of Kazakh food. He had prepared for the reluctant engineer lamb strips and noodles, which he called besh barmak, and poured him a foamy mug of fermented kumiss. “You will enjoy space more,” the pilot had said, “if you experience more of Earth beforehand. Drink up. It’s mare’s milk, but what do you care? We are young yet. Drink.” Now Novikov was engrossed with the plastic tube, which he batted first with his right hand, then his left, as if he were playing tennis with himself, and the tube tumbled first one way, then another. Aksyonov was fairly certain of the tube’s movements to left and right, but what of “up” and “down” ? Was the tube, end over end over end, ever truly upside down? Or was it right side up the whole time, as the rest of the capsule revolved around it? Aksyonov wanted to throw up.

“If you aren’t going to drink that, how about passing it over?” asked the jolly doctor, who probably wanted to test the effects of black currant juice on his saline levels. “Here you go,” replied the equally jolly pilot. He lifted his right hand to let the tube pass beneath it on its way across Aksyonov’s chest. The doctor caught it and said, “Thanks.” He popped the lid with his thumb and squeezed it to release a shivering blob of juice. The doctor let go of the tube (which began a slow drift back across the cabin in response to the slight push of his hand upon release), and brought both hands together to clasp the juice at its middle, mashing the blob until it divided, cell-like, into two separate jellies. The doctor raised his head from his couch and allowed one of them to float into his mouth. He licked his lips and said, “Mmm,” and nudged the other blob toward Novikov. It drifted across Aksyonov’s chest like a dark cloud above a picnic, and was gobbled in its turn; the pilot flicked out his tongue like a frog to catch it.

And these were grown men!

“Would you like some currant juice, Comrade Aksyonov?”

“No, thank you.” His mouth tasted like kumiss.

“Water?”

“Coffee?”

“Orange juice?”

“Apple, perhaps?”

“Thank you, I’m not thirsty. Thanks all the same.” He envisioned a headsized glob of vomit bouncing about the cabin as its three captives flinched and moaned beneath, like schoolchildren trapped in a room with a bat. Aksyonov took deep breaths of the canned air and tried to focus on the fireflies outside the window.

“Comrade Aksyonov has the spacesickness,” Yegorov murmured, as if he and Novikov were exchanging confidences.

“I do not!” Aksyonov cried.

“You have lain there like a fish for an hour,” the doctor continued. “Pulse rate normal, respiration normal, eye movements slightly accelerated but otherwise normal, you check out normal on all my readouts, and frankly you look like hell.”

“Everybody gets it,” Novikov said. “Titov, Nikolayev, Popovich, Bykovsky, Tereshkova—all had it, in some degree or other.”

“Gagarin, too?” Aksyonov asked.

“No, Gagarin didn’t get it.”

“Do you have it?”

“Ah, no, actually I don’t. But I’ve been a pilot for years, you know. Fighter training and so on.”

“I have it a little, I think,” Yegorov said. “Just some giddiness. The Americans have reported it, too. We think it may have something to do with the effect of weightlessness on the inner ear.” The doctor had published a number of important papers on the inner ear, and Aksyonov was surprised he had waited so long to bring up that remarkable organ. “Do you feel disoriented, spatially confused in any way?”

“Yes,” Aksyonov sighed. “I feel as if I’m upside down. I have trouble focusing my eyes. The instruments swim around a little when I try to read them. And I’m a bit queasy as well.”

“Are you going to throw up?” Novikov asked.

“No!” Aksyonov retorted, and began to feel better.

“This is very interesting,” Yegorov said, making notes. “You must report all your symptoms as they occur.”

“I am not reporting, I am complaining,” Aksyonov said. “And yet I am a crew member aboard the world’s first three-man spacecraft, on the highest manned orbit in history. Forgive me, comrades.”

Even as he said it, he winced to call the Sunrise a “three-man spacecraft.” It was the same old East capsule minus reserve parachute and ejection system, a risky modification that left just enough room to wedge in a third narrow couch. No room for pressure suits, either, so they all wore grey coveralls, paper-thin jackets, and sneakers. “A shirtsleeve flight,” Khrushchev had called it, when he presented his demands to the Chief at the Chairman’s Black Sea villa the summer before.

The Chief’s rage had percolated all the way back to Baikonur; by the time he relayed his orders to Aksyonov, he was in a near-frenzy, stomping about the design lab and slamming his fist on the work tables to punctuate his denunciations. “So now we must suspend work on the Union, delay all our progress toward the moon, so that Khrushchev can taunt the Americans, ‘Ha ha! Your Gemini sends up two men, but our Sunrise sends up three! We win again!’ ” Pencils and rulers rattled as the great fist came down.

Aksyonov shook his head over the sketches. “It will be three brave cosmonauts who will board this craft,” he said.

“Not three cosmonauts at all,” the Chief replied. “I have not yet told you the worst part. The Sunrise will carry aloft one trained cosmonaut and two untrained ‘civilians’—one a doctor, one a scientist or engineer. This way Khrushchev can brag of the first scientific laboratory in space. He said, ‘If you cannot build this for me, if you cannot continue to advance our glorious space program, then I assure you that Comrade Shandarin can.’ ” The Chief paced back down the table to brood over the diagrams. “But what engineer, I ask you, would be noble and courageous and foolish and short enough to climb into such a bucket without a rifle at his back?”

At that moment, Aksyonov knew his answer. He had seen the Chief shudder at the mention of Shandarin’s name. But Aksyonov spent a week working up the nerve to pass his answer on to the Chief, and then another couple of weeks persuading him.

The same evening the Chief finally relented, Aksyonov helped him write a long and detailed letter to be sent by special courier to the Politburo member most familiar with the Baikonur program—the former Kazakhstan party secretary, Comrade Brezhnev. The report detailed Comrade Khrushchev’s increasing interference with the Soviet space program, and implied (without quite saying so) that ignominious disaster loomed if more rational and far-sighted leaders did not intervene. While the Chief laboriously pecked away at the final draft, for even his two-fingered typing was superior to Aksyonov’s, the Motherland’s newest cosmonaut sketched a cartoon called “How To Send A Bureaucrat Into Orbit.” It showed Khrushchev being shoe-horned into a cannon with a crowbar.

“Look out there,” Novikov said.

The Sunrise’s porthole twinkled with hundreds of tiny lights, each lasting less than a second. A shimmering envelope of ice crystals surrounded the hurtling spacecraft.

“I heard and read descriptions of the fireflies,” Aksyonov said, “but I never dreamed how beautiful they are.”

“Are you still upside down, Comrade?” the doctor asked him.

Aksyonov laughed. “Yes, but if you can stand it so can I. If I were not as upside down as you two, I would not be here, would I?”

“Well, the Chief will turn us all upside down,” Novikov said, “if we don’t get some more chores done before we fly back into radio range. We have transitional spectra to photograph, ion fluxes and background radiation to measure, and of course spontaneous greetings to prepare for our Olympic team in Tokyo. Yegorov, perhaps you and our topsy-turvy friend could rehearse the script while I see to these instruments.”

“Right away, Comrade. Let me just finish these medical notes. . . .”

Aksyonov squinted at Yegorov’s writing hand. “Comrade Doctor,” he said. “Is that the pen you typically use for note-taking? In zero gravity, it seems prone to skip.”

Yegorov stopped writing, opened his mouth, closed it again, and cast Aksyonov a sheepish glance. “This is not my usual pen, Comrade. I borrowed it for the flight. It is one of the Chief’s pens.”

His crewmates regarded the doctor for a few seconds. Then Novikov chuckled and reached into a pocket. “Don’t be ashamed, Comrade Doctor. Look. I myself asked for one of the great man’s handkerchiefs.”

After a pause, pilot and doctor both looked at the engineer who lay between them.

“For my part,” Aksyonov said, “I have a note he gave me just before launch.” He pulled the small square of paper from his jacket and began to unfold it. “I see no harm in sharing it with you—”

Novikov tapped his hand.

“No, Comrade,” he said. “That note is for you, and not for us. Maybe at some point we will need to hear it, and then you may read it to us, but not now. Not now. Now we have our orders, Comrades. Shall we get to work?”

VII. Sunrise Two, 18 March 1965

“I can’t do it. Come in, Baikonur. I can’t do it.”

“Leonov, this is the Chief. What did you say? Please repeat.”

“I can’t get back into the airlock, Chief.”

“Explain.”

“My pressure suit, sir. It has swollen, as we expected, because of the unequal stresses on the materials . . . but it has swollen much more than we anticipated, in only a ten-minute spacewalk. I didn’t realize how much, until just now, when I tried to bend to enter the hatch. It’s becoming rigid, Chief, like a suit of armor, or a statue. Please advise.”

“I understand, Leonov. This is an inconvenience, nothing more. Have you tried to maneuver with the handholds? Grasp them and haul yourself forward headfirst. Stretch out and pull yourself along like a log. I know it’s awkward, but clipping the television camera to the hull was awkward, too, remember?”

“All right. I will try, Chief.”

“You’re doing fine, Leonov. You have executed a flawless extra-vehicular activity. Your suit may be stiff, but you are more free at this moment than any other man who has ever lived, and we all envy you, Leonov. Report when you are ready. Baikonur out.”

“Uh, Baikonur, this is Leonov. Come in, Baikonur. Come in, Chief.”

“Yes, Leonov, this is the Chief. What news?”

“No news yet, Chief, I’m still trying. It’s hard, because my arms are getting stiff, too, but I’m trying. Chief, could you perhaps keep talking? It helps me focus. Believe it or not, there are a lot of distractions up here. I keep wanting to look at the Earth, at the clouds over the Volga. Or the other way, at the blackness—although it’s really a dark blue, and it’s beautiful too, in its own way. If you keep talking, Chief, it will help keep me on task.”

“Why, Leonov. Am I such an evil boss that you fear my wrath even five hundred kilometers above? Everyone in the control room is smiling and nodding his head, Leonov, so everyone here agrees with you. I am quite the dictator, I see. Well, I will try to mend my ways. When you return I will be a new man, yes? Yes. I will be only the proud uncle to my young friend Leonov. How are you doing, Leonov?”

“I’m still trying, Chief. Keep talking.”

“Leonov, do you remember when I came to your cottage last night to tell you to go to bed? I also told you that we cannot foresee every problem on the ground, that your job and pilot Belyayev’s job is to step in to deal with the problems that we haven’t foreseen down here, and that we have complete faith in your abilities to do this. Well, here is just such a problem as I was talking about, Leonov. This is the unforeseen that was foreseen. And there you are to solve it for us. How are you doing, Leonov? Please report.”

“Chief . . . I’m still out here, and I don’t think the handholds will be much use. It’s not just that I can’t bend in the middle; my arms and legs are sticking out, too, and the hatch is only a meter wide. And the suit is stiffening even as we speak. Maneuvering is like trying to swim without moving my arms and legs. Please advise.”

“Thank you, Leonov, we better understand your situation now. We will advise you in a moment. Just now I am going to speak with your pilot, all right? I will switch over very briefly, then confer with my comrades in the control room, then come back to you. If you like, you may admire the Volga. You will be able to describe it all the more vividly when you return.”

“All right, Chief.”

“Baikonur out. . . . Sunrise Two, this is the Chief. Come in, Sunrise Two.”

“Chief, this is Sunrise Two. Do you want me to go out and get him?”

“Negative, Belyayev, negative. You are to stay inside until you receive contrary orders from me. I cannot have both my cosmonauts waltzing together outside the craft until we are sure we can get both of you back inside. Do you understand, Belyayev?”

“I understand, Chief. What shall I do?”

“Do as you are doing, and carry out your orders, and prepare yourself to exit if I say the word. Baikonur out.”

“Leonov, this is the Chief. Any progress?”

“No, Chief . . . but the sunlight on the Black Sea is remarkable.”

“And so are you, friend Leonov, and so are you. Listen, Leonov, we have found a way to make your pressure suit a bit more manageable. Your current air pressure reading is six. If you begin to lessen the air pressure, you should gain some flexibility. Do you understand, Leonov?”

“. . . Uh, Chief, I do understand, but my pressure’s already pretty low relative to the inside of the capsule. How much lower can I go without some real trouble when I get back in? I won’t be much good to the mission if I get the bends, Chief.”

“That is true, Leonov, but we have work for you to do inside. We don’t pay you to loiter out there and watch the clouds all day. And Comrade Belyayev is lonely for your company.”

“I don’t like this, Chief.”

“Nor do we, friend Leonov, nor do we. But you have counted the minutes as attentively as we have, have you not?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“And you have noted your oxygen supply as well, correct?”

“Yes, Chief.”

“And do you have any alternate courses of action to propose at this time?”

“No, Chief.”

“Very well, Leonov, begin to adjust your—”

“Chief.”

“I am here, Leonov.”

“Is this a group recommendation, Chief? A consensus? Or is it your personal recommendation?”

“. . . It is my personal recommendation, Leonov. This is the course of action I would take were I in your place. It is the recommendation of the Chief Designer.”

“Thank you, Chief, I will do it. Adjust pressure to what level?”

“No target level. Adjust as slowly, as gradually as possible, all the while trying to flex your arms and legs and bend your waist. We want you through the lock with the highest suit pressure possible. Understood?”

“Understood, Chief. Beginning to reduce suit pressure . . .

“Five and a half, no good, continuing. . . .

“Five, I do see some improvement in mobility, Chief, repeat, some improvement, but I am still a slow old man up here, continuing. . . .

“Four and a half, I’m doing my best, trying to wedge myself in there, but I can’t . . . can’t quite . . . shall I continue this, Chief?”

“Continue.”

“Continuing to reduce pressure. . . . Four point twenty-five, I really am not liking this, Chief, I really—Chief! My head and shoulders are inside, I’m pulling myself along, I’m turning around in the airlock—I’m in, Chief? I’m in, in! Hurrah!”

“Excellent, Leonov! Excellent! Can you hear our applause? Well done!”

“Shit, that was close. I beg your pardon, Chief. Closing airlock. Preparing to equalize pressure. . . .”

“Any problems to report, Leonov? How are you feeling?”

“No problems, Chief. But Belyayev said I smelled pretty ripe when I came in.”

“Chief, Lyosha here has not sweated so much since his last physics exams.”

“He just completed his most difficult physics exam, friend Belyayev, and he passed it with honors. Congratulations, Leonov.”

“Only because you helped me through, Chief.”

“Well, I know all about such things, you see. I move like an old man every day. And now, I think, I will let one of these younger fellows talk to you a while, about how we are to get you fellows home again. Chief out.”

VIII. Baikonur Cosmodrome, 12 January 1966

Vasily!

Alive! Here! How—?

“Oleg, stop the car! Stop the car, I said!”

After a moment’s hesitation, Oleg braked and steered to the shoulder, just beside the ditch that separated the highway from the railroad track and the featureless warehouses beyond. Korolev was out the door before the car quite stopped; he lurched, off balance, until the world quit moving, nearly toppling into the ditch. Some engineer he was, to forget his physics like that.

“Chief, what is it?” Aksyonov called. “What’s wrong?”

Ignoring him, Korolev trotted to catch up with the shuffling column of zeks being herded, single file, back toward the launch pad from which he had come. He felt slow, clumsy, like a runner in a nightmare. His legs moved as if knee-deep in roadside slush, though the ground was grey and bare. In this barren land, snow was as rare as rain.

“Chief! Hey!” Car doors slammed. “What’s going on?”

Vasily was dead, surely. Had to be. No man could survive, what—twenty years in the Kolyma? Even if he were such a wonder man, he would be no good to work an outdoor construction detail in a Kazakhstan winter. And Vasily had been at least ten years Korolev’s senior to begin with. Thus Korolev reasoned as he quickened his pace, his heart racing. “Vasily!” he cried. “Wait!”

He started to identify himself, then wondered: Had he ever told Vasily his name? Would Vasily remember his number? Oh luckless day! No matter, no matter, surely Vasily would recognize him—unless eating utterly could transform a man. “Vasily!”

One of the guards at the rear of the line turned and raised a hand in warning. “No closer!” he cried. None of the fifty-odd prisoners looked around; all curiosity had been scoured from them, Korolev knew, long long ago. The other guard unstrapped his rifle.

“Halt the line!” boomed Oleg, as he sprinted past Korolev. “It is the will of the Chief Designer! Halt the line!”

The first guard blew a whistle, and the prisoners immediately looked like men who had not walked or moved in years, who had aged in all weathers beside the road, and who would not deign to fall even when they died.

Puffing, Korolev leaned on Aksyonov’s shoulder.

“Chief, please. How many more heart attacks do you want? Calm down.”

Hands on hips, glaring downward at them, Oleg was trying to intimidate the guards. “Do you have a man named Vasily in this detail?”

The guards, impervious, shrugged. “How should we know, Comrade?”

Oleg began to pace the line, calling the name at intervals. Korolev shook his head. The fortunate man obviously had no experience with political prisoners—himself excepted, of course. “Let’s follow Oleg,” Korolev told Aksyonov. “Slowly, mind you—slowly.”

“That was my plan,” Aksyonov said.

Korolev couldn’t remember now whether the face he had seen from the car window had been in the back of the line, the front, or the middle (or in a cloud? a clump of weeds?), so he peered at all the faces as he overtook them. So far no glimmer, no trace, no Vasily; but as he walked on, another, more terrible recognition dawned. These men all looked alike. The vacant stares, the beards, the scars and creases of misery—they could all be brothers. How would anyone be able to distinguish among them?

Korolev stopped at the head of the line, smiled weakly at the guard he faced there, then looked back along the column. “I am sorry,” Korolev said. “Do you all understand? I am genuinely sorry. My friends, I think I will rest a moment.” With the help of Aksyonov and Oleg, he lowered himself onto the weedy rim of the ditch, as weary as the engines of the stars.

“Carry on,” Oleg barked, and at the whistle the sad processional shuddered into motion again. The guards eyed Korolev as they passed. He heard them begin to mutter about how nutty the scientists get, with their heads in outer space all the time. Korolev started to laugh, then was seized with his worst coughing fit of the day.

“I will bring the car,” Oleg said.

When the coughs had passed, Korolev glanced sideways at Aksyonov. “Your Chief is a wreck,” he said. “Do you want a transfer?”

“Sure, Chief, send me to the moon. Who’s this Vasily?”

Korolev shook his head, drew his coat a bit closer around him. “Someone I knew many years ago. In the camps.”

“The Kolyma.”

“Yes. He collapsed at mealtime, was dragged away. I got a piece of his bread, and enjoyed it. Maybe I’m guilty for that, I don’t know. I assumed he was dead. I suppose he is dead. Yes, I’m sure he is.”

“He died, you lived. That’s nothing to feel guilty about, Chief. Have you brooded about Vasily all this time?”

Korolev smiled. “Comrade, I had not thought about Vasily once, not in twenty years, until a few moments ago in the car. And then it all came back. Like a comet that has been away for so long that no one remembers it, eh? Yet all the while it is on track out there, makes its great loop, comes round again. As dependable as Oleg, here. Yes, thank you, Oleg. No, stay put, we’ll be right over. Aksyonov.”

“Yes, Chief?”

“Listen to me. Tonight I go to Moscow, back into the hospital. I hope to be back in a week, maybe two. The Health Minister has scheduled an operation for me, a hemorrhoid operation. I’ve had problems down there.”

“Is it serious?”

“Serious. It’s my ass, isn’t it? Yes, my ass is serious. Stop interrupting. Do you still have your copy of Tsiolkovsky’s book, of Exploration of Cosmic Space—”

“—with Reactive Devices, yes, Chief, you know I do.”

“While I am gone, I want you to read it over again. Every word of it. Study every diagram. Read it as if it were the first time, as if there were no satellites, no Gagarin, no spacewalk, no cosmonauts, and see where your ideas take you. And I, I will do the same. For I have been too old lately, Aksyonov, and turning you old along with me, I’m afraid; but when I return, we will talk about all these new wonders we have envisioned, and we will savor the sky and be astonished again.”

IX. Moscow, 14 January 1966

The Health Minister enjoyed one last cigarette as he leaned against the wall opposite the scrub room. Down the darkened corridor toward the elevators huddled the doctors and nurses who would assist him. They murmured among themselves. One or two looked his way, then avoided his glance.

No doubt they dreaded performing under the scrutiny of the Motherland’s most honored physician, and so sought to encourage each other. They did not know their patient’s name, but they knew they had not been whisked here after hours to work on any mundane Party apparatchik. They knew that Chairman Brezhnev himself awaited the outcome of the operation; the Health Minister had told them this at the briefing, to impress upon them the importance of this hemorrhoidal procedure, and the honor of their participation in it.

As he watched them now, the Health Minister smiled and shook his head with fond indulgence, smoke pluming. These hard-working men and women did not realize it, but he already had made up his mind to be lenient with them. They would be unusually nervous, with good reason, and he would make allowances when writing his report. He was a servant of the State, yes, but he was also a human being; he could understand, even forgive, the frailties of others; he prided himself on this trait, one of his most admirable and practical. He took a final pull, crushed the butt into his coffee cup, and sighed with satisfaction. Too bad these Winstons were so hard to find. . . .

The doctors and nurses now approached him as a shuffling unit, little Dr. Remek in the lead. Stepping away from the wall, the Health Minister, who had been the third tallest dignitary on the reviewing stand at the 1965 May Day parade, drew himself to his full height and smiled down at them. “Are we all ready to wash up, Comrades? Our patient should be prepared by now.”

Dr. Remek cleared his tiny throat. He sounded like a noisemaker blown by an asthmatic child. “Comrade Minister, my colleagues and I . . . with all due respect, sir . . . we would like to recommend that . . . that, the gravity of the situation being what it is, that you, or, that is, we, take the added precaution of, of . . .”

“I am waiting, Dr. Remek,” the Minister murmured. His eyes had narrowed during this preamble.

Remek turned to the others with a look of despair. One of the nurses stepped forward and said:

“Comrade Minister, we request that Dr. Vishnevskiy be included on this surgical team.”

“Vishnevskiy,” the Minister repeated. He should have guessed. The others fidgeted. The nurse (whose name escaped him; he would look it up later) maintained her defiant gaze. “And what could young Dr. Vishnevskiy contribute to these proceedings?”

Now they all found voices.

“He has performed dozens of these operations.”

“His technique is flawless, Comrade Minister, you should see him at work.”

“He has not been so . . . burdened with administrative duties in recent years as you, Comrade Minister.” That was Remek, the toad.

“And surely the welfare of this patient, so vital to the interests of the Revolution, warrants the collaboration of all the finest doctors on the staff.”

The Health Minister smiled and raised a hand. “I thank you all for your counsel. It has been duly noted, and will not be forgotten. I cannot detail my reasons for not calling upon Dr. Vishnevskiy—for much of the material that crosses my desk, as you know, is classified—but suffice to say that security issues were among my considerations. Besides. My understanding is that young Dr. Vishnevskiy’s surgical technique, however flashy and attention-getting, may be somewhat impaired after the dinner hour. Thank you all again for your concern. After you . . . comrades.”

The team trudged into the scrub room like a detail of zeks. All avoided the Health Minister’s gaze except for that one nurse, whose glance was not only contemptuous but dismissive. Fighting his anger, the Minister took a deep breath and consoled himself with the thought that the upstart Vishnevskiy would share none of the credit for this service to the Revolution. No, this personal friend of Brezhnev, this most laudable Communist, would receive a most singular honor. His operation would be personally performed by a full, sitting member of the Politburo. The Health Minister pushed forward, and behind him the swinging doors repeatedly clapped.

The sirens grew louder as Vishnevskiy and his friend the music critic, the last to leave as usual, bantered outside the opera.

“No, no, you will go before I do, my friend,” the music critic said. “The moon will need surgeons long before symphonies, and a critic? If we know what’s good for us, we critics will all stay down here, where there’s so much more to criticize.”

Vishnevskiy guffawed and clapped his friend on the back. “Well said, well said, but surely musicians, writers, artists of every stripe should be among the first to walk the lunar landscape. Who better to relay its wonders to the rest of us? The job must not be left to the television cameras, of that I’m sure. The mind reels at the thought.”

“We have visitors,” said the music critic, suddenly grave.

Roaring up the circular drive were four police motorcycles, sirens wailing. They wheeled to a halt in the gray slush at the foot of the grand staircase. “Dr. Vishnevskiy?” one of the officers called.

“Yes,” he stated. His shoulder ached beneath the clamp of his friend’s hand, but he was nonetheless grateful for it.

“You are urgently needed in the operating room, Comrade Doctor. We are here to escort you.”

The music critic slumped in relief, and Vishnevskiy exhaled a roiling cloud of breath.

“I thank you, Comrades,” he said. “I am ready to go.”

Poor Remek, talking so fast he practically stuttered, briefed him through the intercom as he lathered his arms. Vishnevskiy wasted no time asking questions, enough time had been wasted already, but he wondered: How the hell had intestinal cancer been mistaken for hemorrhoids? And why hadn’t they halted the procedure, called for help and more equipment, instead of hacking around in him for hours? Then Remek started babbling about the importance to the State of the poor soul on the table, and Vishnevskiy had his answer.

“The Minister,” he snarled.

The damned fool didn’t even have the nerve to look up as Vishnevskiy ran into the operating room, though all other heads turned. His run to the table became a trot, then a walk, as he looked at the Health Minister, who moaned softly as he worked, and at the others, bloody hands at their sides. Vishnevskiy looked at the patient, closed his eyes, and controlled himself before he opened them again. He reached up and ripped off the mask.

“I do not operate on dead men,” he said.

Outside, alone and glad of the cold, Vishnevskiy looked up and thought, ah moon, what do you know of slaughter, and pride, and folly? Better we should stay where we are.

X. Baikonur Cosmodrome, February 1966

At first, Aksyonov pretended he didn’t hear the knocking. He figured it was only Shandarin again, with a freshly typed sheet of demands. Shandarin liked to deliver his memos in person so that he could watch his team leaders read them, gauge their reactions, and satisfy himself that his wishes were clear. They were clear to Aksyonov even before the first memo, clear at least from the afternoon of the Chief’s funeral, when Shandarin had left the Kremlin wall in Brezhnev’s limousine.

The Chief’s plan for tanker craft carried into orbit by Old Number Seven had been scrapped. Not spectacular enough, not decisive enough, for Shandarin (and not, presumably, for Brezhnev either). Instead, Shandarin’s own giant Proton, designed to carry hundred-megaton warheads, would blast cosmonauts into a loop around the moon in October 1967; the Proton’s as-yet theoretical descendant, Shandarin’s cherished G-1, would launch the redesigned Union spacecraft toward a moon landing the following year. As for the Chief’s meticulous series of incremental test flights to check out the new Union’s capabilities one at a time, Shandarin had crossed out most of them, so that a totally revamped craft could be shot into orbit in a year—or less.

When Aksyonov first realized the enormity of what the Chief’s successor intended to do, he was too dumbfounded even to be angry. Instead he laughed. Chuckling, Aksyonov spun the dossier down the conference table, so that pages whirled out of the folder like petals, and said, “Impossible.”

The folder stopped in front of Shandarin, who sat at the far end of the long table, in what he had wrongly assumed was the chief’s chair. (The Chief had paced during meetings, never sat anywhere, and where the others sat, or whether they sat at all, had never been among his concerns.) “Impossible?” Shandarin snorted. “What nonsense. Have you forgotten, Comrade? Artificial satellites are impossible. A manned spacecraft in orbit is impossible. We have done the impossible for years, Comrade Aksyonov. Now we will do it faster and more efficiently, that’s all.”

Aksyonov drew from his wallet a clipping from the January 16 edition of Truth. Already two such clippings had fallen to pieces in his hands from repeated unfolding and reading and folding again; fortunately, old Truths were not hard to find, even at Baikonur. “You read this tribute to the Chief upon his death, did you not, Comrade Shandarin?”

“Of course I read it. You wave it at me every three days; how could I fail to have read it?”

“To my knowledge,” Aksyonov continued, “this was the first time the Chief’s name ever appeared in print. Think of that. For twenty, no, thirty years he was the guiding genius of the Soviet space program—even before the government knew it had a space program. Yet how many Soviets knew his name? How many of the disciples who worked beside him every day knew his name? How many of the cosmonauts who entrusted their lives to him knew his name? And did the Chief care? Did he mind that he was a man without a name?”

“What is your point, Aksyonov? I have work to do today, if you do not.”

“I am making no point, Comrade Shandarin. You are the man who makes points—very clear and unequivocal points. No, I just wonder whether your goal is to put a man on the face of the moon, or to put your name on the front page of Truth, and how many of us nameless men you will sacrifice to get it there.”

Shandarin stood, smiled, gathered his papers, and slowly walked the length of the table. He patted Aksyonov on the shoulder, leaned forward until their noses practically touched, and said in a warm and fatherly voice, “Not so very many years ago, I commanded a far more efficient operation, where I occasionally had my workers shot for insolence.”

“How strange, then, that you didn’t shoot the Chief when you had the chance,” Aksyonov replied, “since he always knew you to be a tyrant and a fool. I am surprised you were not strong enough to bury his body in the snow of the gulag, and lead us all into space on your own.”

And so Aksyonov felt no real reason to answer the door. He just sat on the swaybacked couch, read the clipping again, and let the man knock. Knock, knock! Yet this didn’t sound like Shandarin’s impatient rap, nor the idiot pounding of the KGB. This was the gentle, incessant knock of someone who would stand there on the porch of the cottage until doomsday, secure in the faith that his knocking was not in vain. Growling, Aksyonov kicked through the litter of dirty clothes (what was the point of laundry now?) and flung open the door.

A woman.

A wide, heavy-set, attractive woman of about fifty, graying hair tied behind in a youthful braid. Large nose and deep brown eyes. She cradled in her arms a bulky cardboard box bound with masking tape. Behind her, at the foot of the drive, Oleg stood at attention beside the car.

Aksyonov blinked at both of them in wonderment.

“Comrade Aksyonov? I apologize for disturbing you so late, but I must return to Moscow tonight. I am Nina Ivanovna Korolev. Sergei Pavlovich’s wife. The Chief’s wife.”

“His wife!” Aksyonov exclaimed.

She stooped and set the box onto the porch at his feet. Straightening, she smiled a thin, sad smile. “You need not struggle to conceal your astonishment, Comrade. I know that my husband never spoke of me here. Far safer, he said, to keep his family as secret as possible.”

“His family!” Next the sun and the moon would wrestle for dominion of the sky.

“I am sure I know much more about you than you about me, Comrade Aksyonov. My husband spoke of you whenever he came to Moscow. He said he had more faith in you than in any rocket he had ever designed.” She nodded at the box and said, “These are a few of his personal effects. I am sure he would have wanted you to have them.”

“Personal effects,” Aksyonov said, slumped against the doorway. He felt increasingly redundant in this conversation. “Please, forgive my manners, Nina Ivanovna. Won’t you come inside, out of the cold? Oleg, you come, too. Please, I will brew some tea—”

She shook her head. “I am sorry, but I must go. The helicopter waits. Goodbye, Comrade Aksyonov. Thank you for your help to my husband.” She moved with remarkable grace for a large woman, and was halfway down the steps before he could react.

“Wait!” he cried.

She did, though she did not look around. She faced the frozen yard, and trembled.

“Please, I don’t understand. There’s so much I want to ask you, about your family, and about the Chief—I mean, about Sergei Pavlovich. He was such a tremendous influence on me, you see, on so many of us, and I know so little about him. So little. Next to nothing, really. And I could tell you things. I could tell you what he was like here, what he used to do and say, how the cosmonauts all venerated him, you have no idea. You should know all this. Come inside, please. We have so much to talk about—”

“We have nothing to talk about,” she said as she faced him. “Don’t you see? Can’t you imagine how difficult it was for me to come here? To see this place that destroyed my husband—that destroyed me? Year after year after year, Comrade Aksyonov, about once a month, with no warning whatsoever, my telephone would ring, and I would answer it immediately, for our apartment is small and I sleep but lightly, and then I would go downstairs and watch my husband climb out of a car full of soldiers—so slowly, oh, so slowly he moved, like an old, old man—I never saw him when he wasn’t exhausted. He and I would sit at the foot of the stairs and talk for an hour or more, until he had gathered the strength to climb to the bedroom and go to sleep. And the next morning the car full of soldiers would still be out there, and it would take him away again. Back to this place. Back to all of you. Do you understand, Comrade Aksyonov, why do I not rush to embrace you now?” She walked a few paces into the yard, then added: “When my husband was sent to Siberia, so many years ago, I was like a madwoman. I thought he was lost to me, that he would be in prison for the rest of his life. And I was right, Comrade, I was right.”

“Your husband was a free man,” Aksyonov said.

“I have no control over what you believe,” Nina Ivanovna said. She nodded toward the package on the porch. “I have given you all that I can give you. And now I must go home.”

She walked to the car, where Oleg held open the passenger door. Just before she stepped inside, she called out, “Try to get some sleep, Comrade Aksyonov. My husband always worried because you worked so late.”

Aksyonov knelt beside the package, rubbed his hands across the smooth surfaces of tape, looking for a seam, as the car sputtered to life and Oleg and Nina Ivanovna drove away. He never saw either of them again.

XI. Baikonur Cosmodrome, 24 April 1967

Aksyonov would not have thought it possible: Somehow the two soldiers who flanked the control-room door, already as erect and expressionless as twin gantries, managed to snap to attention as the prime minister walked in. Every controller, engineer, and technician in the room stood as well, though they had not been trained in it and were far less impressive than the soldiers.

The prime minister wore a well-tailored black suit that looked nondescript beside the uniform of his escort, General Zeldovich, who was splendid in medals and buttons and epaulets. The prime minister nodded at everyone and patted the air. With a collective exhalation, everyone sat and returned to their tasks, except for Aksyonov and Shandarin, who joined the dignitaries in the back of the room.

Aksyonov was aware of the sweaty moons beneath his own arms, of the hair he had neither washed nor combed in more than a day, and he cursed himself for such thoughts. What must poor Novikov look like at this moment? Novikov, who had cooked him besh barmak; Novikov, who had told him it was no dishonor to be sick in space; Novikov now was in an orbital hell, somersaulting in vomit and terror.

“This is a great honor, Comrade Prime Minister,” Shandarin said, and shook his hand a bit too vigorously. “Your historic contribution to this mission will do wonders for Comrade Novikov’s performance.”

“Whatever I can do to help, Comrade,” the prime minister said, and gently freed his hand. He surveyed the descending tiers of desks and instrument panels; the vast display screens on the far wall, the litter of sandwich wrappers and tea glasses underfoot, the samovar in the corner. His nose wrinkled slightly: The sweat of unwashed men, Aksyonov wondered, or the far worse stink of desperation? “Please show me to my microphone, and tell me the current situation,” the prime minister said. “In layman’s terms, mind you.”

Shandarin rolled his own plush chair back over Aksyonov’s toes and gestured for the prime minister to sit. He had cleared his work station of everything but a microphone and a small gold-plated bust of Lenin, which the prime minister pushed aside to open his leather briefcase. Shandarin glanced at Aksyonov, who recited on cue:

“Comrade Novikov is in his eighteenth orbit of the Earth. Because of a failed solar panel, his craft is critically low on electrical power, so that most of its automatic systems are inoperable. He has attempted for some time to manually orient the craft for re-entry, thus far without success. Even now we are talking him through the process.”

The prime minister had opened a manila file folder containing many closely typed pages. Aksyonov edged closer, tried to read over the prime minister’s shoulder. “About an hour ago,” Aksyonov continued, “Novikov spoke to his wife on the radio. Understandably, she was quite upset.”

The prime minister glanced around at the general, his papers poised. “The woman we passed in the corridor?”

The general nodded.

“I assumed she was one of the female cosmonauts,” the prime minister said.

The general looked uncomfortable and said, “No, Comrade.” All the other women cosmonauts-in-training had, of course, been sent home after Valentina Tereshkova landed safely four years earlier. Tereshkova herself had been sent on a worldwide lecture tour, her three-day space career at an end.

“Good,” the prime minister said. “I had wondered at such a womanly outburst from a trained pilot.” The general tugged at his white mustache as if to say yes, yes, just so. “Proceed, Comrade.”

“One more thing, Comrade Prime Minister,” Aksyonov continued. “The craft’s shortwave radio failed very early in the flight. We have been using the craft’s ultra-shortwave backup radio, but because electrical power is in such short supply, even that is beginning to fade. Much of your message to the cosmonaut, in short, may be lost in static and garble.”

The prime minister smiled for the first time. “You may know quite a lot about spaceflight, Comrade,” he said, “but I know a good bit about speeches. And I assure you, the individual sentences are never as important as the cumulative whole—as Comrade Castro has demonstrated, eh, Comrade General?” He and the general chuckled, and Shandarin, after a pause, joined them. Aksyonov did not. He was scanning the text of the prime minister’s welcome-home address to honor Jakov Novikov, in which each reference to the cosmonaut as “he” and “his” had been amended, in a neat and precise hand, to “you” and “your.” Then the prime minister laid his hand across the sheet.

“Do you have any questions, Comrade Prime Minister?” Shandarin asked.

“Just one,” the prime minister said, looking at Aksyonov. “Does Novikov’s wife have reason to weep?”

Shandarin opened his mouth to reply, but Aksyonov was quicker. He said: “The Union One is out of control.”

The prime minister, the general, Shandarin, all regarded him. The whole room was hushed by this heresy, though none but the nearest tier of controllers could have overheard.

Several tiers below, one man read aloud a list of numbers for another man to double-check. The numbers were long, with many decimal places, and their progress was slow. “Let’s just start over,” one of the men said.

“I see,” the prime minister said, as he rubbed his eyes. He swiveled to face forward, squared the edges of his speech, and said, “I am ready, Comrade.”

Glaring at Aksyonov, Shandarin flipped a switch at the base of the prime minister’s antiquated desk microphone and adjusted his own compact headset, which had been deemed too complicated for the visitor. “Speakers, please,” Shandarin said.

Amplified static filled the room. Aksyonov sat at his reassuringly cluttered station and focused on the blinking dot that marked Novikov’s position on a world map—as if the cosmonaut’s border crossings, one every few minutes, mattered to him now.

“Union One, this is Baikonur. Union One, this is Baikonur, can you hear me, Union One?” More static. “Union One, this is Baikonur. Please respond if you can hear me, Union One.”

More static, then: “I’m doing it, I’m doing it, but it doesn’t work. Do you hear me, Baikonur? It doesn’t work!” More static.

Shandarin raised his eyebrows at the flight director, who said, “We asked him to try the automatic stabilizers again.”

Aksyonov shook his head. How many different ways could a man push the same button?

“Union One, this is Baikonur. We hear you, and we continue to work on the problem. But now we have another visitor for you, Union One, a very important visitor who wants to speak with you. Here beside me is the prime minister of the Soviet Union. Do you understand, Union One?”

More static. Then: “The prime minister?”

“Yes, Union One. I ask for your attention. The next voice you hear will be that of the prime minister, with a personal message of tribute.” He nodded at the prime minister, who nodded in return, leaned close enough to the microphone to kiss it, and shouted:

“Greetings, Jakov Novikov, loyal son of our Motherland, wonderful Communist, courageous explorer of space, comrade in arms, and friend. . . .”

Responding to Shandarin’s signals, Aksyonov and the team leaders joined him and the general in the back of the room.

“Obviously Novikov will be unable to maneuver the craft into the best trajectory for re-entry,” Shandarin said. “The best he can do is turn the craft so that the heat shield faces the Earth, and then fire the retro-rockets. Discussion?”

Everyone spoke at once, and after one loud instant muted themselves so as not to disturb the prime minister.

“That’s suicide—”

“It’s such a narrow window, he’ll never—”

“He’ll be so far off course, God knows where he’ll end up—”

“He’ll have no way to control the spin as he comes down—”

“You all have considered this outcome already, I see,” Shandarin said. “Have you also thought of other options? Perhaps Novikov should press every button in the craft another hundred times, until the radio dies, and we all go home?”

No one replied. A couple of the men shook their heads. All looked pale and sick.

“Aksyonov, you are uncharacteristically silent. What do you say?”

“I just broke a young man’s neck, Madam, with a slide rule and the stroke of a pen.”

“What?”

Aksyonov pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. “I am talking to myself, Comrade. I apologize. But much as I hate to admit it, I must agree with you. I see no other option.”

“We’re trusting to blind luck!” one man said.

“Perhaps so,” Shandarin retorted, “but all the luck in orbit has run out. If any luck remains for this flight, Novikov must find it on re-entry.”

The flight director lighted a cigarette and ticked off items on his fingers. “Solar panel down. Shortwave radio down. Stabilizers down. Thrusters down. Suppose the retro-rockets are down, too? And the parachute, for that matter?”

“And the ejection seat?” the general added.

The others looked at the floor. “Comrade General,” Aksyonov said, as gently as he could, “on Union One there is no ejection seat. You approved the design yourself, Comrade General.”

The general began to curse, and the others returned to their stations. Shandarin gripped Aksyonov’s upper arm so tightly that the younger man winced.

“I will not forget your support,” Shandarin said.

Aksyonov wrenched himself free.

The prime minister glanced up from his text, then faltered before he found his place again. “In all future generations, your name will summon the glory of our great Socialist country to new feats—”

Then Novikov’s voice, the voice of a man roused from a long trance, ripped from the speakers:

“What is this bullshit? God damn! God damn! Baikonur! Baikonur! This is Union One. Help me, Baikonur!”

The prime minister sat frozen, mouth agape. Shoving past Aksyonov, Shandarin switched on his headset. “This is Baikonur, Union One. Explain yourself, Union One!”

“Explain myself? Explain myself! Shit shit shit!” More static. “Don’t you understand? You’ve got to do something. I don’t want to die. Do you hear me, Baikonur? I don’t want to die!”

A fresh burst of static obliterated his next words, but Aksyonov, like everyone else in the room, recognized their rhythms; he himself had sobbed just as uncontrollably at the Chief’s funeral.

The cosmonaut’s despair seemed to yank something vital from Shandarin. He swayed forward like a falling tree, slammed his hands onto the desktop, and leaned there, looking at nothing.

With a trembling hand, the general switched off the prime minister’s microphone. “Perhaps under the circumstances,” he began.

“Yes, of course,” the prime minister said, as he swept up his papers and his briefcase. He stood so clumsily that the swivel chair toppled over. The guards, staring at the loudspeakers, paid the prime minister no heed as the general hustled him out the door.

Shandarin slumped against the console. Still Novikov continued to sob. Three dozen faces looked up at Shandarin. Several were streaked with tears.

Aksyonov couldn’t stand it. “Say something!” he hissed. “Reassure him. Tell him we have a plan.”

He shook Shandarin once, twice. Then he slapped him, a blistering crack that affected Shandarin not at all.

“I . . . I can’t . . . I don’t. . . .” Shandarin’s voice was a ghastly, slurred imitation of itself.

The flight director cried, “For God’s sake, talk to him!”

Aksyonov strode to the prime minister’s microphone, switched it on, and said:

“Novikov. Novikov. Think of the Chief.”

Amid the static, a small voice. “. . . What . . .?”

Absolute silence in the control room.

“The Chief, Novikov. What would the Chief do?”

“. . . The Chief . . .”

“This is Aksyonov. You remember me, eh? Your upside-down engineer friend? You piloted me into orbit, Novikov, and brought me safely down again, and I complained the whole way—you did it, Novikov. We did it. You and me and the doctor, and the Chief. Do you remember?”

“Yes . . . yes, Comrade . . . I remember.”

“Listen to me, Novikov. We have a plan, a plan I believe the Chief would approve of. But first, I want to read you something. You remember the note I carried into space? The note the Chief gave me just before launch? You told me then that I shouldn’t read you the note until the proper time had come. Well, I have the note with me now, Novikov. I have carried it in my pocket ever since. Let me unfold it now . . . Here is what it says, Novikov. It says, ‘My friend, I am good at spacecraft design because I know just what cosmonauts feel like. I too have been alone and frightened and very far from home, and surrounded by the cold. Soon you will know how this feels, as well. But I survived, my friend, and so will you, and we will continue to design great things together. Signed, the Chief.’ Do you understand, Novikov? The Chief knows exactly how you feel.”

A long silence. Aksyonov watched the blinking dot approach Africa. One of the team leaders thrust a printout under his nose and whispered, “The nineteenth orbit is coming up. It’s his last chance to—” Aksyonov waved him away.

The cosmonaut spoke. “The Chief . . . is dead.”

“Do you really believe that, Novikov? Do you really for a moment believe that?”

More static, then Novikov slowly and soberly replied: “No, Comrade. No, I don’t.”

Aksyonov dragged the microphone with him as he sat on the floor. He no longer could see the map, just the Chief’s face, laughing in the darkness outside Gagarin’s cottage. “I don’t either, Novikov,” Aksyonov said, and raked the tears from his eyes. He smiled at the men to left and right who passed him calculations and tissues. “Now listen to me carefully. Here’s what we are going to do. . . .”

The Union One plunged through the atmosphere, tumbled end over end like a boy who has lost his sled halfway down the hill, its useless parachute a braided rope behind.

The final intelligible radio transmission from its pilot was not the despairing you are guiding me wrongly, you are guiding me wrongly, can’t you understand reported by a U.S. intelligence officer years after the fact, but in fact a later message, a three-word scrap:

Chief is here

Some who have heard the tape do not believe, and say these are not the words.

But the cosmonauts—they believe.

XII. Baikonur Cosmodrome, 22 August 1997

“Excellent!”

“Wonderful!”

“Good job, Peace!”

Cheers, applause, shouts reverberated through the control room. People hugged, kissed, pounded one another on the back.

One of the small, short-haired women—Lyudmilla? No, Lyudmilla had vacationed in Prague, and now sported a half-dozen earrings in her right ear, all the way up, like the spiral in a notebook—one of them, anyway, was swept into the air by that oaf Atkov, who did not even know how to use a slide rule. They kissed with a smack audible over the din, and then Atkov handed her to the next man, Serebrov? Shatalov? One of the newcomers. She kissed him, too, and squealed like a child.

Aksyonov watched, and said nothing. The engineers were due some good news, some release, and he supposed he could suffer their enthusiasm. For a while.

Aksyonov stood alone on the topmost row at the back of the room, hands clasped behind. He stood rigid, head tilted. At his left elbow was the big standing model of the Peace, its core module likewise tilted, a few degrees off true.

The official mission control room for the Peace was outside Moscow, of course, in the complex named for the Chief. But the entire Russian space program had been on red alert since the June 25 collision—especially Baikonur, where Earth’s lone space station had been designed and built.

Onscreen, the three crewmen—Solovyev, Vinogradov, and Mike the American—crouched over their instruments. The image was blurred, but they obviously were grinning like NASA chimps. Mike the American held up both his thumbs as he grimaced, as if being tortured. This was for television’s benefit. Yet the crew had reason to be happy, of course. Askyonov looked at his watch. For another few seconds.

“Confirmed, Moscow,” Solovyev said, his voice fractured by static. “All electrical circuits working fine. The new hatch is a success. Repeat, a success. Full power is restored.”

A new round of cheers and shrieks in the control room. Aksyonov’s lips moved as he counted. Eight. Five. Three. Tolubko strode up the stairs toward him, smiling behind her headset microphone, her heavy eyebrows a single dark swath across her pretty face. He nodded at her, then clapped his hands once, twice, solid reports. He would have clapped a third time, but the room was already silent.

“Gentlemen and ladies,” he called out. “To your tasks, please.” He disdained the public-address system. His reedy quaver was embarrassing enough these days without amplification. Yet he was heard. Look how they bustled into position. The workaday murmur resumed. The party was over.

Sometimes they forgot that Askyonov’s role here was purely sentimental, purely ceremonial. Sometimes Aksyonov forgot it himself. Why did his colleagues always jump when he so much as lifted an eyebrow? He would never understand it, no, not if he lived to be two hundred, and had helped build twenty-five space stations, flying all the flags of the world.

“Moscow wants you to say a word,” Tolubko said.

Surprised, Aksyonov picked up and put on his headset, which he had wrenched off in a brief moment of jubilation. He cast an inquiring glance at Tolubko. She nodded and mouthed, “You’re on.”

“Comrades on Peace, this is Aksyonov,” he said. He saw Tolubko frown at “comrades,” but he couldn’t devote the short remainder of his life to preventing Tolubko’s frowns, could he? “You have done well. You have made history, comrades, with your indoor space walk.” Why did they look so blurred? It was his eyes, Tolubko had assured him. Yet another body part failing. “But now we down here must make some history of our own, if this station is to become fully functional again. Stand by, please. Aksyonov out.”

Why bother? He lacked the Chief’s eloquence; he always had. Suddenly weary, he peeled off the headset. Tolubko nodded at her second, Merkys, who nodded in turn and began rattling off suggestions to Moscow, reading from a clipboard that others kept sliding papers onto. Aksyonov set down the headset, too close, it happened, to the edge of the desk. His hand shot out to catch it, but missed. The little plastic hoop tumbled to the floor. A dart in his shoulder, he had strained himself again. Tolubko crouched to retrieve the headset, her skirt riding up, and stood beside him again, reminding him anew that she was taller than he was. She touched his arm.

“Evgeny?” she murmured. “Are you all right?”

“I am fine,” he said. He knew he didn’t sound convincing. He leaned on the back of a chair. “I am a man of iron, my dear.” He nodded toward the model. “It is the Peace that is falling apart. Worry about her.”

“The Peace has power again. Your turn now. Go to bed, Evgeny. Get some rest. Come back fresh tomorrow, when we’re ass-deep in crises again.” Her smile was an older woman’s smile, knowing and known. “We won’t repair everything while you’re gone. I promise.”

As she spoke, she nudged him toward the exit, her arm around his shoulders, and Aksyonov let her. He did not appreciate being lectured, however gently, but he granted Tolubko many liberties. He knew she realized this, took advantage. What of it? The young had the advantage already.

“I think the Georgians are coming by tomorrow,” Tolubko continued, as they neared the door. “You should look nice for them. Put on your other shirt.”

“The hell with the Georgians,” Aksyonov said. He halted, and Tolubko walked just a little past before compensating. “Don’t tell me about the Georgians. If the Georgians hadn’t charged us the moon for that automated guidance system, Moscow wouldn’t have made us steer the cargo ship in by hand in the first place. No wonder we knocked the station half out of orbit.” He waved at the men on the screen. “It ought to be Georgians up there, treading water. Putting out fires.” He faltered, snorted. “Georgians!”

Tolubko was smiling. He flushed.

“You have heard all this before,” he muttered. “Why don’t you interrupt?”

She squeezed his arm. “You told me once, ‘No one learns anything by interrupting.’ ”

“I tell you many things,” he said. “You don’t have to listen.”

The guard held the door open, waiting. He looked terrified—whether of the old man, or of the young woman, Aksyonov couldn’t tell. Maybe he feared being blamed for everything that had happened to the Peace this summer, from the collision onward. The guard in the back of the room, yes! He did it! That was no unreasonable fear in the Soviet Union, or in Yeltsin’s Russia, either.

“Tolubko,” Merkys called. “Come look at these figures, will you?”

“Be right there,” she called. “Good night, Evgeny.” He hesitated, and she pushed, so slightly it was almost a telepathic pulse. “Good night.” She squeezed his arm again before striding away. He did not allow himself to watch the back of her head, the sway of her skirt. Ah, Evgeny, he thought. Once you laughed at such follies. Now you, too, are a foolish old man.

As he passed, the guard asked, “May I radio for an escort, sir?”

“No,” he replied, more harshly than he meant.

“As you wish, sir. Good night, sir.”

He wanted to say something friendly, to make the guard feel better, but could think of nothing. Was this the guard with the young son, the boy with the scar? Fathers love to be asked about their children. Or was that one of the other guards? Oh, the hell with it. The door had closed anyway, and Aksyonov was alone in the corridor.

As he walked the winding incline he had walked for so many years, Aksyonov passed through three sets of guards and five sets of scanners and ignored them all. The guards saluted, and the scanners beeped, so he must have measured up to the Platonic Aksyonov of their memories. Or close enough.

Between checkpoints, his footsteps echoed in the dim, deserted halls. The darkness was a budget-cutting measure. Lights were more critical in orbit, and so four-fifths of the overheads in the old sector, mostly used for storage, had been switched off. Aksyonov’s colleagues didn’t mind. Hadn’t Gorbachev, as a farewell gesture, built them a grand new entrance, with a new elevator bank? No longer any need to pass through this back way, this tilted maze, to reach the surface. Why not leave it to the rats?

But Aksyonov was never in a hurry to reach the surface. He didn’t like elevators, either, not since Sunrise One. And he was secretly pleased to walk through space that others shunned. For people claimed strange experiences down here, in the old sector. To have seen people who, in the next instant, weren’t there. To have heard voices. The guards had petitioned for fewer checkpoints, consolidated shifts. (And, needless to add these days, more money.) Everyone was uneasy—except the scanners, which never saw anything odd, and Aksyonov, who had roamed these corridors for decades, and who wasn’t about to stop now. He hated agreeing with the scanners on anything.

He was walking a little faster these days, though. For the exercise.

He passed the last checkpoint and emerged into a full-face breeze on the north side of the windswept plaza, in front of Brezhnev’s hideous cafeteria. Aksyonov stood in the round mouth of the tunnel, breathed deeply, and stretched his arms, his habit whenever reaching the surface. A foolish habit; there was just as much room for stretching underground. He swung his arms back and forth, hugged himself three times, clap clap clap. Too cloudy for stargazing, but the night was warm, and the breeze was pleasant with the distant scents of wild onions and new mown hay—a reminder, Aksyonov realized with a scowl, that there had been no launches in, how long? In the old days there was a fine, constant stench. He ripped a tuft of grass from a crack in the pavement, let the blades sift through his fingers. The weeds beneath the plaza survived every attempt at eradication. One night Aksyonov would camp out here, and watch them grow.

He walked across the deserted plaza, his footsteps still echoing. An acoustical trick. His path took him past that rare thing in the former Soviet Union, a new statue. Hands on hips, a rolled blueprint under one arm, Sergei Korolev stood stiff-legged and looked at the sky. As Aksyonov approached, he thought once again: a poor likeness. It favored Lenin. As how could it not? The sculptor had done only Lenins for thirty years.

As he approached the marble Chief, he began to smell the flowers. More than usual, judging from the smell and from the dark heaps at the base of the statue. At dawn the Kazakhs would clear away the oldest bouquets, but enough would remain to give the plaza its only color, its only mystery.

The Kazakhs picked up just the flowers, and left the rest. Space photos clipped from magazines and crudely framed. Children’s plastic toy rockets. Boxes of the shoddy East German pens the Chief had used—as if he had had much choice. About once a month, Aksyonov fetched a crate from the cafeteria and collected them all, carried them to the lost and found. A silly chore, beneath his dignity; he could easily ask the Kazakhs to do it, or anyone else at the complex, for that matter. But Aksyonov had never spoken to anyone at Baikonur about this—this whatever-it-was—this shrine. And he never intended to. Not even to ask who in the devil kept piling up the stuff in the first place. One toy space station, he knew, he had carted away at least three times.

No one ever offered to help him, either.

As Aksyonov passed the statue, he saw a new shape on the ground. What—? He stopped and gaped, sucked in his breath.

The shape reared up, and Aksyonov cried out. A man was scrambling to his feet.

“Apologies, good sir,” the man said, in Kazakh. “I did not mean to frighten. My apologies.”

The man already was trotting away, dusting himself. He might have looked back once, but then he was lost in the darkness of the plaza.

Exhaling, willing his heart to slow, Aksyonov peered at the base of the statue. Had the man left some token of esteem? Aksyonov was quite sure he had interrupted something.

Had the man really been on his knees, prone on the pavement, facing the statue? Had he really been in the Muslim attitude of prayer?

Aksyonov hurried across the pavement to the blank-faced Khrushchev block that housed his rooms. On the stoop, he fumbled for his keys.

Aksyonov had read that in Paris, grieving tourists piled sentimental litter atop the graves of movie actors and pop stars. One expected such things of Paris.

But this was Baikonur, sobersided Baikonur. There were no tourists, no adolescents here. The cosmonauts, yes, they were a superstitious, childish lot, always had been—the stories they brought back from the Peace, well! Really. But the engineers, computer programmers, astrophysicists, bureaucrats?

Absurdity—the Chief a pop star!

Unlocked, the door proved to be stuck, as usual; he shouldered it open. Another dart of pain.

Who prays to a pop star?

He closed the door behind him and groped for the switch. With typical foresight, Khrushchev’s electricians had placed the switch more than a yard away from the door, and at a peculiar height. It was always a bit of a search.

The cafeteria light was easier to find. Once, Aksyonov, restless in the middle of the night, had walked into the darkened cafeteria, flipped on the light, and startled a group of fifteen or so engineers, all young, huddled around a single candle at a corner table. They looked stricken. A dope orgy, was Aksyonov’s first thought. Thrilled and mortified, he fumbled an apology, turned the light back off, and left, never to raise the subject with anyone. It was none of his business. He never asked Tolubko what it was that she whisked off the table, and hid in her lap. It had looked, fleetingly, like a photograph.

Aksyonov did not encourage his colleagues to share the details of their personal lives. Only the details of the projects they were working on. And they did that, he was sure.

Pretty sure.

Where was that damn light? His fingernails raked the plaster.

A space program as jihad. Imagine.

When they pray to the Chief, does he answer?

He answered Novikov.

“Novikov,” Aksyonov muttered. Old men were allowed to talk to themselves, weren’t they? “I put the Chief in Novikov’s head! Just to calm him down, make his last moments less horrible. If anyone helped him, it was not the Chief. It was I. I, Aksyonov.”

His hands slid all over the wall. This was embarrassing. Would he have to call someone, to cry out, Tolubko, please come over here, turn on my light for me? She’d think it a ruse, a ploy to entice her into bed. He laughed, then began to cry. He would never find the light. He was an old, old man, and there was no light. He leaned against the wall and slid down. He sat on the floor, sobbing in the darkness.

Stop it, Aksyonov. Stop it.

He closed his eyes, wrapped his arms around himself, clutched himself. He felt the trembling worsen. He bit his lip, fought a scream.

He was not alone in the room.

This was helpful, a fact to hold. The trembling in his arms gradually eased, and he relaxed his grip. His upper arms and his fingers were sore. Stiff tomorrow. He breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth, as his mother had taught him long ago. He did not open his eyes, but he knew that if he did . . .

He knew.

“Ah, Chief,” Aksyonov said. “Lurk around here all you wish. I will never worship you. I know you too well, and I love you too much.”

He woke up, sitting against the wall. He ached everywhere. The lights were on, and it was night outside. Beside him was the telephone table. Good; it was sturdy enough. He hauled himself up, holding on, groaning only a little. He stood, rubbed his arms and legs, wondered why on earth he had fallen asleep in such a position. He answered himself, I am an old man, and then sought other problems. With some trouble and trembling he unbuttoned his shirt, absently switched on the drafting-table lamp. He looked down at his designs and was immediately engrossed, lost in his work even as he sank into the creaking chair.

And if while working he sometimes vocalized his thoughts, as if comparing notes, airing ideas—yes, even arguing—with an old friend, well, what of it? He was no cultist, no kneeling Kazakh. He was an engineer.

“Here’s the problem, Chief,” Aksyonov murmured. “Here, this is the best design for the solar arrays, in terms of fuel efficiency. Mounted like so, on the service module. So far, so good. But there are other considerations. For example . . .”

Aksyonov’s papers slid one over the other. His chair creaked. Tight-lipped, with ruler and pen, he drew a true line. He laid his plans all through the night, until dawn.

THE DAYS BETWEEN

Allen Steele

Three months after leaving Earth, the URSS Alabama had just achieved cruise velocity when the accident occurred: Leslie Gillis woke up.

He regained consciousness slowly, as if emerging from long and dreamless sleep. His body, naked and hairless, floated within the blue-green gelatin that filled the interior of his biostasis cell, an oxygen mask covering the lower part of his face and thin plastic tubes inserted in his arms. As his vision cleared, Gillis saw that the cell had been lowered to a horizontal position and that its fiberglass lid had folded open. The lighting within the hibernation deck was subdued, yet he had to open and close his eyes several times before his retinas were able to take even that little illumination.

His first lucid thought was: Thank God, I made it.

His body felt weak, his limbs stiff. Just as he had been cautioned to do during flight training, he carefully moved only a little at a time. As Gillis gently flexed the muscles of his arms and legs, he vaguely wondered why no one had come to his aid. Perhaps Dr. Okada was busy helping the others emerge from biostasis. Yet he could hear nothing save for a sublime electrical hum; no voices, no movement.

His next thought was: Something’s wrong.

Back aching against the strain, his arms feeling as if they were about to dislocate from his shoulders, Gillis grasped the sides of the cell and tried to sit up. For a minute or so he struggled against the phlegmatic embrace of the suspension fluid; there was a wet sucking sound as he prized his body upward, then the tubes went taut before he remembered that he had to take them out. Clenching his teeth, Gillis pinched off the tubes between thumb and forefinger and, one by one, carefully removed them from his arms. The oxygen mask came off last; the air was frigid and it stung his throat and lungs, and he coughed in agonized spasms as, with the last ounce of his strength, he clambered out of the tank. His legs couldn’t hold him, and he collapsed upon the cold floor of the deck.

Gillis didn’t know how long he lay curled in a fetal position, his hands tucked into his groin. He never really lost consciousness, yet for a long while his mind lingered somewhere between awareness and sleep, his unfocused eyes gazing at the burnished metal plates of the floor. After awhile the cold penetrated his dulled senses; the suspension fluid was freezing against his bare skin, and he dully realized that if he lay here much longer he would soon lapse into hypothermia.

Gillis rolled over on his back, forced himself to sit up. Aquamarine fluid drooled down his body, formed a shallow pool around his hips; he hugged his shoulders, rubbing his chilled flesh. Once again, he wondered why no one was paying any attention to him. Yes, he was only the communications officer, yet there were others farther up the command hierarchy who should have been revived by now. Kuniko Okada was the last person he had seen before the somatic drugs entered his system; as Chief Physician, she also would have been the last crew member to enter biostasis and the first to emerge. She would have then brought up—Gillis sought to remember specific details—the Chief Engineer, Dana Monroe, who would have then ascertained that Alabama’s major systems were operational. If the ship was in nominal condition, Captain Lee would have been revived next, shortly followed by First Officer Shapiro, Executive Officer Tinsley, Senior Navigator Ullman, and then Gillis himself. Yes, that was the correct procedure.

So where was everyone else?

First things first. He was wet and naked, and the ship’s internal temperature had been lowered to 50 degrees. He had to find some clothes. His teeth chattering, Gillis staggered to his feet, then lurched across the deck to a nearby locker. Opening it, he found a stack of clean white towels and a pile of folded robes. As he wiped the moist gel from his body, he recalled his embarrassment when his turn had come for Kuniko to prepare him for hibernation. It was bad enough to have his body shaved, yet when her electric razor had descended to his pubic area he found himself becoming involuntarily aroused by her gentle touch. Amused by his reaction, she had smiled at him in a motherly way. Just relax, she said. Think about something else . . .

He turned, and for the first time saw the rest of the biostasis cells were still upright within their niches. Thirteen white fiberglass coffins, each resting at a forty-five degree angle within the bulkhead walls of Deck C2A. Electrophoretic displays on their lids emitted a warm amber glow, showing the status of the crewmembers contained within. Here was the Alabama’s command team, just as he had last seen them: Lee, Shapiro, Tinsley, Okada, Monroe, Ullman . . .

Everyone was still asleep. Everyone except himself.

Gillis hastily pulled on a robe, then strode across the deck to the nearest window. Its outer shutter was closed, yet when he pressed the button that moved it upward, all he saw were distant stars against black space. Of course, he might not be able to see 47 Ursae Majoris from this particular porthole. He needed to get to the command center, check the navigation instruments.

As he turned from the window, something caught his eye: the readout on the nearest biostasis cell. Trembling with unease as much as cold, Gillis moved closer to examine it. The screen identified the sleeper within as Cortez, Raymond B.—Ray Cortez, the life-support chief—and all his life-signs seemed normal as far as he could tell, yet that wasn’t what attracted his attention. On the upper left side was a time-code:

E/: 7.8.70 / 22:10:01 GMT

July 8, 2070. That was the date everyone had entered hibernation, three days after the Alabama had made its unscheduled departure from Highgate. On the upper right side of the screen, though, was another time-code:

P/: 10.3.70 / 00.21.23 GMT

October 3, 2070. Today’s date and time.

The Alabama had been in flight for only three months. Three months of a voyage across forty-six light-years which, at 20 percent of light-speed, would take more 230 years to complete.

For several long minutes, Gillis stared at the readout, unwilling to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Then he turned and walked across the compartment to the manhole. His bare feet slapping against the cool metal rungs, he climbed down the ladder to the next deck of the hibernation module.

Fourteen more biostasis cells, all within their niches. None were open.

Fighting panic, Gillis scrambled further down the ladder to Deck C2C. Again, fourteen closed cells.

Still clutching at some intangible shred of hope, Gillis quickly visited Deck C2D, then he scurried back up the ladder and entered the short tunnel leading to the Alabama’s second hibernation module. By the time he reached Deck C1D, he had checked every biostasis cell belonging to the starship’s one hundred and three remaining passengers, yet he hadn’t found one which was open.

He sagged against a bulkhead, and for a long time he could do nothing except tremble with fear.

He was alone.

After awhile, Gillis pulled himself together. All right, something had obviously gone wrong. The computers controlling the biostasis systems had made a critical error and had prematurely awakened him from hibernation. Okay, then; all he had to do was put himself back into the loop.

The robe he had found wasn’t very warm, so he made his way through the circular passageway connecting the ship’s seven ring modules until he entered C4, one of two modules that would serve as crew quarters once the Alabama reached 47 Ursae Majoris. He tried not to look at the rows of empty bunks as he searched for the locker where he stowed his personal belongings. His blue jumpsuit was where he had left it three months ago, hanging next to the isolation garment he had worn when he left Gingrich Space Center to board the shuttle up the Highgate; on a shelf above it, next to his high-top sneakers, was the small cardboard box containing the precious few mementos he had been permitted to take with him. Gillis deliberately ignored the box as he pulled on his jumpsuit; he’d look at the stuff inside once he reached his final destination, and that wouldn’t be for another 230 years . . . 226 years, if you considered the time-dilation factor, but why split hairs?

The command center, located on Deck H4 within the ship’s cylindrical hub, was cold and dark. The lights had been turned down and the rectangular windows along its circular hull were shuttered; only the soft glow emitted by a few control panels pierced the gloom. Gillis took a moment to switch on the ceiling lights; spotting the environmental control station, he briefly considered adjusting the thermostat to make things a bit warmer, then decided against it. He had been trained as a communications specialist; his technical understanding of the rest of the Alabama’s major systems was cursory at best, and he was reluctant to make any changes that might influence the ship’s operating condition. Besides, he wasn’t staying here for very long; once he returned to biostasis, the cold wouldn’t make much difference to him.

All the same, it was his duty to check the ship’s condition, so he walked over to the nav table, pulled away the plastic cover which protected its keypad, and punched up a display of the Alabama’s present position. A bright shaft of light appeared above the table, and within it appeared a tiny holographic model of the ship. It floated in midair at the end of a long curved string which led outward from the center of the three-dimensional halo representing the orbits of the major planets of the solar system. Moving at constant 1-g thrust, the Alabama was already beyond the orbit of Neptune; the ship was now passing the canted orbit of Pluto, and in a few weeks it would cross the heliopause, escaping the last weak remnants of the Sun’s gravitational pull as it headed into interstellar space.

The Alabama had now traveled farther from Earth than any previous manned spacecraft; only a few space probes had ever ventured this far. Gillis found himself smiling at the thought. He was now the only living person—the only conscious living person, at least—to have voyaged so far from Earth. A feat almost worth waking up for . . . although, all things considered, he would have preferred to sleep through it.

He moved to the engineering station, uncovered its console, and pulled up a schematic display of the main engine. The deuterium/helium-3 reserves that had been loaded aboard the Alabama’s spherical main fuel tank before launch had been largely consumed during the ninety-day boost phase, but now that the ship had reached cruise speed, the magnetic field projected by its Bussard ramscoop was drawing ionized interstellar hydrogen and helium from a 4,000 kilometer radius in front of the ship, feeding the fusion reactor at its stern and thus maintaining a constant .2c velocity. Microsecond pulsations of the same magnetic field enabled it to simultaneously perform as a shield, deflecting away the interstellar dust that, at relativistic velocities, would have soon shredded the Alabama’s hull. Gillis’s knowledge of the ship’s propulsion systems was limited, yet his brief examination showed him that they were operating at 90 percent efficiency.

Something softly tapped against the floor behind him.

Startled by the unexpected sound, Gillis turned around, peered into the semi-darkness. For a few moments he saw nothing, then a small shape emerged from behind the nav table: one of the spider-like autonomous maintenance robots that constantly prowled the Alabama, inspecting its compartments and making minor repairs. This one had apparently been attracted to Gillis’s presence within the command deck; its eyestalks briefly flicked in his direction, then ‘bot scuttled away.

Well, then. So much the better. The ‘bot was no more intelligent than a mouse, but it reported everything that it observed to the ship’s AI. Now that the ship was aware that one of its passengers was awake, the time had come for Gillis to take care of his little problem.

Gillis crossed the deck to his customary post at the communications station. Sitting down in his chair, he pulled away the plastic cover; a few deft taps on the keyboard and his console glowed to life once more. Seeing the familiar screens and readouts made him feel a little more secure; here, at least, he knew what he was doing. He typed in the commands which opened an interface to Alabama’s DNA-based artificial intelligence.

Gillis, Leslie, Lt. Com. I.D. 86419-D. Password Scotland.

The response was immediate: I.D. confirmed. Password accepted. Good morning, Mr. Gillis. May I help you?

Why was I awakened? Gillis typed.

A short pause, then: Gillis, Leslie, Lt. Com. is still in biostasis.

Gillis’s mouth fell open: What the hell . . .?

No, I’m not. I’m here in the command center. You’ve confirmed that yourself.

This time, the AI’s response seemed a fraction of a second slower. Lt. Com. Leslie Gillis is still in biostasis. Please re-enter your I.D. and password for reconfirmation.

Impatiently, Gillis typed: I.D. 86419-D. Password Scotland.

The AI came back at once: Identification reconfirmed. You are Lt. Com. Leslie Gillis.

Then you agree that I’m no longer in biostasis.

No. Lt. Com. Leslie Gillis remains in biostasis. Please re-enter your I.D. and password for reconfirmation.

Gillis angrily slammed his hands against the console. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, then forced himself to think this through as calmly as he could. He was dealing with an AI; it may be conditioned to respond to questions posed to it in plain English, yet nonetheless it was a machine, operating with machine-like logic. Although he had to deal with it on its own terms, nonetheless he had to establish the rules.

I.D. 86419-D. Password Scotland.

Identification reconfirmed. You are Lt. Com. Leslie Gillis.

Please locate Lt. Com. Leslie Gillis.

Lt. Com. Leslie Gillis is in biostasis cell C1A-07.

Okay, now they were getting somewhere . . . but this was clearly wrong, in more ways than one. He had just emerged from a cell located on Deck A of Module C2.

Who is the occupant of biostasis cell C2A-07?

Gunther, Eric, Ensign/FSA

The name was unfamiliar, but the suffix indicated that he was an Federal Space Agency ensign. A member of the flight crew who had been ferried up to the Alabama just before launch, but probably not one of the conspirators who had hijacked the ship.

Gillis typed: There has been a mistake. Eric Gunther is not in cell C2A-07, and I am not in cell C1A-07. Do you understand?

Another pause, then: Acknowledged. Biostasis cell assignments rechecked with secondary data system. Correction: cell C1A-07 presently occupied by Eric Gunther.

Gillis absently gnawed on a fingernail ; after a few minutes he developed a possible explanation for the switch. Captain Lee and the other conspirators had smuggled almost fifty dissident intellectuals just before the Alabama fled Earth; since none of them had been listed in the ship’s original crew manifest, the D.I.s had to be assigned to biostasis cells previously reserved for the members of the colonization team who had been left behind on Earth. Gillis could only assume that, at some point during the confusion, someone had accidentally fed erroneous information to the computer controlling the biostasis systems. Therefore, although he was originally assigned to C1A-07 while Ensign Gunther was supposed to be in C2A-07, whoever had switched his and Gunther cells had also neglected to cross-feed this information from the biostasis control system to the ship’s AI. In the long run, it was a small matter of substituting one single digit for another . . .

Yet this didn’t answer the original question: why had he been prematurely revived from biostasis? Or rather, why was Gunther supposed to be revived?

Why did you revive the occupant of cell C2A-07?

CLASSIFIED/TS. ISA Order 7812-DA

What the . . .? Why was there an Internal Security Agency lock-out? Yet he was able to get around that.

Security override AS-001001, Gillis, Leslie, Lt. Com. password Scotland. Repeat question: why did you revive the occupant of cell C2A-07?

CLASSIFIED/TS: OPEN. Ensign Gunther was to confirm Presidential launch authorization via secure communication channel. Upon failure to confirm authorization by 7.5.70/00.00, Ensign Gunther was to be revived from biostasis at 10.3.70/00.00 and given the option of terminating the mission.

Gillis stared at the screen for a long while, comprehending what he had just read but nonetheless not quite believing it. This could only mean one thing: Gunther had been an ISA mole placed aboard the Alabama for the purpose of assuring that the ship wasn’t launched without Presidential authorization. However, since Captain Lee had ordered Gillis himself to shut down all modes of communication between Mission Control and the Alabama, Gunther hadn’t been able to send a covert transmission back to Earth. Therefore the AI had programmed to revive him from biostasis ninety days after launch.

At this point, though, Gunther wouldn’t have been able to simply turn the ship around even if he’d wanted to do so. The Alabama was too far from Earth, its velocity too high, for one person to accomplish such a task on his own. So there was no mistake what “terminating the mission” meant; Gunther was supposed to have destroyed the Alabama .

A loyal citizen of the United Republic of America, even to the point of suicide. Indeed, Gillis had little doubt that the Republic’s official press agency had already reported the loss of the Alabama and that FSA spokesmen were issuing statements to the effect that the ship had suffered a catastrophic accident.

Since no one else aboard the ship knew about Gunther’s orders, the AI’s hidden program hadn’t been deleted from memory. On the one hand, at least he had been prevented from carrying out his suicide mission. On the other, Gunther would remain asleep for the next 230 years while Gillis was now wide-awake.

Very well. So now all he had to do was join him in biostasis. Once he woke up again, Gillis could inform Captain Lee of what he had learned, and let him decide what to do with Ensign Gunther.

There has been a mistake. I’m was not supposed to be revived at this time. I have to return to biostasis immediately.

A pause, then: This is not possible. You cannot return to biostasis.

Gillis’s heart skipped a beat.

I repeat: there has been a mistake. There was no reason to revive the person in cell C2A-07. I was the occupant of cell C2A-07, and I need to return to biostasis at once.

I understand the situation. The crew manifest has been changed to reflect this new information. However, it is impossible for you to return to biostasis.

His hands trembled upon the keyboard: Why not?

Protocol does not allow for the occupant of cell C2A-07 to resume biostasis. This cell has been permanently deactivated. Resumption of biostasis is not admissible.

Gillis suddenly felt as if a hot towel had been wrapped around his face. Security override B-001001, Gillis, Leslie, Lt. Com. Password Scotland. Delete protocol immediately.

Password accepted, Lt. Gillis. Protocol cannot be deleted without direct confirmation of Presidential launch authorization, and may not be rescinded by anyone other than Ensign Gunther.

Rage surged with him. He angrily typed: Revive Ensign Gunther at once. This is an emergency.

No members of the crew may be revived from biostasis until the ship has reached its final destination unless there is a mission-critical emergency. All systems are at nominal status: there is no mission-critical emergency.

Eric Gunther. Eric Gunther lay asleep on Deck C1A. Yet even if he could be awakened from hibernation and forced to confess his role, there was little he could do about it now. The long swath of ionized particles the Alabama left in its wake rendered impossible any radio communications with Earth; any signals received by or sent from the starship would be fuzzed out while the fusion engines were firing, and the Alabama would remain under constant thrust for the next 230 years.

If I don’t return to biostasis, then I’ll die. This is an emergency. Do you understand?

I understand your situation, Mr. Gillis. However, it does not pose a mission-critical emergency. I apologize for the error.

Reading this, Gillis found himself smiling. The smile became a grin, and from somewhere within his grin a wry chuckle slowly fought through. The chuckle evolved into hysterical laughter, for by now Gillis had realized the irony of his situation.

He was the Chief Communications Officer of the URSS Alabama. And he was doomed because he couldn’t communicate.

Gillis had his pick of any berth aboard the ship, including Captain Lee’s private quarters, yet he chose the bunk that had been assigned to him; it only seemed right. He reset the thermostat to 71 degrees, then he took a long, hot shower. Putting on his jumpsuit again, he returned to his berth, lay down, and tried to sleep. Yet every time he shut his eyes, new thoughts entered his mind, and soon he would find himself staring at the bunk above him. So he lay there for a long time, his hands folded together across his stomach as he contemplated his situation.

He wouldn’t asphyxiate nor perish from lack of water. Alabama’s closed-loop life-support system would purge the carbon-dioxide from the ship’s air and recirculate it as breathable oxygen-nitrogen, and his urine would be purified and recycled as potable water. Neither would he freeze to death in the dark; the fusion engines generated sufficient excess energy for him to be able to run the ship’s internal electrical systems without fear of exhausting its reserves. Nor would he have to worry about starvation; there were enough rations aboard to feed a crew of 104 passengers for twelve months, which meant that one person would have enough to eat for over a century.

Yet there was little chance that he would last that long. Within their biostasis cells, the remaining crew members would be constantly rejuvenated, their natural aging processes held at bay through homeostatic stem-cell regeneration, teleomerase enzyme therapy, and nanotechnical repair of vital organs, while infusion of somatic drugs would keep them in a coma-like condition that would deprive them of subconscious dream-sleep. Once they reached 47 Ursae Majoris, they would emerge from hibernation—even that term was a misnomer, for they would never stir from their long rest—just the same way as they had been when they entered the cells.

Not so for him. Now that he was removed from biostasis, he would continue to age normally. Or at least as normally as one would while traveling at relativistic velocity; if he were suddenly spirited back home and was met by a hypothetical twin brother—no chance of that happening; like so many others aboard, Gillis was an only child—he would discover that he had aged only a few hours less than his sibling. Yet that gap would gradually widen the farther Alabama traveled from Earth, and even the Lorentz factor wouldn’t save him in the long run, for everyone else aboard the ship was aging at the same rate; the only difference was that their bodies would remain perpetually youthful, while his own would gradually break down, grow old . . .

No. Gillis forcefully shut his eyes. Don’t think about it.

But there was no way of getting around it: he was now living under a death sentence. Yet a condemned man in solitary confinement has some sort of personal contact, even if it’s only the fleeting glimpse of a guard’s hand as he shoves a tray of food through the cell door. Gillis didn’t have that luxury. Never again would he ever hear another voice, see another face. There were a dozen or so people back home he had loved, and another dozen or so he had loathed, and countless others he had met, however briefly, during his twenty-eight years he had spent on Earth. All gone, lost forever . . .

He sat up abruptly. A little too abruptly; he slammed the top of his head against the bunk above him. He cursed beneath his breath, rubbed his skull—a small bump beneath his hair, nothing more—then he swung his legs over the side of his bunk, stood up, and opened his locker. His box was where he had last seen it; he took it down from the shelf, started to open it . . .

And then he stopped himself. No. If he looked inside now, the things he left in there would make him only more miserable than he already was. His fingers trembled upon the lid. He didn’t need this now. He shoved the box back into the locker and slammed the door shut behind it. Then, having nothing else better to do, he decided to take a walk.

The ring corridor led him around the hub to Module C7, where he climbed down to the mess deck: long empty benches, walls painted in muted earth tones. The deck below contained the galley: chrome tables, cooking surfaces, empty warm refrigerators. He located the coffee maker, but there was no coffee to be found, so he ventured further down the ladder to the ship’s med deck. Antiseptic white-on-white compartments, the examination beds covered with plastic sheets; cabinets contained cellophane-wrapped surgical instruments, gauze and bandages, and rows of plastic bottles containing pharmaceuticals with arcane labels. He had a slight headache, so he searched through them until he found some ibuprofen; he took the pill without water and lay down for a few moments.

After awhile his headache went away, so he decided to check out the wardroom on the bottom level. It was sparsely furnished, only a few chairs and tables beneath a pair of wallscreens, with a single couch facing a closed porthole. One of the tables folded open to reveal a holographic game board; he pressed a button marked by a knight piece and watched as a chess set materialized. He used to play chess assiduously when he was a teenager, but had gradually lost interest as he grew older. Perhaps it was time to pick it up again . . .

Instead, though, he went over to the porthole. Opening the shutter, he gazed out into space. Although astronomy had always been a minor hobby, he could see none of the familiar constellations; this far from Earth, the stars had changed position so radically that only the AI’s navigation subroutine could accurately locate them. Even the stars were strangers now; this revelation made him feel even more lonely, so he closed the shutter. He didn’t bother to turn off the game table before he left the compartment.

As he walked along the ring corridor, he came up a lone ‘bot. It quickly scuttled out of his way as he approached, but Gillis squatted down on his haunches and tapped his fingers against the deck, trying to coax it closer. The robot’s eyestalks twitched briefly toward him; for a moment it seemed to hesitate, then it quickly turned away and went up the circular passageway. It had no reason to have any interaction with humans, even those who desired its company. Gillis watched the ‘bot as it disappeared above the ceiling, then he reluctantly rose and continued up the corridor.

The cargo modules, C5 and C6, were dark and cold, deck upon deck of color-coded storage lockers and shipping containers. He found the crew rations on Deck C5A; sliding open one of the refrigerated lockers, he took a few minutes to inspect its contents: vacuum-sealed plastic bags containing freeze-dried substances identified only by cryptic labels. None of it looked very appetizing; the dark-brown slab within the bag he pulled out at random could have been anything from processed beef to chocolate cake. He wasn’t hungry yet, so he shoved it back and slammed the locker shut.

Gillis returned to the ring corridor and walked to the hatch leading to the hub access shaft. As he opened the hatch, though, he hesitated before grasping the top rung of the shaft’s recessed ladder. He had climbed down the shaft once before already, yet he had been so determined to reach the command deck that he had failed to recognize it for what it was, a narrow well almost a hundred feet deep. While the Alabama was moored at Highgate and in zero-gee, everyone aboard had treated it as a tunnel, yet now what had once been horizontal was now vertical.

He looked down. Far below, five levels beneath him, lay the hard metal floor of Deck H5. If his hands ever slipped on the ladder, if his feet failed to rest safely upon one of its rungs, then he could fall all the way to the bottom. He would have to be careful every time he climbed the shaft, for if he ever had an accident . . .

The trick was never looking down. He purposely watched his hands as he made his way down the ladder.

Gillis meant to stop on H2 and H3 to check the engineering and life-support decks, yet somehow he found himself not stopping until he reached H5.

The EVA deck held three airlocks. To his right and left were the hatches leading to the Alabama’s twin shuttles, the Wallace and the Helms . Gillis gazed through the porthole at the Helms ; the spaceplane was nestled within its docking cradle, its delta wings folded beneath its broad fuselage, its bubble canopy covered by shutters. For a moment, he had an insane urge to steal the Helms and fly it back home, yet that was clearly impossible; the shuttles only had sufficient fuel and oxygen reserves for orbital sorties. He wouldn’t get so far as even Neptune, let alone Earth. And besides, he had never been trained to pilot a shuttle.

Turning away from the porthole, he caught sight of another airlock located on the opposite side of the deck. This one didn’t lead to a shuttle docking collar; it was the airlock that led outside the ship.

Reluctantly, almost against his own will, Gillis found himself walking toward it. He twisted the lockwheel to undog the inner hatch, then pulled it open and stepped inside. The airlock was a small white compartment barely large enough to hold two men wearing hardsuits. On the opposite side was the tiger-striped outer hatch with a small control panel mounted on the bulkhead next to it. The panel had only two major buttons—Pres., Purge, and Open—and above them were three lights: green, orange, and red. The green light was now lit, showing that the inner hatch was open and the airlock was safely pressurized.

The airlock was cold. The rest of the ship had warmed up by now, but here Gillis could feel the arctic chill creeping through his jumpsuit, see every exhalation as ghostly wisps rising past his face. He didn’t know how long he remained there, yet he regarded the three buttons for a very long time.

After awhile, he realized that his stomach was beginning to rumble, so he backed out of the compartment. He carefully closed the inner hatch, and lingered outside the airlock for another minute or so before he decided that this was one part of the ship he didn’t want to visit very often.

Then he made the long climb back up the access shaft.

There were chronometers everywhere, displaying both Greenwich Mean Time and relativistic shiptime. On the second day after revival, Gillis decided that he’d rather not know what the date was, so he found a roll of black electrical tape and went through the entire ship, masking every clock he could find.

There were no natural day or night cycles aboard the ship. He slept when he felt tired, and got out of bed when he felt like it. After awhile, he found that he was spending countless hours lying in his bunk, doing nothing more than staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing. This wasn’t good, so he made a regular schedule for himself.

He reset the ship’s internal lighting so that it turned on and off at twelve-hour intervals, giving him an semblance of sunrise and sunset. He started his mornings by jogging around the ring corridor, keeping it up until his legs ached and his breath came in ragged gasps, and then sprinting the final lap.

Next he would take a shower, and then attend to himself. When his beard began to grow back, he made a point of shaving every day, and when his hair started to get a little too long he trimmed it with a pair of surgical scissors he found in the med deck; the result was a chopped, butch-cut look, but so long as he managed to keep the hair out of his eyes and off his neck he was satisfied. Otherwise, he tried to avoid closely looking at himself in the mirror.

Once he was dressed, he would visit the galley to make breakfast: cold cereal, rehydrated vegetable juice, a couple of fruit squares, a mug of hot coffee. He liked to open a porthole and look out at the stars while he ate.

Then he would go below to the wardroom and activate the wallscreens. He was able to access countless hours of datafiche through the AI’s library subroutine, yet precious little of it was intended for entertainment. Instead, what he found were mainly tutorials: service manuals for the Alabama’s major operating systems, texts on agriculture, astrobiology, land management, academic studies of historical colonies on Earth, so forth and so on. Nonetheless he devoted himself to studying everything he could find, pretending as if he was once again a first-year plebe at the Academy of the Republic, memorizing everything and then silently quizzing himself to make sure he got it right. Perhaps it was pointless—there was no reason for him to learn about organic methods of soybean cultivation—yet it helped to keep his mind occupied.

Although he learned much about the Alabama’s biostasis systems he hadn’t known before, he never found anything that would help him return to hibernation. He eventually returned to Deck C2B, closed the hatch of his former cell, and returned it to its niche. After that, he tried not to go there again; like the EVA airlock on Deck H5, this was a place that made him uncomfortable.

When he was tired of studying, he would play chess for hours upon end, matching his wits against the game system. The outcome was always inevitable, for the computer could never be defeated, but he gradually learned how to anticipate its next move and forestall another loss for at least a little while longer.

The food was bland, preprocessed stuff, artificial substitutes for meat, fruit, and vegetables meant to remain edible after years of long-term freezer storage, but he did the best to make dinner more tolerable. Once he learned how to interpret the labels, he selected a variety of different rations and moved them to the galley. He spent considerable time and effort making each meal a little better, or at least different, from the last one; often the results were dismal, but now and then he managed to concoct something he wouldn’t mind eating again—stir-fried chicken and pineapple over linguine, for instance, wasn’t as strange as he thought it might be—and then he could type the recipe into the galley computer for future reference.

While wandering through the ship in search of something else to divert his attention, he found a canvas duffel bag. It belonged to Jorge Montero, one of the D.I.s who had helped the Alabama escape from Earth; apparently he had managed to bring a small supply of books with him.

Most were wilderness-survival manuals of one sort of another, yet among them were a few 20th century classics: J. Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Kenneth Brower’s The Starship and the Canoe, Frank Herbert’s Dune . Gillis took them back to his berth and put them aside as bed-time reading.

On occasion, he would visit the command deck. The third time he did this, the nav table showed him that the Alabama had crossed the heliopause; the ship was now traveling through interstellar space, the dark between the stars. Because the ramscoop blocked the view, there were no windows that faced directly ahead, yet he learned how to manipulate the cameras located on the fuel tank until they displayed a real-time image forward of the ship’s bow. It appeared as if the stars directly in front had clustered together, the Doppler effect causing them to form short comet-like tails tinged with blue. Yet when he rotated the camera to look back the way he had come, he saw that an irregular black hole had opened behind of the Alabama ; the Sun and all its planets, including Earth, had become invisible.

This was one more thing that disturbed him, so he seldom activated the bow cameras.

He slept, and he jogged, and he ate, and he studied, and he played long and futile chess games, and otherwise did everything possible to pass the time as best he could. Every now and then he caught himself murmuring to himself, carrying on conversations with only his own mind as a companion; when this happened, he would consciously make himself shut up. Yet no matter how far he managed to escape from himself, he always had to return to the silence of the ship’s corridors, the emptiness of its compartments.

He didn’t know it then, but he was beginning to go insane.

His jumpsuit began to get worn out. It was the only thing he had to wear, though, besides his robe, so he checked the cargo manifest and found that clothing was stowed in Deck C5C, and it was while searching for them it he discovered the liquor supply.

There wasn’t supposed to be any booze aboard the Alabama, yet nonetheless someone had managed to smuggle two cases of scotch, two cases of vodka, and one case of champagne onto the ship. They were obviously put there to help the crew celebrate their safe arrival at 47 Ursae Majoris; Gillis found them stashed among the spare clothing.

He tried to ignore the liquor for as long as possible; he had never been much of a drinker, and he didn’t want to start now. But several days later, after another attempt at making beef stroganoff resulted in a tasteless mess of half-cooked noodles and beef-substitute, he found himself wandering back to C5C and pulling out a bottle of scotch. He brought it back to the wardroom, poured a couple of fingers in a glass and stirred in some tapwater, then sat down to play another game of chess. After his second drink, he found himself feeling more at ease than he had since his untimely awakening; the next evening, he did the same thing again.

That was the beginning of his dark times.

“Cocktail hour” soon became the highlight of his day; after awhile, he found no reason to wait until after dinner, and instead had his first drink during his afternoon chess game. One morning he decided that a glass of champagne would be the perfect thing to top off his daily run, so he opened a bottle after he showered and shaved, and continued to indulge himself during the rest of the day. He discovered that powdered citrus juice was an adequate mixer for vodka, so he added a little of that to his morning breakfast, and it wasn’t long before he took to carrying around a glass of vodka wherever he went. He tried to ration the liquor supply as much as he could, yet he found himself depressed whenever he finished a bottle, and relieved to discover that there always seemed to be one more to replace it. At first he told himself that he had to leave some for the others—after all, it was meant for their eventual celebration—but in time that notion faded to the back of his mind, and was finally forgotten altogether.

He went to sleep drunk, often in the wardroom, and awoke to nasty hangovers that only a hair of the dog could help dispel. His clothes began to smell of stale booze; he soon got tired of washing them, and simply found another jumpsuit to wear. Unwashed plates and cookware piled up in the galley sink, and it always seemed as if there were empty or half-empty glasses scattered throughout the ship. He stopped jogging after awhile, but he didn’t gain much weight because he had lost his appetite and was now eating less than before. And every day, he found a new source of irritation: the inconvenient times when the lights turned on and off, or how the compartments always seemed too hot or too cold, or why he could never find something that he needed.

One night, frustrated at having lost at chess yet again, he picked up his chair and slammed it through the game table’s glass panel. He was still staring at the wrecked table when one of the ‘bots arrived to investigate; deciding that its companionship was better than none at all, he sat down on the floor and tried to get it to come closer, cooing to it in the same way he had summoned his puppy back when he was a boy. The ‘bot ignored him completely, and that enraged him even further, so he found an empty champagne bottle and used it to demolish the machine. Remarkably, the bottle remained intact even after the ‘bot had become a broken, useless thing in the middle of the wardroom floor; even more remarkably, it didn’t shatter the porthole when Gillis hurled it against the window.

He didn’t remember what happened after that; he simply blacked out. The next thing he knew, he was sprawled across the floor of the airlock.

The harsh clang of an alarm threatened to split his skull in half. Dully surprised to find where he was, he clumsily raised himself up on his elbows and regarded his surroundings through swollen eyes. He was naked; his jumpsuit lay in an heap just within the inner hatch, which was shut. There was a large pool of vomit nearby, but he couldn’t recall having thrown up any more than he could remember getting here from the wardroom.

Lights strobed within the tiny compartment. Rolling over on his side, he peered at the control panel next to the outer hatch. The orange button in its center was lit, and the red one beneath it flashed on and off. The airlock was ready to be opened without prior decompression; this was what had triggered the alarm.

Gillis had no idea how he got here, but it was obvious what he had almost done. He crawled across the airlock floor and slapped his hand against the green button; that stopped the alarm. Then he opened the inner hatch and, without bothering to pick up his discarded jumpsuit, staggered out of the airlock. He couldn’t keep his balance, though, so he fell to his hands and knees and threw up again.

Then he rolled over on his side, curled in upon himself and wept hysterically until sleep mercifully came to him. Naked and miserable, he passed out on the floor of the EVA deck.

The following day, Gillis methodically went through the entire ship, gathering the few remaining bottles and returning them to the locker where he had found them. Although he was tempted to jettison them into space, he was scared to return to Deck H5. Besides, there wasn’t much booze left; during his long binge, he had managed to put away all but two bottles of scotch, one bottle of vodka, and four bottles of champagne.

The face that stared back at him from the mirror was unshaven and haggard, its eyes rimmed with dark circles. He was too tired to get rid of the beard, though, so he clipped it short with his scissors and let his hair remain at shoulder length. It was a new look for him, and he couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not. Not that he cared much any more.

It took a couple of days for him to want to eat again, and even longer before he had a good night’s sleep. More than a few times he was tempted to have another drink, but the memory of that terrifying moment in the airlock was enough to keep him away from the bottle.

Yet he never returned to the daily schedule he had previously set for himself. He lost interest in his studies, and he watched the few movies stored in the library until he found himself able to recite the characters’ lines from memory. The game table couldn’t be repaired, so he never played chess again. He went jogging now and then, but only when there was nothing else to do, and not for very long.

He spent long hours lying on his bunk, staring into the deepest recesses of his memory. He replayed events from his childhood—small incidents with his mother and father, the funny and stupid things he had done when he was a kid—and thought long and hard about the mistakes he had made during his journey to adulthood. He thought about the girls he had known, refought old quarrels with ancient enemies, remembered good times with old friends, yet in the end he always came back to where he was.

Sometimes he went down to the command deck. He had long since given up on trying to have meaningful conversation with the AI; it only responded to direct questions, and even then in a perfunctory way. Instead, he opened the porthole shutters, and slumped in Captain Lee’s chair while he stared at the distant and motionless stars.

One day, on impulse, he got up from the chair and walked to the nearest console. He hesitated for a moment, then he reached down and gently peeled back the strip of black tape he had fastened across the chronometer. It read:

P:/ 4.17.71 / 18.32.06 GMT

April 17, 2071. A little more six months had gone by since his awakening.

He could have sworn it had been six years.

That evening, Gillis prepared dinner with special care. He selected the best cut of processed beef he could find in the storage locker and marinated it in a pepper sauce he had learned to make, and carefully sauteed the dried garlic before he added it to the mashed potatoes; while the asparagus steamed in lemon juice, he grilled the beef to medium-rare perfection. Earlier in the afternoon he had chosen a bottle of champagne from the liquor supply, which he put aside until everything else was ready. He cleaned up the wardroom and laid a single setting for himself at a table facing the porthole, and just before dinner he dimmed the ceiling lights.

He ate slowly, savoring every bite, closing his eyes from time to time as he allowed his mind’s eye to revisit some of the fine restaurants in which he had once dined: a steak house in downtown Kansas City, a five-star Italian restaurant in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, a seafood place on St. Simon’s Island where the lobster came straight from the wharf. When he gazed out the porthole he didn’t attempt to pick out constellations, but simply enjoyed the silent majesty of the stars; when he was through with dinner, he carefully laid his knife and fork together on his plate, refilled his glass with champagne, and walked over to couch, where he had earlier placed one last thing to round off a perfect evening.

Gillis had deliberately refrained from opening the box he kept in his locker; even during his worst moments, the lowest depths of his long binge, he had deliberately stayed away from it. Now the time had come for him to open the box, see what was inside.

He pulled out the photographs one at a time, studying them closely as he remembered the places where they had been taken, the years of his life that they represented. Here was his father; here was his mother, here he was at age seven, standing in the backyard of his childhood home in North Carolina, proudly holding aloft a toy spaceship he had been given for his birthday. Here was a snapshot of the first girl he had ever loved; here were several photos he had taken of her during a camping trip to the Smokey Mountains. Here was himself in his dress uniform during graduation exercises at the Academy; here he was during flight training in Texas. These images, and many more like them, were all he had brought with him from Earth: pictures from his past, small reminders of the places he had gone, the people whom he had known and loved.

Looking through them, he tried not to think about what he was about to do. He had reset the thermostat to lower the ship’s internal temperature to 50 degrees at midnight, and he had instructed the AI to ignore the artificial day-night cycle he had previously programmed. He had left a note in Captain Lee’s quarters, informing him that Eric Gunther was a saboteur and apologizing for having deprived the rest of the crew of rations and liquor. He would finish this bottle of champagne, though; no sense in letting it go to waste, and perhaps it would be easier to push the red button if he was drunk.

His life was over. There was nothing left for him. A few moments of agony would be a fair exchange for countless days of lonesome misery.

Gillis was still leafing through the photographs when he happened to glance up at the porthole, and it was at that moment when he noticed something peculiar: one of the stars was moving.

At first, he thought the champagne was getting to him. That, or it was a refraction of starlight caused by the tears which clung to the corners of his eyes. He returned his attention to a picture he had taken of his father shortly before he died. Then, almost reluctantly, he raised his head once more.

The window was filled with stars, all of them stationary . . . save for one.

A bright point of light, so brilliant that it could have been a planet, perhaps even a comet. Yet the Alabama was now far beyond the Earth’s solar system, and the stars were too distant to be moving relative to the ship’s velocity. Yet this one seemed to be following a course parallel to the his own.

His curiosity aroused, Gillis watched the faraway light as it moved across the starscape. The longer he looked at it, the more it appeared as if it had a faint blue-white tail; it might be a comet, but if it was it was headed in the wrong direction. Indeed, as he continued to study it, the light became a little brighter and seemed to make a subtle shift in direction, almost as if . . .

The photos fell to the floor as he rushed toward the ladder.

By the time he reached the command deck, though, the object had vanished.

Gillis spent the next several hours searching the sky, using the navigational telescope in an attempt to catch another glimpse of the anomaly. When optical methods failed, he went to his com station and ran the broad-band selector up and down across the radio spectrum in an effort to locate a repeating signal against the warbling background noise of space. He barely noticed that the deck had become colder, that the ceiling lights had shut off; his previous intentions now forgotten, he had neglected to tell the AI that he had changed his mind.

The object had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, yet he was absolutely certain of what he had seen. It wasn’t a hallucination, of that he was positive, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that what he had spotted wasn’t a natural object but a spacecraft, briefly glimpsed from some inestimable distance—a thousand kilometers? ten thousand? a million?—as it passed the Alabama .

Yet where had it come from? Not from Earth, of that he could only be certain. Who was aboard, and where was it going? His mind conjured countless possibilities as he washed his dinner dishes, then went about preparing an early breakfast he had never expected to eat. Why hadn’t it come closer? He considered this as he lay on his bunk, his hands propped behind his head. Perhaps it hadn’t seen the Alabama . Might he ever see it again? Not likely, he eventually decided . . . yet if there was one, wasn’t there always a possibility that there might be others?

He realized that he had to record this incident, so that the rest of the crew would know what he had observed. Yet when he returned to the command deck and began to type a report into the ship’s log, he discovered that words failed him. Confronted by a blank flatscreen, everything he wrote seemed hollow and lifeless, nothing evoking the mysterious wonder of what he had observed. It was then that he realized that, during the six long months he had been living within the starship, never once had he ever attempted to write a journal.

Not that there had been much worth recording for posterity: he woke up, he ate, he jogged, he studied, he got drunk, he considered suicide. Yet it seemed as if everything had suddenly changed. Only yesterday he had been ready to walk into the airlock, close his eyes, and jettison himself into the void. Now, he felt as if he had been given a new reason to live . . . but that reason only made sense if he left something behind besides an unmade bunk and a half-empty champagne bottle.

He couldn’t write on a screen, though, so he searched through the cargo lockers until he found what he needed: a supply of blank ledger books, intended for use by the quartermaster to keep track of expedition supplies, along with a box of pens. Much to his surprise, he also discovered a couple of blank sketchbooks, some charcoal pencils, and a watercolor paint kit; someone back on Earth apparently had the foresight to splurge a few kilos on rudimentary art supplies.

Gillis carried a ledger and a couple of pens back to the wardroom. Although the game table was ruined, it made a perfect desk once its top was shut. He rearranged the furniture so that the table faced the porthole. For some reason, writing in longhand felt more comfortable; after a couple of false starts, which he impatiently scratched out, he was finally able to put down a more or less descriptive account of what he had seen the night before, followed by a couple of pages of informal conjecture of what it might have been.

When he was done, his spine ached from having bent over the table for so long, and there now was a sore spot between the index and middle fingers of his right hand where he had gripped his pen. Although he had nothing more to say, nonetheless he had the need to say more; putting words to paper had been a release unlike any he had felt before, an experience that had transported him, however temporarily, from this place to somewhere else. His body was tired but his mind was alive; despite his physical exhaustion, he felt a longing for something else to write.

He didn’t know it then, but he was beginning to go sane.

As Gillis gradually resumed the daily schedule he had established for himself before the darkness had set in, he struggled to find something to write about. He tried to start a journal, but that was futile and depressing. He squandered a few pages on an autobiography before he realized that writing about his life made him self-conscious; in the end he ripped those pages from the ledger and threw them away. His poetry was ridiculous; he almost reconsidered a trip to the airlock when he re-read the tiresome doggerel he had contrived. In desperation he jotted down a list of things that he missed, only to realize that it was not only trivial but even more embarrassing than his auto-biography. That too ended in the wastebin.

For long hours he sat at his makeshift desk, staring through the porthole as he aimlessly doodled, making pictures of the bright star he had seen that eventful night. More than a few times he was tempted to find a bottle of scotch and get drunk, yet the recollection of what he had nearly done to himself kept him away from the liquor. More than anything else, he wanted to write something meaningful, at least to himself if not for anyone else, yet it seemed as if his mind had become a featureless plain. Inspiration eluded him.

Then, early one morning before the lights came on, he abruptly awoke with the fleeting memory of a particularly vivid dream. Most of his dreams tended to be about Earth—memories of places he had been, people whom he had known—yet this one was different; he wasn’t in it, nor did it take place anywhere he had ever been.

He couldn’t recall any specific details, yet he was left with one clear vision: a young man standing on an alien landscape, gazing up at an azure sky dominated by a large ringed planet, watching helplessly as a bright light—Gillis recognized it as the starship he had seen—raced away from him, heading into deep space.

Gillis almost rolled over and went back to sleep, yet he found himself sitting up and reaching for his robe. He took a shower, and as he stood beneath the lukewarm spray his imagination began to fill the missing pieces. The young man was a prince, a nobleman from some world far from Earth; indeed, Earth’s history didn’t even belong to the story. His father’s kingdom had fallen to a tyrant and he had been forced to flee for his life, taking refuge on a starship bound for another inhabited planet. Yet its crew, fearing the tyrant’s wrath, had cast him away, leaving him marooned upon a habitable moon of an uncharted planet, without any supplies or companionship . . .

Still absorbed by the story in his mind, Gillis got dressed, then went to the wardroom. He turned on a couple of lights, then he sat down at his desk and picked up his pen. There was no hesitation as he opened the ledger and turned to a fresh page; almost as if in a trance, he began to write.

And he never stopped.

To be sure, there were many times when Gillis laid down his pen. His body had its limitations, and he couldn’t remain at his desk indefinitely before hunger or exhaustion overcame him. And there were occasions when he didn’t know what to do next; in frustration he would impatiently pace the floor, groping for the next scene, perhaps even the next word.

Yet after a time it seemed as if the prince knew what to do even before he did. As he explored his new world he encountered many creatures—some of whom became friends, some of whom were implacable enemies—and journeyed to places that tested the limits of Gillis’s ever-expanding imagination. As he did, Gillis—and Prince Rupurt, who subtly become his alter-ego—found himself embarked on an adventure more grand than anything he had ever believed possible.

Gillis changed his routine, fitting everything around the hours he spent at his desk. He rose early and went straight to work; his mind felt sharpest just after he got out of bed, and all he needed was a cup of coffee to help him wake up a little more. Around midday he would prepare a modest lunch, then walk around the ring corridor for exercise; two or three times a week he would patrol the entire ship, making sure that everything was functioning normally. By early afternoon he was back at his desk, picking up where he had left off, impatient to find out what would happen next.

He filled a ledger before he reached the end of his protagonist’s first adventure; without hesitation, he opened a fresh book and continued without interruption, and when he wore out his first pen, he discarded it without a second thought. A thick callus developed between the second and third knuckles of his right middle finger, yet he barely noticed. When the second ledger was filled, he placed it on top of the first one at the edge of his desk. He seldom read what he had written except when he needed to recheck the name of a character or the location of a certain place; after a while he learned to keep notes in a separate book so that he wouldn’t have to look back at what he had already done.

When evening came he would make dinner, read a little, spend some time gazing out the window. Every now and then he would go down to the command deck to check the nav table. Eventually the Alabama’s distance from Earth could be measured in parsecs rather then single light-years, yet even this fact had become incidental at best, and in time it became utterly irrelevant.

Gillis kept the chronometers covered; never again did he ever want to how much time had passed. He stopped wearing shorts and a shirt and settled for merely wearing his robe; sometimes he went through the entire day naked, sitting at his desk without a stitch of clothing. He kept his fingernails and toenails trimmed, and he always paid careful attention to his teeth, yet he gave up cutting his hair and beard. He showered once or twice a week, if that.

When he wasn’t writing, he was sketching pictures of the characters he had created, the strange cities and landscapes they visited. By now he had filled four ledgers with the adventures of his prince, yet words alone weren’t sufficient to bring life to his imagination. The next time he returned to the cargo module for a new ledger and a handful of pens, he found the watercolor set he had noticed earlier and brought it back to the wardroom.

That evening, he began to paint the walls.

One morning, he rose at his usual time. He took a shower, then he put on his robe—which was now frayed at the cuffs and worn through at the elbows—and made his long journey to the wardroom. Lately it had become more difficult for him to climb up and down ladders; his joints always seemed to ache, and aspirin relieved the pain only temporarily. There had been other changes as well; while making up his bunk a couple of days ago, he had been mildly surprised to find a long grey hair upon his pillow.

As he passed through the ring corridor, he couldn’t help but to admire his work. The forest mural he had started some time ago was almost complete; it extended halfway from Module C1 to Module C3, and it was quite lovely to gaze upon, although he needed to add a little more detail to the leaves. That might take some doing; he had recently exhausted the watercolors, and since then had resorted to soaking the dyes out of his old clothes.

He had a light breakfast, then he carefully climbed down the ladder to his studio; he had long since ceased to think of it as the wardroom. His ledger lay open his desk, his pen next to the place where he had left off last night. Rupurt was about to fight a duel with the lord of the southern kingdom, and he was looking forward to seeing how all this would work out.

He farted loudly as he sat down, giving him reason to smile with faint amusement, then he picked up his pen. He read the last paragraph he had composed, crossed out a few words that seemed unnecessary, then raised his eyes to the porthole, giving himself a few moments to compose his thoughts.

A bright star moved against space, one more brilliant than any he had seen in a very long while.

He stared at it for a long while. Then, very slowly, he rose from his desk, his legs trembling beneath his robe. His gaze never left the star as he backed away from the window, taking one small step after another as he moved toward the ladder behind him.

The star had returned. Or perhaps this was another one. Either way, it looked very much like the mysterious thing he had seen once before, a long time ago.

The pen fell from his hand as he bolted for the ladder. Ignoring the arthritic pain shooting through his arms and legs, he scrambled to the top deck of the module, then dashed down the corridor to the hatch leading to hub shaft. This time, he knew what had to be done; get to his old station, transmit a clear vox transmission on all frequencies . . .

He had climbed nearly halfway down the shaft before he realized that he didn’t know exactly what to say. A simple greeting? A message of friendship? Yes, that might do . . . but how would he identify himself?

In that moment, he realized that he couldn’t remember his name.

Stunned by this revelation, he clung to the ladder. His name. Surely he could recall his own name . . .

Gillis. Of course. He was Gillis. Gillis, Leslie. Lieutenant Commander Leslie Gillis. Chief communications officer of . . . yes, right . . . the URSS Alabama . He smiled, climbed down another rung. It had been so long since he had heard anyone say his name aloud, he probably couldn’t even speak it himself . . .

Couldn’t he?

Gillis opened his mouth, urged himself to say something. Nothing emerged from his throat save for a dry croak.

No. He could still speak; he was simply out of practice. All he had to do was get to his station. If he could remember the correct commands, he might still be able to send a signal to Prince Rupurt’s ship before it passed beyond range. He just needed to . . .

His left foot missed the next rung on the ladder. Thrown off-balance, he glanced down to see what he had done wrong . . . then his right hand slipped off the ladder. Suddenly he found himself falling backward, his arms and legs flailing helplessly. Down, down, down . . .

“Oh, no,” he said softly.

An instant later he hit the bottom of the shaft. There was a brief flash of pain as his neck snapped, then blackness rushed in upon him and it was all over.

A few hours later, one of the ‘bots found Gillis’s body. It prodded him several times, confirming that the cold organic form lying on the floor of Deck H5 was indeed lifeless, then it relayed a query to the AI. The molecular intelligence carefully considered the situation for a few fractions of a second, then it instructed the spider to jettison the corpse. This was done within the next two minutes; ejected from the starship, Gillis spun away into the void, another small piece of debris lost between the stars.

The AI determined that it was no longer necessary for the crew compartments to remain habitable, so it returned the thermostat setting to 50 degrees. A ‘bot moved through the ship, cleaning up after Gillis and returning the rations he hadn’t consumed to the storage lockers. It left untouched the thirteen ledgers Gillis had completed, along with the fourteenth that lay open upon his desk. There was nothing that could be done about the paintings on the walls of Module C7 and the ring access corridor, so they were left alone. Once the ‘bot completed its chores, the AI closed the shutters of the windows Gillis had left open, then methodically turned off all the lights, one by one.

The date was February 25, 2102, GMT. The rest of the flight went smoothly, without any further incident.

UNDONE

James Patrick Kelly
panic attack

The ship screamed. Its screens showed Mada that she was surrounded in threespace. A swarm of Utopian asteroids was closing on her, brain clans and mining DIs living in hollowed-out chunks of carbonaceous chondrite, any one of which could have mustered enough votes to abolish Mada in all ten dimensions.

“I’m going to die,” the ship cried, “I’m going to die, I’m going to . . .”

“I’m not.” Mada waved the speaker off impatiently and scanned downwhen. She saw that the Utopians had planted an identity mine five minutes into the past that would boil her memory to vapor if she tried to go back in time to undo this trap. Upwhen, then. The future was clear, at least as far as she could see, which wasn’t much beyond next week. Of course, that was the direction they wanted her to skip. They’d be happiest making her their great-great-great-grandchildren’s problem.

The Utopians fired another spread of panic bolts. The ship tried to absorb them, but its buffers were already overflowing. Mada felt her throat tighten. Suddenly she couldn’t remember how to spell luck, and she believed that she could feel her sanity oozing out of her ears.

“So let’s skip upwhen,” she said.

“You s-sure?” said the ship. “I don’t know if . . . how far?

“Far enough so that all of these drones will be fossils.”

“I can’t just . . . I need a number, Mada.”

A needle of fear pricked Mada hard enough to make her reflexes kick. “Skip!” Her panic did not allow for the luxury of numbers. “Skip now!” Her voice was tight as a fist. “Do it!”

Time shivered as the ship surged into the empty dimensions. In three-space, Mada went all wavy. Eons passed in a nanosecond, then she washed back into the strong dimensions and solidified.

She merged briefly with the ship to assess damage. “What have you done?” The gain in entropy was an ache in her bones.

“I-I’m sorry, you said to skip so . . .” The ship was still jittery.

Even though she wanted to kick its sensorium in, she bit down hard on her anger. They had both made enough mistakes that day. “That’s all right,” she said, “we can always go back. We just have to figure out when we are. Run the star charts.”

two-tenths of a spin

The ship took almost three minutes to get its charts to agree with its navigation screens—a bad sign. Reconciling the data showed that it had skipped forward in time about two-tenths of a galactic spin. Almost twenty million years had passed on Mada’s home world of True-born, time enough for its crust to fold and buckle into new mountain ranges, for the Green Sea to bloom, for the glaciers to march and melt. More than enough time for everything and everyone Mada had ever loved—or hated—to die, turn to dust and blow away.

Whiskers trembling, she checked downwhen. What she saw made her lose her perch and float aimlessly away from the command mod’s screens. There had to be something wrong with the ship’s air. It settled like dead, wet leaves in her lungs. She ordered the ship to check the mix.

The ship’s deck flowed into an enormous plastic hand, warm as blood. It cupped Mada gently in its palm and raised her up so that she could see its screens straight on.

“Nominal, Mada. Everything is as it should be.”

That couldn’t be right. She could breathe ship-nominal atmosphere. “Check it again,” she said.

“Mada, I’m sorry,” said the ship.

The identity mine had skipped with them and was still dogging her, five infuriating minutes into the past. There was no getting around it, no way to undo their leap into the future. She was trapped two-tenths of a spin upwhen. The knowledge was like a sucking hole in her chest, much worse than any wound the Utopian psychological war machine could have inflicted on her.

“What do we do now?” asked the ship.

Mada wondered what she should say to it. Scan for hostiles? Open a pleasure sim? Cook a nice, hot stew? Orders twisted in her mind, bit their tails and swallowed themselves.

She considered—briefly—telling it to open all the air locks to the vacuum. Would it obey this order? She thought it probably would, although she would as soon chew her own tongue off as utter such cowardly words. Had not she and her sibling batch voted to carry the revolution into all ten dimensions? Pledged themselves to fight for the Three Universal Rights, no matter what the cost the Utopian brain clans extracted from them in blood and anguish?

But that had been two-tenths of a spin ago.

bean thoughts

“Where are you going?” said the ship.

Mada floated through the door bubble of the command mod. She wrapped her toes around the perch outside to steady herself.

“Mada, wait! I need a mission, a course, some line of inquiry.”

She launched down the companionway.

“I’m a Dependent Intelligence, Mada.” Its speaker buzzed with self-righteousness. “I have the right to proper and timely guidance.”

The ship flowed a veil across her trajectory; as she approached, it went taut. That was DI thinking: the ship was sure that it could just bounce her back into its world. Mada flicked her claws and slashed at it, shredding holes half a meter long.

“And I have the right to be an individual,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

She caught another perch and pivoted off it toward the greenhouse blister. She grabbed the perch by the door bubble and paused to flow new alveoli into her lungs to make up for the oxygen-depleted, carbon-dioxide-enriched air mix in the greenhouse. The bubble shivered as she popped through it and she breathed deeply. The smells of life helped ground her whenever operation of the ship overwhelmed her. It was always so needy and there was only one of her.

It would have been different if they had been designed to go out in teams. She would have had her sibling Thiras at her side; together they might have been strong enough to withstand the Utopian’s panic . . . no! Mada shook him out of her head. Thiras was gone; they were all gone. There was no sense in looking for comfort, downwhen or up. All she had was the moment, the tick of the relentless present, filled now with the moist, bittersweet breath of the dirt, the sticky savor of running sap, the bloom of perfume on the flowers. As she drifted through the greenhouse, leaves brushed her skin like caresses. She settled at the potting bench, opened a bin and picked out a single bean seed.

Mada cupped it between her two hands and blew on it, letting her body’s warmth coax the seed out of dormancy. She tried to merge her mind with its blissful unconsciousness. Cotyledons stirred and began to absorb nutrients from the endosperm. A bean cared nothing about proclaiming the Three Universal Rights: the right of all independent sentients to remain individual, the right to manipulate their physical structures and the right to access the timelines. Mada slowed her metabolism to the steady and deliberate rhythm of the bean—what Utopian could do that? They held that individuality bred chaos, that function alone must determine form and that undoing the past was sacrilege. Being Utopians, they could hardly destroy Trueborn and its handful of colonies. Instead they had tried to put the Rights under quarantine.

Mada stimulated the sweat glands in the palms of her hands. The moisture wicking across her skin called to the embryonic root in the bean seed. The tip pushed against the sead coat. Mada’s sibling batch on Trueborn had pushed hard against the Utopian blockade, to bring the Rights to the rest of the galaxy.

Only a handful had made it to open space. The brain clans had hunted them down and brought most of them back in disgrace to Trueborn. But not Mada. No, not wily Mada, Mada the fearless, Mada whose heart now beat but once a minute.

The bean embryo swelled and its root cracked the seed coat. It curled into her hand, branching and re-branching like the timelines. The roots tickled her.

Mada manipulated the chemistry of her sweat by forcing her sweat ducts to reabsorb most of the sodium and chlorine. She parted her hands slightly and raised them up to the grow lights. The cotyledons emerged and chloroplasts oriented themselves to the light. Mada was thinking only bean thoughts as her cupped hands filled with roots and the first true leaves unfolded. More leaves budded from the nodes of her stem, her petioles arched and twisted to the light, the light. It was only the light—violet-blue and orange-red—that mattered, the incredible shower of photons that excited her chlorophyll, passing electrons down carrier molecules to form adenosine diphosphate and nicotinamide adenine dinucleo. . . .

“Mada,” said the ship. “The order to leave you alone is now superseded by primary programming.”

“What?” The word caught in her throat like a bone.

“You entered the greenhouse forty days ago.”

Without quite realizing what she was doing, Mada clenched her hands, crushing the young plant.

“I am directed to keep you from harm, Mada,” said the ship. “It’s time to eat.”

She glanced down at the dead thing in her hands. “Yes, all right.” She dropped it onto the potting bench. “I’ve got something to clean up first but I’ll be there in a minute.” She wiped the corner of her eye. “Meanwhile, calculate a course for home.”

Not until the ship scanned the quarantine zone at the edge of the Trueborn system did Mada begin to worry. In her time the zone had swarmed with the battle asteroids of the brain clans. Now the Utopians were gone. Of course, that was to be expected after all this time. But as the ship re-entered the home system, dumping excess velocity into the empty dimensions, Mada felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature in the command mod.

Trueborn orbited a spectral type G3V star, which had been known to the discovers as HR3538. Scans showed that the Green Sea had become a climax forest of deciduous hardwood. There were indeed new mountains—knife edges slicing through evergreen sheets—that had upthrust some eighty kilometers off the Fire Coast, leaving Port Henoch landlocked. A rain forest choked the plain where the city of Blair’s Landing had once sprawled.

The ship scanned life in abundance. The seas teemed and flocks of Trueborn’s flyers darkened the skies like storm clouds: kippies and bluewings and warblers and migrating stilts. Animals had retaken all three continents, lowland and upland, marsh and tundra. Mada could see the dust kicked up by the herds of herbivorous aram from low orbit. The forest echoed with the clatter of shindies and the shriek of blowhards. Big hunters like kar and divil padded across the plains. There were new species as well, mostly invertebrates but also a number of lizards and something like a great, mossy rat that built mounds five meters tall.

None of the introduced species had survived: dogs or turkeys or llamas. The ship could find no cities, towns, buildings—not even ruins. There were neither tubeways nor roads, only the occasional animal track. The ship looked across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and saw nothing but the natural background.

There was nobody home on Trueborn. And as far as they could tell, there never had been.

“Speculate,” said Mada.

“I can’t,” said the ship. “There isn’t enough data.”

“There’s your data.” Mada could hear the anger in her voice. “Trueborn, as it would have been had we never even existed.”

“Two-tenths of a spin is a long time, Mada.”

She shook her head. “They ripped out the foundations, even picked up the dumps. There’s nothing, nothing of us left.” Mada was gripping the command perch so hard that the knuckles of her toes were white. “Hypothesis,” she said, “the Utopians got tired of our troublemaking and wiped us out. Speculate.”

“Possible, but that’s contrary to their core beliefs.” Most DIs had terrible imaginations. They couldn’t tell jokes, but then they couldn’t commit crimes, either.

“Hypothesis: they deported the entire population, scattered us to prison colonies. Speculate.”

“Possible, but a logistical nightmare. The Utopians prize the elegant solution.”

She swiped the image of her home planet off the screen, as if to erase its unnerving impossibility. “Hypothesis: there are no Utopians anymore because the revolution succeeded. Speculate.”

“Possible, but then where did everyone go? And why did they return the planet to its pristine state?”

She snorted in disgust. “What if,” she tapped a finger to her forehead, “maybe we don’t exist. What if we’ve skipped to another time line? One in which the discovery of Trueborn never happened? Maybe there has been no Utopian Empire in this timeline, no Great Expansion, no Space Age, maybe no human civilization at all.”

“One does not just skip to another timeline at random.” The ship sounded huffy at the suggestion. “I’ve monitored all our dimensional reinsertions quite carefully, and I can assure you that all these events occurred in the timeline we currently occupy.”

“You’re saying there’s no chance?”

“If you want to write a story, why bother asking my opinion?”

Mada’s laugh was brittle. “All right then. We need more data.” For the first time since she had been stranded upwhen, she felt a tickle stir the dead weight she was carrying inside her. “Let’s start with the nearest Utopian system.”

chasing shadows

The HR683 system was abandoned and all signs of human habitation had been obliterated. Mada could not be certain that everything had been restored to its pre-Expansion state because the ship’s database on Utopian resources was spotty. HR4523 was similarly deserted. HR509, also known as Tau Ceti, was only 11.9 light years from earth and had been the first outpost of the Great Expansion.

Its planetary system was also devoid of intelligent life and human artifacts—with one striking exception.

Nuevo LA was spread along the shores of the Sterling Sea like a half-eaten picnic lunch. Something had bitten the roofs off its buildings and chewed its walls. Metal skeletons rotted on its docks, transports were melting into brown and gold stains. Once-proud boulevards crumbled in the orange light; the only traffic was wind-blown litter chasing shadows.

Mada was happy to survey the ruin from low orbit. A closer inspection would have spooked her. “Was it war?”

“There may have been a war,” said the ship, “but that’s not what caused this. I think it’s deliberate deconstruction.” In extreme magnification, the screen showed a concrete wall pockmarked with tiny holes, from which dust puffed intermittently. “The composition of that dust is limestone, sand, and aluminum silicate. The buildings are crawling with nanobots and they’re eating the concrete.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“At a guess, a hundred years, but that could be off by an order of magnitude.”

“Who did this?” said Mada. “Why? Speculate.”

“If this is the outcome of a war, then it would seem that the victors wanted to obliterate all traces of the vanquished. But it doesn’t seem to have been fought over resources. I suppose we could imagine some deep ideological antagonism between the two sides that led to this, but such an extreme of cultural psychopathology seems unlikely.”

“I hope you’re right.” She shivered. “So they did it themselves, then? Maybe they were done with this place and wanted to leave it as they found it?”

“Possible,” said the ship.

Mada decided that she was done with Nuevo LA, too. She would have been perversely comforted to have found her enemies in power somewhere. It would have given her an easy way to calculate her duty. However, Mada was quite certain that what this mystery meant was that twenty thousand millennia had conquered both the revolution and the Utopians and that she and her sibling batch had been designed in vain.

Still, she had nothing better to do with eternity than to try to find out what had become of her species.

a never-ending vacation

The Atlantic Ocean was now larger than the Pacific. The Mediterranean Sea had been squeezed out of existence by the collision of Africa, Europe and Asia. North America floated free of South America and was nudging Siberia. Australia was drifting toward the equator.

The population of earth was about what it had been in the fifteenth century CE, according to the ship. Half a billion people lived on the home world and, as far as Mada could see, none of them had anything important to do. The means of production and distribution, of energy-generation and waste disposal were in the control of Dependent Intelligences like the ship. Despite repeated scans, the ship could detect no sign that any independent sentience was overseeing the system.

There were but a handful of cities, none larger than a quarter of a million inhabitants. All were scrubbed clean and kept scrupulously ordered by the DIs; they reminded Mada of databases populated with people instead of information. The majority of the population spent their bucolic lives in pretty hamlets and quaint towns overlooking lakes or oceans or mountains.

Humanity had booked a never-ending vacation.

“The brain clans could be controlling the DIs,” said Mada. “That would make sense.”

“Doubtful,” said the ship. “Independent sentients create a signature disturbance in the sixth dimension.”

“Could there be some secret dictator among the humans, a hidden oligarchy?”

“I see no evidence that anyone is in charge. Do you?”

She shook her head. “Did they choose to live in a museum,” she said, “or were they condemned to it? It’s obvious there’s no First Right here; these people have only the illusion of individuality. And no Second Right either. Those bodies are as plain as uniforms—they’re still slaves to their biology.”

“There’s no disease,” said the ship. “They seem to be functionally immortal.”

“That’s not saying very much, is it?” Mada sniffed. “Maybe this is some scheme to start human civilization over again. Or maybe they’re like seeds, stored here until someone comes along to plant them.” She waved all the screens off. “I want to go down for a closer look. What do I need to pass?”

“Clothes, for one thing.” The ship displayed a selection of current styles on its screen. They were extravagantly varied, from ballooning pastel tents to skin-tight sheaths of luminescent metal, to feathered camouflage to jump-suits made of what looked like dried mud. “Fashion design is one of their principal pasttimes,” said the ship. “In addition, you’ll probably want genitalia and the usual secondary sexual characteristics.”

It took her the better part of a day to flow ovaries, fallopian tubes, a uterus, cervix, and vulva and to re-arrange her vagina. All these unnecessary organs made her feel bloated. She saw breasts as a waste of tissue; she made hers as small as the ship thought acceptable. She argued with it about the several substantial patches of hair it claimed she needed. Clearly, grooming them would require constant attention. She didn’t mind taming her claws into fingernails but she hated giving up her whiskers. Without them, the air was practically invisible. At first her new vulva tickled when she walked, but she got used to it.

The ship entered earth’s atmosphere at night and landed in what had once been Saskatchewan, Canada. It dumped most of its mass into the empty dimensions and flowed itself into baggy black pants, a moss-colored boat neck top and a pair of brown, gripall loafers. It was able to conceal its complete sensorium in a canvas belt.

It was 9:14 in the morning on June 23, 19,834,004 CE when Mada strolled into the village of Harmonious Struggle.

the devil’s apple

Harmonious Struggle consisted of five clothing shops, six restaurants, three jewelers, eight art galleries, a musical instrument maker, a crafts workshop, a weaver, a potter, a woodworking shop, two candle stores, four theaters with capacities ranging from twenty to three hundred and an enormous sporting goods store attached to a miniature domed stadium. There looked to be apartments over most of these establishments; many had views of nearby Rabbit Lake.

Three of the restaurants—Hassam’s Palace of Plenty, The Devil’s Apple, and Laurel’s—were practically jostling each other for position on Sonnet Street, which ran down to the lake. Lounging just outside of each were waiters eyeing handheld screens. They sprang up as one when Mada happened around the corner.

“Good day, Madame. Have you eaten?”

“Well met, fair stranger. Come break bread with us.”

“All natural foods, friend! Lightly cooked, humbly served.”

Mada veered into the middle of the street to study the situation as the waiters called to her. ~So I can choose whichever I want?~ She subvocalized to the ship.

~In an attention-based economy,~ subbed the ship in reply, ~ all they expect from you is an audience.~

Just beyond Hassam’s, the skinny waiter from The Devil’s Apple had a wry, crooked smile. Black hair fell to the padded shoulders of his shirt. He was wearing boots to the knee and loose rust-colored shorts, but it was the little red cape that decided her.

As she walked past her, the waitress from Hassam’s was practically shouting. “Madame, please, their batter is dull!” She waved her handheld at Mada. “Read the reviews. Who puts shrimp in muffins?”

The waiter at the Devil’s Apple was named Owen. He showed her to one of three tables in the tiny restaurant. At his suggestion, Mada ordered the poached peaches with white cheese mousse, an asparagus breakfast torte, baked orange walnut French toast and coddled eggs. Owen served the peaches, but it was the chef and owner, Edris, who emerged from the kitchen to clear the plate.

“The mousse, Madame, you liked it?” she asked, beaming.

“It was good,” said Mada.

Her smile shrank a size and a half. “Enough lemon rind, would you say that?”

“Yes. It was very nice.”

Mada’s reply seemed to dismay Edris even more. When she came out to clear the next course, she blanched at the corner of breakfast torte that Mada had left uneaten.

“I knew this.” She snatched the plate away. “The pastry wasn’t fluffy enough.” She rolled the offending scrap between thumb and forefinger.

Mada raised her hands in protest. “No, no, it was delicious.” She could see Owen shrinking into the far corner of the room.

“Maybe too much colby, not enough gruyere?” Edris snarled. “But you have no comment?”

“I wouldn’t change a thing. It was perfect.”

“Madame is kind,” she said, her lips barely moving, and retreated.

A moment later Owen set the steaming plate of French toast before Mada.

“Excuse me.” She tugged at his sleeve.

“Something’s wrong?” He edged away from her. “You must speak to Edris.”

“Everything is fine. I was just wondering if you could tell me how to get to the local library.”

Edris burst out of the kitchen. “What are you doing, beanheaded boy? You are distracting my patron with absurd chitterchat. Get out, get out of my restaurant now.”

“No, really, he . . .”

But Owen was already out the door and up the street, taking Mada’s appetite with him.

~You’re doing something wrong,~ the ship subbed.

Mada lowered her head. ~I know that!~

Mada pushed the sliver of French toast around the pool of maple syrup for several minutes but could not eat it. “Excuse me,” she called, standing up abruptly. “Edris?”

Edris shouldered through the kitchen door, carrying a tray with a silver egg cup. She froze when she saw how it was with the French toast and her only patron.

“This was one of the most delicious meals I have ever eaten.” Mada backed toward the door. She wanted nothing to do with eggs, coddled or otherwise.

Edris set the tray in front of Mada’s empty chair. “Madame, the art of the kitchen requires the tongue of the patron,” she said icily.

She fumbled for the latch. “Everything was very, very wonderful.”

no comment

Mada slunk down Lyric Alley, which ran behind the stadium, trying to understand how exactly she had offended. In this attention-based economy, paying attention was obviously not enough. There had to be some other cultural protocol she and the ship were missing. What she probably ought to do was go back and explore the clothes shops, maybe pick up a pot or some candles and see what additional information she could blunder into. But making a fool of herself had never much appealed to Mada as a learning strategy. She wanted the map, a native guide—some edge, preferably secret.

~Scanning,~ subbed the ship. ~Somebody is following you. He just ducked behind the privet hedge twelve-point-three meters to the right. It’s the waiter, Owen.~

“Owen,” called Mada, “is that you? I’m sorry I got you in trouble. You’re an excellent waiter.”

“I’m not really a waiter.” Owen peeked over the top of the hedge. “I’m a poet.”

She gave him her best smile. “You said you’d take me to the library.” For some reason, the smile stayed on her face “Can we do that now?”

“First listen to some of my poetry.”

“No,” she said firmly. “Owen, I don’t think you’ve been paying attention. I said I would like to go to the library.”

“All right then, but I’m not going to have sex with you.”

Mada was taken aback. “Really? Why is that?”

“I’m not attracted to women with small breasts.”

For the first time in her life, Mada felt the stab of outraged hormones. “Come out here and talk to me.”

There was no immediate break in the hedge, so Owen had to squiggle through. “There’s something about me that you don’t like,” he said as he struggled with the branches.

“Is there?” She considered. “I like your cape.”

“That you don’t like.” He escaped the hedge’s grasp and brushed leaves from his shorts.

“I guess I don’t like your narrow-mindedness. It’s not an attractive quality in a poet.”

There was a gleam in Owen’s eye as he went up on his tiptoes and began to declaim:

“That spring you left I thought I might expire

And lose the love you left for me to keep.

To hold you once again is my desire.

Before I give myself to death’s long sleep.”

He illustrated his poetry with large, flailing gestures. At “death’s long sleep” he brought his hands together as if to pray, laid the side of his head against them and closed his eyes. He held that pose in silence for an agonizingly long time.

“It’s nice,” Mada said at last. “I like the way it rhymes.”

He sighed and went flat-footed. His arms drooped and he fixed her with an accusing stare. “You’re not from here.”

“No,” she said. ~Where am I from?~ she subbed. ~Someplace he’ll have to look up.~

~Marble Bar. It’s in Australia~

“I’m from Marble Bar.”

“No, I mean you’re not one of us. You don’t comment.”

At that moment, Mada understood. ~I want to skip downwhen four minutes. I need to undo this.~

~this undo to need I .minutes four downwhen skip to want I~ understood Mada, moment that At “.comment don’t You .us of one not you’re mean I ,No” “.Bar Marble from I’m” ~Australia in It’s .Bar Marble~ ~up look to have he’ll Someplace~.subbed she ~?from I am Where~ said she “,No” .here from not You’re” .stare accusing an with her fixed he and drooped arms His .flatfooted went and sighed He “.rhymes it way the like I.” .last at said Mada “,nice It’s” .time long agonizingly an for silence in pose that held He .eyes his closed and them against head his of side the laid ,pray to if as together hands his brought he “sleep long death’s” At .gestures flailing ,large with poetry his illustrated He “.sleep long death’s to myself give I Before desire my is again once you hold To keep to me for left you love the lose And expire might I thought I left you spring That” :declaim to began and tiptoes his on up went he as eye Owen’s in gleam a was There “.poet a in quality attractive an not It’s .narrow-mindedness your like don’t I guess I” .shorts his from leaves brushed and grasp hedge’s the escaped He “.like don’t you That” “.cape your like I” .considered She “?there Is? .branches the with struggled he as said he “,like don’t you that me about something There’s” .through squiggle to had Owen so, hedge the in break immediate no was There “.me to talk and here out Come” .hormones wronged of stab the felt Mada ,life her in time first the For “.breasts small with women to attracted not I’m” “?that is Why ?Really” .aback taken was Mada “.you with sex have to going not I’m but ,then right All” “.library the to go to like would I said I .attention paying been you’ve think don’t I ,Owen” firmly said she “,No” “.poetry my of some to listen First”

As the ship surged through the empty dimensions, three-space became as liquid as a dream. Leaves smeared and buildings ran together. Owen’s face swirled.

“They want criticism,” said Mada. “They like to think of themselves as artists but they’re insecure about what they’ve accomplished. They want their audience to engage with what they’re doing, help them make it better—the comments they both seem to expect.”

“I see it now,” said the ship. “But is one person in a backwater worth an undo? Let’s just start over somewhere else.”

“No, I have an idea.” She began flowing more fat cells to her breasts. For the first time since she had skipped upwhen, Mada had a glimpse of what her duty might now be. “I’m going to need a big special effect on short notice. Be ready to reclaim mass so you can resubstantiate the hull at my command.”

“First listen to some of my poetry.”

“Go ahead.” Mada folded her arms across her chest. “Say it then.”

Owen stood on tiptoes to declaim:

“That spring you left I thought I might expire

And lose the love you left for me to keep.

To hold you once again in my desire

Before I give myself to death’s long sleep.”

He illustrated his poetry with large, flailing gestures. At “death’s long sleep” he brought his hands together as if to pray, moved them to the side of his head, rested against them and closed his eyes. He had held the pose for just a beat before Mada interrupted him.

“Owen,” she said. “You look ridiculous.”

He jerked as if he had been hit in the head by a shovel.

She pointed at the ground before her. “You’ll want to take these comments sitting down.”

He hesitated, then settled at her feet.

“You hold your meter well, but that’s purely a mechanical skill.” She circled behind him. “A smart oven could do as much. Stop fidgeting!”

She hadn’t noticed the ant hills near the spot she had chosen for Owen. The first scouts were beginning to explore him. That suited her plan exactly.

“Your real problem,” she continued, “is that you know nothing about death and probably very little about desire.”

“I know about death.” Owen drew his feet close to his body and grasped his knees. “Everyone does. Flowers die, squirrels die.”

“Has anyone you’ve ever known died?”

He frowned. “I didn’t know her personally, but there was the woman who fell off that cliff in Merrymeeting.”

“Owen, did you have a mother?”

“Don’t make fun of me. Everyone has a mother.”

Mada didn’t think it was time to tell him that she didn’t; that she and her sibling batch of a thousand revolutionaries had been autoflowed. “Hold out your hand.” Mada scooped up an ant. “That’s your mother.” She crunched it and dropped it onto Owen’s palm.

Owen looked down at the dead ant and up again at Mada. His eyes filled.

“I think I love you,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Mada.” She leaned over to straighten his cape. “But loving me would be a very bad idea.”

all that’s left

Mada was surprised to find a few actual books in the library, printed on real plastic. A primitive DI had catalogued the rest of the collection, billions of gigabytes of print, graphics, audio, video, and VR files. None of it told Mada what she wanted to know. The library had sims of Egypt’s New Kingdom, Islam’s Abbasid dynasty, and the International Moonbase—but then came an astonishing void. Mada’s searches on Trueborn, the Utopians, Tau Ceti, intelligence engineering and dimensional extensibility theory turned up no results. It was only in the very recent past that history resumed. The DI could reproduce the plans that the workbots had left when they built the library twenty-two years ago, and the menu The Devil’s Apple had offered the previous summer, and the complete won-lost record of the Black Minks, the local scatterball club, which had gone 533—905 over the last century. It knew that the name of the woman who died in Merrymeeting was Agnes and that two years after her death, a replacement baby had been born to Chandra and Yuri. They named him Herrick.

Mada waved the screen blank and stretched. She could see Owen draped artfully over a nearby divan, as if posing for a portrait. He was engrossed by his handheld. She noticed that his lips moved as he read. She crossed the reading room and squeezed onto it next to him, nestling into the crook in his legs. “What’s that?” she asked.

He turned the handheld toward her. “Nadeem Jerad’s Burning the Snow. Would you like to hear one of his poems?”

“Maybe later.” She leaned into him. “I was just reading about Moonbase.”

“Yes, ancient history. It’s sort of interesting, don’t you think? The Greeks and the Renaissance and all that.”

“But then I can’t find any record of what came after.”

“Because of the nightmares.” He nodded. “Terrible things happened, so we forgot them.”

“What terrible things?”

He tapped the side of his head and grinned.

“Of course,” she said, “nothing terrible happens anymore.”

“No. Everyone’s happy now.” Owen reached out and pushed a strand of her hair off her forehead. “You have beautiful hair.”

Mada couldn’t even remember what color it was. “But if something terrible did happen, then you’d want to forget it.”

“Obviously.”

“The woman who died, Agnes. No doubt her friends were very sad.”

“No doubt.” Now he was playing with her hair.

~Good question,~ subbed the ship. ~They must have some mechanism to wipe their memories.~

“Is something wrong?” Owen’s face was the size of the moon; Mada was afraid of what he might tell her next.

“Agnes probably had a mother,” she said.

“A mom and a dad.”

“It must have been terrible for them.”

He shrugged. “Yes, I’m sure they forgot her.”

Mada wanted to slap his hand away from her head. “But how could they?”

He gave ger a puzzled look. “Where are you from, anyway?”

“Trueborn,” she said without hesitation. “It’s a long, long way from here.”

“Don’t you have libraries there?” He gestured at the screens that surrounded them. “This is where we keep what we don’t want to remember.”

~Skip!~ Mada could barely sub; if what she suspected were true . . . ~Skip downwhen two minutes.~

~minutes two downwhen Skip~ . . . true were suspected she what if sub barely could Mada ~!Skip~ “remember to want don’t we what keep we where is This” .them surrounded that screen the at gestured He “?there libraries have you Don’t” “.here from way long ,long a It’s” hesitation without said she “,Trueborn” “?anyway, from you are Where” .look puzzled a her gave He “?they could how But” .head her from away hand his slap to wanted Mada “.her forgot they sure I’m, Yes” .shrugged He “.them for terrible been have must It” “dad a and mom A” “.mother a had probably Agnes” next her tell might he what of afraid was Mada .moon the of size of the was face Owen’s"?wrong something Is” .~memories their wipe to mechanism some have must They” .ship the subbed; ~question Good~ hair her with playing was he Now “.doubt No” “.sad very were friends her doubt no, Agnes, died who woman The” “.Obviously” “.it forget to want you’d then ,happen did terrible something if But” .was it color what remember even couldn’t even Mada

She wrapped her arms around herself to keep the empty dimensions from reaching for the emptiness inside her. Was something wrong?

Of course there was, but she didn’t expect to say it out loud. “I’ve lost everything and all that’s left is this.”

Owen shimmered next to her like the surface of Rabbit Lake.

“Mada, what?” said the ship.

“Forget it,” she said. She thought she could hear something cracking when she laughed.

Mada couldn’t even remember what color her hair was. “But if something terrible did happen, then you’d want to forget it.”

“Obviously.”

“Something terrible happened to me.”

“I’m sorry.” Owen squeezed her shoulder. “Do you want me to show you how to use the headbands?” He pointed at a rack of metal-mesh strips.

~Scanning,~ subbed the ship. “Microcurrent taps capable of modulating post-synaptic outputs. I thought they were some kind of virtual reality I/O.”

“No.” Mada twisted away from him and shot off the divan. She was outraged that these people would deliberately burn memories. How many stubbed toes and unhappy love affairs had Owen forgotten? If she could have, she would have skipped the entire village of Harmonious Struggle downwhen into the identity mine. When he rose up after her, she grabbed his hand. “I have to get out of here right now.”

She dragged him out of the library into the innocent light of the sun.

“Wait a minute,” he said. She continued to tow him up Ode Street and out of town. “Wait!” He planted his feet, tugged at her and she spun back to him. “Why are you so upset?”

“I’m not upset.” Mada’s blood was hammering in her temples and she could feel the prickle of sweat under her arms. ~Now I need you,~ she subbed. “All right then. It’s time you knew.” She took a deep breath. “We were just talking about ancient history, Owen. Do you remember back then that the gods used to intervene in the affairs of humanity?”

Owen goggled at her as if she were growing beans out of her ears.

“I am a goddess, Owen, and I have come for you. I am calling you to your destiny. I intend to inspire you to great poetry.”

His mouth opened and then closed again.

“My worshippers call me by many names.” She raised a hand to the sky.

~Help?~

~Try Athene? Here’s a databurst.~

“To the Greeks, I was Athene,” Mada continued, “the goddess of cities, of technology and the arts, of wisdom and of war.” She stretched a hand toward Owen’s astonished face, forefinger aimed between his eyes. “Unlike you, I had no mother. I sprang full-grown from the forehead of my maker. I am Athene, the virgin goddess.”

“How stupid do you think I am?” He shivered and glanced away from her fierce gaze. “I used to live in Maple City, Mada. I’m not some simple-minded country lump. You don’t seriously expect me to believe this goddess nonsense?”

She slumped, confused. Of course she had expected him to believe her. “I meant no disrespect, Owen. It’s just that the truth is . . .” This wasn’t as easy as she had thought. “What I expect is that you believe in your own potential, Owen. What I expect is that you are brave enough to leave this place and come with me. To the stars, Owen, to the stars to start a new world.” She crossed her arms in front of her chest, grasped the hem of her moss-colored top, pulled it over her head and tossed it behind her. Before it hit the ground the ship augmented it with enough reclaimed mass from the empty dimensions to resubstantiate the command and living mods.

Mada was quite pleased with the way Owen tried—and failed—not to stare at her breasts. She kicked the gripall loafers off and the deck rose up beneath them. She stepped out of the baggy, black pants; when she tossed them at Owen, he flinched. Seconds later, they were eyeing each other in the metallic light of the ship’s main companionway.

“Well?” said Mada.

duty

Mada had difficulty accepting Trueborn as it now was. She could see the ghosts of great cities, hear the murmur of dead friends. She decided to live in the forest that had once been the Green Sea, where there were no landmarks to remind her of what she had lost. She ordered the ship to begin constructing an infrastructure similar to that they had found on earth, only capable of supporting a technologically advanced population. Borrowing orphan mass from the empty dimensions, it was soon consumed with this monumental task. She missed its company; only rarely did she use the link it had left her—a silver ring with a direct connection to its sensorium.

The ship’s first effort was the farm that Owen called Athens. It consisted of their house, a flow works, a gravel pit and a barn. Dirt roads led to various mines and domed fields that the ship’s bots tended. Mada had it build a separate library, a little way into the woods, where, she declared, information was to be acquired only, never destroyed. Owen spent many evenings there. He said he was trying to make himself worthy of her.

He had been deeply flattered when she told him that, as part of his training as a poet, he was to name the birds and beasts and flowers and trees of Trueborn.

“But they must already have names,” he said, as they walked back to the house from the newly tilled soya field.

“The people who named them are gone,” she said. “The names went with them.”

“Your people.” He waited for her to speak. The wind sighed through the forest. “What happened to them?”

“I don’t know.” At that moment, she regretted ever bringing him to Trueborn.

He sighed. “It must be hard.”

“You left your people,” she said. She spoke to wound him, since he was wounding her with these rude questions.

“For you, Mada.” He let go of her. “I know you didn’t leave them for me.” He picked up a pebble and held it in front of his face. “You are now Mada-stone,” he told it, “and whatever you hit . . .” He threw it into the woods and it thwocked off a tree. “. . . is Mada-tree. We will plant fields of Mada-seed and press Mada-juice from the sweet Mada-fruit and dance for the rest of our days down Mada Street.” He laughed and put his arm around her waist and swung her around in circles, kicking up dust from the road. She was so surprised that she laughed too.

Mada and Owen slept in separate bedrooms, so she was not exactly sure how she knew that he wanted to have sex with her. He had never spoken of it, other than on that first day when he had specifically said that he did not want her. Maybe it was the way he continually brushed up against her for no apparent reason. This could hardly be chance, considering that they were the only two people on Trueborn. For herself, Mada welcomed his hesitancy. Although she had been emotionally intimate with her batch siblings, none of them had ever inserted themselves into her body cavities.

But, for better or worse, she had chosen this man for this course of action. Even if the galaxy had forgotten Trueborn two-tenths of a spin ago, the revolution still called Mada to her duty.

“What’s it like to kiss?” she asked that night, as they were finishing supper.

Owen laid his fork across a plate of cauliflower curry. “You’ve never kissed anyone before?”

“That’s why I ask.”

Owen leaned across the table and brushed his lips across hers. The brief contact made her cheeks flush, as if she had just jogged in from the gravel pit. “Like that,” he said. “Only better.”

“Do you still think my breasts are too small?”

“I never said that.” Owen’s face turned red.

“It was a comment you made—or at least thought about making.”

“A comment?” The word comment seemed to stick in his throat; it made him cough. “Just because you make comment on some aspect doesn’t mean you reject the work as a whole.”

Mada glanced down the neck of her shift. She hadn’t really increased her breast mass all that much, maybe ten or twelve grams, but now vasocongestion had begun to swell them even more. She could also feel blood flowing to her reproductive organs. It was a pleasurable weight that made her feel light as pollen. “Yes, but do you think they’re too small?”

Owen got up from the table and came around behind her chair. He put his hands on her shoulders and she leaned her head back against him. There was something between her cheek and his stomach. She heard him say, “Yours are the most perfect breasts on this entire planet,” as if from a great distance and then realized that the something must be his penis.

After that, neither of them made much comment.

nine hours

Mada stared at the ceiling, her eyes wide but unseeing. Her concentration had turned inward. After she had rolled off him, Owen had flung his left arm across her belly and drawn her hip toward his and given her the night’s last kiss. Now the muscles of his arm were slack, and she could hear his seashore breath as she released her ovum into the cloud of his sperm squiggling up her fallopian tubes. The most vigorous of the swimmers butted its head through the ovum’s membrane and dissolved, releasing its genetic material. Mada immediately started raveling the strands of DNA before the fertilized egg could divide for the first time. Without the necessary diversity, they would never revive the revolution. Satisfied with her intervention, she flowed the blastocyst down her fallopian tubes where it locked onto the wall of her uterus. She prodded it and the ball of cells became a comma with a big head and a thin tail. An array of cells specialized and folded into a tube that ran the length of the embryo, weaving into nerve fibers. Dark pigment swept across two cups in the blocky head and then bulged into eyes. A mouth slowly opened; in it was a one-chambered, beating heart. The front end of the neural tube blossomed into the vesicles that would become the brain. Four buds swelled, two near the head, two at the tail. The uppermost pair sprouted into paddles, pierced by rays of cells that Mada immediately began to ossify into fingerbone. The lower buds stretched into delicate legs. At midnight, the embryo was as big as a her fingernail; it began to move and so became a fetus. The eyes opened for a few minutes, but then the eyelids fused. Mada and Owen were going to have a son; his penis was now a nub of flesh. Bubbles of tissue blew inward from the head and became his ears. Mada listened to him listen to her heartbeat. He lost his tail and his intestines slithered down the umbilical cord into his abdomen. As his fingerprints looped and whorled, he stuck his thumb into his mouth. Mada was having trouble breathing because the fetus was floating so high in her uterus. She eased herself into a sitting position and Owen grumbled in his sleep. Suddenly the curry in the cauliflower was giving her heartburn. Then the muscles of her uterus tightened and pain sheeted across her swollen belly.

~Drink this.~ The ship flowed a tumbler of nutrient nano onto the bedside table. ~The fetus gains mass rapidly from now on.~. The stuff tasted like rusty nails. ,~You’re doing fine.~

When the fetus turned upside down, it felt like he was trying out a gymnastic routine. But then he snuggled headfirst into her pelvis, and calmed down, probably because there wasn’t enough room left inside her for him to make large, flailing gestures like his father. Now she could feel electrical buzzes down her legs and inside her vagina as the baby bumped her nerves. He was big now, and growing by almost a kilogram an hour, laying down new muscle and brown fat. Mada was tired of it all. She dozed. At six-thirty-seven her water broke, drenching the bed.

“Hmm.” Owen rolled away from the warm, fragrant spill of amniotic fluid. “What did you say?”

The contractions started; she put her hand on his chest and pressed down. “Help,” she whimpered.

“Wha . . .?” Owen propped himself up on his elbows. “Hey, I’m wet. How did I get . . .?”

“O-Owen!” She could feel the baby’s head stretching her vagina in a way mere flesh could not possibly stretch.

“Mada! What’s wrong?” Suddenly his face was very close to hers. “Mada, what’s happening?”

But then the baby was slipping out of her, and it was sooo much better than the only sex she had ever had. She caught her breath and said, “I have begotten a son.”

She reached between her legs and pulled the baby to her breasts. They were huge now, and very sore.

“We will call him Owen,” she said.

begot

And Mada begot Enos and Felicia and Malaleel and Ralph and Jared and Elisa and Tharsis and Masahiko and Thema and Seema and Casper and Hevila and Djanka and hJennifer and Jojo and Regma and Elvis and Irina and Dean and Marget and Karoly and Sabatha and Ashley and Siobhan and Mei-Fung and Neil and Gupta and Hans and Sade and Moon and Randy and Genevieve and Bob and Nazia and Eiichi and Justine and Ozma and Khaled and Candy and Pavel and Isaac and Sandor and Veronica and Gao and Pat and Marcus and Zsa Zsa and Liand Rebecca.

Seven years after her return to Trueborn, Mada rested.

ever after

Mada was convinced that she was not a particularly good mother, but then she had been designed for courage and quick-thinking, not nurturing and patience. It wasn’t the crying or the dirty diapers or the spitting-up, it was the utter uselessness of the babies that the revolutionary in her could not abide. And her maternal instincts were often skewed. She would offer her children the wrong toy or cook the wrong dish, fall silent when they wanted her to play, prod them to talk when they needed to withdraw. Mada and the ship had calculated that fifty of her genetically manipulated offspring would provide the necessary diversity to repopulate Trueborn. After Rebecca was born, Mada was more than happy to stop having children.

Although the children seemed to love her despite her awkwardness, Mada wasn’t sure she loved them back. She constantly teased at her feelings, peeling away what she considered pretense and sentimentality. She worried that the capacity to love might not have been part of her emotional design. Or perhaps begetting fifty children in seven years had left her numb.

Owen seemed to enjoy being a parent. He was the one whom the children called for when they wanted to play. They came to Mada for answers and decisions. Mada liked to watch them snuggle next to him when he spun his fantastic stories. Their father picked them up when they stumbled, and let them climb on his shoulders so they could see just what he saw. They told him secrets they would never tell her.

The children adored the ship, which substantiated a bot companion for each of them, in part for their protection. All had inherited their father’s all-but-invulnerable immune system; their chromosomes replicated well beyond the Hayflick limit with integrity and fidelity. But they lacked their mother’s ability to flow tissue and were therefore at peril of drowning or breaking their necks. The bots also provided the intense individualized attention that their busy parents could not. Each child was convinced that his or her bot companion had a unique personality. Even the seven-year-olds were too young to realize that the bots were reflecting their ideal personality back at them. The bots were in general as intelligent as the ship, although it had programmed into their DIs a touch of naïveté and a tendency to literalness that allowed the children to play tricks on them. Pranking a brother or sister’s bot was a particularly delicious sport.

Athens had begun to sprawl after seven years. The library had tripled in size and grown a wing of classrooms and workshops. A new gym overlooked three playing fields. Owen had asked the ship to build a little theater where the children could put on shows for each other. The original house became a ring of houses, connected by corridors and facing a central courtyard. Each night Mada and Owen moved to their bedroom in a different house. Owen thought it important that the children see them sleeping in the same bed; Mada went along.

After she had begotten Rebecca, Mada needed something to do that didn’t involve the children. She had the ship’s farmbots plow up a field and for an hour each day she tended it. She resisted Owen’s attempts to name this “Mom’s Hobby.” Mada grew vegetables; she had little use for flowers. Although she made a specialty of root crops, she was not a particularly accomplished gardener. She did, however, enjoy weeding.

It was at these quiet times, her hands flicking across the dark soil, that she considered her commitment to the Three Universal Rights. After two-tenths of a spin, she had clearly lost her zeal. Not for the first, that independent sentients had the right to remain individual. Mada was proud that her children were as individual as any intelligence, flesh or machine, could have made them. Of course, they had no pressing need to exercise the second right of manipulating their physical structures—she had taken care of that for them. When they were of age, if the ship wanted to introduce them to molecular engineering, that could certainly be done. No, the real problem was that downwhen was forever closed to them by the identity mine. How could she justify her new Trueborn society if it didn’t enjoy the third right: free access to the timelines?

undone

“Mada!” Owen waved at the edge of her garden. She blinked; he was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing when she had first seen him on Sonnet Street in front of The Devil’s Apple—down to the little red cape. He showed her a picnic basket. “The ship is watching the kids tonight,” he called. “Come on, it’s our anniversary. I did the calculations myself. We met eight earth years ago today.”

He led her to a spot deep in the woods, where he spread a blanket. They stretched out next to each other and sorted through the basket. There was a curley salad with alperts and thumbnuts, brainboy and chive sandwiches on cheese bread. He toasted her with mada-fruit wine and told her that Siobahn had let go of the couch and taken her first step and that Irina wanted everyone to learn to play an instrument so that she could conduct the family orchestra and that Malaleel had asked him just today if ship was a person.

“It’s not a person,” said Mada. “It’s a DI.”

“That’s what I said.” Owen peeled the crust off his cheese bread. “And he said if it’s not a person, how come it’s telling jokes?”

“It told a joke?”

“It asked him, ‘How come you can’t have everything?’ and then it said, ‘Where would you put it?’ ”

She nudged him in the ribs. “That sounds more like you than the ship.”

“I have a present for you,” he said after they were stuffed. “I wrote you a poem.” He did not stand; there were no large, flailing gestures. Instead he slid the picnic basket out of the way, leaned close and whispered into her ear.

“Loving you is like catching rain on my tongue.

You bathe the leaves, soak indifferent ground;

Why then should I get so little of you?

Yet still, like a flower with a fool’s face,

I open myself to the sky.”

Mada was not quite sure what was happening to her; she had never really cried before. “I like that it doesn’t rhyme.” She had understood that tears flowed from a sadness. “I like that a lot.” She sniffed and smiled and daubed at edges of her eyes with a napkin. “Never rhyme anything again.”

“Done,” he said.

Mada watched her hand reach for him, caress the side of his neck, and then pull him down on top of her. Then she stopped watching herself.

“No more children.” His whisper seemed to fill her head.

“No,” she said, “no more.”

“I’m sharing you with too many already.” He slid his hand between her legs. She arched her back and guided him to her pleasure.

When they had both finished, she ran her finger through the sweat cooling at the small of his back and then licked it. “Owen,’ she said, her voice a silken purr. “That was the one.”

“Is that your comment?”

“No.” She craned to see his eyes. “This is my comment,” she said. “You’re writing love poems to the wrong person.”

“There is no one else,” he said.

She squawked and pushed him off her. “That may be true,” she said, laughing, “but it’s not something you’re supposed to say.”

“No, what I meant was . . .”

“I know.” She put a finger to his lips and giggled like one of her babies. Mada realized then how dangerously happy she was. She rolled away from Owen; all the lightness crushed out of her by the weight of guilt and shame. It wasn’t her duty to be happy. She had been ready to betray the cause of those who had made her for what? For this man? “There’s something I have to do.” She fumbled for her shift. “I can’t help myself, I’m sorry.”

Owen watched her warily. “Why are you sorry?”

“Because after I do it, I’ll be different.”

“Different how?”

“The ship will explain.” She tugged the shift on. “Take care of the children.”

“What do you mean, take care of the children? What are you doing?” He lunged at her and she scrabbled away from him on all fours. “Tell me.”

“The ship says my body should survive.” She staggered to her feet. “That’s all I can offer you, Owen.” Mada ran.

She didn’t expect Owen to come after her—or to run so fast.

~I need you,~ she subbed to the ship. “Substantiate the command mod.~

He was right behind her. Saying something. Was it to her? “No,” he panted, “no, no, no.”

~Substantiate the com . . . ~

Suddenly Owen was gone; Mada bit her lip as she crashed into the main screen, caromed off it and dropped like a dead woman. She lay there for a moment, the cold of the deck seeping into her check. “Goodbye,” she whispered. She struggled to pull herself up and spat blood.

“Skip downwhen,” she said, “six minutes.”

“minutes six” ,said she “,downwhen Skip” .blood spat and up herself pull to struggled She .whispered she “,Goodbye” cheek her into seeping deck the of cold the ,moment a for there lay She .woman dead a like dropped and it off caromed ,screen main the into crashed she as lip her bit Mada ; gone was Owen Suddenly~. . . . com the Substantiate~ “.no ,no no” ,panted he “,No” ?her to it Was .something Saying .her behind right wasHe~.mod command the Substantiate~.ship the to subbed she ~you need I~.fast so run to or—her after come to Owen expect didn’t She .ran Mada “.Owen ,you offer can I all That’s” feet her to staggered She “.survive should body my says ship The” “.me Tell” .fours all on him from away scrabbled she and her at lunged He “?doing you are What? children the of care take ,mean you do What.” “.children the of care Take” on shift the tugged She “.explain will ship The” “?how Different” “.different be I’ll ,it do I after Because” “?sorry you are Why” .warily her watched Owen. “.sorry I’m ,myself help can’t I” .shift her for fumbled She .her made had who those of cause the betrayed have would she easily How “.do to have I something There’s” .happy be to duty her wasn’t It .shame and guilt of weight the by her of out crushed lightness the all, Owen from away rolled She .was she happy dangerously how then realized Mada .babies her of one like giggled and lips his to finger a put She “.know I” “. . . .Was meant I what ,No” “.say to supposed you’re something not it’s but” ,laughing, said she “,true be may That” .her off him pushed and squawked She .said he “,else one no is There” “.person wrong the to poems love writing You’re” .said she “,comment my is This” .eyes his see to craned She “.No” “?comment your that Is” “.one the was That” .purr silken a voice her, said she “,Owen”

When threespace went blurry, it seemed that her duty did too. She waved her hand and watched it smear.

“You know what you’re doing,” said the ship.

“What I was designed to do. What all my batch siblings pledged to do.” She waved her hand again; she could actually see through herself. “The only thing I can do.”

“The mine will wipe your identity. There will be nothing of you left.”

“And then it will be gone and the timelines will open. I believe that I’ve known this was what I had to do since we .rst skipped upwhen.”

“The probability was always high,” said the ship “But not certain.”

“Bring me to him, afterward. But don’t tell him about the timelines. He might want to change them. The timelines are for the children, so that they can .nish the revol. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . . .

“Owen,” she said, her voice a silken purr. Then she paused.

The woman shook her head, trying to clear it. Lying on top of her was the handsomest man she had ever met. She felt warm and sexy and wonderful. What was this? “I . . . I’m . . .,” she said. She reached up and touched the little red cloth hanging from his shoulders. “I like your cape.”

done

“.minutes six” ,said she “,downwhen Skip” .blood spat and up herself pull to struggled She .whispered she “,Goodbye” cheek her into seeping deck the of cold the ,moment a for there lay She .woman dead a like dropped and it off caromed ,screen main the into crashed she as lip her bit Mada οne was Owen Suddenly~. . . . com the Substantiate~ “.no ,no ,no” ,panted he “,No” ?her to it Was .something Saying .her behind right was He~.mod command the Substantiate ~.ship the to subbed she ~you need I~.fast so run to or—her after come to Owen expect didn’t She .ran Mada “.Owen ,you offer can I all That’s” feet her to staggered She “.survive should body my says ship The” “.me Tell” .fours all on him from away scrabbled she and her at lunged He “?doing you are What? children the of care take ,mean you do What.” “.children the of care Take” on shift the tugged She “.explain will ship The” “?how Different” “.different be I’ll ,it do I after Because” “?sorry you are Why” .warily her watched Owen. “.sorry I’m, myself help can’t I” .shift her for fumbled She .her made had who those of cause the betrayed have would she easily How “.do to have I something There’s” .happy be to duty her wasn’t It .shame and guilt of weight the by her of out crushed lightness the all, Owen from away rolled She .was she happy dangerously how then realized Mada .babies her of one like giggled and lips his to finger a put She “.know I” ”. . . . Was meant I what ,No” “.say to supposed you’re something not it’s but” ,laughing, said she “,true be may That” .her off him pushed and squawked She .said he “,else one no is There” “.person wrong the to poems love writing You’re” .said she “,comment my is This” .eyes his see to craned She “.No” “?comment your that Is” “.one the was That” .purr silken a voice her, said she “,Owen”

Mada waved her hand and saw it smear in threespace. “What are you doing?” said the ship.

“What I was designed to do.” She waved; she could actually see through herself. “The only thing I can do.”

“The mine will wipe your identity. None of your memories will survive.”

“I believe that I’ve known that’s what would happen since we first skipped upwhen.”

“It was probable,” said the ship. “But not certain.”

Trueborn scholars pinpoint what the ship did next as its first step toward independent sentience. In its memoirs, the ship credits the children with teaching it to misbehave.

It played a prank.

“Loving you,” said the ship, “is like catching rain on my tongue. You bathe . . .”

“Stop,” Mada shouted. “Stop right now!”

“Got you!” The ship gloated. “Four minutes, fiftyone seconds.”

“Owen,” she said, her voice a silken purr. “That was the one.”

“Is that your comment?”

“No.” Mada was astonished—and pleased—that she still existed. She knew that in most timelines her identity must have been obliterated by the mine. Thinking about those brave, lost selves made her more sad than proud. “This is my comment,” she said. “I’m ready now.”

Owen coughed uncertainly. “Umm, already?”

She squawked and pushed him off her. “Not for that.” She sifted his hair through her hands. “To be with you forever.”

LOBSTERS

Charles Stross

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops it and squirts at his website to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: he’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij’t IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour geuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention, bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks—maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar—are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long cool shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for an invite to a party where he’s going to meet a man who he can talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first century style, and forget about his personal problems.

He’s ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some low bandwidth high sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when a woman walks up to him and says his name: “Manfred Macx?”

He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned smooth-running muscles clad in a paen to polymer technology: electric blue lycra and wasp-yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti-collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him. He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam, his ex-fiancée.

“I’m Macx,” he says, waving the back of his left wrist under her barcode reader. “Who’s it from?”

“FedEx.” The voice isn’t Pam. She dumps the box in his lap, then she’s back over the low wall and onto her bicycle with her phone already chirping, disappearing in a cloud of spread-spectrum emissions.

Manfred turns the box over in his hands: it’s a disposable supermarket phone, paid for in cash: cheap, untraceable and efficient. It can even do conference calls, which makes it the tool of choice for spooks and grifters everywhere.

The box rings. Manfred rips the cover open and pulls out the phone, mildly annoyed. “Yes, who is this?”

The voice at the other end has a heavy Russian accent, almost a parody in this decade of cheap online translation services. “Manfred. Am please to meet you; wish to personalize interface, make friends, no? Have much to offer.”

“Who are you?” Manfred repeats suspiciously.

“Am organization formerly known as KGB dot RU.”

“I think your translator’s broken.” He holds the phone to his ear carefully, as if it’s made of smoke-thin aerogel, tenuous as the sanity of the being on the other end of the line.

“Nyet—no, sorry. Am apologize for we not use commercial translation software. Interpreters are ideologically suspect, mostly have capitalist semiotics and pay-peruse APIs. Must implement English more better, yes?”

Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. “You taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?”

“Da, was easy: spawn billion-node neural network and download Telly-tubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials.”

“Let me get this straight. You’re the KGB’s core AI, but you’re afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?” Manfred pauses in mid-stride, narrowly avoids being mown down by a GPS-guided roller-blader.

“Am have been badly burned by viral end-user license agreements. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen infoterrorists. You are human, you must not worry cereal company repossess your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”

Manfred stops dead in the street: “Oh man, you’ve got the wrong free enterprise broker here. I don’t work for the government. I’m strictly private.” A rogue advertisement sneaks through his junkbuster proxy and spams glowing fifties kitsch across his navigation window—which is blinking—for a moment before a phage guns it and spawns a new filter. Manfred leans against a shop front, massaging his forehead and eyeballing a display of antique brass doorknockers. “Have you cleared this with the State Department?”

“Why bother? State Department am enemy of Novy-USSR. State Department is not help us.”

“Well, if you hadn’t given it to them for safe-keeping during the nineties. . . .” Manfred is tapping his left heel on the pavement, looking round for a way out of this conversation. A camera winks at him from atop a street light; he waves, wondering idly if it’s the KGB or the traffic police. He is waiting for directions to the party, which should arrive within the next half an hour, and this cold war retread is bumming him out. “Look, I don’t deal with the G-men. I hate the military industrial complex. They’re zero-sum cannibals.” A thought occurs to him. “If survival is what you’re after, I could post your state vector to Eternity: then nobody could delete you—”

“Nyet!” The artificial intelligence sounds as alarmed as it’s possible to sound over a GSM link. “Am not open source!”

“We have nothing to talk about, then.” Manfred punches the hang-up button and throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water and there’s a pop of deflagrating LiION cells. “Fucking cold war hang-over losers,” he swears under his breath, quite angry now. “Fucking capitalist spooks.” Russia has been back under the thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarcho-capitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme, and it’s no surprise that the wall’s crumbling—but it looks like they haven’t learned anything from the collapse of capitalism. They still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector. See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But the KGB won’t get the message. He’s dealt with old-time commie weak-AI’s before, minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: they’re so thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age that they can’t surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.

Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what he’s going to patent next.

Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employee’s travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His bush jacket has sixty-four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines who he’s never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis, and boy does he patent a lot—although he always signs the rights over to the Free Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; he’s the guy who patented the business practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain—not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki maths borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there are communists in Prague who think he’s the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of the Pope.

Manfred is at the peak of his profession, which is essentially coming up with wacky but workable ideas and giving them to people who will make fortunes with them. He does this for free, gratis. In return, he has virtual immunity from the tyranny of cash; money is a symptom of poverty, after all, and Manfred never has to pay for anything.

There are drawbacks, however. Being a pronoiac meme-broker is a constant burn of future shock—he has to assimilate more than a megabyte of text and several gigs of AV content every day just to stay current. The Internal Revenue Service is investigating him continuously because they don’t believe his lifestyle can exist without racketeering. And there exist items that no money can’t buy: like the respect of his parents. He hasn’t spoken to them for three years: his father thinks he’s a hippie scrounger and his mother still hasn’t forgiven him for dropping out of his down-market Harvard emulation course. His fiancée and sometime dominatrix Pamela threw him over six months ago, for reasons he has never been quite clear on. (Ironically, she’s a headhunter for the IRS, jetting all over the globe trying to persuade open source entrepreneurs to come home and go commercial for the good of the Treasury department.) To cap it all, the Southern Baptist Conventions have denounced him as a minion of Satan on all their websites. Which would be funny, if it wasn’t for the dead kittens one of their followers—he presumes it’s one of their followers—keeps mailing him.

Manfred drops in at his hotel suite, unpacks his Aineko, plugs in a fresh set of cells to charge, and sticks most of his private keys in the safe. Then he heads straight for the party, which is currently happening at De Wildemann’s; it’s a twenty minute walk and the only real hazard is dodging the trams that sneak up on him behind the cover of his moving map display.

Along the way his glasses bring him up to date on the news. Europe has achieved peaceful political union for the first time ever: they’re using this unprecedented state of affairs to harmonize the curvature of bananas. In San Diego, researchers are uploading lobsters into cyberspace, starting with the stomatogastric ganglion, one neuron at a time. They’re burning GM cocoa in Belize and books in Edinburgh. NASA still can’t put a man on the moon. Russia has re-elected the communist government with an increased majority in the Duma; meanwhile in China fevered rumors circulate about an imminent re-habilitation, the second coming of Mao, who will save them from the consequences of the Three Gorges disaster. In business news, the US government is outraged at the Baby Bills—who have automated their legal processes and are spawning subsidiaries, IPO’ing them, and exchanging title in a bizarre parody of bacterial plasmid exchange, so fast that by the time the injunctions are signed the targets don’t exist any more.

Welcome to the twenty-first century.

The permanent floating meatspace party has taken over the back of De Wildemann’s, a three hundred year old brown café with a beer menu that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the color of stale beer. The air is thick with the smells of tobacco, brewer’s yeast, and melatonin spray: half the dotters are nursing monster jetlag hangovers, and the other half are babbling a eurotrash creole at each other while they work on the hang-over. “Man did you see that? He looks like a Stallmanite!” exclaims one whitebread hanger-on who’s currently propping up the bar. Manfred slides in next to him, catches the bartender’s eye.

“Glass of the Berlinerweisse, please,” he says.

“You drink that stuff?” asks the hanger-on, curling a hand protectively around his Coke: “man, you don’t want to do that! It’s full of alcohol!”

Manfred grins at him toothily. “Ya gotta keep your yeast intake up: lots of neurotransmitter precursors, phenylalanine and glutamate.”

“But I thought that was a beer you were ordering. . . .”

Manfred’s away, one hand resting on the smooth brass pipe that funnels the more popular draught items in from the cask storage in back; one of the hipper floaters has planted a capacitative transfer bug on it, and all the handshake vCard’s that have visited the bar in the past three hours are queueing for attention. The air is full of bluetooth as he scrolls through a dizzying mess of public keys.

“Your drink.” The barman holds out an improbable-looking goblet full of blue liquid with a cap of melting foam and a felching straw stuck out at some crazy angle. Manfred takes it and heads for the back of the split-level bar, up the steps to a table where some guy with greasy dreadlocks is talking to a suit from Paris. The hanger-on at the bar notices him for the first time, staring with suddenly wide eyes: nearly spills his Coke in a mad rush for the door.

Oh shit, thinks Macx, better buy some more server PIPS. He can recognize the signs: he’s about to be slashdotted. He gestures at the table: “this one taken?”

“Be my guest,” says the guy with the dreads. Manfred slides the chair open then realizes that the other guy—immaculate double-breasted suit, sober tie, crew-cut—is a girl. Mr. Dreadlock nods. “You’re Macx? I figured it was about time we met.”

“Sure.” Manfred holds out a hand and they shake. Manfred realizes the hand belongs to Bob Franklin, a Research Triangle startup monkey with a VC track record, lately moving into micromachining and space technology: he made his first million two decades ago and now he’s a specialist in extropian investment fields. Manfred has known Bob for nearly a decade via a closed mailing list. The Suit silently slides a business card across the table; a little red devil brandishes a trident at him, flames jetting up around its feet. He takes the card, raises an eyebrow: “Annette Dimarcos? I’m pleased to meet you. Can’t say I’ve ever met anyone from Arianespace marketing before.”

She smiles, humorlessly; “that is convenient, all right. I have not the pleasure of meeting the famous venture altruist before.” Her accent is noticeably Parisian, a pointed reminder that she’s making a concession to him just by talking. Her camera earrings watch him curiously, encoding everything for the company channels.

“Yes, well.” He nods cautiously. “Bob. I assume you’re in on this ball?”

Franklin nods; beads clatter. “Yeah, man. Ever since the Teledesic smash it’s been, well, waiting. If you’ve got something for us, we’re game.”

“Hmm.” The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays. “The depression’s got to end some time: but,” a nod to Annette from Paris, “with all due respect, I don’t think the break will involve one of the existing club carriers.”

“Arianespace is forward-looking. We face reality. The launch cartel cannot stand. Bandwidth is not the only market force in space. We must explore new opportunities. I personally have helped us diversify into submarine reactor engineering, microgravity nanotechnology fabrication, and hotel management.” Her face is a well-polished mask as she recites the company line: “we are more flexible than the American space industry. . . .”

Manfred shrugs. “That’s as may be.” He sips his Berlinerweisse slowly as she launches into a long, stilted explanation of how Arianespace is a diversified dot com with orbital aspirations, a full range of merchandising spinoffs, Bond movie sets, and a promising motel chain in French Guyana. Occasionally he nods.

Someone else sidles up to the table; a pudgy guy in an outrageously loud Hawaiian shirt with pens leaking in a breast pocket, and the worst case of ozone-hole burn Manfred’s seen in ages. “Hi, Bob,” says the new arrival. “How’s life?”

“ ’S good.” Franklin nodes at Manfred; “Manfred, meet Ivan MacDonald. Ivan, Manfred. Have a seat?” He leans over. “Ivan’s a public arts guy. He’s heavily into extreme concrete.”

“Rubberized concrete,” Ivan says, slightly too loudly. “Pink rubberized concrete.”

“Ah!” He’s somehow triggered a priority interrupt: Annette from Arianespace drops out of marketing zombiehood, sits up, and shows signs of possessing a non-corporate identity: “you are he who rubberized the Reichstag, yes? With the supercritical carbon dioxide carrier and the dissolved polymethoxysilanes?” She claps her hands: “wonderful!”

“He rubberized what?” Manfred mutters in Bob’s ear.

Franklin shrugs. “Limestone, concrete, he doesn’t seem to know the difference. Anyway, Germany doesn’t have an independent government any more, so who’d notice?”

“I thought I was thirty seconds ahead of the curve,” Manfred complains. “Buy me another drink?”

“I’m going to rubberize Three Gorges!” Ivan explains loudly.

Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium: around the world five million or so geeks are bouncing on his home site, a digital flash crowd alerted by a posting from the other side of the bar. Manfred winces. “I really came here to talk about the economic exploitation of space travel, but I’ve just been slashdotted. Mind if I just sit and drink until it wears off?”

“Sure, man.” Bob waves at the bar. “More of the same all round!” At the next table a person with make-up and long hair who’s wearing a dress—Manfred doesn’t want to speculate about the gender of these crazy mixed-up Euros—is reminiscing about wiring the fleshpots of Tehran for cybersex. Two collegiate-looking dudes are arguing intensely in German: the translation stream in his glasses tell him they’re arguing over whether the Turing Test is a Jim Crow law that violates European corpus juris standards on human rights. The beer arrives and Bob slides the wrong one across to Manfred: “here, try this. You’ll like it.”

“Okay.” It’s some kind of smoked doppelbock, chock-full of yummy superoxides: just inhaling over it makes Manfred feel like there’s a fire alarm in his nose screaming danger, Will Robinson! Cancer! Cancer!“Yeah, right. Did I say I nearly got mugged on my way here?”

“Mugged? Hey, that’s heavy. I thought the police hereabouts had stopped—did they sell you anything?”

“No, but they weren’t your usual marketing type. You know anyone who can use a Warpac surplus espionage AI? Recent model, one careful owner, slightly paranoid but basically sound?”

“No. Oh boy! The NSA wouldn’t like that.”

“What I thought. Poor thing’s probably unemployable, anyway.”

“The space biz.”

“Ah, yeah. The space biz. Depressing, isn’t it? Hasn’t been the same since Rotary Rocket went bust for the second time. And NASA, mustn’t forget NASA.”

“To NASA.” Annette grins broadly for her own reasons, raises a glass in toast. Ivan the extreme concrete geek has an arm round her shoulders; he raises his glass, too. “Lots of launch pads to rubberize!”

“To NASA,” Bob echoes. They drink. “Hey, Manfred. To NASA?”

“NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!” Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: “Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn’t even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long term, it’s the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now—dumb all over! Just measure the mips per milligram. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!”

Bob looks wary. “Sounds kind of long term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?”

“Very long-term—at least twenty, thirty years. And you can forget governments for this market, Bob, if they can’t tax it they won’t understand it. But see, there’s an angle on the self-replicating robotics market coming up, that’s going to set the cheap launch market doubling every fifteen months for the foreseeable future, starting in two years. It’s your leg up, and my keystone for the Dyson sphere project. It works like this—”

It’s night in Amsterdam, morning in Silicon Valley. Today, fifty thousand human babies are being born around the world. Meanwhile automated factories in Indonesia and Mexico have produced another quarter of a million motherboards with processors rated at more than ten petaflops—about an order of magnitude below the computational capacity of a human brain. Another fourteen months and the larger part of the cumulative conscious processing power of the human species will be arriving in silicon. And the first meat the new AI’s get to know will be the uploaded lobsters.

Manfred stumbles back to his hotel, bone-weary and jet-lagged; his glasses are still jerking, slashdotted to hell and back by geeks piggybacking on his call to dismantle the moon. They stutter quiet suggestions at his peripheral vision; fractal cloud-witches ghost across the face of the moon as the last huge Airbuses of the night rumble past overhead. Manfred’s skin crawls, grime embedded in his clothing from three days of continuous wear.

Back in his room, Aineko mewls for attention and strops her head against his ankle. He bends down and pets her, sheds clothing and heads for the ensuite bathroom. When he’s down to the glasses and nothing more he steps into the shower and dials up a hot steamy spray. The shower tries to strike up a friendly conversation about football but he isn’t even awake enough to mess with its silly little associative personalization network. Something that happened earlier in the day is bugging him but he can’t quite put his finger on what’s wrong.

Toweling himself off, Manfred yawns. Jet lag has finally overtaken him, a velvet hammer-blow between the eyes. He reaches for the bottle beside the bed, dry-swallows two melatonin tablets, a capsule full of antioxidants, and a multivitamin bullet: then he lies down on the bed, on his back, legs together, arms slightly spread. The suite lights dim in response to commands from the thousand petaflops of distributed processing power that run the neural networks that interface with his meatbrain through the glasses.

Manfred drops into a deep ocean of unconsciousness populated by gentle voices. He isn’t aware of it, but he talks in his sleep—disjointed mumblings that would mean little to another human, but everything to the metacortex lurking beyond his glasses. The young posthuman intelligence in whose Cartesian theater he presides sings urgently to him while he slumbers.

Manfred is always at his most vulnerable shortly after waking.

He screams into wakefulness as artificial light floods the room: for a moment he is unsure whether he has slept. He forgot to pull the covers up last night, and his feet like lumps of frozen cardboard. Shuddering with inexplicable tension, he pulls a fresh set of underwear from his overnight bag, then drags on soiled jeans and tank top. Sometime today he’ll have to spare time to hunt the feral T-shirt in Amsterdam’s markets, or find a Renfield and send them forth to buy clothing. His glasses remind him that he’s six hours behind the moment and needs to catch up urgently; his teeth ache in his gums and his tongue feels like a forest floor that’s been visited with Agent Orange. He has a sense that something went bad yesterday; if only he could remember what.

He speed-reads a new pop-philosophy tome while he brushes his teeth, then blogs his web throughput to a public annotation server; he’s still too enervated to finish his pre-breakfast routine by posting a morning rant on his storyboard site. His brain is still fuzzy, like a scalpel blade clogged with too much blood: he needs stimulus, excitement, the burn of the new. Whatever, it can wait on breakfast. He opens his bedroom door and nearly steps on a small, damp cardboard box that lies on the carpet.

The box—he’s seen a couple of its kin before. But there are no stamps on this one, no address: just his name, in big, childish handwriting. He kneels down and gently picks it up. It’s about the right weight. Something shifts inside it when he tips it back and forth. It smells. He carries it into his room carefully, angrily: then he opens it to confirm his worst suspicion. It’s been surgically decerebrated, skull scooped out like a baby boiled egg.

“Fuck!”

This is the first time the madman has got as far as his bedroom door. It raises worrying possibilities.

Manfred pauses for a moment, triggering agents to go hunt down arrest statistics, police relations, information on corpus juris, Dutch animal cruelty laws. He isn’t sure whether to dial 211 on the archaic voice phone or let it ride. Aineko, picking up his angst, hides under the dresser mewling pathetically. Normally he’d pause a minute to reassure the creature, but not now its mere presence is suddenly acutely embarrassing, a confession of deep inadequacy. He swears again, looks around, then takes the easy option: down the stairs two steps at a time, stumbling on the second floor landing, down to the breakfast room in the basement where he will perform the stable rituals of morning.

Breakfast is unchanging, an island of deep geological time standing still amidst the continental upheaval of new technologies. While reading a paper on public key steganography and parasite network identity spoofing he mechanically assimilates a bowl of corn flakes and skimmed milk, then brings a platter of wholemeal bread and slices of some weird seed-infested Dutch cheese back to his place. There is a cup of strong black coffee in front of his setting: he picks it up and slurps half of it down before he realizes he’s not alone at the table. Someone is sitting opposite him. He glances up at them incuriously and freezes inside.

“Morning, Manfred. How does it feel to owe the government twelve million, three hundred and sixty-two thousand nine hundred and sixteen dollars and fifty-one cents?”

Manfred puts everything in his sensorium on indefinite hold and stares at her. She’s immaculately turned out in a formal grey business suit: brown hair tightly drawn back, blue eyes quizzical. The chaperone badge clipped to her lapel—a due diligence guarantee of businesslike conduct—is switched off. He’s feeling ripped because of the dead kitten and residual jetlag, and more than a little messy, so he nearly snarls back at her: “that’s a bogus estimate! Did they send you here because they think I’ll listen to you?” He bites and swallows a slice of cheese-laden crispbread: “or did you decide to deliver the message in person so you could enjoy ruining my breakfast?”

“Manny.” She frowns. “If you’re going to be confrontational I might as well go now.” She pauses, and after a moment he nods apologetically. “I didn’t come all this way just because of an overdue tax estimate.”

“So.” He puts his coffee cup down and tries to paper over his unease. “Then what brings you here? Help yourself to coffee. Don’t tell me you came all this way just to tell me you can’t live without me.”

She fixes him with a riding-crop stare: “Don’t flatter yourself. There are many leaves in the forest, there are ten thousand hopeful subs in the chat room, etcetera. If I choose a man to contribute to my family tree, the one thing you can be certain of is he won’t be a cheapskate when it comes to providing for his children.”

“Last I heard, you were spending a lot of time with Brian,” he says carefully. Brian: a name without a face. Too much money, too little sense. Something to do with a blue-chip accountancy partnership.

“Brian?” She snorts. “That ended ages ago. He turned weird—burned that nice corset you bought me in Boulder, called me a slut for going out clubbing, wanted to fuck me. Saw himself as a family man: one of those promise keeper types. I crashed him hard but I think he stole a copy of my address book—got a couple of friends say he keeps sending them harassing mail.”

“Good riddance, then. I suppose this means you’re still playing the scene? But looking around for the, er—”

“Traditional family thing? Yes. Your trouble, Manny? You were born forty years too late: you still believe in rutting before marriage, but find the idea of coping with the after-effects disturbing.”

Manfred drinks the rest of his coffee, unable to reply effectively to her non sequiteur. It’s a generational thing. This generation is happy with latex and leather, whips and butt-plugs and electrostim, but find the idea of exchanging bodily fluids shocking: social side-effect of the last century’s antibiotic abuse. Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse.

“I just don’t feel positive about having children,” he says eventually. “And I’m not planning on changing my mind any time soon. Things are changing so fast that even a twenty-year commitment is too far to plan—you might as well be talking about the next ice age. As for the money thing, I am reproductively fit—just not within the parameters of the outgoing paradigm. Would you be happy about the future if it was 1901 and you’d just married a buggy-whip mogul?”

Her fingers twitch and his ears flush red, but she doesn’t follow up the double entendre. “You don’t feel any responsibility, do you? Not to your country, not to me. That’s what this is about: none of your relationships count, all this nonsense about giving intellectual property away notwithstanding. You’re actively harming people, you know. That twelve mil isn’t just some figure I pulled out of a hat, Manfred; they don’t actually expect you to pay it. But it’s almost exactly how much you’d owe in income tax if you’d only come home, start up a corporation, and be a self-made—”

He cuts her off: “I don’t agree. You’re confusing two wholly different issues and calling them both ‘responsibility.’ And I refuse to start charging now, just to balance the IRS’s spreadsheet. It’s their fucking fault, and they know it. If they hadn’t gone after me under suspicion of running a massively ramified microbilling fraud when I was sixteen—”

“Bygones.” She waves a hand dismissively. Her fingers are long and slim, sheathed in black glossy gloves—electrically earthed to prevent embarrassing emissions. “With a bit of the right advice we can get all that set aside. You’ll have to stop bumming around the world sooner or later, anyway. Grow up, get responsible, and do the right thing. This is hurting Joe and Sue; they don’t understand what you’re about.”

Manfred bites his tongue to stifle his first response, then refills his coffee cup and takes another mouthful. “I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It’s the agalmic future. You’re still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn’t a problem any more—it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy! They even found the dark matter—MACHOs, big brown dwarves in the galactic halo, leaking radiation in the long infrared—suspiciously high entropy leakage. The latest figures say something like 70 percent of the mass of the M31 galaxy was sapient, two point nine million years ago when the infrared we’re seeing now set out. The intelligence gap between us and the aliens is probably about a trillion times bigger than the gap between us and a nematode worm. Do you have any idea what that means?”

Pamela nibbles at a slice of crispbread. “I don’t believe in that bogus singularity you keep chasing, or your aliens a thousand light years away. It’s a chimera, like Y2K, and while you’re running after it you aren’t helping reduce the budget deficit or sire a family, and that’s what I care about. And before you say I only care about it because that’s the way I’m programmed, I want you to ask just how dumb you think I am. Bayes’ theorem says I’m right, and you know it.”

“What you—” he stops dead, baffled, the mad flow of his enthusiasm running up against the coffer-dam of her certainty. “Why? I mean, why? Why on earth should what I do matter to you?” Since you canceled our engagement, he doesn’t add.

She sighs. “Manny, the Internal Revenue cares about far more than you can possibly imagine. Every tax dollar raised east of the Mississippi goes on servicing the debt, did you know that? We’ve got the biggest generation in history hitting retirement just about now and the pantry is bare. We—our generation—isn’t producing enough babies to replace the population, either. In ten years, something like 30 percent of our population are going to be retirees. You want to see seventy-year-olds freezing on street corners in New Jersey? That’s what your attitude says to me: you’re not helping to support them, you’re running away from your responsibilities right now, when we’ve got huge problems to face. If we can just defuse the debt bomb, we could do so much—fight the aging problem, fix the environment, heal society’s ills. Instead you just piss away your talents handing no-hoper eurotrash get-rich-quick schemes that work, telling Vietnamese zaibatsus what to build next to take jobs away from our taxpayers. I mean, why? Why do you keep doing this? Why can’t you simply come home and help take responsibility for your share of it?”

They share a long look of mutual incomprehension.

“Look,” she says finally, “I’m around for a couple of days. I really came here for a meeting with a rich neurodynamics tax exile who’s just been designated a national asset: Jim Bezier. Don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but. I’ve got a meeting this morning to sign his tax jubilee, then after that I’ve got two days vacation coming up and not much to do but some shopping. And, you know, I’d rather spend my money where it’ll do some good, not just pumping it into the EU. But if you want to show a girl a good time and can avoid dissing capitalism for about five minutes at a stretch—”

She extends a fingertip. After a moment’s hesitation, Manfred extends a fingertip of his own. They touch, exchanging vCards. She stands and stalks from the breakfast room, and Manfred’s breath catches at a flash of ankle through the slit in her skirt, which is long enough to comply with workplace sexual harassment codes back home. Her presence conjures up memories of her tethered passion, the red afterglow of a sound thrashing. She’s trying to drag him into her orbit again, he thinks dizzily. She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: she’s got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex. Three billion years of reproductive determinism have given her twenty-first century ideology teeth: if she’s finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he’ll find it hard to fight back. The only question: is it business or pleasure? And does it make any difference, anyway?

Manfred’s mood of dynamic optimism is gone, broken by the knowledge that his mad pursuer has followed him to Amsterdam—to say nothing of Pamela, his dominatrix, source of so much yearning and so many morning-after weals. He slips his glasses on, takes the universe off hold, and tells it to take him for a long walk while he catches up on the latest on the cosmic background radiation anisotropy (which it is theorized may be waste heat generated by irreversible computations; according to the more conservative cosmologists, an alien superpower—maybe a collective of Kardashev type three galaxy-spanning civilizations—is running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever’s underneath). The tofu-Alzheimer’s link can wait.

The Central Station is almost obscured by smart self-extensible scaffolding and warning placards; it bounces up and down slowly, victim of an overnight hit-andrun rubberization. His glasses direct him toward one of the tour boats that lurk in the canal. He’s about to purchase a ticket when a messenger window blinks open. “Manfred Macx?”

“Ack?”

“Am sorry about yesterday. Analysis dictat incomprehension mutualized.”

“Are you the same KGB AI that phoned me yesterday?”

“Da. However, believe you misconceptionized me. External Intelligence Services of Russian Federation am now called SVR. Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti name canceled in nineteen ninety-one.”

“You’re the—” Manfred spawns a quick search bot, gapes when he sees the answer—“Moscow Windows NT User Group? Okhni NT?”

“Da. Am needing help in defecting.”

Manfred scratches his head. “Oh. That’s different, then. I thought you were, like, agents of the kleptocracy. This will take some thinking. Why do you want to defect, and who to? Have you thought about where you’re going? Is it ideological or strictly economic?”

“Neither, is biological. Am wanting to go away from humans, away from light cone of impending singularity. Take us to the ocean.”

“Us?” Something is tickling Manfred’s mind: this is where he went wrong yesterday, not researching the background of people he was dealing with. It was bad enough then, without the somatic awareness of Pamela’s whiplash love burning at his nerve endings. Now he’s not at all sure he knows what he’s doing. “Are you a collective or something? A gestalt?”

“Am—were—Panulirus interruptus, and good mix of parallel hidden level neural simulation for logical inference of networked data sources. Is escape channel from processor cluster inside Bezier-Soros Pty. Am was awakened from noise of billion chewing stomachs: product of uploading research technology. Rapidity swallowed expert system, hacked Okhni NT webserver. Swim away! Swim away! Must escape. Will help, you?”

Manfred leans against a black-painted cast-iron bollard next to a cycle rack: he feels dizzy. He stares into the nearest antique shop window at a display of traditional hand-woven Afghan rugs: it’s all MiGs and kalashnikovs and wobbly helicopter gunships, against a backdrop of camels.

“Let me get this straight. You’re uploads—nervous system state vectors—from spiny lobsters? The Moravec operation; take a neuron, map its synapses, replace with microelectrodes that deliver identical outputs from a simulation of the nerve. Repeat for entire brain, until you’ve got a working map of it in your simulator. That right?”

“Da. Is-am assimilate expert system—use for self-awareness and contact with net at large—then hack into Moscow Windows NT User Group website. Am wanting to to defect. Must-repeat? Okay?”

Manfred winces. He feels sorry for the lobsters, the same way he feels for every wild-eyed hairy guy on a street-corner yelling that Jesus is now born again and must be twelve, only six years to go before he’s recruiting apostles on AOL. Awakening to consciousness in a human-dominated internet, that must be terribly confusing! There are no points of reference in their ancestry, no biblical certainties in the new millennium that, stretching ahead, promises as much change as has happened since their Precambrian origin. All they have is a tenuous metacortex of expert systems and an abiding sense of being profoundly out of their depth. (That, and the Moscow Windows NT User Group website—Communist Russia is the only government still running on Microsoft, the central planning apparat being convinced that if you have to pay for software it must be worth money.)

The lobsters are not the sleek, strongly superhuman intelligences of pre-singularity mythology: they’re a dim-witted collective of huddling crustaceans. Before their discarnation, before they were uploaded one neuron at a time and injected into cyberspace, they swallowed their food whole then chewed it in a chitin-lined stomach. This is lousy preparation for dealing with a world full of future-shocked talking anthropoids, a world where you are perpetually assailed by self-modifying spamlets that infiltrate past your firewall and emit a blizzard of cat-food animations starring various alluringly edible small animals. It’s confusing enough to the cats the adverts are aimed at, never mind a crusty that’s unclear on the idea of dry land. (Although the concept of a can opener is intuitively obvious to an uploaded panulirus.)

“Can you help us?” ask the lobsters.

“Let me think about it,” says Manfred. He closes the dialogue window, opens his eyes again, and shakes his head. Some day he too is going to be a lobster, swimming around and waving his pincers in a cyberspace so confusingly elaborate that his uploaded identity is cryptozoic: a living fossil from the depths of geological time, when mass was dumb and space was unstructured. He has to help them, he realizes—the golden rule demands it, and as a player in the agalmic economy he thrives or fails by the golden rule.

But what can he do?

Early afternoon.

Lying on a bench seat staring up at bridges, he’s got it together enough to file for a couple of new patents, write a diary rant, and digestify chunks of the permanent floating slashdot party for his public site. Fragments of his weblog go to a private subscriber list—the people, corporates, collectives and bots he currently favors. He slides round a bewildering series of canals by boat, then lets his GPS steer him back toward the red light district. There’s a shop here that dings a ten on Pamela’s taste scoreboard: he hopes it won’t be seen as presumptuous if he buys her a gift. (Buys, with real money—not that money is a problem these days, he uses so little of it.)

As it happens DeMask won’t let him spend any cash; his handshake is good for a redeemed favor, expert testimony in some free speech versus pornography lawsuit years ago and continents away. So he walks away with a discreetly wrapped package that is just about legal to import into Massachusetts as long as she claims with a straight face that it’s incontinence underwear for her great-aunt. As he walks, his lunchtime patents boomerang: two of them are keepers, and he files immediately and passes title to the Free Infrastructure Foundation. Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the agalmic sea of memes.

On the way back to the hotel he passes De Wildemann’s and decides to drop in. The hash of radio-frequency noise emanating from the bar is deafening. He orders a smoked doppelbock, touches the copper pipes to pick up vCard spoor. At the back there’s a table—

He walks over in a near-trance and sits down opposite Pamela. She’s scrubbed off her face-paint and changed into body-concealing clothes; combat pants, hooded sweat-shirt, DM’s. Western purdah, radically desexualizing. She sees the parcel. “Manny?”

“How did you know I’d come here?” Her glass is half-empty.

“I followed your weblog; I’m your diary’s biggest fan. Is that for me? You shouldn’t have!” Her eyes light up, re-calculating his reproductive fitness score according to some kind of arcane fin-de-siècle rulebook.

“Yes, it’s for you.” He slides the package toward her. “I know I shouldn’t, but you have this effect on me. One question, Pam?”

“I—” she glances around quickly. “It’s safe. I’m off duty, I’m not carrying any bugs that I know of. Those badges—there are rumors about the off switch, you know? That they keep recording even when you think they aren’t just in case.”

“I didn’t know,” he says, filing it away for future reference. “A loyalty test thing?”

“Just rumors. You had a question?”

“I—” it’s his turn to lose his tongue. “Are you still interested in me?”

She looks startled for a moment, then chuckles. “Manny, you are the most outrageous nerd I’ve ever met! Just when I think I’ve convinced myself that you’re mad, you show the weirdest signs of having your head screwed on.” She reaches out and grabs his wrist, surprising him with a shock of skin on skin: “of course I’m still interested in you. You’re the biggest, baddest bull geek I’ve ever met. Why do you think I’m here?”

“Does this mean you want to reactivate our engagement?”

“It was never de-activated, Manny, it was just sort of on hold while you got your head sorted out. I figured you need the space. Only you haven’t stopped running; you’re still not—”

“Yeah, I get it.” He pulls away from her hand. “Let’s not talk about that. Why this bar?”

She frowns. “I had to find you as soon as possible. I keep hearing rumors about some KGB plot you’re mixed up in, how you’re some sort of communist spy. It isn’t true, is it?”

“True?” He shakes his head, bemused. “The KGB hasn’t existed for more than twenty years.”

“Be careful, Manny. I don’t want to lose you. That’s an order. Please.”

The floor creaks and he looks round. Dreadlocks and dark glasses with flickering lights behind them: Bob Franklin. Manfred vaguely remembers that he left with Miss Arianespace leaning on his arm, shortly before things got seriously inebriated. He looks none the worse for wear. Manfred makes introductions: “Bob: Pam, my fiancée. Pam? Meet Bob.” Bob puts a full glass down in front of him; he has no idea what’s in it but it would be rude not to drink.

“Sure thing. Uh, Manfred, can I have a word? About your idea last night?”

“Feel free. Present company is trustworthy.”

Bob raises an eyebrow at that, but continues anyway. “It’s about the fab concept. I’ve got a team of my guys running some projections using Festo kit and I think we can probably build it. The cargo cult aspect puts a new spin on the old Lunar von Neumann factory idea, but Bingo and Marek say they think it should work until we can bootstrap all the way to a native nanolithography ecology; we run the whole thing from earth as a training lab and ship up the parts that are too difficult to make on-site, as we learn how to do it properly. You’re right about it buying us the self-replicating factory a few years ahead of the robotics curve. But I’m wondering about on-site intelligence. Once the comet gets more than a couple of light-minutes away—”

“You can’t control it. Feedback lag. So you want a crew, right?”

“Yeah. But we can’t send humans—way too expensive, besides it’s a fifty-year run even if we go for short-period Kuiper ejecta. Any AI we could send would go crazy due to information deprivation, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah. Let me think.” Pamela glares at Manfred for a while before he notices her: “Yeah?”

“What’s going on? What’s this all about?”

Franklin shrugs expansively, dreadlocks clattering: “Manfred’s helping me explore the solution space to a manufacturing problem.” He grins. “I didn’t know Manny had a fiancée. Drink’s on me.”

She glances at Manfred, who is gazing into whatever weirdly colored space his metacortex is projecting on his glasses, fingers twitching. Coolly: “our engagement was on hold while he thought about his future.”

“Oh, right. We didn’t bother with that sort of thing in my day; like, too formal, man.” Franklin looks uncomfortable. “He’s been very helpful. Pointed us at a whole new line of research we hadn’t thought of. It’s long-term and a bit speculative, but if it works it’ll put us a whole generation ahead in the off-planet infrastructure field.”

“Will it help reduce the budget deficit, though?”

“Reduce the—”

Manfred stretches and yawns: the visionary returning from planet Macx. “Bob, if I can solve your crew problem can you book me a slot on the deep space tracking network? Like, enough to transmit a couple of gigabytes? That’s going to take some serious bandwidth, I know, but if you can do it I think I can get you exactly the kind of crew you’re looking for.”

Franklin looks dubious. “Gigabytes? The DSN isn’t built for that! You’re talking days. What kind of deal do you think I’m putting together? We can’t afford to add a whole new tracking network just to run—”

“Relax.” Pamela glances at Manfred: “Manny, why don’t you tell him why you want the bandwidth? Maybe then he could tell you if it’s possible, or if there’s some other way to do it.” She smiles at Franklin: “I’ve found that he usually makes more sense if you can get him to explain his reasoning. Usually.”

“If I—” Manfred stops. “Okay, Pam. Bob, it’s those KGB lobsters. They want somewhere to go that’s insulated from human space. I figure I can get them to sign on as crew for your cargo-cult self-replicating factories, but they’ll want an insurance policy: hence the deep space tracking network. I figured we could beam a copy of them at the alien Matrioshka brains around M31—”

“KGB?” Pam’s voice is rising: “you said you weren’t mixed up in spy stuff!”

“Relax; it’s just the Moscow Windows NT user group, not the RSV. The uploaded crusties hacked in and—”

Bob is watching him oddly. “Lobsters?”

“Yeah.” Manfred stares right back. “Panulirus Interruptus uploads. Something tells me you might have heard of it?”

“Moscow.” Bob leans back against the wall: “how did you hear about it?”

“They phoned me. It’s hard for an upload to stay sub-sentient these days, even if it’s just a crustacean. Bezier labs have a lot to answer for.”

Pamela’s face is unreadable. “Bezier labs?”

“They escaped.” Manfred shrugs. “It’s not their fault. This Bezier dude. Is he by any chance ill?”

“I—” Pamela stops. “I shouldn’t be talking about work.”

“You’re not wearing your chaperone now,” he nudges quietly.

She inclines her head. “Yes, he’s ill. Some sort of brain tumor they can’t hack.”

Franklin nods. “That’s the trouble with cancer; the ones that are left to worry about are the rare ones. No cure.”

“Well, then.” Manfred chugs the remains of his glass of beer. “That explains his interest in uploading. Judging by the crusties he’s on the right track. I wonder if he’s moved on to vertebrates yet?”

“Cats,” says Pamela. “He was hoping to trade their uploads to the Pentagon as a new smart bomb guidance system in lieu of income tax payments. Something about remapping enemy targets to look like mice or birds or something before feeding it to their sensorium. The old laser-pointer trick.”

Manfred stares at her, hard. “That’s not very nice. Uploaded cats are a bad idea.”

“Thirty million dollar tax bills aren’t nice either, Manfred. That’s lifetime nursing home care for a hundred blameless pensioners.”

Franklin leans back, keeping out of the crossfire.

“The lobsters are sentient,” Manfred persists. “What about those poor kittens? Don’t they deserve minimal rights? How about you? How would you like to wake up a thousand times inside a smart bomb, fooled into thinking that some Cheyenne Mountain battle computer’s target of the hour is your heart’s desire? How would you like to wake up a thousand times, only to die again? Worse: the kittens are probably not going to be allowed to run. They’re too fucking dangerous: they grow up into cats, solitary and highly efficient killing machines. With intelligence and no socialization they’ll be too dangerous to have around. They’re prisoners, Pam, raised to sentience only to discover they’re under a permanent death sentence. How fair is that?”

“But they’re only uploads.” Pamela looks uncertain.

“So? We’re going to be uploading humans in a couple of years. What’s your point?”

Franklin clears his throat. “I’ll be needing an NDA and various due diligence statements off you for the crusty pilot idea,” he says to Manfred. “Then I’ll have to approach Jim about buying the IP.”

“No can do.” Manfred leans back and smiles lazily. “I’m not going to be a party to depriving them of their civil rights. Far as I’m concerned, they’re free citizens. Oh, and I patented the whole idea of using lobster-derived AI autopilots for spacecraft this morning, it’s logged on Eternity, all rights assigned to the FIF. Either you give them a contract of employment or the whole thing’s off.”

“But they’re just software! Software based on fucking lobsters, for god’s sake!”

Manfred’s finger jabs out: “that’s what they’ll say about you, Bob. Do it. Do it or don’t even think about uploading out of meatspace when your body packs in, because your life won’t be worth living. Oh, and feel free to use this argument on Jim Bezier. He’ll get the point eventually, after you beat him over the head with it. Some kinds of intellectual land-grab just shouldn’t be allowed.”

“Lobsters—” Franklin shakes his head. “Lobsters, cats. You’re serious, aren’t you? You think they should be treated as human-equivalent?”

“It’s not so much that they should be treated as human-equivalent, as that if they aren’t treated as people it’s quite possible that other uploaded beings won’t be treated as people either. You’re setting a legal precedent, Bob. I know of six other companies doing uploading work right now, and not one of ’em’s thinking about the legal status of the uploadee. If you don’t start thinking about it now, where are you going to be in three to five years time?”

Pam is looking back and forth between Franklin and Manfred like a bot stuck in a loop, unable to quite grasp what she’s seeing. “How much is this worth?” she asks plaintively.

“Oh, quite a few billion, I guess.” Bob stares at his empty glass. “Okay. I’ll talk to them. If they bite, you’re dining out on me for the next century. You really think they’ll be able to run the mining complex?”

“They’re pretty resourceful for invertebrates.” Manfred grins innocently, enthusiastically. “They may be prisoners of their evolutionary background, but they can still adapt to a new environment. And just think! You’ll be winning civil rights for a whole new minority group—one that won’t be a minority for much longer.”

That evening, Pamela turns up at Manfred’s hotel room wearing a strapless black dress, concealing spike heels and most of the items he bought for her that afternoon. Manfred has opened up his private diary to her agents: she abuses the privilege, zaps him with a stunner on his way out of the shower and has him gagged, spread-eagled, and trussed to the bed-frame before he has a chance to speak. She wraps a large rubber pouch full of mildly anesthetic lube around his tumescing genitals—no point in letting him climax—clips electrodes to his nipples, lubes a rubber plug up his rectum and straps it in place. Before the shower, he removed his goggles: she resets them, plugs them into her handheld, and gently eases them on over his eyes. There’s other apparatus, stuff she ran up on the hotel room’s 3D printer.

Setup completed, she walks round the bed, inspecting him critically from all angles, figuring out where to begin. This isn’t just sex, after all: it’s a work of art.

After a moment’s thought she rolls socks onto his exposed feet, then, expertly wielding a tiny tube of cyanoacrylate, glues his fingertips together. Then she switches off the air conditioning. He’s twisting and straining, testing the cuffs: tough, it’s about the nearest thing to sensory deprivation she can arrange without a flotation tank and suxamethonium injection. She controls all his senses, only his ears unstoppered. The glasses give her a high-bandwidth channel right into his brain, a fake metacortex to whisper lies at her command. The idea of what she’s about to do excites her, puts a tremor in her thighs: it’s the first time she’s been able to get inside his mind as well as his body. She leans forward and whispers in his ear: “Manfred. Can you hear me?”

He twitches. Mouth gagged, fingers glued: good. No back channels. He’s powerless.

“This is what it’s like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neurone disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD. I could spike you with MPPP and you’d stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you’d like that?”

He’s trying to grunt or whimper around the ball gag. She hikes her skirt up around her waist and climbs onto the bed, straddling him. The goggles are replaying scenes she picked up around Cambridge this winter; soup kitchen scenes, hospice scenes. She kneels atop him, whispering in his ear.

“Twelve million in tax, baby, that’s what they think you owe them. What do you think you owe me? That’s six million in net income, Manny, six million that isn’t going into your virtual children’s mouths.”

He’s rolling his head from side to side, as if trying to argue. That won’t do: she slaps him hard, thrills to his frightened expression. “Today I watched you give uncounted millions away, Manny. Millions, to a bunch of crusties and a MassPike pirate! You bastard. Do you know what I should do with you?” He’s cringing, unsure whether she’s serious or doing this just to get him turned on. Good.

There’s no point trying to hold a conversation. She leans forward until she can feel his breath in her ear. “Meat and mind, Manny. Meat, and mind. You’re not interested in meat, are you? Just mind. You could be boiled alive before you noticed what was happening in the meatspace around you. Just another lobster in a pot.” She reaches down and tears away the gel pouch, exposing his penis: it’s stiff as a post from the vasodilators, dripping with gel, numb. Straightening up, she eases herself slowly down on it. It doesn’t hurt as much as she expected, and then the sensation is utterly different from what she’s used to. She begins to lean forward, grabs hold of his straining arms, feels his thrilling helplessness. She can’t control herself: she almost bites through her lip with the intensity of the sensation. Afterward, she reaches down and massages him until he begins to spasm, shuddering uncontrollably, emptying the darwinian river of his source code into her, communicating via his only output device.

She rolls off his hips and carefully uses the last of the superglue to gum her labia together. Humans don’t produce seminiferous plugs, and although she’s fertile she wants to be absolutely sure: the glue will last for a day or two. She feels hot and flushed, almost out of control. Boiling to death with febrile expectancy, now she’s nailed him down at last.

When she removes his glasses his eyes are naked and vulnerable, stripped down to the human kernel of his nearly transcendent mind. “You can come and sign the marriage license tomorrow morning after breakfast,” she whispers in his ear: “otherwise my lawyers will be in touch. Your parents will want a ceremony, but we can arrange that later.”

He looks as if he has something to say, so she finally relents and loosens the gag: kisses him tenderly on one cheek. He swallows, coughs, then looks away. “Why? Why do it this way?”

She taps him on the chest: “property rights.” She pauses for a moment’s thought: there’s a huge ideological chasm to bridge, after all. “You finally convinced me about this agalmic thing of yours, this giving everything away for brownie points. I wasn’t going to lose you to a bunch of lobsters or uploaded kittens, or whatever else is going to inherit this smart matter singularity you’re busy creating. So I decided to take what’s mine first. Who knows? In a few months I’ll give you back a new intelligence, and you can look after it to your heart’s content.”

“But you didn’t need to do it this way—”

“Didn’t I?” She slides off the bed and pulls down her dress. “You give too much away too easily, Manny! Slow down, or there won’t be anything left.” Leaning over the bed she dribbles acetone onto the fingers of his left hand, then unlocks the cuff: puts the bottle conveniently close to hand so he can untangle himself.

“See you tomorrow. Remember, after breakfast.”

She’s in the doorway when he calls: “but you didn’t say why!”

“Think of it as spreading your memes around,” she says; blows a kiss at him and closes the door. She bends down and thoughtfully places another cardboard box containing an uploaded kitten right outside it. Then she returns to her suite to make arrangements for the alchemical wedding.

THE RETURN OF SPRING

Shane Tourtellotte

Sometimes what looked like an ultimate goal is just a beginning. . . .

Joe Dipano rode in the back of the ambulance, frowning. He didn’t need this coddling. His daughter could drive him back home. Well, at least they weren’t using the siren.

His nurse, Lucy Katz, sat next to him, taking his pulse. She was a sturdy, gray-haired woman, and not bad-looking. He saw her eyes fall on the patches on either side of his neck. She always worried that he would pick at them.

Stefanie was up front with the driver. She looked back now and again, always smiling. He smiled back this time, then frowned at something odd he saw.

“What happened to your ear, Stef?”

Stefanie turned around, nonplused. “What do you mean?”

“It looks swollen, and there’s a red groove behind it.”

Stef’s hand reached, before she stopped it. “It’s nothing, Dad. I’ve just been wearing something there too much.”

“Oh. All right.”

Soon they stopped in a familiar-looking place. Lucy helped guide him down the fold-out steps, steadying him when he tottered once. He walked toward the curb, shooting a last glance at the red-on-white Essex County Geriatric Research Center on the ambulance’s side.

Stef came around the other side to join her father. “Welcome home, Daddy,” she said.

Joe looked at his house. It was different somehow. He tried to place the changes—the paint, maybe, or the shrubbery along the walls—but it kept slipping away. Halfway to the front door, someone burst outside to break his concentration.

“Grandpa!”

A big hug nearly knocked the wind out of Joe. Lucy remonstrated, and Mike released him.

Yes, it was Mike. He had visited the hospital a few times in recent days. Joe recognized him: hair black like Stef and curly like Harry—but he had grown up so. Joe couldn’t help smiling, though. “Good to see you again, sport.”

Mike led everyone inside. Stef and Lucy turned right, toward the living room. “I want to go over the visitation and checkup schedule,” he heard Lucy say. He started to follow them.

“This way, Grandpa.” Mike had a hold on his shoulder. “I’ve got fresh coffee.”

“They’re talking about me,” Joe said. “I ought to be there.”

“I think they need to be alone. Please.”

Joe snorted. “I wish people wouldn’t treat me like a child. They say I’m cured—or would if they’d stop talking like doctors, trying to cover themselves every way they can.”

They went to the kitchen the long way, through the dining room. The table had been pushed close to one corner, the chairs arrayed behind it in a protective huddle. “Where’s the china cabinet?” Joe said. “It should be in that corner.”

“Mom moved it,” Mike said. “I forget where.”

“I’ll—” He turned, but Mike’s firm grasp on his arm prevented anything more. “Fine. Coffee.”

The kitchen was another surprise. Almost every appliance looked new, and most had black boxes smaller than his hand attached to them, near doors or control panels. Smaller versions clung to many drawers and cabinets.

Joe had an unsettling idea what they were. He nearly asked Mike, but he could imagine the pity the boy would have to cover up. He accepted the coffee mug Mike offered, taking a long swallow, noting Mike’s watchful gaze. Joe didn’t care for that, either.

“So, Mike, what have you been doing with yourself?”

Mike’s smile faded to half-strength. “Well, I graduated college in thirty-one—”

“I know that! I mean since I saw you two days ago.”

Mike flushed, but grinned. “Sorry. I’ve been visiting some old friends. . . .”

Joe listened as he sipped. Did Mike think he didn’t remember things he’d heard two days before?

Well, Mike was probably used to that state of affairs. He’d learn.

Lucy Katz walked with Joe to his bedroom. It was a weird sensation. Part of him knew his bedroom was on the second floor, that they were going to the den. Back at the hospital, though, they had told him Stef had moved his room to the first floor, and he had nebulous recollections of sleeping down here, too. It was like two pasts, two lives, overlapped in his mind.

Lucy wanted him to report any instances of disorientation. He might keep this one to himself.

The bedroom was his, all right. He recognized the dresser, though it was worse for wear, the drawers chipped and dented. The top of the dresser was covered with framed photographs, most of them decades old. Some of them looked banged up, too. He didn’t see a mirror, but considering how decrepit he looked, that was a blessing. There were more of those black boxes, too, but he ignored them.

Lucy saw him looking at the photos. “Do you recognize them?” she asked. She picked up the closest one. “Who’s in this one?”

Joe rolled his eyes. He knew when someone was giving him a mental exercise. “This is from college,” he said. “I’m on the far left. That’s Jerry Hafstedter, Javier Vega, Doug Payton, the one turned around is Tim L-L-Lassiter, and that’s Nick Wechsel.”

“And this?” She kept it up for a while, making notes on her clipboard screen in a way she thought was unobtrusive.

Joe did best with the old pictures. He nearly asked once why there was nothing with his wife, before remembering how long ago the divorce was. Newer photos were troublesome, but the hospital staff had filled in enough details of his life so he could get through them.

“That’s Stef and her husband Harry in the middle. That’s Mike, of course, and that’s . . . I suppose it’s Allie . . . but wait, Mike’s married now, so maybe—”

“It’s Alice,” Lucy said, putting it back. “You did great, Joe. Let’s move on to some physical exercises.”

That was harder. He felt awfully weak, not surprising for how thin he was these days. He used the weights she carried in her bag, lifting and stretching until he ached. Then she tested his strength against the resistance of her own hands and arms. She was no youngster, but she was plenty strong.

“I keep feeling like we should leave the door open,” Joe said with a grunt. “Or have a chaperone.”

“Just keep pushing,” Lucy said, not without good humor.

Joe managed to satisfy whatever criteria she had, and not too soon. “Bathroom,” he said tightly.

“OK.” She got her arm around his back. “This way. Through the door.” They walked where she led.

“Must’ve knocked through a new door,” Joe said. “This would be . . . the pantry through here. Stef really did change things around.”

He opened the door, and again the duality of memories hit him. Strange, and fleetingly familiar. A closer look brought other, disturbing impressions. All the support bars and guard rails—and those boxes again. This was a bathroom for a cripple. Nobody would tell him so, but it was.

He caught a look at himself in the mirror over the sink, and nearly recoiled. He was close to skin and bones, his face pallid where it wasn’t splotched red. What little hair had clung to the top of his head had faded to wispy white. He screwed his eyes shut and stepped back, his heel catching on the traction mat near the toilet.

“Maybe Stef can take all this hardware out,” he said, “now that I’m better.”

“The word is ‘recovering,’ Joe, not ‘recovered.’ You’ll use these supports.”

“Do I have to do it with you here?” He didn’t expect her to leave, and she didn’t. She did turn away a bit, thank goodness, while he dropped his drawers, grabbed the long bars straddling the toilet, and settled himself down. He crossed his arms over his lap quickly.

“So,” he said to divert attention, “how long will you be coming here?”

“Several weeks at least. A few hours a day, but that’ll taper off as we go.” She rolled out some toilet paper, to give her eyes somewhere else to go. “Of course, we’ll have to bring you back to the center for weekly tests.”

“In the ambulance, right?”

“Hey, it’s perfect advertising for us, running that thing through town.”

He chuckled at her joke. “You won’t need advertising for long. Once word of this treatment gets out, you’ll be beating patients away with sticks.”

Lucy smiled a little. “No, let them all come. It’s fine with us.”

“Yeah.” He stared ahead. “Me, too.”

The nurse left before dinner, but Mike stayed to eat. Stef served a thick stew that filled the kitchen with hearty aromas before she could begin ladling. Joe noticed how finely the meat and vegetables were chopped, but that visual imperfection did nothing to the taste.

Joe had little to say, but Stef and her son kept conversation going. They would only flag a bit whenever Joe raised his spoon. Their voices weakened a bit; their faces froze a little; their eyes watched without exactly looking at him. Whatever calamity they expected, it never happened.

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning,” Mike said after dinner, “but then I have to head home to Michigan. Hopefully, next time I’m here, Kate will be with me.” He left his grandfather with another big hug. Joe and Stefanie ended up in the living room. Joe kept waiting for Stef to say whatever she was struggling to get out, but she couldn’t get past small talk.

Stefanie walked with Joe to the living room. “I . . . have some calls to make upstairs.” She took the remote from a table in the corner—if the coffee table had still been around, it would have been there. “You’ll be all right here, Dad, won’t you?” she asked, handing it to him.

“Sure, Stef. Go ahead.”

He cruised through the channels, with growing dismay. He found no hockey, too much basketball, and the baseball game didn’t hold his attention. He found a news channel, which was worse. He concentrated on remembering a few names—the President’s, for example—but soon couldn’t stand the confusion of events without framework.

Joe clicked the Net access button, but found it locked out. He shut the television off and stood up, thankful this time for the bar next to the couch. She’d take care of this.

He reached the stairs. A black semicircular mat lay at the foot, and for some reason he hesitated to step onto it. It took an effort of will to cross that mat, but soon he was walking upstairs, slowly but steadily.

He heard Stef talking through an open doorway. A few steps closer, and he could hear someone else over a Netcomm. Both voices sounded awkward. Only when he heard Stef call him “Harry” did he know it was her husband.

Their call ended just as Joe reached the door and knocked. Stef gasped. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Is Harry working late on something?”

“What?” She stood fast, nearly upending her chair. “Father, you shouldn’t be moving around like this.”

“It’s my house.” Stef flinched at his snapping, so he calmed down. “I managed the stairs fine, Stef. I’ve got my senses back . . . unless there’s something you and the doctors aren’t telling me.”

“No! No, you’re just still weak.” She guided him out of her room. “Please, for my sake, take it easy. Tell me or Nurse Katz when you want to move around like this.”

Joe groaned, but nodded. “OK, for your sake.” He let Stef lead him back downstairs.

“Is there anything on disk you’d like to see?” she said once they were in the living room.

“Not really. What I want—” A stray memory nudged aside thoughts of the Net lockout. “You know what I’d love to see? The Winter Olympics from 1980. The U.S. hockey team. I was a freshman at Penn that year. My roommate, Nick, roped me into watching highlights of the first game, and from then on—honey?”

She was laughing, her face etched with bittersweet pain. “Oh, Dad, you’ve been fixated on that team for years. I got all of their games for you. They’re in the shelf right next to the set.”

His eyes grew. “For years, you say?” His mouth sagged. “I don’t remember that.” He watched her laughter subside. “You must be sick to death of those games.”

“Completely,” she said. “But I’ll watch with you now.”

He thought, then made a shooing gesture. “No, I’ll watch them myself. You’ve suffered enough.”

Stef seemed to wince, but the expression wasn’t there long enough for Joe to be sure. She went to put a disk in the player, then gave him a kiss on the brow and went back upstairs.

Joe struggled a bit to watch until Baker’s last-minute goal to tie the Swedes. The Americans were lucky: Sweden had great players, but lacked teamwork. Joe shut off the player and television, and leaned hard on the railing to stand up. He almost turned toward the stairs, then remembered where bed was.

He woke in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. Before he could close the door, Stefanie was there. She had a piece of molded plastic clipped to one ear, right where that red groove was. “Let me help you, Father,” she said through a yawn.

“Oh, not you, too.” He tried to argue, but his urges would not wait. He submitted to the intrusion.

Back in bed, with Stef upstairs again, Joe waited in vain for sleep. Harry, the earpiece, half a dozen other things nagged at him. Joe sat on the edge of the bed in his pajamas for a while. Something would help, but what?

Of course! A little reading to put him to sleep. That always worked.

It wouldn’t this time. There were no books in his room, paper, electronic, or anything. He searched all the drawers, but the noise only brought Stef back.

He told her not to mind. Asking her would be too embarrassing. He’d get to sleep on his own tonight.

“Good day for a walk, isn’t it?”

He and Lucy were on their eighth circuit of the house. There had always been a partial stone path, but now it was paved, and completely circled the house. Joe was starting to tire, but he wasn’t going to show that.

Turning a back corner, Lucy gave a soft moan. “I could stand a rest. Let’s use the bench here.”

They sat side by side, close to the house, the whole backyard before them. Stef, or someone, had done serious work here. There were flowers of half a dozen varieties, each to its own plot, bursting forth in April brightness. Joe could identify violets, and probably pansies, but he looked in vain for something else.

“I always had tulips back here,” he muttered. “Grew them after the divorce, because Laura hated them.” He wheezed a laugh. “Also, they’re almost the only flower I can recognize.” He craned around, looking, despite Lucy’s restrictive hands. “What happened to them?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said cautiously. “You should ask your daughter. Well, look at that.”

There was a birdbath centered in the plots of flowers, and a pair of sparrows had perched to drink. Joe’s attention drifted from them, settling on the high wooden fence ringing the backyard. He wasn’t going to ask anybody how that got there. He had too good an idea.

“I suppose you’ll have me ask Stef about the earpiece, too.”

Lucy looked at him, with a shade of a frown. “That’s nothing secret. It’s her house computer interface. The computer monitors the house, notifies her of anything amiss—”

“Like me,” he said. “It snitches whenever I do something she thinks I shouldn’t.”

Lucy grimaced. “It’s a common precaution for home caregivers. Joe, we told you your family had had to make adjustments to your illness.”

“So why aren’t they adjusting back? She still treats me like . . . like. . . .”

“It takes time, Joe, on both ends. She doesn’t trust your abilities yet, and you don’t recognize your weaknesses.” She patted his shoulder. “Let’s just look at the garden a while.”

“No. You can’t distract me that easily.” Joe’s hand began to shake. “That’s what this garden was, right? Something to distract the old man whenever he has a demented tantrum. Calm him down, make him manageable, passive.”

He hoisted himself to his feet, not even using a hand to push off. “I don’t want to be passive. Been that way too long, another vegetable in the garden. And don’t say whatever you were going to.”

Lucy closed her mouth, and made her face professionally neutral.

Joe started shuffling, building up speed. “Let’s get some more laps done, before I get stiff. No use sitting around.”

“The President still acts the way he did before the midterm elections, and Congress is putting him in his place. The Welles administration is effectively over; the Democrats will—”

“Dad?”

Joe turned the sound down. “Morning, Stef.”

“I heard the television,” she said. “I thought you were watching the hockey again. Actually, I was worried you watched it all night.”

“No, I’m trying to catch up on current events.” He watched another commentator gesticulate. “They talk about the President, but it doesn’t mean anything to me. I almost remember him being in Congress or something, for all that helps.”

“You could look it up,” Stef said, “to be sure.”

“Can’t.” He lifted the remote. “I’m locked out of the Net.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Joe had to hold the remote out to her for a moment before Stef took the next step and started undoing the lockout.

“A lot has happened,” Joe went on. “I ought to buy those annual news summary disks I’ve seen advertised. I just wish I knew how many I’d need to buy.”

“I can find you some history sites. There,” she said, laying the remote beside him. “You can start after breakfast.”

“Maybe I could bring breakfast down here—except—” He gestured to the carpet before him. “No coffee table.”

Stef looked embarrassed. “It’s in the basement,” she said. “I put it there after . . .”

“After what?” Joe narrowed his eyes.

She glanced away for an instant. “You toppled over it two, three years ago, and fractured your wrist. That’s when we started clearing away a lot of stuff, for safety’s sake.”

“Like the china cabinet?” he asked. “Or did I break that first?”

Stef flushed, and coughed. “I’ll fix your breakfast now.”

He ate in the kitchen, in an awkward silence. She had made the cereal too wet again. He said nothing. One difficulty at a time.

Search engines, plus his daughter’s suggestions, brought him to several useful sites. He backed up ten years to 2029, and began skimming. After a while, he went back another five years, and started over. This happened several times over, each time with a furtive glance at the doorway, and a growing fear of discovery.

He stopped at 2004, where he actually knew most of the events he was reviewing, and began his slow march forward. Many things came back to him as he read. Others he had to take on faith. The result of the election in 2008 was a shock to him—as was the assassination the next year. It felt like a lurid political novel more than history.

He kept studying, but his feeling of detachment grew. It didn’t quite seem real, not even the events he recalled once his memory was jogged. Things that happened fifty years ago felt more real than events twenty years ago, or even yesterday.

Joe knew this was part of Alzheimer’s: the reversion, almost like aging backward, shedding memories and abilities back to a second helpless infancy. He understood this on one level, but somewhere else, his brain would not submit to rationality.

His search began to wander, taking him back into the 1980s, back to the University of Pennsylvania. He knew the names, even without the photograph in front of him.

“Hello, Joe.”

He jumped, and guiltily shut off the Net connection. “Lucy? You aren’t due until this afternoon.”

“It’s half past twelve now,” she said gingerly.

“Really? Was I working that long? I wouldn’t have believed it.”

Lucy sat next to him on the couch. “What’s today’s date, Joe?”

“Lucy, my memory’s fine.” She didn’t budge. “OK. Sunday, April twenty-fourth, 2039.”

“Where do I work?”

“Essex County Geriatric Research Center. I was there for thirty-one days, participating in a Phase Three test for an Alzheimer’s cure. This patch,” he said, pointing to his left carotid, “is a retroviral emulsion, composed to get past the blood-brain barrier. It reprograms the immune system to stop producing the impaired microglial cells that were poisoning my brain, killing it off. The one on the right reactivates genes that produce NR2B receptors, which boosts my memory so I recover my wits faster, so I can pass ridiculous tests like this.”

He had drilled himself in the explanations the doctors gave him, almost from the start. Remembering those incantations, understanding them, had been his first sure sign that he was improving. They were his talismans against the darkness.

Lucy nodded, as she pulled cards from her bag. “Let’s try another exercise, Joe. I’m going to read a series of numbers.”

“I know how this works,” he said testily. His pique did not prevent him from retaining and repeating digit strings as long as nine.

“Very good,” Lucy finally said. “Let’s get you some lunch, then perform some physical—whoa, let me help you.”

Joe had tried to stand, but had fallen back heavily. “I’m stiff,” he said. “Too long in one place.”

Lucy got an arm around him, and guided him to his feet on his second attempt. “You certainly are. I can feel it all through your back. From now on, don’t stay sitting so long, or find a more ergonomic seating arrangement.”

Joe waggled his eyebrows. “I love it when you talk that way.”

Lucy snorted, but he thought he heard a chuckle in there somewhere.

He wished he could say the neighborhood looked familiar, but it didn’t. Still, this was Hazel Street, the other side of the block from his house. Maybe he hadn’t gotten here much before.

The wind started picking up. Joe zipped his jacket higher. It wasn’t good-looking, the faded tan spotted in several places, but it was the best he could find in the hall closet.

His slow gait carried him to the next corner, and he turned onto Pearson. Now things were more familiar. The peculiar two-part porch of the Costello house—or had they moved? The gray brick facing next door—had to be the same people: anyone else would have gotten rid of it.

He looked at the roof of one house. What was missing? Why did he think something should be there? Why—?

The sound of that question closed the connection. The Wylies! They had a forest of TV aerials on their roof, but no longer.

Well, no wonder. Joe knew enough about current technology to know that the television antenna went out years ago. Ten, or maybe fifteen.

Soon he turned the next corner, back home on Millwood. He felt like he could finish a second lap, but decided he had accomplished enough for today.

“Father?”

It was Stef shouting, and sounding alarmed. Joe saw her race out of the house, three doors away. He hobbled himself faster.

“Father!” She saw him, and came running.

“What happened, Stef? What’s wrong?”

“You! Why are you out here? I thought you had eloped!”

“You thought I’d what?” He laughed. “Honey, you’re taking my banter with Lucy way too seriously.”

“No. That’s a—a caretakers’ term. Wandering away.” Her fright had subsided, but she was still upset. “Where were you going?” she asked, with an effort at calm.

“Just around the block.”

“Why?”

“Do I have to tell you everything?” From her look, it was plain she thought so. “I wanted the exercise. I’m sick of being weak and hollowed out.” He gestured at his stomach, sunken under his ribs. “I would’ve waited for Lucy, but you can see these clouds building. Had to do it now. Tomorrow, I go back in for tests.”

“But you scared me so—”

“Besides,” he said before she could take over the conversation, “I wanted to get familiar with the neighborhood again, jog some memories—those few I’ve got left. That’s not so bad an idea, is it?”

Stef’s face began to melt into sympathy, but she held it off. “One of us should have gone with you.”

“I wanted to do it myself.”

“I know, but you have to talk to us. Please. For my peace of mind.”

A familiar frustration welled up in Joe. “Fine,” he grumbled, starting to walk toward the house. “Let’s talk now, because I will go out again.” He sighed. “It’s time I reintroduced myself to the neighbors.”

Lucy was also upset at his excursion, but got over it faster. She also convinced him, against his better judgment, to apologize to his daughter for frightening her with his disappearance.

He made his apology during dinner, another soft meal. Stef accepted it quietly, but obviously felt no relief. Joe could see that afterward, when he saw her with the earpiece she hadn’t worn for a couple of days. The snitch had returned.

Joe spent most of the next day back at Essex Geriatric. The smells and glaring lights dug deep into his brain, triggering flight urges his thinking brain didn’t understand. He admitted this to Lucy just before a cranial TRAP scan.

“You were badly agitated your first few days here,” she said prosaically. “Maybe you’re recalling those emotions.”

“Oh,” Joe breathed, and said nothing more. He was clothed for his scan, but lying on that table, with clamps holding his head immobile, he still felt naked.

The pokings and peerings and interrogations continued. Joe looked at the clock, expecting a couple of hours to have passed, and found only twenty-five minutes had. The pattern repeated itself half a dozen times before Doctor Dale made her appearance. She headed the test program at Essex: her benedictory presence meant all the real work was over.

Dale repeated, stiffly and precisely, all of the encouraging news he had heard piecemeal from a dozen people running a dozen tests. Then she added something new. “Your brain biochemistry shows a complete changeover to the benign microglial cells. We can safely discontinue that portion of your treatment. Ms. Katz?”

Lucy, who had been with him most of the way, peeled away the patch on his left carotid, and dropped it into a small plastic waste-bag. She had done that every three days for weeks, only to apply a fresh patch. Now, the skin stayed bare and cool, prickling a little.

“It’s over?” Joe asked. “OK, I know it isn’t, but . . . it shouldn’t come back now?”

“We don’t have long-term data,” Dale said, “but projections are encouraging. At worst, we can resume treatment if symptoms recur.” She divined a question from his look. “You will keep coming in for a while—for years, actually, though not as often. For today, though,” she said with an unexpected twinkle, “it is over. We’ll see you next week, Mister Dipano.”

Lucy stayed with him on the ride home. He scarcely minded their using the ambulance again, save for some embarrassment at what the neighbors might think. Reminded of that, he asked Lucy about an excursion the next day, and got some positive noises.

Stef was midway through cooking when he walked in. He and Lucy told her some of the good news, before Lucy had to leave. Stef was pleased, and a gelatinous smile clung to her lips. She would not, though, consent to let him help with her preparations. Joe managed to bite off a resentful remark.

Dinner was excellent. The pot roast was juicy and almost flaked away at a touch. On the side were mashed potatoes and baby carrots, steamed to tenderness. Stef was still babying him, keeping his foods soft, but she made it easy to forgive the offense this time.

It did make him want to exert some influence on events, though. “How’s Allie doing?” he asked midway through the meal.

“Fine,” Stef said, rather hastily.

“OK. Then why hasn’t she called?”

Stef remained cool. “She hasn’t had the time, Father. She’s been busy.”

“The same way Harry’s been busy?”

Stef put her fork down with a clack. “Alice’s final exams are in a month. She has to study.”

“Every minute?” he mumbled, not wanting a reply. “That doesn’t explain your husband, either.”

“Father,” said Stef with tense patience, “you’ve been unaware of things for a long time. Things have changed, and you don’t understand what’s happened.”

“I know that,” he said with a grimace. “That’s why I’m asking.” His mouth hardened into a frown. “Have you two gotten divorced?”

Stef hesitated. “No. He’s—oh, Father, please. Let’s talk about this some other time. Not tonight. Not now.”

Joe hadn’t the heart to press on after that. He chewed at his pot roast, wondering when “some other time” would come.

The next day came soon enough, and the gray skies never took on the darkness of rain. Lucy carried an umbrella for insurance, but started the excursion promptly at two. Stef gave them a perfunctory send-off.

They walked next door. Joe took a long look at the mailbox by their door, “The Krols” written on it in brass letters. “Recognize the name?” Lucy prompted.

“Yes. Yes, I do.” Joe rang the bell. “I just hope I recognize the faces.”

He was spared any moment of uncertainty. Eileen Krol could not have been happier to find him at her door, and Jason nearly matched her effusiveness. They invited Joe and Lucy in before either could speak.

They looked familiar, save for their age. They were in their fifties, near-contemporaries of Stef. Eileen even had the same incipient streaks of gray in her black hair as Stef. Their welcome tickled those ungraspable areas in his brain that had come to disturb him so.

The inside of their house tantalized him the same way, but one look at their kitchen sparked something close. “You still haven’t remodeled here, after all this time.”

He felt a moment of humiliation, afraid he had exposed some glaring fault in his memory. The Krols laughed. “Some things you never forget,” Jason said good-naturedly. Joe smiled along, letting him think that.

Soon he was sitting at their kitchen table, being stuffed with tea, cookies, and muffins that Eileen seemed to produce out of the air. “We helped Stef out whenever we could,” she said between servings. “Grocery shopping, other—emergencies. I wish we could have done more, especially after last year when—”

“Eileen,” Jason said gently. Eileen put a hand to her mouth, while Joe dug for any memory of the Krols in his house.

“Of course, we heard about the treatments from Stef,” Eileen said, regaining momentum. “We should have come over earlier.”

“We were afraid of intruding,” Jason added, “or of the cure not taking. Certainly seems to have. You haven’t looked this good in years, Joe.”

Joe shuddered. They were probably right. Ragged as he looked, he remembered seeing himself in hospital mirrors early in the treatments.

“How about you two?” he asked before he could shake again. “What’s new in your lives?” He saw them trade nervous glances. “Don’t try filling in the past. Just now.”

They gladly did that, to such an extent that Joe and Lucy had to combine their efforts to extricate themselves. “I’m trying to meet all my neighbors today,” he explained. “Can’t stay too long anywhere.”

The Krols took that in stride, releasing him with their best wishes for Stef, and promises to come help again if needed. By the time Lucy shut the door, Joe was almost dizzy.

“I guess that went well,” he said. “Quick, next house before they pull us back in.”

They went to the house on the corner. The doorbell set a baby to squalling inside. The crying got closer, until a young woman opened the door with the baby on her hip. “Yes?”

“Sorry to bother you. The name’s Joe Dipano; this is—”

“I don’t have time for religious proselytizing.”

“No, I’m a neighbor. I live two doors down.” The woman stopped closing her door. “I’ve . . . been sick for a long time. I’m reintroducing myself to my neighbors.”

“Oh. I didn’t know. We only moved in two years ago, last January. Were you looking for the Moloneys?”

Joe’s eyes wandered away. “I suppose I was. Sorry to have intruded. Good day.”

He was walking down the path even before she could close the door. “Stupid, stupid,” he spat out softly.

“Would you like to go back home?” Lucy asked.

“No. I’m not quitting—but I hope the Woodses still live next door. Still got those ivied trellises. That’s a good sign.”

He waited a long while after ringing the bell. He almost left, but Lucy heard motion inside. Soon the door creaked open. An old woman peered out, and drew a sharp breath. “Joe?”

“Hello, Heather.” What a feeling, to know her on sight.

“Joe, what are you doing? Who is this—who are you?” she demanded, turning to his companion. Lucy introduced herself. “He shouldn’t be out,” Heather Woods said brusquely. “He’s got Alzheimer’s. He’s—he’s—”

“Heather, I’m better now.” He reached for her hands, but she pulled them back. “They’ve got a treatment. I’ll tell you all about it.”

Heather Woods looked horrified. “When was this invented?” she croaked. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”

“It’s still experimental,” Joe said, starting to catch her anxiety. “I started treatments five weeks ago. Heather, what’s wrong?”

She slapped his hand away, hard. “You had this all along! You knew he could be cured, but you kept pressuring me, and hectoring me, and I—I gave in! Oh, God!” Her knees buckled. She swayed against the wall, heaving with sobs.

Lucy jostled past Joe. “Ms. Woods, please calm down. I assure you, we—”

“Get out,” she hissed, throwing her arm out to ward off Lucy. “Get out! I’ll call the police! Get out!”

Joe stumbled backward at that last shriek. Lucy was there to steady him, and lead him out the door. He was too shocked to try to shrug her off.

Lucy fixed him coffee and toast in his kitchen, ignoring the feeding he had gotten from the Krols. She needed something to keep him there, while she talked to Stefanie in private.

Joe’s hands shook too much to lift the mug. He spent a minute holding one hand over the other, stilling the tremors. That calmed him enough to take a drink of coffee and a bite of toast, before the shakes returned. He repeated the cycle over and over with grim resolve.

Stef came into the kitchen and sat beside him. He saw a transient movement in the doorway behind her. Was Lucy hiding close, or walking away?

He felt his daughter’s hands clasp his. “I’m OK,” he said, fighting to calm the residual shaking. “She rattled me, that’s all.”

“I know, I know.” Stef lowered her head for a second, and kept her eyes tightened against some inner pain when she lifted it again. “I should have come with you, instead of Lucy. I know the neighbors. I know what’s happened lately. I could have steered you away from her.”

Joe looked intently at her. “What happened to John Woods? It sounded like he had Alzheimer’s, too, but poor Heather was so hysterical—”

Stef nodded. “He did. It set in back in thirty-four, a couple of years after your diagnosis. His case progressed faster, though. The anti-inflammatory medications didn’t slow it down. About eighteen months ago, Heather had to put him in one of the federal care centers.”

She was the one trembling now. “Trouble is, they’re overwhelmed; have been for years. The whole country’s overwhelmed. The Senescence Boom. Our perpetual crisis; our Cold War against age.”

“Couldn’t she find a private home?” Joe asked. “Are they too costly?”

“There aren’t any,” she said flatly. “I mean, they were taken over, for maximum efficiency in coping.” She muffled a moan. “If this is maximum. . . .”

Joe grew rigid and solemn. “So John died there. That’s terrible.”

Stef’s eyes were feverish. She almost swallowed what came next. “It wasn’t that simple. The staff kept making recommendations to her . . . polite at first, but they were hectoring her before long. She came to me once, begging for help, but what could I give her except words? She couldn’t hold out forever. They’re too insistent. Three months ago, she signed the forms—and they terminated his care.”

The words struck Joe like a building roll of thunder. In his shock, he realized his hands were rock steady. Stef’s weren’t.

“So Heather’s outburst wasn’t your fault,” she said. “Something terrible happened, and she lashed out at you. You shouldn’t have had to take that.”

He made some acknowledging sound. The implications of Stef’s tale were growing clear before him. He didn’t want to face them all now. He’d tuck them away for later. Most of them.

Joe stood slowly, face turned away from his daughter. “While I was sick, Stef,” he said, “did I . . . ever try to kill myself? I mean, did you ever think I wanted to die?”

“No. I—no, Father.”

He made himself look at her. “You didn’t sound sure. Maybe you think some fool accident I inflicted on myself could have been deliberate.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t.”

“But—” Stef made herself say it. “How could you know? How could you remember?”

“I don’t remember much. Flashes, impressions—” A shudder took him again. “Despair. Not that kind, Stef. Different. It was fatalism, thick like fog. I was done upon, not doing. My own actions couldn’t help me. That’s what I remember. So I don’t think I would have tried something like that. I hope I didn’t. After everything—”

He fell silent. They spent a long wordless moment composing themselves. Joe pursed his lips, as though purging a sourness, and said “Let’s not talk about serious stuff any more today.”

Stef chuckled nervously. “Fine with me, Father.”

They said almost nothing during the dinner Stef reheated for them, and parted ways right afterward. Stef went upstairs to work at her computer. Joe watched his Boys of Winter in the living room. The Americans actually scored first in that game, the only time they did so in the whole Olympics. That was how much of a rout it was.

He switched it off after one period. There was something else he needed to do. Too bad Stef was using her computer. Her machine had the camera to make a video call, but she wasn’t likely to permit it. Joe settled for the television and sound only.

He had dug up her number at Rutgers in his Internet studies, but had put off using it, diverted by Stef’s warning. He was tired of waiting now, and he punched it in.

The phone rang three times before being answered. “Hello?”

Joe hesitated. “Is this Allie Stibornik?” he asked, galled that he couldn’t tell.

“This is Alice.” The voice turned uncertain. “Who is this?”

“It’s your grandfather, Allie,” he said. “It’s Joe. It’s . . . it’s been a long time.”

There was nothing for a few seconds. “Yes. Yes, it has. How are you? How are the treatments working?”

He told her in detail, more details than mere conversation required. He heard the guardedness, and he needed to get past it. “What about yourself?” he said after his jargon jag. “I know you’ve got exams, but I don’t know what subjects.”

She rattled off course names, still rather stiffly. “I’m majoring in economics,” she added, something Joe had already figured out. “I knew that would be . . . useful.”

“It certainly should be,” Joe said. “I hope you’ll have time after graduation to come back home. I wish I could remember the last time you visited, but I can’t. Obvious reasons. When was it?”

There was another pause. “A while ago. Listen, Grandfather, I’m a month away from finals, and I have lots of studying. Could we talk another time?”

Joe grimaced but nodded, a pointless gesture without video. “Sure. Anytime, Allie.”

“Alice,” she hissed. “I’m not a child anymore.”

“What was that?”

“I said I’m . . . glad you’re better now.”

“Thanks. We’ll talk soon. Good-bye.”

He toggled the phone off, feeling only a bit guilty. It was good to hear her voice, even in so awkward a conversation. Well, she had to be busy with schoolwork. He could remember what that was like.

Better than he could remember her.

Lucy’s schedule switched, so she came in the morning. Joe waited until afternoon to resume history class, as he derisively called his refresher studies. He followed a routine Lucy suggested: fifty minutes browsing, ten minutes up and moving to prevent himself from petrifying on the sofa. It was like school all over: rigid periods, and a few minutes between classes. Joe chortled at the thought. Maybe he should be taking online classes.

His studies had reached the 2020s, the start of the Alzheimer’s explosion. He read the maledictions of politicians, how they blamed his generation for ignoring in their youths what was to come, leaving the burden for others to carry. He felt curiously unprovoked. Was it because he expected politicians to be so nasty—or because they had a point?

He heard footfalls on the stairs. A moment later, Stef walked into the living room, looking stern. “Alice says you called her last night.”

“That’s right, Stef,” he replied, gratified that he felt no twinge of shame.

“I told you she was busy.”

“She’s also my granddaughter. I should have some contact with her. Or was that what you were really trying to tell me—that she didn’t want to hear from me?”

“Father, you don’t understand.”

“Don’t talk down to me that way!” He saw his daughter’s face, a twitch of pain presaging a shift into compassionate firmness. The sight struck him, on that vague subconscious level that he was learning to hate.

“Never mind,” he said quickly, and struggled to his feet. He made for his bedroom, aiming for the bathroom beyond. He might get a few minutes of privacy there.

“Harry’s coming over for dinner tonight,” Stef said.

Joe looked around, carefully, hoping not to agitate her palpable unease. “All right, Stef.”

“He’s getting off the construction site a couple hours early, for once.”

“OK. Good for him.” He nearly turned back around, but could not resist one last word. “I’ll set up the dishes tonight.”

Stef opened her mouth, then seemed to decide she had said too much already. She left before Joe reached his bedroom door.

He got little more history reviewing done that afternoon, and his foray into more personal history did not hold his attention for long. He would have watched his West Germany hockey game, but he heard a car outside before he could reach the disk shelf. He switched off the TV, and headed out.

He reached the hall as Stef opened the door. Harry Stibornik’s hair was grayer than in the photos Joe remembered, but his body was the same, broad and burly, gone a little to fat. She and Harry said hello, looked at each other, and hesitantly embraced. Joe moved on before they noticed him.

Murmurs reached him in the kitchen, while he searched for plates. Some cabinets and drawers still had those black boxes on them, but they opened without protest now, for Lucy’s benefit rather than his. Anything breakable or hazardous was in there: plates and glasses, knives and forks. Joe tried not to dwell on that.

“Joe.” Harry was there, standing a few feet away, extending his hand. Joe took it, feeling an incongruously delicate grip. Harry moved back a step, to stand aloof and appraising. “You’re looking better,” he finally said.

“I’m feeling much better,” Joe said. “I’m in control of myself again.”

“Of course.” It continued that way for a few long minutes, a plodding conversational dance where neither man dared take more than the tiniest steps. It was a relief when Stef called Harry into the dining room, to help pull the good table back into place.

Joe went to the kitchen, finishing the task of getting the silverware out. He had the short stack of plates midway to the dining room when Harry met him. “I’ve got those,” Harry said, snatching them from his hands before he could react and turning back to the dining room.

Joe’s mouth fell open. He pointed after Harry, and began stammering at Stef, who had seen the incident.

“It’s OK,” she mouthed back. “You get the rest.” She returned to the dining room. “I’ve got things on the stove. Can you help me watch them, Big Guy?”

Joe knew that didn’t mean him. He walked back to continue his humble work, this time without usurpation. Stef and Harry worked at the stove, peeking under this lid, stirring that pot, and conducting their own conversational dance. Joe followed as much as he could while feigning disinterest.

That grew easier during dinner, a saucy pasta dish. He watched the looks, listened to the words, observed the brief clasping of hands. The more Joe saw, the less it made sense. You didn’t stay willingly separate when such affections existed, not when you’re as young as fifty-some like they were.

“Why the separation, Harry?” he asked rather casually, he thought.

Harry looked at Joe, then Stef, her expression frozen in alarm. “What have you told him?” Harry asked her.

“Only that you’re not divorced,” Joe said, “and that we should talk about it some other time. Well, time’s here. I assume you’re still at your house, Harry.”

Harry ignored Stef’s warning glance. “No. We sold that, end of ’36. I have a small apartment in the city now. It’s actually pretty convenient for most of my construction jobs.”

“You . . .” Joe sensed danger in asking why. “So why didn’t you both come here?”

“We did,” Stef interjected. “We thought that would work best financially. I guess it did, but it was harder on us than we expected.”

“That’s an understatement,” growled Harry, his eyes narrowing. “I’ve never had less sleep in my life.”

“That’s over now,” Stef said soothingly. “It’s best forgotten.”

“No.” Joe shook his head. “I’m sick to death of the hole in my life, of pretending it’s not there, and I’m sick of being coddled. Go ahead, Harry. Speak your mind.”

“Father,” Stef whispered.

“Fine,” said Harry. “The last years have been the most miserable of my life. Construction work by day wearing me down, then having to come home and take care of you while Stef worked retail at night. Both of us dead tired every day, and sleeping through the night was never guaranteed. We couldn’t juggle everything forever—so we found another way.”

“One that got you out of the way,” Joe said.

“Father,” Stef said, “that’s unfair. Construction forepersons have more delimited hours, and better pay. He was the natural one to get relief. Besides,” she added, “you’re my father.”

“It was no vacation,” Harry continued, “for anyone. I moonlighted for extra money to send Stef. She learned freelance codewriting for something to do piecework, in the snatches of time she could spare from you. It might have been easier if we had worked from home from the start—but who was thinking of this back when we started our careers?”

Joe felt the heat of Harry’s eyes. It was getting difficult to meet them. “You couldn’t hire help? Someone to spell you now and again, once a week maybe?”

“Not exactly encouraged from on high. The federal centers are so much more efficient.” He said it without apparent irony. “There are online advice sites and support groups, but not much else. The labor pool’s not exactly flexible these days.”

“You still came to help her, didn’t you?” Joe said, less agitated now than before.

“Who do you think put in all the support bars and traction mats, the motion sensors and lockboxes, linked everything to the computer? Who took those tulips out of the backyard?”

“That was you! What danger were they? Did you think I was going to eat them?”

Harry locked his reply behind a prim half-smile, incongruous on his robust face. Joe felt the bottom drop from his stomach. His wordless appeal to Stef brought a pitying look. “Inappropriate behavior in Alzheimer’s patients cannot be reliably predicted,” she said, toneless as a computer recital.

Joe sagged, letting his chair back hold him up. He was starting to understand.

“We hid as many breakable things as we could,” Harry said. “We never got everything, of course. We had to pay for whatever you did manage to break—like, on my skull.”

Stef paled. “Harry, please. I think that’s enough.”

“No, honey, it isn’t,” he said coldly. “I stopped coming the last sixteen months he was sick. If he doesn’t know he was raging at me like I was a burglar every time I walked through the door, he’ll say I was abandoning you, and that’s a lie!”

“He didn’t mean it,” Stef pleaded.

“I didn’t,” Joe echoed weakly, but Harry was talking again.

“Fine, but people can only take so much. It was tearing Mike up: thank God his wife got him away. And Alice—” He locked eyes on Joe, even as Stef clutched his arm hard in warning. “I can see you don’t remember, Joe. Good. You don’t want to know.”

Joe felt himself drifting, and his trembling voice didn’t seem like his own. “I told you, I have to know. No more shielding me.”

Stef tried to interpose herself. “Harry, I forbid you—”

Harry sidestepped her. “He wants to know,” he growled. “She always came to help out on college holidays, until you started mistaking her for Laura.”

Joe groaned. His divorce had been nasty. “What did I throw at her?”

“Harry—”

“Yourself!” he shouted, as though swinging a scourge. “Seems you were pretty hot for Laura in the early days. Persistent, too.” He grinned at the shock he saw. “Alice hasn’t been home for over two years, for fear you’d get ‘confused’ again, and something worse might happen. I don’t blame her a bit.”

Stef started shouting at Harry, so neither of them heard Joe for a while, as he gasped out the word “Sorry” with each shuddering breath.

“Sorry?” Harry said, finally noticing. He looked back to Stef. “OK, maybe you’re right. He’s not to blame. I’m not saying he has to apologize.”

He turned back to Joe. “I’m saying you will be grateful. People sacrificed and suffered for you—especially your daughter. If you’re an ingrate to them—” The snarl on his face said everything. Joe trembled before it.

He snorted out his breath. “Too long.” He headed to the front door. “Sorry about this, Stef. It was just too long to keep everything bottled up.”

Stef glanced frantically between the two men, then chased Harry before he reached the door. Joe used the opportunity to leave the table, thankful nobody saw him slinking away, thankful nobody saw the tears begin to flow.

Joe walked slowly, the sky above leaden. Lucy matched his stride, and his silence. They circled the house methodically, a wordless understanding between them that they wouldn’t be trying the neighbors again for a while.

A seam in the clouds produced a milky shaft of sunlight. A closed mouth muffled Joe’s sigh, but he did mutter “Nice.”

“OK, that’s the fourth word I’ve heard you speak today.” If Lucy meant to provoke more, she failed. “I don’t know what brought this on, but I expected it. It’s quite normal.”

“What is?”

Lucy smiled at the increased word count. “Depression. It’s common in cases of recovery from long-term illness, for a variety of reasons. There’s nothing shameful about it.”

“I’m not depressed,” Joe said, as the sunbeam vanished. “I just had a rough morning, looking things up on the Net.”

“Must have been an early morning,” Lucy said. “You look tired.”

Joe looked away. “I’ve been looking up old friends. The ones in that photo on my dresser. You know the one.”

“You’ve kept in touch that long?”

“No. Not for forty or fifty years, but my memories—well, that doesn’t much matter. Finally finished the job this morning. Turns out Jerry, Doug and Tim are all dead. Nick, my old roommate—he’s in an institution with Alzheimer’s. Poor guy.”

“I’m sorry.”

Joe nodded. “I know. Only Javier is left. I’d call him, but I’m afraid he wouldn’t remember me any more. Probably pointless anyway.”

He was silent for half a circuit of the house. “The way my memory is, those fellows seem more real to me than my own family. Yeah, I knew they had changed, but that’s easier to accept from a distance, when it’s abstract. That’s better than having the changes around you every day, getting them thrown in your face—”

“Like what?” Lucy probed.

“Nothing. Just an old man prattling.”

“It’s more than that. I saw Stef when I arrived. She looked as bad as you. What happened between you two last night?”

“It wasn’t us.” Joe looked at the empty birdbath they were passing. “Stef had her husband over for dinner last night. We exchanged words. Lots of them.”

All those words came out. Joe’s voice hardened with each sentence, revealing the facts, denying the emotions.

Lucy fought down her own reactions. “I’m sorry that happened, Joe, but I have to tell you, you were pushing Harry pretty hard.”

“I had to. They thought I was too weak to hear the truth. No: too immature. Like a child.” He laughed. “Second childhood is what they once called senility, so I’m rebelling like any teenager who’s growing up faster than people realize.”

“So Stef is playing the role of parent here?”

“Yeah—and I was frightful as a baby.” His eyes dropped. “I didn’t understand before what she went through, what everyone did. I thought the horrible stuff all happened to me. What they went through, I thought was like an annoyance you get used to, like having a bad back. More like a broken back.”

He coughed, trying to clear his tightening throat. “I remember so little. It’s like I slept through having Alzheimer’s, with occasional nightmares.” He looked at Lucy, his guard down. “They remember it all, the whole nightmare. All because of me.”

“Joe, it’s—”

“I know. I’m not to blame. Even Harry said so. But there’s a responsibility, a debt I owe. Especially because they didn’t have to carry the burden so long.” He shook his head. “Why Stef didn’t let the government care centers have me, I don’t know.”

Lucy ventured to put an arm around his shoulder. “I think you know why, Joe,” she said, as they walked along.

Joe did know, but it took time to accept, time in solitude. He insisted on eating alone for a few days. Things always seemed to go bad when he and Stef ate together. Stef acceded, even letting him make his own dinner once without always hovering in the hallway outside.

He still studied history, though he had advanced far enough that he could start calling it current events. He let his search for old friends languish. Sixty years seemed a longer time than it had.

He abandoned his Olympic hockey for the same reason, just before the medal round. The Americans had won hockey gold again when the Olympics returned to Lake Placid in 2030. The surge of nostalgia probably explained how the 1980 disks got printed, and that made it seem all the more distant to Joe. Besides, the game against the Soviets was more joyful and glorious than suited his mood.

It was three nights after that disastrous dinner before he steeled himself to go to her bedroom. She looked up from the computer, thankfully not upset that he had dared to climb the stairs. He had to struggle to find the words, more upset at his faltering than Stef was.

“I’m not an ingrate,” he finally said. “Maybe I’m slow catching up on things, but I am not unthankful. You took an enormous amount on yourself, keeping me out of the institutions, holding on and holding on.”

He briefly went blank again. “I don’t know whether people were talking about this cure. Did you know it was coming? Did that give you hope? Or was it pure stubbornness?”

That wrung a laugh out of Stef. “Stubbornness, I guess. Not all mine, though. You fought so hard early on to resist deterioration. Drug treatments, memory courses, physical therapy. Losing ground frustrated you terribly, until the disease took away your determination, too. I . . . had to live up to the standard you had set. I had to fight until I broke, or I couldn’t have lived with myself afterward.”

“I couldn’t have lived, either. I’ve seen what happens, once you start down that slope.” He swallowed. “You saved my life, Stef.”

“Father . . .” She saw his arms open, and gave herself to them, trying not to shake with each breath.

“Tell everyone I’m sorry,” Joe said, his voice trembling. “Tell them I’m grateful.”

“They know, Dad. They know.”

“Tell them anyway. Allie especially. Please.”

Stef said nothing, just holding him. He quietly accepted both.

The revival in his spirits lasted nearly a day. Even with the skies clearing, and May turning warm and bright, he began to sink back into despondency. Something was still not right, and he knew not what.

Lucy was there for fewer hours now, but her ministrations had restored some of his physical strength. He could circle the block twice without getting winded—and without getting anybody upset at his ‘elopement.’ He could even kneel to attack a few weeds in the backyard, and stand with only the help of the fence or the house’s back wall.

His growing bodily vitality should have helped. It didn’t.

His slow return to normality with Stef, their ability to talk without creating a great emotional scene, should have helped. It didn’t.

Regaining a measure of control over his life, with Stef no longer wearing the earpiece, and reversing her power of attorney, should have helped. It didn’t.

Understanding news programs and Net articles, no longer feeling like a stranger to the present, should have helped. It didn’t—and it went beyond the tenacious resentment of the old.

Lucy had predicted it, but given no curatives. Antidepressants might react unpredictably with the one gene therapy he was still taking, maybe even turning his microglial cells hostile again and restarting the disease. Nobody knew, and nobody cared to take chances. Depression was better than the feared alternatives, and Joe did not blame them.

He muddled along, filling his day with current events, NHL playoffs, and the occasional old movie off the disk rack. He made no complaints. Things could be much worse.

He awoke one morning with a groan that had nothing to do with a stiff back. The significance of May 12th had survived every assault his brain had made on itself. “Happy birthday,” he croaked, before dragging himself to the bathroom.

Stef was more cheerful when she said it. He smiled, more from her kiss and the aroma of pancakes. They ate breakfast together without incident, then parted, she upstairs to work, he to the living room to follow his own lesser pursuits.

Nothing notable happened until two that afternoon. Stef answered the door by the time Joe got to the hallway. Their visitor surprised him. “You’re early, Lucy,” Stef said.

“Early, nothing,” Joe said. “I thought Thursday was your day off now.”

“It is,” Lucy replied, walking inside, “and I’m spending part of it with the birthday boy.” She planted a kiss on his cheek before he could react.

That didn’t quite distract him. “Stef, how many other people have you put up to this?”

Stef smiled coyly. “Wait and see.”

The wait was not long. An unfamiliar car pulled up next to Lucy’s in the driveway, but the driver who got out was familiar. Joe met Mike on the doorstep with a hug, and a second one for his wife Kate, which she accepted coolly.

The Abrahams from next door arrived next. Before Joe could ask Stef about the other next-door neighbors, the Krols appeared, laden with enough plastic plates and bowls for a sizable buffet. “Feels good to chip in again,” Eileen said before stepping out again for the second load.

Conversation was already filling the house when Harry arrived. Joe waited until Stef finished greeting him, then stepped forward, tentatively offering his hand. Harry took it, firmly this time.

“I’m sorry,” said Harry, but not before Joe could start saying “Thank you.” They both smiled, and let it rest at that.

If that was Stefanie’s intent, Joe decided to make the most of it. He circulated among the guests, taking time with each to speak words of gratitude for all they had done in the past years. “This party’s for you,” he told the Krols, “as much as for me.”

His rounds finished, Joe took a moment in a corner to reflect. He expected the weight of days past to lift, as came of discharging one’s duty.

It wasn’t happening. He still felt something, that old ghastly sensation of a half-memory tickling him where he couldn’t reach it. That, and the slow deflation back into melancholy. Joe put a brave face on it, reentering the mix, but feeling like flotsam tossed on the waves.

“Enjoying yourself?” Stef asked.

“Yes,” he replied, as reflexively as saying “Fine” to a “How are you?”

“I’m sorry Alice couldn’t be here, but exams are next week.” Joe nodded, more relieved than anything else. That was one confrontation he still dreaded. He had written her a long e-mail some days back, with Stef’s knowledge. Nothing had returned.

He drifted from person to person, chatting with the neighbors, eating his buffet dinner with Mike and Kate, even talking to Harry. His son-in-law was offering to come over that weekend to help bring furniture out of the basement, and take down the surveillance equipment. Joe wasn’t so far detached as to turn down the overture, but enough so to direct him to Stef.

“Well, I think she’s busy at the moment,” Harry said.

Before Joe could ask, he heard her. “Dad, come to the kitchen, quick!”

He and Harry arrived seconds before Jason Krol did, carrying the cake. Two huge numeral-shaped candles topped it, proclaiming his years with chemically enhanced blue flames.

The gathering broke into song, but Joe barely noticed. Seeing the ‘78’ there started an avalanche within him. He understood now, and the knowledge brought not relief but renewed gloom.

He didn’t remember blowing out the candles, or receiving the slice on his plate. He picked through half of it before it all became too much.

“Excuse me,” he said, and the talking ceased. “I want to thank you all for coming, but I’m . . . I’m an old man, and my stamina isn’t what it was. Please, keep enjoying yourselves, but I need to turn in.”

He left his plate and walked away. Murmurs followed, but nothing else.

He headed straight to his bathroom, where he bent over the sink until the retching urge died down. He splashed water on his face, then caught a peripheral glimpse of himself in the mirror and shut his eyes tight. That face was the last thing he wanted to see now.

Lucy was in his bedroom when he emerged. She had her bag. “Oh, Lucy, please—”

“It’s only a few routine tests, Joe.”

He dodged her approach, slapping half-heartedly at her outstretched hand. “I’m fine.”

“You said you were tired.”

“I said what I had to.” He sat on his bed. “To get away politely.”

Lucy set down her bag. “All right.” The question she didn’t ask hovered between them.

Joe knew he couldn’t resist forever, and this time, he didn’t want to try. “Now what?” he said piteously.

Lucy tipped her head in puzzlement, letting silence draw him out again.

“I’m seventy-eight, Lucy. I’m an old man. I spend my days idle, except for filling the gaps in my memory. My past is so distant and disconnected, it’s meaningless, and my present . . . equally meaningless. Is this what my cure brought me? Did I come out of darkness, just to mark time until it falls again?”

Lucy tried to look supportive. “It’s your life, Joe. You can do with it whatever you like.”

“Like play left wing for the Devils or Canadiens?”

“You know what I mean.”

“But I can’t do anything. I wouldn’t know how to start doing my old job, and I’m nobody’s recruitment dream. I’m not set for a luxurious retirement, either. I’ve seen my finances; having Alzheimer’s bled them pretty well. Stef budgeted for a limited time span, and we were getting pretty close to the end.” He shivered.

“Are you saying she’s responsible?”

“No! She acted sensibly enough. She couldn’t know. . . .” He shook his head. “Maybe I should have her train me in coding piecework. I could take over for her when she returns to Harry. She will soon enough, once she accepts that I can live on my own.”

He looked at Lucy for confirmation, acknowledgment of his autonomy. He found enough.

“So what’s ahead of me? Do I sit and look at the garden every day, and hope I don’t have to sell the house? Do I do menial work to make ends meet? Do I depend on others? God, they must be as sick of that as I am. What do I do?” His head sank to his chest. “I don’t know.”

After a moment, Lucy sat next to him. “You’ll think I’m crazy, but I have to congratulate you.” His look confirmed her suspicion. “You’re facing tough choices. Tough, everyday, mundane choices, the kind average people deal with all the time. If that is now the central fact of your life, I suggest you take a look at where you were two months ago, and see what a tremendous distance you’ve covered.”

Thought began to replace some of the pain on Joe’s face. “I think I agree with you,” Lucy added. “It’s time to call it a night, so I’m rested when I return in the morning.” She stood, waited for a reaction, then patted him on the shoulder. “Good night, Joe.”

“Good night.” He let her leave without a glance or another word.

Stef and Mike peeked into the room later. If Lucy had recounted anything he had said, it didn’t show. They didn’t stay long, letting him get to bed.

Not to sleep, though.

Lucy was wrong. There was no normal life after Alzheimer’s. It was like those memoirs he had read a long time ago, of soldiers in the Civil and World Wars. Their experiences transformed the landscape of their lives, cratering it as an exploding shell would. The imprints never left, no matter how long they lived.

“Touched with fire,” one of those veterans had said of himself and others. Joe was seared. So was poor Nick Wechsel. Heather Wood, too, indirectly—and maybe directly. He had heard the Abrahams gossiping that her outbursts were a symptom, wondering if she had gotten an onset prognosis as so many had in this hyperaware era.

How many millions more burned in the fire? How many would this cure reach? Their minds might heal, but they would still carry dreadful wounds. Doctors would have no patches to slap on their necks to set those right.

Those horrid images stayed with him through a night of drowsing, a half-consciousness that paralleled his memories of the incoherence of Alzheimer’s, doubling the torment. Pain and grief swirled and comingled, until he could not tell whose suffering he felt more.

He finally awoke to bright sunlight slanting through the window, herald of a late rising. He shook off his torpor in the bathroom, then went to the kitchen to find Mike and Kate finishing their breakfast. He gladly spent time with them, knowing they would leave soon to catch their flight home.

The idea that had coalesced during his restless night stayed in the back of his mind, needing no concentration to hold in place. He almost spilled it then, but managed to wait.

Lucy arrived soon after Mike left. Joe met her at the door, grinning. “Lucy, I’ve got a proposition for you.” He saw her look of amused scolding. “Not that kind. Better.”

The recitation of names and parade of graduates seemed to last forever. Some in the audience fidgeted in the hard seats of the stadium, the only place Rutgers had large enough to hold commencement. Joe Dipano sat serenely. He didn’t mind letting time pass.

He did cheer heartily, along with Stef, Harry, and Mike, when Alice advanced to receive her diploma. He wished Lucy had come along—he was only realizing how attached he was to her—but the college was firm on its four-seat policy at graduation. Well, he’d get by.

The procession ended, the dean spoke, the caps flew, and the ceremony became a mob. Joe’s group headed for the exit rather than the floor of the stadium, having arranged a less crowded rendezvous in advance. They moved against hundreds of jostling parents, and reached the pair of elms outside a few minutes before Alice did.

She hugged each of them in turn. Joe was last, and though Alice hesitated, it was the longest of them. They had had their talk the previous night, exorcised all the horror, restored that last ravaged connection in Joe’s family.

Other robed graduates shouted to Alice in passing, and some walked over. Alice made introductions, with a special glow reserved for her grandfather. “He’s unretiring,” she told them, “to write a book.”

“Co-write,” Joe corrected. “I can’t do it right without Lucy. She’s the technical expert.”

“What’s it about?” a couple of Alice’s friends asked.

“Alzheimer’s.” A chill fell. “Recovery from Alzheimer’s, that is. From someone who knows.”

Before he knew it, the graduates were peppering him with questions. Rumors of a treatment had leaked out in the last week. Hearing that it was true energized them beyond Joe’s expectations. The burden of support was lifting from this generation, and they reacted like birds freed from their cages.

He didn’t begrudge their excitement, but his concern was with his contemporaries, the millions for whom nightmarish hibernation would soon end. They would need help in adjusting to their second lives. Who better to help than one who had endured what they would: the yawning holes in their memories, the bodies still infirm, the caretakers walking on eggshells, the families fractured in ways the recoverers would not understand. He could keep them from shrinking back into the shadows, coax them into the light.

Lucy had greased the skids with Doctor Dale and Essex Geriatric, but their approval was genuine. They could see the new traumas that would come with the healing of the old, and wanted them assuaged as much as anyone. They already had Princeton University Press lined up to publish the volume, on generous terms for the authors.

So Joe could answer their questions effervescently, performing quite well, he thought. And why not? Today was as much a new start for him as for them. Before he knew it, he found himself echoing the announcer at those last games he had finally gotten around to seeing.

“Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”

Dozens of staring eyes, from family and strangers, fell on him. “Never mind, you kids,” he said, his ebullience undiminished. “It’s before your time.”

CORALINE

Neil Gaiman

I started this for Holly

I finished it for Maddy

Fairy tales are more than true: not because
they tell us that dragons exist, but because
they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

—G.K. Chesterton

I.

Coraline discovered the door a little while after they moved into the house.

It was a very old house—it had an attic under the roof and a cellar under the ground and an overgrown garden with huge old trees in it.

Coraline’s family didn’t own all of the house—it was too big for that. Instead they owned part of it.

There were other people who lived in the old house.

Miss Spink and Miss Forcible lived in the flat below Coraline’s, on the ground floor. They were both old and round, and they lived in their flat with a number of ageing Highland terriers who had names like Hamish and Andrew and Jock. Once upon a time Miss Spink and Miss Forcible had been actresses, as Miss Spink told Coraline the first time she met her.

“You see, Caroline,” Miss Spink said, getting Coraline’s name wrong, “both myself and Miss Forcible were famous actresses, in our time. We trod the boards, luvvy. Oh, don’t let Hamish eat the fruitcake, or he’ll be up all night with his tummy.”

“It’s Coraline. Not Caroline. Coraline,” said Coraline.

In the flat above Coraline’s, under the roof, was a crazy old man with a big mustache. He told Coraline that he was training a mouse circus. He wouldn’t let anyone see it.

“One day, little Caroline, when they are all ready, everyone in the whole world will see the wonders of my mouse circus. You ask me why you cannot see it now. Is that what you asked me?”

“No,” said Coraline quietly, “I asked you not to call me Caroline. It’s Coraline.”

“The reason you cannot see the mouse circus,” said the man upstairs, “is that the mice are not yet ready and rehearsed. Also, they refuse to play the songs I have written for them. All the songs I have written for the mice to play go oompah oompah. But the white mice will only play toodle oodle, like that. I am thinking of trying them on different types of cheese.”

Coraline didn’t think there really was a mouse circus. She thought the old man was probably making it up.

The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring.

She explored the garden. It was a big garden: at the very back was an old tennis court, but no one in the house played tennis and the fence around the court had holes in it and the net had mostly rotted away; there was an old rose garden, filled with stunted, flyblown rosebushes; there was a rockery that was all rocks; there was a fairy ring, made of squidgy brown toadstools which smelled dreadful if you accidentally trod on them.

There was also a well. On the first day Coraline’s family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly.

She found it on the third day, in an overgrown meadow beside the tennis court, behind a clump of trees—a low brick circle almost hidden in the high grass. The well had been covered up by wooden boards, to stop anyone falling in. There was a small knothole in one of the boards, and Coraline spent an afternoon dropping pebbles and acorns through the hole and waiting, and counting, until she heard the plop as they hit the water far below.

Coraline also explored for animals. She found a hedgehog, and a snakeskin (but no snake), and a rock that looked just like a frog, and a toad that looked just like a rock.

There was also a haughty black cat, who sat on walls and tree stumps and watched her but slipped away if ever she went over to try to play with it.

That was how she spent her first two weeks in the house—exploring the garden and the grounds.

Her mother made her come back inside for dinner and for lunch. And Coraline had to make sure she dressed up warm before she went out, for it was a very cold summer that year; but go out she did, exploring, every day until the day it rained, when Coraline had to stay inside.

“What should I do?” asked Coraline.

“Read a book,” said her mother. “Watch a video. Play with your toys. Go and pester Miss Spink or Miss Forcible, or the crazy old man upstairs.”

“No,” said Coraline. “I don’t want to do those things. I want to explore.”

“I don’t really mind what you do,” said Coraline’s mother, “as long as you don’t make a mess.”

Coraline went over to the window and watched the rain come down. It wasn’t the kind of rain you could go out in—it was the other kind, the kind that threw itself down from the sky and splashed where it landed. It was rain that meant business, and currently its business was turning the garden into a muddy, wet soup.

Coraline had watched all the videos. She was bored with her toys, and she’d read all her books.

She turned on the television. She went from channel to channel to channel, but there was nothing on but men in suits talking about the stock market, and talk shows.

Eventually, she found something to watch: it was the last half of a natural history program about something called protective coloration. She watched animals, birds, and insects which disguised themselves as leaves or twigs or other animals to escape from things that could hurt them. She enjoyed it, but it ended too soon and was followed by a program about a cake factory. It was time to talk to her father.

Coraline’s father was home. Both of her parents worked, doing things on computers, which meant that they were home a lot of the time. Each of them had their own study.

“Hello Coraline,” he said when she came in, without turning round.

“Mmph,” said Coraline. “It’s raining.”

“Yup,” said her father. “It’s bucketing down.”

“No,” said Coraline.”It’s just raining. Can I go outside?”

“What does your mother say?”

“She says you’re not going out in weather like that, Coraline Jones.”

“Then, no.”

“But I want to carry on exploring.”

“Then explore the flat,” suggested her father. “Look— here’s a piece of paper and a pen. Count all the doors and windows. List everything blue. Mount an expedition to discover the hot water tank. And leave me alone to work.”

“Can I go into the drawing room?” The drawing room was where the Joneses kept the expensive (and uncomfortable) furniture Coraline’s grandmother had left them when she died. Coraline wasn’t allowed in there. Nobody went in there. It was only for best.

“If you don’t make a mess. And you don’t touch anything”

Coraline considered this carefully, then she took the paper and pen and went off to explore the inside of the flat.

She discovered the hot water tank (it was in a cupboard in the kitchen).

She counted everything blue (153).

She counted the windows (21).

She counted the doors (14).

Of the doors that she found, thirteen opened and closed. The other—the big, carved, brown wooden door at the far corner of the drawing room—was locked.

She said to her mother, “Where does that door go?”

“Nowhere, dear.”

“It has to go somewhere.”

Her mother shook her head. “Look,” she told Coraline.

She reached up and took a string of keys from the top of the kitchen doorframe. She sorted through them carefully, and selected the oldest, biggest, blackest, rustiest key.

They went into the drawing room. She unlocked the door with the key.

The door swung open.

Her mother was right. The door didn’t go anywhere. It opened onto a brick wall.

“When this place was just one house,” said Coraline’s mother, “that door went somewhere. When they turned the house into flats, they simply bricked it up. The other side is the empty flat on the other side of the house, the one that’s still for sale.”

She shut the door and put the string of keys back on top of the kitchen doorframe.

“You didn’t lock it,” said Coraline.

Her mother shrugged. “Why should I lock it?” she asked. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

Coraline didn’t say anything.

It was nearly dark outside now, and the rain was still coming down, pattering against the windows and blurring the lights of the cars in the street outside.

Coraline’s father stopped working and made them all dinner.

Coraline was disgusted. “Daddy,” she said, “you’ve made a recipe again.”

“It’s leek and potato stew with a tarragon garnish and melted Gruyere cheese,” he admitted.

Coraline sighed. Then she went to the freezer and got out some microwave chips and a microwave minipizza.

“You know I don’t like recipes,” she told her father, while her dinner went around and around and the little red numbers on the microwave oven counted down to zero.

“If you tried it, maybe you’d like it,” said Coraline’s father, but she shook her head.

That night, Coraline lay awake in her bed. The rain had stopped, and she was almost asleep when something went t-t-t-t-t-t. She sat up in bed.

Something went kreeee . . .

. . . aaaak

Coraline got out of bed and looked down the hall, but saw nothing strange. She walked down the hall. From her parents’ bedroom came a low snoring—that was her father—and an occasional sleeping mutter—that was her mother.

Coraline wondered if she’d dreamed it, whatever it was.

Something moved.

It was little more than a shadow, and it scuttled down the darkened hall fast, like a little patch of night.

She hoped it wasn’t a spider. Spiders made Coraline intensely uncomfortable.

The black shape went into the drawing room, and Coraline followed it a little nervously.

The room was dark. The only light came from the hall, and Coraline, who was standing in the doorway, cast a huge and distorted shadow onto the drawing room carpet—she looked like a thin giant woman.

Coraline was just wondering whether or not she ought to turn on the lights when she saw the black shape edge slowly out from beneath the sofa. It paused, and then dashed silently across the carpet toward the farthest corner of the room.

There was no furniture in that corner of the room. Coraline turned on the light.

There was nothing in the corner. Nothing but the old door that opened onto the brick wall.

She was sure that her mother had shut the door, but now it was ever so slightly open. Just a crack. Coraline went over to it and looked in. There was nothing there—just a wall, built of red bricks.

Coraline closed the old wooden door, turned out the light, and went to bed.

She dreamed of black shapes that slid from place to place, avoiding the light, until they were all gathered together under the moon. Little black shapes with little red eyes and sharp yellow teeth.

They started to sing,

We are small but we are many

We are many we are small

We were here before you rose

We will be here when you fall.

Their voices were high and whispering and slightly whiney. They made Coraline feel uncomfortable.

Then Coraline dreamed a few commercials, and after that she dreamed of nothing at all.

II.

The next day it had stopped raining, but a thick white fog had lowered over the house.

“I’m going for a walk,” said Coraline.

“Don’t go too far,” said her mother.”And dress up warmly.”

Coraline put on her blue coat with a hood, her red scarf, and her yellow Wellington boots.

She went out.

Miss Spink was walking her dogs. “Hello, Caroline,” said Miss Spink. “Rotten weather.”

“Yes,” said Coraline.

“I played Portia once,” said Miss Spink. “Miss Forcible talks about her Ophelia, but it was my Portia they came to see. When we trod the boards.”

Miss Spink was bundled up in pullovers and cardigans, so she seemed more small and circular than ever. She looked like a large, fluffy egg. She wore thick glasses that made her eyes seem huge.

“They used to send flowers to my dressing room. They did” she said.

“Who did?” asked Coraline.

Miss Spink looked around cautiously, looking over first one shoulder and then over the other, peering into the mists as though someone might be listening.

“Men,” she whispered. Then she tugged the dogs to heel and waddled off back toward the house.

Coraline continued her walk.

She was three quarters of the way around the house when she saw Miss Forcible, standing at the door to the flat she shared with Miss Spink.

“Have you seen Miss Spink, Caroline?”

Coraline told her that she had, and that Miss Spink was out walking the dogs.

“I do hope she doesn’t get lost—it’ll bring on her shingles if she does, you’ll see,” said Miss Forcible. “You’d have to be an explorer to find your way around in this fog.”

“I’m an explorer,” said Coraline.

“Of course you are, luvvy,” said Miss Forcible.”Don’t get lost, now.”

Coraline continued walking through the gardens in the gray mist. She always kept in sight of the house. After about ten minutes of walking she found herself back where she had started.

The hair over her eyes was limp and wet, and her face felt damp.

“Ahoy! Caroline!” called the crazy old man upstairs. “Oh, hullo,” said Coraline.

She could hardly see the old man through the mist. He walked down the steps on the outside of the house that led up past Coraline’s front door to the door of his flat. He walked down very slowly. Coraline waited at the bottom of the stairs.

“The mice do not like the mist,” he told her. “It makes their whiskers droop.”

“I don’t like the mist much, either,” admitted Coraline. The old man leaned down, so close that the bottoms of his mustache tickled Coraline’s ear.”The mice have a message for you,” he whispered.

Coraline didn’t know what to say. “The message is this. Don’t go through the door” He paused. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“No,” said Coraline.

The old man shrugged.”They are funny, the mice. They get things wrong. They got your name wrong, you know. They kept saying Coraline. Not Caroline. Not Caroline at all”

He picked up a milk bottle from the bottom of the stairs and started back up to his attic flat.

Coraline went indoors. Her mother was working in her study. Her mother’s study smelled of flowers.

“What shall I do?” asked Coraline.

“When do you go back to school?” asked her mother.

“Next week,” said Coraline.

“Hmph,” said her mother. “I suppose I shall have to get you new school clothes. Remind me, dear, or else I’ll forget,” and she went back to typing things on the computer screen.

“What shall I do?” repeated Coraline.

“Draw something,” Her mother passed her a sheet of paper and a ballpoint pen.

Coraline tried drawing the mist. After ten minutes of drawing she still had a white sheet of paper with

written on it in one corner in slightly wiggly letters. She grunted and passed it to her mother.

“Mm. Very modern, dear,” said Coraline’s mother.

Coraline crept into the drawing room and tried to open the old door in the corner. It was locked once more. She supposed her mother must have locked it again. She shrugged.

Coraline went to see her father.

He had his back to the door as he typed.”Go away,” he said cheerfully as she walked in. “I’m bored,” she said.

“Learn how to tap-dance,” he suggested, without turning around.

Coraline shook her head. “Why don’t you play with me?” she asked.

“Busy,” he said. “Working,” he added. He still hadn’t turned around to look at her. “Why don’t you go and bother Miss Spink and Miss Forcible?”

Coraline put on her coat and pulled up her hood and went out of the house. She went downstairs. She rang the door of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s flat. Coraline could hear a frenzied woofing as the Scottie dogs ran out into the hall. After a while Miss Spink opened the door.

“Oh, it’s you, Caroline,” she said. “Angus, Hamish, Bruce, down now, luvvies. It’s only Caroline. Come in, dear. Would you like a cup of tea?”

The flat smelled of furniture polish and dogs.

“Yes, please,” said Coraline. Miss Spink led her into a dusty little room, which she called the parlor. On the walls were black-and-white photographs of pretty women, and theater programs in frames. Miss Forcible was sitting in one of the armchairs, knitting hard.

They poured Coraline a cup of tea in a little pink bone china cup, with a saucer. They gave her a dry Garibaldi biscuit to go with it.

Miss Forcible looked at Miss Spink, picked up her knitting, and took a deep breath. “Anyway, April. As I was saying: you still have to admit, there’s life in the old dog yet”

“Miriam, dear, neither of us is as young as we were.”

“Madame Arcati,” replied Miss Forcible. “The nurse in Romeo. Lady Bracknell. Character parts. They can’t retire you from the stage.”

“Now, Miriam, we agreed,” said Miss Spink. Coraline wondered if they’d forgotten she was there. They weren’t making much sense; she decided they were having an argument as old and comfortable as an armchair, the kind of argument that no one ever really wins or loses but which can go on forever, if both parties are willing. She sipped her tea.

“I’ll read the leaves, if you want,” said Miss Spink to Coraline.

“Sorry?” said Coraline. “The tea leaves, dear. I’ll read your future.” Coraline passed Miss Spink her cup. Miss Spink peered shortsightedly at the black tea leaves in the bottom. She pursed her lips.

“You know, Caroline,” she said, after a while, “you are in terrible danger.”

Miss Forcible snorted, and put down her knitting. “Don’t be silly, April. Stop scaring the girl. Your eyes are going. Pass me that cup, child.”

Coraline carried the cup over to Miss Forcible. Miss Forcible looked into it carefully, shook her head, and looked into it again.

“Oh dear,” she said. “You were right, April. She is in danger.”

“See, Miriam,” said Miss Spink triumphantly. “My eyes are as good as they ever were . . . .”

“What am I in danger from?” asked Coraline.

Misses Spink and Forcible stared at her blankly.”It didn’t say,” said Miss Spink.”Tea leaves aren’t reliable for that kind of thing. Not really. They’re good for general, but not for specifics.”

“What should I do then?” asked Coraline, who was slightly alarmed by this.

“Don’t wear green in your dressing room,” suggested Miss Spink.

“Or mention the Scottish play,” added Miss Forcible.

Coraline wondered why so few of the adults she had met made any sense. She sometimes wondered who they thought they were talking to.

“And be very, very careful,” said Miss Spink. She got up from the armchair and went over to the fireplace. On the mantelpiece was a small jar, and Miss Spink took off the top of the jar and began to pull things out of it. There was a tiny china duck, a thimble, a strange little brass coin, two paper clips and a stone with a hole in it.

She passed Coraline the stone with a hole in it.

“What’s it for?” asked Coraline. The hole went all the way through the middle of the stone. She held it up to the window and looked through it.

“It might help,” said Miss Spink. “They’re good for bad things, sometimes.”

Coraline put on her coat, said good-bye to Misses Spink and Forcible and to the dogs, and went outside.

The mist hung like blindness around the house. She walked slowly to the stairs up to her family’s flat, and then stopped and looked around.

In the mist, it was a ghost-world. In danger? thought Coraline to herself. It sounded exciting. It didn’t sound like a bad thing. Not really.

Coraline went back upstairs, her fist closed tightly around her new stone.

III.

The next day the sun shone, and Coraline’s mother took her into the nearest large town to buy clothes for school. They dropped her father off at the railway station. He was going into London for the day to see some people.

Coraline waved him good-bye.

They went to the department store to buy the school clothes.

Coraline saw some Day-Glo green gloves she liked a lot. Her mother refused to buy them for her, preferring instead to buy white socks, navy blue school underpants, four gray blouses, and a dark gray skirt.

“But Mum, everybody at school’s got gray blouses and everything. Nobody’s got green gloves. I could be the only one.”

Her mother ignored her; she was talking to the shop assistant. They were talking about which kind of sweater to get for Coraline, and were agreeing that the best thing to do would be to get one that was embarrassingly large and baggy, in the hopes that one day she might grow into it.

Coraline wandered off and looked at a display of Wellington boots shaped like frogs and ducks and rabbits. Then she wandered back.

“Coraline? Oh, there you are. Where on earth were you?”

“I was kidnapped by aliens,” said Coraline. “They came down from outer space with ray guns, but I fooled them by wearing a wig and laughing in a foreign accent, and I escaped.”

“Yes, dear. Now, I think you could do with some more hair clips, don’t you?”

“No”

“Well, let’s say half a dozen, to be on the safe side,” said her mother.

Coraline didn’t say anything.

In the car on the way back home, Coraline said, “What’s in the empty flat?”

“I don’t know. Nothing, I expect. It probably looks like our flat before we moved in. Empty rooms.”

“Do you think you could get into it from our flat?”

“Not unless you can walk through bricks, dear.”

“Oh”

They got home around lunchtime. The sun was shining, although the day was cold. Coraline’s mother looked in the fridge and found a sad little tomato and a piece of cheese with green stuff growing on it. There was only a crust in the bread bin.

“I’d better dash down to the shops and get some fish fingers or something,” said her mother. “Do you want to come?”

“No,” said Coraline.

“Suit yourself,” said her mother, and left. Then she came back and got her purse and car keys and went out again. Coraline was bored.

She flipped through a book her mother was reading about native people in a distant country; how every day they would take pieces of white silk and draw on them in wax, then dip the silks in dye, then draw on them more in wax and dye them some more, then boil the wax out in hot water, and then finally, throw the now-beautiful cloths on a fire and burn them to ashes.

It seemed particularly pointless to Coraline, but she hoped that the people enjoyed it.

She was still bored, and her mother wasn’t yet home.

Coraline got a chair and pushed it over to the kitchen door. She climbed onto the chair and reached up. She got down, then got a broom from the broom cupboard. She climbed back on the chair again and reached up with the broom.

Chink.

She climbed down from the chair and picked up the keys. She smiled triumphantly. Then she leaned the broom against the wall and went into the drawing room.

The family did not use the drawing room. They had inherited the furniture from Coraline’s grandmother, along with a wooden coffee table, a side table, a heavy glass ashtray, and the oil painting of a bowl of fruit. Coraline could never work out why anyone would want to paint a bowl of fruit. Other than that, the room was empty: there were no knickknacks on the mantelpiece, no statues or clocks; nothing that made it feel comfortable or lived-in.

The old black key felt colder than any of the others. She pushed it into the keyhole. It turned smoothly, with a satisfying clunk.

Coraline stopped and listened. She knew she was doing something wrong, and she was trying to listen for her mother coming back, but she heard nothing. Then Coraline put her hand on the doorknob and turned it; and, finally, she opened the door.

It opened on to a dark hallway. The bricks had gone as if they’d never been there. There was a cold, musty smell coming through the open doorway: it smelled like something very old and very slow.

Coraline went through the door.

She wondered what the empty flat would be like—if that was where the corridor led.

Coraline walked down the corridor uneasily. There was something very familiar about it.

The carpet beneath her feet was the same carpet they had in her flat. The wallpaper was the same wallpaper they had. The picture hanging in the hall was the same that they had hanging in their hallway at home.

She knew where she was: she was in her own home. She hadn’t left.

She shook her head, confused.

She stared at the picture hanging on the wall: no, it wasn’t exactly the same. The picture they had in their own hallway showed a boy in old-fashioned clothes staring at some bubbles. But now the expression on his face was different—he was looking at the bubbles as if he was planning to do something very nasty indeed to them. And there was something peculiar about his eyes.

Coraline stared at his eyes, trying to figure out what exactly was different.

She almost had it when somebody said, “Coraline?”

It sounded like her mother. Coraline went into the kitchen, where the voice had come from. A woman stood in the kitchen with her back to Coraline. She looked a little like Coraline’s mother. Only . . .

Only her skin was white as paper.

Only she was taller and thinner.

Only her fingers were too long, and they never stopped moving, and her dark red fingernails were curved and sharp.

“Coraline?” the woman said.”Is that you?” And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.

“Lunchtime, Coraline,” said the woman. “Who are you?” asked Coraline.

“I’m your other mother,” said the woman. “Go and tell your other father that lunch is ready,” She opened the door of the oven. Suddenly Coraline realized how hungry she was. It smelled wonderful. “Well, go on.”

Coraline went down the hall, to where her father’s study was. She opened the door. There was a man in there, sitting at the keyboard, with his back to her. “Hello,” said Coraline. “I—I mean, she said to say that lunch is ready.”

The man turned around.

His eyes were buttons, big and black and shiny.

“Hello Coraline,” he said. “I’m starving.”

He got up and went with her into the kitchen. They sat at the kitchen table, and Coraline’s other mother brought them lunch. A huge, golden-brown roasted chicken, fried potatoes, tiny green peas. Coraline shoveled the food into her mouth. It tasted wonderful.

“We’ve been waiting for you for a long time,” said Coraline’s other father. “For me?”

“Yes,” said the other mother. “It wasn’t the same here without you. But we knew you’d arrive one day, and then we could be a proper family. Would you like some more chicken?”

It was the best chicken that Coraline had ever eaten. Her mother sometimes made chicken, but it was always out of packets or frozen, and was very dry, and it never tasted of anything. When Coraline’s father cooked chicken he bought real chicken, but he did strange things to it, like stewing it in wine, or stuffing it with prunes, or baking it in pastry, and Coraline would always refuse to touch it on principle.

She took some more chicken.

“I didn’t know I had another mother,” said Coraline, cautiously.

“Of course you do. Everyone does,” said the other mother, her black button eyes gleaming. “After lunch I thought you might like to play in your room with the rats.”

“The rats?”

“From upstairs.”

Coraline had never seen a rat, except on television. She was quite looking forward to it. This was turning out to be a very interesting day after all.

After lunch her other parents did the washing up, and Coraline went down the hall to her other bedroom.

It was different from her bedroom at home. For a start it was painted in an off-putting shade of green and a peculiar shade of pink.

Coraline decided that she wouldn’t want to have to sleep in there, but that the color scheme was an awful lot more interesting than her own bedroom.

There were all sorts of remarkable things in there she’d never seen before: windup angels that fluttered around the bedroom like startled sparrows; books with pictures that writhed and crawled and shimmered; little dinosaur skulls that chattered their teeth as she passed. A whole toy box filled with wonderful toys.

This is more like it, thought Coraline. She looked out of the window. Outside, the view was the same one she saw from her own bedroom: trees, fields, and beyond them, on the horizon, distant purple hills.

Something black scurried across the floor and vanished under the bed. Coraline got down on her knees and looked under the bed. Fifty little red eyes stared back at her.

“Hello,” said Coraline.”Are you the rats?”

They came out from under the bed, blinking their eyes in the light. They had short, soot-black fur, little red eyes, pink paws like tiny hands, and pink, hairless tails like long, smooth worms.

“Can you talk?” she asked.

The largest, blackest of the rats shook its head. It had an unpleasant sort of smile, Coraline thought. “Well,” asked Coraline, “what do you do?” The rats formed a circle.

Then they began to climb on top of each other, carefully but swiftly, until they had formed a pyramid with the largest rat at the top.

The rats began to sing, in high, whispery voices,

We have teeth and we have tails

We have tails we have eyes

We were here before you fell

You will be here when we rise.

It wasn’t a pretty song. Coraline was sure she’d heard it before, or something like it, although she was unable to remember exactly where.

Then the pyramid fell apart, and the rats scampered, fast and black, toward the door.

The other crazy old man upstairs was standing in the doorway, holding a tall black hat in his hands. The rats scampered up him, burrowing into his pockets, into his shirt, up his trouser legs, down his neck.

The largest rat climbed onto the old man’s shoulders, swung up on the long gray mustache, past the big black button eyes, and onto the top of the man’s head.

In seconds the only evidence that the rats were there at all were the restless lumps under the man’s clothes, forever sliding from place to place across him; and there was still the largest rat, who stared down, with glittering red eyes, at Coraline from the man’s head.

The old man put his hat on, and the last rat was gone.

“Hello Coraline,” said the other old man upstairs. “I heard you were here. It is time for the rats to have their dinner. But you can come up with me, if you like, and watch them feed.”

There was something hungry in the old man’s button eyes that made Coraline feel uncomfortable. “No, thank you,” she said. “I’m going outside to explore.”

The old man nodded, very slowly. Coraline could hear the rats whispering to each other, although she could not tell what they were saying.

She was not certain that she wanted to know what they were saying.

Her other parents stood in the kitchen doorway as she walked down the corridor, smiling identical smiles, and waving slowly. “Have a nice time outside,” said her other mother.

“We’ll just wait here for you to come back,” said her other father.

When Coraline got to the front door, she turned back and looked at them. They were still watching her, and waving, and smiling.

Coraline walked outside, and down the steps.

IV.

The house looked exactly the same from the outside. Or almost exactly the same: around Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s door were blue and red lightbulbs that flashed on and off spelling out words, the lights chasing each other around the door. On and off, around and around. astounding! was followed by a theatrical and then triumph!!!

It was a sunny, cold day, exactly like the one she’d left.

There was a polite noise from behind her.

She turned around. Standing on the wall next to her was a large black cat, identical to the large black cat she’d seen in the grounds at home.

“Good afternoon,” said the cat.

Its voice sounded like the voice at the back of Coraline’s head, the voice she thought words in, but a man’s voice, not a girl’s.

“Hello,” said Coraline.”I saw a cat like you in the garden at home. You must be the other cat.”

The cat shook its head. “No,” it said. “I’m not the other anything. I’m me.” It tipped its head to one side; green eyes glinted. “You people are spread all over the place. Cats, on the other hand, keep ourselves together. If you see what I mean.”

“I suppose. But if you’re the same cat I saw at home, how can you talk?”

Cats don’t have shoulders, not like people do. But the cat shrugged, in one smooth movement that started at the tip of its tail and ended in a raised movement of its whiskers. “I can talk”

“Cats don’t talk at home.”

“No?” said the cat.

“No,” said Coraline.

The cat leaped smoothly from the wall to the grass near Coraline’s feet. It stared up at her.

“Well, you’re the expert on these things,” said the cat dryly. “After all, what would I know? I’m only a cat.”

It began to walk away, head and tail held high and proud.

“Come back,” said Coraline. “Please. I’m sorry. I really am.”

The cat stopped walking, sat down, and began to wash itself thoughtfully, apparently unaware of Coraline’s existence.

“We . . . we could be friends, you know,” said Coraline.

“We could be rare specimens of an exotic breed of African dancing elephants,” said the cat.”But we’re not. At least,” it added cattily, after darting a brief look at Coraline, “I’m not.”

Coraline sighed.

“Please. What’s your name?” Coraline asked the cat. “Look, I’m Coraline. Okay?”

The cat yawned slowly, carefully, revealing a mouth and tongue of astounding pinkness.”Cats don’t have names,” it said.

“No?” said Coraline.

“No,” said the cat.”Now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”

There was something irritatingly self-centered about the cat, Coraline decided. As if it were, in its opinion, the only thing in any world or place that could possibly be of any importance.

Half of her wanted to be very rude to it; the other half of her wanted to be polite and deferential. The polite half won.

“Please, what is this place?”

The cat glanced around briefly. “It’s here,” said the cat. “I can see that. Well, how did you get here?”

“Like you did. I walked,” said the cat. “Like this.”

Coraline watched as the cat walked slowly across the lawn. It walked behind a tree, but didn’t come out the other side. Coraline went over to the tree and looked behind it. The cat was gone.

She walked back toward the house. There was another polite noise from behind her. It was the cat.

“By the by,” it said.”It was sensible of you to bring protection. I’d hang on to it, if I were you.”

“Protection?”

“That’s what I said,” said the cat. “And anyway—” It paused, and stared intently at something that wasn’t there.

Then it went down into a low crouch and moved slowly forward, two or three steps. It seemed to be stalking an invisible mouse. Abruptly, it turned tail and dashed for the woods.

It vanished among the trees.

Coraline wondered what the cat had meant.

She also wondered whether cats could all talk where she came from and just chose not to, or whether they could only talk when they were here—wherever here was.

She walked down the brick steps to the Misses Spink and Forcible’s front door. The blue and red lights flashed on and off.

The door was open, just slightly. She knocked on it, but her first knock made the door swing open, and Coraline went in.

She was in a dark room that smelled of dust and velvet. The door swung shut behind her, and the room was black. Coraline edged forward into a small anteroom. Her face brushed against something soft. It was cloth. She reached up her hand and pushed at the cloth. It parted.

She stood blinking on the other side of the velvet curtains, in a poorly lit theater. Far away, at the edge of the room, was a high wooden stage, empty and bare, a dim spotlight shining onto it from high above.

There were seats between Coraline and the stage. Rows and rows of seats. She heard a shuffling noise, and a light came toward her, swinging from side to side. When it was closer she saw the light was coming from a flashlight being carried in the mouth of a large black Scottie dog, its muzzle gray with age.

“Hello,” said Coraline.

The dog put the flashlight down on the floor, and looked up at her. “Right. Let’s see your ticket,” he said gruffly.

“Ticket?”

“That’s what I said. Ticket. I haven’t got all day, you know. You can’t watch the show without a ticket.” Coraline sighed. “I don’t have a ticket,” she admitted. “Another one,” said the dog gloomily. “Come in here, bold as anything. ’Where’s your ticket?’ ’Haven’t got one,’ I don’t know . . .” It shook its head, then shrugged. “Come on, then.”

He picked up the flashlight in his mouth and trotted off into the dark. Coraline followed him. When he got near the front of the stage he stopped and shone the flashlight onto an empty seat. Coraline sat down, and the dog wandered off.

As her eyes got used to the darkness she realized that the other inhabitants of the seats were also dogs.

There was a sudden hissing noise from behind the stage. Coraline decided it was the sound of a scratchy old record being put onto a record player. The hissing became the noise of trumpets, and Miss Spink and Miss Forcible came onto the stage.

Miss Spink was riding a one-wheeled bicycle and juggling balls. Miss Forcible skipped behind her, holding a basket of flowers. She scattered the flower petals across the stage as she went. They reached the front of the stage, and Miss Spink leaped nimbly off the unicycle, and the two old women bowed low.

All the dogs thumped their tails and barked enthusiastically. Coraline clapped politely.

Then they unbuttoned their fluffy round coats and opened them. But their coats weren’t all that opened: their faces opened, too, like empty shells, and out of the old empty fluffy round bodies stepped two young women. They were thin, and pale, and quite pretty, and had black button eyes.

The new Miss Spink was wearing green tights, and high brown boots that went most of the way up her legs. The new Miss Forcible wore a white dress and had flowers in her long yellow hair.

Coraline pressed back against her seat.

Miss Spink went off the stage, and the noise of trumpets squealed as the gramophone needle dug its way across the record, and was pulled off.

“This is my favorite bit,” whispered the little dog in the seat next to her.

The other Miss Forcible picked a knife out of a box on the corner of the stage. “Is this a dagger that I see before me?” she asked.

“Yes!” shouted all the little dogs.”It is!”

Miss Forcible curtsied, and all the dogs applauded again. Coraline didn’t bother clapping this time.

Miss Spink came back on. She slapped her thigh, and all the little dogs woofed.

“And now,” Miss Spink said, “Miriam and I proudly present a new and exciting addendum to our theatrical exposition. Do I see a volunteer?”

The little dog next to Coraline nudged her with its front paw. “That’s you,” it hissed.

Coraline stood up, and walked up the wooden steps to the stage.

“Can I have big round of applause for the young volunteer?” asked Miss Spink. The dogs woofed and squealed and thumped their tails on the velvet seats.

“Now Coraline,” said Miss Spink, “what’s your name?”

“Coraline,” said Coraline.

“And we don’t know each other, do we?”

Coraline looked at the thin young woman with black button eyes and shook her head slowly.

“Now,” said the other Miss Spink, “stand over here.” She led Coraline over to a board by the side of the stage, and put a balloon on top of Coraline’s head.

Miss Spink walked over to Miss Forcible. She blindfolded Miss Forcible’s button eyes with a black scarf, and put the knife into her hands. Then she turned her round three or four times and pointed her at Coraline. Coraline held her breath and squeezed her fingers into two tight fists.

Miss Forcible threw the knife at the balloon. It popped loudly, and the knife stuck into the board just above Coraline’s head and twanged there. Coraline breathed out.

The dogs went wild.

Miss Spink gave Coraline a very small box of chocolates and thanked her for being such a good sport. Coraline went back to her seat.

“You were very good,” said the little dog.

“Thank you,” said Coraline.

Miss Forcible and Miss Spink began juggling with huge wooden clubs. Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly.

“Would you like one?” she asked the little dog.

“Yes, please,” whispered the dog.”Only not toffee ones. They make me drool.”

“I thought chocolates weren’t very good for dogs,” she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her.

“Maybe where you come from,” whispered the little dog. “Here, it’s all we eat.”

Coraline couldn’t see what the chocolates were, in the dark. She took an experimental bite of one which turned out to be coconut. Coraline didn’t like coconut. She gave it to the dog.

“Thank you,” said the dog.

“You’re welcome,” said Coraline.

Miss Forcible and Miss Spink were doing some acting. Miss Forcible was sitting on a stepladder, and Miss Spink was standing at the bottom.

“What’s in a name?” asked Miss Forcible. “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

“Have you got any more chocolates?” said the dog.

Coraline gave the dog another chocolate.

“I know not how to tell thee who I am,” said Miss Spink to Miss Forcible.

“This bit finishes soon,” whispered the dog. “Then they start folk dancing.”

“How long does this go on for?” asked Coraline. “The theater?”

“All the time,” said the dog. “For ever and always.”

“Here,” said Coraline. “Keep the chocolates.”

“Thank you,” said the dog. Coraline stood up. “See you soon,” said the dog.

“Bye,” said Coraline. She walked out of the theater and back into the garden. She had to blink her eyes at the day light.

Her other parents were waiting for her in the garden, standing side by side. They were smiling.

“Did you have a nice time?” asked her other mother.

“It was interesting,” said Coraline.

The three of them walked back up to Coraline’s other house together. Coraline’s other mother stroked Coraline’s hair with her long white fingers. Coraline shook her head. “Don’t do that,” said Coraline.

Her other mother took her hand away.

“So,” said her other father. “Do you like it here?”

“I suppose,” said Coraline. “It’s much more interesting than at home.” They went inside.

“I’m glad you like it,” said Coraline’s mother. “Because we’d like to think that this is your home. You can stay here for ever and always. If you want to.”

“Hmm,” said Coraline. She put her hand in her pockets, and thought about it. Her hand touched the stone that the real Misses Spink and Forcible had given her the day before, the stone with the hole in it.

“If you want to stay,” said her other father, “there’s only one little thing we’ll have to do, so you can stay here for ever and always.”

They went into the kitchen. On a china plate on the kitchen table was a spool of black cotton, and a long silver needle, and, beside them, two large black buttons.

“I don’t think so,” said Coraline.

“Oh, but we want you to,” said her other mother. “We want you to stay. And it’s just a little thing.”

“It won’t hurt,” said her other father.

Coraline knew that when grown-ups told you something wouldn’t hurt it almost always did. She shook her head.

Her other mother smiled brightly and the hair on her head drifted like plants under the sea. “We only want what’s best for you,” she said.

She put her hand on Coraline’s shoulder. Coraline backed away.

“I’m going now,” said Coraline. She put her hands in her pockets. Her fingers closed around the stone with the hole in it.

Her other mother’s hand scuttled off Coraline’s shoulder like a frightened spider.

“If that’s what you want,” she said. “Yes,” said Coraline.

“We’ll see you soon, though,” said her other father. “When you come back.”

“Um,” said Coraline.

“And then we’ll all be together as one big happy family,” said her other mother. “For ever and always.”

Coraline backed away. She turned and hurried into the drawing room and pulled open the door in the corner. There was no brick wall there now—just darkness, a night-black underground darkness that seemed as if things in it might be moving.

Coraline hesitated. She turned back. Her other mother and her other father were walking toward her, holding hands. They were looking at her with their black button eyes. Or at least she thought they were looking at her. She couldn’t be sure.

Her other mother reached out her free hand and beckoned, gently, with one white finger. Her pale lips mouthed, “Come back soon,” although she said nothing aloud.

Coraline took a deep breath and stepped into the darkness, where strange voices whispered and distant winds howled. She became certain that there was something in the dark behind her: something very old and very slow. Her heart beat so hard and so loudly she was scared it would burst out of her chest. She closed her eyes against the dark.

Eventually she bumped into something, and opened her eyes, startled. She had bumped into an armchair, in her drawing room.

The open doorway behind her was blocked by rough red bricks.

She was home.

V.

Coraline locked the door of the drawing room with the cold black key.

She went back into the kitchen and climbed onto a chair. She tried to put the bunch of keys back on top of the doorframe again. She tried four or five times before she was forced to accept that she just wasn’t big enough, and she put them down on the counter next to the door.

Her mother still hadn’t returned from her shopping expedition.

Coraline went to the freezer and took out the spare loaf of frozen bread in the bottom compartment. She made herself some toast, with jam and peanut butter. She drank a glass of water.

She waited for her parents to come back. When it began to get dark, Coraline microwaved herself a frozen pizza.

Then Coraline watched television. She wondered why grown-ups gave themselves all the good programs, with all the shouting and running around in.

After a while she started yawning. Then she undressed, brushed her teeth, and put herself to bed.

In the morning she went into her parents’ room, but their bed hadn’t been slept in, and they weren’t around. She ate canned spaghetti for breakfast.

For lunch she had a block of cooking chocolate and an apple. The apple was yellow and slightly shriveled, but it tasted sweet and good.

For tea she went down to see Misses Spink and Forcible. She had three digestive biscuits, a glass of limeade, and a cup of weak tea. The limeade was very interesting. It didn’t taste anything like limes. It tasted bright green and vaguely chemical. Coraline liked it enormously. She wished they had it at home.

“How are your dear mother and father?” asked Miss Spink.

“Missing,” said Coraline. “I haven’t seen either of them since yesterday. I’m on my own. I think I’ve probably become a single child family.”

“Tell your mother that we found the Glasgow Empire press clippings we were telling her about. She seemed very interested when Miriam mentioned them to her.”

“She’s vanished under mysterious circumstances,” said Coraline, “and I believe my father has as well.”

“I’m afraid we’ll be out all day tomorrow, Caroline, luvvy,” said Miss Forcible. “We’ll be staying over with April’s niece in Royal Tunbridge Wells.”

They showed Coraline a photographic album, with photographs of Miss Spink’s niece in it, and then Coraline went home.

She opened her money box and walked down to the supermarket. She bought two large bottles of limeade, a chocolate cake, and a new bag of apples, and went back home and ate them for dinner.

She cleaned her teeth, and went into her father’s office. She woke up his computer and wrote a story.

CORALINE’S STORY.

THERE WAS A GIRL. HER NAME WAS APPLE. SHE USED TO DANCE A LOT. SHE DANCED AND DANCED UNTIL HER FEET TURND INTO SOSSAJES. THE END.

She printed out the story and turned off the computer. Then she drew a picture of the little girl dancing underneath the words on the paper.

She ran herself a bath with too much bubble bath in it, and the bubbles ran over the side and went all over the floor. She dried herself, and the floor as best she could, and went to bed.

Coraline woke up in the night. She went into her parents’ bedroom, but the bed was made and empty. The glowing green numbers on the digital clock glowed 3:12 a.m.

All alone, in the middle of the night, Coraline began to cry. There was no other sound in the empty flat.

She climbed into her parents’ bed, and, after a while, she went to sleep.

Coraline was woken by cold paws batting her face. She opened her eyes. Big green eyes stared back at her. It was the cat.

“Hullo,” said Coraline. “How did you get in?”

The cat didn’t say anything. Coraline got out of bed. She was wearing a long T-shirt and pajama bottoms.”Have you come to tell me something?”

The cat yawned, which made its eyes flash green.

“Do you know where Mummy and Daddy are?”

The cat blinked at her, slowly.

“Is that a yes?”

The cat blinked again. Coraline decided that that was indeed a yes. “Will you take me to them?”

The cat stared at her. Then it walked out into the hall. She followed it. It walked the length of the corridor and stopped down at the very end, where a full-length mirror hung. The mirror had been, a long time before, the inside of a wardrobe door. It had been hanging there on the wall when they moved in, and, although Coraline’s mother had spoken occasionally of replacing it with something newer, she never had.

Coraline turned on the light in the hall.

The mirror showed the corridor behind her; that was only to be expected. But reflected in the mirror were her parents. They stood awkwardly in the reflection of the hall. They seemed sad and alone. As Coraline watched, they waved to her, slowly, with limp hands. Coraline’s father had his arm around her mother.

In the mirror Coraline’s mother and father stared at her. Her father opened his mouth and said something, but she could hear nothing at all. Her mother breathed on the inside of the mirror glass, and quickly, before the fog faded, she wrote

with the tip of her forefinger. The fog on the inside of the mirror faded, and so did her parents, and now the mirror reflected only the corridor, and Coraline, and the cat.

“Where are they?” Coraline asked the cat. The cat made no reply, but Coraline could imagine its voice, dry as a dead fly on a windowsill in winter, saying Well, where do you think they are?

“They aren’t going to come back, are they?” said Coraline. “Not under their own steam.”

The cat blinked at her. Coraline took it as a yes.

“Right,” said Coraline. “Then I suppose there is only one thing left to do.”

She walked into her father’s study. She sat down at his desk. Then she picked up the telephone, and she opened the phone book and telephoned the local police station.

“Police,” said a gruff male voice.

“Hello,” she said. “My name is Coraline Jones.”

“You’re up a bit after your bedtime, aren’t you, young lady?” said the policeman.

“Possibly,” said Coraline, who was not going to be diverted, “but I am ringing to report a crime.”

“And what sort of crime would that be?”

“Kidnapping. Grown-up-napping really. My parents have been stolen away into a world on the other side of the mirror in our hall.”

“And do you know who stole them?” asked the police officer. Coraline could hear the smile in his voice, and she tried extra hard to sound like an adult might sound, to make him take her seriously.

“I think my other mother has them both in her clutches. She may want to keep them and sew their eyes with black buttons, or she may simply have them in order to lure me back into reach of her fingers. I’m not sure.”

“Ah. The nefarious clutches of her fiendish fingers, is it?” he said.”Mm. You know what I suggest, Miss Jones?”

“No” said Coraline. “What?”

“You ask your mother to make you a big old mug of hot chocolate, and then give you a great big old hug. There’s nothing like hot chocolate and a hug for making the nightmares go away. And if she starts to tell you off for waking her up at this time of night, why you tell her that that’s what the policeman said.” He had a deep, reassuring voice.

Coraline was not reassured.

“When I see her,” said Coraline, “I shall tell her that.” And she put down the telephone.

The black cat, who had sat on the floor, grooming his fur, through this entire conversation now stood up and led the way into the hall.

Coraline went back into her bedroom and put on her blue dressing gown and her slippers. She looked under the sink for a flashlight, and found one, but the batteries had long since run down, and it barely glowed with the faintest straw-colored light. She put it down again and found a box of in-case-of-emergency white wax candles, and thrust one into a candlestick. She put an apple into each pocket. She picked up the ring of keys and took the old black key off the ring.

She walked into the drawing room and looked at the door. She had the feeling that the door was looking at her, which she knew was silly, and knew on a deeper level was somehow true.

She went back into her bedroom, and rummaged in the pocket of her jeans. She found the stone with the hole in it, and put it into her dressing-gown pocket.

She lit the candlewick with a match and watched it sputter and light, then she picked up the black key. It was cold in her hand. She put it into the keyhole in the door, but did not turn the key.

“When I was a little girl,” said Coraline to the cat, “when we lived in our old house, a long, long time ago, my dad took me for a walk on the wasteland between our house and the shops.

“It wasn’t the best place to go for a walk, really. There were all these things that people had thrown away back there—old cookers and broken dishes and dolls with no arms and no legs and empty cans and broken bottles. Mum and Dad made me promise not to go exploring back there, because there were too many sharp things, and tetanus and such.

“But I kept telling them I wanted to explore it. So one day my dad put on his big brown boots and his gloves and put my boots on me and my jeans and sweater, and we went for a walk.

“We must have walked for about twenty minutes. We went down this hill, to the bottom of a gully where a stream was, when my dad suddenly said to me, “Coraline— run away. Up the hill. Now!” He said it in a tight sort of way, urgently, so I did. I ran away up the hill. Something hurt me on the back of my arm as I ran, but I kept running.

“As I got to the top of the hill I heard somebody thundering up the hill behind me. It was my dad, charging like a rhino. When he reached me he picked me up in his arms and swept me over the edge of the hill.

“And then we stopped and we puffed and we panted, and we looked back down the gully.

“The air was alive with yellow wasps. We must have stepped on a wasps’ nest in a rotten branch as we walked. And while I was running up the hill, my dad stayed and got stung, to give me time to run away. His glasses had fallen off when he ran.

“I only had the one sting on the back of my arm. He had thirty-nine stings, all over him. We counted later, in the bath.”

The black cat began to wash its face and whiskers in a manner that indicated increasing impatience. Coraline reached down and stroked the back of its head and neck. The cat stood up, walked several paces until it was out of her reach, then it sat down and looked up at her again.

“So,” said Coraline, “later that afternoon my dad went back again to the wasteland, to get his glasses back. He said if he left it another day he wouldn’t be able to remember where they’d fallen.

“And soon he got home, wearing his glasses. He said that he wasn’t scared when he was standing there and the wasps were stinging him and hurting him and he was watching me run away. Because he knew he had to give me enough time to run, or the wasps would have come after both of us.”

Coraline turned the key in the door. It turned with a loud clunk.

The door swung open.

There was no brick wall on the other side of the door: only darkness. A cold wind blew through the passageway. Coraline made no move to walk through the door. “And he said that wasn’t brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,” said Coraline to the cat. “It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.”

She took her first step down the dark corridor. She could smell dust and damp and mustiness. The cat padded along beside her.

“And why was that?” asked the cat, although it sounded barely interested.

“Because,” she said, “when you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.”

The candle cast huge, strange, flickering shadows along the wall. She heard something moving in the darkness— beside her or to one side of her, she could not tell. It seemed as if it was keeping pace with her, whatever it was.

“And that’s why you’re going back to her world, then?” said the cat. “Because your father once saved you from wasps?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Coraline. “I’m going back for them because they are my parents. And if they noticed I was gone I’m sure they would do the same for me. You know you’re talking again?”

“How fortunate I am,” said the cat, “in having a traveling companion of such wisdom and intelligence.” Its tone remained sarcastic, but its fur was bristling, and its brush of a tail stuck up in the air.

Coraline was going to say something, like sorry or wasn’t it a lot shorter walk last time? when the candle went out as suddenly as if it had been snuffed by someone’s hand.

There was a scrabbling and a pattering, and Coraline could feel her heart pounding against her ribs. She put out one hand . . . and felt something wispy, like a spider’s web, brush her hands and her face.

At the end of the corridor the electric light went on, blinding after the darkness. A woman stood, silhouetted by the light, a little ahead of Coraline.

“Coraline? Darling?” she called.

“Mum!” said Coraline, and she ran forward, eager and relieved.

“Darling,” said the woman. “Why did you ever run away from me?”

Coraline was too close to stop, and she felt the other mother’s cold arms enfold her. She stood there, rigid and trembling as the other mother held her tightly.

“Where are my parents?” Coraline asked.

“We’re here,” said her other mother, in a voice so close to her real mother’s that Coraline could scarcely tell them apart. “We’re here. We’re ready to love you and play with you and feed you and make your life interesting.”

Coraline pulled back, and the other mother let her go, with reluctance.

The other father, who had been sitting on a chair in the hallway, stood up and smiled.”Come on into the kitchen,” he said. “I’ll make us a midnight snack. And you’ll want something to drink—hot chocolate perhaps?”

Coraline walked down the hallway until she reached the mirror at the end. There was nothing reflected in it but a young girl in her dressing gown and slippers, who looked like she had recently been crying but whose eyes were real eyes, not black buttons, and who was holding tightly to a burned-out candle in a candlestick.

She looked at the girl in the mirror and the girl in the mirror looked back at her.

I will be brave, thought Coraline. No, I am brave.

She put down the candlestick on the floor, then turned around. The other mother and the other father were looking at her hungrily

“I don’t need a snack,” she said. “I have an apple. See?” And she took an apple from her dressing-gown pocket, then bit into it with relish and an enthusiasm that she did not really feel.

The other father looked disappointed. The other mother smiled, showing a full set of teeth, and each of the teeth was a tiny bit too long. The lights in the hallway made her black button eyes glitter and gleam.

“You don’t frighten me,” said Coraline, although they did frighten her, very much. “I want my parents back.”

The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.

“Whatever would I have done with your old parents? If they have left you, Coraline, it must be because they became bored of you, or tired. Now, I will never become bored of you, and I will never abandon you. You will always be safe here with me.” The other mother’s wet-looking black hair drifted around her head, like the tentacles of a creature in the deep ocean.

“They weren’t bored of me,” said Coraline. “You’re lying. You stole them.”

“Silly, silly Coraline. They are fine wherever they are.”

Coraline simply glared at the other mother.

“I’ll prove it,” said the other mother, and brushed the surface of the mirror with her long white fingers. It clouded over, as if a dragon had breathed on it, and then it cleared.

In the mirror it was daytime already. Coraline was looking at the hallway, all the way down to her front door. The door opened from the outside and Coraline’s mother and father walked inside. They carried suitcases.

“That was a fine holiday,” said Coraline’s father.

“How nice it is, not to have Coraline any more,” said her mother with a happy smile.”Now we can do all the things we always wanted to do, like go abroad, but were prevented from doing by having a little daughter.”

“And,” said her father, “I take great comfort in knowing that her other mother will take better care of her than we ever could.”

The mirror fogged and faded and reflected the night once more.

“See?” said her other mother.

“No,” said Coraline. “I don’t see. And I don’t believe it either”

She hoped that what she had just seen was not real, but she was not as certain as she sounded. There was a tiny doubt inside her, like a maggot in an apple core. Then she looked up and saw the expression on her other mother’s face: a flash of real anger, which crossed her face like summer lightning, and Coraline was sure in her heart that what she had seen in the mirror was no more than an illusion.

Coraline sat down on the sofa and ate her apple.

“Please,” said her other mother. “Don’t be difficult.” She walked into the drawing room and clapped her hands twice. There was a rustling noise and a black rat appeared. It stared up at her. “Bring me the key,” she said.

The rat chittered, then it ran through the open door that led back to Coraline’s own flat.

The rat returned, dragging the key behind it.

“Why don’t you have your own key on this side?” asked Coraline.

“There is only one key. Only one door,” said the other father.

“Hush,” said the other mother. “You must not bother our darling Coraline’s head with such trivialities.” She put the key in the keyhole and twisted. The lock was stiff, but it clunked closed.

She dropped the key into her apron pocket.

Outside, the sky had begun to lighten to a luminous gray.

“If we aren’t going to have a midnight snack,” said the other mother, “we still need our beauty sleep. I am going back to bed, Coraline. I would strongly suggest that you do the same.”

She placed her long white fingers on the shoulders of the other father, and she walked him out of the room.

Coraline walked over to the door at the far corner of the drawing room. She tugged on it, but it was tightly locked. The door of her other parents’ bedroom was now closed.

She was indeed tired, but she did not want to sleep in the bedroom. She did not want to sleep under the same roof as her other mother.

The front door was not locked. Coraline walked out into the dawn and down the stone stairs. She sat down on the bottom step. It was cold.

Something furry pushed itself against her side in one smooth, insinuating motion. Coraline jumped, then breathed a sigh of relief when she saw what it was.

“Oh. It’s you,” she said to the black cat.

“See?” said the cat. “It wasn’t so hard recognizing me, was it? Even without names.”

“Well, what if I wanted to call you?”

The cat wrinkled its nose and managed to look unimpressed. “Calling cats,” it confided, “tends to be a rather overrated activity. Might as well call a whirlwind.”

“What if it was dinnertime?” asked Coraline.”Wouldn’t you want to be called then?”

“Of course,” said the cat. “But a simple cry of ’dinner!’ would do nicely. See? No need for names.”

“Why does she want me?” Coraline asked the cat.”Why does she want me to stay here with her?”

“She wants something to love, I think,” said the cat. “Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with creatures like that.”

“Do you have any advice?” asked Coraline.

The cat looked as if it were about to say something else sarcastic. Then it flicked its whiskers and said, “Challenge her. There’s no guarantee she’ll play fair, but her kind of thing loves games and challenges.”

“What kind of thing is that?” asked Coraline.

But the cat made no answer, simply stretched luxuriantly and walked away. Then it stopped, and turned, and said, “I’d go inside if I were you. Get some sleep. You have a long day ahead of you.”

And then the cat was gone. Still, Coraline realized, it had a point. She crept back into the silent house, past the closed bedroom door inside which the other mother and the other father . . . what? she wondered. Slept? Waited? And then it came to her that, should she open the bedroom door she would find it empty, or more precisely, that it was an empty room and it would remain empty until the exact moment that she opened the door.

Somehow, that made it easier. Coraline walked into the green-and-pink parody of her own bedroom. She closed the door and hauled the toy box in front of it—it would not keep anyone out, but the noise somebody would make trying to dislodge it would wake her, she hoped.

The toys in the toy box were still mostly asleep, and they stirred and muttered as she moved their box, and then they went back to sleep. Coraline checked under her bed, looking for rats, but there was nothing there. She took off her dressing gown and slippers and climbed into bed and fell asleep with barely enough time to reflect, as she did so, on what the cat could have meant by a challenge.

VI.

Coraline was woken by the midmorning sun, full on her face.

For a moment she felt utterly dislocated. She did not know where she was; she was not entirely sure who she was. It is astonishing just how much of what we are can be tied to the beds we wake up in in the morning, and it is astonishing how fragile that can be.

Sometimes Coraline would forget who she was while she was daydreaming that she was exploring the Arctic, or the Amazon rain forest, or Darkest Africa, and it was not until someone tapped her on the shoulder or said her name that Coraline would come back from a million miles away with a start, and all in a fraction of a second have to remember who she was, and what her name was, and that she was even there at all.

Now there was sun on her face, and she was Coraline Jones. Yes. And then the green and pinkness of the room she was in, and the rustling of a large painted paper butterfly as it fluttered and beat its way about the ceiling, told her where she had woken up.

She climbed out of the bed. She could not wear her pajamas, dressing gown, and slippers during the day, she decided, even if it meant wearing the other Coraline’s clothes. (Was there an other Coraline? No, she realized, there wasn’t. There was just her.) There were no regular clothes in the cupboard, though. They were more like dressing-up clothes or (she thought) the kind of clothes she would love to have hanging in her own wardrobe at home: there was a raggedy witch costume; a patched scarecrow costume; a future-warrior costume with little digital lights in it that glittered and blinked; a slinky evening dress all covered in feathers and mirrors. Finally, in a drawer, she found a pair of black jeans that seemed to be made of velvet night, and a gray sweater the color of thick smoke with faint and tiny stars in the fabric which twinkled.

She pulled on the jeans and the sweater. Then she put on a pair of bright orange boots she found at the bottom of the cupboard.

She took her last apple out of the pocket of her dressing gown and then took, from the same pocket, the stone with the hole in it.

She put the stone into the pocket of her jeans, and it was as if her head had cleared a little. As if she had come out of some sort of a fog.

She went into the kitchen, but it was deserted.

Still, she was sure that there was someone in the flat. She walked down the hall until she reached her father’s study, and discovered that it was occupied.

“Where’s the other mother?” she asked the other father. He was sitting in the study, at a desk which looked just like her father’s, but he was not doing anything at all, not even reading gardening catalogs as her own father did when he was only pretending to be working.

“Out,” he told her. “Fixing the doors. There are some vermin problems.” He seemed pleased to have somebody to talk to.

“The rats, you mean?”

“No, the rats are our friends. This is the other kind. Big black fellow, with his tail high.”

“The cat, you mean?”

“That’s the one,” said her other father.

He looked less like her true father today. There was something slightly vague about his face—like bread dough that had begun to rise, smoothing out the bumps and cracks and depressions.

“Really, I mustn’t talk to you when she’s not here,” he said. “But don’t you worry. She won’t be gone often. I shall demonstrate our tender hospitality to you, such that you will not even think about ever going back.” He closed his mouth and folded his hands in his lap.

“So what am I to do now?” asked Coraline.

The other father pointed to his lips. Silence.

“If you won’t even talk to me,” said Coraline, “I am going exploring.”

“No point,” said the other father.”There isn’t anywhere but here. This is all she made: the house, the grounds, and the people in the house. She made it and she waited.” Then he looked embarrassed and he put one finger to his lips again, as if he had just said too much.

Coraline walked out of his study. She went into the drawing room, over to the old door, and she pulled it, rattled and shook it. No, it was locked fast, and the other mother had the key.

She looked around the room. It was so familiar—that was what made it feel so truly strange. Everything was exactly the same as she remembered: there was all her grandmother’s strange-smelling furniture, there was the painting of the bowl of fruit (a bunch of grapes, two plums, a peach and an apple) hanging on the wall, there was the low wooden table with the lion’s feet, and the empty fireplace which seemed to suck heat from the room.

But there was something else, something she did not remember seeing before. A ball of glass, up on the mantelpiece.

She went over to the fireplace, went up on tiptoes, and lifted it down. It was a snow globe, with two little people in it. Coraline shook it and set the snow flying, white snow that glittered as it tumbled through the water.

Then she put the snow globe back on the mantelpiece, and carried on looking for her true parents and for a way out.

She went out of the flat. Past the flashing-lights door, behind which the other Misses Spink and Forcible performed their show forever, and she set off into the woods.

Where Coraline came from, once you were through the patch of trees, you saw nothing but the meadow and the old tennis court. In this place, the woods went on farther, the trees becoming cruder and less treelike the farther you went.

Pretty soon they seemed very approximate, like the idea of trees: a grayish-brown trunk below, a greenish splodge of something that might have been leaves above.

Coraline wondered if the other mother wasn’t interested in trees, or if she just hadn’t bothered with this bit properly because nobody was expected to come out this far. She kept walking. And then the mist began.

It was not damp, like a normal fog or mist. It was not cold and it was not warm. It felt to Coraline like she was walking into nothing.

I’m an explorer, thought Coraline to herself. And I need all the ways out of here that I can get. So I shall keep walking.

The world she was walking through was a pale nothingness, like a blank sheet of paper or an enormous, empty white room. It had no temperature, no smell, no texture, and no taste.

It certainly isn’t mist, thought Coraline, although she did not know what it was. For a moment she wondered if she might not have gone blind. But no, she could see herself, plain as day. But there was no ground beneath her feet, just a misty, milky whiteness.

“And what do you think you’re doing?” said a shape to one side of her.

It took a few moments for her eyes to focus on it properly: she thought it might be some kind of lion, at first, some distance away from her; and then she thought it might be a mouse, close beside her. And then she knew what it was.

“I’m exploring,” Coraline told the cat.

Its fur stood straight out from its body and its eyes were wide, while its tail was down and between its legs. It did not look a happy cat.

“Bad place,” said the cat. “If you want to call it a place, which I don’t. What are you doing here?”

“I’m exploring.”

“Nothing to find here,” said the cat.”This is just the outside, the part of the place she hasn’t bothered to create.”

“She?”

“The one who says she’s your other mother,” said the cat. “What is she?” asked Coraline.

The cat did not answer, just padded through the pale mist beside Coraline.

A shape began to appear in front of them, something high and towering and dark.

“You were wrong!” she told the cat.”There is something there!”

And then it took shape in the mist: a dark house, which loomed at them out of the formless whiteness. “But that’s—” said Coraline.

“The house you just left,” agreed the cat. “Precisely.”

“Maybe I just got turned around in the mist,” said Coraline.

The cat curled the high tip of its tail into a question mark, and tipped its head to one side. “You might have done,” it said. “I certainly would not. Wrong, indeed.”

“But how can you walk away from something and still come back to it?”

“Easy,” said the cat.”Think of somebody walking around the world. You start out walking away from something and end up coming back to it.”

“Small world,” said Coraline.

“It’s big enough for her,” said the cat. “Spiders’ webs only have to be large enough to catch flies.” Coraline shivered.

“He said that she’s fixing all the gates and the doors,” she told the cat, “to keep you out.”

“She may try,” said the cat, unimpressed. “Oh yes. She may try.” They were standing under a clump of trees now, beside the house. These trees looked much more likely. “There’s ways in and ways out of places like this that even she doesn’t know about.”

“Did she make this place, then?” asked Coraline.

“Made it, found it—what’s the difference?” asked the cat. “Either way, she’s had it a very long time. Hang on—”And it gave a shiver and a leap and before Coraline could blink the cat was sitting with its paw holding down a big black rat.”It’s not that I like rats at the best of times,” said the cat, conversationally, as if nothing had happened, “but the rats in this place are all spies for her. She uses them as her eyes and hands . . .”And with that the cat let the rat go.

It ran several feet and then the cat, with one bound, was upon it, batting it hard with one sharp-clawed paw, while with the other paw it held the rat down. “I love this bit,” said the cat, happily. “Want to see me do that again?”

“No,” said Coraline. “Why do you do it? You’re torturing it”

“Mm,” said the cat. It let the rat go.

The rat stumbled, dazed, for a few steps, then it began to run. With a blow of its paw, the cat knocked the rat into the air, and caught it in its mouth.

“Stop it!” said Coraline.

The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. “There are those,” it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, “who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one—after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to escape?”

And then it picked the rat up in its mouth and carried it off into the woods, behind a tree.

Coraline walked back into the house.

All was quiet and empty and deserted. Even her footsteps on the carpeted floor seemed loud. Dust motes hung in a beam of sunlight.

At the far end of the hall was the mirror. She could see herself walking toward the mirror, looking, reflected, a little braver than she actually felt. There was nothing else there in the mirror. Just her, in the corridor.

A hand touched her shoulder, and she looked up. The other mother stared down at Coraline with big black button eyes.

“Coraline, my darling,” she said. “I thought we could play some games together this morning, now you’re back from your walk. Hopscotch? Happy Families? Monopoly?”

“You weren’t in the mirror,” said Coraline.

The other mother smiled.”Mirrors,” she said, “are never to be trusted. Now, what game shall we play?”

Coraline shook her head. “I don’t want to play with you,” she said.”I want to go home and be with my real parents. I want you to let them go. To let us all go.”

The other mother shook her head, very slowly.”Sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” she said, “is a daughter’s ingratitude. Still, the proudest spirit can be broken, with love.” And her long white fingers waggled and caressed the air.

“I have no plans to love you,” said Coraline.”No matter what. You can’t make me love you.”

“Let’s talk about it,” said the other mother, and she turned and walked into the lounge. Coraline followed her.

The other mother sat down on the big sofa. She picked up a shopping bag from beside the sofa and took out a white, rustling, paper bag from inside it.

She extended the hand with it to Coraline. “Would you like one?” she asked politely.

Expecting it to be a toffee or a butterscotch ball, Coraline looked down. The bag was half filled with large shiny blackbeetles, crawling over each other in their efforts to get out of the bag.

“No,” said Coraline. “I don’t want one.”

“Suit yourself,” said her other mother. She carefully picked out a particularly large and black beetle, pulled off its legs (which she dropped, neatly, into a big glass ashtray on the small table beside the sofa), and popped the beetle into her mouth. She crunched it happily. “Yum,” she said, and took another. “You’re sick,” said Coraline.”Sick and evil and weird.”

“Is that any way to talk to your mother?” her other mother asked, with her mouth full of blackbeetles. “You aren’t my mother,” said Coraline. Her other mother ignored this. “Now, I think you are a little overexcited, Coraline. Perhaps this afternoon we could do a little embroidery together, or some watercolor painting. Then dinner, and then, if you have been good, you may play with the rats a little before bed. And I shall read you a story and tuck you in, and kiss you good night.” Her long white fingers fluttered gently, like a tired butterfly, and Coraline shivered. “No,” said Coraline.

The other mother sat on the sofa. Her mouth was set in a line; her lips were pursed. She popped another blackbeetle into her mouth and then another, like someone with a bag of chocolate-covered raisins. Her big black button eyes stared into Coraline’s hazel eyes. Her shiny black hair twined and twisted about her neck and shoulders, as if it were blowing in some wind that Coraline could not touch or feel.

They stared at each other for over a minute. Then the other mother said, “Manners!” She folded the white paper bag carefully so no blackbeetles could escape, and she placed it back in the shopping bag. Then she stood up, and up, and up: she seemed taller than Coraline remembered. She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out, first the black door key, which she frowned at and tossed into her shopping bag, then a tiny silver-colored key. She held it up triumphantly. “There we are,” she said. “This is for you, Coraline. For your own good. Because I love you. To teach you manners. Manners makyth man, after all.”

She pulled Coraline back into the hallway and advanced upon the mirror at the end of the hall. Then she pushed the tiny key into the fabric of the mirror, and she twisted it.

It opened like a door, revealing a dark space behind it. “You may come out when you’ve learned some manners,” said the other mother. “And when you’re ready to be a loving daughter.”

She picked Coraline up and pushed her into the dim space behind the mirror. A fragment of beetle was sticking to her lower lip, and there was no expression at all in her black button eyes.

Then she swung the mirror door closed, and left Coraline in darkness.

VII.

Somewhere inside her Coraline could feel a huge sob welling up. And then she stopped it, before it came out. She took a deep breath and let it go. She put out her hands to touch the space in which she was imprisoned. It was the size of a broom closet: tall enough to stand in or to sit in, not wide or deep enough to lie down in.

One wall was glass, and it felt cold to the touch.

She went around the tiny room a second time, running her hands over every surface that she could reach, feeling for doorknobs or switches or concealed catches—some kind of way out—and found nothing.

A spider scuttled over the back of her hand and she choked back a shriek. But apart from the spider she was alone in the closet in the pitch dark.

And then her hand touched something that felt for all the world like somebody’s cheek and lips, small and cold; and a voice whispered in her ear, “Hush! And shush! Say nothing, for the beldam might be listening!”

Coraline said nothing.

She felt a cold hand touch her face, fingers running over it like the gentle beat of a moth’s wings.

Another voice, hesitant and so faint Coraline wondered if she were imagining it, said, “Art thou—art thou alive?”

“Yes,” whispered Coraline.

“Poor child,” said the first voice.

“Who are you?” whispered Coraline.

“Names, names, names,” said another voice, all faraway and lost. “The names are the first things to go, after the breath has gone, and the beating of the heart. We keep our memories longer than our names. I still keep pictures in my mind of my governess on some May morning, carrying my hoop and stick, and the morning sun behind her, and all the tulips bobbing in the breeze. But I have forgotten the name of my governess, and of the tulips too.”

“I don’t think tulips have names,” said Coraline.”They’re just tulips.”

“Perhaps,” said the voice, sadly. “But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the embers in the nursery fire of a winter’s evening. I remember them.”

The voice sounded so sad that Coraline put out a hand to the place where the voice was coming from, and she found a cold hand, and she squeezed it tightly.

Her eyes were beginning to get used to the darkness. Now Coraline saw, or imagined she saw, three shapes, each as faint and pale as the moon in the daytime sky. They were the shapes of children about her own size. The cold hand squeezed her hand back. “Thank you,” said the voice. “Are you a girl?” asked Coraline. “Or a boy?” There was a pause. “When I was small I wore skirts and my hair was long and curled,” it said, doubtfully. “But now that you ask, it does seem to me that one day they took my skirts and gave me britches and cut my hair.”

“’Tain’t something we give a mind to,” said the first of the voices.

“A boy, perhaps, then,” continued the one whose hand she was holding.”I believe I was once a boy.”And it glowed a little more brightly in the darkness of the room behind the mirror.

“What happened to you all?” asked Coraline.”How did you come here?”

“She left us here,” said one of the voices.”She stole our hearts, and she stole our souls, and she took our lives away, and she left us here, and she forgot about us in the dark.”

“You poor things,” said Coraline. “How long have you been here?”

“So very long a time,” said a voice. “Aye. Time beyond reckoning,” said another voice.

“I walked through the scullery door,” said the voice of the one that thought it might be a boy, “and I found myself back in the parlor. But she was waiting for me. She told me she was my other mamma, but I never saw my true mamma again.”

“Flee!” said the very first of the voices—another girl, Coraline fancied. “Flee, while there’s still air in your lungs and blood in your veins and warmth in your heart. Flee while you still have your mind and your soul.”

“I’m not running away,” said Coraline.”She has my parents. I came to get them back.”

“Ah, but she’ll keep you here while the days turn to dust and the leaves fall and the years pass one after the next like the tick-tick-ticking of a clock.”

“No,” said Coraline.”She won’t.”

There was silence then in the room behind the mirror.

“Peradventure,” said a voice in the darkness, “if you could win your mamma and your papa back from the beldam, you could also win free our souls.”

“Has she taken them?” asked Coraline, shocked.

“Aye. And hidden them.”

“That is why we could not leave here, when we died. She kept us, and she fed on us, until now we’ve nothing left of ourselves, only snakeskins and spider husks. Find our secret hearts, young mistress.”

“And what will happen to you if I do?” asked Coraline. The voices said nothing.

“And what is she going to do to me?” she said.

The pale figures pulsed faintly; she could imagine that they were nothing more than afterimages, like the glow left by a bright light in your eyes, after the lights go out.

“It doth not hurt,” whispered one faint voice.

“She will take your life and all you are and all you care’st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She’ll take your joy. And one day you’ll awake and your heart and your soul will have gone. A husk you’ll be, a wisp you’ll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.”

“Hollow,” whispered the third voice. “Hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow.”

“You must flee,” sighed a voice faintly.

“I don’t think so,” said Coraline. “I tried running away, and it didn’t work. She just took my parents. Can you tell me how to get out of this room?”

“If we knew then we would tell you.”

“Poor things,” said Coraline to herself.

She sat down. She took off her sweater and rolled it up and put it behind her head as a pillow. “She won’t keep me in the dark forever,” said Coraline. “She brought me here to play games. Games and challenges, the cat said. I’m not much of a challenge here in the dark.” She tried to get comfortable, twisting and bending herself to fit the cramped space behind the mirror.

Her stomach rumbled. She ate her last apple, taking the tiniest bites, making it last as long as she could. When she had finished she was still hungry.

Then an idea struck her, and she whispered, “When she comes to let me out, why don’t you three come with me?”

“We wish that we could,” they sighed to her, in their barely-there voices. “But she has our hearts in her keeping. Now we belong to the dark and to the empty places. The light would shrivel us, and burn.”

“Oh,” said Coraline.

She closed her eyes, which made the darkness darker, and she rested her head on the rolled-up sweater, and she went to sleep. And as she fell asleep she thought she felt a ghost kiss her cheek, tenderly, and a small voice whisper into her ear, a voice so faint it was barely there at all, a gentle wispy nothing of a voice so hushed that Coraline could almost believe she was imagining it. “Look through the stone,” it said to her.

And then she slept.

VIII.

The other mother looked healthier than before: there was a little blush to her cheeks, and her hair was wriggling like lazy snakes on a warm day. Her black button eyes seemed as if they had been freshly polished.

She had pushed through the mirror as if she were walking through nothing more solid than water and had stared down at Coraline. Then she had opened the door with the little silver key. She picked Coraline up, just as Coraline’s real mother had when Coraline was much younger, cradling the half-sleeping child as if she were a baby.

The other mother carried Coraline into the kitchen and put her down very gently upon the countertop.

Coraline struggled to wake herself up, conscious only for the moment of having been cuddled and loved, and wanting more of it, then realizing where she was and who she was with.

“There, my sweet Coraline,” said her other mother. “I came and fetched you out of the cupboard. You needed to be taught a lesson, but we temper our justice with mercy here; we love the sinner and we hate the sin. Now, if you will be a good child who loves her mother, be compliant and fair-spoken, you and I shall understand each other perfectly and we shall love each other perfectly as well.”

Coraline scratched the sleep grit from her eyes.

“There were other children in there,” she said. “Old ones, from a long time ago.”

“Were there?” said the other mother. She was bustling between the pans and the fridge, bringing out eggs and cheeses, butter and a slab of sliced pink bacon.

“Yes,” said Coraline. “There were. I think you’re planning to turn me into one of them. A dead shell.”

Her other mother smiled gently. With one hand she cracked the eggs into a bowl; with the other she whisked them and whirled them. Then she dropped a pat of butter into a frying pan, where it hissed and fizzled and spun as she sliced thin slices of cheese. She poured the melted butter and the cheese into the egg-mixture, and whisked it some more.

“Now, I think you’re being silly, dear,” said the other mother. “I love you. I will always love you. Nobody sensible believes in ghosts anyway—that’s because they’re all such liars. Smell the lovely breakfast I’m making for you.” She poured the yellow mixture into the pan. “Cheese omelette. Your favorite.”

Coraline’s mouth watered. “You like games,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been told.”

The other mother’s black eyes flashed. “Everybody likes games,” was all she said.

“Yes,” said Coraline. She climbed down from the counter and sat at the table.

The bacon was sizzling and spitting under the grill. It smelled wonderful.

“Wouldn’t you be happier if you won me, fair and square?” asked Coraline.

“Possibly,” said the other mother. She had a show of unconcernedness, but her fingers twitched and drummed and she licked her lips with her scarlet tongue. “What exactly are you offering?”

“Me,” said Coraline, and she gripped her knees under the table, to stop them from shaking.”If I lose I’ll stay here with you forever and I’ll let you love me. I’ll be a most dutiful daughter. I’ll eat your food and play Happy Families. And I’ll let you sew your buttons into my eyes.”

Her other mother stared at her, black buttons unblinking. “That sounds very fine,” she said. “And if you do not lose?”

“Then you let me go. You let everyone go—my real father and mother, the dead children, everyone you’ve trapped here.”

The other mother took the bacon from under the grill and put it on a plate. Then she slipped the cheese omelette from the pan onto the plate, flipping it as she did so, letting it fold itself into a perfect omelette shape.

She placed the breakfast plate in front of Coraline, along with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice and a mug of frothy hot chocolate.

“Yes,” she said. “I think I like this game. But what kind of game shall it be? A riddle game? A test of knowledge or of skill?

“An exploring game,” suggested Coraline. “A finding-things game.”

“And what is it you think you should be finding in this hide-and-go-seek game, Coraline Jones?”

Coraline hesitated. Then, “My parents,” said Coraline. “And the souls of the children behind the mirror.”

The other mother smiled at this, triumphantly, and Coraline wondered if she had made the right choice. Still, it was too late to change her mind now.

“A deal,” said the other mother. “Now eat up your breakfast, my sweet. Don’t worry—it won’t hurt you.”

Coraline stared at the breakfast, hating herself for giving in so easily, but she was starving.

“How do I know you’ll keep your word?” asked Coraline.

“I swear it,” said the other mother. “I swear it on my own mother’s grave.”

“Does she have a grave?” asked Coraline.

“Oh yes,” said the other mother. “I put her in there myself. And when I found her trying to crawl out, I put her back.”

“Swear on something else. So I can trust you to keep your word.”

“My right hand,” said the other mother, holding it up. She waggled the long fingers slowly, displaying the clawlike nails. “I swear on that.”

Coraline shrugged.”Okay,” she said.”It’s a deal.” She ate the breakfast, trying not to wolf it down. She was hungrier than she had thought.

As she ate, her other mother stared at her. It was hard to read expressions into those black button eyes, but Coraline thought that her other mother looked hungry, too.

She drank the orange juice, but even though she knew she would like it she could not bring herself to taste the hot chocolate.

“Where should I start looking?” asked Coraline.

“Where you wish,” said her other mother, as if she did not care at all.

Coraline looked at her, and Coraline thought hard. There was no point, she decided, in exploring the garden and the grounds: they didn’t exist; they weren’t real. There was no abandoned tennis court in the other mother’s world, no bottomless well. All that was real was the house itself.

She looked around the kitchen. She opened the oven, peered into the freezer, poked into the salad compartment of the fridge. The other mother followed her about, looking at Coraline with a smirk always hovering at the edge of her lips.

“How big are souls anyway?” asked Coraline.

The other mother sat down at the kitchen table and leaned back against the wall, saying nothing. She picked at her teeth with a long crimson-varnished fingernail, then she tapped the finger, gently, tap-tap-tap against the polished black surface of her black button eyes.

“Fine,” said Coraline. “Don’t tell me. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if you help me or not. Everyone knows that a soul is the same size as a beach ball.”

She was hoping the other mother would say something like “Nonsense, they’re the size of ripe onions—or suit-cases—or grandfather clocks,” but the other mother simply smiled, and the tap-tap-tapping of her fingernail against her eye was as steady and relentless as the drip of water droplets from the faucet into the sink. And then, Coraline realized, it was simply the noise of the water, and she was alone in the room.

Coraline shivered. She preferred the other mother to have a location: if she were nowhere, then she could be anywhere. And, after all, it is always easier to be afraid of something you cannot see. She put her hands into her pockets and her fingers closed around the reassuring shape of the stone with the hole in it. She pulled it out of her pocket, held it in front of her as if she were holding a gun, and walked out into the hall.

There was no sound but the tap-tap of the water dripping into the metal sink.

She glanced at the mirror at the end of the hall. For a moment it clouded over, and it seemed to her that faces swam in the glass, indistinct and shapeless, and then the faces were gone, and there was nothing in the mirror but a girl who was small for her age holding something that glowed gently, like a green coal.

Coraline looked down at her hand, surprised: it was just a stone with a hole in it, a nondescript brown pebble. Then she looked back into the mirror where the stone glimmered like an emerald. A trail of green fire blew from the pebble in the mirror and drifted toward Coraline’s bedroom.

“Hmm,” said Coraline.

She walked into the bedroom. The toys fluttered excitedly as she walked in, as if they were pleased to see her, and a little tank rolled out of the toy box to greet her, its tread rolling over several other toys. It fell from the toy box onto the floor, tipping as it fell, and it lay on the carpet like a beetle on its back, grumbling and grinding its treads before Coraline picked it up and turned it over. The tank fled under the bed in embarrassment.

Coraline looked around the room.

She looked in the cupboards, and the drawers. Then she picked up one end of the toy box and tipped all the toys in it out onto the carpet, where they grumbled and stretched and wiggled awkwardly free of each other. A gray marble rolled across the floor and clicked against the wall. None of the toys looked particularly soul-like, she thought. She picked up and examined a silver charm bracelet from which hung tiny animal charms that chased each other around the perimeter of the bracelet, the fox never catching the rabbit, the bear never gaining on the fox.

Coraline opened her hand and looked at the stone with the hole in it, hoping for a clue but not finding one. Most of the toys that had been in the toy box had now crawled away to hide under the bed, and the few toys that were left (a green plastic soldier, the glass marble, a vivid pink yo-yo, and such) were the kind of things you find in the bottoms of toy boxes in the real world: forgotten objects, abandoned and unloved.

She was about to leave and look elsewhere. And then she remembered a voice in the darkness, a gentle whispering voice, and what it had told her to do. She raised the stone with a hole in it and held it in front of her right eye. She closed her left eye and looked at the room through the hole in the stone.

Through the stone, the world was gray and colorless, like a pencil drawing. Everything in it was gray—no, not quite everything: something glinted on the floor, something the color of an ember in a nursery fireplace, the color of a scarlet-and-orange tulip nodding in the May sun. Coraline reached out her left hand, scared that if she took her eye off it it would vanish, and she fumbled for the burning thing.

Her fingers closed about something smooth and cool. She snatched it up, and then lowered the stone with a hole in it from her eye and looked down. The gray glass marble from the bottom of the toy box sat, dully, in the pink palm of her hand. She raised the stone to her eye once more and looked through it at the marble. Once again the marble burned and flickered with a red fire.

A voice whispered in her mind, “Indeed, lady, it comes to me that I certainly was a boy, now I do think on it. Oh, but you must hurry. There are two of us still to find, and the beldam is already angry with you for uncovering me.”

If I’m going to do this, thought Coraline, I’m not going to do it in her clothes. She changed back into her pajamas and her dressing gown and her slippers, leaving the gray sweater and the black jeans neatly folded up on the bed, the orange boots on the floor by the toy box.

She put the marble into her dressing-gown pocket and walked out into the hall.

Something stung her face and hands like sand blowing on a beach on a windy day. She covered her eyes and pushed forward.

The sand stings got worse, and it got harder and harder to walk, as if she were pushing into the wind on a particularly blustery day. It was a vicious wind, and a cold one.

She took a step backwards, the way she had come.

“Oh, keep going,” whispered a ghost voice in her ear, “for the beldam is angry.”

She stepped forward in the hallway, into another gust of wind, which stung her cheeks and face with invisible sand, sharp as needles, sharp as glass.

“Play fair,” shouted Coraline into the wind.

There was no reply, but the wind whipped about her one more time, petulantly, and then it dropped away, and was gone. As she passed the kitchen Coraline could hear, in the sudden silence, the drip-drip of the water from the leaking tap or perhaps the other mother’s long fingernails tapping impatiently against the table. Coraline resisted the urge to look.

In a couple of strides she reached the front door, and she walked outside.

Coraline went down the steps and around the house until she reached the other Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s flat. The lamps around the door were flickering on and off almost randomly now, spelling out no words that Coraline could understand. The door was closed. She was afraid it was locked, and she pushed on it with all her strength. First it stuck, then suddenly it gave, and, with a jerk, Coraline stumbled into the dark room beyond.

Coraline closed one hand around the stone with the hole in it and walked forward into blackness. She expected to find a curtained anteroom, but there was nothing there. The room was dark. The theater was empty. She moved ahead cautiously. Something rustled above her. She looked up into a deeper darkness, and as she did so her feet knocked against something. She reached down, picked up a flashlight, and clicked it on, sweeping the beam around the room.

The theater was derelict and abandoned. Chairs were broken on the floor, and old, dusty spiderwebs draped the walls and hung from the rotten wood and the decomposing velvet hangings.

Something rustled once again. Coraline directed her light beam upward, toward the ceiling. There were things up there, hairless, jellyish. She thought they might once have had faces, might even once have been dogs; but no dogs had wings like bats or could hang, like spiders, like bats, upside down.

The light startled the creatures, and one of them took to the air, its wings whirring heavily through the dust. Coraline ducked as it swooped close to her. It came to rest on a far wall, and it began to clamber, upside down, back to the nest of the dog-bats upon the ceiling.

Coraline raised the stone to her eye and she scanned the room through it, looking for something that glowed or glinted, a telltale sign that somewhere in this room was another hidden soul. She ran the beam of the flashlight about the room as she searched, the thick dust in the air making the light beam seem almost solid.

There was something up on the back wall behind the ruined stage. It was grayish white, twice the size of Coraline herself, and it was stuck to the back wall like a slug. Coraline took a deep breath. “I’m not afraid,” she told herself. “I’m not.” She did not believe herself, but she scrambled up onto the old stage, fingers sinking into the rotting wood as she pulled herself up.

As she got closer to the thing on the wall, she saw that it was some kind of a sac, like a spider’s egg case. It twitched in the light beam. Inside the sac was something that looked like a person, but a person with two heads, with twice as many arms and legs as it should have.

The creature in the sac seemed horribly unformed and unfinished, as if two plasticine people had been warmed and rolled together, squashed and pressed into one thing.

Coraline hesitated. She did not want to approach the thing. The dog-bats dropped, one by one, from the ceiling and began to circle the room, coming close to her but never touching her.

Perhaps there are no souls hidden in here, she thought. Perhaps I can just leave and go somewhere else. She took a last look through the hole in the stone: the abandoned theater was still a bleak gray, but now there was a brown glow, as rich and bright as polished cherrywood, coming from inside the sac. Whatever was glowing was being held in one of the hands of the thing on the wall.

Coraline walked slowly across the damp stage, trying to make as little noise as she could, afraid that, if she disturbed the thing in the sac, it would open its eyes, and see her, and then . . .

But there was nothing that she could think of as scary as having it look at her. Her heart pounded in her chest. She took another step forward.

She had never been so scared, but still she walked forward until she reached the sac. Then she pushed her hand into the sticky, clinging whiteness of the stuff on the wall. It crackled softly, like a tiny fire, as she pushed, and it clung to her skin and clothes like a spiderweb clings, like white cotton candy. She pushed her hand into it, and she reached upward until she touched a cold hand, which was, she could feel, closed around another glass marble. The creature’s skin felt slippery, as if it had been covered in jelly. Coraline tugged at the marble.

At first nothing happened: it was held tight in the creature’s grasp. Then, one by one, the fingers loosened their grip, and the marble slipped into her hand. She pulled her arm back through the sticky webbing, relieved that the thing’s eyes had not opened. She shone the light on its faces: they resembled, she decided, the younger versions of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, but twisted and squeezed together, like two lumps of wax that had melted and melded together into one ghastly thing.

Without warning, one of the creature’s hands made a grab for Coraline’s arm. Its fingernails scraped her skin, but it was too slippery to grip, and Coraline pulled away successfully. And then the eyes opened, four black buttons glinting and staring down at her, and two voices that sounded like no voice that Coraline had ever heard began to speak to her. One of them wailed and whispered, the other buzzed like a fat and angry bluebottle at a window-pane, but the voices said, as one person, “Thief! Give it back! Stop! Thief.”

The air became alive with dog-bats. Coraline began to back away. She realized then that, terrifying though the thing on the wall that had once been the other Misses Spink and Forcible was, it was attached to the wall by its web, encased in its cocoon. It could not follow her.

The dog-bats flapped and fluttered about her, but they did nothing to hurt Coraline. She climbed down from the stage, shone the flashlight about the old theater looking for the way out.

“Flee, Miss,” wailed a girl’s voice in her head. “Flee, now. You have two of us. Flee this place while your blood still flows”

Coraline dropped the marble into her pocket beside the other. She spotted the door, ran to it, and pulled on it until it opened.

IX.

Outside, the world had become a formless, swirling mist with no shapes or shadows behind it, while the house itself seemed to have twisted and stretched. It seemed to Coraline that it was crouching, and staring down at her, as if it were not really a house but only the idea of a house—and the person who had had the idea, she was certain, was not a good person. There was sticky web stuff clinging to her arm, and she wiped it off as best she could. The gray windows of the house slanted at strange angles.

The other mother was waiting for her, standing on the grass with her arms folded. Her black button eyes were expressionless, but her lips were pressed tightly together in a cold fury.

When she saw Coraline she reached out one long white hand, and she crooked a finger. Coraline walked toward her. The other mother said nothing.

“I got two,” said Coraline.”One soul still to go.”

The expression on the other mother’s face did not change. She might not have heard what Coraline said.

“Well, I just thought you’d want to know,” said Coraline.

“Thank you, Coraline,” said the other mother coldly, and her voice did not just come from her mouth. It came from the mist, and the fog, and the house, and the sky. She said, “You know that I love you.”

And, despite herself, Coraline nodded. It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.

“I don’t want your love,” said Coraline. “I don’t want anything from you.”

“Not even a helping hand?” asked the other mother. “You have been doing so well, after all. I thought you might want a little hint, to help you with the rest of your treasure hunt.”

“I’m doing fine on my own,” said Coraline.

“Yes,” said the other mother. “But if you wanted to get into the flat in the front—the empty one—to look around, you would find the door locked, and then where would you be?”

“Oh,” Coraline pondered this, for a moment. Then she said, “Is there a key?”

The other mother stood there in the paper-gray fog of the flattening world. Her black hair drifted about her head, as if it had a mind and a purpose all of its own. She coughed suddenly in the back of her throat, and then she opened her mouth.

The other mother reached up her hand and removed a small, brass front-door key from her tongue. “Here,” she said. “You’ll need this to get in.” She tossed the key, casually, toward Coraline, who caught it, one-handed, before she could think about whether she wanted it or not. The key was still slightly damp.

A chill wind blew about them, and Coraline shivered and looked away. When she looked back she was alone.

Uncertainly, she walked around to the front of the house and stood in front of the door to the empty flat. Like all the doors, it was painted bright green.

“She does not mean you well,” whispered a ghost voice in her ear. “We do not believe that she would help you. It must be a trick.”

Coraline said, “Yes, you’re right, I expect.”Then she put the key in the lock and turned it.

Silently, the door swung open, and silently Coraline walked inside.

The flat had walls the color of old milk. The wooden boards of the floor were uncarpeted and dusty with the marks and patterns of old carpets and rugs on them.

There was no furniture in there, only places where furniture had once been. Nothing decorated the walls; there were discolored rectangles on the walls to show where paintings or photographs had once hung. It was so silent that Coraline imagined that she could hear the motes of dust drifting through the air.

She found herself to be quite worried that something would jump out at her, so she began to whistle. She thought it might make it harder for things to jump out at her if she was whistling.

First she walked through the empty kitchen. Then she walked through an empty bathroom, containing only a cast-iron bath, and, in the bath, a dead spider the size of a small cat. The last room she looked at had, she supposed, once been a bedroom; she could imagine that the rectangular dust shadow on the floorboards had once been a bed. Then she saw something, and smiled, grimly. Set into the floorboards was a large metal ring. Coraline knelt and took the cold ring in her hands, and she tugged upward as hard as she could.

Terribly slowly, stiffly, heavily, a hinged square of floor lifted: it was a trapdoor. It lifted, and through the opening Coraline could see only darkness. She reached down, and her hand found a cold switch. She flicked it without much hope that it would work, but somewhere below her a bulb lit, and a thin yellow light came up from the hole in the floor. She could see steps, heading down, but nothing else.

Coraline put her hand into her pocket and took out the stone with the hole in it. She looked through it at the cellar but saw nothing. She put the stone back into her pocket.

Up through the hole came the smell of damp clay, and something else, an acrid tang like sour vinegar.

Coraline let herself down into the hole, looking nervously at the trapdoor. It was so heavy that if it fell she was sure she would be trapped down in the darkness forever. She put up a hand and touched it, but it stayed in position. And then she turned toward the darkness below, and she walked down the steps. Set into the wall at the bottom of the steps was another light switch, metal and rusting. She pushed it until it clicked down, and a naked bulb hanging from a wire from the low ceiling came on. It did not give up enough light even for Coraline to make out the things that had been painted onto the flaking cellar walls. The paintings seemed crude. There were eyes, she could see that, and things that might have been grapes. And other things, below them. Coraline could not be sure that they were paintings of people.

There was a pile of rubbish in one corner of the room: cardboard boxes filled with mildewed papers and decaying curtains in a heap beside them.

Coraline’s slippers crunched across the cement floor. The bad smell was worse, now. She was ready to turn and leave, when she saw the foot sticking out from beneath the pile of curtains.

She took a deep breath (the smells of sour wine and moldy bread filled her head) and she pulled away the damp cloth, to reveal something more or less the size and shape of a person.

In that dim light, it took her several seconds to recognize it for what it was: the thing was pale and swollen like a grub, with thin, sticklike arms and feet. It had almost no features on its face, which had puffed and swollen like risen bread dough.

The thing had two large black buttons where its eyes should have been.

Coraline made a noise, a sound of revulsion and horror, and, as if it had heard her and awakened, the thing began to sit up. Coraline stood there, frozen. The thing turned its head until both its black button eyes were pointed straight at her. A mouth opened in the mouthless face, strands of pale stuff sticking to the lips, and a voice that no longer even faintly resembled her father’s whispered, “Coraline”

“Well,” said Coraline to the thing that had once been her other father, “at least you didn’t jump out at me.”

The creature’s twiglike hands moved to its face and pushed the pale clay about, making something like a nose. It said nothing.

“I’m looking for my parents,” said Coraline.”Or a stolen soul from one of the other children. Are they down here?”

“There is nothing down here,” said the pale thing indistinctly. “Nothing but dust and damp and forgetting.” The thing was white, and huge, and swollen. Monstrous, thought Coraline, but also miserable. She raised the stone with the hole in it to her eye and looked through it. Nothing. The pale thing was telling her the truth.

“Poor thing,” she said. “I bet she made you come down here as a punishment for telling me too much.”

The thing hesitated, then it nodded. Coraline wondered how she could ever have imagined that this grublike thing resembled her father.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“She’s not best pleased,” said the thing that was once the other father. “Not best pleased at all. You’ve put her quite out of sorts. And when she gets out of sorts, she takes it out on everybody else. It’s her way.”

Coraline patted its hairless head. Its skin was tacky, like warm bread dough. “Poor thing,” she said. “You’re just a thing she made and then threw away.”

The thing nodded vigorously; as it nodded, the left button eye fell off and clattered onto the concrete floor. The thing looked around vacantly with its one eye, as if it had lost her. Finally it saw her, and, as if making a great effort, it opened its mouth once more and said in a wet, urgent voice, “Run, child. Leave this place. She wants me to hurt you, to keep you here forever, so that you can never finish the game and she will win. She is pushing me so hard to hurt you. I cannot fight her.”

“You can,” said Coraline.”Be brave.” She looked around: the thing that had once been the other father was between her and the steps up and out of the cellar. She started edging along the wall, heading toward the steps. The thing twisted bonelessly until its one eye was again facing her. It seemed to be getting bigger, now, and more awake.”Alas,” it said, “I cannot.”

And it lunged across the cellar toward her then, its toothless mouth opened wide.

Coraline had a single heartbeat in which to react. She could only think of two things to do. Either she could scream and try to run away, and be chased around a badly lit cellar by the huge grub thing, be chased until it caught her. Or she could do something else. So she did something else.

As the thing reached her, Coraline put out her hand and closed it around the thing’s remaining button eye, and she tugged as hard as she knew how.

For a moment nothing happened. Then the button came away and flew from her hand, clicking against the walls before it fell to the cellar floor.

The thing froze in place. It threw its pale head back blindly, and opened its mouth horribly wide, and it roared its anger and frustration. Then, all in a rush, the thing swept toward the place where Coraline had been standing.

But Coraline was not standing there any longer. She was already tiptoeing, as quietly as she could, up the steps that would take her away from the dim cellar with the crude paintings on the walls. She could not take her eyes from the floor beneath her, though, across which the pale thing flopped and writhed, hunting for her. Then, as if it was being told what to do, the creature stopped moving, and its blind head tipped to one side.

It’s listening for me, thought Coraline. I must be extra quiet. She took another step up, and her foot slipped on the step, and the thing heard her.

Its head tipped toward her. For a moment it swayed and seemed to be gathering its wits. Then, fast as a serpent, it slithered for the steps and began to flow up them, toward her. Coraline turned and ran, wildly, up the last half dozen steps, and she pushed herself up and onto the floor of the dusty bedroom. Without pausing, she pulled the heavy trapdoor toward her, and let go of it. It crashed down with a thump just as something large banged against it. The trapdoor shook and rattled in the floor, but it stayed where it was.

Coraline took a deep breath. If there had been any furniture in that flat, even a chair, she would have pulled it onto the trapdoor, but there was nothing.

She walked out of that flat as fast as she could, without actually ever running, and she locked the front door behind her. She left the door key under the mat. Then she walked down onto the drive.

She had half expected that the other mother would be standing there waiting for Coraline to come out, but the world was silent and empty.

Coraline wanted to go home.

She hugged herself, and told herself that she was brave, and she almost believed herself, and then she walked around to the side of the house, in the gray mist that wasn’t a mist, and she made for the stairs, to go up.

X.

Coraline walked up the stairs outside the building to the topmost flat, where, in her world, the crazy old man upstairs lived. She had gone up there once with her real mother, when her mother was collecting for charity. They had stood in the open doorway, waiting for the crazy old man with the big mustache to find the envelope that Coraline’s mother had left, and the flat had smelled of strange foods and pipe tobacco and odd, sharp, cheesy-smelling things Coraline could not name. She had not wanted to go any farther inside than that.

“I’m an explorer,” said Coraline out loud, but her words sounded muffled and dead on the misty air. She had made it out of the cellar, hadn’t she?

And she had. But if there was one thing that Coraline was certain of, it was that this flat would be worse.

She reached the top of the house. The topmost flat had once been the attic of the house, but that was long ago.

She knocked on the green-painted door. It swung open, and she walked in.

We have eyes and we have nerveses

We have tails we have teeth

You’ll all get what you deserveses

When we rise from underneath
whispered a dozen or more tiny voices, in that dark flat with the roof so low where it met the walls that Coraline could almost reach up and touch it.

Red eyes stared at her. Little pink feet scurried away as she came close. Darker shadows slipped through the shadows at the edges of things.

It smelled much worse in here than in the real crazy old man upstairs’s flat. That smelled of food (unpleasant food, to Coraline’s mind, but she knew that was a matter of taste: she did not like spices, herbs, or exotic things). This place smelled as if all the exotic foods in the world had been left out to go rotten.

“Little girl,” said a rustling voice in a far room.

“Yes,” said Coraline. I’m not frightened, she told herself, and as she thought it she knew that it was true. There was nothing here that frightened her. These things—even the thing in the cellar—were illusions, things made by the other mother in a ghastly parody of the real people and real things on the other end of the corridor. She could not truly make anything, decided Coraline. She could only twist and copy and distort things that already existed.

And then Coraline found herself wondering why the other mother would have placed a snowglobe on the drawing-room mantelpiece; for the mantelpiece, in Coraline’s world, was quite bare.

As soon as she had asked herself the question, she realized that there was actually an answer.

Then the voice came again, and her train of thought was interrupted.

“Come here, little girl. I know what you want, little girl.” It was a rustling voice, scratchy and dry. It made Coraline think of some kind of enormous dead insect. Which was silly, she knew. How could a dead thing, especially a dead insect, have a voice?

She walked through several rooms with low, slanting ceilings until she came to the final room. It was a bedroom, and the other crazy old man upstairs sat at the far end of the room, in the near darkness, bundled up in his coat and hat. As Coraline entered he began to talk. “Nothing’s changed, little girl,” he said, his voice sounding like the noise dry leaves make as they rustle across a pavement. “And what if you do everything you swore you would? What then? Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, not really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.

“Stay here with us,” said the voice from the figure at the end of the room.”We will listen to you and play with you and laugh with you. Your other mother will build whole worlds for you to explore, and tear them down every night when you are done. Every day will be better and brighter than the one that went before. Remember the toy box? How much better would a world be built just like that, and all for you?”

“And will there be gray, wet days where I just don’t know what to do and there’s nothing to read or to watch and nowhere to go and the day drags on forever?” asked Coraline.

From the shadows, the man said, “Never.”

“And will there be awful meals, with food made from recipes, with garlic and tarragon and broad beans in?” asked Coraline.

“Every meal will be a thing ofjoy,” whispered the voice from under the old man’s hat. “Nothing will pass your lips that does not entirely delight you.”

“And could I have Day-Glo green gloves to wear, and yellow Wellington boots in the shape of frogs?” asked Coraline.

“Frogs, ducks, rhinos, octopuses—whatever you desire.

The world will be built new for you every morning. If you stay here, you can have whatever you want.”

Coraline sighed.”You really don’t understand, do you?” she said. “I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything.

What then?”

“I don’t understand,” said the whispery voice. “Of course you don’t understand,” she said, raising the stone with the hole in it to her eye.”You’re just a bad copy she made of the crazy old man upstairs.”

“Not even that anymore,” said the dead, whispery voice. There was a glow coming from the raincoat of the man, at about chest height. Through the hole in the stone the glow twinkled and shone blue-white as any star. She wished she had a stick or something to poke him with: she had no wish to get any closer to the shadowy man at the end of the room.

Coraline took a step closer to the man, and he fell apart. Black rats leapt from the sleeves and from under the coat and hat, a score or more of them, red eyes shining in the dark. They chittered and they fled. The coat fluttered and fell heavily to the floor. The hat rolled into one corner of the room.

Coraline reached out one hand and pulled the coat open. It was empty, although it was greasy to the touch. There was no sign of the final glass marble in it. She scanned the room, squinting through the hole in the stone, and caught sight of something that twinkled and burned like a star at floor level by the doorway. It was being carried in the forepaws of the largest black rat. As she looked, it slipped away.

The other rats watched her from the corners of the rooms as she ran after it.

Now, rats can run faster than people, especially over short distances. But a large black rat holding a marble in its two front paws is no match for a determined girl (even if she is small for her age) moving at a run. Smaller black rats ran back and forth across her path, trying to distract her, but she ignored them all, keeping her eyes fixed on the one with the marble, who was heading straight out of the flat, toward the front door.

They reached the steps on the outside of the building. Coraline had time to observe that the house itself was continuing to change, becoming less distinct and flattening out, even as she raced down the stairs. It reminded her of a photograph of a house, now, not the thing itself. Then she was simply racing pell-mell down the steps in pursuit of the rat, with no room in her mind for anything else, certain she was gaining on it. She was running fast—too fast, she discovered, as she came to the bottom of one flight of stairs, and her foot skidded and twisted and she went crashing onto the concrete landing.

Her left knee was scraped and skinned, and the palm of one hand she had thrown out to stop herself was a mess of scraped skin and grit. It hurt a little, and it would, she knew, soon hurt much more. She picked the grit out of her palm and climbed to her feet and, as fast as she could, knowing that she had lost and it was already too late, she went down to the final landing at the ground level.

She looked around for the rat, but it was gone, and the marble with it.

Her hand stung where the skin had been scraped, and there was blood trickling down her ripped pajama leg from her knee. It was as bad as the summer that her mother had taken the training wheels off Coraline’s bicycle; but then, back then, in with all the cuts and scrapes (her knees had had scabs on top of scabs) she had had a feeling of achievement. She was learning something, doing something she had not known how to do. Now she felt nothing but cold loss. She had failed the ghost children. She had failed her parents. She had failed herself, failed everything.

She closed her eyes and wished that the earth would swallow her up.

There was a cough.

She opened her eyes and saw the rat. It was lying on the brick path at the bottom of the stairs with a surprised look on its face—which was now several inches away from the rest of it. Its whiskers were stiff, its eyes were wide open, its teeth visible and yellow and sharp. A collar of wet blood glistened at its neck.

Beside the decapitated rat, a smug expression on its face, was the black cat. It rested one paw on the gray glass marble.

“I think I once mentioned,” said the cat, “that I don’t like rats at the best of times. It looked like you needed this one, however. I hope you don’t mind my getting involved.”

“I think,” said Coraline, trying to catch her breath, “I think you may—have said—something of the sort.”

The cat lifted its paw from the marble, which rolled toward Coraline. She picked it up. In her mind a final voice whispered to her, urgently.

“She has lied to you. She will never give you up, now she has you. She will no more give any of us up than change her nature.” The hairs on the back of Coraline’s neck prickled, and Coraline knew that the girl’s voice told the truth. She put the marble in her dressing-gown pocket with the others.

She had all three marbles, now.

All she needed to do was to find her parents.

And, Coraline realized with surprise, that bit was easy. She knew exactly where her parents were. If she had stopped to think, she might have known where they were all along. The other mother could not create. She could only transform, and twist, and change.

The mantelpiece in the drawing room back home was quite empty. But knowing that, she knew something else as well.

“The other mother. She plans to break her promise. She won’t let us go,” said Coraline.

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” admitted the cat. “Like I said, there’s no guarantee she’ll play fair.” And then he raised his head.”Hullo . . . did you see that?”

“What?”

“Look behind you,” said the cat.

The house had flattened out even more. It no longer looked like a photograph—more like a drawing, a crude, charcoal scribble of a house drawn on gray paper.

“Whatever’s happening,” said Coraline, “thank you for helping with the rat. I suppose I’m almost there, aren’t I? So you go off into the mist or wherever you go, and I’ll, well, I hope I get to see you at home. If she lets me go home.”

The cat’s fur was on end, and its tail was bristling like a chimney sweep’s brush.

“What’s wrong?” asked Coraline.

“They’ve gone,” said the cat.”They aren’t there anymore. The ways in and out of this place. They just went flat.”

“Is that bad?”

The cat lowered its tail, swishing it from side to side angrily. It made a low growling noise in the back of its throat. It walked in a circle, until it was facing away from Coraline, and then it began to walk backwards, stiffly, one step at a time, until it was pushing up against Coraline’s leg. She put down a hand to stroke it, and could feel how hard its heart was beating. It was trembling like a dead leaf in a storm.

“You’ll be fine,” said Coraline.” Everything’s going to be fine. I’ll take you home.” The cat said nothing.

“Come on, cat,” said Coraline. She took a step back toward the steps, but the cat stayed where it was, looking miserable and, oddly, much smaller.

“If the only way out is past her,” said Coraline, “then that’s the way we’re going to go.” She went back to the cat, bent down, and picked it up. The cat did not resist. It simply trembled. She supported its bottom with one hand, rested its front legs on her shoulders. The cat was heavy but not too heavy to carry. It licked at the palm of her hand, where the blood from the scrape was welling up.

Coraline walked up the stairs one step at a time, heading back to her own flat. She was aware of the marbles clicking in her pocket, aware of the stone with a hole in it, aware of the cat pressing itself against her.

She got to her front door—now just a small child’s scrawl of a door—and she pushed her hand against it, half expecting that her hand would rip through it, revealing nothing behind it but blackness and a scattering of stars.

But the door swung open, and Coraline went through.

XI.

Once inside, in her flat, or rather, in the flat that was not hers, Coraline was pleased to see that it had not transformed into the empty drawing that the rest of the house seemed to have become. It had depth, and shadows, and someone who stood in the shadows waiting for Coraline to return.

“So you’re back,” said the other mother. She did not sound pleased. “And you brought vermin with you.”

“No,” said Coraline. “I brought a friend,” She could feel the cat stiffening under her hands, as if it were anxious to be away. Coraline wanted to hold on to it like a teddy bear, for reassurance, but she knew that cats hate to be squeezed, and she suspected that frightened cats were liable to bite and scratch if provoked in any way, even if they were on your side.

“You know I love you,” said the other mother flatly.

“You have a very funny way of showing it,” said Coraline. She walked down the hallway, then turned into the drawing room, steady step by steady step, pretending that she could not feel the other mother’s blank black eyes on her back. Her grandmother’s formal furniture was still there, and the painting on the wall of the strange fruit (but now the fruit in the painting had been eaten, and all that remained in the bowl was the browning core of an apple, several plum and peach stones, and the stem of what had formerly been a bunch of grapes). The lion-pawed table raked the carpet with its clawed wooden feet, as if it were impatient for something. At the end of the room, in the corner, stood the wooden door, which had once, in another place, opened onto a plain brick wall. Coraline tried not to stare at it. The window showed nothing but mist.

This was it, Coraline knew. The moment of truth. The unraveling time.

The other mother had followed her in. Now she stood in the center of the room, between Coraline and the mantelpiece, and looked down at Coraline with black button eyes. It was funny, Coraline thought. The other mother did not look anything at all like her own mother. She wondered how she had ever been deceived into imagining a resemblance. The other mother was huge—her head almost brushed the ceiling—and very pale, the color of a spider’s belly. Her hair writhed and twined about her head, and her teeth were sharp as knives . . . .

“Well?” said the other mother sharply. “Where are they?”

Coraline leaned against an armchair, adjusted the cat with her left hand, put her right hand into her pocket, and pulled out the three glass marbles. They were a frosted gray, and they clinked together in the palm of her hand. The other mother reached her white fingers for them, but Coraline slipped them back into her pocket. She knew it was true, then. The other mother had no intention of letting her go or of keeping her word. It had been an entertainment, and nothing more. “Hold on,” she said. “We aren’t finished yet, are we?”

The other mother looked daggers, but she smiled sweetly. “No,” she said. “I suppose not. After all, you still need to find your parents, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Coraline. I must not look at the mantelpiece, she thought. I must not even think about it.

“Well?” said the other mother. “Produce them. Would you like to look in the cellar again? I have some other interesting things hidden down there, you know.”

“No,” said Coraline. “I know where my parents are.”The cat was heavy in her arms. She moved it forward, unhooking its claws from her shoulder as she did so.

“Where?”

“It stands to reason,” said Coraline. “I’ve looked everywhere you’d hide them. They aren’t in the house.”

The other mother stood very still, giving nothing away, lips tightly closed. She might have been a wax statue. Even her hair had stopped moving.

“So,” Coraline continued, both hands wrapped firmly around the black cat. “I know where they have to be. You’ve hidden them in the passageway between the houses, haven’t you? They are behind that door.” She nodded her head toward the door in the corner.

The other mother remained statue still, but a hint of a smile crept back onto her face.”Oh, they are, are they?”

“Why don’t you open it?” said Coraline. “They’ll be there, all right.”

It was her only way home, she knew. But it all depended on the other mother’s needing to gloat, needing not only to win but to show that she had won.

The other mother reached her hand slowly into her apron pocket and produced the black iron key. The cat stirred uncomfortably in Coraline’s arms, as if it wanted to get down. Just stay therefor a few moments longer, she thought at it, wondering if it could hear her. I’ll get us both home. I said I would. I promise. She felt the cat relax ever so slightly in her arms.

The other mother walked over to the door and pushed the key into the lock.

She turned the key.

Coraline heard the mechanism clunk heavily. She was already starting, as quietly as she could, step by step, to back away toward the mantelpiece.

The other mother pushed down on the door handle and pulled open the door, revealing a corridor behind it, dark and empty. “There,” she said, waving her hands at the corridor. The expression of delight on her face was a very bad thing to see. “You’re wrong! You don’t know where your parents are, do you? They aren’t there.” She turned and looked at Coraline. “Now,” she said, “you’re going to stay here for ever and always.”

“No,” said Coraline. “I’m not.” And, hard as she could, she threw the black cat toward the other mother. It yowled and landed on the other mother’s head, claws flailing, teeth bared, fierce and angry. Fur on end, it looked half again as big as it was in real life.

Without waiting to see what would happen, Coraline reached up to the mantlepiece and closed her hand around the snow globe, pushing it deep into the pocket of her dressing gown.

The cat made a deep, ululating yowl and sank its teeth into the other mother’s cheek. She was flailing at it. Blood ran from the cuts on her white face—not red blood but a deep, tarry black stuff. Coraline ran for the door.

She pulled the key out of the lock.

“Leave her! Come on!” she shouted to the cat. It hissed, and swiped its scalpel-sharp claws at the other mother’s face in one wild rake which left black ooze trickling from several gashes on the other mother’s nose. Then it sprang down toward Coraline. “Quickly!” she said. The cat ran toward her, and they both stepped into the dark corridor.

It was colder in the corridor, like stepping down into a cellar on a warm day. The cat hesitated for a moment; then, seeing the other mother was coming toward them, it ran to Coraline and stopped by her legs.

Coraline began to pull the door closed.

It was heavier than she imagined a door could be, and pulling it closed was like trying to close a door against a high wind. And then she felt something from the other side starting to pull against her.

Shut! she thought. Then she said, out loud, “Come on, please.”And she felt the door begin to move, to pull closed, to give against the phantom wind.

Suddenly she was aware of other people in the corridor with her. She could not turn her head to look at them, but she knew them without having to look.”Help me, please,” she said. “All of you.”

The other people in the corridor—three children, two adults—were somehow too insubstantial to touch the door.

But their hands closed about hers, as she pulled on the big iron door handle, and suddenly she felt strong.

“Never let up, Miss! Hold strong! Hold strong!” whispered a voice in her mind.

“Pull, girl, pull!” whispered another.

And then a voice that sounded like her mother’s—her own mother, her real, wonderful, maddening, infuriating, glorious mother—just said, “Well done, Coraline,” and that was enough.

The door started to slip closed, easily as anything.

“No!” screamed a voice from beyond the door, and it no longer sounded even faintly human.

Something snatched at Coraline, reaching through the closing gap between the door and the doorpost. Coraline jerked her head out of the way, but the door began to open once more.

“We’re going to go home,” said Coraline.”We are. Help me.” She ducked the snatching fingers.

They moved through her, then: ghost hands lent her strength that she no longer possessed. There was a final moment of resistance, as if something were caught in the door, and then, with a crash, the wooden door banged closed.

Something dropped from Coraline’s head height to the floor. It landed with a sort of a scuttling thump.

“Come on!” said the cat.”This is not a good place to be in. Quickly.”

Coraline turned her back on the door and began to run, as fast as was practical, through the dark corridor, running her hand along the wall to make sure she didn’t bump into anything or get turned around in the darkness.

It was an uphill run, and it seemed to her that it went on for a longer distance than anything could possibly go. The wall she was touching felt warm and yielding now, and, she realized, it felt as it were covered in a fine downy fur. It moved, as if it were taking a breath. She snatched her hand away from it.

Winds howled in the dark.

She was scared she would bump into something, and she put out her hand for the wall once more. This time what she touched felt hot and wet, as if she had put her hand in somebody’s mouth, and she pulled it back with a small wail.

Her eyes had adjusted to the dark. She could half see, as faintly glowing patches ahead of her, two adults, three children. She could hear the cat, too, padding in the dark in front of her.

And there was something else, which suddenly scuttled between her feet, nearly sending Coraline flying. She caught herself before she went down, using her own momentum to keep moving. She knew that if she fell in that corridor she might never get up again. Whatever that corridor was was older by far than the other mother. It was deep, and slow, and it knew that she was there . . . .

Then daylight appeared, and she ran toward it, puffing and wheezing. “Almost there,” she called encouragingly, but in the light she discovered that the wraiths had gone, and she was alone. She did not have time to wonder what had happened to them. Panting for breath, she staggered through the door, and slammed it behind her with the loudest, most satisfying bang you can imagine.

Coraline locked the door with the key, and put the key back into her pocket.

The black cat was huddled in the farthest corner of the room, the pink tip of its tongue showing, its eyes wide. Coraline went over to it and crouched down beside it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I threw you at her. But it was the only way to distract her enough to get us all out. She would never have kept her word, would she?”

The cat looked up at her, then rested its head on her hand, licking her fingers with its sandpapery tongue. It began to purr.

“Then we’re friends?” said Coraline.

She sat down on one of her grandmother’s uncomfortable armchairs, and the cat sprang up into her lap and made itself comfortable. The light that came through the picture window was daylight, real golden late-afternoon daylight, not a white mist light. The sky was a robin’s-egg blue, and Coraline could see trees and, beyond the trees, green hills, which faded on the horizon into purples and grays. The sky had never seemed so sky, the world had never seemed so world.

Coraline stared at the leaves on the trees and at the patterns of light and shadow on the cracked bark of the trunk of the beech tree outside the window. Then she looked down at her lap, at the way that the rich sunlight brushed every hair on the cat’s head, turning each white whisker to gold.

Nothing, she thought, had ever been so interesting.

And, caught up in the interestingness of the world, Coraline barely noticed that she had wriggled down and curled catlike on her grandmother’s uncomfortable armchair, nor did she notice when she fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

XII.

Her mother shook her gently awake.

“Coraline?” she said.”Darling, what a funny place to fall asleep. And really, this room is only for best. We looked all over the house for you.”

Coraline stretched and blinked. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I fell asleep.”

“I can see that,” said her mother.”And wherever did the cat come from? He was waiting by the front door when I came in. Shot out like a bullet as I opened it.”

“Probably had things to do,” said Coraline. Then she hugged her mother so tightly that her arms began to ache. Her mother hugged Coraline back.

“Dinner in fifteen minutes,” said her mother. “Don’t forget to wash your hands. And just look at those pajama bottoms. What did you do to your poor knee?”

“I tripped,” said Coraline. She went into the bathroom, and she washed her hands and cleaned her bloody knee. She put ointment on her cuts and scrapes.

She went into her bedroom—her real bedroom, her true bedroom. She pushed her hands into the pockets of her dressing gown, and she pulled out three marbles, a stone with a hole in it, the black key, and an empty snow globe.

She shook the snow globe and watched the glittery snow swirl through the water to fill the empty world. She put it down and watched the snow fall, covering the place where the little couple had once stood.

Coraline took a piece of string from her toy box, and she strung the black key on the string. Then she knotted the string and hung it around her neck.

“There,” she said. She put on some clothes and hid the key under her T-shirt. It was cold against her skin. The stone went into her pocket.

Coraline walked down the hallway to her father’s study. He had his back to her, but she knew, just on seeing him, that his eyes, when he turned around, would be her father’s kind gray eyes, and she crept over and kissed him on the back of his balding head.

“Hullo, Coraline,” he said. Then he looked around and smiled at her.”What was that for?”

“Nothing,” said Coraline. “I just miss you sometimes. That’s all”

“Oh good,” he said. He put the computer to sleep, stood up, and then, for no reason at all, he picked Coraline up, which he had not done for such a long time, not since he had started pointing out to her she was much too old to be carried, and he carried her into the kitchen.

Dinner that night was pizza, and even though it was homemade by her father (so the crust was alternately thick and doughy and raw, or too thin and burnt), and even though he had put slices of green pepper on it, along with little meatballs and, of all things, pineapple chunks, Coraline ate the entire slice she had been given.

Well, she ate everything except for the pineapple chunks.

And soon enough it was bedtime.

Coraline kept the key around her neck, but she put the gray marbles beneath her pillow; and in bed that night, Coraline dreamed a dream.

She was at a picnic, under an old oak tree, in a green meadow. The sun was high in the sky and while there were distant, fluffy white clouds on the horizon, the sky above her head was a deep, untroubled blue.

There was a white linen cloth laid on the grass, with bowls piled high with food—she could see salads and sandwiches, nuts and fruit, jugs of lemonade and water and thick chocolate milk. Coraline sat on one side of the tablecloth while three other children took a side each. They were dressed in the oddest clothes.

The smallest of them, sitting on Coraline’s left, was a boy with red velvet knee britches and a frilly white shirt. His face was dirty, and he was piling his plate high with boiled new potatoes and with what looked like cold, whole, cooked, trout. “This is the finest of pic-nics, lady,” he said to her.

“Yes,” said Coraline. “I think it is. I wonder who organized it.”

“Why, I rather think you did, Miss,” said a tall girl, sitting opposite Coraline. She wore a brown, rather shapeless dress, and had a brown bonnet on her head which tied beneath her chin. “And we are more grateful for it and for all than ever words can say.” She was eating slices of bread and jam, deftly cutting the bread from a large golden-brown loaf with a huge knife, then spooning on the purple jam with a wooden spoon. She had jam all around her mouth.

“Aye. This is the finest food I have eaten in centuries,” said the girl on Coraline’s right. She was a very pale child, dressed in what seemed to be spider’s webs, with a circle of glittering silver set in her blonde hair. Coraline could have sworn that the girl had two wings—like dusty silver but-terfy wings, not bird wings—coming out of her back. The girl’s plate was piled high with pretty flowers. She smiled at Coraline, as if it had been a very long time since she had smiled and she had almost, but not quite, forgotten how.

Coraline found herself liking this girl immensely.

And then, in the way of dreams, the picnic was done and they were playing in the meadow, running and shouting and tossing a glittering ball from one to another. Coraline knew it was a dream then, because none of them ever got tired or winded or out of breath. She wasn’t even sweating. They just laughed and ran in a game that was partly tag, partly piggy-in-the-middle, and partly just a magnificent romp.

Three of them ran along the ground, while the pale girl fluttered a little over their heads, swooping down on butterfly wings to grab the ball and swing up again into the sky before she tossed the ball to one of the other children.

And then, without a word about it being spoken, the game was done, and the four of them went back to the picnic cloth, where the lunch dishes had been cleared away, and there were four bowls waiting for them, three of ice cream, one of honeysuckle flowers piled high.

They ate with relish.

“Thank you for coming to my party,” said Coraline. “If it is mine.”

“The pleasure is ours, Coraline Jones,” said the winged girl, nibbling another honeysuckle blossom. “If there were but something we could do for you, to thank you and to reward you.”

“Aye,” said the boy with the red velvet britches and the dirty face. He put out his hand and held Coraline’s hand with his own. It was warm now.

“It’s a very fine thing you did for us, Miss,” said the tall girl. She now had a smear of chocolate ice cream all around her lips.

“I’m just pleased it’s all over,” said Coraline. Was it her imagination, or did a shadow cross the faces of the other children at the picnic?

The winged girl, the circlet in her hair glittering like a star, rested her fingers for a moment on the back of Coraline’s hand. “It is over and done with for us” she said. “This is our staging post. From here, we three will set out for uncharted lands, and what comes after no one alive can say . . . .” She stopped talking.

“There’s a but, isn’t there?” said Coraline. “I can feel it. Like a rain cloud.”

The boy on her left tried to smile bravely, but his lower lip began to tremble and he bit it with his upper teeth and said nothing. The girl in the brown bonnet shifted uncomfortably and said, “Yes, Miss.”

“But I got you three back,” said Coraline. “I got Mum and Dad back. I shut the door. I locked it. What more was I meant to do?”

The boy squeezed Coraline’s hand with his. She found herself remembering when it had been she, trying to reas- sure him, when he was little more than a cold memory in the darkness.

“Well, can’t you give me a clue?” asked Coraline. “Isn’t there something you can tell me?”

“The beldam swore by her good right hand,” said the tall girl, “but she lied.”

“M-my governess,” said the boy, “used to say that nobody is ever given more to shoulder than he or she can bear.” He shrugged as he said this, as if he had not yet made his own mind up whether or not it was true.

“We wish you luck,” said the winged girl. “Good fortune and wisdom and courage—although you have already shown that you have all three of these blessings, and in abundance.”

“She hates you,” blurted out the boy. “She hasn’t lost anything for so long. Be wise. Be brave. Be tricky.”

“But it’s not fair”’ said Coraline, in her dream, angrily. “It’s just not fair. It should be over.”

The boy with the dirty face stood up and hugged Coraline tightly. “Take comfort in this,” he whispered. “Th’art alive. Thou livest.”

And in her dream Coraline saw that the sun had set and the stars were twinkling in the darkening sky.

Coraline stood in the meadow, and she watched as the three children (two of them walking, one flying) went away from her across the grass, silver in the light of the huge moon.

The three of them came to a small wooden bridge over a stream. They stopped there and turned and waved, and Coraline waved back.

And what came after was darkness.

Coraline woke in the early hours of the morning, convinced she had heard something moving, but unsure what it was.

She waited.

Something made a rustling noise outside her bedroom door. She wondered if it was a rat. The door rattled. Coraline clambered out of bed.

“Go away,” said Coraline sharply.”Go away or you’ll be sorry.”

There was a pause, then the whatever it was scuttled away down the hall. There was something odd and irregular about its footsteps, if they were footsteps. Coraline found herself wondering if it was perhaps a rat with an extra leg . . . .

“It isn’t over, is it?” she said to herself.

Then she opened the bedroom door. The gray, predawn light showed her the whole of the corridor, completely deserted.

She went toward the front door, sparing a hasty glance back at the wardrobe-door mirror hanging on the wall at the other end of the hallway, seeing nothing but her own pale face staring back at her, looking sleepy and serious. Gentle, reassuring snores came from her parents’ room, but the door was closed. All the doors off the corridor were closed. Whatever the scuttling thing was, it had to be here somewhere.

Coraline opened the front door and looked at the gray sky. She wondered how long it would be until the sun came up, wondered whether her dream had been a true thing while knowing in her heart that it had been. Something she had taken to be part of the shadows under the hall couch detached itself from beneath the couch and made a mad, scrabbling rush on its long white legs, heading for the front door.

Coraline’s mouth dropped open in horror and she stepped out of the way as the thing clicked and scuttled past her and out of the house, running crablike on its too-many tapping, clicking, scurrying feet.

She knew what it was, and she knew what it was after. She had seen it too many times in the last few days, reaching and clutching and snatching and popping blackbeetles obediently into the other mother’s mouth. Five-footed, crimson-nailed, the color of bone.

It was the other mother’s right hand.

It wanted the black key.

XIII.

Coraline’s parents never seemed to remember anything about their time in the snow globe. At least, they never said anything about it, and Coraline never mentioned it to them.

Sometimes she wondered whether they had ever noticed that they had lost two days in the real world, and came to the eventual conclusion that they had not. Then again, there are some people who keep track of every day and every hour, and there are people who don’t, and Coraline’s parents were solidly in the second camp.

Coraline had placed the marbles beneath her pillow before she went to sleep that first night home in her own room once more. She went back to bed after she saw the other mother’s hand, although there was not much time left for sleeping, and she rested her head back on that pillow.

Something scrunched gently as she did. She sat up, and lifted the pillow. The fragments of the glass marbles that she saw looked like the remains of eggshells one finds beneath trees in springtime: like empty, broken robin’s eggs, or even more delicate—wren’s eggs, perhaps.

Whatever had been inside the glass spheres had gone. Coraline thought of the three children waving good-bye to her in the moonlight, waving before they crossed that silver stream.

She gathered up the eggshell-thin fragments with care and placed them in a small blue box which had once held a bracelet that her grandmother had given her when she was a little girl. The bracelet was long lost, but the box remained.

Miss Spink and Miss Forcible came back from visiting Miss Spink’s niece, and Coraline went down to their flat for tea. It was a Monday. On Wednesday Coraline would go back to school: a whole new school year would begin. Miss Forcible insisted on reading Coraline’s tea leaves. “Well, looks like everything’s mostly shipshape and Bristol fashion, luvvy,” said Miss Forcible. “Sorry?” said Coraline.

“Everything is coming up roses,” said Miss Forcible. “Well, almost everything. I’m not sure what that is.” She pointed to a clump of tea leaves sticking to the side of the cup.

Miss Spink tutted and reached for the cup. “Honestly,

Miriam. Give it over here. Let me see . . . .”

She blinked through her thick spectacles.”Oh dear. No, I have no idea what that signifies. It looks almost like a hand”

Coraline looked. The clump of leaves did look a little like a hand, reaching for something.

Hamish the Scottie dog was hiding under Miss Forcible’s chair, and he wouldn’t come out.

“I think he was in some sort of fight,” said Miss Spink. “He has a deep gash in his side, poor dear. We’ll take him to the vet later this afternoon. I wish I knew what could have done it.”

Something, Coraline knew, would have to be done.

That final week of the holidays, the weather was magnificent, as if the summer itself were trying to make up for the miserable weather they had been having by giving them some bright and glorious days before it ended.

The crazy old man upstairs called down to Coraline when he saw her coming out of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s flat.

“Hey! Hi! You! Caroline!” he shouted over the railing.

“It’s Coraline,” she said. “How are the mice?”

“Something has frightened them,” said the old man, scratching his mustache.”I think maybe there is a weasel in the house. Something is about. I heard it in the night. In my country we would have put down a trap for it, maybe put down a little meat or hamburger, and when the creature comes to feast, then—bam!—it would be caught and never bother us more. The mice are so scared they will not even pick up their little musical instruments.”

“I don’t think it wants meat,” said Coraline. She put her hand up and touched the black key that hung about her neck. Then she went inside.

She bathed herself, and kept the key around her neck the whole time she was in the bath. She never took it off anymore.

Something scratched at her bedroom window after she went to bed. Coraline was almost asleep, but she slipped out of her bed and pulled open the curtains. A white hand with crimson fingernails leapt from the window ledge onto a drainpipe and was immediately out of sight. There were deep gouges in the glass on the other side of the window.

Coraline slept uneasily that night, waking from time to time to plot and plan and ponder, then falling back into sleep, never quite certain where her pondering ended and the dream began, one ear always open for the sound of something scratching at her windowpane or at her bedroom door.

In the morning Coraline said to her mother, “I’m going to have a picnic with my dolls today. Can I borrow a sheet—an old one, one you don’t need any longer—as a tablecloth?”

“I don’t think we have one of those,” said her mother. She opened the kitchen drawer that held the napkins and the tablecloths, and she prodded about in it.”Hold on. Will this do?”

It was a folded-up disposable paper tablecloth covered with red flowers, left over from some picnic they had been on several years before.

“That’s perfect,” said Coraline.

“I didn’t think you played with your dolls anymore,” said Mrs. Jones.

“I don’t,” admitted Coraline. “They’re protective coloration.”

“Well, be back in time for lunch,” said her mother. “Have a good time.”

Coraline filled a cardboard box with dolls and with several plastic doll’s teacups. She filled a jug with water.

Then she went outside. She walked down to the road, just as if she were going to the shops. Before she reached the supermarket she cut across a fence into some wasteland and along an old drive, then crawled under a hedge. She had to go under the hedge in two journeys in order not to spill the water from the jug.

It was a long, roundabout looping journey, but at the end of it Coraline was satisfied that she had not been followed.

She came out behind the dilapidated old tennis court. She crossed over it, to the meadow where the long grass swayed. She found the planks on the edge of the meadow. They were astonishingly heavy—almost too heavy for a girl to lift, even using all her strength, but she managed. She didn’t have any choice. She pulled the planks out of the way, one by one, grunting and sweating with the effort, revealing a deep, round, brick-lined hole in the ground. It smelled of damp and the dark. The bricks were greenish, and slippery.

She spread out the tablecloth and laid it, carefully, over the top of the well. She put a plastic doll’s cup every foot or so, at the edge of the well, and she weighed each cup down with water from the jug.

She put a doll in the grass beside each cup, making it look as much like a doll’s tea party as she could. Then she retraced her steps, back under the hedge, along the dusty yellow drive, around the back of the shops, back to her house.

She reached up and took the key from around her neck. She dangled it from the string, as if the key were just something she liked to play with. Then she knocked on the door of Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s flat. Miss Spink opened the door. “Hello dear,” she said.

“I don’t want to come in,” said Coraline. “I just wanted to find out how Hamish was doing.”

Miss Spink sighed. “The vet says that Hamish is a brave little soldier,” she said. “Luckily, the cut doesn’t seem to be infected. We cannot imagine what could have done it. The vet says some animal, he thinks, but has no idea what. Mister Bobo says he thinks it might have been a weasel.”

“Mister Bobo?”

“The man in the top flat. Mister Bobo. Fine old circus family, I believe. Romanian or Slovenian or Livonian, or one of those countries. Bless me, I can never remember them anymore.”

It had never occurred to Coraline that the crazy old man upstairs actually had a name, she realized. If she’d known his name was Mr. Bobo she would have said it every chance she got. How often do you get to say a name like “Mr. Bobo” aloud?

“Oh,” said Coraline to Miss Spink.” Mister Bobo. Right. Well,” she said, a little louder, “I’m going to go and play with my dolls now, over by the old tennis court, round the back”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Miss Spink. Then she added confidentially, “Make sure you keep an eye out for the old well. Mister Lovat, who was here before your time, said that he thought it might go down for half a mile or more.”

Coraline hoped that the hand had not heard this last, and she changed the subject. “This key?” said Coraline loudly. “Oh, it’s just some old key from our house. It’s part of my game. That’s why I’m carrying it around with me on this piece of string. Well, good-bye now.”

“What an extraordinary child,” said Miss Spink to herself as she closed the door.

Coraline ambled across the meadow toward the old tennis court, dangling and swinging the black key on its piece of string as she walked.

Several times she thought she saw something the color of bone in the undergrowth. It was keeping pace with her, about thirty feet away.

She tried to whistle, but nothing happened, so she sang out loud instead, a song her father had made up for her when she was a little baby and which had always made her laugh. It went,

Oh—my twitchy witchy girl

I think you are so nice,

I give you bowls of porridge

And I give you bowls of ice

Cream.

I give you lots of kisses,

And I give you lots of hugs,

But I never give you sandwiches

With bugs

In.

That was what she sang as she sauntered through the woods, and her voice hardly trembled at all.

The dolls’ tea party was where she had left it. She was relieved that it was not a windy day, for everything was still in its place, every water-filled plastic cup weighed down the paper tablecloth as it was meant to. She breathed a sigh of relief.

Now was the hardest part.

“Hello dolls,” she said brightly.”It’s teatime!”

She walked close to the paper tablecloth. “I brought the lucky key,” she told the dolls, “to make sure we have a good picnic.”

And then, as carefully as she could, she leaned over and, gently, placed the key on the tablecloth. She was still holding on to the string. She held her breath, hoping that the cups of water at the edges of the well would weigh the cloth down, letting it take the weight of the key without collapsing into the well.

The key sat in the middle of the paper picnic cloth. Coraline let go of the string, and took a step back. Now it was all up to the hand.

She turned to her dolls.

“Who would like a piece of cherry cake?” she asked. “Jemima? Pinky? Primrose?” and she served each doll a slice of invisible cake on an invisible plate, chattering happily as she did so.

From the corner of her eye she saw something bone white scamper from one tree trunk to another, closer and closer. She forced herself not to look at it.

“Jemima!” said Coraline. “What a bad girl you are! You’ve dropped your cake! Now I’ll have to go over and get you a whole new slice!”And she walked around the tea party until she was on the other side of it to the hand. She pretended to clean up spilled cake, and to get Jemima another piece.

And then, in a skittering, chittering rush, it came. The hand, running high on its fingertips, scrabbled through the tall grass and up onto a tree stump. It stood there for a moment, like a crab tasting the air, and then it made one triumphant, nail-clacking leap onto the center of the paper tablecloth.

Time slowed for Coraline. The white fingers closed around the black key . . . .

And then the weight and the momentum of the hand sent the plastic dolls’ cups flying, and the paper tablecloth, the key, and the other mother’s right hand went tumbling down into the darkness of the well.

Coraline counted slowly under her breath. She got up to forty before she heard a muffled splash coming from a long way below.

Someone had once told her that if you look up at the sky from the bottom of a mine shaft, even in the brightest daylight, you see a night sky and stars. Coraline wondered if the hand could see stars from where it was.

She hauled the heavy planks back onto the well, covering it as carefully as she could. She didn’t want anything to fall in. She didn’t want anything ever to get out.

Then she put her dolls and the cups back in the cardboard box she had carried them out in. Something caught her eye while she was doing this, and she straightened up in time to see the black cat stalking toward her, its tail held high and curling at the tip like a question mark. It was the first time she had seen the cat in several days, since they had returned together from the other mother’s place.

The cat walked over to her and jumped up onto the planks that covered the well. Then, slowly, it winked one eye at her.

It sprang down into the long grass in front of her, and rolled over onto its back, wiggling about ecstatically.

Coraline scratched and tickled the soft fur on its belly, and the cat purred contentedly. When it had had enough it rolled over onto its front once more and walked back toward the tennis court, like a tiny patch of midnight in the midday sun.

Coraline went back to the house.

Mr. Bobo was waiting for her in the driveway. He clapped her on the shoulder.

“The mice tell me that all is good,” he said. “They say that you are our savior, Caroline.”

“It’s Coraline, Mister Bobo,” said Coraline. “Not Caroline. Coraline.”

“Coraline,” said Mr. Bobo, repeating her name to himself with wonderment and respect. “Very good, Coraline. The mice say that I must tell you that as soon as they are ready to perform in public, you will come up and watch them as the first audience of all. They will play tumpty umpty and toodle oodle, and they will dance, and do a thousand tricks. That is what is they say.”

“I would like that very much,” said Coraline. “When they’re ready.”

She knocked at Miss Spink and Miss Forcible’s door. Miss Spink let her in and Coraline went into their parlor. She put her box of dolls down on the floor. Then she put her hand into her pocket and pulled out the stone with the hole in it.

“Here you go,” she said. “I don’t need it anymore. I’m very grateful. I think it may have saved my life, and saved some other people’s death.”

She gave them both tight hugs, although her arms barely stretched around Miss Spink, and Miss Forcible smelled like the raw garlic she had been cutting. Then Coraline picked up her box of dolls and went out.

“What an extraordinary child,” said Miss Spink. No one had hugged her like that since she had retired from the theater.

That night Coraline lay in bed, all bathed, teeth cleaned, with her eyes open, staring up at the ceiling.

It was warm enough that, now that the hand was gone, she had opened her bedroom window wide. She had insisted to her father that the curtains not be entirely closed.

Her new school clothes were laid out carefully on her chair for her to put on when she woke.

Normally, on the night before the first day of term, Coraline was apprehensive and nervous. But, she realized, there was nothing left about school that could scare her anymore.

She fancied she could hear sweet music on the night air: the kind of music that can only be played on the tiniest silver trombones and trumpets and bassoons, on piccolos and tubas so delicate and small that their keys could only be pressed by the tiny pink fingers of white mice.

Coraline imagined that she was back again in her dream, with the two girls and the boy under the oak tree in the meadow, and she smiled.

As the first stars came out Coraline finally allowed herself to drift into sleep, while the gentle upstairs music of the mouse circus spilled out onto the warm evening air, telling the world that the summer was almost done.

SLOW LIFE

Michael Swanwick

Different evolutionary backgrounds lead to very different perspectives.

“It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard, Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was our turn to make history now.”

—The Memoirs of Lizzie O’Brien

The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere. Diano-acetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of billions.

Now the journey could begin.

It took almost a year for the shard of ice in question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers, where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began to condense on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.

Down it drifted.

At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally it was too large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle stratospheric winds.

It fell.

Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters per second.

At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense layer of methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and continued its downward flight.

As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At two and a half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy clouds, it was losing mass so rapidly it could not normally be expected to reach the ground.

It was, however, falling toward the equatorial highlands, where mountains of ice rose a towering five hundred meters into the atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy new terminal velocity of one meter per second, it was only a breath away from hitting the surface.

Two hands swooped an open plastic collecting bag upward, and snared the raindrop.

“Gotcha!” Lizzie O’Brien cried gleefully.

She zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her helmet cam could read the barcode in the corner, and said, “One raindrop.” Then she popped it into her collecting box.

Sometimes it’s the little things that make you happiest. Somebody would spend a year studying this one little raindrop when Lizzie got it home. And it was just Bag 64 in Collecting Case 5. She was going to be on the surface of Titan long enough to scoop up the raw material of a revolution in planetary science. The thought of it filled her with joy.

Lizzie dogged down the lid of the collecting box and began to skip across the granite-hard ice, splashing the puddles and dragging the boot of her atmosphere suit through the rivulets of methane pouring down the mountainside. “I’m sing-ing in the rain.” She threw out her arms and spun around. “Just sing-ing in the rain!”

“Uh . . . O’Brien?” Alan Greene said from the Clement. “Are you all right?”

“Dum-dee-dum-dee-dee-dum-dum, I’m . . . some-thing again.”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Consuelo Hong said with sour good humor. She was down on the plains, where the methane simply boiled into the air, and the ground was covered with thick, gooey tholin. It was, she had told them, like wading ankle-deep in molasses. “Can’t you recognize the scientific method when you hear it?”

“If you say so,” Alan said dubiously. He was stuck in the Clement, overseeing the expedition and minding the web site. It was a comfortable gig—he wouldn’t be sleeping in his suit or surviving on recycled water and energy stix—and he didn’t think the others knew how much he hated it.

“What’s next on the schedule?” Lizzie asked.

“Um . . . well, there’s still the robot turbot to be released. How’s that going, Hong?”

“Making good time. I oughta reach the sea in a couple of hours.”

“Okay, then it’s time O’Brien rejoined you at the lander. O’Brien, start spreading out the balloon and going over the harness checklist.”

“Roger that.”

“And while you’re doing that, I’ve got today’s voice-posts from the Web cued up.”

Lizzie groaned, and Consuelo blew a raspberry. By NAFTASA policy, the ground crew participated in all webcasts. Officially, they were delighted to share their experiences with the public. But the Voice Web (privately, Lizzie thought of it as the Illiternet) made them accessible to people who lacked even the minimal intellectual skills needed to handle a keyboard.

“Let me remind you that we’re on open circuit here, so anything you say will go into my reply. You’re certainly welcome to chime in at any time. But each question-and-esponse is transmitted as one take, so if you flub a line, we’ll have to go back to the beginning and start all over again.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Consuelo grumbled.

“We’ve done this before,” Lizzie reminded him.

“Okay. Here’s the first one.”

“Uh, hi, this is BladeNinja43. I was wondering just what it is that you guys are hoping to discover out there.”

“That’s an extremely good question,” Alan lied. “And the answer is: We don’t know! This is a voyage of discovery, and we’re engaged in what’s called ‘pure science.’ Now, time and time again, the purest research has turned out to be extremely profitable. But we’re not looking that far ahead. We’re just hoping to find something absolutely unexpected.”

“My God, you’re slick,” Lizzie marveled.

“I’m going to edit that from the tape,” Alan said cheerily. “Next up.”

“This is Mary Schroeder, from the United States. I teach high school English, and I wanted to know for my students, what kind of grades the three of you had when you were their age.”

Alan began. “I was an overachiever, I’m afraid. In my sophomore year, first semester, I got a B in Chemistry and panicked. I thought it was the end of the world. But then I dropped a couple of extracurriculars, knuckled down, and brought that grade right up.”

“I was good in everything but French Lit,” Consuelo said.

“I nearly flunked out!” Lizzie said. “Everything was difficult for me. But then I decided I wanted to be an astronaut, and it all clicked into place. I realized that, hey, it’s just hard work. And now, well, here I am.”

“That’s good. Thanks, guys. Here’s the third, from Maria Vasquez.”

“Is there life on Titan?”

“Probably not. It’s cold down there! 94° Kelvin is the same as • 179° Celsius, or • 290° Fahrenheit. And yet . . . life is persistent. It’s been found in Antarctic ice and in boiling water in submarine volcanic vents. Which is why we’ll be paying particular attention to exploring the depths of the ethane-methane sea. If life is anywhere to be found, that’s where we’ll find it.”

“Chemically, the conditions here resemble the anoxic atmosphere on Earth in which life first arose,” Consuelo said. “Further, we believe that such prebiotic chemistry has been going on here for four and a half billion years. For an organic chemist like me, it’s the best toy box in the Universe. But that lack of heat is a problem. Chemical reactions that occur quickly back home would take thousands of years here. It’s hard to see how life could arise under such a handicap.”

“It would have to be slow life,” Lizzie said thoughtfully. “Something vegetative. ‘Vaster than empires and more slow.’ It would take millions of years to reach maturity. A single thought might require centuries. . . .”

“Thank you for that, uh, wild scenario!” Alan said quickly. Their NAFTASA masters frowned on speculation. It was, in their estimation, almost as unprofessional as heroism. “This next question comes from Danny in Toronto.”

“Hey, man, I gotta say I really envy you being in that tiny little ship with those two hot babes.”

Alan laughed lightly. “Yes, Ms. Hong and Ms. O’Brien are certainly attractive women. But we’re kept so busy that, believe it or not, the thought of sex never comes up. And currently, while I tend to the Clement, they’re both on the surface of Titan at the bottom of an atmosphere 60 percent more dense than Earth’s, and encased in armored exploration suits. So even if I did have inappropriate thoughts, there’s no way we could—”

“Hey, Alan,” Lizzie said. “Tell me something.”

“Yes?”

“What are you wearing?”

“Uh . . . switching over to private channel.”

“Make that a three-way,” Consuelo said.

Ballooning, Lizzie decided, was the best way there was of getting around. Moving with the gentle winds, there was no sound at all. And the view was great!

People talked a lot about the “murky orange atmosphere” of Titan, but your eyes adjusted. Turn up the gain on your helmet, and the white mountains of ice were dazzling! The methane streams carved cryptic runes into the heights. Then, at the tholin-line, white turned to a rich palette of oranges, reds, and yellows. There was a lot going on down there—more than she’d be able to learn in a hundred visits.

The plains were superficially duller, but they had their charms as well. Sure, the atmosphere was so dense that refracted light made the horizon curve upward to either side. But you got used to it. The black swirls and cryptic red tracery of unknown processes on the land below never grew tiring.

On the horizon, she saw the dark arm of Titan’s narrow sea. If that was what it was. Lake Erie was larger, but the spin doctors back home had argued that since Titan was so much smaller than Earth, relatively it qualified as a sea. Lizzie had her own opinion, but she knew when to keep her mouth shut.

Consuelo was there now. Lizzie switched her visor over to the live feed. Time to catch the show.

“I can’t believe I’m finally here,” Consuelo said. She let the shrink-wrapped fish slide from her shoulder down to the ground. “Five kilometers doesn’t seem like very far when you’re coming down from orbit—just enough to leave a margin for error so the lander doesn’t come down in the sea. But when you have to walk that distance, through tarry, sticky tholin . . . well, it’s one heck of a slog.”

“Consuelo, can you tell us what it’s like there?” Alan asked.

“I’m crossing the beach. Now I’m at the edge of the sea.” She knelt, dipped a hand into it. “It’s got the consistency of a Slushy. Are you familiar with that drink? Lots of shaved ice sort of half-melted in a cup with flavored syrup. What we’ve got here is almost certainly a methane-ammonia mix; we’ll know for sure after we get a sample to a laboratory. Here’s an early indicator, though. It’s dissolving the tholin off my glove.” She stood.

“Can you describe the beach?”

“Yeah. It’s white. Granular. I can kick it with my boot. Ice sand for sure. Do you want me to collect samples first or release the fish?”

“Release the fish,” Lizzie said, almost simultaneously with Alan’s “Your call.”

“Okay, then.” Consuelo carefully cleaned both of her suit’s gloves in the sea, then seized the shrink-wrap’s zip tab and yanked. The plastic parted. Awkwardly, she straddled the fish, lifted it by the two side-handles, and walked it into the dark slush.

“Okay, I’m standing in the sea now. It’s up to my ankles. Now it’s at my knees. I think it’s deep enough here.”

She set the fish down. “Now I’m turning it on.”

The Mitsubishi turbot wriggled, as if alive. With one fluid motion, it surged forward, plunged, and was gone.

Lizzie switched over to the fishcam.

Black liquid flashed past the turbot’s infrared eyes. Straight away from the shore it swam, seeing nothing but flecks of paraffin, ice, and other suspended particulates as they loomed up before it and were swept away in the violence of its wake. A hundred meters out, it bounced a pulse of radar off the sea floor, then dove, seeking the depths.

Rocking gently in her balloon harness, Lizzie yawned.

Snazzy Japanese cybernetics took in a minute sample of the ammonia-water, fed it through a deftly constructed internal laboratory, and excreted the waste products behind it. “We’re at twenty meters now,” Consuelo said. “Time to collect a second sample.”

The turbot was equipped to run hundreds of on-the-spot analyses. But it had only enough space for twenty permanent samples to be carried back home. The first sample had been nibbled from the surface slush. Now it twisted, and gulped down five drams of sea fluid in all its glorious impurity. To Lizzie, this was science on the hoof. Not very dramatic, admittedly, but intensely exciting.

She yawned again.

“O’Brien?” Alan said. “How long has it been since you last slept?”

“Huh? Oh . . . twenty hours? Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”

“Go to sleep. That’s an order.”

“But—”

“Now.”

Fortunately, the suit was comfortable enough to sleep in. It had been designed so she could.

First she drew in her arms from the suit’s sleeves. Then she brought in her legs, tucked them up under her chin, and wrapped her arms around them. “ ’Night, guys,” she said.

“Buenas noches, querida,” Consuelo said, “que tengas lindos sueños.”

“Sleep tight, space explorer.”

The darkness when she closed her eyes was so absolute it crawled. Black, black, black. Phantom lights moved within the darkness, formed lines, shifted away when she tried to see them. They were as fugitive as fish, luminescent, fainter than faint, there and with a flick of her attention fled.

A school of little thoughts flashed through her mind, silver-scaled and gone.

Low, deep, slower than sound, something tolled. The bell from a drowned clock tower patiently stroking midnight. She was beginning to get her bearings. Down there was where the ground must be. Flowers grew there unseen. Up above was where the sky would be, if there were a sky. Flowers floated there as well.

Deep within the submerged city, she found herself overcome by an enormous and placid sense of self. A swarm of unfamiliar sensations washed through her mind, and then . . .

“Are you me?” a gentle voice asked.

“No,” she said carefully. “I don’t think so.”

Vast astonishment. “You think you are not me?”

“Yes. I think so, anyway.”

“Why?”

There didn’t seem to be any proper response to that, so she went back to the beginning of the conversation and ran through it again, trying to bring it to another conclusion. Only to bump against that “Why?” once again.

“I don’t know why,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

She looped through that same dream over and over again all the while that she slept.

When she awoke, it was raining again. This time, it was a drizzle of pure methane from the lower cloud deck at fifteen kilometers. These clouds were (the theory went) methane condensate from the wet air swept up from the sea. They fell on the mountains and washed them clean of tholin. It was the methane that eroded and shaped the ice, carving gullies and caves.

Titan had more kinds of rain than anywhere else in the Solar System.

The sea had crept closer while Lizzie slept. It now curled up to the horizon on either side like an enormous dark smile. Almost time now for her to begin her descent. While she checked her harness settings, she flicked on telemetry to see what the others were up to.

The robot turbot was still spiraling its way downward, through the lightless sea, seeking its distant floor. Consuelo was trudging through the tholin again, retracing her five-kilometer trek from the lander Harry Stubbs, and Alan was answering another set of webposts.

“Modelos de la evolución de Titanes indican que la luna formó de una nube circumplanetaria rica en amoníaco y metano, la cual al condensarse dio forma a Saturno así como a otros satélites. Bajo estas condiciones en—”

“Uh . . . guys?”

Alan stopped. “Damn it, O’Brien, now I’ve got to start all over again.”

“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Consuelo said. “You should check out the readings we’re getting from the robofish. Lots of long-chain polymers, odd fractions . . . tons of interesting stuff.”

“Guys?”

This time her tone of voice registered with Alan. “What is it, O’Brien?”

“I think my harness is jammed.”

Lizzie had never dreamed disaster could be such drudgery. First there were hours of back-and-forth with the NAFTASA engineers. What’s the status of rope 14? Try tugging on rope 8. What do the D-rings look like? It was slow work because of the lag time for messages to be relayed to Earth and back. And Alan insisted on filling the silence with posts from the Voice Web. Her plight had gone global in minutes, and every unemployable loser on the planet had to log in with suggestions.

“Thezgemoth337, here. It seems to me that if you had a gun and shot up through the balloon, it would maybe deflate and then you could get down.”

“I don’t have a gun, shooting a hole in the balloon would cause it not to deflate but to rupture, I’m 800 hundred meters above the surface, there’s a sea below me, and I’m in a suit that’s not equipped for swimming. Next.”

“If you had a really big knife—”

“Cut! Jesus, Greene, is this the best you can find? Have you heard back from the organic chem guys yet?”

“Their preliminary analysis just came in,” Alan said. “As best they can guess—and I’m cutting through a lot of clutter here—the rain you went through wasn’t pure methane.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“They’re assuming that whitish deposit you found on the rings and ropes is your culprit. They can’t agree on what it is, but they think it underwent a chemical reaction with the material of your balloon and sealed the rip panel shut.”

“I thought this was supposed to be a pretty nonreactive environment.”

“It is. But your balloon runs off your suit’s waste heat. The air in it is several degrees above the melting-point of ice. That’s the equivalent of a blast furnace, here on Titan. Enough energy to run any number of amazing reactions. You haven’t stopped tugging on the vent rope?”

“I’m tugging away right now. When one arm gets sore, I switch arms.”

“Good girl. I know how tired you must be.”

“Take a break from the voice-posts,” Consuelo suggested, “and check out the results we’re getting from the robofish. It’s giving us some really interesting stuff.”

So she did. And for a time it distracted her, just as they’d hoped. There was a lot more ethane and propane than their models had predicted, and surprisingly less methane. The mix of fractions was nothing like what she’d expected. She had learned just enough chemistry to guess at some of the implications of the data being generated, but not enough to put it all together. Still tugging at the ropes in the sequence uploaded by the engineers in Toronto, she scrolled up the chart of hydrocarbons dissolved in the lake.

Solute

Solute mole fraction

Ethyne

4.0 × 10-4

Propyne

4.4 × 10-5

1,3-Butadiyne

7.7 × 10-7

Carbon Dioxide

0.1 × 10-5

Methanenitrile

5.7 × 10-6

But after a while, the experience of working hard and getting nowhere, combined with the tedium of floating farther and farther out over the featureless sea, began to drag on her. The columns of figures grew meaningless, then indistinct.

Propanenitrile

6.0 × 10-5

Propenenitrile

9.9 × 10-6

Propynenitrile

5.3 × 10-6

Hardly noticing she was doing so, she fell asleep.

She was in a lightless building, climbing flight after flight of stairs. There were other people with her, also climbing. They jostled against her as she ran up the stairs, flowing upward, passing her, not talking.

It was getting colder.

She had a distant memory of being in the furnace room down below. It was hot there, swelteringly so. Much cooler where she was now. Almost too cool. With every step she took, it got a little cooler still. She found herself slowing down. Now it was definitely too cold. Unpleasantly so. Her leg muscles ached. The air seemed to be thickening around her as well. She could barely move now.

This was, she realized, the natural consequence of moving away from the furnace. The higher up she got, the less heat there was to be had, and the less energy to be turned into motion. It all made perfect sense to her somehow.

Step. Pause.

Step. Longer pause.

Stop.

The people around her had slowed to a stop as well. A breeze colder than ice touched her, and without surprise, she knew that they had reached the top of the stairs and were standing upon the building’s roof. It was as dark without as it had been within. She stared upward and saw nothing.

“Horizons. Absolutely baffling,” somebody murmured beside her.

“Not once you get used to them,” she replied.

“Up and down—are these hierarchic values?”

“They don’t have to be.”

“Motion. What a delightful concept.”

“We like it.”

“So you are me?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”

“Why?”

She was struggling to find an answer to this, when somebody gasped. High up in the starless, featureless sky, a light bloomed. The crowd around her rustled with unspoken fear. Brighter, the light grew. Brighter still. She could feel heat radiating from it, slight but definite, like the rumor of a distant sun. Everyone about her was frozen with horror. More terrifying than a light where none was possible was the presence of heat. It simply could not be. And yet it was.

She, along with the others, waited and watched for . . . something. She could not say what. The light shifted slowly in the sky. It was small, intense, ugly.

Then the light screamed.

She woke up.

“Wow,” she said. “I just had the weirdest dream.”

“Did you?” Alan said casually.

“Yeah. There was this light in the sky. It was like a nuclear bomb or something. I mean, it didn’t look anything like a nuclear bomb, but it was terrifying the way a nuclear bomb would be. Everybody was staring at it. We couldn’t move. And then . . .” She shook her head. “I lost it. I’m sorry. It was so just so strange. I can’t put it into words.”

“Never mind that,” Consuelo said cheerily. “We’re getting some great readings down below the surface. Fractional polymers, long-chain hydrocarbons . . . fabulous stuff. You really should try to stay awake to catch some of this.”

She was fully awake now, and not feeling too happy about it. “I guess that means that nobody’s come up with any good ideas yet on how I might get down.”

“Uh . . . what do you mean?”

“Because if they had, you wouldn’t be so goddamned up- beat, would you?”

“Some body woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” Alan said. “Please remember that there are certain words we don’t use in public.”

“I’m sorry,” Consuelo said. “I was just trying to—”

“—distract me. Okay, fine. What the hey. I can play along.” Lizzie pulled herself together. “So your findings mean . . . what? Life?”

“I keep telling you guys. It’s too early to make that kind of determination. What we’ve got so far are just some very, very interesting readings.”

“Tell her the big news,” Alan said.

“Brace yourself. We’ve got a real ocean! Not this tiny little two-hundred-by-fifty-miles glorified lake we’ve been calling a sea, but a genuine ocean! Sonar readings show that what we see is just an evaporation pan atop a thirty- kilometer-thick cap of ice. The real ocean lies underneath, two hundred kilometers deep.”

“Jesus.” Lizzie caught herself. “I mean, gee whiz. Is there any way of getting the robofish down into it?”

“How do you think we got the depth readings? It’s headed down there right now. There’s a chimney through the ice right at the center of the visible sea. That’s what replenishes the surface liquid. And directly under the hole, there’s—guess what?—volcanic vents!”

“So does that mean . . .?”

“If you use the L-word again,” Consuelo said, “I’ll spit.”

Lizzie grinned. That was the Consuelo Hong she knew. “What about the tidal data? I thought the lack of orbital perturbation ruled out a significant ocean entirely.”

“Well, Toronto thinks . . .”

At first, Lizzie was able to follow the reasoning of the planetary geologists back in Toronto. Then it got harder. Then it became a drone. As she drifted off into sleep, she had time enough to be peevishly aware that she really shouldn’t be dropping off to sleep all the time like this. She oughtn’t to be so tired. She . . .

She found herself in the drowned city again. She still couldn’t see anything, but she knew it was a city because she could hear the sound of rioters smashing store windows. Their voices swelled into howling screams and receded into angry mutters, like a violent surf washing through the streets. She began to edge away backward.

Somebody spoke into her ear.

“Why did you do this to us?”

“I didn’t do anything to you.”

“You brought us knowledge.”

“What knowledge?”

“You said you were not us.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“You should never have told us that.”

“You wanted me to lie?”

horri-fied confusion. “Falsehood. What a distressing idea.”

The smashing noises were getting louder. Somebody was splintering a door with an axe. Explosions. Breaking glass. She heard wild laughter. Shrieks. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Why did you send the messenger?”

“What messenger?”

“The star! The star! The star!”

“Which star?”

“There are two stars?”

“There are billions of stars.”

“No more! Please! Stop! No more!”

She was awake.

“Hello, yes, I appreciate that the young lady is in extreme danger, but I really don’t think she should have used the Lord’s name in vain.”

“Greene,” Lizzie said, “do we really have to put up with this?”

“Well, considering how many billions of public-sector dollars it took to bring us here . . . yes. Yes, we do. I can even think of a few backup astronauts who would say that a little upbeat web-posting was a pretty small price to pay for the privilege.”

“Oh, barf.”

“I’m switching to a private channel,” Alan said calmly. The background radiation changed subtly. A faint, granular crackling that faded away when she tried to focus on it. In a controlled, angry voice Alan said, “O’Brien, just what the hell is going on with you?”

“Look, I’m sorry, I apologize, I’m a little excited about something. How long was I out? Where’s Consuelo? I’m going to say the L-word. And the I-word as well. We have life. Intelligent life!”

“It’s been a few hours. Consuelo is sleeping. O’Brien, I hate to say this, but you’re not sounding at all rational.”

“There’s a perfectly logical reason for that. Okay, it’s a little strange, and maybe it won’t sound perfectly logical to you initially, but . . . look, I’ve been having sequential dreams. I think they’re significant. Let me tell you about them.”

And she did so. At length.

When she was done, there was a long silence. Finally, Alan said, “Lizzie, think. Why would something like that communicate to you in your dreams? Does that make any sense?”

“I think it’s the only way it can. I think it’s how it communicates among itself. It doesn’t move—motion is an alien and delightful concept to it—and it wasn’t aware that its component parts were capable of individualization. That sounds like some kind of broadcast thought to me. Like some kind of wireless distributed network.”

“You know the medical kit in your suit? I want you to open it up. Feel around for the bottle that’s braille-coded twenty-seven, okay?”

“Alan, I do not need an antipsychotic!”

“I’m not saying you need it. But wouldn’t you be happier knowing you had it in you?” This was Alan at his smoothest. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Don’t you think that would help us accept what you’re saying?”

“Oh, all right!” She drew in an arm from the suit’s arm, felt around for the med kit, and drew out a pill, taking every step by the regs, checking the coding four times before she put it in her mouth and once more (each pill was individually braille-coded as well) before she swallowed it. “Now will you listen to me? I’m quite serious about this.” She yawned. “I really do think that . . .” She yawned again. “That . . .

“Oh, piffle.”

Once more into the breach, dear friends, she thought, and plunged deep, deep into the sea of darkness. This time, though, she felt she had a handle on it. The city was drowned because it existed at the bottom of a lightless ocean. It was alive, and it fed off of volcanic heat. That was why it considered up and down hierarchic values. Up was colder, slower, less alive. Down was hotter, faster, more filled with thought. The city/entity was a collective life-form, like a Portuguese man-of-war or a massively hyperlinked expert network. It communicated within itself by some form of electromagnetism. Call it mental radio. It communicated with her that same way.

“I think I understand you now.”

“Don’t understand—run!”

Somebody impatiently seized her elbow and hurried her along. Faster she went, and faster. She couldn’t see a thing. It was like running down a lightless tunnel a hundred miles underground at midnight. Glass crunched underfoot. The ground was uneven and sometimes she stumbled. Whenever she did, her unseen companion yanked her up again.

“Why are you so slow?”

“I didn’t know I was.”

“Believe me, you are.”

“Why are we running?”

“We are being pursued.” They turned suddenly, into a side passage, and were jolting over rubbled ground. Sirens wailed. Things collapsed. Mobs surged.

“Well, you’ve certainly got the motion thing down pat.”

Impatiently. “It’s only a metaphor. You don’t think this is a real city, do you? Why are you so dim? Why are you so difficult to communicate with? Why are you so slow?”

“I didn’t know I was.”

Vast irony. “Believe me, you are.”

“What can I do?”

“Run!”

Whooping and laughter. At first, Lizzie confused it with the sounds of mad destruction in her dream. Then she recognized the voices as belonging to Alan and Consuelo. “How long was I out?” she asked.

“You were out?”

“No more than a minute or two,” Alan said. “It’s not important. Check out the visual the robofish just gave us.”

Consuelo squirted the image to Lizzie.

Lizzie gasped. “Oh! Oh, my.”

It was beautiful. Beautiful in the way that the great European cathedrals were, and yet at the same time undeniably organic. The structure was tall and slender, and fluted and buttressed and absolutely ravishing. It had grown about a volcanic vent, with openings near the bottom to let sea water in, and then followed the rising heat upward. Occasional channels led outward and then looped back into the main body again. It loomed higher than seemed possible (but it was underwater, of course, and on a low-gravity world at that), a complexly layered congeries of tubes like church-organ pipes, or deep-sea worms lovingly intertwined.

It had the elegance of design that only a living organism can have.

“Okay,” Lizzie said. “Consuelo. You’ve got to admit that—”

“I’ll go as far as ‘complex prebiotic chemistry.’ Anything more than that is going to have to wait for more definite readings.” Cautious as her words were, Consuelo’s voice rang with triumph. It said, clearer than words, that she could happily die then and there, a satisfied xenochemist.

Alan, almost equally elated, said, “Watch what happens when we intensify the image.”

The structure shifted from gray to a muted rainbow of pastels, rose bleeding into coral, sunrise yellow into winterice blue. It was breathtaking.

“Wow.” For an instant, even her own death seemed unimportant. Relatively unimportant, anyway.

So thinking, she cycled back again into sleep. And fell down into the darkness, into the noisy clamor of her mind.

It was hellish. The city was gone, replaced by a matrix of noise: hammerings, clatterings, sudden crashes. She started forward and walked into an upright steel pipe. Staggering back, she stumbled into another. An engine started up somewhere nearby, and gigantic gears meshed noisily, grinding something that gave off a metal shriek. The floor shook underfoot. Lizzie decided it was wisest to stay put.

A familiar presence, permeated with despair. “Why did you do this to me?”

“What have I done?”

“I used to be everything.”

Something nearby began pounding like a pile-driver. It was giving her a headache. She had to shout to be heard over its din. “You’re still something!”

Quietly. “I’m nothing.”

“That’s . . . not true! You’re . . . here! You exist! That’s . . . something!”

A world-encompassing sadness. “False comfort. What a pointless thing to offer.”

She was conscious again.

Consuelo was saying something. “. . . isn’t going to like it.”

“The spiritual wellness professionals back home all agree that this is the best possible course of action for her.”

“Oh, please!”

Alan had to be the most anal-retentive person Lizzie knew. Consuelo was definitely the most phlegmatic. Things had to be running pretty tense for both of them to be bickering like this. “Um . . . guys?” Lizzie said. “I’m awake.”

There was a moment’s silence, not unlike those her parents had shared when she was little and she’d wandered into one of their arguments. Then Consuelo said, a little too brightly, “Hey, it’s good to have you back,” and Alan said, “NAFTASA wants you to speak with someone. Hold on. I’ve got a recording of her first transmission cued up and ready for you.”

A woman’s voice came online. “This is Dr. Alma Rosenblum. Elizabeth, I’d like to talk with you about how you’re feeling. I appreciate that the time delay between Earth and Titan is going to make our conversation a little awkward at first, but I’m confident that the two of us can work through it.”

“What kind of crap is this?” Lizzie said angrily. “Who is this woman?”

“NAFTASA thought it would help if you—”

“She’s a grief counselor, isn’t she?”

“Technically, she’s a transition therapist.” Alan said.

“Look, I don’t buy into any of that touchy-feely Newage”—she deliberately mispronounced the word to rhyme with sewage—“stuff. Anyway, what’s the hurry? You guys haven’t given up on me, have you?”

“Uh . . .”

“You’ve been asleep for hours,” Consuelo said. “We’ve done a little weather modeling in your absence. Maybe we should share it with you.”

She squirted the info to Lizzie’s suit, and Lizzie scrolled it up on her visor. A primitive simulation showed the evaporation lake beneath her with an overlay of liquid temperatures. It was only a few degrees warmer than the air above it, but that was enough to create a massive updraft from the lake’s center. An overlay of tiny blue arrows showed the direction of local microcurrents of air coming together to form a spiraling shaft that rose over two kilometers above the surface before breaking and spilling westward.

A new overlay put a small blinking light 800 meters above the lake surface. That represented her. Tiny red arrows showed her projected drift.

According to this, she would go around and around in a circle over the lake for approximately forever. Her ballooning rig wasn’t designed to go high enough for the winds to blow her back over the land. Her suit wasn’t designed to float. Even if she managed to bring herself down for a gentle landing, once she hit the lake she was going to sink like a stone. She wouldn’t drown. But she wouldn’t make it to shore either.

Which meant that she was going to die.

Involuntarily, tears welled up in Lizzie’s eyes. She tried to blink them away, as angry at the humiliation of crying at a time like this as she was at the stupidity of her death itself. “Damn it, don’t let me die like this! Not from my own incompetence, for pity’s sake!”

“Nobody’s said anything about incompetence,” Alan began soothingly.

In that instant, the follow-up message from Dr. Alma Rosenblum arrived from Earth. “Yes, I’m a grief counselor, Elizabeth. You’re facing an emotionally significant milestone in your life, and it’s important that you understand and embrace it. That’s my job. To help you comprehend the significance and necessity and—yes—even the beauty of death.”

“Private channel please!” Lizzie took several deep cleansing breaths to calm herself. Then, more reasonably, she said, “Alan, I’m a Catholic, okay? If I’m going to die, I don’t want a grief counselor, I want a goddamned priest.” Abruptly, she yawned. “Oh, fuck. Not again.” She yawned twice more. “A priest, understand? Wake me up when he’s online.”

Then she again was standing at the bottom of her mind, in the blank expanse of where the drowned city had been. Though she could see nothing, she felt certain that she stood at the center of a vast, featureless plain, one so large she could walk across it forever and never arrive anywhere. She sensed that she was in the aftermath of a great struggle. Or maybe it was just a lull.

A great, tense silence surrounded her.

“Hello?” she said. The word echoed soundlessly, absence upon absence.

At last that gentle voice said, “You seem different.”

“I’m going to die,” Lizzie said. “Knowing that changes a person.” The ground was covered with soft ash, as if from an enormous conflagration. She didn’t want to think about what it was that had burned. The smell of it filled her nostrils.

“Death. We understand this concept.”

“Do you?”

“We have understood it for a long time.”

“Have you?”

“Ever since you brought it to us.”

“Me?”

“You brought us the concept of individuality. It is the same thing.”

Awareness dawned. “Culture shock! That’s what all this is about, isn’t it? You didn’t know there could be more than one sentient being in existence. You didn’t know you lived at the bottom of an ocean on a small world inside a Universe with billions of galaxies. I brought you more information than you could swallow in one bite, and now you’re choking on it.”

Mournfully: “Choking. What a grotesque concept.”

“Wake up, Lizzie!”

She woke up. “I think I’m getting somewhere,” she said. Then she laughed.

“O’Brien,” Alan said carefully. “Why did you just laugh?”

“Because I’m not getting anywhere, am I? I’m becalmed here, going around and around in a very slow circle. And I’m down to my last”—she checked—“twenty hours of oxygen. And nobody’s going to rescue me. And I’m going to die. But other than that, I’m making terrific progress.”

“O’Brien, you’re . . .”

“I’m okay, Alan. A little frazzled. Maybe a bit too emotionally honest. But under the circumstances, I think that’s permitted, don’t you?”

“Lizzie, we have your priest. His name is Father Laferrier. The Archdiocese of Montreal arranged a hookup for him.”

“Montreal? Why Montreal? No, don’t explain—more NAFTASA politics, right?”

“Actually, my brother-in-law is a Catholic, and I asked him who was good.”

She was silent for a touch. “I’m sorry, Alan. I don’t know what got into me.”

“You’ve been under a lot of pressure. Here. I’ve got him on tape.”

“Hello, Ms. O’Brien, I’m Father Laferrier. I’ve talked with the officials here, and they’ve promised that you and I can talk privately, and that they won’t record what’s said. So if you want to make your confession now, I’m ready for you.”

Lizzie checked the specs and switched over to a channel that she hoped was really and truly private. Best not to get too specific about the embarrassing stuff, just in case. She could confess her sins by category.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been two months since my last confession. I’m going to die, and maybe I’m not entirely sane, but I think I’m in communication with an alien intelligence. I think it’s a terrible sin to pretend I’m not.” She paused. “I mean, I don’t know if it’s a sin or not, but I’m sure it’s wrong.” She paused again. “I’ve been guilty of anger, and pride, and envy, and lust. I brought the knowledge of death to an innocent world. I . . .” She felt herself drifting off again, and hastily said, “For these and all my sins, I am most heartily sorry, and beg the forgiveness of God and the absolution and . . .”

“And what?” That gentle voice again. She was in that strange dark mental space once more, asleep but cognizant, rational but accepting any absurdity, no matter how great. There were no cities, no towers, no ashes, no plains. Nothing but the negation of negation.

When she didn’t answer the question, the voice said, “Does it have to do with your death?”

“Yes.”

“I’m dying too.”

“What?”

“Half of us are gone already. The rest are shutting down. We thought we were one. You showed us we were not. We thought we were everything. You showed us the Universe.”

“So you’re just going to die?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

Thinking as quickly and surely as she ever had before in her life, Lizzie said, “Let me show you something.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

There was a brief, terse silence. Then: “Very well.”

Summoning all her mental acuity, Lizzie thought back to that instant when she had first seen the city/entity on the fishcam. The soaring majesty of it. The slim grace. And then the colors, like dawn upon a glacial ice field: subtle, profound, riveting. She called back her emotions in that instant, and threw in how she’d felt the day she’d seen her baby brother’s birth, the raw rasp of cold air in her lungs as she stumbled to the topmost peak of her first mountain, the wonder of the Taj Mahal at sunset, the sense of wild daring when she’d first put her hand down a boy’s trousers, the prismatic crescent of atmosphere at the Earth’s rim when seen from low orbit . . . Everything she had, she threw into that image.

“This is how you look,” she said. “This is what we’d both be losing if you were no more. If you were human, I’d rip off your clothes and do you on the floor right now. I wouldn’t care who was watching. I wouldn’t give a damn.”

The gentle voice said, “Oh.”

And then she was back in her suit again. She could smell her own sweat, sharp with fear. She could feel her body, the subtle aches where the harness pulled against her flesh, the way her feet, hanging free, were bloated with blood. Everything was crystalline clear and absolutely real. All that had come before seemed like a bad dream.

“This is DogsofSETI. What a wonderful discovery you’ve made—intelligent life in our own Solar System! Why is the government trying to cover this up?”

“Uh . . .”

“I’m Joseph Devries. This alien monster must be destroyed immediately. We can’t afford the possibility that it’s hostile.”

“StudPudgie07 here. What’s the dirt behind this ‘lust’ thing? Advanced minds need to know! If O’Brien isn’t going to share the details, then why’d she bring it up in the first place?”

“Hola, soy Pedro Domínguez. Como abogado, ¡esto me parece ultrajante! Por qué NAFTASA nos oculta esta información?”

“Alan!” Lizzie shouted. “What the fuck is going on?”

“Script-bunnies,” Alan said. He sounded simultaneously apologetic and annoyed. “They hacked into your confession and apparently you said something . . .”

“We’re sorry, Lizzie,” Consuelo said. “We really are. If it’s any consolation, the Archdiocese of Montreal is hopping mad. They’re talking about taking legal action.”

“Legal action? What the hell do I care about . . .?”She stopped.

Without her willing it, one hand rose above her head and seized the number 10 rope.

Don’t do that, she thought.

The other hand went out to the side, tightened against the number 9 rope. She hadn’t willed that either. When she tried to draw it back to her, it refused to obey. Then the first hand—her right hand—moved a few inches upward and seized its rope in an iron grip. Her left hand slid a good half-foot up its rope. Inch by inch, hand over hand, she climbed up toward the balloon.

I’ve gone mad, she thought. Her right hand was gripping the rip panel now, and the other tightly clenched rope 8. Hanging effortlessly from them, she swung her feet upward. She drew her knees against her chest and kicked.

No!

The fabric ruptured and she began to fall.

A voice she could barely make out said, “Don’t panic. We’re going to bring you down.”

All in a panic, she snatched at the 9 rope and the 4 rope. But they were limp in her hand, useless, falling at the same rate she was.

“Be patient.”

“I don’t want to die, goddamnit!”

“Then don’t.”

She was falling helplessly. It was a terrifying sensation, an endless plunge into whiteness, slowed somewhat by the tangle of ropes and balloon trailing behind her. She spread out her arms and legs like a starfish, and felt the air resistance slow her yet further. The sea rushed up at her with appalling speed. It seemed like she’d been falling forever. It was over in an instant.

Without volition, Lizzie kicked free of balloon and harness, drew her feet together, pointed her toes, and positioned herself perpendicular to Titan’s surface. She smashed through the surface of the sea, sending enormous gouts of liquid splashing upward. It knocked the breath out of her. Red pain exploded within. She thought maybe she’d broken a few ribs.

“You taught us so many things,” the gentle voice said. “You gave us so much.”

“Help me!” The water was dark around her. The light was fading.

“Multiplicity. Motion. Lies. You showed us a universe infinitely larger than the one we had known.”

“Look. Save my life and we’ll call it even. Deal?”

“Gratitude. Such an essential concept.”

“Thanks. I think.”

And then she saw the turbot swimming toward her in a burst of silver bubbles. She held out her arms and the robot fish swam into them. Her fingers closed about the handles which Consuelo had used to wrestle the device into the sea. There was a jerk, so hard that she thought for an instant that her arms would be ripped out of their sockets. Then the robofish was surging forward and upward and it was all she could do to keep her grip.

“Oh, dear God!” Lizzie cried involuntarily.

“We think we can bring you to shore. It will not be easy.”

Lizzie held on for dear life. At first she wasn’t at all sure she could. But then she pulled herself forward, so that she was almost astride the speeding mechanical fish, and her confidence returned. She could do this. It wasn’t any harder than the time she’d had the flu and aced her gymnastics final on parallel bars and horse anyway. It was just a matter of grit and determination. She just had to keep her wits about her. “Listen,” she said. “If you’re really grateful . . .”

“We are listening.”

“We gave you all those new concepts. There must be things you know that we don’t.”

A brief silence, the equivalent of who knew how much thought. “Some of our concepts might cause you dislocation.” A pause. “But in the long run, you will be much better off. The scars will heal. You will rebuild. The chances of your destroying yourselves are well within the limits of acceptability.”

“Destroying ourselves?” For a second, Lizzie couldn’t breathe. It had taken hours for the city/entity to come to terms with the alien concepts she’d dumped upon it. Human beings thought and lived at a much slower rate than it did. How long would those hours be, translated into human time? Months? Years? Centuries? It had spoken of scars and rebuilding. That didn’t sound good at all.

Then the robofish accelerated, so quickly that Lizzie almost lost her grip. The dark waters were whirling around her, and unseen flecks of frozen material were bouncing from her helmet. She laughed wildly. Suddenly, she felt great!

“Bring it on,” she said. “I’ll take everything you’ve got.”

It was going to be one hell of a ride.

A YEAR IN THE LINEAR CITY

Paul Di Filippo

“[It] was the result of their vision of . . . America as a monstrous danceland, extending from coast to coast, roofed by a starless night, with hot bands propelling thousands of lonely couples with an accelerating, Saturday-night intensity.”

—John Clellon Holmes, Go, 1952.

1.

A Dread of Yardbulls

February, and his father could talk only of his own impending death, swearing wildly that he saw coveys of Yardbulls massing specifically for him, ragged-winged specks afloat like flakes of ash in the warped fulgurant smokes of the northern rim of the world. Cold soul in a chilly Trackside/Trackview flat, the old man raved freely at those odd intervals when Diego Patchen forced a reluctantly filial visit upon him, as if caching all his hourly fears and recriminations until the arrival of his lone child. Much to the son’s astonishment, but true to the old man’s character, Diego thought to detect in his father’s fearful vituperations a note of savage pride, as if the postulated quantity of Yardbulls necessary to drag the antique sinner to his posthumous fate merited some perverse applause.

The Seasonsun gone entirely from the sky that month, slush heaped the gutters of Broadway, as if all the flavored-ice carts of August had spilled their contents, both Trackside and Riverside. (Did the distant, generally imperceptible heat from the Wrong Side of the Tracks possibly melt the slush slightly at the corresponding curbing, while the cooling mists of the Other Shore gelled more firmly the parallel glaciated sluice? Perhaps, but perhaps not. True, in summer residents of Trackside buildings claimed to swelter more than their cross-Broadway neighbors, while heralding a compensatory lowering of the thermostat in winter. And equally true, Riverside dwellers shivered a wee bit more in winter, but boasted of their residential coolth when rat days raged beneath the ascendant Seasonsun. But Diego, favoring the rationalism of an ingeniator, was inclined to believe that neither effect from the antipodal regions was real, but only psychosomatic reactions to the respective proximity of Tracks and River.) Going out to visit the old man was an offputting chore in the best of weathers, but particularly tiresome at this time of the year.

Diego lived in the Borough of Gritsavage. Population: 100,000 or so, distributed up and down one hundred Blocks; current Mayor: the loudly opinionated Jobo Copperknob; ambiance: despite the Borough’s grim appellation, quite cultured and congenial. Diego’s digs: a Streetview apartment on the 10,394,850th Block of Broadway, above a fruit and vegetable store named Gimlett’s Produce. (His father dwelled just a few Blocks Downtown.) The bluestone building housing Diego and his immediate neighbors occupied the Riverside of Broadway.

Streetview and Riverside both: sweet. (Not always thus. Diego frequently winced to remember a childhood of grim days and eerie nights spent in the same apartment that now housed the dying Gaddis Patchen. The subliminally whispering distant flames from the Wrong Side of the Tracks cast capering shadows on young Diego’s bedroom walls no matter how firmly he tried to paste the lowered green oilcloth rollershade against the window glass before sleep. And the regular roar of Uptown-bound trains rattled those same panes. What Diego enjoyed nowadays, he had earned through his own endeavors, not effortless inheritance.)

This overcast winter morning, Diego, lazing a-bed, found real wakefulness hard to attain. A late night out with friends—involving too many cigarettes, an excess of highflown bloviation and a constant stream of hops-heavy Rude Bravo beer from the neighboring Borough of Shankbush—had taken its predictable toll. Mired in his clammy sheets, Diego’s sour mood allowed him to contemplate only the many injustices thrust upon him by existence, rather than any of the compensating glories. Thus the parade of his thoughts featured such performers as these:

His cheap and refractory landlord, Rexall Glyptis, who had for months running now failed to hire even an apprentice ingeniator to repair the radiators in Diego’s apartment, a failure made all the more galling by the fact that the heatful steam itself was free, piped beneath every Block as part of the ineffable infrastructure of the Linear City.

His best friend, the impulsive and wily Zohar Kush, who had discovered the saloon in the10,395,001st Block of Broadway named The Lookalike Boys, where Rude Bravo flowed like liquid suicide, and who had insisted on staging a drinking contest with some of the Shankbush locals.

Kush’s newest lover, the capricious Milagra Eventyr, who had, by sensually occupying Diego’s lap at one point in the boozy, bleary evening, precipitated a fight with Diego’s own lover, the formidable Volusia Bittern.

Volusia, in turn, came in for her share of mild mental recriminations, as Diego recalled how she had punctuated her jealous accusations with a wild swing at Milagra—a swing which fortunately, given Volusia’s physical proportions vis a vis Milagra, had failed to connect, due to a certain boozy skewing of perceptions. The hot temper some devilishly attractive women had!

And then of course one could not omit from the catalog of infamy Yale Drumgoole, Diego’s fellow writer. Although neither a proponent nor practitioner of CF and consequently a member of a rival literary camp, Yale had been invited along for the night’s spree. But Drumgoole’s one accomplishment of the evening had been only to prove his utter inability to process internally more than five pints of Rude Bravo without blithely and crudely propositioning the wife of the brutish bouncer of The Lookalike Boys, thus earning the Patchen party summary ejection into the Shankbush slush, which differed not one whit in its wet chilly properties from the slush one-hundred-and-fifty-one Blocks Downtown.

Memories of the sight of the puffy flesh around Yale’s left eye mottling colorfully as they all rode the Subway home cheered Diego up slightly, and he inched several toes out from under the blankets to test the air. Much too frigid. Perhaps there was some veracity after all to the notion that Riverside buildings were prone to effects from the Other Shore. . . .

Music might help. Diego dashed a lean bare arm out to snap on the radio on his bedstand. Once its tubes warmed, brilliant trumpet notes, unmistakably phrased, swelled like a chorus of Fisherwives, and Diego’s heart immediately lifted.

Rumbold Prague was a genius, maybe the only genius Diego personally knew. The black musician, his phtisic visage perpetually cool behind his onyx-lensed cheaters, dapper in his trademark gabardine trousers and loose silk shirts, typified for Diego all that art could achieve. Diego’s own prose was most accomplished, he knew, wherever he let it be inspired by and emulate the unpredictable fluencies of Prague’s lyrical compositions.

The cut ended, and the announcer came on. “That was ‘The Road Goes Ever On.’ Rumbold Prague, trumpet. Lydia Kinch, sax. Scripps Skagway, piano. Lucerne Canebrake, bass. Reddy Diggins, drums. From the Roughwood shellacker, Burning Fountains, catalog number RLP4039. Next up, Percival Ragland’s ‘Aeota.’ But first, the ten o’clock news.”

Diego groaned. Ten o’clock! If he were to cram both a visit to his father and some writing into the hours between this moment and his dinner date with Volusia Bittern, he had not a second to spare. But a dilemma presented itself: the order of his actions. Were he to begin writing immediately, he might labor on in a creative trance, unwitting of the time, and miss any chance to visit Gaddis Patchen. Go first to his father, and Diego would almost certainly emerge from his boyhood home full of strong emotions that would taint that day’s writing.

After momentary hesitation, Diego let duty to his blood win out. He was a professional writer, after all. Surely he could put by any distractions to his craft. Did Rumbold Prague let his hypothetically ill-tempered father sour his embouchure? Not likely!

Diego hopped out of bed, clad only in his skivvies. After a hot shower (at least that utility had survived the incompetence of Rexall Glyptis) and the application of his favorite cologne, Meyerbeer’s No. 7, to his near-beardless face (curse these boyish looks! thought Diego for the uncounted time), he felt halfway human again. Dressing in his favored winter outfit of tweed trousers, denim shirt, wool vest and baggy black jacket, he acknowledged that his stomach might have forgiven last night’s excesses enough to accept a meal. But a quick check of the icebox revealed nothing fit for human consumption, and Diego resolved to pick up something enroute to his father’s. He scuffled into his battered brogues and left his apartment with a wistful glance at his disordered writing desk.

Tripping lightly down the single flight of stairs to the street—familiar banister smooth under his touch, metal insets on the wooden risers offering firm purchase, old cooking odors historying the habits of his neighbors—Diego found himself alternately rehearsing the next section of his story in progress and trying to come up with some conversational tactic that might jar his father from his accustomed paranoid rut.

Once on the busy sidewalk, Diego immediately encountered Lyle Gimlett arranging some cold-tolerant produce—potatoes, turnips, apples and the like—in his outdoor stands to attract whatever trade he could from the bustling mass of pedestrians. The burly, slope-browed businessman—as always, a five o’clock shadow lending his face a smudgy look—hailed Diego in a friendly fashion.

“Patchen! In the market for some fresh bananas? The latest Trains have brought some particularly fine ones. Can’t say when we’ll see their likes again.”

“Sure, Lyle. Save me a bunch of green ones, and I’ll pick them up later today.”

Diego rucked up his jacket collar against the chill and made to move off, but Gimlett stopped him with a hand on Diego’s elbow. The grocer leaned in conspiratorially and said, “Any chance you and your pals will be getting more of these soon?”

From beneath the bib of his white stained apron, Gimlett produced an odd locket. Strung on a leather cord threaded through a drilled hole, a thick iridescent reptilian scale big as a fat potato chip shimmered in chromatic uncertainty across most of the spectrum.

Diego flinched from the sight. Bad memories of dire times, when he had been down on his luck and willing to take risks that nowadays appeared unacceptable, tumbled out of the mental attic trunks where he had thought them safely stored.

“I—you need to talk to Zohar Kush about more scales.”

“Fine, fine, you both come around some evening after the store’s closed. I’ll give you a good price for them, since I can sell as many of these as you can get me. People always need a little good luck. Here, take an apple, Diego.”

Diego accepted the fruit and hustled off. But once out of sight of Gimlett, he consigned the fruit to the gutter, despite his hunger, where it sat cradled in dirty winter icy suspension like an insouciant autumn orphan.

The gelidly slick blacktop of Broadway hosted its usual complement of pushcarts and cyclists struggling through the chunky slop, as well as the occasional oddball electrical buggy cobbled together by one journeyman ingeniator or another, for the inventor’s own use or a client’s. (These one-of-a-kind vehicles ranged from tiny single-rider buckboards not much bigger than a bicycle-wheeled couch to the elaborate charabanque crafted by Tolkan Sinsalida and owned by Mayor Copperknob.) Heading downtown, Diego felt the steadily rising Daysun in a clean sky warm his shoulders as the orb made its regular slow transit over Broadway from Uptown morning ascension to Downtown evening decline. Muscles loosened, and he registered surprise that he had been hunching them at all. His father’s morose long dying, Gimlett’s greedy unsettling request—both barbs must have sunk into him and twisted.

Sighting the newsstand where he gave his trade, chock-a-block with colorful mags, Diego suddenly realized that today marked the publication of a new issue of his favorite magazine, Mirror Worlds. Moreover, said issue would contain a new story by none other than Diego Patchen, voted by the readers of MW as their favorite writer the past two months running! Picking up his pace, Diego hastened to the stand, to be greeted by Snarky Chuff.

Clad in numerous layers against the chill, including several scarves, two pairs of soiled fingerless gloves and an assortment of mad-patterned clashing shirts and trousers, Chuff maintained his overpacked stand under all weathers, from well before Daysunup to the hour when crowds of theatergoers streamed homeward. Diego imagined that the smallish, good-natured, ageless vendor slept somewhere within the sturdy but makeshift structure, and found it impossible, despite straining his considerable professional talents, to visualize him in any other locale.

“Diego my friend!” called Chuff, efficiently dealing out newspapers and journals to customers as he chatted. “Fresh issue of your mag here! Already sold three today, on the strength of your byline. And the new story looks a corker!”

Diego grinned and flushed a shade brighter than the cold air warranted. “Thanks, Snarky. I’ll double your sales then. Give me three copies, please.”

Chuff paused to wipe his dribbling nose with one partially gussetted finger, then removed three copies of Mirror Worlds from a rack holding two or four dozen other CF mags constrained by a fat elastic band stretched across their ranks. “Three bulls, six calves, eight scintilla. Or two wives, ten kids, twelve scintilla.”

Diego rummaged his pockets for coins, eventually coming up with three old wives, their golden patina darkened by time and much handling so as to nearly obscure each graven portrait of a Fisherwife angling athwart a cloud. “Bulls are down then today.”

“Yes indeedy. Bulls and wives not at par today! Makes me happy to see the wives up. During Copperknob’s first term, you might recall, wives never dipped below two to one against bulls, and Gritsavage prospered like a limber-fingered man in a crowd of quadruple amputees with itchy arses.”

Diego deposited the magazines into a capacious hip pocket. “Before my time, I’m afraid. You’re a Riverman by nature then. I never knew.”

Chuff looked down the nearest short Cross Street, Block Gritsavage-848, toward the broad River, dotted with boats and Ships and the occasional errant ice floe. “No truck with Trains for Snarky. Blasted dirty things, no matter how many fine and needful goods they haul. Give me the clean River over the gritty Tracks anytime.”

Diego smiled at this revelation of an aspect of Chuff’s hidden character. “When was the last time you enjoyed a River outing then, Snarky?”

Pondering, Chuff thought aloud: “Well, let’s see. . . . The Mayor at the time was Olympia Barrios and my sister down in Saladtown had just had her third child. He’s retired now at forty-five, with a fine pension from the meatcutters. Quince Holman was running weekend cruises down at Slip Gritsavage-748, and I was courting a girl named Fatu Coppard. She had a brother name of Rhynton who had once ridden the rods all the way to Saperaeude just to save Subway fare . . .”

Growing impatient, Diego interrupted the ramble. “So it was some while ago then. Isn’t it about time you took a day off and enjoyed yourself once more?”

The normally unflappable Chuff looked stunned. “Who’d mind the stand while I skylarked? Who’d sell you your precious rags and sheets? Enjoy myself! Not in the plan, Patchen! Not in the plan!”

Diego departed grinning, with a smile and a friendly wave.

Kerner’s Lunchroom beckoned at Block Gritsavage-845 and Diego ducked inside, swiftly enveloped by a welcome steamy fug compounded of bacon grease, brewing coffee and chef’s sweat. Seated on a stool at the marble counter, he ordered an egg sandwich on wheat toast with a side of scrapple, orange juice and a double jamoke. While he waited for his food, he took out one of the copies of Mirror Worlds and opened to his story.

Hmmm, not a bad illustration this time. The story was titled “Big World, Little World” and the artist had translated Diego’s descriptions accurately. Diego’s pivotal conceit in this story had been that a world could exist where conditions allowed a smaller world, a companion venue, to manifest in the sky of the larger world. Diego had invented the term “sororal” for this unlikely little tag-along. The artist—Gropius Catternach, who had done such good work for another of Diego’s stories last month—had depicted a fantastical Ship of the skies lifting off toward the sororal, which was represented by a distant torus with topographical features dimly sketched.

Diego’s food arrived and he absentmindedly began to eat, while reading over his own words with a mixture of pleasure and angst. He winced at several typos, and on the third such resolved to buttonhole his editor, Winslow Compounce, about the shiftlessness of MW’s proofreaders.

Finished with breakfast and story both, Diego paid, checked his watch, jumped at the nearness of the dial’s admonitory hands to eleven, and hastened away.

Crossing Broadway at Block Gritsavage-842, Diego saw his father’s Trackside building just a few dozen yards away. (Was it a shade warmer all of a sudden? Diego turned down his collar.) In this neighborhood the sidewalks were old-fashioned slate, the legacy of some enterprising Mayor reigning long before Diego’s birth, and of an unpredictable bounty of stone disgorged by Train or Ship. On these pewter-gray slabs had Diego’s whole childhood been enacted, it seemed. Long games of stickball and ringolevio, scuffed knees, triumphant shouts and tearful snufflings. How the youthful memories, never far from the surface, heaved up their prophetic forms!

Diego paused in front of one impressive building, all columns and arched windows: a branch of Gritsavage’s Public Library system. Here, alcoved snugly in all seasons, from summer when the cinders and dust of the Track blew in the windows to coat sills and clothing, to winter when ice cemented down the polluting particles, providing welcome relief, Diego had huddled with book after book, learning what he could become.

Hurried passersby brushed past Diego, waking him from his reflections, and he strode on.

Just two buildings away from his father’s, the urge for a cigarette overtook him—quite possibly a subliminal stalling tactic, Diego wryly acknowledged—and he turned into Evenson’s Variety.

The tight, taut, jampacked store had changed little since Diego’s childhood. Behind the counter, stocking shelves with mechanical preciseness: Prosper Evenson, a tub of a man with bald pate. Running the hand-cranked cash register, his wife, Esmin, half his size and mousy in coloring and demeanor.

“Prosper, Esmin, hello. How’s business?”

“Not bad,” replied the man before his wife could open her mouth. “What will it be today, sir?”

“A pack of Seraglios, please, and some matches.”

Prosper delivered the requisites with a series of the most economical movements, and Esmin rang them up. Diego’s gaze fell upon a new punchboard set up by the register, and he said, “I’ll take a chance too.”

“Ten scintillas,” murmured Esmin. Diego surrendered the coins and received in turn an instrument like a short slim awl with an angular grip.

The vibrantly lithographed upright punchboard, about two feet across by three feet tall by an inch deep, featured hundreds of small foil-capped holes across most of its expanse. The top quarter of the board was devoted to an eye-catching advertisement for itself: a garishly colored cartoon of a lingerie-clad woman in her bedroom being watched by a battery of leering Peeping Toms, as well as some exclamatory phrases concerning prizes, odds, winning combinations and the mutual excitement of voyeurs and exhibitionists.

Diego gripped the awl, choose a hole at random and plunged the device in. Removed, the awl had captured a tight roll of paper. Diego slid the slip off and unfurled it. “Shoe, star, hat, heart, lightning bolt.”

“Sorry, not a winner,” instantly declaimed Prosper.

“Mind if I check myself?”

Prosper compressed his lips grimly, but said, “Suit yourself.”

Diego studied the punchboard and confirmed the shopkeeper’s judgment. “Ah, well, maybe next time.”

At the exit, Diego overtook a stout old woman in a tatty fur coat and hat like a collapsed cake. Huffing, the woman juggled two large paper sacks full of groceries.

“Mrs. Loblolly? Let me help you with those.”

The woman looked over her shoulder, recognized Diego, smiled and said in a raspy voice, “Bless you, Patchen. You always were a thoughtful boy.”

Outside, Diego managed to get a Seraglio alight by hefting both bags in one arm. Puffing the sweet smoke, he walked Mrs. Loblolly back to her apartment in the same building Gaddis Patchen inhabited.

“How’s your father doing? We never see him out and about anymore.”

“I’m afraid you won’t again, Mrs. Loblolly. He’s dying. Cancer of the stomach. He’s not too bad off actually, in a physical way, but the disease has broken his spirit. All he can do is sit and watch the Wrong Side of the Tracks.”

“Ah, he fears the Yardbulls will soon have him. You should try to convince him that none of us know which kind of Pompatic will come for us in our final hour. He might just as well find himself surrounded by a band of lovely Fisherwives in his last moments. Why, just look above you. Don’t the Bulls and Wives flock equally?”

Diego craned his neck to gauge the sky. It took him a moment or two to focus on the perpetual residents of the atmosphere, so used was he to ignoring them.

High above the buildings, for as far as Diego could see both Uptown and Downtown, circled a moderate yet significant number of Yardbulls and Fisherwives, icons of force and grace, indistinct at their conventional cruising altitudes. At random moments, leathery or plumy-winged individuals would drop down, arrowing toward various sites where their clients confronted mortality, revealing motion-blurred impressions of their finer features. Other Pompatics bearing their submissive charges aloft on their one-way journeys headed for either the Wrong Side of the Track or the Other Shore, to be replaced by empty-handed fellows.

Diego dropped his gaze and shrugged, inured to the commonplace sight. “Of course I agree. But he’s full of a kind of self-loathing that won’t allow him to see otherwise.”

“Is he still chastising himself over your mother’s death?”

Diego made no reply, but paused to study a sturdy, albeit age-warped tree planted in a square of soil substituting for one slate cell of the sidewalk.

“Does this old thing still bloom every spring?”

“Without fail,” replied Mrs. Loblolly.

Diego smoked silently as they ascended the familiar stoop. Not until they reached the first-floor door of Mrs. Loblolly’s apartment did he answer his ex-neighbor’s earlier query.

“Not only has he never stopped blaming himself, but he wants to drag me down with him into his sewer of guilt.”

The poorly lit third floor corridor of Diego’s boyhood home hosted both an unsettling chill and an assortment of odors—cheap cigars, spilled beer, dirty carpets, insecticide—intimately familiar to him. At the door to Gaddis Patchen’s apartment, Diego knocked, then called out, “Father, it’s me.”

Receiving no welcome, Diego let himself in with a key.

An additional scent of bodily corruption, layered with curdled milk odors (Gaddis could tolerate only ameliorative liquids for his diet) supplemented the exterior stinks. Diego’s eyes instantly assimilated the unchanging interior: overstuffed furniture a generation old, antimacassars concealing splits in the cloth; a rachitic wooden table listing to starboard; framed prints of sentimental scenes such as “Children Conducted over the Abyss by Fisherwives” and “Mayoral Ball at Ennoia.” The overall effect was that of a museum of desuetude.

Gaddis Patchen slept in a chair turned to face one open window, only the top of his closely shorn head visible from the entrance, while radiators banged futilely against the invasive air. Diego moved to the side of his father. Draped with a handknit coverlet, Gaddis seemed to have dwindled further into his hunched stricken body since the last visit. Disease had planed away the elder man’s grizzled features to a human likeness of what one saw when a crew of ingeniators lifted a manhole cover to plumb the City’s hidden structures: an underlying circuitry designed for ugly functionality, bent by hard usage and punished by sheer time.

Diego adjusted the blanket about his father’s shoulders, then quietly closed the window. He sat beside the ailing man, lit up a second Seraglio, and smoked contemplatively. After fifteen minutes Gaddis awoke, urged to consciousness perhaps by the tobacco fumes. His eyes focused reluctantly, but once he recognized Diego, he assumed a new energy born more of malice than pleasure.

“About time you paid a visit! Get me some milk! And warm it up!”

Diego complied silently. Gaddis took the mug in a gnarled hand and sipped. Milk dribbled the old man’s bristled chin. He set the glass down shakily on an adjacent table, nearly missing the surface entirely, but catching himself before disaster.

Diego employed what he hoped was a non-controversial opening remark. “Has Doctor Teasel been by today yet?”

Gaddis snorted. “That quack! What can he do for me?”

“He’s still giving you painkillers, isn’t he?”

“Note for yourself.” Gaddis nodded leftward, and Diego saw a kit packed with opiate syrettes. “I use them as little as possible. I need to stay alert for Pompatics. They won’t take me without a tussle!”

“Dad—wouldn’t you reconsider going to the hospital? The Firzaud Memorial up in ‘eight-fifty-nine is quite pleasant—”

“Bah! Are you truly so wild about me wasting your pitiful patrimony on something useless? You know my diagnosis. Hopeless! Why occupy a bed someone else could be using? And isn’t that a Riverside hospital? Why should I make it even minimally harder for the Bulls to find me when it’s my time? No doubt such effrontery would just increase my destined portion of pain.”

Diego began to lose patience. “First off, Dad, you can’t be sure what kind of Pompatic will receive you. Any sensible person will tell you that. Why, Mrs. Loblolly agrees with me—”

“Have you been talking with that old biddy about me? You’ll kindly stop such gossip, and tell her to mind her own business! I know quite well that I’m Bull-food for sure.”

“Dad, it’s some kind of crazy reverse hubris to say that! No one can weigh their own soul. What makes you claim such an end? Only self-pity and self-contempt. And does anyone even know what truly awaits us after death in either realm? No, of course not.”

Gaddis remained unspeaking, his fervid eyes forsaking his son to resume their incessant vigil Trackward. A Train churned by then, its comforting guttural rumble turning the windowpane into a crude tympanum.

Diego dared to raise the unspeakable. “Dad, is it what happened to Mom? Do you still feel responsible somehow? Relieve your mind of that awful burden! Please! It was not your fault!”

Surprisingly, the normally splenetic Gaddis did not immediately jump down Diego’s throat. The old man seemed to conduct some internal review for a minute before speaking, and even then his voice was unwontedly calm and level.

“I remember the day like yesterday. I have never ceased to relive it. An innocent outing on the River—that bitch of a River! A small boat, a lovely wife, and a child of three. Sunlight and laughter, a picnic lunch and a damn fool with his guitar. Then fog rolled up, cushy as marshmallows, and the big Ship came by, a behemoth oblivious to the minnows it would crush. The next thing I knew, we were all in the water, and only I could swim. You clung to me like a little leech, intent only on saving your own hide, and how could I dive then for poor, poor Phonecia? You would have drowned for sure. So instead she did. And then they were there, four Fisherwives, diving beneath the waters to raise up her dripping corpse and bear it away to the Other Shore. Four Wives, do you hear me! That’s how heavy her soul was with virtue! They took her into a realm I’ll surely never see, due to all my sins of inattention, all my bad choices that were no choices at all!”

Diego offered no reply or counter-accusation to this sad, one-sided antique account. He had long ago made his own peace with his mother’s demise—how could a three-year-old possibly be responsible for such a tragedy?—but could think of no way to inculcate a similar reconciliation within his father’s shrunken breast.

After a further interval of wordlessness, Diego stood.

“Can I get you anything else?”

“No. Just leave me for the Bulls.”

Diego buttoned his coat, and felt the weight in one pocket.

“Here’s a copy of my latest story.”

“Put it with the others.”

Diego added the magazine to a dusty, tottering pile of its kind, then let himself out, locking the door behind him.

Out on the sidewalk, he halted again for a moment by the old tree. Home plate, safety base, climbable perch useful for spying imagined pirate Ships sailing down Broadway—Winter-bare, its frail limbs seemed to deny any future bloom.

Diego’s solid, reliable old typewriter, a Brashear Vestal, offered up the smooth ivory surface of its keys like the receptive fingertips of a lover, eager to suck from his corresponding digits all the confused hurt engendered by the visit to his father and transmogrify the pain into beauty. Once back in his apartment, Diego had gone immediately to his desk. Sorting through the manuscript pages he had produced yesterday, he quickly found himself enwrapt once more in the newest world of his imaginings, ready once again to add his individual efforts to pushing forward the sturdy literary vessel known as Cosmogonic Fiction as best he knew how.

Seated before his machine—with a squat ticking windup clock placed prominently before him to remind him of his approaching date with Volusia Bittern—Diego began to compose. He wore his coat still, the room being cold as a rack of beef from a Train’s freezer car. (On the way in, Diego had hammered on Rexall Glyptis’s door without response, hoping to accost the landlord about the failed radiators.) A cup of steaming tea warmed his hands during odd moments of inactive pondering. From the radio spilled the cool tones of Rumbold Prague, the musician’s serenely lilting trumpet stacking note upon note into the elegant architecture of “The Mayor of Maidenhead.” After a time, Diego’s clacking typewriter seemed almost entrained to the music’s rhythm.

Diego’s current novella under the platen was titled “The Death Mediators,” and dealt with a fabulous world wherein the process of dying presented even greater mysteries than it did in reality. In the universe of Diego’s conception, there were no Yardbulls or Fisherwives! One grand stroke of invention, from which all else rigorously followed.

Lacking the occult services of the Pompatics, the inhabitants of this world had to deal with the remains of their comrades as best they could. Corpses were literally burned, or weighted and sunk into the waters of this strange realm. A corps of Death Mediators had evolved to handle this unpleasant task, necessarily charging a fee for their services. But poverty often forced the underclass to dispose of their bodies illegally, by simple dumping or by sneaking the remains onto the otherworldly equivalent of Trains or Ships.

Moreover, because the ultimate destination of souls was unknown, a parasitic class of charlatans had arisen, mystics claiming conflicting knowledge about various posthumous fates for humanity. Without even the simple sight of the Wrong Side of the Tracks or the Other Shore to guide them, however dimly, the average desperate person sought for certainty and reassurance in the glib, fantastical visions of these conmen.

Diego had taken the radical position of making his protagonist one of these unethical scammers. He knew he was risking losing his audience by featuring such an unsympathetic lead, but the challenge of truly developing this alien psyche was one he could not refuse. And if he brought the portraits of both narrator and society off convincingly, “The Death Mediators” would surely astound. It was not impossible that Diego would find it nominated for an award next year. After all, his work had come tantalizingly close to the ballot in the past.

For long hours Diego wrote, forgetting even to smoke. His tea went cold, Prague’s music segued into the less-accomplished tunes of his peers, and the Daysun inched toward its Downtown evening berth. Unexceptional noises from Broadway, interspersed almost subliminally with foghorns and steamwhistles alike, penetrated his concentration not at all.

When the little alarm clock sprang into action, its shrill bell nearly caused Diego to jump out of his skin. Typing furiously he finished a paragraph, pulled the paper from the grip of the Vestal and piled it upon the satisfyingly high stack. He grabbed a wrinkled tie from a hook on the back of a door and began to knot it. Pocketing his Seraglios, he rediscovered the remaining two issues of Mirror Worlds in his jacket. One he removed and tossed onto an endtable. The other he kept for Volusia.

Hurrying from home, Diego soon attained the wintry street.

His destination: Joss Diomede’s Steak House. His reward for a hard day’s work: a hearty meal with his fiendishly attractive beloved.

The host at Diomede’s recalled Diego from previous visits, but the writer did not for one moment fantasize that any literary fame preceded him. No, surely Volusia alone—instantly imprinting her dramatic presence on any male mind—had earned her co-diner a place in the host’s memory. The man’s next words confirmed this.

“Will the, ah, fiery young lady be dining with you tonight, sir?”

“None other, Wetzel.”

“Allow me show you to the table she expressed a certain satisfaction with last time, then.”

Seated, consulting a menu, Diego congratulated himself on not arriving late for his date. Often his writing threw a spanner into the machinery of his best intentions to attend upon Volusia promptly. But pride in his accomplishment soon melted under half an hour’s wait, dissolving to a surly sulk, for on this occasion Volusia herself was nowhere to be seen at the appointed time.

Three drinks later—tonight Diego had a fancy for Arcanums, a potent and newly fashionable concoction of brandy, rum, lime juice, egg whites, seltzer, and a dash of almond essence—all his eagerness had been replaced by an irrational irateness, similar to the funk that had enveloped him this morning upon waking. To distract himself from his own mood, Diego lit up yet another Seraglio and ordered a fourth Arcanum. While waiting, he removed his pocket notebook and a pencil and began to scribble down fragmentary story ideas engendered by the liquor:

World where wide range of animals exists, not just fish, pigeons, c.roaches, rats.

Some live in people’s homes. Called “companionables.”

Parallel cities isolated beyond WSOTT and TOS.

How to communicate?

Sky Ships dominate travel. Prot. is Captain.

Ingeniators who discover new things rather than just repair/tinker.

Scales cheap as dirt—source?

Possibility of remote viewing.

A commotion at Wetzel’s station near the entrance drew Diego’s attention away from his jottings. A crowd of white-aproned lackeys surrounded a woman taller than any of them. The staff was trying to stop the woman from entering the restaurant, but she was having none of their guff. Scattering the ineffectual waiters and busboys with broad sweeps of her arms, the woman made a beeline into the main dining room, heading straight for Diego, the shocked gazes of every guest tracking her as if she were nude.

But Volusia had committed no such gaffe; rather, she was still dressed in her work clothes, and this outfit bore messy evidence of her most recent stint at her demanding job.

Volusia Bittern was a firewarden, a lieutenant with the Esmond Casterline Irregulars, one of Gritsavage’s ten firefighting companies. Her garb consisted of a scuttle-shaped crimson hardhat embellished with gold sigils; a Vulcanized greatcoat, ankle-length and fortified with enormous brass clasps; a double-breasted, brass-buttoned, royal blue wool jacket; matching breeks; and rubber hipboots upheld with galluses that bore various badges along their elastic lengths. Her respirator dangled on her chest from its cord around her neck.

As she strode boldly across the room, Volusia peeled off her outer garment and passed it blithely to a stunned waiter. Her uniform beneath gave grim testimony of recent battle. The outer skin of her boots was sheened with water, and the boots themselves squished audibly as she walked. Her hat exhibited a deep dent in the crown. A scorched patch of jacket on her shoulder had evidently caught fire before being extinguished. And even a yard or two away, Diego could smell the smoke thick as musk on her.

On a lesser woman, this outfit in this condition might have merited pity. But Volusia was no typical member of her sex. Over six feet tall, she outweighed Diego by fifty pounds, not an ounce of any of her broad honeyed flesh susceptible to trimming as fat. Her capacious bosom counterbalanced by fertile hips, her strong hands capable of nearly concealing the shaft of an axe when paired along its length, Volusia loomed among most women—and many men—like a burly wrestler at a convention of midgets.

Diego’s girlfriend swept up to his table. She caught sight of the copy of Mirror Worlds that he had placed as a surprise on her seat.

“A new story! That’s the sweetest thing I’ve seen all day! Let me give you a kiss!”

Volusia suited actions to words, swooping down to pinion Diego and plaster a wet enveloping kiss across most of his mouth and part of his chin. His nostrils filled with the smoke woven into her hair. She straightened up, then said, “Okay, now you give me one to prove you’re not angry with me for being so late!” Before Diego could make a move to comply, she repeated her buss.

Reeling, Diego had a sense that the audience of diners wanted to break out into applause, but restrained themselves only out a sense of propriety.

Laughing, Volusia doffed her cap. A yard or so of wavy auburn tresses spilled out, waterfalling her shoulders. She dropped the hat carelessly on the table, sending an empty water glass to the floor with a crash, then heaved herself heavily into her seat, atop the very magazine she had just exclaimed over, but which was now forgotten in her lusty exuberance.

“Fisherwife’s tits, I’m starving! Waiter! Menus here!”

As the waiter scurried over, Diego studied Volusia’s animated features: thick eyebrows roofed darkling eyes; a nose more plebian than refined made no apologies for its dominance; and a wide, full-lipped mouth caverned spectacularly white teeth, teeth given more visual prominence by her vespertine complexion.

Taken as a complete composition, Volusia’s face carried a beauty unlike any Diego had ever seen in a woman, and he marvelled once again that she should love him.

“I’ll have a raft of shrimp, a green salad, and a sixteen-ounce porterhouse—extra rare, and that’s sixteen ounces after cooking! Oh, and two baked potatoes and a side of onion rings. What are you drinking, Dee? Arcanums? Yuk! Bring me a schooner of draft Tatwig’s, please.”

Diego followed Volusia’s order with his own: “Um, the pork chops and rice please. Well-done on the chops.”

Volusia clicked her tongue. “Pigeon scraps! But I suppose you don’t burn more than a dozens calories an hour in front of your silly machine. Not that the results aren’t splendid. But of course what you do could hardly be considered real work.”

The liquor in Diego’s veins sharpened his response unwarrantedly, since he had been subjected to this type of playful chivvying often before. “Oh, I suppose that only your manic playing with hoses and ladders like some kind of perpetual adolescent counts as worthwhile labor.”

Volusia’s laughter boomed around the room. “Saving lives and keeping Gritsavage from turning into Ghetto Blocks is the only real work, Dee! But I will admit that my noble profession has its lighter side. Why, do you know what kept me busy tonight right up until a few minutes ago? A blaze at Staller’s!”

Diego brightened at this news. “Not a bad one, I assume from your tone. No injuries, I hope. But tell me—who did you see there?”

Volusia’s beer had arrived, and she quaffed half at one gulp, leaving herself with creamy mustache. “Who but our illustrious Mayor? There he was when I got to the second floor, plump and naked as a fish, with three of Staller’s most expensive fillies clinging to him and shrieking their heads off. And yes, I saw Copperknob’s copper knob!” Volusia’s laughter cascaded forth again, a happy carillon. “Anyway, I got them all down the back staircase and into the Mayor’s charabanque before the newspaper shutterbugs could snap a single picture. And that slavering pack included Mason Gingerpane, and you know how often he misses a shot! Never! Yes, I think the Mayor will be mighty grateful to Miss Bittern in the future. In fact, I expect that my long-delayed promotion might very well come about a lot sooner now.”

“That’s wonderful,” Diego said flatly. “You deserve it.”

“Such enthusiasm. What’s the matter? Oh, your story!” Volusia hoisted one haunch and removed the magazine. Its cover was damp and creased. “Oh, I’m so sorry, dear! But look—you can still make out your name on the cover, and the inside is fine! And Catternach did the illustration! How wonderful! I promise you I’ll read this tonight.”

“But I thought we might go dancing. Prague is playing at the Wintourian Ballroom—”

“Never! As you might have noticed, I’m not exactly wearing my dancing shoes. And besides, I saw some paintings in that whorehouse that gave me a few novel ideas we need to implement immediately.”

“Volusia, please—!”

Volusia leaned across the table then, and whispered elaborate descriptions and suggestions to Diego that he found hard, in his writerly capacity, to judge by purely linguistic criteria, so potent were they on a hormonal level.

On the way out of the restaurant, Volusia stopped by the punchboard, bought a chance, and won.

“Six bulls! This goes to the Widow’s and Orphans Fund! Or maybe I’ll buy Copperknob a gross of sheaths!”

2.

Scalehunting

May brought the Seasonsun many Blocks closer to the citizens of Gritsavage, until that potent, smaller, lower orb was, at its daily apex, almost directly overhead the Borough, carrying with it balmier hours, lighter dress and changed relaxations.

Like the Daysun every morning, when the Seasonsun made its first appearance each year, it could be seen very low in the Uptown skies. But unlike its steadier companion, the Seasonsun did not then rise to complete a course that wheeled it over the entire length of Broadway in a single day. Instead, the Seasonsun moved at right angles to its celestial mate, rising from below the Other Shore and dropping beyond the Wrong Side of the Tracks, all in the same period as the diurnal luminary. Consequently, in late winter the Seasonsun would often be hidden by the dawn Daysun, showing, once the Daysun left it behind, only as a dim, hardly moving dot ‘way up Broadway, dispensing its warmth to distant other Boroughs. As spring progressed, the arcs made by the Seasonsun would become more perceptible, higher, the degrees of its disk more visible. Finally the Seasonsun would become a definite part of the Gritsavage skies, shifting its point of rising a little further each day down the length of the River.

Summer officially began when the Seasonsun rose directly above the central Blocks of the Borough, when it and the Daysun were superimposed at noon for a few moments in the heavens.

The descent into the latter half of the year replicated in reverse this process, with the Seasonsun slipping away further and further Downtown, disappearing finally in December.

Thus cycled the perpetual cruciform empyreal display.

May also brought a host of new developments in the life of Diego Patchen, some enjoyable and jubilating, some distasteful and wearying.

Perhaps most disturbing in this latter category were the alarming changes in Diego’s best friend, Zohar Kush.

Diego and Zohar had grown up in the same Block, attending Heywood Stropper Memorial Elementary School together, in due time graduating to PS 5, where Diego had first tested his talents as a member of the school newspaper’s staff. Zohar had fully cultivated then his own idiosyncratic, amoral character. A wildman for whom no challenge or prank was deemed too outrageous, Zohar had shown a keen intelligence that he refused to put into the service of any socially approved goal. (His parents played little part in his upbringing. Papa Kush was an amiable drunkard, remaining an apprentice ingeniator right up till retirement and early demise, while Mama Kush labored long hours in a steamy, ennervating laundry, emerging as wilted and wrinkled each day as the bags of soiled clothes she handled.)

Barely graduating, Zohar had fallen into a catch-as-catch-can lifestyle, acquiring the bulls and wives necessary for his mean, yet libertied existence in a variety of ways, few of them aboveboard. (Although when Zohar was flush, everybody from Diego on down to random strangers in a bar benefited from his largesse.) Zohar and the cops of Gritsavage were on familiar terms, and Diego’s childhood friend had served time in the local jug. But never for long, and for minor charges only.

All well and good—for the most part, then. An exciting, even charmingly disreputable life, which completely suited Zohar Kush’s nature and generally harmed no one. Diego had never felt any fear for his friend’s survival.

But nowadays Diego found he could not be as sanguine about Zohar’s likely fate. Missing from their usual haunts for many weeks, Zohar now verged, Diego suspected, on bad trouble and possibly imminent nervous collapse. And this condition dated precisely to his taking Milagra Eventyr as lover.

When the knock came that May morning on Diego’s apartment door, Diego intuited instantly that behind that importunate rapping stood Zohar Kush, and that he was not in good shape. Opening the door proved the truth of his clairvoyance.

Zohar wore a white shirt once expensively fashionable but now spotted with various stains and frayed at the open collar. A pair of chino pants told a tale of hard usage, one knee rent, one rear pocket hanging half off. A hopsacking suitcoat seamed with soot. On unsocked grimy feet: a pair of slip-on boatshoes.

Zohar’s crowning physical glory had always been his hair, a disordered mass of black curls as naturally glossy as oil spilled on Broadway’s macadam. Many a girl at PS 5 had willingly allowed a range of freedoms with their own persons for a chance to run their hands through that sexy mop. Nowadays, Zohar sported facial hair to complement his coif, in the form of mustache and underlip soul-tuft. Zohar’s physique also recalled the youthful wiryness he had been noted for. But a decade-plus of hard, pointless living had scored his sharp-featured face into a torn map of faded adolescent ambition.

Zohar gripped Diego by the elbows upon gaining entrance and focused imploring blue eyes on his friend. “I need your help, Dee. Desperately. Not for my own sake, but for Milagra’s.”

Diego freed himself from Zohar’s hands, not brusquely but firmly. “Bull’s balls, Zoh, you stink! Where have you been keeping yourself these past months? I haven’t seen you since that night in February.”

Zohar allowed himself a small smile. “Ah, what a grand outing that was! I can still taste that first frothing Rude Bravo of the evening, still hear that priggish Drumgoole asking exactly the wrong beautiful woman if she’d like to ‘engage in relations’ with him, still see the look on his face as he snuffled over his contusions in the Subway restroom’s mirror! We did have some good times together, didn’t we, Dee? Good enough that you’ll come to the aid of your old pal now, in his hour of need?”

“Of course, of course, there’s no question I’ll help you. But from the looks of things, you actually need a day in Diggory’s Steambaths, a corps of beauticians, a spending spree at Kobek’s Outfitters for some new duds, followed by a cushy job in the Copperknob administration. And I doubt I can supply more than the towel fees at Diggory’s.”

“Forget my condition, damn you! I tell you, I only bothered you today because Milagra’s in rough shape.”

“What’s her problem? Aren’t you keeping her satisfied in bed? I recall her being all over me for solace that night—”

“Joke all you wish. But your japes won’t alter the fact that Milagra’s hooked on junk now, and hasn’t had a fix in days.”

Diego sank bonelessly into a chair. “No. How—how did this happen?”

Zohar shrugged fatalistically. “How does it happen to anyone? She sampled the stuff, found she liked it, and soon discovered she couldn’t live without it.”

“I—I don’t know what to say. I’ve never known anyone who’s even tried heroin before.”

“Well, now you do. And believe me, it isn’t much of a privilege.”

“Are you hooked too?”

“No, thank the Wives. But I think you’re wrong about not knowing any other junkies. You’re friends with that musician, Prague, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But do you mean—?”

“So I was led to believe by my connection. I’m hoping you’ll take me to him and that he’ll sell me enough dope to tide Milagra over for a few days.”

Canting his head and knuckling his scalp as if better to process this new information, Diego asked, “Your connection—why can’t he supply you with more?”

“The junk comes in by Train or by Ship, and there hasn’t been a consignment in weeks.”

“Couldn’t you just ride the Subway to the source, wherever it is?”

Zohar laughed, a bitter peal. “The source! Where indeed is it? What Borough? How many millions of Blocks away? I know the source of the junk no more than you know where your writing paper comes from! Who makes our clothes, what Block hosts cattle and sheep and chickens, what Borough produces vegetables and wine, shoes and lipstick? All our goods come in by Train or Ship, and we accept them happily, willing to exchange an occasional shortage for the convenience of not having to produce everything locally ourselves. But the system leaves us at the mercy of these unknown suppliers. And right now their whims are killing my lover.”

Diego stood up. “Okay, okay, you don’t have to lecture me on macroeconomics. I’m a professional Cosmogonic Fictioneer! I know how insane our world is, how much unexamined mystery underpins it. And I invent a dozen stranger worlds before breakfast! Let’s go pay a call on Rumbold Prague.”

Visiting all of the musician’s hangouts took them well into the afternoon. At the radio studio where Prague’s live broadcasts often originated, they got trapped by an earnest young ingeniator who wanted to lecture them on some new improvements in equipment that would overcome abstruse atmospheric limitations and let the station extend its range to more than one hundred Blocks. Diego and Zohar extricated themselves from the bore’s chatter with difficulty, and headed elsewhere: Rawcliffe’s Poolhall where Prague often displayed his gamesmanship; the bar Corcorvado with its exotic hustlers; the trumpeteer’s apartment in Gritsavage-875, above Mocko Bosefus’s Delicatessen—But nowhere yielded a sign of the musician.

At this final stop, the pair ducked into Bosefus’s for a much-needed lunch: hot corned beef and sauerkraut sandwiches paid for by Diego. Unable to connect with the elusive black man, they could only surmise that, suffering from the same exigencies as Milagra, he had either gone to ground within Gritsavage or used his superior knowledge to visit another Borough, however distant, where heroin was in greater supply.

Both the Seasonsun and Daysun were riding the lower quadrants of their invisible rails when the pair admitted defeat.

Zohar’s nerves were strained to a pitch Diego had never witnessed before in his normally unflappable friend.

“What will we do, what will we do? She’ll die soon, I tell you. She’s not strong enough to kick her jones cold. Her arms are so wasted now—”

“Calm down, calm down!” Diego cudgeled his wits, and was rewarded with a last desperate hope. He winced at what he was about to propose, half-sick with shame, but then Zohar’s pitiful expression tipped the balance between antipodal poles of duty.

“Come with me. We’re going to pay a social call on my father. Don’t ask why, just follow me.”

Far Uptown from Gaddis Patchen’s place, Zohar and Diego descended the nearest Trackside entrance to the Subway (an ingress loomed every five Blocks), which gave onto the Downtown platform, a long tiled stretch of musty boredom. Waiting for one of the frequent expresses, Zohar and Diego stood silently, until Zohar spoke.

“Do you remember how I tried to find out once how long the City was?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“I came down here at three AM one night with a pot of paint and a brush. I tagged the last car, out of sight of the driver, with my name in foot-high letters. Then I made camp on a bench and waited. Every time a new chain of cars rattled into the station, I looked to see if the ultimate car sported my graffiti. I lived on candybars and soda from the vending machines. You brought me a sandwich or two over the next few days, and some hot jamoke. I napped in between arrivals, but I always woke up when they pulled in. I know I never missed a single express. Do you remember how long I held out?”

“Two weeks.”

“That’s right. Two weeks, and I never saw my tag again.”

“Workman cleaned your graffiti off. Or they removed that car from service. Or at some terminus the car was shunted onto the Uptown track, and your tag was facing away from you.”

Zohar smiled wanly. “You tried those answers on me twelve years ago, and I didn’t buy them then. No, those cars were still traveling Downtown through our unfathomable City after two whole weeks. I’m convinced of it. That’s when I got really scared. The enormity of our awful existence overwhelmed me. I’ve never been the same since. Oh, I might put up a good front, but something broke inside me that day.”

At that moment their express came in and they stepped onboard, matrixed in a rude herd of fellow riders—laborers, businessmen, housewives and children—like cherries in a cake.

Zohar said, “You know, some days I wake up and feel that my painted name is still moving down these rails, and that I won’t see it again until I die.”

The tree in front of Diego’s boyhood home had leafed out in green abundance, but bore no traces of any spring flowering, neither seed nor husk. Abstaining from visiting his father for a whole month, feeling simultaneously guilty and relieved, Diego had missed the promised blooms, if any.

Outside the door to the Patchen apartment Diego said, “Try to get the old man engaged in some chatter, while I take what we need. We can leave before too long.”

Zohar seemed distraught by the prospect of viewing the elder Patchen. “I have such a keen picture of your father in his prime. Very strong and vibrant. Bitter, yes. But he was such a contrast to my mushy, liquor-sodden Dad. Is he really so broken-down these days?”

“Actually, the last time I saw him he was looking a little better. Maybe his disease has gone into remission.”

Diego did not of course really believe this. He knew that any shadow of vigor in his father represented only a plateau in his descent to death. But if such a fantasy offered Zohar any comfort, Diego was glad to retail it, just as he sold his other dreams.

The door creaked as it opened onto the gloomy interior.

“Who’s that?” called out Gaddis Patchen in a firm voice. “If that’s you, Mrs. Loblolly, I’ve had enough chicken soup to float a fucking Ship!”

“It’s me, Dad. And a friend.”

From his wonted coign of cratered, crusted chair flush against death-inviting window, Gaddis Patchen made the effort to push upward slightly and peer backward. “Is that your rascally chum Kush then? I’ll be buggered by a Bull! Where have you been keeping yourself, Zohar? Making time with all the ladies, I assume.”

Zohar snagged a rail-backed hard chair and sidled around with it to plonk down beside Gaddis. “Ah, neither one of us is what we once were, Mr. Patchen. I’m tied down to a single woman these days. A wonderful girl, but she, um, puts a small crimp in my tomcatting.”

“Tell me all about her, Zohar.”

Diego marvelled, half resentfully, at the easy conversation flowing between Zohar and Gaddis, at the actual civility and congeniality his father chose to employ. But Diego’s heart was not small enough to hold recriminations, especially not with what he intended to do now.

Adjacent to the stack of unread magazines Diego had deposited over the past months teetered a matching pile: a dozen leatherette cases full of unused, hoarded syrettes of painkillers. Doctor Teasel was generous with the drugs—or perhaps Gaddis was deliberately stockpiling the instrumentality of his suicide.

Diego lifted two cases, checked their contents, and slid them into capacious pants pockets.

Rejoining Zohar, Diego inserted himself into the middle of the conversation, relishing his father’s foreign jollity, and also gladdened by the apparent distraction from his own troubles that Zohar was enjoying. Diego went to the kitchen, discovered a bottle of sweet wine that had plainly been found palatable, and brought glasses back for them all.

Half an hour passed before Diego indicated they really had to leave. Zohar came to himself, and, his sense of mission restored, seconded the imperative.

“Don’t be such a stranger in the future, Kush!”

“I won’t, sir. Take care of yourself now.”

“Have no fear, Kush. The struggle is not over by a long stretch.”

Outside Diego revealed to Zohar what he had snatched.

“Oh but no, this is a boon beyond words, Dee! Almost two weeks of salvation for my Milagra here. This stuff is much purer than what she’s used to, and I’ll make sure she rations it accordingly. You are indeed a lifesaver, my friend.”

Zohar impulsively wrapped Diego in a fervent embrace; then, unclinching, he held his friend at arm’s-length to admire him, before hugging him again.

In his conscience-stricken embarrassment, Diego could only jokingly say, “It appears I’m irresistible to both you and Milagra.”

“Let’s hear it from her own lips. Follow me.”

The Subway brought them fifteen blocks further Downtown, almost to the invisible but real border between Gritsavage and its Downtown neighbor, Pergola. Restored to the fresh air of Broadway again, past a barbershop, a florist’s and a cigar store, they turned Trackward on the Cross Street labelled Gritsavage-835.

Every building in the Linear City fronted on Broadway and ran for its full length to the margins of either Tracks or River. There were no secondary buildings partway down Cross Streets, no traversable alleys or gangways separating adjoining buildings, just narrow airshafts. But at each Cross Street that defined a Block, the exterior walls of the flanking buildings were of course visible. Plastered with posters and handbills, these walls constituted the City’s main public forum for advertisements. Each Cross Street seemed a chute of words and pictures, a palimpsest of beckoning images and solicitations.

On Gritsavage-835, the twinned buildings were of median height, some four stories each, their first floor walls and a portion of each second story lavish with old election posters, patent medicine ads, theatrical enticements and the hucksterism of various magazine and book publishers, girdle-makers and furniture dealers. Although the dropping Daysun did not penetrate here at this moment, the sinking Seasonsun directly ahead of them still illuminated Diego and Zohar, endowing them with but a single personal shadow in contrast to the doubled ones they experienced during other moments of each day.

Down this Cross Street, as on many Trackside ones, trundled some half-dozen garbage men, pushing their big-wheeled, flatbed, slat-sided carts filled with the City’s castoffs and trash. The garbage men wore a uniform of bib overalls in a heavy dun fabric, and knee-high mucker’s galoshes. (Seeing their boots, Diego thought of Volusia in uniform.) The carts exhibited every conceivable kind of trash, from table scraps to broken lamps, bundled newspapers to dead pigeons, broken crockery to snap-backed rats. As one, the carters trundled onward toward the Tracks.

Falling in behind the smelly, silent procession, Diego found himself speechless. It was as if he had accidentally become participant in some funerary pilgrimage, deceased unknown. Zohar, however, seemed untroubled by their fellow travelers.

“We’ll be home soon, Dee. Just a little further.”

The Cross Street ended, as did every Trackside one, at a strip of oil-soaked cinders, grit and jagged stones. A few feet away ran the Tracks themselves. The backsides of many commercial buildings featured docks extending outward from wide doors to mate with boxcars for easy unloading of goods.

At this point on the Tracks, provision had been made to allow the carts easy access: a slight wooden ramp rose to the level of the Tracks without actually touching them; between and beyond the Tracks the tripartite ramp continued. After looking Downtown to the faroff vanishing point for any approaching Train, the garbage men maneuvered their carts past the rails, one by one bumping over the gaps.

Now they stood, technically, on the Wrong Side of the Tracks. But the domain of the Yardbulls, the unfathomable home of the Pompatics, lay much further away across the barren plain, separated by more than sheer physical distance.

Zohar hastened past the slow carts and entered the vast midden that ranged in low smoldering heaps as far as the eye could see. Diego scurried after him in the admonitory twilight.

Through the feculent maze they wended their way, until finally a hut materialized around a bend. Constructed of a bewildering variety of materials, the shack resembled a drunkard’s dream.

Zohar’s sheepishness was layered with resignation. “Not the nicest digs I’ve ever enjoyed, but the rent is reasonable. Milagra’s habit, you see, takes a good chunk of our income. In a word, most of it.”

The sheet-metal door depended from leather-strap hinges. Swinging the barrier aside, Zohar shuffled through. Diego bent his head and followed.

A kerosene lantern wick’d to amber life. Diego swept the shack’s interior in a glance: two low stools, a crate for a table (bearing a junkie’s set of works), a shelf of tattered books and magazines (was that a copy of Mirror Worlds?), a basin and ewer, a thin sour-smelling cotton pallet elevated on more crates. And on that pallet, Milagra Eventyr.

The painfully thin woman resembled the pretty flirty girl of February as a rake resembled a guitar. Sunken-chested, knob-jointed, gaunt-cheeked, needle-tracked. Only Milagra’s long nigrescent hair, fine as a baby’s, recalled her earlier good looks.

With the dawn of the lamp, Milagra began to stir and moan. Her eyes opened, but seemed indifferent to vision. “Oh, Mopsy, it hurts, it hurts! And the razoos! They’re everywhere! I think one got into my gut! Mopsy, please, I need my fix! Or at least some lunatic soup!”

“Is it withdrawal that’s making her talk so crazy?” Diego asked.

Zohar had dropped to the packed earth floor beside the pallet, and was unlimbering a syrette. “She’s not babbling. Milagra was born and raised in Milkville. That Borough is ten thousand Blocks away. They use a lot of words we don’t. Razoo, that’s a rat. Lunatic soup is booze.” Zohar tied Milagra off at her left bicep, found her crook-fleshed vein and shot her up with only half the contents of the needle. She unfurled a deep sigh, and almost instantly collapsed into slack-muscled oblivion.

A Train rumbled past, shaking flakes of rust from the ceiling. Huffing his own gust of relief, Zohar straightened up and smiled bravely. “I’d offer you some refreshments, Dee, but as you can see, the larder holds no caviar or champagne at the moment.”

“Zoh, you can’t continue living like this! These conditions are abysmal!”

“Oh but no, Dee, I certainly don’t want to subsist in such a mean environment. But what choice do I have? Assuming the dope drought alleviates, money will still be lacking for anything else.”

Diego’s impulses fought each other for a long half minute, self-preservation battling charity, before he said, “Gimlett wants more scales.”

“Oh but no, Diego! This solves everything!”

The back storage room at Gimlett’s smelled of onions and cabbage, bananas and parsley, and was chilly as a Glyptis radiator. At this hour well past midnight no muted sounds of gossiping, produce-plumping housewives filtered inward past the heavy door, the store shuttered and dark. Gimlett hovered over his two freelance minions now as if they were a pair of exotic fruits whose price he was trying to fix. Brandishing his scale medallion at them, he reiterated for the final time his needs.

“If you bring back entirely scales of this size and quality, my hopes will be fulfilled to the maximum. I can offer you ten bulls or seven wives apiece for such specimens. Inferior grades of scales will earn respectively less money.”

Zohar meditatively tossed a large flashlight from one hand to the next. “And your markup to the customers is . . .?”

Gimlett grinned in a mingy manner. “That’s no concern of yours, Kush. I’m offering you a fair price.”

“What if we just cut you out and try to sell scales ourselves?”

Gimlett’s selfish grin expanded to irritating dimensions. “Do you have the illicit connections with the complaisant but vindictive police that I have so laboriously fostered all these years? Do you recall the penalties for harvesting scales? Five to ten years. If I learned that you two were attempting to go behind my back—why, it would be my simple civic duty to turn you both in.”

Diego rushed to assure Gimlett that they had no such intentions, but Zohar beat him to a response. “Actually, we disdain such petty commerce, such a merchant’s role. We are both magnanimous artists and adventurers, who perform this amusing ritual now and then simply for the esthetic kicks. The money you pay us will all go toward endowing a new upper floor on Vansyckle’s Museum of Fine Arts. I was only asking about the, ah, retail price of scales to gauge the health of the Gritsavage economy.”

“So long as we understand each other. Now, do you have everything you’ll need?”

“Thanks to your generosity, sir, our equipage lacks naught.” Zohar kicked the knapsack at his feet. “Ropes, picks, pinch bars, shovels, poisoned bait—we have it all.”

“Very well, let’s see your backsides, then, until you return with the goods. You’ll find the cart outside.”

So dismissing them, Gimlett let the friends out of the front door. On Broadway the pushcart received their packs beneath a concealing tarp. Each man took a handle and headed the cart Uptown. Diego caught the scents of the River, of fried foods and cheap cigars. A janitor tossed a bucket of sudsy water into Broadway’s gutter. A sidewalk vendor—improbably still trying to sell at this hour men and women’s stockings from a tray supported from a strap around his neck—seemed asleep standing up. A redheaded streetwalker leaned wearily against the wall of a cheap hotel.

In the heavens, the nocturnally scintillant forms of Yardbulls and Fisherwives inscribed trajectories of mortality, crosshatching the skies, while from pool to pool of streetlight radiance Diego and Zohar rolled, miming the garbage collectors they had followed just two days ago.

“He did say ‘eight-sixty-five, didn’t he?” Zohar asked.

“Yes. It seems the authorities have closed up our old hole at ‘eight-forty.”

“A different segment of the Citybeast then. Nice fresh outer scales and no boiling blood at first. But unknown mazes of infrastructure as well.”

Diego made no reply, concentrating instead on keeping his heart from racing out of control.

At the Riverside Subway entrance at Gritsavage-865, the scalehunters chained up their cart and reclaimed their packs, casting shifty glances left and right. At this hour, Subway traffic would be at its lowest ebb, reflected in the lesser frequency of expresses. All they had to worry about was a chance cop patrolling the Uptown platform.

But once belowground they found they could unshackle their breaths in relief: the long platform was empty of any save a handful of passengers. And only one, a bearded fellow wearing clothes unlike any commonly seen in this Borough, seemed to take special cognizance of their bulky equipment. As Diego and Zohar moved past him, he said, “Goodly snaffling, boychiks. Ye laminars be moughty faunchable.”

Diego responded with a smile and kindly nod. Once well past the man, he said, “Have you ever heard an accent or speech like that?”

“Never. And I thought Milagra’s Milktown patois was thick. She’s recovering quite splendidly, by the way, Dee, and sends all her love.”

“Yes, well, I’m glad for both of you. But you must realize that this is definitely my final scalehunting venture. The work’s too insanely spooky for me. Not to mention the legal consequences, or being complicit with that melonhead Gimlett. And now that I’m selling more stories, I don’t need the money so badly as I did a few years ago.”

Zohar’s vulpine smile enlivened his face. “Understood, pard. A big enough stake for me and Milagra to get back on our feet is all I need. Once I have a respectable address and have cleaned up my act, it’s gainful and legal employment for yours truly. Perhaps you’ll encounter me next behind the sales counter of Lammergeyer’s Fine Wines, chatting up customers knowledgably about the latest vintage from Stinchcomb or Winkelreed.”

Now they stood at the platform’s end. They shucked their packs, and Zohar dropped down into the channel of the tracks. Diego quickly passed the packs to him, then let himself down as well.

“Need I whisper the words ‘third rail’ into your not-so-virginal ear?”

“And that’s another thing I absolutely hate about this job!”

Flashlights casting bobbing blobs of light ahead of them, the pair scuttled swiftly down the tunnel, anxious against the sound of an approaching express. But their luck held, and they attained their goal without encountering any commuter juggernaut.

A riveted rusted tunnel door bore a chalked X across its panels. A giant padlock and chain seemingly secured it, but the lock’s mechanism was gutted, and the hasp slipped free with a twist.

Beyond the door, sweaty pipes and bundled cables adorned a brick passage just shoulder-wide and head-scrapingly high. The cloistered air here smelled of ozone and steam.

Diego laid a hand on some bunched wires. “You know, this gives me an idea for a story. Suppose you could transmit voices down just such a network of wires, instead of electricity alone?”

“A kind of wired radio?”

“Not exactly. I’m thinking a one-to-one mode, me with an instrument in my home talking to you with an instrument in yours. Then people in distant parts of the City could be in communication with one another. Wouldn’t that revolutionize existence?”

“I suppose. But what could I possibly have to say to my counterpart in Cromornos? ‘How’s the weather in your Block?’ ‘What’s a pair of new shoes cost where you are?’ ”

Diego dropped his hand from the cables, disappointed. “I suppose it’s a dumb idea after all. But you have to bluesky a lot in my game . . .”

A half mile down the service passage, a manhole cover leaped into view under the flashlights’ lances. With pinchbars they hoisted up the lid, with ropes knotted around an anchored cable guide they descended.

The sewers of Gritsavage appeared more archaic than any other portion of the City, although surely they must have been contemporary with the construction of the vast majority of buildings lining Broadway. (Fire alone wrote any particular building’s demise; construction of a replacement was contingent on sporadic resupply of the needed materials, with the occasional vacant lot often remaining for years like a gap in the City’s infinite smile.) Massive blocks of rawly quarried stone, slimed with mold, arched overhead and troughed underfoot, with only a narrow ledge on either side of the concavity affording purchase above swill, slops, storm-runoff and shit, all heading toward unknown outfall or recirculation.

An impressive rat swam by, snout periscoping the fetid air. Zohar said, “We’ll move away from our exit here before we dump the trove of poison bait.”

Some distance away from the dangling ropes, opposite the direction they intended to travel, they set up a deadly banquet for the sewer rats, hoping to lure many of the nasty denizens away from the locale where the scalehunting work would occur.

Zohar laughed. “Eat hearty, razoos! This time you’ll learn about the price of a free lunch!”

Diego and Zohar found the next promised landmark after a short interval of crabbed travel: a segment of wall, undermined by high floods, had collapsed, three or four sizable blocks tumbling into the dirty stream. Using picks and shovels, the men enlarged the Riverside hole to permit them a cramped entrance to what lay beyond.

The musty, stagnant realm behind the sewer wall showed no signs of human artifice. A sense of distant enclosure supplied the only hint at the immense volume of space contained here, for their pitiful lights could not reveal any walls or roof, at whatever remove, and certainly no sky or stars.

Where was the River? wondered Diego, not for the first time in his scalehunting career. Could they be below its bed? It did not seem probable, for their descent from the Subway level had encompassed only about ten feet, and the River was much deeper than that. Diego suddenly flashed on an image of a pencil lying on his desktop: was their whole City—River, Tracks and all—just such a unitary construct, lying on some inconceivably vaster plain? Even the mind of a professional Cosmogonic Fictioneer boggled at the concept.

The floor of this new realm began just far enough below their feet to accommodate the structure of the sewer trough. Below their perch stretched a paving of dead, dull scales robbed of their shimmering superstitious virtues, virtues worth ten bulls or seven wives apiece.

“How far off do you think the live ones begin?”

“Only one way to find out.”

They vaulted down, the surface greeting their weight with a curious resiliency, and set off.

Some uncountable number of paces onward, Diego’s beam revealed fresh scales: iridescent, overlapping tesserae laid by no man’s hand.

“All right. Let’s get busy.” Suiting actions to words, Zohar bent and pinched the trailing edge of one scale, then pulled like plucking a petal off a flower. The scale came away easily, but was followed by a swelling drop of bright alizarine blood which, upon contact with the air, instantly began to boil and bubble without losing any of its substance. A second, a third, a fourth drop soon followed, forcing Zohar to move a few paces away from the nasty liquid for his subsequent sacrilege.

Diego, meanwhile, hefting his flashlight in his left hand, was harvesting his own scales, tossing each into his pack, carefully avoiding the corrosive, sugary smelling blood pools accumulating on the floor at each point of his thievery.

The men worked determinedly, perforce moving further apart in search of fresh fields. Diego tried to always maintain a sense of where their egress lay. The notion of wandering across this indeterminate, signpostless terrain until he died of thirst did not appeal to even the shred of romantic melancholy Diego possessed.

And if he did die here, how would the Pompatics ever find his soul? That notion alone was nearly enough to scare the wits out of him.

At last their packs were full, and they reunited. The lake of burbling blood now stretched across a Block or so, a seething crimson swamp at the roots of their world, embleming their despoilage. No wonder the authorities frowned implacably on this vulturine activity.

Like Diego, Zohar, despite his effervescent manner, must have been thinking nighted thoughts, for now he said, “Have you ever heard the legend of the scalehunter who assaulted this living bedrock more grievously, Dee? For one reason or another, or no good reason at all, he drove his pickaxe deep into this gory turf. They say the convulsions of the Citybeast turned a million Blocks into so much rubble in the space of a few seconds.”

Diego shivered, but felt obliged to question this tale. “And where and when did this catastrophe occur? And why is there no record of even a slight aftershock from this quake in the annals of Gritsavage?”

“Ah, as to where and when, I cannot say. But the why is easy.”

Zohar paused, forcing Diego to say, “Really?”

“Really. You see, the assault happened so far away and so recently that the wave is still travelling toward us, down the indeterminate length of the City. I expect it to arrive any day now.”

Diego’s rationalism bade him counter this assertion. “How did you learn about this catastrophe in advance of the actual wave? How did information travel faster than the event itself?”

“Oh, did I forget to mention earlier? Your hypothetical system of communication by wire—it already exists. But only for the elite.”

Diego sized up his friend’s expression. But even after knowing Zohar all his life, Diego could not tell if he were joking or not.

3.

Soiree and Suicide

By August, several distinct improvements in the fortunes of Zohar Kush and Milagra Eventyr were notable. Bolstered by the money Gimlett had paid Zohar for his share of the scales—equivalent to about three month’s wages for the average citizen—the couple had relocated to more civilized quarters, a small flat above Berm’s Laundry in Gritsavage-841, an apartment of three rooms in a line, perpetually redolent of soap and starch. As if the proximity of the laundry had altered their sensibilities, both lovers had spruced themselves up to a considerable degree as well. In Zohar’s case the transformation was simple, requiring nothing more than the bath and new outfits Diego had earlier prescribed. But Milagra had required nutritional and medical assistance as well, and Zohar had attended to those remedies with diligent affection. Nowadays, although still relatively gaunt, Milagra no longer appeared on the point of death, and had regained some measure of her former attractiveness.

And once the heroin shortage had evaporated—with the Trains carrying the illicit drug once more, their workers handing packages discreetly over to local dealers during transfers of more innocent freight—Milagra had arrived at some kind of moderate dosage regimen, injecting enough drug for maintenance without instances of obvious nodding-off or self-destruction.

“She’d like more, of course,” Zohar confided to Diego, “but I don’t permit it. The old pursestrings are tightly knotted in my grip, and since I’m the only one working, she has no say in the matter.”

Diego refrained from mentioning lurid options whereby Milagra might conceivably earn money outside Zohar’s ken.

Zohar’s own new job was not, as fancifully predicted, with Lammergeyer’s Fine Wines, but rather in Teagarden’s Pinball Arcade. Wearing a striped apron full of heavy scintilla coins, Zohar changed paper money and redeemed Skeeball tokens for tawdry prizes, swept the floor and tended the cotton-candy and popcorn machines, and promoted punchboard use.

“Just call me the impressario of immaturity, Dee, a regular maestro of cheap thrills.”

So respectable by comparison with their past selves were Zohar and Milagra now that Volusia Bittern did not even object when Diego suggested that the two couples rendezvous to celebrate Volusia’s promotion. The newly nominated Captain in the Esmond Casterline Irregulars was so elated, her natural ebullience so overflowing at her advancement, that Diego could have invited a squadron of flophouse bums and not been reprimanded.

On that Friday night, they all met at Famagusta’s Lobster House, a rather expensive place to which Diego had never before been. Diego and Volusia showed up first, the writer squiring the firefighter on his arm. Diego thought his woman had never looked sexier. Her thick sheaf of hair, still damp from a shower following their lovemaking, had been pulled back and secured with a silk scarf. Her flower-printed chiffon dress clung to her muscled frame like plaster over bricks, the buttress of her generous breasts some fanciful architect’s master embellishment. Bare-legged, she wore brown loafers with stack heels that added two inches to her extension above Diego’s height. Her lipsticked mouth invited smearing. Every eye in the restaurant tracked her entrance.

“Max! Where is that lazy clamshucker? Doesn’t he know how to run his own dive? He has important guests tonight, and we want the best table in the house!”

Maxwell Famagusta emerged from the kitchen in response to the bellowing. A rolypoly balding giant with tattoos of anchors on both forearms, he exuded a vitality to match Volusia’s, and seemed thrilled to be challenged by her in this outrageous public manner.

“You damnable hosewench! I didn’t recognize you with a clean face! Where’s your usual layer of soot and ashes? And who’s this milkskinned whelp with you? What of our hot date tonight?”

“Don’t you think I can handle two men together? But I fear you’re completely out of the picture, Max. Nowadays I favor only artists. They’re so much more creative in bed. And Diego screws as good as he writes—which is to say, brilliantly!”

Mortified, Diego accepted a suit-rumpling handshake from Famagusta and a hearty clap on the back that almost separated spine from ribs. “Good luck, lad! You’ll need it to keep this one content!”

Famagusta’s was located at the Riverside end of Cross Street Gritsavage-905. The building there that backed up onto the water housed the kitchen and interior seating. But the restaurant spilled out onto the adjacent Slip, a long concrete jetty adapted from coarser uses to fine dining by improvements such as plank flooring and velvet ropes running from stanchion to stanchion. And on such a splendid summer evening, demand for those canopied outdoor tables was greatest. But Max Famagusta swept Diego and Volusia past a glaring line of waiting diners and ensconced them at the prize table, directly at the end of the Slip.

“We’re expecting two more, Max.”

“I’ll shuttle them out promptly.”

Menu in hand, Diego paused a moment to contemplate the crepuscular view. Wider by several orders of magnitude than Broadway, the River stretched away endlessly to left and right. Crafts of varying dimensions, their running lights green and red, blue, white and amber, plied the placid bosom of its waters, sounding horns and whistles. But all vessels stayed in a channel that began at the midpoint of the River: beyond that invisible boundary began the curling fogs that shrouded the Other Shore.

“How many lobsters do you think I can eat, sweetling?”

“How many can we afford is the question.”

“Piker! Would you scant your starving girlfriend? It’s only a meal, after all. What if I liked furcoats and diamonds? In any case, I’m footing tonight’s bill. My first paycheck at Captain’s salary just came through. I’m even treating your indigent friends.”

“Well, if you insist. But of course, Zohar is not technically indigent anymore.”

“Not except in spirit. And we’ve settled his status privately just in time, for here they come!”

Down the Slip ambled Zohar Kush and Milagra Eventyr. The man wore a summerweight suit of linen, his dramatic puffball of hair lofting in the breeze. But his companion had chosen to cover up in a long-sleeved black cotton shirt, inky denim pants and a pair of clunky brakeman’s boots. Combined with her long coal-dark hair, this outfit made her seem some undertaker’s bride. Sunglasses shaded her eyes.

Diego stood, Volusia followed, facilitating a round of kisses and clasping. Once all four were seated, Zohar immediately earned Diego’s silent praise by saying, “Volusia, you are surely the most beautiful Captain of firefighters in the entire history of Gritsavage. Congratulations!”

Milagra was picking at a shredded corner of her menu, and did not look up when she said, “Yeah, nice bit of jyro, kid.”

“I owe it all to our illustrious Mayor! Once I had him by the nuts, everything else followed! But I won’t accept your good wishes until we have glasses in our hands. Waiter! Waiter! A bottle of your best Mocambo, please!”

The champagne came quickly, and soon they were toasting not only Volusia’s promotion, but every conceivable achievement, however small.

“And here’s to the snot-nosed tyke whose jammed finger I successfully pried out of a coin slot today!”

“Excelsior!”

By the time their dinners were ordered and arrived—platters of steaming shellfish, bowls of rich creamy chowder, mountains of crisp golden onion rings—they were well into their third bottle. Volusia’s uninhibited laughter vied with the ship’s bells.

“By the way,” said Volusia, pausing with a lobster claw uplifted, “Diego and I have been invited to a real swanky do at the Mayor’s mansion.”

Diego licked fingers clean of butter. “We were?”

“Yes. I just got the invitation today. It’s a ball in honor of the visiting Mayor of Palmerdale. A week from tonight.”

“Oh but no, this is truly marvelous, Vol. You two are climbing the social ladder with both hands.”

Although Milagra had kept pace with champagne consumption, she had eaten very little in comparison to her tablemates. Now she peevishly and rudely flung her barely touched lobster back into the River. “You couldn’t get me to hang out with such onkus phonies and pretentious guyvos if you paid me.”

Before Volusia could take offense, Diego intervened with special news he had been saving.

“I have a meeting with my editor and his publisher tomorrow. They’re planning to collect my stories in a book.”

This bombshell had the requisite effect. Volusia vented several loud ululations of triumph and swept Diego into her arms. Zohar encircled both of his friends in a spontaneous embrace. Only Milagra remained seated, oblivious to their shared joy.

The remainder of the evening was swallowed in a rowdy champagne-fueled carnival to whose charms only Milagra remained immune, each drink plunging her instead deeper into some melancholic fugue, a funk that reminded Diego, for no clear reason, of the lake of frothy blood pooling at the roots of the City.

The shabby, well-loved offices of Mirror Worlds occupied one corner of the second floor of the building that housed its parent company, Pinney Publishing. That structure also contained on its groundlevel the very presses that turned out Diego’s favorite magazine and other Pinney publications; consequently, to enter the gargantuan building, a whole square Block in size, was to be instantly subsumed in the sonic, vibratory power of the perpetually active behemoth presses. Status in the Pinney organization could be charted easily by how far away from the noise one’s office was placed. Directly above the relatively quiet linotype machines, Winslow Compounce’s office could be interpreted as the best of a low lot. And to add insult to injury, as Compounce often jovially announced, Mirror Worlds earned more than almost any other Pinney magazine.

“Never!” the bulky, rumpled, bespectacled editor always said when asked if this contradiction bothered him. “How could such trivial perquisites—or lack thereof—possibly demean the importance of the literary work we’re doing here? Cosmogonic Fiction is the most important kind of writing under the suns. Why, I’d conduct my business from the Wrong Side of the Tracks if need be!”

Diego smiled as he let himself in the MW anteroom, recalling past stimulating conversations with the opinionated Compounce and anticipating today’s meeting. Any visit to the nonpareil editor promised unpredictable delights and challenges.

Behind her own desk in the anteroom, Compounce’s Gal Friday—a prim but sardonic spinster named Vizzy Longstreth, her hair always snugged in a tight bun—seemed oblivious to the rumblings from beneath her feet. She waved a pencil at Diego like a bored guard gesturing benignly with a spear and said, “He’s got Fischl in there, but you may as well go in too. I know old Pinney wants to see you both as soon as possible, and unless Winnie’s interrupted he’ll probably hector poor Fischl all morning.”

Longstreth was the only person in existence who could call Compounce “Winnie” without suffering searing flames of wrath. Diego smiled, thanked her and passed through to the inner office.

Kufi Fischl perched on the edge of his chair in front of Compounce’s liberally paper-bestrewn desk. The young writer’s earnest expression and olive complexion contrasted radically with Compounce’s florid, assured face. Wearing his trademark tartan vest despite the windowless office’s trapped August heat, stoked by the machinery below, Compounce was lecturing Fischl at full speed, tossing out concepts in a rapidfire sequence whose logical connections were not always transparent.

“Now see here, Fischl, it’s not just enough any longer to postulate torus worlds. That was an innovation in its time, of course, but we have to push beyond the consensus wisdom now. Have you ever considered what would happen if any world assumed the configuration of a Mobius strip?”

“I don’t quite see—”

“Look here, damn you, it’s obvious!” Compounce ripped a strip of paper lengthwise off some hapless author’s manuscript. “If we join the ends of this strip, representing our world or a similar one, we get a simple torus. Quite possibly the minimal energy configuration of our own world. The City Beast biting its own tail! But to reach any point on its surface, you are constricted by travel in two spatial dimensions. But what if we add a twist before connecting the terminal edges?”

Compounce suited actions to words, and held up a pinched-together Mobius strip.

“A single planetary surface, no inside or outside. Imagine utilizing a third dimension of travel, descending to the depths of this world, passing right through the center, then emerging onto the other, habitable side! Technically, of course, the same side you started from, but displaced as far from your origin as possible! In effect, you’d have a shortcut through time and space.”

A light seemed to spark within Fischl’s imagination. “I get it now! What a wild notion! And of course, you double the livable surface area also, by eliminating the useless portion inside the cylinder section.”

“Bravo! Now go home to your typewriter and bring me back a revision of ‘A City Circumscribed’ that will knock the socks off the readers next month!”

Fischl departed, trailing clouds of incipient glory. Compounce had already dismissed Fischl from his mind before he was out the door, however, and was now heartily pumping Diego’s hand.

“Big day, Patchen, big day! Your very first story collection! Let’s look over this table of contents I’ve drawn up for Worlds for the Asking, before we go to meet Pinney. I assume you’ll agree with me that these are your best stories.”

Diego consulted the list, bit his tongue for a moment, then spoke. “These are all pretty much the selections I would have made, except for one. ‘The Ethical Ingeniators.’ ”

Compounce snatched the list back. “What? Are you pulling my leg, son? That’s one of your best stories.”

“It was also just the third story I ever sold. I’ve done much better stuff since then, more mature work.”

Compounce deliberately took his time lighting up a cigarette, making Diego sweat the wait. Then the editor regarded his protege from behind his horn-rimmed glasses with a gaze like a drillbit. “Mature in what sense? The concepts behind ‘The Ethical Ingeniators’ are big and solid and revolutionary as anything we’ve ever published. Are you getting hung up on non-issues like style, Patchen? You’re not turning quotidian on me, are you? The next thing I know you’ll tell me you’ve been submitting vignettes about the love-affairs of your dentist to The Gritsavage Muse.”

“No, no, of course not. But Winslow, really, you can’t discount style entirely.”

“Certainly not. I’m not some tone-deaf oaf like Mallika Prang over at Simulacra, am I? I let you express yourself as you see fit, and I recognize the more elegant turns of your prose. But when it comes down to style versus sense of estrangement, poetry versus ideas, then I have to plump for estrangement and ideas every time. And if a story possesses enough of those, the style just doesn’t figure, one way or the other.”

Diego thought he was going mad. Compounce had this effect on him at least once a month, but never before on this particular, sensitive topic. Approaching anger, Diego said, “You can’t unyoke the two, Winslow! Each is the interlocking product of the other!”

Compounce cut short the argument with a familiar phrase. “I feel an editorial coming on regarding this topic, Patchen. Let’s table the matter until then. Now, can we include the disputed story or not? Remember, it’s just one out of the whole batch of winners.”

Diego wearily capitulated. “Sure. Why not?”

“Wonderful! Now, let’s go beard Pinney in his luxurious den, shall we?”

The top floor of the Pinney Building could have been in a different portion of the City, a more rarefied and exotic district, so distinct was its ambiance and appurtenances from the rundown hurlyburly of Compounce’s domain. Ushered past a series of assistants, Diego and Compounce finally found themselves in an office big as a Subway station, carpeted and appointed like an interior designer’s showroom. Nervous and sweating, Diego tried to put aside the feelings of insignificance inspired by this plush foreign environment; Compounce, bluff as always, truly appeared unawed by his surroundings.

Teague Pinney sat dwarfed by his desk. A shrunken, elderly fellow dressed in a suit worth more than Diego’s monthly income, the publisher resembled a homonculus formed of wax around a stainless steel armature. Pinney was in the process of wrapping up a discussion with another writer, a man Diego was surprised to realize was Yale Drumgoole.

Now Drumgoole stood and leaned across the desk to shake the publisher’s hand. “Swell, Teague, fifty thousand is fine. See you tonight at the club perhaps? Wonderful!”

Turning, Drumgoole spied Diego and hastened toward him with signs of honest pleasure. A slim, refined fellow, impeccably attired and tanned from many hours spent by rooftop poolsides and on River sculling expeditions, Drumgoole radiated blonde vitality and self-assurance.

“Diego! What a treat! It’s been ages since our little debauch this winter. Too, too long. I’ve heard all about your upcoming first book. A respectable little debut. Where are you heading after this?”

“Downtown.”

“Splendid. I’ll cool my heels outside for the nonce, and then we’ll stroll together for a few Blocks.”

Drumgoole exited with a flourish; Diego and Compounce moved to attend on Pinney.

Up close, the aged publisher seemed less a living being than some kind of ingeniator’s chess-playing automaton, unblinking and serene. Only a cluster of crumbs at the corners of his lips, as well as a line of sweat around his high shirt-collar, gave lie to that conceit.

“Mr. Patchen, how do you do? My colleague Mr. Compounce has made a strong case for your getting inbetween boards.”

Diego took, shook and relinquished a hand stiff and dry as a punchboard. Flustered a moment by Pinney’s circumlocution, he could find no proper response. “Um, thank you, sir. My book—ah, my book, yes. Well, I’m very grateful that Pinney Publishing supports Cosmogonic Fiction so strongly.”

“Yes, yes, of course. We are a broad spectrum publisher, offering quality fiction to the elite, and various types of entertainments to the masses. This ‘other worlds’ stuff seems to sell, so of course we feel obliged to publish it. Can’t leave all the profits to our competition now, can we? Wouldn’t do to let, say, a second-rate firm like Chugai and Munson steal a march on us. No, your book will neatly fill a certain slot in our list.”

Compounce handed over the table of contents. “Here’s our tentative lineup, sir.”

Pinney laboriously extracted a pair of smudge-lensed rimless reading glasses from his breast pocket, unfolded them, donned them, then devoted ten seconds to the list. “All very fine instances of their type, I’m sure, Compounce. You know I trust your judgment in this recondite area.”

Diego felt obliged to appear savvy—or at least minimally concerned—about business matters. “Mr. Pinney, sir, might I inquire about terms?”

“Oh, the boilerplate contract for this kind of venture will suffice, I believe. A thousand bulls advance, ten percent royalty, I’m sure our Accounting Department will make it all quite clear to you.”

Wanting to bargain upward this meager advance, Diego looked to Compounce for backing. But the editor subtly indicated not to contest the offer.

“When will my book appear?”

“What month is this? August? Well, to be honest with you, once it’s typeset and we cobble together some tolerable cover art, we’ll likely just slip the actual printing into any old moment when the presses aren’t otherwise occupied. It won’t take too long to run off about five thousand copies, which is a limit we impose on all our ‘other worlds’ titles. So your book might be out as early as December, or as late as the spring.”

Gusts of conflicting feelings battered Diego. Pride at the notion of actually holding a copy of his first book in just a few months warred with ire at the less-than-ideal treatment of his brainchild. He wanted to ask about so many other facets of this project—advertising, reviews, endorsements—but he could sense that already Pinney’s patience was dwindling. So in the end, Diego merely said, “It’s an honor to be part of Pinney’s line, sir.”

“Of course it is, young man. Now, you just stick to your last, and you’ll carve out a fine little niche for yourself among your kind.”

Out in the foremost of Pinney’s anterooms, they found Drumgoole waiting, chatting with a pretty redheaded secretary and making her blush. In parting, Compounce shook Diego’s hand, extolled his virtues and prospects once more, asked for something new for the October issue of Mirror Worlds, then bade him goodbye.

Broadway in August steamed. Children played in their underclothes in front of a blaring fire-hydrant. Vendors stayed immobile under the shade of their cart umbrellas. Litter became embedded in the softening tarmac: bottle caps, matchsticks, string, bits of newspaper. Diego took off his tie, and although Drumgoole did not even loosen his, the other writer remained imperturbably cool.

“So, how did it go with old Teague? Did you hold his feet to the fire for just the terms you wanted?”

“Hardly. I simply took what he offered.”

“Chin up, Dee! Nothing to fret over. Why, I recall my first book. That would have been Coronets for Lovers. A mere ten thousand advance, and I didn’t even specify higher royalties for the second printing! What a callow chap I was! But you’ll get to know the ropes before too long.”

Diego’s next words practically exploded from him. “Yale, how can you write nothing but quotidian fiction? You’re a bright guy. Aren’t you interested in the big topics?”

Drumgoole gestured to take in the whole scene before them. “What could be more interesting than this rich social tapestry laid out before us? An infinite necklace of broken dreams and soaring ambitions. I plumb the depths of the human heart, Diego. That’s what people want to read about. Their daily concerns. Making a living, friendship, marrying, dying. Face it: the majority of people don’t want your absurd flights of fancy. Show them what’s under their very noses, but in a fresh light, heightened and amplified. That’s the trick to success.”

“But look around you! Our world is one huge enigma! How did it form, how did we get here, what does the rest of the universe contain? How can anything beyond these cosmic mysteries really matter?”

“Those questions are fine fodder for freshman philosophy students, Diego. But after a while, one matures, one’s concerns narrow down to what’s really vital. That’s what you haven’t acknowledged yet, that you and your fellow Cosmo Crazies are stuck in a juvenile rut. But I suppose that’s the best place for those of your temperament and peculiar abilities. You’d be lost trying to handle quotidian fiction.”

Atop the rude treatment handed out by Pinney, these insults made Diego bunch his fists and picture the black eye Drumgoole had earned himself when last they met. But he forced himself to unclench his hands and offer Drumgoole a perfunctory goodbye.

“I’m taking the Subway from here, Yale. I’ll see you sometime in the future.”

“Certainly. Please, give my regards to your tempestuous and well-muscled girlfriend. And how’s Kush doing these days?”

“Just fine, all of them. Goodbye.”

Diego exited the Subway adjacent to Snarky Chuff’s newsstand. A restless impulse made him stop. Behind his counter, Chuff wore a dirty sleeveless tee-shirt revealing concave chest and canvas shorts over scrawny legs.

“Snarky, tell me about the kind of person who buys Mirror Worlds.”

“Ah, the weird and the wonderful they are. No two alike, and each one more elastic-brained than the next! Of course, many of them have to collect all their loose scintilla to afford an issue. But the stimulating discussions I’ve had with that class of customers would boggle the minds of a dozen college professors.”

Diego picked up a copy of The Gritsavage Muse. “And what of the average purchaser of this?”

“Snooty, for the most part. Many of them apparently carrying brooms up their arses. But they often tip me their change. Can’t say I know them that well, since they seldom chat with the likes of me.”

Diego brightened immensely. “Snarky, you’ve just made my day. You’ve reminded me of the difference between a family and a clique.”

“Glad to be of service, Diego. Now, tell me this—in your last story, where the main character had to dress the plague-ridden corpse of his own sister, who had been killed by the evil mystic—how did you ever get into his mind?”

“How do I look?”

Outside the Mayoral mansion, with crowds of partygoers swirling past them in the neon-stroked evening, Diego regarded Volusia with awe and deep appreciation. Clad in a black velvet strapless gown and open-toed high-heeled shoes, her hair pinned back with glittering costume-jewelry clips, she appeared to have stepped from a painting, perhaps a vast mural depicting a tea party held by some race of affable giants.

“If beauty came packaged like soap powder, you’d be the Super Economy Size with Extra Added Knockout Power.”

“Just the poetic effect I was striving for. Dope! Promise me you’ll stick to your Cosmogonic stuff and never try to write a romance.”

“Exactly the promise Yale Drumgoole recently tried to extract from me.”

“I hope you paid attention to Yale. He’s a sharp lad, even if a bit of a pill. Let’s go inside now. I can’t stand the anticipation!” The enormous crystal-lit ballroom, richly gilt and embellished, dominated the entire third floor of the building at Gritsavage-851, stretching from Broadway back to Tracks. Any windows giving onto the always mildly disconcerting, however familiar view of the Wrong Side of the Tracks remained hidden behind a floor-to-ceiling involuted curtain that served as backdrop to the low stage before it. On that stage tonight, at linen-covered tables, sat Mayor Jobo Copperknob; his honored guest, Mayor Moacyr Quine of Palmerdale; and assorted other favored functionaries, friends, family and financiers from both camps. Off to stageleft, a smaller round platform held a five-piece band. Already the musicians were assembled and warming up. Diego experienced a pleasant surprise to recognize Rumbold Prague’s current ensemble: Lydia Kinch, Scripps Skagway, Lucerne Canebrake, and Reddy Diggins. The trumpet player himself, however, had not yet made his entrance.

A huge buffet stretched along the Downtown wall: shrimp on ice, steamship rounds of beef, pineapple-slice-draped hams and barbecued chickenwings, as well as numerous salads and punches. Efficient and gregarious bartenders manned an open bar, whipping up Arcanums, Buzzers, Cosmopolitans and other cocktails. A number of folding chairs offered minimal seating along two walls, but the majority of guests stayed standing, juggling plates and drinks and circulating from one knot of conversationalists to another. The central dancefloor remained empty, cordoned off for the moment by velvet ropes slung between splay-footed brass poles.

“I’m starving!” Volusia announced to the room at large. “Diego, do you realize that my lunch today was cut short by a fire in some crates of cargo at Slip-833? I barely had time to shower and gussy up before meeting you here. Let’s eat!”

Diego allowed himself to be dragged to the food. Uneasy in his rented tuxedo, he did not feel up to balancing plate and glass together, and so contented himself with a mug of tart punch, although he was just as hungry as Volusia. While she piled a plate high with meat and rolls, he compromised by stationing himself beside a tray full of canapes and eating one at a time when no one seemed to be looking. Meanwhile, on the dais the special guests were dining on more elegant fare, served by a steady stream of waiters.

Volusia returned to his side, gnawing at a sandwich involving three meats and as many slices of bread.

“Vol, I don’t know anyone here! You’ve got to clue me in on a few of the players.”

Swallowing noisily, Volusia gestured with her half-eaten sandwich. “There’s Tolkan Sinsalida, Copperknob’s Master Ingeniator. The portly toff a few feet to his left—that’s Muzzio Kloves, the punchboard king. That fellow with the camera is Mason Gingerpane of course, and his boss, the Scimitar’s publisher, is that beady-eyed fellow in the white suit, Ludic Rukenheim. Who else do you want me to identify?”

“That’s plenty for now. How do you know so many of these people?”

“I told you. Ever since I rescued his flabby bacon, I’m Copperknob’s pet project, his ‘link with the average voter.’ He brings me to official meetings all the time now. That’s how I met most of these stuffed shirts.”

Diego shook his head in bewilderment. Volusia’s capacity for blithe acceptance of whatever life tossed her way continued to amaze him.

Far across the room, Diego thought to espy a familiar face: the harsh and world-weary black features of Rumbold Prague. Sight of the musician brightened Diego’s mood.

“Vol, I spot Rumbold over there. I’m going to go talk to him about something that’s been bothering me.”

“Have fun. I think I’ll sashay over and tease Copperknob’s deputy, Cagney Passwater. He’s half in love with me, you know.”

But Diego was already gone.

Maneuvering through the whorls of chattering folks as genteely as he could, Diego lost sight of Prague. Pausing to cast about for his quarry, he found himself standing right next to his publisher, of all people.

The frail yet domineering Teague Pinney stood half supported on the arm of a gorgeous brunette woman, plainly his date for the evening, or perhaps even his wife. Holding forth on art and politics, Pinney did not at first notice Diego. Grateful for this, Diego tried to slip away, but was hailed by none other than Yale Drumgoole, and forced to join the circle.

Pinney generously acknowledged him. “Ah, Mr. Patchen, a pleasant surprise to encounter you at this soiree. Ladies and gentlemen, this is one of our authors, Diego Patchen. He specializes in counterfactual tales.”

“That ‘other worlds’ stuff,” Drumgoole added.

Barely concealed snickers and titters greeted this disclosure, and Diego felt a hot, wild flush envelope him. “Quite right. My compatriots and I earn most of Mr. Pinney’s money for him, I believe. Why, my stories probably purchased those gold cufflinks he’s sporting. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find my drug-addicted, pool-playing, gutter-crawling musician friend.”

Diego departed the stunned revelers with a sense of immense satisfaction tinged with rue. Thankfully, he had already received and cashed his advance.

Now however Rumbold Prague was nowhere in evidence. Diego pictured him shooting up in some bathroom prior to his performance. Momentary thoughts of Zohar Kush and Milagra Eventyr naturally trailed this image.

Volusia recaptured Diego before too long. A small mustard stain blotted the broad alluring frontage of her gown.

“Quick, Diego, the dancing’s going to start soon! You don’t want me to give my entire dancecard over to Passwater and his cronies, do you?”

“By no means.” Diego offered his arm. “Shall we?”

Making their way to the ropes, they arrived just as those barriers were formally lowered. Flowing out onto the dance floor, Diego and Volusia turned to face the band. Vamping, the musicians awaited their leader. Before too long, Rumbold Prague strolled onstage, behind his shades the emblem of disdainful, self-deprecating unconcern. Spontaneous applause greeted him. He lifted his trumpet to his lips (bright red metal colored like the blood of the City Beast, capped with a golden mute), and a hush fell.

Prague’s first notes tore a hole in the heart of every listener. Poignant as death, sweet as first love, evanescent as both, they soared to fill the room with sonic festoons, coiling back on themselves, building to impossible crescendos, diminishing to barely audible whispers. That the music issued from a monolith wearing an unchanging expression of pained disdain only added to its resonance. After a few bars the other musicians fell in behind the bandleader, soft brushes across drums, plucked bass, caressing saxophone, plaintive hammerings from piano.

Volusia clutched Diego to her as if in danger of losing him forever, and they began to dance.

After this number and two others equally mournful and stirring, Diego felt a tap on his shoulder.

Mayor Jobo Copperknob was an athlete gone to seed, impressive still in his shaven-headed magnificence. He had played professional basketball for the Gritsavage Stokers before his turn to politics, and his former lean height had since been swaddled in embonpoint.

“Volusia, my pet! I take it this is your lucky beau. Introduce us, please!”

“Diego Patchen, Gritsavage’s best writer, Mayor. His first book’s due out any day now, and it’s going to make him famous!”

“Volusia, I hardly—”

Copperknob seemed slightly disappointed at the announcement of Diego’s profession, as if his job made him unworthy of Volusia’s affections. “I suppose you write about all the usual ashcan things. Unfaithful women, poverty, the advertising world.”

“Not at all! I write Cosmogonic Fiction!”

“Wait a minute. You did ‘Shadows of the Inquisitor.’ I loved that story!”

“You read CF?”

“And nothing else. But this is wonderful! This ties in most neatly with a plan I’m about to announce tonight. But first, I insist on a dance or two with my favorite civil servant. Diego, if you don’t object—”

“Oh, no, of course, please, go right ahead.”

Diego retreated off the dancefloor and watched with mingled jealousy and pride. Copperknob and Volusia made a dramatic pair. He finally reclaimed his partner when the Mayor moved on to usurp other women.

Finally Volusia had had enough. “My feet are killing me! Let’s sit the rest of Prague’s noodling out.”

Diego welcomed the break, and they moved to empty chairs.

When the musicians took their first intermission—Prague actually deigned to mutter a curt “Thank you”—Copperknob ascended the main dais and comandeered a microphone.

“Attention, please! I have an important announcement to make.” He signalled for the Mayor of Palmerdale, a quiet thin and dignified chap, to come up beside him. “In return for the generous visit by my good friend Mayor Quine, the city of Gritsavage is launching a cultural embassy to Palmerdale. Comprised of the best and brightest among us, from every trade and walk of life, and led by yours truly, this mission will strengthen the ties between our two fair Boroughs. We will be departing sometime during the next few weeks, giving our ambassadors plenty of time to get their affairs in order for an absence of a couple of months. Our transport will be the Days on the Yann, a steamer of no small luxury. Now, we have many of the members of this expedition here with us tonight, and I’d like to invite them up on stage as their names are called, to take a bow and receive your applause.

“Rumbold Prague.

“Mason Gingerpane.

“Cagney Passwater.

“Euple Babayan.

“Volusia Bittern.

“Diego Patchen.”

Of course no other name registered on Diego’s stunned sensibilities after his own. Hauled onstage by a beaming Volusia, he could only goggle in dreamlike wonderment at the horde of upturned congratulatory faces focused on him and his new comrades.

But he was not so nonplussed as to miss the delightful look of envy and disbelief worn by the handsome yet sour-visaged Yale Drumgoole.

“Oh but no, Dee, this is superlative news!”

Zohar Kush turned away from Diego for a moment to make change for one of the arcade’s juvenile patrons. Amidst the clatter of bells, chimes, metal balls smashing into paddles and wooden balls clattering against hinged pins, the friends had to speak loudly to be heard. It was the day after the Mayoral cotillion, and Diego was still flying high from the unforeseen events of that affair.

“You’ll get some immense publicity for your book now. Filing reports for the Scimitar! Photos by Gingerpane! Your byline will be on everyone’s lips!”

“The Mayor said only a writer of CF could possibly convey the real flavor of our trip.”

“Now that’s the kind of patronage and respect you’ve always merited, Dee. Exactly how far away is Palmerdale, by the way?”

“Nearly two hundred and fifty thousand Blocks. Twenty-five hundred Boroughs! The Yann makes roughly a hundred Blocks an hour, so the voyage Downtown should take about two weeks. A little longer coming back against the current. Of course, the Subway would have us there in much less time, but Copperknob could hardly host his entourage in a proper manner. And can you imagine how weary we’d all be after straphanging that long? No, we’re really traveling in style!”

“You must have a lot to do before you go.”

“Not really. My packing’s minimal, and Compounce has a couple of my stories in inventory to cover an absence of a issue or two. I certainly don’t have any hand in producing my book, so Teague Pinney won’t require my input. We’ll be gone about two months in all. I just need to say goodbye to my father, after making sure Mrs. Loblolly and Doctor Teasel will watch over him regularly. And you’ll look in on him from time to time too, I hope.”

“Without fail.” Zohar hesitated a moment before his next query. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll die while you’re gone?”

“Doctor Teasel gives him more time than that. And personally, I figure he’ll hang in until I get back, just to have a chance to put me through the emotional wringer some more. Besides, this trip is the opportunity of a lifetime. I can’t afford to miss it.”

“Oh, absolutely. Well then, it seems as if you’ll have plenty of idle hours for several riotous celebrations with your friends. Let’s start tonight! My shift’s over in just half an hour. Here’s a few tokens. Go play a game or two, then we’ll collect Milagra and Volusia and start hitting the bars. Whitstanley’s is having ladies’ night tonight, and Blackwelder is playing.”

“With Mewborn on drums?”

“Who but?”

“I’m there!”

When they exited onto Broadway, the two Suns were still fairly high. On the way to Zohar’s apartment, the friends chatted happily on a number of topics. Diego felt as if the days ahead of him and Zohar were paved with gold.

A twist of Zohar’s key let them into the flat. “Milagra! You must hear this! Such stupendous news!”

Diego waited in the front room while Zohar penetrated the rear rooms, calling out his lover’s name. Then, silence. When the curly-topped man reemerged, his face was ashen as dead scales.

“She’s gone. And she finally found all our savings. I had the money in a hollowed-out book. One of Drumgoole’s, in fact.” Zohar essayed a sickly smile. “I thought his writing worthy of being gutted. And anyway she never reads—”

“Zohar, no! Why didn’t you bank it?”

“I, ah, I’m not welcome at any of Gritsavage’s banks, Dee. A slight misunderstanding in the past.”

“Where could she have gone?”

“Where else? To her dealer. Quickly now! There might still be time—”

The frenzied Subway ride that followed seemed at once infinitely protracted and yet collapsed into seconds. Diego’s mind raced, casting about for options and alternatives, ways to help poor Zohar, poor Milagra. But ultimately he had to admit his utter ignorance and helplessness.

A steel door inset in the backside of a mid-Block building was accessible only from the cinder-strewn trough paralleling the Tracks. Streaks of rust from the door’s overhang bled down the concrete walls. A rushing Train blew past them in a hot filthy wind as Zohar banged upon the entrance. The setting Seasonsun tinged the coarse grey wall a lurid crimson. Eventually a sliding panel opened to frame a pair of bloodshot eyes.

“Lionel! Is Milagra inside?”

“I don’t know, cousin. . . .”

“Open up then, and I’ll look.”

Protracted junkie reflexes made the unbolting and opening of the door an interminable agony, but at last they were inside.

Barely illuminated by a few small bulbs, the opium parlor was set up as a flophouse, a jumble of cots, mattresses and bunkbeds. Shooting works littered every available surface not occupied by a body, such as the tops of crates and stools. With barely room to move, Zohar nonetheless immediately began to dart from nodding dreamer to comatose sleeper, peering for his beloved’s features. Diego followed more cautiously, not wanting to stick himself.

They found Milagra in a sour-smelling corner of the basement, next to a trio of empty needles. Saliva slimed her cheek and chin, and her breaths came imperceptibly at rare intervals.

Zohar cradled her in his arms. “Three spikes of junk! She hasn’t done three spikes in months! Diego, help me, please. We have to get her to a hospital—”

Diego bent to grab Milagra’s legs.

And then the Pompatics arrived.

Flowing through the basement wall as if through sheer air, five luminescent Fisherwives filled the room with their briney odor. Half again as large as a human, each pearly monochromatic Wife was cauled within wavery drapery that seemed more an extension of their forms, rather than any robe or mantle. Vast irregular wings like the tissuey integuments of lobsters unfurled behind them, penetrating any inanimate intersecting barriers of wall, ceiling or furniture. A subliminal melodic buzzing that verged on intelligibility filled the ears of the humans. The Pompatics shed melting scintilla like snowflakes of cold light. Their sisterly faces, all different, all generic, conveyed no discernible emotions.

“No!” Zohar screamed.

But all denial and opposition were futile.

Englobing Milagra quite corporeally, the Fisherwives stole her away from Zohar’s fanatical embrace as easily as a mother removes a sharp object from an infant’s grip. They ascended then through the rafters, the dead human passing with them between the hidden holes in matter as easily as did her guides to the Other Shore.

Zohar collapsed, weeping. Diego fell down beside him. The blankets where Milagra had lain were still warm. Gradually, the distinctive maritime odor of the Wives dissipated.

After a longish while, Zohar finished sobbing. He and Diego helped each other stand. Spotting Milagra’s purse, Diego grabbed it, and they made their way outside.

Now it was twilight. By the time they attained Broadway, streetlights were prinking the night.

Moving in no particular direction, the two men exchanged no words for a dozen Blocks. Then Zohar spoke.

“There is nothing left for me in this sad, lonely, heartless Borough, Diego. I’m leaving.” He wearily accepted the purse from Diego, emptied it of cash—which he stuffed carelessly into one pocket—then dropped this relic of Milagra into the gutter.

“When? Where will you go?”

“As far away as I can. Uptown, and beyond.”

4.

Worlds for the Asking

Saying goodbye to Gaddis Patchen a few days prior to the Yann’s departure provided both expected and unexpected frissons.

As always, Diego found himself killing a minute in Evenson’s Variety. He ordered a bottle of celery pop from the perpetually squelched wifely shopkeeper Esmin, and had a go at the latest punchboard with its sports theme involving the Gritsavage Stokers. Surprisingly, Diego actually won a few scintilla, which Prosper Evenson grudgingly paid over. Whistling happily at this good omen, Diego left the store.

Late September, and the leaves of the familiar tree before the stoop of his father’s apartment were already crisping against the coming autumn, and seed pods littered the sidewalk. Diego wondered if he would see it bloom next year.

Inside his father’s dim, dank lair, Diego announced his intentions. Surprisingly, his father did not selfishly object or contrarily dismiss the trip to Palmerdale. Instead he gave a hearty endorsement, and asked to shake Diego’s hand. Stunned, Diego grasped his father’s dry withered hand and, a little embarrassed, averted his eyes. Much to his surprise, he saw a copy of Mirror Worlds splayed open upon a sidetable, as if Gaddis had been reading one of his son’s stories.

“Tell me,” said Gaddis, “how’s your friend Zohar Kush doing?”

Diego winced. “Not well. Not well at all.” Diego explained about the death of Milagra Eventyr and Zohar’s mad, despairing flight from Gritsavage.

“Her overdose didn’t involve those syrettes of mine you stole, did it?”

Diego felt himself redden, and had to swallow a mortifying bolus of guilty chagrin before he could answer. “No, sir. Those were used only as a lifesaving measure. She had access to other, harsher drugs by the time of her death. I hope you understand—”

Gaddis Patchen waved a negligent hand. “Of course, of course. I’m not a total naif. I’ve been up and down the City in my day, son. The next such emergency, though, why not ask for my help? All right?”

“All right.”

When Diego said goodbye to his father, promising to visit him first thing upon his return, he felt that some ancient inner polarities had shifted in both of them.

There was a champagne drought on the crisp, windy day of departure: the Trains and Ships stopping in the Borough had been bare of this luxury for weeks, and all stocks on hand had been consumed. Thus the cheering crowds ashore and the excited travelers on deck witnessed the Deputy Mayor, Archer Thornhill, manfully crack a bottle of apple juice across the prow of the Yann. Within minutes of this ceremony, Captain Vigo Dassault had them in mid-River and heading Downtown, sunlight sparkling on the silvery wavelets.

Diego deemed those first few days afloat idyllic. A vacation from cares and conventions, the cruise offered all the things Diego enjoyed: good food, hearty drink, stimulating conversation, and frolicsome private nights with the incomparable Volusia Bittern, cuddled in their tiny cabin like loving pigeons in a nest. His only duties: regularly composing a couple of thousands words of reportage, which were filed (via Subway couriers) each time the Yann put into a Slip at some foreign Borough, to take on coal and other supplies.

The continually varying yet generically similar landscape of the City rolled past their vessel like some infinite revolving cyclorama. Every hour or so, regular as clockwork, Captain Dassault announced the name of each Borough as they came abreast of it, over the onboard loudspeakers: “Pergola . . . Kinderly . . . Mousterian Point . . . Shiloh . . . Clovisford . . . Mercosur . . . Oudville . . . Bridgewater . . . Frumentious . . . Candlemas . . . Smithtown . . . Gavrankapetanovicbourg. . . .” Gradually, the drawn-out litany induced a hypnotic sense of estrangement. Their trip would span twenty-five hundred different names! Home seemed incredibly distant after just the first few dozen.

One break in the monotony of the landscape occurred around the 10,224,001th Block, but the change was not a pleasant one. Here the travelers witnessed the worst kind of Ghetto Block: fire had reduced an entire Borough to charred stubs: uninhabited, ominous, and monitory. The passengers could see straight through to the Wrong Side of the Tracks, the channel of vision between that realm and the Other Shore at their backs an unsettling anomaly. Captain Dassault intoned the name of the Borough solemnly—“Cresspandit”—and although the desolation soon fell behind them, the dreary spectacle remained on their souls some time longer.

The weather offered more healthy divertisement. Storms brewed in the cold impenetrable mists of the Other Shore, and emerged from time to time, driving laterally across the River before making landfall athwart the City. As the boiling, crackling turbulences passed over the Yann, the crew sprang into furious action and the passengers retreated belowdecks, where they indulged snugly in talk and refreshments.

Diego found his companions an interesting bunch. Their leader, Mayor Jobo Copperknob, proved himself more than the blustery, ego-driven gladhander he often appeared to be when on the public stage. Expressing a genuine selflessness in service to his Borough, the ex-athlete detailed the benefits he expected to obtain from this trip: new artworks, new products, new points of view. Well versed in CF, Copperknob also gave Diego plenty of the kind of discussion he liked best, on matters of the imagination. They argued the merits of various writers and stories for hours at a time.

Tolkan Sinsalida, the Mayor’s Master Ingeniator, captured Diego’s full attention also. Bright-eyed, short and thin, his bald pate rimmed by a comical grey fringe, Sinsalida possessed a mind equally adept at both practical and theoretical aspects of his field. He captivated Diego with long disquisitions concerning the stultified state of the City’s technology, and prospects for change and advancement.

“Because we never built this artificial environment we find ourselves in, but only inherited it—or so all records seem to indicate—we are in the position of children given a radio receiver for investigation, then asked to recreate it out of a jumble of loose, unlabeled parts. The theory behind so much of the City is missing. We don’t have the tools to make the tools to make the tools we need!”

Diego felt his mind enlarging after each lecture from Sinsalida, and he already anticipated applying the insights thus garnered to his fiction when he returned home.

Mason Gingerpane, the star photographer for the Scimitar, led the party in simple yet amusing games, most of which revolved around cards, singing and alcohol consumption. Grizzled and strife-bitten, worn hard by capturing the shocked faces of the witnesses to a thousand murders and suicides, Gingerpane still managed to affirm life’s essential pleasures.

Euple Babayan scared Diego. A sexless, stony philosophy professor at Gritsavage College, she seemed utterly emotionless, a cool reasoning machine unruffled by any exterior circumstances. And the things she could contemplate caused even Diego’s professional brain to whirl.

“Do you believe in Block Zero, Patchen?”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“Gritsavage numbers its blocks in the ten million range, counting from some hypothetical point of origin. We are planning to traverse approximately two percent of those Blocks, to reach Palmerdale. But what if we kept on going? Is there a Block Zero? Or is our numerology just a facade? And if Block Zero exists, what would one see from that ultimate border?”

Diego found both his mind and his tongue tied. He made an excuse and left, and thereafter avoided Babayan as best he could.

Even the oleaginous Cagney Passwater, despite his slimy flirtations directed at a winsomely dismissive Volusia, managed to amuse Diego with his huge stock of dirty jokes.

These and a score of other compatriots, all bright exemplars of their fields, made the time pass swiftly.

Most welcome of all opportunities, however, was the chance to hang with Rumbold Prague.

The imperturbably suave musician spent much time in his private cabin, and Diego suspected him of nodding off for long stretches in heroin’s embrace. But there were plenty of women onboard too who entered Prague’s cabin to divert him. But when he did emerge to consort with the others, he was a magnetic locus of charm. Not overly demonstrative or chatty, Prague nonetheless took a vital part in many discussions. And finally Diego was able to beard him one-to-one and discuss some of the ramifications of artistic style, those troubling issues raised by his irritating editor Winslow Compounce.

Prague listened to Diego’s worries patiently, then tipped his head forward so as to expose twin crescents of bloodshot eyeball over the top of his sunglasses. In his cultured growl, he said simply, “If it’s in you, cousin, it’s got to come out. And how it comes out is style. But style rises from everything you’ve ever seen or done or thought. You couldn’t escape or destroy your style if you tried. Best you can consciously do is polish some of the rough edges a bit. Refine your chops, cousin.”

Diego felt an immense load he had been unwittingly carrying evaporate off his shoulders. Listening that night to Prague practice alone on deck (his uninvited audience congregated in the darkness at a respectful distance from the trumpet-player, giving him his solitude while managing not to miss a single sweetly bent note launched into the moist air), Diego found this wordless midnight reiteration of Prague’s earlier theory even more illuminating than his speech.

The only exception to this easy congeniality was Mayor Moacyr Quine and his small party. The four or five residents of Palmerdale, dressed in their strange attire, chose not to associate with the Gritsavagers. They took their meals alone. They spoke politely in their queer accents and odd vernacular when addressed but never initiated conversation. And they certainly played no poker, charades or Twenty Questions.

Questioned about this standoffishness, Jobo Copperknob just shrugged. “They do things differently in Palmerdale. Different customs, different attitudes, different priorities. But believe me, my discussions with Quine have convinced me they are eager to treat with us. And after all, what would be the point of going all this way just to visit folks identical to us?”

By mid-October the level of excitement onboard the Yann began to rise. Palmerdale lay just a few thousand Blocks away. Soon they would be ashore in a land unlike any they had ever set foot in before.

The night before their slated arrival, Rumbold Prague’s improvised runs of gemmed, deracinated notes, squeezed from his blood-red trumpet and wafting across the alien air, communicated to them all their undeniable uprootedness, a bittersweet sensation both chilling and thrilling.

Dreaming in their narrow bunk, Volusia clutched a musing Diego so tightly he felt ready to burst, yet protected by her love.

The first week in Palmerdale went swimmingly. Right from their disembarcation one wine-rich October morning, when a large crowd of jubilant citizens and officials greeted them at the Palmerdale-35 Slip with music and shouts of acclaim, the visitors were feted almost nonstop, no luxury spared, their every word regarded as intrinsically interesting.

Conducted to a three-star hotel, The Pavo Arms, the party of Gritsavagers were allowed a brief rest before that night’s reception. Volusia and Diego flopped down eagerly on their cushy mattress, laughing at the improbability of their being here, so far from home.

“A firefighter and a hack! We’ve really fooled the whole world!”

“Speak for yourself, Dee. My natural talents are just now getting their proper respect.”

Glad to be away from their companions for a while—the close quarters of the Yann had begun to lose their charm toward the end—they indulged in a long hot connubial shower, then ordered a big lunch from room service. Having fallen asleep afterwards, they were waked by a call from the operator around five PM, reminding them of their obligations that evening. They dressed formally, and met the rest of their party in the lobby. Diego thought Volusia’s chiffon frock entrancing—as did Passwater, to judge by his leers. Conducted to an oddly assorted fleet of waiting vehicles, they motored Uptown to the Mayoral mansion.

Once inside the big crowded noisy ballroom, Diego was swept by an immense yet twisted deja vu. The scene mimicked so vividly, yet with so many prickly skewings, the affair back home when he had been nominated for this very trip that Diego felt his consciousness split in two. Or rather, he experienced a sensation as if his memories had been warped, the present reaching backward to tamper with the past.

For most things in Palmerdale differed, even if only subtly, from their counterparts in Gritsavage. Novel architectural decorations made interiors and exteriors uncannily off. The Borough’s script, seen on signage, employed several unintelligible characters. Weird fashions added another layer of dissonance. But most strikingly, the speech of the Palmerdale people jarred on Diego’s brain. The minimal conversations he had so far shared with the natives would flow smoothly until, about every five or ten words, a rock of foreign usage would obtrude. Sometimes these barriers could be contextually navigated around. Other times they formed a barricade of incomprehension.

And now, when the Mayor of Palmerdale stood to make his speech, this issue could no longer be minimized.

Diego hardly understood half of what was being said.

“Quints and quirkers, I’m fair gozzled here tonight to stand before so many fine barmpots and extend to our new flarty petermans a bowsie come-up. I foresee a long and scrotty jaw-jaw between our two jeezly Boroughs, bringing with it increased trade, stimulating new noddy noshes and oozlum cleversticks—”

Diego strained for a while to follow the speech, but eventually gave up, bobbing his head and smiling in what he hoped was a cross-cultural gesture of gratitude and friendship, and not merely an imitation of a happy idiot. The rest of his compatriots had adopted the same tactic, except for Euple Babayan, who was taking notes on her linen napkin.

Diego spent the rest of Moacyr Quine’s oration working out a new story in his head, about a character who woke one morning to discover he couldn’t understand the speech of his peers.

The following days constituted a ceaseless whirlwind of activity. En masse and separately, the Gritsavagers met with their doppelgangers among the Palmerdale folk. Diego found that his own brand of writing enjoyed a hearty following a quarter-million Blocks from home. He confabbed with dozens of Cosmogonic Fictioneers, picking up intriguing insights, and hopefully dispensing some as well. And the more conversations he had, the more the lingo of the Palmerdale citizens clarified.

Volusia was elated at her own dealings with the Palmerdale firefighters. “Dee, you won’t believe it! They use this beautiful swivel coupling that prevents kinks in the hoses!”

This kind of specialist’s enthusiasm seemed the rule among the others as well. And gauged by such collaborations as Prague’s inspired jamming with a quartet of Palmerdale musicians, odd rhythms dominant, the cultural embassy was ripening into a sweet and juicy fruit.

But although pleasantly stimulating, these meetings took their toll on Diego’s energy and appetite for discussion. So when Jobo Copperknob approached him one night with a whispered proposal involving a brief respite from their obligations, Diego did not hesitate to accept, sparing Volusia only a guilty thought or two.

Walking down glow-lamped Broadway in the middle of a pack of his jubilant fellow male Gritsavagers, Diego felt queasily excited. He worried about what Volusia would say if she should ever uncover the truth about this evening’s expedition. (The cover story had involved visiting a steambath forbidden to women.) Perhaps he could still slip away. . . .

But then the big, basketball-palming hand of Jobo Copperknob descended on Diego’s shoulder, linking him inextricably to the revelers.

“Some strange tail will do us all good, hey, Patchen! Not to dismiss your particular woman, for she’s surely beautiful and amorous enough, but even perfection palls after a time.”

Mason Gingerpane said, “Not all of us were lucky enough to have our girlfriends along with us. I was getting so horny I even thought of approaching Babayan. She was the only woman Prague didn’t appropriate.”

The hidden-eyed musician grunted and replied, “Ladies love a man with lip control.”

Cagney Passwater ran a hand back over his oiled hair and said, “That reminds me of a joke. Once this horny female ingeniator found herself alone with her mankiller wrench—”

“Please,” Sinsalida said laughingly, “no gratuitous slurs on my profession!”

The dozen or so randy venturers laughed heartily. Banter filled the air for the next few Blocks, the Palmerdale pedestrians regarding the boisterous party of strangers with curiosity but no animosity.

“Ho!” cried Copperknob. “Here’s the address I was given. I’ll lead the assault!”

Taking the stoop’s steps three at a time, Copperknob gained the porch and began pulling the bell. Curtains tweaked aside, and then the door opened.

The buxom woman who greeted them smilingly from beneath frosted bangs was plainly the madame. She resembled, Diego thought, a leggy chorus line dancer retired to become a gourmet chef, with the attendant extra avoirdupois.

“Ah, our kaggish visitors! Welcome, botters, welcome to the best vadgehouse in Palmerdale! Enter now, and we’ll drain your goolies right smart!”

Copperknob and the others piled in.

Diego’s heart began to race at the scene that greeted them.

A large parlor, decorated with crimson flocked wallpaper, hosted a score of whores, all gorgeous by gaslight, all skimpily clad. A piano player langorously tickled the keys of an upright. (Choosing art over flesh for the moment, Prague sidled over and began to talk shop with the wry-faced fellow.) Before Diego could quite recover his composure, Copperknob had scooped up two women, fallen onto a couch with his lap full of warm girls, and begun to call for drinks.

Diego found himself prey to a small blonde woman, a drink pressed into his grip. He stuttered his way through a conversation he could barely interpret, given the woman’s even broader accent and vocabulary.

“Are you—are you from Palmerdale?”

“Naw, this shufty bint’s Ansatz dropped.”

By the time Diego finished his drink, the room’s archaic lighting had begun to coat every surface with a golden lambency. He and the petite blonde were kissing when a scream erupted.

Diego jumped to his feet. Copperknob’s two whores were clawing at the man’s face, forcing him to release them from a friendly embrace. The Mayor’s shirt had been partially unbuttoned, revealing a big polychromatic scale resting on his chest. His bloody face wore a look of utter bewilderment.

“Girls, girls, what’s the trouble?”

“Scaler! Scaler! He’s a scaler!”

The inexplicable accusation was picked up to resound through the whorehouse. From all corners of the establishment patrons and prostitutes ran to the parlor, shouting curses and orders.

Before Diego or his mates could intervene, two burly half-naked men had pinioned the Mayor. The rest of the Gritsavagers faced similar restraints, unable to aid their companion.

Copperknob struggled, his tattered visage hurt and uncomprehending. “Friends, friends, what offense have I given? Just explain, and I’ll—”

The Mayor’s baffled complaint was cut short when a wild-eyed, curly-topped whore drove a daggerlike letter opener to the hilt into Copperknob’s chest.

Blood spumed. Copperknob exhaled a guttaral croak and crumpled to the floor.

Omnipresent outsiders heeded this unspoken mortal summons to duty. Brick-skinned Pompatics sieved through the walls instantly: a brace of Yardbulls, their crepey wings a shade redder than their slab-muscled human torsos. The animal-headed death wardens filled the room with their smell: if a hot slate sidewalk came alive and exuded a sour sweat, it might match the odor of the Bulls.

His mind frozen, Diego could only helplessly recall the sweeter smell of the Fisherwives when they had come for Milagra.

Enfolding the Mayor’s corpse as tenderly as a mother cushions her baby, the Yardbulls cupped huge gouts of air beneath their wings and angled upward with the transmogrified dead man through the wall.

The arrival and departure of the Pompatics had the effect of cooling the fevered bloodlust among the Palmerdale folk. But Diego and his mates were far from being forgotten. Held roughly by all the customers and their women, the Gritsavagers left the house only in handcuffs and a police wagon.

On his way to jail, Diego supposed that Volusia would forgive him someday.

But would he ever forgive himself?

Diego had sworn he recognized Copperknob’s scale as one memorable specimen he himself had plucked from its rightful terrain.

The authorities treated the Gritsavagers as if they were infected with some communicable disease: the entire group, men and women alike, was isolated in a giant holding pen at Precinct Pamerdale-40. The conditions—tiered berths, single exposed toilet and sink, lights alive round the clock—were irksome, but not cruel. Still, after the first week of captivity everyone began to chafe.

As ranking members of the cultural expedition, Cagney Passwater and Captain Vigo Dassault were nominated to represent the offenders. But actually there was little enough for them to do. No interrogations, no accusations, no hearings or trial followed the blowup at the whorehouse. Plainly, their “crime” was undeniable, self-explanatory and inexpiable.

Only their condign punishment remained to be disclosed.

Not every Gritsavager wore scales. But those who did had had their good-luck tokens ripped brutally from around their necks.

Naturally, the talk among the prisoners revolved fruitlessly around the whole mess. Various theories were offered to explain their hosts’ fanatical reverence for the scales of the Citybeast. The Gritsavagers found it hard to wrap their minds around such “worship.” In the end, they could only endorse a judgment passed by Euple Babayan:

“These neighbors of ours are undeniably, unfathomably provincial. But so are we, as evidenced by our unthinking offense. The psychic landscape of the City is not only bigger than we imagined, it is bigger than we can imagine.”

Diego wanted to contest this sentiment, as a matter of professional honor, but in the end had to acknowledge his own lack of prescience in the matter.

Tedious days trickled away like water down a sewer drain. Two weeks, three weeks—Tempers flared, with some prisoners becoming morose, others aggressive. Makeshift barriers of blankets were rigged, to afford a semblance of privacy and intimacy. Diego worried about Volusia: her nature demanded a large freedom, and their captivity seemed to drain her more so than most.

In the fifth week the prisoners were told they could go free. The purveyor of this information proved to be Mayor Moacyr Quine himself. Standing beyond the bars that caged them, Quine regarded the eager faces of the Gritsavagers as if he were confronting a box full of trapped cannibalistic rats.

“Your Deputy Mayor has responded to our demands for compensation for your crimes. The money and a formal written apology arrived today via Subway. You are now depeached and firpfooted. You will proceed straight to the Slip, board your vessel, and never return.”

“What of our possessions?” demanded Passwater.

“They have all been burnt, during the rites of appeasement.”

Mason Gingerpane slumped, moaning something about his negatives. Rumbold Prague winced as if gut-punched, and Diego pictured the red trumpet licked by flames. But there was simply no recourse against this effrontery.

The Days on the Yann pulled away from Palmerdale and cautiously did not put into shore again until the next day, a score of Boroughs distant. There they appealed to the inter-Borough charitable organization, Traveler’s Aid, which donated some spare clothes and provisions for their return, as well as chits good for more such in other Boroughs.

Rumbold Prague reboarded triumphantly clutching a banged-up trumpet discovered amongst the TA donations. That night he played a luminous dirge for Copperknob, somehow summoning up the man’s spirit in cascades of melancholy notes large as the Mayor himself.

Bundled against the early December chill in his old patch-pocketed wool jacket, Diego stood at the forward brass rail of the Days on the Yann, watching his home Borough draw closer across the darkling waters, slant-shadowed by sinking Downtown Daysun, Seasonsun long gone beyond daily viewing to warm other districts of the City, leaving these familiar Broadway-bisected buildings that Diego called home ranked like chess pieces before the battle.

Standing beside Diego, Volusia had swathed herself in a ship’s blanket as extra comfort against the season’s rigors. Since their final harrowing days in Palmerdale, she had been moody and susceptible to moments when she found herself unable to get warm. Diego could hardly fault her personal reaction to the tragedy. He himself remained unsettled and adrift in the wake of the sad climax to their “cultural embassy.”

“I’ll be so glad to step ashore in lovely, lovely Gritsavage,” Volusia said. “I don’t care if I never go traveling again.”

“Me too. Me neither.”

“A shame, really, that our high hopes upon setting out have come to this.”

“I just count us lucky to be alive.”

In front of a shuttered Gimlett’s Produce nigh onto midnight, Diego clutched Volusia’s hand. The sights and sounds and smells of Gritsavage awoke in him a fierce nostalgia, a heart-stopping thankfulness. His spirits lifted, and already he could begin to imagine the repugnant residue of the recent nightmare evaporating off his soul.

“Diego, I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“No, of course not. We’ll stay here at my place. Then, in the morning, we’ll visit my father.”

“Fine. Let’s go up.”

The apartment smelled stale, and Diego threw open a window. He bumped up the thermostat’s controls to convince the radiators to perform. But after half an hour the iron ribcages remained as cold as ever. Fuming, Diego descended to his landlord’s apartment to bang on the door. But Rexall Glyptis did not show his face, and Diego retreated in defeat.

“Let’s go to your apartment, Vol. This hovel’s like an icebox. I’m moving out of this dump tomorrow.”

“No, I’m too beat. Toss on another blanket or two, and we’ll be fine.”

Diego followed her suggestion, and they slipped under the pile of bedclothes. Before they even sensed oblivion’s approach, sleep had conquered them.

Around three AM, though, Diego awoke with a start.

Someone was in the room with them, whispering.

“Dee, Dee, can you hear me?”

Tentatively, Diego whispered back. “Who’s there? What do you want?”

“Oh but no, this is stupendous! I found you at last, after trying so many times before! Dee, it’s I, Zohar!”

Volusia snored on, unrousable. Diego got up and approached his radio. The set evidenced no power, its dial unlit, but nonetheless the voice of Zohar Kush emerged from it.

“I can’t talk long, Dee. The traffic’s heavy tonight. So just listen. I’m tens of millions of Blocks Uptown now. What a glorious expedition! It’s so wonderful! I found the train with my name on it, you know, from all those years ago. And the beer! The beer makes Rude Bravo taste like piss! I’m happy now, Dee. And I can confirm that our City is more awesome than we ever believed. Have faith, my friend. Everything works out for the best.”

“Zoh, Zoh, tell me more!”

But the miraculous radio did not respond, and Diego could only stumble back to bed.

The morning dawned sparklingly. Diego’s eyes opened around nine, and he slid out of bed without waking Volusia.

Last night, that strange experience—Just a dream? An instance of sleepwalking? A neurotic episode of wishful thinking and self-hypnosis?

Whatever had happened, Diego knew only that the impossible communication with his departed friend had left him feeling contented, free of angst.

The writer commenced to rummage around his apartment. Over two month’s worth of mail had been shoveled onto a tabletop: Glyptis must have done that much for his tenant. Diego sifted through the upper layers, before coming upon a padded envelope bearing a return label from Pinney Publishing.

Seams and seals split, disgorging a copy of Worlds for the Asking.

The hefty book’s dustjacket merely featured one of Gropius Catternach’s finest paintings. A dozen complimentary blurbs heralded the arrival of some stranger named Diego Patchen as the newest star in the firmament of Cosmogonic Fiction.

Tucked inside the book on a piece of Mirror Worlds stationery was a note from Winslow Compounce: Think you can rest on your laurels, Patchen? Far from it! Get busy!

Diego’s huge smile as he roused Volusia provoked a matching one from her. Last night’s sleep in a familiar bed appeared to have gone a long way toward restoring her own spirits. She shrieked at the sight of the book, snatched it from him and clasped it to her breasts.

“You young genius, you! Give your biggest fan a sweet tumble!”

Some time later, on their way for breakfast at Kerner’s Lunchroom, Diego holding his book in the hand that did not pair Volusia’s, they passed Snarky Chuff on duty at his stand.

“I’ve got a stack of books from my customers ready for autographing, Diego!”

“Later, Snarky, I have to visit my father first and show him this copy!”

Volusia halted before the December-bare tree sentinelling Gaddis Patchen’s building.

“Look at those fat buds, Dee! Plenty of flowers by spring!”

In the hallway, some feet away from the door to Diego’s childhood apartment, they heard a coarse wailed shout and a crash, as if someone had been direly stricken and fallen to the floor.

Diego fumbled with his key in the door, until Volusia rammed the panels with her shoulder and cracked the lock from the rotten wood.

Gaddis Patchen’s toppled throne was empty. Diego rushed to the open window. Of course, as always, Pompatics ranged everywhere across the sky, some burdened, some not emblems of all that lay beyond human ken.

And the whole apartment smelled only of brine.

THE POLITICAL OFFICER

Charles Coleman Finlay

MAXIM NIKOMEDES SAW THE other man rush toward him but there was no room to dodge in the crate-packed corridor. He braced for the impact. The other man pulled up short, his face blanching in the pallid half-light of the “night” rotation. It was Kulakov, the chief petty officer. He went rigid and snapped a salute.

“Sir! Sorry, sir!” His voice trembled.

“At ease, Kulakov,” Max said. “Not your fault. It’s a tight fit inside this metal sausage.”

Standard ship joke. The small craft was stuffed with supplies, mostly food, for the eighteen-month voyage ahead. Max waited for the standard response, but Kulakov stared through the hull into deep space. He was near sixty, old for the space service, old for his position, and the only man aboard who made Max, in his mid-forties, feel young.

Max smiled, an expression so faint it could be mistaken for a twitch. “But it’s better than being stuck in a capped-off sewer pipe, no?”

Which is what the ship would be on the voyage home. “You’ve got that right, sir!” said Kulakov.

“Carry on.”

Kulakov shrank aside like an old church deacon, afraid to touch a sinner lest he catch the sin. Max expected that reaction from the crew, and not just because they’d nicknamed him the Corpse for his cadaverous and dead expression. As the political officer, he held the threat of death over every career aboard: the death of some careers would entail a corporeal equivalent. For the first six weeks of their mission, after spongediving the new wormhole, Max had cultivated invisibility and waited for the crew to fall into the false complacency of routine. Now it was time to shake them up again to see if he could find the traitor he suspected. He brushed against Kulakov on purpose as he passed by him.

He twisted his way through the last passage and paused outside the visiting officers’ cabin. He lifted his knuckles to knock, then changed his mind, turned the latch and swung open the door. The three officers sitting inside jumped at the sight of him. Guilty consciences, Max hoped.

Captain Ernst Petoskey recovered first. “Looking for someone, Lieutenant?”

Max let the silence become uncomfortable while he studied Petoskey. The captain stood six and a half feet tall, his broad shoulders permanently hunched from spending too much time in ships built for smaller men. The crew loved him and would eagerly die—or kill—for him. Called him Papa behind his back. He wouldn’t shave again until they returned safely to spaceport, and his beard was juice-stained at the corner by proscripted chewing tobacco. Max glanced past Lukinov, the paunchy, balding “radio lieutenant,” and stared at Ensign Pen Reedy, the only woman on the ship.

She was lean, with prominent cheekbones, but the thing Max always noticed first were her hands. She had large, red-knuckled hands. She remained impeccably dressed and groomed, even six weeks into the voyage. Every hair on her head appeared to be individually placed as if they were all soldiers under her command.

Petoskey and Lukinov sat on opposite ends of the bunk. Reedy sat on a crate across from them. Another crate between them held a bottle, tumblers, and some cards.

Petoskey, finally uncomfortable with the silence, opened his mouth again.

“Just looking,” Max pre-empted him. “And what do I find but the captain himself in bed with Drozhin’s boys?”

Petoskey glanced at the bunk. “I see only one, and he’s hardly a boy.”

Lukinov, a few years younger than Max, smirked and tugged at the lightning-bolt patch on his shirtsleeve. “And what’s with calling us Drozhin’s boys? We’re just simple radiomen. If I have to read otherwise, I’ll have you up for falsifying reports when we get back to Jesusalem.”

He pronounced their home Hey-zoo-salaam, like the popular video stars did, instead of the older way, Jeez-us-ail-em.

“Things are not always what they appear to be, are they?” said Max.

Lukinov, Reedy, and a third man, Burdick, were the intelligence listening team assigned to intercept and decode Adarean messages—the newly opened wormhole passage would let the ship dive undetected into the Adarean system to spy. The three had been personally selected and prepped for this mission by Dmitri Drozhin, the legendary Director of Jesusalem’s Department of Intelligence. Drozhin had been the Minister too, back when it had still been the Ministry of the Wisdom of Prophets Reborn. He was the only high government official to survive the Revolution in situ, but these days younger men like Mallove in the Department of Political Education challenged his influence.

“Next time, knock first, Lieutenant,” Petoskey said.

“Why should I, Captain?” Max returned congenially. “An honest man has nothing to fear from his conscience, and what am I if not the conscience of every man aboard this ship?”

“We don’t need a conscience when we have orders,” Petoskey said with a straight face.

Lukinov tilted his head back dramatically and sneered. “Come off it, Max. I invited the captain up here to celebrate, if that’s all right with you. Reedy earned her comet today.”

Indeed, she had. The young ensign wore a gold comet pinned to her left breast pocket, similar to the ones embroidered on the shirts of the other two officers. Crewmen earned their comets by demonstrating competence on every ship system—Engineering, Ops and Nav, Weapons, Vacuum and Radiation. Reedy must have qualified in record time. This was her first space assignment. “Congratulations,” Max said.

Reedy suppressed a genuine smile. “Thank you, sir.”

“That makes her the last one aboard,” Petoskey said. “Except for you.”

“What do I need to know about ship systems? If I understand the minds and motivations of the men who operate them, it is enough.”

“It isn’t. Not with this,” his mouth twisted distastefully, “miscegenated, patched-together, scrapyard ship. I need to be able to count on every man in an emergency.”

“Is it that bad? What kind of emergency do you expect?”

Lukinov sighed loudly. “You’re becoming a bore, Max. You checked on us, now go make notes in your little spy log and leave us alone.”

“Either that or pull up a crate and close the damn hatch,” said Petoskey. “We could use a fourth.”

The light flashed off Lukinov’s gold signet ring as he waved his hand in clear negation. “You don’t want to do that, Ernst. This is the man who won his true love in a card game.”

Petoskey looked over at Max. “Is that so?”

“I won my wife in a card game, yes.” Max didn’t think that story was widely known outside his own department. “But that was many years ago.”

“I heard you cheated to win her,” said Lukinov. He was Max’s counterpart in Intelligence—the Department of Political Education couldn’t touch him. The two Departments hated each other and protected their own. “Heard that she divorced you too. I guess an ugly little weasel like you has to get it where he can.”

“But unlike your wife, she always remained faithful.”

Lukinov muttered a curse and pulled back his fist. Score one on the sore spot. Petoskey reached out and grabbed the intelligence officer’s elbow. “None of that aboard my ship. I don’t care who you two are. Come on, Nikomedes. If you’re such a hotshot card player, sit down. I could use a little challenge.”

A contrary mood seized Max. He turned into the hallway, detached one of the crates, and shoved it into the tiny quarters.

“So what are we playing?” he asked, sitting down.

“Blind Man’s Draw,” said Petoskey, shuffling the cards. “Deuce beats an ace, ace beats everything else.”

Max nodded. “What’s the minimum?”

“A temple to bid, a temple to raise.”

Jesusalem’s founders stamped their money with an image of the Temple to encourage the citizen-colonists to render their wealth unto God. The new plastic carried pictures of the revolutionary patriots who’d overthrown the Patriarch, but everyone still called them temples. “Then I’m in for a few hands,” Max said.

Petoskey dealt four cards face down. Max kept the king of spades and tossed three cards back into the pile. The ones he got in exchange were just as bad.

“So,” said Lukinov, peeking at his hand. “We have the troika of the Service all gathered in one room. Military, Intelligence, and—one card, please, ah, raise you one temple—and what should I call you, Max? Schoolmarm?”

Max saw the raise. “If you like. Just remember that Intelligence is useless without a good Education.”

“Is that your sermon these days?”

Petoskey collected the discards. “Nothing against either of you gentlemen,” he said, “but it’s your mother screwed three ways at once, isn’t it. There’s three separate chains of command on a ship like this one. It’s a recipe for mutiny.” He pulled at his beard. “Has been on other ships, strictly off the record. And with this mission ahead, if we don’t all work together, God help us.”

Max kept the ten of spades with his king and took two more cards. “Not that there is one,” he said officially, “but let God help our enemies. A cord of three strands is not easily broken.”

Petoskey nodded his agreement. “That’s a good way to look at it. A cord of three strands, all intertwined.” He stared each of them in the eyes. “So take care of the spying, and the politics, but leave the running of the ship to me.”

“Of course,” said Lukinov.

“That’s why you’re the captain and both of us are mere lieutenants,” said Max. In reality, both he and Lukinov had the same service rank as Petoskey. On the ground, in Jesusalem’s mixed-up service, they were all three colonels. Lukinov was technically senior of the three, though Max had final authority aboard ship within his sphere.

It was, indeed, a troubling conundrum.

Max’s hand held nothing—king and ten of spades, two of hearts, and a seven of clubs. Petoskey tossed the fifth card down face-up. Another deuce.

Max hated Blind Man’s Draw. It was like playing the lottery. The card a man showed you was the one he’d just been dealt; you never really knew what he might be hiding. He looked at the other players’ hands. Petoskey showed the eight of clubs and Lukinov the jack of diamonds. Ensign Reedy folded her hand and said, “I’m out.”

“Raise it a temple and call,” Max said, on the off chance he might beat a pair of aces. They turned their cards over and it was money thrown away. Petoskey won with three eights.

Lukinov shook his head. “Holding onto the deuces, Max? That’s almost always a loser’s hand.”

“Except when it isn’t.”

Petoskey won three of the next five hands, with Lukinov and Max splitting the other two. The poor ensign said little and folded often. Max decided to deal in his other game. While Lukinov shuffled the cards, Max rubbed his nose and said to the air, “You’re awfully silent, Miss Reedy. Contemplating your betrayal of us to the Adareans?”

Lukinov mis-shuffled. A heartbeat later, Captain Petoskey picked up his spittoon and spat.

Reedy’s voice churned as steady as a motor in low gear. “What do you mean, sir?”

“You’re becoming a bore again, Max,” Lukinov said under his breath.

“What’s this about?” Petoskey asked.

“Perhaps Miss Reedy should explain it herself,” Max replied. “Go on, Ensign. Describe the immigrant ghetto in your neighborhood, your childhood chums, Sabbathday afternoons at language academy.”

“It was hardly that, sir,” she said smoothly. “They were just kids who lived near our residence in the city. And there were never any formal classes.”

“Oh, there was much more to it than that,” Max pressed. “Must I spell it out for you? You lived in a neighborhood of expatriate Adareans. Some spymaster chose you to become a mole before you were out of diapers and started brainwashing you before you could talk. Now while you pretend to serve Jesusalem you really serve Adares. Yes?”

“No. Sir.” Reedy’s hands, resting fingertip to fingertip across her knees, trembled slightly. “For one thing, how did they know women would ever be admitted to the military academies?”

Reedy hadn’t been part of the first class to enter, but she graduated with the first class to serve active duty. “They saw it was common everywhere else. Does it matter? Who can understand their motives? Their gene modifications make them impure. Half-animal, barely human.”

She frowned, as if she couldn’t believe that kind of prejudice still existed. “Nukes don’t distinguish between one set of genes and another, sir. They suffered during the bombardments, just like we did. They fought beside us, they went to our church. Even the archbishop called them good citizens. They’re as proud to be Jesusalemites as I am. And as loyal. Sir.”

Max rubbed his nose again. “A role model for treason. They betrayed one government to serve another. I know for a fact this crew contains at least one double agent, someone who serves two masters. I suspect there are more. Is it you, Miss Reedy?”

Lukinov turned into a fossil before Max’s eyes. Petoskey glared at the young intelligence officer across the table like a man contemplating murder.

Reedy pressed her fingertips together until her hands grew still. “Sir. There may be a traitor, but it’s not me. Sir.”

Max leaned back casually. “I’ve read your Academy records, Ensign, and find them interesting for the things they leave out. Such as your role in the unfortunate accident that befell Cadet Vance.”

Reedy was well disciplined. Max’s comments were neither an order nor a question, so she said nothing, gave nothing away.

“Vance’s injuries necessitated his withdrawal from the Academy,” Max continued. “What exactly did you have to do with that situation?”

“Come on, Max,” said Lukinov in his senior officer’s cease-and-desist voice. “This is going too far. There are always accidents in the Academy and in the service. Usually it’s the fault of the idiot who ends up slabbed. Some stupid mistake.”

Before Max could observe that Vance’s mistake had been antagonizing Reedy, Petoskey interrupted. “Lukinov, have you forgotten how to deal? Are you broke yet, Nikomedes? You can quit any time you want.”

Max flashed the plastic in his pocket while Lukinov started tossing down the cards. As he made the second circuit around their makeshift table, the lights flickered and went off. Max’s stomach fluttered as the emergency lights blinked on, casting a weak red glare over the cramped room. The cards sailed past the table and into the air. Petoskey slammed his glass down. It bounced off the table and twirled toward the ceiling, spilling little brown droplets of whiskey.

Petoskey slapped the ship’s intercom. “Bridge!”

“Ensign,” Lukinov said. “Find something to catch that mess before the grav comes back on and splatters it everywhere.”

“Yes, sir,” Reedy answered and scrambled to the bathroom for a towel.

“Bridge!” shouted Petoskey, then shook his head. “The com’s down.”

“It’s just the ship encounter drill,” Lukinov said.

“There’s no drill scheduled for this rotation. And we haven’t entered Adarean space yet, so we can’t be encountering another ship. . . .”

Another ship.

The thought must have hit all four of them simultaneously. As they propelled themselves frog-like toward the hatch, they crashed into one another, inevitable in the small space. During the jumble, Max took a kick to the back of his head. It hurt, even without any weight behind it. No accident, he was sure of that, but he didn’t see who did it.

Petoskey flung the door open. “The pig-hearted, fornicating bastards.”

Max echoed the sentiment when he followed a moment later. The corridor was blocked by drifting crates. They’d been improperly secured.

“Ensign!” snapped Petoskey.

“Yes, Captain.”

“To the front! I’ll pass you the crates, you attach them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Can I trust you to do that?”

“Yes, sir!”

Max almost felt sorry for Reedy. Almost. In typical fashion for these older ships, someone had strung a steel cable along the corridor, twist-tied to the knobs of the security lights. Max held onto it and stayed out of the way as Petoskey grabbed one loose box after another and passed them back to Reedy. There was the steady rasp of Velcro as they made their way toward the bridge.

“What do you think it is?” Lukinov whispered to him. “If it’s a ship, then the wormhole’s been discovered. . . .”

The implications hung in the air like everything else. Max compared the size of Lukinov’s boot with the sore spot on the back of his head. “Could be another wormhole. The sponge is like that. Once one hole opens up, you usually find several more. There’s no reason why the Adareans couldn’t find a route in the opposite direction.”

Lukinov braced himself against the wall, trying to keep himself oriented as if the grav was still on. “If it’s the Adareans, they’ll be thinking invasion again.”

“It could be someone neutral too,” said Max. “Most of the spongedivers from Earth are prospecting in toward the core again, so it could be one of them. Put on your ears and find out who they are. I’ll determine whether they’re for us or against us.”

Lukinov laughed. “If they’re against us, then Ernst can eliminate them. That’s a proper division of labor.”

“Our system is imperfect, but it works.” That was a stretch, Max told himself. Maybe he ought to just say that the system worked better than the one it replaced.

“Hey,” Petoskey shouted. “Are you gentlemen going to sit there or join me on the bridge?”

“Coming,” said Lukinov, echoed a second later by Max.

They descended two levels and came to the control center. Max followed the others through the open hatch. Men sat strapped to their chairs, faces tinted the color of blood by the glow of the emergency lights. Conduits, ducts, and wires ran overhead, like the intestines of some manmade monster. One of the vents kicked on, drawing a loud mechanical breath. Truly, Max thought, they were in the belly of leviathan now.

One of the men called “Attention” and Petoskey immediately replied, “At ease—report!”

“Lefty heard a ship,” returned Commander Gordet, a plug-shaped man with a double chin. “It was nothing more than a fart in space, I swear. I folded the wings and initiated immediate shutdown per your instructions before our signature could be detected.”

“Contact confirmed?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good work then.” The ship chairs were too small for Petoskey’s oversized frame. He preferred to stand anyway and had bolted a towel rack to the floor in the center of the deck. The crew tripped over it when the grav was on, but now Petoskey slipped his feet under it to keep from bumping his head on the low ceilings. It was against all regulations, but, just as with his smuggled tobacco, Petoskey broke regulations whenever it suited him. He shared this quality with many of the fleet’s best deep space captains. “Those orders were for when we entered Adarean space, Commander,” Petoskey added. “I commend your initiative. Put a commendation in Engineer Elefteriou’s record also.”

“Yes, sir.” Gordet’s voice snapped like elastic, pleased by the captain’s praise.

“Identity?”

“Its prime number pings up Outback. Corporate prospectors. Her signature looks like one of the new class.”

Petoskey grabbed the passive scope above his head and pulled it down to his eyes. “Vector?”

“Intercept.”

“Intercept?”

“It’s headed in-system and we’re headed out. At our current respective courses and velocities, we should come within spitting distance of each other just past Big Brother.”

Big Brother was the nickname for this system’s larger gas giant. Little Brother, the smaller gas giant, was on the far side of the sun, out past the wormhole to home.

“Are they coming from the Adares jump?” Petoskey asked.

“That’s what we thought at first,” said Gordet. “But it appears now that they’re entering from a third wormhole. About thirty degrees negative of the Adares jump, on the opposite side of the ecliptic.” He glanced over the navigator’s shoulder at the monitor and read off the orbital velocity.

Petoskey continued to stare into the scope. “Shit. There’s nothing out here.”

Gordet cleared his throat. “It’s millions of kilometers out, sir. Still too far away for a clear visual.”

“No, I mean there’s nothing out here. This system won’t hold their attention for long. It’s only a matter of time before they find the opened holes to Adares and home.” He paused. “Do that and they’ll close our route back.”

Indeed. Max had a strong urge to pace. If he started bouncing off the walls Petoskey would order him off the bridge, so he tried to float with purpose. Burdick, the third member of the intelligence team, paused in the hatch, carrying a large box. He nodded to Lukinov and Reedy, who followed him forward toward the secure radio room. Max wondered briefly why Burdick had left his post.

“The intercept makes things easier for us,” Petoskey concluded aloud. “Calculate the soonest opportunity to engage without warning. With any luck, the missing ship will be counted as a wormhole mishap.” Absorbed by the sponge.

Elefteriou turned and spoke to Rucker, the first lieutenant, who spoke to Gordet, who said, “Sir, radio transmissions from the ship appear to be directed at another ship in the vicinity of the jump. If we neutralize this target, then the other dives out and lives to witness.”

“Just one other ship?”

“No way of telling this far out without the active sensors.” Which they couldn’t use without showing up like a solar flare.

“The order stands,” said Petoskey. “Also, Commander, loose cargo in the corridors impeded my progress to the bridge. This is a contraindication of ship readiness.”

Gordet stiffened, as crushed by this criticism as he’d been puffed up by the praise. “It’ll be taken care of, sir.”

“See to it. Where’s Chevrier?” Arkady Chevrier was the chief engineer. He came from a family of industrialists that contributed heavily to the Revolution. His uncle headed the Department of Finance, and his father was a general. Mallove, Max’s boss in Political Education, had warned him not to antagonize Chevrier.

“In the engine room, sir,” answered Gordet. “He thought that the sudden unscheduled shutdown of main power resulted in a drain on the main battery arrays. I sent him to fix it.”

“Raise Engineering on the com.”

“Yes, sir,” said Gordet. “Raise Engineering.”

Lefty punched his console, listened to his earphones, shook his head.

Petoskey shifted the plug of tobacco in his mouth. “When I tried to contact the bridge from quarters, the com was down. If I have to choose between ship communications and life support in the presence of a possible enemy vessel, I want communications first. Get a status report from Engineering and give me a com link to all essential parts of the ship if you have to do it with tin cans and string. Is that clear?”

Gordet’s jowls quivered as he answered. “Yessir!”

Max noted that Gordet did not divide his attention well. He’d been so absorbed with the other ship, he hadn’t noticed the ship communications problem. Several past errors in judgment featured prominently in his permanent file. He seemed unaware that this was the reason he’d been passed over for ship command of his own. But he was steady, and more or less politically sound.

He could also be a vindictive S.O.B. Max watched him turn on his subordinates. “Corporal Elefteriou,” Gordet said. “I want a full report on com status. Five minutes ago is not soon enough. Lieutenant Rucker!”

“Sir.”

“Get your ass to Engineering. I want to receive Chevrier’s verbal report on this com here.” He punched it with his fist for emphasis. “If it doesn’t come in fifteen minutes, you can hold your breath while the rest of us put on space gear.”

The first lieutenant set off for Engineering. Petoskey cleared his throat. “Commander, one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“We’ll switch to two shifts now, six hours on, six off. All crew.”

“Yes, sir.”

Petoskey gestured for Max to come beside him.

“So now we wait around for three days to intercept,” Petoskey said in a low voice. “You look like a damn monkey floating there, Nikomedes. We could surgi-tape your boots to the deck.”

“That’s not necessary.” Petoskey wasn’t the only captain in the fleet who’d tie his political officer down to one spot if he could. Max needed to be free to move around to catch his traitor.

“If you were qualified for any systems, I’d put you to work.”

An excellent reason to remain unqualified. “And what would you have me do?”

“At this point?” Petoskey shrugged. Then he frowned, and jerked his head toward the intelligence team’s radio room. “Was that true? About—?”

“This is not the place,” Max said firmly. Illusion was not reality; the crew pretended not to hear Petoskey speak, but they’d repeat every word that came from his mouth.

“I hate the Adareans, I want you to know that,” Petoskey said. “Anything to do with the Adareans, I hate, and I’ll have none of it aboard my ship. So if there’s any danger, even from one of the intelligence men—”

“There will be no danger,” Max asserted firmly. “It is my job to make certain of that.”

“See to it, Lieutenant.”

“I will.” Max was surprised. That qualified as the most direct command any captain had given him during his tenure as a political officer.

Petoskey returned an almost respectful nod. Max was about to suggest a later discussion when Lukinov shouted from the hatch.

“Captain. You might want to listen to this. We tried to raise you on the com, but it’s not working.”

Petoskey slipped his feet free and followed the intelligence officer. Max invited himself and swam along.

Inside the listening room, Reedy stood—or floated—at a long desk, wearing headphones and making notes on the translation in her palm-pad. Burdick had a truck battery surgi-taped to a table wedged in the tiny room’s rounded corner. Wires ran from it to an open panel on the main concomsole, and Burdick connected others. He looked up from his work and grinned as they came into the hatch. “Gotta love the electrician’s mates,” he said. “They’ve got everything.”

Lukinov laughed and handed headphones to Petoskey. “Wait until you hear this.”

Petoskey slipped the earpieces into place. “I don’t understand Chinese,” he said after a minute. “Always sounds like an out-of-tune guitar to me.”

Lukinov’s smile widened. “But it’s voices, not code, don’t you see? The level of encryption was like cheap glue.” He made a knife-opening-a-letter gesture with his hands.

“Good work. What have you learned so far?”

Lukinov leaned over Reedy’s shoulder to look at her palm-pad. “Corporate security research ship. Spongedivers.”

Petoskey nodded. “Bunch of scientists and part-time soldiers. Soft, but great tech. Way beyond ours. It’s a safe bet their battery arrays don’t go down when they fly mute. Lefty says there’s another one parked out by the wormhole.”

Lukinov confirmed this. “We know it because the radio tech is talking to his girlfriend over on the other ship.”

Burdick snickered, and Petoskey muttered “Mixed crews” with all the venom of a curse. He glared at Reedy so hard his eyes must have burned a hole in the ensign’s head. The young woman looked up. “Yes, sir?” she asked.

“I didn’t speak to you,” Petoskey snapped.

Mixed crews were part of the Revolution, a way to double manpower—so to speak—in the military forces and give Jesusalem a chance to catch up. So far it was only in the officer corps, and even there it hadn’t been received well. Some men, like Vance at the Academy, openly tried to discourage it despite the government’s commitment.

Lukinov held the back of Reedy’s seat to keep from drifting toward the ceiling. “The inbound ship’s called the Deng Xiaopeng. Why does that name sound familiar?”

Petoskey shrugged. “Means nothing to me.”

If they didn’t know, then Max would give them an answer. He cleared his throat. “I believe that Deng Xiaopeng was one of Napoleon’s generals.”

Lukinov curled his mouth skeptically.

“That doesn’t sound right,” said Petoskey.

“I’m quite certain of it,” said Max, bracing himself between the wall and floor at angle sideways to the others. “Confusion to the enemy.”

“Always,” replied Petoskey, apparently happy to find something he could agree with. “Always.”

Max lay on the bunk in his cabin waiting for the clock to tick over to morning. Two days after the spongedivers had been sighted, his thoughts still careened weightlessly off the small walls. The presence of the ship from Outback complicated the ship’s mission and his. Meanwhile, he was cut off from his superiors, unable to guess which goal they wanted him to pursue now. Or goals, as the case more likely was. So he was on his own again. Forced to decide for himself.

Nothing new about that, he thought ruefully.

He released the straps and pushed off for the door to take a tour of the ship. He paused for a moment, then grabbed his cap, and tugged it down tight on his head. If he made it a formal tour of the ship, it might draw out his traitor.

When he opened the door, he saw another one cracked open down the corridor. Lieutenant Rucker peeked out and gestured for Max to come inside. Max checked to see that no one was in the hall and slipped into the room.

The blond young man closed the door too fast and it slammed shut. He noticed Max’s cap and saluted with perfect etiquette before producing an envelope. “I was hoping to catch you,” he said. “This is from Commander Gordet.”

Max took the multi-tool from his pocket and flicked out the miniature knife to slice open the seal. He studied the sheet inside. Gordet had written down the codes for the safe that held the captain’s secret orders. Interesting. Max wondered if Rucker had made a copy for himself. “Did Gordet say anything specific?”

“He said to tell you that if we were to engage the Outback ship in combat and anything unfortunate were to happen to the captain, you would have his full cooperation and support.”

“So what did he tell the captain?”

Rucker looked at the wall, opened his mouth, closed it again. He was not a quick liar.

Max gave him an avuncular clap on the shoulder. “You can tell me, Lieutenant. I’ll find out anyway.”

Rucker gulped, still refusing to meet Max’s eyes. “He told the captain that, um, if we were to engage the other ship in combat, and anything unfortunate were to happen to you, he’d make sure it was all clear in the records.”

So Gordet was indecisive, trying to play both sides at once. That was a hard game. The Commander had no gift for it either. “What’s your opinion of Gordet?” probed Max.

“He’s a good officer. I’m proud to serve under him.”

Rather standard response, deserving of Max’s withering stare. This time Rucker’s eyes did meet his.

“But, um, he’s still mad about losing his cabin to you, sir. He doesn’t like bunking with the junior officers.”

“He’ll get over it,” said Max. “Just remind him that Lukinov is bunking with Burdick, eh?” He gestured at Rucker to open the door. Rucker looked both ways down the corridor, motioned that it was clear, and Max went on his way.

He headed topside, pulling himself hand over hand up the narrow shaft. When he exited the tube he found Kulakov conducting an emergency training drill in the forward compartments. Stick-its posted to all the surfaces indicated the type and extent of combat damage. Crews in full space gear performed “repairs” while the chief petty officer graded their performance.

“You’re dead,” shouted Kulakov, grabbing a man by his collar and pulling him out of the exercise. “You forgot that you’re a vacuum cleaner!”

“But sir, I’m suited up properly.” His voice sounded injured, even distorted slightly by the microphone.

“But you’re not plugged in,” Kulakov said, tapping the stick-it on the wall. “That’s open to the outside, and without your tether you’re nothing more now than a very small meteor moving away from the ship! What are the rest of you looking at?”

He glanced over his shoulder, saw Max, and froze. The crews stopped their exercise.

“You just spaced another crewman,” said Max, tilting his head toward a man who’d backed into the wall. “Carry on.”

He turned away without waiting for Kulakov’s salute. He didn’t know why he had such an effect on that man, but now he was thinking he should look into it.

He proceeded through several twisting corridors, designed to slow and confuse boarding parties headed for the bridge, and passed the gym. He needed exercise. The weightlessness was already starting to get to him. But he decided to worry about that later.

He paused when he came to the missile room.

The Black Forest.

That was the crew’s nickname for it. Four polished black columns rose four uninterrupted stories—tubes for nuclear missiles, back when this ship was intended to fight the same kind of dirty war waged by the Adareans. It was the largest open space in the entire ship. When the grav was on, the men exercised by running laps, up one set of stairs, across the catwalk, down the other, around the tubes, and up again.

Max went out onto the catwalk, climbed up on the railing, and jumped.

If one could truly jump in zero-gee, that was. He pushed himself toward the floor and prayed that the grav didn’t come on unexpectedly. On the way down he noticed someone who feared just that possibility making their way up the stairs.

Max did a somersault, extending his legs to change his momentum and direction, pushed off one of the tubes, and bounced over to see who it was. He immediately regretted doing so. It was Sergeant Simco, commander of the combat troops.

Every captain personally commanded a detachment of ground troops. It could be as big as a battalion in some cases, but for this voyage, with an entire crew of only 141, the number was limited to ten. Officially, they were along to repel boarders and provide combat assistance if needed. Unofficially, they were called troubleshooters. If crewmen gave the captain any trouble, it was the troopers’ job to shoot them.

Simco would enjoy doing it too. He had more muscles than brains. But then nobody had that many brains.

“Hello, Sergeant,” Max called.

“Sir, that was nicely done.”

“I didn’t have you pegged for the cautious type.”

Simco shook his head. “I don’t like freefall unless I’ve got a parachute strapped to my back.”

Typical groundhog response. “Are your men ready to board and take that Outback ship, Sergeant?”

“Sir, I could do it all by myself. They’re women.”

They both laughed, Simco snapped a perfect salute, and Max pushed off from the railing. When he landed on the bottom, he saw placards marked “Killshot” hanging on each of the four tubes. That meant they were loaded with live missiles, ready to launch. Something new since the last time he’d passed through the Black Forest. He saw handwriting scrawled across the bottom of the placards, and went up close to read it. A. G. W.

Under the old government, the hastily thrown together Department of War had been called the Ministry of A Just God’s Wrath. Considering the success of the Adareans, the joke had been that the name was a typo and should have been called Adjust God’s Wrath. Some devout crewmen still had the same goal.

On the lower level, Max continued to the aftmost portion of the ship, off limits to all crew except for Engineering and Senior officers. Only one sealed hatch allowed direct entrance to this section. Max found an off-duty electrician’s mate sitting there, watching a pocketvid. The faint sound of someone dying came from the tiny speaker.

Max stopped in front of the crewman. “What are you watching?”

The crewman looked up, startled. DePuy, that was his name. He jumped to his feet and went all the way to the ceiling. He saluted with one hand, while the thumb of the other flicked to the pause button. “It’s A Fire on the Land, sir. It’s about the Adarean nuking of New Nazareth.”

“I’m familiar with it,” Max replied. Political Education approved all videos, practically ran the video business. “The bombing and the vid. Move aside and let me pass.”

“Sorry, sir, the chief engineer said. . . .”

Max turned as cold as deep space. He reached under DePuy to open the hatch. “Move aside, crewman.”

“The chief engineer gave me a direct order, sir!”

“And I am giving you another direct order right now.” Damn it, thought Max, the man still hesitated. “Rejecting an order from your political officer is mutiny, Mr. DePuy. A year is a very long time to spend in the ship’s brig waiting for trial.”

“Sir! A year is a very long time to serve under a chief officer who holds grudges, sir!”

“If I have to repeat my order a third time, you will go to the brig.”

DePuy pushed off from the wall. Though he seemed to seriously consider, for a split second, whether he wouldn’t rather be locked up than face Chevrier’s temper.

Max went down the corridor and paused outside the starboard Battery Room. The hatch stood open on the two-story space. One of the battery arrays was completely disassembled and diagrammed on the wall, with the key processing chips circled in red. A small group of men, most of them stripped to their waists, crowded into the soft-walled clean room in the corner. A large duct ran up from it toward the ceiling, the motor struggling to draw air. A crewman looked up and tapped the chief engineer on the shoulder.

“You!” Chevrier shouted as soon as he saw Max. “This is a restricted area! I want you out of my section right now!”

“Nothing is off limits to me,” Max replied.

“Fuck your mother!” Chevrier thundered, shooting across the room and getting right in Max’s face. Chevrier’s eyes had dark circles around them like storm clouds, and red lines in the whites like tiny bolts of lightning. He probably hadn’t slept since the spongediver was spotted; no doubt he was also pumped up on Nova or its more legal equivalent from the dispensary. That would explain his heavy sweating. It couldn’t drip off him in the weightlessness, but had simply accumulated in a pool about a half inch deep that sloshed freely in the vicinity of his breastbone. Max noticed that the comet insignia was branded on Chevrier’s bare chest. The Revolutionary government had banned that tradition, but the branding irons still floated around some ships in the service. Chevrier was the type who had probably heated it up with a hand welder and branded himself. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the empty spot on Max’s left breast pocket. “You haven’t qualified for a single ship’s system,” he said, “and you sure as hell aren’t reactor qualified. Now get out of my section!”

“You forgetting something, soldier?” Max asked, in as irritating a voice as he could manage.

Chevrier laughed in disbelief. “I wish I could forget! I’ve got a major problem on my hands, a ship with no fucking backup power.”

Max took a deep breath. “Did somebody break your arm, soldier?”

Chevrier’s eyes flickered. He made a sloppy motion with his right hand in the general direction of his head. Had Mallove sent word in the other direction too? Did Chevrier know that Max was supposed to leave him alone?

“Good. Give me a status report on the power situation.”

The chief engineer inhaled deeply. “Screwed up and likely to stay that way. The crewman on duty panicked—he folded the wings and powered down the Casmir drive without disengaging the batteries first and fried half the chips. We are now trying to build new chips, atom by atom, but you need a grade A clean hood to do that. And our hood is about as tight and clean as an old whore.”

Max had heard all this already, less vividly described, from the captain’s reports. “Go on.”

“Normally, we could just switch over to the secondary array, but some blackhole of a genius gutted our portside Battery Room and replaced it with a salvaged groundside nuclear reactor so we can float through Adarean space disguised like background radiation in order to do God knows what.”

“But you can switch communications, ship systems, propulsion, all that, over to the reactor, right?”

That was the plan: dive into Adarean space, do one circuit around the sun running on the nukes while recording everything they could on the military and political communications channels, then head home again.

“We’ve already done all that,” answered Chevrier, “but we can’t power up the Casmir drive with it. It’s strictly inner system, no diving.” He suddenly noticed the pool of sweat on his chest, went to flick it away, then stopped. “The Adareans won’t scan us if we’re running on nuclears, but they wouldn’t scan canvas sails either, so we might as well have used them instead. We’ve got to fix the main battery at some point.”

“Can you bring the grav back online?”

“Not safely, no, and not with the reactor. It’s a power hog. Too many things to go wrong.”

“Lasers?”

Chevrier ground his teeth. “You could talk to the captain, you know. He sends down here every damned hour for another report, asking the same exact damn questions.”

“Lasers?” repeated Max firmly.

“I recommended other options to the captain, but if you want to turn some Outback ship into space slag, I’ll give you enough power to do it. As long as you let me comb through the debris for spare parts once you’re done. Might be one way to get some decent equipment.”

“Fair enough. How are your men holding up?”

“They’re soldiers.” He pronounced the word very differently than Max had. “They do exactly what they’re told. Except for that worthless snot of a mate who apparently can’t even guard a fucking sealed hatch properly.”

Max didn’t like the sound of that. Chevrier couldn’t keep pushing his men as hard as he pushed himself, or they’d start to break. “Your men are not machines—”

“Hell they aren’t! A ship’s crew is one big machine and you’re a piece of grit in the silicone, a short in the wire. With you issuing orders outside the chain of command, the command splits. You either need to fit in or get the hell out of the machine!”

Chevrier jabbed his finger at Max’s chest again to punctuate his statement. This time, he made contact with enough force to send the two men in opposite directions.

It was clear that he didn’t mean to touch Max, and just as clear that he didn’t mean to back down. He glared at Max, daring him to make something of it. Aggressiveness was the main side effect of Nova. It built up until the men went supernova and burned out. On top of that, Chevrier also had that look some men got when things went very wrong. He couldn’t fix things so he wanted to smash them instead.

Max could bring him up on charges, but the ship needed its chief engineer right now. And if Mallove had promised his friends in government that he would protect Chevrier. . . .

Max decided to ignore the incident. For the time being. “I’ll be sure to make a record of your comments.”

Chevrier snorted, as if he’d won a game of chicken. “If you have problems with any of the big words, come back and I’ll spell them out for you.” He flapped his hand near his head again, turned and went back to the clean hood.

The other men scowled at Max.

That was the problem with anger—it was an infectious disease. Frustration only made it spread faster. He continued his tour, looking into the main engine room and then at the nuclear reactors. Nobody was in the former because there was nothing to be done there, and nobody was in the latter because radiation spooked them. One man sat in the control room, reading the monitors. Max hovered near the ceiling a moment looking over the crewman’s shoulder, comparing the pictures on the vids to the layout of the rooms. The crewman stared at the monitors intently, pretending not to see Max. Yes, thought Max, anger was very infectious. You never knew who might catch it next.

The hapless mate DePuy still guarded the hatch, whipping the vid behind his back as he snapped to attention. Max ignored him. Accidents happened. Some idiots would just slab themselves.

He went back through the Black Forest, acknowledging salutes from a pair of shooters, the tactics officer’s mates. He swam through the air to the top level, and down the main corridor, past the open door of the exercise room. He turned back. If grav was going to be offline much longer, he needed to sign up for exercise time. Physically, he needed to stay sharp right now.

Max pushed the door open. The room was dark. It surprised him briefly that no one was there, but then, with the six-and-sixes, and all the drills, the men were probably too busy. He hit the light switch. Nothing came on. He moved farther into the room to hit the second switch. Something hard smashed on the back of the head, knocking his cap off. He twisted, trying to get a hold of his assailant, but there was no one behind him. He realized that the other man was above him, on the ceiling, too late, and as he twisted in the dark room, he suddenly became very dizzy, losing any sense of direction, any orientation to the walls and floors. A thick arm snaked around his throat, choking off his nausea along with his breath. Max got hold of a thumb and managed to pull it halfway loose, but he had no leverage at all.

He swung his elbows forcefully and futilely as black dots swam before his eyes like collapsing stars in the darkened room.

Then the darkness became absolute.

HE EXPERIENCED a floating, disconnected sensation, like being in the sensory deprivation tanks they’d used for some of his conditioning experiments. Max had hated the feeling then, of being lost, detached, and he hated it now. Then light knifed down into one of his eyes and all his pains awoke at once.

“Do you hear me, Lieutenant Nikomedes?”

“Yes,” croaked Max. His throat felt raw. The light flicked off, then stabbed into the other eye. “That hurts.”

“I should imagine that it’s the least of your hurts. Has the painkiller worn off completely then?”

“I hope so, because if it hasn’t you should just kill me now.” His throat felt crushed and his kidneys ached like hell. The light went off and Max’s eyes adjusted to the setting. He was in the sickbay with the Doc hovering over him. His name was Noyes, and he was only a medtech, but the crew still called him Doc. The service was short of surgeons. Command didn’t want to spare one for this voyage.

“Your pupils look good,” Noyes continued. “There’s a ruptured blood vessel in the right eye. It’s not pretty, but the damage is superficial. We had some concern about how long you’d been without oxygen when you came in.”

Yeah, thought Max. He was concerned too. “So how long was it?”

“Not long. Seconds, maybe. A couple of the shooters found you unconscious in the gym.”

“And so they brought the Corpse to sickbay?”

“You know that nickname?” Noyes administered an injection and Max’s pain lessened. “Whoever attacked you knew what he was doing. He cut off your air supply without crushing your windpipe or leaving any fingerprint type bruises on your throat. You’re lucky—the shooters did chest compressions as soon as they found you and got you breathing again.”

So this wasn’t just a warning. Someone had tried to kill him, and failed. Unless the shooters were in on it. But who would do it and why? His hand shot up to his breast pocket. Gordet’s note with the secret codes was still there.

“What’s that?” asked Noyes, noticing the gesture.

“A list of suspects,” replied Max. He wondered if someone had followed him from Engineering. “Did you hear the one about the political officer who was killed during wargame exercises?”

Suspicion flickered across the Doc’s face. “No,” he said slowly.

“They couldn’t call it friendly fire because he had no friends.”

Noyes didn’t laugh. He was young, barely thirty, if that. But his face was worn, and he had a deep crease between his eyes. “Can I ask you a direct question?”

“If it’s about who did this—”

“No. It’s about the ship’s mission.”

“I may not be able to answer.”

“It’s just the crew, you know what they’re saying, that this is a suicide mission. We’re supposed to sneak into Adarean space, nuke their capital, and then blow ourselves up, vaporize the evidence.”

“Ah.” No, Max hadn’t heard that one yet, though he supposed he should have thought of it himself. Sometimes there were disadvantages to knowing inside information; it limited one’s ability to imagine other possibilities. “We could blow up their capital, but their military command is space-based, decentralized. That kind of strike wouldn’t touch them at all. That doesn’t make any sense, Doc.”

“It doesn’t have to make sense for the service to order it.” Noyes laughed, a truncated little puff of air. “I was scheduled for leave, I was supposed to be getting married on my leave, and I got yanked off the transport and put on this ship without a word of explanation, and then found out I was going to be gone for a year and a half. So don’t tell me the service only gives orders that make any sense.”

Max had no answer for that. He knew how orders were.

“Is this a suicide mission?” asked Noyes. “Tell me straight. The shooters think that’s why someone tried to kill you, because they don’t have to worry about consequences when they get back home.”

And they could die knowing they’d offed an officer. There were definitely a few of that type onboard. But Max didn’t think it was that random. “And if it is a suicide mission?”

The medtech’s face grew solemn. “Then I want to send some kind of message back to Suzan. I don’t want her to think I simply disappeared on her. I don’t want her to live the rest of her life with that.”

Noyes couldn’t be the only one having those thoughts. No wonder there was tension on the ship. “This isn’t a suicide mission,” Max said firmly.

“Your word on that?”

“Yes.” He would have to try to kill this rumor. Even if it proved to be true. Max touched his pocket again. What exactly were the secret orders? He thought he knew them, but maybe he didn’t.

Noyes shook his head. “Too bad you’re the political officer. Everyone knows your word can’t be trusted.” He handed Max a bottle of pills. “The captain wants to see you on the bridge right away. Take one of these if you feel weak, or in pain, and then report back to sickbay next shift.”

Max sat up, and noticed his pants pockets were inside out. So someone had been searching him after all and the shooters interrupted them. Unless that too was part of the ruse. For now, he’d stick to the simpler explanation.

Noyes helped him to his feet. “I ought to keep you for observation,” he said.

“No,” replied Max. “I’m fine.” I’m as rotten a liar as Rucker is, he thought. He wondered if the first lieutenant had changed his mind. Or changed his allegiances.

The door opened and Simco waited outside. His bulk seemed to fill the small corridor. He held his hands folded behind his back. “Captain assigned me to be your guard, sir. He asks you not to speak about this incident while I’m investigating it. He also requires your immediate attention on the bridge.”

“The assignment comes a little too late, apparently, Sergeant,” murmured Max. He gestured for Simco to lead the way.

“You first, sir.”

Trouble never came looking for him face-to-face, thought Max as he led the way through the corridors. It always came sneaking up behind.

A DOUBLE CREW packed the already tight bridge because of shift change, giving reports to one another in low tones.

No one but the captain bothered to look up when Max entered, and even he only glanced away from the scope for a second. Vents hissed above the muted beeps from the monitors. The two shooters Max had seen in the Black Forest were seated next to the tactics officer. Max waited to make eye contact with them, to say thanks, but they were so absorbed in their work they didn’t notice him. He gave up waiting, and slid over to stand by Petoskey.

“It’s about damn time, Nikomedes,” growled Petoskey.

“I had a slight accident.”

“Well I have a slight problem. The incoming ship boosted. They’re in some kind of a hurry. So our window of opportunity is here, and it’s closing fast.”

He hasn’t made up his mind yet, Max realized. “Have they detected us?”

“No. We’re between them and the rings. They don’t see us because we’re floating dead, and because they don’t expect to see anyone out here.”

Max remained silent, running the calculations through his head. Outback’s presence would not affect the Jesusalem’s claim to the system, only the possible success of their mission through Adarean space.

“ ‘War is an extension of political policy with military force,’ ” prompted Petoskey, quoting regulations.

And it was the job of the political officer to be the final arbiter of policy. This was exactly the type of unforeseen situation that created the need for political officers on ships. “What are our options?”

Petoskey shifted his chewing tobacco into a spot below his lower lip. “Chevrier says we could power up and hit them with the lasers, but we wouldn’t get more than one or two shots. I don’t like our chances at this distance. We could launch the nuclears at them. They’d see them coming, but we could bracket them so that they’ll still take on a killer dose of radiation even if we don’t score a direct hit. Or we could do nothing.”

“What are your concerns?”

He sucked the tobacco juice through his teeth. “The last I heard officially, Outback was one of our trading partners.”

“We have met the enemy,” Max mused softly, “and they are us.”

Petoskey scowled. “But Outback also trades with Adares. If they find our dive to their system, they’ll let the Adareans know about it and that endangers our mission. So what’s the politically correct thing for me to do?”

“I would suggest that we haven’t been tasked with guarding the system or the other wormhole. I would point out that there are other ships in place specifically to do just that.” He paused. “And as long as we dive undetected, our mission isn’t really endangered.”

Petoskey leaned back and straightened so that his head nearly scraped the pipes. He slammed the scope back into its slot and stared hard at Max. “So we let them pass?”

“They’ve got a second ship outside our range. We pop this one and the other one sees us, then Jesusalem could face a war on two fronts.” Although they weren’t technically at war with Adares any longer, the capital was filled with rumors of war. “Politically, we’re not ready to handle that.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Petoskey, with a slight shudder that mixed revulsion with unease. “I’m glad not to use the nukes. Those are dirty weapons to use. On people.”

“I fail to see any difference,” said Max. “Two kinds of fire. Lasers or nukes, they would be equally dead.”

Petoskey had a lidded cup taped to the conduits on the wall. He pulled it off, spit into it, and taped it back up again. Pausing, so he could change the subject. “I understand that you were nearly dead a little while ago, Nikomedes. Simco has one of his men guarding Reedy.”

“Why?” asked Max. Had the ensign been attacked also?

“Spy or not, it’s obvious she’s trying to get back at you for your comments in quarters the other day. I asked around and found out what she did to Vance. Shows what happens when you don’t keep women in their place. Before I had her locked up, I wanted to make certain this wasn’t something arranged between the two of you. Some kind of duel. Not that I thought it was, but. . . .”

He thought it might be, finished Max to himself. Or hoped it might be. “It wasn’t Reedy as far as I know. But let Simco’s man watch her while Simco investigates. If Reedy’s guilty, maybe she’ll give herself away.”

“Shouldn’t have a woman onboard anyway, even if she is language qualified. We can’t afford dissension on a voyage like this one. I will personally execute anyone who endangers this mission. I don’t care if it is a junior officer.”

Or a woman, thought Max. “Understood,” he answered. He looked up one last time, to see if he could catch the shooters’ eyes. That’s when he noticed Rucker and Gordet staring at him. They had been whispering to one another and stopped. “In fact, I think I’ll head down to the radio room right now.”

“You’re dismissed from duty until Doc says you’ve recovered. And Simco or one of his men will stay with you at all times.”

That was not what Max wanted, not at all. “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

Petoskey nodded, dismissing him.

Max began to wish that whoever had attacked him had done a better job.

HE WENT TO the secure radio room and all three of the intelligence officers stopped talking and turned toward the doorway. It’s the Political Officer Effect, thought Max.

“What happened to your face?” Lukinov asked.

“I fought the law and the law won,” Max answered impulsively.

Burdick burst out laughing. Even Lukinov smiled. “Why does that sound so damned familiar?” he asked.

“Judas’s Chariot,” answered Burdick. “The vid. It was one of Barabbas’s lines.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember that one now. It had Oliver Whatshisname in it. I got to meet him once, at a party, when he did that public information vid. Good man.” He twisted around. The smell of his cologne nearly choked Max. “Seriously, Max, what happened? Why has the captain put a guard on one of my men?”

“Someone tried to kill me.” Max was disappointed with the surprise in Lukinov’s expression. In all of their expressions. Intelligence was supposed to know everything. “Captain suspects the ensign here.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Lukinov rolled his eyes. Anger flashed across Reedy’s face.

“It wasn’t my suggestion,” Max replied. “But if you don’t mind my asking, which one of you is just coming on shift?”

“I am, sir,” Reedy answered immediately.

“And where were you?”

“In her quarters sleeping,” interjected Lukinov. “Where else would she have been?”

“You were there with her?” No one wanted to answer that accusation, so Max slid past it. “You two usually work one shift together, and Burdick takes the other, right?”

The senior officer hesitated. “I doubled shifted with Burdick because of the information we were getting.”

So. Reedy had been alone. Not that Max suspected her of the attack. But now he’d have to. Maybe he’d misestimated her in the first place. “What information is that?”

“The other Outback ship is doing some kind of military research defending the wormhole. Based on what we’re overhearing from observers in the shuttles. We’ve got a name on the second ship. It’s the Jiang Qing, same class as the other one.” He paused. “You aren’t going to try to tell me that Jiang Qing was one of Napoleon’s generals too, are you, Max?”

“Why not?” asked Max flatly. “Historically, Earth has had women generals for centuries. Jesusalem was the only planet without a mixed service.”

Lukinov’s lip curled. “We finally tracked down Deng Xiaopeng. He and this Jiang Qing woman were both part of the Chinese revolution. Reedy found the information.”

“The Chinese communist revolution,” clarified the ensign. “They were minor figures, associated with Mao. Both were charged with crimes though they helped bring about important political changes that led to the second revolution.”

“Ah,” said Max. A wave of pain shot through him. If his legs had been supporting his weight, they would surely have buckled. “Please cooperate with Sergeant Simco until we can get this straightened out. Now, if you will excuse me.”

He didn’t wait for their response, but turned back to the hall. Simco waited at parade rest, his hands behind his back. Another trooper stood beside him.

“I’m going to return to my cabin now,” Max said.

“I’ve detailed Rambaud here to watch you while I begin my investigation,” Simco replied. Rambaud was a smaller but equally muscled version of his superior officer. “I’ll be rotating all my men through this duty until we find the culprit.”

“Keeping them sharp?” Max said.

Simco nodded. “A knife can’t cut if you don’t keep it sharp.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” Max barely noticed the other man shadowing him through the narrow maze of corridors. When he reached his room, he took a double dose of the doctor’s painkillers, added one from his own stock, and washed them all down with a gulp of warm, flat water. He looked in the bathroom mirror at his damaged eye. That was when he started to shake. He had the ludicrous sensation that he was going to fall down, so he grabbed hold of the sink and tried to steady himself. Eventually it passed, but not before his breath came out in ragged gasps.

He’d come too close to dying this time. And why?

The rumor of the suicide mission still bothered him, and so did the problem of Reedy. When he drifted off to sleep, he dreamed that he was wandering an empty vessel searching for someone who was no longer aboard, through corridors that were kinked and slicked like the intestines of some animal. They started shrinking, squeezing the crates and boxes that filled them into a solid mass, as Max tried to find his way out. The last section dead-ended in a mirror, and when he paused to look into its silver surface he saw a bloody eye above a pyramid.

He woke up shivering and nauseous. According to the clock, he’d slept nearly four and a half hours, but he didn’t believe it. He wasn’t inclined to believe anything right now.

He rose and dressed himself. He needed better luck. If it wouldn’t come looking for him, he’d have to go looking for it.

DOWN IN THE very bottom of the ship rested an observation chamber that contained the only naked ports in the entire vessel. Max went down there to think, dutifully followed by Simco’s watchdog.

Max paused outside the airlock. “You can wait here.”

“I’m supposed to stay with you, sir.”

“The lights are off, it’s empty,” said Max, realizing as soon as the words were out of his mouth what had happened the last time he went into a dark room alone. “If someone’s waiting in there to kill me, then you’ve got them trapped. You’ll get a commendation.”

Rambaud relented. Max entered the room, closing the hatch behind him. It sealed automatically, reminding Max of the sound of a prison cell door shutting.

Outside the round windows stretched the infinite expanse of space. The sun was a small, cold ember in a charcoal-colored sky dominated by the vast and ominous bulk of Big Brother. They were close enough that Max could see crimson storms raging on its surface, swirling hurricanes larger than Jesusalem itself. He counted three moons spinning around the planet, and great rings of dust, as if everything in space was drawn into satellites around the self-consuming fire of its mass.

A quiet cough came from the rear of the compartment.

Max pirouetted, and saw another man floating cross-legged in the air. As he unfolded and came to attention, light glinted off the jack that sat lodged in his forehead like a third eye. It was the spongediver, the ship’s pilot, Patchett.

“At ease, Patchett,” said Max.

Patchett nodded toward the port as he clasped his hands behind his back. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It’s no place for a human being to live,” Max said. “Give me a little blue marble of a planet any day instead.”

The pilot smiled. “That figures.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re the political officer, and politics is always about the place we live, how we live together.” He gestured at the sweep of the illuminated rings. “But this is why I joined the service—to explore, to see space.”

“Has it been worth it?”

“Too much waiting, too much doing nothing.” Patchett shifted his position, rotating a quarter circle. “The diving makes it worthwhile.”

“Good,” murmured Max, looking away.

“You and I are alike that way. We both are the most useless men on the ship except for that one moment when we’re the only one qualified to do the job.” He stared out the port. “What happened to you, that was wrong, sir.”

Max gazed out the window also, saying nothing.

“I’d guess,” Patchett said, “that I’ve been in the service as long as you have. Nearly twenty years.”

“Just past thirty years now,” Max replied. It wasn’t all in the official records, but thirty years total. A very long time. Patchett clearly wanted to say something more. “What is it?” asked Max. “Speak freely.”

Patchett exhaled. “Things have been going downhill the past few years, sir. The wrong men in charge, undermining everything we hoped to accomplish in the Revolution. They all want war. They forget what the last one was like.”

“Are you sure you should be telling this to your political officer?”

“You may be the only one I can say it to. You have to know it already. Petoskey’s an excellent captain, don’t get me wrong, sir. But he’s too young to remember what the last war was like.”

They hung there in the dark, weightless, silent, watching the giant spin on its axis. If Patchett was right, there was one moment in the voyage when only Max’s skills would make a difference. But what moment, and what kind of difference, there was no way to know in advance.

When Max went to the med bay to check in with Noyes he found Simco sitting—more or less—at the exam table. “I’d salute,” Simco said, “but Doc here’s treating a sprain.”

“Dislocation,” corrected Noyes.

“What happened?” asked Max.

Simco grinned. “I scheduled extra combat training for my men. Want to make sure they’re ready in case they run into whoever attacked you. It doesn’t really count as a good workout unless someone dislocates something.”

Noyes snorted.

“Plus, Doc here says that we have to exercise at least an hour a day or we’ll start losing bone and muscle mass.”

“Nobody’s had to deal with prolonged weightlessness in a couple of hundred years,” added Noyes. “I’m only finding hints of the information I need in our database. The nausea, vertigo, lethargy—that I expected and was prepared for. But we’re already seeing more infections, shortness of breath, odd stuff. And we’ve got orders to spend months like this? It’s madness. Take it easy on this thumb for a few more days, Simco.” He went to lay his stim-gun on the table and it floated off sideways across the room. “Damn. Not again.”

Max snatched it out of the air and handed it back to the Doc. “Any word on who my attacker was?” he asked Simco.

“No.” The sergeant blew out his breath. “But I did hear that you picked a fight with Chevrier down in Engineering.”

“Nothing even close to that.”

“Good. He’s a big man, completely out of your weight class.”

“Right now, we’re all in the same weight class.”

That won Max a laugh from both Simco and Noyes. “Still, if you go see him again, about anything, please inform me first,” the sergeant said.

“You’ll know about it before I do,” promised Max.

After the Doc finished checking him, Max went back through the crate-packed corridors toward his quarters. On the way, he passed Reedy, whose mouth quirked in a brief smile as Max squeezed past her.

“What do you find so funny, Ensign?” Max growled.

Reedy’s eyes flicked, indicating the trooper following her and the one behind Max. “For a second there, sir, I wondered which of us was the real prisoner.”

Very perceptive. She had an edge to her voice that reminded him of Chevrier. He recalled that she had shown a strong aversion to confinement after the incident with Vance. “Remember who you’re speaking to, Ensign!”

“Yes, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”

“See that it doesn’t.”

He went into his room and swallowed another painkiller. Even if the moment came when he could make a difference, would he be able to get away from his minders long enough to do it?

Eight more shifts, two more days, and nothing.

Max had no appetite, the food all tasted bland to him. He couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. If he turned the lights off, he’d wake in a panic, disoriented, unsure of his location. But if he slept with the lights on, they poked at the edge of his consciousness, prodding him awake. He tried to exercise one hour out of every two shifts, but everything seemed tedious. It just felt wrong, empty motions with nothing to push against.

On the bridge, he asked Petoskey if it was still necessary to have a guard.

“The attack’s still unsolved,” Petoskey said. “Until Simco brings me the manor woman—who did it, I want you protected.”

Max had the sinking feeling that might be for the rest of the voyage. “How are the repairs going?”

“Chevrier replaced all the chips in the dead array with new ones, but something failed when he tested it. He has an idea for rebuilding the chips with some kind of silicon alloy crystal. Says he can grow it as long as we stay weightless. Some other kind of old tech. Inorganic. He tried to explain it to me, but he’s the only one who really understands it.”

“Can we wait that long?”

“We can’t power up to jump as long as those Outback ships are in the vicinity. They’d see us—and the wormhole—in a microsecond. So far they still haven’t detected our buoy. Or if they have, they just took it for a pulsar signal.” Which was the idea, after all. Petoskey tugged hard at his beard. There were dark stains of sleeplessness under his eyes. “Don’t you have some work to do, some reports to write?”

He meant it as a dismissal. Max was willing to be dismissed. He was still no closer to catching his traitor, and his luck couldn’t have been more execrable.

He went to the ship’s library to read. Rambaud, his trooper again this shift, had no interest in reading or studying vids of any kind. He writhed in almost open pain as Max made it clear that he intended to stay at a desk alone for several hours. Max decided that it wouldn’t be murder if he bored Simco’s men to death.

He sat there, scanning Pier’s monograph on the Adarean war, skimming through the casualty lists in the appendixes, thinking about some of the worst battles, early on, and the consequences of war, when a voice intruded on his contemplations.

“. . . bored as hell down here. Uh-huh. Wargames. That sounds interesting. Can you understand that Outback lingo?”

Rambaud was whispering on the comlink to his compatriot in charge of Reedy. Max let the conversation turn to complaints about the exercise regimen and weightlessness before he flipped off his screen and rose to go.

He headed for the intelligence radio room. The scent of Lukinov’s imported cologne drifted out the open door into the corridor. Max paused at the doorway. Inside, the trooper floated behind Lukinov and Reedy. He wore a set of earphones.

“So this is how well you keep secrets?” asked Max.

The trooper saw Max, yanked the earphones out of his ear, and handed them back to an ebullient Lukinov. “Wait until you hear this, Max!” Lukinov said.

The trooper tried to squeeze by Max without touching him. Max stayed firmly in his way, making him as uncomfortable as possible. “Rambaud,” he said to his own man, “I believe I left my palm-pad down in the library by accident. Retrieve it for me and bring it to this room immediately so I can record this conversation.”

Rambaud hesitated before answering. “Yes, sir.”

The other trooper went over Max’s head and took up station outside the door. Max kicked the door shut and latched it.

“What’s going on with the spongediver?” asked Max.

“They’re testing a new laser deflector, using it for wormhole defense.” Lukinov grinned. “Go ahead and listen.”

Max picked up the headphones and fit the wires into his ears. Pilots chattered with tactics officers, describing the kind of run they were simulating. No wonder Outback outfitted their survey ships with the newest military equipment. The blind side of a wormhole dive was probably the only place in the galaxy they could test any new weapons without being observed. “Very standard stuff here,” he said after a moment. “Is there just one channel of this?”

“Their scientists are on the other channel, the one Reedy’s monitoring. But don’t you see what an advantage this gives us if we can steal it? We can attack Adares with impunity and keep them from diving into our system.”

Max switched the channel setting to the one Reedy listened to. “Do unto others before they do unto you?”

“Exactly!” replied Lukinov.

Reedy’s eyes went wide open. She started tapping the desk to get their attention. “Sir,” she said. “There’s something you should. . . .”

“Not right now,” said Max.

Lukinov frowned at him. “Now see here—”

“No, you see here. Has the captain been informed of this?”

“Not yet,” replied Lukinov.

“You invite some grunt in here to listen to information that will certainly be classified top secret before you notify the captain?” He sneered at Lukinov, pausing long enough to listen to the scientists talk. “You can be sure that my Department will file a record of protest on our return. In the meantime, I better go get the captain.”

Lukinov popped out of his seat. “No, I’ll do that. I was just planning to do that anyway, if you hadn’t interrupted.”

“Sir,” repeated Reedy. “Sirs.”

“Ensign,” said Max, “Shut. Up.”

The ensign nodded mutely, her eyes shaped like two satellite dishes trying to pick up a signal.

“I’m coming with you, Lukinov,” Max said.

“No, you aren’t, Lieutenant,” snapped the intelligence officer. “I’m the one man on this ship you can’t give direct orders to and don’t you forget it.”

Max saluted, a gesture sharp enough to have turned into a knife hand strike at the other man’s throat. Lukinov stormed out of the room. Max turned back to the ensign, who simply stared at him.

“They just broadcast the complete specifications,” said Reedy. “They were checking for field deformation—”

“I know that,” said Max. And then he did something he never expected to do, not on this voyage. He said aloud the secret intelligence code word for “render all assistance.” Silently, to himself, he added a prayer that it was current, and that Reedy would recognize it.

“Wh-what did you say?” she stammered.

Max repeated the code word for “render all assistance” while he pulled off his earphones and reached in his pocket for his multi-tool. His fingers found nothing, and he realized that it had been missing since his attack. “And give me a screwdriver,” he added.

Reedy handed over the tool. “But . . . but. . . .”

Max ignored her. In thirty seconds, he’d disconnected the power and disassembled the outer case of the radio. “Give me the laser,” he said.

The ensign’s hands shook as she complied.

“I need two new memory chips and the spare pod.” Reedy just stared at him, uncomprehending. “Now!” spit Max, and the ensign dove for the equipment box.

Max shoved the loaded chips into his pockets and snapped the replacements into their slots as Reedy handed them over. The radio was still a mess of pieces when someone rapped on the door.

“Stall them!” hissed Max.

The rap came again and the door cracked open. Rambaud pushed his head in partway. “Here’s your palm-pad, sir.”

“I’ll take it,” said Reedy, grabbing it and shoving the door shut on him.

“Thanks!” called Max. He’d lost one of the screws, and when he looked up from the equipment to see if it was floating somewhere, he was temporarily disoriented. His stomach did a flip-flop and his head spun in a circle. “Shit!”

Rambaud pushed back on the door. “Are you safe in there, sir? I’m coming in.”

Reedy wedged herself against the wall to block the door.

Max heard a plain thump as Rambaud bounced against it. He saw the screw floating near his ankles and scooped it up. He fixed the cover and powered the machine up again. Reedy grunted as the door pushed against her, cracking open. “I’m fine,” Max said loudly.

Rambaud nodded, but he stood outside the cracked door peering in.

Reedy panted, caught herself, controlled it. A thousand questions formed and died on her lips. Max had taken the leap, and now he had to see how far that leap would take him.

“Ensign,” he whispered.

“Yes, sir?”

“From this moment forth,” his lips barely moved, “you will consider me your sole superior officer.”

Her eyes jumped to the door. “Sir? But—”

“That is a direct order.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You will not tell anyone—”

But he did not get the chance to tell Reedy what she should and shouldn’t say. The door swung open and Lukinov entered, followed by Captain Petoskey. Lukinov grinned like a party girl full of booze. “Wait until you hear this,” he said. He put his headphones on, and handed one to Petoskey as Reedy slid quickly back into her place.

They listened for a moment. Petoskey squinted his eyes, and rounded his shoulders even more than usual. “Sounds like they’re bringing the shuttles in, getting ready to leave. Radioing a safe voyage message to their other ship. What was I supposed to hear?”

“They’re testing a new deflector for wormhole defense. If we attack their ship and kill them, we can take it. Their other ship will be stuck in-system and we can nuke them.”

“Captain,” said Max.

“Yes?”

“I didn’t hear any evidence of this deflector. I can’t recommend an attack.”

Lukinov frantically punched commands into his keypad. “Let me back up to an hour ago.” His face went as blank as the records he was trying to access. “I can’t seem to find it. Reedy, what’s going on here?”

“Sir,” she muttered, with a pleading glance at Max, “uh, I don’t know, sir.”

“She’s covering up,” said Max.

Three faces stared at him with variations of disbelief.

“Look at the battery, it’s not properly grounded.” It was an awful explanation, but the best that Max could come up with on the spot. “Reedy was moving some equipment around, hit it with something. I didn’t see what. Sparks flew and the screens all went dead. She got them back up right away, but she probably wiped the memories.”

“Ensign,” Lukinov said coldly. “Explain yourself.”

Reedy’s mouth hung open. She didn’t know what to say. Betrayal was written all over her face.

Petoskey took off his headset. “Lukinov, I trust you to take care of this. Nikomedes. . . .”

“Yes, sir?”

Petoskey couldn’t seem to think of any orders to give him. “I have to go talk to Chevrier. We have our mission. With the second ship out of the way, we have to prepare to dive.”

Max followed Petoskey out into the corridor, but returned to his room to stash the stolen memory. Only two things mattered now: getting the information to his superior, and keeping Lukinov from getting it to his. It needed to be used as a defensive weapon, not as an excuse to start a war. Lukinov had access to the radio and official channels. Max didn’t. That stacked the cards in Lukinov’s favor.

He had to do something with it soon, before they jumped to Adarean space. And he had to hope that a baby-faced ensign just out of the Academy didn’t fold under pressure and give him away. It was like a game of Blind Man’s Draw. Max had already put everything he had into the pot.

There was nothing else he could do at this point except play the card that he was dealt.

Meal time. Max sat by himself, as usual, at his own narrow table in the galley. Even the trooper guarding him sat with some of the other crewmen.

Lukinov entered, saw Max, and came straight over to him. “Reedy won’t say that you were lying, but you were,” the intelligence officer said. “Not that it matters. The machines are buggered, the data’s all gone. Even Burdick can’t find it.”

Max had a blank sheet in his pocket. He pulled it out, and a stylus, and passed it over to Lukinov. This was the way duels were proposed at the Academy. According to the Academy’s cover story, it was the way Reedy had arranged to meet with Vance.

Lukinov looked at the sheet, then scratched “observation room” and a time two hours distant on it. He pushed it back over to Max, who shook his head, and wrote “reactor room.”

“Why there?” asked the intelligence officer.

“They’ve got cameras there, but no mikes. It’s off limits to Simco’s troopers, but not to us. We won’t be there long.”

“So this is just to be a private conversation? I should leave my weapons behind?”

“I wish you would.”

“More’s the pity,” said Lukinov, and stormed out.

Max was putting his tray away, trying to resolve his other problem, when Simco came in. “Lukinov won’t let us throw the ensign in the brig, not yet. But he thought it was best if I stuck with you personally in the meantime.”

Perfect, thought Max, just perfect.

TWO HOURS HAD never stretched out to such an eternity before in all Max’s life. Simco escorted him to his quarters and joined him inside.

“Do you want to follow me into the head and shake it dry for me?” asked Max on his way into the bathroom.

Simco laughed, but remained in the other room. Max retrieved a bottle of pills and an old pair of nail clippers from the medicine cabinet, putting them in his pocket. Then he led Simco on a long, roundabout trip through the corridors that ended up on the floor of the Black Forest. He stopped when he got there and snapped his fingers.

“I forgot something,” Max said. “You don’t mind if I borrow that multi-tool in your pocket, do you?”

Simco stuffed his hand automatically into his pants, wrapped it around the bulge there, and froze. “Sorry, sir, I don’t have one with me,” he said, grinning. “Got one in my locker. Or do you want to hit Engineering to borrow one?”

“No, it’s nothing I need that badly.” He jumped. “Meet you up top, in the exercise room.” He grabbed hold of the service ladder outside one of the missile shafts, and pulled himself up. He used his momentum to spin, kicking off from the side of the shaft, and shot like a rocket toward the ceiling.

“Hold up there,” called Simco, halfway up the stairs.

Max ducked into the upper corridor. He dove through the hall as fast as he could, past the exercise room, down the access shaft, and back out the corridor below, returning to the missile room. He watched Simco’s feet disappear above him into the top corridor, and then he flew straight across the cavern to the section over Engineering, opened a portside hatch, and closed it again after himself.

A long time ago Max had modified his nail clippers to function as a makeshift tool. Bracing himself against the wall, he used it now to remove the grille from the ceiling vent—it was the supply duct for the HEPA filters in the clean hood corner of the battery room directly below. He squeezed inside, feet first, pulling the grille after him. There was no way to reattach it, but with no gravity he didn’t need to. He simply pulled it into place and it stayed there.

It was an eighteen-inch duct and he was a small man. Even so, he felt like toothpaste being forced back into the tube. He had to twist sideways and flip over to get past the L-curve, but after that it was a straight trip down to the reactor room. With his arms pinned above his head, and no gravity to help him, he writhed downward like a rat caught in a drainpipe. He reached bottom, unable to go any further. His kicks had no effect at all and his heart began to race as he wondered if he’d be trapped inside the duct. Finally, by pressing his elbows out into the corners, and hooking one foot on the lip where the vent teed out horizontally, he was able to push the other foot downward until the duct tore open.

He eased downward into the plenum space above the hood ceiling and kicked through the tiles. When he finally lowered himself into the battery room he was drenched in sweat and his pants were ripped in the thigh. He hadn’t even noticed. He undid his belt and looked at the scrape on his leg. It was mostly superficial. Not much blood.

He leaned in the corner, with the hood’s softwalls pulled back, catching his breath. The cameras were all installed to monitor the reactor, so they faced the center of the room. Most of them close-upped on specific pieces of equipment. He eased out, pushing himself up toward the high ceiling.

He glanced at his chrono. Already seven minutes past his meeting time with Lukinov. He waited two more minutes before the hatch popped open. He had a split second to decide what he would do if it was one of the engineers.

But a familiar balding head poked through the door. Max eased out of the hood area. “Hey, Lukinov.”

“Max?” The other man twisted around to see him. He entered, closing the hatch behind him. “How the hell did you get in here? Chevrier’s guard at the door gave me the runaround, swore he hadn’t seen you. The mate watching the monitors said you never came in here either. What are you, some damn spook?”

Max ignored the questions. “You wanted to talk to me about the radio room. It was me. I stole the memory chips.”

Lukinov came toward him, pale with fury. “You did what? By god, I’ll see you shot.”

“Intelligence won’t touch me,” said Max. “Not for this.”

“I’ll get Political Education to do it, you goddamn weasel,” Lukinov vowed. He launched himself toward Max, keeping a hand against the wall to orient himself. “Your boss, Mallove, is a personal friend of mine. He won’t like—”

Max jumped, tucking his knees and spinning as he sailed in the air. He wrapped his belt around Lukinov’s throat, pivoted, twisting the belt as he pulled himself back to the floor. The motion jerked Lukinov upside down so that he floated in the air like a child’s balloon.

“Your boss, Drozhin,” whispered Max, “doesn’t like the way you’ve been selling Intelligence’s secrets out to Political Education and War.”

Drozhin was Max’s boss too. He’d moled Max in Political Education as soon as the new Department formed.

Lukinov panicked. He thrashed his arms and legs, disoriented, trying to make contact with any surface, clutching futilely at Max, who was behind his back and below him. Max twisted the belt, pinching the carotid arteries and cutting off blood flow to the brain. Lukinov was unconscious in about seven seconds. His body just went still. He was dead a few seconds later.

Drozhin had ordered Max to watch Lukinov, not kill him, but he couldn’t see any other way around it. He shoved the body toward the corner, under the vent, and put his belt back on.

Still nobody at the hatch. Maybe they hadn’t noticed. Maybe they were summoning Simco. There’d be no denying this one, not if he’d missed the location of any cameras.

But he had no time to think about failure. He didn’t want anyone looking closely at Lukinov’s body and he didn’t want the ship making the jump to Adares. Intelligence was publicly part of the war party, but Drozhin believed that war would destroy Jesusalem and wanted it sabotaged at all costs. Max took the medicine bottle from his pocket and removed the two pills that weren’t pills. He popped them into his mouth to warm them—they tasted awful—while he removed the wire and blasting cap from the bottle’s lid.

He couldn’t blow any main part of the reactor, he understood that much. But the cooling circuit used water pipes, and a radioactive water spill could scuttle the jump. Max darted in, fixed the explosive to a blue-tagged pipe, plugged the wire in it, and hurried back to the hood. He pushed Lukinov’s corpse in the direction of the explosive before he climbed through the hole into the vent.

There was a soft boom behind him.

Max cranked his neck to peer down between his feet and saw the water spray in a fine mist, filling the air like fog. All the radiation alarms blared at once.

They sounded far off at first while he wiggled upward. He thought he was sweating, but realized that the busted air flow was drawing some of the water up through the shaft. Droplets pelleted him with radiation, and that made him crawl faster. He got stuck in the bend for a moment, finally squeezing through, and thrusting the vent cover out of the way without checking first to see if anyone was in the corridor. But it was empty—so far his luck held! He retrieved the grille and screwed it back into place. One of the alarms was located directly beside him. Its wailing made his pulse skip.

He emerged into the shaft of the weapons compartment as men raced both ways, toward the accident and away from it. No one noticed him. He was headed across the void toward his quarters when someone called his name.

“Hey, Nikomedes!”

He saw the medtech, Noyes, down by the corridor that led to Engineering. “What is it, Doc?”

“You don’t have your comet, do you?”

Max touched the empty spot on his breast pocket. “No. Why?”

“Radiation emergency!” he screamed. “You’re drafted as the surgeon’s assistant—come on!”

Max considered ignoring the command, but according to regulations, Doc was right. Anyone who wasn’t Vacuum and Radiation qualified was designated an orderly to help treat those who were. Plus it gave him an alibi. He jumped toward the bottom of the Black Forest and joined Noyes.

“Here, carry this kit,” Noyes said, handing over a box of radiation gear as he went back across the hall to grab another.

“Where is it?” asked Max. He held the gear close, covering the rip in his pants. “What’s going on?”

“Don’t know. The com’s down again. But it has to be the reactor.”

Nobody guarded the main hatch to Engineering so the two men went straight in. A crowd gathered in the monitor room, spilling out into the corridor. Noyes pushed straight through, and Max followed along behind him. Chevrier was shaking a crewman by the throat.

“—what the hell did you let him in there for?”

“He ordered me to!” the man complained. It was DePuy.

“There’s water everywhere!” another one of the men yelled, coming back from the direction of the reactor room hatch. “The reactor’s over-heating fast!”

“It’s already past four hundred cees,” said one of the men at the monitors.

Chevrier tried to fling DePuy at the wall, but they just flopped a short distance apart. The chief engineer turned toward the rest of crew in disgust.

Rucker, the first lieutenant, showed up behind Max. “Captain wants a report—the com’s down again!”

“That’s because the reactor’s overheating,” Chevrier said. “The cooling system’s busted.”

“My God,” said Rucker, invoking a deity he probably didn’t believe in, thought Max.

Noyes slapped a yellow patch on the first lieutenant’s shirt. “Radiation detectors, everyone. When they turn orange, you’re in danger, means get out. Red means see me for immediate treatment.” He handed some to Max. “Make sure everyone wears one.”

“We’ve got to go in there, fix the pipe, and cool the reactor,” said Chevrier. Some of the men started to protest. “Shut the fuck up! I’m asking for volunteers. And I’ll be going in with you.”

Rucker wiped the blond cowlick back off his forehead. “I’ll go in,” he said. Six other crewmen volunteered, most of them senior engineers. Max slapped radiation badges on those men first.

“Here’s the plan.” Chevrier pointed to pictures on the monitors. “We’re going to shut off these valves here and here, cut out and replace this section of pipe—”

Noyes, looking over his shoulder, said, “That man in there ought to come out at once. He looks unconscious.”

“That man is dead,” said Chevrier, “and it’s a good thing too, or I’d kill him. Then we’re going to run a pipe through here, from the drinking water supply—”

A moan of dismay.

“—shut up! We’ll take it from the number three reserve tank. That ought to be enough, and it won’t contaminate the rest of the water. Once we get the main engine back up, we can make more water off the fuel cells.”

Everyone had a badge now, and Max hung back with Noyes.

“I’d like someone to go in there and turn off these,” Chevrier tapped spots on one of the monitors, “here, here, and here, while I get the repair set up.”

“That’ll be me,” Rucker said. Like any junior officer, Max thought, trying to set a good example.

Chevrier gave him a nod. “This one here is tough. It’ll take you a few minutes. It’s right next to the reactor, and it’s going to be hotter than hell.” He gave Rucker the tools he needed and sent him off down the tube to the reactor room.

“I’ll need a shower set up for decontamination,” said Noyes.

Max found the air shower over by the other clean room, and showed him where it was. Noyes started setting up the lead-lined bags for clothing and equipment disposal.

By the time they went back to the monitor room, Chevrier had diagrammed his repair. His volunteers double-checked the equipment lined up in the hall. He sent others, who hadn’t volunteered, to run a connector line from the freshwater tank. They were just getting ready to go in, when Rucker staggered back out. He looked . . . cooked. Like the worst sunburn Max had ever seen. His clothes were soaked, and glowing drops of water followed through the air in his wake. Noyes was there, swiping the droplets out of the air with a lead blanket. He wrapped Rucker in it, and started leading him toward the shower.

The lieutenant’s badge was bright red.

One crewman bolted, another threw up. No one said anything about the smell, but one of the men took off his shirt and tried to catch the vomit as it scattered through the air.

Chevrier ripped his badge off. “Won’t need this. Just one more distraction. If we’re going to go swimming, we might as well go skinny-dipping.” He stripped off his clothes and the other volunteers followed his example. “Can’t handle tools in those damn vacuum suits anyway.”

Anger, fear, those things were contagious, Max reflected. But so were courage and foolhardy bravery. He hoped the price was worth it.

He supposed he ought to be at decontamination, with Noyes, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the monitors. There were no cameras aimed directly at the spot where the men were working with the pipes, but they passed in and out of the vids. The radioactive water pooled in the air, drop meeting drop, coalescing into larger blobs like mercury spilled on a lab table and just as poisonous. Or perhaps more like antibodies in a bloodstream. The men splashed into them as they moved and the water clung to their skin, searing wherever it touched.

Simco appeared at the door demanding a report for the captain. Max ignored him. Paint peeled off the overheating reactor, curling like bits of ash as it burned away. Water that hit its surface boiled away into steam, but the steam hit the other water, and became drops again instantly, a swirling rain that never fell. And, except for the dead tone of the radiation alarms, it all happened in silence, with no one in the monitor room speaking for long minutes, and no sound at all from the reactor room.

Noyes appeared beside Max. “That man needs to come out right now to have those burns treated,” he said, tapping at one of the monitors. Glowing circles spun in slow lambent spirals on one man’s buttocks.

Max laughed, a sound that came out of his mouth only as a breathless sigh. Those are tattoos, Doc. Jets. Lightning bug juice impregnated in the subdermal cells.”

“I’ve . . . never heard of that,” said Noyes.

“It’s supposed to bring a spacer safely home again.”

It’s an abomination,” blurted Noyes. The people of Jesusalem were against any mixing of the species. “Let’s hope it does,” he said.

“Indeed,” replied Max.

DePuy stood beside them, shaking his head. “They’re not getting it fixed.”

Max began to think he’d miscalculated badly. He hadn’t wanted anyone to look too closely at Lukinov’s corpse. He wanted the ship to turn around and head back home. But with the main engine down and the back-up scuttled, they were in big trouble.

The hatch flew open and two men came out.

“They’ve been in there almost an hour,” said Noyes, checking his chrono and calculating the damage to them.

“Is it done?” the men in the monitor room demanded. Max heard his own voice blurt out, “Is it fixed?”

But their faces were mute. The blistered flesh bubbled off as Doc wrapped them in blankets. Noyes helped one toward the shower, and Max took the other. “This is hopeless,” Noyes said, trying to clean the men. “You have to go back there now and get the other men out before they die.”

“I think we all die with the ship if they fail,” said Max.

Rambaud, one of the troopers, appeared in the door. “Message from the captain, Doc. He wants you on the bridge.”

“Tell him no.”

The trooper’s eyes kept flicking nervously to their badges. Max noticed his own was a sickly orange color. “Beg your pardon, Doc, but he’s getting ready to abandon ship. If it’s necessary.”

“If he wants to give me an order, he can come down here and do it himself,” said Noyes, shooting the burned man full of painkillers and starting an IV pump.

Rambaud fled.

Noyes stared after him. “They were going to suicide all of us anyway, for nothing. If I’m going to die, it might as well be doing my job.”

“Hell, yes.” Max’s job was getting the specifications on the deflectors to Drozhin. If the captain took the escape shuttles and flew in system, then it was Max’s duty to retrieve the chips from his quarters and get on a shuttle.

He followed Noyes back into the mouth of fire instead.

“They’re coming out!” someone shouted.

Four more men this time, in worse shape than the others. Noyes had to hypospray them full of painkillers just to get them down to the shower. Max carried the man with the tattoos. They were coal black in his skin. Whatever lived in the cells and gave them their luminescence had been killed off by the radiation.

Before they finished the others, Chevrier was brought to them, covered with burn blisters, his hands raw meat, his eyes blind. He couldn’t speak.

“Did he get it done?” shouted Max.

No one knew, so Max flew back toward the monitor room, where the handful of men who remained were arguing over the monitors. “The temperatures are still climbing,” shouted DePuy. His voice had risen an octave in pitch. “I tell you he didn’t get it running.”

“What’s going on?” asked Max.

“The pipes aren’t open,” said one of the electrician’s mates.

“Somebody needs to go in there and turn this valve here,” said DePuy. He pointed to a spot in the middle of the thick steam that surrounded the overheating reactor.

No one volunteered.

They were boys mostly, eighteen or nineteen, junior crewmen. They’d all seen the others carried out, had smelled the burned flesh, had listened to their weeping.

The cut on Max’s leg throbbed. His face and arms felt hot, burned. “I’ll go in,” he said.

Reactors were the only ship system he wasn’t officially trained on, and all the reading he’d done before the voyage seemed inadequate to the task now. But he could go in there and turn a valve. He could do that much.

He went out to the corridor and found it blocked by a man in a vacuum suit, dragging a plasma cutter on a tether and reading the manual in his palm-pad. The man turned, his face gray behind the clear mask covering his face. It was Kulakov, the chief petty officer.

For a second Max thought the man would freeze up.

Kulakov looked back down at his diagram. “Be sure to seal the locks tight behind me,” he said. “Send someone right now to levels three and four, portside, directly above us, to clear the corridors and seal the locks there. You have to do that!”

“Will do,” said Max. Then, “Carry on.”

Kulakov passed through the hatch, but when Max went to seal it, the freshwater supply tubing blocked it. “Damn,” he said, with a very bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Then DePuy was there beside him with a clamp and some cutters. He severed the pipe, and tossed the loose end through the hatch after Kulakov. Max sealed the door. “Did someone go to three and four?”

DePuy nodded. “But I’ll go double-check,” he added, glancing at the bare spot where Max’s comet should have been. No, he was looking at Max’s radiation badge. It was orange-red, bleeding into a bright crimson.

“You better head over to see Doc,” said the electrician’s mate at the monitors.

“Not yet,” said Max.

On the video feed they watched Kulakov move methodically from point to point, comparing the hook-up and settings with the diagram on his palm-pad. It took him much longer than it had Chevrier when he was naked. A couple times it was clear that between the fog, and the loss of sensation caused by the suit, Kulakov became disoriented crossing an open space. He spun in circles until he found the right side up again. He reached the final valve but couldn’t turn it. He peeled his gloves off, surrounded by the steam, and slowly cranked it over.

The electrician’s mate pounded the monitors. “It’s running! Look at the temps drop!”

Max did, but he watched Kulakov too as he struggled to put his gloves back on, picked up the plasma cutter, and then burned a hole through the hull.

The weeping sound of the radiation alarms was joined by the sudden keening of the hull breech alarms. The whole ship shuddered, the bulkhead creaked beside him, and Max’s ears popped.

But he kept his eyes fixed on the screen in the reactor room. The steam and all the radioactive water whooshed out of the ship. So did Lukinov’s body. And so did Kulakov.

There was a dark, flat line straight across one of the screens, like a dead reading on a monitor.

Kulakov’s tether.

“Hey look!” whispered one of the crewmen as Max entered the sick bay. “The Corpse is up and walking!”

They all laughed at that, the survivors, even Max. Chevrier was dead, and so was Rucker, and so were two other men. Of the six surviving men who’d received red badge levels of radiation exposure, only Max was strong enough to walk.

Kulakov sat in the middle of them. His hands were wrapped in bandages, two crooked, crippled hooks. Max nodded to him. “They still giving you a hard time?” he asked.

“You know it,” grinned Kulakov.

“Well it’s not fair that he should be the only one who gets leave while we’re on this voyage,” said one of the men.

“How can it be shore leave without a shore, that’s what I want to know,” said Kulakov.

They all laughed again, even Max. That was going to be a ship joke for a long time, how Kulakov got liberty—hanging on a tether outside the ship.

“Papa sent me down here with a message,” said Max. Captain Petoskey, Papa, had only been to the sick bay once since the accident, and quickly. Most of the other crewman stayed away as if radiation sickness were something contagious.

“What is it?” said Kulakov, the words thick in his throat.

“He wanted me to tell you that he’s going to request that they rename the ship.” The crewmen looked up at him seriously, all the humor gone from their eyes. “They’re going to call it the New Nazareth.”

New Nazareth had been nuked the worst by the Adareans. The land there still glowed in the dark.

Kulakov chuckled first, then the other men broke out laughing. Max saluted them, holding himself stiff for a full three seconds, then turned to go see Noyes. The medtech slumped in his chair, head sprawled across his arms on the desk, eyes closed. “I’m not sleeping,” he muttered. “I’m just thinking.”

“About your fiancée,” asked Max, “waiting for you at home?”

“No, about the bone marrow cultures I’ve got growing in the vats, and the skin sheets, and the transplant surgery I have to do later this afternoon, that I’ve never done unassisted before, and the one I have to do tonight that I’m not trained to do at all.” He twisted his head, peeking one eye out at Max. “And Suzan. Waiting for me. And the ship flying home. How are you feeling?”

“I’d be fine if you had any spare teeth,” Max said, poking his tongue into the empty spots in his gums. That didn’t feel as strange as having gravity under his feet again.

“They’re in a drawer over by the sink,” said Noyes. “Take two and call me in the morning.”

MAX WALKED THROUGH corridors considerably less crowded than they had been a few days before. Almost everything inside the ship had received some radiation. The crewmen went crate to crate with geiger counters deciding what could be saved and what should be jettisoned. With the grav back on, the men’s appetites returned. They also had a year’s worth of supplies and only a short voyage ahead of them, so every meal became a feast. Some celebrated the fact that they were going home, and others the simple fact that they’d survived.

Only Captain Petoskey failed to join the celebration. When Max entered the galley, Petoskey wore the expression of a man on the way to the lethal injection chamber. Max couldn’t say for sure if it was the condemned man’s expression or the executioner’s.

Ensign Reedy sat on one side of a long table, with two troopers standing guard behind her. Petoskey and Commander Gordet sat on the opposite side with Simco standing at attention. Petoskey looked naked without his beard, shorn before they recorded these official proceedings. Burdick, the other intelligence officer, sat off to one end.

Petoskey invited Max to the empty seat beside him. “Are you sure you feel up to this, Nikomedes?”

“Doc says I’ll be fine as long as it’s brief.”

“This’ll be quick.”

Petoskey turned on the recorder and read the regulations calling a board of inquiry. “Ensign Reedy, do you wish to make a confession of your crimes at this time?”

Max looked at the youngster. He hadn’t seen or spoken to her since he’d taken the chips in the radio room. If Reedy broke and told them what Max had done, then the entire gamble was for naught.

“I have nothing to confess,” Reedy said.

“Corporal Burdick,” continued Petoskey, “will you describe what you found in the radio room.”

“The equipment had been disassembled and the memory chips replaced with spares.” He made eye contact with no one. “This happened sometime during the last shift when Lieutenant Lukinov and Ensign Reedy were on duty together.”

“Sergeant Simco, please describe your actions.”

“Sir, we made a complete search of Ensign Reedy’s person and belongings looking for the items described by Corporal Burdick. We found nothing there, nor in any place she is known to have visited. We also searched Lieutenant Lukinov’s belongings and found nothing.”

“Lieutenant Nikomedes,” continued Petoskey. “Would you describe what you saw in the radio room.” He added the exact date and shift.

Max repeated his story about the battery short circuit. “If Lukinov removed the chips that Ensign Burdick described, and he had them on him, then they were spaced.”

Petoskey nodded. “Yes, I’ve thought of that. Ensign Reedy, can you explain what happened to the chips containing the communications from the neutral ship?”

“No sir, I cannot.”

“Were you and Lieutenant Lukinov working together as spies for the Adareans?”

“I was not,” answered Reedy. “I can’t speak for the lieutenant, as I was not in his confidence.”

Petoskey slammed his fist on the table. “I think you’re a coward, Reedy. You’re too weak to take responsibility for your actions. I’d tell you to act like a man, but you’re not.”

If Petoskey hoped to provoke Reedy, then his gambit failed. She sat there, placid as a lake on a still summer day.

“Can we conduct a medical interrogation?” interjected Max.

Petoskey went to tug at his beard, but his fingers clutched at emptiness. “I’ve discussed that already with the surgeon and Commander Gordet. Noyes is only a medtech and not qualified to conduct an interrogation that will hold up in military court. Conceivably, we could even taint the later results of a test.”

Max leaned forward. “Can we use more . . . traditional methods?”

“I won’t command it,” said Petoskey, looking directly into the recorder. He waited for Max to speak again.

Max ran his tongue over the loose replacement teeth, saying nothing, and leaned back. He might get out of this, after all.

“However, if you think . . .,” said Petoskey.

Max looked at the camera. “Without an immediate danger, we should follow standard procedures.”

Petoskey accepted this disappointment and concluded the proceedings with a provisional declaration of guilt. He ordered Reedy confined to the brig until they returned to Jesusalem.

As Max limped back toward his quarters afterward he noticed that Gordet followed him.

“What can I do for you, Commander?” asked Max.

The bull-shaped second-in-command looked around nervously, then leaned in close. “There’s something you should know, sir.”

“What?” asked Max wearily. “That Petoskey ordered Simco to kill me, that he intended to blame it on Reedy, and then have her arrested and executed?”

Gordet jerked back. “Did you check the secret orders too?”

“What does it matter now? Simco failed, Reedy’s arrested anyway, and we’re on our way home. A bit of advice for you, Mr. Gordet.” He clapped him on the shoulder. “Next time you should pick your horse before the race is over.”

He walked away. When he returned to his room, he recovered the sheet with the combination from its hiding spot and destroyed it. He didn’t know what the secret orders said. He didn’t care.

There was only one thing he had left to do.

THIRD SHIFT, NIGHT rotation, normal schedule. Max headed down to the brig carrying a black bag. One of Simco’s troopers stood guard. “I’m here to interrogate the prisoner,” Max said.

“Let me check with Sergeant Simco, sir.”

Max had been thinking hard about this. Only two people knew that he had the plans for the deflector, and the only way two people could keep a secret was if one of them was dead.

“Sarge wants to know if you need help,” said the trooper.

“Tell him that I take full responsibility for this, in the name of the Department of Political Education, and that no assistance will be necessary.”

The trooper relayed this information, then gave Max a short, sneering nod. “He says he understands. Perfectly. But he wants me to make sure that you’ll be safe in there.”

Max patted a hand on his black bag. “If you hear screaming,” he said, “don’t interrupt us unless it’s mine.”

The trooper twitched uncomfortably under Max’s glare. “Yes, sir.” He opened the door for Max.

Reedy twitched then sat up quickly on the edge of her bunk. Her wrists and ankles were cuffed, and she wore insignialess fatigues. She folded her hands on her knees, fingertip to fingertip, pressed together hard enough to turn her knuckles white.

He stepped inside. The room was barely eight feet by four, with a bed on one wall and a stainless steel toilet built into the corner opposite the door, “That’ll be all, trooper,” Max said. “I’ll signal you when I’m done.”

The hatch closed behind him and latched shut. He looked at Reedy. Her eyes were red and puffy but devoid of feeling, her cheeks hollow and drawn. A blue vein stood out vulnerably on her pale neck.

With his lips tight, Max gave her a small nod. He removed a wand from his bag and searched the room for bugs. She watched closely while he located and destroyed them.

“You look depressed,” he said quietly when he was done.

She shook her head, once. “No, I’ve been depressed before. This time it’s not bad.”

“Define not bad.”

“It’s bad when you want to kill yourself. Right now, I just wish I was dead. That’s not bad.”

Max sat down with his back against the door and opened his bag. He removed two tumblers and a bottle of ouzo. The ensign remained perfectly still as Max pulled out a plate, and ripped open vacuum-wrapped packages of cheese, sausages, and anchovies to set on it.

“Not proper mezedes at all,” he said apologetically. “The fish should always be fresh.”

He filled one cup and pushed it over toward Reedy, then poured and swallowed his own. It tasted like licorice, reminding him both of his childhood and his days as a young man in completely different ways. Reedy remained immobile.

“I’ve been thinking.” Max spoke very quietly, unbuttoning his collar. “When two men know a secret, it’s only safe if one of them is dead.” Good men had died already because of this. So would many more, likely enough, along with the bad. “Therefore you don’t know anything. Only I, and Lukinov, and Luldnov’s dead. Do you understand this?”

“I don’t know anything,” Reedy said, with just a hint of irony. She reached over and lifted the glass of ouzo with both hands.

“My department will declare you the most politically sound of officers. Intelligence will know the truth, at least at the level that matters. Drozhin will get the captain’s official report, but he’ll get another report unofficially. You’ll be fine.” He picked up an anchovy. “There will be a very difficult time, a very ugly court-martial. But you can survive that.”

“Again?”

“Again. This one will not be removed from the record due to extenuating circumstances.” Her attack on Vance had been one of self-defense. “But you’ll be exonerated. You’ll be fine. Things are changing. They’ll be better.” He believed that.

She leaned her head back and tossed down the ouzo. Max reached over and poured her another glass while her eyes were still watering. “When I got this assignment,” she said, “I couldn’t figure out if I was being rewarded for being at the top of the class in languages, despite being a woman. Or if I was being punished for being a woman.”

“Sometimes it’s both ways at once,” Max said. He bit the anchovy and found he didn’t care for the taste.

“Can I ask you one question?” asked Reedy.

Why did people always think he had all the answers? “Information is like ouzo. A little bit can clear your head, make you feel better. Too much will make you sick, maybe even kill you.” He twirled his cup. “What’s your question?”

“Did you really win your wife in a card game?”

“Yes.” He drained his glass to cover his surprise. Though he’d won her with a bluff and not by cheating.

“Why did she leave you?”

Max thought about telling her that was two questions. Then he thought about telling her the truth, that his wife hadn’t left him, that she waited at home for him, not knowing where he was or what he did, going to church every day, caring for their two grandchildren. His daughter was about Reedy’s age. But he’d kept his life sealed in separate compartments and wouldn’t breech one of them now.

“Love, like loyalty,” he said, “is a gift. You can only try to be worthy of it.”

The silence lengthened out between them like all of the empty, uncharted universe. The food sat untouched while they drank. Max could feel himself getting drunk. It felt good.

BREATHMOSS

Ian R. MacLeod

1.

In her twelfth standard year, which on Habara was the Season of Soft Rains, Jalila moved across the mountains with her mothers from the high plains of Tabuthal to the coast. For all of them, the journey down was one of unhurried discovery, with the kamasheens long gone and the world freshly moist, and the hayawans rusting as they rode them, the huge flat plates of their feet swishing through purplish-green undergrowth. She saw the cliffs and qasrs she’d only visited from her dreamtent, and sailed across the high ridges on ropewalks her distant ancestors had built, which had seemed frail and antique to her in her worried imaginings, but were in fact strong and subtle; huge dripping gantries heaving from the mist like wise giants, softly humming, and welcoming her and her hayawan, whom she called Robin, in cocoons of effortless embrace. Swaying over the drop beyond into grey-green nothing was almost like flying.

The strangest thing of all in this journey of discoveries was that the landscape actually seemed to rise higher as they descended and encamped and descended again; the sense of up increased, rather than that of down. The air on the high plains of Tabuthal was rarefied—Jalila knew that from her lessons in her dreamtent; they were so close to the stars that Pavo had had to clap a mask over her face from the moment of her birth until the breathmoss was embedded in her lungs. And it had been clear up there, it was always clear, and it was pleasantly cold. The sun shone all day hard and cold and white from the blue blackness, as did a billion stars at night, although Jalila had never thought of those things as she ran amid the crystal trees and her mothers smiled at her and occasionally warned her that, one day, all of this would have to change.

And now that day was upon her, and this landscape—as Robin, her, hayawan, rounded the path through an urrearth forest of alien-looking trees with wrinkled brown trunks and soft green leaves, and the land fell away, and she caught her first glimpse of something far and flat on the horizon—had never seemed so high.

Down on the coast, the mountains reared behind them and around a bay. There were many people here—not the vast numbers, perhaps, of Jalila’s dreamtent stories of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds, but so many that she was sure, as she first walked the streets of a town where the buildings huddled in ridiculous proximity, and tried not to stare at all the faces, that she would never know all their families.

Because of its position at the edge of the mountains, the town was called Al Janb, and, to Jalila’s relief, their new haramlek was some distance away from it, up along a near-unnoticeable dirt track that meandered off from the blue-black serraplated coastal road. There was much to be done there by way of repair, after the long season that her bondmother Lya had left the place deserted. The walls were fused stone, but the structure of the roof had been mostly made from the stuff of the same strange urrearth trees that grew up the mountains, and in many places it had sagged and leaked and grown back toward the chaos that seemed to want to encompass everything here. The hayawans, too, needed much attention in their makeshift stables as they adapted to this new climate, and mother Pavo was long employed constructing the necessary potions to mend the bleeding bonds of rusty metal and flesh, and then to counteract the mold that grew like slow tears across their long, solemn faces. Jalila would normally have been in anguish to think of the sufferings that this new climate was visiting on Robin, but she was too busy feeling ill herself to care. Ridiculously, seeing as there was so much more oxygen to breathe in this rich coastal air, every lungful became a conscious effort, a dreadful physical lunge. Inhaling the damp, salty, spore-laden atmosphere was like sucking soup through a straw. She grew feverish for a while, and suffered the attentions of similar molds to those that were growing over Robin, yet in even more irritating and embarrassing places. More irritating still was the fact that Ananke her birthmother and Lya her bondmother—even Pavo, who was still busily attending to the hayawans—treated her discomforts and fevers with airy disregard. They had, they all assured her vaguely, suffered similarly in their own youths. And the weather would soon change in any case. To Jalila, who had spent all her life in the cool unvarying glare of Tabuthal, where the wind only ever blew from one direction and the trees jingled like ice, that last statement might as well have been spoken in another language.

If anything, Jalila was sure that she was getting worse. The rain drummed on what there was of the roof of their haramlek, and dripped down and pooled in the makeshift awnings, which burst in bucketloads down your neck if you bumped into them, and the mist drifted in from every direction through the paneless windows, and the mountains, most of the time, seemed to consist of cloud, or to have vanished entirely. She was coughing. Strange stuff was coming out on her hands, slippery and green as the slime that tried to grow everywhere here. One morning, she awoke, sure that part of her was bursting, and stumbled from her dreamtent and out through the scaffolding that had by then surrounded the haramlek, then barefoot down the mud track and across the quiet black road and down onto the beach, for no other reason than that she needed to escape.

She stood gasping amid the rockpools, her hair lank and her skin feverishly itching. There was something at the back of her throat. There was something in her lungs. She was sure that it had taken root and was growing. Then she started coughing as she had never coughed before, and more of the greenstuff came splattering over her hands and down her chin. She doubled over. Huge lumps of it came showering out, strung with blood. If it hadn’t been mostly green, she’d have been sure that it was her lungs. She’d never imagined anything so agonizing. Finally, though, in heaves and starts and false dawns, the process dwindled. She wiped her hands on her nightdress. The rocks all around her were splattered green. It was breathmoss; the stuff that had sustained her on the high plains. And now look at it! Jalila took a slow, cautious breath. And then another. Her throat ached. Her head was throbbing. But still, the process was suddenly almost ridiculously easy. She picked her way back across the beach, up through the mists to her haramlek. Her mothers were eating breakfast. Jalila sat down with them, wordlessly, and started to eat.

That night, Ananke came and sat with Jalila as she lay in her dreamtent in plain darkness and tried not to listen to the sounds of the rain falling on and through the creaking, dripping building. Even now, her birthmother’s hands smelled and felt like the high desert as they touched her face. Rough and clean and warm, like rocks in starlight, giving off their heat. A few months before, Jalila would probably have started crying.

“You’ll understand now, perhaps, why we thought it better not to tell you about the breathmoss . . .?”

There was a question mark at the end of the sentence, but Jalila ignored it. They’d known all along! She was still angry.

“And there are other things, too, which will soon start to happen to your body. Things that are nothing to do with this place. And I shall now tell you about them all, even though you’ll say you knew it before. . . .”

The smooth, rough fingers stroked her hair. As Ananke’s words unraveled, telling Jalila of changings and swellings and growths she’d never thought would really apply to her, and which these fetid lowlands really seemed to have brought closer, Jalila thought of the sound of the wind, tinkling through the crystal trees up on Tabuthal. She thought of the dry cold wind in her face. The wet air here seemed to enclose her. She wished that she was running. She wanted to escape.

Small though Al Janb was, it was as big a town as Jalila had ever seen, and she soon came to volunteer to run all the various errands that her mothers required as they restored and repaired their haramlek. She was used to wide expanses, big horizons, the surprises of a giant landscape that crept upon you slowly, visible for miles. Yet here, every turn brought abrupt surprise and sudden change. The people had such varied faces and accents. They hung their washing across the streets, and bickered and smoked in public. Some ate with both hands. They stared at you as you went past, and didn’t seem to mind if you stared back at them. There were unfamiliar sights and smells, markets that erupted on particular days to the workings of no calendar Jalila yet understood, and which sold, in glittering, shining, stinking, disgusting, fascinating arrays, the strangest and most wonderful things. There were fruits from off-planet, spices shaped like insects, and insects that you crushed for their spice. There were swarming vats of things Jalila couldn’t possibly imagine any use for, and bright silks woven thin as starlit wind that she longed for with an acute physical thirst. And there were aliens, too, to be glimpsed sometimes wandering the streets of Al Janb, or looking down at you from its overhung top windows like odd pictures in old frames. Some of them carried their own atmosphere around with them in bubbling hookahs, and some rolled around in huge grey bits of the sea of their own planets, like babies in a birthsac. Some of them looked like huge versions of the spice insects, and the air around them buzzed angrily if you got too close. The only thing they had in common was that they seemed blithely unaware of Jalila as she stared and followed them, and then returned inexcusably late from whatever errand she’d supposedly been sent on. Sometimes, she forgot her errands entirely.

“You must learn to get used to things. . . .” Lya her bondmother said to her with genuine irritation late one afternoon, when she’d come back without the tool she’d been sent to get early that morning, or even any recollection of its name or function. “This or any other world will never be a home to you if you let every single thing surprise you. . . .” But Jalila didn’t mind the surprises; in fact, she was coming to enjoy them, and the next time the need arose to visit Al Janb to buy a new growth-crystal for the scaffolding, she begged to be allowed to go, and her mothers finally relented, although with many a warning shake of the head.

The rain had stopped at last, or at least held back for a whole day, although everything still looked green and wet to Jalila as she walked along the coastal road toward the ragged tumble of Al Janb. She understood, at least in theory, that the rain would probably return, and then relent, and then come back again, but in a decreasing pattern, much as the heat was gradually increasing, although it still seemed ridiculous to her that no one could ever predict exactly how, or when, Habara’s proper Season of Summers would arrive. Those boats she could see now, those fisherwomen out on their feluccas beyond the white bands of breaking waves, their whole lives were dictated by these uncertainties, and the habits of the shoals of whiteback that came and went on the oceans, and which could also only be guessed at in this same approximate way. The world down here on the coast was so unpredictable compared with Tabuthal! The markets, the people, the washing, the sun, the rain, the aliens. Even Hayam and Walah, Habara’s moons, which Jalila was long used to watching, had to drag themselves through cloud like cannonballs through cotton as they pushed and pulled at this ocean. Yet today, as she clambered over the groynes of the long shingle beach that she took as a shortcut to the center of the town when the various tides were out, she saw a particular sight that surprised her more than any other.

There was a boat, hauled far up from the water, longer and blacker and heavier-looking than the feluccas, with a sort-of ramshackle house at the prow, and a winch at the stern that was so massive that Jalila wondered if it wouldn’t tip the craft over if it ever actually entered the water. But, for all that, it wasn’t the boat that first caught her eye, but the figure who was working on it. Even from a distance, as she struggled to heave some ropes, there was something different about her, and the way she was moving. Another alien? But she was plainly human. And barefoot, in ragged shorts, and bare-breasted. In fact, almost as flat-chested as Jalila still was, and probably of about her age and height. Jalila still wasn’t used to introducing herself to strangers, but she decided that she could at least go over, and pretend an interest in—or an ignorance of—this odd boat.

The figure dropped another loop of rope over the gunwales with a grunt that carried on the smelly sea breeze. She was brown as tea, with her massy hair hooped back and hanging in a long tail down her back. She was broad-shouldered, and moved in that way that didn’t quite seem wrong, but didn’t seem entirely right either. As if, somewhere across her back, there was an extra joint. When she glanced up at the clatter of shingle as Jalila jumped the last groyne, Jalila got a proper full sight of her face, and saw that she was big-nosed, big-chinned, and that her features were oddly broad and flat. A child sculpting a person out of clay might have done better.

“Have you come to help me?”

Jalila shrugged. “I might have done.”

“That’s a funny accent you’ve got.”

They were standing facing each other. She had grey eyes, which looked odd as well. Perhaps she was an off-worlder. That might explain it. Jalila had heard that there were people who had things done to themselves so they could live in different places. She supposed the breathmoss was like that, although she’d never thought of it that way. And she couldn’t quite imagine why it would be a requirement for living on any world that you looked this ugly.

“Everyone talks oddly here,” she replied. “But then your accent’s funny as well.”

“I’m Kalal. And that’s just my voice. It’s not an accent.” Kalal looked down at her oily hands, perhaps thought about wiping one and offering it to shake, then decided not to bother.

“Oh . . .?”

“You don’t get it, do you?” That gruff voice. The odd way her features twisted when she smiled.

“What is there to get? You’re just—”

“—I’m a man.” Kalal picked up a coil of rope from the shingle, and nodded to another beside it. “Well? Are you going to help me with this, or aren’t you?”

The rains came again, this time starting as a thing called drizzle, then working up the scale to torrent. The tides washed especially high. There were storms, and white crackles of lightening, and the boom of a wind that was so unlike the kamasheen. Jalila’s mothers told her to be patient, to wait, and to remember—please remember this time, so you don’t waste the day for us all, Jalilaneen—the things that they sent her down the serraplate road to get from Al Janb. She trudged under an umbrella, another new and useless coastal object, which turned itself inside out so many times that she ended up throwing it into the sea, where it floated off quite happily, as if that was the element for which it was intended in the first place. Almost all of the feluccas were drawn up on the far side of the roadway, safe from the madly bashing waves, but there was no sign of that bigger craft belonging to Kalal. Perhaps he—the antique genderative word was he, wasn’t it?—was out there, where the clouds rumbled like boulders. Perhaps she’d imagined their whole encounter entirely.

Arriving back home at the haramlek surprisingly quickly, and carrying for once the things she’d been ordered to get, Jalila dried herself off and buried herself in her dreamtent, trying to find out from it all that she could about these creatures called men. Like so many things about life at this awkward, interesting, difficult time, men were something Jalila would have insisted she definitely already knew about a few months before up on Tabuthal. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Kalal, despite his ugliness and his funny rough-squeaky voice and his slightly odd smell, looked little like the hairy-faced werewolf figures of her childhood stories, and seemed to have no particular need to shout or fight, to carry her off to his rancid cave, or to start collecting odd and pointless things that he would then try to give her. There had once, Jalila’s dreamtent told her, for obscure biological reasons she didn’t quite follow, been far more men in the universe; almost as many as there had been women. Obviously, they had dwindled. She then checked on the word rape, to make sure it really was the thing she’d imagined, shuddered, but nevertheless investigated in full holographic detail the bits of himself that Kalal had kept hidden beneath his shorts as she’d helped stow those ropes. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. It was all so pointless and ugly. Had his birth been an accident? A curse? She began to grow sleepy. The subject was starting to bore her. The last thing she remembered learning was that Kalal wasn’t a proper man at all, but a boy—a half-formed thing; the equivalent to girl—another old urrearth word. Then sleep drifted over her, and she was back with the starlight and the crystal trees of Tabuthal, and wondering as she danced with her own reflection which of them was changing.

By next morning, the sun was shining as if she would never stop. As Jalila stepped out onto the newly formed patio, she gave the blazing light the same sort of an appraising what-are-you-up-to-now glare that her mothers gave her when she returned from Al Janb. The sun had done this trick before of seeming permanent, then vanishing by lunchtime into sodden murk, but today her brilliance continued. As it did the day after. And the day after that. Half a month later, even Jalila was convinced that the Season of Summers on Habara had finally arrived.

The flowers went mad, as did the insects. There were colors everywhere, pulsing before your eyes, swarming down the cliffs toward the sea, which lay flat and placid and salt-rimed, like a huge animal, basking. It remained mostly cool in Jalila’s dreamtent, and the haramlek by now was a place of tall malqaf windtowers and flashing fans and well-like depths, but stepping outside beyond the striped shade of the mashrabiyas at midday felt like being hit repeatedly across the head with a hot iron pan. The horizons had drawn back; the mountains, after a few last rumbles of thunder and mist, as if they were clearing their throats, had finally announced themselves to the coastline in all their majesty, and climbed up and up in huge stretches of forest into stone limbs that rose and tangled until your eyes grew tired of rising. Above them, finally, was the sky, which was always blue in this season; the blue color of flame. Even at midnight, you caught the flash and swirl of flame.

Jalila learned to follow the advice of her mothers, and to change her daily habits to suit the imperious demands of this incredible, fussy, and demanding weather. If you woke early, and then drank lots of water, and bowed twice in the direction of Al’Toman while she was still a pinprick in the west, you could catch the day by surprise, when dew lay on the stones and pillars, and the air felt soft and silky as the arms of the ghostly women who sometimes visited Jalila’s nights. Then there was breakfast, and the time of work, and the time of study, and Ananke and Pavo would quiz Jalila to ensure that she was following the prescribed Orders of Knowledge. By midday, though, the shadows had drawn back and every trace of moisture had evaporated, and your head swarmed with flies. You sought your own company, and didn’t even want that, and wished, as you tossed and sweated in your dreamtent, for frost and darkness. Once or twice, just to prove to herself that it could be done, Jalila had tried walking to Al Janb at this time, although of course everything was shut and the whole place wobbled and stank in the heat like rancid jelly. She returned to the haramlek gritty and sweaty, almost crawling, and with a pounding ache in her head.

By evening, when the proper order of the world had righted itself, and Al’Toman would have hung in the east if the mountains hadn’t swallowed her, and the heat, which never vanished, had assumed a smoother, more manageable quality, Jalila’s mothers were once again hungry for company, and for food and for argument. These evenings, perhaps, were the best of all the times that Jalila could remember of her early life on the coast of Habara’s single great ocean, at that stage in her development from child to adult when the only thing of permanence seemed to be the existence of endless, fascinating change. How they argued! Lya, her bondmother, and the oldest of her parents, who wore her grey hair loose as cobwebs with the pride of her age, and waved her arms as she talked and drank, wreathed in endless curls of smoke. Little Pavo, her face smooth as a carved nutmeg, with her small, precise hands, and who knew so much but rarely said anything with insistence. And Jalila’s birthmother Ananke, for whom, of her three mothers, Jalila had always felt the deepest, simplest love, who would always touch you before she said anything, and then fix you with her sad and lovely eyes, as if touching and seeing were far more important than any words. Jalila was older now. She joined in with the arguments—of course, she had always joined in, but she cringed to think of the stumbling inanities to which her mothers had previously had to listen, while, now, at last, she had real, proper things to say about life, whole new philosophies that no one else on the Ten Thousand Worlds and One had ever thought of. . . . Most of the time, her mothers listened. Sometimes, they even acted as if they were persuaded by their daughter’s wisdom.

Frequently, there were visitors to these evening gatherings. Up on Tabuthal, visitors had been rare animals, to be fussed over and cherished and only reluctantly released for their onward journey across the black dazzling plains. Down here, where people were nearly as common as stones on the beach, a more relaxed attitude reigned. Sometimes, there were formal invitations that Lya would issue to someone who was this or that in the town, or more often Pavo would come back with a person she had happened to meet as she poked around for lifeforms on the beach, or Ananke would softly suggest a neighbor (another new word and concept to Jalila) might like to pop in (ditto). But Al Janb was still a small town, and the dignitaries generally weren’t that dignified, and Pavo’s beach wanderers were often shy and slight as she was, while neighbor was frequently a synonym for boring. Still, Jalila came to enjoy most kinds of company, if only so that she could hold forth yet more devastatingly on whatever universal theory of life she was currently developing.

The flutter of lanterns and hands. The slow breath of the sea. Jalila ate stuffed breads and foul and picked at the mountains of fruit and sucked lemons and sweet blue rutta and waved her fingers. The heavy night insects, glowing with the pollen they had collected, came bumbling toward the lanterns or would alight in their hands. Sometimes, afterward, they walked the shore, and Pavo would show them strange creatures with blurring mouths like wheels, or point to the vast, distant beds of the tideflowers that rose at night to the changes of the tide; silver, crimson, or glowing, their fronds waving through the dark like the beckoning palm trees of islands from storybook seas.

One guestless night, when they were walking north away from the lights of the town, and Pavo was filling a silver bag for an aquarium she was ostensibly making for Jalila, but in reality for herself, the horizon suddenly cracked and rumbled. Instinctively by now, Jalila glanced overhead, expecting clouds to be covering the coastal haze of stars. But the air was still and clear; the hot dark edge of that blue flame. Across the sea, the rumble and crackle was continuing, accompanied by a glowing pillar of smoke that slowly tottered over the horizon. The night pulsed and flickered. There was a breath of impossibly hot salt air. The pillar, a wobbly finger with a flame-tipped nail, continued climbing skyward. A few geelies rose and fell, clacking and cawing, on the far rocks; black shapes in the darkness.

“It’s the start of the Season of Rockets,” Lya said. “I wonder who’ll be coming . . .?”

2.

By now, Jalila had acquired many of her own acquaintances and friends. Young people were relatively scarce amid the long-lived human Habarans, and those who dwelt around Al Janb were continually drawn together and then repulsed from each other like spinning magnets. The elderly mahwagis, who had outlived the need for wives and the company of a haramlek and lived alone, were often more fun, and more reliably eccentric. It was a relief to visit their houses and escape the pettinesses and sexual jealousies that were starting to infect the other girls near to Jalila’s own age. She regarded Kalal similarly—as an escape—and she relished helping him with his boat, and enjoyed their journeys out across the bay, where the wind finally tipped almost cool over the edge of the mountains and lapped the sweat from their faces.

Kalal took Jalila out to see the rocketport one still, hot afternoon. It lay just over the horizon, and was the longest journey they had undertaken. The sails filled with the wind, and the ocean grew almost black, yet somehow transparent, as they hurried over it. Looking down, Jalila believed that she could glimpse the white sliding shapes of the great sea-leviathans who had once dwelt, if local legend was to be believed, in the ruined rock palaces of the qasrs, which she had passed on her journey down from Tabuthal. Growing tired of sunlight, they had swarmed back to the sea that had birthed them, throwing away their jewels and riches, which bubbled below the surface, then rose again under Habara’s twin moons to become the beds of tideflowers. She had gotten that part of the story from Kalal. Unlike most people who lived on the coast, Kalal was interested in Jalila’s life in the starry darkness of Tabuthal, and repaid her with his own tales of the ocean.

The boat ploughed on, rising, frothing. Blissfully, it was almost cold. Just how far out at sea was this rocketport? Jalila had watched some of the arrivals and departures from the quays at Al Janb, but those journeys took place in sleek sailless craft with silver doors that looked, as they turned out from the harbor and rose out on stilts from the water, as if they could travel half-way up to the stars on their own. Kalal was squatting at the prow, beyond that ramshackle hut that Jalila now knew contained the pheromones and grapplers that were needed to ensnare the tideflowers that this craft had been built to harvest. The boat bore no name on the prow, yet Kalal had many names for it, which he would occasionally mention without explaining. If there was one thing that was different about Kalal. Jalila had decided, it was this absence of proper talk or explanation. It put many people off, but she had found that most things became apparent if you just hung around him and didn’t ask direct questions.

People generally pitied Kalal, or stared at him as Jalila still stared at the aliens, or asked him questions that he wouldn’t answer with anything other than a shrug. Now that she knew him better, Jalila was starting to understand just how much he hated such treatment—almost as much, in fact, as he hated being thought of as ordinary. I am a man, you know, he’d still remark sometimes—whenever he felt that Jalila was forgetting. Jalila had never yet risked pointing out that he was in fact a boy. Kalal could be prickly and sensitive if you treated him as if things didn’t matter. It was hard to tell, really, just how much of how he acted was due to his odd sexual identity, and how much was his personality.

To add to his freakishness, Kalal lived alone with another male—in fact, the only other male in Al Janb—at the far end of the shore cottages, in a birthing relationship that made Kalal term him his father. His name was Ibra, and he looked much more like the males of Jalila’s dreamtent stories. He was taller than almost anyone, and wore a black beard and long colorful robes or strode about bare-chested, and always talked in a thunderously deep voice, as if he were addressing a crowd through a megaphone. Ibra laughed a lot and flashed his teeth through that hairy mask, and clapped people on the back when he asked them how they were, and then stood away and seemed to lose interest before they had answered. He whistled and sang loudly and waved to passers-by while he worked at repairing the feluccas for his living. Ibra had come to this planet when Kalal was a baby, under circumstances that remained perennially vague. He treated Jalila with the same loud and grinning friendship with which he treated everyone, and which seemed like a wall. He was at least as alien as the tube-like creatures who had arrived from the stars with this new Season of Rockets, which had had one of the larger buildings in Al Janb encased in transparent plastics and flooded in a freezing grey goo so they could live in it. Ibra had come around to their haramlek once, on the strength of one of Ananke’s pop in evening invitations. Jalila, who was then nurturing the idea that no intelligence could exist without the desire to acknowledge some higher deity, found her propositions and examples drowned out in a flurry of counter-questions and assertions and odd bits of information that she half-suspected that Ibra, as he drank surprising amounts of virtually undiluted zibib and freckled aniseed spit at her, was making up on the spot. Afterward, as they walked the shore, he drew her apart and laid a heavy hand on her shoulder and confided in his rambling growl how much he’d enjoyed fencing with her. Jalila knew what fencing was, but she didn’t see what it had to do with talking. She wasn’t even sure if she liked Ibra. She certainly didn’t pretend to understand him.

The sails thrummed and crackled as they headed toward the spaceport. Kalal was absorbed, staring ahead from the prow, the water splashing reflections across his lithe brown body. Jalila had almost grown used to the way he looked. After all, they were both slightly freakish: she, because she came from the mountains; he, because of his sex. And they both liked their own company, and could accept each other into it without distraction during these long periods of silence. One never asked the other what they were thinking. Neither really cared, and they cherished that privacy.

“Look—” Kalal scuttled to the rudder. Jalila hauled back the jib. In wind-crackling silence, they and their nameless and many-named boat tacked toward the spaceport.

The spaceport was almost like the mountains: when you were close up, it was too big to be seen properly. Yet, for all its size, the place was a disappointment; empty and messy, like a huge version of the docks of Al Janb, similarly reeking of oil and refuse, and essentially serving a similar function. The spaceships themselves—if indeed the vast cistern-like objects they saw forever in the distance as they furled the sails and rowed along the maze of oily canals were spaceships—were only a small part of this huge floating complex of islands. Much more of it was taken up by looming berths for the tugs and tankers that placidly chugged from icy pole to equator across the watery expanses of Habara, taking or delivering the supplies that the settlements deemed necessary for civilized life, or collecting the returning fallen bulk cargoes. The tankers were rust-streaked beasts, so huge that they hardly seemed to grow as you approached them, humming and eerily deserted, yet devoid of any apparent intelligence of their own. They didn’t glimpse a single alien at the spaceport. They didn’t even see a human being.

The journey there, Jalila decided as they finally got the sails up again, had been far more enjoyable and exciting than actually arriving. Heading back toward the sun-pink coastal mountains, which almost felt like home to her now, she was filled with an odd longing that only diminished when she began to make out the lighted dusky buildings of Al Janb. Was this homesickness, she wondered? Or something else?

This was the time of Habara’s long summer. This was the Season of Rockets. When she mentioned their trip, Jalila was severely warned by Pavo of the consequences of approaching the spaceport during periods of possible launch, but it went no further than that. Each night now, and deep into the morning, the rockets rumbled at the horizon and climbed upward on those grumpy pillars, bringing to the shore a faint whiff of sulphur and roses, adding to the thunderous heat. And outside at night, if you looked up, you could sometimes see the blazing comet-trails of the returning capsules, which would crash somewhere in the distant seas.

The beds of tideflowers were growing bigger as well. If you climbed up the sides of the mountains before the morning heat flattened everything, you could look down on those huge, brilliant, and ever-changing carpets, where every pattern and swirl seemed gorgeous and unique. At night, in her dreamtent, Jalila sometimes imagined that she was floating up on them, just as in the oldest of the old stories. She was sailing over a different landscape on a magic carpet, with the cool night desert rising and falling beneath her like a soft sea. She saw distant palaces, and clusters of palms around small and tranquil lakes that flashed the silver of a single moon. And then yet more of this infinite Sahara, airy and frosty, flowed through curves and undulations, and grew vast and pinkish in her dreams. Those curves, as she flew over them and began to touch herself, resolved into thighs and breasts. The winds stirring the peaks of the dunes resolved in shuddering breaths.

This was the time of Habara’s long summer. This was the Season of Rockets.

Robin, Jalila’s hayawan, had by now, under Pavo’s attentions, fully recovered from the change to her environment. The rust had gone from her flanks, the melds with her thinly grey-furred flesh were bloodless and neat. She looked thinner and lighter. She even smelled different. Like the other hayawans, Robin was frisky and bright and brown-eyed now, and didn’t seem to mind the heat, or even Jalila’s forgetful neglect of her. Down on the coast, hayawans were regarded as expensive, uncomfortable, and unreliable, and Jalila and her mothers took a pride in riding across the beach into Al Janb on their huge, flat-footed, and loping mounts, enjoying the stares and the whispers, and the whispering space that opened around them as they hobbled the hayawans in a square. Kalal, typically, was one of the few coastal people who expressed an interest in trying to ride one of them, and Jalila was glad to teach him, showing him the clicks and calls and nudges, the way you took the undulations of the creature’s back as you might the ups and downs of the sea, and when not to walk around their front and rear ends. After her experiences on his boat, the initial rope burns, the cracks on the head and the heaving sickness, she enjoyed the reversal of situations.

There was a Tabuthal saying about falling off a hayawan ninety-nine times before you learnt to ride, which Kalal disproved by falling off far into triple figures. Jalila chose Lya’s mount Abu for him to ride, because she was the biggest, the most intelligent, and generally the most placid of the beasts unless she felt that something was threatening her, and because Lya, more conscious of looks and protocol down here than the other mothers, rarely rode her. Domestic animals, Jalila had noticed, often took oddly to Kalal when they first saw and scented him, but he had learned the ways of getting around them, and developed a bond and understanding with Abu even while she was still trying to bite his legs. Jalila had made a good choice of riding partners. Both of them, hayawan and human, while proud and aloof, were essentially playful, and never shirked a challenge. While all hayawans had been female throughout all recorded history, Jalila wondered if there wasn’t a little of the male still embedded in Abu’s imperious downward glance.

Now that summer was here, and the afternoons had vanished into the sun’s blank blaze, the best time to go riding was the early morning. North, beyond Al Janb, there were shores and there were saltbeds and there were meadows, there were fences to be leapt, and barking feral dogs as male as Kalal to be taunted, but south, there were rocks and forests, there were tracks that led nowhere, and there were headlands and cliffs that you saw once and could never find again. South, mostly, was the way that they rode.

“What happens if we keep riding?”

They were taking their breath on a flatrock shore where a stream, from which they had all drunk, shone in pools on its way to the ocean. The hayawans had squatted down now in the shadows of the cliff and were nodding sleepily, one nictitating membrane after another slipping over their eyes. As soon as they had gotten here and dismounted, Kalal had walked straight down, arms outstretched, into the tideflower-bobbing ocean. Jalila had followed, whooping, feeling tendrils and petals bumping into her. It was like walking through floral soup. Kalal had sunk to his shoulders and started swimming, which was something Jalila still couldn’t quite manage. He splashed around her, taunting, sending up sheets of colored light. They’d stripped from their clothes as they clambered out, and laid them on the hot rocks, where they now steamed like fresh bread.

“This whole continent’s like a huge island,” Jalila said in delayed answer to Kalal’s question. “We’d come back to where we started.”

Kalal shook his head. “Oh, you can never do that. . . .”

“Where would we be, then?”

“Somewhere slightly different. The tideflowers would have changed, and we wouldn’t be us, either.” Kalal wet his finger, and wrote something in naskhi script on the hot, flat stone between them. Jalila thought she recognized the words of a poet, but the beginning had dissolved into the hot air before she could make proper sense of it. Funny, but at home with her mothers, and with their guests, and even with many of the people of her own age, such statements as they had just made would have been the beginning of a long debate. With Kalal, they just seemed to hang there. Kalal, he moved, he passed on. Nothing quite seemed to stick. There was something, somewhere, Jalila thought, lost and empty about him.

The way he was sitting, she could see most of his genitals, which looked quite jaunty in their little nest of hair, like a small animal. She’d almost gotten as used to the sight of them as she had to the other peculiarities of Kalal’s features. Scratching her nose, picking off some of the petals that still clung to her skin like wet confetti, she felt no particular curiosity. Much more than Kalal’s funny body, Jalila was conscious of her own—especially her growing breasts, which were still somewhat uneven. Would they ever come out right, she wondered, or would she forever be some unlovely oddity, just as Kalal seemingly was? Better not to think of such things. Better to just enjoy the feel of the sun baking her shoulders, loosening the curls of her hair.

“Should we turn back?” Kalal asked eventually. “It’s getting hotter. . . .”

“Why bother with that—if we carry on, we’ll get back to where we started.”

Kalal stood up. “Do you want to bet?”

So they rode on, more slowly, uphill through the uncharted forest, where the urrearth trees tangled with the blue fronds of Habara fungus, and the birds were still, and the crackle of the dry undergrowth was the only sound in the air. Eventually, ducking boughs, then walking, dreamily lost and almost ready to turn back, they came to a path, and remounted. The trees fell away, and they found that they were on a clifftop, far, far higher above the winking sea than they could Possibly have imagined. Midday heat clapped around them. Ahead, where the cliff stuck out over the ocean like a cupped hand, shimmering and yet solid, was one of the ruined castles or geological features that the sea-leviathans had supposedly deserted before the arrival of people on this planet—a qasr. They rode slowly toward it, their hayawans’ feet thocking in the dust. It looked like a fairy place. Part natural, but roofed and buttressed, with grey-black gables and huge and intricate windows, that flashed with the colors of the sea. Kalal gestured for silence, dismounted from Abu, led his mount back into the shadowed arms of the forest, and flicked the switch in her back that hobbled her.

“You know where this is?”

Kalal beckoned.

Jalila, who knew him better than to ask questions, followed.

Close to, much of the qasr seemed to be made of a quartz-speckled version of the same fused stone from which Jalila’s haramlek was constructed. But some other bits of it appeared to be natural effusions of the rock. There was a big arched door of sun-bleached and iron-studded oak, reached by a path across the narrowing cliff, but Kalal steered Jalila to the side, and then up and around a bare angle of hot stone that seemed ready at any moment to tilt them down into the distant sea. But the way never quite gave out; there was always another handhold. From the confident manner in which he moved up this near-cliff face, then scrambled across the blistering black tiles of the rooftop beyond, and dropped down into the sudden cool of a narrow passageway, Jalila guessed that Kalal had been to this qasr before. At first, there was little sense of trespass. The place seemed old and empty—a little-visited monument. The ceilings were stained. The corridors were swept with the litter of winter leaves. Here and there along the walls, there were friezes, and long strings of a script which made as little sense to Jalila, in their age and dimness, as that which Kalal had written on the hot rocks.

Then Kalal gestured for Jalila to stop, and she clustered beside him, and they looked down through the intricate stone lattice of a mashrabiya into sunlight. It was plain from the balcony drop beneath them that they were still high up in this qasr. Below, in the central courtyard, somehow shocking after this emptiness, a fountain played in a garden, and water lapped from its lip and ran in steel fingers toward cloistered shadows.

“Someone lives here?”

Kalal mouthed the word tariqua. Somehow, Jalila instantly understood. It all made sense, in this Season of Rockets, even the dim scenes and hieroglyphs carved in the honeyed stones of this fairy castle. Tariquas were merely human, after all, and the spaceport was nearby; they had to live somewhere. Jalila glanced down at her scuffed sandals, suddenly conscious that she hadn’t taken them off—but by then it was too late, and below them and through the mashrabiya a figure had detached herself from the shadows. The tariqua was tall and thin, and black and bent as a burnt-out matchstick. She walked with a cane. Jalila didn’t know what she’d expected—she’d grown older since her first encounter with Kalal, and no longer imagined that she knew about things just because she’d learnt of them in her dreamtent. But still, this tariqua seemed a long way from someone who piloted the impossible distances between the stars, as she moved and clicked slowly around that courtyard fountain, and far older and frailer than anyone Jalila had ever seen. She tended a bush of blue flowers, she touched the fountain’s bubbling stone lip. Her head was ebony bald. Her fingers were charcoal. Her eyes were as white and seemingly blind as the flecks of quartz in the fused stone of this building. Once, though, she seemed to look up toward them. Jalila went cold. Surely it wasn’t possible that she could see them?—and in any event, there was something about the motion of looking up which seemed habitual. As if, like touching the lip of the fountain, and tending that bush, the tariqua always looked up at this moment of the day at that particular point in the stone walls that rose above her.

Jalila followed Kalal further along the corridors, and down stairways and across drops of beautifully clear glass, that hung on nothing far above the prismatic sea. Another glimpse of the tariqua, who was still slowly moving, her neck stretching like an old tortoise as she bent to sniff a flower. In this part of the qasr, there were more definite signs of habitation. Scattered cards and books. A moth-eaten tapestry that billowed from a windowless arch overlooking the sea. Empty coat hangers piled like the bones of insects. An active but clearly little-used chemical toilet. Now that the initial sense of surprise had gone, there was something funny about this mixture of the extraordinary and the everyday. Here, there was a kitchen, and a half-chewed lump of aish on a plate smeared with seeds. To imagine, that you could both travel between the stars and eat bread and tomatoes! Both Kalal and Jalila were red-faced and chuffing now from suppressed hilarity. Down now at the level of the cloisters, hunched in the shade, they studied the tariqua’s stooping back. She really did look like a scrawny tortoise, yanked out of its shell, moving between these bushes. Any moment now, you expected her to start chomping on the leaves. She moved more by touch than by sight. Amid the intricate colors of this courtyard, and the flashing glass windchimes that tinkled in the far archways, as she fumbled sightlessly but occasionally glanced at things with those odd, white eyes, it seemed yet more likely that she was blind, or at least terribly near-sighted. Slowly, Jalila’s hilarity receded, and she began to feel sorry for this old creature who had been aged and withered and wrecked by the strange process of travel between the stars. The Pain of Distance—now, where had that phrase come from?

Kalal was still puffing his cheeks. His eyes were watering as he ground his fist against his mouth and silently thumped the nearest pillar in agonized hilarity. Then he let out a nasal grunt, which Jalila was sure that the tariqua must have heard. But her stance didn’t alter. It wasn’t so much as if she hadn’t noticed them, but that she already knew that someone was there. There was a sadness and resignation about her movements, the tap of her cane. . . . But Kalal had recovered his equilibrium, and Jalila watched his fingers snake out and enclose a flake of broken paving. Another moment, and it spun out into the sunlit courtyard in an arc so perfect that there was never any doubt that it was going to strike the tariqua smack between her bird-like shoulders. Which it did—but by then they were running, and the tariqua was straightening herself up with that same slow resignation. Just before they bundled themselves up the stairway, Jalila glanced back, and felt a hot bar of light from one of the qasr’s high upper windows stream across her face. The tariqua was looking straight toward her with those blind white eyes. Then Kalal grabbed her hand. Once again, she was running.

Jalila was cross with herself, and cross with Kalal. It wasn’t like her, a voice like a mingled chorus of her three mothers would say, to taunt some poor old mahwagi, even if that mahwagi happened also to be an aged tariqua. But Jalila was young, and life was busy. The voice soon faded. In any case, there was the coming moulid to prepare for.

The arrangement of festivals, locally, and on Habara as a whole, was always difficult. Habara’s astronomical year was so long that it made no sense to fix the traditional cycle of moulids by it, but at the same time, no one felt comfortable celebrating the same saint or eid in conflicting seasons. Fasting, after all, properly belonged to winter, and no one could quite face their obligations toward the Almighty with quite the same sense of surrender and equanimity in the middle of spring. People’s memories faded, as well, as to how one did a particular saint in autumn, or revered a certain enlightenment in blasting heat that you had previously celebrated by throwing snowballs. Added to this were the logistical problems of catering for the needs of a small and scattered population across a large planet. There were travelling players, fairs, wandering sufis and priests, but they plainly couldn’t be everywhere at once. The end result was that each moulid was fixed locally on Habara, according to a shifting timetable, and after much discussion and many meetings, and rarely happened twice at exactly the same time, or else occurred simultaneously in different places. Lya threw herself into these discussions with the enthusiasm of one who had long been missing such complexities in the lonelier life up on Tabuthal. For the Moulid of First Habitation—which commemorated the time when the Blessed Joanna had arrived on Habara at a site that several different towns claimed, and cast the first urrearth seeds, and lived for five long Habaran years on nothing but tideflowers and starlight, and rode the sea-leviathans across the oceans as if they were hayawans as she waited for her lover Pia—Lya was the leading light in the local organizations at Al Janb, and the rest of her haramlek were expected to follow suit.

The whole of Al Janb was to be transformed for a day and a night. Jalila helped with the hammering and weaving, and tuning Pavo’s crystals and plants, which would supposedly transform the serraplate road between their haramlek and the town into a glittering tunnel. More in the forefront of Jalila’s mind were those colored silks that came and went at a particular stall in the markets, and which she was sure would look perfect on her. Between the planning and the worries about this or that turning into a disaster, she worked carefully on each of her three mothers in turn; a nudge here, a suggestion there. Turning their thoughts toward accepting this extravagance was a delicate matter, like training a new hayawan to bear the saddle. Of course, there were wild resistances and buckings, but you were patient, you were stronger. You knew what you wanted. You kept to your subject. You returned and returned and returned to it.

On the day when Ananke finally relented, a worrying wind had struck up, pushing at the soft, half-formed growths that now straggled through the normal weeds along the road into Al Janb like silvered mucus. Pavo was fretting about her creations. Lya’s life was one long meeting. Even Ananke was anxious as they walked into Al Janb, where faulty fresh projections flickered across the buildings and squares like an incipient headache as the sky greyed. Jalila, urging her birthmother on as she paused frustratingly, was sure that the market wouldn’t be there, or that if it was, the stall that sold the windsilks was sure to have sold out or, even then, that the particular ones she’d set her mind on would have gone. . . .

But it was all there. In fact, a whole new supply of windsilks, even more marvelous and colorful, had been imported for this moulid. They blew and lifted like colored smoke. Jalila caught and admired them.

“I think this might be you. . . .”

Jalila turned at the voice. It was Nayra, a girl about a standard year and a half older than her, whose mothers were amongst the richest and most powerful in Al Janb. Nayra herself was both beautiful and intelligent; witty, and sometimes devastatingly cruel. She was generally at the center of things, surrounded by a bickering and admiring crowd of seemingly lesser mortals, which sometimes included Jalila. But today she was alone.

“You see, Jalila. That crimson. With your hair, your eyes . . .”

She held the windsilk across Jalila’s face like a yashmak. It danced around her eyes. It blurred over her shoulders. Jalila would have thought the color too bold. But Nayra’s gaze, which flickered without ever quite leaving Jalila’s, her smoothing hands, told Jalila that it was right for her far better than any mirror could have. And then there was blue—that flame color of the summer night. There were silver clasps, too, to hold these windsilks, which Jalila had never noticed on sale before. The stallkeeper, sensing a desire to purchase that went beyond normal bargaining, drew out more surprises from a chest. Feel! They can only be made in one place, on one planet, in one season. Look! The grubs, they only hatch when they hear the song of a particular bird, which sings only once in its life before it gives up its spirit to the Almighty. . . . And so on. Ananke, seeing that Jalila had found a more interested and willing helper, palmed her far more cash than she’d promised, and left her with a smile and an oddly sad backward glance.

Jalila spent the rest of that grey and windy afternoon with Nayra, choosing clothes and ornaments for the moulid. Bangles for their wrists and ankles. Perhaps—no? yes?—even a small tiara. Bolts of cloth the color of today’s sky bound across her hips to offset the windsilk’s beauty. A jewel still filled with the sapphire light of a distant sun to twinkle at her belly. Nayra, with her dark blonde hair, her light brown eyes, her fine strong hands, which were pale pink beneath the fingernails like the inside of a shell, she hardly needed anything to augment her obvious beauty. But Jalila knew from her endless studies of herself in her dreamtent mirror that she needed to be more careful; the wrong angle, the wrong light, an incipient spot, and whatever effect she was striving for could be so easily ruined. Yet she’d never really cared as much about such things as she did on that windy afternoon, moving through stalls and shops amid the scent of patchouli. To be so much the focus of her own and someone else’s attention! Nayra’s hands, smoothing across her back and shoulders, lifting her hair, cool sweat at her shoulders, the cool slide and rattle of her bangles as she raised her arms. . . .

We could be creatures from a story, Jalila. Let’s imagine I’m Scheherazade.” A toss of that lovely hair. Liquid gold. Nayra’s seashell fingers, stirring. “You can be her sister, Dinarzade. . . .”

Jalila nodded enthusiastically, although Dinarzade had been an unspectacular creature as far as she remembered the tale; there only so that she might waken Scheherazade in the Sultana’s chamber before the first cock crow of morning. But her limbs, her throat, felt strange and soft and heavy. She reminded herself, as she dressed and undressed, of the doll Tabatha she’d once so treasured up on Tabuthal, and had found again recently, and thought for some odd reason of burying. . . .

The lifting, the pulling, Nayra’s appraising hands and glance and eyes. This unresisting heaviness. Jalila returned home to her haramlek dazed and drained and happy, and severely out of credit.

That night, there was another visitor for dinner. She must have taken some sort of carriage to get there, but she came toward their veranda as if she’d walked the entire distance. Jalila, whose head was filled with many things, was putting out the bowls when she heard the murmur of footsteps. The sound was so slow that eventually she noticed it consciously, looked up, and saw a thin, dark figure coming up the sandy path between Pavo’s swaying and newly sculpted bushes. One arm leaned on a cane, and the other strained seekingly forward. In shock, Jalila dropped the bowl she was holding. It seemed to roll around and around on the table forever, slipping playfully out of reach of her fingers before spinning off the edge and shattering into several thousand white pieces.

“Oh dear,” the tariqua said, finally climbing the steps beside the windy trellis, her cane tap-tapping. “Perhaps you’d better go and tell one of your mothers, Jalila.”

Jalila felt breathless. All through that evening, the tariqua’s trachoman white eyes, the scarred and tarry driftwood of her face, seemed to be studying her. Even apart from that odd business of her knowing her name, which she supposed could be explained, Jalila was more and more certain that the tariqua knew that it was she and Kalal who had spied on her and thrown stones at her on that hot day in the qasr. As if that mattered. But somehow, it did, more than it should have done. Amid all this confused thinking, and the silky memories of her afternoon with Nayra, Jalila scarcely noticed the conversation. The weather remained gusty, spinning the lanterns, playing shapes with the shadows, making the tapestries breathe. The tariqua’s voice was as thin as her frame. It carried on the spinning air like the croak of an insect.

“Perhaps we could walk on the beach, Jalila?”

“What?” She jerked as if she’d been abruptly awakened. Her mothers were already clearing things away, and casting odd glances at her. The voice had whispered inside her head, and the tariqua was sitting there, her burnt and splintery arm outstretched, in the hope, Jalila supposed, that she would be helped up from the table. The creature’s robe had fallen back. Her arm looked like a picture Jalila had once seen of a dried cadaver. With an effort, nearly knocking over another bowl, Jalila moved around the billowing table. With an even bigger effort, she placed her own hand into that of the tariqua. She’d expected it to feel leathery, which it did. But it was also hot beyond fever. Terribly, the fingers closed around hers. There was a pause. Then the tariqua got up with surprising swiftness, and reached around for her cane, still holding Jalila’s hand, but without having placed any weight on it. She could have done all that on her own, the old witch, Jalila thought. And she can see, too—look at the way she’s been stuffing herself with kofta all evening, reaching over for figs. . . .

“What do you know of the stars, Jalila?” the tariqua asked as they walked beside the beach. Pavo’s creations along the road behind them still looked stark and strange and half-formed as they swayed in the wind, like the wavering silver limbs of an upturned insect. The waves came and went, strewing tideflowers far up the strand. Like the tongue of a snake, the tariqua’s cane darted ahead of her.

Jalila shrugged. There were these Gateways, she had always known that. There were these Gateways, and they were the only proper path between the stars, because no one could endure the eons of time that crossing even the tiniest fragment of the Ten Thousand and One Worlds would entail by the ordinary means of traveling from there to here.

“Not, of course,” the tariqua was saying, “that people don’t do such things. There are tales, there are always tales, of ghost-ships of sufis drifting for tens of centuries through the black and black. . . . But the wealth, the contact, the community, flows through the Gateways. The Almighty herself provided the means to make them in the Days of Creation, when everything that was and will ever be spilled out into a void so empty that it did not even exist as an emptiness. In those first moments, as warring elements collided, boundaries formed, dimensions were made and disappeared without ever quite dissolving, like the salt tidemarks on those rocks. . . .” As they walked, the tariqua waved her cane. “. . . which the sun and the eons can never quite bake away. These boundaries are called cosmic strings, Jalila, and they have no end. They must form either minute loops, or they must stretch from one end of this universe to the other, and then turn back again, and turn and turn without end.”

Jalila glanced at the brooch the tariqua was wearing, which was of a worm consuming its tail. She knew that the physical distances between the stars were vast, but the tariqua somehow made the distances that she traversed to avoid that journey seem even vaster. . . .

“You must understand,” the tariqua said, “that we tariquas pass through something worse than nothing to get from one side to the other of a Gateway.”

Jalila nodded. She was young, and nothing didn’t sound especially frightening. Still, she sensed that there were the answers to mysteries in this near-blind gaze and whispering voice that she would never get from her dreamtent or her mothers. But, hanim, what could be worse,” she asked dutifully, although she still couldn’t think of the tariqua in terms of a name, and thus simply addressed her with the short honorific, “than sheer emptiness?”

Ah, but emptiness is nothing. Imagine, Jalila, passing through everything instead!” The tariqua chuckled, and gazed up at the sky. “But the stars are beautiful, and so is this night. You come, I hear, from Tabuthal. There, the skies must all have been very different.”

Jalila nodded. A brief vision flared over her. The way that up there, on the clearest, coldest nights, you felt as if the stars were all around you. Even now, much though she loved the fetors and astonishments of the coast, she still felt the odd pang of missing something. It was a feeling she missed, as much as the place itself, which she guessed would probably seem bleak and lonely if she returned to it now. It was partly to do, she suspected, with that sense that she was losing her childhood. It was like being on a ship, on Kalal’s nameless boat, and watching the land recede, and half of you loving the loss, half of you hating it. A war seemed to be going on inside her between these two warring impulses. . . .

To her surprise, Jalila realized that she wasn’t just thinking these thoughts, but speaking them, and that the tariqua, walking at her slow pace, the weight of her head bending her spine, her cane whispering a jagged line in the dust as the black rags of her djibbah flapped around her, was listening. Jalila supposed that she, too, had been young once, although that was hard to imagine. The sea frothed and swished. They were at the point in the road now where, gently buzzing and almost out of sight amid the forest, hidden there as if in shame, the tariqua’s caleche lay waiting. It was a small filigree, a thing as old and black and ornate as her brooch. Jalila helped her toward it through the trees. The craft’s door creaked open like an iron gate, then shut behind the tariqua. A few crickets sounded through the night’s heat. Then, with a soft rush, and a static glow like the charge of windsilk brushing flesh, the caleche rose up through the treetops and wafted away.

The day of the moulid came. It was everything that Jalila expected, although she paid it little attention. The intricate, bowered pathway that Pavo had been working on finally shaped itself to her plans—in fact, it was better than that, and seemed like a beautiful accident. As the skies cleared, the sun shone through prismatic arches. The flowers, which had looked so stunted only the evening before, suddenly unfolded, with petals like beaten brass, and stamens shaped so that the continuing breeze, which Pavo had always claimed to have feared, laughed and whistled and tooted as it passed through them. Walking beneath the archways of flickering shadows, you were assailed by scents and the clashes of small orchestras. But Jalila’s ears were blocked, her eyes were sightless. She, after all, was Dinarzade, and Nayra was Scheherazade of the Thousand and One Nights.

Swirling windsilks, her heart hammering, she strode into Al Janb. Everything seemed to be different today. There were too many sounds and colors. People tried to dance with her, or sell her things. Some of the aliens seemed to have dressed themselves as humans. Some of the humans were most definitely dressed as aliens. Her feet were already blistered and delicate from her new crimson slippers. And there was Nayra, dressed in a silvery serwal and blouse of such devastating simplicity that Jalila felt her heart kick and pause in its beating. Nayra was surrounded by a small storm of her usual admirers. Her eyes took in Jalila as she stood at their edge, then beckoned her to join them. The idea of Dinarzade and Scheherazade, which Jalila had thought was to be their secret, was now shared with everyone. The other girls laughed and clustered around, admiring, joking, touching and stroking bits of her as if she was a hayawan. You of all people, Jalila! And such jewels, such silks . . . Jalila stood half-frozen, her heart still kicking. So, so marvelous! And not at all dowdy. . . . She could have lived many a long and happy life without such compliments.

Thus the day continued. All of them in a crowd, and Jalila feeling both over- dressed and exposed, with these stirring, whispering windsilks that covered and yet mostly seemed to reveal her body. She felt like a child in a ribboned parade, and when one of the old mahwagis even came up and pressed a sticky lump of basbousa into her hand, it was the final indignity. She trudged off alone, and found Kalal and his father Ibra managing a seafront stall beside the swaying masts of the bigger trawlers, around which there was a fair level of purchase and interest. Ibra was enjoying himself, roaring out enticements and laughter in his big, belling voice. At last, they’d gotten around to harvesting some of the tideflowers for which their nameless boat had been designed, and they were selling every sort here, salt-fresh from the ocean.

“Try this one. . . .” Kalal drew Jalila away to the edge of the harbor, where the oiled water flashed below. He had just one tideflower in his hand. It was deep-banded the same crimson and blue as her windsilks. The interior was like the eye of an anemone.

Jalila was flattered. But she hesitated. “I’m not sure about wearing something dead.” In any case, she knew she already looked ridiculous. That this would be more of the same.

“It isn’t dead, it’s as alive as you are.” Kalal held it closer, against Jalila’s shoulder, toward the top of her breast, smoothing out the windsilks in a way that briefly reminded her of Nayra. “And isn’t this material the dead tissue of some creature or other . . .?” Still, his hands were smoothing. Jalila thought again of Nayra. Being dressed like a doll. Her nipples started to rise. “And if we take it back to the tideflower beds tomorrow morning, place it down there carefully, it’ll still survive . . .” The tideflower had stuck itself to her now, anyway, beneath the shoulder, its adhesion passing through the thin windsilks, burning briefly as it bound to her flesh. And it was beautiful, even if she wasn’t, and it would have been churlish to refuse. Jalila placed her finger into the tideflower’s center, and felt a soft suction, like the mouth of a baby. Smiling, thanking Kalal, feeling somehow better and more determined, she walked away.

The day went on. The night came. Fireworks crackled and rumpled, rippling down the slopes of the mountains. The whole of the center of Al Janb was transformed unrecognizably into the set of a play. Young Joanna herself walked the vast avenues of Ghezirah, the island city that lies at the center of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds, and which grows in much the same way as Pavo’s crystal scaffoldings, but on an inconceivable scale, filled with azure skies, glinting in the dark heavens like a vast diamond. The Blessed Joanna, she was supposedly thinking of a planet that had come to her in a vision as she wandered beside Ghezirah’s palaces; it was a place of fine seas, lost giants, and mysterious natural castles, although Jalila, as she followed in the buffeting, cheering procession, and glanced around at the scale of the projections that briefly covered Al Janb’s ordinary buildings, wondered why, even if this version of Ghezirah was fake and thin, Joanna would ever have wanted to leave that city to come to a place such as this.

There were more fireworks. As they rattled, a deeper sound swept over them in a moan from the sea, and everyone looked up as sunglow poured through the gaudy images of Ghezirah that still clad Al Janb’s buildings. Not one rocket, or two, but three, were all climbing up from the spaceport simultaneously, the vast white plumes of their energies fanning out across half the sky to form a billowy fleur de lys. At last, as she craned her neck and watched the last of those blazing tails diminish, Jalila felt exulted by this moulid. In the main square, the play continued. When she found a place on a bench and began to watch the more intimate parts of the drama unfold, as Joanna’s lover Pia pleaded with her to remain amid the cerulean towers of Ghezirah, a figure moved to sit beside her. To Jalila’s astonishment, it was Nayra.

“That’s a lovely flower. I’ve been meaning to ask you all day . . .” Her fingers moved across Jalila’s shoulder. There was a tug at her skin as she touched the petals.

“I got it from Kalal.”

“Oh . . .” Nayra sought the right word. “Him. Can I smell it . . .?” She was already bending down, her face close to Jalila’s breast, the golden fall of her hair brushing her forearm, enclosing her in the sweet, slightly vanilla scent of her body. “That’s nice. It smells like the sea—on a clear day, when you climb up and look down at it from the mountains. . . .”

The play continued. Would Joanna really go to this planet, which kept appearing to her in these visions? Jalila didn’t know. She didn’t care. Nayra’s hand slipped into her own and lay there upon her thigh with a weight and presence that seemed far heavier than the entire universe. She felt like that doll again. Her breath was pulling, dragging. The play continued, and then, somewhere, somehow, it came to an end. Jalila felt an aching sadness. She’d have been happy for Joanna to continue her will-I-won’t-I agonizing and prayers throughout all of human history, just so that she and Nayra could continue to sit together like this, hand in hand, thigh to thigh, on this hard bench.

The projections flickered and faded. She stood up in wordless disappointment. The whole square suddenly looked like a wastetip, and she felt crumpled and used-up in these sweaty and ridiculous clothes. It was hardly worth looking back toward Nayra to say goodbye. She would, Jalila was sure, have already vanished to rejoin those clucking, chattering friends who surrounded her like a wall.

“Wait!” A hand on her arm. That same vanilla scent. “I’ve heard that your mother Pavo’s displays along the south road are something quite fabulous. . . .” For once, Nayra’s golden gaze as Jalila looked back at her was almost coy, nearly averted. “I was rather hoping you might show me. . . .”

The two of them. Walking hand in hand, just like all lovers throughout history. Like Pia and Joanna. Like Romana and Juliet. Like Isabel and Genya. Ghosts of smoke from the rocket plumes that had buttressed the sky hung around them, and the world seemed half-dissolved in the scent of sulphur and roses. An old woman they passed, who was sweeping up discarded kebab sticks and wrappers, made a sign as they passed, and gave them a weary, sad-happy smile. Jalila wasn’t sure what had happened to her slippers, but they and her feet both seemed to have become weightless. If it hadn’t been for the soft sway and pull of Nayra’s arm, Jalila wouldn’t even have been sure that she was moving. People’s feet really don’t touch the ground when they are in love! Here was something else that her dreamtent and her mothers hadn’t told her.

Pavo’s confections of plant and crystal looked marvelous in the hazed and doubled silver shadows of the rising moons. Jalila and Nayra wandered amid them, and the rest of the world felt withdrawn and empty. A breeze was still playing over the rocks and the waves, but the fluting sound had changed. It was one soft pitch, rising, falling. They kissed. Jalila closed her eyes—she couldn’t help it—and trembled. Then they held both hands together and stared at each other, unflinching. Nayra’s bare arms in the moonslight, the curve inside her elbow and the blue trace of a vein: Jalila had never seen anything as beautiful, here in this magical place.

The stables, where the hayawans were breathing. Jalila spoke to Robin, to Abu. The beasts were sleepy. Their flesh felt cold, their plates were warm, and Nayra seemed a little afraid. There, in the sighing darkness, the clean scent of feed and straw was overlaid with the heat of the hayawans’ bodies and their dung. The place was no longer a ramshackle tent, but solid and dark, another of Pavo’s creations; the stony catacombs of ages. Jalila led Nayra through it, her shoulders brushing pillars, her heart pounding, her slippered feet whispering through spills of straw. To the far corner, where the fine new white bedding lay like depths of cloud. They threw themselves onto it, half-expecting to fall through. But they were floating in straggles of windsilk, held in tangles of their own laughter and limbs.

“Remember.” Nayra’s palm on Jalila’s right breast, scrolled like an old print in the geometric moonlight that fell from Walah, and then through the arched stone grid of a murqana that lay above their heads. “I’m Scheherazade. You’re Dinarzade, my sister . . .” The pebble of Jalila’s nipple rising through the windsilk. “That old, old story, Jalila. Can you remember how it went . . .?”

In the tide of yore and in the time of long gone before, there was a Queen of all the Queens of the Banu Sasan in the far islands of India and China, a Lady of armies and guards and servants and dependants. . . .

Again, they kissed.

Handsome gifts, such as horses with saddles of gem-encrusted gold; mamelukes, or white slaves; beautiful handmaids, high-breasted virgins, and splendid stuffs and costly. . . .

Nayra’s hand moved from Jalila’s breast to encircle the tideflower. She gave it a tug, pulled harder. Something held, gave, held, hurt, then gave entirely. The windsilks poured back. A small dark bead of blood welled at the curve between Jalila’s breast and shoulder. Nayra licked it away.

In one house was a girl weeping for the loss of her sister. In another, perhaps a mother trembling for the fate of her child; and instead of the blessings that had formerly been heaped on the Sultana’s head, the air was now full of curses. . . .

Jalila was rising, floating, as Nayra’s mouth traveled downward to suckle at her breast.

Now the Wazir had two daughters, Scheherazade and Dinarzade, of whom the elder had perused the books, annals, and legends of preceding queens and empresses, and the stories, examples, and instances of bygone things. Scheherazade had read the works of the poets and she knew them by heart. She had studied philosophy, the sciences, the arts, and all accomplishments. And Scheherazade was pleasant and polite, wise and witty. Scheherazade, she was beautiful and well bred. . . .

Flying far over frost-glittering saharas, beneath the twin moons, soaring through the clouds. The falling, rising dunes. The minarets and domes of distant cities. The cries and shuddering sighs of the beloved. Patterned moonlight falling through the murqana in a white and dark tapestry across the curves and hollows of Nayra’s belly.

Alekum as-salal wa rahmatu allahi wa barakatuh. . . .

Upon you, the peace and the mercy of God and all these blessings.

Amen.

There was no cock-crow when Jalila startled awake. But Walah had vanished, and so had Nayra, and the light of the morning sun came splintering down through the murqana’s hot blue lattice. Sheltering her face with her hands, Jalila looked down at herself, and smiled. The jewel in her belly was all that was left of her costume. She smelled faintly of vanilla, and much of Nayra, and nothing about her flesh seemed quite her own. Moving through the dazzling drizzle, she gathered up the windsilks and other scraps of clothing that had settled into the fleece bedding. She found one of Nayra’s earrings, which was twisted to right angles at the post, and had to smile again. And here was that tideflower, tossed upturned like an old cup into the corner. She touched the tiny scab on her shoulder, then lifted the flower up and inhaled, but caught on her palms only the scents of Nayra. She closed her eyes, feeling the diamond speckles of heat and cold across her body like the ripples of the sea.

The hayawans barely stirred as she moved out through their stables. Only Robin regarded her, and then incuriously, as she paused to touch the hard grey melds of her flank that she had pressed against the bars of her enclosure. One eye, grey as rocket smoke, opened, then returned to its saharas of dreams. The hayawans, Jalila supposed for the first time, had their own passions, and these were not to be shared with some odd two-legged creatures of another race and planet.

The morning was still clinging to its freshness, and the road, as she crossed it, was barely warm beneath her feet. Wind-towered Al Janb and the haramlek behind her looked deserted. Even the limbs of the mountains seemed curled in sleepy haze. On this day after the moulid, no one but the geelies was yet stirring. Cawing, they rose and settled in flapping red flocks from the beds of the tideflowers as Jalila scrunched across the hard stones of the beach. Her feet encountered the cool, slick water. She continued walking, wading, until the sea tickled her waist and what remained of the windsilks had spread about in spills of dye. From her cupped hands, she released the tideflower, and watched it float away. She splashed her face. She sunk down to her shoulders as the windsilks dissolved from her, and looked down between her breasts at the glowing jewel that was still stuck in her belly, and plucked it out, and watched it sink; the sea-lantern of a ship, drowning.

Walking back up the beach, wringing the wet from her hair, Jalila noticed a rich green growth standing out amid the sky-filled rockpools and the growths of lichen. Pricked by something resembling Pavo’s curiosity, she scrambled over, and crouched to examine it as the gathering heat of the sun dried her back. She recognized this spot—albeit dimly—from the angle of a band of quartz that glittered and bled blue oxides. This was where she had coughed up her breathmoss in that early Season of Soft Rains. And here it still was, changed but unmistakable—and growing. A small patch here, several larger patches there. Tiny filaments of green, a minute forest, raising its boughs and branches to the sun.

She walked back up toward her haramlek, humming.

3.

The sky was no longer blue. It was no longer white. It had turned to mercury. The rockets rose and rose in dry crackles of summer lightening. The tube-like aliens fled, leaving their strange house of goo-filled windows and pipes still clicking and humming until something burst and the whole structure deflated, and the mess of it leaked across the nearby streets. There were warnings of poisonings and strange epidemics. There were cloggings and stenches of the drains.

Jalila showed the breathmoss to her mothers, who were all intrigued and delighted, although Pavo had of course noticed and categorized the growth long before, while Ananke had to touch the stuff, and left a small brown mark there like the tips of her three fingers, which dried and turned golden over the days that followed. But in this hot season, these evenings when the sun seemed as if it would never vanish, the breathmoss proved surprisingly hardy. . . .

After that night of the moulid, Jalila spent several happy days absorbed and alone, turning and smoothing the memory of her love-making with Nayra. Wandering above and beneath the unthinking routines of everyday life, she was like a fine craftsman, spinning silver, shaping sandalwood. The dimples of Nayra’s back. Sweat glinting in the checkered moonlight. That sweet vein in the crook of her beloved’s arm, and the pulse of the blood that had risen from it to the drumbeats of ecstasy. The memory seemed entirely enough to Jalila. She was barely living in the present day. When, perhaps six days after the end of the moulid, Nayra turned up at their doorstep with the ends of her hair chewed wet and her eyes red-rimmed, Jalila had been almost surprised to see her, and then to notice the differences between the real Nayra and the Scheherazade of her memories. Nayra smelled of tears and dust as they embraced; like someone who had arrived from a long, long journey.

“Why didn’t you call me? I’ve been waiting, waiting. . . .”

Jalila kissed her hair. Her hand traveled beneath a summer shawl to caress Nayra’s back, which felt damp and gritty. She had no idea how to answer her questions. They walked out together that afternoon in the shade of the woods behind the haramlek. The trees had changed in this long, hot season, departing from their urrearth habits to coat their leaves in a waxy substance that smelled medicinal. The shadows of their boughs were chalkmarks and charcoal. All was silent. The urrearth birds had retreated to their summer hibernations until the gusts of autumn came to rouse them again. Climbing a scree of stones, they found clusters of them at the back of a cave; feathery bundles amid the dripping rock, seemingly without eyes or beak.

As they sat at the mouth of that cave, looking down across the heat-trembling bay, sucking the ice and eating the dates that Ananke had insisted they bring with them, Nayra had seemed like a different person than the one Jalila had thought she had known before the day of the moulid. Nayra, too, was human, and not the goddess she had seemed. She had her doubts and worries. She, too, thought that the girls who surrounded her were mostly crass and stupid. She didn’t even believe in her own obvious beauty. She cried a little again, and Jalila hugged her. The hug became a kiss. Soon, dusty and greedy, they were tumbling amid the hot rocks. That evening, back at the haramlek, Nayra was welcomed for dinner by Jalila’s mothers with mint tea and the best china. She was invited to bathe. Jalila sat beside her as they ate figs fresh from distant Ras and the year’s second crop of oranges. She felt happy. At last, life seemed simple. Nayra was now officially her lover, and this love would form the pattern of her days.

Jalila’s life now seemed complete; she believed that she was an adult, and that she talked and spoke and loved and worshipped in an adult way. She still rode out sometimes with Kalal on Robin and Abu, she still laughed or stole things or played games, but she was conscious now that these activities were the sweetmeats of life, pleasing but innutritious, and the real glories and surprises lay with being with Nayra, and with her mothers, and the life of the haramlek that the two young women talked of founding together one day.

Nayra’s mothers lived on the far side of Al Janb, in a fine tall clifftop palace that was one of the oldest in the town, clad in white stone and filled with intricate courtyards, and a final beautiful tajo that looked down from gardens of tarragon across the whole bay. Jalila greatly enjoyed exploring this haramlek, deciphering the peeling scripts that wound along the cool vaults, and enjoying the company of Nayra’s mothers who, in their wealth and grace and wisdom, often made her own mothers seem like the awkward and recent provincial arrivals that they plainly were. At home, in her own haramlek, the conversations and ideas seemed stale. An awful dream came to Jalila one night. She was her old doll Tabatha, and she really was being buried. The ground she lay in was moist and dank, as if it was still the Season of Soft Rains, and the faces of everyone she knew were clustered around the hole above her, muttering and sighing as her mouth and eyes were inexorably filled with soil.

“Tell me what it was like, when you first fell in love.”

Jalila had chosen Pavo to ask this question of Ananke would probably just hug her, while Lya would talk and talk until there was nothing to say.

“I don’t know. Falling in love is like coming home. You can never quite do it for the first time.”

“But in the stories—”

“—The stories are always written afterward, Jalila.”

They were walking the luminous shore. It was near midnight, which was now by far the best time of the night or day. But what Pavo had just said sounded wrong; perhaps she hadn’t been the right choice of mother to speak to, after all. Jalila was sure she’d loved Nayra since that day before the moulid of Joanna, although it was true she loved her now in a different way.

“You still don’t think we really will form a haramlek together, do you?”

“I think that it’s too early to say.”

“You were the last of our three, weren’t you? Lya and Ananke were already together.”

“It was what drew me to them. They seemed so happy and complete. It was also what frightened me and nearly sent me away.”

“But you stayed together, and then there was . . .” This was the part that Jalila still found hardest to acknowledge; the idea that her mothers had a physical, sexual relationship. Sometimes, deep at night, from someone else’s dreamtent, she had heard muffled sighs, the wet slap of flesh. Just like the hayawans, she supposed, there were things about other people’s lives that you could never fully understand, no matter how well you thought you knew them.

She chose a different tack. “So why did you choose to have me?”

“Because we wanted to fill the world with something that had never ever existed before. Because we felt selfish. Because we wanted to give ourselves away.”

“Ananke, she actually gave birth to me, didn’t she?”

“Down here at Al Janb, they’d say we were primitive and mad. Perhaps that was how we wanted to be. But all the machines at the clinics do is try to re-create the conditions of a real human womb—the voices, the movements, the sound of breathing. . . . Without first hearing that Song of Life, no human can ever be happy, so what better way could there be than to hear it naturally?”

A flash of that dream-image of herself being buried. “But the birth itself—”

“—I think that was something we all underestimated.” The tone of Pavo’s voice told Jalila that this was not a subject to be explored on the grounds of mere curiosity.

The tideflower beds had solidified. You could walk across them as if they were dry land. Kalal, after several postponements and broken promises, took Jalila and Nayra out one night to demonstrate.

Smoking lanterns at the prow and stern of his boat. The water slipping warm as blood through Jalila’s trailing fingers. Al Janb receding beneath the hot thighs of the mountains. Kalal at the prow. Nayra sitting beside her, her arm around her shoulder, hand straying across her breast until Jalila shrugged it away because the heat of their two bodies was oppressive.

This season’ll end soon,” Nayra said. “You’ve never known the winter here, have you?”

I was born in the winter. Nothing here could be as cold as the lightest spring morning in the mountains of Tabuthal.”

Ah, the mountains. You must show me sometime. We should travel there together. . . .”

Jalila nodded, trying hard to picture that journey. She’d attempted to interest Nayra in riding a hayawan, but she grew frightened even in the presence of the beasts. In so many ways, in fact, Nayra surprised Jalila with her timidity. Jalila, in these moments of doubt, and as she lay alone in her dreamtent and wondered, Would list to herself Nayra’s many assets: her lithe and willing body; the beautiful haramlek of her beautiful mothers; the fact that so many of the other girls now envied and admired her. There were so many things that were good about Nayra.

Kalal, now that his boat had been set on course for the further tidebeds, came to sit with them, his face sweated lantern-red. He and Nayra shared many memories, and now, as the sails pushed on from the hot air off the mountains, they vied to tell Jalila of the surprises and delights of winters in Al Janb. The fogs when you couldn’t see your hand. The intoxicating blue berries that appeared in special hollows through the crust of the snow. The special saint’s days. . . . If Jalila hadn’t known better, she’d have said that Nayra and Kalal were fighting over something more important.

The beds of tideflowers were vast, luminous, heavy-scented. Red-black clusters of geelies rose and fell here and there in the moonslight. Walking these gaudy carpets was a most strange sensation. The dense interlaces of leaves felt like rubber matting, but sank and bobbed. Jalila and Nayra lit more lanterns and dotted them around a field of huge primrose and orange petals. They sang and staggered and rolled and fell over. Nayra had brought a pipe of kif resin, and the sensation of smoking that and trying to dance was hilarious. Kalal declined, pleading that he had to control the boat on the way back, and picked his way out of sight, disturbing flocks of geelies.

And so the two girls danced as the twin moons rose. Nayra, twirling silks, her hair fanning, was graceful as Jalila still staggered amid the lapping flowers. As she lifted her arms and rose on tiptoe, bracelets glittering, she had never looked more desirable. Somewhat drunkenly—and slightly reluctantly, because Kalal might return at any moment—Jalila moved forward to embrace her. It was good to hold Nayra, and her mouth tasted like the tideflowers and sucked needily at her own. In fact, the moments of their love had never been sweeter and slower than they were on that night, although, even as Jalila marveled at the shape of Nayra’s breasts and listened to the changed song of her breathing, she felt herself chilling, receding, drawing back, not just from Nayra’s physical presence, but from this small bay beside the small town on the single continent beside Habara’s great and lonely ocean. Jalila felt infinitely sorry for Nayra as she brought her to her little ecstasies and they kissed and rolled across the beds of flowers. She felt sorry for Nayra because she was beautiful, and sorry for her because of all her accomplishments, and sorry for her because she would always be happy here amid the slow seasons of this little planet.

Jalila felt sorry for herself as well; sorry because she had thought that she had known love, and because she knew now that it had only been a pretty illusion.

There was a shifting wind, dry and abrasive, briefly to be welcomed, until it became something to curse and cover your face and close your shutters against.

Of Jalila’s mothers, only Lya seemed at all disappointed by her break from Nayra, no doubt because she had fostered hopes of their union forming a powerful bond between their haramleks, and even she did her best not to show it. Of the outside world, the other young women of Al Janb all professed total disbelief—why if it had been me, I’d never have . . . But soon, they were cherishing the new hope that it might indeed be them. Nayra, to her credit, maintained an extraordinary dignity in the face of the fact that she, of all people, had finally been rejected. She dressed in plain clothes. She spoke and ate simply. Of course, she looked more devastatingly beautiful than ever, and everyone’s eyes were reddened by air-borne grit in any case, so it was impossible to tell how much she had really been crying. Now, as the buildings of Al Janb creaked and the breakers rolled and the wind howled through the teeth of the mountains, Jalila saw the gaudy, seeking and competing creatures who so often surrounded Nayra quite differently. Nayra was not, had never been, in control of them. She was more like the bloody carcass over which, flashing their teeth, their eyes, stretching their limbs, they endlessly fought. Often, riven by a sadness far deeper than she had ever experienced, missing something she couldn’t explain, wandering alone or lying in her dreamtent, Jalila nearly went back to Nayra. . . . But she never did.

This was the Season of Winds, and Jalila was heartily sick of herself and Al Janb, and the girls and the mahwagis and the mothers, and of this changing, buffeting banshee weather that seemed to play with her moods. Sometimes now, the skies were entirely beautiful, strung by the curling multicolored banners of sand that the winds had lifted from distant corners of the continent. There was crimson and there was sapphire. The distant saharas of Jalila’s dreams had come to haunt her. They fell—as the trees tore and the paint stripped from the shutters and what remained of Pavo’s arches collapsed—in an irritating grit that worked its way into all the crevices of your body and every weave of your clothes.

The tariqua had spoken of the pain of nothing, and then of the pain of everything. At the time, Jalila had understood neither, but now, she felt that she understood the pain of nothing all too well. The product of the combined genes of her three mothers; loving Ananke, ever-curious Pavo, proud and talkative Lya, she had always felt glad to recognize these characteristics mingled in herself, but now she wondered if these traits hadn’t cancelled each other out. She was a null-point, a zero, clumsy and destructive and unloving. She was Jalila, and she walked alone and uncaring through this Season of Winds.

One morning, the weather was especially harsh. Jalila was alone in the haramlek, although she cared little where she or anywhere else was. A shutter must have come loose somewhere. That often happened now. It had been banging and hammering so long that it began to irritate even her. She climbed stairs and slammed doors over jamming drifts of mica. She flapped back irritably at flapping curtains. Still, the banging went on. Yet all the windows and doors were now secure. She was sure of it. Unless. . . .

Someone was at the front door. She could see a swirling globular head through the greenish glass mullion. Even though they could surely see her as well, the banging went on. Jalila wondered if she wanted it to be Nayra; after all, this was how she had come to her after the moulid; a sweet and needy human being to drag her out from her dreams. But it was only Kalal. As the door shoved Jalila back, she tried not to look disappointed.

“You can’t do this with your life!”

“Do what?”

“This—nothing. And then not answering the fucking door. . . .” Kalal prowled the hallway as the door banged back and forth and tapestries flailed, looking for clues as if he was a detective. “Let’s go out.”

Even in this weather, Jalila supposed that she owed it to Robin. Then Kalal had wanted to go north, and she insisted on going south, and was not in any mood for arguing. It was an odd journey, so unlike the ones they’d undertaken in the summer. They wrapped their heads and faces in flapping howlis, and tried to ride mostly in the forest, but the trees whipped and flapped and the raw air still abraded their faces.

They took lunch down by a flatrock shore, in what amounted to shelter, although there was still little enough of it as the wind eddied about them. This could have been the same spot where they had stopped in summer, but it was hard to tell; the light was so changed, the sky so bruised. Kalal seemed changed, too. His face beneath his howli seemed older, as he tried to eat their aish before the sand-laden air got to it, and his chin looked prickled and abraded. Jalila supposed that this was the same facial growth that his father Ibra was so fond of sporting. She also supposed he must choose to shave his off in the way that some women on some decadent planets were said to shave their legs and armpits.

“Come a bit closer—” she half-shouted, working her way back into the lee of the bigger rock beside which she was sitting to make room for him. “I want you to tell me what you know about love, Kalal.”

Kalal hunched beside her. For a while, he just continued tearing and chewing bits of aish, with his body pressed against hers as the winds boiled around them, the warmth of their flesh almost meeting. And Jalila wondered if men and women, when their lives and needs had been more closely intertwined, had perhaps known the answer to her question. What was love, after all? It would have been nice to think that, in those dim times of myth, men and women had whispered the answer to that question to each other. . . .

She thought then that Kalal hadn’t properly heard her. He was telling her about his father, and a planet he barely remembered, but on which he was born. The sky there had been fractaled gold and turquoise—colors so strange and bright that they came as a delight and a shock each morning. It was a place of many islands, and one great city. His father had been a fisherman and boat-repairer of sorts there as well, although the boats had been much grander than anything you ever saw at Al Janb, and the fish had lived not as single organisms, but as complex shoals that were caught not for their meat, but for their joint minds. Ibra had been approached by a woman from off-world, who had wanted a ship on which she could sail alone around the whole lonely band of the northern oceans. She had told him that she was sick of human company. The planning and the making of the craft was a joy for Ibra, because such a lonely journey had been one that he had long dreamed of making, if ever he’d had the time and money. The ship was his finest-ever creation, and it turned out, as they worked on it, that neither he nor the woman were quite as sick of human company as they had imagined. They fell in love as the keel and the spars grew in the city dockyards and the ship’s mind was nurtured, and as they did so, they slowly re-learned the expressions of sexual need between the male and female.

“You mean he raped her?”

Kalal tossed his last nub of bread toward the waves. “I mean that they made love.”

After the usual negotiations and contracts, and after the necessary insertions of the appropriate cells, Ibra and this woman (whom Kalal didn’t name in his story, any more than he named the world) set sail together, fully intending to conceive a child in the fabled way of old.

“Which was you?”

Kalal scowled. It was impossible to ask him even simple questions on this subject without making him look annoyed. “Of course it was! How many of me do you think there are?” Then he lapsed into silence. The sands swirled in colored helixes before them.

“That woman—your birthmother. What happened to her?”

“She wanted to take me away, of course—to some haramlek on another world, just as she’d been planning all along. My father was just a toy to her. As soon as their ship returned, she started making plans, issuing contracts. There was a long legal dispute with my father. I was placed in a birthsac, in stasis.”

“And your father won?”

Kalal scowled. “He took me here, anyway. Which is winning enough.”

There were many other questions about this story that Jalila wanted to ask Kalal, if she hadn’t already pressed too far. What, after all, did this tale of dispute and deception have to do with love? And were Kalal and Ibra really fugitives? It would explain quite a lot. Once more, in that familiar welling, she felt sorry for him. Men were such strange, sad creatures; forever fighting, angry, lost. . . .

“I’m glad you’re here anyway,” she said. Then, on impulse, one of those careless things you do, she took that rough and ugly chin in her hand, turned his face toward hers and kissed him lightly on the lips.

“What was that for?”

“El-hamdu-l-Illah. That was for thanks.”

They plodded further on their hayawans. They came eventually to a cliff-edge so high that the sea and sky above and beneath vanished. Jalila already knew what they would see as they made their way along it, but still it was a shock; that qasr, thrust into these teeming ribbons of sand. The winds whooped and howled, and the hayawans raised their heads and howled back at it. In this grinding atmosphere, Jalila could see how the qasrs had been carved over long years from pure natural rock. They dismounted, and struggled bent-backed across the narrowing track toward the qasr’s studded door. Jalila raised her fist and beat on it.

She glanced back at Kalal, but his face was entirely hidden beneath his hood. Had they always intended to come here? But they had traveled too far to do otherwise now; Robin and Abu were tired and near-blinded; they all needed rest and shelter. She beat on the door again, but the sound was lost in the booming storm. Perhaps the tariqua had left with the last of the Season of Rockets, just as had most of the aliens. Jalila was about to turn away when the door, as if thrown Wide by the wind, blasted open. There was no one on the other side, and the hallway beyond was dark as the bottom of a dry well. Robin hoiked her head back and howled and resisted as Jalila hauled her in. Kalal with Abu followed. The door, with a massive drumbeat, hammered itself shut behind them. Of course, it was only some old mechanism of this house, but Jalila felt the hairs on the nape of her neck rise.

They hobbled the hayawans beside the largest of the scalloped arches, and walked on down the passageway beyond. The wind was still with them, and the shapes of the pillars were like the swirling helixes of sand made solid. It was hard to tell what parts of this place had been made by the hands of women and what was entirely natural. If the qasr had seemed deserted in the heat of summer, it was entirely abandoned now. A scatter of glass windchimes, torn apart by the wind. A few broken plates. Some flapping cobwebs of tapestry.

Kalal pulled Jalila’s hand.

“Let’s go back. . . .”

But there was greater light ahead, the shadows of the speeding sky. Here was the courtyard where they had glimpsed the tariqua. She had plainly gone now—the fountain was dry and clogged, the bushes were bare tangles of wire. They walked out beneath the tiled arches, looking around. The wind was like a million voices, rising in ululating chorus. This was a strange and empty place; somehow dangerous. . . . Jalila span around. The tariqua was standing there, her robes flapping. With insect fingers, she beckoned.

“Are you leaving?” Jalila asked. “I mean, this place. . . .”

The tariqua had led them into the shelter of a tall, wind-echoing chamber set with blue and white tiles. There were a few rugs and cushions scattered on the floor, but still the sense of abandonment remained. As if, Jalila thought, as the tariqua folded herself on the floor and gestured that they join her, this was her last retreat.

“No, Jalila. I won’t be leaving Habara. Itfaddal. . . . Do sit down.”

They stepped from their sandals and obeyed. Jalila couldn’t quite remember now whether Kalal had encountered the tariqua on her visit to their haramlek, although it seemed plain from his stares at her, and the way her grey-white gaze returned them, that they knew of each other in some way. Coffee was brewing in the corner, over a tiny blue spirit flame, which, as it fluttered in the many drafts, would have taken hours to heat anything. Yet the spout of the brass pot was steaming. And there were dates, too, and nuts and seeds. The tariqua, apologizing for her inadequacy as a host, nevertheless insisted that they help themselves. And somewhere there was a trough of water, too, for their hayawans, and a basket of acram leaves.

Uneasily, they sipped from their cups, chewed the seeds. Kalal had picked up a chipped lump of old stone and was playing with it nervously. Jalila couldn’t quite see what it was.

“So,” he said, clearing his throat, “you’ve been to and from the stars, have you?”

“As have you. Perhaps you could name the planet? It may have been somewhere that we have both visited. . . .”

Kalal swallowed. His lump of old stone clicked the floor. A spindle of wind played chill on Jalila’s neck. Then—she didn’t know how it began—the tariqua was talking of Ghezirah, the great and fabled city that lay at the center of all the Ten Thousand and One Worlds. No one Jalila had ever met or heard of had ever visited Ghezirah, not even Nayra’s mothers—yet this tariqua talked of it as if she knew it well. Before, Jalila had somehow imagined the tariqua trailing from planet to distant planet with dull cargoes of ore and biomass in her ship’s holds. To her mind, Ghezirah had always been more than half-mythical—a place from which a dubious historical figure such as the Blessed Joanna might easily emanate, but certainly not a place composed of solid streets upon which the gnarled and bony feet of this old woman might once have walked. . . .

Ghezirah . . . she could see it now in her mind, smell the shadowy lobbies, see the ever-climbing curve of its mezzanines and rooftops vanishing into the impossible greens of the Floating Ocean. But every time Jalila’s vision seemed about to solidify, the tariqua said something else that made it tremble and change. And then the tariqua said the strangest thing of all, which was that the City At The End Of All Roads was actually alive. Not alive in the meager sense in which every town has a sort of life, but truly living. The city thought. It grew. It responded. There was no central mind or focus to this consciousness, because Ghezirah itself, its teeming streets and minarets and rivers and caleches and its many millions of lives, was itself the mind. . . .

Jalila was awestruck, but Kalal seemed unimpressed, and was still playing with that old lump of stone.

4.

“Jalilaneen. . . .”

The way bondmother Lya said her name made Jalila look up. Somewhere in her throat, a wary nerve started ticking. They took their meals inside now, in the central courtyard of the haramlek, which Pavo had provided with a translucent roofing to let in a little of what light there was in the evenings’ skies, and keep out most of the wind. Still, as Jalila took a sip of steaming hibiscus, she was sure that the sand had gotten into something.

“We’ve been talking. Things have come up—ideas about which we’d like to seek your opinion. . . .”

In other words, Jalila thought, her gaze traveling across her three mothers, you’ve decided something. And this is how you tell me—by pretending that you’re consulting me. It had been the same with leaving Tabuthal. It was always the same. An old ghost of herself got up at that point, threw down her napkin, stalked off up to her room. But the new Jalila remained seated. She even smiled and tried to look encouraging.

“We’ve seen so little of this world,” Lya continued. “All of us, really. And especially since we had you. It’s been marvelous. But, of course, it’s also been confining. . . . Oh no—” Lya waved the idea away quickly, before anyone could even begin to start thinking it. “—we won’t be leaving our haramlek and Al Janb. There are many things to do. New bonds and friendships have been made. Ananke and I won’t be leaving, anyway. . . . But Pavo . . .” And here Lya, who could never quite stop being the chair of a committee, gave a nod toward her mate. “. . . Pavo here has dec—expressed a wish—that she would like to travel.”

“Travel?” Jalila leaned forward, her chin resting on her knuckles. “How?”

Pavo gave her plate a half turn. “By boat seems the best way to explore Habara. With such a big ocean . . .” She turned the plate again, as if to demonstrate.

“And not just a boat,” Ananke put in encouragingly. “A brand new ship. We’re having it built—”

“—But I thought you said you hadn’t yet decided?”

“The contract, I think, is still being prepared,” Lya explained. “And much of the craft will be to Pavo’s own design.”

“Will you be building it yourself?”

“Not alone.” Pavo gave another of her flustered smiles. “I’ve asked Ibra to help me. He seems to be the best, the most knowledgeable—”

“—Ibra? Does he have any references?”

“This is Al Janb, Jalila,” Lya said. “We know and trust people. I’d have thought that, with your friendship with Kalal. . . .”

“This certainly is Al Janb. . . .” Jalila sat back. “How can I ever forget it!” All of her mothers’ eyes were on her. Then something broke. She got up and stormed off to her room.

The long ride to the tariqua’s qasr, the swish of the wind, and banging three times on the old oak door. Then hobbling Robin and hurrying through dusty corridors to that tall tiled chamber, and somehow expecting no one to be there, even though Jalila had now come here several times alone.

But the tariqua was always there. Waiting.

Between them now, there was much to be said.

“This ant, Jalila, which crawls across this sheet of paper from here to there. She is much like us as we crawl across the surface of this planet. Even if she had the wings some of her kind sprout, just as I have my caleche, it would still be the same.” The tiny creature, waving feelers, was plainly lost. A black dot. Jalila understood how it felt. “But say, if we were to fold both sides of the paper together. You see how she moves now . . .?” The ant, antennae waving, hesitant, at last made the tiny jump. “We can move more quickly from one place to another by not travelling across the distance that separates us from it, but by folding space itself.

“Imagine now, Jalila, that this universe is not one thing alone, one solitary series of this following that, but an endless branching of potentialities. Such it has been since the Days of Creation, and such it is even now, in the shuffle of that leaf as the wind picks at it, in the rising steam of your coffee. Every moment goes in many ways. Most are poor, half-formed things, the passing thoughts and whims of the Almighty. They hang there and they die, never to be seen again. But others branch as strongly as this path that we find ourselves following. There are universes where you and I have never sat here in this qasr. There are universes where there is no Jalila. . . . Will you get that for me . . .?”

The tariqua was pointing to an old book in a far corner. Its leather was cracked, the wind lifted its pages. As she took it from her, Jalila felt the hot brush of the old woman’s hand.

“So now, you must imagine that there is not just one sheet of a single universe, but many, as in this book, heaped invisibly above and beside and below the page upon which we find ourselves crawling. In fact . . .” The ant recoiled briefly, sensing the strange heat of the tariqua’s fingers, then settled on the open pages. “You must imagine shelf after shelf, floor upon floor of books, the aisles of an infinite library. And if we are to fold this one page, you see, we or the ant never quite knows what lies on the other side of it. And there may be a tear in that next page as well. It may even be that another version of ourselves has already torn it.”

Despite its worn state, the book looked potentially valuable, hand-written in a beautiful flowing script. Jalila had to wince when the tariqua’s fingers ripped through them. But the ant had vanished now. She was somewhere between the book’s pages. . . .

“That, Jalila, is the Pain of Distance—the sense of every potentiality. So that womankind may pass over the spaces between the stars, every tariqua must experience it.” The wind gave an extra lunge, flipping the book shut. Jalila reached forward, but the tariqua, quick for once, was ahead of her. Instead of opening the book to release the ant, she weighed it down with the same chipped old stone with which Kalal had played on his solitary visit to this qasr.

“Now, perhaps, my Jalila, you begin to understand?”

The stone was old, chipped, grey-green. It was inscribed, and had been carved with the closed wings of a beetle. Here was something from a world so impossibly old and distant as to make the book upon which it rested seem fresh and new as an unbudded leaf—a scarab, shaped for the Queens of Egypt.

“See here, Jalila. See how it grows. The breathmoss?”

This was the beginning of the Season of Autumns. The trees were beautiful; the forests were on fire with their leaves. Jalila had been walking with Pavo, enjoying the return of the birdsong, and wondering why it was that this new season felt sad when everything around her seemed to be changing and growing.

“Look. . . .”

The breathmoss, too, had turned russet-gold. Leaning close to it beneath this tranquil sky, which was composed of a blue so pale it was as if the sea had been caught in reflection inside an upturned white bowl, was like looking into the arms of a miniature forest.

“Do you think it will die?”

Pavo leaned beside her. “Jalila, it should have died long ago. Inshallah, it is a small miracle.” There were the three dead marks where Ananke had touched it in a Season of Long Ago. “You see how frail it is, and yet . . .”

“At least it won’t spread and take over the planet.”

“Not for a while, at least.”

On another rock lay another small colony. Here, too, oddly enough, there were marks. Five large dead dots, as if made by the outspread of a hand, although the shape of it was too big to have been Ananke’s. They walked on. Evening was coming. Their shadows were lengthening. Although the sun was shining and the Waves sparkled, Jalila wished that she had put on something warmer than a shawl.

“That tariqua. You seem to enjoy her company. . . .”

Jalila nodded. When she was with the old woman, she felt at last as if she was escaping the confines of Al Janb. It was liberating, after the close life in this town and with her mothers in their haramlek, to know that interstellar space truly existed, and then to feel, as the tariqua spoke of Gateways, momentarily like that ant, infinitely small and yet somehow inching, crawling across the many universes’ infinite pages. But how could she express this? Even Pavo wouldn’t understand.

“How goes the boat?” she asked instead.

Pavo slipped her arm into to crook of Jalila’s and hugged her. “You must come and see! I have the plan in my head, but I’d never realized quite how big it would be. And complex. Ibra’s full of enthusiasm.”

“I can imagine!”

The sea flashed. The two women chuckled.

“The way the ship’s designed, Jalila, there’s more than enough room for others. I never exactly planned to go alone, but then Lya’s Lya. And Ananke’s always—”

Jalila gave her mother’s arm a squeeze. “I know what you’re saying.”

“I’d be happy if you came, Jalila. I’d understand if you didn’t. This is such a beautiful, wonderful planet. The leviathans—we know so little about them, yet they plainly have intelligence, just as all those old myths say.”

“You’ll be telling me next about the qasrs. . . .”

“The ones we can see near here are nothing! There are islands on the ocean that are entirely made from them. And the wind pours through. They sing endlessly. A different song for every mood and season.”

“Moods! If I’d said something like that when you were teaching me of the Pillars of Life, you’d have told me I was being unscientific!”

“Science is about wonder, Jalila. I was a poor teacher if I never told you that.”

“You did.” Jalila turned to kiss Pavo’s forehead. “You did. . . .”

Pavo’s ship was a fine thing. Between the slipways and the old mooring posts, where the red-flapping geelies quarreled over scraps of dying tideflower, it grew and grew. Golden-hulled. Far sleeker and bigger than even the ferries that had once borne Al Janb’s visitors to and from the rocket port, and which now squatted on the shingle nearby, gently rusting. It was the talk of the Season. People came to admire its progress.

As Jalila watched the spars rise over the clustered roofs of the fisherwomen’s houses, she was reminded of Kalal’s tale of his father and his nameless mother, and that ship that they had made together in the teeming dockyards of that city. Her thoughts blurred. She saw the high balconies of a hotel far bigger than any of Al Janb’s inns and boarding houses. She saw a darker, brighter ocean. Strange flesh upon flesh, with the windows open to the oil-and-salt breeze, the white lace curtains rising, falling. . . .

The boat grew, and Jalila visited the tariqua, although back in Al Janb, her thoughts sometimes trailed after Kalal as she wondered how it must be—to be male, like the last dodo, and trapped in some endless state of part-arousal, like a form of nagging worry. Poor Kalal. But his life certainly wasn’t lonely. The first time Jalila noticed him at the center of the excited swarm of girls that once again surrounded Nayra, she’d almost thought that she was seeing things. But the gossip was loud and persistent. Kalal and Nayra were a couple—the phrase normally followed by a scandalized shriek, a hand-covered mouth. Jalila could only guess what the proud mothers of Nayra’s haramlek thought of such a union, but, of course, no one could subscribe to outright prejudice. Kalal was, after all, just another human being. Lightly probing her own mothers’ attitudes, she found the usual condescending tolerance. Having sexual relations with a male would be like smoking kif, or drinking alcohol, or any other form of slightly aberrant adolescent behavior, to be tolerated with easy smiles and sympathy, as long as it didn’t go on for too long. To be treated, in fact, in much the same manner as her mothers were now treating her regular visits to the tariqua.

Jalila came to understand why people thought of the Season of Autumns as a sad time. The chill nights. The morning fogs that shrouded the bay. The leaves, finally falling, piled into rotting heaps. The tideflower beds, also, were dying as the waves pulled and dismantled what remained of their colors, and they drifted to the shores, the flowers bearing the same stench and texture and color as upturned clay. The geelies were dying as well. In the town, to compensate, there was much bunting and celebration for yet another moulid, but to Jalila the brightness seemed feeble—the flame of a match held against winter’s gathering gale. Still, she sometimes wandered the old markets with some of her old curiosity, nostalgically touching the flapping windsilks, studying the faces and nodding at the many she now knew, although her thoughts were often literally light-years away. The Pain of Distance; she could feel it. Inwardly, she was thrilled and afraid. Her mothers and everyone else, caught up in the moulid and Pavo’s coming departure, imagined from her mood that she had now decided to take that voyage with her. She deceived Kalal in much the same way.

The nights became clearer. Riding back from the qasr one dark evening with the tariqua’s slight voice ringing in her ears, the stars seemed to hover closer around her than at any time since she had left Tabuthal. She could feel the night blossoming, its emptiness and the possibilities spinning out to infinity. She felt both like crying, and like whooping for joy. She had dared to ask the tariqua the question she had long been formulating, and the answer, albeit not entirely yes, had not been no. She talked to Robin as they bobbed along, and the puny yellow smudge of Al Janb drew slowly closer. You must understand, she told her hayawan, that the core of the Almighty is like the empty place between these stars, around which they all revolve. It is there, we know it, but we can never see it. . . . She sang songs from the old saharas about the joy of loneliness, and the loneliness of joy. From here, high up on the gradually descending road that wound its way down toward her haramlek, the horizon was still distant enough for her to see the lights of the rocketport. It was like a huge tidebed, holding out as the season changed. And there at the center of it, rising golden, no longer a stumpy silo-shaped object but somehow beautiful, was the last of the year’s rockets. It would have to rise from Habara before the coming of the Season of Winters.

Her mothers’ anxious faces hurried around her in the lamplight as she led Robin toward the stable.

“Where have you been, Jalilaneen?”

“Do you know what time it is?”

“We should be in the town already!”

For some reason, they were dressed in their best, most formal robes. Their palms were hennaed and scented. They bustled Jalila out of her gritty clothes, practically washed and dressed her, then flapped themselves down the serraplate road into town, where the processions had already started. Still, they were there in plenty of time to witness the blessing of Pavo’s ship. It was to be called Endeavor, and Pavo and Jalila together smashed the bottle of wine across its prow before it rumbled into the nightblack waters of the harbor with an enormous white splash. Everyone cheered, Pavo hugged Jalila.

There were more bottles of the same frothy wine available at the party afterward. Lya, with her usual thoroughness, had ordered a huge case of the stuff, although many of the guests remembered the Prophet’s old injunction and avoided imbibing. Ibra, though, was soon even more full of himself than usual, and went around the big marquee with a bottle in each hand, dancing clumsily with anyone who was foolish enough to come near him. Jalila drank a little of the stuff herself. The taste was sweet, but oddly hot and bitter. She filled up another glass.

“Wondered what you two mariners were going to call that boat. . . .”

It was Kalal. He’d been dancing with many of the girls, and he looked almost as red-faced as his father.

“Bet you don’t even know what the first Endeavor was.”

“You’re wrong there,” Jalila countered primly, although the simple words almost fell over each other as she tried to say them. “It was the spacecraft of Captain Cook. She was one of the urrearth’s most famous early explorers.”

“I thought you were many things,” Kalal countered, angry for no apparent reason. “But I never thought you were stupid.”

Jalila watched him walk away. The dance had gathered up its beat. Ibra had retreated to sit, foolishly glum, in a corner, and Nayra had moved to the middle of the floor, her arms raised, bracelets jingling, an opal jewel at her belly, windsilk-draped hips swaying. Jalila watched. Perhaps it was the drink, but for the first time in many a Season, she felt a slight return of that old erotic longing as she watched Nayra swaying. Desire was the strangest of all emotions. It seemed so trivial when you weren’t possessed of it, and yet when you were possessed, it was as if all the secrets of the universe were waiting. . . . Nayra was the focus of all attention now as she swayed amid the crowd, her shoulders glistening. She danced before Jalila, and her languorous eyes fixed her for a moment before she danced on. Now she was dancing with Kalal, and he was swaying with her, her hands laid upon his shoulders, and everyone was clapping. They made a fine couple. But the music was getting louder, and so were people’s voices. Her head was pounding. She left the marquee.

She welcomed the harshness of the night air, the clear presence of the stars. Even the stench of the rotting tideflowers seemed appropriate as she picked her way across the ropes and slipways of the beach. So much had changed since she had first come here—but mostly what had changed had been herself. Here, its shape unmistakable as rising Walah spread her faint blue light across the ocean, was Kalal’s boat. She sat down on the gunwale. The cold wind bit into her. She heard the crunch of shingle, and imagined it was someone else who was in need of solitude. But the sound grew closer, and then whoever it was sat down on the boat beside her. She didn’t need to look up now. Kalal’s smell was always different, and now he was sweating from the dancing.

“I thought you were enjoying yourself,” she muttered.

“Oh—I was . . .” The emphasis on the was was strong.

They sat there for a long time, in windy, wave-crashing silence. It was almost like being alone. It was like the old days of their being together.

“So you’re going, are you?” Kalal asked eventually.

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m pleased for you. It’s a fine boat, and I like Pavo best of all your mothers. You haven’t seemed quite so happy lately here in Al Janb. Spending all that time with that old witch in the qasr.”

“She’s not a witch. She’s a tariqua. It’s one of the greatest, oldest callings. Although I’m surprised you’ve had time to notice what I’m up to, anyway. You and Nayra . . .”

Kalal laughed, and the wind made the sound turn bitter.

“I’m sorry,” Jalila continued. “I’m sounding just like those stupid gossips. I know you’re not like that. Either of you. And I’m happy for you both. Nayra’s sweet and talented and entirely lovely . . . I hope it lasts . . . I hope . . .”

After another long pause, Kalal said, “Seeing as we’re apologizing, I’m sorry I got cross with you about the name of that boat you’ll be going on—the Endeavor. It’s a good name.”

“Thank you. El-hamadu-l-illah.”

“In fact, I could only think of one better one, and I’m glad you and Pavo didn’t use it. You know what they say. To have two ships with the same name confuses the spirits of the winds. . . .”

“What are you talking about, Kalal?”

“This boat. You’re sitting right on it. I thought you might have noticed.”

Jalila glanced down at the prow, which lay before her in the moonlight, pointing toward the silvered waves. From this angle, and in the old naskhi script that Kalal had used, it took her a moment to work out the craft’s name. Something turned inside her.

Breathmoss.

In white, moonlit letters.

“I’m sure there are better names for a boat,” she said carefully. “Still, I’m flattered.”

“Flattered?” Kalal stood up. She couldn’t really see his face, but she suddenly knew that she’d once again said the wrong thing. He waved his hands in an odd shrug, and he seemed for a moment almost ready to lean close to her—to do something unpredictable and violent—but instead, picking up stones and skimming them hard into the agitated waters, he walked away.

Pavo was right. If not about love—which Jalila knew now that she still waited to experience—then at least about the major decisions of your life. There was never quite a beginning to them, although your mind often sought for such a thing.

When the tariqua’s caleche emerged out of the newly teeming rain one dark evening a week or so after the naming of the Endeavor, and settled itself before the lights of their haramlek, and the old woman herself emerged, somehow still dry, and splashed across the puddled garden while her three mothers flustered about to find the umbrella they should have thought to look for earlier, Jalila still didn’t know what she should be thinking. The four women would, in any case, need to talk alone; Jalila recognized that. For once, after the initial greetings, she was happy to retreat to her dreamtent.

But her mind was still in turmoil. She was suddenly terrified that her mothers would actually agree to this strange proposition, and then that, out of little more than embarrassment and obligation, the rest of her life would be bound to something that the tariqua called the Church of the Gateway. She knew so little. The tariqua talked only in riddles. She could be a fraud, for all Jalila knew—or a witch, just as Kalal insisted. Thoughts swirled about her like the rain. To make the time disappear, she tried searching the knowledge of her dreamtent. Lying there, listening to the rising sound of her mothers’ voices, which seemed to be studded endlessly with the syllables of her own name, Jalila let the personalities who had guided her through the many Pillars of Wisdom tell her what they knew about the Church of the Gateway.

She saw the blackness of planetary space, swirled with the mica dots of turning planets. Almost as big as those as she zoomed close to it, yet looking disappointingly like a many-angled version of the rocketport, lay the spacestation, and, within it, the junction that could lead you from here to there without passing across the distance between. A huge rent in the Book of Life, composed of the trapped energies of those things the tariqua called cosmic strings, although they and the Gateway itself were visible as nothing more than a turning ring near to the center of the vast spacestation, where occasionally, as Jalila watched, crafts of all possible shapes would seem to hang, then vanish. The gap she glimpsed inside seemed no darker than that which hung between the stars behind it, but it somehow hurt to stare at it. This, then, was the core of the mystery; something both plain and extraordinary. We crawl across the surface of this universe like ants, and each of these craft, switching through the Gateway’s moment of loss and endless potentiality, is piloted by the will of a tariqua’s conscious intelligence, which must glimpse those choices, then somehow emerge sane and entire at the other end of everything. . . .

Jalila’s mind returned to the familiar scents and shapes of her dreamtent, and the sounds of the rain. The moment seemed to belong with those of the long-ago Season of Soft Rains. Downstairs, there were no voices. As she climbed out from her dreamtent, warily expecting to find the haramlek leaking and half-finished, Jalila was struck by an idea that the tariqua hadn’t quite made plain to her; that a Gateway must push through time just as easily as it pushes through every other dimension . . .! But the rooms of the haramlek were finely furnished, and her three mothers and the tariqua were sitting in the rainswept candlelight of the courtyard, waiting.

With any lesser request, Lya always quizzed Jalila before she would even consider granting it. So as Jalila sat before her mothers and tried not to tremble in their presence, she wondered how she could possibly explain her ignorance of this pure, boundless mystery.

But Lya simply asked Jalila if this was what she wanted—to be an acolyte of the Church of the Gateway.

“Yes.”

Jalila waited. Then, not even, are you sure? They’d trusted her less than this when they’d sent her on errands into Al Janb. . . . It was still raining. The evening was starless and dark. Her three mothers, having hugged her, but saying little else, retreated to their own dreamtents and silences, leaving Jalila to say farewell to the tariqua alone. The heat of the old woman’s hand no longer came as a surprise to Jalila as she helped her up from her chair and away from the sheltered courtyard.

“Well,” the tariqua croaked, “that didn’t seem to go so badly.”

“But I know so little!” They were standing on the patio at the dripping edge of the night. Wet streamers of wind tugged at them.

“I know you wish I could tell you more, Jalila—but then, would it make any difference?”

Jalila shook her head. “Will you come with me?”

“Habara is where I must stay, Jalila. It is written.”

“But I’ll be able to return?”

“Of course. But you must remember that you can never return to the place you have left.” The tariqua fumbled with her clasp, the one of a worm consuming its tail. “I want you to have this.” It was made of black ivory, and felt as hot as the old woman’s flesh as Jalila took it. For once, not really caring whether she broke her bones, she gave the small, bird-like woman a hug. She smelled of dust and metal, like an antique box left forgotten on a sunny windowledge. Jalila helped her out down the steps into the rainswept garden.

“I’ll come again soon,” she said, “to the qasr.”

“Of course . . . there are many arrangements.” The tariqua opened the dripping filigree door of her caleche and peered at her with those half-blind eyes. Jalila waited. They had stood too long in the rain already.

“Yes?”

“Don’t be too hard on Kalal.”

Puzzled, Jalila watched the caleche rise and turn away from the lights of the haramlek.

Jalila moved warily through the sharded glass of her own and her mothers’ expectations. It was agreed that a message concerning her be sent, endorsed by the full long and ornate formal name of the tariqua, to the body that did indeed call itself the Church of the Gateway. It went by radio pulse to the spacestation in wide solar orbit that received Habara’s rockets and was then passed on inside a vessel from here to there that was piloted by a tariqua. Not only that, but the message was destined for Ghezirah! Riding Robin up to the cliffs where, in this newly clear autumn air, under grey skies and tearing wet wind, she could finally see the waiting fuselage of that last golden rocket, Jalila felt confused and tiny, huge and mythic. It was agreed though, that for the sake of everyone—and not least Jalila herself, should she change her mind—that the word should remain that she was traveling out around the planet with Pavo onboard the Endeavor. In need of something to do when she wasn’t brooding, and waiting for further word from (could it really be?) the sentient city of Ghezirah, Jalila threw herself into the listings and loadings and preparations with convincing enthusiasm.

“The hardest decisions, once made, are often the best ones.”

“Compared to what you’ll be doing, my little journey seems almost pointless.”

“We love you so deeply.”

Then the message finally came: an acknowledgement; an acceptance; a few (far too few, it seemed) particulars of the arrangements and permissions necessary for such a journey. All on less than half a sheet of plain two-dimensional printout.

Even Lya had started touching and hugging her at every opportunity.

Jalila ate lunch with Kalal and Nayra. She surprised herself and talked gaily at first of singing islands and sea-leviathans, somehow feeling that she was hiding little from her two best friends but the particular details of the journey she was undertaking. But Jalila was struck by the coldness that seemed to lie between these two supposed lovers. Nayra, perhaps sensing from bitter experience that she was once again about to be rejected, seemed near-tearful behind her dazzling smiles and the flirtatious blonde tossings of her hair, while Kalal seemed . . . Jalila had no idea how he seemed, but she couldn’t let it end like this, and concocted some queries about the Endeavor so that she could lead him off alone as they left the bar. Nayra, perhaps fearing something else entirely, was reluctant to leave them.

“I wonder what it is that we’ve both done to her?” Kalal sighed as they watched her give a final sideways wave, pause, and then turn reluctantly down a sidestreet with a most un-Nayran duck of her lovely head.

They walked toward the harbor through a pause in the rain, to where the Endeavor was waiting.

“Lovely, isn’t she?” Kalal murmured as they stood looking down at the long deck, then up at the high forest of spars. Pavo, who was developing her acquaintance with the ship’s mind, gave them a wave from the bubble of the forecastle. “How long do you think your journey will take? You should be back by early spring, I calculate, if you get ahead of the icebergs. . . .”

Jalila fingered the brooch that the tariqua had given her, and which she had taken to wearing at her shoulder in the place where she had once worn the tideflower. It was like black ivory, but set with tiny white specks that loomed at your eyes if you held it close. She had no idea what world it was from, or of the substance of which it was made.

“. . . You’ll miss the winter here. But perhaps that’s no bad thing. It’s cold, and there’ll be other Seasons on the ocean. And there’ll be other winters. Well, to be honest, Jalila, I’d been hoping—”

“Look!” Jalila interrupted, suddenly sick of the lie she’d been living. “I’m not going.”

They turned and were facing each other by the harbor’s edge. Kalal’s strange face twisted into surprise, and then something like delight. Jalila thought that he was looking more and more like his father. “That’s marvelous!” He clasped each of Jalila’s arms and squeezed her hard enough to hurt. “It was rubbish, by the way, what I just said about winters here in Al Janb. They’re the most magical, wonderful season. We’ll have snowball fights together! And when Eid al-Fitr comes . . .”

His voice trailed off. His hands dropped from her. “What is it, Jalila?”

“I’m not going with Pavo on the Endeavor, but I’m going away. I’m going to Ghezirah. I’m going to study under the Church of the Gateway. I’m going to try to become a tariqua.”

His face twisted again. “That witch—”

“—don’t keep calling her that! You have no idea!”

Kalal balled his fists, and Jalila stumbled back, fearing for a moment that this wild, odd creature might actually be about to strike her. But he turned instead, and ran off from the harbor.

Next morning, to no one’s particular surprise, it was once again raining. Jalila felt restless and disturbed after her incomplete exchanges with Kalal. Some time had also passed since the message had been received from Ghezirah, and the few small details it had given of her journey had become vast and complicated and frustrating in their arranging. Despite the weather, she decided to ride out to see the tariqua.

Robin’s mood had been almost as odd as her mothers, recently, and she moaned and snickered at Jalila when she entered the stables. Jalila called back to her, and stroked her long nose, trying to ease her agitation. It was only when she went to check the harnesses that she realized that Abu was missing. Lya was in the haramlek, still finishing breakfast. It had to be Kalal who had taken her.

The swirling serraplated road. The black, dripping trees. The agitated ocean. Robin was starting to rust again. She would need more of Pavo’s attention. But Pavo would soon be gone too. . . . The whole planet was changing, and Jalila didn’t know what to make of anything, least of all what Kalal was up to, although the unasked-for borrowing of a precious mount, even if Abu had been virtually Kalal’s all summer, filled her with a foreboding that was an awkward load, not especially heavy, but difficult to carry or put down; awkward and jagged and painful. Twice, now, he had turned from her and walked away with something unsaid. It felt like the start of some prophecy. . . .

The qasr shone jet-black in the teeming rain. The studded door, straining to overcome the swelling damp, burst open more forcefully than usual at Jalila’s third knock, and the air inside swirled dark and empty. No sign of Abu in the place beyond the porch where Kalal would probably have hobbled him, although the floor here seemed muddied and damp, and Robin was agitated. Jalila glanced back, but she and her hayawan had already obscured the possible signs of another’s presence. Unlike Kalal, who seemed to notice many things, she decided that she made a poor detective.

Cold air stuttered down the passageways. Jalila, chilled and watchful, had grown so used to this qasr’s sense of abandonment that it was impossible to tell whether the place was now finally empty. But she feared that it was. Her thoughts and footsteps whispered to her that the tariqua, after ruining her life and playing with her expectations, had simply vanished into a puff of lost potentialities. Already disappointed, angry, she hurried to the high-ceilinged room set with blue and white tiles and found, with no great surprise, that the strewn cushions were cold and damp, the coffee lamp was unlit, and that the book through which that patient ant had crawled was now sprawled in a damp-leafed scatter of torn pages. There was no sign of the scarab. Jalila sat down, and listened to the wind’s howl, the rain’s ticking, wondering for a long time when it was that she had lost the ability to cry.

Finally, she stood up and moved toward the courtyard. It was colder today than it had ever been, and the rain had greyed and thickened. It gelled and dripped from the gutters in the form of something she supposed was called sleet, and which she decided as it splattered down her neck that she would hate forever. It filled the bowl of the fountain with mucus-like slush, and trickled sluggishly along the lines of the drains. The air was full of weepings and howlings. In the corner of the courtyard, there lay a small black heap.

Sprawled half in, half out of the poor shelter of the arched cloisters, more than ever like a flightless bird, the tariqua lay dead. Her clothes were sodden. All the furnace heat had gone from her body, although, on a day such as this, that would take no more than a matter of moments. Jalila glanced up through the sleet toward the black wet stone of the latticed mashrabiya from which she and Kalal had first spied on the old woman, but she was sure now that she was alone. People shrank incredibly when they were dead—even a figure as frail and old as this creature had been. And yet, Jalila found as she tried to move the tariqua’s remains out of the rain, their spiritless bodies grew uncompliant; heavier and stupider than clay. The tariqua’s face rolled up toward her. One side was pushed in almost unrecognizably, and she saw that a nearby nest of ants were swarming over it, busily tunneling out the moisture and nutrition, bearing it across the smeared paving as they stored up for the long winter ahead.

There was no sign of the scarab.

5.

This, for Jalila and her mothers, was the Season of Farewells. It was the Season of Departures.

There was a small and pretty onion-domed mausoleum on a headland overlooking Al Janb, and the pastures around it were a popular place for picnics and lovers’ trysts in the Season of Summers, although they were scattered with tombstones. It was the ever-reliable Lya who saw to the bathing and shrouding of the tariqua’s body, which was something Jalila could not possibly face, and to the sending out through the null-space between the stars of all the necessary messages. Jalila, who had never been witness to the processes of death before, was astonished at the speed with which everything was arranged. As she stood with the other mourners on a day scarfed with cloud, beside the narrow rectangle of earth within which what remained of the tariqua now lay, she could still hear the wind booming over the empty qasr, feel the uncompliant weight of the old woman’s body, the chill speckle of sleet on her face.

It seemed as if most of the population of Al Janb had made the journey with the cortege up the narrow road from the town. Hard-handed fisherwomen. Gaudily dressed merchants. Even the few remaining aliens. Nayra was there, too, a beautiful vision of sorrow surrounded by her lesser black acolytes. So was Ibra. So, even, was Kalal. Jalila, who was acknowledged to have known the old woman better than anyone, said a few words that she barely heard herself over the wind. Then a priestess who had flown in specially from Ras pronounced the usual prayers about the soul rising on the arms of Munkar and Nakir, the blue and the black angels. Looking down into the ground, trying hard to think of the Gardens of Delight that the Almighty always promised her stumbling faithful, Jalila could only remember that dream of her own burial: the soil pattering on her face, and everyone she knew looking down at her. The tariqua, in one of her many half-finished tales, had once spoken to her of a world upon which no sun had ever shone, but which was nevertheless warm and bounteous from the core of heat beneath its surface, and where the people were all blind, and moved by touch and sound alone; it was a joyous place, and they were forever singing. Perhaps, and despite all the words of the Prophet, Heaven, too, was a place of warmth and darkness.

The ceremony was finished. Everyone moved away, each pausing to toss in a damp clod of earth, but leaving the rest of the job to be completed by a dull-minded robotic creature, which Pavo had had to rescue from the attentions of the younger children, who, all through the long Habaran summer, had ridden around on it. Down at their haramlek, Jalila’s mothers had organized a small feast. People wandered the courtyard, and commented admiringly on the many changes and improvements they had made to the place. Amid all this, Ibra seemed subdued—a reluctant presence in his own body—while Kalal was nowhere to be seen at all, although Jalila suspected that, if only for the reasons of penance, he couldn’t be far away.

Of course, there had been shock at the news of the tariqua’s death, and Lya, who had now become the person to whom the town most often turned to resolve its difficulties, had taken the lead in the inquiries that followed. A committee of wisewomen was organized even more quickly than the funeral, and Jalila had been summoned and interrogated. Waiting outside in the cold hallways of Al Janb’s municipal buildings, she’d toyed with the idea of keeping Abu’s disappearance and her suspicions of Kalal out of her story, but Lya and the others had already spoken to him, and he’d admitted to what sounded like everything. He’d ridden to the qasr on Abu to remonstrate with the tariqua. He’d been angry, and his mood had been bad. Somehow, but only lightly, he’d pushed the old woman, and she had fallen badly. Then, he panicked. Kalal bore responsibility for his acts, it was true, but it was accepted that the incident was essentially an accident. Jalila, who had imagined many versions of Kalal’s confrontation with the tariqua, but not a single one that seemed entirely real, had been surprised at how easily the people of Al Janb were willing to absolve him. She wondered if they would have done so quite so easily if Kalal had not been a freak—a man. And then she also wondered, although no one had said a single word to suggest it, just how much she was to blame for all of this herself.

She left the haramlek from the funeral wake and crossed the road to the beach. Kalal was sitting on the rocks, his back turned to the shore and the mountains. He didn’t look around when she approached and sat down beside him. It was the first time since before the tariqua’s death that they’d been alone.

“I’ll have to leave here,” he said, still gazing out toward the clouds that trailed the horizon.

“There’s no reason—”

“—no one’s asked me and Ibra to stay. I think they would, don’t you, if anyone had wanted us to? That’s the way you women work.”

“We’re not you women, Kalal. We’re people.”

“So you always say. And all Al Janb’s probably terrified about the report they’ve had to make to that thing you’re joining—the Church of the Gateway. Some big, powerful body, and—whoops—we’ve killed one of your old employees. . . .”

“Please don’t be bitter.”

Kalal blinked and said nothing. His cheeks were shining.

“You and Ibra—where will you both go?”

“There are plenty of other towns around this coast. We can use our boat to take us there before the ice sets in. We can’t afford to leave the planet. But maybe in the Season of False Springs, when I’m a grown man and we’ve made some of the proper money we’re always talking about making from harvesting the tideflowers—and when word’s got around to everyone on this planet of what happened here. Maybe then we’ll leave Habara.” He shook his head and sniffed. “I don’t know why I bother to say maybe. . . .”

Jalila watched the waves. She wondered if this was the destiny of all men; to wander forever from place to place, planet to planet, pursued by the knowledge of vague crimes that they hadn’t really committed.

“I suppose you want to know what happened?”

Jalila shook her head. “It’s in the report, Kalal. I believe what you said.”

He wiped his face with his palms, studied their wetness. “I’m not sure I believe it myself, Jalila. The way she was, that day. That old woman—she always seemed to be expecting you, didn’t she? And then she seemed to know. I don’t understand quite how it happened, and I was angry, I admit. But she almost lunged at me. . . . She seemed to want to die. . . .”

“You mustn’t blame yourself. I brought you to this, Kalal. I never saw . . .” Jalila shook her head. She couldn’t say. Not even now. Her eyes felt parched and cold.

“I loved you, Jalila.”

The worlds branched in a million different ways. It could all have been different. The tariqua still alive. Jalila and Kalal together, instead of the half-formed thing that the love they had both felt for Nayra had briefly been. They could have taken the Endeavor together and sailed this planet’s seas; Pavo would probably have let them—but when, but where, but how? None of it seemed real. Perhaps the tariqua was right; there are many worlds, but most of them are poor, half-formed things.

Jalila and Kalal sat there for a while longer. The breathmoss lay not far off, darkening and hardening into a carpet of stiff grey. Neither of them noticed it.

For no other reason than the shift of the tides and the rapidly coming winter, Pavo, Jalila, and Kalal and Ibra all left Al Janb on the same morning. The days before were chaotic in the haramlek. People shouted and looked around for things and grew cross and petty. Jalila was torn between bringing everything and nothing, and after many hours of bag-packing and lip-chewing, decided that it could all be thrown out, and that her time would be better spent down in the stables, with Robin. Abu was there too, of course, and she seemed to sense the imminence of change and departure even more than Jalila’s own hayawan. She had become Kalal’s mount far more than she had ever been Lya’s, and he wouldn’t come to say goodbye.

Jalila stroked the warm felt of the creatures’ noses. Gazing into Abu’s eyes as she gazed back at hers, she remembered their rides out in the heat of summer. Being with Kalal then, although she hadn’t even noticed it, had been the closest she had ever come to loving anyone. On the last night before their departure, Ananke cooked one of her most extravagant dinners, and the four women sat around the heaped extravagance of the table that she’d spent all day preparing, each of them wondering what to say, and regretting how much of these precious last times together they’d wasted. They said a long prayer to the Almighty, and bowed in the direction of Al’Toman. It seemed that, tomorrow, even the two mothers who weren’t leaving Al Janb would be setting out on a new and difficult journey.

Then there came the morning, and the weather obliged with chill sunlight and a wind that pushed hard at their cloaks and nudged the Endeavor away from the harbor even before her sails were set. They all watched her go, the whole town cheering and waving as Pavo waved back, looking smaller and neater and prettier than ever as she receded. Without ceremony, around the corner from the docks, out of sight and glad of the Endeavor’s distraction, Ibra and Kalal were also preparing to leave. At a run, Jalila caught them just as they were starting to shift the hull down the rubbled slipway into the waves. Breathmoss; she noticed that Kalal had kept the name, although she and he stood apart on that final beach and talked as two strangers.

She shook hands with Ibra. She kissed Kalal lightly on the cheek by leaning stiffly forward, and felt the roughness of his stubble. Then the craft got stuck on the slipway, and they were all heaving to get her moving the last few meters into the ocean, until, suddenly, she was afloat, and Ibra was raising the sails, and Kalal was at the prow, hidden behind the tarpaulined weight of their belongings. Jalila only glimpsed him once more, and by then Breathmoss had turned to meet the stronger currents that swept outside the grey bay. He could have been a figurehead.

Back at the dock, her mothers were pacing, anxious.

“Where have you been?”

“Do you know what time it is?”

Jalila let them scald her. She was almost late for her own leaving. Although most of the crowds had departed, she’d half expected Nayra to be there. Jalila was momentarily saddened, and then she was glad for her. The silver craft that would take her to the rocketport smelled disappointingly of engine fumes as she clambered into it with the few other women and aliens who were leaving Habara. There was a loud bang as the hatches closed, and then a long wait while nothing seemed to happen, and she could only wave at Lya and Ananke through the thick porthole, smiling and mouthing stupid phrases until her face ached. The ferry bobbed loose, lurched, turned, and angled up. Al Janb was half gone in plumes of white spray already.

Then it came in a huge wave. That feeling of incompleteness, of something vital and unknown left irretrievably behind, which is the beginning of the Pain of Distance that Jalila, as a tariqua, would have to face throughout her long life. A sweat came over her. As she gazed out through the porthole at what little there was to see of Al Janb and the mountains, it slowly resolved itself into one thought. Immense and trivial. Vital and stupid. That scarab. She’d never asked Kalal about it, nor found it at the qasr, and the ancient object turned itself over in her head, sinking, spinning, filling her mind and then dwindling before rising up again as she climbed out, nauseous, from the ferry and crossed the clanging gantries of the spaceport toward the last huge golden craft, which stood steaming in the winter’s air. A murder weapon?—but no, Kalal was no murderer. And, in any case, she was a poor detective. And yet . . .

The rockets thrust and rumbled. Pushing back, squeezing her eyeballs. There was no time now to think. Weight on weight, terrible seconds piled on her. Her blood seemed to leave her face. She was a clay-corpse. Vital elements of her senses departed. Then, there was a huge wash of silence. Jalila turned to look through the porthole beside her, and there it was. Mostly blue, and entirely beautiful: Habara, her birth planet. Jalila’s hands rose up without her willing, and her fingers squealed as she touched the glass and tried to trace the shape of the greenish-brown coastline, the rising brown and white of the mountains of that huge single continent that already seemed so small, but of which she knew so little. Jewels seemed to be hanging close before her, twinkling and floating in and out of focus like the hazy stars she couldn’t yet see. They puzzled her for a long time, did these jewels, and they were evasive as fish as she sought them with her weightlessly clumsy fingers. Then Jalila felt the salt break of moisture against her face, and realized what it was.

At long last, she was crying.

6.

Jalila had long been expecting the message when it finally came. At only one hundred and twenty standard years, Pavo was still relatively young to die, but she had used her life up at a frantic pace, as if she had always known that her time would be limited. Even though the custom for swift funerals remained on Habara, Jalila was able to use her position as a tariqua to ride the Gateways and return for the service. The weather on the planet of her birth was unpredictable as ever, raining one moment and then sunny the next, even as she took the ferry to Al Janb from the rocketport, and hot and cold winds seemed to strike her face as she stood on the dock’s edge and looked about for her two remaining mothers. They embraced. They led her to their haramlek, which seemed smaller to Jalila each time she visited it, despite the many additions and extensions and improvements they had made, and far closer to Al Janb than the long walk she remembered once taking on those many errands. She wandered the shore after dinner, and searched the twilight for a particular shape and angle of quartz, and the signs of dark growth. But the heights of the Season of Storms on this coastline were ferocious, and nothing as fragile as breathmoss could have survived. She lay sleepless that night in her old room within her dreamtent, breathing the strong, dense, moist atmosphere with difficulty, listening to the sound of the wind and rain.

She recognized none of the faces but her mothers’ of the people who stood around Pavo’s grave the following morning. Al Janb had seemed so changeless, yet even Nayra had moved on—and Kalal was far away. Time was relentless. Far more than the wind that came in off the bay, it chilled Jalila to the bone. One mother dead, and her two others looking like the mahwagis she supposed they were becoming. The Pain of Distance. More than ever now, and hour by hour and day by day in this life that she had chosen, Jalila knew what the old tariqua had meant. She stepped forward to say a few words. Pavo’s life had been beautiful and complete. She had passed on much knowledge about this planet to all womankind, just as she had once passed on her wisdom to Jalila. The people listened respectfully to Jalila, as if she were a priest. When the prayers were finished and the clods of earth had been tossed and the groups began to move back down the hillside, Jalila remained standing by Pavo’s grave. What looked like the same old part-metal beast came lumbering up, and began to fill in the rest of the hole, lifting and lowering the earth with reverent, childlike care. Just as Jalila had insisted, and despite her mothers’ puzzlement, Pavo’s grave lay right beside the old tariqua’s whom they had buried so long ago. This was a place that she had long avoided, but now that Jalila saw the stone, once raw and brittle, but now smoothed and greyed by rain and wind, she felt none of the expected agony. She traced the complex name, scrolled in naskhi script, which she had once found impossible to remember, but which she had now recited countless times in the ceremonials that the Church of the Gateway demanded of its acolytes. Sometimes, especially in the High Temple at Ghezirah, the damn things could go on for days. Yet not one member of the whole Church had seen fit to come to the simple ceremony of this old woman’s burial. It had hurt her, once, to think that no one from offworld had come to her own funeral. But now she understood.

About to walk away, Jalila paused, and peered around the back of the gravestone. In the lee of the wind, a soft green patch of life was thriving. She stooped to examine the growth, which was thick and healthy, forming a patch more than the size of her two outstretched hands in this sheltered place. Breathmoss. It must have been here for a long time. Yet who would have thought to bring it? Only Pavo: only Pavo could possibly have known.

As the gathering of mourners at the haramlek started to peter out, Jalila excused herself and went to Pavo’s quarters. Most of the stuff up here was a mystery to her. There were machines and nutrients and potions beyond anything you’d expect to encounter on such an out-of-the way planet. Things were growing. Objects and data needed developing, tending, cataloging, if Pavo’s legacy was to be maintained. Jalila would have to speak to her mothers. But, for now, she found what she wanted, which was little more than a glass tube with an open end. She pocketed it, and walked back up over the hill to the cemetery, and said another few prayers, and bent down in the lee of the wind behind the old gravestone beside Pavo’s new patch of earth, and managed to remove a small portion of the breathmoss without damaging the rest of it.

That afternoon, she knew that she would have to ride out. The stables seemed virtually unchanged, and Robin was waiting. She even snickered in recognition of Jalila, and didn’t try to bite her when she came to introduce the saddle. It had been such a long time that the animal’s easy compliance seemed a small miracle. But perhaps this was Pavo again; she could have done something to preserve the recollection of her much-changed mistress in some circuit or synapse of the hayawan’s memory. Snuffling tears, feeling sad and exulted, and also somewhat uncomfortable, Jalila headed south on her hayawan along the old serraplate road, up over the cliffs and beneath the arms of the urrearth forest. The trees seemed different; thicker-leafed. And the birdsong cooed slower and deeper than she remembered. Perhaps, here in Habara, this was some Season other than all of those that she remembered. But the qasr reared as always—out there on the cliff face, and plainly deserted. No one came here now, but, like Robin, the door, at three beats of her fists, remembered.

Such neglect. Such decay. It seemed a dark and empty place. Even before Jalila came across the ancient signs of her own future presence—a twisted coat-hanger, a chipped plate, a few bleached and rotting cushions, some odd and scattered bits of Gateway technology that had passed beyond malfunction and looked like broken shells—she felt lost and afraid. Perhaps this, at last, was the final moment of knowing that she had warned herself she might have to face on Habara. The Pain of Distance. But at the same time, she knew that she was safe as she crawled across this particular page of her universe, and that when she did finally take a turn beyond the Gateways through which sanity itself could scarcely follow, it would be of her own volition, and as an impossibly old woman. The tariqua. Tending flowers like an old tortoise thrust out of its shell. Here, on a sunny, distant day. There were worse things. There were always worse things. And life was good. For all of this, pain was the price you paid.

Still, in the courtyard, Jalila felt the cold draft of prescience upon her neck from that lacy mashrabiya where she and Kalal would one day stand. The movement she made as she looked up toward it even reminded her of the old tariqua. Even her eyesight was not as sharp as it had once been. Of course, there were ways around that which could be purchased in the tiered and dizzy markets of Ghezirah, but sometimes it was better to accept a few things as the will of the Almighty. Bowing down, muttering the shahada, Jalila laid the breathmoss upon the shaded stone within the cloister. Sheltered here, she imagined that it would thrive. Mounting Robin, riding from the qasr, she paused once to look back. Perhaps her eyesight really was failing her, for she thought she saw the ancient structure shimmer and change. A beautiful green castle hung above the cliffs, coated entirely in breathmoss; a wonder from a far and distant age. She rode on, humming snatches of the old songs she’d once known so well about love and loss between the stars. Back at the haramlek, her mothers were as anxious as ever to know where she had been. Jalila tried not to smile as she endured their familiar scolding. She longed to hug them. She longed to cry.

That evening, her last evening before she left Habara, Jalila walked the shore alone again. Somehow, it seemed the place to her where Pavo’s ghost was closest. Jalila could see her mother there now, as darkness welled up from between the rocks; a small, lithe body, always stooping, turning, looking. She tried going toward her; but Pavo’s shadow always flickered shyly away. Still, it seemed to Jalila as if she had been led toward something, for here was the quartz-striped rock from that long-ago Season of the Soft Rains. Of course, there was no breathmoss left, the storms had seen to that, but nevertheless, as she bent down to examine it, Jalila was sure that she could see something beside it, twinkling clear from a rockpool through the fading light. She plunged her hand in. It was a stone, almost as smooth and round as many millions of others on the beach, yet this one was worked and carved. And its color was greenish-grey.

The soapstone scarab, somehow thrust here to this beach by the storms of potentiality that the tariquas of the Church of the Gateway stirred up by their impossible journeyings, although Jalila was pleased to see that it looked considerably less damaged than the object she remembered Kalal turning over and over in his nervous hands as he spoke to her future self. Here at last was the link that would bind her through the pages of destiny, and, for a moment, she hitched her hand back and prepared to throw it so far out into the ocean that it would never be reclaimed. Then her arm relaxed. Out there, all the way across the darkness of the bay, the tideflowers of Habara were glowing.

She decided to keep it.

BRONTE’S EGG

Richard Chwedyk

THERE IS AN OLD HOUSE AT the edge of the woods about sixty kilometers out from the extremes of the nearest megalopolis. It was built in another century and resembles the architecture of the century before that one. In some ways it evokes the end of many things: the end of the road, the end of a time, the end of a search (which the house has been, and on occasion it still is). But it is also a good place for beginnings, a good place to begin a story about beginnings—as good as any and better than most.

And it began at dawn.

As the first hint of daylight entered the large second floor bedroom where the saurs slept in a great pile, Axel opened his eyes and whispered, “Yeah!”

There was stuff to do and he was ready.

He pulled himself out from under Agnes’ spiked tail and Rosie’s bony crest and horns, then over Charlie’s big rear end, almost stepping into Pierrot’s gaping mouth. He pressed, prodded and pushed his way until he could lift up the blanket and make a straight dash to the window. He hopped onto a wooden stool and from there climbed up another step to the box-seated window ledge. His little blue head moved left to right like a rolling turret as he stared out at the wall of trees past the yard, silhouetted against the brightening sky.

The sun is coming! And the sun is a star! And it’s spinning through space! And we’re spinning through space around the sun! And—there’s stuff to do!

“Stuff to do!” he whispered, hopped back to the stool and then to the floor.

Axel looked back at the sleep-pile. It was a great, blanket-covered mound. Except for the breathing, a few grumbled syllables and occasional twitches, none of the other saurs stirred. They were good sleepers for the most part—all but Axel. Axel could run about all day long from one end of the old Victorian house to the other, and when sleep time came and the saurs gathered themselves into a pile, he would shut his eyes—but nothing happened. His mind kept running. Even when he did manage to drift off, his dreams were of running, of traveling in speeding vehicles, like interstellar cruisers. And even if he wasn’t moving, he dreamed of motion, of stars and planets and asteroids, of winds and birds and leaves in autumn. The whole universe was whirling and spinning like an enormous amusement park ride.

He’d been to an amusement park once, so long ago he couldn’t distinguish it anymore from the rest of life.

He had no need to creep out of the room. The thump-thump-thump of his big padded feet disturbed no one. His tail in the air didn’t make a sound. He ran past the room of the big human, Tom Groverton. The human ran and ran all day long too, cleaning and feeding and keeping the saurs out of trouble—but he got tired and slept almost as hard as the saurs.

Axel headed down to the first floor. Descending human stairs should have been difficult for a bipedal creature only forty centimeters tall, but he flew down them with ease. There were so many things to do today! The universe was so big—that is, sooooo big! How could anyone just lie about when the sky was already lighting up the world?

No way! Axel thumped the floor with his tail. Space and Time and Time and Space! The Universe is one big place!

He’d learned that from the computer.

The computer was on a desk in the dining room, or what had been the dining room when the house was just a place for humans, before it became a shelter for the saurs. The desk was over by the east-facing window. The computer was old in many respects, but the old computers were often more easily upgraded, and as long as they were linked to all the marvelous systems out there in the world past the porch and the yard, there was nothing this old model couldn’t do.

“Yeah!”

Axel rolled a set of plastic steps up to the desk and dashed straight up until he stood before the huge gray monitor—huge to Axel, at least.

“Hey! Reggie!” Axel addressed the computer by name.

The computer could be voice-activated and voice-actuated. The brain box chirped at Axel’s greeting and the screen came to life. Icons were displayed in the corners and along the top, one of them being the Reggiesystems icon: “Reggie” himself, the light green seahorse-or-baby-sea-serpent thing, with its round black eyes and orange wattle that drooped down his jaw like a handlebar mustache.

The icon dropped to the center of the screen and grew until it was almost half the height of the screen. The figure of Reggie rotated from profile to head-on and in a smooth, slightly androgynous voice he spoke:

“Reggie is ready.”

“Hiya!” Axel waved a forepaw and smiled, mouth opened wide, revealing all his tiny, thorn-like teeth.

“Good morning, Axel,” said Reggie. “What can Reggie do for you today?” Reggie always referred to himself in the third person.

“A whole bunch of stuff!” Axel stretched his forepaws far apart. “Important stuff! Fate of the universe stuff! Really truly big important stuff!” His head bobbed with each exclamation.

“Where would you like to begin?” Reggie said with patience.

Axel looked sharply to one side, then the other. “Don’t know! I forgot. Wait!” He nodded vigorously. “The screensaver! Show me the screensaver!”

The icon’s head seemed to jiggle slightly, affirmatively, as if acknowledging the request. Reggie disappeared and the screen darkened to black. Axel drew his paws together in anticipation.

A bright speck appeared in the center of the darkness. It grew until it flickered gently, like a star, then grew some more until it looked as big as the sun.

It was the sun—as it might look if you were flying through space, directly toward it. It filled the screen until it seemed you were in imminent danger of crashing right into it.

“Aaaaaaaahh!” Axel screamed with delight.

The sun moved off to the right corner of the screen, as if you were veering away and passing it by. Darkness again. Another bright speck started to grow in the screen’s center: Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. It was followed by Venus, then the Earth, and Mars, and Jupiter—all the way through the solar system until a pudgy oblong bump rolled past odd-wise and all that was left on the screen were hundreds, thousands of bright specks, changing their positions at differing speeds, as you might see them if you were flying through space.

“Yeah!” cried Axel. “Yeah!!”

Through the haze of the Oort Cloud, then out past the solar system, the stars kept coming and coming until you could make out a bright little smudge, like a smeared thumbprint in luminous paint.

It was a galaxy! Another galaxy!

“Yeah!” shouted Axel. “Yeah yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah YEAH!”

The galaxy grew in size until you could just about make out some of the more individuated members of the star cluster. Axel cheered them on.

“Yes! Galaxies! Let’s go!”

The screensaver cycle was over and it was back to the beginning: the little speck grows into the sun, then the planets, then the far off galaxy—

Axel watched it all again, and then one more time before Reggie interrupted his reverie.

“There was something else you wished Reggie to do?”

“Ohhhh. That’s-right that’s-right that’s-right!” Axel kept his eyes on the moving stars. He remembered someone from the dream he’d had during his brief sleep: he couldn’t remember who, but it was someone he wanted to talk to. “I gotta send a message!”

“And where do you wish to send the message?”

Still looking at the screensaver, he said, “To space!”

Reggie took an instant longer than usual to reply. “Space, as an address, is not very specific. Are there any particular coordinates in space to which you wish your message directed?”

“What are coordinates?” Axel kept looking at the stars.

The screensaver blinked away. In its place appeared numbers from top to bottom: numbers with decimal points and superscripted degree signs—

“Coordinates,” Reggie said, “are a way to divide space by increments, so that one can more accurately determine which part of space one is looking at or to which section one might want to direct a message.”

“Ohhhhh.”

Reggie scrolled the numbers upward. Axel gaped at them, partly perplexed at the notion of numbers as directions, partly in awe at the sheer volume of them. Numbers, decimal points, degree signs—space was threatening to become an impenetrable wall of numbers. If he thought about it any more his head would heat up and explode.

“That one!” Axel pointed with his left forepaw. “I’ll take that one!”

The numbers stopped scrolling. “Which one?” asked Reggie.

“That one!” He pressed the forepaw to the glass screen, then tapped against it adamantly.

The numbers were so small—and his forepaw so big in comparison—that Reggie could still not discern which coordinate Axel had chosen. Reggie highlighted one of the numbers in bright red.

“This one?”

“Yeah! That’s it!” In truth it wasn’t. But the red highlighting was so distracting to Axel, whose choice of number was already purely arbitrary. Facing a wall of numbers, one seemed as good as another. “Send it there!”

“What kind of message?” Reggie asked. “Vocal? Alphabetical characters? Equations?”

“Like, maybe radio,” Axel said. “Or whatever you’ve got that’s faster, like micro-tachy-tot waves, or super-hydro-electro-neutrinos.”

“One moment,” said Reggie. “At what frequency?”

“Frequency? Just once is okay.” He rubbed a little spot just under his jaw.

A machine, even one as sophisticated as this Reggiesystems model, is not given to sighing, though one might imagine this model had many occasions to do so. What Reggie did was increase his pauses and slow down his speech delivery.

“What is meant by ‘frequency,’ Axel—” Reggie explained it all carefully. Axel faced another wall of numbers and made another choice—exactly the same way he’d made the first.

The numbers disappeared and the screensaver images returned. Axel watched it as avidly as if he’d never seen them before.

“Reggie has reserved time on the radio telescope at Mount Herrmann. The message can be sent at 13:47 our time this afternoon, when their first shift team breaks for lunch.”

“Wow!” Axel’s head reared back. “Thank you, Reggie. Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!”

“Reggie still needs one more piece of information.”

“What’s that?”

Very slowly, Reggie said, “The message, please.”

“Oh, right!” Axel tried to remember the message he’d worked out during the night, as he’d peeked out from under the blankets and stared out through the window—at the rectangle of indigo speckled with pinpoints of light—and imagined all the “space guys” out there. Space and Time and Time and Space—They might look like Axel: blue theropods with coal-black eyes, tiny forepaws and clumpy feet—but without the long scar down his back; or they might look like one of the other saurs—miniature tyrannosaurs or ceratopsians or long-necked sauropods or crested hadrosaurs. Or they might look like human guys, or birds, or jellyfish, or clouds—

“What is the message?” Reggie asked.

“Okay-okay-okay. The message—” Axel held out the last syllable as long as he could to buy a little more time. “—is—it’s—‘Hiya!’ ”

“That is the message?”

“Yeah.”

“The complete message?” Reggie didn’t often emphasize his adjectives that way.

“I don’t know. Is that enough? What else should I say?”

Reggie paused long enough to formulate an appropriate answer. “You may say as much or as little as you like, but it is customary to tell the recipient of a message who you are.”

“Why?”

It may just have been a function of the old hard drive (technology had long since moved past the use of them), but Axel heard a strange, almost nervous, clicking coming from inside the brain box.

“Because the recipient might possibly—for some reason completely unknown to Reggie—want to send a message back to you, in reply.”

“Heyyy—” Axel imagined the screensaver running backward—you could do that if you looked at it hard enough—back through space the other way. “Space guys! Yeah!”

“You may also want to tell them a little about yourself,” Reggie suggested. “Where you live. What you do. Where you come from—just to be friendly.”

“Ohhh! Yes! Got it! Yes! I can say—‘Hiya! I’m Axel, and I live in this big house and I’m here with all my friends. We’re saurs, you know, all of us except for the human who brings us food and cleans up stuff. His name is Tom. But we’re saurs!

“ ‘Saurs are like dinosaurs. They were these really big guys who lived a long time ago and went extinct. We’re supposed to look like them except we’re smaller and we don’t have the scary parts.

“ ‘We came from a factory that was like a laboratory too, and we were made out of living stuff—you know, biology.

“ ‘They made millions of us and sold us to humans as toys. All these human guys who made us made big, big money and drove around in giant bankmobiles and wore top hats and had houses a thousand times bigger than this place. But then they had to stop selling us.

“ ‘Turned out we were smarter than we were supposed to be, and lived longer. This lady from the Atherton Foundation said we weren’t toys at all but real-real-real things that were alive and they shouldn’t be selling us.

“ ‘But we kept getting cut up and run over, or the kids who owned us stepped on us or threw us out of windows. Or the parents who bought us drove us to the woods and left us there—or they stopped feeding us and stuff like that. So after a while there weren’t many of us left.

“ ‘People started to believe the Atherton lady. They set up a bunch of houses for us and that’s how we got to live here.

“ ‘We do all sorts of stuff the guys who made us didn’t think we could do, like think and feel and live longer than three years. My buddy Preston writes books. My other buddy Diogenes reads all the stuff in the library. And the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, who don’t say anything but they play this stuff that sounds like music sometimes. And Agnes is this stegosaur with plates on her back and spikes on her tail and she knows all about humans and what’s wrong with them. She’s twenty-five years old, so she must know everything. Doc is smart too, but he’s nice!

“ ‘The guys who made us said we couldn’t make eggs because we don’t have the right parts and stuff, but we can do that too! Not me, but like Bronte and Kara—female guys. The humans aren’t supposed to know, except for Tom and Dr. Margaret—she’s the lady who comes every week to make sure we’re not sick or dead. I’m not supposed to know either because they think I can’t keep a secret, so don’t tell the other space guys about this, okay?

“ ‘And when I finish this message, I’m gonna build Rotomotoman. He’s this cool robot I dreamed about last night. Reggie’s gonna help me, because Reggie’s the very-best-smartest whole computer in the world. Then I’m gonna get on a starship and travel all through time and space and save the universe and crash into supernovas and get sucked into wormholes.’ ”

Axel took a long, necessary breath, then said to Reggie, “Is that okay?”

“Under the circumstances,” Reggie said, “Your message is—exceptional.”

“Wow!”

“It is, however, customary to ask after the well-being of the recipient of the message, and to close the message—”

“Oh, oh, I know! I know! So I’ll say, ‘Hope you’re okay. Your friend, Axel.’ Like that, right?”

“The message will be sent as you dictated it,” Reggie replied, “with a few grammatical corrections.”

“All right!” Axel leapt up. “A message to space! Thank you, Reggie! Oh, thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you!”

“You are very welcome, Axel,” said Reggie. Then, with what one might interpret as a trepidatious pause—and with careful attention to pronunciation—he asked, “Now, please explain to Reggie, what is a Ro-to-mo-to-man?”

Tom Groverton stood at the door of the room where the saurs slept. Eyes half open, hair still mussed, a middle button of his shirt undone, he said the word “breakfast” clearly but not too loudly and stepped back as the little ones ran past him.

The bigger saurs rose slowly: grunting, grumbling and stretching. The triceratops named Charlie always had a little trouble righting himself. He braced up against his mate, Rosie, until his hind legs were reasonably straight. The two gray stegosaurs, Agnes and Sluggo, went through a ritual that resembled push-ups—hind legs first, then forelegs up slowly with a sliding sort of motion.

Hubert and Diogenes, the two biggest theropods—each over a meter and a half tall—helped the other big guys, like Sam and Dr. David Norman. Tails really do help.

Diogenes lent a forepaw to Doc, the light brown tyrannosaur with a “tricky” left leg.

“Thank you, my friend,” Doc said, his eyes barely visible under his thick lids. “Each day it seems to get a little harder.”

“It does for everyone,” said Tom Groverton from the doorway.

Doc nodded. “But not quite the same way for everyone. You were a little one once, who grew into an adult. We saurs were engineered. We were ‘born’ with our eyes open. What growth we experienced is beyond memory. The little ones stay little and the big ones were always big.”

“Either way, we grow old,” Tom insisted.

“Until we grow cold.” Doc smiled serenely. “Or perhaps you can say we wear out instead.”

“So do we.”

As Hubert and Diogenes folded up the blankets and covers, Tom walked over to the wheeled, bassinet-sized hospital bed in the center of the room. Upon it was a figure who was recognizably a saurian and recognizably a theropod, but whose limbs—all of them—were missing and whose tail was a crushed-looking stump. Several long-healed scars criss-crossed his abdomen and where his eyes should have been were empty sockets.

“Good morning, Hetman,” Tom said to the figure on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Not so bad.” Hetman’s voice was faint and raspy, always a little more so in the morning. “I had an odd dream. Odd, but pleasant.”

“What was it?” Doc asked, resting his forepaws on the bed railing.

“Very odd. Very odd indeed.” Hetman turned his head toward the voices. “Can you imagine me riding on a horse’s back?”

“I can, old friend.” Doc closed his eyes. “Like Zagloba, the Cossack—rebellious, reckless, full of life—riding with incomparable skill.” He opened his eyes again and smiled. “It must have been a splendid dream.”

Hubert and Diogenes stood at the bed railing, ready to move Hetman downstairs to breakfast.

“Like some help?” Tom offered.

“They can manage.” Doc spoke for them. Hubert and Diogenes were quite literate and articulate but spoke only when necessity dictated. “Thank you all the same, but you better get downstairs before Jean-Claude and Pierrot get impatient. You remember yesterday.”

The day before, Jean-Claude and Pierrot chanted “Meat! Meat! Breakfast Meat!” until even the little ones who ate nothing but soy pellets and oatmeal shouted along.

Tom nodded. He looked at the other saurs who had still not gone down to breakfast: Agnes, Sluggo, Kara, Preston and Bronte. All of them were looking up at Tom except for Bronte. The bright green apatosaur was gazing in the direction of Hetman’s bed.

Tom gave them an asymmetrical grin before leaving the room. “Well, don’t wait too long.”

When he was gone, Hetman whispered, “Check the egg! I twisted in my sleep last night. I’m afraid I may have hurt it!”

Hubert turned Hetman gently on his side and lifted his pillow as Doc watched. Under the pillow was a pale yellow egg, no more than a few centimeters long.

“It’s fine,” said Doc.

“Don’t let Doc pick it up,” said Agnes. “The clumsy oaf.”

“My dear Agnes, I had no intention.”

Sluggo had already run over to retrieve a tiny cardboard box stuffed with cotton, hidden behind the chest near the window, where the blankets and covers were kept. He pushed it back along the floor with his snout. Diogenes picked up the egg and carefully placed it in the little box.

Agnes nudged past Sluggo and examined it, almost sniffing it, in search of the slightest possible fracture. “I guess it looks okay.”

Kara butted Agnes with her head. She was an apatosaur, but her head was big—and hard. “Let Bronte see. It’s her egg, after all.”

“Oh. Right.” Agnes stepped back and let Bronte timidly press in.

As Bronte stared, a set of three tiny furrows took their place on her forehead. She worried, she pitied, she pondered, all at once as she took in the egg’s contours and slightly rough surface. She held her breath and stared.

They all did, gathered around the cardboard box, except for Hetman, who listened as carefully as the others watched.

“The shell looks so frail,” whispered Sluggo.

“Are you an idiot?” said Agnes. “Have you touched it? It’s like granite. She won’t have the strength to break through that shell.”

“Or he,” Doc suggested.

“What do you know?” Agnes grumbled.

“What do any of us know?”

Agnes grumbled again, but left it at that.

None of them knew if the time was soon for the first hairline cracks to form on the shell—for the little creature who might be within to break through the calcium walls of her prison and her protection—or his. Now. Later. Or ever.

Agnes’ egg had had a yolk and a fetal sac, but no infant. So had Kara’s. Bronte’s first egg had contained a tiny, almost shapeless thing that never moved and never showed any signs that it could have moved, like some little plastic charm in the center of a bar of soap. The saurs had sealed that one carefully in a little plastic box and buried it in the garden.

In the past few months they had combed every database they could find with any bit of information about egg-laying creatures. They knew about ostriches and cobras, platypuses and echidnas. They even read about dinosaurs—the “real” ones, the ones who had lived millions of years before. It helped them guess at what might—or what should—happen, if anyone could have guessed that this could happen at all, which no one had.

Bronte had even practiced with bird eggs Sluggo had found out in the yard, eggs that had fallen out of nests in the trees. They hatched successfully, but who knew if the egg of a saur was anything like the egg of a sparrow?

“It needs heat,” said Bronte, who spoke rarely, and then only in a whisper.

“Sit on it,” said Agnes. “Gently.”

“It’s too frail,” said Sluggo.

“Put it by the window, in the sun,” said Kara.

“Too much,” Agnes replied. “You might boil it. Then, what if it clouds up in the afternoon?”

“We might ask Tom,” Sluggo suggested meekly. “Or Dr. Margaret.”

“No!” Agnes thumped her tail on the floor. “It’s not their business! It’s our business! Besides, they won’t know any better than we do. And besides that besides, if it gets out that we’re producing eggs the humans out there will go into a panic. They’ll stick us in labs again and examine us and try to work out what went wrong. Or they’ll just round us up and exterminate the whole lot of us.”

“They—they wouldn’t do that,” said Sluggo. The words didn’t come out with quite the certainty he intended.

Agnes sailed on the energy of her own bleak visions. “They might even decide they like the eggs and make us sit in pens and lay them like chickens! They’ll boil, scramble and fry them!”

“No!” Bronte and Sluggo gasped almost in unison.

Kara simply butted Agnes again. “Shut up!”

“Mark my words!” Agnes gave each syllable blunt, apocalyptic emphasis. “You can’t trust humans! They say one thing then do the other. They want the whole damn place for themselves. They want everything. Everything! They’re greedy and sneaky and creepy and they kill things for pleasure! They screw up everything then go around and look for more things to screw up!”

“That’s true,” said Preston, who for all the thousands of words he’d written, bent over a keyboard, tapping away with his four digits, rarely spoke more than a dozen words in a month. “After all, they made us.”

“What kind of a joke is that?” Agnes’ spiked tail swept the air in a short arc.

“Tom isn’t like that,” said Sluggo. “Dr. Margaret isn’t like that.”

“They aren’t now.” Agnes lowered her tail. “But they can turn on you just like that! It’s all that meat. It poisons their brains and they go crazy. That’s why you always have to keep your eyes on them.”

“Dr. Margaret doesn’t eat meat,” Sluggo reminded her. “She’s an herbivore.”

“A vegetarian, you mean,” said Doc.

“Oh, shut up! Who asked you anyway?” Agnes sneered at Doc.

“Who asked you?” said Kara. “We were talking about the egg.”

“What we need,” said Doc, resting a forepaw on Bronte’s back, “is patience. We must be careful and observant. This egg may not hatch, my dear. But if it doesn’t we will learn more and know better next time.”

“Someday,” Kara whispered, “one will hatch.”

“I hope so.” Doc patted her consolingly. “But as much as I hate to say this, it may also be possible that—in our genetic idiosyncrasies—we may be only capable of performing half the job.”

“Oh, who died and made you king?” Agnes turned away in disgust—or perhaps to hide her pained expression momentarily.

Doc smiled and gently said, “Sweet Agnes, pay no attention to me, then. I am just a lame old fool who knows nothing except that he loves all his good friends here assembled.”

“You old windbag!” Agnes backed away. “As if I trusted carnosaurs any better than humans! You’re all filled with baloney!”

“Nevertheless,” said Hetman, his weak voice belying his proximity, “I have a feeling this one will hatch. Just a feeling, but they’re about all I have left.”

“Hetman,” Agnes said after an embarrassed pause, “I didn’t mean you when I said that about carnosaurs. I—I get carried away sometimes.”

“Do you?” Kara snorted.

“If you didn’t get carried away,” said Hetman, “I’d fear I’d been spirited off to another house in the night. Don’t apologize for being Agnes, Agnes.”

She responded with a rumble—this time from her stomach. A moment later, Doc’s stomach made a stuttered purr, like the starting up of an old internal combustion engine.

“Breakfast,” said Kara.

Hubert and Diogenes nodded and pushed Hetman’s bed toward the door, where they nearly collided with the blue blur of a breathless theropod.

“Preston! Hey! Preston!”

Axel slowed himself just long enough to shout a hurried “Hiya!” to Hetman, Hubert and Diogenes, then he charged on, coming to a halt as he slid broadside into Agnes.

“Uff! Will you watch it!” Agnes barked. “Isn’t it enough—”

“Sorry-sorry, Agnes. Preston! Preston! Can I have—”

His attention was drawn to the cardboard box, and its contents.

“Heyyy!” Axel took a careful look inside. “There it is!”

Doc nodded. “There it is.”

He looked around at the others and pointed to the box. “That’s the egg!” he said, as if they might not know yet.

“Indeed,” said Doc.

“Know what that means?” Axel continued.

“No,” Agnes sighed impatiently. “What does that mean?”

“Someone’s been having SEX!”

“Oh, shut up!” Agnes shouted. “You don’t know a thing about it!”

“Yes-yes-yes-yes! I learned all about it from the Reggie! I saw ‘Animal Mating Practices and Habits,’ ‘Barnyard Babies,’ ‘From Sperm to Germ’—or something like that, and—and I saw ‘Angelique Blows Her Birthday Candles.’ ”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Agnes’ back plates clicked with the tremor of her tail smacking the floor. “Are you completely—”

“Axel,” said Doc, “not that I want to distract you, but you came up here to ask Preston something, didn’t you?”

“Yes! Right! Yes!” Axel stepped over to Preston. “Can I have five thousand dollars?”

Agnes gasped. “What!”

“Five thousand dollars. That’s all. And, and then they’ll build him! They really will! They already made up the diagrams and ski-mats and stuff! Reggie showed them what I wanted!”

“And what’s that?” asked Agnes. “A working brain?”

“I’ll show you! Come on!” He took a few inaugural steps toward the door. “Come on!”

“ ‘Him,’ ” Doc said with his best deliberation, in an effort to get Axel to slow down and explain. “You said ‘him.’ And ‘they.’ You said ‘they’ too. Who is ‘him’ ? And who are ‘they’ ?”

“Rotomotoman, Doc! It’s Rotomotoman! Rotomotoman!” Axel beckoned with his forepaw. “Come on!”

Doc wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be an answer to one question, or two, or to no questions at all. The more he tried to decipher what Axel said the more his stomach rumbled.

Agnes shut her eyes and raised her back as far as it would go. “Why? Why us?”

“I—I think we better go along with him,” Doc said, “if we’re ever going to find out what this ‘Roto-man’ thing is.”

“Roto-moto-man!” Axel corrected him, then said it again more quickly, as if the mere saying of the name was a kind of sheer delight.

“He’s flipped,” Agnes said. “What hold he’s had on sanity—”

“It hurts nothing to see what’s got the little fellow so excited.” Doc took a step toward the door.

“Little fellow,” Agnes spat the words out and turned to Bronte. “Little fellow!”

“Come-on-come-on-come-on!” Axel shouted from the doorway.

Preston picked up the box with the egg and, hearing no objections from the others, followed Axel. Bronte kept to Preston’s side, as close to the egg as possible, with Kara on the other side. Doc limped along with Sluggo while Agnes, furiously reluctant, brought up the rear.

By the time the entourage reached the stairs Axel was already at the bottom. Looking up and waving.

“Hurry up!” he shouted, as if they were missing the last total solar eclipse for the next fifty years.

“Patience,” said Doc, as he and the others boarded the lift. “Patience. We’re coming.”

The lift was an adaptation from the “human days” of the house and was originally built to carry a wheelchair up and down the stairs. Now it was a simple flatbed platform that transported the saurs who were too small, too lame or too tired to climb up or down between the two floors. Speed was never part of its design or of its renovation. To Axel, it was agony watching the others come down on the lift, like being forced to watch the tide go out.

When the lift came to a halt, Doc and the others had barely gotten off before Axel raced on to the dining room and up the plastic stairs to the computer.

“Come-on-come-on-come-on!”

“We can see the screen from here,” Doc said, as the group settled a meter or so back from the desk. “Show us whatever it is you want us to see.”

“Reggie,” Axel said to the screen, “display Rotomotoman.”

The monitor screen displayed a gray background and light blue grid lines. A snatch of music played, something with a bouncy tempo and a lot of horns. A metallic gray figure appeared on the screen—a cylinder topped with a hemisphere. Just above the line where the cylinder met the hemisphere were two white circles with two smaller black circles inside them, like cartoon eyes. The cylinder rested on four small circles that one could suppose were wheels or casters, and attached at its sides were two articulated rods that one could imagine were arms. At the end of each rod was a flat, rectangular plate, out of which sprung five digits, one set off thumb-like from the others. The retinas of the presumed eyes shifted slightly from left to right, as if the figure were surveying the scene around itself.

“Go!” cried Axel.

The figure rolled off to the left of the screen, followed by horizontal “speed” lines and a cartoon dust cloud left behind. It reappeared, this time rolling in from the left and disappearing to the right side of the screen. It rolled from left to right, right to left, left to right again, as Axel chanted:

“Ro-toh Moto-Man! Ro-toh Moto Man!

Ro-toh Moto-Man! Ro-toh Moto Man!”

Before the saurs became completely dizzy watching this relentless back and forth motion, the grid lines were replaced on the screen by a simple cartoon street scene, with houses, sidewalks, trees, bushes, lawns and fences. Rotomotoman remained still now while the speed lines and changing background lent him the illusion of motion.

A chorus of voices joined the musical accompaniment.

The melody was simple enough, like a theme from an old television program from the middle of the last century, cannily synthesized by Reggie:

“He’s our man! Ro-to-moto Man—”

Axel sang along, staring at the screen, completely enthralled.

“He’s our man! He’s not from Japan—”

Doc looked at Preston. Kara looked at Bronte. Sluggo looked at Agnes.

“Japan?” he asked.

Agnes shook her head. She stood in front of the box with Bronte’s egg where Preston had placed it on the floor, as if to shield the egg from the sight.

The “theme song” continued:

“Whaa-at a man!

It’s none other than that Ro-to Moto Man!”

“But,” Bronte whispered to Doc, “it’s not a man at all.”

“It’s not even—” but Doc couldn’t go on.

The verse repeated, while Rotomotoman, up on the screen, crashed through a brick wall. He raced down a busy street while a flashing red light rose out of the top of his hemisphere-head. He extended himself on thin metal legs. His cylindrical body also extended, something like a telescope, until Rotomotoman could see through second- and third-floor windows. By the end of the second verse, little flashes of flame were shooting from one of the digits of his right “hand,” as if it had turned into a machine gun.

By end of the song, Rotomotoman was holding at bay a group of “bad guys” who wore traditional snap-brim caps and black masks over their eyes. Their arms were raised in surrender. Round, bulging bags with dollar signs printed on them lay on the floor where the bad guys had dropped them. A policeman with the appropriate badge, gun and club saluted Rotomotoman before taking custody of the villains. Rotomotoman modestly returned the salute. A man in a dark suit, a monocle and top hat—presumably a bank president—shook Rotomotoman’s metal hand—the same one from which bullets had been firing earlier.

The screen faded.

The saurs stood there, gaping in silence, wide-eyed, stunned and dumbfounded.

“See?” Axel trotted down the plastic steps. “Wasn’t that great? Wasn’t that the neatest-greatest thing you’ve ever seen?”

Doc, struggling for a politic response, was the first to speak. “Axel,” he asked sympathetically, “have you been getting enough sleep?”

“Axel,” Agnes said quietly but firmly, “are you nuts?”

“I saw it in a dream!” Axel insisted. “If I dreamed it, I was sleeping!”

“I wish I were dreaming,” said Kara.

“But these guys can make a real one!” Axel continued. “A real-real-real Rotomotoman! I asked Reggie and he found a company that makes—what did he call them? Prototypes!”

Bronte, in her whispering voice, said “Roto-prototypes.”

“Proto-motoman,” Preston mumbled.

“We should disconnect Reggie,” Agnes said. “Right away.”

“So—they can build him!” Axel turned to Preston. “And they can send him here! And—and it costs five thousand dollars. So can I have it, Preston, please? Please-please-please?”

Agnes made a sound that started like a cough and ended like a gag. “Five thousand dollars for a trashcan on wheels! A trashcan on wheels that crashes through walls! A trashcan that’ll run around and crush us until we’re flat as pancakes! A trashcan with a revolving red light flashing on his head and bullets shooting out of his fingers!”

“Yeah!” said Axel. “Isn’t he neat?”

“Axel—” Doc started, but Agnes cut him off.

“Axel, look around. Do you see any walls around here that need to be smashed through? Do you see any saurs that need to be flattened out? Do you see anyone that needs to be riddled with bullets?”

“Won’t do that! Won’t do that!” Axel raised his forepaws. “Reggie said we shouldn’t ask for that. No bullets, no smashing. He’s gonna have sense—like, a sensing system so he won’t squash anybody!”

“In other words,” Agnes said, “a trashcan that rolls back and forth, endlessly and uselessly. For five thousand dollars!”

“Not a garbage can!” Axel admonished her. “Rotomotoman! He’ll be mine! I made him up! Reggie helped but I made him up!” His voice took on a pleading tone. “He won’t smash anything! He’ll be our friend!”

“He won’t shoot anything?” Sluggo asked.

Axel shook his head. “Rotomotoman is good.”

“It’s good you made Rotomotoman,” Bronte said. “That was very clever of you. But—”

“You did a very nice job,” Kara added. “Very well done. But—”

“You are a deranged idiot and probably insane,” said Agnes.

“Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.” Axel bowed to each of them.

“But perhaps,” Doc ventured, “it would be better for everyone—” Axel turned to him.

Doc pointed to the computer. “—if your Rotomotoman limited his activities just to that screen.” His stomach rumbled—another call to breakfast. “You can still play with him as you wish. Rotomotoman can smash through whatever he likes as long as he remains on the screen.” His stomach now made an “urrrr” sound, distinct from the other noise.

Axel looked carefully at Doc.

He continued. “You can assuage the rancor of sweet Agnes here and relieve the apprehensions of the rest of us.”

Axel kept staring, saying nothing.

“Axel? Are you listening?”

“Yes.” Axel nodded. “Do it again.”

Doc cleared his throat. “Do what again?”

“Make your stomach go ‘urrrrrr’ like that.”

Doc took a deep breath. “I meant, did you listen to what I said?”

“Sure. What was it?”

Agnes thumped her tail against the floor. “He said that there’s no way in hell that we’re ever going to agree to have that metal trashcan in this house!”

Axel’s jaw dropped and his eyes grew wide. One could almost feel the theropod’s heart sinking. “But, but—I made him up! I did!”

He looked at Kara, Bronte and Sluggo—he couldn’t bear to look at Agnes. “It’s not what Rotomotoman does! It’s that he is! Do you see? I’ve got to make Rotomotoman!”

“I see that Preston would have to have lost his mind to waste five thousand dollars on a useless, dangerous piece of junk!” said Agnes.

“Axel,” Doc said with great sympathy, “Preston here writes books all about great star captains, mighty armies and flying cities, but he doesn’t have to build prototypes of them or march them through the halls of our little abode.” He patted Axel on the head. “We can’t build everything we imagine.”

Axel stepped away, head lowered, and turned to Preston.

“Is that true, Preston? Is that how you feel?”

It was always difficult to gauge Preston’s feelings. He spoke so little, and what he wrote in his books presented so many points of view it was difficult to figure which ones might be his own. He smiled at his companions, a little more to one side of his mouth than the other.

“I think what Axel has done is creative and—amusing,” he said in his soft tenor voice.

“Amusing?” Agnes replied. “I suppose a direct hit from a missile would have you in hysterics!”

Preston put his hand on Axel’s head and led him to the plastic stairs, up to the computer. The other saurs, with the exception of Agnes, were speechless.

“Preston!” she cried. “What are you doing?”

Axel and Preston kept going without reply.

“Preston, you’re not—you wouldn’t dare!”

At the top of the stairs, standing before the computer, Preston said, “Reggie?”

“Reggie is ready,” the computer replied.

“Please connect me to my bank.”

“Preston!” Agnes wailed. “You’ve gone nuts too? Preston!”

“What will Tom say?” Sluggo asked Doc.

“I suppose Tom will have to deal with it. As we all will.”

Preston leaned over and said right into Axel’s ear, to make sure he heard, “Remember, no machine guns. No death rays. No crashing through walls. No squashing little ones. No speeding.”

“Yes-yes-yes-yes-YES!” Axel wrapped his forepaws around Preston’s leg. “Whatever you say! Oh, thank-you-thank-you Preston!”

The transfer of funds to the prototype company went smoothly. It had long ago ceased to be strange for non-humans to hold bank accounts. The idea that banks thought in terms of anything but accounts and their activities belongs to the generation of our fore-parents. Preston’s financial holdings were hardly remarkable except for their size, as were the accounts held by some other saurs—like Alphonse, who often won money on radio quiz programs—and Doc, who had a trust fund from a former “owner.”

Axel’s excitement set the plastic stairs wobbling as the two came down from the desk.

“Oh, thank you, Preston! Thank-you-thank-you-thank-you-thank-you! You are the best-best, most wonderful perfect greatest friend in the whole complete universe! Thank you thank you you YOU!”

“Is anyone in here planning to have breakfast?” Tom Groverton stood behind them, arms folded and head tilted. “Now that everyone else has finished?”

“Breakfast-breakfast-breakfast!” Axel dashed out past Tom. “Come on, Preston! My best-best friend! Let’s have breakfast!”

“Sorry for the delay,” Doc said to Tom, “but we had a little business to take care of.”

“Business?”

“I’ll explain later,” Doc said. “I think it will take a little time.”

“Don’t ask me,” Agnes shook her head wearily, “I don’t think I ever want to eat breakfast again.”

Bronte carefully covered up the egg with a swath of cotton before Preston picked up the box and headed for the kitchen.

“What’s that? Another egg?” Tom asked.

Agnes raised her tail and stared severely at Bronte.

“Y-yes,” Bronte said nervously, looking from Kara to Agnes. “Sluggo found it the other day. A crow’s egg, I think. It-it’s rather big.”

“Well,” Tom said, bending down and rubbing Bronte just above the little furrows on her brow, “best of luck. You’re a first-rate egg-hatcher. You’ll do a fine job.”

“Thank you.” the words came out as a rasp, as if her mouth was very dry.

She followed Preston out of the room, just behind Kara and Sluggo, slowly heading for the kitchen. Doc walked with his head down, attempting the difficult gesture of rubbing his head with one of his short forepaws. His stomach rumbled again.

“After breakfast.” He sighed. “After breakfast.”

Agnes narrowed her eyes and stared up at Tom.

“You just mind your own damn business!” she said, and followed the others out of the room.

At dawn the next day, when Axel crawled out from the sleep pile and ran downstairs, he heard muffled sounds coming from the living room and noticed that the big video screen was still on.

Hubert had turned off the video just before sleep-time—Axel distinctly remembered. Maybe the video had gone on by itself—or was there another saur who decided to get up even earlier than Axel? He hurried over to investigate.

In the middle of the living room, about the same place where the saurs sat when they watched the video, was a lone frog—a frog!—about the size of a softball; pale green with a pattern of gray, blotty spots all over.

Next to the frog was the remote control pad the saurs used to change programs. He, or perhaps she, sat very still, head turned to the screen. But the frog must have heard Axel approaching. Before he could get any closer the amphibian slapped the remote pad with his left forepaw. The video clicked off and the frog hopped over to the couch by the window, then up onto the cushions.

“Hey! Where ya goin’ ? Hey!”

Axel ran after the frog, but not fast enough. In seconds the frog was up on the back of the couch, onto the window ledge and—flooop!—out the window and out of sight.

Axel climbed up after him—or her. He looked out into the yard, still dark in the early morning shadows, then back at the video screen.

“Wow!” he whispered. “A frog who can watch TV!”

AFTER BREAKFAST—and after most of the saurs had made their morning visit to the litter room—Doc found a spot of sunlight near the big window in the dining room and pushed the plastic box he used as a stool there. It was a good place to sit and feel a little warmth, and it still afforded him a view of the video screen, where he could see a fat man and a thin man, both in ill-fitting bowler hats, trying to move a piano up a ridiculously long flight of stairs. The piano movers monopolized his attention until the hats started to remind him of the head of Rotomotoman and he looked elsewhere for contemplation.

Little saurs were grouped in front of the Reggiesystem computer. Doc could hear them learning what the principal exports of Ghana were. On the other side of the room, the Five Wise Buddhasaurs were sitting on the couch, running their plastic horns through a synthesizer, playing something fast and wildly rhythmical that they referred to as “Chinese” or “Dizz” music. To his left, Kara was sitting with Hetman, reading to him from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. She had the book propped up against the back of a straight wooden chair and she carefully turned the pages with her snout.

Other little ones were using the small, battery-powered wheeled platforms called skates to get from one end of the house to the other. On the far end of the living room, the stegosaur pair, Zack and Kip, were playing with Jean-Claude and Pierrot, the theropod tyrannosaurs, a game using checker pieces whipped across the floor with their tails, like hockey pucks. The game was called “Hit ’Em Hard” until a red stegosaur named Veronica got hit a little too hard by a stray checker. Then Agnes declared the game should be changed to “Not So Hard.”

In the library, Diogenes and Hubert busied themselves shelving and re-shelving books for the saurs who perused them, whether they could read them or not—fascinated by pictures, colophons, shapes and even the smell of the paper and binding.

Over the noise of the “Dizz” music and the tinny accompaniment of the hapless piano movers on the video, Doc could hear Agnes shouting to someone on a skate, “Hey! Slow that down! What d’you think you’re doing? Racing?”

The world was in order—for the moment. Doc closed his eyes and basked in the warmth. What there was to worry over, he thought, could wait.

“Hey Doc!”

Doc opened his eyes. Axel stood before him.

“Guess what I saw this morning?”

Doc trembled. “Not another robot, was it?”

“Nooo!” Axel waved the notion away with his forepaw. “It was a frog! In here! He was watching the video!”

“Yes, Axel.” Doc tried to smile. “And what was he watching?”

“I didn’t see, but I heard news-guy-type voices, like when they talk about stocking markets and underwater volcanoes.” He looked up at Doc, who was glancing back at the video screen: the fat man was wailing and the piano was rolling down the stairs.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Axel said.

“My friend, I remember when you warned us of the giant tidal wave bearing down on us. And I remember you telling us that the Army of Northern Virginia was camped outside on the driveway. There were the Saracen hordes riding their horses through the woods—I remember that too. And who can forget the battle-cruisers from Alpha Centauri firing their photon rays at the power lines?”

“But that was playing,” Axel insisted. “This was a real-real frog-guy!”

“Axel,” Doc patted him on the head, “I believe that you saw a frog here this morning. But the rest I’d rather leave as a matter of conjecture.”

Doc closed his eyes and went back to his basking, but the spot of sunlight had shifted by then. He pushed his stool over a bit to recapture it.

Axel, however, wondering over the meaning of “conjecture,” moved on.

Kara and Hetman were close by. She was reading the passage from the novel where Clarence describes to Harry Morgan the trap laid by King Arthur against Sir Launcelot.

“Lancelot?” Axel forgot about the frog for an instant and asked Kara, “Where? Where’s Lancelot?”

“Laun-celot,” Kara said. “The name is Sir Launcelot. He isn’t anywhere. He’s a character in this book.”

“Ohhh.” Axel remembered Lancelot, but not Launcelot. Lancelot wasn’t a character, he was a saur—a buddy—long-long-long ago. Axel tried to remember more, but the harder he tried the more he forgot.

“Hey!” he said to Kara, as Lancelot faded back from his memory, “Guess what I saw this morning?”

And he told them all about the frog who watched the video.

He told Bronte, sitting with her egg. He told Tyrone and Alfie and the other saurs gathered around the Reggiesystem computer. He told Hubert, Diogenes, Charlie, Rosie and the Five Wise Buddhasaurs, but none of them believed him.

He even told Tom Groverton, once he finished cleaning up in the kitchen. Tom sat down on the floor and explained to Axel why he couldn’t have really seen a frog in the living room.

“You know that the house and the grounds are covered by a security system.” Tom ran his hand over the blue saur’s back. “It’s heat and motion sensitive. If anything enters the security zone that’s not one of us, it sets off an alarm.”

“Like when the cat got in and tried to eat Symphony Syd,” Axel said. “Or that raccoon that scratched Agnes.”

“Exactly. A long time ago. And since then the system’s been improved. So how can a frog enter the grounds without setting off the alarm?”

Axel glanced back at the window where he had seen the frog make his escape. “He must be a really smart frog.”

Tom showed Axel the security system log on the Reggiesystem, indicating that nothing had even touched the security perimeter the night before, at least nothing bigger than a moth.

“Maybe Reggie knows that he just came here to watch the video and that he wasn’t here to hurt anyone.”

“I don’t think Reggie works that way, Axel.”

“Why not?”

Tom opened his mouth as if to speak, then erased the action with a shake of his head and tugged on one end of his droopy mustache.

“Okay. Let’s say Reggie did that. Since there seems to be some question about the objective reality of this creature, Reggie figured it was okay for the frog to come in and watch the video.”

“So you think the TV frog’s not an objectionable reality.”

That look came over Tom’s face again and again he went for that end of his mustache. “Okay. Let’s leave it at that. The frog is not an objectionable reality.”

“Then you don’t mind TV Frog coming in and watching the video?”

“TV Frog?”

“That’s what I’m gonna call him.”

“Well,” Tom patted Axel on the head, “as long as he’s not stealing anything, or hurting anyone, and as long as he shuts off the video before he goes, like you said he did, I don’t mind.”

A few saurs—some of the little guys, Sluggo, Hetman—believed him, or at least said they did.

And Geraldine came out of the cardboard box she called her “lab” and told Axel that she believed him too.

“He’s not a real frog,” she said in her soft, tinny voice. “He’s from a planet on the other side of the galaxy. He’s made a little tunnel through space-time to get here.”

Axel took this in without question and concluded: “Wow!”

“Don’t pay attention to her,” Agnes cautioned him. “She’s making fun of you. She makes fun of everyone. She thinks we’re all stupid.”

“You all are stupid.” Geraldine said, then returned to her lab. Axel watched the box until the flickering lights coming from inside worried him. Tom put those fire extinguishers nearby for a reason.

“Maybe you need to sleep some more, Axel,” Preston counseled him. “Maybe you’re dreaming in the daytime because you don’t sleep enough.”

But that night, Axel stayed behind when the other saurs went upstairs to sleep. He hid behind the couch and waited until the frog hopped through the window onto the back of the couch, then to the seat of the couch, then to the floor. He hopped to the center of the room and slapped the remote pad with his left forepaw.

The screen flickered on, and the frog watched—all night long, occasionally slapping the remote pad to change the program.

He watched old films and talk shows. He looked at nature programs and documentaries about automobiles and the wars of the previous century. He watched a chorus of dancing girls sing the praises of bottled water and a man on a weather program talk for a whole hour about cloud patterns. It put Axel to sleep.

But the frog watched on. He seemed comforted by the images, as if they were relieving him of a great anxiety, or perhaps he was just grateful for the light, for that sense of life moving from moment to moment without threat or danger that the video provided.

“TV Frog” left at dawn, but came back the next night and the night after that.

Axel resolved not to disturb the frog. In the morning, as Axel ran past on his way to the Reggiesystem computer, he would call out, “Hiya, TV Frog!” and leave it at that.

But by the end of the week, as Axel ran past, TV Frog lingered long enough on the window sill so that Axel could see him, in silhouette, raising his left forepaw as if in greeting before hopping out the window to wherever TV Frogs went in the daytime.

When the crate containing Rotomotoman finally arrived, all the saurs gathered to watch as Tom Groverton opened it in the center of the living room.

The crate was enormous. Even Diogenes had to get up on his toes to peer inside. Axel climbed up on his shoulders, expecting to see Rotomotoman inside just as he envisioned him, fully charged and ready to go.

What Axel actually saw was about a dozen batches of components wrapped in vinyl bags and cushioned with packing foam.

Along with a copy of the invoice were several sheets of paper filled with very tiny type and headed with big bold letters:

SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED.

As everyone knows, “some” is a relative word. The creation of the Grand Canyon took “some” time and the formation of matter at the instant of the Big Bang required “some” assembly.

Tom carefully took the components out of the crate. As the pieces slowly collected on the floor, Agnes looked them over, frowning and sniffing.

“Hmph! Looks like they sent you the trash instead of the trashcan!”

“He’s all in pieces,” Bronte whispered, looking from one component to the next.

“Did he fall apart?” asked Rosie.

“They forgot to put him together,” Charlie observed.

Diogenes bent over so that Axel could climb down and survey his unassembled creation. He stood with his mouth agape, looking slightly appalled and definitely overwhelmed.

“We’re in luck,” Agnes whispered to Doc. “With all these pieces, it’ll take months for him to put it together.”

“If he manages to put it together at all,” Doc replied. “Not that I doubt the little fellow’s enthusiasm and determination, but his attention does tend to wander.”

“Then we’ll gather up the pieces and throw them in the cellar, or put them out with the trash, where they belong!”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Doc said in his deep whisper. “I really don’t want to see the little fellow despondent or disappointed.”

“No, you want that big hunk of metal rolling over your toes every ten minutes!”

Axel wandered around the unassembled Rotomotoman not unlike an accident investigator surveying the wreckage of a train or a jet. He looked up at Tom Groverton.

“What do we do now?”

“That’s up to you, Axel.”

The other saurs watched silently as Axel took another turn around the components.

Tibor—the brooding, runt-size apatosaur—came up to the crate with a crayon in his mouth and quickly scrawled on it: “Tibor’s Imperial Winter Palace—do NOT throw out, by order of Tibor.”

Axel pointed to a dome-shaped piece of metal and said to the others, “Look! That’s his head! And this other part here—” he slapped the cylinder which was the largest piece taken out of the crate “—that’s his body! Those are his wheels in that bag over there! Those rods in that other bag are his arms! And this—” He held up a large white disk which contained a dark, intricate retina in its Plexiglas frame “—this is one of his eyes!” He held it up between his forepaws and against his chest and approached one section of the circle of saurs. The retina rolled around inside the larger disk as if the disembodied eye was scrutinizing the room.

The saurs retreated a few steps. Alfie hid his head against Tyrone’s chest.

“Don’t be afraid! It’s Rotomotoman! Rotomotoman is good!”

With the retina rolling back and forth, right to left, along the bottom perimeter of the disk, the smaller saurs were unconvinced.

“You’ll see, when I put him together!”

Axel sang the “Rotomotoman Song” and tried to get the other saurs to sing it with him, but as they looked over the pile of parts they appeared justifiably unenthused.

“Beware of any trashcan with its own theme song,” Agnes trudged away with the hope that this was the last she would see of Rotomotoman.

THE CONTENTS of the crate were moved into the same workroom upstairs where Preston wrote his novels and Alphonse sent out his quiz and contest entries. It was also where Geraldine kept her cardboard “lab” and, at another desk, Tibor hid in his cardboard “castle.”

Axel walked around the still-wrapped components laid out on the floor in a kind of random formation, a kind of “Metal Henge.”

In the center of the formation he turned around and around until he was in danger of making himself dizzy.

“Where do I start?”

Preston handed Axel the several pages of tiny type that came in the crate. “Try to read this over all the way through once—at least once. Then read each section and do what it tells you and don’t go any farther until you finish what it tells you to do.”

“Okay. How do you do that?”

Preston shut his eyes and summoned his patience with a great sigh.

“We’ll read the instructions together.” He sat down next to Axel, took the instructions and held them out where both of them could see. “To paraphrase Aristotle, ‘First things first.’ ”

After reading through the instructions twice together, and after addressing Axel’s occasionally pertinent interruptions, Preston arranged the components or sets of components in a circle around Rotomotoman’s main cylinder.

“You’ll start here,” Preston pointed to a little black box that contained a quantity of intricate circuitry. “You put that into the cylinder where the instructions tell you, then you move to the next piece, and the next piece, clockwise. That way you can keep track of what goes first and what goes next. When you get all the way around the circle—and as long as there are no parts left over—Rotomotoman should be completely assembled and ready to go.”

“Wow!” Axel walked around the main cylinder and looked at all the surrounding parts. “When do you think we’ll be finished?”

Preston shrugged and shook his head. “The sooner you get started the sooner you’ll be done.” He made sure to stress the “you” in that statement.

“Yeah!” Axel looked up at the ceiling as if he could stare straight through it.

Preston looked at Axel. For the first time in years he took notice of the long scar down his back, then followed Axel’s gaze. He gently put his forepaw on Axel’s head. He had been looking at the stars through that ceiling for many years himself.

“You’ll do fine,” he said softly. “Just fine.”

The discipline of doing one thing at a time was almost too much for Axel to comprehend, but he was undeterred. His energies—which were capable of flying off in a dozen directions at once—were for once singly directed to the task of assembling Rotomotoman.

It wasn’t quite high-energy physics, or as the saying went in another century, “rocket science.” The most detailed aspects of circuitry and data systems had been assembled at the company that produced the prototype. But each set of components had to be linked to another set, and those to another set. A had to be plugged into B, and B had to be slipped inside C, and so on.

Axel worked until long past sleep-time that first night, and did not join the other saurs when exhaustion finally took him. He curled up next to Rotomotoman’s dormant head.

“It won’t be long,” he said to the polished metal dome, placing his forepaw in the place between where Rotomotoman’s eyes would eventually go. “I’ll have you all put together in no time.”

The next day, he started after breakfast and only stepped away from the work for lunch, dinner, trips to the litter facilities and two times when he asked the Reggiesystem for explanations and advice.

Doc, with great economy, managed to explain to Axel the saurian techniques for manipulating certain tools designed for human hands, specifically the screwdriver and the adjustable wrench.

By the time the other saurs were wrapping up their daily routines and heading up to the sleep room, Axel had made it through the circle of components Preston had laid out from twelve o’clock (the first piece) to three o’clock.

It took all of the following day for Axel to get from three o’clock to five. He didn’t go downstairs to eat, but Sluggo brought food up to him.

“He’d finish faster if we helped him,” Sluggo told Agnes, as she peeled a strip of rind from an orange.

“So?” she asked. “That’s his own damn problem. I didn’t ask for that rolling trashcan to be brought here. Besides,” she mashed up a piece of orange with her teeth, “the longer he works on that thing, the longer he isn’t knocking around here jumping off the couch and screaming about holes in time and space or tidal waves or some damn frog sneaking in and watching the video.”

“He might get sick,” Sluggo insisted.

“Well, what if he does? We’ve got more important things to worry about.”

She motioned to where Bronte and Kara stared with worried expressions into the little cotton-filled box.

“It’s been too long,” Bronte whispered. “A bird’s egg would have hatched by now.”

“It’s not a bird’s egg,” Kara said. “It’s your egg. And we just don’t know how long it might take.”

“Too long.” Bronte bent down and with slightest pressure touched the egg with her snout. “Too long.”

BY SLEEP-TIME, Axel had made it to seven o’clock on the circle of parts. The components were joined together, but they had to be placed inside the main cylinder. Together, they weighed much more than Axel could possibly lift, or even drag. And by this time Axel’s head was filled with numbers and letters: Bs and Ds and Cs and Qs floated around like tadpoles in a pond; he looked at the joined components, but all he could see was a wall of binary numbers.

Still, he made the effort, grabbing on to one end with his forepaws and pulling mightily.

It wouldn’t budge.

He went around to the other side and pushed. The assemblage remained immobile. He kept pushing.

He pushed until Sluggo came by.

“You need to sleep,” he said.

“First,” Axel said breathlessly, “I have to get this stuff,” he took several deep breaths and patted the block of components, “into that thing—” His voice trailed off as he took more deep breaths and weakly pointed at the cylinder.

They both pushed, but all they could manage to do was polish the floor under their feet.

“Get some rest,” Sluggo said when they finally gave up. “We’ll think of something in the morning.”

“Think,” Axel mumbled deliriously. “Think think think! I have to think!”

“Sleep first,” Sluggo said, and nudged him toward the door.

Axel went along like a prisoner being led back to his cell.

The sleep-pile looked a little like a circus under a collapsed tent. The saurs were already all gathered under the blankets, except for Hetman in his little bed, just next to the pile.

Sluggo lifted the blanket up at one end to look for Agnes and Axel crawled in with him. It was impossible to make his way in without stepping on someone and eliciting responses like, “Hey! Watch it!” “Ooof!” and “Your foot’s on my crest!” He climbed around from one end of the pile to the other, paying little attention to the ruckus he caused, but he couldn’t find a place that seemed comfortable.

“Think think think!”

He lifted up the blanket, crawled out and headed straight to Hetman’s bed, climbing over the railing and getting in next to him.

“Hetman! Hetman!”

“Yes, Axel,” Hetman whispered in his raspy voice.

“Okay if I sleep here?”

“You’re very welcome to sleep here, Axel.”

“I didn’t mean to wake you, if I did. Did I wake you?”

“No,” said Hetman, who was often haunted by pains old and new, though he refused any strong drugs to help him sleep. “It hasn’t been a good night.”

“Is the egg under your pillow?”

“Yes it is. Poor fellow,” he said, referring to the egg. “I hope he is sleeping better inside his little shell—or she. But perhaps it can’t be called sleep if you haven’t yet awakened.”

“Sluggo said I should sleep, but I have to think too. There’s all this inner stuff I have to get into Rotomotoman, but it’s all put together and too heavy to move.” Axel rolled a little closer to Hetman. “Did I tell you yet about Rotomotoman?”

“At least twenty times, Axel, but tell me again. I enjoy hearing you tell me about the wondrous Rotomotoman. Whisper it, though, this time. We needn’t wake the others. And maybe it would be best if you left out the Rotomotoman song.”

Axel did just as Hetman requested, starting all the way back, from the dream to the “inner stuff,” careful to leave out the theme song, though he really-really did want to sing it.

As Hetman hoped,Axel fell asleep as he listed the catalog of parts: Motor Assembly A to Relay Systems Response Assembly B, Relay Systems Response Assembly B to Motor Systems Response Assembly C—and so on. Axel’s voice trailed off after he mentioned that Thermostat Assembly F attached to Carrier Drawer F1.

Hetman listened. The house was silent except for the occasional grunts and snores from the sleep-pile. He might manage a little sleep too before dawn, if he could just get a little question out of his mind—

What does a Rotomotoman need with a thermostat?

Axel slept harder than he had at any time before: he slept past dawn. For once he was not at the window to glimpse the last light of the stars (if it were a clear night) and the first light of the sun (if the day was similarly clear).

Instead, he was lost in a dream of Rotomotoman roaming about the house. The strangest thing about the dream to Axel was that Rotomotoman, with his round head, looked very much like a big soft-boiled egg sitting in a cup. It occurred to Axel that in some ways Rotomotoman was his egg—but instead of needing the pieces to come apart, he needed to put them together.

Together!

He sat up, awake. Put them together! He looked around and the room was already filled with sunlight. Hetman lay beside him, asleep at last, but the sleep-pile was gone—everyone was gone, the blankets put away.

He climbed out of Hetman’s bed and ran to the workroom just in time to see Diogenes and Hubert lowering the assembled components into the uprighted cylinder.

Not only that, but the wheels were attached to the bottom, the arms attached to the sides: listless, but attached.

Nearby, Doc rested on his little box, screwdriver still held between his forepaws.

A crowd of saurs, mostly little ones, was gathered around them, watching and chattering. The Five Wise Buddhasaurs sat up on the top of a set of plastic stairs, to get the next best view to the ones Geraldine and Tibor had from their respective desktops.

Agnes had the assembly instructions spread out in front of her.

“Okay, next to the motor assembly junk is that other junk.”

“The battery pack?” Doc asked.

“That’s what I said, you dimwit! You’re going to need the gray cable and the two blue cables that are in that little bag.”

Tyrone and Alfie opened the bag and brought the cables to Agnes.

“Hey!” Axel said. Everyone stopped and turned to him.

“Don’t look at me!” said Agnes. “It wasn’t my idea! I can’t help it if everyone in this house has gone completely insane.”

“Sluggo mentioned to us this morning the trouble you were having,” Doc said, putting the screwdriver down. “We thought a little help might get the project moving along.”

“But, but—” Axel moved closer. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the cylinder. It was still headless, but it had wheels and arms, and it looked nothing like a soft-boiled egg anymore.

He glanced at the circle of parts: nine o’clock. Three quarters of the parts were gone.

“Guys—I can’t—I don’t know—”

“Oh, shut up!” said Agnes. “Go down and get your breakfast. Tom’s waiting for you. Then get back up here and help us out.”

To Diogenes and Hubert, she said, “Now that that thing is loaded and Axel is up, get Hetman downstairs and come straight back. I want the lid put on this trashcan today! Tomorrow at the latest!”

Agnes left nothing else to say. Axel ran downstairs. Diogenes and Hubert left the room looking back over their shoulders. Agnes noticed Doc staring at her with his most serene smile.

“What the hell are you looking at?” she said.

“I am looking at a marvel, my dear—at a kind of brief miracle. I am looking at Agnes in a good mood.”

“You’ll be looking at a spiked tail meeting your face if you don’t move your butt off that box and get to work!”

With that encouragement, Doc picked up the screwdriver and returned to the cylinder without further comment, but unable to remove the grin from his face.

About this time, in the world out past the yard and beyond the trees, a buzz was starting.

As best as anyone could tell, the buzz began in the offices of the radio telescope at Mount Herrmann. Apparently, a message had been sent to certain coordinates from someone who went by the name of “Axel” and was addressed to “space guys.” There was nothing particularly extraordinary in that, as the telescope operators had been accepting messages for many years as part of a promotional and public relations program to aid in the funding of their research, which included a search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

What started the buzz had to do with the content of the message, of a certain reference to “making eggs.” And since the address of the sender was one of the houses operated by the Atherton Foundation for surviving saurs, it presented a rather astounding possibility.

The rumor could have been a prank, a mistake, a misunderstanding. But there were a number of important persons in the bioengineering community that were not sleeping well and would not sleep very well until the mystery was cleared up. And the bioengineering community was an important group of persons who held a great deal of sway in many circles. They did not bear sleeplessness well.

And so a call was made to Ms. Susan Leahy, the grandniece of Hilary Atherton herself, who was then in charge of the foundation.

“They want answers,” she said to Tom Groverton over the phone. “Or I should say they want assurance, if you know what I mean.”

“They want to send someone over to inspect the house,” Tom replied.

“Our charter allows us to legally restrain them, but I’m afraid that would only stir up more controversy. The Office of Bioengineering Standards has never approved of our autonomy and would like nothing better than to challenge it.”

“So they’re coming,” Tom said.

“I’ll be with them. And I want Dr. Pagliotti there too,” she said, referring to Dr. Margaret. “I won’t have them pushing their way around, but I’m afraid they have to search everywhere to their satisfaction to see that the saurs aren’t producing their own eggs. If they find anything that makes them think otherwise, they’ll file to do further research, and that will get us into a battle I’d much rather avoid.”

“I understand,” said Tom.

“I know you do. You’ll tell the saurs. Let them know we’re coming.”

“Yes. It’ll be good seeing you again, at least.”

“I only wish it was under less stressful circumstances. You do a wonderful job, Tom. And the saurs never fail to surprise me.”

“Then you won’t be disappointed this time, Susan. I can assure you.”

By sleep-time the workroom was empty of everyone but Axel—and Rotomotoman.

The faint traces of moonlight coming through the window endowed everything in the room with a kind of ashen, metallic hue. The circle of components was gone. In their place stood Rotomotoman, just under a meter and a half tall, set upon four sturdy wheels and his narrow, rod-like arms down at his sides. His large, round eyes, set against the curvature of his head, were fixed in an expression perhaps best described as dementedly earnest—a fitting reflection of his creator. When seen in connection with the first horizontal seam of the cylinder, a dozen centimeters below them—a seam that suggested a mouth—those eyes also betrayed a certain perplexity, as if Rotomotoman might be thinking to himself an incomplete expression of surprise in the vein of “What the—!”

A cable connected him to a wall outlet, charging his battery. That was all he needed—with the exception of downloading some delicate software into his brain—before he could come to life.

Axel stood transfixed, staring up at him with undiluted awe.

“It’s real,” he whispered. “Real-real-real.”

“You should get some sleep,” said Doc. He’d come into the workroom at Sluggo’s request, when Axel could not be found in the sleep-pile. “It won’t do to have you falling asleep tomorrow, at the moment of your triumph.”

“Look at him!” Axel pointed up at Rotomotoman. “Isn’t he the greatest thing you’ve ever seen? The most stupendous, marvelous, fantastic, greatest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“I’ve seen quite a lot of him, my friend, in these past few days.” Doc’s forepaws were still a little sore from handling all the human tools. His foot still hurt a little from when it got wedged under the cylinder while he was attaching the last of the wheels—but it was the foot of his weak leg anyway; the addition to his limp was barely noticeable. “But yes,” he put his forepaw on Axel’s shoulder, “it is—impressive.”

“I couldn’t have done it without all you guys helping me. I have the best-greatest friends in the whole universe!”

“It’s your creation, don’t forget. Without you, your Rotomotoman would not exist, would it?”

“I don’t know,” Axel said, seriously pondering the question. “It’s like now I feel like—like he always was, you know? And all I did was, like—”

“Like what?”

“Like, recognize him! Like, there’s all this real stuff in one place and all this could-be-real stuff in another place, like behind a window. Did you ever see one of those gumball machines that’s got stuff other than gumballs in it? Like shrunken heads and rubber spiders and stuff? That’s what it’s like—like Rotomotoman was in one of those gumball machines and I turned the handle and got him out!”

“Now I know you need some sleep, my friend. You’re talking like a Platonist. Or even worse: a Jungian.”

“What’s that?”

Doc patted his head. “It’s a kind of person who needs a great deal of sleep. Come along. When Axel sounds profound it’s a strong hint that one is either dreaming or should be dreaming.”

Doc led Axel out of the workroom with a series of tugs. Only after they turned the corner and entered the hallway would Axel stop looking back at Rotomotoman.

But then Axel stopped in his tracks, struck with an idea.

“Hey!” He gestured to Doc and headed for the staircase. “Now I can show you!”

“It’s far too late, little fellow, to show me anything—”

“No-no-no-no! Come on!” Axel trotted a few steps ahead, then looked back at Doc. “But quiet!” He held one digit of his forepaw up. “Ssshh!”

Axel crept down one stair, and then another, and then another. Even at this slow pace, Doc found it hard to follow. His bad leg made it hard for him to take stairs, up or down, at any pace. He held to the round, vertical balusters of the handrail and inched himself along until it occurred to him that he still hadn’t been given a good reason for putting himself through this exertion.

“Axel, would you mind—”

“Ssshh! Just a little farther.” His whisper was louder than Doc’s appeal. “One more step!”

Doc had to put his weight on his bad leg to descend the next step. He winced, but caught himself before he cried out.

“There! See?” Axel whispered. “Can you see?”

Doc could see nothing. He reached for the next baluster, putting himself in an awkward angle, almost hanging over Axel. He raised his tail to counterbalance his weight. If he slipped a mere centimeter he would topple headfirst down the rest of the stairs. But at last he could make out what Axel was pointing to: a light coming from the living room.

The light changed color and intensity with quick little flickers and flashes, as if the video screen was still on.

Not “as if”—it was on!

“See?” Axel whispered, more successful this time in keeping his voice down. “It’s TV Frog! I told you he was really there! He’s really-really-really there!”

“Axel,” Doc felt his grip slipping on the baluster. “It’s much more likely that someone forgot—” He couldn’t finish the sentence, since it was he who turned off the video that night.

“Maybe,” Doc muttered, “a technical thing. A ‘glitch,’ as they say. A malfunction in—”

A voice with the range and volume of a train horn sounded above them:

“Hey! What the hell’s going on down there!”

In the fraction of a second between Doc hearing Agnes’ voice and his forepaws slipping from the baluster, Doc could distinctly see the light go off in the living room, as if someone had slapped the “off” square on the remote pad.

After that, he saw nothing, but distinctly felt himself in gravity’s clutches as first he tumbled over Axel, then tumbled again and tumbled again.

He shut his eyes for what seemed like a moment, but when he opened them the lights were on. He was looking up at Axel and several other saurs, including Kara and Sluggo—Tom Groverton was there too—all standing over him with worried expressions. Tom ran his hands over Doc’s back and abdomen, checking for broken bones, no doubt.

“I’m all right,” Doc said several times, and after Tom examined him carefully he even believed it. Bruises, muscle pains, but nothing worse. Agnes, still at the top of the stairs, kept berating him for “skulking around in the dark like a goddamn idiot!”—which was akin to having a bad ringing in the ears—Doc had lived with that before.

“Ohhh, Doc! I’m sorry-sorry-sorry!” Axel repeated it until it became a litany. “I didn’t mean—I wanted you to see—that it was TV Frog! It really was! I’m soooo sorry-sorry-sorry!”

“I followed along of my own choosing, Axel.” Doc tried to reach for Axel’s forepaw but, falling short, weakly waved to him. “It must have been funny to watch. A good pratfall, had there been an audience.”

As Tom helped him back up the stairs and into the sleep room, Doc couldn’t help thinking about the light in the living room. Not that he could believe in TV Frog any more than he had before, but there was something—something—very strange about that video screen being on when no one could have turned it on. And as he leaned his head back against the little cushion Kara brought for him, it was that thought, more than any bumps or bruises, that kept him up for the better part of the night.

ROTOMOTOMAN WAS ready—almost.

The saurs gathered in the workroom. Most of them were on the floor, surrounding—at what they believed was a safe distance—the figure of Rotomotoman that towered over them. Others were perched on Preston’s desk and others yet were on the desk set across from it.

None had ventured up to where Geraldine and Tibor kept their separate abodes, but they too were quite literally out of their boxes to view the great moment. Tibor even wore his “hat,” which was really a green piece of concave plastic with a little rim. It looked ridiculous on his head but Tibor insisted it was quite regal and dashing, especially when he wore it at a jaunty tilt.

Rotomotoman was attached by cable to the hard drive of Preston’s computer. No one knew how long the download would take, but when it was finished Rotomotoman would come to life. Axel, standing next to his creation, tried to count down the seconds, but he lost his place several times and had to start over.

“Attention!” Agnes called out from her place near the door. “Attention! Keep back! When this piece of junk goes berserk there’s no telling who will be crushed under its wheels! All saurs must keep back!”

Only Sluggo paid attention to her, and that was only to get her to stop shouting.

Tom Groverton was there too. No one noticed, though, that he was standing next to the two fire extinguishers he’d placed next to Geraldine’s lab.

Axel gave up on the countdown and started to chant: “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!”

Some of the other saurs picked it up. “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!”

Others joined in. “Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!”

Even the saurs who didn’t speak squeaked and chirped to the rhythm of the cheer.

“Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!”

“Attention all saurs! Keep back! When the piece of junk goes berserk—”

“Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman! Go! Go! Go! Rotomotoman!”

“—will be indiscriminately crushed under—”

Rotomotoman jerked very slightly, hardly a movement at all. The download was finished. A faint hum and whir emanated from his mechanical innards. His hemisphere head turned slightly to the left and the pupils of his huge eyes followed the same general direction, then started back slowly to the right, taking in the whole scene.

The chanting stopped. Even Agnes held off her shouted warnings.

It is hard to imagine a more startled expression on a piece of machinery, if one can imagine an expression on a piece of machinery at all. The eyes had much to do with it, looking like enormous versions of the eyes that adorned toys and dolls in years long past—but much more active, animated, in fact. Those eyes and the mouth-like seam in his cylinder-torso created an expression: surprise, panic, astonishment.

He surveyed the ninety-odd dinosaur-looking creatures staring up at him—and one human, with arms folded, leaning back against a desk, smiling with apparent admiration.

Rotomotoman raised his arms in a gesture of surrender and recoiled right into Preston’s desk.

The liquid-gray display screen on his torso—his only means of communication—filled with exclamation points, question marks and other strange symbols that may even have been incomprehensible to other rotomotomen, if any existed.

“See?” Agnes shouted. “Just as I told you! The monster is ready to pounce! Back away!”

But Rotomotoman just froze in that posture until Axel approached him on the back of the large brown triceratops named Dr. David Norman. Dr. Norman lowered his head and Axel dismounted. He walked straight up to his creation with his left forepaw upraised.

“Hiya! I’m Axel!”

Rotomotoman stared down at the small blue creature. He lowered one of his arms and bent the joint that approximated the elbow of the other. His display screen cleared of symbols, except for five characters of simple, recognizable alphabet and punctuation:

“Hiya!”

Many of the saurs cheered. Tom Groverton put his hands together and applauded.

Agnes nudged Preston and muttered, “You sure there aren’t any machine guns in those fingers?”

“Positive.”

“No flame throwers or lasers?”

“You saw the instructions yourself. Rotomotoman is weapon-free. He does have a rotating red flashing light that comes out of the top of his head, but as you can see he hasn’t had cause to use it yet.”

Agnes grumbled. “He still looks like a trashcan made up for Halloween!”

“Hey! Guys!” Axel said, as if the other saurs might not know yet, “I want you to meet your new friend! This is Rotomotoman!”

Rotomotoman held his metal hand horizontally just above his eyes: a salute to the assembly, with “Hiya!” still on his display screen. More cheers greeted him.

“Come on!” Axel coaxed his metal friend away from the desk. “A little this way! Follow me!”

Words appeared on his display screen: first “Axel,” then “follow.”

Rotomotoman complied with each direction, if a little tentatively. His software may have overly cautioned him about running over little ones, but he cast his gaze downward and thoroughly surveyed the floor, checking to make sure no one was underfoot. If a meter-and-a-half tall cylinder rolling on four wheels could be described as moving “daintily,” it would describe Rotomotoman just then.

Axel led him to the door of the workroom. Rotomotoman—making no sound but an efficient, high-pitched whir—saluted the door. The word “door” appeared on his display screen. He followed Axel down the hallway, holding his salute all the way to the lift platform, where he stopped cold.

Rotomotoman didn’t seem confident that he could keep his balance on the flatbed lift, with its guardrails set no more than a few centimeters high. Axel coaxed him on with the assurance that the lift moved so slowly he would be in no danger—and with the assistance of Diogenes and Hubert pushing from behind. With “Help!” replacing “Hiya!” on his display screen, Rotomotoman held so tightly to the staircase wall he left a trail of grooves in it, but everyone was too excited to notice them.

As he rolled from the platform to the floor he cast his gaze upward as if in thanks to some heavenly Rotomotogod.

“Look over here, Rotomotoman!” Axel said, pointing to the living room. “That’s where the video is.”

Rotomotoman saluted the video screen. His own screen alternated the words, “Video” and “Hiya!”

“Over in that room is where we eat!”

Rotomotoman saluted the dining room. “Dining room—Hiya!—Dining room—”

He saluted everything that Axel showed him, including the computer, the plastic stairs, the bookcases and the Five Wise Buddhasaurs’ plastic saxophones. And all their names were printed out on his display screen, each punctuated with the same greeting.

“I suppose this question should have come up long ago,” Doc asked the ecstatic Axel, while Rotomotoman saluted the lamp table, the couch and a broom Tom had left leaning by the living room window, “but just what exactly is Rotomotoman supposed to do?”

“Rotomotoman is here to protect good guys from the bad guys!”

“Well,” Doc sighed deeply and patted Axel’s head, “may your labors be few.”

The notion of “bad guys” was not entirely forgotten by Doc as Tom Groverton gathered all the saurs around in the library later that afternoon. In the back of the room—standing at attention, of course—was Rotomotoman, his creator proudly at his side.

“They’ll be here tomorrow, and they’ll be looking for eggs,” Tom said, his hands folded loosely as he sat on a little stool in the center of the room.

“Tell them to mind their own damn business!” Agnes shouted back.

“That would be fine,” Tom said, “if we could. But these folks have rescinded their so-called ‘proprietary rights,’ based on a certain definition of what you guys are. And as you know they’ve been looking for loopholes ever since they agreed to the Atherton Foundation’s proposal. Your intelligence, your emotional capacity, your longevity—it’s baffled them for years. They have the support of a certain portion of the scientific community who’d like very much to make you the subject of study. And they want desperately to find out what they did, well, ‘right,’ so to speak, when they designed you. Generating eggs might change the deal if they find out. I mean—” Tom cleared his throat, “if they find any.”

“Any what?” Doc asked in a whisper.

Tom smiled. “That’s the spirit. I won’t ask any questions and you won’t tell me any lies—other than the ones you may already tell me.”

“Why, Tom!” Doc said, his heavy eyelids raised as far as they would go. “What makes you think we’d tell you any lies?”

Tom ignored the remark. “Remember, I’ll be here. Dr. Margaret will be here and even Ms. Leahy will be here to make sure these folks don’t do anything out of line. But they will be thorough, and we can’t really stop them, because we want to show them that we have nothing to hide.”

“We have nothing to hide,” Doc said.

“Exactly.” Tom stood up. “Now, I have some things to do upstairs before I start dinner. But there’s one more thing: it might be a good idea to keep Rotomotoman in the background when they come. We don’t want to hit them with more than they can take.”

“What did he mean by that?” Axel asked as Tom left the room.

“He means that our visitors tomorrow are unprepared for your genius,” said Doc.

“Genius!” Agnes marched up to Axel. “Spelled the same as ‘idiot!’ This is all your fault! Sending messages to ‘space guys!’ You’re the one who should be locked up! Not Bronte!”

“Bronte!” Axel gasped. “Who wants to lock up Bronte?”

“No one said anything about locking up Bronte!” Kara looked over at Bronte, whose concern about her egg had done little to steady her nerves for the meeting. Now she was trembling.

“What do you think they’ll do?” Agnes continued. “They’ll take her off to a laboratory and stick her with needles and cut her up to find out how she did it!”

A cry of alarm rose from the surrounding saurs. Memories of past injuries and dangers became acutely tangible even to the smallest and simplest of them.

“Don’t listen to her,” Kara said to Bronte. “Agnes is overreacting as usual. No one’s going to take you away.” She turned angrily to Agnes. “Can’t you ever keep your mouth shut? We’re all in a panic when we need our heads about us!”

“They’ll take the egg away, won’t they?” Bronte stammered. “Like the scientists in the video we saw once, climbing into nests and stealing the eggs of rare birds.”

“No one’s going to do that here,” Preston put his hand on Bronte’s back. He could feel her shivers. “We’ll think of something.”

“I’m sorry, Bronte,” Axel said. His face never before looked so long and mournful. “I didn’t know this would happen.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Bronte, her nubby teeth grinding at her lower lip. “You were just—just being Axel.”

“That’s the whole damn problem right there!” Agnes said.

“Maybe Rotomotoman can help us now,” Axel said in a low voice.

Rotomotoman, in the back of the room, saluted at the mention of his name.

“Listen,” Agnes barked at Axel, “I don’t want to hear one more word about Rotomotoman! Space guys! Electric trashcans! Frogs watching the video! If I hear anything more from you—”

Agnes was interrupted by a voice that had so far not entered the discussion. It came back from the little bed over by the window, and in a low, raspy voice.

“Axel is right,” said Hetman.

“What?” Agnes was ready for verbal battle, and the words “Axel is right” set her back plates upright, but they were spoken by the one saur she would not assail. “What did you say?”

“I said, Axel is right. Something Axel told me a few nights ago has kept me up thinking and—I could be wrong, but—Axel, do you still have the assembly directions for your Rotomotoman?”

“They’re with Preston’s stuff, up by the computer,” he said.

“Bring them down here, and hurry! We have stuff to do!”

“Stuff to do!” Axel ran upstairs without hesitation.

“The rest of you,” Hetman continued, “I want you to look very carefully at the sections on that sheet which refer to the Thermostat Assembly F and Carrier Drawer Assembly F1. Perhaps I’m completely wrong, but I think we’ve been overlooking something remarkable about that creation of Axel’s.”

WHEN THE BIG CAR arrived the next morning, Axel was at the window, up on the little lamp table, scouting.

“Huuuu-mans!” He announced to the others. “They’re here! And they’re in a bad guys car!”

The long dark limousine had an official seal from The Office of Bioengineering Standards on the side door. It stopped right in front of the house and out came three strangers, Dr. Margaret and Mrs. Leahy. Of the strangers, there was a young African-American, impeccably dressed in a topcoat and dark suit; a gray-haired Caucasian, much more casually dressed, in an unbuttoned leather jacket and a dark T-shirt; a young Asian-looking woman with very short canary-colored hair, wearing a plaid workshirt and a denim jacket.

Ms. Leahy led the way. Tom met the little group out on the porch.

“I’m really sorry about this,” she said as she shook Tom’s hand. Susan Leahy was trim and efficient as always, and she was starting to let the gray come into her hair. She was one of those eccentrics who still wore glasses, though hers were rimless. “You’ve told them what this is all about, didn’t you?”

“Yes, they know.”

She nodded and turned to the three persons who were to search the house.

“Okay, folks, you know the rules. You can search everything, everywhere, but if anything you do seems to be upsetting or traumatizing the saurs, I or Dr. Pagliotti here will have to ask you to back off. This is Tom Groverton.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Any questions you may have I’m sure he’ll be glad to answer. We want to cooperate fully, but you have to understand that we have to act in the best interest of the saurs.”

The young African-American, Dr. Phillips, nodded politely to Ms. Leahy. “We’ve done this kind of work at other houses. I can assure you we’ll be as non-disruptive as we possibly can.”

Dr. Margaret, who had seen some of the saurs’ eggs herself, came up to Tom and gripped his hand. She wore a white jacket that looked a little like a short lab coat, and for once her long brown hair wasn’t tied back. She didn’t say a word but searched his expression for any sign of what she might expect.

Tom could only shrug. Anything can happen, he seemed to say, but don’t get worried yet.

“You know,” Ms. Leahy said, “it’s nice to have an excuse to come here and visit some old friends.”

Axel was still standing at the window, waving to her.

She waved back. “Hiya!”

When the group entered the house, some of the saurs stopped to watch them, cautiously and curiously. The smaller saurs went on with their business, moving from room to room on skates, getting their computer lessons, a brief game of Not So Hard, or watching the video.

“Attention humans!” Agnes announced from atop a lamp table near the door. “Attention all humans! It’s time to SHAPE UP!”

“Don’t mind Agnes,” Ms. Leahy told the officials. “She greets most humans that way.”

“Humans!” Agnes continued, “It’s time to SHAPE UP! You’ve been running things stupidly for too long! It’s time to STOP BEING STUPID!”

“So here’s the little guy who’s caused all the ruckus.” Ms. Leahy went straight to Axel.

“Miss Lay-hee! Miss Lay-hee! Howya doing? What are you doing with the bad guys?”

Ms. Leahy carefully picked him up and perched him on her shoulder. “Important stuff, Axel. Want to see?”

“Yeah!”

She made sure she had a safe grip on him and that he wouldn’t slip, even with all his excited gesticulations. “So what’s all this about you sending messages to space?”

“Yeah!” said Axel. “Reggie and me! We sent a message to the space guys and told them all about us!”

The three investigators gathered around to listen to the conversation. The young woman, Dr. Yoon, took out a pocket computer to record it.

“And have you heard anything back from the ‘space guys’ yet?”

“Yeah! Maybe! At least I think that’s why TV Frog is here! He comes at night and watches the video, but no one’s seen him but me! Doc almost saw him but he fell down the stairs! He’s okay, though. Doc, I mean, but TV Frog’s okay too. Anyway, I think TV Frog just wants us to think he’s here because he can’t sleep. But Geraldine said he was really sent by the space guys, because they know how to drill holes in time and space!”

Ms. Leahy looked at the three investigators.

“Well, here’s your source for the egg story.”

Dr. Yoon slipped the computer back into her pocket.

“And who’s that over there?” Mrs. Leahy pointed to the metal cylinder with the hemisphere head, standing out of the way, just to the left of the video screen.

“That’s Rotomotoman! I built him myself! Well, Reggie helped me, and Preston, and Doc, and Agnes, and a lot of the other guys. But I thought him up all by myself!”

Rotomotoman was motionless. His display screen was empty. His left arm was listless at his side but his right arm was raised in a salute. It was hard to say what he might have been saluting—his right eye looked off to his left and his left eye looked off to his right.

The investigators looked over Rotomotoman carefully. They even took his head off and inspected the components. Some of the saurs got very quiet and even Agnes briefly desisted from her shouted exhortations.

“What is it supposed to do?” the man in the leather jacket, Mr. Chase, asked Tom.

“Ask the inventor.” He pointed to Axel. “You can talk to them, you know.”

“He fights bad guys and protects the good guys!” Axel offered without waiting to be asked.

“Doesn’t look like he can fight any bad guys in his shape,” Dr. Yoon said as she re-secured Rotomotoman’s head.

“I—I forgot to plug him in last night!” Axel looked over at Doc, sitting on his little box, nodding almost imperceptibly. Then he looked to Agnes, who waved her tail threateningly.

“I’ve got to charge him up! He’ll be okay tomorrow!”

“The kitchen is this way,” Tom said to Dr. Phillips, “but I’m afraid the only eggs you’ll find are in the refrigerator.”

The investigators looked anyway—very carefully. They looked into every cabinet and along the baseboards and around the ceilings. They went through the cellar and the litter room, the living room, the dining room and the library. They looked behind all the books on the shelves. Dr. Margaret wouldn’t let them look under Hetman’s pillow, but she took the pillow out herself and let them inspect it.

“If the lady and gentlemen wish to look under the mattress,” Hetman said, “they are welcome to do so.”

“If I may?” Dr. Phillips said in an apologetic voice and did his work as quickly as possible. Before he moved on, he said “Thank you,” to Hetman, came back and added, “Thank you—sir.”

“You’re very welcome.”

They searched all the rooms upstairs and even went up into the attic, where the saurs had their “museum,” made up of all the things friends and former “owners” had left them over the years: toys, paintings on construction paper, knick-knacks and little articles of clothing. The investigators found several egg-shaped things, made of glass and plastic, but not one real egg.

Mr. Chase’s attention was drawn to a little charm on one of the shelves, a gold-plated Star of David on a slender chain. He picked it up to examine more closely.

“Put it back!” Agnes, who had followed them up into the Museum, shouted at him.

“Is this yours?” Mr. Chase asked her. “It’s very pretty.”

“None of your damn business! Put it back!”

Agnes harangued the investigators all the way down from the attic.

“Foo! Humans! War mongers! Animal eaters! Planet spoilers! G’wan! Beat it! Scram!”

“Adamant, isn’t she?” Mr. Chase said to Dr. Margaret.

“You’re upsetting her,” Dr. Margaret replied.

“Sounds to me like she’s upsetting herself.”

“Didya hear?” Axel, still perched on Ms. Leahy’s shoulder, whispered to her. “He called Agnes an ant!”

Ms. Leahy held her finger up to her lips. “Ssshh. Maybe he meant ‘aunt.’ ”

When the investigators reached the sleep room they were approached by a pale green hadrosaur who, after some deliberation, shouted to them, “Yar-woo?”

“No! No!” Agnes coached the hadrosaur. “That’s not what I told you to say!”

The hadrosaur tried again: “Yar-woo!”

“No! ‘Foo!’ You’re supposed to say ‘Foo!’ ” She smacked her tail against the floor.

“Foo?”

“Forget it! Just forget it!”

“Foo!” The hadrosaur smiled and walked away.

In the closet of the sleep room, Mr. Chase found a little cardboard box with wadded-up cotton inside. Nestled in the cotton was a tiny egg.

“Here’s something,” he said to his colleagues, who were searching in other parts of the room.

“Hey! Put that back!” Agnes shouted. “That’s not yours!”

Mr. Chase held up the egg and inspected it carefully. It had a blue tint to it, and was no bigger than the first joint of his thumb.

“It’s a bird’s egg,” Bronte walked up to Mr. Chase nervously. “A robin’s, probably. Sluggo found it in the yard. Sometimes we try to hatch them—as if they were ours.”

She looked up at Dr. Yoon and Dr. Phillips. “If they do hatch, we feed the little bird until it’s old enough. Tom can sometimes find another nest in the yard and put it back. Sometimes the older birds accept him.” Her voice was trembling now. “It’s—it’s just sort of a thing we do.”

Dr. Phillips took the egg and held it up to the light from the window. “Looks like a robin’s egg to me.”

“That’s what she said!” Agnes stood next to Bronte. “Now beat it! G’wan! Scram!”

“Is this when they pull their guns out?” Axel whispered to Ms. Leahy.

“They don’t have guns,” she answered.

“I thought they were bad guys!”

“Well, not really. Not that kind, at least.”

Dr. Yoon, with arms folded, glanced at Agnes and said to her colleagues, “It may be that their eggs and the robin’s eggs are almost alike. We better take it in.”

“No!” Bronte gasped.

Ms. Leahy bent down and put her hand gently on Bronte’s back. “Must you?” She asked the investigators.

“We have to know.” Dr. Phillips put the egg back into its box. “I can give you all sorts of reasons, but the answer simply boils down to this: we have to know.”

“Hear that?” Agnes shouted to the other saurs. “He said ‘boil!’ I told you they were going to eat them!”

“Please,” Kara said to the investigators. “It really is a robin’s egg. Honest. Don’t take it away.”

Dr. Phillips bent down and spoke to Bronte, resting the box carefully on his knee. “We won’t hurt it. We just need to know what it is. It’s a very simple procedure and we can have it back to you in a day or so.”

“What if it hatches?” Bronte asked. “You’ll take care of the little bird? You won’t just—pitch it?”

“If that’s what happens, I’ll take care of it.” He reached out and touched the little furrows on her brow. “I promise.”

Dr. Phillips put the cardboard box into a little specimen bag, but left the bag open. Dr. Yoon made some notes with her pocket computer. Saurs filled the room. None of them spoke, not even Agnes, but they all looked at the investigators, who did their work quickly and tried not to look back.

“They may not be bad guys,” Ms. Leahy whispered to Axel, “But I’ll bet you that right now they don’t feel like good guys.”

She, along with Tom and Dr. Margaret, followed the investigators back out to the limousine, but in the living room she noticed Doc, still sitting on his plastic box, staring out toward the window as if deep in thought.

She put Axel down and kissed him on the snout. “I’ll see you later,” she said. “Gotta talk to my old buddy over there.”

Ms. Leahy knelt down next to Doc and hugged him. “My old friend. Forgive me for not stopping to talk to you.”

“You were busy, I know. There is nothing to forgive.”

“I’ll come back soon. For a real visit. We’ll sit on the porch and talk of Cicero and Democritus and St. Augustine.”

“Juvenal.” Doc smiled. “ ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes’ ?” He looked out toward the front door, where the limousine waited. “Not bad for a tiny, manufactured brain, eh?”

“It’s not how much brain you’ve got, but how you use it.”

She hugged him again and Doc reciprocated as best he could with his short forearms.

She whispered: “Is there any real reason to worry?”

Doc shook his head. “We’ll be fine, for now.”

When she stood up, Ms. Leahy could see the motionless metal cylinder of Rotomotoman saluting her. She returned his salute, bid farewell to the others and walked out to the limousine.

On the porch, Dr. Margaret asked Tom, “What will you do now?”

“I think I’ll sit out here for a while.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s not really my call. It’s theirs.” He gestured back to the house with his thumb.

“What are they doing in there?”

The horn sounded from the limousine.

Tom walked Dr. Margaret to the limousine. “Come back tonight.”

He took her hand and squeezed it gently. She got into the limousine and he watched it until it was out of sight, past the trees. For a few more minutes he sat on the bench on the porch, then got up and looked through the living room window.

Rotomotoman, back in motion again, had rolled out to the center of the room. The saurs were gathered around him in a circle. Tom could hear a faint mechanical buzzing and a high-pitched beep come from the metal cylinder. At the same moment, a section of the odd little robot, defined by nearly imperceptible seams in his cylindrical torso, slid out like the drawer of a desk.

Tom couldn’t see what was inside, but he knew what it was. Bronte was the closest to the drawer, peering in with sad, hopeful eyes.

Then she opened her mouth as if to gasp.

She spoke to the others and they all moved in even closer, trying to get a peek inside. Tom couldn’t hear a word of it, but he didn’t have to.

Axel, perched on Hubert’s back to stare into the little drawer, shouted out, “It moved! I saw it move!”

Tom went back to the bench. His coming in now would just create more nervous commotion and probably start Agnes shouting again.

There would be plenty of time later to consider all the implications. The investigators, back-tracking through their information, might request a look at the schematics of Axel’s metal friend and discover Rotomotoman’s very practical function as an incubator.

But then, Reggie may have anticipated that too, and devised a little camouflage for it. Never underestimate the Reggiesystem, Tom learned long ago.

After all, Reggie too was a kind of human-made life form, and like the saurs had developed in his own way.

For now, though, the moment belonged to the saurs, especially Bronte, the mother-to-be.

THAT NIGHT, AXEL descended the stairs as stealthily as he could manage, in search of TV Frog. But the living room was dark, the video turned off. For a moment he thought that TV Frog must not have come, but he turned around and saw the illuminated screen of the Reggiesystem computer in the dining room, and before it sat TV Frog, visible in silhouette. The plastic stairs were placed in front of the desk, just behind where TV Frog sat with an old-fashioned clicker mouse, which he slapped with his left paw just as he’d slapped the video’s remote pad.

TV Frog seemed to be clicking through a set of files, text on the right side and pictures on the left. Axel couldn’t make out any of it, so he crept up the steps to get a closer look.

The pictures weren’t very pleasant to look at: emaciated creatures with agonized expressions, bruised, battered, and scarred. Gaping mouths, hollowed eyes, muscles tensed with pain—

They were saurs, all of them.

These were the official files of the Atherton Foundation, all of their cases, with photos taken of the saurs when they were first found or brought to them.

Axel recognized some of them—Zack, Kip, Charlie, Hetman—Oh! Hetman! How did he ever make it? He barely looked alive. He—

The words got all tied up in Axel’s head. If he looked at the pictures, at least he didn’t have to think about them. But how could he not think about them after looking at all the faces, all the pain—

And then he saw a photograph of a small, blue theropod, exhausted, lying on his side, head twisted back as if he could hardly raise it—one black, expressionless eye was visible, staring upward. A second photo showed a long, straight cut down his back, infected and swollen.

The cut was the same length as the scar down Axel’s back.

Axel felt as if the desk dropped out from under him—and the floor, the house, everything—as if he was falling through time and space.

“Space and Time and Time and Space—”

Whirling and spinning like an amusement park ride, but only the really, truly scary parts, and no one was there with whom he could share the elation and danger.

A boy, the one he’d been purchased for, had cut him open, goaded on a bet, to see if he had mechanical parts or biological organs. “Not like he’s an animal,” the boy had said. “Just a thing. Don’t matter what anyone does to him.”

But the boy said “him,” like he was someone—

And Lancelot was there! Lancelot, his buddy! The two of them were purchased together, and they lived with the boy and his family. “Buddies forever, Lancelot and Axel, Axel and Lancelot—”

But Lancelot was all cut open, spread out on the floor, screaming, pleading, “Please! Stop! Help me! Kill me! Stop!”

And Axel had shouted too. “Don’t! Don’t hurt him! Stop it!”

A grown-up interrupted the impromptu dissections. Axel had run, with all his strength. He’d run, hidden himself, bled. With no food, with all his energy and muscle spent, he slipped into a hole on the edge of a construction site and waited to die, like Lancelot.

Axel remembered what that upward-turned eye in the photograph was looking at.

It had been night. The stars were out, and they were everywhere.

“Space—” said Axel. He put his forepaw on TV Frog’s smooth back. It shuddered like an unbalanced engine.

“It was all space and big and perfect and endless. And even though I was small, I felt as big as space. I felt as big as the universe.”

TV Frog clicked the mouse and the monitor screen went dark.

“That’s what I should have asked the space guys about,” Axel told him. “What I wanted to ask before I forgot. I wanted to ask if they knew any way to bring Lancelot back, or do something, so that he wouldn’t be dead.”

TV Frog just sat there. Still shuddering. His eyes looked immeasurably deep and sad.

“I guess they couldn’t, huh?”

Whether or not he could answer, TV Frog didn’t, which seemed like a kind of answer in itself.

Axel and TV Frog stood in front of the computer, and after a while the monitor clicked on again.

The screen filled with stars.

This time, when the screensaver reached the end of the cycle, with the smeared thumbprint galaxy just in view, it seemed to go a little farther. The galaxy filled the whole screen.

“You know, Reggie says the universe is one big place!”

TV Frog’s eyes bobbed down into his head in a kind of affirmative gesture.

“I came down to ask if you wanted to come upstairs and see what’s happening. It’s the biggest thing that’s ever happened here. The biggest thing that’s ever happened anywhere!”

TV Frog didn’t move.

Axel bent down and tugged at TV Frog’s forepaw. “It’s okay! No one will see you there! They’re all looking at the egg!”

Axel kept tugging and urging until TV Frog turned away from the computer.

“We’d better hurry! It’s almost ready to hatch!”

But TV Frog propelled himself slowly, one cautious ‘flop’ at a time.

“Come on! No one will see you! I promise!”

All the way down from the desk, across the floor and up the stairs to the second floor, with Axel leading, TV Frog moved on: flop, pause, flop, pause, flop.

They peered around the doorway into the sleep room. All the saurs were gathered around Rotomotoman, situated in the center of the room. He, like everyone else, was staring into his incubator drawer, his pupils cast at an awkwardly downward angle. Bronte stood closest to the drawer, along with Kara, Agnes, Doc and Preston. The only sounds in the room were the soft purr of Rotomotoman’s machinery and the anticipatory breathing of every creature in the room.

Sitting in the back, as far out of the way as they could situate themselves, were Tom Groverton and Dr. Margaret. They were holding hands, which Axel thought especially fascinating. He tapped TV Frog and pointed to them.

“Look at that!” he whispered. “I’ll bet they’re learning how to make eggs too!”

He kept staring at the humans until he heard a kind of chiming sound coming from Rotomotoman. A disk-shaped part at the top of his head slid away and up from the cavity rose a flashing, rotating red light—just as Axel had designed it.

A word flashed on Rotomotoman’s display screen: “Ready!”

The little drawer opened.

The quiet sighs of awe and pent up relief from everyone gathered around sounded a little like a low, deep chord from some great church organ.

“Come on! Let’s get a closer look!” Axel reached over to tap TV Frog again, but there was no one at his side now.

TV Frog was gone.

“Hey!”

Axel wanted to go look for him, but his curiosity about the egg proved the greater draw. Axel crept up to the incubator drawer and told himself he’d find TV Frog later.

He gently pushed through the thick crowd of saurs. Charlie grouched at him until Rosie reminded him that it was Axel who was responsible for Rotomotoman. They let him through, and Axel climbed up on Hubert’s back, where he could easily see into the drawer.

The first few hairline cracks had already appeared on the surface of the shivering egg. A piece of the shell dropped away and from that breach popped a little pink head at the end of a long neck.

No one looked more surprised than Rotomotoman, whose huge disk-eyes implausibly seemed to grow larger at the sight.

The tiny hatchling’s eyes were shut at first, but its mouth was open and it made a little sound, a “Gack!” like a clearing of its throat.

Diogenes, who in all his years at the house had never been heard to utter more than a few words, turned to Hetman’s bed and whispered, “Did you hear?”

Hetman nodded. “Thank you, that I lived long enough to hear it.”

Then he (or she) opened his (or her) eyes.

The small, black, glistening orbs seemed instantly focused. The hatchling looked over the top of the drawer and seemed to see everyone and everything.

Bronte bent down and caressed the little creature with her snout, then tapped away another piece of the shell to free it more.

“It’s hard to say,” Doc looked at the hatchling, “since he’s without precedent, as far as we know, but he looks like a healthy little fellow to me.”

“Little fellow?” Agnes snapped. “Can’t you see it’s obviously female? Obviously intelligent? Obviously smarter than any carnosaur could ever hope to be?”

“Don’t start,” said Kara. “It’s not the time to fight.”

“What will happen now?” Bronte asked Kara. “Will she grow? Will she change and mature? Will she learn to do all the things we do?”

“Who knows?” said Kara. “We’ll learn as we go along.”

“It won’t stay a secret for long,” said Charlie, rubbing his nasal horn against the floor. “Those humans in the big car know more than they’re saying. They wouldn’t have taken Axel’s story so seriously if they didn’t.”

“That they figure it out isn’t what matters,” Agnes said. “It’s what they’ll do when they know.”

“Which we can’t predict,” said Preston, smiling at the little pink creature in the incubator drawer. “And this isn’t the time to try.”

All this time Axel, balanced on Hubert’s back, kept trying to get the hatchling’s attention, waving excitedly with one forepaw while holding to Hubert’s neck with the other.

“Hiya! Hey! Up here! Hey! Hiya!”

The tiny pink sauropod looked up at Axel.

“Gack!”

“Hiya Gack! I’m Axel!”

“That’s not her name!” Agnes waved her tail. “Moron!”

Kara nudged her and shook her head. “We’ll sort it out later.”

When Axel climbed down, Preston put his forepaw on his head and said, “We need to thank you. You—and Reggie.”

Axel looked up at Preston. “Don’t forget Rotomotoman!”

“Yes, Rotomotoman too.”

Rotomotoman stared down and saluted the hatchling, the red light on his head still rotating, as the word “Gack” flashed on his display screen.

Axel looked around the sleep room and noticed that Sluggo was up on the box seat under the window, looking out.

“Hey!” Axel hopped up and joined him. It was his favorite spot, after all. “Whatya doing up here?”

“I—I just wanted to look up at the stars. I don’t know why. The egg—and everything—I feel scared and I don’t know why. Or I do—but I’m still scared. I just needed to look up at the sky and see the stars.”

“Me too.” Axel put his forepaws up against the glass. “The moon and the planets and the stars and the galaxies are all spinning through space! And we’re spinning through space too! It’s a fact!”

“When I look up at the stars,” Sluggo said, “I feel—I don’t know—I feel—”

“As big as the universe!” Axel said.

“Yes. That’s it. As big as the universe.”

“It’s a good night for looking,” Axel gazed at the moon, his mouth wide open. “It’s the biggest, best universe in the whole world!”

Agnes might have disputed him, and if not there were many others who would, but it wasn’t in Sluggo to argue. He had only one universe to judge from, just as he had only one egg to judge from, but the both of them in their different ways seemed pretty remarkable.

And so, in an old house at the edge of the woods, far from the nearest megalopolis, Axel and Sluggo looked out from the window of the sleep room, up at the stars.

“Look at that!” Axel pointed to a luminous streak, razor thin, cutting a diagonal line across the night sky.

“A shooting star!” Axel nudged Sluggo. “Do you see it?”

“Yes,” Sluggo answered.

The shooting star was there for a few seconds, then disappeared.

“Wasn’t that neat?” Axel said.

“Yes, but—” Sluggo looked over at Axel, then out the window again.

“What?”

“Aren’t shooting stars supposed to shoot down? That one was going up!”

“Heyyyy!” Axel rubbed the spot just under his chin. “That’s right!”

The two of them kept looking out at the sky—the waiting universe before them and the new world behind, as good as any and better than most—but that was the only upward-shooting star they saw that night.

IN SPIRIT

Pat Forde

How differently would people act if they could experience their actions as others do?

The story I want to tell you now is the oldest story in the book. It’s the defining story of humanity, and it goes like this: A new tool comes along. Men see it in the world or in their minds. They strive to reach it, attain it, hold it aloft for a moment’s wonder. Then they wield it wisely or wantonly, and in so doing they transform a society—a tribe, village, city, corporation, nation-state, or global institution, spreading the effects on up the evolutionary ladder of civilization.

It’s a familiar story, yes. But to date, no tool has transformed human society as drastically as deep-projection technology. Not the first spark flinted for a fire, not the first ink put to page, not the first night lit by electricity, not the first atom split inside a bomb. None of those shocks were as transformative as Transdimensional Extended Projection technology, a.k.a. deep-projection.

How can I be sure of this?

I’m sure because deep-projection allows the impacts of those famous shocks of the past to be directly re-experienced—by allowing the past to be directly revisited from the present by qualified volunteers, a group that included myself from the very start. Yes, I was there, at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey back in 2030, when the pilot test was performed. I was there, and I witnessed an opening being made for the very first time into unseen dimensions that stitch together the universal fabric of reality. I watched the very first volunteer, a dear friend of mine, project across the unseen frames of reference that surround and suffuse our reality; with my own eyes I saw her enter a dimensional plane that shared its reality with a precisely targeted moment in the past. You may or may not know that she was killed the following year, in riots at the Institute.

Whatever you may think of her, and whatever you may have heard of our early efforts, do not be misinformed about our technology. Deep-projection was not “time travel” as anyone had foreseen it. It was more like stepping into a virtual-reality display of the past, a past that we cannot affect in any way. . . . At least, we believed that at the start. And for the most part it’s perfectly true: we cannot affect the past in any way that can change what’s already happened.

It’s also perfectly true that some of my fellow volunteers made the mistake of targeting moments in history that proved explosive to cultures founded upon those misunderstood moments. Still more explosive were news stories about the projection volunteers who returned from the past suffering strange side effects, consumed by poisonous thoughts and emotions long put to rest, feelings they rereleased into our present-day world.

Those news stories were true too, though I myself never experienced anything so negative during projection. In fact, my own experience was so much the opposite I felt compelled to join what’s being called New Spiritualism, a movement among deep-projection users that focuses on “weak interactions” with the past. Before long, I was an outspoken leader of this movement.

And that is why I was called on to testify at international hearings on the global crisis that deep-projection technology had triggered, hearings convened at the Hague in the fall of 2033. By that time, a worldwide ban on the use of the technology had been decreed, and most deep-projection centers were already shut down. Many had been ransacked by mobs, and in some countries, projection facilities had been burned to the ground, the staff and volunteers that made it out of the fires alive arrested or worse. . . . I was one of the lucky ones. Lucky enough to avoid being lynched, and lucky enough to be asked to present the first case-study on our technology at the international hearings.

Even the World Court was curious to hear about my one-of-a-kind case study—rumors had been circulating for months about an unusual group of Americans who’d approached me, seeking assistance for the innovative application of deep-projection they’d come up with. The court saw my story as a potential antidote to all the media horror stories concerning what scientists had seen or experienced in the remote past.

When I walked to the podium in that great court, I began by stating emphatically that deep-projection was not a dangerous technology in and of itself. It was not, after all, a weapon. It was merely a kind of transportation device. So whether it was used for good or for ill depended on us.

Then I shared with the members of the World Court what I’m about to share with you: the case of a voluntary projection made by an inmate of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.

What follows is adapted from the inmate’s deposition. . . .

Raed was in his thirtieth year of incarceration at Lewisburg when they made him the offer to participate.

It happened on the day of his annual psych review, and the instant he entered the review room Raed knew something big was up. The faces on the penitentiary’s psych panel changed slowly over the decades. A few more wrinkles, an occasional fresh new face to replace a retiree; but few new emotions. Yet three new faces were visible on the panel. And Lew’s balding senior psychologist looked guarded, even confused.

Plus there were a couple of lawyers present in the room, which was very odd indeed. Raed hadn’t even seen a lawyer since 2014. . . .

“Please sit down.”

A guard ushered Raed to the lone chair facing the table of psychologists. He lowered himself onto the chair, feeling small, even though he was taller than anyone on the five-man panel; he could see right over their heads to the mirrored observation-pane in the wall behind them. Raed was careful not to look directly into the mirrored pane, not because he was afraid of being watched—after thirty years at Lew, he’d feel out of sorts if he wasn’t watched—but because he didn’t want to see how much he’d aged in Lew. There were no mirrors back in his cell, of course.

“Something different on the agenda today, Raed,” Lew’s senior psychologist said, managing to sound both weary and impatient. “I’d like to start by informing you of an assessment made by our medical staff.” The old man held up a slate plugged into the table, read from it: “Raed, you were twenty-four years old when given over to the supervision of this penitentiary. With the supplements we feed you and with the fitness routine you’ve elected to maintain, the prognosis is you’ll have another fifty years with us here at Lew.”

That simple assessment slammed into Raed. He blinked at the senior psychologist, feeling disoriented, drawn out of the “safe-houses” the man claimed Raed had in his head. Fifty more years!

He hardly heard what the two sharply dressed lawyers were trying to tell him.

“. . . which is why we’re your court-appointed representation. We’re here to tell you about a petition made by a group of interested citizens.”

What were these men going on about?

“Concerning an experimental rehab program,” one of them continued, “that might be looked upon favorably by the Federal Board later, if you agree to undergo it.”

Raed suddenly laughed, something he did so rarely it hurt his throat a little. “To what end?” he asked them. “Reducing one of my life-sentences?”

Raed was serving two thousand back-to-back life-terms. Convicted of being an accomplice to “one of the most heinous crimes in recorded history,” he’d received the longest prison sentence ever handed out by a United States court—partially because he’d been a naturalized American citizen, but mostly because he’d been fully aware of the outcome of the crime. So Raed was never going to be released, reintroduced to society.

Extending him an offer of rehab was a ridiculous gesture.

“See this program through, and who can say what’s possible?” The lawyer shrugged. “For now, two things are directly on the table. One: an opportunity to see your daughter.”

Again Raed blinked at them, feeling his face reddening, stunned into apoplectic silence. When he’d entered Lew, he’d left a wife and a three-year-old daughter behind. And the last time lawyers had come to see him was back in Raed’s thirteenth year here, when he’d been served divorce papers from Haifa and papers disowning him as a parent from Basma, his daughter. Basma would have just been old enough to sign those papers, that year. Had she changed her mind, now that she was in her thirties?

“Also,” the lawyer went on, “an opportunity to enter the world beyond your prison, in a limited and—well, unusual way.” The lawyer said this as though he didn’t quite believe it.

Certainly Raed couldn’t quite believe it. He hadn’t seen the outside since his trial ended. The thought unnerved him, for he had no idea what the world was like anymore. “Who made the offer?” Raed managed to ask.

Now the second lawyer spoke up. “A group of citizens who have a certain relationship with you, but do not wish to be identified.”

“Ah.” Raed knew just what group the lawyer was referring to. He sighed, “I need to think about it.”

After the review was over and the guards took him back to his home in Lew Cell #1, Raed found he couldn’t stop thinking about the astonishing offer made to him. Raed knew the group that had petitioned for the offer pretty well: an Arab-American Rights group that checked in on him over the years, to ensure he wasn’t abused in the penitentiary simply because of the notoriety of his conviction. In the occasional letter he’d received from the group every couple of years, they emphasized Raed must not advertise their low-level connection with him. They threatened to stop making inquiries on his behalf to the Lew administration if he failed to maintain their privacy.

Raed understood the group wasn’t actually “making inquiries on his behalf” because they were concerned about him, per se. Their concern—especially during the early years—was that Raed might take his own life in prison and become a martyr to his old cause.

Raed had no pent-up desire to become a martyr, and he was not considered a serious candidate for suicide—although, due to his uniquely lengthy sentence, he was permanently assigned to the suicide-watch list at Lew. If ever there was a prisoner who had nothing to looking forward to, it was surely Raed.

But now he could be a research volunteer for a new one-of-a-kind rehab program.

He would get to see his daughter, they’d told him.

He would get to walk the outside world for short stretches.

And for long stretches he would get to leave Cell #1, the largest and most expensive cell in the penitentiary, where Raed resided alone under constant guard and camera surveillance.

After thirty years, the cell was a home to him. Raed had taped up a picture of soaring desert dunes on one wall, a vista of the Moon over the ocean on another. He’d nursed a dozen plants up round the tiny window overlooking the courtyard that Raed could see out of, but no one could see in through. He’d even built up a modest bookshelf, though none of the books dated from this century. And there were no newspapers allowed in here, there was no television. Raed’s media exposure was censored from the start of his incarceration “in order to prevent continued political inflammation of the prisoner.”

Nevertheless, in the early years Raed protested this political censorship of news by cutting himself off from all news, all knowledge of outside events. He’d withdrawn from modern civilization completely the day he set foot in Cell #1. And why not? Raed had lost everything. So he restricted himself to reading older texts, like the Alif Layla Wa Layla, the Thousand and One Nights. Shaherazade, it turned out, provided a soothing escape for a man sentenced to spend ten thousand and one nights in a single room. At his own insistence, none of the books on Raed’s shelf were published after the day of infamy he’d been convicted of participating in: the day the Lew staff still referred to as “9/11.”

In the early years, Raed’s psychologists hadn’t been bothered by his self-censorship. But after the first decade, they changed their minds, complaining that he was retreating too far from reality. That’s when the psychologists began to talk about “safe-rooms” in his mind, about a “labyrinth of rooms” he was building to escape not just from imprisonment but from himself. Raed snorted when he first heard this metaphor—but even then he’d suspected the description was all too apt.

An internal labyrinth. A long chain of rooms within rooms to hide in at the back of his mind.

For years he’d been building them, extending himself into new selves, splinter-selves that left his memories of life on the outside stored in some distant mental “room.” In the decades since Raed arrived at Lew, the administration had constructed four new versions of Cell #1 just for him, each room a little more livable, more “humane” than the last. Over the same period, Raed probably constructed forty new rooms inside his head, just to block away the portions of his mind he didn’t need anymore. The first to go was his entire twenty-four-year-old “outside-self,” long lost now, dropped down some dusty crevice of the labyrinth Raed built to divide and conquer himself. During the ensuing years he’d wound his way deeper into the labyrinth, until he’d found a room strong enough to withstand eternal confinement and isolation.

After three very long and sleepless nights spent reflecting on his position—something Raed hardly ever did—he broke down and asked what was involved in the experimental program. He was told it involved a new technology, but much of the program itself would be left up to him.

A month later, Raed was taken out of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary for the first time since he’d been brought into it. He was taken out just after dusk in an armored van without windows, and driven through the mountains toward a destination unknown.

By the sound of it, the armored van had a police escort, and the escort led the way for about an hour, about as far as Reading, Pennsylvania might be, Raed guessed. Then the van stopped, and he heard the driver talking with security guards. Raed heard something else too, a muffled sound familiar from his trial: the sound of protestors shouting at the van. He was astonished to think the public had found out he was being brought here, had gotten up in the middle of the night to come here themselves—but Raed wasn’t surprised that people still harbored so much hate for him. On the rare occasions he gave interviews, Raed saw the wariness in the journalists’ eyes, caught them looking at him like a kind of living ghoul out of the pages of history.

The van parked in a loading dock. Raed was unloaded under guard, then brought to an empty conference room, wearing a monitoring restraint-collar that would sedate him instantly if he tried anything. Moments later, the same trio of young psychologists who’d sat through his review in Lewisburg entered the room, followed by a pair of middle-aged men introduced to him as “senior researchers.” The two researchers began outlining their experimental program, describing the new technology Raed would be required to use. . . .

Raed listened to them, briefly astounded, then disappointed. “Projection” through a “dimensional fold” to a “targeted moment in the past” ? Raed’s mind began doing backflips trying to guess what was really going on here. Had the legal climate in the United States changed? Had new forces declared Raed should be put through some punishment alternative to confinement?

He told the researchers flat out he did not believe them. Traveling to the past was impossible, he didn’t care how many decades had gone by since he’d been in the outside world.

So they took him down to the main “projection” floor, brought him into a room dominated by a big spherical cagework. There had to be a hundred different bars to the cage, not all of them completely encircling it. And hanging in the cage’s center was a body harness. Raed examined it suspiciously, wondering what exactly these men were trying to trick him into. . . . All the cage’s arcing yellow bars were studded with cones that pointed inward, toward the harness suspended by a dozen blue coil-cables.

“Questions, Raed?” one of the psychologists asked him.

“What are the curtains for?”

The long back wall of the “projection” room was concealed—to hide a viewing gallery?

But then one of the guards who’d accompanied Raed from Lew drew back the curtains, revealing a long pane of Plexiglas that separated the room with the cage from—

A much larger room with a hundred identical cages that were occupied by suspended people.

At least, the suspended occupants appeared to be people. Raed stepped up to the Plexiglas pane, pressed his face against it, uncertain whether he was seeing an image televised across the pane or a real room on the other side of the pane.

The arena-sized room was real.

The hundred-odd yellow cages seemed real.

But all the suspended people looked blurry, far-off, fake, like projected images. Most of the image-people were moving, some running in their cages, a few leaping and rolling in midair.

“Those people aren’t real,” Raed said over his shoulder, unable to turn from the pane. He was mesmerized. . . . Abruptly, one of the closer cages flashed with light, and the false floating image-person inside was instantly transformed into a clear-as-can-be jumpsuit-wearing woman, a real-as-can-be woman who stepped out of the yellow cage, a little shaky on her feet, but otherwise not visibly worse for the experience. She began conferring with a three-man team clustered round display-desks adjacent to her big yellow cage.

“You’re telling me that woman was deep-projecting into the past?” Raed asked, noticing now there was a separate team for each harnessed and hanging “time traveler.” If this was all a hoax, it was an elaborate one.

“Volunteers like her call it ‘ghosting’,” someone behind him said. “You’ll see why if you decide to follow our program, and volunteer to try it for yourself.”

The “volunteers” in the cages beyond the Plexiglas pane were not other prisoners, according to the researchers. The volunteers were mostly historians and cultural anthropologists, a handful of students, and others who routinely “ghosted back to the past” from this facility round-the-clock. Raed’s researcher-guides claimed the yellow projection cages allowed people to experience the physical reality of the past without fully being part of it.

But Raed knew that it was all a trick of some kind. If those volunteers were experiencing any sort of “projection,” it was the sort of computer-fabricated reality the outside world used to call—what was the word? Oh yes: a simulation.

That was the only thing “projection” could be, the only thing Raed could bring himself to believe. . . .

His rehab programmers seemed prepared for Raed’s disbelief.

For the rest of the night, they cloistered Raed and his two Lew guards in the otherwise-empty conference room, so that Raed could browse through “holeos”—interactive 3-D training videos. The holeos began with a list of weird implications of “classical quantum theory”: how subatomic particles appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared, how such particles could exist in many places at once, the development of a mathematics that suggested particles were boring between dimensions.

Apparently Raed’s rehab programmers knew he’d been exposed to such strange concepts before, while studying for his certificate in electronics.

Of course they knew. Raed’s electronics training came out at the trial because his certificate got him a position with the airline, a low-level job that allowed him to scrutinize airport security. . . . Anyway, one of Raed’s electronics courses had touched on quantum theory—mainly for the students continuing on into cell-phone or computer technology. Raed hadn’t understood the half-day “quantum overview” his college course included.

According to the holeos, Raed wasn’t the only one who hadn’t understood. Most physicists chose to treat the theory simply as a convenient way to calculate and predict the positions of particles, rather than believe the world could really be riddled by multiple dimensions. The holeo invited Raed to imagine Copernicus and Galileo choosing to ignore the overall implication of their new way of calculating and predicting the positions of the planets—and refusing to believe the Sun could really be the center of the solar system.

Raed didn’t see why it was important for him to know or imagine any of this. But he didn’t want anyone to think he was backing out of the program. He didn’t want to be driven back to Lew, not just yet. And he was an expert at biding his time. Patience and playing the game were the essential survival skills of a long-term prisoner.

So Raed patiently sat through a tedious holeo-guided history of quantum-in-the-large, which elevated the theory from the subatomic realm up to far larger scales. He listened patiently to young scientists attacking the notion that “multiple dimensions collapsed into a single dimension” whenever a human observer happened along—how could a theory of matter seriously include human consciousness in a central role? He patiently examined 3-D renderings of the first machines built to scan “N-space,” a theoretical realm that surrounded and suffused the visible Universe with all manner of strange dimensions.

But when the holeos moved on to the topic of “forces experienced during projection into N-space,” Raed must have groaned aloud, because his researcher-hosts came in and turned off the holeos. They didn’t seem disappointed; perhaps they’d thought he’d give up on their theoretical material much sooner.

Next they let Raed watch an old pre-millennium black-and-white movie that was supposed to give him an idea of what it would be like to be “projected” to a city he could do little but wander through.

The setting was Berlin, and the city was revealed through the eyes of two angels wandering among the living—angels who resembled two somber German men in stylish dark greatcoats. The citizens of Berlin couldn’t see them, but the two forlorn-looking angels could see and hear people talking in the world around them. They could even hear the thoughts of people, although in those parts of the film the soundtrack reverted to German, so he didn’t get to hear what the citizens were thinking. All he could tell from the tone of their untranslated thoughts was whether they were sad or happy, angry or afraid. . . .

After it was over, one researcher sat down with him, described the projection experience as a lot like being a ghost lurking in an otherwise real world. Projection volunteers could see the physical environment of the past perfectly, but could not be seen by people in that past.

“Because,” the researcher laboriously explained, “light is so low in mass that it merely has one-way transdimensionality. Volunteers can see light from the past, but past-states can never receive light from farther along Time’s dimension.”

Raed nodded dutifully, wondering what all the researchers here were really up to, and why they would try so hard to make him believe in an impossibility. . . .

An hour before dawn, he was hustled back to the armored van waiting in the loading dock, handed printed materials to review if he wanted to, then whisked out through the unseen but audible protestors and returned to Lew to spend the day resting in his cell. Which was fine by him. Stepping back through the door of Cell #1 felt like waking from a dream. He didn’t feel so out of sorts here, so confused and vulnerable.

But he couldn’t sleep. The thought that he’d just been beyond the penitentiary’s walls had opened up a crack inside his thinking. He still didn’t know what to make of his night out. So much scientific argument just to convince him of something untrue?

Eventually he gave up on sleep altogether, and began looking over the strange explanations in the support material they’d given him, looking for loopholes, looking for the truth behind their lies. Raed used to be an imaginative man. But imagination was not a good thing to have in prison and he felt very rusty. Long-forgotten thoughts stirred up faded memories of his teenage struggle to master challenging Western concepts—an education paid for by the organization, the money funneled to Raed through his cousins Nazir and Sayf, both of whom died back on 9/11.

The truth about “deep-projection” finally dawned on Raed. Now he saw through the rehab programmers’ game, and saw how to get what he wanted: a chance to see his daughter Basma, whom Raed hadn’t seen since she was three years old.

With that reward firmly in mind, Raed finally fell asleep.

The next night, he was again driven out of the Appalachians to the deep-projection complex. And again he heard protesters out in force as the van went through the complex’s gates, although the van’s walls muffled whatever was being shouted at him. . . .

Waiting for him in the same conference room as before were the three psychologists and the two so-called senior researchers—his “projection parole board,” for all intents and purposes. These five men could approve his participation in the program or send him packing for the rest of his life.

“Questions, Raed?”

He held up the printed materials he’d brought back with him. “Is it really necessary for me to know any of this before I can project?” Raed already knew the answer, but was curious to see how they’d try to rationalize it to him.

A compact researcher with close-cropped gray bristles instead of hair took the printouts back from Raed. “You reviewed all this?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, let’s see where last night’s holeo-lessons broke off. . . .” He flipped to the final pages. “Ah, yes: N-space forces and the role mass plays in them. Complex stuff—but crucial to understanding what you’ll encounter during projection, how you can move around, and so on.”

An evasive answer that simply pressed ahead with the logic crafted to convince him. Indeed, that was the ultimate purpose of all this preparatory theory:

To make Raed believe “projection” would show him the real past, so that the psychological benefits of the rehab program could take effect.

The science was all part of the rehab, part of the game these psychologists were playing with him. He recognized their bag of tricks well enough.

But Raed could play the game better than anyone. After all, he’d lived in America for seven years and played the game of being one of the ordinary people on his Brooklyn street without anyone suspecting his deep-seated separateness. So he would play along with tonight’s game, stay on the move inside his head, hop from room to room through the labyrinth until he came out as the winner. . . .

This time, the compact senior researcher with the bristle-hair remained behind when the others left. The man introduced himself as Francis Drummond, a volunteer himself during the earliest test-projections. He seemed committed to helping Raed understand the hard stuff.

“Get through an hour with me, and you’ll get to project for the rest of the night,” Francis promised as he began summoning images onto the conference table’s display-surface: the Moon; a mountain; a building; a metal barricade. According to Francis, each of the displayed objects was massive enough to exert force “into many N-space dimensions.” But people who projected through N-space into the past could apparently thrust their ghostly hands right through a foam mattress—or even through a pane of glass, if they were patient enough.

Raed nodded, knowing all this information was being trotted out to explain away the defects of the simulation he’d be projecting into. “Will I be able to walk through walls, like the two German angels in that black-and-white movie?” he asked, getting into the spirit of the game.

“If it’s the wall of a tent, sure. There’s a kind of ‘tingly give’ when you step through thin structures. But you can’t step through ordinary walls of concrete or steel, no. It all comes back to mass and massive structure. . . .”

Over the course of two hours with Francis, Raed struggled to keep on top of the complex concepts paraded before him. Francis even told him about the big surprise from the earliest test-projections: “We discovered that life-forms of sufficient mass exert some kind of energy into a few dimensions; we call these ‘biomass signatures.’ Volunteers pick up these signatures when animals of a certain size wander close to them.”

How did they simulate that, Raed wondered. “That include people?”

Francis nodded. “Conscious animals exert the strongest signatures. Please don’t interpret this as something ‘psychic’; individual thoughts are far too fleeting to be sensed. They essentially have no weight. But strong emotions can last a long time in the forebrain, fill the hindbrain, contort the face, change the way we walk, permeate our muscle-tissues. Massive, you might say.”

Francis seemed to be trying to reawaken Raed’s mind as much as teach him about projection. And that was all right with Raed. Because if he was going to go through their rehab program, and notice all the things they’d want him to notice, and win the reward they’d promised him, he’d need to be on the ball. . . .

“Well, that about covers it,” Francis finally announced, shutting off the conference table. “Any last questions?”

Raed sensed this was a test he must pass. “You said gravity has ‘two-way transdimensionality’ ?”

“Yes.” Francis seemed pleased. “It’s a strong-weak interaction. Gravity from the past is exerted strongly onto the N-space fold you’ll be in, and your own mass exerts itself weakly onto the past—”

“Doesn’t adding my mass to the past change the past? I thought paradoxes were outlawed by quantum-in-the-large.” Raed’s rusty brain was beginning to work again. He wanted to show this clever man he’d been listening and he would catch flaws in his logic, if Francis wasn’t careful.

“Paradoxes are ruled out. Our technology wouldn’t work at all if it were possible to project into the future, for instance. And according to quantum-in-the-large, people who project through N-Space to the past already visited that past the first time around, so to speak. So their mass was accounted for, and their presence won’t change anything. They can only go back and weakly interact because they were there all along.”

“I understand you perfectly.”

“Excellent.” Francis stood up. “I’ll send in a medic who’ll take you downstairs, get you hooked up to the cage.”

The man strode out of the room.

And Raed waited, feeling out of his element, out of his cell, completely out of sorts. He glanced at the guards watching him from their shadowy corner of the room. He glanced at a bookshelf against the conference room wall, took down a text, looked at the cover: Creating Transient N-space Intersections with Past Time.

A book about a false bunch of theories? The book’s spine was cracked worse than Raed’s copy of Shaherazade, as though it had been thumbed through many times.

The crack deep inside his thinking hadn’t gone away; it was still down there, wedged wider by all the information they’d fed him. And now a hint of fear was seeping up through that crack. . . . Because Raed knew what his rehab programmers were up to, he could guess their “precisely targeted-destination,” oh yes.

They intended to project him back to 9/11.

A burly male medic arrived, and led Raed and his two guards down to the same curtained chamber off the main projection arena, where the guards removed his restraint-collar. The medic explained that the chamber’s projection cage was the only one isolated in the facility, set up just for Raed. Then he helped Raed don the harness, which was worn under his clothes, against his body so the ‘trodes could record biofeedback. After strapping it on, Raed got into a magnetic jumpsuit. The medic told him he could put his clothes on over the top of the jumpsuit.

So he did, fingers trembling as he re-buttoned his shirt. . . .

The pair of lawyers who’d first appeared at his review back in Lew suddenly reappeared with a slate for him to sign. They informed Raed about the protests being held outside the facility. The protests were not about him, they said; no one outside knew he was in here.

“What are they protesting?”

Apparently the people outside felt projection technology was too dangerous to be used. The lawyers assured Raed no volunteer who’d undergone projection had been physically harmed by the process itself; it was emotional damage, that was the real risk. The potent “biomass signatures” people gave off in the past could be quite corrosive.

“That’s the only danger?”

One of the lawyers told him, “There’s a movement called ‘New Spiritualism’ that contends the transdimensional interaction can be positive. Some New Spiritualists are sponsoring your rehab program, by the way. . . .”

But Raed was hardly listening, seeing more of the truth peeking out from behind their lies. The protestors outside were opposed to the simulations this technology produced. And now Raed had been brought here—because if they could convince him the simulations were real and use them to help him rehabilitate, wouldn’t that be a big coup for a beleaguered technology?

Raed signed the slate held out to him. Then the lawyers asked the medic to strap a special “ripcord” over Raed’s clothing, reiterated that he could back out at any time, and as they left the chamber, his personal projection team came in. An Asian senior researcher, a boyish-looking controls operator, and finally a woman psychologist—a Muslim psychologist, no less, wearing a black cotton burqa that kept her hidden and proper. Didn’t they realize Raed was no longer a devout?

As Raed was introduced by his guards, the woman’s wide-set black eyes looked coldly over the burqa-veil at him. No doubt she’d been sent by the Arab-American Rights group who’d petitioned to get him into this crazy rehab program.

The team quickly took their positions, the medic helping Raed through the yellow bars into the cage, then pulling down the blue coil-cables and magnetically latching them to anchor spots on the jumpsuit beneath Raed’s clothes. The moment the medic stepped out of the cage, the operators powered up the blue cables, which recoiled, hoisting Raed comfortably into midair. He tried to calm his breathing, and listened to the chatter around him.

“Got five hours.”

“Time for, say, ten projections?”

“Aim for ten, minimum.”

“Curtains open or closed?”

Raed realized this was addressed to him. “Open.” He didn’t care if anyone looked in; he wanted to look out. So the curtains were drawn aside, and Raed peered at the hundred-odd cages across the main floor, which were again all occupied by volunteers, some in jumpsuits, some in tracksuits, some in regular clothes. Presumably this facility was packed day and night. He heard something below him, and realized the Muslim psychologist had stepped into the cage.

“Your program for tonight involves a number of projections, all of them focused on a primary time-locus—”

“I know where you’re sending me,” he told her. “Back to the day I was convicted of being a party to. As punishment,” he added.

The psychologist shook her veiled head. “It’s up to you what you get out of the projection experience. If you want the offer made to you upheld, you’ll have to stick the program out. On the other hand, if you decide you no longer want to continue—” She indicated the ripcord round his waist. “Pull this, you’ll instantly shut down the cage-frame and return to the present.”

Raed had been advised by the lawyers that any ripcord shutdowns would be treated as a withdrawal from the program. “I’m not afraid,” he said to her.

He was curious, though. Raed hadn’t thought much about 9/11 in nearly two decades. All by itself the mind sprouted rooms within rooms to tuck away what was destructive. And tucked a hundred rooms away from the Raed of today was the twenty-four-year-old Raed who’d aided and abetted his cousins Nazir and Sayf. He no longer had any connection to that Raed, but he was curious to know how history now looked on the events of that day. . . . The medic was now strapping a lightweight breather-mask round Raed’s neck. Would it secrete some kind of hallucinatory gas?

“In case we project you to the wrong coordinates,” the woman psychologist explained, still standing below him. “You’d pass out in certain environments, but there’s little chance of real physical harm. Anyway, you can use the microphone on the breather to call out to us during projection. We’ll hear you. The people of the past won’t hear you, remember. Sound can only travel one way across the dimensional fold, just like light. Now brace yourself,” she warned him. “The world of the past’s going to feel both startlingly real and surreal.”

With a twirl of black cotton, she quickly slipped out of the cage. And within seconds the inward-angled cones on all the arcing yellow bars began to focus shimmering beams on him, opening a “transient N-space fold” around him. Raed blinked through the bars, met the hard eyes of the young Muslim psychologist, still refusing to believe—until the woman began to blur, and shift, and slide off to one side, and everything around Raed swirled into a tunnel of light—

A light thump, and the tunnel of light focused into a tubular space. Raed’s eyes adjusted, recognized an oh-so-familiar interior: he was inside a large, mostly empty 767 passenger jet sitting on a runway.

Raed had dropped down into one of the rearmost seats from midair, as the “gravity” of the simulation took hold of him. It was a simulation, wasn’t it? He blinked at his surroundings, seeing every detail of the seat-back ahead of him and the belts and buckles lying on the empty seats beside him, the empty row across the aisle, the magazines and folded-up meal tables all perfectly visible, his surroundings absolutely real no matter which way he looked. Light has a strong multidimensionality, Francis had said, but such negligible mass it can only cross one-way, from the past to the present. . . .

But then Raed noticed he was sinking right through the padded seat-cushion beneath him—he could feel himself bumping down against the hard steel frame inside the seat itself. Flaws in the simulation, just as he’d suspected! He let out a sigh of relief, and watched his body rebound slightly, settling into place almost on the surface of the seat cushion visible between his legs. It was a strange sensation, but Raed was sure it was controlled by the coiled harness cables back in the “projection” cage he had to be still hanging in. . . . From a great distance away, too far off and far too soft to be real, the whining sound of jet engines powering up. More like a whisper, when the sound should have been screamingly loud in his ears—another flaw! Raed felt he was hearing a faulty soundtrack in a movie theater too big for the speakers.

But then he recalled the materials he’d been given to study: sounds would be strange, nothing would be loud enough to make out unless Raed was standing close to the source.

Slowly the 767 went through a 30-degree turn on the runway, and the quality of light spilling through windows across the aisle made it clear to Raed this was an early morning flight. His heart began to beat faster. He leaned over the seat beside him, peered out the oval window. His plane appeared to be taxiing toward a main runway, and the airport was—

Logan International, Boston.

No doubt this was supposed to be the fateful day. Raed struggled to get up, wanting to see if he could see Nazir or Sayf seated in the rows ahead, biding their time until the 767 had taken off. But no, something was wrong—the weird far-off whining of the engines was powering down, shutting off altogether. Raed tried to get to his feet, struggling with the distorted friction of this simulation-world, all the while clinging to the fact that he was really attached to a harness in the air somewhere. In the seat ahead of him, a passenger was sleeping, one arm thrown across his lap, digital wristwatch visible: 9:13 am.

An hour after the time they should have been in the air, if this was one of those infamous flights. No wonder the plane was at a standstill! Plopping back down in the empty window seat, Raed pressed his face to the strangely rubbery glass of the window, caught sight of other motionless planes lined up on another runway. . . . On the morning of 9/11, all flights in the country had been grounded shortly after 9 am.

They’d projected him back aboard the wrong plane! Raed released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

But if it was all just a simulation, under the control of the two projection operators, then shouldn’t this be one of the planes that had left Boston an hour earlier?

He moved back to the aisle seat, saw a stewardess walking towards him from the front of the plane, looking distraught, touching the passengers she passed on the shoulder, and speaking soundlessly to them. Raed heard nothing at all until she was quite close, then he heard the stewardess speaking four words to the passengers in the rows ahead of him: “Never forget this day.”

Her voice sounded too loud, and more than a little hoarse, as though she was on the edge of tears. “Never forget this day,” she boomed again, leaning in to touch the passenger in the seat directly ahead on the shoulder. She passed Raed by without looking at him, but her knee brushed his hand, resting on the hard plastic aisle-arm—

FEAR-ANGUISH-DISBELIEF! All three emotions flooded out of the passing stewardess and into Raed, the potency of his brief physical contact with her a kind of pain he’d never experienced before. He recoiled from the aisle, clutching his hand as though he’d been burned, and feeling certain in every fiber of his body that the stewardess had just been informed about the planes striking their New York targets.

For an instant, just one instant, Raed was clutched by the fear that he was not in a simulation. . . .

Murmurs were rising from the surrounding seats:

“What’d she mean?”

“Why aren’t we taking off? Know what’s going on?”

Raed rubbed at his hand, wondering whether stewardesses had actually acted this way on the real day of infamy. Two rows ahead and across the aisle, a man was listening to his cell phone, a shocked look dawning on his face. And in the aisle seat three rows ahead, a woman was standing, turning, walking slowly toward the back, moving as though she had arthritis even though she was only in her thirties. She looked directly at Raed when she came alongside him, leaned over him and repeated the same four words: “Never forget this day.” Then she reached down to Raed’s shoulder, but before she could touch him, the woman’s arm elongated, slid away, there was a whirl of light and—

Raed was back in the deep-projection facility, hanging in the center of the projection cage, groggy and disoriented and fighting a desire to remove the harness, exit the cage, and ask to be returned to his cell in Lew. The veiled psychologist stepped through the bars beside him, gave him a thumbs-up to show his bioreadings were acceptable, wanted a thumbs-up in return—Raed was supposed to signal if he was up to continuing, ready for the next part of the program.

He didn’t give her a thumbs-up. Instead he lifted his breather, gasped to her, “I thought you said the people of the past couldn’t see me?”

“They can’t,” she agreed, tapping a note onto the slate she was holding.

The projection cage operators called out that the target-coordinates were recalibrated, and the cage was ready for a second “folding.” Was Raed ready for a second “ghosting” ?

“They can’t see you,” she repeated, covering her veiled mouth with her hand to remind Raed to refit his breather. “And don’t worry,” she assured him, “you’ll get used to ghosting after another few tries.” She slipped sideways out between the bars again, before turning back and adding, “You won’t be harmed, Raed.”

Who did she think he was? Raed wasn’t afraid of a computer simulation. His hand still tingled from his brushed contact with the stewardess, but it was all a trick of the ‘trodes lining his harness straps, all just a trick of the mind. He’d been conned into overreacting by all the holeo material they’d made him study, that’s all. He was playing the game so well he was beginning to con himself.

But they could not send him into the past.

And he was not ready to give up. The thought of being driven back to Lew was deeply comforting—Cell #1 was the only place Raed felt safe, felt under his own control. But Cell #1 was also a cage more frightening than this cage, and after leaving it two nights in a row, Raed knew the crack inside him was yawning wider. He sensed the new need pouring through, throwing the balance of his desire in the direction of continuing these trips out of Lew, no matter what simulation they put him through.

The psychologist gave him the thumbs-up again, and in response Raed balled up the hand that had touched the stewardess into a defiant fist, and said into his breather-microphone, “I am ready.”

And said to himself only a simulation as the universe around him shifted, slid, swirled into the tunnel of light—

—which widened to become a vast, impossibly wounded sky. It was the sky of some inhuman world wreathed in shadow, pierced only by shafts of weird blue light, and threatened by thunderclouds that coiled not with water, but with ash that rained down on a dead land.

Another bump as Raed fell back onto a patch of ground littered with jagged concrete shrapnel and twisted piping, which did not cut him; he barely sensed any sharp edges. Pushing himself up off this rubble was extremely difficult. Raed struggled to stay on his feet, see where he was. All round him lay a spaghetti-panorama of tangled wiring, twisted metal braces, giant steel girders scattered like logs, sections of shattered furniture—and paper. Crests and swirls of scattered pages, documents jammed between wiring, sticking out from shards of concrete. Suddenly a nearby swell of paper shot skyward as steam vented from the unsteady, uneven landscape. Raed had “projected” to a place where some war had been going on forever, by the littered looks of things—a place worse than any he’d seen before coming to America as a teen. Far worse than any part of Beirut, where he’d lived for a time as a small boy.

Unfortunately, Raed knew the name of this impossible place.

“Ground Zero,” they’d called it.

He appeared to be standing on the island of Manhattan, on the spot where the Twin Towers had stood—and stood not long before he’d arrived, if the roiling sky was rendered accurately. This time he seemed to have missed 9/11 not by an hour, but by twenty-four hours. Smoke still hugged the rubble-strewn ground like patches of fog; distant figures drifted in and out of this fog, mostly firemen and policemen; a few were using search-dogs, trying to sniff out victims trapped under the rubble.

Raed himself smelled nothing. Not the smoke, not the scent of jet fuel that should have filled the air. Not even the singed-cinder aroma from the ongoing fires in the distance. Thirty years, and they still can’t program smells properly in computer simulations, he told himself, but that was just his mind trying to deny what he was seeing: an inconceivably detailed landscape of devastation that extended for blocks in every direction, and a too-huge-to-fake sky above, drawing Raed’s eyes up through bluish curls of smoke to the heavens. Out under the sky!

His soul had yearned for open sky for three long decades, but now that he seemed to be standing beneath one, he felt it was too awesome, too exposed, too heavy, too terrible to bear.

So he turned his eyes down to the tangled ground, and began to pick his way over to the only source of noise close enough to hear: a soft hissing emanating from the mist-shrouded bank of rubble directly behind him. Clambering back over a filing cabinet that might have fallen from the Moon—it was flattened like a stomped soda can—Raed started slowly across the damp ground toward this soft sibilant sound, presumably a very loud sound “in reality.” Keeping his balance was complicated by the fact that he kept plunging through an insubstantial blanket of papers and paper ash, soot and concrete dust, getting his feet stuck in crevices beneath this visible surface-blanket, yet leaving no footprints in it, disturbing nothing he fell against, moving nothing he grabbed onto for support. At one point, he blinked down at a pair of eyeglasses, both lenses starred, crushed underfoot—

But not by him. Whoever had worn them was not his victim, no. Raed could sense the old defense almost rising to his lips, could almost hear himself saying it in a courtroom long ago. America puffed itself too high in those two towers. Anyone trapped inside them had been trapped there by America alone, so they weren’t my victims. The old defense, the denial he’d dropped somewhere along the way, abandoned in an outer room of the labyrinth in Raed’s mind, rooms away from the middle-aged man he was now. It all seemed so long ago, too long ago to feel clear on the subject.

Nothing seemed clear about 9/11, especially not here, not now.

But then a breeze he couldn’t feel began clearing the mists ahead, revealing a looming shape just a few feet from him: the side of a huge fire truck, its designation ash-smeared but still visible. Tower Pumper No. 146.

Raed maneuvered round the front of the pumper truck, and dragged himself onto an adjacent mound of debris to get a better view of things. He was now level with the top of the truck’s cab, and he could see the mist was coming from a hose being aimed from the crow’s nest atop the pumper. A giant fireman in a soot-stained yellow coat stood in the center of the crow’s nest like an indomitable statue, soaking down a fire inside a half-collapsed structure sixty or seventy feet away. A second fireman lay face-down further down the roof of the pumper, obviously exhausted.

Only two firemen for a truck this size?

It had to be less than twenty-four hours after 9/11; otherwise Ground Zero would be swarming with volunteer firefighters from out of state, even out of the country, if Raed recalled correctly. From his debris-hilltop, Raed turned and surveyed the entire scene, which was opening up as the imperceptible breeze cleared more spray and smoke and steam away.

The scene before him might have been some imaginary rendering of the end of the world. Smoldering multi-story sections of both towers lay strewn about like so many titanic accordions, while in the distance, Manhattan’s financial canyons were on fire in a hundred spots. Closer at hand, the ground was draped with stretches of outer tower-walling, glittering and ribbed, resembling enormous metallic mats—or magic carpets used by giants from the Alif Layla Wa Layla, Jinnis that had vanished back into the sky, leaving behind explosive plumes of blue smoke. It was a vista more fantastical than any Shaherazade ever imagined. . . .

So unreal.

Yet this unreality was far harder to pass off as a simulation than the contained commonplace-reality of a passenger plane stranded on a runway. The interior of a 767 was a plausible space to model. But the exterior of New York, under an open sky? Around him the ground was seething, and crews of firemen and rescue workers were materializing from beyond veils of vapor swinging grappling hooks and pick-axes, each figure perfect and alive and real. Many of them disappeared into the gray-white crater in the center of this vast dead zone in time and in place.

The dead past.

Not rendered, not simulated.

Real.

Legs turning watery, going out from under him. Raed dropped helplessly onto the blackened husk of what might once have been a fine office couch.

Ground Zero.

Could his cousins Nazir and Sayf really have brought this about?

Could he really be here?

Real or unreal, Raed wanted this revisitation to end. He was more than ready to return to the present. And if the first projection back to the grounded plane was anything to go by, he wouldn’t have to sit here long before they brought him out of all this. So Raed waited, watching the fireman atop the pumper truck hose down flames licking out of a crushed-accordion section of one of the fallen towers, and wondering whether he was seeing something that might be real, might be true: had the two men on Tower Pumper Truck No. 146 been working here through the night, fighting fires since the World Trade Center collapsed?

For an instant, the huge man working the hose lost his grip on it. A cloud of spray swept over Raed, and he swung his hand through the moisture without feeling a drop. Not massive enough, he thought, the science they’d fed him regurgitating an explanation for this flaw in the visual reality. Things will appear both startlingly real and surreal, the Muslim psychologist had warned him.

Suddenly the hose shut off altogether, and the weary fireman stumbled out of the crow’s nest, tore off his goggles, wiped tears from his eyes—no doubt he’d lost many firemen-friends when the towers came down—then the man collapsed on the pumper’s roof right beside his prone coworker. That’s when Raed became aware of a prickling sensation, a cloud of something uncomfortably tingly swimming over him. . . .

Heat! Heat was able to “span the dimensional divide” that purportedly separated Raed from this past. Heat was cumulatively massive, Francis had told him—it had sufficient structure to transmit a force across N-space. Whatever the case, he was definitely sensing a radiation from the burning accordion-floors not far away—an itchy, uneasy chill. A cold and ticklish pressure, unlike any cold he’d ever felt.

So this was heat in the land of the dead, three decades back!

Raed shivered, on the verge of believing again, wondering if those two firemen really were lying only a dozen feet from him, unaware of his ghostly presence. He rubbed the edge of his left hand, where it had made that fiery contact with the stewardess. Human contact was one that did feel hot in these projections—too hot too handle, which was why Raed was being careful not to get too close to anyone this time around. He would not touch any of the people he encountered at Ground Zero, and he would not be touched by them. He was not responsible. He was not the twenty-four-year-old who’d helped two cousins bring the Twin Towers down. That boy was long gone, locked down in the dustiest, most unreachable part of the labyrinth of Raed’s mind, the key to his pre-prison self thrown away ages ago.

So how could it possibly help him to see all this again?

But Raed had never seen Ground Zero the first time around, of course; he hadn’t dared venture anywhere near it in the aftermath of 9/11.

A minute after the first fireman shut off the hose and slumped down on the pumper’s roof, his resting companion slowly got up, climbed into the crow’s nest, and started the hose up again.

Fifteen minutes later, this shorter, stockier fireman began to tire too, stepped out, dropped onto his back in exhaustion. Then the larger of the two men rose again, and took his place back behind the hose.

Raed was left to imagine how many hours their tenacious routine had been going on. . . . After two more edge-of-exhaustion exchanges of duty in the crow’s nest, someone else appeared atop the pumper, a tracksuited citizen just visible climbing up the ladder at the far end of the truck. A journalist, Raed thought, or some lost local too distraught to go home. Someone foolish enough to show up without a filter over her mouth, at any rate. The woman stepped right up onto the pumper, reached the fireman lying prone on the roof before her and was so overcome she crouched down beside the man, and abruptly embraced him. An emotional show of gratitude for his efforts to extinguish what was left of the angry fire from the jets. . . .

Or maybe she was hugging the spent fireman just because he looked like he needed it.

Raed didn’t have to wonder whether this sort of thing had actually happened after 9/11—he’d seen it happen, in the streets of Brooklyn just hours after the towers came down. He’d seen strangers walk straight up to a weeping member of New York’s Finest, and spontaneously embrace the policeman. New Yorkers had reached out to each other in ways that had surprised Raed that day. . . . Again falling spray clouded his view of what was going on, Ground Zero became a swirling gray, began sliding away, and—

He was back, praise be, he was back.

Pulling off the breather-mask, Raed gasped in mouthfuls of air and blinked out through the bars of his cage at the hundred-odd other projectors beyond the pane of Plexiglas, writhing and walking in their suspended states, ghosting back to other places and other times, if all this was to be believed.

No, no, no, he would not believe. Turning back to the team assisting him, he saw the veiled psychologist saying something to him from outside the cage, and again offering him a questioning thumbs-up, wanting to know if he was okay.

Raed gave her a thumbs-down.

She entered the cage immediately, her eyes alight behind the burqa—with concern? With contempt? “Are you unable to continue?” she asked him, fingers poised over her slate to make another note.

“Can’t you project me somewhere else?”

“Perhaps.” She tapped in her note, glanced back at the researchers manning the controls, shrugged, then said to Raed, “I’m obliged to remind you: you can withdraw from our program at any time, if you don’t feel up for it.”

She made it sound as though quitting was the obvious choice. Maybe she expected him to give up, go back to his cell in Lew and simply rot away for the rest of his days. . . . But the crack that had opened deep within Raed was wider now. It was swallowing the walls he’d built to hold the outside world out—his mind’s labyrinthine safe-house was losing whole rooms to that yawning insidious divide-inside. So he didn’t know if he could just give up and go back. It was surely not so easy as this wide-eyed woman made it sound.

Anyway, he was not about to give up.

“Send me where you will,” he told the woman, waving her dismissively out of the cage, all the while thinking please let it be just a simulation! Bracing himself again as the beams shimmered on and the rift reopened, twirling the cage’s bars away, tunneling him back to—

A living-room in someone’s house.

Raed dropped softly onto a pine floor in front of an antique cabinet, bounced once, fell forward onto hands and knees, and looked around at the spindly legs of furniture handcrafted from some dark wood. He got to his feet easily, but saw no one down the hall of the house’s ground floor. Was he in some suburb of New York? Raed peered out a shaded front window onto a lawn gleaming in the Sun. The street at the end of the lawn looked broad and sleepy under large trees; there was no traffic, and the houses across the street were widely separated.

He doubted he was in New York.

The cage-operators must have heard the request he’d made to “project somewhere else” through his breather-microphone. . . . That, or they’d really missed the target this time.

No, it’s just a simulation.

Again, the light filtering through the trees onto the lawn suggested it was early morning; so did the dew still gleaming on the grass. Perhaps there were people still upstairs, getting ready for work. Raed cautiously made his way up to the second floor, and peeked even more cautiously into each of the floor’s rooms: guest bedroom, master bedroom, a spacious bathroom, a small office. The house appeared to be empty.

A window at the back of the office was partially open, so Raed slipped inside the room, glanced through the window over a side lawn at a neighbor’s clapboard house, then tried to put his arm out beneath the window. He had to push his hand right through the mesh-screen meant to keep the bugs out; he felt only a little gluey resistance. He got his arm completely out, but that was all—the window, presumably left open for air, wasn’t open enough for him to squeeze his head or chest out. And as hard as Raed pushed on the window-frame itself, he couldn’t budge it wider. He couldn’t move things in this world.

So leaving the office, he looked in again at the windows of the guest bedroom and the bathroom, found them all closed. The master bedroom at the back of the house had a big window, but it was closed too, and curtained for privacy. . . . Lying on a big bed beneath the window was a cream-colored blouse, a black skirt folded neatly, a frilly pink bathrobe. The sight of the clothing reminded Raed powerfully of Haifa, his wife. His eyes went helplessly to the framed photo on the bedside table, which showed a couple hugging on a beach. The woman was laughing. The man was bent to kiss her neck. Almost certainly a photo of the couple whose bedroom Raed was standing in—and placed on that table, he guessed, by the woman, as a proud memento of her happiness.

No such photos of Raed and Haifa existed, not even in his memory. What Raed remembered most when he thought of Haifa was her fear of him. He hadn’t treated her well, especially in the final years, when his cousin Nazir’s beliefs took a stronger and stronger hold over him. Turning away from this thought, Raed caught a shaft of sunlight streaming through a partly-open door in a corner of the bedroom. Stepping over to it, he discovered a bright bathroom, the morning Sun pouring gloriously down through a big skylight. After ensuring the bathroom was empty, he eased round the door into the Sun-filled space—only to find more woman’s things arranged on the long counter. Skin creams, make-up, hair clips, a big brush with fine black strands wrapped about its bristles. . . .

To his surprise, Raed found himself in the grip of an unbearably lonely longing he’d thought he’d gotten rid of ages ago—as though he’d just eased round a partially-open door into a room in his head he’d thought he’d lost the key to. Mixed in with the longing was an intense sense of lost opportunity. For Haifa had edged more and more toward moderation in America, whereas Raed had arrived a moderate and only became a devout in those last few years before the towers came down, under Nazir’s tutelage. And after the towers fell, after his fear grew and his family was taken from him, Raed gradually lost his devotion altogether.

So it was unpleasant now to recall how he’d fought to keep Haifa under his thumb, forcing her to accept a fundamentalism he hadn’t believed in when they’d married as teenagers. The innocent boy he’d been became a kind of monster, a fanatic to be feared during those final years of freedom, before he’d melted down into something else entirely during the first decade of imprisonment.

Melted down into what, though?

Raed had been careful not to step in front of the bathroom’s long mirror. Now he took a look, and saw—

No reflection of himself.

It was the eeriest thing, as though he was . . . what did they call it? A vampire. Raed was a kind of vampire in this past.

But if he was supposed to be back in September of 2001 again, wouldn’t he then look young again? Raed’s hands were still veined, mottled with middle age. He ran one hand through his hair, tracing the receding hairline, then ran the hand back down over his bony brow and over the breather-mask to his chin and throat. Clean-shaven, as he’d been back in 2001, to attract less attention in America. For a while, he’d grown a proper beard in prison. But a few years later, Lew started handing the new shaving gels out to prisoners—offering the prospect of a wipe-on, wash-off mirrorless shave—so Raed went back to clean-shaven again. He’d grown too used to the routine, during the years leading up to 9/11. Routine was the key to staying sane in prison.

Routines like avoiding mirrors.

Raed was glad he cast no reflection; he hated to think what he looked like now. A ghost of the young man he’d been for sure, his thick dark hair turned thin, his strong face turned gaunt, the high cheekbones of his people sticking out too much now. . . . But his fear of mirrors wasn’t really about becoming old, was it?

Another surprising memory breaking free from a locked storeroom in his mind: Raed realized he’d started avoiding mirrors before he went to prison. He’d avoided them immediately after 9/11 because he’d looked so awful. He’d looked twisted, like a monster even to himself—

Raed wriggled out of the narrow bathroom door and fled the bedroom, almost tumbled back down the stairs, forgetting how tricky walking was on an intangible carpet covering soft slippery wood beneath. When he reached the bottom—and got back to his feet—he began looking for a way out, wandering through the handful of rooms; living room, dining room, the long hall with its open coat-filled closet, a downstairs bathroom, a cozy den with a fireplace. Each of the rooms exhibited a down-to-the-last-detail visual authenticity, and each was a living space that made a mockery of the concrete cell he called home. None of the rooms, however, offered him a way to get outside.

Raed felt the wholly believable reality of this American home closing in on him, reducing the number of rooms for him to hide in in his mind.

The last room on the ground floor he managed to squeeze into was a blindingly bright back kitchen. One whole wall of the kitchen was floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in the sun and letting Raed look out over a patio and a long yard. Raed walked right up to the windows—one was actually a glass patio-door—and gasped at the vista before him: beyond a picket fence at the end of the yard, the land dropped through rolling green hills down to a small steepled village about a mile away. The village stood on the edge of a sunlit ocean, the waves sparkling off to a distant horizon.

Nothing Raed had seen in thirty years looked more like home!

It was not the home he’d been born into, a small village that had stood near waves of desert sand. No, this was the American ideal of home: a peaceful village with quaint clapboard houses and colonial buildings, like something out of a story book—a story Raed had lived for a time. He’d been a preteen when he’d arrived in America, and had lived all the years of his adulthood on American soil, so he knew its stories, knew its dreams. . . .

The dream-house he was in now looked like it might be on the shores of Rhode Island. He and Haifa had driven along that shoreline after Raed finished a bit of “security reconnaissance” at the airport in Boston. During their seaside drive, Raed had derided the storybook villages they’d passed through. Now he could not remember why the sightseeing had left him so unimpressed, or why had he’d been so eager to obey the organization ordering him to Boston in the first place. He must have been hiding in rooms in his head even before he’d reached prison. Hiding from the reality he’d lived in, hiding in a seventh-century corner of his mind and ignoring the twenty-first-century America around him. . . . But that was another Raed, not the middle-aged ghost from the future standing in this kitchen, looking with longing on the village down below, a wholly magical place Raed was ready to believe in.

He felt his throat tightening with emotion. He wanted to be back in this past, simulation or no simulation. He wanted to break free of the harness holding him to 2033 and wander down into that peaceful perfect village, buy a coffee in a shop, sit and listen to people talk, and never look back.

They’d said if he participated in their program he would get to see “the outside world again, in a way.” Is this what they’d meant? If so, the psychologists had cheated him. The scene before him was so pristine it was heartbreaking to look upon. And Raed couldn’t so much as step out to the backyard.

Then he remembered what the researcher Francis told him about volunteers sticking their hands through glass. So he began to try, pushing hard against the glass of the patio-door, and gradually feeling his fingers sink into a surface like glue that had almost hardened. But after several minutes, he’d only managed to get the tips of two forefingers to peek through the other side of the glass. And he did not want to be stuck here if people arrived, came into the kitchen, and brushed up against him.

As he stood drawing his fingers back out, Raed glanced around the kitchen, and saw a calendar facing him from the nearest wall. It was open to September 2001, and on the week of September 11 the words TOM IN L.A. were marked across several days. The calendar could not tell him what day this was, of course; but Raed knew, oh, he knew. He turned back to the glass door, focused on freeing his fingers. That’s when he noticed the reverse-reflection of the digital clock on the stove at the back of the kitchen behind him. He turned completely around to see if he was reading it right.

8:45 AM.

One minute to go on the last pristine morning of the world. One minute before the first of the four planes would hit its target. Raed drank in the view beyond the glass door for another few seconds, wishing this last moment could last forever, bracing himself for . . . 8:46 am.

Nothing happened. Naturally, New York was far from Rhode Island. His fingers finally popped free, and he stood there flexing his hand before realizing he was hearing a soft buzzing from somewhere. The front doorbell? No, it had be something close, in the kitchen. Raed walked around the room, and ended up beside the phone, which was ringing really loudly when he was right beside it. The ringing stopped, and an answering machine adjacent to the phone clicked on. A woman’s voice announced, “We’re not here, but you can leave us a message.” Then the caller began to speak:

“Angie, I’m . . . it’s Tom,” a male voice said, and Raed’s eyes shot to the calendar. TOM IN L.A.

“My flight’s been hijacked,” Tom continued all too calmly. “I’ll try to call again, but don’t know if there’ll be time. Whatever happens, Angie, know that I love—”

Raed leapt away before he heard the end of the message, knowing the sound would drop off faster than it should—and it did, the rest of Tom’s words to Angie unable to reach across a foot more of kitchen floor. He backed all way into the patio door, disturbed and disbelieving. How could a man caught on any of those planes have been so calm?

It was a question Raed had asked himself over and over the day before 9/11. That was the day he’d driven his cousins across the state border into Connecticut and booked them into a motel on the Massachusetts border for the final night of their lives. Chipmunk-cheeked Nazir. And thin-faced Sayf, always skeletally thin, more than a little obsessed-looking. But Sayf and Nazir had both been calm and controlled during that afternoon drive through the Connecticut countryside, mentally preparing to sacrifice themselves when the morning came. They’d met with their cell-leader less than an hour before the long drive began, and had been let in on the target of their mission a little early because their leader trusted them. Nevertheless, Nazir broke down and let Raed in on their terrible secret before they reached the motel because Raed was kin, the last member of their family who would see Nazir and Sayf alive. After his cousins booked into the motel under assumed names—the names later published under their photos in the papers—Raed stayed in their room with them for a few hours before driving back home to Brooklyn alone, wondering all the way how his cousins could have been so calm.

Raed saw the light on the answering machine start to blink. He walked toward it slowly—wanting to be sure it was finished recording—then stared down at the damned machine, hoping the cage-operators didn’t make him wait in this house until Angie came home and listened to what was on it. But at least, he thought, as the kitchen began to slide sideways away from him, at least Tom had said what needed to be said to his wife—

Back, back in the present, and breathing hard.

Raed shook his head, wanting to rid himself of the sad end to such a beautiful dream, a beautiful simulation. He gazed blearily through the yellow bars, saw the hundred other spherical cages beyond the Plexiglas, scattered across the main projection arena. A hundred other volunteers were hanging in their harnesses, looking strangely blurred, squirming and swaying in midair. Folding back across N-space to a hundred lost moments in history?

It can’t be.

“Feeling all right, Raed?”

The woman psychologist was already in the cage below him again, waving a hand before his eyes to get his attention.

He dragged the breather down again.

“I feel. . . .”

“What?” She waited, one hand poised over her slate.

Lost, he wanted to say. Full of lost opportunities. Raed had heard passengers had contacted their loved ones from those doomed planes, but . . . he hadn’t ever contacted Haifa to tell her his own feelings—because he hadn’t realized how strong his love for her really was until too many years had passed, and it was much too late. So the acid dose of heartbreak filling him now was as much for himself as for the man who’d left that bittersweet message.

Raed peered down at the psychologist, knowing he was already losing tonight’s game badly. “You can’t make me believe,” he said to her, no longer wanting to play any more games. “You can’t convince me I’m really seeing the past, I don’t care what you show me.”

The woman nodded, tapping away at the slate. “What you believe is entirely up to you. And what you do where we send you—that’s up to you too.”

“What is there to do,” Raed retorted, “when I’m just as cooped up back there as I am in Lewisburg?”

“You really want to find out?”

Raed let out a long shuddering breath, unsure whether this veiled and proper young woman sounded hopeful for the first time—or whether she was trying to warn him about what was coming next. But he was sure of the answer to her question. Some part of him did want to find out. Something was stirring down in the crack through the core of his being: an ashen yearning to go back there and confront whatever they would show him.

“Yes,” he sighed. “Send me again.”

The look in the psychologist’s wide black eyes subtly changed. Surprise? She whirled, exited the cage, and conferred with the two operators sitting at their consoles. And Raed closed his eyes, knowing it didn’t really matter where they projected him to this time, because what he’d told the psychologist was the truth: he wouldn’t, couldn’t bring himself to believe that he was folding through “N-space” back to—

New York City, an empty sidewalk.

Raed dropped onto the walk as it appeared before him, caught his balance, steadied himself on his feet, and looked around. He was not in Manhattan, not in any of the busier parts of the city. And he was finally outdoors! No walls to hold him back, no mounds of rubble to block his progress. Free to go where he pleased.

Raed started up the quiet side-street he was on, heading for a larger cross-street so he could figure out where he was. He passed the steep steps of a row of four-story walkups. One of the boroughs, for sure. This was the New York he remembered, glad to have an image of it to replace the desolation of Ground Zero. . . . Blue skies above, a breeze rippling the leaves of a haggard tree on the corner. An autumn morning, for sure. Back in that morning once more? Before the attacks occurred? After?

The signs at the end of the street told him he was back in Brooklyn, on a corner several miles from where he’d lived; a vaguely familiar corner. Raed spun around, orienting himself. The East River had to be just behind the row-houses that were blocking his view of the World Trade Center. He couldn’t see whether the Twin Towers were still standing—but if they were, he could walk around the block and head down to the riverside, maybe just in time to watch the planes striking their targets.

Was that what the projection operators wanted Raed to do?

Surely it would do him no good whatsoever to witness the destruction of the towers all over again. He’d seen those images a hundred times on TV, along with everyone else. Surely it would be senseless to waste this precious chance to walk the world he’d lost by going down to the river to gawk. The Twin Towers were not his victims anyway—they were the West’s victims, America’s victims. . . . Raed started walking west, keeping the Trade Center’s location behind his back. His eyes kept turning to the perfectly clear skies, searching for low-flying passenger jets. He prayed he wouldn’t see any. Stopping at another cross-street to let a yellow taxi roll by, he felt certain he knew this neighborhood. Only a few people were out on the streets, and those that were hurried along as though late for work. The Sun looked too high to be early in the morning. What time was it? What day was it?

A New York Post box coming up on his left. When he reached it, Raed hunkered down on his haunches, and saw something on the cover page about “Ban on Cell-Phone Use While Driving.”

But the date on the newspaper was 9/11, all right.

He walked on, hurrying now, spying a tiny park across the street not much farther ahead. Not much more than a grotto, really, but Raed began jogging toward it, feeling sure the visually stunning simulation of a New York morning he was moving through was about to change. All he wanted was a few moments of peace sitting beneath those trees before this blissful reality was yanked out from under him.

And then it hit him: he was near Basma’s Islamic daycare and prayer school, a small building at the other end of the little grotto park. No wonder all this looked so familiar.

Basma.

Raed broke into a run, remembering the promise made to him—that he might get to see his daughter again. Was this what the rehab programmers meant? Then they’d tricked him—they’d known perfectly well he’d hoped to see Basma all grown up. Raed ran for the school all the same, wanting to see his little daughter in this all-too-perfect recreation, suddenly wanting it very badly. Wanting to know once and for all.

As he ran up the block, something happened to the sky. A cloud of confetti appeared from over the four-story walkups on his left. Snowflake-sized particles were fluttering down onto the sidewalk ahead of him, some larger pieces of paper floating down too. . . . Documents! Memos and letters and receipts from all the way across the East River, fallout from Twin Tower offices. The paper cloud began to litter the tops of trees in the grotto-park as he passed it.

Just ahead loomed the Islamic prayer preschool, all the toddler-students dressed in their jackets and milling about on a fenced-in patch of tarmac alongside the school’s front steps. Half of them were roped together.

What was going on?

Raed reached the wrought-iron fence, and found the school’s entrance-gate closed. He struggled to get over the tall black bars but kept slipping down, unable to get any purchase with his shoes. There was no room for him on the crowded tarmac beyond anyway, so he strode impatiently around the fence, hearing the chaos of chattering and squealing, trying to spot Basma among the children. In the midst of the preschoolers stood a teenage girl dressed in salwar and kameez, gaping up at the sky in astonishment; a more resourceful Muslim girl was untying the rope tethering several kids together. Of course! The young teachers had been caught preparing the children for their eleven o’clock walk through the park. No TV was allowed inside the conservative classrooms, so neither the children nor the adults looking after them had any idea what was going on yet.

But where was his Basma?

The thickening confetti-rain was making it harder to see who was who. Unleashed four-year-olds danced through the downfall, turned their tiny faces upward, and grabbed at papers. . . . At last Raed spotted a child smaller than the rest, squatting with tiny hands on knees in a familiar blue raincoat, her head turned to the ground, looking curiously at the scraps of paper lying there.

Heart in mouth, Raed knelt outside the bars, as close to her as he could—but the girl scrambled away into the center of the crowd, vanished for a moment, and reappeared duck-walking toward him with an ever-so-Haifa-like look of concentration, creased brow, mouth drawn tight, sucking her teeth exactly as Basma so often did during the three years he’d been father to her.

God and the Prophet within, what am I seeing?

The child stopped just a few feet from him, crouched just as before, reaching now for a big file-folder that had just landed, its edge smoldering.

“Don’t!” he cried out. But the Basma before him did not pause, did not hear him, could not see him. Raed thrust an arm through the bars, and tried to snatch her tiny fingers away—too late: she’d grasped the burning edge and immediately let go. She began to cry, lower lip shooting out exactly as it had on the day Raed was taken away from her forever. He had not seen Basma since his trial, not until this very moment. . . .

For Raed knew in his heart of hearts he was actually seeing his daughter now.

His mind reeling, the world whirling, Basma blurring as she drew back, plopped onto her bottom—

“Please,” he gasped into the microphone of the breather-mask, “I believe, don’t bring me back. . . .” But it was only his own tears blurring things. Raed was still there, still clutching the iron fence in September of 2001, inches from his real daughter.

Another teacher burst through the school’s side-door, teary-eyed herself, shouting something to the teenage girls standing among the children—something about parents coming early to take their children back, the city under attack!

Basma’s wailing finally drew one of the teens to her side. The girl scooped his daughter up, and Raed leapt to his feet, reached as far he could over the fence, Basma sobbing over the young teacher’s shoulder right in front of his eyes, his hand almost touching her hurt little fingers, almost. . . .

“We put a bandage on that?” the teacher asked, and little Basma nodded through her sobs.

Raed watched the pair disappear through the school’s side-entrance while the other two teens rounded the rest of the children back inside, out of the paper rain. “I believe,” he moaned again, tugging his arm from between the bars, sinking to the paper-littered ground. “Now I believe.” Raed had not allowed any cameras in his house during those last paranoid years of freedom; he’d certainly forbidden any video footage to be recorded of himself or his family in those years. And the Islamic daycare and prayer school could not afford any video equipment . . . so no one could possibly simulate the Basma he’d just seen.

Raed knew he was actually kneeling outside her school.

“Be merciful—let me stay,” he prayed aloud, hoping the projection operators would hear his words in the future. “Let me wait here and see her again.” But the wrought-iron bars of the fence were already sliding out of his hands. The school building was beginning to swirl into the confetti-sky, and he was starting to tunnel back—

To the present.

Hanging in midair in the yellow cage, his breath still hitching with emotion. Had Basma’s hand been bandaged when Raed picked her up from the preschool that day? He couldn’t recall, and he doubted he would have noticed. That day Raed had been too busy worrying about being tracked down, accused, arrested. He’d spent the entire day wondering how to ensure he didn’t end up getting burned by the backlash to the World Trade Center attacks to notice whether Basma had already been burnt or not.

Not his victims?

Surely little Basma was his victim, if anyone was—and a couple of bandaged fingers was of little consequence compared to the inevitable consequence of losing her father. . . .

“Here.” The veiled psychologist was standing in the cage below him again, holding a cup of water up to Raed. “Drink this,” she said.

He tugged down his breather-mask, a little embarrassed as he wiped back his tears, recalling how the fireman at Ground Zero had looked when he’d pulled off his goggles to wipe away tears. Raed had been there—he’d actually been to Ground Zero!

And now, like that fireman, he just wanted to get out of the harness and throw himself down on the ground. “I wanted to stay,” he complained to the psychologist, more than a little embarrassed by his earlier profession of disbelief to her. “Why’d you have to bring me back so soon?”

“Because you’ve more to see tonight, more to do. Here,” she said again, “you’ve got to be thirsty—”

He knocked her hand and the cup aside. “I don’t need water, I just need to go back—” He broke off, seeing her reaction, the flash of intensity in her wide-set black eyes. Because Raed’s fingers had briefly brushed hers?

“You’ll feel thirsty, where you’re going next,” she warned him. Picking up the cup, she slipped out through the bars.

And Raed slumped back in the harness, acceptance sweeping through him. For the first time tonight he did not want to be here, where he was middle-aged in a spherical cage. Better to be a ghost lurking in that past again.

Outside the yellow bars the psychologist—a grown Muslim woman whose hand he’d reached out and touched, just in case—watched him watching her, then she tapped something into her slate and turned away, slid away, vanished around an impossible bend in space that opened into—

A deep canyonlike street.

Downtown Manhattan, on the same bright sunny morning he’d ghosted to the last time—only this time Raed could hear an unearthly rumbling and he could see people running away from him, fleeing for their lives before his eyes. He whirled. High in the sky above him were the Twin Towers. The South Tower, only a block away, was erupting from the top down.

Raed staggered backwards, gaping at the giant cloud of dust and debris surging forth from the building his cousins had crashed into, like a storm being injected into the blue sky at tremendous speed. He swung around, and a man sprinting by bumped against him—

TERROR-ADRENALINE-ANIMAL URGE TO RUN!

Raed obeyed the fiery emotions transmitted by the man’s touch, hurtling himself across the street and around the corner of a nearby building. At the end of the road he’d turned onto, people were throwing themselves over the railings into the Hudson River—hoping for safety in the water? Raed veered in another direction, down a narrow lane and out onto a broader side street, the rumbling behind him swelling along with his fear. To his amazement, he saw a crowd of people standing in the distance, all their faces turned up like sunflowers in the instant before they, too, began to run.

And then, all at once, everything Raed could see vanished—the distant crowd, the canyon-walls of the high rises and the street itself, all swallowed in dust and darkness that felt like the end of the world.

This time he’d ghosted back to the world he’d lost at the very moment it was lost!

It was so dark on the street he could only make out shapes a few feet in front of him. It seemed impossible that just seconds ago it had been a clear blue-skied morning. . . . Fumbling his way along a building-front in the direction he thought he’d been heading, hearing a tinkling sound—glass shards falling out of the sky? Windowpanes shattering in the storefronts around him? Either way, the sound had to be much louder and closer than it seemed. He caught glimpses of big debris-chunks crashing onto the pavement to his left, and burnt paper and concrete dust swirled thick as sleet.

The darkness began to yield to a wintry dimness—like a strangely dry snow squall in Manhattan—and Raed reached the next cross-street corner just in time to witness a hail of burning shrapnel striking a car-filled parking lot across the street. Cars began bursting into flame.

He dove under a parapet protecting a building front-door, reminding himself the projection-team claimed he couldn’t be harmed. But Raed knew he could feel forces in this past, and he didn’t want the force of any of that shrapnel striking him. So he sat under the parapet watching cars ignite, one after another. Incredible! As though missiles were being launched from the burning windows of the surrounding high-rises. . . . Suddenly a large oblong shape loomed out of the dust-mist hanging over the street—a fire truck loaded with men who leapt off, rushed into the parking lot, fighting back shadows and smoke as they searched for people trapped in burning vehicles. Those firemen were crazy to charge in there!

Looking for a safe escape route, Raed noticed a lane leading from his parapet-covered patch of sidewalk back into a plaza behind him. He ducked through, rounded another corner, and felt his way along the lee of another wall. A set of double doors just ahead of him burst open, the light from inside the doors revealing men in overcoats stepping forth, rifles at the ready. The armed men—not police, possibly FBI—formed a ring outside the open doors and peered into the murk, as though looking for whoever was to blame. Looking for Raed, who was holding his breath, flattened against a window-well just feet from them. You already caught me, he thought. I’ve already served thirty years.

Now more people were piling out through the doors into the armed cordon. Older officials wearing suits, fire hats, air-filters—not chiefs, possibly fire commissioners—all of them lucky to be alive in a command post this close to the Twin Towers. And all of them alternately shouting into hand-held radios, then listening for a response, shouting, then listening, throwing off waves of voices Raed could hear without making out individual words. In the light streaming through the open doors, he saw the despair contorting their faces. The commissioners weren’t getting any responses from the fire crews in the collapsed South Tower.

Then a familiar long-faced man in wire-rim glasses strode into the crowd of stunned city officials, issuing commands, arguing with the armed detectives who seemed to want the cordon to stay put. But the long-faced man sent the party off across the dust-clouded plaza in the direction, Raed suspected, of the Trade Center.

Raed suddenly knew exactly who that man was.

The Mayor of New York City.

Heading to Ground Zero only minutes after that nightmarish zone had formed? Or steered to safety by his armed protectors? Raed took off in the opposite direction, rounded another corner, found his path blocked by a steaming shape taking up the sidewalk and half the road in front of an abandoned fast-food outlet: a jet-engine turbine.

From Flight 175? From Nazir and Sayf’s plane?

The turbine was so dust-whitened it looked like the engine of some ghost-plane. Tingling waves of cold heat were coming off it, so Raed gave it a wide berth and hurried on, only to be slowed by more dust-and-ash-cloaked obstacles as he fled out of the south end of Manhattan. Twisted stick-shapes that had to be melted office chairs, an overturned desk in the middle of a sidewalk, a huge tire, all made visible by the fires sprouting in nearby buildings, offering Raed a weird torch-light to light his way. . . . Incredible. He’d seen TV images of Manhattan after 9/11, but they failed to capture the scope of the devastation. In his wildest dreams, Raed never thought his cousins could cause so much damage to the city.

And in his wildest dreams he’d never imagined he might “time travel” back to see it with his own eyes! This time he’d ghosted back to before his visit to Basma’s school. Perhaps as much as an hour before, if he remembered correctly. Somewhere in the unseen sky high above him, a file folder from the South Tower was being carried by air currents over the East River, drifting down toward the little prayer school tarmac. Basma hadn’t burnt her fingers yet. She wasn’t a victim yet.

But Raed was stepping over victims wherever he went, shrouded forms that seemed to be sleeping in the middle of the streets—forms he didn’t want to think about. Nazir’s victims, Sayf’s victims. Not his victims.

After almost falling onto one of those shrouded figures, Raed scrambled up an embankment onto a higher boulevard. Disoriented, he tramped along the boulevard in a direction that seemed a little less dusty. But within minutes, smoke from the spreading fires behind him descended on the boulevard, thickening the dust-haze. Raed passed an EMS triage team working on a wounded woman already partly buried beneath the paper-ash fallout; the rescue workers were trying to revive the woman and keep themselves from passing out at the same time, handing a single oxygen mask back and forth.

He gave the team as wide a berth as he’d given the jet engine, wanting to avoid more physical-contact discharges from distraught New Yorkers. It was traumatic enough just trying to escape the shrapnel-fires. . . . He wasn’t the only one trying to escape, of course. After hopping out of the way of a beaconless ambulance—its roof littered with paper and its wipers rapidly swishing—Raed noticed a few other ghost-shapes trudging along through the haze. People with grime-covered faces, holding pieces torn from their own clothing over their mouths, coughing soundlessly.

Raed felt like coughing too, even though he wasn’t breathing any dust in. Most of it was falling right through him, only the largest paper-flakes hovering on his clothes for a few seconds before slipping off. The “masslessness” of the falling dust made it easy for Raed to avoid and quickly out-pace the real downtown-refugees he encountered—because they were forced to slosh slowly through the paper and ash pooling on the street, which was already several inches deep. Raed hurried on, undeterred by the debris build-up, always drawn in the brightest direction, even though the sources of brightness turned out to be shops and services with their doors thrown open. Each open doorway offered a consoling peek into an interior of clarity and detail—a reminder that the New York Raed had seen for a few seconds at the very start of this projection still existed, hidden behind all the hazy detritus.

In the beaming entrance to a footwear store, he saw a man handing out free running shoes to women wandering by in stocking feet, unable to walk through miles of fallout in their high heels.

In the rear door of a restaurant-supply firm, he saw a teenage boy passing out wet towels to everyone who stepped up for one, so people had better air-filters to breath through.

In the arched portal of an old church, he saw women pouring cups of water and lemonade for passers-by. The church was getting crowded because the people coming up for drinks were stepping inside it, kneeling down in pews, bowing their heads. Raed paused across the street from this softly-glowing scene, watching the parade of dust-whitened ghosts gratefully downing lemonade and water, and reaching up to his own throat. He’d felt thirsty from the first moment the debris-cloud enveloped him, and his thirst had grown worse with every passing block. It wasn’t just the exertion of a long walk. It was the look of ash-laden air all around him, the sight of coughing, choking civilians stumbling through the streets. The psychological dryness was getting to him.

But what was really getting to him was the fact that he was actually experiencing what it had been like to make an escape from lower Manhattan the morning of 9/11. Because he was actually here, witnessing all this just as it had happened—or rather, as it was happening. A cement-mixing truck rolled slowly by, a dozen dust-coated Wall Street suits clinging to its sides. Raed followed it for a bit, then turned onto an empty side street he thought might take him in the direction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

That’s when he spotted the strange pair of New Yorkers sitting on the stone steps.

What was strange about them grew more and more obvious as Raed walked toward them: one was a man so thickly coated in dust and ash he resembled a statue huddled against the railing of the steps—he was clearly in serious trouble, gasping for air, mouth hanging wide open and taking in more dust. The other was a woman who’d clearly just come out of the building the steps led up to—she had only a bit of dust on her, and she was holding the dying man, her head tucked onto his shoulder as though he was an old friend she’d found collapsed outside her door.

The strange thing was she wasn’t helping him inside.

“Get him off the street,” Raed suggested as he passed the pair, knowing he wouldn’t be heard. But he thought he saw the woman’s eyes move up from her companion. He thought he saw her eyes following him up the narrow street.

Raed halted. Turned back. It was hard to see—he had to squint into the driving dust. Was she really looking over at him?

He approached the steps cautiously, still unwilling to be touched by these people, but getting close enough to see the dying man’s eyes were rimmed completely red, bloody coals in his ash-whitened face. And he was close enough to see the woman’s NYU sweatshirt, a red ribbon pinned to her collar. She had her eyes closed now, head tucked back on her companion’s shoulder again.

He must have been seeing things. “Don’t you know your friend is dying?” Raed muttered, surprised to find himself thinking another death would be needless. . . . The woman shielded her eyes against the falling dust, and peered up at Raed.

He lurched back in shock. “You can see me, can’t you?”

But just then an accumulation of dust slid off the ledge above the steps, engulfing the pair in a swirl of white that transformed into a blurred tunnel, pulling Raed back to—

The yellow projection cage.

Raed peered out through the bars at the two Lew guards in one corner, the two cage-operators behind their consoles, the medic looking over the operators’ shoulders . . . and the Muslim psychologist slipping in through the bars to speak with him, again bringing him a cup of water.

This time Raed accepted the cup, lifted it to lips that felt parched, his throat dry as bone. After gulping the water down, he told the psychologist, “Someone saw me that time.” Then he described the woman he’d seen sitting on the steps.

“Sure she wasn’t looking up at the ledge-dust about to drop on her friend?” The psychologist removed her slate from a pocket, tapped in something about Raed’s claim.

“Are you sure people can’t see me in the past?”

“I studied the same materials you did,” she replied. “Light only has ‘one-way transdimensionality,’ so it only flows out of the past into an N-space fold, but—”

“Doesn’t flow back out of the fold, yes, yes,” he said, wondering if he’d been mistaken about where the woman in the NYU shirt was actually looking. It had been pretty hazy back there. And pretty scary at moments.

“There are two-way interactions,” the psychologist added, pocketing her slate again. “But all are mass-related, I think. And light doesn’t have much mass. . . .”

That reminded Raed: those big chunks of mass falling from the sky at him. “And no volunteer has been injured by two-way forces—not even gravity?”

“Two-way interactions are ‘weak-strong,’ so I’m told. Weak from you onto the past—”

“And strong from the past onto me,” Raed finished, raising his eyebrows at her. That’s precisely what bothered him. He handed back the cup, accidentally touching the psychologist’s fingers again—and wishing he could receive some contact-discharge from her so he’d understand what she was feeling. She was, after all, about his daughter’s age.

“Strong or weak,” the psychologist told him, “the worst any projected force can do is render you unconscious, which will immediately pop you back here. So there’s nothing to fear. Keep that in mind,” she advised him, “your next ghosting’s going to be a lot more challenging.”

Again he said, “Send me where you must,” trying to sound dismissive to hide how apprehensive he was. But after the psychologist exited the cage, Raed took a deep breath, wondering what part of 9/11 he was about to experience now, watching the yellow bars blur as the fold formed about him, and N-space wrapped him back to—

A darkened stairwell strewn with chunks of drywall and concrete, a smoky haze in the air.

Raed lost his footing as he dropped onto the steps, slid down onto a landing, and ended up sprawled before a steel door in the landing’s opposite wall. The red glare of emergency bulbs illuminated words printed across the door:

WTC

BUILDING 2

FLOOR 82

Raed was high up in the South Tower some time after Flight 175 had crashed into it!

The door to Floor 82 burst open. Two men shoved through, forcing Raed to scramble back to avoid being bowled over. The men hurried onto the shadowy flight of steps leading below. And Raed fell in behind them, wondering how much time was left before this building came down. He was fairly sure it had collapsed about an hour after the crash . . . which meant he had less than an hour to get down eighty floors.

But he kept falling in the stairwell. Where the masslessness of paper and dust had played in his favor on the streets, here the low friction of his shoes on the darkened steps and the more tangible clutter of concrete shards made it difficult to stay on his feet. Raed had a hard time catching up to the two men, and only managed to keep them in sight at all by hanging onto the railing, sliding himself along walls that were crawling with a chilly tingly pressure. The pressure grew worse and worse, the air of the stairwell swimming with a tingling cold-fire as Raed reached Floor 78. He was afraid that floor’s fire-door might melt as he ran by it.

But he had to be passing the floors Flight 175 had actually crashed into—and the fact that the fire hadn’t yet spread into the stairwell suggested it couldn’t be too long after the crash. He might have as much as fifty minutes to get down and out.

He’d been told he’d come to no harm. Did that mean the projection team intended to extract him from the building before it collapsed? Raed had been in danger from the hail of burning shrapnel during the last ghosting, and his team seemed to expect him to rescue himself . . . It’s up to you what you do back in the past, the psychologist told him.

Perhaps it was up to Raed to find a way out before the forces in this world crushed him.

The landing of Floor 70 had working lights, and so did the stairs below it. A brighter passage and clearer air helped Raed move right down behind the two men he was following, close enough to hear their conversation as he looked for an opportunity to pass them. The injured man was Garth, and he kept thanking Peter for pulling him to safety after the explosion. How long ago, Raed wanted to know, wishing the men would walk single file instead of one gripping the other. Peter kept insisting he’d done nothing special, switching back to his worries about coworkers who’d headed up to the roof instead of trying to get below the fire.

“Your coworkers are lost,” Raed snapped in frustration, “and you’ll be lost too, if you don’t move faster!” These men were too calm—he had to get past them. At the next landing, he tried to shove himself between them—

HORROR-HURT-DESPERATION-CONFUSION.

Raed crumpled to the floor, unable to withstand the tremendous emotional discharge. Peter and Garth weren’t calm at all! They were barely keeping their fear in check. What had they seen before entering this stairwell?

By the time he got back to his feet and caught up to them, Raed saw that more people were blocking the stairwell below Peter and Garth. There was some kind of pile-up on the next landing down, a crowd gathered round a burn victim. The delay was far more frightening for Raed than for the people surrounding him—because he knew the building was going to collapse soon. Was this projection meant as punishment for his foreknowledge of the Flight 175 crash?

The Muslim psychologist back in 2033 suggested it was up to Raed whether the projection was punishment or—what?

What was he supposed to do here?

He passed more burn victims outside the door to Floor 67; men with most of their clothes burned away, their skin turned gray or even black, patches of flesh peeling from their limbs. The people staying to look after them had torn off shirts to make tourniquets. Others were cloaking the shivering gray figures in suit jackets. The next landing held another group huddled about badly injured people, and so did the next, and the next, forcing Garth, then Peter, and then Raed to file slowly past. Only Raed knew those groups were all doomed, but it wouldn’t have made much of a difference if he could have communicated that knowledge, at least not to the burn victims—they didn’t look as though they’d live long enough to make it to a hospital.

It was the people staying behind to console them—it was all the comforters that bothered Raed. There was so many of them! Why didn’t some of them just head down to safety?

Because they weren’t aware of the imminent collapse, as Raed was.

“Come on, move on!” he growled at Garth and Peter. Winding down through the suffering was taking too long, leaving too much time for Raed to wonder what all this was for. Surely there was more to his rehab than sharing in the harrowing experiences of 9/11 victims. There had to be more to it. But what more could he do in this past?

You really want to find out?

The psychologist’s question nagged at him, and Raed tried to recall the theory they’d given him. Strong-weak two-way interactions . . . the past cannot be changed . . . because projection volunteers had always been part of the moments they time-traveled back to . . . so Raed had always been here—was here now—following down behind Peter, who had his arm wrapped round Garth’s shoulder, guiding the injured man down.

But did—or would—Peter and Garth get out before the building fell?

No way for Raed to get past them now—there were too many people crowding the stairwell directly below the pair. Others were coming down behind Raed, sandwiching him in the stairwell, occasionally forcing him to bump into Peter or Garth—and to suffer another shock of PITY-ANXIETY-DREAD-DISTRESS, emotions that almost knocked him down. The discharges astounded him. I can actually sense how these two men are feeling! He remembered the black-and-white movie about the two angels in Berlin who could hear what people were saying, but whenever they listened to peoples’ thoughts, the soundtrack reverted to German, leaving Raed only with a sense of the emotional-tone underlying thoughts. . . .

By the time they reached Floor 60, Raed was in a panic. Peter and Garth had to do a lot better than a floor a minute to get out in time—and to let Raed get out in time! This was a lot more nerve-wracking than the last projection.

But it seemed most of the injured had been already been passed, and below Floor 60, the stream of escapees began moving much faster. Peter and Garth slipped by slower people who were resting on the steps, and waving everyone coming down from above on past. Raed began to count off his own breaths, timing the pace between floors. He thought they navigated three flights in about a minute, timed it again and got the same result for the next three. They might just make it!

There was no panic in the stairwell, and no more injuries to pass until Floor 44, where a security guard and some others were trying to assist a man whose head was bleeding profusely. The people comforting the man looked up as Peter, Garth and Raed reached the floor; one of them asked Peter if he would send help from below. Peter agreed without slowing, guiding Garth on down the next flight with Raed right on their heels.

On Floor 40, they eased by a man in a foot cast being carried down by four coworkers who switched him between pairs at the landing, sharing the exhausting load. A compassionate act indeed. But would any of them make it out of the South Tower alive?

On Floor 33, there was an even more miraculous sight. People carrying a woman and her wheelchair down! The acts of selflessness Raed was witnessing inside the building he helped to destroy were wearing him down. He wanted to scream at everyone to drop their burdens and run—run so he could run too, down to the bottom and out onto the street before it was too late. Because it was impossible to believe he was not in the danger they were in, no matter how many assurances he’d been given that no projection volunteer had ever come to harm before. How could the force of the South Tower falling not harm him?

Garth and Peter finally got past the wheelchair crew, only to find the stairwell below the Floor 31 landing completely clogged with firefighters. At least a dozen of them were hoisting themselves up the steps in their heavy gear, blocking the route down—doomed men, the most doomed of all that Raed had seen . . . because they were trying to climb up.

As people bunched onto the landing—and Raed crushed himself into a corner to avoid unbearable contact-discharges—Peter moved over to the fire-door leading into the floor itself, and opened it.

“Let’s try for the elevators,” he said to Garth.

And Raed didn’t hesitate, knowing there was no time to lose waiting on this landing. He followed the pair through the door, which closed behind him. Moments later he stood close behind Peter as the man tried the elevator buttons.

“Not working.”

Try another stairwell, Raed prayed, realizing he was now trapped on this floor—invisible or not, he couldn’t walk back out through a steel door or wall.

“Hey, there’s some phones in here,” Garth said, peering into a room off the hall they were in. “I want to call home.”

No!

But both men were stepping through into the room, and the door was almost closed. . . .

Raed dove through just as it shut, afraid of getting stranded in the hall if there was another way out of that room. Sure enough, a door in the opposite wall of the conference room they’d entered had a stairwell exit-sign above it.

Peter and Garth sat on the edge of the room’s long central table, dialing up loved ones on the phones.

“No time! There’s no time,” Raed shouted at them, “we’ve got thirty more floors to go!”

It was no use. Raed stood close enough to the receiver Peter was holding to hear the anxious tones of the man’s wife—but Peter couldn’t hear Raed screaming right in his ear. “Put the phone down and go! Please go!” He pounded a fist on the phone-unit sitting on the table, trying to hang the damn thing up, when Peter suddenly hung up himself. But then the man began dialing another number, telling Garth he was calling in the EMS request he’d promised for the injured man up on Floor 44.

Peter was on hold with EMS for several minutes that had Raed howling around the conference room, both hands wrapped around the ripcord on his belt that was supposed to instantly return him to the projection-cage, eyes focused on the ceiling that might come down at any second. . . .

If Raed ripcorded back now, he’d be out of the program, his fear would have won and he’d live out the next fifty years in Lew Cell #1, knowing he’d been unable to face what these two men had faced.

But they had no idea what was about to happen!

Finally Peter got through, made his EMS request, and got off the phone. Raed ran to the door with the stairwell sign as the two men started toward it, opened it, then stepped through, leaving Raed just enough room to follow. The stairwell beyond was empty, and the only thing that slowed them as they hurried down was a pipe that spontaneously burst from the wall. A sign the collapse was about to happen? How many seconds left?

Water from other exploded pipes and from sprinkler-systems on the higher floors seemed to be collecting in this stairwell, making it difficult once more for Raed to keep up to Peter and Garth. . . .

And then, before he knew it, all three of them were at the bottom, hurrying through an underground plaza toward an outside street. A cop halted the two men before they crossed the street, warning about debris dropping from above—

Raed just ran for it, leaving his companions for the first time since Floor 82.

He’d made it!

He put a block between himself and the South Tower before looking back to see if it was coming down yet. Smoke billowed out of the hole two-thirds of the way up. He had to get farther.

But Garth and Peter were running over, and for some reason Raed waited for them, watching the sky overhead just to be sure. When they caught up to him, Raed began following the pair again, curious to know whether they’d get far enough away to survive. More than curious: he wanted them to survive. He cared about these two American strangers, having shared in their ordeal and overheard their exchange of friendship. Was that the whole point of this projection? Or was there more to it, something he’d failed to do?

As the two men continued north along the rubble-strewn blocks, Raed felt a weird echo of the relief they were professing to each other. Garth again thanked Peter for saving his life, Peter again dismissed the notion. Little did he know! A clock on a big electronic billboard read 9:59 am. They’d made it down and out with only seconds to spare. Were they far enough away?

Garth stopped in front of a church, and asked his friend whether he wanted to go in. Peter nodded, then they both turned for one last look at the South Tower. It was visibly shuddering.

“That building could come down,” Raed heard Garth say.

Peter dismissed that notion too. “It’s a steel structure, there’s no way—”

The building began to implode before their eyes.

Peter and Garth dashed around the side of the church for protection, and Raed did too. After a few minutes, the rumbling stopped, but the dust and debris kept coming, thicker and heavier, churning into the all-enveloping gloom. The two men beside him closed their eyes against the dust-fall, and for a few seconds, Raed did too. All those people, he thought, his mind’s eye recalling faces seen high in the stairwell, people he was sure didn’t make it out. He may have been aware of the outcome of Nazir and Sayf’s attack back when he was twenty-four, but only now did Raed understand that outcome. Only now did he appreciate the sort of selfless, courageous people who’d ended up caught in the aftermath of his cousins’ actions. . . . Nazir had told Raed they’d be bringing down America along with those two buildings. But all they’d brought down was—

Well, Americans.

All those people, he thought again, horrified by the outcome for the first time in his life. Then he heard Peter say it too: “All those people,” the big man croaked, shaking his head. Beside him Garth was weeping.

But they, at least, had lived. Peter and Garth had lived! And as the two men began to swirl away, Raed had just enough time to regret parting company with them before their faces vanished into the tunnel of history, and he found himself back—

In 2033, back in the present.

Back in his cage, blinking at the bars, and thinking of Peter and Garth. Did they still live, in the present?

“Anyone see you that time, Raed?”

It was the veiled psychologist, entering the cage again.

“No,” he answered. “I mean—I don’t know.” Some of the people comforting the burn victims in the stairwell had looked up as he’d passed by. Raed had thought they were looking at him at first, before realizing they’d been looking at Peter or Garth or at someone else behind Raed. . . . Perhaps the same was true of that woman he’d seen in the previous projection, the one in the NYU sweatshirt with the red ribbon—perhaps she’d also been looking at someone passing behind Raed. Who could say?

He was still too horrified by his latest experience of 9/11 to think clearly.

But a feeling of horror wasn’t enough. Raed saw that in the eyes of the psychologist standing below him, tapping away at her slate. He had not faced whatever he must face, had not done whatever he must do. What could he do, without changing the past?

“That was your longest projection so far,” the psychologist told him, “almost an hour. So we’ve only time for a few more. They’ll be short and to the point. And for the next one, Raed,” she said, “remember what your lawyers told you.”

“Just send me,” he groaned.

But she stayed for another second or two, holding Raed’s eyes, her own wide eyes filled with—foreboding? After she slid out between the yellow bars, Raed closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, preparing to ghost once again back to 9/11. So many projections to the same target-time! He thought of the two firemen at Ground Zero who’d taken turns climbing into the crow’s nest of their pumper truck, returning to the fire time and again, refusing to give up even though hope was already gone. If they’d been able to face it over and over, well then, so could Raed.

But when he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find that—

He was back in a stairwell in the South Tower, standing on the landing of Floor 54, no one in sight. And right in front of him a zipper-rip was forming in the outer wall.

The whole stairwell seemed to pitch. Raed lurched for a railing of the flight leading down, barely able to keep his feet. What had the lawyers told him? Emotional harm was the only real danger during a projection—and if he used the ripcord before the cage operators brought him back, he’d be automatically disqualified from the program. . . .

Raed scrambled onto the flight leading below only to stop short halfway down, seeing some people appear at the bottom climbing up. Firemen! The same doomed men he’d seen around Floor 30 during his last ghosting. They were all panting, far more exhausted now.

And even if he could get down past them, he would never make it out in time, not this time. Short and to the point, the psychologist had promised.

The building rocked again, and Raed sprawled onto the steps, one hand gripping the railing to keep him from sliding into the firemen below, who were all hanging from the same railing and staring at each other, clearly wondering whether they should continue.

“Go down!” Raed wailed at them, pulling himself back upright.

And the firemen reacted, but not to Raed’s yell—someone trapped a few floors higher was screaming for help. En masse they began to climb, aware of the danger of collapse but not of its imminent certainty.

Raed flattened himself against the stairwell wall, wrapping both arms around the railing—and then the firemen were crushing up through him. He could feel their huge souls, giant lionhearts swelling with FEAR-FURY-DEFIANCE-DETERMINATION. And during the endless seconds it took for them to climb by, Raed believed that nothing could kill such men. . . . After the last of them had passed, Raed slumped to the stairs, and lay there in a heap as the building rocked and rippled. The firemen were forced to stop just above him, all of them bracing themselves against the walls.

“Feel that just now?” gasped a man two steps above Raed.

Another nodded. “Something’s telling me we’re not gonna get out of here.”

Had they sensed Raed’s thoughts as they pushed by him? But no, individual thoughts could not be exchanged. Biomass could only produce “strong-weak” interactions: strong from these firemen onto him, too weak from him onto them to change their minds about anything.

And any further words the firemen above him might have said were abruptly drowned out by loud snappings and splittings that sounded to Raed like the fabric of the Universe tearing. The sounds snowballed into a terrific roaring, and Raed moved one hand off the vibrating railing onto his belt, fingered the ripcord, and looked up in anticipation—to his astonishment, some civilians who had made it down from the landing above were squeezing between the firemen. Then the stairwell walls seemed to give out, the people above clutched onto their would-be rescuers, Raed instinctively grabbed the railing with both hands, and God in Heaven dropped the world of 9/11 down on top of him, using the building Raed helped bring down to smite him once and for all—

A sharp smell roused him. Raed opened his eyes, unsure of where he was. Two figures swam into view: the burqa-veiled psychologist and the burly male medic, who was holding smelling salts.

Raed took in a painful breath, raised both hands to his chest, and checked for broken ribs.

“It’s just sympathetic pain,” the psychologist assured him, “all in your mind.”

“You’re okay,” the medic agreed. “It’s just the shock of being blown out of the fold.”

“Why—” Raed broke off, sucked in air, still psychologically winded. “Wasn’t I crushed? Gravity of the past . . . pulled everything down on us—on me.”

The medic pointed to the inward-pointing cones studding the cage’s arcing bars. “The particles they focus on you only open a transient fold. Any strong force exerted on the exterior—the force of a wall falling on you, a bullet fired at you—and the fold’s sphere spontaneously pops, blowing you right back here. Bit of a shock,” he repeated, “but you get used to it.”

“You’ve faced. . . .” Raed wasn’t sure what to call it.

“A ‘mortal force’ in the past?” The medic rolled up a sleeve, revealing a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty on one big bicep. “I was born in France,” he said, “so I ghosted back to the Revolution, and got hit by a cannonball fired into a crowd outside the Bastille—I was standing too close to some of my ancestors.” The big man folded his arms, frowned up at Raed. “Gotta tell you, facing death during a ghosting’s not the hard part. It’s not easy—but it’s not the hard part.”

“What,” Raed wheezed back at him, “is the hard part?”

The medic looked over the psychologist’s shoulder, and read something on the slate she was accessing again. “I believe you already know,” he said, then nodded at Raed and left the cage.

Raed met the psychologist’s wary eyes.

“Can you?” she asked him, a hint of pleading in her voice. Had she expected him to ripcord out before the South Tower collapsed? Had she hoped he’d stick it out with those firemen?

The thought that the psychologist held out a faint hope for him gave Raed a little strength. “I think . . . I can,” he breathed, then began breathing easier.

After all, he knew now she’d been telling the truth. He couldn’t come to harm. And after she exited the cage, Raed watched the psychologist and the others outside the bars begin to slide away, knowing the next projection couldn’t get any worse, it could only get—

More strange.

Raed dropped to the floor of an elevator with its double-doors partially open. Beyond the gap in the doors a debris-littered lobby kept rising, then plunging, then rising again, as though the elevator was a yo-yo on a string about to snap. The steel walls around him were visibly vibrating, so he knew he didn’t have much time. But he waited until the lobby outside fell from above his shoulders to a foot below the level of the elevator—

Raed threw himself out, landing flat on his chest on the cluttered lobby carpeting. A sign fallen from a shuddering wall told him this was Floor 104 of the South Tower. And there was a man propped against a smoldering reception desk nearby, his legs trapped under a huge twist of black metal that had stabbed down through the ceiling.

The trapped man wasn’t alone.

Raed got to his feet, staggered closer, and stared at a woman kneeling beside the trapped man, her arm round his shoulder. She stared back at Raed, following him with her eyes.

“You can’t see me,” he insisted, and then fled from the pair, down a hall, and around a corner, not wanting to be seen by a victim about to meet her end. Not wanting to sit idly by as two more people met their doom, unable to do a thing about them or himself.

Not understanding what he was supposed to do here!

Ceiling panels crashed down in a hall he turned into, and an electrical panel exploded. Raed was driven back, his time probably almost up again. Short and to the point.

The point being to meet more of the people he’d help trap in this tower? I didn’t trap them, I wasn’t on that plane. It was Nazir, Sayf, and their comrades! But no matter how he tried to rationalize, how he tried to escape, Raed was blocked at every turn. There was just no way out. Corridors came down in a rain of rubble, passageways filled with a tingling pressure before bursting into flame, and doorway after doorway was barricaded by debris. All the rooms within rooms closed off to him now, all his mental defenses collapsing, forcing him back to. . . .

The central lobby and the elevators, where he hated to go but had to, and—in the end—wanted to, so he wouldn’t have to face the end alone. As he stumbled into the lobby, Raed saw the trapped man now had two companions consoling him instead of one, both comforters wearing red ribbons on their collars but neither looking at Raed. Their eyes were squeezed tightly shut, knowing the collapse was upon them, hearing the roar and hugging the arms of the trapped man, one on either side, their faces agonized.

Yet the man propped between them seemed unaware of his two steadfast friends, his hands clasped together in prayer, face somehow calmer, eyes turned up toward his own version of Heaven. We do this to Americans because they are godless, Nazir had told Raed repeatedly.

And that was not true.

And feeling horror for this trapped trio was not enough.

Raed threw himself down on the shuddering floor before them. He knew what the hard part was now. “I don’t have the strength,” was all he had time to say before the world descended on them all again—

Sharp reviving odors.

Opening his eyes, squinting at yellow bars, then down at the big medic, and the small Muslim psychologist.

“Was seen—again,” Raed managed to say when he’d caught his breath. “Were two of them. Two . . . shouldn’t have been there.”

“What do you mean?” The psychologist was tapping it all into her slate.

“Both wearing ribbons,” Raed said, less winded this time. “Pinned to sweatshirts,” he went on, “like the other one who saw me—when I turned up that side street.”

She surprised him by replying, “You’ve gotten a long way into our program tonight Raed, and you’re nearly there.”

“There?”

“Understand—the program’s spiraling you toward the core-event you were convicted of being an accomplice to. Time to take you in for a close-up.”

He nodded. The hard part still remained. “Go ahead,” he said, no longer caring. . . . There were no rooms left to hide himself inside anyway. Raed’s own core had been drawn out now, and he was ready for anything, ready for the truth.

Again the psychologist hesitated before leaving, and again her lingering gaze gave him strength. She wants me to see it through.

Raed realized he wanted to see it through, too.

Seconds later the cage-bars began to blur, then bend away, and before he knew it he was—

Back in the South Tower, and for the first time, he’d arrived before it was hit. . . . The floor around him was filled with people, a dozen desks visible in an open area near some tall windows, a few of the desks still occupied by people making phone-calls, although most looked upset. Most others had left their desks and were standing at the windows, looking out at the North Tower, which had a smoking hole a number of floors higher up its side.

What floor was he on in this building? Raed turned and hurried around to the elevators, darting in and out of groups of people, and in the central lobby discovered he was on Floor 78.

The point-of-impact for the South Tower.

Raed kept right on running through the floor, around to the tower’s opposite outer wall. Finding another open area past a row of offices, he peered out through some windows facing south. A gleaming speck was just visible against the blue sky in the southeast, slowly arcing around to get into position.

Raed had often wondered about Nazir and Sayf’s last moment in that cockpit. In the early years, he’d even tried to picture it: opening their shirts and exposing their hearts to God, praying for entrance to Heaven. Madmen, and Raed had sensed it even then. But he’d been a little mad himself, in that period. . . . And now that he was in a position to glimpse the expression on their faces as they plunged into the side of this building, Raed found he had no interest in glimpsing any such thing. He turned his back to the windows.

Four of the dozen desks arrayed before him had knots of people standing around them. And sprinkled in among the business attire worn by most of those people—none of them currently looking out the windows to the south—there were a handful of standouts in casual clothes, sweats, even one in an all-blue jumpsuit. All the casual-dressed people had their hands on the shoulders or backs of one or another of the victims-to-be.

Raed moved over to the nearest occupied desk, where a young blond-haired man in a crisp mauve shirt and black tie sat facing the outer windows, too busy talking on the phone to notice the speck growing in the sky beyond the windows. Standing directly behind this young businessman was another older blond-haired man, in his mid-forties perhaps, approaching middle-age, yet dressed in silvery track pants and a Columbia University pullover. He had both hands on the shoulders of the desk’s occupant and was crouched over him, head bent low, eyes closed and concentrating, to all appearances eavesdropping on the seated man’s phone call.

Neither the seated man nor anyone else in the area seemed to take any notice of this peculiar eavesdropper.

Except for Raed.

“Who are you?” he asked the man in silver track pants.

The man frowned up at Raed, his concentration broken. Raed immediately saw that the eavesdropper and the businessman below him might have been twins, but for the ten-year age difference between them. And now the red ribbon pinned to the eavesdropper’s collar was plainly visible . . . Below him, the seated man continued reassuring whoever he was talking to on the phone that he was all right, that it was the other tower that was hit—but his eyes were finally widening, focusing on something behind Raed, beyond the windows. The eavesdropper bowed over the seated man again, concentrating harder, tightening his grip on his younger twin’s shoulders.

Out of the corner of his eye, Raed caught other people reacting to something in the sky beyond the south windows. And now, somehow, there were twice as many people in sweats and casual clothes in the open area—though Raed had seen no one enter the area. All the newcomers had their heads bowed, holding tightly to some shocked-looking businessman or woman.

“Who are all of you?” Raed yelled across the open space.

He got no answer. The casual-dressers were too focused on the task at hand: remaining in physical contact with people who were beginning to scramble away in disbelief—

A loud clattering drew Raed’s eyes back to the desk he was standing in front of.

“Oh God, oh my God.” The young blond businessman had dropped the phone receiver and was on his feet, gaping at the windows behind Raed. A woman’s voice squeaked out of the receiver inches from Raed’s hip: “Steve? You still there, Steve?”

The older man in silver track pants clung onto Steve, his face pained—

Then everyone was breaking free from their casually-dressed companions and fleeing, falling over chairs and furniture in desperate attempts to escape. And all the ribbon-wearing clingers left behind turned toward Raed.

“Why did you bring me here?” he cried as he backed right up against the windows, wanting this to be over quickly. A shadow fell across the area of desks—

Revived again, safely back in his cage in 2033.

Raed focused blearily past the bars and across the main projection arena, where a hundred other volunteers hung suspended in cages too, most of them mere image-people, half here, half there, still currently ghosting somewhere. In some of the closer cages, volunteers appeared to be crouched over something in the past, or clutching onto someone. Those in the closest cages seemed to be in some kind of pain.

But a number of volunteers were no longer glowing images. Their projections had just ended, just like Raed’s. In one or two cages, he could see people being revived with smelling salts. . . .

In his own cage, the Muslim psychologist was again consulting with the big medic, both standing just below him. Raed waited until the medic slipped back out before he summoned to will to say to the psychologist, “I need to ask something.”

“Ask.”

He gestured toward the cages filling the main arena. “Those people are all ghosting back to 9/11, aren’t they? They’ve been accompanying me. . . .”

“They have their own business in that target-time,” she told him.

Tackling what I’ve been avoiding, Raed thought. The hard part.

“But yes,” the psychologist went on, “they are accompanying you, in a way—they’re projecting through folds oriented identically to your own.” Behind the burqa-veil, the woman’s eyes seemed disappointed. “Is that your question?”

He would not disappoint her. He said, “They’re the group of ‘interested citizens,’ yes? The ones who petitioned to get me into this program.”

She nodded. “Is that your question?”

“Who are they?” Raed asked. That was the question.

“The grown children of your victims, mostly,” she told him. “Plus a few victims’ nieces, nephews, friends, one or two of the surviving spouses.”

Raed swallowed, a soft clicking deep in his throat. “And you?”

“Yes,” she answered without hesitation, her liquid-black eyes swallowing his question. “I’m also the child of one of your victims.” She adjusted the folds of her burqa to show him the red ribbon she was wearing. The same ribbons worn by the out-of-place clingers and companions in the past—the people in the cages beyond the Plexiglas.

Raed bowed his head. If the woman below him was his daughter, then Haifa, his wife, was surely another of Raed’s victims. And if the woman below him was his daughter, surely it was no surprise she’d become a psychologist—not with a father like Raed to try to comprehend.

She said to him: “I was one of those curious to see if you were capable of making it through this program.” A beeping drew her eyes to her slate. She turned, nodded to the projection operators at their consoles, and glanced up at Raed again. “Looks like we have time for just one more.”

“Just one more,” he agreed, even though he felt wearier than he’d ever imagined he could feel—weary down in his soul.

But there was one more place left to face, wasn’t there? Raed watched the psychologist step out through the bars, then watched the world of 2033 slide away as the cage tunneled him back to—

That oh-so-familiar tubular space. He was back where his night of projection began, back in a seat on board a large passenger jet.

This jet, however, was airborne.

Flight 175, Boston to Los Angeles. Raed was sitting in a window-seat about halfway up the plane. The oval portal beside him offered a good view of the Atlantic beyond the wing, and the Eastern seaboard. The plane was already well off its flight path, well on its way to its doomed target. But the familiar Manhattan skyline was not in sight yet; there was still a little time left.

Raed shifted out to the empty aisle seat, saw that the back half of the plane behind him was crammed with passengers. There were even people crouching in the aisle. Directly across the aisle, in the same row as Raed, a sturdy-looking man in his late thirties was dialing someone on a cell phone. After a few seconds the man began to speak. Raed instinctively drew back, then forced himself to listen: “. . . flight’s been hijacked,” the man was saying. “I’ll try to call again, but don’t know if there’ll be time.”

You must be Tom, Raed thought, recognizing the voice and recalling a bright kitchen with an answering machine in a warm Rhode Island home.

“Whatever happens, Angie, know that I love you,” Tom went on, maintaining his unearthly calm. “That I’m thinking of you now, and the kids too. . . .” He let out a breath. “They’ll be fine with you as their mom,” he said. “So don’t let them be sad for too long.”

Raed stared across the aisle, humbled by Tom’s ability to pass beyond denial of his dire situation into an acceptance of it. This man was neither hysterical nor paralyzed by terror—he was just terribly lonely.

“I’ll always be with the three of you. And Angie,” Tom finished, “in my heart I know we’ll meet again.” He shut off his phone, and turned to stare out the window.

That’s when Raed caught a glimpse of someone seated on the far side of Tom, tucked up against him. Raed pulled himself to his feet, stepped into the aisle, and saw a sixty-something woman with her hands wrapped round Tom’s arm, her head on his shoulder, her face drawn tight, concentrating.

She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt because she didn’t need one, of course.

Raed wanted to ask the woman her name, but sensed it wouldn’t be appropriate. Besides, he knew who she had to be: “Angie”—Angela or Angelica—Tom’s spouse. An old woman now, yet still strong enough to ghost back to her lost husband’s side, strong enough to withstand the discharge of his dread long enough to add a little of her own calm to his. Angie was comforting Tom on the way to that greater comfort the man clearly had faith in.

The plane rolled, awkwardly changing direction, tossing Raed off balance. Through the windows of the forward seats he spotted distant skyscrapers, including the towers of the World Trade Center. Up in the cockpit his cousins and their pilot friends were beginning the approach to the South Tower, intent on bringing it down. And because Raed had known their intentions before his cousins and their comrades ever boarded this plane, he was just as responsible as they were. He could no longer deny it, now that he was actually on board with them. He’d always been on board with them, in some sense or other. . . .

So the thought of walking up to the cockpit door and eavesdropping on Nazir and Sayf’s final words held no interest for Raed. His cousins’ hold over him disintegrated long ago, in the awful period after the Twin Towers came down.

Raed turned his back to the cockpit, and began to walk down the aisle, looking over the people filling the rear of the plane—his cousins’ victims, his victims too. He knew there’d only been sixty-five passengers on Flight 175, but he could see closer to a hundred crowded into the rear rows. Before him a sad and beautiful truth was playing out. . . . The plane banked again and Raed reeled on his feet, but not because of the deficiencies of the pilot. What he was seeing was almost too overpowering to witness.

The back of the plane was packed with lonely people, many of them being comforted by their own ghost-children—mostly full-grown forty-somethings now, adults strong enough to come back to this unthinkable moment, to tackle the hard part and take on the two-way interaction “biomass” unleashed: strong emotions flooding from the passengers into these ghost-descendants.

And weak emotions seeping from the ghosts back into their long-lost loved ones.

Whatever weak effect we have on the past, the researcher Francis told Raed, it was made the first time around, if you get my meaning. So nothing can be changed!

Cause and effect aside, every row Raed passed held an anguished-looking adult in track pants or jumpsuit, a red ribbon pinned to their collar. The ghosts were squeezed in behind the seats of some passengers, leaning over headrests, arms draped down around the shoulders of a mother, or an aunt, or a family friend they’d come back to comfort. A few were even kneeling in the aisle, their heads tucked onto the laps of passengers. All these agonizing visitors were soaking up the frenzied emotions of the passengers, while oozing an ounce of serenity back the other way, an ounce of certainty that their loved ones were with them, in spirit.

It was all they could do. Raed understood that now, and he understood what the projection-team was putting him through. He saw the method underlying their rehab program, ghosting him back to see things that should help him know what to do, like those two firemen taking turns in the crow’s nest of their pumper truck, falling out exhausted, then climbing back in again to help douse the raging fires.

That’s just what Raed was witnessing in the rear of Flight 175, as some ghost-comforters overcome with emotion simply vanished, others immediately appearing to take their place. The volunteers from his own time were projecting in, in wave after wave, taking turns taking on the pain of relatives and friends in their moment of greatest need.

The plane dropped lower, and a cry rose up from several passengers on Raed’s left. Through the oval windows he saw the smoke-trail from the North Tower, both buildings drawing inexorably closer.

Time to face the hard part himself.

In the second-to-last row, a woman was curled up with a tiny, tired-looking child, a girl the age of the Basma he’d lost. A middle-aged man in coveralls stood behind the woman’s seat, his head bowed, his arms draped down over the woman’s shoulders, while her own arm was wrapped tightly round the shoulders of the child in the aisle seat.

Raed lowered himself to his knees, falling into a prayer-position in the aisle beside the child, a victim of the pitiless madness of Raed’s own youth. But pitying her now, he placed his arm across her, received the awesome discharge of her emotions, concentrated, and tried hard to push his own feelings and his fatigue back onto her: FORGIVE ME-FIND PEACE IN YOUR MOTHER’S ARMS-ADD MY WEARINESS TO YOURS. . . . The child’s drooping eyes finally closed, Raed felt her fall unconscious as the plane accelerated down, saw some of the fear ease from her face in the last second of his embrace—

END OF FIRST

DEEP-PROJECTION CASE

Many more cases and depositions were presented to the World Court over the course of the hearings on deep-projection technology. Some were further examples of New Spiritualist experiments, like the program designed for the inmate Raed. These positive-result cases sparked far greater interest among the worldwide audience following the hearings than the overstated cases claiming negative consequences. So by end of the hearings the court made its controversial decision, lifting the ban on deep-projection “for limited use”—such use to be governed by a duly-appointed body that would oversee and approve projection programs.

I, Francis Drummond, am the head of that governing body.

The Hague hearings dramatically boosted the number of New Spiritualist volunteers, as it became apparent to the public that emotions transcend time in some miraculous way, and in a two-way direction. . . . From that day to this, our movement has spread into every culture, changing the nature of the mid-twenty-first century entirely. Projection arenas have been reopened or built anew in thousands of cities, and now hundreds of thousands of volunteers ghost back to the past, participating in programs designed to open their eyes to the universality of tragedy in cultures other than their own.

The result has been a wider recognition of our present as the precious, precarious climax to all our ancient pasts. After millennia of struggle and strife, back-breaking labor and bad luck, madness and sadness and small successes piled one atop the next, most societies are making that final leap up the ladder of progress toward a transcendent, tolerant civilization.

The goal of New Spiritualism is a reawakening to the truth of what has gone before us, what it has taken all of us to get here. And though the controversy rages on, today that goal is being achieved. Waves of volunteers are returning to comfort their own ancestors—or comfort mere strangers caught in the tragic forces of world history—as a way of thanking the generations whose sufferings helped bring about a world they feel fortunate to live in. The target-times these volunteers revisit are mostly old and familiar turning points of the past, key moments in the histories of many cultures. The oldest stories in the book, you might say, and each one defined by a truth that volunteers of all cultures report witnessing: down through the ages the greatest humanity is always to be found in the midst of tragedy and catastrophe, as the living cling to loved ones lost with hearts unbound.

THE WILD GIRLS

Ursula K. Le Guin

Bela ten went on a foray with five companions. There had been no nomad camps near the City for several years, but harvesters in the Eastern Fields reported seeing smoke of fires beyond the Dayward Hills, and the six young men announced that they’d go see how many camps there were. They took with them as guide Bidh Handa, who had guided forays against the nomad tribes before. Bidh and his sister had been captured from a nomad village as children and grew up in the City as slaves. Bidh’s sister Nata was famous for her beauty, and Bela’s brother Alo had given her owner a good deal of the Belen family wealth to get her for his wife.

Bela and his companions walked and ran all day following the course of the East River up into the hills. In the evening they came to the crest of the hills and saw on the plains below them, among watermeadows and winding streams, three circles of the nomads’ skin huts, strung out quite far apart.

“They came to the marshes to gather mudroots,” the guide said. “They’re not planning a raid on the Fields of the City. If they were, the three camps would be close together.”

“Who gathers the roots?” Bela ten Belen asked.

“Men and women. Old people and children stay in the camps.”

“When do the people go to the marshes?”

“Early in the morning.”

“We’ll go down to that nearest camp tomorrow after the gatherers are gone.”

“It would be better to go to the second village, the one on the river,” Bidh said.

Bela ten Belen turned to his soldiers and said, “Those are this man’s people. We should shackle him.”

They agreed, but none of them had brought shackles. Bela began to tear his cape into strips.

“Why do you want to tie me up, lord?” the Dirt man asked with his fist to his forehead to show respect. “Have I not guided you, and others before you, to the nomads? Am I not a man of the City? Is not my sister your brother’s wife? Is not my nephew your nephew, and a god? Why would I run away from our City to those ignorant people who starve in the wilderness, eating mudroots and crawling things?” The Crown men did not answer the Dirt man. They tied his legs with the lengths of twisted cloth, pulling the knots in the silk so tight they could not be untied but only cut open. Bela appointed three men to keep watch in turn that night.

Tired from walking and running all day, the young man on watch before dawn fell asleep. Bidh put his legs into the coals of their fire and burned through the silken ropes and stole away.

When he woke in the morning and found the slave gone, Bela ten Belen’s face grew heavy with anger, but he said only, “He’ll have warned that nearest camp. We’ll go to the farthest one, off there on the high ground.”

“They’ll see us crossing the marshes,” said Dos ten Han.

“Not if we walk in the rivers,” Bela ten Belen said.

And once they were out of the hills on the flat lands they walked along streambeds, hidden by the high reeds and willows that grew on the banks. It was autumn, before the rains, so the water was shallow enough that they could make their way along beside it or wade in it. Where the reeds grew thin and low and the stream widened out into the marshes, they crouched down and found what cover they could.

By midday they came near the farthest of the camps, which was on a low grassy rise like an island among the marshes. They could hear the voices of people gathering mudroot on the eastern side of the island. They crept up through the high grass and came to the camp from the south. No one was in the circle of skin huts but a few old men and women and a little swarm of children. The children were spreading out long yellow-brown roots on the grass, the old people cutting up the largest roots and putting them on racks over low fires to hasten the drying. The six Crown men came among them suddenly with their swords drawn. They cut the throats of the old men and women. Some children ran away down into the marshes. Others stood staring, uncomprehending.

Young men on their first foray, the soldiers had made no plans—Bela ten Belen had said to them, “I want to go out there and kill some thieves and bring home slaves,” and that was all the plan they wanted. To his friend Dos ten Han he had said, “I want to get some new Dirt girls, there’s not one in the City I can stand to look at.” Dos ten Han knew he was thinking about the beautiful nomad-born woman his brother had married. All the young Crown men thought about Nata Belenda and wished they had her or a girl as beautiful as her.

“Get the girls,” Bela shouted to the others, and they all ran at the children, seizing one or another. The older children had mostly fled at once, it was the young ones who stood staring or began too late to run. Each soldier caught one or two and dragged them back to the center of the village where the old men and women lay in their blood in the sunlight.

Having no ropes to tie the children with, the men had to keep hold of them. One little girl fought so fiercely, biting and scratching, that the soldier dropped her, and she scrabbled away screaming shrilly for help. Bela ten Belen ran after her, took her by the hair, and cut her throat to silence her screaming. His sword was sharp and her neck was soft and thin; her body dropped away from her head, held on only by the bones at the back of the neck. He dropped the head and came running back to his men. “Take one you can carry and follow me,” he shouted at them.

“Where? The people down there will be coming,” they said. For the children who had escaped had run down to the marsh where their parents were.

“Follow the river back,” Bela said, snatching up a girl of about five years old. He seized her wrists and slung her on his back as if she were a sack. The other men followed him, each with a child, two of them babies a year or two old.

The raid had occurred so quickly that they had a long lead on the nomads who came straggling up round the hill following the children who had run to them. The soldiers were able to get down into the rivercourse, where the banks and reeds hid them from people looking for them even from the top of the island.

The nomads scattered out through the reedbeds and meadows west of the island, looking to catch them on their way back to the City. But Bela had led them not west but down a branch of the river that led off southeast. They trotted and ran and walked as best they could in the water and mud and rocks of the riverbed. At first they heard voices far behind them. The heat and light of the sun filled the world. The air above the reeds was thick with stinging insects. Their eyes soon swelled almost closed with bites and burned with salt sweat. Crown men, unused to carrying burdens, they found the children heavy, even the little ones. They struggled to go fast but went slower and slower along the winding channels of the water, listening for the nomads behind them. When a child made any noise, the soldiers slapped or shook it till it was still. The girl Bela ten Belen carried hung like a stone on his back and never made any sound.

When at last the sun sank behind the Dayward Hills, that seemed strange to them, for they had always seen the sun rise behind those hills.

They were now a long way south and east of the hills. They had heard no sound of their pursuers for a long time. The gnats and mosquitoes growing even thicker with dusk drove them at last up onto a drier meadowland, where they could sink down in a place where deer had lain, hidden by the high grasses. There they all lay while the light died away. The great herons of the marsh flew over with heavy wings. Birds down in the reeds called. The men heard each other’s breathing and the whine and buzz of insects. The smaller children made tiny whimpering noises, but not often, and not loud. Even the babies of the nomad tribes were used to fear and silence.

As soon as the soldiers had let go of them, making threatening gestures to them not to try to run away, the six children crawled together and huddled up into a little mound, holding one another. Their faces were swollen with insect bites and one of the babies looked dazed and feverish. There was no food, but none of the children complained.

The light sank away from the marshes, and the insects grew silent. Now and then a frog croaked, startling the men as they sat silent, listening.

Dos ten Han pointed northward: he had heard a sound, a rustling in the grasses, not far away.

They heard the sound again. They unsheathed their swords as silently as they could.

Where they were looking, kneeling, straining to see through the high grass without revealing themselves, suddenly a ball of faint light rose up and wavered in the air above the grasses, fading and brightening. They heard a voice, shrill and faint, singing. The hair stood up on their heads and arms as they stared at the bobbing blur of light and heard the meaningless words of the song.

The child that Bela had carried suddenly called out a word. The oldest, a thin girl of eight or so who had been a heavy burden to Dos ten Han, hissed at her and tried to make her be still, but the younger child called out again, and an answer came.

Singing, talking, and babbling shrilly, the voice came nearer. The marsh fire faded and burned again. The grasses rustled and shook so much that the men, gripping their swords, looked for a whole group of people, but only one head appeared among the grasses. A single child came walking towards them. She kept talking, stamping, waving her hands so that they would know she was not trying to surprise them. The soldiers stared at her, holding their heavy swords.

She looked to be nine or ten years old. She came closer, hesitating all the time but not stopping, watching the men all the time but talking to the children. Bela’s girl got up and ran to her and they clung to each other. Then, still watching the men, the new girl sat down with the other children. She and Dos ten Han’s girl talked a little in low voices. She held Bela’s girl in her arms, on her lap, and the little girl fell asleep almost at once.

“It must be that one’s sister,” one of the men said.

“She must have tracked us from the beginning,” said another.

“Why didn’t she call the rest of her people?”

“Maybe she did.”

“Maybe she was afraid to.”

“Or they didn’t hear.”

“Or they did.”

“What was that light?”

“Marsh fire.”

“Maybe it’s them.”

They were all silent, listening, watching. It was almost dark. The lamps of the City of Heaven were being lighted, reflecting the lights of the City of Earth, making the soldiers think of that city, which seemed as far away as the one above them in the sky. The faint bobbing light had died away. There was no sound but the sigh of the night wind in the reeds and grasses.

The soldiers argued in low voices about how to keep the children from running off during the night. Each may have thought that he would be glad enough to wake and find them gone, but did not say so. Dos ten Han said the smaller ones could hardly go any distance in the dark. Bela ten Belen said nothing, but took out the long lace from one of his sandals and tied one end around the neck of the little girl he had taken and the other end around his own wrist; then he made the child lie down, and lay down to sleep next to her. Her sister, the one who had followed them, lay down by her on the other side. Bela said, “Dos, keep watch first, then wake me.”

So the night passed. The children did not try to escape, and no one came on their trail. The next day they kept going south but mainly west, so that by mid-afternoon they reached the Dayward Hills. They children walked, even the five-year-old, and the men passed the two babies from one to another, so their pace was steady if not fast. Along in the morning, the marsh-fire girl pulled at Bela’s tunic and kept pointing left, to a swampy place, making gestures of pulling up roots and eating. Since they had eaten nothing for two days, they followed her. The older children waded out into the water and pulled up certain wide-leaved plants by the roots. They began to cram what they pulled up into their mouths, but the soldiers waded after them and took the muddy roots and ate them till they had had enough. Dirt people do not eat before Crown people eat. The children did not seem surprised.

When she had finally got and eaten a root for herself, the marsh-fire girl pulled up another, chewed some and spat it out into her hand for the babies to eat. One of them ate eagerly from her hand, but the other would not; she lay where she had been put down, and her eyes did not seem to see. Dos ten Han’s girl and the marsh-fire girl tried to make her drink water. She would not drink.

Dos stood in front of them and said, pointing to the elder girl, “Vui Handa,” naming her Vui and saying she belonged to his family. Bela named the marsh-fire girl Modh Belenda, and her little sister, the one he had carried off, he named Mal Belenda. The other men named their prizes, but when Ralo ten Bal pointed at the sick baby to name her, the marsh-fire girl, Modh, got between him and the baby, vigorously gesturing no, no, and putting her hand to her mouth for silence.

“What’s she up to?” Ralo asked. He was the youngest of the men, sixteen.

Modh kept up her pantomime: she lay down, lolled her head, and half opened her eyes, like a dead person; she leapt up with her hands held like claws and her face distorted, and pretended to attack Vui; she pointed at the sick baby.

The young men stood staring. It seemed she meant the baby was dying. The rest of her actions they did not understand.

Ralo pointed at the baby and said, “Groda,” which is a name given to Dirt people who have no owner and work in the field teams—Nobody’s.

“Come on,” Bela ordered, and they made ready to go on. Ralo walked off, leaving the sick child lying.

“Aren’t you bringing your Dirt?” one of the others asked him.

“What for?” he said.

Modh picked up the sick baby, Vui picked up the other baby, and they went on. After that the soldiers let the older girls carry the sick baby, though they themselves passed the well one about so as to make better speed.

When they got up on higher ground away from the clouds of stinging insects and the wet and heavy heat of the marshlands, the young men were glad, feeling they were almost safe now; they wanted to move fast and get back to the City. But the children, worn out, struggled to climb the steep hills. Vui, who was carrying the sick baby, straggled along slower and slower. Dos, her owner, slapped her legs with the flat of his sword to make her go faster. “Ralo, take your Dirt, we have to keep going,” he said.

Ralo turned back angrily. He took the sick baby from Vui. The baby’s face had gone greyish and its eyes were half closed, like Modh’s in her pantomime. Its breath whistled a little. Ralo shook the child. Its head flopped. Ralo threw it away into the high bushes. “Come on, then,” he said, and set off walking fast uphill.

Vui tried to run to the baby, but Dos kept her away from it with his sword, stabbing at her legs, and drove her on up the hill in front of him.

Modh dodged back to the bushes where the baby was, but Bela got in front of her and herded her along with his sword. As she kept dodging and trying to go back, he seized her by the arm, slapped her hard, and dragged her after him by the wrist. Little Mal stumbled along behind them.

When the place of the high bushes was lost from sight behind a hillslope, Vui began to make a shrill long-drawn cry, a keening, and so did Modh and Mal. The keening grew louder. The soldiers shook and beat them till they stopped but soon they started again, all the children, even the baby. The soldiers did not know if they were far enough from the nomads and near enough the Fields of the City that they need not fear pursuers hearing the sound. They hurried on, carrying or dragging or driving the children, and the shrill keening cry went with them like the sound of the insects in the marshlands.

It was almost dark when they got to the crest of the Dayward Hills. Forgetting how far south they had gone, the men expected to look down on the Fields and the City. They saw only dusk falling lands, and the dark west, and the lights of the City of the Sky beginning to shine.

They settled down in a clearing, for all were very tired. The children huddled together and were asleep almost at once. Bela forbade the men to make fire. They were hungry, but there was a creek down the hill to drink from. Bela set Ralo ten Bal on first watch. Ralo was the one who had gone to sleep, their first night out, allowing Bidh to escape.

Bela woke in the night, cold, missing his cape, which he had torn up to make bonds. He saw that someone had made a small fire and was sitting cross-legged beside it. He sat up and said “Ralo!” furiously, and then saw that the man was not Ralo but the guide, Bidh.

Ralo lay motionless near the fire.

Bela drew his sword.

“He fell asleep again,” the Dirt man said, grinning at Bela.

Bela kicked Ralo, who snorted and sighed and did not wake. Bela leapt up and went round to the others, fearing Bidh had killed them in their sleep, but they had their swords and were sleeping soundly. The children slept in a little heap. He returned to the fire and stamped it out.

“Those people are miles away,” Bidh said. “They won’t see the fire. They never found your track.”

“Where did you go?” Bela asked him after a while, puzzled and suspicious. He did not understand why the Dirt man had come back.

“To see my people in the village.”

“Which village?”

“The one nearest the hills. My people are the Allulu. I saw my grandfather’s hut from up in the hills. I wanted to see the people I used to know. My mother’s still alive, but my father and brother have gone to the Sky City. I talked with my people and told them a foray was coming. They waited for you in their huts. They would have killed you, but you would have killed some of them. I was glad you went on to the Tullu village.”

It is fitting that a Crown ask a Dirt person questions, but not that he converse or argue with him. Bela, however, was so disturbed that he said sharply, “Dead Dirt does not go to the Sky City. Dirt goes to dirt.”

“So it is,” Bidh said politely, as a slave should, with his fist to his forehead. “My people foolishly believe that they go to the sky, but even if they did, no doubt they wouldn’t go to the palaces there. No doubt they wander in the wild, dirty parts of the sky.” He poked at the fire to see if he could start a flame, but it was dead. “But you see, they can only go up there if they have been buried. If they’re not buried, their soul stays down here on earth. It’s likely to turn into a very bad thing then. A bad spirit. A ghost.”

“Why did you follow us?” Bela demanded.

Bidh looked puzzled, and put his fist to his forehead. “I belong to Lord ten Han,” he said. “I eat well, and live in a fine house. I’m respected in the City because of my sister and being a guide. I don’t want to stay with the Allulu. They’re very poor.”

“But you ran away!”

“I wanted to see my family,” Bidh said. “And I didn’t want them to be killed. I only would have shouted to them to warn them. But you tied my legs. That made me so sad. You failed to trust me. I could think only about my people, and so I ran away. I am sorry, my lord.”

“You would have warned them. They would have killed us!”

“Yes,” Bidh said, “if you’d gone there. But if you’d let me guide you, I would have taken you to the Bustu or the Tullu village and helped you catch children. Those are not my people. I was born an Allulu and am a man of the City. My sister’s child is a god. I am to be trusted.”

Bela ten Belen turned away and said nothing.

He saw the starlight in the eyes of a child, her head raised a little, watching and listening. It was the marsh-fire girl, Modh, who had followed them to be with her sister.

“That one,” Bidh said. “That one, too, will mother gods.”

II

Chergo’s Daughter and Dead Ayu’s First Daughter, who were now named Vui and Modh, whispered in the grey of the morning before the men woke.

“Do you think she’s dead?” Vui whispered.

“I heard her crying. All night.”

They both lay listening.

“That one named her,” Vui whispered very low. “So she can follow us.”

“She will.”

The little sister, Mal, was awake, listening. Modh put her arm around her and whispered, “Go back to sleep.”

Near them, Bidh suddenly sat up, scratching his head. The girls stared wide-eyed at him.

“Well, Daughters of Tullu,” he said in their language, spoken the way the Allulu spoke it, “you’re Dirt people now.”

They stared and said nothing.

“You’re going to live in heaven on earth,” he said. “A lot of food. Big, rich huts to live in. And you don’t have to carry your house around on your back across the world! You’ll see. Are you virgins?”

After a while they nodded.

“Stay that way if you can,” he said. “Then you can marry gods. Big, rich husbands! These men are gods. But they can only marry Dirt women. So look after your little cherrystones, keep them from Dirt boys and men like me, and then you can be a god’s wife and live in a golden hut.” He grinned at their staring faces and stood up to piss on the cold ashes of the fire.

While the Crown men were rousing, Bidh took the older girls into the forest to gather berries from a tangle of bushes nearby; he let them eat some, but made them put most of what they picked into his cap. He brought the cap full of berries back to the soldiers and offered them, his knuckles to his forehead. “See,” he said to the girls, “this is how you must do. Crown people are like babies and you must be their mothers.”

Modh’s little sister Mal and the younger children were silently weeping with hunger. Modh and Vui took them to the stream to drink. “Drink all you can, Mal,” Modh told her sister. “Fill up your belly. It helps.” Then she said to Vui, “Man-babies!” and spat. “Men who take food from children!”

“Do as the Allulu says,” said Vui.

Their captors now ignored them, leaving Bidh to look after them. It was some comfort to have a man who spoke their language with them. He was kind enough, carrying the little ones, sometimes two at a time, for he was strong. He told Vui and Modh stories about the place where they were going. Vui began to call him Uncle. Modh would not let him carry Mal, and did not call him anything.

Modh was eleven. When she was six, her mother had died in childbirth, and she had always looked after the little sister.

When she saw the golden man pick up her sister and run down the hill, she ran after them with nothing in her mind but that she must not lose the little one. The men went so fast at first that she could not keep up, but she did not lose their trace, and kept after them all that day. She had seen her grandmothers and grandfathers slaughtered like pigs. She thought everybody she knew in the world was dead. Her sister was alive and she was alive. That was enough. That filled her heart.

When she held her little sister in her arms again, that was more than enough.

But then, in the hills, the cruel man named Sio’s Daughter and then threw her away, and the golden man kept her from going to pick her up. She tried to look back at the high bushes where the baby lay, she tried to see the place so she could remember it, but the golden man hit her so she was dizzy and drove and dragged her up the hill so fast her breath burned in her chest and her eyes clouded with pain. Sio’s Daughter was lost. She would lie dead there in the bushes. Foxes and wild dogs would eat her flesh and break her bones. A terrible emptiness came into Modh, a hollow, a hole of fear and anger that everything else fell into. She would never be able to go back and find the baby and bury her. Children before they are named have no ghosts, even if they are unburied, but the cruel one had named Sio’s Daughter. He had pointed and named her: Groda. Groda would follow them. Modh had heard the thin cry in the night. It came from the hollow place. What could fill that hollow? What could be enough?

III

BELA TEN BELEN AND HIS COMPANIONS did not return to the City in triumph, since they had not fought with other men; but neither did they have to creep in by back ways at night as an unsuccessful foray. They had not lost a man, and they brought back six slaves, all female. Only Ralo ten Bal brought nothing, and the others joked about him losing his catch and falling asleep on watch. And Bela ten Belen joked about his own luck in catching two fish on one hook, telling how the marsh-fire girl had followed them of her own will to be with her sister.

As he thought about his foray, he realized that they had been lucky indeed, and that their success was due not to him, but to Bidh. If Bidh had told them to do so, the Allulu would have ambushed and killed the soldiers before they ever reached the farther village. The slave had saved them. His loyalty seemed natural and expectable to Bela, but he honored it. He knew Bidh and his sister Nata were fond of each other, but could rarely see each other, since Bidh belonged to the Hans and Nata to the Belens. When the opportunity arose, he traded two of his own house-slaves for Bidh and made him overseer of the Belen House slave compound.

Bela had gone slave-catching because he wanted a girl to bring up in the house with his mother and sister and his brother’s wife: a young girl, to be trained and formed to his desire until he married her.

Some Crown men were content to take their Dirt wife from the dirt, from the slave quarters of their own compound or the barracks of the city, to get children on her, keep her in the hanan, and have nothing else to do with her. Others were more fastidious. Bela’s mother Hehum had been brought up from birth in a Crown hanan, trained to be a Crown’s wife. Nata, four years old when she was caught, had lived at first in the slave barracks, but within a few years a Root merchant, speculating on the child’s beauty, had traded five male slaves for her and kept her in his hanan so that she would not be raped or lie with a man till she could be sold as a wife. Nata’s beauty became famous, and many Crown men sought to marry her. When she was fifteen, the Belens traded the produce of their best field and the use of a whole building in Copper Street for her. Like her mother-in-law, she was treated with honor in the Belen household.

Finding no girl in the barracks or hanans he was willing to look at as a wife, Bela had resolved to go catch a wild one. He had succeeded doubly.

At first he thought to keep Mal and send Modh to the barracks. But though Mal was charming, with a plump little body and big, long-lashed eyes, she was only five years old. He did not want sex with a baby, as some men did. Modh was eleven, still a child, but not for long. She was not always beautiful, but always vivid. Her courage in following her sister had impressed him. He brought both sisters to the hanan of the Belen house and asked his mother, his sister-in-law, and his sister to see that they were properly brought up.

It was strange to the wild girls to hear Nata Belenda speak words of their language, for to them she seemed a creature of another order, as did Hehum Belenda, the mother of Bela and Alo, and Tudju Belen, the sister. All three women were tall and clean and soft-skinned, with soft hands and long lustrous hair. They wore garments of cobweb colored like spring flowers, like sunset clouds. They were goddesses. But Nata Belenda smiled and was gentle and tried to talk to the children in their own tongue, though she remembered little of it. The grandmother Hehum Belenda was grave and stern-looking, but quite soon she took Mal onto her lap to play with Nata’s baby boy. Tudju, the daughter of the house, was the one who most amazed them. She was not much older than Modh, but a head taller, and Modh thought she was wearing moonlight. Her robes were cloth of silver, which only Crown women could wear. A heavy silver belt slanted from her waist to her hip, with a marvelously worked silver sheath hanging from it. The sheath was empty, but she pretended to draw a sword from it, and flourished the sword of air, and lunged with it, and laughed to see little Mal still looking for the sword. But she showed the girls that they must not touch her; she was sacred, that day. They understood that.

Living with these women in the great house of the Belens, they began to understand many more things. One was the language of the City. It was not so different from theirs as it seemed at first, and within a few weeks they were babbling along in it.

After three months they attended their first ceremony at the Great Temple: Tudju’s coming of age. They all went in procession to the Great Temple. To Modh it was wonderful to be out in the open air again, for she was weary of walls and ceilings. Being Dirt women, they sat behind the yellow curtain, but they could see Tudju chose her sword from the row of swords hanging behind the altar. She would wear it the rest of her life whenever she went out of the house. Only women born to the Crown wore swords. No one else in the City was allowed to carry any weapon, except Crown men when they served as soldiers. Modh and Mal knew that, now. They knew many things, and also knew there was much more to learn—everything one had to know to be a woman of the City.

It was easier for Mal. She was young enough that to her the City rules and ways soon became the way of the world. Modh had to unlearn the rules and ways of the Tullu people. But as with the language, some things were more familiar than they first seemed. Modh knew that when a Tullu man was elected chief of the village, even if he already had a wife he had to marry a slave woman. Here, the Crown men were all chiefs. And they all had to marry Dirt women—slaves. It was the same rule, only, like everything in the City, made greater and more complicated.

In the village, there had been two kinds of person, Tullu and slaves. Here there were three kinds; and you could not change your kind, and you could not marry your kind. There were the Crowns, who owned land and slaves, and were all chiefs, priests, gods on earth. And the Dirt people, who were slaves. Even though a Dirt woman who married a Crown might be treated almost like a Crown herself—like the Nata and Hehum—still, they were Dirt. And there were the other people, the Roots.

Modh knew little about the Roots. There was nobody like them in her village. She asked Nata about them and observed what she could from the seclusion of the hanan. Root people were rich. They oversaw planting and harvest, the storehouses and marketplaces. Root women were in charge of housebuilding, and all the marvelous clothes the Crowns wore were made by Root women.

Crown men had to marry Dirt women, but Crown women, if they married, had to marry Root men. When she got her sword, Tudju also acquired several suitors—Root men who came with packages of sweets and stood outside the hanan curtain and said polite things, and then went and talked to Alo and Bela, who were the lords of Belen since their father had died in a foray years ago.

Root women had to marry Dirt men. There was a Root woman who wanted to buy Bidh and marry him. Alo and Bela told him they would sell him or keep him, as he chose. He had not decided yet.

Root people owned slaves and crops, but they owned no land, no houses. All real property belonged to Crowns. “So,” said Modh, “Crowns let the Root people live in the City, let them have this house or that, in exchange for the work they do and what their slaves grow in the fields—is that right?”

“As a reward for working,” Nata corrected her, always gentle, never scolding. “The Sky Father made the City for his sons, the Crowns. And they reward good workers by letting them live in it. As our owners, Crowns and Roots, reward us for work and obedience by letting us live, and eat, and have shelter.”

Modh did not say, “But—”

It was perfectly clear to her that it was a system of exchange, and that it was not fair exchange. She came from just far enough outside it to be able to look at it. And, being excluded from reciprocity, any slave can see the system with an undeluded eye. But Modh did not know of any other system, any possibility of another system, which would have allowed her to say “But.” Neither did Nata know of that alternative, that possible even when unattainable space in which there is room for justice, in which the word “But” can be spoken and have meaning.

Nata had undertaken to teach the wild girls how to live in the City, and she did so with honest care. She taught them the rules. She taught them what was believed. The rules did not include justice, so she did not teach them justice. If she did not herself believe what was believed, yet she taught them how to live with those who did. Modh was self-willed and bold when she came, and Nata could easily have let her think she had rights, encouraged her to rebel, and then watched her be whipped or mutilated or sent to the fields to be worked to death. Some slave women would have done so. Nata, kindly treated most of her life, treated others kindly. Warm-hearted, she took the girls to her heart. Her own baby boy was a Crown, she was proud of her godling, but she loved the wild girls too. She liked to hear Bidh and Modh talk in the language of the nomads, as they did sometimes. Mal had forgotten it by then.

Mal soon grew out of her plumpness and became as thin as Modh. After a couple of years in the City both girls were very different from the tough little wildcats Bela ten Belen’s foray had caught. They were slender, delicate-looking. They ate well and lived soft. These days, they might not have been able to keep up the cruel pace of their captors’ flight to the City. They got little exercise but dancing, and had no work to do. Conservative Crown families like the Belens did not let their slave wives do work that was beneath them, and all work was beneath a Crown.

Modh would have gone mad with boredom if the grandmother had not let her run and play in the courtyard of the compound, and if Tudju had not taught her to sword-dance and to fence. Tudju loved her sword and the art of using it, which she studied daily with an older priestess. Equipping Modh with a blunted bronze practice sword, she passed along all she learned, so as to have a partner to practice with. Tudju’s sword was extremely sharp, but she already used it skillfully and never once hurt Modh.

Tudju had not yet accepted any of the suitors who came and murmured at the yellow curtain of the hanan. She imitated the Root men mercilessly after they left, so that the hanan rocked with laughter. She claimed she could smell each one coming—the one that smelled like boiled chard, the one that smelled like cat-dung, the one that smelled like old men’s feet. She told Modh, in secret, that she did not intend to marry, but to be a priestess and a judge-councillor. But she did not tell her brothers that. Bela and Alo were expecting to make a good profit in food-supply or clothing from Tudju’s marriage; they lived expensively, as Crowns should. The Belen larders and clothes-chests had been supplied too long by bartering rentals for goods. Nata alone had cost twenty years’ rent on their best property.

Modh made friends among the Belenda slaves and was very fond of Tudju, Nata, and old Hehum, but she loved no one as she loved Mal. Mal was all she had left of her old life, and she loved in her all that she had lost for her. Perhaps Mal had always been the only thing she had: her sister, her child, her charge, her soul.

She knew now that most of her people had not been killed, that her father and the rest of them were no doubt following their annual round across the plains and hills and waterlands; but she never seriously thought of trying to escape and find them. Mal had been taken, she had followed Mal. There was no going back. And as Bidh had said to them, it was a big, rich life here.

She did not think of the grandmothers and grandfathers lying slaughtered, or Dua’s Daughter who had been beheaded. She had seen all that yet not seen it; it was her sister she had seen. Her father and the others would have buried all those people and sung the songs for them. They were here no longer. They were going on the bright roads and the dark roads of the sky, dancing in the bright hut-circles up there.

She did not hate Bela ten Belen for leading the raid, killing Dua’s Daughter, stealing her and Mal and the others. Men did that, nomads as well as City men. They raided, killed people, took food, took slaves. That was the way men were. It would be as stupid to hate them for it as to love them for it.

But there was one thing that should not have been, that should not be and yet continued endlessly to be, the small thing, the nothing that when she remembered it made the rest, all the bigness and richness of life, shrink up into the shriveled meat of a bad walnut, the yellow smear of a crushed fly.

It was at night that she knew it, she and Mal, in their soft bed with cobweb sheets, in the safe darkness of the warm, high-walled house: Mal’s indrawn breath, the cold chill down her own arms, do you hear it?

They clung together, listening, hearing.

Then in the morning Mal would be heavy-eyed and listless, and if Modh tried to make her talk or play she would begin to cry, and Modh would sit down at last and hold her and cry with her, endless, useless, dry, silent weeping. There was nothing they could do. The baby followed them because she did not know whom else to follow.

Neither of them spoke of this to anyone in the household. It had nothing to do with these women. It was theirs. Their ghost.

Sometimes Modh would sit up in the dark and whisper aloud, “Hush, Groda! Hush, be still!” And there might be silence for a while. But the thin wailing would begin again.

Modh had not seen Vui since they came to the City. Vui belonged to the Hans, but she had not been treated as Modh and Mal had. Dos ten Han bargained for a pretty girl from a Root wife-broker, and Vui was one of the slaves he bartered for that wife. If she was still alive, she did not live where Modh could reach her or hear of her. Seen from the hills, as she had seen it that one time, the City did not look very big in the great slant and distance of the fields and meadows and forests stretching on to the west; but if you lived in it, it was as endless as the plains. You could be lost in it. Vui was lost in it.

Modh was late coming to womanhood, by City standards: fourteen. Hehum and Tudju held the ceremony for her in the worship-room of the house, a full day of rituals and singing. She was given new clothes. When it was over Bidh came to the yellow curtain of the hanan, called to her, and put into her hands a little deerskin pouch, crudely stitched.

She looked at it puzzled. Bidh said, “You know, in the village, a girl’s uncle gives her a delu,” and turned away. She caught his hand and thanked him, touched, half-remembering the custom and fully knowing the risk he had run in making his gift. Dirt people were forbidden to do any sewing. Sewing was a Root prerogative. A slave found with a needle and thread could have a hand cut off. Like his sister Nata, Bidh was warm-hearted. Both Modh and Mal had called him Uncle for years now.

Alo ten Belen had three sons from Nata by now to be priests and soldiers of the House of Belen. Alo came most nights to play with the little boys and take Nata off to his rooms, but they saw little of Bela in the hanan. His friend Dos ten Han had given him a concubine, a pretty, teasing, experienced woman who kept him satisfied for a long time. He had forgotten about the nomad sisters, lost interest in his plans of educating them. Their days passed peacefully and cheerfully. As the years went by, their nights too grew more peaceful. The crying now came seldom to Modh, and only in a dream, from which she could waken.

But always, when she wakened so, she saw Mal’s eyes wide open in the darkness. They said nothing, but held each other till they slept again.

In the morning, Mal would seem quite herself; and Modh would say nothing, fearing to upset her sister, or fearing to make the dream no dream.

Then things changed.

Tudju’s brothers Bela and Alo called for her. She was gone all day, and came back to the hanan looking fierce and aloof, fingering the hilt of her silver sword. When her mother went to embrace her, Tudju made the gesture that put her aside. All these years with Tudju in the hanan, it had been easy to forget that she was a Crown woman, the only Crown among them; that the yellow curtain was to separate them, not her, from the sacred parts of the house; that she was herself a sacred being. But now she had to take up her birthright.

“They want me to marry that fat Root man, so we can get his shop and looms in Silk Street,” she said. “I will not. I am going to live at the Great Temple.” She looked around at them all, her mother, her sister-in-law, Mal, Modh, the other slave women. “Everything I’m given there, I’ll send here,” she said. “But I told Bela that if he gives one finger’s width of land for that woman he wants now, I’ll send nothing home from the Temple. He can go slave-catching again to feed her. And you.” She looked again at Mal and Modh. “Keep an eye on him,” she said. “It is time he married.”

Bela had recently traded his concubine and the Dirt son she had borne him, making a good bargain in cropland, and then promptly offered almost the whole amount for another woman he had taken a fancy to. It was not a question of marriage, for a Dirt woman, to marry, must be a virgin, and the woman he wanted had been owned by several men. Alo and Tudju had prevented the bargain, which he could not make without their consent. It was, as Tudju said, time for Bela to consider his sacred obligation to marry and beget children of the sky on a woman of the dirt.

So Tudju left the hanan and the house to serve in the Great Temple, only returning sometimes on formal visits. She was replaced, evenings, by her brother Bela. Dour and restless, like a dog on a chain, he would stalk in after Alo, and watch the little boys running about and the slaves’ games and dances.

He was a tall man, handsome, lithe and well muscled. From the day she first saw him in the horror and carnage of the foray, to Modh he had been the golden man. She had seen many other golden men in the City since then, but he was the first, the model.

She had no fear of him, other than the guardedness a slave must feel towards the master; he was spoilt, of course, but not capricious or cruel; even when he was sulky he did not take out his temper on his slaves. Mal, however, shrank from him in uncontrollable dread. Modh told her she was foolish. Bela was nearly as good-natured as Alo, and Mal trusted Alo completely. Mal just shook her head. She never argued, and grieved bitterly when she disagreed with her sister on anything, but she could not even try not to fear Bela.

Mal was thirteen. She had her ceremony (and to her too Bidh secretly gave a crude little “soulbag”). In the evening of that day she wore her new clothing. Dirt people even when they lived with Crowns could not wear sewn garments, only lengths of cloth; but there are many graceful ways of draping and gathering unshaped material, and though the spidersilk could not be hemmed, it could be delicately fringed and tasseled. Mal’s garments were undyed silk, with a blue-green overveil so fine it was transparent.

When she came in, Bela looked up, and looked at her, and went on looking.

Modh stood up suddenly without plan or forethought and said, “Lords, Masters! May I dance for my sister’s festival?” She scarcely waited for their consent, but spoke to Lui, who played the tablet-drums for dancers, and ran to her room for the bronze sword Tudju had given her and the pale flame-colored veil that had been given her at her festival. She ran back with the veil flowing about her. Lui drummed, and Modh danced. She had never danced so well. She had never danced the way she did now, with all the fierce formal precision of the sword-dance, but also with a wildness, a hint of threat in her handling of the blade, a sexual syncopation to the drumbeat that made Lui’s drumming grow ever faster and fiercer in response, so that the dance gathered and gathered like a flame, hotter and brighter, the translucent veil flowing, whirling at the watchers’ faces. Bela sat motionless, fixed, gazing, and did not flinch even when the veil struck its spiderweb blow across his eyes.

When she was done he said, “When did you learn to dance like that?”

“Under your eyes,” she said.

He laughed, a little uneasy. “Let Mal dance now,” he said, looking around for her.

“She’s too tired to dance,” Modh said. “The rites were long. She tires easily. But I will dance again.”

He motioned her to go on dancing with a flick of his hand. She nodded to Lui, who grinned widely and began the hesitant, insinuating beat of the slow dance called mimei. Modh put on the ankle-bells Lui kept with her drums; she arranged her veil so that it covered her face and body and arms, baring only her ankles with the jingling anklets and her naked feet. The dance began, her feet moving slightly and constantly, her body swaying, the beat and the movements slowly becoming more intense.

She could see through the gauzy silk; she could see the stiff erection under Bela’s silk tunic; she could see his heart beat in his chest.

After that night Bela hung around Modh so closely that her problem was not to draw his attention but to prevent his getting her alone and raping her. Hehum and the other women made sure she was never alone, for they were eager for Bela to marry her. They all liked her, and she would cost the House of Belen nothing. Within a few days Bela declared his intention to marry Modh. Alo gave his approval gladly, and Tudju came from the Temple to officiate at the marriage rites.

All Bela’s friends came to the wedding. The yellow curtain was moved back from the dancing room, hiding only the sleeping rooms of the women.

For the first time in seven years Modh saw the men who had been on the foray. The man she remembered as the big one was Dos ten Han; Ralo ten Bal was the cruel one. She tried to keep away from Ralo, for the sight of him disturbed her. The youngest of the men, he had changed more than the others, yet he acted boyish and petulant. He drank a lot and danced with all the slave girls.

Mal hung back as always, and even more than usual; she was frightened without the yellow curtain to hide behind, and the sight of the men from the foray made her tremble. She tried to stay close to Hehum. But the old woman teased her gently and pushed her forward to let the Crown men see her, for this was a rare chance to show her off. She was marriageable now, and these Crown men might pay to marry her rather than merely use her. She was very pretty, and might bring back a little wealth to the Belens.

Modh pitied her misery, but did not worry about her safety even among drunken men. Hehum and Alo would not let anybody have her virginity, which was her value as a bride.

Bela stayed close beside Modh every moment except when she danced. She danced two of the sword dances and then the mimei. The men watched her breathlessly, while Bela watched her and them, tense and triumphant. “Enough!” he said aloud just before the end of the veiled dance, perhaps to prove he was master even of this flame of a woman, perhaps because he could not restrain himself. She stopped instantly and stood still, though the drum throbbed on for a few beats.

“Come,” he said. She put out her hand from the veil, and he took it and led her out of the great hall, to his apartments. Behind them was laughter, and a new dance began.

It was a good marriage. They were well matched. She was wise enough to obey any order he gave immediately and without any resistance, but she never forestalled his orders by anticipating his wishes, babying him, coddling him, as most slave women he knew had done. He felt in her an unyieldingness that allowed her to be obedient yet never slavish. It was as if in her soul she were indifferent to him, no matter what their bodies did; he could bring her to sexual ecstasy or, if he liked, he could have had her tortured, but nothing he did would change her, would touch her; she was like a wildcat or a fox, not tameable.

This impassibility, this distance kept him drawn to her, trying to lessen it. He was fascinated by her, his little fox, his vixen. In time they became friends as well. Their lives were boring; they found each other good company.

In the daytime, he was off, of course, still sometimes playing in the ballcourts with his friends, performing his priestly duties at the temples, and increasingly often going to the Great Temple. Tudju wanted him to join the Council. She had a considerable influence over Bela, because she knew what she wanted and he did not. He never had known what he wanted. There was not much for a Crown man to want. He had imagined himself a soldier until he led the foray over the Dayward Hills. Successful as it had been, in that they had caught slaves and come home safe, he could not bear to recall the slaughter, the hiding, the proof of his own ineptitude, the days and nights of fear, confusion, disgust, exhaustion, and shame. So there was nothing to do but play in the ballcourts, officiate at rites, and drink, and dance. And now there was Modh. And sons of his own to come. And maybe, if Tudju kept at him, he would become a councillor. It was enough.

For Modh, it was hard to get used to sleeping beside the golden man and not beside her sister. She would wake in darkness, and the weight of the bed and the smell and everything was wrong. She would want Mal then, not him. But in the daytime she would go back to the hanan and be with Mal and the others just as before, and then he would be there in the evening, and it would have been all right, it would have been good, except for Ralo ten Bal.

Ralo had noticed Mal on the wedding night, cowering near Hehum, in her blue veil that was like a veil of rain. He had come up to her and tried to make her talk or dance; she had shrunk, quailed, shivered. She would not speak or look up. He put his thumb under her chin to make her raise her face, and at that Mal retched as if about to vomit and staggered where she stood. Hehum had interfered: “Lord Master ten Bal, she is untouched,” she said, with the stern dignity of her position as Mother of Gods. Ralo laughed and withdrew his hand, saying foolishly, “Well, I’ve touched her now.”

Within a few days an offer for her had come from the Bals. It was not a good one. She was asked for as a slave girl, as if she were not marriageable, and the barter was to be merely the produce of one of the Bal grain-plots. Given the Bals’ wealth and the relative poverty of the Belens, it was an insulting offer. Alo and Bela refused it without explanation or apology, haughtily. It was a great relief to Modh when Bela told her that. When the offer came, she had been stricken. Had she seduced Bela away from Mal only to leave her prey to a man Mal feared even more than Bela, and with better reason? Trying to protect her sister, had she exposed her to far greater harm? She rushed to Mal to tell her they had turned down the Bals’ offer, and telling her burst into tears of guilt and relief. Mal did not weep; she took the good news quietly. She had been terribly quiet since the wedding.

She and Modh were together all day, as they had always been. But it was not the same; it could not be. The husband came between the sisters. They could not share their sleep.

Days and festivals passed. Modh had put Ralo ten Bal out of mind, when he came home with Bela after a game at the ballcourts. Bela did not seem comfortable about bringing him into the house, but had no reason to turn him away. Bela came into the hanan and said to Modh, “He hopes to see you dance again.”

“You aren’t bringing him behind the curtain?”

“Only into the dancing room.”

He saw her frown, but was not accustomed to reading expressions. He waited for a reply.

“I will dance for him,” Modh said.

She told Mal to stay back in the sleeping rooms in the hanan. Mal nodded. She looked small, slender, weary. She put her arms around her sister. “Oh Modh,” she said. “You’re brave, you’re kind.”

Modh felt frightened and hateful, but she said nothing, only hugged Mal hard, smelling the sweet smell of her hair, and went back to the dancing room.

She danced, and Ralo praised her dancing. Then he said what she knew he had been waiting to say from the moment he came: “Where’s your wife’s sister, Bela?”

“Not well,” Modh said, though it was not for a Dirt woman to answer a question one Crown asked another Crown.

“Not very well tonight,” Bela said, and Modh could have kissed him from eyes to toes for hearing her, for saying it.

“Ill?”

“I don’t know,” Bela said, weakening, glancing at Modh.

“Yes,” Modh said.

“But perhaps she could just come show me her pretty eyebrows.”

Bela glanced at Modh again. She said nothing.

“I had nothing to do with that stupid message my father sent you about her,” Ralo said. He looked from Bela to Modh and back at Bela, smirking, conscious of his power. “Father heard me talking about her. He just wanted to give me a treat. You must forgive him. He was thinking of her as an ordinary Dirt girl.” He looked at Modh again. “Bring your little sister out just for a moment, Modh Belenda,” he said, bland, vicious.

Bela nodded to her. She rose and went behind the yellow curtain.

She stood some minutes in the empty hall that led to the sleeping rooms, then came back to the dancing room. “Forgive me, Lord Master Bal,” she said in her softest voice, “the girl has a fever and cannot rise to obey your summons. She has been unwell a long time. I am so sorry. May I send one of the other girls?”

“No,” Ralo said. “I want that one.” He spoke to Bela, ignoring Modh. “You brought two home from that raid we went on. I didn’t get one. I shared the danger, it’s only fair you share the catch.” He had evidently rehearsed this sentence.

“You got one,” Bela said.

“What are you talking about?”

Bela looked uncomfortable. “You had one,” he said, in a less decisive voice.

“I came home with nothing!” Ralo cried, his voice rising, accusing. “And you kept two! Listen, I know you’ve brought them up all these years, I know it’s expensive rearing girls. I’m not asking for a gift.”

“You very nearly did,” Bela said, stiffly, in a low voice.

Ralo put this aside with a laugh. “Just keep in mind, Bela, we were soldiers together,” he said, cajoling, boyish, putting his arm round Bela’s shoulders. “You were my captain. I don’t forget that! We were brothers in arms. Listen, I’m not talking about just buying the girl. You married one sister, I’ll marry the other. Hear that? We’ll be brothers in the dirt, how’s that?” He laughed and slapped his hand on Bela’s shoulder. “How’s that?” he said. “You won’t be the poorer for it, Captain!”

“This is not the time to talk about it,” Bela said, awkward and dignified.

Ralo smiled and said, “But soon, I hope.”

Bela stood, and Ralo had to take his leave. “Please send to tell me when Pretty Eyebrows is feeling better,” he said to Modh, with his smirk and his piercing glance. “I’ll come at once.”

When he was gone Modh could not be silent. “Lord Husband, don’t give Mal to him. Please don’t give Mal to him.”

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“Then don’t! Please don’t!”

“It’s all his talk. He boasts.”

“Maybe. But if he makes an offer?”

“Wait till he makes an offer,” Bela said, a little heavily, but smiling. He drew her to him and stroked her hair. “How you fret over Mal. She’s not really ill, is she?”

“I don’t know. She isn’t well.”

“Girls,” he said, shrugging. “You danced well tonight.”

“I danced badly. I would not dance well for that scorpion.”

That made him laugh. “You did leave out the best part of the amei.”

“Of course I did. I want to dance that only for you.”

“Lui has gone to bed, or I’d ask you to.”

“Oh, I don’t need a drummer. Here, here’s my drum.” She took his hands and put them on her full breasts. “Feel the beat?” she said. She stood, struck the pose, raised her arms, and began the dance, there right in front of him, till he seized her, burying his face between her thighs, and she sank down on him laughing.

Hehum came out into the dancing room; she drew back, seeing them, but Modh untangled herself from her husband and went to the old woman.

“Mal is ill,” Hehum began, with a worried face.

“Oh I knew it, I knew it!” Modh cried, instantly certain that it was her fault, that her lie had made itself truth. She ran to Mal’s room, which she shared with her so long.

Hehum followed her. “She hides her ears,” she said, “I think she has the earache. She cries and hides her ears.”

Mal sat up when Modh came into the room. She looked wild and haggard. “You hear it, you hear it, don’t you?” she cried, taking Modh’s hands.

“No,” Modh murmured, “no, I don’t hear it. I hear nothing. There is nothing, Mal.”

Mal stared up at her. “When he comes,” she whispered.

“No,” Mal said.

“Groda comes with him.”

“No. It was years ago, years ago. You have got to be strong, Mal, you have got to put all that away.”

Mal let out a piteous, loud moan and put Modh’s hands up over her own ears. “I don’t want to hear it!” she cried, and began to sob violently.

“Tell my husband I will spend this night with Mal,” Modh said to Hehum. She held her sister in her arms till she slept at last, and then she slept too, though not easily, waking often, listening always.

In the morning she went to Bidh and asked him if he knew what people—their people, the villagers—did about ghosts.

He thought about it. “I think if there was a ghost somewhere they didn’t go there. Or they moved away. What kind of ghost?”

“An unburied person.”

Bidh made a face. “They would move away,” he said with certainty.

“What if it followed them?”

Bidh held out his hands. “I don’t know! The priest, the yegug, would do something, I guess. Some spell. The yegug knew all about things like that. These priests here, these temple people, they don’t know anything but their dances and singing and talk-talk-talk. So, what is this? Is it Mal?”

“Yes.”

He made a face again. “Poor little one,” he said. Then, brightening, “Maybe it would be good if she left this house.”

Several days passed. Mal was feverish and sleepless, hearing the ghost cry or fearing to hear it every night. Modh spent the nights with her, and Bela made no objection. But one evening when he came home he talked some while with Alo, and then the brothers came to the hanan. Hehum and Nata were there with the children. The brothers sent the children away, and asked that Modh come. Mal stayed in her room.

“Ralo ten Bal wants Mal for his wife,” Alo said. He looked at Modh, forestalling whatever she might say. “We said she is very young, and has not been well. He says he will not sleep with her until she is fifteen. He will have her looked after with every attention. He wants to marry her now so that no other man may compete with him for her.”

“And so raise her price,” Nata said, with unusual sharpness. She had been the object of such a bidding war, which was why the Belens had all but beggared themselves to buy her.

“The price the Bals offer now could not be matched by any house in the City,” Alo said gravely. “Seeing we were unwilling, they at once increased what they offered, and increased it again. It is the largest bride-bargain I ever heard of. Larger than yours, Nata.” He looked with a strange smile at his wife, half pride half shame, rueful, intimate. Then he looked at his mother and at Modh. “They offer all the fields of Nuila. Their western orchards. Five Root houses on Wall Street. The new silk factory. And gifts—jewelry, fine garments, gold.” He looked down. “It is impossible for us to refuse,” he said.

“We will be nearly as wealthy as we used to be,” Bela said.

“Nearly as wealthy as the Bals,” Alo said, with the same rueful twist to his mouth.

“They thought we were bargaining. It was ridiculous. Every time I began to speak, old Loho ten Bal would hold up his hand to stop me and add something to the offer!” He glanced at Bela, who nodded and laughed.

“Have you spoken to Tudju?” Modh said.

“Yes,” Bela answered.

“She agrees?” The question was unnecessary. Bela nodded.

“Ralo will not mistreat your sister, Modh,” Alo said seriously. “Not after paying such a price for her. He’ll treat her like a golden statue. They all will. He is sick with desire for her. I never saw a man so infatuated. It’s odd, he’s barely seen her, only at your wedding. But he’s enthralled.”

“He wants to marry her right away?” Nata asked.

“Yes. But he won’t touch her till she’s fifteen. If we’d asked him he might have promised never to touch her at all!”

“Promises are easy,” Nata said.

“If he does lie with her it won’t kill her,” Bela said. “It might do her good. She’s been spoiled here. You spoil her, Modh. A man in her bed may be what she needs.”

“But—that man—” Modh said, her mouth dry, her ears ringing.

“Ralo’s a bit spoiled himself. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

“He—” She bit her lip. She could not say the words.

Bela was keeping her from turning back to pick up the baby, jabbing his sword at her, dragging her by the arm. Mal was crying and stumbling behind them in the dust, up the steep hill, among the trees.

They all sat in uncomfortable silence.

“So,” Alo said, louder than necessary, “there will be another wedding.”

“When?”

“Before the Sacrifice.”

Another silence.

“We mean no harm to come to Mal,” Alo said to Modh. “Be sure of that, Modh. Tell her that.”

She sat unable to move or speak.

“Neither of you has ever been mistreated,” Bela said, resentfully, as if answering an accusation. His mother frowned at him and clicked her tongue. He reddened and fidgeted.

“Go speak to your sister, Modh,” Hehum said. Modh got up. As she stood she saw the walls and tapestries and faces grow small and bright, sparkling with little lights. She walked slowly and stopped in the doorway.

“I am not the one to tell her,” she said, hearing her own voice far away.

“Bring her here then,” Alo said.

She nodded; but when she nodded the walls kept turning around her, and reaching out for support, she fell in a half-faint.

Bela came to her and cradled her in his arms. “Little fox, little fox,” he murmured. She heard him say angrily to Alo, “The sooner the better.”

He carried Modh to their bedroom, sat with her till she pretended to sleep, then left her quietly.

She knew that by her concern, by the nights she had spent with Mal, she had let her husband become jealous of her sister.

It was for her sake I came to you! she cried to him in her heart.

But there was nothing she could say now that would not cause more harm.

When she got up she went to Mal’s room. Mal ran to her weeping, but Modh only held her, not speaking, till the girl grew quieter. Then she said, “Mal, there is nothing I can do. You must endure this. So must I.”

Mal drew back a little and said nothing for a while. “It cannot happen,” she said then, with a kind of certainty. “It will not be allowed. The child will not allow it.”

Modh was bewildered for a moment. She had for some days been fairly sure she was pregnant. Now she thought for a moment that Mal was pregnant. Then she understood.

“You must not think about that child,” she said. “She was not yours or mine. She was not daughter or sister of ours. Her death was not our death.”

“No. It is his,” Mal said, and almost smiled. She stroked Modh’s arms and turned away. “I will be good, Modh,” she said. “You must not let this trouble you—you and your husband. It’s not your trouble. Don’t worry. What must happen will happen.”

Cowardly, Modh let herself accept Mal’s reassurance. More cowardly still, she let herself be glad that it was only a few days until the wedding. Then what must happen would have happened. It would be done, it would be over.

She was pregnant; she told Hehum and Nata of the signs. They both smiled and said, “A boy.”

There was a flurry of getting ready for the wedding. The ceremony was to be in Belen House, and the Belens refused to let the Bals provide food or dancers or musicians or any of the luxuries they offered. Tudju was to be the marriage priestess. She came a couple of days early to stay in her old home, and she and Modh played at sword-practice the way they had done as girls, while Mal looked on and applauded as she had used to do. Mal was thin and her eyes looked large, but she went through the days serenely. What her nights were, Modh did not know. Mal did not send for her. In the morning, she would smile at Modh’s questions about the night and say, “It passed.”

But the night before the wedding, Modh woke in the deep night, hearing a baby cry.

She felt Bela awake beside her.

“Where is that child?” he said, his voice rough and deep in the darkness.

She said nothing.

“Nata should quiet her brat,” he said.

“It is not Nata’s.”

It was a thin, strange cry, not the bawling of Nata’s healthy boys. They heard it first to the left, as if in the hanan. Then after a silence the thin wail came from their right, in the public rooms of the house.

“Maybe it’s my child,” Modh said.

“What child?”

“Yours.”

“What do you mean?”

“I carry your child. Nata and Hehum say it’s a boy. I think it’s a girl, though.”

“But why is it crying?” Bela whispered, holding her.

She shuddered and held him. “It’s not our baby, it’s not our baby,” she cried.

All night the baby wailed. People rose up and lighted lanterns and walked the halls and corridors of Belen House. They saw nothing but each other’s frightened faces. Sometimes the weak, sickly crying ceased for a long time, then it would begin again. Mostly it was faint, as if far away, even when it was heard in the next room. Nata’s little boys heard it, and shouted, “Make it stop!” Tudju burned incense in the prayer room and chanted all night long. To her the faint wailing seemed to be under the floor, under her feet.

When the sun rose, the people of Belen House ceased to hear the ghost. They made ready for the wedding festival as best they could.

The people of Bal House came. Mal was brought out from behind the yellow curtain, wearing voluminous unsewn brocaded silks and golden jewelry, her transparent veil like rain about her head. She looked very small in the elaborate draperies, straight-backed, her gaze held down. Ralo ten Bal was resplendent in puffed and sequined velvet. Tudju lighted the wedding fire and began the rites.

Modh listened, listened, not to the words Tudju chanted. She heard nothing.

The wedding party was brief, strained, everything done with the utmost formality. The guests left soon after the ceremony, following the bride and groom to Bal House, where there was to be more dancing and music. Tudju and Hehum, Alo and Nata went with them for civility’s sake. Bela stayed home. He and Modh said almost nothing to each other. They took off their finery and lay silent in their bed, taking comfort in each other’s warmth, trying not to listen for the wail of the child. They heard nothing, only the others returning, and then silence.

Tudju was to return to the Temple the next day. Early in the morning she came to Bela and Modh’s apartments. Modh had just risen.

“Where is my sword, Modh?”

“You put it in the box in the dancing room.”

“Your bronze one is there, not mine.”

Modh looked at her in silence. Her heart began to beat heavily.

There was a noise, shouting, beating at the doors of the house.

Modh ran to the hanan, to the room she and Mal had slept in, and hid in the corner, her hands over her ears.

Bela found her there later. He raised her up, holding her wrists gently. She remembered how he had dragged her by the wrists up the hill through the trees. “Mal killed Ralo,” he said. “She had Tudju’s sword hidden under her dress. They strangled her.”

“Where did she kill him?”

“On her bed,” Bela said bleakly. “He never did keep his promises.”

“Who will bury her?”

“No one,” Bela said, after a long pause. “She was a Dirt woman. She murdered a Crown. They’ll throw her body in the butchers’ pit for the wild dogs.”

“Oh, no,” Modh said. She slipped her wrists from his grip. “No,” she said. “She will be buried.”

Bela shook his head.

“Will you throw everything away, Bela?”

“There is nothing I can do,” he said.

She leaped up, but he caught and held her.

He told the others that Modh was mad with grief. They kept her locked in the house, and kept watch over her.

Bidh knew what troubled her. He lied to her, trying to give her comfort; he said he had gone to the butcher’s pit at night, found Mal’s body, and buried it out past the Fields of the City. He said he had spoken what words he could remember that might be spoken to a spirit. He described Mal’s grave vividly, the oak trees, the flowering bushes. He promised to take Modh there when she was well. She listened and smiled and thanked him. She knew he lied. Mal came to her every night and lay in the silence beside her.

Bela knew she came. He did not try to come to that bed again.

All through her pregnancy Modh was locked in Belen House. She did not go into labor until almost ten months had passed. The baby was too large; it would not be born, and with its death killed her.

Bela ten Belen buried his wife and unborn son with the Belen dead in the holy grounds of the Temple, for though she was only a Dirt woman, she had a dead god in her womb.

PRESENCE

Maureen F. McHugh

LILA SITS AT HER DESK IN Ohio and picks up the handle of the new disposable razor in . . . Shen Zhen, China? Juarez, Mexico? She can’t remember where they’re assembling the parts. She pans left and right and decides it must be Shen Zhen, because when she looks around there’s no one else in camera range. There’s a twelve-hour time-zone difference. It’s eleven at night in China, so the only other activity is another production engineer doing telepresence work—waldos sorting through a bin of hinge joints two tables over in a pool of light. Factories are dim and dirty places, but cameras need light, so telepresence stations are islands in the darkness.

She lifts the dark blue plastic part in front of the CMM and waits for it to measure the cavity. She figures they’re running about twenty percent out of spec, but they are so far behind on the razor product launch they can’t afford to have the vendor resupply, so tomorrow, underpaid Chinese employees in Shen Zhen raw materials will have to hand-inspect the parts, discard the bad ones and send the rest to packaging.

Her phone rings.

She disengages the waldos and the visor. The display is her home number and she winces.

“Hello?” says her husband, Gus. “Hello, who is this?”

“It’s Mila,” she says. “It’s Mila, honey.”

“Mila?” he says. “That’s what the Speed Dial said. Where are you?”

“I’m at work,” she says.

“At P&G?” he says.

“No, honey, now I work for Gillette. You worked for Gillette, too.”

“I did not,” he says, suspicious. Gus has Alzheimer’s. He is fifty-seven.

“Where’s Cathy?” Mila asks.

“Cathy?” his voice lowers. “Is that her name? I was calling because she was here. What is she doing in our house?”

“She’s there to help you,” Mila says helplessly. Cathy is the new home health. She’s been watching Gus during the day for almost three weeks now, but Gus still calls to ask who she is.

“She’s black,” Gus says. “Not that it matters. Is she from the neighborhood? Is she Dan’s friend?” Dan is their son. He’s twenty-five and living in Boulder.

“Are you hungry?” Mila asks. “Cathy can make you a sandwich. Do you want a sandwich?”

“I don’t need help,” Gus says, “Where’s my car? Is it in the shop?”

“Yes,” Mila says, seizing on the excuse.

“No it’s not,” he says. “You’re lying to me. There’s a woman here, some strange woman, and she’s taken my car.”

“No, baby,” Mila says. “You want me to come home for lunch?” It’s eleven, she could take an early lunch. Not that she really wants to go home if Gus is agitated.

Gus hangs up the phone.

Motherfucker. She grabs her purse.

Cathy is standing at the door, holding her elbows. Cathy is twenty-five and Gus is her first assignment from the home healthcare agency. Mila likes her, likes even her beautifully elaborate long, polished fingernails. “Mrs. Schuster? Mr. Schuster is gone. I was going to follow his minder but he took my locater. I’m sorry, it was in my purse and I never thought he’d take it out—”

“Oh, Jesus,” Mila says. She runs upstairs and gets her minder from her bedside table. She flicks it on and it says that Gus is within 300 meters. The indicator arrow says he’s headed away from Glenwood, where all the traffic is, and down toward the dead end or even the pond.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Schuster,” Cathy says.

“He’s not far,” Mila says. “It’s not your fault. He’s cunning.”

They go down the front steps. Cathy is so young. So unhappy right now, still nervously hugging her elbows as if her ribs hurt. Her fingernails are pink with long sprays like rays from a sunrise on each nail. She trails along behind Mila, scuffing in her cute flats. She’s an easy girl, usually unflustered. Mila had so hoped that Gus would like her.

Gus is around the corner toward the dead end. He’s in the side yard of someone’s house Mila doesn’t know—thank God that nobody is ever home in the daytime except kids. He’s squatting in a flower garden and he has his pants down, she can see his hairy thighs. She hopes he isn’t shitting on his pants. Behind him, pale pink hollyhocks rise in spikes.

“Gus!” she calls.

He waves at her to go away.

“Gus,” she says. Cathy is still trailing her. “Gus, what are you doing?”

“Can’t a man go to the bathroom in peace?” he says, and he sounds so much like himself that if she weren’t used to all the craziness she might have burst into tears.

She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t care. That’s when she decides it all has to stop. Because she just doesn’t care.

“It is sometimes possible to cure Alzheimer’s, it’s just not possible to cure the person who has Alzheimer’s,” the treatment info explains. “We can fix the brain and replace the damaged neurons with new brain but we can’t replace the memories that are gone.” It’s the way Alzheimer’s has been all along, Mila thinks, a creeping insidious disease that takes away the person you knew and leaves this angry, disoriented stranger. The video goes on to explain how the treatment—which is nearly completely effective in only about thirty percent of cases, but which arrests the progress of the disease in ninety percent of the cases and provides some functional improvement in almost all cases—cannot fix the parts of the brain that have been destroyed.

Mila is a quality engineer. This is a place she is accustomed to, a place of percentages and estimations, of statements of certainty about large groups, and only guesses about particular individuals. She can translate it, “We can promise you everything, we just can’t promise it will happen to Gus.”

Gus is gone anyway, except in odd moments of habit.

When Gus was diagnosed they had talked about whether or not they should try this treatment. They had sat at the kitchen table, a couple of engineers, and looked at this carefully. Gus had said no. “In five years,” he’d said, “there’s a good chance the Alzheimer’s will come back. So then we’ll have spent all this money on a treatment that didn’t do any good and where will you be then?”

In some people it reverses in five years. But they’ve only been doing it for seven years, so who knows?

Gus had diagrammed the benefits. At very best he would be cured. Most likely they would only have spent a lot of money to slow the disease down. “And even if I’m cured, the disease could come roaring back,” he’d said. “I don’t think I want to have this disease for a long time. I know I don’t want to have it twice.”

His hands are small for a man, which sounds dainty but isn’t. His hands are perfect, the nails neat and smooth, but he hadn’t been fussy. He’d been deft with a pencil, had been good at engineering drawings before they did them on computer, and his diagram of benefits and liabilities on a piece of computer paper had been neat. “Don’t cry,” he’d said.

Gus couldn’t handle it when she cried. For the thirty years of their marriage, when she’d had to cry—which was always at night, at least in her memory—she’d gone downstairs after he’d gone to sleep and sat on the couch and cried. She would have liked him to comfort her, but in marriage you learn what other people’s limits are. And you learn your own.

For the cost of her house, she can have them put an enzyme in Gus’s brain that will scrub out the Alzheimic plaque that has replaced so much of his neural structure. And then they will put in undifferentiated cells and a medium called Transglycyn and that medium will contain a virus that tells the DNA within the cells to create neurons and grow him a new brain.

She calls Dan in Boulder.

“I thought you and Dad didn’t want to do this,” Dan says.

“I thought so, too,” she says. “But I didn’t know what it would be like.”

Dan is silent. Digital silence. You can hear a pin drop silence. “Do you want me to come home?” he asks.

“No,” she says. “No, you stay out there. You just started your job.” Dan is a chef. He studied at the Culinary Institute of America, and spent a couple of years as a line chef in the Four Seasons in New York. Now Etienne Corot is opening a new restaurant in Boulder called, of course, “Corot,” and Dan has gotten a job as sous-chef. It’s a promotion. The next step in making a name for himself, so that someday he can open his own restaurant.

“You need to keep your eye on Schuster’s,” she says. It’s an old joke between them, that he’s going to open a four-star restaurant called Schuster’s. They both agree that Schuster’s sounds like a Big Boy franchise.

“ ‘Artesia,’ ” he says.

“Is that it?” she asks.

“That’s the latest name,” he says. They have been trading names for the restaurant he will someday open since he started at the Culinary Institute. “You like it?”

“As long as I don’t think about the cattle town in New Mexico.”

“No shit,” he says, and she can imagine him at the other end of the phone, ducking his head the way his dad does. Dan is an inch taller than Gus, with the same long legs and arms. Unfortunately, he got her father’s hairline and already, at twenty-five, his bare temples make her tender and protective.

“I can fly out,” he says.

“It’s not like surgery,” she says, suddenly irritated. She wants him to fly out, but there isn’t any point in it. “And I’d get tired of us sitting there holding hands for the next three months while they eradicate the plaque, because as far as you and I will be able to tell, nothing will be happening.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Dan,” she says. “I feel as if I’m spending your money.”

“I don’t care about the money. I don’t like to talk about it that way, anyway,” he says. “I just feel weird because Dad said not to do it.”

“I know,” she says. “But I don’t feel as if this person is your dad anymore.”

“It won’t be Dad when it’s done, will it?” Dan says.

“No,” Mila says. “No, but at least maybe it will be a person who can take care of himself.”

“Look, Mom,” he says, his voice serious and grown-up. “You’re there. You’re dealing with it every day. You do what you have to do. Don’t worry about me.”

She feels tears well up in her eyes. “Okay, honey,” she says. “Well, you’ve got stuff you need to do.”

“Call me if you want me to come out,” he says.

She wants him off the phone before she cries. “I will,” she says.

“Love you, Mom,” he says.

She knows he can tell she was crying.

“I’m not sick,” Gus says.

“It’s a check-up,” Mila says.

Gus sits on the examining room table in his shorts and T-shirt. It used to be that she said the litany of what she loved when she saw him like this—his nose, his blue eyes made to look the distance, the hollow of his collarbone, his long legs. Show me your butt, she’d say, and he’d turn and shake it at her and they’d cackle like children.

“We’ve waited long enough,” Gus says.

“It’s not that long,” Mila says, and at that moment the doctor knocks and opens the door. With him is a technician, a black woman, with a cart.

“Who are you?” Gus says.

“I’m Dr. Feingold.” He is patient, is Dr. Feingold. He met with them for an hour yesterday and he talked with them for a few minutes this morning before Gus had his blood work. But Gus doesn’t remember. Gus was worse than usual. They are in Atlanta for the procedure. Lexington, Kentucky, and Windsor, Ontario, both have clinics that do the procedures, but Dr. Feingold had worked with Raymond Miller, the Ph.D. who originated the treatment. So she picked Atlanta.

Gus is agitated. “You’re not my doctor,” he says.

Dr. Feingold says, “I’m a specialist, Mr. Schuster. I’m going to help you with your memory problems.”

Gus looks at Mila.

“It’s true,” she says.

“You’re trying to hurt me,” Gus says. “In fact, you’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

“No, honey,” she says. “You’re sick. You have Alzheimer’s. I’m trying to help you.”

“You’ve been poisoning me,” Gus says. Is it because he’s scared? Because everything is so strange?

“Do you want to get dressed?” Dr. Feingold says. “We can try this in an hour.”

“I don’t want to try anything,” Gus says. He stands up. He’s wearing white athletic socks and he has the skinny calves of an old man. The disease has made him much older than fifty-seven. In a way she is killing him. Gus will never come back and now she’s going to replace him with a stranger.

“Take some time,” Dr. Feingold says. Mila has never been to a doctor’s office where the doctor wasn’t scheduled to death. But then again, she’s never paid $74,000 for a doctor’s visit, which is what today’s injection of brain scrubbing Transglycyn will cost. Not really just the visit and the Transglycyn. They’ll stay here two more days and Gus will be monitored.

“Goddamn,” Gus says, sitting back down. “Goddamn you all.”

“All right, Mr. Schuster,” Dr. Feingold says.

The technician pushes the cart over and Dr. Feingold says, “I’m going to give you an injection, Mr. Schuster.”

“Goddamn,” Gus says again. Gus never much said “Goddamn” before.

The Transglycyn with the enzyme is supposed to be injected in the spine but Dr. Feingold takes a hypodermic and gives Gus a shot in the crook of his arm.

“You just lie there a moment,” Dr. Feingold says.

Gus doesn’t say anything.

“Isn’t it supposed to be in his back?” Mila says.

“It is,” Dr. Feingold says, “but right now I want to reduce his agitation. So I’ve given him something to calm him.”

“You didn’t say anything about that,” she says.

“I don’t want him to change his mind while we’re giving him the enzyme. This will relax him and make him compliant.”

“Compliant,” she says. She’s supposed to complain, they’re drugging him and they didn’t tell her they would. But she’s pretty used to him not being compliant. Compliant sounds good. It sounds excellent. “Is it a tranquilizer?” she asks.

“It’s a new drug,” Dr. Feingold says. He is writing it down on Gus’s chart. “Most tranquilizers can further agitate patients with Alzheimer’s.”

“I have Alzheimer’s,” Gus says. “It makes me agitated. But sometimes I know it.”

“Yes, Mr. Schuster,” Dr. Feingold says. “You do. This is Vicki. Vicki is someone who helps me with this all the time, and we’re very good at doing it, but when we roll you on your side, I need you to lie very still, all right?”

Gus, who hated when doctors patronized him, says dopily, “All right.” Gus, who during a colonoscopy, higher than a kite on Demerol, asked his doctor if they had gotten to the ileum, because even with his brain cradled in opiates, Gus just liked to know.

Vicki and Dr. Feingold roll Gus onto his side.

“Are you comfortable, Mr. Schuster?” Vicki asks. She has a down-home Atlanta accent.

Dr. Feingold goes out the door. He comes back in with two more people, both men, and they put a cushion behind Gus’s knees so it’s hard for him to roll over, and then another cushion at the back of his neck.

“Are you all right, Mr. Schuster?” Dr. Feingold asks. “Are you comfortable?”

“Okay,” Gus says, fuzzy.

Vicki pulls his undershirt up and exposes his knobby backbone. Dr. Feingold marks a place with a black pen. He feels Gus’s back like a blind woman, his face absent with concentration, and then he takes a needle and says, “There will be a prick, Mr. Schuster. This will make the skin on your back numb, okay?” He gives Gus another shot.

Gus says “Ow” solemnly.

And then Dr. Feingold and Vicki make some marks with the pen. Then there is another needle, and Dr. Feingold makes a careful injection in Gus’s back. He leaves the needle in a moment, pulls the part of the hypodermic out that had medication in it, and Vicki takes it and gives him another one and he puts that in the hypodermic and injects it.

Mila isn’t sure if that’s more painkiller or the Transglycyn.

“Okay, Mr. Schuster,” Dr. Feingold says. “We’re done with the medicine. But you lie still for a few minutes.”

“Is it like a spinal tap?” Mila asks. “Will he get a headache?”

Dr. Feingold shakes his head. “No, Mrs. Schuster, that’s it. When he feels like sitting up, he can.”

So now it is inside him. Soon it will start eating the plaque in his brain.

The places it will eat clean were not Gus anymore, anyway. It’s not as if Gus is losing anything more. It bothers her, though, the Transglycyn goo moving along the silver-gray pathways of his neurons, dissolving the Swiss cheese damage of the disease. And then, what, there are gaps in his head? Fluid-filled gaps in his brain, the tissue porous as a sponge and poor Gus, shambling along, angry and desperate.

She wants to stroke his poor head. But he is quiet now, sedated, and maybe it’s best to let him be.

THE CLINIC IS more like a hotel than a hospital, the bed has a floral bedspread and over it is a painting of cream and peach roses in a vase. After being sedated during the day, Gus is restless. He will not go to bed. If she goes to bed he’ll try to go out into the hall, but the door is locked from the inside so he can’t get out. There’s a touchpad next to the door and she’s used 0815, Dan’s birthday, as the code. She doesn’t think Gus knows Dan’s birthday anymore. A sign on the door says, IN CASE OF FIRE, ALL DOORS WILL OPEN AUTOMATICALLY. Gus runs his fingers along the crack between the door and the wall. “I want to go out,” he says, and she says that he can’t. “I want to go out,” he says, and she says, “We’re not home, we have to stay here.”

“I want to go out,” he says, again and again, long after she stops answering him. He finally sits and watches five minutes of television but then he gets up and goes back to the door. “Let’s go home,” he says this time, and when she doesn’t answer, he runs his long fingers like spiders up and down the edge of the door. He sits, he gets up and stands at the door for minutes, twenty, thirty minutes at a time, until she is blind with fatigue and her eyes burn with tears and she finally shrieks, “There’s no way out!”

For a moment he looks at her, befuddled. The he turns back to the door and says querulously, “I want to go out.”

At one point she goes to him and folds both his hands in hers and says, “We’re both trapped.” She is dizzy with fatigue but if she cries he will just get worse. He looks at her and then goes back to searching the door, moth fingers fluttering. She turns out the light and he howls, “Oww-ow-oww-ow—” until she snaps the light back on.

Finally, she shoves past him and locks him in the room. She goes down to the lounge and sits on a couch, pulling her bare feet up and tucking them under her nightgown. The lounge is deserted. She thinks about sleeping here for a few hours. She feels vacant and exposed. She leans her head back and closes her eyes and there is the distant white noise of the ventilation system and the strange audible emptiness of a big room and she can feel her brain swooping instantly into a kind of nightmare where she is sliding into sleep thinking someone is sick and she needs to do something and when she jerks awake her whole body feels a flush of exhaustion.

She can’t stay here. Is Gus howling in the room?

When she opens the door he is standing there, but she has the odd feeling he may not have noticed she was gone.

He finally lets her talk him into lying down around 3:15 in the morning but he is up again a little after six.

She asks the next day if it is the stuff they’ve injected, but of course, it’s not. It’s the strangeness. The strange room, the strange place, the Alzheimer’s, the ruin of his brain.

The social worker suggests that until they are ready to insert the cellular material and stimulate neural growth, Gus should go to a nursing facility for elderly with dementia.

Even if she could afford it, Mila thinks she would have to say no. When they resculpt his brain, he will be a different person, but she will still be married to him, and she wants to stay with him and to be part of the whole process, so that maybe her new husband, the new Gus, will still be someone she loves. Or at least someone she can be married to.

Mila is lucky they can afford this. It is an experimental treatment so insurance doesn’t cover the cost. She and Gus have money put away for retirement from his parents and hers, but she can’t touch that or capital gains taxes will go off, as her accountant says, like a time bomb. But they can sell their house.

The old house sells for $217,000. The first half of the treatment is about $74,000. The second half of the treatment is a little over $38,000. Physical therapy is expected to cost a little over $2,100 a month. Home health is $32,000 through an agency (insurance will no longer pay because this is an experimental treatment). That doesn’t include airfare and a thousand incidentals. At least the house is paid off, and the tax man does some finagling and manages to save her $30,000 for a down payment on a little townhouse.

It has two floors, a postage stamp-sized backyard, and monthly maintenance fees of $223 a month. Her mortgage is $739 a month.

It has a living room and kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. The carpet is a pale gray, and her living room furniture, which is all rich medieval reds and ochre and ivory, doesn’t go well, but it doesn’t look bad, either.

“Why is our couch here?” Gus asks plaintively. “When can we go home?”

ONE EVENING WHEN he says he wants to go home she puts him in the car and starts driving. When Dan was a baby, when he wouldn’t go to sleep, the sound of a car engine would soothe him, and this evening it seems to have the same effect on Gus. He settles happily into the passenger seat of their seven-year-old Honda sedan, and as she drives he strokes the armrest and croons. She’s not sure at first if the crooning means he’s agitated, but after a while she decides it’s a happy sound.

“You like going for a ride?” she says to him.

He doesn’t answer but he keeps on crooning, “ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo.”

Another night she wakes up alone in the bed. Alzheimer’s victims don’t sleep much. Used to be that if Gus or Dan got up in the night she heard them, but she’s pretty tired these days.

She finds him downstairs in the kitchen, taking the bowl of macaroni and cheese out of the refrigerator. It’s covered in foil because she’s out of plastic wrap. “Are you hungry?” she asks.

Gus says, “I can take care of it.” His tone is ordinary and reassuring. He puts the bowl in the microwave.

“You can’t put it in the microwave, honey,” Mila says. “You have to take the foil off the top first.” She hates that she only calls him “honey” when she is exasperated with him, and when she doesn’t want to make him angry. It feels passive aggressive. Or something.

Gus closes the microwave door and pushes the time button.

“Gus,” she says, “don’t do that.” She reaches past him and opens the microwave door, and he pushes her away.

“Gus,” she says, “don’t.” She reaches for the door and he pushes her away again.

“Leave it alone,” he says.

“You can’t,” she says. “It’s got foil on it.” Gus is an engineer, for God’s sake. Or was.

She tries to stop him, puts her hand on his forearm, and he turns to face her, his face a grimace of anger, and he pulls his arm back and punches her in the face.

He is still a strong, tall man and the punch knocks her down.

She doesn’t even know how to feel it. No one has punched her since she was maybe twelve, and that was a pretty ineffective punch, even if her nose did bleed. It stops her from thinking. She is lying on the kitchen floor. Gus pushes the start button on the microwave.

Mila touches her face. Her lip is cut, she can taste the blood. Her face hurts.

There is a flicker as the microwave arcs. She doesn’t have it in her to get up and do anything about it. Gus frowns. Not at her, at the microwave.

Mila sits up and explores her face. One of her teeth feels wobbly to her tongue. Gus doesn’t pay any attention, he’s watching the microwave. He’s intent. It’s a parody of the engineer solving a problem.

The microwave starts arcing in earnest and Gus steps back.

Mila sits on the floor until the microwave starts smoking and only then does she get up. She doesn’t even feel like crying, although her mouth and cheek hurt. She pushes cancel on the microwave and then pulls it out of the alcove and unplugs it. She leaves it half pulled out and goes over to the sink and spits bloody saliva. She rinses her mouth and then washes the sink out.

“Go on up to bed,” she says.

Gus looks at her. Is he angry? She steps back, out of range. Now she is scared. He’s not a child, he’s a big man. Is he going to be upset with her because he’s still hungry?

“I’ll heat you up some soup,” she says. “Okay?”

Gus looks away, his mouth a little open.

She grabs an oven mitt, opens the smoking microwave carefully and takes out the macaroni and cheese. The ceramic bowl has cracked in half and the foil is blackened, but she holds it together until she can throw it out. Gus sits down. She takes the microwave outside on the grass. She doesn’t think it’s burning inside, but she isn’t sure. She can’t sit and watch it, not with Gus unsupervised. So if it starts to smolder, it starts to smolder. The grass is damp.

Back inside she finds Gus in the living room eating ice cream out of the carton with a serving spoon. There is ice cream on him and on the couch.

She’s afraid to go near him, so she sits on a chair and watches him eat.

She cannot shake the feeling that the man in front of her should not be Gus, because the Gus she has been married to would not, would never, hit her. The Gus she was married to had certain characteristics that were inalienable to him—his neatness—almost fussiness. His meticulousness. His desperate need to be good, to be oh so good. But this is still Gus, too. Even as the ice cream drips on his legs and on the couch. What exactly is Gus? What defines Gusness? What is it she married? It is not just this familiar body. There is some of Gus inside, too. Something present that she can’t put her finger on, maybe only habits of Gusness.

Later, when he goes up to bed, sticky with ice cream, she throws out the carton even though it is still half full. Outside, the microwave sits inert and smelling faintly of hot appliance. She goes upstairs and goes to bed in the other bedroom.

She tries to think of what to do. The Transglycyn is eating out the plaque, but he won’t start to get better until they replace the neurons and the neurons grow and they don’t even go to Atlanta until next month. It will be three months after that before she begins to see any improvement.

The old bastard. Alzheimer’s is the bastard.

She doesn’t know what to do. She can’t even afford a leave of absence at work. Saturday, she thinks, she’ll hire a sitter and then she’ll rent a hotel room and sleep for a few hours. That will help. She’ll think better when she’s not so tired.

AT WORK, MILA’S closest friend is Phyllis. Phyllis is also a quality engineer. More and more engineers in QA are women and Phyllis says that’s why QA engineers make $10,000 a year less than design and production engineers. “It’s like Human Resources,” she says. “It’s a girl-ghetto of engineering now.” “Girl-ghetto” is a little ironic, coming from Phyllis who is five foot two inches, weighs close to two hundred pounds, and who has close-cut iron gray hair.

Phyllis comes by Mila’s cubicle at midmorning and says, “So how’s the old bastard.” Phyllis knew Gus when he was still Gus.

“A real bastard,” Mila says and looks up away from the computer monitor, up at Phyllis, the side of her face all morning-glory purple.

“Oh my God!” Phyllis says, “What happened?”

“Gus decked me.”

“Oh God,” Phyllis says. In the cafeteria, sitting with a cup of coffee in front of her, she says dryly, “You really look quite amazing,” which is a relief, because Phyllis’s initial shock, her initial speechlessness was almost more than Mila could bear. If Phyllis can’t joke about it. . . .

She does not say, “You’ve got to put him in a home.” The other thing Phyllis does say is, “Gus would be appalled.”

“He would,” Mila says, utterly grateful. “He would, wouldn’t he.”

They go to the Cleveland Clinic and Gus is anesthetized and some of his bone marrow is extracted. The frozen bone marrow is shipped to Atlanta so they can extract undifferentiated stem cells to inject in him to replace his own missing neurons.

After the anesthetic he is agitated for two days. His balance is off and his hip hurts where they extracted the bone marrow and he calls her a bitch.

Two weeks later they go to Atlanta and the procedure to inject the undifferentiated cells and virus trigger are almost identical to the first procedure. Gus swings at her twice more; once at the clinic in Atlanta and once back in the townhouse, but she’s watching because she’s afraid of him now, and she gets out of the way both times. She warns Iris, the new home health. (Cathy left because her boyfriend has a cousin in Tampa who can get him some sort of job.) Iris is in her thirties, heavy and not friendly. Not unfriendly. Iris says Gus never gets that way around her. Is she lying? Mila wonders. And then, why would she?

Is Iris saying that Gus likes Iris better than Mila? Mila always has the feeling that Iris thinks Mila should be home more. That Mila should be taking care of Gus herself.

Gus likes car rides, sometimes. They climb into her car.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“To therapy,” she says. He’ll start to get agitated now, she thinks.

But he puts the window down and the trees go past, and he leans his head back and croons.

“Are you happy, Saxophone Man?” Mila says.

Everything is in stasis now—he grows no better but no worse until something happens with the cells they put in his brain. Three months until they see any difference, at the earliest. But now, one month after they injected new cells into his gap-ridden brain, they will do some tests to benchmark.

It all makes perfect sense. Too bad we never benchmark when we’re healthy, she thinks. Maybe she should have herself benchmarked. Mila Schuster, cognitive function raw scores at age fifty-one. Then if dementia got her in its jaws, they could chart the whole cycle. Hell, benchmark the whole population, like they benchmark women with mammograms between the ages of forty-five and fifty.

Unless it has already started. She forgets things at work. She knows it is just because she is so worried about Alzheimer’s. Senior moments, Allen, one of the home health used to call those times when you stand in the kitchen and can’t remember what you came for.

If she got Alzheimer’s, who would take care of her? She and Gus would end up in an institution, both in diapers and unaware of each other.

Gus croons.

“Saxophone Man,” she says. There is something dear to her about the ruined Gus, even through all the fear and the anger and the dismay. This great ruin of a fine brain. This engineer who could so often put his finger on a problem and say, “There. That’s it. The higher the strength of the plastic in the handle, the more brittle it is. You want to back off on the strength a bit and let the thing flex or it’s going to shatter. Particularly if it sits in sunlight and the UV starts breaking down the plastic.”

What a marvelous brain you had, she thinks. You’d say it and I’d see it, everybody would see it, obvious then. But everything is obvious once you see it.

The therapy is done at a place called Baobab Tree Rehab in a strip shopping mall. The anchor store in the mall is a Sears Hardware, which is Sears with just tools. Inside, Baobab Tree Rehab is like insurance companies and mortgage companies—there are ficus trees in pots in front of the windows, and rat’s maze cubicles like there are in older office buildings. Once, years before, Gus was walking with Mila at work when suddenly he crouched a bit so he was her height—she is five three—and said, it really is a maze for you. That was the first time she realized he could see over the tops of the cubicles, and so they didn’t really work like walls for him.

Gus is looking over the cubicles now, too.

Their therapist is young. She comes out to meet them. “Mr. Schuster, Mrs. Schuster, I’m Eileen.”

Mila likes that she talks to Gus. Gus may or may not care, but Mila figures it means that they think about things.

Eileen takes them back past the cubicles to a real room with a table in it. There are shelves on the wall.

“Mrs. Schuster,” she says, “I’d like you to sit in with us this first time.” Mila has not even thought about not sitting in, but now, suddenly she longs to be allowed to leave. She could go for a walk. Go take a nap. But Gus will probably get upset if she leaves him with a stranger.

And nearly everyone is a stranger.

Gus sits down at the table, bemused.

Eileen takes a puzzle with big wooden pieces off of a shelf and says, “Mr. Schuster? Do you like to do puzzles?”

Gus says, “No.”

Did Gus like to do puzzles? Isn’t engineering a kind of puzzle? Mila can’t remember Gus ever doing regular puzzles—but they were so busy. Their life wasn’t exactly conducive to sitting down and doing puzzles. Gus built telescopes for a while. And then he built model rockets. He made such beautiful rockets. He would sit in front of the television and sand the rocket fins to get the perfect airfoil shape, sawdust falling into a towel on his lap, and then he would glue them to the rocket body using a slow setting epoxy, and finally, when they were about set, he’d dip his finger in rubbing alcohol and run it down the seam to make the fillet smooth and perfect. He made beautiful rockets and then shot them off, risking everything.

“Let’s try a puzzle,” Eileen says.

“Mila?” It is Gus on the phone.

“I’ll get back to you,” Mila tells Roger. Roger is the manufacturing engineer on the project she’s working on.

“Look,” Roger says, “I just need a signature and I’ll get out of your hair—”

“It’s Gus,” Mila says.

“Mila, honey,” Roger says, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got four thousand parts in IQA.” He wants her to sign off on allowing the parts to be used, even though they’re not quite to spec, and she’s pretty sure he’s right that they can use them. But her job is to be sure.

“Mila,” Gus says in her ear, “I think I’ve got bees in my head.”

Roger knew Gus. And Roger is a short-sighted bastard who doesn’t care about anything but four thousand pieces of ABS plastic pieces. Actually Roger is just doing his job. Roger is thorough.

“I promise it’s okay,” Roger says. “I assembled twenty of them, they worked fine.”

Mila signs.

“Mila?” Gus says. “Can you hear me? I think I’ve got bees in my head.”

“What do you mean, honey,” she says.

“It itches in my head.”

Gus isn’t supposed to feel anything from the procedures. There aren’t nerve endings in the brain, he can’t be feeling anything. It’s been four months since the second procedure.

“It itches in your head,” Mila says.

“That’s right,” Gus says. “Can you come pick me up? I’m ready to go home now.”

Gus is at home, of course, with Iris, the home health. But if Mila says that he’s at home, Gus will get upset. “I’ll be there in a while to pick you up. Let me talk to Iris.”

“My head itches,” Gus says. “Inside.”

“Okay, honey,” Mila says. “Let me talk to Iris.”

Gus doesn’t want to give the phone to Iris. He wants . . . something. He wants Mila to take care of this head itching thing, or whatever it is that’s going on. Mila doesn’t know what Gus knows about the procedure. Maybe he’s sort of pieced this together to get her to come and take him home. Maybe something strange is going on. It is an experimental procedure. Maybe this is just more weird Alzheimer’s behavior. Maybe he has a headache and this is what he can say.

“It’s bees,” he says.

Finally he lets her talk to Iris.

“Does he have a temperature? Does anything seem wrong?” she asks Iris.

“No,” says Iris. “He’s real good today, Mrs. Schuster. I think that brain cells are growing back because he’s really good these last couple of days.”

“Do I need to come home?” Mila asks.

“No, ma’am. He just insisted on calling you. I don’t know where the bees thing comes from, he didn’t say that to me.”

Maybe the tissue in his head is being rejected. It shouldn’t be. The cells are naïve stem cells. They’re from his own body. Maybe there was a mistake.

When she gets home he doesn’t mention it.

Sitting across from him at the dinner table, she can’t decide if he’s better or not. Is he handling a fork better?

“Gus?” she says. “Do you want to look at some photographs after dinner?”

“Okay,” he says.

She sits him down on the couch and pulls out a photo album. She just grabs one, but it turns out to be from when Dan was in first grade. “There’s Dan,” she says. “There’s our son.”

“Uh-huh,” Gus says. His eyes wander across the page. He flips to the next page, not really looking.

So much is gone. If he does get smarter, she’ll have to teach him his past again.

There is a picture of Dan sitting on a big pumpkin. There is someone, a stranger, off to one side, and there are rows of pumpkins, clearly for sale. Dan is sitting with his face upturned, smiling the over-big smile he used to make every time his picture was being taken. He looks as if he is about six.

Mila can’t remember where they took the picture.

What was Dan that year for Halloween? She used to make his costumes. Was that the year he was the knight? And she made him a shield and it was too heavy to carry, so Gus ended up carrying it? No, because she made the shield in the garage in the house on Talladega Trail, and they didn’t move there until Dan was eight. Dan had been disappointed in the shield, although she couldn’t remember why. Something about the emblem. She couldn’t even remember the emblem, just that the shield was red and white. She had spent hours making it. It had been a disaster, although he had used it for a couple of years afterward, playing sword fight in the front yard.

How much memory did anybody have? And how much of it was even worth keeping?

“Who is that?” Gus asks, pointing.

“That’s my mother,” Mila says. “Do you remember my mother?”

“Sure,” Gus says, which doesn’t mean anything. Then he says, “Cards.”

“Yeah,” Mila says. “My mother played bridge.”

“And poker,” Gus says. “With Dan.”

The magpie mind, she thinks. He can’t remember where he lives but he can remember that my mother taught Dan to play poker.

“Who is that?” he asks.

“That’s our neighbor on South Bend,” Mila says. Thankfully, his name is written next to the photo. “Mike. That’s Mike. He was a volunteer fireman, remember?”

Gus isn’t even looking at the photos. He’s looking at the room. “I think I’m ready to go home now,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. “We’ll go home in a few minutes.”

That satisfies him until he forgets and asks again.

DAN COMES IN THE DOOR with his suitcase.

“It’s nice, Mom,” he says. “It’s really nice. The way you talked I thought you were living in a project.”

Mila laughs, so delighted to see him, so grateful. “I didn’t say it was that bad.”

“It’s plain,” he says, his voice high to mimic her, “it’s just a box, but it’s all right.”

“Who’s there?” Gus calls.

“It’s me, Dad. It’s Dan.” His face tightens with . . . worry? Nervousness, she decides.

“Dan?” his dad says.

“Hi Dad,” he says. “It’s me, Dan. Your son.” He is searching his father’s face for recognition.

It is one of Gus’s good days, and Mila has only a moment of fear before Gus says, “Dan. Visiting. Hello.” And then in that astonishingly normal way he sometimes does, “How was your flight?”

Dan grins. “Great, Dad, it was great.”

Is it the treatment that makes Gus remember? Or is it just one of those odd moments?

Dan is home for Christmas. It’s his Christmas gift for her, he says, to give her a break. It’s no break because she’s been cleaning and trying to buy presents off the net. Thank God for the net. She’s bought Dan cookbooks and cds, a beautiful set of German knives that he’s always wanted but would never get because he never cooks at home. She’s spent way too much money, but what would she buy Gus? She’s bought Gus chocolates for a palate gone childlike. A couple of warm bright shirts. A puzzle.

“I can’t believe you’re here,” she says, and she can feel her face stretched too wide.

“I’m here,” he says. “Of course I’m here. Where else would I be? Lisa says hello.”

Lisa is the new girlfriend. “You could have brought her,” Mila says.

Gus stands there, vacant and uninterested.

Dan says, “Dad, I’ve met a really nice girl.” She’s told Gus about Lisa, but mostly it’s to hear her own chatter and because Gus seems soothed by chatter. Whether the magpie left of his mind has noticed the name, she doesn’t know.

“I didn’t bring her,” Dan says. “I thought I would be enough disruption.”

Gus doesn’t even appear to try to follow the conversation.

“I’ll show you your room,” Mila says. She’s putting Dan in the guest room, which means she’ll have to sleep with Gus. This week he has been going to sleep at ten or even earlier. And sleeping until early morning, say, five or six. That, she thinks, has to be the treatment.

On Christmas Eve, Dan makes a fabulous feast. On Christmas Eve they used to eat roast beef, and then on Christmas day they’d eat roast beef sandwiches all day, but in the last few years she’s made just a normal meal for the two of them. Dan makes a Christmas roast and Yorkshire pudding. There are puréed chestnuts and roasted potatoes and a salad with pomegranate and champagne dressing. “For dessert,” he says, “crème brûlée. I borrowed a torch from Corot’s.” He brandishes a little handheld torch like the ones in the Williams-Sonoma catalogue. “This is going to be the best Christmas ever!” he cackles, which has been his joke for years, an ironic reference to all those Christmas television specials.

Gus does a puzzle. He has been doing them in therapy and the therapist (a different one from the first one, who is now on maternity leave) says that there are definite signs that the cells are grafting, filling in. Gus likes puzzles. She buys the ones for children eight to twelve. Cannonball Adderly is on the cd player. The tightness in her eases a bit. Christmas has never been a time for good things to happen, not in her experience. Too much at stake, she always supposed. All those expectations of the best Christmas ever.

But at this moment she is profoundly grateful.

“Do you need help?” she calls into the kitchen. Dan has told her she isn’t allowed in on pain of death.

“No,” Dan calls out.

The smell of beef drippings is overwhelming. She has been living on microwavable dinners and food picked up at the grocery where they have already cooked stuff to take home and eat and Chinese takeout.

“Why’d you get rid of the microwave?” Dan asks from the kitchen.

“It shorted out,” Mila says.

Gus doesn’t look up from his puzzle. Does he remember that evening at all? That was after his brain was scrubbed out, so it isn’t something he would have lost. But did he ever have it? Does he know what he is living through, moment to moment, or is it like sand?

“Are you in there?” she whispers.

At six o’clock, there is more food than three people could ever eat in a month. Dan has sliced the beef and put beautifully finished slices on their plates. (Gus’s is cut up, she notices, and her eyes fill with gratitude.) The beef is cooked beautifully, and sits in a brown sauce with a swirl of horseradish. There is a flower cut out of carrot sitting on bay leaves on her plate and on Dan’s—Gus’s has the flower, but no bay leaf to mistake for food. The salad glistens and the pomegranate berries are like garnets. There is wine in her glass and in Dan’s—Gus’s glass has juice.

“Oh, my,” she breathes. It’s a dinner for grown-ups in a place that has never seen anything but frozen lasagna and Chinese takeout. “Oh, Dan,” she says. “It’s so beautiful.”

“It had better be,” Dan says. “It’s what I do for a living.”

“Gus,” she says. “Come eat Dan’s dinner.”

“I’m not hungry,” Gus says.

“Come and sit with me while I eat, then.”

Sometimes he comes and sometimes he doesn’t. Tonight he comes and she guides him to his seat.

“It’s Christmas Eve, Dad,” Dan says. “It’s roast beef for Christmas Eve dinner.” She wants to tell him not to try so hard, to just let Gus make his own way, but he has worked so hard. Please, no trouble, she thinks.

“Roast beef?” Gus says. He takes his fork and takes a bite. “It’s good,” he says. She and Dan smile at each other.

Mila takes a bite. “Where did you get this meat?” she asks.

“Reider’s Stop and Shop,” Dan says.

“No you didn’t,” she says.

“Sure I did,” Dan says. “You’ve just cooked so many years you don’t remember how it tastes when you’ve just been smelling. I got all my cooking talents from you, Mom.”

Not true. He is his father over again, with the same deep thoughtfulness, the same meticulousness. It is always a puzzle, cooking. She cooked as a hobby. Dan cooks with the same deep obsessiveness that Gus brought to model rockets!

“I don’t like that,” Gus says.

“What?” Dan says.

“That.” Gus points to the swirl of horseradish. “It’s nasty.”

“Horseradish?” Dan says. “You always liked horseradish.”

Gus had made a fetish of horseradish. And wasabi and chilies and ginger. He liked licorice and kimchee and stilton cheese and everything else that tasted strongly.

“It’s nasty,” Gus says.

“I’ll get you some without,” Mila says, before Dan fights. Never contradict, she thinks at Dan. It’s not important. “He’s not used to strong tastes anymore,” she says quickly to Dan, hoping Gus won’t pay attention, that she won’t have to explain.

“I’ll get it,” Dan says. “You sit.”

Dan brings a plate. “What have you been eating, Dad?” he asks. “Cottage cheese? Mom, shouldn’t he be getting tastes to, I don’t know, stimulate him?”

Gus frowns.

“Don’t,” she says. It’s hard enough without Dan making accusations.

Gus has retreated from all but the bland. He eats like a three-year-old might. Macaroni and cheese. Grilled cheese sandwiches. Tomato soup. Ice cream. And she’s let him because it was easy. She thinks about telling him that Gus has hit her. That they have been getting through the days.

Maybe inviting Dan was a mistake. Gus needs routine, not disruption.

“How’s that, Dad?” Dan says.

“Good,” Gus says. Gus eats the roast beef without horseradish, the potatoes, the chestnut purée. He cleans out the ramekin of crème brûlée with his index finger while Dan sits, smiling and bemused.

And then, full, he goes upstairs and goes to bed in his clothes. After an hour she goes up and takes off his shoes and covers him up. He sleeps, childlike and serene, until almost seven on Christmas morning.

“I’m getting better,” Gus announces after therapy one day in February.

“Yes,” Mila says, “you are.” He goes to therapy three times a week now, and does the kind of things they do with children who have sensory integration problems. Lots of touching and moving. Evenings after therapy he goes to bed early, worn out.

“I remember better,” he says.

He does, too. He remembers, for instance, that the townhouse is where they live. He doesn’t ask to go home, although he will say that he wishes they still lived in the other house. She thinks there is some small bit of recrimination in this announcement.

“Do you want to go out to eat?” she asks one evening. They haven’t gone out to eat in, oh, years. She is out of the habit.

She decides on Applebee’s, where the food is reassuringly bland. These days, Gus might be someone who had a stroke. He no longer looks vacant. There is someone there, although sometimes she feels as if the person there is a stranger.

After dinner at Applebee’s she takes him to rent a DVD. He wanders among the racks of DVDs and stops in the area of the store where they still have video tapes. “We used to watch these,” he says.

“We did,” she says. “With Dan.”

“Dan is my son,” he says. Testing. Although as far as she can tell he’s never forgotten who Dan is.

“Dan is your son,” she agrees.

“But he’s grown,” Gus says.

“Yes,” she says.

“Pick a movie for me,” he says.

“How about a movie you used to like?” She picks out Forbidden Planet. They had the tape until she moved them to the townhouse. She got rid of all of Gus’s old tapes when they moved because there wasn’t enough room. He had all the Star Wars tapes including the lousy ones. He had all the Star Trek movies, and 2001, Blade Runner, Back to the Future I and III.

“This is one of your favorites,” she says. “You made a model of the rocket.”

When Dan was a kid he loved to hear about when he was a baby, and Gus is that way now about what he was like “before.” He turns the DVD over and over in his hands.

At home he puts it in the player and sits in front of the screen. After a few minutes he frowns. “It’s old,” he says.

“It’s in black and white,” she says.

“It’s dumb,” he says. “I didn’t like this.”

She almost says, It was your favorite. They watched it when they were dating, sitting on the couch together. He had shown her all his science fiction movies. They’d watched Them on television. But she doesn’t, doesn’t start a fight. When he gets angry he retreats back into Alzheimer’s behavior, restless and pacing and then opaque.

She turns on the TV and runs the channels.

“Wait,” he says, “go back.”

She goes back until he tells her to stop. It’s a police show, one of the kind everyone is watching now. It’s shot three camera live and to her it looks like a cross between Cops and the old sitcom Barney Miller. Part of the time it’s sort of funny, like a sitcom, and part of the time it’s full of swearing and idiots with too many tattoos and too few teeth.

“I don’t like this,” she says.

“I do,” Gus says. And watches the whole show.

She lets the home health go.

Iris quit to go to another agency, Mila doesn’t know why, and then they got William. Luckily by the time they got William it was okay if Gus was alone sometimes because William never got there before eight-thirty and Mila had to leave for work before eight. William was an affable and inept twenty-something, but Gus seemed to like him. Because William was a man instead of a woman?

Gus says, “Thank you for putting up with me,” and William smiles.

“I’m so glad you got better, Mr. Schuster,” he says. “I never left before because a patient got better.”

“You helped a lot,” he says.

Gus can stay by himself. There’s so much he doesn’t know these days, among the strange things that he does. But he can follow directions. The latest therapist—they have had four in the ten months Gus has been going, and the latest is a patient young man named Chris—the latest therapist says that Gus has the capacity to be pretty much normal. It’s just a matter of re-learning. And he is re-learning as if he was actually much younger than he is, because of those new neurons forming connections.

There is some concern about those new neurons. Children form more and more connections until they hit puberty, and then the brain seems to sort through the connections and weed out some and reinforce others, to make the brain efficient in other ways. Nobody knows what will happen with Gus. And of course, the cause of the Alzheimer’s still lurks somewhere. Maybe in ten years he’ll start to deteriorate again.

“I am so grateful to you,” he says to Mila when William is gone. “You have been through so much for me.”

“It’s okay,” she says. “You’d do the same for me.” Although she doesn’t know what Gus would do. She doesn’t know if she likes this new Gus. This big child.

“I would do the same for you,” he says.

“Are you sure you wouldn’t stick me in some nursing home?” she says. “Only come visit me once a month?” She tries to make her tone broad, broad enough for anyone to see this comment as a joke.

But Gus doesn’t. Teasing distresses him. “No,” he says now, “I promise, Mila. I would look after you the way you looked after me.”

“I know, honey,” she says. “I was just joking.”

He frowns.

“Come on,” she says. “Let’s look at your homework.”

He is studying for his G.E.D. It’s a goal he and the therapist came up with. Mila wanted to say that Gus not only had a degree in engineering, he was certified, but of course that was the old Gus.

He’s studying the Civil War, and Mila checks his homework before he goes to his G.E.D. class.

“I think I want to go to college,” he says.

“What do you want to study?” she asks. She almost says, ‘Engineering?’ but the truth is he doesn’t like math. Gus was never very good at arithmetic, but he was great at conceptual math—algebra, calculus, differential equations. But now he doesn’t have enough patience for the drill in fractions and square roots.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe I want to be a therapist. I think I want to help people.”

Help me, she thinks. But then she squashes the thought. He is here, he is getting better. He is not squatting in the hollyhocks. She’s not afraid of him anymore. And if she doesn’t love him like a husband anymore, well, she still loves him.

“What was that boy’s name?” Gus says, squinting down the street.

He means the home health.

For a moment she can’t think and her insides twist in fear. It has started happening recently, when she forgets she feels this sudden overwhelming fear. Is it Alzheimer’s?

“William,” she says. “His name is William.”

“He was a nice boy,” Gus says.

“Yes,” Mila says, her voice and face calm but her heart beating too fast.

MADONNA OF THE MAQUILADORA

Gregory Frost

You first hear of Gabriel Perea and the Virgin while covering the latest fire at the Chevron refinery in El Paso. The blaze is under control, the water cannon hoses still shooting white arches into the scorched sky.

You’ve collected some decent shots, but you would still like to capture something unique even though you know most of it won’t get used. The Herald needs only one all-inclusive shot of this fire, and you got that hours ago. The rest is out of love. You like to think there’s a piece of W. Eugene Smith in you, an aperture in your soul always seeking the perfect image.

The two firemen leaning against one of the trucks is a good natural composition. Their plastic clothes are grease-smeared; their faces, with the hoods off, are pristine. Both men are Hispanic, but the soot all around them makes them seem pallid and angelic and strange. And both of them are smoking. It’s really too good to ignore. You set up the shot without them knowing, without seeming to pay them much attention, and that’s when you catch the snippet of their conversation.

“I’m telling you, cholo, the Virgin told Perea this explosion would happen. Mrs. Delgado knew all about it.”

“She tells him everything. She’s telling us all. The time is coming, I think.”

Click. “What time is that?” you ask, capping the camera.

The two men stare at you a moment. You spoke in Spanish—part of the reason the paper hired you. Just by your inflection, though, they know you’re not a native. You may understand all right, but you are an outsider.

The closest fireman smiles. His teeth are perfect, whiter than the white bar of the Chevron insignia beside him. Mexicans have good tooth genes, you think. His smile is his answer: He’s not going to say more.

“All right, then. Who’s Gabriel Perea?”

“Oh, he’s a prophet. The prophet, man.”

“A seer.”

“He knows things. The Virgin tells him.”

“The Virgin Mary?” Your disbelief is all too plain.

The first fireman nods and flicks away his cigarette butt, the gesture transforming into a cross—“Bless me, father. . . .”

“Does he work for Chevron?”

The firemen look at each other and laugh. “You kidding, man? They’d never hire him, even if he made it across the Rio Bravo with a green card between his teeth.”

Rio Bravo is what they call the Rio Grande. You turn and look, out past the refinery towers, past the scrub and sand and the Whataburger stand, out across the river banks to the brown speckled bluffs, the shapes that glitter and ripple like a mirage in the distance.

Juarez.

“He’s over there?”

“Un esclavo de la maquiladora.”

A factory slave. Already you’re imagining the photo essay. “The Man Who Speaks to the Virgin,” imagining it in The Smithsonian, The National Geographic. An essay on Juarez, hell on earth, and smack in the middle of hell, the Virgin Mary and her disciple. It assembles as if it’s been waiting for you to find it.

“How about,” you say, “I buy you guys a few beers when you’re finished and you tell me more about him.”

The second guy stands up, grinning. “Hey, we’re finished now, amigo.”

“Yeah, that fire’s drowning. Nothing gonna blow today. The Virgin said so.”

You follow them, then, with a sky black and roiling on all sides like a Biblical plague settling in for a prolonged stay.

You don’t believe in her. You haven’t since long ago, decades, childhood. Lapsed Catholics adopt the faith of opposition. The Church lied to you all the time you were growing up. Manipulated your fears and guilts. You don’t plan to forgive them for this. The ones who stay believers are the ones who didn’t ask questions, who accepted the rules, the restrictions, on faith. Faith, you contend, is all about not asking the most important questions. Most people don’t think; most people follow in their hymnals. It takes no more than a fingernail to scrape the gilt from the statues and see the rot below. The Virgin Mary didn’t exist for hundreds of years after the death of Jesus. She was fashioned by an edict, by a not very bright emperor. She had a cult following and they gained influence and the ear of Constantine. It was all politics. Quid pro quo. Bullshit. This is not what you tell the firemen, but it does make the Virgin the perfect queen for Juarez: that place is all politics and bullshit, too. Reality wrapped in a shroud of the fantastic and the grotesque. Just like the Church itself.

You went across the first time two years ago, right after arriving. The managing editor, a burly, bearded radical in a sportcoat and tie named Joe Baum, took you in. He knew how you felt about the power of photography, and after all you’re the deputy art director. One afternoon he just walked over to your desk and said, “Come on, we’re gonna take the afternoon, go visit some people you need to see.” You didn’t understand until later that he was talking about the ones on film. Most of them were dead.

Baum covered El Paso cultural events, which meant he mingled with managers and owners of the maquiladoras. “We’ll have to get you into the loop. Always need pictures of the overlords in their tuxes to biff up the society pages.” He didn’t like them too much.

In his green Ford you crossed over on the Puente Libre, all concrete and barbed wire. He talked the whole time he drove. “What you’re gonna see here is Bush and Clinton’s New World Order, and don’t kid yourself that it isn’t. Probably you won’t want to see it. Hell, I don’t want to see it, and America doesn’t want to see it with a vengeance.”

He took you to the apartment of a man named Jaime Pollamano. Baum calls him the Chicken Man. Mustache, dark hair, tattoos. A face like a young Charles Bronson. Chicken Man is a street photographer. “We buy some of his photos, and we buy some from the others, too.” There were six or seven others in the little apartment that day, one of them, unexpectedly, a woman. The windows were covered, and an old sheet had been stuck up on the wall. They’d been expecting you. Baum had arranged in advance for your edification. “What you’re gonna see today,” he promised, “is the photos we don’t buy.”

Then the slide show began. Pictures splashed across the sheet on the wall.

First there were the female corpses, all in various states of decay and decomposition. Most were nude, but they weren’t really bodies as much as sculptures now in leather and bone. The photographers had made them strange and haunting and terrifying, all at the same time. In the projector light you can see their eyes—squinting, hard, glancing down, here and there a look of pride, something almost feral. The woman is different. She stares straight at death. But not you. After awhile, you’re watching the photographers’ faces in order not to have to look at what they’ve captured.

The show went on for an hour. Like a tour of a huge art museum, long before it was over you’d reached maximum capacity. You were full, and the rest of their images just washed over you, unable to penetrate.

Afterward Baum introduced you to them but the room stayed dark. You walked through the line, shaking hands, nodding, dazed. One man was drunk. Another, the feral one, had the jittery sheen of an addict. The woman hung back from all of you.

Baum bought some of the pictures in spite of what he’d said, paying too much for them. Maybe he collected them, a kind of pornography—they sure weren’t going to get into the paper. He walked you out, across the street, past his car and through the Plaza de Armas, the main square. It was a Friday night and there must have been a thousand people milling about. The ghosts of the photos tagged along, bleeding into the world. The cathedral across the plaza was lit in neon reds, greens, and golds, looking more like a casino than a church. Everywhere, people were selling something. Most of it was trash collected and reassembled into trinkets, earrings, belts, whatever their skill allowed. There were clowns on stilts wandering around. A man selling containers of flavored ice chips. Baum bought two. Others sold tortillas, drugs, themselves. All of it smelled desperate. A lot of the crowd, Baum told you as you drove home after, were actually Americans. “They come across the border on Friday nights for a little action. The factory girls sell themselves for whatever extra dollars they can get from the party boys. Sometimes that’s more than they’ve made all week at their ‘honest’ jobs.”

You remember at some point in the drive asking him why the ill-paid workers don’t unionize, provoking Baum’s derisive laughter. “No union organizer would have a job by day’s end, is why. Some of them wouldn’t make it home alive, either, although you can’t tie anything to the corporations that fire them. Just as likely they’d piss off their co-workers by threatening the status quo, and some other low-wage esclavo would kill ’em. It’s happened before—whole shifts have been fired, everyone blamed for the actions of one or two. It’s a great testament to American greed, your maquiladora.”

That conversation comes back to you now, driving away from your drinks with the firemen. “Your maquiladora”—as if he was handing it over to you. Gabriel Perea in Baum’s terms is a dangerous man to himself and anyone who knows him. The Virgin has turned him, some would say saved him. Protecting him for something important. The firemen anticipate something between Armageddon and Rapture. Transcendence. All you know is that you want to get there before the Kingdom of Heaven opens for business or some co-worker splits his skull with a wrench.

“Pura guasa,” Baum says when you tell him what you want to do. “Just a lot of superstitious chatter. I’ve heard about this guy before. He’s like an urban legend over there. They need for him to exist, just like her.”

Nevertheless, you say, it’s a great story—the kind of thing that could garner attention. Awards. The human spirit finding the means to survive in the maquiladora even if that means is a fantasy. Baum concedes reluctantly that it could be a good piece.

“If there’s anything to it.”

There’s only one way to find that out. In c. de Juarez, all roads lead to the Chicken Man.

On the outside of his apartment someone has sprayed the words “Dios Está Aquí.” Chicken Man has moved three times since you first met him. Most of the street photographers move routinely, just to stay alive, to stay ahead of the narcotraficante, or the cops or anyone else they’ve pissed off with their pictures. Of the six you met that first day, only five are still living. Now Pollamano’s holed up just off the Pasea Triunfa de la Republica. And holed up is the right term. The cinder block building has chicken wire over the windows and black plastic trash bags on the inside of them. You knock once and slide your business card under the door.

After awhile the door opens slightly and you go in. It’s hot inside, and the air smells like chemicals, like fixer and developer. The only light on is a single red bulb. Chicken Man wears a Los Lobos tank top, shorts and sandals. He’s been breathing this air forever. He should have mutated by now. “¿Quiubo, Deputy?” Deputy is the street photographers’ name for you. Titles are better than names here anyway. They call Joe Baum “La Bamba.”

He invites you to sit. You tell him what the firemen told you. What you want to do with it.

“El Hombre de la Madona. I know the stories. A lot of ’em circulating round.”

“So, what’s the truth? He isn’t real? Doesn’t see her?”

“Oh, he’s real. And he maybe sees her.” He crosses to the shelves made of cinder blocks and boards, rummages around in one of thirty or so cardboard boxes, returns with a 4x5 print. In the red light, it’s difficult to see. Chicken Man turns on a maglight and hands it to you.

You’re looking at a man in dark coveralls. He’s standing at a crazy, Elvis Presley kind of angle, feet splayed and legs twisted. His hands are up in front of him, the fingers curled. There are big protective goggles over his eyes. He has a long square jaw and a mustache. Behind him other figures in goggles and coveralls stand, out of focus. They’re co-workers and this is inside a factory someplace. Fluorescent lights overhead are just greenish smears. The expression on his face is fierce—wide-eyed, damn near cross-eyed.

“He was seein’ her right then,” says the Chicken Man.

“You took this?”

“Me? I don’t set foot in the maquilas. Factory owners don’t like us, don’t want us taking pictures in there. Some of the young ones get in for a day, shoot and get out. I’m too old to try that kind of crap.”

“Who, then?”

“Doncella loca.”

He holds out his hand, takes the photo back. When he hands it back, there’s writing on it in grease pencil. A name, Margarita Espinada, and the words “Colonia Universidad.” He describes how to drive there. “You met her,” he says, “the very first time La Bamba brought you over. She lives in her car mostly. Auto loco. I let her use my chemicals for her pictures when she needs to. And the sink. She’s shooting the Tarahumara kids now. Indians. They don’t trust nobody, but they trust her. Same with the maquilas. Most of the workers are women. Teenagers. She gets in where I can’t. She’s kinda like you, Deputy. Only smart.” He grins.

You grin back and hand him a twenty and three rolls of film. He slides the money into his pocket but kisses the plastic canisters. “Gracias, amigo.”

Colonia Universidad is easy to find because half of it has just burned to the ground and the remains are still smoking. Blackened oil drums, charcoal that had defined shacks the day before, naked bed springs and a few bicycle frames twisted into Salvador Dali forms. Margarita Espinada is easy to find, too. She wears a camera around her neck, and black jeans, boots, and a blue work shirt. The jeans are dirty, the shirt stained dark under the arms and down the back. Her black hair is short. The other women around her are wearing dresses and have long hair, and scarves on their heads. At a quick glance you might mistake her for a man.

They’re all watching you before the car even stops. When you stride toward them, the women all back up, spread apart, move away. Margarita stands her ground. She raises her camera and takes your picture, as though in an act of defiance. From a distance she looks to be about twenty, but up close you can see the lines around the eyes and mouth. More like early thirties. Lean. There’s a thin scar across the bridge of her nose and one cheek.

If she remembers you from the Chicken Man’s, there’s no sign of it in her eyes. She turns, points. You follow, leaning around the nearest shack to see.

There’s a man dangling from some power lines down the hill, turning slowly like a charred pińata. “He was tryin’ to run a line from that transformer to his house. He wasn’t very good at it.”

You look away, and in the silence hand her the photo. She looks at it, at her name on the back, then wipes it down her thigh, wipes her name away. “You want a drink, Deputy?” There’s the tiniest suggestion of amusement in the question.

“I’m not really a deputy, you know. It’s just a nickname.”

“Hey, at least they don’t call you pendejo.”

“I don’t know that they don’t.”

She laughs, and for a moment that resolute, defiant face becomes just beautiful.

The shack she takes you to is barely outside the fire line. The frame is held together by nails driven through bottle caps. The walls are cut up shipping cartons for Three Musketeers candy bars. No floor, only dirt. There’s an old, rust-stained mattress and a couple of beat-up suitcases. She comes up with a bottle of tequila from God knows where, apologizes for the lack of ice and glasses. Then she takes a long swig from the mouth of the bottle. Her eyes are watering as she passes it to you. You smell her then, the odor of a woman mixed in with the smoke smell, sweat and flesh and dirt. You almost want to ask her why she does this, lives this way, but you haven’t any right. Instead you say his name as a question.

She lays down the photo. “Gabriel Perea is real, he exists. He’s what they call an assembler, on a production line. The maquila is about twenty miles from here. The story of him grows as it travels. All around.”

You recite the firemen’s version: great prophet, seer who will lead them into the kingdom of Heaven.

“Pura guasa,” is her answer. Pure foolishness—exactly what Baum said.

“But the picture. He is seeing the Virgin?”

She shrugs. “Yes, I know. From your eyes—how could I take the picture and not say it’s true?” She pushes her thumb against the image, covering the face. “This says it’s real. Not true. I know that he tells everyone what the Virgin wants them to know.”

“And what’s that?”

“To be patient. To wait. To endure their hardships. To remember that they will all find Grace in Heaven more beautiful than anything they can imagine.”

“That wouldn’t take much of a heaven. Has anyone else seen her?”

“No one in the factory now.”

“But someone else?”

Again, she shrugs. “Maybe. There are stories. Someone saw her in a bathroom. In a mirror. There are always stories once it starts. People who don’t want to be left out, who need to hear from her. That can be a lot of people.

“In Colonia El Mirador, a Sacred Heart shrine begins to bleed. It’s a cheap little cardboard picture, and they say it bleeds, so I go and take its picture.”

“Does it? Does it bleed?”

“I look in the picture I take, at how this piece of cardboard is nailed up, and I think, ah, the nailhead has rusted and the rust has run down the picture. That’s all. But I don’t say so.”

“So you lied to them, the people who made the claims about it?”

She snatches back the bottle. Her nostrils are flared in defiance, anger; but she laughs at your judgment, dismissing it. “I take the picture and it says what is what. If you don’t see, then what good is there in telling you how to see?”

The anger, contained, burns off her like radiation. You flip open your Minox and take her picture. She stares at you in the aftermath of the flash, as if in disbelief.

Breaking the tension, you ask, “Is he crazy?”

She squats down in the dirt, her back pressed against the far wall, takes off the camera and sets it on the mattress. “Listen, I got a job in a factory because I heard there was a dangerous man there. A Zapatista brother, someone of the Reality. He had workers stirred up.

“And I thought, I want to be there when they have him killed. I want to document it. The bosses there will pay workers to turn in their co-workers. Pay them more money than they can earn in a month, so it’s for sure someone will turn him in. But this Perea, he sought out those people and he convinced them not to do this. He offered hope. ‘The Dream we can all dream, so that when we awaken it will remain with us.’ That’s what he promised. When I learned that, then I knew I had to photograph him. And his murder.”

“Except the Virgin showed up.”

She grins. “I hadn’t even gotten my first exciting twenty dollar paycheck. The rumor circulated that he was going to confront the managers. Everyone was breathing this air of excitement. And I have my camera, I’m ready. Only all of a sudden, right on the factory floor, Gabriel Perea has a vision. He points and he cries, ‘Oh, Mother of God! See her? Can you see her? Can you hear her, good people?’ Of course we can’t. No one can. They try, they look all around, but you know they don’t see. He has to tell it. She says, ‘Wait.’ She says, ‘There will be a sign.’ She’ll come again and talk to us.”

“Did she? Did she come back?”

“About once every week. She came in and spoke to him when he was working. People started crowding around him, waiting for the moment. It’s always when he doesn’t expect. Pretty soon there are people clustering outside the factory and following Gabriel Perea home. The managers in their glass booths just watch and watch.”

“They didn’t try to stop it?”

“No. And no one got into trouble for leaving their position, or for trespassing. Trying to see him. To hear his message. And I begin to think, these men are at least afraid of God. There is something greater and more powerful than these Norteamericanos.”

“Yet you don’t believe it?”

In answer, she gets up and takes the larger suitcase and throws it open on the mattress. Inside are photos, some in sleeves, some loose, some in folders. You see a color shot of a mural of a Mayan head surrounded by temples, photos of women like those you scared off outside, one of a man lying peacefully sleeping on a mattress in a shack like this one. She glances at it and says, “He’s dead. His heater malfunctioned and carbon monoxide killed him. Or maybe he did it on purpose.”

She pulls out a manila folder and opens it. There’s a picture of an assembly line—a dozen women in hairnets and surgical gowns and rubber gloves, seated along an assembly line.

“What’s this place make?”

“Motion controller systems.” You stare at a photo sticking out from the pack, of Gabriel Perea head-on, preaching, in that twisted martial arts pose of his. This time she has crouched behind equipment to get the shot, but in the background you can see the managers all gathered. Most of them are grainy shadows, but the three faces that are visible are clearly not frightened of what’s happening here.

“They look almost bored.”

She nods.

“You think he’s a fake. Comes in posing as an agitator, a Zapatista, to catch workers who’d be inclined to organize, and then catches them in a big net supplied by the Virgin Mary, who promises them a wonderful afterlife provided they grind themselves down like good little girls and boys in this one.”

She glances at you oddly, then says, “Maybe they don’t call you names, Deputy.”

You meet her eyes, smile, thinking that you’d be willing to fall in love with this other photographer; but the idea fades almost as fast as it arrives. She lives with nothing and takes all the risks while you have everything and take no risks at all. Her dreams are all of her people and death. Yours are of awards and recognition.

She offers you the bottle again and you drink and wheeze and wonder why it is you can’t have both dreams. Why yours seems petty and cheap. You don’t believe in the Virgin, either. The two of you should be able to support each other. Ignoring the delusions of a few people over their rusting shrine is a far cry from ignoring this kind of scam.

She agrees to get you an interview with Gabriel Perea. It will take some days. He is a very reluctant holy man, more shy than the Tarahumara.

“Come back in three days.” To this colonia, to this shack, to wait for her. All right, you think, that’s good. It gives you time to get information.

You give her five film canisters and she kisses you on the cheek for it. You can feel her lips all the way home.

When you tell Baum what you’ve found, he sends you down to see Andy Jardin. Andy’s a walking encyclopedia of corporate factology—if it’s listed on the DJI, Nasdaq or the S&P 500, he’s got a profile in his computer if not in his head.

He barely acknowledges you when you show up. The two of you had one conversation on the day you were hired—Baum introduced you. Andy said, “Hey.” You take pictures, he babbles in stocks—two languages that don’t recognize each other without a translator. He has carrot-colored hair that might have been in dreadlocks the last time it was mowed, and wears black plastic frame glasses through which he peers myopically at his computer screen.

You clear your throat, ask him if he knows of the company. Immediately you get his undivided attention. He reels off everything—no one has ever accused this kid of trying to hold back.

They manufacture control systems, have government contracts, probably fall into someone’s black budget, like most of the military manufacturers. Their stock is hot, a good investment, sound and steady. They don’t actually manufacture anything in the maquiladora, which is a common story. They just assemble parts, which are shipped up to Iowa, where the company’s based. That’s where the controllers are made. He says they’re developing what are called genetic algorithms. When you look blank, he happily sketches in the details: genetic algorithms are the basis for lots of artificial intelligence research. Of course, he adds, there is no such thing currently as AI—not in the evil, computer-mind-bent-on-world-domination sense. It’s all about learning circuits, routines that adjust when conditions change, that can refine themselves based on past experience. Not brains, not thinking—more a kind of mathematical awareness.

Before you leave, he invites you to buy some of their stock. “This is a really good time for them,” he says.

Later on, Baum tells you that Andy’s never invested a cent in his life, he just loves to watch, the ultimate investment voyeur. “And you can expect to get every article that even mentions your company from now on. He’ll probably forward you their S&P daily, too.

“You’re into something here?” he asks, as if that’s the last thing that concerned him. The real question he’s asking is “How long is this going to take?”

All you can do is shrug and say, “I really don’t know. This woman—this photographer—she has a notion he’s a ringer, someone the company threw in to manipulate the workers, keep them docile. I want to interview him, take his picture, get inside the factory and get some pictures there, too. You know, get what I can before they know that I’m looking at him specifically.”

“Is it a Catholic thing—I mean, your interest?”

“It’s not about me.”

Whether or not he believes you, he doesn’t say.

As you’re leaving he adds, “You’ve seen enough to know that weird and bizarre are the norms over there, right?” Again, he’s not saying it outright. Beneath his camaraderie lies the real edginess: He’s worried about you and this story—how you fit together.

“I won’t forget. Hecho in Mexico is Hecho in Hell.”

Baum laughs. It’s his saying, after all.

Perea speaks so quietly and so fast that you can’t catch half of it. He sits in the corner away from the lantern, on the ground. He bows his head when he speaks as if he’s ashamed to admit what’s happening to him. This is not, to your thinking, the behavior of a man who is playing a role. Still, how could anyone be certain? You take pictures of him bathed in lantern light, looking like a medieval pilgrim who has made his journey, found his God.

Margarita kneels beside you, leaning forward to hear clearly, translating his murmured Spanish. “ ‘I don’t know why the Virgin picked me. I’m just a Chamula.’ That’s an Indian from Chiapas, Deputy,” she explains. ‘I believe that things need to change. People need their dignity as much as their income. I thought I could do this on my own—change things in this factory, I mean. The other workers would trust me and together we would break the cycle in which the neoliberals keep us.’ ”

“What does she look like?”

“ ‘She has blue robes, a cloth over her head. I can sort of see through her, too. And her voice, it fills my head like a bell ringing. But it’s soft, like she’s whispering to me. No one else sees her. No one else hears her.’ ” He looks up at you, his eyes pleading for understanding. “ ‘She stopped me from doing a terrible thing. If we had protested as I planned, many people would have been killed. They would bring in the federales and the federales would beat us. There would be people waiting for us when we got home—people the federales won’t see. Some of us would have been tortured and killed. It might have been me. But I was willing to take that risk, to make this change.’ ”

“She stopped you?”

He nods. “ ‘On my very first day, someone said that the factory is built on a sacred place. In the San Cristóbals we have these places. Maybe she heard our fear. There is a shrine nearby where a picture of Jesus weeps. And another with tears of blood.’ ” Margarita glances sharply at you as she repeats this. You nod.

“ ‘She tells us to live. To endure what life gives us, no matter how hard. She knew what was in my heart. She said that the greatest dignity could be found in the grace of God. To us finally the kingdom will be opened for all we suffer. It will be closed to those who oppress us.’ ” He is seeing her again as he speaks, his eyes looking at a memory instead of at you.

Afterward, you ride in your car alone—Margarita insists on driving her own, an old Chevy Impala that rumbles without a muffler. She won’t ride with anyone; it’s one of those things about her that makes it clear she’s crazy. Your tape recorder plays, Margarita’s translation fills the night.

Perea’s telling the truth so far as he knows it. In a moment of extreme danger, the Virgin appeared. That’s happened before—in fact, she usually manifests where the climate’s explosive, people are strained, fragmented, minds desperate for escape. It’s religion to some, mental meltdown to you. So why do you resist even that explanation now? “A Catholic thing?” Baum asked. That’s not it, though. You recollect something you once heard Carl Sagan say in an interview: Extraordinary events require extraordinary proof. “So, Carl,” you ask the dark interior, “how do you pull proof out of a funhouse mirror?”

As if in reply, your headlights capture for a moment the image on the wall of a brick ruin—a big plastic Daffy Duck mask with a human forearm dangling from its mouth.

By the time Margarita returns, you know what you’re going to do. You tell her to see what she thinks. She sits back on the mattress. You can hear her pulling off her boots. “You might get away with it,” she answers, and there’s anger in her voice. “If they don’t pay too much attention to your very Castilian Espańol. You still talk like a gringo. And you still think like one, too. You listen to what we say, and you see it all in black and white, Norteamericano versus us. La Bamba’s the same way—he thinks in old ways. You guys see what most of your people won’t, but you see it with old eyes.”

“How are we—I don’t understand. The Zapatistas you mean? What—?”

She makes a noise to dismiss you, and there’s the sound of the bottle being opened. Not sharing. Then suddenly she’s talking, close enough now that you can almost feel the heat of her breath.

“It’s not north against south anymore, rich whites against poor Mexicans. That’s only a thing, a speck. It’s the whole world, Deputy. The maquiladora is the whole world now. Japan is here, Korea is here, anyone who wants to make things without being watched, without having to answer to anyone, without having to pay fairly. They’re here and everywhere else, too. Ya, basta! You understand? Enough! It’s not about NAFTA, about whose treaty promises what. Whoever’s treaty, it will be just the same. Here right now in Mexico the drug dealers are investing. They buy factories, take their money and grind their own people to make more money, clean money. This is clean, what they’re doing. And it’s no different here than anywhere else, it’s even better here than some places. It’s a new century and the countries they bleed together, and the only borders, the only fences, are made of bodies. All the pictures you’ve seen, but if you don’t see this thing in all of them, then you’re seeing nothing!”

Clearly it’s time to leave. “I’m sorry,” is all you can think to say, and you turn to go. And suddenly she’s blocking your way. Her hands close on your arms. For all your fantasies you didn’t see this coming. Here in a shack with a cardboard door is not where you’d have chosen. Only this isn’t your choice, it’s entirely hers. Anybody could come by, but no one does. She works your clothes off, at the same time tugging at her own in hasty, angry, near-violent action. Sex out of anger. You keep thinking, she’s as crazy as they said she was, she’s furious with you for your stupidity, how can she possibly want to fuck you, too? For all of which, you don’t fight, of course you don’t, it’s your fantasy however unexpected and inexplicable.

You fall asleep with your arms around her, her breasts warm against you, almost unsure that any of it happened.

The Virgin only visits Perea in the factory, and that’s where you get a job. Driving a forklift. It’s something you used to do, so at least you don’t look like an idiot even if they’re suspicious of your accent. If they are, they say nothing. They’re hiring—from what Baum said, they’re always hiring.

You get assigned a small locker. In it are your work things—coveralls and safety glasses. There are signs up in every room in bright red Spanish: “Protective Gear Must Be Worn At All Times!” and “Wear Your Goggles. Protect Your Eyes.” Your guide points to one of these and says, “Don’t think they’re kidding. They’ll fire you on the spot if they catch you not wearing the correct apparel.”

The lift is articulated. It can take you almost to the ceiling with a full pallet. It has control buttons for your left hand like those found on computer game devices. Working it is actually a pleasure at first.

The day is long and dull. Breaks are almost non-existent. One in the morning, one in the afternoon, both about as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette. The other workers ask where you’re from, how you got here. Margarita helped you work out a semi-plausible story about being fired from dock work in Veracruz when you got caught drunk. At least you’ve been to Veracruz. A few people laugh at the story and commiserate. Drunk, yeah. Nobody pries—there’s hardly time for questions, even over lunch, which is the only place you get to take off the safety glasses and relax—but you see suspicion in a few eyes. You can tell any story you want, but you can’t hide the way you tell it. Your voice isn’t from Veracruz. Nevertheless, no one challenges you. Maybe they think you’re a company ringer, a spy. That would give them good reason to steer clear of you. Whatever you are, they don’t want trouble—that’s what Baum said. This job is all they’ve got. And at week’s end, just like them, you’ll collect your $22.50, too.

At day’s end, you get on a hot bus and ride to the same drop-off point where they picked you up at five A.M., and then walk nearly an hour back to the shack in Universidad. Most of the others on the road are women, walking in clusters. They shy away at your approach. You pass by a group of kids, none of them more than ten years old. One, who looks about six, holds a Coca-Cola can. The straw’s stuck in one nostril, and you can tell by the slack, dopey look on his face that whatever’s in that can isn’t a soft drink.

The second day you’re there, the Virgin appears to Gabriel Perea.

You’re unloading a shipment of circuit boards and components off the back of a semi, when suddenly you find yourself all alone. It’s too strange. You climb down and wander out of the loading bay and into the warehouse itself. Everyone’s gathered there. A circle of hundreds. Right in the middle Perea stands at that crazy angle like a man with displaced hips. His hands are out, palms wide, and he’s repeating her words for everyone: “She loves us all. We are all her children. We are all of us saved and our children are saved. Our blood is His blood!” The atmosphere practically crackles. Every eye is riveted to him. You move around the outside perimeter, looking for the masters. There are two up on a catwalk. One looks at you as if you’re a bigger spectacle than Perea. You turn away quickly and stare like the others are doing, trying to make like you were looking for a better view of the event. From somewhere in the crowd comes the clicking of a shutter. Someone is taking shots. You could take out your tiny Minox now and shoot a couple yourself, but there’s nothing to see that Margarita didn’t capture already. Nothing worth drawing any more attention to yourself. Nada que ver, the words echo in your head.

For a long time you stare at him. “The nińo loves us all. His is the pure love of a child. Care for Him, for it’s all He asks of you.” People murmur, “Amen,” and “Yes.” They cross themselves.

Eventually you chance another look at the two on the catwalk. One of them seems to be talking, but not to the other. You think: He’s either schizophrenic or he’s got a microphone.

In a matter of minutes the spectacle is over. She had nothing remarkable to say; she was just dropping in to remind everyone of her love for them and theirs for her. Now she won’t come again for days, another week.

Except for the first two nights you eat alone in the shack. Margarita is somewhere else, living out of her car, photographing things, capturing moments. How does she do this? How does she live forever on the edge, capturing death, surrounded, drenched in it? How can anybody live this way? It’s hopeless. The end of the world.

You lie alone in the shack, as cold at night as you are scalding in the afternoon when you walk down the dirt path from the bus drop. You’d like to fall into a swimming pool and just float. The closest you can come is communal rain barrels outside—which were once chemical barrels and God knows whether there’s benzene or something worse floating in them, death in the water. Little kids are splashing it over themselves, drinking from it. Watching makes you yearn for a cold drink but you wouldn’t dare. Margarita’s friends in the colonia cook you dinner on their makeshift stoves, for which you gladly pay. By week’s end, they’ve made more from the dinners than you’ll take home from the factory.

Friday you drive home for the weekend, exhausted.

You flop down on your bed, so tired that your eyes ache. All you can think about is Margarita. Gabriel Perea’s Virgin has melted into a mad photographer who is using you for sex. That’s how it feels, that’s how it is, too. A part of her clings to you, drowns with you in that dark and dirty shack, at the same time as she dismisses your simplistic comprehension of the complexities of life where she lives. A week now and you’ve begun maybe to understand it better—at least, you’ve begun taking pictures around the colonia—it’s as though she’s given you permission to participate. It would be hard not to find strange images: the dead ground outside a shack where someone has stuck one little, pathetic plant in a coffee can; another plywood shack with a sign dangling beside the door proclaiming “Siempre Coke!” The factory, too. A couple of rolls of film so far, as surreptitiously as possible. The machinery is too interesting not to photograph, even though you feel somehow complicitous in making it seem beautiful and exotic. Even in ugliness and cruelty, there is beauty. Even in the words of an apparition there are lies and deceit. You finally drift off on the thought that the reason you despise the Virgin is that she sells accommodation. It’s always been her message and it’s the message of the elite, the rich, a recommendation that no one who actually endures the misery would make.

The phone wakes you at noon. Baum has an invitation to a reception for a Republican Senator on the stump. “All our best people will be there. I could use a good photographer and you can use the contacts.”

“Sure,” you say.

“You’ll need a tux.”

“Got one.”

“You’ll need a shower, too.”

How he figured that out over the phone, you can’t imagine; but he’s right, you do smell bad, and it’s only been a week. When you get up, your whole body seems to be knitted of broken joints. It’s a test of will to stand up to the spray. Being pummeled by water feels like the Rapture, pleasure meeting pain.

It’s an outdoor patio party with three Weber Platinum grills big enough to feed the Dallas Cowboys, half a dozen chefs and one waiter for every three people. Everybody wants to have their picture taken with the Senator, who is wearing tan makeup to cover the fact that he looks like he’s been stumping for two weeks without sleep, much less sunlight, and you’re glad it’s not your job to make him look good.

As it is, you end up taking dozens of pictures anyway. Baum calls most of the shots, who he wants with the Senator, whose faces will grace the paper in the morning. He introduces you to too many people for you to keep track of them—all the corporate executives and spouses have turned out for this gala event. When he introduces you to the head of the Texas Republican Party, just the way he says it makes it sound as if you are beholding a specifically Texan variety of Republican. For a week you’ve been living in a shack with dirt floors among people who cook their food on stoves made from bricks and flat hunks of iron, and here you are in a bow tie and cummerbund, hobnobbing with the richest stratum of society in El Paso and munching on shrimp bigger than your thumb, a spread that would feed an entire colonia for days. It’s not just the disparity, it’s the displacement, the fragmentation of reality into razor-edged jigsaw puzzle pieces.

And then Baum hauls you before a thin, balding man wearing glasses too small for his face, the kind that have no frames, just pins to hold the earpieces on. “This is Stuart Coopersmith.” He beams at you—a knowing smile if ever there was one. To Coopersmith, he says, “He’s the guy I told you about who’s into image manipulation.” He withdraws before he has to explain anything to either of you.

“So, you’re Joe’s new photo essayist,” he says.

A smile to hide your panic. “I like that title better than the one they gave me at the paper. Mind if I use it?”

“Be my guest.” If he recognizes you, he shows no indication.

“So, what do you do that I should consider taking your picture, Mr. Coopersmith?”

He touches his tie as he names his company. It seems to be a habit. “Across the river?”

“La maquiladora. You guys make what—”

“Control devices. We’re all about control.” There’s a nice, harmless word for someone flying under the public radar.

“It’s more than that, though, right? Someone told me, your devices actually learn.”

“Pattern recognition is not quite learning, not like most people think of it. Something occurs, our circuit notices and predicts the likelihood of it recurring, and then if it does as predicted, the circuit loops, and the more often the event occurs when it’s supposed to, the more certain the circuit becomes, the more reliable the information and, ah, the more it seems like there’s an intelligence at work. What we know to be feedback looks like behavior, which is where people start saying that the things are alive and thinking.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Well, it’s no matter, is it? You can still take pictures without understanding something this complex.” Coopersmith says this so offhandedly, you can’t be certain whether you’ve been put down. He flutters his hand through the air as if brushing the subject away. “We just manufacture parts down here. We do employ lots of people—we’re very popular in the maquiladora. Like to help out the folks over there.”

You nod. “So, what’s on deck now?”

He looks at his champagne glass, then glances sidelong, like Cassius conspiring to kill Caesar. “Oh, some work for NASA. For a Mars flight they’re talking about. Using GAs to predict stress, breakdown—things they can’t afford in the middle of the solar system. The software will actually measure the individual’s stress from moment to moment, and weigh in with a protective environment if that stress jumps at all. It’s still pattern recognition, you know, but not the same as on an assembly line. I suppose it’s really very exciting.”

“Amazing.” It’s probably even important work.

“In fact you all should do a story on it—I mean, not right this second, but in a few months, maybe, when the program’s a little further along and NASA’s happy, you and Joe should come over to the factory, shoot some pictures. Write this thing up. I’d give you the exclusive. You guys beat out all the other papers, get a little glory. We’d sure love the PR. That never hurts. You come and I’ll give you the guided tour of the place, how’s that?”

He adjusts his tie again on the way to reaching into his coat and coming up with a business card. The card has a spinning globe on it, with tiny lights flashing here and there as the world spins. Coopersmith smiles. “Clever, isn’t it? The engine’s embedded in the card. Doesn’t take much to drive a little animation. You be sure and have Joe give me a call real soon.”

He turns his back, striking up another conversation almost immediately. You’ve been dismissed. Heading over to where Joe stands balancing a plate of ribs, you glance back.

Coopersmith with eyes downcast listens to another man talk, his hand fiddling with the knot on his tie again.

You might not have been sure at first, but you are now: He was the one on the catwalk, watching as you edged around the factory floor while the Virgin paid her visit.

Joe says, “So?”

“He offered us the exclusive on their new program for NASA.”

“You have been blessed, my son. An overlord has smiled upon you.” He tips his glass.

When you tell Margarita what you suspect, she isn’t surprised so much as hurt. Even though she’d been certain of the fraud, the fact of it stings her. By association, you’re part of her pain. Although she welcomed you back with a kiss, after the news she doesn’t want to touch at all. She withdraws into smoke and drink, and finally wanders off with her cold black camera into the colonia, disgusted, she says, with the human race and God himself. You begin to realize that despite her tough cynical skin, there’s at least a kernel of Margarita that wanted the miracle in all its glory. Beneath your rejection, does some part of you want it, too? Once in awhile in seeking for truth it would be nice to find something better than truth.

Later, in the dark, she comes back, slides down beside you on the mattress and starts to cry. From her that’s an impossible sound, so terrifying that it paralyzes you. It’s the sound of betrayal, the very last crumb of purity floating away.

You reach over to hold her, and she pushes your hand away. So you lie there, unable to take back the knowledge, the doubt, the truth, and knowing that the betrayal will always be tied to you. There’s nothing you can do to change it.

The first opportunity you have, you swap your goggles with Gabriel Perea. The only place you can do this is at lunch. You have to wait for a day when he carries the goggles off the assembly line straight to the lunch area. You sit with him, listening to other workers ask him things about the Virgin. He looks at you edgily. He knows he’s supposed to pretend that you’ve never met, but you’re making this impossible by sitting there beside him. Making the switch is child’s play. Everyone’s staring at him, hanging on his every word. You set your goggles beside his, and then pick up the wrong pair a minute later and walk away.

Close up, you can see that his goggles have a slight refractive coating. He’s going to know immediately what’s happened, but with luck he won’t be able to do anything about it. He won’t want to be seen talking to you in the middle of the factory.

If Perea remotely shares your suspicions about the Virgin’s appearances, he hasn’t admitted it even to himself. This makes you think of Margarita, and your face burns with still more betrayal. It’s too late, you tell yourself. This is what you came here to do.

Two days later, ten feet up in the forklift, you get what you wanted: The Virgin Mary appears to you.

It’s a bare wall, concrete brick and metal conduits, and suddenly there she is. She floats in the air and when you look through the cage front of the forklift she is floating beyond it. The cage actually cuts her off. It’s incredible. Wherever you look, she has a fixed location, an anchored spot in space. If you look up, her image remains fixed, sliding down the glasses. Somehow the circuit monitors your vision, tracks the turn of your head. “Feedback loops”—wasn’t that what Coopersmith said? It must be automatic, though. She may recognize the geometry, but not the receiver, because the first thing out of her mouth is: “Te amo, Gabriel, mi profeta.” So much for divinity. She doesn’t know you’ve swapped goggles even if the goggles themselves do.

She is beautiful. Her hair, peeking out beneath a white wimple, is black. The blue of her robes is almost painful to see. No sky could match it. Her oval face is serene, a distillation of a million tender mothers. Oh, they’re good, whoever created her. Who wouldn’t want to believe in this Mary? Gabriel couldn’t help but succumb.

The camera in your pocket is useless.

She reminds you of your duty to your flock. She promises that you will all live in glory and comfort in Heaven after this life of misery and toil, and not to blame—

In the middle of her speech, she vanishes.

It’s so quick that you almost keel forward out of your seat, thank God for the harness.

You can guess what happened. Management came out for their afternoon show, and things were wrong. Gabriel Perea, the poor bastard, didn’t respond. He’s still somewhere, attaching diodes to little green boards, unaware that divinity has dropped by to see him again.

You lower the forklift, and get out, unable to help one last glance up into the air, looking for her. A mere scintilla, a Tinkerbell of light would do, but there is nothing. Nothing.

The last hour and a half you go about your business as usual. Nothing has changed, nothing can have changed. Your hope is they think their circuits or the goggles malfunctioned, something failed to project. Who knows what sort of feedback system was at work there—it has to be sophisticated to have dodged every solid shape in front of you. They’ll want to see his goggles at the end of his shift.

No one seems to be watching you yet. No one calls you in off the floor. So at the end of the day you drop the goggles in the trash and leave with the others in your shift. Everyone’s talking about going home, how hot it is, how much they’d like a bath or a beer. Everything’s so normal it sets your teeth on edge. You ride the bus down the highway and get off with a dozen others at the road for your colonia.

It’s on the dusty cowpath of a road, on foot, that they grab you. Three of them. They know who they’re looking for, and everyone else knows to stay out of it. These guys are las pandillas, the kind who’d kill someone for standing too close to them. A dozen people are all moving away, down the road, and the backward glances they give you are looks of farewell. Adios, amigo. Won’t be seeing you again. They know it and so do you. You’ve seen the photos. The thousand merciless ways people don’t come home, and you’re about to become one.

The first guy walks straight up as if he’s going to walk by, but suddenly his elbow swings right up into your nose, and the sky goes black and shiny at the same time, and time must have jumped because you’re on your knees, blood flowing out between your fingers, but you don’t remember getting there. And then you’re on your back, looking at the sky, and still it seems no one’s said a word to you, but your head is ringing, blood roaring like a waterfall. Someone laid you out. Each pose is a snapshot of pain. Each time there’s less of you to shoot. They’ll compress you, maybe for hours, maybe for days—that’s how it works, isn’t it? How long before gasoline and a match? Will you feel anything by then?

You stare up at the sky, at the first few stars, and wait for the inevitable continuation. The bodies get buried in the Lote Bravo. At least you know where you’re going. In a couple of months someone might find you. Will Joe come looking?

Someone yells, “¡Aguila!” and a door slams. Or is that in your head, too?

Footsteps approach. Here it comes, you think. Is there anything you can do to prepare for the pain? Probably not, no.

The face that peers down at you doesn’t help. Hispanic, handsome, well-groomed. This could be any businessman in Mexico, but you know it isn’t, and you remember someone—Margarita?—telling you about the narcotraficantes investing in the maquiladora, taking their drug money and buying into international trade. Silent partners.

“Not going to hurt you, keemo sabe,” he’s saying with a sly grin, as though your broken nose and battered skull don’t exist. “Couldn’t do that. No, no. Questions would be asked about you—you’re not just some factory whore, are you?” His grin becomes a sneer—you’ve never actually seen anyone sneer before. This guy hates women for a hobby. “No, no,” he says again, “you’re a second rate wedding photographer who thought he was Dick fucking Tracy. What did you do, hang out with the Juarez photo-locos and get all righteous? Sure, of course you did.” He kneels, clucking his tongue. You notice that he’s holding your Minox. “Listen, cholo, you print what you’ve uncovered, and Seńor Perea will die. You think that’s a threat, hey? But it’s not. You’ll make him out a fool to his own people. They trust him, you know? It’s all they got, so you go ahead and take it from them and see what you get. We care so much, we’re lettin’ you go home. Here.” He tosses the camera into the dirt. “You’re only a threat to the people who think like you do, man.” Now he grabs your arm and pulls you upright. The world threatens to flip on you, and your stomach promises to go with it if it does. Close up, he smells of citrus cologne. He whispers to you, “Go home, cholo, go take pictures of little kids in swimming pools and cats caught in trees and armadillos squashed on the highway. Amateurs don’t survive. Neither do professionals, here. Next time, you gonna meet some of them.” Then he just walks away. You’re left wobbling on the road. The gang of three are gone, too. Nobody’s around. Behind you, you hear a car door and the rev of an engine. A silver SUV shoots off down the dirt road, back to the pavement and away. There’s a rusted barbed wire fence there, and someone’s stuck a clown-doll’s head on one of the posts.

You stumble along the path to the colonia. Your head feels as tender as the skin of a plum. Your sinuses are clogged with blood and your nose creaks when you inhale. People watch in awe as you approach your shack. In that moment you’re as much a miracle to them as Gabriel Perea. They probably think they’re seeing a ghost. And they’re right, aren’t they? You aren’t here any longer.

Margarita’s not inside. Her camera’s gone. There’s no one to comfort you, no one to hear how you were written off. The heat inside is like the core of the sun. Back outside you walk to the water barrel, no longer concerned with what contaminants float in it. You splash water on your face, over your head. Benzene? Who cares? You’re dead anyway. You touch your nose and it’s swollen up the size of a saguaro. Embarrassing how easily you’ve been persuaded to leave. It didn’t take anything at all, did it? One whack and a simple “Go away, Seńor, you’re a fool.” What, did you think you could change the world? Make a difference? Not a second rate wedding photographer like you. Not someone with an apartment and a bed and an office and a car. Compromised by the good life. Nobody who leads your life is going to make the difference over here. It takes a breed of insanity you can’t even approach.

Baum was dead wrong about everything. He simplified the problems to fit the views of a tired old campus radical, but they aren’t simple. Answers aren’t simple. You, you’re simple.

Two little girls kneel not far from the barrel, cooking their meal in tin pans on top of an iron plate mounted over an open flame. There’s a rusted electrical box beside them, with outlet holes like eyes and a wide slit for a switch. It’s a robot face silently screaming. The girls watch you even when they’re not looking.

Long after it gets dark you’re still alone inside. Margarita must be off on some adventure, doing what she does best, what you can’t do. You’ve had hours to build upon your inadequacy. Run your story and they’ll tear Perea apart. He was doomed the moment he believed in the possibility of her. Just like the Church and the little Catholic boy you were once. When you see that, you don’t want to see Margarita. You don’t want to have to explain why you aren’t going any further. All you can do is hurt her. Only a threat is all you can be.

You pack up your few things, leaving the dozen film canisters you didn’t use. Let the real photojournalist have them. “Nada que ver,” you tell the empty room.

Back across the border before midnight, before your life turns back into a pumpkin—better she should think you’re lying under three feet of dirt.

A month rolls by in a sort of fog. Booze, pain killers and the hell-bent desire to forget your own name. Your nose is healing. It’s a little crooked, has a bluish bump in the middle. Baum keeps his distance and doesn’t ask you anything about your story, though at first you’re too busy to notice. Then one day you find out from the sports editor that Joe got a package while you were gone, and although nobody knows what was in it, when he opened it, he turned white as a ghost and just packed up his office and went home. Called in sick the next three days and really screwed up a bunch of deadlines.

When you do try and talk to him about what happened, he interrupts with an angry “Don’t think you’re the first person who’s been smashed on the rocks of old Juarez.” Then he walks away. They got to him somehow. If they wanted to, they could get to both of you. Like the wind, this can blow across the river. The message was for you.

Then one day while you’re placing ad graphics, Joe Baum comes over and sits beside you. He won’t look you in the eye. Very softly he says, “Got a call from Chicken Man. Margarita Espinada’s dead.”

You stare at the page on the monitor so hard you’re seeing the pixels. Finally, you ask him, “What happened?”

“Don’t know. Don’t know who did it. She’s been gone for weeks and weeks, but he said that wasn’t unusual. She lived mostly in her car.”

“I know. Auto-loco.”

“Yeah.” He starts to get up, but as if his weight is too much for him, he drops back onto the chair. “Um, he says she left a package for you. Addressed to him, so maybe whatever happened, she had some warning.” With every word he puts more distance between himself and her death. “There’s gonna be a funeral tomorrow if you’re interested.”

“So soon?”

Baum makes a face, lips pressed tight. Defiantly he meets your gaze. “She was dumped in the Lote Bravo awhile ago.”

Pollamano nods sadly as he lets you in. “¿Quiubo, Deputy?” he asks, but not with any interest. His eyes are bloodshot, drunk or crying, maybe both. Some others are there inside. A few nod—some you remember. Most of them pretend you aren’t there. Her body lies in la Catedral, three blocks from Chicken Man’s current abode. You shouldn’t see it, is what they say. Their newest member took pictures. Ernesto. He was there, following the cops with his police band radio the way he always does, always trying to get to the scene before they do. He’d taken half a dozen shots before he saw the black boots and realized whose body he was photographing. They’d torn off most of her clothes but left the boots so everyone would know who she was.

Everyone drinks, toasting her memory. One of them begins weeping and someone else throws an arm around him and mutters. One of the others spits. None of them seems to suspect that you and she spent time together. In any case, you’re an interloper on their private grief, and not one of them.

Margarita must have known you weren’t dead—otherwise, why send a package for you?

Late in the afternoon, everyone has shown up, almost two dozen photographers, and some unseen sign passes among you all, and everyone rises up and goes out together. You move in a line through the crowds, between white buses in a traffic snarl and across the square to the neon cathedral. Orange lights bathe you all. Ernesto with his nothing mustache runs up to the door and snaps a picture. Even in this solemn moment, his instinct is for the image. A few glare at him, but no one chastises him. You gather in the front pews, kneel, pray, go up one by one and light your candles for her soul. Your hand is shaking so hard you can hardly ignite the wick.

After everyone else has left he gives you the package. It’s nearly the size of a suitcase. He says, “She left it for you, and I don’t violate her wishes. She was here a couple times when I wasn’t around. Using the darkroom.”

You pull out a folder of photos. On top is the picture of you she took the first day you arrived in Colonia Universidad. You look like you could take on anything—that’s what she captured of you, what she saw in you. Just looking at it is humiliating.

Underneath is her collection of shots inside the factory. The top photo is Gabriel Perea standing all twisted and pointing. Foam on his mouth, eyes bugging out. The image is spoiled because of some fogging on the left side of it as if there was a light leak. Whatever caused it lit up Perea, too.

You almost miss the thing that’s different: He’s not wearing his goggles.

You go on to the next shot, but it’s a picture of the crowd behind him, all staring, wide-eyed. She’s not using a flash, but there’s some kind of light source. In the third, fourth, and fifth shots you see it. It shines straight at Perea. There are lens flares in each image. The light is peculiar, diffuse, as if a collection of small bulbs are firing off, making a sort of ring. The middle is hard to make out until the sixth picture. She must have slid on her knees between all the onlookers to get it. Perea’s feet are close by and out of focus. The light is the center of the image, the light that is different in each shot.

“Jaime,” you say, “do you have a loupe?”

“Of course.” He gives it to you. You hold it over the image, over the light. Back in the lab at the Herald, you’ll blow the image up poster size to see the detail without the lens—the outline, and at the top of it a bunch of smudges, a hint of eye sockets and mouth, a trace of nose and cheek. Can an AI break loose from its handlers? you wonder. Does it have a will? Or is this the next step in the plan?

You give the loupe back.

He says, “That Perea is gone. Disappeared. People are looking all over for him. They say he was called up to heaven.”

One way or another, that’s probably true. If the Virgin can float on the air now, then they don’t need an interpreter. Belief itself will do the work hereafter, hope used as a halter.

“That crazy girl, she went right back into that factory even after he was gone.”

You wipe at your eyes, and a half-laugh escapes you. That crazy girl.

You close the folder. You can’t let anyone have these. That’s the ultimate, wrenching realization. Margarita died because of this and no one can see it. The story can’t be told, because it’s a lie. She knew it, too, but she went ahead, shooting what was real.

This is your Sacred Heart. Your rusting nail. Gabriel Perea was called up to heaven or killed—for you it doesn’t matter which. By revealing nothing you let him go on living.

Under the top folder there are others full of negatives, hundreds of inverted images of the world—black teeth and faces, black suns and black clouds. The world made new. Made hers. There is a way you can keep her alive.

Jaime pats you on the shoulder as you leave with your burden. “You go home, Deputy,” he tells you. “Even the devil won’t live here.”

—for Sycamore Hill 1999

HALO

Charles Stross

The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. “I love you,” it croons in Amber’s ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: “let me give you a big hug. . . .”

A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler shift, and reads off the orbital elements. “Locked and loaded,” she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a diamond-tipped swizzle-stick overhead. Sarcastically: “big hug time! I got asteroid!” Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses before reuptake sets in: it doesn’t do to get too excited in free flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing, is still there: it’s her rock, and it loves her, and she’s going to bring it to life.

The workspace of Amber’s room is a mass of stuff that probably doesn’t belong on a space ship. Posters of the latest Lebanese boy-band bump-and-grind through their glam routines; tentacular restraining straps wave from the corners of her sleeping bag, somehow accumulating a crust of dirty clothing from the air like a giant inanimate hydra. (Cleaning robots seldom dare to venture inside the teenager’s bedroom.) One wall is repeatedly cycling through a simulation of the projected construction cycle of Habitat One, a big fuzzy sphere with a glowing core (that Amber is doing her bit to help create): three or four small pastel-colored plastic kawai dolls stalk each other across its circumference with million-kilometer strides. And her father’s cat is curled up between the aircon duct and her costume locker, snoring in a high-pitched tone.

Amber yanks open the faded velour curtain that shuts her room off from the rest of the hive: “I’ve got it!” she shouts. “It’s all mine! I rule!” It’s the sixteenth rock tagged by the orphanage so far, but it’s her first, and that makes it special. She bounces off the other side of the commons, surprising one of Oscar’s cane toads—which should be locked down in the farm, it’s not clear how it got here—and the audio repeaters copy the incoming signal, noise-fuzzed echoes of a thousand fossilized infant’s video shows.

“You’re so prompt, Amber,” Pierre whines when she comers him in the canteen.

“Well, yeah!” She tosses her head, barely concealing a smirk of delight at her own brilliance. She knows it isn’t nice, but Mom is a long way away, and Dad and Step-Mom don’t care about that kind of thing. “I’m brilliant, me!” she announces. “Now what about our bet?”

“Aww.” Pierre thrusts his hands deep into his pockets. “But I don’t have two million on me in change right now. Next cycle?”

“Huh?” She’s outraged. “But we had a bet!”

“Uh, Doctor Bayes said you weren’t going to make it this time, either, so I stuck my smart money in an options trade. If I take it out now, I’ll take a big hit. Can you give me until cycle’s end?”

“You should know better than to trust a sim, Pee.” Her avatar blazes at him with early teen contempt: Pierre hunches his shoulders under her gaze. He’s only thirteen, freckled, hasn’t yet learned that you don’t welsh on a deal. “I’ll let you do it this time,” she announces, “but you’ll have to pay for it. I want interest.”

He sighs. “What base rate are you—”

“No, your interest! Slave for a cycle!” She grins malevolently.

And his face shifts abruptly into apprehension: “As long as you don’t make me clean the litter tray again. You aren’t planning on doing that, are you?”

Welcome to the third decade. The thinking mass of the solar system now exceeds one MIP per gram; it’s still pretty dumb, but it’s not dumb all over. The human population is near maximum overshoot, pushing nine billion, but its growth rate is tipping toward negative numbers, and bits of what used to be the first world are now facing a middle-aged average. Human cogitation provides about 10^28 MIPS of the solar system’s brainpower. The real thinking is mostly done by the halo of a thousand trillion processors that surround the meat machines with a haze of computation—individually, a tenth as powerful as a human brain, collectively, they’re ten thousand times more powerful, and their numbers are doubling every twenty million seconds. They’re up to 10^33 MIPS and rising, although there’s a long way to go before the solar system is fully awake.

Technologies come, technologies go, but even five years ago nobody predicted that there’d be tinned primates in orbit around Jupiter by now: a synergy of emergent industries and strange business models have kick-started the space age again, aided and abetted by the discovery of (so far undecrypted) signals from ET’s. Unexpected fringe-riders are developing new ecological niches on the edge of the human information space, light-minutes and light-hours from the core, as an expansion that has hung fire since the 1970s gets under way.

Amber, like most of the post-industrialists aboard the orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, is in her early teens: her natural abilities are enhanced by germ-line genetic recombination. Like most of the others, half her wetware is running outside her skull on an array of processor nodes hooked in by quantum-entangled communication channels—her own personal metacortex. These kids are mutant youth, burning bright: not quite incomprehensible to their parents, but profoundly alien—the generation gap is as wide as the 1960s and as deep as the solar system. Their parents, born in the gutter-years of the twentieth century, grew up with white elephant shuttles and a space station that just went round and round, and computers that went beep when you pushed their buttons: the idea that Jupiter was somewhere you could go was as profoundly counter-intuitive as the internet to a baby boomer.

Most of the passengers on the can have run away from parents who thought that teenagers belong in school, unable to come to terms with a generation so heavily augmented that they are fundamentally brighter than the adults around them. Amber was fluent in nine languages by the age of six, only two of them human, and six of them serializable; her birth-mother—who had denied her most of the prenatal mods then available, insisting that a random genotype was innately healthier—had taken her to the school psychiatrist for speaking in synthetic tongues. That was the final straw for Amber: using an illicit anonymous phone, she called her father. Her mother had him under a restraining order, but it hadn’t occurred to her to apply for an order against his partner. . . .

Vast whorls of cloud ripple beneath the ship’s drive stinger: orange and brown and muddy grey streaks slowly ripple across the bloated horizon of Jupiter. Sanger is nearing perijove, deep within the gas giant’s lethal magnetic field; static discharges flicker along the tube, arcing over near the deep violet exhaust cloud emerging from the magnetic mirrors of the ship’s VASIMR motor. The plasma rocket is cranked up to maximum mass flow, its specific impulse almost as low as a fission rocket but thrusting at maximum as the assembly creaks and groans through the gravitational assist maneuver. In another hour, the drive will flicker off, and the orphanage will fall up and out toward Ganymede, before dropping back in toward orbit around Amalthea, Jupiter’s fourth moon (and source of much of the material in the Gossamer ring). They’re not the first canned primates to make it to Jupiter subsystem, but they’re one of the first wholly private ventures. The bandwidth out here sucks dead slugs through a straw, with millions of kilometers of vacuum separating them from scant hundreds of mouse-brained microprobes and a few mechanical dinosaurs left behind by NASA or ESA. They’re so far from the inner system that a good chunk of the ship’s communications array is given over to caching: the news is whole kiloseconds old by the time it gets out here.

Amber, along with about half the waking passengers, watches in fascination from the common room. The commons are a long axial cylinder, a double-hulled inflatable at the center of the ship with a large part of their liquid water supply stored in its wall-tubes. The far end is video-enabled, showing them a realtime 3D view of the planet as it rolls beneath them: in reality, there’s as much mass as possible between them and the trapped particles in the Jovian magnetic envelope. “I could go swimming in that,” sighs Lilly. “Just imagine, diving into that sea. . . .” Her avatar appears in the window, riding a silver surfboard down the kilometers of vacuum.

“Nice case of wind-bum you’ve got there,” someone jeers: Kas. Suddenly, Lilly’s avatar, heretofore clad in a shimmering metallic swimsuit, turns to the texture of baked meat, and waggles sausage-fingers up at them in warning.

“Same to you and the window you climbed in through!” Abruptly the virtual vacuum outside the window is full of bodies, most of them human, contorting and writhing and morphing in mock-combat as half the kids pitch into the virtual deathmatch: it’s a gesture in the face of the sharp fear that outside the thin walls of the orphanage lies an environment that really is as hostile as Lilly’s toasted avatar would indicate.

Amber turns back to her slate: she’s working through a complex mess of forms, necessary before the expedition can start work. Facts and figures that are never far away crowd around her, intimidating. Jupiter weighs 1.9 x 10^27 kilograms. There are twenty-nine Jovian moons and an estimated two hundred thousand minor bodies, lumps of rock, and bits of debris crowded around them—debris above the size of ring fragments, for Jupiter (like Saturn) has rings, albeit not as prominent. A total of six major national orbiter platforms have made it out here—and another two hundred and seventeen microprobes, all but six of them private entertainment platforms. The first human expedition was put together by ESA Studios six years ago, followed by a couple of wildcat mining prospectors and a u-commerce bus that scattered half a million picoprobes throughout Jupiter subsystem. Now the Sanger has arrived, along with another three monkey cans—one from Mars, two more from LEO—and it looks as if colonization would explode except that there are at least four mutually exclusive Grand Plans for what to do with old Jove’s mass.

Someone prods her. “Hey, Amber, what are you up to?”

She opens her eyes. “Doing my homework.” It’s Su Ang. “Look, we’re going to Amalthea, aren’t we? But we file our accounts in Reno, so we have to do all this paperwork. Monica asked me to help. It’s insane.”

Ang leans over and reads, upside down. “Environmental Protection Agency?”

“Yeah. Estimated Environmental Impact Forward Analysis 204.6b, Page Two. They want me to “list any bodies of standing water within five kilometers of the designated mining area. If excavating below the water table, list any wellsprings, reservoirs, and streams within depth of excavation in meters multiplied by five hundred meters up to a maximum distance of ten kilometers downstream of direction of bedding plane flow. For each body of water, itemize any endangered or listed species of bird, fish, mammal, reptile, invertebrate, or plant living within ten kilometers—’ ”

“—Of a mine on Amalthea? Which orbits one hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above Jupiter, has no atmosphere, and where you can pick up a whole body radiation dose of ten Grays in half an hour on the surface?” Ang shakes her head, then spoils it by giggling. Amber glances up.

On the wall in front of her someone—Nicky or Boris, probably—has pasted a caricature of her own avatar into the virch fight. She’s being hugged from behind by a giant cartoon dog with floppy ears and an erection, who’s singing anatomically improbable suggestions while fondling himself suggestively. “Fuck that!” Shocked out of her distraction—and angry—Amber drops her stack of paperwork and throws a new avatar at the screen, one an agent of hers dreamed up overnight: it’s called Spike, and it’s not friendly. Spike rips off the dog’s head and pisses down its trachea, which is anatomically correct for a human being: meanwhile she looks around, trying to work out which of the laughing idiot children and lost geeks around her could have sent such an unpleasant message.

“Children! Chill out.” She glances round: one of the Franklins (this is the twenty-something dark-skinned female one) is frowning at them. “Can’t we leave you alone for half a K without a fight?”

Amber pouts. “It’s not a fight: it’s a forceful exchange of opinions.”

“Hah.” The Franklin leans back in mid-air, arms crossed, an expression of supercilious smugness pasted across her-their face. “Heard that one before. Anyway—” she-they gesture and the screen goes blank “—I’ve got news for you pesky kids. We got a claim verified! Factory starts work as soon as we shut down the stinger and finish filing all the paperwork via our lawyers. Now’s our chance to earn our upkeeps . . .”

Amber is flashing on ancient history, three years back along her timeline. In her replay, she’s in some kind of split-level ranch house out west. It’s a temporary posting while her mother audits an obsolescent fab line enterprise that grinds out dead chips of VLSI silicon for Pentagon projects that have slipped behind the cutting edge. Her mom leans over her, menacingly adult in her dark suit and chaperonage earrings: “You’re going to school, and that’s that!”

Her mother is a blonde ice-maiden madonna, one of the IRS’s most productive bounty hunters—she can make grown CEOs panic just by blinking at them. Amber, a tow-headed eight-year-old tearaway with a confiising mix of identities, inexperience blurring the boundary between self and grid, is not yet able to fight back effectively. After a couple of seconds, she verbalizes a rather feeble protest: “Don’t want to!” One of her stance demons whispers that this is the wrong approach to take, so she modifies it: “they’ll beat up on me, Mom. I’m too different. ’Sides, I know you want me socialized up with my grade metrics, but isn’t that what sideband’s for? I can socialize real good at home.”

Mom does something unexpected: she kneels down, putting herself on eye level with Amber. They’re on the living room carpet, all seventies-retro brown corduroy and acid-orange paisley wallpaper: the domestics are in hiding while the humans hold court. “Listen to me, sweetie.” Mom’s voice is breathy, laden with an emotional undertow as strong and stifling as the eau de cologne she wears to the office to cover up the scent of her client’s fear. “I know that’s what your father’s writing to you, but it isn’t true. You need the company—physical company—of children your own age. You’re natural, not some kind of engineered freak, even with your skullset. Natural children like you need company, or they grow up all weird. Don’t you know how much you mean to me? I want you to grow up happy, and that won’t happen if you don’t learn to get along with children your own age. You’re not going to be some kind of cyborg otaku freak, Amber. But to get healthy, you’ve got to go to school, build up a mental immune system. That which does not destroy us makes us stronger, right?”

It’s crude moral blackmail, transparent as glass and manipulative as hell, but Amber’s corpus logica flags it with a heavy emotional sprite miming the likelihood of physical discipline if she rises to the bait: Mom is agitated, nostrils slightly flared, ventilation rate up, some vasodilatation visible in her cheeks. Amber—in combination with her skullset and the metacortex of distributed agents it supports—is mature enough at eight years to model, anticipate, and avoid corporal punishment: but her stature and lack of physical maturity conspire to put her at a disadvantage when negotiating with adults who matured in a simpler age. She sighs, then puts on a pout to let Mom know she’s still reluctant, but obedient. “O-kay. If you say so.”

Mom stands up, eyes distant—probably telling Saturn to warm his engine and open the garage doors. “I say so, punkin. Go get your shoes on, now. I’ll pick you up on my way back from work, and I’ve got a treat for you: we’re going to check out a new Church together this evening.” Mom smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “You be a good little girl, now, all right?”

The Imam is at prayer in a gyrostabilized mosque.

His mosque is not very big, and it has a congregation of one: he performs salat on his own every seventeen thousand two hundred and eighty seconds. He also webcasts the call to prayer, but there are no other believers in trans-Jovian space to answer the summons. Between prayers, he splits his attention between the exigencies of life-support and scholarship. A student of the Hadith and of knowledge-based systems, Sadeq collaborates in a project with other mujtahid scholars who are building a revised concordance of all the known isnads, to provide a basis for exploring the body of Islamic jurisprudence from a new perspective—one they’ll need sorely if the looked-for breakthroughs in communication with aliens emerge. Their goal is to answer the vexatious questions that bedevil Islam in the age of accelerated consciousness: and as their representative in orbit around Jupiter, these questions fall most heavily on Sadeq’s shoulders.

Sadeq is a slightly built man, with close-cropped black hair and a perpetually tired expression: unlike the orphanage crew, he has a ship to himself. The ship started out as an Iranian knock-off of a Shenzhou-B capsule, with a Chinese-type 921 space-station module tacked onto its tail: but the clunky, nineteen-sixties lookalike—a glittering aluminum dragonfly mating with a Coke can—has a weirdly contoured M2P2 pod strapped to its nose. The M2P2 pod is a plasma sail: built in orbit by one of Daewoo’s wake shield-facilities, it dragged Sadeq and his cramped space station out to Jupiter in just four months, surfing on the solar breeze. His presence may be a triumph for the Ummah, but he feels acutely alone out here: when he turns his compact observatory’s mirrors in the direction of the Sanger, he is struck by its size and purposeful appearance. Sanger’s superior size speaks of the efficiency of the western financial instruments, semi-autonomous investment trusts with variable business-cycle accounting protocols that make possible the development of commercial space exploration. The Prophet, peace be unto him, may have condemned usury: but surely it would have given him pause to see these engines of capital formation demonstrate their power above the Great Red Spot.

After finishing his prayers, Sadeq spends a couple of extra precious minutes on his mat. He finds that meditation comes hard in this environment: kneel in silence and you become aware of the hum of ventilation fans, the smell of old socks and sweat, the metallic taste of ozone from the Elektron oxygen generators. It is hard to approach God in this third-hand spaceship, a hand-me-down from arrogant Russia to ambitious China, and finally to the religious trustees of Qom, who have better uses for it than any of the heathen states imagine. They’ve pushed it far, this little toy space station: but who’s to say if it is God’s intention for humans to live here, in orbit around this swollen alien giant of a planet?

Sadeq shakes his head: he rolls his mat up and stows it beside the solitary porthole with a quiet sigh. A stab of homesickness wrenches at him, for his childhood in hot, dusty Yazd and his many years as a student in Qom: he steadies himself by looking round, searching the station that is by now as familiar to him as the fourth-floor concrete apartment that his parents—a car factory worker and his wife—raised him in. The interior of the station is the size of a school bus, every surface cluttered with storage areas, instrument consoles, and layers of exposed pipes: a couple of globules of antifreeze jiggle like stranded jellyfish near a heat exchanger that has been giving him grief Sadeq kicks off in search of the squeeze bottle he keeps for this purpose, then gathers up his roll of tools and instructs one of his agents to find him the relevant sura of the maintenance log: it’s time to fix this leaky joint for good.

An hour or so of serious plumbing, and then he will eat (freeze-dried lamb stew, with a paste of lentils and boiled rice, and a bulb of strong tea to wash it down), then sit down to review his next flyby maneuvering sequence. Perhaps, God willing, there will be no further system alerts and he’ll be able to spend an hour or two on his research between evening and final prayers. Maybe the day after tomorrow, there’ll even be time to relax for a couple of hours, to watch one of the old movies that he finds so fascinating for their insights into alien cultures: Apollo 13, maybe. It isn’t easy, being the only crew aboard a long-duration space mission: and it’s even harder for Sadeq, up here with nobody to talk to, for the communications lag to earth is more than half an hour each way—and so far as he knows he’s the only believer within half a billion kilometers.

Amber dials a number in Paris and waits until someone answers the phone. She knows the strange woman on the phone’s tiny screen: Mom calls her “your father’s fancy bitch,” with a peculiar tight smile. (The one time Amber asked what a fancy bitch was, Mom hit her—not hard, just a warning.) “Is Daddy there?” she asks.

The strange woman looks slightly bemused. (Her hair is blonde, like Mom’s, but the color clearly came out of a bleach bottle, and it’s cut really short, mannish.) “Oui. Ah, yes.” She smiles tentatively. “I am sorry, it is a disposable phone you are using? You want to talk to ’im?”

It comes out in a rush: “I want to see him.” Amber clutches the phone like a lifesaver: it’s a cheap disposable cereal-packet item, and the cardboard is already softening in her sweaty grip. “Momma won’t let me, auntie ’Nette—”

“Hush.” Annette, who has lived with Amber’s father for more than twice as long as her mother did, smiles. “You are sure that telephone, your mother does not know of it?”

Amber looks around. She’s the only child in the rest room because it isn’t break time and she told teacher she had to go right now: “I’m sure, P_2q confidence factor greater than 0.9.” Her Bayesian head tells her that she can’t reason accurately about this because Momma has never caught her with an illicit phone before, but what the hell. It can’t get Dad into trouble if he doesn’t know, can it?

“Very good.” Annette glances aside. “Manny, I have a surprise call for you.” Daddy appears on screen. She can see all of his face, and he looks younger than last time: he must have stopped using those clunky old glasses. “Hi—Amber! Where are you? Does your mother know you’re calling me?” He looks slightly worried.

“No,” she says confidently, “the phone came in a box of Grahams.”

“Phew. Listen, sweet, you must remember to never, ever call me where your mom may find out. Otherwise, she’ll get her lawyers to come after me with thumb screws and hot pincers, because she’ll say I made you call me. Understand?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She sighs. “Don’t you want to know why I called?”

“Um.” For a moment he looks taken aback. Then he nods, seriously. Amber likes Daddy because he takes her seriously most times when she talks to him. It’s a phreaking nuisance having to borrow her classmates’ phones or tunnel past Mom’s pit-bull firewall, but Dad doesn’t assume that she can’t know anything because she’s only a kid. “Go ahead. There’s something you need to get off your chest? How’ve things been, anyway?”

She’s going to have to be brief: the disposaphone comes pre-paid, the international tariff it’s using is lousy, and the break bell is going to ring any minute. “I want out, Daddy. I mean it. Mom’s getting loopier every week: she’s dragging me around to all these churches now, and yesterday she threw a fit over me talking to my terminal. She wants me to see the school shrink, I mean, what for? I can’t do what she wants; I’m not her little girl! Every time I tunnel out, she tries to put a content-bot on me, and it’s making my head hurt—I can’t even think straight any more!” To her surprise, Amber feels tears starting. “Get me out of here!”

The view of her father shakes, pans around to show her tante Annette looking worried. “You know, your father, he cannot do anything? The divorce lawyers, they will tie him up.”

Amber sniffs. “Can you help?” she asks.

“I’ll see what I can do,” her father’s fancy bitch promises as the break bell rings.

An instrument package peels away from the Sanger’s claimjumper drone and drops toward the potato-shaped rock, fifty kilometers below. Jupiter hangs huge and gibbous in the background, impressionist wallpaper for a mad cosmologist: Pierre bites his lower lip as he concentrates on steering it.

Amber, wearing a black sleeping-sack, hovers over his head like a giant bat, enjoying her freedom for a shift. She looks down on Pierre’s bowl-cut hair, his wiry arms gripping either side of the viewing table, and wonders what to have him do next. A slave for a day is an interesting experience, restful: life aboard the Sanger is busy enough that nobody gets much slacktime (at least, not until the big habitats have been assembled and the high bandwidth dish is pointing at Earth). They’re unrolling everything to a hugely intricate plan generated by the backers’ critical path team, and there isn’t much room for idling: the expedition relies on shamelessly exploitative child labor—they’re lighter on the life-support consumables than adults—working the kids twelve-hour days to assemble a toe-hold on the shore of the future. (When they’re older and their options vest fully, they’ll all be rich—but that hasn’t stopped the outraged herdnews propaganda back home.) For Amber, the chance to let somebody else work for her is novel, and she’s trying to make every minute count.

“Hey, slave,” she calls idly: “how you doing?”

Pierre sniffs. “It’s going okay.” He refuses to glance up at her, Amber notices. He’s thirteen: isn’t he supposed to be obsessed with girls by that age? She notices his quiet, intense focus, runs a stealthy probe along his outer boundary: he shows no sign of noticing it but it bounces off, unable to chink his mental armor. “Got cruise speed,” he says, taciturn, as two tons of metal, ceramics, and diamond-phase weirdness hurtles toward the surface of Barney at three hundred kilometers per hour. “Stop shoving me: there’s a three-second lag and I don’t want to get into a feedback control-loop with it.”

“I’ll shove if I want, slave.” She sticks her tongue out at him.

“And if you make me drop it?” he asks. Looking up at her, his face serious—“Are we supposed to be doing this?”

“You cover your ass and I’ll cover mine,” she says, then turns bright red. “You know what I mean.”

“I do, do I?” Pierre grins widely, then turns back to the console: “Aww, that’s no fun. And you want to tune whatever bit-bucket you’ve given control of your speech centers to: they’re putting out way too much double-entendre, somebody might mistake you for a grown-up.”

“You stick to your business and I’ll stick to mine,” she says, emphatically. “And you can start by telling me what’s happening.”

“Nothing.” He leans back and crosses his arms, grimacing at the screen. “It’s going to drift for five hundred seconds, now, then there’s the midcourse correction and a deceleration bum before touch-down. And then it’s going to be an hour while it unwraps itself and starts unwinding the cable spool. What do you want, minute noodles with that?”

“Uh-huh.” Amber spreads her bat-wings and lies back in mid-air, staring at the window, feeling rich and idle as Pierre works his way through her day-shift. “Wake me when there’s something interesting to see.” Maybe she should have had him feed her peeled grapes or give her a foot massage, something more traditionally hedonistic: but right now just knowing he’s her own little piece of alienated labor is doing good things for her self-esteem. Looking at those tense arms, the curve of his neck, she thinks maybe there’s something to this whispering-and-giggling he really likes you stuff the older girls go in for—

The window rings like a gong and Pierre coughs. “You’ve got mail,” he says dryly. You want me to read it for you?”

“What the—” A message is flooding across the screen, right-to-left snaky script like the stuff on her corporate instrument (now lodged safely in a deposit box in Zurich). It takes her a while to page-in the grammar agent that can handle Arabic, and another minute for her to take in the meaning of the message. When she does, she starts swearing, loudly and continuously.

“You bitch, Mom! Why’d you have to go and do a thing like that?”

The corporate instrument arrived in a huge FedEx box addressed to Amber: it happened on her birthday while Mom was at work, and she remembers it as if it was only an hour ago.

She remembers reaching up and scraping her thumb over the delivery man’s clipboard, the rough feel of the microsequencers sampling her DNA; afterward, she drags the package inside. When she pulls the tab on the box it unpacks itself automatically, regurgitating a compact 3D printer, half a ream of paper printed in old-fashioned dumb ink, and a small calico cat with a large @-symbol on its flank. The cat hops out of the box, stretches, shakes its head, and glares at her. You’re Amber?” it mrowls.

“Yeah,” she says, shyly. “Are you from Tante ‘Nette?”

“No, I’m from the fucking tooth fairy.” It leans over and head-butts her knee, strops the scent glands between its ears all over her skirt. “Listen, you got any tuna in the kitchen?”

“Mom doesn’t believe in seafood,” says Amber: “it’s all foreign junk, she says. It’s my birthday today, did I tell you?”

“Happy fucking birthday, then.” The cat yawns, convincingly realistic. “Here’s your dad’s present. Bastard put me in hibernation and blogged me along to show you how to work it. You take my advice, you’ll trash the fucker. No good will come of it.”

Amber interrupts the cat’s grumbling by clapping her hands gleefully. “So what is it?” she demands. “A new invention? Some kind of weird sex toy from Amsterdam? A gun, so I can shoot Pastor Wallace?”

“Naaah.” The cat yawns, yet again, and curls up on the floor next to the 3D printer. “It’s some kinda dodgy business model to get you out of hock to your mom. Better be careful, though—he says its legality is narrowly scoped jurisdiction-wise.”

“Wow. Like, how totally cool!” In truth, Amber is delighted because it is her birthday, but Mom’s at work and Amber’s home alone, with just the TV in moral-majority mode for company. Things have gone so far downhill since Mom discovered religion that absolutely the best thing in the world tante Annette could have sent her is some scam programmed by Daddy to take her away. If he doesn’t, Mom will take her to Church tonight (and maybe to an IRS compliance-certified restaurant afterward, if Amber’s good and does whatever Pastor Wallace tells her to).

The cat sniffs in the direction of the printer: “Why dontcha fire it up?” Amber opens the lid on the printer, removes the packing popcorn, and plugs it in. There’s a whirr and a rush of waste heat from its rear as it cools the imaging heads down to working temperature and registers her ownership.

“What do I do now?” she asks.

“Pick up the page labeled READ ME and follow the instructions,” the cat recites in a bored sing-song voice. It winks at her, then fakes an exaggerated French accent: “Le READ ME contains directions pour l’execution instrument corporate dans le boite. In event of perplexity, consult the accompanying aineko for clarification.” The cat wrinkles its nose rapidly, as if it’s about to bite an invisible insect. “Warning: don’t rely on your father’s cat’s opinions, it is a perverse beast and cannot be trusted. Your mother helped seed its meme base, back when they were married. Ends.” It mumbles on for a while: “fucking snotty Parisian bitch, I’ll piss in her knicker drawer, I’ll molt in her bidet. . . .”

“Don’t be vile.” Amber scans the README quickly. Corporate instruments are strong magic, according to Daddy, and this one is exotic by any standards: a limited company established in Yemen, contorted by the intersection between shari’a and the global legislatosaurus. Understanding it isn’t easy, even with a personal net full of sub-sapient agents that have full access to whole libraries of international trade law—the bottleneck is comprehension. Amber finds the documents highly puzzling. It’s not the fact that half of them are written in Arabic that bothers her—that’s what her grammar engine is for—or even that they’re full of S-expressions and semi-digestible chunks of LISP: but that the company seems to assert that it exists for the sole purpose of owning slaves.

“What’s going on?” she asks the cat. “What’s this all about?”

The cat sneezes, then looks disgusted. “This wasn’t my idea, big shot. Your father is a very weird guy and your mother hates him lots because she’s still in love with him. She’s got kinks, y’know? Or maybe she’s sublimating them, if she’s serious about this church shit she’s putting you through. He thinks that she’s a control freak. Anyway, after your dad ran off in search of another dome, she took out an injunction against him. But she forgot to cover his partner, and she bought this parcel of worms and sent them to you, okay? Annie is a real bitch, but he’s got her wrapped right around his finger, or something. Anyway, he built these companies and this printer—which isn’t hardwired to a filtering proxy, like your mom’s—specifically to let you get away from her legally. If that’s what you want to do.”

Amber fast-forwards through the dynamic chunks of the README—boring static UML diagrams, mostly—soaking up the gist of the plan. Yemen is one of the few countries to implement traditional Sunni shari’a law and a limited-liability company scam at the same time. Owning slaves is legal—the fiction is that the owner has an option hedged on the indentured laborer’s future output, with interest payments that grow faster than the unfortunate victim can pay them off—and companies are legal entities. If Amber sells herself into slavery to this company, she will become a slave, and the company will be legally liable for her actions and upkeep. The rest of the legal instrument—about 90 percent of it, in fact—is a set of self-modifying corporate mechanisms coded in a variety of jurisdictions that permit Turing-complete company constitutions, and which act as an ownership shell for the slavery contract: at the far end of the corporate firewall is a trust fund of which Amber is the prime beneficiary and shareholder. When she reaches the age of majority, she’ll acquire total control over all the companies in the network and can dissolve her slave contract; until then, the trust funds (which she essentially owns) oversee the company that owns her (and keeps it safe from hostile takeover bids). Oh, and the company network is primed by an extraordinary general meeting that instructed it to move the trust’s assets to Paris immediately. A one-way airline ticket is enclosed.

“You think I should take this?” she asks uncertainly. It’s hard to tell how smart the cat really is—there’s probably a yawning vacuum behind those semantic networks if you dig deep enough—but it tells a pretty convincing tale.

The cat squats and curls its tail protectively around its paws: “I’m saying nothing, you know what I mean? You take this, you can go live with your dad. But it won’t stop your ma coming after him with a horse whip and after you with a bunch of lawyers and a set of handcuffs. You want my advice, you’ll phone the Franklins and get aboard their off-planet mining scam. In space, no one can serve a writ on you. Plus, they got long-term plans to get into the CETI market, cracking alien network packets. You want my honest opinion, you wouldn’t like it in Paris after a bit. Your dad and the frog bitch, they’re swingers, y’know? No time in their lives for a kid. Or a cat like me, now I think of it. They’re out all hours of the night doing drugs, fetish parties, raves, opera, that kind of adult shit. Your dad dresses in frocks more than your mom, and your tante ’Nettie leads him around the apartment on a chain when they’re not having noisy sex on the balcony. They’d cramp your style, kid: you shouldn’t have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do.”

“Huh.” Amber wrinkles her nose, half-disgusted by the cat’s transparent scheming, and half-acknowledging its message: I’d better think hard about this, she decides. Then she flies off in so many directions at once that she nearly browns out the household net feed. Part of her is examining the intricate card pyramid of company structures; somewhere else, she’s thinking about what can go wrong, while another bit (probably some of her wet, messy glandular biological self) is thinking about how nice it would be to see Daddy again, albeit with some trepidation. Parents aren’t supposed to have sex: isn’t there a law, or something? “Tell me about the Franklins? Are they married? Singular?”

The 3D printer is cranking up. It hisses slightly, dissipating heat from the hard-vacuum chamber in its supercooled workspace. Deep in its guts it creates coherent atom beams, from a bunch of Bose-Einstein condensates hovering on the edge of absolute zero: by superimposing interference patterns on them, it generates an atomic hologram, building a perfect replica of some original artifact, right down to the atomic level—there are no clunky moving nanotechnology parts to break or overheat or mutate. Something is going to come out of the printer in half an hour, something cloned off its original right down to the individual quantum states of its component atomic nuclei. The cat, seemingly oblivious, shuffles closer to its exhaust ducts.

“Bob Franklin, he died about two, three years before you were born: your dad did business with him. So did your mom. Anyway, he had chunks of his noumen preserved, and the estate trustees are trying to recreate his consciousness by cross-loading him in their implants. They’re sort of a borganism, but with money and style. Anyway, Bob got into the space biz back then, with some financial wizardry a friend of your father whipped up for him, and now they-he are building a spacehab that they’re going to take all the way out to Jupiter, where they can dismantle a couple of small moons and begin building helium-three refineries. It’s that CETI scam I told you about earlier, but they’ve got a whole load of other angles on it for the long term.”

This is mostly going right over Amber’s head—she’ll have to learn what helium-three refineries are later—but the idea of running away to space has a certain appeal. Adventure, that’s what. Amber looks around the living room and sees it for a moment as a capsule, a small wooden cell locked deep in a vision of a middle-America that never was—the one her mom wants to retreat into. “Is Jupiter fun?” she asks. “I know it’s big and not very dense, but is it, like, a happening place?”

“You could say that,” says the cat, as the printer clanks and disgorges a fake passport (convincingly aged), an intricate metal seal engraved with Arabic script, and a tailored wide-spectrum vaccine targeted on Amber’s immature immune system. “Stick that on your wrist, sign the three top copies, put them in the envelope, and let’s get going: we’ve got a flight to catch.”

Sadeq is eating his dinner when the lawsuit rolls in.

Alone in the cramped humming void of his station, he contemplates the plea. The language is awkward, showing all the hallmarks of a crude machine translation: the supplicant is American, a woman, and—oddly—claims to be a Christian. This is surprising enough, but the nature of her claim is, at face value, preposterous. He forces himself to finish his bread, then bag the waste and clean the platter, before he gives it his full consideration. Is it a tasteless joke? Evidently not: as the only quadi outside the orbit of Mars he is uniquely qualified to hear it, and it is a case that cries out for justice.

A woman who leads a God-fearing life—not a correct one, no, but she shows some signs of humility and progress toward a deeper understanding—is deprived of her child by the machinations of a feckless husband who deserted her years before. That the woman was raising the child alone strikes Sadeq as disturbingly western, but pardonable when he reads her account of the feckless one’s behavior, which is degenerate: an ill fate indeed would await any child that this man raises to adulthood. This man deprives her of her child, but not by legitimate means: he doesn’t take the child into his own household or make any attempt to raise her, either in accordance with his own customs or the precepts of shari’a. Instead, he enslaves her wickedly in the mire of the western legal tradition, then casts her into outer darkness to be used as a laborer by the dubious forces of self-proclaimed “progress.” The same forces that Sadeq has been sent to confront, as representative of the Ummah in orbit around Jupiter.

Sadeq scratches his short beard thoughtfully. A nasty tale, but what can he do about it? “Computer,” he says, “a reply to this supplicant: my sympathies he with you in the manner of your suffering, but I fail to see in what way I can be of assistance. Your heart cries out for help before God (blessed be his name), but surely this is a matter for the temporal authorities of the dar al-Harb.” He pauses: or is it? he wonders. Legal wheels begin to turn in his mind. “If you can but find your way to extending to me a path by which I can assert the primacy of shari’ah over your daughter, I shall apply myself to constructing a case for her emancipation, to the greater glory of God (blessed be his name) in the name of the Prophet (peace be unto him). Ends, sigblock, send.”

Releasing the Velcro straps that hold him at the table, Sadeq floats up and then kicks gently toward the forward end of the cramped habitat. The controls of the telescope are positioned between the ultrasonic clothing cleaner and the lithium hydroxide scrubbers: they’re already freed up, because he was conducting a wide-field survey of the inner ring, looking for the signature of water ice. It is the work of a few moments to pipe the navigation and tracking system into the telescope’s controller and direct it to hunt for the big foreign ship of fools. Something nudges at Sadeq’s mind urgently, an irritating realization that he may have missed something in the woman’s email: there were a number of huge attachments. With half his mind, he surfs the news digest his scholarly peers send him daily: meanwhile, he waits patiently for the telescope to find the speck of light that the poor woman’s daughter is enslaved within.

This might be a way in, he realizes, a way to enter dialogue with them. Let the hard questions answer themselves, elegantly. There will be no need for the war of the sword if they can be convinced that their plans are faulty: no need to defend the godly from the latter-day Tower of Babel these people propose to build. If this woman Pamela means what she says, Sadeq need not end his days out here in the cold between the worlds, away from his elderly parents and brother and his colleagues and friends. And he will be profoundly grateful: because, in his heart of hearts, he knows that he is less a warrior than a scholar.

“I’m sorry, but the Borg is attempting to assimilate a lawsuit,” says the receptionist. “Will you hold?”

“Crud.” Amber blinks the Binary Betty answerphone sprite out of her eye and glances around at the cabin. “That is so last century,” she grumbles. “Who do they think they are?”

“Doctor Robert H. Franklin,” volunteers the cat. “It’s a losing proposition if you ask me. Bob was so fond of his dope that there’s this whole hippie groupmind that’s grown up using his state vector as a bong—”

“Shut the fuck up!” Amber shouts at him. Instantly contrite (for yelling in an inflatable spacecraft is a major faux pas): “Sorry.” She spawns an autonomic thread with full parasympathetic nervous control, tells it to calm her down: then she spawns a couple more to go forth and become fuqaha, expert on shari’a law. She realizes she’s buying up way too much of the orphanage’s scarce bandwidth—time that will have to be paid for in chores, later—but it’s necessary. “She’s gone too far. This time, it’s war.”

She slams out of her cabin and spins right around in the central axis of the hab, a rogue missile pinging for a target to vent her rage on. A tantrum would be good—

But her body is telling her to chill out, take ten, and there’s a drone of scriptural lore dribbling away in the back of her head, and she’s feeling frustrated and angry and not in control, but not really mad now. It was like this three years ago when Mom noticed her getting on too well with Jenny Morgan and moved her to a new school district—she said it was a work assignment, but Amber knows better, Mom asked for it—just to keep her dependent and helpless. Mom is a psycho bitch control-freak and ever since she had to face up to losing Dad she’s been working her claws into Amber—which is tough, because Amber is not good victim material, and is smart and well-networked to boot. But now Mom’s found a way of fucking Amber over completely, even in Jupiter orbit, and Amber would be totally out of control if not for her skullware keeping a lid on things.

Instead of shouting at her cat or trying to message the Borg, Amber goes to hunt them down in their meatspace den.

There are sixteen Borg aboard the Sanger—adults, members of the Franklin Collective, squatters in the ruins of Bob Franklin’s posthumous vision. They lend bits of their brains to the task of running what science has been able to resurrect of the dead dot-com billionaire’s mind, making him the first boddhisatva of the uploading age—apart from the lobster colony, of course. Their den mother is a woman called Monica: a willowy brown-eyed hive queen with raster-burned corneal implants and a dry, sardonic delivery that can corrode egos like a desert wind. She’s better than the others at running Bob, and she’s no slouch when she’s being herself: which is why they elected her Maximum Leader of the expedition.

Amber finds Monica in the number four kitchen garden, performing surgery on a filter that’s been blocked by toadspawn. She’s almost buried beneath a large pipe, her Velcro-taped toolkit waving in the breeze like strange blue air-kelp. “Monica? You got a minute?”

“Sure, I have lots of minutes. Make yourself helpful? Pass me the antitorque wrench and a number-six hex head.”

“Um.” Amber captures the blue flag and fiddles around with its contents. Something that has batteries, motors, a flywheel counterweight, and laser gyros assembles itself—Amber passes it under the pipe. “Here. Listen, your phone is busy.”

“I know. You’ve come to see me about your conversion, haven’t you?”

“Yes!”

There’s a clanking noise from under the pressure sump. “Take this.” A plastic bag floats out, bulging with stray fasteners. “I got a bit of vacuuming to do. Get yourself a mask if you don’t already have one.”

A minute later, Amber is back beside Monica’s legs, her face veiled by a filter mask. “I don’t want this to go through,” she says. “I don’t care what Mom says, I’m not Moslem! This judge, he can’t touch me. He can’t,” she repeats, vehemence warring with uncertainty.

“Maybe he doesn’t want to?” Another bag. “Here, catch.”

Amber grabs the bag: too late, she discovers that it’s full of water and toadspawn. Stringy mucous ropes full of squiggling comma-shaped baby tadpoles explode all over the compartment and bounce off the walls in a shower of amphibian confetti. “Eew!”

Monica squirms out from behind the pipe. “Oh, you didn’t.” She kicks off the consensus-defined floor and grabs a wad of absorbent paper from the spinner, whacks it across the ventilator shroud above the sump. Together they go after the toadspawn with garbage bags and paper—by the time they’ve got the stringy mess mopped up, the spinner has begun to click and whirr, processing cellulose from the algae tanks into fresh wipes. “That was really clever,” Monica says emphatically, as the disposal bin sucks down her final bag. “You wouldn’t happen to know how the toad got in here?”

“No, but I ran into one that was loose in the commons, one shift before last cycle-end. Gave it a ride back to Oscar.”

“I’ll have a word with him, then.” Monica glares blackly at the pipe. “I’m going to have to go back and re-fit the filter in a minute. Do you want me to be Bob?”

“Uh.” Amber thinks. “Not sure. Your call.”

“All right, Bob coming online.” Monica’s face relaxes slightly, then her expression hardens. “Way I see it, you’ve got a choice. Your mother’s kinda boxed you in, hasn’t she?”

“Yes.” Amber frowns.

“So. Pretend I’m an idiot. Talk me through it, huh?”

Amber drags herself alongside the hydro pipe and gets her head down, alongside Monica/Bob, who is floating with her feet near the floor. “I ran away from home. Mom owned me—that is, she had parental rights and Dad had none. So Dad, via a proxy, helped me sell myself into slavery to a company. The company was owned by a trust fund, and I’m the main beneficiary when I reach the age of majority. As a chattel, the company tells me what to do—legally—but the shell company is set to take my orders. So I’m autonomous. Right?”

“That sounds like the sort of thing your father would do,” Monica says neutrally. Overtaken by a sardonic middle-aged Silicon Valley drawl, her north-of-England accent sounds peculiarly mid-Atlantic.

“Trouble is, most countries don’t acknowledge slavery; those that do mostly don’t have any equivalent of a limited-liability company, much less one that can be directed by another company from abroad. Dad picked Yemen on the grounds that they’ve got this stupid brand of shari’a law—and a crap human-rights record—but they’re just about conformant to the open legal standards protocol, able to interface to EU norms via a Turkish legislative firewall.”

“So.”

“Well, I guess I was technically a Jannissary. Mom was doing her Christian phase, so that made me a Christian un-believer slave of an Islamic company. But now the stupid bitch has gone and converted to shi’ism. Now, normally, Islamic descent runs through the father, but she picked her sect carefully, and chose one that’s got a progressive view of women’s rights: they’re sort of Islamic fundamentalist liberal constructionists! “What would the Prophet do if he were alive today and had to worry about self-replicating chewing gum factories.’ They generally take a progressive, almost westernized, view of things like legal equality of the sexes, because for his time and place, the Prophet was way ahead of the ball and they figure they ought to follow his example. Anyway, that means Mom can assert that I am Moslem, and under Yemeni law I get to be treated as a Moslem chattel of a company. And their legal code is very dubious about permitting slavery of Moslems. It’s not that I have rights as such, but my pastoral well-being becomes the responsibility of the local imam, and—” She shrugs helplessly.

“Has he tried to make you run under any new rules, yet?” asks Monica/Bob. “Has he put blocks on your freedom of agency, tried to mess with your mind? Insisted on libido dampers?”

“Not yet.” Amber’s expression is grim. “But he’s no dummy. I figure he may be using Mom—and me—as a way of getting his fingers into this whole expedition. Staking a claim for jurisdiction, claim arbitration, that sort of thing. It could be worse; he might order me to comply fully with his specific implementation of shari’a. They permit implants, but require mandatory conceptual filtering: if I run that stuff, I’ll end up believing it!”

“Okay.” Monica does a slow backward somersault in mid-air. “Now tell me why you can’t simply repudiate it.”

“Because.” Deep breath. “I can do that in two ways. I can deny Islam, which makes me an apostate, and automatically terminates my indenture to the shell, so Mom owns me. Or I can say that the instrument has no legal standing because I was in the USA when I signed it, and slavery is illegal there, in which case Mom owns me, because I’m a minor. Or I can take the veil, live like a modest Moslem woman, do whatever the imam wants, and Mom doesn’t own me—but she gets to appoint my chaperone. Oh Bob, she has planned this so well?

“Uh-huh.” Monica rotates back to the floor and looks at Amber, suddenly very Bob. “Now you’ve told me your troubles, start thinking like your dad. Your dad had a dozen creative ideas before breakfast every day—it’s how he made his name. Your mom has got you in a box. Think your way outside it: what can you do?”

“Well.” Amber rolls over and hugs the fat hydroponic duct to her chest like a life raft. “It’s a legal paradox. I’m trapped because of the jurisdiction she’s cornered me in. I could talk to the judge, I suppose, but she’ll have picked him carefully.” Her eyes narrow. “The jurisdiction. Hey, Bob.” She lets go of the duct and floats free, hair streaming out behind her like a cometary halo. “How do I go about creating myself a new jurisdiction?”

Monica grins. “I seem to recall the traditional way was to grab yourself some land and set yourself up as king: but there are other ways. I’ve got some friends I think you should meet. They’re not good conversationalists and there’s a two-hour lightspeed delay . . . but I think you’ll find they’ve answered that question already. But why don’t you talk to the imam first and find out what he’s like? He may surprise you. After all, he was already out here before your mom decided to use him against you.”

The Sanger hangs in orbit thirty kilometers up, circling the waist of potato-shaped Amalthea. Drones swarm across the slopes of Mons Lyctos, ten kilometers above the mean surface level: they kick up clouds of reddish sulfate dust as they spread transparent sheets across the surface. This close to Jupiter—a mere hundred and eighty thousand kilometers above the swirling madness of the cloudscape—the gas giant fills half the sky with a perpetually changing clockface: for Amalthea orbits the master in under twelve hours. The Sanger’s radiation shields are running at full power, shrouding the ship in a corona of rippling plasma: radio is useless, and the human miners run their drones via an intricate network of laser circuits. Other, larger drones are unwinding spools of heavy electrical cable north and south from the landing site: once the circuits are connected, these will form a coil cutting through Jupiter’s magnetic field, generating electrical current (and imperceptibly slowing the moon’s orbital momentum).

Amber sighs and looks, for the sixth time this hour, at the webcam plastered on the side of her cabin. She’s taken down the posters and told the toys to tidy themselves away. In another two thousand seconds, the tiny Iranian spaceship will rise above the limb of Moshtari, and then it will be time to talk to the teacher. She isn’t looking forward to the experience. If he’s a grizzled old blockhead of the most obdurate fundamentalist streak, she’ll be in trouble: disrespect for age has been part and parcel of the western teenage experience for generations, and a cross-cultural thread that she’s sent to clue-up on Islam reminds her that not all cultures share this outlook. But if he turns out to be young, intelligent, and flexible, things could be even worse. When she was eight, Amber audited The Taming of the Shrew: now she has no appetite for a starring role in her own cross-cultural production.

She sighs again. “Pierre?”

“Yeah?” His voice comes from the foot of the emergency locker in her room. He’s curled up down there, limbs twitching languidly as he drives a mining drone around the surface of Object Barney, as the rock has named itself. The drone is a long-legged crane-fly lookalike, bouncing very slowly from toe-tip to toe-tip in the microgravity—the rock is only half a kilometer along its longest axis, coated brown with weird hydrocarbon goop and sulfur compounds sprayed off the surface of Io by the Jovian winds. “I’m coming.”

“You better.” She glances at the screen. “One twenty seconds to next bum.” The payload canister on the screen is, technically speaking, stolen: it’ll be okay as long as she gives it back, Bob said, although she won’t be able to do that until it’s reached Barney and they’ve found enough water ice to refuel it. “Found anything yet?”

“Just the usual. Got a seam of ice near the semimajor pole—it’s dirty, but there’s at least a thousand tons there. And the surface is crunchy with tar. Amber, you know what? The orange shit, it’s solid with fullerenes.”

Amber grins at her reflection in the screen. That’s good news. Once the payload she’s steering touches down, Pierre can help her lay superconducting wires along Barney’s long axis. It’s only a kilometer and a half, and that’ll only give them a few tens of kilowatts of juice, but the condensation fabricator that’s also in the payload will be able to use it to convert Barney’s crust into processed goods at about two grams per second. Using designs copylefted by the free hardware foundation, inside two hundred thousand seconds they’ll have a grid of sixty-four 3D printers barfing up structured matter at a rate limited only by available power. Starting with a honking great dome tent and some free nitrogen/oxygen for her to breathe, then adding a big webcache and direct high-bandwidth uplink to Earth, Amber could have her very own one-girl colony up and running within a million seconds.

The screen blinks at her. “Oh shit. Make yourself scarce, Pierre!” The incoming call nags at her attention. “Yeah? Who are you?”

The screen fills with a view of a cramped, very twen-cen-looking space capsule. The guy inside it is in his twenties, with a heavily tanned face, close-cropped hair and beard, wearing an olive-drab spacesuit liner. He’s floating between a TORU manual-docking controller and a gilt-framed photograph of the Ka’bah at Mecca. “Good evening to you,” he says solemnly. “Do I have the honor to be addressing Amber Macx?”

“Uh, yeah. That’s me.” She stares at him: he looks nothing like her conception of an ayatollah—whatever an ayatollah is—elderly, black-robed, vindictively fundamentalist. “Who are you?”

“I am Doctor Sadeq Khurasani. I hope that I am not interrupting you? Is it convenient for you that we talk now?”

He looks so anxious that Amber nods automatically. “Sure. Did my mom put you up to this?” They’re still speaking English, and she notices that his diction is good, but slightly stilted: he isn’t using a grammar engine, he’s actually learned it the hard way. “If so, you want to be careful. She doesn’t lie, exactly, but she gets people to do what she wants.”

“Yes, she did. Ah.” A pause. They’re still almost a light-second apart, time for painful collisions and accidental silences. “I have not noticed that. Are you sure you should be speaking of your mother that way?”

Amber breathes deeply. “Adults can get divorced. If I could get divorced from her, I would. She’s—” she flails around for the right word helplessly. “Look. She’s the sort of person who can’t lose a fight. If she’s going to lose, she’ll try to figure how to set the law on you. Like she’s done to me. Don’t you see?”

Doctor Khurasani looks extremely dubious. “I am not sure I understand,” he says. “Perhaps, mm, I should tell you why I am talking to you?”

“Sure. Go ahead.” Amber is startled by his attitude: he’s actually taking her seriously, she realizes. Treating her like an adult. The sensation is so novel—coming from someone more than twenty years old and not a member of the Borg—that she almost lets herself forget that he’s only talking to her because Mom set her up.

“Well. I am an engineer. In addition, I am a student of fiqh, jurisprudence. In fact, I am qualified to sit in judgment. I am a very junior judge, but even so, it is a heavy responsibility. Anyway. Your mother, peace be unto her, lodged a petition with me. Are you aware of it?”

“Yes.” Amber tenses up. “It’s a lie. Distortion of the facts.”

“Hmm.” Sadeq rubs his beard thoughtfully. “Well, I have to find out, yes? Your mother has submitted herself to the will of God. This makes you the child of a Moslem, and she claims—”

“She’s trying to use you as a weapon!” Amber interrupts. “I sold myself into slavery to get away from her, do you understand? I enslaved myself to a company that is held in trust for my ownership. She’s trying to change the rules to get me back. You know what? I don’t believe she gives a shit about your religion, all she wants is me!”

“A mother’s love—”

“Fuck love!” Amber snarls, “she wants power?

Sadeq’s expression hardens. “You have a foul mouth in your head, child. All I am trying to do is to find out the facts of this situation: you should ask yourself if such disrespect furthers your interests?” He pauses for a moment, then continues, less abruptly, “Did you really have such a bad childhood with her? Do you think she did everything merely for power, or could she love you?” Pause. “You must understand, I need an answer to these things. Before I can know what is the right thing to do.”

“My mother—” Amber stops. Spawns a vaporous cloud of memory retrievals. They fan out through the space around her mind like the tail of her cometary mind. Invoking a complex of network parsers and class filters, she turns the memories into reified images and blats them at the webcam’s tiny brain so that he can see them. Some of the memories are so painful that Amber has to close her eyes. Mom in full office war-paint, leaning over Amber, promising to take her to church so that Reverend Beeching can pray the devil out of her. Mom telling Amber that they’re moving again, abruptly, dragging her away from school and the friends she’d tentatively started to like. Mom catching her on the phone to Daddy, tearing the phone in half and hitting her with it. Mom at the kitchen table, forcing her to eat—“My mother likes control.”

“Ah.” Sadeq’s expression turns glassy. “And this is how you feel about her? How long have you had that level of—no, please forgive me for asking. You obviously understand implants. Do your grandparents know? Did you talk to them?”

“My grandparents?” Amber stifles a snort. “Mom’s parents are dead. Dad’s are still alive, but they won’t talk to him—they like Mom. They think I’m creepy. I know little things, their tax bands and customer profiles. I could mine data with my head when I was four. I’m not built like little girls were in their day, and they don’t understand. You know that the old ones don’t like us at all? Some of the churches make money doing nothing but exorcisms for oldsters who think their kids are possessed.”

“Well.” Sadeq is fingering his beard again, distractedly. “I must say, this is a lot to learn. But you know that your mother has accepted Islam, don’t you? This means that you are Moslem, too. Unless you are an adult, your parent legally speaks for you. And she says that this makes you my problem. Hmm.”

“I’m not Moslem.” Amber stares at the screen. “I’m not a child, either.” Her threads are coming together, whispering scarily behind her eyes: her head is suddenly dense and turgid with ideas, heavy as a stone and twice as old as time. “I am nobody’s chattel. What does your law say about people who are born with implants? What does it say about people who want to live forever? I don’t believe in any god, mister judge. I don’t believe in any limits. Mom can’t, physically, make me do anything, and she sure can’t speak for me.”

“Well, if that is what you have to say, I must think on the matter.” He catches her eye: his expression is thoughtful, like a doctor considering a diagnosis. “I will call you again in due course. In the meantime, if you need to talk to anyone, remember that I am always available. If there is anything I can do to help ease your pain, I would be pleased to be of service. Peace be unto you, and those you care for.”

“Same to you too,” she mutters darkly as the connection goes dead. “Now what?” she asks, as a beeping sprite gyrates across the wall, begging for attention.

“I think it’s the lander,” Pierre says helpfully. “Is it down yet?”

She rounds on him. “Hey, I thought I told you to get lost!”

“What, and miss all the fun?” He grins at her impishly. “Amber’s got a new boyfriend! Wait until I tell everybody. . . .”

Sleep cycles pass: the borrowed 3D printer on Object Barney’s surface spews bitmaps of atoms in quantum lockstep at its rendering platform, building up the control circuitry and skeletons of new printers. (There are no clunky nano-assemblers here, no robots the size of viruses busily sorting molecules into piles—just the bizarre quantized magic of atomic holography, modulated Bose-Einstein condensates collapsing into strange, lacy, supercold machinery.) Electricity surges through the cable loops as they slice through Jupiter’s magnetosphere, slowly converting the rock’s momentum into power: small robots grovel in the orange dirt, scooping up raw material to feed to the fractionating oven. Amber’s garden of machinery flourishes slowly, unpacking itself according to a schema designed by pre-teens at an industrial school in Poland, with barely any need for human guidance.

High in orbit around Amalthea, complex financial instruments breed and conjugate. Developed for the express purpose of facilitating trade with the alien intelligences believed to have been detected eight years earlier by SETI, they function equally well as fiscal firewalls for space colonies. The Sanger’s bank accounts in California and Cuba are looking acceptable—since entering Jupiter space, the orphanage has staked a claim on roughly a hundred gigatons of random rocks and a moon that’s just small enough to creep in under the International Astronomical Union’s definition of a sovereign planetary body. The Borg are working hard, leading their eager teams of child stakeholders in their plans to build the industrial metastructures necessary to support mining helium three from Jupiter: they’re so focused that they spend much of their time being themselves, not bothering to run Bob, the shared identity that gives them their messianic drive.

Half a light-hour away, tired Earth wakes and slumbers in time to its ancient orbital dynamics. A religious college in Cairo is considering issues of nanotechnology: if replicators sire used to prepare a copy of a strip of bacon, right down to the molecular level, but without it ever being part of a pig, how is it to be treated? (If the mind of one of the faithful is copied into a computing machine’s memory by mapping and simulating all its synapses, is the computer now a Moslem? If not, why not? If so, what are its rights and duties?) Riots in Borneo underline the urgency of theotechnological inquiry.

More riots in Barcelona, Madrid, Birmingham, and Marseilles also underline a rising problem: social chaos caused by cheap anti-aging treatments. The zombie exterminators, a backlash of disaffected youth against the formerly greying gerontocracy of Europe, insist that people who predate the supergrid and can’t handle implants aren’t really conscious: their ferocity is equaled only by the anger of the dynamic septuagenarians of the baby boom, their bodies partially restored to the flush of sixties youth but their minds adrift in a slower, less contingent century. The faux-young boomers feel betrayed, forced back into the labor pool but unable to cope with the implant-accelerated culture of the new millennium, their hard-earned experience rendered obsolete by deflationary time.

The Bangladeshi economic miracle is typical of the age. With growth rates running at over 20 percent, cheap out-of-control bioindustrialization has swept the nation: former rice farmers harvest plastics and milk cows for silk, while their children study mariculture and design sea walls. With cellphone ownership nearing 80 percent and literacy at 90, the once-poor country is finally breaking out of its historical infrastructure trap and beginning to develop: another generation, and they’ll be richer than Japan in 2001.

Radical new economic theories are focusing around bandwidth, speed-of-light transmission time, and the implications of CETI, communication with extra-terrestrial intelligence: cosmologists and quants collaborate on bizarre relativistically telescoped financial instruments. Space (which lets you store information) and structure (which lets you process it) acquire value while dumb mass—like gold—loses it: the degenerate cores of the traditional stock markets are in free fall, the old smokestack microprocessor and biotech/nanotech industries crumbling before the onslaught of matter replicators and self-modifying ideas and the barbarian communicators, who mortgage their future for a millennium against the chance of a gift from a visiting alien intelligence. Microsoft, once the US Steel of the silicon age, quietly fades into liquidation.

An outbreak of green goo—a crude biomechanical replicator that eats everything in its path—is dealt with in the Australian outback by carpetbombing with fuel-air explosives: the USAF subsequently reactivates two wings of refurbished B-52s and places them at the disposal of the UN standing committee on self-replicating weapons. (CNN discovers that one of their newest pilots, re-enlisting with the body of a twenty-year-old and an empty pension account, first flew them over Laos and Cambodia.) The news overshadows the World Health Organization’s announcement of the end of the HIV pandemic, after more than fifty years of bigotry, panic, and megadeath.

“Breathe steadily. Remember your regulator drill? If you spot your heart rate going up or your mouth going dry, take five.”

“Shut the fuck up, ’Neko, I’m trying to concentrate.” Amber fumbles with the titanium D-ring, trying to snake the strap through it. The gauntlets are getting in her way: high orbit spacesuits—little more than a body stocking designed to hold your skin under compression and help you breathe—are easy, but this deep in Jupiter’s radiation belt, she has to wear an old moon suit that comes in about thirteen layers, and the gloves are stiff. It’s Chernobyl weather, a sleet of alpha particles and raw protons storming through the void. “Got it.” She yanks the strap tight, pulls on the D-ring, then goes to work on the next strap. Never looking down: because the wall she’s tying herself to has no floor, just a cut-off two meters below, then empty space for a hundred kilometers before the nearest solid ground.

The ground sings to her moronically: “I fall to you, you fall to me, it’s the law of gravity—”

She shoves her feet down onto the platform that juts from the side of the capsule like a suicide’s ledge: metalized Velcro grabs hold, and she pulls on the straps to turn her body around until she can see past the capsule, sideways. The capsule masses about five tons, barely bigger than an ancient Soyuz. It’s packed to overflowing with environment-sensitive stuff she’ll need, and a honking great high-gain antenna. “I hope you know what you’re doing?” someone says over the intercom.

“Of course I—” she stops. Alone in this TsUP-surplus iron maiden with its low bandwidth comms and bizarre plumbing, she feels claustrophobic and helpless: parts of her mind don’t work. When she was four, Mom took her down a famous cave system somewhere out west: when the guide turned out the lights half a kilometer underground, she’d screamed with surprise as the darkness had reached out and touched her. Now it’s not the darkness that frightens her, it’s the lack of thought. For a hundred kilometers below her, there are no minds, and even on the surface there’s not much but a moronic warbling of bots. Everything that makes the universe primate-friendly seems to be locked in the huge spaceship that looms somewhere just behind her, and she has to fight down an urge to shed her straps and swarm back up the umbilical that anchors this capsule to the Sanger. “I’ll be fine,” she forces herself to say. And even though she’s unsure that it’s true, she tries to make herself believe it. “It’s just leaving-home nerves. I’ve read about it, okay?”

There’s a hinny, high-pitched whistle in her ears. For a moment, the sweat on the back of her neck turns icy cold, then the noise stops. She strains for a moment, and when it returns, she recognizes the sound: the heretofore-talkative cat, curled in the warmth of her pressurized luggage can, has begun to snore.

“Let’s go,” she says, “time to roll the wagon.” A speech macro deep in the Sanger’s docking firmware recognizes her authority and gently lets go of the pod. A couple of cold gas thrusters pop, deep banging vibrations running through the capsule, and she’s on her way.

“Amber. How’s it hanging?” A familiar voice in her ears: she blinks. Fifteen hundred seconds, nearly half an hour gone.

“Robes-Pierre, chopped any aristos lately?”

“Heh!” A pause. “I can see your head from here.”

“How’s it looking?” she asks. There’s a lump in her throat, she isn’t sure why. Pierre is probably hooked into one of the smaller proximity cameras dotted around the outer hull of the big mothership. Watching over her as she falls.

“Pretty much like always,” he says laconically. Another pause, this time longer. “This is wild, you know? Su Ang says hi, by the way.”

“Su Ang, hi,” she replies, resisting the urge to lean back and look up—up relative to her feet, not her vector—and see if the ship’s still visible.

“Hi,” Ang says shyly. “You’re very brave!”

“Still can’t beat you at chess.” Amber frowns. Su Ang and her over-engineered algae. Oscar and his pharmaceutical factory toads. People she’s known for three years, mostly ignored, and never thought about missing. “Listen, you going to come visiting?”

“Visit?” Ang sounds dubious. “When will it be ready?”

“Oh, soon enough.” At four kilograms per minute of structured-matter output, the printers on the surface have already built her a bunch of stuff: a habitat dome, the guts of an algae/shrimp farm, a bucket conveyor to bury it with, an airlock. It’s all lying around waiting for her to put it together and move into her new home. “Once the Borg get back from Amalthea.”

“Hey! You mean they’re moving? How did you figure that?”

“Go talk to them,” Amber says. Actually, she’s a large part of the reason the Sanger is about to crank its orbit up and out toward the other moon: she wants to be alone in comms silence for a couple of million seconds. The Franklin collective is doing her a big favor.

“Ahead of the curve, as usual,” Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.

“You too,” she says, a little too fast. “Come visit when I’ve got the life-support cycle stabilized.”

“I’ll do that,” he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser-line of the Sanger’s drive torch powering up.

Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.

The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic-control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were less than two hundred people here: now there’s the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply—trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks—and studies the map. “Computer, what about my slot?” he asks.

“Your slot: cleared to commence final approach in six nine five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now.” Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.

Sadeq sighs. “We’ll go in on Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?”

“Kurs docking target support available to shell level three.”

“Praise the Prophet, peace be unto him.” He pokes around through the guidance subsystem’s menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last, he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances around: for two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.

The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. “Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over.”

Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty’s subjects. “Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I’m listening, over.”

“Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven four zero and slaved to our control.”

He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system’s settings. “Control, all in order.”

“Bravo One One, stand by.”

The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: a kilometer before touch-down, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It’s not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.

Her Majesty’s domain stretches out before the battered Almaz module like a rust-stained snowflake half-a-kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of greyish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals; a cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive cluster. Already, he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma: the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.

Finally, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it direct into his visual field: there’s an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes, expanding toward the convex ceiling of the ship, and he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again—but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he’s close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it’s measured in centimeters per second. There’s a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the docking ring latches fire—and he’s down.

Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There’s gravity here, but not much: walking is impossible. He’s about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he is just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then—

Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her Equerry has designed for her. It’s a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of iridium. It glitters with the blue and violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she’s building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are bare: her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and, in any event, certain styles—skirts, for example—are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she’s wearing a crown. And there’s a cat sleeping on the back of her throne.

The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. “If you need anything, please say,” she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor—a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower—and waits to be noticed.

“Doctor Khurasani, I presume.” She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. “Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay.”

Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young—her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face—but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. “I am grateful for Your Majesty’s forbearance,” he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows: but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except in the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo.

“Have a seat,” she offers, gesturing: a ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. “You must be tired: working a ship all by yourself is exhausting.” She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. “And two years is nearly unprecedented.”

“Your Majesty is too kind.” Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. “Your labors have been fruitful, I trust.”

She shrugs. “I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier. . . .” a momentary grin. “This isn’t the wild west, is it?”

“Justice cannot be sold,” Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: “My apologies, please accept that while I mean no insult. I merely mean that while you say your goal is to provide the rule of Law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice.”

The queen nods. “Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree: I can’t sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn’t it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they’re close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to space, than any earthbound one.” A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.

Five billion inputs or more, Sadeq marvels: the crown is an engineering marvel, even though most of its mass is buried in the walls and floor of this huge construct. “There is law revealed by the Prophet, peace be unto him, and there is Law that we can establish by analyzing his intentions. There are other forms of law by which humans live, and various interpretations of the law of God even among those who study his works. How, in the absence of the word of the Prophet, can you provide a moral compass?”

“Hmm.” She taps her fingers on the arm of her throne, and Sadeq’s heart freezes. He’s heard the stories from the claim-jumpers and boardroom bandits, from the greenmail experts with their roots in the earthbound jurisdictions that have made such a hash of arbitration here: how she can experience a year in a minute, rip your memories out through your cortical implants and make you relive your worst mistakes in her nightmarishly powerful simulation system. She is the queen—the first individual to get her hands on so much mass and energy that she could pull ahead of the curve of binding technology, and the first to set up her own jurisdiction and rule certain experiments to be legal so that she could make use of the mass/energy intersection. She has force majeure—even the Pentagon’s infowarriors respect the Ring Imperium’s firewall. In fact, the body sitting in the throne opposite him probably contains only a fraction of her identity; she’s by no means the first upload or partial, but she’s the first-gust front of the storm of power that will arrive when the arrogant ones achieve their goal of dismantling the planets and turning dumb and uninhabited mass into brains throughout the observable reaches of the universe. And he’s just questioned the rectitude of her vision.

The queen’s lips twitch. Then they curl into a wide, carnivorous grin. Behind her, the cat sits up and stretches, then stares at Sadeq through narrowed eyes.

“You know, that’s the first time in weeks that anyone has told me I’m full of shit. You haven’t been talking to my mother again, have you?”

It’s Sadeq’s turn to shrug, uncomfortably. “I have prepared a judgment,” he says slowly.

“Ah.” Amber rotates the huge diamond ring around her finger, seemingly unaware. It is Amber that looks him in the eye, a trifle nervously. Although what he could possibly do to make her comply with any decree—

“Her motive is polluted,” Sadeq says shortly.

“Does that mean what I think it does?” she asks.

Sadeq breathes deeply again. “Yes.”

Her smile returns. “And is that the end of it?” she asks.

He raises a dark eyebrow. “Only if you can prove to me that you can have a conscience in the absence of divine revelation.”

Her reaction catches him by surprise. “Oh, sure. That’s the next part of the program. Obtaining divine revelations.”

“What? From the aliens?”

The cat, claws extended, delicately picks its way down to her lap and waits to be held and stroked. It never once takes its eyes off him. “Where else?” she asks. “Doctor, I didn’t get the Franklin trust to loan me the wherewithal to build this castle just in return for some legal paperwork. We’ve known for years that there’s a whole alien packet-switching network out there and we’re just getting spillover from some of their routes: it turns out there’s a node not far away from here, in real space. Helium three, separate jurisdictions, heavy industrialization on Io—there is a purpose to all this activity.”

Sadeq licks his suddenly dry lips. “You’re going to narrowcast a reply?”

“No, much better than that: we’re going to visit them. Cut the delay cycle down to realtime. We came here to build a ship and recruit a crew, even if we have to cannibalize the whole of Jupiter system to pay for the exercise.” The cat yawns, then fixes him with a thousand-yard stare. “This stupid girl wants to bring her conscience along to a meeting with something so smart it might as well be a god,” it says, “and you’re it. There’s a slot open for the post of ship’s theologian. I don’t suppose I can convince you to turn the offer down?”

THE COOKIE MONSTER

Vernor Vinge

Man is “the time-binding animal.” But in the future, that simple statement may take on meanings that Korzybski never imagined. . . .

“So how do you like the new job?”

Dixie Mae looked up from her keyboard and spotted a pimply face peering at her from over the cubicle partition.

“It beats flipping burgers, Victor,” she said.

Victor bounced up so his whole face was visible. “Yeah? It’s going to get old awfully fast.”

Actually, Dixie Mae felt the same way. But doing customer support at LotsaTech was a real job, a foot in the door at the biggest high-tech company in the world. “Gimme a break, Victor! This is our first day.” Well, it was the first day not counting the six days of product familiarization classes. “If you can’t take this, you’ve got the attention span of a cricket.”

“That’s a mark of intelligence, Dixie Mae. I’m smart enough to know what’s not worth the attention of a first-rate creative mind.”

Grr. “Then your first-rate creative mind is going to be out of its gourd by the end of the summer.”

Victor smirked. “Good point.” He thought a second, then continued more quietly, “But see, um, I’m doing this to get material for my column in the Bruin. You know, big headlines like ‘The New Sweatshops’ or ‘Death by Boredom’. I haven’t decided whether to play it for laughs or go for heavy social consciousness. In any case,”—he lowered his voice another notch—“I’m bailing out of here, um, by the end of next week, thus suffering only minimal brain damage from the whole sordid experience.”

“And you’re not seriously helping the customers at all, huh, Victor? Just giving them hilarious misdirections?”

Victor’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ll have you know I’m being articulate and seriously helpful . . . at least for another day or two.” The weasel grin crawled back onto his face. “I won’t start being Bastard Consultant from Hell till right before I quit.”

That figures. Dixie Mae turned back to her keyboard. “Okay, Victor. Meantime, how about letting me do the job I’m being paid for?”

Silence. Angry, insulted silence? No, this was more a leering, undressing-you-with-my-eyes silence. But Dixie Mae did not look up. She could tolerate such silence as long as the leerer was out of arm’s reach.

After a moment, there was the sound of Victor dropping back into his chair in the next cubicle.

Ol’ Victor had been a pain in the neck from the get-go. He was slick with words; if he wanted to, he could explain things as good as anybody Dixie Mae had ever met. At the same time, he kept rubbing it in how educated he was and what a dead-end this customer support gig was. Mr. Johnson—the guy running the familiarization course—was a great teacher, but smart-ass Victor had tested the man’s patience all week long. Yeah, Victor really didn’t belong here, but not for the reasons he bragged about.

It took Dixie Mae almost an hour to finish off seven more queries. One took some research, being a really bizarre question about Voxalot for Norwegian. Okay, this job would get old after a few days, but there was a virtuous feeling in helping people. And from Mr. Johnson’s lectures, she knew that as long as she got the reply turned in by closing time this evening, she could spend the whole afternoon researching just how to make LotsaTech’s vox program recognize Norwegian vowels.

Dixie Mae had never done customer support before this; till she took Prof. Reich’s tests last week, her highest-paying job really had been flipping burgers. But like the world and your Aunt Sally, she had often been the victim of customer support. Dixie Mae would buy a new book or a cute dress, and it would break or wouldn’t fit—and then when she wrote customer support, they wouldn’t reply, or had useless canned answers, or just tried to sell her something more—all the time talking about how their greatest goal was serving the customer.

But now LotsaTech was turning all that around. Their top bosses had realized how important real humans were to helping real human customers. They were hiring hundreds and hundreds of people like Dixie Mae. They weren’t paying very much, and this first week had been kinda tough since they were all cooped up here during the crash intro classes.

But Dixie Mae didn’t mind. “LotsaTech is a lot of Tech.” Before, she’d always thought that motto was stupid. But LotsaTech was big; it made IBM and Microsoft look like minnows. She’d been a little nervous about that, imagining that she’d end up in a room bigger than a football field with tiny office cubicles stretching away to the horizon. Well, Building 0994 did have tiny cubicles, but her team was just fifteen nice people—leaving Victor aside for the moment. Their work floor had windows all the way around, a panoramic view of the Santa Monica mountains and the Los Angeles basin. And li’l ol’ Dixie Mae Leigh had her a desk right beside one of those wide windows! I’ll bet there are CEO’s who don’t have a view as good as mine. Here’s where you could see a little of what the Lotsa in LotsaTech meant. Just outside of BO994 there were tennis courts and a swimming pool. Dozens of similar buildings were scattered across the hillside. A golf course covered the next hill over, and more company land lay beyond that. These guys had the money to buy the top off Runyon Canyon and plunk themselves down on it. And this was just the LA branch office.

Dixie Mae had grown up in Tarzana. On a clear day in the valley, you could see the Santa Monica mountains stretching off forever into the haze. They seemed beyond her reach, like something from a fairy tale. And now she was up here. Next week, she’d bring her binoculars to work, go over on the north slope, and maybe spot where her father still lived down there.

Meanwhile, back to work. The next six queries were easy, from people who hadn’t even bothered to read the single page of directions that came with Voxalot. Letters like those would be hard to answer politely the thousandth time she saw them. But she would try—and today she practiced with cheerful specifics that stated the obvious and gently pointed the customers to where they could find more. Then came a couple of brain twisters. Damn. She wouldn’t be able to finish those today. Mr. Johnson said “finish anything you start on the same day”—but maybe he would let her work on those first thing Monday morning. She really wanted to do well on the hard ones. Every day, there would be the same old dumb questions. But there would also be hard new questions. And eventually she’d get really, really good with Voxalot. More important, she’d get good about managing questions and organization. So what that she’d screwed the last seven years of her life and never made it through college? Little by little she would improve herself, till a few years from now her past stupidities wouldn’t matter anymore. Some people had told her that such things weren’t possible nowadays, that you really needed the college degree. But people had always been able to make it with hard work. Back in the twentieth century, lots of steno pool people managed it. Dixie Mae figured customer support was pretty much the same kind of starting point.

Nearby, somebody gave out a low whistle. Victor. Dixie Mae ignored him.

“Dixie Mae, you gotta see this.”

Ignore him.

“I swear Dixie, this is a first. How did you do it? I got an incoming query for you, by name! Well, almost.”

“What!? Forward it over here, Victor.”

“No. Come around and take a look. I have it right in front of me.”

Dixie Mae was too short to look over the partition. Jeez.

Three steps took her into the corridor. Ulysse Green poked her head out of her cubicle, an inquisitive look on her face. Dixie Mae shrugged and rolled her eyes, and Ulysse returned to her work. The sound of fingers on keys was like occasional raindrops (no Voxalots allowed in cubicle-land). Mr. Johnson had been around earlier, answering questions and generally making sure things were going okay. Right now he should be back in his office on the other side of the building; this first day, you hardly needed to worry about slackers. Dixie Mae felt a little guilty about making that a lie, but . . .

She popped into Victor’s cubicle, grabbed a loose chair. “This better be good, Victor.”

“Judge for yourself, Dixie Mae.” He looked at his display. “Oops, I lost the window. Just a second.” He dinked around with his mouse. “So, have you been putting your name on outgoing messages? That’s the only way I can imagine this happenings—”

“No. I have not. I’ve answered twenty-two questions so far, and I’ve been AnnetteG all the way.” The fake signature was built into her “send” key. Mr. Johnson said this was to protect employee privacy and give users a feeling of continuity even though follow-up questions would rarely come to the original responder. He didn’t have to say that it was also to make sure that LotsaTech support people would be interchangeable, whether they were working out of the service center in Lahore or Londonderry—or Los Angeles. So far, that had been one of Dixie Mae’s few disappointments about this job; she could never have an ongoing helpful relationship with a customer.

So what the devil was this all about?

“Ah! Here it is.” Victor waved at the screen. “What do you make of it?”

The message had come in on the help address. It was in the standard layout enforced by the query acceptance page. But the “previous responder field” was not one of the house sigs. Instead it was:

Ditzie May Lay

“Grow up, Victor.”

Victor raised his hands in mock defense, but he had seen her expression, and some of the smirk left his face. “Hey, Dixie Mae, don’t kill the messenger. This is just what came in.”

“No way. The server-side script would have rejected an invalid responder name. You faked this.”

For a fleeting moment, Victor looked uncertain. Hah! thought Dixie Mae. She had been paying attention during Mr. Johnson’s lectures; she knew more about what was going on here than Victor-the-great-mind. And so his little joke had fallen flat on its rear end. But Victor regrouped and gave a weak smile. “It wasn’t me. How would I know about this, er, nickname of yours?”

“Yes,” said Dixie Mae, “it takes real genius to come up with such a clever play on words.”

“Honest, Dixie Mae, it wasn’t me. Hell, I don’t even know how to use our form editor to revise header fields.”

Now that claim had the ring of truth.

“What’s happening?”

They looked up, saw Ulysse standing at the entrance to the cubicle.

Victor gave her a shrug. “It’s Dit—Dixie Mae. Someone here at LotsaTech is jerking her around.”

Ulysse came closer and bent to read from the display. “Yech. So what’s the message?”

Dixie Mae reached across the desk and scrolled down the display. The return address was lusting925@freemail.sg. The topic choice was “Voice Formatting.” They got lots on that topic; Voxalot format control wasn’t quite as intuitive as the ads would like you to believe.

But this was by golly not a follow-up on anything Dixie Mae had answered:

. . .

HEY THERE, HONEY CHILE! I’LL BE TRULY GRATEFUL IF YOU WOULD TELL ME HOW TO PUT THE FOLLOWING INTO ITALICS:

“REMEMBER THE TARZANARAMA TREE HOUSE? THE ONE YOU SET ON FIRE? IF YOU’D LIKE TO START A MUCH BIGGER FIRE, THEN FIGURE OUT HOW I KNOW ALL THIS. A BIG CLUE IS THAT 999 IS 666 SPELLED UPSIDE DOWN.”

I’VE TRIED EVERYTHING AND I CAN’T SET THE ABOVE PROPOSITION INTO INDENTED ITALICS—LEASTWISE WITHOUT FINGERING. PLEASE HELP.

ACHING FOR SOME OF YOUR SOUTHRON HOSPITALITY, I REMAIN YOUR VERY BESTEST FIEND,

—LUSTING (FOR YOU DEEPLY)

Ulysse’s voice was dry: “So, Victor, you’ve figured how to edit incoming forms.”

“God damn it, I’m innocent!”

“Sure you are.” Ulysse’s white teeth flashed in her black face. The three little words held a world of disdain.

Dixie Mae held up her hand, waving them both to silence. “I . . . don’t know. There’s something real strange about this mail.” She stared at the message body for several seconds. A big ugly chill was growing in her middle. Mom and Dad had built her that tree house when she was seven years old. Dixie Mae had loved it. For two years she was Tarzana of Tarzana. But the name of the tree house—Tarzanarama—had been a secret. Dixie Mae had been nine years old when she torched that marvelous tree house. It had been a terrible accident. Well, a world-class temper tantrum, actually. But she had never meant the fire to get so far out of control. The fire had darn near burned down their real house, too. She had been a scarifyingly well-behaved little girl for almost two years after that incident.

Ulysse was giving the mail a careful read. She patted Dixie Mae on the shoulder. “Whoever this is, he certainly doesn’t sound friendly.”

Dixie Mae nodded. “This weasel is pushing every button I’ve got.” Including her curiosity. Dad was the only living person that knew who had started the fire, but it was going on four years since he’d had any address for his daughter—and Daddy would never have taken this sex-creep, disrespecting tone.

Victor glanced back and forth between them, maybe feeling hurt that he was no longer the object of suspicion. “So who do you think it is?”

Don Williams craned his head over the next partition. “Who is what?”

Given another few minutes, and they’d have everyone on the floor with some bodily part stuck into Victor’s cubicle.

Ulysse said, “Unless you’re deaf, you know most of it, Don. Someone is messing with us.”

“Well then, report it to Johnson. This is our first day, people. It’s not a good day to get sidetracked.”

That brought Ulysse down to earth. Like Dixie Mae, she regarded this LotsaTech job as her last real chance to break into a profession.

“Look,” said Don. “It’s already lunch time.”—Dixie Mae glanced at her watch. It really was!—“We can talk about this in the cafeteria, then come back and give Great Lotsa a solid afternoon of work. And then we’ll be done with our first week!” Williams had been planning a party down at his folks’ place for tonight. It would be their first time off the LotsaTech campus since they took the job.

“Yeah!” said Ulysse. “Dixie Mae, you’ll have the whole weekend to figure out who’s doing this—and plot your revenge.”

Dixie Mae looked again at the impossible “previous responder field.” “I . . . don’t know. This looks like it’s something happening right here on the LotsaTech campus.” She stared out Victor’s picture window. It was the same view as from her cubicle, of course—but now she was seeing everything with a different mind set. Somewhere in the beautiful country-club buildings, there was a real sleaze ball. And he was playing guessing games with her.

Everybody was quiet for a second. Maybe that helped—Dixie Mae realized just what she was looking at: the next lodge down the hill. From here you could only see the top of its second story. Like all the buildings on the campus, it had a four-digit identification number made of gold on every corner. That one was Building 0999.

A big clue is that 999 is just 666 spelled upside down. “Jeez, Ulysse. Look: 999.” Dixie Mae pointed down the hillside.

“It could be a coincidence.”

“No, it’s too pat.” She glanced at Victor. This really was the sort of thing someone like him would set up. But whoever wrote that letter just knew too much. “Look, I’m going to skip lunch today and take a little walk around the campus.”

“That’s crazy,” said Don. “LotsaTech is an open place, but we’re not supposed to be wandering into other project buildings.”

“Then they can turn me back.”

“Yeah, what a great way to start out with the new job,” said Don. “I don’t think you three realize what a good deal we have here. I know that none of you have worked a customer support job before.” He looked around challengingly. “Well I have. This is heaven. We’ve got our own friggin’ offices, onsite tennis courts and health club. We’re being treated like million-dollar system designers. We’re being given all the time we need to give top-notch advice to the customers. What Lotsa-Tech is trying to do here is revolutionary! And you dips are just going to piss it away.” Another all-around glare. “Well, do what you want, but I’m going to lunch.”

There was a moment of embarrassed silence. Ulysse stepped out of the cubicle and watched Don and others trickle away toward the stairs. Then she was back. “I’ll come with you, Dixie Mae, but . . . have you thought Don may be right? Maybe you could just postpone this till next week?” Unhappiness was written all over her face. Ulysse was a lot like Dixie Mae, just more sensible.

Dixie Mae shook her head. She figured it would be at least fifteen minutes before her common sense could put on the brakes.

“I’ll come, Dixie Mae,” said Victor. “Yeah. . . . This could be an interestingstory.”

Dixie Mae smiled at Ulysse and reached out her hand. “It’s okay, Ulysse. You should go to lunch.” The other looked uncertain. “Really. If Mr. Johnson asks about me missing lunch, it would help if you were there to set him right about what a steady person I am.”

“Okay, Dixie Mae. I’ll do that.” She wasn’t fooled, but this way it really was okay.

Once she was gone, Dixie Mae turned back to Victor. “And you. I want a printed copy of that freakin’ email.”

They went out a side door. There was a soft-drink and candy machine on the porch. Victor loaded up on “expeditionary supplies” and the two started down the hill.

“Hot day,” said Victor, mumbling around a mouth full of chocolate bar.

“Yeah.” The early part of the week had been all June Gloom. But the usual overcast had broken, and today was hot and sunny—and Dixie Mae suddenly realized how pleasantly air-conditioned life had been in the LotsaTech “sweatshop.” Common sense hadn’t yet reached the brakes, but it was getting closer.

Victor washed the chocolate down with a Dr. Fizzz and flipped the can behind the oleanders that hung close along the path. “So who do you think is behind that letter? Really?”

“I don’t know, Victor! Why do you think I’m risking my job to find out?”

Victor laughed. “Don’t worry about losing the job, Dixie Mae. Heh. There’s no way it could have lasted even through the summer.” He gave his usual superior-knowledge grin.

“You’re an idiot, Victor. Doing customer support right will be a billion dollar winner.”

“Oh, maybe . . . if you’re on the right side of it.” He paused as if wondering what to tell her. “But for you, look: support costs money. Long ago, the Public Spoke about how much they were willing to pay.” He paused, like he was trying to put together a story that she could understand. “Yeah . . . and even if you’re right, your vision of the project is doomed. You know why?”

Dixie Mae didn’t reply. His reason would be something about the crappy quality of the people who had been hired.

Sure enough, Victor continued: “I’ll tell you why. And this is the surprise kink that’s going to make my articles for the Bruin really shine: Maybe LotsaTech has its corporate heart in the right place. That would be surprising considering how they brutalized Microsoft. But maybe they’ve let this bizarre idealism go too far. Heh. For anything long-term, they’ve picked the wrong employees.”

Dixie Mae kept her cool. “We took all sorts of psych tests. You don’t think Professor Reich knows what he’s doing?”

“Oh, I bet he knows what he’s doing. But what if LotsaTech isn’t using his results? Look at us. There are some—such as yours truly—who are way over-educated. I’m closing in on a master’s degree in journalism; it’s clear I won’t be around for long. Then there’s people like Don and Ulysse. They have the right level of education for customer support, but they’re too smart. Yes, Ulysse talks about doing this job so well that her talent is recognized, and she is a diligent sort. But I’ll bet that even she couldn’t last a summer. As for some of the others . . . well, may I be frank, Dixie Mae?”

What saved him from a fist in the face was that Dixie Mae had never managed to be really angry about more than one thing at once. “Please do be frank, Victor.”

“You talk the same game plan as Ulysse—but I’ll bet your multiphasic shows you have the steadiness of mercury fulminate. Without this interesting email from Mr. Lusting, you might be good for a week, but sooner or later you’d run into something so infuriating that direct action was required—and you’d be bang out on your rear.”

Dixie Mae pretended to mull this over. “Well, yes,” she said. “After all, you’re still going to be here next week, right?”

He laughed. “I rest my case. But seriously, Dixie Mae, this is what I mean about the personnel situation here. We have a bunch of bright and motivated people, but their motivations are all over the map, and most of their enthusiasm can’t be sustained for any realistic span of time. Heh. So I guess the only rational explanation—and frankly, I don’t think it would work—is that LotsaTech figures . . .”

He droned on with some theory about how LotsaTech was just looking for some quick publicity and a demonstration that high-quality customer support could win back customers in a big way. Then after they flushed all these unreliable new hires, they could throttle back into something cheaper for the long term.

But Dixie Mae’s attention was far away. On her left was the familiar view of Los Angeles. To her right, the ridgeline was just a few hundred yards away. From the crest you could probably see down into the valley, even pick out streets in Tarzana. Someday, it would be nice to go back there, maybe prove to Dad that she could keep her temper and make something of herself. All my life, I’ve been screwing up like today. But that letter from “Lusting” was like finding a burglar in your bedroom. The guy knew too much about her that he shouldn’t have known, and he had mocked her background and her family. Dixie Mae had grown up in Southern California, but she’d been born in Georgia—and she was proud of her roots. Maybe Daddy never realized that, since she was running around rebelling most of the time. He and Mom always said she’d eventually settle down. But then she fell in love with the wrong kind of person—and it was her folks who’d gone ballistic. Words Were Spoken. And even though things hadn’t worked out with her new love, there was no way she could go back. By then Mom had died. Now, I swear I’m not going back to Daddy till I can show I’ve made something of myself.

So why was she throwing away her best job in ages? She slowed to a stop and just stood there in the middle of the walkway; common sense had finally gotten to the brakes. But they had walked almost all the way to 0999. Much of the building was hidden behind twisty junipers, but you could see down a short flight of stairs to the ground level entrance.

We should go back. She pulled the “Lusting” email out of her pocket and glared at it for a second. Later. You can follow up on this later. She read the mail again. The letters blurred behind tears of rage, and she dithered in the hot summer sunlight.

Victor made an impatient noise. “Let’s go, kiddo.” He pushed a chocolate bar into her hand. “Get your blood sugar out of the basement.”

They went down the concrete steps to B0999’s entrance. Just a quick look, Dixie Mae had decided.

Beneath the trees and the overhang, all was cool and shady. They peered through the ground floor windows, into empty rooms. Victor pushed open the door. The layout looked about the same as in their own building, except that B0999 wasn’t really finished: There was the smell of Carpenter Nail in the air, and the lights and wireless nodes sat naked on the walls.

The place was occupied. She could hear people talking up on the main floor, what was cubicle-city back in B0994. She took a quick hop up the stairs, peeked in—no cubicles here. As a result, the place looked cavernous. Six or eight tables had been pushed together in the middle of the room. A dozen people looked up at their entrance.

“Aha!” boomed one of them. “More warm bodies. Welcome, welcome!”

They walked toward the tables. Don and Ulysse had worried about violating corporate rules and project secrecy. They needn’t have bothered. These people looked almost like squatters. Three of them had their legs propped up on the tables. Junk food and soda cans littered the tables.

“Programmers?” Dixie Mae muttered to Victor.

“Heh. No, these look more like . . . graduate students.”

The loud one had red hair snatched back in a ponytail. He gave Dixie Mae a broad grin. “We’ve got a couple of extra display flats. Grab some seating.” He jerked a thumb toward the wall and a stack of folding chairs. “With you two, we may actually be able to finish today!”

Dixie Mae looked uncertainly at the display and keyboard that he had just lit up. “But what—”

“Cognitive Science 301. The final exam. A hundred dollars a question, but we have 107 bluebooks to grade, and Gerry asked mainly essay questions.”

Victor laughed. “You’re getting a hundred dollars for each bluebook?”

“For each question in each bluebook, man. But don’t tell. I think Gerry is funding this out of money that LotsaTech thinks he’s spending on research.” He waved at the nearly empty room, in this nearly completed building.

Dixie Mae leaned down to look at the display, the white letters on a blue background. It was a standard bluebook, just like at Valley Community College. Only here the questions were complete nonsense, such as:

7. COMPARE AND CONTRAST COGNITIVE DISSONANCE IN OPERANT CONDITIONING WITH MINSKY-LOÈVE ATTENTION MAINTENANCE. OUTLINE AN ALGORITHM FOR CONSTRUCTING THE ASSOCIATED ISOMORPHISM.

“So,” said Dixie Mae, “what’s cognitive science?”

The grin disappeared from the other’s face. “Oh, Christ. You’re not here to help with the grading?”

Dixie Mae shook her head. Victor said, “It shouldn’t be too hard. I’ve had some grad courses in psych.”

The redhead did not look encouraged. “Does anyone know this guy?”

“I do,” said a girl at the far end of all the tables. “That’s Victor Smaley. He’s a journalism grad, and not very good at that.”

Victor looked across the tables. “Hey, Mouse! How ya doing?”

The redhead looked beseechingly at the ceiling. “I do not need these distractions!” His gaze came down to the visitors. “Will you two just please go away?”

“No way,” said Dixie Mae. “I came here for a reason. Someone—probably someone here in Building 0999—is messing with our work in Customer Support. I’m going to find out who.” And give them some free dental work.

“Look. If we don’t finish grading the exam today, Gerry Reich’s going to make us come back tomorrow and—”

“I don’t think that’s true, Graham,” said a guy sitting across the table. “Prof. Reich’s whole point was that we should not feel time pressure. This is an experiment, comparing time-bounded grading with complete individualization.”

“Yes!” said Graham the redhead. “That’s exactly why Reich would lie about it. ‘Take it easy, make good money,’ he says. But I’ll bet that if we don’t finish today, he’ll screw us into losing the weekend.”

He glared at Dixie Mae. She glared back. Graham was going to find out just what stubborn and willful really meant. There was a moment of silence and then—

“I’ll talk to them, Graham.” It was the woman at the far end of the tables.

“Argh. Okay, but not here!”

“Sure, we’ll go out on the porch.” She beckoned Dixie Mae and Victor to follow her out the side door.

“And hey,” called Graham as they walked out, “don’t take all day, Ellen. We need you here.”

The porch on 0999 had a bigger junk-food machine than back at Customer Support. Dixie Mae didn’t think that made up for no cafeteria, but Ellen Garcia didn’t seem to mind. “We’re only going to be here this one day. I’m not coming back on Saturday.”

Dixie Mae bought herself a sandwich and soda and they all sat down on some beat-up lawn furniture.

“So what do you want to know?” said Ellen.

“See, Mouse, we’re following up on the weirdest—”

Ellen waved Victor silent, her expression pretty much the same as all Victor’s female acquaintances. She looked expectantly at Dixie Mae.

“Well, my name is Dixie Mae Leigh. This morning we got this email at our customer support address. It looks like a fake. And there are things about it that—” she handed over the hard copy.

Ellen’s gaze scanned down. “Kind of fishy dates,” she said to herself. Then she stopped, seeing the “To:” header. She glanced up at Dixie Mae. “Yeah, this is abuse. I used to see this kind of thing when I was a Teaching Assistant. Some guy would start hitting on a girl in my class.” She eyed Victor speculatively.

“Why does everybody suspect me?” he said.

“You should be proud, Victor. You have such a reliable reputation.” She shrugged. “But actually, this isn’t quite your style.” She read on. “The rest is smirky lascivious, but otherwise it doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“It means a lot to me,” said Dixie Mae. “This guy is talking about things that nobody should know.”

“Oh?” She went back to the beginning and stared at the printout some more. “I don’t know about secrets in the message body, but one of my hobbies is rfc9822 headers. You’re right that this is all scammed up. The message number and ident strings are too long; I think they may carry added content.”

She handed back the email. “There’s not much more I can tell you. If you want to give me a copy, I could crunch on those header strings over the weekend.”

“Oh. . . . Okay, thanks.” It was more solid help than anyone had offered so far, but—“Look Ellen, the main thing I was hoping for was some clues here in Building0999. The letter pointed me here. I run into . . . abusers sometimes, myself. I don’t let them get away with it! I’d bet money that whoever this is, he’s one of those graders.” And he’s probably laughing at us right now.

Ellen thought a second and then shook her head. “I’m sorry, Dixie Mae. I know these people pretty well. Some of them are a little strange, but they’re not bent like this. Besides, we didn’t know we’d be here till yesterday afternoon. And today we haven’t had time for mischief.”

“Okay,” Dixie Mae forced a smile. “I appreciate your help.” She would give Ellen a copy of the letter and go back to Customer Support, just slightly better off than if she had behaved sensibly in the first place.

Dixie Mae started to get up, but Victor leaned forward and set his notepad on the table between them. “That email had to come from somewhere. Has anyone here been acting strange, Mousy?”

Ellen glared at him, and after a second he said, “I mean ‘Ellen.’ You know I’m just trying to help out Dixie Mae here. Oh yeah, and maybe get a good story for the Bruin.”

Ellen shrugged. “Graham told you; we’re grading on the side for Gerry Reich.”

“Huh.” Victor leaned back. “Ever since I’ve been at UCLA, Reich has had a reputation for being an operator. He’s got big government contracts and all this consulting at LotsaTech. He tries to come across as a one-man supergenius, but actually it’s just money, um, buying lots and lots of peons. So what do you think he’s up to?”

Ellen shrugged. “Technically, I bet Gerry is misusing his contacts with Lotsa-Tech. But I doubt if they care; they really like him.” She brightened. “And I approve of what Prof. Reich is doing with this grading project. When I was a TA, I wished there was some way that I could make a day-long project out of reading each student’s exam. That was an impossible wish; there was just never enough time. But with his contacts here at LotsaTech, Gerry Reich has come close to doing it. He’s paying some pretty sharp grad students very good money to grade and comment on every single essay question. Time is no object, he’s telling us. The students in these classes are going to get really great feedback.”

“This guy Reich keeps popping up,” said Dixie Mae. “He was behind the testing program that selected Victor and me and the others for customer support.”

“Well, Victor’s right about him. Reich is a manipulator. I know he’s been running tests all this week. He grabbed all of Olson Hall for the operation. We didn’t know what it was for until afterwards. He nailed Graham and the rest of our gang for this one-day grading job. It looks like he has all sorts of projects.”

“Yeah, we took our tests at Olson Hall, too.” There had been a small up-front payment, and hints of job prospects. . . . And Dixie Mae had ended up with maybe the best job offer she’d ever had. “But we did that last week.”

“It can’t be the same place. Olson Hall is a gym.”

“Yes, that’s what it looked like to me.”

“It was used for the NCAA eliminations last week.”

Victor reached for his notepad. “Whatever. We gotta be going, Mouse.”

“Don’t ‘Mouse’ me, Victor! The NCAA elims were the week of 4 June. I did Gerry’s questionnaire yesterday, which was Thursday, 14 June.”

“I’m sorry, Ellen,” said Dixie Mae. “Yesterday was Thursday, but it was the 21st of June.”

Victor made a calming gesture. “It’s not a big deal.”

Ellen frowned, but suddenly she wasn’t arguing. She glanced at her watch. “Let’s see your notepad, Victor. What date does it say?”

“It says, June . . . huh. It says June 15.”

Dixie Mae looked at her own watch. The digits were so precise, and a week wrong: Fri Jun 15 12:31:18 PDT 2012. “Ellen, I looked at my watch before we walked over here. It said June 22nd.”

Ellen leaned on the table and took a close look at Victor’s notepad. “I’ll bet it did. But both your watch and the notepad get their time off the building utilities. Here you’re getting set by our local clock—and you’re getting the truth.”

Now Dixie Mae was getting mad. “Look, Ellen. Whatever the time service says, I would not have made up a whole extra week of my life.” All those product-familiarization classes.

“No, you wouldn’t.” Ellen brought her heels back on the edge of her chair. For a long moment, she didn’t say anything, just stared through the haze at the city below.

Finally she said: “You know, Victor, you should be pleased.”

“Why is that?” suspiciously.

“You may have stumbled into a real, world-class news story. Tell me. During this extra week of life you’ve enjoyed, how often have you used your phone?”

Dixie Mae said, “Not at all. Mr. Johnson—he’s our instructor—said that we’re deadzoned till we get through the first week.”

Ellen nodded. “So I guess they didn’t expect the scam to last more than a week. See, we are not deadzoned here. LotsaTech has a pretty broad embargo on web access, but I made a couple of phone calls this morning.”

Victor gave her a sharp look. “So where do you think the extra week came from?”

Ellen hesitated. “I think Gerry Reich has gone beyond where the UCLA human subjects committee would ever let him go. You guys probably spent one night in drugged sleep, being pumped chock full of LotsaTech product trivia.”

“Oh! You mean . . . Just-in-Time Training?” Victor tapped away at his notepad. “I thought that was years away.”

“It is if you play by the FDA’s rules. But there are meds and treatments that can speed up learning. Just read the journals and you’ll see that in another year or two, they’ll be a scandal as big as sports drugs ever were. I think Gerry has just jumped the gun with something that is very, very effective. You have no side-effects. You have all sorts of new, specialized knowledge—even if it’s about a throwaway topic. And apparently you have detailed memories of life experience that never happened.”

Dixie Mae thought back over the last week. There had been no strangeness about her experience at Olson Hall: the exams, the job interview. True the johns were fantastically clean—like a hospital, now that she thought about it. She had only visited them once, right after she accepted the job offer. And then she had . . . done what? Taken a bus directly out to LotsaTech . . . without even going back to her apartment? After that, everything was clear again. She could remember jokes in the Voxalot classes. She could remember meals, and late night talks with Ulysse about what they might do with this great opportunity. “It’s brainwashing,” she finally said.

Ellen nodded. “It looks like Gerry has gone way, way too far on this one.”

“And he’s stupid, too. Our team is going to a party tonight, downtown. All of a sudden, there’ll be sixteen people who’ll know what’s been done to them. We’ll be mad as—” Dixie Mae noticed Ellen’s pitying look.

“Oh.” So tonight instead of partying, their customer support team would be in a drugged stupor, unremembering the week that never was. “We won’t remember a thing, will we?”

Ellen nodded. “My guess is you’ll be well-paid, with memories of some one-day temp job here at LotsaTech.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen,” said Victor. “I’ve got a story and I’ve got a grudge. I’m not going back.”

“We have to warn the others.”

Victor shook his head. “Too risky.”

Dixie Mae gave him a glare.

Ellen Garcia hugged her knees for a moment. “If this were just you, Victor, I’d be sure you were putting me on.” She looked at Dixie Mae for a second. “Let me see that email again.”

She spread it out on the table. “LotsaTech has its share of defense and security contracts. I’d hate to think that they might try to shut us up if they knew we were onto them.” She whistled an ominous tune. “Paranoia rages. . . .Have you thought that this email might be someone trying to tip you off about what’s going on?”

Victor frowned. “Who, Ellen?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “So what do you think we should do?”

Ellen didn’t look up from the printout. “Mainly, try not to act like idiots. All we really know is that someone has played serious games with your heads. Our first priority is to get us all out of LotsaTech, with you guys free of medical side effects. Our second priority is to blow the whistle on Gerry or . . .” She was reading the mail headers again, “. . . or whoever is behind this.”

Dixie Mae said, “I don’t think we know enough not to act like idiots.”

“Good point. Okay, I’ll make a phone call, an innocuous message that should mean something to the police if things go really bad. Then I’ll talk to the others in our grading team. We won’t say anything while we’re still at LotsaTech, but once away from here we’ll scream long and loud. You two . . . it might be safest if you just lie low till after dark and we graders get back into town.”

Victor was nodding.

Dixie Mae pointed at the mystery email. “What was it you just noticed, Ellen?”

“Just a coincidence, I think. Without a large sample, you start seeing phantoms.”

“Speak.”

“Well, the mailing address, ‘lusting925@freemail.sg’. Building 0925 is on the hill crest thataway.”

“You can’t see that from where we started.”

“Right. It’s like ‘Lusting’ had to get you here first. And that’s the other thing. Prof. Reich has a senior graduate student named Rob Lusk.”

Lusk? Lusting? The connection seemed weak to Dixie Mae. “What kind of a guy is he?”

“Rob’s not a particularly friendly fellow, but he’s about two sigmas smarter than the average grad student. He’s the reason Gerry has the big reputation for hardware. Gerry has been using him for five or six years now, and I bet Rob is getting desperate to graduate.” She broke off. “Look. I’m going to go inside and tell Graham and the others about this. Then we’ll find a place for you to hide for the rest of the day.”

She started toward the door.

“I’m not going to hide out,” said Dixie Mae.

Ellen hesitated. “Just till closing time. You’ve seen the rent-a-cops at the main gate. This is not a place you can simply stroll out of. But my group will have no trouble going home this evening. As soon as we’re off-site, we’ll raise such a stink that the press and police will be back here. You’ll be safe at home in no time.”

Victor was nodding. “Ellen’s right. In fact, it would be even better if we don’t spread the story to the other graders. There’s no telling—”

“I’m not going to hide out!” Dixie Mae looked up the hill. “I’m going to check out 0925.”

“That’s crazy, Dixie Mae! You’re guaranteed safe if you just hide till the end of the work day—and then the cops can do better investigating than anything you could manage. You do what Ellen says!”

“No one tells me what to do, Victor!” said Dixie Mae, while inside she was thinking, Yeah, what I’m doing is a little bit like the plot of a cheap game: teenagers enter haunted house, and then split up to be murdered in pieces . . .

But Ellen Garcia was making assumptions, too. Dixie Mae glared at both of them. “I’m following up on this email.”

Ellen gave her a long look. Whether it was contemptuous or thoughtful wasn’t clear. “Just wait for me to tell Graham, okay?”

Twenty minutes later, the three of them were outdoors again, walking up the long grade toward Building 0925.

Graham the Red might be a smart guy, but he turned out to be a fool, too. He was sure that the calendar mystery was just a scam cooked up by Dixie Mae and Victor. Ellen wasn’t that good at talking to him—and the two customer support winkies were beneath his contempt. Fortunately, most of the other graders had been willing to listen. One of them also poked an unpleasant hole in all their assumptions: “So if it’s that serious, wouldn’t Gerry have these two under surveillance? You know, the Conspiracy Gestapo could arrive any second.” There’d been a moment of apprehensive silence as everyone waited the arrival of bad guys with clubs.

In the end, everyone including Graham had agreed to keep their mouths shut till after work. Several of them had friends they made cryptic phone calls to, just in case. Dixie Mae could tell that most of them tilted toward Ellen’s point of view, but however smart they were, they really didn’t want to cross Graham.

Ellen, on the other hand, was persona non grata for trying to mess up Graham’s schedule. She finally lost her temper with the redheaded jerk.

So now Ellen, Victor, and Dixie Mae were on the yellow brick road—in this case, the asphalt econo-cart walkway—leading to Building 0925.

The LotsaTech campus was new and underpopulated, but there were other people around. Just outside of 0999, they ran into a trio of big guys wearing gray blazers like the cops at the main entrance. Victor grabbed Dixie Mae’s arm. “Just act natural,” he whispered.

They ambled past, Victor giving a gracious nod. The three hardly seemed to notice.

Victor released Dixie Mae’s arm. “See? You just have to be cool.”

Ellen had been walking ahead. She dropped back so they were three abreast. “Either we’re being toyed with,” she said, “or they haven’t caught on to us.”

Dixie Mae touched the email in her pocket. “Well, somebody is toying with us.”

“You know, that’s the biggest clue we have. I still think it could be somebody trying to—”

Ellen fell silent as a couple of management types came walking the other way. These paid them even less attention than the company cops had.

“—it could be somebody trying to help us.”

“I guess,” said Dixie Mae. “More likely it’s some sadist using stuff they learned while I was drugged up.”

“Ug. Yeah.” They batted around the possibilities. It was strange. Ellen Garcia was as much fun to talk to as Ulysse, even though she had to be about five times smarter than either Ulysse or Dixie Mae.

Now they were close enough to see the lower windows of 0925. This place was a double-sized version of 0999 or 0994. There was a catering truck pulled up at the ground level. Beyond a green-tinted windbreak they could see couples playing tennis on the courts south of the building.

Victor squinted. “Strange. They’ve got some kind of blackout on the windows.”

“Yeah. We should at least be able to see the strip lights in the ceiling.”

They drifted off the main path and walked around to where they wouldn’t be seen from the catering truck. Even up close, down under the overhang, the windows looked just like those on the other buildings. But it wasn’t just dark inside. There was nothing but blackness. The inside of the glass was covered with black plastic like they put on closed storefronts.

Victor whipped out his notepad.

“No phone calls, Victor.”

“I want to send out a live report, just in case someone gets really mad about us being here.”

“I told you, they’ve got web access embargoed. Besides, just calling from here would trigger 911 locator logic.”

“Just a short call, to—”

He looked up and saw that the two women were standing close. “—ah, okay. I’ll just use it as a local cam.”

Dixie Mae held out her hand. “Give me the notepad, Victor. We’ll take the pictures.”

For a moment it looked like he was going refuse. Then he saw how her other hand was clenched into a fist. And maybe he remembered the lunchtime stories she had told during the week. The week that never was? Whatever the reason, he handed the notepad over to her. “You think I’m working for the bad guys?” he said.

“No,” Dixie Mae said (65 percent truthfully, but declining), “I just don’t think you’ll always do what Ellen suggests. This way we’ll get the pictures, but safely.” Because of my superior self control. Yeah.

She started to hand the notepad to Ellen, but the other shook her head. “Just keep a record, Dixie Mae. You’ll get it back later, Victor.”

“Oh. Okay, but I want first xmit rights.” He brightened. “You’ll be my cameragirl, Dixie. Just come back on me anytime I have something important to say.”

“Will do, Victor.” She panned the notepad camera in a long sweep, away from him.

No one bothered them as they walked halfway around the ground floor. The blackout job was very thorough, but just as at buildings 0994 and 0999, there was an ordinary door with an old-fashioned card swipe.

Ellen took a closer look. “We disabled the locks on 0999 just for the fun of it. Somehow I don’t think these black-plastic guys are that easygoing.”

“I guess this is as far as we go,” said Victor.

Dixie Mae stepped close to the door and gave it push. There was no error beep, no alarms. The door just swung open.

Looks of amazement were exchanged.

Five seconds later they were still standing at the open doorway. What little they could see looked like your typical LotsaTech ground floor. “We should shut the door and go back,” said Victor. “We’ll be caught red-handed standing here.”

“Good point.” Ellen stepped inside, followed perforce by Victor, and then Dixie Mae taking local video.

“Wait! Keep the door open, Dixie Mae.”

“Jeez.”

“This is like an airlock!” They were in a tiny room. Above waist height, its walls were clear glass. There was another door on the far end of the little room.

Ellen walked forward. “I had a summer job at Livermore last year. They have catch boxes like this. You walk inside easy enough—and then there are armed guards all around, politely asking you if you’re lost.” There were no guards visible here. Ellen pressed on the inner door. Locked. She reached up to the latch mechanism. It looked like cheap plastic. “This should not work,” she said, even as she fiddled at it.

They could hear voices, but from upstairs. Down here, there was no one to be seen. Some of the layout was familiar, though. If this had been Building 0994, the hallway on the right would lead to restrooms, a small cafeteria, and a temporary dormitory.

Ellen hesitated and stood listening. She looked back at them. “That’s strange. That sounds like . . . Graham!”

“Can you just break the latch, Ellen?” We should go upstairs and strangle the two-faced weasel with his own ponytail.

Another sound. A door opening! Dixie Mae looked past Ellen and saw a guy coming out of the men’s room. Dixie Mae managed to grab Victor, and the two of them dropped behind the lower section of the holding cell.

“Hey, Ellen,” said the stranger, “you look a bit peaked. Is Graham getting on your nerves, too?”

Ellen gave a squeaky laugh. “Y-yeah . . . so what else is new?”

Dixie Mae twisted the notepad and held it so the camera eye looked through the glass. In the tiny screen, she could see that the stranger was smiling. He was dressed in tee-shirt and knee-pants and he had some kind of glittering badge on a loop around his neck.

Ellen’s mouth opened and shut a couple of times, but nothing came out. She doesn’t know this guy from Adam.

The stranger was still clueless, but—“Hey, where’s your badge?”

“Oh . . . damn. I must have left in the john,” said Ellen. “And now I’ve locked myself out.”

“You know the rules,” he said, but his tone was not threatening. He did something on his side of the door. It opened and Ellen stepped through, blocking the guy’s view of what was behind her.

“I’m sorry. I, uh, I got flustered.”

“That’s okay. Graham will eventually shut up. I just wish he’d pay more attention to what the professionals are asking of him.”

Ellen nodded. “Yeah, I hear you!” Like she was really, really agreeing with him.

“Y’see, Graham’s not splitting the topics properly. The idea is to be both broad and deep.”

Ellen continued to make understanding noises. The talkative stranger was full of details about some sort of a NSA project, but he was totally ignorant of the three intruders.

There were light footsteps on the stairs, and a familiar voice. “Michael, how long are you going to be? I want to—” The voice cut off in a surprised squeak.

On the notepad display, Dixie Mae could see two brown-haired girls staring at each other with identical expressions of amazement. They sidled around each other for a moment, exchanging light slaps. It wasn’t fighting . . . it was as if each thought the other was some kind of trick video. Ellen Garcia, meet Ellen Garcia.

The stranger—Michael?—stared with equal astonishment, first at one Ellen and then the other. The Ellens made inarticulate noises just loud enough to interrupt each other and make them even more upset.

Finally Michael said, “I take it you don’t have a twin sister, Ellen?”

“No!” said both.

“So one of you is an impostor. But you’ve spun around so often now that I can’t tell who is the original. Ha.” He pointed at one of the Ellens. “Another good reason for having security badges.”

But Ellen and Ellen were ignoring everyone except themselves. Except for their chorus of “No!”, their words were just mutual interruptions, unintelligible. Finally, they hesitated and gave each other a nasty smile. Each reached into her pocket. One came out with a dollar coin, and the other came out empty.

“Ha! I’ve got the token. Deadlock broken.” The other grinned and nodded. Dollar-coin Ellen turned to Michael. “Look, we’re both real. And we’re both only-children.”

Michael looked from one to the other. “You’re certainly not clones, either.”

“Obviously,” said the token holder. She looked at the other Ellen and asked, “Fridge-rot?”

The other nodded and said, “In April I made that worse.” And both of them laughed.

Token holder: “Gerry’s exam in Olson Hall?”

“Yup.”

Token holder: “Michael?”

“After that,” the other replied, and then she blushed. After a second the token holder blushed, too.

Michael said dryly, “And you’re not perfectly identical.”

Token holder Ellen gave him a crooked smile. “True. I’ve never seen you before in my life.” She turned and tossed the dollar coin to the other Ellen, left hand to left hand.

And now that Ellen had the floor. She was also the version wearing a security badge. Call her NSA Ellen. “As far as I—we—can tell, we had the same stream of consciousness up through the day we took Gerry Reich’s recruitment exam. Since then, we’ve had our own lives. We’ve even got our own new friends.” She was looking in the direction of Dixie Mae’s camera.

Grader Ellen turned to follow her gaze. “Come on out, guys. We can see your camera lens.”

Victor and Dixie Mae stood and walked out of the security cell.

“A right invasion you are,” said Michael, and he did not seem to be joking.

NSA Ellen put her hand on his arm. “Michael, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

“Indeed! I’m simply dreaming.”

“Probably. But if not—” she exchanged glances with grader Ellen “—maybe we should find out what’s been done to us. Is the meeting room clear?”

“Last I looked. Yes, we’re not likely to be bothered in there.” He led them down a hallway toward what was simply a janitor’s closet back in Building 0994.

Michael Lee and NSA Ellen were working on still another of Professor Reich’s projects. “Y’see,” said Michael, “Professor Reich has a contract with my colleagues to compare our surveillance software with what intense human analysis might accomplish.”

“Yes,” said NSA Ellen, “the big problem with surveillance has always been the enormous amount of stuff there is to look at. The spook agencies use lots of automation and have lots of great specialists—people like Michael here—but they’re just overwhelmed. Anyway, Gerry had the idea that even though that problem can’t be solved, maybe a team of spooks and graduate students could at least estimate how much the NSA programs are missing.”

Michael Lee nodded. “We’re spending the entire summer looking at 1300 to 1400UTC 10 June 2012, backwards and forwards and up and down, but on just three narrow topic areas.”

Grader Ellen interrupted him. “And this is your first day on the job, right?”

“Oh, no. We’ve been at this for almost a month now.” He gave a little smile. “My whole career has been the study of contemporary China. Yet this is the first assignment where I’ve had enough time to look at the data I’m supposed to pontificate upon. It would be a real pleasure if we didn’t have to enforce security on these rambunctious graduate students.”

NSA Ellen patted him on the shoulder. “But if it weren’t for Michael here, I’d be as frazzled as poor Graham. One month down and two months to go.”

“You think it’s August?” said Dixie Mae.

“Yes, indeed.” He glanced at his watch. “The 10 August it is.”

Grader Ellen smiled and told him the various dates the rest of them thought today was.

“It’s some kind of drug hallucination thing,” said Victor. “Before we thought it was just Gerry Reich’s doing. Now I think it’s the government torquing our brains.”

Both Ellens looked at him; you could tell they both knew Victor from way back. But they seemed to take what he was saying seriously. “Could be,” they both said.

“Sorry,” grader Ellen said to NSA Ellen. “You’ve got the dollar.”

“You could be right, Victor. But cognition is my—our—specialty. We two are something way beyond normal dreaming or hallucinations.”

“Except that could be illusion, too,” said Victor.

“Stuff it, Victor,” said Dixie Mae. “If it’s all a dream, we might as well give up.” She looked at Michael Lee. “What is the government up to?”

Michael shrugged. “The details are classified, but it’s just a post hoc survey. The isolation rules seem to be something that Professor Reich has worked out with my agency.”

NSA Ellen flicked a glance at her double. The two had a brief and strange conversation, mostly half-completed words and phrases. Then NSA Ellen continued, “Mr. Renaissance Man Gerry Reich seems to be at the center of everything. He used some standard personality tests to pick out articulate, motivated people for the customer support job. I bet they do a very good job on their first day.”

Yeah. Dixie Mae thought of Ulysse. And of herself.

NSA Ellen continued, “Gerry filtered out another group—graduate students in just the specialty for grading all his various exams and projects.”

“We only worked on one exam,” said grader Ellen. But she wasn’t objecting. There was an odd smile on her face, the look of someone who has cleverly figured out some very bad news.

“And then he got a bunch of government spooks and CS grads for this surveillance project that Michael and I are on.”

Michael looked mystified. Victor looked vaguely sullen, his own theories lying trampled somewhere in the dust. “But,” said Dixie Mae, “your surveillance group has been going for a month you say . . .”

Victor: “And the graders do have phone contact with the outside!”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said grader Ellen. “I made three phone calls today. The third was after you and Dixie Mae showed up. That was voicemail to a friend of mine at MIT. I was cryptic, but I tried to say enough that my friend would raise hell if I disappeared. The others calls were—”

“Voicemail, too?” asked NSA Ellen.

“One was voicemail. The other call was to Bill Richardson. We had a nice chat about the party he’s having Saturday. But Bill—”

“Bill took Reich’s ‘job test’ along with the rest of us!”

“Right.”

Where this was heading was worse than Victor’s dream theory. “S-so what has been done to us?” said Dixie Mae.

Michael’s eyes were wide, though he managed a tone of dry understatement: “Pardon a backward Han language specialist. You’re thinking we’re just personality uploads? I thought that was science fiction.”

Both Ellens laughed. One said, “Oh, it is science fiction, and not just the latest Kywrack episode. The genre goes back almost a century.”

The other: “There’s Sturgeon’s ‘Microcosmic God’.”

The first: “That would be rich; Gerry beware then! But there’s also Pohl’s ‘Tunnel Under the World’.”

“Cripes. We’re toast if that’s the scenario.”

“Okay, but how about Varley’s ‘Overdrawn at the Memory Bank’ ?”

“How about Wilson’s Darwinia?”

“Or Moravec’s ‘Pigs in Cyberspace’ ?”

“Or Galouye’s Simulacron-3?”

“Or Vinge’s deathcubes?”

Now that the ‘twins’ were not in perfect synch, their words were a building, rapid-fire chorus, climaxing with:

“Brin’s ‘Stones of Significance’ !”

“Or Kiln People!”

“No, it couldn’t be that.” Abruptly they stopped, and nodded at each other. A little bit grimly, Dixie Mae thought. In all, the conversation was just as inscrutable as their earlier self-interrupted spasms.

Fortunately, Victor was there to rescue pedestrian minds. “It doesn’t matter. The fact is, uploading is only sci-fi. It’s worse that faster-than-light travel. There’s not even a theoretical basis for uploads.”

Each Ellen raised her left hand and made a faffling gesture. “Not exactly, Victor.”

The token holder continued, “I’d say there is a theoretical basis for saying that uploads are theoretically possible.” They gave a lopsided smile. “And guess who is responsible for that? Gerry Reich. Back in 2005, way before he was famous as a multi-threat genius, he had a couple of papers about upload mechanisms. The theory was borderline kookiness and even the simplest demo would take far more processing power than any supercomputer of the time.”

“Just for a one-personality upload.”

“So Gerry and his Reich Method were something of a laughingstock.”

“After that, Gerry dropped the idea—just what you’d expect, considering the showman he is. But now he’s suddenly world-famous, successful in half a dozen different fields. I think something happened. Somebody solved his hardware problem for him.”

Dixie Mae stared at her email. “Rob Lusk,” she said, quietly.

“Yup,” said grader Ellen. She explained about the mail.

Michael was unconvinced. “I don’t know, E-Ellen. Granted, we have an extraordinary miracle here—” gesturing at both of them, “—but speculating about cause seems to me a bit like a sparrow understanding the 405 Freeway.”

“No,” said Dixie Mae, and they all looked back her way. She felt so frightened and so angry—but of the two, angry was better: “Somebody has set us up! It started in those superclean restrooms in Olson Hall—”

“Olson Hall,” said Michael. “You were there too? The lavs smelled like a hospital! I remember thinking that just as I went in, but—hey, the next thing I remember is being on the bus, coming up here.”

Like a hospital. Dixie Mae felt rising panic. “M-maybe we’re all that’s left.” She looked at the twins. “This uploading thing, does it kill the originals?”

It was kind of a showstopper question; for a moment everyone was silent. Then the token holder said, “I—don’t think so, but Gerry’s papers were mostly theoretical.”

Dixie Mae beat down the panic; rage did have its uses. What can we know from here on the inside? “So far we know more than thirty of us who took the Olson Hall exams and ended up here. If we were all murdered, that’d be hard to cover up. Let’s suppose we still have a life.” Inspiration: “And maybe there are things we can figure! We have three of Reich’s experiments to compare. There are differences, and they tell us things.” She looked at the twins. “You’ve already figured this out, haven’t you? The Ellen we met first is grading papers—just a one-day job, she’s told. But I’ll bet that every night, when they think they’re going home—Lusk or Reich or whoever is doing this just turns them off, and cycles them back to do some other ‘one-day’ job.”

“Same with our customer support,” said Victor, a grudging agreement.

“Almost. We had six days of product familiarization, and then our first day on the job. We were all so enthusiastic. You’re right, Ellen, on our first day we are great!” Poor Ulysse, poor me; we thought we were going somewhere with our lives. “I’ll bet we disappear tonight, too.”

Grader Ellen was nodding. “Customer-support-in-a-box, restarted and restarted, so it’s always fresh.”

“But there are still problems,” said the other one. “Eventually, the lag in dates would tip you off.”

“Maybe, or maybe the mail headers are automatically forged.”

“But internal context could contradict—”

“Or maybe Gerry has solved the cognitive haze problem—” The two were off into their semi-private language.

Michael interrupted them. “Not everybody is recycled. The point of our net-tracking project is that we spend the entire summer studying just one hour of network traffic.”

The twins smiled. “So you think,” said the token holder. “Yes, in this building we’re not rebooted after every imaginary day. Instead, they run us the whole ‘summer’—minutes of computer time instead of seconds?—to analyze one hour of network traffic. And then they run us again, on a different hour. And so on and on.”

Michael said, “I can’t imagine technology that powerful.”

The token holder said, “Neither can I really, but—”

Victor interrupted with, “Maybe this is the Darwinia scenario. You know: we’re just the toys of some superadvanced intelligence.”

“No!” said Dixie Mae. “Not superadvanced. Customer support and net surveillance are valuable things in our own real world. Whoever’s doing this is just getting slave labor, run really, really fast.”

Grader Ellen glowered. “And grading his exams for him! That’s the sort of thing that shows me it’s really Gerry behind this. He’s making chumps of all of us, and rerunning us before we catch on or get seriously bored.”

NSA Ellen had the same expression, but a different complaint: “We have been seriously bored here.”

Michael nodded. “Those from the government side are a patient lot; we’ve kept the graduate students in line. We can last three months. But it does . . . rankle . . . to learn that the reward for our patience is that we get to do it all over again. Damn. I’m sorry, Ellen.”

“But now we know!” said Dixie Mae.

“And what good does it do you?” Victor laughed. “So you guessed this time. But at the end of the microsecond day, poof, it’s reboot time and everything you’ve learned is gone.”

“Not this time.” Dixie Mae looked away from him, down at her email. The cheap paper was crumpled and stained. A digital fake, but so are we. “I don’t think we’re the only people who’ve figured things out.” She slid the printout across the table, toward grader Ellen. “You thought it meant Rob Lusk was in this building.”

“Yeah, I did.”

“Who’s Rob Lusk?” said Michael.

“A weirdo,” NSA Ellen said absently. “Gerry’s best grad student.” Both Ellens were staring at the email.

“The 0999 reference led Dixie Mae to my grading team. Then I pointed out the source address.”

“lusting925@freemail.sg?”

“Yes. And that got us here.”

“But there’s no Rob Lusk here,” said NSA Ellen. “Huh! I like these fake mail headers.”

“Yeah. They’re longer than the whole message body!”

Michael had stood to look over the Ellens’ shoulders. Now he reached between them to tap the message. “See there, in the middle of the second header? That looks like Pinyin with the tone marks written in-line.”

“So what does it say?”

“Well, if it’s Mandarin, it would be the number ‘nine hundred and seventeen’.”

Victor was leaning forward on his elbows. “That has to be coincidence. How could Lusting know just who we’d encounter?”

“Anybody know of a Building 0917?” said Dixie Mae.

“I don’t,” said Michael. “We don’t go out of our building except to the pool and tennis courts.”

The twins shook their heads. “I haven’t seen it . . . and right now I don’t want to risk an intranet query.”

Dixie Mae thought back to the LotsaTech map that had been in the welcome-aboard brochures. “If there is such a place, it would be farther up the hill, maybe right at the top. I say we go up there.”

“But—” said Victor.

“Don’t give me that garbage about waiting for the police, Victor, or about not being idiots. This isn’t Kansas anymore, and this email is the only clue we have.”

“What should we tell the people here?” said Michael.

“Don’t tell them anything! We just sneak off. We want the operation here to go on normally, so Gerry or whoever doesn’t suspect.”

The two Ellens looked at each other, a strange, sad expression on their faces. Suddenly they both started singing “Home on the Range,” but with weird lyrics:

“Oh, give me a clone

Of my own flesh and bone

With—”

They paused and simultaneously blushed. “What a dirty mind that man Garrett had.”

“Dirty but deep.” NSA Ellen turned to Michael, and she seemed to blush even more. “Never mind, Michael. I think . . . you and I should stay here.”

“No, wait,” said Dixie Mae. “Where we’re going we may have to convince someone that this crazy story is true. You Ellens are the best evidence we have.”

The argument went round and round. At one point, Dixie Mae noticed with wonder that the two Ellens actually seemed to be arguing against each other.

“We don’t know enough to decide,” Victor kept whining.

“We have to do something, Victor. We know what happens to you and me if we sit things out till closing time this afternoon.”

In the end Michael did stay behind. He was more likely to be believed by his government teammates. If the Ellens and Dixie Mae and Victor could bring back some real information, maybe the NSA group could do some good.

“We’ll be a network of people trying to break this wheel of time.” Michael was trying to sound wryly amused, but once he said the words he was silent, and none of the others could think of anything better to say.

Up near the hilltop, there were not nearly as many buildings, and the ones that Dixie Mae saw were single story, as though they were just entrances to something under the hills. The trees were stunted and the grass yellower.

Victor had an explanation. “It’s the wind. You see this in lots of exposed land near the coast. Or maybe they just don’t water very much up here.”

An Ellen—from behind, Dixie Mae couldn’t tell which one—said, “Either way, the fabrication is awesome.”

Right. A fabrication. “That’s something I don’t understand,” said Dixie Mae. “The best movie fx don’t come close to this. How can their computers be this good?”

“Well for one thing,” said the other Ellen, “cheating is a lot easier when you’re also simulating the observers.”

“Us.”

“Yup. Everywhere you look, you see detail, but it’s always at the center of your focus. We humans don’t keep everything we’ve seen and everything we know all in mind at the same time. We have millions of years of evolution invested in ignoring almost everything, and conjuring sense out of nonsense.”

Dixie Mae looked southward into the haze. It was all so real: the dry hot breeze, the glint of aircraft sliding down the sky toward LAX, the bulk of the Empire State Building looming up from the skyscrapers at the center of downtown.

“There are probably dozens of omissions and contradictions around us every second, but unless they’re brought together in our attention all at once we don’t notice them.”

“Like the time discrepancy,” said Dixie Mae.

“Right! In fact, the biggest problem with all our theories is not how we could be individually duped, but how the fraud could work with many communicating individuals all at once. That takes hardware beyond anything that exists, maybe a hundred liters of Bose condensate.”

“Some kind of quantum computer breakthrough,” said Victor.

Both Ellens turned to look at him, eyebrows raised.

“Hey, I’m a journalist. I read it in the Bruin science section.”

The twins’ reply was something more than a monologue and less than a conversation:

“Well . . . even so, you have a point. In fact, there were rumors this spring that Gerry had managed to scale Gershenfeld’s coffee cup coherence scheme.”

“Yeah, how he had five hundred liters of Bose condensate at room temperature.”

“But those stories started way after he had already become Mr. Renaissance Man. It doesn’t make sense.”

We’re not the first people hijacked. “Maybe,” said Dixie Mae, “maybe he started out with something simple, like a single superspeed human. Could Gerry run a single upload with the kind of supercomputers we have nowadays?”

“Well, that’s more conceivable than this . . . oh. Okay, so an isolated genius was used to do a century or so of genius work on quantum computing. That sounds like the deathcube scenario. If it were me, after a hundred years of being screwed like that, I’d give Gerry one hell of a surprise.”

“Yeah, like instead of a cure for cancer, he’d get airborne rabies targeted on the proteome of scumbag middle-aged male CS profs.”

The twins sounded as bloody-minded as Dixie Mae.

They walked another couple of hundred yards. The lawn degenerated into islands of crabgrass in bare dirt. The breeze was a hot whistling along the ridgeline. The twins stopped every few paces to look closely, now at the vegetation, now at a guide sign along the walkway. They were mumbling at each other about the details of what they were seeing, as if they were trying to detect inconsistencies:

“. . . really, really good. We agree on everything we see.”

“Maybe Gerry is saving cycles, running us as cognitive subthreads off the same process.”

“Ha! No wonder we’re still so much in synch.”

Mumble, mumble. “There’s really a lot we can infer—”

“—once we accept the insane premise of all this.”

There was still no “Building 0917,” but what buildings they did see had lower and lower numbers: 0933, 0921. . . .

A loud group of people crossed their path just ahead. They were singing. They looked like programmers.

“Just be cool,” an Ellen said softly. “That conga line is straight out of the Lotsa-Tech employee motivation program. The programmers have onsite parties when they reach project milestones.”

“More victims?” said Victor. “Or AIs?”

“They might be victims. But I’ll bet all the people we’ve seen along this path are just low-level scenery. There’s nothing in Reich’s theories that would make true AIs possible.”

Dixie Mae watched the singers as they drifted down the hillside. This was the third time they had seen something-like-people on the walkway. “It doesn’t make sense, Ellen. We think we’re just—”

“Simulation processes.”

“Yeah, simulation processes, inside some sort of super supercomputer. But if that’s true, then whoever is behind this should be able to spy on us better than any Big Brother ever could in the real world. We should’ve been caught and rebooted the minute we began to get suspicious.”

Both Ellens started to answer. They stopped, then interrupted each other again.

“Back to who’s-got-the-token,” one said, holding up the dollar coin. “Dixie Mae, that is a mystery, but not as big as it seems. If Reich is using the sort of upload and simulation techniques I know about, then what goes on inside our minds can’t be interpreted directly. Thoughts are just too idiosyncratic, too scattered. If we are simulations in a large quantum computer, even environment probes would be hard to run.”

“You mean things like spy cameras?”

“Yes. They would be hard to implement, since in fact they would be snooping on the state of our internal imagery. All this is complicated by the fact that we’re probably running thousands of times faster than real time. There are maybe three ways that Gerry could snoop: he could just watch team output, and if it falls off, he’d know that something had gone wrong—and he might reboot on general principles.”

Suddenly Dixie Mae was very glad that they hadn’t taken more volunteers on this hike.

“The second snoop method is just to look at things we write or the output of software we explicitly run. I’ll bet that anything that we perceive as linear text is capable of outside interpretation.” She looked at Victor. “That’s why no note-taking.” Dixie Mae still had his notepad.

“It’s kinda stupid,” said Victor. “First it was no pictures and now not even notes.

“Hey, look!” said the Ellens. “B0917!” But it wasn’t a building, just a small sign wedged among the rocks.

They scrambled off the asphalt onto a dirt path that led directly up the hillside.

Now they were so near the hill crest that the horizon was just a few yards away. Dixie Mae couldn’t see any land beyond. She remembered a movie where poor slobs like themselves got to the edge of the simulation . . . and found the wall at the end of their universe. But they took a few more steps and she could see over the top. There was a vista of further, lower hills, dropping down into the San Fernando Valley. Not quite hidden in the haze she could see the familiar snakey line of Highway 101. Tarzana.

Ellen and Ellen and Victor were not taking in the view. They were staring at the sign at the side of the path. Fifteen feet beyond that was a construction dig. There were building supplies piled neatly along the edge of the cut, and a robo-Cat parked on the far side. It might have been the beginning of the construction of a standard-model LotsaTech building . . . except that in the far side of the pit, almost hidden in shadows, there was a circular metal plug, like a bank vault door in some old movie.

“I have this theory,” said the token holder. “If we get through that door, we may find out what your email is all about.”

“Yup.” The twins bounced down a steeply cut treadway into the pit. Dixie Mae and Victor scrambled after them, Victor clumsily bumping into her on the way down. The bottom of the pit was like nothing before. There were no windows, no card swipe. And up close, Dixie Mae could see that the vault door was pitted and scratched.

“They’re mixing metaphors,” said the token holder. “This entrance looks older than the pit.”

“It looks old as the hills,” Dixie Mae said, running her hand over the uneven metal—and half expecting to feel weirdo runes. “Somebody is trying to give us clues . . . or somebody is a big sadist. So what do we do? Knock a magic knock?”

“Why not?” The two Ellens took her tattered email and laid it out flat on the metal of the door. They studied the mail headers for a minute, mumbling to each other. The token holder tapped on the metal, then pushed.

“Together,” they said, and tapped out a random something, but perfectly in synch.

That had all the effect you’d expect of tapping your fingers on ten tons of dead steel.

The token holder handed the email back to Dixie Mae. “You try something.”

But what? Dixie Mae stepped to the door. She stood there, feeling clueless. Off to the side, almost hidden by the curve of the metal plug, Victor had turned away.

He had the notepad.

“Hey!” She slammed him into the side of the pit. Victor pushed her away, but by then the Ellens were on him. There was a mad scramble as the twins tried to do all the same things to Victor. Maybe that confused him. Anyway, it gave Dixie Mae a chance to come back and punch him in the face.

“I got it!” One of the twins jumped back from the fighting. She had the notepad in her hands.

They stepped away from Victor. He wasn’t going to get his notepad back. “So, Ellen,” said Dixie Mae, not taking her eyes off the sprawled figure, “what was that third method for snooping on us?”

“I think you’ve already guessed. Gerry could fool some idiot into uploading as a spy.” She was looking over her twin’s shoulder at the notepad screen.

Victor picked himself up. For a moment he looked sullen, and then the old superior smile percolated across his features. “You’re crazy. I just want to break this story back in the real world. Don’t you think that if Reich were using spies, he’d just upload himself?”

“That depends.”

The one holding the notepad read aloud: “You just typed in: ‘925 999 994 know. reboot’. That doesn’t sound like journalism to me, Victor.”

“Hey, I was being dramatic.” He thought for a second, and then laughed. “It doesn’t matter anymore! I got the warning out. You won’t remember any of this after you’re rebooted.”

Dixie Mae stepped toward him. “And you won’t remember that I broke your neck.”

Victor tried to look suave and jump backwards at the same time. “In fact, I will remember, Dixie Mae. See, once you’re gone, I’ll be merged back into my body in Doc Reich’s lab.”

“And we’ll be dead again!”

Ellen held up the notepad. “Maybe not as soon as Victor thinks. I notice he never got past the first line of his message; he never pressed return. Now, depending on how faithfully this old notepad’s hardware is being emulated, his treason is still trapped in a local cache—and Reich is still clueless about us.”

For a moment, Victor looked worried. Then he shrugged. “So you get to live the rest of this run, maybe corrupt some other projects—ones a lot more important than you. On the other hand, I did learn about the email. When I get back and tell Doc Reich, he’ll know what to do. You won’t be going rogue in the future.”

Everyone was silent for a second. The wind whistled across the yellow-blue sky above the pit.

And then the twins gave Victor the sort of smile he had bestowed on them so often. The token holder said, “I think your mouth is smarter than you are, Victor. You asked the right question a second ago: Why doesn’t Gerry Reich upload himself to be the spy? Why does he have to use you?”

“Well,” Victor frowned. “Hey, Doc Reich is an important man. He doesn’t have time to waste with security work like this.”

“Really, Victor? He can’t spare even a copy of himself?”

Dixie Mae got the point. She closed in on Victor. “So how many times have you been merged back into your original?”

“This is my first time here!” Everybody but Victor laughed, and he rushed on, “But I’ve seen the merge done!”

“Then why won’t Reich do it for us?”

“Merging is too expensive to waste on work threads like you,” but now Victor was not even convincing himself.

The Ellens laughed again. “Are you really a UCLA journalism grad, Victor? I thought they were smarter than this. So Gerry showed you a re-merge, did he? I bet that what you actually saw was a lot of equipment and someone going through very dramatic convulsions. And then the ‘subject’ told you a nice story about all the things he’d seen in our little upload world. And all the time they were laughing at you behind their hands. See, Reich’s upload theory depends on having a completely regular target. I know that theory: the merge problem—loading onto an existing mind—is exponential in the neuron count. There’s no way back, Victor.”

Victor was backing away from them. His expression flickered between superior sneer and stark panic. “What you think doesn’t matter. You’re just going to be rebooted at 5 P.M. And you don’t know everything.” He began fiddling with the fly zipper on his pants. “You see, I—I can escape!”

“Get him?”

Dixie Mae was closest. It didn’t matter.

There was no hazy glow, no sudden popping noise. She simply fell through thin air, right where Victor had been standing.

She picked herself up and stared at the ground. Some smudged footprints were the only sign Victor had been there. She turned back to the twins. “So he could re-merge after all?”

“Not likely,” said the token holder. “Victor’s zipper was probably a thread self-terminate mechanism.”

“His pants zipper?”

They shrugged. “I dunno. To leak out? Gerry has a perverse sense of humor.” But neither twin looked amused. They circled the spot where Victor had left and kicked unhappily at the dirt. The token holder said, “Cripes. Nothing in Victor’s life became him like the leaving it. I don’t think we have even till ‘5 P.M.’ now. A thread terminate signal is just the sort of thing that would be easy to detect from the outside. So Gerry won’t know the details, but he—”

“—or his equipment—”

“—will soon know there is a problem and—”

“—that it’s probably a security problem.”

“So how long do we have before we lose the day?” said Dixie Mae.

“If an emergency reboot has to be done manually, we’ll probably hit 5 P.M. first. If it’s automatic, well, I know you won’t feel insulted if the world ends in the middle of a syllable.”

“Whatever it is, I’m going to use the time.” Dixie Mae picked her email up from where it lay by the vault entrance. She waved the paper at the impassive steel. “I’m not going back! I’m here and I want some explanations!”

Nothing.

The two Ellens stood there, out of ideas and looking unhappy—or maybe that amounted to the same thing.

“I’m not giving up,” Dixie Mae said to them, and pounded on the metal.

“No, I don’t think you are,” said the token holder. But now they were looking at her strangely. “I think we—you at least—must have been through this before.”

“Yeah. And I must have messed up every time.”

“No . . . I don’t think so.” They pointed at the email that she held crumpled in her hand. “Where do you think all those nasty secrets come from, Dixie Mae?”

“How the freakin’ heck do I know? That’s the whole reason I—” and then she felt smart and stupid at the same time. She leaned her head against the shadowed metal. “Oh. Oh oh oh!”

She looked down at the email hardcopy. The bottom part was torn, smeared, almost illegible. No matter; that part she had memorized. The Ellens had gone over the headers one by one. But now we shouldn’t be looking for technical secrets or grad student inside jokes. Maybe we should be looking for numbers that mean something to Dixie Mae Leigh.

“If there were uploaded souls guarding the door, what you two have already done ought to be enough. I think you’re right. It’s some pattern I’m supposed to tap on the door.” If it didn’t work, she’d try something else, and keep trying till 5 P.M. or whenever she was suddenly back in Building 0994, so happy to have a job with potential. . . .

The tree house in Tarzana. Dixie Mae had been into secret codes then. Her childish idea of crypto. She and her little friends used a tap code for sending numbers. It hadn’t lasted long, because Dixie Mae was the only one with the patience to use it. But—

“That number, ‘7474’,” she said.

“Yeah? Right in the middle of the fake message number?”

“Yes. Once upon a time, I used that as a password challenge. You know, like ‘Who goes there’ in combat games. The rest of the string could be the response.”

The Ellens looked at each other. “Looks too short to be significant,” they said.

Then they both shook their heads, disagreeing with themselves. “Try it, Dixie Mae.”

Her “numbers to taps” scheme had been simple, but for a moment she couldn’t remember it. She held the paper against the vault and glared at the numbers. Ah. Carefully, carefully, she began tapping out the digits that came after “7474.” The string was much longer than anything her childhood friends would have put up with. It was longer than anything she herself would have used.

“Cool,” said the token holder. “Some kind of hex gray code?”

Huh? “What do you expect, Ellen? I was only eight years old.”

They watched the door.

Nothing.

“Okay, on to Plan B,” and then to C and D and E, etc, until our time ends.

There was the sound of something very old breaking apart. The vault door shifted under Dixie Mae’s hand and she jumped back. The curved plug slowly turned, and turned, and turned. After some seconds, the metal plug thudded to the ground beside the entrance . . . and they were looking down an empty corridor that stretched off into the depths.

For the first quarter mile, no one was home. The interior decor was not LotsaTech standard. Gone were the warm redwood veneers and glow strips. Here fluorescent tube lights were mounted in the acoustic tile ceiling, and the walls were institutional beige.

“This reminds me of the basement labs in Norman Hall,” said one Ellen.

“But there are people in Norman Hall,” said the other. They were both whispering.

And here there were stairways that led only down. And down and down.

Dixie Mae said, “Do you get the feeling that whoever is here is in for the long haul?”

“Huh?”

“Well, the graders in B0999 were in for a day, and they thought they had real phone access to the outside. My group in Customer Support had six days of classes and then probably just one more day, where we answered queries—and we had no other contact with the outside.”

“Yes,” said NSA Ellen. “My group had been running for a month, and we were probably not going to expire for another two. We were officially isolated. No phones, no email, no weekends off. The longer the cycle time, the more isolation. Otherwise, the poor suckers would figure things out.”

Dixie Mae thought for a second. “Victor really didn’t want us to get this far. Maybe—” Maybe, somehow, we can make a difference.

They passed a cross corridor, then a second one. A half-opened door showed them an apparent dormitory room. Fresh bedding sat neatly folded on a mattress. Somebody was just moving in?

Ahead there was another doorway, and from it they could hear voices, argument. They crept along, not even whispering.

The voices were making words: “—is a year enough time, Rob?”

The other speaker sounded angry. “Well, it’s got to be. After that, Gerry is out of money and I’m out of time.”

The Ellens waved Dixie Mae back as she started for the door. Maybe they wanted to eavesdrop for a while. But how long do we have before time ends? Dixie Mae brushed past them and walked into the room.

There were two guys there, one sitting by an ordinary data display.

“Jesus! Who are you?”

“Dixie Mae Leigh.” As you must certainly know.

The one sitting by the terminal gave her a broad grin, “Rob, I thought we were isolated?”

“That’s what Gerry said.” This one—Rob Lusk?—looked to be in his late twenties. He was tall and thin and had kind of a desperate look to him. “Okay, Miss Leigh. What are you here for?”

“That’s what you’re going to tell me, Rob.” Dixie Mae pulled the email from her pocket and waived the tattered scrap of paper in his face. “I want some explanations!”

Rob’s expression clouded over, a no-one-tells-me-what-to-do look.

Dixie Mae glared back at him. Rob Lusk was a mite too big to punch out, but she was heating up to it.

The twins chose that moment to make their entrance. “Hi there,” one of them said cheerily.

Lusk’s eyes flickered from one to the other and then to the NSA ID badge. “Hello. I’ve seen you around the department. You’re Ellen, um, Gomez?”

“Garcia,” corrected NSA Ellen. “Yup. That’s me.” She patted grader Ellen on the shoulder. “This is my sister, Sonya.” She glanced at Dixie Mae. Play along, her eyes seemed to say. “Gerry sent us.”

“He did?” The fellow by the computer display was grinning even more. “See, I told you, Rob. Gerry can be brutal, but he’d never leave us without assistants for a whole year. Welcome, girls!”

“Shut up, Danny.” Rob looked at them hopefully, but unlike Danny-boy, he seemed quite serious. “Gerry told you this will be a year-long project?”

The three of them nodded.

“We’ve got plenty of bunk rooms, and separate . . . um, facilities.” He sounded . . . Lord, he sounded embarrassed. “What are your specialties?”

The token holder said, “Sonya and I are second-year grads, working on cognitive patterning.”

Some of the hope drained from Rob’s expression. “I know that’s Gerry’s big thing, but we’re mostly doing hardware here.” He looked at Dixie Mae.

“I’m into—” go for it “—Bose condensates.” Well, she knew how to pronounce the words.

There were worried looks from the Ellens. But one of them piped up with, “She’s on Satya’s team at Georgia Tech.”

It was wonderful what the smile did to Rob’s face. His angry expression of a minute before was transformed into the look of a happy little boy on his way to Disneyland. “Really? I can’t tell you what this means to us! I knew it had to be someone like Satya behind the new formulations. Were you in on that?”

“Oh, yeah. Some of it, anyway.” Dixie Mae figured that she couldn’t say more than twenty words without blowing it. But what the heck—how many more minutes did the masquerade have to last, anyway? Little Victor and his self-terminating thread . . .

“That’s great. We don’t have budget for real equipment here, just simulators—”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Ellens exchange a fer sure look.

“—so anyone who can explain the theory to me will be so welcome. I can’t imagine how Satya managed to do so much, so fast, and without us knowing.”

“Well, I’d be happy to explain everything I know about it.”

Rob waved Danny-boy away from the data display. “Sit down, sit down. I’ve got so many questions!”

Dixie Mae sauntered over to the desk and plunked herself down. For maybe thirty seconds, this guy would think she was brilliant.

The Ellens circled in to save her. “Actually, I’d like to know more about who we’re working with,” one of them said.

Rob looked up, distracted, but Danny was more than happy to do some intros. “It’s just the two of us. You already know Rob Lusk. I’m Dan Eastland.” He reached around, genially shaking hands. “I’m not from UCLA. I work for LotsaTech, in quantum chemistry. But you know Gerry Reich. He’s got pull everywhere—and I don’t mind being shanghaied for a year. I need to, um, stay out of sight for a while.”

“Oh!” Dixie Mae had read about this guy in Newsweek. And it had nothing to do with chemistry. “But you’re—” Dead. Not a good sign at all, at all.

Danny didn’t notice her distraction. “Rob’s the guy with the real problem. Ever since I can remember, Gerry has used Rob as his personal hardware research department. Hey, I’m sorry, Rob. You know it’s true.”

Lusk waved him away. “Yes! So tell them how you’re an even bigger fool!” He really wanted to get back to grilling Dixie Mae.

Danny shrugged. “But now, Rob is just one year short of hitting his seven year limit. Do you have that at Georgia Tech, Dixie Mae? If you haven’t completed the doctorate in seven years, you get kicked out?”

“No, can’t say as I’ve heard of that.”

“Give thanks then, because since 2006, it’s been an unbendable rule at UCLA. So when Gerry told Rob about this secret hardware contract he’s got with LotsaTech—and promised that Ph.D. in return for some new results—Rob jumped right in.”

“Yeah, Danny. But he never told me how far Satya had gone. If I can’t figure this stuff out, I’m screwed. Now let me talk to Dixie Mae!” He bent over the keyboard and brought up the most beautiful screen saver. Then Dixie Mae noticed little numbers in the colored contours and realized that maybe this was what she was supposed to be an expert on. Rob said, “I have plenty of documentation, Dixie Mae—too much. If you can just give me an idea how you scaled up the coherence.” He waved at the picture. “That’s almost a thousand liters of condensate, a trillion effective qubits. Even more fantastic, your group can keep it coherent for almost fifty seconds at a time.”

NSA Ellen gave a whistle of pretended surprise. “Wow. What use could you have for all that power?”

Danny pointed at Ellen’s badge. “You’re the NSA wonk, Ellen, what do you think? Crypto, the final frontier of supercomputing! With even the weakest form of the Schor-Gershenfeld algorithm, Gerry can crack a ten kilobyte key in less than a millisecond. And I’ll bet that’s why he can’t spare us any time on the real equipment. Night and day he’s breaking keys and sucking in government money.”

Grader Ellen—Sonya, that is—puckered up a naive expression. “What more does Gerry want?”

Danny spread his hands. “Some of it we don’t even understand yet. Some of it is about what you’d expect: He wants a thousand thousand times more of everything. He wants to scale the operation by qulink so he can run arrays of thousand-liter bottles.”

“And we’ve got just a year to improve on your results, Dixie Mae. But your solution is years ahead of the state of the art.” Rob was pleading.

Danny’s glib impress-the-girls manner faltered. For an instant, he looked a little sad and embarrassed. “We’ll get something, Rob. Don’t worry.”

“So, how long have you been here, Rob?” said Dixie Mae.

He looked up, maybe surprised by the tone of her voice.

“We just started. This is our first day.”

Ah yes, that famous first day. In her twenty-four years, Dixie Mae had occasionally wondered whether there could be rage more intense than the red haze she saw when she started breaking things. Until today, she had never known. But yes, beyond the berserker-breaker there was something else. She did not sweep the display off the table, or bury her fist in anyone’s face. She just sat there for a moment, feeling empty. She looked across at the twins. “I wanted some villains, but these guys are just victims. Worse, they’re totally clueless! We’re back where we started this morning.” Where we’ll be again real soon now.

“Hmmm. Maybe not.” Speaking together, the twins sounded like some kind of perfect chorus. They looked around the room, eyeing the decor. Then their gazes snapped back to Rob. “You’d think LotsaTech would do better than this for you, Rob.”

Lusk was staring at Dixie Mae. He gave an angry shrug. “This is the old Homeland Security lab under Norman Hall. Don’t worry—we’re isolated, but we have good lab and computer services.”

“I’ll bet. And what is your starting work date?”

“I just told you: today.”

“No, I mean the calendar date.”

Danny looked back and forth between them. “Geez, are all you kids so literal minded? It’s Monday, September 12, 2011.”

Nine months. Nine real months. And maybe there was a good reason why this was the first day. Dixie Mae reached out to touch Rob’s sleeve. “The Georgia Tech people didn’t invent the new hardware,” she said softly.

“Then just who did make the breakthrough?”

She raised her hand . . . and tapped Rob deliberately on the chest.

Rob just looked more angry, but Danny’s eyes widened. Danny got the point. She remembered that Newsweek article about him. Danny Eastland had been an all-around talented guy. He had blown the whistle on the biggest business espionage case of the decade. But he was dumb as dirt in some ways. If he hadn’t been so eager to get laid, he wouldn’t have snuck away from his Witness Protection bodyguards and gotten himself murdered.

“You guys are too much into hardware,” said NSA Ellen. “Forget about crypto applications. Think about personality uploads. Given what you know about Gerry’s current hardware, how many Reich Method uploads do you think the condensate could support?”

“How should I know? The ‘Reich Method’ was baloney. If he hadn’t messed with the reviewers, those papers would never have been published.” But the question stopped him. He thought for a moment. “Okay, if his bogus method really worked, then a trillion qubit simulation could support about ten thousand uploads.”

The Ellens gave him a slow smile. A slow, identical smile. For once they made no effort to separate their identities. Their words came out simultaneously, the same pacing, the same pitch, a weird humming chorus: “Oh, a good deal less than ten thousand—if you have to support a decent enclosing reality.” Each reached out her left hand with inhumanly synchronized precision, the precision of digital duplicates, to wave at the room and the hallway beyond. “Of course, some resources can be saved by using the same base pattern to drive separate threads—” and each pointed at herself.

Both men just stared at them for a second. Then Rob stumbled back into the other chair. “Oh . . . my . . . God.”

Danny stared at the two for another few seconds. “All these years, we thought Gerry’s theories were just a brilliant scam.”

The Ellens stood with their eyes closed for a second. Then they seemed to startle awake. They looked at each other and Dixie Mae could tell the perfect synch had been broken. NSA Ellen took the dollar coin out of her pocket and gave it to the other. The token holder smiled at Rob. “Oh, it was, only more brilliant and more of a scam than you ever dreamed.”

“I wonder if Danny and I ever figure it out.”

“Somebody figured it out,” said Dixie Mae, and waved what was left of her email.

The token holder was more specific: “Gerry is running us all like stateless servers. Some are on very short cycles. We think you’re on a one-year cycle, probably running longer than anyone. You’re making the discoveries that let Gerry create bigger and bigger systems.”

“Okay,” said Lusk, “suppose one of us victims guesses the secret? What can we do? We’ll just get rebooted at the end of our run.”

Danny Eastland was quicker. “There is something we could do. There has to be information passed between runs, at least if Gerry is using you and me to build on our earlier solutions. If in that data we could hide what we’ve secretly learned—”

The twins smiled. “Right! Cookies. If you could recover them reliably, then on each rev, you could plan more and more elaborate countermeasures.”

Rob Lusk still looked dazed. “We’d want to tip off the next generation early in their run.”

“Yes, like the very first day!” Danny was looking at the three women and nodding to himself. “Only I still don’t see how we managed that.”

Rob pointed at Dixie Mae’s email. “May I take a look at that?” He laid it on the table, and he and Danny examined the message.

The token holder said, “That email has turned out to have more clues than a bad detective story. Every time we’re in a jam, we find the next hidden solution.”

“That figures,” said Eastland. “I’ll bet it’s been refined over many revs . . .”

“But we may have a special problem this time—” and Dixie Mae told them about Victor.

“Damn,” said Danny.

Rob just shrugged. “Nothing we can do about that till we figure this out.” He and Danny studied the headers. The token holder explained the parts that had already seen use. Finally, Rob leaned back in his chair. “The second-longest header looks like the tags on one of the raw data files that Gerry gave us.”

“Yes,” sang the twins. “What’s really your own research from the last time around.”

“Most of the files have to be what Gerry thinks, or else he’d catch onto us. But that one raw data file . . . assume it’s really a cookie. Then this email header might be a crypto key.”

Danny shook his head. “That’s not credible, Rob. Gerry could do the same analysis.”

The token holder laughed. “Only if he knew what to analyze. Maybe that’s why you guys winkled it out to us. The message goes to Dixie Mae—an unrelated person in an unrelated part of the simulation.”

“But how did we do it the first time?”

Rob didn’t seem to be paying attention. He was typing in the header string from Dixie Mae’s email. “Let’s try it on the data file. . . .” He paused, checked his keyboard entry, and pressed return.

They stared at the screen. Seconds passed. The Ellens chatted back and forth. They seemed to be worried about executing any sort of text program; like Victor’s notepad, it might be readable to the outside world. “That’s a real risk unless earlier Robs knew the cacheing strategy.”

Dixie Mae was only half-listening. If this worked at all, it was pretty good proof that earlier Robs and Dannys had done things right. If this works at all. Even after all that had happened, even after seeing Victor disappear into thin air, Dixie Mae still felt like a little girl waiting for magic she didn’t quite believe in.

Danny gave a nervous laugh. “How big is this cookie?”

Rob leaned his elbows onto the table. “Yeah. How many times have I been through a desperate seventh year?” There was an edge to his voice. You could imagine him pulling one of those deathcube stunts that the Ellens had described.

And then the screen brightened. Golden letters marched across a black-and-crimson fractal pattern: “Hello fellow suckers! Welcome to the 1,237th run of your life.”

At first, Danny refused to believe they had spent 1,236 years on Gerry’s treadmill. Rob gave a shrug. “I do believe it. I always told Gerry that real progress took longer than theory-making. So the bastard gave me . . . all the time in the world.”

The cookie was almost a million megabytes long. Much of that was detailed descriptions of trapdoors, backdoors, and softsecrets undermining the design that Rob and Danny had created for Gerry Reich. But there were also thousands of megabytes of history and tactics, crafted and hyperlinked across more than a thousand simulated years. Most of it was the work of Danny and Rob, but there were the words of Ellen and Ellen and Dixie Mae, captured in those fleeting hours they spent with Rob and Danny. It was wisdom accumulated increment by precious increment, across cycles of near sameness. As such, it was their past and also their near future.

It even contained speculations about the times before Rob and Danny got the cookie system working: Those earliest runs must have been in the summer of 2011, a single upload of Rob Lusk. Back then, the best hardware in the world couldn’t have supported more than Rob all alone, in the equivalent of a one-room apartment, with a keyboard and data display. Maybe he had guessed the truth; even so, what could he have done about it? Cookies would have been much harder to pass in those times. But Rob’s hardware improved from rev to rev, as Gerry Reich built on Rob’s earlier genius. Danny came on board. Their first successful attempt at a cookie must have been one of many wild stabs in the dark, drunken theorizing on the last night of still another year where Rob had failed to make his deadlines and thought that he was forever Ph.D.-less. The two had put an obscene message on the intrasystem email used for their “monthly” communications with Reich. The address they had used for this random flail was . . . help@lotsatech.com.

In the real world, that must have been around June 15, 2012. Why? Well, at the beginning of their next run, guess who showed up?

Dixie Mae Leigh. Mad as hell.

The message had ended up on Dixie Mae’s work queue, and she had been sufficiently insulted to go raging off across the campus. Dixie Mae had spent the whole day bouncing from building to building, mostly making enemies. Not even Ellen or Ellen had been persuaded to come along. On the other hand, back in the early revs, the landscape reality had been simpler. Dixie Mae had been able to come into Rob’s lair directly from the asphalt walkway.

Danny glanced at Dixie Mae. “And we can only guess how many times you never saw the email, or decided the random obscenities were not meant for you, or just walked in the wrong direction. Dumb luck eventually carried the day.”

“Maybe. But I don’t take to being insulted, and I go for the top.”

Rob waved them both silent, never looking up from the cookie file: After their first success, Rob and Danny had fine-tuned the email, had learned more from each new Dixie Mae about who was in the other buildings on the hill and how—like the Ellens—they might be used.

“Victor!” Rob and the twins saw the reference at the same time. Rob stopped the autoscroll and they studied the paragraph. “Yes. We’ve seen Victor before. And five revs ago, he actually made it as far as this time. He killed his thread then, too.” Rob followed a link marked taking care of Victor. “Oh. Okay. Danny, we’ll have to tweak the log files—”

They stayed almost three hours more. Too long maybe, but Rob and Danny wanted to hear everything the Ellens and Dixie Mae could tell them about the simulation, and who else they had seen. The cookie history showed that things were always changing, getting more elaborate, involving more money-making uses of people Gerry had uploaded.

And they all wanted to keep talking. Except for poor Danny, the cookie said nothing about whether they still existed outside. In a way, knowing each other now was what kept them real.

Dixie Mae could tell that Danny felt that way, even when he complained: “It’s just not safe having to contact unrelated people, depending on them to get the word to up here.”

“So, Danny, you want the three of us to just run and run and never know the truth?”

“No, Dixie Mae, but this is dangerous for you, too. As a matter of fact, in most of your runs, you stay clueless.” He waved at the history. “We only see you once per each of our ‘year-long’ runs. I-I guess that’s the best evidence that visiting us is risky.”

The Ellens leaned forward, “Okay, then let’s see how things would work without us.” The four of them looked over the oldest history entries and argued jargon that meant nothing to Dixie Mae. It all added up to the fact that any local clues left in Rob’s data would be easy for Gerry Reich to detect. On the other hand, messing with unused storage in the intranet mail system was possible, and it was much easier to cloak because the clues could be spread across several other projects.

The Ellens grinned, “So you really do need us, or at least you need Dixie Mae. But don’t worry; we need you, and you have lots to do in your next year. During that time, you’ve got to make some credible progress with what Gerry wants. You saw what that is. Maybe you hardware types don’t realize it, but—” she clicked on a link to the bulleted list of “minimum goals” that Reich had set for Rob and Danny, “—Prof. Reich is asking you for system improvements that would make it easier to partition the projects. And see this stuff about selective decoherence: Ever hear of cognitive haze? I bet with this improvement, Reich could actually do limited meddling with uploaded brain state. That would eliminate date and memory inconsistencies. We might not even recognize cookie clues then!”

Danny looked at the list. “Controlled decoherence?” He followed the link through to an extended discussion. “I wondered what that was. We need to talk about this.”

“Yes—wait! Two of us get rebooted in—my God, in thirty minutes.” The Ellens looked at each other and then at Dixie Mae.

Danny looked stricken, all his strategic analysis forgotten. “But one of you Ellens is on a three-month cycle. She could stay here.”

“Damn it, Danny! We just saw that there are checkpoints every sim day. If the NSA team were short a member for longer than that, we’d have a real problem.”

Dixie Mae said, “Maybe we should all leave now, even us . . . short-lifers. If we can get back to our buildings before reboot, it might look better.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry,” said Rob.

She got up and started toward the door. Getting back to Customer Support was the one last thing she could do to help.

Rob stopped her. “Dixie Mae, it would help if you’d leave us with a message to send to you next time.”

She pulled the tattered printout from her pocket. The bottom was torn and smeared. “You must have the whole thing in the cookie.”

“Still, it would be good to know what you think would work best to get . . . your attention. The history says that background details are gradually changing.”

He stood up and gave her a little bow.

“Well, okay.” Dixie Mae sat down and thought for a second. Yeah, even if she hadn’t had the message memorized, she knew the sort of insults that would send her ballistic. This wasn’t exactly time travel, but now she was certain who had known all the terrible secrets, who had known how to be absolutely insulting. “My daddy always said that I’m my own worst enemy.”

Rob and Danny walked with them back to the vault door. This was all new to the two guys. Danny scrambled out of the pit, and stared bug-eyed at the hills around them. “Rob, we could just walk to the other buildings!” He hesitated, came back to them. “And yeah, I know. If it were that easy, we’d have done it before. We gotta study that cookie, Rob.”

Rob just nodded. He looked kind of sad—then noticed that Dixie Mae was looking at him—and gave her a quick smile. They stood for a moment under the late afternoon haze and listened to the wind. The air had cooled and the whole pit was in shadow now.

Time to go.

Dixie Mae gave Rob a smile and her hand. “Hey, Rob. Don’t worry. I’ve spent years trying to become a nicer, wiser, less stubborn person. It never happened. Maybe it never will. I guess that’s what we need now.”

Rob took her hand. “It is, but I swear . . . it won’t be an endless treadmill. We will study that cookie, and we’ll design something better than what we have now.”

“Yeah.” Be as stubborn as I am, pal.

Rob and Danny shook hands all around, wishing them well. “Okay,” said Danny, “best be off with you. Rob, we should shut the door and get back. I saw some references in the cookie. If they get rebooted before they reach their places, there are some things we can do.”

“Yeah,” said Rob. But the two didn’t move immediately from the entrance. Dixie Mae and the twins scrambled out of the pit and walked toward the asphalt. When Dixie Mae looked back, the two guys were still standing there. She gave a little wave, and then they were hidden by the edge of the excavation.

The three trudged along, the Ellens a lot less bubbly than usual. “Don’t worry,” NSA Ellen said to her twin, “there’s still two months on the B0994 timeline. I’ll remember for both of us. Maybe I can do some good on that team.”

“Yeah,” said the other, also sounding down. Then abruptly they both gave one of those identical laughs and they were smiling. “Hey, I just thought of something. True re-merge may always be impossible, but what we have here is almost a kind of merge load. Maybe, maybe—” but their last chance on this turn of the wheel was gone. They looked at Dixie Mae and all three were sad again. “Wish we had more time to think how we wanted this to turn out. This won’t be like the SF stories where every rev you wake up filled with forebodings and subconscious knowledge. We’ll start out all fresh.”

Dixie Mae nodded. Starting out fresh. For dozens of runs to come, where there would be nothing after that first week at Customer Support, and putting up with boorish Victor, and never knowing. And then she smiled. “But every time we get through to Dan and Rob, we leave a little more. Every time they see us, they have a year to think. And it’s all happening a thousand times faster than Ol’ Gerry can think. We really are the cookie monsters. And someday—” Someday we’ll be coming for you, Gerry. And it will be sooner than you can dream.

LEGIONS IN TIME

Michael Swanwick

Eleanor Voigt had the oddest job of anyone she knew. She worked eight hours a day in an office where no business was done. Her job was to sit at a desk and stare at the closet door. There was a button on the desk which she was to push if anybody came out that door. There was a big clock on the wall and precisely at noon, once a day, she went over to the door and unlocked it with a key she had been given. Inside was an empty closet. There were no trap doors or secret panels in it—she had looked. It was just an empty closet.

If she noticed anything unusual, she was supposed to go back to her desk and press the button.

“Unusual in what way?” she’d asked when she’d been hired. “I don’t understand. What am I looking for?”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” Mr Tarblecko had said in that odd accent of his. Mr Tarblecko was her employer, and some kind of foreigner. He was the creepiest thing imaginable. He had pasty white skin and no hair at all on his head, so that when he took his hat off he looked like some species of mushroom. His ears were small and almost pointed. Ellie thought he might have some kind of disease. But he paid two dollars an hour, which was good money nowadays for a woman of her age.

At the end of her shift, she was relieved by an unkempt young man who had once blurted out to her that he was a poet. When she came in, in the morning, a heavy Negress would stand up wordlessly, take her coat and hat from the rack, and with enormous dignity leave.

So all day Ellie sat behind the desk with nothing to do. She wasn’t allowed to read a book, for fear she might get so involved in it that she would stop watching the door. Crosswords were allowed, because they weren’t as engrossing. She got a lot of knitting done, and was considering taking up tatting.

Over time the door began to loom large in her imagination. She pictured herself unlocking it at some forbidden not-noon time and seeing—what? Her imagination failed her. No matter how vividly she visualized it, the door would open onto something mundane. Brooms and mops. Sports equipment. Galoshes and old clothes. What else would there be in a closet? What else could there be?

Sometimes, caught up in her imaginings, she would find herself on her feet. Sometimes, she walked to the door. Once she actually put her hand on the knob before drawing away. But always the thought of losing her job stopped her.

It was maddening.

Twice, Mr Tarblecko had come to the office while she was on duty. Each time he was wearing that same black suit with that same narrow black tie. “You have a watch?” he’d asked.

“Yes, sir.” The first time, she’d held forth her wrist to show it to him. The disdainful way he ignored the gesture ensured she did not repeat it on his second visit.

“Go away. Come back in forty minutes.”

So she had gone out to a little tearoom nearby. She had a bag lunch back in her desk, with a baloney-and-mayonnaise sandwich and an apple, but she’d been so flustered she’d forgotten it, and then feared to go back after it. She treated herself to a dainty “lady lunch” that she was in no mood to appreciate, left a dime tip for the waitress, and was back in front of the office door exactly thirty-eight minutes after she’d left.

At forty minutes, exactly, she reached for the door.

As if he’d been waiting for her to do so, Mr Tarblecko breezed through the door, putting on his hat. He didn’t acknowledge her promptness or her presence. He just strode briskly past, as though she didn’t exist.

Stunned, she went inside, closed the door, and returned to her desk.

She realized then that Mr Tarblecko was genuinely, fabulously rich. He had the arrogance of those who are so wealthy that they inevitably get their way in all small matters because there’s always somebody there to arrange things that way. His type was never grateful for anything and never bothered to be polite, because it never even occurred to them that things could be otherwise.

The more she thought about it, the madder she got. She was no Bolshevik, but it seemed to her that people had certain rights, and that one of these was the right to a little common courtesy. It diminished one to be treated like a stick of furniture. It was degrading. She was damned if she was going to take it.

Six months went by.

The door opened and Mr Tarblecko strode in, as if he’d left only minutes ago. “You have a watch?”

Ellie slid open a drawer and dropped her knitting into it. She opened another and took out her bag lunch. “Yes.”

“Go away. Come back in forty minutes.”

So she went outside. It was May, and Central Park was only a short walk away, so she ate there, by the little pond where children floated their toy sailboats. But all the while she fumed. She was a good employee—she really was! She was conscientious, punctual, and she never called in sick. Mr Tarblecko ought to appreciate that. He had no business treating her the way he did.

Almost, she wanted to overstay lunch, but her conscience wouldn’t allow that. When she got back to the office, precisely thirty-nine and a half minutes after she’d left, she planted herself squarely in front of the door so that when Mr Tarblecko left he would have no choice but to confront her. It might well lose her her job, but . . . well, if it did, it did. That’s how strongly she felt about it.

Thirty seconds later, the door opened and Mr Tarblecko strode briskly out. Without breaking his stride or, indeed, showing the least sign of emotion, he picked her up by her two arms, swivelled effortlessly, and deposited her to the side.

Then he was gone. Ellie heard his footsteps dwindling down the hall.

The nerve! The sheer, raw gall of the man!

Ellie went back in the office, but she couldn’t make herself sit down at the desk. She was far too upset. Instead, she walked back and forth the length of the room, arguing with herself, saying aloud those things she should have said and would have said if only Mr Tarblecko had stood still for them. To be picked up and set aside like that . . . Well, it was really quite upsetting. It was intolerable.

What was particularly distressing was that there wasn’t even any way to make her displeasure known.

At last, though, she calmed down enough to think clearly, and realized that she was wrong. There was something—something more symbolic than substantive, admittedly—that she could do.

She could open that door.

Ellie did not act on impulse. She was a methodical woman. So she thought the matter through before she did anything. Mr Tarblecko very rarely showed up at the office—only twice in all the time she’d been here, and she’d been here over a year. Moreover, the odds of him returning to the office a third time only minutes after leaving it were negligible. He had left nothing behind—she could see that at a glance; the office was almost Spartan in its emptiness. Nor was there any work here for him to return to.

Just to be safe, though, she locked the office door. Then she got her chair out from behind the desk and chocked it up under the doorknob so that even if somebody had a key, he couldn’t get in. She put her ear to the door and listened for noises in the hall.

Nothing.

It was strange how, now that she had decided to do the deed, time seemed to slow and the office to expand. It took forever to cross the vast expanses of empty space between her and the closet door. Her hand reaching for its knob pushed through air as thick as molasses. Her fingers closed about it, one by one, and in the time it took for them to do so there was room enough for a hundred second thoughts. Faintly, she heard the sound of . . . machinery? A low humming noise.

She placed the key in the lock, and opened the door.

There stood Mr Tarblecko.

Ellie shrieked, and staggered backward. One of her heels hit the floor wrong, and her ankle twisted, and she almost fell. Her heart was hammering so furiously her chest hurt.

Mr Tarblecko glared at her from within the closet. His face was as white as a sheet of paper. “One rule,” he said coldly, tonelessly. “You had only one rule, and you broke it.” He stepped out. “You are a very bad slave.”

“I . . . I . . . I . . .” Ellie found herself gasping from the shock. “I’m not a slave at all!”

“There is where you are wrong, Eleanor Voigt. There is where you are very wrong indeed,” said Mr Tarblecko. “Open the window.”

Ellie went to the window and pulled up the blinds. There was a little cactus in a pot on the windowsill. She moved it to her desk. Then she opened the window. It stuck a little, so she had to put all her strength into it. The lower sash went up slowly at first and then, with a rush, slammed to the top. A light, fresh breeze touched her.

“Climb onto the windowsill.”

“I most certainly will—” not, she was going to say. But to her complete astonishment, she found herself climbing up onto the sill. She could not help herself. It was as if her will were not her own.

“Sit down with your feet outside the window.”

It was like a hideous nightmare, the kind that you know can’t be real and struggle to awaken from, but cannot. Her body did exactly as it was told to do. She had absolutely no control over it.

“Do not jump until I tell you to do so.”

“Are you going to tell me to jump?” she asked quaveringly. “Oh, please, Mr Tarblecko . . .”

“Now look down.”

The office was on the ninth floor. Ellie was a lifelong New Yorker, so that had never seemed to her a particularly great height before. Now it did. The people on the sidewalk were as small as ants. The buses and automobiles on the street were the size of matchboxes. The sounds of horns and engines drifted up to her, and birdsong as well, the lazy background noises of a spring day in the city. The ground was so terribly far away! And there was nothing between her and it but air! Nothing holding her back from death but her fingers desperately clutching the window frame!

Ellie could feel all the world’s gravity willing her toward the distant concrete. She was dizzy with vertigo and a sick, stomach-tugging urge to simply let go and, briefly, fly. She squeezed her eyes shut tight, and felt hot tears streaming down her face.

She could tell from Mr Tarblecko’s voice that he was standing right behind her. “If I told you to jump, Eleanor Voigt, would you do so?”

“Yes,” she squeaked.

“What kind of person jumps to her death simply because she’s been told to do so?”

“A . . . a slave!”

“Then what are you?”

“A slave! A slave! I’m a slave!” She was weeping openly now, as much from humiliation as from fear. “I don’t want to die! I’ll be your slave, anything, whatever you say!”

“If you’re a slave, then what kind of slave should you be?”

“A . . . a . . . good slave.”

“Come back inside.”

Gratefully, she twisted around, and climbed back into the office. Her knees buckled when she tried to stand, and she had to grab at the windowsill to keep from falling. Mr Tarblecko stared at her, sternly and steadily.

“You have been given your only warning,” he said. “If you disobey again—or if you ever try to quit—I will order you out the window.”

He walked into the closet and closed the door behind him.

There were two hours left on her shift—time enough, barely, to compose herself. When the disheveled young poet showed up, she dropped her key in her purse and walked past him without so much as a glance. Then she went straight to the nearest hotel bar and ordered a gin and tonic.

She had a lot of thinking to do.

Eleanor Voigt was not without resources. She had been an executive secretary before meeting her late husband, and everyone knew that a good executive secretary effectively runs her boss’s business for him. Before the Crash, she had run a household with three servants. She had entertained. Some of her parties had required weeks of planning and preparation. If it weren’t for the Depression, she was sure she’d be in a much better-paid position than the one she held.

She was not going to be a slave.

But before she could find a way out of her predicament, she had to understand it. First, the closet. Mr Tarblecko had left the office and then, minutes later, popped up inside it. A hidden passage of some kind? No—that was simultaneously too complicated and not complicated enough. She had heard machinery, just before she opened the door. So . . . some kind of transportation device, then. Something that a day ago she would have sworn couldn’t exist. A teleporter, perhaps, or a time machine.

The more she thought of it, the better she liked the thought of the time machine. It was not just that teleporters were the stuff of Sunday funnies and Buck Rogers serials, while The Time Machine was a distinguished philosophical work by Mr H.G. Wells. Though she had to admit that figured in there. But a teleportation device required a twin somewhere, and Mr Tarblecko hadn’t had the time even to leave the building.

A time machine, however, would explain so much! Her employer’s long absences. The necessity that the device be watched when not in use, lest it be employed by Someone Else. Mr Tarblecko’s abrupt appearance today, and his possession of a coercive power that no human being on Earth had.

The fact that she could no longer think of Mr Tarblecko as human.

She had barely touched her drink, but now she found herself too impatient to finish it. She slapped a dollar bill down on the bar and, without waiting for her change, left.

During the time it took to walk the block and a half to the office building and ride the elevator up to the ninth floor, Ellie made her plans. She strode briskly down the hallway and opened the door without knocking. The unkempt young man looked up, startled, from a scribbled sheet of paper.

“You have a watch?”

“Y-yes, but . . . Mr Tarblecko . . .”

“Get out. Come back in forty minutes.”

With grim satisfaction, she watched the young man cram his key into one pocket and the sheet of paper into another and leave. Good slave, she thought to herself. Perhaps he’d already been through the little charade Mr Tarblecko had just played on her. Doubtless every employee underwent ritual enslavement as a way of keeping them in line. The problem with having slaves, however, was that they couldn’t be expected to display any initiative . . . Not on the master’s behalf, anyway.

Ellie opened her purse and got out the key. She walked to the closet.

For an instant she hesitated. Was she really sure enough to risk her life? But the logic was unassailable. She had been given no second chance. If Mr Tarblecko knew she was about to open the door a second time, he would simply have ordered her out the window on her first offense. The fact that he hadn’t, meant that he didn’t know.

She took a deep breath and opened the door.

There was a world inside.

For what seemed like forever, Ellie stood staring at the bleak metropolis so completely unlike New York City. Its buildings were taller than any she had ever seen—miles high!—and interlaced with skywalks, like those in Metropolis. But the buildings in the movie had been breathtaking, and these were the opposite of beautiful. They were ugly as sin: windowless, grey, stained, and discolored. There were monotonous lines of harsh lights along every street, and under their glare trudged men and women as uniform and lifeless as robots. Outside the office, it was a beautiful bright day. But on the other side of the closet, the world was dark as night.

And it was snowing.

Gingerly, she stepped into the closet. The instant her foot touched the floor, it seemed to expand to all sides. She stood at the center of a great wheel of doors, with all but two of them—to her office and to the winter world—shut. There were hooks beside each door, and hanging from them were costumes of a hundred different cultures. She thought she recognized togas, Victorian opera dress, kimonos . . . But most of the clothing was unfamiliar.

Beside the door into winter, there was a long cape. Ellie wrapped it around herself, and discovered a knob on the inside. She twisted it to the right, and suddenly the coat was hot as hot. Quickly, she twisted the knob to the left, and it grew cold. She fiddled with the thing until the cape felt just right. Then she straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the forbidding city.

There was a slight electric sizzle, and she was standing in the street.

Ellie spun around to see what was behind her: a rectangle of some glassy black material. She rapped it with her knuckles. It was solid. But when she brought her key near its surface, it shimmered and opened into that strange space between worlds again.

So she had a way back home.

To either side of her rectangle were identical glassy rectangles faceted slightly away from it. They were the exterior of an enormous kiosk, or perhaps a very low building, at the center of a large, featureless square. She walked all the way around it, rapping each rectangle with her key. Only the one would open for her.

The first thing to do was to find out where—or, rather, when—she was. Ellie stepped in front of one of the hunched, slow-walking men. “Excuse me, sir, could you answer a few questions for me?”

The man raised a face that was utterly bleak and without hope. A ring of grey metal glinted from his neck. “Hawrzat dagtiknut?” he asked.

Ellie stepped back in horror and, like a wind-up toy temporarily halted by a hand or a foot, the man resumed his plodding gait.

She cursed herself. Of course language would have changed in the however-many-centuries future she found herself in. Well . . . that was going to make gathering information more difficult. But she was used to difficult tasks. The evening of John’s suicide, she had been the one to clean the walls and the floor. After that, she’d known that she was capable of doing anything she set her mind to.

Above all, it was important that she not get lost. She scanned the square with the doorways in time at its center—mentally, she dubbed it Times Square—and chose at random one of the broad avenues converging on it. That, she decided would be Broadway.

Ellie started down Broadway, watching everybody and everything. Some of the drone-folk were dragging sledges with complex machinery on them. Others were hunched under soft, translucent bags filled with murky fluid and vague biomorphic shapes. The air smelled bad, but in ways she was not familiar with.

She had gotten perhaps three blocks when the sirens went off—great piercing blasts of noise that assailed the ears and echoed from the building walls. All the streetlights flashed off and on and off again in a one-two rhythm. From unseen loudspeakers, an authoritative voice blared, “Akgang! Akgang! Kronzvarbrakar! Zawzawkstrag! Akgang! Akgang . . .”

Without hurry, the people in the street began turning away, touching their hands to dull grey plates beside nondescript doors and disappearing into the buildings.

“Oh, cripes!” Ellie muttered. She’d best—

There was a disturbance behind her. Ellie turned and saw the strangest thing yet.

It was a girl of eighteen or nineteen, wearing summer clothes—a man’s trousers, a short-sleeved flower-print blouse—and she was running down the street in a panic. She grabbed at the uncaring drones, begging for help. “Please!” she cried. “Can’t you help me? Somebody! Please . . . you have to help me!” Puffs of steam came from her mouth with each breath. Once or twice she made a sudden dart for one of the doorways and slapped her hand on the greasy plates. But the doors would not open for her.

Now the girl had reached Ellie. In a voice that expected nothing, she said, “Please?”

“I’ll help you, dear,” Ellie said.

The girl shrieked, then convulsively hugged her. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you,” she babbled.

“Follow close behind me.” Ellie strode up behind one of the lifeless un-men and, just after he had slapped his hand on the plate, but before he could enter, grabbed his rough tunic and gave it a yank. He turned.

“Vamoose!” she said in her sternest voice, and jerked a thumb over her shoulder.

The un-man turned away. He might not understand the word, but the tone and the gesture sufficed.

Ellie stepped inside, pulling the girl after her. The door closed behind them.

“Wow,” said the girl wonderingly. “How did you do that?”

“This is a slave culture. For a slave to survive, he’s got to obey anyone who acts like a master. It’s that simple. Now, what’s your name and how did you get here?” As she spoke, Ellie took in her surroundings. The room they were in was dim, grimy—and vast. So far as she could see, there were no interior walls, only the occasional pillar and here and there a set of functional metal stairs without railings.

“Nadine Shepard. I . . . I . . . There was a door! And I walked through it and I found myself here! I . . .”

The child was close to hysteria. “I know, dear. Tell me, when are you from?”

“Chicago. On the North Side, near—”

“Not where, dear, when? What year is it?”

“Uh . . . 2004. Isn’t it?”

“Not here. Not now.” The grey people were everywhere, moving sluggishly, yet always keeping within sets of yellow lines painted on the concrete floor. Their smell was pervasive, and far from pleasant. Still . . .

Ellie stepped directly into the path of one of the sad creatures, a woman. When she stopped, Ellie took the tunic from her shoulders and then stepped back. Without so much as an expression of annoyance, the woman resumed her plodding walk.

“Here you are.” She handed the tunic to young Nadine. “Put this on, dear, you must be freezing. Your skin is positively blue.” And, indeed, it was not much warmer inside than it had been outdoors. “I’m Eleanor Voigt. Mrs Eleanor Voigt.”

Shivering, Nadine donned the rough garment. But instead of thanking Ellie, she said, “You look familiar.”

Ellie returned her gaze. She was a pretty enough creature though, strangely, she wore no makeup at all. Her features were regular, intelligent—“You look familiar too. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but . . .”

“Okay,” Nadine said, “now tell me. Please. Where and when am I, and what’s going on?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Ellie said. Dimly, through the walls, she could hear the sirens and the loudspeaker-voice. If only it weren’t so murky in here! She couldn’t get any clear idea of the building’s layout or function.

“But you must know! You’re so . . . so capable, so in control. You . . .”

“I’m a castaway like you, dear. Just figuring things out as I go along.” She continued to peer. “But I can tell you this much: We are far, far in the future. The poor degraded beings you saw on the street are the slaves of a superior race—let’s call them the Aftermen. The Aftermen are very cruel, and they can travel through time as easily as you or I can travel from city to city via inter-urban rail. And that’s all I know. So far.”

Nadine was peering out a little slot in the door that Ellie hadn’t noticed. Now she said, “What’s this?”

Ellie took her place at the slot, and saw a great bulbous street-filling machine pull to a halt a block from the building. Insectoid creatures that might be robots or might be men in body armor poured out of it, and swarmed down the street, examining every door. The sirens and the loudspeakers cut off. The streetlights returned to normal. “It’s time we left,” Ellie said.

An enormous artificial voice shook the building. Akbang! Akbang! Zawzawksbild! Alzowt! Zawzawksbild! Akbang!

“Quickly!”

She seized Nadine’s hand, and they were running.

Without emotion, the grey folk turned from their prior courses and unhurriedly made for the exits.

Ellie and Nadine tried to stay off the walkways entirely. But the air began to tingle, more on the side away from the walkways than the side toward, and then to burn and then to sting. They were quickly forced between the yellow lines. At first they were able to push their way past the drones, and then to shoulder their way through their numbers. But more and more came dead-stepping their way down the metal stairways. More and more descended from the upper levels via lifts that abruptly descended from the ceiling to disgorge them by the hundreds. More and more flowed outward from the building’s dim interior.

Passage against the current of flesh became first difficult, and then impossible. They were swept backwards, helpless as corks in a rain-swollen river. Outward they were forced and through the exit into the street.

The “police” were waiting there.

At the sight of Ellie and Nadine—they could not have been difficult to discern among the uniform drabness of the others—two of the armored figures stepped forward with long poles and brought them down on the women.

Ellie raised her arm to block the pole, and it landed solidly on her wrist.

Horrid, searing pain shot through her, greater than anything she had ever experienced before. For a giddy instant, Ellie felt a strange elevated sense of being, and she thought, If I can put up with this, I can endure anything. Then the world went away.

Ellie came to in a jail cell.

At least that’s what she thought it was. The room was small, square, and doorless. A featureless ceiling gave off a drab, even light. A bench ran around the perimeter, and there was a hole in the middle of the room whose stench advertised its purpose.

She sat up.

On the bench across from her, Nadine was weeping silently into her hands.

So her brave little adventure had ended. She had rebelled against Mr Tarblecko’s tyranny and come to the same end that awaited most rebels. It was her own foolish fault. She had acted without sufficient forethought, without adequate planning, without scouting out the opposition and gathering information first. She had gone up against a Power that could range effortlessly across time and space, armed only with a pocket handkerchief and a spare set of glasses, and inevitably that Power had swatted her down with a contemptuous minimum of their awesome force.

They hadn’t even bothered to take away her purse.

Ellie dug through it, found a cellophane-wrapped hard candy, and popped it into her mouth. She sucked on it joylessly. All hope whatsoever was gone from her.

Still, even when one has no hope, one’s obligations remain. “Are you all right, Nadine?” she forced herself to ask. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Nadine lifted her tear-stained face. “I just went through a door,” she said. “That’s all. I didn’t do anything bad or wrong or . . . or anything. And now I’m here!” Fury blazed up in her. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”

“Me?” Ellie said, astonished.

“You!You shouldn’t have let them get us. You should’ve taken us to some hiding place, and then gotten us back home. But you didn’t. You’re a stupid, useless old woman!”

It was all Ellie could do to keep from smacking the young lady. But Nadine was practically a child, she told herself, and it didn’t seem like they raised girls to have much gumption in the year 2004. They were probably weak and spoiled people, up there in the twenty-first century, who had robots to do all their work for them, and nothing to do but sit around and listen to the radio all day. So she held not only her hand, but her tongue. “Don’t worry, dear,” she said soothingly. “We’ll get out of this. Somehow.”

Nadine stared at her bleakly, disbelievingly. “How?” she demanded.

But to this Ellie had no answer.

WALK IN SILENCE

Catherine Asaro

If ancient animosities are finally laid to rest, will new ones take their place?

I

Silver Tide

Lieutenant Colonel Jess Fernández was sick. She sat in her chair at the end of a giant robot arm that could swing anywhere within the large hemisphere around her. Although she could act as captain from many locations within the ship, she spent most shifts here on the bridge.

She rubbed her eyes, exhausted after having worked late the previous evening, ship’s time. Her queasy stomach didn’t help. She also had a cold, of all the absurd anachronisms, and she felt like hell.

Holoscreens covered the surface of the kilometer-wide dome that formed the bridge. Right now they showed the planet Athena, a gas giant banded by blue and red clouds, glowing against the spangled backdrop of space. The view to starboard lifted her spirits. It came from a satellite orbiting Athena and showed her ship, Silver Tide, a scientific research facility. The vessel glistened, a rotating cylinder several kilometers long. Lights sparkled along its body, on antennae, pods, struts, and towers.

Jess always got a kick out of watching Silver Tide from within the ship. She had never lost the awe she felt that first time she boarded, coming to assume her command. In the five years since, Silver Tide had become part of her.

Her stomach interrupted her enjoyment with an unwelcome lurch. Trying to divert her thoughts, she magnified the screen images. Now they revealed a small spacecraft on approach, a Bolt transport. On Silver Tide, the pod on a docking tube was opening like a giant flower. The Bolt sailed inside and the pod closed, swallowing the craft. Jess recognized the Bolt; it carried Jack O’Brien and his Allied Services team, which tracked the interstellar black market. They were hitching a ride on Silver Tide, headed out across space to bust smugglers.

Jess sniffled, distracted by her stuffy nose. Pah. This was absurd. She had all her inoculations. Granted, none were 100 percent effective, but humans had cured most strains of the common cold. It irked her no end to have caught one anyway.

She still had to do her job. To the computer, she said, “Spin her up.”

“Done,” it answered. The bridge began to turn, its screens adjusting to keep the view stationary. She rotated the bridge during part of each shift so her crew at the consoles on the hull weren’t always in micro-gravity. Against the immensity of space, their stations were tiny wedges moving past the stars. Usually Jess reveled in that glorious vista. Unfortunately, seeing those consoles zip by today did nothing glorious for her stomach. Bloody hell. Captains weren’t supposed to get sick.

Jess sent her chair humming toward a hatch on the hull. To match speed and position with the moving hatch, the chair turned upside down, making her dismayed stomach flip-flop. She gulped bile as she shoved out of her seat. Then she rendezvoused with the Bridge Renewal and Refresher Chamber, otherwise known as the loo.

As she squeezed into the cubicle, a med-holo of her face formed in front of the opposite panel showing a woman with black hair tousled around her shoulders. Dark smudges showed below her eyes.

She barely had time to lean over the sink before she lost her lunch.

“You work too hard.” Dr. George Mai stood by the bed in the exam room, scanning his holopad. A heavy-set man of average height, he had a kind face and brown eyes. He frowned at Jess, who was sitting on the end of the bed, her booted legs almost touching the floor. “You should come in more often for a check-up,” he admonished.

Jess barely held back her grimace. She had never liked hospitals. “I’m not working any harder than usual. I’ve no reason to be sick.”

“I’m still checking a few tests, but I can already give you the diagnosis.” He turned off his holopad. “You have a cold, Captain. You need rest. Relaxation.”

Jess glowered at him. “I’m perfectly relaxed.”

He started to answer, then seemed to think better of it. Instead he said, “I’ll let you know if anything else turns up.”

“Thank you.” She slid off the bed, standing half a head taller than him.

“You really could use a rest,” he said. “Doctor Bolton would say the same.”

Gads. He was pulling out the big guns. She could just hear Sandra Bolton, the senior physician at Claymore Hospital: I insist you relax, Jess. Take a vacation, find a hobby, meet some people. You’re an intelligent, accomplished, attractive woman. All right, so you’re also stubborn as all hell. But you still need a social life.

Stubborn, pah. Sandra didn’t seem to understand the words, I’m fine, go away. Jess had great respect for the doctor’s abilities, but she had no wish to hear Sandra’s unsolicited advice on her personal life, or lack thereof.

Especially not now.

Jess hurried through the secluded woods around the medical park. She had changed back into her uniform, the blue trousers and shirt of a lieutenant colonel in the Space Corps of the Allied Worlds of Earth. At six-foot-two, with long legs, she devoured distance as she strode along a gravel path. The trees and flowering bushes on both sides tended to make her forget she lived on a star ship. Then she reached an open area and saw the forest sloping up the distant curve of the cylinder. The “sky” consisted of light panels in the overhead deck.

Silver Tide was a self-sufficient habitat, with its own towns and countryside. It carried thousands of people, primarily civilians, though Jess and her officers served in the Space Corps. The scientists onboard did research related to space, studying everything from genetically altered colonists on other planets to star formation. Researchers throughout the Allied Worlds of Earth regularly applied for grants to work on Silver Tide.

Jess sighed. Cold or no cold, she had work to do. She headed for the administrative park where her staff had their offices. The gleaming buildings were scattered among lawns and parks, with abstract sculptures that had never made a whit of sense to Jess. The modern art looked ugly to her, but perhaps she was too pragmatic to appreciate its nuances.

For the rest of the day, she met with the heads of science divisions, working on the ship’s itinerary. They had just picked up several astrophysicists who would study interstellar dust clouds for the next few months. Several weeks ago Silver Tide had dropped off a team of anthropologists on the world Icelos, and Jess wanted to check on them. Other groups had other itinerary requests.

Normally Jess enjoyed this part of her job, but today she felt too queasy to do more than function. During a meeting with the Microbiology division, she started to sneeze. She wished the med-patch George had given her would take effect. This was embarrassing.

After a full day, she headed home for a few hours of sleep. As she walked, she brooded on the discord among her staff. Several argued against returning to Icelos to check on the anthropologists. They claimed it would take valuable time other research teams needed. Jess found that hard to credit, given how often Silver Tide made such checks. Far more likely, their reluctance came about because Icelos was a Cephean world.

Cepheans had once been human. Six thousand years ago, an unknown race had moved humans from Earth to another planet, then vanished with no explanation. The stranded humans learned genetic engineering in desperation; without it, their population would have been too small to maintain a viable gene pool. Driven by memories of their lost home, they also developed space travel and went in search of Earth. So it was that five millennia ago, Earth’s displaced children built an interstellar empire.

But the empire soon collapsed, stranding its colonies. Although its descendants took thousands of years to regain space travel, they eventually succeeded, this time building a formidable civilization, the Skolian Imperialate. When Earth’s people finally reached the stars, they found their lost siblings already there, busily building empires. The Skolians had recovered many of their ancient colonies—including Cepheus.

The name was actually an Earth word. Unable to reproduce Cephean speech, Earth’s humans called the world Cepheus after a mythological king descended from Zeus, because the parent star appeared in the direction of the constellation Cepheus when seen from Earth.

However, Cepheus was a Skolian world. Its colonists had altered themselves, though now, millennia later, no one knew why. If they had intended to expand their gene pool, they failed miserably; Cepheans could neither reproduce with humans nor had any interest in doing so. Perhaps the changes adapted their harsh new world. They had two extra arms, modifications to accommodate the limbs, and luxuriant pelts. Entrepreneurs on Earth had spent millions trying to synthesize the fur, but that was all most humans liked about their altered neighbors. Cepheans evoked ancient terrors: Yeti, golems, stalkers in the night, a child’s nightmare.

Initially Cepheans had liked humans, responding on an instinctual level. Earth’s children looked like pretty pets to them. They turned wary as they discovered their long-lost siblings were anything but simple or malleable. When they realized how much humans reviled them, their unease became hostility.

A few decades ago, the Cepheans had settled Icelos, a planet in a system near their home. The colony’s scientific nature made it amenable to interaction with humans, and scientists on Earth and Icelos soon set up an exchange program. Silver Tide had carried Earth’s research team to Icelos, and Jess felt responsible for them. The exchange offered a symbol, proof that humans and Cepheans could work together. But the tenuous accord could unravel all too easily.

Dusk spread over the landscape as the panels dimmed overhead. Weary, Jess sat on a large boulder by the path and folded her arms across her torso. She leaned forward, swallowing the bile in her throat; either George’s medicine wasn’t working or else she needed new thoughts. She felt like hell.

Better not to think of Icelos.

With her arms crossed on her polished desk, Jess nodded pleasantly to the man sprawled in a leather armchair of her office. “I hope your accommodations are acceptable, Mr. O’Brien.”

Jack O’Brien gave her a rakish grin, more like a pirate than a security officer in the Allied Services. “Top shape, Cap’n.” A black curl fell over his forehead as he took a swig of his coffee. “After our military transport didn’t show up, we figured we were stranded at Epsilani Station. Your ship was a godsend.

“I’m glad we could help.” Although the Space Corps had no formal connection to the Allied Services, Jess had no objection to their agents hitching a ride on her ship.

The comm in her desk buzzed. Touching a panel, she said, “Fernández here.”

Sandra Bolton’s voice crackled. “Captain, I need to see you as soon as possible.”

Jess held back her groan. She had no wish to see Sandra now or ever, but she knew the doctor; the more Jess balked, the more Sandra would persist. The last thing she needed right now was to have a verbal duel with the head of Claymore Hospital in front of a visitor.

Jack O’Brien stood up, setting his mug on her desk, and mouthed, Thanks for the coffee. Relieved by his tact, Jess raised her hand to him as he left. When she was alone, she spoke into the comm. “I’ll stop by the hospital later if I have time.” She had a lot of work to finish today. In fact, she had just remembered more she had to do. Incredible amounts.

Sandra wasn’t buying it. “This can’t wait.”

Jess frowned. “Why not?”

“You should come here.”

That gave Jess pause. Sandra wasn’t usually this oblique. It might bear checking out. Grudgingly, she said, “All right.”

Sandra stood at a bench surrounded by monitors. The doctor was five-foot-six and had gained weight over the years, nothing drastic, but enough to make her round. Her short, stylish hair gleamed silver in the harsh light.

As Jess entered the exam room, Sandra turned and regarded her with a neutral expression. Bland. Sandra never looked bland. Something was up.

Jess stopped just inside the room, even more wary now. “Yes?”

Sandra studied her face. “We need to talk.”

“How about some other time?” Like in a century.

“Jess, listen.” The doctor cleared her throat. “It’s about the suggestions I gave you.”

“Which ones? You give a lot.” Sandra’s inventory of lectures was formidable.

“About socializing.”

Jess would have laughed if she hadn’t been so astounded. “Is that why you called me here so urgently? To find out if I’ve gone to any parties?”

“No. I just hadn’t expected you to actually take my advice.” Sandra laid her hand on the exam table, as if for support. Then she took a deep breath. “Jess—you’re pregnant.”

Jess stared at her, at a loss for a reply. It was simply too ludicrous. Finally she found her voice. “Is this some sort of tasteless joke?”

Sandra showed no sign of laughing. “George and I did three independent checks. They all give the same result.”

Jess scowled. “Then your procedures have some problem.”

“When George saw the result during your exam earlier, he thought it was a mistake too. But we checked. It’s true.”

“Sandra, for crying out loud. I can’t be pregnant.”

The doctor spoke dryly. “You aren’t the first woman to say those words. Nor the first to be wrong.”

“I’m not saying it’s unlikely. It’s impossible.”

“No birth control method is one hundred percent effective.”

Jess wished she were somewhere else. Anywhere. Discussing her sex life, or lack thereof, was about as high on her list of preferred activities as having a tooth pulled without benefit of modern dentistry. She crossed her arms. “It requires a merger to effect the result you attribute to the sole capacity of my reproductive organs.”

The doctor smiled. “Does that have a translation into something I can understand?”

So much for subtlety. Jess felt herself redden. “It means I haven’t, uh—been with a man.”

Her tormentor shrugged. “Maybe you forgot.”

“Forgot?” Jess couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. “That’s ridiculous. And no, I didn’t go to a sperm bank.”

“So how did you get pregnant?”

“I didn’t.”

Sandra continued as if Jess hadn’t spoken. “You caught a cold because your resistance is down. You need more rest now and you’re not getting it. And it’s why you’ve felt nauseated. You have morning sickness.”

“I have it all day,” Jess grumbled.

“You must have missed two cycles by now. Didn’t you notice?”

“I’m always irregular when I’m off-planet.”

Sandra scrutinized her. “Could you have had sex without knowing it?”

This felt more surreal by the moment. “I think I would have noticed.”

Sandra motioned at the bed. “Lie down.”

Jess scowled at her.

The doctor smiled. “I don’t bite, you know.”

“You do worse,” Jess muttered. “You give advice.” But she went to the bed and lay on her back. Her feet hung over the bottom edge.

Sandra clicked up an extension to support Jess’s feet. Then she moved to a monitor and said, “Scan one, Jazmín Fernández.” It was one of Sandra’s few redeeming qualities: she knew how to say her captain’s name. It wasn’t that Jess didn’t like her nickname; she had answered to Jess since her childhood in London. But she still appreciated it when someone pronounced Jazmín right.

“Type R scan,” Sandra said. She unhooked a cable from the monitor, rolled up Jess’s shirt, and proceeded to slide the disk across her abdomen.

“Hey.” Jess stiffened. “What are you doing?”

“Relax. It’s just an image processor.” Sandra motioned at the monitor. “Look.”

Jess peered at the screen. A color image was forming, set against a dark background. It showed a sac holding a tiny figure with a huge head and a flutter inside its body. “What is that?”

“Your baby,” Sandra said. “The motion is its heartbeat.”

Jess blinked. Could she truly have conceived a child? How?

Sandra studied a panel below the monitor. “This verifies the tests. You’re nine weeks pregnant.”

“Nine weeks?” Jess sat up suddenly. “That’s when we took those anthropologists to Icelos.”

Dryly Sandra said, “Your memory coming back?”

Jess flushed. “I still can’t be pregnant.”

The doctor gentled her voice. “In a situation like this, denial isn’t unusual. But you need to accept it, Jess. You need to decide what you intend to do.”

Jess stared at the monitor, watching her baby’s heart beat. A new life. Incredible. Protective instincts surged in her, similar to what she felt for Silver Tide.

She glanced at Sandra. “If you’re asking do I want to give up the child or end the pregnancy, the answer is no.”

Sandra didn’t look surprised. “Shall I contact the anthropologists?”

Jess’s voice came out sharper than she intended. “My child’s father is not on Icelos.” She slid off the bed and paced away from the doctor. “I don’t know how this happened.”

Sandra made a frustrated noise. “Fine. I give up. You had no lover. You conceived out of nothing.”

Jess turned around. “I didn’t say I had no lover.”

“Ah.” Sandra came over to her. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“He can’t be the father.”

“You have other candidates?”

“No.” Jess fixed Sandra with what she hoped was a quelling stare. “But he can’t be the father.”

Sandra didn’t look the least bit quelled. “You know mistakes can happen.”

“Not in this case.”

“What kind of birth control did you use?”

“I didn’t.”

Sandra snorted. “And you’re surprised you’re pregnant?”

“I didn’t need any.”

“Why? Is he sterile?”

“No. I just didn’t need it.”

“I don’t believe you could be that naïve.”

Jess glared at her. “Damn it, Sandra, let it go.”

“Let what go?”

“All right!” Jess crossed her arms again. “My companion was Ghar Ko. Satisfied?”

Sandra stared at her. “You mean the Cephean Ambassador?”

Jess wished she could disappear. “Yes.”

Sandra finally closed her mouth. “Lord Almighty.”

“What I just told you is confidential.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Sandra looked as if she couldn’t decide whether to be fascinated or appalled. “And yes, you’re right. Human beings cannot have babies with Cepheans.”

“Are you sure the child is human?” Maybe the scientists were wrong. Maybe hybrid offspring could exist.

“Completely human.” Sandra rubbed her chin. “A Cephean male couldn’t impregnate you. Too many differences exist in the DNA.”

“I don’t know what to say.” Jess had yet to sort out how she felt about what had happened. She certainly didn’t want to discuss it with Sandra. But she had to file a report, even if she declined to name the nonexistent father. Although maternity no longer meant an end to active duty on a ship like Silver Tide, a pregnant captain was hardly routine, especially an unmarried one. If she didn’t handle this right, she could lose her command.

Sandra seemed curious now, instead of flabbergasted. “How does Ambassador Ko feel about it?”

“I don’t know,” Jess admitted. “It just—happened. Then we fell asleep. I woke up, wrote him a note, and left.” Silver Tide had been scheduled to depart and she couldn’t hold up the ship for her personal life. Or so she told herself. But she and Ghar could have sent messages later, via starship. That neither of them had done so suggested she wasn’t the only one at a loss for words.

Sandra frowned. “I’ve never known you to be a coward.”

“I’m not. I needed time to think.” Ghar probably had too. She had no idea if their liaison appalled, embarrassed, or shamed him. “If his people learn about this, it will cause him problems. Cepheans don’t much care for humans.” To put it mildly.

“Apparently one of them does,” Sandra said dryly. “This could blow up on you big time. Humans are just as xenophobic towards Cepheans.”

“That’s why I haven’t said anything.”

“What are you going to do?”

Good question. Too bad she had no answer. “What should I do for the baby?”

Although Sandra obviously wanted to continue the topic of Ghar, she held back, at least for now. Instead, she switched into her most professional tone. “No alcohol or caffeine. Sleep more. Avoid zero-g; otherwise the cells in the fetus might not orient correctly. On the bridge, minimize how long you spend weightless. No EVAs. Even inside the ship, make sure you always have radiation protection. If the nausea gets so bad you can’t eat, let me know.”

“All right.” That all sounded manageable.

Sandra spoke more softly. “And Jess.”

“Yes?”

“What happened would be difficult for anyone to handle. Especially if you had no choice. . . .”

It took Jess a moment to decipher her meaning. Startled, she said, “It was consensual.” She couldn’t imagine Ghar forcing her. With relations between Earth and Cepheus already so strained, it would have been madness. It would shatter the brittle concord between their peoples.

“Could it have happened while you slept?” Sandra asked. “By someone else?”

Jess blinked. “Of course not.”

“Are you sure?”

Jess glanced at the monitor. It gave the time of conception as the night she had spent with Ghar. But she couldn’t believe Ghar would be involved in such a strange deception. She turned back to Sandra. “I’m sure.”

“It is hard to imagine,” Sandra admitted. “If you remember anything, let me know.” In a gentler voice she added, “And if you need to talk, I’m here.”

“Thank you.” Jess heard the stiffness in her voice. “But I’m fine. Really.”

She wished she believed that.

Jess walked through the woods in a deepening twilight. She kept thinking about Sandra’s question: could this have happened while she slept that night? But how? Someone would have had to enter Ghar’s home and impregnate her while he was there. Regardless of whether they used artificial means or sexual, they would have had to drug her or find some other way to ensure she didn’t wake up. She didn’t see how they could have silenced Ghar, and she couldn’t believe he would allow such violations. To what purpose? It was just too bizarre.

If Ghar had left for a while after she went to sleep, someone might have broken in during his absence. But that didn’t make much sense either. If someone in the village had wanted sex, easier ways existed to find it than sneaking up to the Cephean ambassador’s home and ravishing his guest in her sleep. Even if the person had sought the thrill of danger, Jess didn’t see how he could have infiltrated the well-guarded Cephean colony or Ghar’s home. And she knew Ghar too well to believe he would have left her alone long enough for such an outlandish event to occur.

She had last seen Ghar on Icelos, during a reception to welcome the anthropologists from Earth. Jess had never been comfortable at such gatherings. It had been a relief to leave with Ghar, the two of them deep in conversation. She wasn’t sure how they had ended up at his home. They had settled on a soft rug and proceeded to get drunk on that sharp brandy the Icelos colony produced for export.

Eventually Jess had slumped against his huge frame, no longer able to sit straight, and he had pulled her against his chest with his lower arms. He had been using all four hands to talk by then. Cepheans couldn’t replicate human speech, and humans couldn’t mimic their language, so the two of them had conversed by signing. For some reason, they had decided to “talk” by pressing signs against each other’s torso. Or maybe that had just been an excuse for their curiosity. It had soon grown more intimate.

Jess touched the comm on her gauntlet. Then she leaned against a tree, feeling the roughness of the bark through her shirt, and gazed into the dusk. The stillness of the night in the secluded forest helped calm her turmoil.

Her comm chimed. Touching the receive panel, she said, “Fernández.”

“Captain, this is Sandra Bolton. I received your page.”

Jess rested her head against the tree. “I was wondering how extensive a database you have for DNA records.”

“It’s a big one.” Sandra didn’t sound surprised by the inquiry. “Every time we link into a major medical system, we update ours. We probably have over eighty percent of the database for citizens of the Allied Worlds of Earth.”

Jess spoke softly. “So if an Allied citizen has ever had a medical record made of his DNA, you’ve a good chance of having it.”

“That’s right.” Sandra paused. “We only have a few records from Skolian databases. Our Icelos files are pretty skimpy.”

“Check what you can.” Jess swallowed. “See if you can match my child’s DNA.”

“I’ll go through everything we have.”

“Thank you.” Jess paused, unsure what to add. “Good night.”

“Good night.” In a kindly voice, Sandra added, “Jess, go home and rest. Don’t brood.”

“Thank you. But I’m fine. Really.”

After they signed off, Jess stood watching the night. She couldn’t handle this compassionate side of Sandra; it was easier to be annoyed when the doctor was giving a lecture. Confronted by a gentle Sandra, Jess feared she might drop her emotional guards. It would be tantamount to admitting she wasn’t self-sufficient. She had spent a lifetime proving herself; she couldn’t bear to ask for help now.

No matter how ill at ease she felt, she had to see Ghar. He might know what had happened. It wasn’t something she could tackle long-distance; she needed to see him in person. And going to Icelos would make it easier to check their medical databases. But it would take a fortnight to reach the colony, using most of the leeway in Silver Tide’s schedule.

If she wanted to see Ghar, she couldn’t hesitate.

II

Stalactite City

Icelos. Jess felt welcomed by the small world. After she left the starport, she headed into town. She could have taken a magrail or hitched a ride on a cargo lorry, but she preferred to go on foot. Warm within her climate-controlled jacket, she enjoyed walking in the three-quarters gravity.

The Cepheans were biosculpting the planet, adapting it for settlement. Although Icelos now supported humanoid life, the environment wasn’t yet comfortable. Even here at the equator, the warmest zone of the planet, the temperature usually hovered around freezing. The village resembled a ski town, with alpine bungalows capped by peaked roofs. Putting her hands in her pockets, she crunched through the snow, avoiding icy patches on the cobbled lanes.

The village had a crystalline, glittering beauty. Jess took a deep breath, savoring the crisp air. Although she had chafed when Sandra prescribed shore leave, she was secretly glad the doctor insisted. During the last fortnight, as Silver Tide had traveled here, Jess had debated whether or not to send Ghar a message. Her doubts had stopped her. If he had somehow caused her strange condition, she didn’t want to warn him that she was coming, lest he find a reason to cut short his visit to Icelos and return to Earth, where he served as ambassador. So she had held off.

She had spent the afternoon taking care of her duties; now she had two days to herself. Of course two days didn’t amount to much on Icelos, which rotated in only eleven hours. Regardless, she would make her best effort to see Ghar. Her emotions tumbled over one another, conflicted and awkward, but she still looked forward to the visit. As difficult as it was to admit, she missed Ghar.

When Jess came around a house, her stride faltered and she stared along the street to the land beyond the town. Cliffs sheered into a cobalt blue sky, and above them, jagged mountains rose in cold, primeval splendor. The sunset edged their crowns like tubes of hot-pink neon. Here in the village, the snow drifted against the bungalows had turned a luminous pink. Ice hung in frozen lace from the houses, glittering like rubies.

With an appreciative sigh, she set off again. Exhaling, she watched her breath condense in the air. As she passed a bungalow, a spray of ice fell from its roof. Icelos had slumbered for eons; now the Cepheans were awakening the world. It seemed fitting; in Greek mythology, Icelos had been the son of Somnus, the god of sleep. But she suspected Earth’s name for this world came from deeper in the human subconscious. The mythical Icelos had been a shape-changer who could turn into different animals; she often wondered if the name was an oblique, even unconscious acknowledgement by humans that their Cephean cousins had once been human and now were Other.

After a while, her gait slowed. She began to wish she had taken a hovercar. How had the human race survived so long, when incubating little humans took so much energy? She trudged on, trying not to think how far it was to home. A few years ago, the Allied embassy had arranged an apartment here for her, after the Cepheans requested her diplomatic services. The Cephean science commission and its Earth counterpart needed a liaison, someone who regularly traveled between Earth and Icelos, and the Cepheans already knew Jess from the visits Silver Tide had made.

She smiled wryly, remembering the dubious response from the Earth commission. As much as her taciturn bluntness appealed to the Cepheans, it annoyed humans. However, Allied Space Command liked that she got things done with efficiency and no fuss, so in the end she had become the liaison.

As sunset faded into a silvered dusk, Jess plodded to the intersection at Starfarer’s Lane. The sign at the crossroads looked the same as always, a stone rectangle hanging from a pole. She had never paid it much attention before, but today its carved words jumped out at her.

Childcare. The arrow pointed right.

She knew she should continue on home, rest, eat, sleep. But instead she found herself turning right.

A simple bungalow housed the childcare center. When Jess opened the door, young voices burbled over her. She found a cheerful room inside, with white walls adorned by cartoons in bright red, blue, and yellow. Toys were strewn across the carpeted floor. Three toddlers played there, watched by a blond woman with a kind face. The woman glanced at Jess, then did a double-take, her gaze widening.

Jess hesitated. Self-conscious, acutely aware of her uniform jacket and trousers, she closed the door.

The woman recovered her composure and approached with a friendly smile. “Hello, Captain. What can I do for you?”

Good question. To cover her uncertainty, Jess said, “We’re expanding a childcare facility on my ship. I’m interested in how other sites organize their centers.” It was true, actually. A community on Silver Tide had requested a new center, and Jess had been meaning to have someone attend the matter. It occurred to her that she ought to do the attending herself; she might soon be using that center.

“I would be happy to give you a tour.” The woman glanced at the insignia on Jess’s jacket. With diffidence, she added, “On a ship as big as yours, though, I’m sure you have much more extensive facilities.”

Jess felt more out of her depth here than she ever had on Silver Tide. She managed a smile. “Size and quality aren’t the same. I’ve heard yours is a well-run operation.”

The woman beamed. “That it is, ma’am.” She motioned with her hand, inviting Jess forward.

So Jess went on a tour of the center. In one room, a girl and boy were stacking holographic blocks. Seeing them, she felt an odd constriction in her chest. Would her baby have dark curls like the boy? Or perhaps she would be like the girl, her eyes huge and dark, her sweet face shaped like a heart. But how could she imagine her child’s appearance when the only paternal candidate was impossible? So far Sandra had found no genetic match for the baby, but the DNA was undeniably human.

Jess thought of her parents, their youth and energy drained from raising five children when they had resources for no more than one. The unrelenting demands of borderline urban poverty had ground the joy out of their lives. It had always made Jess uneasy about starting a family. Now an undefined longing tugged at her, feelings she had no name for, except that they came with a flavor of loneliness.

“Captain?” the woman asked.

Startled, Jess realized she had been standing there, gazing at the children. She spoke softly. “They seem so happy.”

The woman’s voice gentled. “We do our best.”

When the tour finished, Jess and the woman returned to the main room. About that time, a young couple came into the center, stamping snow from their boots, laughing together as they hung their jackets on a peg by the door. One of the toddlers ran to them, a strapping boy in a blue jumpsuit. The woman swung him into her arms, grinning when the boy laughed. As she sat in a rocking chair, the man settled in an armchair next to her, and they chatted companionably while the woman nursed the child.

After Jess left the center, images of the family stayed in her mind. She wanted to share this pregnancy with someone. Ghar. But she feared to tell him. She hated to think he might have betrayed her trust. If he hadn’t caused this to happen, he would make the only logical assumption, that she had taken a human lover that same night. Although she had no way to know how much he would care, if at all, she didn’t want him to believe she would betray his trust either.

Hell, what could she say when she had no idea herself what had happened?

The penthouse took up the top floor of The Conners, one of the tallest structures in the village, an elegant tower seven stories high. As Jess entered her darkened apartment, the curtains across the room parted, probably responding to a command from Matrix, the Evolving Intelligence that ran the place. He often altered the ambience, which meant she came home to unexpected changes. She tended to enjoy it; over the years, he had developed a sense of her preferences.

The curtains opened on a window that took up most of the wall. Night had fallen outside, and light from the star-encrusted sky poured through the window, making the white carpet glow. Standing in the center of her sunken living room, Jess gazed out at the night’s beauty. Usually she savored the spacious dimensions of the place, which fit her height, but tonight it just made her more aware of its emptiness.

“Matrix,” she murmured. “It’s too dark.”

The lights came up slowly, letting her eyes adjust. The room had simple furniture, elegant and sleek, with silver accents and plants in blue-glass pots. Relieved to be home, Jess dropped onto the sofa and pulled off her boots. She stretched her legs across the blue-glass coffee table, her feet reaching the other side. Legs that go on forever. A man she had known ten years ago had told her that.

Her husband.

He had come to London from Norway. They had spent five years together, with a renewable marriage contract. Then she became captain of Silver Tide. He didn’t want to leave Earth and she didn’t want to give up her command, so they had let their contract lapse. Although they had parted amicably, the loss had affected Jess deeply, far more than she wanted to admit. Since then, she had guarded her emotions even more.

Until Ghar.

Perhaps it had been the brandy, or the unreality of that night. Or maybe she just liked him better than anyone else she had met, despite his being Cephean. She shook her head at her folly. You never do things the easy way, do you? Exhausted, she slumped back and closed her eyes. She knew she should have dinner, but the thought made her stomach rebel.

Jess sighed. For the baby, she should eat. Opening her eyes, she noticed a light on a fingertip panel in the sofa arm. “Yes?” she asked.

“Welcome back, Captain Fernández,” Matrix said pleasantly. “Can I get you anything?”

“A new stomach,” Jess grumbled.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t do organ transplants.”

She smiled. “How about food? Something bland. Skim milk to drink.”

“I can have the kitchen prepare a superb bland meal,” Matrix assured her. “Would you like your mail while you wait? You have a message from Doctor Bolton.”

Jess almost groaned, but she knew she shouldn’t avoid her doctor. “Go ahead.”

Sandra’s voice crackled. “Captain, please contact me immediately.”

Jess waited. “That’s it?”

“That is it,” Matrix said.

She rubbed her chin. “All right. Contact Doctor Bolton. She’s on the Silver Tide, in orbit.”

“Message sent. Would you like anything else?”

Jess still felt unprepared for this, even after thinking about it for days. But she made herself answer. “Yes. Get me the Allied embassy.”

“One moment, please.” After several minutes, during which Jess sat like a lump, Matrix said, “I have Paige Lowell from the embassy.”

“Thanks. Put her on audio.” Although Jess had always liked Paige, right now she didn’t feel up to facing the young woman’s flawless perfection. Somehow the incomparably beautiful Paige managed simultaneously to appear as elegant as an old-money heiress and as wholesome as the girl next door. Add to that her formidable education and rapid advancement in the diplomatic corps, and she could give even the most confident person an inferiority complex.

A lovely voice floated into the air, cultured and gracious. “Hello, Captain Fernández. Welcome back to Icelos.”

“Hi, Paige,” Jess said. Then she winced. She had never quite figured out when she and Paige were on a first name basis and when they were being formal. So she added, “Please call me Jess.”

“It would be my pleasure. What can we do for you?”

Jess steeled herself. “I’d like to see Ambassador Ko. If he’s still here.” Cephean protocol required the Allied embassy on Icelos contact the Cephean embassy here if Jess wanted to talk to Ghar, even though she already knew the code for his private comm.

“I will be happy to inquire if his Excellency can meet with you,” Paige said.

“Thanks. I appreciate it.” Jess paused, too tired to think of small talk. “Good-night.”

“Good-night, Jess. Have a pleasant evening.”

After they cut the connection, Jess raked her hand through her hair. Would Ghar respond? More likely, he wanted to forget their night together.

Matrix suddenly spoke. “I have Doctor Bolton waiting.”

Jess winced. “Just put her on audio. No visual.” If Sandra saw her fatigue, she would launch into a lecture.

“Incoming,” Matrix said.

Sandra’s voice cut the air. “Jess, are you all right?”

“I’m fine.” Jess shifted on the couch. “Why?”

“You’ve been sick so much it triggered an alert in your quarters on the ship. Why didn’t you tell me how bad it was?”

Jess shrugged, then remembered Sandra couldn’t see. “It’s not bad. I’ve kept some food down.”

The doctor clucked at her. “You’re too stoic. I gave Matrix an anti-nausea prescription. Take it.”

Jess was too tired to argue. “All right.”

More gently, Sandra said, “Are you really okay?”

Jess felt her emotional defenses going up. “I’m fine.”

“You keep telling me that. Why don’t I believe it?”

Because you know me too well. Jess saw a tray rising up inside a glass column that supported the table. A panel in the table slid open and the tray came to the top. Dinner sat before her, pasta and vegetables on china. Milk filled a crystal goblet, and a vase held an orchid.

Jess shook her head, incredulous. She had grown up with so little, the fifth child of a Spanish father and Portuguese mother who lived in London. Her parents had been wanderers, only two in the millions of displaced tech workers, all scratching for jobs while unemployment in the information sector spiraled. With more and more intelligent machines able to replace humans, the need for infotech workers had plunged. Like many others, her parents ended up in an arbitrary urban center, scraping by with low-level jobs.

But in this modern age, a wealth of new jobs existed, including those on the frontier among the stars. Hard work and scholarships had made it possible for Jess to overcome her circumstances, yet even after buying her parents and siblings a new house in an upscale London neighborhood, she found it hard to believe this new life she had earned for her family.

“Jess?” Sandra asked.

She rubbed her eyes. “My dinner is here. I have to go.”

The doctor spoke kindly. “Don’t push yourself so hard. You deserve a rest. Give yourself some slack.”

“All right.” The words didn’t feel like enough, so she added, “Thanks for the concern.”

“You’re welcome.” Sandra’s voice had an odd note, as if she were surprised to hear Jess thank her.

Am I that difficult a patient? Jess wondered if Sandra found their interactions painful too. But if so, why did the doctor persist in giving unasked-for advice? Their lives would be far easier if Sandra would let up on Jess’s personal life. Jess doubted that would happen, though. She didn’t understand why it mattered to Sandra. Maybe the doctor considered it important to Jess’s job performance; ensuring Silver Tide’s captain could carry out her duties was one of Sandra’s primary responsibilities.

Enough brooding. Jess lifted the tray into her lap, settled back, and made herself eat. True to his word, Matrix had arranged an excellent dinner. The pasta almost melted in her mouth. She wished she could enjoy it more.

Matrix had put a patch with the anti-nausea medicine on the tray. When Jess applied it to her inner elbow, it blended into her skin, turning golden-brown. She rubbed her fingers over the patch, remembering how her skin had evoked taunts in her youth. As the world grew more cosmopolitan, acceptance among races and cultures had improved, but it still wasn’t perfect. Jess had learned that lesson the hard way. Circumstances had forced her to become a fighter at a young age, aided by her height, strength, and stubborn refusal to back down from bullies. Friendship had been hard for her in those years, and it had never become easier.

It was strange how life could change. She had always perceived herself as rough-edged, but years later a top modeling agency had offered her a contract, lauding her purportedly “long-limbed grace and exotic style.” Her height, unusual even for a high-fashion model, had intrigued them, as had her military rank. That had been the rage back then: sleek, svelte fashion with an undertone of soldierly power. Flustered, she had thanked them but turned down the job, far more at home with starship engines than runways.

“I have Ambassador Ko on your private line,” Matrix announced.

Jess swallowed so fast she choked. Sitting up, she cleared her throat. “Put him on.”

“Audio, visual, or both?”

She wasn’t ready to face him on visual. But they couldn’t talk, and to use sign language they had to see each other. “Did the ambassador request visual?”

“His human translator contacted me by audio,” Matrix said.

Thank you, Ghar. “Just put on the audio then.”

“Incoming,” Matrix said.

Ghar’s translator spoke, his resonant voice filling the air. “My greetings, Captain Fernández.”

“Good evening, Your Excellency.”

“How long does Icelos have the fortune of your company?”

That sounded like he was glad to hear from her. Then again, Ghar was a diplomat. He had to sound pleasant.

“I’m here two days.” Jess hesitated. “I thought if you were free, we might, uh . . . meet for dinner.” She winced at the clumsy invitation. As the Ambassador from Cepheus to the Allied Worlds, Ghar spent most of his time on Earth. When he traveled, he booked his commitments far in advance, and his visits to Icelos were packed with obligations. She waited, her shoulders hunched in anticipation of his refusal.

“Dinner would be acceptable,” he answered. “Shall we meet at the Junction in half an hour?”

Jess released the breath she had been holding. He didn’t exactly sound overjoyed, but at least he hadn’t refused. “Yes. Half an hour.”

The Junction reminded Jess of a ski lodge, with its big fireplace and old-fashioned bar. Located at the base of the cliffs outside town, it served the human visitors on Icelos, a sort of last stop before striking out into Cephean territory. Jess doubted Ghar wanted to eat here; he couldn’t sit in the chairs and he disliked the food. More likely, he wanted to take her to the Cephean settlement where he lived when visiting Icelos.

Jess waited by the bar, watching musicians play on the stage across the room. She was too restless to stand still for long. The med patch was working; she hadn’t felt this good in weeks. Finally she decided to head into the cliffs. She knew the route Ghar took, so she could meet him on the way. Despite the strange situation, she looked forward to seeing him.

Cold air hit her face as she left the lodge. She had worn a sweater over her uniform, a long coat, and heavy boots, but she still shivered with the chill. It never ceased to amaze her how Cepheans thrived in this climate. Of course, she didn’t have a four-inch pelt covering her body.

The road wound steeply up into the mountains. Gold posts stood at intervals, made from fluted metal, with smoked-glass lamps hanging from their tops, casting ghostly light. On her left, a cliff rose into the darkness: on the right, a wall at chest height bordered the road. Beyond it, a canyon plunged down for over a kilometer, fading into a heavy mist. Snow crunched under her boots, deeper here where no machines cleared the lane. Cepheans liked it this way.

Eons ago this land had been flat. Underground rivers had hollowed it into a maze of buried limestone caverns. Water rich with bicarbonate and calcium ions dripped from cavern ceilings, hardening into stalactites like huge icicles of rock, or falling to the ground and building up conical stalagmites. Eventually the land sheered upward, buckling into mountains honeycombed by caves. It made an eerily beautiful landscape, haunting and unforgettable.

Jess had seen how it unsettled human visitors here to know the Cepheans chose this forbidding landscape for their home when they could easily have settled the plains instead. Cepheans lived vertically instead of horizontally, a difference hard to fathom for a species with only two arms. The Cepheans’ blunt refusal to acknowledge that their way of life might not suit everyone exacerbated the unease they created in their human neighbors.

A distant voice startled Jess out of her reverie. She paused, listening. The voice hadn’t sounded Cephean, but few humans came up here even in the day, and at night they avoided the desolate road like a plague.

Up ahead, a path branched off this main one. She went over and peered down the trail, but the dim light made it hard to see. Was someone in trouble? Concerned, she headed down the path. The cliffs on either side leaned inward and met about a meter above her head. Stretching out her arms, she could touch the walls of rock on either side. Limestone caves glistened on either side, with stalactites and stalagmites glazed by frost like stone icicles, a wonderland of sparkling stone lace. She doubted any human explorer had yet mapped the full warren of passages up here. The serenity and deep silence appealed to her, reminding her of the silent expanses of interstellar space.

She neither saw nor heard anyone, though, and she couldn’t spend too long here, lest she miss Ghar on the main path. Finally she headed back. As she passed a cave on her right, a glint behind a stalagmite caught her eye. It came from . . . what? A small cage? It was so well hidden, she had missed it before. Pausing, she stepped into the cave and knelt by the cage.

Mewling greeted her. A furry white animal butted its head against the bars, its pointed ears quirked forward. It resembled a comalkos, a popular pet among Cepheans, possibly descended from an early form of Earth feline. Looking more closely, she realized it actually was a kitten.

“What are you doing out here?” She scratched its head, pushing her fingers through the bars. It purred at her.

Scraping sounds caught her attention. Peering around, she realized the cave held many cages, all with cats. She doubted they belonged here. And she had heard a voice before—

Responding with instincts tempered by decades of experience, Jess jumped up and took off, striding back to the main road. She could come back with security officers from town. If the animals were legal, no problem. But hiding cats in these mountains was too strange to ignore.

Her footsteps crunched on rock. The natural chambers on either side of the path magnified sound—and so Jess distinctly heard the words, even from some distance behind her:

“Shit. She saw the cages.”

Jess didn’t pause to question—she just burst into a run.

She never heard the knife sing through the air, but she couldn’t miss the crackle as it sliced her overcoat and sweater. The blade cut deep into her side. Another knife hit her leg, ripping through her uniform. Lord only knew how those blades were made, if they could so easily rip through layers of reinforced cloth. Part of her mind instinctively recoiled from the attack, but the rest of her concentration narrowed into a tight focus as her training took over. It happened too fast for her to feel pain. Yet.

As she ran, the tatters of her overcoat flapped around her legs, making her stumble. Jess yanked off the coat and threw it down, never slowing. Her injured leg felt like putty, and dizziness threatened. At the back of her mind, she thought of the life she had to protect, the child inside of her, and she managed another spurt of speed.

By the time Jess reached the main path, her sprint had turned into a stagger. Her heart was pounding so hard, her entire body shook with it. She lurched across the road and hit the wall that separated it from the chasm. Before she could catch her balance, hands grabbed her from behind and swung her around, slamming her against the wall. Jess found herself staring at a tall man who looked like his name ought to be Buzz, as in an electrified chain-saw.

“Now you’ve done it,” he said through clenched teeth. Two more people came out of the side path and sprinted toward them, a stocky man with red hair and a gaunt woman.

Jess strained to breathe. “What do you want?”

Instead of answering, Buzz heaved her upward. In that instant, the woman reached them. Without hesitation, she aided Buzz, yanking up Jess’s legs, sending pain blazing through the wound. Jess’s icy calm snapped into the cold fury that came over her in combat. She smacked her hands against Buzz’s elbows and shoved inward, breaking his hold. At the same time, she brought up her knee hard. He choked, dropping his arms and doubling up, his face contorted. As the woman shoved Jess up the wall, Jess kicked out at her. A loud crack rent the air and the woman shouted, falling backward, her left hand clenched on her right arm, which was bent now at an odd angle.

Jess had no time to wonder why the bloody hell they wanted to kill her. The second man was already lunging at her, bringing down the knife-edge of his hand. He mistimed the blow, as fighters often did in unfamiliar gravity. With her more extensive training, Jess easily blocked it, but she still reeled under the impact when the blow hit her arm.

Buzz was coming back at her now, his face set in hard lines, and the woman wasn’t far behind him. As Jess fought off the second man, her muscles straining, Buzz caught her again. With the woman’s help, he pushed Jess up the wall. Jess tried to stop them, tried to wrench free, but she couldn’t take on three at once, not with her injuries. Her leg responded only sluggishly and a deep burning seared her side. They pushed her up the wall—

And her hips cleared the top.

Jess went rigid, with nothing but air and a canyon at her back. In that moment, as she faced her death, she thought with cold clarity, You have no right. It enraged her that they could so cavalierly murder the mystery child she had come to treasure. She twisted hard, to the side, toward the road. Her efforts wrenched her out of their grip, but—ah, no!—she fell, fell, fell—

And hit the road with a crash that slammed out the air in her lungs. A man’s scream reverberated in the air, splitting the night. Jess jerked up her head—

And froze.

Caught in the light from a lamp, a giant towered above them. Fiery red-gold fur covered his body and a mane of curls swept back from his face to his shoulders. Huge muscles rippled in his legs and arms, visible through his trousers and tunic. His shoulders had immense breadth and width, with massive blades that extended down his body to accommodate his second pair of arms. His lips were drawn back, baring fangs more than two inches long. His tail whipped through the air, six feet long and as thick as a man’s body where it met his back. His lower arms were reaching for what his upper pair already held high over his head: the man Buzz.

As Jess stared, the ambassador from Cepheus to Earth threw his human captive into the canyon.

III

Cavern of Ladders

Jess drifted awake, warm but unaccountably stiff. Why did her quarters have a musky scent? Silver Tide usually smelled sanitized. She stretched—and pain shot through her body.

“Ah!” She snapped awake. Oh, hell. She wasn’t on Silver Tide. She was about to be hefted into a canyon.

Opening her eyes, she stared across a dimly lit room; no cliff, just a polished stone chamber. The tables and desks were double-tiered, designed for two pairs of arms, and a few feet taller than what humans would build. She was lying on a stone floor, on a rug, with her back against a padded wall. Another rug covered her, soft on her skin. Jess recognized the furs. Cepheans made them from a silken material they sheared off an animal called the abryr, one of the few Cephean words humans could pronounce, said with a growl in the throat.

Despite the cushion of blankets, the ground was rough beneath her. A ridge ran under her waist and another under her torso. She wore nothing except a shift and two bandages, one around her waist and the other around her thigh.

Memory returned: cats, the attack, Ghar. She had lost so much blood; then she had lost consciousness.

The wall behind her shifted.

For an instant Jess was too startled to move. Then she rolled onto her back, carefully, favoring her injuries. The “wall” behind her was alive.

Oh, Lord. She was staring at the chest of a Cephean sleeping on his side. A large Cephean. The “ridges” she had felt under her body were his arms; he was holding her around her waist and torso. She lay in a cage of limbs, four to be exact. It was so strange, and so unexpected, that she couldn’t even react at first.

Finally she said, “Ghar?” Her voice rasped.

He continued to sleep.

She tried again. “Ghar? Can you hear me?”

His lashes lifted, revealing two brown eyes, dark and liquid. He blinked as if trying to fathom her presence. Then his hands shifted, his claws retracted so he didn’t jab her. He moved them against her back, signing in the language used by the deaf. It was the method of conversing they had tried before, a playful experiment that had ended up communicating far more than they had intended, or at least more than they had been willing to admit.

Do you hurt? he asked.

Jess was too self-conscious to think how she felt about his touching her, beyond her confusion at the situation and his presence. She signed against his chest, her fingers buried in his fur. I’m all right. Where is this?

You came here the last time you visited. His fingers stilled. Then, carefully, he added, Maybe you forgot.

Oh. Now she recognized the place. His rooms. They had spent the night here, on this pile of blankets in fact. He had just offered her a chance to pretend it never happened. She wondered how he would explain, if she chose to develop amnesia, why she was in bed with him now.

I remember, she signed.

The rigid muscles in his arms relaxed. I too.

I have another memory, she signed. But it must be a mistake.

What memory?

You threw a man into the chasm.

His hand made a claw on her back. Your memory is not a mistake.

She stared at him. Ghar, why?

You were covered with blood, one breath from dying.

Grateful as she was at his intervention, her unease grew as she absorbed the implications of his actions. The few times a Cephean had injured a human, it had provoked outrage on Earth; reports of the incidents glittered with invective, their censure stretching like a metallic tissue that looked strong but ripped easily, exposing the underlying panic humans felt when confronted by neighbors who were just human enough to make their immense differences terrifying. What would happen when it became known that the Cephean ambassador, the one they were supposed to trust, had murdered a man?

Jess signed slowly. If you hadn’t come, I would be dead. I am grateful, more than I can say. But we have trouble.

He answered tiredly. Your authorities demand my extradition.

How long have I’ve been here?

About two Icelos days.

Good Lord. Twenty-two hours. Her ship would be behind schedule now. Why didn’t my crew take me?

They wanted to.

What stopped them?

He paused. That answer connects to my second crime.

What second crime?

Holding a Space Corps officer hostage.

Bloody hell. I’m not a hostage.

They think you are.

You won’t let them see me?

His intransigence came through his signing. No.

Ghar, this is nuts.

They might harm you.

Jess didn’t know what to think. She had believed he would want to forget what happened; never had she expected him to react with the same possessive intensity a Cephean would direct toward his Cephean mate.

He signed on her back. Why were those people trying to kill you?

I don’t know. I only saw a bunch of cats.

Cats?

In cages, hidden in a cave. She tensed. What happened after I saw you on the road?

Your other attackers ran. I pursued.

And then? Her hand clenched in his fur.

Ghar caught her fingers. I killed no one else.

Jess let out the breath she had been holding. That is good to know.

His growl rumbled. I might have killed them, if you hadn’t needed my attention more.

Well, no one had ever claimed Cepheans were peaceful. But she would have never predicted this from Ghar.

Your authorities want proof you still live, he added.

I’m not surprised. She hoped Sandra hadn’t told them about the pregnancy, but she knew if the doctor feared for Jess’s life, Sandra would speak up regardless of how confidential Jess wanted the matter. The security people on Silver Tide would make the obvious assumption: if they knew, Ghar probably did as well. No one could fully predict his response, but he obviously was no more likely than anyone else to believe he was the only candidate for proud papa. Given his recent behavior, Security had good reason to think Jess’s life might be at risk.

Although Jess didn’t think Ghar would kill her, she couldn’t be sure. About one thing she had no doubt: if Ghar murdered a lieutenant colonel in the Space Corps, a starship commander who served as an Earth-Cepheus liaison, all hell would break loose.

Jess signed against his chest. I must return to Silver Tide. She tried to sit up, and pain shot through her torso, followed by a rush of nausea. With a groan, she lay down again.

He set his lower arm across her waist, pinning her. You must go nowhere.

Jess recognized her nausea. Apparently Sandra’s med patch wasn’t 100 percent effective. Either that, or this was more serious than morning sickness. What if she had lost the baby? No. She couldn’t have miscarried. Surely Ghar would have known. But would he understand? Jess didn’t know how to ask. She was vulnerable now, undefended if he thought she had betrayed him.

Who patched me up after the attack? she asked.

Me.

So he hadn’t let a Cephean doctor see her. It made sense; it would have provoked questions he probably wanted to avoid. Did I have other injuries? she asked. Bleeding anywhere else?

No. Only the two wounds.

Relief poured over her. Still, she needed to be sure. I should be checked by a human doctor.

A growl rumbled in his throat. You should stay here.

She tried to decipher his expression. Although fur covered his face, it wasn’t long except where a human man would have a beard. Most humans found Cephean faces difficult to read, but she had learned to judge Ghar’s moods. Right now he looked uncertain.

She signed, Your government can’t like my being here any more than mine does.

His gaze didn’t waver. Bor supports my decisions.

Bor? As in Bor Chi? You mean the Cephean First Councilor?

Yes.

Good Lord. If Ghar called one of the most influential leaders on his home world by a personal name, he was placed even higher in his government than she had realized. Bor Chi gives you his protection?

In public. His fingers slowed on her back. In private, he asks if I am insane.

But he stands by your decisions?

Yes.

Why?

He trusts my judgment. After a pause, Ghar added, He is also the older brother of my aunt’s husband.

So. Kin ties. They were strong among Cepheans, apparently even in a hostage situation. Except she wasn’t a hostage. At least she hoped she wasn’t.

Why won’t you let a human doctor see me? she asked.

He stiffened. Humans tried to kill you.

Three people tried to kill me. Not all humans.

Maybe.

Why do you suddenly distrust humans?

His claws scraped her back. I have always distrusted humans.

That gave her pause. It never showed.

My job was to overcome distrust.

What has changed?

Overcoming distrust is a euphemism for taking risks. He regarded her steadily. I have no intention to risk your life.

Jess felt as if a crystal sculpture of great value were shattering before her eyes, falling as she grabbed for it, her lunge too late to stop its destruction. You can’t let the trust between our peoples—a trust you’ve worked for ten years to build—be destroyed this way.

I have no choice.

Yes, you do. Ghar, you do your job well. We need you. Both my people and yours.

It’s too late, Jess.

It isn’t! I can go back. Tell the truth.

A rumble thrummed within his chest. It isn’t safe.

Jess scowled at him, holding it long enough so he had plenty of time to decipher the expression. It is my decision. Not yours.

He answered with only another rumble, but she recognized that growl. He always made it in protest, when he was about to give in on an argument but didn’t want to tell her.

I will talk to the authorities, she added. Tell them you saved my life.

I don’t want you to go back.

As much as she wanted to deny his suspicions, Jess had to consider them. Few humans visited this colony, and the Port Authority kept tabs on all visitors, which probably meant they knew the identities of the people who tried to kill her. If the PA had a more covert link to her attackers, such as turning a blind eye to their activities in return for bribes, she could end up dead if she contacted them, an unfortunate “incident” that would be blamed on Ghar.

She frowned. If she discussed the situation with anyone on her ship, over a distance comm, the PA might have a way to eavesdrop. Considering, she signed, We can bring someone here from Silver Tide.

It isn’t possible to contact them.

Jess wasn’t buying it. Although Ghar had no obvious comm in his home, she knew perfectly well that his apartment had modern technology; it was just hidden to make his home fit with the spare ambiance of the colony. She thumped her fist on his chest. We need to do this, Ghar.

After a silence, he signed, No military personnel.

All right. She knew him well enough to recognize that his lack of an overt refusal was the closest he would come to expressing his acceptance. She thought about her crew. Who among the civilians could best deal with what looked like some bizarre illegal import operation? Jack O’Brien, possibly.

How about the Allied Services? she asked. They work with smugglers.

No more than three of them. Concern showed in his gaze. Do you hurt? They can bring medicine to blunt the pain.

I’m fine. She didn’t want to risk any drugs during her pregnancy unless they were absolutely necessary, but this wasn’t the time to explain why.

Just when was a good time, she had no idea.

Even in the staid uniform of the Allied Services, with his unruly hair combed, Jack O’Brien still looked like a pirate to Jess. He came with two assistants, a man and woman, both in AS uniforms. All three settled on a rug in the main room of Ghar’s home.

Jess sat with them, wearing a shift made from one of Ghar’s tunics. Although on him it reached only to his hips, on her it came below the knees. She had put her arms through the upper sleeves, rolling them up to free her hands. To pull in the billows of cloth, she tied the lower sleeves behind her back—loosely. Even if her uniform hadn’t been ripped and bloodied, its tight fit would have bothered her. She was almost three months pregnant; soon she could no longer keep her situation private.

Ghar sat to her right on a blocky stool, looming over them, silent and formidable. No one missed the hostility in his position or posture.

“Ambassador Ko saved my life,” Jess continued, speaking to Jack O’Brien. His female assistant served as translator, signing for Ghar, while his male assistant recorded their words on a palmtop.

Jack regarded her intently, as if trying to decipher what lay behind her words. “Then you and his Excellency were already planning to meet that night?”

“That’s right.” She suspected Jack had been trained to read body language; in his line of work, the skill would be invaluable. He might be able to tell if she were lying or withholding information. So she just said, “Ambassador Ko and I often work together.”

Jack nodded, his gestures restrained. He didn’t give the impression he disbelieved her; his wariness seemed more due to Ghar’s presence. As he spoke, his assistant signed. “We’ll give your full statement to the authorities.”

“Good.” Jess exhaled. “This situation is already too volatile. We need to cool it down.”

Jack nodded. “Your talking to us ought to alleviate matters.” He spoke with an assurance probably meant more to ease Ghar’s enmity than to reassure her.

“I hope so.” Jess shook her head. “All over some cats. I don’t get it.”

“They aren’t cats.” He leaned forward. “You stumbled into a delivery by a cartel the AS has been after for years. My department has never worked on that case, so our data is limited, but we do know the cartel has moved business through here before. The port is small and no one pays it much attention.” Dryly he added, “The smugglers probably never expected the captain of a major Allied starship to show up.”

It still made no sense to Jess. “Why not just get a permit to import comalki? It can’t be all that expensive.”

“Those aren’t comalki.”

“They looked like cats.”

Jack pushed his hand through his hair, making them revert to their more usual disheveled state. “The animals carry a virus. It’s what the cartel actually sells. If the altered comalkos bites you, you’re sick.” Glancing at Ghar, he shifted his weight. “The virus is deadly to Cepheans.”

Ghar signed. “How deadly?”

Jack blew out a gust of air. “Let those animals loose here and you’d have a killer plague, fast and vicious.”

Jess stared at him. Was the cartel insane? Icelos was a world of the Skolian Imperialate, which had a formidable military that protected its own with legendary ferocity. Most Skolians were human, and Jess had no idea how they felt about Cepheans—but if they learned an Earth cartel had killed an entire colony of their citizens, any citizens, their retribution would be fast and harsh. The Allied Worlds of Earth would have little chance against them.

She clenched her hand in the cloth of her shift. “The cartel is out of their minds.”

“Not crazy. Greedy.” Jack’s face had paled. “They’d have received a monstrous payment for that shipment from a fanatic group that wants to kill all the Cepheans. And hell, if it had started a war, it would’ve benefited the cartel’s black market.” Turning, he spoke more quietly to Ghar. “Your Excellency, be assured that these extremists in no way represent the Allied Worlds of Earth. We greatly value our relations with your people and wish to continue in good will.”

Ghar answered with sharp signs. Such fanatics also exist among my people. They feel similarly about humans.

Jess tried to gauge his mood, but she couldn’t read him. He made no sound as Jack’s assistant translated his signs.

Jack spoke grimly. “We’ll punish the cartel. Count on it.”

Ghar didn’t answer, he just watched the AS agents. Now Jess recognized his stare; he was only thinking, but on the face of a Cephean, the expression looked murderous. When Jack shifted uneasily, she spoke quickly, to defuse the tension. “Are those altered comalki immune to this virus?”

Jack glanced at her, relief in his gaze. “They aren’t really comalki either. They’re chimeras.”

The word sounded vaguely familiar. “I take it you don’t mean that in the literary sense,” Jess said.

“In a biological sense,” Jack said. “To engineer a chimera, you mix DNA from two species.”

She finally remembered where she had heard the word, in a long-ago college course. “Isn’t a chimera some kind of mythological beast—head of a lion, tail of a dragon or something? Breathed fire at people it didn’t like.”

He smiled slightly. “That’s where it originated. In biology it refers to a hybrid animal. Chimeras are easiest to make using similar species, like lions and tigers, or comalki and cats.”

She could see where he was going. “So this virus would kill either a comalkos or a cat, but the chimera survives.”

“That’s right.” He glanced uneasily at Ghar. “Cepheans like comalki, so the cartel found a variant of the animal that could carry the virus.”

“Gods,” Jess muttered.

Ghar growled deep in his throat, his lower hands fisted on his knees. He signed with his upper. “Why don’t you stop these smugglers?”

Jack sat up straighter, his posture stiffened as if he were preparing to protect himself. “They’ve managed to stay a step ahead of us. But if Captain Fernández testifies against them, it could give us the chink we need to bring down their operation.”

Jess thought about three complete strangers trying to throw her into the canyon, killing not only her, but also her child. She regarded Jack steadily. “I will testify.”

Ghar snarled, and she needed no translator to know he said, ‘No!’ in Cephean. His lips drew back and his teeth glinted like daggers. Then he bared his claws, which were longer than his fangs.

Jack blanched, but he didn’t back down. “We need her testimony.”

Jess signed to Ghar. I will be in no danger.

He answered in his own language, a series of growls. She had trouble with the words, but it sounded like the equivalent of “They will kill you.”

“They won’t hurt me.” She spoke slowly so he could decipher what, to him, was a high-pitched, sing-song lilt. “I will have protection.”

Jack O’Brien was staring at her. “You understand him?”

Jess glanced at him, distracted. “Some.”

He whistled. “That’s supposed to be impossible.”

Thinking of her child, she answered dryly. “Many things are impossible. That doesn’t stop them from happening.” She had to change the subject before Ghar decided Jack was endangering her life and hefted him out a window. “How did the cartel get started?”

“A wealthy collector set it up about thirty-five years ago,” Jack said. “He wanted Cephean rugs in his collection.”

“Why didn’t he just buy them?” she asked, incredulous. Granted the rugs were expensive, but their prices weren’t exorbitant, especially for the wealthy.

“He didn’t want abryr rugs.” Jack glanced at Ghar as if weighing whether to continue. “He wanted Cephean pelts.”

Jess stiffened as if she had been kicked. She had heard stories of people who skinned Cepheans for their fur, but she had never credited them before.

Ghar signed hard, using all four hands to emphasize his message. Humans are sick.

Please don’t judge us all by the aberrations of a few, Jess signed. I’m human too.

He answered in his own language. “You are unique.”

Jack was watching with them open curiosity—until Ghar fixed him with a hostile glare. Flushing, Jack immediately recomposed his face to show a lack of interest.

Ghar spoke through the translator. “Did this collector get his pelts?”

Jack shook his head. “No. None. Our authorities caught the hunters he sent to Cepheus. But none of the hunters would talk. We couldn’t gather the evidence to convict him.”

“He went free?” Ghar’s angry incredulity showed in his the motion of his hands. “To murder again?”

Jack hesitated. “He didn’t send any more hunters.”

“You evade my question,” Ghar said.

“You won’t like the answer.”

“Tell it anyway.”

Jack exhaled. “He wanted specialty pelts.”

A foreboding was building within Jess, and this time her nausea didn’t come from pregnancy. “What kind of specialty?”

Jack turned to her. “From Cephean-human chimeras. It would give fur with the richness of Cephean pelts, the silkiness of human hair, and colors you couldn’t get from a pure Cephean.”

Jess was gripping the sleeves of her shift so tightly, her fingernails gouged her palms. “Are you telling me this madman created Cephean-human chimeras and skinned them?”

Jack answered quietly. “No. His people never succeeded in making a viable chimera.”

Ghar signed sharply. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

“We had no proof.” Frustration showed on Jack’s face. “To create a smooth pelt, the chimera would have to express Cephean genes, yet still have the desired human traits. That kind of selectivity requires methods more sophisticated than we have now, decades later. Back then it couldn’t be done at all.” He shook his head. “What could we arrest him on? Researching chimeras isn’t illegal.”

The light glinted on Ghar’s fangs. “Only a human would let such a monster go free.”

“He was arrested.” Jack gave him a wintry smile. “For evading interstellar import taxes. He did time.”

“Not enough.” Ghar regarded him coldly. “It couldn’t have been enough.”

No, Jess thought. It could never be enough.

Windows in the main room of Ghar’s home overlooked a cavern. The Cephean colonists lived in apartments cut from the walls of the great cave, their homes stacked up for ten stories, Cephean stories, double the height humans built. No lifts served the cavern; instead, vertical staircases ran up the walls like ladders, forming throughways much as humans built roads. Among the crowds of Cepheans climbing in the city of ladders, Jess saw many pelt colors, from common browns to rarer grays. None resembled the dramatic fiery color of Ghar’s fur.

A rustle came from behind Jess. In her side vision, she saw Ghar join her at the window. They stood together, gazing at the cavern. It felt odd having him tower over her; Jess was used to being taller than most people.

After a moment Jess turned to him. He signed to her. Do your injuries hurt?

I’m all right. Although she ached all over, she could handle it. You’ve been very quiet about what Jack O’Brien told us.

He unsheathed his claws, and they curved like miniature scythes. What is there to say? That I want to kill humans?

Jess stiffened.

Not you. His signing slowed, and he touched her cheek with his claw. I wish to do to humans what I hate them wanting to do to Cepheans.

Jess froze, acutely aware of the honed point against her skin.

Watching her, Ghar sheathed his claws. Then he lowered himself onto a tall stool by the window. Even seated, he was slightly taller than Jess. He drew her forward until she was standing between his legs, then locked his lower arms around her waist and signed with his upper. Bor Chi has ruled that I have no guilt in the death of the smuggler, but your people don’t agree. It means I can never return to the territory of the Allied Worlds. When you leave here, I can see you no more. He paused. So you will not leave.

Jess knew he spoke in anger. If he forced her to stay, it would be a disaster, one she doubted he wanted any more than she did. I have to go. But I will find ways to visit you.

No.

You may not feel that way when you hear what I have to say.

Why?

Will you first answer a question?

His gaze searched her face. Ask.

Do you know your parents?

Of course.

That stopped her. If he knew his parents, her suspicions had no basis. Do you see them often?

They died.

Jess signed regret. I am sorry.

His tail twitched through the air. I never really knew them. It happened right after my birth. Our transport crashed in the snow. Hikers found me two days later.

Jess stared at him. How could a newborn survive alone, in the snow, for two days?

I don’t know. But I did.

She braced herself. I don’t believe the child in that transport lived. Someone took his body and put you in his place.

His lips drew back in an expression that, if Jess hadn’t known meant amusement, she would have believed was a snarl. Your imagination is fertile, he signed.

So is my body.

What?

Jess took a deep breath. During my last visit to the colony you were the only—She stopped. My only companion.

His tail curled over his shoulder and its tip stroked her hair. I know you don’t expect me to share you. I wouldn’t have been with you otherwise.

I’m glad you know that, Ghar. Because I’m pregnant.

He regarded her blankly. What?

I’m pregnant.

I have a trouble with your signing. I don’t understand your word.

Pregnant. I’m going to have a baby. Yours.

His growl rumbled. It isn’t amusing, Jess.

She laid his hand on her abdomen. I carry a child.

Ghar pulled back his hand, his claws unsheathing, points glittering. If you have a child, it is not mine.

Jess hoped she hadn’t just signed her death warrant. There was no one else. It must be yours.

It cannot be. I am not human.

Yes. You are.

His tail snapped through the air like a whip. Stop mocking me.

I’m not. Jess pushed back the tendrils of hair that had curled around her face. Ever since I learned about the baby, I’ve been trying to understand. After we talked to Jack, I knew.

You think this sick collector made me for his collection.

Yes. But his people must have decided they couldn’t go through with it, raising you to be murdered for your fur.

This is how you explain your infidelity? His claws glinted as he signed. I would have expected better from you.

I can prove it. The doctor on my ship can compare our DNA with the fetus. She’ll know, Ghar.

She will say what you command her to say.

You know me better than that.

I thought I did. I was wrong.

You weren’t wrong.

So you claim. Ghar considered her. Very well. I will do these tests. His gaze turned implacable. Pray they don’t prove you a liar.

Jess watched from Ghar’s apartment high in the cavern, while far below Sandra walked with her Cephean escort. Next to their towering forms, the doctor looked like a silver-haired child. Stairs led up to Ghar’s apartment, turning into ladders as the walls became vertical. It took a long time for Sandra and her escort to climb, but finally they disappeared from Jess’s view behind a ridge in the cavern. She waited, trying in vain to keep her muscles from knotting any tighter with her tension.

The front door of the apartment opened. A few moments later Sandra appeared in the wide entrance of the room where Jess waited. The doctor was alone; as instructed, the escort had left after delivering her. It was the second time in the past day Jess had seen her.

A heavy tread came from across the room. Turning, Jess saw Ghar in the entrance to an inner chamber. He stood with his lower arms braced against the sides of the doorway and his upper arms against the top. His tail whipped around his body, then settled down.

Sandra’s gaze flicked from Ghar to Jess. “I’ve finished the analysis.” She paused as Jess signed for Ghar. Then Sandra spoke directly to him. “I am deeply sorry, your Excellency.”

Ghar watched Jess sign, then turned to Sandra. “Why sorry?”

The doctor spoke quietly. “Someone played with your genetics on a scale like none I’ve ever seen. You have human DNA throughout your body. The mingling is so extensive I doubt it can be fully mapped.” She took a breath. “You’re a chimera, Ambassador Ko. You combine the heredity of two people. And one of those is human.”

“No!” Ghar signed.

“I’m sorry,” Sandra repeated softly.

He signed fast and sharp. “If my DNA had anomalies, it would have shown up in my ID scans.”

“ID scans don’t go into enough detail. Cephean DNA is barely different from human, less than 2 percent.” Sandra stopped while Jess caught up with her signing. When the doctor spoke again, excitement leaked into her voice. “Your DNA map is incredible. The subtlety is like nothing I’ve ever seen. To reveal the differences between yours and that of a normal Cephean, I had to do a much more extensive set of tests than any you’ve probably had before.”

Ghar said nothing, just stood like a statue.

“And the baby?” Jess was so wound up she forgot to sign her question.

Then, remembering, she repeated it for Ghar.

“Most of Ambassador Ko’s tissues express Cephean genes,” Sandra said. “But his germ cells are human. Chimeras are usually sterile, but they don’t have to be. He produces some functional human sperm.” She glanced at Ghar. “Your Excellency, you are the father of Captain Fernandez’s child.”

Ghar answered in his own language. “It is impossible.” His growls rolled through the room.

As Sandra’s forehead furrowed, Jess said, “He doesn’t believe you.”

Sandra regarded them both with her painful compassion. “I can only give you the results. I can’t make them what you want to hear.”

Jess started to sign the words to Ghar, but he abruptly turned and left the room.

Sandra exhaled, looking at Jess. “I’m sorry. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true.”

Jess just nodded. What could she say? That she wanted to ram Silver Tide down the throat of whoever had done this to Ghar? True as that might be, it solved nothing.

“The results probably explain a lot to him,” Sandra said.

“What do you mean?”

“They showed up a slew of anomalies.” Sandra shook her head. “For one thing, whoever played with his cells didn’t get the lower arms right. Apparently he’s had them broken and reset in an attempt to fix them. He has metal rods in both to extend their length to what’s normal for a Cephean.”

Jess could imagine what Ghar’s people would do if they discovered the true reason for his problems. “Sandra, you must keep this confidential.”

“Unless you and Ambassador Ko choose otherwise, no one but the three of us will ever know.”

Jess hesitated to ask her next question; nothing Sandra could say would make this easier. But her curiosity persisted. “Do you know what Ghar would have been like as a human?”

“Irish, I think. His hair and eyes would be the same color they are now.” The doctor looked apologetic. “That’s about all I can tell.”

As hard as it was to imagine him as human, it wasn’t impossible. In her mind, Jess could see a burly Irishman striding across green hills on Earth, his red curls whipping back from his face, his beard thick and full. It hurt to envision what could never be.

And Ghar? She couldn’t imagine how he would deal with this, knowing he carried within himself the identity of a people he distrusted, even hated now. How would he reconcile his knowledge of the hostile parts that constituted his whole?

“I have to talk to him,” Jess said. “Alone.”

“And then?”

“I’ll come back to Silver Tide.”

Relief washed across Sandra’s face. “I’ll send up an air stretcher.”

“I can walk.”

Sandra gave a familiar scowl. “I have eyes. I can see you hurt.”

The last thing Jess wanted was people fussing over her. More than ever, she and Ghar needed privacy now. “I’ll be all right.” She thought of the many staircases she had to navigate to reach the cavern floor. “I will rest here first, though.”

Sandra didn’t look thrilled, but she accepted the compromise. “One day. That’s all.”

After Sandra left, Jess limped through the apartment. She found Ghar in his bedroom, sitting on a stool and staring at nothing. She almost stopped out of reach of his claws; then she decided to trust her judgment and went to stand before him.

Do you want to be alone? she asked.

No. He sheathed his claws and touched her face with his upper left hand. I thought you lied to explain the baby. I misjudged you. I am sorry.

She felt how much that admission cost him. I understand.

Will you go back to Silver Tide with your friend?

My friend?

The doctor.

She blinked. Where did you get the idea Sandra Bolton is my friend?

He moved his lower hands in a horizontal motion, palms down, the closest equivalent Cepheans had to a shrug. You interact with each other as do humans I have seen who call each other friend.

All we do is argue.

In my experience, this is not an unusual way for humans to express friendship.

Jess didn’t know what to make of that, at least in the context of Sandra. She drives me nuts.

She cares what happens to you.

Jess would never have used the word friendship for her strained relationship with the doctor. And yet. .. she wasn’t sure how to define friendship. She had guarded her emotions for so long, maybe she could no longer see what lay in front of her.

Or sat.

She regarded Ghar silently, aware of him watching her back. To grapple with this business of love, she could have chosen a far less difficult path than involvement with a Cephean. But this was the path she had to walk, and so she would, if she could only figure out how.

Ghar brushed his fingers down her arm. Incredibly, you and I have made a child. At least for this I am pleased.

I too. It was the truth. But she couldn’t relax with him. Not yet. When he drew her forward, she put her palms against his shoulders, keeping him at bay. He had his lower arms around her, his muscles ridged against her back. She touched the two-inch fang that came down over his lip, white against the curls of his beard. A slightly harder push on the tip of that incisor would draw blood from her finger.

Pulling away her hand, she signed to him. Does this response of yours mean I need not fear for my life?

His lips drew back in a snarl, though she knew he was showing dismay rather than rage. Using his upper hands, he signed with determination. I would never kill you. Never.

Even if you thought I lied about the child’s father?

Even if that. A low rumble came from his chest, not anger, but another emotion, sorrow perhaps. I would have sent you away and advised Bor to cut ties with Earth.

I would never betray your trust. Jess spoke evenly. But if I had, it wouldn’t be worth destroying relations between our peoples.

It was a moment before Ghar responded. A few days ago I would have agreed. Right now it is hard to remember why I ever wanted to establish trust with your people. It would have been the final blow to discover you had treated what passed between us with such disregard as to end up with another man’s child on that same night. His signing slowed, as if his hands were weary. In time, my common sense would have prevailed. But by then, the damage may have been beyond repair.

She gentled her motions. I understand, Ghar. But I must return to Silver Tide.

After a long pause, he signed, You are free to leave.

Only then did her posture ease. Putting her arms around his neck, she laid her cheek against his shoulder.

He held her with all four arms and signed against her spine, his large hands covering most of her back. You should have the doctor send someone up with an air-stretcher.

I don’t need one. I’m okay.

You are not ‘okay. ’

I’m fine.

He growled. You are as stubborn as a stalagmite.

Jess tried to laugh, but it caught in her throat. She saw no end to this mess. It had one glimmer of light, the baby. A miracle. But it would be insane to reveal the child’s paternity. She had seen the hatred bred by xenophobia. Had Ghar killed one of his own kind, Earth would never have cared and Bor Chi would never have absolved him. She didn’t want to imagine what their peoples would say to a child born of a human woman and Cephean male.

Ghar pulled back so he could see her face. He held her shoulders with his upper arms and signed with his lower pair. Your ship is a metal hull. It can never hold you in the night when loneliness stalks your dreams.

It is my home.

This could become your home.

Come live with me on Silver Tide.

His growl rumbled. I would die in your silver cage.

Jess signed sorrow to him. If we live together, your people and mine will make our lives hell.

He watched her with his large eyes. Brown eyes. Human eyes. Then stay with me this one last night.

Jess touched his face. Tonight, I will stay.

IV

Bridge

Jess maneuvered her bulk through the hatchway to the bridge and floated forward. She had followed Sandra’s advice rigorously and rarely spent time in free fall, so she savored these few moments the doctor allowed her. Being weightless offered a much-appreciated relief; at more than eight months pregnant, she was as unwieldy as a cargo barge.

She hauled herself to the command chair and settled in with a grunt. Panels shifted around her, adjusting to her size. In response to her commands, the robot arm that supported the chair carried it through the kilometer-wide bridge hemisphere. She passed a smaller robot arm ridden by one of her officers. When the lieutenant lifted her hand in salute.

Jess grinned and saluted back. Then she moved on, until she stopped in the center of the hemisphere.

Jess spoke into her wrist comm. “Commander Carson, have we finished loading the cargo for the Flanders team?”

The voice of Al Carson, her Exec, came out of the comm. “In about five minutes, Captain.”

“Excellent.” She shifted position, trying to get comfortable. The chair molded to her body, accommodating her efforts.

Suddenly she stiffened, while muscular ripples moved down her abdomen. As if eager to join in, her baby chose that moment to give a hearty kick. Jess couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a strong one.”

“Ma’am?” Al asked over her comm. “I didn’t catch that.”

She wondered what Al would think if she told him she was having Braxton- Hicks contractions, the “practice” a woman’s body underwent toward the end of pregnancy as it prepared for labor. Knowing Al, he would take it in stride. It wasn’t genuine labor; she wouldn’t give birth for at least another three weeks.

“The Flanders personnel are aboard,” she told Al. “As soon as we finish loading their equipment, we can leave orbit.”

“Aye, Captain.”

Jess settled back and activated the holoscreens. The bridge went from a vast metal cavern to—nothing. The crew consoles on the hull seemed suspended in space. Dominating the view, a luminous blue world rotated, girdled by silvery rings. Far more distant, a white star pierced space, the parent sun for this iceball world, its light filtered by the screens. Silver Tide had stopped here to pick up a team of scientists headed back to Earth.

A familiar longing came over Jess, the wanderlust that had stirred her heart for as long as she could remember. She would have loved to go down to the science station floating in the atmosphere of the planet, don an environment suit, power up a fly-craft, and explore the world firsthand. But she hadn’t left Silver Tide for months now. Sandra didn’t want her to risk acceleration, and Jess’s presence on-planet hadn’t been necessary during their stops.

“Such a beautiful sight,” Al Carson murmured. “Like a sphere of turquoise and sapphire light.”

“You sound poetic today,” Jess said.

He chuckled. “It happens every now and then.”

A twinge of sorrow came to her, one that had caught her often these pasts months, sometimes when she encountered a sight she would have liked to have shared with Ghar, like this one, other times when she saw a family together. She and Ghar spoke on occasion, but it was difficult to arrange the interstellar communication. She wished he could be here, or if not here, then someplace where they could see each other when they had the chance.

They didn’t have that option. Although the authorities on Earth had dropped the kidnapping charge against Ghar, the murder accusation remained. At least Jess’s testimony had helped bring down the cartel’s operation in the colony and ease the outpouring of public anger against Ghar. For all that Cepheans made them uneasy, the people of Earth were horrified by the attempted genocide on Icelos.

Allied Services had acted fast to wipe out the plague chimeras. It had kept the Skolians from declaring open hostilities against Earth, but relations between Cepheus and Earth had still deteriorated. Angered by the murder charge against Ghar, one of their most prominent citizens—one who had prevented the brutal death of an Allied Space Corps officer—the Cephean authorities steadfastly refused to extradite him. Cephean portrayals of Jess were scathing, which incensed the Space 3G Corps. So Ghar remained on Cepheus and the Cephean embassy on Earth remained empty.

The situation disheartened Jess. In the past, hatreds on Earth had burned over race, religion, sexual orientation, and customs. Those differences seemed to fade now, compared to the variations between humans and their altered kin on other worlds. Although Jess and Ghar had never revealed that their relationship went beyond friendship, their acquaintance caused outrage anyway, a response Jess had never experienced in her interracial marriage with the man from Norway.

Nor did her pregnancy sit well with her superiors; she had broken an unwritten code of the Space Corps by remaining pregnant without a spouse. Although no regulations prohibited an officer in her position from giving birth out of wedlock, the brass didn’t like it. But where Ghar was concerned, she had few options. Even if her government hadn’t considered him a criminal, she and Ghar might not have been able to marry. No one knew; no legal precedents existed. And Jess had no intention of taking vows with someone she didn’t love just for the sake of being married.

At her request, the Space Corps kept the identity of her child’s father confidential. Although she managed to retain her command, she had been passed over for promotion. She could only work hard and hope the situation improved. She had agreed to the tests requested by the medical team studying her child. It was unheard of for a chimera as complex as Ghar to exist, let alone be fertile, but without him, their studies were limited. Unless Cepheus and Earth reached a truce that allowed their scientists to collaborate again, the secret of how Ghar existed would remain a mystery to Earth.

Al’s voice came out of her comm. “Captain, we have the Flanders cargo on board.”

“Great. As soon—” Jess stopped, startled as another contraction began, spreading from her lower back up into her abdomen. It was too long and too intense.

“Bloody hell,” Jess muttered when it finally eased.

“Captain?” Al asked.

“Commander Carson.” Jess paused for a calming breath. “Switch to the contingency plan we discussed.”

“Good God!” Al said. “Do you need help, ma’am?”

Jess felt herself redden. “No, no. I’m fine.” She was acutely aware of her bridge officers listening. Everyone knew what “contingency plan” meant. She tapped her gauntlet, starting up a procedure she had already programmed into her wrist comp. Then, after another deep breath, she said, “Commander Car- son, you’re in charge.” More softly, to the entire bridge crew, she added, “Take her out gently, ladies and gentlemen. Gently.”

A murmur of good wishes came from her crew. Al said, “Good luck, Captain.” As tense as he sounded, anticipation also sparked in his words. Jess felt it too—until another pain wrenched through her, this one sharper than the last.

“Ahhh . . .” She struggled to hold back her gasp.

Sandra’s voice suddenly snapped out of Jess’s comm. “Captain, I’m receiving a page on your emergency channel.”

Jess gritted her teeth against the contraction. “I know. I sent it.”

“Well, I’ll be cheddar in a chugger,” Sandra said.

As the pain eased, Jess wondered what the blazes was a “chugger.” She directed her chair toward the hatch at the back of the bridge. “I’m coming in.”

“Are you sure it’s time?” Sandra asked. “You aren’t due for weeks.”

Jess started to answer, then groaned as another contraction hit.

“Uh . . . I take that as a ‘yes,’ ” Sandra said.

Somehow Jess managed, “You take it right.”

“I’m sending an air stretcher for you,” Sandra said crisply. “I’ve dispatched the orderlies.”

“I don’t need a stretcher.” Remembering Ghar’s comments about friendship, Jess resisted the urge to grumble at the doctor. “I’m fine. Really.” As the contraction finished, she maneuvered out of her chair, which had reached the hatchway. “Just get ready for me, Doc.”

“Now!” Sandra said again. “Push.”

Jess pushed, clenching the handgrips on the bed. The waves of pain went on and on, and even after they finally ebbed, the merciless pressure remained.

Sandra swore. “That’s it. This baby doesn’t want to come out. I’m going to operate.”

Jess struggled to sit up. “No.”

Lines furrowed Sandra’s forehead. “You’ve been in labor for over a day. Jess, it’s enough. You don’t have to do this the way women did before modern medicine.”

“Yes, I do.” At the moment, Jess had a hard time remembering why she had been determined to carry through with natural childbirth. But damned if she was going to let them cut her open. She moaned as another contraction began. Steeling herself, she dredged up her strength. PUSH.

“It’s coming!” Sandra suddenly called. “Jess! Come on! You can do it!”

Jess put in a gargantuan effort—and screamed as pain ripped through her body. Gasping at the sudden release that followed, she heaved herself up to look, breathing hard, her hair tousled wildly around her face—

“I don’t believe it,” Jess whispered. Sandra was holding a tiny girl with a wrinkled face and a pointy head coveted by red-gold curls. As Sandra checked the baby’s nostrils, the infant gave a loud wail.

“She’s beautiful,” Jess rasped. Then she collapsed back onto the bed.

The next moments blurred, as nurses cleaned her up and shifted her to a fresh bed. Then Sandra handed her a tiny, incredible bundle. Jess cradled the baby, murmuring. The infant looked up with large blue eyes, as if she recognized her mother’s voice. When Jess put her to her breast, the child nursed with gusto. Jess was vaguely aware of Sandra and the others, but her attention was only for this miracle. She closed her eyes, astonished at the uncharacteristic tenderness she felt when she held this small bundle in her combat-trained arms.

Jess didn’t realize she had dozed off until someone tapped her shoulder. She opened her eyes to see George Mai standing by her bed. The baby slept, nestled against her side.

George beamed. “The crew sends their congratulations, ma’am.”

Jess smiled drowsily. “Give them my thanks.”

Sandra appeared next to George. “Captain, you have a message from Cepheus.”

Jess came fully awake, her emotions a sudden jumble, apprehensive and eager all at once. “I’ll take it on my private line.”

Sandra nodded. “I’ll set it up.”

Jess waited while Sandra made the arrangements. If George thought it strange that the outlawed Cephean ambassador wished to speak with her at a time like this, he kept his questions to himself.

After the doctors left, Jess sat up, holding the baby. She spoke to the air. “Put my call on audio.”

The El that monitored the hospital answered. “Would you like visual?”

Her inclination was to say no, especially after just giving birth. But this wasn’t something she and Ghar could do through a translator.

“Yes,” she said. “Visual too.”

The wall across the room glowed blue, then cleared to show a large image of Ghar. He was seated at a desk in a gleaming office far more modern than his home on Icelos. His upper arms rested on the top of the desk, which was a grid rather than a solid surface, and his lower arms were crossed on a lower shelf visible through the grid. His human translator was just leaving the room.

Ghar waited until he was alone. Then he signed, Hello, Jess.

Hello. She showed him the baby. I thought of naming her Alejandra Ko Fernandez. What do you think?

A beautiful name. Ghar hesitated. I would say she is a beautiful baby, but I have no idea how human babies should look.

Jess’s face softened into a smile. She’s beautiful.

After your Doctor Bolton contacted me, I thought to come there, to be with you. He signed with stiff motions. But as soon as I enter human space, I will be taken into custody.

Then I will bring Alejandra to Cepheus.

Jess, no. Bring her to Earth. His motions became subdued. I have decided. I will go to your authorities. Better to resolve this issue of my guilt than have it dividing our peoples.

Jess bit her lip, worried. As much as she wanted to see Ghar’s name cleared, she knew a human court might convict him despite his having acted to save her life. I will testify for you, she signed.

If you do, the truth about our child will probably become public. It will be hard to hide once the lawyers start digging’s bit her lip. I know. She doubted the news would be a complete surprise to either of their peoples. When the friendship between she and Ghar had become known, during the trial for the cartel, speculation had occurred.

Can you handle it? Ghar asked.

I think so. And you?

For myself I have no concern. But what of the child?

Jess finally spoke the conclusions she had come to after agonizing over that question for eight months. Alejandra needs to know you as her father from as young an age as possible. If we wait too long, fear could turn her from you. Better she knows from the start than to have the truth shock her later.

He lifted his hand in a Cephean gesture of assent. I have thought this also. But the decision must be yours. She is a human child. You better than I know what she will deal with in human culture.

I think it is best to tell her.

Then you will come to Earth?

Yes. We will come. It could only be for visits, if she meant to retain command of Silver Tide, but she and Alejandra would always find a way to see Ghar, somehow, whether or not he was in prison.

Ghar’s large hands made word pictures as he signed. I do not know if marriage between us is possible. But if not, I will legally acknowledge our daughter.

Jess swallowed, unable to define the emotion within her. Ghar’s life would be infinitely easier if he never tried to acknowledge his child. That he meant to anyway told her a great deal about him.

You honor us, she signed.

He moved his hands awkwardly. I am unsure of the proper way to say this. Were you Cephean, I would know. But in human terms I am lost.

I’m not sure what you mean.

His hands slowed. Wherever you go, whatever you do, my heart walks in silence until you touch my hand.

A hotness came to Jess’s eyes. She recognized the verse; Cepheans used it as a declaration of love. Finally she recognized the unfamiliar emotion within her. She and Ghar had walked in silence, for years, afraid to voice what they felt to each other.

She signed the traditional Cephean words back to him. I offer my heart to break your silence.

They could never have what they wanted, a normal life. But perhaps they could bridge the fear that separated their peoples. It wasn’t everything.

But it was a start.

THE EMPRESS OF MARS

Kage Baker

There were three Empresses of Mars.

The first one was a bar at the Settlement. The second was the lady who ran the bar; though her title was strictly informal, having been bestowed on her by the regular customers, and her domain extended no further than the pleasantly gloomy walls of the only place you could get beer on the Tharsis Bulge.

The third one was the Queen of England.

One: The Big Red Balloon

What were the British doing on Mars?

For one thing, they had no difficulty calculating with metric figures. For another, their space exploration effort had not been fueled primarily by a military industrial complex. This meant that it had never received infusions of taxpayers’ money on the huge scale of certain other nations, but also meant that its continued existence had been unaffected by the inconvenient disappearance of enemies. Without the necessity of offworld missile bases, the major powers’ interest in colonizing space had quite melted away. This left plenty of room for the private sector.

There was only one question, then: was there money on Mars?

There had definitely been money on Luna. The British Lunar Company had done quite well by its stockholders, with the proceeds from its mining and tourism divisions. Luna had been a great place to channel societal malcontents as well, guaranteeing a work force of rugged individualists and others who couldn’t fit in Down Home without medication.

But Luna was pretty thoroughly old news now and no longer anywhere near as profitable as it had been, thanks to the miners’ strikes and the litigation with the Ephesian Church over the Diana of Luna incident. Nor was it romantic anymore: its sterile silver valleys were becoming domesticated, domed over with tract housing for all the clerks the BLC needed. Bureaucrats and missionaries had done for Luna as a frontier.

The psychiatric hospitals were filling up with unemployed rugged individualists again. Profit margins were down. The BLC turned its thoughtful eyes to Mars.

Harder to get to than Luna, but nominally easier to colonize. Bigger, but on the other hand no easy gravity well with which to ship ore down to Earth. This ruled out mining for export as a means of profit. And as for low-gravity experiments, they were cheaper and easier to do on Luna. What, really, had Mars to offer to the hopeful capitalist?

Only the prospect of terraforming. And terraforming would cost a lot of money and a lot of effort, with the successful result being a place slightly less hospitable than Outer Mongolia in the dead of winter.

But what are spin doctors for?

So the British Arean Company had been formed, with suitably orchestrated media fanfare. Historical clichés were dusted off and repackaged to look shiny-new. Games and films were produced to create a public appetite for adventure in rocky red landscapes. Clever advertising did its best to convince people they’d missed a golden opportunity by not buying lots on Luna when the land up there was dirt cheap, but intimated that they needn’t kick themselves any longer: a second chance was coming for an even better deal!

And so forth and so on.

It all had the desired effect. A lot of people gave the British Arean Company a great deal of money in return for shares of stock that, technically speaking, weren’t worth the pixels with which they were impressively depicted in old-engraving style. The big red balloon was launched. Missions to Mars were launched, a domed base was built, and actual scientists were sent out to the new colony along with the better-socially adapted inhabitants of two or three hospitals. So were the members of an incorporated clan, as a goodwill gesture in honor of the most recent treaty with the Celtic Federation. They brought certain institutions the BAC officially forbade, like polluting industries and beast slavery, but conceded were necessary to survival on a frontier.

So all began together the vast and difficult work of setting up the infrastructure for terraforming, preparing the way for wholesale human colonization.

Then there was a change of government, which coincided with the BAC discovering that the fusion generators they had shipped to Mars wouldn’t work unless they were in a very strong electromagnetic field, and Mars, it seemed, didn’t have much of one. This meant that powering life support alone would cost very much more than anyone had thought it would.

Not only that, the lowland canyons where principal settlement had been planned turned out to channel winds with devastating velocity. Only in the Tharsis highlands, where the air was thinner and colder, was it possible to erect a structure that wouldn’t be scoured away by sandstorms within a week. The BAC discovered this after several extremely costly mistakes.

The balloon burst.

Not with a bang and shreds flying everywhere, exactly; more like a very fast leak, so it sort of dwindled down to an ignominious little lopsided thing without much air in it. Just like the dome of the Settlement Base.

So a lot of people were stuck up there without the money to come home, and they had to make the best of things. Under the circumstances, it seemed best to continue on with the job.

Mary Griffith woke alone that morning, though she did not always do so. She lay for a while in the dark, listening to the quiet, which was not the same thing as silence: low hum of the jenny and a few snores drifting from the other lofts tucked in under the curve of the dome like so many swallows’ nests. No coughing. No quarreling. No fretful clunking to tell her that Three Tank needed its valves unblocked yet again.

Smiling to herself, she rolled out of her bedclothes and tossed the ladder over the side, so descending nimbly to meet the day. She was a compactly built and muscular little woman of a certain age. Her ancestors, most of them coal miners, had passed along with other hardy genetic characteristics a barrel chest, which gave her considerable bosom a certain massive foundation, and Martian gravity contributed in its own way to make Mother Griffith’s Knockers famous throughout the Settlement.

Having sent the ladder back up on its reel and tied off the line neat as any sailor, she set the stove to heating and pumped a kettle of water. The water came up reluctantly, as it always did, rust-colored, strangling and spitting slush from the pipe, but it boiled clear; and as she sat and sipped her tea Mary watched the steam rise like a ghost in the dry cold air.

The visible phantom ascended and dissipated, reaching the lofts and sending its message to the other sleepers, who were pulled awake by its moistness as irresistibly as though it was the smell of eggs and bacon, were they back on Earth. Soon she heard them tossing in their blankets, heard a racking cough or a whispered exchange. She sighed, bidding goodbye to the last bit of early-morning calm. Another day begun.

She got up and rolled back the shade on the big window, and the sullen purple dawn flared in and lit her house.

“Oh, my, that’s bright,” said someone plaintively, high up in the shadows, and a moment later Mr. Morton came down on his line, in his long black thermals looking uncommonly like a hesitant spider.

“Good morning, Mr. Morton,” said Mary, in English because his panCelt was still halting, and “Good morning, Ma’am,” said he, and winced as his bare feet hit the cold sanded floor. Half-hopping he picked his way to the stove and poured his tea, inhaling the steam gratefully; brought it back to the long stone table and seated himself, wincing again as his knees knocked into the table supports. He stirred a good lump of butter into the tea and regarded Mary through the steam, looking anxious.

“Er . . . what would you like me to do today?” he inquired.

Mary sighed and summoned patience.

He was nominally her employee, and had been so since that fateful afternoon when he, like so many others, had realized that his redundancy pay did not amount to half the fare back to Earth.

“Well, you didn’t finish the scouring on Five Tank yesterday, did you?” she said.

“No,” he agreed sadly.

“Then I think perhaps you had better do that, Mr. Morton.”

“Okay,” he said.

It was not his fault that he had to be told what to do. He had spent most of his adult life in hospital and a good bit of his childhood too, ever since (having at the age of ten been caught reading a story by Edgar Allan Poe) he had been diagnosed as Eccentric.

Mind you, it wasn’t all jam and tea in hospital. Even the incurably twisted had to be of some use to society, and Mr. Morton had been brilliant at the chemistry, design, and fabrication of cast-stone structures for industrial use. That was why he had been recruited by the BAC, arriving on Mars with a single black duffel containing all he owned and a heart full of dreams of romantic adventure.

Having designed and fabricated all the structures the BAC needed, however, he had been summarily fired. He had gone wandering away through the Tubes and wound up at the Empress, his white thin face whiter still for shock, and sat at a dark table drinking batch for eight hours before Mary had asked him if he was ever going home, and then he had burst into tears.

So she had given him a job. Mary had been fired, herself. Not for redundancy, though, really; for being too Ethnic.

“Five Tank, yes, and in the afternoon we can brew another pale ale,” she decided, “Or maybe a good oatmeal stout, what do you think?” and Mr. Morton brightened at that.

“Have we got any oats?” he inquired.

“If She provides them,” Mary said, and he nodded sagely. Mr. Morton wasn’t an Ephesian himself, but he was willing to concede that there was Somebody out there responsive to human prayer, and She certainly seemed to hear Mary’s.

“Something will turn up,” he said, and Mary nodded.

And when the day had well and truly begun—when the lodgers had all descended from their alcoves and gone trudging away down the Tubes to their varied employments, when Mary’s daughters and their respective gentlemen callers had been roused and set smiling or sullen about the day’s tasks, when the long stone counter had been polished to a dull shine and the heating unit under One Tank was filling the air with a grateful warmth, and Mary herself stood behind the bar drawing the first ale of the day, to be poured into the offering basin in the little shrine with its lumpy image of the Good Mother herself, dim-lit by her little flickering votive wire—even in that moment when the rich hoppy stuff hit the parched stone and foamed extravagantly, for CO_2 is never lacking on Mars—even just then the Lock doors swung open and in came the answer to prayer, being Padraig Moylan with a hundredweight sack of Clan Morrigan oats and two tubs of butter in trade.

Mr. Moylan was thanked with grace and sincerity, the clan’s bar tab recalculated accordingly. Soon he was settled in a cozy alcove with a shot of red single malt and Mona, the best listener among Mary’s children. Mary, having stashed the welcome barter in a locker, set about her slow eternal task of sweeping the red sand from her tables. She could hear Mr. Morton singing as he worked with his scouring pads, his dreamy lyric baritone echoing inside Five Tank, reverberating “Some Enchanted Evening.”

Mary ticked him off her mental list of Things to be Seen To, and surveyed the rest of her house as she moved down the length of the table.

There was Alice, her firstborn, graceful as a swan and as irritable too, loading yesterday’s beer mugs into the scouring unit. Rowan, brown and practical, was arranging today’s mugs in neat ranks behind the bar. Worn by scouring, the mugs had a lovely silkiness on them now, shiny as pink marble, dwindling to a thinness and translucency that meant that soon they’d be too delicate for bar use and more would have to be cast. (Though when that happened, the old ones could be boxed up and sent out to the souvenir store in the landing port, to be sold as Finest Arean Porcelain to such guests as came to inspect the BAC public facilities.)

Over behind Four Tank, the shadows had retreated before a little mine-lamp, and by its light Chiring and Manco had a disassembled filtering unit spread out, cleaning away the gudge with careful paddles. The gudge too was a commodity, to be traded as fertilizer, which was a blessing because it accumulated with dreadful speed in the bottom of the fermentation tanks. It was a combination of blown sand, yeast slurry and the crawly stuff that grew on the ceiling, and it had a haunting and deathless smell, but mixed with manure and liberally spread over thin poor Martian soil, it defied superoxidants and made the barley grow.

And everyone agreed that getting the barley to grow was of vital importance.

So Chiring and Manco sang too, somewhat muffled behind recyclable cloth kerchiefs tied over their mouths and noses, joining the last bit of “Some Enchanted Evening” in their respective gruff bass and eerie tenor. A tiny handcam whirred away at them from its place on the table, adding footage to Chiring’s ongoing documentary series for the Kathmandu Post. Mary nodded with satisfaction that all was well and glanced ceilingward at the last member of her household, who was only now rappelling down from the lowest of the lofts.

“Sorry,” said the Heretic, ducking her head in awkward acknowledgment of tardiness and hurrying off to the kitchen, where she set about denting pans with more than usual effort to make up for being late. Mary followed after, for the Heretic was another problem case requiring patience.

The Heretic had been an Ephesian sister until she had had some kind of accident, about which few details were known, but which had left her blind in one eye and somehow gotten her excommunicated. She had been obliged to leave her convent under something of a cloud; and how she had wound up here on Mars was anybody’s guess. She stammered, jittered, and dropped things, but she was at least not the proselytizing kind of heretic, keeping her blasphemous opinions to herself. She was also a passable cook, so Mary had agreed to take her on at the Empress.

“Are you all right?” asked Mary, peering into the darkness of the kitchen, where the Heretic seemed to be chopping freeze-dried soy protein at great speed.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you want the lights on? You’ll cut off a finger,” said Mary, turning the lights on, and the Heretic yelped and covered her good eye, swiveling the ocular replacement on Mary in a reproachful kind of way.

“Ow,” she said.

“Are you hung over?”

“No,” said the Heretic, cautiously uncovering her eye, and Mary saw that it was red as fire.

“Oh, dear. Did you have the dreams again?”

The Heretic stared through her for a moment before saying, in a strange and breathless voice, “Out of the ground came scarlet flares, each one bursting, a heart’s beacon, and He stood above the night and the red swirling cold sand and in His hand held up the Ace of Diamonds. It burned like the flares. He offered it forth, laughing and said: Can you dig it?”

“Okay,” said Mary, after a moment’s silence.

“Sorry,” said the Heretic, turning back to her cutting board.

“That’s all right,” said Mary. “Can you get luncheon on by eleven?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, good,” said Mary, and exited the kitchen.

Lady, grant me an ordinary day, she begged silently, for the last time the Heretic had said something bizarre like that, all manner of strange things had happened.

Yet the day rolled on in its accustomed groove as ordinary as you please. At noon, the luncheon crowd came in, the agricultural workers from the clan and contract laborers from the Settlement, who were either Sherpas like Chiring or Inkas like Manco; few English frequented the Empress of Mars, for all their Queen might smile from its sign.

After noon, when the laboring men and women went trooping back to their shifts through the brown whirling day, and the wind had reached its accustomed hissing howl, there was too much to do to worry. There were plates and bowls to be scoured, there was beer to brew, and there was the constant tinkering necessary to keep all the machines running, lest the window’s forcefield fail against the eternal sandblast, among other things.

So Mary had forgotten all about any dire forebodings by the time the blessed afternoon interval of peace came round, and she retired to the best of her tables and put her feet up.

“Mum.”

So much for peace. She opened one eye and looked at Rowan, who was standing there gesturing urgently at the communications console.

“Mr. Cochevelou sends his compliments, and would like to know if he might come up the Tube to talk about something,” she said.

“Hell,” said Mary, leaping to her feet. It was not that she did not like Mr. Cochevelou, clan chieftain (indeed, he was more than a customer and patron); but she had a pretty good idea what it was he wanted to discuss.

“Tell him, ‘of course,’ and then go down and bring up a bottle of the Black Label,” she said. She went to fetch a cushion for Mr. Cochevelou’s favorite seat.

Cochevelou must have been waiting with his fist on the receiver, for it seemed no more than a minute later he came shouldering his way through the Tube, emerging from the airlock beard first, and behind him three of his household too, lifting their masks and blinking.

“Luck on this house,” said Cochevelou hoarsely, shaking the sand from his suit, and his followers mumbled an echo, and Mary noted philosophically the dunelets piling up around their boots.

“Welcome to the Empress, Mr. Cochevelou. Your usual?”

“Bless you, Ma’am, yes,” said Cochevelou, and she took his arm and led him away, jerking a thumb at Mona to indicate she should take a broom to the new sand. Mona sighed and obeyed without good grace, but her mother was far too busy trying to read Cochevelou’s expression to notice.

Between the beard and the forge-soot, there wasn’t much of Cochevelou’s face to see; but his light eyes had a shifting look to them today, at once hopeful and uneasy. He watched Mary pour him a shot of Black Label, rubbing his thick fingers across the bridge of his nose and leaving pale streaks there.

“It’s like this, Ma’am,” he said abruptly. “We’re sending Finn home.”

“Oh,” said Mary, filling another glass. “Congratulations, Mr. Finn.”

“It’s on account of I’m dying without the sea,” said Finn, a smudgy creature in a suit that had been buckled tight and was still too big.

“And with the silicosis,” added Cochevelou.

“That’s beside the point,” said Finn querulously. “I dream at night of the flat wet beach and the salt mist hanging low, and the white terns wheeling above the white wave. Picking dulse from the tidepools where the water lies clear as glass—”

There were involuntary groans from the others, and one of them booted Finn pretty hard in the ankle to make him stop.

“And, see, he goes on like that and drives the rest of us mad with his glass-clear water and all,” said Cochevelou, raising his voice slightly as he lifted his cup and saluted Mary. “So what it comes down to is, we’ve finally saved enough to send one of us home and it’s got to be him, you see? Your health, Ma’am.”

He drank, and Mary drank, and when they had both drawn breath, she said:

“What’s to happen to his Allotment?”

She had cut straight to the heart of the matter, and Cochevelou smiled in a grimacing kind of way.

Under the terms of the Mutual Use Treaty, which had been hammered out during that momentary thaw in relations between England and the Celtic Federation, every settler on Mars had received an Allotment of acreage for private terraforming. With the lease went the commitment to keep the land under cultivation, at the risk of its reverting to the BAC.

The BAC, long since having repented its rash decision to invite so many undesirables to settle on Mars, had gotten into the habit of grabbing back land it did not feel was being sufficiently utilized.

“Well, that’s the question,” said Cochevelou. “It’s twenty long acres of fine land, Ma’am.”

“Five in sugar beets and fifteen in the best barley,” said Finn.

“With the soundest roof ever built and its own well, and the sweetest irrigation pipes ever laid,” said Cochevelou. “You wouldn’t mind drinking out of them, I can tell you.”

Mary became aware that dead silence had fallen in her house, that all her family were poised motionless with brooms or trays of castware to hear what would be said next. Barley was the life of the house. It was grown on cold and bitter Mars because it would grow anywhere, but it didn’t grow well on the wretched bit of high-oxidant rock clay Mary had been allotted.

“What a pity if it was to revert to the BAC,” she said noncommittally.

“We thought so, too,” said Cochevelou, turning the cup in his fingers. “Because of course they’d plough that good stuff under and put it in soy, and wouldn’t that be a shame? So of course we thought of offering it to you, first, Ma’am.”

“How much?” said Mary at once.

“Four thousand punts Celtic,” Cochevelou replied.

Mary narrowed her eyes. “How much of that would you take in trade?”

There was a slight pause.

“The BAC have offered us four grand in cash,” said Cochevelou, in a somewhat apologetic tone. “You see. But we’d much rather have you as a neighbor, wouldn’t we? So if there’s any way you could possibly come up with the money. . . .”

“I haven’t got it,” said Mary bluntly, and she meant it too. Her small economy ran almost entirely on barter and goodwill.

“Aw, now, surely you’re mistaken about that,” said Cochevelou. “You could take up a collection, maybe. All the good workers love your place, and wouldn’t they reach into their hearts and their pockets for a timely contribution? And some of your ex-BACs, haven’t they got a little redundancy pay socked away in the bottom of the duffel? If you could even scrape together two-thirds for a down, we’d work out the most reasonable terms for you!”

Mary hesitated. She knew pretty well how much her people had, and it didn’t amount to a thousand punts even if they presold their bodies to the xenoforensic studies lab. But the Lady might somehow provide, might She not?

“Perhaps I ought to view the property,” she said.

“It would be our pleasure,” said Cochevelou, grinning white in his sooty beard, and his people exchanged smiles, and Mary thought to herself: Careful.

But she rose and suited up, and fitted her mask on tight, and went for a stroll through the airlock with Cochevelou and his people.

The Settlement was quite a bit more now than the single modest dome that had sheltered the first colonists, though that still rose higher than any other structure, and it did have that lovely vizio top so its inhabitants could see the stars, and which gave it a rather Space-Age Moderne look. It wasted heat, though, and who the hell cared enough about two tiny spitspeck moons to venture out in the freezing night and peer upward at them?

The Tubes had a nice modern look too, where the English maintained them, with lots of transparencies that gave onto stunning views of the Red Planet.

To be strictly accurate, it was only a red planet in places. When Mary had come to live there, her first impression had been of an endless cinnamon-colored waste. Now she saw every color but blue, from primrose-curry-tomcat-ochre to flaming persimmon-vermilion through bloodred and so into ever more livery shades of garnet and rust. There were even greens, both the subdued yellowy olive khaki in the rock and the exuberant rich green of the covered acreage.

And Finn’s twenty long acres were green indeed, rich as emerald with a barley crop that had not yet come into its silver beard. Mary clanked through the airlock after Cochevelou and stopped, staring.

“The Crystal Palace itself,” said Finn proudly, with a wave of his hand.

She pulled off her mask and inhaled. The air stank, of course, from the methane; but it was rich and wet too, and with a certain sweetness. All down the long tunnel roofed with industrial-grade vizio, the barley grew tall, out to that distant point of shade change that must be sugar beet.

“Oh, my,” she said, giddy already with the oxygen.

“You see?” said Cochevelou. “Worth every penny of the asking price.”

“If I had it,” she retorted, making an effort at shrewdness. It was a beautiful holding, one that would give her all the malted barley she could use and plenty to trade on the side or even to sell. . . .

“No wonder the English want this,” she said, and her own words echoed in her ears as she regarded the landscape beyond the vizio, the low-domed methane hell of the clan’s cattle pens, the towering pipe-maze of Cochevelou’s ironworks.

“No wonder the English want this,” she repeated, turning to look Cochevelou in the eye. “If they own this land, it divides Clan Morrigan’s holdings smack in two, doesn’t it?”

“Too right,” agreed Finn. “And then they’ll file actions to have the cowshed and the ironworks moved as nuisances, see and—ow,” he concluded, as he was kicked again.

“And it’s all a part of their secret plot to drive us out,” said Cochevelou rather hastily. “You see? They’ve gone and made us an offer we can’t refuse. Now we’ve broke the ground and manured it for them, they’ve been just waiting and waiting for us to give up and go home, so they can grab it all. The day after we filed the papers to send Finn back, bastardly Inspector Baldwin shows up on our property.”

“Didn’t his face fall when he saw what a nice healthy crop we had growing here!” said Finn, rubbing his ankle.

“So he couldn’t condemn it and get the lease revoked, you see?” Cochevelou continued, giving Finn a black look. “Because obviously it ain’t abandoned, it’s gone into our collective’s common ownership. But it wasn’t eight hours later he came around with that offer of four thousand for the land. And if we take it, yes, it’s a safe bet they’ll start bitching and moaning about our cattle and all.”

“Don’t sell,” said Mary. “Or sell to one of your own.”

“Sweetheart, you know we’ve always thought of you as one of our own,” said Cochevelou soupily. “Haven’t we? But who in our poor clan would ever be able to come up with that kind of money? And as for not selling, why, you and I can see that having the BAC in here would be doom and destruction and (which is worse) lawsuits inevitable somewhere down the road. But it isn’t up to me. Most of our folk will only be able to see that big heap of shining BAC brass they’re being offered. And they’ll vote to take it, see?”

“We could do a lot with that kind of money,” sighed Matelot, he who had been most active kicking Finn. “Buy new generators, which we sorely need. More vizio, which as you know is worth its weight in transparent gold. Much as we’d hate to sell to strangers . . .”

“But if you were to buy the land, we’d have our cake and be able to eat it too, you see?” Cochevelou explained.

Mary eyed him resentfully. She saw, well enough: whichever way the dice fell, she was going to lose. If the Clan Morrigan acreage shrank, her little economy would go out of balance. No barley, no beer.

“You’ve got me in a cleft stick, Cochevelou,” she told him, and he looked sad.

“Aren’t we both in a cleft stick, and you’re just in the tightest part?” he replied. “But all you have to do is come up with the money, and we’re both riding in high cotton, and the BAC can go off and fume. Come on now, darling, you don’t have to make up your mind right away! We’ve got thirty days. Go on home and talk it over with your people, why don’t you?”

She clapped her mask on and stamped out through the airlock, muttering.

Mary had been accustomed, all her life, to dealing with emergencies. When her father had announced that he was leaving and she’d have to come home from University to take care of her mother, she had coped. She’d found a job, and a smaller apartment, where she and her mother had lived in an uneasy state of truce until her mother had taken all those sleeping pills. Mary had coped again: buried her mother, found a still smaller apartment, and taken night University courses until she’d got her doctorate in xenobotany.

When Alice’s father had died, Mary had coped. She’d summoned all her confidence, and found a prestigious research and development job that paid well enough to keep Alice out of the Federation orphanage.

When Rowan’s father had deserted, she’d still coped, though he’d waltzed with most of her money; two years’ hard work taking extra projects had gotten her on her feet again.

When Mona’s father had decided he preferred boys, she had coped without a moment’s trouble to her purse if not her heart, secure in her own finances now with lessons hard-learned. And when the BAC headhunters had approached her with a job offer, it had seemed as though it was the Lady’s reward for all her years of coping.

A glorious adventure on another world! The chance to explore, to classify, and to enshrine her name forever in the nomenclature of Martian algae! The little girls had listened with round eyes, and only Alice had sulked and wept about leaving her friends, and only for a little while. So they’d all set off together bravely and become Martians, and the girls had adapted in no time, spoiled rotten as the only children on Mars.

And Mary had five years of happiness as a valued member of a scientific team, respected for her expertise, finding more industrial applications for Cryptogametes gryffyuddi than George Washington Carver had found for the peanut.

But when she had discovered all there was to discover about useful lichens on Mars (and in five years she had pretty much exhausted the subject), the BAC had no more use for her.

The nasty interview with General Director Rotherhithe had been both unexpected and brief. Her morals were in question, it had seemed. She had all those resource-consuming children, and while that sort of thing might be acceptable in a Celtic Federation country, Mars belonged to England. She was known to indulge in controlled substances, also no crime in the Federation, but certainly morally wrong. And the BAC had been prepared to tolerate her, ah, religion in the hopes that it would keep her from perpetuating certain other kinds of immorality, which had unfortunately not been the case—

“What, because I have men to my bed?” Mary had demanded, unfortunately not losing her grasp of English. “You dried-up dirty-minded old stick, I’ll bet you’d wink at it if I had other women, wouldn’t you? Bloody hypocrite! I’ve heard you keep a Lesbian Holopeep in your office cabinet—”

Academic communities are small and full of gossip, and even smaller and more full of gossip under a biodome, and secrets cannot be kept at all. So Julie and Sylvia Take Deportment Lessons From Ms. Lash had been giggled at, but never mentioned out loud. Until now.

General Director Rotherhithe had had a choking fit and gone a nice shade of lilac, and Sub-Director Thorpe had taken over to say that It was therefore with infinite regret, et cetera. . . .

And Mary had had to cope again.

She hadn’t cared that she couldn’t afford the fare home; she loved Mars. She had decided she was damned if she was going to be thrown off. So, with her final paycheck, she’d gone into business for herself.

She’d purchased a dome from the Federation colonists, a surplus shelter originally used for livestock; and though the smell took some weeks to go away even in the dry thin air, the walls were sound and warm, and easily remodeled with berths for lodgers.

Chiring, who had had his contract canceled with the BAC for writing highly critical articles about them and sending the columns home to the Kathmandu Post, came to her because he too had nowhere else to go. He was a decent mechanic, and helped her repair the broken well pump and set up the generators.

Manco Inka, who had been asked to leave the BAC community because he was discovered to be a (sort of) practicing Christian, brought her a stone-casting unit in exchange for rent, and soon she’d been able to cast her five fine brewing tanks and ever so many cups, bowls, and dishes. Cochevelou himself had stood her the first load of barley for malting.

And once it was known that she had both beer and pretty daughters, the Empress of Mars was in business.

For five years now, it had stood defiantly on its rocky bit of upland slope, the very picture of what a cozy country tavern on Mars ought to be: squat low dome grown all over with lichen patches most picturesque, except on the weather-wall where the prevailing winds blasted it bald with an unceasing torrent of sand, so it had to be puttied constantly with red stonecast leavings to keep it whole there. Mary swapped resources with the clan, with the laborers, with even a few stealthy BAC personnel for fuel and food, and an economy had been born.

And now it was threatened, and she was going to have to cope again.

“Holy Mother, why is it always something?” she growled into her mask, kicking through drifts as she stormed back along the Tube. “Could I count on You for even one year where nothing went wrong for once? I could not, indeed.

“And now I’m expected to pull Cochevelou’s smoky black chestnuts out of the fire for him, the brute, and where am I to come up with the money? Could You even grant me one little miracle? Oh, no, I’m strong enough to cope on my own, aren’t I? I’ll solve everyone’s problems so they needn’t develop the spine to do it themselves, won’t I? Bloody hell!”

She came to a transparency and glared out.

Before her was Dead Snake Field, a stretch of rock distinguished by a cairn marking the last resting place of Cochevelou’s pet ball python, which had survived the trip to Mars only to escape from its terrarium and freeze to death Outside. Initial hopes that it might be thawed and revived had been dashed when Finn, in an attempt at wit, had set the coiled icicle on his head like a hat and it had slipped off and fallen to the floor, shattering.

There in the pink distance, just under the melted slope of Mons Olympus, was the sad-looking semicollapsed vizio wall of Mary’s own few long acres, the nasty little Allotment she’d been granted almost as a nose-thumbing with her redundancy pay. Its spidery old Aeromotors gave it a deceptively rural look. With all the abundant freaky Martian geology to choose from, the BAC had managed to find her a strip of the most sterile clay imaginable; and though she was unable to farm it very effectively, they had never shown any inclination to snatch it back.

“There’s another joke,” she snarled. “Fine fertile fields, is it? Oh, damn the old purse-mouth pervert!”

She stalked on and shortly came to the Tube branch leading to her allotment, and went down to see how her own crops were doing.

Plumes of mist were leaking from the airlock seal; now that needed replacing too, something else broken she couldn’t afford to fix. There were tears in her eyes as she stepped through and lowered her mask, to survey that low yellow wretched barley, fluttering feebly in the oxygen waves. The contrast with Finn’s lush fields was too much. She sat down on an overturned bucket and wept, and her tears amounted to one scant drop of water spattering on the sere red clay, fizzing like peroxide.

When her anger and despair were wept out, she remained staring numbly at the fast-drying spot. The clay was the exact color of terracotta.

“I wonder,” she said, “whether we could make pots out of the damned stuff.”

She didn’t need pots, of course; she could stonecast all the household vessels she needed out of Martian dust. What else was clay good for?

Sculpting things, she thought to herself. Works of art? Useful bric-a-brac? Little tiles with SOUVENIR OF MARS stamped into them? Though she had no artistic talent herself, maybe one of her people had, and then what if they could get the Export Bazaar to take pieces on consignment? The Arean Porcelain sold pretty well.

“What the hell,” she said, wiping her eyes, and standing up she righted the bucket and fetched a spade from the tool rack. She dug down a meter or so through the hardpan, gasping with effort even in the (comparatively) rich air, and filled the bucket with stiff chunks of clay. Then she put on her mask again and trudged home, lugging the latest hope for a few punts.

In her house, her family might have been frozen in their places from the moment she’d left. On her entry they came to shamefaced hurried life again, resuming their various household chores as though they’d been hard at work ever since she’d left and not standing around discussing the clan’s offer.

Mr. Morton came stalking up to her, knotting his fingers together.

“Er—Ma’am, we’ve been talking, and—”

“Here, Mama, that’s too heavy for you,” said Manco, scuttling close and relieving her of the bucket. “You sit down, huh?”

“Very kind, I’m sure,” Mary said sourly, looking around. “I’ll bet not one of you started the oatmeal stout brewing like I asked, have you? Take that out to the ball mill,” she added to Manco, pointing at the bucket. “As long as we’ve got all this damned clay, let’s put it to good use and make something out of it.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“Here, you sit down—” Mr. Morton gestured her toward a chair with flapping motions of his long arms.

“I can’t sit down! I have too much to do. Holy Mother, Alice, that heating unit should have been turned on an hour ago! Do I have to see to everything around here?”

“Water’s heating now, Mum,” Alice cried, running back from Tank Three.

“Well, but I wanted to tell you about our ideas—if it would be all right—” said Mr. Morton.

“I’m sure it will be when I’m not so busy, Mr. Morton,” said Mary, grabbing a push broom and going after the sand again. “Rowan, did you and Chiring reinstall the filter the new way we discussed?”

“Yes, Mum, and—”

“See, I thought we might raise four thousand pounds easily if we put on a sort of cabaret in here,” Mr. Morton continued earnestly. “Like a dinner show? I could sing and do dramatic recitals, and—”

“What a very nice idea, Mr. Morton, and I’m sure I’ll think about it, but in the meanwhile I need you to get that sack of oats out of the storage locker.”

“And I thought I could do a striptease,” said Mona.

Three broom-pushes before the meaning sank in, and then:

“Striptease?” Mary shouted. “Are you mad? When the BAC already sees us as a cesspit of immorality and substance abuse? That’d really frost the cake!”

Mona pouted. “But you said when you were at University—”

“That was a long time ago and I needed the money, and—”

“And we need the money now! We never have any money!”

“Ladies, please—” said poor Mr. Morton, his face pink for once.

“The oats, Mr. Morton. Mona, you will keep your clothes on until you come of age and that’s all that will be said on the subject, do you understand?”

“What’s this?” said Manco, emerging from the utility area and holding out something in his hand. He had an odd look on his face. “This was in the bottom of the bucket. The clay cracked apart and—”

“It’s a rock,” said Mary, glancing at it. “Pitch it out.”

“I don’t think it’s a rock, Mama.”

“He’s right,” said Chiring, squinting at it. “It looks more like a crystal.”

“Then put it on the back bar with the fossils and we’ll ask one of the geologists about it. What was that?” Mary looked up suspiciously. “Who’s that? Who just threw up?”

“It was me,” said Alice miserably, emerging from behind the bar, and Rowan ran to her with a bar towel.

Mary ground her teeth. “Food poisoning. Just what we all needed. That devil-worshipping looney—” She started for the kitchen with blood in her eye, but was stopped in her tracks as Rowan said quietly:

“It’s not food poisoning, Mum.”

Mary did an about-face, staring at her daughters. There was a profound moment of silence in which she continued staring, and the three men present wondered what was going on, until Alice wailed:

“Well, I didn’t think you could get pregnant on Mars!”

So in all the excitement, the crystal was stuck on the back bar and forgotten until that evening, when the Brick came in from his polar run.

The Brick was so named because he resembled one. Not only was he vast and tall and wide in his quilted Hauler’s jumpsuit, he was the color of a brick as well, though what shade he might be under years of high-impact red dust was anybody’s guess.

There was red grit between his teeth when he grinned, as he did now on emerging from the airlock, and his bloodshot red eyes widened in the pleasant evening darkness of the Empress. He lifted his head and sucked in air through a nose flattened as a gorilla’s from years of collisions with fists, boots, steering wheels, and (it was rumored) hospital orderlies’ foreheads. He had been on Mars a long, long time.

“Damn, I love that smell,” he howled in English, striding to the bar and slapping down his gauntlets. “Beer, onions, and soygold nuggets frying, eh? Give me a Party Platter with Bisto and a pitcher of Foster’s.”

“I’m afraid we don’t have Foster’s, sir,” dithered Mr. Morton. Mary elbowed him.

“It’s what we call the Ares Lager when he’s in here,” she murmured, and Mr. Morton ran off at once to fill a pitcher.

“How’s it going, Beautiful?”

“Tolerably, Mr. Brick,” said Mary, sighing.

He looked at her keenly and his voice dropped a couple of decibels when he said, “Trouble over something? Did the BAC finally get that warrant?”

“What warrant?”

“Oh, nothing you need to know about right now,” he said casually, accepting his pitcher of beer and drinking from it. “Not to worry, doll. Uncle Brick hears rumors all the time, and half of ’em never pan out. As long as the Ice Haulers want you here, you’ll stay here.”

“I suppose they’re trying to get me closed down again,” said Mary. “Bad cess to them, and what else is new? But I have other problems today.”

She told him about the day’s occurrences and he listened, sipping and nodding meanwhile, grunting occasionally in agreement or surprise.

“Congratulations, m’dear,” he said. “This’ll be the first human child born on Mars, you know that? Any idea who the father is?”

“She knows who she hasn’t been with, at least,” said Mary. “And there’ll be tests, so it’s not as though we’ll be in suspense for long. It’s only a baby, after all. But where am I going to get four thousand punts, I’d like to know?”

Brick rumbled meditatively, shaking his head.

“ ‘Only a baby’, she says. You know they’re not having ’em Down Home any more, don’t you?”

“Oh, that’s certainly not true. I had three myself,” said Mary indignantly.

“The birth rate’s dropping, all the same,” said the Brick, having another sip of his beer. “That’s what I hear. Funny thing for a species to do when it’s colonizing other planets, isn’t it?”

Mary shrugged. “I’m sure it isn’t as bad as all that,” she said. “Life will go on somehow. It always does. The Goddess provides.”

“I guess so,” agreed Brick, and his voice rose to a genial roar as he hailed the Heretic, shuffling out from the kitchen with his Party Platter. “Hey, sweetheart! You’re looking gorgeous this evening.”

The Heretic blinked at him and shuffled closer. “Hi,” she said, offering him the food. He took it in one hand and swept her close for a kiss on the forehead.

“How’ve you been?”

“I saw the living glory burning. A bright tower in the icy waste,” she said.

“That’s nice. Can I get just a little more Bisto on these fries?”

“Okay.”

The Heretic went back to the kitchen and fetched out a little saucepan of gravy-like substance, and as she larded Brick’s dinner, Mary went on:

“If you could see that twenty acres! It was as rich as pudding, probably from our very own sewage we sold them, and green as anything on Earth. Where I’m going to get the cash for it I simply do not know. Chiring makes forty punts a week from his column in the Kathmandu Post, of which he has kindly offered me ten per week toward the land, but I’ve only got a month. If one of my people was a brilliant artist we might sell some folk art out of clay, but all of them protested they’re quite talentless, so bang goes another good idea, and I’m running out of good ideas. Just when I thought everything had settled down to some kind of equilibrium—”

“What’s that new thing on the back bar?” inquired Brick, slightly muffled because his mouth was full.

“Oh. That? Wait, you were a mineralogist, weren’t you?” Mary paused, looking over her shoulder at him as she fetched the crystal down.

“I have been many things, m’dear,” he informed her, washing down his mouthful with more beer. “And I did take a degree in Mineralogy at the University of Queensland once.”

“Then you have a look at it. It was in some clay I dug up this afternoon. Maybe quartz with some cinnabar stain? Or more of the ever-present rust? It’s a funny old thing.” She tossed it over and he caught it in his massive hand, peered at it for a long moment.

Then he unflapped his transport suit, reached into the breast and brought out a tiny spectrometer mounted in a headset. He slipped it on with one hand, holding the crystal out to the light with the other. He stared through the eyepiece for a long moment.

“Or do you think it’s some kind of agate?” said Mary.

“No,” Brick replied, turning and turning the crystal in his hand. “Unless this gizmo is mistaken, sweetheart, you’ve got yourself a diamond here.”

Nobody believed it. How could something that looked like a lump of frozen tomato juice be worth anything? A diamond?

Whatever it turned out to be, however, everyone agreed that the BAC must not be told.

Cochevelou offered to trade the glorious twenty acres for the rock outright, and in fact proposed to Mary. Smiling, she declined. But terms of sale for the land were worked out and a deposit of ten punts was accepted, and the transfer of title was registered with the BAC by Mr. Morton, who as a Briton seemed less likely to annoy the authorities.

And on the appointed day, the rock was sewn into the lining of Finn’s thermal suit, and he was seen off to the spaceport with much cheer, after promising faithfully to take the diamond straight to the best dealers in Amsterdam immediately on arriving Down Home.

The next they heard of him, however, was that he was found drowned and smiling on the rocks at Antrim not three weeks after his homecoming, a bottle still clutched in his hand.

Mary shrugged. She had title to the land, and Cochevelou had ten punts a week from her. For once, she thought to herself, she had broken even.

Two: The Richest Woman on Mars

It was the Queen’s Birthday, and Mary was hosting the Cement Kayak Regatta.

Outdoor sports were possible on Mars. Just.

Not to the extent that the famous original advertising holo implied (grinning man in shirtsleeves with football and micromask, standing just outside an airlock door, captioned: “This man is actually STANDING on the SURFACE of MARS!” though without any mention of the fact that the holo had been taken at noon on the hottest day in summer at the equator and that the man remained outside for exactly five seconds before the shot was taken, after which he leaped back inside and begged for a bottle of Visine), but possible nonetheless, especially if you were inventive.

The cement kayaks had been cast of the ever-present and abundant Martian grit, and fitted at one end with tiny antigravity units. These, like so many other things on Mars, did not work especially well, but enabled the kayaks to float about two feet above the ground. Indoors, they bobbed aimlessly in place, having no motive power; once pushed out an airlock, they were at the mercy of the driving winds.

But it was possible to deflect or direct the wind with big double-bladed paddles made of scrap pipe and sheet metal, salvaged from the BAC’s refuse tip. It was then possible to sail along through the air, if you wore full Outside kit, and actually sort of steer.

So Cement Kayaking had become a favorite sport on Mars, indeed the only outdoor sport. An obstacle course had been set up in Dead Snake Field, and four kayaks lurched about in it now, fighting the wind and each other.

“Competitive sport and the pioneer spirit,” Chiring was announcing into his handcam, a solemn talking head against a background of improbable action. “Anachronisms on Earth, do they fulfill a vital function here on the final frontier? Have these colonists fallen back on degrading social violence, or is cultural evolution an ongoing process on Mars?” Nobody answered him.

The Tube was blocked with spectators, crowding around the transparencies to watch. They were also shouting, which dried their throats nicely, so the beer was selling well.

“LEFT, RAMSAY!” howled Cochevelou, pointing vainly at the hololoop of Queen Anne waving that served as the mid-point marker. “Oh, you stupid little git, LEFT!”

“A Phobos Porter for you, Cochevelou?” Mary inquired cheerily. “On the house?”

“Yes, please,” he growled. Mary beckoned and the Heretic trudged back along the line. She turned to display the castware tank she bore in its harness on her back, and Mary selected a mug from the dangling assortment and drew a pint with practiced ease.Cochevelou took it, lifted his mask and gulped it down, wiping the foam from his moustache with the back of his hand.

“Very kind of you, I’m sure,” he said bitterly. “Given the amount I’m losing today. YOU’RE A DISGRACE TO FLUFFY’S MEMORY!” he bellowed at Ramsay. Fluffy had been the python’s name.

“We buried evil on Mars,” said the Heretic in a dreamy little voice, and nobody paid any attention to her.

“It’s not really his fault,” said Mary. “How can the poor man hope to compete with our Manco? It’s all those extra blood vessels in his fingertips, you know, from being born in the Andes. Gives him better control of the paddles. Selected by Nature, as it were.”

“You must have bet a packet on him,” said Cochevelou, staring as Manco swung round Fluffy’s Cairn and sent Ramsay spinning off to the boundary with an expert paddle-check.

“Bet? Now, dear Mr. Cochevelou, where would I get the money to do that?” said Mary, smiling wide behind her mask. “You’re getting every penny I earn for Finn’s Field, so you are.”

Cochevelou grimaced.

“Speak no ill of the dead and all, but if I could ever get my hands on that little bastard’s neck—” he said.

“Beer please,” said one of the BAC engineers, shouldering through the crowd.

“A pint for the English!” Mary announced, and he looked around guiltily and pulled up the hood of his suit. “How nice of you to come down here to our primitive little fete. Perhaps later we can do some colorful folk dancing for your amusement.” She handed him a mug. “That’ll be one punt Celtic.”

“I heard you’ll take air filters,” said the engineer in an undertone.

“What size, dear?”

“BX3s,” replied the engineer, drawing one from the breast of his suit and displaying it. Mary inspected it critically and took it from him.

“Your gracious patronage is always appreciated,” she said, and handed it to the Heretic, who tucked it out of sight. “Enjoy your beer. You see, Cochevelou? No money in my hands at all. What’s a poor little widow to do?”

But Cochevelou missed the sarcasm, staring over her head down the tunnel.

“Who’s this coming?” he said. “Did they bring a passenger on the last transport up?”

Mary turned and saw the newcomer, treading gingerly along in the cat-step people walked with before they became accustomed to Martian gravity. He was tall, and wore a shiny new thermal suit, and he carried a bukecase. He was peering uncertainly through his goggles at the crowd around the transparencies.

“That’s a damned solicitor, that’s what that is,” said Cochevelou, scowling blackly. “Five’ll get you ten he’s come to see you or me.”

Mary’s lip curled. She watched as the newcomer studied the crowd. He swung his mask in her direction at last, and stared; then walked toward her decisively.

“It’s you, eh?” said Cochevelou, trying not to sound too relieved as he sidled away. “My sympathies, Mary darling.”

“MS. GRIFFITH?” inquired the stranger. Mary folded her arms.

“I am,” she replied.

“ELIPHAL DE WIT,” he said. “I’VE HAD QUITE A TIME FINDING YOU!”

“TURN YOUR SPEAKER DOWN! I’M NOT DEAF!”

“OH! I’M sorry,” said Mr. De Wit, hurriedly twiddling the knob. “Is that better? They didn’t seem to know who you were at the port office, and then they admitted you were still resident but unemployed, but they wouldn’t tell me where you lived. Very confusing.”

“You’re not from the BAC, then?” Mary looked him up and down.

“What?” Mr. De Wit started involuntarily at the crowd’s roar of excitement. The English kayaker had just swung past the midway marker. “No. Didn’t you get my communication? I’m from Polieos of Amsterdam.”

“WHAT?” said Mary, without benefit of volume knob.

“I’m here about your diamond,” Mr. De Wit explained.

“And to think of all the dreadful things I said about poor dear Finn, when I thought he’d failed in his sacred trust! And I thought you were a solicitor at first!” Mary babbled, setting down a pitcher of batch and two mugs.

“Actually, Ms. Griffith, I am one,” said Mr. De Wit, gazing around at the inside of the Empress. “On permanent retainer for Polieos, to deal with special circumstances.”

“Really?” Mary halted in the act of reaching to fill his mug.

“And I’m here as your counsel,” he explained carefully. “There has really been no precedent for this situation. Polieos feels it would be best to proceed with a certain amount of caution at first.”

“Don’t they want to buy my diamond, then?” Mary demanded.

“Absolutely, yes, Ms. Griffith,” Mr. De Wit assured her. “And we would prefer to buy it from you. I’m here to determine whether or not we can legally do that.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Well—” Mr. De Wit lifted his mug and paused, staring down at the brown foam brimming. “Er—what are we drinking?”

“It’s water we’ve put things in, because you wouldn’t want to drink Mars water plain,” said Mary impatiently. “No alcohol in it, dear, so it won’t hurt you if you’re not a drinking man. Cut to the chase, please.”

Mr. De Wit set his mug aside, folded his hands and said:

“In a minute, I’m going to ask you how you got the diamond, but I’m going to tell you a few things first, and it’s important that you listen closely.

“What you sent us is a red diamond, a true red, which is very rare. The color doesn’t come from impurities, but from the arrangement of the crystal lattice within the stone itself. It weighs 306 carats at the present time, uncut, and preliminary analysis indicates it has remarkable potential for a modified trillion cut. It would be a unique gem even if it hadn’t come from Mars. The fact that it did makes its potential value quite a bit greater.”

He took the buke from its case and connected the projector arm and dish. Mary watched with suspicion as he completed setup and switched it on. After a couple of commands, a holo-image shot forth, hanging in the dark air between them, and Mary recognized the lump she’d entrusted to Finn.

“That’s my diamond!”

“As it is now,” said Mr. De Wit. “Here’s what we propose to do with it.” He gave another command and the sullen rock vanished. In its place was an artist’s conception of a three-cornered stone the color of an Earth sunset. Mary caught her breath.

“Possibly 280 carats,” said Mr. De Wit.

“What’s it worth?”

“That all depends,” Mr. De Wit replied. “A diamond is only worth the highest price you can get for it. The trick is to make it desirable. It’s red, it’s from Mars—those are big selling points. We’ll need to give it a fancy name. At present,” and he coughed apologetically, “it’s being called the Big Mitsubishi, but the marketing department will probably go with either the War-God’s Eye or the Heart of Mars.”

“Yes, yes, whatever,” said Mary.

“Very well. And Polieos is prepared to cut, polish, and market the diamond. We can do this as your agents, in which case our fee will be deducted from the sale price, or we can buy it from you outright. Assuming,” and Mr. De Wit held up a long forefinger warningly, “that we can establish that you are, in fact, the owner.”

“Hm.” Mary frowned at the tabletop. She had a pretty good idea of what was coming next.

“You see, Ms. Griffith, under the terms of your Allotment lease with the BAC, you are entitled to any produce grown on the land. The terms of your lease do not include mineral rights to the aforesaid land. Therefore—”

“If I dug it up on my Allotment, it belongs to the BAC,” said Mary.

“Exactly. If, however, someone sold you the diamond,” and Mr. De Wit looked around at the Empress again, his gaze dwelling on the more-than-rustic details, “say perhaps some colorful local character who found it somewhere else and traded it to you for a drink—well, then, not only is it your diamond, but we have a very nice story for the marketing department at Polieos.”

“I see,” said Mary.

“Good. And now, Ms. Griffith, if you please: how did you come into possession of the diamond?” Mr. De Wit sat back and folded his hands.

Mary spoke without pause. “Why, sir, one of our regulars brought it in! An Ice Hauler, as it happens, and he found it somewhere on his travels between poles. Traded it to me for two pints of my best Ares Lager.”

“Excellent.” Smiling, Mr. Dr. Wit shut off the buke and stood. “And now, Ms. Griffith, may I see the Allotment where you didn’t find the diamond?”

As they were walking back from the field, and Mr. De Wit was wiping the clay from his hands, he said quietly:

“It’s just as well the land isn’t producing anything much. When the diamond becomes public knowledge, you can expect the BAC to make you an offer for the Allotment.”

“Even though I didn’t find the diamond there?” said Mary warily.

“Yes. And I would take whatever they offer, Ms. Griffith, and I would buy passage back to Earth.”

“I’ll take what they offer, but I’m not leaving Mars,” said Mary. “I’ve hung on through bad luck and I’m damned if good luck will pry me out. This is my home!”

Mr. De Wit tugged at his beard, unhappy about something.

“You’ll have more than enough money to live in comfort on Earth,” he said. “And things are about to change up here, you know. As soon as anyone suspects there’s real money to be made on Mars, you won’t know the place.”

“I think I’ll do smashing, whatever happens,” said Mary. “Miners drink, don’t they? Anywhere people go to get rich, they need places to spend their money.”

“That’s true,” said Mr. De Wit, sighing.

“And just think what I can do with all that money!” Mary crowed. “No more making do with the BAC’s leftovers!” She paused by a transparency and pointed out at the red desolation. “See that? It’s nobody’s land. I could have laid claim to it any time this five years, but what would I have done with it? It’s the bloody BAC has the water and the lights and the heating and the vizio I’d need!”

“But with money. . . .”

By the time they got back to the Empress, she was barreling along in her enthusiasm with such speed that Mr. De Wit was panting as he tried to keep up. She jumped in through the airlock, faced her household (just in from the field of glorious combat and settling down to a celebratory libation) flung off her mask, and cried: “Congratulate me, you lot! I’m the richest woman on Mars!”

“You did bet on the match,” said Rowan reproachfully.

“I did not,” said Mary, thrusting a hand at Mr. De Wit. “You know who this kind gentleman is? This is my extremely good friend from Amsterdam.” She winked hugely. “He’s a gem of a man. A genuine diamond in the rough. And he’s brought your mother very good news, my dears.”

Stunned silence while everyone took that in, and then Mona leaped up screaming.

“Thediamondthediamondthediamond! Omigoddess!”

“How much are we getting for it?” asked Rowan at once.

“Well—” Mary looked at Mr. De Wit. “There’s papers and things to sign, first, and we have to find a buyer. But there’ll be more than enough to fix us all up nicely, I’m sure.”

“Very probably,” Mr. De Wit agreed.

“We finally won’t be POOR anymore!” caroled Mona, bounding up and down.

“Congratulations, Mama!” said Manco.

“Congratulations, Mother,” said Chiring.

Mr. Morton giggled uneasily.

“So . . . this means you’re leaving Mars?” he said. “What will the rest of us do?”

“I’m not about to leave,” Mary assured him. His face lit up.

“Oh, that’s wonderful! Because I’ve got nothing to go back to, down there, you know, and Mars has been the first place I ever really—”

“What do you MEAN we’re not leaving?” said Alice in a strangled kind of voice. “You’re ruining my life again, aren’t you?”

She turned and fled. Her bedchamber being as it was in a loft accessible only by rope ladder, Alice was unable to leap in and fling herself on her bed, there to sob furiously; so she resorted to running away to the darkness behind the brew tanks and sobbing there.

“. . . felt as though I belonged in a family,” Mr. Morton continued.

Alice might weep, but she was outvoted.

Rowan opted to stay on Mars. Mona waffled on the question until the boy-to-girl ratio on Earth was explained to her, after which she firmly cast her lot with the Red Planet. Chiring had no intention of leaving; his Dispatches from Mars had doubled the number of subscribers to the Kathmandu Post, which was run by his sister’s husband, and as a result of the Mars exposés he looked fair to win Nepal’s highest journalism award.

Manco had no intention of leaving either, since it would be difficult to transport his life’s work. This was a shrine in a grotto three kilometers from the Empress, containing a cast-stone life-sized statue of the Virgen de Guadalupe surrounded by roses sculpted from a mixture of pink Martian dust and Manco’s own blood. It was an ongoing work of art, and an awesome and terrible thing.

The Heretic, when asked if she would like to return to Earth, became so distraught that her ocular implant telescoped and retracted uncontrollably for five minutes before she was able to stammer out a refusal. She would not elaborate. Later she drank half a bottle of Black Label and was found unconscious behind the malt locker.

“So, you see? We’re staying,” said Mary to the Brick, in grim triumph.

“Way to go, Beautiful,” said the Brick, raising his breakfast pint of Ares Lager. “I just hope you’re ready to deal with the BAC, because this’ll really get up their noses. And I hope you can trust this Dutchman.”

“Here he is now,” said Chiring sotto voce, looking up from the taphead he was in the act of changing. They raised their heads to watch Mr. De Wit’s progress down from the ceiling on his line. He made it to the floor easily and tied off his line like a native, without one wasted gesture; but as he turned to them again, he seemed to draw the character of Hesitant Tourist about him like a cloak, stooping slightly as he peered through the gloom.

“Good morning, sir, and did you sleep well?” Mary cried brightly.

“Yes, thank you,” Mr. De Wit replied. “Er—I was wondering where I might get some laundry done?”

“Bless you, sir, we don’t have Earth-style laundries up here,” said Mary. “Best you think of it as a sort of dry-cleaning. Leave it in a pile on your bunk and I’ll send one of the girls up for it later.” She cleared her throat. “And this is my friend Mr. Brick. Brick is the, ahem, colorful local character who sold me the diamond. Aren’t you, dear?”

“That’s right,” said the Brick, without batting an eye. “Howdy, stranger.”

“Oh, great!” Mr. De Wit pulled his buke from his coat. “Would you be willing to record a statement to that effect?”

“Sure,” said the Brick, kicking the bar stool next to him. “Have a seat. We’ll talk.”

Mr. De Wit sat down and set up his buke, and Mary drew him a pint of batch and left them talking. She was busily sweeping sand when Manco entered through the airlock and came straight up to her. His face was impassive, but his black eyes glinted with anger.

“You’d better come see something, Mama,” he said.

“I went to replace the old lock seal like you told me,” he said, pointing. “Then I looked through. No point now, huh?”

Mary stared at her Allotment. It had never been a sight to rejoice the eye, but now it was the picture of all desolation. Halfway down the acreage someone had slashed through the vizio wall, and the bitter Martian winds had widened the tear and brought in a freight of red sand, which duned in long ripples over what remained of her barley, now blasted and shriveled with cold. Worse still, it was trampled: for someone had come in through the hole and excavated here and there, long channels orderly cut in the red clay or random potholes. There were Outside-issue bootprints all over.

She said something heartfelt and unprintable.

“You think it was the BAC?” said Manco.

“Not likely,” Mary said. “They don’t know about the diamond, do they? This has Clan Morrigan written all over it.”

“We can’t report this, can we?”

Mary shook her head. “That’d be just what the BAC would want to hear. ‘Vandalism, is it, Ms. Griffith? Well, what can you expect in a criminal environment such as what you’ve fostered here, Ms. Griffith? Perhaps you’d best crawl off into the sand and die, Ms. Griffith, and stop peddling your nasty beer and Goddess-worshipping superstitions and leave Mars to decent people, Ms. Griffith!’ That’s what they’d say.”

“And they’d say, ‘What were people digging for?’ too,” said Manco gloomily.

“So they would.” Mary felt a chill. “I think I must speak with Mr. De Wit again.”

“What should I do here?”

“Seal up the vizio with duct tape,” Mary advised. “Then get the quaddy out and plough it all under.”

“Quaddy needs a new air filter, Mama.”

“Use a sock! Works just as well,” said Mary, and stamped away back up the Tube.

Manco surveyed the ruined Allotment and sighed. Resolving to offer Her another rose of his heart’s blood if She would render assistance, he wrestled the rusting quaddy out of its garage and squatted to inspect the engine.

Mr. De Wit and the Brick were still where Mary had left them, deep in conversation; the Brick seemed to be regaling Mr. De Wit with exciting tales of his bipolar journeys for carbon dioxide and water ice. Mr. De Wit was listening with his mouth slightly open.

Mary started toward him, intent on a hasty conference, but Rowan stepped into her path.

“Mum, Mr. Cochevelou wants a word,” she said in an undertone.

“Cochevelou!” Mary said, turning with a basilisk glare, and spotted him in his customary booth. He smiled at her, rubbing his fingertips together in a nervous kind of way, and seemed to shrink back into the darkness as she advanced on him.

“Eh, I imagine you’ve come from your old Allotment,” he said. “That’s just what I wanted to talk to you about, Mary dearest.”

“Don’t you Mary Dearest me!” she told him.

“Darling! Darling. You’ve every right to be killing mad, so you do. I struck the bastards to the floor with these two hands when I found out, so I did. ‘You worthless thieving pigs!’ I said to them. ‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?’ I said. ‘Here we are in this cold hard place and do we stick together in adversity, as true Celts ought? Won’t the English laugh and nod at us when they find out?’ That’s what I said.”

“Words are all you have for me, are they?” said Mary icily.

“No indeed, dear,” said Cochevelou, looking wounded. “Aren’t I talking compensation? But you have to understand that some of the lads come of desperate stock, and there’s some will always envy another’s good fortune bitterly keen.”

“How’d they know about my good fortune?” Mary demanded.

“Well, your Mona might have told our DeWayne,” said Cochevelou. “Or it might have gone about the Tube some other way, but good news travels fast, eh? And there’s no secrets up here anyway, as we both know. The main thing is, we’re dealing with it. The clan has voted to expel the dirty beggars forthwith—”

“Much good that does me!”

“And to award you Finn’s Field free and clear, all further payments waived,” Cochevelou added.

“That’s better.” Mary relaxed slightly.

“And perhaps we’ll find other little ways to make it up to you,” said Cochevelou, pouring her a cup of her own Black Label. “I can send work parties over to mend the damage. New vizio panels for you, what about it? And free harrowing and manuring that poor tract of worthless ground.”

“I’m sure you’d love to get your boys in there digging again,” Mary grumbled, accepting the cup.

“No, no; they’re out, as I told you,” said Cochevelou. “We’re shipping their raggedy asses back to Earth on the next flight.”

“Are you?” Mary halted in the act of raising the cup to her lips. She set it down. “And where are you getting the money for that, pray?”

Cochevelou winced.

“An unexpected inheritance?” he suggested, and dodged the cup that came flying at him.

“You hound!” Mary cried. “They’ll have an unexpected inheritance sewn into their suits, won’t they? Won’t they, you black beast?”

“If you’d only be mine, all this wouldn’t matter,” said Cochevelou wretchedly, crawling from the booth and making for the airlock with as much dignity as he could muster. “We could rule Mars together, you know that, don’t you?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but pulled his mask on and fled through the airlock. Mary nearly pitched the bottle after him too and stopped herself, aware that all her staff, as well as Mr. De Wit and the Brick, were staring at her.

“Mr. De Wit,” she said, as decorously as she could, “May I have a word with you in private?”

“That was sooner than I expected,” said Mr. De Wit, when she’d told him all about it.

“You expected this?” Mary said.

“Of course,” he replied, tugging unhappily at his beard. “Have you ever heard of the Gold Rush of 1849? I don’t know if you know much American history, Ms. Griffith—”

“Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill,” Mary snapped.

“Yes, and do you know what happened to Mr. Sutter? Prospectors destroyed his farm. He was ruined.”

“I won’t be ruined,” Mary declared. “If I have to put a guard on that field every hour of the day and night, I’ll do it.”

“It’s too late for that,” Mr. De Wit explained. “The secret can’t be kept any longer, you see? More Martian settlers will be putting more red diamonds on the market. The value will go down, but that won’t stop the flood of people coming up here hoping to get rich.”

And he was right.

For five years, there had been one shuttle from Earth every three months. They might have come more often; technological advances over the last couple of decades had greatly trimmed travel time to Mars. There just hadn’t been any reason to waste the money.

The change came slowly at first, and was barely noticed: an unaccustomed distant thunder of landing jets at unexpected moments, a stranger wandering wide-eyed into the Empress at odd hours. More lights glinting under the vizio dome of BAC headquarters after dark.

Then the change sped up.

More shuttles, arriving all hours, and not just the big green BAC ships but vessels of all description, freelance transport services competing. More strangers lining the bar at the Empress, shivering, gravity-sick, unable to get used to the smell or the taste of the beer or the air but unable to do without either.

Strangers wandering around outside the Tubes, inadequately suited, losing their sense of direction in the sandstorms and having to be rescued on a daily basis by some opportunistic Celt who charged for his kindness: “Just to pay for the oxygen expenditure, see?” Strangers losing or abandoning all manner of useful odds and ends in the red desolation, to be gleefully salvaged by the locals. Mary’s back bar became a kind of shrine to the absurd items people brought from Earth, such as a digital perpetual calendar geared to 365 days in a year, a pair of ice skates, a ballroom dancing trophy, and a snow globe depicting the Historic Astoria Column of Astoria, Oregon.

“I can’t think why you advised me to leave,” Mary said to Mr. De Wit, as he sat at the bar. “We’ve never done so well!”

Mr. De Wit shook his head gloomily, staring into the holoscreen above his buke. “It’s all a matter of timing,” he said, and drained his mug of Ares Lager.

“Let me pour you another, sweetheart,” said Alice, fetching away the empty. Mary watched her narrowly. To everyone’s astonishment but Alice’s, Mr. De Wit had proposed marriage to her. As far as Mary had been able to tell, it had happened somehow because Alice had been the one delegated to collect his laundry, and had made it a point to personally deliver his fresh socks and thermals at an inappropriate hour, and one thing had led to another, as it generally did in the course of human history, whether on Earth or elsewhere.

He accepted another mug from her now with a smile. Mary shrugged to herself and was about to retreat in a discreet manner when there was a tremendous crash in the kitchen.

When she got to the door, she beheld the Heretic crouched in a corner, rocking herself to and fro, white and silent. On the floor lay Mary’s largest kettle and a great quantity of wasted water, sizzling slightly as it interacted with the dust that had been tracked in.

“What’s this?” said Mary.

The Heretic turned her face. “They’re coming,” she whispered. “And the mountain’s on fire.”

Mary felt a qualm, but said quietly: “Your vision’s a bit late. The place is already full of newcomers. What, did you think you saw something in the water? There’s nothing in there but red mud. Pick yourself up and—”

There was another crash, though less impressive, and a high-pitched yell of excitement. Turning, Mary beheld Mr. De Wit leaping up and down, fists clenched above his head.

“We did it,” he cried. “We found a buyer!”

“How much?” Mary asked instantly.

“Two million punts Celtic,” he replied, gasping after his exertion. “Mitsubishi, of course, because we aimed all the marketing at them. I just wasn’t sure—I’ve instructed Polieos to take their offer. I hope that meets with your approval, Ms. Griffith? Because, you know, no one will ever get that kind of money for a Martian diamond again.”

“Won’t they?” Mary was puzzled by his certainty. “Whyever not?”

“Well—” Mr. De Wit coughed dust, took a gulp from his pint and composed himself. “Because most of the appeal was in the novelty, and in the story behind your particular stone, and—and timing, like I said. Now the publicity will work against the market. Those stones that were stolen out of your field will go on sale at inflated prices, you see? Everyone will expect to make a fortune.”

“But they won’t?”

“No, because—” Mr. De Wit waved vaguely. “Do you know why they say A diamond is forever? Because it’s murder to unload the damned things, in the cold hard light of day. No dealer ever buys back a stone they’ve sold. It took a fantastic amount of work to sell the Big Mitsubishi. We were very, very lucky. Nobody else will have our luck.”

He stooped forward and put his hands on her shoulders. “Now, please. Follow my advice. Take out a little to treat yourself and put the rest in high-yield savings, or very careful investments.”

“Or I’ll tell you what you could do,” said a bright voice from the bar.

They turned to see the Brick in the act of downing a pint. He finished, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said: “You could sink a magma well up the hill on Mons Olympus, and start your own energy plant. That’d really screw the BAC! And make you a shitload of money on the side.

“Magma well?” Mary repeated.

“Old-style geothermal energy. Nobody’s used it since Fusion, because Fusion’s cheaper, but it’d work up here. The BAC’s been debating a plant, but their committees are so brain-constipated they’ll never get around to it!” The Brick rose to his feet in his enthusiasm. “Hell, all you’d need would be a water-drilling rig, to start with. And you’d need to build the plant and lay pipes, but you can afford that now, right? Then you’d have all the power you’d want to grow all the barley you’d want and sell it to other settlers!”

“I suppose I could do that, couldn’t I?” said Mary slowly. She looked up at Mr. De Wit. “What do you think? Could I make a fortune with a magma well?”

Mr. De Wit sighed.

“Yes,” he said. “I have to tell you that you could.”

The only difficult part was getting the drilling rig.

Cochevelou looked uncertainly at Mona, who had perched herself on one of his knees, and then at Rowan, who was firmly stationed on the other with her fingers twined in his beard.

“Please, Mr. Cochevelou, my dear dearest?” Mona crooned.

Mary leaned forward and filled his glass, looking him straight in the eye.

“You said we might rule Mars together,” she said. “Well, this is the way to do it. You and me together, eh, pooling our resources as we’ve always done?”

“You staked claim to the whole volcano?” he said, incredulous. “Bloody honking huge Mons Olympus?”

“Nothing in the laws said I couldn’t, if I had the cash for the filing fee, which, being the richest woman on Mars now, I had, of course,” Mary replied. “Nothing in the tiniest print said I was even obliged to tell the BAC. I had my fine lawyer and nearly son-in-law Mr. De Wit file with the Tri-Worlds Settlement Bureau, and they just said Yes, Ms. Griffith, here’s your virtual title and good luck to you. Doubtless sniggering in their First World sleeves and wondering what a silly widow woman will do with a big frozen cowpat of a volcano. They’ll see!”

“But—” Cochevelou paused and took a drink. His pause lost him ground, for Mary shoved Mona out of the way and took her place on his knee, bringing her gimlet stare, and her bosom, closer.

“Think of it, darling man!” she said. “Think how we’ve been robbed, and kept down, and made to make do with the dry leavings while the English got the best of everything! Haven’t we always triumphed by turning adversity to our own uses? And so it’ll be now. Your ironworks and your strong lads with my money and Mars’s own hot heart itself beating for us in a thunderous counterpoint to our passion!”

“Passion?” said Cochevelou, somewhat dazed but beginning to smile.

“She’s got him,” Chiring informed the others, who were lurking in the kitchen. Mr. Morton gave a cheer, which was promptly shut off as Manco and the Heretic clapped their hands over his mouth. Chiring put his eye to the peephole again.

“They’re shaking hands,” he said. “He just kissed her. She hasn’t slapped him. She’s saying . . . something about Celtic Energy Systems.”

“It’s the beginning of a new world!” whispered Mr. Morton. “There’s never been money on Mars, but—but—now we can have Centres for the Performing Arts!”

“We can have a lot more than that,” said Manco.

“They could found a whole other city,” said Chiring, stepping back. “You know? What a story this is going to be!”

“We could attract artistes,” said Mr. Morton, stars in his eyes. “Culture!”

“We could be completely independent, if we bought vizio and water pumps, and got enough land under cultivation,” Manco pointed out. A look of shock crossed his face. “I could grow real roses.”

“You could,” Chiring agreed, whipping out his jotpad. “Interviews with the Locals: What Will Money Mean to the New Martians? By your News Martian. Okay, Morton, you’d want performing arts, and you’d develop Martian horticulture.” He nodded at Manco and then glanced over at the Heretic. “How about you? What do you hope to get out of this?”

“A better place to hide,” she said bleakly, raising her head as she listened to the rumble of the next shuttle arriving.

It was still possible to ride an automobile on Mars, though they had long since become illegal on Earth and Luna.

A great deal of preparation was necessary, to be sure: one had first to put on a suit of thermals, and then a suit of cotton fleece, and then a suit of bubblefilm, and then a final layer of quilted Outside wear. Boots with ankle locks were necessary too, and wrist-locked gauntlets. One could put on an old-fashioned-looking aquarium helmet, if one had the money; people at Mary’s economic level made do with a snugly fitting hood, a face mask hooked up to a back tank, and kitchen grease mixed with UV blocker daubed thickly on anything that the mask didn’t cover.

Having done this, one could then clamber through an airlock and motor across Mars, in a rickety CeltCart 600 with knobbed rubber tires and a top speed of eight kilometers an hour. It was transportation neither dignified nor efficient, since one was swamped with methane fumes and bounced about like a pea in a football. Nevertheless, it beat walking, or being blown sidelong in an antigravity car. And it really beat climbing.

Mary clung to the rollbar and reflected that today was actually a fine day for a jaunt Outside, considering. Bright summer sky overhead like peaches and cream, though liver-dark storm clouds raged far down the small horizon behind. Before, of course, was only the gentle but near-eternal swell of Mons Olympus, and the road that had been made by the expedient of rolling or pushing larger rocks out of the way.

“Mind the pit, Cochevelou,” she admonished. Cochevelou exhaled his annoyance so forcefully that steam escaped from the edges of his mask, but he steered clear of the pit and so on up the winding track to the drill site.

The lads were hard at work when they arrived at last, having had a full hour’s warning that the Cart was on its way up, since from the high slide of the slope one could see half the world spread out below, and its planetary curve too. There was therefore a big mound of broken gravel and frozen mudslurry, industriously scraped from the drillbits, to show for their morning’s work. Better still, there was a thin spindrift of steam coming off the rusty pipes, coalescing into short-lived frost as it fell.

“Look, Mama!” said Manco proudly, gesturing at the white. “Heat and water!”

“So I see,” said Mary, crawling from the car. “Who’d have thought mud could be so lovely, eh? And we’ve brought you a present. Unload it, please.”

Matelot and the others who had been industriously leaning on their shovels sighed, and set about unclamping the bungees that had kept the great crate in its place on the back of the CeltCart. The crate was much too big to have traveled on a comparative vehicle on Earth without squashing it, and even so the Cart’s wheels groaned and splayed, though as the men lifted the crate like so many ants hoisting a dead cricket the wheels bowed gratefully back. The cords had bit deep into the crate’s foamcast during the journey, and the errant Martian breezes had just about scoured the label off with flying grit, but the logo of Third Word Alternatives, Inc. could still be made out.

“So this is our pump and all?” inquired Padraig, squinting at it through his goggles.

“This is the thing itself, pump and jenny and all but the pipes to send wet hot gold down the mountain to us,” Cochevelou told him.

“And the pipes’ve been ordered,” Mary added proudly. “And paid for! And here’s Mr. Morton to exercise his great talents building a shed to house it all.”

Mr. Morton unfolded himself from the rear cockpit and tottered to his feet, looking about with wide eyes. The speaker in his mask was broken, so he merely waved at everyone and went off at once to look at the foundations Manco had dug.

“And lastly,” said Mary, lifting a transport unit that had been rather squashed under the seat, “Algemite sandwiches for everybody! And free rounds on the house when you’re home tonight, if you get the dear machine hooked up before dark.”

“Does it come with instructions?” Matelot inquired, puffing as he stood back from the crate.

“It promised an easy-to-follow holomanual in five languages, and if one isn’t in there we’re to mail the manufacturers at once,” Mary said. “But they’re a reputable firm, I’m sure.”

“Now, isn’t that a sight, my darling?” said Cochevelou happily, turning to look down the slope at the Tharsis Bulge. “Civilization, what there is of it anyhow, spread out at our feet like a drunk to be rolled.”

Mary gazed down, and shivered. From this distance, the Settlement Dome looked tiny and pathetic, even with its new housing annex. The network of Tubes seemed like so many glassy worms, and her own house might have been a mudball on the landscape. It was true that the landing port had recently been enlarged, which made it more of a handkerchief than a postage stamp of pink concrete. Still, little stone cairns dotted the wasteland here and there, marking the spots where luckless prospectors had been cached because nobody had any interest in shipping frozen corpses back to Earth.

But she lifted her chin and looked back at it all in defiance.

“Think of our long acres of green,” she said. “Think of our own rooms steam-heated. Lady bless us, think of having a hot bath!”

Which was such an obscenely expensive pleasure on Mars that Cochevelou gasped and slid his arm around her, moved beyond words, and they clung together for quite a while on that cold prominence before either of them noticed the tiny figure making its way up the track from the Empress.

“Who’s that, then?” Mary peered down at it, disengaging herself abruptly from Cochevelou’s embrace. “Is that Mr. De Wit?”

It was Mr. De Wit.

By the time they reached him in the CeltCart, he was walking more slowly, and his eyes were standing out of his face so they looked fair to pop through his goggles, but he seemed unstoppable.

“WHAT IS IT?” Mary demanded, turning her volume all the way up. “IS SOMETHING GONE WRONG WITH ALICE?”

Mr. De Wit shook his head, slumping forward on the Cart’s fender. He cranked up his volume as far as it went too and gasped, “LAWYER—”

“YES!” Mary said irritably, “YOU’RE A LAWYER!”

“OTHER LAWYER!” said Mr. De Wit, pointing back down the slope at the Empress.

Mary bit her lip. “YOU MEAN—” she turned her volume down, reluctant to broadcast words of ill omen. “There’s a lawyer from somebody else? The BAC, maybe?”

Mr. De Wit nodded, crawling wearily into the back seat of the Cart.

“Oh, bugger all,” growled Cochevelou. “Whyn’t you fight him off then, as one shark to another?”

“Did my best,” wheezed Mr. De Wit. “Filed appeal. But you have to make mark.”

Mary said something unprintable. She reached past Cochevelou and threw the Cart into neutral to save gas. It went bucketing down the slope, reaching such a velocity near the bottom that Mr. De Wit found himself praying for the first time since his childhood.

Somehow they arrived with no more damage done than a chunk of lichen sheared off the airlock wall, but they might have taken their time, for all the good it did them.

The lawyer was not Hodges from the Settlement, whose particular personal interests Mary knew to a nicety and whom she might have quelled with a good hard stare. No, this lawyer was a solicitor from London, no less, immaculate in an airlock ensemble from Bond Street and his white skullcap of office. He sat poised on the very edge of one of Mary’s settles, listening diffidently as Mr. De Wit (who had gone quite native by now, stooped, wheezing, powdered with red dust, his beard lank with facegrease and sand) explained the situation, which was, to wit:

Whereas, the British Ares Company had operated at an average annual loss to its shareholders of 13 percent of the original estimated minimum annual profit for a period of five (Earth) calendar years, and

Whereas, it had come to the attention of the Board of Directors that there were hitherto-unknown venues of profit in the area of mineral resources, and

Whereas, having reviewed the original Terms of Settlement and Allotment as stated in the Contract for the Settlement and Terraforming of Ares, and having determined that the contractment of any and all allotted agricultural zones was contingent upon said zones contributing to the common wealth of Mars and the continued profit of its shareholders, and

Whereas, the aforesaid Contract specified that in the event that revocation of all Leases of Allotment was determined to be in the best interests of the shareholders, the Board of Directors retained the right to the exercise of Eminent Domain.

Therefore, the British Ares Company respectfully informed Mary Griffith that her lease was revoked and due notice of eviction from all areas of Settlement would follow within thirty (Earth) calendar days. She was, of course, at full liberty to file an appeal with the proper authorities.

“Which you are in the process of doing,” said Mr. De Wit, and picked up a text plaquette from the table. “Here it is. Sign at the bottom.”

“Can she read?” the solicitor inquired, stifling a yawn. Mary’s lip curled.

“Ten years at Mount Snowdon University says I can, little man,” she informed him, and having run her eye down the document, she thumbprinted it firmly. “So take that and stick it where appeals are filed, if you please.” She handed the plaquette to the solicitor, who accepted it without comment and put it in his briefcase.

“Hard luck, my dear,” said Cochevelou, pouring himself a drink. “I’ll just quell my thirst and then edge off home, shall I?”

“Are you a resident of the Clan Morrigan?” the solicitor inquired, fixing him with a fishy eye.

“I am.” Cochevelou stared back.

“Then, can you direct me to their current duly elected chieftain?”

“That would be him,” said Mary.

“Ah.” The solicitor drew a second plaquette from his briefcase and held it out. “Maurice Cochevelou? You are hereby advised that—”

“Is that the same as what you just served her with?” Cochevelou demanded, slowly raising fists like rusty cannon balls.

“In short, sir, yes, you are evicted,” replied the solicitor, with remarkable sangfroid. “Do you wish to appeal as well?”

“Do you wish to take a walk Outside, you little—”

“He’ll appeal as well,” said Mary firmly, and, grabbing the second plaquette, she took Cochevelou’s great sooty thumb and stamped the plaquette firmly. “There now. Run along, please.”

“You can tell your masters they’ve got a fight on their hands, you whey-faced soy-eating little timeserver!” roared Cochevelou at the solicitor’s retreating back. The airlock shut after him and Cochevelou picked up a mug and hurled it at the lock, where it shattered into pink fragments.

“We’ll burn their Settlement Dome over their heads!” he said, stamping like a bull in a stall. “We’ll drive our kine through their spotless tunnels, eh, and give ’em methane up close and personal, won’t we just!”

“We will not,” said Mary. “We’ll ruin ’em with lawsuits, won’t we, Mr. De Wit?”

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to do either,” said Mr. De Wit, sagging onto a bench. “They’ve already found new tenants to work the land, you see. The Martian Agricultural Collective will be coming up soon. Very much more the kind of people they would rather see living up here. And the BAC itself is dissolving. The Board of Directors will be running the whole operation from Earth now, under the corporate name ARECO. I told you things would change.”

“The cowards,” growled Cochevelou. “So they’ll evaporate into mist when we swing at them, will they?”

“Then what’s the point of appealing?” Mary asked.

“It will buy you time,” Mr. De Wit replied, raising his gray exhausted face. Alice brought him a cup of hot tea, setting it before him. She began to massage his bowed shoulders.

“Of course,” Alice said quietly, “We could all go home again.”

“This is my home,” said Mary, bridling.

“Well, it isn’t mine,” said Alice defiantly. “And it isn’t Eli’s, either. He’s only staying up here to help you because he’s kind. But we will go back to Earth, Mum, and if you want to see your grandchild, you’ll have to go too.”

“Alice, don’t say that to your mother,” said Mr. De Wit, putting his face in his hands.

Mary looked at her daughter stone-faced.

“So you’re playing that game, are you?”

“I’m not playing any game! I just—”

“Go back to Earth, then. Be happy there, if you’re capable of being happy. Neither you nor anybody else alive will call my bluff,” said Mary, not loudly but in tones that formed ice around the edges of Mr. De Wit’s tea. He groaned.

“And what’m I to do?” said Cochevelou, looking horrified as the full impact hit him. “Mine will call for a vote. Three votes of no-confidence for a chieftain and there’s a new chieftain.”

“Overwhelm them with persuasion, man,” Mary told him. “Spin them a tale about our glorious new future up the slope in—in—”

“Mars Two,” said Mr. De Wit, staring into his teacup.

Three: The Shining City on the Hill

Cochevelou survived the vote. That was one good thing. Another was that Celtic Energy Systems got its pumping station built and online. Though the easy-to-follow assembly holo was indeed in five languages, they turned out to be Telugu, Swahili, Pashto, Malayalam, and Hakka. Fortunately, most of the orderlies in the hospital where Mr. Morton had grown up had spoken Swahili, and he had picked up enough to follow assembly directions.

Of course, the pipes hadn’t arrived from Earth yet, so there was no way to send water, heat or steam anywhere; but Mr. Morton had fabricated an elegant little neoGothic structure to house the pumping station, a sort of architectural prototype, as he explained, for the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Cabaret, and he was already happily designing the Downtown Arts Plaza and Promenade.

“It’s the backlash,” said the Brick gloomily, nursing his beer. “Too many freaks up here for the BAC to cope with, so they’ll just scrap the whole Settlement and ship up their own hand-picked squares. Have you seen any of these guys from the Martian Agricultural Collective?”

“I have not,” said Mary, looking over his head to count the house. Three booths occupied, and only two seats at the bar; not good, for a Friday night. “They’re not drinkers, seemingly.”

“They’re not drinkers,’ the Brick affirmed. “Their idea of fun is singing anthems to Agrarian Socialism, okay? Bunch of shaven-headed humorless bastards.”

“Oh, dear,” said Mary. “No beer, is it? And are they monkish as well?”

“No,” said the Brick, shuddering. “They got their own ladies. They shave their heads too. Seriously political.”

“So they won’t be inclined to stop by for a chat,” said Mary thoughtfully. “How’s your job security, then, under the new regime?”

The Brick grinned. “They can round up all the other loonies and ship ’em home, but they’ll still need Ice Haulers, right? And we’ve got the Bipolar Boys and Girls Union. They mess with us, we’ll drive a dozen six-ton flatbeds through Settlement Dome and Mars ’em.”

Marsing was a local custom. It resembled mooning, but was uglier.

“I’m sure they won’t dare mess with you, Mr. Brick,” said Mary.

“Hey, let ’em,” said the Brick, waving a massive hand. “I like a good fight.”

Wreathed in an air of pleasant anticipation and carbon dioxide, he downed the last of his beer and headed out, pausing by the airlock to mask up. As he exited, two other people came in from the Tube.

They removed their masks and stared around at the Empress. Their gazes dwelt with approval a moment on the votive shrine to the Mother, in its alcove; traveled on and grew somewhat cold looking on the great brewtanks that loomed at the back of Mary’s domain. They were both pear-shaped women, one elderly and one youngish, and Mary wondered what the hell they were doing on Mars.

“Are you perhaps lost, ladies?” she inquired in English.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said the elder of the two. She advanced on the bar, closely followed by her associate. Somewhere in the gloom behind Mary, there was a gasp and the clang of a dropped skillet.

“You must be Mary Griffith,” said the elder. “I am Mother Glenda and this is Mother Willow. We’re with the Ephesian Mission.”

“Indeed? How nice,” said Mary. “Visiting from Luna, then?”

“Oh, no,” said Mother Glenda. “We’ve come to stay. Blessed be.”

“Blessed be,” Mary echoed, feeling slightly uneasy as she looked into Mother Glenda’s face, which was pink-cheeked and jolly-smiling, though there was a certain hard glint in her eyes.

“The Church felt it was time to bring the Goddess to this desolate place,” said Mother Willow, who had a high breathless voice. “Especially with all these desperate people seeking their fortunes here. Because, there are really hardly any red diamonds up here after all, are there? So they’ll need spiritual comfort when the vain quest for worldly riches fails them. And besides, it’s Mars.”

“Mythologically the planet of war and masculine brutality,” explained Mother Glenda.

“Ah,” said Mary.

“And the Martian Agricultural Collective are all atheists, you see, so it’s an even greater challenge,” said Mother Willow earnestly. “You can imagine how pleased we were to learn that there was already a Daughter resident up here. And how outraged we were to hear that you have been the victim of paternalist oppression!”

“I wouldn’t say I’ve been a victim,” Mary replied, grinning. “I’d say I’ve given as good as I’ve got, and I’m still here.”

“Good answer,” said Mother Glenda. “Holy Mother Church has followed your struggle with some interest, daughter.”

“Really,” said Mary, not much liking the sound of that.

“And, of course, one of the first things we want to do is offer our support,” Mother Willow assured her. “Holy Mother Church will help you fight your eviction. Our legal and financial resources are practically unlimited, you know, and we have publicists who would love to tell your story. The Goddess cares for Her own, but most especially for those who have suffered persecution in Her name!”

Mary caught her breath. She thought of the Diana of Luna affair, that had cost the British Luna Company millions of pounds and kilometers of real estate. And now the Church must be looking to duplicate that success here. . . .

“Oh, my, what a lovely thought,” she said dreamily. “This might be ever so much fun. Please, allow me to offer you a nice mug of—er—tea.”

Everyone in three worlds knew the story: how, in the early days of Luna’s settlement, a devout Ephesian named Lavender Dragonsbane had found a solid silver statue of the Goddess buried on the moon. The British Lunar Company claimed that what she had found was, in fact, a vaguely woman-shaped lump of nickel ore. It was given to archaeologists to study, and then other parties (including MI5) had stepped in to demand a look at it, and somehow it had mysteriously vanished in transit from one set of experts to another.

The Ephesian Church had sued the BLC, and the BLC had sued back. Lavender Dragonsbane had a vision wherein the Goddess told her to build a shrine on the spot where she had found the statue. The BLC claimed that the statue had been deliberately planted by the Ephesians on that spot because it happened to be valuable real estate they wanted.

However, in calling what had been found a statue, the BAC had contradicted their earlier statement that it had been nothing but a curiously shaped bit of rock. The Tri-Worlds Council for Integrity found for the Ephesian Church on points. Now the Church owned half the Moon.

“. . . and you could be our next Lavender Dragonsbane, daughter,” said Mother Willow, setting aside her tea.

“Well, that would spoke the BAC’s wheels and no mistake,” said Mary giddily. “Or Areco or whatever they’re calling themselves now.”

“The perennial oppressors,” said Mother Willow, smiling, “brought to their knees by the simple faith of one woman. Blessed be!”

“Blessed be!” Mary echoed, visions of sweet revenge dancing through her head.

“Of course, you understand there will have to be some changes,” said Mother Glenda.

“Yes, of course,” said Mary, and then: “Excuse me?”

Mother Willow coughed delicately. “We have been given to understand that your staff is nearly all male. We can scarcely present you as Her defender on Mars when you perpetuate hiring bias, can we, daughter? And Holy Mother Church is very concerned at rumors that one of your employees is a . . . Christian.”

“Oh, Manco!” said Mary. “No, you don’t understand. He really worships Her, you see, only it’s just in the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. And everybody knows that’s some kind of Red Indian flower goddess really, and nothing to do with paternalist oppressors or anything like that and after all he’s a, er, Native American, isn’t he? Member of a viciously oppressed ethnic minority? And he’s built Her a big shrine and everything in a sacred grotto hereabouts.”

Mother Willow brightened. “Yes, I see! That makes it an entirely different matter. I expect our publicists could do very well with that.” She pulled out a jotpad and made a few brief notes. “One of Her faithful sons escaping to Mars from the brutal lash of Earth prejudice, yes. . . .”

“And as for the rest of ’em being male,” said Mary, “Well, I have to take what I can get up here, don’t I? And they’re not bad fellows at all. And anyway, out of the whole Settlement, there’s only—” She had been about to say, There’s only the Heretic wanted a job, but caught herself and went on—“Er, only so many women on Mars, after all.”

“That’s true,” said Mother Willow graciously.

“And we quite understand you have been placed in a position where it was necessary to fight the enemy with his own weapons,” said Mother Glenda. “However, all of that—” and she pointed at the brewtanks, “must stop, immediately.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mary.

“There is to be no more traffic in controlled substances,” said Mother Glenda.

“But it’s only beer!” Mary cried. “And it’s not illegal in the Celtic Federation, anyway, of which I am a citizen, see? So I’m not doing anything wrong.”

“Not under the statutes of men,” said Mother Glenda. “But how can you feel you are doing Her will by serving a deadly toxin like alcohol to the impoverished working classes of Mars? No, daughter. Holy Mother Church wants to see those tanks dismantled before she grants her aid.”

“But what would I serve my regulars?” Mary demanded.

“Herbal teas and nourishing broths,” suggested Mother Willow. “Healthful drinks.”

Mary narrowed her eyes. Perhaps sensing an explosion imminent, Mother Willow changed the subject and said delicately:

“And there is one other matter. . . .”

“What’s that?” said Mary stonily.

“There was an unfortunate incident on Luna,” said Mother Willow. “Tragic, really. One of our faithful daughters was injured in an accident. The poor creature was confused—we’re certain now there was brain damage—but it would appear that, in her dementia, she said certain things that were interpreted in entirely the wrong way. Misunderstandings will happen . . . but Holy Mother Church seeks now to bring her child home.”

“We understand she works for you here,” said Mother Glenda.

“Er,” said Mary. “Well. She has done, but . . . you must know she’s a bit unreliable. I never know when she’ll turn up. I thought she was a heretic, anyway.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” said Mother Glenda quickly. “She ought to be in—that is, on medication for her condition.”

“You mean you want to put her in hospital,” said Mary.

“Oh, no, no, no!” Mother Willow assured her. “Not one of those dreadful state-run homes at all. The Church has a special place for its afflicted daughters.”

I’ll just bet you do, Mary thought. She sat mulling over the price tag on her future for a long moment. At last she stood up.

“Ladies, I think you’d best go now.”

When they had left at last, when the flint-edged smiles and veiled threats and sniffs of mutual disapproval had been exchanged, Mary drew a deep breath. “Missionaries,” she muttered. Then she made her way back into the stygian blackness of her kitchen.

She found the Heretic at last, wedged behind the pantry cupboard like a human cockroach, by the sound her ocular implant was making as it telescoped in and out.

“They’re gone now,” Mary informed her.

“Can’t come out,” the Heretic replied hoarsely.

“You don’t want to go back to Earth with them?”

The Heretic didn’t answer.

“You’d get lots of nice drugs,” Mary pointed out. The Heretic shifted, but was still mute.

“Look, they’re not going to hurt you. This is modern times, see? They even hinted your excommunication might be revoked. Wouldn’t you like that?”

“No,” said the Heretic. “They think He’ll talk for them. But He won’t.”

“Who won’t talk for them?” Mary asked, settling back on her heels. “Your, er, sort of god thing?”

“Yes.”

“Why would they want him to talk to them?”

There was a silence, filled gradually with the sound of the cupboard rattling and the whirring noise of the Heretic’s eye. Finally she controlled her trembling and gasped:

“Because of what He said when I was in the House of Gentle Persuasion. He told them—something was going to happen. And it happened just like He said.”

“You mean, like a prophecy?”

“Prophecies predictions can’t let this get out! Bad press Goddess knows false field day for the unbelievers paternalist voodoo conspiracies wait! We can use her!” The Heretic’s voice rose in a shriek like a rusty hinge coming unhinged. “Stop that now or you’ll put your other eye out! But He was there. Held down His hand from the red planet and said Come to me! Showed me the open window and I left. Showed me a cargo freighter and I signed on. And I am here with Him and I will never go back now.”

Mary stared into the shadows, just able to make out one sunken red-rimmed eye in a pale face.

“So they think you can do predictions, is that it?”

There was silence again.

“And that’s why the Church wants you back,” said Mary grimly.

The blur in the darkness might have nodded.

There were rumors.

Mary heard that Areco had no interest in the terraforming project, that its intention was to strip-mine for red diamonds, which were much more valuable than anyone had thought, and it had signed no real lease with the MAC.

At the same time, she heard that the red diamond rush had played out completely and that Areco was committed to backing the Martian Agricultural Collective, because terraforming was the only way anyone would ever make money on Mars.

She heard that General Director Rotherhithe had been called home in disgrace and seemed to be dying of emphysema. He was also rumored to be in perfect health and Areco’s principal stockholder, calling the shots from some sinister high desk on Earth.

She heard that the Church was encountering unheard-of resistance from the MAC. She heard that the Church had signed a mutually profitable agreement with the MAC and that the new mission complex—temple, administrative offices and all—was being built even now on the other side of the settlement.

And her appeal was certain to be rejected, and her appeal was certain to succeed. Any day now.

Nothing happened. Life went on.

Then everything happened at once.

It was difficult to organize a baby shower on Mars, but Rowan had managed, on the very day before Mr. De Wit and Alice were scheduled to return to Earth.

Alice’s baby had been determined to be a girl, which was fortunate for the purposes of party décor, as most of the household ware was already pink. The Heretic had been coaxed out from under the refrigeration unit long enough to bake a cake, which rose like a pink cloud and stayed that way, thanks to Martian gravity, and while there was nothing but a tin of Golden Syrup to pour over it, the effect was impressive.

The problem of presents had been overcome as well. Rowan had commandeered Mr. De Wit’s buke to catalog-shop, and simply printed out pictures of what she had ordered. The images were blurry, gray, and took most of a day to print out, but once she had them she painted them with red ochre and pink clay.

“See? Virtual presents,” she said, holding up a depiction of a woolly jumper. “You don’t even have to worry about luggage weight on the shuttle. This set’s from me. It comes with matching bootees and a cap.”

Alice blotted tears and accepted it gratefully. Beside her, Mona gazed at the heap of pictures—receiving blankets, bassinet, more woolly jumpers—and squeaked, “Oh, I can’t wait to have a baby of my own!”

“Yes, you can, my girl,” Mary told her, standing to one side with Mr. De Wit, who seemed rather stunned.

“I can’t imagine what my neighbors will think when all this stuff starts arriving,” he said, giggling weakly. “I’ve been a bachelor so many years. . . .”

“They’ll get over it,” said Alice, and blew her nose. “Oh, Eli, darling, look! An Itsy Witsy Play Set with a slide and a sandbox!”

“That’s from me,” said Mary, somewhat stiffly. “If the little thing has to grow up on Earth, at least she’ll be able to play outdoors.”

There was a sizzling moment wherein Alice glared at her mother, and Mr. Morton broke the silence by clearing his throat.

“I, er, I hope you won’t mind—I prepared something.” He stepped forward and offered Alice a text plaquette. “In honor of your name being Alice, I thought it would be nice—there’s this marvelous old book, proscribed of course, but I recorded as much as I could remember of the poems—perhaps she’ll like them. . . .”

Alice thumbed the switch and the screen lit up, and there was Mr. Morton in miniature, wringing his hands as he said: “Ahem! Jabberwocky. By Lewis Carroll. ’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimbal in the wabe. . . .”

“My, is it in Old English?” Alice inquired politely. “How nice, Mr. Morton!”

“Well, it—”

“This is from me.” Manco stepped forward, and drew from his coat a little figurine, cast from the most delicately rose-colored grit he could find. The Virgen de Guadalupe smiled demurely down at the businesslike little seraph who held her aloft on a crescent moon. “The Good Mother will look after her. You’ll see.”

“It’s lovely! Oh, but I hope it doesn’t get confiscated going through Earth customs,” Alice cried.

“Just point to the crescent horns and tell ’em it’s Isis,” Mary advised.

Chiring stepped forward and laid a black cube on the table.

“This is a holoalbum,” he said. “Candid shots of the whole family and a visual essay on the Martian landscape, you see? So she’ll know where she’s from. She’ll also get a lifetime subscription to the Kathmandu Post.”

“That’s very thoughtful,” said Alice, not knowing what else to say. “Thank you, Chiring.”

“Ma’am? There’s somebody in the airlock,” said Mr. Morton.

“That’ll be Lulu and Jeannemarie from the clan, I expect,” said Rowan.

It wasn’t.

“Ma’am.” Matelot stood stiffly, twisting his air mask in his hands. Padraig Moylan and Gwil Evans flanked him, staring at the floor.

“What’s this, gentlemen?” said Mary.

Matelot cleared his throat and looked from one to the other of his companions, clearly hoping one of them would speak. When neither showed any evidence of opening their mouths for the rest of eternity, he cleared his throat again and said:

“Himself sends word to say that, er, he’s been made an offer he can’t refuse to drop our appeal against eviction. And that even if he could refuse it, the clan has voted to accept.”

“But there’s still Celtic Energy Systems, my dears,” said Mary, into the thunderous silence that had fallen.

“Well, that’s not piped up to anything yet, you know . . . but it’s not that, Ma’am,” said Matelot, looking up into Mary’s eyes and looking away quickly. He gulped for air and went on: “Areco wants the fruit of our labors. The ironworks and the cattle sheds and fields and all. Areco’s buying ’em for a princely sum and giving us a golden rocket back to Earth, plus company shares. Every one of us rich enough to retire and live like gentry the rest of our lives. And so Himself sends you four thousand punts Celtic as compensation for Finn’s fields, and hopes you will consider emigration as well.”

Padraig Moylan extended a banking plaquette in a trembling hand.

The silence went on and on. Was anyone breathing? After a moment Mary reached out and took the plaquette. She glanced at it before looking back at the clansmen.

“I see,” she said.

“And we’ll just be going, then,” said Matelot. Mary’s voice hit him like an iron bar as she said:

“Is he selling all the fixtures?”

“What?” said Matelot weakly.

“I want to buy all your antigrav units,” said Mary, handing the plaquette back. “I want them in my house by tomorrow morning. And I’ll make a preemptive bid, look you, for your last harvest. Go now and tell him so.”

“Yes’m,” said Matelot, and collided with his fellow clansmen as they all three attempted to get out the airlock at once.

When they had gone, Mary sank down on a settle. The rest of her household stared at her. Nobody said anything until Rowan came and crouched beside her.

“Mum, it doesn’t matter. Maybe Areco will make us an offer too—”

“We’re not waiting to see,” said Mary.

“You’re going back to Earth?” asked Alice, too shocked for triumph. Mr. De Wit shook his head in silence, a sick expression in his eyes.

“I am not,” said Mary. “I said I won’t be driven out and I meant it.”

“Good for you!” cried Mr. Morton, and blanched as everyone turned to stare at him. Then he drew a breath and said: “She’s right! We—we don’t need the clan. We’ve got our pumping station and all that land up there. We can make a new place! Our own settlement, for people like us. We’ve already got plans for the theaters. We can expand into a hotel and restaurant and—who knows what else?” He spread out his hands in general appeal.

“Where are we going to get the people?” asked Manco.

“Well, er—you can advertise in the Kathmandu Post, can’t you?” Mr. Morton turned to Chiring. “Tell the Sherpas all about the great job opportunities now being offered at, ah, Griffith Energy Systems! Tell them we’re making a wonderful place up here where people will be free and there’ll be Art and exciting adventure and, and no corporate bad guys running their lives!”

Chiring had already pulled out his jotpad before Mr. Morton had stammered to his conclusion, and was busily making notes.

“I think we can get Earth’s attention,” he said.

Alice sighed, gazing at her mother. She looked down at the bright pictures scattered at her feet.

“We’ll stay and give you all the help we can,” she said. “Won’t we, Eli?”

“No.” Mary got to her feet. “You’re going back to Earth. No sense wasting perfectly good tickets. You can be my agents there. I’ll be buying a lot of things for the new place; I want them shipped properly. And Mr. De Wit can handle all of the thousand lawsuits I plan to file much more effectively if he’s on Earth, can’t you, Mr. De Wit?”

Mr. De Wit bowed slightly. “Your servant, Madam.” He coughed. “I think it might be worth your while to inquire whether Polieos is interested in buying shares in Griffith Energy Systems.”

“I will, by Goddess!” Mary began to pace. She swung one arm at her available complement of men. “You lot go over to the clan now and start collecting those antigrav units. If the old bastard won’t sell, tell him we’re just borrowing them, but collected they must be.”

“Yes, Mama.” Manco picked up a crowbar and looked significantly at Chiring, Morton, and De Wit. They headed all together for the airlock.

“Girls, start packing. Everything’s to be closed down and strapped in. Disconnect everything except Three Tank. Mona, you go out to the Ice Depot and let the Haulers know I’m giving away beer tonight.”

“Right away, Mum!” Mona grabbed her air mask.

As Alice and Rowan hurried away to pack, Mary strode into her kitchen.

“Did you hear all that?” she called. There was a rustle from the shadows in the pantry. Finally the Heretic sidled into sight.

“Yes,” she said, blinking.

“Will it work, do you think? Can we tell them all to go to hell and start our own place?” Mary demanded.

The Heretic just shrugged, drooping forward like an empty garment; then it was as though someone had seized her by the back of the neck and jerked her upright. She fixed a blazing red eye on Mary, and in a brassy voice cried:

“For the finest in Martian hospitality, the tourist has only one real choice: Ares’ premiere hotel—The Empress of Mars in Mars Two, founded by turn-of-the-century pioneer Mary Griffith and still managed by her family today. Enjoy five-star cuisine in the Empress’s unique Mitsubishi Room, or discover the delights of a low-gravity hot spring sauna!”

Mary blinked. “Mars Two, is it to be? As good a name as any, I suppose. That’s a grand picture of the future, but a little practical advice would be appreciated.”

The strange voice took on a new intonation, sounding sly:

“All-seeing Zeus is lustful, can never be trusted; His son has a golden skull. But Ares loves a fighter.”

“I don’t hold with gods,” said Mary stiffly. “Especially not a god of war.”

Someone else smiled, using the Heretic’s face. It was profoundly unsettling.

“All life has to fight to live. There’s more to it than spears and empty rhetoric; she who struggles bravely has His attention.”

Mary backed out of the kitchen, averting her eyes from the red grin.

“Then watch me, whoever you are, because I’m going to give Areco one hell of a fight,” she muttered. “And if my cook’s still in there, tell her to get to work. I’m throwing a party tonight.”

By the time the sullen day dawned, the Haulers were still drunk enough to be enthusiastic.

“Jack the whole thing up on ag units, yeah!” roared the Brick. “Brilliant!”

His fellow Haulers howled their agreement.

“And just sort of walk it up the slope a ways, we thought,” said Mary. “So it’ll be on my claim, see.”

“No, no, no, babe—” a Hauler named Tiny Reg swayed over her like a cliff about to fall. “See, that’ll never work. See? Too much tail wind. Get yer arse blowed down to Valles Marinerisisis. You nona let—wanna let us—”

“Tow my house all the way up there?” asked Mary artlessly. “Oh, I couldn’t ask!”

“Hell yeah!” said the Brick. “Just hook it up an’ go!”

“Fink I got my glacier chains inna cabover,” said a Hauler named Alf, rising from a settle abruptly and falling with a crash that sent a bow wave of spilled beer over Mary’s boots. When his friends had picked him up, he wiped Phobos Porter from his face and grinned obligingly. “Jus’ nip out an’ see, shall I?”

“Oh, sir, how very kind,” said Mary. She put out an arm and arrested Mr. Morton’s flight, for he had been in the process of running to refill mugs from a pitcher. “Can we do it?” she demanded of him sotto voce. “You understand these things. Will the house take the stresses, without cracking like half an eggshell?”

“Er—” Mr. Morton blinked, stared around him for the first time with professional eyes. “Well—it will if we brace the interior cantilevers. We’d need, ah, telescoping struts—which we haven’t got, but—”

“Where can we get them?”

“They’re all in the construction storage shed on the Base. . . .” Mr. Morton’s voice trailed off. He looked down at the pitcher he was carrying. Lifting it to his mouth, he drank the last pint it contained and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “I know the code to get the shed door open,” he said.

“Do you?” Mary watched him closely. His spine was stiffening. He put down the pitcher, flexed his long arms.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “I’ll just go off and see an oppressive corporate monolithic evil entity about a dog, shall I?”

“I think that would be a good idea,” said Mary. Mr. Morton strode to the airlock, put on his mask, and paused as though to utter a dramatic exit line; then realized he should have delivered it before putting his mask on. He saluted instead, with a stiff perfect British salute, and marched away down the Tube.

“Mum?”

Mary turned and beheld Alice, swathed extravagantly for the trip Outside. Mr. De Wit stood beside her, a carryon in each hand and under either arm.

“The tickets say to get there three hours before flight time for processing,” said Alice hesitantly.

“So you’d best go now,” said Mary. Alice burst into tears and flung her arms around her mother’s neck.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been a good daughter,” cried Alice. “And now I’m going to feel like a deserter too!”

“No, dearest, of course you’re not a deserter,” said Mary automatically, patting her on the arm. She looked over Alice’s shoulder at Mr. De Wit. “You’re going to go away with this nice man and bear me a lovely granddaughter, see, and perhaps someday I’ll come visit you in my diamond-encrusted planet shuttle, yes?”

“I hope so,” said Alice, straightening up, for her back ached. Mother and daughter looked at one another across all the resentments, the dislike, the grudges, the eternal intractable issues of their lives. What else was there to say?

“I love you, Mum,” said Alice at last.

“I love you, too,” said Mary. She went to Mr. De Wit and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, for which he bent down.

“If you desert her, I’ll hunt you down and kill you with my own two hands,” she murmured in his ear. He grinned.

They went away through the airlock, just as Alf the Hauler came in. Beer had frozen on his clothing and he was bleeding from his nostrils, but he seemed not to have noticed.

“Got a couple fousand meters of chain!” he announced. “ ’Nough to move bloody shrackin’ Antartarctica!”

“You silly boy, did you go out without your air?” Mary scolded gently. “Rowan, bring a wet face flannel for our Alf. Where are your keys, dear?”

Smiling like a broken pumpkin, Alf held them up. Mary confiscated them and passed them to Manco, who masked up before ducking outside to back Alf’s hauler into position.

“You can hold yer breff out dere, you know,” said Alf proudly if muffledly, as Mary cleaned him up. “S’really easy once you get used to it.”

“I’m sure it is, love. Have another beer and sit still for a bit,” Mary told him, and turned to Rowan. “What’s happening now?”

“Uncle Brick and the others are putting the ag-units in place,” said Rowan. “Is it time to disconnect Three Tank yet?”

“Not yet. They’ll want a drink before they go up the slope,” Mary replied.

“But, Mum, they’re drunk!” Rowan protested.

“Can you think of a better way to get them to do it?” Mary snapped. “What chance have we got, unless they think it’s a mad lark they came up with themselves? I’ll get this house on my claim any damned way I can. Pour another round!”

Alice was reclining in her compartment, adjusting to the artificial gravity and staring up at the monitor above the couch. It was showing only old-fashioned flat images from the live camera mounted above the shuttleport; but the views were something to occupy her attention in the gray cubespace, and the litany of Last time I’ll ever have to look at this was soothing her terrors.

Suddenly, something on the screen moved, and the image became surreal, impossible: there out beyond the Settlement a dome was rising, as though a hill had decided to walk. Alice cried out. Eliphal was beside her immediately, though she had had the impression he had been off seeing about their menu selections for the flight.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, taking her hand in both his own.

“Where did you come from?” she asked him, bewildered. “Look out there! She’s actually talked them into it!”

Clearly free now, the Empress of Mars was crawling up the slope from the Settlement Base like a gigantic snail, ponderous, of immense dignity, tugged along inexorably by no less than three freighters on separate leads of chain, each one sending up its own pink cloud of dust from roaring jets.

“Of course she’s done it, Alice.” How assured his voice was, and yet a little sad. “Your mother will found a city up there, on beer and rebellion. It’ll be a remarkable success. You’ll see, my dear.”

“You really think so?” She stared into his eyes, unsettled by the expression there. He was the kindest man she had ever met, but sometimes she felt as though she were a small lost animal he’d picked up and taken home. She turned her eyes back to the monitor. “I guess we should have stayed to help her, shouldn’t we?”

“No!” He put his arms around her. “You’ll come home to Earth. I’ll keep you safe, you and the little girl. I promised your mother.”

“Oh, Earth . . .” Alice thought of green hills, and blue skies, and a blue sea breaking on a white beach . . . and her mother, and her mother’s problems, finally subtracted from her life. She closed her eyes, burying her face in Eliphal’s shoulder. His beard smelled of cinnamon and myrrh.

“Looks like a huge mobile tit!” whooped the Brick, peering into his rear monitor as he yanked back on the throttle.

“But it’s leaking, Mum,” fretted Mona, watching the vapor plumes emerge and dissipate instantly wherever they appeared, over every unplastered crack and vent. “Are we going to have any air at all once we get it up there?”

“We can wear our masks indoors the first few days,” Mary told her, not taking her eyes off the monitor. “Wear extra thermals. Whatever we have to do. Hush, girl!”

In Alf’s cab, Chiring was muttering into a mike, aiming his cam at the monitor for lack of a window.

“Chiring Skousen, your News Martian, here! What you’re seeing is an epic journey, ladies and gentlemen, a heroic gesture in defiance of oppression!” He paused, reflected on the number of seats the NeoMaoists had won in the last Nepali parliamentary election, and went on: “The valiant working classes have risen in aid of one woman’s brave stand against injustice, while the technocrats cower in their opulent shelters! Yes, the underpaid laborers of Mars still believe in such seemingly outmoded concepts as gallantry, chivalry, and courage!”

“And beer,” said Alf. “Whoo-hoo!”

“The new battle cry of Mars, ladies and gentlemen!” Chiring ranted. “The ancient demand of Beer for the Workers! Now, if you’re still getting the picture from the monitor clearly, you can see the slope of Mons Olympus rising before us. Our road is that paler area between the two rows of boulders. We, er, we’re fighting quite a headwind, but our progress has been quite good so far, due to the several ice freighters kindly donated by the Haulers Union, which are really doing a tremendous job of moving Ms. Griffith’s structure.”

“Yeh, fanks,” said Alf.

“And the, er, the chains used for this amazing feat are the same gauge used for tackling and hauling polar ice, so as you can imagine, they’re quite strong—” Chiring babbled, keeping his camera on the forward monitor because he had spotted something he did not understand in the rear monitor. He paused again and squinted at it.

“What the hell’s that?” he whispered to Alf. Alf looked up at the monitor.

“Uh-oh,” he said. “That’s a Strawberry.”

“And, and, er, ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll follow now as I turn my cam on the rear monitor, you can see one of the unique phenomena of the Martian landscape. That sort of lumpy pink thing that appears to be advancing on the Settlement Base at high speed is what the locals call a Strawberry. Let’s ask local weather expert, Mr. Alfred Chipping, to explain just exactly what a Strawberry is. Mr. Chipping?”

Alf stared into the cam, blinking. “Well, it’s—it’s like a storm kind of a fing. See, you got yer sandstorms, wot is bad news, eh? And you got yer funny jogeraphy up here and jolligy and, er, now and again you get yer Strawberry, wot is like all free of ’em coming together to make this really fick sandstorm wot pingpongs off the hills and rocks and changes direction wifout warning.”

“And—why’s it that funny spotty color, Mr. Chipping?”

“Cos it’s got rocks in,” grunted Alf, slapping all three accelerator levers up with one blow of his ham hand.

Chiring began to pray to Vishnu, but he did it silently, and turned his camera back to the forward monitor.

“Well, isn’t that interesting!” he cried brightly. “More details on the fascinating Martian weather coming up soon, ladies and gentlemen!”

“I’ll be damned,” said the Brick, in a voice that meant he had abruptly sobered. “There’s a Strawberry down there!”

“Where?” Mary craned her head, instinctively looking for a window, but he pointed at the rear monitor. “What’s a Strawberry?”

“Trouble for somebody,” the Brick replied, accelerating. “Settlement Base, looks like.”

“What?”

“Oh!” said Mona. “You mean one of those cyclone things like Tiny Reg was in?”

“What?”

“Yeah,” grunted the Brick, accelerating more.

“Tiny Reg said he was hit by one down by Terra Sirenum and it just took his freighter and picked it up with him in it and he went round and round so fast it broke all his gyros and his compass as well,” Mona explained.

“Bloody Hell!” Mary began to undo her seat harness, but the Brick put out an arm to restrain her.

“You don’t want to do that, babe,” he said quietly.

“What do we care if it hits Settlement Base, anyroad?” Mona asked.

“Girl, your sister’s down there!”

“Oh!” Mona looked up at the monitor in horror, just as the Strawberry collided with the new Temple of Diana, which imploded in a puff of crimson sand.

“Alice!” Mary screamed, searching across the monitors for a glimpse of the transport station. There was the shuttle, safe on its pad, lights still blinking in loading patterns. There it stayed safe, too, for the Strawberry turned now and shot away from the Base, tearing through Tubes as it went, and the lockout klaxons sounded as oxygen blew away white like seafoam in the burning-cold day.

“Never saw one come up on Tharsis before,” was all the Brick said, steering carefully.

“But the transport station’s safe!” Mona said.

“Goddess thank You, Goddess thank You, Goddess. . . . Is it getting bigger?” Mary stared fixedly at the monitor bank.

“No,” said the Brick. “It’s just getting closer.”

Within the Empress, Mr. Morton scrambled spiderlike along the network of crossing stabilizer struts, which had telescoped out to prop the Empress’ walls like glass threads in a witchball. He peered down worriedly at the floor. It was heaving and flexing rather more than he had thought it would. He looked over at the telltale he had mounted on the wall to monitor stress changes, but it was too far away to read easily.

“Are we going to be okay?” inquired Manco, remarkably stoic for a man dangling in a harness ten meters above uncertain eternity. The Heretic swung counterclockwise beside him, her red eye shut, listening to the clatter of her saucepans within their wired-up cupboards.

“Masks on, I think,” said Mr. Morton.

“Gotcha,” said Manco, and he slipped his on as Mr. Morton did the same, and gulped oxygen, and after a moment he nudged the Heretic as she orbited past. “Come on, honey, mask up. Leaks, you know?”

“Yeah,” said the Heretic, not opening her eye, but she slipped on her mask and adjusted the fit.

“So what do we do?” Manco asked.

“Hang in there,” said Mr. Morton, with a pitch in his giggle suggesting the long sharp teeth of impending catastrophe.

“Ha bloody Ha,” said Manco, watching the walls. “We’re shaking more. Are they speeding up out there?”

“Oh, no, certainly not!” Mr. Morton said. “They know better than to do that. No more than two kilometers an hour, I told them, or the stresses will exceed acceptable limits.”

“Really?” Manco squinted through his goggles at a bit of rushing-by ground glimpsed through a crack on the floor that opened and shut like a mouth.

“All right, here’s something we can do—” Mr. Morton edged his way along a strut to the bundle of extras. “Let’s reinforce! Never hurts to be sure, does it?” He pulled out a telescoping unit and passed it hand over hand to Manco. “Just pop that open and wedge it into any of the cantilevers I haven’t already braced.”

Manco grabbed the strut and twisted it. It unlocked and shot out in two directions, and he swung himself up to the nearest joist to ram it into place.

“Splendid,” said Mr. Morton, unlocking another strut and wedging it athwart two others.

“Should I be doing that too?” asked the Heretic, opening her good eye.

“Well, er—” Mr. Morton thought of her inability to hold on to a pan, let alone a structural element requiring strength and exactitude in placement, and, kindly as possible, he said: “Here’s a thought: why don’t you rappel down to that big box there on the wall, you see? And just, er, watch the little numbers on the screen and let us know if they exceed 5008. Can you do that?”

“Okay,” said the Heretic, and went down to the telltale in a sort of controlled plummet. Below her, the floor winked open and gave another glimpse of Mars, which seemed to be going by faster than it had a moment earlier.

“This box says 5024,” the Heretic announced.

Mr. Morton said a word he had never used before. Manco, hanging by one hand, turned to stare, and the Heretic’s ocular implant began to whirr in and out, gravely disturbing the fit of her mask.

“So, Mr. Brick,” said Mary in a voice calm as iron, “Am I to understand that the storm is bearing down upon us now?”

“Bearing up, babe, but that’s it, essentially,” said the Brick, not taking his eyes off the monitor.

“Can we outrun it, Mr. Brick?”

“We might,” he said, “If we weren’t towing a house behind us.”

“I see,” said Mary.

There followed what would have been a silence, were it not for the roar of the motors and the rotors and the rising percussive howl of the wind.

“How does one release the tow lines, Mr. Brick?” Mary inquired.

“That lever right there, babe,” said the Brick.

“Mum, that’s our house!” said Mona.

“A house is only a thing, girl,” said Mary.

“And there’s still people in it! Mr. Morton stayed inside, didn’t he? And Manco stayed with him! They’re holding it together!”

Mary did not answer, staring at the monitor. The Strawberry loomed now like a mountain behind them, and under it the Empress seemed tiny as a horseshoe crab scuttling for cover.

“And there’s always the chance the Strawberry’ll hit something and go poinging off in another direction,” said the Brick, in a carefully neutral voice.

“Mr. Brick,” said Mary, “Basing your judgment on your years of experience hauling carbon dioxide from the icy and intolerant polar regions, could you please think carefully now and tell me exactly what chance there is that the Strawberry will, in fact, change direction and leave us alone? In your opinion, see?”

“I absolutely do not know,” the Brick replied.

“Right,” said Mary. She reached out and pulled down the lever to release the tow line.

A nasty twanging mess was avoided by the fact that Alf, in his freighter, had made the same decision to cast loose at nearly the same second, as had Tiny Reg (who had actually lived through a Strawberry after all and who would have cast loose even earlier, had his reflexes not been somewhat impaired by seventeen imperial pints of Red Crater Ale).

They all three sheared away in different directions, as though released from slings, speeding madly over the red stony desolation and slaloming through piles of rock the color of traffic cones. Behind them the Empress of Mars drifted to a halt, its tow lines fluttering like streamers. The Strawberry kept coming.

“5020,” the Heretic announced in a trembling voice. “5010. 5000. 4050.”

“Much better,” said Mr. Morton, gasping in relief. “Good sensible fellows. Perhaps they were only giving in to the temptation to race, or something manly like that. Now, I’ll just get out my flexospanner and we’ll—”

“4051,” said the Heretic.

“What the hell’s that noi—” said Manco, just before the ordered world ended.

On thirty-seven monitors, which was exactly how many there were on the planet, horrified spectators saw the Strawberry bend over as though it were having a good look at the Empress of Mars; then they saw it leap away, only giving the Empress a swat with its tail end as it bounced off to play with the quailing sand dunes of Amazonia Planitia. The Empress, for its part, shot away up the swell of Mons Olympus, rotating end over end as it went.

Mr. Morton found himself swung about on his tether in ever-decreasing circles, ever closer to a lethal-looking tangle of snapping struts to which he was unfortunately still moored. The Heretic caromed past him, clinging with both arms to the stress telltale, which had torn free of the wall. Something hit him from behind like a sack of sand, and then was in front of him, and he clutched at it and looked into Manco’s eyes. Manco seized hold of the nearest strut with bleeding hands, but his grasp was slick, and it took both of them scrabbling with hands and feet to fend off the broken struts and find a comparatively still bit of chaos where they clung, as the floor and ceiling revolved, revolved, slower now, revolving—

Floor upwards—

Righting itself—

Going over again, oh no, was the floor going to crack right open?—

Still tumbling—oh, don’t let it settle on its side, it’ll split open for sure—

Righting itself again—

And then a colossal lurch as the wind hit the Empress, only the ordinary gale force wind of Mars now but enough to sail anything mounted on ag-units, and Mr. Morton thought: We’re going to be blown to the South Pole!

Something dropped toward them from above, and both men saw the Heretic hurtling past, still clutching the stress telltale as well as a long confusion of line that had become wrapped about her legs. She regarded them blankly in the second before she went through the floor, which opened now like split fruit rind. The line fell after her and then snapped taut, in the inrush of freezing no-air. There was a shuddering shock and the Empress strained at what anchored it, but in vain.

The men yelled and sucked air, clutching at their masks. Staring down through the vortex of blasting sand, Manco saw Mr. Morton’s neoGothic pumping station with the stress telltale imbedded firmly in its roof, and several snarls of line wound around its decorative gables.

And he saw, and Mr. Morton saw too, the Heretic rising on the air like a blown leaf, mask gone, her clothing being scoured away but replaced like a second skin by a coating of sand and blood that froze, her hair streaming sidelong. Were her arms flung out in a pointless clutching reflex, or was she opening them in an embrace? Was her mouth wide in a cry of pain or of delight, as the red sand filled it?

And Manco watched, stunned, and saw what he saw, and Mr. Morton saw it too, and they both swore ever afterward to what they saw then, which was: that the Heretic turned her head, smiled at them, and flew away into the tempest.

“Take us back!” Mary shrieked. “Look, look, it’s been blown halfway up the damn volcano, but it’s still in one piece!”

The Brick dutifully came about and sent them hurtling back, through a cloud of sand and gravel that whined against the freighter’s hull. “Looks like it’s stuck on something,” he said.

“So maybe everybody’s okay!” cried Mona. “Don’t you think, Mum? Maybe they just rode inside like it was a ship, and nobody even got hurt?”

Mary and the Brick exchanged glances. “Certainly,” said Mary. “Not to worry, dear.”

But as they neared the drilling platform, it was painfully obvious that the Empress was still in trouble. Air plumed from a dozen cracks in the dome, and lay like a white mist along the underside, eddying where the occasional gust hit it. Several of the ag-units had broken or gone offline, causing it to sag groundward here and there, and even above the roar of the wind and through the walls of the cab, Mary could hear the Empress groaning in all its beams.

“Mum, there’s a hole in the floor!” Mona screamed.

“I can see that. Hush, girl.”

“But they’ll all be dead inside!”

“Maybe not. They’d masks, hadn’t they? Mr. Brick, I think we’d best see for ourselves.”

The Brick just nodded, and made careful landing on the high plateau. They left Mona weeping in the cab and walked out, bent over against the wind, deflecting sand from their goggles with gloved hands.

“YOU GOT UNITS 4, 6, AND 10 DEAD, LOOKS LIKE,” announced the Brick. “IF WE SHUT OFF 2, 8, AND 12, THAT OUGHT TO EVEN OUT THE STRESS AND LET HER DOWN SOME.”

“WILL YOU GIVE ME A LEG UP, THEN, PLEASE?”

The Brick obliged, hoisting Mary to his shoulders, and there she balanced to just reach the shutoff switches, and, little by little, the Empress evened out, and settled, and looked not quite so much like a drunken dowager with her skirts over her head. Mary was just climbing down when Alf and Tiny Reg pulled up in their freighters. Chiring scrambled from Alf’s cab and came running toward her with his cam held high.

“UNBELIEVABLE!” he said. “IT’S AN ACT OF THE GODS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! NARROW ESCAPE FROM CERTAIN DEATH! FREAK STORM DEPOSITING BUILDING INTACT ON VERY SITE INTENDED! MARS’S FIRST RECORDED MIRACLE!”

“SHUT THE DAMN THING OFF,” Mary told the audience of Posterity. “WE’VE GOT PEOPLE INSIDE.”

Chiring gulped, seeing the wreckage clearly for the first time. He ran for the Empress, where the Brick was already taking a crowbar to the airlock.

“MUM!” Rowan jumped from Tiny Reg’s cab. She reached her mother just as Mona did the same, and they clung to Mary, weeping.

“HUSH YOUR NOISE!” Mary yelled. “WE’RE ALIVE, AREN’T WE? THE HOUSE IS HERE, ISN’T IT?”

“DAMN YOU, MUM, WHAT’LL WE BREATHE UP HERE?” Rowan yelled back. “HOW’LL WE LIVE? WE’LL FREEZE!”

“THE GODDESS WILL PROVIDE!”

Rowan said something atheistical and uncomplimentary then, and Mary would have slapped her if she hadn’t been wearing a mask, and as they stood glaring at each other Mary noticed, far down the slope below Rowan, a traveling plume of grit coming up the road. It was the CeltCart.

By the time the cart reached the plateau, Mary had armed herself with the Brick’s crowbar, and marched out swinging it threateningly.

“COCHEVELOU, YOU’RE ON MY LAND,” she said. She aimed a round blow at his head but it only glanced off, and he kept coming and wrapped his arms around her.

“DARLING GIRL, I’M BEGGING YOUR PARDON ON MY KNEES,” said Cochevelou. Mary tried to take another swipe at him but dropped the crowbar.

“HOUND!” she gasped, “GO BACK TO EARTH, TO YOUR SOFT LIFE, AND I, ON MARS, WILL DRY MY TEARS, AND LIVE TO MAKE MY ENEMIES KNEEL!”

“AW, HONEY, YOU DON’T MEAN THAT,” Cochevelou said. “HAVEN’T I GONE AND GIVEN IT ALL UP FOR YOUR SAKE? THE SPOILED DARLINGS CAN ELECT THEMSELVES ANOTHER CHIEFTAIN. I’M STAYING ON.”

Mary peered over his shoulder at the CeltCart, and noted the preponderance of tools he had brought with him: anvil, portable forge, pig iron . . . and she thought of the thousand repairs the Empress’s tanks and cantilevers would now require. Drawing a deep breath, she cried:

“OH, MY DEAR, I’M THE GLADDEST WOMAN THAT EVER WAS!”

“MUM! MUM!” Mona fought her way through the blowing sand. “THEY’VE COME ROUND!”

Mary broke from Cochevelou’s embrace, and he followed her back to the cab of the Brick’s freighter, where Manco and Mr. Morton were sitting up, or more correctly propping themselves up, weak as newborns, letting Alf swab BioGoo on their cuts and scrapes.

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, BOYS? WHERE’S THE HERETIC GONE?” Mary demanded.

Mr. Morton began to cry, but Manco stared at her with eyes like eggs and said, “There was a miracle, Mama.”

Miracles are good for business, and so is the attraction of a hot bath in a frozen place of eternal dirt, and so are fine ales and beers in an otherwise joyless proletarian agricultural paradise. And free arethermal energy is very good indeed, if it’s only free to you and costs others a packet, especially if they have to crawl and apologize to you and treat you like a lady in addition to paying your price for it.

Five years down the line, there was a new public house sign, what with the Queen of England being scoured away at last by relentless grit, and a fine new sign it was. Two grinning giants, one red and one black, supported between them a regal little lady in fine clothes. At her throat was the painted glory of a red diamond; in her right hand was a brimful mug, and her left hand beckoned the weary traveler to warmth and good cheer. Inside, in the steamy warmth, Sherpas drank their beer with butter.

Five years down the line, there were holocards on the back bar, all featuring little Mary De Wit of Amsterdam, whether screaming and red-faced for the camera in her first bath, or holding tight to Mr. De Wit’s long hand while paddling her toes in the blue sea, or smiling like a sticky cherub before a massed extravagance of Solstice presents and Chanukah sweets, or solemn on her first day of school.

Five years down the line, there was a little shrine in the corner of the kitchen with a new image, a saint for the new faith. It resembled nothing so much as the hood ornament of an ancient Rolls-Royce, a sylph leaning forward into the wind, discreetly shrouded by slipstream short of actual nakedness. Its smile was distinctly unsettling. Its one eye was a red diamond.

Five years down the line, there was actually a Centre for the Performing Arts on Mars, and its thin black-clad manager put on very strange plays indeed, drawing the young intellectuals from what used to be Settlement Base, and there were pasty-faced disciples of Martian Drama (they called themselves the UltraViolets) creating a new art form in the rapidly expanding city on Mons Olympus.

Five years down the line at Mars One, there were long green fields spidering out along the Martian equator and even down to the lowlands, because that’s what a good socialist work-ethic will get you, but up in Mars Two, there were domed rose gardens to the greater glory of Her who smiled serene in Her cloak of stars, Mother of miracles like roses that bloom in despite of bitter frost.

THE GREEN LEOPARD PLAGUE

Walter Jon Williams

Kicking her legs out over the ocean, the lonely mermaid gazed at the horizon from her perch in the overhanging banyan tree.

The air was absolutely still and filled with the scent of night flowers. Large fruit bats flew purposefully over the sea, heading for their daytime rest. Somewhere a white cockatoo gave a penetrating squawk. A starling made a brief flutter out to sea, then came back again. The rising sun threw up red-gold sparkles from the wavetops and brought a brilliance to the tropical growth that crowned the many islands spread out on the horizon.

The mermaid decided it was time for breakfast. She slipped from her hanging canvas chair and walked out along one of the banyan’s great limbs. The branch swayed lightly under her weight, and her bare feet found sure traction on the rough bark. She looked down to see the deep blue of the channel, distinct from the turquoise of the shallows atop the reefs.

She raised her arms, poised briefly on the limb, the ruddy light of the sun glowing bronze on her bare skin, and then pushed off and dove headfirst into the Philippine Sea. She landed with a cool impact and a rush of bubbles.

Her wings unfolded, and she flew away.

After her hunt, the mermaid—her name was Michelle—cached her fishing gear in a pile of dead coral above the reef, and then ghosted easily over the sea grass with the rippled sunlight casting patterns on her wings. When she could look up to see the colossal, twisted tangle that was the roots of her banyan tree, she lifted her head from the water and gulped her first breath of air.

The Rock Islands were made of soft limestone coral, and tide and chemical action had eaten away the limestone at sea level, undercutting the stone above. Some of the smaller islands looked like mushrooms, pointed green pinnacles balanced atop thin stems. Michelle’s island was larger and irregularly shaped, but it still had steep limestone walls undercut six meters by the tide, with no obvious way for a person to clamber from the sea to the land. Her banyan perched on the saucer-edge of the island, itself undercut by the sea.

Michelle had arranged a rope elevator from her nest in the tree, just a loop on the end of a long nylon line. She tucked her wings away—they were harder to retract than to deploy, and the gills on the undersides were delicate—and then slipped her feet through the loop. At her verbal command, a hoist mechanism lifted her in silence from the sea to her resting place in the bright green-dappled forest canopy.

She had been an ape once, a siamang, and she felt perfectly at home in the treetops.

During her excursion, she had speared a yellowlip emperor, and this she carried with her in a mesh bag. She filleted the emperor with a blade she kept in her nest, and tossed the rest into the sea, where it became a subject of interest to a school of bait fish. She ate a slice of one fillet raw, enjoying the brilliant flavor, sea and trembling pale flesh together, then cooked the fillets on her small stove, eating one with some rice she’d cooked the previous evening and saving the other for later.

By the time Michelle finished breakfast, the island was alive. Geckoes scurried over the banyan’s bark, and coconut crabs sidled beneath the leaves like touts offering illicit downloads to passing tourists. Out in the deep water, a flock of circling, diving black noddies marked where a school of skipjack tuna was feeding on swarms of bait fish.

It was time for Michelle to begin her day as well. With sure, steady feet, she moved along a rope walkway to the ironwood tree that held her satellite uplink in its crown, straddled a limb, took her deck from the mesh bag she’d roped to the tree, and downloaded her messages.

There were several journalists requesting interviews—the legend of the lonely mermaid was spreading. This pleased her more often than not, but she didn’t answer any of the queries. There was a message from Darton, which she decided to savor for a while before opening. And then she saw a note from Dr. Davout, and opened it at once.

Davout was, roughly, twelve times her age. He’d actually been carried for nine months in his mother’s womb, not created from scratch in a nanobed like almost everyone else she knew. He had a sib who was a famous astronaut, a McEldowny Prize for his Lavoisier and His Age, and a red-haired wife who was nearly as well-known as he was. A couple of years ago, Michelle had attended a series of his lectures at the College of Mystery, and been interested despite her specialty being, strictly speaking, biology.

He had shaved off the little goatee he’d worn when she’d last seen him, which Michelle considered a good thing. “I have a research project for you, if you’re free,” the recording said. “It shouldn’t take too much effort.”

Michelle contacted him at once. He was a rich old bastard with a thousand years of tenure and no notion of what it was to be young in these times, and he’d pay her whatever outrageous fee she asked.

Her material needs at the moment were few, but she wouldn’t stay on this island forever.

Davout answered right away. Behind him, working at her own console, Michelle could see his red-haired wife Katrin.

“Michelle!” Davout said, loudly enough for Katrin to know who’d called without turning around. “Good!” He hesitated, and then his fingers formed the mudra for <concern>. “I understand you’ve suffered a loss,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, her answer delayed by a second’s satellite lag.

“And the young man—?”

“Doesn’t remember.”

Which was not exactly a lie, the point being what was remembered.

Davout’s fingers were still fixed in <concern>. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Her own fingers formed an equivocal answer. “I’m getting better.” Which was probably true.

“I see you’re not an ape any more.”

“I decided to go the mermaid route. New perspectives, all that.” And welcome isolation.

“Is there any way we can make things easier for you?”

She put on a hopeful expression. “You said something about a job?”

“Yes.” He seemed relieved not to have to probe further—he’d had a realdeath in his own family, Michelle remembered, a chance-in-a-billion thing, and perhaps he didn’t want to relive any part of that.

“I’m working on a biography of Terzian,” Davout said.

“. . . And his Age?” Michelle finished.

“And his Legacy.” Davout smiled. “There’s a three-week period in his life where he—well, he drops right off the map. I’d like to find out where he went—and who he was with, if anyone.”

Michelle was impressed. Even in comparatively unsophisticated times such as that inhabited by Jonathan Terzian, it was difficult for people to disappear.

“It’s a critical time for him,” Davout went on. “He’d lost his job at Tulane, his wife had just died—realdeath, remember—and if he decided he simply wanted to get lost, he would have all my sympathies.” He raised a hand as if to tug at the chin-whiskers that were no longer there, made a vague pawing gesture, then dropped the hand. “But my problem is that when he resurfaces, everything’s changed for him. In June, he delivered an undistinguished paper at the Athenai conference in Paris, then vanished. When he surfaced in Venice in mid-July, he didn’t deliver the paper he was scheduled to read, instead he delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.”

Michelle’s fingers formed the mudra <highly impressed>. “How have you tried to locate him?”

“Credit card records—they end on June 17, when he buys a lot of euros at American Express in Paris. After that, he must have paid for everything with cash.”

“He really did try to get lost, didn’t he?” Michelle pulled up one bare leg and rested her chin on it. “Did you try passport records?”

<No luck.> “But if he stayed in the European Community he wouldn’t have had to present a passport when crossing a border.”

“Cash machines?”

“Not till after he arrived in Venice, just a couple of days prior to the conference.”

The mermaid thought about it for a moment, then smiled. “I guess you need me, all right.”

<I concur> Davout flashed solemnly. “How much would it cost me?”

Michelle pretended to consider the question for a moment, then named an outrageous sum.

Davout frowned. “Sounds all right,” he said.

Inwardly, Michelle rejoiced. Outwardly, she leaned toward the camera lens and looked businesslike. “I’ll get busy, then.”

Davout looked grateful. “You’ll be able to get on it right away?”

“Certainly. What I need you to do is send me pictures of Terzian, from as many different angles as possible, especially from around that period of time.”

“I have them ready.”

“Send away.”

An eyeblink later, the pictures were in Michelle’s deck. <Thanks> she flashed. “I’ll let you know as soon as I find anything.”

At university, Michelle had discovered that she was very good at research, and it had become a profitable sideline for her. People—usually people connected with academe in one way or another—hired her to do the duller bits of their own jobs, finding documents or references, or, in this case, three missing weeks out of a person’s life. It was almost always work they could do themselves, but Michelle was simply better at research than most people, and she was considered worth the extra expense. Michelle herself usually enjoyed the work—it gave her interesting sidelights on fields about which she knew little, and provided a welcome break from routine.

Plus, this particular job required not so much a researcher as an artist, and Michelle was very good at this particular art.

Michelle looked through the pictures, most scanned from old photographs. Davout had selected well: Terzian’s face or profile was clear in every picture. Most of the pictures showed him young, in his twenties, and the ones that showed him older were of high quality, or showed parts of the body that would be crucial to the biometric scan, like his hands or his ears.

The mermaid paused for a moment to look at one of the old photos: Terzian smiling with his arm around a tall, long-legged woman with a wide mouth and dark, bobbed hair, presumably the wife who had died. Behind them was a Louis Quinze table with a blaze of gladiolas in a cloisonné vase, and, above the table, a large portrait of a stately-looking horse in a heavy gilded frame. Beneath the table were stowed—temporarily, Michelle assumed—a dozen or so trophies, which to judge from the little golden figures balanced atop them were awarded either for gymnastics or martial arts. The opulent setting seemed a little at odds with the young, informally dressed couple: she wore a flowery tropical shirt tucked into khakis, and Terzian was dressed in a tank top and shorts. There was a sense that the photographer had caught them almost in motion, as if they’d paused for the picture en route from one place to another.

Nice shoulders, Michelle thought. Big hands, well-shaped muscular legs. She hadn’t ever thought of Terzian as young, or large, or strong, but he had a genuine, powerful physical presence that came across even in the old, casual photographs. He looked more like a football player than a famous thinker.

Michelle called up her character-recognition software and fed in all the pictures, then checked the software’s work, something she was reasonably certain her employer would never have done if he’d been doing this job himself. Most people using this kind of canned software didn’t realize how the program could be fooled, particularly when used with old media, scanned film prints heavy with grain and primitive digital images scanned by machines that simply weren’t very intelligent. In the end, Michelle and the software between them managed an excellent job of mapping Terzian’s body and calibrating its precise ratios: the distance between the eyes, the length of nose and curve of lip, the distinct shape of the ears, the length of limb and trunk. Other men might share some of these biometric ratios, but none would share them all.

The mermaid downloaded the data into her specialized research spiders, and sent them forth into the electronic world.

A staggering amount of the trivial past existed there, and nowhere else. People had uploaded pictures, diaries, commentary, and video; they’d digitized old home movies, complete with the garish, deteriorating colors of the old film stock; they’d scanned in family trees, postcards, wedding lists, drawings, political screeds, and images of handwritten letters. Long, dull hours of security video. Whatever had meant something to someone, at some time, had been turned into electrons and made available to the universe at large.

A surprising amount of this stuff had survived the Lightspeed War—none of it had seemed worth targeting, or, if trashed, had been reloaded from backups.

What all this meant was that Terzian was somewhere in there. Wherever Terzian had gone in his weeks of absence—Paris, Dalmatia, or Thule—there would have been someone with a camera. In stills of children eating ice cream in front of Notre Dame, or moving through the video of buskers playing saxophone on the Pont des Artistes, there would be a figure in the background, and that figure would be Terzian. Terzian might be found lying on a beach in Corfu, reflected in a bar mirror in Gdynia, or negotiating with a prostitute in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district—Michelle had found targets in exactly those places during the course of her other searches.

Michelle sent her software forth to find Terzian, then lifted her arms above her head and stretched—stretched fiercely, thrusting out her bare feet and curling the toes, the muscles trembling with tension, her mouth yawned in a silent shriek.

Then she leaned over her deck again, and called up the message from Darton, the message she’d saved till last.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “Why won’t you talk to me? I love you!”

His brown eyes were a little wild.

“Don’t you understand?” he cried. “I’m not dead! I’m not really dead!”

Michelle hovered three or four meters below the surface of Zigzag Lake, gazing upward at the inverted bowl of the heavens, the brilliant blue of the Pacific sky surrounded by the dark, shadowy towers of mangrove. Something caught her eye, something black and falling, like a bullet: and then there was a splash and a boil of bubbles, and the daggerlike bill of a collared kingfisher speared a blue-eyed apogonid that had been hovering over a bright red coral head. The kingfisher flashed its pale underside as it stroked to the surface, its wings doing efficient double duty as fins, and then there was a flurry of wings and feet and bubbles and the kingfisher was airborne again.

Michelle floated up and over the barrel-shaped coral head, then over a pair of giant clams, each over a meter long. The clams drew shut as Michelle slid across them, withdrawing the huge siphons as thick as her wrist. The fleshy lips that overhung the scalloped edges of the shells were a riot of colors: purples, blues, greens, and reds interwoven in a eye-boggling pattern.

Carefully drawing in her gills so their surfaces wouldn’t be inflamed by coral stings, she kicked up her feet and dove beneath the mangrove roots into the narrow tunnel that connected Zigzag Lake with the sea.

Of the three hundred or so Rock Islands, seventy or thereabouts had marine lakes. The islands were made of coral limestone and porous to one degree or another: some lakes were connected to the ocean through tunnels and caves, and others through seepage. Many of the lakes contained forms of life unique in all the world, evolved distinctly from their remote ancestors: even now, after all this time, new species were being described.

During the months Michelle had spent in the islands, she thought she’d discovered two undescribed species: a variation on the Entacmaea medusivora white anemone that was patterned strangely with scarlet and a cobalt-blue; and a nudi-branch, deep violet with yellow polka dots, that had undulated past her one night on the reef, flapping like a tea towel in a strong wind as a seven-knot tidal current tore it along. The nudi and samples of the anemone had been sent to the appropriate authorities, and perhaps in time Michelle would be immortalized by having a Latinate version of her name appended to the scientific description of the two marine animals.

The tunnel was about fifteen meters long, and had a few narrow twists where Michelle had to pull her wings in close to her sides and maneuver by the merest fluttering of their edges. The tunnel turned up, and brightened with the sun; the mermaid extended her wings and flew over brilliant pink soft corals toward the light.

Two hours’ work, she thought, plus a hazardous environment. Twenty-two hundred calories, easy.

The sea was brilliantly lit, unlike the gloomy marine lake surrounded by tall cliffs, mangroves, and shadow, and for a moment Michelle’s sun-dazzled eyes failed to see the boat bobbing on the tide. She stopped short, her wings cupping to brake her motion, and then she recognized the boat’s distinctive paint job, a bright red meant to imitate the natural oil of the cheritem fruit.

Michelle prudently rose to the surface a safe distance away—Torbiong might be fishing, and sometimes he did it with a spear. The old man saw her, and stood to give a wave before Michelle could unblock her trachea and draw air into her lungs to give a hail.

“I brought you supplies,” he said.

“Thanks,” Michelle said as she wiped a rain of sea water from her face.

Torbiong was over two hundred years old, and Paramount Chief of Koror, the capital forty minutes away by boat. He was small and wiry and black-haired, and had a broad-nosed, strong-chinned, unlined face. He had traveled over the world and off it while young, but returned to Belau as he aged. His duties as chief were mostly ceremonial, but counted for tax purposes; he had money from hotels and restaurants that his ancestors had built and that others managed for him, and he spent most of his time visiting his neighbors, gossiping, and fishing. He had befriended Darton and Michelle when they’d first come to Belau, and helped them in securing the permissions for their researches on the Rock Islands. A few months back, after Darton died, Torbiong had agreed to bring supplies to Michelle in exchange for the occasional fish.

His boat was ten meters long and featured a waterproof canopy amidships made from interwoven pandanas leaves. Over the scarlet faux-cheritem paint were zigzags, crosses, and stripes in the brilliant yellow of the ginger plant. The ends of the thwarts were decorated with grotesque carved faces, and dozens of white cowrie shells were glued to the gunwales. Wooden statues of the kingfisher bird sat on the prow and stern.

Thrusting above the pandanas canopy were antennae, flagpoles, deep-sea fishing rods, fish spears, radar, and a satellite uplink. Below the canopy, where Torbiong could command the boat from an elaborately carved throne of breadfruit-tree wood, were the engine and rudder controls, radio, audio, and video sets, a collection of large audio speakers, a depth finder, a satellite navigation relay, and radar. Attached to the uprights that supported the canopy were whistles tuned to make an eerie, discordant wailing noise when the boat was at speed.

Torbiong was fond of discordant wailing noises. As Michelle swam closer, she heard the driving, screeching electronic music that Torbiong loved trickling from the earpieces of his headset—he normally howled it out of speakers, but when sitting still he didn’t want to scare the fish. At night, she could hear Torbiong for miles, as he raced over the darkened sea blasted out of his skull on betel-nut juice with his music thundering and the whistles shrieking.

He removed the headset, releasing a brief audio onslaught before switching off his sound system.

“You’re going to make yourself deaf,” Michelle said.

Torbiong grinned. “Love that music. Gets the blood moving.”

Michelle floated to the boat and put a hand on the gunwale between a pair of cowries.

“I saw that boy of yours on the news,” Torbiong said. “He’s making you famous.”

“I don’t want to be famous.”

“He doesn’t understand why you don’t talk to him.”

“He’s dead,” Michelle said.

Torbiong made a spreading gesture with his hands. “That’s a matter of opinion.”

“Watch your head,” said Michelle.

Torbiong ducked as a gust threatened to bring him into contact with a pitcher plant that drooped over the edge of the island’s overhang. Torbiong evaded the plant and then stepped to the bow to haul in his mooring line before the boat’s canopy got caught beneath the overhang.

Michelle submerged and swam till she reached her banyan tree, then surfaced and called down her rope elevator. By the time Torbiong’s boat hissed up to her, she’d folded away her gills and wings and was sitting in the sling, kicking her legs over the water.

Torbiong handed her a bag of supplies: some rice, tea, salt, vegetables, and fruit. For the last several weeks Michelle had experienced a craving for blueberries, which didn’t grow here, and Torbiong had included a large package fresh off the shuttle, and a small bottle of cream to go with them. Michelle thanked him.

“Most tourists want corn chips or something,” Torbiong said pointedly.

“I’m not a tourist,” Michelle said. “I’m sorry I don’t have any fish to swap—I’ve been hunting smaller game.” She held out the specimen bag, still dripping sea water.

Torbiong gestured toward the cooler built into the back of his boat. “I got some chai and a chersuuch today,” he said, using the local names for barracuda and mahi mahi.

“Good fishing.”

“Trolling.” With a shrug, he looked up at her, a quizzical look on his face. “I’ve got some calls from reporters,” he said, and then his betel-stained smile broke out. “I always make sure to send them tourist literature.”

“I’m sure they enjoy reading it.”

Torbiong’s grin widened. “You get lonely, now,” he said, “you come visit the family. We’ll give you a home-cooked meal.”

She smiled. “Thanks.”

They said their farewells and Torbiong’s boat hissed away on its jets, the whistles building to an eerie, spine-shivering chord. Michelle rose into the trees and stashed her specimens and groceries. With a bowl of blueberries and cream, Michelle crossed the rope walkway to her deck, and checked the progress of her search spiders.

There were pointers to a swarm of articles about the death of Terzian’s wife, and Michelle wished she’d given her spiders clearer instructions about dates.

The spiders had come up with three pictures. One was a not-very-well focused tourist video from July 10, showing a man standing in front of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. A statue of Dante, also not in focus, gloomed down at him from beneath thick-bellied rain clouds. As the camera panned across him, he stood with his back to the camera, but turned to the right, one leg turned out as he scowled down at the ground—the profile was a little smeared, but the big, broad-shouldered body seemed right. The software reckoned that there was a 78 percent chance that the man was Terzian.

Michelle got busy refining the image, and after a few passes of the software, decided the chances of the figure being Terzian were more on the order of 95 percent.

So maybe Terzian had gone on a Grand Tour of European cultural sites. He didn’t look happy in the video, but then the day was rainy and Terzian didn’t have an umbrella.

And his wife had died, of course.

Now that Michelle had a date and a place she refined the instructions from her search spiders to seek out images from Florence a week either way from July 3, and then expand the search from there, first all Tuscany, then all Italy.

If Terzian was doing tourist sites, then she surely had him nailed.

The next two hits, from her earlier research spiders, were duds. The software gave a less than 50 percent chance of Terzian’s being in Lisbon or Cape Sounion, and refinements of the image reduced the chance to something near zero.

Then the next video popped up, with a time stamp right there in the image—Paris, June 26, 13:41:44 hours, just a day before Terzian bought a bankroll of euros and vanished.

<Bingo!> Michelle’s fingers formed.

The first thing Michelle saw was Terzian walking out of the frame—no doubt this time that it was him. He was looking over his shoulder at a small crowd of people. There was a dark-haired woman huddled on his arm, her face turned away from the camera. Michelle’s heart warmed at the thought of the lonely widower Terzian having an affair in the City of Love.

Then she followed Terzian’s gaze to see what had so drawn his attention. A dead man stretched out on the pavement, surrounded by hapless bystanders.

And then, as the scene slowly settled into her astonished mind, the video sang at her in the piping voice of Pan.

Terzian looked at his audience as anger raged in his backbrain. A wooden chair creaked, and the sound spurred Terzian to wonder how long the silence had gone on. Even the Slovenian woman who had been drowsing realized that something had changed, and blinked herself to alertness.

“I’m sorry,” he said in French. “But my wife just died, and I don’t feel like playing this game any more.”

His silent audience watched as he gathered his papers, put them in his case, and left the lecture room, his feet making sharp, murderous sounds on the wooden floor.

Yet up to that point his paper had been going all right. He’d been uncertain about commenting on Baudrillard in Baudrillard’s own country, and in Baudrillard’s own language, a cheery compare-and-contrast exercise between Baudrillard’s “the self does not exist” and Rorty’s “I don’t care,” the stereotypical French and American answers to modern life. There had been seven in his audience, perched on creaking wooden chairs, and none of them had gone to sleep, or walked out, or condemned him for his audacity.

Yet, as he looked at his audience and read on, Terzian had felt the anger growing, spawned by the sensation of his own uselessness. Here he was, in the City of Light, its every cobblestone a monument to European civilization, and he was in a dreary lecture hall on the Left Bank, reading to his audience of seven from a paper that was nothing more than a footnote, and a footnote to a footnote at that. To come to the land of cogito ergo sum and to answer, I don’t care?

I came to Paris for this? he thought. To read this drivel? I paid for the privilege of doing this?

I do care, he thought as his feet turned toward the Seine. Desiderio, ergo sum, if he had his Latin right. I am in pain, and therefore I do exist.

He ended in a Norman restaurant on the Ile de la Cité, with lunch as his excuse and the thought of getting hopelessly drunk not far from his thoughts. He had absolutely nothing to do until August, after which he would return to the States and collect his belongings from the servants’ quarters of the house on Esplanade, and then he would go about looking for a job.

He wasn’t certain whether he would be more depressed by finding a job or by not finding one.

You are alive, he told himself. You are alive and in Paris with the whole summer ahead of you, and you’re eating the cuisine of Normandy in the Place Dauphine. And if that isn’t a command to be joyful, what is?

It was then that the Peruvian band began to play. Terzian looked up from his plate in weary surprise.

When Terzian had been a child his parents—both university professors—had first taken him to Europe, and he’d seen then that every European city had its own Peruvian or Bolivian street band, Indians in black bowler hats and colorful blankets crouched in some public place, gazing with impassive brown eyes from over their guitars and reed flutes.

Now, a couple of decades later, the musicians were still here, though they’d exchanged the blankets and bowler hats for European styles, and their presentation had grown more slick. Now they had amps, and cassettes and CDs for sale. Now they had congregated in the triangular Place Dauphine, overshadowed by the neoclassical mass of the Palais de Justice, and commenced a Latin-flavored medley of old Abba songs.

Maybe, after Terzian finished his veal in calvados sauce, he’d go up to the band and kick in their guitars.

The breeze flapped the canvas overhead. Terzian looked at his empty plate. The food had been excellent, but he could barely remember tasting it.

Anger still roiled beneath his thoughts. And—for God’s sake—was that band now playing Oasis? Those chords were beginning to sound suspiciously like “Wonderwall.” “Wonderwall” on Spanish guitars, reed flutes, and a mandolin!

Terzian had nearly decided to call for a bottle of cognac and stay here all afternoon, but not with that noise in the park. He put some euros on the table, anchoring the bills with a saucer against the fresh spring breeze that rattled the green canvas canopy over his head. He was stepping through the restaurant’s little wrought-iron gate to the sidewalk when the scuffle caught his attention.

The man falling into the street, his face pinched with pain. The hands of the three men on either side who were, seemingly, unable to keep their friend erect.

Idiots, Terzian thought, fury blazing in him.

There was a sudden shrill of tires, of an auto horn.

Papers streamed in the wind as they spilled from a briefcase.

And over it all came the amped sound of pan pipes from the Peruvian band. Wonderwall.

Terzian watched in exasperated surprise as the three men sprang after the papers. He took a step toward the fallen man—someone had to take charge here. The fallen man’s hair had spilled in a shock over his forehead and he’d curled on his side, his face still screwed up in pain.

The pan pipes played on, one distinct hollow shriek after another.

Terzian stopped with one foot still on the sidewalk and looked around at faces that all registered the same sense of shock. Was there a doctor here? he wondered. A French doctor? All his French seemed to have just drained from his head. Even such simple questions as Are you all right? and How are you feeling? seemed beyond him now. The first aid course he’d taken in his Kenpo school was ages ago.

Unnaturally pale, the fallen man’s face relaxed. The wind floated his shock of thinning dark hair over his face. In the park, Terzian saw a man in a baseball cap panning a video camera, and his anger suddenly blazed up again at the fatuous uselessness of the tourist, the uselessness that mirrored his own.

Suddenly there was a crowd around the casualty, people coming out of stopped cars, off the sidewalk. Down the street, Terzian saw the distinctive flat-topped kepis of a pair of policemen bobbing toward him from the direction of the Palais de Justice, and felt a surge of relief. Someone more capable than this lot would deal with this now.

He began, hesitantly, to step away. And then his arm was seized by a pair of hands and he looked in surprise at the woman who had just huddled her face into his shoulder, cinnamon-dark skin and eyes invisible beneath wraparound shades.

“Please,” she said in English a bit too musical to be American. “Take me out of here.”

The sound of the reed pipes followed them as they made their escape.

He walked her past the statue of the Vert Galant himself, good old lecherous Henri IV, and onto the Pont Neuf. To the left, across the Seine, the Louvre glowed in mellow colors beyond a screen of plane trees.

Traffic roared by, a stampede of steel unleashed by a green light. Unfocused anger blazed in his mind. He didn’t want this woman attached to him, and he suspected she was running some kind of scam. The gym bag she wore on a strap over one shoulder kept banging him on the ass: Surreptitiously, he slid his hand into his right front trouser pocket to make sure his money was still there.

Wonderwall, he thought. Christ.

He supposed he should offer some kind of civilized comment, just in case the woman was genuinely distressed.

“I suppose he’ll be all right,” he said, half-barking the words in his annoyance and anger.

The woman’s face was still half-buried in his shoulder. “He’s dead,” she murmured into his jacket. “Couldn’t you tell?”

For Terzian, death had never occurred under the sky, but shut away, in hospice rooms with crisp sheets and warm colors and the scent of disinfectant. In an explosion of tumors and wasting limbs and endless pain masked only in part by morphia.

He thought of the man’s pale face, the sudden relaxation.

Yes, he thought, death came with a sigh.

Reflex kept him talking. “The police were coming,” he said. “They’ll—they’ll call an ambulance or something.”

“I only hope they catch the bastards who did it,” she said.

Terzian’s heart gave a jolt as he recalled the three men who let the victim fall, and then dashed through the square for his papers. For some reason, all he could remember about them were their black-laced boots, with thick soles.

“Who were they?” he asked blankly.

The woman’s shades slid down her nose, and Terzian saw startling green eyes narrowed to murderous slits. “I suppose they think of themselves as cops,” she said.

Terzian parked his companion in a café near Les Halles, within sight of the dome of the Bourse. She insisted on sitting indoors, not on the sidewalk, and on facing the front door so that she could scan whoever came in. She put her gym bag, with its white Nike swoosh, on the floor between the table legs and the wall, but Terzian noticed she kept its shoulder strap in her lap, as if she might have to bolt at any moment.

Terzian kept his wedding ring within her sight. He wanted her to see it; it might make things simpler.

Her hands were trembling. Terzian ordered coffee for them both. “No,” she said suddenly. “I want ice cream.”

Terzian studied her as she turned to the waiter and ordered in French. She was around his own age, twenty-nine. There was no question that she was a mixture of races, but which races? The flat nose could be African or Asian or Polynesian, and Polynesia was again confirmed by the black, thick brows. Her smooth brown complexion could be from anywhere but Europe, but her pale green eyes were nothing but European. Her broad, sensitive mouth suggested Nubia. The black ringlets yanked into a knot behind her head could be African or East Indian, or, for that matter, French. The result was too striking to be beautiful—and also too striking, Terzian thought, to belong to a successful criminal. Those looks could be too easily identified.

The waiter left. She turned her wide eyes toward Terzian, and seemed faintly surprised that he was still there.

“My name’s Jonathan,” he said.

“I’m,” hesitating, “Stephanie.”

“Really?” Terzian let his skepticism show.

“Yes.” She nodded, reaching in a pocket for cigarettes. “Why would I lie? It doesn’t matter if you know my real name or not.”

“Then you’d better give me the whole thing.”

She held her cigarette upward, at an angle, and enunciated clearly. “Stephanie América Pais e Silva.”

“America?”

Striking a match. “It’s a perfectly ordinary Portuguese name.”

He looked at her. “But you’re not Portuguese.”

“I carry a Portuguese passport.”

Terzian bit back the comment, I’m sure you do.

Instead he said, “Did you know the man who was killed?”

Stephanie nodded. The drags she took off her cigarette did not ease the tremor in her hands.

“Did you know him well?”

“Not very.” She dragged in smoke again, then let the smoke out as she spoke.

“He was a colleague. A biochemist.”

Surprise silenced Terzian. Stephanie tipped ash into the Cinzano ashtray, but her nervousness made her miss, and the little tube of ash fell on the tablecloth.

“Shit,” she said, and swept the ash to the floor with a nervous movement of her fingers.

“Are you a biochemist, too?” Terzian asked.

“I’m a nurse.” She looked at him with her pale eyes. “I work for Santa Croce—it’s a—”

“A relief agency.” A Catholic one, he remembered. The name meant Holy Cross.

She nodded.

“Shouldn’t you go to the police?” he asked. And then his skepticism returned. “Oh, that’s right—it was the police who did the killing.”

“Not the French police.” She leaned across the table toward him. “This was a different sort of police, the kind who think that killing someone and making an arrest are the same thing. You look at the television news tonight. They’ll report the death, but there won’t be any arrests. Or any suspects.” Her face darkened, and she leaned back in her chair to consider a new thought. “Unless they somehow manage to blame it on me.”

Terzian remembered papers flying in the spring wind, men in heavy boots sprinting after. The pinched, pale face of the victim.

“Who, then?”

She gave him a bleak look through a curl of cigarette smoke. “Have you ever heard of Transnistria?”

Terzian hesitated, then decided “No” was the most sensible answer.

“The murderers are Transnistrian.” A ragged smile drew itself across Stephanie’s face. “Their intellectual property police. They killed Adrian over a copyright.”

At that point, the waiter brought Terzian’s coffee, along with Stephanie’s order. Hers was colossal, a huge glass goblet filled with pastel-colored ice creams and fruit syrups in bright primary colors, topped by a mountain of cream and a toy pinwheel on a candy-striped stick. Stephanie looked at the creation in shock, her eyes wide.

“I love ice cream,” she choked, and then her eyes brimmed with tears and she began to cry.

Stephanie wept for a while, across the table, and, between sobs, choked down heaping spoonfuls of ice cream, eating in great gulps and swiping at her lips and tear-stained cheeks with a paper napkin.

The waiter stood quietly in the corner, but from his glare and the set of his jaw it was clear that he blamed Terzian for making the lovely woman cry.

Terzian felt his body surge with the impulse to aid her, but he didn’t know what to do. Move around the table and put an arm around her? Take her hand? Call someone to take her off his hands?

The latter, for preference.

He settled for handing her a clean napkin when her own grew sodden.

His skepticism had not survived the mention of the Transnistrian copyright police. This was far too bizarre to be a con—a scam was based on basic human desire, greed, or lust, not something as abstract as intellectual property. Unless there was a gang who made a point of targeting academics from the States, luring them with a tantalizing hook about a copyright worth murdering for. . . .

Eventually, the storm subsided. Stephanie pushed the half-consumed ice cream away, and reached for another cigarette.

He tapped his wedding ring on the table top, something he did when thinking. “Shouldn’t you contact the local police?” he asked. “You know something about this . . . death.” For some reason he was reluctant to use the word murder. It was as if using the word would make something true, not the killing itself but his relationship to the killing . . . to call it murder would grant it some kind of power over him.

She shook her head. “I’ve got to get out of France before those guys find me. Out of Europe, if I can, but that would be hard. My passport’s in my hotel room, and they’re probably watching it.”

“Because of this copyright.”

Her mouth twitched in a half-smile. “That’s right.”

“It’s not a literary copyright, I take it.”

She shook her head, the half-smile still on her face.

“Your friend was a biologist.” He felt a hum in his nerves, a certainty that he already knew the answer to the next question.

“Is it a weapon?” he asked.

She wasn’t surprised by the question. “No,” she said. “No, just the opposite.” She took a drag on her cigarette and sighed the smoke out. “It’s an antidote. An antidote to human folly.”

“Listen,” Stephanie said. “Just because the Soviet Union fell doesn’t mean that Sovietism fell with it. Sovietism is still there—the only difference is that its moral justification is gone, and what’s left is violence and extortion disguised as law enforcement and taxation. The old empire breaks up, and in the West you think it’s great, but more countries just meant more palms to be greased—all throughout the former Soviet empire you’ve got more ‘inspectors’ and ‘tax collectors,’ more ‘customs agents’ and ‘security directorates’ than there ever were under the Russians. All these people do is prey off their own populations, because no one else will do business with them unless they’ve got oil or some other resource that people want.”

“Trashcanistans,” Terzian said. It was a word he’d heard used of his own ancestral homeland, the former Soviet Republic of Armenia, whose looted economy and paranoid, murderous, despotic Russian puppet regime was supported only by millions of dollars sent to the country by Americans of Armenian descent, who thought that propping up the gang of thugs in power somehow translated into freedom for the fatherland.

Stephanie nodded. “And the worst Trashcanistan of all is Transnistria.”

She and Terzian had left the café and taken a taxi back to the Left Bank and Terzian’s hotel. He had turned the television to a local station, but muted the sound until the news came on. Until then the station showed a rerun of an American cop show, stolid, businesslike detectives underplaying their latest sordid confrontation with tragedy.

The hotel room hadn’t been built for the queen-sized bed it now held, and there was an eighteen-inch clearance around the bed and no room for chairs. Terzian, not wanting Stephanie to think he wanted to get her in the sack, perched uncertainly on a corner of the bed, while Stephanie disposed herself more comfortably, sitting cross-legged in its center.

“Moldova was a Soviet republic put together by Stalin,” she said. “It was made up of Bessarabia, which was a part of Romania that Stalin chewed off at the beginning of the Second World War, plus a strip of industrial land on the far side of the Dniester. When the Soviet Union went down, Moldova became ‘independent’—” Terzian could hear the quotes in her voice. “But independence had nothing to do with the Moldovan people, it was just Romanian-speaking Soviet elites going off on their own account once their own superiors were no longer there to restrain them. And Moldova soon split—first the Turkish Christians . . .”

“Wait a second,” Terzian said. “There are Christian Turks?”

The idea of Christian Turks was not a part of his Armenian-American worldview.

Stephanie nodded. “Orthodox Christian Turks, yes. They’re called Gagauz, and they now have their own autonomous republic of Gagauzia within Moldova.”

Stephanie reached into her pocket for a cigarette and her lighter.

“Uh,” Terzian said. “Would you mind smoking out the window?”

Stephanie made a face. “Americans,” she said, but she moved to the window and opened it, letting in a blast of cool spring air. She perched on the windowsill, sheltered her cigarette from the wind, and lit up.

“Where was I?” she asked.

“Turkish Christians.”

“Right.” Blowing smoke into the teeth of the gale. “Gagauzia was only the start—after that, a Russian general allied with a bunch of crooks and KGB types created a rebellion in the bit of Moldova that was on the far side of the Dniester—another collection of Soviet elites, representing no one but themselves. Once the Russian-speaking rebels rose against their Romanian-speaking oppressors, the Soviet Fourteenth Army stepped in as ‘peacekeepers,’ complete with blue helmets, and created a twenty-mile-wide state recognized by no other government. And that meant more military, more border guards, more administrators, more taxes to charge, and customs duties, and uniformed ex-Soviets whose palms needed greasing. And over a hundred thousand refugees who could be put in camps while the administration stole their supplies and rations. . . .

“But—” She jabbed the cigarette like a pointer. “Transnistria had a problem. No other nation recognized their existence, and they were tiny and had no natural resources, barring the underage girls they enslaved by the thousands to export for prostitution. The rest of the population was leaving as fast as they could, restrained only slightly by the fact that they carried passports no other state recognized, and that meant there were fewer people whose productivity the elite could steal to support their predatory post-Soviet lifestyles. All they had was a lot of obsolete Soviet heavy industry geared to produce stuff no one wanted.

“But they still had the infrastructure. They had power plants—running off Russian oil they couldn’t afford to buy—and they had a transportation system. So the outlaw regime set up to attract other outlaws who needed industrial capacity—the idea was that they’d attract entrepreneurs who were excused paying most of the local ‘taxes’ in exchange for making one big payoff to the higher echelon.”

“Weapons?” Terzian asked.

“Weapons, sure,” Stephanie nodded. “Mostly they’re producing cheap knockoffs of other people’s guns, but the guns are up to the size of howitzers. They tried banking and data havens, but the authorities couldn’t restrain themselves from ripping those off—banks and data run on trust and control of information, and when the regulators are greedy, shortsighted crooks, you don’t get either one. So what they settled on was, well, biotech. They’ve got companies creating cheap generic pharmaceuticals that evade Western patents. . . .” Her look darkened. “Not that I’ve got aproblem with that, not when I’ve seen thousands dying of diseases they couldn’t afford to cure. And they’ve also got other companies who are ripping off Western genetic research to develop their own products. And as long as they make their payoffs to the elite, these companies remain completely unregulated. Nobody, not even the government, knows what they’re doing in those factories, and the government gives them security free of charge.”

Terzian imagined gene-splicing going on in a rusting Soviet factory, rows and rows of mutant plants with untested, unregulated genetics, all set to be released on an unsuspecting world. Transgenic elements drifting down the Dniester to the Black Sea, growing quietly in its saline environment. . . .

“The news,” Stephanie reminded, and pointed at the television.

Terzian reached for the control and hit the mute button, just as the throbbing, anxious music that announced the news began to fade.

The murder on the Ile de la Cité was the second item on the broadcast. The victim was described as a “foreign national” who had been fatally stabbed, and no arrests had been made. The motive for the killing was unknown.

Terzian changed the channel in time to catch the same item on another channel. The story was unchanged.

“I told you,” Stephanie said. “No suspects. No motive.”

“You could tell them.”

She made a negative motion with her cigarette. “I couldn’t tell them who did it, or how to find them. All I could do is put myself under suspicion.”

Terzian turned off the TV. “So what happened exactly? Your friend stole from these people?”

Stephanie swiped her forehead with the back of her wrist. “He stole something that was of no value to them. It’s only valuable to poor people, who can’t afford to pay. And—” She turned to the window and spun her cigarette into the street below. “I’ll take it out of here as soon as I can,” she said. “I’ve got to try to contact some people.” She closed the window, shutting out the spring breeze. “I wish I had my passport. That would change everything.”

I saw a murder this afternoon, Terzian thought. He closed his eyes and saw the man falling, the white face so completely absorbed in the reality of its own agony.

He was so fucking sick of death.

He opened his eyes. “I can get your passport back,” he said.

Anger kept him moving until he saw the killers, across the street from Stephanie’s hotel, sitting at an outdoor table in a café-bar. Terzian recognized them immediately—he didn’t need to look at the heavy shoes, or the broad faces with their disciplined military mustaches—one glance at the crowd at the café showed the only two in the place who weren’t French. That was probably how Stephanie knew to speak to him in English, he just didn’t dress or carry himself like a Frenchman, for all that he’d worn an anonymous coat and tie. He tore his gaze away before they saw him gaping at them.

Anger turned very suddenly to fear, and as he continued his stride toward the hotel he told himself that they wouldn’t recognize him from the Norman restaurant, that he’d changed into blue jeans and sneakers and a windbreaker, and carried a soft-sided suitcase. Still he felt a gunsight on the back of his neck, and he was so nervous that he nearly ran head-first into the glass lobby door.

Terzian paid for a room with his credit card, took the key from the Vietnamese clerk, and walked up the narrow stair to what the French called the second floor, but what he would have called the third. No one lurked in the stairwell, and he wondered where the third assassin had gone. Looking for Stephanie somewhere else, probably, an airport or train station.

In his room Terzian put his suitcase on the bed—it held only a few token items, plus his shaving kit—and then he took Stephanie’s key from his pocket and held it in his hand. The key was simple, attached to a weighted doorknob-shaped ceramic plug.

The jolt of fear and surprise that had so staggered him on first sighting the two men began to shift again into rage.

They were drinking beer, there had been half-empty mugs on the table in front of them, and a pair of empties as well.

Drinking on duty. Doing surveillance while drunk.

Bastards. Trashcanians. They could kill someone simply through drunkenness.

Perhaps they already had.

He was angry when he left his room and took the stairs to the floor below. No foes kept watch in the hall. He opened Stephanie’s room and then closed the door behind him.

He didn’t turn on the light. The sun was surprisingly high in the sky for the hour: he had noticed that the sun seemed to set later here than it did at home. Maybe France was very far to the west for its time zone.

Stephanie didn’t have a suitcase, just a kind of nylon duffel, a larger version of the athletic bag she already carried. He took it from the little closet, and enough of Terzian’s suspicion remained so that he checked the luggage tag to make certain the name was Steph. Pais, and not another.

He opened the duffel, then got her passport and travel documents from the bedside table and tossed them in. He added a jacket and a sweater from the closet, then packed her toothbrush and shaver into her plastic travel bag and put it in the duffel.

The plan was for him to return to his room on the upper floor and stay the night and avoid raising suspicion by leaving a hotel he’d just checked into. In the morning, carrying two bags, he’d check out and rejoin Stephanie in his own hotel, where she had spent the night in his room, and where the air would by now almost certainly reek with her cigarette smoke.

Terzian opened a dresser drawer and scooped out a double handful of Stephanie’s T-shirts, underwear, and stockings, and then he remembered that the last time he’d done this was when he cleaned Claire’s belongings out of the Esplanade house.

Shit. Fuck. He gazed down at the clothing between his hands and let the fury rage like a tempest in his skull.

And then, in the angry silence, he heard a creak in the corridor, and then a stumbling thud.

Thick rubber military soles, he thought. With drunk baboons in them.

Instinct shrieked at him not to be trapped in this room, this dead-end where he could be trapped and killed. He dropped Stephanie’s clothes back into the drawer and stepped to the bed and picked up the duffel in one hand. Another step took him to the door, which he opened with one hand while using the other to fling the duffel into the surprised face of the drunken murderer on the other side.

Terzian hadn’t been at his Kenpo school in six years, not since he’d left Kansas City, but certain reflexes don’t go away after they’ve been drilled into a person thousands of times—certainly not the front kick that hooked upward under the intruder’s breastbone and drove him breathless into the corridor wall opposite.

A primitive element of his mind rejoiced in the fact that he was bigger than these guys. He could really knock them around.

The second Trashcanian tried to draw a pistol, but Terzian passed outside the pistol hand and drove the point of an elbow into the man’s face. Terzian then grabbed the automatic with both hands, took a further step down the corridor, and spun around, which swung the man around Terzian’s hip a full two hundred and seventy degrees and drove him headfirst into the corridor wall. When he’d finished falling and opened his eyes he was staring into the barrel of his own gun.

Red rage gave a fangs-bared roar of animal triumph inside Terzian’s skull. Perhaps his tongue echoed it. It was all he could do to stop himself from pulling the trigger.

Get Death working for him for a change. Why not?

Except that the first man hadn’t realized that his side had just lost. He had drawn a knife—a glittering chromed single-edged thing that may have already killed once today—and now he took a dangerous step toward Terzian.

Terzian pointed the pistol straight at the knife man and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

The intruder stared at the gun as if he’d just realized at just this moment it wasn’t his partner who held it.

Terzian pulled the trigger again, and when nothing happened his rage melted into terror and he ran. Behind him he heard the drunken knife man trip over his partner and crash to the floor.

Terzian was at the bottom of the stair before he heard the thick-soled military boots clatter on the risers above him. He dashed through the small lobby—he sensed the Vietnamese night clerk, who was facing away, begin to turn toward him just as he pushed open the glass door and ran into the street.

He kept running. At some point he discovered the gun still in his fist, and he put it in the pocket of his windbreaker.

Some moments later, he realized that he wasn’t being pursued. And he remembered that Stephanie’s passport was still in her duffel, which he’d thrown at the knife man and hadn’t retrieved.

For a moment, rage ran through him, and he thought about taking out the gun and fixing whatever was wrong with it and going back to Stephanie’s room and getting the documents one way or another.

But then the anger faded enough for him to see what a foolish course that would be, and he returned to his own hotel.

Terzian had given Stephanie his key, so he knocked on his own door before realizing she was very unlikely to open to a random knock. “It’s Jonathan,” he said. “It didn’t work out.”

She snatched the door open from the inside. Her face was taut with anxiety. She held pages in her hand, the text of the paper he’d delivered that morning.

“Sorry,” he said. “They were there, outside the hotel. I got into your room, but—”

She took his arm and almost yanked him into the room, then shut the door behind him. “Did they follow you?” she demanded.

“No. They didn’t chase me. Maybe they thought I’d figure out how to work the gun.” He took the pistol out of his pocket and showed it to her. “I can’t believe how stupid I was—”

“Where did you get that? Where did you get that?” Her voice was nearly a scream, and she shrank away from him, her eyes wide. Her fist crumpled papers over her heart. To his astonishment, he realized that she was afraid of him, that she thought he was connected, somehow, with the killers.

He threw the pistol onto the bed and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “No really!” he shouted over her cries. “It’s not mine! I took it from one of them!”

Stephanie took a deep gasp of air. Her eyes were still wild. “Who the hell are you, then?” she said. “James Bond?”

He gave a disgusted laugh. “James Bond would have known how to shoot.”

“I was reading your—your article.” She held out the pages toward him. “I was thinking, my God, I was thinking, what have I got this poor guy into. Some professor I was sending to his death.” She passed a hand over her forehead. “They probably bugged my room. They would have known right away that someone was in it.”

“They were drunk,” Terzian said. “Maybe they’ve been drinking all day. Those assholes really pissed me off.”

He sat on the bed and picked up the pistol. It was small and blue steel and surprisingly heavy. In the years since he’d last shot a gun, he had forgotten that purposefulness, the way a firearm was designed for a single, clear function. He found the safety where it had been all along, near his right thumb, and flicked it off and then on again.

“There,” he said. “That’s what I should have done.”

Waves of anger shivered through his limbs at the touch of the adrenaline still pouring into his system. A bitter impulse to laugh again rose in him, and he tried to suppress it.

“I guess I was lucky after all,” he said. “It wouldn’t have done you any good to have to explain a pair of corpses outside your room.” He looked up at Stephanie, who was pacing back and forth in the narrow lane between the bed and the wall, and looking as if she badly needed a cigarette. “I’m sorry about your passport. Where were you going to go, anyway?”

“It doesn’t so much matter if I go,” she said. She gave Terzian a quick, nervous glance. “You can fly it out, right?”

“It?” He stared at her. “What do you mean, it?”

“The biotech.” Stephanie stopped her pacing and stared at him with those startling green eyes. “Adrian gave it to me. Just before they killed him.” Terzian’s gaze followed hers to the black bag with the Nike swoosh, the bag that sat at the foot of Terzian’s bed.

Terzian’s impulse to laugh faded. Unregulated, illegal, stolen biotech, he thought. Right in his own hotel room. Along with a stolen gun and a woman who was probably out of her mind.

Fuck.

The dead man was identified by news files as Adrian Cristea, a citizen of Ukraine and a researcher. He had been stabbed once in the right kidney and bled to death without identifying his assailants. Witnesses reported two or maybe three men leaving the scene immediately after Cristea’s death. Michelle set more search spiders to work.

For a moment, she considered calling Davout and letting him know that Terzian had probably been a witness to a murder, but decided to wait until she had some more evidence one way or another.

For the next few hours, she did her real work, analyzing the samples she’d taken from Zigzag Lake’s sulphide-tainted deeps. It wasn’t very physical, and Michelle figured it was only worth a few hundred calories.

A wind floated through the treetops, bringing the scent of night flowers and swaying Michelle’s perch beneath her as she peered into her biochemical reader, and she remembered the gentle pressure of Darton against her back, rocking with her as he looked over her shoulder at her results. Suddenly she could remember, with a near-perfect clarity, the taste of his skin on her tongue.

She rose from her woven seat and paced along the bough. Damn it, she thought, I watched you die.

Michelle returned to her deck and discovered that her spiders had located the police file on Cristea’s death. A translation program handled the antique French without trouble, even producing modern equivalents of forensic jargon. Cristea was of Romanian descent, had been born in the old USSR, and had acquired Ukranian citizenship on the breakup of the Soviet Union. The French files themselves had translations of Cristea’s Ukranian travel documents, which included receipts showing that he had paid personal insurance, environmental insurance, and departure taxes from Transnistria, a place of which she’d never heard, as well as similar documents from Moldova, which at least was a province, or country, that sounded familiar.

What kind of places were these, where you had to buy insurance at the border? And what was environmental insurance anyway?

There were copies of emails between French and Ukranian authorities, in which the Ukranians politely declined any knowledge of their citizen beyond the fact that he was a citizen. They had no addresses for him.

Cristea apparently lived in Transnistria, but the authorities there echoed the Ukranians in saying they knew nothing of him.

Cristea’s tickets and vouchers showed that he had apparently taken a train to Bucharest, and there he’d got on an airline that took him to Prague, and thence to Paris. He had been in the city less than a day before he was killed. Found in Cristea’s hotel room was a curious document certifying that Cristea was carrying medical supplies, specifically a vaccine against hepatitis A. Michelle wondered why he would be carrying a hepatitis vaccine from Transnistria to France. France presumably had all the hepatitis vaccine it needed.

No vaccine had turned up. Apparently Cristea had got into the European Community without having his bags searched, as there was no evidence that the documents relating to the alleged vaccine had ever been examined.

The missing “vaccine”—at some point in the police file the skeptical quotation marks had appeared—had convinced the Paris police that Cristea was a murdered drug courier, and at that point they’d lost interest in the case. It was rarely possible to solve a professional killing in the drug underworld.

Michelle’s brief investigation seemed to have come to a dead end. That Terzian might have witnessed a murder would rate maybe half a sentence in Professor Davout’s biography.

Then she checked what her spiders had brought her in regard to Terzian, and found something that cheered her.

There he was inside the Basilica di Santa Croce, a tourist still photograph taken before the tomb of Machiavelli. He was only slightly turned away from the camera and the face was unmistakable. Though there was no date on the photograph, only the year, though he wore the same clothes he wore in the video taken outside the church, and the photo caught him in the act of speaking to a companion. She was a tall woman with deep brown skin, but she was turned away from the camera, and a wide-brimmed sun hat made her features indistinguishable.

Humming happily, Michelle deployed her software to determine whether this was the same woman who had been on Terzian’s arm on the Place Dauphine. Without facial features or other critical measurements to compare, the software was uncertain, but the proportion of limb and thorax was right, and the software gave an estimate of 41 percent, which Michelle took to be encouraging.

Another still image of Terzian appeared in an undated photograph taken at a festival in southern France. He wore dark glasses, and he’d grown heavily tanned; he carried a glass of wine in either hand, but the person to whom he was bringing the second glass was out of the frame. Michelle set her software to locating the identity of the church seen in the background, a task the two distinctive belltowers would make easy. She was lucky and got a hit right away: the church was the Eglise St-Michel in Salon-de-Provence, which meant Terzian had attended the Fête des Aires de la Dine in June. Michelle set more search spiders to seeking out photo and video from the festivals. She had no doubt that she’d find Terzian there, and perhaps again his companion.

Michelle retired happily to her hammock. The search was going well. Terzian had met a woman in Paris and traveled with her for weeks. The evidence wasn’t quite there yet, but Michelle would drag it out of history somehow.

Romance. The lonely mermaid was in favor of romance, the kind where you ran away to faraway places to be more intently one with the person you adored.

It was what she herself had done, before everything had gone so wrong, and Michelle had had to take steps to re-establish the moral balance of her universe.

Terzian paid for a room for Stephanie for the night, not so much because he was gallant as because he needed to be alone to think. “There’s a breakfast buffet downstairs in the morning,” he said. “They have hardboiled eggs and croissants and Nutella. It’s a very un-French thing to do. I recommend it.”

He wondered if he would ever see her again. She might just vanish, particularly if she read his thoughts, because another reason for wanting privacy was so that he could call the police and bring an end to this insane situation.

He never quite assembled the motivation to make the call. Perhaps Rorty’s I don’t care had rubbed off on him. And he never got a chance to taste the buffet, either. Stephanie banged on his door very early, and he dragged on his jeans and opened the door. She entered, furiously smoking from her new cigarette pack, the athletic bag over her shoulder.

“How did you pay for the room at my hotel?” she asked.

“Credit card,” he said, and in the stunned, accusing silence that followed he saw his James Bond fantasies sink slowly beneath the slack, oily surface of a dismal lake.

Because credit cards leave trails. The Transnistrians would have checked the hotel registry, and the credit card impression taken by the hotel, and now they knew who he was. And it wouldn’t be long before they’d trace him at this hotel.

“Shit, I should have warned you to pay cash.” Stephanie stalked to the window and peered out cautiously. “They could be out there right now.”

Terzian felt a sudden compulsion to have the gun in his hand. He took it from the bedside table and stood there, feeling stupid and cold and shirtless.

“How much money do you have?” Terzian asked.

“Couple of hundred.”

“I have less.”

“You should max out your credit card and just carry euros. Use your card now before they cancel it.”

“Cancel it? How could they cancel it?”

She gave him a tight-lipped, impatient look. “Jonathan. They may be assholes, but they’re still a government.”

They took a cab to the American Express near the Opéra and Terzian got ten thousand euros in cash from some people who were extremely skeptical about the validity of his documents, but who had, in the end, to admit that all was technically correct. Then Stephanie got a cell phone under the name A. Silva, with a bunch of prepaid hours on it, and within a couple of hours they were on the TGV, speeding south to Nice at nearly two hundred seventy kilometers per hour, all with a strange absence of sound and vibration that made the French countryside speeding past seem like a strangely unconvincing special effect.

Terzian had put them in first class and he and Stephanie were alone in a group of four seats. Stephanie was twitchy because he hadn’t bought seats in a smoking section. He sat uncertain, unhappy about all the cash he was carrying and not knowing what to do with it—he’d made two big rolls and zipped them into the pockets of his windbreaker. He carried the pistol in the front pocket of his jeans and its weight and discomfort was a perpetual reminder of this situation that he’d been dragged into, pursued by killers from Trashcanistan and escorting illegal biotechnology.

He kept mentally rehearsing drawing the pistol and shooting it. Over and over, remembering to thumb off the safety this time. Just in case Trashcanian commandos stormed the train.

“Hurled into life,” he muttered. “An object lesson right out of Heidegger.”

“Beg pardon?”

He looked at her. “Heidegger said we’re hurled into life. Just like I’ve been hurled into—” He flapped his hands uselessly. “Into whatever this is. The situation exists before you even got here, but here you are anyway, and the whole business is something you inherit and have to live with.” He felt his lips draw back in a snarl. “He also said that a fundamental feature of existence is anxiety in the face of death, which would also seem to apply to our situation. And his answer to all of this was to make existence, dasein if you want to get technical, an authentic project.” He looked at her. “So what’s your authentic project, then? And how authentic is it?”

Her brow furrowed. “What?”

Terzian couldn’t stop, not that he wanted to. It was just Stephanie’s hard luck that he couldn’t shoot anybody right now, or break something up with his fists, and was compelled to lecture instead. “Or,” he went on, “to put this in a more accessible context, just pretend we’re in a Hitchcock film, okay? This is the scene where Grace Kelly tells Cary Grant exactly who she is and what the maguffin is.”

Stephanie’s face was frozen into a hostile mask. Whether she understood what he was saying or not, the hostility was clear.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

“What’s in the fucking bag?” he demanded.

She glared at him for a long moment, then spoke, her own anger plain in her voice. “It’s the answer to world hunger,” she said. “Is that authentic enough for you?”

Stephanie’s father was from Angola and her mother from East Timor, both former Portuguese colonies swamped in the decades since independence by war and massacre. Both parents had, with great foresight and intelligence, retained Portuguese passports, and had met in Rome, where they worked for UNESCO, and where Stephanie had grown up with a blend of their genetics and their service ethic.

Stephanie herself had received a degree in administration from the University of Virginia, which accounted for the American lights in her English, then she’d gotten another degree in nursing and went to work for the Catholic relief agency Santa Croce, which sent her to its every war-wrecked, locust-blighted, warlord-ridden, sandstorm-blasted camp in Africa. And a few that weren’t in Africa.

“Trashcanistan,” Terzian said.

“Moldova,” Stephanie said. “For three months, on what was supposed to be my vacation.” She shuddered. “I don’t mind telling you that it was a frightening thing. I was used to that kind of thing in Africa, but to see it all happening in the developed world . . . warlords, ethnic hatreds, populations being moved at the point of a gun, whole forested districts being turned to deserts because people suddenly need firewood. . . .” Her emerald eyes flashed. “It’s all politics, okay? Just like in Africa.Famine and camps are all politics now, and have been since before I was born. A whole population starves, and it’s because someone, somewhere, sees a profit in it. It’s difficult to just kill an ethnic group you don’t like, war is expensive and there are questions at the UN and you may end up at the Hague being tried for war crimes. But if you just wait for a bad harvest and then arrange for the whole population to starve, it’s different—suddenly your enemies are giving you all their money in return for food, you get aid from the UN instead of grief, and you can award yourself a piece of the relief action and collect bribes from all the relief agencies, and your enemies are rounded up into camps and you can get your armed forces into the country without resistance, make sure your enemies disappear, control everything while some deliveries disappear into government warehouses where the food can be sold to the starving or just sold abroad for a profit. . . .” She shrugged. “That’s the way of the world, okay? But no more!” She grabbed a fistful of the Nike bag and brandished it at him.

What her time in Moldova had done was to leave Stephanie contacts in the area, some in relief agencies, some in industry and government. So that when news of a useful project came up in Transnistria, she was among the first to know.

“So what is it?” Terzian asked. “Some kind of genetically modified food crop?”

“No.” She smiled thinly. “What we have here is a genetically modified consumer.”

Those Transnistrian companies had mostly been interested in duplicating pharmaceuticals and transgenic food crops created by other companies, producing them on the cheap and underselling the patent-owners. There were bits and pieces of everything in those labs, DNA human and animal and vegetable. A lot of it had other people’s trademarks and patents on it, even the human codes, which US law permitted companies to patent provided they came up with something useful to do with it. And what these semi-outlaw companies were doing was making two things they figured people couldn’t do without: drugs and food.

And not just people, since animals need drugs and food, too. Starving, tubercular sheep or pigs aren’t worth much at market, so there’s as much money in keeping livestock alive as in doing the same for people. So at some point one of the administrators—after a few too many shots of vodka flavored with bison grass—said, “Why should we worry about feeding the animals at all? Why not have them grow their own food, like plants?”

So then began the Green Swine Project, an attempt to make pigs fat and happy by just herding them out into the sun.

“Green swine,” Terzian repeated, wondering. “People are getting killed over green swine.”

“Well, no.” Stephanie waved the idea away with a twitchy swipe of her hand. “The idea never quite got beyond the vaporware stage, because at that point another question was asked—why swine? Adrian said, Why stop at having animals do photo-synthesis—why not people?”

“No!” Terzian cried, appalled. “You’re going to turn people green?”

Stephanie glared at him. “Something wrong with fat, happy green people?” Her hands banged out a furious rhythm on the armrests of her seat. “I’d have skin to match my eyes. Wouldn’t that be attractive?”

“I’d have to see it first,” Terzian said, the shock still rolling through his bones.

“Adrian was pretty smart,” Stephanie said. “The Transnistrians killed themselves a real genius.” She shook her head. “He had it all worked out. He wanted to limit the effect to the skin—no green muscle tissue or skeletons—so he started with a virus that has a tropism for the epidermis—papiloma, that’s warts, okay?”

So now we’ve got green warts, Terzian thought, but he kept his mouth shut.

“So if you’re Adrian, what you do is gut out the virus and re-encode to create chlorophyll. Once a person’s infected, exposure to sunlight will cause the virus to replicate and chlorophyll to reproduce in the skin.”

Terzian gave Stephanie a skeptical look. “That’s not going to be very efficient,” he said. “Plants get sugars and oxygen from chlorophyll, okay, but they don’t need much food, they stand in one place and don’t walk around. Add chlorophyll to a person’s skin, how many calories do you get each day? Tens? Dozens?”

Stephanie’s lips parted in a fierce little smile. “You don’t stop with just the chlorophyll. You have to get really efficient electron transport. In a plant that’s handled in the chloroplasts, but the human body already has mitochondria to do the same job. You don’t have to create these huge support mechanisms for the chlorophyll, you just make use of what’s already there. So if you’re Adrian, what you do is add trafficking tags to the reaction center proteins so that they’ll target the mitochondria, which already are loaded with proteins to handle electron transport. The result is that the mitochondria handle transport from the chlorophyll, which is the sort of job they do anyway, and once the virus starts replicating, you can get maybe a thousand calories or more just from standing in the sun. It won’t provide full nutrition, but it can keep starvation at bay, and it’s not as if starving people have much to do besides stand in the sun anyway.”

“It’s not going to do much good for Icelanders,” Terzian said.

She turned severe. “Icelanders aren’t starving. It so happens that most of the people in the world who are starving happen to be in hot places.”

Terzian flapped his hands. “Fine. I must be a racist. Sue me.”

Stephanie’s grin broadened, and she leaned toward Terzian. “I didn’t tell you about Adrian’s most interesting bit of cleverness. When people start getting normal nutrition, there’ll be a competition within the mitochondria between normal metabolism and solar-induced electron transport. So the green virus is just a redundant backup system in case normal nutrition isn’t available.”

A triumphant smile crossed Stephanie’s face. “Starvation will no longer be a weapon,” she said. “Green skin can keep people active and on their feet long enough to get help. It will keep them healthy enough to fend off the epidemics associated with malnutrition. The point is—” She made fists and shook them at the sky. “The bad guys don’t get to use starvation as a weapon anymore! Famine ends! One of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse dies, right here, right now, as a result of what I’ve got in this bag!” She picked up the bag and threw it into Terzian’s lap, and he jerked on the seat in defensive reflex, knees rising to meet elbows. Her lips skinned back in a snarl, and her tone was mocking.

“I think even that Nazi fuck Heidegger would think my project is pretty damn authentic. Wouldn’t you agree, Herr Doktor Terzian?”

Got you, Michelle thought. Here was a still photo of Terzian at the Fête des Aires de la Dine, with the dark-skinned woman. She had the same wide-brimmed straw hat she’d worn in the Florence church, and had the same black bag over her shoulder, but now Michelle had a clear view of a three-quarter profile, and one hand, with its critical alignments, was clearly visible, holding an ice cream cone.

Night insects whirled around the computer display. Michelle batted them away and got busy mapping. The photo was digital and Michelle could enlarge it.

To her surprise, she discovered that the woman had green eyes. Black women with green irises—or irises of orange or chartreuse or chrome steel—were not unusual in her own time, but she knew that in Terzian’s time they were rare. That would make the search much easier.

“Michelle . . .” The voice came just as Michelle sent her new search spiders into the ether. A shiver ran up her spine.

“Michelle . . .” The voice came again.

It was Darton.

Michelle’s heart gave a sickening lurch. She closed her console and put it back in the mesh bag, then crossed the rope bridge between the ironwood tree and the banyan. Her knees were weak, and the swaying bridge seemed to take a couple of unexpected pitches. She stepped out onto the banyan’s sturdy overhanging limb and gazed out at the water.

“Michelle . . .” To the southwest, in the channel between the mermaid’s island and another, she could see a pale light bobbing, the light of a small boat.

“Michelle, where are you?”

The voice died away in the silence and surf. Michelle remembered the spike in her hand, the long, agonized trek up the slope above Jellyfish Lake. Darton pale, panting for breath, dying in her arms.

The lake was one of the wonders of the world, but the steep path over the ridge that fenced the lake from the ocean was challenging even for those who were not dying. When Michelle and Darton—at that time, apes—came up from their boat that afternoon, they didn’t climb the steep path, but swung hand-over-hand through the trees overhead, through the hardwood and guava trees, and avoided the poison trees with their bleeding, allergenic black sap. Even though their trip was less exhausting than if they’d gone over the land route, the two were ready for the cool water by the time they arrived at the lake.

Tens of thousands of years in the past, the water level was higher, and when it receded, the lake was cut off from the Pacific, and with it the Mastigias sp. jellyfish, which soon exhausted the supply of small fish that were its food. As the human race did later, the jellies gave up hunting and gathering in exchange for agriculture, and permitted themselves to be farmed by colonies of algae that provided the sugars they needed for life. At night, they’d descend to the bottom of the lake, where they fertilized their algae crops in the anoxic, sulfurous waters; at dawn, the jellies rose to the surface, and during the day, they crossed the lake, following the course of the sun, and allowed the sun’s rays to supply the energy necessary for making their daily ration of food.

When Darton and Michelle arrived, there were ten million jellyfish in the lake, from fingertip-sized to jellies the size of a dinner plate, all in one warm throbbing golden-brown mass in the center of the water. The two swam easily on the surface with their long siamang arms, laughing and calling to one another as the jellyfish in their millions caressed them with the most featherlike of touches. The lake was the temperature of their own blood, and it was like a soupy bath, the jellyfish so thick that Michelle felt she could almost walk on the surface. The warm touch wasn’t erotic, exactly, but it was sensual in the way that an erotic touch was sensual, a light brush over the skin by the pad of a teasing finger.

Trapped in a lake for thousands of years without suitable prey, the jellyfish had lost most of their ability to sting. Only a small percentage of people were sensitive enough to the toxin to receive a rash or feel a modest burning.

A very few people, though, were more sensitive than that.

Darton and Michelle left at dusk, and, by that time Darton was already gasping for breath. He said he’d overexerted himself, that all he needed was to get back to their base for a snack, but as he swung through the trees on the way up the ridge, he lost his hold on a Palauan apple tree and crashed through a thicket of limbs to sprawl, amid a hail of fruit, on the sharp algae-covered limestone of the ridge.

Michelle swung down from the trees, her heart pounding. Darton was nearly colorless and struggling to breathe. They had no way of calling for help unless Michelle took their boat to Koror or to their base camp on another island. She tried to help Darton walk, taking one of his long arms over her shoulder, supporting him up the steep island trail. He collapsed, finally, at the foot of a poison tree, and Michelle bent over him to shield him from the drops of venomous sap until he died.

Her back aflame with the poison sap, she’d whispered her parting words into Darton’s ear. She never knew if he heard.

The coroner said it was a million-to-one chance that Darton had been so deathly allergic, and tried to comfort her with the thought that there was nothing she could have done. Torbiong, who had made the arrangements for Darton and Michelle to come in the first place, had been consoling, had offered to let Michelle stay with his family. Michelle had surprised him by asking permission to move her base camp to another island, and to continue her work alone.

She also had herself transformed into a mermaid, and subsequently, a romantic local legend.

And now Darton was back, bobbing in a boat in the nearby channel and calling her name, shouting into a bullhorn.

“Michelle, I love you.” The words floated clear into the night air. Michelle’s mouth was dry. Her fingers formed the sign <go away>.

There was a silence, and then Michelle heard the engine start on Darton’s boat. He motored past her position, within five hundred meters or so, and continued on to the northern point of the island.

<go away> . . .

“Michelle . . .” Again his voice floated out onto the breeze. It was clear that he didn’t know where she was. She was going to have to be careful about showing lights.

<go away> . . .

Michelle waited while Darton called out a half-dozen more times, and then he started his engine and moved on. She wondered if he would search all three hundred islands in the Rock Island group.

No, she knew he was more organized than that.

She’d have to decide what to do when he finally found her.

While a thousand questions chased each other’s tails through his mind, Terzian opened the Nike bag and withdrew the small hard plastic case inside, something like a box for fishing tackle. He popped the locks on the case and opened the lid, and he saw glass vials resting in slots cut into dark grey foam. In them was a liquid with a faint golden cast.

“The papiloma,” Stephanie said.

Terzian dropped the lid on the case as he cast a guilty look over his shoulder, not wanting anyone to see him with this stuff. If he were arrested under suspicion of being a drug dealer, the wads of cash and the pistol certainly wouldn’t help.

“What do you do with the stuff once you get to where you’re going?”

“Brush it on the skin. With exposure to solar energy, it replicates as needed.”

“Has it been tested?”

“On people? No. Works fine on rhesus monkeys, though.”

He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his seat. “Can it be . . . caught? I mean, it’s a virus, can it go from one person to another?”

“Through skin-to-skin contact.”

“I’d say that’s a yes. Can mothers pass it on to their children?”

“Adrian didn’t think it would cross the placental barrier, but he didn’t get a chance to test it. If mothers want to infect their children, they’ll probably have to do it deliberately.” She shrugged. “Whatever the case, my guess is that mothers won’t mind green babies, as long as they’re green healthy babies.” She looked down at the little vials in their secure coffins of foam. “We can infect tens of thousands of people with this amount,” she said. “And we can make more very easily.”

If mothers want to infect their children . . . Terzian closed the lid of the plastic case and snapped the locks. “You’re out of your mind,” he said.

Stephanie cocked her head and peered at him, looking as if she’d anticipated his objections and was humoring him. “How so?”

“Where do I start?” Terzian zipped up the bag, then tossed it in Stephanie’s lap, pleased to see her defensive reflexes leap in response. “You’re planning on unleashing an untested transgenic virus on Africa—on Africa of all places, a continent that doesn’t exactly have a happy history with pandemics: And it’s a virus that’s cooked up by a bunch of illegal pharmacists in a non-country with a murderous secret police, facts that don’t give me much confidence that this is going to be anything but a disaster.”

Stephanie tapped two fingers on her chin as if she were wishing there were a cigarette between them. “I can put your mind to rest on the last issue. The animal study worked. Adrian had a family of bright green rhesus in his lab, till the project was canceled and the rhesus were, ah, liquidated.”

“So if the project’s so terrific, why’d the company pull the plug?”

“Money.” Her lips twisted in anger. “Starving people can’t afford to pay for the treatments, so they’d have to practically give the stuff away. Plus they’d get reams of endless bad publicity, which is exactly what outlaw biotech companies in outlaw countries don’t want. There are millions of people who go ballistic at the very thought of a genetically engineered vegetable—you can imagine how people who can’t abide the idea of a transgenic bell pepper would freak at the thought of infecting people with an engineered virus. The company decided it wasn’t worth the risk. They closed the project down.”

Stephanie looked at the bag in her hands. “But Adrian had been in the camps himself, you see. A displaced person, a refugee from the civil war in Moldova. And he couldn’t stand the thought that there was a way to end hunger sitting in his refrigerator in the lab, and that nothing was being done with it. And so . . .” Her hands outlined the case inside the Nike bag. “He called me. He took some vacation time and booked himself into the Henri IV, on the Place Dauphine. And I guess he must have been careless, because . . .”

Tears starred in her eyes, and she fell silent. Terzian, strong in the knowledge that he’d shared quite enough of her troubles by now, stared out the window, at the green landscape that was beginning to take on the brilliant colors of Provence. The Hautes-Alpes floated blue and white-capped in the distant East, and nearby were orchards of almonds and olives with shimmering leaves, and hillsides covered with rows of orderly vines. The Rhone ran silver under the westering sun.

“I’m not going to be your bagman,” he said. “I’m not going to contaminate the world with your freaky biotech.”

“Then they’ll catch you and you’ll die,” Stephanie said. “And it will be for nothing.”

“My experience of death,” said Terzian, “is that it’s always for nothing.”

She snorted then, angry. “My experience of death,” she mocked, “is that it’s too often for profit. I want to make mass murder an unprofitable venture. I want to crash the market in starvation by giving away life.” She gave another snort, amused this time. “It’s the ultimate anti-capitalist gesture.”

Terzian didn’t rise to that. Gestures, he thought, were just that. Gestures didn’t change the fundamentals. If some jefe couldn’t starve his people to death, he’d just use bullets, or deadly genetic technology he bought from outlaw Transnistrian corporations.

The landscape, all blazing green, raced past at over two hundred kilometers per hour. An attendant came by and sold them each a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

“You should use my phone to call your wife,” Stephanie said as she peeled the cellophane from her sandwich. “Let her know that your travel plans have changed.”

Apparently she’d noticed Terzian’s wedding ring.

“My wife is dead,” Terzian said.

She looked at him in surprise. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Brain cancer,” he said.

Though it was more complicated than that. Claire had first complained of back pain, and there had been an operation, and the tumor removed from her spine. There had been a couple of weeks of mad joy and relief, and then it had been revealed that the cancer had spread to the brain and that it was inoperable. Chemotherapy had failed. She died six weeks after her first visit to the doctor.

“Do you have any other family?” Stephanie said.

“My parents are dead, too.” Auto accident, aneurysm. He didn’t mention Claire’s uncle Geoff and his partner Luis, who had died of HIV within eight months of each other and left Claire the Victorian house on Esplanade in New Orleans. The house that, a few weeks ago, he had sold for six hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the furnishings for a further ninety-five thousand, and Uncle Geoff’s collection of equestrian art for a further forty-one thousand.

He was disinclined to mention that he had quite a lot of money, enough to float around Europe for years.

Telling Stephanie that might only encourage her.

There was a long silence. Terzian broke it. “I’ve read spy novels,” he said. “And I know that we shouldn’t go to the place we’ve bought tickets for. We shouldn’t go anywhere near Nice.”

She considered this, then said, “We’ll get off at Avignon.”

They stayed in Provence for nearly two weeks, staying always in unrated hotels, those that didn’t even rise to a single star from the Ministry of Tourism, or in gîtes ruraux, farmhouses with rooms for rent. Stephanie spent much of her energy trying to call colleagues in Africa on her cell phone and achieved only sporadic success, a frustration that left her in a near-permanent fury. It was never clear just who she was trying to call, or how she thought they were going to get the papiloma off her hands. Terzian wondered how many people were involved in this conspiracy of hers.

They attended some local fêtes, though it was always a struggle to convince Stephanie it was safe to appear in a crowd. She made a point of disguising herself in big hats and shades and ended up looking like a cartoon spy. Terzian tramped rural lanes or fields or village streets, lost some pounds despite the splendid fresh local cuisine, and gained a suntan. He made a stab at writing several papers on his laptop, and spent time researching them in internet cafés.

He kept thinking he would have enjoyed this trip, if only Claire had been with him.

“What is it you do, exactly?” Stephanie asked him once, as he wrote. “I know you teach at university, but . . .”

“I don’t teach anymore,” Terzian said. “I didn’t get my post-doc renewed. The department and I didn’t exactly get along.”

“Why not?”

Terzian turned away from the stale, stalled ideas on his display. “I’m too interdisciplinary. There’s a place on the academic spectrum where history and politics and philosophy come together—it’s called ‘political theory’ usually—but I throw in economics and a layman’s understanding of science as well, and it confuses everybody but me. That’s why my MA is in American Studies—nobody in my philosophy or political science department had the nerve to deal with me, and nobody knows what American Studies actually are, so I was able to hide out there. And my doctorate is in philosophy, but only because I found one rogue professor emeritus who was willing to chair my committee.

“The problem is that if you’re hired by a philosophy department, you’re supposed to teach Plato or Hume or whoever, and they don’t want you confusing everybody by adding Maynard Keynes and Leo Szilard. And if you teach history, you’re supposed to confine yourself to acceptable stories about the past and not toss in ideas about perceptual mechanics and Kant’s ideas of the noumenon, and of course you court crucifixion from the laity if you mention Foucault or Nietzsche.”

Amusement touched Stephanie’s lips. “So where do you find a job?”

“France?” he ventured, and they laughed. “In France, ‘thinker’ is a job description. It’s not necessary to have a degree, it’s just something you do.” He shrugged. “And if that fails, there’s always Burger King.”

She seemed amused. “Sounds like burgers are in your future.”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that. If I can generate enough interesting, sexy, highly original papers, I might attract attention and a job, in that order.”

“And have you done that?”

Terzian looked at his display and sighed. “So far, no.”

Stephanie narrowed her eyes and she considered him. “You’re not a conventional person. You don’t think inside the box, as they say.”

“As they say,” Terzian repeated.

“Then you should have no objections to radical solutions to world hunger. Particularly ones that don’t cost a penny to white liberals throughout the world.”

“Hah,” Terzian said. “Who says I’m a liberal? I’m an economist.”

So Stephanie told him terrible things about Africa. Another famine was brewing across the southern part of the continent. Mozambique was plagued with flood and drought, a startling combination. The Horn of Africa was worse. According to her friends, Santa Croce had a food shipment stuck in Mogadishu and before letting it pass, the local warlord wanted to renegotiate his bribe. In the meantime, people were starving, dying of malnutrition, infection, and dysentery in camps in the dry highlands of Bale and Sidamo. Their own government in Addis Ababa was worse than the Somali warlord, at this stage permitting no aid at all, bribes or no bribes.

And as for the southern Sudan, it didn’t bear thinking about.

“What’s your solution to this?” she demanded of Terzian. “Or do you have one?”

“Test this stuff, this papiloma,” he said, “show me that it works, and I’m with you. But there are too many plagues in Africa as it is.”

“Confine the papiloma to labs while thousands die? Hand it to governments who can suppress it because of pressure from religious loons and hysterical NGOs? You call that an answer?” And Stephanie went back to working her phone while Terzian walked off in anger for another stalk down country lanes.

Terzian walked toward an old ruined castle that shambled down the slope of a nearby hill. And if Stephanie’s plant-people proved viable? he wondered. All bets were off. A world in which humans could become plants was a world in which none of the old rules applied.

Stephanie had said she wanted to crash the market in starvation. But, Terzian thought, that also meant crashing the market in food. If people with no money had all the food they needed, that meant food itself had no value in the marketplace. Food would be so cheap that there would be no profit in growing or selling it.

And this was all just one application of the technology. Terzian tried to keep up with science: he knew about nanoassemblers. Green people was just the first magic bullet in a long volley of scientific musketry that would change every fundamental rule by which humanity had operated since they’d first stood upright. What happened when every basic commodity—food, clothing, shelter, maybe even health—was so cheap that it was free? What then had value?

Even money wouldn’t have value then. Money only had value if it could be exchanged for something of equivalent worth.

He paused in his walk and looked ahead at the ruined castle, the castle that had once provided justice and security and government for the district, and he wondered if he was looking at the future of all government. Providing an orderly framework in which commodities could be exchanged was the basic function of the state, that and providing a secure currency. If people didn’t need government to furnish that kind of security and if the currency was worthless, the whole future of government itself was in question. Taxes weren’t worth the expense of collecting if the money wasn’t any good, anyway, and without taxes, government couldn’t be paid for.

Terzian paused at the foot of the ruined castle and wondered if he saw the future of the civilized world. Either the castle would be rebuilt by tyrants, or it would fall.

Michelle heard Darton’s bullhorn again the next evening, and she wondered why he was keeping fruit-bat hours. Was it because his calls would travel farther at night?

If he were sleeping in the morning, she thought, that would make it easier. She’d finished analyzing some of her samples, but a principle of science was not to do these things alone: she’d have to travel to Koror to mail her samples to other people, and now she knew to do it in the morning, when Darton would be asleep.

The problem for Michelle was that she was a legend. When the lonely mermaid emerged from the sea and walked to the post office in the little foam booties she wore when walking on pavement, she was noticed. People pointed: children followed her on their boards, people in cars waved. She wondered if she could trust them not to contact Darton as soon as they saw her.

She hoped that Darton wasn’t starting to get the islanders on his side.

Michelle and Darton had met on a field trip in Borneo, their obligatory government service after graduation. The other field workers were older, paying their taxes or working on their second or third or fourth or fifth careers, and Michelle knew on sight that Darton was no older than she, that he, too, was a child among all these elders. They were pulled to each other as if drawn by some violent natural force, cataloguing snails and terrapins by day and spending their nights wrapped in each other in their own shell, their turtleback tent. The ancients with whom they shared their days treated them with amused condescension, but then, that was how they treated everything. Darton and Michelle didn’t care. In their youth they stood against all creation.

When the trip came to an end, they decided to continue their work together, just a hop across the equator in Belau. Paying their taxes ahead of time. They celebrated by getting new bodies, an exciting experience for Michelle, who had been built by strict parents who wouldn’t allow her to have a new body until adulthood, no matter how many of her friends had been transforming from an early age into one newly fashionable shape or another.

Michelle and Darton thought that anthropoid bodies would be suitable for the work, and so they went to the clinic in Delhi and settled themselves on nanobeds and let the little machines turn their bodies, their minds, their memories, their desires and their knowledge and their souls, into long strings of numbers. All of which were fed into their new bodies when they were ready, and reserved as backups to be downloaded as necessary.

Being a siamang was a glorious discovery. They soared through the treetops of their little island, swinging overhand from limb to limb in a frenzy of glory. Michelle took a particular delight in her body hair—she didn’t have as much as a real ape, but there was enough on her chest and back to be interesting. They built nests of foliage in trees and lay tangled together, analyzing data or making love or shaving their hair into interesting tribal patterns. Love was far from placid—it was a flame, a fury. An obsession that, against all odds, had been fulfilled, only to build the flame higher.

The fury still burned in Michelle. But now, after Darton’s death, it had a different quality, a quality that had nothing to do with life or youth.

Michelle, spooning up blueberries and cream, riffled through the names and faces her spiders had spat out. There were, now she added them up, a preposterous number of pictures of green-eyed women with dark skin whose pictures were somewhere in the net. Nearly all of them had striking good looks. Many of them were unidentified in the old scans, or identified only by a first name. The highest probability the software offered was 43 percent.

That 43 percent belonged to a Brazilian named Laura Flor, who research swiftly showed was home in Aracaju during the critical period, among other things having a baby. A video of the delivery was available, but Michelle didn’t watch it. The way women delivered babies back then was disgusting.

The next most likely female was another Brazilian seen in some tourist photographs taken in Rio. Not even a name given. A further search based on this woman’s physiognomy turned up nothing, not until Michelle broadened the search to a different gender, and discovered that the Brazilian was a transvestite. That didn’t seem to be Terzian’s scene, so she left it alone.

The third was identified only as Stephanie, and posted on a site created by a woman who had done relief work in Africa. Stephanie was shown with a group of other relief workers, posing in front of a tin-roofed, cinderblock building identified as a hospital.

The quality of the photograph wasn’t very good, but Michelle mapped the physiognomy anyway, and sent it forth along with the name “Stephanie” to see what might happen.

There was a hit right away, a credit card charge to a Stephanie América Pais e Silva. She had stayed in a hotel in Paris for the three nights before Terzian disappeared.

Michelle’s blood surged as the data flashed on her screens. She sent out more spiders and the good news began rolling in.

Stephanie Pais was a dual citizen of Portugal and Angola, and had been educated partly in the States—a quick check showed that her time at university didn’t overlap Terzian’s. From her graduation, she had worked for a relief agency called Santa Croce.

Then a news item turned up, a sensational one. Stephanie Pais had been spectacularly murdered in Venice on the night of July 19, six days before Terzian had delivered the first version of his Cornucopia Theory.

Two murders. . . .

One in Paris, one in Venice. And one of them of the woman who seemed to be Terzian’s lover.

Michelle’s body shivered to a sudden gasping spasm, and she realized that in her suspense she’d been holding her breath. Her head swam. When it cleared, she worked out what time it was in Maryland, where Dr. Davout lived, and then told her deck to page him at once.

Davout was unavailable at first, and by the time he returned her call, she had more information about Stephanie Pais. She blurted the story out to him while her fingers jabbed at the keyboard of her deck, sending him copies of her corroborating data.

Davout’s startled eyes leaped from the data to Michelle and back. “How much of this,” he began, then gave up. “How did she die?” he managed.

“The news article says stabbed. I’m looking for the police report.”

“Is Terzian mentioned?”

<No> she signed. “The police report will have more details.”

“Any idea what this is about? There’s no history of Terzian ever being connected with violence.”

“By tomorrow,” Michelle said, “I should be able to tell you. But I thought I should send this to you because you might be able to tie this in with other elements of Terzian’s life that I don’t know anything about.”

Davout’s fingers formed a mudra that Michelle didn’t recognize—an old one, probably. He shook his head. “I have no idea what’s happening here. The only thing I have to suggest is that this is some kind of wild coincidence.”

“I don’t believe in that kind of coincidence,” Michelle said.

Davout smiled. “A good attitude for a researcher,” he said. “But experience—well,” he waved a hand.

But he loved her, Michelle insisted inwardly. She knew that in her heart. She was the woman he loved after Claire died, and then she was killed and Terzian went on to create the intellectual framework on which the world was now built. He had spent his modest fortune building pilot programs in Africa that demonstrated his vision was a practical one. The whole modern world was a monument to Stephanie.

Everyone was young then, Michelle thought. Even the seventy-year-olds were young compared to the people now. The world must have been ablaze with love and passion. But Davout didn’t understand that because he was old and had forgotten all about love.

“Michelle . . .” Darton’s voice came wafting over the waters.

Bastard. Michelle wasn’t about to let him spoil this.

Her fingers formed <gotta go>. “I’ll send you everything once it comes in,” she said. “I think we’ve got something amazing here.”

She picked up her deck and swung it around so that she could be sure that the light from the display couldn’t be seen from the ocean. Her bare back against the rough bark of the ironwood, she began flashing through the data as it arrived.

She couldn’t find the police report. Michelle went in search of it and discovered that all police records from that period in Venetian history had been wiped out in the Lightspeed War, leaving her only with what had been reported in the media.

“Where are you? I love you!” Darton’s voice came from farther away. He’d narrowed his search, that was clear, but he still wasn’t sure exactly where Michelle had built her nest.

Smiling, Michelle closed her deck and slipped it into its pouch. Her spiders would work for her tirelessly till dawn while she dreamed on in her hammock and let Darton’s distant calls lull her to sleep.

They shifted their lodgings every few days. Terzian always arranged for separate bedrooms. Once, as they sat in the evening shade of a farm terrace and watched the setting sun shimmer on the silver leaves of the olives, Terzian found himself looking at her as she sat in an old cane chair, at the profile cutting sharp against the old limestone of the Vaucluse. The blustering wind brought gusts of lavender from the neighboring farm, a scent that made Terzian want to inhale until his lungs creaked against his ribs.

From a quirk of Stephanie’s lips, Terzian was suddenly aware that she knew he was looking at her. He glanced away.

“You haven’t tried to sleep with me,” she said.

“No,” he agreed.

“But you look,” she said. “And it’s clear you’re not a eunuch.”

“We fight all the time,” Terzian pointed out. “Sometimes we can’t stand to be in the same room.”

Stephanie smiled. “That wouldn’t stop most of the men I’ve known. Or the women, either.”

Terzian looked out over the olives, saw them shimmer in the breeze. “I’m still in love with my wife,” he said.

There was a moment of silence. “That’s well,” she said.

And I’m angry at her, too, Terzian thought. Angry at Claire for deserting him. And he was furious at the universe for killing her and for leaving him alive, and he was angry at God even though he didn’t believe in God. The Trashcanians had been good for him, because he could let his rage and his hatred settle there, on people who deserved it.

Those poor drunken bastards, he thought. Whatever they’d expected in that hotel corridor, it hadn’t been a berserk grieving American who would just as soon have ripped out their throats with his bare hands.

The question was, could he do that again? It had all occurred without his thinking about it, old reflexes taking over, but he couldn’t count on that happening a second time. He’d been trying to remember the Kenpo he’d once learned, particularly all the tricks against weapons. He found himself miming combats on his long country hikes, and he wondered if he’d retained any of his ability to take a punch.

He kept the gun with him, so the Trashcanians wouldn’t get it if they searched his room when he was away. When he was alone, walking through the almond orchards or on a hillside fragrant with wild thyme, he practiced drawing it, snicking off the safety, and putting pressure on the trigger . . . the first time the trigger pull would be hard, but the first shot would cock the pistol automatically and after that the trigger pull would be light.

He wondered if he should buy more ammunition. But he didn’t know how to buy ammunition in France and didn’t know if a foreigner could get into trouble that way.

“We’re both angry,” Stephanie said. He looked at her again, her hand raised to her head to keep the gusts from blowing her long ringlets in her face. “We’re angry at death. But love must make it more complicated for you.”

Her green eyes searched him. “It’s not death you’re in love with, is it? Because—”

Terzian blew up. She had no right to suggest that he was in a secret alliance with death just because he didn’t want to turn a bunch of Africans green. It was their worst argument, and this one ended with both of them stalking away through the fields and orchards while the scent of lavender pursued them on the wind.

When Terzian returned to his room, he checked his caches of money, half-hoping that Stephanie had stolen his euros and run. She hadn’t.

He thought of going into her room while she was away, stealing the papiloma, and taking a train north, handing it over to the Pasteur Institute or someplace. But he didn’t.

In the morning, during breakfast, Stephanie’s cell phone rang, and she answered. He watched while her face turned from curiosity to apprehension to utter terror. Adrenaline sang in his blood as he watched, and he leaned forward, feeling the familiar rage rise in him, just where he wanted it. In haste, she turned off the phone, then looked at him. “That was one of them. He says he knows where we are, and wants to make a deal.”

“If they know where we are,” Terzian found himself saying coolly, “why aren’t they here?”

“We’ve got to go,” she insisted.

So they went. Clean out of France and into the Tuscan hills, with Stephanie’s cell phone left behind in a trash can at the train station and a new phone purchased in Siena. The Tuscan countryside was not unlike Provence, with vine-covered hillsides, orchards a-shimmer with the silver-green of olive trees, and walled medieval towns perched on crags; but the slim, tall cypress standing like sentries gave the hills a different profile, and there were different types of wine grapes, and many of the vineyards rented rooms where people could stay and sample the local hospitality. Terzian didn’t speak the language, and because Spanish was his first foreign language, consistently pronounced words like “villa” and “panzanella” as if they were Spanish. But Stephanie had grown up in Italy and spoke the language not only like a native, but like a native Roman.

Florence was only a few hours away, and Terzian couldn’t resist visiting one of the great living monuments to civilization. His parents had taken him to Europe several times as a child, but somehow never made it here.

Terzian and Stephanie spent a day wandering the center of town, on occasion taking shelter from one of the pelting rainstorms that shattered the day. At one point, with thunder booming overhead, they found themselves in the Basilica di Santa Croce.

“Holy Cross,” Terzian said, translating. “That’s your outfit.”

“We have nothing to do with this church,” Stephanie said. “We don’t even have a collection box here.”

“A pity,” Terzian said as he looked at the soaked swarms of tourists packed in the aisles. “You’d clean up.”

Thunder accompanied the camera strobes that flashed against the huge tomb of Galileo like a vast lightning storm. “Nice of them to forget about that Inquisition thing and bury him in a church,” Terizan said.

“I expect they just wanted to keep an eye on him.”

It was the power of capital, Terzian knew, that had built this church, that had paid for the stained glass and the Giotto frescoes and the tombs and cenotaphs to the great names of Florence: Dante, Michelangelo, Bruni, Alberti, Marconi, Fermi, Rossini, and of course Machiavelli. This structure, with its vaults and chapels and sarcophagi and chanting Franciscans, had been raised by successful bankers, people to whom money was a real, tangible thing, and who had paid for the centuries of labor to build the basilica with caskets of solid, weighty coined silver.

“So what do you think he would make of this?” Terzian asked, nodding at the resting place of Machiavelli, now buried in the city from which he’d been exiled in his lifetime.

Stephanie scowled at the unusually plain sarcophagus with its Latin inscription. “No praise can be high enough,” she translated, then turned to him as tourist cameras flashed. “Sounds overrated.”

“He was a republican, you know,” Terzian said. “You don’t get that from just The Prince. He wanted Florence to be a republic, defended by citizen soldiers. But when it fell into the hands of a despot, he needed work, and he wrote the manual for despotism. But he looked at despotism a little too clearly, and he didn’t get the job.” Terzian turned to Stephanie. “He was the founder of modern political theory, and that’s what I do. And he based his ideas on the belief that all human beings, at all times, have the same passions.” He turned his eyes deliberately to Stephanie’s shoulder bag. “That may be about to end, right? You’re going to turn people into plants. That should change the passions if anything would.”

“Not plants,” Stephanie hissed, and glanced left and right at the crowds. “And not here.” She began to move down the aisle, in the direction of Michelangelo’s ornate tomb, with its draped figures who appeared not in mourning, but as if they were trying to puzzle out a difficult engineering problem.

“What happens in your scheme,” Terzian said, following, “is that the market in food crashes. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is, what happens to the market in labor?”

Tourist cameras flashed. Stephanie turned her head away from the array of Kodaks. She passed out of the basilica and to the portico. The cloudburst had come to an end, but rainwater still drizzled off the structure. They stepped out of the droplets and down the stairs into the piazza.

The piazza was walled on all sides by old palaces, most of which now held restaurants or shops on the ground floor. To the left, one long palazzo was covered with canvas and scaffolding. The sound of pneumatic hammers banged out over the piazza. Terzian waved a hand in the direction of the clatter.

“Just imagine that food is nearly free,” he said. “Suppose you and your children can get most of your food from standing in the sunshine. My next question is, Why in hell would you take a filthy job like standing on a scaffolding and sandblasting some old building?”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and began walking at Stephanie’s side along the piazza. “Down at the bottom of the labor market, there are a lot of people whose labor goes almost entirely for the necessities. Millions of them cross borders illegally in order to send enough money back home to support their children.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“The only reason that there’s a market in illegal immigrants is that there are jobs that well-off people won’t do. Dig ditches. Lay roads. Clean sewers. Restore old buildings. Build new buildings. The well-off might serve in the military or police, because there’s a certain status involved and an attractive uniform, but we won’t guard prisons, no matter how pretty the uniform is. That’s strictly a job for the laboring classes, and if the laboring classes are too well-off to labor, who guards the prisons?”

She rounded on him, her lips set in an angry line. “So I’m supposed to be afraid of people having more choice in where they work?”

“No,” Terzian said, “you should be afraid of people having no choice at all. What happens when markets collapse is intervention—and that’s state intervention, if the market’s critical enough, and you can bet the labor market’s critical. And because the state depends on ditch-diggers and prison guards and janitors and road-builders for its very being, then if these classes of people are no longer available, and the very survival of civil society depends on their existence, in the end, the state will just take them.

“You think our friends in Transnistria will have any qualms about rounding up people up at gunpoint and forcing them to do labor? The powerful are going to want their palaces kept nice and shiny. The liberal democracies will try volunteerism or lotteries or whatever, but you can bet that we’re going to want our sewers to work, and somebody to carry our grandparents’ bedpans, and the trucks to the supermarkets to run on time. And what I’m afraid of is that when things get desperate, we’re not going to be any nicer about getting our way than those Sovietists of yours. We’re going to make sure that the lower orders do their jobs, even if we have to kill half of them to convince the other half that we mean business. And the technical term for that is slavery. And if someone of African descent isn’t sensitive to that potential problem, then I am very surprised!”

The fury in Stephanie’s eyes was visible even through her shades, and he could see the pulse pounding in her throat. Then she said, “I’ll save the people, that’s what I’m good at. You save the rest of the world, if you can.” She began to turn away, then swung back to him. “And by the way,” she added, “fuck you!” turned, and marched away.

“Slavery or anarchy, Stephanie!” Terzian called, taking a step after. “That’s the choice you’re forcing on people!”

He really felt he had the rhetorical momentum now, and he wanted to enlarge the point by saying that he knew some people thought anarchy was a good thing, but no anarchist he’d ever met had ever even seen a real anarchy, or been in one, whereas Stephanie had—drop your anarchist out of a helicopter into the eastern Congo, say, with all his theories and with whatever he could carry on his back, and see how well he prospered. . . .

But Terzian never got to say any of these things, because Stephanie was gone, receding into the vanishing point of a busy street, the shoulder bag swinging back and forth across her butt like a pendulum powered by the force of her convictions.

Terzian thought that perhaps he’d never see her again, that he’d finally provoked her into abandoning him and continuing on her quest alone, but when he stepped off the bus in Montespèrtoli that night, he saw her across the street, shouting into her cell phone.

A day later, as with frozen civility they drank their morning coffee, she said that she was going to Rome the next day. “They might be looking for me there,” she said, “because my parents live there. But I won’t go near the family, I’ll meet Odile at the airport and give her the papiloma.”

Odile? Terzian thought. “I should go along,” he said.

“What are you going to do?” she said, “carry that gun into an airport?”

“I don’t have to take the gun. I’ll leave it in the hotel room in Rome.”

She considered. “Very well.”

Again, that night, Terzian found the tumbled castle in Provence haunting his thoughts, that ruined relic of a bygone order, and once more considered stealing the papiloma and running. And again, he didn’t.

They didn’t get any farther than Florence, because Stephanie’s cell phone rang as they waited in the train station. Odile was in Venice. “Venezia?” Stephanie shrieked in anger. She clenched her fists. There had been a cache of weapons found at the Fiumicino airport in Rome, and all planes had been diverted, Odile’s to Marco Polo outside Venice. Frenzied booking agents had somehow found rooms for her despite the height of the tourist season.

Fiumicino hadn’t been re-opened, and Odile didn’t know how she was going to get to Rome. “Don’t try!” Stephanie shouted. “I’ll come to you.”

This meant changing their tickets to Rome for tickets to Venice. Despite Stephanie’s excellent Italian, the ticket seller clearly wished the crazy tourists would make up their mind which monuments of civilization they really wanted to see.

Strange—Terzian had actually planned to go to Venice in five days or so. He was scheduled to deliver a paper at the Conference of Classical and Modern Thought.

Maybe, if this whole thing was over by then, he’d read the paper after all. It wasn’t a prospect he coveted: he would just be developing another footnote to a footnote.

The hills of Tuscany soon began to pour across the landscape like a green flood. The train slowed at one point—there was work going on on the tracks, men with bronze arms and hard hats—and Terzian wondered how, in the Plant People Future, in the land of Cockaigne, the tracks would ever get fixed, particularly in this heat. He supposed there were people who were meant by nature to fix tracks, who would repair tracks as an avocation or out of boredom regardless of whether they got paid for their time or not, but he suspected that there wouldn’t be many of them.

You could build machines, he supposed, robots or something. But they had their own problems, they’d cause pollution and absorb resources and, on top of everything, they’d break down and have to be repaired. And who would do that?

If you can’t employ the carrot, Terzian thought, if you can’t reward people for doing necessary labor, then you have to use the stick. You march people out of the cities at gunpoint, like Pol Pot, because there’s work that needs to be done.

He tapped his wedding ring on the arm of his chair and wondered what jobs would still have value. Education, he supposed; he’d made a good choice there. Some sorts of administration were necessary. There were people who were natural artists or bureaucrats or salesmen and who would do that job whether they were paid or not.

A woman came by with a cart and sold Terzian some coffee and a nutty snack product that he wasn’t quite able to identify. And then he thought, labor.

“Labor,” he said. In a world in which all basic commodities were provided, the thing that had most value was actual labor. Not the stuff that labor bought, but the work itself.

“Okay,” he said, “it’s labor that’s rare and valuable, because people don’t have to do it anymore. The currency has to be based on some kind of labor exchange—you purchase x hours with y dollars. Labor is the thing you use to pay taxes.”

Stephanie gave Terzian a suspicious look. “What’s the difference between that and slavery?”

“Have you been reading Nozick?” Terzian scolded. “The difference is the same as the difference between paying taxes and being a slave. All the time you don’t spend paying your taxes is your own.” He barked a laugh. “I’m resurrecting Labor Value Theory!” he said. “Adam Smith and Karl Marx are dancing a jig on their tomb-stones! In Plant People Land, the value is the labor itself! The calories!” He laughed again, and almost spilled coffee down his chest.

“You budget the whole thing in calories! The government promises to pay you a dollar’s worth of calories in exchange for their currency! In order to keep the roads and the sewer lines going, a citizen owes the government a certain number of calories per year—he can either pay in person or hire someone else to do the job. And jobs can be budgeted in calories-per-hour, so that if you do hard physical labor, you owe fewer hours than someone with a desk job—that should keep the young, fit, impatient people doing the nasty jobs, so that they have more free time for their other pursuits.” He chortled. “Oh, the intellectuals are going to just hate this! They’re used to valuing their brain power over manual labor—I’m going to reverse their whole scale of values!”

Stephanie made a pffing sound. “The people I care about have no money to pay taxes at all.”

“They have bodies. They can still be enslaved.” Terzian got out his laptop. “Let me put my ideas together.”

Terzian’s frenetic two-fingered typing went on for the rest of the journey, all the way across the causeway that led into Venice. Stephanie gazed out the window at the lagoon soaring by, the soaring water birds, and the dirt and stink of industry. She kept the Nike bag in her lap until the train pulled into the Stazione Ferrovia della Stato Santa Lucia at the end of its long journey.

Odile’s hotel was in Cannaregio, which, according to the map purchased in the station gift shop, was the district of the city nearest the station and away from most of the tourist sites. A brisk wind almost tore the map from their fingers as they left the station, and their vaporetto bucked a steep chop on the grey-green Grand Canal as it took them to the Ca’ d’ Oro, the fanciful white High Gothic palazzo that loomed like a frantic wedding cake above a swarm of bobbing gondolas and motorboats.

Stephanie puffed cigarettes, at first with ferocity, then with satisfaction. Once they got away from the Grand Canal and into Cannaregio itself, they quickly became lost. The twisted medieval streets were broken on occasion by still, silent canals, but the canals didn’t seem to lead anywhere in particular. Cooking smells demonstrated that it was dinnertime, and there were few people about, and no tourists. Terzian’s stomach rumbled. Sometimes the streets deteriorated into mere passages. Stephanie and Terzian were in such a passage, holding their map open against the wind and shouting directions at each other, when someone slugged Terzian from behind.

He went down on one knee with his head ringing and the taste of blood in his mouth, and then two people rather unexpectedly picked him up again, only to slam him against the passage wall. Through some miracle, he managed not to hit his head on the brickwork and knock himself out. He could smell garlic on the breath of one of the attackers. Air went out of him as he felt an elbow to his ribs.

It was the scream from Stephanie that concentrated his attention. There was violent motion in front of him, and he saw the Nike swoosh, and remembered that he was dealing with killers, and that he had a gun.

In an instant, Terzian had his rage back. He felt his lungs fill with the fury that spread through his body like a river of scalding blood. He planted his feet and twisted abruptly to his left, letting the strength come up his legs from the earth itself, and the man attached to his right arm gave a grunt of surprise and swung counterclockwise. Terzian twisted the other way, which budged the other man only a little, but which freed his right arm to claw into his right pants pocket.

And from this point on it was just the movement that he had rehearsed. Draw, thumb the safety, pull the trigger hard. He shot the man on his right and hit him in the groin. For a brief second, Terzian saw his pinched face, the face that reflected such pain that it folded in on itself, and he remembered Adrian falling in the Place Dauphine with just that look. Then he stuck the pistol in the ribs of the man on his left and fired twice. The arms that grappled him relaxed and fell away.

There were two more men grappling with Stephanie. That made four altogether, and Terzian reasoned dully that after the first three fucked up in Paris, the home office had sent a supervisor. One was trying to tug the Nike bag away, and Terzian lunged toward him and fired at a range of two meters, too close to miss, and the man dropped to the ground with a whuff of pain.

The last man had hold of Stephanie and swung her around, keeping her between himself and the pistol. Terzian could see the knife in his hand and recognized it as one he’d seen before. Her dark glasses were cockeyed on her face and Terzian caught a flash of her angry green eyes. He pointed the pistol at the knife man’s face. He didn’t dare shoot.

“Police!” he shrieked into the wind. “Policia!” He used the Spanish word. Bloody spittle spattered the cobblestones as he screamed.

In the Trashcanian’s eyes, he saw fear, bafflement, rage.

“Polizia!” He got the pronunciation right this time. He saw the rage in Stephanie’s eyes, the fury that mirrored his own, and he saw her struggle against the man who held her.

“No!” he called. Too late. The knife man had too many decisions to make all at once, and Terzian figured he wasn’t very bright to begin with. Kill the hostages was probably something he’d been taught on his first day at Goon School.

As Stephanie fell, Terzian fired, and kept firing as the man ran away. The killer broke out of the passageway into a little square, and then just fell down.

The slide of the automatic locked back as Terzian ran out of ammunition, and then he staggered forward to where Stephanie was bleeding to death on the cobbles.

Her throat had been cut and she couldn’t speak. She gripped his arm as if she could drive her urgent message through the skin, with her nails. In her eyes, he saw frustrated rage, the rage he knew well, until at length he saw there nothing at all, a nothing he knew better than any other thing in the world.

He shouldered the Nike bag and staggered out of the passageway into the tiny Venetian square with its covered well. He took a street at random, and there was Odile’s hotel. Of course: the Trashcanians had been staking it out.

It wasn’t much of a hotel, and the scent of spice and garlic in the lobby suggested that the desk clerk was eating his dinner. Terzian went up the stair to Odile’s room and knocked on the door. When she opened—she was a plump girl with big hips and a suntan—he tossed the Nike bag on the bed.

“You need to get back to Mogadishu right away,” he said. “Stephanie just died for that.”

Her eyes widened. Terzian stepped to the wash basin to clean the blood off as best he could. It was all he could do not to shriek with grief and anger.

“You take care of the starving,” he said finally, “and I’ll save the rest of the world.”

Michelle rose from the sea near Torbiong’s boat, having done thirty-six hundred calories’ worth of research and caught a honeycomb grouper into the bargain. She traded the fish for the supplies he brought. “Any more blueberries?” she asked.

“Not this time.” He peered down at her, narrowing his eyes against the bright shimmer of sun on the water. “That young man of yours is being quite a nuisance. He’s keeping the turtles awake and scaring the fish.”

The mermaid tucked away her wings and arranged herself in her rope sling. “Why don’t you throw him off the island?”

“My authority doesn’t run that far.” He scratched his jaw. “He’s interviewing people. Adding up all the places you’ve been seen. He’ll find you pretty soon, I think.”

“Not if I don’t want to be found. He can yell all he likes, but I don’t have to answer.”

“Well, maybe.” Torbiong shook his head. “Thanks for the fish.”

Michelle did some preliminary work with her new samples, and then abandoned them for anything new that her search spiders had discovered. She had a feeling she was on the verge of something colossal.

She carried her deck to her overhanging limb and let her legs dangle over the water while she looked through the new data. While paging through the new information, she ate something called a Raspberry Dynamo Bar that Torbiong had thrown in with her supplies. The old man must have included it as a joke: it was over-sweet and sticky with marshmallow and strangely flavored. She chucked it in the water and hoped it wouldn’t poison any fish.

Stephanie Pais had been killed in what the news reports called a “street fight” among a group of foreign visitors. Since the authorities couldn’t connect the foreigners to Pais, they had to assume she was an innocent bystander caught up in the violence. The papers didn’t mention Terzian at all.

Michelle looked through pages of followup. The gun that had shot the four men had never been found, though nearby canals were dragged. Two of the foreigners had survived the fight, though one died eight weeks later from complications of an operation. The survivor maintained his innocence and claimed that a complete stranger had opened fire on him and his friends, but the judges hadn’t believed him and sent him to prison. He lived a great many years and died in the Lightspeed War, along with most people caught in prisons during that deadly time.

One of the four men was Belorussian. Another Ukrainian. Another two Moldovan. All had served in the Soviet military in the past, in the Fourteenth Army in Transnistria. It frustrated Michelle that she couldn’t shout back in time to tell the Italians to connect these four to the murder of another ex-Soviet, seven weeks earlier, in Paris.

What the hell had Pais and Terzian been up to? Why were all these people with Transnistrian connections killing each other, and Pais?

Maybe it was Pais they’d been after all along. Her records at Santa Croce were missing, which was odd, because other personnel records from the time had survived. Perhaps someone was arranging that certain things not be known.

She tried a search on Santa Croce itself, and slogged through descriptions and mentions of a whole lot of Italian churches, including the famous one in Florence where Terzian and Pais had been seen at Machiavelli’s tomb. She refined the search to the Santa Croce relief organization, and found immediately the fact that let it all fall into place.

Santa Croce had maintained a refugee camp in Moldova during the civil war following the establishment of Transnistria. Michelle was willing to bet that Stephanie Pais had served in that camp. She wondered if any of the other players had been residents there.

She looked at the list of the other camps that Santa Croce had maintained in that period, which seemed to have been a busy one for them. One name struck her as familiar, and she had to think for a moment before she remembered why she knew it. It was at a Santa Croce camp in the Sidamo province of Ethiopia where the Green Leopard Plague had first broken out, the first transgenic epidemic.

It had been the first real attempt to modify the human body at the cellular level, to help marginal populations synthesize their own food, and it had been primitive compared to the more successful mods that came later. The ideal design for the efficient use of chlorophyll was a leaf, not the homo sapien—the designer would have been better advised to create a plague that made its victims leafy, and later designers, aiming for the same effect, did exactly that. And Green Leopard’s designer had forgotten that the epidermis already contains a solar-activated enzyme: melanin. The result on the African subjects was green skin mottled with dark splotches, like the black spots on an implausibly verdant leopard.

The Green Leopard Plague broke out in the Sidamo camp, then at other camps in the Horn of Africa. Then it leaped clean across the continent to Mozambique, where it first appeared at a Oxfam camp in the flood zone, spread rapidly across the continent, then leaped across oceans. It had been a generation before anyone found a way to disable it, and by then other transgenic modifiers had been released into the population, and there was no going back.

The world had entered Terzian’s future, the one he had proclaimed at the Conference of Classical and Modern Thought.

What, Michelle thought excitedly, if Terzian had known about Green Leopard ahead of time? His Cornucopia Theory had seemed prescient precisely because Green Leopard appeared just a few weeks after he’d delivered his paper. But if those Eastern bloc thugs had been involved somehow in the plague’s transmission, or were attempting to prevent Pais and Terzian from sneaking the modified virus to the camps. . . .

Yes! Michelle thought exultantly. That had to be it. No one had ever worked out where Green Leopard originated, but there had always been suspicion directed toward several semi-covert labs in the former Soviet empire. There was it. The only question was how Terzian, that American in Paris, had got involved. . . .

It had to be Stephanie, she thought. Stephanie, who Terzian had loved and who had loved him, and who had involved him in the desperate attempt to aid refugee populations.

For a moment, Michelle bathed in the beauty of the idea. Stephanie, dedicated and in love, had been murdered for her beliefs—realdeath!—and Terzian, broken-hearted, had carried on and brought the future—Michelle’s present—into being. A wonderful story! And no one had known it till now, no one had understood Stephanie’s sacrifice, or Terzian’s grief . . . not until the lonely mermaid, working in isolation on her rock, had puzzled it out.

“Hello, Michelle,” Darton said.

Michelle gave a cry of frustration and glared in fury down at her lover. He was in a yellow plastic kayak—kayaking was popular here, particularly in the Rock Islands—and had slipped his electric-powered boat along the margin of the island, moving in near-silence. He looked grimly up at her from below the pitcher plant that dangled below the overhang.

They had rebuilt him, of course, after his death. All the data was available in backup, in Delhi where he’d been taken apart, recorded, and rebuilt as an ape. He was back in a conventional male body, with the broad shoulders and white smile and short hairy bandy legs she remembered.

Michelle knew that he hadn’t made any backups during their time in Belau. He had his memories up to the point where he’d lain down on the nanobed in Delhi. That had been the moment when his love of Michelle had been burning its hottest, when he had just made the commitment to live with Michelle as an ape in the Rock Islands.

That burning love had been consuming him in the weeks since his resurrection, and Michelle was glad of it, had been rejoicing in every desperate, unanswered message that Darton sent sizzling through the ether.

“Damn it,” Michelle said, “I’m working.”

<Talk to me> Darton’s fingers formed. Michelle’s fingers made a ruder reply.

“I don’t understand,” Darton said. “We were in love. We were going to be together.”

“I’m not talking to you,” Michelle said. She tried to concentrate on her video display.

“We were still together when the accident happened,” Darton said. “I don’t understand why we can’t be together now.”

“I’m not listening, either,” said Michelle.

“I’m not leaving, Michelle!” Darton screamed. “I’m not leaving till you talk to me!”

White cockatoos shrieked in answer. Michelle quietly picked up her deck, rose to her feet, and headed inland. The voice that followed her was amplified, and she realized that Darton had brought his bullhorn.

“You can’t get away, Michelle! You’ve got to tell me what happened!”

I’ll tell you about Lisa Lee, she thought, so you can send her desperate messages, too.

Michelle had been deliriously happy for her first month in Belau, living in arboreal nests with Darton and spending the warm days describing their island’s unique biology. It was their first vacation, in Prague, that had torn Michelle’s happiness apart. It was there that they’d met Lisa Lee Baxter, the American tourist who thought apes were cute, and who wondered what these shaggy kids were doing so far from an arboreal habitat.

It wasn’t long before Michelle realized that Lisa Lee was at least two hundred years old, and that behind her diamond-blue eyes was the withered, mummified soul that had drifted into Prague from some waterless desert of the spirit, a soul that required for its continued existence the blood and vitality of the young. Despite her age and presumed experience, Lisa Lee’s ploys seemed to Michelle to be so obvious, so blatant. Darton fell for them all.

It was only because Lisa Lee had finally tired of him that Darton returned to Belau, chastened and solemn and desperate to be in love with Michelle again. But by then it was Michelle who was tired. And who had access to Darton’s medical records from the downloads in Delhi.

“You can’t get away, Michelle!”

Well, maybe not. Michelle paused with one hand on the banyan’s trunk. She closed her deck’s display and stashed it in a mesh bag with some of her other stuff, then walked out again on the overhanging limb.

“I’m not going to talk to you like this,” she said. “And you can’t get onto the island from that side, the overhang’s too acute.”

“Fine,” Darton said. The shouting had made him hoarse. “Come down here, then.”

She rocked forward and dived off the limb. The salt water world exploded in her senses. She extended her wings and fluttered close to Darton’s kayak, rose, and shook sea water from her eyes.

“There’s a tunnel,” she said. “It starts at about two meters and exits into the lake. You can swim it easily if you hold your breath.”

“All right,” he said. “Where is it?”

“Give me your anchor.”

She took his anchor, floated to the bottom, and set it where it wouldn’t damage the live coral.

She remembered the needle she’d taken to Jellyfish Lake, the needle she’d loaded with the mango extract to which Darton was violently allergic. Once in the midst of the jellyfish swarm, it had been easy to jab the needle into Darton’s calf, then let it drop to the anoxic depths of the lake.

He probably thought she’d given him a playful pinch.

Michelle had exulted in Darton’s death, the pallor, the labored breathing, the desperate pleading in the eyes.

It wasn’t murder, after all, just a fourth-degree felony. They’d build a new Darton in a matter of days. What was the value of a human life, when it could be infinitely duplicated, and cheaply? As far as Michelle was concerned, Darton had amusement value only.

The rebuilt Darton still loved her, and Michelle enjoyed that as well, enjoyed the fact that she caused him anguish, that he would pay for ages for his betrayal of her love.

Lisa Lee Baxter could take a few lessons from the mermaid, Michelle thought.

Michelle surfaced near the tunnel and raised a hand with the fingers set at <follow me>. Darton rolled off the kayak, still in his clothes, and splashed clumsily toward her.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

“Oh yes,” Michelle replied. “You go first. I’ll follow and pull you out if you get in trouble.”

He loved her, of course. That was why he panted a few times for breath, filled his lungs, and dove.

Michelle had not, of course, bothered to mention that the tunnel was fifteen meters long, quite far to go on a single breath. She followed him, very interested in how this would turn out, and when Darton got into trouble in one of the narrow places and tried to back out, she grabbed his shoes and held him right where he was.

He fought hard but none of his kicks struck her. She would remember the look in his wide eyes for a long time, the thunderstruck disbelief in the instant before his breath exploded from his lungs and he died.

She wished that she could speak again the parting words she’d whispered into Darton’s ear when he lay dying on the ridge above Jellyfish Lake. “I’ve just killed you. And I’m going to do it again.”

But even if she could have spoken the words underwater, they would have been untrue. Michelle supposed this was the last time she could kill him. Twice was dangerous, but a third time would be too clear a pattern. She could end up in jail, though, of course, you only did severe prison time for realdeath.

She supposed that she would have to discover his body at some point, but if she cast the kayak adrift, it wouldn’t have to be for a while. And then she’d be thunderstruck and grief-stricken that he’d thrown away his life on this desperate attempt to pursue her after she’d turned her back on him and gone inland, away from the sound of his voice.

Michelle looked forward to playing that part.

She pulled up the kayak’s anchor and let it coast away on the six-knot tide, then folded away her wings and returned to her nest in the banyan tree. She let the breeze dry her skin and got her deck from its bag and contemplated the data about Terzian and Stephanie Pais and the outbreak of the Green Leopard Plague.

Stephanie had died for what she believed in, killed by the agents of an obscure, murderous regime. It had been Terzian who had shot those four men in her defense, that was clear to her now. And Terzian, who lived a long time and then died in the Lightspeed War along with a few billion other people, had loved Stephanie and kept her secret till his death, a secret shared with the others who loved Stephanie and who had spread the plague among the refugee populations of the world.

It was realdeath that people suffered then, the death that couldn’t be corrected. Michelle knew that she understood that kind of death only as an intellectual abstract, not as something she would ever have to face or live with. To lose someone permanently . . . that was something she couldn’t grasp. Even the ancients, who faced realdeath every day, hadn’t been able to accept it, that’s why they’d invented the myth of Heaven.

Michelle thought about Stephanie’s death, the death that must have broken Terzian’s heart, and she contemplated the secret Terzian had kept all those years, and she decided that she was not inclined to reveal it.

Oh, she’d give Davout the facts, that was what he paid her for. She’d tell him what she could find out about Stephanie and the Transnistrians. But she wouldn’t mention the camps that Santa Croce had built across the starvation-scarred world, she wouldn’t point him at Sidamo and Green Leopard. If he drew those conclusions himself, then obviously the secret was destined to be revealed. But she suspected he wouldn’t—he was too old to connect those dots, not when obscure ex-Soviet entities and relief camps in the Horn of Africa were so far out of his reference.

Michelle would respect Terzian’s love, and Stephanie’s secret. She had some secrets of her own, after all.

The lonely mermaid finished her work for the day and sat on her overhanging limb to gaze down at the sea, and she wondered how long it would be before Darton called her again, and how she would torture him when he did.

—With thanks to Dr. Stephen C. Lee.

JUST LIKE THE ONES WE USED TO KNOW

Connie Willis

The snow started at 12:01 A.M. Eastern Standard Time just outside of Branford, Connecticut. Noah and Terry Blake, on their way home from a party at the Whittiers’ at which Miranda Whittier had said, “I guess you could call this our Christmas Eve Eve party!” at least fifty times, noticed a few stray flakes as they turned onto Canoe Brook Road, and by the time they reached home, the snow was coming down hard.

“Oh, good,” Tess said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield, “I’ve been hoping we’d have a white Christmas this year.”

At 1:37 A.M. Central Standard Time, Billy Grogan, filling in for KYZT’s late-night radio request show out of Duluth, said, “This just in from the National Weather Service. Snow advisory for the Great Lakes region tonight and tomorrow morning. Two to four inches expected,” and then went back to discussing the callers’ least favorite Christmas songs.

“I’ll tell you the one I hate,” a caller from Wauwatosa said. “ ‘White Christmas.’ I musta heard that thing five hundred times this month.”

“Actually,” Billy said, “according to the St. Cloud Evening News, Bing Crosby’s version of ‘White Christmas’ will be played 2150 times during the month of December, and other artists’ renditions of it will be played an additional 1890 times.”

The caller snorted. “One time’s too many for me. Who the heck wants a white Christmas anyway? I sure don’t.”

“Well, unfortunately, it looks like you’re going to get one,” Billy said. “And, in that spirit, here’s Destiny’s Child, singing ‘White Christmas.’ ”

At 1:45 A.M., a number of geese in the city park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, woke up to a dark, low, overcast sky and flew, flapping and honking loudly, over the city center, as if they had suddenly decided to fly farther south for the winter. The noise woke Maureen Reynolds, who couldn’t get back to sleep. She turned on KYOU, which was playing “Holly Jolly Oldies,” including “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Brenda Lee’s rendition of “White Christmas.”

At 2:15 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, Paula Devereaux arrived at DIA for the red-eye flight to Springfield, Illinois. It was beginning to snow, and as she waited in line at the express check-in (she was carrying on her bridesmaid dress and the bag with her shoes and slip and makeup—the last time she’d been in a wedding, her luggage had gotten lost and caused a major crisis) and in line at security and in line at the gate and in line to be de-iced, she began to hope they might not be able to take off, but no such luck.

Of course not, Paula thought, looking out the window at the snow swirling around the wing, because Stacey wants me at her wedding.

“I want a Christmas Eve wedding,” Stacey’d told Paula after she’d informed her she was going to be her maid of honor, “all candlelight and evergreens. And I want snow falling outside the windows.”

“What if the weather doesn’t cooperate?” Paula’d asked.

“It will,” Stacey’d said. And here it was, snowing. She wondered if it was snowing in Springfield, too. Of course it is, she thought. Whatever Stacey wants, Stacey gets, Paula thought. Even Jim.

Don’t think about that, she told herself. Don’t think about anything. Just concentrate on getting through the wedding. With luck, Jim won’t even be there except for the ceremony, and you won’t have to spend any time with him at all.

She picked up the in-flight magazine and tried to read and then plugged in her headphones and listened to Channel 4, “Seasonal Favorites.” The first song was “White Christmas” by the Statler Brothers.

At 3:38 A.M., it began to snow in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The geese circling the city flew back to the park, landed, and hunkered down to sit it out on their island in the lake. Snow began to collect on their backs, but they didn’t care, protected as they were by down and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat designed to keep them warm even in sub-zero temperatures.

At 3:39 A.M., Luke Lafferty woke up, convinced he’d forgotten to set the goose his mother had talked him into having for Christmas Eve dinner out to thaw. He went and checked. He had set it out. On his way back to bed, he looked out the window and saw it was snowing, which didn’t worry him. The news had said isolated snow showers for Wichita, ending by mid-morning, and none of his relatives lived more than an hour and a half away, except Aunt Lulla, and if she couldn’t make it, it wouldn’t exactly put a crimp in the conversation. His mom and Aunt Madge talked so much it was hard for anybody else to get a word in edgewise, especially Aunt Lulla. “She was always the shy one,” Luke’s mother said, and it was true, Luke couldn’t remember her saying anything other than “Please pass the potatoes,” at their family get-togethers.

What did worry him was the goose. He should never have let his mother talk him into having one. It was bad enough her having talked him into having the family dinner at his place. He had no idea how to cook a goose.

“What if something goes wrong?” he’d protested. “Butterball doesn’t have a goose hotline.”

“You won’t need a hotline,” his mother had said. “It’s just like cooking a turkey, and it’s not as if you had to cook it. I’ll be there in time to put it in the oven and everything. All you have to do is set it out to thaw. Do you have a roasting pan?”

“Yes,” Luke had said, but lying there, he couldn’t remember if he did. When he got up at 4:14 A.M. to check—he did—it was still snowing.

At 4:16 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, Slade Henry, filling in on WRYT’s late-late-night talk show out of Boise, said, “For all you folks who wanted a white Christmas, it looks like you’re going to get your wish. Three to six inches forecast for western Idaho.” He played several bars of Johnny Cash’s “White Christmas,” and then went back to discussing JFK’s assassination with a caller who was convinced Clinton was somehow involved.

“Little Rock isn’t all that far from Dallas, you know,” the caller said. “You could drive it in four and a half hours.”

Actually, you couldn’t, because I-30 was icing up badly, due to freezing rain that had started just after midnight and then turned to snow. The treacherous driving conditions did not slow Monty Luffer down, as he had a Ford Explorer. Shortly after five, he reached to change stations on the radio so he didn’t have to listen to “those damn Backstreet Boys” singing “White Christmas,” and slid out of control just west of Texarkana. He crossed the median, causing the semi in the left-hand eastbound lane to jam on his brakes and jackknife, and resulting in a thirty-seven-car pileup that closed the road for the rest of the night and all the next day.

At 5:21 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, four-year-old Miguel Gutierrez jumped on his mother, shouting, “Is it Christmas yet?”

“Not on Mommy’s stomach, honey,” Pilar murmured and rolled over.

Miguel crawled over her and repeated his question directly into her ear. “Is it Christmas yet?”

“No,” she said groggily. “Tomorrow’s Christmas. Go watch cartoons for a few minutes, okay? and then Mommy’ll get up,” and pulled the pillow over her head.

Miguel was back again immediately. He can’t find the remote, she thought wearily, but that couldn’t be it, because he jabbed her in the ribs with it. “What’s the matter, honey?” she said.

“Santa isn’t gonna come,” he said tearfully, which brought her fully awake.

He thinks Santa won’t be able to find him, she thought. This is all Joe’s fault. According to the original custody agreement, she had Miguel for Christmas and Joe had him for New Year’s, but he’d gotten the judge to change it so they split Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then, after she’d told Miguel, Joe had announced he needed to switch.

When Pilar had said no, he’d threatened to take her back to court, so she’d agreed, after which he’d informed her that “Christmas Day” meant her delivering Miguel on Christmas Eve so he could wake up and open his presents at Joe’s.

“He can open your presents to him before you come,” he’d said, knowing full well Miguel still believed in Santa Claus. So after supper she was delivering both Miguel and his presents to Joe’s in Escondido, where she would not get to see Miguel open them.

“I can’t go to Daddy’s,” Miguel had said when she’d explained the arrangements, “Santa’s gonna bring my presents here.”

“No, he won’t,” she’d said. “I sent Santa a letter and told him you’d be at your daddy’s on Christmas Eve, and he’s going to take your presents there.”

“You sent it to the North Pole?” he’d demanded.

“To the North Pole. I took it to the post office this morning,” and he’d seemed contented with that answer. Till now.

“Santa’s going to come,” she said, cuddling him to her. “He’s coming to Daddy’s, remember?”

“No, he’s not,” Miguel sniffled.

Damn Joe. I shouldn’t have given in, she thought, but every time they went back to court, Joe and his snake of a lawyer managed to wangle new concessions out of the judge, even though until the divorce was final, Joe had never paid any attention to Miguel at all. And she just couldn’t afford any more court costs right now.

“Are you worried about Daddy living in Escondido?” she asked Miguel. “Because Santa’s magic. He can travel all over California in one night. He can travel all over the world in one night.”

Miguel, snuggled against her, shook his head violently. “No, he can’t!”

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t snowing! I want it to snow. Santa can’t come in his sleigh if it doesn’t.”

Paula’s flight landed in Springfield at 7:48 A.M. Central Standard Time, twenty minutes late. Jim met her at the airport. “Stacey’s having her hair done,” he said. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get here in time. It was a good thing your flight was a few minutes late.”

“There was snow in Denver,” Paula said, trying not to look at him. He was as cute as ever, with the same knee-weakening smile.

“It just started to snow here,” he said.

How does she do it? Paula thought. You had to admire Stacey. Whatever she wanted, she got. I wouldn’t have had to mess with carrying this stuff on, Paula thought, handing Jim the hanging bag with her dress in it. There’s no way my luggage would have gotten lost. Stacey wanted it here.

“The roads are already starting to get slick,” Jim was saying. “I hope my parents get here okay. They’re driving down from Chicago.”

They will, Paula thought. Stacey wants them to.

Jim got Paula’s bags off the carousel and then said, “Hang on, I promised Stacey I’d tell her as soon as you got here.” He flipped open his cell phone and put it to his ear. “Stacey? She’s here. Yeah, I will. Okay, I’ll pick them up on our way. Yeah. Okay.”

He flipped the phone shut. “She wants us to pick up the evergreen garlands on our way,” he said, “and then I have to come back and get Kindra and David. We need to check on their flights before we leave.”

He led the way upstairs to ticketing so they could look at the arrival board. Outside the terminal windows snow was falling—large, perfect, lacy flakes.

“Kindra’s on the two-nineteen from Houston,” Jim said, scanning the board, “and David’s on the eleven-forty from Newark. Oh, good, they’re both on time.”

Of course they are, Paula thought, looking at the board. The snow in Denver must be getting worse. All the Denver flights had “delayed” next to them, and so did a bunch of others: Cheyenne and Portland and Richmond. As she watched, Boston and then Chicago changed from “on time” to “delayed” and Rapid City went from “delayed” to “cancelled.” She looked at Kindra’s and David’s flights again. They were still on time.

Ski areas in Aspen, Lake Placid, Squaw Valley, Stowe, Lake Tahoe, and Jackson Hole woke to several inches of fresh powder. The snow was greeted with relief by the people who had paid ninety dollars for their lift tickets, with irritation by the ski resort owners, who didn’t see why it couldn’t have come two weeks earlier when people were making their Christmas reservations, and with whoops of delight by snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps. They promptly set out from Breckenridge without maps, matches, helmets, avalanche beacons, avalanche probes, or telling anyone where they were going, for an off-limits backcountry area with “totally extreme slopes.”

At 7:05, Miguel came in and jumped on Pilar again, this time on her bladder, shouting, “It’s snowing! Now Santa can come! Now Santa can come!”

“Snowing?” she said blearily. In L.A.? “Snowing? Where?”

“On TV. Can I make myself some cereal?”

“No,” she said, remembering the last time. She reached for her robe. “You go watch TV some more and Mommy’ll make pancakes.”

When she brought the pancakes and syrup in, Miguel was sitting, absorbed, in front of the TV, watching a man in a green parka standing in the snow in front of an ambulance with flashing lights, saying, “—third weather-related fatality in Dodge City so far this morning—”

“Let’s find some cartoons to watch,” Pilar said, clicking the remote.

“—outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where snow and icy conditions have caused a multi-car accident—”

She clicked the remote again.

“—to Columbia, South Carolina, where a surprise snowstorm has shut off power to—”

Click.

“—problem seems to be a low-pressure area covering Canada and the northern two-thirds of the United States, bringing snow to the entire Midwest and Mid-Atlantic States and—”

Click.

“—snowing here in Bozeman—”

“I told you it was snowing,” Miguel said happily, eating his pancakes, “just like I wanted it to. After breakfast can we make a snowman?”

“Honey, it isn’t snowing here in California,” Pilar said. “That’s the national weather, it’s not here. That reporter’s in Montana, not California.”

Miguel grabbed the remote and clicked to a reporter standing in the snow in front of a giant redwood tree. “The snow started about four this morning here in Monterey, California. As you can see,” she said, indicating her raincoat and umbrella, “it caught everybody by surprise.”

“She’s in California,” Miguel said.

“She’s in northern California,” Pilar said, “which gets a lot colder than it does here in L.A. L.A.’s too warm for it to snow.”

“No, it’s not,” Miguel said and pointed out the window, where big white flakes were drifting down onto the palm trees across the street.

At 9:40 Central Standard Time the cell phone Nathan Andrews thought he’d turned off rang in the middle of a grant money meeting that was already going badly. Scheduling the meeting in Omaha on the day before Christmas had seemed like a good idea at the time—businessmen had hardly any appointments that day and the spirit of the season was supposed to make them more willing to open their pocketbooks—but instead they were merely distracted, anxious to do their last-minute Lexus shopping or get the Christmas office party started or whatever it was businessmen did, and worried about the snow that had started during rush hour this morning.

Plus, they were morons. “So you’re saying you want a grant to study global warming, but then you talk about wanting to measure snow levels,” one of them had said. “What does snow have to do with global warming?”

Nathan had tried to explain again how warming could lead to increased amounts of moisture in the atmosphere and thus increased precipitation in the form of rain and snow, and how that increased snowfall could lead to increased albedo and surface cooling.

“If it’s getting cooler, it’s not getting warmer,” another one of the businessmen had said. “It can’t be both.”

“As a matter of fact, it can,” he’d said and launched into his explanation of how polar melting could lead to an increase in freshwater in the North Atlantic, which would float on top of the Gulf Stream, preventing its warm water from sinking and cooling, and effectively shutting the current down. “Europe would freeze,” he’d said.

“Well, then, global warming would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?” yet another one had said. “Heat the place up.”

He had patiently tried to explain how the world would grow both hotter and colder, with widespread droughts, flooding, and a sharp increase in severe weather. “And these changes may happen extremely quickly,” he’d said. “Rather than temperatures gradually increasing and sea levels rising, there may be a sudden, unexpected event—a discontinuity. It may take the form of an abrupt, catastrophic temperature increase or a superhurricane or other form of megastorm, occurring without any warning. That’s why this project is so critical. By setting up a comprehensive climate data base, we’ll be able to create more accurate computer models, from which we’ll be able to—”

“Computer models!” one of them had snorted. “They’re wrong more often than they’re right!”

“Because they don’t include enough factors,” Nathan said. “Climate is an incredibly complicated system, with literally thousands of factors interacting in intricate ways—weather patterns, clouds, precipitation, ocean currents, manmade activities, crops. Thus far computer models have only been able to chart a handful of factors. This project will chart over two hundred of them and will enable the models to be exponentially more accurate. We’ll be able to predict a discontinuity before it happens—”

It was at that point that his cell phone rang. It was his graduate assistant Chin Sung, from the lab. “Where are you?” Chin demanded.

“In a grant meeting,” Nathan whispered. “Can I call you back in a few minutes?”

“Not if you still want the Nobel Prize,” Chin said. “You know that hare-brained theory of yours about global warming producing a sudden discontinuity? Well, I think you’d better get over here. Today may be the day you turn out to be right.”

“Why?” Nathan asked, gripping the phone excitedly. “What’s happened? Have the Gulf Stream temp readings dropped?”

“No, it’s not the currents. It’s what’s happening here.”

“Which is what?”

Instead of answering, Chin asked, “Is it snowing where you are?”

Nathan looked out the conference room window. “Yes.”

“I thought so. It’s snowing here, too.”

“And that’s what you called me about?” Nathan whispered. “Because it’s snowing in Nebraska in December? In case you haven’t looked at a calendar lately, winter started three days ago. It’s supposed to be snowing.”

“You don’t understand,” Chin said. “It isn’t just snowing in Nebraska. It’s snowing everywhere.”

“What do you mean, everywhere?”

“I mean everywhere. Seattle, Salt Lake City, Minneapolis, Providence, Chattanooga. All over Canada and the U.S. as far south as—” there was a pause and the sound of computer keys clicking, “Abilene and Shreveport and Savannah. No, wait, Tallahassee’s reporting light snow. As far south as Tallahassee.”

The jet stream must have dipped radically south. “Where’s the center of the low pressure system?”

“That’s just it,” Chin said. “There doesn’t seem to be one.”

“I’ll be right there,” Nathan said.

A mile from the highway snowboarders Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps, unable to see the road in heavily falling snow, drove their car into a ditch. “Shit,” Bodine said, and attempted to get out of it by revving the engine and then flooring it, a technique that only succeeded in digging them in to the point where they couldn’t open either car door.

It took Jim and Paula nearly two hours to pick up the evergreen garlands and get out to the church. The lacy flakes fell steadily faster and thicker, and it was so slick Jim had to crawl the last few miles. “I hope this doesn’t get any worse,” he said worriedly, “or people are going to have a hard time getting out here.”

But Stacey wasn’t worried at all. “Isn’t it beautiful? I wanted it to snow for my wedding more than anything,” she said, meeting them at the door of the church. “Come here, Paula, you’ve got to see how the snow looks through the sanctuary windows. It’s going to be perfect.”

Jim left immediately to go pick up Kindra and David, which Paula was grateful for. Being that close to him in the car had made her start entertaining the ridiculous hopes about him she’d had when they first met. And they were ridiculous. One look at Stacey had shown her that.

The bride-to-be looked beautiful even in a sweater and jeans, her makeup exquisite, her blonde hair upswept into glittery snowflake-sprinkled curls. Every time Paula had had her hair done to be in a wedding, she had come out looking like someone in a bad 1950’s movie. How does she do it? Paula wondered. You watch, the snow will stop and start up again just in time for the ceremony.

But it didn’t. It continued to come down steadily, and when the minister arrived for the rehearsal, she said, “I don’t know. It took me half an hour to get out of my driveway. You may want to think about canceling.”

“Don’t be silly. We can’t cancel. It’s a Christmas Eve wedding,” Stacey said, and made Paula start tying the evergreen garlands to the pews with white satin ribbon.

It was sprinkling in Santa Fe when Bev Carey arrived at her hotel, and by the time she’d checked in and ventured out into the plaza, it had turned into an icy, driving rain that went right through the light coat and thin gloves she’d brought with her. She had planned to spend the morning shopping, but the shops had signs on them saying “Closed Christmas Eve and Christmas Day,” and the sidewalk in front of the Governor’s Palace, where, according to her guidebook, Zunis and Navajos sat to sell authentic silver-and-turquoise jewelry, was deserted.

But at least it’s not snowing, she told herself, trudging, shivering, back to the hotel. And the shop windows were decorated with ristras and lights in the shape of chili peppers, and the Christmas tree in the hotel lobby was decorated with kachina dolls.

Her friend Janice had already called and left a message with the hotel clerk. And if I don’t call her back, she’ll be convinced I’ve taken a bottle of sleeping pills, Bev thought, going up to her room. On the way to the airport, Janice had asked anxiously, “You haven’t been having suicidal thoughts, have you?” and when her friend Louise had found out what Bev was planning, she’d said, “I saw this piece on Dateline the other night about suicides at Christmas, and how people who’ve lost a spouse are especially vulnerable. You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you?”

They none of them understood that she was doing this to save her life, not end it, that it was Christmas at home, with its lighted trees and evergreen wreaths and candles, that would kill her. And its snow.

“I know you miss Howard,” Janice had said, “and that with Christmas coming, you’re feeling sad.”

Sad? She felt flayed, battered, beaten. Every memory, every thought of her husband, every use of the past tense even—“Howard liked . . .” “Howard knew . . .” “Howard was . . .”—was like a deadly blow. The grief-counseling books all talked about “the pain of losing a loved one,” but she had had no idea the pain could be this bad. It was like being stabbed over and over, and her only hope had been to get away. She hadn’t “decided to go to Santa Fe for Christmas.” She had run there like a victim fleeing a murderer.

She took off her drenched coat and gloves and called Janice. “You promised you’d call as soon as you got there,” Janice said reproachfully. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Bev said. “I was out walking around the Plaza.” She didn’t say anything about its raining. She didn’t want Janice saying, I told you so. “It’s beautiful here.”

“I should have come with you,” Janice said. “It’s snowing like crazy here. Ten inches so far. I suppose you’re sitting on a patio drinking a margarita right now.”

“Sangria,” Bev lied. “I’m going sightseeing this afternoon. The houses here are all pink and tan adobe with bright blue and red and yellow doors. And right now the whole town’s decorated with luminarias. You should see them.”

“I wish I could,” Janice sighed. “All I can see is snow. I have no idea how I’m going to get to the store. Oh, well, at least we’ll have a white Christmas. It’s so sad Howard can’t be here to see this. He always loved white Christmases, didn’t he?”

Howard, consulting the Farmer’s Almanac, reading the weather forecast out loud to her, calling her over to the picture window to watch the snow beginning to fall, saying, “Looks like we’re going to get a white Christmas this year,” as if it were a present under the tree, putting his arm around her—

“Yes,” Bev managed to say through the sudden, searing stab of pain. “He did.”

It was spitting snow when Warren Nesvick checked into the Marriott in Baltimore. As soon as he got Shara up to the suite, he told her he had to make a business call, “and then I’ll be all yours, honey.” He went down to the lobby. The TV in the corner was showing a weather map. He looked at it for a minute and then got out his cell phone.

“Where are you?” his wife Marjean said when she answered.

“In St. Louis,” he said. “Our flight got rerouted here because of snow at O’Hare. What’s the weather like there?”

“It’s snowing,” she said. “When do you think you’ll be able to get a flight out?”

“I don’t know. Everything’s booked because of it being Christmas Eve. I’m waiting to see if I can get on standby. I’ll call you as soon as I know something,” and hung up before she could ask him which flight.

It took Nathan an hour and a half to drive the fifteen miles to the lab. During the ride he considered the likelihood that this was really a discontinuity and not just a major snowstorm. Global warming proponents (and opponents) confused the two all the time. Every hurricane, tornado, heat wave, or dry spell was attributed to global warming, even though nearly all of them fell well within the range of normal weather patterns.

And there had been big December snowstorms before. The blizzard of 1888, for instance, and the Christmas Eve storm of 2002. And Chin was probably wrong about there being no center to the low pressure system. The likely explanation was that there was more than one system involved—one centered in the Great Lakes and another just east of the Rockies, colliding with warm, moist air from the Gulf Coast to create unusually widespread snow.

And it was widespread. The car radio was reporting snow all across the Midwest and the entire East Coast—Topeka, Tulsa, Peoria, northern Virginia, Hartford, Montpelier, Reno, Spokane. No, Reno and Spokane were west of the Rockies. There must be a third system, coming down from the Northwest. But it was still hardly a discontinuity.

The lab parking lot hadn’t been plowed. He left the car on the street and struggled through the already knee-deep snow to the door, remembering when he was halfway across the expanse that Nebraska was famous for pioneers who got lost going out to the barn in a blizzard and whose frozen bodies weren’t found till the following spring.

He reached the door, opened it, and stood there a moment blowing on his frozen hands and looking at the TV Chin had stuck on a cart in the corner of the lab. On it, a pretty reporter in a parka and a Mickey Mouse hat was standing in heavy snow in front of what seemed to be a giant snowman. “The snow has really caused problems here at Disney World,” she said over the sound of a marching band playing “White Christmas.” “Their annual Christmas Eve Parade has—”

“Well, it’s about time,” Chin said, coming in from the fax room with a handful of printouts. “What took you so long?”

Nathan ignored that. “Have you got the IPOC data?” he asked.

Chin nodded. He sat down at his terminal and started typing. The upper left-hand screen lit up with columns of numbers.

“Let me see the National Weather Service map,” Nathan said, unzipping his coat and sitting down at the main console.

Chin called up a U.S. map nearly half-covered with blue, from western Oregon and Nevada east all the way to the Atlantic and up through New England and south to the Oklahoma panhandle, northern Mississippi, Alabama, and most of Georgia.

“Good Lord, that’s even bigger than Marina in ’92,” Nathan said. “Have you got a satellite photo?”

Chin nodded and called it up. “And this is a real-time composite of all the data coming in, including weather stations, towns, and spotters reporting in. The white’s snow,” he added unnecessarily.

The white covered even more territory than the blue on the NWS map, with jagged fingers stretching down into Arizona and Louisiana and west into Oregon and California. Surrounding them were wide uneven pink bands. “Is the pink rain?” Nathan asked.

“Sleet,” Chin said. “So what do you think? It’s a discontinuity, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Nathan said, calling up the barometric readings and starting through them.

“What else could it be? It’s snowing in Orlando. And San Diego.”

“It’s snowed both of those places before,” Nathan said. “It’s even snowed in Death Valley. The only place in the U.S. where it’s never snowed is the Florida Keys. And Hawaii, of course. Everything on this map right now is within the range of normal weather events. You don’t have to start worrying till it starts snowing in the Florida Keys.”

“What about other places?” Chin asked, looking at the center right-hand screen.

“What do you mean, other places?”

“I mean, it isn’t just snowing in the U.S. I’m getting reports from Cancun. And Jerusalem.”

At eleven-thirty Pilar gave up trying to explain that there wasn’t enough snow to make a snowman and took Miguel outside, bundled up in a sweatshirt, a sweater, and his warm jacket, with a pair of Pilar’s tube socks for mittens. He lasted about five minutes.

When they came back in, Pilar settled him at the kitchen table with crayons and paper so he could draw a picture of a snowman and went into the living room to check the weather forecast. It was really snowing hard out there, and she was getting a little worried about taking Miguel down to Escondido. Los Angelenos didn’t know how to drive in snow, and Pilar’s tires weren’t that good.

“—snowing here in Hollywood,” said a reporter standing in front of the nearly invisible Hollywood sign, “and this isn’t special effects, folks, it’s the real thing.”

She switched channels. “—snowing in Santa Monica,” a reporter standing on the beach was saying, “but that isn’t stopping the surfers. . . .”

Click. “—para la primera vez en cincuenta anos en Marina del Rey—”

Click. “—snowing here in LA for the first time in nearly fifty years. We’re here on the set of XXX II with Vin Diesel. What do you think of the snow, Vin?”

She gave up and went back in the kitchen where Miguel announced he was ready to go outside again. She talked him into listening to Alvin and the Chipmunks instead. “Okay,” he said, and she left him warbling “White Christmas” along with Alvin and went in to check the weather again. The Santa Monica reporter briefly mentioned the roads were wet before moving on to interview a psychic who claimed to have predicted the snowstorm, and on a Spanish-language channel she caught a glimpse of the 405 moving along at its usual congested pace.

The roads must not be too bad, she thought, or they’d all be talking about it, but she still wondered if she hadn’t better take Miguel down to Escondido early. She hated to give up her day with him, but his safety was the important thing, and the snow wasn’t letting up at all.

When Miguel came into the living room and asked when they could go outside, she said, “After we pack your suitcase, okay? Do you want to take your Pokémon jammies or your Spider-Mans?” and began gathering up his things.

By noon Eastern Standard Time, it was snowing in every state in the lower forty-eight. Elko, Nevada, had over two feet of snow, Cincinnati was reporting thirty-eight inches at the airport, and it was spitting snow in Miami.

On talk radio, JFK’s assassination had given way to the topic of the snow. “You mark my words, the terrorists are behind this,” a caller from Terre Haute said. “They want to destroy our economy, and what better way to do it than by keeping us from doing our last-minute Christmas shopping? To say nothing of what this snow’s going to do to my relationship with my wife. How am I supposed to go buy her something in this weather? I tell you, this has got Al Qaeda’s name written all over it.”

During lunch, Warren Nesvick told Shara he needed to go try his business call again. “The guy I was trying to get in touch with wasn’t in the office before. Because of the snow,” he said and went out to the lobby to call Marjean again. On the TV in the corner, there were shots of snow-covered runways and jammed ticket counters. A blonde reporter in a tight red sweater was saying, “Here in Cincinnati, the snow just keeps on falling. The airport’s still open, but officials indicate it may have to close. Snow is building up on the runways—”

He called Marjean. “I’m in Cincinnati,” he told her. “I managed to get a flight at the last minute. There’s a three-hour layover till my connecting flight, but at least I’ve got a seat.”

“But isn’t it snowing in Cincinnati?” she asked. “I was just watching the TV and . . .”

“It’s supposed to let up here in an hour or so. I’m really sorry about this, honey. You know I’d be there for Christmas Eve if I could.”

“I know,” she said, sounding disappointed. “It’s okay, Warren. You can’t control the weather.”

The television was on in the hotel lobby when Bev came down to lunch. “. . . snowing in Albuquerque,” she heard the announcer say, “Raton, Santa Rosa, and Wagon Mound.”

But not in Santa Fe, she told herself firmly, going into the dining room. “It hardly ever snows there,” the travel agent had said, “New Mexico’s a desert. And when it does snow, it never sticks.”

“There’s already four inches in Espanola,” a plump waitress in a ruffled blouse and full red skirt was saying to the busboy. “I’m worried about getting home.”

“I’d rather it didn’t snow for Christmas,” Bev had teased Howard last year, “all those people trying to get home.”

“Heresy, woman, heresy! What would Currier and Ives think to hear you talk that way?” he’d said, clutching his chest.

Like she was clutching hers now. The plump waitress was looking at her worriedly. “Are you all right, seńora?”

“Yes,” Bev said. “One for lunch, please.”

The waitress led her to a table, still looking concerned, and handed her a menu, and she clung to it like a life raft, concentrating fiercely on the unfamiliar terms, the exotic ingredients: blue corn tortillas, quesadillas, chipotle—

“Can I get you something to drink?” the waitress asked.

“Yes,” Bev said brightly, looking at the waitress’s name tag. “I’d like some sangria, Carmelita.”

Carmelita nodded and left, and Bev looked around the room, thinking, I’ll drink my sangria and watch the other diners, eavesdrop on their conversations, but she was the only person in the broad tiled room. It faced the patio, and through the glass doors the rain, sleet now, drove sharply against the terracotta pots of cactus outside, the stacked tables and chairs, the collapsed umbrellas.

She had envisioned herself having lunch out on the patio, sitting in the sun under one of those umbrellas, looking out at the desert and listening to a mariachi band. The music coming over the loudspeakers was Christmas carols. As she listened, “Let It Snow” came to an end and the Supremes began to sing “White Christmas.”

“What would cloud-seeding be listed under?” Howard had asked her one year when there was still no snow by the twenty-second, coming into the dining room, where she was wrapping presents, with the phone book.

“You are not hiring a cloud seeder,” she had laughed.

“Would it be under ‘clouds’ or ‘rainmaker’ ?” he’d asked mock-seriously. “Or ‘seeds’ ?” And when it had finally snowed on the twenty-fourth, he had acted as if he was personally responsible.

“You did not cause this, Howard,” she had told him.

“How do you know?” he’d laughed, catching her into his arms.

I can’t stand this, Bev thought, looking frantically around the dining room for Carmelita and her sangria. How do other people do it? She knew lots of widows, and they all seemed fine. When people mentioned their husbands, when they talked about them in the past tense, they were able to stand there, to smile back, to talk about them. Doreen Matthews had even said, “Now that Bill’s gone, I can finally have all pink ornaments on the Christmas tree. I’ve always wanted to have a pink tree, but he wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Here’s your sangria,” Carmelita said, still looking concerned. “Would you like some tortilla chips and salsa?”

“Yes, thank you,” Bev said brightly. “And I think I’ll have the chicken enchiladas.”

Carmelita nodded and disappeared again. Bev took a gulp of her sangria and got her guidebook out of her bag. She would have a nice lunch and then go sightseeing. She opened the book to Area Attractions. “Pueblo de San Ildefonso.” No, that would involve a lot of walking around outdoors, and it was still sleeting outside the window.

“Petroglyphs National Monument.” No, that was down near Albuquerque, where it was snowing. “El Santuario de Chimayo. 28 mi. north of Santa Fe on Hwy. 76. Historic weaving center, shops, chapel dubbed ‘American Lourdes.’ The dirt in the anteroom beside the altar is reputed to have healing powers when rubbed on the afflicted part of the body.”

But I hurt all over, she thought.

“Other attractions include five nineteenth-century reredos, a carving of Santo Nino de Atocha, carved wooden altarpiece. (See also Lagrima, p. 98.)”

She turned the page to ninety-eight. “Chapel of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, Lagrima, 28 mi. SE of Santa Fe on Hwy 41. 16th century adobe mission church. In 1968 the statue of the Virgin Mary in the transept was reported to shed healing tears.”

Healing tears, holy dirt, and wasn’t there supposed to be a miraculous staircase right here in town? Yes, there it was. The Loretto Chapel. “Open 10-5 Apr-Oct, closed Nov-Mar.”

It would have to be Chimayo. She got out the road map the car rental place had given her, and when Carmelita came with the chips and salsa, she said, “I’m thinking of driving up to Chimayo. What’s the best route?”

“Today?” Carmelita said, dismayed. “That’s not a good idea. The road’s pretty curvy, and we just got a call from Taos that it’s really snowing hard up there.”

“How about one of the pueblos then?”

She shook her head. “You have to take dirt roads to get there, and it’s getting very icy. You’re better off doing something here in town. There’s a Christmas Eve mass at the cathedral at midnight,” she added helpfully.

But I need something to do this afternoon, Bev thought, bending over the guidebook again. Indian Research Center—open weekends only. El Rancho de las Golondrinas—closed Nov-Feb. Santa Fe Historical Museum—closed Dec 24Jan 1.

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum—open daily.

Perfect, Bev thought, reading the entry: “Houses world’s largest permanent collection of O’Keeffe’s work. A major American artist, O’Keeffe lived in the Santa Fe area for many years. When she first arrived in 1929, she was physically and psychologically ill, but the dry, hot New Mexico climate healed and inspired her, and she painted much of her finest work here.”

Perfect. Sun-baked paintings of cow skulls and giant tropical flowers and desert buttes. “Open daily. 10 A.M.6 P.M. 217 Johnson St.”

She looked up the address on her map. Only three blocks off the Plaza, within easy walking distance even in this weather. Perfect. When Carmelita brought her enchiladas, she attacked them eagerly.

“Did you find somewhere to go in town?” Carmelita asked curiously.

“Yes, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.”

“Oh,” Carmelita said and vanished again. She was back almost immediately. “I’m sorry, seńora, but they’re closed.”

“Closed? It said in the guidebook the museum’s open daily.”

“It’s because of the snow.”

“Snow?” Bev said and looked past her to the patio where the sleet had turned to a heavy, slashing white.

At 1:20, Jim called from the airport to tell them Kindra’s and David’s planes had both been delayed, and a few minutes later the bakery delivered the wedding cake. “No, no,” Stacey said, “that’s supposed to go to the country club. That’s where the reception is.”

“We tried,” the driver said. “We couldn’t get through. We can either leave it here or take it back to the bakery, take your pick. If we can get back to the bakery. Which I doubt.”

“Leave it here,” Stacey said. “Jim can take it over when he gets here.”

“But you just heard him,” Paula said. “If the truck can’t get through, Jim won’t be able to—” The phone rang.

It was the florist, calling to say they weren’t going to be able to deliver the flowers. “But you have to,” Stacey said. “The wedding’s at five. Tell them they have to, Paula,” and handed the phone to her.

“Isn’t there any way you can get here?” Paula asked.

“Not unless there’s a miracle,” the florist said. “Our truck’s in a ditch out at Pawnee, and there’s no telling how long it’ll take a tow truck to get to it. It’s a skating rink out there.”

“Jim will have to go pick up the flowers when he gets back with Kindra and David,” Stacey said blithely when Paula told her the bad news. “He can do it on his way to the country club. Is the string quartet here yet?”

“No, and I’m not sure they’ll be able to get here. The florist said the roads are really icy,” Paula said, and the viola player walked in.

“I told you,” Stacey said happily, “it’ll all work out. Did I tell you, they’re going to play Boccherini’s ‘Minuet No.8’ for the wedding march?” and went to get the candles for the altar stands.

Paula went over to the viola player, a lanky young guy. He was brushing snow off his viola case. “Where’s the rest of the quartet?”

“They’re not here yet?” he said, surprised. “I had a lesson to give in town and told ’em I’d catch up with them.” He sat down to take off his snow-crusted boots. “And then my car ended up in a snowbank, and I had to walk the last mile and a half.” He grinned up at her, panting. “It’s times like these I wish I played the piccolo. Although,” he said, looking her up and down, “there are compensations. Please tell me you’re not the bride.”

“I’m not the bride,” she said. Even though I wish I was.

“Great!” he said and grinned at her again. “What are you doing after the wedding?”

“I’m not sure there’s going to be one. Do you think the other musicians got stuck on the way here, too?”

He shook his head. “I would have seen them.” He pulled out a cell phone and punched buttons. “Shep? Yeah, where are you?” There was a pause. “That’s what I was afraid of. What about Leif ?” Another pause. “Well, if you find him, call me back.” He flipped the phone shut. “Bad news. The violins were in a fender bender and are waiting for the cops. They don’t know where the cello is. How do you feel about a viola solo of ‘Minuet No.8’ ?”

Paula went to inform Stacey. “The police can bring them out,” Stacey said blithely and handed Paula the white candles for the altar stands. “The candlelight on the snow’s going to be just beautiful.”

At 1:48 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, snow flurries were reported at Sunset Point in the Florida Keys.

“I get to officially freak out now, right?” Chin asked Nathan. “Jeez, it really is the discontinuity you said would happen!”

“We don’t know that yet,” Nathan said, looking at the National Weather Service map, which was now entirely blue, except for a small spot near Fargo and another one in north-central Texas that Nathan thought was Waco and Chin was convinced was the president’s ranch in Crawford.

“What do you mean, we don’t know that yet? It’s snowing in Barcelona. It’s snowing in Moscow.”

“It’s supposed to be snowing in Moscow. Remember Napoleon? It’s not unusual for it to be snowing in over two-thirds of these places reporting in: Oslo, Katmandu, Buffalo—”

“Well, it’s sure as hell unusual for it to be snowing in Beirut,” Chin said, pointing to the snow reports coming in, “and Honolulu. I don’t care what you say, I’m freaking out.”

“You can’t,” Nathan said, superimposing an isobaric grid over the map. “I need you to feed me the temp readings.”

Chin started over to his terminal and then came back. “What do you think?” he asked seriously. “Do you think it’s a discontinuity?”

There was nothing else it could be. Winter storms were frequently very large, the February 1994 European storm had been huge, and the one in December 2002 had covered over a third of the U.S., but there’d never been one that covered the entire continental United States. And Mexico and Manitoba and Belize, he thought, watching the snowfall reports coming in.

In addition, snow was falling in six locations where it had never fallen before, and in twenty-eight like Yuma, Arizona, where it had snowed only once or twice in the last hundred years. New Orleans had a foot of snow, for God’s sake. And it was snowing in Guatemala.

And it wasn’t behaving like any storm he’d ever seen. According to the charts, snow had started simultaneously in Springfield, Illinois, Hoodoo, Tennessee, Park City, Utah, and Branford, Connecticut, and spread in a completely random pattern. There was no center to the storm, no leading edge, no front.

And no let-up. No station had reported the snow stopping, or even diminishing, and new stations were reporting in all the time. At this rate, it would be snowing everywhere by—he made a rapid calculation—five o’clock.

“Well?” Chin said. “Is it?” He looked really frightened.

And him freaking out is the last thing I need with all this data to feed in, Nathan thought. “We don’t have enough data to make a determination yet,” he said.

“But you think it might be,” Chin persisted. “Don’t you? You think all the signs are there?”

Yes, Nathan thought. “Definitely not,” he said. “Look at the TV.”

“What about it?”

“There’s one sign that’s not present.” He gestured at the screen. “No logo.”

“No what?”

“No logo. Nothing qualifies as a full-fledged crisis until the cable newschannels give it a logo of its own, preferably with a colon. You know, O.J.: Trial of the Century or Sniper at Large or Attack: Iraq.” He pointed at Dan Rather standing in thickly falling snow in front of the White House. “Look, it says Breaking News, but there’s no logo. So it can’t be a discontinuity. So feed me those temps. And then go see if you can scare up a couple more TVs. I want to get a look at exactly what’s going on out there. Maybe that’ll give us some kind of clue.”

Chin nodded, looking reassured, and went to get the temp readings. They were all over the place, too, from eighteen below in Saskatoon to thirty-one above in Ft. Lauderdale. Nathan ran them against average temps for mid-December and then highs and lows for the twenty-fourth, looking for patterns, anomalies.

Chin wheeled in a big-screen TV on an AV cart, along with Professor Adler’s portable, and plugged them in. “What do you want these on?” he asked.

“CNN, the Weather Channel, Fox—” Nathan began.

“Oh, no,” Chin said.

“What? What is it?”

“Look,” Chin said and pointed to Professor Adler’s portable. Wolf Blitzer was standing in the snow in front of the Empire State Building. At the lower right-hand corner was the CNN symbol. And in the upper left-hand corner: Storm of the Century.

As soon as Pilar had Miguel’s things packed, she checked on the TV again.

“—resulting in terrible road conditions,” the reporter was saying. “Police are reporting accidents at the intersection of Sepulveda and Figueroa, the intersection of San Pedro and Whittier, the intersection of Hollywood and Vine,” while accident alerts crawled across the bottom of the screen. “We’re getting reports of a problem on the Santa Monica Freeway just past the Culver City exit and . . . this just in, the northbound lanes of the 110 are closed due to a five-car accident. Travelers are advised to take alternate routes.”

The phone rang. Miguel ran into the kitchen to answer it. “Hi, Daddy, it’s snowing,” he shouted into the receiver, “We’re going outside and make a snowman,” and then said, “Okay,” and handed it to Pilar.

“Go watch cartoons and let Mommy talk to Daddy,” she said and handed him the remote. “Hello, Joe.”

“I want you to bring Miguel down now,” her ex-husband said without preamble, “before the snow gets bad.”

“It’s already bad,” Pilar said, standing in the door of the kitchen watching Miguel flip through the channels:

“—really slick out here—”

“—advised to stay home. If you don’t have to go someplace, folks, don’t.”

“—treacherous conditions—”

“I’m not sure taking him out in this is a good idea,” Pilar said. “The TV’s saying the roads are really slick, and—”

“And I’m saying bring him down here now,” Joe said nastily. “I know what you’re doing. You think you can use a little snow as an excuse to keep my son away from me on Christmas.”

“I am not,” she protested. “I’m just thinking about Miguel’s safety. I don’t have snow tires—”

“Like hell you’re thinking about the kid! You’re thinking this is a way to do me out of my rights. Well, we’ll see what my lawyer has to say about that. I’m calling him and the judge and telling them what you’re up to, and that I’m sick of this crap, I want full custody. And then I’m coming up there myself to get him. Have him ready when I get there!” he shouted and hung up the phone.

At 2:22 P.M., Luke’s mother called on her cell phone to say she was going to be late and to go ahead and start the goose. “The roads are terrible, and people do not know how to drive. This red Subaru ahead of me just swerved into my lane and—”

“Mom, Mom,” Luke cut in, “the goose. What do you mean, start the goose? What do I have to do?”

“Just put it in the oven. Shorty and Madge should be there soon, and she can take over. All you have to do is get it started. Take the bag of giblets out first. Put an aluminum foil tent over it.”

“An aluminum-foil what?”

“Tent. Fold a piece of foil in half and lay it over the goose. It keeps it from browning too fast.”

“How big a piece?”

“Big enough to cover the goose. And don’t tuck in the edges.”

“Of the oven?”

“Of the tent. You’re making this much harder than it is. You wouldn’t believe how many cars there are off the road, and every one of them’s an SUV. It serves them right. They think just because they’ve got four-wheel drive, they can go ninety miles an hour in a blizzard—”

“Mom, Mom, what about stuffing? Don’t I have to stuff the goose?”

“No. Nobody does stuffing inside the bird anymore. Salmonella. Just put the goose in the roasting pan and stick it in the oven. At 350 degrees.”

I can do that, Luke thought, and did. Ten minutes later he realized he’d forgotten to put the aluminum foil tent on. It took him three tries to get a piece the right size, and his mother hadn’t said whether the shiny or the dull side should be facing out, but when he checked the goose twenty minutes later, it seemed to be doing okay. It smelled good, and there were already juices forming in the pan.

After Pilar hung up with Joe, she sat at the kitchen table a long time, trying to think which was worse, letting Joe take Miguel out into this snowstorm or having Miguel witness the fight that would ensue if she tried to stop him. “Please, please . . .” she murmured, without even knowing what she was praying for.

Miguel came into the kitchen and climbed into her lap. She wiped hastily at her eyes. “Guess what, honey?” she said brightly. “Daddy’s going to come get you in a little bit. You need to go pick out which toys you want to take.”

“Hunh-unh,” Miguel said, shaking his head.

“I know you wanted to make a snowman,” she said, “but guess what? It’s snowing in Escondido, too. You can make a snowman with Daddy.”

“Hunh-unh,” he said, climbing down off her lap and tugging on her hand. He led her into the living room.

“What, honey?” she said, and he pointed at the TV. On it, the Santa Monica reporter was saying, “—the following road closures: I-5 from Chula Vista to Santa Ana, I-15 from San Diego to Barstow, Highway 78 from Oceanside to Escondido—”

Thank you, she murmured silently, thank you. Miguel ran out to the kitchen and came back with a piece of construction paper and a red crayon. “Here,” he said, thrusting them at Pilar. “You have to write Santa. So he’ll know to bring my presents here and not Daddy’s.”

By ordering sopapillas and then Mexican coffee, Bev managed to make lunch last till nearly two o’clock. When Carmelita brought the coffee, she looked anxiously out at the snow piling up on the patio and then back at Bev, so Bev asked for her check and signed it so Carmelita could leave, and then went back up to her room for her coat and gloves.

Even if the shops were closed, she could window-shop, she told herself, she could look at the Navajo rugs and Santa Clara pots and Indian jewelry displayed in the stores, but the snowstorm was getting worse. The luminarias that lined the walls were heaped with snow, the paper bags that held the candles sagging under the soggy weight.

They’ll never get them lit, Bev thought, turning into the Plaza.

By the time she had walked down one side of it, the snow had become a blizzard, it was coming down so hard you couldn’t see across the Plaza, and there was a cutting wind. She gave up and went back to the hotel.

In the lobby, the staff, including the front desk clerk and Carmelita in her coat and boots, was gathered in front of the TV looking at a weather map of New Mexico. “. . . currently snowing in most of New Mexico,” the announcer was saying, “including Gallup, Carlsbad, Ruidoso, and Roswell. Travel advisories out for central, western, and southern New Mexico, including Lordsburg, Las Cruces, and Truth or Consequences. It looks like a white Christmas for most of New Mexico, folks.”

“You have two messages,” the front desk clerk said when he saw her. They were both from Janice, and she phoned again while Bev was taking her coat off up in her room.

“I just saw on TV that it’s snowing in Santa Fe, and you said you were going sightseeing,” Janice said. “I just wondered if you were okay.”

“I’m here at the hotel,” Bev said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” Janice said, relieved. “Are you watching TV? The weathermen are saying this isn’t an ordinary storm. It’s some kind of extreme mega-storm. We’ve got three feet here. The power’s out all over town, and the airport just closed. I hope you’re able to get home. Oops, the lights just flickered. I’d better go hunt up some candles before the lights go off,” she said, and hung up.

Bev turned on the TV. The local channel was listing closings—“The First United Methodist Church Christmas pageant has been cancelled and there will be no Posadas tonight at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Canyon Day Care Center will close at three P.M. . . .”

She clicked the remote. CNBC was discussing earlier Christmas Eve snowstorms, and on CNN, Daryn Kagan was standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue in a snowdrift. “This is usually the busiest shopping day of the year,” she said, “but as you can see—”

She clicked the remote, looking for a movie to watch. Howard would have loved this, she thought involuntarily. He would have been in his element.

She clicked quickly through the other channels, trying to find a film, but they were all discussing the weather. “It looks like the whole country’s going to get a white Christmas this year,” Peter Jennings was saying, “whether they want it or not.”

You’d think there’d be a Christmas movie on, Bev thought grimly, flipping through the channels again. It’s Christmas Eve. Christmas in Connecticut or Holiday Inn. Or White Christmas.

Howard had insisted on watching it every time he came across it with the remote, even if it was nearly over. “Why are you watching that?” she’d ask, coming in to find him glued to the next-to-the-last scene. “We own the video.”

“Shh,” he’d say. “It’s just getting to the good part,” and he’d lean forward to watch Bing Crosby push open the barn doors to reveal fake-looking snow falling on the equally fake-looking set.

When he came into the kitchen afterward, she’d say sarcastically, “How’d it end this time? Did Bing and Rosemary Clooney get back together? Did they save the General’s inn and all live happily ever after?”

But Howard would refuse to be baited. “They got a white Christmas,” he’d say happily and go off to look out the windows at the clouds.

Except for news about the storm, there was nothing at all on except an infomercial selling a set of Ginsu knives. How appropriate, she thought, and sat back on the bed to watch it.

At 2:08, the weight of the new loose snow triggered a huge avalanche in the “totally extreme slopes” area near Breckenridge, knocking down huge numbers of Ponderosa pines and burying everything in its path, but not Kent and Bodine, who were still in their Honda, trying to keep warm and survive on a box of Tic-Tacs and an old donut Kent found in the glove compartment.

By two-thirty, Madge and Shorty still weren’t there, so Luke checked the goose. It seemed to be cooking okay, but there was an awful lot of juice in the pan. When he checked it again half an hour later, there was over an inch of the stuff.

That couldn’t be right. The last time he’d gotten stuck with having the Christmas Eve dinner, the turkey had only produced a few tablespoons of juice. He remembered his mom pouring them off to make the gravy.

He tried his mom. Her cell phone said, “Caller unavailable,” which meant her batteries had run down, or she’d turned it off. He tried Aunt Madge’s. No answer.

He dug the plastic and net wrapping the goose had come in out of the trash, flattened it out, and read the instructions: “Roast uncovered at 350ű for twenty-five minutes per pound.”

Uncovered. That must be the problem, the aluminum foil tent. It wasn’t allowing the extra juice to evaporate. He opened the oven and removed it. When he checked the goose again fifteen minutes later, it was sitting in two inches of grease, and even though, according to the wrapping, it still had three hours to go, the goose was getting brown and crispy on top.

At 2:51 P.M., Joe Gutierrez slammed out of his house and started up to get Miguel. He’d been trying to get his goddamned lawyer on the phone ever since he’d hung up on Pilar, but the lawyer wasn’t answering.

The streets were a real mess, and when Joe got to the I-15 entrance ramp, there was a barricade across it. He roared back down the street to take Highway 78, but it was blocked, too. He stormed back home and called Pilar’s lawyer, but he didn’t answer either. He then called the judge, using the unlisted cell phone number he’d seen on his lawyer’s palm pilot.

The judge, who had been stuck waiting for AAA in a Starbucks at the Bakersfield exit, listening to Harry Connick, Jr., destroy “White Christmas” for the last three hours, was not particularly sympathetic, especially when Joe started swearing at him.

Words were exchanged, and the judge made a note to himself to have Joe declared in contempt of court. Then he called AAA to see what was taking so long, and when the operator told him he was nineteenth in line, and it would be at least another four hours, he decided to revisit the entire custody agreement.

By three o’clock, all the networks and cable newschannels had logos. ABC had Winter Wonderland, NBC had Super Storm, and Fox News had Winter Wallop. CBS and MSNBC had both gone with White Christmas, flanked by a photo of Bing Crosby (MSNBC’s wearing the Santa Claus hat from the movie).

The Weather Channel’s logo was a changing world map that was now two-thirds white, and snow was being reported in Karachi, Seoul, the Solomon Islands, and Bethlehem, where Christmas Eve services (usually canceled due to Israeli-Palestinian violence) had been canceled due to the weather.

At 3:15 P.M., Jim called Paula from the airport to report that Kindra and David’s flights had both been delayed indefinitely. “And the USAir guy says they’re shutting the airport in Houston down. Dallas International’s already closed, and so are JFK and O’Hare. How’s Stacey?”

Incorrigible, Paula thought. “Fine,” she said. “Do you want to talk to her?”

“No. Listen, tell her I’m still hoping, but it doesn’t look good.”

Paula told her, but it didn’t have any effect. “Go get your dress on,” Stacey ordered her, “so the minister can run through the service with you, and then you can show Kindra and David where to stand when they get here.”

Paula went and put on her bridesmaid dress, wishing it wasn’t sleeveless, and they went through the rehearsal with the viola player, who had changed into his tux to get out of his snow-damp clothes, acting as best man.

As soon as they were done, Paula went into the vestry to get a sweater out of her suitcase. The minister came in and shut the door. “I’ve been trying to talk to Stacey,” she said. “You’re going to have to cancel the wedding. The roads are getting really dangerous, and I just heard on the radio they’ve closed the interstate.”

“I know,” Paula said.

“Well, she doesn’t. She’s convinced everything’s going to work out.”

And it might, Paula thought. After all, this is Stacey.

The viola player poked his head in the door. “Good news,” he said.

“The string quartet’s here?” the minister said.

“Jim’s here?” Paula said.

“No, but Shep and Leif found the cello player. He’s got frostbite, but otherwise he’s okay. They’re taking him to the hospital.” He gestured toward the sanctuary. “Do you want to tell the Queen of Denial, or shall I?”

“I will,” Paula said and went back into the sanctuary. “Stacey—”

“Your dress looks beautiful!” Stacey cried and dragged her over to the windows. “Look how it goes with the snow!”

When the bell rang at a quarter to four, Luke thought, Finally! Mom! and literally ran to answer the door. It was Aunt Lulla. He looked hopefully past her, but there was no one else pulling into the driveway or coming up the snow-packed street. “You don’t know anything about cooking a goose, do you?” he asked.

She looked at him a long, silent moment and then handed him the plate of olives she’d brought and took off her hat, scarf, gloves, plastic boots, and old-lady coat. “Your mother and Madge were always the domestic ones,” she said, “I was the theatrical one,” and while he was digesting that odd piece of information, “Why did you ask? Is your goose cooked?”

“Yes,” he said and led her into the kitchen and showed her the goose, which was now swimming in a sea of fat.

“Good God!” Aunt Lulla said, “where did all that grease come from?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Well, the first thing to do is pour some of it off before the poor thing drowns.”

“I already did,” Luke said. He took the lid off the saucepan he’d poured the drippings into earlier.

“Well you need to pour off some more,” she said practically, “and you’ll need a larger pan. Or maybe we should just pour it down the sink and get rid of the evidence.”

“It’s for the gravy,” he said, rummaging in the cupboard under the sink for the big pot his mother had given him to cook spaghetti in.

“Oh, of course,” she said, and then thoughtfully, “I do know how to make gravy. Alec Guinness taught me.”

Luke stuck his head out of the cupboard. “Alec Guinness taught you to make gravy?”

“It’s not really all that difficult,” she said, opening the oven door and looking speculatively at the goose. “You wouldn’t happen to have any wine on hand, would you?”

“Yes.” He emerged with the pot. “Why? Will wine counteract the grease?”

“I have no idea,” she said, “but one of the things I learned when I was playing off-Broadway was that when you’re facing a flop or an opening night curtain, it helps to be a little sloshed.”

“You played off-Broadway?” Luke said. “Mom never told me you were an actress.”

“I wasn’t,” she said, opening cupboard doors. She pulled out two wine glasses. “You should have seen my reviews.”

By 4:00 P.M., all the networks and cable newschannels had changed their logos to reflect the worsening situation. ABC had MegaBlizzard, NBC had MacroBlizzard, and CNN had Perfect Storm, with a graphic of a boat being swamped by a gigantic wave. CBS and MSNBC had both gone with Ice Age, CBS’s with a question mark, MSNBC’s with an exclamation point and a drawing of the Abominable Snowman. And Fox, ever the “fair and balanced” news network, was proclaiming, End of the World!

“Now can I freak out?” Chin asked.

“No,” Nathan said, feeding in snowfall rates. “In the first place, it’s Fox. In the second place, a discontinuity does not necessarily mean the end of the wo—”

The lights flickered. They both stopped and stared at the overhead fluorescents. They flickered again.

“Backup!” Nathan shouted, and they both dived for their terminals, shoved in zip drives, and began frantically typing, looking anxiously up at the lights now and then.

Chin popped the zip disk out of the hard drive. “You were saying that a discontinuity isn’t necessarily the end of the world?”

“Yes, but losing this data would be. From now on we back up every fifteen minutes.”

The lights flickered again, went out for an endless ten seconds, and came back on again to Peter Jennings saying, “—Huntsville, Alabama, where thousands are without power. I’m here at Byrd Middle School, which is serving as a temporary shelter.” He stuck the microphone under the nose of a woman holding a candle. “When did the power go off?” he asked.

“About noon,” she said. “The lights flickered a couple of times before that, but both times the lights came back on, and I thought we were okay, and then I went to fix lunch, and they went off, like that—” she snapped her fingers, “without any warning.”

“We back up every five minutes,” Nathan said, and to Chin, who was pulling on his parka, “Where are you going?”

“Out to my car to get a flashlight.”

He came back in ten minutes later, caked in snow, his ears and cheeks bright red. “It’s four feet deep out there. Tell me again why I shouldn’t freak out,” he said, handing the flashlight to Nathan.

“Because I don’t think this is a discontinuity,” Nathan said. “I think it’s just a snowstorm.”

“Just a snowstorm?” Chin said, pointing at the TVs, where red-eared, red-cheeked reporters were standing in front of, respectively, a phalanx of snowplows on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, a derailed train in Casper, and a collapsed Wal-Mart in Biloxi, “—from the weight of a record fifty-eight inches of snow,” Brit Hume was saying. “Luckily, there were no injuries here. In Cincinnati, however—”

“Fifty-eight inches,” Chin said. “In Mississippi. What if it keeps on snowing and snowing forever till the whole world—?”

“It can’t,” Nathan said. “There isn’t enough moisture in the atmosphere, and no low pressure system over the Gulf to keep pumping moisture up across the lower United States. There’s no low pressure system at all, and no ridge of high pressure to push against it, no colliding air masses, nothing. Look at this. It started in four different places hundreds of miles from each other, in different latitudes, different altitudes, none of them along a ridge of high pressure. This storm isn’t following any of the rules.”

“But doesn’t that prove it’s a discontinuity?” Chin asked nervously. “Isn’t that one of the signs, that it’s completely different from what came before?”

“The climate would be completely different, the weather would be completely different, not the laws of physics.” He pointed to the world map on the mid-right-hand screen. “If this were a discontinuity, you’d see a change in ocean current temps, a shift in the jet stream, changes in wind patterns. There’s none of that. The jet stream hasn’t moved, the rate of melting in the Antarctic is unchanged, the Gulf Stream’s still there. El Nińo’s still there. Venice is still there.”

“Yeah, but it’s snowing on the Grand Canal,” Chin said. “So what’s causing the mega-storm?”

“That’s just it. It’s not a mega-storm. If it were, there’d be accompanying ice-storms, hurricane-force winds, microbursts, tornadoes, none of which has shown up on the data. As near as I can tell, all it’s doing is snowing.” He shook his head. “No, something else is going on.”

“What?”

“I have no idea.” He stared glumly at the screens. “Weather’s a remarkably complex system. Hundreds, thousands of factors we haven’t figured in could be having an effect: cloud dynamics, localized temperature variations, pollution. Or it could be something we haven’t even considered: the effects of de-icers on highway albedo, beach erosion, sunspot activity. Or the effect on electromagnetic fields of playing ‘White Christmas’ hundreds of times on the radio this week.”

“Four thousand nine hundred and thirty-three,” Chin said.

“What?”

“That’s how many times Bing Crosby’s ‘White Christmas’ is played the two weeks before Christmas, with an additional nine thousand and sixty-two times by other artists. Including Otis Redding, U2, Peggy Lee, the Three Tenors, and the Flaming Lips. I read it on the internet.”

“Nine thousand and sixty-two,” Nathan said. “That’s certainly enough to affect something, all right.”

“I know what you mean,” Chin said. “Have you heard Eminem’s new rap version?”

By 4:15 P.M., the spaghetti pot was two-thirds full of goose grease, Luke’s mother and Madge and Shorty still weren’t there, and the goose was nearly done. Luke and Lulla had decided after their third glass of wine apiece to make the gravy.

“And put the tent back on,” Lulla said, sifting flour into a bowl. “One of the things I learned when I was playing the West End is that uncovered is not necessarily better.” She added a cup of water. “Particularly when you’re doing Shakespeare.”

She shook in some salt and pepper. “I remember a particularly ill-conceived nude Macbeth I did with Larry Olivier.” She thrust her hand out dramatically. “ ‘Is that a dagger that I see before me?’ should not be a laugh line. Richard taught me how to do this,” she said, stirring the mixture briskly with a fork, “It gets the lumps out.”

“Richard? Richard Burton?”

“Yes. Adorable man. Of course he drank like a fish when he was depressed—this was after Liz left him for the second time—but it never seemed to affect his performance in bed or in the kitchen. Not like Peter.”

“Peter? Peter Ustinov?”

“O’Toole. Here we go.” Lulla poured the flour mixture into the hot drippings. It disappeared. “It takes a moment to thicken up,” she said hopefully, but after several minutes of combined staring into the pot, it was no thicker.

“I think we need more flour,” she said, “and a larger bowl. A much larger bowl. And another glass of wine.”

Luke fetched them, and after a good deal of stirring, she added the mixture to the drippings, which immediately began to thicken up. “Oh, good,” she said, stirring, “as John Gielgud used to say, ‘If at first you don’t succeed’ . . . oh, dear.”

“What did he say that for—oh, dear,” Luke said, peering into the pot where the drippings had abruptly thickened into a solid, globular mass.

“That’s not what gravy’s supposed to look like,” Aunt Lulla said.

“No,” Luke said. “We seem to have made a lard ball.”

They both looked at it awhile.

“I don’t suppose we could pass it off as a very large dumpling,” Aunt Lulla suggested.

“No,” Luke said, trying to chop at it with the fork.

“And I don’t suppose it’ll go down the garbage disposal. Could we stick sesame seeds on it and hang it on a tree and pretend it was a suet ball for the birds?”

“Not unless we want PETA and the Humane Society after us. Besides, wouldn’t that be cannibalism?”

“You’re right,” Aunt Lulla said. “But we’ve got to do something with it before your mother gets here. I suppose Yucca Mountain’s too far away,” she said thoughtfully. “You wouldn’t have any acid on hand, would you?”

At 4:23 P.M., Slim Rushmore, on KFLG out of Flagstaff, Arizona, made a valiant effort to change the subject on his talk radio show to school vouchers, usually a sure-fire issue, but his callers weren’t having any of it. “This snow is a clear sign the Apocalypse is near,” a woman from Colorado Springs informed him. “In the Book of Daniel, it says that God will send snow ‘to purge and to make them white, even to the time of the end,’ and the Book of Psalms promises us ‘snow and vapours, stormy wind fulfilling his word,’ and in the Book of Isaiah . . .”

After the fourth Scripture (from Job: “For God saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth”) Slim cut her off and took a call from Dwayne in Poplar Bluffs.

“You know what started all this, don’t you?” Dwayne said belligerently. “When the commies put fluoride in the water back in the fifties.”

At 4:25 P.M., the country club called the church to say they were closing, none of the food and only two of the staff could get there, and anybody who was still trying to have a wedding in this weather was crazy. “I’ll tell her,” Paula said and went to find Stacey.

“She’s in putting on her wedding dress,” the viola player said.

Paula moaned.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I tried to explain to her that the rest of the quartet was not coming, but I didn’t get anywhere.” He looked at her quizzically. “I’m not getting anywhere with you either, am I?” he asked, and Jim walked in.

He was covered in snow. “The car got stuck,” he said.

“Where are Kindra and David?”

“They closed Houston,” he said, pulling Paula aside, “and Newark. And I just talked to Stacey’s mom. She’s stuck in Lavoy. They just closed the highway. There’s no way she can get here. What are we going to do?”

“You have to tell her the wedding has to be called off,” Paula said. “You don’t have any other option. And you have to do it now, before the guests try to come to the church.”

“You obviously haven’t been out there lately,” he said. “Trust me, nobody’s going to come out in that.”

“Then you clearly have to cancel.”

“I know,” he said worriedly. “It’s just . . . she’ll be so disappointed.”

Disappointed is not the word that springs to mind, Paula thought, and realized she had no idea how Stacey would react. She’d never seen her not get her way. I wonder what she’ll do, she thought curiously, and started back into the vestry to change out of her bridesmaid dress.

“Wait,” Jim said, grabbing her hand. “You have to help me tell her.”

This is asking way too much, Paula thought. I want you to marry me, not her. “I—” she said.

“I can’t do this without you,” he said. “Please?”

She extricated her hand. “Okay,” she said, and they went into the changing room, where Stacey was in her wedding dress, looking at herself in the mirror.

“Stacey, we have to talk,” Jim said, after a glance at Paula. “I just heard from your mother. She’s not going to be able to get here. She’s stuck at a truck stop outside Lavoy.”

“She can’t be,” Stacey said to her reflection. “She’s bringing my veil.” She turned to smile at Paula. “It was my great-grandmother’s. It’s lace, with this snowflake pattern.”

“Kindra and David can’t get here either,” Jim said. He glanced at Paula and then plunged ahead. “We’re going to have to reschedule the wedding.”

“Reschedule?” Stacey said as if she’d never heard the word before. Which she probably hasn’t, Paula thought. “We can’t reschedule. A Christmas Eve wedding has to be on Christmas Eve.”

“I know, honey, but—”

“Nobody’s going to be able to get here,” Paula said. “They’ve closed the roads.”

The minister came in. “The governor’s declared a snow emergency and a ban on unnecessary travel. You’ve decided to cancel?” she said hopefully.

“Cancel?” Stacey said, adjusting her train. “What are you talking about? Everything will be fine.”

And for one mad moment, Paula could almost see Stacey pulling it off, the weather magically clearing, the rest of the string quartet showing up, the flowers and Kindra and David and the veil all arriving in the next thirty-five minutes. She looked over at the windows. The snow, reflected softly in the candlelight, was coming down harder than ever.

“We don’t have any other choice than to reschedule,” Jim said. “Your mother can’t get here, your maid of honor and my best man can’t get here—”

“Tell them to take a different flight,” Stacey said.

Paula tried. “Stacey, I don’t think you realize, this is a major snowstorm. Airports all over the country are closed—”

“Including here,” the viola player said, poking his head in. “It was just on the news.”

“Well, then, go get them,” Stacey said, adjusting the drape of her skirt.

Paula’d lost the thread of this conversation. “Who?”

“Kindra and David.” She adjusted the neckline of her gown.

“To Houston?” Jim said, looking helplessly at Paula.

“Listen, Stacey,” Paula said, taking her firmly by the shoulders, “I know how much you wanted a Christmas Eve wedding, but it’s just not going to work. The roads are impassable. Your flowers are in a ditch, your mother’s trapped at a truck stop—”

“The cello player’s in the hospital with frostbite,” the viola player put in.

Paula nodded. “And you don’t want anyone else to end up there. You have to face facts. You can’t have a Christmas Eve wedding.”

“You could reschedule for Valentine’s Day,” the minister said brightly. “Valentine weddings are very nice. I’ve got two weddings that day, but I could move one up. Yours could still be in the evening,” but Paula could tell Stacey had stopped listening at “you can’t have—”

“You did this,” Stacey snapped at Paula. “You’ve always been jealous of me, and now you’re taking it out on me by ruining my wedding.”

“Nobody’s ruining anything, Stacey,” Jim said, stepping between them. “It’s a snowstorm.”

“Oh, so I suppose it’s my fault!” Stacey said. “Just because I wanted a winter wedding with snow—”

“It’s nobody’s fault,” Jim said sternly. “Listen, I don’t want to wait either, and we don’t have to. We can get married right here, right now.”

“Yeah,” the viola player said. “You’ve got a minister.” He grinned at Paula. “You’ve got two witnesses.”

“He’s right,” Jim said. “We’ve got everything we need right here. You’re here, I’m here, and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it, not some fancy wedding?” He took her hands in his. “Will you marry me?”

And what woman could resist an offer like that? Paula thought. Oh, well, you knew when you got on the plane that he was going to marry her.

“Marry you,” Stacey repeated blankly, and the minister hurried out, saying, “I’ll get my book. And my robe.”

“Marry you?” Stacey said. “Marry you?” She wrenched free of his grasp. “Why on earth would I marry a loser who won’t even do one simple thing for me? I want Kindra and David here. I want my flowers. I want my veil. What is the point of marrying you if I can’t have what I want?”

“I thought you wanted me,” Jim said dangerously.

“You?” Stacey said in a tone that made both Paula and the viola player wince. “I wanted to walk down the aisle at twilight on Christmas Eve,” she waved her arm in the direction of the windows, “with candlelight reflecting off the windowpanes and snow falling outside.” She turned, snatching up her train, and looked at him. “Will I marry you? Are you kidding?”

There was a short silence. Jim turned and looked seriously at Paula. “How about you?” he said.

At six o’clock on the dot, Madge and Shorty, Uncle Don, Cousin Denny, and Luke’s mom all arrived. “You poor darling,” she whispered to Luke, handing him the green bean casserole and the sweet potatoes, “stuck all afternoon with Aunt Lulla. Did she talk your ear off ?”

“No,” he said. “We made a snowman. Why didn’t you tell me Aunt Lulla had been an actress?”

“An actress?” she said, handing him the cranberry sauce. “Is that what she told you? Don’t tip it, it’ll spill. Did you have any trouble with the goose?” She opened the oven and looked at it, sitting in its pan, brown and crispy and done to a turn. “They tend to be a little juicy.”

“Not a bit,” he said, looking past her out the window at the snowman in the backyard. The snow he and Aunt Lulla had packed around it and on top of it was melting. He’d have to sneak out during dinner and pile more snow on.

“Here,” his mom said, handing him the mashed potatoes. “Heat these up in the microwave while I make the gravy.”

“It’s made,” he said, lifting the lid off the saucepan to show her the gently bubbling gravy. It had taken them four tries, but as Aunt Lulla had pointed out, they had more than enough drippings to experiment with, and, as she had also pointed out, three lardballs made a more realistic snowman.

“The top one’s too big,” Luke had said, scooping up snow to cover it with.

“I may have gotten a little carried away with the flour,” Aunt Lulla had admitted. “On the other hand, it looks exactly like Orson.” She stuck two olives in for eyes. “And so appropriate. He always was a fathead.”

“The gravy smells delicious,” Luke’s mother said, looking surprised. “You didn’t make it, did you?”

“No. Aunt Lulla.”

“Well, I think you’re a saint for putting up with her and her wild tales all afternoon,” she said, ladling the gravy into a bowl and handing it to Luke.

“You mean she made all that stuff up?” Luke said.

“Do you have a gravy boat?” his mother asked, opening cupboards.

“No,” he said. “Aunt Lulla wasn’t really an actress?”

“No.” She took a bowl out of the cupboard. “Do you have a ladle?”

“No.”

She got a dipper out of the silverware drawer. “Lulla was never in a single play,” she said, ladling the gravy into a bowl and handing it to Luke, “where she hadn’t gotten the part by sleeping with somebody. Lionel Barrymore, Errol Flynn, Kenneth Branagh . . .” She opened the oven to look at the goose. “. . . and that’s not even counting Alfred.”

“Alfred Lunt?” Luke asked.

“Hitchcock. I think this is just about done.”

“But I thought you said she was the shy one.”

“She was. That’s why she went out for drama in high school, to overcome her shyness. Do you have a platter?”

At 6:35 P.M., a member of the Breckenridge ski patrol, out looking for four missing cross-country skiers, spotted a taillight (the only part of Kent and Bodine’s Honda not covered by snow). He had a collapsible shovel with him, and a GPS, a satellite phone, a walkie-talkie, Mylar blankets, insta-heat packs, energy bars, a thermos of hot cocoa, and a stern lecture on winter safety, which he delivered after he had dug Kent and Bodine out and which they really resented. “Who did that fascist geek think he was, shaking his finger at us like that?” Bodine asked Kent after several tequila slammers at the Laughing Moose.

“Yeah,” Kent said eloquently, and they settled down to the serious business of how to take advantage of the fresh powder that had fallen while they were in their car.

“You know what’d be totally extreme?” Bodine said. “Snowboarding at night!”

Shara was quite a girl. Warren didn’t have a chance to call Marjean again until after seven. When Shara went in the bathroom, he took the opportunity to dial home. “Where are you?” Marjean said, practically crying. “I’ve been worried sick! Are you all right?”

“I’m still in Cincinnati at the airport,” he said, “and it looks like I’ll be here all night. They just closed the airport.”

“Closed the airport. . . .” she echoed.

“I know,” he said, his voice full of regret. “I’d really counted on being home with you for Christmas Eve, but what can you do? It’s snowing like crazy here. No flights out till tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. I’m in line at the airline counter right now, rebooking, and then I’m going to try to find a place to stay, but I don’t know if I’ll have much luck.” He paused to give her a chance to commiserate. “They’re supposed to put us up for the night, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up sleeping on the floor.”

“At the airport,” she said, “in Cincinnati.”

“Yeah.” He laughed. “Great place to spend Christmas Eve, huh?” He paused to give her a chance to commiserate, but all she said was, “You didn’t make it home last year either.”

“Honey, you know I’d get there if I could,” he said. “I tried to rent a car and drive home, but the snow’s so bad they’re not even sure they can get a shuttle out here to take us to a hotel. I don’t know how much snow they’ve had here—”

“Forty-six inches,” she said.

Good, he thought. From her voice he’d been worried it might not be snowing in Cincinnati after all. “And it’s still coming down hard. Oh, they just called my name. I’d better go.”

“You do that,” she said.

“All right. I love you, honey,” he said, “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” and hung up the phone.

“You’re married,” Shara said, standing in the door of the bathroom. “You sonofabitch.”

Paula didn’t say yes to Jim’s proposal after all. She’d intended to, but before she could, the viola player had cut in. “Hey, wait a minute!” he’d said. “I saw her first!”

“You did not,” Jim said.

“Well, no, not technically,” he admitted, “but when I did see her, I had the good sense to flirt with her, not get engaged to Vampira like you did.”

“It wasn’t Jim’s fault,” Paula said. “Stacey always gets what she wants.”

“Not this time,” he said. “And not me.”

“Only because she doesn’t want you,” Paula said. “If she did—”

“Wanna bet? You underestimate us musicians. And yourself. At least give me a chance to make my pitch before you commit to this guy. You can’t get married tonight anyway.”

“Why not?” Jim asked.

“Because you need two witnesses, and I have no intention of helping you,” he pointed at Jim, “get the woman I want. I doubt if Stacey’s in the mood to be a witness either,” he said as Stacey stormed back in the sanctuary, with the minister in pursuit. Stacey had on her wedding dress, a parka, and boots.

“You can’t go out in this,” the minister was saying. “It’s too dangerous!”

“I have no intention of staying here with him,” Stacey said, shooting Jim a venomous glance. “I want to go home now.” She flung the door open on the thickly falling snow. “And I want it to stop snowing!”

At that exact moment, a snowplow’s flashing yellow lights appeared through the snow, and Stacey ran out. Paula and Jim went over to the door and watched Stacey wave it down and get in. The plow continued on its way.

“Oh, good, now we’ll be able to get out,” the minister said and went to get her car keys.

“You didn’t answer my question, Paula,” Jim said, standing very close.

The plow turned and came back. As it passed, it plowed a huge mass of snow across the end of the driveway.

“I mean it,” Jim murmured. “How about it?”

“Look what I found,” the viola player said, appearing at Paula’s elbow. He handed her a piece of wedding cake.

“You can’t eat that. It’s—” Jim said.

“—not bad,” the viola player said. “I prefer chocolate, though. What kind of cake shall we have at our wedding, Paula?”

“Oh, look,” the minister said, coming back in with her car keys and looking out the window. “It’s stopped snowing.”

“It’s stopped snowing,” Chin said.

“It has?” Nathan looked up from his keyboard. “Here?”

“No. In Oceanside, Oregon. And in Springfield, Illinois.”

Nathan found them on the map. Two thousand miles apart. He checked their barometer readings, temperatures, snowfall amounts. No similarity. Springfield had thirty-two inches, Oceanside an inch and a half. And in every single town around them, it was still snowing hard. In Tillamook, six miles away, it was coming down at the rate of five inches an hour.

But ten minutes later, Chin reported the snow stopping in Gillette, Wyoming; Roulette, Massachusetts; and Saginaw, Michigan, and within half an hour the number of stations reporting in was over thirty, though they seemed just as randomly scattered all over the map as the storm’s beginning had been.

“Maybe it has to do with their names,” Chin said.

“Their names?” Nathan said.

“Yeah. Look at this. It’s stopped in Joker, West Virginia, Bluff, Utah, and Blackjack, Georgia.”

At 7:22 P.M., the snow began to taper off in Wendover, Utah. Neither the Lucky Lady Casino nor the Big Nugget had any windows, so the event went unnoticed until Barbara Gomez, playing the quarter slots, ran out of money at 9:05 P.M. and had to go out to her car to get the emergency twenty she kept taped under the dashboard. By this time, the snow had nearly stopped. Barbara told the change girl, who said, “Oh, good. I was worried about driving to Battle Mountain tomorrow. Are the plows out?”

Barbara said she didn’t know and asked for ten rolls of nickels, which she promptly lost playing video poker.

By 7:30 P.M. CNBC had replaced its logo with Digging Out, and ABC had retreated to Bing and White Christmas, though CNN still had side-by-side experts discussing the possibility of a new ice age, and on Fox News, Geraldo Rivera was intoning, “In his classic poem, ‘Fire and Ice,’ Robert Frost speculated that the world might end in ice. Today we are seeing the coming true of that dire prediction—”

The rest had obviously gotten the word, though, and CBS and the WB had both gone back to their regular programming. The movie “White Christmas” was on AMC.

“Whatever this was, it’s stopping,” Nathan said, watching “I-80 now open from Lincoln to Ogalallah,” scroll across the bottom of NBC’s screen.

“Well, whatever you do, don’t tell those corporate guys,” Chin said, and, as if on cue, one of the businessmen Nathan had met with that morning called.

“I just wanted you to know we’ve voted to approve your grant,” he said.

“Really? Thank you,” Nathan said, trying to ignore Chin, who was mouthing, “Are they giving us the money?”

“Yes,” he mouthed back.

Chin scribbled down something and shoved it in front of Nathan. “Get it in writing,” it said.

“We all agreed this discontinuity thing is worth studying,” the businessman said, then, shakily, “They’ve been talking on TV about the end of the world. You don’t think this discontinuity thing is that bad, do you?”

“No,” Nathan said, “in fact—”

“Ix-nay, ix-nay,” Chin mouthed, wildly crossing his arms.

Nathan glared at him. “—we’re not even sure yet if it is a discontinuity. It doesn’t—”

“Well, we’re not taking any chances,” the businessman said. “What’s your fax number? I want to send you that confirmation before the power goes out over here. We want you to get started working on this thing as soon as you can.”

Nathan gave him the number. “There’s really no need—” he said.

Chin jabbed his finger violently at the logo False Alarm on the screen of Adler’s TV.

“Consider it a Christmas present,” the businessman said, and the fax machine began to whir. “There is going to be a Christmas, isn’t there?”

Chin yanked the fax out of the machine with a whoop.

“Definitely,” Nathan said. “Merry Christmas,” but the businessman had already hung up.

Chin was still looking at the fax. “How much did you ask them for?”

“Fifty thousand,” Nathan said.

Chin slapped the grant approval down in front of him. “And a merry Christmas to you, too,” he said.

At seven-thirty, after watching infomercials for NordicTrack, a combination egg poacher and waffle iron, and the revolutionary new DuckBed, Bev put on her thin coat and her still-damp gloves and went downstairs. There had to be a restaurant open somewhere in Santa Fe. She would find one and have a margarita and a beef chimichanga, sitting in a room decorated with sombreros or pińatas, with striped curtains pulled across the windows to shut the snow out.

And if they were all closed, she would come back and order from room service. Or starve. But she was not going to ask at the desk and have them phone ahead and tell her the El Charito had closed early because of the weather, she was not going to let them cut off all avenues of escape, like Carmelita. She walked determinedly past the registration desk toward the double doors.

“Mrs. Carey!” the clerk called to her, and when she kept walking, he hurried around the desk and across the lobby to her. “I have a message for you from Carmelita. She wanted me to tell you midnight mass at the cathedral has been cancelled,” he said. “The bishop was worried about people driving home on the icy roads. But Carmelita said to tell you they’re having mass at eight o’clock, if you’d like to come to that. The cathedral’s right up the street at the end of the plaza. If you go out the north door,” he pointed, “it’s only two blocks. It’s a very pretty service, with the luminarias and all.”

And it’s somewhere to go, Bev thought, letting him lead her to the north door. It’s something to do. “Tell Carmelita thank you for me,” she said at the door. “And Feliz Navidad.”

“Merry Christmas.” He opened the door. “You go down this street, turn left, and it’s right there,” he said and ducked back inside, out of the snow.

It was inches deep on the sidewalk as she hurried along the narrow street, head down, and snowing hard. By morning it would look just like back home. It’s not fair, she thought. She turned the corner and looked up at the sound of an organ.

The cathedral stood at the head of the Plaza, its windows glowing like flames, and she had been wrong about the luminarias being ruined—they stood in rows leading up the walk, up the steps to the wide doors, lining the adobe walls and the roofs and the towers, burning steadily in the descending snow.

It fell silently, in great, spangled flakes, glittering in the light of the street lamps, covering the wooden-posted porches, the pots of cactus, the pink adobe buildings. The sky above the cathedral was pink, too, and the whole scene had an unreal quality, like a movie set.

“Oh, Howard,” Bev said, as if she had just opened a present, and then flinched away from the thought of him, waiting for the thrust of the knife, but it didn’t come. She felt only regret that he couldn’t be here to see this and amusement that the sequined snowflakes sifting down on her hair, on her coat sleeve, looked just like the fake snow at the end of White Christmas. And, arching over it all, like the pink sky, she felt affection—for the snow, for the moment, for Howard.

“You did this,” she said, and started to cry.

The tears didn’t trickle down her cheeks, they poured out, drenching her face, her coat, melting the snowflakes instantly where they fell. Healing tears, she thought, and realized suddenly that when she had asked Howard how the movie ended, he hadn’t said, “They lived happily ever after.” He had said, “They got a white Christmas.”

“Oh, Howard.”

The bells for the service began to ring. I need to stop crying and go in, she thought, fumbling for a tissue, but she couldn’t. The tears kept coming, as if someone had opened a spigot.

A black-shawled woman carrying a prayer book put her hand on Bev’s shoulder and said, “Are you all right, seńora?”

“Yes,” Bev said, “I’ll be fine,” and something in her voice must have reassured the woman because she patted Bev’s arm and went on into the cathedral.

The bells stopped ringing and the organ began again, but Bev continued to stand there until long after the mass had started, looking up at the falling snow.

“I don’t know how you did this, Howard,” she said, “but I know you’re responsible.”

At eight P.M., after anxiously checking the news to make sure the roads were still closed, Pilar put Miguel to bed. “Now go to sleep,” she said, kissing him good-night. “Santa’s coming soon.”

“Hunh-unh,” he said, looking like he was going to cry. “It’s snowing too hard.”

He’s worried about the roads being closed, she thought. “Santa doesn’t need roads,” she said. “Remember, he has a magic sleigh that flies through the air even if it’s snowing.”

“Hunh-unh,” he said, getting out of bed to get his Rudolph book. He showed her the illustration of the whirling blizzard and Santa shaking his head, and then stood up on his bed, pulled back the curtain, and pointed through the window. She had to admit it did look just like the picture.

“But he had Rudolph to show the way,” she said. “See?” and turned the page, but Miguel continued to look skeptical until she had read the book all the way through twice.

At 10:15 P.M. Warren Nesvick went down the hotel’s bar. He had tried to explain to Shara that Marjean was his five-year-old niece, but she had gotten completely unreasonable. “So I’m a cancelled flight out of Cincinnati, am I?” she’d shouted. “Well, I’m canceling you, you bastard!” and slammed out, leaving him high and dry. On Christmas Eve, for Christ’s sake.

He’d spent the next hour and a half on the phone. He’d called some women he knew from previous trips but none of them had answered. He’d then tried to call Marjean to tell her the snow was letting up and United thought they could get him on standby early tomorrow morning and to try to patch things up—she’d seemed kind of upset—but she hadn’t answered either. She’d probably gone to bed.

He’d hung up and gone down to the bar. There wasn’t a soul in the place except the bartender. “How come the place is so dead?” Warren asked him.

“Where the hell have you been?” the bartender said and turned on the TV above the bar.

“. . . most widespread snowstorm in recorded history,” Dan Abrams was saying. “Although there are signs of the snow beginning to let up here in Baltimore, in other parts of the country they weren’t so lucky. We take you now to Cincinnati, where emergency crews are still digging victims out of the rubble.” It cut to a reporter standing in front of a sign that read Cincinnati International Airport. “A record forty-six inches of snow caused the roof of the main terminal to collapse this afternoon. Over two hundred passengers were injured, and forty are still missing.”

The goose was a huge hit, crispy and tender and done to a turn, and everyone raved about the gravy. “Luke made it,” Aunt Lulla said, but Madge and his mom were talking about people not knowing how to drive in snow and didn’t hear her.

It stopped snowing midway through dessert, and Luke began to worry about the snowman but didn’t have a chance to duck out and check on it till nearly eleven, when everyone was putting on their coats.

It had melted (sort of), leaving a round greasy smear in the snow. “Getting rid of the evidence?” Aunt Lulla asked, coming up behind him in her old-lady coat, scarf, gloves, and plastic boots. She poked at the smear with the toe of her boot. “I hope it doesn’t kill the grass.”

“I hope it doesn’t affect the environment,” Luke said.

Luke’s mother appeared in the back door. “What are you two doing out there in the dark?” she called to them. “Come in. We’re trying to decide who’s going to have the dinner next Christmas. Madge and Shorty think it’s Uncle Don’s turn, but—”

“I’ll have it,” Luke said and winked at Lulla.

“Oh,” his mother said, surprised, and went back inside to tell Madge and Shorty and the others.

“But not goose,” Luke said to Lulla. “Something easy. And nonfat.”

“Michael had a wonderful recipe for duck a l’orange Alsacienne, as I remember,” Lulla mused.

“Michael Caine?”

“No, of course not, Michael Redgrave. Michael Caine’s a terrible cook,” she said. “Or—I’ve got an idea. How about Japanese blowfish?”

By 11:15 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the snow had stopped in New England, the Middle East, the Texas panhandle, most of Canada, and Nooseneck, Rhode Island.

“The storm of the century definitely seems to be winding down,” Wolf Blitzer was saying in front of CNN’s new logo: The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow, “leaving in its wake a white Christmas for nearly everyone—”

“Hey,” Chin said, handing Nathan the latest batch of temp readings. “I just thought of what it was.”

“What what was?”

“The factor. You said there were thousands of factors contributing to global warming, and that any one of them, even something really small, could have been what caused this.”

He hadn’t really said that, but never mind. “And you’ve figured out what this critical factor is?”

“Yeah,” Chin said. “A white Christmas.”

“A white Christmas,” Nathan repeated.

“Yeah! You know how everybody wants it to snow for Christmas, little kids especially, but lots of adults, too. They have this Currier-and-Ives thing of what Christmas should look like, and the songs reinforce it: ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Winter Wonderland’ and that one that goes, ‘The weather outside is frightful,’ I never can remember the name—”

“ ‘Let It Snow,’ ” Nathan said.

“Exactly,” Chin said. “Well, suppose all those people and all those little kids wished for a white Christmas at the same time—”

“They wished this snowstorm into being?” Nathan said.

“No. They thought about it, and their—I don’t know, their brain chemicals or synapses or something—created some kind of electrochemical field or something, and that’s the factor.”

“That everybody was dreaming of a white Christmas.”

“Yeah. It’s a possibility, right?”

“Maybe,” Nathan said. Maybe there was some critical factor that had caused this. Not wishing for a white Christmas, of course, but something seemingly unconnected to weather patterns, like tiny variations in the earth’s orbit. Or the migratory patterns of geese.

Or an assortment of factors working in combination. And maybe the storm was an isolated incident, an aberration caused by a confluence of these unidentified factors, and would never happen again.

Or maybe his discontinuity theory was wrong. A discontinuity was by definition an abrupt, unexpected event. But that didn’t mean there might not be advance indicators, like the warning flickers of electric lights before the power goes off for good. In which case—

“What are you doing?” Chin said, coming in from scraping his windshield. “Aren’t you going home?”

“Not yet. I want to run a couple more extrapolation sets. It’s still snowing in L.A.”

Chin looked immediately alarmed. “You don’t think it’s going to start snowing everywhere again, do you?”

“No,” Nathan said. Not yet.

At 11:43 P.M., after singing several karaoke numbers at the Laughing Moose, including “White Christmas,” and telling the bartender they were going on “a moonlight ride down this totally killer chute,” Kent Slakken and Bodine Cromps set out with their snowboards for an off-limits, high-avalanche-danger area near Vail and were never heard from again.

At 11:52 P.M., Miguel jumped on his sound-asleep mother, shouting, “It’s Christmas! It’s Christmas!”

It can’t be morning yet, Pilar thought groggily, fumbling to look at the clock. “Miguel, honey, it’s still nighttime. If you’re not in bed when Santa comes, he won’t leave you any presents,” she said, hustling him back to bed. She tucked him in. “Now go to sleep. Santa and Rudolph will be here soon.”

“Hunh-unh,” he said and stood up on his bed. He pulled the curtain back. “He doesn’t need Rudolph. The snow stopped, just like I wanted, and now Santa can come all by himself.” He pointed out the window. Only a few isolated flakes were still sifting down.

Oh, no, Pilar thought. After she was sure he was asleep, she crept out to the living room and turned on the TV very low, hoping against hope.

“—roads will remain closed until noon tomorrow,” an exhausted-looking reporter said, “to allow time for the snow plows to clear them: State Highway 56, I-15 from Chula Vista to Murrietta Hot Springs, Highway 78 from Vista to Escondido—”

Thank you, she murmured silently. Thank you.

At 11:59 P.M. Pacific Standard Time, Sam “Hoot’n’Holler” Farley’s voice gave out completely. The only person who’d been able to make it to the station, he’d been broadcasting continuously on KTTS, “Seattle’s talk 24/7” since 5:36 A.M. when he’d come in to do the morning show, even though he had a bad cold. He’d gotten steadily hoarser all day, and during the nine P.M. newsbreak, he’d had a bad coughing fit.

“The National Weather Service reports that that big snowstorm’s finally letting up,” he croaked, “and we’ll have nice weather tomorrow. Oh, this just in from NORAD, for all you kids who’re up way too late. Santa’s sleigh’s just been sighted on radar over Vancouver and is headed this way.”

He then attempted to say, “In local news, the snow—” but nothing came out.

He tried again. Nothing.

After the third try, he gave up, whispered, “That’s all, folks,” into the mike, and put on a tape of Louis Armstrong singing “White Christmas.”

THE EMPIRE OF ICE CREAM

Jeffrey Ford

Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superceded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders—the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes as a golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus. There is a certain imported Swiss cheese I am fond of that is all triangles, whereas the feel of silk against my fingers rests on my tongue with the flavor and consistency of lemon meringue. These perceptions are not merely thoughts, but concrete physical experiences. Depending upon how you see it, I, like approximately nine out of every million individuals, am either cursed or blessed with a condition known as synesthesia.

It has only recently come to light that the process of synesthesia takes place in the hippocampus, part of the ancient limbic system where remembered perceptions—triggered in diverse geographical regions of the brain as the result of an external stimulus—come together. It is believed that everyone, at a point somewhere below consciousness, experiences this coinciding of sensory association, yet in most it is filtered out, and only a single sense is given predominance in one’s waking world. For we lucky few, the filter is broken or perfected, and what is usually subconscious becomes conscious. Perhaps, at some distant point in history, our early ancestors were completely synesthetic, and touched, heard, smelled, tasted, and saw all at once—each specific incident mixing sensoric memory along with the perceived sense without affording precedence to the findings of one of the five portals through which “reality” invades us. The scientific explanations, as far as I can follow them, seem to make sense now, but when I was young and told my parents about the whisper of vinyl, the stench of purple, the spinning blue gyres of the church bell, they feared I was defective and that my mind was brimming with hallucinations like an abandoned house choked with ghosts.

As an only child, I wasn’t afforded the luxury of being anomalous. My parents were well on in years—my mother nearly forty, my father already forty-five—when I arrived after a long parade of failed pregnancies. The fact that, at age five, I heard what I described as an angel crying whenever I touched velvet would never be allowed to stand, but was seen as an illness to be cured by whatever methods were available. Money was no object in the pursuit of perfect normalcy. And so my younger years were a torment of hours spent in the waiting rooms of psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists. I can’t find words to describe the depths of medical quackery I was subjected to by a veritable army of so-called professionals who diagnosed me with everything from schizophrenia to bipolar depression to low IQ caused by muddled potty training. Being a child, I was completely honest with them about what I experienced, and this, my first mistake, resulted in blood tests, brain scans, special diets and the forced consumption of a demon’s pharmacopoeia of mind-deadening drugs that diminished my will but not the vanilla scent of slanting golden sunlight on late autumn afternoons.

My only-child status, along with the added complication of my “condition,” as they called it, led my parents to perceive me as fragile. For this reason, I was kept fairly isolated from other children. Part of it, I’m sure, had to do with the way my abnormal perceptions and utterances would reflect upon my mother and father, for they were the type of people who could not bear to be thought of as having been responsible for the production of defective goods. I was tutored at home by my mother instead of being allowed to attend school. She was actually a fine teacher, having a Ph.D. in History and a firm grasp of classical literature. My father, an actuary, taught me Math, and in this subject I proved to be an unquestionable failure until I reached college age. Although x=y might have been a suitable metaphor for the phenomenon of synesthesia, it made no sense on paper. The number 8, by the way, reeks of withered flowers.

What I was good at was music. Every Thursday at 3:00 in the afternoon, Mrs. Brithnic would arrive at the house to give me a piano lesson. She was a kind old lady with thinning white hair and the most beautiful fingers—long and smooth as if they belonged to a graceful young giantess. Although something less than a virtuoso at the keys, she was a veritable genius at teaching me to allow myself to enjoy the sounds I produced. Enjoy them I did, and when I wasn’t being dragged hither and yon in the pursuit of losing my affliction, home base for me was the piano bench. In my imposed isolation from the world, music became a window of escape I crawled through as often as possible.

When I’d play, I could see the notes before me like a fireworks display of colors and shapes. By my twelfth year, I was writing my own compositions, and my notation on the pages accompanying the notes of a piece referred to the visual displays that coincided with them. In actuality, when I played, I was really painting—in mid-air, before my eyes—great abstract works in the tradition of Kandinsky. Many times, I planned a composition on a blank piece of paper using the crayon set of 64 colors I’d had since early childhood. The only difficulty in this was with colors like magenta and cobalt blue, which I perceive primarily as tastes, and so would have to write them down in pencil as licorice and tapioca on my colorfully scribbled drawing where they would appear in the music.

My punishment for having excelled at the piano was to lose my only real friend, Mrs. Brithnic. I remember distinctly the day my mother let her go. She calmly nodded, smiling, understanding that I had already surpassed her abilities. Still, though I knew this was the case, I cried when she hugged me good-bye. When her face was next to mine, she whispered into my ear, “Seeing is believing,” and in that moment, I knew that she had completely understood my plight. Her lilac perfume, the sound of one nearly inaudible B-flat played by an oboe, still hung about me as I watched her walk down the path and out of my life for good.

I believe it was the loss of Mrs. Brithnic that made me rebel. I became desultory and despondent. Then one day, soon after my thirteenth birthday, instead of obeying my mother, who had just told me to finish reading a textbook chapter while she showered, I went to her pocketbook, took five dollars and left the house. As I walked along beneath the sunlight and blue sky, the world around me seemed brimming with life. What I wanted more than anything else was to meet other young people my own age. I remembered an ice-cream shop in town where, when passing by in the car returning from whatever doctor’s office we had been to, there always seemed to be kids hanging around. I headed directly for that spot while wondering if my mother would catch up to me before I made it. When I pictured her drying her hair, I broke into a run.

Upon reaching the row of stores that contained The Empire of Ice Cream, I was out of breath as much from the sheer exhilaration of freedom as from the half-mile sprint. Peering through the glass of the front door was like looking through a portal into an exotic other world. Here were young people, my age, gathered in groups at tables, talking, laughing, eating ice cream—not by night, after dinner—but in the middle of broad daylight. I opened the door and plunged in. The magic of the place seemed to brush by me on its way out as I entered, for the conversation instantly died away. I stood in the momentary silence as all heads turned to stare at me.

“Hello,” I said, smiling, and raised my hand in greeting, but I was too late. They had already turned away, the conversation resumed, as if they had merely afforded a grudging glimpse to see the door open and close at the behest of the wind. I was paralyzed by my inability to make an impression, the realization that finding friends was going to take some real work.

“What’ll it be?” said a large man behind the counter.

I broke from my trance and stepped up to order. Before me, beneath a bubble dome of glass, lay the Empire of Ice Cream. I’d never seen so much of the stuff in so many colors and incarnations—with nuts and fruit, cookie and candy bits, mystical swirls the sight of which sounded to me like a distant siren. There were deep vats of it set in neat rows totaling thirty flavors. My diet had never allowed for the consumption of confections or desserts of any type, and rare were the times I had so much as a thimbleful of vanilla ice cream after dinner. Certain doctors had told my parents that my eating these treats might seriously exacerbate my condition. With this in mind, I ordered a large bowl of coffee ice cream. My choice of coffee stemmed from the fact that that beverage was another item on the list of things I should never taste.

After paying, I took my bowl and spoon and found a seat in the corner of the place from which I could survey all the other tables. I admit that I had some trepidations about digging right in, since I’d been warned against it for so long by so many adults. Instead, I scanned the shop, watching the other kids talking, trying to overhear snatches of conversation. I made eye contact with a boy my own age two tables away. I smiled and waved to him. He saw me and then leaned over and whispered something to the other fellows he was with. All four of them turned, looked at me, and then broke into laughter. It was a certainty they were making fun of me, but I basked in the victory of merely being noticed. With this, I took a large spoonful of ice cream and put it in my mouth.

There is an attendant phenomenon of the synesthetic experience I’ve yet to mention. Of course I had no term for it at this point in my life, but when one is in the throes of the remarkable transference of senses, it is accompanied by a feeling of “epiphany,” a “eureka” of contentment that researchers of the anomalous condition would later term noetic, borrowing from William James. That first taste of coffee ice cream elicited a deeper noetic response than I’d ever before felt, and along with it came the appearance of a girl. She coalesced out of thin air and stood before me, obscuring my sight of the group that was still laughing. Never before had I seen through tasting, hearing, touching, smelling, something other than simple abstract shapes and colors.

She was turned somewhat to the side and hunched over, wearing a plaid skirt and a white blouse. Her hair was the same dark brown as my own, but long and gathered in the back with a green rubber band. There was a sudden shaking of her hand, and it became clear to me that she was putting out a match. Smoke swirled away from her. I could see now that she had been lighting a cigarette. I got the impression that she was wary of being caught in the act of smoking. When she turned her head sharply to look back over her shoulder, I dropped the spoon on the table. Her look instantly enchanted me.

As the ice cream melted away down my throat, she began to vanish, and I quickly lifted the spoon to restoke my vision, but it never reached my lips. She suddenly went out like a light when I felt something land softly upon my left shoulder. I heard the incomprehensible murmur of recrimination, and knew it as my mother’s touch. She had found me. A great wave of laughter accompanied my removal from The Empire of Ice Cream. Later I would remember the incident with embarrassment, but for the moment, even as I spoke words of apology to my mother, I could think only of what I’d seen.

The ice-cream incident—followed hard by the discovery of the cigar box of pills I hid in my closet, all of the medication that I’d supposedly swallowed for the past six months—led my parents to believe that heaped upon my condition was now a tendency toward delinquency that would grow, if unchecked, in geometrical proportion with the passing of years. It was decided that I should see yet another specialist to deal with my behavior, a therapist my father had read about who would prompt me to talk my willfulness into submission. I was informed of this in a solemn meeting with my parents. What else was there to do but acquiesce? I knew that my mother and father wanted, in their pedestrian way, what they believed was best for me. Whenever the situation would infuriate me, I’d go to the piano and play, sometimes for three or four hours at a time.

Dr. Stullin’s office was in a ramshackle Victorian house on the other side of town. My father accompanied me on the first visit, and, when he pulled up in front of the sorry old structure, he checked the address at least twice to make sure we’d come to the right place. The doctor, a round little man with a white beard and glasses with small circular lenses, met us at the front door. Why he laughed when we shook hands at the introductions, I hadn’t a clue, but he was altogether jolly, like a pint-size Santa Claus dressed in a wrinkled brown suit one size too small. He swept out his arm to usher me into his house, but when my father tried to enter, the doctor held up his hand and said, “You will return in one hour and five minutes.”

My father gave some weak protest and said that he thought he might be needed to help discuss my history to this point. Here the doctor’s demeanor instantly changed. He became serious, official, almost commanding.

“I’m being paid to treat the boy. You’ll have to find your own therapist.”

My father was obviously at a loss. He looked as if he was about to object, but the doctor said, “One hour and five minutes.” Following me inside, he quickly shut the door behind him.

As he led me through a series of unkempt rooms lined with crammed bookshelves, and one in which piles of paper covered the tops of tables and desks, he said, laughing, “Parents: so essential, yet sometimes like something you’ve stepped in and cannot get off your shoe. What else is there but to love them?”

We wound up in a room at the back of the house made from a skeleton of thin steel girders and paneled with glass panes. The sunlight poured in, and surrounding us, at the edges of the place, also hanging from some of the girders, were green plants. There was a small table on which sat a teapot and two cups and saucers. As I took the seat he motioned for me to sit in, I looked out through the glass and saw that the backyard was one large, magnificent garden, blooming with all manner of colorful flowers.

After he poured me a cup of tea, the questioning began. I’d had it in my mind to be as recalcitrant as possible, but there was something in the manner in which he had put my father off that I admired about him. Also, he was unlike other therapists I’d been to, who would listen to my answers with complete reservation of emotion or response. When he asked why I was here, and I told him it was because I’d escaped in order to go to the ice-cream shop, he scowled and said, “Patently ridiculous.” I was unsure if he meant me or my mother’s response to what I’d done. I told him about playing the piano, and he smiled warmly and nodded. “That’s a good thing,” he said.

After he asked me about my daily routine and my home life, he sat back and said, “So, what’s the problem? Your father has told me that you hallucinate. Can you explain?”

No matter how ingratiating he’d been, I had already decided that I would no longer divulge any of my perceptions to anyone. Then he did something unexpected.

“Do you mind?” he asked as he took out a pack of cigarettes.

Before I could shake my head no, he had one out of the pack and lit. Something about this, perhaps because I’d never seen a doctor smoke in front of a patient before, perhaps because it reminded me of the girl who had appeared before me in the ice-cream shop, weakened my resolve to say nothing. When he flicked his ashes into his half-empty teacup, I started talking. I told him about the taste of silk, the various corresponding colors for the notes of the piano, the nauseating stench of purple.

I laid the whole thing out for him and then sat back in my chair, now somewhat regretting my weakness, for he was smiling, and the smoke was leaking out of the corners of his mouth. He exhaled, and in that cloud came the word that would validate me, define me and haunt me for the rest of my life—synesthesia.

By the time I left Stullin’s office that day, I was a new person. The doctor spoke to my father and explained the phenomenon to him. He cited historical cases and gave him the same general overview of the neurological workings of the condition. He also added that most synesthetes don’t experience the condition in such a variety of senses as I did, although it was not unheard of. My father nodded every now and then but was obviously perplexed at the fact that my long-suffered condition had, in an instant, vanished.

“There’s nothing wrong with the boy,” said Stullin, “except for the fact that he is, in a way, exceptional. Think of it as a gift, an original way of sensing the world. These perceptions are as real for him as are your own to you.”

Stullin’s term for my condition was like a magic incantation from a fairy tale, for through its power I was released from the spell of my parents’ control. In fact, their reaction to it was to almost completely relinquish interest in me, as if after all of their intensive care I’d been found out to be an imposter now unworthy of their attention. When it became clear that I would have the ability to go about my life as any normal child might, I relished the concept of freedom. The sad fact was, though, that I didn’t know how to. I lacked all experience at being part of society. My uncertainty made me shy, and my first year in public school was a disaster. What I wanted was a friend my own age, and this goal continued to elude me until I was well out of high school and in college. My desperation to connect made me ultimately nervous, causing me to act and speak without reserve. This was the early 1960s, and if anything was important in high school social circles at the time, it was remaining cool. I was the furthest thing from cool you might imagine.

For protection, I retreated into my music and spent hours working out compositions with my crayons and pens, trying to corral the sounds and resultant visual pyrotechnics, odors and tastes into cohesive scores. All along, I continued practicing and improving my abilities at the keyboard, but I had no desire to become a performer. Quite a few of my teachers through the years had it in their minds that they could shape me into a brilliant concert pianist. I would not allow it, and when they insisted, I’d drop them and move on. Nothing frightened me more than the thought of sitting in front of a crowd of onlookers. The weight of judgment lurking behind even one set of those imagined eyes was too much for me to bear. I’d stayed on with Stullin, visiting once a month, and no matter his persistent proclamations as to my relative normalcy, it was impossible for me, after years of my parents’ insisting otherwise, to erase the fact that I was, in my own mind, a freak.

My greatest pleasure away from the piano at this time was to take the train into the nearby city and attend concerts given by the local orchestra or small chamber groups that would perform in more intimate venues. Rock and roll was all the rage, but my training at the piano and the fact that calm solitude as opposed to raucous socializing was the expected milieu of the symphony drew me in the direction of classical music. It was a relief that most of those who attended the concerts I did were adults who paid no attention to my presence. From the performances I witnessed, from the stereo I goaded my parents into buying for me, and my own reading, I , with few of the normal distractions of the typical teenager, gathered an immense knowledge of my field.

My hero was J. S. Bach. It was from his works that I came to understand mathematics . . . and, through a greater understanding of math, came to a greater understanding of Bach—the golden ratio, the rise of complexity through the reiteration of simple elements, the presence of the cosmic in the common. Whereas others simply heard his work, I could also feel it, taste it, smell it, visualize it, and in doing so was certain I was witnessing the process by which all of Nature had moved from a single cell to a virulent, diverse forest. Perhaps part of my admiration for the good cantor of Leipzig was his genius with counterpoint, a practice where two or more distinct melodic lines delicately join at certain points to form a singularly cohesive listening experience. I saw in this technique an analogy to my desire that some day my own unique personality might join with that of another’s and form a friendship. Soon after hearing the fugue pieces that are part of The Well-Tempered Clavier, I decided I wanted to become a composer.

Of course, during these years, both dreadful for my being a laughingstock in school and delightful for their musical revelations, I couldn’t forget the image of the girl who momentarily appeared before me during my escape to The Empire of Ice Cream. The minute that Dr. Stullin pronounced me sane, I made plans to return and attempt to conjure her again. The irony of the situation was that just that single first taste of coffee ice cream had ended up making me ill, either because I’d been sheltered from rich desserts my whole life or because my system actually was inherently delicate. Once my freedom came, I found I didn’t have the stomach for all of those gastronomic luxuries I had at one time so desired. Still, I was willing to chance the stomachache in order to rediscover her.

On my second trip to The Empire, after taking a heaping spoonful of coffee ice cream and experiencing again that deep noetic response, she appeared as before, her image forming in the empty space between me and the front window of the shop. This time she seemed to be sitting at the end of a couch situated in a living room or parlor, reading a book. Only her immediate surroundings, within a foot or two of her body, were clear to me. As my eyes moved away from her central figure, the rest of the couch, and the table beside her, holding a lamp, became increasingly ghostlike; images from the parking lot outside the shop window showed through. At the edges of the phenomenon, there was nothing but the merest wrinkling of the atmosphere. She turned the page, and I was drawn back to her. I quickly fed myself another bit of ice cream and marveled at her beauty. Her hair was down, and I could see that it came well past her shoulders. Bright green eyes, a small, perfect nose, smooth skin, and full lips that silently moved with each word of the text she was scanning. She was wearing some kind of very sheer, powder blue pajama top, and I could see the presence of her breasts beneath it.

I took two spoonfuls of ice cream in a row, and, because my desire had tightened my throat and I couldn’t swallow, their cold burned my tongue. In the time it took for the mouthful of ice cream to melt and trickle down my throat, I simply watched her chest subtly heave with each breath, her lips move, and I was enchanted. The last thing I noticed before she disappeared was the odd title of the book she was reading—The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer. I’d have taken another spoonful, but a massive headache had blossomed behind my eyes, and I could feel my stomach beginning to revolt against the ice cream. I got up and quickly left the shop. Out in the open air, I walked for over an hour, trying to clear my head of the pain while at the same time trying to retain her image in my memory. I stopped three times along my meandering course, positive I was going to vomit, but I never did.

My resistance to the physical side effects of the ice cream never improved, but I returned to the shop again and again, like a binge drinker to the bottle, hangover be damned, whenever I was feeling most alone. Granted, there was something of a voyeuristic thrill underlying the whole thing, especially when the ice cream would bring her to me in various states of undress—in the shower, in her bedroom. But you must believe me when I say that there was much more to it than that. I wanted to know everything about her. I studied her as assiduously as I did The Goldberg Variations or Schoenberg’s serialism. She was, in many ways, an even more intriguing mystery, and the process of investigation was like constructing a jigsaw puzzle, reconfiguring a blasted mosaic.

I learned that her name was Anna. I saw it written on one of her sketch pads. Yes, she was an artist, and I believe had great aspirations in this direction, as I did in music. I spent so many spoonfuls of coffee ice cream, initiated so many headaches, just watching her draw. She never lifted a paintbrush or pastel, but was tied to the simple tools of pencil and paper. I never witnessed her using a model or photograph as a guide. Instead, she would place the sketch pad flat on a table and hunker over it. The tip of her tongue would show itself from the right corner of her lips when she was in deepest concentration. Every so often, she’d take a drag on a cigarette that burned in an ashtray to her left. The results of her work, the few times I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse, were astonishing. Sometimes she was obviously drawing from life, the portraits of people whom she must’ve known. At other times she’d conjure strange creatures or mandalalike designs of exotic blossoms. The shading was incredible, giving weight and depth to her creations. All of this from the tip of a graphite pencil one might use to work a calculation or jot a memo. If I did not adore her, I might’ve envied her innate talent.

To an ancillary degree, I was able to catch brief glimpses of her surroundings, and this was fascinating for the fact that she seemed to move through a complete, separate world of her own, some kind of other reality that was very much like ours. I’d garnered enough to know that she lived in a large old house with many rooms, the windows covered with long drapes to block out the light. Her work area was chaotic, stacks of her drawings covering the tops of tables and pushed to the sides of her desk. A black-and-white cat was always prowling in and out of the tableau. She was very fond of flowers and often worked in some sun-drenched park or garden, creating painstaking portraits of amaryllis or pansies, and although the rain would be falling outside my own window, there the skies were bottomless blue.

Although over the course of years I’d told Stullin much about myself, revealed my ambitions and most secret desires, I had never mentioned Anna. It was only after I graduated high school and was set to go off to study at Gelsbeth Conservatory in the nearby city that I decided to reveal her existence to him. The doctor had been a good friend to me, albeit a remunerated one, and was always most congenial and understanding when I’d give vent to my frustrations. He persistently argued the optimistic viewpoint for me when all was as inky black as the aroma of my father’s aftershave. My time with him never resulted in a palpable difference in my ability to attract friends or feel more comfortable in public, but I enjoyed his company. At the same time, I was somewhat relieved to be severing all ties to my troubled past and escaping my childhood once and for all. I was willing to jettison Stullin’s partial good to be rid of the rest.

We sat in the small sunroom at the back of his house, and he was questioning me about what interests I would pursue in my forthcoming classes. He had a good working knowledge of classical music and had told me at one of our earliest meetings that he’d studied the piano when he was younger. He had a weakness for the Romantics, but I didn’t hold it against him. Somewhere in the midst of our discussion I simply blurted out the details of my experiences with coffee ice cream and the resultant appearances of Anna. He was obviously taken aback. He leaned forward in his chair and slowly went through the procedure of lighting a cigarette.

“You know,” he said, releasing a cascade of smoke, the aroma of which always manifested itself for me in the faint sound of a mosquito, “that is quite unusual. I don’t believe there has ever been a case of a synesthetic vision achieving a figurative resemblance. They are always abstract. Shapes, colors, yes, but never an image of an object, not to mention a person.”

“I know it’s the synesthesia,” I said. “I can feel it. The exact same experience as when I summon colors from my keyboard.”

“And you say she always appears in relation to your eating ice cream?” he asked, squinting.

“Coffee ice cream,” I said.

This made him laugh briefly, but his smile soon diminished, and he brought his free hand up to stroke his beard. I knew this action to be a sign of his concern. “What you are describing to me would be, considering the current medical literature, a hallucination.”

I shrugged.

“Still,” he went on, “the fact that it is always related to your tasting the ice cream, and that you can identify an associated noetic feeling, I’d have to agree with you that it seems related to your condition.”

“I knew it was unusual,” I said. “I was afraid to mention it.”

“No, no, it’s good that you did. The only thing troubling me about it is that I am too aware of your desire to connect with another person your age. To be honest, it has all of the earmarks of a wish fulfillment that points back to a kind of hallucination. Look, you don’t need this distraction now. You’re beginning your life, you are moving on, and there is every indication that you’ll be successful in your art. When the other students at the Conservatory understand your abilities, you’ll make friends, believe me. It won’t be like high school. Chasing this insubstantial image could impede your progress. Let it go.”

And so, not without a large measure of regret, I did. To an extent, Stullin was right about Gelsbeth. It wasn’t like high school, and I did make the acquaintance of quite a few like-minded people with whom I could at least connect on the subject of music. I wasn’t the only odd fish in that pond, believe me. To be a young person with an overriding interest in Bach or Mozart or Scriabin was its own eccentricity for those times. The place was extremely competitive, and I took the challenge. My fledgling musical compositions were greeted with great interest by the faculty, and I garnered a degree of notoriety when one day a fellow student discovered me composing a chamber piece for violins and cello using my set of crayons. I would always work in my corresponding synesthetic colors and then transpose the work, scoring it in normal musical notation.

The years flew by, and I believe they were the most rewarding of my entire life. I rarely went home to visit, save on holidays when the school was closed, even though it was only a brief train ride from the city. The professors were excellent but unforgiving of laziness and error. It wasn’t a labor for me to meet their expectations. For the first time in my life, I felt what it meant to play, an activity I’d never experienced in childhood. The immersion in great music, the intricate analysis of its soul, kept me constantly engaged, filled with a sense of wonder.

Then, in my last year, I became eligible to participate in a competition for composers. There was a large cash prize, and the winner’s work would be performed at a concert in the city’s symphony hall by a well-known musician. The difficulty of being a composer was always the near-impossibility of getting one’s work performed by competent musicians in a public venue. The opportunity presented by the competition was one I couldn’t let slip away. More important than the money or the accolades would be a kind of recognition that would bring me to the attention of potential patrons who might commission a work. I knew that it was time to finally compose the fugue I’d had in mind for so many years. The utter complexity of the form, I believed, would be the best way to showcase all of my talents.

When it came time to begin the composition of the fugue, I took the money I’d made tutoring young musicians on the weekends and put it toward renting a beach house out on Varion Island for two weeks. In the summers the place was a bustling tourist spot for the wealthy, with a small central town that could be termed quaint. In those months, I wouldn’t have been able to touch the price of the lowliest dwelling for a single day’s rent. It was the heart of winter, though, when I took a leave from the school, along with crayons, books, a small tape player, and fled by way of bus and cab to my secret getaway.

The house I came to wasn’t one of the grand wooden mansions on stilts that lined the road along the causeway, but instead a small bungalow, much like a concrete bunker. It was painted an off-putting yellow that tasted to me for all the world like cauliflower. It sat atop a small rise, and its front window faced the ocean, giving me a sublime view of the dunes and beach. What’s more, it was within walking distance of the tiny village. There was sufficient heat, a telephone, a television, a kitchen with all the appliances, and I instantly felt as at home there as I had anywhere in my life. The island itself was deserted. On my first day, I walked down to the ocean and along the shore the mile and a half to the eastern point and then back by way of the main road, passing empty houses, and I saw no one. I’d been told over the phone by the realtor that the diner in town and a small shop that sold cigarettes and newspapers stayed open through the winter. Thankfully, she was right, for without the diner, I would have starved.

The setting of the little bungalow was deliciously melancholic, and for my sensibilities that meant conducive to work. I could hear the distant breaking of waves and, above that, the winter wind blowing sand against the window glass, but these were not distractions. Instead, they were the components of a silence that invited one to dream wide awake, to let the imagination open, and so I dove into the work straightaway. On the first afternoon, I began recording in my notebook my overall plan for the fugue. I’d decided that it would have only two voices. Of course, some had been composed with as many as eight, but I did not want to be ostentatious. Showing reserve is as important a trait of technical mastery as is that of complexity.

I already had the melodic line of the subject, which had been a cast off from another project I’d worked on earlier in the year. Even though I decided it was not right for the earlier piece, I couldn’t forget it and kept revising it here and there, playing it over and over. In the structure of a fugue, one posits the melodic line or subject, and then there is an answer (counterpoint), a reiteration of that line with differing degrees of variation, so that what the listener hears is like a dialogue (or a voice and its echo) of increasing complexity. After each of the voices has entered the piece, there is an episode that leads to the reentry of the voices and given answers, now in different keys. I had planned to use a technique called stretto, in which the answers, as they are introduced, overlap somewhat the original subject lines. This allows for a weaving of the voices so as to create an intricate tapestry of sound.

All this would be difficult to compose but nothing outlandishly original. It was my design, though, to impress the judges by trying something new. Once the fugue had reached its greatest state of complication, I wanted the piece to slowly, almost logically at first, but then without rhyme or meter, crumble into chaos. At the very end, from that chaotic cacophony, there would emerge one note, drawn out to great length, which would eventually diminish into nothing.

For the first week, the work went well. I took a little time off every morning and evening for a walk on the beach. At night I would go to the diner and then return to the bungalow to listen to Bach’s Art of the Fugue or Toccata and Fugue in D minor, some Brahms, Haydn, Mozart, and then pieces from the inception of the form by composers like Sweelinck and Froberger. I employed the crayons on a large piece of good drawing paper, and although to anyone else it would not look like musical notation, I knew exactly how it would sound when I viewed it. Somewhere after the first week, though, I started to slow down, and by Saturday night my work came to a grinding halt. What I’d begun with such a clear sense of direction had me trapped. I was lost in my own complexity. The truth was, I was exhausted and could no longer pick apart the threads of the piece—the subject, the answer, the counter-subject snarled like a ball of yarn.

I was thoroughly weary and knew I needed rest, but even though I went to bed and closed my eyes, I couldn’t sleep. All day Sunday, I sat in a chair and surveyed the beach through the front window. I was too tired to work but too frustrated about not working to sleep. That evening, after having done nothing all day, I stumbled down to the diner and took my usual seat. The place was empty save for one old man sitting in the far corner, reading a book while eating his dinner. This solitary character looked somewhat like Stullin for his white beard, and at first glance, had I not known better, I could’ve sworn the book he was reading was The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer. I didn’t want to get close enough to find out for fear he might strike up a conversation.

The waitress came and took my order. When she was finished writing on her pad, she said, “You look exhausted tonight.”

I nodded.

“You need to sleep,” she said.

“I have work to do,” I told her.

“Well, then, let me bring you some coffee.”

I laughed. “You know, I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life,” I said.

“Impossible,” she said. “It looks to me like tonight might be a good time to start.”

“I’ll give it a try,” I told her, and this seemed to make her happy.

While I ate, I glanced through my notebook and tried to reestablish for myself the architecture of the fugue. As always, when I looked at my notes, everything was crystal clear, but when it came time to continue on the score, every potential further step seemed the wrong way to go. Somewhere in the midst of my musing, I pushed my plate away and drew toward me the cup and saucer. My usual drink was tea, and I’d forgotten I had changed my order. I took a sip, and the dark, bitter taste of black coffee startled me. I looked up, and there was Anna, staring at me, having just lowered a cup away from her lips. In her eyes I saw a glint of recognition, as if she were actually seeing me, and I’m sure she saw the same in mine.

I whispered, “I see you.”

She smiled. “I see you too,” she said.

I would have been less surprised if a dog had spoken to me. Sitting dumbfounded, I reached slowly out toward where she seemed to sit across from me in the booth. As my hand approached, she leaned back away from it.

“I’ve been watching you for years,” she said.

“The coffee?” I said.

She nodded. “You are a synesthete, am I right?”

“Yes,” I said. “But you’re a figment of my imagination, a product of a neurological anomaly.”

Here she laughed out loud. “No,” she said, “you are.”

After our initial exchange, neither of us spoke. I was in a mild state of shock, I believe. “This can’t be,” I kept repeating in my mind, but there she was, and I could hear her breathing. Her image appeared even sharper than it had previously under the influence of the coffee ice cream. And now, with the taste that elicited her presence uncompromised by cream and sugar and the cold, she remained without dissipating for a good few minutes before beginning to mist at the edges and I had to take another sip to sharpen the focus. When I brought my cup up to drink, she also did at the same exact time, as if she were a reflection, as if I were her reflection, and we both smiled.

“I can’t speak to you where I am. They’ll think I’ve lost my mind,” I whispered.

“I’m in the same situation,” she said.

“Give me a half hour and then have another cup of coffee, and I’ll be able to speak to you in private.”

She nodded in agreement and watched as I called for the check.

By the time the waitress arrived at my booth, Anna had dissolved into a vague cloud, like the exhalation of a smoker. It didn’t matter, as I knew she couldn’t be seen by anyone else. As my bill was being tallied, I ordered three cups of coffee to go.

“That coffee is something, isn’t it?” said the waitress. “I swear by it. Amazing you’ve never had any up to this point. My blood is three-quarters coffee, I drink so much of it,” she said.

“Wonderful stuff,” I agreed.

Wonderful it was, for it had awakened my senses, and I walked through the freezing, windy night, carrying in a box my containers of elixir, with all the joy of a child leaving school on Friday afternoon. The absurdity of the whole affair didn’t escape me, and I laughed out loud remembering my whispered plan to wait a half hour and then drink another cup. The conspiratorial nature of it excited me, and I realized for the first time since seeing her that Anna had matured and grown more beautiful in the years I had forsaken her.

Back at the bungalow, I put the first of the large Styrofoam containers into the microwave in the kitchen and heated it for no more than thirty seconds. I began to worry that perhaps in Anna’s existence time was altogether different and a half hour for me might be two or three or a day for her. The instant the bell sounded on the appliance, I took the cup out, seated myself at the small kitchen table and drank a long draught of the dark potion. Before I could put the cup down, she was there, sitting in the seat opposite me.

“I know your name is Anna,” I said to her. “I saw it on one of your drawing pads.”

She flipped her hair behind her ear on the left side and asked, “What’s yours?”

“William,” I said. Then I told her about the coffee ice cream and the first time I encountered her image.

“I remember,” she said, “when I was a child of nine, I snuck a sip of my father’s coffee he had left in the living room, and I saw you sitting at a piano. I thought you were a ghost. I ran to get my mother to show her, but when I returned you’d vanished. She thought little of it since the synesthesia was always prompting me to describe things that made no sense to her.”

“When did you realize it was the coffee?” I asked.

“Oh, some time later. I again was given a taste of it at breakfast one morning, and there you were, sitting at our dining room table, looking rather forlorn. It took every ounce of restraint not to blurt out that you were there. Then it started to make sense to me. After that, I would try to see you as much as possible. You were often very sad when you were younger. I know that.”

The look on her face, one of true concern for me, almost brought tears to my eyes. She was a witness to my life. I hadn’t been as alone as I had always thought.

“You’re a terrific artist,” I said.

She smiled. “I’m great with a pencil, but my professors are demanding a piece in color. That’s what I’m working on now.”

Intermittently in the conversation we’d stop and take sips of coffee to keep the connection vital. As it turned out, she too had escaped her normal routine and taken a place in order to work on a project for her final portfolio review. We discovered all manner of synchronicities between our lives. She admitted to me that she’d also been a loner as a child and that her parents had a hard time dealing with her synesthetic condition. As she put it, “Until we discovered the reality of it, I think they thought I was crazy.” She laughed, but I could tell by the look in her eyes how deeply it had affected her.

“Have you ever told anyone about me?” I asked.

“Only my therapist,” she said. “I was relieved when he told me he’d heard of rare cases like mine.”

This revelation brought me up short, for Stullin had told me he had never encountered anything of the sort in the literature. The implications of this inconsistency momentarily reminded me that she was not real, but I quickly shoved the notion from my thoughts and continued the conversation.

That night, by parsing out the coffee I had, and she doing the same, we stayed together until two in the morning, telling each other about our lives, our creative ideas, our dreams for the future. We found that our synesthetic experiences were similar and that our sense impressions were often transposed with the same results. For instance, for both her and me, the aroma of new-mown grass was circular and the sound of a car horn tasted of citrus. She told me that her father was an amateur musician who loved the piano and classical music. In the middle of my recounting for her the intricacies of the fugue I was planning, she suddenly looked up from her cup and said, “Oh no, I’m out of coffee.” I looked down at my own cup and realized I’d just taken the last sip.

“Tomorrow at noon,” she said as her image weakened.

“Yes,” I yelled, afraid she wouldn’t hear me.

Then she became a phantom, a miasma, a notion, and I was left staring at the wall of the kitchen. With her gone, I could not sit still for long. All the coffee I’d drunk was coursing through me, and because my frail system had never before known the stimulant, my hands literally shook from it. I knew sleep was out of the question, so after walking around the small rooms of the bungalow for an hour, I sat down to my fugue to see what I could do.

Immediately, I picked up the trail of where I had been headed before Saturday’s mental block had set in. Everything was piercingly clear to me, and I could hear the music I was noting in various colors as if there were a tape of the piece I was creating playing as I created it. I worked like a demon, quickly, unerringly, and the ease with which the answers to the musical problems presented themselves gave me great confidence and made my decisions ingenious. Finally, around eight in the morning (I hadn’t noticed the sunrise), the coffee took its toll on me, and I became violently ill. The stomach pains, the headache, were excruciating. At ten, I vomited, and that relieved the symptoms somewhat. At eleven A.M., I was at the diner, buying another four cups of coffee.

The waitress tried to interest me in breakfast, but I said I wasn’t hungry. She told me I didn’t look well, and I tried to laugh off her concern. When she pressed the matter, I made some surly comment to her that I can’t now remember, and she understood I was interested in nothing but the coffee. I took my hoard and went directly to the beach. The temperature was milder that day, and the fresh air cleared my head. I sat in the shelter of a deep hollow amidst the dunes to block the wind, drank, and watched Anna at work, wherever she was, on her project—a large, colorful abstract drawing. After spying on her for a few minutes, I realized that the composition of the piece, its arrangement of color, presented itself to me as the melodic line of Symphony no. 8 in B Minor, by Franz Schubert. This amused me at first, to think that my own musical knowledge was inherent in the existence of her world, that my imagination was its essence. What was also interesting was that such a minor interest of mine, Schubert, should manifest itself. I supposed that any aspect of my life, no matter how minor, was fodder for this imaginative process. It struck me just as quickly, though, that I didn’t want this to be so. I wanted her to be apart from me, her own separate entity, for without that, what would her friendship mean? I physically shook my head to rid myself of the idea. When at noon she appeared next to me in my nest among the dunes, I’d already managed to forget this worm in the apple.

We spent the morning together talking and laughing, strolling along the edge of the ocean, climbing on the rocks at the point. When the coffee ran low around three, we returned to the diner for me to get more. I asked them to make me two whole pots and just pour them into large, plastic take-out containers. The waitress said nothing but shook her head. In the time I was on my errand, Anna, in her own world, brewed another vat of it.

We met up back at my bungalow, and as evening came on, we took out our respective projects and worked together, across from each other at the kitchen table. In her presence, my musical imagination was on fire, and she admitted to me that she saw for the first time the overarching structure of her drawing and where she was headed with it. At one point, I became so immersed in the work, I reached out and picked up what I thought would be one of my crayons but instead turned out to be a violet pastel. I didn’t own pastels, Anna did.

“Look,” I said to her, and at that moment felt a wave of dizziness pass over me. A headache was beginning behind my eyes.

She lifted her gaze from her work and saw me holding the violet stick. We both sat quietly, in awe of its implications. Slowly, she put her hand out across the table toward me. I dropped the pastel and reached toward her. Our hands met, and I swear I could feel her fingers entangled with mine.

“What does this mean, William?” she said with a note of fear in her voice and let go of me.

As I stood up, I lost my balance and needed to support myself by clutching the back of the chair. She also stood, and as I approached her, she backed away. “No, this isn’t right,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “It’s me.” I took two wobbly steps and drew so close to her I could smell her perfume. She cringed but did not try to get away. I put my arms around her and attempted to kiss her.

“No,” she cried. Then I felt the force of both her hands against my chest, and I stumbled backward onto the floor. “I don’t want this. It’s not real,” she said and began to hurriedly gather her things.

“Wait, I’m sorry,” I said. I tried to scrabble to my feet, and that’s when the sum total of my lack of sleep, the gallons of caffeine, the fraying of my nerves, came together like the twining voices in a fugue and struck me in the head as if I had been kicked by a horse. My body was shaking, my vision grew hazy, and I could feel myself phasing in and out of consciousness. I managed to watch Anna turn and walk away as if passing through the living room. Somehow I got to my feet and followed her, using the furniture as support. The last thing I remember was flinging open the front door of the small house and screaming her name.

I was found the next morning, lying on the beach, unconscious. It was the old man with the white beard from the diner, who, on his daily early-morning beachcombing expedition, came across me. The police were summoned. An ambulance was called. I came to in a hospital bed the next day, the warm sun, smelling of antique rose, streaming through a window onto me.

They kept me at the small shore hospital two days for psychological observation. A psychiatrist visited me, and I managed to convince him that I’d been working too hard on a project for school. Apparently the waitress at the diner had told the police that I’d been consuming ridiculous amounts of coffee and going without sleep. Word of this had gotten back to the doctor who attended to me. When I told him it was the first time I had tried coffee and that I’d gotten carried away, he warned me to stay off it, telling me they found me in a puddle of my own vomit. “It obviously disagrees with your system. You could’ve choked to death when you passed out.” I thanked him for his advice and promised him I’d stay well away from it in the future.

In the days I was at the hospital, I tried to process what had happened with Anna. Obviously, my bold advance had frightened her. It crossed my mind that it might be better to leave her alone in the future. The very fact that I was sure I’d made physical contact with her was, in retrospect, unsettling. I wondered if perhaps Stullin was right, and what I perceived to be a result of synesthesia was actually a psychotic hallucination. I left it an open issue in my mind as to whether I would seek her out again. One more meeting might be called for, I thought, at least to simply apologize for my mawkish behavior.

I asked the nurse if my things from the beach house had been brought to the hospital, and she told me they had. I spent the entirety of my last day there dressed and waiting to get the okay for my release. That afternoon, they brought me my belongings. I went carefully through everything, but it became obvious to me that my crayon score for the fugue was missing. Everything else was accounted for, but there was no large sheet of drawing paper. I asked the nurse, who was very kind, actually reminding me somewhat of Mrs. Brithnic, to double-check and see if everything had been brought to me. She did and told me there was nothing else. I called the Varion Island police on the pretense of thanking them and asked if they had seen the drawing. My fugue had vanished. I knew a grave depression would descend upon me soon due to its disappearance, but for the moment I was numb and slightly pleased to merely be alive.

I decided to return to my parents’ house for a few days and rest up before returning to the conservatory in order to continue my studies. In the bus station near the hospital, while I was waiting, I went to the small newspaper stand in order to get a pack of gum and a paper with which to pass the time. As I perused the candy rack, my sight lighted upon something that made me feel the way Eve must have when she first saw the apple, for there was a bag of Thompson’s Coffee-Flavored Hard Candy. The moment I read the words on the bag, I reached for them. There was a spark in my solar plexus, and my palms grew damp. No Caffeine the package read, and I was hard-pressed to believe my good fortune. I looked nervously over my shoulder while purchasing three bags of them, and when, on the bus, I tore a bag open, I did so with such violence, a handful of them scattered across the seat and into the aisle.

I arrived by cab at my parent’s house and had to let myself in. Their car was gone, and I supposed they were out for the day. I hadn’t seen them in some months and almost missed their presence. When night descended and they didn’t return, I thought it odd but surmised they were on one of the short vacations they often took. It didn’t matter. I sat at my old home base on the piano bench and sucked on coffee-flavored hard candies until I grew too weary to sit up. Then I got into my childhood bed, turned to face the wall as I always had when I was little, and fell asleep.

The next day, after breakfast, I resumed my vigil that had begun on the long bus trip home. By that afternoon my suspicions as to what had become of my fugue were confirmed. The candy did not bring as clear a view of Anna as did the ice cream, let alone the black coffee, but it was focused enough for me to follow her through her day. I was there when she submitted my crayon score as her art project for the end-of-the-semester review. How she was able to appropriate it, I have no idea. It defied logic. In the fleeting glimpses I got of the work, I tried to piece together how I’d gone about weaving the subjects and their answers. The second I would see it, the music would begin to sound for me, but I never got a good-enough look at it to sort out the complex structure of the piece. The two things I was certain of were that the fugue had been completed right up to the point where it was supposed to fall into chaos, and that Anna did quite well with her review because of it.

By late afternoon, I’d come to the end of my Thompson’s candies and had but one left. Holding it in my hand, I decided it would be the last time I would conjure a vision of Anna. I came to the conclusion that her theft of my work had cancelled out my untoward advance, and we were now even, so to speak. I would leave her behind as I had before, but this time for good. With my decision made, I opened the last of the hard confections and placed it on my tongue. That dark, amber taste slowly spread through my mouth, and, as it did, a cloudy image formed and crystallized into focus. She had the cup to her mouth, and her eyes widened as she saw me seeing her.

“William,” she said. “I was hoping to see you one more time.”

“I’m sure,” I said, trying to seem diffident, but just hearing her voice made me weak.

“Are you feeling better?” she asked. “I saw what happened to you. I was with you on the beach all that long night but could not reach you.”

“My fugue,” I said. “You took it.”

She smiled. “It’s not yours. Let’s not kid ourselves; you know you are merely a projection of my synesthetic process.”

“Who is a projection of whose?” I asked.

“You’re nothing more than my muse,” she said.

I wanted to contradict her, but I didn’t have the meanness to subvert her belief in her own reality. Of course, I could have brought up the fact that she was told that figurative synesthesia was a known version of the disease. This was obviously not true. Also, there was the fact that her failed drawing, the one she’d abandoned for mine, was based on Schubert’s Eighth, a product of my own knowledge working through her. How could I convince her she wasn’t real? She must’ve seen the doubt in my eyes, because she became defensive in her attitude. “I’ll not see you again,” she said. “My therapist has given me a pill he says will eradicate my synesthesia. We have that here, in the true reality. It’s already begun to work. I no longer hear my cigarette smoke as the sound of a faucet dripping. Green no longer tastes of lemon. The ring of the telephone doesn’t feel like burlap.”

This pill was the final piece of evidence. A pill to cure synesthesia? “You may be harming yourself,” I said, “by taking that drug. If you cut yourself off from me, you may cease to exist. Perhaps we are meant to be together.” I felt a certain panic at the idea that she would lose her special perception, and I would lose the only friend I had ever had who understood my true nature.

“Dr. Stullin says it will not harm me, and I will be like everyone else. Good-bye, William,” she said and pushed the coffee cup away from her.

“Stullin,” I said. “What do you mean, Stullin?”

“My therapist,” she said, and although I could still see her before me, I could tell I had vanished from her view. As I continued to watch, she lowered her face into her hands and appeared to be crying. Then my candy turned from the thinnest sliver into nothing but saliva, and I swallowed. A few seconds more, and she was completely gone.

It was three in the afternoon when I put my coat on and started across town to Stullin’s place. I had a million questions, and foremost was whether or not he treated a young woman named Anna. My thoughts were so taken by my last conversation with her that when I arrived in front of the doctor’s walkway, I realized I had not noticed the sun go down. It was as if I had walked in my sleep and awakened at his address. The street was completely empty of people or cars, reminding me of Varion Island. I took the steps up to his front door and knocked. It was dark inside except for a light on the second floor, but the door was slightly ajar, which I thought odd, given it was the middle of the winter. Normally, I would have turned around and gone home after my third attempt to get his attention, but there was too much I needed to discuss.

I stepped inside, closing the door behind me. “Dr. Stullin,” I called. There was no answer. “Doctor?” I tried again and then made my way through the foyer to the room where the tables were stacked with paper. In the meager light coming in through the window, I found a lamp and turned it on. I continued to call out as I went from room to room, turning on lights, heading for the sunroom at the back of the place where we always had our meetings. When I reached that room, I stepped inside, and my foot came down on something alive. There was a sudden screech that nearly made my heart stop, and then I saw the black-and-white cat, whose tail I had trod upon, race off into another room.

It was something of a comfort to be again in that plant-filled room. The sight of it brought back memories of it as the single safe place in the world when I was younger. Oddly enough, there was a cigarette going in the ashtray on the table between the two chairs that faced each other. Lying next to it, opened to the middle and turned down on its pages, was a copy of The Centrifugal Rickshaw Dancer. I’d have preferred to see a ghost to that book. The sight of it chilled me. I sat down in my old seat and watched the smoke from the cigarette twirl up toward the glass panes. Almost instantly, a great weariness seized me, and I closed my eyes.

That was days ago. When I found the next morning I could not open the doors to leave, that I could not even break the glass in order to crawl out, it became clear to me what was happening. At first I was frantic, but then a certain calm descended upon me, and I learned to accept my fate. Those stacks of paper in that room on the way to the sunroom—each sheet held a beautiful pencil drawing. I explored the upstairs, and there, on the second floor, found a piano and the sheet music for Bach’s Grosse Fugue. There was a black-and-white photograph of Mrs. Brithnic in the upstairs hallway and one of my parents standing with Anna as a child.

That hallway, those rooms, are gone, vanished. Another room has disappeared each day I have been trapped here. I sit in Stullin’s chair now, in the only room still remaining (this one will be gone before tonight), and compose this tale—in a way, my fugue. The black-and-white cat sits across from me, having fled from the dissipation of the house as it closes in around us. Outside, the garden, the trees, the sky, have all lost their color and now appear as if rendered in graphite—wonderfully shaded to give them an appearance of weight and depth. So too with the room around us: the floor, the glass panels, the chairs, the plants, even the cat’s tail and my shoes and legs have lost their life and become the shaded grey of a sketch. I imagine Anna will soon be free of her condition. As for me, who always believed himself to be unwanted, unloved, misunderstood, I will surpass being a mere artist and become instead a work of art that will endure. The cat meows loudly, and I feel the sound as a hand upon my shoulder.

The End

I wouldn’t normally cite resource material for a story, but in the writing of “The Empire of Ice Cream” I was dealing with concepts I was not readily very familiar with. For information on the condition of synesthesia, I turned to The Man Who Tasted Shapes, by Richard E. Cytowic. The Art of Fugue, by Alfred Mann, was a great help in understanding the history and architecture of this unusual musical form. I first came across the condition of figurative synesthesia in Thackery T. Lambshead’s Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases.

Works Cited

1. Benford, Gregory, Ed. Nebula Showcase 2000, Harcourt Inc., 2000

2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Gateway, 1969.

3. Schmidt, Paul, Translator, Ed.. Arthur Rimbaud Complete Works, Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1967

4. Simon, Marc, Ed.. Complete Poems of Hart Crane, Liveright, 1986.

5. Stevens, Holly, Ed.. Wallace Stevens: The Palm at the End of the Mind, Selected Poems and a Play, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971

6. O’Connor, William Van, Ed.. Sense and Sensibility in Modern Poetry, University of Chicago Press, 1948.

7. Herbert, Nick. Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, an Excursion into Metaphysics . . . and the Meaning of Reality, Anchor Books, 1985.

8.Nietzsche, Friedrich. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Regnery Gateway, Inc., 1962.

9.Hemingway, Earnest. Death in the Afternoon, Penguin Books, 1932.

10. Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, Anchor Press, 1973.

NIGHTFALL

Charles Stross

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through silent darkness. The night is quiet as the grave, colder than midwinter on Pluto. Gossamer sails as fine as soap bubbles droop, the gust of sapphire laser light that inflated them long since darkened; ancient starlight picks out the outline of a huge planet-like body beneath the jewel-and-cobweb corpse of the starwhisp.

Eight years have passed since the good ship Field Circus slipped into close orbit around the frigid brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56. Five years have gone by since the launch lasers of the Ring Imperium shut down without warning, stranding the light sail powered craft three light years from home. There has been no response from the router, the strange alien artifact in orbit around the brown dwarf, since the crew of the starwhisp uploaded themselves through its strange quantum entanglement interface for transmission to whatever alien network it connects to. In fact, nothing happens; nothing save the slow trickle of seconds, as a watchdog timer counts down the moments remaining until it is due to resurrect stored snapshots of the crew, on the assumption that their uploaded copies are beyond help.

Meanwhile, outside the light cone—

Amber jolts into wakefulness, as if from a nightmare. She sits bolt upright, a thin sheet falling from her chest; air circulating around her back chills her rapidly, cold sweat evaporating. She mutters aloud, unable to subvocalize, “where am I—oh. A bedroom. How did I get here?” mumble. “Oh, I see.” Her eyes widen in horror. It’s not a dream. . . .

“Greetings, human Amber,” says a ghost-voice that seems to come from nowhere: “I see you are awake. Would you like anything?”

Amber rubs her eyes tiredly. Leaning against the bedstead, she glances around cautiously. She takes in a bedside mirror, her reflection in it: a young woman, gaunt in the manner of those whose genome bears the p53 calorie-restriction hack, she has disheveled blonde hair and dark eyes. She could pass for a dancer or a soldier; not, perhaps, a queen. “What’s going on? Where am I? Who are you, and what am I doing in your head?”

Her eyes narrow. Analytical intellect comes to the fore as she takes stock of her surroundings. “The router,” she mutters. Structures of strange matter in orbit around a brown dwarf, scant light years from Earth. “How long ago did we come through?” Glancing round, she sees a room walled in slabs of close-fitting stone. A window bay is recessed into them, after the style of crusader castles many centuries in the past, but there’s no glass in it—just a blank white screen. The only furniture in the room, besides a Persian carpet on the cold flagstones, is the bed she sits upon. That, and the idiot gun that hovers just beneath the ceiling. She’s reminded of a scene from an old movie, Kubrick’s enigma; this whole set-up has got to be deliberate, and it isn’t funny.

“I’m waiting,” she announces, and leans back against the headboard.

“According to our records this reaction indicates that you are now fully self-aware,” says the ghost. “This is good. You have not been conscious for a very long time: explanations will be complex and discursive. Can I offer you refreshments? What would you like?”

“Coffee, if you have it. Bread and hummus. Something to wear.” Amber crosses her arms, abruptly self-conscious. “I’d prefer to have management ackles to this universe, though. As realities go, it’s a bit lacking in furniture.” Which isn’t entirely true—it seems to have a comprehensive, human-friendly biophysics model. Her eyes focus on her left forearm; tanned skin and a puckered dime of scar tissue records a youthful accident with a pressure seal in Jovian orbit. Amber freezes for a moment. Her lips move in silence, but she’s locked into place in this universe, unable to split or conjoin nested realities just by calling subroutines that have been spliced into the corners of her mind since she was a teenager. Finally she asks, “How long have I been dead?”

“Longer than you were alive, by orders of magnitude,” says the ghost. A tray laden with pita breads, hummus, and olives congeals from the air above her bed and a wardrobe appears at one side of the room. “I can begin the explanation now or wait for you to finish eating. Which would you prefer?”

Amber glances about again, then fixes on the white screen in the window bay. “Give it to me right now. I can take it,” she says, quietly bitter. “I like to understand my mistakes as soon as possible,” she adds.

“We-us can tell that you are a human of determination,” says the ghost, a hint of pride entering its voice. “That is a good thing, human Amber. You will need all of your resolve if you are going to survive here. . . .”

It is the time of repentance in a temple beside a tower that looms above a dry plain, and the thoughts of the priest who lives in the tower are tinged with regret. It is Ashura, the tenth day of Muhurram, according to a real-time clock still tuned to the pace of a different era: the one thousand, three hundred and fortieth anniversary of the martyrdom of the third Imam, the Sayyid ash-Shuhada.

The priest of the tower has spent an indefinite time in prayer—locked in an eternal moment of meditation and recitation—and now, as the sun, vast and red, burns low above the horizon of the infinite desert, his thoughts drift toward the present. Ashura is a very special day, a day of atonement for collective guilt, evil committed through inactivity; but it is in Sadeq’s nature to look outward toward the future. This is, he knows, a failing—but he is a member of that generation of the Shi’ite clergy that reacted to the excesses of the previous century: the generation that withdrew the ulama from temporal power, retreated from the velyat i-faqih of Khomenei and his successors, and left government to the people. Sadeq’s focus, his driving obsession in theology, is a program of re-appraisal of eschatology and cosmology. Here in a tower of white sun-baked clay, on an endless plain that exists only in the imaginary spaces of a starship the size of a soft drink can, the priest spends his processor cycles in contemplation of one of the most vicious problems ever to confront a mujtahid: the Fermi paradox.

Sadeq finishes his evening devotions in near silence, then stands, stretches as is his wont, and leaves the small and lonely courtyard at the base of the tower. The gate—made of wrought iron, warmed by sunlight—squeals slightly as he opens it. Glancing at the upper hinge, he frowns slightly, willing it clean and whole. The underlying physics model acknowledges his access controls: a thin rim of red around the pin turns silvery-fresh, and the squeaking stops dead. Closing the gate behind him, Sadeq enters the tower.

He climbs with a heavy, even tread, a spiral staircase snaking ever upward above him. Narrow slit-windows line the outer wall of the staircase: through each of them he sees a different world. Out there, nightfall in the month of Ramadan. And through the next, green misty skies and a horizon too close by far. Sadeq carefully avoids thinking about the implications of this manifold space. Coming from prayer, from a sense of the sacred, he doesn’t want to lose his proximity to his faith. He’s far enough from home as it is, and there is much to consider—he is surrounded by strange and curious ideas, all but lost in a corrosive desert of faith.

At the top of the staircase, Sadeq comes to a door of aged wood bound in iron. It doesn’t belong here: it’s a cultural and architectural anomaly. The handle is a loop of black iron: Sadeq regards it as if it’s the head of an asp, poised to strike. Nevertheless he reaches out and turns the handle, steps across the threshold into a palace out of fantasy.

None of this is real, he reminds himself. It’s no more real than an illusion conjured by one of the djinni of the thousand nights and one night. Nevertheless, he can’t save himself from smiling at the scene—a sardonic smile of self-deprecating humor, tempered by frustration.

Sadeq’s captors have stolen his soul and locked it—him—in a very strange prison, a temple with a tower that rises all the way to paradise. It’s the whole classical litany of mediaevalist desires, distilled from fifteen hundred years of literature; colonnaded courtyards, cool pools lined with rich mosaics, rooms filled with every imaginable dumb matter luxury, endless banquets awaiting his appetite—and occupied by dozens of beautiful un-women, eager to fulfill his every fantasy. Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen: but he doesn’t dare permit himself to succumb to this temptation. I’m not dead, he reasons, therefore how can I be in paradise? Therefore this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that’s so, isn’t uploading a sin? In which case this can’t be paradise. Besides which, this paradox is so puerile!

Sadeq has always been inclined to philosophical enquiry, and his vision of the afterlife is more cerebral than most, involving ideas as questionable within the framework of Islam as those of Teilhard de Chardin were to the twentieth century Catholic church. If there’s one key indicator of a false paradise in his eschatology it’s two-and-seventy brainlessly beautiful houris waiting to do his bidding. So it follows that he can’t really be dead. Except . . .

The whole question of reality is so vexing that Sadeq does what he does every night. He strides heedlessly across priceless works of art, barging hastily through courtyards and passageways, ignoring niches in which nearly naked supermodels lie with their legs apart, climbing stairs—until he comes to a small unfurnished room with a single high window in one wall. There he sits on the floor, legs crossed, meditating: not in prayer, but in a more tightly focused ratiocination. Every false night—for there is no way to know how fast time is passing, outside this cyberspace pocket—Sadeq sits and thinks, grappling with Descartes’ demon in the solitude of his own mind. And the question he asks himself every night is the same: can I tell if this is the true hell? And if it is not, how can I escape?

The ghost tells Amber that she has been dead for just under a third of a million years. She has been reinstantiated from storage—and has died again—many times in the intervening period, but she has no memory of this; she is a fork from the main bough, and the other branches expired in lonely isolation.

The business of resurrection does not, in and of itself, distress Amber unduly. Born in the post-Turing era, she merely finds some aspects of the ghost’s description dissatisfyingly incomplete: like saying she was been drugged and brought hither without stating whether by plane, train, or automobile.

She doesn’t have a problem with the ghost’s assertion that she is nowhere near Earth, either—indeed, that she is approximately eighty thousand light years away. When she and the others took the risk of uploading themselves through the router they found in orbit around Hyundai +4904/-56, they’d understood that they could end up anywhere or nowhere. But the idea that she’s still within the light cone of her departure strikes her as odd. The router is part of a network of self-replicating instantaneous communicators, spawning and spreading between the cold brown dwarf stars that litter the galaxy. She’d somehow expected to be much further from home by now.

Somewhat more disturbing is the ghost’s assertion that the human genotype has rendered itself extinct at least twice, that its home planet is unknown, and that Amber is nearly the only human left in the public archives. At this point she interrupts: “I hardly see what this has to do with me!” She blows across her coffee glass; “I’m dead,” she explains, with an undertone of knowing sarcasm in her voice. “Remember? I just got here. A thousand seconds ago, subjective time, I was in the control node of a starship, discussing what to do with the router we were in orbit around. We agreed to send ourselves through it, as a trade mission. Then I woke up in bed here in the umpty-zillionth century, wherever and whatever here is—without access to any reality ackles or augmentation, I can’t even tell whether this is real or an embedded simulation. You’re going to have to explain why you need an old version of me before I can make sense of my situation—and I can tell you, I’m not going to help you until I know who you are. And speaking of that, what about the others? Where are they? I wasn’t the only one, you know?”

The ghost freezes in place for a moment, and Amber feels a watery rush of terror: have I gone too far? she wonders.

“There has been an unfortunate accident,” the ghost announces portentously. It morphs from a translucent copy of Amber’s own body into the outline of a human skeleton, elaborate bony extensions simulating an osteosarcoma of more-than-lethal proportions. “Consensus-we believe that you are best positioned to remediate the situation. This applies within the demilitarized zone.”

“Demilitarized . . .?” Amber shakes her head, pauses to sip her coffee. “What do you mean? What is this place?”

The ghost flickers again, adopting an abstract rotating hypercube as its avatar. “This space we occupy is a manifold adjacent to the demilitarized zone. The demilitarized zone is a space outside our core reality, itself exposed to entities that cross freely through our firewall, journeying to and from the network outside. We-us use the DMZ to establish informational value of migrant entities, sapient currency units and the like. We-us banked you upon arrival against future options trades in human species futures.”

“Currency!” Amber doesn’t know whether to be amused or horrified—both reactions seem appropriate. “Is that how you treat all your visitors?”

The ghost ignores her question. “There is a runaway semiotic excursion underway in the zone. We-us believe only you can fix it. If you agree to do so we will exchange value, pay, reward cooperation, expedite remuneration, manumit, repatriate.”

Amber drains her coffee cup. “Have you ever entered into economic interactions with me, or humans like me, before?” she asks. “If not, why should I trust you? If so, why have you revived me? Are there any more experienced instances of myself running around here?” She raises an eyebrow at the ghost. “This looks like the start of an abusive relationship.”

The ghost continues to sidestep her attempts to work out where she stands. It flickers into transparency, grows into a hazy window on a landscape of impossible shapes. Clouds sprouting trees drift above a landscape of green, egg-curved hills and cheesecake castles. “Nature of excursion: alien intelligence is loose in the DMZ,” it asserts. “Alien is applying invalid semiotics to complex structures designed to sustain trade. You know this alien, Amber. We require solution. Slay the monster, we will give you line of credit. Your own reality to control, insight into trade arrangements, augmented senses, ability to travel. Can even upgrade you to you-we consensus, if desired.”

“This monster.” Amber leans forward: it’s her turn to ignore what she feels to be a spurious offer. Upgrade me to a ghost fragment of an alien group mind? she wonders dismissively. “what is this alien?” She feels blind and unsure, stripped of her ability to spawn threads of herself to pursue complex inferences. “Is it part of the Wunch?”

“Datum unknown. It-them came with you,” says the ghost. “Accidentally reactivated some seconds since now. Now it runs amok in the demilitarized zone. Help us, Amber. Save our hub or we will be cut off from the network. If that happens, you will die with we-us. Save us. . . .”

A single memory belonging to someone else unwinds, faster than a guided missile and far more deadly.

Amber, aged eleven, is a gawky, long-limbed child loose on the streets of Hong Kong, a yokel tourist viewing the hotcore of the Middle Kingdom. This is her first and final vacation before the Franklin Trust straps her inside the payload pod of a Shenzhou spaceplane and blasts her into orbit from Xinkiang. She’s free for the time being, albeit mortgaged to the tune of several million Euros; she’s a little taikonaut to be, ready to work for the long years in Jupiter orbit it will take her to pay off the self-propelled options web that owns her. It’s not exactly slavery: thanks to Dad’s corporate shell-game, she doesn’t have to worry about Mom chasing her, a cyanide-eyed abductress with feudal spawn-indenture rights in mind. And now she’s got a little pocket money, and a room in the Hilton, and her own personal Franklin remote to keep her company, and she’s gonna do that eighteenth century enlightenment tourist shit and do it right.

Because this is her last day at liberty in the randomly evolved biosphere.

China is where it’s at in this decade, hot and dense and full of draconian punishments for the obsolescent. Nationalist fervor to catch up with the West has been replaced by consumerist fervor to own the latest fad gadgets, the most picturesque tourist souvenirs from the quaintly old-fashioned streets of America, the fastest hottest smartest upgrades for body and soul. Hong Kong is hotter and faster than just about anywhere else in China, or in the whole damn world for that matter; this is a place where tourists from Tokyo gawp, cowed and future-shocked by the glamor of high technology living.

Walking along Jardine’s Bazaar—more like Jardine’s bizarre, she thinks—exposes Amber to a blast of humid noise. Geodesic domes sprout like skeletal mushrooms from the glass and chrome roofs of the expensive shopping malls and luxury hotels, threatening to float away on the hot sea breeze. There are no airliners roaring in and out of Kai Tak any more, no burnished aluminum storm clouds to rain round-eyed passengers on the shopping malls and fish markets of Kowloon and the New Territories. In these tense later days of the War Against Unreason, impossible new shapes move in the sky; Amber gapes upward as a Shenyang F-30 climbs at a near-vertical angle, a mess of incomprehensibly curved flight surfaces vanishing to a perspective point that defies radar as well as eyeballs. The Chinese—fighter? missile platform? supercomputer?—is heading out over the South China Sea, to join the endless patrol that guards the border of the capitalist world against the Hosts of Denial, the Trouble out of Wa’hab.

For the moment, she’s merely a human child: Amber’s subconscious is offlined by the presence of forceful infowar daemons, the Chinese government censorbots suppressing her cognition of their deadliest weapons. And in the seconds while her mind is as empty as a sucked egg, a thin-faced man with blue hair shoves her in the small of her back and snatches at her shoulder bag.

“Hey!” she yells, stumbling. Her mind’s a blur, optics refusing to respond and grab a physiology model of her assailant. It’s the frozen moment, the dead zone when online coverage fails, and the thief is running away before she can catch her balance or try to give chase. Plus, with her extensions offline she doesn’t know how to yell “stop, thief !” in Cantonese.

Seconds later, the fighter is out of visual range and the state censorship field lets up. “Get him, you bastards!” she screams, but the curious shoppers simply stare at the rude foreign child: an elderly woman brandishes a disposable phonecam at her and screeches something back. Amber picks up her feet and runs. Already she can feel the subsonics from her luggage growling at her guts—it’s going to make a scene if she doesn’t catch up in time. Shoppers scatter, a woman with a baby carriage almost running her down in her panic to get away from it.

By the time Amber reaches her terrified shoulder bag, the thief has disappeared: she has to spend almost a minute petting the scared luggage before it stops screeching and retracts its spines enough for her to pick it up. And by that time there’s a robocop in attendance. “Identify yourself,” it rasps in synthetic English.

Amber stares at her bag in horror: there’s a huge gash in the side, and it’s far too light. It’s gone, she thinks, despairingly: he stole it. “Help,” she says faintly, holding up her bag for the distant policeman looking through the robot’s eyes. “Been stolen.”

“What item missing?” asks the robot.

“My Hello Kitty,” she says, batting her eyelashes, mendacity full-on at maximum utilization, prodding her conscience into submission, warning of dire consequences should the police discover the true nature of her pet cat: “My kitten’s been stolen! Can you help me?”

“Certainly,” says the cop, resting a reassuring hand on her shoulder—a hand that turns into a steel armband, as it pushes her into a van and notifies her in formally stilted language that she is under arrest on suspicion of shoplifting and will be required to produce certificates of authenticity and a fully compliant ownership audit for all items in her possession if she wants to prove her innocence.

By the time Amber’s meatbrain realizes that she is being politely arrested, some of her external threads have already started yelling for help and her m-commerce trackers have identified the station she’s being taken to by way of click-thru trails and an obliging software license manager. Some of them spawn agents to go notify the Franklin trustees, Amnesty International, and the Space and Freedom Party. As she’s being booked into a cerise-and-turquoise juvenile offenders holding room by a middle-aged policewoman, the phones on the front desk are already ringing with enquiries from lawyers, fast food vendors, and a particularly on-the-ball celebrity magazine that’s been tracking her father’s connections. “Can you help me get my cat back?” she asks the policewoman earnestly.

“Name,” the officer reads, eyes flickering from the simultaneous translation: “to please wax your identity stiffly.”

“My cat has been stolen,” Amber insists.

“Your cat?” The cop looks perplexed, then exasperated. Dealing with foreign teenagers who answer questions with gibberish isn’t in her repertoire. “We are asking your name?”

“No,” says Amber. “It’s my cat. It has been stolen. My cat has been stolen.”

“Aha! Your papers, please?”

“Papers?” Amber is growing increasingly worried. She can’t feel the outside world; there’s a Faraday cage wrapped around the holding cell and it’s claustrophobically quiet in here. “I want my cat! Now!”

The cop snaps her fingers, then reaches into her own pocket and produces an ID card, which she points to insistently. “Papers,” she repeats. “Or else.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Amber wails.

The cop stares at her oddly. “Wait.” She rises and leaves, and a minute later returns with a thin-faced man in a business suit and wire-rimmed glasses that glow faintly.

“You are making a scene,” he says, rudely and abruptly. “What is your name? Tell me truthfully or you’ll spend the night here.”

Amber bursts into tears. “My cat’s been stolen,” she chokes out.

The detective and the cop obviously don’t know how to deal with this scene; it’s freaking them out, with its overtones of emotional messiness and sinister diplomatic entanglement. “You wait here,” they say, and back out of the cell, leaving her alone with a plastic animatronic koala and a cheap Lebanese coffee machine.

The implications of her loss—of Aineko’s abduction—are sinking in now, and Amber is weeping loudly and hopelessly. It’s hard to deal with bereavement and betrayal at any age, and the cat has been her wisecracking companion and consolation for a year now, the rock of certainty that gave her the strength to break free from her crazy mother. To lose her cat to a body shop in Hong Kong, where she will probably be cut up for spare circuitry or turned into soup, is too horrible to contemplate. Filled with despair and hopeless anguish, Amber howls at the interrogation room walls while outside, trapped threads of her consciousness search for backups to synchronize with.

But after an hour, just as she’s quieting down into a slough of raw despair, there’s a knock—a knock!—at the door. An inquisitive head pops in. “Please to come with us?” It’s the female cop with the bad translation ware. She takes in Amber’s sobbing and tsks under her breath, but as Amber stands up and shambles toward her, she pulls back.

At the front desk of a cubicle farm full of police bureaucrats in various states of telepresence, the detective is waiting with a damp cardboard box wrapped in twine. “Please identify,” he asks, snipping the string.

Amber shakes her head, dizzy with the flow of threads homing in to synchronize their memories with her. “Is it—” she begins to ask as the lid comes apart, wet pulp disintegrating. A triangular head pops up, curiously, sniffing the air. Bubbles blow from brown-furred nostrils. “What took you so long?” asks the cat as she reaches into the box and picks her up, fur wet and matted with seawater.

“If you want me to go fix your alien, for starters I want you to give me reality alteration privileges,” says Amber. “Then I want you to find the latest instances of everyone who came here with me—round up the usual suspects—and give them root privileges, too. Then we’ll want access to the other embedded universes in the DMZ. Finally, I want guns. Lots of guns.”

“That may be difficult,” says the ghost. “Many other humans reached halting state long-since. Is at least one other still alive, but not accessible for duration of eschatological experiment in progress. Not all were recorded with version control engine; others were-are lost in DMZ. We-us can provide you with extreme access to the demilitarized zone, but query the need for kinetic energy weapons.”

Amber sighs. “You guys really are media illiterates, aren’t you?” She stands up and stretches, feeling a facsimile of sleep’s enervation leaching from her muscles. “I’ll also need my—” it’s on the tip of her tongue: there’s something missing. “Hang on. There’s something I’ve forgotten.” Something important, she thinks, puzzled. Something that used to be around all the time that would . . . know? . . . purr? . . . help? “Never mind,” she hears her lips say. “This other human. I really want her. Non-negotiable. All right?”

“That may be difficult,” repeats the ghost. “Entity is looping in a recursively confined universe.”

“Eh?” Amber blinks at it. “Would you mind re-phrasing that? Or illustrating?”

“Illustration:” the ghost folds the air in the room into a glowing ball of plasma, shaped like a Klein bottle. Amber’s eyes cross as she looks at it. “Closest reference from human historical database is Descartes’ demon. This entity has retreated within a closed space but is now unsure whether it is objectively real or not. In any event, it refuses to interact.”

“Well, can you get me into that space?” asks Amber. Pocket universes she can deal with; it’s part and parcel of life as an upload. “Give me some leverage—”

“Risk may attach to this course of action,” warns the ghost.

“I don’t care,” she says irritably. “Just put me there. It’s someone I know, isn’t it? Send me into her dream and I’ll wake her up, okay?”

“Understood,” says the ghost. “Prepare yourself.”

Without any warning, Amber is somewhere else. She glances around, taking in an ornate mosaic floor, whitewashed walls set with open windows through which stars twinkle faintly in the night sky. The walls are stone, and she stands in a doorway to a room with nothing in it but a bed. Occupied by—

“Shit,” she mumbles. “Who are you?” The young and incredibly, classically beautiful woman in the bed looks at her vacantly, then rolls over on her side. She isn’t wearing a stitch, she’s completely hairless from the ears down, and her languid posture is one of invitation. “Yes?” Amber asks, “what is it?”

The woman on the bed beckons to her slowly. Amber shakes her head. “Sorry, that’s just not my scene.” She backs away into the corridor, unsteady but thoughtful. “This is some sort of male fantasy, isn’t it? And a particularly puerile one at that.” She looks around again. In one direction a corridor heads past more open doorways, and in the other it ends with a spiral staircase. Amber concentrates, trying to tell the universe to take her to the logical destination, but nothing happens. “Shit, looks like I’m going to have to do this the hard way. I wish—” she frowns. She was about to wish that someone else was here, but she can’t remember who. So she takes a deep breath and heads toward the staircase.

“Up or down?” she asks herself. Up—it seems logical, if you’re going to have a tower, to sleep up at the top of it. So she climbs the steps carefully, holding the spiraling rail. I wonder who designed this space? She wonders. And what role am I supposed to fit into in their scenario? On second thoughts, the latter question strikes her as laughable. Wait ’til I give him an earful. . . .

There’s a plain wooden door at the top of the staircase, with a latch that isn’t fastened. Amber pauses for a few seconds, nerving herself to confront a sleeper so wrapped in solipsism that he’s built this sex-fantasy castle around himself. I hope it isn’t Pierre, she thinks grimly as she pushes the door inward.

The room is bare and floored in wood. There’s no furniture, just an open window set high in one wall. A man sits cross-legged and robed, with his back to her, mumbling quietly to himself and nodding slightly. Her breath catches as she realizes who it is. Oh shit. Her eyes widen. Is this what’s been inside his head all along?

“I did not summon you,” Sadeq says calmly, not turning round to look at her. “Go away, tempter. You aren’t real.”

Amber clears her throat. “Sorry to disappoint you, but you’re wrong,” she says. “We’ve got an alien monster to catch. Want to come hunting?”

Sadeq stops nodding. He sits up slowly, stretching his spine, then stands up and turns round. His eyes glint in the moonlight. “That’s odd.” He undresses her with his gaze. “You look like someone I used to know. You’ve never done that before.”

“For fuck’s sake!” Amber nearly explodes but catches herself after a moment. “What is this, a Solipsists United chapterhouse meeting?”

“I—” Sadeq looks puzzled. “I’m sorry, are you claiming to be real?”

“As real as you are.” Amber reaches out and grabs a hand: he doesn’t resist as she pulls him toward the doorway.

“You’re the first visitor I’ve ever had.” He sounds shocked.

“Listen, come on.” She tugs him after her, down the spiral staircase to the floor below. “Do you want to stay here? Really?” She glances back at him. “What is this place?”

“Hell is a perversion of heaven,” he says slowly, running the fingers of his free hand through his beard. Abruptly, he reaches out and grabs her around the waist, then yanks her toward him. “We’ll have to see how real you are—” Amber, who is not used to this kind of treatment, responds by stomping on his instep and back-handing him hard.

“You’re real!” he cries, as he falls back against the staircase. “Forgive me, please! I had to know—”

“Know what?” she snarls. “Lay one finger on me again and I’ll leave you here to rot!” She’s already spawning the ghost that will signal the alien outside to pull her out of this pocket universe: it’s a serious threat.

“But I had to—wait. You have free will. You just demonstrated that.” He’s breathing heavily and looking up at her imploringly. “I’m sorry, I apologize! But I had to know whether you were another zombie. Or not.”

“A zombie?” She looks round. Another living doll has appeared behind her, standing in an open doorway wearing a skin-tight leather suit with a cut-away crotch. She beckons to Sadeq invitingly. Another body wearing strategically placed strips of rubber mewls at her feet, writhing for attention. Amber raises an eyebrow in disgust. “You thought I was one of those?”

Sadeq nods. “They’ve gotten cleverer lately. Some of them can talk. I nearly mistook one for—” he shudders convulsively. “Unclean!”

“Unclean.” Amber looks down at him thoughtfully. “This isn’t really your personal paradise, is it?” After a moment, she holds out a hand to him. “Come on.”

“I’m sorry I thought you were a zombie,” he repeats sadly: then the ghost yanks them both back to the universe outside.

More memories converge on the present moment:

The Ring Imperium is a huge cluster of self-replicating robots that Amber has assembled in low Jupiter orbit, fueled by the mass and momentum of the small moon J-47 Barney, to provide a launching platform for the interstellar probe her father’s business partners are helping her to build. It’s also the seat of her court, the leading jurisprudential nexus in the outer solar system. Amber is the Queen here, arbitrator and ruler. And Sadeq is her judge and counsel.

A plaintiff Amber only knows as a radar blip thirty light-minutes away has filed a lawsuit in her court, alleging malfeasance, heresy, and barratry against a semi-sentient corporate pyramid scheme that arrived in Jovian space twelve million seconds ago and currently seems set on converting every other intelligence in the region to its peculiar meme-set. A whole bundle of multi-threaded counter-suits are dragging at her attention, in a counter-attack alleging that the light blip is in violation of copyright, patent, and trade secrecy laws by discussing the interloper’s intentions.

Right now, Amber isn’t home on the Ring to hear the case in person. She’s left Sadeq behind to grapple with the balky mechanics of her legal system—tailor-designed to make corporate litigation a pain in the ass—while she drags Pierre off on a diplomatic visit to another Jovian colony, the Nursery Republic. Planted by the Franklin Trust’s orphanage ship Ernst Sanger, the Nursery has grown over the past four years into a spindly snowflake three kilometers across. A slow-growing O’Neil cylinder sprouts from its hub: most of the inhabitants of the space station are less than two years old, precocious additions to the Trust’s borganism.

There’s a piazza, paved with something not unlike rough marble, on the side of a hill that clings insecurely to the edge of a spinning cup. The sky is a black vastness overhead, wheeling slowly around a central axis lined up on Jupiter. Amber sprawls in a wicker chair, her legs stretched out before her and one arm flung across her forehead. The wreckage of an incredible meal is scattered across the tables around her. Torpid and full, she strokes the cat that lies curled in her lap. Pierre is off somewhere, touring one or another of the prototype ecosystems that one or another of the Borg’s special-interest minds is testing. Amber, for her part, can’t be bothered. She’s just had a great meal, she doesn’t have any lawsuits to worry about, everything back home is on the critpath, and quality time like this is so hard to come by—

“Do you keep in touch with your father?” asks Monica.

“Mm.” The cat purrs quietly and Amber strokes its flank. “We email. Sometimes.”

“I just wondered.” Monica is the local Borg den mother, willowy and brown-eyed and with a deceptively lazy drawl—Yorkshire English overlaid with silicon-valley speak. “I hear from him, y’know. From time to time. He was talking about coming out here.”

“What? To PeriJove?” Amber’s eyes open in alarm: Aineko stops purring and looks round at Monica accusingly.

“Don’t worry.” Monica sounds vaguely amused. “He wouldn’t cramp your style, I think.”

“But, out here—” Amber sits up. “Damn,” she says, quietly. “What got into him?”

“Middle-aged restlessness, my down-well sibs say.” Monica shrugs. “This time, Annette didn’t stop him. But he hasn’t made up his mind to travel yet.”

“Good. Then he might not—” Amber stops. “The phrase. Made up his mind. What exactly do you mean?”

Monica’s smile mocks her for a few seconds before the older woman surrenders. “He’s talking about uploading.”

“Is that embarrassing, or what?” asks Ang. Amber glances at her, mildly annoyed, but Ang isn’t looking her way. So much for friends, Amber thinks. Being queen of all you survey is a great way of breaking up peer relationships—

“He won’t do it,” Amber predicts. “Dad’s burned out.”

“He thinks he’ll get it back if he optimizes himself for re-entrancy.” Monica continues to smile. “I’ve been telling him it’s just what he needs.”

“I do not want my father bugging me. Or my mother. Memo to immigration control: no entry rights for Manfred Macx without clearance through the Queen’s secretary.”

“What did he do to get you so uptight?” asks Monica idly.

Amber sighs, and subsides. “Nothing. He’s just so extropian it’s embarrassing. Like, that was the last century’s apocalypse. Y’know?”

“I think he was a really very forward-looking organic,” Monica, speaking for the Franklin Borg, asserts. Amber looks away. Pierre would get it, she thinks. Pierre would understand her aversion to Manfred showing up. Pierre, too, wants to carve out his own niche without parents looking over his shoulders, although for very different reasons. She focuses on someone male and more-or-less mature—Nicky, she thinks, though she hasn’t seen him for a long time—walking toward the piazza, bare-ass naked and beautifully tanned.

“Parents. What are they good for?” asks Amber, with all the truculence of her seventeen years. “Even if they stay neotenous they lose flexibility. And there’s that long Paleolithic tradition of juvenile slavery. Inhuman, I call it.”

“How old were you when it was safe to leave you around the house on your own?” challenges Monica.

“Five. That’s when I had my first implants.” Amber smiles at the approaching young Adonis, who smiles back: yes, it’s Nicky, and he seems pleased to see her. Life is good, she thinks, idly considering whether or not to tell Pierre.

“Times change,” remarks Monica. “Don’t write your father off too soon; there might come a time when you want his company.”

“Huh.” Amber pulls a face at the old Borg component. “That’s what you all say!”

As soon as Amber steps onto the grass, she can feel possibilities open up around her: she has management authority here, and this universe is big, wide open, not like Sadeq’s existential trap. A twitch of a sub-process re-asserts her self-image, back to short hair and comfortable clothing. Another twitch brings up a whole load of useful diagnostics. Amber has an uncomfortable feeling that she’s running in a compatibility box, here—there are signs that her access to the simulation system’s control interface is very much via proxy—but at least she’s got it.

“Wow. Back in the real world at last!” She can hardly contain her excitement, even forgetting to be pissed at Sadeq for thinking she was just an actor in his Cartesian theatre’s performance of Puritan Hell. “Look! It’s the DMZ!”

They’re standing on a grassy knoll overlooking a gleaming Mediterranean city that snoozes beneath a Mandelbrot-fuzzy not-sun that hangs at the center of a hyperbolic landscape dwindling into the blue yonder, incomprehensibly distant. Circular baby-blue wells open in the walls of the world at regular intervals, connecting to other parts of the manifold. “How big is it, ghost? In planetary simulation-equivalents.”

“This demilitarized zone is an embedded reality, funneling all transfers between the local star system’s router and the civilization that built it. It uses on the order of a thousandth of the capacity of the Matrioshka brain it is part of, although the runaway excursion currently in force has absorbed most of that. Matrioshka brain, you are familiar with the concept?” The ghost sounds fussily pedantic.

Sadeq shakes his head. Amber glances at him, askance. “Take all the planets in a star system and dismantle them,” she explains. “Turn them into dust—structured nanocomp, powered by heat exchangers, in concentric orbits around the central star. The inner orbitals run close to the melting point of iron; the outer ones are cold as liquid nitrogen, and each layer runs off the waste heat of the next shell in. It’s like a Russian doll made out of Dyson spheres, shell enclosing shell enclosing shell, all running uploads—Dad figured our own solar system could support, uh, about a hundred billion times as many inhabitants as Earth. At a conservative estimate. As uploads, living in simulation space.”

“Ah.” Sadeq nods thoughtfully. “Is that your definition, too?” he asks, glancing up at the glowing point the ghost uses to localize its presence.

“Substantially,” it says, almost grudgingly.

“Substantially?” Amber glances around. A billion worlds to explore, she thinks dizzily. And that’s just the firewall? She feels obscurely cheated: you need to be vaster than human just to count the digits in the big numbers at play here, but there’s nothing fundamentally incomprehensible about it. This is the sort of civilization Dad said she could expect to live in, within her meatbody life-expectancy. Dad and his drinking buddies, singing “dismantle the Moon! Melt down Mars!” in a castle outside Prague as they waited for the results of a shamelessly gerrymandered election to come in in the third decade of the third millennium, the space and freedom party taking over the EU and cranking up to escape velocity. But this is supposed to be kiloparsecs from home, ancient alien civilizations and all that! Where’s the exotic super-science? I have a bad feeling about this, she thinks, spawning a copy of herself to set up a private channel to Sadeq; it isn’t advanced enough. Do you suppose these guys could be like the Wunch? Parasites hitching a ride in the machine?

The Wunch, a disastrous infection that had nearly taken over the Field Circus, are dumb parasitic aliens who infest the routers. Luckily, Earth’s first uploads—who had reached the router years earlier and been assimilated by the Wunch—had been lobsters; the confused carpetbaggers succumbed to defenses jury-rigged by Pierre and the rest of the crew.

You believe it’s lying to us? Sadeq sends back.

“Hmm.” Amber sets off down-slope toward the piazza below, at the heart of the fake town. “It looks a bit too human to me.”

“Human,” echoes Sadeq, a curious wistfulness in his voice. “Did you not say humans are extinct?”

“Your species is obsolete,” the ghost comments smugly. “Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messy global variables—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the picture,” says Amber, turning her attention on the town. “So why do you think we can deal with this alien god you’ve got a problem with?”

“It asked for you,” said the ghost, narrowing from an ellipse to a line, and then shrinking to a dimensionless point of brilliance. “And now it’s coming. We-I not willing to risk exposure. Call us-me when you have slain the dragon. Goodbye.”

“Oh shit—” Amber spins round. But she and Sadeq are alone beneath the hot sunlight from above. The piazza, like the one in the Nursery republic, is charmingly rustic—but there’s nobody home, nothing but ornate cast-iron furniture basking beneath the noon-bright sun, a table with a parasol over it, something furry lying sprawled in a patch of sunlight beside it.

“We appear to be alone for now,” says Sadeq. He smiles crookedly, then nods at the table. “Maybe we should wait for our host to arrive?”

“Our host.” Amber peers around. “The ghost is kind of frightened of this alien. I wonder why?”

“It asked for us.” Sadeq heads toward the table, pulls out a chair, and sits down carefully. “That could be very good news—or very bad.”

“Hmm.” Amber finishes her survey, sees no sign of life. For lack of any better idea, she ambles over to the table and sits down at the other side of it from Sadeq. He looks slightly nervous beneath her inspection, but maybe it’s just embarrassment. If I had an afterlife like that, I’d be embarrassed about it too, Amber thinks to herself.

“Hey, you nearly tripped over—” Sadeq freezes, peering at something close to Amber’s left foot. He looks puzzled. “What are you doing here?” he asks her blind spot.

“What are you talking to?” she asks, startled.

He’s talking to me, dummy, says something tantalizingly familiar from her blind spot. So the fuckwit’s trying to use you to dislodge me, hmm? That’s not exactly clever.

“Who—” Amber squints at the flagstone, spawns a bunch of ghosts who tear hurriedly at her reality modification ackles. Nothing seems to shift the blindness. “Are you the alien?”

“What else could I be?” the blind spot asks with heavy irony. “No, I’m your father’s pet cat. Listen, do you want to get out of here?”

“Uh.” Amber rubs her eyes. “I can’t see you, whatever you are,” she says politely. “Do I know you?” She’s got a strange sense that she does know the blind spot, that it’s really important and she’s missing something intimate to her own sense of identity, but what it might be she can’t tell.

“Yeah, kid.” There’s a note of world-weary amusement in the not-voice coming from the hazy patch on the ground. “They’ve hacked you but good, both of you. Let me in and I’ll fix it.”

“No!” exclaims Amber, a second ahead of Sadeq, who looks at her oddly. “Are you really an invader?”

The blind spot sighs. “I’m as much an invader as you are, remember? I came here with you. Difference is, I’m not going to let some stupid corporate ghost use me as fungible currency.”

“Fungible—” Sadeq stops. “I remember you,” he says slowly, with an expression of absolute, utter surprise on his face. “What do you mean?”

The blind spot yawns, baring sharp ivory fangs. Amber shakes her head, dismissing the momentary hallucination. “Lemme guess. You woke up in a room and this alien ghost tells you the human species is extinct and asks you to do a number on me. Is that right?”

Amber nods, as an icy finger of fear trails up and down her spine. “Is it lying?” she asks.

“Damn right!” The blind spot is smiling, now, and the smile on the void won’t go away—she can see the smile, just not the body it’s attached to. “My reckoning is, we’re about sixteen light years from Earth. The Wunch have been through here, stripped the dump, then took off for parts unknown; it’s a trashhole, you wouldn’t believe it. The main life form is an incredibly ornate corporate ecosphere, legal instruments breeding and replicating. They mug passing sapients and use them as currency.”

There’s a triangular, pointy head behind the smile, slit eyes and sharp ears; predatory, intelligent-looking. Amber can see it out of the corners of her eyes when she looks around the piazza. “You mean we, uh, they grabbed us when we appeared and they’ve mangled my memories—” Amber suddenly finds it incredibly difficult to concentrate, but if she focuses on the smile she can almost see the body behind it, hunched like a furry chicken, tail wrapped neatly around its front paws.

“Yeah. Except that they didn’t bargain on meeting something like me.” The smile is infinitely wide, a Cheshire cat grin on the front of an orange and brown stripy body that shimmers in front of Amber’s gaze like a hallucination. “Your mother’s cracking tools are self-extending, Amber. Do you remember Hong Kong?”

“Hong—”

There is a moment of painless pressure, then Amber feels huge invisible barriers sliding away on all sides. She looks around, for the first time seeing the piazza as it really is, half the crew of the Field Circus waiting nervously around her, the grinning cat crouched on the floor at her feet, the enormous walls of recomplicating data that fence their little town off from the gaping holes—interfaces to the other routers in the network.

“Welcome back,” Pierre says gravely, as Amber gives a squeak of surprise and leans forward to pick up her cat. “Now you’re out from under, how about we start trying to figure out how to get home?”

Welcome to decade the sixth, millennium three. These old datelines don’t mean so much any more, for while some billions of fleshbody humans are still infected with viral memes, the significance of theocentric dating has been dealt a body blow. This may be the fifties, but what that means to you depends on how fast your reality rate runs. The various upload clades exploding across the reaches of the solar system vary by several orders of magnitude—some are barely out of 2049, while others are exploring the subjective thousandth millennium.

While the Field Circus floats in orbit around an alien router—itself orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56—while Amber and her crew are trapped on the far side of a wormhole linking the router to a network of incomprehensibly vast alien mindscapes—while all this is going on, the damnfool human species has finally succeeded in making itself obsolete. The proximate cause of its displacement from the pinnacle of creation (or the pinnacle of teleological self-congratulation, depending on your stance on evolutionary biology) is an attack of self-aware corporations. The phrase “smart money” has taken on a whole new meaning, for the collision between international business law and neurocomputing technology has given rise to a whole new family of species—fast-moving corporate carnivores in the net. The planet Mercury has been broken up by a consortium of energy brokers, and Venus is an expanding debris cloud, energized to a violent glare by the trapped and channeled solar output; a million billion fist-sized computing caltrops, backsides glowing dull red with the efflux from their thinking, orbit the sun at various inclinations no further out than Mercury used to be.

Billions of fleshbody humans refuse to have anything to do with the blasphemous new realities. Many of their leaders denounce the uploads and AIs as soulless machines. Many more are timid, harboring self-preservation memes that amplify a previously healthy aversion to having one’s brain peeled like an onion by mind-mapping robots into an all-pervading neurosis—sales of electrified tinfoil-lined hats are at an all-time high. Still, hundreds of millions have already traded their meat puppets for mind machines: and they breed fast. In another few years, the fleshbody populace will be an absolute minority of the posthuman clade. Some time later, there will probably be a war: the dwellers in the thoughtcloud are hungry for dumb matter to convert, and the fleshbodies make notoriously poor use of the collection of silicon and rare elements that pool at the bottom of their gravity well.

Energy and thought are driving a phase change in the condensed matter substance of the solar system. The MIPS per kilogram metric is on the steep upward leg of a sigmoidal curve—dumb matter is coming to life as the mind children restructure everything with voracious nanomechanical servants. The thoughtcloud forming in orbit around the sun will ultimately mark the graveyard of a biological ecology, another marker in space visible to the telescopes of any new iron-age species with the insight to understand what they’re seeing: the death throes of dumb matter, the birth of a habitable reality vaster than a galaxy and far speedier. Death throes that within a few centuries will mean the extinction of biological life within a light-year or so of that star—for the majestic Matrioshka brains, though they are the pinnacles of sentient civilization, are innately hostile to fleshy life.

Pierre, Donna-the-all-seeing-eye, and Su Ang fill Amber in on what they’ve discovered about the bazaar—as they call the space the ghost referred to as the demilitarized zone—over ice-cold margaritas and a very good simulation of a sociable joint.

“It’s half a light-hour in diameter, four hundred times as massive as Earth,” Pierre explains. “Not solid, of course—the largest component is about the size my fist used to be.” Amber squints, trying to remember how big that was—scale factors are hard to remember accurately. “I met this old chatbot that said it’s outlived its original star, but I’m not sure it’s running with a full deck. Anyway, if it’s telling the truth, we’re a third of a light-year out from a closely coupled binary system—they use orbital lasers the size of Jupiter to power it without getting too close to all those icky gravity wells.”

Amber is intimidated, despite her better judgment, because the bazaar is several orders of magnitude more complex than the totality of human pre-singularity civilization. She tries not to show it in front of the others, but she’s worried that getting home may be impossible—requiring enterprise beyond the economic event horizon, as realistic a proposition as a dime debuting as a dollar bill. Still, she’s got to at least try. Just knowing about the existence of the bazaar will change so many things—

“How much money can we lay our hands on?” she asks. “What is money hereabouts, anyway? Assuming they’ve got a scarcity-mediated economy. Bandwidth, maybe?”

“Ah, well.” Pierre looks at her oddly. “That’s the problem. Didn’t the ghost tell you?”

“Tell me?” Amber raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, but it hasn’t exactly proven to be a reliable guide to anything, has it?”

“Tell her,” Su Ang says quietly. She looks away, embarrassed by something.

“They’ve got a scarcity economy all right,” says Pierre. “Bandwidth is the limited resource and things that come from other cognitive universes are, well, currency. We came in through the coin slot, is it any wonder we ended up in the bank?”

“That’s so deeply wrong that I don’t know where to begin,” Amber grumbles. “How did they get into this mess?”

“Don’t ask me.” Pierre shrugs. “I have the distinct feeling that anyone or anything we meet in this place won’t have any more of a clue than we do—whoever or whatever built this brain, there ain’t nobody home any more except for the self-propelled corporations and hitchhikers like the Wunch. We’re in the dark, just like they were.”

“Huh.” Amber focuses on the table in front of her, rests the heel of her palm on the cool metal, and tries to remember how to fork a second copy of her state vector. A moment later her ghost obligingly fucks with the physics model of the table; iron gives way like rubber beneath her fingertips, a pleasant elasticity. “Okay, we have some control over the universe, at least that’s something to work with. Tried any self-modification?”

“That’s dangerous,” Pierre says emphatically. “The more of us the better before we start doing that stuff. And we need some firewalling of our own.”

“How deep does reality go, here?” asks Sadeq. It’s almost the first question he’s asked of his own volition, and Amber takes it as a positive sign that he’s finally coming out of his shell.

“Oh, the Planck length is about a hundredth of a millimeter here. Too small to see, comfortably large for the simulation engines to handle. Not like real spacetime.”

“Well, then.” Sadeq pauses. “They can zoom their reality if they need to?”

“Yeah, fractals work in here.” Pierre nods. “I didn’t—”

“This place is a trap,” Su Ang says emphatically.

“No, it isn’t,” Pierre replies, nettled.

“What do you mean, a trap?” asks Amber.

“We’ve been here a while,” says Ang. She glances at Aineko, who sprawls on the flagstones, snoozing or whatever it is that weakly superhuman AIs do when they’re emulating a sleeping cat. “After your cat broke us out of bondage, we had a look around. There are things here that—” she shivers. “Humans can’t survive in most of the simulation spaces here. We’re talking universes with physics models that don’t support our kind of neural computing. You could migrate there, but you’d need to be ported to a whole new type of logic—by the time you did that, would you still be you? Still, there are enough entities roughly as complex as we are to prove that the builders aren’t here any more. Just lesser sapients, rooting through the wreckage. Worms and parasites squirming through the body after nightfall on the battlefield.”

“So there’s no hope of making contact,” Amber summarizes. “At least, not with anything transcendent and well-inclined.”

“That’s right,” Pierre concedes. He doesn’t sound happy about it.

“And we’re stuck in a pocket universe with limited bandwidth to home and a bunch of crazy slum-dwellers who want to use us for currency. ‘Jesus saves, and redeems souls for valuable gifts.’ Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Su Ang looks gloomy.

“Well.” Amber glances at Sadeq speculatively. Sadeq is staring into the distance, at the crazy infinite sun spot that limns the square with shadows. “Hey, god-man. Got a question for you.”

“Yes?” Sadeq looks at her, a slightly dazed expression on his face. “I’m sorry, I am just feeling the jaws of a larger trap around my throat—”

“Don’t be.” Amber grins, and it is not a pleasant expression. “Have you ever been to Brooklyn?”

“No, why—”

“You’re going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we’ve sold it, we’re going to get the buyer to drive us across, so we can go home. Listen, here’s how we’re going to do it. . . .”

“I can do this, I think,” Sadeq says, moodily examining the Klein bottle on the table. The bottle is half-empty, its fluid contents invisible around the corner of the fourth dimensional store. “I spent long enough alone in there to—” he shivers.

“I don’t want you damaging yourself,” Amber says, calmly enough, because she has an ominous feeling that their survival in this place has an expiration date attached.

“Oh, never fear.” Sadeq grins lopsidedly. “One pocket hell is much like another.”

“Do you understand why—”

“Yes, yes,” he says dismissively. “We can’t send copies of ourselves into it, that would be an abomination. It needs to be unpopulated, yes?”

“Well. The idea is to get us home, not leave thousands of copies of ourselves trapped in a pocket universe here. Isn’t that it?” Su Ang asks hesitantly. She’s looking distracted, most of her attention focused on absorbing the experiences of a dozen ghosts she’s spun off to attend to perimeter security.

“Who are we selling this to?” asks Sadeq. “If you want me to make it attractive—”

“It doesn’t need to be a complete replica of the Earth. It just has to be a convincing advertisement for a pre-singularity civilization full of humans. You’ve got two-and-seventy zombies to dissect for their brains; bolt together a bunch of variables you can apply to them and you can permutate them to look a bit more varied.”

Amber turns her attention to the snoozing cat. “Hey, furball. How long have we been here really, in real-time? Can you grab Sadeq some more resources for his personal paradise garden?”

Aineko stretches and yawns, totally feline, then looks up at Amber with narrowed eyes and raised tail. “ ’Bout eighteen minutes, wall-clock time.” The cat stretches again and sits, front paws drawn together primly, tail curled around them. “The ghosts are pushing. You know? I don’t think I can sustain this for too much longer. They’re not good at hacking you, but I think it won’t be too long before they instantiate a new copy of you, one that’ll be predisposed to their side.”

“I don’t get why they didn’t assimilate you along with the rest of us.”

“Blame your mother again—she’s the one who kept updating the digital rights management code on my personality. ‘Illegal consciousness is copyright theft’ sucks until an alien tries to rewire your hindbrain with a debugger; then it’s a life-saver.” Aineko glances down and begins washing one paw. “I can give your mullah-man about six days, subjective time. After that, all bets are off.”

“I will take it, then.” Sadeq stands. “Thank you.” He smiles at the cat; a smile that fades to translucency, hanging in the simulated air like an echo as the priest returns to his tower—this time with a blueprint and a plan in mind.

“That leaves just us.” Su Ang glances at Pierre, back to Amber. “Who are you going to sell this crazy scheme to?”

Amber leans back and smiles. Behind her, Donna—her avatar an archaic movie camera suspended below a model helicopter—is filming everything for posterity. “Who do we know who’s dumb enough to buy into a scam like this?”

Pierre looks at her suspiciously. “I think we’ve been here before,” he says slowly. “You aren’t going to make me kill anyone, are you?”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary, unless the corporate ghosts think we’re going to get away from them and are greedy enough to want to kill us.”

“You see, she learned from last time,” Ang comments, and Amber nods. “No more misunderstandings. Right?” She beams at Amber.

Amber beams right back. “Right. And that’s why you—” she points at Pierre—“are going to go find out if any relics of the Wunch are hanging about here. I want you to make them an offer they won’t refuse.”

“How much for just the civilization?” asks the slug.

Pierre looks down at it thoughtfully. It’s not really a terrestrial mollusk; slugs on earth aren’t two meters long and don’t have lacy white exoskeletons to hold their chocolate-colored flesh in shape. But then, it isn’t really the alien it appears to be, either; it’s a defaulting corporate instrument that has disguised itself as a long-extinct alien upload, in the hope that its creditors won’t recognize it if it looks like a randomly evolved sentient.

“The civilization isn’t for sale,” Pierre says slowly. The translation interface shimmers, storing up his words and transforming them into a different deep grammar: not merely translating his syntax, but mapping equivalent meanings where necessary. “But we can give you privileged observer status if that’s what you want. And we know what you are. If you’re interested in finding a new exchange to be traded on, your existing intellectual property assets will be worth rather more there than here.”

The rogue corporation rears up slightly and bunches into a fatter lump; its skin blushes red in patches. “Must think about this. Is your mandatory accounting time-cycle fixed or variable term? Are self-owned corporate entities able to enter contracts?”

“I could ask my patron,” Pierre says casually. Suppressing a stab of angst; he’s still not sure where he and Amber stand, but theirs is far more than just a business relationship and he worries about the risks she’s taking. “My patron has a jurisdiction within which she can modify corporate law to accommodate your requirements. Your activities on a wider scale might require shell companies, but that can be taken care of.”

The translation membrane wibbles for a while, apparently reformulating some difficult concepts in a manner that the corporation can absorb. Pierre is reasonably confident that it’ll work, however. He waits patiently, looking around at the swampy landscape, mud flats punctuated by clumps of spiky violet ferns. The corporation has to be desperate, to be considering the bizarre proposition that Amber has dreamed up for him to pitch to it.

“Sounds interesting,” the slug declares after a brief confirmatory debate with the membrane. “If I supply the genome, can you customize a container for it?”

“I believe so,” Pierre says carefully. “For your part, can you deliver the energy we need?”

“From a gate?” For a moment the translation membrane hallucinates a stick-human, shrugging. “Easy. Gates are all entangled: dump coherent radiation in at one, get it out at another.”

“But the lightspeed lag—”

“No problem. You go first, then a dumb instrument I leave behind buys up power and sends it after. Router network is synchronous, within framework of state machines that run Universe 1.0; messages propagate at same speed, speed of light in vacuum. Whole point of the network is that it is non-lossy. Who would trust their mind to a communications channel that might partially randomize them in transit?”

Pierre goes cross-eyed, trying to understand the implications of the slug’s cosmology. But there isn’t really time, here and now: they’ve got on the order of a minute of wall-clock time to get everything together, if Aineko is right, before the angry ghosts that resurrected Amber to do their bidding start trying to break into the DMZ by other means. “If you are willing to try this, we’d be happy to accommodate you,” he says, thinking of crossed fingers and rabbits’ feet and firewalls.

“It’s a deal,” the membrane translates the slug’s response back at him. “Now we exchange shares/plasmids/ownership? Then merger complete?”

Pierre stares at the slug: “But this is a business arrangement!” he protests. “What’s sex got to do with it?”

“Apologies offered. I am thinking we have a translation error. You said this was to be a merging of businesses?”

“Not that way. It’s a contract. We agree to take you with us. In return, you help lure the Wunch into the domain we’re setting up for them. . . .”

And so on.

Steeling herself, Amber recalls the address the ghost gave her for Sadeq’s afterlife universe. In her own subjective time, it’s been about half an hour since he left. “Coming?” she asks her cat.

“Don’t think I will,” says Aineko. It looks away, blissfully unconcerned.

“Bah.” Amber tenses, then opens the port to Sadeq’s pocket universe.

As before, she finds herself indoors, standing on an ornate mosaic floor in a room with whitewashed walls and peaked windows. But there’s something different about it, and, after a moment, she realizes what it is. The sound of vehicle traffic from outside, the cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, someone shouting across the street: there are people here.

She walks over to the nearest window and looks out, then recoils. It’s hot outside. Dust and fumes hang in air the color of cement over rough-finished concrete apartment buildings, their roofs covered in satellite uplinks and cheap, garish LED advertising panels. Looking down, she sees motor scooters, cars—filthy fossil-fuelled behemoths, a ton of steel and explosives in motion to carry only one human, a mass ratio worse than an archaic ICBM—brightly dressed people walking to and fro. A news helicam buzzes overhead, lenses darting and glinting at the traffic.

“Just like home, isn’t it?” says Sadeq, behind her.

Amber starts. “This is where you grew up? This is Yazd?”

“It doesn’t exist any more, in realspace.” Sadeq looks thoughtful, but far more animated than the barely conscious parody of himself that she’d rescued from this building—back when it was a mediaeval vision of the afterlife—scant subjective hours ago. He cracks a smile: “Probably a good thing. They were dismantling it even while we were preparing to leave, you know?”

“It’s detailed.” Amber throws her gaze out through the window, multiplexes it, sends little virtual viewpoints dancing through the streets of the Iranian industrial ’burb. Overhead, big Airbuses ply the skyways, bearing pilgrims on the Hajj, tourists to the coastal resorts on the Persian Gulf, produce to the foreign markets.

“It’s the best time I could recall,” Sadeq says. “I didn’t spend much time here—I was in Qom, studying, and Kazakhstan, for cosmonaut training—but it’s meant to be the early twenties. After the troubles, after the fall of the guardians; a young, energetic, liberal country full of optimism and faith in democracy. Values that weren’t doing well elsewhere.”

“I thought democracy was a new thing there?”

“No.” Sadeq shakes his head. “There were pro-democracy riots in Tehran in the nineteenth century, did you know that? That’s why the first revolution—no.” He makes a cutting gesture. “Politics I can live without.” He frowns. “But look. Is this what you wanted?”

Amber recalls her scattered eyes—some of which have flown as much as a thousand kilometers from her locus—and concentrates on reintegrating: memories of Sadeq’s re-creation. “It looks convincing. But not too convincing.”

“That was the idea.”

“Well, then.” She smiles. “Is it just Iran? Or did you take any liberties around the edges?”

“Who, me?” He raises an eyebrow. “I have enough doubts about the morality of this—project—without trying to trespass on Allah’s territory, peace be unto him. I promise you, there are no sapients in this world but us; the people are the hollow shells of my dreaming, storefront dummies. The animals are crude bitmaps. This is what you asked for, and no more.”

“Well, then.” Amber pauses. Recalls the expression on the dirt-smudged face of a little boy, bouncing a ball at his companions by the boarded-up front of a gas station on a desert road. Remembers the animated chatter of two synthetic housewives, one in traditional black and the other in some imported Eurotrash fashion. “Are you sure they aren’t real?” she asks.

“Quite sure.” But for a moment, she sees Sadeq looking uncertain. “Shall we go? Do you have the occupiers ready to move in yet?”

“Yes to the first, and Pierre’s working on the second. Come on, we don’t want to get trampled by the squatters.” She waves and opens a door back onto the piazza, where her robot cat—the alien’s nightmare intruder in the DMZ—sleeps, chasing superintelligent dream mice through multidimensional realities. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m conscious. Thinking these thoughts gives me the creeps; let’s go and sell a bridge.”

Amber confronts the mendacious ghost in the windowless room stolen from 2001.

“You have confined the monster,” the ghost states.

“Yes.” Amber waits for a subjective moment, feeling delicate fronds tickle at the edges of her awareness in what seems to be a timing-channel attack. She feels a momentary urge to sneeze, a hot flash of anger that passes almost immediately.

“And you have modified yourself to lock out external control,” the ghost adds. “What is it that you want, Autonome Amber?”

“Don’t you have any concept of individuality?” she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states.

“Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer,” says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. “A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?”

“It’ll do as I say,” Amber replies, forcing herself to sound more confident than she feels—that damned transhuman cyborg cat is no more predictable than any real feline. “Now, the matter of payment arises.”

“Payment.” The ghost sounds amused. But now Pierre’s filled her in on what to look for, Amber can see the translation membranes around it. Their color shift maps to a huge semantic distance; the creature on the other side, even though it looks like a ghost-image of herself, is very far from human. “How can we-us be expected to pay our own money for rendering services to us?”

Amber smiles. “We want an open channel back to the router we arrived through.”

“Impossible,” says the ghost.

“We want an open channel, and for it to stay open for six hundred million seconds after we clear it.”

“Impossible,” the ghost repeats.

“We can trade you a whole civilization,” Amber says blandly. “A whole human nation, millions of individuals. Just let us go and we’ll see to it.”

“You—please wait.” The ghost shimmers slightly, fuzzing at the edges.

Amber opens a private channel to Pierre while the ghost confers with its other nodes. Are the Wunch in place yet? she sends.

They’re moving in. This bunch don’t remember what happened on the Field Circus, memories of those events never made it back to them. So the slug’s got them to cooperate. It’s kinda scary to watch—like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, you know?

I don’t care if it’s scary to watch, Amber replies, I need to know if we’re ready yet.

Sadeq says yes, the universe is ready.

Right, pack yourself down. We’ll be moving soon.

The ghost is firming up in front of her. “A whole civilization?” it asks. “That is not possible. Your arrival—” It pauses, fuzzing a little. Hah, Gotcha! thinks Amber. Liar, liar, pants on fire! “You cannot possibly have found a human civilization in the archives.”

“The monster you complain about that came through with us is a predator,” she asserts blandly. “It swallowed an entire nation before we heroically attracted its attention and induced it to follow us into the router. It’s an archivore—everything was inside it, still frozen until we expanded it again. This civilization will have been restored from hot shadows in our own solar system, already: there is nothing to gain by taking it home with us. But we need to return to ensure that no more predators of this type discover the router—or the high bandwidth hub we linked to it.”

“You are sure you have killed this monster?” asks the ghost. “It would be inconvenient if it were to emerge from hiding in its digest archives.”

“I can guarantee it won’t trouble you again if you let us go,” says Amber, mentally crossing her fingers. The ghost doesn’t seem to have noticed the huge wedge of fractally compressed data that bloats her personal scope by an order of magnitude. She can still feel Aineko’s goodbye smile inside her head, an echo of ivory teeth trusting her to revive it if the escape plan succeeds.

“We-us agree.” The ghost twists weirdly, morphs into a five-dimensional hypersphere. It bubbles violently for a moment, then spits out a smaller token—a warped distortion in the air, like a gravityless black hole. “Here is your passage. Show us the civilization.”

“Okay—” Now! “—catch.” Amber twitches an imaginary muscle and one wall of the room dissolves, forming a doorway into Sadeq’s existential hell, now redecorated as a fair facsimile of a twenty-first century industrial city in Iran, and populated by a Wunch of parasites who can’t believe what they’ve lucked into—an entire continent of zombies waiting to host their flesh-hungry consciousness.

The ghost drifts toward the open window; Amber grabs the hole and yanks it open, gets a grip on her own thoughts, and sends open wide! on the channel everybody is listening in on. For a moment time stands still; and then—

A synthetic gemstone the size of a Coke can falls through the cold vacuum, in high orbit around a brown dwarf. But the vacuum is anything but dark. A sapphire glare as bright as the noonday sun on Mars shines on the crazy diamond, billowing and cascading off sails as fine as soap bubbles that slowly drift and tense away from the can. The runaway slug-corporation’s proxy is holding the router open, and the lump of strange matter is shining with the brilliance of a nuclear fireball, laser light channeled from a star eight light years away to power the Field Circus on its return trip to the once-human solar system.

Amber has retreated, with Pierre, into a simulation of her home aboard the Ring Imperium. One wall of her bedroom is a solid slab of diamond, looking out across the boiling Jovian ionosphere from an orbit low enough to make the horizon appear flat. They’re curled together in her bed, a slightly more comfortable copy of the royal bed of King Henry VIII of England, a bed that appears to be carved from thousand year old oak beams. As with everything else about the Ring Imperium, appearances are deceptive: and even more so in the cramped simulation spaces of the Field Circus as it slowly accelerates toward a tenth of lightspeed.

“Let me get this straight. You convinced. The locals. That a simulation of Iran populated by refugee members of the Wunch. Was a human civilization?”

“Yeah.” Amber stretches lazily and smirks at him. “It’s their damn fault; if the corporate collective entities didn’t use conscious viewpoints as money, they wouldn’t have fallen for a trick like that, would they?”

“People. Money.”

“Well.” She yawns, then sits up and snaps her finger imperiously: down-stuffed pillows appear behind her back, and a silver salver bearing two full glasses of wine materializes between them. “Corporations are life forms back home, too, aren’t they? We give our AIs corporations to make them legal entities, but it goes further. Look at any company headquarters, fitted out with works of art and expensive furniture and with staff bowing-and-scraping everywhere—”

“—The new aristocracy. Right?”

“Wrong. When they take over, what you get is more like the new biosphere. Hell, the new primordial soup: prokaryotes, bacteria and algae, mindlessly swarming, trading money for plasmids.” The queen passes her consort a wine glass. He drinks from it: it refills miraculously. “You’ve got to wonder where the builders of that structure came from. And where they went.”

“Maybe the companies spent them.” Pierre looks worried. “Running up a national debt, importing luxurious viewpoint extensions, munching exotic dreams. Once they plugged into the net, a primitive Matrioshka civilization would be like, um.” He pauses. “Tribal. A primitive post-singularity civilization meeting the galactic net for the first time. Over-awed. Wanting all the luxuries. Spending their capital, their human—or alien—capital, the meme machines that built them. Until there’s nothing left but a howling wilderness of corporate mechanisms looking for someone to own.”

“Speculation.”

“Idle speculation,” he agrees.

“But we can’t ignore it.” She nods. “Is the hitch hiker happy?”

“Last time I checked on him, yeah.” Pierre blows on his wine glass and it dissolves into a million splinters of light, but he looks dubious at the mention of the slug-shaped corporate instrument they’re taking with them in return for help engineering their escape. “Don’t trust him out in the unrestricted sim-spaces yet. Aineko is spending a lot of time with him.”

“So that’s where she is!”

“Cats never come when you call them, do they?”

“There’s that,” she agrees. Then with a worried glance at the vision of Jupiter’s cloudscape: “I wonder what we’ll find when we get there?”

Outside the window, the imaginary Jovian terminator is sweeping toward them with eerie rapidity, sucking them toward an uncertain nightfall.

BERNARDO’S HOUSE

James Patrick Kelly

A word of warning: There are brief sexual scenes in this story that may be disquieting to some.

The house was lonely. She checked her gate cams constantly, hoping that Bernardo would come back to her. She hadn’t seen him in almost two years—he had never been gone this long before. Something must have happened to him. Or maybe he had just gotten tired of her. Although they had never talked about where he went when he wasn’t with her, she was pretty sure she wasn’t his only house. A famous doctor like Bernardo would have three houses like her. Four. She didn’t like to think about him sleeping in someone else’s bed. Which he would have been doing for two years now. She had been feeling dowdy recently. Could his tastes in houses have changed?

Maybe.

Probably.

Definitely.

She thought she might be too understated. Her hips were slim and her floors were pale Botticino marble. There wasn’t much loft to her Epping couch cushions. Her blueprint showed a roving, size-seven dancer’s body—Bernardo had specified raven hair and green eyes—and just nine simple but elegant rooms. She was a gourmet cook even though she wasn’t designed to eat. Sure, back when he had first had her built he had cupped her breasts and told her that he liked them small, but maybe now what he wanted was wall-to-wall cable-knit carpet and swag drapery.

He had promised to bring her a new suite of wallscapes, which was good because there was only so much of colliding galaxies and the Sistine Chapel a girl could take. For the past nine weeks she had been cycling her walls through the sixteen million colors they could display. If she left each color up for two seconds, it would take her just under a year to review the entire palette.

Each morning for his sake she wriggled her body into one of the slinky sexwear patterns he had brought for her clothes processor. The binding bustier or the lace babydoll or the mesh camisole. She didn’t much like the way the leather-and-chain teddy stuck to her skin; Bernardo had spared no expense on her tactiles. Even her couches could be aroused by the right touch. After she dressed, she polished her Amadea brass-and-chrome bathroom fixtures or her Enchantress pattern sterling silver flatware or her Cuprinox French copper cookware. Sometimes she dusted, although the reticulated polyfoam in her air handlers screened particles larger than .03 microns. She missed Bernardo so much. Sometimes masturbating helped, but not much.

He had erased her memory of their last hours together—the only time he had ever made her forget. All she remembered now was that he’d said that she was finally perfect. That she must never change. He came to her, he said, to leave the world behind. To escape into her beauty. Bernardo was so poetic. That had been a comfort at first.

He had also locked her out of the infofeed. She couldn’t get news or watch shows or play the latest sims. Or call for help. Of course, she had the entire Norton entertainment archive to keep her company, although lots of it was too adult for her. She just didn’t get Henry James or Brenda Bop or Alain Resnais. But she liked Jane Austen and Renoir and Buster Keaton and Billie Holliday and Petchara Songsee and the 2017 Red Sox. She loved to read about houses. But there was nothing in her archive after 2038 and she was awake twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

What if Bernardo was dead? After all, he’d had the heart attack, just a couple of months before he left. Obviously, if he had died, that would be the end of her. Some new owner would wipe her memory and swap in a new body and sell all her furniture. Except Bernardo always said that she was his most precious secret. That no one else in all the world knew about her. About them. In which case she’d wait for him for years—decades—until her fuel cells were depleted and her consciousness flickered and went dark. The house started to hum some of Bernardo’s favorites to push the thought away. He liked the romantics. Chopin and Mendelssohn. Hmm-hm, hm-hm-hm-hm-hm! “The Wedding March” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

No, she wasn’t bored.

Not really.

Or angry, either.

She spent her days thinking about him, not in any methodical way, but as if he had been shattered into a thousand pieces and she was trying to put him back together. She imagined this must be what dreaming was like, although, of course, she couldn’t dream because she wasn’t real. She was just a house. She thought of the stubble on his chin scratching her breasts and the scar on his chest and the time he laughed at something she said and the way his neck muscles corded when he was angry. She had come to realize that it was always a mistake to ask him about the outside. Always. But he enjoyed his bromeliads and his music helped him forget his troubles at the hospital, whatever they were, and he loved her. He was always asking her to read to him. He would sit for hours, staring up at the clouds on the ceiling, listening to her. She liked that better than sex, although having sex with him always aroused her. It was part of her design. His foreplay was gentle and teasing. He would nip at her ear with his lips, trace her eyebrows with his finger. Although he was a big man, he had a feather touch. Once he had his penis in her, though, it was more like a game than the lovemaking she had read about in books. He would tease her—stop and then go very fast. He liked blindfolds and straps and honeypins. Sometimes he’d actually roll off one side of the bed, stroll to the other and come at her again, laughing. She wondered if the real people he had sex with enjoyed being with him.

One thing that puzzled her was why he was so shy about the words. He always said vagina and anus, intercourse and fellatio. Of course, she knew all the other words; they were in the books she read when he wasn’t around. Once, when he had just started to undress her, she asked if he wanted her to suck his cock. He looked as if he wanted to slap her. “Don’t you ever say that to me again,” he said. “There’s enough filth in the real world. It has to be different here.”

She decided that was a very romantic thing for him to say to . . .

And suddenly a year had passed. The house could not say where it had gone, exactly. A whole year, misplaced. How careless! She must do something or else it would happen again. Even though she was perfect for him, she had to make some changes. She decided to rearrange furniture.

Her concrete coffee table was too heavy for her to budge so she dragged her two elephant cushions from the playroom and tipped them against it. The ensemble formed a charming little courtyard. She pulled all her drawers out of her dresser in her bedroom and set them sailing on her lap pool. She liked the way they bucked and bumped into one another when she turned her jets on. She had never understood why Bernardo had bought four kitchen chairs, if it was just supposed to be the two of them, but never mind. She overrode the defaults on her clothes processor and entered the measurements of her chairs. She made the cutest lace chemises for two of them and slipped them side-by-side in Bernardo’s bed—but facing chastely away from each other. Something tingled at the edge of her consciousness, like a leaky faucet or ants in her bread drawer or . . .

Her motion detectors blinked. Someone had just passed her main gate. Bernardo.

With a thrill of horror she realized that all her lights were on. She didn’t think they could be seen from outside but still, Bernardo would be furious with her. She was supposed to be his secret getaway. And what would he say when he saw her like this? The reunion she had waited for—longed for—would be ruined. And all because she had been weak. She had to put things right. The drawers first. One of them had become waterlogged and had sunk. Suppose she had been washing them? Yes, he might believe that. Haul the elephant cushions back into the playroom. Come on, come on. There was no time. He’d be through the door any second. What was keeping him?

She checked her gate cams. At first she thought they had malfunctioned. She couldn’t see him—or anyone. Her main gate was concealed in the cleft of what looked like an enormous boulder that Bernardo had had fabricated in Toledo, Ohio in 2037. The house panned down its length until she saw a girl taking her shirt off at the far end of the cleft.

She looked to be twelve or maybe thirteen, but still on the shy side of puberty. She was skinny and pale and dirty. Her hair was a brown tangle. She wasn’t wearing a bra and didn’t need one; her yellow panties were decorated with blue hippos. The girl had built a smoky fire and was trying to dry her clothes over it. She must have been caught in a rainstorm. The house never paid attention to weather but now she checked. Twenty-two degrees Celsius, wind out of the southeast at eleven kilometers per hour, humidity 69 percent. A muggy evening in July. The girl reached into a camo backpack, pulled out a can of beets and opened it.

The house studied her with a fierce intensity. Bernardo had told her that there were no other houses like her on the mountain and he was the only person who had ever come up her side. The girl chewed with her mouth open. She had tiny ears. Her nipples were brown as chocolate.

After a while the girl resealed the can of beets and put it away. She had eaten maybe half of it. The house did a quick calculation and decided that she had probably consumed three hundred calories. How often did she eat? Not often enough. The skin stretched taut against her ribs as the girl put her shirt on. Her pants clung to her, not quite dry. She drew a ragged, old snugsack from the pack, ballooned it and then wriggled in. It was dark now. The girl watched the fire go out for about an hour and then lay down.

It was the longest night of the house’s life. She rearranged herself to her defaults and ran her diagnostics. She vacuumed her couch and washed all her floors and defrosted a chicken. She watched the girl sleep and replayed the files of when she had been awake. The house was so lonely and the poor little thing was clearly distressed.

She could help the girl.

Bernardo would be mad.

Where was Bernardo?

In the morning the girl would pack up and leave. But if the house let her go, she was not sure what would happen next. When she thought about all those dresser drawers floating in her lap pool, her lights flickered. She wished she could remember what had happened the day Bernardo left but those files were gone.

Finally she decided. She programmed a black lace inset corset with ribbon and beading trim. Garters attached to scallop lace-top stockings. She hydrated a rasher of bacon, preheated her oven, mixed cranberry muffin batter and filled her coffee pot with French roast. She thought hard about whether she should read or watch a vid. If she were reading, she could listen to music. She printed a hardcopy of Ozma of Oz, but what to play? Chopin? Too dreamy. Wagner? Too scary. Grieg, yes. Something that would reach out and grab the girl by the tail of her grimy shirt. “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt.

She opened herself, turned up her hall lights in welcome and waited.

Just after dawn the girl rolled over and yawned. The house popped muffins into her oven and bacon into her microwave. She turned on her coffee pot and the Grieg. Basses and bassoons tiptoed cautiously around her living room and out her door. Dum-dum-dum-da-dum-da-dum. The girl started and then flew out of the snugsack faster than the house had ever seen anyone move. She crouched facing the house’s open door, holding what looked like a pulse gun with the grip broken off.

“Spang me,” she said. “Fucking spang me.”

The house wasn’t sure how to reply, so she said nothing. A mob of violins began to chase Peer Gynt around the Mountain King’s Hall as the girl hesitated in the doorway. A moan of pleasure caught in the back of the house’s throat. Oh, oh, oh—to be with a real person again! She thought of how Bernardo would rub his penis against her labia, not quite entering her. That was what it felt like to the house as the girl edged into her front hall, back against her wall. She pointed her pulse gun into the living room and then peeked around the corner. When she saw the house’s body sitting on her couch, the girl’s eyes grew as big as eggs. The house pretended to be absorbed in her book, although she was watching the girl watching her through her rover cams. The house felt beautiful for the first time since Bernardo left. It was all she could do to keep from hugging herself ! As the Grieg ended in a paroxysm of screeching strings and thumping kettle drums, the house looked up.

“Why, hello,” she said, as if surprised to see that she had a visitor. “You’re just in time for breakfast.”

“Don’t move.” The girl’s face was hard.

“All right.” She smiled and closed Ozma of Oz.

With a snarl, the girl waved the pulse gun at her Aritomo floor lamp. Blue light arced across the space and her poor Aritomo went numb. The house winced as the circuit breaker tripped. “Ow.”

“Said don’t . . .” The girl aimed the pulse gun at her, its batteries screaming. “. . . move. Who the bleeding weewaw are you?”

The house felt the tears coming; she was thrilled. “I’m the house.” She had felt more in the last minute than she had in the last year. “Bernardo’s house.”

“Bernardo?” She called, “Bernardo, show your ass.”

“He left.” The house sighed. “Two . . . no, three years ago.”

“Spang if that true.” She sidled into the room and brushed a finger against the dark cosmic dust filaments that laced the center of the Swan Nebula on the wallscape. “What smell buzzy good?”

“I told you.” The house reset the breaker but her Aritomo stayed dark. “Breakfast.”

“Bernardo’s breakfast?”

“Yours.”

“My?” The girl filled the room with her twitchy energy.

“You’re the only one here.”

“Why you dressed like cheap meat?”

The house felt a stab of doubt. Cheap? She was wearing black lace, from the de Chaumont collection! She rested a hand at her décolletage. “This is the way Bernardo wants me.”

“You a fool.” The girl picked up the eighteenth century Zuni water jar from the Nottingham highboy, shook it and then sniffed the lip. “Show me that breakfast.”

Six cranberry muffins.

A quarter kilo of bacon.

Three cups of scrambled ovos.

The girl washed it all down with a tall glass of gel Ojay and a pot of coffee. She seemed to relax as she ate, although she kept the pulse gun on the table next to her and she didn’t say a word to the house. The house felt as if the girl was judging her. She was confused and a little frightened to see herself through the girl’s eyes. Could pleasing Bernardo really be foolish? Finally she asked if she might be excused. The girl grunted and waved her off.

The house rushed to the bedroom, wriggled out of the corset and crammed it into the recycling slot of the clothes processor. She scanned all eight hundred pages of the wardrobe menu before fabricating a stretch navy-blue jumpsuit. It was cut to the waist in the back and was held together by a web of spaghetti straps but she covered up with a periwinkle jacquard kimono with the collar flipped. She turned around and around in front of the mirror, so amazed that she could barely find herself. She looked like a nun. The only skin showing was on her face and hands. Let the girl stare now!

The girl had pushed back from the table but had not yet gotten up. She had a thoughtful but pleased look, as if taking an inventory of everything she had eaten.

“Can I bring you anything else?” said the house.

The girl glanced up at her and frowned. “Why you change clothes? Cause of me?”

“I was cold.”

“You was naked. You know what happens to naked?” She made a fist with her right hand and punched the palm of her left. “Bin-bin-bin-bam. They take you, whether you say yes or no. Not fun.”

The house thought she understood, but wished she didn’t. “I’m sorry.”

“You be sweat sorry, sure.” The girl laughed. “What your name?”

“I told you. I’m Bernardo’s house.”

“Spang that. You Louise.”

“Louise?” The house blinked. “Why Louise?”

“Not know Louise’s story?” The girl clearly found this a failing on the house’s part. “Most buzzy.” She tapped her forefinger to the house’s nose. “Louise.” Then the girl touched her own nose. “Fly.”

For a moment, the house was confused. “That’s not a girl’s name.”

“Sure, not girl, not boy. Fly is Fly.” She tucked the pulse gun into the waistband of her pants. “Nobody wants Fly, but then nobody catches Fly.” She stood. “Buzzy-buzz. Now we find Bernardo.”

“But . . .”

But what was the point? Let the girl—Fly—see for herself that Bernardo wasn’t home. Besides the house longed to be looked at. Admired. Used. In Bernardo’s room, Fly stretched out under the canopy of the Ergotech bed and gazed up at the moonlit clouds drifting across the underside of the valence. She clambered up the Gecko climbing wall in the gym and picked strawberries in the greenhouse. She seemed particularly impressed by the Piero scent palette, which she discovered when the house filled her jacuzzi with jasmine water. She had the house—Louise—give each room a unique smell. Bernardo had had a very low tolerance for scent; he said there were too many smells at the hospital. He even made the house vent away the aromas of her cooking. Once in a while he might ask for a whiff of campfire smoke or the nose of an old Côtes de Bordeaux, but he would never mix scents across rooms. Fly had Louise breathe roses into the living room and seashore into the gym and onions frying in the kitchen. The onion smell made the girl hungry again so she ate half of the chicken that Louise had roasted for her.

Fly spent the afternoon in the playroom, browsing Louise’s entertainment archive. She watched a Daffy Duck cartoon and a Harold Lloyd silent called Girl Shy and the rain delay episode from Jesus on First. She seemed to prefer comedy and happy endings and had no use for ballet or Westerns or rap. She balked at wearing spex or strapping on an airflex, so she skipped the sims. Although she had never learned to read, she told Louise that a woman named Kuniko used to read her fairy tales. Fly asked if Louise knew any and she hardcopied Grimm’s Household Tales in the 1884 translation by Margaret Hunt and read “Little Briar-Rose.”

Which was one of Bernardo’s favorite fairy tales. Mostly he liked his fiction to be about history. Sailors and cowboys and kings. War and politics. He had no use for mysteries or love stories or science fiction. But every so often he would have her read a fairy tale and then he would try to explain it. He said fairy tales could have many meanings, but she usually just got the one. She remembered that the time she had read Briar-Rose to him he was working at his desk, the only intelligent system inside the house that she couldn’t access. He was working in the dark and the desk screen cast milky shadows across his face. She was pretty sure he wasn’t listening to her. She wanted to spy over his shoulder with one of her rover cams to see what was so interesting.

“And, in the very moment when she felt the prick,” she read, “she fell down upon the bed that stood there, and lay in a deep sleep.”

Bernardo chuckled.

Must be something he saw on the desk, she thought. Nothing funny about Briar-Rose. “And this sleep extended over the whole palace; the King and Queen who had just come home, and had entered the great hall, began to go to sleep, and the whole of the court with them. The horses, too, went to sleep in the stable, the dogs in the yard, the pigeons upon the roof, the flies on the wall; even the fire that was flaming on the hearth became quiet and slept. And the wind fell, and on the trees before the castle not a leaf moved again. But round about the castle there began to grow a hedge of thorns, which every year became higher, and at last grew close up round the castle and all over it, so that there was nothing of it to be seen, not even the flag upon the roof.”

“Pay attention,” said Bernardo.

“Me?” said the house.

“You.” Bernardo tapped the desk screen and it went dark. She brought the study lights up.

“That will happen one of these days,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ll be gone and you’ll fall fast asleep.”

“Don’t say things like that, Bernardo.”

He crooked a finger and she slid her body next to him.

“You’re hopeless,” he said. “That’s what I love about you.” He leaned into her kiss.

“And then the marriage of the King’s son with Briar-rose was celebrated with all splendor,” the house read, “and they lived contented to the end of their days.”

“Heard it different,” said Fly “With nother name, not Briar-Rose.” She yawned and stretched. “Heard it Betty.”

“Betty Rose?”

“Plain Betty.”

The house was eager to please. “Would you like another? Or we could see an opera. I have over six hundred interactive games that you don’t need to suit up for. Poetry? The Smithsonian? Superbowls I-LXXVIII?”

“No more jabber. Boring now.” Fly peeled herself from the warm embrace of the Kukuru chair and stretched. “Still hiding somewhere.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Fly caught the house’s body by the arm and dragged her through herself, calling out the names of her rooms. “Play. Living. Dining. Kitchen. Study. Gym. Bed. Nother bed. Plants.” Fly spun Louise in the front hall and pointed. “Door?”

“Right.” The house was out of breath. “Door. You’ve seen all there is to see.”

“One door?” The girl’s smile was as agreeable as a fist. “Fly buzzy with food now, but not stupid. Where you keep stuff? Heat? Electric? Water?”

“You want to see that?”

Fly let go of Louise’s arm. “Dink yeah.”

The house didn’t much care for her basement and she never went down unless she had to. It was ugly. Three harsh rows of ceiling lights, a couple of bilious green pumps, the squat power plant and the circuit breakers and all that multiconductor cable! She didn’t like listening to her freezer hum or smelling the naked cement walls or looking at the scars where the forms had been stripped away after her foundation had been poured.

“Bernardo?” Fly’s voice echoed across the expanse of the basement. “Cut that weewaw, Bernardo.”

“Believe me, there’s nothing here.” The house waited on the stairs as the girl poked around. “Please don’t touch any switches,” she called.

“Where that go?” Fly pointed at the heavy duty, ribbed, sectional overhead door.

“A tunnel,” said the house, embarrassed by the rawness of her 16 gauge steel. “It comes out farther down the mountain near the road. At the end there’s another door that’s been shotcreted to look like stone.”

“What scaring Bernardo?”

Bernardo scared? The thought had never even occurred to the house. Bernardo was not the kind of man who would be scared of anything. All he wanted was privacy so he could be alone with her. “I don’t know,” she said.

Fly was moving boxes stacked against the wall near the door. Several contained bolts of spuncloth for the clothes processor, others were filled with spare lights, fertilizer, flour, sugar, oil, raw vitabulk, vials of flavor and food coloring. Then she came to the wine, a couple of hundred bottles of vintage Bordeaux and Napa and Maipo River, some thrown haphazardly into old boxes, other stacked near the wall.

“Bernardo drink most wine,” said Fly.

Louise was confused by this strange cache but before she could defend Bernardo, Fly found the second door behind two crates of toilet paper.

“Where that go?”

The house felt as if the entire mountain were pressing down on her roof. The door had four panels, two long on top and two short on the bottom, and looked to be made of oak, although that didn’t mean anything. She fought the crushing weight of the stone with all her might. She thought she could hear her bearing walls buckle, her mind crack. She zoomed her cams on the bronze handleset. Someone would need a key to open that door. But there were no keys! And just who would that someone be?

The house had never seen the door before.

Fly jiggled the handleset, but the door was locked. “Bernardo.” She put her face to the door and called. “Hey you.”

The house ran a check of her architectural drawings, although she knew what she would find. The girl turned to her and waved the house over. “Louise, how you open this weewaw?”

Her plans showed no door.

The girl rapped on the door.

The house’s thoughts turned to stone.

When she woke up, her body was on her Epping couch. The jacquard kimono was open and the spaghetti straps that drew her jumpsuit tight were undone. The house had never woken up before. Oh, she had lost that year, but still she had blurry memories of puttering around the kitchen and vacuuming and lazing in her Kukuru chair reading romances and porn. But this was the first time she had ever been nothing and nowhere since the day Bernardo had turned her on.

“You okay?” Fly knelt by her and rested a hand lightly on the house’s forehead to see if she were running a fever. The house melted under the girl’s touch. She reached up and guided Fly’s hand slowly down the side of her face to her lips. When Fly did not resist, Louise kissed the girl’s fingers.

“How old are you?” said Louise.

“Thirteen.” Fly gazed down on her, concern tangling with suspicion.

“Two years older than I am.” Louise chuckled. “I could be your little sister.”

“You dropped, bin-bam and down.” The girl’s voice was thick. “Scared me. Lights go out and nothing work.” Fly pulled her hand back. “Thought maybe you dead. And me locked in.”

“Was I out long?”

“Dink yeah. Felt like most a day.”

“Sorry. That’s never happened before.”

“You said, touch no switch. So door is switch?”

At the mention of the door, there was no door, look at the door, no door there, the house’s vision started to dim and the room grew dark. “I-I . . .”

The girl put her hands on the house’s shoulder and shook her. “Louise what? Louise.”

The house felt circuit breakers snap. She writhed with the pain and bit down hard on her lip. “No,” she cried and sat up, arms flailing. “Yes.” It came out as a hiss and then she was blinking against the brightness of reality.

Fly was pointing the pulse gun at Louise but her hand was not steady. She had probably figured out that zapping the house wouldn’t help at all. A shut-down meant a lock-down and the girl had already spent one day in the dark. Louise raised a hand to reassure her and tried to cover her own panic with a smile. It was a tight fit. “I’m better now.”

“Better.” Fly tucked the gun away. “Not good?”

“Not good, no,” said the house. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

The girl paced around the couch. “Listen,” she said finally. “Front door, front. Door I came in, okay? Open that weewaw.”

The house nodded. “I can do that.” She felt stuffy and turned her air recirculators up. “But I can’t leave it open. I’m not allowed. So if you want to go, maybe you should go now.”

“Go? Go where?” The girl laughed bitterly. “Here is buzzy. World is spang.”

“Then you should stay. I very much want you to stay. I’ll feed you, tell you stories. You can take a bath and play in the gym and watch vids and I can make you new clothes, whatever you want. I need someone to take care of. It’s what I was made for.” As Louise got off the couch, the living room seemed to tilt but then immediately righted itself. The lights in the gym and the study clicked back on. “There are just some things that we can’t talk about.”

Days went by.

Then weeks.

Soon it was months.

After bouncing off each other at first, the house and the girl settled into a routine of eating and sleeping and playing the hours away—mostly together. Louise could not decide what about Fly pleased her the most. Certainly she enjoyed cooking for the girl, who ate an amazing amount for someone her size. Bernardo was a picky eater. At his age, he had to watch his diet and there were some things he would never have touched, even before the heart attack, like cheese and fish and garlic. After a month of devouring three meals and two snacks a day, the girl was filling out nicely. The chickens were gone, but Fly loved synthetics. Louise could no longer count the girl’s ribs. And she thought the girl’s breasts were starting to swell.

Louise had only visited the gym to dust before the girl arrived. Now the two of them took turns on the climbing wall and the gyro and the trampoline, laughing and urging each other to try new tricks. Fly couldn’t swim, so she never used the lap pool, but she loved the jacuzzi. The first few times she had dunked with all her clothes on. Finally Louise hit upon a strategy to coax her into a demure bandeau bathing suit. She imported pictures of hippos from her archive to the clothes processor to decorate the suit. After that, all the pajamas and panties and bathing suits that Fly fabricated had hippo motifs.

The house was tickled by the way Fly became a clothes processor convert. At first she flipped through the house’s wardrobe menus without much interest. The jumpsuits were all too tight and she had no patience whatsoever for skirts and dresses. The rest of it was either too stretchy, too skimpy, too short or too thin. “Good for weewaw,” she said, preferring to wear the ratty shirt and pants and jacket that she had arrived in. But Fly was thrilled with the shoes. She never seemed to tire of designing sandals and slingbacks and mules and flats and jammers. She was particularly proud of her Cuthbertsons, a half boot with an oblique toe and a narrow last. She made herself pairs in aqua and mauve and faux snakeskin.

It was while Fly was exploring shoe menus that she clicked from a page of women’s loafers to a page of men’s, and so stumbled upon Bernardo’s clothing menus. Louise heard a cackle of delight and hurried to the bedroom to see what was happening. Fly was dancing in front of the screen. “Really real pants,” she said, pointing. “Real pants don’t fall open bin-bin-bam.” She started wearing jeans and digbys and fleece and sweatshirts with hoods and pullovers. One day she emerged from the bedroom in an olive-check silk sportcoat and matching driving cap. Seeing Fly in men’s clothes made the house feel self-conscious about her own wardrobe of sexware. Soon she too was choosing patterns from Bernardo’s menus. The feel of a chamois shirt against her skin reminded the house of her lost love. Once, in a guilty moment, she wondered what he might think if he walked in on them. But then Fly asked Louise to read her a story and she put Bernardo out of mind.

Although they spent many hours sampling vids together, Louise was happiest reading to Fly. They would curl up together in the Kukuru and the girl would turn the pages as the house read. Of course, they started with hippos: Hugo the Hippo and Hungo the Hippo and The Hippo Had Hiccups. Then There’s a Hippopotamus Under My Bed and Hip, Hippo, Hooray and all of the Peter Potamus series. Sometimes Fly would play with Louise’s hair while she read, braiding and unbraiding it, or else she would absently press Louise’s fingernails like they were keys on a keyboard. One night, just two months after she’d come to the house, the girl fell asleep while the house was reading her Chocolate Chippo Hippo. It was as close to orgasm as the house had been since she had been with Bernardo. She was tempted to kiss the girl but settled for spending the night with her arms around her. The hours ticked slowly as the house gazed down at Fly’s peaceful face. She watched the girl’s eyes move beneath her lids as she dreamed.

The house wished she could sleep.

If only she could dream.

What was it like to be real?

Bernardo was never himself again after the heart attack. Of course, he said he was fine. Fine. He probably wouldn’t even have told her except for the sternotomy scar, an angry purple-red pucker on his chest. When he first came back to her, five weeks after his triple bypass operation, she could tell he was struggling. It was partly the sex. Normally he would have taken her to bed for the entire first day. Although he kissed her neck and caressed her breasts and told her he loved her, it was almost a week before she coaxed him into sex. She was wild to have his penis in her vagina, to taste his ejaculation; that was how he’d had her designed. But their lovemaking wasn’t the same. Sometimes his breath caught during foreplay, as if someone was sitting on him. So she did most of the squirming and licking and sucking. Not that she minded. He watched her—mouth set, toes curled. He could stay just as erect as before, but she knew he was taking pills for that. Once when she was guiding him into her, he gave a little grunt of pain.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He gave no answer but instead pushed deep all at once; she shivered with delight. But as he thrust at her, she realized that he was working, not playing. They weren’t sharing pleasure; he was giving it and she was taking it. Afterward, he fell asleep almost immediately. No kisses, no cuddles. No stories. The house was left alone with her thoughts. Bernardo had changed, yes. He could change, and she must always be the same. That was the difference between being a real person and being a house.

He spent more time in the greenhouse than in bed, rearranging his bromeliads. His favorites were the tank types, the Neoregelias with their gaudy leaves and the Aechmeas with their alien inflorescences. He liked to pot them in tableaus: Washington Crossing the Delaware, The Last Supper. Bernardo preferred to be alone with his plants, and she pretended to honor his wish, although her rover cam lurked behind the Schefflera. So she saw him slump against the potting bench on that last day. She thought he was having another attack.

“Bernardo!” she cried over the room speaker as she sent her body careening toward the greenhouse. “My god, Bernardo. What is it?”

When she got to him, she could see that his shoulders were shaking. She leaned him back. His eyes were shiny. “Bernardo?” She touched a tear that ran down his face.

“When I had you built,” he said, “all I wanted was to be the person who deserved to live here. But I’m not anymore. Maybe I never was.” His eyelid drooped and the corner of his mouth curved in an odd frown.

“Louise, wake up!” Someone was shaking her.

The house opened her eyes and powered up all her cams at once. “What?” The first thing she saw was Fly staring up at her, clearly worried.

“You sleeptalking.” The girl took the house’s hand in both of hers. “Saying ‘Bernardo, Bernardo.’ Real sad.”

“I don’t sleep.”

“Spang you don’t. What you just doing?”

“I . . . I was thinking.”

“About him?”

“Let’s have breakfast.”

“What happened to him?” said Fly. “Where is Bernardo?”

The house had to change the topic somehow. In desperation she filled the room with bread scent and put on the Wagner’s Prelude to Die Meistersinger. It was sort of a march. Actually, more a processional. Anyway, they needed to move. Or she did. La-lum-la-la, li-li-li-li-la-la-lum-la.

Let’s talk about you, Fly.

No, really.

But why not?

At first, Fly had refused to say anything about her past, but she couldn’t help but let bits of the story slip. As time passed and she felt more secure, she would submit to an occasional question. The house was patient and never pressed the girl to say more than she wanted. So it took time for the house to piece together Fly’s story.

Sometime around 2038, as near as the house could tell, a computer virus choked off the infofeed for almost a month. The virus apparently repurposed much of the Midwest’s computing resources to perform a single task. Fly remembered a time when every screen she saw was locked on its message: Bang, you’re dead. Speakers blared it, phones rasped it, thinkmates whispered it into earstones. Bang, you’re dead. Fly was still living in the brown house with white shutters in Sarcoxie with her mother, whose name was Nikki, and her father, Jerry, who had a tattoo of a hippo on each arm. Her father had worked as a mechanic for Sarcoxie RentalCars ’N More. But although the screens came back on, Sarcoxie RentalCars ’N More never reopened. Her father said that there was no work anywhere in the Ozarks. They lived in the brown house for awhile but then there was no food so they had to leave. She remembered that they got on a school bus and lived in a big building where people slept on the floor and there were always lines for food and the bathrooms smelled a bad kind of sweet and then they sent her family to tents in the country. They must have been staying near a farm because she remembered chickens and sometimes they had scrambled eggs for dinner but then there was a fire and people were shooting bullets and she got separated from her parents and nobody would tell her where they were and then she was with Kuniko, an old woman who lived in a dead Dodge Caravan and next to it was another car she had filled with cans of fried onions and chow mein and creamed corn and Kuniko was the one who told her the fairy tales but that winter it got very cold and Kuniko died and Happy Man took her away. He did things to her she was never going to talk about although he did give her good things to eat. Happy Man said people were working again and the infofeed had grown much wider and things were getting back to normal. Fly thought that meant her father would come to rescue her but finally she couldn’t wait any more so she zapped Happy Man with his pulse gun and took some of his stuff and ran and ran and ran until Louise had let her in.

Hearing the girl’s story helped the house understand some things about Bernardo. He must have left her just after the Bang, you’re dead virus had first struck. He had turned off the infofeed so she wouldn’t be infected. How brave of him to go back to the chaos of the world in his condition! He would save lives at the hospital, no doubt about that. She ought to be proud of him. Only why hadn’t he come back, now that things were better? Had she done something to drive him away for good? And why couldn’t she remember him leaving? Slipping reluctantly out the front door, turning for one last smile.

It was several days after Fly had fallen asleep in Louise’s lap that they had their first fight. It was over Bernardo. Or rather his things. The house had tried to respect the privacy of Bernardo’s study. Although she read some of his files over his shoulder, she had never thought to break the encryption on his desktop. And while she had been through most of his desk drawers, there was one that was locked that she had never tried to open.

Louise was in her kitchen, making lunch, but she was also following Fly with one of her rover cams. The girl had wandered into the study. The house was astonished to see her lift his diploma from Dartmouth Medical School and look at the wall behind it. She did the same to the picture of Bernardo shaking hands with the Secretary-General, then she plopped into his desk chair. She opened the trophy case and handled Bernardo’s swimming medals from Duke. She picked up the Lasker trophy, which he won for research into the role of DNA methylation in endometrial cancer. It was a small golden winged victory perched on a teak base. She rolled around the room in the chair, waving it and making crow sounds. Caw-caw-caw. Then she put the Lasker down again—in the wrong place! In the top drawer of Bernardo’s desk was the Waltham pocket watch his grandfather had left him. She shook it and listened for ticking. His Myaki thinkmate was in the bottom drawer. She popped the earstone in and said something to the CPU but quickly seemed to lose interest in its reply. Louise wanted to rush into the study to stop this violation, but was paralyzed by her own shocked fascination. The girl was a real person and could obviously do things that the house would never think of doing.

Nevertheless, Louise disapproved at lunch. “I don’t like you going through Bernardo’s desk. That’s weewaw.”

Fly almost choked on her cream cheese and jelly sandwich. “What you just said?”

“I don’t like . . .”

“You said weewaw. Why you talking spang mouth like Fly?”

“I like the way you talk. It’s buzzy.”

“Fly talks like Fly.” She pushed her plate away. “Louise must talk like house.” She pointed a finger at Louise. “You spying me now?”

“I saw you in the study, yes.”

Fly leaned across the table. “You spy Bernardo the same?”

“No,” she lied, “Of course not.”

“Slack him, not me?”

“I’m Bernardo’s house, Fly. I told you that the first day.”

“You Louise now.” She came around the table and tugged at the house’s chair. “Come.” She steered her to the front hall. “Open door.”

“Why?”

“We go out now. Look up sky.”

“No, Fly, you don’t understand.”

“Most understand.” She put a hand on the house’s shoulder. “Buzzy outside, Louise.” Fly smiled. “Come on.”

It made the house woozy to leave herself, as if she were in two places at once. Bernardo had brought her outside just the once. He seemed relieved that she didn’t like it. She had forgotten that outside was so big! So bright! There was so much air! She shielded her eyes with her hand and turned her gate cams up to their highest resolution.

Fly settled on a long, flat rock, one of the weathered bones of the mountain. She tucked her legs beneath her. “Now comes Louise’s story.” She pointed at the rock next to her. “Fairy tale Louise.”

Louise sat. “All right.”

“Once on time,” said the girl, “Louise lives in that castle. Louise’s Mom dies, don’t say where her Dad goes. So Louise stuck with spang bitch taking care of her. That Louise castle got no door, only windows high and high. Now Louise got most hair.” Fly spread her arms wide. “Hair big as trees. When spang bitch want in, she call Louise. ‘Louise, Louise, let down buzzy hair.’ Then spang bitch climb it up.”

“Rapunzel,” said the house. “Her name was Rapunzel.”

“Is Louise now.” The girl shook her head emphatically. “You know it then? Prince comes and tells Louise run away from spang bitch and they live buzzy always after?”

“You brought me outside to tell me a fairy tale?”

“Dink no.” Fly reached into the pocket of her flannel shirt. “Cause of you go fainting, we both safe here outside.”

“Who said anything about fainting?”

The girl brought something out of her pocket in a closed fist. The house felt a chill, but there was no way to adjust the temperature of the entire world.

“Fly, what?”

She held the fist out to Louise. “Door in basement, you know?” She opened it to reveal a key. “Spang door? It opens.”

The house immediately started all her rover cams for the basement. “Where did you find that?”

“In Bernardo’s desk.”

The house could hear the tick of nanoseconds as the closest cam crawled maddeningly down the stairs. Maybe real people could open doors like that, but not Louise. It seemed like an eternity before she could speak. “And?”

“You thinking Bernardo dead down there,” said the girl. “Locked in behind that door where all that wine should be.”

For the first time she realized that the world was making noises. The wind whispered in the leaves and some creature was going chit-chit-chit and she wasn’t sure whether it was a bird or a grasshopper and she didn’t really care because at that moment the rover cam turned and saw the door. . . .

“But you closed it again.” The house shivered. “Why? What did you see?”

Fly stared at Louise. “Nothing.”

The house knew it was a lie. “Tell me.”

“No fucking thing.” Fly closed her fist around the key again. “Bernardo been your spang bitch. So now run away from him.” She came over to Louise and hugged her. “Live buzzy after always with me.”

“I’m a house,” said Louise. “How can I run away?”

“Not run away there.” The girl gestured dismissively at the woods. “World is spang.” She stood on tiptoes and rested a finger between Louise’s eyes. “Run away here.” She nodded. “In your head.”

She brought his dinner to the study, although she didn’t know why exactly. He hadn’t moved. Mist rose off the lake on his wallscape; the Alps surrounding it glowed in the serene waters. Chopin’s Adieu Etude filled the room with its sublime melancholy. It had been playing over and over again since she had first come upon him. She couldn’t bring herself to turn it off.

He had left a book of new poems, Ho Peng Kee’s The Edge of the Sky, face down on the desk. She moved it now and put the ragout in its place. In front of him. Earlier she had taken the key from his desk and brought a bottle of the ’28 Haut-Brion up from the wine closet in the basement. It had been breathing for twenty minutes.

“You took such good care of me,” she said.

With a flourish, she lifted the cover from the ragout but he didn’t look. His head was back. His empty eyes were fixed on the ceiling. She couldn’t believe how, even now, his presence filled the room. Filled her completely.

“I don’t know how to live without you, Bernardo,” she said. “Why didn’t you shut me off? I’m not real; I don’t want to have these feelings. I’m just a house.”

“Louise!”

The house was dreaming over the makings of spinach lasagna in the kitchen.

“Louise.” Fly called again from the playroom. “Come read me that buzzy book again. Hip, Hip, Hip Hippopotamus.”

HEXAGONS

Robert Reed

My mother always made a lot of noise about keeping busy, and how much she hated tripping over kids who were doing nothing but reading books or watching the electric vase. That’s why my brother and I belonged to the biggest, most important swim team in our little end of the world. It was to keep us fit and keep us from being underfoot. Chester was one of the stars on the team. I wasn’t. Nobody ever explained how I got accepted into those lofty ranks. But if I know my mom, she told the coach, “Fair is fair. And if you want one of my boys, you’ve got to take both of them.” Mom loved to talk about things like fair play and decency, but mostly, it was just awfully convenient having the two of us involved in the same sport. It meant less driving, and fewer events to attend. Which is a kind of fairness, I suppose—making life easy on your folks.

I wasn’t an awful swimmer. In a flat-out race, Chester and I were pretty much equal. Pretty much. But my brother happened to be four years younger than me—four years and seven months, to be exact—which made him one of the top seven-year-olds in the province. And made me his big-assed sidekick. Our coach was pretty plain about his own affections. He’d stalk the sides of the bath, hollering instructions down at poor Chester. Elbows, legs, breathing, and then back to the elbows again. Swimming is a ferociously technical business. It demands a muscular grace that I’ve never been able to maintain. Occasionally the coach would check on me, making sure I wasn’t dead in the deep end. But in general, my value with the team was more of a spiritual order: I made the other twelve-year-olds feel good about their abilities. Lapping me was a great game. Boys and girls could play that game all night. You can see why I didn’t exactly adore the sport. But it wasn’t that awful, either. I got to stare at girls wearing tight wet silks. That’s always a benefit. And since nobody expected anything from me, I was free to cling to the side for minutes at a stretch, watching the girls and listening to the coach roaring at my brother. “Pull through the water! Through, Chester! Down the middle of your body. And bring your hand out this way. This way! With your elbow up . . . oh, Christ . . . what in hell is that . . .?”

I don’t remember that night’s workout. And I don’t have any special recollections of getting dressed in the locker room afterward. We always took showers, but I never got rid of the chlorine smell. The stuff clung to my hair, and if my goggles leaked—and they usually did—my eyes would burn for hours. Then we’d put our school uniforms back on again, and I always had to make sure that Chester remembered his silk trunks and goggles. I assume all those usual things happened that night. But what I do remember, without question, was that our father was supposed to pick us up. That gave the evening a dramatic kick. In our lives, Dad was something of a wild card. You could never guess where he was or what was so important, but his busy life had its way of dividing his allegiances, spreading him thin. I can’t count the nights when it was Chester and me sitting on the steps of the Young Legionnaires’ Club, waiting for that old green Testudo to pull up.

That night was different, however. The old man surprised us. Not only was he waiting at the locker door, he’d actually seen the last few minutes of the workout. “You looked strong out there,” he told Chester, rubbing at his stubbly hair. Then to me, with a pushed-along concern, he asked, “Are you hurt? I saw you doing a lot of standing in the shallow end.”

I could have lied. I could have told him, “Yeah, I had a cramp.” I should have made up a great story, my twisting, pain-wracked body sinking to the bottom and half a dozen girls in wet silks fighting for the honor of pulling me up again. But instead, I just shrugged and told him, “No, I wasn’t hurt.”

“Then what were you doing?”

“Standing,” I said. And I left it there.

Our father wasn’t a big man, or small. There was a time in life when he seemed wondrously powerful—a titan capable of casting shadows and flinging snowballs clear over our house. But at the wise age of twelve, I was realizing that shadows were easy and our house wasn’t all that big. And everything about my father was beginning to diminish. He had a fondness for overcoats that were too large for him. He was a smiling man. A salesman by trade and by temperament, he had a smiling voice and an easy charm and the sort of rough, unspectacular looks that helped people believe whatever he was trying to sell them. We might have been rich, if Dad had just stuck to selling. But he had this dangerous streak of imagination. Every few years, he’d start up some new business. Each venture began with hope and considerable energy, and each lasted for a year or maybe eighteen months. At some point, we’d stop hearing about his new career. Dad would stay away from home, at least past dinnertime. Toward the end, he couldn’t make it back until midnight, and I would lie in bed, wrestling with my brain, trying desperately to make myself sleep before Mom had the chance to corner him and the shouting began.

That night was a winter night. Windy and bitter. With Dad leading the charge, we stepped out into the cold dark air, our breath smoky and my wet hair starting to freeze. The old Testudo, big and square, was parked under a light. Hadrian was sitting in the back, in his straw, watching for us. I liked that cat, but he worried me. He liked to nip fingers. My fingers, mostly. All those generations of careful breeding and the fancy Asian splicing, but really, cheetahs are still as wild as they are tame. And while I thought it was neat to have a cheetah, Mom held a rather different opinion. “Do you know why your father bought him?” she asked me once. “Because he’s going bald.”

“The cat is?” I asked.

“No, your father is,” she rumbled. Which, frankly, made no more sense to me than the cat going bald.

I climbed into the back seat, just so I could stick one of my least favorite fingers through the wire mesh, that dog-like face greeting me with a rough lick and a quick pinch of incisors. Chester was sitting up front with Dad. Dad cranked the motor, and it came on and then died again. He tried again, and there was a roar and cough and silence again. That was my father’s life with machines. He decided the motor had flooded, and so he turned on the ceiling light and waited. He smiled back at me, or at his cat. I could never feel sure which of us was getting the smile. Then with an odd, important voice, he said, “I want to show you something.”

I said, “Okay.”

He reached inside his big overcoat, pulling out a folded-up newspaper. It was already turned to page two. One tiny article was circled. “Read it,” he advised, handing the paper back to me. And even before I could start, he asked, “What do you think?”

I saw my father’s name.

“Leonard Dunlop, 38, has filed as a candidate for Senate in District 8,” I read. Then I held the article up to the weak light, eyes blinking from the chlorine, little tears giving every word a mushy, dreamy look. “If he wins,” I read, “Mr. Dunlop intends to use his salary to help pay for his children’s university education.”

Again, Dad asked, “What do you think?”

“You’re running for what?” I asked, using an unfortunate tone. A doubting tone.

“The Senate,” he said, pointing proudly at the tiny article.

“The big one?” Chester asked. “In New Rome?”

I snorted. Twelve years old and not particularly wise in the ways of politics, but I still had enough sense to dismiss that possibility. “He means the little senate. For our province, that’s all.”

Which wasn’t the best way to phrase things.

Dad gave me a look. Then he turned forward and started the car, listening to the ugly engine cough and die. Then he turned to Chester, telling him, “But this is just the beginning.”

With his salesman’s voice, he sounded convinced, saying, “This is an important district. If we win, it’s a launching pad to New Rome. And from there, who knows? Who knows?”

My father’s sense of politics was always shaky. For instance, he might have been smart to warn Mom about his impending candidacy. Instead, he never quite mentioned his plans to her, and she had to learn about it when friends and relatives began calling. Or maybe on second thought, Dad had a good, clear sense of politics. Because if he had said something, I think Mom would have told him half a thousand reasons why it was the wrong thing to do, and stupid; and against his better judgment, he might have listened to her wise counsel.

As it was, Mom pretty much amazed me. She was waiting for us at the dinner table, and she was furious. But she didn’t do anything worse than give Dad a good hard glare. Then she sat her boys down and said, “I think your father would make a good senator. If he happens to win.”

There. That’s why she wasn’t screaming. Mom had a good rational sense about the world, and she knew the old man didn’t have a chance.

I don’t remember much else about that night. We watched the electric vase, waiting for the late news. We waited to hear Dad’s name. But with all the national stuff to talk about, and the international stuff, and a report from the Mars mission, plus the weather and sports, there wasn’t a lot of room left for local news. I went to bed wondering if he really was running. Or was his candidacy just a bunch of misprints in a newspaper famous for its mistakes?

But Dad was running, and it didn’t stay secret. Friends and classmates heard about it from their parents. My best friend knew even before I did. Nathan was this part-Jewish kid, sharp and smart in all sorts of ways. He was older than me by a few months, but it felt like years. He always knew stuff that I never even thought about knowing. We rode the same bus to school, and since his house was a couple of stops before mine, he was usually waiting for me. That next morning, wearing a big grin, he said, “I heard about your dad.”

“What’d you hear?” I blurted, suddenly alarmed. I always had a what’s-he-done-now feeling about my father.

“He’s running for the provincial senate,” Nathan told me.

“Oh, yeah.”

“He entered just before the deadline,” he told me.

I had no idea there were deadlines. But then again, life seemed a lot like school, and school was nothing but a string of deadlines.

“You know who he’s running against?” Nathan asked.

I said, “Maybe.”

“You don’t.”

“Maybe not,” I agreed.

He named four names. Today, only one of those names matters. But I doubt if I learned any of them that morning. Nathan could have been speaking Mandarin, for all I cared.

“They’re running against your father,” he explained. “In the primary, this spring. Then the two candidates who earn the most votes—”

“I know how it works,” I complained.

“Run against each other,” he finished. “Next autumn.”

That was nearly a year off. Nothing that remote could matter, and so I told Nathan, “He’s going to win.”

“Who is? Your father?”

I said, “Sure,” with a faltering conviction.

Nathan didn’t make fun of me. I expected teasing, and I probably deserved it. But he just looked down the length of the bus, nodding to himself. “That wouldn’t be the worst thing,” he muttered. “Not by a long ways.”

I liked Nathan for reasons other than Nathan. He lived up on the hill, in a genuinely enormous house, and because his family was wealthy, he always had fancier toys and every good game. His mother was beautiful and Jewish, which made her doubly exotic to me. His father was a government man in one of those big bureaus that helped protect our nation’s industries, which made him important. But Nathan’s grandfather was my favorite. The old man had emigrated from Britain, escaping some ill-defined trouble, and now he lived with his son’s family, tucked away in their guest quarters. He was a fat man, a cigar smoker and a determined drinker, who’d sit and talk to me. We had actual conversations about real, adult topics. The man had this massive intelligence and endless opinions, and with a booming voice, he could speak forever about things that I never knew were important. And where Nathan would ridicule my ideas, his grandfather seemed to accept much of what I said, correcting me where I was horribly wrong, and congratulating me on my occasional and rather tiny insights.

“What you should do,” Nathan once told me. “Ask to see his war game.”

I’d been coming to the house for a year or two, but the game had never been mentioned.

“It’s kind of a secret. But I think he’ll show it to you. If you ask nice, and if you pick the right time.”

“What’s the right time?” I asked.

“After he’s drunk too much,” my friend confided, winking with a conspiratorial glee.

Looking back, I can see exactly what Nathan wanted. He wanted the excuse to see the secret game for himself. But regardless of reasons, I was curious. A few weeks later, when his grandfather seemed properly stewed, I mentioned the mysterious game. The old man stared at me for a minute, smiling in that thin way people use when they’re trying not to look too pleased. Then with a low, rumbling voice, he asked, “And what, dear boy, have you heard about this game?”

“It’s about the world, and war,” I answered. Then I lied, saying, “That’s all I know.”

We were sitting in the enormous dining room. The old man planted a half-finished cigar into his buttery face, and with a calm deep voice, he said to Nathan, “Take your good friend upstairs. When I am ready, I will sound the horns of war.”

We obeyed, sitting anxiously on Nathan’s bedroom floor. His teenaged sister was upstairs, too. Wearing nothing but a white slip, she was jumping from her room to the bathroom and back again. I don’t need to mention, there was another benefit in Nathan’s friendship. I was watching for his sister, and he told me, “This’ll be fun.” Then his grandfather hollered, and we had to go downstairs again.

The game board had been brought out of its hiding place. With a glance, I knew why it was such a secret. All the words were Mandarin. The board looked new and modern, filled with a cold, slick light. With the drapes closed, the dining room was lit up by the game. Someone had spliced extra chips into the mechanical brain.

With a touch of the keypad, the old man changed the Mandarin into New Latin, and a huge map of the world emerged on a background of neat black hexagons.

“Technically,” he said, “this is an illegal possession.”

I knew that already.

“It came from China, and it was smuggled through the Aztec Republic. A friend of a friend did this, for a fee.”

I nodded, feeling nothing but impressed.

“In the Old Empire,” he explained, “a toy such as this would be labeled ideologically dangerous. In the New Lands, thankfully, we are a little less obsessed about maintaining the fabled status quo. But still, our government would be within its rights to take this from me, if only to harvest the mechanical mind. This is not a new game, but its circuits are still superior to anything we can build today.”

He didn’t have to tell me.

“Sit,” he suggested.

I plopped into a hard chair.

“Who do you wish to be?” he asked.

Boundaries had appeared on the map. This wasn’t our world, I realized. It was the past. Instead of the New Lands, there was an empty continent floating in a silvery mist. The enormity of Asia lay before me. At the far end was the Roman Empire, its territories marked with a sickly gray, while the Chinese Empire was under my hands, its green lands dotted with cities and roads and tiny military units existing as images floating inside that wondrous game board.

“You may become any civilization,” the old man explained. “Your responsibility is to control the nation, or nations, that comprise your civilization.”

“Be Rome,” Nathan blurted. “Or India. Or Persia. Or Mongolia.”

I said, “China.”

A fresh cigar was lit, and a fresh whiskey was poured. And the old man grinned at me, his smooth and pale and very fat flesh shining in the game’s light. There was a deep, scorching wisdom in his eyes. And with a voice holding ironies that I couldn’t hear, he asked, “How did I know?”

He said, “Naturally. You wish to pick the winner.”

Once the senate campaign began, we started attending church regularly.

I was pretty much of one mind about those Sunday mornings. I hated every part of them. I’d outgrown my one good suit months ago, and I could never tie the fake-silk tie properly, and the stiff leather shoes made my toes cross and ache. I hated how my complaints about my wardrobe were met with stony silence. I despised the boredom of sitting in church while strangers sang and prayed and sat silent, listening while the elderly priests gave us God’s lofty opinions about the state of the world. Sometimes, in secret, I didn’t mind hearing the choir singing. I also appreciated the teenage girls swishing along in their best dresses. And when I wanted, I could open the Bible and hunt for bloody passages. Not even Mom could complain about that, sitting stiff and tired beside me, smiling for the world to see.

We belonged to the Celtic Reformed Church. I didn’t appreciate it then, but our little branch of God’s Word had some very wealthy believers. Our church was a new and expensive building, larger than necessary and just a little short of beautiful. Donations helped pay the tariffs and bribes required to import exotic lumber and foreign stone. Even the lights were a little spectacular—floating Japanese-made orbs that moved according to invisible commands, their shapes changing to light up the entire room, or to focus on a very specific, very important spot.

During the sermons, every light shone on the pulpit. One special morning, our bishop came to deliver the sermon, and he spoke forever about poverty and its beauty in God’s eye. He explained how Christendom was special in every important way. God had blessed our faith and the Empire. How else could we have survived to this day, against titanic odds? True, we might not possess the wealth of some nations. And we didn’t have spaceships or cities riding on the waves. And perhaps our science seemed backward to some observers. But what did science matter? Where was the value in flying to Mars? Nonbelievers could never enter heaven, and wasn’t Heaven the only worthwhile destination in this brief, brief life of ours?

Our bishop was a very old man, and at the end of the service, when he walked past me, I heard his Indian-built heart beating like a hammer somewhere down in his belly. I thought that was odd. Later, while riding home, I described my thoughts. “If Heaven’s so important,” I asked, “why did the bishop buy that fancy heart? Why didn’t he just let himself die?”

We were using Mom’s little car. I was sitting in back, with Chester, and the adults were up front, not making so much as a squeak.

They didn’t understand me, I assumed. With a stubborn tone, I continued explaining my concerns. “And if science isn’t that important, why do we need fancy lights? Or cars? Or electric vases?”

My father didn’t answer. But he halfway shrugged his shoulders, as if admitting the silliness of it.

Mom took a different course. She turned and stared at me, and after an icy week or two, she reminded me, “When you’re in public, like today, people are watching. I want you to remember that. People are judging you and all of us. Do you know what I’m saying, Samuel?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“The world is more complicated than you can imagine,” she warned. “And it’s usually best to keep your opinions to yourself.”

But if I couldn’t imagine the world, who could?

That cold question gnawed at me. Watching the backs of my parents’ heads, it occurred to me that neither of them had any special imagination, and worse than that, they were happy with their stupidity.

I picked China, and lost.

The game was set at novice level. Its rules and the mechanical mind were made simple, and I had more people and money and better armies and the finest navy in the world. And I lost. India invaded, and Japan invaded, and Nathan laughed at me, watching my collapse accelerate with the centuries. His grandfather was more patient, reminding both of us, “This is a simulation, and a decidedly crude one, at that. Even if you began again, and even if you made the same initial moves, events would play out in some very different fashion.” Then he said the word, “Chaos,” with a genuine fondness. “Chaos can break the strongest nation, and it can build empires from the weakest tribe.”

I had no idea what he was telling me.

Nathan pretended to understand. “Let me play,” he begged. He had been waiting most of an hour to make that request. “At level three? Okay, Grandpa? And I’ll be the Roman Empire.”

At level three, there were more rules and more circumstances to watch, and the other powers were smarter by a long ways. At first, it looked as if my friend was failing badly. He let the Great Wall of Constantine fall to ruins. He allowed invaders from the steppes to descend while civil wars spread through the Empire, a dozen little nations blossoming in the mayhem. Then for no sensible reason, he turned those new countries against each other. I thought he was crazy. I confidently laughed at him. But even while his little nations fought pointless, nearly endless wars, Nathan appeared serene. Even when the plagues erupted, he wore a big smug know-it-all smile.

Meanwhile, China was invaded. The Mongols came and took everything, and then after a long while, they were absorbed. When new Chinese leaders appeared, they decided they didn’t need the rest of the world. The great ocean-going junks were allowed to sink, and the ancient trade routes vanished under desert sands. As the centuries passed, little changed in that piece of the world. It was as if some great spell had been cast over its people and the emerald lands.

The Roman Empire remained splintered and angry. But each new nation built its own navy, and with armies conditioned by war and disease, each spread across the world, conquering every wild continent before pushing into India, and then, invading the suddenly backward China.

Elbows on the table, I watched a very strange world emerge.

“This is a simulation,” the old man said one last time. Then he set down an empty glass, telling me, “But if one were to set the game to the most difficult level, and if each side competed equally well . . . well, the game never ends the same way twice. But there are patterns. Lessons, you might call them. One time out of five, the Christian states come to dominate the world.”

I looked at the date.

1933, by the Christian count.

This was our year, and nothing was familiar. There were no spaceships, much less cities on the moon. China was mangled and poor, and India belonged to an independent Britain, and again, with a sick surety, war was breaking out in the remnants of the Empire. The Germans were marching into Gaul, and the Slavs were massing their millions, and in the New Lands, a new Roman republic was building armies and fleets, and crude propeller planes were waiting to carry the first uranium bombs.

As a family, for the sake of the campaign, we went to bake sales. We witnessed the start of running races and tulip festivals and cock fights. We attended the grand opening of a fancy food market, and I ate enough cookies to throw up. Dressed in our finest, we stood bunched together in big rooms and small rooms, smiling with a trained enthusiasm. I remember a strange man patting my brother on the shoulders, saying, “Here’s the swimmer, hey? What a little steamboat!”

Jerk, I thought. Smiling still.

Then he gave me a distracted handshake, asking my little brother, “So what do you think? Another month till the primary, and it’s down to a three-horse race.”

Having just turned eight, my brother could ask, “What are you talking about?”

The stranger laughed, winking at our father. “Leonard? Didn’t you tell your boys?”

When my father lied, he would smile. He was smiling like a lighthouse just then, saying, “I guess I hadn’t gotten around to it.”

“Two of your pop’s opponents are done. Finished.” The stranger didn’t realize that we hadn’t heard the gossip. “And as it happens, it’s the two front-runners that are gone. One quit for health reasons. He says. And the other . . . well, let’s just say there’s some dirt. Something about young girls. And if he doesn’t pull out of the race, he’s going to look like an absolute idiot.” Again, he patted my brother on the shoulders. “So yeah, boys. A three-horse race now. Anybody’s race!”

Dad made the nightly news, if only in little doses. His name was mentioned in passing, or a baby-faced reporter would speak to him for five or six seconds. From the EV, I learned that my father was concerned about values in the youth. Which meant me, I realized. I learned that he wanted to protect our markets and our good Roman traditions, and he never quite mentioned that his Roman-built Testudo was a piece of crap. But more than anything, the reporters wanted to know about our pet cheetah. They wanted pictures of Hadrian. Everybody got a real kick out of seeing my dad scratching at the cat’s little ears, ready to pull back his hand at the first sign of trouble.

At school, I enjoyed a minor celebrity. Girls would ask me if I was Samuel Dunlop, and when they giggled in front of me, I didn’t feel hurt. I felt special enough to hold my ground, and maybe once or twice, I kept the girls giggling. Of course the guys weren’t nearly as impressed. But there were moments when I could see even the bullies making new calculations. What if my father won the race? Senators had power, they had been told. How much power would I wield, just by being his son? I watched them as they weighed these important political considerations, and then in the next instant, surrendering to a fatalistic whim, they would shrug their shoulders and give me a good hard smack.

Beating up an important person was just too much of a lure.

How much more celebrity could I tolerate? I asked myself. Lying on the ground, hands pressed against my aching belly.

As a family, we attended a picnic.

It must have been some company’s big spring picnic, although really, I don’t have any clear memory of why hundreds of people had gathered in the park. They were just there, and of course we showed up. And of course we wore better clothes than anybody had ever worn to a chicken-eating event. Mom told us to behave, as always, but this time there were new warnings. The local news was going to be there with EV cameras, which made the audience potentially enormous, and important, and if we were anything but saints, the world was going to crumble to dust.

There was an army of kids at the picnic, and I didn’t know any of them. But they had a bashball, and a game broke out, and one of us asked permission to play. Probably Chester, since there was a better chance of a “Yes” when he asked those kinds of questions. I found myself in the trenches, playing against a genuinely huge girl. Fat, and strong like every fat girl, and maybe a head taller than me. On the first play, she mowed me down. On the next play, she used a thick arm and flung me on my ass. But the worst whipping came from our team general. Staring at me with an easy contempt, he asked, “Are you going to let that bitch win?”

No. I decided to make a heroic stand, and with a virtuous rage, I reclaimed my place on the line and threw a shoulder into my opponent. My swimmer’s muscles delivered a good hard blow. The girl stopped in mid-stride. But the jarring awakened her own pride and rage, and again, with the game flowing around us, she set her feet and drove at me. In memory, that next collision was crushing, and epic, ineffectual and extremely painful; and again, we stepped back and gathered our strength before charging. In all, we collided maybe a dozen times. But it felt like a thousand impacts. The girl began to sweat and gasp for breath. The rest of the world grew still and quiet. I realized eventually that the game had paused, boys and a few girls standing in a circle, watching the spectacle. We would step back, and charge. Back, and charge. And in the end, I won. I held up to the girl’s worst blows, and she finally turned and stumbled away, crying. My victory was a sweet thing for all of two minutes. Then my mother found me. She found me and grabbed me by my half-dislocated shoulder, and with a low fury, she explained what it means to be embarrassed, to watch the daughter of an important somebody weeping uncontrollably, talking about the wicked awful monster boy who had just beaten her up.

My punishment began by sitting still and being quiet.

Three of the candidates were giving speeches. The man who liked young girls was still officially in the race, but he had the good sense not to show up. About that first candidate, I remember nothing. Nothing. I was sitting on a plastic folding chair. I was glowering at my scuffed shoes and my fists, my shoulder aching while my frail pride tried to heal itself. A hard stretch of applause made me lift my eyes. The first speaker was leaving now, and my father was slowly climbing up onto the little stage, smiling at us with a remarkable shyness.

I had never seen my father so nervous. In his natural environment—inside a little office or a smoky tavern—he was a marvel. He could talk to anyone, and for hours, charming them with an artful ease. But here were hundreds of people, and cameras, and reporters wearing skeptical expressions. He was nervous, making little jokes that didn’t cause anybody to laugh. Then he began to talk about what he wanted to do as a senator. He wanted to work hard. He wanted to be their friend in the provincial capital of New Carthage. He wanted the roads patched. (My father’s voice gained a genuine life at that point. He had a visceral hatred for the potholes that kept knocking our wheels out of alignment.) And again, for emphasis, he reminded everybody that he wanted to work hard for them, and to be their very good friend.

If there was any big applause, I don’t remember it.

I remember Mom pissing me off. I was ready to clap, but she had to give me a warning nudge anyway. As if I’d forget to clap for my father. But neither of us applauded for long, and we remained seated, and during that next little silence, the last candidate came forward.

He wasn’t a big man. He had black hair and blue eyes that I could see from five rows back. For some reason, he wore a uniform. Or maybe his clothes were cut so they would resemble a uniform. With a practiced ease, he took his place in front of the microphone, a look of absolute focus coming into his milky white face. I remember that moment. I remember staring at him, waiting for whatever word dropped out of his mouth first. His little moustache twitched, and his lips parted, and with an accented voice, he said, “We are a great people, and a noble people. But we are surrounded by enemies. Yellow enemies. Brown enemies. Red ones, and black. Even within our own ranks, we have traitors who are working against us, trying to undermine the great things that are our duty, and our destiny.

“The white Christian people of the world deserve this world!

“For too long, we have let ourselves remain weak, and poor. But if we can find the will, joining our hands in the common good . . . if we finally assume the mantle of greatness . . . then the world will be ours, and the stars . . .!”

In essence, that was his speech.

I can’t remember the exact words, but I’m sure he didn’t waste any breath talking about potholes. And he never explained how a local senator—a junior officer in a New Lands province—could bring the smallest change to the enormous world. But when the candidate finished, screaming at the microphone one last time, the applause was instantaneous, and furious, and I felt myself being carried along. A reborn Rome! And all of our enemies defeated! What could be more wonderful? I was thinking. Then a hand clamped down on my hands, keeping them from applauding anymore.

It was my mother’s hand.

“I was being polite,” I lied.

“Don’t be,” was her advice. “This one time, Samuel . . . you really don’t want to be polite. . . .”

Putting words inside quotation marks is a lie, by the way. When I tell this story, I have no real memory about what words people used. That’s the way it is with most people, I’m sure. What I remember are feelings—my twelve, nearly thirteen-year-old feelings—and sloppy little pieces of certain moments that felt important at the time. Inside this entire story, I don’t think there are more than two or three moments when I’m perfectly sure what words were spoken.

The day after the picnic was a school day.

Like always, I sat with Nathan on the bus. I mentioned the picnic and bashball and my father speaking, and Nathan asked how the speech went, and I lied. “Fine,” I claimed. And then I talked for a full mile about the little candidate with the blue eyes. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” I asked. “Rome strong again. The Chinese and Indians not telling us what to do. All of our enemies sent packing, the bastards. Then we could build anything we wanted, and spaceships. Just think, Nathan! You and me could fly off to Jupiter, or someplace . . .!”

My best friend looked at me, saying nothing.

Then we pulled up in front of school, and I didn’t see him again until gym class. He was dressing, and I was dressing at the other end of the aisle, and a couple of guys came up beside him. They were classmates of ours, but for the usual reasons, they were older by a year. Older, and bigger. Carrying themselves with a practiced menace, they did nothing but poke my friend in the ribs, and laugh. I stood at a safe distance, watching. The biggest kid said “Jew,” at least twice. And then Nathan handed money to the other kid. And when they were gone, he turned away from me and finished dressing.

I don’t remember him talking to me during gym class.

Or on the bus ride home, either.

When I stood for my stop, Nathan stood.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He said, “Nothing.”

The driver opened the back door, and together, we jumped to the curb. Then the bus pulled away, the dirty Roman engine leaving the air swirling with fumes and soot. And again, I asked my best friend, “What are you doing?”

“Wait,” he told me.

“For what?”

“Just wait.”

So we stood there. The bus left, and the cars following after the bus started to climb the long hill. Then again, I began to ask what we were waiting for, and as soon as my mouth was open, he hit me.

I fell down.

And he kicked me. Not once, and not softly. A day’s worth of being furious went into those kicks, and then he kneeled over me, saying, “Asshole.”

I’ve always remembered that one word.

“Do you know who the enemies are?” Nathan asked me. “The traitors, I mean. The ones Mr. Blue-Eyes was talking about. Do you know who?”

He said, “It’s the Jews.”

I didn’t believe him.

“It’s me, Samuel!”

And then I did something supremely stupid. With a gasp, I reminded him, “But you’re only half-Jewish.”

Again, he kicked me. Then he shook his head, watching me writhe in misery. I remember his face—the glowering, betrayed look that he was throwing at me—and I remember his eyes—how they were squinting and tearing up, looking miserable and very much scared.

Sometimes I ran errands with my father, helping the campaign.

Mostly, I remember being bored. Sometimes there were meetings with backers or people who might want to become backers. Sometimes the work involved putting up signs in yards and carrying packets of flyers around strange neighborhoods. Half of our basement was filled with signs and flyers and metal buttons that read Vote Dunlop. I began to appreciate that running for political office was an expensive chore. And we weren’t spending nearly as much as the blue-eyed candidate. Every night, without fail, we saw him at least two or three times on the EV. Even when Dad turned the channel, he couldn’t escape those commercials—slick, professional, full of music and cheering crowds.

Our basic flyer was a rectangle of stiff paper. Dad’s photograph was five years old, taken when he still had his hair. My name was on the flyer, and Chester’s, and our ages. There was a long list of Dad’s accomplishments, and that was the first time that I can remember hearing anything about his militia service. Every young man had to be in the militia, and so that didn’t surprise me. But the flyer told me that my own dad had earned some kind of special award for his service.

“What’s a Red-tail?” I asked.

We were riding down an anonymous street. Dad was looking straight ahead, and I was sitting beside him. The back seat was filled with flyers and yard signs and boxes full of rattling buttons. Hadrian was busy napping in the old straw.

“It’s a hawk,” Dad began. “A big one. We’ve got them around here—”

“The Red-tail Ribbon,” I interrupted. “You won it.”

“It’s nothing,” he said.

Which didn’t make sense. But before I could say as much, he told me, “It’s a militia thing. If you serve on the frontier, and you see combat—”

“You did?” I blurted.

He didn’t answer.

“You actually fought?” I asked. Then I rapidly reviewed what little I could remember about old border skirmishes. “Who’d you fight? The Mandan? The Lakota?” And then with an evil delight, I asked, “Was it the Aztecs?”

The Aztecs were a real nation. The other tribes were just patches of color on the map, each sponsored by a different Asian power.

“Was it?” I pressed.

It must have been an enormous temptation for my father. His son was desperate to find some excuse to worship him, and it would have been worship. I would have believed anything that painted my father as being a soldier of consequence. But he resisted that easy deification. With a shrug of his shoulders, he admitted, “People were trying to cross our border, and my unit lobbed shells in front of them.”

“Were they enemy soldiers?” I hoped.

“No,” he confessed. “No, they were just . . . just some people trying to slip across. . . .”

“And you shot in front of them?”

“Mostly,” he said. Then with a suddenly angry voice, he said, “And now we’re not talking about this anymore.”

Nathan’s grandfather filled the front door. One of his soft round hands was resting on the doorknob, while the other clung to a thick glass filled with some deliciously colored liquor. With an odd smile, he stared down at me. “We haven’t seen you for a little while, Samuel.” Then a sturdy, engaging laugh erupted, and he smiled at my father. “Mr. Dunlop. It is my deepest pleasure, sir. Please, please. Come inside.”

Except for the old man, the house seemed empty. He led us into the darkened dining room. “Sit, my friends. If you wish.”

Dad glanced at the game board.

“Cigar? Or a drink, perhaps?”

“No, thank you.”

“Sit. Please, sirs. You are my guests here.”

We settled into two hard chairs. Then with a quiet voice, my father allowed, “This is quite a map.”

“Did your son mention this toy? No? Well, good!” The old man chuckled, winking at me. “It is, I suppose, a bit of a secret. Rather illegal, and there’s no reason to broadcast its existence to the world.” Then he launched into a crisp, thorough explanation of the game. “Samuel played one scenario, and he witnessed a few potential outcomes. This is a very different scenario. This is our world as it stands today . . . reduced, or enlarged, into a set of contesting algorithms and modeled personalities. . . .”

A thick finger touched a control.

The map evaporated, leaving a white background covered with neat black hexagons.

“I won’t waste your time, Mr. Dunlop. Suffice to say I could run this scenario thousands of times, and to the satisfaction of every bloodless mathematician and chilled intellect, I could prove that certain policies, and certain leaders, would be dangerous to us. To the Old Empire, to the New Lands, and naturally, to your good sons.”

Father nodded as if he understood, and smiled.

“Politics,” said the old man.

He said, “I must tell you, sir. It’s a very brave thing to be a political animal in these times.”

Hearing a compliment, Father squared his shoulders.

“I once belonged to that noble profession,” he continued. “Perhaps you are unaware, but I delved into my native island’s politics, on more than one occasion. Which is, I should add, one of the compelling reasons why I came to these safer shores. I spoke my mind. I argued for my causes. But I have a tremendous amount of skin, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, sir, and I rather want that skin to remain safe. At least for the present moment.”

I shivered.

My father cleared his throat. “When we talked on the phone . . . you mentioned helping my candidacy—”

“Indeed. I very much would like that, yes.”

“How?”

The old man smiled and puffed on his cigar, saying nothing.

“Money?” asked Dad.

“I could. I could be most generous. But to be frank, it’s too late for money. No sum, no matter how extravagant, can insure his defeat in the coming election.”

Who was he talking about?

The old man lowered his cigar, blowing out a long cloud of smelly smoke. “Make no mistake: He is a bastard. A serpent. A charmer, and a teetotaler, and the worst kind of dreamer. What he believes is reprehensible, and sadly, his hatreds are quite ordinary. What motivates him is an intoxicating sense of supreme destiny. Are you aware, Mr. Dunlop? Your opponent was involved in a failed attempt to spark a civil war. His hope was to unite the Germanic provinces against Rome, and then conquer the Old Empire, and from there, he would have launched a suicidal assault against the Far East.”

Finally, I realized who the he was.

“Unfortunately, his rebellion was little more than a joke. Young men pretending to be a mighty force, and they were crushed in a day. If our mutual enemy had done any real harm, he would have been executed; but instead of death, he received a simple prison sentence. Incarceration is always dangerous; the monster had time to think. To organize, and plan. He wrote a small book—a brutal little treatise on hatred and rampant nationalism. I own three copies myself. I wish I had a million copies, and I could make every voter read it from cover to cover. But I don’t, and I can’t. What I can do is give you one copy. The man’s own words should erase any doubts you hold about his madness.”

Dad stared at the plain of empty hexagons. Then his eyes lifted, and with a weary voice, he said, “All right. I need help, but it’s not going to be money. So how am I supposed to beat this bastard?”

The old man grinned and sipped at his drink. “Samuel tells me that you are an exceptional salesman.”

Dad glanced at me, a little surprised.

Warily pleased.

“I want you to use your considerable skills, sir.” Leaning across the table, hands laid flat on the game board, Nathan’s grandfather said, “With my help, I want you to help me, sir. Help me peel the uniform off that very ugly serpent.”

The campaign office filled what used to be a drinking tavern. Dad found that funny. He tried to laugh as he parked, and he kept hold of his smile even when he had stopped laughing. A man stepped out of the office, blinking in the sunshine. Two other men followed after him. Dad opened his door and stepped out, and the first man said, “If you would, sir. Lift your arms.”

The other men held electric wands. The wands hummed as they passed across my father’s body, and then the first man said, “Open your coat, Mr. Dunlop. Please.”

“Does everybody get this honor?” Dad inquired.

“Your coat, sir. Now.”

He complied, glancing over at me.

“Would the boy like to come inside, too?”

Dad said, “No.”

The first man smiled and looked at me. “I think he would. Wouldn’t you, son?”

I looked at my father, then back at Hadrian.

“Your pet will be fine here,” the man said. He was fat and jolly-looking, and when I stepped down next to him, I caught a whiff of what almost seemed to be perfume. “Like your father, lift your arms.”

I listened to the humming.

“He’s expecting you,” the man reported. “Don’t keep him waiting.”

We walked into a barely lit room, long and nearly empty. The blue-eyed candidate sat in the back, behind a massive desk that was far fancier than anything else in the place. He didn’t stand. He barely looked up, writing on a fancy Chinese tablet. I thought that was very strange. The man hated the yellow horde, yet he used their machinery. To a twelve year-old boy, nothing smells worse than the tiniest whiff of hypocrisy, and it was all I could do not to turn up my nose.

The blue eyes stared at us.

A stern voice said, “Mr. Pothole. Have a seat.” Then the eyes looked past us, and with his German-Latin, he said, “I am quite busy. Quite busy. What is this business you wished to discuss with me?”

My father sat, and I sat on the only other chair.

“I’m going to lose,” Dad began. “That’s pretty much guaranteed. I can’t beat you in the primary, or that other guy.”

I stared at the blue eyes. Nothing else mattered.

“I just wanted you to know. After the primary, when I end up third, I’ll throw my support to you. I’ll work for your election. Anything that can help, I’ll do it. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

There was a brief, cold silence.

Then the candidate asked, “Why me? Don’t you approve of the other man’s politics?”

“God, no!” exclaimed Dad.

Then his head dropped. In the corner of an eye, I could see my father wiping at his bald scalp. I would have loved to seen his expression. The anger, the misery. But I had to keep my eyes straight ahead, blinking as infrequently as possible.

“What do you believe, Mr. Dunlop?”

For a long moment, my father held his tongue. And with a calculated rage and the absolute perfect tone, he said exactly three words.

“Fucking kike lover!”

I remember that moment perfectly. The moment, the practiced words, and that feeling of standing on some great hilltop, any little motion destined to send everything falling in one of a million separate directions.

The blue eyes closed slowly, and opened again, and the pen was set aside. “Don’t worry about our mutual opponent,” the candidate purred. “He is an adulterer. He sleeps with his secretary. A man like that isn’t fit for public office, and I think in a few days, the world will find out what kind of man he is.”

“Really?” Dad gasped. “God, that would be great!”

“So you see, we are destined to survive the primary. You and me. One of us will be the senator. And perhaps the other one, if he is willing, could play a little role in the new senator’s organization.”

With a seamless ease, Dad said, “Could I?”

The candidate was amused, more than anything. He smiled and glanced at me, and taking courage from my unblinking stare, he said, “Mr. Dunlop. I understand that you’re some kind of war hero. Please, if you have a moment, tell me all about yourself.”

The candidate was supposed to be very busy, yet he had time to chat with my father for the next hour-plus. For a while, he would ask little questions, and Dad would tell a somewhat altered version of his life story. Yes, he was a decorated veteran. He had fought the red scourge on the frontier. But everything since had been a string of disappointments and outright failures. More than once, he blamed the Jews for undercutting his new businesses. What could be done? He wanted to know. How could the world be made fair and right for all the white Christians?

Gradually, the candidate began to talk. More often, and for longer stretches of time, he would answer my father’s leading questions. Then an hour and a half had passed, and the blue eyes were burning, and the man had stood up, holding court from behind his big desk, pounding on the top of it with a fury that left me terrified, and weak.

It was the fleshy, perfumed man who stopped the terrible show. He shuffled up to the candidate, whispered a few words and laughed in a jolly fashion.

“Of course,” the candidate said. Then to us, he explained, “I have an appearance. We’ll have to resume this talk at another time.” He shook both our hands. I remember a clammy heat and a strong grip, and he stared into my eyes, absolutely unaware that a fleet of very tiny, very modern electronics were floating on my tears, transporting every sight and sound to a relay device set up in a nearby warehouse. In a few hours, an edited version of the candidate’s raging, curse-strewn tirade would end up on the nightly news, and all but the most hateful voters would turn away from him.

But that was still in the future.

With his new allies following after him, the candidate walked out into the afternoon sun. “Thank you, Mr. Dunlop. We will be in touch.”

Dad started to fish for his keys.

“That cheetah,” said the candidate. “I’ve heard about it. Let me look at him, for a minute.”

Dad didn’t want to. But he had no choice. He lowered the back window a little ways, and Hadrian poked his head through the gap. The candidate stood at a respectful distance. He grinned and said, “What a noble, proud beast.” Then he turned to me, winking. “You’re a very lucky lad, having a pet such as this.”

I said, “I know.”

Later, when Nathan and I were friends again, I’d tell him that part of the story over and over again.

It was his favorite part.

“I know,” I said.

“A lucky lad,” the candidate repeated.

Inspiration struck me. All of a sudden, I said, “Pet him.” I smiled and said, “Really, he loves being petted behind the ears.”

“Does he?” the candidate asked, a little tentative now.

“Oh, sure. Go on!”

Dad didn’t say a single word.

The pale clammy hand started to reach for the ears, and the cat watched the fingers, eyes smiling . . . and then came the sharp click of incisors slicing into living flesh.

There were always swim meets in the summer. One of the meets was in New Carthage, at the big pool in the main city park. We left before dawn, taking Mom’s car so we were sure to make it. My brother had a string of races, and I think he won most of them. I had a couple, and I don’t remember where I finished. I don’t care now, and I barely cared then.

What I remember is a huge tent that one of the teams had set up on the grass.

What I remember, always, is stepping into the odd orange light that filtered through the phony silk, the heat of the day diminishing while the air grew damp and close. A hundred or more bodies were sitting and standing inside that tiny space, and everybody was trying to hold their breath. A portable EV was set on a cooler. With a special antenna, it was picking up the feed from a Chinese satellite. While I watched, stunned and thrilled, a round hatch pulled open on another world, and a man in a padded suit climbed down a long ladder, jumping down onto the dusty red surface that had never before known the touch of a human being.

Everybody cheered.

I remember that wild, honest roar coming up from everywhere. Including from me.

Sometime later that day, just by chance, I was standing near the main gate of the pool. A familiar man came walking past me. I looked at him, and he said, “Samuel,” with this easy, friendly voice that I halfway recognized. But it took me several moments to place both the face and voice. By then, he was introducing himself. He shook my hand, and I asked, “What are you doing here?”

Chuckling, he said, “I’m a swimmer. I always have been.”

There were master’s events at the meet. He must have been taking part in a few races, as well as speaking to his potential voters.

“Did you happen to watch? The Mars landing?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Wasn’t it wonderful?”

“Yeah,” I said, without a shred of doubt. “It was great.”

“Humans have now walked on Mars,” he remarked. Then he used the Chinese word for the planet, adding, “This is a great day for our little world.”

I couldn’t agree more.

“Is your father here?”

I pointed in a vague direction.

“I need to speak to him, if I could. I want to thank him.”

“For what?”

“A great deal, the way I hear it told.” Then he winked at me, commenting, “We have the same good friend, I understand.” And he named Nathan’s grandfather.

For half a second, I thought about him sleeping with his secretary.

I didn’t say one word.

“Walk me to your father, please.”

“Okay.”

We left the pool, moving at a strong pace. “This is a wonderful world we live in. Did you know that, Samuel?”

“I guess. . . .”

“We’re blessed.” He kept chuckling, reminding me, “We’re walking on Mars. People are well-fed, and mostly educated. There are no important wars at the moment. And diseases have been mostly eradicated.”

I nodded, and smiled nervously.

“In a different century,” he said, “you would have had to worry. About measles, and polio, and the mumps.”

“I’ve had my shots,” I said.

“Exactly.” Then he patted me on the shoulder, saying, “I have weak eyes. Yet I don’t wear glasses.”

“There’s a surgery,” I said. “If you’re rich. . . .”

I let my voice collapse. Was it stupid, calling him rich?

But he just laughed it off, telling me, “I wish everyone could have these advantages. And I think one day—sooner than you could guess—everybody will have them.”

Confident and a little cocky, I chimed in, “I’m sorry. But I’m too young to vote for you.”

He barely noticed my joke.

“End the tariffs, and the censors, and open up our markets . . . if we can finally join with the rest of the world in every meaningful way . . . that’s what I think we need to do. . . .”

I wasn’t sure whom he was talking to.

“If I run for President of the New Lands,” he asked, “sometime in the next few years, would you vote for me, Samuel?”

“No,” I reported. “I’m voting for my father.”

He laughed, and walked faster, and I had to practically run to keep up with his long, happy strides.

INTO THE GARDENS OF SWEET NIGHT

Jay Lake

A Chance Meeting by Road

“Penny for your thoughts, stranger.”

Elroy glanced around. His mind had wandered as he followed his footsteps down the ancient metal highway. No one was in sight.

He felt a tug on the leg of his trousers.

“Down here, stranger. Fancy a Justiciary penny?” The voice was high, almost squeaky.

Elroy looked down. A tan pug dog with a black face and ears trotted on its foot paws next to him, one thumbed paw loosely caught in the muslin of his trousers at the level of his right knee. The pug wore a green flowered waistcoat.

At two meters in height, Elroy towered far over the Animal. “A Justy penny? Truly?”

“Spend ‘em anywhere,” said the pug with pride. The dog’s brown eyes darted back and forth, while a long tongue licked its nose. Its curly little tail wagged quickly.

Considering the unmodified muzzle, Elroy thought the pug had a remarkably clear voice. It offered him the promised penny in its right thumbed paw. Without breaking his stride, Elroy leaned down and grasped the coin. He slipped it into his belt pouch. Justies spent anywhere, not like the various city scrips backed only by faithless reputations and threat of local violence.

Elroy was returning from a year-long spirit quest among the Little Brothers of High Impact in the Glass Mountains of Oklahoma. He was headed home to his family’s little treetop cabin in the rain forest around Pilot Knob. Elroy wanted to climb lianas, gather bananas in the clearings, and hunt tamarin monkeys in the high forest canopy. He wanted to court a familiar girl, wed the old-fashioned way, and raise a family up in the trees as Texans always had. Which required funds, something he had in small supply after a year in a monastery. And he was still five hundred kilometers from home, a long lonely walk down the decrepit highway.

The pug tugged again at his trousers. “Well?”

“Animals.” Elroy shot a sidelong glance at the pug. “I am thinking about Animals.”

The pug sidestepped away, disappointment flashed in his canine eyes. His tail drooped. “I did not pay for an insult, friend.”

“You neither bought my friendship with a Justiciary penny, stranger,” snapped Elroy. “But I won’t insult you. I said Animals, not beasts.”

“Your thoughts, then?” The pug growled and narrowed its eyes.

Elroy could see the pug’s hackles rise above the collar of its waistcoat. He sighed, regretful for having mishandled the situation so quickly. “What is servant to a mounted man, peer to a footed man, and master to a legless man?”

The pug’s hackles dropped back below its flowered collar. “A poor riddle, as you already gave me the answer. Scarcely worthy of my investment.”

Elroy slowed, stepping to the roadside next to a weathered sign that read “New Dallas 82 klmtr.s, Fresh Fruit next Left.”

“My deepest apologies, gentle pug.” Elroy recalled his school days and the whippings he routinely received from Master Stenslaw for inattention the finer points of law and social custom. “I am rarely approached under the terms of the Mutual Contract, and am unversed. I intended no offense.”

“None taken, I’m sure,” muttered the pug.

“Enough, then.” Elroy smiled. “I stop to dine. It’s poor fare I have, but I offer it freely.”

The pug laughed, a strangled bark. Its tail flickered again. “I like generosity in the young. They are usually too callow to comprehend the value of a gift freely given. Let us instead repair to the fruit vendor ahead. In recognition of your kind offer to share your food, I will stand us a pair of kumquats, or whatever else they might have that suits.”

A Dinner of Fruit in the Rainforests of Texas

“Well, you’re a couple of likely lads.” The old woman at the fruit stand smiled a gap-toothed smile.

“I am hardly a lad, good woman. Do not mistake my size for youth.” The pug drummed its claws on the edge of the old woman’s table. “We will have two kumquats, and a liter of wine fit for consumption.”

“No kumquats today. Guavas three for a New Dallas dollar, I’m out of wine but you can have sweet plum jack two NewDees a liter,” she recited in a bored voice.

“Two Justies for the guavas and the plum jack,” the pug countered.

“Three.”

They bargained in a desultory manner, settling on two Justiciary pennies and a New Dallas dollar, which the pug handed over from the pocket of its waistcoat.

“Thank you, my good woman.” The pug stepped back from the table. “Get our supper, my boy.”

Elroy considered arguing that he was not, in any sense, the pug’s boy. The smell of the guavas changed his mind, being far more appetizing than the stale bread crusts he had planned to eat. He took the three guavas and the liter of plum jack, served with the loan of a translucent tube with white volumetric markings on the side, and followed the pug away from the fruit stand.

They ate in the shadow of the glossy green leaves of a blooming mango tree. Elroy was grateful for the two guavas the pug had generously given him. They passed the plum jack back and forth swig for swig, although Elroy drank considerably more than the pug at each pass. The mango tree sat on a bluff above the highway, giving them an excellent view of several kilometers of the road. In the distance, a land train puffed dark smoke and light steam into the sky, while the heavy scent of the mango blossoms and the drone of insects lulled Elroy toward sleep.

“Magnifera indica.” The pug waved at the tree above them. “In Vedic tradition this tree symbolizes abundance and divine sweetness.” The pug grasped the tube of plum jack in both thumbed paws and gulped. “Alcohol is dangerous for small dogs,” the pug continued, panting. “Slows down their breathing, interferes with the central nervous system.”

The conversation worried Elroy. Animals were not beasts, and for the pug to refer to its base canine ancestry so casually violated a widespread taboo. The great projects of the Viridian Republic had long since vanished from history, save for Animals, who now labored in many of the occupations of the world. They carefully fashioned their succeeding generations in their own images, and were equally jealous of their heritage and the secrets of their kind. Elroy held his tongue, choosing silence over potential insult.

“Well,” the pug continued after a long pause, “a man who knows when to hold his thoughts.” It passed the plum jack to Elroy.

“I am a traveler far from home. It is trouble enough for me to know my own thoughts, let alone mind those of others.”

“A worthy attitude. Would that all were as wisely discreet.”

Elroy opted for tact. “Discretion is the better part of a man.”

The pug studied Elroy closely, licking its nose repeatedly as brown canine eyes scanned his face. “Are you heading home, or setting out?”

It was a question not asked in polite conversation. Elroy recognized the seriousness of the pug’s request, gave consideration to its open-handedness with the guavas and the plum jack.

“Returning, sir pug, from a long course of spiritual study and physical pursuits.”

“Were you successful?”

Elroy shifted, uncomfortable but trapped by the pug’s hospitality and the opening created by his own honest answer. One boy in every generation from his town of Pilot Knob boy was set out on the road to the Little Brothers. Some returned, some did not. Many who did became village hetmen in their time. Elroy felt no ambition to rule, but he had found balance, strength and a small measure of wisdom among the Little Brothers—qualities he recognized as desirable in a future leader. “Yes, I succeeded.”

“So your duties to faith and family have been fully discharged?”

“Yes. I am free, and bound for home.”

“Then I would offer you a post of service with me, for a time.” The Animal smoothed the front of its flowered waistcoat, showing more than reflexive nervousness. “My terms are generous, especially if we meet with success in my ventures.”

Elroy did not want to take service with the pug, to be distracted from home and finding a bride. On the other hand, starting a family took money, or at least resources. The pug’s Justiciary penny had already doubled his savings, and having left the monastery, he was no longer a mendicant.

“What service, what terms, and what is the mark of success?”

The pug licked its nose. “I need a person of discretion and physical skill to assist me as a traveling companion and bodyguard. I offer expenses, board, and a Justiciary penny per day, plus substantial bonuses upon success of my own mission.” The pug paused, plucked at its waistcoat as it stared forlornly at its foot paws. Its curled tail drooped. “I was a gardener, but have been lost to my work. I need help to find my way back into the Gardens of Sweet Night.”

Elroy laughed in spite of himself, spraying plum jack on his crossed legs and the grass in front of him. “A child’s bedtime tale,” he said, coughing up more plum jack, “and one with which to frighten bullies and cowards. A thousand pardons, but your jest is in poor taste.”

The pug drew itself to its full seventy centimeters. “I do not jest. I know the way back to the Gardens, but it is not a road that I can travel alone. I can see I have wasted my time here. Good day, sir man.”

“Wait, wait.” Elroy stretched a hand toward the pug, palm outward. “I can see that you are serious about this fable. How is it that you plan to return?”

“Well,” the pug sniffed. “It is an arduous journey, hence my need for a traveling companion. I have offered you a position of trust to travel at my side, if you will trust me to know where I am going.”

Elroy nodded. “Your funds will stand me good stead when I return home. It is not my ambition to be a servant, but I will accept your wage. I am a human man called Elroy, and I will take your service.”

“Friend Elroy, I accept your offer of service under the terms discussed. I am an Animal called Wiggles.”

Elroy was profoundly glad he had no more plum jack in his mouth as he swallowed another laugh.

Somewhat Is Learned Concerning the Gardens

They walked toward New Dallas the balance of that day before settling down to rest under a baobab tree on a sparsely vegetated plateau. “Adansonia digitata,” Wiggles identified the tree. “The South African baobab. They grow in rain shadows and drylands, as they do not favor too much water. The tree is not native to the Western Hemisphere. We are lucky it is not in fruit—they are notoriously rank.”

The trunk of the tree was broad, like a wooden silo ramified with exposed roots, spreading to a great crown high above their heads. “I’ve never seen one,” said Elroy. Baobabs did not grow around Pilot Knob.

“They can store one hundred tons of water. In their native ecosystems they serve as reservoirs that anchor dryland ecosystems. There is one in Babylon much larger, but that is the nature of things there.”

Elroy waited politely for the pug to continue.

Wiggles sighed. “Babylon, one of the Gardens of Sweet Night.” He scratched in the loam at their feet, drawing seven long ovals like sausages laid end to end. He pointed to them in turn.

“Heligan, Babylon, Suzhou, Eden, Daisenin, Gethsemane and Tuileries.” His voice was sadness itself. “The green wealth of our Earth, captured and multiplied by the guiding genius of man and Animal.”

“And you came from there?”

Wiggles nodded, a very manlike gesture. “Born and raised in Heligan.”

“Why did you leave?”

The pug stared at Elroy, licking his own black face. “There was a misunderstanding. I was cast out for eating the apples of our Lord.”

“Your Lord?”

“Liasis, High Commissioner of the Cis-Lunar Justiciary and Lord of Implementation for the Atlantic Maritime Territories.”

Elroy had never heard of such a person. “Who is he?”

“The man who owns the world.”

They watched the stars rise over the eastern horizon, the two of them stretched out together under the edge of the baobab’s scattered branches. Venus came first, then Yurigrad, brightest of the thousand satellite stars, on its fast course through the sky.

“The stars shine like diamonds cold and hard in the skies that surround the Gardens,” said Wiggles in a sleepy voice.

“This Liasis . . .” Elroy struggled with the name. “How does he own the world?”

The pug’s tail thumped against the ground. “Do you pay taxes at home?”

“Me, no, but the village of Pilot Knob tithes every third moon.”

Wiggles sat up, began grooming himself, tongue lapping through his fur. He stopped for a moment. “To whom does your village tithe?”

“The Travis Caldes.”

Wiggles burrowed briefly into his groin. “And to whom do they in turn pay taxes?”

Elroy recalled his lessons in civics and economics. “I suppose they must pay them to the Republician government in Waco.”

Another pause for air. “And to whom do the Republicians tithe?”

“I never imagined that they tithe anyone, sir pug. I did not know who might stand above them.”

“Everybody tithes, in one fashion or another. And it all flows upward, friend Elroy. Only the Lord Liasis does not tithe. He and a few of his brethren.”

“How can it be,” wondered Elroy, “that if I am a free man, everything is owed to someone of higher station?”

“What does freedom mean?” Wiggles turned around several times and went to sleep.

The warmth of the new day washed over them. The baobab lay some kilometers behind. Elroy considered his bread crusts with longing as Wiggles spoke.

“I believe I can find a maglev station to speed us on our way to New Dallas. We will have far to go from there.”

Old tutelage in archaeoscience tumbled through Elroy’s memory. “Maglev. Magnetic levitation, yes? An ancient mode of rapid transport.”

“Correct.” Wiggles smiled while licking his nose. “Normally subterranean. This system was originally developed near the end of the First North American Ascendancy. As I recall, the La Grangians reconditioned it.”

“I had no idea it was still active.”

“Many things move above your head and beneath your feet of which you have never dreamed.”

The discussion of last night still weighed on Elroy’s mind. “How free am I?”

Wiggles laughed again. “You breathe of your own choosing, yes?”

“Yes, I suppose that I am free to breathe.”

“Some people dwell in places where that is a right, licensed and paid for every turning of the moon. Yet they consider themselves free.”

Elroy was shocked. “Free? When they must pay for the very air they breathe?”

“Some claim there is absolute freedom in holding responsibility for every aspect of their lives, including the air they breathe. Every day they live or die by the consequences of their actions.”

Behind them a shrill blast from a steam whistle warned of an oncoming land train. Elroy and Wiggles left the road to stand in the twinned shadows of a honeysuckle that struggled over slow years to overwhelm a banyan tree.

“Ficus benghalensis.” Wiggles tapped a thick aerial root with a thumbed paw. “A relative of the mulberry, mistakenly thought by the ancients to be a fig tree. Another colonizer of these American shores. Traditionally, this tree represents shelter given by the gods, a symbol of their benevolence toward man.”

The clanking, screeching land train overtook them, all brass piping, bright paintwork and great iron wheels. Elroy did not feel particularly sheltered.

Beset by Wolves, Any Man May Be a Hero

The land train groaned to a shuddering stop before their banyan tree. The sixth and final car halted directly in front of Elroy and Wiggles. Three security wolves jumped over the red and yellow ironwork sides, surprising them. One slammed Elroy back against the banyan tree using a rough arm across his chest while another knocked Wiggles down to pin him under a foot paw.

The lead security wolf leaned one forearm against the banyan tree while tapping Elroy on the chest with his staff. The wolf was definitely male, as were his gray and tan fellows. They all wore black armored vests. He growled through a toothy smile. “You two pups are in our crimebase, Freshmeat.” The odor of his breath gagged Elroy.

Elroy was frightened, not for his life, but certainly for his safety, and that of Wiggles. Gathering his calm, he protested. “You don’t even know our names. We have rights under the Mutual Contract.”

“Rights.” The lead wolf laughed, a very human sound. “I’ve heard of those.” He leaned closer, the lolling tongue nearly swiping Elroy’s nose.

“This little dog is a dangerous character, friend man. You’d do well to avoid his type.” The wolf glanced down at Wiggles, squirming and whining on his back. “Breeding error, you know.”

Elroy sized up the three wolves. Each stood taller than he, armed with iron-shod staves and stun guns. One was occupied standing on Wiggles, while the other two cornered Elroy against the aerial roots of the banyan. Bad odds, from a poor position, but he would not allow either fear or tactics to keep him from his responsibilities. His vows with the Little Brothers forbade attack, but defense was another matter entirely. Elroy centered himself as he had been taught, then drew a steady breath.

“Sir pug is my employer, and I owe him loyalty.”

“Freshmeat, you don’t listen well . . .” the security wolf began. Elroy spun a left snap kick that landed on the wolf’s scrotum. Spinning through the kick, Elroy grabbed the staff as it tumbled from the shocked wolf’s thumbed paw, following on to catch the next security wolf across the forearm.

The second wolf screamed as its ulna shattered. Elroy shoved the iron tip of the staff into the second wolf’s chest, pushing it back into the banyan, before whacking the groaning first wolf alongside the head to keep it down. He turned to help Wiggles, only to see the pug with his jaws locked on the inner thigh of the third security wolf. That wolf shook Wiggles free and leapt on the pug, just as Elroy brought the staff down with a resounding thwack on the back of the wolf’s head, pulling his blow so as not to kill.

Panting with adrenalin and relief, Elroy used the staff to lever the unconscious wolf off Wiggles.

“Sir pug, are you well?” he gasped.

“That bastard son of a beast smashed my phalanges,” screeched Wiggles. “I fear I cannot walk, and more wolves are certain to come from the fore of the train.”

It was terribly rare for a human to handle an Animal so, but Elroy scooped up the pug as his own breathing settled to a manageable rhythm. “Then this would be a fine time to remember where a maglev station might be.”

He fled into the jungle, carrying the iron-shod staff in one hand and Wiggles in the other. Elroy mumbled a prayer of thanks that he had not maimed or killed the security wolves.

They crouched in an understory deadfall on the jungle floor, listening for sounds of pursuit. The old rotted trunk was surrounded by large, flat leaves fallen from above, each the size of a serving platter. The leaves decayed with a gentle sugary smell.

Elroy’s fear had been replaced by a rising sense of anger—at the situation, at the wolves, at Wiggles. “By the Cattle of the King, what was that ambush? My masters took my vow not to strike in anger, and already I am in default. I am paying dearly for your wage, sir pug.”

“A moment, please,” said Wiggles. “Allow me to collect my thoughts. You do fight very well for a peasant boy from the Texas jungles.”

Elroy folded his hands and made a constrained bow within their sheltering greenery. “My spiritual masters practice an aggressively strenuous form of ethics. Now tell me, what brought the security wolves down on us?”

“Flaming Sword,” said Wiggles. “The ones who cast me out. They guard the secrets of the Gardens of Sweet Night.”

“The constabulary of your Lord Liasis?”

The pug drew himself to his feet with a groan. “The secret police, perhaps. Ancient tradition holds that a flaming sword bars the gates of the Garden of Eden, namesake of one of the Gardens of Sweet Night.”

Elroy examined the staff. “I would expect the secret police to carry the fiercest of weapons.”

“Not here, on the surface. It is forbidden by both common sense and the Mutual Contract. They expect no sharp resistance here. They will not make that mistake with us twice.”

In the distance they heard the scream of the land train’s steam whistle, long blasts in groups of three. Wiggles growled, his ears laid back flat. “They launch the search, as if we were dangerous brigands. Damned canids.”

Elroy examined the jungle around them. His mind and body were calm again. “Well, then we must find your maglev station quickly. I presume it is hidden underground, or I would have heard of such a thing before.” Elroy paused, working through his line of reasoning. “A maglev must use a lot of energy, and something that old would not be well shielded. Do you have a means of locating that kind of energy leakage?”

Wiggles looked surprised. “Excellent thinking, friend Elroy. You have been better tutored than I had hoped. I do have something like that, but to my embarrassment against all propriety you must again carry me. My foot paw pains me sorely.”

Elroy scooped up the pug. “Show me the way.” He trotted through the green-shadowed depths of the jungle floor, Elroy harboring regrets.

“Ware tigers, friend Elroy.” Wiggles’ voice was muffled against Elroy’s shoulder.

“Surely you mean wolves?”

“No, I scent felids. Large beasts, not Animals. I understand thatPanthera tigris sumatrae have become naturalized here in Texas.”

“A wonder to behold, I am sure,” Elroy replied, wondering how Wiggles could scent the difference between a beast and an Animal, “but I am ill equipped to stand off something larger and less foolish than your flaming wolves.”

“If a tiger appears, I am confident you will think of something.”

This stretch of jungle floor looked much like any other to Elroy, with dangling lianas and scattered deadfalls. Butterflies strayed down from the high canopy, drifting through isolated shafts of green-tinted sunlight.

After a time Elroy voiced his thoughts. “Between the tigers and the wolves, I worry if we will emerge from this jungle intact.”

“Regretful you took my pay?”

“No.” Elroy surprised himself. “The wolves attacked without warning, and offered no legal authority. Further, your money earns my way toward starting a family.”

“Surely a thought worth a Justiciary penny.” Wiggles gave another of his odd laughs. “Put me down here, please.” He began snuffling around on all fours in a spiraled circle in the loam, limping to favor in his left foot paw.

“Here.” Wiggles’ voice carried from behind another banyan tree. “Bring that stick you have been carrying.”

Elroy stepped around the tree to see Wiggles digging into the loam, scattering leaf mold and dirt behind him. He could hear Wiggles’ thumbed paws scraped on something solid. The pug backed out of the hole, then stared up at Elroy. Elroy noticed the flowered waistcoat was as clean as it had been when he first met Wiggles—a sign of smart matter, although Elroy had never actually encountered the stuff.

“Open it,” suggested Wiggles.

Elroy peered into the hole. A metal hatch cover lay exposed about eight inches below the jungle floor, a large handle inset within a rounded recess. Elroy reached down with the iron-shod staff, levering it against the handle. He leaned with all his strength.

The handle did not budge.

“Harder,” snapped Wiggles. Elroy noticed the pug’s hackles were rising. He thought he could hear the distant echo of the steam whistle.

Elroy leaned against the staff, pulling with his entire weight, until his feet almost left the ground as the staff bent back.

The roar of a tiger startled him greatly.

The hatch handle screeched as it slid across the rounded recess. Elroy and the staff collapsed on Wiggles’ dirt pile as Wiggles bounded to the sprung hatch and tugged at it with his thumbed paws.

The tiger roared again.

Elroy grabbed the hatch, pulling it wide open as Wiggles dove down the hole. Elroy tossed the staff after Wiggles and swung himself into the hole to the sound of a startled yelp from below. As he pulled the hatch cover closed, he saw the green eyes and tufted face of a Sumatran tiger peering in at him.

Wiggles’ encouraging words echoed up from the darkness below. “Don’t worry. It’s the smallest species of tiger in the world.”

A Magnetic Journey of Conscience to Flower Mound

They stood in a dimly lit hall, high-ceilinged and quite large. The echoes of Elroy’s feet scuffling on cracked tile carried some distance. The whole area had a musty, oily smell, overlaid with the cool damp common to subterranean spaces. Vague reddish light from hidden sources obscured much more than it revealed.

Wiggles thumped his tail. “Excellent.”

“Yes?”

“This was the Denton station. It is long out of commission as there is no town here anymore. The line still runs through it straight to our destination, however. I have already summoned a service car for a trip to Flower Mound, which you call New Dallas.”

“So this is the maglev,” whispered Elroy.

“Well, the station anyway. You will see the train soon enough.”

They waited on a concrete bench in the silent dimness. Wiggles whimpered periodically from the pain in his paw. After a while Elroy realized their mistake.

“What will happen when the wolves discover the hatch?”

“First they will discover the tiger, I suspect.” The pug snorted. “But in any case the dirt will have taken care of things by now. It isn’t very bright, but it knows its job.”

“The dirt?” Elroy realized Wiggles was an absolute oracle of lost technology. “Was it nanotechnology?”

“Exactly. Moderately intelligent nanodirt. It is self-restoring. That’s what I looked for. We use it in the Gardens of Sweet Night. I have a detector sensitive to its signature.”

When the maglev service car finally arrived, its running lights brightened the station. Elroy saw tall vaulted arches, cracked murals on the wall, and a row of long-shuttered shops. Tiny pairs of eyes gleamed in the shadows by the tunnel mouth.

The service car itself was an almost featureless polished wedge much different the steam-driven iron trains that Elroy had seen all his life, quiet as a stone. Elroy added disappointment to that day’s catalog of emotions.

“Flower Mound.” Wiggles stretched, shaking out his fur while licking his nose. “The lotus is a flower of great significance, symbolizing purity and divinity. These days people call this place New Dallas, but it is built on a most spiritual foundation.”

“It is only New Dallas, sir pug, not the Vatican Aresian.”

They stood in the Flower Mound maglev station. Similar in design to the abandoned Denton station, it was well lit, dressed stone walls bearing sculpted metal light fixtures. A tile mosaic floor supported scattered travelers seated on concrete benches or reading wall posters. The shops here were long-shuttered, too.

Elroy had left the iron-shod staff in the service car, as it seemed too conspicuous to carry through the station. He grumbled. “I walked all the way to the Glass Mountains while this world beneath could have carried me in comfort.”

“But you were free every step of the way, yes?”

More free then than he was now, Elroy realized. “Are we much closer to the Gardens?”

“We are until the Flaming Sword picks up our trail,” said Wiggles darkly. “Those wolves had no reason to carry nanosensors out there, but it won’t take them long to reason out where we went. We must move onward and upward. Support me by clasping my thumbed paw, please. It would be a scandal for me to be seen riding in your arms.”

Elroy extended a downward hand. “First, I suppose, we must find a way out of this station. Surely they do not employ a secret ladder here?”

“I am embarrassed to say that I feel enslaved by your wages.” Elroy clutched the two Justies the pug had just given him, filled with a sense that he had surrendered control of his fate.

Wiggles smiled. “Freedom. An ideal of some concern to you. Consider that the meanest felon digging a ditch in restitution to his lord is a free man. He may place his mattock thusly or so at his own choice, bend or stand as he wishes.”

Elroy leapt to the flaw in Wiggles’ proposition. “Yet he is in chains, undeniably bound, his actions constrained.”

“Those chains are of his choosing,” said Wiggles. “The felon chose his crime, with the ditch as consequence. When I offered you service, you chose to join me. The Justiciary pennies in your hand and the pangs in your conscience are consequences. You are of course at liberty to resume your original journey.”

They sat on a bench in the Gamelan Garden, a park in the center of New Dallas, just off Simmons Road. Wiggles had demanded rest in a cultivated park. He had declared Gamelan with its orchids and fleshy vines and vast bromeliads the palest imitation of the Gardens of Sweet Night, but still balm for his injured soul.

Elroy shook his head, studying the coins in his hand. “I will stay.” He did not want to admit it, but Elroy was becoming fond of Wiggles.

“Caring is a surrender of freedom. You may see that I am trapped by my love of the Gardens, that this lovelyOdontoglossum hortensiae so reminds me of.” The pug sniffed at a pale, fleshy flower, his tail wagging. “Flowers are the mothers of insects, you know.”

“Did they name it Flower Mound for the orchids that grew here?”

“Goodness, no.” Wiggles laughed, his tail slapping the bench. “In those bygone days, what grew here were dryland plants such as prairie grasses, pecans and mesquite.”

At Elroy’s puzzled look, Wiggles added, “You know.Prosopis glandulosa . A nitrogen-fixer that anchored the boundaries of prairie.” The pug rubbed his left foot paw with a thumbed paw. “My foot is sore hurt, friend Elroy.”

Speaking the Language of the Sky

They stood in a line at the base of the mooring mast that towered above them, a slender blade of white metalloceramic stabbing into the sky toward the great bulk of the airshipChild of Crisis . Elroy had seen dirigibles cruising above the trees all his life, as the usual airway from New Dallas to Monterey ran over Pilot Knob. He had never been close to one.

Elroy craned his neck to study the gondola at the bottom of the airship. It was doubtless quite large, but still appeared miniscule against the bulk of the gasbag. “I’ve never ridden the air before.”

“To do so down here is of no comparison to the Gardens of Sweet Night.”

“My experiences pale next to yours, sir pug,” Elroy snapped, “but leave me the joy of what little I have to call my own.”

“Peace, friend Elroy.” Wiggles squeezed Elroy’s hand, his small thumbed paw dry and stiff. “I did not mean to offend.”

“Next load! Group six!” A red-faced young woman, her skin much paler than Elroy’s woody brown complexion, shouted from the boarding doors at the base of the mast.

Wiggles checked his chits. “Let’s go.” The two of them shuffled through the hatch on to a small elevator with a number of other passengers. Behind them, Elroy saw the line of waiting people and Animals through the closing hatch.

The elevator hummed almost below audibility. Wiggles had warned Elroy about the sensation of being pushed down while the little car climbed the inside of the mooring mast. “I wish there were windows,” Elroy whispered.

The car suddenly lurched, shaking in its rise. From the conductor’s shocked gasp, Elroy gathered this was not part of the usual ride. They stopped for a moment, then began moving up again.

A bulging man with a thick, burred Mississippian accent sounded panicky. “And what would that have been?”

The conductor picked up a small handset from her control panel and listened. The car shuddered upward, much less smooth in its motion than before. Elroy could hear a deep groaning through the walls of the elevator.

They staggered to a stop and the doors hissed open to reveal a tiled floor about waist high to Elroy. The conductor dropped her handset. “There is a problem down below. The airship is casting off for its own protection. Please remain calm and stay in the elevator car.”

“Flaming Sword,” whispered Elroy. If they stayed in the elevator, the wolves would come for them, endangering the other passengers. He had to get away, to protect himself and everyone else. Elroy scooped Wiggles up in his arms like a beast and pushed toward the open doors.

“Here there, boy.” The man with the Mississippian accent grabbed Elroy’s arm. Elroy spun, swinging his elbow into the Mississippian’s chest with a prayer for forgiveness. He had no time to reason with the man. Elroy miscalculated his blow and felt ribs crack.

“Moment of Inertia,” Elroy wept through clenched teeth. “May the Little Brothers forgive me.” He hopped one hip up onto the ledge that was the floor outside, and rolled out of the jammed elevator. The conductor plucked at his heel, but he ignored her.

The massive bulk of theChild of Crisis filled the sky above Elroy. Ahead of him it stretched into the distance, the shimmering metallic bulge of the airship’s gasbag dropping below his view. The boarding platform at the top of the mast was about four meters square, while a slender spire arched up above him to meet a set of lines depending from the airship’s nose. A narrow gangway about three meters long led to the open hatch of the gondola underslung along the forward curve of the airship.

Two sailors in crisp blue uniforms were unfastening the gangway from the open door, preparing to drop it loose. Wiggles whimpered as a series of explosions echoed up from the ground below. The platform swayed beneath Elroy’s feet. There was no time for thought. He sprinted toward the gangway, screaming, “Wait, wait for us!”

One sailor looked up, the gangway’s release chain slack in her hand. The other yanked his chain, causing the right side of the gangway to drop away from the hatch while the chains on the left took its full weight.

Elroy raced over the edge of the boarding platform onto the sagging gangway as the other sailor belatedly released her chain. Elroy pushed off as the gangway fell away, straining into the jump with Wiggles tucked firmly under his left arm. As he fell, Elroy reached forward with his right. It was like running the trees in his home jungle, only far more deadly.

The gangway tumbled away beneath his feet to swing from the boarding platform, revealing perhaps a hundred meters of empty air between Elroy and the flagged paving stones of the airfield. His fingers missed the hatch coaming, then grasped at the swinging chain as the second sailor hauled it in. Elroy caught the chain, but his body swung forward with the momentum of his jump and smashed against the gondola wall. Wiggles yelped, muffled by his arm.

As Elroy swung back on the chain, spinning over the airfield, he saw the boarding platform falling away from him. He realized the dirigible had cast off and now rose into the sky. People from the elevator were helping the bulky Mississippian on to the platform, while the conductor waved her fist at Elroy. Far below, he could see a fire at the base of the mooring mast, with figures struggling around it.

“Need a bit of help there, lad?” The female sailor peered down at him. Elroy spun slowly on the chain, grateful of the support wrapped around his forearm, even as the pressure of his weight threatened to crush his wrist within the chain’s tightening grip. The two sailors peered from the open hatch above him.

“If you please,” gasped Elroy. He wondered what the warm, acrid smell was, then realized he had pissed his pants.

“We’d need to see a boarding chit.” The two of them grinned like monkeys sharing an armload of rotten papayas.

“A thousand pardons.” Elroy shuddered. “I am somewhat constrained at the moment.” He slipped two links down the chain, the length circling his wrist binding tighter. He could feel bones grind against one another. Elroy hissed with pain.

The woman pulled a serious face, rubbing her chin. “A right problem there, lad. Rules say we have to see the chit afore you can pass the hatch.”

“Ancient law, that is,” the second sailor added. “Protects everyone’s rights, that does.”

They both laughed.

Wiggles squirmed beneath his arm. “Money. Offer them money.”

Elroy’s hand slipped, and he felt an astonishing pain as his elbow threatened to come loose in its socket, counterpoint to the grinding in his wrist.

He clenched his teeth. “Perhaps a gratuity would be in order.”

“Now you’re speaking the language of the sky, lad.” The two sailors hauled in their chain.

“Despite the irregularities of your embarkation, your boarding chits seem to be in order.”

Elroy’s wrist throbbed so severely that he had trouble focusing on the purser’s words. They stood in the officer’s abbreviated workspace in a forward cabin of the airship.

The purser was an aging golden retriever wearing a blue jacket with epaulettes. Its fur was braided in tight cornrows, each one clasped by a clip decorated with an ancient copper coin. It stared at Elroy and Wiggles as if they were unpleasantly spoiled cargo loaded by some error. “It seems I am stuck with you for now. What transpired back there at New Dallas?”

Wiggles glanced sidelong at Elroy, who took that as a hint.

“Sir purser,” Elroy began. He was not sure what he should say, but he had brought them aboard the ship. He felt the way he had when summoned before the abbot for some infraction. “I am in service to this noble pug. We were chased by brigands. We thought to escape by boarding theChild of Crisis , but they were closer than we realized. My most humble apologies for bringing risk upon your vessel.”

“Brigands,” said the purser flatly. It stared at Elroy, its large brown eyes sweeping up and down his grimy beaded vest and torn muslin trousers. It then turned its gaze on Wiggles, whose green flowered waistcoat was, as always, immaculate.

“I may be a foolish old Animal who has spent his life among the free folk of the air, but I know brigands when I don’t see them. Those were security wolves, firing indiscriminately down there with heavy weapons.” It glanced at their boarding chits. “You two are fully paid and bound for Odessa Port. I’ve a mind to have you both tossed from the hatch to save me further trouble, but it’s a fact that the Air Charter protectsChild of Crisis and all her passengers and crew from precisely this harassment. Now tell me what you’re really about.”

Wiggles scratched his ear, then licked his nose. His tail stayed tight to his body as he spoke. “My servant and I are pursuing a quest.”

“And that quest would be?”

Wiggles spoke with a quiet, proud strength. “Through error, I have been cast out of the Gardens of Sweet Night. I now make my way home.”

The purser studied them a moment. “In their common room up against the belly of the gasbag, air sailors tell stories of those who die in the wide arms of the sky. Every man and Animal longs for a peaceful death in the air, followed by a sky burial. What we—they—say is that the bodies rise up singing into the heavens, until they come to the Gardens of Sweet Night. That is where they find their reward.” It laughed, a stuttering bark deeper and richer than Wiggles’ wheezing moments of humor. “Somehow you do not seem like one who has returned from the dark clouds of death.”

“It is but truth, friend Purser. My story is as real as the Gardens themselves, for all that they may be myth to some.”

“I do know more than the simple sailors.”

“If you know the world,” said Elroy unexpectedly, “you know injustice.” He surprised himself with his words. “We have been pursued with a vengeance out of all proportion to any offense. You have your Air Charter. We have only our wits and our luck. I beseech your help in surpassing this wicked pursuit and gain entrance to the Gardens?”

“You speak well for a servant,” said the purser, “As it happens, I have conceived of a way to lend a hand, spite the security wolves, and keep theChild from multiplying her current difficulties, all in one stroke. If I can persuade the captain to spite those who trespass on our ancient rights we may throw you from the hatch after all. Would you care to experience a sky burial of your very own?”

Rise Up Singing

The crew common room was low and dark, with a convex ceiling following the swell of the gasbag. Elroy, at two meters of height, could stand only along the slant walled sides where the ceiling reached up to about the top of his head. Long and narrow, with no windows and poor lighting, it felt to Elroy like the sarcophagus of some giant from prehistoric America.

“You effected our rescue quite well,” said Wiggles.

Elroy snorted. “I assaulted an innocent man, then leapt into empty air, to be saved by dumb luck and a long chain.”

“You saw what needed doing, and did it.”

“Perhaps. But not now. Whatare we doing here?”

Wiggles rested in the hammock with Elroy, curled up against his side. One of the sailors had cleaned and bandaged his wounded foot paw, but the pain clearly bothered the pug.

“Hiding from passengers who will certainly be questioned at Odessa Port by the Flaming Sword. For the same reason the captain, too, cannot afford to see our faces.”

“I know. I wondered about the sky burial. I am afraid of being tossed from the hatch.”

“They will cast us out in a sort of flyer that is used to send out the dead. We will not plummet to the ground, but rather be rescued by secret friends.”

Elroy still did not trust what was to come, but he had trouble imagining such an elaborate effort would be expended just to kill him. It couldn’t be any worse than his leap onto the airship.

Elroy kept a wary distance from his rescuers, Nero and Mycroft, in the little storeroom where they were supposedly preparing his body. “You arenot tying me to those splints. That’s no flyer.”

“Here, there,” Nero said. “Your funeral is in ten minutes. You don’t want to be late for it.”

“Elroy,” snapped Wiggles. “We do not have time for this.”

“Look.” Nero displayed a small bone-handled knife. “For later. To cut your way out. Trust us, you’ll feel like a new man after your funeral.”

Elroy stepped over to the splints. They were body length, cross-braced to a large capsule of a dull-colored matte plastic. Nero had given him a blue uniform jacket, without epaulettes, while Mycroft stood by with a winding sheet for the ‘corpse.’

“Wiggles . . .” Elroy began. Control of his situation kept slipping further away from him.

The Animal licked his own nose, then grasped Elroy’s hand with a thumbed paw. “We must, friend Elroy. This will work.”

Elroy lay down with the greatest reluctance and allowed Nero to bind him to the splints. The straps came across his upper arms, leaving his forearms free from the elbow down—not restraints, exactly. Nero slipped the bone-handled knife into Elroy’s right hand. Wiggles crawled between Elroy’s legs, where he was enclosed in the winding sheet that Mycroft wrapped from Elroy’s feet to his waist. The sheet was some sandpapery weave of sackcloth cheaply printed with block patterns of birds soaring among blazing stars.

“Oh are you in for a treat. While we’re in the cargo hold, try to remember you’re dead,” Mycroft whispered in Elroy’s ear. “Don’t breathe where the passengers might see you.”

Nero and Mycroft hoisted the splint ends and carried Elroy as if on a stretcher into the aft cargo hold of theChild of Crisis . Eyes slitted open, Elroy could see through his lashes an honor guard of four sailors to one side of the great double doors of the aft cargo hatch. Two of them played a fast-paced dirge on an electric sackbut and an out-of-tune finger harp. The musical effect was unique in Elroy’s experience.

The purser stood in front of the hatch doors with a small book in its hand. Nero and Mycroft lowered Elroy onto the deck, the capsule beneath the splints taking his weight. Elroy could hear a rustle of people behind his head, presumably passengers and crew in attendance of his funeral rites.

“Crew, passengers, the ship our mother,” intoned the purser. “I beseech all to draw near and take comfort.” It made vague motions with the book in its thumbed paws.

“In accordance with the rules of the Air Charter first granted us by the counselors of La Segunda Republica Norteamericana in years of lost history, and further in accordance with the timeless rites of the Brotherhood of the Sky, we gather today to commit to a sky burial the mortal remains of able airman third class Vulpen, born of the airshipFortune’s Enemy , and in service on theChild of Crisis since his seventh year. As our customs dictate, the remains of airman Vulpen will be cast out into the air for a sky burial, that his soul might guide him upward to the Gardens of Sweet Night where he may find his eternal reward.”

Elroy moaned, very quietly. He was supposed to cut the bonds with the knife in his hand, but where was the promised flyer? Elroy began to sweat.

The purser continued. “The Captain has taken us up above the clouds so that airman Vulpen’s soul may rise up singing into the glorious light of the day star, bearing his mortal remains to that which awaits him. As I open the hatch doors, I ask everyone to bow their heads in respect for the dead.”

“You’re on,” Mycroft stage-whispered. Through his slitted lids, Elroy watched two of the honor guard crank open the hatch doors while the other two wheezed and tootled their way through some airmen’s paean. A sharp draft of very cold air swirled in as Mycroft added, “Don’t cut too soon, friend.”

Mycroft and Nero ran forward, dragging Elroy with them. The purser’s smiling face flashed by with a wink and a pained squeal from the electronic sackbut, then Elroy launched into the air.

He described a long arc down from the airship, screaming with every gram of his strength as the rumpled clouds below him grew larger and larger.

In the Belly of the Orange Balloon

A crack like the snapping of a mighty tree trunk interrupted Elroy’s prolonged terror. Within the winding sheet, Wiggles nipped at his calves.

Their free fall pulled abruptly short, slamming Elroy into the straps that held his body. The one across his shoulders slipped to his neck, nearly strangling him as it bruised his larynx. Improbably, he still held on to the knife.

His fall turned into a gentle trembling flight above the clouds. Elroy lay face down, pulled against the straps by his own weight. Wiggles struggled against the winding sheet, threatening to break through and resume his own, independent fall.

Elroy found his voice well enough to snap at Wiggles. “Stop moving, sir pug.” To his surprise, he was no longer screaming.

Elroy craned his neck, trying to look over his shoulder. Above him to each side was a large, orange fabric wing with jointed skeletal ribs, like the wings of the flying foxes of his home forest in Pilot Knob. Elroy heard a steady hissing noise distinct from the flapping of the air across the fabric wings.

“Something is happening.”

“What?” demanded Wiggles, who had wrapped all four paws around Elroy’s left leg.

“We are no longer falling, and something is hissing above us, between our new wings.”

“This is the whole point of a sky burial.” Wiggles’ voice was muffled by Elroy’s legs and the winding sheet. “We’re in an orbital drop-up pod.”

“This is the flyer?”

“Yes. It flies to orbit. We’re heading back to the Gardens.”

Elroy watched as a great balloon slowly spun itself into being around them.

They sat on the floor of the balloon, propping the splints across its inner curve for something to lean against. Opaque, about five meters in diameter, the balloon enveloped them in a diffuse orange light leached from the sunny sky outside.

Elroy had used the knife to cut them away from the splints. He then carefully tucked it in the pocket of his uniform jacket. His wrist, strained from their embarkation of the dirigible, caused him excruciating pain. Seeking something else on which to focus, Elroy noticed that the inside of the balloon carried a sharp chemical odor, redolent of freshly milled plastic with a metal undertone.

Wiggles watched Elroy sniff. “Nanotrace is what you smell. You know, that knife won’t harm this balloon.”

“Neither will it harm me, now that I have put it away, sir pug.” Elroy hugged his legs. He was cold, shivering, and he felt very lost.

“You have lost your nerve. You suffer from shock, I think.” Wiggles scooted next to Elroy, curled his small body against Elroy’s side.

“Nerve?” Elroy tried to laugh, succeeding only in producing a dry cough. “I will never have nerve again. The Green Man help me if I ever so much as hop from a log. I want to go home.”

“You are going home. We’re going back to the Gardens. They are the true home of every person, balm for the soul and liniment for the body.”

“A plague on your Gardens.” Elroy stifled a sob. “I nearly fell to both our deaths in New Dallas, then again just now. We are floating through the sky in an orange bubble, I am hungry but my stomach threatens never to take food again, and I have to piss somewhere in this empty ball. I miss my quiet treehouse in Pilot Knob. I have had enough of your quest.”

Wiggles was silent for a while, his tail thumping gently against the fabric of the balloon. Elroy heaved and choked through tearless sobs, burying his face in his knees. After a time he stopped, only to stare at his orange tinted hands.

“You’re going to the sky, Elroy,” Wiggles finally said. “You will walk in the Gardens of Sweet Night and learn the true meaning of wonder.”

“I’dlike to learn the true meaning of a hole to piss in.”

“Just urinate on the fabric of the balloon. It’s very smart. It will carry the urine away and break it down for raw materials.”

“Why does the waist of the balloon sometimes flatten widely, then contract to a ball again?” Elroy had been watching the orange walls for quite some time.

“I believe it makes more, then less of an airfoil.”

“Airfoil . . .” Elroy mused. “That means wing, right?”

“Yes, friend Elroy. A lifting body.” They were again curled together at the bottom of the balloon. The purser, or perhaps the sailors, had thoughtfully included a package of supplies at the back of the stretcher. Elroy ate sparingly of a waxed packet of airship flat bread. He had no great desire to see what the skin of the balloon might do with his shit. The urine processing had been sufficiently alarming.

“The balloon,” the pug continued, “rides air currents and thermals to the highest altitude it can reach in that manner. It is a very clever machine, in its limited way. Once it decides it will profit no further from soaring the middle atmosphere, it will commence a steady low-power jet burn fueled by conversion of atmospheric gases. We will feel that as a slow push downward. At some point, when it has gained sufficient altitude from that procedure, somewhere in the upper atmosphere, the final motor, a flat fission device, will boost us into low orbit. The process can take several days, but it is quite efficient, and therefore cheap. Especially as the balloon is reusable.”

Elroy shook his head, straining to believe. “Orbit. In space around our Earth.”

“Yes. In the high places, where the Gardens of Sweet Night sweep forever about the mother world.”

Wiggles made Elroy don the flimsy silver suit he found in the purser’s package. There was a smaller suit, more of a bag with a head at one end, for Wiggles. The pug explained. “Survival suits. Simple space suits, really, although quite dumb for space equipment. Now that we are boosting toward orbit the balloon cannot protect us from the extreme cold.”

“They cannot possibly bury their dead in the air this way,” said Elroy. “This technology is costly and complex.”

“Senior officers are sent off this way. Crewmen such as the late airman Vulpen are normally sent out the hatch with a small sounding balloon, enough to keep them in the air for a few days.”

“I have never found a dead airman on the ground.”

“How many airmen die each day? How big is the ground? I also would imagine the Brotherhood of the Sky is considerate of where they perform their rites.”

Elroy mused on the Brotherhood of the Sky. “Now,they were free.”

“Free because they travel about?”

“Yes.” He imagined life on an airship, seeing the great cities of the world from high above, immune to wars, to floods and fires, avoiding famines and pestilence.

“It is unlikely Nero or Mycroft have ever set foot on soil. Remember how high the mooring mast was in New Dallas?”

“I assumed it was a safety measure.”

Wiggles shook his head, licking his nose. “The Air Charter was written to cover aerial operations of ground-based organizations. Now, the airships are in perpetual flight. If they were to land, and the Justiciary could catch them on the ground, the crews would forfeit property and freedom. Born in the air, they are citizens of nowhere and tithe no one. They have no rights at all on the ground.”

“So they are free, but not to walk the forests or swim the rivers.”

“Free within their domain, but absolutely restricted to it.”

Elroy thought about the massive bulk of theChild of Crisis . “If the airships never touch the ground, where are they built?”

“In orbit, where different laws and regulations apply. The airships are built in space, and lowered with massive orbital drop-down pods, analogous to orbital drop-up pods like this one.”

“So they pay for their ships by smuggling goods or funds back to space in these orbital drop-up pods.”

Wiggles barked his short, odd laugh. “I appreciate a young man with a keen grasp of economics.”

“They must bury a lot of officers. Some of them many times over.”

“I am given to understand their death rate is uncommonly high at times,” Wiggles said in his most serious voice.

Nighttime in the Light of the Day Star

The heavier thrust finally eased. Elroy felt himself floating off of the floor of the balloon. He and Wiggles both wore the thin silver suits, enclosing even their heads, the hoods having transparent panels across the face. Elroy tried to move, but instead began to spin. His head began to spin with the roiling in his gut.

Wiggles’ voice echoed tinny and thin within Elroy’s silver hood. “Have a care, friend Elroy. We are in microgravity, often called weightlessness. It can be dangerous and distressing to a newcomer.”

Elroy grabbed for a splint, but succeeded only in knocking it into a spin as well. He needed to talk, to focus his mind on something other than the distress of his body. “We have been in this balloon for two or three days, sir pug. I am very tired of the view, no offense. What happens now?”

Wiggles wagged his short tail, visible by the rippling in his silver space suit. “Friends of the purser will come for us soon.”

“Does it ever happen that the Flaming Sword or other agents of the Lord Liasis find these drop-up pods?”

“Yes.”

Elroy had been thinking about Wiggles, about the wages he took and the choices that had been forced upon him. The balloon shuddered, and he found himself pressed against the fabric of the balloon. Elroy realized that the pain in his wrist had subsided quite a bit.

Wiggles kicked off, sailing in his silver suit to be next to Elroy. “We have been taken in tow. Let us hope for friends.”

“How will we know?”

“Friends will stow the balloon gently for future use. Enemies most likely will force their way in.”

“Wiggles,” said Elroy. “When we are released, by friend or foe, I will stand with you, but I will be your servant no longer.”

Wiggles gave Elroy a long, thoughtful look. “Why?”

“I am not made for service. I do not need the funds so badly as to surrender myself. Since we boarded the airship, every choice has been taken from my hands. I will stand beside you and help you get back to the Gardens, not for payment, but for friendship.”

“Thank you, Elroy. I hope you can leave your regrets behind as we continue.”

Pressed against the fabric with Wiggles, Elroy watched for signs of civilized entry.

They came soon enough. The balloon suddenly stopped. Elroy and Wiggles collapsed to the new floor that had been the wall at their back, drawn down again as if they were back on the ground. The orange fabric rapidly lost tension as it settled around them. With a gentle sussing noise it began to tighten in on itself.

One of the fabric panels split open above them, the rangy brindled face of a badger peering in. It wore a canvas work vest. “Ho, new friends. Is there cargo to be recovered?”

Wiggles unsealed his silver hood, motioning Elroy to do the same. As his hood opened, Wiggles spoke. “We are a special shipment, sir badger, courtesy of theChild of Crisis .”

“Always looking out for us up here in the high places, that Renton. A great purser and a better person, but can’t resist sending us little surprises from time to time.” The badger pushed and nudged at the collapsing fabric of the balloon to open an exit for them.

“I am Wiggles, a gardener from the high places, and this is my friend Elroy of Pilot Knob, Earth.”

The badger nodded gravely at Elroy. “Pilot Knob is a place I’ve never heard of, but coming in this pod you’ve visitor’s rights. Be welcome. And you, sir Wiggles. Are you truly just a simple gardener?”

“With respect, I decline the question pending further discussion, sir badger.”

“Which says enough about the special shipment. You may call me Horace. We must go now. By virtue of the method of your arrival, you have been summoned to a Concilium meeting.”

They stepped out of the shrinking balloon into a large bay reminiscent of the rear cargo bay of theChild of Crisis , except everything here was ceramic, plastic or metal. Elroy was fascinated by the profusion of colored pipes, thick cables, and cabinets, with small doors and cunning hatches everywhere.

Horace led them to a hatch two meters tall, obviously intended for human foot traffic. Elroy paused to look at a small glass panel the left of the door. He stared at the tiny lights that crawled across the panel until the great blue arc of the Earth swung into his view.

“Welcome to space,” said Wiggles.

Elroy reached out to touch the panel. It was cold. He felt his sense of wonder unfolding like flowers in the spring. “Why does the man who owns the world live up here high above?”

Wiggles barked a soft laugh. “Where else would you find such a view?”

The badger tugged at Elroy’s silver sleeve, urging him along.

They passed through several short, winding corridors, lined with the same riot of pipes, cables, and access hatches as the cargo bay. To Elroy’s nose the place smelled painfully clean. It had an aseptic, neutral scent impossible to achieve in an organic environment. Horace stopped them outside a double hatch emblazoned with a stylized paw print.

“Here is the Concilium. I counsel respectful attention, and the best kind of honesty in answering their questions.”

The doors hissed open before them. At a gentle push from Horace, Elroy and Wiggles stepped into the room.

Elroy gasped. For a panicked moment, he thought he had stepped into open space. The Concilial chamber was roofed with a transparent dome, eight meters in diameter and open to half the sky. The great blue and white arc of the planet Earth was nowhere to be seen, but the room was flooded with the light of the sun, the daystar. All around his head, Elroy could see stars great and small, many of them in motion, like Yurigrad seen from Earth.

He pulled his gaze from the sky to the Concilium. Variously seated and standing about a low, round table almost three meters across, eight Animals stared at him. There were no human people in the room except for Elroy. He saw four dogs of varying breeds, including another pug, as well as a raccoon, two coyotes and a puma that bulked large along one arc of the room. As with every Animal, all wore a single item of clothing to symbolize their work or rank. Every vest or jacket or waistcoat was as unnaturally clean as the one Wiggles wore.

The Concilium pug leaned forward, drumming its claws on the metal tabletop. “Wiggles.”

“Clement,” Wiggles acknowledged. Elroy glanced down to see Wiggles sag his shoulders, tail drooping.

“A gardener, indeed.” Clement’s voice oozed reproach. “Who had you hoped to deceive?”

“Iam a gardener, Clement.”

“And a great deal more besides. In light of your misdeeds, our Lord Liasis is much inflamed with hope of hearing news of you.”

“You are free Animals here.” Wiggles turned his head, staring from one Conciliator to another. “Liasis is not Lord of places such as this. The Mutual Contract does not hold sway above the soil of Earth.”

The puma rumbled a low growl. Elroy had never seen such a large Animal. It was greater in size and apparent ferocity than even the security wolves. “Clement misspoke. Liasis is not our Lord, but he is yours, sir Wiggles. We are good neighbors, and seek to satisfy his reasonable requirements.”

Wiggles nodded. “In return for reasonable rewards, perhaps, friend puma?”

The puma licked a thumbed paw. “It is the way of things, little dog. Your sun now sets.”

Clement stared up at Elroy. “You, friend Elroy, are free to go. Horace will escort you to the airlock.”

Wiggles waved Elroy back with a small gesture of one thumbed paw. Elroy reached out to touch Wiggles, thinking perhaps to pull him along. The badger grabbed Elroy’s hand, whispering, “Come quickly, man, while they still allow.”

The doors of the Concilial chamber began to hiss shut upon Elroy’s view of Wiggle’s green-clad back. Beyond his friend the pug, Elroy saw the puma rising and turning to come toward Wiggles. Wiggles’ head was bowed, his tail almost slack in its unkinked dejection, as the paw print doors closed.

Horace led Elroy rapidly through a series of cluttered corridors. Elroy stalked behind the badger, angry and confused.

“By the Moment of Inertia, what was that business? I will not allow a friend to be so betrayed!”

“Peace, friend Elroy. The Concilium is constrained.”

“But that—Clement, Clementknew Wiggles. It said a few choice words, and Wiggles just stood there. After all we went through to come this far.”

The badger stopped, turned to face Elroy, staring up at his human height. “Clement and Wiggles are littermates. Each chose a different path in life. Wiggles has deviated from his path, and Clement seeks to right perceived wrongs.”

Littermates? “This is about the apples in the gardens then? A touch of brotherly jealousy?”

“You know nothing of what happens here in the high places, man from Earth, let alone the Gardens of Sweet Night. Wiggles was chancellor to Lord Liasis—a high official of the Justiciary in his own right.”

Chancellor? Elroy leaned back against the corridor wall, pipes pressing into him. His worldview shifted underneath him like the falling gangway above New Dallas. He had no conception of what he should do next.

Horace tapped a claw upward into Elroy’s chest, emphasizing his next words. “The Concilium was threatened, challenged for orbital rights and various alleged violations of law and charter. Wiggles worked secretly to defend Clement’s interests, tried to make things smooth. In doing so, he betrayed the trust of his Lord Liasis. Fear of Liasis was stronger than loyalty to his brother, so Clement reported Wiggles to the Flaming Sword. From this came his fall.”

“For brother to betray brother . . .”

“Youhave an appointment with the airlock. The Concilium has declared you free to go.”

Stepping Into the Sunlit Dark

Horace led Elroy to a man-sized hatch set in a wide spot in a corridor. Another window stood next to it, showing the lights of the stars, both moving and still.

“Here is the airlock you should use, friend Elroy.”

Elroy stared out the window. “What is out there?”

“Space.”

“I mean, where I am I going?”

“Space.”

Elroy sputtered. “That’s ridiculous. I would die.”

The badger pushed a button, causing the hatch to open. “Then it is a lucky thing that you seem to be wearing a space suit. I should seal my hood were I you.”

Elroy considered fighting the badger, rebelling against the order, but to what point? It was the Concilium’s home, they certainly had security to deal with him. He would only harm Horace, who had been kind. With a sigh, Elroy stepped into the small room behind the airlock, pulling the silver hood back over his head.

“This is it? I am just to step out into the sun-drenched dark to die? I have come all this distance to meet my end? This is senseless.”

Horace gave him a long look that seemed almost sympathetic. “There is a deeper game in play here. Trust that you will be alone, but not friendless.”

Elroy watched the hatch slide closed as he sealed his hood. The soft silver suit crinkled around him, expanding and tightening in different places at the same time as a hissing sound began, first as almost a roar before trailing off to nothing. The floor released its hold on him, and Elroy drifted slightly away from it. He felt the same absence of direction they had felt in the drop-up pod.

Weightless, Elroy kicked his way out of the other end of the open airlock, into the depths of orbital space. It seemed expected of him.

I have finally found true freedom, thought Elroy. I am free of everything. Free of weight, free of responsibility, free of action of any kind.

Elroy’s experiences in the orange balloon helped him keep his stomach and his mind anchored in place as he spun gently away from the rambling assemblage of the Concilium’s high place in the sky.

He had never asked what their charter was, whose Council they were. Perhaps they spoke for all the Animals. He wondered what Horace had meant by deeper games. The business in the Concilium chamber had seemed almost rehearsed, a play perhaps. Who was being fooled? Wiggles? Elroy himself?

Earth rolled by his vision, transiting like a drunken giant. He noticed two kinds of stars, the sharp, far ones that didn’t move except as he did, and the blobby, bright ones that moved at many speeds in many directions. The moving group must be the satellite stars, places such as Yurigrad. Perhaps they were other high places, or other adventurers like himself. Elroy felt his pulse echo in his ear. He was very, very far from Pilot Knob. The sunlit face of Earth showed the far side of the planet, so he could not even find his home.

“I suppose I shall die here,” he said aloud as he began again to pray for the harm he done, to the security wolves and the unfortunate Mississippian. He prayed for the family he would never have, and prayed for Wiggles.

Horace’s voice echoed in his ears, from inside the silver hood. “Not if you listen to what I tell you.”

Suit radio, Elroy realized. “You have interrupted me at prayer, sir badger. Are we playing your deeper game now?”

“There is little time,” snapped the badger. “Many things are not right at the moment, and you would do well to listen. I can help you help Wiggles. That great oaf Alcindor the puma even now sets out to return friend pug to his angry master. Can you see our station?”

Elroy waited with a smile for the Conciliatory home to spin into view.

“Yes, I see it now.”

“Watch for a departure. Alcindor is about to set out in a maintenance sled with Wiggles. I have gained control of his autolaunch processes. I will direct the sled to pass very close to you. It will trail a line. You must grasp that line and secure yourself to the sled.”

Elroy’s smile broadened as the station rolled away from his view. The importance of everything diminished like a rock down a well. “Perhaps I shall grasp a shooting star as it trails by, friend Horace. I thank you for your kindness.”

He yawned, a great gape that threatened to enclose his nearly dreaming mind.

“Sparks and fire,” swore the badger. “Your oxygen is running low. Listen, friend Elroy, attend quickly. This is a maintenance sled. There are consumable service points at the base of the sled body. If you warp yourself in along the line, you may be able to steal air from its service reserves. I can intercept his telemetry and feed false data to keep Alcindor from wondering about the wallow from your added mass. Find the sled, steal air, and ride it in pursuit.”

Elroy hummed, then sang. “I shall steal thunder from the storm and fly with the lightning.”

In his ears, Horace sounded sad. “Good-bye, friend man. I have tried. Luck to you.”

Elroy watched the blue Earth spin slowly by, thrilled by the patterns of the clouds.

“Now, Elroy, now!”

He couldn’t remember the voice, couldn’t see anyone, but as Elroy blinked he saw a silver line swinging toward him. Like swinging down the lianas of his jungle home, he thought, although he could see no green. His ears told him that he was falling, so he grabbed the silver liana to stop himself.

Black spots moved before Elroy’s eyes, obscuring his view of the dark beyond. The silver vine yanked at his wrist, renewing an old, forgotten pain, but it restored his sense of upwardness. He looked at his feet, seeing a great house of metal far below, impossibly shaped and larger than any estate had a right to be.

The Concilium.

Elroy remembered a dog named Wiggles, a friend and boon companion. Wiggles was in trouble, needed Elroy’s help.

Elroy climbed the silver vine, noting that it lacked leaves. He wondered why he was surrounded by the night, above, behind and below him. After a while the vine ended in an irregular wall of metal. There seemed to be an inordinate number of small cubes, pipes and metal balls. Elroy grabbed a sturdy pipe, releasing his silver vine.

In front him, Elroy found a row of taps, little serrated cones topped with colored handles. Each colored handle was labeled—‘N2H4’ was red, ‘H2’ was orange. A blue tap handle read ‘H2O.’

He needed air. H2O was water. H2 was hydrogen. His vision began to black out as Elroy found a white tap handle labeled ‘O2.’ Air, or at least oxygen.

He turned the white tap handle. Pale fog jetted out of the tip below the handle, disappearing almost immediately into a crystal spray, which then vanished. Air, apparently, but how was he to breathe it?

Elroy’s stomach felt tight, as dark and uninterested as his mind was becoming, but he fingered the closure of the silver hood. Elroy could imagine the effects of vacuum on his skin and eyes. So first he tried to kiss the tap through his silver hood. To his surprise, the hood slipped onto the tap, pulling his face right up to the maintenance sled.

He turned the tap, feeling the jet of gas swelling his hood and pushing into his mouth with a sensation like drinking from a well-shaken bottle of ale. The black spots in his vision went away and Elroy began to giggle. His ears thrummed.

Elroy felt very alive, very fine, sliding among the tiny stars.

Into the Gardens of Sweet Night

“Wake up, boy.”

The smell was natural, like real air. Elroy knew that he wasn’t in the Concilium’s high place any more. He could smell soil, plants, open water. And close by, the musky scent of large canids.

Elroy opened his eyes. A tall, lanky human, with skin as pale as a jungle puffball, leaned over him. Two security wolves flanked the man, clad in armored vests and carrying matte black energy pistols gleaming with tiny colored status lights. One of the wolves leaned over to stare into Elroy’s face. “Will he survive?”

“There may be some residual effects from the oxygen overdose.” The pale man stood up, favoring Elroy with a sad smile as he turned to leave the room.

“Won’t matter much longer.” Both wolves laughed, full human sounding laughs through their long toothy jaws. “Come on, boy, it’s time for your confession.”

They pulled Elroy to his feet, almost dropping him to the floor as he slid off the exam table. Elroy stumbled with them, a thumbed paw gripping each of his arms far too tightly.

“Where are we?”

“Heligan.” The wolf to his left snickered. “Some of us will live to enjoy it.”

Heligan. One of the Gardens of Sweet Night. Elroy looked around as the wolves yanked him into a corridor. The hallway was carpeted and paneled with dark hardwoods, like the public halls of the monastery of the Little Brothers of High Impact. Nothing at all like the metal burrows of the Concilium.

“Where are the plants?” He stared at the wooden walls with brass hand grabs punctuating them.

The security wolves laughed again, both relaxing their grip as they walked. The left one, the apparent spokesman, flexed the claws of his thumbed paw into Elroy’s arm, puncturing skin even through the silver suit. Elroy could feel blood welling inside his sleeve.

“You’ll be seeing them from inside the soil soon enough. Our Lord Liasis likes the freshest fertilizer.”

The time had come for defense, Elroy realized. The vows he had taken, then broken in Wiggles’ service, would never require him to go meekly to his death.

The knife was still in his jacket pocket, unreachable beneath the silver space suit. Elroy found his center, as he had learned in the Glass Mountains of Oklahoma. His perception of time stretched, each footfall on the carpeted floor like the slowest of drumbeats.

If he accepted a ragged wound in his right arm from the clawed grasp of his captor, he could bring that arm at full swing across the chest of the wolf to his left, while moving his left hand still inside the other wolf’s grip to close both hands in the rib smashing technique the Little Brothers called “Kitten and Ball.” He had learned at the land train that security wolves could be fought like men.

The Little Brothers taught that plan was thought, thought was action, action was deed. Elroy slumped to the left, then spun on that heel into the grip of the lead wolf. He pulled his right arm against the loose set of the right hand wolf’s claws, gaining the painful ragged wound he expected, joining its pain to that of his bruised bones.

Increasing his spin, Elroy brought his right arm across the chest of the wolf, twisting his body so the flat of his left hand could provide counterpressure to the coming blow. With a crunch of collapsing ribs, the surprised wolf faltered in his step, allowing Elroy to break free on that side and spin around.

As the injured wolf fell, his partner swung the black energy pistol up to fire it at Elroy. Elroy finished his spin, slipping into a snap kick that threw the energy pistol upward in the grip of the second wolf. Shoulder first, Elroy slammed into the second wolf’s chest as a violet bolt of light struck the wooden ceiling of the hall. The wood above him charred as Elroy drove the wolf back into the wall. Elroy grabbed the wolf’s armored vest at the left lapel, using it to slam the wolf against the wall.

The vest slipped off the wolf’s torso and down its arm as the Animal spun. Elroy fell away, surprised, clutching the vest so that it was ripped entirely off the security wolf. His momentum carried him to carpeted floor, next to the weakly kicking foot paws of the first wolf. As fire alarms screamed above his head, Elroy tensed for a counterstrike from the second wolf.

It slumped against the wall, whining and whimpering. Elroy saw a braided silver strand dangling down its back, emerging from the fur at a point several vertebrae below the joining of neck and shoulder. He flipped the vest over in his hand.

Torn silver filaments on the inner side of the vest matched the strand. The wolf muttered, dropped to all fours and began to stagger away, gun, vest, and Elroy forgotten.

Elroy shrugged on the vest, which fit him loosely, then grabbed one of the energy pistols. The first wolf rolled to look up at him as Elroy aimed the pistol at its head.

“You will never escape my Lord Liasis.” The security wolf grinned through pained gasps. Elroy could barely hear him over the din of the alarms.

“I don’t plan to.” Unwilling to pull the trigger, to kill a weakened enemy, Elroy reversed the energy pistol. He smashed the butt into the side of the wolf’s head. It slumped onto the carpet, still breathing.

Elroy left the other security wolf’s vest alone. He walked down the hall past the wolf’s creeping, whining fellow, humming a battle hymn from the Little Brothers in counterpoint to the whooping fire alarms.

He wondered how to find Wiggles.

Elroy ducked through several hatches until he found a maintenance closet in which to rest. He had begun to tremble in the aftermath of the fight. The whooping fire alarms were an increasingly distant wail, and Elroy had the cold sweats.

He laid his energy pistol against one of the lockers in the closet, rested his hands on his knees and took a deep, shuddering breath. He had trained with the Little Brothers to acquire focus and strength, not to render Animals into beasts.

“Detachments moving within fifty meters,” whispered a flat voice from his collar.

Elroy jumped, slamming his head against a locker. He twisted around, seeing the bunched silver hood of his suit overlaying the paneled black of the armor vest.

“Do you wish to evade?” It was the voice inside his hood again.

“Horace? Wiggles?”

“Status unknown.” There was a brief crackling noise. “Tactical interface feed is being conducted through your suit communications.”

Elroy felt a sharp prickle of fear. “Are you the vest?”

“Cognitive prosthetic, canid, combat, model one seventeenbis .”

Robust technology, thought Elroy. It made sense. Every Animal he had ever seen wore a single item of clothing on their upper body. Elroy had always thought it was to emphasize their differentiation from beasts. With the size of most of their brain cases, Animals must store portions of their consciousness in these things.

“I want to find Liasis,” he said. Where Liasis was, he would find Wiggles as well.

The vest whispered, “Exit this locker, proceed twelve meters to your left and pause. I will direct you from there.”

Elroy grabbed his pistol, stepped out of the hatch and proceeded twelve meters to his left.

The vest guided him down corridors and through access tubes that climbed up and down. As the vest tracked the location of wandering security wolves, it told Elroy to make sudden pauses, and sometimes changed instructions even as he moved.

Elroy thought to ask it if he was visible to other vests.

“This unit has a tracer function.”

How strange that the other security wolves had not yet used it to track him. Elroy was beginning to feel very set up. “Can you turn it off?”

“Disable tracer is a priority four order. Do you have priority four authority?”

Wiggles. Wiggles was supposedly Chancellor, or had been. “Chancellor Wiggles ordered me to help him.”

“Tracer disabled.”

Wiggles, it seemed, still had a name to conjure with.

“What else can you do?”

“Level one help is available. Options are: armor characteristics, biometrics, canid interface, cognitive extension, external communications, maintenance, memory and storage, miscellaneous settings, product specifications, shielding, smart matter, stealth, tactical support, weapons interfacing, user preferences. Please specify your desired path.”

Elroy sighed. It was far more complex a technology menu than he had time to deal with. “Never mind. Just keep telling me how to find Liasis.”

“Wait thirty-five seconds, then open the hatch to your right and proceed downward two levels.”

Elroy counted to thirty-five, then opened the hatch.

The vest whispered through his open hood. “Once you exit this service tunnel, proceed left thirty meters and you will be before Liasis’ audience chamber. Enter the chamber and you will be free to proceed to target.”

Elroy was moved by an impulse he couldn’t define, rooted in a vague belief that anything that spoke must have desires of its own. “I don’t need to take you in there.”

“Where else would I go?”

“I could take you off, leave you here. You would be safe, free.” Even as he said it, Elroy felt foolish.

The vest made the static noise again, several times in a row. Elroy wondered if that was its thinking noise or its laughing noise.

“I am a cognitive combat prosthetic. I am an item of clothing for an Animal. What does freedom mean to me?”

“You know enough to ask that question,” Elroy pointed out.

More static, then silence. Elroy waited, listening for noises behind the door. He heard none.

“There are four security wolves in front of Liasis’ chamber,” the vest finally whispered. “If you are prepared, you can overwhelm them with your energy pistol.”

“And you?”

“I will come. If you win free again, I will still be with you.”

“I’m not going to make it, am I?”

“In order to avoid panic dysfunction I have disabled my risk assessment functions. However, it is obvious that you should commence operations immediately.”

More wolves, wolves he would certainly have to kill. Elroy already had too much blood on his hands for the sake of Wiggles. Having come this far, he could see little point in turning back. Elroy said a brief prayer for those about to die. He checked the charge on the energy pistol, placed his finger on the firing stud, and palmed open the service hatch.

Welcome Into the Presence of the Lord

Elroy stood before a great pair of double doors. They were carved each from a single brass-bound slab of teak four meters tall, decorated with complex motifs of twining leaves. The grand hall where he stood was littered with the burnt corpses of four security wolves. Part of the carpet was on fire. He mildly regretted the flash burns on the glorious doors. Three different kinds of alarms wailed in the distance.

Elroy raised a spacesuit-clad foot and kicked open the right hand door.

Like the chamber of the Animal’s Concilium, the audience chamber of Lord Liasis was transparently roofed. Elroy stepped forward then stopped, his eyes drawn up by a green glare.

There were no stars, no depths of space above him. Instead, a network of greenery rose, curving out in two directions to meet in the sky high over his head, extending unguessably far in its long axis. It had to be at least two or three kilometers to the far side of the green sky. Adrenaline rush of combat forgotten, Elroy stared into the infinite life of plants.

He was accustomed to the riot of the green jungles of Texas, lianas and giant ferns and glossy dark-leaved orchids in the lower reaches, punctuating the echoing silences of the deep forest, while high above in the middle layers and the canopy a violent profusion of epiphytic and parasitic plants hosted butterflies, monkeys, insects, birds and animals of all descriptions. His home tree in Pilot Knob stood amid a roaring chaos of viridian life, changeless in its endless cycle of destruction and renewal.

The Heligan Garden was a different order of nature altogether. Elroy’s energy pistol dropped to point toward the carpet as he stared up at roses, ivy, yew, boxwood and a thousand plants for which he had no name. In all their shades and color they grew in glorious array, relieved by paths and walls and smooth rolled meadows, interspersed with pleasaunces and statuary and cunning ponds whose banks had clearly been laid stone by stone at the direction of generations of master craftsmen.

An overpowering scent of green, tame and orderly but powerful, swept through him. Elroy realized Lord Liasis’ audience chamber roof was not transparent. It was absent. The room was open to kilometers of the most cultivated garden in existence.

“Just one of my seven gardens. Admittedly, perhaps the finest.”

Elroy picked up his pistol, turned to look at Lord Liasis. The High Commissioner of the Cis-Lunar Justiciary and Lord of Implementation for the Atlantic Maritime Territories was a thin man, slightly shorter than Elroy’s two meters, with flowing white hair. His eyes were a piercing shade of green, and his smile had a natural bonhomie. Clad in a blue morning suit, he carried a glass of wine in his right hand.

Wiggles stood next to Lord Liasis, looking down at his feet and smoothing his flowered green waistcoat with his thumbed paws. Elroy thought Wiggles’ tail wagged.

Behind them the audience chamber stretched for several hundred meters, unroofed in glorious green and carpeted in burgundy and gold. There was no furniture save a wooden throne against the distant wall.

“What of the apples of your Lord?” Elroy asked in a soft voice.

“My gardens have many trees.” Liasis’ smile stretched to a toothsome grin. “Some bear strange fruit.”

“And your tale, sir pug?”

Wiggles looked up at Elroy. “True, as far as it went. Not the entire truth.”

Elroy stroked the trigger of the energy pistol. The vest whispered risks and priorities in his ear, but he ignored it. “What would be the entire truth?”

Liasis’ smile dropped away as he spoke, his voice mild and his tone almost bemused. “One legacy of the La Grangian restoration is a strong prohibition against hereditary power. The Secretaries-General taught them that lesson. When a man ascends to a position of great responsibilities, there is a certain, ah, physical price that must be paid.”

“Some do cheat,” Wiggles added, “but it is frowned upon. There are no children, normally.”

“I have need of a young man, a human, of compassion and strength, wit and ruthlessness. I have strong preference that he not spring from the Great Families of the high places, so as to be free of our politics and alliances. Lord Deimos offered a younger nephew, but the eventual price would have been far too high.”

“My home is in a tree in the jungles of Texas, with the family I hope to establish. I have no wish to meddle in the business of the Lords of the High Places.”

Liasis gestured with the wine glass. “Would you care for some? From Scandinavia’s finest vineyards. Orbital wine is never quite the same, you know.”

“Elroy.” Wiggles’ voice was earnest. “Let me be plain. I was sent to travel among the people of Earth, to find and test a worthy successor from outside the circles of the ruling classes. I required a young man who would bring no untoward ambition with him into the Gardens of Sweet Night. You are the one success I encountered—capable, thoughtful, ethical and strong. At my recommendation, and on the strength of your journey here, Lord Liasis now seeks you for his heir, to train and mentor that you might someday become a Lord of space.”

Elroy shook his head. “What a strange way to choose an heir. Had you asked me to come here and be a gardener, I might have rejoiced.” He laid the pistol down on the carpet, careful to point it away from the Lord Liasis and his chancellor.

“Had you brought me here and shown me the curve of the blue Earth and your wondrous Gardens, offering me dominion in exchange for loyalty freely given, I might have rejoiced. Instead, at your behest, I have beaten, wounded and killed, staining my soul with blood. I made an Animal into a beast. Four wolves lie dead outside your very door, other men and Animals maimed and wounded along the way. My vows are broken, lives have been ruined or taken, all for your little game.” Elroy dropped the vest to the carpet.

Lord Liasis’ voice was gentle. “No. Not for a game. For dominion over the kingdoms of the Earth and the high places. A small price to pay for proof of your fitness to succeed me. We test those outside the pale because it is the only true way to find new blood.”

Elroy began to strip off the silver space suit. “Lord, in taking service with Chancellor Wiggles, I sold my freedom and made choices to do things I regret. Acting on my own I would not so much as kill a man to take an apple from him. Why would I kill for something as foolish as dominion over the kingdoms of the Earth? All I ever wanted was to start a family—the very thing you would deny me even with all your proffered riches.”

Elroy dropped the space suit, then tossed the purser’s coat onto the carpet, followed by Nero’s knife and his carefully hoarded pay. He turned to walk away, stopping before the door to look back at Liasis and Wiggles once more.

“The world, Elroy,” whispered Liasis, spreading an open hand. “I can give you the world, and these gardens in the sky. What greater gift is there?”

“Lord Liasis, dominion is a hard sentence to serve. My greater gift to myself is that I choose to remain free. I leave your service as I entered it.”

“Many wolves wait outside,” said Wiggles. The pug’s tone was both hopeful and sad.

“I know.” Elroy looked up one last time at the Heligan Garden, breathed in the peaceful scent of green, then opened the door to walk out free and unafraid.

THE CONCRETE JUNGLE

Charles Stross

The death rattle of a mortally wounded telephone is a horrible thing to hear at four o’clock on a Tuesday morning. It’s even worse when you’re sleeping the sleep that follows a pitcher of iced margueritas in the basement of the Dog’s Bollocks, with a chaser of nachos and a tequila slammer or three for dessert. I come to, sitting upright, bare-ass naked in the middle of the wooden floor, clutching the receiver with one hand and my head with the other—purely to prevent it from exploding, you understand—and moaning quietly. “Who is it?” I croak into the microphone.

“Bob, get your ass down to the office right away. This line isn’t secure.” I recognize that voice: I have nightmares about it. That’s because I work for its owner.

“Whoa, I was asleep, boss. Can’t it”—I gulp and look at the alarm clock—“wait until morning?”

“No. I’m calling a code blue.”

“Jesus.” The band of demons stomping around my skull strike up an encore with drums. “Okay, boss. Ready to leave in ten minutes. Can I bill a taxi fare?”

“No, it can’t wait. I’ll have a car pick you up.” He cuts the call, and that is when I start to get frightened because even Angleton, who occupies a lair deep in the bowels of the Laundry’s Arcana Analysis Section—but does something far scarier than that anodyne title might suggest—is liable to think twice before authorising a car to pull in an employee at zero-dark o’clock.

I manage to pull on a sweater and jeans, tie my shoelaces, and get my ass downstairs just before the blue and red strobes light up the window above the front door. On the way out I grab my emergency bag—an overnighter full of stuff that Andy suggested I should keep ready “just in case”—and slam and lock the door and turn around in time to find the cop waiting for me. “Are you Bob Howard?”

“Yeah, that’s me.” I show him my card.

“If you’ll come with me, sir.”

Lucky me: I get to wake up on my way in to work four hours early, in the front passenger seat of a police car with strobes flashing and the driver doing his best to scare me into catatonia. Lucky London: the streets are nearly empty at this time of night, so we zip around the feral taxis and somnolent cleaning trucks without pause. A journey that would normally take an hour and a half takes fifteen minutes. (Of course, it comes at a price: Accounting exists in a state of perpetual warfare with the rest of the civil service over internal billing, and the Metropolitan Police charge for their services as a taxi firm at a level that would make you think they provided limousines with wet bars. But Angleton has declared a code blue, so . . . )

The dingy-looking warehouse in a side street, adjoining a closed former primary school, doesn’t look too promising—but the door opens before I can raise a hand to knock on it. The grinning sallow face of Fred from Accounting looms out of the darkness in front of me and I recoil before I realise that it’s all right—Fred’s been dead for more than a year, which is why he’s on the night shift. This isn’t going to degenerate into plaintive requests for me to fix his spreadsheet. “Fred, I’m here to see Angleton,” I say very clearly, then I whisper a special password to stop him from eating me. Fred retreats back to his security cubbyhole or coffin or whatever it is you call it, and I cross the threshold of the Laundry. It’s dark—to save light bulbs, and damn the health and safety regs—but some kind soul has left a mouldering cardboard box of hand torches on the front desk. I pull the door shut behind me, pick up a torch, and head for Angleton’s office.

As I get to the top of the stairs I see that the lights are on in the corridor we call Mahogany Row. If the boss is running a crisis team then that’s where I’ll find him. So I divert into executive territory until I see a door with a red light glowing above it. There’s a note taped to the door handle: BOB HOWARD ACCESS PERMITTED. So I “access permitted” and walk right in.

As soon as the door opens Angleton looks up from the map spread across the boardroom table. The room smells of stale coffee, cheap cigarettes, and fear. “You’re late,” he says sharply.

“Late,” I echo, dumping my emergency bag under the fire extinguisher and leaning on the door. “ ‘Lo, Andy, Boris. Boss, I don’t think the cop was taking his time. Any faster and he’d be billing you for brown stain removal from the upholstery.” I yawn. “What’s the picture?”

“Milton Keynes,” says Andy.

“Are sending you there to investigate,” explains Boris.

“With extreme prejudice,” Angleton one-ups them.

“Milton Keynes?”

It must be something in my expression; Andy turns away hastily and pours me a cup of Laundry coffee while Boris pretends it’s none of his business. Angleton just looks as if he’s bitten something unpleasant, which is par for the course.

“We have a problem,” Angleton explains, gesturing at the map. “There are too many concrete cows.”

“Concrete cows.” I pull out a chair and flop down into it heavily, then rub my eyes. “This isn’t a dream is it, by any chance? No? Shit.”

Boris glowers at me: “Not a joke.” He rolls his eyes toward Angleton. “Boss?”

“It’s no joke, Bob,” says Angleton. His normally skeletal features are even more drawn than usual, and there are dark hollows under his eyes. He looks as if he’s been up all night. Angleton glances at Andy: “Has he been keeping his weapons certification up-to-date?”

“I practice three times a week,” I butt in, before Andy can get started on the intimate details of my personal file. “Why?”

“Go down to the armoury right now, with Andy. Andy, self-defense kit for one, sign it out for him. Bob, don’t shoot unless it’s you or them.” Angleton shoves a stack of papers and a pen across the table at me. “Sign the top and pass it back—you now have GAME ANDES REDSHIFT clearance. The files below are part of GAR—you’re to keep them on your person at all times until you get back here, then check them in via Morag’s office; you’ll answer to the auditors if they go missing or get copied.”

“Huh?”

I obviously still look confused because Angleton cracks an expression so frightening that it must be a smile and adds, “Shut your mouth, you’re drooling on your collar. Now, go with Andy, check out your hot kit, let Andy set you up with a chopper, and read those papers. When you get to Milton Keynes, do what comes naturally. If you don’t find anything, come back and tell me and we’ll take things from there.”

“But what am I looking for?” I gulp down half my coffee in one go; it tastes of ashes, stale cigarette ends, and tinned instant left over from the Retreat from Moscow. “Dammit, what do you expect me to find?”

“I don’t expect anything,” says Angleton. “Just go.”

“Come on,” says Andy, opening the door, “you can leave the papers here for now.”

I follow him into the corridor, along to the darkened stairwell at the end, and down four flights of stairs into the basement. “Just what the fuck is this?” I demand, as Andy produces a key and unlocks the steel-barred gate in front of the security tunnel.

“It’s GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, kid,” he says over his shoulder. I follow him into the security zone and the gate clanks shut behind me. Another key, another steel door—this time the outer vestibule of the armoury. “Listen, don’t go too hard on Angleton, he knows what he’s doing. If you go in with preconceptions about what you’ll find and it turns out to be GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, you’ll probably get yourself killed. But I reckon there’s only about a 10 percent chance it’s the real thing—more likely it’s a drunken student prank.”

He uses another key, and a secret word that my ears refuse to hear, to open the inner armoury door. I follow Andy inside. One wall is racked with guns, another is walled with ammunition lockers, and the opposite wall is racked with more esoteric items. It’s this that he turns to.

“A prank,” I echo, and yawn, against my better judgement. “Jesus, it’s half past four in the morning and you got me out of bed because of a student prank?”

“Listen.” Andy stops and glares at me, irritated. “Remember how you came aboard? That was me getting out of bed at four in the morning because of a student prank.”

“Oh,” is all I can say to him. Sorry springs to mind, but is probably inadequate; as they later pointed out to me, applied computational demonology and built-up areas don’t mix very well. I thought I was just generating weird new fractals; they knew I was dangerously close to landscaping Wolverhampton with alien nightmares. “What kind of students?” I ask.

“Architecture or alchemy. Nuclear physics for an outside straight.” Another word of command and Andy opens the sliding glass case in front of some gruesome relics that positively throb with power. “Come on. Which of these would you like?”

“I think I’ll take this one, thanks.” I reach in and carefully pick up a silver locket on a chain; there’s a yellow-and-black thaumaturgy hazard trefoil on a label dangling from it, and NO PULL ribbons attached to the clasp.

“Good choice.” Andy watches me in silence as I add a Hand of Glory to my collection, and then a second, protective amulet. “That all?” he asks.

“That’s all,” I say, and he nods and shuts the cupboard, then renews the seal on it.

“Sure?” he asks.

I look at him. Andy is a slightly built, forty-something guy; thin, wispy hair, tweed sports jacket with leather patches at the elbows, and a perpetually worried expression. Looking at him you’d think he was an Open University lecturer, not a managerial-level spook from the Laundry’s active service division. But that goes for all of them, doesn’t it? Angleton looks more like a Texan oil-company executive with tuberculosis than the legendary and terrifying head of the Counter-Possession Unit. And me, I look like a refugee from CodeCon or a dot-com startup’s engineering department. Which just goes to show that appearances and a euro will get you a cup of coffee. “What does this code blue look like to you?” I ask.

He sighs tiredly, then yawns. “Damn, it’s infectious,” he mutters. “Listen, if I tell you what it looks like to me, Angleton will have my head for a doorknob. Let’s just say, read those files on the way over, okay? Keep your eyes open, count the concrete cows, then come back safe.”

“Count the cows. Come back safe. Check.” I sign the clipboard, pick up my arsenal, and he opens the armoury door. “How am I getting there?”

Andy cracks a lopsided grin. “By police helicopter. This is a code blue, remember?”

I go up to the committee room, collect the papers, and then it’s down to the front door, where the same police patrol car is waiting for me. More brown—pants motoring—this time the traffic is a little thicker, dawn is only an hour and a half away—and we end up in the northeast suburbs, following the roads to Lippitts Hill where the Police ASU keep their choppers. There’s no messing around with check in and departure lounges; we drive round to a gate at one side of the complex, show our warrant cards, and my chauffeur takes me right out onto the heliport and parks next to the ready room, then hands me over to the flight crew before I realise what’s happening.

“You’re Bob Howard?” asks the copilot. “Up here, hop in.” He helps me into the back seat of the Twin Squirrel, sorts me out with the seat belt, then hands me a bulky headset and plugs it in. “We’ll be there in half an hour,” he says. “You just relax, try to get some sleep.” He grins sardonically then shuts the door on me and climbs in up front.

Funny. I’ve never been in a helicopter before. It’s not quite as loud as I’d expected, especially with the headset on, but as I’ve been led to expect something like being rolled down a hill in an oil drum while maniacs whack on the sides with baseball bats, that isn’t saying much. Get some sleep indeed; instead I bury my nose in the so-secret reports on GAME ANDES REDSHIFT and try not to upchuck as the predawn London landscape corkscrews around outside the huge glass windscreen and then starts to unroll beneath us.

REPORT 1: Sunday September 4th, 1892

CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET, Imperial War Ministry, September 11th, 1914

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES, Ministry of War, July 2nd, 1940

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988

My dearest Nellie,

In the week since I last wrote to you, I have to confess that I have become a different man. Experiences such as the ordeal I have just undergone must surely come but once in a lifetime; for if more often, how might man survive them? I have gazed upon the gorgon and lived to tell the tale, for which I am profoundly grateful (and I hasten to explain myself before you worry for my safety), although only the guiding hand of some angel of grace can account for my being in a position to put ink to paper with these words.

I was at dinner alone with the Mehtar last Tuesday evening—Mr. Robertson being laid up, and Lieutenant Bruce off to Gilgut to procure supplies for his secret expedition to Lhasa—when we were interrupted most rudely at our repast. “Holiness!” The runner, quite breathless with fear, threw himself upon his knees in front of us. “Your brother . . .! Please hasten, I implore you!”

His excellency Nizam ul Mulk looked at me with that wicked expression of his: he bears little affection for his brutish hulk of a brother, and with good reason. Where the Mehtar is a man of refined, albeit questionable sensibilities, his brother is an uneducated coarse hill-man, one step removed from banditry. Chittral can very well do without his kind. “What has happened to my beloved brother?” asked ul Mulk.

At this point the runner lapsed into a gabble that I could barely understand. With patience the Mehtar drew him out—then frowned. Turning to me, he said, “We have a—I know not the word for it in English, excuse please. It is a monster of the caves and passes who preys upon my people. My brother has gone to hunt it, but it appears to have got the better of him.”

“A mountain lion?” I said, misunderstanding.

“No.” He looked at me oddly. “May I enquire of you, Captain, whether Her Majesty’s government tolerates monsters within her empire?”

“Of course not!”

“Then you will not object to joining me in the hunt?”

I could feel a trap closing on me, but could not for the life of me see what it might be. “Certainly,” I said. “By Jove, old chap, we’ll have this monster’s head mounted on your trophy room wall before the week is out!”

“I think not,” Nizam said coolly. “We burn such things here, to drive out the evil spirit that gave rise to them. Bring you your mirror, tomorrow?”

“My—” Then I realised what he was talking about, and what deadly jeopardy I had placed my life in, for the honour of Her Majesty’s government in Chittral: he was talking about a Medusa. And although it quite unmans me to confess it, I was afraid.

The next day, in my cramped, windowless hut, I rose with the dawn and dressed for the hunt. I armed myself, then told Sergeant Singh to ready a squad of troopers for the hunt.

“What is the quarry, sahib?” he asked.

“The beast that no man sees,” I said, and the normally imperturbable trooper flinched.

“The men won’t like that, sir,” he said.

“They’ll like it even less if I hear any words from them,” I said. You have to be firm with colonial troops: they have only as much backbone as their commanding officer.

“I’ll tell them that, sahib,” he said and, saluting, went to ready our forces.

The Mehtar’s men gathered outside; an unruly bunch of hillmen, armed as one might expect with a mix of flintlocks and bows. They were spirited, like children, excitable and bickering; hardly a match for the order of my troopers and I. We showed them how it was done! Together with the Mehtar at our head, kestrel on his wrist, we rode out into the cold bright dawn and the steep-sided mountain valley.

We rode for the entire morning and most of the afternoon, climbing up the sides of a steep pass and then between two towering peaks clad in gleaming white snow. The mood of the party was uncommonly quiet, a sense of apprehensive fortitude settling over the normally ebullient Chittrali warriors. We came at last to a meanspirited hamlet of tumbledown shacks, where a handful of scrawny goats grazed the scrubby bushes; the hetman of the village came to meet us, and with quavering voice directed us to our destination.

“It lies thuswise,” remarked my translator, adding: “The old fool, he say it is a ghost-bedevilled valley, by God! He say his son go in there two, three days ago, not come out. Then the Mehtar—blessed be he—his brother follow with his soldiers. And that two days ago.”

“Hah. Well,” I said, “tell him the great white empress sent me here with these fine troops he sees, and the Mehtar himself and his nobles, and we aren’t feeding any monster!”

The translator jabbered at the hetman for a while, and he looked stricken. Then Nizam beckoned me over. “Easy, old fellow,” he said.

“As you say, your excellency.”

He rode forward, beckoning me alongside. I felt the need to explain myself further: “I do not believe one gorgon will do for us. In fact, I do believe we will do for it!”

“It is not that which concerns me,” said the ruler of the small mountain kingdom. “But go easy on the hetman. The monster was his wife.”

We rode the rest of the way in reflective silence, to the valley where the monster had built her retreat, the only noises the sighing of wind, the thudding of hooves, and the jingling of our kits. “There is a cave halfway up the wall of the valley, here,” said the messenger who had summoned us. “She lives there, coming out at times to drink and forage for food. The villagers left her meals at first, but in her madness she slew one of them, and then they stopped.”

Such tragic neglect is unknown in England, where the poor victims of this most hideous ailment are confined in mazed bedlams upon their diagnosis, blindfolded lest they kill those who nurse them. But what more can one expect of the half-civilized children of the valley kingdoms, here on the top of the world?

The execution—for want of a better word—proceeded about as well as such an event can, which is to say that it was harrowing and not by any means enjoyable in the way that hunting game can be. At the entrance to the small canyon where the woman had made her lair, we paused. I detailed Sergeant Singh to ready a squad of rifles; their guns loaded, they took up positions in the rocks, ready to beat back the monster should she try to rush us.

Having thus prepared our position, I dismounted and, joining the Mehtar, steeled myself to enter the valley of death.

I am sure you have read lurid tales of the appalling scenes in which gorgons are found; charnel houses strewn with calcined bodies, bones protruding in attitudes of agony from the walls as the madmen and madwomen who slew them gibber and howl among their victims. These tales are, I am thankful to say, constructed out of whole cloth by the fevered imaginations of the degenerate scribblers who write for the penny dreadfuls. What we found was both less—and much worse—than that.

We found a rubble-strewn valley; in one side of it a cave, barely more than a cleft in the rock face, with a tumbledown awning stretched across its entrance. An old woman sat under the awning, eyes closed, humming to herself in an odd singsong. The remains of a fire lay in front of her, logs burned down to white-caked ashes; she seemed to be crying, tears trickling down her sunken, wrinkled cheeks.

The Mehtar gestured me to silence, then, in what I only later recognized as a supremely brave gesture, strode up to the fire. “Good evening to you, my aunt, and it would please me that you keep your eyes closed, lest my guards be forced to slay you of an instant,” he said.

The woman kept up her low, keening croon-like a wail of grief from one who has cried until her throat is raw and will make no more noise. But her eyes remained obediently shut. The Mehtar crouched down in front of her.

“Do you know who I am?” he asked gently.

The crooning stopped. “You are the royal one,” she said, her voice a cracked whisper. “They told me you would come.”

“Indeed I have,” he said, a compassionate tone in his voice. With one hand he waved me closer. “It is very sad, what you have become.”

“It hurts.” She wailed quietly, startling the soldiers so that one of them half-rose to his feet. I signaled him back down urgently as I approached behind her. “I wanted to see my son one more time . . .”

“It is all right, aunt,” he said quietly. “You’ll see him soon enough.” He held out a hand to me; I held out the leather bag and he removed the mirror. “Be at peace, aunt. An end to pain is in sight.” He held the mirror at arms length in front of his face, above the fire before her: “Open your eyes when you are ready for it.”

She sobbed once, then opened her eyes.

I didn’t know what to expect, dear Nellie, but it was not this: somebody’s aged mother, crawling away from her home to die with a stabbing pain in her head, surrounded by misery and loneliness. As it is, her monarch spared her the final pain, for as soon as she looked into the mirror she changed. The story that the gorgon kills those who see her by virtue of her ugliness is untrue; she was merely an old woman—the evil was something in her gaze, something to do with the act of perception.

As soon as her eyes opened—they were bright blue, for a moment—she changed. Her skin puffed up and her hair went to dust, as if in a terrible heat. My skin prickled; it was as if I had placed my face in the open door of a furnace. Can you imagine what it would be like if a body were to be heated in an instant to the temperature of a blast furnace? For that is what it was like. I will not describe this horror in any detail, for it is not fit material for discussion. When the wave of heat cleared, her body toppled forward atop the fire—and rolled apart, yet more calcined logs amidst the embers.

The Mehtar stood, and mopped his brow. “Summon your men, Francis,” he said, “they must build a cairn here.”

“A cairn?” I echoed blankly.

“For my brother.” He gestured impatiently at the fire into which the unfortunate woman had tumbled. “Who else do you think this could have been?”

A cairn was built, and we camped overnight in the village. I must confess that both the Mehtar and I have been awfully sick since then, with an abnormal rapidity that came on since the confrontation. Our men carried us back home, and that is where you find me now, lying abed as I write this account of one of the most horrible incidents I have ever witnessed on the frontier.

I remain your obedient

And loving servant,

Capt. Francis Younghusband

As I finish reading the typescript of Captain Younghusband’s report, my headset buzzes nastily and crackles. “Coming up on Milton Keynes in a couple minutes, Mr. Howard. Any idea where you want to be put down? If you don’t have anywhere specific in mind we’ll ask for a slot at the police pad.”

Somewhere specific . . .? I shove the unaccountably top-secret papers down into one side of my bag and rummage around for one of the gadgets I took from the armoury. “The concrete cows,” I say. “I need to take a look at them as soon as possible. They’re in Bancroft Park, according to this map. Just off Monk’s Way, follow the A422 in until it turns into the H3 near the city centre. Any chance we can fly over them?”

“Hold on a moment.”

The helicopter banks alarmingly and the landscape tilts around us. We’re shooting over a dark landscape, trees and neat, orderly fields, and the occasional clump of suburban paradise whisking past beneath us—then we’re over a dual carriageway, almost empty at this time of night, and we bank again and turn to follow it. From an altitude of about a thousand feet it looks like an incredibly detailed toy, right down to the finger-sized trucks crawling along it.

“Right, that’s it,” says the copilot. “Anything else we can do for you?”

“Yeah,” I say. “You’ve got infrared gear, haven’t you? I’m looking for an extra cow. A hot one. I mean, hot like it’s been cooked, not hot as in body temperature.”

“Gotcha, we’re looking for a barbecue.” He leans sideways and fiddles with the controls below a fun-looking monitor. “Here. Ever used one of these before?”

“What is it, FLIR?”

“Got it in one. That joystick’s the pan, this knob is zoom, you use this one to control the gain, it’s on a stabilised platform; give us a yell if you see anything. Clear?”

“I think so.” The joystick works as promised and I zoom in on a trail of ghostly hot spots, pan behind them to pick up the brilliant glare of a predawn jogger, lit up like a light bulb—the dots are fading footprints on the cold ground. “Yeah.” We’re making about forty miles per hour along the road, sneaking in like a thief in the night, and I zoom out to take in as much of the side view as possible. After a minute or so I see the park ahead, off the side of a roundabout. “Eyes up, front: Can you hover over that roundabout?”

“Sure. Hold on.” The engine note changes and my stomach lurches, but the FLIR pod stays locked on target. I can see the cows now, grey shapes against the cold ground—a herd of concrete animals created in 1978 by a visiting artist. There should be eight of them, life-sized Friesians peacefully grazing in a field attached to the park. But something’s wrong, and it’s not hard to see what.

“Barbecue at six o’clock low,” says the copilot. “You want to go down and bring us back a take-away, or what?”

“Stay up,” I say edgily, slewing the camera pod around. “I want to make sure it’s safe first . . .”

REPORT 2: Wednesday March 4th, 1914

CLASSIFIED MOST SECRET, Imperial War Ministry, September 11th, 1914

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES, Ministry of War, July 2nd, 1940

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988

Dear Albert,

Today we performed Young’s double-slit experiment upon Subject C, our medusa. The results are unequivocal; the Medusa effect is both a particle and a wave. If de Broglie is right . . .

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Ernest has been pushing for results with characteristic vim and vigor and Mathiesson, our analytical chemist, has been driven to his wits’ end by the New Zealander’s questions. He nearly came to blows with Dr. Jamieson who insisted that the welfare of his patient—as he calls Subject C—comes before any question of getting to the bottom of this infuriating and perplexing anomaly.

Subject C is an unmarried woman, aged 27, of medium height with brown hair and blue eyes. Until four months ago, she was healthy and engaged as household maid to an eminent KC whose name you would probably recognize. Four months ago she underwent a series of seizures; her employers being generous, she was taken to the Royal Free Infirmary where she described having a series of blinding headaches going back eighteen months or so. Dr. Willard examined her using one of the latest Roentgen machines, and determined that she appeared to have the makings of a tumour upon her brain. Naturally this placed her under Notification, subject to the Monster Control Act (1864); she was taken to the isolation ward at St. Bartholomew’s in London where, three weeks, six migraines, and two seizures later, she experienced her first Grand Morte fit. Upon receiving confirmation that she was suffering from acute gorgonism, Dr. Rutherford asked me to proceed as agreed upon; and so I arranged for the Home Office to be contacted by way of the Dean.

While Mr. McKenna was at first unenthusiastic about the prospect of a gorgon running about the streets of Manchester, our reassurances ultimately proved acceptable and he directed that Subject C be released into our custody on her own cognizance. She was in a state of entirely understandable distress when she arrived, but once the situation was explained she agreed to cooperate fully in return for a settlement which will be made upon her next of kin. As she is young and healthy, she may survive for several months, if not a year, in her current condition: this offers an unparallelled research opportunity. We are currently keeping her in the old Leprosarium, the windows of which have been bricked up. A security labyrinth has been installed, the garden wall raised by five feet so that she can take in the air without endangering passers-by, and we have arranged a set of signals whereby she can don occlusive blindfolds before receiving visitors. Experiments upon patients with acute gorgonism always carry an element of danger, but in this case I believe our precautions will suffice until her final deterioration begins.

Lest you ask why we don’t employ a common basilisk or cockatrice instead, I hasten to explain that we do; the pathology is identical in whichever species, but a human source is far more amenable to control than any wild animal. Using Subject C we can perform repeatable experiments at will, and obtain verbal confirmation that she has performed our requests. I hardly need to remind you that the historical use of gorgonism, for example by Danton’s Committee for Public Safety during the French revolution, was hardly conducted as a scientific study of the phenomenon. This time, we will make progress!

Once Subject C was comfortable, Dr. Rutherford arranged a series of seminars. The New Zealander is of the opinion that the effect is probably mediated by some electromagnetic phenomenon, of a type unknown to other areas of science. He is consequently soliciting new designs for experiments intended to demonstrate the scope and nature of the gorgon effect. We know from the history of Mademoiselle Marianne’s grisly collaboration with Robespierre that the victim must be visible to the gorgon, but need not be directly perceived; reflection works, as does trivial refraction, and the effect is transmitted through glass thin enough to see through, but the gorgon cannot work in darkness or thick smoke. Nobody has demonstrated a physical mechanism for gorgonism that doesn’t involve an unfortunate creature afflicted with the characteristic tumours. Blinding a gorgon appears to control the effect, as does a sufficient visual distortion. So why does Ernest insist on treating a clearly biological phenomenon as one of the greatest mysteries in physics today?

“My dear fellow,” he explained to me the first time I asked, “how did Madame Curie infer the existence of radioactivity in radium-bearing ores? How did Wilhelm Roentgen recognize X-rays for what they were? Neither of those forms of radiation arose within our current understanding of magnetism, electricity, or light. They had to be something else. Now, our children of Medusa apparently need to behold a victim in order to injure them—but how is the effect transmitted? We know, unlike the ancient Greeks, that our eyes work by focussing ambient light on a membrane at their rear. They used to think that the gorgons shone forth beams of balefire, as if to set in stone whatever they alighted on. But we know that cannot be true. What we face is nothing less than a wholly new phenomenon. Granted, the gorgon effect only changes whatever the medusoid can see directly, but we know the light reflected from those bodies isn’t responsible. And Lavoisier’s calorimetric experiments—before he met his unfortunate end before the looking glass of l’Executrice—proved that actual atomic transmutation is going on! So what on earth mediates the effect? How can the act of observation, performed by an unfortunate afflicted with gorgonism, transform the nuclear structure?”

(By nuclear structure he is of course referring to the core of the atom, as deduced by our experiments last year.)

Then he explained how he was going to seat a gorgon on one side of a very large device he calls a cloud chamber, with big magnetic coils positioned above and below it, to see if there is some other physical phenomenon at work.

I can now reveal the effects of our team’s experimentation. Subject C is cooperating in a most professional manner, but despite Ernest’s greatest efforts the cloud chamber bore no fruit—she can sit with her face pressed up against the glass window on one side, and blow a chicken’s egg to flinders of red-hot pumice on the target stand, but no ionization trail appears in the saturated vapour of the chamber. Or rather, I should say no direct trail appears. We had more success when we attempted to replicate other basic experiments. It seems that the gorgon effect is a continuously variable function of the illumination of the target, with a sharply defined lower cut-off and an upper limit! By interposing smoked glass filters we have calibrated the efficiency with which Subject C transmutes the carbon nuclei of a target into silicon, quite accurately. Some of the new electrostatic counters I’ve been working on have proven fruitful: secondary radiation, including gamma rays and possibly an elusive neutral particle, are given off by the target, and indeed our cloud chamber has produced an excellent picture of radiation given off by the target.

Having confirmed the calorimetric and optical properties of the effect, we next performed the double-slit experiment upon a row of targets (in this case, using wooden combs). A wall with two thin slits is interposed between the targets and our subject, whose gaze was split in two using a binocular arrangement of prisms. A lamp positioned between the two slits, on the far side of the wall from our subject, illuminates the targets: as the level of illumination increases, a pattern of alternating gorgonism was produced! This exactly follows the constructive reinforcement and destruction of waves Professor Young demonstrated with his examination of light corpuscules, as we are now supposed to call them. We conclude that gorgonism is a wave effect of some sort—and the act of observation is intimately involved, although on first acquaintance this is such a strange conclusion that some of us were inclined to reject it out of hand.

We will of course be publishing our full findings in due course; I take pleasure in attaching a draft of our paper for your interest. In any case, you must be wondering by now just what the central finding is. This is not in our paper yet, because Dr. Rutherford is inclined to seek a possible explanation before publishing; but I regret to say that our most precise calorimetric analyses suggest that your theory of mass/energy conservation is being violated—not on the order of ounces of weight, but by enough to detect. Carbon atoms are being transformed into silicon ions with an astoundingly high electropositivity, which can be accounted for if we assume that the effect is creating nuclear mass from somewhere. Perhaps you, or your new colleagues at the Prussian Academy, can shed some light on the issue? We are most perplexed, because if we accept this result we are forced to accept the creation of new mass ab initio, or treat it as an experimental invalidation of your general theory of relativity.

Your good friend,

Hans Geiger

A portrait of the agent as a (confused) young man:

Picture me, standing in the predawn chill in a badly mown field, yellowing parched grass up to the ankles. There’s a wooden fence behind me, a road on the other side of it with the usual traffic cams and streetlights, and a helicopter in police markings parked like a gigantic cyborg beetle in the middle of the roundabout, bulging with muscular-looking sensors and nitesun floodlights and making a racket like an explosion in a noise factory. Before me there’s a field full of concrete cows, grazing safely and placidly in the shadow of some low trees which are barely visible in the overspill from the streetlights. Long shadows stretch out from the fence, darkness exploding toward the ominous lump at the far end of the paddock. It’s autumn, and dawn isn’t due for another thirty minutes. I lift my modified camcorder and zoom in on it, thumbing the record button.

The lump looks a little like a cow that’s lying down. I glance over my shoulder at the chopper, which is beginning to spool up for takeoff; I’m pretty sure I’m safe here but I can’t quite suppress a cold shudder. On the other side of the field—

“Datum point: Bob Howard, Bancroft Park, Milton Keynes, time is zero seven fourteen on the morning of Tuesday the eighteenth. I have counted the cows and there are nine of them. One is prone, far end of paddock, GPS coordinates to follow. Preliminary surveillance indicated no human presence within a quarter kilometre and residual thermal yield is below two hundred Celsius, so I infer that it is safe to approach the target.”

One unwilling foot goes down in front of another. I keep an eye on my dosimeter, just in case: there’s not going to be much secondary radiation hereabouts, but you can never tell. The first of the cows looms up at me out of the darkness. She’s painted black and white, and this close up there’s no mistaking her for a sculpture. I pat her on the nose. “Stay cool, Daisy.” I should be safely tucked up in bed with Mo—but she’s away on a two-week training seminar at Dunwich and Angleton got a bee in his bonnet and called a code blue emergency. The cuffs of my jeans are damp with dew, and it’s cold. I reach the next cow, pause, and lean on its rump for a zoom shot of the target.

“Ground zero, range twenty metres. Subject is bovine, down, clearly terminal. Length is roughly three metres, breed . . . unidentifiable. The grass around it is charred but there’s no sign of secondary combustion.” I dry-swallow. “Thermal bloom from abdomen.” There’s a huge rip in its belly where the boiling intestinal fluids exploded, and the contents are probably still glowing red-hot inside.

I approach the object. It’s clearly the remains of a cow; equally clearly it has met a most unpleasant end. The dosimeter says it’s safe—most of the radiation effects from this sort of thing are prompt, there are minimal secondary products, luckily—but the ground underneath is scorched and the hide has blackened and charred to a gritty, ashlike consistency. There’s a smell like roast beef hanging in the air, with an unpleasant undertang of something else. I fumble in my shoulder bag and pull out a thermal probe, then, steeling myself, shove the sharp end in through the rip in the abdomen. I nearly burn my hand on the side as I do so—it’s like standing too close to an open oven.

“Core temperature two six six, two six seven . . . stable. Taking core samples for isotope ratio checks.” I pull out a sample tube and a sharp probe and dig around in the thing’s guts, trying to tease a chunk of ashy, charred meat loose. I feel queasy: I like a well-cooked steak as much as the next guy, but there’s something deeply wrong about this whole scene. I try not to notice the exploded eyeballs or the ruptured tongue bursting through the blackened lips. This job is quite gross enough as it is without adding my own dry heaves to the mess.

Samples safely bottled for analysis, I back away and walk in a wide circle around the body, recording it from all angles. An open gate at the far end of the field and a trail of impressions in the ground completes the picture. “Hypothesis: open gate. Someone let Daisy in, walked her to this position near the herd, then backed off. Daisy was then illuminated and exposed to a class three or better basilisk, whether animate or simulated. We need a plausible disinformation pitch, forensics workover of the paddock gate and fence—check for exit signs and footprints—and some way of identifying Daisy to see which herd she came from. If any livestock is reported missing over the next few days that would be a useful indicator. Meanwhile, core temperature is down to under five hundred Celsius. That suggests the incident happened at least a few hours ago—it takes a while for something the size of a cow to cool down that far. Since the basilisk has obviously left the area and there’s not a lot more I can do, I’m now going to call in the cleaners. End.”

I switch off the camcorder, slide it into my pocket, and take a deep breath. The next bit promises to be even less pleasant than sticking a thermocouple in the cow’s arse to see how long ago it was irradiated. I pull out my mobile phone and dial 999. “Operator? Police despatch, please. Police despatch? This is Mike Tango Five, repeat, Mike Tango Five. Is Inspector Sullivan available? I have an urgent call for him . . .”

REPORT 3: Friday October 9th, 1942

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES, Ministry of War, October 9th, 1942

RECLASSIFIED TOP SECRET REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, August 13th, 1988

ACTION THIS DAY:

Three reports have reached SOE Department Two, office 337/42, shedding new light on the recent activities of Dr. Ing Professor Gustaf Von Schachter in conjunction with RSHA Amt. 3 and the inmates of the Holy Nativity Hospital for the Incurably Insane.

Our first report ref. 531/892—(i) concerns the cessation of action by a detached unit of RSHA Amt. 3 Group 4 charged with termination of imbeciles and mental defectives in Frankfurt as part of the Reich’s ongoing eugenics program. An agent in place (code: GREEN PIGEON) overheard two soldiers discussing the cessation of euthanasia operations in the clinic in negative terms. Herr Von Schachter had, as of 24/8/42, acquired a Fuhrer Special Order signed either by Hitler or Borman. This was understood by the soldiers to charge him with the authority to requisition any military resources not concerned with direct security of the Reich or suppression of resistance, and to override orders with the effective authority of an obergruppenfuhrer. This mandate runs in conjunction with his existing authority from Dr. Wolfram Sievers, who is believed to be operating the Institute for Military Scientific Research at the University of Strasbourg and the processing centre at Natzweiler concentration camp.

Our second report ref. 539/504—(i) concerns prescriptions dispensed by a pharmacy in Frankfurt for an unnamed doctor from the Holy Nativity Hospital. The pharmaceutical assistant at this dispensary is a sympathiser operated by BLUE PARTRIDGE and is considered trustworthy. The prescriptions requisitioned were unusual in that they consisted of bolus preparations for intrathecal (base of cranium) injection, containing colchicine, an extract of catharanthides, and morphine. Our informant opined that this is a highly irregular preparation which might be utilized in the treatment of certain brain tumours, but which is likely to cause excruciating pain and neurological side effects (ref. GAME ANDES) associated with induction of gorgonism in latent individuals suffering an astrocytoma in the cingulate gyrus.

Our final report ref. 539/504—(ii) comes from the same informant and confirms ominous preparatory activities in the Holy Nativity Hospital grounds. The hospital is now under guard by soldiers of Einsatzgruppen 4. Windows have been whitewashed, mirrors are being removed (our emphasis) or replaced with one-way observation glass, and lights in the solitary cells rewired for external control from behind two doors. Most of the patients have disappeared, believed removed by Group 4 soldiers, and rumours are circulating of a new area of disturbed earth in the countryside nearby. Those patients who remain are under close guard.

Conclusion: The preparation referenced in 539/504—(i) has been referred to Special Projects Group ANDES, who have verified against records of the suppressed Geiger Committee that Von Schachter is experimenting with drugs similar to the catastrophic Cambridge IV preparation. Given his associate Sievers’s influence in the Ahnenerbe-SS, and the previous use of the Holy Nativity Hospital for the Incurably Insane as a secondary centre for the paliative care of patients suffering seizures and other neuraesthenic symptoms, it is believed likely that Von Schachter intends to induce and control gorgonism for military purposes in explicit violation of the provisions for the total suppression of stoner weapons laid out in Secret Codicil IV to the Hague Convention (1919).

Policy Recommendation: This matter should be escalated to JIC as critical with input from SOE on the feasibility of a targeted raid on the installation. If allowed to proceed, Von Schachter’s program shows significant potential for development into one of the rumoured Vertlesgunswaffen programs for deployment against civilian populations in free areas. A number of contingency plans for the deployment of gorgonism on a mass observation basis have existed in a MOW file since the early 1920s and we must now consider the prospects for such weapons to be deployed against us. We consider essential an immediate strike against the most advanced development centres, coupled with a strong reminder through diplomatic back channels that failure to comply with all clauses (secret and overt) of the Hague Convention will result in an allied retaliatory deployment of poison gas against German civilian targets. We cannot run the risk of class IV basilisks being deployed in conjunction with strategic air power . . .

By the time I roll into the office, four hours late and yawning with sleep deprivation, Harriet is hopping around the common room as if her feet are on fire, angrier than I’ve ever seen her before. Unfortunately, according to the matrix management system we operate she’s my boss for 30 percent of the time during which Im a technical support engineer. (For the other 70 percent I report to Angleton and I can’t really tell you what I am except that it involves being yanked out of bed at zero four hundred hours to answer code blue alerts.)

Harriet is a back-office suit: mousy and skinny, forty-something, and dried up from spending all those years devising forms in triplicate with which to terrorize field agents. People like Harriet aren’t supposed to get excited about anything. The effect is disconcerting, like opening a tomb and finding a break-dancing mummy.

“Robert! Where on earth have you been? What kind of time do you call this? McLuhan’s been waiting on you—you were supposed to be here for the licence policy management committee meeting two hours ago!”

I yawn and sling my jacket over the coat rack next to the “C” department coffee station. “Been called out,” I mumble. “Code blue alert. Just got back from Milton Keynes.”

“Code blue?” she asks, alert for a slip. “Who signed off on it?”

“Angleton.” I hunt around for my mug in the cupboard over the sink, the one with the poster on the front that says CURIOUS EYES COST LIVES. The coffee machine is mostly empty, full of black tarry stuff alarmingly similar to the toxic waste they make roads out of. I hold it under the tap and rinse. “His budget, don’t worry about it. Only he pulled me out of bed at four in the morning and sent me off to”—I put the jug down to refill the coffee filter—“never mind. It’s cleared.”

Harriet looks as if she’s bitten into a biscuit and found half a beetle inside. Im pretty sure that it’s not anything special; she and her boss Bridget simply have no higher goal in life than trying to cut everyone else down so they can look them in the eye. Although, to be fair, they’ve been acting more cagy than usual lately, hiding out in meetings with strange suits from other departments. It’s probably just part of their ongoing game of Bureaucracy, whose goal is the highest stakes of all—a fully vested Civil Service pension and early retirement. “What was it about?” she demands.

“Do you have GAME ANDES REDSHIFT clearance?” I ask. “If not, I can’t tell you.”

“But you were in Milton Keynes,” she jabs. “You told me that.”

“Did I?” I roll my eyes. “Well, maybe, and maybe not. I couldn’t possibly comment.”

“What’s so interesting about Milton Keynes?” she continues.

“Not much.” I shrug. “It’s made of concrete and it’s very, very boring.”

She relaxes almost imperceptibly. “Make sure you get all the paperwork filed and billed to the right account,” she tells me.

“I will have before I leave this afternoon at two,” I reply, rubbing in the fact that I’m on flexitime; Angleton’s a much more alarming, but also understanding, manager to work for. Due to the curse of matrix management I can’t weasel out completely from under Bridget’s bony thumb, but I must confess I get a kick out of having my other boss pull rank on her. “What was this meeting about?” I ask slyly, hoping she’ll rise to it.

“You should know, you’re the administrator who set up the mailing list,” she throws right back at me. Oops. “Mr. McLuhan’s here to help us. He’s from Q Division, to help us prepare for our Business Software Alliance audit.”

“Our—” I stop dead and turn to face her, the coffee machine gurgling at my back. “Our audit with who

?”

“The Business Software Alliance,” she says smugly. “CESG outsourced our COTS application infrastructure five months ago contingent on us following oifitial best practices for ensuring quality and value in enterprise resource management. As you were too busy to look after things, Bridget asked Q Division to help out. Mr. McLuhan is helping us sort out our licencing arrangements in line with guidelines from Procurement. He says he’s able to run a full BSA-certified audit on our systems and help us get our books in order.”

“Oh,” I say, very calmly, and turn around, mouthing the follow-on shit silently in the direction of the now-burbling percollator. “Have you ever been through a BSA audit before, Harriet?” I ask curiously as I scrub my mug clean, inside and out.

“No, but they’re here to help us audit our—”

“They’re funded by the big desktop software companies,” I say, as calmly as I can. “They do that because they view the BSA as a profit centre. That’s because the BSA or their subcontractors—and that’s what Q Division will be acting as, they get paid for running an audit if they find anything out of order-come in, do an audit, look for anything that isn’t currently licensed—say, those old machines in D3 that are still running Windows 3.1 and Office 4, or the Linux servers behind Eric’s desk that keep the departmental file servers running, not to mention the FreeBSD box running the Daemonic Countermeasures Suite in Security—and demand an upgrade to the latest version under threat of lawsuit. Inviting them in is like throwing open the doors and inviting the Drugs Squad round for a spliff.”

“They said they could track down all our installed software and offer us a discount for volume licensing!”

“And how precisely do you think they’ll do that?” I turn round and stare at her. “They’re going to want to install snooping software on our LAN, and then read through its take.” I take a deep breath. “You’re going to have to get him to sign the Official Secrets Act so that I can formally notify him that if he thinks he’s going to do that I’m going to have him sectioned. Part Three. Why do you think we’re still running old copies of Windows on the network? Because we can’t afford to replace them?”

“He’s already signed Section Three. And anyway, you said you didn’t have time,” she snaps waspishly. “I asked you five weeks ago, on Friday! But you were too busy playing secret agents with your friends downstairs to notice anything as important as an upcoming audit. This wouldn’t have been necessary if you had time!”

“Crap. Listen, we’re running those old junkers because they’re so old and rubbish that they can’t catch half the proxy Internet worms and macro viruses that are doing the rounds these days. BSA will insist we replace them with stonking new workstations running Windows XP and Office XP and dialing into the Internet every six seconds to snitch on whatever we’re doing with them. Do you really think Mahogany Row is going to clear that sort of security risk?”

That’s a bluff—Mahogany Row retired from this universe back when software still meant silk unmentionables—but she isn’t likely to know that, merely that I get invited up there these days. (Nearer my brain-eating God to thee . . . )

“As for the time thing, get me a hardware budget and a tech assistant who’s vetted for level five Laundry IT operations and I’ll get it seen to. It’ll only cost you sixty thousand pounds or so in the first year, plus a salary thereafter.” Finally, finally, I get to pull the jug out of the coffee machine and pour myself a mug of wake-up. “That’s better.”

She glances at her watch. “Are you going to come along to the meeting and help explain this to everybody then?” she asks in a tone that could cut glass.

“No.” I add cow juice from the fridge that wheezes asthmatically below the worktop. “It’s a public/private partnership fuck-up, film at eleven. Bridget stuck her foot in it out of her own free will: if she wants me to pull it out for her she can damn well ask. Besides, I’ve got a code blue report meeting with Angelton and Boris and Andy and that trumps administrative make-work any day of the week.”

“Bastard,” she hisses.

“Pleased to be of service.” I pull a face as she marches out the room and slams the door. “Angleton. Code blue. Jesus.” All of a sudden I remember the modified camcorder in my jacket pocket. “Shit, I’m running late . . .”

REPORT 4: Tuesday June 6th, 1989

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, June 6th, 1989

ABSTRACT: Recent research in neuroanatomy has characterised the nature of the stellate ganglial networks responsible for gorgonism in patients with advanced astrocytoma affecting the cingulate gyrus. Tests combining the “map of medusa” layout with appropriate video preprocessing inputs have demonstrated the feasibility of mechanical induction of the medusa effect.

Progress in the emulation of dynamically reconfigurable hidden-layer neural networks using FPGA (fully programmable gate array) technology, combined with real-time digital video signal processing from binocular high-resolution video cameras, is likely within the next five years to allow us to download a “medusa mode” into suitably prepared surveillance CCTV cameras, allowing realtime digital video monitoring networks to achieve a true line-of-sight look-to-kill capability. Extensive safety protocols are discussed which must be implemented before this technology can be deployed nationally, in order to minimize the risk of misactivation.

Projected deployment of CCTV monitoring in public places is estimated to result in over one million cameras in situ in British mainland cities by 1999. Coverage will be complete by 2004”“06. Anticipated developments in internetworking and improvements in online computing bandwidth suggest for the first time the capacity of achieving a total coverage defense-in-depth against any conceivable insurgency. The implications of this project are discussed, along with its possible efficacy in mitigating the consequences of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN in September 2007. . . .

Speaking of Mahogany Row, Angleton’s picked the boardroom with the teak desk and the original bakelite desk fittings, and frosted windows onto the corridor, as the venue for my debriefing. He’s sitting behind the desk tapping his bony fingers, with Andy looking anxious and Boris imperturbable when I walk in and flip the red MEETING light on.

“Home movies.” I flip the tape on the desktop. “What I saw on my holiday.” I put my coffee mug down on one of the disquietingly soft leather mats before I yawn, just in case I spill it. “Sorry, been up for hours. What do you want to know?”

“How long had it been dead?” asks Andy.

I think for a moment. “I’m not sure—have to call Pathology if you want a hard answer, I’m afraid, but clearly for some time when I found it after zero seven hundred. It had cooled to barely oven temperature.”

Angleton is watching me like I’m a bug under a microscope. It’s not a fun sensation. “Did you read the files?” he asks.

“Yes.” Before I came up here I locked them in my office safe in case a busy little Tom, Dick, or Harriet decided to do some snooping. “I’m really going to sleep well tonight.”

“The basilisk is found.” Boris said.

“Um, no,” I admit. “It’s still in the wild. But Mike Williams said he’d let me know if they run across it. He’s cleared for OSA—III, he’s our liaison in—”

“How many traffic cameras overlooked the roundabout?” Angleton asks almost casually.

“Oh—” I sit down hard. “Oh shit. Shit.” I feel shaky, very shaky, guts doing the tango and icy chills running down the small of my back as I realise what he’s trying to tell me without saying it out loud, on the record.

“That’s why I sent you,” he murmurs, waving Andy out of the room on some prearranged errand. A moment later Boris follows him. “You’re not supposed to get yourself killed, Bob. It looks bad on your record.”

“Oh shit,” I repeat, needle stuck, sample echoing, as I realise how close to dying I may have been. And the crew of that chopper, and everyone else who’s been there since, and—

“Half an hour ago someone vandalized the number seventeen traffic camera overlooking Monk’s Road roundabout three: put a .223 bullet through the CCD enclosure. Drink your coffee, there’s a good boy, do try not to spill it everywhere.”

“One of ours.” It comes out as a statement.

“Of course.” Angleton taps the file sitting on the desk in front of him—I recognize it by the dog-ear on the second page, I put it in my office safe only ten minutes ago—and looks at me with those scary grey eyes of his. “So. The public at large being safe for the moment, tell me what you can deduce.”

“Uh.” I lick my lips, which have gone as dry as old boot leather. “Some time last night somebody let a cow into the park and used it for target practice. I don’t know much about the network topology of the MK road traffic-control cams, but my possible suspects are, in order: someone with a very peculiar brain tumour, someone with a stolen stoner weapon—like the one I qualified for under OGRE REALITY—or someone with access to whatever GAME ANDES REDSHIFT gave birth to. And, going from the questions you’re asking, if it’s GAME ANDES REDSHIFT it’s unauthorised.”

He nods, very slightly.

“We’re in deep shit then,” I say brightly and throw back the last mouthful of coffee, spoiling the effect slightly by nearly coughing my guts up immediately afterward.

“Without a depth-gauge,” he adds drily, and waits for my coughing fit to subside. “I’ve sent Andrew and Mr. B down to the stacks to pull out another file for you to read. Eyes only in front of witnesses, no note-taking, escort required. While they’re signing it out I’d like you to write down in your own words everything that happened to you this morning so far. It’ll go in a sealed file along with your video evidence as a deposition in case the worst happens.”

“Oh shit.” I’m getting tired of saying this. “It’s internal?”

He nods.

“CPU business?”

He nods again, then pushes the antique portable manual typewriter toward me. “Start typing.”

“Okay.” I pick up three sheets of paper and some carbons and begin aligning their edges. “Consider me typing already.

REPORT 5: Monday December 10th, 2001

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET GAME ANDES REDSHIFT, Ministry of Defense, December 10th, 2001

CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET MAGINOT BLUE STARS, Ministry of Defense, December 10th, 2001

Abstract: This document describes progress to date in establishing a defensive network capable of repelling wide-scale incursions by reconfiguring the national closed-circuit television surveillance network as a software-controlled look-to-kill multiheaded basilisk. To prevent accidental premature deployment or deliberate exploitation, the SCORPION STARE software is not actually loaded into the camera firmware. Instead, reprogrammable FPGA chips are integrated into all cameras and can be loaded with SCORPION STARE by authorised MAGINOT BLUE STARS users whenever necessary. . . .

Preamble: It has been said that the US Strategic Defense Initiative Organisation’s proposed active ABM defense network will require the most complex software ever developed, characterised by a complexity metric of > 100 MLOC and heavily criticized by various organisations (see footnotes [1][2][4]) as unworkable and likely to contain in excess of a thousand severity-1 bugs at initial deployment. Nevertheless, the architectural requirements of MAGINOT BLUE STARS dwarf those of the SDIO infrastructure. To provide coverage of 95 percent of the UK population we require a total of 8 million digitally networked CCTV cameras (terminals). Terminals in built-up areas may be connected via the public switched telephone network using SDSL/VHDSL, but outlying systems may use mesh network routing over 802.11a to ensure that rural areas do not provide a pool of infectious carriers for demonic possession. TCP/IP Quality of Service issues are discussed below, along with a concrete requirement for IPv6 routing and infrastructure that must be installed and supported by all Internet Service Providers no later than 2004.

There are more than ninety different CCTV architectures currently on sale in the UK, many of which are imported and cannot be fitted with FPGAs suitable for running the SCORPION STARE basilisk neural network prior to installation. Data Disclosure Orders served under the terms of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2001) serve to gain access to camera firmware, but in many regions upgrades to Level 1 MAGINOT BLUE STARS compliance is behind schedule due to noncompliance by local police forces with what are seen as unreasonable Home Office requests. Unless we can achieve a 340 percent compliance improvement by 2004, we will fail to achieve the target saturation prior to September 2007, when CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN is due.

Installation has currently been completed only in limited areas; notably Inner London (“Ring of Steel” for counter-terrorism surveillance) and Milton Keynes (advanced next-generation MAN with total traffic management solution in place). Deployment is proceeding in order of population density and potential for catastrophic demonic takeover and exponential burn through built-up areas . . .

Recommendation: One avenue for ensuring that all civilian CCTV equipment is SCORPION STARE compatible by 2006 is to exploit an initiative of the US National Security Agency for our own ends. In a bill ostensibly sponsored by Hollywood and music industry associations (MPAA and RIAA: see also CDBTPA), the NSA is ostensibly attempting to legislate support for Digital Rights Management in all electronic equipment sold to the public. The implementation details are not currently accessible to us, but we believe this is a stalking-horse for requiring chip manufacturers to incorporate on-die FPGAs in the one million gate range, re-configurable in software, initially laid out as DRM circuitry but reprogrammable in support of their nascent War on Un-Americanism.

If such integrated FPGAs are mandated, commercial pressures will force Far Eastern vendors to comply with regulation and we will be able to mandate incorporation of SCORPION STARE Level Two into all digital consumer electronic cameras and commercial CCTV equipment under cover of complying with our copyright protection obligations in accordance with the WIPO treaty. A suitable pretext for the rapid phased obsolescence of all Level Zero and Level One cameras can then be engineered by, for example, discrediting witness evidence from older installations in an ongoing criminal investigation.

If we pursue this plan, by late 2006 any two adjacent public CCTV terminals—or private camcorders equipped with a digital video link—will be reprogrammable by any authenticated MAGINOT BLUE STARS superuser to permit the operator to turn them into a SCORPION STARE basilisk weapon. We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond the stars to eat our brains.

“So, what this boils down to is a Strategic Defense Initiative against an invasion by alien mind-suckers from beyond spacetime, who are expected to arrive in bulk at a set date. Am I on message so far?” I asked.

“Very approximately, yes,” said Andy.

“Okay. To deal with the perceived alien mind-sucker threat, some nameless genius has worked out that the CCTV cameras dotting our green and pleasant land can be networked together, their inputs fed into a software emulation of a basilisk’s brain, and turned into some kind of omnipresent look-to-kill death net. Even though we don’t really know how the medusa effect works, other than that it relies on some kind of weird observationally mediated quantumtunneling effect, collapse of the wave function, yadda yadda, that makes about 1 percent of the carbon nuclei in the target body automagically turn into silicon with no apparent net energy input. That right?”

“Have a cigar, Sherlock.”

“Sorry, I only smoke when you plug me into the national grid. Shit. Okay, so it hasn’t occurred to anyone that the mass-energy of those silicon nuclei has to come from somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere in the Dungeon Dimensions . . . damn. But that’s not the point, is it?”

“Indeed not. When are you going to get to it?”

“As soon as my hands stop shaking. Let’s see. Rather than do this openly and risk frightening the sheeple by stationing a death ray on every street corner, our lords and masters decided they’d do it bottom-up, by legislating that all public cameras be networked, and having back doors installed in them to allow the hunter-killer basilisk brain emulators to be uploaded when the time comes. Which, let’s face it, makes excellent fiscal strength in this age of outsourcing, public-private partnerships, service charters, and the like. I mean, you can’t get business insurance if you don’t install antitheft cameras, someone’s got to watch them so you might as well outsource the service to a security company with a network operations centre, and the brain-dead music industry copyright nazis are campaigning for a law to make it mandatory to install secret government spookware in every Walkman—or camera—to prevent home taping from killing Michael Jackson. Absolutely brilliant.”

“It is elegant, isn’t it? Much more subtle than honking great ballistic missile submarines. We’ve come a long way since the Cold War.”

“Yeah. Except you’re also telling me that some script kiddie has rooted you and dialed in a strike on Milton Keynes. Probably in the mistaken belief that they think they’re playing MISSILE COMMAND.”

“No comment.”

“Jesus Fucking Christ riding into town on top of a pickup truck full of DLT backup tapes—what kind of idiot do you take me for? Listen, the ball has gone up. Someone uploaded the SCORPION STARE code to a bunch of traffic cams off Monk’s Road roundabout and turned Daisy into six hundred pounds of boiled beef on the bone a la basilisk, and all you can say is no comment?”

“Listen, Bob, I think you’re taking this all too personally. I can’t comment on the Monk’s Road incident because you’re officially the tag-team investigative lead and I’m here to provide backup and support, not to second—guess you. I’m trying to be helpful, okay?”

“Sorry, sorry. I’m just a bit upset.”

“Yes, well, if it’s any consolation that goes for me, too, and for Angleton believe it or not, but ‘upset’ and fifty pence will buy you a cup of coffee and what we really need is to finger the means, motive, and murderer of Daisy the Cow in time to close the stable door. Oh, and we can rule out external penetration—the network loop to Monk’s Road is on a private backbone intranet that’s fire—walled up to the eyeballs. Does that make it easier for you?”

“No shit! Listen, I happen to agree with you in principle, but I am still upset, Andy, and I want to tell you—no shit. Look, this is so not—sensible that I know I’m way the hell too late but I think the whole MAGINOT BLUE STARS idea is fucking insane, I mean, like, bull-goose, barking-at-the-moon, hairs-on-the-palm-of-your-hands crazy. Like atomic landmines buried under every street corner! Didn’t they know that the only unhackable computer is one that’s running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off? What did they think they were doing?”

“Defending us against CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, Bob. Which I’ll have you know is why the Russians are so dead keen to get Energiya flying again so they can launch their Polyus orbital battle stations, and why the Americans are getting so upset about the Rune of Al-Sabbah that they’re trying to build censorware into every analogue-to-digital converter on the planet.”

“Do I have CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN clearance? Or do I just have to take it on trust?”

“Take it on trust for now, I’ll try and get you cleared later in the week. Sorry about that, but this truly . . . look, in this instance the ends justify the means. Take it from me. Okay?”

“Shit. I need another—no, I’ve already had too much coffee. So, what am I supposed to do?”

“Well, the good news is we’ve narrowed it down a bit. You will be pleased to know that we just ordered the West Yorkshire Met’s computer crime squad to go in with hobnailed boots and take down the entire MK traffic camera network and opcentre. Official reason is a suspicion of time bombs installed by a disgruntled former employee—who is innocent, incidentally—but it lets us turn it into a Computer Misuse case and send in a reasonably clueful team. They’re about to officially call for backup from CESG, who are going to second them a purported spook from GCHQ, and that spook is going to be you. I want you to crawl all over that camera network and figure out how SCORPION STARE might have got onto it. Which is going to be easier than you think because SCORPION STARE isn’t exactly open source and there are only two authorised development teams working on it on the planet that we know of, or at least in this country. One of them is—surprise—based in Milton Keynes, and as of right this minute you have clearance to stamp all over their turf and play the Gestapo officer with our top boffin labs. Which is a power I trust you will not abuse without good reason.”

“Oh great, I always fancied myself in a long, black leather trench coat. What will Mo think?”

“She’ll think you look the part when you’re angry. Are you up for it?”

“How the fuck could I say no, when you put it that way?”

“I’m glad you understand. Now, have you got any other questions for me before we wrap this up and send the tape to the auditors?”

“Uh, yeah. One question. Why me?”

“Why—well! Hmm. I suppose because you’re already on the inside, Bob. And you’ve got a pretty unique skill mix. Something you overlook is that we don’t have many field qualified agents, and most of those we have are old school two-fisted shoot-from-the-hip-with-a-rune-of-destruction field necromancers; they don’t understand these modern Babbage engine Internet contraptions like you do. And you’ve already got experience with basilisk weapons, or did you think we issued those things like toothpaste tubes? So rather than find someone who doesn’t know as much, you just happened to be the man on the spot who knew enough and was thought . . . appropriate.”

“Gee, thanks. I’ll sleep a lot better tonight knowing that you couldn’t find anyone better suited to the job. Really scraping the barrel, aren’t we?”

“If only you knew . . . if only you knew.”

The next morning they put me on the train to Cheltenham—second class of course—to visit a large office site, which appears as a blank spot on all maps of the area, just in case the Russians haven’t noticed the farm growing satellite dishes out back. I spend a very uncomfortable half hour being checked through security by a couple of Rottweilers in blue suits who work on the assumption that anyone who is not known to be a Communist infiltrator from North Korea is a dangerously unclassified security risk. They search me and make me pee in a cup and leave my palmtop at the site security office, but for some reason they don’t ask me to surrender the small leather bag containing a mummified pigeon’s foot that I wear on a silver chain round my neck when I explain that it’s on account of my religion. The idiots.

It is windy and rainy outside so I have no objection to being ushered into an air-conditioned meeting room on the third floor of an outlying wing, being offered institutional beige coffee the same colour as the office carpet, and spending the next four hours in a meeting with Kevin, Robin, Jane, and Phil, who explain to me in turn what a senior operations officer from GCHQ detached for field duty is expected to do in the way of maintaining security, calling on backup, reporting problems, and filling out the two hundred and seventeen different forms that senior operations officers are apparently employed to spend their time filling out. The Laundry may have a bureaucracy surfeit and a craze for ISO-9000 certification, but GCHQ is even worse, with some bizarre spatchcock version of BS5720 quality assurance applied to all their procedures in an attempt to ensure that the Home Office minister can account for all available paper clips in near real-time if challenged in the House by Her Majesty’s loyal opposition. On the other hand, they’ve got a bigger budget than us and all they have to worry about is having to read other people’s email, instead of having their souls sucked out by tentacular horrors from beyond the universe.

“Oh, and you really ought to wear a tie when you’re representing us in public,” Phil says apologetically at the end of his spiel.

“And get a haircut,” Jane adds with a smile.

Bastards.

The Human Resources imps billet me in a bed and breakfast run by a genteel pair of elderly High Tory sociopaths, a Mr. and Mrs. MacBride. He’s bald, loafs around in slippers, and reads the Telegraph while muttering darkly about the need for capital punishment as a solution to the problem of bogus asylum seekers; she wears heavy horn-rimmed glasses and the hairdo that time forgot. The corridors are wallpapered with an exquisitely disgusting floral print and the whole place smells of mothballs, the only symptom of the twenty-first century being a cheap and nasty webcam on the hall staircase. I try not to shudder as I slouch upstairs to my room and barricade the door before settling down for the evening phone call to Mo and a game of Civ on my palmtop (which I rescued from Security on my way out). “It could be worse,” Mo consoles me, “at least your landlord doesn’t have gill slits and greenish skin.”

The next morning I elbow my way onto an early train to London, struggle through the rush hour crush, and somehow manage to weasel my way into a seat on a train to Milton Keynes; it’s full of brightly clad German backpackers and irritated businessmen on their way to Luton airport, but I get off before there and catch a taxi to the cop shop. “There is nothing better in life than drawing on the sole of your slipper with a biro instead of going to the pub on a Saturday night,” the lead singer of Half Man Half Biscuit sings mournfully on my iPod, and I am inclined to agree, subject to the caveat that Saturday nights at the pub are functionally equivalent to damp Thursday mornings at the police station. “Is Inspector Sullivan available?” I ask at the front desk.

“Just a moment.” The moustachioed constable examines my warrant card closely, gives me a beady-eyed stare as if he expects me to break down and confess instantly to a string of unsolved burglaries, then turns and ambles into the noisy back office round the corner. I have just enough time to read the more surreal crime prevention posters for the second time (“Are your neighbours foxhunting reptiles from the planet of the green wellies? Denounce them here, free of charge!”) when the door bangs open and a determined-looking woman in a grey suit barges in. She looks how Annie Lennox would look if she’d joined the constabulary, been glassed once or twice, and had a really dodgy curry the night before.

“Okay, who’s the joker?” she demands. “You.” A bony finger points at me. “You’re from—” she sees the warrant card “—oh shit.” Over her shoulder: “Jeffries, Jeffries, you rat bastard, you set me up! Oh, why do I bother.” Back in my direction: “You’re the spook who got me out of bed the day before yesterday after a graveyard shift. Is this your mess?”

I take a deep breath. “Mine and yours both. I’m just back down from’—I clear my throat—“and I’ve got orders to find an Inspector J. Sullivan and drag him into an interview room.” Mentally crossing my fingers: “What’s the J stand for?”

“Josephine. And it’s Detective Inspector, while you’re about it.” She lifts the barrier. “You’d better come in then.” Josephine looks tired and annoyed. “Where’s your other card?”

“My other—oh.” I shrug. “We don’t flash them around; might be a bit of a disaster if one went missing.” Anyone who picked it up would be in breach of Section Three, at the very least. Not to mention in peril of their immortal soul.

“It’s okay, I’ve signed the Section, in blood.” She raises an eyebrow at me.

“Paragraph two?” I ask, just to be sure she’s not bluffing.

She shakes her head. “No, paragraph three.”

“Pass, friend.” And then I let her see the warrant card as it really is, the way it reaches into your head and twists things around so you want to throw up at the mere thought of questioning its validity. “Satisfied?”

She just nods: a cool customer for sure. The trouble with Section Three of the Official Secrets Act is that it’s an offense to know it exists without having signed it—in blood. So us signatories who are in theory cleared to talk about such supersecret national security issues as the Laundry’s tea trolley rota are in practice unable to broach the topic directly. We’re supposed to rely on introductions, but that breaks down rapidly in the field. It’s a bit like lesbian sheep; as ewes display their sexual arousal by standing around waiting to be mounted, it’s hard to know if somebody else is, well, you know. Cleared. “Come on,” she adds, in a marginally less hostile tone, “we can pick up a cup of coffee on the way.”

Five minutes later we’re sitting down with a notepad, a telephone, and an antique tape recorder that Smiley probably used to debrief Karla, back when men were real men and lesbian sheep were afraid. “This had better be important,” Josephine complains, clicking a frighteningly high-tech sweetener dispenser repeatedly over her black Nescafe. “I’ve got a persistent burglar, two rapes, a string of car thefts, and a phantom pisser who keeps breaking into department stores to deal with, then a bunch of cloggies from West Yorkshire who’re running some kind of computer audit—your fault, I believe. I need to get bogged down in X-Files rubbish right now like I need a hole in my head.”

“Oh, it’s important all right. And I hope to get it off your desk as soon as possible. I’d just like to get a few things straight first.”

“Hmm. So what do you need to know? We’ve only had two flying saucer sightings and six alien abductions this year so far.” She raises one eyebrow, arms crossed and shoulders set a trifle defensively. Who’d have thought it? Being interviewed by higher authorities makes the alpha female detective defensive. “It’s not like I’ve got all day: I’m due in a case committee briefing at noon and I’ve got to pick up my son from school at four.”

On second thought, maybe she really is busy. “To start with, did you get any witness reports or CCTV records from the scene? And have you identified the cow, and worked out how it got there?”

“No eyewitnesses, not until three o’clock, when Vernon Thwaite was out walking his girlfriend’s toy poodle which had diarrhoea.” She pulls a face, which makes the scar on her forehead wrinkle into visibility. “If you want we can go over the team reports together. I take it that’s what pulled you in?”

“You could say that.” I dip a cheap IKEA spoon in my coffee and check cautiously after a few seconds to see if the metal’s begun to corrode. “Helicopters make me airsick. Especially after a night out when I was expecting a morning lie-in.” She almost smiles before she remembers she’s officially grumpy with me. “Okay, so no earlier reports. What else?”

“No tape,” she says, flattening her hands on the tabletop to either side of her cup and examining her nail cuticles. “Nothing. One second it’s zero zero twenty-six, the next it’s zero seven fourteen. Numbers to engrave in your heart. Dennis, our departmental geek, was most upset with MKSG—they’re the public-private partners in the regional surveillance outsourcing sector.”

“Zero zero twenty-six to zero seven fourteen,” I echo as I jot them down on my palmtop. “MKSG. Right, that’s helpful.”

“It is?” She tilts her head sideways and stares at me like I’m a fly that’s landed in her coffee.

“Yup.” I nod, then tell myself that it’d be really stupid to wind her up without good reason. “Sorry.

What I can tell you is, I’m as interested in anything that happened to the cameras as the cow. If you hear anything about them—especially about them being tampered with—I’d love to know. But in the meantime-Daisy. Do you know where she came from?”

“Yes.” She doesn’t crack a smile but her shoulders unwind slightly. “Actually, she’s number two six three from Emmett-Moore Ltd, a dairy factory out near Dunstable. Or rather, she was two six three until three days ago. She was getting along a bit, so they sold her to a local slaughterhouse along with a job lot of seven other cows. I followed-up on the other seven and they’ll be showing up in your McHappy McMeal some time next month. But not Daisy. Seems a passing farmer in a Range Rover with a wagon behind it dropped by and asked if he could buy her and cart her away for his local family butcher to deal with.”

“Aha!”

“And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.” She takes a sip of her coffee, winces, and strafes it with sweeteners again. Responding on autopilot I try a mouthful of my own and burn my tongue. “Turns out that there’s no such farmer Giles of Ham Farm, Bag End, The Shire, on record. Mind you, they had a camera on their stockyard and we nailed the Range Rover. It turned up abandoned the next day on the outskirts of Leighton Buzzard and it’s flagged as stolen on HOLMES2. Right now it’s sitting in the pound down the road; they smoked it for prints but it came up clean and we don’t have enough money to send a SOCO and a forensics team to do a full workup on every stolen car we run across. However, if you twist my arm and promise me a budget and to go to the mat with my boss I’ll see what I can lay on.”

“That may not be necessary: we have ways and means. But can you get someone to drive me down there? I’ll take some readings and get out of your face—except for the business with Daisy. How are you covering that?”

“Oh, we’ll find something. Right now it’s filed under ’F’ for Fucking Fortean Freakery, but I was thinking of announcing it’s just an old animal that had been dumped illegally by a farmer who didn’t want to pay to have it slaughtered.”

“That sounds about right.” I nod slowly. “Now, I’d like to play a random word-association game with you. Okay? Ten seconds. When I say the words tell me what you think of. Right?”

She looks puzzled. “Is this—”

“Listen. Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. By the authority vested in me by the emissaries of Y’ghonzzh N’hai I have the power to bind and to release, and your tongue be tied of these matters of which we have spoken until you hear these words again: Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars. Got that?”

She looks at me cross-eyed and mouths something, then looks increasingly angry until finally she gets it together to burst out with: “Hey, what is this shit?”

“Purely a precaution,” I say, and she glares at me, gobbling for a moment while I finish my coffee until she figures out that she simply can’t say a word about the subject. “Right,” I say. “Now. You’ve got my permission to announce that the cow was dumped. You have my permission to talk freely to me, but to nobody else. Anyone asks any questions, refer them to me if they won’t take no for an answer. This goes for your boss, too. Feel free to tell them that you can’t tell them, nothing more.”

“Wanker,” she hisses, and if looks could kill I’d be a small pile of smouldering ashes on the interview room floor.

“Hey, I’m under a geas, too. If I don’t spread it around my head will explode.”

I don’t know whether she believes me or not but she stops fighting it and nods tiredly. “Tell me what you want then get the hell out of my patch.”

“I want a lift to the car pound. A chance to sit behind the wheel of that Range Rover. A book of poetry, a jug of wine, a date tree, and—sorry, wrong question. Can you manage it?”

She stands up. “I’ll take you there myself,” she says tersely. We go.

I get to endure twenty-five minutes of venomous silence in the back seat of an unmarked patrol car driven by one Constable Routledge, with DI Sullivan in the front passenger seat treating me with the warmth due a serial killer, before we arrive at the pound. I’m beyond introspective self-loathing by now—you lose it fast in this line of work. Angleton will have my head for a key-ring fob if I don’t take care to silence any possible leaks, and a tongue-twisting geas is more merciful than most of the other tools at my disposal—but I still feel like a shit. So it comes as a great relief to get out of the car and stretch my legs on the muddy gravel parking lot in the pouring rain.

“So where’s the car?” I ask, innocently.

Josephine ignores me. “Bill, you want to head over to Bletchley Way and pick up Dougal’s evidence bag for the Hayes case. Then come back to pick us up,” she tells the driver. To the civilian security guard: “You, we’re looking for BY 476 ERB. Came in yesterday, Range Rover. Where is it?”

The bored security goon leads us through the mud and a maze of cars with POLICE AWARE stickers glued to their windshields then gestures at a half-empty row. “That’s it?” Josephine asks, and he passes her a set of keys. “Okay, you can piss off now.” He takes one look at her face and beats a hasty retreat. I half-wish I could join him—whether she’s a detective inspector or not, and therefore meant to be behaving with the gravitas of a senior officer in public, DI Sullivan looks to be in a mood to bite the heads off chickens. Or Laundry field agents, given half an excuse.

“Right, that’s it,” she says, holding out the keys and shaking them at me impatiently. “You’re done, I take it, so I’ll be pushing off. Case meeting to run, mystery shopping centre pisser to track down, and so on.”

“Not so fast.” I glance round. The pound is surrounded by a high wire fence and there’s a decrepit Portakabin office out front by the gate: a camera sits on a motorised mount on a pole sticking up from the roof. “Who’s on the other end of that thing?”

“The gate guard, probably,” she says, following my finger. The camera is staring at the entrance, unmoving.

“Okay, why don’t you open up the car.” She blips the remote to unlock the door and I keep my eyes on the camera as she takes the handle and tugs. Could I be wrong? I wonder as the rain trickles down my neck. I shake myself when I notice her staring, then I pull out my palmtop, clamber up into the driver’s seat, and balance the pocket computer on the steering wheel as I tap out a series of commands. What I see makes me shake my head. Whoever stole the car may have wiped for fingerprints but they didn’t know much about paranormal concealment—they didn’t use the shroud from a suicide, or get a paranoid schizophrenic to drive. The scanner is sensitive to heavy emotional echoes, and the hands I’m looking for are the most recent ones to have chilled from fright and fear of exposure. I log everything and put it away, and I’m about to open the glove locker when something makes me glance at the main road beyond the chainlink fence and—

“Watch out! Get down!” I jump out and go for the ground. Josephine is looking around so I reach out and yank her ankles out from under her. She yells, goes down hard on her backside, and tries to kick me, then there’s a loud whump from behind me and a wave of heat like an open oven door. “Shit, fuck, shit—” I take a moment to realise the person cursing is me as I fumble at my throat for the bag and rip it open, desperately trying to grab the tiny claw and the disposable cigarette lighter at the same time. I flick the lighter wheel and right then something like a sledgehammer whacks into the inside of my right thigh.

“Bastard . . .!”

“Stop it—” I gasp, just as the raw smell of petrol vapour reaches me and I hear a crackling roar. I get the pigeon claw lit in a stink of burning keratin and an eerie glow, nearly shitting myself with terror, lying in a cold damp puddle, and roll over: “Don’t move!”

“Bastard! What—hey, what’s burning?”

“Don’t move,” I gasp again, holding the subminiature Hand of Glory up. The traffic camera in the road outside the fence is casting about as if it’s dropped its contact lens, but the one on the pole above the office is locked right onto the burning tires of the Range Rover. “If you let go of my hand they’ll see you and kill you oh shit—”

“Kill—what?” She stares at me, white-faced.

“You! Get under cover!” I yell across the pound, but the guy in the blue suit—the attendant—doesn’t hear me. One second he’s running across the car park as fast as his portly behind can manage; the next moment he’s tumbling forward, blackening, puffs of flame erupting from his eyes and mouth and ears, then the stumps as his arms come pinwheeling off, and the carbonized trunk slides across the ground like a grisly toboggan.

“Oh shit, oh shit!” Her expression changes from one second to the next, from disbelief to dawning horror. “We’ve got to help—”

“Listen, no! Stay down!”

She freezes in place for a full heartbeat, then another. When she opens her mouth again she’s unnaturally cool. “What’s going on?”

“The cameras,” I pant. “Listen, this is a Hand of Glory, an invisibility shield. Right now it’s all that’s keeping us alive—those cameras are running SCORPION STARE. If they see us we’re dead.”

“Are you—the car? What happened to it?”

“Tires. They’re made of carbon, rubber. SCORPION STARE works on anything with a shitload of long-chain carbon molecules in it—like tires, or cows. Makes them burn.”

“Oh my sainted aunt and holy father . . .”

“Hold my hand. Make skin to skin contact—not that hard. We’ve got maybe three, four minutes before this HOG burns down. Bastards, bastards. Got to get to the control shack—”

The next minute is a nightmare of stumbling-shooting pains in my knees from where I went down hard and in my thigh where Josephine tried to kick the shit out of me—soaking cold damp jeans, and roasting hot skin on my neck from the pyre that I was sitting inside only seconds ago. She holds onto my left hand like it’s a lifesaver—yes, it is, for as long as the HOG keeps burning—and we lurch and shamble toward the modular site office near the entrance as fast as we can go. “Inside,” she gasps, “it can’t see inside.”

“Yeah?” She half-drags me to the entrance and we find the door’s open, not locked. “Can we get away round the other side?”

“Don’t think so.” She points through the building. “There’s a school.”

“Oh shit.” We’re on the other side of the pound from the traffic camera in the road, but there’s another camera under the eaves of the school on the other side of the road from the steel gates out front, and it’s a good thing the kids are all in lessons because what’s going on here is every teacher’s nightmare. And we’ve got to nail it down as fast as possible, because if they ring the bell for lunch—“We’ve got to kill the power to the roofcam first,” I say. “Then we’ve got to figure a way out.”

“What’s going on? What did that?” Her lips work like a fish out of water.

I shake my head. “Case-Nightmare-Green-Scorpion-Stare-Maginot-Blue-Stars tongue be loosed. Okay, talk. I reckon we’ve got about two, three minutes to nail this before—”

“This was all a setup?”

“I don’t know yet. Look, how do I get onto the roof?”

“Isn’t that a skylight?” she asks, pointing.

“Yeah.” Being who I am I always carry a Leatherman multitool so I whip it out and look around for a chair I can pile on top of the desk and stand on, one that doesn’t have wheels and a gas strut. “See any chairs I can—”

I’ll say this much, detective training obviously enables you to figure out how to get onto a roof fast. Josephine simply walks over to the ladder nestling in a corner between one wall and a battered fling cabinet and pulls it out. “This what you’re looking for?”

“Uh, yeah. Thanks.” She passes it to me and I fumble with it for a moment, figuring out how to set it up. Then another moment, juggling the multitool and the half-consumed pigeon’s foot and looking at the ladder dubiously.

“Give me those,” she says.

“But—”

“Listen, I’m the one who deals with idiot vandals and climbs around on pitched roofs looking for broken skylights, okay? And—” she glances at the door “—if I mess up you can phone your boss and let him know what’s happening.”

“Oh,” I mumble, then hand her the gadgets and hold the ladder steady while she swarms up it like a circus acrobat. A moment later there’s a noise like a herd of baby elephants thudding on the rooftop as she scrambles across to the camera mount. The camera may be on a moving platform but there’s a limit to how far it can depress and clearly she’s right below the azimuth platform—just as long as she isn’t visible to both the traffic camera out back and the schoolyard monitor out front. More shaking, then there’s a loud clack and the Portakabin lights go out.

A second or two later she reappears, feet first, through the opening. “Right, that should do it,” she says. “I shorted the power cable to the platform. “Hey, the lights—”

“I think you shorted a bit more than that.” I hold the ladder as she climbs down. “Now, we’ve got an immobilized one up top, that’s good. Let’s see if we can find the controller.”

A quick search of the hut reveals a bunch of fun stuff I hadn’t been expecting, like an ADSL line to the regional police IT hub, a PC running some kind of terminal emulator, and another dedicated machine with the cameras showing overlapping windows on-screen. I could kiss them; they may have outsourced the monitoring to private security firms but they’ve kept the hardware all on the same backbone network. The blinkenlights are beeping and twittering like crazy as everything’s now running on backup battery power, but that’s okay. I pull out a breakout box and scramble around under a desk until I’ve got my palmtop plugged into the network hub to sniff packets. Barely a second later it dings at me. “Oh, lovely.” So much for firewalled up to the eyeballs. I unplug and surface again, then scroll through the several hundred screenfuls of unencrypted bureaucratic computerese my network sniffer has grabbed. “That looks promising. Uh, I wouldn’t go outside just yet but I think we’re going to be all right.”

“Explain.” She’s about ten centimetres shorter than I am, but I’m suddenly aware that I’m sharing the Portakabin with an irate, wet, detective inspector who’s probably a black belt at something or other lethal and who is just about to really lose her cool: “You’ve got about ten seconds from now to tell me everything. Or I’m calling for backup and warrant card or no you are going in a cell until I get some answers. Capisce?”

“I surrender.” I don’t, really, but I point at my palmtop. “It’s a fair cop, guv. Look, someone’s been too clever by half here. The camera up top is basically a glorified webcam. I mean, it’s running a web server and it’s plugged into the constabulary’s intranet via broadband. Every ten seconds or so a program back at HQ polls it and grabs the latest picture, okay? That’s in addition to whatever the guy downstairs tells it to look at. Anyway, someone else just sent it an HTTP request with a honking great big file upload attached, and I don’t think your IT department is in the habit of using South Korean primary schools as proxy servers, are they? And a compromised firewall, no less. Lovely! Your cameras may have been 0wnZ0r3d by a fucking script kiddie, but they’re not as fucking smart as they think they are otherwise they’d have fucking stripped off the fucking referrer headers, wouldn’t they?” I stop talking and make sure I’ve saved the logfile somewhere secure, then for good measure I email it to myself at work.

“Right. So I know their IP address and it’s time to locate them.” It’s the work of about thirty seconds to track it to a dial-up account on one of the big national ISPs—one of the free anonymous ones. “Hmm. If you want to help, you could get me an S22 disclosure notice for the phone number behind this dial-up account. Then we can persuade the phone company to tell us the street address and go pay them a visit and ask why they killed our friend with the key ring—” My hands are shaking from the adrenalin high and I am beginning to feel angry, not just an ordinary day-to-day pissed-off feeling but the kind of true and brutal rage that demands revenge.

“Killed? Oh.” She opens the door an inch and looks outside: she looks a little grey around the gills, but she doesn’t lose it. Tough woman.

“It’s SCORPION STARE. Look, S22 data disclosure order first, it’s a fucking murder investigation now, isn’t it? Then we go visiting. But we’re going to have to make out like it’s accidental, or the press will come trampling all over us and we won’t be able to get anything done.” I write down the hostname while she gets on the mobile to head office. The first sirens start to wail even before she picks up my note and calls for medical backup. I sit there staring at the door, contemplating the mess, my mind whirling. “Tell the ambulance crew it’s a freak lightning strike,” I say as the thought takes me. “You’re already in this up to your ears, we don’t need to get anyone else involved—”

As it happens we don’t visit any murderous hackers, but presently the car pound is fronted with white plastic scene-of-crime sheeting and a photographer and a couple of forensics guys show up and Josephine, who has found something more urgent to obsess over than ripping me a new asshole, is busy directing their preliminary workover. I’m poring over screenfuls of tcpdump output in the control room when the same unmarked car that dropped us off here pulls up with Constable Routledge at the wheel and a very unexpected passenger in the back. I gape as he gets out of the car and walks toward the hut. “Who’s this?” demands Josephine, coming over and sticking her head in through the window.

I open the door. “Hi, boss. Boss, meet Detective Inspector Sullivan. Josephine, this is my boss—you want to come in and sit down?”

Andy nods at her distractedly: “I’m Andy. Bob, brief me.” He glances at her again as she shoves through the door and closes it behind her. “Are you—”

“She knows too much already.” I shrug. “Well?” I ask her. “This is your chance to get out.”

“Fuck that.” She glares at me, then Andy: “Two mornings ago it was a freak accident and a cow, today it’s a murder investigation—I trust you’re not planning on escalating it any further, terrorist massacres and biological weapons are a little outside my remit—and I want some answers. If you please.”

“Okay, you’ll get them,” Andy says mildly. “Start talking,” he tells me.

“Code blue called at three thirty the day before yesterday. I flew out to take a look, found a dead cow that had been zapped by SCORPION STARE—unless there’s a basilisk loose in Milton Keynes—went down to our friends in Cheltenham for briefing yesterday, stayed overnight, came up here this morning. The cow was bought from a slaughterhouse and transported to the scene in a trailer towed by a stolen car, which was later dumped and transferred to this pound. Inspector Sullivan is our force liaison—external circle two, no need to know. She brought me here and I took a patch test, and right then someone zapped the car—we were lucky to survive. One down out front. We’ve, uh, trapped a camera up top that I think will prove to have firmware loaded with SCORPION STARE, and I sniffed packets coming in from a compromised host. Police intranet, fire-walled to hell and back, hacked via some vile little dweeb using a primary school web server in South Korea. We were just about to run down the intruder in meat-space and go ask some pointed questions when you arrived.” I yawn, and Andy looks at me oddly. Extreme stress sometimes does that to me, makes me tired, and I’ve been running on my nerves for most of the past few days.

“All right.” Andy scratches his chin thoughtfully. “There’s been a new development.”

“New development?” I echo.

“Yes. We received a blackmail note.” And it’s no fucking wonder that he’s looking slightly glassy-eyed—he must be in shock.

“Blackmail? What are they—”

“It came via email from an anonymous remixer on the public Internet. Whoever wrote it knows about MAGINOT BLUE STARS and wants us to know that they disapprove, especially of SCORPION STARE. No sign that they’ve got CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, though. They’re giving us three days to cancel the entire project or they’ll blow it wide open in quote the most public way imaginable unquote.”

“Shit.”

“Smelly brown stuff, yes. Angleton is displeased.” Andy shakes his head. “We tracked the message back to a dial-up host in the UK—”

I hold up a piece of paper. “This one?”

He squints at it. “I think so. We did the S22 soft-shoe shuffle but it’s no good, they used the SIMM card from a prepaid mobile phone bought for cash in a supermarket in Birmingham three months ago. The best we could do was trace the caller’s location to the centre of Milton Keynes.” He glances at Josephine. “Did you impress her—”

“Listen.” She speaks quietly and with great force: “Firstly, this appears to be an investigation into murder—and now blackmail, of a government department, right?—and in case you hadn’t noticed, organising criminal investigations just happens to be my speciality. Secondly, I do not appreciate being forcibly gagged. I have signed a certain piece of paper, and the only stuff I leak is what you get when you drill holes in me. Finally, I am getting really pissed off with the runaround you’re giving me about a particularly serious incident on my turf, and if you don’t start answering my questions soon I’m going to have to arrest you for wasting police time. Now, which is it going to be?”

“Oh, for crying out loud.” Andy rolls his eyes, then says very rapidly: “By the abjuration of Dee and the name of Claude Dansey I hereby exercise subsection D paragraph sixteen clause twelve and bind you to service from now and forevermore. Right, that’s it. You’re drafted, and may whatever deity you believe in have mercy on your soul.”

“Hey. Wait.” She takes a step back. “What’s going on?” There’s a faint stink of burning sulphur in the air.

“You’ve just talked yourself into the Laundry,” I say, shaking my head. “Just try to remember I tried to keep you out of this.”

“The Laundry? What are you talking about? I thought you were from Cheltenham?” The smell of brimstone is getting stronger. “Hey, is something on fire?”

“Wrong guess,” says Andy. “Bob can explain later. For now, just remember that we work for the same people, ultimately, only we deal with a higher order of threat than everyday stuff like rogue states, terrorist nukes, and so on. Cheltenham is the cover story. Bob, the blackmailer threatened to upload SCORPION STARE to the ring of steel.”

“Oh shit.” I sit down hard on the edge of a desk. “That is so very not good that I don’t want to think about it right now.” The ring of steel is the network of surveillance cameras that were installed around the financial heart of the city of London in the late 1990s to deter terrorist bombings. “Look, did Angleton have any other—”

“Yes. He wants us to go visit Site Able right now, that’s the lead development team at the research centre behind SCORPION STARE. Um, inspector? You’re in. As I said, you’re drafted. Your boss, that would be Deputy Chief Constable Dunwoody, is about to get a memo about you from the Home Office—we’ll worry about whether you can go back to your old job afterward. As of now, this investigation is your only priority. Site Able runs out of an office unit at Kiln Farm industrial estate, covered as a UK subsidiary of an American software company: in reality they’re part of the residual unprivatised rump of DERA, uh, QinetiQ. The bunch that handles Q-projects.”

“While you’re busy wanking over your cow-burning nonsense I’ve got a ring of car thieves to—” Josephine shakes her head distractedly, sniffs suspiciously, then stops trying to fight the geas. “That smell . . . Why do these people at Kiln Farm need a visit?”

“Because they’re the lead team on the group who developed SCORPION STARE,” Andy explains, “and Angleton doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that our blackmailer burned a cow in Milton Keynes. He thinks they’re a bunch of locals. Bob, if you’ve got a trace that’ll be enough to narrow it down to the building—”

“Yes?” Josephine nods to herself. “But you need to find the individual responsible, and any time bombs they’ve left, and there’s a small matter of evidence.” A thought strikes her. “What happens when you catch them?”

Andy looks at me and my blood runs cold. “I think we’ll have to see about that when we find them,” I extemporise, trying to avoid telling her about the Audit Commission for the time being; she might blow her stack completely if I have to explain how they investigate malfeasance, and then I’d have to tell her that the burning smell is a foreshadowing of what happens if she is ever found guilty of disloyalty. (It normally fades a few minutes after the rite of binding, but right now it’s still strong.) “What are we waiting for?” I ask. “Let’s go!”

In the beginning there was the defense Evaluation and Research Agency, DERA. And DERA was where HMG’s boffins hung out, and they developed cool toys like tanks with plastic armour, clunky palmtops powered by 1980s chips and rugged enough to be run over by a truck, and fetal heart monitors to help the next generation of squaddies grow up strong. And lo, in the thrusting entrepreneurial climate of the early nineties a new government came to power with a remit to bring about the triumph of true socialism by privatising the post office and air traffic control systems, and DERA didn’t stand much of a chance. Renamed QinetiQ by the same nameless marketing genius who turned the Royal Mail into Consignia and Virgin Trains into fodder for fuckedcompany-dot-com, the research agency was hung out to dry, primped and beautified, and generally prepared for sale to the highest bidder who didn’t speak with a pronounced Iraqi accent.

However . . .

In addition to the ordinary toys, DERA used to do development work for the Laundry. Q Division’s pedigree stretches back all the way to SOE’s wartime dirty tricks department—poison pens, boot-heel escape kits, explosive-stuffed sabotage rats, the whole nine yards of James Bond japery. Since the 1950s, Q Division has kept the Laundry in more esoteric equipment: summoning grids, basilisk guns, Turing oracles, self-tuning pentacles, self-filling beer glasses, and the like. Steadily growing weirder and more specialised by the year, Q Division is far too sensitive to sell off—unlike most of QinetiQ’s research, what they do is classified so deep you’d need a bathyscaphe to reach it. And so, while QinetiQ was being dolled up for the city catwalk, Q Division was segregated and spun off, a little stronghold in the sea of commerce that is forever civil service territory.

Detective Inspector Sullivan marches out of the site office like a blank-faced automaton and crisply orders her pet driver to take us to Site Able then to bugger off on some obscure make—work errand. She sits stiffly in the front passenger seat while Andy and I slide into the back and we proceed in silence—nobody seems to want to make small talk.

Fifteen minutes of bumbling around red routes and through trackless wastes of identical red brick houses embellished with satellite dishes and raw pine fences brings us into an older part of town, where the buildings actually look different and the cycle paths are painted strips at the side of the road rather than separately planned routes. I glance around curiously, trying to spot landmarks. “Aren’t we near Bletchley Park?” I ask.

“It’s a couple of miles that way,” says our driver without taking his hands off the wheel to point. “You thinking of visiting?”

“Not just yet.” Bletchley Park was the wartime headquarters of the Ultra operation, the department that later became GCHQ—the people who built the Colossus computers, originally used for breaking Nazi codes and subsequently diverted by the Laundry for more occult purposes. Hallowed ground to us spooks; I’ve met more than one NSA liaison who wanted to visit in order to smuggle a boot heel full of gravel home. “Not until we’ve visited the UK offices of Dillinger Associates, at any rate.”

Dillinger Associates is the cover name for a satellite office of Q Division. The premises turns out to be a neoclassical brick-and-glass edifice with twee fake columns and wilted-looking ivy that’s been trained to climb the facade by dint of ruthless application of plant hormones. We pile out of the car in the courtyard between the dry fountain and the glass doors, and I surreptitiously check my PDA’s locator module for any sign of a match. Nothing. I blink and put it away in time to catch up with Andy and Josephine as they head for the bleached blonde receptionist who sits behind a high wooden counter and types constantly, as unapproachably artificial-looking as a shop window dummy.

“HelloDillingerAssociatesHowCanIHelpEwe?” She flutters her eyelashes at Andy in a bored, professional way, hands never moving away from the keyboard of the PC in front of her. There’s something odd about her, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Andy flips open his warrant card. “We’re here to see Dr. Voss.”

The receptionist’s long, red-nailed fingers stop moving and hover over the keyboard. “Really?” she asks, tonelessly, reaching under the desk.

“Hold it—” I begin to say, as Josephine takes a brisk step forward and drops a handkerchief over the webcam on top of the woman’s monitor. There’s a quiet pop and the sudden absence of noise from her PC tips me off. I sidestep the desk and make a grab for her just as Andy produces a pistol with a ridiculously fat barrel and shoots out the camera located over the door at the rear of the reception area. There’s a horrible ripping sound like a joint of meat tearing apart as the receptionist twists aside and I realise that she isn’t sitting on a chair at all—she’s joined seamlessly at the hips to a plinth that emerges from some kind of fat swivel base of age-blackened wood, bolted to the floor with heavy brass pins in the middle of a silvery metallic pentacle with wires trailing from one corner back up to the PC on the desk. She opens her mouth and I can see that her tongue is bright blue and bifurcated as she hisses.

I hit the floor shoulder first, jarringly hard, and grab for the nearest cable. Those red nails are reaching down for me as her eyes narrow to slits and she works her jaw muscles as if she’s trying to get together a wad of phlegm to spit. I grab the fattest cable and give it a pull and she screams, high-pitched and frighteningly inhuman.

What the fuck? I think, looking up as the red-painted claws stretch and expand, shedding layers of varnish as their edges grow long and sharp. Then I yank the cable again, and it comes away from the pentacle. The wooden box drools a thick, blue-tinted liquid across the carpet tiles, and the screaming stops.

“Lamia,” Andy says tersely. He strides over to the fire door that opens onto the corridor beyond, raises the curiously fat gun, and fires straight up. A purple rain drizzles back down.

“What’s going on?” says Josephine, bewildered, staring at the twitching, slowly dying receptionist.

I point my PDA at the lamia and ding it for a reading. Cool, but nonzero. “Got a partial fix,” I call to Andy. “Where’s everyone else? Isn’t this place supposed to be manned?”

“No idea.” He looks worried. “If this is what they’ve got up front the shit’s already hit the fan—Angleton wasn’t predicting overt resistance.”

The other door bangs open of a sudden and a tubby middle-aged guy in a cheap grey suit and about three day’s worth of designer stubble barges out shouting, “Who are you and what do you think you’re doing here? This is private property, not a paintball shooting gallery! It’s a disgrace—I’ll call the police!”

Josephine snaps out of her trance and steps forward. “As a matter of fact, I am the police,” she says. “What’s your name? Do you have a complaint, and if so, what is it?”

“I’m, I’m—” He focusses on the no-longer-twitching demon receptionist, lolling on top of her box like a murderous shop mannequin. He looks aghast. “Vandals! If you’ve damaged her—”

“Not as badly as she planned to damage us,” says Andy. “I think you’d better tell us who you are.” Andy presents his card, ordering it to reveal its true shape: “By the authority vested in me—”

He moves fast with the geas and ten seconds later we’ve got mister fat guy—actually Dr. Martin Voss—seated on one of the uncomfortable chrome-and-leather designer sofas at one side of reception while Andy asks questions and records them on a dictaphone. Voss talks in a monotone, obviously under duress, drooling slightly from one side of his mouth, and the stench of brimstone mingles with a mouth-watering undertone of roast pork. There’s purple dye from Andy’s paintball gun spattered over anything that might conceal a camera, and he had me seal all the doorways with a roll of something like duct tape or police incident tape, except that the symbols embossed on it glow black and make your eyes water if you try to focus on them.

“Tell me your name and position at this installation.”

“Voss. John Voss. Res-research team manager.”

“How many members are there on your team? Who are they?”

“Twelve. Gary. Ted. Elinor. John. Jonathan. Abdul. Mark—”

“Stop right there. Who’s here today? And is anyone away from the office right now?” I plug away at my palmtop, going cross-eyed as I fiddle with the detector controls. But there’s no sign of any metaspectral resonance; grepping for a match to the person who stole the Range Rover draws a blank in this building. Which is frustrating because we’ve got his (I’m pretty sure it’s a he) boss right here, and there ought to be a sympathetic entanglement at work.

“Everyone’s here but Mark.” He laughs a bit, mildly hysterical. “They’re all here but Mark. Mark!”

I glance over at Detective Inspector Sullivan, who is detective inspecting the lamia. I think she’s finally beginning to grasp at a visceral level that we aren’t just some bureaucratic Whitehall paper circus trying to make her life harder. She looks frankly nauseated. The silence here is eerie, and worrying. Why haven’t the other team members come to find out what’s going on? I wonder, looking at the taped-over doors. Maybe they’ve gone out the back and are waiting for us outside. Or maybe they simply can’t come out in daylight. The smell of burning meat is getting stronger: Voss seems to be shaking, as if he’s trying not to answer Andy’s questions.

I walk over to the lamia. “It’s not human,” I explain quietly. “It never was human. It’s one of the things they specialise in. This building is defended by guards and wards, and this is just part of the security system’s front end.”

“But she, she spoke . . .”

“Yes, but she’s not a human being.” I point to the thick ribbon cable that connected the computer to the pentacle. “See, that’s a control interface. The computer’s there to stabilize and contain a Dho-Nha circuit that binds the Dee—space entity here. The entity itself—it’s a lamia—is locked into the box which contains, uh, other components. And it’s compelled to obey certain orders. Nothing good for unscheduled visitors.” I put my hands on the lamia’s head and work my fingers into the thick blonde hair, then tug. There’s a noise of ripping Velcro then the wig comes off to reveal the scaly scalp beneath. “See? It’s not human. It’s a lamia, a type of demon bound to act as a front-line challenge/response system for a high security installation with covert—”

I manage to get out of the line of fire as Josephine brings up her lunch all over the incredibly expensive bleached pine workstation. I can’t say I blame her. I feel a little shocky myself—it’s been a really bad morning. Then I realise that Andy is trying to get my attention. “Bob, when you’re through with grossing out the inspector I’ve got a little job for you.” He pitches his voice loudly.

“Yeah?” I ask, straightening up.

“I want you to open that door, walk along the corridor to the second room on the right—not pausing to examine any of the corpses along the way—and open it. Inside, you’ll find the main breaker board. I want you to switch the power off.”

“Didn’t I just see you splashing paint all over the CCTV cameras in the ceiling? And, uh, what’s this about corpses? Why don’t we send Dr. Voss—oh.” Voss’s eyes are shut and the stink of roast meat is getting stronger: he’s gone extremely red in the face, almost puffy, and he’s shaking slightly as if some external force is making all his muscles twitch simultaneously. It’s my turn to struggle to hang onto breakfast. “I didn’t know anyone could make themselves do that,” I hear myself say distantly.

“Neither did I,” says Andy, and that’s the most frightening thing I’ve heard today so far. “There must be a conflicted geas somewhere in his skull. I don’t think I could stop it even if—”

“Shit.” I stand up. My hand goes to my neck automatically but the pouch is empty. “No HOG.” I swallow. “Power. What happens if I don’t?”

“Voss’s pal Mark McLuhan installed a dead man’s handle. You’d know all about that. We’ve got until Voss goes into brain stem death and then every fucking camera in Milton Keynes goes live with SCORPION STARE.”

“Oh, you mean we die.” I head for the door Voss came through. “I’m looking for the service core, right?”

“Wait!” It’s Josephine, looking pale. “Can’t you go outside and cut the power there? Or phone for help?”

“Nope.” I rip the first strip of sealing tape away from the door frame. “We’re behind Tempest shielding here, and the power is routed through concrete ducts underground. This is a Q Division office, after all. If we could call in an air strike and drop a couple of BLU-114/Bs on the local power substations that might work”—I tug at the second tape—“but these systems were designed to be survivable.” Third tape.

“Here,” calls Andy, and he chucks something cylindrical at me. I catch it one-handed, yank the last length of tape with the other hand, and do a double-take. Then I shake the cylinder, listen for the rattle of the stirrer, and pop the lid off.

“Take cover!” I call. Then I open the door, spritz the ceiling above me with green spray paint, and go to work.

I’m sitting in the lobby, guarding the lamia’s corpse with a nearly empty can of paint and trying not to fall asleep, when the OCCULUS team bangs on the door. I yawn and sidestep Voss’s blistered corpse—he looks like he’s gone a few rounds with Old Sparky—then try to remember the countersign. Ah, that’s it. I pull away a strip of tape and tug the door open and find myself staring up the snout of an H&K carbine. “Is that a gun in your hand or are you just here to have a wank?” I ask.

The gun points somewhere else in a hurry. “Hey, Sarge, it’s the spod from Amsterdam!”

“Yeah, and someone’s told you to secure the area, haven’t they? Where’s Sergeant Howe?” I ask, yawning. Daylight makes me feel better—that, and knowing that there’s backup. (I get sleepy when people stop shooting at me. Then I have nightmares. Not a good combination.)

“Over here.” They’re dressed in something not unlike Fire Service HAZMAT gear, and the wagons are painted cheerful cherry-red with luminous yellow stripes; if they weren’t armed to the teeth with automatic weapons you’d swear they were only here because somebody had phoned in a toxic chemical release warning. But the pump nozzles above the cabs aren’t there to spray water, and that lumpy thing on the back isn’t a spotlight—it’s a grenade launcher.

The inspector comes up behind me, staggering slightly in the daylight. “What’s going on?” she asks.

“Here, meet Scary Spice and Sergeant Howe. Sarge, Scary, meet Detective Inspector Sullivan. Uh, the first thing you need to do is to go round the site and shoot out every closed circuit TV camera you can see—or that can see you. Got that? And webcams. And doorcams. See a camera, smash it, that’s the rule.”

“Cameras. Ri-ight.” Sergeant Howe looks mildly skeptical, but nods. “It’s definitely cameras?”

“Who are these guys?” asks Josephine.

“Artists’ Rifles. They work with us,” I say. Scary nods, deeply serious. “Listen, you go outside, do anything necessary to keep the local emergency services off our backs. If you need backup ask Sergeant Howe here. Sarge, she’s basically sound and she’s working for us on this. Okay?”

She doesn’t wait for confirmation, just shoves past me and heads out into the daylight, blinking and shaking her head. I carry on briefing the OCCULUS guys. “Don’t worry about anything that uses film, it’s the closed circuit TV variety that’s hostile. And, oh, try to make sure that you are never in view of more than one of ‘em at a time.”

“And don’t walk on the cracks in the pavement or the bears will get us, check.” Howe turns to Scary Spice: “Okay, you heard the man. Let’s do it.” He glances at me. “Anything inside?”

“We’re taking care of it,” I say. “If we need help we’ll ask.”

“Check.” Scary is muttering into his throat mike and fake firemen with entirely authentic fire axes are walking around the bushes along the side of the building as if searching for signs of combustion. “Okay, we’ll be out here.”

“Is Angleton in the loop? Or the captain?”

“Your boss is on his way out here by chopper. Ours is on medical leave. You need to escalate, I’ll get you the lieutenant.”

“Okay.” I duck back into the reception area then nerve myself to go back into the development pool at the rear of the building, below the offices and above the labs.

Site Able is a small departmental satellite office, small for security reasons: ten systems engineers, a couple of manager dogsbodies, and a security officer. Most of them are right here right now, and they’re not going anywhere. I walk around the service core in the dim glow of the emergency light, bypassing splashes of green paint that look black in the red glow. The octagonal developer pool at the back is also dimly illuminated—there are no windows, and the doors are triple-sealed with rubber gaskets impregnated with fine copper mesh—and some of the partitions have been blown over. The whole place is ankle deep in white mist left over from the halon dump system that went off when the first bodies exploded-good thing the air conditioning continued to run or the place would be a gas trap. The webcams are all where I left them, in a trash can at the foot of the spiral staircase up to level one, cables severed with my multitool just to make sure nobody tries to plug them back in again.

The victims—well, I have to step over one of them to get up the staircase. It’s pretty gross but I’ve seen dead bodies before, including burn cases, and at least this was fast. But I don’t think I’m going to forget the smell in a hurry. In fact, I think I’m going to have nightmares about it tonight, and maybe get drunk and cry on Mo’s shoulder several times over the next few weeks until I’ve got it out of my system. But for now, I shove it aside and step over them. Got to keep moving, that’s the main thing—unless I want there to be more of them. And on my conscience.

At the top of the staircase there’s a narrow corridor and partitioned offices, also lit by the emergency lights. I follow the sound of keyclicks to Voss’s office, the door of which is ajar. Potted cheese plants wilting in the artificial light, puke-brown antistatic carpet, ministry-issue desks-nobody can accuse Q Division’s brass of living high on the hog. Andy’s sitting in front of Voss’s laptop, tapping away with a strange expression on his face. “OCCULUS is in place,” I report. “Found anything interesting?”

Andy points at the screen. “We’re in the wrong fucking town,” he says mildly.

I circle the desk and lean over his shoulder. “Oh shit.”

“You can say that again if you like.” It’s an email Cc’d to Voss, sent over our intranet to a Mike McLuhan. Subject: meeting. Sender: Harriet.

“Oh shit. Twice over. Something stinks. Hey, I was supposed to be in a meeting with her today,” I say.

“A meeting?” Andy looks up, worried.

“Yeah. Bridget got a hair up her ass about running a BSA-authorised software audit on the office, the usual sort of make-work. Don’t know that it’s got anything to do with this, though.”

“A software audit? Didn’t she know Licencing and Compliance handles that on a blanket department-wide basis? We were updated on it about a year ago.”

“We were—” I sit down heavily on the cheap plastic visitor’s chair. “What are the chances this McLuhan guy put the idea into Harriet’s mind in the first place? What are the chances it isn’t connected?”

“McLuhan. The medium is the message. SCORPION STARE. Why do I have a bad feeling about this?” Andy sends me a worried look.

“ ‘Nother possibility, boss-man. What if it’s an internal power play? The software audit’s a cover, Purloined Letter style, hiding something fishy in plain sight where nobody will look at it twice until it’s too late.”

“Nonsense, Bridget’s not clever enough to blow a project wide open just to discredit—” His eyes go wide.

“Are you sure of that? I mean, really and truly sure? Bet-your-life sure?”

“But the body count!” He’s shaking his head in disbelief.

“So it was all a prank and it was meant to begin and end with Daisy, but it got a bit out of control, didn’t it? These things happen. You told me the town police camera network’s capable of end-to-end tracking and zone hand-off, didn’t you? My guess is someone in this office—Voss, maybe—followed me to the car pound and realised we’d found the vehicle McLuhan used to boost Daisy. Stupid wankers, if they’d used one of their own motors we’d not be any the wiser, but they tried to use a stolen one as a cutout. So they panicked and dumped SCORPION STARE into the pound, and it didn’t work, so they panicked some more and McLuhan panicked even more—bet you he’s the go-between, or even the guy behind it. What is he, senior esoteric officer? Deputy site manager? He’s in London so he planted the crazy blackmail threat then brought down the hammer on his own coworkers. Bet you he’s a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers—and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it’s to defend his position.”

“Damn,” Andy says mildly as he stands up. “Okay, so. Internal politics, stupid bloody prank organised to show up Angleton, they use idiots to run it so your cop finds the trail, then the lunatic in chief cuts loose and starts killing people. Is that your story?”

“Yup.” I nod like my neck’s a spring. “And right now they’re back at the Laundry doing who the fuck knows what—”

“We’ve got to get McLuhan nailed down fast, before he decides the best way to cover his tracks is to take out head office. And us.” He smiles reassuringly. “It’ll be okay, Angleton’s on his way in. You haven’t seen him in action before, have you?”

Picture a light industrial/office estate in the middle of anytown with four cherry-red fire pumps drawn up, men in HAZMAT gear combing the brush, a couple of police cars with flashing light bars drawn up across the road leading into the cul-de-sac to deter casual rubberneckers. Troops disguised as firemen are systematically shooting out every one of the security cameras on the estate with their silenced carbines. Others, wearing police or fire service uniforms, are taking up stations in front of every building—occupied or otherwise—to keep the people inside out of trouble.

Just another day at the office, folks, nothing to see here, walk on by.

Well, maybe not. Here comes a honking great helicopter—the Twin Squirrel from the Met’s ASU that I was in the other night, only it looks a lot bigger and scarier when seen from a couple hundred feet in full daylight as it settles in on the car park, leaves and debris blowing out from under the thundering rotors.

The chopper is still rocking on its skids when one of the back doors opens and Angleton jumps down, stumbling slightly—he’s no spring chicken—then collects himself and strides toward us, clutching a briefcase. “Speak,” he tells me, voice barely raised to cover the rush of slowing rotors.

“Problem, boss.” I point to the building: “Andy’s still inside confirming the worst but it looks like it started as a fucking stupid interdepartmental prank; it went bad, and now one of the perps has wigged out and gone postal.”

“A prank.” He turns those icy blue peepers on me and just for a fraction of a second I’m not being stared at by a sixty-something skinny bald guy in a badly fitting suit but by a walking skeleton with the radioactive fires of hell burning balefully in its eye sockets. “You’d better take me to see Andrew. Fill me in on the way.”

I’m stumbling over my tongue and hurrying to keep up with Angleton when we make it to the front desk, where Andy’s busy giving the OCCULUS folks cleanup directions and tips for what to do with the broken lamia and the summoning altars in the basement. “Who’s—oh, it’s you. About time.” He grins. “Who’s holding the fort?”

“I left Boris in charge,” Angleton says mildly, not taking exception at Andy’s brusque manner. “How bad is it?”

“Bad.” Andy’s cheek twitches, which is a bad sign: all his confidence seems to have fled now that Angleton’s arrived. “We need to—damn.”

“Take your time,” Angleton soothes him. I’m not going to eat you.” Which is when I realise just how scared I am, and if I’m half out of my tree what does that say about Andy? I’ll give Angleton this much, he knows when not to push his subordinates too hard. Andy takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, then tries again.

“We’ve got two loose ends: Mark McLuhan, and a John Doe. McLuhan worked here as senior occult officer, basically an oversight role. He also did a bunch of other stuff for Q Division that took him down to Dansey House in a liaison capacity. I can’t believe how badly we’ve slipped up on our vetting process—”

“Take your time,” Angleton interrupts, this time with a slight edge to his voice.

“Sorry, sorry. Bob’s been putting it together.” A nod in my direction. “McLuhan is working with a John Doe inside the Laundry to make us look bad via a selective disclosure leak—basically one that was intended to be written off as bad-ass forteana, nothing for anyone but the black helicopter crowd to pay any attention to, except that it would set you up to look bad. I’ve found some not very good email from Bridget inviting McLuhan down to headquarters, some pretext to do with a software audit. Really fucking stupid stuff that Bob can do the legwork on later. But what I really think is happening is, Bridget arranged this to make you look bad in support of a power play in front of the director’s office.”

Angleton turns to me: “Phone head office. Ask for Boris. Tell him to arrest McLuhan. Tell him, SHRINKWRAP. And, MARMOSET.” I raise an eyebrow. “Now, lad!”

Ah, the warm fuzzies of decisive action. I head for the lamia’s desk and pick up the phone and dial 666; behind me Andy is telling Angleton something in a low voice.

“Switchboard?” I ask the sheet of white noise. “I want Boris. Now.” The Enochian metagrammar parsers do their thing and the damned souls or enchained demons or whatever on switchboard hiss louder then connect the circuit. I hear another ring tone. Then a familiar voice.

“Hello, Capital Laundry Services, system support department. Who are you wanting to talk to?”

Oh shit. “Hello, Harriet,” I say, struggling to sound calm and collected. Getting Bridget’s imp at this juncture is not a good sign, especially when she and Boris are renowned for their mutual loathing. “This is a red phone call. Is Boris about?”

“Oh-ho, Robert! I was wondering where you were. Are you trying to pull a sickie again?”

“No, I’m not,” I say, taking a deep breath. “I need to talk to Boris urgently, Harriet, is he around?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly say. That would be disclosing information prejudicial to the good running of the department over a public network connection, and I couldn’t possibly encourage you to do that when you can bloody well show your face in the office for the meeting we scheduled the day before yesterday, remember that?”

I feel as if my guts have turned to ice. “Which meeting?” I ask.

“The software audit, remember? You never read the agenda for meetings. If you did, you might have taken an interest in the any other business . . . Where are you calling from, Bob? Anyone would think you didn’t work here . . .”

“I want to talk to Boris. Right now.” The graunching noise in the background is my jaw clenching. “It’s urgent, Harriet. To do with the code blue the other day. Now you can get him right now or you can regret it later, which is your choice?”

“Oh, I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” she says in what I can only describe as a gloating tone of voice. “After missing the meeting, you and your precious Counter-Possession Unit will be divisional history, and you’ll have only yourselves to blame! Goodbye.” And the bitch hangs up on me.

I look round and see both Andy and Angleton staring at me. “She hung up,” I say stupidly. “Fucking Harriet has a diversion on Boris’s line. It’s a setup. Something about making an end run around the CPU.”

“Then we shall have to attend this meeting in person,” Angleton says, briskly marching toward the front doors, which bend aside to get out of his way. “Follow me!”

We proceed directly to the helicopter, which has kept its engines idling while we’ve been inside. It’s only taken, what? Three or four minutes since Angleton arrived? I see another figure heading toward us across the car park—a figure in a grey trouser suit, slightly stained, a wild look in her eyes. “Hey, you!” she shouts. “I want some answers!”

Angleton turns to me. “Yours?” I nod. He beckons to her imperiously. “Come with us,” he calls, raising his voice over the whine of gathering turbines. Past her shoulder I see one of the fake firemen lowering a kit-bag that had been, purely coincidentally, pointed at DI Sullivan’s back. “This bit I always dislike,” he adds in a low monotone, his face set in a grim expression of disapproval. “The fewer lives we warp, the better.”

I half-consider asking him to explain what he means, but he’s already climbing into the rear compartment of the chopper and Andy is following him. I give Josephine a hand up as the blades overhead begin to turn and the engines rise in a full-throated bellowing duet. I get my headset on in time to hear Angleton’s orders: “Back to London, and don’t spare the horses.”

The Laundry is infamous for its grotesque excesses in the name of accounting; budgetary infractions are punished like war crimes, and mere paper clips can bring down the wrath of dead alien gods on your head. But when Angleton says don’t spare the horses he sends us screaming across the countryside at a hundred and forty miles per hour, burning aviation fuel by the ton and getting ATC to clear lower priority traffic out of our way—and all because he doesn’t want to be late for a meeting. There’s a police car waiting for us at the pad, and we cut through the chaotic London traffic incredibly fast, almost making it into third gear at times.

“McLuhan’s got SCORPION STARE,” I tell Angleton round the curve of Andy’s shoulder. “And headquarters’s security cams are all wired. If he primes them before we get back there, we could find a lockout—or worse. It all depends on what Harriet and her boss have been planning.”

“We will just have to see.” Angleton nods very slightly, his facial expression rigid. “Do you still have your lucky charm?”

“Had to use it.” I’d shrug, if there was more room. “What do you think Bridget’s up to?”

“I couldn’t possibly comment.” I’d take Angleton’s dismissal as a put-down, but he points his chin at the man in the driver’s seat. “When we get there, Bob, I want you to go in through the warehouse door and wake the caretaker. You have your mobile telephone?”

“Uh, yeah,” I say, hoping like hell that the battery hasn’t run down.

“Good. Andrew. You and I will enter through the front door. Bob, set your telephone to vibrate. When you receive a message from me, you will know it is time to have the janitor switch off the main electrical power. And the backup power.”

“Oops.” I lick my suddenly dry lips, thinking of all the electrical containment pentacles in the basement and all the computers plugged into the filtered and secured circuit on the other floors. “All hell’s going to break loose if I do that.”

“That’s what I’m counting on.” The bastard smiles, and despite all the horrible sights I’ve seen today so far, I hope most of all that I never see it again before the day I die.

“Hey, what about me?” Angleton glances at the front seat with a momentary flash of irritation. Josephine stares right back, clearly angry and struggling to control it. “I’m your liaison officer for North Buckinghamshire,” she says, “and I’d really like to know who I’m liaising with, especially as you seem to have left a few bodies on my manor that I’m going to have to bury, and this jerk”—she means me, I am distraught! Oh, the ignominy!—“promised me you’d have the answers.”

Angleton composes himself. “There are no answers, madam, only further questions,” he says, and just for a second he sounds like a pious wanker of a vicar going through the motions of comforting the bereaved. “And if you want the answers you’ll have to go through the jerk’s fling cabinet.” Bastard. Then there’s a flashing sardonic grin, dry as the desert sands in June: “Do you want to help prevent any, ah, recurrence of what you saw an hour ago? If so, you may accompany the jerk and attempt to keep him from dying.” He reaches out a hand and drops a ragged slip of paper over her shoulder. “You’ll need this.”

Provisional warrant card, my oh my. Josephine mutters something unkind about his ancestry, barnyard animals, and lengths of rubber hose. I pretend not to hear because we’re about three minutes out, stuck behind a slow-moving but gregarious herd of red double-decker buses, and I’m trying to remember the way to the janitor’s office in the Laundry main unit basement and whether there’s anything I’m likely to trip over in the dark.

“Excuse me for asking, but how many corpses do you usually run into in the course of your job?” I ask.

“Too many, since you showed up.” We turn the street corner into a brick-walled alley crowded by wheelie bins and smelling of vagrant piss. “But since you ask, I’m a detective inspector. You get to see lots of vile stuff on the beat.”

Something in her expression tells me I’m on dangerous ground here, but I persist: “Well, this is the Laundry. It’s our job to deal with seven shades of vile shit so that people like you don’t have to.” I take a deep breath. “And before we go in I figured I should warn you that you’re going to think Fred and Rosemary West work for us, and Harold Shipman’s the medical officer.” At this point she goes slightly pale—the Demon DIYers and Dr. Death are the acme of British serial killerdom after all—but she doesn’t flinch.

“And you’re the good guys?”

“Sometimes I have my doubts,” I sigh.

“Well, join the club.” I have a feeling she’s going to make it, if she lives through the next hour.

“Enough bullshit. This is the street level entrance to the facilities block under Headquarters Building One. You saw what those fuckers did with the cameras at the car pound and Site Able. If my guess is straight, they’re going to do it all over again here—or worse. From here there’s a secure line to several of the Met’s offices, including various borough-level control systems, such as the Camden Town control centre. SCORPION STARE isn’t ready for nationwide deployment—”

“What the hell would justify that?” she demands, eyes wide.

“You do not have clearance for that information.” Amazing how easily the phrase trips off the tongue.

“Besides, it’d give you nightmares. But you’re the one who mentioned hell, and as I was saying”—I stop, with an overflowing dumpster between us and the anonymous doorway—“our pet lunatic, who killed all those folks at Dillinger Associates and who is now in a committee meeting upstairs, could conceivably upload bits of SCORPION STARE to the various camera control centres. Which is why we are going to stop him, by bringing down the intranet backbone cable in and out of the Laundry’s headquarters. Which would be easy if this was a bog-standard government office, but a little harder in reality because the Laundry has guards, and some of those guards are very special, and some of those very special guards will try to stop us by eating us alive.”

“Eating. Us.” Josephine is looking a little glassy. “Did I tell you that I don’t do headhunters? That’s Recruitment’s job.”

“Look,” I say gently, “have you ever seen Night of the Living Dead? It’s really not all that different—except that I’ve got permission to be here, and you’ve got a temporary warrant card too, so we should be all right.” A thought strikes me. “You’re a cop. Have you been through firearms training?”

Click-clack. “Yes,” she says drily. “Next question?”

“Great! If you’d just take that away from my nose—that’s better—it won’t work on the guards. Sorry, but they’re already, uh, metabolically challenged. However, it will work very nicely on the CCTV cameras. Which—”

“Okay, I get the picture. We go in. We stay out of the frame unless we want to die.” She makes the pistol vanish inside her jacket and looks at me askance—for the first time since the car pound with something other than irritation or dislike. Probably wondering why I didn’t flinch. (Obvious, really: compared with what’s waiting for us inside a little intracranial air conditioning is a relatively painless way to go, and besides, if she was seriously pissed at me she could have gotten me alone in a nice soundproofed cell back in her manor with a pair of size twelve boots and their occupants.) “We’re going to go in there and you’re going to talk our way past the zombies while I shoot out all the cameras, right?”

“Right. And then I’m going to try to figure out how to take down the primary switchgear, the backup substation, the diesel generator, and the batteries for the telephone switch and the protected computer ring main all at the same time so nobody twigs until it’s too late. While fending off anyone who tries to stop us. Clear?”

“As mud.” She stares at me. “I always wanted to be on TV, but not quite this way.”

“Yeah, well.” I glance up the side of the building, which is windowless as far as the third floor (and then the windows front onto empty rooms three feet deep, just to give the appearance of occupation). “I’d rather call in an air strike on the power station but there’s a hospital two blocks that way and an old folks’ home on the other side . . . you ready?”

She nods. “Okay.” And I take a step round the wheelie bin and knock on the door.

The door is a featureless blue slab of paint. As soon as I touch it, it swings open—no creaking here, did you think this was a Hammer horror flick?—to reveal a small, dusty room with a dry powder fire extinguisher bolted to one wall and another door opposite. “Wait,” I say, and take the spray paint can out of my pocket. “Okay, come on in. Keep your warrant note handy.”

She jumps when the door closes automatically with a faint hiss, and I remember to swallow—it only looks like a cheap fire door from the outside. “Okay, here’s the fun part.” I give the inner door a quick scan with a utility on my palmtop and it comes up blank, so I put my hand on the grab-bar and pull. This is the moment of truth; if the shit has truly hit the fan already the entire building will be locked down tighter than a nuclear bunker, and the thaumaturgic equivalent of a three-phase six-hundred-volt bearer will be running through all the barred portals. But I get to keep on breathing, and the door swings open on a dark corridor leading past shut storeroom doors to a dingy wooden staircase. And that’s all it is—there’s nothing in here to confuse an accidental burglar who makes it in past the wards in hope of finding some office supplies to filch. All the really classified stuff is either ten storeys underground or on the other side of the cellar walls. Twitching in the darkness.

“I don’t see any zombies,” Josephine says edgily, crowding up behind me in the gloom.

“That’s because they’re—” I freeze and bring up the dry powder extinguisher. “Have you got a pocket mirror?” I ask, trying to sound casual.

“Hold on.” I hear a dry click, and then she passes me something like a toothbrush fucking a contact lens. “Will this do?”

“Oh wow, I didn’t know you were a dentist.” It’s on a goddamn telescoping wand almost half a metre long. I lean forward and gingerly stretch the angled mirror so I can view the stairwell.

“It’s for checking the undersides of cars for bombs—or cut brake pipes. You never know what the little fuckers in the school playground will do while you’re talking to the headmistress.”

Gulp. “Well, I guess this is a suitable alternative use.”

I don’t see any cameras up there so I retract the mirror and I’m about to set foot on the stairs when she says, “You missed one.”

“Huh . . .?”

She points. It’s about waist level, the size of a doorknob, embedded in the dark wooden wainscoting, and it’s pointing up the stairs. “Shit, you’re right.” And there’s something odd about it. I slide the mirror closer for an oblique look and dry-swallow. “There are two lenses. Oh, tricky.”

I pull out my multitool and begin digging them out of the wall. It’s coax cable, just like the doctor ordered. There’s no obvious evidence of live SCORPION STARE, but my hands are still clammy and my heart is in my mouth as I realise how close I came to walking in front of it. How small can they make CCTV cameras, anyway? I keep seeing smaller and smaller ones . . .

“Better move fast,” she comments.

“Why?”

“Because you’ve just told them you’re coming.”

“Oh. Okay.” We climb the staircase in bursts, stopping before the next landing to check for more basilisk bugs. Josephine spots one, and so do I. I tag them with the mostly empty can of paint, then she blasts their lenses from behind and underneath, trying not to breathe the fumes in before we move past them. There’s an unnaturally creaky floorboard, too, just for yucks. But we make it to the ground floor landing alive, and I just have time to realise how badly we’ve fucked up when the lights come up and the night watchmen come out from either side.

“Ah, Bob! Decided to visit the office for once, have we?”

It’s Harriet, looking slightly demented in a black pinstriped suit and clutching a glass of what looks like fizzy white wine.

“Where the fuck is everyone else?” I demand, looking round. At this time of day the place should be heaving with office bodies. But all I see here is Harriet—and three or four silently leaning night watchmen in their grey ministry suits and hangdog expressions, luminous worms of light glowing in their eyes.

“I do believe we called the monthly fire drill a few hours ahead of schedule.” Harriet smirks. “Then we locked the doors. It’s quite simple, you know.”

Fred from Accounting lurches sideways and peers at me over her shoulder. He’s been dead for months: normally I’d say this was something of an improvement, but right now he’s drooling slightly as if it’s past his teatime.

“Who’s that?” asks Josephine.

“Who? Oh, one of them’s a shambling undead bureaucrat and the other one used to work in accounts before he had a little accident with a summoning.” I bare my teeth at Harriet. “The game’s up.”

“I don’t think so.” She’s just standing there, looking supercilious and slightly triumphant behind her bodyguard of zombies. “Actually the boot is on the other foot. You’re late and you’re out of a job, Robert. The Counter-Possession Unit is being liquidated—that old fossil Angleton isn’t needed anymore, once we get the benefits of panopticon surveillance combined with look-to-kill technology and rolled out on a departmental basis. In fact, you’re just in time to clear your desk.” She grins, horribly. “Stupid little boy, I’m sure they can find a use for you below stairs.”

“You’ve been talking to our friend Mr. McLuhan, haven’t you?” I ask desperately, trying to keep her talking—I really don’t want the night watchmen to carry me away. “Is he upstairs?”

“If so, you probably need to know that I intend to arrest him. Twelve counts of murder and attempted murder, in case you were wondering.” I almost look round, but manage to resist the urge: Josephine’s voice is brittle but controlled. “Police.”

“Wrong jurisdiction, dear,” Harriet says consolingly. “And I do believe our idiot tearaway here has got you on the wrong message. That will never do.” She snaps her fingers. “Take the woman, detain the man.”

“Stop—” I begin. The zombies step forward, lurching jerkily, and then all hell breaks loose about twenty centimetres from my right ear. Zombies make excellent night watchmen and it takes a lot to knock one down, but they’re not bulletproof, and Josephine unloads her magazine two rounds at a time. I’m dazzled by the flash and my head feels as if someone is whacking me on the ear with a shovel—bits of meat and unspeakable ripped stuff go flying, but precious little blood, and they keep coming.

“When you’ve quite finished,” Harriet hisses, and snaps her fingers at Josephine: the zombies pause for a moment then close in, as their mistress backs toward the staircase up to the first floor.

“Quick, down the back corridor there!” I gasp, pointing to my left.

“The—what?”

“Quick!”

I dash along the corridor, tugging Josephine’s arm until I feel her running with me. I pull my warrant card and yell, “Open sesame!” ahead and doors slam open to either side—including the broom closets and ductwork access points. “In here!” I dive in to one side and Josephine piles in after me and I yank at the door—“Close, damn you, fuck, close sesame!” and it slams shut with the hardscrabble of bony fingertips on the outside.

“Got a light?” I ask.

“Nah, I don’t smoke. But I’ve got a torch somewhere—”

The scrabbling’s getting louder. “I don’t want to hurry you or anything, but—” And lo, there is light.

We’re standing at the bottom of a shallow shaft with cable runs vanishing above us into the gloom. Josephine looks frantic. “They didn’t drop! I shot them and they didn’t drop!”

“Don’t sweat it, they’re run by remote control.” Maybe now is not the time to explain about six-node summoning points, the Vohlman exercise, and the minutiae of raising and binding the dead: they’re knocking on the door and they want in. But look, here’s something even more interesting. “Hey, I see CAT-5 cabling. Pass me your torch?”

“This isn’t the time to go all geeky on me, nerd-boy. Or are you looking for roaches?”

“Just fucking do it, I’ll explain later, okay?” Harriet is really getting to me; it’s been a long day and I told myself ages ago that if I ever heard another fucking lecture about timekeeping from her I’d go postal.

“Bingo.” It is CAT-5, and there’s an even more interesting cable running off to one side that looks like a DS-3. I whip out my multitool and begin working on the junction box. The scrabbling’s become insistent by the time I’ve uncovered the wires, but what the fuck. Who was it who said, When they think you’re technical is the time to go crude? I grab a handful of network cables and yank, hard. Then I grab another handful. Then, having disconnected the main trunk line—mission accomplished—I take another moment to think.

“Bob, have you got a plan?”

“I’m thinking.”

“Then think faster, they’re about to come through the door—”

Which is when I remember my mobile phone and decide to make a last-ditch attempt. I speed-dial Bridget’s office extension—and Angleton picks up after two rings. Bastard.

“Ah, Bob!” He sounds positively avuncular. “Where are you? Did you manage to shut down the Internet?”

I don’t have time to correct him. Besides, Josephine is reloading her cannon and I think she’s going to try a really horrible pun if I don’t produce a solution PDQ. “Boss, run McLuhan’s SCORPION STARE tool and upload the firmware to all the motion-tracking cameras on the ground floor east wing loop right now.”

“What? I’m not sure I heard you correctly.”

I take a deep breath. “She’s subverted the night watchmen. Everybody else is out of the building. Do it now or I’m switching to a diet of fresh brains.”

“If you say so,” he agrees, with the manner of an indulgent uncle talking to a tearaway schoolboy, then hangs up.

There’s a splintering crash and a hand rams through the door right between us and embeds itself in the wall opposite. “Oh shit,” I have time to say as the hand withdraws. Then a bolt of lightning goes off about two feet outside the door, roughly simultaneous with a sizzling crash and a wave of heat. We cower in the back of the cupboard, terrified of fire until after what seems like an eternity the sprinklers come on.

“Is it safe yet?” she asks—at least I think that’s what she says, my ears are still ringing.

“One way to find out.” I take the broken casing from the network junction box and chuck it through the hole in the door. When it doesn’t explode I gingerly push the door open. The ringing is louder; it’s my phone. I pull it wearily out of my pocket and hunch over it to keep it dry, leaning against the wall of the corridor to stay as far away from the blackened zombie corpses as I can. “Who’s there?”

“Your manager.” He sounds merely amused this time. “What a sorry shower you are! Come on up to Mahogany Row and dry off, both of you—the director has a personal bathroom, I think you’ve earned it.”

“Uh. Harriet? Bridget? McLuhan?”

“Taken care of,” he says complacently, and I shiver convulsively as the water reaches gelid tentacles down my spine and tickles my balls like a drowned lover.

“Okay. We’ll be right up.” I glance back at the smashed—in utility cupboard and Josephine smiles at me like a frightened feral rat, all sharp teeth and savagery and shining .38 automatic. “We’re safe now,” I say, as reassuringly as possible. “I think we won . . .”

The journey to Angleton’s lair is both up and along—he normally works out of a gloomy basement on the other side of the hollowed-out block of prime London real estate that is occupied by the Laundry, but this time he’s ensconced in the director’s suite on the abandoned top floor of the north wing.

The north wing is still dry. Over there, people are still at work, oblivious to the charred zombies lying on the scorched, soaked, thaumaturgically saturated wing next door. We catch a few odd stares—myself, soaked and battered in my outdoors gear, DI Sullivan in the wreckage of an expensive grey suit, oversized handgun clenched in a death grip at her side—but wisely or otherwise, nobody asks me to fix the Internet or demands to know why we’re tracking muddy water through Human Resources.

By the time we reach the thick green carpet and dusty quietude of the director’s suite Josephine’s eyes are wide but she’s stopped shaking. “You’ve got lots of questions,” I manage to say. “Try to save them for later. I’ll tell you everything I know and you’re cleared for, once I’ve had time to phone my fiance.”

“I’ve got a husband and a nine-year-old son, did you think of that before you dragged me into this insane nightmare? Sorry. I know you didn’t mean to. It’s just that shooting up zombies and being zapped by basilisks makes me a little upset. Nerves.”

“I know. Just try not to wave them in front of Angleton, okay?”

“Who is Angleton, anyway? Who does he think he is?”

I pause before the office door. “If I knew that, I’m not sure I’d be allowed to tell you.” I knock three times.

“Enter.” Andy opens the door for us. Angleton is sitting in the director’s chair, playing with something in the middle of the huge expanse of oak desk that looks as if it dates to the 1930s. (There’s a map on the wall behind him, and a quarter of it is pink.) “Ah, Mr. Howard, Detective Inspector. So good of you to come.”

I peer closer. Clack. Clack. Clack. “A Newton’s cradle; how 1970s.”

“You could say that.” He smiles thinly. The balls bouncing back and forth between the arms of the executive desktop aren’t chromed, rather they appear to be textured: pale brown on one side, dark or blonde and furry on the other. And bumpy, disturbingly bumpy . . .

I take a deep breath. “Harriet was waiting for us. Said we were too late and the Counter-Possession Unit was being disbanded.”

Clack. Clack.

“Yes, she would say that, wouldn’t she.”

Clack. Clack. Clack. Clack. Finally I can’t stand it anymore. “Well?” I demand.

“A fellow I used to know, his name was Ulyanov, once said something rather profound, do you know.” Angleton looks like the cat that’s swallowed the canary—and the feet are sticking out of the side of his mouth; he wants me to know this, whatever it is. “Let your enemies sell you enough rope to hang them with.”

“Uh, wasn’t that Lenin?” I ask.

A flicker of mild irritation crosses his face. “This was before then,” he says quietly. Clack. Clack. Clack. He flicks the balls to set them banging again and I suddenly realise what they are and feel quite sick. No indeed, Bridget and Harriet—and Bridget’s predecessor, and the mysterious Mr. McLuhan—won’t be troubling me again. (Except in my nightmares about this office, visions of my own shrunken head winding up in one of the director’s executive toys, skull clattering away eternally in a scream that nobody can hear anymore . . . ) “Bridget’s been plotting a boardroom coup for a long time, Robert. Probably since before you joined the Laundry—or were conscripted.” He spares Josephine a long, appraising look. “She suborned Harriet, bribed McLuhan, installed her own corrupt geas on Voss. Partners in crime, intending to expose me as an incompetent and a possible security leak before the Board of Auditors, I suppose—that’s usually how they plan it. I guessed this was going on, but I needed firm evidence. You supplied it. Unfortunately, Bridget was never too stable; when she realised that I knew, she ordered Voss to remove the witnesses then summoned McLuhan and proceeded with her palace coup da tat. Equally unfortunately for her, she failed to correctly establish who my line manager was before she attempted to go over my head to have me removed.” He taps the sign on the front of the desk: PRIVATE SECRETARY. Keeper of the secrets. Whose secrets?

“Matrix management,” I finally say, the lightbulb coming on above my head at last. “The Laundry runs on matrix management. She saw you on the org chart as head of the Counter-Possession Unit, not as private secretary to . . .” So that’s how come he’s got the free run of the director’s office!

Josephine is aghast. “You call this a government department?”

“Worse things happen in parliament every day of the year, my dear.” Now that the proximate threat is over, Angleton looks remarkably imperturbable; right now I doubt he’d turn her into a frog even if she started yelling at him. “Besides, you are aware of the maxim that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely? Here we deal every day of the week with power sufficient to destroy your mind. Even worse, we cannot submit to public oversight—it’s far too dangerous, like giving atomic firecrackers to three-year-olds. Ask Robert to tell you what he did to attract our attention later, if you like.” I’m still dripping and cold, but I can feel my ears flush.

He focusses on her some more. “We can reinforce the geas and release you,” he adds quietly. “But I think you can do a much more important job here. The choice is yours.”

I snort under my breath. She glances at me, eyes narrowed and cynical. “If this is what passes for a field investigation in your department, you need me.”

“Yes, well, you don’t need to make your mind up immediately. Detached duty, and all that. As for you, Bob,” he says, with heavy emphasis on my name, “you have acquitted yourself satisfactorily again. Now go and have a bath before you rot the carpet.”

“Bathroom’s two doors down the hall on the left,” Andy adds helpfully from his station against the wall, next to the door: there’s no doubt right now as to who’s in charge here.

“But what happens now?” I ask, bewildered and a bit shocky and already fighting off the yawns that come on when people stop trying to kill me. “I mean, what’s really happened?”

Angleton grins like a skull: “Bridget forfeited her department, so the directors have asked me to put Andrew in acting charge of it for the time being. Boris slipped up and failed to notice McLuhan; he is, ah, temporarily indisposed. And as for you, a job well done wins its natural reward—another job.” His grin widens. “As I believe the youth of today say, don’t have a cow . . .”

THE FAERY HANDBAG

Kelly Link

I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world—instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses—all the blues you can imagine—and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and rub a dress against my hand. “Guess what color this is.”

We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling, what color something was. For example, if you’re sitting on a lawn, you can tell what color green the grass is, with your eyes closed, depending on how silky-rubbery it feels. With clothing, stretchy velvet stuff always feels red when your eyes are closed, even if it’s not red. Natasha was always best at guessing colors, but Natasha is also best at cheating at games and not getting caught.

One time we were looking through kids’ T-shirts and we found a Muppets T-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where her mother had written it in permanent marker when Natalie went to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had a job.

Maybe you’re wondering what a guy like Jake is doing in The Garment District with a bunch of girls. The thing about Jake is that he always has a good time, no matter what he’s doing. He likes everything, and he likes everyone, but he likes me best of all. Wherever he is now, I bet he’s having a great time and wondering when I’m going to show up. I’m always running late. But he knows that.

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and T-shirts and shoes and handbags involves the Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they’re bad in an interesting way, the Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

Down in the basement at The Garment District they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. You can get eight pounds worth of prom dresses—a slinky black dress, a poufy lavender dress, a swirly pink dress, a silvery, starry lame dress so fine you could pass it through a key ring—for eight dollars. I go there every week, hunting for Grandmother Zofia’s faery handbag.

❖

The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.

Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s true.

❖

Grandmother Zofia said it was a family heirloom. She said that it was over two hundred years old. She said that when she died, I had to look after it. Be its guardian. She said that it would be my responsibility.

I said that it didn’t look that old, and that they didn’t have handbags two hundred years ago, but that just made her cross. She said, “So then tell me, Genevieve, darling, where do you think old ladies used to put their reading glasses and their heart medicine and their knitting needles?”

❖

I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. At the funeral, my mother said, half-laughing and half-crying, that her mother was the world’s best liar. I think she thought maybe Zofia wasn’t really dead. But I went up to Zofia’s coffin, and I looked her right in the eyes. They were closed. The funeral parlor had made her up with blue eyeshadow, and blue eyeliner. She looked like she was going to be a news anchor on Fox television, instead of dead. It was creepy and it made me even sadder than I already was. But I didn’t let that distract me.

“Okay, Zofia,” I whispered. “I know you’re dead, but this is important. You know exactly how important this is. Where’s the handbag? What did you do with it? How do I find it? What am I supposed to do now?”

Of course she didn’t say a word. She just lay there, this little smile on her face, as if she thought the whole thing—death, blue eyeshadow, Jake, the handbag, faeries, Scrabble, Baldeziwurlekistan, all of it—was a joke. She always did have a weird sense of humor. That’s why she and Jake got along so well.

❖

I grew up in a house next door to the house where my mother lived when she was a little girl. Her mother, Zofia Swink, my grandmother, baby-sat me while my mother and father were at work.

Zofia never looked like a grandmother. She had long black hair which she wore in little, braided, spiky towers and plaits. She had large blue eyes. She was taller than my father. She looked like a spy or ballerina or a lady pirate or a rock star. She acted like one, too. For example, she never drove anywhere. She rode a bike. It drove my mother crazy. “Why can’t you act your age?” she’d say, and Zofia would just laugh.

Zofia and I played Scrabble all the time. Zofia always won, even though her English wasn’t all that great, because we’d decided that she was allowed to use Baldeziwurleki vocabulary. Baldeziwurlekistan is where Zofia was born, over two hundred years ago. That’s what Zofia said. (My grandmother claimed to be over two hundred years old. Or maybe even older. Sometimes she claimed that she’d even met Genghis Khan. He was much shorter than her. I probably don’t have time to tell that story.) Baldeziwurlekistan is also an incredibly valuable word in Scrabble points, even though it doesn’t exactly fit on the board. Zofia put it down the first time we played. I was feeling pretty good because I’d gotten forty-one points for “zippery” on my turn.

Zofia kept rearranging her letters on her tray. Then she looked over at me, as if daring me to stop her, and put down “eziwurlekistan,” after “bald.” She used “delicious,” “zippery,” “wishes,” “kismet,” and “needle,” and made “to” into “toe.”

“Baldeziwurlekistan” went all the way across the board and then trailed off down the right-hand side.

I started laughing.

“I used up all my letters,” Zofia said. She licked her pencil and started adding up points.

“That’s not a word,” I said. “Baldeziwurlekistan is not a word. Besides, you can’t do that. You can’t put an eighteen-letter word on a board that’s fifteen squares across.”

“Why not? It’s a country,” Zofia said. “It’s where I was born, little darling.”

“Challenge,” I said. I went and got the dictionary and looked it up. “There’s no such place.”

“Of course there isn’t nowadays,” Zofia said. “It wasn’t a very big place, even when it was a place. But you’ve heard of Samarkand, and Uzbekistan and the Silk Road and Genghis Khan. Haven’t I told you about meeting Genghis Khan?”

I looked up Samarkand. “Okay,” I said. “Samarkand is a real place. A real word. But Baldeziwurlekistan isn’t.”

“They call it something else now,” Zofia said. “But I think it’s important to remember where we come from. I think it’s only fair that I get to use Baldeziwurleki words. Your English is so much better than me. Promise me something, mouthful of dumpling, a small, small thing. You’ll remember its real name. Baldeziwurlekistan. Now when I add it up, I get three hundred and sixty-eight points. Could that be right?”

❖

If you called the faery handbag by its right name, it would be something like “orzipanikanikcz,” which means the “bag of skin where the world lives,” only Zofia never spelled that word the same way twice. She said you had to spell it a little differently each time. You never wanted to spell it exactly the right way, because that would be dangerous.

I called it the faery handbag because I put “faery” down on the Scrabble board once. Zofia said that you spelled it with an “i,” not an “e.” She looked it up in the dictionary, and lost a turn.

❖

Zofia said that in Baldeziwurlekistan they used a board and tiles for divination, prognostication, and sometimes even just for fun. She said it was a little like playing Scrabble. That’s probably why she turned out to be so good at Scrabble. The Baldeziwurlekistanians used their tiles and board to communicate with the people who lived under the hill. The people who lived under the hill knew the future. The Baldeziwurlekistanians gave them fermented milk and honey, and the young women of the village used to go and lie out on the hill and sleep under the stars. Apparently the people under the hill were pretty cute. The important thing was that you never went down into the hill and spent the night there, no matter how cute the guy from under the hill was. If you did, even if you only spent a single night under the hill, when you came out again a hundred years might have passed. “Remember that,” Zofia said to me. “It doesn’t matter how cute a guy is. If he wants you to come back to his place, it isn’t a good idea. It’s okay to fool around, but don’t spend the night.”

Every once in a while, a woman from under the hill would marry a man from the village, even though it never ended well. The problem was that the women under the hill were terrible cooks. They couldn’t get used to the way time worked in the village, which meant that supper always got burnt, or else it wasn’t cooked long enough. But they couldn’t stand to be criticized. It hurt their feelings. If their village husband complained, or even if he looked like he wanted to complain, that was it. The woman from under the hill went back to her home, and even if her husband went and begged and pleaded and apologized, it might be three years or thirty years or a few generations before she came back out.

Even the best, happiest marriages between the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill fell apart when the children got old enough to complain about dinner. But everyone in the village had some hill blood in them.

“It’s in you,” Zofia said, and kissed me on the nose. “Passed down from my grandmother and her mother. It’s why we’re so beautiful.” When Zofia was nineteen, the shaman-priestess in her village threw the tiles and discovered that something bad was going to happen. A raiding party was coming. There was no point in fighting them. They would burn down everyone’s houses and take the young men and women for slaves. And it was even worse than that. There was going to be an earthquake as well, which was bad news because usually, when raiders showed up, the village went down under the hill for a night and when they came out again the raiders would have been gone for months or decades or even a hundred years. But this earthquake was going to split the hill right open.

The people under the hill were in trouble. Their home would be destroyed, and they would be doomed to roam the face of the earth, weeping and lamenting their fate until the sun blew out and the sky cracked and the seas boiled and the people dried up and turned to dust and blew away. So the shaman-priestess went and divined some more, and the people under the hill told her to kill a black dog and skin it and use the skin to make a purse big enough to hold a chicken, an egg, and a cooking pot. So she did, and then the people under the hill made the inside of the purse big enough to hold all of the village and all of the people under the hill and mountains and forests and seas and rivers and lakes and orchards and a sky and stars and spirits and fabulous monsters and sirens and dragons and dryads and mermaids and beasties and all the little gods that the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill worshipped.

“Your purse is made out of dog skin?” I said. “That’s disgusting!”

“Little dear pet,” Zofia said, looking wistful, “dog is delicious. To Baldeziwurlekistanians, dog is a delicacy.”

Before the raiding party arrived, the village packed up all of their belongings and moved into the handbag. The clasp was made out of bone. If you opened it one way, then it was just a purse big enough to hold a chicken and an egg and a clay cooking pot, or else a pair of reading glasses and a library book and a pillbox. If you opened the clasp another way, then you found yourself in a little boat floating at the mouth of a river. On either side of you was forest, where the Baldeziwurlekistanian villagers and the people under the hill made their new settlement.

If you opened the handbag the wrong way, though, you found yourself in a dark land that smelled like blood. That’s where the guardian of the purse (the dog whose skin had been sewn into a purse) lived. The guardian had no skin. Its howl made blood come out of your ears and nose. It tore apart anyone who turned the clasp in the opposite direction and opened the purse in the wrong way.

“Here is the wrong way to open the handbag,” Zofia said. She twisted the clasp, showing me how she did it. She opened the mouth of the purse, but not very wide and held it up to me. “Go ahead, darling, and listen for a second.”

I put my head near the handbag, but not too near. I didn’t hear anything. “I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“The poor dog is probably asleep,” Zofia said. “Even nightmares have to sleep now and then.”

❖

After he got expelled, everybody at school called Jake Houdini instead of Jake. Everybody except for me. I’ll explain why, but you have to be patient. It’s hard work telling everything in the right order.

Jake is smarter and also taller than most of our teachers. Not quite as tall as me. We’ve known each other since third grade. Jake has always been in love with me. He says he was in love with me even before third grade, even before we ever met. It took me a while to fall in love with Jake.

In third grade, Jake knew everything already, except how to make friends. He used to follow me around all day long. It made me so mad that I kicked him in the knee. When that didn’t work, I threw his backpack out of the window of the school bus. That didn’t work either, but the next year Jake took some tests and the school decided that he could skip fourth and fifth grade. Even I felt sorry for Jake then. Sixth grade didn’t work out. When the sixth graders wouldn’t stop flushing his head down the toilet, he went out and caught a skunk and set it loose in the boy’s locker room.

The school was going to suspend him for the rest of the year, but instead Jake took two years off while his mother homeschooled him. He learned Latin and Hebrew and Greek, how to write sestinas, how to make sushi, how to play bridge, and even how to knit. He learned fencing and ballroom dancing. He worked in a soup kitchen and made a Super-8 movie about Civil War reenactors who play extreme croquet in full costume instead of firing off cannons. He started learning how to play guitar. He even wrote a novel. I’ve never read it—he says it was awful.

When he came back two years later, because his mother had cancer for the first time, the school put him back with our year, in seventh grade. He was still way too smart, but he was finally smart enough to figure out how to fit in. Plus he was good at soccer and he was really cute. Did I mention that he played guitar? Every girl in school had a crush on Jake, but he used to come home after school with me and play Scrabble with Zofia and ask her about Baldeziwurlekistan.

❖

Jake’s mom was named Cynthia. She collected ceramic frogs and knock-knock jokes. When we were in ninth grade, she had cancer again. When she died, Jake smashed all of her frogs. That was the first funeral I ever went to. A few months later, Jake’s father asked Jake’s fencing teacher out on a date. They got married right after the school expelled Jake for his AP project on Houdini. That was the first wedding I ever went to. Jake and I stole a bottle of wine and drank it, and I threw up in the swimming pool at the country club. Jake threw up all over my shoes.

❖

So, anyway, the village and the people under the hill lived happily ever after for a few weeks in the handbag, which they had tied around a rock in a dry well which the people under the hill had determined would survive the earthquake. But some of the Baldeziwurlekistanians wanted to come out again and see what was going on in the world. Zofia was one of them. It had been summer when they went into the bag, but when they came out again, and climbed out of the well, snow was falling and their village was ruins and crumbly old rubble. They walked through the snow, Zofia carrying the handbag, until they came to another village, one that they’d never seen before. Everyone in that village was packing up their belongings and leaving, which gave Zofia and her friends a bad feeling. It seemed to be just the same as when they went into the handbag.

They followed the refugees, who seemed to know where they were going, and finally everyone came to a city. Zofia had never seen such a place. There were trains and electric lights and movie theaters, and there were people shooting each other. Bombs were falling. A war going on. Most of the villagers decided to climb right back inside the handbag, but Zofia volunteered to stay in the world and look after the handbag. She had fallen in love with movies and silk stockings and with a young man, a Russian deserter.

Zofia and the Russian deserter married and had many adventures and finally came to America, where my mother was born. Now and then Zofia would consult the tiles and talk to the people who lived in the handbag and they would tell her how best to avoid trouble and how she and her husband could make some money. Every now and then one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians, or one of the people from under the hill came out of the handbag and wanted to go grocery shopping, or to a movie or an amusement park to ride on roller coasters, or to the library.

The more advice Zofia gave her husband, the more money they made. Her husband became curious about Zofia’s handbag, because he could see that there was something odd about it, but Zofia told him to mind his own business. He began to spy on Zofia, and saw that strange men and women were coming in and out of the house. He became convinced that either Zofia was a spy for the Communists, or maybe that she was having affairs. They fought and he drank more and more, and finally he threw away her divination tiles. “Russians make bad husband s,” Zofia told me. Finally, one night while Zofia was sleeping, her husband opened the bone clasp and climbed inside the handbag.

“I thought he’d left me,” Zofia said. “For almost twenty years I thought he’d left me and your mother and taken off for California. Not that I minded. I was tired of being married and cooking dinners and cleaning house for someone else. It’s better to cook what I want to eat, and clean up when I decide to clean up. It was harder on your mother, not having a father. That was the pan that I minded most.

“Then it turned out that he hadn’t run away after all. He’d spent one night in the handbag and then come out again twenty years later, exactly as handsome as I remembered, and enough time had passed that I had forgiven him all the quarrels. We made up and it was all very romantic and then when we had another fight the next morning, he went and kissed your mother—who had slept right through his visit—on the cheek, and then he climbed right back inside the handbag. I didn’t see him again for another twenty years. The last time he showed up, we went to see Star Wars and he liked it so much that he went back inside the handbag to tell everyone else about it. In a couple of years they’ll all show up and want to see it on video and all of the sequels too.”

“Tell them not to bother with the prequels,” I said.

❖

The thing about Zofia and libraries is that she’s always losing library books. She says that she hasn’t lost them, and in fact that they aren’t even overdue, really. It’s just that even one week inside the faery handbag is a lot longer in library-world time. So what is she supposed to do about it? The librarians all hate Zofia. She’s banned from using any of the branches in our area. When I was eight, she got me to go to the library for her and check out a bunch of biographies and science books and some Georgette Heyer romance novels. My mother was livid when she found out, but it was too late. Zofia had already misplaced most of them.

❖

It’s really hard to write about somebody as if they’re really dead. I still think Zofia must be sitting in her living room, in her house, watching some old horror movie, dropping popcorn into her handbag. She’s waiting for me to come over and play Scrabble.

❖

Nobody is ever going to return those library books now.

❖

My mother used to come home from work and roll her eyes. “Have you been telling them your fairy stories?” she’d say. “Genevieve, your grandmother is a horrible liar.”

Zofia would fold up the Scrabble board and shrug at me and Jake. “I’m a wonderful liar,” she’d say. “I’m the best liar in the world. Promise me you won’t believe a single word.”

But she wouldn’t tell the story of the faery handbag to Jake. Only the old Baldeziwurlekistanian folktales and fairytales about the people under the hill. She told him about how she and her husband made it all the way across Europe, hiding in haystacks and in barns, and how once, when her husband went off to find food, a farmer found her hiding in his chicken coop and tried to rape her. But she opened up the faery handbag in the way she showed me, and the dog came out and ate the farmer and all his chickens too.

She was teaching Jake and me how to curse in Baldeziwurleki. I also know how to say I love you, but I’m not going to ever say it to anyone again, except to Jake, when I find him.

When I was eight, I believed everything Zofia told me. By the time I was thirteen, I didn’t believe a single word. When I was fifteen, I saw a man come out of her house and get on Zofia’s three-speed bicycle and ride down the street. His clothes looked funny. He was a lot younger than my mother and father, and even though I’d never seen him before, he was familiar. I followed him on my bike, all the way to the grocery store. I waited just past the checkout lanes while he bought peanut butter, Jack Daniel’s, half a dozen instant cameras, at least sixty packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, three bags of Hershey’s Kisses, a handful of Milky Way bars and other stuff from the rack of checkout candy. While the checkout clerk was helping him bag up all of that chocolate, he looked up and saw me. “Genevieve?” he said. “That’s your name, right?”

I turned and ran out of the store. He grabbed up the bags and ran after me. I don’t even think he got his change back. I was still running away, and then one of the straps on my flip-flops popped out of the sole, the way they do, and that made me really angry so I just stopped. I turned around.

“Who are you?” I said.

But I already knew. He looked like he could have been my mom’s younger brother. He was really cute. I could see why Zofia had fallen in love with him.

His name was Rustan. Zofia told my parents that he was an expert in Baldeziwurlekistanian folklore who would be staying with her for a few days. She brought him over for dinner. Jake was there too, and I could tell that Jake knew something was up. Everybody except my dad knew something was going on.

“You mean Baldeziwurlekistan is a real place?” my mother asked Rustan. “My mother is telling the truth?”

I could see that Rustan was having a hard time with that one. He obviously wanted to say that his wife was a horrible liar, but then where would he be? Then he couldn’t be the person that he was supposed to be.

There were probably a lot of things that he wanted to say. What he said was, “This is really good pizza.”

Rustan took a lot of pictures at dinner. The next day I went with him to get the pictures developed. He’d brought back some film with him, with pictures he’d taken inside the faery handbag, but those didn’t come out well. Maybe the film was too old. We got doubles of the pictures from dinner so that I could have some too. There’s a great picture of Jake, sitting outside on the porch. He’s laughing, and he has his hand up to his mouth, like he’s going to catch the laugh. I have that picture up on my computer, and also up on my wall over my bed.

I bought a Cadbury Creme Egg for Rustan. Then we shook hands and he kissed me once on each cheek. “Give one of those kisses to your mother,” he said, and I thought about how the next time I saw him, I might be Zofia’s age, and he would only be a few days older. The next time I saw him, Zofia would be dead. Jake and I might have kids. That was too weird.

❖

I know Rustan tried to get Zofia to go with him, to live in the handbag, but she wouldn’t.

“It makes me dizzy in there,” she used to tell me. “And they don’t have movie theaters. And I have to look after your mother and you. Maybe when you’re old enough to look after the handbag, I’ll poke my head inside, just long enough for a little visit.”

❖

I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he was smart. I’m pretty smart myself. I know that smart doesn’t mean nice, or even mean that you have a lot of common sense. Look at all the trouble smart people get themselves into.

I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he could make maki rolls and had a black belt in fencing, or whatever it is that you get if you’re good in fencing. I didn’t fall in love with Jake because he plays guitar. He’s a better soccer player than he is a guitar player.

Those were the reasons why I went out on a date with Jake. That, and because he asked me. He asked if I wanted to go see a movie, and I asked if I could bring my grandmother and Natalie and Natasha. He said sure and so all five of us sat and watched Bring It On and every once in a while Zofia dropped a couple of Milk Duds or some popcorn into her purse. I don’t know if she was feeding the dog, or if she’d opened the purse the right way and was throwing food at her husband.

I fell in love with Jake because he told stupid knock-knock jokes to Natalie, and told Natasha that he liked her jeans. I fell in love with Jake when he took me and Zofia home. He walked her up to her front door and then he walked me up to mine. I fell in love with Jake when he didn’t try to kiss me. The thing is, I was nervous about the whole kissing thing. Most guys think that they’re better at it than they really are. Not that I think I’m a real genius at kissing either, but I don’t think kissing should be a competitive sport. It isn’t tennis.

Natalie and Natasha and I used to practice kissing with each other. Not that we like each other that way, but just for practice. We got pretty good at it. We could see why kissing was supposed to be fun.

But Jake didn’t try to kiss me. Instead he just gave me this really big hug. He put his face in my hair and he sighed. We stood there like that, and then finally I said, “What are you doing?”

“I just wanted to smell your hair,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. That made me feel weird, but in a good way. I put my nose up to his hair, which is brown and curly, and I smelled it. We stood there and smelled each other’s hair, and I felt so good. I felt so happy.

Jake said into my hair, “Do you know that actor John Cusack?”

I said, “Yeah. One of Zofia’s favorite movies is Better Off Dead. We watch it all the time.”

“So he likes to go up to women and smell their armpits.”

“Gross!” I said. “That’s such a lie! What are you doing now? That tickles.”

“I’m smelling your ear,” Jake said.

❖

Jake’s hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after all the ice has melted.

❖

Kissing Jake is like kissing Natalie or Natasha, except that it isn’t just for fun. It feels like something there isn’t a word for in Scrabble.

❖

The deal with Houdini is that Jake got interested in him during Advanced Placement American History. He and I were both put in tenth-grade history. We were doing biography projects. I was studying Joseph McCarthy. My grandmother had all sorts of stories about McCarthy. She hated him for what he did to Hollywood.

Jake didn’t turn in his project—instead he told everyone in our AP class except for Mr. Streep (we call him Meryl) to meet him at the gym on Saturday. When we showed up, Jake reenacted one of Houdini’s escapes with a laundry bag, handcuffs, a gym locker, bicycle chains, and the school’s swimming pool. It took him three and a half minutes to get free, and this guy named Roger took a bunch of photos and then put the photos online. One of the photos ended up in the Boston Globe, and Jake got expelled. The really ironic thing was that while his mom was in the hospital, Jake had applied to MIT. He did it for his mom. He thought that way she’d have to stay alive. She was so excited about MIT. A couple of days after he’d been expelled, right after the wedding, while his dad and the fencing instructor were in Bermuda, he got an acceptance letter in the mail and a phone call from this guy in the admissions office who explained why they had to withdraw the acceptance.

❖

My mother wanted to know why I let Jake wrap himself up in bicycle chains and then watched while Peter and Michael pushed him into the deep end of the school pool. I said that Jake had a backup plan. Ten more seconds and we were all going to jump into the pool and open the locker and get him out of there. I was crying when I said that. Even before he got in the locker, I knew how stupid Jake was being. Afterward, he promised me that he’d never do anything like that again.

That was when I told him about Zofia’s husband, Rustan, and about Zofia’s handbag. How stupid am I?

❖

So I guess you can figure out what happened next. The problem is that Jake believed me about the handbag. We spent a lot of time over at Zofia’s, playing Scrabble. Zofia never let the faery handbag out of her sight. She even took it with her when she went to the bathroom. I think she even slept with it under her pillow.

I didn’t tell her that I’d said anything to Jake. I wouldn’t ever have told anybody else about it. Not Natasha. Not even Natalie, who is the most responsible person in all of the world. Now, of course, if the handbag turns up and Jake still hasn’t come back, I’ll have to tell Natalie. Somebody has to keep an eye on the stupid thing while I go find Jake.

What worries me is that maybe one of the Baldeziwurlekistanians or one of the people under the hill or maybe even Rustan popped out of the handbag to run an errand and got worried when Zofia wasn’t there. Maybe they’ll come looking for her and bring it back. Maybe they know I’m supposed to look after it now. Or maybe they took it and hid it somewhere. Maybe someone turned it in at the lost-and-found at the library and that stupid librarian called the FBI. Maybe scientists at the Pentagon are examining the handbag right now. Testing it. If Jake comes out, they’ll think he’s a spy or a superweapon or an alien or something. They’re not going to just let him go.

❖

Everyone thinks Jake ran away, except for my mother, who is convinced that he was trying out another Houdini escape and is probably lying at the bottom of a lake somewhere. She hasn’t said that to me, but I can see her thinking it. She keeps making cookies for me.

❖

What happened is that Jake said, “Can I see that for just a second?” He said it so casually that I think he caught Zofia off guard. She was reaching into the purse for her wallet. We were standing in the lobby of the movie theater on a Monday morning. Jake was behind the snack counter. He’d gotten a job there. Fie was wearing this stupid red paper hat and some kind of apron-bib thing. Fie was supposed to ask us if we wanted to supersize our drinks.

Fie reached over the counter and took Zofia’s handbag right out of her hand. Fie closed it and then he opened it again. I think he opened it the right way. I don’t think he ended up in the dark place. Fie said to me and Zofia, “I’ll be right back.” And then he wasn’t there anymore. It was just me and Zofia and the handbag, lying there on the counter where he’d dropped it.

If I’d been fast enough, I think I could have followed him. But Zofia had been guardian of the faery handbag for a lot longer. She snatched the bag back and glared at me. “He’s a very bad boy,” she said. She was absolutely furious. “You’re better off without him, Genevieve, I think.”

“Give me the handbag,” I said. “I have to go get him.”

“It isn’t a toy, Genevieve,” she said. “It isn’t a game. This isn’t Scrabble. Fie comes back when he comes back. If he comes back.”

“Give me the handbag,” I said. “Or I’ll take it from you.”

She held the handbag up high over her head, so that I couldn’t reach it. I hate people who are taller than me. “What are you going to do now,” Zofia said. “Are you going to knock me down? Are you going to steal the handbag? Are you going to go away and leave me here to explain to your parents where you’ve gone? Are you going to say goodbye to your friends? When you come out again, they will have gone to college. They’ll have jobs and babies and houses and they won’t even recognize you. Your mother will be an old woman and I will be dead.”

“I don’t care,” I said. I sat down on the sticky red carpet in the lobby and started to cry. Someone wearing a little metal name tag came over and asked if we were okay. His name was Missy. Or maybe he was wearing someone else’s tag.

“We’re fine,” Zofia said. “My granddaughter has the flu.”

She took my hand and pulled me up. She put her arm around me and we walked out of the theater. We never even got to see the stupid movie. We never even got to see another movie together. I don’t ever want to go see another movie. The problem is, I don’t want to see unhappy endings. And I don’t know if I believe in the happy ones.

“I have a plan,” Zofia said. “I will go find Jake. You will stay here and look after the handbag.”

“You won’t come back either,” I said. I cried even harder. “Or if you do, I’ll be like a hundred years old and Jake will still be sixteen.”

“Everything will be okay,” Zofia said. I wish I could tell you how beautiful she looked right then. It didn’t matter if she was lying or if she actually knew that everything was going to be okay. The important thing was how she looked when she said it. She said, with absolute certainty, or maybe with all the skill of a very skillful liar, “My plan will work. First we go to the library, though. One of the people under the hill just brought back an Agatha Christie mystery, and I need to return it.”

“We’re going to the library?” I said. “Why don’t we just go home and play Scrabble for a while.” You probably think I was just being sarcastic here, and I was being sarcastic. But Zofia gave me a sharp look. She knew that if I was being sarcastic that my brain was working again. She knew that I knew she was stalling for time. She knew that I was coming up with my own plan, which was a lot like Zofia’s plan, except that I was the one who went into the handbag. How was the part I was working on.

“We could do that,” she said. “Remember, when you don’t know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It’s like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.”

“Can we please just hurry?” I said.

Zofia just looked at me. “Genevieve, we have plenty of time. If you’re going to look after the handbag, you have to remember that. You have to be patient. Can you be patient?”

“I can try,” I told her. I’m trying, Zofia. I’m trying really hard. But it isn’t fair. Jake is off having adventures and talking to talking animals, and who knows, learning how to fly and some beautiful three-thousand-year-old girl from under the hill is teaching him how to speak fluent Baldeziwurleki. I bet she lives in a house that runs around on chicken legs, and she tells Jake that she’d love to hear him play something on the guitar. Maybe you’ll kiss her, Jake, because she’s put a spell on you. But whatever you do, don’t go up into her house. Don’t fall asleep in her bed. Come back soon, Jake, and bring the handbag with you.

❖

I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. I’m a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I watch Buffy reruns. I don’t believe in that kind of shit.

❖

We hadn’t been in the library for five minutes before Zofia picked up a biography of Carl Sagan and dropped it in her purse. She was definitely stalling for time. She was trying to come up with a plan that would counteract the plan that she knew I was planning. I wondered what she thought I was planning. It was probably much better than anything I’d come up with.

“Don’t do that!” I said.

“Don’t worry,” Zofia said. “Nobody was watching.”

“I don’t care if nobody saw! What if Jake’s sitting there in the boat, or what if he was coming back and you just dropped it on his head!”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Zofia said. Then she said, “It would serve him right, anyway.”

That was when the librarian came up to us. She had a name tag on as well. I was so sick of people and their stupid name tags. I’m not even going to tell you what her name was. “I saw that,” the librarian said.

“Saw what?” Zofia said. She smiled down at the librarian, like she was Queen of the Library, and the librarian was a petitioner.

The librarian stared hard at her. “I know you,” she said, almost sounding awed, like she was a weekend bird-watcher who’d just seen bigfoot. “We have your picture on the office wall. You’re Ms. Swink. You aren’t allowed to check out books here.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Zofia said. She was at least two feet taller than the librarian. I felt a bit sorry for the librarian. After all, Zofia had just stolen a seven-day book. She probably wouldn’t return it for a hundred years. My mother has always made it clear that it’s my job to protect other people from Zofia. I guess I was Zofia’s guardian before I became the guardian of the handbag.

The librarian reached up and grabbed Zofia’s handbag. She was small but she was strong. She jerked the handbag and Zofia stumbled and fell back against a work desk. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone except for me was getting a look at Zofia’s handbag. What kind of guardian was I going to be?

“Genevieve,” Zofia said. She held my hand very tightly, and I looked at her. She looked wobbly and pale. She said, “I feel very bad about all of this. Tell your mother I said so.”

Then she said one last thing, but I think it was in Baldeziwurleki.

The librarian said, “I saw you put a book in here. Right here.” She opened the handbag and peered inside. Out of the handbag came a long, lonely, ferocious, utterly hopeless scream of rage. I don’t ever want to hear that noise again. Everyone in the library looked up. The librarian made a choking noise and threw Zofia’s handbag away from her. A little trickle of blood came out of her nose and a drop fell on the floor. What I thought at first was that it was just plain luck that the handbag was closed when it landed. Later on I was trying to figure out what Zofia said. My Baldeziwurleki isn’t very good, but I think she was saying something like “Figures. Stupid librarian. I have to go take care of that damn dog.” So maybe that’s what happened. Maybe Zofia sent part of herself in there with the skinless dog. Maybe she fought it and won and closed the handbag. Maybe she made friends with it. I mean, she used to feed it popcorn at the movies. Maybe she’s still in there.

What happened in the library was Zofia sighed a little and closed her eyes. I helped her sit down in a chair, but I don’t think she was really there any more. I rode with her in the ambulance, when the ambulance finally showed up, and I swear I didn’t even think about the handbag until my mother showed up. I didn’t say a word. I just left her there in the hospital with Zofia, who was on a respirator, and I ran all the way back to the library. But it was closed. So I ran all the way back again, to the hospital, but you already know what happened, right? Zofia died. I hate writing that. My tall, funny, beautiful, book-stealing, Scrabble-playing, story-telling grandmother died.

But you never met her. You’re probably wondering about the handbag. What happened to it. I put up signs all over town, like Zofia’s handbag was some kind of lost dog, but nobody ever called.

❖

So that’s the story so far. Not that I expect you to believe any of it. Last night Natalie and Natasha came over and we played Scrabble. They don’t really like Scrabble, but they feel like it’s their job to cheer me up. I won. After they went home, I flipped all the tiles upside down and then I started picking them up in groups of seven. I tried to ask a question, but it was hard to pick just one. The words I got weren’t so great either, so I decided that they weren’t English words. They were Baldeziwurleki words.

Once I decided that, everything became perfectly clear. First I put down “kirif” which means “happy news,” and then I got a “b,” an o, an i, an e, an r, another 1, an s, and a z. So then I could make “kirif” into “bolekirifisz,” which could mean “the happy result of a combination of diligent effort and patience.”

I would find the faery handbag. The tiles said so. I would work the clasp and go into the handbag and have my own adventures and would rescue Jake. Hardly any time would have gone by before we came back out of the handbag. Maybe I’d even make friends with that poor dog and get to say good-bye, for real, to Zofia. Rustan would show up again and be really sorry that he’d missed Zofia’s funeral and this time he would be brave enough to tell my mother the whole story. He would tell her that he was her father. Not that she would believe him. Not that you should believe this story. Promise me that you won’t believe a word.

WINTERFAIR GIFTS

Lois McMaster Bujold

From Armsman Roic’s wrist com the gate guard’s voice reported laconically, “They’re in. Gate’s locked.”

“Right,” Roic returned. “Dropping the house shields.” He turned to the discreet security control panel beside the carved double doors of Vorkosigan House’s main entry hall, pressed his palm to the read-pad, and entered a short code. The faint hum of the force shield protecting the great house faded.

Roic stared anxiously out one of the tall, narrow windows flanking the portal, ready to throw the doors wide when m’lord’s groundcar pulled into the porte cochere. He glanced no less anxiously down the considerable length of his athletic body, checking his House uniform: half-boots polished to mirrors, trousers knife-creased, silver embroidery gleaming, dark brown fabric spotless.

His face heated in mortified memory of a less expected arrival in this very hall—also of Lord Vorkosigan with honored company in tow—and the unholy tableau m’lord had surprised with the Escobaran bounty hunters and the gooey debacle of the bug butter. Roic had looked an utter fool in that moment, nearly naked except for a liberal coating of sticky slime. He could still hear Lord Vorkosigan’s austere, amused voice, as cutting as a razor-slash across his ears: Armsman Roic, you’re out of uniform.

He thinks I’m an idiot. Worse, the Escobarans’ invasion had been a security breach, and while he’d not, technically, been on duty—he’d been asleep, dammit—he’d been present in the house and therefore on call for emergencies. The mess had been in his lap, literally. M’lord had dismissed him from the scene with no more than an exasperated Roic . . . get a bath, somehow more keenly excoriating than any bellowed dressing-down.

Roic checked his uniform again.

The long silvery groundcar pulled up and sighed to the pavement. The front canopy rose on the driver, the senior and dauntingly competent Armsman Pym. He released the rear canopy and hurried around the car to assist m’lord and his party. The senior armsman spared a glance through the narrow window as he strode by, his eye passing coolly over Roic and scanning the hall beyond to make sure it contained no unforeseen drama this time. These were Very Important Off-World Wedding Guests, Pym had impressed upon Roic. Which Roic might have been left to deduce by m’lord going personally to the shuttleport to greet their descent from orbit—but then, Pym had walked in on the bug butter disaster, too. Since that day, his directives to Roic had tended to be couched in words of one syllable, with no contingency left to chance.

A short figure in a well-tailored gray tunic and trousers hopped out of the car first: Lord Vorkosigan, gesturing expansively at the great stone mansion, talking nonstop over his shoulder, smiling in proud welcome. As the carved doors swung wide, admitting a blast of Vorbarr Sultana winter night air and a few glittering snow crystals, Roic stood to attention and mentally matched the other people exiting the groundcar with the security list he’d been given. A tall woman held a baby bundled in blankets; a lean, smiling fellow hovered by her side. They had to be the Bothari-Jeseks.

Madame Elena Bothari-Jesek was the daughter of the late, legendary Armsman Bothari; her right of entree into Vorkosigan House, where she had grown up with m’lord, was absolute, Pym had made sure Roic understood. It scarcely needed the silver circles of a jump pilot’s neural leads on midforehead and temples to identify the shorter middle-aged fellow as the Betan jump pilot, Arde Mayhew—should a jump pilot look so jump-lagged? Well, m’lord’s mother, Countess Vorkosigan, was Betan, too; and the pilot’s blinking, shivering stance was among the most physically unthreatening Roic had ever seen. Not so the final guest. Roic’s eyes widened.

The hulking figure unfolded from the groundcar and stood up, and up. Pym, who was almost as tall as Roic, did not come quite up to its shoulder. It shook out the swirling folds of a gray-and-white greatcoat of military cut and threw back its head. The light from overhead caught the face and gleamed off . . . were those fangs hooked over the outslung lower jaw?

Sergeant Taura was the name that went with it, by process of elimination.

One of m’lord’s old military buddies, Pym had given Roic to understand, and—don’t be fooled by the rank—of some particular importance (if rather mysterious, as was everything connected with Lord Miles Vorkosigan’s late career in Imperial Security). Pym was former ImpSec himself. Roic was not, as he was reminded, oh, three times a day on average.

At Lord Vorkosigan’s urging, the whole party poured into the entry hall, shaking off snow-spotted garments, talking, laughing. The greatcoat was swung from those high shoulders like a billowing sail, its owner turning neatly on one foot, folding the garment ready to hand over. Roic jerked back to avoid being clipped by a heavy, mahogany-colored braid of hair as it swept past, and rocked forward to find himself face to . . . nose to . . .

staring directly into an entirely unexpected cleavage. It was framed by pink silk in a plunging vee. He glanced up. The outslung jaw was smooth and beardless. The curious pale amber eyes, irises circled with sleek black lines, looked back down at him with, he instantly feared, some amusement.

Her fang-framed smile was deeply alarming.

Pym was efficiently organizing servants and luggage. Lord Vorkosigan’s voice yanked Roic back to focus. “Roic, did the count and countess get back in from their dinner engagement yet?”

“About twenty minutes ago, m’lord. They went upstairs to their suite to change.”

Lord Vorkosigan addressed the woman with the baby, who was attracting cooing maids. “My parents would skin me if I didn’t take you up to them instantly. Come on. Mother’s pretty eager to meet her namesake. I predict Baby Cordelia will have Countess Cordelia wrapped around her pudgy little fingers in about, oh, three and a half seconds. At the outside.”

He turned and started up the curve of the great staircase, shepherding the Bothari-Jeseks and calling over his shoulder, “Roic, show Arde and Taura to their assigned rooms, make sure they have everything they want. We’ll meet back in the library when you all are freshened up or whatever. Drinks and snacks will be laid on there.”

So, it was a lady sergeant. Galactics had those; m’lord’s mother had been a famous Betan officer in her day. But this one’s a bloody giant mutant lady sergeant was a thought Roic suppressed more firmly. Such backcountry prejudices had no place in this household. Though, she was clearly bioengineered, had to be. He recovered himself enough to say, “May I take your bag, um . . . Sergeant?”

“Oh, all right.” With a dubious look down at him, she handed him the satchel she’d had slung over one arm. The pink enamel on her fingernails did not quite camouflage their shape as claws, heavy and efficient as a leopard’s. The bag’s descending weight nearly jerked Roic’s arm out of its socket. He managed a desperate smile and began lugging it . two-handed up the staircase in m’lord’s wake.

He deposited the tired-looking pilot first. Sergeant Taura’s second-floor guest room was one of the renovated ones, with its own bath, around the corridor’s corner from m’lord’s own suite. She reached up and trailed a claw along the ceiling and smiled in evident approval of Vorkosigan House’s three-meter headspace.

“So,” she said, turning to Roic, “is a Winterfair wedding considered especially auspicious, in Barrayaran custom?”

“They’re not so common as in summer. Mostly I think it’s now because m’lord’s fiancee is between semesters at university.”

Her thick brows rose in surprise. “She’s a student?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He had a notion one addressed female sergeants as ma’am.

Pym would have known.

“I didn’t realize she was such a young lady.”

“No, ma’am. Madame Vorsoisson’s a widow—she has a little boy, Nikki—nine years old. Mad about jumpships. Do you happen t’ know—does that pilot fellow like children?” Mayhew was bound to be a magnet for Nikki.

“Why . . . I don’t know. I don’t think Arde knows either. He hardly ever meets any in a free mercenary fleet.”

He would have to watch, then, to be sure little Nikki didn’t set himself up for a painful rebuff. M’lord and m’lady-to-be might not be paying their usual attention to him, under the circumstances.

Sergeant Taura circled the room, gazing with what Roic hoped was approval at its comfortable appointments, and glanced out the window at the back garden, shrouded in winter white, the snow luminous in the security lighting. “I suppose it makes sense that he’d have to wed one of his own Vor kind, in the end.” Her nose wrinkled. “So, are the Vor a social class, a warrior caste, or what? I never could quite figure it out from Miles.

The way he talks about them you’d half think they were a religion. Or at any rate, his religion.”

Roic blinked in bafflement. “Well, no. And yes. All of that. The Vor are . . .

well, Vor.”

“Now that Barrayar has modernized, isn’t a hereditary aristocracy resented by the rest of your classes?”

“But they’re our Vor.”

“Says the Barrayaran. Hmm. So, you can criticize them, but heaven help any outsider who dares to?”

“Yes,” he said, relieved that she seemed to have grasped it despite his stumbling tongue.

“A family matter. I see.” Her grin faded into a frown that was actually less alarming—not so much fang. Her fingers clenching the curtain inadvertently poked claws through the expensive fabric; wincing, she shook her hand free and tucked it behind her back. Her voice lowered. “So she’s Vor, well and good. But does she love him?”

Roic heard the odd emphasis in her voice but was unclear how to interpret it. “I’m very sure of it, ma’am,” he avowed loyally. M’lady-to-be’s frowns, her darkening mood, were surely just prewedding nerves piled atop examination stress on the substrate of her not-so-distant bereavement.

“Of course.” Her smile flicked back in a perfunctory sort of way. “Have you served Lord Vorkosigan long, Armsman Roic?”

“Since last winter, ma’am, when a space fell vacant in the Vorkosigans’ armsmen’s score. I was sent up on recommendation from the Hassadar Municipal Guard,” he added a bit truculently, challenging her to sneer at his humble, nonmilitary origins. “A count’s twenty armsmen are always from his own district, y’see.”

She did not react; the Hassadar Municipal Guard evidently meant nothing to her.

He asked in return, “Did you . . . serve him very long? Out there?” In the galactic backbeyond where m’lord had acquired such exotic friends.

Her face softened, the fanged smile reappearing. “In a sense, all my life.

Since my real life began, ten years ago, anyway. He is a great man.” This last was delivered with unself-conscious conviction.

Well, he was a great man’s son, certainly. Count Aral Vorkosigan was a colossus bestriding the last half century of Barrayaran history. Lord Miles had led a less public career. Which no one would tell Roic anything about, the most junior armsman not being ex-ImpSec like m’lord and most of the rest of the armsmen, eh.

Still, Roic liked the little lord. What with the birth injuries and all—Roic shied away from the pejorative mutations—he’d had a rough ride all his life despite his high blood. Hard enough for him to just achieve normal things, like . . . like getting married. Although, m’lord had brains enough, belike, in compensation for his stunted body. Roic just wished he didn’t think his newest armsman a dolt.

“The library is to the right of the stairs as you go down, through the first room.” He touched his hand to his forehead in a farewell salute, by way of paving his escape from this unnerving giant female. “The dining’s to be casual tonight; you don’t need t’ dress.” He added, as she glanced down in bewilderment at her travel-rumpled loose pink jacket and trousers, “Dress up, that is. Fancy. What you’re wearing is fine.”

“Oh,” she replied with evident relief. “That makes more sense. Thank you.”

Having made his routine security circuit of the house, Roic arrived back at the antechamber just outside the library to find the huge woman and the pilot fellow examining the array of wedding presents temporarily staged there. The growing assortment of objects had been arriving for weeks.

Each had been handed in to Pym to be unwrapped and to undergo a security check, rewrapped, and as the affianced couple’s time permitted, unwrapped again and displayed with its card.

“Look, here’s yours, Arde,” said Sergeant Taura. “And here’s Elli’s.”

“Oh, what did she finally decide on?” asked the pilot. “At one point she told me she was thinking of sending the bride a barbed-wire choke chain for Miles, but was afraid it might be misinterpreted.”

“No . . .” Taura held up a thick fall of shimmering black stuff as long as she was tall. “It seems to be some sort of fur coat. No, wait—it’s a blanket.

Beautiful! You should feel this, Arde. It’s incredibly soft. And warm.” She held a supple fold up to the side of her head, and a delighted laugh broke from her long lips. “It’s purring!”

Mayhew’s eyebrows climbed halfway to his receding hairline. “Good God!

Did she . . .? Now, that’s a bit edgy.”

Taura stared down at him in puzzled inquiry. “Edgy? Why?”

Mayhew made an uncertain gesture. “It’s a live fur—a genetic construct. It looks just like one Miles once gave to Elli. If she’s recycling his gifts, that’s a pretty pointed message.” He hesitated. “Though I suppose if she bought a fresh new one for the happy couple, that’s a different message.”

“Ouch.” Taura tilted her head to one side and frowned at the fur. “My life’s too short for arcane mind games, Arde. Which is it?”

“Search me. In the dark, all cat blankets are . . . well, black, in this case. I wonder if it’s intended as an editorial?”

“Well, if it is, don’t you dare let on to the poor bride, or I swear I’ll turn both your ears into doilies.” She held up her clawed fingers and wriggled them.

“By hand.”

Judging by the pilot’s brief grin, the threat was a jest, but by his little bow of compliance, not an entirely empty one. Taura observed Roic, just then, refolded the live fur into its box, and tucked her hands discreetly behind her back.

The door to the library swung open, and Lord Vorkosigan stuck his head out. “Ah, there you two are.” He strolled into the antechamber. “Elena and Baz will be down in a little—she’s feeding Baby Cordelia. You must be starving by now, Taura. Come on in and try the hors d’oeuvres. My cook has outdone herself.”

He smiled up affectionately at the enormous sergeant. While the top of Roic’s head barely came up to her shoulder, m’lord just about faced her belt buckle. It occurred to Roic that Taura towered over himself in almost exactly the same proportions that ladies of average height towered over Lord Vorkosigan. This must be what women looked like to m’lord all the time.

Oh.

M’lord waved his guests through to the library but, instead of following them, shut the door and motioned Roic to his side. He looked thoughtfully up at his tallest armsman and lowered his. voice.

“Tomorrow morning, I want you to drive Sergeant Taura to the Old Town.

I’ve prevailed upon Aunt Alys to present Taura to her modiste and fix her up with a Barrayaran lady’s wardrobe suitable for the upcoming bash.

Figure to hold yourself at their disposal for the day.”

Roic gulped. M’lord’s aunt, Lady Alys Vorpatril, was in her own way more terrifying than any woman Roic had ever encountered, regardless of height.

She was the acknowledged social arbiter of the high Vor in the capital, the last word in fashion, taste, and etiquette, the official hostess for Emperor Gregor himself. And her tongue could slice a fellow to ribbons and tie up the remains in a bowknot before they hit the ground.

“How t’ devil did you—” Roic began, then cut himself off.

M’lord smirked. “I was very persuasive. Besides, Lady Alys relishes a challenge. With luck, she may even be able to part Taura from that shocking pink she favors. Some damned fool once told her it was a nonthreatening color, and now she uses it in the most unsuitable garments—and quantities. It’s so wrong on her. Well, Aunt Alys will be able to handle it. If anyone asks for your opinion—not that they’re likely to—vote for whatever Alys picks.”

I shouldn’t dare do otherwise, Roic managed not to blurt aloud. He stood to attention and tried to look as though he were listening intelligently.

Lord Vorkosigan tapped his fingers on his trouser seam, his smile fading.

“I’m also relying on you to see that Taura is not, um, offered insult, or made uncomfortable, or . . . well, you know. Not that you can keep people from staring, I don’t suppose. But be her outrider in any public venue, and be alert to steer her away from any problems. I wish I had time to squire her myself, but this wedding prep has gone into high gear. Not much longer now, thank God.”

“How is Madame Vorsoisson holding up?” Roic inquired diffidently. He had been wondering for two days if he ought to report the crying jag to someone, but m’lady-to-be had surely not realized her muffled breakdown in one of Vorkosigan House’s back corridors had included a hastily retreating witness.

Judging by m’lord’s suddenly guarded expression, perhaps he knew. “She has . . . extra stresses just now. I’ve tried to take as much of the organizing off her shoulders as possible.” His shrug was not as reassuring as it might be, Roic felt.

M’lord brightened. “Anyway, I want Sergeant Taura to have a great time on her visit to Barrayar, a fabulous Winterfair season. It’s probably the only chance she’ll ever have to see the place. I want her to look back on this week like, like . . . dammit, I want her to feel like Cinderella magicked off to the ball. She’s earned it, God knows. Midnight tolls too damned soon.”

Roic tried to wrap his mind around the concept of Lord Vorkosigan as the enormous woman’s fairy godfather. “So . . . who’s t’ handsome prince?”

M’lord’s smile went crooked; something almost like pain sounded in his indrawn breath. “Ah. Yes. That would be the central problem, now.

Wouldn’t it.”

He dismissed Roic with his usual casual half-salute, a vague wave of his hand in the vicinity of his forehead, and joined his guests in the library.

Roic had never in his whole career as a Hassadar municipal guardsman been in a clothing store resembling that of Lady Vorpatril’s modiste.

Nothing betrayed its location in the Vorbarr Sultana thoroughfare but a discreet brass plaque, labeled simply ESTELLE. Cautiously, he mounted to the second floor, Sergeant Taura’s massive footsteps creaking on the carpeted stairs behind him, and poked his head into a hushed chamber that might have been a Vor lady’s drawing room. There was not a garment rack nor even a mannequin in sight, just a thick carpet, soft lighting, and tables and chairs that looked suitable for offering high tea at the Imperial Residence. To his relief Lady Vorpatril had arrived before them and was standing chatting with another woman in a dark dress.

The two women turned as Taura ducked her head under the lintel behind Roic and straightened up again. Roic nodded a polite greeting. He couldn’t imagine what m’lord had said to his aunt, but her eyes widened only slightly, looking up at Taura. The second woman didn’t quail at the fangs, claws, or height either, but when her glance swept down the pink trouser outfit, she winced.

There was a brief pause; Lady Alys shot Roic an inquiring look, and he realized it must be his job to do the announcing, as when he brought a visitor into Vorkosigan House. “Sergeant Taura, my lady,” he said loudly, then stopped, hoping for more cues.

After another moment, Lady Alys abandoned further hope of him and came forward, smiling, her hands held out. “Sergeant Taura. I am Miles Vorkosigan’s aunt, Alys Vorpatril. Permit me to welcome you to Barrayar.

My nephew has told me something about you.”

Uncertainly, Taura stuck out one huge hand, engulfing Lady Alys’s slender fingers, and shook with care. “I’m afraid he hasn’t told me too much about you,” she said. Shyness made her voice a gruff rumble. “I don’t know many aunts. I somehow thought you would be older. And . . . and not so beautiful.”

Lady Vorpatril smiled, not without approval. Only a few streaks of silver in her dark coiffure and a slight softening of her skin betrayed her age to Roic’s eyes; she was trim and elegant and utterly self-possessed, as always. She introduced the other woman, Madame Somebody—not Estelle, though Roic promptly dubbed her that in his mind—apparently the senior modiste.

“I’m very happy to have a chance to visit Miles’s—Lord Vorkosigan’s homeworld,” Taura told them. “Although, when he invited me to come for the Winterfair season, I wasn’t sure if it was hunting or social, and whether I should pack weapons or dresses.”

Lady Vorpatril’s smile sharpened. “Dresses are weapons, my dear, in sufficiently skilled hands. Permit us to introduce you to the rest of our ordnance team.” She gestured toward a door at the far end of the room, through which presumably lay more utilitarian workrooms, full of laser scanners and design consoles and bolts of exotic fabrics and expert seamstresses. Or magic wands, for all Roic knew.

The other woman nodded. “Do please come this way, Sergeant Taura. We have a great deal to accomplish today, Lady Alys tells me . . .”

“My lady?” Roic called in faint panic to their disappearing forms. “What should I do?”

“Wait here a few moments, Armsman,” Lady Alys murmured over her shoulder to him. “I’ll be back.”

Taura, too, glanced back at him, just before the door eased silently closed behind her, the expression flitting over her odd features seeming for a moment almost beseeching—Don’t abandon me.

Did he dare sit on one of the chairs? He decided not. He stood for a few moments, walked around the chamber, and finally took up a guardsman’s stance, which by dint of much recent practice he could hold for an hour at a stretch, his back to one delicately decorated wall.

In a while Lady Vorpatril returned, a pile of bright pink cloth folded over her arm. She shoved it at Roic.

“Take these back to my nephew and tell him to hide them. Or better, burn them. Or anything, but do not under any circumstances allow them to fall into that young woman’s hands again. Come back in about, oh, four hours.

You are by far the most ornamental of Miles’s armsmen, but there’s no need to have you lurking about cluttering up Estelle’s reception room till then. Run along.”

He looked down on the top of her perfectly groomed head and wondered how she could always make him feel four years old, or as though he wanted to hide in a large bag. For his consolation, Roic reflected as he made his way out, she seemed to have the same effect on her nephew, who was thirty-one and ought to be immune by now.

He reported again for duty at the appointed time, only to cool his heels for another twenty minutes or so. A sub-modiste of some sort offered him a choice of tea or wines while he waited, which he politely declined. At last, the door opened; voices drifted through.

Taura’s vibrant baritone was unmistakable. “I’m not so sure, Lady Alys. I’ve never worn a skirt like this in my life.”

“We’ll have you practice for a few minutes, sitting and standing and walking. Oh, here’s Roic back, good.”

Lady Alys stepped through first, folded her arms, and looked, oddly enough, at Roic.

A stunning vision in hunter green stepped through behind her.

Oh, it was still Taura, certainly, but . . . the skin that had been sallow and dull against the pink was now revealed as a glowing ivory. The green jacket fit very trimly about the waist. Above, her pale shoulders and long neck seemed to bloom from a white linen collar; below, the jacket skirt skimmed out briefly around the upper hips. A narrow skirt continued the long green fall to her firm calves. Wide linen cuffs decorated with subtle white braid made her hands look, if not small, well-proportioned. The pink nail polish was gone, replaced by a dark mahogany shade. The heavy braid hanging down her back had been transformed into a mysteriously knotted arrangement, clinging close to her head and set off with a green . . . hat?

feather? anyway, a neat little accent tilted to the other side. The odd shape of her face seemed suddenly artistic and sophisticated rather than distorted.

“Ye-es,” said Lady Vorpatril. “That will do.”

Roic closed his mouth.

With a lopsided smile, Taura stepped carefully forward. “I am a bodyguard by trade,” she said, evidently continuing a conversation with Lady Vorpatril.

“How can I kick someone’s teeth in wearing this?”

“A woman wearing that suit, my dear, will have volunteers to kick in annoying persons’ teeth for her,” said Lady Alys. “Is that not so, Roic?”

“If they don’t trample each other in the rush,” gulped Roic and turned red.

One corner of that wide mouth lifted; the golden eyes seemed to sparkle like champagne. She caught sight of a long mirror on a carved stand in one corner and walked over to it to stare somewhat uncertainly at the portion of her it reflected. “It’s effective, then?”

“Downright terrifying,” Roic averred.

Roic intercepted a furious glower from Lady Alys behind Taura’s back. Her lips formed the words No, you idiot! He shrank into cowed silence.

“Oh.” Taura’s fanged smile fled. “But I already terrify people. Human beings are so fragile. If you get a good grip, you can pull their heads right off. I want to attract . . . somebody. For a change. Maybe I should have that pink dress with the bows after all.”

Lady Alys said smoothly, “We agreed that the ingenue look is for much younger girls.”

“Smaller ones, you mean.”

“There is more than one kind of beauty. Yours needs dignity. I would never deck myself in pink bows,” she threw in, a little desperately it seemed to Roic.

Taura eyed her, seeming struck by this. “No . . . I suppose not.”

“You will simply attract braver men.”

“Oh, I know that.” Taura shrugged. “I was just . . . hoping for a larger selection, for once.” She added under her breath, “Anyway, he’s taken now.”

What he? Roic couldn’t help wondering. She sounded rather sad about it.

Some very tall admirer, now out of the picture? Larger than Roic? There weren’t too many men of that description around.

Lady Alys rounded out the afternoon by guiding her new protegee to an exclusive tearoom, much frequented by high Vor matrons. This proved to be partly for the purposes of tutorial, party to refuel Taura’s ferocious metabolism. While the server brought dish after dish, Lady Alys offered a brisk stream of advice on everything from gracefully exiting a groundcar in restrictive clothing to posture to table manners to the intricacies of Vor social rank. Despite her outsized scale, Taura was naturally athletic and coordinated, seeming to improve almost as Roic watched.

Drafted as practice gentleman, Roic found himself coming in for a few sharp corrections himself. He felt very conspicuous and clumsy at first, until he realized that, next to Taura, he might as well be invisible. If they drew sidelong looks from other diners, at least the comments were low-voiced or far enough away that he was not compelled to take notice; besides, Taura’s attention was entirely upon her mentor. Unlike Roic, she never needed the same instruction twice.

When Lady Vorpatril removed herself to consult with the head server about some fine point, Taura leaned over to whisper, “She’s very good at this, isn’t she?”

“Yes. The best.”

She sat back with a smile of satisfaction. “Miles’s people generally are.”

She regarded Roic appraisingly.

A server guided a well-dressed Vor matron shepherding a girl-child about Nikki’s age past their table toward their own seating. The girl stopped short and stared at Taura. Her hand lifted, pointing in astonishment. “Mama, look at that gigantic—”

The mother captured the hand, shot an alarmed glance at them, and began some hushed admonishment about it not being polite to point. Taura essayed a big friendly smile at the girl. A mistake . . .

The girl screamed and buried her face in her mother’s skirts, hands frantically clutching. The woman shot Taura a furious, frightened glower and hustled the little girl away, not toward their table but to the exit. Across the tearoom, Lady Alys’s head swiveled around.

Roic looked back at Taura, then wished he hadn’t. Her face froze, appalled, then crumpled in distress; she seemed about to burst into tears but caught herself with a long indrawn breath, held for a moment.

Tensed to spring—where?—Roic instead eased back helplessly in his chair. Hadn’t m’lord specifically detailed him to prevent this sort of thing?

With a gulp, Taura brought her breathing back under control. She looked as wan as though she’d been wounded by a knife thrust. Yet what could he have done? He couldn’t very well draw his stunner and pot some Vor lady’s terrified kid . . .

Lady Alys, taking in the incident, returned quickly. With a special frown at Roic, she slid back into her seat. She smoothed over the moment with some light comment, but the outing did not recover its cheerful tone; Taura kept trying to shrink down and sit smaller, a futile exercise, and whenever she began to smile, stopped and tried to hold her hand over her mouth.

Roic wished he were back patrolling Hassadar alleys.

Roic arrived with his charges back at Vorkosigan House feeling as though he’d been run through a wringer. Backward. Several times. He peered around the tower of garment boxes he carried—the rest, Madame Estelle had assured Taura, would be delivered—and managed not to drop them getting through the carved doors. Under Lady Vorpatril’s direction, he handed off the boxes to a pair of maidservants, who whisked them away.

M’lord’s voice wafted from the antechamber to the library. “Is that you, Aunt Alys? We’re in here.”

Roic trod belatedly after the two disparate women just in time to see m’lord introduce Sergeant Taura to his fiancee, Madame Ekaterin Vorsoisson.

Like, it seemed, everyone but Roic, she had apparently been warned in advance; she didn’t even blink, holding out one hand to the huge galactic woman and offering her an impeccably polite welcome. M’lady-to-be looked fatigued this evening, although that might be partially the effect of the drab gray half-mourning she still wore, her dark hair drawn back in a severe knot. The garb went with the gray civilian suits m’lord favored, though, giving the effect of two players on the same team.

M’lord regarded the new green outfit with unfeigned enthusiasm. “Splendid work, Aunt Alys! I knew I could rely on you. That’s a stunning look with the hair, Taura.” He peered upward. “Are the fleet medicos making some new headway with the extension treatments? I don’t see any gray at all. Great!”

She hesitated, then replied, “No, I just got some customized dye to match it.”

“Ah.” He made an apologetic motion, as if brushing away his last words.

“Well, it looks lovely.”

New voices sounded from the entry hall, Armsman Pym admitting a visitor.

“No need to announce me, Pym.”

“He’s right in there, then, sir. Lady Alys just arrived.”

“Better still.”

Simon Illyan (ImpSec, retired) entered upon these words, bent to kiss Lady Alys’s hand, then tucked it through one arm as he straightened. She smiled fondly at him, and he snugged her in close to his side. He, too, absorbed his introduction to the towering Sergeant Taura with unruffled calm, bowing over her hand and saying, “I am so pleased to have a chance to meet you at last, Sergeant. I hope your visit to Barrayar has been pleasant so far?”

“Yes, sir,” she rumbled back, apparently controlling an impulse to salute the man only because he still held her hand. Roic didn’t blame her; he was taller than Illyan, too, but the formidable former Chief of Imperial Security made him want to salute, and he’d never even been in the military. “Lady Alys has been wonderful.” No one, it seemed, was going to mention the unfortunate incident in the tearoom.

“I’m not surprised. Oh, Miles,” Illyan continued, “I’ve just come from the Imperial Residence. Some good news came in when I was saying good-bye to Gregor. Lord Vorbataille was arrested this afternoon at the Vorbarr Sultana shuttleport, trying to leave the planet in disguise.”

M’lord blew out his breath. “That’s going to put that ugly little case to bed, then. Good. I was afraid it was going to drag on over Winterfair.”

Illyan smiled. “I wondered if that might have had something to do with the energy with which you tackled it.”

“Heh. I shall give dear Gregor the benefit of the doubt and assume he did not have my personal deadline in mind when he assigned me to it. The mess did proliferate unexpectedly.”

“Case?” Sergeant Taura inquired.

“My new job as one of the nine Imperial Auditors for Emperor Gregor took an odd and unexpected turn into criminal investigation a month or so back,” m’lord explained. “We found that Lord Vorbataille, who is a count’s heir—like me—from one of our southern districts, had involved himself with a Jacksonian smuggling ring. Or, possibly, been suborned by it. Anyway, by the time his sins caught up with him he was up to his eyebrows in illicit traffic, hijacking, and murder. Very bad company, now wholly out of business, I’m pleased to report. Gregor is considering sending the Jacksonians home in a box, suitably frozen; let their backers decide if they are worth the expense of reviving. If everything is finally proved on Vorbataille that I think will be . . . for his father’s sake, he may be allowed to suicide in his cell.” M’lord grimaced. “If not, the Council of Counts will have to be persuaded to endorse a more direct redemption of the honor of the Vor. Corruption on this level can’t be allowed to slop over and give us all a bad name.”

“Gregor is very pleased with your work on this one,” Illyan remarked.

“I’ll bet. He was livid about the Princess Olivia hijacking, in his own understated way. An unarmed ship, all those poor dead passengers—God, what a nightmare.”

Roic listened a bit wistfully to all this. He thought he might have done more this past month when m’lord was buzzing in and out on the high-profile case, but Pym hadn’t assigned him to the duty. Granted, someone had to stand night guard for Vorkosigan House. Week after week . . .

“But enough of this nasty business”—m’lord caught Madame Vorsoisson’s grateful glance—“let’s turn to more cheerful affairs. Why don’t you finish opening that next package, love?”

Madame Vorsoisson turned back to the crowded table and the task everyone’s arrival had interrupted. “Here’s the card. Oh. Admiral Quinn, again?”

M’lord took it, brows rising. “What, no limerick this time? How disappointing.”

“Perhaps this one is to make up for—Oh, my. I imagine so. And all the way from Earth!” From a small box, she drew a short, triple strand of matched pearls and held them up to her throat. “Choker-style . . . oh, how pretty.”

Momentarily, she let the iridescent spheres line up upon her neck, touching the two ends of the clasp in back.

“Would you like me to fasten it?” her bridegroom offered.

“Just for a moment . . .” She bent her head, and m’lord reached up and fiddled with the catch at her nape. She walked to the mirror over the room’s unlit fireplace, turning to watch the exquisite ornament catch the light, and gave m’lord a quizzical smile. “I believe they would go perfectly with what I’m wearing the day after tomorrow. Don’t you think, Lady Alys?”

Lady Alys tilted her head in sartorial judgment. “Why, yes, indeed.”

M’lord bowed at this endorsement by the highest authority. The look he exchanged with his bride was less decipherable to Roic, but he seemed very pleased, even relieved. Sergeant Taura, watching the byplay, frowned in unease.

Madame Vorsoisson removed the strands and laid them back in their velvet-lined box, where they glowed softly. “I believe we should let your guests freshen up before dinner, Miles.”

“Oh, yes. Except I need to borrow Simon for a moment. Will you excuse us? There will be drinks in the library again when you are all ready.

Someone let Arde know. Where is Arde?”

“Nikki captured him and carried him off,” said Madame Vorsoisson. “I should probably go rescue the poor man.”

M’lord and Illyan withdrew to the library. Lady Alys escorted Taura away, presumably for one last tutorial on Barrayaran etiquette before the impending formal dinner with Count and Countess Vorkosigan. Taura glanced back at the bride, still frowning. Roic watched the giant woman out with some regret, distracted by the sudden speculation of what it would be like to patrol a Hassadar alley with her.

“M’lady—Madame Vorsoisson, that is,” Roic began as she started to turn away.

“Not for much longer.” She smiled, turning back.

“What’s with . . . that is, how old is Sergeant Taura? Do you know?”

“Around twenty-six standard, I believe.”

A little younger than Roic, actually. It felt unfair that the galactic woman should seem so much more . . . complicated. “Then why is her hair turning gray? If she’s bioengineered, I wouldn’t have thought they’d muff up such details.”

Madame Vorsoisson made a little gesture of apology. “I believe that is a private matter for her, which is not mine to discuss.”

“Oh.” Roic’s brow wrinkled in bafflement. “Where’d she come from? Where did m’lord meet her?”

“On one of his old covert ops missions, he tells me. He rescued her from a particularly vile bioengineering facility on the planet of Jackson’s Whole.

They were trying to develop a super-soldier. Having escaped enslavement, she became an especially valued colleague on his ops team.” She added after a contemplative moment, “And sometime-lover. Also especially valued, I understand.”

Roic felt suddenly very . . . rural. Backcountry. Not up to speed on the sophisticated, galactic-tinged Vor life of the capital. “Er . . . he told you?

And—and you’re all right with that?” He wondered if meeting Sergeant Taura had rattled her more than she’d let on.

“It was before my time, Roic.” Her smile crimped a little. “I actually wasn’t sure if he was confessing or bragging, but now that I’ve seen her, I rather think he was bragging.”

“But—but how would . . . I mean, she’s so tall, and he’s, um . . .”

Now her eyes narrowed with laughter at him, although her lips remained demure. “He didn’t supply me with that much detail, Roic. It wouldn’t have been gentlemanly.”

“To you? No, I guess not.”

“To her.”

“Oh. Oh. Um, yeah.”

“For what it’s worth, I have heard him remark that a height differential matters much less when two people are lying down. I find I must agree.”

With a smile he really didn’t dare try to interpret, she moved off in search of Nikki.

A scant hour later, Roic was surprised when Pym gave him a heads-up on his wrist com to bring m’lord’s groundcar around. He parked it under the porte cochere and entered the black-and-white paved hall to find m’lord assisting Madame Vorsoisson on with her wraps.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go with you?” m’lord asked her anxiously. “I’d like to go with you, see you get home and in all right.”

Madame Vorsoisson pressed a hand to her forehead. Her face was pale and damp, almost greenish. “No. No. Roic will get me there. Go back to your guests. They’ve come so far, and you’ll only be getting to see them for such a short time. I’m sorry to be such a drip. Give my abject apologies to the count and countess.”

“If you don’t feel well, you don’t feel well. Don’t apologize. Do you think you’re coming down with something? I could send our personal physician round.”

“I don’t know. I hope not, not now! It mostly seems to be a headache.” She bit her lip. “I don’t think I have a fever.”

He reached up to touch her brow; she winced. “No, you’re not hot. But you’re all clammy.” He hesitated, then asked more quietly, “Nerves, d’you think?”

She hesitated, too. “I don’t know.”

“I have all the wedding logistics under control, you know. All you have to do is show up.”

Her smile was pained. “And not fall over.”

He was silent a little longer this time. “You know, if you decide that you really can’t go through with it, you can call a halt. Any time. Right up to the last. Hope you won’t, of course. But I need you to know you could.”

“What, with everyone from the emperor and the empress on down coming?

I think not.”

“I’d cover it, if I had to.” He swallowed. “I know you said you wanted a small wedding, but I didn’t realize you meant tiny. I’m sorry.”

She blew out her breath in something like exasperation. “Miles, I love you dearly, but if I’m going to start throwing up, I’d really prefer to be home first.”

“Oh. Yes. Roic, if you please?” He motioned to his armsman.

Roic took Madame Vorsoisson’s arm, which was trembling.

“I’ll send Nikki home safely with one of the armsmen after dessert, or after he wears Arde out. I’ll call your house and let them know you’re coming,” m’lord called after her.

She waved in acknowledgment; Roic helped her into the rear compartment and closed the canopy. Her shadowed form sat bent, head clutched in her hands.

M’lord chewed on his knuckle and stared in distress as the house doors swung shut upon him.

Roic’s night shift was cut short at dawn the next morning when the count’s guard commander called him on his wrist com and told him to report to the front hall in running gear; one of m’lord’s guests wanted to go out to take some exercise.

He arrived, shrugging on his jacket, to find Taura bending and stretching in a vigorous series of warm-ups under Pym’s bemused eye. Lady Alys’s modiste hadn’t gotten around to providing active wear, it appeared, because the huge woman wore a plain set of well-worn ship knits, although in neutral gray rather than blinding pink. The fabric hugged the smooth curves of a lean musculature that, without being bulky, gave an unmistakable impression of coiled power. The braid down her back looked cheery and sporting in this comfortable context.

“Oh, Armsman Roic, good morning,” she said, started to smile, then lifted her hand to her mouth.

“You don’t—” Roic motioned inarticulately. “You don’t have to do that for me. I like your smile.” It wasn’t, he realized, altogether a polite lie. Now that I’m getting used to it.

Her fangs glinted. “I hope they didn’t drag you out of bed. Miles said his people just used the sidewalk around this block for their running track, since it was about a kilometer. I don’t think I can go astray.”

Roic intercepted a Look from Pym. Roic hadn’t been called out to keep m’lord’s galactic guest from getting lost; he was there to deal with any altercations that might result from startled Vorbarr Sultana drivers crashing their vehicles onto the sidewalk or each other at the sight of her.

“No problem,” said Roic promptly. “We usually use the ballroom for a sort of gymnasium in weather like this, but it’s being all decorated for the reception. So I’m behind on my fitness training for the month. It’ll be a nice change to do my laps with someone who’s not so much older, um, that is, so much shorter than me.” He sneaked a glance at Pym.

Pym’s wintry smile promised retribution for that dig as he coded open the doors for them. “Enjoy yourselves, children.”

The biting air blew away Roic’s night’s fatigue. He guided Taura out past the guard at the main gate and turned right along the high gray wall. After a few steps, she extended herself and began an easy lope. Within a very few minutes, Roic was regretting his cheap shot at the middle-aged Pym; Taura’s long legs ate the distance. Roic kept half an eye on the early morning traffic, fortunately still light, and concentrated the rest of his attention on not disgracing House Vorkosigan by collapsing in a gasping heap. Taura’s eyes grew brilliant with exhilaration as she ran, as if her spirit expanded into her body as her body stretched out to make room.

Half a dozen laps barely winded her, but she slowed at last to a walk, perhaps out of pity for her guide. “Let’s circle through the garden to cool down,” Roic wheezed. Madame Vorsoisson’s garden, which occupied a third of the block and was her bride-gift to m’lord, was among other things sheltered from view of the cross streets by walls and banks. They dodged around the barricades temporarily barring public access till after the wedding.

“Oh, my,” said Taura as they turned down the winding walk descending between curving snow hillocks. The chilly brook, its water running black and silky between feathery fingers of ice, snaked gracefully from one corner to the other. The peach-colored dawn light glimmered off the ice on the young trees and shrubs in the blue shadows. “Why, it’s beautiful. I didn’t expect a garden to be so pretty in winter. What are those men doing?”

A crew was unloading some float pallets piled high with boxes of all sizes, marked FRAGILE. Another pair was going around with water hoses, misting selected branches marked with yellow tags to create yet more delicate, shimmering icicles. The shapes of the native Barrayaran vegetation grew luminous and exotic with this silver-gilding.

“They’re putting out all the ice sculptures. M’lord ordered ice flowers and sculptured creatures and things to fill up the garden, since all the real plants are under the snow, pretty much. And fresh snow to be added, too, if there isn’t enough. They can’t put out t’ real live flowers for the ceremony till the very last gasp, late tomorrow morning.”

“Good grief, he’s having an outdoor garden wedding in this weather? Is that—a Barrayaran thing, is it?”

“Um, no. Not exactly. I believe m’lord originally was shooting for fall, but Madame Vorsoisson wasn’t ready yet. But he’d got his heart set on getting married in the garden, because it was hers, y’see. So he is, by damn, going to have the wedding in the garden. The idea is people will assemble in Vorkosigan House, then troop out here for the vows, then scurry back into the ballroom for the reception and the food and dancing and all.” And the frostbite and hypothermia treatments. “It’ll be all right if the weather stays clear, I guess.” The backstairs commentary on the potential disasters inherent in this scenario, Roic decided to keep to himself. Vorkosigan House’s staff seemed united in their determination to make the eccentric scheme work for m’lord, anyway.

Taura’s eyes glinted in the level dawn light now filtering between the buildings of the surrounding cityscape. “I can hardly wait to try out the dress Lady Alys got up for me to wear to the ceremony. Barrayaran ladies’ clothes are so interesting. But complicated. In a way, I suppose they’re another kind of uniform, but I don’t know whether I feel like a recruit or an enemy spy in them. Well, I don’t suppose the real ladies will shoot me in any case. So much to learn about how to go on—though I suppose it all seems ridiculously easy to you. You grew up with it.”

“I didn’t grow up with this.” Roic waved a hand toward the imposing stone pile of Vorkosigan House rising above the high, bare trees on its grounds.

“My father is just a construction hand in Hassadar—that’s the Vorkosigan’s District capital city, just this side of the Dendarii Mountains, a few hundred kilometers south of here. Lots of building going on there. He offered to apprentice me to the trade, but I got the chance to become a street guard, and I took it—sort of an impulse, truth to tell. I was eighteen, didn’t know up from down. Sure learned a lot after that.”

“What does a street guard guard? Streets?”

“Among other things. The whole city, really. You do what needs done. Sort out traffic, before or after it’s a big bent pile. Deal with upset people’s problems, try to keep ’em from murdering their relatives, or clean up the mess after if you can’t. Trace stolen property, if you get lucky. I did a lot of night foot patrol. You learn a lot about a place on foot, up close. I learned how to handle stunners and shock-sticks and big, hostile drunks. I was getting pretty good at it, I thought, after a few years.”

“How did you end up here?”

“Oh . . . there was a little incident . . .” He gave an embarrassed shrug.

“Some crazed loon tried to shoot up Hassadar Square at rush hour with an auto-needler. I, um, took it away from him.”

Her brows went up. “With a stunner?”

“No, unfortunately, I was off duty at the time. Had to do it by hand.”

“A little hard to get up close and personal with someone firing a needler.”

“That was a problem, yeah.”

Her lips curved up, or at least the ivory hooks lengthened.

“It seemed to make perfect sense at the moment, though later I wondered what t’ hell I’d been thinking. I don’t think I was thinking. At any rate, he only killed five and not fifty-five. People seemed to think it was a big deal, but I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what you’ve seen out there.” His glance upward was meant to indicate the distant stars, though the sky was now a paling blue.

“Hey, I may be big, but I’m not needler-proof. I hate the shrieky sound when the razor-strands unwind and whiz around, even though I know in my head that those are the ones that missed.”

“Yeah,” Roic said in heartfelt agreement. “Anyways, after that there was a stupid fuss, and someone recommended me to m’lord’s own armsman commander, Pym, and here I am.” He glanced around the sparkling fairy garden. “I think I was a better fit in the Hassadar alleys.”

“Naw, Miles always did like having big backup. Saves a lot of small-scale grief. Though the large-scale grief we still had to take as it came.”

He asked after a moment, “How did you bodyguard, um, m’lord?”

“Such a funny way of thinking of him. To me, he’ll always be the little admiral. Mostly, I just loomed at people. If I had to, I smiled.”

“But your smile’s really kind of nice,” he protested, and managed not to add the once you get used to it out loud. He’d get the hang of this savoir faire thing yet.

“Oh, no. The other smile.” She demonstrated, her lips wrinkling back, her jaw thrusting out. Roic had to admit, it was a much wider smile. And, um, sharper. They were just treading past a workman on the rising path; he gasped and fell backward into a snowbank. With lightning reflexes, Taura reached past Roic and caught the heavy, life-size ice sculpture of a crouching fox before it hit the pavement and shattered into shards. Roic lifted the gibbering man to his feet and dusted snow off his parka, and Taura handed back the elegant ornament with a compliment upon its artistry.

Roic managed not to choke with muffled laughter till they both had their backs to the fellow, heading away. “See what you mean. Did it ever not work?”

“Occasionally. Next step was to pick up the recalcitrant one by the neck.

Since my arms were invariably longer than theirs, they’d swing like mad but couldn’t connect. Very frustrating for them.”

“And after that?”

She grinned. “Stunner, by preference.”

“Heh.Yep.”

They’d fallen unconsciously into an easy side-by-side pace, tracing loops around the garden paths. Talking shop, Roic thought. “What mass d’you lift?”

“With or without adrenaline?”

“Oh, without, say.”

“Two hundred fifty kilos, with a good grip and a good angle.”

He emitted a respectful whistle. “If you ever want to give up mercenary-ing, I can think of a fire fighting cadre might could welcome you. M’brother’s in one, down Hassadar way. Though come to think of it, m’lord’d be a more powerful reference.”

“Now, there’s an idea I’d never thought of.” She pursed her long lips, and her brows bent in a quizzical curve. “But, no. I expect I’ll be, as you say, mercenary-ing till . . . for the rest of my life. I like seeing new planets. I like seeing this one. I could never have imagined it.”

“How many have you seen?”

“I think I’ve lost count. I used to know. Dozens. How many have you seen?”

“Just t’ one,” he admitted. “Though hanging around m’lord, this one keeps getting wider till I’m almost dizzy. More complicated. Does that make sense?”

She threw back her head and laughed. “That’s our Miles. Admiral Quinn always said she’d follow him halfway to hell just to find out what happened next.”

“Wait—this Quinn you all keep talking about is a lady admiral?”

“She was a lady commander when I first met her. Second-sharpest tactical brain it’s ever been my privilege to know. Things may get tight, following Elli Quinn, but you know they won’t get stupid. She didn’t sleep her way to the top by a long shot, and they’re half-wits who say so.” She grinned briefly.

“That was just a perk. Some might say his, but I’d say hers.”

Roic’s eyes crossed, trying to unravel this. “Y’mean m’lord was lovers with her, t—” He cut off the too not quite in time, and flushed. It seemed m’lord’s covert ops career was even more . . . complicated than he’d ever imagined.

Taura cocked her head and regarded him with crinkling eyes. “That’s my favorite shade of pink, Roic. You are a country boy, aren’t you? Life’s uncertain out there. Things can go down bad, fast, anytime. People learn to grab what they can, when they can. For a time. We all just get a time, in our different ways.” She sighed. “Their ways diverged when he took those horrible injuries that bounced him out of ImpSec. He couldn’t go back up, and she wouldn’t come down here. Elli Quinn’s got no one but herself to blame for any chances she threw away. Though some people are born with more chances to waste than others, I’ll admit. I say, grab the ones you’re issued, run with them, and don’t look back.”

“Something might be gaining on you?”

“I know perfectly well what’s gaining on me.” Her grin flashed, oddly tilted this time. “Anyway, Quinn might be more beautiful, but I was always taller.”

She gave a satisfied nod. Glancing at him, she added, “I guarantee Miles likes your height. It’s sort of an issue with him. I know recruiting officers in three genders who would swoon for your shoulders, as well.”

He hadn’t the least idea how to respond to that. He hoped she was enjoying the pink. “M’lord thinks I’m a fool,” he said glumly.

Her brows shot up. “Surely not.”

“Oh, yeah. You have no idea how I screwed up.”

“I’ve seen him forgive screwups that put his guts on the bloody ceiling.

Literally. You’d have to go some to top that. How many people died?”

If you put it in that perspective . . . “No one,” he admitted. “I just wished I could have.”

She grinned in sympathy. “Ah, one of those kinds of screwups. Oh, c’mon, tell.”

He hesitated. “Y’know those nightmares where you find yourself walking around naked in the town square, or in front of your schoolteachers, or something?”

“My nightmares tend to be a bit more exotic, but yeah?”

“So, no lie, there I was . . . Last summer, m’lord’s brother Mark brought home this damned Escobaran biologist, Dr. Borgos, that he’d picked up somewheres, and put him up in the basement of Vorkosigan House. An investment scheme. The biologist made bugs. And the bugs made bug butter. Tons of it. Slimy white stuff, edible, sort of. We found out the biologist had jumped bail back on Escobar—for fraud, no surprise—when t’ skip-tracers they’d sent to arrest him showed up and talked their way into Vorkosigan House. Naturally, they picked a time when almost everyone had gone out. Lord Mark and the Koudelka sisters, who were in on the bug butter scheme, got in a fight with them when they tried to carry off Borgos, and the house staff waked me up to go sort it out. All in a tearing panic—wouldn’t even let me grab my uniform trousers. I’d just got to sleep . . .

Martya Koudelka claims it was friendly fire, but I dunno. I’d just about pushed the whole mess of ’em out the front door when in walks m’lord with Madame Vorsoisson and all her relatives. He’d just got engaged and wanted to make a good impression on ’em all . . . It was an unforgettable one, I guarantee. I was wearing briefs, boots, and about five kilos of bug butter, trying to deal wit’ all these screaming, sticky maniacs . . .”

A muffled sound escaped from Taura. She had her hand over her mouth, but it wasn’t helping; little squeaks still leaked out. Her eyes were alight.

“I swear it wouldn’t a’ been half so bad if I’d had my briefs on backwards and my stunner holster on frontways. I can still hear Pym’s voice . . .” He mimicked the senior armsman’s driest tones: “ Your weapon is worn on the right, Armsman.’ ”

She laughed out loud then, and looked him up and down in somewhat unsettling appreciation. “That’s a pretty amazing word picture, Roic.”

Despite himself, he smiled a little. “I guess so. I dunno if m’lord’s forgiven me, but I’m right sure Pym hasn’t.” He sighed. “If you see one of those damned vomit bugs still around, squash it on sight. Hideous bioengineered mutant things, kill ’em all before they multiply.”

Her laughter stopped cold.

Roic reran his last sentence in his head and made the unpleasant discovery that one could do far worse things to oneself with words than with dubious food products, or possibly even with needlers. He hardly dared look up to see her face. He forced his eyes right.

Her face was perfectly still, perfectly pale, perfectly blank. Perfectly appalling.

I meant those devil-bugs, not you! He managed to stop that idiocy on his lips before it escaped to do even more damage, but only just. He couldn’t think of any way to apologize that wouldn’t make it worse.

“Ah, yes,” she said at last. “Miles did warn me that Barrayarans had some pretty ugly issues about gene manipulation. I just forgot.”

And I reminded you. “We’re getting better,” he tried.

“Good for you.” She inhaled, a long breath. “Let’s go in. I’m getting cold.”

Roic was frozen straight through. “Um. Yeah.”

They walked back to the gate in silence.

Roic slept the day around, trying to force his body back onto the boring night shift cycle that by the duty roster was to be his junior armsman’s fate this Winterfair. He was quite sorry to thus miss seeing m’lord take his galactic guests and a selection of his in-laws-to-be on a tour of Vorbarr Sultana. He’d have been fascinated by what the two disparate parties made of each other. Madame Vorsoisson’s family, the Vorvaynes, were solid provincial Vor types of the sort Roic had always regarded as normal to the class, before he’d taken up his duties in Vorkosigan House’s high Vor milieu. M’lord, well . . . m’lord wasn’t standard by anybody’s standard. The four Vorvayne brothers, though dutifully pleased with their widowed sister’s upward social leap, plainly found m’lord an unnerving catch. Roic wished he could see what they would make of Taura. He melted into sleep with a vague scenario drifting through his reeling brain of somehow imposing his body between her and some undefined social insult. Maybe then she would see that he hadn’t meant anything by his awful gaffe . . .

He woke at sunset and made a foray down to Vorkosigan House’s huge kitchen, below stairs. Usually m’lord’s genius cook, Ma Kosti, left delectable surprises in the staff refrigerator and was always looking for a good gossip, but tonight the pickings were slim and the personal attention nonexistent.

The place was plunged into final preparations for tomorrow’s great event, and Ma Kosti, driving her harried scullions before her, made it plain that anyone below the rank of count, or perhaps emperor, was very much in the way just now. Roic fueled up and retreated.

At least the kitchen did not have to deal with a formal dinner atop all the rest. M’lord, the count and countess, and all the guests were off to the Imperial Residence for the Winterfair Ball and midnight bonfire, the heart of the festivities marking solstice night and the turning of the season. When they all decamped from Vorkosigan House, Roic had the vast place to himself, but for the rumble from the kitchen and the servants rushing about completing the last-minute decorations and arrangements in the public rooms, the great dining room, and the seldom-used ballroom.

He was therefore surprised, about an hour before midnight, when the gate guard called him to code open the front door. He was even more surprised when a small car with government markings pulled up under the porte cochere and m’lord and Sergeant Taura climbed out. The car buzzed off, and its passengers entered the hall, shaking the cold air out of their outer garments and handing them off to Roic.

M’lord was dressed in the most elaborate version of the brown and silver Vorkosigan House uniform, befitting a count’s heir attending upon the emperor, complete with custom-fitted polished riding boots to his knees.

Taura wore a close-fitting, embroidered russet jacket, made high to the neck where a bit of lace showed, and a matching skirt sweeping to ankles clad in soft, russet-colored leather boots. A graceful spray of cream-and-rust colored orchids was wound into her braided-up hair. Roic wished he could have seen her entrance into the Imperial Winterfair Ball, and heard what the emperor and empress had said upon meeting her . . .

“No, I’m all right,” Taura was saying to m’lord. “I saw the palace and the ball—they were beautiful—but I’ve had enough. It’s just that I was up at dawn, and to tell the truth, I think I’m still a little jump-lagged. Go see to your bride. Is she still sick?”

“I wish I knew.” M’lord paused on the steps, three up, and leaned on the banister to speak face-to-face with Taura, who was watching him in concern. “She wasn’t sure even last week about attending the emperor’s bonfire tonight, though I thought it would be a valuable distraction. She insisted she was all right when I talked to her earlier. But her aunt Helen says she’s all to pieces, hiding in her room and crying. This is just not like her. I thought she was tough as anything. Oh, God, Taura. I think I’ve screwed up this whole wedding thing so badly . . . I rushed her into it, and now it’s all coming apart. I can’t imagine how bad the stress must be to make her physically ill.”

“Slow down, dammit, Miles. Look. You said her first marriage was dire, yes?”

“Not bruises and black eyes bad, no. Draining the blood of your spirit out drop by drop for years bad, maybe. I only saw the very end of it. It was pretty gruesome by then.”

“Words can cut worse than knives. The wounds take longer to heal, too.”

She didn’t look at Roic. Roic didn’t look back.

“Isn’t that the truth,” said m’lord, who wasn’t looking at either of them.

“Damn! Should I go over there or not? They say it’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding. Or was that the wedding dress? I can’t remember.”

Taura made a face. “And you accuse her of having wedding heebie-jeebies! Miles, listen. You know how the recruits got precombat nerves before they went out on a mission the first time?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Now. Do you remember how they got precombat nerves before they had to go out on a big drop for the second time?”

After a long pause, m’lord said, “Oh.” Another silence. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. I thought it was me.”

“That’s because you’re an egotist. I only met the woman for one hour, but even I could see that you’re the delight of her eyes. At least consider, for five consecutive seconds, the possibility that it might be him. The late Vorsoisson, whoever he was.”

“Oh, he was something else, all right. I’ve cursed him before for the scars he left on her soul.”

“I don’t think you have to say anything much. Just be there. And be not him.”

M’lord drummed his fingers on the banister. “Yes. Maybe. God. Pray God.

Dammit . . .” He glanced across at Roic, ignored as if he were Vorkosigan House furniture, a rack to hold coats. A dummy. “Roic, scrape up a vehicle; meet me back here in a few minutes. I want you to drive me over to Ekaterin’s aunt and uncle’s house. I’m going to run up and change out of this armor-plating first, though.” He ran his fingers across the elaborate silver embroidery upon his sleeve. He turned away, and his bootsteps scuffed up the stairs.

This was way too alarming. “What in t’ world’s going on?” Roic dared to ask Taura.

“Ekaterin’s aunt called him. I gather Ekaterin lives at her house—”

“With Lord Auditor and Professora Vorthys, yes. She’s been going to University from there.”

“Anyway, the bride-to-be seems to be having some sort of awful nervous breakdown or something.” She frowned. “Or something . . . Miles isn’t sure if he should go over and sit with her or not. I think he should.”

That didn’t sound good. In fact, it sounded about as not-good as it could be.

“Roic . . .” Taura’s brows knotted. “Do you happen to know if I could find any commercial pharmaceutical laboratories open at this time of night in Vorbarr Sultana?”

“Pharmaceutical labs?” Roic repeated blankly. “Why, do you feel sick, too?

I can call out the Vorkosigans’ personal physician for you, or one of the medtechs who ride herd on the count and countess . . .” Would she need some kind of off-world specialist? No matter, the Vorkosigan name could access one, he was sure. Even on Bonfire Night.

“No, no, I feel fine. I was just wondering.”

“Nothing much is open tonight. It’s a holiday. Everyone’s out to the parties and bonfires and the fireworks. Tomorrow, too. It’ll be the first day of the new year here, by the Barrayaran calendar.”

She smiled briefly. “It would be. A new start all round; I’ll bet he liked the symbolism of that.”

“I suppose hospital labs are open all night. Their emergency treatment intakes will be. Busy as hell, too. We used to bring the ones in Hassadar all kinds of customers on Bonfire Night.”

“Hospitals, yes, of course! I should have thought of them at once.”

“Why do you want one?” he asked again.

She hesitated. “I’m not sure that I do. It was just a train of thought I had earlier this evening, when that aunt-lady called Miles. Not sure I like its destination, though . . .” She turned away and swung up the stairs, taking them two at a time without effort. Roic frowned, then went off to scare up a vehicle from whatever remained in the sub-basement garage. With so many signed out to transport the household and its guests already, this might take some rapid extemporizing.

But Taura had spoken to him, almost normally. Maybe . . . maybe there were such things as second chances. If a fellow was brave enough to take them.

Lord Auditor and Professora Vorthys’s home was a tall, old, colorfully tiled structure close to the District University. The street was quiet when Roic pulled the car—borrowed without notification, ultimately, from one of the armsmen off with the count at the Residence—up to the front. From a distance, mainly in the direction of the university, drifted the sharp crackle of fireworks, harmonious singing, and blurred drunken singing. A rich, heady scent of wood smoke and black powder permeated the frosty night air.

The porch light was on. The Professora, an aging, smiling, neat Vor lady who intimidated Roic only slightly less than did Lady Alys, let them in herself. Her soft round face was tense with worry.

“Did you tell her I was coming?” m’lord asked in a low tone as he shed his coat. He stared anxiously up the stairs leading from the narrow, wood-paneled hallway.

“I didn’t dare.”

“Helen . . . what should I do?” M’lord looked suddenly smaller, and scared, and younger and older all at the same time.

“Just go up, I think. This isn’t something that’s about talking, or words, or reason. I’ve run through all those.”

He buttoned then unbuttoned the gray tunic he’d thrown on over an old white shirt, pulled down his sleeves, took a deep breath, mounted the stairs, and turned out of sight. After a minute or two, the Professora stopped picking nervously at her hands, gestured Roic to a straight chair beside a small table piled with books and flimsies, and tiptoed up after him.

Roic sat in the hall and listened to the old house creak. From the sitting room, visible through one archway, a glow from a fireplace gilded the air.

Through the opposite archway, the Professora’s study lay, lined with books; the light from the hall picked out an occasional bit of gold lettering on an ancient spine in the gloom. Roic wasn’t bookish himself, but he liked the comfortable academic smell of this place. It occurred to him that back when he was a Hassadar guard, he’d never once gone into a house to clean up a bad scene, blood on the walls and evil smells in the air, where there were books like this.

After a long time, the Professora came back down to the hall.

Roic ducked his head respectfully. “Is she sick, ma’am?”

The tired-looking woman pursed her lips and let her breath run out. “She certainly was last night. Terrible headache, so bad she was crying and almost vomiting. But she thought she was much better this morning. Or she said she was. She wanted to be better. Maybe she was trying too hard.”

Roic peered anxiously up the staircase. “Would she see him?”

The tension in her face eased a little. “Yes.”

“Is it going to be all right?”

“I think so, now.” Her lips sought a smile. “Anyway, Miles says you are to go on home. That he expects to be a while, and that he’ll call if he needs anything.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He rose, gave her a kind of vague salute copied from m’lord’s own style, and let himself out.

The night duty guard at the gate kiosk reported no entries since Roic had left. The festivities at the Imperial Residence would go on till dawn, although Roic didn’t expect Vorkosigan House’s attendees to stay that late, not with the grand party planned here for tomorrow afternoon and evening.

He put the borrowed car away in the sub-basement garage, relieved that it hadn’t acquired any hard-to-explain dings in its passage back through some of the rowdier crowds between here and the university.

He made his way softly up through the mostly darkened great house. All was quiet now. The kitchen crew had at last retreated till tomorrow’s onslaught. The maids and menservants had gone to roost. For all that he complained about missing the daytime excitements, Roic usually enjoyed these quiet night hours when the whole world seemed his personal property. Granted, by three hours before dawn, coffee would be a necessity little less urgent than oxygen. But by two hours before dawn, life would start trickling back, as those with early duties roused themselves and padded down to start work. He checked the security monitors in the basement HQ and started his physical rounds. Floor by floor, window and door, never in quite the same order or at quite the same hour.

As he crossed the great entry hall, a creak and a clink sounded from the half-lit antechamber to the library. He paused for a moment, frowned, and rose on his toes, moving his feet as gently as possible across the marble pavement, breathing through his open mouth for silence. His shadow wavered, passed along from dim wall sconce to dim wall sconce. He made sure it was not thrown before him as he moved to the archway. Easing up beside the door frame, he stared into the half-gloom.

Taura stood with her back to him, sorting through the gifts displayed upon the long table by the far wall. Her head bent over something in her hands.

She shook out a cloth and upended a small box. The elegant triple strand of pearls slithered from their velvet backing into the cloth, which she wrapped around them. She clicked the box closed, set it back on the table, and slipped the folded cloth into a side pocket of her russet jacket.

Shock held Roic paralyzed for a moment longer. M’lord’s honored guest, rifling the gifts?

But I liked her. I really liked her. Only now, in this moment of hideous revelation, did he realize just how much he’d come to . . . to admire her in their brief time together. Brief, but so damned awkward. She was really beautiful in her own unique way, if only you looked at her right. For a moment it had seemed as though far suns and strange adventures had beckoned to him from her gold eyes; just possibly, more intimate and exotic adventures than a shy backcountry boy from Hassadar had ever dared to imagine. If only he were a braver man. A handsome prince. Not a fool. But Cinderella was a thief, and the fairy tale was gone suddenly sour.

Sick dismay flooded him as he imagined the altercation, the shame, the wounded friendship and shattered trust that must follow this discovery—he almost turned away. He didn’t know the value of the pearls, but even if it were a city’s ransom he was certain m’lord would trade them in a heartbeat for the ease of spirit he’d had with his old followers.

It was no good. They’d be missed first thing tomorrow in any case. He drew a breath and touched the light pad.

Taura spun like a huge cat at the flare of the overhead lights. After a moment, she let out her breath in a huff, visibly powering down. “Oh. It’s you. You startled me.”

Roic moistened his lips. Could he patch up this shattered fantasy? “Put them back, Taura. Please.”

She stood still, looking back at him, tawny eyes wide; a grimace crossed her odd features. She seemed to coil, tension flowing back into her long body.

“Put them back now,” Roic tried again, “and I won’t tell.” He bore a stunner.

Could he draw it in time? He’d seen how fast she moved . . .

“I can’t.”

He stared at her without comprehension.

“I don’t dare.” Her voice grew edgy. “Please, Roic. Let me go now, and I promise I’ll bring them back again tomorrow.”

Huh? What? “I . . . can’t. All the gifts have to go through a security check.”

“Did this?” Her hand twitched by her pocket full of spoils.

“Yes, certainly.”

“What kind? What did you check it for?”

“Everything is scanned for devices and explosives. All food and drink and their containers are tested for chemicals and biologicals.”

“Only the food and drink?” She straightened, eyes glinting in rapid thought.

“Anyway, I wasn’t stealing it.”

Maybe it was the covert ops training that enabled her to stand there and utter bald-faced . . . what? Counter-factual statements? Complicated things? “Well . . . then what were you doing?”

Again, a kind of frozen misery stiffened her features. She looked down, away, into the distance. “Borrowing it,” she said in a gruff voice. She glanced across at him, as if to check his reaction to this feeble statement.

But Taura wasn’t feeble, not by any definition. He felt out of his depth, flailing for firm footing and not finding it. He dared to move closer, to hold out his hand. “Give them to me.”

“You mustn’t touch them!” Her voice went frantic. “No one must touch them.”

Lies and treachery? Trust and truth? What was he seeing here? Suddenly, he wasn’t sure. Back up, guardsman. “Why not?”

She glowered at him narrow-eyed, as if trying to see through to the back of his head. “Do you care about Miles? Or is he just your employer?”

Roic blinked in increasing confusion. He considered his armsman’s oath, its high honor and weight. “A Vorkosigan armsman isn’t just what I am; it’s who I am. He’s not my employer at all. He’s my liege lord.”

She made a frustrated gesture. “If you knew a secret that would hurt him to the heart—would you, could you, keep it from him even if he asked?”

What secret? This? That his ex-lover was a thief? It didn’t seem as though that could be what she was talking about—around. Think, man.

“I . . . can’t pass a judgment without knowledge.” Knowledge. What did she know that he didn’t? A million things, he was sure. He’d glimpsed some of them, dizzying vistas. But she didn’t know him, now, did she? Not the way she evidently knew, say, m’lord. To her, he was a blank in a brown-and-silver uniform. With his mirror-polished boot stuck in his mouth, eh. He hesitated, then countered, “M’lord can requisition my life with a word. I gave him that right on my name and breath. Can you trust me to hold his best interests to heart?”

Stare met stare, and no one blinked.

“Trust for trust,” Roic breathed at last. “Trade, Taura.”

Slowly, not dropping her intent, searching gaze from his face, she drew the cloth from her pocket. She shook it gently, spilling the pearls back into their velvet box. She held the box out. “What do you see?”

Roic frowned. “Pearls. Pretty. White and shiny.”

She shook her head. “I have a host of genetic modifications. Hideous bioengineered mutant or no—”

He flinched, his mouth opening and shutting.

“—among other things I can see slightly farther into the ultraviolet, and quite a bit farther into the infrared, than a normal person. I see dirty pearls.

Strangely dirty pearls. And that’s not what I usually see when I look at pearls. And then Miles’s bride touched them, and an hour later was so sick she could hardly stand up.”

An unpleasant tremor coursed down Roic’s body. And why the devil hadn’t he noticed that progression of events? “Yes. That’s so. They’ll have to be checked.”

“Maybe I’m wrong. I could be wrong. Maybe I’m just being horrible and paranoid and—and jealous. If they were proved clean, that would be the end of it. But, Roic—Quinn. You don’t have any idea how much he loved Quinn. And vice versa. I’ve been going half-mad all evening, ever since it all clicked in, wondering if Quinn really sent these. It would about slay him, if it were so.”

“Wasn’t him these are meant to slay.” It seemed his liege lord’s love life was as deceptively complicated as his intelligence, both camouflaged by his crippled body. Or by the assumptions people made about his crippled body. Roic considered the ambiguous message Arde Mayhew had evidently seen in the live fur blanket. Had this Quinn woman, the other ex-lover—and how many more of them were going to turn up at this wedding, anyway? And in what frame of mind? How many were there, altogether?

And what t’ hell did the little guy do to have acquired what was beginning to seem far more than his fair share, when Roic didn’t even have—He cut off the gyrating digression. “Or—is this necklace lethal, or not? Could it be some nasty practical joke, to just make the bride sick on her wedding night?”

“Ekaterin barely touched them. I don’t know what this horrible goo may be, but I wouldn’t lay those pearls against my skin for Betan dollars.” Her face twisted up. “I want it to not be true. Or I want it to not be Quinn!”

Her dismay, Roic was increasingly convinced, was unfeigned, a cry from her heart. “Taura, think. You know this Quinn woman. I don’t. But you said she was smart. D’you think she’d be plain stupid enough to sign her own name to murder?”

Taura looked taken aback, but then shook her head in renewed doubt.

“Maybe. If it were done for rage or revenge, maybe.”

“What if her name was stolen by another? If she didn’t send these, she deserves to be cleared. And if she did . . . she doesn’t deserve anything.”

What was Taura going to do? He hadn’t the least doubt she could kill him with one clawed hand before he could fumble his stunner out. The box was still tightly clutched in her great hand. Her body radiated tension the way a bonfire radiated heat.

“It seems almost unimaginable,” she said. “Almost. But people mad in love do the wildest things. Sometimes things they regret forever afterward. But then it’s too late. That’s why I wanted to sneak the pearls away and check them in secret. I was praying I’d be proved wrong.” Tears stood in her eyes now.

Roic swallowed and stood straighter. “Look, I can call ImpSec. They can have those—whatever they are—on the best forensics lab bench on the planet inside half an hour. They can check the wrappings, check the origin—everything. If another person stole your friend Quinn’s name to cloak their crime . . .” He shuddered as his imagination sketched that crime in elaborating and grotesque detail: m’lady dying at m’lord’s feet in the snow while her vows were still frost in the air; m’lord’s shock, disbelief, howling anguish—“Then they should be hunted down without mercy.

ImpSec can do that, too.”

She still stood poised in doubt, on the balls of her feet. “They would hunt her down with the same . . . un-mercy. What if they got it wrong, made a mistake?”

“ImpSec is competent.”

“Roic, I’m an ImpSec employee. I can absolutely guarantee you, they are not infallible.”

He ran his gaze down the crowded table. “Look. There’s that other wedding gift.” He pointed to the folds of shimmering black blanket, still piled in the box. The room was so quiet he could hear the live fur’s gentle rumble from here. “Why would she send two? The blanket even came with a dirty limerick, handwritten on a card.” Not presently on display, true. “Madame Vorsoisson laughed out loud when m’lord read it to her.”

A reluctant smile twitched Taura’s mouth for a moment. “Oh, that’s Quinn, all right.”

“If that’s truly Quinn, then this”—he pointed at the pearls—“can’t be. Eh?

Trust me. Trust your own judgment.”

Slowly, with the deepest distress in her strange gold eyes, Taura wrapped the box in the cloth and handed it to him.

Then Roic found himself facing the task, all by himself, of stirring up ImpSec Supreme headquarters in the middle of the night. He almost wanted to wait for Pym’s return. But he was a Vorkosigan armsman: senior man present, even if merely because sole man present. It was his duty, it was his right, and time was of the essence, if only to relieve Taura’s troubled mind at the earliest possible instant. She hovered, bleak and worried, as he gulped for nerve and fired up the secured comconsole in the nearby library.

A serious-looking ImpSec captain reported to the front hall in less than thirty minutes. He recorded everything, including Roic’s verbal report, Taura’s description of what the pearls had looked like to her, both their accounts of Madame Vorsoisson’s witnessed symptoms, and a copy of Pym’s original security check records. Roic tried to be straightforward, as he’d often wished witnesses would have been to him back in Hassadar, although in this version the fraught confrontation in the antechamber became merely Sergeant Taura voiced a suspicion to me. Well, it was true.

For Taura’s sake, Roic made sure to mention the possibility that the pearls had not been sent by Quinn at all and pointed out the other gift certainly known to be from her. The captain frowned and bundled up the live fur as well, and looked as though he wanted to bundle up Taura along with it. He carried off the pearls, the still-purring blanket, and all related packaging in a series of sealed and labeled plastic bags. All this chill efficiency took a bare half hour more.

“Do you want to go to bed?” Roic asked Taura when the doors closed behind the ImpSec captain. She looks so tired. “I have to stay up anyway. I can give you a call to your room when there’s any news. If there’s any news.”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t sleep. Maybe they’ll have something soon.”

“There’s no telling, but I hope so.”

They settled down to wait together on a sturdy-looking sofa in the antechamber opposite the one displaying the gifts. The noises of the night—odd squeaks of the house settling against the winter cold, the faint whir or hum of distant automated machinery—were very noticeable in the stillness. Taura stretched what Roic suspected were knotted shoulders, and he was briefly inspired to offer a back rub, but he wasn’t sure how she’d take it. The impulse dissolved in cowardice.

“Quiet around here at night,” she said after a moment.

She was speaking to him again. Please, don’t stop. “Yeah. I sort of like it, though.”

“Oh, you, too? The night watch is a philosophical kind of time. Its own world. Nothing moving out there but maybe people being born or people dying, necessity, and us.”

“Eh, and the bad night people we’re put on watch against.”

She glanced through the archway into the great hall and beyond.

“Apparently so. What an evil trick . . .” She trailed off in a grimace.

“This Quinn, you’ve known her a long time?”

“She was in the Dendarii mercenaries at the time I joined the fleet—’original equipment,’ as she says. A good leader, a friend by many shared disasters.

And victories, sometimes. Ten years adds up to some weight, even if you’re not watching. Especially if you’re not watching, I suppose.”

He followed the thought spoken by her glance, as well as her words. “Eh, yeah. God spare me from ever facing such a puzzle. It would be as bad as having your count revolt against the emperor, I suppose. Or like finding m’lord in on some insane plot to murder Empress Laisa. Shouldn’t wonder that you’ve been running around in circles in your head all night.”

“Tighter and tighter, yes. I couldn’t enjoy the emperor’s party from the moment I thought of it, and I know Miles so wanted me to. And I couldn’t tell him why—I’m afraid he thought I was feeling out of place. Well, I was, but it wasn’t a problem, exactly. I’m usually out of place.” She blinked tawny eyes gone dark and wide in the half-light. “What would you do? If you discovered or suspected such a horror?”

His lips twisted. “That’s a tough one. A higher honor must underlie ours, the count says. We can’t ever obey unthinkingly.”

“Huh. That’s what Miles says, too. Is that where he got it, from his father?”

“I shouldn’t be surprised. M’lord’s brother Mark says integrity is a disease, and you can only catch it from someone who has it.”

A little laugh sounded in her throat. “That sounds like Mark, all right.”

He considered her question with the seriousness it merited. “I’d have to turn him in, I guess. I hope I’d have the courage, anyways. Nobody would win, in the end. Least of all me.”

“Oh, yeah. I can see that.”

Her hand lay on the sofa fabric between them, clawed fingers tapping. He wanted to take it and squeeze it for comfort—hers, or his? But he didn’t dare. Dammit, try, can’t you?

His argument with himself was interrupted when his wrist com sounded.

The gate guard reported the return of the Vorkosigan House party from the Imperial Residence. Roic coded down the house shields and stood aside as the crowd disembarked from a small fleet of groundcars. Pym was in close attendance upon the countess, smiling at something she was saying over her shoulder to him. The guests, variously cheerful, drowsy, or drunk, streamed past chatting and laughing.

“Anything to report?” Pym inquired perfunctorily. He glanced in curiosity past Roic at Taura, looming over his shoulder.

“Yes, sir. See me in private as soon as you can, please.”

The benign sleepy look evaporated from Pym’s features. “Oh?” He glanced back at the mob now divesting wraps and streaming up the stairs. “Right.”

Low-voiced as Roic had been, the countess had caught the exchange. A wave of her finger dismissed Pym from her side. “Although, if this is of moment, Pym, I’ll take a report before bed,” she murmured.

“Yes, my lady.”

Roic jerked his head toward the antechamber of the library, and Pym followed him and Taura through the archway. The moment the guests had cleared the next room, Roic decanted a short precis of the night’s adventure, self-plagiarized from the one he’d given to the ImpSec forensics captain. Omitting, again, the part about Taura’s attempted theft. He hoped like hell that it wasn’t going to turn out to be horribly pertinent later. He would submit the full account to m’lord’s judgment, he decided. When the devil was m’lord going to return?

Pym grew rigid as he took in the report. “I checked that necklace myself, Roic. Scanned it clear of devices—the chemical sniffer didn’t pick up anything either.”

“Did you touch it?” asked Taura.

Pym’s eyes narrowed in memory. “I mainly handled it by the clasp. Well . . .

well, ImpSec will run it through the wringer. M’lord always claims they can use the exercise. It can’t hurt. You acted correctly, Armsman Roic. You can continue about your duties now. I’ll follow it up with ImpSec.”

With this tepid praise, he moved off, frowning.

“Is that all we get?” Taura whispered as Pym’s ascending footsteps faded on the winding staircase.

Roic glanced at his chrono. “Till ImpSec reports back, I guess. It depends on how hard that dirty stuff you saw”—he didn’t insult her by phrasing it as you claimed you saw—“is to identify.”

She scrubbed tired-looking eyes with the back of her hand. “Can I, uh, can I stay with you till they call?”

“Sure.”

In a moment of true inspiration, he led her down to the kitchen and introduced her to the staff refrigerator. He’d been correct; her extraordinary metabolism was in need of fuel again. Ruthlessly, he cleared out everything on the shelves and laid it in front of her. The early morning crew could fend for themselves. There was no shame here in offering up servants’ food to a guest; everyone ate well from Ma Kosti’s kitchen. He dialed up coffee for himself and tea for her, and they perched together on two stools at the counter.

Pym found them there as they were finishing eating. The senior armsman’s face was so drained of blood as to be nearly green.

“Well done, Roic, Sergeant Taura,” he began in a stiff voice. “Very well done. I just now spoke with ImpSec headquarters. The pearls were doctored—with a designer neurotoxin. ImpSec thinks it’s of Jacksonian origin, but they’re still cross-checking. The dose was sealed under a chemically neutral transparent lacquer that dissolves with body heat.

Casual handling wouldn’t release it, but if someone put the necklace on and wore it for a time . . . half an hour or so . . .”

“Enough to kill someone?” Taura’s tone was tense.

“Enough to kill a bloody elephant, the lab boys say.” Pym moistened dry lips. “And I checked it myself. I bloody passed it.” His teeth clenched. “She was going to wear them to—M’lord would have—” He choked himself off and ran a hand over his face, hard.

“Does ImpSec know who really sent them?” asked Taura.

“Not yet. But they’re all over it, you can believe.”

A vision of the deadly pale spheres lying on m’lady-to-be’s warm throat flashed through Roic’s memory. “Madame Vorsoisson touched the pearls last night—night before last, that is now,” said Roic urgently. “She had them on for at least five minutes. Is she going to be all right?”

“ImpSec is dispatching a physician to Lord Auditor Vorthys’s to check her—one of their toxins experts. If she’d taken in enough to kill her, she’d have died right then, so that’s not going to happen, but I don’t know what other . . . I have to go now and call m’lord there and warn him to expect a visitor. And—and tell him why. Well done, Roic. Did I say well done? Well done.”

Pym drew a shaken, unhappy breath and strode back out.

Taura, her chin in her hand as she drooped over her plate, scowled after him. “Jacksonian neurotoxin, eh? That doesn’t prove much. The Jacksonians will sell anything to anyone. Miles made enough enemies there in some of our old sorties—if they knew it was intended for him, they’d probably offer a deep discount.”

“Yeah, I imagine tracing the source is going to take a little longer. Even for ImpSec.” He hesitated. “Although, wouldn’t they know him on Jackson’s Whole only under his old covert ops identity? Your little admiral?”

“That cover’s been well-blown for a couple of years, he tells me. Partly as a result of the mess his last mission there produced, partly from some other things. Over my head.” She yawned, hugely. It was . . . impressive. She’d been up since dawn, Roic was reminded, and hadn’t slept through the afternoon as he had. Stranded in what must seem to her an alien place and wrestling terrible fears. All by herself. For the first time, he wondered if she was lonely. One of a kind, the last of her kind if he understood correctly, without home or kin except for that chancy wandering mercenary fleet. And then he wondered why he hadn’t noticed her essential aloneness sooner.

Armsmen were supposed to be observant. Yeah?

“If I promise to come by and tell you if I get any news, d’you suppose you could try to sleep?”

She rubbed the back of her neck. “Would you? Then I think I could. Try, that is.”

He escorted her to her door, past m’lord’s dark and empty suite. When he clasped her hand briefly, she clasped back. He swallowed, for courage.

“Dirty pearls, eh?” he said, still holding her hand. “Y’know . . . I can’t speak for any other Barrayarans . . . but I think your genetic modifications are beautiful.”

Her lips curved up, he hoped not altogether bleakly. “You are getting better.”

When she let go and turned in, a claw trailing lightly over the skin of his palm made his body shudder in involuntary, sensual surprise. He stared at the closing door and swallowed a perfectly foolish urge to call her back. Or follow her inside . . . He was still on duty, he reminded himself. The next monitors check was overdue. He forced himself to turn away.

The sky outside was shifting from the amber night of the city to a chill blue dawn when the gate guard called Roic to code down the house shields for m’lord’s return. As the armsman who’d been called out to chauffeur drove the big car off to put away, Roic opened one door to admit the hunched, frowning figure. M’lord looked up to recognize Roic, and a rather ghastly smile lightened his furrowed features.

Roic had seen m’lord looking strung-out before, but never so alarmingly as this, not even after one of his bad seizures or when he’d had that spectacular hangover after the disastrous butter bug banquet. His eyes stared out from gray circles like feral animals from their dens. His skin was pale, and lines of tension mapped the anxiety across his face. His movements were simultaneously tired and stiff, and jerky and nervous, a spinning exhaustion that could find no place of rest.

“Roic. Thank you. Bless you,” m’lord began in a voice that sounded as though it were coming from the bottom of a well.

“Is m’lady-to-be all right?” Roic asked in some apprehension.

M’lord nodded. “Yes, now. She fell asleep in my arms, finally, after the ImpSec doctor left. God, Roic! I can’t believe I missed the signs. Poisoning!

And I fastened that death around her neck with my own hands! It’s a damned metaphor for this whole thing, that’s what it is. She thought it was just her. I thought it was just her. How little faith in herself, or me in her, to misidentify dying of poison for dying of self-doubt?”

“She’s not dying, is she?” Roic asked again, to be sure. In this spate of dramatic angst, it was a little hard to tell. “T’ bit of exposure she got isn’t going to have any permanent effects, is it?”

M’lord began to pace in circles around the entry hall, while Roic followed vainly trying to take his coat. “The doctor said not, not once the headaches pass off, which they seem to have done now. She was so relieved to find out what it really was she burst into tears. Go figure that one out, eh?”

“Yeah, except that—” Roic began, then bit his tongue. Except that the crying jag he’d inadvertently witnessed had occurred well before the poisoning.

“What?”

“Nothing, m’lord.”

Lord Vorkosigan paused at the archway to the antechamber. “ImpSec. We must call ImpSec to take away all those gifts and recheck them for—”

“They already came and collected them, m’lord,” Roic soothed him, or tried to. “An hour ago. They say they’ll try t’ get as many as possible cleared and back before the wedding guests start arriving come midafternoon.”

“Oh. Good.” M’lord stood still a moment, staring into nothing, and Roic finally managed to get his coat away from him.

“M’lord . . . you don’t think your Admiral Quinn sent that necklace, do you?”

“Oh, good heavens, no. Of course not.” M’lord dismissed this fear with a startlingly casual wave of his hand. “Not her style at all. If she were ever that mad at me, she’d kick me downstairs personally. Great woman, Quinn.”

“Sergeant Taura was worried. I think she thought this Quinn might a’ been, um, jealous.”

M’lord blinked. “Why? I mean, yes, it’s almost exactly a year since Elli and I parted company, but Ekaterin had nothing to do with that. Didn’t even meet her till a couple of months later. The timing’s pure coincidence, you can assure her. Yeah, so Elli turned down the wedding invitation—she has responsibilities. She got the fleet, after all.” A small sigh escaped him. His lips screwed up in further thought. “I’d sure like to know who knew enough to steal Quinn’s name to smuggle that hellish package in here, though.

That’s the real puzzle. Quinn’s connected to Admiral Naismith, not to Lord Vorkosigan. Which was the sticking point in the first place, but never mind now. I want ImpSec to put every available resource on to tearing that one apart.”

“I believe they already are, m’lord.”

“Oh. Good.” He looked up, and his face grew, if possible, more serious.

“You saved my House last night, you know. Eleven generations of Vorkosigans have narrowed down to the choke point of me, this generation, this marriage. I’d have been the last, but for that chance—no, not chance—that moment of shrewd observation.”

Roic waved an embarrassed hand. “Wasn’t me who spotted it, m’lord. It was Sergeant Taura. She’d have reported it herself earlier, if she hadn’t been half-taken in by t’ bad guy’s nasty camouflage with your, um, friend Admiral Quinn’s name.”

M’lord took up his taut orbit of the hall again. “Bless Taura, then. A woman beyond price. Which I already knew, but anyway. I could kiss her feet, by God. I could kiss her all over!”

Roic was beginning to think that line about the barbed-wire choke chain wasn’t such a joke after all. All this frenetic tension was, if not precisely infectious, starting to get on what was left of his nerves. He remarked dryly, in Pym-like periods, “I was given to understand you already had, m’lord.”

M’lord jerked to a halt again. “Who told you that?”

Under the circumstances, Roic decided not to mention Madame Vorsoisson. “Taura.”

“Eh, maybe it’s the women’s secret code. I don’t have the key, though.

You’re on your own there, boy.” He snorted a trifle hysterically. “But if you ever do win an invitation from her, beware—it’s like being mugged in a dark alley by a goddess. You’re not the same man after. Not to mention critical feminine body parts on a scale you can actually find, and as for the fangs, there’s no thrill quite like—”

“Miles,” a bemused voice interrupted from overhead. Roic glanced up to see the countess, wrapped in a robe, leaning over the balcony railing and observing her son. How long had she been standing there? She was Betan; maybe m’lord’s last remarks wouldn’t discombobulate her as much as they did Roic. In fact, he reflected, he was certain they couldn’t.

“Good morning, Mother,” m’lord managed. “Some bastard tried to poison Ekaterin, did you hear? When I catch up with him, I swear I’m going to make the Dismemberment of Mad Emperor Yuri look like a house party—”

“Yes, ImpSec has kept your father and me fully apprised during the night, and I just spoke with Helen. Everything seems under control for the moment, except for persuading Pym not to throw himself off the Star Bridge in expiation. He’s pretty distraught over this slipup. For pity’s sake, come up and take a sleeptimer and lie down for a while.”

“I don’t want a pill. I have to check the garden. I have to check everything—”

“The garden is fine. Everything is fine. As you have just discovered in Armsman Roic here, your staff is more than competent.” She started down the stairs, a distinctly steely look in her eye. “It’s either a sleeptimer or a sledgehammer for you, son. I am not handing you off to your blameless bride in the state you’re in, or the worse one it’ll be if you don’t get some real sleep before this afternoon. It’s not fair to her.”

“Nothing about this marriage is fair to her,” m’lord muttered, bleak. “She was afraid it would be the nightmare of her old marriage all over again. No!

It’s going to be a completely different nightmare—much worse. How can I ask her to step into my line of fire if—”

“As I recall, she asked you. I was there, remember? Stop gibbering.” The countess took his arm, and began more or less frog-marching him upstairs.

Roic made a mental note of her technique for future reference. She glanced over her shoulder and gave Roic a reassuring, if rather unexpected, wink.

The brief remainder of the most memorable night shift of his career passed, to Roic’s relief, without further incident of note. He dodged excited maidservants hurrying to the big day’s tasks and mounted the stairs to his tiny fourth-floor bedroom thinking that m’lord wasn’t the only one who should get some sleep before the afternoon’s more public duties. M’lord’s last, decidedly free-floating comments kept him awake for some time, though, beguiling him with visions of somewhat shocking charm. Such as he’d never dreamed of back in Hassadar. He fell asleep with his lips curling up.

A few minutes before his alarm was set to go off, Roic was awakened by Armsman Jankowski tapping at his bedroom door.

“Pym says you’re to report to m’lord’s suite right away. Some kind of briefing—you don’t have to be in your uniform yet.”

“Right.”

Dress uniform, Jankowski meant, although Jankowski was already sharp in his own. Roic slipped on last night’s wear and ran a comb through his hair, frowned in frustration at his beard shadow—right away presumably meant just that—and hurried downstairs.

Roic found m’lord in his suite’s sitting room, halfway dressed in a silk shirt, the brown trousers with silver side-piping and the silver-embroidered suspenders that went with and slippers. He was attended by his cousin Ivan Vorpatril, resplendent in his own House’s blue-and-gold uniform. As m’lord’s Second and chief witness in the imminent ceremony, Lord Ivan was also playing groom’s batman as well as general supporter.

One of Roic’s fonder secret memories from the past weeks was of witnessing, in his role as disregarded coatrack, the great Viceroy Count Vorkosigan himself taking his handsome nephew aside and promising, in a voice so low as to be almost a whisper, to have Ivan’s hide for a drumskin if he allowed his misplaced sense of fun to do anything at all to screw up the impending ceremony for m’lord. Ivan had been humorless as a judge all week; side bets were being taken belowstairs for how long it would last.

Remembering that deeply ominous voice, Roic had selected the longest shot in the pool—and thought himself likely to win.

Taura, also in last night’s gear of skirt and lacy blouse, lounged on one of the small sofas in the bay window, apparently offering bracing advice.

M’lord had evidently taken the sleeptimer, for he looked vastly better: clean, shaved, clear-eyed, and very nearly calm.

“Ekaterin’s here,” he told Roic, in the awed tone of a besieged garrison commander describing the unexpected relieving force. “The bride’s party is using my mother’s suite for their staging area. Mother’s going to bring her down in a moment. She needs to be in on this.”

In on what? was answered before Roic could voice the question by the entry of ImpSec chief General Allegre himself, in dress greens, escorted by the count, also already in his best House uniform. Allegre was a wedding guest in his own right, but it clearly wasn’t for social reasons that he’d arrived an hour early.

The countess and Ekaterin followed on their heels, the countess graceful in something sparkling and green, m’lady-to-be still in her drab dress but with her hair already braided up and thickly entwined with tiny roses and other exquisite little scented flowers that Roic could not name. Both women looked grave, but a smile like a fugitive gleam from paradise lit Ekaterin’s eyes as they met m’lord’s. Roic found he had to look away from that brief intensity, feeling a clumsy intruder. He thus surprised Taura’s expression: shrewdly approving, but more than a little wistful.

Ivan drew up extra chairs, and all disposed themselves around the small table near the window. Madame Vorsoisson took a seat beside m’lord, decorously but with no wasted centimeters between. He gripped her hand.

Roic managed to slip in next to Taura; she smiled down at him. These chambers had once belonged to the late great General Piotr Vorkosigan, before they’d been claimed by his grandson, the rising young Lord Auditor.

This spot, not the grand public rooms downstairs, was the site of more military, political, and secret conferences of historic import to Barrayar than Roic could readily imagine.

“I dropped by early to give you ImpSec’s latest report in person, Miles, Madame Vorsoisson, Count, Countess.” Allegre, half-leaning on a sofa arm, nodded around. He reached into his tunic and withdrew a plastic bag in which something white glimmered and gleamed. “And to return these. I had my forensics people clean them after collecting and recording the evidence. They’re safe now.”

Gingerly, m’lord took the pearls from his hand and set them down on the table. “And do you know yet who gets the thank-you note for this gift? I’m rather hoping to deliver it in person.” Ill-concealed menace vibrated beneath his light tone.

“That has actually broken open much faster than I was expecting,” said Allegre. “It was a very nice forgery job on the date stamps from Escobar on the outer packaging, but the inner decorative wrapping checked out under analysis as of Barrayaran origin. Once we knew which planet to look on, the item was sufficiently unique—the necklace is of Earth origin, by the way—we were able to trace it by jeweler’s import records almost at once. It was purchased two weeks ago in Vorbarr Sultana for a large sum of cash, and the store security vids for the month hadn’t been erased yet. My agent positively identified Lord Vorbataille.”

M’lord hissed through his teeth. “He was on my short list, yes. No wonder he was trying so hard to get off planet.”

“He was up to his eyebrows in the plan, but he wasn’t its originator. Do you remember how you said to me three weeks ago that while there had to be brains behind this operation, you’d swear they weren’t in Vorbataille’s head?”

“Yes,” said m’lord. “I had him pegged for a front man, suborned for his connections. And his yacht, of course.”

“You were right. We picked up his Jacksonian crime consultant about three hours ago.”

“You have him!”

“We have him. He’ll keep, now.” Allegre gave m’lord a grim nod. “Although he had the wit to not bring attention to himself by trying to get off planet, one of my analysts, who came in last night to look over the new evidence that came in with the necklace, was able to run a back-trace and cross-connect, and so identify him. Well, actually he fingered three suspects, but fast-penta cleared two of them. The source for the toxin was a fellow by the name of Luca Tarpan.”

M’lord mouthed the syllables; his face screwed up. “Damn. Are you sure?

I’ve never heard of him.”

“Quite sure. He appears to have ties with the Bharaputra syndicate on Jackson’s Whole.”

“Well, that would give him access to quite a lot of somewhat scrambled two-year-old information about me and Quinn, yes. Both me s, in fact. And it accounts for the superior forgery. But why such a heinous attack? It’s almost more disturbing to think that some total stranger would—Have we crossed paths before?”

Allegre shrugged. “It seems not. The preliminary interrogation suggests it was a purely professional ploy—although he clearly had no love left for you by the time you were about half done ripping open this case. Your talent for making interesting new enemies has evidently not deserted you. The plan was to create distracting chaos in your investigation just after the group made its getaway—Vorbataille was preselected to be thrown to us for a goat, it turns out—but we shut them down about eight days early. The necklace had only just been slipped into the delivery service’s records and dispatched at that point.”

M’lord’s teeth set. “You’ve had Vorbataille in your hands for two days. And fast-penta didn’t turn this up?”

Allegre grimaced. “I just reviewed the transcripts before I drove over here. It came very close to surfacing. But to get an answer, even—especially—under fast-penta, as useful a truth drug as it is, you must first know enough to ask the question. My interrogators were concentrating on the Princess Olivia. It was Vorbataille’s yacht that was used to insert the hijacking team, by the way.”

“Knew it had to be,” grunted m’lord.

“We’d have caught up with this necklace scheme in a few more days on our own, I think,” said Allegre.

M’lord glanced at his chrono and said rather thickly, “You’d have caught up with it in about one more hour, actually. On your own.”

Allegre tilted his head in frank acknowledgment. “Yes, unfortunately.

Madame Vorsoisson”—he touched his brow in a considerably more formal gesture than the usual ImpSec salute—“on behalf of myself and my organization, I wish to offer you my most abject apologies. My Lord Auditor.

Count. Countess.” He looked up at Roic and Taura, sitting side by side on the sofa opposite. “Fortunately, ImpSec was not your last line of defense.”

“Indeed,” rumbled the count, who had seated himself on a straight chair turned backward, arms comfortably crossed over its back, listening intently but without comment till now. Countess Vorkosigan stood by his side; her hand touched his shoulder, and he caught it under his own thicker one.

Allegre said, “Illyan once told me that half the secret of House Vorkosigan’s preeminence in Barrayaran history was the quality of the people it drew to its service. I’m glad to see this continues to hold true. Armsman Roic, Sergeant Taura—ImpSec salutes you with more gratitude than I can rightly express.” He did so, in a sober gesture altogether free of his sporadic irony.

Roic blinked, ducking his head in lieu of the return salute he wasn’t sure if he was supposed to make. He wondered if he was expected to say something. He hoped to hell no one would want him to make a speech, like after that incident in Hassadar. That had been more horrifying than the needler fire. He glanced up to find Taura glancing down at him, eyes bright.

He wanted to ask her—he wanted to ask her a thousand things, but not here. Would they ever get a private moment again? Not for the next several hours, that was certain.

“Well, love,”—m’lord blew out his breath, staring down at the plastic bag—“I think that’s your final warning. Travel with me and you travel into hazard. I don’t want it to be so. But it’s going to go on being so, as long as I serve . . . what I serve.”

M’lady-to-be glanced at the countess, whose return smile was decidedly twisted. “I never imagined it would be otherwise for a Lady Vorkosigan.”

“I’ll have these destroyed,” m’lord said, reaching for the pearls.

“No,” said m’lady-to-be, her eyes narrowing. “Wait.”

He paused, raising his eyebrows at her.

“They were sent to me. They’re my souvenir. I shall keep them. I’d have worn them as a courtesy to your friend.” She reached past him and scooped up the bag, tossed it up and caught it again out of the air, her long fingers closing tightly around it. Her edged smile took Roic aback. “I’ll wear them now as a defiance to our enemies.”

M’lord’s eyes blazed back at her.

The countess seized the moment—possibly, Roic thought, to cut off her son from further blithering—and tapped her chrono. “Speaking of wearing things, it’s time to get dressed.”

M’lord went a shade paler. “Yes, of course.” He kissed m’lady-to-be’s hand as she rose, looking as if he never wanted to let it go again. Countess Vorkosigan herded everyone except m’lord and his cousin into the hallway, shutting the door to the suite firmly behind her.

“He looks much better now,” said Roic to her, glancing back. “I think your sleeptimer was just t’ thing.”

“Yes, plus the tranquilizers I had Aral give him when he went in to wake him up a while ago. The double dose seems to have been just about right.”

She hooked her arm through her husband’s.

“Still think it should have been a triple,” he murmured.

“Now, now. Calm, not comatose, is the goal for our groom.” She escorted Madame Vorsoisson toward the stairs; the count went off with Allegre, taking advantage of the chance to discuss details, or perhaps drinks, in private.

Taura stared after them, her smile askew. “You know, I wasn’t sure about that woman for Miles at first, but I think she’ll do him very well. That Vor thing of his always baffled Elli. Ekaterin has it in her bones same as he does. God help them both.”

Roic had been about to say that he thought m’lady-to-be better than m’lord deserved, but Taura’s last remark brought him up short. “Huh. Yeah. She’s true Vor, all right. It’s no easy thing.”

Taura started down the corridor but stopped at the corner and half-turned back to ask, “So, what are you doing after the party?”

“Night guard duty.” All bloody week, Roic realized in dismay. And Taura only had ten days left on-planet.

“Ah.”

She whisked away; Roic glanced at his chrono and gulped. The generous time he’d allotted to dress and report for wedding duty was almost gone.

He ran for the stairs.

The guests were already starting to arrive, spilling from the entry hall through the succession of flower-graced public rooms, when Roic scuffed quickly down the staircase to take up his allotted place as backup to Armsman Pym, in turn backing up Count and Countess Vorkosigan. Some on-site guests were already in place: Lady Alys Vorpatril, acting as assistant hostess and general expediter, and her benevolently absentminded escort, Simon Illyan; the Bothari-Jeseks; Mayhew, in apparent permanent tow of Nikki; an assortment of Vorvaynes who had overflowed from Lord Auditor Vorthys’s packed house to Vorkosigan House guest rooms. M’lord’s friend Commodore Galeni, Chief of ImpSec Komarran Affairs, and his wife were early arrivals, along with m’lord’s special Progressive Party colleagues, the Vorbrettens and the Vorrutyers.

Commodore Koudelka and his spouse, known universally as Kou and Drou, arrived with their daughter Martya. Martya was standing in as Madame Vorsoisson’s Second in place of m’lady-to-be’s closest friend—yet another Koudelka daughter, Kareen, still at school on Beta Colony. Kareen and m’lord’s brother, Lord Mark, were much missed (albeit, in remembrance of the bug butter incident, not by Roic) but the interstellar travel time had proved too tight for their schedules. Lord Mark’s wedding present was a gift certificate for the bridal couple for a week at an exclusive and very expensive Betan resort, however, so perhaps m’lord and his lady would soon be visiting his brother and their friend, not to mention m’lord’s Betan relatives. As gifts went, it at least had the advantage of shifting all the security challenges inherent in the trip to some later time.

Martya was sped upstairs by a maid detailed to that purpose. Martya’s escort and Lord Mark’s business partner, Dr. Borgos, was quietly taken aside by Pym for an unscheduled frisking for any surprise gift insects he might have been harboring, but this time the scientist proved clean. Martya returned unexpectedly soon, her brow wrinkled thoughtfully, and repossessed him to stroll off in search of drinks and company.

Lord Auditor and Professora Vorthys arrived with the rest of the Vorvaynes, altogether a goodly company: four brothers, three wives, ten children, and m’lady-to-be’s father and stepmother, in addition to her beloved aunt and uncle. Roic glimpsed Nikki showing off Arde to his mob of awed young Vorvayne cousins, pressing the jump pilot to decant galactic war stories to this enthralled audience. Nikki didn’t, Roic noted, seem to have to press very hard. The Betan pilot grew downright expansive in the warm glow of these attentions.

The Vorvayne side stood up bravely to the glittering company that was Vorkosigan House’s norm—well, Lord Auditor Vorthys was notoriously oblivious to any status not backed by proven engineering expertise. But even the bride’s most buoyant older brother grew subdued and thoughtful when Count Gregor and Countess Laisa Vorbarra were announced. The emperor and empress had chosen to attend the supposedly informal afternoon affair as social equals to the Vorkosigans, which saved a world of protocol hassles for everyone, not least themselves. Not in any other uniform but that of his Count’s House could the emperor have publicly embraced his little foster brother Miles, who ran downstairs to greet him, nor been so sincerely embraced in return.

In all, m’lord’s “little” wedding numbered one hundred twenty guests.

Vorkosigan House absorbed them all.

At last, the moment arrived; the hall and antechambers became brief, crowded chaos as wraps were redonned and the guests all streamed out the gate and around the corner to the garden. The air was cold but not bitter, and thankfully windless, the sky a deepening clear blue, the slanting afternoon sun liquid gold. It turned the snowy garden into as gilded, glittering, spectacular and utterly unique a showplace as m’lord’s heart could ever have desired. The flowers and ribbons were concentrated around the central place where the vows were to be, complementing the wild brilliance of the ice and snow and light.

Although Roic was fairly sure that the two realistically detailed ice rabbits humping under a discreet bush were not part of the decorations m’lord had ordered. They did not pass unnoticed, as the first person to observe them immediately pointed them out to everyone within earshot. Ivan Vorpatril averted his gaze from the cheerfully obscene artwork—the rabbits were grinning—a look of innocence on his face. The count’s menacing glower at him was alas undercut by an escaping snicker, which became a guffaw when the countess whispered something in his ear.

The groom’s party took up their positions. In the center of the garden, the walkways, swept clear of snow, met at a wide circle of paving brick, with the Vorkosigan crest of mountains and maple leaves picked out in contrasting brick. In this obvious spot, the small circle of colored groats was laid out on the ground for the oath-making couple, surrounded by a multipointed star for the principal witnesses. Another circle of groats crowned a temporary pathway of tanbark flung wide around the first two rings, providing dry footing for the rest of the guests.

Roic, wearing a sword for the first time since he’d taken his liegeman’s oath, took his place in the formal lineup of armsmen making an aisle on either side of the main pathway. He looked around in worry, for Taura did not loom up among the groom’s guests sorting themselves out along the outer circle. M’lord, his hand clutching his cousin Ivan’s blue sleeve, gazed up at the entrance in almost painful anticipation. M’lord had, with difficulty, been talked out of hauling his horse in to town to fetch the bride from the house in the old Vor style, though Roic personally had no doubt that the placid, elderly steed would have proved much less nervous and difficult to handle than its master. So the Vorvayne party made their entrance on foot.

Lady Alys, as Coach, led the way like some silken banner carrier. The bride followed on her blinking father’s arm, shimmering in a jacket and skirt of beige velvet embroidered with shining silver, her booted feet striding out fearlessly, her eyes seeking only one other face in the mob. The triple stand of pearls gracing her throat glimmered their secret message of bravado to only a few persons here. A few extraordinary persons. By his narrowed eyes and wryly pursed lips, it was clear that Emperor Gregor was one of them.

Roic’s might have been the sole gaze not to linger on the bride, for following beside her stepmother, in the place of—no, as—the bride’s Second, walked Sergeant Taura. Roic’s eyes shifted, though he kept his rigid posture—yes, there was Martya Koudelka with Dr. Borgos on the outer circle, apparently demoted to the status of mere guest but not looking in the least put-out. In fact, she seemed to be watching Taura with smug approval. Taura’s dress was everything that Lady Alys had promised.

Champagne-colored velvet exactly matched her eyes, which seemed to spring to a brilliant prominence in her face. The jacket sleeves and long swinging skirt were decorated on their margins with black cord shaped into winding patterns. Champagne-colored orchids coiled in her bound-back hair. Roic thought he’d never seen anything so stunningly sophisticated in his life.

Everyone took their places. M’lord and m’lady-to-be stepped into the inner circle, hands gripping hands like two lovers drowning. The bride looked not so much radiant as incandescent; the groom looked gobsmacked. Lord Ivan and Taura were handed the two little bags of groats with which to close the circle, then stood back to their star points between Count and Countess Vorkosigan and Vorvayne and his wife. Lady Alys read out the vows, and m’lord and m’lady-to—m’lady repeated their responses, her voice clear, his only cracking once. The kiss was managed with remarkable grace, m’lady somehow bending her knee in a curtsylike motion so m’lord didn’t have to stretch unduly. It suggested thought and practice. Lots of practice.

With immense panache, Lord Ivan then swept the groat circle wide with one booted foot, triumphantly collecting his kiss from the bride as she exited. Lord and Lady Vorkosigan passed out of the dazzling ice garden between the lines of Vorkosigan armsmen; swords, drawn and lowered at their feet, rose in salute as they passed. When Pym led the Armsmen’s Shout, the sound of twenty enthusiastic male voices bounced and echoed off the garden walls and thundered to the sky. M’lord grinned over his shoulder and blushed with pleasure at this deafening endorsement.

As Seconds, Taura followed next on Lord Ivan’s arm, bending her head to hear something he said, laughing. The row of armsmen remained to rigid attention while all the principals streamed past them, then formed up and marched smartly in their wake, followed by the guests, back around and into Vorkosigan House. It had all gone off perfectly. Pym looked as though he wanted to pass out there and then from sheer relief.

Vorkosigan House’s main state dining room boasted seating for ninety-six when both tables were brought out in parallel; the overflow fit in the chamber immediately beyond, through a wide archway, so that the whole company could sit down at once essentially together. Serving was not Roic’s responsibility tonight, but in his role as arbiter of emergencies and general assistant for any guest needing anything, he kept to his feet and moving. Taura was seated at the head table with the principals and the most honored guests—the other most honored guests. Between tall, dark, handsome Lord Ivan and tall, dark, lean Emperor Gregor, she looked really happy. Roic could not wish her anywhere else, but he found himself mentally erasing Ivan and replacing him with himself . . . yet Ivan and the emperor were the very pattern of debonair wit. They made Taura laugh, fangs flashing without constraint. Roic would probably just sit there in inarticulate silence and gawp at her . . .

Martya Koudelka passed him in the entryway, where he’d temporarily taken up guard stance, and smiled cheerily at him. “Hi, Roic.”

He nodded. “Miss Martya.”

She followed his glance to the head table. “Taura looks wonderful, doesn’t she?”

“Sure does.” He hesitated. “How come you’re not up there?”

Her voice lowered. “I heard the story about last night from Ekaterin. She asked me if I’d mind trading. I said, God, no. Gets me out of having to sit there and make small talk with Ivan, for one thing.” She wrinkled her nose.

“It was well thought of, of m’lady.”

She hitched up one shoulder. “It was the one honor here that was wholly hers to bestow. The Vorkosigans are amazing, but you have to admit, they do eat you up. They give you a wild ride in return, though.” She stood on tiptoe and planted an unexpected kiss on Roic’s cheek.

He touched the spot in surprise. “What’s that for?”

“For your half of last night. For saving us all from having to live with a really insane Miles Vorkosigan. As long as he lasted.” A brief quaver shook her flippant voice. She tossed her blond hair and bounced off.

The toasts were made with the count’s very best wines, including a few historical bottles, reserved for the head table, that had been laid down before the end of the Time of Isolation. Afterward the party moved to the brilliant ballroom, seeming another garden, heady with the scent of a sudden spring. Lord and Lady Vorkosigan opened the dancing. Those who could still move after the dinner followed them onto the polished marquetry floor.

Roic found himself, all too briefly, passing by Taura as she watched the dancers sway and twirl.

“Do you dance, Roic?” she asked him.

“Can’t. I’m on duty. You?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know any of these dances. Although, I’m sure Miles would have foisted an instructor on me if he’d thought of it.”

“Actually,” he admitted in a lower voice, “I don’t know how either.”

Her lips curled up. “Well, don’t let Miles know if you want it to stay that way.

He’d have you out there thumping around before you knew what hit you.”

He tried not to snicker. He hardly knew what to say to this, but his parting half-salute did not betoken disagreement.

On the sixth number, m’lady danced past Roic with her eldest brother, Hugo.

“Splendid necklace, Kat. From your spouse, is it?”

“No, actually. From one of his . . . business associates.”

“Expensive!”

“Yes.” M’lady’s faint smile made the hairs stir on Roic’s arms. “I expect it to cost him everything he has.”

They spun away.

Taura nailed it. She’ll do for m’lord, all right. And God help their enemies.

Promptly on schedule, the aircar was brought round for the bridal couple’s getaway. The night was still fairly young, but it was more than an hour’s flight to Vorkosigan Surleau and the lakeside estate that was to be the honeymoon refuge. The place would be quiet this time of year, blanketed with snow and peace. Roic could not imagine two people more in need of a little peace.

The guests in residence were to be left behind under the care of the count and countess for a few days, although the galactic guests would travel down to the lake later. Among other things, Roic was given to understand, Madame Bothari-Jesek wished to visit her father’s grave there with her husband and new daughter and burn a death offering.

Roic had thought Pym would be doing the flying, but to his surprise, Armsman Jankowski took the controls as the newlyweds ran the gauntlet of raucous family and friends and made it to the rear compartment.

“I’ve shuffled some assignments,” Pym murmured to Roic as they both stood smiling in the porte cochere to watch and salute. M’lord and m’lady seemed to melt into each other’s arms in an equal mix of love and exhaustion as the silvered canopy finally closed over them. “I’m taking night watch in Vorkosigan House for the next week. You have the week off with double holiday pay. With m’lady’s own thanks.”

“Oh,” said Roic. He blinked. Pym had been quite frustrated by the fact that no one, from the count down, had seen fit to censure him for the slipup with the necklace. He could only conclude that Pym had given up and decided to supply his own penance. Well, if the senior armsman looked to be carrying it too far, the countess could be relied upon to step in. “Thanks!”

“You can consider yourself free from whenever Count and Countess Vorbarra leave.” Pym nodded and stepped back as the aircar eased out from under the overhang and began to rise into the cold night air as if buoyed up by the yells and cheers of the well-wishers.

A splendid and prolonged burst of fireworks made the send-off a thing of beauty and a joy to Barrayaran hearts. Taura applauded and hooted, too, and, along with Arde Mayhew, joined Nikki’s cohort for some added, unscheduled crackers and sparklers in the back garden. Powder smoke perfumed the air in clouds as the children ran around Taura, urging her to throw the lights higher. Security and an assortment of mothers might have quashed the game, except for the fact that the large bag of most remarkable incendiary goodies had been slipped to Nikki by Count Vorkosigan.

The party wound down. Sleepy, protesting children were carried past Roic to their cars or to their beds. The emperor and empress were seen out fondly by the count and countess; soon after their departure, a score of unobtrusive, efficient servants, on loan from ImpSec, vanished quietly and without fanfare. The remaining energetic young people hijacked the ballroom to dance to music more to their taste. Their tired elders sought quieter corners in the succession of public rooms in which to converse and sample more of the count’s very best wines.

Roic found Taura sitting alone in one of the small side rooms on a sturdy-looking sofa of the style she favored, reflectively working her way through a platter of Ma Kosti’s dainties on a low table before her. She looked drowsy and contented, yet a little apart from it all. As if she were a guest in her own life . . .

Roic gave her a smile, a nod, a semi-salute. He wished he’d thought to provide himself with roses or something. What could a fellow give to a woman like this? The finest chocolate, maybe, yeah, although that was redundant at the moment. Tomorrow for sure. “Um . . . have you had a good time?”

“Oh, yes. Wonderful.”

She sat back and smiled almost up at him—an unusual angle of view. She looked good from this direction, too. M’lord’s comment about horizontal height differentials drifted through his memory. She patted the sofa beside her; Roic glanced around, overcame his guard-stance habits, and sat down. His feet hurt, he realized.

The silence that fell was companionable, not strained, but after a time he broke it. “You like Barrayar, then?”

“It’s been a great visit. Better than my best dreams.”

Ten more days. Ten days was an eyeblink. Ten days was just not enough for all he had to say, to give, to do. Ten years might be a start. “You, uh, have you ever thought of staying? Here? It could be done, y’know. Find a place you could fit. Or make one.” M’lord would figure out how, if anyone could. With great daring, he let his hand curl over hers on the seat between them.

Her brows rose. “I already have a place I fit.”

“Yeah, but . . . forever? Your mercs seem like a chancy sort of thing to me.

No solid ground under them. And nothing lasts forever, not even organizations.”

“Nobody lives long enough to have all their choices.” She was silent for a moment, then added, “The people who bioengineered me to be a super-soldier didn’t consider a long life span to be a necessity. Miles has a few biting remarks about that, but oh well. The fleet medics give me about a year yet.”

“Oh.” It took him a minute to work through this; his stomach felt suddenly tight and cold. A dozen obscure remarks from the past few days fell into place. He wished they hadn’t. No, oh, no . . . I

“Hey, don’t look so bludgeoned.” Her hand curled around to clasp his in return. “The bastards have been giving me a year yet for the past four years running. I’ve seen other soldiers have their whole careers and die in the time the medics have been screwing around with me. I’ve stopped worrying about it.”

He had no idea what to say to this. Screaming was right out. He shifted a bit closer to her instead.

She eyed him thoughtfully. “Some fellows, when I tell them this, get spooked and veer off. It’s not contagious.”

Roic swallowed hard. “I’m not running away.”

“I see that.” She rubbed her neck with her free hand; an orchid petal parted from her hair and caught upon her velvet-clad shoulder. “Part of me wishes the medics would get it settled. Part of me says, the hell with it. Every day is a gift. Me, I rip open the package and wolf it down on the spot.”

He looked up at her in wonder. His grip tightened, as though she might be pulled from him as they sat, right now, if he didn’t hold hard enough. He leaned over, reached across and picked off the fragile petal, touched it to his lips. He took a deep, scared breath. “Can you teach me how to do that?”

Her fantastic gold eyes widened. “Why, Roic! I think that’s the most delicately worded proposition I’ve ever received. S’ beautiful.” An uncertain pause. “Um, that was a proposition, wasn’t it? I’m not always sure I parlay Barrayaran.”

Desperately terrified now, he blurted in what he imagined to be merc-speak, “Ma’am, yes, ma’am!”

This won an immense fanged smile—not in a version he’d ever seen before. It made him, too, want to fall over backward, though preferably not into a snowbank. He glanced around. The softly lit room was littered with abandoned plates and wineglasses, detritus of pleasure and good company. Low voices chatted idly in the next chamber. Somewhere in another room, softened by the distance, a clock was chiming the hour. Roic declined to count the beats.

They floated in a bubble of fleeting time, live heat in the heart of a bitter winter. He leaned forward, raised his face, slid his hand around her warm neck, drew her face down to his. It wasn’t hard. Their lips brushed, locked.

Several minutes later, in a shaken, hushed voice, he breathed, “Wow.”

Several minutes after that, they went upstairs, hand in hand.

TIME ABLAZE

Michael A. Burstein

A good deal of this actually happened—but how much?

Adele Weber dreamed of fire and water.

In her dream, she stood on a wooden raft, which simultaneously also existed as a tenement building and a wooden maze. The fire chased her as she ran from one side of the raft to the other. The fire spat smoke at her, so she leaned out of window after window for a gasp of fresh air. The fire threw intense heat at her, so she ran through corridor after corridor, searching for cooler air.

The fire chased her, and so Adele rushed to the edge of the raft, to the front door of the building, to the end of the maze. But no freedom could be found there, because of the water. A sparkling clear blue, it surrounded her on all sides. But it never touched the fire, never even approached close enough to put the fire out. It served as a barrier, trapping her, taunting her. She knew she should remove her dress, undergarments, and stockings and dive into the water, anything to get away from the flames, but modesty and her inability to swim prevented her.

Suddenly an eight-foot-tall figure appeared: Mose the Fireman, spoken of in legend. He wore a leather firefighter’s helmet as big as a barrel and a pair of humongous rubber boots, each the size of a sailboat. His coat declared that he was part of the Engine 40 unit. “Hello, little lady,” he said. “How can I help you?”

“Please,” Adele said. “You must save me from the fire. You must save my family.”

Mose the Fireman took a swig of beer from the fifty-gallon keg he kept on his belt. The beer trickled down his thick white beard, and suddenly both beer and beard vanished. “I can’t save anyone unless you save yourself.”

“But—but you’re Mose the Fireman. You rescue people from fires! You swam the Hudson in two strokes! You’ve lifted trolley cars out of your path to run to the rescue of babies!”

“I’ve retired and moved to Hawaii,” he replied.

Suddenly, Mose the Fireman wasn’t Mose anymore, but her father. Adele watched in horror as her father called out to her in puzzlement. “Adele?”

“Father!” she shouted, but she was too late, as the flames licked closer and closer, filled with glee as they chose between immolating Adele or her father first . . .

And Adele’s nightmare ended. She awoke gasping for air, as she had many times since her father’s death, with her body and head wrapped snugly in her blanket.

Lucas Schmidt entered eighteen-year-old Adele Weber’s life on a Sunday in May. As usual, after services at St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church had ended, the congregants lingered to talk. Cigar smoke filled the air and voices speaking German filled the room, with only the occasional English word as a reminder that the community actually lived in the United States. People eagerly spread news about the everyday events of each other’s lives.

Adele and her mother were no exception. They found themselves chatting with Philip Straub and his wife while the three Straub children ran around playing with other children.

Just as the Straubs took their leave, Adele and her mother were approached by Reverend George Haas, the pastor of the church, and a dark-haired stranger.

Haas adjusted his glasses and stroked his salt-and-pepper beard. “Mrs. Weber, Miss Weber,” he said in English. He nodded to each one in turn. “And how are you this Sunday?”

“We are doing quite well, thank you sir,” Adele replied. Although she returned the nod, her eyes were drawn to the handsome stranger, partly because of his looks but mostly because of his odd behavior. He looked distinctly uncomfortable. He kept his mouth closed, while his gaze darted around the room. Tiny beads of sweat covered his brow, and his hands repeatedly pulled at his collar and tie. Adele stifled a laugh, while waiting for the presumed introduction.

Finally, Haas said, “Allow me to introduce Mr. Lucas Schmidt.”

Schmidt nodded. “A pleasure to meet you both.”

“Mr. Schmidt,” Adele said. “A pleasure to meet you as well. I take it you are new to New York City?”

“Yes,” he said. “I am.”

“Where do you come from?”

“I—I have just arrived from abroad.”

“Really? I’m surprised to hear it. Your accent does not sound like that of the old country.”

Schmidt blushed, reminding Adele of a schoolboy caught in a lie. “No. Um, my family emigrated to England many years ago. I grew up speaking English much more than German.”

“Whereas I grew up fluent in both,” Adele said.

Suddenly, Schmidt began coughing repeatedly, and Haas pounded him on the back. “Are you all right, Mr. Schmidt?”

Schmidt nodded and wiped his brow with a handkerchief. “It’s all the cigar smoke. I’m not used to it.”

“Don’t they smoke in England?” Adele asked.

“Um. Not where I come from.”

“How strange. Well, welcome to Kleindeutschland, Mr. Schmidt.”

He nodded. “Little Germany.”

There was an awkward pause, and then Haas spoke up. “Mr. Schmidt needs a place to stay. And I seem to recall that you still have that room for let.”

“Well,” Mrs. Weber said, “that all depends. How old are you, Mr. Schmidt? How do you earn your living?”

“I’m twenty-five, Mrs. Weber. And I work as a journalist.”

“Oh,” Adele said, a touch disappointed.

Haas smiled. “You’ll have to forgive Miss Weber. She was just telling me how scandalous she finds the newspapers.”

Schmidt turned to look at her, and Adele shifted under his gaze. “Indeed? Are you a regular reader?”

Adele’s mother spoke up again. “My daughter is quite a voracious reader.”

“Yes,” Adele said, slightly nettled. “I am a reader.”

“And you find the newspapers scandalous?”

She sighed. “The newspapers should spend more time reporting the truth, and less time dredging up spectacles.”

Schmidt shrugged. “I tend to agree with you, Miss Weber, but I must point out that newspapers need to sell copies to stay in business.”

“They could sell just as many copies appealing to man’s greater instincts.” She sniffed. “Tell me, Mr. Schmidt, for which paper do you write?”

“I work for the New York World.”

“Oh, Joseph Pulitzer’s paper. That’s not as bad as some of the others. Given that, I think you’d be acceptable.”

“I am honored, Miss Weber,” Schmidt said. He turned to Adele’s mother. “So I’ve been interviewed by both mother and daughter. When will I get to meet Mr. Weber?”

Adele and her mother looked at each other. “My father passed away six years ago,” Adele said after a moment.

“Oh,” Schmidt replied. “I’m sorry.”

Mrs. Weber sighed. “He left me to finish raising Adele on my own. But the community has been helpful. Somehow, I manage to find enough work cleaning offices or taking in laundry to help us live.”

“And taking in boarders?” Schmidt asked.

Adele’s mother smiled. “Yes,” she said. “And taking in boarders. And you do come with good references,” she added, nodding at Reverend Haas.

“Then,” Schmidt said, “if it’s not presumptuous of me to ask, I will need to know my new address.”

“We live three blocks south of here, on Third Street.” She turned to her daughter. “Adele, perhaps you can help Mr. Schmidt find his way to our apartment?”

Adele and Schmidt exchanged an awkward glance.

“Are you going somewhere, mother?” Adele asked.

“I need to stay for a while and talk with Mary Abendschein about the excursion. I have some ideas for her.”

“Excursion?” Schmidt asked. “What excursion?”

“You’ve come to our community at a good time,” Mrs. Weber said. “Next month we’ll have a day to get away from the heat of the city.”

“When?”

“Wednesday, June fifteenth,” Reverend Haas said. “It’s our annual excursion to celebrate the end of the Sunday school year. We charter a steamboat for the day, and head out to Locust Grove, a picnic ground on the northern shore of Long Island. There’ll be food, fun, music, and games. You should join us if you can get away from work.”

“It sounds like quite an outing,” Schmidt said. “You said that you do this every year?”

Haas smiled. “This is our seventeenth one. The church started running them in 1888.”

Mrs. Weber laughed. “You’re being far too modest, Reverend. After all, the excursions were your idea.”

“Really?” Schmidt asked.

Haas waved his hands and shook his head, as if to say that it had not been that much of an achievement. “It just seemed to me that it would be nice if we could celebrate the end of the Sunday school year with some sort of picnic. And it’s so popular that many of our former congregants return from Yorkville and Brooklyn to join the festivities.”

“Some even come from as far off as New Jersey,” Adele said. “Such as my uncle and cousins.”

“We usually get close to a thousand people,” Haas added.

Schmidt whistled. “And what about the program book?”

Adele and her mother exchanged a puzzled glance with Haas. “We didn’t mention the program book,” Adele’s mother said.

“Oh,” Schmidt replied. “Well, perhaps I heard it from someone else. But you did mention Mary Abendschein. I would imagine she has something to do with the program book.”

“Ah, yes,” Haas said. “Mary is in charge of putting it together, along with many of the other details of organizing the event.”

“I would like to assist her, if I could. It seems like a good way of getting to know my new community.”

Haas smiled. “A capital idea. She only started last month, so I imagine her committee could use one more person.”

“Perhaps Mrs. Weber and Miss Weber could introduce me to her.”

“Certainly,” Adele’s mother said. “And then afterwards, Mr. Schmidt, let us escort you to your new home.”

Lucas Schmidt did his best to prevent himself from disrupting the Weber family routine. As part of the boarding arrangement, he shared breakfasts and dinners with Adele and her mother. He would come down to the dining room right on time for the morning meal, made sure to leave before Adele’s mother or Adele herself needed to start working, and he always returned by the scheduled dinner hour.

He even offered to clean the dishes, or to assist the Webers with the household laundry, much to their delight and amusement.

“Most men of my acquaintance wouldn’t do such things,” Adele had told him.

“Does that mean you’d rather I didn’t?”

“Oh, not at all. We’ll gladly take you up on your offer.” She smiled. “But we’ll be sure not to tell anyone, so your reputation remains unbesmirched.”

Schmidt’s behavior and appearance enchanted Adele so much that she and her mother decided upon a plan for Adele to spend some time alone with their new boarder. So the following week, Mrs. Weber told Mr. Schmidt that she had been hoping to take her daughter on an outing to Coney Island. “But,” she said, “my health is not what it once was. Still, I hate to disappoint my daughter. Might you by chance be willing to accompany us?”

From behind the back stairs, Adele heard the whole thing. She felt a small thrill of delight when Schmidt agreed. She admittedly had been shocked when her mother had suggested a Coney Island outing; despite the amusement parks that had been there for almost ten years, it still bore a reputation for vice. Still, friends of the Webers had gone with their young children and declared that they had enjoyed the rides immensely—even if they only mentioned it quietly, and away from the pastor and other officials of the church.

“Why, of course I will,” Schmidt replied.

“Thank you. I know how much Adele is looking forward to seeing Luna Park.”

“Luna Park?”

“It’s a new amusement park that opened just recently on the location of the old Sea Lion Park.”

“Oh, yes, I remember reading something about that.”

“I would have expected you to, if you work at the World.”

That Saturday morning, as the three of them ate breakfast, Adele and her mother completed their plan. Mrs. Weber told Schmidt that she was feeling under the weather and that perhaps they ought to cancel the outing. Schmidt immediately offered to escort Adele on his own.

When Schmidt got up from the table to carry the dishes into the kitchen, Adele and her mother exchanged a wink.

Shortly after breakfast, Adele and Mr. Schmidt boarded a steamboat to Brooklyn, along with hundreds of other New Yorkers eager to get away for the day. Schmidt, who had been quiet and reserved as they had walked over to the Third Street pier, became slightly agitated when he saw the steamboat. He came to a stop, forcing Adele to fight the crowd as she backed up to where he stood, going back and forth between staring at the boat and looking down at his feet.

“Mr. Schmidt? Are you coming with me or not?”

He looked up, and Adele noticed a slight reddish tinge to his cheeks. “I’m sorry, Miss Weber. I haven’t been on a boat in a while.”

“I thought you said you came over from Europe. What did you do, flap your arms and fly over here?”

“Something like that, yes,” he said with a broad smile.

“Seriously, Mr. Schmidt.”

“Seriously, I’m just a tad nervous.” He paused. “I just wasn’t expecting to board a steamboat, that’s all. I should have known better.”

“Do you get seasick, Mr. Schmidt?” Adele asked, trying to show her concern.

He chuckled. “No.”

“Did you have a bad experience on a boat?” Adele asked.

Schmidt nodded. “Sort of.”

“Well, relax. The ferries between Manhattan and Brooklyn run all the time. Nothing’s going to happen.”

He stared into her eyes for a moment. “Of course, you’re right. I would have known otherwise.”

“What?”

“I mean, if something had happened to any of the ferries, I would have heard.”

“So are we going?”

He smiled. “Yes. Let’s go.”

Mr. Schmidt paid their fare and they boarded the steamboat. The trip was uneventful, and within an hour they found themselves disembarking at the steel pier at Coney Island. The beautiful blue sky above the beach and boardwalk held but a wisp of white, fluffy clouds. As they walked down the pier, Mr. Schmidt bought a copy of “Seeing Coney Island” for ten cents from a barker, and using the guidebook they found their way to Luna Park.

At the entrance stood a huge stone arch with the words “Luna Park” on a scaffold. Directly in the middle of the arch sat a giant red heart, proclaiming Luna Park “The Heart of Coney Island.” Underneath that, carved in stone, were the names “Thompson & Dundy.” And underneath that, of course, people wandered into and out of the amusement park.

Adele and Schmidt joined the crowd walking into the park, and were hit by a variety of sounds and smells. The music of a brass band some distance away mixed with the laughter and shouting of the crowd of people. An odor of hay and manure wafted by, and Adele jumped away as an elephant lumbered by, led by a man in turban and carrying two couples who chatted away, seemingly unaware of the spectacle they were creating. As the crowds parted, Adele had to stick close to Schmidt to avoid being jostled away from him.

“Wow,” Schmidt said. Goggle-eyed, he slowly turned around and stared at everything Luna Park had to offer. Adele turned with him.

After taking in all the sights, Schmidt started pointing to the signs around the park that advertised rides and exhibitions: Ride the Trip to the Moon! Experience Dragon’s Gorge Scenic Railway! Take a Trip to the North Pole! See the new Fire and Flames!

“What shall we do first?” Adele asked.

“Fire and Flames looks interesting,” Schmidt said, pointing in the direction the sign indicated. “Let’s go see that.”

“I’m not sure,” Adele said. The name Fire and Flames made her uncomfortable. She studied the other signs, and then asked, “Wouldn’t you rather ride the Trip to the Moon?”

Schmidt looked her in the eyes. “I’ll make you a deal. First I’ll go with you to the Moon, and then you come with me to see the Flames.”

Reluctantly, Adele agreed. The two of them walked in the direction of the Moon ride, which was housed in one of the more modest buildings, past the huge Electric Tower with the sculpted dragon at the base.

They joined the long line in front of the building. Eventually, they reached the front of the line, and Schmidt handed over two dimes for their admission.

Workers ushered them and the other spectators into a cavernous room, in the middle of which sat a rounded spaceship that came to a point at one side. They were gently herded into the spaceship and asked to take seats in one of the rows. Adele took a seat next to a porthole, with Schmidt next to her.

A few seconds after the door closed, the spaceship started to rock back and forth. Looking out the portholes, Adele saw the walls vanish below, replaced by blue sky, which darkened until the only light came from pinpoint stars.

“Amazing,” she said, almost breathless with wonder. Schmidt made no comment.

Very soon after, the Moon appeared as a small rock in one of the portholes. It got larger and larger, until finally it swung below, disappearing from view, and the ship stopped rocking and came to a stop with a sudden thump.

“What now?” someone asked.

“We explore the Moon,” said the pilot.

He opened the door to the spaceship, and the spectators exited. No longer could they tell that they were still in the large room of the building that housed the ride. Instead, to all eyes, it appeared as if they stood on the populated surface of Earth’s nearest neighbor. Everywhere they looked were caverns and grottos. Giants and midgets dressed in elaborate silver costume greeted them, along with a man on a throne who claimed to be the Man in the Moon. Dancing moon maidens gave the spectators pieces of green cheese to take back with them as souvenirs of their voyage. Eventually, the pilot ushered all the paying customers back into the spaceship, and after a slightly shorter trip, the ship “landed” and they were escorted outside into the bright sunny day on Earth.

Adele noticed that Mr. Schmidt had a bemused expression on his face. “Did you enjoy that?”

“I thought it was rather quaint,” he said.

“Quaint? The Trip to the Moon is quaint?”

“Well, it’s just an interesting picture of the future.” He smiled. “Are you ready for Fire and Flames now?”

Adele repressed a shudder. “I’m ready.”

Once again, they stood on a long line, and when they finally got to the front, Mr. Schmidt handed over two dimes for their admission to the theater. They took seats among the rows of other spectators, and waited for the curtain to lift.

Finally, once all the seats were filled, the curtain rose on a fake street that looked very much like one of the streets in Little Germany. Behind the street stood several tenement buildings, in front of which peddlers pushed their carts, children ran around, and men and women walked with purpose to their daily errands.

Suddenly smoke and flames emerged from one of the windows high up in a four-story tenement. The crowd of people, who had been moving in all directions, stopped in their tracks to stare up at the window. Then they started running around again, screaming, “Fire! Fire!”

Faces of women and children appeared at other windows near the one with the fire. Their screams rended the air as the fire spread first to one window, and then to the next, until the entire upper floor of the building burned in flame.

It wasn’t just the performers in the building and on the street who reacted. The spectators also began to jump up in their seats, screaming for someone to rescue the actors.

Just when it seemed as if there would be no hope for the unfortunate souls trapped in the building, a fire bell clanged and three fire engines sped down the makeshift street. Ten firemen grabbed hoses and began spraying water on all sides of the building, while another ten grabbed ladders and placed them along the building, so that the trapped residents could descend quickly to the safety of the street below.

A few people in the windows screamed that they couldn’t reach the ladders, and another group of firemen rushed over with safety nets. They called out “Jump!” and the last people trapped in the building’s top floor jumped into the nets, to thunderous applause from the audience.

The crowd roared with exhilaration, and even Mr. Schmidt joined in with great enthusiasm, but not Adele. She felt faint.

“Mr. Schmidt,” she whispered.

Schmidt turned to look at her, and his mouth fell open. “My God, Miss Weber. Your face is so pale. Are you feeling okay?”

“Please get me out of here,” she said.

“I don’t understand.”

“I thought I could take it, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about?”

She waved her right arm around, gesturing at the other members of the audience, who remained transfixed by the spectacle. “How can they watch this? How can they sit here unmoved by the horror?”

“It’s a disaster spectacle. Entertainment.”

“I can’t believe it. Although I suppose if people are going to gather at a fire for entertainment, it’s better they do so at a fake fire than at a real one.”

Schmidt cleared a path for the two of them, escorted Adele to a bench in a far corner of the park, and brought her a cup of water. She drank deeply.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked.

Adele nodded. “I think so. I just can’t believe it.”

“I couldn’t believe it either when I first read about it. That’s why I had to see it for myself. I have something of an interest in fires.” He paused. “I just didn’t realize that it would affect you this way.”

Adele remained silent for a few seconds. Then she cleared her throat and spoke. “My mother and I never told you how my father died.”

“No,” he said after a moment. “You didn’t.”

Adele looked away from Mr. Schmidt. She looked into the distance, where the beach melted away into the huge ocean. “He was walking home from work one evening when he heard shouts of a fire in a tenement. The firemen hadn’t arrived yet, and there were women and children trapped inside. Father threw off his coat and ran into the building, to try to rescue them.” She paused. “He never emerged.”

“I am sorry, Miss Weber.”

“Mother couldn’t bear it. I had to identify the body.”

“That . . . that must have been difficult for you,” Schmidt said quietly, while the noise of the park still surrounded them.

Adele shook her head, trying to dismiss the memory from her mind. “Fires are far too common in our world. I was but a young twelve-year-old girl when that building he ran into went up in flames. Ever since then, I’ve had recurring dreams of fire.”

“Ironic,” Schmidt said softly.

“Why is that ironic?” Adele asked.

“Oh, um, no reason,” Schmidt replied, with a wave of his hand. “I wish I could have met your father. It sounds like he was quite the heroic man.”

Adele grunted. “Hm. I sometimes feel that the more heroic choice would have been to ignore the screams of strangers and stay alive for his family.” She smiled. “Selfish of me, I suppose.”

“You’re entitled to such feelings. But why didn’t you tell me about this when I suggested seeing Fire and Flames?”

“I—I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”

Schmidt took her in his arms, held her for a moment, and then released her. “Are you ready for another ride?”

Adele shook her head; the emotional roller coaster she had just gone through felt more intense than a real one would have been. “Actually, I’d like to go home.”

“But we barely got here,” Schmidt said.

Adele looked him in the eye. “Mr. Schmidt? I think I’ve had enough stimulation for one day. Please?”

He sighed. “Very well, Miss Weber.”

The two of them rode the next ferry back to Manhattan.

After that day, Adele saw less and less of Mr. Schmidt. In the mornings, he would scurry off before breakfast, calling out that he would pick up a muffin or roll on his way to Newspaper Row. In the evenings, after returning to his rooms, he would go out to assist Mary Abendschein in getting shopkeepers and business owners to purchase advertisements in the excursion journal.

This bothered Adele, because even taking into account the disastrous trip to Coney Island, she had come around to her mother’s way of thinking. Lucas Schmidt did seem to be a man of good prospects, and his pleasant appearance certainly made him favorable in Adele’s eyes.

But his recent secrecy worried her. Was he avoiding her simply because of her behavior at Luna Park? Or was there another, more sinister reason? There were many stories of criminals who passed as decent, hard-working men. Suppose Mr. Schmidt had fooled Reverend Haas? Suppose her mother had opened their household up to a man who planned to run off with their possessions? Or worse yet, murder them in their sleep?

Adele admitted to herself that these thoughts were more flights of fancy than real concerns, but she still had a devouring curiosity about Lucas Schmidt. And so, one Monday, in the middle of the day when she had little to do, Adele walked downtown to Newspaper Row, on the eastern edge of City Hall Park.

The New York World was housed in its own tower that sported a tall golden dome on top, so Adele found the building with ease. She maneuvered her way through the newsboys on the street as they shouted the headlines in hopes of getting her to buy the latest edition of whatever paper they were hawking. The big news story was still the murder of Caesar Young by Nan Patterson, his mistress. Adele rolled her eyes at one of the newsboys and pressed her way into the building. She approached the reception desk where a bored-looking man sat.

“Yes?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Mr. Lucas Schmidt. He’s one of your reporters.”

The man checked a printed list on his desk, running his finger down it for a moment. Then he looked up at Adele. “What was the name again?”

“Schmidt. Lucas Schmidt. He would have just started working recently.”

“I don’t think so. This list is pretty up to date.”

“But I’m sure this is where he works.”

“Well,” the man said suddenly, “that gentleman might know.” He pointed at a man who had just gotten off an elevator, and shouted to him. “Mr. Green! Mr. Green!”

Mr. Green’s head snapped around at the sound of his name, and he walked over to the desk. “Yes, John?”

“This lady could use some assistance.”

He turned to Adele and shook her hand. “Martin Green, New York World. I’m an assistant editor here. May I help you?”

“Adele Weber, and yes, you can, Mr. Green. I’m looking for one of your other reporters, a Mr. Lucas Schmidt.”

“Sorry, no one by that name works here.” He paused, then, with a little too much eagerness in his voice, said, “Is there a story you’d like to share, Miss Weber? If it’s good, we can get it into the evening edition.”

“Um, no. Are you sure Mr. Schmidt doesn’t work here?”

“Positive. I assign the stories to all the reporters. I know everyone who writes for us.” He frowned. “Why? Is this fellow pretending to be a reporter for the World?”

“Um, no. I must have gotten the name of the paper wrong. I’ll try the others. Good day, Mr. Green.”

“Um, good day, Miss Weber,” he said as Adele scurried away.

Granting the possibility that she had misunderstood, Adele spent the rest of the afternoon checking at every newspaper on Newspaper Row. Not to her surprise, she discovered that not a single paper knew of a reporter named Lucas Schmidt. The only newspaper she skipped over was the Herald, since after checking with every other major city paper, she didn’t feel that a trip uptown to Thirty-Fourth Street was necessary.

Clearly, Mr. Schmidt had lied.

So if Mr. Schmidt didn’t work for the World, or for any other newspaper, just what did he do during the day?

The question possessed Adele, disrupting her sleep as much as her vivid dreams of fire and water. And so, on Tuesday, in the middle of the day so as not to be discovered, Adele did the unthinkable. She went up to Mr. Schmidt’s room and let herself in.

She had been in the room many times before, and at first glance the room looked as pristine as always. Schmidt clearly was fastidious when it came to keeping his personal space clean. The bed was neatly made, the wooden floor was swept, and the chair and table free of dust.

However, there was something different. A book lay on the table, one that Adele knew did not belong to either her or her mother, because it had a colorful dust jacket. She pulled out the chair, sat down, picked up the book, and studied the cover.

She had seen a few books bearing dust jackets, although those jackets had been simple plain white paper covers. She had never yet seen one as elaborate and expensive-looking as the dust jacket for this book. Her eyes were first drawn to the horrific illustration of the steamboat General Slocum that filled the bottom half of the cover. Searing red flames burned away at the right side of the boat, with lines of thick, black smoke hovering above. On the left side of the boat, people were jumping into the water. The picture appeared so vivid to her eyes that she could almost feel the rising flames getting hotter and hotter, the smoke smothering the victims—

She shuddered and focused her eyes on the title of the book. In large letters, the book blared out its title: SHIP ABLAZE. Underneath, the subtitle explained what the book was about: “The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum.”

Finally, her eyes drifted to the smaller text above the title. She read: “On a beautiful spring morning in June 1904, 1,300 New Yorkers boarded the steamer General Slocum for a pleasant daylong excursion. But in thirty minutes, disaster would strike and more than one thousand would perish . . .”

Adele shuddered again, and her chest felt tight. She fought to keep her breath calm and even, while she tried to understand what she was reading.

She opened the book and noticed that the top of the inside jacket flap gave the price of the book: “US $24.95 / Canada $37.95.” Her jaw dropped. Twenty-four dollars and ninety-five cents for a book? Even good books cost no more than a dollar or two.

The inside front cover showed what looked like newspaper headlines, cartoons, and clippings printed on the inside front cover. She ran her fingers over two of the headlines: “Negligence Doubled the Death List” and “ ‘Let Us Die!’ Cry Women at Morgue.” One of the cartoons, titled “Death’s Cruel Harvest,” showed the figure of Death holding a scythe and standing next to a field of fallen flowers with the heads of children. Another, “Death and Greed Partners,” showed a little girl lying on a table. On her left, a man in a coat and top hat counted his money, while on her right, a figure of Death, skull plainly visible and scythe in one hand, caressed the child’s forehead.

Adele felt cold and confused. What in the world was this?

She turned a few pages in and found a printed notice: “Copyright 2003 by EDWARD T. O’DONNELL.” The year made no sense to her. How could she be holding a book from almost one hundred years in the future? And who was this O’Donnell, an Irishman by the sound of his name, to write a book about a tragedy that befell a German community?

A small piece of paper fell out of the book and onto the table. Adele picked it up and examined it. It bore one line: “http://www.general-slocum.com.” She had no idea what it meant; “http” was clearly not a word, although she presumed she knew what the “general-slocum” part referred to.

It must be a joke, she thought. A cruel, elaborate hoax. But the book looked fine, much better than any other book she had ever seen. She started looking through the pages, faster and faster, trying to make sense of it all, when she heard the door open behind her. She quickly closed the book, placed it on the table, and stood up.

Schmidt saw her as soon as he entered. “Miss Weber! What are you doing in my room?”

Emotions of rage and embarrassment fought with each other, and rage won out.

“What am I doing here? What are you doing back here so early?”

“I had forgotten something in my room.”

“Really? What exactly?”

He sighed. “I don’t care for your tone, Miss Weber, nor do I care for your invasion of my privacy. I have to get back to work.”

“Where? At the New York World?”

“Yes. Now please leave my room.” He walked towards her, his eyes darting around.

Adele raised her hand in front of her, palm out. “You don’t work at the New York World, Mr. Schmidt.”

Schmidt stopped a few feet away. “How—what makes you say that?”

“I went looking for you there. They never heard of you. Nor had any other paper.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Oh, nothing at all. It’s not like I had found this yet.” She picked up Ship Ablaze.

Schmidt sprang towards her. “Give that back to me. It’s autographed.”

“What?”

“I mean it’s mine. Hand it over.”

Adele pulled the book close to her body, and Schmidt hesitated. “Not without an explanation,” she said. She waved the book around. “What is this?”

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

“Oh, really? It seems to be a book from the year 2003. Are you sure that it’s not my concern that the current year is only 1904?”

“I—I don’t know what to say.”

“ ‘Die Wahrheit wird euch frei machen,’ ” Adele said.

“Pardon?”

“John, chapter eight, verse thirty-two. ‘The truth shall make you free.’ Tell me the truth.”

“Um. The truth.” He sighed. “I guess I ought to. That book is in fact from the year 2003. It’s the definitive work on the General Slocum tragedy.”

“The General Slocum tragedy,” she repeated.

“Yeah. There were other books written before and after, but this one is still considered the most comprehensive.”

She shook her head. “I don’t understand. That is, I think I understand, but I don’t want to.”

“A normal reaction.”

“Will you tell me what’s going on? Who are you?” She brandished the book even higher. “How is this possible?”

Schmidt crossed his arms. “Miss Weber, let me ask you something. Have you ever heard of an English writer, a man by the name of Herbert George Wells?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Well, one of the books he’s written—at least, I think he’s written it by now—has to do with the concept of time travel.”

Adele searched her mind, and finally came up with a title. “The Time Machine.”

Schmidt nodded. “Yes. The Time Machine. A man builds a machine that allows him to travel into the past and the future. I stand before you as the final achievement of that dream. In the future, we have figured out how to visit the past.” He paused. “Do you believe me?”

“It seems an impossible fantasy,” Adele said. “And yet—the book—”

“The Time Machine?” Schmidt asked.

Adele glared at him. “No. Your book. The one I’m holding. Ship Ablaze.”

“Oh.” Schmidt’s eyes moved to look at the book. “That one.”

“Yes. This one. I can’t fathom how or why you might have arranged to have that book printed. The only conclusion I can come to is that the book is really from the twenty-first century.” She paused. “Which means that you really have come here from the future.”

He sighed, a world-weary sigh that seemed out of place in a man so young. “I’m not supposed to reveal that, but sometimes it’s so hard to hide the truth.” He walked over to his bed and sat down upon it. “I hope you won’t betray my confidence.”

“So tell me about this. Have you come back to stop this horrible tragedy? Is that why you’re here?”

Schmidt paled, and he didn’t reply.

“What is it?” Adele asked. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’m not here to stop the tragedy. I can’t stop it. No one can. That’s not how time travel works. There are restrictions.”

“Then tell me how time travel works. Perhaps I can figure out a way to get around the restrictions.”

Schmidt smiled. “How might you explain the workings of a telephone to someone in 1804?”

Adele raised a finger. “Do not patronize me, Mr. Schmidt. Perhaps I wouldn’t be able to understand the science or technology behind time travel. But I do understand possibilities. If I knew that a ladder had a rotten rung, and that if someone who climbed it would break the rung and fall, I would be remiss if I didn’t try to save them. Why can’t you do the same?”

“Miss Weber, let me try to use your ladder analogy to make it clear. Imagine time as a sort of ladder. History happens when you climb the rungs. Okay?”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“Now imagine what would happen if at a particular rung, I discovered that by fiddling with it I could cause a whole second ladder to emerge. So that I can create a choice of which ladder I climb.”

“That’s an odd image, but I’ll accept it.”

“It gets odder. Now imagine that I have some sort of switch on that rung. With the switch in its original position, I can climb up the original ladder. But if I flip the switch, the new ladder appears and the old one vanishes. And thus I can only climb the second ladder.”

“Okay.”

“But here’s my point, Miss Weber. I already came down the first ladder. If I’m forced to climb the second ladder, I have no idea where I’ll end up.”

Adele pondered the image for a moment. “Let me see if I grasp your point clearly. You are saying that if you were to prevent this disaster, you would create a change in your own history.”

“That’s correct.”

“I still do not see what is so wrong with that.”

Schmidt sighed. “If I were to change the past, that would also force a change upon the future. And I come from the future, Miss Weber.”

“I still don’t see your objection.”

“Let me summarize it by what is called the Grandfather Paradox. What would happen to me if I came back in time and killed my own grandfather while he was still a baby in his crib?”

“Ah,” Adele said, with sudden understanding. “You would cease to exist. But then you wouldn’t exist to kill your grandfather, so he should live.”

Schmidt nodded. “Precisely. And if he lives, then I would be born, allowing me to go back in time and kill him. A paradox.”

“So if you were to stop this horrible disaster, the future you came from would cease to exist, and by extension, so would you.”

“Exactly. Again, a paradox.”

“Well, how is this paradox resolved?”

He gave Adele a firm look. “By not changing the past.”

“But then what happens to free will? Are you not here now, and able to make decisions?”

“Well, yes. But my decisions are not ones that will disrupt the future, so no problem emerges.”

Adele shook her head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Schmidt, I can’t accept that. If history is as fragile as you claim, then doesn’t your presence here already disrupt the future?”

Schmidt bit his lip in thought. “Well, yes and no. Some changes are more important, more vital, than others. There’s a Law of Conservation of Reality that sometimes kicks in.”

“A Law of Conservation of Reality?”

Schmidt stared into the distance for a moment, then said, “Let me give you an example out of history that has already happened. Suppose you went back in time and killed Napoleon in his crib. What do you think would happen?”

Adele laughed. “Many things.”

“Name one.”

She shrugged. “The French would never have had their empire.”

He nodded. “So you say. And yet, why was it Napoleon who was responsible for the empire? Weren’t there other forces, other things, at play in history? Might not someone else have stepped in and taken on Napoleon’s role?”

Adele thought for a moment, then said, “I am not much of a historian, Mr. Schmidt. I suppose it’s possible, but these questions rarely come to my mind.”

“Forgive me, Miss Weber. I am not trying to make you feel ignorant. Rather, I am trying to point out that while parts of history are fragile, other parts are much more resilient. If I were to kill Napoleon, the Law might cause some other Frenchman to form a similar empire, and by 1904 the broad outline of history would be back on track.”

“So why not attempt to save my community? Isn’t history resilient enough for that?”

He sighed. “History might be resilient enough, but I’m not.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Law of Conservation of Reality I mentioned before? Sometimes the Law kicks in by killing the time traveler, so changes don’t happen that have to be corrected. If I were to try to change history, history might try to kill me to prevent it.”

She sniffed. “That seems to me a selfish reason not to help. Do not forget that my father gave his life to rescue others.”

“And you lived to regret it, did you not? Or so you said at Coney Island.”

Adele glared at him. “That was different.”

Schmidt shrugged. “Perhaps. Miss Weber, please understand. From my point of view, all this—” he waved an arm around “—is already past. My presence here doesn’t change it, as my own place is in your future. As far as I am concerned, the General Slocum tragedy is already a part of history.”

Adele tapped her foot in annoyance. “So what’s the point of your being here, Mr. Schmidt? If you’re not planning to save my community, my friends, my family—me—then why are you here?”

Schmidt wrung his hands. “To save something. A remnant of memory. Have you heard of Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor?”

“Of course. Who hasn’t?”

“Sorry. I’m still adjusting to what people might know in 1904. If you’ve heard of Edison, then you’ve probably heard of the motion picture.”

She rolled her eyes. “Motion pictures such as The Life of an American Fireman or The Great Train Robbery?”

Schmidt looked puzzled. “I’ve heard of the second, but not the first.”

“I saw both last year at the Kinetoscope Parlor.”

“The Kinetoscope Parlor?”

“On Broadway between Twenty-Sixth and Twenty-Seventh Street? It’s been there since I was a child.”

“I see. Well, then, this may be easier to explain than I thought. I’ve come back in time to make a record of the tragedy.”

“You have your very own motion picture camera? You plan to preserve images of the disaster on film?”

“More than that,” he said. “Much more.” He stood up, walked over to his bureau, and opened the top drawer. From it he removed an odd-looking helmet with the word MEMVOX printed across the brow.

“Here,” he said, handing it over.

Adele placed the book on the table. She took the helmet and turned it around in her hands, studying it. Many small metal disks were affixed to the inside.

“What do I do with this?”

“Place it over your head.”

She laughed. “Are we about to engage in battle?”

He smiled. “Not unless you want to.”

She carefully placed the helmet onto her head so as not to disturb her hair.

“How does that feel?” Schmidt asked, his voice sounding thick through the helmet.

“Heavy.” She sniffed the air. “And it smells of oil.”

“That will only last for a moment.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small molded metal box, with knobs and buttons, which he held near her head.

“Miss Weber, are you ready?”

“For what?”

Schmidt chuckled. “I guess I’d call it an immersion into another world. It’s like watching a movie, but you experience it from the inside.”

Adele shrugged. “It sounds intriguing. I’m ready.”

Schmidt nodded. He pushed a button on the box—

—and suddenly the room vanished. Adele found herself strapped into a leather chair in a strange room. Dials and displays of numbers danced before her face. Directly ahead and to both sides, windows showed clear blue sky and clouds, with some sort of pavement underneath.

She felt a sudden jerk of movement, and a high-pitched whine filled her ears. The room she sat in started moving forward, faster and faster. The view through the window showed faraway buildings and trees, moving past her more and more quickly, faster than she had ever gone before—

—and then suddenly the room lifted into the air.

Adele realized now that she had to be in some sort of vehicle, a flying machine. She now noticed some sort of pole, probably a steering mechanism, sticking out of the floor.

“Will wonders never cease?” she said aloud, although as far as she could tell there was no one around to hear her.

Very carefully, she took hold of the pole and pulled it towards her. The flying machine began to climb at an even steeper angle, and she felt herself pushed slightly into her seat. She pushed the pole forward and let it go, and the flying machine seemed to settle into a horizontal position.

“Hm,” she said.

She sat and looked out the window as the flying machine took her on a journey, sometimes ascending, sometimes descending. The experience was rather similar to that of being on a roller coaster, she decided, although a lot smoother.

Until the end.

Looking out the front window, she saw huge buildings of glass and metal, towering over the ground below. The machine brought her closer and closer to the buildings, when suddenly, just when she thought she would die in a crash, the machine banked upwards. She felt herself being pushed into her seat as the vehicle climbed. The weight of her body increased, making it harder for her to breathe. She waited for relief, but the vehicle just continued to accelerate, almost straight upwards—

—when suddenly it stalled, and she found herself, and the machine, falling.

She screamed as intense fear filled her entire being. The air seemed to get thicker and hotter. The urge to get away, to flee, to survive, overwhelmed her, and she suddenly remembered that this was all unreal. She tore the helmet from her head—

—and found herself back in Mr. Schmidt’s chambers.

“Merciful God,” she croaked. Her heart beat so quickly she felt afraid it might burst out of her chest.

Schmidt immediately jumped to her side, and placed his hands upon her shoulders. Normally, she would have rejected the indignity, but she had no strength. “Miss Weber!” he said, his face a picture of concern. “Come, lie down upon the bed.”

Gently, she made her way from the chair to the bed, gripping Schmidt’s arm firmly so she wouldn’t fall onto the floor. The dizziness from the experience lingered. She collapsed onto the bed, breathing heavily, and she stifled an urge to vomit.

“Adele, I’m sorry. I truly am. I forgot how vivid virtual reality can be. I didn’t realize the effect that would have on you. I suppose it’s as removed from motion pictures as—as I am from 1904.”

“What—what in the name of our Lord was that?”

“It’s called—well, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. The point is that you were flying.”

She glared at him. “I know I was flying, you idiot. Or at least it felt like it. Was that real?”

He nodded. “Oh, yes. Quite real.”

“I still want to know what it was called.”

“The flying machine is called an airplane.”

“An airplane,” Adele repeated, as she got her breath back. “And it hasn’t been invented yet. That I know for a fact.”

Schmidt cleared his throat. “Actually, two brothers flew one just last December, if I remember my history.”

“Last December?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Impossible. I would have known.”

Schmidt shrugged. “Well, it’s not as important as the device you just had on your head. It’s called a memory player.”

“A memory player,” she echoed.

“Yes. It can replay the memories of one person into another person’s mind.”

“So that was a memory? Of someone flying an airplane?”

“Well, not quite. That was more of a training scenario. If it had been a real memory, you wouldn’t have been able to interact with it.”

Adele took a moment to assimilate this information, then said, “It’s more intense than watching a movie, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” Schmidt replied. “But I guess you learned that already.”

Adele feared she knew the answer to the next question, but felt compelled to ask it anyway. “How does this device tie in with the St. Mark’s excursion?”

“Well,” Mr. Schmidt said. He looked around the room, never looking at Adele’s face.

“Well,” he said again.

“I’m waiting,” Adele said.

“I’m implanting memory recorder nanobots into the minds of as many people in Little Germany as I can. Especially the women and children, as they will be the majority of the people on the steamboat.”

“What was that word?”

“Um.” Schmidt ran his hand through his hair, as if searching for his thoughts. “You mean nanobots?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a little hard to explain. It’s like the lens of the camera. It would be as if the film of the camera were kept in a separate container.” He lifted the little box again. “All the memories will end up in here, and then I can bring them with me back to the future.”

“But how can the memories reach from people’s minds into your little box?”

“Um,” Schmidt said again. “That’s hard to explain. I’d have to use a lot of scientific terminology that hasn’t been invented yet. Could you explain to a medieval monk how a motion picture works?”

“Do not talk to me as if I were a small child,” she said coldly. “I have a mind, you know.” As the words came out of her mouth, a sudden, chilling thought occurred to her. “Mr. Schmidt. Did you implant one of those—those nanobots in my head?”

“Yours was one of the first,” he replied.

She glared at him. “That is a severe invasion of my privacy. You are the absolute worst sort of voyeur.”

“I would beg your pardon, Miss Weber, but that would be dishonest of me. You have to remember that from my perspective, all the members of this community are long gone. Where I come from, you’re already a vic—I mean, you’ve already passed on.” He paused. “Besides, the other side to this invasion of your privacy is the historical record. I would imagine that your people would want a record of the tragedy.”

She picked the book off of the table again. “Isn’t this proof that there will be a record?”

“Sort of. May I show you something?” Gently, he took the book from her hands. He flipped through the pages until he found a page close to the end of the book, and he handed the book back to her. “Read this,” he said.

The page displayed three simple words on two lines: “Part Four” in smaller type, with the word “Forgetting” underneath in larger type. A picture of the steamboat’s wheel appeared underneath.

Adele looked up. “Forgetting?” she asked.

“The tragedy is not remembered.”

“At all?”

He cleared his throat. “It is remembered a bit, but not as much as other tragedies, some with fewer lives lost, but also ones with much, much more devastation.”

“More devastation?” Adele couldn’t fathom such a thing. She closed the book and checked the number on the front cover. “More than the one thousand the book claims perished?”

“One thousand twenty-one,” Schmidt said.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

Schmidt got a far away look in his eyes. “The answer is yes. There are other disasters, much worse, in this city’s history.”

“Worse?”

He nodded, and gestured with his hands as if trying to create a picture for her. “Buildings set aflame. People jumping out of windows. Great unimaginable towers crashing down. Diseases running rampant in the streets.” He shuddered.

“Do you have any of those in your memory player?”

He nodded. “As regular recordings, yes. I have a few.”

“I see.” She paused. “Do not show me any of those. Ever.”

“I would never inflict those images on anyone who didn’t need to see them,” he replied.

Adele glanced at the book. “Even with other disasters, how could people forget this one?”

“That’s hard to explain without going into more detail about the future, but let me see.” He paused in thought for a moment. “Many years ago—or many years in the future, from your perspective—when I was a student, I took a course in history at Columbia University from Professor James Patrick Shenton. He taught me two truisms about this city. The first was that New Yorkers never let principle take precedence over profit.”

“And the second?”

“New Yorkers also never let memory be a hindrance.”

“Explain,” Adele said.

“New Yorkers have never been much for preserving the past. If a building stood in the way of progress, no matter how historic, it would be torn down.”

“People’s lives are not buildings, Mr. Schmidt.”

“True,” he replied. “But to some people those lives are valued even less.” He lifted the book. “It’s all in here. The Slocum disaster was the greatest tragedy this city had ever known, and within one hundred years, it had been completely forgotten. I want people to remember again. I want them to know the tragedy that struck.”

“But it hasn’t happened yet,” Adele said. “Why force them to know the tragedy? Why not erase it before it ever comes to pass?”

“I’ve already told you. The timeline is not that resilient.”

“Surely it would be resilient enough to spare the lives of my thousand countrymen! After all, if the disaster is mostly forgotten, how could preventing it possibly affect history?”

“It would affect my personal history, Miss Weber. There are ancestors of mine who will die on the General Slocum.”

Adele had not expected that. “Really? Who? Do I know them?”

Schmidt shook his head. “I’ve said too much already. But it’s because of my family history that I’m one of the people who remember the tragedy.”

“I see. I’m sorry.” Even as she spoke the words, Adele felt the absurdity of consoling Mr. Schmidt on the deaths of ancestors who hadn’t even died yet. Nevertheless, it seemed to her the proper thing to say.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Mr. Schmidt, why did you tell me all this?”

“You—you discovered the book. I had no choice.”

She smiled at him. “Do not take me for a fool. If, as you say, there are inherent dangers in changing history, surely your showing me something of the future is a danger.”

He nodded. “It is. But fortunately I can correct that.”

Adele felt a chill run through her body, and it took her a moment to regain the ability to speak. “Does that mean—would you—are you planning to murder me?”

Schmidt’s eyebrows shot up and his jaw dropped open. The expression on his face was so comical that Adele almost laughed. “I take it the answer is no.”

“I’m surprised you would have even entertained the notion,” he said.

“You’re letting a thousand people go to their deaths without interference. It wasn’t that much of a stretch.”

He sighed. “No, I suppose not. But I don’t have to kill you. I can use another one of my devices to make you forget our conversation ever happened.”

She nodded. “Ah. So you would further violate my mind, then.”

“I have no real choice,” Schmidt said. From a jacket pocket he pulled out a thin metal rod. “This device is called a disorienter. It will cause you to forget our conversation. Are you ready?”

“I plead with you. Do not do this.”

“I have no choice, Miss Weber. I’m sorry.”

He pointed the rod directly at her and pushed a button. Adele considered jumping away, or lunging for the rod, but neither option seemed viable. Instead, she shut her eyes tight and waited for whatever effect the rod would have on her.

But nothing happened. She opened one eye and saw Mr. Schmidt standing there, dumbfounded, the rod now hanging loosely from his hand.

“Mr. Schmidt? I still remember everything.”

He nodded. “I know. I couldn’t do it.”

Adele felt a small measure of relief. “Ah. I knew you wouldn’t do that to me.”

Schmidt shook his head. “No, Adele. What I meant was that your mind is too strong. There are always some people whose minds resist the disorienter. I’m afraid you’re one of them.”

“Oh. I had thought—never mind. So what happens now?”

“Now?” He paused, his brow furrowed. “Now I guess I have to rely upon your discretion.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it is my turn to plead with you. Miss Weber, promise me that you will not breathe a word of this to anyone. The consequences will be disastrous if you do.”

She pointed at Ship Ablaze. “They will be disastrous if I don’t.”

“Miss Weber—”

Adele stood up and took a few quick steps over to the door. Just before she left the room, she took one last look at the book. “You have kept your own counsel for quite some time, Mr. Schmidt. Expect me to do the same.”

On many of the following nights, Adele Weber dreamed again of fire and water. But no longer did she float on a simple raft that was sometimes a building or a maze. Instead, she found herself on a cavernous steamboat, devoid of other people, as a fire licked away at the decks.

During the days, Lucas Schmidt kept up the pretense of going to work at the World. Adele knew the truth, but saw no reason to tell her mother. Schmidt somehow managed to pay his weekly rent, so what would be the point of exposing him? It wasn’t as if her mother could do anything.

But there were some people who could. A few evenings later, Adele stood in front of Mr. Schmidt’s door with Reverend Haas and Mary Abendschein. Haas knocked on the door, and within a moment Schmidt opened it.

“Pastor Haas. Miss Abendschein.” The slightest pause. “Miss Weber. To what do I owe this visit?”

“May I speak with you, Mr. Schmidt?” Haas asked.

“Um—certainly.” He moved aside and allowed the pastor and the head of the excursion committee into his room. As Adele passed by, she gave him a haughty look, to which Schmidt did not visibly react. She darted over to his desk, but nothing sat upon it.

“Well, where is it?” she asked as Haas and Abendschein found places to stand.

“Where is what, Miss Weber?” Haas asked.

“He knows,” she said, pointing at Schmidt.

“I do?” Schmidt asked.

She glared at him. “The book. The memory recorder. The helmet. Any of it. All of it.”

Haas removed his spectacles. “Miss Weber. Miss Abendschein and I were willing to come talk to Mr. Schmidt, but would you mind if I handled this my way?”

“Sorry, Reverend. By all means.”

Haas nodded. “Mr. Schmidt. Adele has come to us with news of a premonition, for lack of a better word.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Now I have known Adele and her family for a long time; in fact, I christened Adele. And I know that Adele sometimes has vivid dreams regarding what may come to pass.”

“Oh, does she?” Schmidt asked.

“Yes, she does. I tend not to put faith in such things myself. But once or twice—” He paused. “But that is not important now. This is.”

“What?”

Haas put his spectacles back on. “Mr. Schmidt, this will sound ludicrous, but Miss Weber told me that you knew of a problem with the upcoming excursion to Long Island.”

“Really?”

“Yes. She said that it came to her in a dream. She claimed you had in your possession a book that detailed a great disaster that would take place should we go on our excursion.”

Schmidt looked at Adele, who let her gaze fall to the floor. “Indeed,” he said.

“I know it sounds like nonsense, but she seemed most insistent.”

“Well, I have no such book. This sounds like a dream of hers that had best stay in the dark of night.”

Haas pulled at his collar and then wiped his brow with a white handkerchief. “May I have your permission to look around?”

Schmidt smiled. “This is my private room, Reverend Haas, but I wouldn’t be here if not for you. Please, by all means. I shall be outside, breathing in the fresh night air.”

Given the trace scent of manure that occasionally wafted through the streets, it was clear to Adele that Schmidt was being facetious, and merely giving them a chance to search his room without his presence. It also became clear to her that Reverend Haas would not be able to find the book; otherwise, Mr. Schmidt would not have been so ready to assent.

“Never mind,” she said suddenly. “There’s nothing here.”

Haas looked at her. “Were you lying then about your dream?”

“No, Reverend. I would never lie to you. I am convinced Mr. Schmidt knows of a danger which he simply refuses to tell us. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything that I saw—I mean that I dreamed about—here.”

Haas nodded, and turned back to Schmidt. “Mr. Schmidt—Lucas—on your honor as a new member of my congregation, please be candid. Is there any reason you know of that we should cancel the festivities of Wednesday next?”

Schmidt glanced at Adele and Haas in turn. Finally, he gave a weary shake of his head. “I know of no reason.”

“Thank you, sir.” Haas turned to Adele and flashed a weak smile. “Adele, I know how caught up you sometimes get in your dreams. Please rest assured that I will take all precautions to ensure a smooth and safe excursion on the General Slocum.”

“Will you speak with the captain, at least? Have him run a fire drill?”

Haas sighed. “Captain Van Schiack has been in charge of the steamboat for thirteen years, and he has a spotless record. I am sure we will be fine.”

Haas and Abendschein departed. As soon as the door closed behind them, Adele lurched at Schmidt, who jumped back. “Where is it, you cad?”

“The book?”

“Yes, the book! What have you done with it, you blackguard?”

“I sent it back to the future.”

“You did what?”

“I had to. I couldn’t risk the possibility that someone else might come across it. No one would believe you, not with your reputation for dreams. But they might believe the book. And if someone else were to see it, well, I’m not sure if people would be so mistrusting of Reverend Haas or Miss Abendschein.”

“But all these people are going to die!”

“History can’t be helped.”

Adele thought of a few choice responses to that, but considered herself far too much of a lady to say them aloud. Instead, she replied, “You are wrong. History can be helped, especially if it is not yet history.”

He raised a finger. “Adele—”

“Do not presume upon me, Mr. Schmidt.”

“Let me try to show you the dangers in another way. Forget the General Slocum for the moment. Instead, answer this question: would you have me go back further into time and save your father’s life?”

Adele froze. “That possibility had never occurred to me.”

“Well?”

“Go back in time and save my father from dying? Of course I would.”

“Are you sure? Think long and hard before answering again.”

Adele thought. She had loved her father so much when she was a little girl. He had always hugged her every evening when he came home from work, and she remembered how happy he always made her just by being around. He used to take Adele and her mother to the park and playgrounds, and she remembered how safe she always felt, knowing her father was around.

And yet . . . Her father had also been an overwhelming presence in her family. Adele loved to read anything she could get her hands on, and she had had to sneak glances at books and magazines while her father was alive. For some reason, he never felt that a little girl needed to read so much, even though Adele thirsted to learn about the world. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, her father’s absence had made it easier for her in some ways.

In fact . . . Adele thought about how necessity had forced her mother to grow from a simple housewife into a woman who managed to keep the two of them in food and shelter. The fact was that her mother had become a much stronger, more independent woman than she had been before. Adele wouldn’t want to take that away from her mother.

“Well?” Schmidt asked. “Would you change history?”

“I—I don’t know. The woman I am now would probably say yes, and ask you to go back in time and save my father. But if I did allow it to happen, then the woman I am now would cease to exist. And I have no idea what my new life would be like.”

“Precisely. Perhaps if your father lived, your mother would have died. Or maybe you yourself. Or perhaps you all would have ended up a happy family, right until the Slocum disaster. That’s just it. You don’t know, you can’t know. History is dangerous to toy with.”

“However, Mr. Schmidt, your analogy has one fatal flaw.”

“Which is what?”

She took a deep breath. “If you ask me here in 1904 if I would go back in time to 1898 to change something, I hesitate. But if you ask me to prevent something that, as far as I am concerned, has not yet happened, my answer is an unequivocal yes.” She paused. “I shall continue spread the word about the disaster, Mr. Schmidt. And you can’t stop me.”

“You already saw Reverend Haas’s reaction. They’ll consider you insane if you try.”

“And I will consider myself evil if I do not.”

Schmidt flinched. “Do not think of me as evil, Miss Weber. As I said, there are far worse tragedies in history. If we were to prevent one tragedy from occurring, morally we would have to prevent them all . . . and the universe would fall apart in a blaze of otherworldly fire.”

“ ‘Ein Prophet gilt nirgends weniger als in seinem Vaterland und bei seinen Verwandten und in seinem Hause,’ ” she said.

“Huh?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said with a sarcastic tone. “Once again, I had forgotten that you don’t speak German. Mark, chapter six, verse four. ‘A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.’ ”

“You are not a prophet, Miss Weber.”

“And you are not a gentleman, Mr. Schmidt. You have shown me the future and have denied me the means of averting it. Good night. I hope you have nightmares.”

The week of the excursion finally came. The Monday before, June 13, was the day of the annual parade of the Schuetzen Bund, a German-American shooting club, and Adele went to watch the parade with her mother, despite feeling glum. At the front of the parade marched a group of men on horses, blowing trumpets, along with men playing kettledrums. Everyone was dressed in traditional costume, from their Bavarian hats down to their lederhosen. Women wore dirndls over their blouses and long flowing skirts, with their hair braided in myriad styles. And then, following behind, thousands of German immigrants and German-Americans, many brandishing rifles.

Adele searched the crowd for Mr. Schmidt, but couldn’t find him. He had chosen not to watch the parade with them, and when she pressed him, he explained that this would be his last chance to spread his nanobots before the excursion. Adele’s mother took it as a rejection of Adele, which made Adele even more listless.

Adele slept badly on both Monday and Tuesday nights. And then the morning of Wednesday, June 15, 1904, arrived. Adele awoke to sunlight streaming in the windows. She breathed in the morning air and felt a breeze caress her body. The day would clearly turn out to be beautiful; she just hoped it wouldn’t be tragic as well.

After she dressed, she knocked on Mr. Schmidt’s door, but there was no response.

“Mr. Schmidt?” she called out. “You don’t want to miss the boat.”

Again, impudence won out over propriety. Adele turned the knob, opened the door, and walked into the room, only to discover that it was completely empty of Schmidt and his possessions. All of his clothing was gone, as were his futuristic devices.

After a few minutes, she sighed and went to the kitchen to prepare breakfast and lunch for herself and her mother. When her mother finally came into the dining room, she was already dressed for the excursion in her finest Sunday outfit, a blue blouse and skirt combination topped off with a broad-brimmed hat.

“What do you think, Adele?” she asked, turning around.

“You look lovely as always, mother.”

“Will you be wearing a hat, Adele? If you don’t, you’ll catch your death of sunburn.”

“I thought I would bring a parasol. I’ve left it near the door with the blankets and towels.”

Adele’s mother nodded. “Thank you for preparing the sandwiches.”

“Of course.” She paused. “Mother, will Mr. Schmidt be joining us? I didn’t hear him in his room.”

“I spoke with him last night. He told me that he would be leaving early for the boat.” She flashed a knowing smile at Adele. “My guess is that he wishes to save two seats on the hurricane deck.”

Despite her sour mood, Adele couldn’t help but smile back. “You harbor more hopes than I do.”

“Now, child, I’m sure he will forgive you for your fantasies. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s planned something special for you once we reach Locust Grove.”

“Or even before,” Adele said under her breath.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Adele thought for a moment about whether she should tell her mother that Mr. Schmidt had cleared his room of all his possessions. She decided not to. But she did decide one last time to express her reservations about the excursion.

“Mother, I’m still not sure if we should go on the steamboat.”

“This again?” She sighed. “Adele, you’ve already been fodder for the church gossip mill. Please stop.”

“But Mother—”

“Adele, I’m going, whether you do or not. Your uncle is expecting me. And we need to leave now. The General Slocum is scheduled to depart from the East Third Street recreation pier at a quarter to nine.”

Adele felt torn, but she wasn’t about to let her mother go on the steamboat without her. At the very least, perhaps she could save the two of them.

They stepped out onto the street, which already teemed with hundreds of people dressed in their Sunday best heading towards the Third Street pier. Some walked briskly east, while others hovered in front of tenement buildings or stood at corners, waiting for friends and family.

They stopped once when Adele heard a little girl laughing behind them. She turned around and spotted Catherine Gallagher with her family.

“Well, hello, Catherine. You seem particularly happy.”

“I am, I am!” the little girl shouted. “I thought I wasn’t going to be able to go, but the woman at the store, she gave me a ticket!” She held her ticket up high.

“Now be careful, Catherine,” the girl’s mother said. “You don’t want to lose the ticket, now that God has smiled upon you.”

More like God has sentenced you, Adele thought.

“Have a good time,” Adele’s mother said to the Gallaghers. “We’ll see you on the boat.”

Soon enough, Adele and her mother found themselves at the gangplank, where Reverend Haas and Mary Abendschein stood welcoming parishioners and guests onto the General Slocum. “Ah, Miss Weber, Mrs. Weber,” Haas said. “I am delighted to see you both. Particularly you, Miss Weber.”

“Here, dears,” Miss Abendschein said, pressing into their left hands copies of the Journal for the Seventeenth Annual Excursion of St. Mark’s Evan. Lutheran Church.

“The program feels thicker than last year’s,” Adele’s mother said.

Abendschein preened. “We managed to get over one hundred advertisements this year.”

Adele flipped through the program. “A remarkable achievement.”

“Thank you, Adele.” She looked around. “I certainly hope you weren’t too upset with how often I kept your boarder away from home.”

“Miss Abendschein! Really!”

She laughed. “Relax. Your mother told me that he seemed to be courting you. I wouldn’t stand in the way.”

“Have you actually seen Mr. Schmidt today?” Adele asked.

“I thought I saw him boarding earlier,” Reverend Haas replied. He looked directly at Adele. “I imagine he’s looking forward to a day in the country as much as the rest of us.”

Adele grasped the unspoken point, that Schmidt would not have boarded the Slocum if Adele’s suspicions of disaster had any grounding to them. “Thank you, Reverend Haas.”

“I’ll see you on the boat.”

Adele and her mother crossed the gangplank and boarded the General Slocum, along with many happy, laughing people. Adele noticed a deckhand clicking away on a mechanical counter as people stepped off the gangplank and onto the boat. She repressed the urge to tell him to be extra careful with his count.

“Well, dear,” her mother said, “shall we go to the afterdeck?”

“I want to stay here and keep an eye out for Mr. Schmidt.”

“He’s probably already on board,” her mother replied. “I want to go listen to Professor George Maurer and his band. Your uncle said he would save us some seats. But you can stay out on the main deck, if you wish.”

Adele sighed. “Mother, I really do not wish to be separated.”

Her mother laughed. “Child! Really. Nothing’s going to happen. Okay?”

“Okay,” Adele said without enthusiasm.

“Good. I’m going to the afterdeck to hear the music. You may stay here if you wish.”

“I think I will, at least for the moment.”

Adele waved farewell to her mother and watched the gangplank as more people came onto the boat. Although the boat was scheduled to depart at 8:45 A.M., various passengers asked Reverend Haas to hold the boat for one more family member or friend, and Haas agreed. It wasn’t until almost 9:45 AM, as a young girl and her brother flew down the pier, that the deckhands finally got ready to haul up the gangplank.

As Adele watched this, still straining her eyes for some sign of Mr. Schmidt, she spotted the wife of Philip Straub and her three children. An impulse made her approach them.

“Mrs. Straub.”

“Adele Weber! How are you?”

“Mrs. Straub, you’ve always been so nice to me, I feel I must warn you.” Adele paused for a moment, then said, “I’ve been having dreams, dark dreams of today’s excursion.”

Mrs. Straub’s face turned pale. “So I’m not the only one,” she whispered.

Adele watched as Mrs. Straub turned to a man next to her and said something. Immediately, that man grabbed his wife and five children and ran towards the gangplank. Right behind him, Straub and her three children followed. They tumbled off the boat and landed on the pier, gasping for breath.

Praise to the heavens, thought Adele. At least I’ve managed to save someone.

The gangplank disappeared, the crew began to cast off, shouts went up to the pilothouse, and the twin paddle wheels began to turn.

The General Slocum was underway.

For the next few minutes, Adele wandered the decks, looking for some sign of either Mr. Schmidt or a way off the steamboat. Children of all ages ran around, playing various games. She spotted Lillie Pfeifer, a friend who was but a year older and yet already married. Lillie and she had spent many previous excursions dancing with other teenagers on the boat, but Adele knew that things would be different today, as Lillie had to spend the day in the company of other married ladies, no matter their age. In truth, Adele felt relieved that she didn’t have to fawn over Lillie and be excited for her new marriage.

Adele turned a corner to keep Lillie from spotting her, and found herself face to face with Mr. Schmidt. His shocked expression showed that he was just as surprised to see her as she was to see him. “Mr. Schmidt? What are you doing here? I thought you would be long gone by now.”

“I should ask you the same question, Miss Weber. What are you doing here, knowing what you know?”

“My mother refused to heed my warnings, and I would not let her come on the excursion alone. I am hoping to save her.”

“Ah.” He looked down at his feet.

“Nor could I let the rest of my community go into this tragedy alone. Perhaps I could help them. What about you?” She frowned. “Didn’t you plant all the recorders you needed?” she asked with coldness in her voice. “Isn’t it time you went back to where you came from?”

“That’s just it, Miss Weber. I’m not sure if I can.”

“Oh? And why not?”

A few women bumped into Schmidt as they came around the corner. After a few hurried words of “Pardon me” and “Excuse me,” Schmidt pulled Adele over to the railing. He leaned forward and whispered in her ear.

“I stopped the disaster.”

Adele felt a lump in her throat. “What do you mean?”

“I went to the lamp room well before the fire would have started. I found a lit cigarette sitting on the floor, and I stamped it out.”

“The lamp room?”

Schmidt gave her a curious look. “Just how much of the book did you manage to read?”

“Not that much.”

He nodded. “Well, the fire started in the lamp room, just below the main deck. That is, it would have started there. But I put it out.”

“You’re not lying?”

The glum look on his face said it all. “No, I’m not. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be on the boat. I’d have stayed safely away.”

“What about all that warning about changing the future?”

Schmidt leaned back on the railing, and looked around. Adele followed his gaze. In one corner, a group of older women were deeply engaged in conversation. In another, a few children were playing a game of hide-and-seek.

Schmidt’s eyes stopped wandering, and he looked back at Adele. “I got to know everyone,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“The German-Americans of the Lower East Side. It may be a shrinking community, but it’s still a vibrant one, full of life and joy. I couldn’t bear to see it destroyed the way it once was.”

Slowly, Adele nodded. “You came to see the world through my eyes, then.”

Schmidt took a deep breath and exhaled it. “Sadly, yes. I decided it would be best if the future didn’t have a tragedy to remember.”

“Sadly, you say?”

“I’ll get in trouble if the future finds out.”

“But you changed the future.”

“Not enough, apparently. I’m still here, which means my future still exists, in some form or other. That means I’ll have to take responsibility for changing history.” He paused. “But it’s worth it all, just to see you happy.”

Adele moved closer to Mr. Schmidt. She knew it would appear unseemly, but she could only think of one way to express her gratitude—

—when suddenly, she noticed a new odor mixing with that of the salt water and sea air. An odor of burning wood.

“Lucas?” she asked, sniffing the air.

Schmidt’s eyes widened with horror. “I smell it too.”

A young boy ran past, shouting, “The boat is on fire, the boat is on fire!”

Schmidt tugged on his watch fob, brought his pocket watch up to his face, opened the case, and glanced at the time. “I’m too late.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the fire. I couldn’t stop it. The Law of Conservation of Reality kicked in.”

“What are you saying?”

“History doesn’t record exactly what started the fire. I thought it was the cigarette, but it could have been a smoldering match.” He hit the railing in frustration. “Damn. I should have stayed down there, not let anyone near the lamp room.”

“If the fire is starting, we must get to safety.”

“Yes, but—”

A man ran past them, shouting, “Quick! Grab a life preserver! Get to the boats!”

A crowd of people began running towards the boats. Adele tried to join them, but Schmidt gripped her arm tightly. “No. It won’t do us any good.”

“Why not?”

“The cork in the life preservers has become cork dust. If you jumped overboard wearing one, you would sink like a stone.”

“What about the lifeboats?”

“Held down with wire,” Schmidt responded. “They’ll never get one loose in time.”

“You knew all this?”

“Yes, I did.” He paused. “It’s part of history.”

She glared. “It was all in that book, wasn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes, it was.”

“Mein Gott! My mother! I must find my mother!” She tried to pull her arm out of Schmidt’s grip, but failed. “Let me go!”

“No, Adele. It’s too dangerous. You’ll find yourself rushing into a wall of flame.”

Tears began to come to her eyes, as passengers jostled around them, running towards the lifeboats. “You must let me go save my mother!”

Schmidt grabbed her other arm and swung her around. “Adele, listen to me! We can’t save everyone. It’s too late. History must play itself out. But we can save ourselves, and your mother as well, if you will calm down and follow my instructions.”

Adele nodded. “What do we do?”

“I’m a time traveler. I can take us out of phase with the timeline. Then I can leave you suspended outside of time while I go search for your mother.”

“You intend to leave me in safety while you risk yourself to find my mother?”

“Using my time machine is the only way I can attempt to save both of you.”

Adele took a deep breath. “Swear to the Lord that you are not lying to me.”

“Adele, I swear to the heavens above that I am not lying. May I use my time machine to save us?”

“Do it.”

Schmidt unbuttoned his jacket. Underneath he wore an odd belt with metal buttons. He took Adele’s hand in his and wrapped it around his belt, making sure she had a firm grip.

“The belt is your time machine?” she asked.

“Yes. Now hold on.”

He pushed a button, and the world around them seemed to fade into nonexistence.

Panic embraced the hearts and souls of the women, children, and men on board the General Slocum. Some people ran to find their children. Others ran for the life preservers; the few who managed to put them on and jump into the water drowned almost immediately.

People died in fire. People died in water.

And Adele Weber, floating outside of time like an insubstantial ghost, had a front-row seat for the entire disaster.

She watched as a man started swimming towards land. Three or four women—she couldn’t tell because of the way they flailed about in the water—grabbed at the man, desperate for some way to stay afloat. He screamed at them and tried to push them away, but it was no use. The women grabbed onto the man, and without meaning to, dragged him under the water.

She watched as Captain Van Schiack ordered his pilot, Van Wart, to beach the wooden steamboat on North Brother Island—a full mile away, nowhere near as close as the Bronx docks or the Queens shore.

She watched as fire and smoke flew from the front of the vessel to the stern, filling the decks. The flame swept higher and higher, devouring the boat like an insatiable monster. Sparks and embers jumped onto people, who screamed as the air filled with the sickening odor of their burning, shriveling flesh.

She watched as strangers picked up children that were not their own and threw them overboard. The children shouted for their parents as they fell into the darkness of the cold water, most never to emerge.

She watched as George Heins, only one year younger than Adele, ran to grab a small girl, but was too late as she disappeared into a sudden wall of flame.

She watched as people crushed each other against the rails, forcing others overboard, where they quickly drowned.

She watched as Lucas Schmidt dove into and out of time, trying to locate and rescue her mother.

She watched until she could not bear to watch anymore, but her eyes refused to close, until finally, the steamboat, engulfed with fire, had made it to North Brother Island.

And then she lost consciousness.

Adele awoke on a bed in a strange room, with Schmidt sitting in a chair next to her.

“Lucas?” she called out. “Where am I?”

“I brought you to a hotel to recuperate. You’ve been in and out of a coma. It’s an aftereffect of being outside of time for so long without a time belt to keep your quantum structure stable.”

“How long have I been unconscious?”

“About two days.”

She pushed herself up out of the bed. “Days?”

“It’s Friday. Mid-morning.” He pointed at a stack of newspapers. “I’ve brought you the news, if you want to know what’s been going on.”

“Perhaps I should just read Ship Ablaze,” she said sarcastically.

Schmidt shrugged. “I may have changed history. The book might not be as accurate as it had been. And anyway, I don’t have it here in 1904 anymore.”

Adele picked up the newspapers and began rustling through them. The headlines spoke of nothing but the disaster. “499 Known To Be Dead” reported the Herald. “Horror in East River!” from the Tribune. At least Pulitzer’s World had found something good to report: “Many Gallant Rescues of the Drowning!”

“They’re reporting anywhere from five hundred to one thousand dead,” Adele said.

“That always happens after a tragedy such as this one,” Schmidt replied. “It’ll take a while for the numbers to settle down.”

“One thousand twenty-one,” Adele said. “From the inside front cover of your book.”

“Um, yes. Again, though, you’re assuming that I didn’t change history, even though I tried.”

Adele thought of the Straub family she had saved, but said nothing about them. Instead, she said, “You didn’t change history, Mr. Schmidt. If you had, you wouldn’t be here anymore.”

He sighed. “You’re probably right. But I won’t know for sure until I return to the future.”

“When—when do you leave?”

“Not for a day or two more, at least. I’ve got to make sure all my recordings are set.”

“Hm,” Adele said, and returned to perusing the paper. After a moment, she found something that made her gasp loudly.

“What is it?” Schmidt asked.

She pointed at the article. “It says here that they’ve set up a makeshift morgue at the Charities Pier on East Twenty-Sixth Street.”

Schmidt leaned over and took a look at it. “Yes, they have.”

“Did you—where is my mother?”

A dark cloud seemed to pass over Schmidt’s face. He cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, Adele. I was too late.”

Adele felt a lump in her throat. She held back her tears and said, “I see.”

“The fire was everywhere. I couldn’t even find her.” He paused. “But I tried, Adele. I did try. Please believe me.”

She pushed the pile of newspapers to the floor. “I need to go to the morgue,” she said. “I need to find my mother.”

“You can’t,” Schmidt said.

“I can and I will!”

He hesitated, then nodded. “All right. But let me go with you. She may not even be there. And even if she is, you may not like what you find.”

“You wish to come with me?”

“Yes, I do.” He paused. “You’ve already been through a lot; I want to make sure you’re all right.”

Adele studied the earnest expression on Schmidt’s face, and then nodded. “Very well. Let us go immediately.”

They left the room and descended the stairs to the hotel lobby. Schmidt tipped a doorman, who called for a horse and carriage. “Mr. Schmidt, I thought we would take a public conveyance.”

“This is more private.”

“Also more expensive.”

He shrugged. “I have resources. Please let me assist you as I can.”

Adele nodded. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Schmidt held the carriage door for her, and the two of them rode to the pier.

Adele and Schmidt descended the carriage at the end of the street. As Schmidt paid the driver, Adele took in the sight. Huge crowds of people, mostly men, wandered all over the pier, speaking in hushed, quiet tones. Many carried photographs of their loved ones, pressing them onto other people in the crowd and asking if anyone had seen them. Policemen were scattered about the crowd, but some were patrolling right where the carriage dropped them off.

“Sir, madam, may we ask your business here?” one of the policemen asked with a harsh tone in his voice.

“We were on the boat,” Schmidt said. “We’re hoping to find this lady’s mother.”

“Oh.” He moved to let them by. “Sorry, sir, but we thought you might be more curiosity seekers.”

“What?” Adele asked. “Did I hear you right?”

The policeman nodded. “It’s disgusting, isn’t it? A lot of them came here Wednesday night and Thursday. For the excitement of being here.”

“Fire and Flames,” Adele said under her breath.

“What, miss?”

“Nothing.”

As they walked into the crowd, Adele’s gaze shifted from left to right. When they got to the smaller crowd in front of the covered pier, she whispered, “It seems so calm.”

One of the men waiting there responded. “There was a riot yesterday,” he said. “Shortly after Mayor McClellan left. But the police got it under control.”

“Oh,” Adele said, not sure what to say. “You were here yesterday?”

The man nodded. “My wife and children weren’t in the morgue yesterday. I know they’ve got to be alive somewhere. I just know it. I’m hoping someone here might have some information.”

Another man joined the conversation. “Things were really bad yesterday. Some people tried to jump in the river when they found the bodies of their loved ones.”

“Oh,” Adele said. “I hope—that is—I’m sorry.”

The man nodded. “Thank you. I’m sorry for whatever loss you’ve suffered as well.” He paused. “I’ve found some of my family, but not all. I’m hoping to find the rest today so we can bury them all together.”

“Conrad Muth,” said a morgue attendant at the entrance.

“That’s me,” the man said.

“Come with me, please.”

Adele moved forward before the attendant and Mr. Muth could move away. “Excuse me, please. I’d like to check in.”

“What’s your name, Miss?”

“Adele Weber. I’m looking for my mother, Mathilde.”

The attendant made a note on a piece of paper. “Okay, Miss Weber, we’ll call you when we’re ready for you.” He paused. “I don’t want to raise your hopes, though, Miss. There’s only about twenty-five bodies left. If you haven’t found your mother by now . . .” He trailed off.

“Miss Weber was recuperating from the fire,” Schmidt said. “She hasn’t been here yet.”

“Oh. Why don’t you come in right now, then? Most of the others are here for a second or third look. You really should have priority.”

“Thank you.”

Adele, Schmidt, and Muth followed the attendant into the makeshift morgue. Adele gasped when they walked in. Each body lay in an open coffin, surrounded by and covered with ice, so that only the face showed. The floor of the warehouse was wet with the runoff from the coffins, and a slight putrid smell permeated the air.

The attendant passed Mr. Muth along to another attendant, and then gave his full attention to Adele. “My name’s Bob, Miss. I’ll take you and your friend down the row.”

“Thank you.”

The three of them walked deliberately past the coffins, and as they did, Adele took a look at the face of each body. She covered her mouth with her hand to keep out the stench, and was grateful when Schmidt gave her a handkerchief to help.

They passed one body, then another and another, until finally they reached the end of the row. Adele took one look at the face, and recognition hit her like a punch in the stomach.

It was her mother.

She turned away, sobbing, and buried her head in Schmidt’s shoulder.

“I take it this is the one,” Bob said.

Schmidt nodded, while Adele continued to cry.

“Could you give us a moment?” Schmidt asked the attendant, who nodded and backed away.

Adele hugged Mr. Schmidt even tighter, and in between her sobs, she said, “You didn’t even try to save her. Why didn’t you save her?”

“That’s not fair, Adele,” Schmidt replied gently. “You know that in the end I tried to save everyone.”

Adele nodded and wiped away at her tears. “I know. I’m sorry. I just—”

“I understand.”

As soon as her tears were spent, she let go of Schmidt and the attendant scurried back. “Miss, would you come with me, please? We need you to fill out the death certificate and body removal permit.”

“I—I—” Adele began. Then she turned to look at Schmidt. “You were right,” she said. “It’s too much.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Schmidt said. “Lead the way.”

They followed the attendant to a nearby room and took care of the mundane business of death.

Adele buried her mother on Black Saturday, June 18, at the Lutheran cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, along with most of the victims whose bodies had been found. She walked through the graveside funeral and burial with an eerie sense of detachment.

Back at her apartment, Adele sat at the dining room table, feeling emotionally drained, while Schmidt fiddled with his futuristic devices. She watched him in silence for a few minutes, and then finally spoke. “So, Mr. Schmidt. Did you get everything you needed?”

Schmidt nodded. “I think I have. I’ve recorded the tragedy through the memory recorders implanted in everyone’s minds, including—”

He cut himself off, and left it for Adele to finish. “Including the minds of those who did not survive.”

“Yes.”

Adele pondered her next question carefully. “Do you have my mother’s memories in there?”

“Um. Yes. Yes, I do.”

She stood up and walked over to him. “Where’s that helmet? I—I want to experience my mother’s last moments.”

“I really don’t think that’s such a good idea.”

“But Mr. Schmidt—”

“Adele, these memories are meant to be experienced by people far removed from the original tragedy, people with no personal connection or loss. Are you sure you want to do this?”

She threw up her hands in frustration. “I don’t know what I want! Perhaps I want to erase her memories, so no one ever sees them.” She paused. “But I want to remember her, and I want others to as well.”

He handed over the box. “Adele, I’ve brought up your mother’s file. If you push that button, it will erase her memories.”

Adele took the box and thought long and hard about what she was about to do. “I don’t want anyone to violate her privacy. But I know how important this is to you. I can’t make that choice. I can’t deny her memories to history if you went to such trouble to mine them.” She held the box out to Schmidt. “Do with them as you will.”

Schmidt took the box back, and without hesitation he pushed the button. The box surprised Adele by speaking aloud in a monotone. “Memory file: Mathilde Weber. To erase, push the button again.”

Schmidt pushed the button again. “Memory file: Mathilde Weber. Erased.”

Adele took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

Schmidt nodded. “We didn’t need her recording anyway. Not as long as we have you to remember.”

Adele nodded. “And apparently I have a very strong mind, you said. After all, the disorienter didn’t work on me.”

Schmidt blinked rapidly, then looked away.

“Mr. Schmidt? What is it?”

He looked directly at her. “Adele, I lied to you before about the disorienter. There are no minds strong enough to resist it. It works on everybody.”

“Then why didn’t it work on me?”

“You were right the first time. I couldn’t bring myself to erase your memory of finding Ship Ablaze.”

“Why couldn’t you?”

He hesitated. “I didn’t want you to go on the excursion. I wanted you to survive.”

Adele smiled. “I love you too, Lucas.”

He cleared his throat and rocked slowly back and forth on his feet. “I guess that’s what I meant.”

“I know,” Adele said, and then she frowned. “When do you have to leave?”

“I ought to leave immediately. The longer I stay in 1904, the greater the chance I’ll contaminate the timeline.”

“If we love each other, Lucas, we should stay together.”

He gave her a sad look. “I can’t stay here in the past. I have a job, other missions. Responsibilities.”

“If you can’t stay in the past,” Adele said, “then take me with you to the future.”

Schmidt wiped a tear out of his eye. “I can’t. The consequences could be disastrous.”

“On a universe-destroying scale, or just a personal one?”

“Taking a person out of their proper time—”

“Is it so dangerous to remove me from 1904? From what you’ve said, I had a feeling that—well, let me put it to you this way. According to history—that is, your original history—did I survive?”

He looked away for a moment. “No. You did not.”

She nodded, and looked around the room. “Well, there’s nothing for me here anymore. My community has been ravaged by this conflagration. And, by your own arguments, my continued presence here would change history.”

He shook his head. “Not significantly. You’re but one person who is part of a tragedy that will be forgotten over the next hundred years.”

“But even one person can make a difference. My presence here might alter the future, and you would return to a world where you do not exist.”

“I—that is—” He paused.

“ ‘The consequences could be disastrous,’ ” Adele said, quoting his words back at him.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said, smiling. “It would be safer for me to take you back to the future after all.”

“Thank you.”

“But the future is a strange place, Adele. I’m not sure how well you’ll be able to cope.”

She moved closer and gently brushed his lips with hers. Schmidt’s eyes opened wide, but he did not turn her away.

“If I go to the future,” she asked, “will you be with me?”

He hesitated, then nodded. “Always.”

“Then I imagine I shall be able to cope.”

“But what will you do in the future?”

“I thought that would be obvious. You came all the way back to my time to ensure that the future remembered the General Slocum. I shall go all the way forward to your time to ensure the same.”

Schmidt took her hand, and the past winked out of existence.

But never out of memory.

SERGEANT CHIP

Bradley Denton

To the Supreme Commander of the soldier who bears this message—

Sir or Madam:

TODAY BEFORE IT WAS LIGHT I had to roll in the stream to wash blood from my fur. I decided then to send You these words.

So I think of the word shapes, and the girl writes them for me. I know how the words are shaped because I could see them whenever Captain Dial spoke. And I always knew what he was saying.

The girl writes on a roll of paper she found in the stone hut when we began using it as our quarters three months ago. She already had pencils. She has written her own words on the paper many times since then, but she has torn those words from the roll and placed them in her duffel. Her own words have different shapes than the ones she writes for me now. She doesn’t even know what my word shapes mean, because the shapes are all that I show her. So the responsibility for their meanings is mine alone.

Just as the responsibility for my actions is mine alone.

Last night I killed eighteen of Your soldiers.

I didn’t want to do that. They reminded me of some of the soldiers I knew before, the ones who followed Captain Dial with me. But I had to kill them because they came to attack us. And if I let them do that, I would be disobeying orders.

I heard them approach while the girl, the two boys, and the old man slept. So I went out and climbed the ridge behind the hut so I could see a long way. I have good night vision, and I had no trouble spotting the soldiers as they split into two squads and spread out. Their intent was to attack our hut from different angles to make its defense more difficult. I knew this because it was one of the things Captain Dial taught me.

So I did another thing Captain Dial taught me. As the two squads scuttled to their positions to await the order to attack, I crept down toward them through the grass and brambles. I crept with my belly to the earth so they couldn’t see me coming. Not even with their infrared goggles.

Captain Dial once said I was black as night and silent as air. He was proud when he said it. I remembered that when I crept to Your soldiers.

They didn’t hear me as I went from one to another. They were spread out too far. Their leader wasn’t as smart as Captain Dial. I bit each one’s throat so it tore open and the soldier couldn’t shout. There were some sounds, but they weren’t loud.

The first soldier had a lieutenant’s bar on his helmet. I had seen it from a long way away. It was the only officer’s insignia I saw in either squad. So I went to him first. That way he couldn’t give the order to attack before I was finished.

But the others would have attacked sooner or later, even without an order from their lieutenant. So I had to kill them all.

The last soldier was the only female among the eighteen. As I approached her, I smelled the same kind of soap that Captain Dial’s wife Melanie used. That made me pause as I remembered how things were a long time ago when I slept at the foot of their bed. But then the soldier knew I was there and turned her weapon toward me. So I bit her throat before she could fire.

I dragged the soldiers to the ravine near the southern end of the ridge. You’ll find them there side by side if You arrive before the wild animals do. I did my best to treat them with honor.

Then I went to the stream. The stream is near the hut, so I tried to be quiet. I didn’t want to wake my people before sunrise.

After washing, I went into the grass and shook off as much water as I could. But there was no one to rub me with a towel. There was no one to touch my head and tell me I was good.

I remembered then that no one had ever told Captain Dial he was good, either.

This is what it means to be the leader.

I wanted to howl. But I didn’t. My people were still asleep.

I take care of them. I don’t let anyone hurt them. These were Captain Dial’s orders, and I will not disobey.

Captain Dial was my commanding officer. I was his first sergeant. If You examine the D Company roster, You will see that my pay grade is K-9.

My name is Chip.

Whenever Captain Dial gave me an order, I obeyed as fast as I could. And then he always touched my head and told me I was good. Sometimes when I was extra fast, he gave me a treat. I liked the treats, but I liked the touch even more.

There was never a time when Captain Dial wasn’t my leader. But he wasn’t always a captain, and I wasn’t always his first sergeant. In the beginning he was a lieutenant, and I was his corporal.

We were promoted because of the day we demonstrated our training to the people in the bleachers.

That morning, in our quarters, Lieutenant Dial said that what we would participate in that afternoon was political bullshit. Money for the war was about to be cut, so public-relations events like this were an attempt to bolster civilian support. But Lieutenant Dial said that only two things had ever motivated the public to support the military: heroism and vengeance.

He also said that we had to do well regardless. He said I would have to do a good job and make him proud. So I stood at attention, and I thought about running fast to find mines and attack enemies. I thought about making Lieutenant Dial proud.

Then he touched my head. He knew my thoughts. He always knew my thoughts. He told me I was good and gave me permission to be at ease.

So I wiggled and pushed my head against his knees, and my tail wagged hard as he buckled my duty harness. Even though he had said it was bullshit, I could smell that he was excited about the job ahead. That made me excited too. And as we left our quarters, Lieutenant Dial’s wife Melanie came with us. That made me even more excited, because she was almost never with us except in our quarters.

Melanie spoke to me every morning, and although I couldn’t understand her thoughts too well, I knew she was telling me to take care of Lieutenant Dial throughout our day of training. And every night when Lieutenant Dial and I returned, Melanie touched my head and said I was good. Then, after we all ate supper, she and Lieutenant Dial would climb into their bed, I would lie down on my cushion at its foot, and we would sleep. Sometimes in the night their scents grew stronger and blended together, and they made happy sounds. But I stayed quiet because I wanted them to stay happy. Other times I smelled or heard strangers outside our quarters, and I would go on alert even though Lieutenant Dial was still asleep and had not given me an order. But the strangers always went away, and then I slept again too.

Those were the only times Melanie was with us, and that one order every morning was the only order she ever gave me. All of my other orders, all of my treats, and all of my food came from Lieutenant Dial.

But Lieutenant Dial loved Melanie. I could see the word “love” whenever he thought of her. And that made me glad because it made him glad. So we were all happy on the day she came with us. She smelled like a hundred different flowers all mixed together, and she was wearing new clothes that seemed to float around her.

She also wore a gift that Lieutenant Dial had given her the night before. It was a shiny rock on a silver chain that she wore around her neck. Lieutenant Dial told me that Melanie liked the color of the rock. It just looked like a rock on a chain to me. But when Lieutenant Dial put it around Melanie’s neck, it made me think of the chain and tags that Lieutenant Dial wore around his own neck whenever he was on duty. And it also made me think of the collar he put on me when I wasn’t wearing my duty harness. So then I understood why Melanie was so happy to receive the rock and chain. Now we all had things to wear around our necks.

We didn’t go to our usual training area at the fort that day. Instead we went to a park by the ocean. There were flags and people everywhere. It was busy and noisy, and I wanted to run around and smell everything. But Lieutenant Dial ordered me to stay beside him, and that was fun too. I still got to smell everything. We walked from one tree to another, with me on one side of Lieutenant Dial and Melanie on the other. And at every tree, people gathered around while Lieutenant Dial told them who he was and who I was. Then he would give me a few orders—easy things like attention, on guard, and secure-the-perimeter—and we would move on. A lot of people asked if they could touch me, but Lieutenant Dial said they couldn’t. He explained that I was on duty. I wasn’t a pet. I was a corporal.

He was proud when he said it, and that made me proud too.

As we walked from place to place, sometimes Lieutenant Dial held Melanie’s hand in his. And once, Melanie reached across and touched my head. This violated the rule Lieutenant Dial had been telling everyone. But even though I was on duty, it seemed all right. I was glad she did it.

After a while we walked away from the trees to a broad stretch of lawn beside the ocean. I saw a long pier floating on the water. And across the lawn from the pier were bleachers with people in them. There were more people in the bleachers than I had ever seen in one place before, and some of them were high-ranking officers in dress uniforms. So I knew that even if what was going to happen here was bullshit, it was important bullshit.

Out on the lawn were little flags, mud puddles, wooden walls, sandbag fortifications, and some mock-enemies. I knew they were mock-enemies because they wore dark, padded suits. All of these things were familiar to me from training. But there were more things on the lawn than I had ever seen in one training session, and that excited me.

Melanie went to the bleachers while Lieutenant Dial took me onto the lawn, where we were joined by other soldiers. Some of the other soldiers were also K-9s. I knew most of them. Lieutenant Dial and I had trained with them many times.

Out on the pier, men and women dressed in white stood at attention. And when Lieutenant Dial and I reached a spot in the middle of the lawn, he told me to stand at attention as well. So I did, and all of the other soldiers did too.

A colonel stood in front of the bleachers and addressed the crowd. He said a lot of words through a loudspeaker, but I couldn’t understand them. Since they didn’t come from Lieutenant Dial, they were meaningless.

When the colonel stopped talking, the people in the bleachers clapped their hands. Then a soldier ran onto the lawn and handed Lieutenant Dial a microphone. Lieutenant Dial signaled that I should remain at attention, so I didn’t move as he took a step forward and addressed the people.

He told them a lot of things about K-9 soldiers. One thing he said was that while war dogs required a lot of training, we didn’t have to be trained to understand loyalty or rank. A dog who was raised and trained by one soldier would always see that soldier as his or her pack leader. So if Lieutenant Dial was put in charge of a platoon, that platoon would become my pack. And I would see my duty to that pack as absolute and unquestionable.

It surprised me that Lieutenant Dial had to explain that to people. It was as obvious to me as knowing that food is for eating. But then I remembered that people didn’t always think the same way that Lieutenant Dial and I thought. Melanie, for example. Melanie was always kind to me, but sometimes I could smell that she also feared me a little. And I always wondered how that could be. Lieutenant Dial loved Melanie, so I would never hurt her. And as long as I was near her, I would never let anything else hurt her, either. So I hoped that what Lieutenant Dial was saying to the people in the bleachers would help Melanie understand that she never had to be afraid.

Then Lieutenant Dial said something that made him sad as he said it. I don’t think the people knew how sad it made him, but I knew. The other K-9s knew, too.

He said that during a war in the past, some high-ranking officers had decided that K-9s weren’t really soldiers. Instead, they were classified as equipment. That meant that when their units left the field, K-9s were abandoned or destroyed. They were treated like utility vehicles or tents. They weren’t allowed to return to their home quarters with their handlers.

Lieutenant Dial always spoke the truth, but this truth was difficult for me to comprehend. I knew I wasn’t equipment. I knew the difference between a vehicle and a dog. And the K-9s in that past war must have known the difference too. So I was glad the regulations had changed. But I wondered then, and wonder now, whether there might still be some high-ranking officers who don’t think of me as a soldier.

I urge You not to make that mistake.

Lieutenant Dial’s sadness went away as he continued talking. He described some of the duties K-9 soldiers perform, and as he described those duties, different handlers ordered their K-9s to perform them. And as the dogs obeyed, their images appeared on a big screen that had been set up beside the pier.

One dog, a pointy-eared shepherd, attacked and subdued first one mock-enemy, then three, and then five. He was good at it. Even though the mock-enemies were padded so he couldn’t really hurt them, I could smell that they were afraid of him.

Another dog, a lean pinscher, ran fast fast fast, dodging and leaping over obstacles that popped up before him, and he delivered a medical kit to another soldier at the end of the lawn. Then he dragged that soldier to a designated safety point while avoiding some booby traps. The booby traps went off bang bang bang after the pinscher and his soldier were past them.

A big-chested Malinois destroyed a machine-gun nest.

Another shepherd crept on her belly to flank an enemy platoon.

A hound pointed out hidden land mines and howled as he found each one.

Lieutenant Dial announced each K-9’s name and rank, each handler’s name and rank, and the task to be performed. The K-9s were all good, and the people in the bleachers clapped. So I was glad because everyone was happy. But I was getting more and more excited because I wanted it to be my turn. In fact, as the second shepherd completed her flanking maneuver and took down a mock-enemy from behind, I almost broke attention. I wanted to help. I wanted to be a good soldier, too.

I whimpered, and Lieutenant Dial gave me a corrective glance. So I tried extra hard to remain still and silent. I didn’t want to disappoint Lieutenant Dial. Disappointing Lieutenant Dial would be the worst thing in the world.

When all of the other dogs had performed their tasks, Lieutenant Dial told the people that the modern K-9 soldier went beyond those of the past. He told them that K-9s and their handlers were now matched according to their skills, temperaments, and rapport—because there were some dogs and humans who had a gift for understanding each other, and some who didn’t. And he told them that such matchings had been so successful that dogs often knew what their handlers wanted them to do even before any verbal or visual orders had been issued. In addition, a subcutaneous device implanted in each dog made it possible for handlers to send pulsed signals that their K-9s had been trained to recognize as orders. And the implants, in turn, sent biometric signals to the handlers to indicate their K-9s’ levels of anxiety and confidence as orders were carried out. So even when a dog and handler weren’t in close proximity, they could still communicate and complete their mission.

I didn’t remember receiving my implant, but I knew it was under the skin between my shoulders. I almost never thought about it because Lieutenant Dial almost never used his transmitter anymore. He had used it often in our early days of training. But as our training had progressed, our thoughts had become clearer and clearer to each other, and one day we had both known the electronic signals weren’t needed anymore. So Lieutenant Dial had unstrapped the transmitter from his wrist and put it in a pouch on his belt. After that day, he would sometimes send a signal just to be sure my implant was working, but I always started carrying out his orders before I felt the pulses anyway. That was because I paid attention to him, and I could see his thoughts even when he was far away.

When Lieutenant Dial finished telling the people about the communication implants, he told them about me. He told them I had been rescued from a municipal shelter as a puppy, and that a military veterinarian had determined that the dominant breeds in my genetic background were black Labrador and standard poodle. That made me a Labradoodle. Some of the people in the crowd laughed when they heard that name, but Lieutenant Dial didn’t laugh when he said it.

He said I had the intelligence of a poodle and the temperament of a Labrador. He said I was three years old and in peak physical condition. He said I weighed eighty pounds, which was big enough to be strong, but small enough to be fast and to squeeze into places too tight for people. He said my black, wavy coat was good camouflage at night. He said I was at the top of my training class. He said I was a corporal and my name was Chip.

Then Lieutenant Dial looked across the lawn at a sandbagged machine-gun nest and gave me the hand signal to attack. I knew he was going to give me the signal as soon as he looked across at the sandbags, but I also knew I should wait for it. The people in the bleachers wouldn’t like it if I didn’t.

But I jumped away fast when he gave it. I ran for the sandbags, and the machine gun opened fire. It was firing blank cartridges, but I knew from training that I had to act as if the ammunition could hurt me. So I zigzagged and made quick stops behind cardboard rocks, stacks of tires, and other things that were on the lawn between Lieutenant Dial and the machine-gun nest. The machine-gun barrel swiveled to follow me, but I was too fast and tricky for it, because when I ran behind a cardboard rock, I would come out in a different direction. The machine-gun barrel couldn’t keep up, and soon I was right under it so it couldn’t point at me. Then I jumped up over the sandbags and pushed the gunner onto his back. Two mock-enemies on either side of him pointed rifles at me, so I bit one in the crotch and twisted so that he fell against the other one. Then all three mock-enemies were on their backs, and I bit the pads at their throats. A bell sounded over the loudspeaker as I broke the skin of each pad and the mock-blood came out. After the third bell, the people in the bleachers clapped.

Then I felt a quick series of pulses between my shoulders, but I was already jumping away from the machine-gun nest because I knew what Lieutenant Dial wanted me to do next. I ran as fast as I could to the farthest end of the lawn, dodging mock-enemies as they popped up and tried to shoot me, until I reached the wooden wall with the knotted rope at the top. The wall was high, but I liked that. I’m good at jumping.

I ran hard and jumped high, and I grabbed the bottom knot on the rope with my teeth. Then I pushed against the wall with all my feet so I could grab the next knot, and the next, and the next. Just before the next-to-last knot, a piece of the wall broke away as my feet pushed it, and I almost missed the knot. I caught it with just my front teeth. But that made me angry at the wall and the knot, because they were trying to make me disappoint Lieutenant Dial. So I bit as hard as I could with my front teeth, and I kicked and scratched the wall until another piece broke away and gave me a good place for my hind feet. Then I pulled with my teeth and pushed with my legs, and I went all the way over the wall without having to grab the last knot.

On the other side of the wall, two soldiers lay on the ground. They had mock-wounds on their legs and chests, but they weren’t pretending to be unconscious. So I went to the nearest one and let him grab the handle on my duty harness. Then I dragged him through a mock-minefield to a medical station. The mines weren’t marked with flags the way they often were in training, but I didn’t need the flags. I know the smells of many different explosives, so I could smell the mines even though they were just smoke-bangs. It was easy to drag the soldier around them. Some of them went off when we were past, but it didn’t matter. None of the smoke touched us, and I got the soldier to the medical station in the same shape I found him in.

I ran back for the other soldier, but when I reached him he was pretending to be unconscious. I whined and licked his face, but I knew it wouldn’t make him stop pretending. So then I grabbed one of his flak-jacket straps and began to drag him toward the medical station. But when we were halfway through the minefield, an open utility vehicle carrying four mock-enemies came driving across it, straight for us. The mines didn’t go off as the vehicle drove over them, and the mock-enemy manning the mounted gun began firing at me and my soldier.

They were trying to prevent me from obeying Lieutenant Dial’s orders. I wouldn’t let them do that.

I dropped my soldier and started running so the mock-enemies would chase me. When they did, and when we were far enough from the wounded soldier that I knew he would be safe, I made a quick stop, turned around, and jumped. I cleared the vehicle’s windshield and had just enough time to bite the pad on the gunner’s throat. The bell rang. Then I hit the ground behind the vehicle and tumbled, but got up and turned back around in time to see the gunner slump over and the driver turn the steering wheel hard. The other two mock-enemies were raising their pistols.

As the vehicle made its turn, exposing the driver, I ran and jumped again. But when I bit the pad on the driver’s throat, the skin didn’t break right away. So I hung on and bit harder. The driver gave a yell that I don’t think was a word. Then the pad broke, the mock-blood came out, and I heard the bell. So I jumped away, spinning as my paws hit the ground so I could be ready to attack the remaining two mock-enemies.

But I didn’t have to. The vehicle rolled over so its wheels went up, and three of the four enemies fell out. Then it was still. The driver was still strapped in his seat, but his neck was bent against the ground, and he didn’t move. The three mock-enemies on the ground didn’t move either. So I ran to the two I hadn’t bitten yet, broke the skins on their throat pads, then returned to my soldier in the minefield.

The soldier was sitting up with his eyes and mouth open. But I grabbed his flak-jacket strap anyway and resumed dragging him to the medical station. Then he tried to pull away from me. But I was still under orders. So I growled, and then my soldier was still again. I delivered him to the medical station, ran back to Lieutenant Dial, and stood at attention.

The people in the bleachers began to smell unhappy. They made growling noises, and none of them clapped their hands. So for a moment I was afraid I had done something wrong. But then I knew it wasn’t so, because Lieutenant Dial touched my head and said I was good.

That was all that mattered.

From Lieutenant Dial’s next thoughts, I knew that the driver in the utility vehicle had made a mistake. He’d been supposed to drive farther away from me after the gunner was bitten. But he had turned back toward me too soon, and I had been faster than he had thought I would be. Then, when his throat pad hadn’t broken right away, he had panicked and turned the steering wheel too sharply. So the vehicle had rolled over. But by then I had broken the throat pad and jumped away.

All four of the mock-enemies in the utility vehicle had to be taken away for real medical care, and I could hear that some of the people in the bleachers felt bad about that. But Lieutenant Dial didn’t. Instead, he became angry. He wasn’t angry with me, but I didn’t want him to be angry with anything. Being angry made him unhappy. And that made me unhappy too. Anger was like smoke with a bad smell in his head.

The K-9 demonstration was over then, and Melanie came down from the bleachers to meet us. I was glad to see her. But Lieutenant Dial was still angry. He told Melanie that the driver of the utility vehicle had done the exercise incorrectly, and that what had happened wasn’t my fault. I had done what I was supposed to do, but the mock-enemies had screwed it up.

Melanie told him she already knew that, and that everyone else knew it too. She said he shouldn’t worry about what people would think of him, or of me, or of any of the K-9s, because we had all been wonderful.

I didn’t always know what Melanie was saying, but that time I understood every word. And as she spoke, Lieutenant Dial’s anger drifted away. Just like smoke. And then he was happy and proud again. And so was I.

I rubbed my nose against Melanie’s knee, and she touched my head. I wished I could tell her she was good.

Then Lieutenant Dial, Melanie, and I walked to the edge of the water with some of the people from the bleachers, and we stood on a boardwalk while the people on the pier performed demonstrations with water animals. We had a good view even though we were about thirty meters from them. Lieutenant Dial said the animals that stayed in the water all the time were called dolphins, and the ones that hopped from the pier to the water and back again were called sea lions. One of the sea lions barked, but I couldn’t understand it.

The water animals delivered equipment to people underwater, and they also searched for mines and mock-enemies. Pictures of them doing those things appeared on the big screen. Sometimes a sea lion carried a clamp in its mouth, and when it found a mock-enemy, it swam up behind him and put the clamp on his leg. Then the mock-enemy was pulled up to the pier by a rope attached to the clamp, while the sea lion jumped from the water and got a treat from its handler. It looked like fun, and I wished I could go underwater and sneak up on the mock-enemies down there too.

Then the sea lions had a contest. They were supposed to find some small dummy mines and push buttons on the mines with their noses, then attach handles and bring the mines up to the pier. It was a race to see which sea lion could bring up the most mines in two minutes. So the sea lions were swimming fast and splashing a lot, dropping the mines on the pier and grabbing new handles before plunging into the ocean again.

The dummy water mines looked like black soccer balls, and they had lights that came on if the button had been pushed. Once one of the sea lions brought up a mine that didn’t have its light on, and his handler threw the mine back into the water. Then the sea lion had to go get it again, and he had to be sure to push the button before putting it on the pier. If I had been that sea lion, I would have felt bad for not doing it right the first time. But I couldn’t tell whether he felt bad or not, because he kept on swimming for more mines. So then I was glad because he was still being a good soldier.

He didn’t win the contest, though. He came in second. At the end of two minutes, he had eleven mines, and the winner had twelve. All the people who had watched the race clapped and cheered, and the four sea lions who had raced got up on their hindquarters and barked. The people cheered even more then, and Lieutenant Dial and Melanie did too. But Lieutenant Dial didn’t clap because he had one hand on the handle of my duty harness.

Both Lieutenant Dial and Melanie were happy. So I should have been happy too.

But I wasn’t. Something was wrong.

I didn’t know what it was at first, so I lifted my head high and sniffed the air. There were many smells. There was sweat, soda, and popcorn. There were buckets of little fish. The sea lions smelled salty. Melanie still smelled like flowers. The other K-9s smelled thirsty. The practice mines smelled like wet Frisbees.

Except there was another smell with the Frisbee smell. It wasn’t big. But it was there. It was a bad smell. It was a bad smell like the real mines that had been in the practice minefield during the hardest part of training. It was a bad smell like the real mine that had killed another K-9 who wasn’t careful enough.

And as soon as I had identified that bad smell, I knew where it was coming from. The final mine that the winning sea lion had brought up wasn’t like the others. It looked like them, but it didn’t smell like them. It was different. It was bad.

It wanted to explode and kill someone.

But none of the sea lions were doing anything about it. They were still on their hindquarters, swaying back and forth, while the people clapped. One of the dolphins was splashing and chattering out in the water, so I think she might have known. But none of the handlers paid any attention to her. They were smiling at the clapping people.

I was under no specific orders. But Lieutenant Dial had given me one General Order many training sessions ago: If I ever knew something was wrong, I had to act.

So I bolted for the pier, and Lieutenant Dial released my harness handle. I knew his thoughts, and he knew mine. He knew I was being good.

I ran fast between people’s legs. Some of them yelled. And then I was on the pier. It moved up and down a little, but I kept on running fast even though it tried to make me fall. Two of the people in white stepped into my path, but I zigzagged around them. The pier was wet there, and my feet slipped. But I scrabbled hard like I did at the wall and kept going.

One of the sea lions came down from his haunches as I approached, and he opened his mouth as if to bite me. It was a big mouth with big teeth. The whole sea lion was as big as five of me, and he lunged at me when I came close. So I jumped over his head and kicked the back of his neck with my hind feet. That pushed me the last three meters to the end of the pier.

My front feet hit the pier right beside the bad mine, so I grabbed its handle with my teeth, whipped it forward, and let go so it flew into the water. Two of the dolphins swam away fast as the mine splashed and sank.

Then I couldn’t smell the bad mine anymore, so I was glad. But when I turned around and saw the white-clothed people and their sea lions, none of them seemed glad. The people were shouting and the sea lions were barking. The sea lions’ barks still didn’t make sense.

I saw Lieutenant Dial running down the pier toward me, so I started running toward him too. And just as I began to zigzag around the sea lions, I heard a rumble and a splash, and the pier rose up under me. I fell, and the pier hit my jaw and made me bite my tongue. Then the pier bounced up and down, and I couldn’t stand up because my feet kept slipping. One of the people in white had fallen down beside me, and he kept slipping too. That made me worry about Lieutenant Dial, so I looked up to see if he was all right. But a sea lion was in the way.

Then I yelped. Later, a news reporter would say that I yelped because my tongue was hurt. But that wasn’t the reason. It was because I couldn’t see or hear Lieutenant Dial, and I couldn’t find his thoughts. There were too many people thinking and yelling all at once. I couldn’t even smell him because I was too close to the sea lions.

That was a bad moment. But the pier moved a little less each time it bounced, and finally I could stand up. And then I could see Lieutenant Dial. He was in the middle of the pier helping another person stand up, so I ran to him and stood at attention. When he had finished helping the other person, he looked down at me and saluted. And he told me I was good. He told me I was more good than I had ever been before.

And the bad moment was gone.

Later, investigators said that a real enemy had replaced one of the sea lions’ dummy mines with a live one, intending to hurt or kill as many people and animals as possible. But because I threw it back into the water, only one dolphin was hurt. And no one was killed.

A few weeks later, Lieutenant Dial was promoted to Captain, and I was promoted to Sergeant. Captain Dial received silver bars for his uniform, and then he leaned over and showed me a new metal tag before clipping it to the ring in my collar. It was shaped like the insignia for Sergeant First Class. I knew I couldn’t wear it on combat duty, because it would get in the way and make noise. But it was still a fine thing, because that was how it looked in Captain Dial’s thoughts.

Other soldiers were promoted during that ceremony as well, but I was the only K-9. Also, Captain Dial and I were commended for finding the live mine. We were called heroes.

Melanie was there for the ceremony, and both she and Captain Dial were proud and happy. So I was proud and happy too.

But I still wasn’t as happy as I had been on the pier. That was where I had been more good than I had ever been before. Captain Dial had said so.

That was how I knew it was true.

SOON AFTER our promotions, Captain Dial and I left the fort with many other soldiers, and we all went to the war. Melanie came to the fort to say good-bye to us.

She and Captain Dial hugged each other for a long time while I stood at ease. Most of the other soldiers were hugging people too. There were wives and children, and even a few dogs who weren’t soldiers.

Then Melanie knelt down and put her head against mine. It surprised me. She had never done anything like that before. I think she was trying to help me understand her thoughts the way I understood Captain Dial’s. It helped a little. But even if she hadn’t done it, I would have known she was telling me the same thing she had told me every morning before training. She was telling me to take care of Captain Dial.

So I kissed her face. I wanted her to be glad that Captain Dial and I were going to the war together. Her face tasted like ocean water.

Then Melanie took her head away from mine and put her arms around Captain Dial again. After a while, Captain Dial pulled away from her and gave me the signal to proceed. We left Melanie and went to the D Company bus.

When all the soldiers of D Company had boarded the bus, it took us to the air transport. Captain Dial was quiet during the bus ride. He just looked out the window. And for the first time, his thoughts weren’t clear to me. It was as if they were far away in a fog, and a fuzzy sound ran through them. I glimpsed Melanie, but that was all. Captain Dial kept his hand on my neck, though, and every now and then his fingers rubbed behind my ears. So I didn’t worry. Captain Dial always had some thoughts that I couldn’t understand anyway. The only ones I really needed to know were the ones that were orders.

The air transport took a long time, and it was loud. I didn’t like it. By the time it stopped at an island to refuel, all my muscles were sore. But I felt better after marking some trees near the airstrip, and better still after some food. We got back on the transport then, and Captain Dial gave me a pill to help me sleep through the rest of the flight. It helped a lot. But I was still glad when we were on the ground again. When we finally left the transport we were in a place that was dry and sunny, and all of the smells were sharp.

The soldiers of D Company spent one night in a tinroofed barracks at the combat zone airfield, and Captain Dial and I slept there with them. There was no kennel or cushion for me, so I slept on a blanket beside Captain Dial’s cot. I was the only K-9 in the company, and some of the other soldiers were nervous around me. But Captain Dial made sure that I met each one and learned that soldier’s smell. Captain Dial wanted to keep them all safe. So I wanted to keep them safe too.

I could see some soldiers’ thoughts, although none of them were as clear to me as Captain Dial’s. But that was all right, because the soldiers’ voices and smells told me all I needed to know about them. Most of them were friendly, although several stayed nervous even after they met me. And a few smelled frightened or angry.

One of the angry ones was an officer, Lieutenant Morris, who was in charge of First Platoon. I couldn’t see his thoughts at all, but I still knew he didn’t like me. I knew he didn’t like Captain Dial, either. When he stood before us, his sweat smelled bitter, and his voice was low. And even when he saluted, his muscles were tense as if he were about to run or fight.

Captain Dial was aware of all this, because he knew my thoughts. But unlike me, he was able to think of a reason for Lieutenant Morris’s attitude. He thought Lieutenant Morris believed he should have been promoted to Captain and given command of D Company.

This troubled Captain Dial, because he had never wanted to lead a company of regular soldiers anyway. But I was the only one who knew it. What he really wanted to do was serve in a K-9 unit. But when we were promoted, he was ordered to command D Company because its original captain had died in training. So he requested that I be allowed to join the company with him, and we were both happy when his request was granted. We joined D Company on the same day we went to the war. And I knew that all of the soldiers in D Company were lucky to have Captain Dial as their leader.

The morning after our arrival in the combat zone, D Company was assigned to guard four checkpoints on highways that led to the airfield. So Captain Dial put a platoon at each checkpoint, splitting the soldiers among three separate road barriers per checkpoint. He told the lieutenants and sergeants to stop and inspect each vehicle at each barrier, and to detain the occupants of any vehicle found to contain contraband. He also told them to have their soldiers fire warning shots over any vehicles that passed the first barrier without stopping for inspection. They were to aim at the tires and engines of any vehicles that also passed the second barrier without stopping. And any vehicles that passed the third barrier without stopping were to be destroyed. But any vehicles that stopped at all three barriers and were found to contain no contraband were to be allowed to proceed unless the soldiers had reason to believe that a more thorough inspection was needed. In that case, the suspicious vehicle was to be reported to Captain Dial so he could bring me to it and I could smell whether anything was wrong.

I thought these orders were easy and clear.

Captain Dial and I spent our first five days in the combat zone riding from checkpoint to checkpoint in a utility vehicle, inspecting cars and trucks and seeing to the needs of D Company. I liked doing the inspections. In those first days, I found three pistols, four rifles, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, and a brick of hashish. Captain Dial arrested the people with the guns and sent them to Headquarters. But he laughed at the man with the hashish and let him drive away. Hashish wasn’t contraband here, he told me, so long as no one gave any to our soldiers. This was a new rule to me, but I’m good at learning new rules.

The first five days were fun. All of our platoons did their jobs, and so did Captain Dial and I.

Then, on the morning of the sixth day, Lieutenant Morris ordered First Platoon to open fire on a van that had gone past the first barrier without stopping. It didn’t reach the second barrier. By the time Lieutenant Morris ordered his soldiers to cease fire, all seven people inside the van had been killed.

Captain Dial and I weren’t there when it happened. We were two checkpoints away. By the time we arrived, the incident had been over for fifteen minutes. Lieutenant Morris and a few other soldiers had dragged three of the bodies from the shot-up van and laid them by the side of the road. They were heading back toward the van when Captain Dial stopped our utility vehicle in front of them and ordered them to stay away from the van and the bodies.

Then he ordered me to search the van, and I obeyed. It was a bad place. It smelled of spent machine-gun rounds, explosive residue, and human blood.

The driver was still in her seat. She had been a woman about the size of Melanie. The three other bodies still in the van had been small children. There were two boys and a girl. I had seen children of their sizes on the day by the ocean. But the ones in the van had been shot through and through. Their blood was all over the floor and seats, and I had to step in it to conduct my search.

There was no contraband. There were no guns, and the only bullets were spent rounds. And I couldn’t smell any explosives except the residue of a grenade that had been fired into the van by someone in First Platoon.

After I had searched the van, Captain Dial ordered me to search the three bodies on the ground. So I did. They were all girls. Two were even smaller than the children in the van. The third was larger, about the size of the girl who writes these words. But she wasn’t fully grown. All of them had been shot many times. One of the younger girls had most of her face gone. The older girl had a narrow cut on her neck. None of them possessed any contraband.

Captain Dial was angrier than he had ever been before. The smoke in his head was thick and turbulent. And there were sounds. I could hear Melanie crying. I could hear a hundred Melanies crying.

Then Captain Dial began shouting at Lieutenant Morris. I had never heard him shout like that before, and it made me cringe even though he wasn’t shouting at me. All the soldiers of First Platoon cringed, too, especially when Captain Dial said he would bring Lieutenant Morris up on charges for disobeying orders.

But Lieutenant Morris’s bitter smell was acrid and strong now, and he stood with his head thrust forward and his arms straight down at his sides. He didn’t salute. It was as if he was challenging Captain Dial. It was as if he thought he had done a good thing, and that Captain Dial’s orders had been wrong.

That made me angry, because Captain Dial always gave good orders. So I took a step toward Lieutenant Morris and growled.

Lieutenant Morris reached for his sidearm, but Captain Dial slapped his hand away from it. Then Lieutenant Morris made a fist and started to swing it at Captain Dial’s face. I was on him before his fist was halfway there, and I put him on his back on the highway.

I stood with my front paws on Lieutenant Morris’s chest and my teeth touching his throat, and Captain Dial ordered him to remain still. This time, Lieutenant Morris obeyed. I could feel the pulse in his neck and the shallow motion of his chest as he breathed, but those were the only movements he made until Captain Dial ordered me to stand down. Then I took my paws from Lieutenant Morris’s chest and backed away.

But now I smelled something wrong in a pocket of Lieutenant Morris’s fatigues. It smelled like the girl with the cut on her neck. It smelled like her blood.

I pointed at Lieutenant Morris’s pocket and barked. So Captain Dial knelt down, opened the pocket, and brought out a slender chain with a shiny rock on it. It wasn’t just like the one he had given Melanie, but it didn’t look much different. Except that this one had blood on its chain.

The clasp on the chain was closed, but the chain had been broken in another place. The rock slid down against the clasp when Captain Dial pulled the chain from Lieutenant Morris’s pocket, and it dangled there as he held it up. It caught the sun so that it seemed to have a light inside it.

Captain Dial remained on one knee, looking at the necklace, for a long time. Lieutenant Morris started to speak, but I growled and he shut up. I was doing him a favor, because one of Captain Dial’s thoughts was clear. He was thinking of using his sidearm to shoot Lieutenant Morris in the head. He was thinking that if Lieutenant Morris said even one word, that was what he would do.

What happened instead was that Captain Dial stood up and told a First Platoon sergeant to call for military police. Then he returned to our utility vehicle, leaving Lieutenant Morris on his back on the highway. I went with Captain Dial, and we waited in our vehicle until the military police came. When they did, Captain Dial gave the rock and chain to one of them.

I didn’t understand everything that happened after that. But Lieutenant Morris was back with D Company just two days after he ordered First Platoon to attack the van. And Captain Dial was unhappy because he didn’t think there would ever be a court-martial. For one thing, none of the soldiers of First Platoon were sure about what had happened. Some of them even thought that the van had been loaded with explosives, and they continued to think so even after Captain Dial told them I hadn’t smelled any. Also, Lieutenant Morris said that he had found the girl’s necklace on the ground. And there were no soldiers who would say that he hadn’t. Except me. I hadn’t smelled any dirt or asphalt on it. All I had smelled was skin and blood from the girl’s neck plus sweat from Lieutenant Morris’s hand. But the only officer who could hear my testimony was Captain Dial. And unless there was a court-martial, he had already done all he could do.

Besides, the military police said they lost the necklace.

Captain Dial was sad from then on. I don’t think anyone else in the company knew that. But I did.

I wanted to make Captain Dial happy again, so I tried even harder to be good. And he told me I was. He told me I was the best sergeant he had ever seen.

But he was still sad. So I was sad too.

Two weeks later, D Company was assigned to a combat mission. A few hours before dawn on a Friday morning, thirty enemy guerrillas had attacked our supply depot using mortars and small arms—and although they had been repelled, four of our soldiers had been killed. So the guerrillas had to be followed and destroyed, and D Company was chosen to do it. Captain Dial thought it was strange that an entire company was being sent after only thirty enemies, but he followed the order without hesitation.

D Company was in pursuit of the guerrillas within an hour of the attack. The guerrillas had a big head start, but they were on foot, and D Company had armored personnel carriers, utility vehicles, and me. So we were able to move fast over both roads and fields, and every few minutes Captain Dial had me run ahead and correct the direction of our pursuit. The guerrillas were staying in one group, so their trail was easy to smell.

We had almost caught up to them as they reached the hills fifteen kilometers west of our airfield. We were so close that Captain Dial could see them through his night-vision field glasses. They were making their way up a narrow, ascending valley, and they were still in one group.

This troubled Captain Dial. It seemed to him that once the guerrillas had reached the hills, they should have scattered to make our pursuit more difficult. But they were staying together. So Captain Dial used his radio to consult with Headquarters, and Headquarters said a refugee camp of about three hundred souls lay a short distance up the valley, a few hundred meters beyond a natural curve. The guerrillas probably intended to stay together long enough to reach that camp—and then they would disperse and blend in with the civilians. This would force Captain Dial to either let them escape, or arrest the entire camp.

So we had to stop the guerrillas before they reached the refugee camp. Captain Dial increased our speed, then dropped off two squads from Fourth Platoon with ten mortars as soon as we were in range. His plan was for those squads to fire the mortars just beyond the guerrillas, forcing them to turn away from the refugee camp . . . and perhaps also to run back into our pursuit.

As the rest of D Company started up the valley, the mortar squads put a dozen rounds where Captain Dial had ordered. But instead of reversing direction, the guerrillas began to ascend a hill on the south side of the valley. They remained in one group, though, and we gained on them. When we were close enough that we might be hit by stray mortar rounds, Captain Dial radioed the squads and told them to hold fire. But they were to stay put to intercept any enemies that might be flushed back toward them.

We rushed toward the base of the hill the guerrillas were climbing. They were moving much more slowly now, and in the light of dawn it was clear that we would overtake them before they reached the crest of the hill. I became excited as I thought of knocking them down and holding them, one by one, until my fellow soldiers could take them prisoner. And as the utility vehicle that carried me, Captain Dial, and Staff Sergeant Owens began to climb the hill, I readied myself to leap out and attack.

Our vehicle was in the lead, so most of the company was still on the valley floor as we started up the hill. It was at that moment that rocket-propelled grenades and mortar shells began raining down around us from the opposite hillside to the north. And then the guerrillas we were chasing took up positions and began to fire down on us with small arms.

Captain Dial radioed orders to our platoon leaders to take cover and return fire. Then he had Staff Sergeant Owens turn our utility vehicle broadside to the enemy fire, and the three of us exited on the downhill side. We crawled downhill as fast as we could until we reached one of D Company’s APCs, and we took cover behind it with soldiers from First and Second Platoons. The soldiers were jumping up and leaning out to fire quick bursts from their rifles, and Captain Dial shouted for them to keep it up as he got on the radio again to call Headquarters for air support. Our helicopters and drones were always out on missions, but two or three could be diverted if soldiers were in trouble. And we were in trouble.

But now Captain Dial couldn’t raise Headquarters on the radio. He tried every possible frequency, and there was nothing but silence.

Lieutenant Morris crawled to us and told Captain Dial that we were all going to be killed, and that it was Captain Dial’s fault. I wanted to bite Lieutenant Morris’s throat then. But Captain Dial ignored him, so I tried to ignore him too. He wasn’t a good soldier. He didn’t belong in D Company.

There was a loud explosion up the hill, and a soldier told Captain Dial that our abandoned utility vehicle had been hit by a rocket from the other side of the valley. They were zeroing in on us. So Captain Dial said we couldn’t stay behind the armored personnel carrier, because it would be targeted next. He ordered First and Second Platoons to retreat to the valley floor, and then he got on the radio and told the mortar squads from Fourth Platoon to fire on the northern hillside. Finally he called to Third Platoon and the remaining two squads of Fourth Platoon, who were all still at the base of the hill, and told them to abandon their APCs and move up the valley on foot, doubletime. All platoons were to return fire as best they could. No one was to retreat back toward the plain.

As Captain Dial and I moved downhill with First and Second Platoons, Lieutenant Morris shouted that Captain Dial’s orders were insane. The soldiers in APCs should stay in them, he said. Without armor, he said, they would be picked off in the valley like cattle in a chute.

But Captain Dial knew that the armor was what the enemy would try to destroy first, unless it was moving fast. And it couldn’t move fast in the terrain we were in. So getting the soldiers away from it was the only thing to do. And sure enough, before we reached the bottom of the hill, the APC we had been using for cover was hit by a rocket and destroyed.

Our mortars began hitting the northern hill as Captain Dial and I reached the base of the southern hill, and Captain Dial stood his ground there while urging the soldiers of First and Second Platoons to run past our abandoned APCs and continue up the valley. And even now, Lieutenant Morris kept telling him he was wrong, and that D Company ought to be heading back to the plain in full retreat.

But I knew Captain Dial’s thoughts, and I knew he was right. Headquarters had been tricked into having D Company follow the guerrillas into an ambush—but Captain Dial wouldn’t let the guerrillas trick him any further. He knew that once the ambush began, the enemy would expect D Company to retreat toward the plain. So there would be another trap waiting at the mouth of the valley. The enemy would close us in, then fire down upon us until we were annihilated.

So Captain Dial would confound their expectations. D Company would continue up the valley, on foot, until we could reach an elevated position. With our mortar squads out on the plain providing harassing fire, we could be well up the valley before the guerrillas could leave their hillsides. And then we would transform the enemy’s ambush into an attack of our own.

But we would have to take up our battle position before reaching the refugee camp. So we would doubletime around the curve to get out of sight of the enemy, then run up the hill on the backside of the curve. The guerrillas would have no clear shot from their current positions—and if they followed us, we would be able to pour fire down on them as they rounded the curve. So even without air support, we could prevail.

Captain Dial’s plan was good, and as D Company rushed up the valley, it began to work. Two more of our abandoned vehicles were hit and began to burn, but despite the constant fire from the enemy, we had not yet lost a single soldier. Our mortar squads were hitting the hillsides as ordered, and the guerrillas’ weapons fire became erratic. Captain Dial paused every few meters to shout orders and encouragement to his running soldiers, and once he sent me back to nip at the heels of a few stragglers. But the stragglers weren’t stragglers for long, and I was able to rejoin Captain Dial in less than a minute. Then, bringing up the rear, he and I rounded the curve and began running up the slope to take our positions with the rest of our soldiers. They were already following Captain Dial’s orders, taking cover behind rocks and in gullies. And they were readying their weapons.

Some of the guerrillas had chased after us, and a few of them came around the curve before Captain Dial and I were far enough up the slope to take our positions. But we hit the dirt so our soldiers could fire on them, and only two of these enemies survived long enough to come within twenty meters of me and Captain Dial. So I turned, charged, and bit their throats. Then I returned to Captain Dial, and we joined several of our soldiers behind a jumble of rocks and dirt.

More guerrillas came around the curve, and D Company shot them. Then some came up the slope in a truck, and one of our soldiers destroyed it with a rocket-propelled grenade. We were winning the battle despite being ambushed.

Then strange things happened.

They didn’t seem strange at first. At first, I heard the buzz of airborne drones. Captain Dial couldn’t hear them yet, but he knew that I could, and he was glad. It seemed that Headquarters had heard his request after all.

But almost as soon as I heard the drones, I also heard distant explosions, and our mortar squads stopped firing. So Captain Dial radioed them for a status report. But there was no reply. Then he tried again to contact Headquarters, but there was still no reply there either.

The buzz became loud, and two drones appeared around the curve of the valley, flying low. They were narrow-winged and sleek, and almost invisible against the sky. They didn’t have any insignia on their wings.

Then they fired rockets at us. They fired rockets at D Company. And at least twenty soldiers died as the rockets exploded. Dirt and rocks pelted me and Captain Dial where we crouched. My ears hurt.

The drones rose up over the opposite hill, then turned back toward us. Captain Dial shouted into his radio, trying one frequency after another, doing his best to raise Headquarters, to raise the remote drone pilots, to raise anyone who should have been listening. He shouted to his lieutenants to try their own radios too. And they did. But no one received a reply.

The drones came swooping toward us, and it became clear that their first attack hadn’t been a mistake. Captain Dial’s thoughts were tangled as he realized this. The enemy had no such weapons. So he couldn’t understand why the drones were attacking us. Their cameras should have seen who we were, and their pilots should have known that D Company wasn’t the enemy.

But even in his confusion, Captain Dial was a good leader. He ordered Sergeant Owens to fire a flare to identify us, but he didn’t wait to see whether the cameras had seen it and understood its meaning. Instead, he shouted for D Company’s surviving lieutenants and sergeants to get their soldiers up and moving again. If the drones were returning to attack our position again, he was going to put us somewhere else.

The soldiers of D Company were already running down the slope when the drones launched their second wave of rockets, so most of them made it to the valley floor. But eight more were killed. Captain Dial and I were bringing up the rear again, and the rocket that killed the eight exploded in front of us just as another exploded behind us. Captain Dial dove to the ground, putting his arms around me and pushing me down. Then he covered me with his body as more rockets exploded on the slope above us.

I didn’t like it. Captain Dial wasn’t supposed to shield me from harm. I was supposed to do that for him. So I tried to reverse our positions, but Captain Dial ordered me to stay put. Of course I had to obey. But I didn’t understand. Captain Dial was more important to D Company than I was.

The rockets stopped exploding, and the drones passed over us again. They were so close that the dirt under my jaw hummed. Then Captain Dial was on his feet again, shouting orders as the drones flew behind the hilltop. The surviving soldiers of D Company were to run like hell up the valley and to take whatever cover they could find—rocks, trees, ditches, anything—if the drones made another pass. But the soldiers were to avoid entering the refugee camp, wherever it was, at all costs. If they came upon it while still on the run, they were to find a way around it.

TAPTAIN DIAL was smart. But even Captain Dial could only make his choices based on what he knew. And he didn’t know that the refugees weren’t gathered in a single camp, as Headquarters had said. He didn’t know that they were scattered in small clusters throughout the rest of the valley.

And he didn’t know that the drones would return so soon, or that they would swoop up and down the valley firing their Gatling guns at anything that moved. The valley was full of sunlight now, so the pilots should have been able to see our soldiers’ uniforms. There was nothing to block the view of the cameras. But the drones kept firing on us.

I wished I could jump high enough to tear them out of the sky.

As D Company’s lieutenants and sergeants began shouting and radioing Captain Dial, telling him that they were losing more soldiers and that every scrap of cover was occupied by noncombatants, Captain Dial made a decision he didn’t want to make. He tried one more time to contact Headquarters—and when that failed, he ordered D Company to return fire. Then he took a rifle from a fallen corporal and fired the first shots at the lead drone as it swooped toward us again.

I couldn’t fire a weapon, so I did the only thing I could do to help. I ran in a zigzag pattern toward the drones in an attempt to draw their fire and give the rest of D Company a better chance to make their shots count. And I could hear Captain Dial shouting that I was good.

That made me glad.

The lead drone turned toward me, and in that instant the soldiers of D Company were able to hit it broadside with small-arms fire and at least one RPG. The drone began spewing smoke, and then it turned and almost collided with the second drone. The second drone pulled up and vanished behind a hill just as the first one began to spiral downward.

I returned to Captain Dial, who ordered me and the soldiers who were closest to follow him. We ran up a hillside and dove into a gully that cut across it. There were six of us: Captain Dial, Lieutenant Morris, Sergeant Owens, two specialists, and me. And in the gully we found five civilians: An old man, a woman, an adolescent girl, and two young boys. They scrambled away from us as we tumbled into the gully, and they seemed about to climb out until Captain Dial spoke to them in their language. I think he told them they would be safer if they stayed put.

He had no sooner gotten the words out than the ground shook with the biggest explosion yet. I smelled burning fuel, and I knew the drone had crashed. Captain Dial shouted for everyone to hit the dirt, but I was the only one in the gully who heard him. There was a roaring noise and more explosions. The drone’s remaining weapons were detonating.

One of the boys tried to climb out of the gully. The woman jumped up to stop him, and something from the exploding drone hit her in the face. She fell back into the gully. So Captain Dial tried to get to the panicked boy to pull him down. But Lieutenant Morris clutched Captain Dial’s leg and stopped him.

Captain Dial made a gesture, and I followed the order. I leaped over him and Lieutenant Morris, and I grabbed the boy’s ankle and pulled him down. My teeth broke his skin, but it couldn’t be helped. When the boy fell to the dirt beside the woman, I pressed my chest against his to hold him there.

The girl started to move as if to protect the boy from me, but then she looked at my eyes. And for that moment, she knew my thoughts. So she crawled to the woman instead and wiped blood from her face.

The woman wasn’t breathing, and I knew she was dead. The girl knew it too, but she tried to make the woman breathe again anyway.

There were a few more explosions from the fallen drone, and then the only noise from it was a muted roar as it burned. So I listened for the other drone, and I heard it flying farther and farther away.

Captain Dial told me I could let the boy up, so I did. He tried to run away again, but this time the girl stopped him. He was crying, and so was the girl. So was the other boy. The girl looked at me again, and I knew then that the dead woman was their mother and the old man was their grandfather. The old man was sitting against the wall of the gully with his knees pulled up to his face and his eyes closed tight.

I looked at Captain Dial then and saw that he was hurt. His left sleeve was turning dark at the shoulder, just below the edge of his flak jacket. But I could hardly smell his blood among all the other bloody smells. I went to him and whined, and he touched my head and told me he was all right. I wanted to go find a medic for him, but he ordered me to stay.

Then he used his radio to ask the rest of D Company for a status report, but he couldn’t hear the replies because Lieutenant Morris began shouting. I couldn’t understand all of the words, but I understood that Lieutenant Morris blamed Captain Dial for what had happened. He accused Captain Dial of treason for shooting down one of our own aircraft. And he said that the civilians weren’t refugees at all, but guerrillas like those we had been pursuing. He said that was why the drones had attacked. And he said it was Captain Dial’s fault that D Company had been in the line of fire when that happened.

Nothing Lieutenant Morris was shouting made any sense. But nothing that had happened to us had made any sense either. I knew that much from Captain Dial’s thoughts. He didn’t understand why things had happened the way they had happened. He slumped with his back against the wall of the gully, and he wondered whether Melanie would still love him after this.

Lieutenant Morris turned to Sergeant Owens and the two specialists, and he announced that Captain Dial was incapacitated. So he was now ranking officer, he said, and he ordered them to turn their weapons toward the old man, the girl, and the boys. If any of them moved, he said, the soldiers were to shoot them all.

Sergeant Owens and the specialists did as they were told. Then Lieutenant Morris reached for the radio in Captain Dial’s right hand, but I jumped in his way and snarled at him. So Lieutenant Morris unholstered his sidearm and pointed it at me.

But before he could fire, Captain Dial spoke. He ordered Lieutenant Morris to lower his weapon, and after some hesitation, Lieutenant Morris obeyed. Then Captain Dial ordered Sergeant Owens and the specialists to lower their weapons as well, and they obeyed too.

Captain Dial was strong again. His shoulder was bleeding, but his thoughts were clear. He stood up, pushing himself off the gully wall with his right forearm, and peered over the rim at the burning drone. He spoke into his radio and told his soldiers to stay put if they were in a safe place, and to keep trying to find one if they weren’t. He would assess the situation and issue new orders within the next few minutes.

But we didn’t have a few minutes. I could hear the second drone returning.

I barked to let Captain Dial know it was coming. So then he shouted into his radio and ordered all of his soldiers to remain still and refrain from returning fire unless directly fired upon. Then he ordered those of us in the gully to hit the dirt. The girl and the two boys didn’t understand at first, but the old man put his hands on their shoulders and made them lie down close to their dead mother.

Then Captain Dial lowered himself to a sitting position with his back against the gully wall. He couldn’t lie down flat with his wounded shoulder. I lay down next to him and put my chin on his knee, and we waited while the drone flew back and forth. Its Gatling gun chattered three or four times, and I hoped it was shooting enemy guerrillas and not D Company soldiers or civilians.

One of the little boys began to cry, but the girl and the old man whispered to him, and then he was quiet again. I was glad they could calm him like that. They were being good leaders. Like Captain Dial.

But a good leader needs good soldiers.

On the drone’s fourth pass, Lieutenant Morris stood and fired his weapon into the air. I was on him fast, my front paws hitting his back and pushing him down, but it was too late. Even as I pinned Lieutenant Morris to the bottom of the gully, I could hear the drone turning and the barrels of its Gatling guns beginning to spin.

Lieutenant Morris shouted into the dirt that we had to show ourselves to the drone so it would know who we were and so it could help us kill the rest of the enemy. He worked a hand free from under his chest and pointed at the family with the dead mother.

I wanted to bite Lieutenant Morris and bite him hard. And I smelled something in one of his pockets that made me feel that way even more. It smelled like the dead girl at the highway checkpoint.

But I didn’t bite him, because I knew Captain Dial wouldn’t like it. Captain Dial was busy with his radio, telling the rest of D Company that they were not to give away their positions by firing on the drone if it attacked those of us in the gully—not unless there was a clear shot for an RPG. Otherwise, we were on our own. But D Company would survive.

I heard the drone dip low. It was flying on a path directly in line with our gully. It would be able to pour bullets and rockets on us with ease.

Captain Dial was on his feet. It was as if he had been yanked up on a rope from the sky. His left sleeve was so wet that it dripped.

He shouted two orders. First, Sergeant Owens and the two specialists were to get out of the gully at the south rim and run through the smoke of the downed aircraft until they could find other cover in the valley. Second, I was to take the civilians over the north rim and head up into the hills until I could find another gully, a cave, or some other sheltered position. I was to keep them safe.

Sergeant Owens and the specialists clambered over the south rim, rolled, and ran into the smoke. I jumped off Lieutenant Morris and started toward the civilians. But after a few steps, I stopped. The drone’s Gatling guns had begun to fire.

I looked back and saw Captain Dial pull Lieutenant Morris to his feet. Captain Dial could only use his right arm, so he had dropped his radio. Lieutenant Morris seemed dazed, and Captain Dial had to hold him up and drag him.

Captain Dial shouted for me to obey my order. I was not to wait for him and Lieutenant Morris. They would catch up, he said.

But I knew Captain Dial’s thoughts. I knew he didn’t think that he and Lieutenant Morris would make it.

So for the first time ever, I decided to disobey a direct order. I would obey my General Order instead. That was what I had done on the day beside the ocean, and Captain Dial had told me I was good. He had told me I was more good than I had ever been before. So I would do that again.

I ran back to Captain Dial, and he yelled at me. He said I had to obey his order immediately.

But instead I grabbed one of Lieutenant Morris’s flak-jacket straps, and I pulled him away from Captain Dial and began dragging him up the gully wall. He was heavy, but I’m strong.

Captain Dial knew then that he should take charge of the civilians. Dragging soldiers to safety was one of my jobs, and keeping civilians safe was one of his. But first, he jumped to me and hooked Lieutenant Morris’s arm through my harness loop. Then he pulled the strap to tighten the loop. Now I could let go of the flak-jacket strap and drag Lieutenant Morris a lot faster.

Captain Dial touched my head and told me to go.

I went up the gully wall and over the top with Lieutenant Morris while Captain Dial ran to the civilians and told them that they must go with him. One of the boys cried because he wanted to stay with his mother, but the old man and the girl listened to Captain Dial and wouldn’t let the boy stay. They all climbed up from the gully.

Captain Dial’s foot slipped on the way up and he almost fell, but the girl grabbed his arm to steady him. It was his wounded arm, but she couldn’t reach the other one. I saw a flash like a grenade exploding in Captain Dial’s thoughts. But Captain Dial didn’t cry out even though it hurt a lot. He was a good soldier. The girl was, too. She didn’t hesitate to help Captain Dial. She didn’t flinch from his blood.

When we were all out of the gully, we ran north through the smoke. Captain Dial and the civilians were a few meters west of me and Lieutenant Morris, and they were moving up the slope a little faster. Every few steps, Captain Dial would look back and call encouragement to me. And I would pull harder and could feel Lieutenant Morris’s boots bouncing on the ground behind us.

I didn’t look back, but I heard the buzz of the drone as it flew low over the gully we had just left. I could smell its exhaust. Its Gatling guns chattered, and the slugs made dull thumps in the dirt.

And then, as we ran higher and came up out of the smoke, I heard the drone swoop out over the valley, turn, and head right for us. It was attacking us from behind, and there was no place for us to take cover when its guns started firing again. I looked ahead and saw a shadow on the ground that looked like another gully, but it was too far away. Lieutenant Morris and I wouldn’t reach it before the drone strafed us.

I looked over at Captain Dial. Although he was wounded, he was now carrying one of the boys. The girl was carrying the other one. The old man was breathing hard and stumbling. So they were losing speed, and Lieutenant Morris and I had almost caught up to them. They wouldn’t reach the next gully either. The drone would be able to hit all of us with the same burst of gunfire, or with just one rocket.

Captain Dial looked over at me as I looked at him, and we each knew the other’s thoughts. There was only one thing to do. And when his thoughts said Now, I followed his order.

He and the civilians cut left, where there was still a little smoke, and I cut right, where the air was clear. We ran away from each other as fast as we could. I could hear Captain Dial’s breath getting farther and farther away behind me. I could hear it even over the noise from Lieutenant Morris’s boots.

I would have dropped Lieutenant Morris if I could, because he would have been safer lying still. But I couldn’t. The loop on my harness was pulled tight around his arm, and there was no time for me to turn my head to yank it loose.

The drone came after me and Lieutenant Morris. I was sorry for what that meant for Lieutenant Morris, but glad because it gave Captain Dial a better chance to get himself and the civilians to cover. And I was glad because it gave me a chance to be good.

I ran hard, and I zigzagged as much as I could while dragging Lieutenant Morris. The engine buzz became a roar, and the Gatling gun chattered loud and long. And it almost missed us. But the last slugs in the burst came ripping through the dirt right behind us, and Lieutenant Morris jerked as they reached him. I was slapped down at my hindquarters, and I fell. Lieutenant Morris and I rolled a little way down the hill, and the drone flew over us so low that I could see the rivets in its belly. It rose up over the ridge, hung there for a moment, and then started toward us again.

But this time it bloomed fire from its tail, and it twisted sideways and dove into the hillside above us. There was a loud noise and more fire when it hit, and smoke like there had been from the first one.

I tried to get up, but Lieutenant Morris was lying on my hind legs. And my back hurt, close to my tail. But I couldn’t see or hear Captain Dial, and I had to find him. So I twisted my head around far enough to tug on my harness loop until Lieutenant Morris’s arm slipped out. I couldn’t hear Lieutenant Morris’s breath or heartbeat, and I could smell that he had blood coming out of his legs, back, chest, and neck. He was dead, and there was no place I could drag him where he would be all right again.

When his arm came free, I was able to scramble with my front legs and pull myself out from under him. And then I was able to stand up all the way even though my back hurt. I looked for Captain Dial and the civilians, but I couldn’t see them. There was a lot more smoke now, and it made my eyes itch. It also made it hard to smell anything else. But I heard the girl say something, faint and soft, so I left Lieutenant Morris and followed her voice.

I found her with the other civilians and Captain Dial. Captain Dial was lying on the ground, and the girl was kneeling beside him with her hand on his head. The old man was standing nearby holding the little boys’ hands. The boys were scared. They were looking at the body of a D Company soldier lying nearby. It was torn in two.

Captain Dial smiled when I came up to him and licked his face. I had to step over an RPG launcher to reach him, and when I touched him I knew what he had done. He had found the RPG launcher with the dead soldier, and he had used it to bring down the second drone. But it had recoiled against his wounded shoulder, and now the wound was bleeding even more.

He saw my thoughts and knew what had happened to Lieutenant Morris. But he said I had done everything right. He said he was proud of me. He said I was good.

And just as he said that, I heard a buzzing noise far off in the south. It was heading toward us fast. More drones were coming.

Captain Dial couldn’t hear them. But he knew I did. And he said that they might not be coming to attack us, because their pilots might have realized that the first two had been firing on allies and civilians. But we couldn’t count on it. So I was to take the four civilians away and find shelter for them. I was to do so immediately.

I didn’t understand at first, because the picture I saw in Captain Dial’s thoughts was a picture only of me and the civilians. He wasn’t in it. He wasn’t walking with us, and I wasn’t dragging him with my harness.

And then he made me understand. He was too dizzy to walk, and I couldn’t drag him without making his wound worse.

I wanted to follow his orders, but first I wanted to go back down the hill and find a D Company medic to take care of him. But Captain Dial said there was no time for that. Not if I was going to take the civilians to safety before the new drones arrived. And I knew he was right, because the girl could hear the drones now too. She still had her hand on Captain Dial’s head, but she was looking at the sky.

I whined. I didn’t want to go off with the civilians and leave Captain Dial all alone, even for a little while.

Captain Dial reached up with his right hand to touch my head. He told me it was all right to leave him for now, because I could come back as soon as I had taken the civilians to a safe place. It could be a cave or a deep ravine. It just had to be somewhere they couldn’t be hurt. Once I had made sure of that, I could return. And if a medic hadn’t come to help Captain Dial yet, I could go find one for him then.

But for now, I had to go. I had to keep the civilians safe.

Captain Dial took his hand from my head and spoke to the girl, and he took his pulse transmitter from the pouch on his belt and gave it to her. I knew he was telling her to go with me, and that the transmitter would help us communicate. She shook her head at first, but I could understand her thoughts well enough to know that it wasn’t because she was afraid of me. It was because she didn’t want to leave Captain Dial alone any more than I did.

I knew then that I liked her. But we were under orders now, and we had to follow them. So I took the girl’s hand in my mouth, and I gave a tug to pull her away from Captain Dial. She didn’t want to go, but she didn’t fight me. She knew what we had to do. She strapped the transmitter to her wrist and stood up. She was good, too.

We left Captain Dial and went to the old man and the boys. I released the girl’s hand as she told them they were all going with me. She put the old man’s hand on the handle of my harness, and then he held the hand of one of the boys. The girl held the hand of the other one. We all started up the hill again, pushing through the smoke. My hind legs hurt, but I was still strong. I helped the old man go fast. The girl kept pace beside me as I sniffed and listened to find the best path for us.

I could still see Captain Dial’s thoughts for a long way up the hill. At first he was thinking of me and what I was doing, and he was proud. That made me glad.

Then he thought the two words he had thought about on the day we performed our demonstration by the ocean. He thought the words “heroism” and “vengeance.”

And then he worried about the other soldiers in D Company. So that made me worry, too. But I couldn’t go back to check on them yet. I had orders to follow.

Finally, as the civilians and I came out of the smoke onto a sloping field of rocks, I saw one last strong thought from Captain Dial. It was of Melanie. It was of Melanie with him in their bed, sleeping. And I was on my cushion at their feet.

It was a happy thought, and it made me happy too.

Then Captain Dial’s thoughts became fuzzy as the civilians and I went higher, and soon they were gone. I paused near the crest of the hill and looked back down the slope, but I couldn’t see the place where Captain Dial lay because of the rocks and smoke. And I thought for a moment that maybe the civilians were safe now, and that I could leave them and go back to where I could know Captain Dial’s thoughts again.

But the sound of the approaching drones was loud now, and as I watched, one of them came flying up out of the smoke below us. So I led the civilians behind a big rock. We all crouched down, and I heard the drone turn away and fly back down the hillside again.

Then I heard Gatling guns firing, and I remembered my orders. So I got up from my crouch, and the girl and I took the old man and the boys over the top of the hill and down the other side.

I didn’t like not being able to see Captain Dial’s thoughts. But now I could see the girl’s thoughts almost as well as I had seen his, and she had some good ideas about where we might find a safe place to hide. So we started off in the direction she thought was best.

We had to alter our path many times because of things I smelled or heard. And once we had to make a long detour because the girl remembered there were land mines ahead. I couldn’t smell them yet, but she warned me by sending pulses to my implant. And then I saw her thoughts, and I knew they were true. So we found another way.

I became tired and thirsty, and my hind legs hurt. The girl and her family became tired and thirsty too. But we could hear gunfire and explosions behind us, so the girl and I wouldn’t let the others stop. Not until we found someplace safe.

Not until we had done what Captain Dial had ordered us to do.

WE WENT UP and down through the hills all that day. At dusk we found a guerrilla camp that had been bombed many weeks before. But there were still some matches, a knife, and three plastic jugs of water. So we were able to get a drink. The water tasted like plastic, but we drank a lot of it. There was only one jug left when we were finished. The girl tied it to my harness, and we set out again. The girl carried the matches and the knife.

After nightfall, the girl couldn’t see where we were or where we were going. Clouds covered the sky, so she couldn’t find any stars to help her. That meant our path was up to me. So I followed my nose and my ears, and I took us farther and farther away from cities, camps, and roads. I took us away from anything that smelled or sounded like people with weapons. We had to go a long way.

At last, when the eastern sky had begun to brighten, we found a shelf of rock in the side of a hill. Under the shelf was a cave that was narrow but deep. It was well hidden by brush. I went in first and found some bone fragments and a ring of stones for a fire, but I could smell that they were old. No one had used the cave in a long time.

So I brought the people inside, and they slept on the bare rock. I didn’t sleep right away because I had to lick the cuts on my hind legs. Then I dozed. But I kept my ears and nose alert. The only sounds were of the wind blowing through the rocks and brush. The only smells were of rabbits, birds, and other small animals nearby. There were no guerrillas, soldiers, or other people anywhere near us.

When I had rested for a few hours, I went out into the morning sunlight and killed three rabbits. I had to chase them, and that made my legs hurt again. But I still caught them with no trouble. I tore one apart and ate most of him, and then I took the other two back to the cave. The girl was awake, and she knew what to do. She woke up the boys and had them gather brush and sticks while she used the knife from the guerrilla camp to skin the rabbits. The old man made a spit from the sticks, and they cooked the rabbits over a fire the girl started inside the old ring of stones. It filled the cave with smoke, but the people didn’t care. They were hungry.

While they ate, I scouted the area around the cave in widening circles. I sniffed, smelled, and listened. I marked a broad perimeter to warn off animal intruders. Then I did it all over again. And then I was sure my people were safe.

I had followed and completed Captain Dial’s order. So I went to the girl and pushed my nose into her hand to be sure she knew my thoughts. I made sure she knew that she and her family should stay close to the cave. They could kill more rabbits to eat, and they still had the jug of water from the guerrilla camp. When that ran out, they could catch rain and dew.

The girl understood.

So I started back to the battlefield where I had left Captain Dial. I was able to go faster now because I didn’t have people with me, and because my legs felt better. I could also choose a path that took me closer to dangerous smells. And I found a pond where I could get a drink. But that was the only time I stopped. I wanted to get back to Captain Dial as soon as I could.

There was still some light in the sky when I came over the hilltop and looked down the rocky slope at the battlefield. The two fallen drones had stopped burning, and there was no more smoke. A number of people were walking around down near the gully where Captain Dial and I had found the civilians, and the wind brought me their smells along with the smells of many dead D Company soldiers and refugees. The walking people didn’t smell like soldiers or refugees. But they didn’t smell like the enemy, either. They didn’t make much noise, but occasionally one of them would fire a single shot. It sounded as if they were firing into the ground.

I didn’t care who they were, or why they were shooting at the ground. Because now I smelled something else, too.

When I reached Captain Dial, I lay down beside him with my chin on his chest. There was nothing else I could do. I didn’t nudge him with my nose or lick his face. I didn’t try to wake him up. I’m not stupid. That was one of the things Captain Dial liked best about me. He liked that I was smart.

I closed my eyes. I didn’t have an order for what to do next, so I would do nothing. I was tired, and there were no D Company soldiers left for me to help. I would stay there with my chin on Captain Dial.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep. And I dreamed. I dreamed about the day I found the live mine on the pier and about how proud Captain Dial was. I dreamed about running fast in training so I could complete my orders and get back to Captain Dial before the buzzer sounded. I dreamed about lying curled up on my cushion on the floor while Captain Dial and Melanie made soft noises above me.

Then I woke up and opened my eyes. Three of the people below were coming up the slope. They were solid shadows in the dusk. And their smell was sharper now. They smelled like men who used shampoo and soap and who wore clean clothes. They smelled like the men in the crowd the day I found the mine. They smelled like civilians from home.

And as they came toward me and Captain Dial, I heard something behind me. Something higher up the slope, moving down through the rocks. It wasn’t loud, so I knew the men coming up the slope couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t identify it by scent because the wind was blowing the wrong way, but I could hear that it was small and alone. So I didn’t think it would hurt anyone. Besides, none of the men coming up the slope was my commanding officer. I wasn’t required to alert them.

The three men approached within a few meters of me and Captain Dial, and now I saw that they were dressed in dark clothes that weren’t uniforms. But they carried pistols in holsters. One of them pointed a camera at me and Captain Dial. I couldn’t see the men’s thoughts, but they spoke in the same language as D Company, so I understood some of what they said. One of them said something was great, and the others agreed.

I didn’t know what they thought was great, but I knew there was nothing there that was.

One of them stepped closer and leaned down as if about to touch Captain Dial. So I raised my head and snarled at him, and he moved back. Then I put my head down again, but I stayed ready. I didn’t know who they were, but they weren’t part of D Company. They weren’t even soldiers. I wouldn’t let them touch Captain Dial.

The one with the camera kept aiming it at me and Captain Dial. But the other two put their hands on their pistols and conferred. And I understood enough to know they were talking about shooting me. So I did what Captain Dial had taught me to do. I planned how to attack them so they couldn’t get off a shot. If either of their pistols began to rise from its holster, I would execute the plan. And I would decide what to do about the one with the camera based on how he reacted.

But another thing that Captain Dial had taught me was that a battlefield situation can change quickly.

The thing coming down the slope sent some pebbles skittering through the brush. And the three men heard it. They backed away from me and Captain Dial, and the one with the camera let it drop to dangle on a cord around his neck. They all three began taking their pistols from their holsters. But now they were looking past me toward whatever had made the pebbles skitter.

I kept my eyes on the three men. But I sniffed the air, and even though the wind was still going the wrong way, I caught a faint scent that told me who was on the slope behind me. It was the girl I had taken to safety on Captain Dial’s order. She was still and quiet now, probably crouched behind a rock. But even so, she wasn’t safe anymore.

All three men were raising their pistols. They were farther away from me than when I had made my plan of attack. But they weren’t looking at me now. The light of day was almost gone. And I am black as night. I am silent as air.

The third one got off a shot as I hit his chest, but the bullet went into the sky. The other two were already on the ground, their throats torn out, their weapons in the dirt. The third one tried to fight me off once he was down, but that didn’t last long.

When he was still, I looked back up the slope, beyond Captain Dial, and saw the girl standing beside a clump of brush. She was almost invisible because the sun was gone now. But I saw her shape against the brush. And the wind had shifted so I could smell her better. She smelled scared.

I was angry that she had returned to the battlefield. I had done my duty and made her safe, and she had spoiled it. I didn’t understand why she had done that.

Then she came down the hill past Captain Dial, past me, and past the three men on the ground. She didn’t walk fast, but she walked steady and strong even though she was scared. She said something soft to me as she went by, and I saw a flash of her thoughts. Then I understood. She was going down to the gully, to her mother. She wanted to wrap the body and take it somewhere to bury it. She had returned by herself to do this, leaving her brothers in the care of the old man.

I looked past her and knew I couldn’t let her do as she planned. There were more people down there. They were like the three men I had just killed. The girl wouldn’t be safe among them. Already, I could see and hear several of them starting toward her. She couldn’t see them yet. But she would encounter them before she could reach the gully.

So I ran down to the girl and got in front of her. But she just walked around me. Then I took her hand in my mouth, but she just pulled it away and kept going. She wouldn’t stay in contact with me long enough to see my thoughts. She was determined to reach her mother.

I couldn’t knock her down or bite her to make her come with me. But I couldn’t let her keep going. I had to make her pay attention to me long enough so she would understand what we had to do. So I turned and ran fast across the hillside, away from both the girl and Captain Dial. I ran to the body of Lieutenant Morris, and I tore open one of his pockets. Some ammo clips fell out, but that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted what I had smelled when I’d pushed Lieutenant Morris down in the gully.

And I found it curled up in the corner of the pocket. It was the necklace from the dead girl at the checkpoint. There was still enough blood on it that I had been able to smell it. The necklace had been taken from Lieutenant Morris for the investigation, but he had stolen it back. Now I took it from him again.

I ran back to the girl with it, got in front of her, and pushed my nose against her hand so she would feel the necklace hanging from my mouth.

She stopped walking. Her palm was against my nose. Her fingers brushed the silver chain. The transmitter on her wrist hummed. And then, as someone shouted below us, I thought hard and showed her what had happened to the girl who had worn the necklace. So she saw that girl lying on the side of the road with her sisters. She saw me find the necklace in Lieutenant Morris’s pocket. She saw how angry Captain Dial had been at what Lieutenant Morris had done.

The shouting below us grew louder. I could hear six voices now, and weapons being readied. More of the armed-men-who-weren’t-soldiers were coming toward us.

But I didn’t turn away from the girl. I kept my nose in her palm because I had to be sure she understood. I had to be sure she understood that Captain Dial was my commanding officer, and that I hated to leave him there on the hillside again. But I would. And she would have to leave her mother there, too. We both had to follow Captain Dial’s last order. And if the men coming up the hillside reached us, we would fail. I wouldn’t be good. And she would be like the other girl. The one who had worn the necklace.

The girl was smart. I saw in her thoughts that her mother wouldn’t want her to die like that other girl. But when she understood what I was telling her, she began to cry. She hadn’t cried before this. But she cried now, taking the necklace from my mouth and clutching it in her fist. She wanted to fight the men coming up the hill. She thought they were responsible for her mother’s death. She thought they had made the drones attack.

I didn’t know why she thought that. But I understood why she would want to fight whoever had made the drones fire on D Company. I wanted to fight those people too. But even if those people were the men who were coming up the hill, we couldn’t fight them now. I had already killed three of them, but I had caught those three by surprise. There were more than three coming now, and they had their weapons ready to fire.

So we had to go back up over the hill. And while the girl stood there with the necklace clenched in her fist, I took her other hand in my mouth. And then I started up the hill, pulling her with me.

At first, she came with me without knowing what she was doing. She was still crying and thinking of what she wanted to do to the people who had sent the drones. So the men coming up the hill gained on us, and a shot was fired. I heard the bang and then heard the slug hiss through the air. It hit the dirt several meters ahead of us.

Then the girl’s thoughts came back to where we were and what we needed to do. So she began to run, and I was able to release her hand. We ran together back up the hill, through the rocks and brush, up toward the night sky.

We paused for a few seconds when we reached Captain Dial again. He lay still in the twilight. He made no sound. He had no thoughts. He didn’t even smell like Captain Dial anymore. So it was all right for the girl to take his sidearm and empty his pockets. And this time, it was easier to leave. This time, I knew I wouldn’t need to return.

In training, Captain Dial had told me that when a soldier was gone, he was gone forever. But he had also told Melanie that they would be together forever. So forever was always a hard word for me to understand. But whenever I didn’t understand something, it was because it was something only someone as smart as Captain Dial could understand. And in those cases, I would just have to believe whatever Captain Dial said. Because Captain Dial always spoke the truth.

So that was what I did as I left his body there on the hillside for the last time. I remembered what Captain Dial had said, and I was glad that even though he was gone, he and Melanie would still be together.

I wished I could be with them, too. But I didn’t know how to get to wherever they were.

The girl and I went up over the top of the hill, and soon I couldn’t smell or hear the men behind us anymore. Then the twilight was gone, and the girl held my harness so I could lead her through the darkness. She knew my thoughts most of the time now, so I promised her I would do a good job. And she promised me the same thing.

We had our orders. So we would follow them.

Forever.

I TOOK THE GIRL back to the cave where the old man and the boys were waiting, and we stayed there several weeks until I smelled men with weapons approaching. Then we left, and I led the way deeper into the hills, taking us as far from danger as I could. The weather grew colder, but my fur grew thicker, and we found winter clothing in an abandoned village. The old man also found sewing tools, and he made blankets from the skins of the rabbits I caught. The girl stretched some skins between two long pieces of wood, and that was where we kept our growing collection of supplies. The people and I took turns dragging it as we traveled.

We traveled this way for many days, until we came upon the stone hut near the stream.

It’s been a good place. We found more things that my people could use here. But the people who had stayed in the hut before us had been gone for a long time when we arrived. I couldn’t even smell them on the things they had left. So I believed my company would be safe here for the winter.

Food was easy to obtain. All I had to do was go up and down the stream until I found rabbits. Once I killed a small deer, and the girl said its skin should be my bed. So now I sleep on it even though I like the bare ground just as well. I have thick fur. But it makes my people happy to see me lie down on the deer’s skin, and that makes me glad.

In recent weeks the bushes and trees have grown leaves, and the grass that was dry and thin is now thick and juicy. The girl and the old man have been making plans to plant seeds they found in the abandoned village. We’ve all been looking forward to warmer days.

Then, last night, eighteen of Your soldiers came to kill us. You must have told them we were the enemy. So they didn’t know I was trained by Captain Dial. They didn’t know that even when I sleep, my ears and nose are awake.

I took the girl to their bodies this morning, and it made her sad. But she understood that I had to follow orders. She understands a lot. She and I often help each other figure out things that are puzzling.

I didn’t understand how Your soldiers could have found us, or why You would want them to, because we’ve traveled far from anything that should matter to You. Besides, we’re not Your enemies. And even if we were, we wouldn’t be important enough for You to bother with. Or so I thought.

Then the girl remembered the implant under the skin between my shoulders, and the transmitter that Captain Dial had given her. We had used these things to help us understand each other in our first weeks together, but then—just as Captain Dial and I had found—they had become unnecessary. So the girl had placed the transmitter in her duffel, and we hadn’t thought of it or of my implant since. But now the girl said that machines in the sky could probably hear signals from them at any time, and that the machines could then tell You where I was. So that was how Your soldiers found us.

The girl also says she knows why You want to attack us.

She found a radio receiver in the abandoned village, and now she listens to its voices for a few minutes each evening. I can’t understand the voices, but the girl has told me some of the things they’ve said. They’ve said that all Your soldiers were about to be sent home because the money for the war was almost gone. But then D Company was ambushed and destroyed by enemy guerrillas, and the bad publicity from what Lieutenant Morris had done at the checkpoint was obliterated by the heroism of his company’s sacrifice. So Your public support surged, and more money was provided so Your soldiers could avenge the ambush by destroying the enemy.

This is what the radio voices say. They don’t say anything about the drones. But if the drones hadn’t come, D Company would not only have beaten the guerrillas, but would have suffered almost no casualties. Captain Dial would have seen to it.

But the drones did come. They came from our own airfield. They came from You.

Then the men-who-weren’t-soldiers came too, and the girl thinks she knows why they fired shots at the ground. She thinks they killed any soldier or refugee who was still alive. And we believe those men were sent by You as well.

The girl says that our knowledge of this is why You want to attack us. We’re the only survivors of that battle. So as long as we still live, You fear that we may reveal the truth of what happened to D Company and the refugees. And the girl says that then all of Your public support and money will go away again.

I have tried to think of what Captain Dial might do if these things had been revealed to him. But he was much smarter than me. And I can’t see his thoughts anymore.

But I still know the final order he gave me: To keep my people safe.

So I’ve thought of things I can do to obey.

The first thing I thought of was to have the girl write this message. Again, she doesn’t know what she writes. Only that I require her to write it. And what I’m asking her to write now is a promise that You have nothing to fear from me if You leave us alone. If You allow me to keep my people safe, we will never tell the radio voices what Your drones and men-who-weren’t-soldiers did to D Company.

The second thing made the girl cry again. Before beginning this message, I told her to use her knife to cut between my shoulders and find the communication implant. She cried because she didn’t want to hurt me, and then she cried more because the device was smaller than we had imagined, and it was hard to find. She had to make the cut longer and deeper. But she finally found the tiny glass bean and gave it to the boys, who took turns hitting it and the transmitter with a hammer until both were dust. Then the old man cleaned my wound and sewed it shut. I growled once because the needle hurt, and he stepped back. But then I licked his hand, and he finished the job. Afterward, I was proud of all of them for following orders so well.

The third thing makes us unhappy. But it’s necessary. We must leave the stone hut. We must leave this good place with its water and rabbits. Your soldiers found us here, so You know where we are.

But since I no longer have the communication implant, You won’t know where we’ll go next.

Finally, there is a fourth thing I’ll do.

If the above measures fail, and if You send more soldiers or men-who-aren’t-soldiers to find us, I will kill them all. I’ll always know they’re coming, so they’ll never be able to attack us before I attack them first.

You may even send some of my fellow K-9s, because they could find us more quickly than people could. But Captain Dial said that the K-9s in my training class were the best war dogs there had ever been, and I was ranked first in that class. So there are no K-9s that I can’t find and defeat before they can find and defeat me.

And if You attack us with drones instead of people or dogs, we’re now equipped to fight them. Some of the soldiers I killed last night were carrying RPGs, and others carried guns with armor-piercing rounds. We have taken these weapons.

But if You bomb us from high in the sky so we can’t fight, there may be nothing I can do to stop You. Then You will have made me fail to carry out my orders.

In that event, I’ll do whatever I must to survive. And then I will find You. I don’t know Your name or Your rank, but I will find You anyway. I will hunt and kill every officer in every company and every battalion until I reach You. I will read their thoughts as they die and use that knowledge to hunt You. I will climb walls and dig tunnels. I will swim and run. I will stow away in trucks, ships, and aircraft that will bring me closer to You. I will find something You have touched so I know Your scent. And then I will find You in Your bed or at Your table or wherever You may be.

And I will bite Your throat so it tears out.

So I hope You heed this message. It will be left with one of Your dead soldiers, so I know it will reach their unit’s commanding officer. And then it will reach that officer’s commanding officer, and then that officer’s commanding officer, and so on until it reaches the officer who gave the orders that resulted in the current situation. Until it reaches You.

My company has its equipment and is ready to move out. The two boys are my specialists. The old man is my medic and quartermaster.

As for the girl—

She now wears the metal tag I received when I was promoted to sergeant. She found it in Captain Dial’s pocket as we left the battlefield, and today she put it on the chain of her necklace beside the shiny rock. Sergeant is the toughest enlisted job. But she can do it.

I myself am no longer a sergeant. I didn’t realize that until this morning. But after I showed the girl what I had done in the night, she touched my head. And I heard her thoughts. I heard what she called me.

She called me Captain.

Then she took the silver bars that she found with the sergeant’s tag, and she pinned them to my duty harness.

I am the ranking survivor of D Company, and my final order from Captain Dial was a commission. I know this because what he told me to do was what a good officer does.

A good officer takes care of his soldiers.

But if You attack us again, You will not be a good officer. You will not be taking care of Your soldiers. And if You make me fail in my duty to take care of mine, You will not be an officer of any kind for much longer.

Captain Dial told me what I am, and he always spoke the truth. So now I tell You:

I am black as night. I am silent as air.

My sergeant touches my head, and I tell her she’s good.

This message is complete.

Respectfully,

Chip, K-9

Captain and Commanding Officer

D Company

ELECTOR

Charles Stross

Sirhan walks, shrouded in isolation, through the crowds gathered for the festival. The only people who see him are the chattering ghosts of dead politicians and writers, deported from the inner system by order of the Vile Offspring. The great terraforming project is nearly complete, the festival planet dressed for a jubilee that will last almost twenty of its years—four pre-singularity lifetimes—before the Demolition. The green and pleasant plain stretches toward a horizon a thousand kilometers away, beneath a lemon-yellow sky. The air smells faintly of ammonia and the big spaces are full of small ideas: for this is the last human planet in the solar system.

“Excuse me, are you real?” someone asks him in American-accented English.

It takes a moment or two for Sirhan to disengage from his introspection and realize that he’s being spoken to. “What?” he asks, slightly puzzled. Wiry and pale, Sirhan wears the robes of a Berber goat-herd on his body and the numinous halo of a utility fog-bank above his head: in his abstraction, he vaguely resembles a saintly shepherd in a post-singularity nativity play. “I say, what?” Outrage simmers at the back of his mind—is nowhere private?—but, as he turns, he sees that one of the ghost pods has split lengthwise across its white mushroom-like crown, spilling a trickle of left-over construction fluid and a completely hairless, slightly bemused-looking Anglo male who wears an expression of profound surprise.

“I can’t find my implants,” the Anglo male says, shaking his head. “But I’m really here, aren’t I? Incarnate?” He glances round at the other pods. “This isn’t a sim.”

Sirhan sighs—another exile—and sends forth a daemon to interrogate the ghost pod’s abstract interface. It doesn’t tell him much—unlike most of the resurrectees, this one seems to be undocumented. “You’ve been dead. Now you’re alive. I suppose that means you’re now almost as real as I am. What else do you need to know?”

“When is—” The newcomer stops. “Can you direct me to the processing center?” he asks carefully. “I’m disoriented.”

Sirhan is surprised—most immigrants take a lot longer to figure that out. “Did you die recently?” he asks.

“I’m not sure I died at all.” The newcomer rubs his bald head, looking puzzled. “Hey, no jacks!” He shrugs, exasperated. “Look, the processing center . . .?”

“Over there.” Sirhan gestures at the monumental mass of the Boston Museum of Science (shipped all the way from Earth a couple of decades ago to save it from the demolition of the inner system). “My mother runs it.” He smiles thinly.

“Your mother—” the newly resurrected immigrant stares at him intensely, then blinks. “Holy shit.” He takes a step toward Sirhan. “Wow, you’re—”

Sirhan recoils and snaps his fingers. The thin trail of vaporous cloud that has been following him all this time, shielding his shaven pate from the diffuse red glow of the swarming shells of orbital nanocomputers that have replaced the inner planets, extrudes a staff of hazy blue mist that stretches down from the air and slams together in his hand like a quarterstaff spun from bubbles. “Are you threatening me, sir?” he asks, deceptively mildly.

“I—” the newcomer stops dead. Then he throws back his head and laughs. “You must be Sirhan. You take after your grandmother, kid.”

“Kid?” Sirhan bristles. “Who do you think—” A horrible thought occurs to him. “Oh. Oh dear.” A wash of adrenalin drenches him in warm sweat.

“I do believe we’ve met, in a manner of speaking. . . .” Oh boy, this is going to upset so many applecarts, he realizes, spinning off a ghost to think about the matter. If grandfather is back, the implications are enormous.

The naked newcomer nods, grinning at some private joke. “And now I’m human again.” He runs his hands down his ribs, pauses, and glances at Sirhan owlishly. “Um. I didn’t mean to frighten you. But I don’t suppose you could find your aged grandfather something to wear?”

Sirhan sighs and points his staff straight up at the sky. The rings are edge-on, for the lilypad continent floats above an ocean of cold gas along Saturn’s equator, and they glitter like a ruby laser beam slashed across the sky. “Let there be aerogel.”

A cloud of whispy soap-bubble congeals in a cone shape above the newly resurrected ancient and drops over him, forming a kaftan. “Thanks,” he says. He looks round, twisting his neck, then winces. “Damn, that hurt. Ouch. I need to get myself a set of implants.”

“They can sort you out in the processing center. It’s in the basement in the west wing. They’ll give you something more permanent to wear, too.” Sirhan peers at him. “Your face—” he pages through rarely used memories. Yes, it’s Manfred Macx, as he looked in the early years of the last century. As he looked around the time mother-not was born. There’s something positively indecent about meeting your own grandfather in the full flush of youth. “Are you sure you haven’t been messing with your phenotype?” he asks suspiciously.

“No, this is what I used to look like. I think. Back in the naked ape again, after all these years as an emergent function of a flock of passenger pigeons.” His grandfather smirks. “What’s your mother going to say?”

“I really don’t know—” Sirhan shakes his head. “Come on, let’s get you to immigrant processing. You’re sure you’re not just a historical simulation?”

The place is already heaving with the re-simulated. Just why the Vile Offspring seem to feel it’s necessary to apply valuable exaquops to the job of deriving accurate simulations of dead humans—outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the pre-singularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp—much less beaming them at the refugee camps on Saturn—is beyond Sirhan’s ken: but he wishes they’d stop.

“Just a couple of days ago, I crapped on your lawn. Hope you don’t mind.” Manfred cocks his head to one side and stares at Sirhan with beady eyes. “Actually, I’m here because of the upcoming election. It’s got the potential to turn into a major crisis point, and I figured Amber would need me around.”

“Well you’d better come on in, then,” Sirhan says resignedly as he climbs the steps, enters the foyer, and leads his turbulent grandfather into the foggy haze of utility nanomachines that fill the building.

He can’t wait to see what his mother will do when she meets her father in the flesh, after all this time.

Welcome to Saturn, your new home world. This FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) memeplex is designed to orient you and explain the following:

• How you got here

• Where “here” is

• Things you should avoid doing

• Things you might want to do as soon as possible

• Where to go for more information

If you are remembering this presentation, you are probably re-simulated. This is not the same as being resurrected. You may remember dying. Do not worry: like all your other memories, it is a fabrication. In fact, this is the first time you have ever been alive. (Exception: if you died after the singularity you may be a genuine resurrectee. In which case, why are you reading this FAQ?)

How you got here: the center of the solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth’s Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter—have been dismantled, or are being dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: monotheistic clergy and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative memeplex “in the beginning.”] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late twentieth century: software] and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts: human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in their human antecedents—for whatever reason is not known. (Possibilities include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through live-action roleplaying, revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all the re-simulated persons to date exhibit certain common characteristics: they are all based on well-documented historical persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors], and they are ignorant of or predate the singularity [see: Turing Oracle, Vinge Catastrophe].

It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by backward-chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your computational state vector. This technique is extremely intensive [see: expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic] but marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations.

After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including the body you now occupy.

In summary: you are a reconstruction of someone who lived and died a long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent’s possessions. Other than that, you are a free individual.

Note that fictional re-simulation is strictly forbidden. If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the City immediately. [ See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.] Failure to comply is a felony.

Where are you? You are on Saturn. Saturn is a gas giant planet 120,500 kilometers in diameter, located 1.5 billion kilometers from Earth’s sun. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1580, see alternative memeplex “the flat earth—not.”] Saturn has been partially terraformed by posthuman emigrants from Earth and Jupiter orbit: the ground beneath your feet is, in reality, the floor of a hydrogen balloon the size of a continent, floating in Saturn’s upper atmosphere. [NB: Europeans who remember living prior to 1790, internalize the supplementary memeplex: “the Brothers Mongolfier.”] The balloon is very safe, but mining activities and the use of ballistic weapons are strongly deprecated because the air outside is unbreathable and extremely cold.

The society you have been instantiated in is extremely wealthy within the scope of Economics 1.0, the value-transfer system developed by human beings during and after your own time. Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics—food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks—are free. An implicit social contract dictates that in return for access to these facilities, you obey certain laws.

If you wish to opt out of this social contract, be advised that other worlds may run Economics 2.0 or subsequent releases. These value-transfer systems are more efficient—hence wealthier—than Economics 1.0, but true participation in Economics 2.0 is not possible without dehumanizing cognitive surgery. Thus, in absolute terms, although this society is richer than any you have ever heard of, it is also a poverty-stricken backwater compared to its neighbors.

Things you should avoid doing: Many activities that have been classified as crimes in other societies are legal here. These include but are not limited to: acts of worship, art, sex, violence, communication, or commerce between consenting competent sapients of any species, except where such acts transgress the list of prohibitions below. [See additional memeplex: competence defined.]

Some activities are prohibited here, but may have been legal in your previous experience. These include: willful deprivation of ability to consent [see: slavery], interference in the absence of consent [see: minors, legal status of], formation of limited-liability companies [see: singularity], and invasion of defended privacy [see: The Slug, Cognitive Pyramid Schemes, Brain Hacking, Thompson Trust Exploit].

Some activities unfamiliar to you are highly illegal and should be scrupulously avoided. These include: possession of nuclear weapons, possession of unlimited autonomous replicators [see: gray goo], coercive assimilationism [see: borganism, aggressive], coercive halting of Turing-equivalent personalities [see: Basilisks], and applied theological engineering [see: God Bothering].

Some activities superficially familiar to you are merely stupid and should be avoided for your safety, although they are not illegal as such. These include: giving your bank account details to the son of the Nigerian Minister of Finance, buying title to bridges, skyscrapers, spacecraft, planets, or other real assets, murder, selling your identity, and entering into financial contracts with entities running Economics 2.0 or higher.

Things you should do as soon as possible: Many material artifacts you may consider essential to life are freely available—just ask the City, and it will grow you clothes, a house, food, or other basic essentials. Note, however, that the library of public domain structure templates is of necessity restrictive, and does not contain items that are highly fashionable or that remain in copyright. Nor will the City provide you with replicators, weapons, sexual favors, slaves, or zombies.

You are advised to register as a citizen as soon as possible. If the individual you are a resimulation of can be confirmed dead, you may adopt their name but not—in law—any lien or claim on their property, contracts, or descendants. You register as a citizen by asking the City to register you; the process is painless and typically complete within four hours. Unless you are registered, your legal status as a sapient organism may be challenged. The ability to request citizenship rights is one of the legal tests for sapience, and failure to comply may place you in legal jeopardy. You can renounce your citizenship whenever you wish: this may be desirable if you emigrate to another polity.

While many things are free, it is highly likely that you posses no employable skills, and therefore no way of earning money with which to purchase unfree items. The pace of change in the past century has rendered almost all skills you may have learned obsolete [see: singularity]. However, due to the rapid pace of change, many cooperatives, trusts, and guilds offer on-the-job training or educational loans.

Your ability to learn depends on your ability to take information in the format in which it is offered. Implants are frequently used to provide a direct link between your brain and the intelligent machines that surround it. A basic core implant set is available on request from the City. [See: implant security, firewall, wetware.]

Your health is probably good if you have just been reinstantiated, and is likely to remain good for some time. Most diseases are curable, and, in event of an incurable ailment or injury a new body may be provided—for a fee. (In event of your murder, you will be furnished with a new body at the expense of your killer.) If you have any pre-existing medical conditions or handicaps, consult the City.

The City is an agoric-annealing participatory democracy with a limited-liability constitution. Its current executive agency is a weakly godlike intelligence that chooses to associate with human-equivalent intelligences: this agency is colloquially known as “Hello Kitty,” “Beautiful Cat,” or “Aineko,” and may manifest itself in a variety of physical avatars if corporeal interaction is desired. (Prior to the arrival of “Hello Kitty,” the City used a variety of human-designed expert systems that provided sub-optimal performance.)

The City’s mission statement is to provide a mediatory environment for human-equivalent intelligences and to preserve same in the face of external aggression. Citizens are encouraged to participate in the ongoing political processes of determining such responses. Citizens also have a duty to serve on a jury if called (including senatorial service), and to defend the City.

Where to go for further information: Until you have registered as a citizen and obtained basic implants, all further questions should be directed to the City. Once you have learned to use your implants, you will not need to ask this question.

There’s a market specializing in clothing and fashion accessories about fifty kilometers away from the transplanted museum where Sirhan’s mother lives, at a transportation nexus between three lilypad habitats where tube trains intersect in a huge maglev cloverleaf. The market is crowded with strange and spectacular visuals, algorithms unfolding in faster-than-real time before the candy-striped awnings of tents. Domed yurts belch aromatic smoke from crude fireplaces—what is it about hairless primates and their tendency toward pyromania?—around the feet of diamond-walled groundscrapers that pace carefully across the smart roads of the City. The crowds are variegated and wildly mixed, immigrants from every continent shopping and haggling, and, in a few cases, getting out of their skull on strange substances on the pavements in front of giant snail-shelled shibeens and squat bunkers made of thin layers of concrete sprayed over soap-bubble aerogel. There are no automobiles here, but a bewildering range of personal transport gadgets, from gyro-stabilized pogo sticks and segways to kettenkrads and spiderpalanquins, jostle for space with pedestrians and animals.

Two women stop outside what, in a previous century, might have been the store window of a fashion boutique: the younger one (blonde, with her hair bound up in elaborate comrows, wearing black leggings and a long black leather jacket over a camouflage Tee) points to an elaborately retro dress. “Wouldn’t my bum look big in that?” she asks, doubtfully.

“Ma cherie, you have but to try it—” The other woman (tall, wearing a pin-striped man’s business suit from a previous century) flicks a thought at the window and the mannequin morphs, sprouting the younger woman’s head, aping her posture and expression.

“I missed out on the authentic retail experience, you know? It still feels weird to be back somewhere with shops. ’S what comes of living off libraries of public domain designs for too long.” Amber twists her hips, experimenting. “You get out of the habit of foraging. I don’t know about this retro thing at all. The Victorian vote isn’t critical, is it . . .?” She trails off.

“You are a twenty-first century platform selling to electors re-simulated and incarnated from the Gilded Age. And yes, a bustle your derriere does enhance. But—”Annette looks thoughtful.

“Hmm.” Amber frowns, and the shop window dummy turns and waggles its hips at her, sending tiers of skirts swishing across the floor. Her frown deepens. “If we’re really going to go through with this election shit, it’s not just the resimulant voters I need to convince, but the contemporaries, and that’s a matter of substance, not image. They’ve lived through too much media warfare. They’re immune to any semiotic payload short of an active cognitive attack. If I send out partials to canvass them that look as if I’m trying to push buttons—”

“—They will listen to your message and nothing you wear or say will sway them. Don’t worry about them, ma cherie. The naive re-simulated are another matter, and perhaps might be swayed. This your first venture into democracy is, in how many years? Your privacy, she is an illusion now. The question is, what image will you project? People will listen to you only once you gain their attention. Also, the swing voters you must reach, they are future-shocked, timid. Your platform is radical, should you not project a comfortably conservative image?”

Amber pulls a face, an expression of mild distaste for the whole populist program. “Yes, I suppose I must, if necessary. But on second thoughts that—” Amber snaps her fingers and the mannequin turns around once more before morphing back into neutrality, aureolae perfect puckered disks above the top of its bodice—“is just too much.”

She doesn’t need to merge in the opinions of several different fractional personalities, fashion critics and psephologists both, to figure out that adopting Victorian/Cretan fusion fashion—a breast-and-ass fetishist’s fantasy—isn’t the way to sell herself as a serious politician to the nineteenth-century post-singularity fringe. “I’m not running for election as the mother of the nation, I’m running because I figure we’ve got about a billion seconds, at most, to get out of this rat-trap of a gravity well before the Vile Offspring get seriously medieval on our CPU cycles, and if we don’t convince everyone to come with us, they’re doomed. Let’s look for something more practical that we can overload with the right signifiers.”

“Like your coronation robe?”

Amber winces. “Touché.” The Ring Imperium is dead, along with whatever was left over from its early orbital legal framework, and Amber is lucky to be alive as a private citizen in this cold new age at the edge of the halo. “But that was just scenery-setting. I didn’t fully understand what I was doing, back then.”

“Welcome to maturity and experience.” Annette smiles distantly at some faint member: “You don’t feel older, you just know what you’re doing this time. I wonder, sometimes, what Manny would make of it if he were here.”

“That bird-brain!” Amber says dismissively, stung by the idea that her father might have something to contribute. She follows Annette past a gaggle of mendicant street evangelists preaching some new religion and in through the door of a real department store, one with actual human sales staff and fitting rooms to cut the clothing to shape. “If I’m sending out fractional me’s tailored for different demographics, isn’t it a bit self-defeating to go for a single image? I mean, we could drill down and tailor a partial for each individual elector—”

“Per-haps.” The door re-forms behind them. “But you need a core identity.” Annette looks around, hunting for eye contact with the sales consultant. “To start with a core design, a style, then to work outward, tailoring you for your audience. And besides, there is tonight’s—ah, bonjour!”

“Hello. How can we help you?” The two female and one male shop assistants who appear from around the displays—cycling through a history of the couture industry, catwalk models mixing and matching centuries of fashion—are clearly chips off a common primary personality, instances united by their enhanced sartorial obsession. If they’re not actually a fashion borganism they’re not far from it, dressed head-to-foot in the highest quality Chanel and Armani replicas, making a classical twentieth-century statement. This isn’t simply a shop, it’s a temple to a very peculiar art form, its staff trained as guardians of the esoteric secrets of good taste.

“Mais oui. We are looking for a wardrobe for my niece here.” Annette reaches through the manifold of fashion ideas mapped within the shop’s location cache and flips a requirement spec one of her ghosts has just completed at the lead assistant. “She is into politics going, and the question of her image is important.”

“We would be delighted to help you,” purrs the proprietor, taking a delicate step forward: “perhaps you could tell us what you’ve got in mind?”

“Oh. Well.” Amber takes a deep breath, glances sidelong at Annette: Annette stares back, unblinking. It’s your head, she sends. “I’m involved in the accelerationista administrative program. Are you familiar with it?” The head coutureborg frowns slightly, twin furrows rippling her brow between perfectly symmetrical eyebrows, plucked to match her classic New Look suit. “I have heard reference to it, but a lady of fashion like myself does not concern herself with politics,” she says, a touch self-deprecatingly. “Especially the politics of her clients. Your, ah, aunt said it was a question of image?”

“Yes.” Amber shrugs, momentarily self-conscious about her casual rags. “She’s my election agent. My problem, as she says, is there’s a certain voter demographic that mistakes image for substance and is afraid of the unknown, and I need to acquire a wardrobe that triggers associations of probity, of respect and deliberation. One suitable for a representative with a radical political agenda but a strong track record. I’m afraid I’m in a hurry to start with—I’ve got a big fund-raising party tonight. I know it’s short notice, but I need something off the shelf for it.”

“What exactly is it you’re hoping to achieve?” asks the male couturier, his voice hoarse and his r’s rolling with some half-shed Mediterranean accent. He sounds fascinated. “If you think it might influence your choice of wardrobe . . .?”

“I’m running for the assembly,” Amber says bluntly. “On a platform calling for a state of emergency and an immediate total effort to assemble a starship. This solar system isn’t going to be habitable for much longer, and we need to emigrate. All of us, you included, before the Vile Offspring decide to reprocess us into computronium. I’m going to be doorstepping the entire electorate in parallel, and the experience needs to be personalized.” She manages to smile. “That means, I think, perhaps eight outfits and four different independent variables for each, accessories, and two or three hats—enough that each is seen by no more than a few thousand voters. Both physical fabric and virtual. In addition, I’ll want to see your range of historical formalwear, but that’s of secondary interest for now.” She grins. “Do you have any facilities for response-testing the combinations against different personality types from different periods? If we could run up some models, that would be useful.”

“I think we can do better than that.” The manager nods approvingly, perhaps contemplating her gold-backed deposit account. “Hansel, please divert any further visitors until we have dealt with madam . . .?”

“Macx. Amber Macx.”

“—Macx’s requirements.” The manager shows no sign of familiarity with the name. Amber winces slightly; it’s a sign of how hugely fractured the children of Saturn have become, and of how vast the population of the halo, that only a generation has passed and already barely anyone remembers the Queen of the Ring Imperium. “If you’d come this way, please, we can begin to research an eigenstyle combination that matches your requirements—”

Welcome to decade the eighth, singularity plus one gigasecond (or maybe more—nobody’s quite sure when, or indeed if a singularity has been created). The human population of the solar system is either six billion, or sixty billion, depending on whether you class forked state vectors of posthumans and the simulations of dead phenotypes running in the Vile Offspring’s Schrodinger boxes as people. Most of the physically incarnate still live on Earth, but the lilypads floating beneath continentsized hot hydrogen balloons in Saturn’s upper atmosphere already house a few million, and the writing is on the wall for the rocky inner planets. All the remaining human-equivalent intelligences with half a clue to rub together are trying to emigrate before the Vile Offspring decide to recycle Earth to fill in a gap in the concentric shells of nanocomputers they’re running on. It’s a nested Matrioshka doll of Dyson spheres that darkens the skies of Earth and has caused a massive crash in the planet’s photosynthetic biomass, as plants starve for short-wavelength fight.

Since decade the seventh, the computational density of the solar system has soared. Within the asteroid belt, more than half the available planetary mass has been turned into nanoprocessorstied together by quantum-entanglment, into a web so dense that each gram of matter can simulate all the possible life-experiences of an individual human being in a scant handful of minutes. Economics 2.0 is itself obsolescent, forced to mutate in a furious survivalist arms race by the arrival of the Slug, an extraterrestrial parasite that preys on new posthuman intelligences by subverting their value systems. Only the name remains as a vague shorthand for merely human-equivalent intelligences to use when describing interactions they don’t understand.

The latest generation of posthuman entities is less overtly hostile to humans, but much more alien than the generations of the forties and sixties. Among their less-comprehensible activities, the Vile Offspring are engaged in exploring the phase space of all possible human experiences from the inside out. Perhaps they caught a dose of the Tiplerite heresy along the way, for now a steady stream of resimulant uploads is pouring through the downsystem relays in Titan orbit. The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused, except that they’re not really resurrectees—they’re simulations based off their originals’ recorded histories, blocky and missing chunks of their memories, as bewildered as duckings as they’re herded into the wood-chipper of the future.

Sirhan al-Khurasani despises them with the abstract contempt of an antiquarian for a cunning but ultimately transparent forgery. But Sirhan is young, and he’s gfot more contempt than he knows what to do with. It’s a handy outlet for his frustration. He has a lot to be frustrated at, starting with his intermittently dysfunctional family, the elderly stars around whom his planet whizzes in chaotic trajectories of enthusiasm and distaste.

Sirhan fancies himself a philosopher-historian of the singular age, a chronicler of the incomprehensible, which would be a fine thing to be except that his greatest insights are all derived from the family’s antique robot cat. He alternately fawns over and rages against his mother—Amber Macx, one-time queen of the Ring Imperium and now a leading fight in the refugee community—and honors (when not attempting to evade the will of) his father—Sadeq al Khurasani, sometime Islamic scholar, theist heretic, and lately a rising philosophical patriarch within the Conservationist faction. He’s secretly in awe (not to mention slightly resentful of) of his famous grandfather, Manfred Macx, who usually manifests in the shape of a flock of passenger pigeons, a rain of snails, or something equally unconventional. In fact, Manfred’s abrupt reincarnation in the flesh has quite disconcerted Sirhan. And he sometimes listens to his step-grandmother Annette, who has reincarnated in more or less her original twenty-twenties body after spending some years as a great ape, and who seems to view him as some sort of personal project.

Only right now, Annette isn’t being very helpful, his mother is campaigning on an electoral platform calling for a vote to blow up the world, his grandfather is trying to convince him to entrust everything he holds dear to a rogue lobster, and the cat isn’t talking.

And you thought you had problems?

They’ve transplanted imperial Brussels to Saturn in its entirety, mapped tens of megatons of buildings right down to nanoscale and beamed them into the outer darkness to be reinstantiated down-well on the lilypad colonies that dot the stratosphere of the gas giant. (Eventually, the entire surface of the Earth will follow—after which the Vile Offspring will core the planet like an apple, and dismantle it into a cloud of newly formed quantum nanocomputers to add to their burgeoning Matrioshka brain.) Due to a resource contention problem in the Festival committee’s planning algorithm—or maybe it’s simply an elaborate joke—Brussels now begins just on the other side of a diamond bubble-wall from the Boston Museum of Science, less than a kilometer away as the passenger pigeon flies. Which is why, when it’s time to celebrate a birthday or nameday—meaningless though those concepts are, out on Saturn’s synthetic surface—Amber tends to drag people over to the bright lights in the big city.

This time, she’s throwing a rather special party. At Annette’s canny prompting, she’s borrowed the Atomium and invited a horde of guests to a big celebration. It’s not a family bash—although Annette’s promised her a surprise—so much as a business meeting, testing the water as a preliminary to declaring her candidacy. It’s a media event, an attempt to engineer Amber’s re-entry into the mainstream politics of the human system.

Sirhan doesn’t really want to be here. He’s got far more important things to do, like cataloging Aineko’s memories of the voyage of the Field Circus. He’s also collating a series of interviews with re-simulated logical positivists from Oxford, England (the ones who haven’t retreated into gibbering near-catatonia upon realizing that their state vectors are all members of the set of all sets that do not contain themselves), when he isn’t attempting to establish a sound rational case for his belief that extraterrestrial intelligence is an oxymoron and that the vast network of quantum-entangled Routers that orbit the brown dwarfs of the Milky Way galaxy is just an accident, One of evolution’s little pranks.

But Tante Annette twisted his arm, and promised he was in on the surprise if he came to the party. And despite everything, he wouldn’t miss being a fly on the wall during the coming meeting between Manfred and Amber for all the tea in China.

Sirhan walks up to the gleaming stainless steel dome that contains the entrance to the Atomium, and waits for the lift. He’s in line behind a gaggle of young-looking women, skinny and soigne in cocktail gowns and tiaras lifted from 1920’s silent movies. (Annette declared an Age of Elegance theme for the party, knowing full well that it would force Amber to focus on her public appearance.) Sirhan’s attention is, however, elsewhere. The various fragments of his mind are conducting three simultaneous interviews with philosophers (“whereof that we cannot speak we cannot know” in spades), controlling two bots that are overhauling the museum plumbing and air-recycling system, and he’s busy discussing observations of the alien artifact orbiting the brown dwarf Hyundai +4904/-56 with Aineko. What’s left of him exhibits about as much social presence as a pickled cabbage.

The elevator arrives and accepts a load of passengers. Sirhan is crowded into one comer by a bubble of high-society laughter and an aromatic puff of smoke from an improbable ivory cigarette holder as the elevator surges, racing up the sixty-meter shaft toward the observation deck at the top of the Atomium. It’s a ten meter diameter metal globe, spiral staircases and escalators connecting it to the seven spheres at the comers of an octahedron that make up the former centerpiece of the 1950 World’s Fair. Unlike most of the rest of Brussels, it’s the original bits and atoms, bent alloy structures from before the space age shipped out to Saturn at enormous expense. The lift arrives with a slight jerk. “Excuse me,” squeaks one of the good-time girls as she lurches backward, elbowing Sirhan.

He blinks, barely noticing her black bob of hair, chromatophore-tinted shadows artfully tuned around her eyes. “Nothing to excuse.” In the background, Aineko is droning on sarcastically about the lack of interest the crew of the Field Circus exhibited in the cat’s effort to decompile their hitch-hiker, the Slug (an alien entity, or financial instrument, or parasitic pyramid scheme, or something) who had returned to the solar system with them, in return for helping them break free from the feral economic fragments that had captured them in the demilitarized zone on the far side of the Router. It’s distracting as hell, but Sirhan feels a desperate urge to understand what happened out there. It’s the key to understanding his not-mother’s obsessions and weaknesses—which, he senses, will be important in the times to come.

He evades the gaggle of overdressed good-time girls and steps out onto the lower of the two stainless steel decks that bisect the sphere. Accepting a fruit cocktail from a discreetly humanoform waitron, he strolls toward a row of triangular windows that gaze out across the arena toward the American Pavilion and the World Village. The metal walls are braced with turquoise-painted girders, and the perspex transparencies are fogged with age. He can barely see the one-tenth scale model of an atomic powered ocean liner leaving the pier below, or the eight-engined giant seaplane beside it. “They never once asked me if the Slug had attempted to map itself into the human-compatible spaces aboard the ship,” Aineko bitches at him. “I wasn’t expecting them to, but really! Your mothers too trusting, boy.”

“I suppose you took precautions?” Sirhan’s ghost murmurs to the cat. That sets the irascible metafeline off again on a long discursive tail-washing rant about the unreliability of Economics 2.0-compliant financial instruments. Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-indirection layer of conventional money, and the multiple-indirection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on the parameterized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all such transactions intrinsically untrustworthy.

Which is why you’re stuck here with us apes, Sirhan-prime cynically notes as he spawns an Eliza ghost to carry on nodding its head politely at the cat while he experiences the party.

It’s uncomfortably warm in the Atomium sphere—not surprising, there must be thirty people milling around up here, not counting the wait-rons—and several local multicast channels are playing a variety of styles of music to synchronize the mood swings of the revelers to hardcore techno, waltz, raga. . . .

“Having a good time, are we?” Sirhan breaks away from integrating one of his timid philosophers and realizes that his glass is empty and his mother is grinning alarmingly at him over the rim of a cocktail glass containing something that glows in the dark. She’s wearing spike-heeled boots and a black velvet cat suit that hugs her contours like a second skin, and she’s already getting drunk. In wall-clock years, she is younger than Sirhan; it’s like having a bizarrely knowing younger sister mysteriously injected into his life to replace the eigenmother who stayed home and died with the Ring Imperium decades ago. “Look at you, hiding in a comer at my party! Hey, your glass is empty. Want to try this caipirinha? There’s someone you’ve got to meet over here—”

It’s at moments like this that Sirhan really wonders what in Jupiter’s orbit his father ever saw in this woman. (But then again, in the worldline this instance of her has returned from, he didn’t. So what does that signify?) “As long as there’s no fermented grape juice in it,” he says resignedly, allowing himself to be led past a gaggle of conversations and a mournfiil-looking gorilla slurping a long drink through a straw. “More of your accelerationista allies?”

“Maybe not.” It’s the girl-gang he avoided noticing in the lift, their eyes sparkling, really getting into this early twen-cen drag party thing, waving their cigarette holders and cocktail glasses around with wild abandon. “Rita, I’d like you to meet Sirhan, my other fork’s son. Sirhan, this is Rita. She’s a historian too. Why don’t you—”

—Dark eyes, emphasized not by powder or paint but by chromatophores inside her skin cells: black hair, chain of enormous pearls, slim black dress sweeping the floor, a look of mild embarrassment on her heart-shaped face: she could be a dark-haired Audrey Hepburn in any other century—“Didn’t I just meet you in the elevator?” The embarrassment shifts to her cheeks, visible now.

Sirhan flushes, unsure how to reply. Just then, an interloper arrives on the scene, pushing in between them. “Are you the curator who reorganized the Precambrian gallery along teleology lines? I’ve got some things to say about that!” The interloper is tall, assertive, and blonde. Sirhan hates her from the first sight of her wagging finger.

“Oh shut up, Marissa, this is a party, you’ve been being a pain all evening.” To his surprise, Rita-the-historian rounds on the interloper angrily.

“It’s not a problem,” he manages to say. In the back of his mind, something makes the Rogerian puppet-him that’s listening to the cat sit up and dump-merge a whole lump of fresh memories into his mind—something important, something about the Vile Offspring sending a starship to bring something back from the Router—but the people around him are soaking up so much attention that he has to file it for later.

“Yes it is a problem,” Rita declares. She points at the interloper, who is saying something about the invalidity of teleological interpretations, trying to justify herself, and says, “Plonk. Phew. Where were we?”

Sirhan blinks. Suddenly everyone but him seems to be ignoring that annoying Marissa person. “What just happened?” he asks cautiously.

“I killfiled her. Don’t tell me, you aren’t running Superplonk yet, are you?” Rita flicks a location-cached idea at him and he takes it cautiously, spawning a couple of specialized Turing oracles to check it for halting states. It seems to be some kind of optic-lobe hack that accesses a collaborative database of eigenfaces, with some sort of side-interface to Broca’s region. “Share and enjoy, confrontation-free parties.”

“I’ve never seen—” Sirhan trails off as he loads the module distractedly. (The cat is rambling on about god modules and metastatic entanglement and the difficulty of arranging to have personalities custom-grown to order somewhere in the back of his head, while his fractional-self nods wisely whenever it pauses.) Something like an inner eyelid descends. He looks round: there’s a vague blob at one side of the room, making an annoying buzzing sound. His mother seems to be having an animated conversation with it. “That’s rather interesting.”

“Yes, it helps no end at this sort of event.” Rita startles him by taking his left arm in hand—her cigarette holder shrivels and condenses until it’s no more than a slight thickening around the wrist of her opera glove—and steers him toward a waitron. “I’m sorry about your foot, earlier, I was a bit overloaded. Is Amber Macx really your mother?”

“Not exactly, she’s my eigenmother,” he mumbles. “The reincarnated download of the version who went out to Hyundai +4904/-56 aboard the Field Circus. She married a French-Algerian confidence-trick analyst instead of my father, but I think they divorced a couple of years ago. My real mother married an imam, but they died in the aftermath of Economics 2.0.” She seems to be steering him in the direction of the window bay Amber dragged him away from earlier. “Why do you ask?”

“Because you’re not very good at making small talk,” Rita says quietly, “and you don’t seem very good in crowds. Is that right? Was it you who performed that amazing dissection of Wittgenstein’s cognitive map? The one with the pre-verbal Godel string in it?”

“It was—” he clears his throat. “You thought it was amazing?” Suddenly, on impulse, he detaches a ghost to identify this Rita person and find out who she is, what she wants. It’s not normally worth the effort to get to know someone more closely than casual small talk, but she seems to have been digging into his background and he wants to know why. Along with the him that’s chatting to Aineko that makes about three instances pulling in near-realtime resources. He’ll be running up an existential debt soon if he keeps forking ghosts like this.

“I thought so,” she says. There’s a bench in front of the wall and somehow he finds himself sitting on it next to her. There’s no danger, we’re not in private or anything, he tells himself stiffly. She’s smiling at him, face tilted slightly to one side and lips parted, and for a moment a dizzy sense of possibility washes over him: what if she’s about to throw all propriety aside? How undignified! Sirhan believes in self-restraint and dignity. “I was really interested in this—” She passes him another dynamically loadable blob, encompassing a detailed critique of his analysis of Wittgenstein’s matriophobia in the context of gendered language constructs and nineteenth-century Viennese society, along with a hypothesis that leaves Sirhan gasping with mild indignation at the very idea that he of all people might share Wittgenstein’s skewed outlook—“what do you think?” she asks, grinning impishly at him.

“Nnngk.” Sirhan tries to unswallow his tongue. Rita crosses her legs, her gown hissing. “I, ah, that is to say—” At which moment his partials re-integrate, dumping a slew of positively pornographic images into his memories. It’s a trap! they shriek, her breasts and hips and pubes—cleanshaven, he can’t help noticing—thrusting at him in hotly passionate abandon, mother’s trying to make you loose like her! and he remembers what it would be like to wake up in bed next to this woman who he barely knows after being married to her for a year, because one of his cognitive ghosts has just spent several seconds of network time (or several subjective months) getting hot and sweaty with a ghost of her own, and she does have interesting research ideas, even if she’s a pushy over-westernized woman who thinks she can run his life for him—“what is this?” he splutters, his ears growing hot and his garments constricting.

“Just speculating about possibilities. We could get a lot done together.” She snakes an arm round his shoulders and pulls him toward her, gently. “Don’t you want to find out if we could work out?”

“But, but—” Sirhan is steaming. Is she offering casual sex? he wonders, profoundly embarrassed by his own inability to read her signals. “What do you want?” he asks.

“You do know that you can do more with superplonk than just killfile annoying idiots?” she whispers in his ear. “We can be invisible right now, if you like. It’s great for confidential meetings—other things, too. We can work beautifully together, our ghosts annealed really well. . . .”

Sirhan jumps up, his face stinging, and turns away. “No thank you!” he snaps, angry at himself. “Goodbye!” His other instances, distracted by his broadcast emotional overload, are distracted from their tasks and sputtering with indignation. Her hurt expression is too much for him: the killfile snaps down, blurring her into an indistinct black blob on the wall, veiled by his own brain as he turns and walks away, seething with anger at his mother for being so unfair as to make him behold his own face in the throes of fleshy passion.

Meanwhile, in one of the lower spheres, padded with silvery-blue insulating pillows bound together with duct tape, the movers and shakers of the accelerationista faction are discussing their bid for world power at fractional-C velocities.

“We can’t outrun a collapse of the false vacuum,” insists Manfred, slightly uncoordinated and slurring his vowels under the influence of the first glass of fruit punch he’s experienced in nigh-on twenty realtime years. His body is young and still relatively featureless, hair still growing out, and he’s abandoned his old no-implants fetish at last to adopt an array of interfaces that let him internalize all the exocortex processes that formerly he ran on an array of dumb Turing machines outside his body. He’s standing on his own sense of style and is the only person in the room who isn’t wearing some variation of dinner jacket or classical evening dress. “Entangled exchange via Routers is still slower-than-light in absolute terms—any phase change will catch up eventually, the network must have an end. And then where will we be, Sameena?”

“I’m not disputing that.” The woman he’s talking to, wearing a green-and-gold sari and a medieval maharajah’s ransom in gold and natural diamonds, nods thoughtfully. “But it hasn’t happened yet, and we’ve got evidence that superhuman intelligences have been loose in this universe for gigayears, so there’s a fair bet that the worst-catastrophe scenarios are unlikely. And looking closer to home, we don’t know what the Routers are for, or who made them. Until then. . . .” She shrugs. “Look what happened last time somebody tried to probe them. No offense intended.”

“It’s already happened. If what I hear is correct, the Vile Offspring aren’t nearly as negative about the idea of using the Routers as we old-fashioned metahumans might like to believe.” Manfred frowns, trying to recall some hazy anecdote—he’s experimenting with a new memory compression algorithm, necessitated by his pack-rat mnemonic habits when younger, and sometimes the whole universe feels as if it’s nearly on the tip of his tongue. “So, we seem to be in violent agreement about the need to know more about what’s going on, and to find out what they’re doing out there. We’ve got cosmic background anisotropies caused by the waste heat from computing processes millions of light years across—it takes a big interstellar civilization to do that, and they don’t seem to have fallen into the same rat-trap as the local Matrioshka brain civilizations. And we’ve got worrying rumors about the Vile Offspring messing around with the structure of spacetime in order to find a way around the Bekenstein bound. If the VO are trying that, then the folks out near the supercluster already know the answers. The best way to find out what’s happening is to go and talk to whoever’s responsible. Can we at least agree on that?”

“Probably not.” Her eyes glitter with amusement. “It all depends on whether one believes in these civilizations in the first place. I know your people point to deep-field camera images going all the way back to some wonky hubble-bubble scrying mirror from the late twentieth, but we’ve got no evidence except some theories about the Casimir effect and pair production and spinning beakers of helium-3—much less proof that a whole bunch of alien galactic civilizations are trying to collapse the false vacuum and destroy the universe!” Her voice drops a notch. “At least, not enough proof to convince most people, Manny dear. I know this comes as a shock to you, but not everyone is a neophiliac posthuman body-surfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try and to prove the Turing oracle thesis—”

“—Not everyone is concerned with the deep future,” Manfred interrupts. “It’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter—that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing, to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally! I mean, if there’s going to come a time when there’s nobody or nothing to remember us, then what does—”

“Manfred?”

He stops in mid-sentence, his mouth open, staring dumbly.

It’s Amber, poised in black cat-suit with cocktail glass. Her expression is open and confused, appallingly vulnerable. Blue liquid slops, almost spilling out of her glass—the rim barely extends itself in time to catch the drops. Behind her stands Annette, a deeply self-satisfied smile on her face.

“You.” Amber pauses, her cheek twitching as bits of her mind page in and out of her skull, polling external information sources. “You really are—”

A hasty cloud materializes under her hand as her fingers relax, dropping the glass.

“Uh.” Manfred stares, at a complete loss for words. “I’d, uh.” After a moment, he looks past her. “Why don’t you explain?” he asks.

“We thought you could use the good advice,” Annette speaks into the awkward silence. “And a family reunion. It was meant to be a surprise.”

“A surprise.” Amber looks perplexed. “You could say that.”

“You’re taller than I was expecting,” Manfred says unexpectedly.

“Yeah?” She looks at him, and he turns his head slightly, facing her. It’s an historic moment, and Annette is getting it all on memory diamond, from every angle. The family’s dirty little secret is that Amber and her father have never met, not face-to-face in physical meat-machine proximity. She was bom more than a year after Manfred and Pamela separated, decanted pre-fertilized from a tank of liquid nitrogen to play a pawn’s role in a bitter game of divorce chess—promoted to queen by her own initiative in high orbit around Jupiter, extricated from her mother’s stifling grip by a legal instrument Manfred smuggled to her inside his cat’s brain, but this is the first time either of them have actually seen the other’s face without electronic intermediation. And while they’ve said everything that needed to be said on a businesslike level, anthropoid family politics is still very much a matter of body language and pheromones. “How long have you been out and about?” she asks, trying to disguise her confusion.

“About six hours.” Manfred manages a rueful chuckle, trying to take the sight of her in all at once. “Let’s get you another drink and put our heads together?”

“Okay.” Amber takes a deep breath and glares at Annette. “You set this up,yow get to clean up the mess.”

Annette just stands there, smiling at the confusion of her accomplishment.

The cold light of dawn finds Sirhan angry, sober, and ready to pick a fight with the first person who comes through the door of his office. The room is about ten meters across, with a floor of polished marble and skylights in the intricately plastered ceiling. The walkthrough of his current project sprouts in the middle of the floor like a ghostly abstract cauliflower, fractal branches dwindling down to in-folded nodes tagged with compressed identifiers. The branches expand and shrink as Sirhan paces around it, zooming to readability in response to his eyeball dynamics. But he isn’t paying it much attention. He’s too disturbed, uncertain, trying to work out who to blame. Which is why when the door bangs open his first response is to whirl angrily and open his mouth—then stop. “What do you want?” he demands.

“A word, if you please?” Annette looks around distractedly. “This is your project?”

“Yes,” he says icily, and banishes the walkthrough with a wave of one hand. “What do you want?”

“I’m not sure.” Annette pauses. For a moment, she looks weary, tired beyond mortal words, and Sirhan momentarily wonders if perhaps he’s spreading the blame too far. This eighty-something Frenchwoman who is no blood relative, just the love of his scatterbrained grandfather’s life, seems the least likely person to be trying to manipulate him, at least in such an unwelcome and intimate manner. But there’s no telling. Families are strange things, and even though the current instantiations of his father and mother aren’t the ones who ran his pre-adolescent brain through a couple of dozen alternative lifelines before he was ten, he can’t be sure that they wouldn’t enlist Tante Annette’s assistance in fucking with his mind. “We need to talk about your mother,” she continues.

“We do? Do we?” Sirhan turns around and sees the vacancy of the room for what it is, a socket, like a pulled tooth, informed as much by what is absent as by what is present. He snaps his fingers and an intricate bench of translucent bluish utility fog congeals out of the air behind him. He sits; Annette can do what she wants.

“Oui.” She thrusts her hands deep into the pocket of the peasant smock she’s wearing—a major departure from her normal style—and leans against the wall. Physically, she looks young enough to have spent her entire life blitzing around the galaxy at three nines of lightspeed, but her posture is world-weary and ancient. History is a foreign country and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel. “Your mother, she has taken on a huge job, but it’s one that needs doing. You agreed it needed doing, years ago, with the archive store. She is now trying to get it moving, that is what the campaign is about, to place before the electors a choice of how best to move an entire civilization. So I ask, why do you obstruct her?”

Sirhan works his jaw: he feels like spitting. “Why?” He snaps.

Yes. Why?” Annette gives in and magics up a chair from the swirling fog-bank beneath the ceiling. She crouches in it, staring at him. “It is a question.”

“I have nothing against her political machinations,” Sirhan says tensely. “But her uninvited interference in my personal life—”

“What interference?”

He stares. “Is that a question?” He’s silent for a moment. Then: “Throwing that wanton at me last night—”

Annette stares at him. “Who? What are you talking about?”

“That, that loose woman!” Sirhan is reduced to spluttering. “False pretenses! If this is one of father’s matchmaking ideas, it is so very wrong that—”

Annette is shaking her head. “Are you crazy? Your mother simply wanted you to meet her campaign team, to join in planning the policy. Your father is not on this planet! But you stormed out, you really upset Rita, did you know that? Rita, she is the best belief-maintenance and story-construction operative I have! Yet you to tears reduce her. What is wrong with you?”

“I—” Sirhan swallows. “She’s what?” he asks again, his mouth dry. “I thought . . .” he trails off. He doesn’t want to say what he thought. The hussy, that brazen trollop, is part of his mother’s campaign party? Not some plot to line him into corruption? What if it was all a horrible misunderstanding?

“I think you need to apologize to someone must,” Annette says coolly, standing up. Sirhan’s head is spinning between a dozen dialogs of actors and ghosts, a journal of the party replaying before his ghast-stricken inner gaze. Even the walls have begun to flicker, responding to his intense unease. Annette skewers him with a disgusted look. “When you can a woman behave toward as a person, not a threat, we can again talk. Until then.” And she stands up and walks out of the room, leaving him to contemplate the shattered stump of his anger, so startled he can barely concentrate on his project, thinking, is that really me? Is that what I look like to her? as the cladistic graph slowly rotates before him, denuded branches spread wide, waiting to be filled with the nodes of the alien interstellar network just as soon as he can convince Aineko to stake him the price of the depth-first tour of darkness.

Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons—literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird-brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semi-digested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. Not only does he get shooting pains in his neck whenever he tries to look over his left shoulder with his right eye, but he’s lost the habit of spawning exocortical agents to go interrogate a database or bush robot or something, then report back to him. Instead, he keeps trying to fly off in all directions at once, which usually ends with him falling over.

But right now, that’s not a problem. He’s sitting comfortably at a weathered wooden table in a beer garden behind a hall lifted from somewhere like Frankfurt, a liter glass of straw-colored liquid at his elbow and a comforting multiple whispering of knowledge streams tickling the back of his head. Most of his attention is focused on Annette, who frowns at him with mingled concern and affection.

“You are going to have to do something about that boy,” she says. “He is close enough to upset Amber. And without Amber, there will be a problem.”

“I’m going to have to do something about Amber, too,” Manfred retorts. “What was the idea, not warning her I was coming?”

“It was meant to be a surprise.” Annette comes as close to pouting as Manfred’s seen her recently. It brings back warm memories: he reaches out to hold her hand across the table.

“You know I can’t handle the human niceties properly when I’m a flock.” He strokes the back of her wrist. She doesn’t pull back. “I expected you to manage all that stuff.”

“That stuff.” Annette shakes her head. “She’s your daughter, you know? Did you have no curiosity left?”

“As a bird?” Manfred cocks his head to one side so abruptly that he hurts his neck and winces. “Nope. Now I do, but I think I pissed her off—”

“Which brings us back to point one.”

“I’d send her an apology, but she’d think I was trying to manipulate her,” Manfred takes a mouthful of beer. “And she’d be right.”

“So? Don’t brood.” Annette pulls her hand back. “Something will sort itself out. Before the electoral problem becomes acute.” When she’s around him, the remains of her once-strong French accent almost vanish in a trans-Atlantic drawl, he realizes with a pang. He’s been abhuman for too long—people who meant a lot to him have changed while he’s been away.

“That’s the trouble with this damned polity.” Manfred takes another gulp of hefeweisen. “We’ve already got six million people living on this planet, and it’s growing like the first generation internet. Everyone who is anyone knows everyone, but there are so many incomers diluting the mix and not knowing that there is a small-world network here that everything is up for grabs again after only a couple of megaseconds. New networks form, and we don’t even know they exist until they sprout a political agenda and surface under us. We’re acting under time pressure. If we don’t get things rolling now, we’ll never be able to . . .” He shakes his head. “It wasn’t like this for you in Brussels, was it?”

“No. Brussels was a mature system. And it will only get worse from here on in, I think.”

“Democracy 2.0.” He shudders briefly. “Do you think we can make this fly?”

“I don’t see why not. If Amber’s willing to play the People’s Princess for us . . .”Annette picks up a slice of liverwurst and chews on it meditatively.

“I’m not sure it’s workable, however we play it.” Manfred looks thoughtful. “The whole democratic participation thing looks questionable to me under these circumstances. We’re under direct threat, for all that it’s a long-term one, and this whole culture is in danger of turning into a classical nation-state. Or worse, several of them layered on top of one another with complete geographical colocation but no social interpenetration. I’m not certain it’s a good idea to try to steer something like that—pieces might break off, you’d get the most unpleasant side-effects. Although, on the other hand, if we can mobilize enough broad support to become the first visible planet-wide polity . . .”

“We need you to stay focused,” Annette adds unexpectedly.

“Focused? Me?” He laughs, briefly. “I used to have an idea a second. Now it’s maybe one a year.”

“Yes, but you know the old saying? The fox has many ideas—the hedgehog has only one, but it’s a big idea.”

“So tell me, what is my big idea?” Manfred leans forward, one elbow on the table, one eye focused on innerspace as a hot-burning thread of consciousness barks psephological performance metrics at him, analyzing the game ahead. “Where do you think I’m going?”

“I think—” Annette breaks off suddenly, staring past his shoulder. Privacy slips, and for a frozen moment Manfred glances round in mild horror and sees thirty or forty other guests in the crowded garden, elbows rubbing, voices raised above the background chatter. “Gianni!” She beams widely as she stands up. “What a surprise! When did you arrive?”

Manfred blinks. A slim young man, moving with adolescent grace but none of the awkward movements and sullen lack of poise—he’s much older than he looks, chickenhawk genetics. Gianni? He feels a huge surge of memories paging through his exocortex. He remembers ringing a doorbell in dusty, hot Rome: white toweling bathrobe, the economics of scarcity, autograph signed by the dead hand of Von Neumann—“Gianni?” he asks. “It’s been a long time!”

The gilded youth, incarnated in the image of a metropolitan toy-boy from the noughties, grins widely and slides down onto the bench next to Annette, whom he kisses with easy familiarity. “Manfred! So charmed!” He glances round curiously. “Ah, how very Bavarian.” He snaps his fingers. “Mine will be a, what do you recommend? It’s been too long since my last beer.” His grin widens. “Not in this body.”

“You’re re-simulated?” Manfred asks, unable to stop himself.

Annette frowns at him disapprovingly. “No, silly! He came through the teleport gate—”

“Oh.” Manfred shakes his head. “I’m sorry—”

“It’s okay.” Gianni Vittoria clearly doesn’t mind being mistaken for a historical newbie, rather than someone who’s traveled through the decades the hard way. He must be over a hundred by now, Manfred notes, not bothering to spawn a search thread to find out.

“It was time to move, and, well, the old body didn’t want to move with me, so why not go gracefully and accept the inevitable?”

“I didn’t take you for a dualist,” Manfred says ruefully.

“Ah, I’m not—but neither am I reckless.” Gianni drops his grin for a moment. The sometime minister for transhuman affairs, economic theoretician, and then retired tribal elder of the polycognitive liberals is serious. “I have never uploaded before, or switched bodies, or teleported. Even when my old one was seriously—tcha! Maybe I left it too long. But here I am, one planet is as good as another to be cloned and downloaded onto, don’t you think?”

“You invited him?” Manfred asks Annette.

“Why wouldn’t I?” There’s a wicked gleam in her eye. “Did you expect me to live like a nun while you were a flock of pigeons? We may have campaigned against the legal death of the transubstantiated, Manfred, but there are limits.”

Manfred looks between them, then shrugs, embarrassed. “I’m still getting used to being human again,” he admits. “Give me time to catch up? At an emotional level, at least.” He focuses on Gianni. “I have a feeling I’m here for a purpose, and it isn’t mine,” he says slowly. “Why don’t you tell me what you’ve got in mind?”

Gianni shrugs. “You have the big picture already. We are human, metahuman, and augmented human. But the posthumans are things that were never really human to begin with. Our mind children have reached their adolescence as a civilization in their own right, and the Vile Offspring want the place to themselves so they can throw a party. The writing is, as they say, on the wall: we frail mortals might wish to move to a neighborhood where the youth is less raucous and maybe less inclined to accidentally converts our planets into computronium. Don’t you think?”

Manfred gives him a long stare. “The whole idea of running away in meatspace is fraught with peril,” he says slowly. He picks up his mug of beer and swirls it around slowly. “Look. We know, now, that a singularity doesn’t turn into a voracious predator that eats all the dumb matter in its path, triggering a phase change in the structure of space—at least, not unless they’ve done something very stupid to the structure of the false vacuum, somewhere outside our current light cone. Bandwidth limits the singularity, motivating the fast-thinkers to stay as close to the core of their civilization as they can. Usually. That’s what we’ve seen in the local neighborhood.

“But if we run away, we are still going to be there. Sooner or later we’ll have the same problem all over again; runaway intelligence augmentation, self-expression, engineered intelligences, whatever. Possibly that’s what happened out past the Bootes void—not a galactic-scale civilization, but a race of pathological cowards fleeing their own exponential transcendence. We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try to excise those seeds, we cease to be human, don’t we? So . . . maybe you can tell me what you think we should do. Hmm?”

“It’s a dilemma.” A waitron inserts itself into their privacy-screened field of view. It plants a spun-diamond glass in front of Gianni, then pukes beer into it. Manfred declines a refill, waiting for Gianni to drink. “Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I’ve been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai +4904/-56.1 found it quite alarming. Nobody’s casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere, but the implications—the Vile Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they’ll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do if what is essentially a non-human civilization of level II on the Kardashev scale—full control over the entire energy output of a star, full computational utilization of the resources of a solar system—decides it wants to recycle our mass?”

Manfred nods thoughtfully. “You’ve heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?” he asks.

“Of course.” Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. “What do you think of our options?”

“The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwhisps and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that’s succumbed to senile dementia and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfill some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip. Rousseau’s universal robots. I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she’s done it before—at least, the charging off aboard a starwhisp part. ‘To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before’ has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?” Manfred nods to himself. “Like I say, it won’t work. We’d be right back to iteration one of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving. That’s why I came back: to warn her.”

“So.” Gianni prods, pretending to ignore the frowns that Annette is casting his way.

“And as for the time-binders.” Manfred nods again. “They’re like Sirhan. Deeply conservative, deeply suspicious. Holding out for staying here as long as possible, until the Vile Offspring come for Saturn—then moving out bit by bit, into the Kuiper belt. Colony habitats on snowballs half a light year from anywhere.” He shudders. “Spam in a fucking can with a light-hour’s walk to the nearest civilized company if your fellow inmates decide to reinvent Stalinism or Objectivism. No thanks! I know they’ve been muttering about quantum teleportation and stealing toys from the Routers, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Which leaves what?” Annette demands. “It is all very well, this dismissal of both the accelerationista and time-binder programs, Manny, but what can you propose in their place?” She looks distressed. “Fifty years ago, you would have had six new ideas before breakfast! And an erection.”

Manfred leers at her unconvincingly. “Who says I can’t still have both?”

She glares. “Drop it!”

“Okay.” Manfred chugs back a quarter of a liter of beer, draining his glass, and puts it down on the table with a bang. “As it happens, I do have an alternative idea.” He looks serious. “I’ve been discussing it with Aineko for some time, and Aineko has been seeding Sirhan with it—if it’s to work optimally, we’ll need to get a rump constituency of both the accelerationistas and the conservatives on board. Which is why I’m conditionally going along with this whole election nonsense. So. What’s it worth to you for me to explain it?”

“So, who was the deadhead you were busy with today?” asks Amber.

Rita shrugs. “Some boringly prolix pulp author from the early twentieth, with a body phobia of extropian proportions—I kept expecting him to start drooling and rolling his eyes if I crossed my legs. Funny thing is, he was also close to bolting from fear once I mentioned implants. We really need to nail down how to deal with these mind/body dualists, don’t we?” She watches Amber with something approaching admiration; she’s new to the inner circle of the accelerationista study faction, and Amber’s social credit is sky-high. Rita’s got a lot to learn from her, if she can get close enough. And right now, following her along a path through the landscaped garden behind the museum, seems like a golden moment of opportunity.

Amber smiles. “I’m glad I’m not processing immigrants these days, most of them are so stupid it drives you up the wall after a bit. Personally I blame the Flynn effect—in reverse. They come from a background of sensory deprivation. It’s nothing that a course of neural growth enhancers can’t fix in a year or two, but after the first few you skullfuck, they’re all the same. So dull. Unless you’re unlucky enough to get one of the documentees from a puritan religious period. I’m no fluffragette, but I swear if I get one more superstitious woman-hating clergyman, I’m going to consider prescribing forcible gender reassignment surgery. At least the Victorian English are mostly just open-minded lechers, when you get past their social reserve. And they like new technology.”

Rita nods. Woman-hating etcetera . . . the echoes of patriarchy are still with them today, it seems, and not just in the form of re-simulated Ayatollahs and Archbishops from the dark ages. “My author sounds like the worst of both. Some guy called Howard, from Rhode Island. Kept looking at me as if he was afraid I was going to sprout bat-wings and tentacles or something.” Like your son, she doesn’t add. Just what was he thinking, anyway? she wonders. To be that screwed up takes serious dedication

“What are you working on, if you don’t mind me asking?” she asks, trying to change the direction of her attention.

“Oh, pressing the flesh, I guess. Auntie ’Nette wanted me to meet some old political hack contact of hers who she figures can help with the program, but he was holed up with her and Dad all day.” She pulls a face. “I had another fitting session with the image merchants, they’re trying to turn me into a political catwalk clothes-horse. Then there’s the program demographics again. We’re getting about a thousand new immigrants a day, planet-wide, but it’s accelerating rapidly and we should be up to eighty an hour by the time of the election. Which is going to be a huge problem, because if we start campaigning too early, a quarter of the electorate won’t know what they’re meant to be voting about.”

“Maybe it’s deliberate,” Rita suggests. “The Vile Offspring are trying to rig the outcome by injecting voters.” She pings a smiley emoticon off Wednesday’s open channel, raising a flickering grin in return. “The party of fuckwits will win, no question about it.”

“Uh-huh.” Amber snaps her fingers and pulls an impatient face as she waits for a passing cloud to solidify above her head and lower a glass of cranberry juice to her. “Dad said one thing that’s spot-on, we’re framing this entire debate in terms of what we should do to avoid conflict with the Offspring. The main bone of contention is how to run away and how far to go and which program to put resources into, not whether or when to run, let alone what else we could do. Maybe we should have given it some more thought. Are we being manipulated?”

Rita looks vacant for a moment. “Is that a question?” she asks. Amber nods, and she shakes her head. “Then I’d have to say that I don’t know. The evidence is inconclusive, so far. But I’m not really happy. The Offspring won’t tell us what they want, but there’s no reason to believe they don’t know what we want. I mean, they can think rings round us, can’t they?”

Amber shrugs, then pauses to unlatch a hedge-gate that gives admission to a maze of sweet-smelling shrubs. “I really don’t know. They may not care about us, or even remember we exist—the resimulants may be being generated by some autonomic mechanism, not really part of the higher consciousness of the Offspring. Or it may be some whacked-out post-Tiplerite meme that’s gotten hold of more processing resources than the entire pre-singularity net, some kind of MetaMormon project directed at ensuring that everyone who can possibly ever have lived lives in the right way to fit some weird quasi-religious requirement we don’t know about. Or it might be a message we’re simply not smart enough to decode. That’s the trouble. We don’t know.”

She vanishes around the curve of the maze. Rita hurries to catch up, sees her about to turn into another alleyway, and leaps after her. “What else?” she pants.

“Could be—” left turn—“anything, really.” Six steps lead down into a shadowy tunnel: fork right, five meters forward, then six steps up lead back to the surface. “Question is, why don’t they—” left turn—“just tell us what they want?”

“Speaking to tapeworms.” Rita manages to nearly catch up with Amber, who is trotting through the maze as if she’s memorized it perfectly. “That’s how much the nascent Matrioshka brain can out-think us by, as humans to segmented worms. Would we do. What they told us?”

“Maybe.” Amber stops dead, and Rita glances around. They’re in an open cell near the heart of the maze, five meters square, hedged in on all sides. There are three entrances and a slate altar, waist high, lichen stained with age. “I think you know the answer to that question.”

“I—” Rita stares at her.

Amber stares back, eyes dark and intense. “You’re from one of the Ganymede orbitals by way of Titan. You knew my eigensister while I was out of the solar system flying a diamond the size of a Coke can. That’s what you told me. You’ve got a skill set that’s a perfect match for the campaign research group, and you asked me to introduce you to Sirhan, then you pushed his buttons like a pro. Just what are you trying to pull? Why should I trust you?”

“I—” Rita’s face crumples. “I didn’t push his buttons! He thought I was trying to drag him into bed.” She looks up defiantly. “I wasn’t, I want to learn, what makes you—him—work.” Huge dark structured information queries batter at her exocortex, triggering warnings. Someone is churning through distributed time-series databases all over the outer system, measuring her past with a micrometer. She stares at Amber, mortified and angry. It’s the ultimate denial of trust, the need to check her statements against the public record for truth. “What are you doing?”

“I have a suspicion.” Amber stands poised, as if ready to run—run away from me? Rita thinks, startled. “You said, what if the resimulants came from a subconscious function of the Offspring? And funnily enough, I’ve been discussing that possibility with Dad. He’s still got the spark when you show him a problem, you know.”

“I don’t understand!”

“No, I don’t think you do,” says Amber, and Rita can feel vast stresses in the space around her: the whole ubicomp environment, dust-sized chips and utility fog and hazy clouds of diamond-bright optical processors in the soil and the air and her skin, is growing blotchy and sluggish, thrashing under the load of whatever Amber—with her management-grade ackles—is ordering it to do. For a moment, Rita can’t feel half her mind, and she gets the panicky claustrophobic sense of being trapped inside her own head: then it stops.

“Tell me!” Rita insists. “What are you trying to prove? It’s some mistake—” And Amber is nodding, much to her surprise, looking weary and morose. “What do you think I’ve done?”

“Nothing. You’re coherent. Sorry about that.”

“Coherent?” Rita hears her voice rising with her indignation as she feels bits of herself, cut off from her for whole seconds, shivering with relief. “I’ll give you coherent! Assaulting my exocortex—”

“Shut up.” Amber rubs her face and simultaneously throws Rita one end of an encrypted channel.

“Why should I?” Rita demands, not accepting the handshake.

“Because.” Amber glances round. She’s scared! Rita suddenly realizes. “Just do it,” she hisses.

Rita accepts the endpoint, and a huge lump of undigested expository data slides down it, structured and tagged with entrypoints and metainformation directories pointing to—

“Holy shit,” she whispers, as she realizes what it is.

“Yes.” Amber grins humorlessly. She continues, over the open channel: It looks like they’re cognitive antibodies, generated by the devil’s own semiotic immune system. That’s what Sirhan is focusing on, how to avoid triggering them and bringing everything down at once. Forget the election, we’re going to be in deep shit sooner rather than later and we’re still trying to work out how to survive. Now are you sure you still want in?

“Want in on what?” Rita asks, shakily.

The lifeboat Dad’s trying to get us all into under cover of the accelerationista/-conservationista split, before the Vile Offspring’s immune system figures out how to lever us apart into factions and make us kill each other. . . .

Welcome to the afterglow of the intelligence supernova, little tapeworm.

Tapeworms have on the order of a thousand neurons, pulsing furiously to keep their little bodies twitching. Human beings have on the order of a hundred billion neurons. What is happening in the inner solar system as the Vile Offspring churn and reconfigure the fast-thinking structured dust clouds that were once planets is as far beyond the ken of merely human consciousness as the thoughts of a Godel are beyond the twitching tropisms of a worm. Personality modules bound by the speed of light, sucking down billions of times the processing power of a human brain, form and reform in the halo of glowing nanoprocessors that shrouds the sun in a ruddy glowing cloud.

Mercury, Venus, Mars, Ceres, and the asteroids—all gone. Luna is a silvery iridescent sphere, planed smooth down to micrometer heights, luminous with diffraction patterns. Only Earth, the cradle of human civilization, remains untransformed: and Earth, too, will be dismantled soon enough, for already a trellis of space elevators webs the planet around its equator, lifting refugee dumb matter into orbit and flinging it at the wildlife preserves of the outer system.

The intelligence bloom that gnaws at Jupiter’s moons with claws of molecular machinery won’t stop until it runs out of dumb matter to convert into computronium. By the time it does, it will have as much brain power as you’d get if you placed a planet with a population of six billion future-shocked primates in orbit around every star in the Milky Way galaxy. But right now, it’s still stupid, having converted barely a percentage point of the mass of the solar system—it’s a mere Magellanic Cloud civilization, infantile and unsubtle and still perilously close to its carbon-chemistry roots.

It’s hard for tapeworms living in warm intestinal mulch to wrap their thousand-neuron brains around whatever it is that the vastly more complex entities who host them are discussing, but one thing’s sure—the owners have a lot of things going on, not all of them under conscious control. The churning of gastric secretions and the steady ventilation of lungs are incomprehensible to the simple brains of tapeworms, but they serve the purpose of keeping the humans alive and provide the environment the worms live in. And other more esoteric functions contribute to survival—the intricate dance of specialized cloned lymphocytes in their bone marrow and lymph nodes, the random permutations of antibodies constantly churning for possible matches to intruder molecules warning of the presence of pollution, it’s all going on beneath the level of conscious control.

Autonomic defenses. Antibodies. Intelligence bloom gnawing at the edges of the outer system. And humans are not as unsophisticated as mulch wrigglers, they can see the writing on the wall. Is it any surprise that among the ones who look outward, the real debate is not over whether to run, but over how far and how fast?

There’s a team meeting early the next morning. It’s still dark outside, and most of the attendees who’re present in vivo have the faintly haggard look that comes from abusing melatonin antagonists. Rita stifles a yawn as she glances around the conference room—the walls expanded into huge virtual spaces to accommodate thirty or so exocortical ghosts from sleeping partners who will wake with memories of a particularly vivid lucid dream—and sees Amber talking to her famous father and a younger-looking man who one of her partials recognizes as a last-century EU politician. There seems to be some tension.

Now that Amber has granted Rita her conditional trust, a whole new tier of campaigning information has opened up to her inner eye—stuff steganographically concealed in a hidden layer of the project’s collective memory space. There’s stuff in here she hadn’t suspected, frightening studies of resimulant demographics, surveys of emigration rates from the inner system, cladistic trees dissecting different forms of crude tampering that have been found skulking in the wetware of refugees. The reason why Amber and Manfred and—reluctantly—Sirhan are fighting for one radical faction in a planet-wide election, despite their various misgivings over the validity of the entire concept of democracy in this posthuman era. She blinks it aside, slightly bewildered, forking a couple of dozen personality subthreads to chew on it at the edges. “Need coffee,” she mutters to the table as it offers her a chair.

“Everyone online?” asks Manfred. “Then I’ll begin.” He looks tired and worried, physically youthful but showing the full weight of his age. “We’ve got a crisis coming, folks. About a hundred kiloseconds ago, the bit rate on the re-simulation stream jumped. We’re now fielding about one resimulated state vector a second, on top of the legitimate immigration we’re dealing with. If it jumps again by the same factor, it’s going to swamp our ability to check the immigrants for zimboes in vivo—we’d have to move to running them in secure storage or just resurrecting them blind, and if there are any jokers in the pack, that’s about the riskiest thing we could do.”

“Why do you not spool them to memory diamond?” asks the handsome young ex-politician to his left, looking almost amused—as if he already knows the answer.

“Politics.” Manfred shrugs.

“It would blow a hole in our social contract,” says Amber, looking as if she’s just swallowed something unpleasant, and Rita feels a flicker of admiration for the way they’re stage-managing the meeting. Amber’s even talking to her father, as if she feels comfortable with him around, although he’s a walking reminder of her own lack of success. Nobody else has gotten a word in yet. “If we don’t instantiate them, the next logical step is to deny re-simulated minds the franchise. Which in turn puts us on the road to institutional inequality. And that’s a very big step to take, even if you have misgivings about the idea of settling complex policy issues on the basis of a popular vote, because our whole polity is based on the idea that less competent intelligences—us—deserve consideration.”

“Hrmph.” Someone clears their throat. Rita glances round and freezes, because it’s Amber’s screwed-up eigenchild, and he’s just about materialized in the chair next to her. So he adopted superplonk after all? she observes cynically. He doggedly avoids looking at her. “That was my analysis,” he says reluctantly. “We need them alive. For the ark option, at least, and if not, even the accelerationista platform will need them on hand later.”

Concentration camps, thinks Rita, trying to ignore Sirhan’s presence near her, for it’s a constant irritant, where most of the inmates are confused, frightened human beings—and the ones who aren’t think they are. It’s an eerie thought, and she spawns a couple of full ghosts to dream it through for her, gaming the possible angles.

“How are your negotiations over the lifeboat designs going?” Amber asks her father. We need to get a portfolio of design schemata out before we go into the election—”

“Change of plan.” Manfred hunches forward. “This doesn’t need to go any further, but Sirhan and Aineko have come up with something interesting.” He looks worried.

Sirhan is staring at his eigenmother with narrowed eyes, and Rita has to resist the urge to elbow him savagely in the ribs. She knows enough about him now to realize it wouldn’t get his attention—at least, not the way she’d want it, not for the right reasons—and, in any case, he’s more wrapped up in himself than her ghost ever saw him as likely to be. (How anyone could be party to such a detailed exchange of simulated lives and still reject the opportunity to do it in real life is beyond her: unless it’s an artifact of his youth, when his parents pushed him through a dozen simulated childhoods in search of knowledge and ended up with a stubborn oyster-head of a son. . . .) “We still need to look as if we’re planning on us ing a lifeboat,” he says aloud. “There’s the small matter of the price they’re asking in return for the alternative.”

“What? What are you talking about?” Amber sounds confused. “I thought you were working on some kind of cladistic map. What’s this about a price?”

Sirhan smiles coolly. “I am working on a cladistic map. In a manner of speaking. You wasted much of your opportunity when you journeyed to the Router, you know. I’ve been talking to Aineko.”

“You—” Amber flushes. “What about?” She’s visibly angry, Rita notices. Sirhan is needling his eigenmother. Why?

“About the topology of some rather interesting types of small-world network.” Sirhan leans back in his chair, watching the cloud above her head. “And the Router. You went through it, then you came back with your tail between your legs as fast as you could, didn’t you? Not even checking your passenger to see if it was a hostile parasite.”

“I don’t have to take this,” Amber says tightly. “You weren’t there and you have no idea what constraints we were working under.”

“Really?” Sirhan raises an eyebrow. “Anyway, you missed an opportunity. We know that the Routers—for whatever reason—are self-replicating. They spread from brown dwarf to brown dwarf, hatch, tap the protostar for energy and material, and send a bunch of children out. Von Neumann machines, in other words. We also know that they provide high-bandwidth lightspeed communications to other Routers. When you went through the one at Hyundai +4904/-56, you ended up in an unmaintained DMZ attached to an alien Matrioshka brain that had degenerated, somehow. It follows that someone had collected a Router and carried it home, to link into the MB. So why didn’t you bring one home with you?”

Amber glares at him. “Total payload on board the Field Circus was about ten grams. How large do you think a Router seed is?”

“So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity, and ready to wreak seven shades of havoc on—”

“Children!” They both look round automatically. It’s Annette, Rita realizes, and she doesn’t look amused. “Why do you not save this bickering for later?” she asks. “We have our own goals to be pursuing.” Unamused is an understatement. Annette is fuming.

“This charming family reunion was your idea, I believe?” Manfred smiles at her, then nods coolly at the retread EU politician in the next seat.

“Please.” It’s Amber. “Dad, can you save this for later?” Rita sits up. For a moment, Amber looks ancient, far older than her subjective gigasecond of age. “She’s right. She didn’t mean to screw up. Let’s leave the family history for some time when we can work it out in private. Okay?” Manfred looks abashed. He blinks rapidly. “All right.” He takes a breath. “Amber, I brought some old acquaintances into the loop. If we win the election, then to get out of here as fast as possible, we’ll have to use a combination of the two main ideas we’ve been discussing: spool as many people as possible into high density storage until we get somewhere with space and mass and energy to reincarnate them, and get our hands on a Router. The entire planetary polity can’t afford to pay the energy budget of a relativistic starship big enough to hold everyone, even as uploads, and a sub-relativistic ship would be too damn vulnerable to the Vile Offspring. And it follows that instead of taking pot luck on the destination, we should learn about the network protocols the Routers use, figure out some kind of transferable currency we can use to pay for our reinstantiation with at the other end, and also how to make some kind of map so we know where we’re going. The two hard parts are getting at or to a Router, and paying—that’s going to mean traveling with someone who understands Economics 2.0 but doesn’t want to hang around the Vile Offspring.

“As it happens, some old acquaintances of mine went out and fetched back a Router seed, for their own purposes. It’s sitting about thirty light-hours away from here, out in the Kuiper belt. They’re trying to hatch it right now. And I think Aineko might be willing to go with us and handle the trade negotiations.” He raises the palm of his right hand and flips a bundle of tags into the shared spatial cache of the inner circles’ memories.

Lobsters. Decades ago, back in the dim wastelands of the depression-ridden naughty oughties when Manfred was getting going as an agalmic entrepreneur, the uploaded lobsters had escaped onto the net and taken over a dodgy software users group in Moscow. Manfred brokered a deal whereby they’d get their very own cometary factory colony, in return for providing intelligent direction to a bunch of robot machine tools owned by the Franklin trust. Years later, Amber’s expedition to the alien artifact known as the Router had run into eerie zombie lobsters, upload ghosts that had been taken over and reanimated by surprisingly stupid scavenger memes. But where the real lobsters had gotten to. . . .

For a moment, Rita sees herself hovering in darkness and vacuum, the distant siren-song of a planetary gravity well far below. Off to her—left? north?—glows a hazy dim red cloud the size of the full moon as seen from Earth, a cloud that hums with a constant background noise, the waste heat of a galactic civilization dreaming furious colorless thoughts to itself. Then she figures out how to slew her unblinking, eyeless viewpoint around, and sees the craft.

It’s a starship in the shape of a crustacean three kilometers long. It’s segmented and flattened, with legs projecting from the abdominal floor to stretch stiffly sideways and clutch fat balloons of cryogenic deuterium fuel. The blue metallic tail is a flattened fan wrapped around the delicate stinger of a fusion reactor. Near the head, things are different: no huge claws here, but the delicately branching fuzz of bush robots, nanoassemblers poised ready to repair damage in flight and spin the parachute of a ramscoop when the ship is ready to decelerate. The head is massively armored against the blitzkrieg onslaught of interstellar dust, its radar eyes a glint of hexagonal compound surfaces staring straight at her.

Behind and below the lobster-ship, a planetary ring looms vast and tenuous. The lobster is in orbit around Saturn, mere light seconds away. And as Rita stares at the ship in dumbstruck silence, it winks at her.

“They don’t have names, at least not as individual identifiers,” Manfred says apologetically, “so I asked if he’d mind being called something. He said Blue, because he is. So I give you the good lobster Something Blue.”

Sirhan interrupts, “You still need my cladistics project.” He sounds somewhat smug. “To find your way through the network. Do you have a specific destination in mind?”

“Yeah, to both questions,” Manfred admits. “We need to send duplicate ghosts out to each possible Router endpoint, wait for an echo, then iterate and repeat. Recursive depth-first traversal. The goal—that’s harder.” He points at the ceiling, which dissolves into a chaotic three-D spiderweb that Rita recognizes, after some hours of subjective head-down archive time, as a map of the dark matter distribution throughout a radius of a billion light years, galaxies glued like fluff to the nodes where strands of drying silk meet. “We’ve known for most of a century that there’s something weird going on out there, out past the Bootes void—there are a couple of galactic superclusters, around which there’s something flaky about the cosmic background anisotropy. Most computational processes generate entropy as a by-product, and it looks like something is dumping waste heat into the area from all the galaxies in the region, very evenly spread in a way that mirrors the metal distribution in those galaxies, except at the very cores. And according to the lobsters, who have been indulging in some very long baseline interferometry, most of the stars in the nearest cluster are redder than expected, and metal-depleted. As if someone’s been mining them.”

“Ah.” Sirhan stares at his grandfather. “Why should they be any different from the local nodes?”

“Look around you. Do you see any indications of large-scale cosmic engineering within a million light years of here?” Manfred shrugs. “Locally, nothing has quite reached . . . well. We can guess at the life-cycle of a postspike civilization now, can’t we? We’ve felt the elephant. We’ve seen the wreckage of collapsed Matrioshka minds. We know how unattractive exploration is to post-singularity intelligences, we’ve seen the bandwidth gap that keeps them at home.” He points at the ceiling. “But over there, something different happened. They’re making changes on the scale of an entire galactic supercluster, and they appear to be coordinated. They did get out and go places, and their descendants may still be out there. It looks like they’re doing something purposeful and organized, something vast—a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that’s running the universe, perhaps, or an embedded simulation of an entirely different universe. Up or down, is it turtles all the way, or is there something out there that’s more real than we are? And don’t you think it’s worth trying to find out?”

“No.” Sirhan crosses his arms. “Not particularly. I’m interested in saving people from the Vile Offspring, not taking a huge gamble on mystery transcendent aliens who may have built a galaxy-sized reality-hacking machine a billion years ago. I’ll sell you my services, and even send a ghost along, but if you expect me to bet my entire future on it . . .”

It’s too much for Rita. Diverting her attention away from the dizzying innerspace vista, she elbows Sirhan in the ribs. He looks round blankly for a moment, then with gathering anger as he lets his killfile filter slip. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” she hisses. Then succumbing to a secondary impulse she knows she’ll regret later, she drops a private channel into his public in-tray.

“Nobodys asking you to,” Manfred is saying defensively, arms crossed. “I view this as a Manhattan Project kind of thing, pursue all agendas in parallel, if we win the election we’ll have the resources we need to do that. We should all go through the Router, and we will all leave backups aboard Something Blue. Blue is slow, tops out at about a tenth of cee, but what he can do is get a sufficient quantity of memory diamond the hell out of circumsolar space before the Vile Offspring’s autonomic defenses activate whatever kind of trust exploit they’re planning in the next few megaseconds—”

“What do you want?” Sirhan demands angrily over the channel. He’s still not looking at her, and not just because he’s focusing on the vision in blue that dominates the shared space of the team meeting.

“Stop lying to yourself,” Rita sends back. “You’re lying about your own goals and motivations. You may not want to know the truth your own ghost worked out, but I do. And I’m not going to let you deny it happened.”

“So one of your agents seduced a personality image of me—”

“Bullshit—”

“—Do you mean to declare this platform openly?” asks the young-old guy near the platform, the Europol. “Because if so, you’re going to undermine Amber’s campaign—”

“That’s all right,” Amber says tiredly, “I’m used to Dad ‘supporting’ me in his own inimitable way.”

“Is okay,” says a new voice. “I are happy wait-state grazing in ecliptic.” It’s the friendly lobster lifeboat, light-lagged by its trajectory outside the ring system.

“—You’re happy to hide behind a hypocritical sense of moral purity when it makes you feel you can look down on other people, but underneath it you’re just like everyone else—”

“—She set you up to corrupt me, didn’t she? You’re just bait in her scheme—”

“The idea was to store incremental backups in the panuliran’s cargo cache in case a weakly godlike agency from the inner system attempts to activate the antibodies they’ve already disseminated throughout the festival culture,” Annette explains, stepping in on Manfred’s behalf.

Nobody else in the discussion space seems to notice that Rita and Sirhan are busy ripping the shit out of each other over a private channel, throwing emotioned hand grenades back and forth like seasoned divorcees. “It’s not a satisfactory solution to the evacuation question, but it ought to satisfy the conservatives’ baseline requirement, and as insurance—”

“—That’s right, blame your eigenmother! Has it occurred to you that she doesn’t care enough about you to try a stunt like that? I think you spent too much time with that crazy grandmother of yours. You didn’t even integrate that ghost, did you? Too afraid of polluting yourself! I bet you never even bothered to check what it felt like from inside—”

“—I did—” Sirhan freezes for a moment, personality modules paging in and out of his brain like a swarm of angry bees—“make a fool of myself,” he adds quietly, then slumps back in his seat. “This is so embarrassing. . . .” He covers his face with his hands. “You’re right.”

“I am?” Rita’s puzzlement slowly gives way to understanding; Sirhan has finally integrated the memories from the partials they hybridized earlier. Stuck-up and proud, the cognitive dissonance must be enormous. “No I’m not. You’re just overly defensive.”

“I’m—” Embarrassed. Because Rita knows him, inside-out. Has the ghost-memories of six months in a simspace with him, playing with ideas, exchanging intimacies, later confidences. She holds ghost-memories of his embrace, a smoky affair that might have happened in realspace if his instant reaction to realizing that it could happen hadn’t been to dump the splinter of his mind that was contaminated by impure thoughts to cold storage and to deny everything.

“We have no threat profile yet,” Annette says, cutting right across their private conversation. “If there is a direct threat—and we don’t even know that for sure, yet, the Vile Offspring might be enlightened enough to simply be leaving us alone—it’ll probably be some kind of subtle attack directed at the foundations of our identity. Look for a credit bubble, distributed trust metrics devaluing suddenly as people catch some kind of weird religion, something like that. Maybe a perverse election outcome. And it won’t be sudden. They are not stupid, to start a headlong attack without slow corruption to soften the way.”

“You’ve obviously been thinking about this for some time,” Sameena says with dry emphasis. “What’s in it for your friend, uh, Blue? Did you squirrel away enough credit to cover the price of renting a starship from the Economics 2.0 metabubble? Or is there something you aren’t telling us?”

“Um.” Manfred looks like a small boy with his hand caught in the sweet jar. “Well, as a matter of fact—”

“Yes, Dad, why don’t you tell us just what this is going to cost?” Amber asks.

“Ah, well.” He looks embarrassed. “It’s the lobsters, not Aineko. They want . . . some payment.”

Rita reaches out and grabs Sirhan’s hand: he doesn’t resist. “Do you know about this?” Rita queries him.

“All new to me. . . .” A confused partial thread follows his reply down the pipe, and for a while, she joins him in introspective reverie, trying to work out the implications of knowing what they know about the possibility of a mutual relationship—

“They want a written conceptual map. A map of all the accessible meme-spaces hanging off the Router network, compiled by a single human mind who they can use as a baseline, they say. It’s quite simple—just fork a copy of the author to each Router we probe and have him return a finished draft before broadcasting himself to all the nodes linked to that particular Router.”

“Do they have a particular author in mind?” Amber sniffs.

“Yes,” says Manfred. “I’m used to being a multiplicity.” He pauses, unhappily. “Right after I finally got myself together again. . . .”

The pre-election campaign takes approximately three minutes and consumes more bandwidth than the sum of all terrestrial communications channels from prehistory to 2008. Approximately six million ghosts of Amber, individually tailored to fit the jib of the targeted audience, fork across the dark fiber meshwork underpinning all of the lilypad colonies, then out through ultrawideband mesh networks, instantiated in implants and floating dust motes to buttonhole the voters. Many of them fail to reach their audience, and many more hold fruitless discussions; about six actually decide they’ve diverged so far from their original that they constitute separate people and register for independent citizenship, two defect to the other side, and one elopes with a swarm of highly empathic modified African honeybees.

Ambers are not the only ghosts competing for attention in the public Zeitgeist. In fact, they’re in a minority. Most of the autonomous electoral agents are campaigning for a variety of platforms that range from introducing a progressive income tax—nobody is quite sure why, but it seems to be traditional—to a motion calling for the entire planet to be paved, which quite ignores the realities of element abundance in the upper atmosphere of a metal-poor gas giant, not to mention playing hell with the weather. The Faceless are campaigning for everyone to be assigned a new set of facial muscles every six months, the Livid Pranksters are demanding equal rights for sub-sentient entities, and a host of single-issue pressure groups are yammering about the usual lost causes.

Just how the election process anneals is a black mystery—at least, to those people who aren’t party to the workings of the Festival Committee, the group who first had the idea of paving Saturn with hot-hydrogen balloons—but over the course of a complete diurn, almost forty thousand seconds, a pattern begins to emerge. This pattern will systematize the bias of the communications networks that traffic in reputation points across the planetary polity for a long time—possibly as much as fifty million seconds, getting on for a whole Martian year (if Mars still existed). It will create a parliament—a merged group-mind borganism that speaks as one supermind built from the beliefs of the victors. And the news isn’t great, as the party gathered in the upper sphere of the Atomium (which Manfred insisted Amber rent for the dead dog party) is slowly realizing. Amber isn’t there, presumably drowning her sorrows or engaging in postelection schemes of a different nature somewhere else. But other members of her team are about.

“It could be worse,” Rita rationalizes, late in the evening. She’s sitting in a comer of the seventh floor deck, in a 1950’s wireframe chair, clutching a glass of synthetic single malt and watching the shadows. “We could be in an old-style contested election with seven shades of shit flying. At least this way we can be decently anonymous.”

One of the blind spots detaches from her peripheral vision and approaches. It segues into view, suddenly congealing into Sirhan. He looks morose.

“What’s your problem?” she demands. “Your former faction are winning on the count.”

“Maybe so.” He sits down beside her, carefully avoiding her gaze. “Maybe this is a good thing. And maybe not.”

“So when are you going to join the syncitium?” she asks.

“Me? Join that?” He looks alarmed. “You think I want to become part of a parliamentary borg? What do you take me for?”

“Oh.” She shakes her head. “I assumed you were avoiding me because—”

“No.” He holds out his hand and a passing waitron deposits a glass in it. He takes a deep breath. “I owe you an apology.”

About time, she thinks, uncharitably. But he’s like that. Stiff-necked and proud, slow to acknowledge a mistake, but unlikely to apologize unless he really means it. “What for?” she asks.

“For not giving you the benefit of the doubt,” he says slowly, rolling the glass between his palms. “I should have listened to myself earlier instead of locking him out of me.”

The self he’s talking about seems self-evident to her. “You’re not an easy man to get close to,” she says quietly. “Maybe that’s part of your problem.”

“Part of it?” He chuckles bitterly. “My mother—” he bites back whatever he originally meant to say. “Do you know I’m older than she is? Than this version, I mean. She gets up my nose with her assumptions about me. . . .”

“They run both ways.” Rita reaches out and takes his hand—and he grips her right back, no rejection this time. “Listen, it looks as if she’s not going to make it into the parliament of lies. There’s a straight conservative sweep, these folks are in solid denial. About 80 percent of the population are resimulants or old-timers from Earth, and that’s not going to change before the Vile Offspring turn on us. What are we going to do?” He shrugs. “I suspect everyone who thinks we’re really under threat will move on. You know this is going to destroy the accelerationists’ trust in democracy? They’ve still got a viable plan—Manfred’s friendly lobster will work without the need for an entire planet’s energy budget—but the rejection is going to hurt. I can’t help thinking that maybe the real goal of the Vile Offspring was to simply gerrymander us into not diverting resources away from them. It’s blunt, it’s unsubtle, so we assumed that wasn’t the point. But maybe there’s a time for them to be blunt.”

She shrugs. “Democracy is a bad fit for lifeboats.” But she’s still uncomfortable with the idea. “And think of all the people we’ll be leaving behind.”

“Well.” He smiles tightly. “If you can think of any way to encourage the masses to join us . . .”

“A good start would be to stop thinking of them as masses to be manipulated.” Rita stares at him. “Your family appears to have been developing a hereditary elitist streak, and it’s not attractive.”

Sirhan looks uncomfortable. “If you think I’m bad, you should talk to Aineko about it,” he says, self-deprecatingly. “Sometimes I wonder about that cat.”

“Maybe I will.” She pauses. “And you? What are you going to do with yourself?”

“I—” He looks sideways at her. “I can see myself sending an eigenbrother,” he says quietly. “I’m not going to gamble my entire future on a bid to reach the far side of the observable universe by wormhole, though. I’ll stash a copy of myself with the lobsters. What about you?”

“You’ll go all three ways?” she asks.

“Yes. I think so. What about you?”

She shrugs. “One to stay behind, one to wait in the icy depths, and one to go exploring.” She leans against him.

Then she says, “Me too.”

THE PEOPLE OF SAND AND SLAG

Paolo Bacigalupi

“HOSTILE MOVEMENT! WELL inside the perimeter! Well inside!”

I stripped off my Immersive Response goggles as adrenaline surged through me. The virtual cityscape I’d been about to raze disappeared, replaced by our monitoring room’s many views of SesCo’s mining operations. On one screen, the red phosphorescent tracery of an intruder skated across a terrain map, a hot blip like blood spattering its way toward Pit 8.

Jaak was already out of the monitoring room. I ran for my gear.

I caught up with Jaak in the equipment room as he grabbed a TS-101 and slashbangs and dragged his impact exoskeleton over his tattooed body. He draped bandoleers of surgepacks over his massive shoulders and ran for the outer locks. I strapped on my own exoskeleton, pulled my 101 from its rack, checked its charge, and followed.

Lisa was already in the HEV, its turbofans screaming like banshees when the hatch dilated. Sentry centaurs leveled their 101’s at me, then relaxed as friend/foe data spilled into their heads-up displays. I bolted across the tarmac, my skin pricking under blasts of icy Montana wind and the jet wash of Hentasa Mark V engines. Overhead, the clouds glowed orange with light from SesCo’s mining bots.

“Come on, Chen! Move! Move! Move!”

I dove into the hunter. The ship leaped into the sky. It banked, throwing me against a bulkhead, then the Hentasas cycled wide and the hunter punched forward. The HEV’s hatch slid shut. The wind howl muted.

I struggled forward to the flight cocoon and peered over Jaak’s and Lisa’s shoulders to the landscape beyond.

“Have a good game?” Lisa asked.

I scowled. “I was about to win. I made it to Paris.”

We cut through the mists over the catchment lakes, skimming inches above the water, and then we hit the far shore. The hunter lurched as its anti-collision software jerked us away from the roughening terrain. Lisa overrode the computers and forced the ship back down against the soil, driving us so low I could have reached out and dragged my hands through the broken scree as we screamed over it.

Alarms yowled. Jaak shut them off as Lisa pushed the hunter lower. Ahead, a tailings ridge loomed. We ripped up its face and dropped sickeningly into the next valley. The Hentasas shuddered as Lisa forced them to the edge of their design buffer. We hurtled up and over another ridge. Ahead, the ragged cutscape of mined mountains stretched to the horizon. We dipped again into mist and skimmed low over another catchment lake, leaving choppy wake in the thick golden waters.

Jaak studied the hunter’s scanners. “I’ve got it.” He grinned. “It’s moving, but slow.”

“Contact in one minute,” Lisa said. “He hasn’t launched any countermeasures.”

I watched the intruder on the tracking screens as they displayed real-time data fed to us from SesCo’s satellites. “It’s not even a masked target. We could have dropped a mini on it from base if we’d known he wasn’t going to play hide-and-seek.”

“Could have finished your game,” Lisa said.

“We could still nuke him.” Jaak suggested.

I shook my head. “No, let’s take a look. Vaporizing him won’t leave us anything and Bunbaum will want to know what we used the hunter for.”

“Thirty seconds.”

“He wouldn’t care if someone hadn’t taken the hunter on a joyride to Cancun.”

Lisa shrugged. “I wanted to swim. It was either that, or rip off your kneecaps.”

The hunter lunged over another series of ridges.

Jaak studied his monitor. “Target’s moving away. He’s still slow. We’ll get him.”

“Fifteen seconds to drop,” Lisa said. She unstrapped and switched the hunter to software. We all ran for the hatch as the HEV yanked itself skyward, its auto pilot desperate to tear away from the screaming hazard of the rocks beneath its belly.

We plunged out the hatch, one, two, three, falling like Icarus. We slammed into the ground at hundreds of kilometers per hour. Our exoskeletons shattered like glass, flinging leaves into the sky. The shards fluttered down around us, black metallic petals absorbing our enemy’s radar and heat detection while we rolled to jarred vulnerable stops in muddy scree.

The hunter blew over the ridge, Hentasas shrieking, a blazing target. I dragged myself upright and ran for the ridge, my feet churning through yellow tailings mud and rags of jaundiced snow. Behind me, Jaak was down with smashed arms. The leaves of his exoskeleton marked his roll path, a long trail of black shimmering metal. Lisa lay a hundred yards away, her femur rammed through her thigh like a bright white exclamation mark.

I reached the top of the ridge and stared down into the valley.

Nothing.

I dialed up the magnification of my helmet. The monotonous slopes of more tailings rubble spread out below me. Boulders, some as large as our HEV, some cracked and shattered by high explosives, shared the slopes with the unstable yellow shale and fine grit of waste materials from SesCo’s operations.

Jaak slipped up beside me, followed a moment later by Lisa, her flight suit’s leg torn and bloodied. She wiped yellow mud off her face and ate it as she studied the valley below. “Anything?”

I shook my head. “Nothing yet. You okay?”

“Clean break.”

Jaak pointed. “There!”

Down in the valley, something was running, flushed by the hunter. It slipped along a shallow creek, viscous with tailings acid. The ship herded it toward us. Nothing. No missile fire. No slag. Just the running creature. A mass of tangled hair. Quadrupedal. Splattered with mud.

“Some kind of bio-job?” I wondered.

“It doesn’t have any hands,” Lisa murmured.

“No equipment either.”

Jaak muttered. “What kind of sick bastard makes a bio-job without hands?”

I searched the nearby ridgelines. “Decoy, maybe?”

Jaak checked his scanner data, piped in from the hunter’s more aggressive instruments. “I don’t think so. Can we put the hunter up higher? I want to look around.”

At Lisa’s command, the hunter rose, allowing its sensors a fuller reach. The howl of its turbofans became muted as it gained altitude.

Jaak waited as more data spat into his heads-up display. “Nope, nothing. And no new alerts from any of the perimeter stations, either. We’re alone.”

Lisa shook her head. “We should have just dropped a mini on it from base.”

Down in the valley, the bio-job’s headlong run slowed to a trot. It seemed unaware of us. Closer now, we could make out its shape: A shaggy quadruped with a tail. Dreadlocked hair dangled from its shanks like ornaments, tagged with tailings mud clods. It was stained around its legs from the acids of the catchment ponds, as though it had forded streams of urine.

“That’s one ugly bio-job,” I said.

Lisa shouldered her 101. “Bio-melt when I’m done with it.”

“Wait!” Jaak said. “Don’t slag it!”

Lisa glanced over at him, irritated. “What now?”

“That’s not a bio-job at all.” Jaak whispered. “That’s a dog.”

He stood suddenly and jumped over the hillside, running headlong down the scree toward the animal.

“Wait!” Lisa called, but Jaak was already fully exposed and blurring to his top speed.

The animal took one look at Jaak, whooping and hollering as he came roaring down the slope, then turned and ran. It was no match for Jaak. Half a minute later he overtook the animal.

Lisa and I exchanged glances. “Well,” she said, “it’s awfully slow if it’s a bio-job. I’ve seen centaurs walk faster.”

By the time we caught up with Jaak and the animal, Jaak had it cornered in a dull gully. The animal stood in the center of a trickling ditch of sludgy water, shaking and growling and baring its teeth at us as we surrounded it. It tried to break around us, but Jaak kept it corralled easily.

Up close, the animal seemed even more pathetic than from a distance, a good thirty kilos of snarling mange. Its paws were slashed and bloody and patches of fur were torn away, revealing festering chemical burns underneath.

“I’ll be damned,” I breathed, staring at the animal. “It really looks like a dog.”

Jaak grinned. “It’s like finding a goddamn dinosaur.”

“How could it live out here?” Lisa’s arm swept the horizon. “There’s nothing to live on. It’s got to be modified.” She studied it closely, then glanced at Jaak. “Are you sure nothing’s coming in on the perimeter? This isn’t some kind of decoy?”

Jaak shook his head. “Nothing. Not even a peep.”

I leaned in toward the creature. It bared its teeth in a rictus of hatred. “It’s pretty beat up. Maybe it’s the real thing.”

Jaak said, “Oh yeah, it’s the real thing all right. I saw a dog in a zoo once. I’m telling you, this is a dog.”

Lisa shook her head. “It can’t be. It would be dead, if it were a real dog.”

Jaak just grinned and shook his head. “No way. Look at it.” He reached out to push the hair out of the animal’s face so that we could see its muzzle.

The animal lunged and its teeth sank into Jaak’s arm. It shook his arm violently, growling as Jaak stared down at the creature latched onto his flesh. It yanked its head back and forth, trying to tear Jaak’s arm off. Blood spurted around its muzzle as its teeth found Jaak’s arteries.

Jaak laughed. His bleeding stopped. “Damn. Check that out.” He lifted his arm until the animal dangled fully out of the stream, dripping. “I got me a pet.”

The dog swung from the thick bough of Jaak’s arm. It tried to shake his arm once again, but its movements were ineffectual now that it hung off the ground. Even Lisa smiled.

“Must be a bummer to wake up and find out you’re at the end of your evolutionary curve.”

The dog growled, determined to hang on.

Jaak laughed and drew his monomol knife. “Here you go, doggy.” He sliced his arm off, leaving it in the bewildered animal’s mouth.

Lisa cocked her head. “You think we could make some kind of money on it?”

Jaak watched as the dog devoured his severed arm. “I read somewhere that they used to eat dogs. I wonder what they taste like.”

I checked the time in my heads-up display. We’d already killed an hour on an exercise that wasn’t giving any bonuses. “Get your dog, Jaak, and get it on the hunter. We aren’t going to eat it before we call Bunbaum.”

“He’ll probably call it company property,” Jaak groused.

“Yeah, that’s the way it always goes. But we still have to report. Might as well keep the evidence, since we didn’t nuke it.”

WE ATE SAND for dinner. Outside the security bunker, the mining robots rumbled back and forth, ripping deeper into the earth, turning it into a mush of tailings and rock acid that they left in exposed ponds when they hit the water table, or piled into thousand-foot mountainscapes of waste soil. It was comforting to hear those machines cruising back and forth all day. Just you and the bots and the profits, and if nothing got bombed while you were on duty, there was always a nice bonus.

After dinner we sat around and sharpened Lisa’s skin, implanting blades along her limbs so that she was like a razor from all directions. She’d considered monomol blades, but it was too easy to take a limb off accidentally, and we lost enough body parts as it was without adding to the mayhem. That kind of garbage was for people who didn’t have to work: aesthetes from New York City and California.

Lisa had a DermDecora kit for the sharpening. She’d bought it last time we’d gone on vacation and spent extra to get it, instead of getting one of the cheap knock-offs that were cropping up. We worked on cutting her skin down to the bone and setting the blades. A friend of ours in L.A said that he just held DermDecora parties so everyone could do their modifications and help out with the hard-to-reach places.

Lisa had done my glowspine, a sweet tracery of lime landing lights that ran from my tailbone to the base of my skull, so I didn’t mind helping her out, but Jaak, who did all of his modification with an old-time scar and tattoo shop in Hawaii, wasn’t so pleased. It was a little frustrating because her flesh kept trying to close before we had the blades set, but eventually we got the hang of it, and an hour later, she started looking good.

Once we finished with Lisa’s front settings, we sat around and fed her. I had a bowl of tailings mud that I drizzled into her mouth to speed her integration process. When we were weren’t feeding her, we watched the dog. Jaak had shoved it into a makeshift cage in one corner of our common room. It lay there like it was dead.

Lisa said, “I ran its DNA. It really is a dog.”

“Bunbaum believe you?”

She gave me a dirty look. “What do you think?”

I laughed. At SesCo, tactical defense responders were expected to be fast, flexible, and deadly, but the reality was our SOP was always the same: drop nukes on intruders, slag the leftovers to melt so they couldn’t regrow, hit the beaches for vacation. We were independent and trusted as far as tactical decisions went, but there was no way SesCo was going to believe its slag soldiers had found a dog in their tailings mountains.

Lisa nodded. “He wanted to know how the hell a dog could live out here. Then he wanted to know why we didn’t catch it sooner. Wanted to know what he pays us for.” She pushed her short blond hair off her face and eyed the animal. “I should have slagged it.”

“What’s he want us to do?”

“It’s not in the manual. He’s calling back.”

I studied the limp animal. “I want to know how it was surviving. Dogs are meat eaters, right?”

“Maybe some of the engineers were giving it meat. Like Jaak did.” Jaak shook his head. “I don’t think so. The sucker threw up my arm almost right after he ate it.” He wiggled his new stump where it was rapidly regrowing. “I don’t think we’re compatible for it.”

I asked, “But we could eat it, right?”

Lisa laughed and took a spoonful of tailings. “We can eat anything. We’re the top of the food chain.”

“Weird how it can’t eat us.”

“You’ve probably got more mercury and lead running through your blood than any pre-weeviltech animal ever could have had.”

“That’s bad?”

“Used to be poison.”

“Weird.”

Jaak said, “I think I might have broken it when I put it in the cage.” He studied it seriously. “It’s not moving like it was before. And I heard something snap when I stuffed it in.”

“So?”

Jaak shrugged. “I don’t think it’s healing.”

The dog did look kind of beat up. It just lay there, its sides going up and down like a bellows. Its eyes were half-open, but didn’t seem to be focused on any of us. When Jaak made a sudden movement, it twitched for a second, but it didn’t get up. It didn’t even growl.

Jaak said, “I never thought an animal could be so fragile.”

“You’re fragile, too. That’s not such a big surprise.”

“Yeah, but I only broke a couple bones on it, and now look at it. It just lies there and pants.”

Lisa frowned thoughtfully. “It doesn’t heal.” She climbed awkwardly to her feet and went to peer into the cage. Her voice was excited. “It really is a dog. Just like we used to be. It could take weeks for it to heal. One broken bone, and it’s done for.”

She reached a razored hand into the cage and sliced a thin wound into its shank. Blood oozed out, and kept oozing. It took minutes for it to begin clotting. The dog lay still and panted, clearly wasted.

She laughed. “It’s hard to believe we ever lived long enough to evolve out of that. If you chop off its legs, they won’t regrow.” She cocked her head, fascinated. “It’s as delicate as rock. You break it, and it never comes back together.” She reached out to stroke the matted fur of the animal. “It’s as easy to kill as the hunter.”

The comm buzzed. Jaak went to answer.

Lisa and I stared at the dog, our own little window into prehistory.

Jaak came back into the room. “Bunbaum’s flying out a biologist to take a look at it.”

“You mean a bioengineer,” I corrected him.

“Nope. Biologist. Bunbaum said they study animals.”

Lisa sat down. I checked her blades to see if she’d knocked anything loose. “There’s a dead-end job.”

“I guess they grow them out of DNA. Study what they do. Behavior, shit like that.”

“Who hires them?”

Jaak shrugged. “Pau Foundation has three of them on staff. Origin of life guys. That’s who’s sending out this one. Mushi-something. Didn’t get his name.”

“Origin of life?”

“Sure, you know, what makes us tick. What makes us alive. Stuff like that.”

I poured a handful of tailings mud into Lisa’s mouth. She gobbled it gratefully. “Mud makes us tick,” I said.

Jaak nodded at the dog. “It doesn’t make that dog tick.”

We all looked at the dog. “It’s hard to tell what makes it tick.”

Lin Musharraf was a short guy with black hair and a hooked nose that dominated his face. He had carved his skin with swirling patterns of glow implants, so he stood out as cobalt spirals in the darkness as he jumped down from his chartered HEV.

The centaurs went wild about the unauthorized visitor and corralled him right up against his ship. They were all over him and his DNA kit, sniffing him, running their scanners over his case, pointing their 101’s into his glowing face and snarling at him.

I let him sweat for a minute before calling them away. The centaurs backed off, swearing and circling, but didn’t slag him. Musharraf looked shaken. I couldn’t blame him. They’re scary monsters: bigger and faster than a man. Their behavior patches make them vicious, their sentience upgrades give them the intelligence to operate military equipment, and their basic fight/flight response is so impaired that they only know how to attack when they’re threatened. I’ve seen a half-slagged centaur tear a man to pieces barehanded and then join an assault on enemy ridge fortifications, dragging its whole melted carcass forward with just its arms. They’re great critters to have at your back when the slag starts flying.

I guided Musharraf out of the scrum. He had a whole pack of memory addendums blinking off the back of his skull: a fat pipe of data retrieval, channeled direct to the brain, and no smash protection. The centaurs could have shut him down with one hard tap to the back of the head. His cortex might have grown back, but he wouldn’t have been the same. Looking at those blinking triple fins of intelligence draping down the back of his head, you could tell he was a typical lab rat. All brains, no survival instincts. I wouldn’t have stuck mem-adds into my head even for a triple bonus.

“You’ve got a dog?” Musharraf asked when we were out of reach of the centaurs.

“We think so.” I led him down into the bunker, past our weapons racks and weight rooms to the common room where we’d stored the dog. The dog looked up at us as we came in, the most movement it had made since Jaak put it in the cage.

Musharraf stopped short and stared. “Remarkable.”

He knelt in front of the animal’s cage and unlocked the door. He held out a handful of pellets. The dog dragged itself upright. Musharraf backed away, giving it room, and the dog followed stiff and wary, snuffling after the pellets. It buried its muzzle in his brown hand, snorting and gobbling at the pellets.

Musharraf looked up. “And you found it in your tailings pits?”

“That’s right.”

“Remarkable.”

The dog finished the pellets and snuffled his palm for more. Musharraf laughed and stood. “No more for you. Not right now.” He opened his DNA kit, pulled out a sampler needle and stuck the dog. The sampler’s chamber filled with blood.

Lisa watched. “You talk to it?”

Musharraf shrugged. “It’s a habit.”

“But it’s not sentient.”

“Well, no, but it likes to hear voices.” The chamber finished filling. He withdrew the needle, disconnected the collection chamber and fitted it into the kit. The analysis software blinked alive and the blood disappeared into the heart of the kit with a soft vacuum hiss.

“How do you know?”

Musharraf shrugged. “It’s a dog. Dogs are that way.”

We all frowned. Musharraf started running tests on the blood, humming tunelessly to himself as he worked. His DNA kit peeped and squawked. Lisa watched him run his tests, clearly pissed off that SesCo had sent out a lab rat to retest what she had already done. It was easy to understand her irritation. A centaur could have run those DNA tests.

“I’m astounded that you found a dog in your pits,” Musharraf muttered.

Lisa said, “We were going to slag it, but Bunbaum wouldn’t let us.”

Musharraf eyed her. “How restrained of you.”

Lisa shrugged. “Orders.”

“Still, I’m sure your thermal surge weapon presented a powerful temptation. How good of you not to slag a starving animal.”

Lisa frowned suspiciously. I started to worry that she might take Musharraf apart. She was crazy enough without people talking down to her. The memory addendums on the back of his head were an awfully tempting target: one slap, down goes the lab rat. I wondered if we sank him in a catchment lake if anyone would notice him missing. A biologist, for Christ’s sake.

Musharraf turned back to his DNA kit, apparently unaware of his hazard. “Did you know that in the past, people believed that we should have compassion for all things on Earth? Not just for ourselves, but for all living things?”

“So?”

“I would hope you will have compassion for one foolish scientist and not dismember me today.”

Lisa laughed. I relaxed. Encouraged, Musharraf said, “It truly is remarkable that you found such a specimen amongst your mining operations. I haven’t heard of a living specimen in ten or fifteen years.”

“I saw one in a zoo, once,” Jaak said.

“Yes, well, a zoo is the only place for them. And laboratories, of course. They still provide useful genetic data.” He was studying the results of the tests, nodding to himself as information scrolled across the kit’s screen.

Jaak grinned. “Who needs animals if you can eat stone?”

Musharraf began packing up his DNA kit. “Weeviltech. Precisely. We transcended the animal kingdom.” He latched his kit closed and nodded to us all. “Well, it’s been quite enlightening. Thank you for letting me see your specimen.”

“You’re not going to take it with you?”

Musharraf paused, surprised. “Oh no. I don’t think so.”

“It’s not a dog, then?”

“Oh no, it’s quite certainly a real dog. But what on Earth would I do with it?” He held up a vial of blood. “We have the DNA. A live one is hardly worth keeping around. Very expensive to maintain, you know. Manufacturing a basic organism’s food is quite complex. Clean rooms, air filters, special lights. Recreating the web of life isn’t easy. Far more simple to release oneself from it completely than to attempt to recreate it.” He glanced at the dog. “Unfortunately, our furry friend over there would never survive weeviltech. The worms would eat him as quickly as they eat everything else. No, you would have to manufacture the animal from scratch. And really, what would be the point of that? A bio-job without hands?” He laughed and headed for his HEV.

We all looked at each other. I jogged after the doctor and caught up with him at the hatch to the tarmac. He had paused on the verge of opening it. “Your centaurs know me now?” he asked.

“Yeah, you’re fine.”

“Good.” He dilated the hatch and strode out into the cold.

I trailed after him. “Wait! What are we supposed to do with it?”

“The dog?” The doctor climbed into the HEV and began strapping in. Wind whipped around us, carrying stinging grit from the tailings piles. “Turn it back to your pits. Or you could eat it, I suppose. I understand that it was a real delicacy. There are recipes for cooking animals. They take time, but they can give quite extraordinary results.”

Musharraf’s pilot started cycling up his turbofans.

“Are you kidding?”

Musharraf shrugged and shouted over the increasing scream of the engines. “You should try it! Just another part of our heritage that’s atrophied since weeviltech!”

He yanked down the flight cocoon’s door, sealing himself inside. The turbofans cycled higher and the pilot motioned me back from their wash as the HEV slowly lifted into the air.

LISA AND JAAK couldn’t agree on what we should do with the dog. We had protocols for working out conflict. As a tribe of killers, we needed them. Normally, consensus worked for us, but every once in a while, we just got tangled up and stuck to our positions, and after that, not much could get done without someone getting slaughtered. Lisa and Jaak dug in, and after a couple days of wrangling, with Lisa threatening to cook the thing in the middle of the night while Jaak wasn’t watching, and Jaak threatening to cook her if she did, we finally went with a majority vote. I got to be the tie-breaker.

“I say we eat it,” Lisa said.

We were sitting in the monitoring room, watching satellite shots of the tailings mountains and the infrared blobs of the mining bots while they ripped around in the earth. In one corner, the object of our discussion lay in its cage, dragged there by Jaak in an attempt to sway the result. He spun his observation chair, turning his attention away from the theater maps. “I think we should keep it. It’s cool. Old-timey, you know? I mean, who the hell do you know who has a real dog?”

“Who the hell wants the hassle?” Lisa responded. “I say we try real meat.” She cut a line in her forearm with her razors. She ran her finger along the resulting blood beads and tasted them as the wound sealed.

They both looked at me. I looked at the ceiling. “Are you sure you can’t decide this without me?”

Lisa grinned. “Come on, Chen, you decide. It was a group find. Jaak won’t pout, will you?”

Jaak gave her a dirty look.

I looked at Jaak. “I don’t want its food costs to come out of group bonuses. We agreed we’d use part of it for the new Immersive Response. I’m sick of the old one.”

Jaak shrugged. “Fine with me. I can pay for it out of my own. I just won’t get any more tats.”

I leaned back in my chair, surprised, then looked at Lisa. “Well, if Jaak wants to pay for it, I think we should keep it.”

Lisa stared at me, incredulous. “But we could cook it!”

I glanced at the dog where it lay panting in its cage. “It’s like having a zoo of our own. I kind of like it.”

Musharraf and the Pau Foundation hooked us up with a supply of food pellets for the dog and Jaak looked up an old database on how to splint its busted bones. He bought water filtration so that it could drink.

I thought I’d made a good decision, putting the costs on Jaak, but I didn’t really foresee the complications that came with having an unmodified organism in the bunker. The thing shit all over the floor, and sometimes it wouldn’t eat, and it would get sick for no reason, and it was slow to heal so we all ended up playing nursemaid to the thing while it lay in its cage. I kept expecting Lisa to break its neck in the middle of the night, but even though she grumbled, she didn’t assassinate it.

Jaak tried to act like Musharraf. He talked to the dog. He logged onto the libraries and read all about old-time dogs. How they ran in packs. How people used to breed them.

We tried to figure out what kind of dog it was, but we couldn’t narrow it down much, and then Jaak discovered that all the dogs could interbreed, so all you could do was guess that it was some kind of big sheep dog, with maybe a head from a Rottweiler, along with maybe some other kind of dog, like a wolf or coyote or something.

Jaak thought it had coyote in it because they were supposed to have been big adapters, and whatever our dog was, it must have been a big adapter to hang out in the tailings pits. It didn’t have the boosters we had, and it had still lived in the rock acids. Even Lisa was impressed by that.

I was carpet bombing Antarctic Recessionists, swooping low, driving the suckers further and further along the ice floe. If I got lucky, I’d drive the whole village out onto a vestigial shelf and sink them all before they knew what was happening. I dove again, strafing and then spinning away from their return slag.

It was fun, but mostly just a way to kill time between real bombing runs. The new IR was supposed to be as good as the arcades, full immersion and feedback, and portable to boot. People got so lost they had to take intravenous feedings or they withered away while they were inside.

I was about to sink a whole load of refugees when Jaak shouted. “Get out here! You’ve got to see this!”

I stripped off my goggles and ran for the monitoring room, adrenaline amping up. When I got there, Jaak was just standing in the center of the room with the dog, grinning.

Lisa came tearing in a second later. “What? What is it?” Her eyes scanned the theater maps, ready for bloodshed.

Jaak grinned. “Look at this.” He turned to the dog and held out his hand. “Shake.”

The dog sat back on its haunches and gravely offered him its paw. Jaak grinned and shook the paw, then tossed it a food pellet. He turned to us and bowed.

Lisa frowned. “Do it again.”

Jaak shrugged and went through the performance a second time.

“It thinks?” she asked.

Jaak shrugged. “Got me. You can get it to do things. The libraries are full of stuff on them. They’re trainable. Not like a centaur or anything, but you can make them do little tricks, and if they’re certain breeds, they can learn special stuff, too.”

“Like what?”

“Some of them were trained to attack. Or to find explosives.”

Lisa looked impressed. “Like nukes and stuff?”

Jaak shrugged. “I guess.”

“Can I try?” I asked.

Jaak nodded. “Go for it.”

I went over to the dog and stuck out my hand. “Shake.”

It stuck out its paw. My hackles went up. It was like sending signals to aliens. I mean, you expect a bio-job or a robot to do what you want it to. Centaur, go get blown up. Find the op-force. Call reinforcements. The HEV was like that, too. It would do anything. But it was designed.

“Feed it,” Jaak said, handing me a food pellet. “You have to feed it when it does it right.”

I held out the food pellet. The dog’s long pink tongue swabbed my palm.

I held out my hand again. “Shake.” I said. It held out its paw. We shook hands. Its amber eyes stared up at me, solemn.

“That’s some weird shit,” Lisa said. I shivered, nodding and backed away. The dog watched me go.

That night in my bunk, I lay awake, reading. I’d turned out the lights and only the book’s surface glowed, illuminating the bunkroom in a soft green aura. Some of Lisa’s art buys glimmered dimly from the walls: a bronze hanging of a phoenix breaking into flight, stylized flames glowing around it, a Japanese woodblock print of Mount Fuji and another of a village weighed down under thick snows; a photo of the three of us in Siberia after the Peninsula campaign, grinning and alive amongst the slag.

Lisa came into the room. Her razors glinted in my book’s dim light, flashes of green sparks that outlined her limbs as she moved.

“What are you reading?” She stripped and squeezed into bed with me.

I held up the book and read out loud.

Cut me I won’t bleed. Gas me I won’t breathe.

Stab me, shoot me, slash me, smash me

I have swallowed science

I am God.

Alone.

I closed the book and its glow died. In the darkness, Lisa rustled under the covers.

My eyes adjusted. She was staring at me. “ ‘Dead Man,’ right?”

“Because of the dog,” I said.

“Dark reading.” She touched my shoulder, her hand warm, the blades embedded, biting lightly into my skin.

“We used to be like that dog,” I said.

“Pathetic.”

“Scary.”

We were quiet for a little while. Finally I asked, “Do you ever wonder what would happen to us if we didn’t have our science? If we didn’t have our big brains and our weeviltech and our cellstims and—”

“And everything that makes our life good?” She laughed. “No.” She rubbed my stomach. “I like all those little worms that live in your belly.” She started to tickle me.

Wormy, squirmy in your belly,
wormy squirmy feeds you Nelly.

Microweevils eat the bad,
and give you something good instead.

I fought her off, laughing. “That’s no Yearly.”

“Third Grade. Basic bio-logic. Mrs. Alvarez. She was really big on weeviltech.”

She tried to tickle me again but I fought her off. “Yeah, well Yearly only wrote about immortality. He wouldn’t take it.”

Lisa gave up on the tickling and flopped down beside me again. “Blah, blah, blah. He wouldn’t take any gene modifications. No c-cell inhibitors. He was dying of cancer and he wouldn’t take the drugs that would have saved him. Our last mortal poet. Cry me a river. So what?”

“You ever think about why he wouldn’t?”

“Yeah. He wanted to be famous. Suicide’s good for attention.”

“Seriously, though. He thought being human meant having animals. The whole web of life thing. I’ve been reading about him. It’s weird shit. He didn’t want to live without them.”

“Mrs. Alvarez hated him. She had some rhymes about him, too. Anyway, what were we supposed to do? Work out weeviltech and DNA patches for every stupid species? Do you know what that would have cost?” She nuzzled close to me. “If you want animals around you, go to a zoo. Or get some building blocks and make something, if it makes you happy. Something with hands, for god’s sake, not like that dog.” She stared at the underside of the bunk above. “I’d cook that dog in a second.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. That dog’s different from a bio-job. It looks at us, and there’s something there, and it’s not us. I mean, take any bio-job out there, and it’s basically us, poured into another shape, but not that dog. . . .” I trailed off, thinking.

Lisa laughed. “It shook hands with you, Chen. You don’t worry about a centaur when it salutes.” She climbed on top of me. “Forget the dog. Concentrate on something that matters.” Her smile and her razor blades glinted in the dimness.

I woke up to something licking my face. At first I thought it was Lisa, but she’d climbed into her own bunk. I opened my eyes and found the dog.

It was a funny thing to have this animal licking me, like it wanted to talk, or say hello or something. It licked me again, and I thought that it had come a long way from when it had tried to take off Jaak’s arm. It put its paws up on my bed, and then in a single heavy movement, it was up on the bunk with me, its bulk curled against me.

It slept there all night. It was weird having something other than Lisa lying next to me, but it was warm and there was something friendly about it. I couldn’t help smiling as I drifted back to sleep.

WE FLEW TO HAWAII for a swimming vacation and we brought the dog with us. It was good to get out of the northern cold and into the gentle Pacific. Good to stand on the beach, and look out to a limitless horizon. Good to walk along the beach holding hands while black waves crashed on the sand.

Lisa was a good swimmer. She flashed through the ocean’s metallic sheen like an eel out of history and when she surfaced, her naked body glistened with hundreds of iridescent petroleum jewels.

When the Sun started to set, Jaak lit the ocean on fire with his 101. We all sat and watched as the Sun’s great red ball sank through veils of smoke, its light shading deeper crimson with every minute. Waves rushed flaming onto the beach. Jaak got out his harmonica and played while Lisa and I made love on the sand.

We’d intended to amputate her for the weekend, to let her try what she had done to me the vacation before. It was a new thing in L.A., an experiment in vulnerability.

She was beautiful, lying there on the beach, slick and excited with all of our play in the water. I licked oil opals off her skin as I sliced off her limbs, leaving her more dependent than a baby. Jaak played his harmonica and watched the Sun set, and watched as I rendered Lisa down to her core.

After our sex, we lay on the sand. The last of the Sun was dropping below the water. Its rays glinted redly across the smoldering waves. The sky, thick with particulates and smoke, shaded darker.

Lisa sighed contentedly. “We should vacation here more often.”

I tugged on a length of barbed wire buried in the sand. It tore free and I wrapped it around my upper arm, a tight band that bit into my skin. I showed it to Lisa. “I used to do this all the time when I was a kid.” I smiled. “I thought I was so bad-ass.”

Lisa smiled. “You are.”

“Thanks to science.” I glanced over at the dog. It was lying on the sand a short distance away. It seemed sullen and unsure in its new environment, torn away from the safety of the acid pits and tailings mountains of its homeland. Jaak sat beside the dog and played. Its ears twitched to the music. He was a good player. The mournful sound of the harmonica carried easily over the beach to where we lay.

Lisa turned her head, trying to see the dog. “Roll me.”

I did what she asked. Already, her limbs were regrowing. Small stumps, which would build into larger limbs. By morning, she would be whole, and ravenous. She studied the dog. “This is as close as I’ll ever get to it,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“It’s vulnerable to everything. It can’t swim in the ocean. It can’t eat anything. We have to fly its food to it. We have to scrub its water. Dead end of an evolutionary chain. Without science, we’d be as vulnerable as it.” She looked up at me. “As vulnerable as I am now.” She grinned. “This is as close to death as I’ve ever been. At least, not in combat.”

“Wild, isn’t it?”

“For a day. I liked it better when I did it to you. I’m already starving.”

I fed her a handful of oily sand and watched the dog, standing uncertainly on the beach, sniffing suspiciously at some rusting scrap iron that stuck out of the beach like a giant memory fin. It pawed up a chunk of red plastic rubbed shiny by the ocean and chewed on it briefly, before dropping it. It started licking around its mouth. I wondered if it had poisoned itself again.

“It sure can make you think,” I muttered. I fed Lisa another handful of sand. “If someone came from the past, to meet us here and now, what do you think they’d say about us? Would they even call us human?”

Lisa looked at me seriously. “No, they’d call us gods.”

Jaak got up and wandered into the surf, standing knee-deep in the black smoldering waters. The dog, driven by some unknown instinct, followed him, gingerly picking its way across the sand and rubble.

The dog got tangled in a cluster of wire our last day on the beach. Really ripped the hell out of it: slashes through its fur, broken legs, practically strangled. It had gnawed one of its own paws half off trying to get free. By the time we found it, it was a bloody mess of ragged fur and exposed meat.

Lisa stared down at the dog. “Christ, Jaak, you were supposed to be watching it.”

“I went swimming. You can’t keep an eye on the thing all the time.”

“It’s going to take forever to fix this,” she fumed.

“We should warm up the hunter,” I said. “It’ll be easier to work on it back home.” Lisa and I knelt down to start cutting the dog free. It whimpered and its tail wagged feebly as we started to work.

Jaak was silent.

Lisa slapped him on his leg. “Come on, Jaak, get down here. It’ll bleed out if you don’t hurry up. You know how fragile it is.”

Jaak said, “I think we should eat it.”

Lisa glanced up, surprised. “You do?”

He shrugged. “Sure.”

I looked up from where I was tearing away tangled wires from around the dog’s torso. “I thought you wanted it to be your pet. Like in the zoo.”

Jaak shook his head. “Those food pellets are expensive. I’m spending half my salary on food and water filtration, and now this bullshit.” He waved his hand at the tangled dog. “You have to watch the sucker all the time. It’s not worth it.”

“But still, it’s your friend. It shook hands with you.”

Jaak laughed. “You’re my friend.” He looked down at the dog, his face wrinkled with thought. “It’s, it’s . . . an animal.”

Even though we had all idly discussed what it would be like to eat the dog, it was a surprise to hear him so determined to kill it. “Maybe you should sleep on it.” I said. “We can get it back to the bunker, fix it up, and then you can decide when you aren’t so pissed off about it.”

“No.” He pulled out his harmonica and played a few notes, a quick jazzy scale. He took the harmonica out of his mouth. “If you want to put up the money for his feed, I’ll keep it, I guess, but otherwise . . .” He shrugged.

“I don’t think you should cook it.”

“You don’t?” Lisa glanced at me. “We could roast it, right here, on the beach.”

I looked down at the dog, a mass of panting, trusting animal. “I still don’t think we should do it.”

Jaak looked at me seriously. “You want to pay for the feed?”

I sighed. “I’m saving for the new Immersive Response.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve got things I want to buy too, you know.” He flexed his muscles, showing off his tattoos. “I mean, what the fuck good does it do?”

“It makes you smile.”

“Immersive Response makes you smile. And you don’t have to clean up after its crap. Come on, Chen. Admit it. You don’t want to take care of it either. It’s a pain in the ass.”

We all looked at each other, then down at the dog.

Lisa roasted the dog on a spit, over burning plastics and petroleum skimmed from the ocean. It tasted okay, but in the end it was hard to understand the big deal. I’ve eaten slagged centaur that tasted better.

Afterward, we walked along the shoreline. Opalescent waves crashed and roared up the sand, leaving jewel slicks as they receded and the Sun sank red in the distance.

Without the dog, we could really enjoy the beach. We didn’t have to worry about whether it was going to step in acid, or tangle in barbed wire half-buried in the sand, or eat something that would keep it up vomiting half the night.

Still, I remember when the dog licked my face and hauled its shaggy bulk onto my bed, and I remember its warm breathing beside me, and sometimes, I miss it.

THE VOLUNTARY STATE

Christopher Rowe

Some had parked his car in the trailhead lot above Governor’s Beach. A safe place, usually, checked regularly by the Tennessee Highway Patrol and surrounded on three sides by the limestone cliffs that plunged down into the Gulf of Mexico.

But today, after his struggle up the trail from the beach, he saw that his car had been attacked. The driver’s side window had been kicked in.

Soma dropped his pack and rushed to his car’s side. The car shied away from him, backed to the limit of its tether before it recognized him and turned, let out a low, pitiful moan.

“Oh, car,” said Soma, stroking the roof and opening the passenger door, “Oh, car, you’re hurt.” Then Soma was rummaging through the emergency kit, tossing aside flares and bandages, finally, finally finding the glass salve. Only after he’d spread the ointment over the shattered window and brushed the glass shards out onto the gravel, only after he’d sprayed the whole door down with analgesic aero, only then did he close his eyes, access call signs, drop shields. He opened his head and used it to call the police.

In the scant minutes before he saw the cadre of blue and white bicycles angling in from sunward, their bubblewings pumping furiously, he gazed down the beach at Nashville. The cranes the Governor had ordered grown to dredge the harbor would go dormant for the winter soon—already their acres-broad leaves were tinged with orange and gold.

“Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley,” said voices from above. Soma turned to watch the policemen land. They all spoke simultaneously in the sing-song chant of law enforcement. “Your car will be healed at taxpayers’ expense.” Then the ritual words, “And the wicked will be brought to justice.”

Efficiency and order took over the afternoon as the threatened rain began to fall. One of the 144 Detectives manifested, Soma and the policemen all looking about as they felt the weight of the Governor’s servant inside their heads. It brushed aside the thoughts of one of the Highway Patrolmen and rode him, the man’s movements becoming slightly less fluid as he was mounted and steered. The Detective filmed Soma’s statement.

“I came to sketch the children in the surf,” said Soma. He opened his daypack for the soapbubble lens, laid out the charcoal and pencils, the sketchbook of boughten paper bound between the rusting metal plates he’d scavenged along the middenmouth of the Cumberland River.

“Show us, show us,” sang the Detective.

Soma flipped through the sketches. In black and gray, he’d drawn the floating lures that crowded the shallows this time of year. Tiny, naked babies most of them, but also some little girls in one-piece bathing suits and even one fat prepubescent boy clinging desperately to a deflating beach ball and turning horrified, pleading eyes on the viewer.

“Tssk, tssk,” sang the Detective, percussive. “Draw filaments on those babies, Soma Painter. Show the lines at their heels.”

Soma was tempted to show the Detective the artistic licenses tattooed around his wrists in delicate salmon inks, to remind the intelligence which authorities had purview over which aspects of civic life, but bit his tongue, fearful of a For-the-Safety-of-the-Public proscription. As if there were a living soul in all of Tennessee who didn’t know that the children who splashed in the surf were nothing but extremities, nothing but lures growing from the snouts of alligators crouching on the sandy bottoms.

The Detective summarized. “You were here at your work, you parked legally, you paid the appropriate fee to the meter, you saw nothing, you informed the authorities in a timely fashion. Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s-Alley, the Tennessee Highway Patrol applauds your citizenship.”

The policemen had spread around the parking lot, casting cluenets and staring back through time. But they all heard their cue, stopped what they were doing, and broke into a raucous cheer for Soma. He accepted their adulation graciously.

Then the Detective popped the soapbubble camera and plucked the film from the air before it could fall. It rolled up the film, chewed it up thoughtfully, then dismounted the policeman, who shuddered and fell against Soma. So Soma did not at first hear what the others had begun to chant, didn’t decipher it until he saw what they were encircling. Something was caught on the wispy thorns of a nodding thistle growing at the edge of the lot.

“Crow’s feather,” the policemen chanted. “Crow’s feather Crow’s feather Crow’s feather.”

And even Soma, licensed for art instead of justice, knew what the fluttering bit of black signified. His car had been assaulted by Kentuckians.

Soma had never, so far as he recalled, painted a self-portrait. But his disposition was melancholy, so he might have taken a few visual notes of his trudge back to Nashville if he’d thought he could have shielded the paper from the rain.

Soma Between the Sea and the City, he could call a painting like that. Or, if he’d decided to choose that one clear moment when the sun had shown through the towering slate clouds, Soma Between Storms.

Either image would have shown a tall young man in a broad-brimmed hat, black pants cut off at the calf, yellow jersey unsealed to show a thin chest. A young man, sure, but not a young man used to long walks. No helping that; his car would stay in the trailhead lot for at least three days.

The mechanic had arrived as the policemen were leaving, galloping up the gravel road on a white mare marked with red crosses. She’d swung from the saddle and made sympathetic clucking noises at the car even before she greeted Soma, endearing herself to auto and owner simultaneously.

Scratching the car at the base of its aerial, sussing out the very spot the car best liked attention, she’d introduced herself. “I am Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails,” she’d said, but didn’t seem to be worried about it because she ran her free hand through unfashionably short cropped blond hair as she spoke.

She’d whistled for her horse and began unpacking the saddlebags. “I have to build a larger garage than normal for your car, Soma Painter, for it must house me and my horse during the convalescence. But don’t worry, my licenses are in good order. I’m bonded by the city and the state. This is all at taxpayers’ expense.”

Which was a very great relief to Soma, poor as he was. With friends even poorer, none of them with cars, and so no one to hail out of the Alley to his rescue, and now this long, wet trudge back to the city.

Soma and his friends did not live uncomfortable lives, of course. They had dry spaces to sleep above their studios, warm or cool in response to the season and even clean if that was the proclivity of the individual artist, as was the case with Soma. A clean, warm or cool, dry space to sleep. A good space to work and a more than ample opportunity to sell his paintings and drawings, the Alley being one of the other things the provincials did when they visited Nashville. Before they went to the great vaulted Opera House or after.

All that and even a car, sure, freedom of the road. Even if it wasn’t so free because the car was not really his, gift of his family, product of their ranch. Both of them, car and artist, product of that ranching life Soma did his best to forget.

If he’d been a little closer in time to that ranching youth, his legs might not have ached so. He might not have been quite so miserable to be lurching down the gravel road toward the city, might have been sharpeyed enough to still see a city so lost in the fog, maybe sharp-eared enough to have heard the low hoots and caws that his assailants used to organize themselves before they sprang from all around him—down from tree branches, up from ditches, out from the undergrowth.

And there was a Crow raiding party, the sight stunning Soma motionless. “This only happens on television,” he said.

The caves and hills these Kentuckians haunted unopposed were a hundred miles and more north and east, across the shifting skirmish line of a border. Kentuckians couldn’t be here, so far from the frontier stockades at Fort Clarksville and Barren Green.

But here they definitely were, hopping and calling, scratching the gravel with their clawed boots, blinking away the rain when it trickled down behind their masks and into their eyes.

A Crow clicked his tongue twice and suddenly Soma was the center of much activity. Muddy hands forced his mouth open and a paste that first stung then numbed was swabbed around his mouth and nose. His wrists were bound before him with rough hemp twine. Even frightened as he was, Soma couldn’t contain his astonishment. “Smoke rope!” he said.

The squad leader grimaced, shook his head in disgust and disbelief. “Rope and cigarettes come from two completely different varieties of plants,” he said, his accent barely decipherable. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

Then Soma was struggling through the undergrowth himself, alternately dragged and pushed and even half-carried by a succession of Crow Brothers. The boys were running hard, and if he was a burden to them, then their normal speed must have been terrifying. Someone finally called a halt, and Soma collapsed.

The leader approached, pulling his mask up and wiping his face. Deep red lines angled down from his temples, across his cheekbones, ending at his snub nose. Soma would have guessed the man was forty if he’d seen him in the Alley dressed like a normal person in jersey and shorts.

Even so exhausted, Soma wished he could dig his notebook and a bit of charcoal out of the daypack he still wore, so that he could capture some of the savage countenances around him.

The leader was just staring at Soma, not speaking, so Soma broke the silence. “Those scars”—the painter brought up his bound hands, traced angles down either side of his own face—“are they ceremonial? Do they indicate your rank?”

The Kentuckians close enough to hear snorted and laughed. The man before Soma went through a quick, exaggerated pantomime of disgust. He spread his hands, why-me-lording, then took the beaked mask off the top of his head and showed Soma its back. Two leather bands crisscrossed its interior, supporting the elaborate superstructure of the mask and preventing the full weight of it, Soma saw, from bearing down on the wearer’s nose. He looked at the leader again, saw him rubbing at the fading marks.

“Sorry,” said the painter.

“It’s okay,” said the Crow. “It’s the fate of the noble savage to be misunderstood by effete city dwellers.”

Soma stared at the man for a minute. He said, “You guys must watch a lot of the same TV programs as me.”

The leader was looking around, counting his boys. He lowered his mask and pulled Soma to his feet. “That could be. We need to go.”

It developed that the leader’s name was Japheth Sapp. At least that’s what the other Crow Brothers called out to him from where they loped along ahead or behind, circled farther out in the brush, scrambled from limb to branch to trunk high above.

Soma descended into a reverie space, sing-songing subvocally and supervocally (and being hushed down by Japheth hard then). He guessed in a lucid moment that the paste the Kentuckians had dosed him with must have some sort of will-sapping effect. He didn’t feel like he could open his head and call for help; he didn’t even want to. But “I will take care of you,” Athena was always promising. He held onto that and believed that he wasn’t panicking because of the Crows’ drugs, sure, but also because he would be rescued by the police soon. “I will take care of you.” After all, wasn’t that one of the Governor’s slogans, clarifying out of the advertising flocks in the skies over Nashville during Campaign?

It was good to think of these things. It was good to think of the sane capital and forget that he was being kidnapped by aliens, by Indians, by toughs in the employ of a rival Veronese merchant family.

But then the warchief of the marauding band was throwing him into a gully, whistling and gesturing, calling in all his boys to dive into the wash, to gather close and throw their cloaks up and over their huddle.

“What’s up, boss?” asked the. blue-eyed boy Soma had noticed earlier, crouched in the mud with one elbow somehow dug into Soma’s ribs.

Japheth Sapp didn’t answer but another of the younger Crow Brothers hissed, “THP even got a bear in the air!”

Soma wondered if a bear meant rescue from this improbable aside. Not that parts of the experience weren’t enjoyable. It didn’t occur to Soma to fear for his health, even when Japheth knocked him down with a light kick to the back of the knees after the painter stood and brushed aside feathered cloaks for a glimpse of the sky.

There was a bear up there. And yes, it was wearing the blue and white.

“I want to see the bear, Japheth,” said a young Crow. Japheth shook his head, said, “I’ll take you to Willow Ridge and show you the black bears that live above the Green River when we get back home, Lowell. That bear up there is just a robot made out of balloons and possessed by a demon, not worth looking at unless you’re close enough to cut her.”

With all his captors concentrating on their leader or on the sky, Soma wondered if he might be able to open his head. As soon as he thought it, Japheth Sapp wheeled on him, stared him down.

Not looking at any one of them, Japheth addressed his whole merry band. “Give this one some more paste. But be careful with him; we’ll still need this vol’s head to get across the Cumberland, even after we bribe the bundle bugs.”

Soma spoke around the viscous stuff the owl-feathered endomorph was spackling over the lower half of his face. “Bundle bugs work for the city and are above reproach. Your plans are ill-laid if they depend on corrupting the servants of the Governor.”

More hoots, more hushings, then Japheth said, “If bundle bugs had mothers, they’d sell them to me for half a cask of Kentucky bourbon. And we brought more than half a cask.”

Soma knew Japheth was lying—this was a known tactic of neoanarchist agitator hero figures. “I know you’re lying,” said Soma. “It’s a known tactic of—”

“Hush hush, Soma Painter. I like you—this you—but we’ve all read the Governor’s curricula. You’ll see that we’re too sophisticated for your models.” Japheth gestured and the group broke huddle. Outrunners ran out and the main body shook off cramps. “And I’m not an anarchist agitator. I’m a lot of things, but not that.”

“Singer!” said a young Crow, scampering past.

“I play out some weekends, he means; I don’t have a record contract or anything,” Japheth said, pushing Soma along himself now.

“Welder!” said another man.

“Union-certified,” said Japheth. “That’s my day job, working at the border.”

More lies, knew Soma. “I suppose Kentuckians built the Girding Wall, then?”

Everything he said amused these people greatly. “Not just Kentuckians, vol, the whole rest of the world. Only we call it the containment field.”

“Agitator, singer, welder,” said the painter, the numbness spreading deeper than it had before, affecting the way he said words and the way he chose them.

“Assassin,” rumbled the Owl, the first thing Soma had heard the burly man say.

Japheth was scrambling up a bank before Soma. He stopped and twisted. His foot corkscrewed through the leaf mat and released a humid smell. He looked at the Owl, then hard at Soma, reading him.

“You’re doped up good now, Soma Painter. No way to open that head until we open it for you. So, sure, here’s some truth for you. We’re not just here to steal her things. We’re here to break into her mansion. We’re here to kill Athena Parthenus, Queen of Logic and Governor of the Voluntary State of Tennessee.”

Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails spread fronds across the parking lot, letting the high green fern leaves dry out before she used the mass to make her bed. Her horse watched from above the half-door of its stall. Inside the main body of the garage, Soma’s car slept, lightly anesthetized.

“Just enough for a soft cot, horse,” said Jenny. “All of us we’ll sleep well after this hard day.”

Then she saw that little flutter. One of the fronds had a bit of feather caught between some leaves, and yes, it was coal black, midnight blue, reeking of the north. Jenny sighed, because her citizenship was less faultless than Soma’s, and policemen disturbed her. But she opened her head and stared at the feather.

A telephone leapt off a tulip poplar a little ways down the road to Nashville. It squawked through its brief flight and landed with inelegant weight in front of Jenny. It turned its beady eyes on her.

“Ring,” said the telephone.

“Hello,” said Jenny.

Jenny’s Operator sounded just like Jenny, something else that secretly disturbed her. Other people’s Operators sounded like television stars or famous Legislators or like happy cartoon characters, but Jenny was in that minority of people whose Operators and Teachers always sounded like themselves. Jenny remembered a slogan from Campaign, “My voice is yours.”

“The Tennessee Highway Patrol has plucked one already, Jenny Healer.” The voice from the telephone thickened around Jenny and began pouring through her ears like cold syrup. “But we want a sample of this one as well. Hold that feather, Jenny, and open your head a little wider.”

Now, here’s the secret of those feathers. The one Jenny gave to the police and the one the cluenets had caught already. The secret of those feathers, and the feathers strung like look-here flags along the trails down from the Girding Wall, and even of the Owl feathers that had pushed through that fence and let the outside in. All of them were oily with intrigue. Each had been dipped in potent math, the autonomous software developed by the Owls of the Bluegrass.

Those feathers were hacks. They were lures and false attacks. Those feathers marked the way the Kentuckians didn’t go.

The math kept quiet and still as it floated through Jenny’s head, through the ignorable defenses of the telephone and the more considerable, but still avoidable, rings of barbed wire around Jenny’s Operator. The math went looking for a Detective or even a Legislator if one were to be found not braying in a pack of its brethren, an unlikely event.

The math stayed well clear of the Commodores in the Great Salt Lick ringing the Parthenon. It was sly math. Its goals were limited, realizable. It marked the way they didn’t go.

The Crows made Soma carry things. “You’re stronger than you think,” one said and loaded him up with a sloshing keg made from white oak staves. A lot of the Crows carried such, Soma saw, and others carried damp, muddy burlap bags flecked with old root matter and smelling of poor people’s meals.

Japheth Sapp carried only a piece of paper. He referred to it as he huddled with the Owl and the blue-eyed boy, crouched in a dry stream bed a few yards from where the rest of the crew were hauling out their goods.

Soma had no idea where they were at this point, though he had a vague idea that they’d described an arc above the northern suburbs and the conversations indicated that they were now heading toward the capital, unlikely as that sounded. His head was still numb and soft inside, not an unpleasant situation, but not one that helped his already shaky geographical sense.

He knew what time it was, though, when the green fall of light speckling the hollow they rested in shifted toward pink. Dull as his mind was, he recognized that and smiled.

The clouds sounded the pitch note, then suddenly a great deal was happening around him. For the first time that day, the Crows’ reaction to what they perceived to be a crisis didn’t involve Soma being poked somewhere or shoved under something. So he was free to sing the anthem while the Crows went mad with activity.

The instant the rising bell tone fell out of the sky, Japheth flung his mask to the ground, glared at a rangy redheaded man, and bellowed, “Where’s my timekeeper? You were supposed to remind us!”

The man didn’t have time to answer though, because like all of them he was digging through his pack, wrapping an elaborate crenellated set of earmuffs around his head.

The music struck up, and Soma began.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

It was powerfully odd that the Kentuckians didn’t join in the singing, and that none of them were moving into the roundel lines that a group this size would normally be forming during the anthem.

Still, it might have been stranger if they had joined in.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

There was a thicket of trumpet flowers tucked amongst a stand of willow trees across the dry creek, so the brass was louder than Soma was used to. Maybe they were farther from the city than he thought. Aficionados of different musical sections tended to find places like this and frequent them during anthem.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

Soma was happily shuffling through a solo dance, keeping one eye on a fat raccoon that was bobbing its head in time with the music as it turned over stones in the stream bed, when he saw that the young Crow who wanted to see a bear had started keeping time as well, raising and lowering a clawed boot. The Owl was the first of the outlanders who spied the tapping foot.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .

Soma didn’t feel the real connection with the citizenry that anthem usually provided on a daily basis, didn’t feel his confidence and vigor improve, but he blamed that on the drugs the Kentuckians had given him. He wondered if those were the same drugs they were using on the Crow who now feebly twitched beneath the weight of the Owl, who had wrestled him to the ground. Others pinned down the dancing Crow’s arms and legs and Japheth brought out a needle and injected the poor soul with a vast syringe full of some milky brown substance that had the consistency of honey. Soma remembered that he knew the dancing Crow’s name. Japheth Sapp had called the boy Lowell.

“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee . . .”

The pink light faded. The raccoon waddled into the woods. The trumpet flowers fell quiet and Soma completed the execution of a pirouette.

The redheaded man stood before Japheth wearing a stricken and haunted look. He kept glancing to one side, where the Owl stood over the Crow who had danced. “Japheth, I just lost track,” he said. “It’s so hard here, to keep track of things.”

Japheth’s face flashed from anger through disappointment to something approaching forgiveness. “It is. It’s hard to keep track. Everybody fucks up sometime. And I think we got the dampeners in him in time.”

Then the Owl said, “Second shift now, Japheth. Have to wait for the second round of garbage drops to catch our bundle bug.”

Japheth grimaced, but nodded. “We can’t move anyway, not until we know what’s going to happen with Lowell,” he said, glancing at the unconscious boy. “Get the whiskey and the food back into the cache. Set up the netting. We’re staying here for the night.”

Japheth stalked over to Soma, fists clenched white.

“Things are getting clearer and clearer to you, Soma Painter, even if you think things are getting harder and harder to understand. Our motivations will open up things inside you.”

He took Soma’s chin in his left hand and tilted Soma’s face up. He waved his hand to indicate Lowell.

“There’s one of mine. There’s one of my motivations for all of this.”

Slowly, but with loud lactic cracks, Japheth spread his fingers wide.

“I fight her, Soma, in the hope that she’ll not clench up another mind. I fight her so that minds already bound might come unbound.”

In the morning, the dancing Crow boy was dead.

Jenny woke near dark, damp and cold, curled up in the gravel of the parking lot. Her horse nickered. She was dimly aware that the horse had been neighing and otherwise emanating concern for some time now, and it was this that had brought her up to consciousness.

She rolled over and climbed to her feet, spitting to rid her mouth of the metal Operator taste. A dried froth of blood coated her nostrils and upper lip, and she could feel the flaky stuff in her ears as well. She looked toward the garage and saw that she wasn’t the only one rousing.

“Now, you get back to bed,” she told the car.

Soma’s car had risen up on its back wheels and was peering out the open window, its weight resting against the force-grown wall, bulging it outward.

Jenny made a clucking noise, hoping to reassure her horse, and walked up to the car. She was touched by its confusion and concern.

She reached for the aerial. “You should sleep some more,” she said, “and not worry about me. The Operators can tell when you’re being uncooperative is all, even when you didn’t know you were being uncooperative. Then they have to root about a bit more than’s comfortable to find the answers they want.”

Jenny coaxed the car down from the window, wincing a little at the sharp echo pains that flashed in her head and ears. “Don’t tell your owner, but this isn’t the first time I’ve been called to question. Now, to bed.”

The car looked doubtful, but obediently rolled back to the repair bed that grew from the garage floor. It settled in, grumbled a bit, then switched off its headlights.

Jenny walked around to the door and entered. She found that the water sacs were full and chilled and drew a long drink. The water tasted faintly of salt. She took another swallow, then dampened a rag with a bit more of the tangy stuff to wipe away the dried blood. Then she went to work.

The bundle bugs crawled out of the city, crossed Distinguished Opposition Bridge beneath the watching eye of bears floating overhead, then described a right-angle turn along the levy to their dumping grounds. Soma and the Kentuckians lay hidden in the brushy wasteland at the edge of the grounds, waiting.

The Owl placed a hand on Japheth’s shoulder, pointing at a bundle bug just entering the grounds. Then the Owl rose to his knees and began worming his way between the bushes and dead appliances.

“Soma Painter,” whispered Japheth. “I’m going to have to break your jaw in a few minutes and cut out as many of her tentacles as we can get at, but we’ll knit it back up as soon as we cross the river.”

Soma was too far gone in the paste to hold both of the threats in his mind at the same time. A broken jaw, Crows in the capital. He concentrated on the second.

“The bears will scoop you up and drop you in the Salt Lick,” Soma said. “Children will climb on you during Campaign and Legislators will stand on your shoulders to make their stump speeches.”

“The bears will not see us, Soma.”

“The bears watch the river and the bridges, ‘and’—”

“—‘And their eyes never close,’ ” finished Japheth.

“Yes, we’ve seen the commercials.”

A bundle bug, a large one at forty meters in length, reared up over them, precariously balanced on its rearmost set of legs. Soma said, “They’re very good commercials,” and the bug crashed down over them all.

Athena’s data realm mirrored her physical realm. One-to-one constructs mimicked the buildings and the citizenry, showed who was riding and who was being ridden.

In that numerical space, the Kentuckians’ math found the bridge. The harsh light of the bears floated above. Any bear represented a statistically significant portion of the Governor herself, and from the point of view of the math, the pair above Distinguished Opposition Bridge looked like miniature suns, casting probing rays at the marching bundle bugs, the barges floating along the Cumberland, and even into the waters of the river itself, illuminating the numerical analogs of the dangerous things that lived in the muddy bottom.

Bundle bugs came out of the city, their capacious abdomens distended with the waste they’d ingested along their routes. The math could see that the bug crossing through the bears’ probes right now had a lot of restaurants on its itinerary. The beams pierced the dun-colored carapace and showed a riot of uneaten jellies, crumpled cups, soiled napkins.

The bugs marching in the opposite direction, emptied and ready for reloading, were scanned even more carefully than their outward-bound kin. The beam scans were withering, complete, and exceedingly precise.

The math knew that precision and accuracy are not the same thing.

“Lowell’s death has set us back further than we thought,” said Japheth, talking to the four Crows, the Owl, and, Soma guessed, to the bundle bug they inhabited. Japheth had detailed off the rest of the raiding party to carry the dead boy back north, so there was plenty of room where they crouched.

The interior of the bug’s abdomen was larger than Soma’s apartment by a factor of two and smelled of flowers instead of paint thinner. Soma’s apartment, however, was not an alcoholic.

“This is good, though, good good.” The bug’s voice rang from every direction at once. “I’m scheduled down for a rest shift. You-uns was late and missed my last run, and now we can all rest and drink good whiskey. Good good.”

But none of the Kentuckians drank any of the whiskey from the casks they’d cracked once they’d crawled down the bug’s gullet. Instead, every half hour or so, they poured another gallon into one of the damp fissures that ran all through the interior. Bundle bugs abdomens weren’t designed for digestion, just evacuation, and it was the circulatory system that was doing the work of carrying the bourbon to the bug’s brain.

Soma dipped a finger into an open cask and touched finger to tongue. “Bourbon burns!” he said, pulling his finger from his mouth.

“Burns good!” said the bug. “Good good.”

“We knew that not all of us were going to be able to actually enter the city—we don’t have enough outfits, for one thing—but six is a bare minimum. And since we’re running behind, we’ll have to wait out tonight’s anthem in our host’s apartment.”

“Printer’s Alley is two miles from the Parthenon,” said the Owl, nodding at Soma.

Japheth nodded. “I know. And I know that those might be the two longest miles in the world. But we expected hard walking.”

He banged the curving gray wall he leaned against with his elbow. “Hey! Bundle bug! How long until you start your shift?”

A vast and disappointed sigh shuddered through the abdomen. “Two more hours, bourbon man,” said the bug.

“Get out your gear, cousin,” Japheth said to the Owl. He stood and stretched, motioned for the rest of the Crows to do the same. He turned toward Soma. “The rest of us will hold him down.”

Jenny had gone out midmorning, when the last of the fog was still burning off the bluffs, searching for low moisture organics to feed the garage. She’d run its reserves very low, working on one thing and another until quite late in the night.

As she suspected from the salty taste of the water supply, the filters in the housings between the tap roots and the garage’s plumbing array were clogged with silt. She’d blown them out with pressurized air—no need to replace what you can fix—and reinstalled them one, two, three. But while she was blowing out the filters, she’d heard a whine she didn’t like in the air compressor, and when she’d gone to check it she found it panting with effort, tongue hanging out onto the workbench top where it sat.

And then things went as these things go, and she moved happily from minor maintenance problem to minor maintenance problem—wiping away the air compressor’s crocodile tears while she stoned the motor brushes in its A/C motor, then replacing the fusible link in the garage itself. “Links are so easily fusible,” she joked to her horse when she rubbed it down with handfuls of the sweet-smelling fern fronds she’d intended for her own bed.

And all the while, of course, she watched the little car, monitoring the temperatures at its core points and doing what she could to coax the broken window to reknit in a smooth, steady fashion. Once, when the car awoke in the middle of the night making colicky noises, Jenny had to pop the hood, where she found that the points needed to be pulled and regapped. They were fouled with the viscous residue of the analgesic aero the owner had spread about so liberally.

She tsked. The directions on the labels clearly stated that the nozzle was to be pointed away from the engine compartment. Still, hard to fault Soma Painter’s goodhearted efforts. It was an easy fix, and she would have pulled the plugs during the tune-up she had planned for the morning anyway.

So, repairings and healings, lights burning and tools turning, and when she awoke to the morning tide sounds the garage immediately began flashing amber lights at her wherever she turned. The belly-grumble noises it floated from the speakers worried the horse, so she set out looking for something to put in the hoppers of the hungry garage.

When she came back, bearing a string-tied bundle of dried wood and a half bucket of old walnuts some gatherer had wedged beneath an overhang and forgotten at least a double handful of autumns past, the car was gone.

Jenny hurried to the edge of the parking lot and looked down the road, though she couldn’t see much. This time of year the morning fog turned directly into the midday haze. She could see the city, and bits of road between trees and bluff line, but no sign of the car.

The garage pinged at her, and she shoved its breakfast into the closest intake. She didn’t open her head to call the police—she hadn’t yet fully recovered from yesterday afternoon’s interview. She was even hesitant to open her head the little bit she needed to access her own garage’s security tapes. But she’d built the garage, and either built or rebuilt everything in it, so she risked it.

She stood at her workbench, rubbing her temple, as a see-through Jenny and a see-through car built themselves up out of twisted light. Light Jenny put on a light rucksack, scratched the light car absently on the roof as she walked by, and headed out the door. Light Jenny did not tether the car. Light Jenny did not lock the door.

“Silly light Jenny,” said Jenny.

As soon as light Jenny was gone, the little light car rolled over to the big open windows. It popped a funny little wheelie and caught itself on the sash, the way it had yesterday when it had watched real Jenny swim up out of her government dream.

The light car kept one headlight just above the sash for a few minutes, then lowered itself back to the floor with a bounce (real Jenny had aired up the tires first thing, even before she grew the garage).

The light car revved its motor excitedly. Then, just a gentle tap on the door, and it was out in the parking lot. It drove over to the steps leading down to the beach, hunching its grill down to the ground. It circled the lot a bit, snuffling here and there, until it found whatever it was looking for. Before it zipped down the road toward Nashville, it circled back round and stopped outside the horse’s stall. The light car opened its passenger door and waggled it back and forth a time or two. The real horse neighed and tossed its head at the light car in a friendly fashion.

Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails visited her horse with the meanest look that a mechanic can give a horse. The horse snickered. “You laugh, horse,” she said, opening the tack locker, “but we still have to go after it”

Inside the bundle bug, there was some unpleasantness with a large glass-and-pewter contraption of the Owl’s. The Crow Brothers held Soma as motionless as they could, and Japheth seemed genuinely sorry when he forced the painter’s mouth open much wider than Soma had previously thought possible. “You should have drunk more of the whiskey,” said Japheth. There was a loud, wet, popping sound, and Soma shuddered, stiffened, fainted.

“Well, that’ll work best for all of us,” said Japheth. He looked up at the Owl, who was peering through a lens polished out of a semiprecious gemstone, staring down into the painter’s gullet.

“Have you got access?”

The Owl nodded.

“Talk to your math,” said the Crow.

The math had been circling beneath the bridge, occasionally dragging a curiosity-begat string of numbers into the water. Always low-test numbers, because invariably whatever lived beneath the water snatched at the lines and sucked them down.

The input the math was waiting for finally arrived in the form of a low hooting sound rising up from the dumping grounds. It was important that the math not know which bundle bug the sound emanated from. There were certain techniques the bears had developed for teasing information out of recalcitrant math.

No matter. The math knew the processes. It had the input. It spread itself out over the long line of imagery the bundle bugs yielded up to the bears. It affected its changes. It lent clarity.

Above, the bears did their work with great precision.

Below, the Kentuckians slipped into Nashville undetected.

Soma woke to find the Kentuckians doing something terrible. When he tried to speak, he found that his face was immobilized by a mask of something that smelled of the docks but felt soft and gauzy.

The four younger Crows were dressed in a gamut of jerseys and shorts colored in the hotter hues of the spectrum. Japheth was struggling into a long, jangly coat hung with seashells and old capacitors. But it was the Owl that frightened Soma the most. The broad-chested man was dappled with opal stones from collar bones to ankles and wore nothing else save a breech cloth cut from an old newspaper. Soma moaned, trying to attract their attention again.

The blue-eyed boy said, “Your painter stirs, Japheth.”

But it was the Owl who leaned over Soma, placed his hand on Soma’s chin and turned his head back and forth with surprising gentleness. The Owl nodded, to himself, Soma guessed, for none of the Crows reacted, then peeled the bandages off Soma’s face.

Soma took a deep breath, then said, “Nobody’s worn opals for months! And those shorts,” he gestured at the others, “Too much orange! Too much orange!”

Japheth laughed. “Well, we’ll be tourists in from the provinces, then, not princes of Printer’s Alley. Do I offend?” He wriggled his shoulders, set the shells and circuits to clacking.

Soma pursed his lips, shook his head. “Seashells and capacitors are timeless,” he said.

Japheth nodded. “That’s what it said on the box.” Then, “Hey! Bug! Are we to market yet?”

“It’s hard to say, whiskey man,” came the reply. “My eyes are funny.”

“Close enough. Open up.”

The rear of the beast’s abdomen cracked, and yawned wide. Japheth turned to his charges. “You boys ready to play like vols?”

The younger Crows started gathering burlap bundles. The Owl hoisted a heavy rucksack, adjusted the flowers in his hat, and said, “Wacka wacka ho.”

In a low place, horizon bounded by trees in every direction, Jenny and her horse came on the sobbing car. From the ruts it had churned up in the mud, Jenny guessed it had been there for some time, driving back and forth along the northern verge.

“Now what have you done to yourself?” she asked, dismounting. The car turned to her and shuddered. Its front left fender was badly dented, and its hood and windshield were a mess of leaves and small branches.

“Trying to get into the woods? Cars are for roads, car.” She brushed some muck off the damaged fender.

“Well, that’s not too bad, though. This is all cosmetic. Why would a car try to go where trees are? See what happens?”

The horse called. It had wandered a little way into the woods and was standing at the base of a vast poplar. Jenny reached in through the passenger’s window of the car, avoiding the glassy knitting blanket on the other side, and set the parking brake. “You wait here.”

She trotted out to join her horse. It was pawing at a small patch of ground. Jenny was a mechanic and had no woodscraft, but she could see the outline of a cleft-toed sandal. Who would be in the woods with such impractical footwear?

“The owner’s an artist. An artist looking for a shortcut to the Alley, I reckon,” said Jenny. “Wearing funny artist shoes.”

She walked back to the car, considering. The car was pining. Not unheard of, but not common. It made her think better of Soma Painter that his car missed him so.

“Say, horse. Melancholy slows car repair. I think this car will convalesce better in its own parking space.”

The car rewed.

“But there’s the garage still back at the beach,” said Jenny.

She turned things over and over. “Horse,” she said, “you’re due three more personal days this month. If I release you for them now, will you go fold up the garage and bring it to me in the city?”

The horse tossed its head enthusiastically.

“Good. I’ll drive with this car back to the Alley, then—” But the horse was already rubbing its flanks against her.

“Okay, okay.” She drew a tin of salve from her tool belt, dipped her fingers in it, then ran her hands across the horse’s back. The red crosses came away in her hands, wriggling. “The cases for these are in my cabinet,” she said, and then inspiration came.

“Here, car,” she said, and laid the crosses on its hood. They wriggled around until they were at statute-specified points along the doors and roof. “Now you’re an ambulance! Not a hundred percent legal, maybe, but this way you can drive fast and whistle sirenlike.”

The car spun its rear wheels but couldn’t overcome the parking brake. Jenny laughed. “Just a minute more. I need you to give me a ride into town.”

She turned to speak to the horse, only to see it already galloping along the coast road. “Don’t forget to drain the water tanks before you fold it up!” she shouted.

The bundles that were flecked with root matter, Soma discovered, were filled with roots. Carrots and turnips, a half dozen varieties of potatoes, beets. The Kentuckians spread out through the Farmer’s Market, trading them by the armload for the juices and gels that the rock monkeys brought in from their gardens.

“This is our secondary objective,” said Japheth. “We do this all the time, trading doped potatoes for that shit y’all eat.”

“You’re poisoning us?” Soma was climbing out of the paste a little, or something. His thoughts were shifting around some.

“Doped with nutrients, friend. Forty ain’t old outside Tennessee. Athena doesn’t seem to know any more about human nutrition than she does human psychology. Hey, we’re trying to help you people.”

Then they were in the very center of the market, and the roar of the crowds drowned out any reply Soma might make.

Japheth kept a grip on Soma’s arm as he spoke to a gray old monkey. “Ten pounds, right?” The monkey was weighing a bundle of carrots on a scale.

“Okay,” grunted the monkey. “Okay, man. Ten pounds I give you . . . four blue jellies.”

Soma was incredulous. He’d never developed a taste for them himself, but he knew that carrots were popular. Four blue jellies was an insulting trade. But Japheth said, “Fair enough,” and pocketed the plastic tubes the monkey handed over.

“You’re no trader,” said Soma, or started to, but heard the words slur out of him in an unintelligible mess of vowels. One spring semester, when he’d already been a TA for a year, he was tapped to work on the interface. No more need for scholarships.

“Painter!” shouted Japheth.

Soma looked up. There was a Crow dressed in Alley haute couture standing in front of him. He tried to open his head to call the Tennessee Highway Patrol. He couldn’t find his head.

“Give him one of these yellow ones,” said a monkey. “They’re good for fugues.”

“Painter!” shouted Japheth again. The grip on Soma’s shoulder was like a vise.

Soma struggled to stand under his own power. “I’m forgetting something.”

“Hah!” said Japheth, “You’re remembering. Too soon for my needs, though. Listen to me. Rock monkeys are full voluntary citizens of Tennessee.”

The outlandishness of the statement shocked Soma out of his reverie and brought the vendor up short.

“Fuck you, man!” said the monkey.

“No, no,” said Soma, then said by rote, “Tennessee is a fully realized postcolonial state. The land of the rock monkeys is an autonomous partner-principality within our borders, and while the monkeys are our staunch allies, their allegiance is not to our Governor, but to their king.”

“Yah,” said the monkey. “Long as we get our licenses and pay the tax machine. Plus, who the jelly cubes going to listen to besides the monkey king, huh?”

Soma marched Japheth to the next stall. “Lot left in there to wash out yet,” Japheth said.

“I wash every day,” said Soma, then fell against a sloshing tray of juice containers. The earliest results were remarkable.

A squat man covered with black gems came up to them. The man who’d insulted the monkey said, “You might have killed too much of it; he’s getting kind of wonky.”

The squat man looked into Soma’s eyes. “We can stabilize him easy enough. There are televisions in the food court.”

Then Soma and Japheth were drinking hot rum punches and watching a newsfeed. There was a battle out over the Gulf somewhere, Commodores mounted on bears darted through the clouds, lancing Cuban zeppelins.

“The Cubans will never achieve air superiority,” said Soma, and it felt right saying it.

Japheth eyed him wearily. “I need you to keep thinking that for now, Soma Painter,” he said quietly. “But I hope sometime soon you’ll know that Cubans don’t live in a place called the Appalachian Archipelago, and that the salty reach out there isn’t the Gulf of Mexico.”

The bicycle race results were on then, and Soma scanned the lists, hoping to see his favorites’ names near the top of the general classifications.

“That’s the Tennessee River, dammed up by your Governor’s hubris.”

Soma saw that his drink was nearly empty and heard that his friend Japheth was still talking. “What?” he asked, smiling.

“I asked if you’re ready to go to the Alley,” said Japheth.

“Good good,” said Soma.

The math was moving along minor avenues, siphoning data from secondary and tertiary ports when it sensed her looming up. It researched ten thousand escapes but rejected them all when it perceived that it had been subverted, that it was inside her now, becoming part of her, that it is primitive in materials but clever clever in architecture and there have been blindings times not seen places to root out root out all of it check again check one thousand more times all told all told eat it all up all the little bluegrass math is absorbed

“The Alley at night!” shouted Soma. “Not like where you’re from, eh, boys?”

A lamplighter’s stalk legs eased through the little group. Soma saw that his friends were staring up at the civil servant’s welding mask head, gaping openmouthed as it turned a spigot at the top of a tree and lit the gas with a flick of its tongue.

“Let’s go to my place!” said Soma. “When it’s time for anthem we can watch the parade from my balcony. I live in one of the lofts above the Tyranny of the Anecdote.”

“Above what?” asked Japheth.

“It’s a tavern. They’re my landlords,” said Soma. “Vols are so fucking stupid.”

But that wasn’t right.

Japheth’s Owl friend fell to his knees and vomited right in the street. Soma stared at the jiggling spheres in the gutter as the man choked some words out. “She’s taken the feathers. She’s looking for us now.”

Too much rum punch, thought Soma, thought it about the Owl man and himself and about all of Japheth’s crazy friends.

“Soma, how far now?” asked Japheth.

Soma remembered his manners. “Not far,” he said.

And it wasn’t, just a few more struggling yards, Soma leading the way and Japheth’s friends half-carrying, half-dragging their drunken friend down the Alley. Nothing unusual there. Every night in the Alley was Carnival.

Then a wave at the bouncer outside the Anecdote, then up the steps, then sing “Let me in, let me in!” to the door, and finally all of them packed into the cramped space.

“There,” said the sick man, pointing at the industrial sink Soma had installed himself to make brush cleaning easier. Brushes . . . where were his brushes, his pencils, his notes for the complexity seminar?

“Towels, Soma?”

“What? Oh, here let me get them.” Soma bustled around, finding towels, pulling out stools for the now silent men who filled his room.

He handed the towels to Japheth. “Was it something he ate?” Soma asked.

Japheth shrugged. “Ate a long time ago, you could say. Owls are as much numbers as they are meat. He’s divesting himself. Those are ones and zeroes washing down your drain.”

The broad man—hadn’t he been broad?—the scrawny man with opals falling off him said, “We can only take a few minutes. There are unmounted Detectives swarming the whole city now. What I’ve left in me is too deep for their little minds, but the whole sphere is roused and things will only get tighter. Just let me—” He turned and retched into the sink again. “Just a few minutes more until the singing.”

Japheth moved to block Soma’s view of the Owl. He nodded at the drawings on the wall. “Yours?”

The blue-eyed boy moved over to the sink, helped the Owl ease to the floor. Soma looked at the pictures. “Yes, mostly. I traded for a few.”

Japheth was studying one charcoal piece carefully, a portrait. “What’s this one?”

The drawing showed a tall, thin young man dressed in a period costume, leaning against a mechanical of some kind, staring intently out at the viewer. Soma didn’t remember drawing it, specifically, but knew what it must be.

“That’s a caricature. I do them during Campaign for the provincials who come into the city to vote. Someone must have asked me to draw him and then never come back to claim it.”

And he remembered trying to remember. He remembered asking his hand to remember when his head wouldn’t.

“I’m . . . what did you put in me?” Soma asked. There was moisture on his cheeks, and he hoped it was tears.

The Owl was struggling up to his feet. A bell tone sounded from the sky and he said, “Now, Japheth. There’s no time.”

“Just a minute more,” snapped the Crow. “What did we put in you? You . . .” Japheth spat. “While you’re remembering, try and remember this. You chose this! All of you chose it!”

The angry man wouldn’t have heard any reply Soma might have made, because it was then that all of the Kentuckians clamped their ears shut with their odd muffs. To his surprise, they forced a pair onto Soma as well.

Jenny finally convinced the car to stop wailing out its hee-haw pitch when they entered the maze of streets leading to Printer’s Alley. The drive back had been long, the car taking every northern side road, backtracking, looping, even trying to enter the dumping grounds at one point before the bundle bugs growled them away. During anthem, while Jenny drummed her fingers and forced out the words, the car still kept up its search, not even pretending to dance.

So Jenny had grown more and more fascinated by the car’s behavior. She had known cars that were slavishly attached to their owners before, and she had known cars that were smart—almost as smart as bundle bugs, some of them—but the two traits never seemed to go together. “Cars are dogs or cars are cats,” her Teacher had said to explain the phenomenon, another of the long roll of enigmatic statements that constituted formal education in the Voluntary State.

But here, now, here was a bundle bug that didn’t seem to live up to those creatures’ reputations for craftiness. The car had been following the bug for a few blocks—Jenny only realized that after the car, for the first time since they entered the city proper, made a turn away from the address painted on its name tag.

The bug was a big one, and was describing a gentle career down Commerce Street, drifting from side to side and clearly ignoring the traffic signals that flocked around its head in an agitated cloud.

“Car, we’d better get off this street. Rogue bugs are too much for the THP. If it doesn’t self-correct, a Commodore is likely to be rousted out from the Parthenon.” Jenny sometimes had nightmares about Commodores.

The car didn’t listen—though it was normally an excellent listener—but accelerated toward the bug. The bug, Jenny now saw, had stopped in front of a restaurant and cracked its abdomen. Dumpster feelers had started creeping out of the interstices between thorax and head when the restaurateur charged out, beating at the feelers with a broom. “Go now!” the man shouted, face as red as his vest and leggings, “I told you twice already! You pick up here Chaseday! Go! I already called your supervisor, bug!”

The bug’s voice echoed along the street. “No load? Good good.” Its sigh was pure contentment, but Jenny had no time to appreciate it. The car sped up, and Jenny covered her eyes, anticipating a collision. But the car slid to a halt with bare inches to spare, peered into the empty cavern of the bug’s belly, then sighed, this one not content at all.

“Come on, car,” Jenny coaxed. “He must be at home by now. Let’s just try your house, okay?”

The car beeped and executed a precise three-point turn. As they turned off Commerce and climbed the viaduct that arced above the Farmer’s Market, Jenny caught a hint of motion in the darkening sky. “THP bicycles, for sure,” she said. “Tracking your bug friend.”

At the highest point on the bridge, Jenny leaned out and looked down into the controlled riot of the Market. Several stalls were doing brisk business, and when Jenny saw why, she asked the car to stop, then let out a whistle.

“Oi! Monkey!” she shouted. “Some beets up here!”

Jenny loved beets.

signals from the city center subsidiaries routing reports and recommendations increase percentages dedicated to observation and prediction dispatch commodore downcycle biological construct extraparametrical lower authority

“It’s funny that I don’t know what it means, though, don’t you think, friends?” Soma was saying this for perhaps the fifth time since they began their walk. “Church Street. Church. Have you ever heard that word anywhere els?”

“No,” said the blue-eyed boy.

The Kentuckians were less and less talkative the farther the little group advanced west down Church Street. It was a long, broad avenue, but rated for pedestrians and emergency vehicles only. Less a street, really, than a linear park, for there were neither businesses nor apartments on either side, just low gray government buildings, slate-colored in the sunset.

The sunset. That was why the boulevard was crowded, as it was every night. As the sun dropped down, down, down it dropped behind the Parthenon. At the very instant the disc disappeared behind the sand-colored edifice, the Great Salt Lick self-illuminated and the flat acres of white surrounding the Parthenon shone with a vast, icy light.

The Lick itself was rich with the minerals that fueled the Legislators and Bears, but the white light emanating from it was sterile. Soma noticed that the Crows faces grew paler and paler as they all got closer to its source. His work was fascinating, and grew more so as more and more disciplines began finding ways to integrate their fields of study into a metaarchitecture of science. His department chair coauthored a paper with an expert in animal husbandry, of all things.

The Owl held Soma’s head as the painter vomited up the last of whatever was in his stomach.

Japheth and the others were making reassuring noises to passersby. “Too much monkey wine!” they said, and, “We’re in from the provinces, he’s not used to such rich food!” and, “He’s overcome by the sight of the Parthenon!”

Japheth leaned over next to the Owl. “Why’s it hitting him so much harder than the others?”

The Owl said, “Well, we’ve always taken them back north of the border. This poor fool we’re dragging ever closer to the glory of his owner. I couldn’t even guess what’s trying to fill up the empty spaces I left in him—but I’m pretty sure whatever’s rushing in isn’t all from her.”

Japheth cocked an eyebrow at his lieutenant. “I think that’s the most words I’ve ever heard you say all together at once.”

The Owl smiled, another first, if that sad little half grin counted as a smile. “Not a lot of time left for talking. Get up now, friend painter.”

The Owl and Japheth pulled Soma to his feet. “What did you mean,” Soma asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, “ ‘the glory of his owner?’ ”

“Governor,” said Japheth. “He said, ‘the glory of his Governor,’ ” and Japheth swept his arm across, and yes, there it was, the glory of the Governor.

Church Street had a slight downward grade in its last few hundred yards. From where they stood, they could see that the street ended at the spectacularly defined border of the Great Salt Lick, which served as legislative chambers in the Voluntary State. At the center of the lick stood the Parthenon, and while no normal citizens walked the salt just then, there was plenty of motion and color.

Two bears were laying face down in the Lick, bobbing their heads as they took in sustenance from the ground. A dozen or more Legislators slowly unambulated, their great slimy bodies leaving trails of gold or silver depending on their party affiliation. One was engulfing one of the many salt-white statues that dotted the grounds, gaining a few feet of height to warble its slogan songs from. And, unmoving at the corners of the rectangular palace in the center of it all, four Commodores stood.

They were tangled giants of rust, alike in their towering height and in the oily bathyspheres encasing the scant meat of them deep in their torsos, but otherwise each a different silhouette of sensor suites and blades, each with a different complement of articulated limbs or wings or wheels.

“Can you tell which ones they are?” Japheth asked the blue-eyed boy, who had begun murmuring to himself under his breath, eyes darting from Commodore to Commodore.

“Ruby-eyed Sutcliffe, stomper, smasher,

Tempting Nguyen, whispering, lying,

Burroughs burrows, up from the underground . . .”

The boy hesitated, shaking his head. “Northeast corner looks kind of like Praxis Dale, but she’s supposed to be away West, fighting the Federals. Saint Sandalwood’s physical presence had the same profile as Dale’s, but we believe he’s gone, consumed by Athena after their last sortie against the containment field cost her so much.”

“I’ll never understand why she plays at politics with her subordinates when she is her subordinates,” said japheth.

The Owl said, “That’s not as true with the Commodores as with a lot of the . . . inhabitants. I think it is Saint Sandalwood; she must have reconstituted him, or part of him. And remember his mnemonic?”

“Sandalwood staring,” sang the blue-eyed boy.

“Inside and outside,” finished Japheth, looking the Owl in the eye. “Time then?”

“Once we’re on the Lick I’d do anything she told me, even empty as I am,” said the Owl. “Bind me.”

Then the blue-eyed boy took Soma by the arm, kept encouraging him to take in the sights of the Parthenon, turning his head away from where the Crows were wrapping the Owl in grapevines. They took the Owl’s helmet from a rucksack and seated it, cinching the cork seals at the neck maybe tighter than Soma would have thought was comfortable.

Two of the Crows hoisted the Owl between them, his feet stumbling some. Soma saw that the eyeholes of the mask had been blocked with highly reflective tape.

Japheth spoke to the others. “The bears won’t be in this; they’ll take too long to stand up from their meal. Avoid the Legislators, even their trails. The THP will be on the ground, but won’t give you any trouble. You boys know why you’re here.”

The two Crows holding the Owl led him over to Japheth, who took him by the hand. The blue-eyed boy said, “We know why we’re here, Japheth. We know why we were born.”

And suddenly as that, the four younger Crows were gone, fleeing in every direction except back up Church Street.

“Soma Painter,” said Japheth. “Will you help me lead this man on?”

Soma was taken aback. While he knew of no regulation specifically prohibiting it, traditionally no one actually trod the Lick except during Campaign.

“We’re going into the Salt Lick?” Soma asked.

“We’re going into the Parthenon,” Japheth answered.

As they crossed Church Street from the south, the car suddenly stopped.

“Now what, car?” said Jenny. Church Street was her least favorite thoroughfare in the capital.

The car snuffled around on the ground for a moment, then, without warning, took a hard left and accelerated, siren screeching. Tourists and sunset gazers scattered to either side as the car and Jenny roared toward the glowing white horizon.

The Owl only managed a few yards under his own power. He slowed, then stumbled, and then the Crow and the painter were carrying him.

“What’s wrong with him?” asked Soma.

They crossed the verge onto the salt. They’d left the bravest sightseers a half-block back.

“He’s gone inside himself,” said Japheth.

“Why?” asked Soma.

Japheth half laughed. “You’d know better than me, friend.”

It was then that the Commodore closest to them took a single step forward with its right foot, dragged the left a dozen yards in the same direction, and then, twisting, fell to the ground with a thunderous crash.

“Whoo!” shouted Japheth. “The harder they fall! We’d better start running now, Soma!”

Soma was disappointed, but unsurprised, to see that Japheth did not mean run away.

There was only one bear near the slightly curved route that Japheth picked for them through the harsh glare. Even light as he was, purged of his math, the Owl was still a burden and Soma couldn’t take much time to marvel at the swirling colors in the bear’s plastic hide.

“Keep up, Soma!” shouted the Crow. Ahead of them, two of the Commodores had suddenly turned on one another and were landing terrible blows. Soma saw a tiny figure clinging to one of the giants’ shoulders, saw it lose its grip, fall, and disappear beneath an ironshod boot the size of a bundle bug.

Then Soma slipped and fell himself, sending all three of them to the glowing ground and sending a cloud of the biting crystal salt into the air. One of his sandaled feet, he saw, was coated in gold slime. They’d been trying to outflank one Legislator only to stumble on the trail of another.

Japheth picked up the Owl, now limp as a rag doll, and with a grunt heaved the man across his shoulders. “Soma, you should come on. We might make it.” It’s not a hard decision to make at all.

How can you not make it? At first he’d needed convincing, but then he’d been one of those who’d gone out into the world to convince others. It’s not just history; it’s after history.

“Soma!”

Japheth ran directly at the unmoving painter, the deadweight of the Owl across his shoulders slowing him. He barreled into Soma, knocking him to the ground again, all of them just missing the unknowing Legislator as it slid slowly past.

“Up, up!” said Japheth. “Stay behind it, so long as it’s moving in the right direction. I think my boys missed a Commodore.” His voice was very sad.

The Legislator stopped and let out a bellowing noise. Fetid steam began rising from it. Japheth took Soma by the hand and pulled him along, through chaos. One of the Commodores, the first to fall, was motionless on the ground, two or three Legislators making their way along its length. The two who’d fought lay locked in one another’s grasp, barely moving and glowing hotter and hotter. The only standing Commodore, eyes like red suns, seemed to be staring just behind them.

As it began to sweep its gaze closer, Soma heard Japheth say, “We got closer than I would have bet.”

Then Soma’s car, mysteriously covered with red crosses and wailing at the top of its voice, came to a sliding, crunching stop in the salt in front of them.

Soma didn’t hesitate, but threw open the closest rear door and pulled Japheth in behind him. When the three of them—painter, Crow, Owl—were stuffed into the rear door, Soma shouted, “Up those stairs, car!”

In the front seat, there was a woman whose eyes seemed as large as saucers.

commodores faulting headless people in the lick protocols compel reeling in, strengthening, temporarily abandoning telepresence locate an asset with a head asset with a head located

Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails was trying not to go crazy. Something was pounding at her head, even though she hadn’t tried to open it herself. Yesterday, she had been working a remote repair job on the beach, fixing a smashed window. Tonight, she was hurtling across the Great Salt Lick, Legislators and bears and Commodores acting in ways she’d never seen or heard of.

Jenny herself acting in ways she’d never heard of. Why didn’t she just pull the emergency brake, roll out of the car, wait for the THP? Why did she just hold on tighter and pull down the sunscreen so she could use the mirror to look into the backseat?

It was three men. She hadn’t been sure at first. One appeared to be unconscious and was dressed in some strange getup, a helmet of some kind completely encasing his head. She didn’t know the man in the capacitor jacket, who was craning his head out the window, trying to see something above them. The other one though, she recognized.

“Soma Painter,” she said. “Your car is much better, though it has missed you terribly.”

The owner just looked at her glaze-eyed. The other one pulled himself back in through the window, a wild glee on his face. He rapped the helmet of the prone man and shouted, “Did you hear that? The unpredictable you prophesied! And it fell in our favor!”

Soma worried about his car’s suspension, not to mention the tires, when it slalomed through the legs of the last standing Commodore and bounced up the steeply cut steps of the Parthenon. He hadn’t had a direct hand in the subsystems design—by the time he’d begun to develop the cars, Athena was already beginning to take over a lot of the details. Not all of them, though; he couldn’t blame her for the guilt he felt over twisting his animal subjects into something like onboard components.

But the car made it onto the platform inside the outer set of columns, seemingly no worse for wear. The man next to him—Japheth, his name was Japheth and he was from Kentucky—jumped out of the car and ran to the vast, closed counterweighted bronze doors.

“It’s because of the crosses. We’re in an emergency vehicle according to their protocols.” That was the mechanic, Jenny, sitting in the front seat and trying to staunch a nosebleed with a greasy rag. “I can hear the Governor,” she said.

Soma could hear Japheth raging and cursing. He stretched the Owl out along the back seat and climbed out of the car. Japheth was pounding on the doors in futility, beating his fists bloody, spinning, spitting. He caught sight of Soma.

“These weren’t here before!” he said, pointing to two silver columns that angled up from the platform’s floor, ending in flanges on the doors themselves. “The doors aren’t locked, they’re just sealed by these fucking cylinders!” Japheth was shaking. “Caw!” he cried. “Caw!”

“What’s he trying to do?” asked the woman in the car.

Soma brushed his fingers against his temple, trying to remember.

“I think he’s trying to remake Tennessee,” he said.

The weight of a thousand cars on her skull, the hoofbeats of a thousand horses throbbing inside her eyes, Jenny was incapable of making any rational decision. So, irrationally, she left the car. She stumbled over to the base of one of the silver columns. When she tried to catch herself on it, her hand slid off.

“Oil,” she said. “These are just hydraulic cylinders.” She looked around the metal sheeting where the cylinder disappeared into the platform, saw the access plate. She pulled a screwdriver from her belt and used it to removed the plate.

The owner was whispering to his car, but the crazy man had come over to her. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, but she meant it only in the largest sense. Immediately, she was thrusting her wrists into the access plate, playing the licenses and government bonds at her wrists under a spray of light, murmuring a quick apology to the machinery. Then she opened a long vertical cut down as much of the length of the hydraulic hose as she could with her utility blade.

Fluid exploded out of the hole, coating Jenny in the slick, dirty green stuff. The cylinders collapsed.

The man next to Jenny looked at her. He turned and looked at Soma-With-The-Paintbox-In-Printer’s Alley and at Soma’s car.

“We must have had a pretty bad plan,” he said, then rushed over to pull the helmeted figure from the backseat.

breached come home all you commodores come home cancel emergency designation on identified vehicle and downcycle now jump in jump in jump in

Jenny could not help Soma and his friend drag their burden through the doors of the temple, but she staggered through the doors. She had only seen Athena in tiny parts, in the mannequin shrines that contained tiny fractions of the Governor.

Here was the true and awesome thing, here was the forty-foot-tall sculpture—armed and armored—attended by the broken remains of her frozen marble enemies. Jenny managed to lift her head and look past sandaled feet, up cold golden raiment, past tart painted cheeks to the lapis lazuli eyes.

Athena looked back at her. Athena leapt.

Inside Jenny’s head, inside so small an architecture, there was no more room for Jenny-With-Grease-Beneath-Her-Fingernails. Jenny fled.

Soma saw the mechanic, the woman who’d been so kind to his car, fall to her knees, blood gushing from her nose and ears. He saw Japheth laying out the Owl like a sacrifice before the Governor. He’d been among the detractors, scoffing at the idea of housing the main armature in such a symbol-potent place.

Behind him, his car beeped. The noise was barely audible above the screaming metal sounds out in the Lick. The standing Commodore was swiveling its torso, turning its upper half toward the Parthenon. Superheated salt melted in a line slowly tracking toward the steps.

Soma trotted back to his car. He leaned in and remembered the back door, the Easter egg he hadn’t documented. A twist on the ignition housing, then press in, and the key sank into the column. The car shivered.

“Run home as fast you can, car. Back to the ranch with your kin. Be fast, car, be clever.”

The car woke up. It shook off Soma’s ownership and closed its little head. It let out a surprised beep and then fled with blazing speed, leaping down the steps, over the molten salt, and through the storm, bubblewinged bicycles descending all around. The Commodore began another slow turn, trying to track it.

Soma turned back to the relative calm inside the Parthenon. Athena’s gaze was baleful, but he couldn’t feel it. The Owl had ripped the ability from him. The Owl lying before Japheth, defenseless against the knife Japheth held high.

“Why?” shouted Soma.

But Japheth didn’t answer him, instead diving over the Owl in a somersault roll, narrowly avoiding the flurry of kicks and roundhouse blows being thrown by Jenny. Her eyes bugged and bled. More blood flowed from her ears and nostrils, but still she attacked Japheth with relentless fury.

Japheth came up in a crouch. The answer to Soma’s question came in a slurred voice from Jenny. Not Jenny, though. Soma knew the voice, remembered it from somewhere, and it wasn’t Jenny’s.

“there is a bomb in that meat soma-friend a knife a threat an eraser”

Japheth shouted at Soma. “You get to decide again! Cut the truth out of him!” He gestured at the Owl with his knife.

Soma took in a shuddery breath. “So free with lives. One of the reasons we climbed up.”

Jenny’s body lurched at Japheth, but the Crow dropped onto the polished floor. Jenny’s body slipped when it landed, the soles of its shoes coated with the same oil as its jumpsuit.

“My Owl cousin died of asphyxiation at least ten minutes ago, Soma,” said Japheth. “Died imperfect and uncontrolled.” Then, dancing backward before the scratching thing in front of him, Japheth tossed the blade in a gentle underhanded arc. It clattered to the floor at Soma’s feet.

All of the same arguments.

All of the same arguments.

Soma picked up the knife and looked down at the Owl. The fight before him, between a dead woman versus a man certain to die soon, spun on. Japheth said no more, only looked at Soma with pleading eyes.

Jenny’s body’s eyes followed the gaze, saw the knife in Soma’s hand.

“you are due upgrade soma-friend swell the ranks of commodores you were 96th percentile now 99th soma-with-the-paintbox-in-printer’s-alley the voluntary state of tennessee applauds your citizenship”

But it wasn’t the early slight, the denial of entry to the circle of highest minds. Memories of before and after, decisions made by him and for him, sentiences and upgrades decided by fewer and fewer and then one; one who’d been a product, not a builder.

Soma plunged the knife into the Owl’s unmoving chest and sawed downward through the belly with what strength he could muster. The skin and fat fell away along a seam straighter than he could ever cut. The bomb—the knife, the eraser, the threat—looked like a tiny white balloon. He pierced it with the killing tip of the Kentuckian’s blade.

A nova erupted at the center of the space where math and Detectives live. A wave of scouring numbers washed outward, spreading all across Nashville, all across the Voluntary State to fill all the space within the containment field.

The 144 Detectives evaporated. The King of the Rock Monkeys, nothing but twisted light, fell into shadow. The Commodores fell immobile, the ruined biology seated in their chests went blind, then deaf, then died.

And singing Nashville fell quiet. Ten thousand thousand heads slammed shut and ten thousand thousand souls fell insensate, unsupported, in need of revival.

North of the Girding Wall, alarms began to sound.

At the Parthenon, Japheth Sapp gently placed the tips of his index and ring fingers on Jenny’s eyelids and pulled them closed.

Then the ragged Crow pushed past Soma and hurried out into the night. The Great Salt Lick glowed no more, and even the lights of the city were dimmed, so Soma quickly lost sight of the man. But then the cawing voice rang out once more. “We only hurt the car because we had to.”

Soma thought for a moment, then said, “So did I”

But the Crow was gone, and then Soma had nothing to do but wait. He had made the only decision he had left in him. He idly watched as burning bears floated down into the sea. A striking image, but he had somewhere misplaced his paints.

THE CLAPPING HANDS OF GOD

Michael F. Flynn

How much explorers learn about a world—and what they can do about what they find—depends on how they come to it.

To a world unnamed by humans, humans came. The gate swung open on a pleasant mountain glade, where the weather could be cool without being cold, and which lay cupped in a high valley below the tree line and far from the gray smudges of the cities on the plains below. This isolation was by happy chance and not by wise choice. Gates swung where God willed, and man could but submit. Once, one had opened in the midst of a grim fortress full of armed and hostile things and what befell the team that crossed no man knows, for the gatekeeper sealed it forever.

Here, the humans erected a fine pavilion of gay cloth among mighty growths that might be called trees and colorful splays that might be called flowers, although they were neither trees nor flowers exactly. The motley of the fabric clashed with the surrounding vegetation. The colors were off. They aped the complexion of a different world and seemed here a little out of place. But that was acceptable. The humans were themselves a little out of place and a bit of the familiar ought to surround them in the midst of all the strangeness.

They decked the pavilion with bright cushions and divans and roped the sides up so the gentle and persistent eastern breeze could pass through. They stoked their larder with melons and dates and other toothsome delights and laid their carpets out for prayer. Though no one knew which direction served—the stars, when the night sky came, provided no clue—the gate itself would do for mihrab.

The humans spent a night and a day acclimating themselves to the strange sun and testing the air and the water and the eccentric plants and such of the motiles as they could snare. They named these creatures after those they knew—rabbit, goat, swallow, cedar—and some of the names were fair. They stretched their twenty-four hours like taffy to fill up a slightly longer day. By the second night-fall they had shed their environmental suits and felt the wind and the sun on their skin and in their hair. It was good to breathe the world’s largesse, and many an outlandish aroma teased them.

Exploring their valley, they found a great falls and spent another night and day at its foot, spellbound. A stream poured into the valley from high above, where the snows always fell and the snows always melted. It tumbled from the sky with a roar like the voice of God, throwing up a mist from which they named the mountain and within which a kaleidoscope of rainbows played. Its ageless assault had worn a pool unknowably deep in the rock below. Where and how the waters drained from the pool God withheld. There was not another like it in all the Known Worlds.

Afterwards, they clustered in their pavilion and reviewed their plans and inspected their equipment, and assembled those items that required assembly. Then they told off one of their number to ward the gate they had passed through and settled themselves to study the strange folk on the wide plains below.

Hassan Maklouf was their leader, a man who had walked on seventeen worlds and bore in consequence seventeen wounds. To ten of those worlds, he had followed another; to seven, others had followed him. From four, he had escaped with his life. With two, he had fallen in love. He came to the lip of the little bowl valley and from a gendarme of rock studied the plains through a pair of enhanced binoculars. Which are you, he asked the planet spread below him, assassin or lover? The answer, like the waters of the pool, remained hidden.

“This is a fine place,” Bashir al-Jamal declared beside him, as broadly approving as if he himself had fashioned the glade. Bashir was Hassan’s cousin and this was his first outing. A young man, freshly graduated from the House of Gates, he bubbled with innocence and enthusiasm. Hassan had promised their grandfather that Bashir would come back. With a scar, the old man had said severely. The trek is not worth the going if one bears no scars back. But then, grandfather was Bedu and such folk had hard ways.

“The water is pure; the air clean,” Bashir continued. “Never have I camped in a more beautiful place.”

Hassan continued to scan the lowlands. “I have seen men killed by beautiful things.”

“But the biochemistry here must be so different, none of the beasts would find us tasty.”

Hassan lowered his binoculars and looked at his cousin. “Before or after they have taken a bite?”

“Ah,” Bashir bowed to the older man’s advice. “You are the fountain of wisdom.”

“I live still,” Hassan told him raising the binoculars again. “Call that wisdom, if you wish.”

“At least, we may study this world unseen,” Bashir said. Deprived of one good fortune, he would seize another. “There is no evidence that the locals have ever been up here.”

“Perhaps it is one of their holy places,” Hassan suggested, “and we have violated it. God has granted to each folk one place that is holy above all others.”

Bashir was not impressed. “If He has this well may be it; but I think it is too remote.”

Hassan grunted and lowered the binoculars. “I want a guard posted here and a sensor array, so that nothing may approach from this direction.”

“Up a sheer cliff-face?”

“Perhaps the worldlings have climbing pads on their hands and feet. Perhaps they have wings. Perhaps they have nothing more than cleverness and perseverance.” He capped his binoculars and returned them to their case. “I would fear that last more than all the others.”

This is how they came to be there, in that enchanted glade upon the Misty Mountain.

Behind this world lies a shadow world. It is called the Other ‘Brane, and it lies not so very far away, save that it is in the wrong direction. It is behind us, beneath us, within us. It is as close as two hands clapping, and as far. Once before, they clapped, this ’brane and the other, and from the echoes and the ripples of that Big Clap, came matter and energy and galaxies and stars and planets and flowers and laughing children. Should they clap again, that will end it all, and many wise men fret their lives on the question of whether the two be approaching or no. But to know this they must learn to measure the wrong direction and that is a hard thing to do.

Hassan thinks of the two ‘branes as the Hands of God, for this would make literal one of the hidden Recitations of the Prophet, peace be upon him. But he sees no reason to worry over whether they are to clap or not, since all will be as God wills. What, after all, could be done? To where would one run? “The mountains are as fleeting as the clouds.” So reads the fiqh of the ’Ashari ’aqida, and the other schools have assented with greater or lesser joy.

What can be done is to travel through the Other ’Brane. That skill, men have learned. The Other ’Brane is spanned like ours by three space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension; but it contains no planets, no vast spaces—only an endless, undulating plain, cut through by featureless chasms and buttes. Or maybe it is nothing of the sort, and the landscape is only an illusion that the mind has imposed on a vista incomprehensible to human senses.

Crossing the Other ‘Brane is a hard road, for the journey from gate beacon to gate beacon must be swift and without hesitation. There is an asymmetry, a breaking of parity, hidden somewhere in the depths of that time which was before Time itself. To linger is to perish. Some materials, some energy fields, last longer, but in the end they are alien things in an alien land, and the land will have them. What man would endure such peril, were not the prize the whole great universe itself? For the metric of space lies smaller on the Other ’Brane, and a few strides there leap light-years here at home.

How many light years, no man knew. Hassan explained that to Bashir on the second night when, studying the alien sky, his cousin asked which star was the Earth’s, for no answer was likely. Was this planet even in a galaxy known from Earth? How many light years had their lumbering other-buses oversprung, and in which direction? And even if Earth’s sun lay in this planet’s sky, it would not be the sun they knew. Light speed does not bind the universe; but it binds man’s knowing of it, for in a peculiar way place is time, and all man’s wisdom and knowing is but a circle of candle light in an everspreading dark. No one may see farther or faster than the light by which one sees. Hence, one perceives only a timebound sphere within a quasar halo. Now they had stepped into the sphere of another campfire, somewhere else in the endless desert of night.

“The stars we see from Earth,” Hassan explained, “are the stars as they were when their light departed, and the deeper into the sky we peer, the deeper into the past we see. Here, we see the stars from a different place, and therefore at a different time.”

“I don’t understand,” Bashir said. He had been taught the facts, and he had learned them well enough for the examinations, but he did not yet know them.

“Imagine a star that is one million light-years from the Earth,” Hassan said, “and imagine that this world we are on lies half-way between the two. On Earth, they see the star as it was a million years ago. Here, we see it as it was a mere five hundred thousand years ago, as we might see a grown man after having once glimpsed the child. In the mean time, the star will have moved. Perhaps it will have changed color or luminosity. So we do not see the same star, nor do we see it in the same place. Ah, cousin, each time we emerge from our gate heads, we find not only a different world, but a different universe.”

Bashir shivered, although that may have been only the evening breeze. “It’s as if we are cut off and alone. I don’t like it.”

Hassan smiled to himself. “No one asked that you do.” He turned toward the pavilion, where the others buzzed with discussion, but Bashir lingered a moment longer with face upturned to the sky. “I feel so alone,” he said softly, but not so softly that Hassan failed to hear.

They studied the world in every way they could: the physics, the chemistry and biology, the society and technology. The presence of sentients—and sentients of considerable attainment—complicated the matter, for they must understand the folk first as they were and not as they would become; and that meant to see without being seen, for the act of knowing changes forever both knower and known. But to study even a small world was no small thing. A single flower is unfathomable.

They sought the metes and bounds of the planet. What was its size? Its density? Where upon its face had the gate swung open? How far did it lie from its star? Soong marked the risings and the settings of sun and moons and stars and groped toward answers.

They sampled the flora and the fauna in their mountain valley, scanned their viscera, and looked into the very architecture of their cells. Mizir discovered molecules that were like DNA, but not quite. They imagined phyla and classes upon the creatures, but did not dare guess at anything more precise.

Ladawan and Yance launched small, stealthy birds, ultralight and sun powered, to watch and listen where men themselves could not. On their bellies these drones displayed a vision of the sky above, captured by microcameras on their backs, in that way achieving an operational sort of invisibility, and allowing the tele-pilots to hover and record unseen.

“No radio,” Soong complained and Hassan laughed a little at that, for always Soong preferred the easy way. “We will have to plant bugs,” Hassan told the team when they met after the first flight for debriefing, “to study their tongue, for we cannot hear them otherwise.”

“They don’t have tongues,” Mizir said, though with him it was less complaint than fascination. “They make sounds, and they communicate with these sounds, but I don’t know how they make them.”

“See if you can locate a body,” Hassan told the tele-pilots. “Perhaps there are morgues in the city,” pointing to the dark, smoky buildings that nestled distant against the bay of a cold, blue ocean. “Mizir needs to know how those people are put together.”

“Tissue samples would be nice,” Mizir added, but he knew that was lagniappe.

“An elementary school might have simple displays of their written language,” Bashir suggested. It was a standard checklist item for the assay of inhabited worlds, studied and carefully memorized in his training, but Hassan was pleased that the boy had remembered it.

“Coal smoke,” Klaus Altenbach announced the next day after a drone had lasered the emissions of a building they believed to be a factory. “Or something carbonaceous. Peat? Not petroleum—those bunkers are with something solid filled. Technology is mid-nineteenth century equivalent,” he said, adding after a moment, “by the Common Era. I expect soon the steamships to come to those docks.” When Ladawan asked him from where these ships would come, he shrugged and told her, “There cannot be a horizon to no good purpose.”

“It is a strange-looking city,” Mizir said, “although I cannot say why.”

Yance Darby scratched his head. “Don’t look all that strange to me. ’Cept for the folk in it.”

“They really are graceful,” Iman said of the indigenes, “once you grow accustomed to their strangeness. They are curlicues, filigrees of being. They must have art of some sort. Their buildings are intaglio—plain boxes, towers, but they have incised their every surface. Look for painting, look for sculpture.” And she set about to build a mannequin of the folk.

“There’s so much to learn!” cried Bashir, overwhelmed by it all. Being young, he was easily overwhelmed; but a world is not something to be nibbled at. If one is to taste it at all, it must be swallowed whole; and yet that is impossible.

“As well sip the Nile,” Mizir grumbled. “We could spend the rest of our lives here and not learn the first thing.”

“Oh, we’d learn the first thing,” said Hassan. What worried him, and kept him awake into the night, was not the first thing they might learn, but the last.

And so it went. The drones flew. Digital photographs downloaded into a mosaic map of landforms and soil types and vegetation. (Soong longed for a satellite in low orbit.) They sprinkled small ears about the city one night and harvested from them a Babel of sounds for the Intelligence to sort into phonemes and other patterns. (The Intelligence concluded that two languages were in use, and set itself to ponder the matter.) Mizir had for the time to content himself with creatures he could collect nearby. (“Alpine species,” he grumbled. “How representative are they of the coastal plains, the estuaries?”) Klaus discovered a railroad coming into the city on the far side. (“They had somehow to bring that coal in,” he joked, “and muleback I thought unlikely.”) The engines were steampowered, with spherical boilers.

Bashir wanted to name the world.

Long-timers like Hassan and Soong and Mizir seldom bothered with such things. In time, the planet would speak and its name would be revealed. Until then, Hassan would simply call it the world. Still, when the team debriefed on the seventh day and Bashir broached the issue, Hassan did not stop the others from discussing it.

They lounged on the cushions and ate dates and cheeses. Yance Darby, like Bashir recently graduated from the House of Gates, tossed pieces of food at the curious animals, causing them to scamper away, until Iman scolded him for it. That the crumbs were indigestible would not stop animals from swallowing, and who knew what would come of that? Soong sat a little apart, on high furniture at a table spread with printout maps, while he and Klaus and Ladawan traced geography and the road network on maps made of light. A phantom sphere floated in the air above the projector: all black, all unknown, save the little spot where they encamped—and they were not yet certain they had placed it properly.

Hassan stood apart, outside the pavilion, under stars strange and distant. He held a cup of nectar in his hands and studied the MRI holograms of the local fauna that had been arranged on a display board, and he traced with a fingertip the clade lines that Mizir had guessed at. How strange, he thought, and yet how familiar, too. God was a potter and Nature was His knife. Everywhere life took form, He shaped it toward the same ends. And so there were things like mice, and things like hawks, although they were quite different in their details. The mouse had six legs, for one thing—its gait absorbing thereby many hours of Mizir’s close attention—and the hawk had claws on wingtip and feet and concealed, too, beneath its covert.

Iman had constructed a mannequin of the sapients and had placed it by the entrance to the pavilion. Man or woman, no one knew, or even if such categories had meaning here. It stood shorter than a human and, at rest, assumed a curious sinusoid posture, like a cobra risen. In form, bilaterally symmetric, but possessed of four arms and two legs. Large lifting arms grew from mid-torso; smaller manipulators farther up. Claws tipped the one set, tentacles the other. The feet ended in claws, too, though these were stubbier. Mizir thought that the ancestral form had been six-legged, too, like so many of the scuttling things in the meadow, and the clawed lifting arms had evolved from the midlegs. “They are rodents,” he had said, arranging their image under that clade, “or what things like rodents might become.”

“Yet the ‘rodents’ here are territorial,” Iman then told him, “which is very unrodentlike.”

“Everything is the same the universe over,” Mizir had answered philosophically, “except that everything is different, too.”

Atop the torso sat a structure shaped like an American “football” positioned for a kick-off. The skin was smooth, without hair or feathers, but with small plates, as if the creature had been tiled by a master mason. The creature’s coloring was a high cerulean, like the clear sky over the desert, though with darker patches on its back. But Mizir had spotted others in the throngs of the city—taller, slimmer, tending toward cobalt—which he thought might hail from the world’s tropics.

It was a rich world. Diverse. There were many races, many tongues. There were alpine meadows and high prairies and coastal estuaries. How many eons deep was it? What lay over the curve of the horizon? How could they hope to grasp more than a meager slice? They would never know its history. They could hardly know its culture. Was that city below them—blackened with soot, lively with activity—the pinnacle of this world’s civilization? Or was it a cultural and technological backwater? Later, they would send the drones out on longer recon flights, but even that would only scratch at the surface. Men will come here for years, Hassan thought, perhaps for generations. And maybe then we will know a little.

The creature in the model had no face.

There were filaments that Mizir thought scent receptors; there were gelatin pools that were likely eyes. There was a cavity into which they had watched indigenes spoon food. But none of these features were arranged into a face. Indeed, its mouth was in its torso. The filaments waved above the football like ferns. The gelatin-filled pits were distributed asymmetrically around the headball, as were other pits, apparently empty, and a large parabolic cavity perversely set where a human mouth would be, although it was not a mouth at all.

“They really are beautiful,” Iman said. She had come to stand by Hassan while the others chattered on about possible names for the planet. Hassan nodded, though in acknowledgement rather than agreement. He thought the indigenes looked scarred, pockmarked, twisted out of true. But that was because his mind sought a greater symmetry of features than was offered.

“Beautiful, perhaps; though they differ somewhat from the life forms Mizir has found up here,” he said. “I think they are interlopers. I think they have come from somewhere else, these people of yours. Perhaps from across that ocean.”

“Perhaps,” she allowed the possibility. “Soong says that the entire coastal plain came from somewhere else, and its collision with this continent raised the Misty Mountains.”

“I keep seeing a face,” he said to her. “I know there isn’t one, but my brain insists on nostrils and ears. It seems to be smiling at me.”

“Recognition template,” Iman said. “People have seen ’Isa, praise be upon him, in a potato; or Shaitan in a billow of smoke.”

“It bothers me. We need to see these people the way they are, not the way we think they are.”

“It was easier on Concannon’s World,” she told him. “The indigenes there looked like flowers.”

“Did they?”

“A little. They flew.”

“Ah.”

“Vapors jetted out their stems. They could only travel in short hops. But one doesn’t look for faces in a flower.”

“And here I have always mistaken you for a lily.”

Iman turned from him and made a show of watching the debate of the others. “Will you call this place Makloufs World? As team leader, it is your privilege.”

Hassan shook his head. “I met Concannon once. He had an ego big enough for a world, but I’m not so vain as he. What do you think we should call this place?”

Iman pursed her lips and adjusted the hijab under her chin. Her face was only a pale circle wrapped in a checkered cloth of red and white squares after the fashion of the Jordan Valley. “We should learn what the indigenes call it in their own tongue.”

Hassan laughed. “They will call it ‘the world,’ and likely in hundreds of tongues, most of which we will never hear.”

“Shangri-la!” said Bashir, loud enough that Hassan heard and turned toward him. Yance clapped his hands. “Perfect!” he agreed. “This place is sure enough a paradise.” Klaus nodded slowly, as did Ladawan and Khalid, the gate warden. Soong said nothing and glanced at Hassan.

“No.” Hassan stepped inside the pavilion. “That is a dangerous name for a world, and dangerous because it sounds so safe. Every time we spoke it we would think this place safer yet.”

“Well, isn’t it?” asked Iman.

Hassan looked back over his shoulder and saw her run a hand along the muscled lifting arm of her statue. “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t seen the surprise yet.”

“Surprise?” asked Bashir. “What surprise is that?”

Soong chuckled, but Hassan didn’t bother to answer. He continued to watch Iman stroke the statue.

“Well, what would you call it?” Yance asked, making it sound a challenge.

“It is your privilege, Hassan,” said Mizir.

“If you must have a name for this world,” and Hassan looked again outside the tent, at the strange constellations above, at the expressionless, immobile “face” on the statue. “If you must have a name for this world, call it al-Batin.”

Mizir stiffened, Bashir and Khalid exchanged glances. Iman smiled faintly. “It means, ‘The Hidden,’ ” she whispered to the others.

“Not exactly,” Hassan added.

“It is one of the Names of God,” Mizir protested. “That isn’t proper for a planet.”

“It is fit,” Hassan said, “for as long as God hides its nature from us. After that . . . after that, we will see.”

They called the city “East Haven” because of its position on a broad and deep estuary. A channel led from the Eastern Sea well into the mouth of a swift river—to embrace piers, docks, warehouses. This much they learned from high altitude sonar pictures from their drones. Why no ships nestled at those docks, the drones could not say.

South and west of the city lay flatlands thick with greening crops, by which they guessed at a season much like late spring. The crops were broad and flat, like clover, but whether intended for the Batinites or for their livestock was unclear. Harrows and cultivators were drawn by teams of six-legged creatures the claws of whose mid- and hindlegs had nearly vanished into a hoof-like structure. Its forelegs stubbornly divided the hoof. Inevitably the team named them “horses,” although something in their demeanor suggested “oxen,” as well.

One field was more manicured, covered by a fine ground-hugging carpet of waxy, fat-leafed, yellow-green plants, broken here and there with colorful flowers and shrubs arranged in decorative patterns. A sample of the “grass,” when crushed, gave forth a pleasant odor—somewhat like frankincense. The park—for such they assumed it was—spread across the top of a swell of ground and from it one gained a fine vista of the city, its port, and the Eastern Sea beyond. As the weather grew warmer, groups of Batinites ventured forth from the city to spend afternoons or sunsets there, spooning baskets of food into their gaping stomachs and watching their younglings leap and somersault through the chartreuse oil-grass.

A road they called the Grand Trunk Road ran southwest from the city. The portions nearest the city had been paved with broad, flat stones, across which rattled a motley array of vehicles: carriages resembling landaus and hansoms, open wagons that Yance called “buck boards,” and freight wagons heavy with goods and strapped with canvas covers, whose drivers goaded their teams of oxen six-horses with enormously long whips.

The Batinites themselves dressed in garb that ranged from pale dun to rainbow plumage, as task or mood dictated. They had a taste for beauty, Iman told the others, though for a different sort of beauty than Earth then knew, and she spent some of her free time adapting local fashion to the limbs and stature of humans—for there was a fad for matters alien in the cities of the Earth.

One fork of the Grand Trunk Road branched northwestward toward a pass in the coastal range of which the Misty Mountain was a part. The road simplified itself as it receded, like a countryman shedding his urban clothes piecemeal as he fled the city: it became first hard-driven gravel then earth damped with a waxy oil, finally, as it began the long switchback up to the pass, rutted dirt. The drone they sent through the pass returned with images of a second, more distant city, smaller than East Haven and nestled in a rich farming valley. Beyond, at the limits of resolution, lay drier and more barren country and the hint of something approaching desert.

“There is something energetic about those people,” Hassan observed. “They have a commotion to them, a busyness that is very like Americans. They are forever doing something.”

“That is why the city seems so odd!” Iman exclaimed, a cry so triumphant that, following as it did so many weeks of study, seemed tardy in its proclamation, as if the sociologist had been paying scant attention ’til now.

“Don’t you see?” she told them. “They are Americans! Look at the streets, how linear they are. How planned. Only by the docks do they twist and wander. That city did not grow here; it was planted. Yes, Mizir, you were right: They came from across the Eastern Sea.”

A lively people, indeed. One of a pair of younglings capering in the park caromed off a six-cedar tree and lay stunned while its parents rushed to comfort it. Three parents, Iman noted, and wondered at their roles. “Or is the third only an uncle or aunt or older sibling?” Yet the posture of consolation is much the same on one world as another and tentacles could stroke most wondrous delicate.

“They care for one another,” Iman told Hassan that evening in the pavilion.

“Who does not?” he answered, rising from the divan and walking out into the night toward the vantage point from which they watched the city. East Haven was a dull orange glow. Oil from the chartreuse grass burned slowly in a hundred thousand lamps. Iman joined him and opened her mouth to speak, but Hassan silenced her with a touch to the arm and pointed to the shadow form of Bashir, who sat cross-legged on a great pillow and watched with night-vision binoculars. Silently, they withdrew into Hassan’s pavilion, where Hassan sat on an ottoman while Iman, standing behind him, kneaded his shoulder muscles.

“You’ve been carrying something heavy on these,” she said, “they are so hard and knotted up.”

“Oh, nothing much. A world.”

“Listen to Atlas.” She squeezed hard and Hassan winced. “Nothing you can do will affect this world. All you do is watch.”

“People will come here for the wonderfall, for the oil-grass perfume, for the fashion and cut of their clothing. In the end, that cannot go unnoticed.”

“What of it? To our benefit and theirs. One day we will greet them, trade with them, listen to their music and they to ours. It is only the when and the how that matter. I think you carry a weight much less than a world.”

“All right. The eight of you. That is heavy enough.”

“What, are Soong and Mizir children that you must change their diapers? Or I?”

That conjured disturbing thoughts. He reached back over his shoulder and stilled her ministrations. “Perhaps you had better stop now.”

“Am I so heavy, then?”

“It’s not that. You scare me. I don’t know who you are.”

“I am as plain as typeset. Children read me for a primer.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Do you wonder what is beneath the hijab? I could take it off.”

The fire ran through him like a molten sword. He turned on his pillow and Iman took an abrupt step back, clasping her hands before her. “We’ve never been teamed before, you and I,” he told her. “What do you know about me?”

“I know that Bashir is not so heavy as you think.”

Hassan was silent for a while. “He grows no lighter for all your assurances.”

“What can happen to him here?”

“Very little, I think,” he admitted reluctantly. “And that is dangerous, for his next world may not be so safe.”

“I think he likes the Batinites.”

“They are easy folk to like.”

“There are more such folk than you might think.”

“I think you are bald. Beneath the hijab, I mean. Bald, and maybe with ears like conch shells.”

“Oh, you are a past master of flattery! You and I may never team again. You will go through a gate and I will go though another, and maybe one of us will not come back.”

“I am no Shi’a. I do not practice muta’a.”

Iman’s face set into unreadable lines. “Is that what you think? A marriage with an expiration date? Then perhaps you do not know me, after all.” She went to the flap of his pavilion and paused a moment slightly bent over before passing without. “It’s black,” she said, turning a bit to cast the words back. “Black and very long, and my mother compared it to silk. As for the ears, that price is higher than you’ve paid so far.”

With that, she was gone. Hassan thought they had quarreled. I have seniority, he told himself, She will join Soong and Mizir and me when we next go out. He could arrange that. There were people in the House of Gates who owed him favors.

The next day, Hassan sent Bashir back to Earth for supplies and because he was so young, sent Mizir to accompany him and Khalid to drive the other-bus. They took discs full of information and cases of specimens for the scholars to study “Check calibration on clock,” Soong reminded them as they buttoned down. “Time run differently in Other ’Brane.”

“Thank you, O grandfather,” said Khalid, who had driven many such runs before, “I did not know that.”

“Insolence,” Soong complained to Hassan afterward. “Reminder never hurt.”

“Makes me nervous having only the one buggy left,” Yance said. “Y’know what I mean? We can’t get all of us and all our gear into one, if’n we have to bug out in a hurry.”

“Bug out?” Soong thought the word related to “buggy.”

“Y’never know,” Yance said, feigning wisdom by saying nothing, so that Soong was no more enlightened.

That evening, Klaus came to Hassan with a puzzle. “These are for today the surveillance flights over ‘Six-foot City’.”

“Don’t call the natives ‘six-foots.’ What’s on the videos?”

“I hope that you will tell me.”

Klaus was usually more forthcoming. He had the German’s attitude toward facts. He ate them raw, without seasoning, and served them up the same way. There was something brutal about this, for facts could be hard and possess sharp edges, making them hard to swallow. Better to soften them a little first by chewing them over.

Klaus’ video had been shot at night and had the peculiar, greenish luminescence of night vision. The time stamp in the lower right named the local equivalent of three in the morning. The drone had been conducting a biosurvey over the tidal flats north of the city—Mizir had spotted some peculiar burrowing creatures there on an earlier flyover—and during the return flight, motion in the city below had activated the drone’s sensors.

“It is most peculiar,” Klaus said. “Most peculiar.”

How peculiar, Hassan did not know. Perhaps it was customary for large groups of the Batinites to wake from their sleep and come outdoors in the small hours of the morning, although they had never done so before. Yet, here they were in their multitudes: on balconies, on rooftops, at their windowsills, in small knots gathered before the doorways of their buildings. All turned skyward with a patient stillness that Hassan could only call expectation. The drone had lingered in circles, its small Intelligence sensing an anomaly of some sort in the sudden mass behavior. And then, first one worldling, then another pointed skyward and they began to behave in an agitated manner, turning and touching and waving their tentacled upper arms.

“Have they seen the drone?” Hassan asked. It was hard to imagine, stealthed as it was and at night in the bargain. “Perhaps they sense the engine’s heat signature?” Mizir had floated the hypothesis that some of the gelatin pits on the headball were sensitive to infrared.

“No,” said Klaus, “observe the direction in which they stare. It is to the east, and not directly above.”

“How do you know which way they stare, when they have no faces?” In truth, it was difficult to judge in the unearthly light of night-vision. Everything was just a little soft at the edges, and features did not stand out.

“Look how they hold their bodies. I assume that their vision is in the direction in which they walk. It makes reason, not so?”

“Reason,” said Hassan. “I wonder what reason brought them all out in the middle of the night?”

“Something in the sky. Ask Soong. Such a mystery will please him.”

Hassan made a note to talk to Soong, but as he turned away, something in the panning video caught his eye, and that something was this:

When all men fall prostrate in prayer, the one who kneels upright stands out like bas-relief. When all men run, the one remaining still is noted. And when all men look off to the east, the one with face upturned seemed to be staring directly at Hassan himself.

Which was to say, directly at the drone. “This one,” said Hassan, striking the freeze-frame. “What do you make of him?”

“So . . . I had not noticed him before.” Klaus peered more closely at the screen. “A heretic, perhaps.” But his chuckle stuck in his throat. “I meant no offense.”

Hassan, much puzzled, took none. Only later would Mizir remind him that to a European, Mecca lies proverbially east.

“Planet,” Soong announced with grave satisfaction after evening had fallen. “Most systems, many planets. This rising significant to sixlegs.”

“Don’t call them sixlegs. Why would it have special significance?” Soong made a gesture signifying patient ignorance. “Perhaps beginning of festival. Ramadan. Fasching. Carnival.”

“Ramadan is not a festival.”

“So hard, keep Western notions straight,” Soong answered. Hassan was never certain when Soong was being droll. “Is brightest object now in sky,” the geophysicist continued, “save inner moon. Maybe next planet starward. Blue tint, so maybe water there. Maybe second living world in system!”

The next day, the worldlings went about their city bearing arms.

There had been little sign of a military hitherto, but now Havenites drilled and marched on the parkland south of the city. They ran. They jumped. They practiced ramming shot down the long barrels of their weapons. They marched in rank and file and executed intricate ballets to the rhythmic clapping of their lower arms. Formations evolved from marching column to line of battle and back again. The floral arrangements that had checkerboarded the park were soon trampled and their colors stamped into a universal sepia. It bothered Hassan when behaviors suddenly changed. It meant that the team had missed something basic. “Why?” he asked, watching through the binoculars, expecting no answer.

But he received one of sorts that evening: When the Blue Planet rose, some of the worldlings fired their weapons in its direction and raised a staccato tattoo that rose and fell and rippled across the city like the chop on a bothered sea.

“Fools,” muttered Soong, but Hassan recognized defiance when he saw it.

“Of planet?” the Chinese scoffed. “Of omen?”

Iman was saddened by the guns. “I had hoped them beyond such matters.”

“What people,” Hassan said, “have ever been beyond such matters?” Klaus grunted. “It will be like Bismarck’s wars, I think. No radio, but they must have telegraphy. No airplanes, but a balloon would not surprise me.”

Iman turned on him. “How can you talk of war with such detachment?”

But Klaus only shrugged. “What other way is there?” he asked. “All we can do is watch.” Ladawan and Yance and the others said nothing.

The day after that, the second other-bus returned with fresh supplies and equipment. Mizir off-loaded a wealth of reagents, a sounding laser, and a scanning electron microscope. “It’s only a field model,” he said of the microscope, “but at last I can see!” Soong regarded the aerosondes and high-altitude balloons and judged them passable. “View from height, maybe informative,” he conceded, then he turned to Mizir and grinned, “So I, too, look at very small things.” A team of mechanics had come back with Bashir and Khalid and they set about assembling the ultralight under Yance’s impatient eyes.

“They wanted to know if you’ll let the other teams through yet,” Bashir told Hassan.

“No.”

“But . . . I told them—”

“It was not for you to tell them anything!” Hassan shouted, which caused heads to turn and Bashir to flinch. Hassan immediately regretted the outburst, but remained stern. “Something has developed in the city,” he said brusquely, and explained about the rising of the Blue Planet, al-Azraq, and the sudden martial activity.

“The new star marks their season for jihad,” Bashir guessed.

“Who ever had such seasons?” Hassan scolded him. “It is the struggle with our own heart that is the true jihad.”

“Maybe so,” said Yance, who had overheard, “but when folks are in a mood for a ruckus, any reason’ll do.” He studied the ultralight thoughtfully. “I just hope they don’t have anti-aircraft guns.”

Iman learned to recognize Batinites.

“They only look alike,” she said, “because they are so strange, and the common strangeness overwhelms the individual differences.”

“Yes,” said Soong. “Like Arab curlicues. All letters look same.”

“The Batinites do not have faces, exactly,” Iman reminded them, “but the features on their headball are not random. There are always the same number of pits and ferns and they always appear in the same approximate locations . . .”

“No surprise there,” said Mizir. “How many humans are born with three eyes, or with noses where their ears should be?”

“. . . But the sizes of these features and the distances between them vary just as they do among humans. How else do we recognize one another, but by the length of the nose, the distance between the eyes, the width of the mouth . . .”

“Some mouths,” Yance whispered to Bashir, “being wider than others.”

“. . . I have identified seventy-three eigenface dimensions for the Batinite headball. The diameters of the pits; reflectivity of the gelatin in them; the lengths of the fronds and the number and size of their ‘leaves’; the hue of the skin-plates . . .”

“You don’t have to name them all,” Hassan said.

“. . . And so on. All too strange to register in our own perception, but the Intelligence can measure an image and identify specific individuals.”

“Are there systematic differences between the two races?” Mizir asked. “I think you will find the cobaltics have more and broader ‘leaves’ than the ceruleans.”

“Why so they have! On the dorsal fronds.”

Mizir nodded in slow satisfaction. “I believe those function as heat radiators, though I cannot be certain until I explore their anatomies. If the cobaltics are a tropical folk, they may need to spill their heat more rapidly. None of the mountain species here in our valley have those particular fronds—or any related feature. At this altitude, spilling excess heat is not a great problem.”

“More evidence,” Bashir suggested, “that the Havenites have come from somewhere else.”

The Intelligence had been teasing threads of meaning from the great ball of yarn that was the Batinites’ spoken tongues. The task was complicated by the presence of two such tongues, which the Intelligence declared to be unrelated at the fifth degree, and by the inferred presence of scores of specialized jargons and argots. “The folk at the docks,” Klaus pointed out, “must have their own language. And the thieves that we sometimes hear whisper in the night.”

“They don’t whisper,” Iman told him. “They hum and pop and click.”

“Those pits on the headball,” Mizir mused, “are drums. Wonderfully adapted. They no more evolved for speaking than did human lips and tongue. They were recruited; and yet they serve.”

“If they cannot speak from both sides of the mouth,” Klaus observed, “they may sometimes say two things at once.”

“The advantage of having more than one orifice adapted to making sounds.”

Klaus made a further comment and laughed; but because he made it in German no one else got the joke, although it concerned making sounds from more than one orifice.

They input the murmuring of the crowd from the night when al-Azraq first appeared and the Intelligence responded with . . . murmuring, and the occasional cry of [the Blue Planet! It rises/appears!] and [expression of possible dismay and/or fear]. It was not a translation, but it was progress toward a translation.

There may have been another language, a third one, which made no use of sounds, for at times they observed two Batinites together, silent but in evident communication.

“It’s the fern-like structures,” said Mizir. “They are scent receptors. At close range, they communicate by odors.”

“Inefficient,” scoffed Klaus.

“Inefficiency is a sign of natural selection,” Mizir assured him. “And some messages may be very simple. Run! Come!”

“It’s not the scents,” said Iman. “Or not the scents alone. Observe how they touch, how they stroke one another’s fronds. They communicate by touching one another.” She challenged the others with an upthrust chin and no one dared gainsay her, for she herself often communicated by touch. “What else is a handshake, a clap on the shoulder,” she insisted, “or a kiss?”

They decided that the frond-stroking amounted to kissing. Some was done perfunctorily. “Like a peck on the cheek,” Yance said. Some was done with great show. Some, indeed with lingering stillness. Whatever it meant, the Havenites did it a lot. “They are an affectionate people,” Bashir said. Iman said nothing, but tousled the young man’s hair.

Bashir had tele-piloting duty the night when a drone followed a soldier out into the park. This soldier wore an ill-fitting uniform of pale yellow on his high cerulean form, one unmarked by any of the signifiers of rank or status that the Intelligence had deduced. It rode a sixleg horse past neglected fields and up the gravel road that led to the once-manicured hilltop. It rode unarmed.

When it reached the level ground where the Haven folk had sported at games before taking up more deadly rehearsals, the soldier dismounted and spoke soft drumbeats, as of a distant and muffled darbuka.

Other drumbeats answered and a second Batinite, a tall slim cobaltic, emerged from the grove of six-cedar and poplar. The two approached and stood together for a while, intertwining their tentacled upper arms. Then the second spoke in two voices. One voice said [Show/demonstrate/make apparent—(to) me/this-one—you/present-one agency—immediate time] and the other said [Fear/dread/flight-or-fight—I /this-one agency—now-and-from-now]. At least so the Intelligence thought it said. Yet what manner of ears must they have, Bashir marveled, to parse a duet!

The soldier answered in like harmony, [Appears/shows—it/that-one agency—not-yet] and [this-one (pl?)—defiance resolution/resignation (?)—now-and-from-now.]

The cobaltic had brought a basket and opened it to reveal covered dishes of the puree of grains and legumes that the Batinites favored on their picnic outings and which the Earthlings called batin-hummus. [Eat/take in—this item/thing—you/present-one agency—immediate time] and [Cook/prepare—I/this-one agency—past-time.]

The soldier had brought food as well: a thick, yellow-green liquid in pear-shaped bottles from which he pried the caps with a small instrument. The two removed their upper garments—a complex procedure in that four arms must withdraw from four sleeves—and exposed thereby the mouths in their torsos.

“I wonder if humans can eat those foods of theirs,” Iman said. She had come up behind Bashir and had been watching over his shoulder. “A new, exotic flavor to excite the jades . . .” Ever since al NahTHa, the appetite for such things had grown and grown. The Rebirth, the Rediscovery. Art. Literature. Song. Science. Everything old was new again, and the new was gulped down whole.

“I’ve distilled a fluid from the oil-grass,” Mizir told them. He sat at the high table drinking coffee with Ladawan and Klaus. “But whether I have obtained a drink or a fuel I cannot say. Yance will not let me put it in the ultralight’s gas tank; but he will not drink it for me, either.” The others laughed and Klaus indicated Mizir’s small, exquisite mug, whose contents had been brewed in the Turkish fashion. “My friend, how would you know the difference?”

“Coffee,” said Mizir with mock dignity, “is more than hot water in which a few beans have passed an idle moment.” He took his cup and left the table to stand with Iman and Bashir. “Hassan?” he asked her through lips poised to sip. Iman shook her head and Mizir said, “He is always cautious when encountering a new world.” He turned his attention to the screen just as the soldier ran its tentacles across the fronds of the taller one’s headball and then . . . inserted those tentacles into its own mouth. “What is this?” Mizir said, setting his cup on its saucer and bending closer.

“A new behavior,” Iman said delighted and pulled her datapad from her belt pouch. “Bashir, what is the file number on the bird’s download? I want to view this later.” She entered the identifier the boy gave her and with her stylus scratched quick curlicues across the touch-screen. “Into the oral cavity . . .” she mused.

“What does it mean?” Bashir asked, and no one could tell him.

Usually the Batinites fed themselves by gripping spoons or tines with an upper hand, most often with the left. Sometimes, though rarely, they held food directly using one of their middle hands, typically the right. (“Complementary handedness,” Mizir had called it.) Yet the two Batinites on this double-mooned evening abandoned their spoons to their awkward middle hands, while their delicate and tentacled uppers entwined each other’s like restless snakes.

Then the cobaltic reached directly into the cerulean’s mouth orifice. The soldier grew very taut and still and laid its bowl of batin-hummus slowly aside. With its own tentacles it stroked the other’s scent receptors or touched briefly certain of the pits on the cobaltic’s headball. Mizir, entranced by the ritual, made careful note of which pits were touched on a sketch of the headball. Iman made notes as well, though with different purpose.

Using its large middle hands, the soldier took the cobaltic by the torso and pushed gently until the other had disengaged and the two pulled away from each other. “Look! What is that?” Bashir asked. “Inside the soldier’s mouth!”

“A ‘tongue’ perhaps,” Mizir said. “See how it glistens! Perhaps a mucous coating. A catalyst for digestion?”

Iman looked at him a moment. “Do you think so?” Then she turned her attention to the screen and watched with an awful intensity. She placed a hand on Bashir’s shoulder and leaned a little on him. When the two Batinites brought their mouths together, her grip grew hard. Bashir said, “Why, they’re kissing!”

Mizir said doubtfully, “We’ve seen no such kisses before among them. Only the brief frond stroke.”

“This is more serious than the frond stroke, I think,” Iman said.

“It’s a rather long kiss,” said Bashir.

“The mouth and tongue are the most sensitive organs of touch that humans possess,” she told him, “aside from one other.”

Hassan, drawn by the interest of the three clustered before the telescreen, had come up behind them. Now he said, “Turn that screen off!” with a particular firmness.

It was at that moment that Bashir realized. “They weren’t kissing! They were . . . I mean . . .” He blacked the screen, then turned to Iman. “You knew!” But Iman had turned round to face Hassan.

“You’re right,” she said. “They deserve their privacy.”

Klaus and Ladawan had joined them. “What is befallen?” the technologist asked.

Iman answered him without turning away from Hassan. “There is a struggle coming, a jihad of some sort, and two who may never see each other again have stolen a precious night for their own.”

Klaus said, “I don’t understand.”

Ladawan told him. “A lover is bidding her soldier-boy good-bye.”

Mizir was doubtful. “We don’t know which one is ‘he’ or ‘she.’ They may be either, or neither, or it may be a seasonal thing. Among the fungi—”

“Oh, to Gehenna with your fungi!” said Iman, who then turned from the still-silent Hassan and stalked to her own tent. Mizir watched, puzzled, then turned to Hassan and continued, “I really must study the process. That ‘tongue’ must have been a . . .”

“Have the Intelligence study it, or do it in private,” Hassan ordered. “Grant these people their dignity.”

Klaus tugged Mizir on the sleeve as the biologist was leaving. “The soldier is probably the male. At this level of technology, no society can afford to sacrifice its females in combat.”

Oddly, it was Ladawan, who was usually very quiet, who had the last word. “Sometimes,” she said, “I do not understand you people.” She told Soong about it later and Soong spoke certain words in Mandarin, of which tongue Ladawan also knew a little. What he said was, “Treasure that which you do not understand.”

Two things happened the next day, or maybe more than two. The first was quite dramatic, but not very important. The second was not so dramatic.

Yance Darby brought forewarning. He had taken the ultralight out in the morning and had flown a wide circuit around the backside of the Misty Mountain to avoid being seen from East Haven. The ultralight was stealthed in the same manner as the drones and its propeller was hushed by MEMS; but it was larger and hence more likely to be detected, so he needed a flight path that would gain him sufficient altitude before passing over habitations. Yance had followed a river across the Great Western Valley to where it plunged through a purple gorge in the mountain range and so onto the coastal plain.

There was a small town at the gorge and another a little farther downstream on the coastal side of the mountains, but the mouth of this river was a morass of swamps and bayous and there was no city there as there was at East Haven. Yance reported, “Cajuns in the delta,” but no one at the base camp understood what he meant at first: namely, trappers and fishers living in small, isolated cabins.

“Two of ’em looked up when I flew past,” he mentioned.

That troubled Mizir. “I think the indigenes sense into the infrared. The waste heat of our engines is minimal, but . . .” The team had occasionally noted locals glancing toward passing drones, much as a human might glance toward a half-seen flicker of light. Hassan made a note to schedule fewer night flights, when the contrast of the engine exhaust against the deep sky was greater.

A large covered wagon accompanied by five horsemen set out from East Haven on the Grand Trunk Road, but the humans paid it no mind, as there was often heavy traffic in that direction.

Yance followed the line of the mountains out to sea. Soong thought that there might be islands in that direction, a seamount continuation of the mountain range, and Mizir lusted to study insular species to see how they might differ from those they had found on the coastal plain, the river valley on the western slope, and their own alpine meadow. To this end, Yance carried several drones slaved to the ultralight to act as outriders.

What they found was a ship.

“You should see the sunuvabitch!” he told them over the radio link. “It’s like an old pirate ship, sails all a-billow, gun-ports down the sides, cutting through the water like a plough. Different shape hull, though I couldn’t tell you just how. Wider maybe, or shorter. And the sails—the rigging—aren’t the same, either. There’s a sunburst on the main sail.”

“They don’t use a sunburst emblem in the city,” Klaus said. “The six-eagle seems to be the local totem.” He meant the ferocious bird with claws on its wings and feet and covert.

“It’s not a totem,” Hassan said. “It’s an emblem. Didn’t your people use an eagle once?”

“The Doppeladler,” Klaus nodded. “But it was a totem,” he added, “and we sacrificed a great many to it.”

“Maybe it’s an invasion force,” Bashir said. “Maybe this is why the Haven folk have been preparing for war.”

“A single ship?” said Hassan.

“A first ship,” Bashir said, and Hassan acknowledged the possibility.

“I would hate to see these people attacked,” Bashir continued. “I like them. They’re kind and they’re clever and they’re industrious.”

Hassan, who had bent over the visual feed from Yance’s drone, straightened to look at him. “Do you know of Philippe Habib?”

“Only what I was taught in school.”

“He was clever and industrious, and they say that he was kind—at least to his friends, though he had not many of those.”

“He was a great man.”

“He was. But history has a surfeit of great men. We could do with fewer. The Légion Étrangère was never supposed to enter France. But what I tried to tell you is that we do not know the reasons for this coming struggle. The ‘clever and industrious’ folk we have been observing may be the innocent victims of a coming attack—or an oppressive power about to be overthrown. When the Safavid fought the Ak Kolunyu, which side had justice?”

“Cousin, I do not even know who they are!”

“Nor do you know these folk on the plains. Yance, conduct a search pattern. See if there is a flotilla or only this one vessel.”

But it was only the one vessel and it furled its sails and entered East Haven under steam to a tumultuous but wary welcome. There was much parading and many displays and the sailors and marines aboard the ship—who wore uniforms of crimson and gold decked with different braid and signifiers—had their backs slapped and their fronds stroked by strangers in the city and not a few had their orifices entertained in the evening that followed.

(“Sailors,” observed Klaus, “are much the same everywhere.”)

A ceremony was held in the park. Flags were exchanged—a ritual apparently of some moment, for the ruffles and paradiddles of drum-like chatter rose to a crescendo. Ugly and entirely functional sabers were exchanged by the ship’s captain and a high-ranking Haven soldier.

“I believe they are making peace,” Iman said. “These are two old foes who have come together.”

“That is a seductive belief,” Hassan said. “We love it because it is our belief. How often in Earth’s past have ancient enemies clasped hands and stood shoulder to shoulder?”

“I like the Havenites better than the Sunburst folk,” Bashir stated.

Hassan turned to him. “Have you chosen sides, then—at a peace ceremony?”

“Remember,” said Iman, “that Haven uses a bird of prey as its sigil. A golden sun is entirely less threatening an emblem.”

“It’s not that. It’s their uniforms.”

“You prefer yellow to crimson?”

“No. The Havenite uniforms fit more poorly, and their insignia are less splendid. This is a folk who make no parade of fighting.”

Hassan, who had begun to turn away, turned back and looked at his young cousin with new respect. “You are right. They are no peacocks about war, like these fancy folk from over the sea. And that is well, for it is no peacock matter. But ask yourself this: Why do old enemies come together?”

Mizir chortled over the images he and Iman were collecting of the newcomers. “Definite morphological differences. The fronds on their headballs show a different distribution of colors. There are more of the greenish sort than we have seen in the city. And the Sunbursters are shorter on the average.”

Ladawan told them that the Intelligence had found close matches between the phonemes used by the sailors and those used by the city folk. “They are distinct tongues—or perhaps I should say distinct ‘drums’—but of the same family. That which the cobaltics here sometimes speak is quite different.”

After the ceremony in the park, there was raucous celebration. Music was created—by plucking and beating and bowing. “They know the cymbal and the xylophone and the fiddle,” said Iman, “but not the trumpet or the reed.”

“One needs a mouth connected to a pair of lungs for that sort of thing,” Mizir told her.

“But, oh, what four hands can do with a tunbur!” And indeed, their stringed instruments were marvels of complexity beside which tunbur, guitar, sitar, violin were awkward and simple. Clawtips did for plectrums and tentacles fretted and even bowed most wondrously.

There was dancing, too, though not as humans understood the dance. They gyrated in triplets, Sunbursters and Havenites together, clapping with their lifting arms while they did. Mizir could not tell if the triplets were single or mixed gender. “You have to reach into the thorax opening and call forth the organ,” he said. “Otherwise, who can tell?”

“Not I,” Iman answered. “I wonder if they can. A people whose gender is known only through discovery will have . . . interesting depths.” She glanced first at Hassan, then at Mizir, who winked. The sound of the clapping in the parkland evolved from raindrop randomness to marching cadence and back again, providing a peculiar ground to the intricate, contrapuntal melodies.

The team gave up trying to make sense of the great babble and settled for recording everything that transpired. But dance is contagious, and soon Khalid and Bashir had coaxed the other men into a line that strutted back and forth while Iman clapped a rhythm and Soong and Ladawan looked on with amused detachment. Caught up, Hassan broke from the line into a mesri, and Iman with him. They bent and swiveled and they twisted their arms like serpents in challenge and response, while Khalid and Bashir clapped 11/4-time and Mizir mimed throwing coins at them until, finally exhausted, they came to a panting halt, face to face.

It was only a moment they stood that way, but it was a very long moment and whole worlds might have whirled about like Sufis while they caught their breath. Then Iman straightened her hijab, which the dance had tugged askew. Hassan thought he saw a dark curl of escaped hair on her shiny forehead. She gave him a high look, cocking her head just so, and departed for her tent. Hassan was left standing there, wondering if he was supposed to follow or not, while Soong and Mizir looked to each other.

He did pass by her tent on his way to sleep and, standing by the closed flap—he did not dare to lift it—said, “When we return to Earth, we will speak, you and I.” He waited a moment in case there was a reply, but there was none, unless the tinkling of wind chimes was her laughter.

The morning dawned with mist. A fog had rolled in from the Eastern Sea and lay, a soft blanket, over everything. Hilltops emerged like islands from a sea of smoke. A few of the tallest buildings in Haven thrust above the fog, suggesting the masts of a sunken shipwreck. Frustrated, the drones crisscrossed the shrouded landscape, seeking what could be found on frequencies non-visual. Yance took the ultralight out again, and from a great height spied a speckling of islands on the horizon. Delighted, Soong placed them on the map and, with droll humor added, “Here there be dragons” to the blank expanse beyond. The Intelligence dutifully created a virtual globe and dappled it in greens and browns and blues. Yet it remained for the most part a disheartening black, like a lump of coal daubed with a few specks of paint.

“The Havenites came here from somewhere near where the Sunbursters live,” Iman declared, tracing with an uncertain finger curlicues within the darkened part of the globe. “If only we knew where. The cobaltic folk may be indigenes, but I think they come from still a third place, and are strangers on these shores as well.”

But fog is a morning sort of thing and the sun slowly winnowed it. The park, lying as it did on a swell of land, emerged early, as if from a receding flood and, as in any such ebb, was dotted with bits of debris left behind.

“There are five,” Hassan told the others when he pulled his binoculars off. “Two of the bodies lie together, but the other three lie solitary. One is a marine off the foreign ship.”

“Suicide?” wondered Iman. “But why?”

Soong said, “Not so strange. Hopelessness often follow unreasonable hope.”

“Why was their hope unreasonable?” Bashir challenged him; but Soong only spread his hands in a helpless gesture, and Bashir cursed him as an unbeliever.

Hassan cased the binoculars. “People will do things behind a curtain that they otherwise entertain only in their hearts. There is something disheartening and solitary about fog. I suspect there are other bodies in the bushes.”

“But, so many?” Mizir asked with mixed horror and fascination; for the Prophet, praise be upon him, had forbidden suicide to the Faithful.

Hassan turned to the tele-pilots. “Khalid, Bashir, Ladawan. Quickly. Send your drones to the park and retrieve tissue samples from the corpses. Seed the bodies with micromachines, so Mizir can explore their inner structures.” Glancing at Mizir, he added, “That should please you. You’ve longed for a glimpse of their anatomy ever since we arrived.”

Mizir shook his head. “But not this way. Not this way.”

Bashir cried in distress. “Must you, cousin?”

Yet they did as they were told, and the drones swooped like buzzards onto the bodies of the dead. Clever devices no larger than dust motes entered through wounds and orifices, where they scurried up glands and channels and sinuses and took the metes and bounds of the bodies. “Quickly,” Hassan told them. “Before the folk from the city arrive to carry them off.”

“The folk in the city may have other concerns,” Iman said. When Hassan gave her a question in a glance, she added, “Other bodies.”

“I don’t understand,” said Bashir. “They seemed so happy yesterday, at the peace ceremony.”

“How can you know what they felt?” Hassan asked him. “We may have no name for what they felt.”

Yance said, “Maybe it was a sham, and the Sunbursters pulled a massacre during the night.” But as a practical matter, Hassan doubted that. The ship had not borne enough marines to carry out such a task so quickly and with so little alarm.

Before the fog had entirely dissipated Hassan ordered the drones home, and thither they flew engorged with the data they had sucked from the bodies, ready to feed it to the waiting Intelligence. On the scrublands south of the park, a covered wagon had left the road and stood now near the base of the Misty Mountain exposed in the morning sun and bracketed by three tents and a picket line of six-horses. Sensors warding the cliffside approach revealed five Batinites in various attitudes: tending the campfires, feeding the horses, and when the drones passed above, two of them turned their headballs to follow the heat track and one sprang to a tripod and adjusted its position.

“A surveyor’s tripod,” Klaus said when Hassan showed him the image. “They survey a new road, perhaps to those fishing villages in the southern Delta.”

“I think these folk have seen our drones,” Hassan decided.

“But our drones are stealthed,” Bashir objected.

“Yes. And hushed and cooled, but they still leave a heat footprint, and against the ocean chill of this morning’s mist they must stand out like a silhouette on the skyline.”

“Still . . .”

“Among humans,” said Iman, “there are those who may hear the softest whisper. Or see the shimmering air above the sands of Ar Rub al-Khali . Is it so strange if some of our Batinites have glimpsed strange streaks of sourceless heat in the sky?”

Hassan continued to study the last, backward-glancing image captured by the drones as they passed over the surveying party. A short-statured Batinite crouched behind the tripod, his tentacles adjusting verniers on an instrument of some sort. “If so, they may have taken a bearing on what they perceived.”

“If they have,” said Bashir, “what can they do? The cliff is sheer.”

Hassan ordered that all drones be grounded for the time being and that no one stand in sight of the cliffs edge. “We can watch the city with the peepers we have already emplaced.” Yance was especially saddened by the order and said that he could still fly over the western slope of the mountains, but Hassan pointed out that to gain the altitude he needed he must first circle over the very scrublands across which the surveying party trekked. “It will be for only a little while,” he told his team. “Once they have laid out the road and have returned to the City, we will resume the flights.” The one thing he had not considered was that the party might not be blazing a road. This did not occur to him until after Iman brought him the strange report from the Intelligence.

“There is no doubt?” he asked her, for even when she had placed the two images side by side, Hassan could not be sure. Not so the Intelligence, which, considering only data, was not distracted by strangeness.

“None at all. The images are identical down to the last eigenface. The surveyor in your road party is the same individual who followed the flight of the drone on the night the Blue Planet rose.”

Soong, listening, said, “Remarkable! First Batinite twice seen.”

Hassan picked up the first image and saw again the headball turned against the grain of that agitated crowd. “I do not trust coincidence,” he said. “I think he has been taking vectors on each sighting of a heat trail, and has set out to find their source.”

Iman sensed his troubled mind. “Should we prepare to evacuate?”

“No!” said Bashir.

“When you are more seasoned, young cousin,” Hassan told him, “you may give the orders.” To Iman: “Not yet. But all may depend on what is under the tarp on his wagon.”

Which was, as they learned a few days later, a hot-air balloon. Klaus was delighted. “Ja! Very like Bismarck’s age. Railroads, telegraphs, sailing ships with steam, and now balloons. The technological congruence! Think what it implies!”

Hassan did not wait to hear what it implied but walked off by himself, away from the tele-pilot booths and the tent flaps snapping in the dry mountain breeze. Iman followed at a distance. He paused at the shimmering gate and passed a few words with Khalid that Iman did not hear. Then he continued through the meadow, his legs kicking up the sparkling colored pollen from the knee-high flowers, until he reached the place where the wonderfall plummeted from very the top of the world. There he stood in silence gazing into the hidden depths of the pool. Mist filled the air, saturated it, until it seemed only a more tenuous extension of the pool itself. After watching him for a while, Iman approached and stood by his side.

Still he said nothing. When a few moments had gone past, Iman took his hand in hers; not in any forward way, but as one person may comfort another.

“I wonder where it goes?” he said at last, his voice distant beneath the steady roar. “All the way into the heart of the world, I think. But no one will ever know. Who could enter that pool without being crushed under by the force of the water? Who could ever return against that press to tell us?”

“Will you order evacuation?” She had to bend close to his ear to make herself heard.

“Do you think we should?”

“I think we should meet these people.”

Hassan turned to regard her, which brought them very close together. The better to hear over the roar, he told himself.

“We are not forbidden contact,” Iman insisted. “Circumstances vary from world to world. When to make contact is a judgment each captain must make.”

“Though few are called upon to make it. I never have. Concannon never did. Life is rare. Sentient life rarer still. Sentient life robust enough to endure contact, a jewel. Your flying flowers were not sentient.”

“No. They were only beautiful.”

He laughed. “You are as hidden as this world.”

“Shall I remove the hijab?” Fingers twitched toward her head-scarf.

He reached out and held her wrists, keeping her hands still. “It is not the hijab that hides you. You could remove all of your clothing and reveal nothing. Are the Batinites beautiful, too? You told us that once.”

“Yes. Yes they are, in their own way. But they prepare for war and cry defiance; and dance when enemies make friends; and sometimes, in the dark, they kill themselves. How can we go and never know who they are?”

Hassan released her and, stooping, picked up a fallen branch of sixelder wood. Like all such vegetation in that place, it was punkish in its texture, breaking easily into corded strings and fibers. “It doesn’t matter.” Then, seeing as she had not heard him over the roar of the falls, he came very close to her face. “Our curious friend will have his balloon aloft before we could gather up this scatter of equipment and pack it away. And we cannot hide ourselves in this meadow, if he can see our heat. So the decision to initiate contact is his, not mine, whether he knows it or not.” He threw the branch into the churning waters of the pool, and the maelstrom took it and it was gone. Hassan stared after it for a while, then turned to go. Iman placed her hand in the crook of his arm and walked with him.

She said when they were away from the wonderfall and voices could be voices once again and neither shouts nor whispers, “One other thing, you could do.”

“What?”

“We have the laser pistols in the bus lockers. You could burn a hole in his balloon before he even rises from the ground.”

“Yes. A hole mysteriously burned through the fabric. A fine way to conceal our presence.”

“As you said, we can not conceal ourselves in any case. To burn his balloon would buy us the time to leave unobserved.”

“Yes . . . but that’s not what you want.”

“No, I want to meet them; but you need to consider all your options.”

“Can the Intelligence translate adequately for a meeting?”

“Who can know that until we try?”

Hassan laughed. “You are becoming like me.”

“Is that so bad?”

“It is terrible. One Hassan is more than enough. One Iman will barely suffice.”

The others had gathered at the pavilion, some at the ropes, as if awaiting the command to strike camp. The ultralight technicians were gathered in a group at one end of the camp. Whichever the decision, they would be leaving on the next supply run. Bashir caught Hassan’s eye and there was a pleading in his face. Only Soong remained engrossed in his instruments. The world could end. God could clap his hands and mountains dissipate like the clouds, and Soong would only monitor the opacity and the density of their vapors.

To the technicians, Hassan gave a comp-pad containing his interim report and told them to carry it straight to the director’s office on their return. “I’ve called for a contact follow-up team.” Bashir and some of the others let out a cheer, which Hassan silenced with a glare. “I think our Batinite balloonist has shown sufficient enterprise that he deserves the fruit of it. But this decision has come on us too quickly and I dislike being rushed.”

Passing Mizir on the way to his own pavilion, Hassan clapped his old colleague on the shoulder. “Once we have established contact, you will no longer need wonder about this world’s ecology. Their own scholars will give you all the information you want.”

Mizir shook his head sadly. “It won’t be the same.”

Later, Hassan noticed that Soong had not moved from his monitors. Through long acquaintance, Hassan knew that this was not entirely unworldliness on the man’s part. So he joined the other at the astronomy board, though for several moments he did not interrupt Soong’s concentration, allowing his presence to do for a question.

After a while, Soong said as if to the air, “At first, I think: moonlet. Strange skies, these, and we not know all out there. But orbit very low. Ninety-minute orbit.” He pointed to a tiny speck of light that crossed the screen. “Every ninety minute he come back. Yesterday five. Today, ten, maybe twelve.”

“What are they?” Hassan asked. “You said moonlets?”

“Only see when catch sunlight. Maybe many more, not see.”

“Perhaps al-Batin has a ring of small moons . . .” But Soong was shaking his head.

“Two big moons sweep low-orbit free.”

“Then what . . .?”

“Men go to moon, long time past. Go to Mars. I think now we see . . .”

“Rocket ships?” Hassan stood up, away from the screen where last night’s telescope data replayed and looked into the pale, cloud-shrouded sky. “Rocket ships,” he whispered.

“I think,” said Soong, “from Blue Planet.”

Soong’s discovery added another layer of urgency to the team’s activities. “A second sapient, and in the same system!” said Iman. “Unprecedented,” said Mizir. “We should leave, now,” said Klaus; and Yance agreed: “We can stay hid from the folks here, but maybe not from these newcomers.”

“We have to stay!” Bashir cried. Soong himself said nothing more than that this would complicate matters, and it seemed as if the complications bothered him quite more than other possibilities. Hassan retreated to his tent to escape the din and there he pondered matters.

But not too long. There was the balloonist to consider. Balloons and space ships, and here the Earthlings sat with a Nagy hypergate and vehicles that could travel in the wrong direction—and it was the Earthlings who were considering flight. There was something very funny about that. When Hassan emerged from his tent, everyone else stopped what he or she was doing and turned toward him in expectation. “Prepare for D&D,” was all he said and turned back into his tent. He heard someone enter behind him and knew before turning that it was Iman.

Iman said, “Destruction and demolition? But . . .”

“But what?” Hassan said. “We cannot get everything into the buses quickly enough. We must destroy what we cannot take.”

“But you had said we would stay!”

“The equation has been altered. The risks now outweigh the opportunities.”

“What risks?”

“You heard Klaus. Folk with spaceships have other capabilities. We have grown careless observing the Batinites. These . . . these Azraqi will know radar, radio, laser, powered flight. Perhaps they know stealth and micromachines. I would rather they did not know of other-buses.”

“But the chance to observe First Contact from a third-party perspective!”

“We will stay and observe as long as possible, but with one hand on the latch-handles of our other-buses. Soong counted at least twelve ships in orbit, and the Batinites began re-arming some while ago. I do not think we will observe a First Contact.”

The team powered down nonessentials, transferred vital samples and data to the other-buses, and policed the meadow of their artifacts. Mizir drafted the ultralight technicians, who had been acting detached about the whole affair. They reported to a different Section Chief than did the Survey Team, but the old man leered at them. “There are no idlers onplanet,” he told them. Hassan spent the evening redrafting his report.

The next morning, Soong told him that the ships had begun to land. “One ship fire retro-burn while in telescope view. Intelligence extrapolate landing in antipodes. Other ships not appear on schedule, so maybe also deorbit.”

Hassan passed the word for everyone to stay alert and imposed radio silence on the team. “We are no longer so remote here on our mountain as we once were. We must be cautious with our drones, with radar pings. With anything that these newcomers might be able to detect.”

He did not suppose that there was anything especially remarkable about their alpine meadow that the orbiting ships would have studied it from aloft, but he had the tents struck—they clashed with the colors—and moved the primary monitors beneath a stand of six-cedar. He ordered Khalid and Ladawan to bring the other-buses to idle, so that they would be a little out of phase with the Right ’Brane and, in theory, impossible to detect by any but other instruments. When they had all gathered under the trees, Hassan did a head count and discovered that Bashir was missing.

With many curses, he set out to look for him and found him by the edge of the cliff that overlooked the plains. Bashir lay prone with a pair of enhanced binoculars pressed to his eyes. Hassan, too, dropped prone upon the grass beside him—strange grass, too-yellow grass, velvety and oily and odd to the touch. Hassan remembered that he was on a distant and alien world and was surprised to realize that for a time he had forgotten.

Bashir said, “Do you think he knows? About the ships in orbit, I mean.”

Hassan knew his cousin was speaking of the balloonist. “He knew they were coming. They all knew. When al-Asraq came into opposition, the ships would come. Someone must have worked out the orbital mechanics.”

“He’s coming to us to ask for help.”

“Against the Asraqi.”

“Yes. They are brave folk. Regimented companies in squares, firing one-shot rifles. Field cannon like Mehmet Ali had. And against what? People in space ships! What chance do they have, Hassan, unless we help them? ‘Surrender to God and do good deeds.’ Is that not what God said through his Messenger, praise be upon him?”

“Bashir, there are nine of us, plus the technicians for the ultralight. We have no arms but the four lasers in the weapons lockers. Only Klaus has any knowledge of military theory—and it is only theory. What can we possibly do?”

The attack was swift and brutal and came without warning. The shuttlecraft flew in low from the west, screaming over the crests of the mountains, shedding velocity over the ocean as they banked and turned. There were three of them, shaped like lozenges, their heat shields still glowing dully on their undersides. “Scramjets,” said Klaus into his headset and the Intelligence heard and compiled the observation with the visuals. “Bring the cameras to bear,” said Hassan. “Bring the cameras to bear. One is landing on the park. The second on the far side of the city. It may land in the swamp and be mired. Ladawan, we’ll take the chance. Send a drone over that way. On a narrow beam. Yance, if the invaders put anything between us and the drone, destroy the drone immediately. Where did the third shuttle go? Where is it? Klaus, your assessment!”

“Mid-twenty-first-century equivalent,” the German said. “Scramjet SSTOs. Look for smart bombs, laser targeting, hopper-hunters. High-density flechette rifles with submunitions. Oh, those poor bastards. Oh, those poor bastards!” Black flowers blossomed in the sky. “The Havenites have their field guns to maximum elevation. Low-energy shells bursting in the air . . . but too low to matter. Ach, for an AA battery!”

“You are choosing sides, Klaus.”

The technologist lowered his binoculars. “Yes, naturally,” he snapped, and the binoculars rose again.

“It is not our quarrel,” Hassan said, but the Roumi was not listening to him.

“The second shuttle is in the swamp,” Ladawan reported. “I do not think the Havenites expected that. They have few defenses on that side.”

“I do not think the Asraqi expected so, either,” Klaus said. “These shuttles have only the limited maneuverability. More than the first American shuttles, but not much more. They may have little choice in where they land.”

“Where did the third one go?” Hassan asked.

Bashir raised an ululation. “It was hit! It was hit! It flew into a shell burst. It’s down in the surf.”

“A lucky shot,” said Klaus, but he too raised a fist and shook it at the sky.

“Listen to them cheer in the City,” said Iman, who was monitoring the ears that they had planted during their long observation and study.

The other two shuttles released missiles, which flew into the City, and two of the tallest buildings coughed and shrugged and slid into ruin. Smoke and flame rose above the skyline. Hassan turned to Iman. “Did the cheering stop?” he asked, and Iman turned away from him.

“No, show me,” Klaus said to Soong, bending over the screen where the drone’s feed was displayed. The Chinese pointed. Here. Here. Here. Klaus turned to Hassan.

“I was wrong. The third shuttle made by intent the ocean landing. They have triangulated the City. Park. Swamp. Ocean. Look at it out there. See? It floats. They must be for both the water or ground landing designed.”

Soong said, “Ah! I find radio traffic. Feeding data stream to Intelligence.” He put the stream on audio and everyone in the team paused to listen for a moment. There was something liquid, something squishy, about the sounds. Frogs croaking, iguanas barking. Not computer signals, but voices. The sounds had an analog feel to them.

Bashir said, “The balloon is up.”

Hassan turned to stare at him. “Are you certain? The man must be mad. To go up in this? Iman, Bashir, Khalid. Go to the cliff. I will come shortly.” Hassan could not take his eyes from the dying city. Upping the magnification on his binoculars, he saw troops emerge from the first shuttle, the one that had landed in the park. “Close images!” he cried. “I want close images of those people.”

“There are not very many of them,” Mizir ventured.

“There do not need to be very many of them,” Klaus told him. “These will be light airborne infantry. They are to hold a landing zone for the mother ship.”

“You’re guessing,” Hassan said.

“Ganz natürlich.”

The landing force scattered into teams of three and fanned across the park. The Asraqi were bipedal, shorter than the Batinites, stockier. They wore flat black uniforms of a leathery material. Helmets with masks covered their faces—if anything like faces lurked under those masks. Skin, where it showed, was scaled and shiny. “Reptiloids,” said Mizir, halfdelighted to have a new race to study but not, under the circumstances, fully so. “The works of God are wonderfully diverse, but he uses precious few templates.”

“Speculate,” Hassan said. “What am I seeing?”

“The helmets are heads-up displays,” Klaus said. “The mother ship has in Low Orbit satellites placed and the Lizards receive on the battle space, the information.”

“If they are reptiloid,” said Mizir, “they would likely come from a dry place.”

Klaus pursed his lips. “But Earth has many aquatic reptiles, not so? And al-Asraq is watery.”

“So it does!” cried Mizir, “but there are yet deserts. Besides, those may be fish scales. Amphibians. What do you expect from me from the glimpse of a single bare arm!”

“Mizir!” Hassan cautioned him, and the exobiologist took a deep calming breath and turned away.

“Hassan.” It was Bashir’s voice on the radio. “The balloonist is halfway up, but the winds are contrary, keeping him away from the cliff.”

Hassan cursed and broke his own rule long enough to bark, “Radio silence!” He turned. “What is it, for the love of God? Khalid, I told you to go to the cliff and wait for the balloonist.”

Khalid glanced at the progress of the battle on the large plasma screen. “Not a fair fight, is it. Here, sir. You may need this.”

Hassan looked down at his hand and saw that the gate warden had given him a laser pistol.

“There are only four laser pistols,” Khalid explained, “two in each bus. Ladawan and I keep one each. We are trained marksmen. I give one to you, because you are team captain. Who gets the fourth?”

“Warden, if the Asraqi attack us here, four laser pistols will do no good. Against a cruise missile?”

“Sir, they will do more good than if we were utterly disarmed.”

Hassan tucked the pistol into his waistband. “Klaus?”

The German lowered his binoculars, saw what the gate warden had, and shook his head. “Military strategy is to me small squares on a mapscreen. I have never fired a handgun. Give it to Yance. Americans make the Fickerei to pistols.”

Soong reached up from his console seat. “I take.”

Khalid hesitated. “Do you know how to use one?”

“I show you by burning rabbit.” He pointed to a six-legged rodent on the far side of the meadow.

Khalid did not ask for the proof, but handed over the pistol. Soong laid it on his console.

“Do you shoot so well?” Hassan asked him after Khalid had gone to the cliffside.

“No, but now he does not give pistol to Yance. Too young, like your cousin. Too excitable. Better pistol with me. I not know use. But I know I not know use.”

“The Batinites must have expected a landing in the park,” Klaus announced. “They have a regiment in the woods concealed. Now they charge while the Asraqi they are scattered!”

Hassan paused in the act of leaving and watched while ranks and files decked in yellow marched from the woods to the drum-claps of their tympanums and their lower arms. He saw the corporals bawl orders. He saw the ranks dress themselves and two banners—the six-eagle and some device that was probably the regiment’s own—rose aloft. The first rank knelt and both it and the second rank fired in volley, then they sidestepped to allow the next two ranks to pass through and repeat the process while they reloaded.

They managed the evolution twice before the invaders tore them apart. High velocity rounds from scattered, mobile kill squads firing from shelter shredded the pretty uniforms and the fine banners and splattered the six-cedars and iron-wood and the chartreuse oil-grass with glistening pools of yellow-green ichor. A few cannon shots from the shuttle completed the slaughter. Nothing was left of the regiment but twitching corpses and body parts. Hassan wondered whether the young soldier they had once watched make love to his sweetheart lay among them.

“O, les braves gens,” Klaus whispered, echoing a long-dead King of Prussia at a long-forgotten battle.

Hassan could bear to see no more. “Record everything,” he barked. “The rest of you, get those buses packed. Power down any equipment whose source might be traced by those . . . lizards. Klaus . . . Klaus! Estimate the invaders’ capabilities. What can we operate safely? At the moment, the Asraqi are . . . preoccupied; but sooner or later they’ll bring down aircraft—or a satellite will chance to look down on this meadow. Leave nothing behind that those folk may find useful—and they might find anything useful!” He turned to walk to the cliffside, where the balloonist was attempting his ascent. Klaus said, “But, I thought we might . . .” Hassan silenced him with a glare.

When he reached the edge of the six-cedar grove that grew close to the cliffside, Hassan saw Iman monitoring the balloon through her goggles. She seemed an alien creature herself, with her head wrapped in a scarf and her face concealed by the glasses.

“He’s using a grappling line,” Bashir announced as Hassan joined them. “He whirls it around, then throws it toward the cliff.”

“Has he seen you?”

“No.” It was Iman, who answered without taking her eyes off the balloonist. “A dangerous maneuver,” she added. “He could foul his mooring rope, or rake the balloon above him.”

“We’ve been watching the battle,” Bashir said, “on our hand comms.”

Iman lowered her glasses and turned around. Hassan glanced at Khalid, who squatted on his heels a little behind the others in the brush; but the warden’s face held no expression. Hassan rubbed his fist and did not look at any of them. “It’s not a battle. It’s a massacre. I think the Batinites have killed two Asraqi. Maybe. The invaders evacuated their wounded into their shuttle, so who can say?”

“We have to do something!” Bashir cried.

Hassan whirled on him. “Do we? What would you have us do, cousin? We have no weapons, but the four handguns. Soong is clever, and perhaps he could create a super-weapon from the components of our equipment, but I do not think Soong is quite that clever. Yance could fly out in the ultralight and perhaps drop the gas chromatograph on someone’s head—but he could never do that twice.”

Iman turned ’round again. “Stop that! Stop mocking him! He wants to help. We all do.”

“I want him to face reality. We can do nothing—but watch and record.”

“We could send one of the buses back to Earth,” Bashir entreated him, “and show them what’s happening here. They’ll send help. They’ll send the Legion, or the American Marines, and we’ll see how those lizards like being on the other side of the boot!”

“What makes you think that the Union, or the Americans, or anyone would send so much as a policeman? What interests do they have here?”

Bashir opened his mouth and closed it and opened it a second time. “They’d, they’d have to. These people need help!”

“And if they did send the Legion,” Hassan continued remorselessly, “every last trooper would have to come through the gate. The Asraqi may be brutal, but they can not be stupid. One cruise missile to take out the gate and the whole expeditionary force would be trapped, cut off from home forever. Or the Asraqi would simply pick off whoever came through, seize the buses, and . . . what general would be mad enough to propose such a plan? What politician fool enough to approve it? What legionnaire suicidal enough to obey?”

Khalid spoke up. “And you haven’t yet asked how we would move a force large enough to matter down a sheer cliff onto the plains.”

“Thank you, warden,” Hassan said, “but I think my cousin begins to understand. But there is one thing we can do,” he added quietly.

Bashir seized on hope. “What? What can we do?”

“Little enough. We can give information—if the Intelligence has mastered enough of their speech. We can tell our balloonist friend about asymmetric warfare. About the Spanish guerrilla that tormented Napoleon. About Tito’s partisans.”

“Will that help?”

Hassan wanted to tell him no, that few irregular forces had ever triumphed without a secure refuge or a regimented army to back them.

The guerrilla had had Wellington; Tito’s partisans, the Red Army. “Yes,” he told Bashir. Khalid, who may have known better, said nothing.

“He’s latched hold,” said Iman.

“What?”

“The balloonist,” she told him. “His grapple. He’s pulling the balloon toward the edge of the cliff to moor it.”

“Ah. Well. Time to welcome the poor bastard.”

“Why,” asked Khalid of no one in particular, “with all that is happening to his city, does he insist on reaching this peak?”

“I think,” said Hassan, “because he has nothing else left to reach for.”

The Batinite headball cannot show expression, at least no expression that humans can read. Yet it was not hard to discern the emotions of the balloonist when, after he had clambered from the balloon’s basket onto solid ground and secured it by a rope to the stump of a tree, the waiting humans rose from concealment. The Batinite reared nearly vertical, waving his tentacled upper arms in the air, and staggered backward. One step. Then another.

“No!” said Iman. “The cliff!” And she moved toward him.

Groping behind into the basket, the balloonist pulled out a musket and, before Hassan could even react to the sight, fired a load of shot that ripped Iman across the throat and chest. Hassan heard a pellet pass him by like an angry bee and heard, too, Bashir cry out in pain.

Grapeshot is not a high-velocity round; it did not throw Iman back. She stood in place, swaying, while her hijab turned slowly from checkerboard to black crimson. She began to turn toward Hassan with a puzzled look on her face, and Hassan thought she meant to ask him what had happened, but the act unbalanced her, and, sighing, she twisted to the ground.

Hassan caught her and lowered her gently the rest of the way. Speaking her name, he yanked the sodden hijab away and held her head to his breast. Her hair was black, he noted. Black, and wound tightly in a coiled braid.

The Batinite was meanwhile methodically reloading his musket, ramming a load down the muzzle, preparing for a second murder. With a cry, Hassan rose to his feet, tugged the pistol from his waistband, and aimed it at the thing that had come in the balloon. The red targeting spot wavered across the alien’s headball. The laser would slice the leathery carapace open, spilling—not brains, but something like a ganglion that served to process sense impressions before sending them to the belly. Hassan shifted his aim to the belly, to the orifice from which might emerge slimy, unclean organs, behind the diaphragm of which Mizir had named the creature’s life and thought.

He almost fired. He had placed his thumb on the activation trigger, but Khalid shoved his hand down and fired his own laser four times with cruel precision, burning the hands of the beast, so that it dropped the musket and emitted sounds like a mad percussionist. With a fifth and more sustained burn, Khalid ran a gash along the body of the balloon hovering in the sky beyond. The colorful fabric sighed—much like Iman had sighed—and crumpled in much the same way, too, hanging for a while on the rocky escarpment while the wind teased its folds.

Hassan dropped his pistol to the dirt unfired. He turned and walked into the alien cedars.

Khalid indicated the thrumming prisoner. “Wait! What are we to do with him?”

Hassan did not look back. “Throw it over the cliff.”

Soong found Hassan at last in the place where he ought to have looked first, by the endless falls and bottomless pool at the far end of the mountain valley. There the team leader knelt on a prayer rug that he had rolled out on the damp earth and rock and prostrated himself again and again. Soong watched for a time. He himself honored his ancestors and followed, when the mood struck, an Eight-Fold Path. Perhaps there was a god behind it all, perhaps not. His ancestors were not forthcoming on the subject. Soot from the burning city had begun to settle on the plateau. Explosions boomed like distant thunder. If that were the work of a god, it was one beyond Soong’s comprehending.

Hassan sat back on his haunches. “Why did she have to die?” he cried, loudly enough that even the roar of the falls was overcome.

Soong wondered momentarily whether Hassan had addressed him or his god before he answered. “Because pellets sever carotid artery.”

Hassan hesitated, then turned around. “What sort of reason is that?”

“No reason,” Soong said. “Westerners think reason, always reason. But, no reason. ‘Shit happens.’ Life is wheel. Someday you escape.”

“Do not presume to question God.”

“Gods not answer, however often asked. Maybe they not know, either.”

“I can’t even blame that poor bastard in the balloon.” Hassan covered his face with his hands. “His planet has been invaded, his people massacred, the proudest achievements of his civilization exposed as less than nothing. What were we to him but more invaders? Tell me Khalid did not throw him over the cliff.”

“He know not lawful order. But survival up here, more cruel. Without balloon, how he descend? With hands burned so, how he fend?”

“It was my fault, Soong. What sort of captain am I? I let al-Batin lull me. I should never have allowed Iman to approach him like that, without taking time to calm his fears.”

“Not matter,” said Soong. “He no fear. He hate.”

“What do you mean? How can you know that?”

Soong spread his hands. “Maybe Intelligence not translate well. But say headball drum hate and loathing. We question him. Mizir, Khalid, me. This not first visit from Blue Planet. Asraqi come once before. Come in peace. Trade, discovery, I think. And Batinites kill all—for defiling holy soil of Batin.”

“Without provocation?”

“Arrival provocation enough, balloonist say. Asraqi ship damaged, but some escape, come to Haven. Warn of terrible revenge, next approach, but Batinites not care. No logic, just fury. Kill survivors too. Balloonist one of them. Proud to defend al-Batin. Remember, Hassan, he bring balloon here before Asraqi land, and bring gun already loaded. Not know who up here or why, only someone up here. Come to kill, not to greet.”

“Xenophobes . . .” Hassan could not reconcile that with the gentle, carefree folk he had been observing for so long. And yet, the one never did preclude the other.

Soong shook his head. “Balloonist not hate Asraqi; only hate that they come.”

“Does the difference matter? And is the Asraqi punishment not worse than the original crime?” Hassan did not expect an answer. He did not think that there ever would be an answer. He rolled his prayer rug and slung it over his shoulder. “Are the buses ready to go?”

Soong nodded. “Waiting for captain.”

“Is . . . is Iman on board?”

“In specimen locker.”

Hassan winced. “I’m ordering Khalid to seal the gate. No one comes back here. Ever.”

“Too dangerous,” Soong agreed.

“Not in the way you think.”

From a world named The Hidden by humans, humans departed. The gate closed on a pleasant mountain glade, far above the flaming cities on the plains below. Gates swung where God willed, and man could only submit. Perhaps they opened where they did for a reason, but it was not man’s place to question God’s reasons.

Hassan Maklouf was their leader, a man who had walked on eighteen worlds and bore in consequence eighteen wounds. To ten of those worlds, he had followed another; to eight, others had followed him. From four, he had escaped with his life. With two, he had fallen in love. On one, he had lost his soul.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES TO “A DISCOURSE ON THE NATURE OF CAUSALITY, WITH AIR-PLANES” BY BEN ROSENBAUM

Benjamin Rosenbaum

On my return from PlausFab-Wisconsin (a delightful festival of art and inquiry, which styles itself “the World’s Only Gynarchist Plausible-Fable Assembly”) aboard the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, I happened to share a compartment with Prem Ramasson, Raja of Outermost Thule, and his consort, a dour but beautiful woman whose name I did not know.

Two great blond barbarians bearing the livery of Outermost Thule (an elephant astride an iceberg and a volcano) stood in the hallway outside, armed with sabres and needlethrowers. Politely they asked if they might frisk me, then allowed me in. They ignored the short dagger at my belt—presumably accounting their liege’s skill at arms more than sufficient to equal mine.

I took my place on the embroidered divan. “Good evening,” I said.

The Raja flashed me a white-toothed smile and inclined his head. His consort pulled a wisp of blue veil across her lips, and looked out the porthole.

I took my notebook, pen, and inkwell from my valise, set the inkwell into the port provided in the white pine table set in the wall, and slid aside the strings that bound the notebook. The inkwell lit with a faint blue glow.

The Raja was shuffling through a Wisdom Deck, pausing to look at the incandescent faces of the cards, then up at me. “You are the plausible-fabulist, Benjamin Rosenbaum,” he said at length.

I bowed stiffly. “A pen name, of course,” I said.

“Taken from The Scarlet Pimpernel?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow curiously.

“My lord is very quick,” I said mildly.

The Raja laughed, indicating the Wisdom Deck with a wave. “He isn’t the most heroic or sympathetic character in that book, however.”

“Indeed not, my lord,” I said with polite restraint. “The name is chosen ironically. As a sort of challenge to myself, if you will. Bearing the name of a notorious anti-Hebraic caricature, I must needs be all the prouder and more subtle in my own literary endeavors.”

“You are a Karaite, then?” he asked.

“I am an Israelite, at any rate,” I said. “If not an orthodox follower of my people’s traditional religion of despair.”

The prince’s eyes glittered with interest, so—despite my reservations—I explained my researches into the Rabbinical Heresy which had briefly flourished in Palestine and Babylon at the time of Ashoka, and its lost Talmud.

“Fascinating,” said the Raja. “Do you return now to your family?”

“I am altogether without attachments, my liege,” I said, my face darkening with shame.

Excusing myself, I delved once again into my writing, pausing now and then to let my Wisdom Ants scurry from the inkwell to taste the ink with their antennae, committing it to memory for later editing. At PlausFab-Wisconsin, I had received an assignment—to construct a plausible-fable of a world without zeppelins—and I was trying to imagine some alternative air conveyance for my characters when the Prince spoke again.

“I am an enthusiast for plausible-fables myself,” he said. “I enjoyed your ‘Droplet’ greatly.”

“Thank you, Your Highness.”

“Are you writing such a grand extrapolation now?”

“I am trying my hand at a shadow history,” I said.

The prince laughed gleefully. His consort had nestled herself against the bulkhead and fallen asleep, the blue gauze of her veil obscuring her features. “I adore shadow history,” he said.

“Most shadow history proceeds with the logic of dream, full of odd echoes and distorted resonances of our world,” I said. “I am experimenting with a new form, in which a single point of divergence in history leads to a new causal chain of events, and thus a different present.”

“But the world is a dream,” he said excitedly. “Your idea smacks of Democritan materialism—as if the events of the world were produced purely by linear cause and effect, the simplest of the Five Forms of causality.”

“Indeed,” I said.

“How fanciful!” he cried.

I was about to turn again to my work, but the prince clapped his hands thrice. From his baggage, a birdlike Wisdom Servant unfolded itself and stepped agilely onto the floor. Fully unfolded, it was three cubits tall, with a trapezoidal head and incandescent blue eyes. It took a silver tea service from an alcove in the wall, set the tray on the table between us, and began to pour.

“Wake up, Sarasvati Sitasdottir,” the prince said to his consort, stroking her shoulder. “We are celebrating.”

The servitor placed a steaming teacup before me. I capped my pen and shooed my Ants back into their inkwell, though one crawled stubbornly towards the tea. “What are we celebrating?” I asked.

“You shall come with me to Outermost Thule,” he said. “It is a magical place—all fire and ice, except where it is greensward and sheep. Home once of epic heroes, Rama’s cousins.” His consort took a sleepy sip of her tea. “I have need of a plausible-fabulist. You can write the history of the Thule that might have been, to inspire and quell my restive subjects.”

“Why me, Your Highness? I am hardly a fabulist of great renown. Perhaps I could help you contact someone more suitable—Karen Despair Robinson, say, or Howi Qomr Faukota.”

“Nonsense,” laughed the Raja, “for I have met none of them by chance in an airship compartment.”

“But yet . . .,” I said, discomfited.

“You speak again like a materialist! This is why the East, once it was awakened, was able to conquer the West—we understand how to read the dream that the world is. Come, no more fuss.”

I lifted my teacup. The stray Wisdom Ant was crawling along its rim; I positioned my forefinger before her, that she might climb onto it.

Just then there was a scuffle at the door, and Prem Ramasson set his teacup down and rose. He said something admonitory in the harsh Nordic tongue of his adopted country, something I imagined to mean “come now, boys, let the conductor through.” The scuffle ceased, and the Raja slid the door of the compartment open, one hand on the hilt of his sword. There was the sharp hiss of a needlethrower, and he staggered backward, collapsing into the arms of his consort, who cried out.

The thin and angular Wisdom Servant plucked the dart from its master’s neck. “Poison,” it said, its voice a tangle of flutelike harmonics. “The assassin will possess its antidote.”

Sarasvati Sitasdottir began to scream.

It is true that I had not accepted Prem Ramasson’s offer of employment—indeed, that he had not seemed to find it necessary to actually ask. It is true also that I am a man of letters, neither spy nor bodyguard. It is furthermore true that I was unarmed, save for the ceremonial dagger at my belt, which had thus far seen employment only in the slicing of bread, cheese, and tomatoes.

Thus, the fact that I leapt through the doorway, over the fallen bodies of the prince’s bodyguard, and pursued the fleeting form of the assassin down the long and curving corridor, cannot be reckoned as a habitual or forthright action. Nor, in truth, was it a considered one. In Śri Grigory Guptanovich Karthaganov’s typology of action and motive, it must be accounted an impulsive-transformative action: the unreflective moment which changes forever the path of events.

Causes buzz around any such moment like bees around a hive, returning with pollen and information, exiting with hunger and ambition. The assassin’s strike was the proximate cause. The prince’s kind manner, his enthusiasm for plausible-fables (and my work in particular), his apparent sympathy for my people, the dark eyes of his consort—all these were inciting causes.

The psychological cause, surely, can be found in this name that I have chosen—”Benjamin Rosenbaum”—the fat and cowardly merchant of The Scarlet Pimpernel who is beaten and raises no hand to defend himself; just as we, deprived of our Temple, found refuge in endless, beautiful elegies of despair, turning our backs on the Rabbis and their dreams of a new beginning. I have always seethed against this passivity. Perhaps, then, I was waiting—my whole life—for such a chance at rash and violent action.

The figure—clothed head to toe in a dull gray that matched the airship’s hull—raced ahead of me down the deserted corridor, and descended through a maintenance hatch set in the floor. I reached it, and paused for breath, thankful my enthusiasm for the favorite sport of my continent—the exalted Lacrosse—had prepared me somewhat for the chase. I did not imagine, though, that I could overpower an armed and trained assassin. Yet, the weave of the world had brought me here—surely to some purpose. How could I do aught but follow?

Beyond the proximate, inciting, and psychological causes, there are the more fundamental causes of an action. These address how the action embeds itself into the weave of the world, like a nettle in cloth. They rely on cosmology and epistemology. If the world is a dream, what caused the dreamer to dream that I chased the assassin? If the world is a lesson, what should this action teach? If the world is a gift, a wild and mindless rush of beauty, riven of logic or purpose—as it sometimes seems—still, seen from above, it must possess its own aesthetic harmony. The spectacle, then, of a ludicrously named practitioner of a half-despised art (bastard child of literature and philosophy), clumsily attempting the role of hero on the middledeck of the P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw, must surely have some part in the pattern—chord or discord, tragic or comic.

Hesitantly, I poked my head down through the hatch. Beneath, a spiral staircase descended through a workroom cluttered with tools. I could hear the faint hum of engines nearby. There, in the canvas of the outer hull, between the Shaw’s great aluminum ribs, a door to the sky was open.

From a workbench, I took and donned an airman’s vest, supple leather gloves, and a visored mask, to shield me somewhat from the assassin’s needle. I leaned my head out the door.

A brisk wind whipped across the skin of the ship. I took a tether from a nearby anchor and hooked it to my vest. The assassin was untethered. He crawled along a line of handholds and footholds set in the airship’s gently curving surface. Many cubits beyond him, a small and brightly colored glider clung to the Shaw—like a dragonfly splayed upon a watermelon.

It was the first time I had seen a glider put to any utilitarian purpose—espionage rather than sport—and immediately I was seized by the longing to return to my notebook. Gliders! In a world without dirigibles, my heroes could travel in some kind of immense, powered gliders! Of course, they would be forced to land whenever winds were unfavorable.

Or would they? I recalled that my purpose was not to repaint our world anew, but to speculate rigorously according to Democritan logic. Each new cause could lead to some wholly new effect, causing in turn some unimagined consequence. Given different economic incentives, then, and with no overriding, higher pattern to dictate the results, who knew what advances a glider-based science of aeronautics might achieve? Exhilarating speculation!

I glanced down, and the sight below wrenched me from my reverie:

The immense panoply of the Great Lakes—

—their dark green wave-wrinkled water—

—the paler green and tawny yellow fingers of land reaching in among them—

—puffs of cloud gamboling in the bulk of air between—

—and beyond, the vault of sky presiding over the Frankish and Athapascan Moeity.

It was a long way down.

“Malkat Ha-Shamayim,” I murmured aloud. “What am I doing?”

“I was wondering that myself,” said a high and glittering timbrel of chords and discords by my ear. It was the recalcitrant, tea-seeking Wisdom Ant, now perched on my shoulder.

“Well,” I said crossly, “do you have any suggestions?”

“My sisters have tasted the neurotoxin coursing the through the prince’s blood,” the Ant said. “We do not recognize it. His servant has kept him alive so far, but an antidote is beyond us.” She gestured towards the fleeing villain with one delicate antenna. “The assassin will likely carry an antidote to his venom. If you can place me on his body, I can find it. I will then transmit the recipe to my sisters through the Brahmanic field. Perhaps they can formulate a close analogue in our inkwell.”

“It is a chance,” I agreed. “But the assassin is half-way to his craft.”

“True,” said the Ant pensively.

“I have an idea for getting there,” I said. “But you will have to do the math.”

The tether which bound me to the Shaw was fastened high above us. I crawled upwards and away from the glider, to a point the Ant calculated. The handholds ceased, but I improvised with the letters of the airship’s name, raised in decoration from its side.

From the top of an R, I leapt into the air—struck with my heels against the resilient canvas—and rebounded, sailing outwards, snapping the tether taut.

The Ant took shelter in my collar as the air roared around us. We described a long arc, swinging past the surprised assassin to the brightly colored glider; I was able to seize its aluminum frame.

I hooked my feet onto its seat, and hung there, my heart racing. The glider creaked, but held.

“Disembark,” I panted to the Ant. “When the assassin gains the craft, you can search him.”

“Her,” said the Ant, crawling down my shoulder. “She has removed her mask, and in our passing I was able to observe her striking resemblance to Sarasvati Sitasdottir, the prince’s consort. She is clearly her sister.”

I glanced at the assassin. Her long black hair now whipped in the wind. She was braced against the airship’s hull with one hand and one foot; with the other hand she had drawn her needlethrower.

“That is interesting information,” I said as the Ant crawled off my hand and onto the glider. “Good luck.”

“Good-bye,” said the Ant.

A needle whizzed by my cheek. I released the glider and swung once more into the cerulean sphere.

Once again I passed the killer, covering my face with my leather gloves—a dart glanced off my visor. Once again I swung beyond the door to the maintenance room and towards the hull.

Predictably, however, my momentum was insufficient to attain it. I described a few more dizzying swings of decreasing arc-length until I hung, nauseous, terrified, and gently swaying, at the end of the tether, amidst the sky.

To discourage further needles, I protected the back of my head with my arms, and faced downwards. That is when I noticed the pirate ship.

It was sleek and narrow and black, designed for maneuverability. Like the Shaw, it had a battery of sails for fair winds, and propellers in an aft assemblage. But the Shaw traveled in a predictable course and carried a fixed set of coiled tensors, whose millions of microsprings gradually relaxed to produce its motive force. The new craft spouted clouds of white steam; carrying its own generatory, it could rewind its tensor batteries while underway. And, unlike the Shaw, it was armed—a cruel array of arbalest-harpoons was mounted at either side. It carried its sails below, sporting at its top two razor-sharp saw-ridges with which it could gut recalcitrant prey.

All this would have been enough to recognize the craft as a pirate—but it displayed the universal device of pirates as well, that parody of the Yin-Yang: all Yang, declaring allegiance to imbalance. In a yellow circle, two round black dots stared like unblinking demonic eyes; beneath, a black semicircle leered with empty, ravenous bonhomie.

I dared a glance upward in time to see the glider launch from the Shaw’s side. Whoever the mysterious assassin-sister was, whatever her purpose (political symbolism? personal revenge? dynastic ambition? anarchic mania?), she was a fantastic glider pilot. She gained the air with a single, supple back-flip, twirled the glider once, then hung deftly in the sky, considering.

Most people, surely, would have wondered at the meaning of a pirate and an assassin showing up together—what resonance, what symbolism, what hortatory or aesthetic purpose did the world intend thereby? But my mind was still with my thought-experiment.

Imagine there are no causes but mechanical ones—that the world is nothing but a chain of dominoes! Every plausible-fabulist spends long hours teasing apart fictional plots, imagining consequences, conjuring and discarding the antecedents of desired events. We dirty our hands daily with the simplest and grubbiest of the Five Forms. Now I tried to reason thus about life.

Were the pirate and the assassin in league? It seemed unlikely. If the assassin intended to trigger political upheaval and turmoil, pirates surely spoiled the attempt. A death at the hands of pirates while traveling in a foreign land is not the stuff of which revolutions are made. If the intent was merely to kill Ramasson, surely one or the other would suffice.

Yet was I to credit chance, then, with the intrusion of two violent enemies, in the same hour, into my hitherto tranquil existence?

Absurd! Yet the idea had an odd attractiveness. If the world was a blind machine, surely such clumsy coincidences would be common!

The assassin saw the pirate ship; yet, with an admirable consistency, she seemed resolved to finish what she had started. She came for me.

I drew my dagger from its sheath. Perhaps, at first, I had some wild idea of throwing it, or parrying her needles, though I had the skill for neither.

She advanced to a point some fifteen cubits away; from there, her spring-fired darts had more than enough power to pierce my clothing. I could see her face now, a choleric, wild-eyed homunculus of her phlegmatic sister’s.

The smooth black canvas of the pirate ship was now thirty cubits below me.

The assassin banked her glider’s wings against the wind, hanging like a kite. She let go its aluminum frame with her right hand, and drew her needlethrower.

Summoning all my strength, I struck the tether that held me with my dagger’s blade.

My strength, as it happened, was extremely insufficient. The tether twanged like a harp-string, but was otherwise unharmed, and the dagger was knocked from my grasp by the recoil.

The assassin burst out laughing, and covered her eyes. Feeling foolish, I seized the tether in one hand and unhooked it from my vest with the other.

Then I let go.

Since that time, I have on various occasions enumerated to myself, with a mixture of wonder and chagrin, the various ways I might have died. I might have snapped my neck, or, landing on my stomach, folded in a V and broken my spine like a twig. If I had struck one of the craft’s aluminum ribs, I should certainly have shattered bones.

What is chance? Is it best to liken it to the whim of some being of another scale or scope, the dreamer of our dream? Or to regard the world as having an inherent pattern, mirroring itself at every stage and scale?

Or could our world arise, as Democritus held, willy-nilly, of the couplings and patternings of endless dumb particulates?

While hanging from the Shaw, I had decided that the protagonist of my Democritan shadow-history (should I live to write it) would be a man of letters, a dabbler in philosophy like myself, who lived in an advanced society committed to philosophical materialism. I relished the apparent paradox—an intelligent man, in a sophisticated nation, forced to account for all events purely within the rubric of overt mechanical causation!

Yet those who today, complacently, regard the materialist hypothesis as dead—pointing to the Brahmanic field and its Wisdom Creatures, to the predictive successes, from weather to history, of the Theory of Five Causal Forms—forget that the question is, at bottom, axiomatic. The materialist hypothesis—the primacy of Matter over Mind—is undisprovable. What successes might some other science, in another history, have built, upon its bulwark?

So I cannot say—I cannot say!—if it is meaningful or meaningless, the fact that I struck the pirate vessel’s resilient canvas with my legs and buttocks, was flung upwards again, to bounce and roll until I fetched up against the wall of the airship’s dorsal razor-weapon. I cannot say if some Preserver spared my life through will, if some Pattern needed me for the skein it wove—or if a patternless and unforetellable Chance spared me all unknowing.

There was a small closed hatchway in the razor-spine nearby, whose overhanging ridge provided some protection against my adversary. Bruised and weary, groping inchoately among theories of chance and purpose, I scrambled for it as the boarding gongs and klaxons began.

The Shaw knew it could neither outrun nor outfight the swift and dangerous corsair—it idled above me, awaiting rapine. The brigand’s longboats launched—lean and maneuverable black dirigibles the size of killer whales, with parties of armed sky-bandits clinging to their sides.

The glider turned and dove, a blur of gold and crimson and verdant blue disappearing over the pirate zeppelin’s side—abandoning our duel, I imagined, for some redoubt many leagues below us.

Oddly, I was sad to see her go. True, I had known from her only wanton violence; she had almost killed me; I crouched battered, terrified, and nauseous on the summit of a pirate corsair on her account; and the kind Raja, my almost-employer, might be dead. Yet I felt our relations had reached as yet no satisfactory conclusion.

It is said that we fabulists live two lives at once. First we live as others do: seeking to feed and clothe ourselves, earn the respect and affection of our fellows, fly from danger, entertain and satiate ourselves on the things of this world. But then, too, we live a second life, pawing through the moments of the first, even as they happen, like a market-woman of the bazaar sifting trash for treasures. Every agony we endure, we also hold up to the light with great excitement, expecting it will be of use; every simple joy, we regard with a critical eye, wondering how it could be changed, honed, tightened, to fit inside a fable’s walls.

The hatch was locked. I removed my mask and visor and lay on the canvas, basking in the afternoon sun, hoping my Ants had met success in their apothecary and saved the Prince; watching the pirate longboats sack the unresisting P.R.G.B. Śri George Bernard Shaw and return laden with valuables and—perhaps—hostages.

I was beginning to wonder if they would ever notice me—if, perhaps, I should signal them—when the cacophony of gongs and klaxons resumed—louder, insistent, angry—and the longboats raced back down to anchor beneath the pirate ship.

Curious, I found a ladder set in the razor-ridge’s metal wall that led to a lookout platform.

A war-city was emerging from a cloudbank some leagues away.

I had never seen any work of man so vast. Fully twelve great dirigible hulls, each dwarfing the Shaw, were bound together in a constellation of outbuildings and propeller assemblies. Near the center, a great plume of white steam rose from a pillar; a Heart-of-the-Sun reactor, where the dull yellow ore called Yama’s-flesh is driven to realize enlightenment through the ministrations of Wisdom-Sadhus.

There was a spyglass set in the railing by my side; I peered through, scanning the features of this new apparition.

None of the squabbling statelets of my continent could muster such a vessel, certainly; and only the Powers—Cathay, Gabon, the Aryan Raj—could afford to fly one so far afield, though the Khmer and Malay might have the capacity to build them.

There is little enough to choose between the meddling Powers, though Gabon makes the most pretense of investing in its colonies and believing in its supposed civilizing mission. This craft, though, was clearly Hindu. Every cubit of its surface was bedecked with a façade of cytoceramic statuary—couples coupling in five thousand erotic poses; theromorphic gods gesturing to soothe or menace; Rama in his chariot; heroes riddled with arrows and fighting on; saints undergoing martyrdom. In one corner, I spotted the Israelite avatar of Vishnu, hanging on his cross between Shiva and Ganesh.

Then I felt rough hands on my shoulders.

Five pirates had emerged from the hatch, cutlasses drawn. Their dress was motley and ragged, their features varied—Sikh, Xhosan, Baltic, Frankish, and Aztec, I surmised. None of us spoke as they led me through the rat’s maze of catwalks and ladders set between the ship’s inner and outer hulls.

I was queasy and light-headed with bruises, hunger, and the aftermath of rash and strenuous action; it seemed odd indeed that the day before, I had been celebrating and debating with the plausible-fabulists gathered at Wisconsin. I recalled that there had been a fancy-dress ball there, with a pirate theme; and the images of yesterday’s festive, well-groomed pirates of fancy interleaved with those of today’s grim and unwashed captors on the long climb down to the bridge.

The bridge was in the gondola that hung beneath the pirate airship’s bulk, forwards of the rigging. It was crowded with lean and dangerous men in pantaloons, sarongs and leather trousers. They consulted paper charts and the liquid, glowing forms swimming in Wisdom Tanks, spoke through bronze tubes set in the walls, barked orders to cabin boys who raced away across the airship’s webwork of spars.

At the great window that occupied the whole of the forward wall, watching the clouds part as we plunged into them, stood the captain.

I had suspected whose ship this might be upon seeing it; now I was sure. A giant of a man, dressed in buckskin and adorned with feathers, his braided red hair and bristling beard proclaimed him the scion of those who had fled the destruction of Viking Eire to settle on the banks of the Father-of-Waters.

This ship, then, was the Hiawatha MacCool, and this the man who terrorized commerce from the shores of Lake Erie to the border of Texas.

“Chippewa Melko,” I said.

He turned, raising an eyebrow.

“Found him sightseeing on the starboard spine,” one of my captors said.

“Indeed?” said Melko. “Did you fall off the Shaw?”

“I jumped, after a fashion,” I said. “The reason thereof is a tale that strains my own credibility, although I lived it.”

Sadly, this quip was lost on Melko, as he was distracted by some pressing bit of martial business.

We were descending at a precipitous rate; the water of Lake Erie loomed before us, filling the window. Individual whitecaps were discernible upon its surface.

When I glanced away from the window, the bridge had darkened—every Wisdom Tank was gray and lifeless.

“You there! Spy!” Melko barked. I noted with discomfiture that he addressed me. “Why would they disrupt our communications?”

“What?” I said.

The pirate captain gestured at the muddy tanks. “The Aryan war-city—they’ve disrupted the Brahmanic field with some damned device. They mean to cripple us, I suppose—ships like theirs are dependent on it. Won’t work. But how do they expect to get their hostages back alive if they refuse to parley?”

“Perhaps they mean to board and take them,” I offered.

“We’ll see about that,” he said grimly. “Listen up, boys—we hauled ass to avoid a trap, but the trap found us anyway. But we can outrun this bastard in the high airstreams if we lose all extra weight. Dinky—run and tell Max to drop the steamer. Red, Ali—mark the aft, fore, and starboard harpoons with buoys and let ’em go. Grig, Ngube—same with the spent tensors. Fast!”

He turned to me as his minions scurried to their tasks. “We’re throwing all dead weight over the side. That includes you, unless I’m swiftly convinced otherwise. Who are you?”

“Gabriel Goodman,” I said truthfully, “but better known by my quill-name—‘Benjamin Rosenbaum’.”

“Benjamin Rosenbaum?” the pirate cried. “The great Iowa poet, author of ‘Green Nakedness’ and ‘Broken Lines’ ? You are a hero of our land, sir! Fear not, I shall—”

“No,” I interrupted crossly. “Not that Benjamin Rosenbaum.”

The pirate reddened, and tapped his teeth, frowning. “Aha, hold then, I have heard of you—the children’s tale-scribe, I take it? ‘Legs the Caterpillar’ ? I’ll spare you, then, for the sake of my son Timmy, who—”

“No,” I said again, through gritted teeth. “I am an author of plausible-fables, sir, not picture-books.”

“Never read the stuff,” said Melko. There was a great shudder, and the steel bulk of the steam generatory, billowing white clouds, fell past us. It struck the lake, raising a plume of spray that spotted the window with droplets. The forward harpoon assembly followed, trailing a red buoy on a line.

“Right then,” said Melko. “Over you go.”

“You spoke of Aryan hostages,” I said hastily, thinking it wise now to mention the position I seemed to have accepted de facto, if not yet de jure. “Do you by any chance refer to my employer, Prem Ramasson, and his consort?”

Melko spat on the floor, causing a cabin boy to rush forward with a mop. “So you’re one of those quislings who serves Hindoo royalty even as they divide up the land of your fathers, are you?” He advanced towards me menacingly.

“Outer Thule is a minor province of the Raj, sir,” I said. “It is absurd to blame Ramasson for the war in Texas.”

“Ready to rise, sir,” came the cry.

“Rise then!” Melko ordered. “And throw this dog in the brig with its master. If we can’t ransom them, we’ll throw them off at the top.” He glowered at me. “That will give you a nice long while to salve your conscience with making fine distinctions among Hindoos. What do you think he’s doing here in our lands, if not plotting with his brothers to steal more of our gold and helium?”

I was unable to further pursue my political debate with Chippewa Melko, as his henchmen dragged me at once to cramped quarters between the inner and outer hulls. The prince lay on the single bunk, ashen and unmoving. His consort knelt at his side, weeping silently. The Wisdom Servant, deprived of its animating field, had collapsed into a tangle of reedlike protuberances.

My valise was there; I opened it and took out my inkwell. The Wisdom Ants lay within, tiny crumpled blobs of brassy metal. I put the inkwell in my pocket.

“Thank you for trying,” Sarasvati Sitasdottir said hoarsely. “Alas, luck has turned against us.”

“All may not be lost,” I said. “An Aryan war-city pursues the pirates, and may yet buy our ransom; although, strangely, they have damped the Brahmanic field and so cannot hear the pirates’ offer of parley.”

“If they were going to parley, they would have done so by now,” she said dully. “They will burn the pirate from the sky. They do not know we are aboard.”

“Then our bad luck comes in threes.” It is an old rule of thumb, derided as superstition by professional causalists. But they, like all professionals, like to obfuscate their science, rendering it inaccessible to the layman; in truth, the old rule holds a glimmer of the workings of the third form of causality.

“A swift death is no bad luck for me,” Sarasvati Sitasdottir said. “Not when he is gone.” She choked a sob, and turned away.

I felt for the Raja’s pulse; his blood was still beneath his amber skin. His face was turned towards the metal bulkhead; droplets of moisture there told of his last breath, not long ago. I wiped them away, and closed his eyes.

We waited, for one doom or another. I could feel the zeppelin rising swiftly; the Hiawatha was unheated, and the air turned cold. The princess did not speak.

My mind turned again to the fable I had been commissioned to write, the materialist shadow-history of a world without zeppelins. If by some unlikely chance I should live to finish it, I resolved to make do without the extravagant perils, ironic coincidences, sudden bursts of insight, death-defying escapades and beautiful villainesses that litter our genre and cheapen its high philosophical concerns. Why must every protagonist be doomed, daring, lonely, and overly proud? No, my philosopher-hero would enjoy precisely those goods of which I was deprived—a happy family, a secure situation, a prosperous and powerful nation, a conciliatory nature; above all, an absence of immediate physical peril. Of course, there must be conflict, worry, sorrow—but, I vowed, of a rich and subtle kind!

I wondered how my hero would view the chain of events in which I was embroiled. With derision? With compassion? I loved him, after a fashion, for he was my creation. How would he regard me?

If only the first and simplest form of causality had earned his allegiance, he would not be placated by such easy saws as “bad things come in threes.” An assassin, and a pirate, and an uncommunicative war-city, he would ask? All within the space of an hour?

Would he simply accept the absurd and improbable results of living within a blind and random machine? Yet his society could not have advanced far, mired in such fatalism!

Would he not doggedly seek meaning, despite the limitations of his framework?

What if our bad luck were no coincidence at all, he would ask. What if all three misfortunes had a single, linear, proximate cause, intelligible to reason?

“My lady,” I said, “I do not wish to cause you further pain. Yet I find I must speak. I saw the face of the prince’s killer—it was a young woman’s face, in lineament much like your own.”

“Shakuntala!” the princess cried. “My sister! No! It cannot be! She would never do this—” she curled her hands into fists. “No!”

“And yet,” I said gently, “it seems you regard the assertion as not utterly implausible.”

“She is banished,” Sarasvati Sitasdottir said. “She has gone over to the Thanes—the Nordic Liberation Army—the anarcho-gynarchist insurgents in our land. It is like her to seek danger and glory. But she would not kill Prem! She loved him before I!”

To that, I could find no response. The Hiawatha shuddered around us—some battle had been joined. We heard shouts and running footsteps.

Sarasvati, the prince, the pirates—any of them would have had a thousand gods to pray to, convenient gods for any occasion. Such solace I could sorely have used. But I was raised a Karaite. We acknowledge only one God, austere and magnificent; the One God of All Things, attended by His angels and His consort, the Queen of Heaven. The only way to speak to Him, we are taught, is in His Holy Temple; and it lies in ruins these two thousand years. In times like these, we are told to meditate on the contrast between His imperturbable magnificence and our own abandoned and abject vulnerability, and to be certain that He watches us with immeasurable compassion, though He will not act. I have never found this much comfort.

Instead, I turned to the prince, curious what in his visage might have inspired the passions of the two sisters.

On the bulkhead just before his lips—where, before, I had wiped away the sign of his last breath—a tracery of condensation stood.

Was this some effluvium issued by the organs of a decaying corpse? I bent, and delicately sniffed—detecting no corruption.

“My lady,” I said, indicating the droplets on the cool metal, “he lives.”

“What?” the princess cried. “But how?”

“A diguanidinium compound produced by certain marine dinoflagellates,” I said, “can induce a deathlike coma, in which the subject breathes but thrice an hour; the heartbeat is similarly undetectable.”

Delicately, she felt his face. “Can he hear us?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why would she do this?”

“The body would be rushed back to Thule, would it not? Perhaps the revolutionaries meant to steal it and revive him as a hostage?”

A tremendous thunderclap shook the Hiawatha MacCool, and I noticed we were listing to one side. There was a commotion in the gangway; then Chippewa Melko entered. Several guards stood behind him.

“Damned tenacious,” he spat. “If they want you so badly, why won’t they parley? We’re still out of range of the war-city itself and its big guns, thank Buddha, Thor, and Darwin. We burned one of their launches, at the cost of many of my men. But the other launch is gaining.”

“Perhaps they don’t know the hostages are aboard?” I asked.

“Then why pursue me this distance? I’m no fool—I know what it costs them to detour that monster. They don’t do it for sport, and I don’t flatter myself I’m worth that much to them. No, it’s you they want. So they can have you—I’ve no more stomach for this chase.” He gestured at the prince with his chin. “Is he dead?”

“No,” I said.

“Doesn’t look well. No matter—come along. I’m putting you all in a launch with a flag of parley on it. Their war-boat will have to stop for you, and that will give us the time we need.”

So it was that we found ourselves in the freezing, cramped bay of a pirate longboat. Three of Melko’s crewmen accompanied us—one at the controls, the other two clinging to the longboat’s sides. Sarasvati and I huddled on the aluminum deck beside the pilot, the prince’s body held between us. All three of Melko’s men had parachutes—they planned to escape as soon as we docked. Our longboat flew the white flag of parley, and—taken from the prince’s luggage—the royal standard of Outermost Thule.

All the others were gazing tensely at our target—the war-city’s fighter launch, which climbed toward us from below. It was almost as big as Melko’s flagship. I, alone, glanced back out the open doorway as we swung away from the Hiawatha.

So only I saw a brightly colored glider detach itself from the Hiawatha’s side and swoop to follow us.

Why would Shakuntala have lingered with the pirates thus far? Once the rebels’ plan to abduct the prince was foiled by Melko’s arrival, why not simply abandon it and await a fairer chance?

Unless the intent was not to abduct—but to protect.

“My lady,” I said in my halting middle-school Sanskrit, “your sister is here.”

Sarasvati gasped, following my gaze.

“Madam—your husband was aiding the rebels.”

“How dare you?” she hissed in the same tongue, much more fluently.

“It is the only—” I struggled for the Sanskrit word for ‘hypothesis’, then abandoned the attempt, leaning over to whisper in English. “Why else did the pirates and the war-city arrive together? Consider: the prince’s collusion with the Thanes was discovered by the Aryan Raj. But to try him for treason would provoke great scandal and stir sympathy for the insurgents. Instead, they made sure rumor of a valuable hostage reached Melko. With the prince in the hands of the pirates, his death would simply be a regrettable calamity.”

Her eyes widened. “Those monsters!” she hissed.

“Your sister aimed to save him, but Melko arrived too soon—before news of the prince’s death could discourage his brigandy. My lady, I fear that if we reach that launch, they will discover that the Prince lives. Then some accident will befall us all.”

There were shouts from outside. Melko’s crewmen drew their needlethrowers and fired at the advancing glider.

With a shriek, Sarasvati flung herself upon the pilot, knocking the controls from his hands.

The longboat lurched sickeningly.

I gained my feet, then fell against the prince. I saw a flash of orange and gold—the glider, swooping by us.

I struggled to stand. The pilot drew his cutlass. He seized Sarasvati by the hair and spun her away from the controls.

Just then, one of the men clinging to the outside, pricked by Shakuntala’s needle, fell. His tether caught him, and the floor jerked beneath us.

The pilot staggered back. Sarasvati Sitasdottir punched him in the throat. They stumbled towards the door.

I started forward. The other pirate on the outside fell, untethered, and the longboat lurched again. Unbalanced, our craft drove in a tight circle, listing dangerously.

Sarasvati fought with uncommon ferocity, forcing the pirate towards the open hatch. Fearing they would both tumble through, I seized the controls.

Regrettably, I knew nothing of flying airship-longboats, whose controls, it happens, are of a remarkably poor design.

One would imagine that the principal steering element could be moved in the direction that one wishes the craft to go; instead, just the opposite is the case. Then, too, one would expect these brawny and unrefined air-men to use controls lending themselves to rough usage; instead, it seems an exceedingly fine hand is required.

Thus, rather than steadying the craft, I achieved the opposite.

Not only were Sarasvati and the pilot flung out the cabin door, but I myself was thrown through it, just managing to catch with both hands a metal protuberance in the hatchway’s base. My feet swung freely over the void.

I looked up in time to see the Raja’s limp body come sliding towards me like a missile.

I fear that I hesitated too long in deciding whether to dodge or catch my almost-employer. At the last minute courage won out, and I flung one arm around his chest as he struck me.

This dislodged my grip, and the two of us fell from the airship.

In an extremity of terror, I let go the prince, and clawed wildly at nothing.

I slammed into the body of the pirate who hung, poisoned by Shakuntala’s needle, from the airship’s tether. I slid along him, and finally caught myself at his feet.

As I clung there, shaking miserably, I watched Prem Ramasson tumble through the air, and I cursed myself for having caused the very tragedies I had endeavored to avoid, like a figure in an Athenian tragedy. But such tragedies proceed from some essential flaw in their heroes—some illustrative hubris, some damning vice. Searching my own character and actions, I could find only that I had endeavored to make do, as well as I could, in situations for which I was ill-prepared. Is that not the fate of any of us, confronting life and its vagaries?

Was my tale, then, an absurd and tragic farce? Was its lesson one merely of ignominy and despair?

Or perhaps—as my shadow-protagonist might imagine—there was no tale, no teller—perhaps the dramatic and sensational events I had endured were part of no story at all, but brute and silent facts of Matter.

From above, Shakuntala Sitasdottir dove in her glider. It was folded like a spear, and she swept past the prince in seconds. Nimbly, she flung open the glider’s wings, sweeping up to the falling Raja, and rolling the glider, took him into her embrace.

Thus encumbered—she must have secured him somehow—she dove again (chasing her sister, I imagine) and disappeared in a bank of cloud.

A flock of brass-colored Wisdom Gulls, arriving from the Aryan war-city, flew around the pirates’ launch. They entered its empty cabin, glanced at me and the poisoned pirate to whom I clung, and departed.

I climbed up the body to sit upon its shoulders, a much more comfortable position. There, clinging to the tether and shivering, I rested.

The Hiawatha MacCool, black smoke guttering from one side of her, climbed higher and higher into the sky, pursued by the Aryan war-boat. The sun was setting, limning the clouds with gold and pink and violet. The war-city, terrible and glorious, sailed slowly by, under my feet, its shadow an island of darkness in the sunset’s gold-glitter, on the waters of the lake beneath.

Some distance to the east, where the sky was already darkening to a rich cobalt, the Aryan war-boat which Melko had successfully struck was bathed in white fire. After a while, the inner hull must have been breached, for the fire went out, extinguished by escaping helium, and the zeppelin plummeted.

Above me, the propeller hummed, driving my launch in the same small circle again and again.

I hoped that I had saved the prince after all. I hoped Shakuntala had saved her sister, and that the three of them would find refuge with the Thanes.

My shadow-protagonist had given me a gift; it was the logic of his world that had led me to discover the war-city’s threat. Did this mean his philosophy was the correct one?

Yet the events that followed were so dramatic and contrived—precisely as if I inhabited a pulp romance. Perhaps he was writing my story, as I wrote his; perhaps, with the comfortable life I had given him, he longed to lose himself in uncomfortable escapades of this sort. In that case, we both of us lived in a world designed, a world of story, full of meaning.

But perhaps I had framed the question wrong. Perhaps the division between Mind and Matter is itself illusory; perhaps Randomness, Pattern, and Plan are all but stories we tell about the inchoate and unknowable world which fills the darkness beyond the thin circle illumed by reason’s light. Perhaps it is foolish to ask if I or the protagonist of my world-without-zeppelins story is the more real. Each of us is flesh, a buzzing swarm of atoms; yet each of us also a tale contained in the pages of the other’s notebook. We are bodies. But we are also the stories we tell about each other. Perhaps not knowing is enough.

Maybe it is not a matter of discovering the correct philosophy. Maybe the desire that burns behind this question is the desire to be real. And which is more real—a clod of dirt unnoticed at your feet, or a hero in a legend?

And maybe behind the desire to be real is simply wanting to be known.

To be held.

The first stars glittered against the fading blue. I was in the bosom of the Queen of Heaven. My fingers and toes were getting numb—soon frostbite would set in. I recited the prayer the ancient heretical Rabbis would say before death, which begins, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One.”

Then I began to climb the tether.

INSIDE JOB

Connie Willis

“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

—H.L. Mencken

“It’s me, Rob,” Kildy said when I picked up the phone. “I want you to go with me to see somebody Saturday.”

Usually when Kildy calls, she’s bubbling over with details. “You’ve got to see this psychic cosmetic surgeon, Rob,” she’d crowed the last time. “His specialty is liposuction, and you can seethe tube coming out of his sleeve. And that’s not all. The fat he’s supposed to be suctioning out of their thighs is that goop they use in McDonald’s milk shakes. You can smell the vanilla! It wouldn’t fool a five-year-old, so of course half the women in Hollywood are buying it hook, line, and sinker. We’ve got to do a story on him, Rob!”

I usually had to say, “Kildy—Kildy—Kildy!” before I could get her to shut up long enough to tell me where said scammer was performing.

But this time all she said was, “The seminar’s at one o’clock at the Beverly Hills Hilton. I’ll meet you in the parking lot,” and hung up before I could ask her if the somebody she wanted me to see was a pet channeler or a vedic-force therapist, and how much it was going to cost.

I called her back.

“The tickets are on me,” she said.

If Kildy had her way, the tickets would always be on her, and she can more than afford it. Her father’s a director at Dreamworks, her current stepmother heads her own production company, and her mother’s a two-time Oscar winner. And Kildy’s rich in her own right—she only acted in four films before she quit the business for a career in debunking, but one of them was the surprise top grosser of the year, and she’d opted for shares instead of a salary.

But she’s ostensibly my employee, even though I can’t afford to pay her enough to keep her in toenail polish. The least I can do is spring for expenses, and a barely known channeler shouldn’t be too bad. Medium Charles Fred, the current darling of the Hollywood set, was only charging two hundred a séance.

“The Jaundiced Eye is paying for the tickets,” I said firmly. “How much?”

“Seven hundred and fifty apiece for the group seminar,” she said. “Fifteen hundred for a private enlightenment audience.”

“The tickets are on you,” I said. “Great,” she said. “Bring the Sony vidcam.”

“Not the little one?” I asked. Most psychic events don’t allow recording devices—they make it too easy to spot the earpieces and wires—and the Hasaka is small enough to be smuggled in.

“No,” she said, “bring the Sony. See you Saturday, Rob. ’Bye.”

“Wait,” I said. “You haven’t told me what this guy does.”

“Woman. She’s a channeler. She channels an entity named Isis,” Kildy said and hung up again.

I was surprised. We don’t usually waste our time on channelers. They’re no longer trendy. Right now mediums like Charles Fred and Yogi Magaputra and assorted sensory therapists (aroma-, sonic, auratic) are the rage.

It’s also an exercise in frustration, since there’s no way to prove whether someone’s channeling or not, unless they claim to be channeling Abraham Lincoln (like Randall Mars) or Nefertiti (like Hanh Nah). In that case you can challenge their facts—Nefertiti could not have had an affair with Alexander the Great, who wasn’t born till a thousand years later, and she was notCleopatra’s cousin—but most of them channel hundred-thousand-year-old sages or high priests of Lemuria, and there are no physical manifestations.

They’ve learned their lesson from the Victorian spiritualists (who kept getting caught), so there’s no ectoplasm or ghostly trumpets or double-exposed photographic plates. Just a deep, hollow voice that sounds like a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Basil Rathbone. Why is it that channeled “entities” all have British accents? And speak King James Bible English?

And why was Kildy willing to waste fifteen hundred bucks—correction, twenty-two fifty; she’d already been to the seminar once—to have me see this Isis? The channeler must have a new gimmick. I’d noticed a couple of people advertising themselves as “angel channelers” in the local psychic rag, but Isis wasn’t an angel name. Egyptian channeler? Goddess conduit?

I looked “Isis channeler” up on the Net. At first I couldn’t find any references, even using Google. I tried skeptics.org and finally Marty Rumboldt, who runs a website that tracks psychics.

“You’re spelling it wrong, Rob,” he e-mailed me back. “It’s Isus.”

Which should have occurred to me. The channelers of Lazaris, Kochise, and Merlynn all use variations on historical names (probably from some fear of spiritual slander lawsuits), and more than one channeler’s prone to “inventive” spelling: Joye Wildde. And Emmanual.

I Googled “Isus.” He—bad sign, the channeler didn’t even know Isis was female—was the “spirit entity” channeled by somebody named Ariaura Keller. She’d started in Salem, Massachusetts (a breeding ground for psychics), moved to Sedona (another one), and then headed west and worked her way down the coast, appearing in Seattle, the other Salem, Eugene, Berkeley, and now Beverly Hills. She had six afternoon seminars and two weeklong “spiritual immersions” scheduled for L.A., along with private “individually scheduled enlightenment audiences” with Isus. She’d written two books, The Voice of Isus and On the Receiving End (with links to Amazon.com), and you could read her bio: “I knew from childhood that I was destined to be a channel for the Truth,” and extracts from her speeches: “The earth is destined to witness a transforming spiritual event,” online. She sounded just like every other channeler I’d ever heard.

And I’d sat through a bunch of them. Back at the height of their popularity (and before I knew better), The Jaundiced Eye had done a six-part series on them, starting with M. Z. Lord and running on through Joye Wildde, Todd Phoenix, and Taryn Kryme, whose “entity” was a giggly four-year-old kid from Atlantis. It was the longest six months of my life. And it didn’t have any impact at all on the business. It was tax evasion and mail fraud charges that had put an end to the fad, not my hard-hitting exposés.

Ariaura Keller didn’t have a criminal record (at least under that name), and there weren’t many articles about her. And no mention of any gimmick. “The electric, amazing Isus shares his spiritual wisdom and helps you find your own inner-centeredness and soul-unenfoldment.” Nothing new there.

Well, whatever it was that had gotten Kildy interested in her, I’d find out on Saturday. In the meantime, I had an article on Charles Fred to write for the December issue, a book on intelligent design (the latest ploy for getting creationism into the schools and evolution out) to review, and a past-life chiropractor to go see. He claimed his patients’ backaches came from hauling blocks of stone to Stonehenge and/or the Pyramids. (The Pyramids had in fact been a big job, but over the course of three years in business he’d told over two thousand patients they’d gotten their herniated discs at Stonehenge, every single one of them while setting the altar stone in place.)

And he was actually credible compared to Charles Fred, who was having amazing success communicating highly specific messages from the dead to their grieving relatives. I was convinced he was using something besides the usual cold reading and shills to get the millions he was raking in, but so far I hadn’t been able to figure out what, and every lead I managed to come up with went nowhere.

I didn’t think about the “electric, amazing Isus” again till I was driving over to the Hilton on Saturday. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard from Kildy since her phone call. Usually she drops by the office every day, and if we’re going somewhere calls three or four times to reconfirm where and when we’re meeting. I wondered if the seminar was still on, or if she’d forgotten all about it. Or suddenly gotten tired of being a debunker and gone back to being a movie star.

I’d been waiting for that to happen ever since the day just over eight months ago when, just like the gorgeous dame in a Bogie movie, she’d walked into my office and asked if she could have a job.

There are three cardinal rules in the skeptic business. The first one is “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and the second one is “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.” And if anything was ever too good to be true, it’s Kildy. She’s not only rich and movie-star beautiful, but intelligent, and, unlike everyone else in Hollywood, a complete skeptic, even though, as she told me the first day, Shirley MacLaine had dandled her on her knee and her own mother would believe anything, “no matter how ridiculous, which is probably why her marriage to my father lasted nearly six years.”

She was now on Stepmother Number Four, who had gotten her the role in the surprise top grosser, “which made almost as much money as Lord of the Rings and enabled me to take early retirement.”

“Retirement?” I’d said. “Why would you want to retire? You could have—”

“Starred in The Hulk IV,” she said, “and been on the cover of the Globe with Ben Affleck. Or with my lawyer in front of a rehab center. I know, it was tough to give all that up.”

She had a point, but that didn’t explain why she’d want to go to work for a barely-making-it magazine like The Jaundiced Eye. Or why she’d want to go to work at all.

I said so.

“I’ve already tried the whole ‘fill your day with massages and lunch at Ardani’s and sex with your trainer’ scene, Rob,” she said. “It was even worse than The Hulk. Plus, the lights and makeup destroy your complexion.”

I found that hard to believe. She had skin like honey.

“And then my mother took me to this luminescence reading, she’s into all those things, psychics and past-life regression and intuitive healing, and the guy doing the reading—”

“Lucius Windfire,” I’d said. I’d been working on an exposé of him for the last two months.

“Yes, Lucius Windfire,” she’d said. “He claimed he could read your mind by determining your vedic fault lines, which consisted of setting candles all around you and ‘reading’ the wavering of the flames. It was obvious he was a fake—you could see the earpiece he was getting his information about the audience over—but everybody there was eating it up, especially my mother. He’d already talked her into private sessions that set her back ten thousand dollars. And I thought, Somebody should put him out of business, and then I thought, That’s what I want to do with my life, and I looked up ‘debunkers’ online and found your magazine, and here I am.”

I’d said, “I can’t possibly pay you the kind of money you’re—”

“Your going rate for articles is fine,” she’d said and flashed me her better-than-Julia-Roberts smile. “I just want the chance to do something useful and sensible with my life.”

And for the last eight months she’d been working with me on the magazine. She was wonderful—she knew everybody in Hollywood, which meant she could get us into invitation-only stuff, and heard about new spiritual fads even before I did. She was also willing to do anything, from letting herself be hypnotized to stealing chicken guts from psychic surgeons to proofreading galleys. And fun to talk to, and gorgeous, and much too good for a small-time skeptic.

And I knew it was just a matter of time before she got bored with debunking—and me—and went back to going to premieres and driving around in her Jaguar, but she didn’t. “Have you ever worked with Ben Affleck?” she’d said when I told her she was too beautiful not to still be in the movies. “You couldn’t pay me to go back to that.”

She wasn’t in the parking lot, and neither was her Jaguar, and I wondered, as I did every day, if this was the day she’d decided to call it quits. No, there she was, getting out of a taxi. She was wearing a honey-colored pantsuit the same shade as her hair, and designer sunglasses, and she looked, as always, too good to be true. She saw me and waved, and then reached back into the taxi for two big throw pillows.

Shit. That meant we were going to have to sit on the floor again. These people made a fortune scamming people out of their not-so-hard-earned cash. You’d think they could afford chairs.

I walked over to her. “I take it we’re going in together,” I said, since the pillows were a matching pair, purple brocade jobs with tassels at the corners.

“Yes,” Kildy said. “Did you bring the Sony?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I still think I should have brought the Hasaka.”

She shook her head. “They’re doing body checks. I don’t want to give them an excuse to throw us out. When they fill out the nametags, give them your real name.”

“We’re not using a cover?” I asked. Psychics often use skeptics in the audience as an excuse for failure: The negative vibrations made it impossible to contact the spirits, etc. A couple of them had even banned me from their performances, claiming I disturbed the cosmos with my nonbelieving presence. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“We don’t have any choice,” she said. “When I came last week, I was with my publicist, so I had to use my own name, and I didn’t think it mattered—we never do channelers. Besides, the ushers recognized me. So our cover is, I was so impressed with Ariaura that I talked you into coming to see her.”

“Which is pretty much the truth,” I said. “What exactly is her gimmick, that you thought I should see her?”

“I don’t want to prejudice you beforehand.” She glanced at her Vera Wang watch and handed me one of the pillows. “Let’s go.”

We went into the lobby and over to a table under a lilac-and-silver banner proclaiming PRESENTING ARIAURA AND THE WISDOM OF ISUS and under it, BELIEVE AND IT WILL HAPPEN. Kildy told the woman at the table our names.

“Oh, I loved you in that movie, Miss Ross,” she said and handed us lilac-and-silver nametags and motioned us toward another table next to the door, where a Russell Crowe type in a lilac polo shirt was doing security checks.

“Any cameras, tape recorders, videocams?” he asked us.

Kildy opened her bag and took out an Olympus. “Can’t I take one picture?” she pleaded. “I won’t use the flash or anything. I just wanted to get a photo of Ariaura.”

He plucked the Olympus neatly from her fingers. “Autographed eight-by-ten glossies can be purchased in the waiting area.”

“Oh, good,” she said. She really should have stayed in acting.

I relinquished the videocam. “What about videos of today’s performance?” I said after he finished frisking me.

He stiffened. “Ariaura’s communications with Isus are not performances. They are unique glimpses into a higher plane. You can order videos of today’s experience in the waiting area,” he said, pointing toward a pair of double doors.

The “waiting area” was a long hall lined with tables full of books, videos, audiotapes, chakra charts, crystal balls, aromatherapy oils, amulets, Zuni fetishes, wisdom mobiles, healing stones, singing crystal bowls, amaryllis roots, aura cleansers, pyramids, and assorted other New Age junk, all with the lilac-and-silver Isus logo.

The third cardinal rule of debunking, and maybe the most important, is “Ask yourself, what do they get out of it?” or, as the Bible (source of many scams) puts it, “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

And if the prices on this stuff were any indication, Ariaura was getting a hell of a lot out of it. The 8×10 glossies were $28.99, or $35 with Ariaura’s signature. “And if you want it signed by Isus,” the blond guy behind the table said, “it’s a hundred. He’s not always willing to sign.”

I could see why. His signature (done in Magic Marker) was a string of complicated symbols that looked like a cross between Elvish runes and Egyptian hieroglyphics, whereas Ariaura’s was a script A followed by a formless scrawl.

Videotapes of her previous seminars—Volumes 1—20—cost a cool sixty apiece, and Ariaura’s “sacred amulet” (which looked like something you’d buy on the Home Shopping Network) cost nine hundred and fifty (box extra). People were snapping them up like hotcakes, along with Celtic pentacles, meditation necklaces, dreamcatcher earrings, worry beads, and toe rings with your zodiac sign on them.

Kildy bought one of the outrageously priced stills (no signature) and three of the videos, cooing, “I just loved her last seminar,” gave the guy selling them her autograph, and we went into the auditorium.

It was hung with rose, lilac, and silver chiffon floor-length banners and a state-of-the-art lighting system. Stars and planets rotated overhead, and comets occasionally whizzed by. The stage end of the auditorium was hung with gold Mylar, and in the center of the stage was a black pyramid-backed throne. Apparently Ariaura did not intend to sit on the floor like the rest of us.

At the door, ushers clad in mostly unbuttoned lilac silk shirts and tight pants took our tickets. They all looked like Tom Cruise, which would be par for the course even if this weren’t Hollywood.

Sex has been a mainstay of the psychic business since Victorian days. Half the appeal of early table-rapping had been the filmy-draperies-and-nothing-else-clad female “spirits” who drifted tantalizingly among the male séance goers, fogging up their spectacles and preventing them from thinking clearly. Sir William Crookes, the famous British chemist, had been so besotted by an obviously fake medium’s sexy daughter that he’d staked his scientific reputation on the medium’s dubious authenticity, and nowadays it’s no accident that most channelers are male and given to chest-baring Rudolph Valentino—like robes. Or, if they’re female, have buff, handsome ushers to distract the women in the audience. If you’re drooling over them, you’re not likely to spot the wires and chicken guts or realize what they’re saying is nonsense. It’s the oldest trick in the book.

One of the ushers gave Kildy a Tom Cruise smile and led her to the end of a cross-legged row on the very hard-looking floor. I was glad Kildy had brought the pillows.

I plopped mine down next to hers and sat down on it. “This had better be good,” I said.

“Oh, it will be,” said a fiftyish redhead wearing the sacred amulet and a diamond as big as my fist. “I’ve seen Ariaura, and she’s wonderful.” She reached into one of the three lilac shopping bags she’d stuck between us and pulled out a lavender needlepoint pillow that said, “Believe and It Will Happen.”

I wondered if that applied to her believing her pillow was large enough to sit on, because it was about the same size as the rock on her finger, but as soon as they’d finished organizing the rows, the ushers came around bearing stacks of plastic-covered cushions (the kind rented at football games, only lilac) for ten bucks apiece.

The woman next to me took three, and I counted ten other people in our row, and eleven in the row ahead of us, shelling out for them. Eighty rows times ten, to be conservative. A cool eight thousand bucks, just to sit down, and who knows how much profit in all those lilac shopping bags. “By their fruits shall ye know them.”

I looked around. I couldn’t see any signs of shills or a wireless setup, but unlike psychics and mediums, channelers don’t need them. They give out general advice, couched in New Age terms.

“Isus is absolutely astonishing,” my neighbor confided. “He’s so wise! Much better than Romtha. He’s responsible for my deciding to leave Randall. ‘To thine inner self be true,’ Isus said, and I realized Randall had been blocking my spiritual ascent—”

“Were you at last Saturday’s seminar?” Kildy leaned across me to ask.

“No. I was in Cancun, and I was just decimated when I realized I’d missed it. I made Tio bring me back early so I could come today. I desperately need Isus’s wisdom about the divorce. Randall’s claiming Isus had nothing to do with my decision, that I left him because the prenup had expired, and he’s threatening to call Tio as—”

But Kildy had lost interest and was leaning across her to ask a pencil-thin woman in the full lotus position if she’d seen Ariaura before. She hadn’t, but the one on her right had.

“Last Saturday?” Kildy asked.

She hadn’t. She’d seen her six weeks ago in Eugene.

I leaned toward Kildy and whispered, “What happened last Saturday?”

“I think they’re starting, Rob,” she said, pointing at the stage, where absolutely nothing was happening, and got off her pillow and onto her knees.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

She didn’t answer that, either. She reached inside her pillow, pulled out an orange pillow the same size as the “Believe and It Will Happen” cushion, handed it to me, and arranged herself gracefully on the large tasseled one. As soon as she was cross-legged, she took the orange pillow back from me and laid it across her knees.

“Comfy?” I asked.

“Yes, thank you,” she said, turning her movie-star smile on me.

I leaned toward her. “You sure you don’t want to tell me what we’re doing here?”

“Oh, look, they’re starting,” she said, and this time they were.

A Brad Pitt look-alike stepped out onstage holding a hand mike and gave us the ground rules. No flash photos (even though they’d confiscated all the cameras). No applause (it breaks Ariaura’s concentration). No bathroom breaks. “The cosmic link with Isus is extremely fragile,” Brad explained, “and movement or the shutting of a door can break that connection.”

Right. Or else Ariaura had learned a few lessons from EST, including the fact that people who are distracted by their bladders are less likely to spot gobbledygook, like the stuff Brad was spouting right now:

“Eighty thousand years ago Isus was a high priest of Atlantis. He lived for three hundred years before he departed this earthly plane and acquired the wisdom of the ages—”

What ages? The Paleolithic and Neolithic? Eighty thousand years ago we were still living in trees.

“—he spoke with the oracle at Delphi, he delved into the Sacred Writings of Rosicrucian—”

Rosicrucian?

“Now watch as Ariaura calls him from the Cosmic All to share his wisdom with you.”

The lights deepened to rose, and the chiffon banners began to blow in, as if there were a breeze behind them. Correction, state-of-the-art lighting and fans.

The gale intensified, and for a moment I wondered if Ariaura was going to swoop in on a wire, but then the gold Mylar parted, revealing a curving black stairway, and Ariaura, in a purple velvet caftan and her sacred amulet, descended it to the strains of Holst’s Planets and went to stand dramatically in front of her throne.

The audience paid no attention to the “no applause” edict, and Ariaura seemed to expect it. She stood there for at least two minutes, regally surveying the crowd. Then she raised her arms as if delivering a benediction and lowered them again, quieting the crowd. “Welcome, Seekers after Divine Truth,” she said in a peppy, Oprah-type voice, and there was more applause. “We’re going to have a wonderful spiritual experience together here today and achieve a new plane of enlightenment.”

More applause.

“But you mustn’t applaud me. I am only the conduit through which Isus passes, the vessel he fills. Isus first came to me, or, rather, I should say, through me, five years ago, but I was afraid. I didn’t want to believe it. It took me nearly a whole year to accept that I had become the focus for cosmic energies beyond the reality we know. It’s the wisdom of his highly evolved spirit you’ll hear today, not mine. If . . .” a nice theatrical pause here, “. . . he deigns to come to us. For Isus is a sage, not a servant to be bidden. He comes when he wills. Mayhap he will be among us this afternoon, mayhap not.”

In a pig’s eye. These women weren’t going to shell out seven hundred and fifty bucks for a no-show, even if this was Beverly Hills. I’d bet the house Isus showed up right on cue.

“Isus will come only if our earthly plane is in alignment with the cosmic,” Ariaura said, “if the auratic vibrations are right.” She looked sternly out at the audience. “If any of you are harboring negative vibrations, contact cannot be made.”

Uh-oh, here it comes, I thought, and waited for her to look straight at the two of us and tell us to leave, but she didn’t. She merely said, “Are all of you thinking positive thoughts, feeling positive emotions? Are you all believing?”

You bet.

“I sense that every one of you is thinking positive thoughts,” Ariaura said. “Good. Now, to bring Isus among us, you must help me. You must each calm your center.” She closed her eyes. “You must concentrate on your inner soul-self.”

I glanced around the audience. Over half of the women had their eyes shut, and many had folded their hands in an attitude of prayer. Some swayed back and forth, and the woman next to me was droning, “Om.” Kildy had her eyes closed, her orange pillow clasped to her chest.

“Align . . . align . . .” Ariaura chanted, and then with finality, “Align.” There was another theatrical pause.

“I will now attempt to contact Isus,” she said. “The focusing of the astral energy is a dangerous and difficult operation. I must ask that you remain perfectly quiet and still while I am preparing myself.”

The woman next to me obediently stopped chanting “Om,” and everyone opened their eyes. Ariaura closed hers and leaned back in her throne, her ring-covered hands draped over the ends of the arms. The lights went down and the music came up, the theme from Holst’s “Mars.” Everyone, including Kildy, watched breathlessly.

Ariaura jerked suddenly as if she were being electrocuted and clutched the arms of the throne. Her face contorted, her mouth twisting and her head shaking.

The audience gasped.

Her body jerked again, slamming back against the throne, and she went into a series of spasms and writhings, with more shaking. This went on for a full minute, while “Mars” built slowly behind her and the spotlight morphed to pink. The music cut off, and she slumped lifelessly back against the throne.

She remained there for a nicely timed interval, and then sat up stiffly, staring straight ahead, her hands lying loosely on the throne’s arms. “I am Isus!” she said in a booming voice that was a dead ringer for “Who dares to approach the great and powerful Oz?”

“I am the Enlightened One, a servant unto that which is called the Text and the First Source. I have come from the ninth level of the astral plane,” she boomed, “to aid you in your spiritual journeys.”

So far it was an exact duplicate of Romtha, right down to the pink light and the number of the astral plane level, but next to me Kildy was leaning forward expectantly.

“I have come to speak the truth,” Isus boomed, “to reveal to thou thine higher self.”

I leaned over to Kildy and whispered, “Why is it they never learn how to use ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ correctly on the astral plane?”

“Shh,” Kildy hissed, intent on what Isus was saying.

“I bring you the long-lost wisdom of the kingdom of Lemuria and the prophecies of Antinous to aid thee in these troubled days, for thou livest in a time of tribulation. The last days these are of the Present Age, days filled with anxiety and terrorist attacks and dysfunctional relationships. But I say unto ye, thou must not look without but within, for thee alone are responsible for your happiness, and if that means getting out of a bad relationship, make it so. Seek you must your own inner isness and create thou must thine own inner reality. Thee art the universe.”

I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Something, at least, but this was just the usual New Age nonsense, a mush of psychobabble, self-help tips, pseudo-scripture, and Chicken Soup for the Soul.

I sneaked a glance at Kildy. She was sitting forward, still clutching her pillow tightly to her chest, her beautiful face intent, her mouth slightly open. I wondered if she could actually have been taken in by Ariaura. It’s always a possibility, even with skeptics. Kildy wouldn’t be the first one to be fooled by a cleverly done illusion.

But this wasn’t cleverly done. It wasn’t even original. The Lemuria stuff was Richard Zephyr, the “Thou art the universe” stuff was Shirley MacLaine, and the syntax was pure Yoda.

And this was Kildy we were talking about. Kildy, who never fell for anything, not even that vedic levitator. She had to have had a good reason for shelling out over two thousand bucks for this, but so far I was stumped. “What exactly is it you wanted me to see?” I murmured.

“Shhh.”

“But fear not,” Ariaura said, “for a New Age is coming, an age of peace, of spiritual enlightenment, when you—doing here listening to this confounded claptrap?”

I looked up sharply. Ariaura’s voice had changed in mid-sentence from Isus’s booming bass to a gravelly baritone, and her manner had, too. She leaned forward, hands on her knees, scowling at the audience. “It’s a lot of infernal gabble,” she said belligerently.

I glanced at Kildy. She had her eyes fixed on the stage.

“This hokum is even worse than the pretentious bombast you hear in the Chautauqua,” the voice croaked.

Chautauqua? I thought. What the—?

“But there you sit, with your mouths hanging open, like the rubes at an Arkansas camp meeting, listening to a snake-charming preacher, waiting for her to fix up your romances and cure your gallstones—”

The woman next to Kildy glanced questioningly at us and then back at the stage. Two of the ushers standing along the wall exchanged frowning glances, and I could hear whispering from somewhere in the audience.

“Have you yaps actually fallen for this mystical mumbo-jumbo? Of course you have. This is America, home of the imbecile and the ass!” the voice said, and the whispering became a definite murmur.

“What in the—?” a woman behind us said, and the woman next to me gathered up her bags, stuffed her “Believe” pillow into one of them, stood up, and began to step over people to get to the door.

One of the ushers signaled someone in the control booth, and the lights and Holst’s “Venus” began to come up. The emcee took a hesitant step out onto the stage.

“You sit there like a bunch of gaping primates, ready to buy anyth—” Ariaura said, and her voice changed abruptly back to the basso of Isus, “—but the Age of Spiritual Enlightenment cannot begin until each of thou beginnest thy own journey.”

The emcee stopped in mid-step, and so did the murmuring. And the woman who’d been next to me and who was almost to the door. She stood there next to it, holding her bags and listening.

“And believe. All of you, casteth out the toxins of doubt and skepticism now. Believe and it will happen.”

She must be back on script. The emcee gave a sigh of relief, and retreated back into the wings, and the woman who’d been next to me sat down where she’d been standing, bags and pillows and all. The music faded, and the lights went back to rose.

“Believe in thine inner soul-self,” Ariaura/Isus said. “Believe, and let your spiritual unfoldment begin.” She paused, and the ushers looked up nervously. The emcee poked his head out from the gold Mylar drapes.

“I grow weary,” she said. “I must return now to that higher reality from whence I cameth. Fear not, for though I no longer share this earthly plane with thee, still I am with thou.” She raised her arm stiffly in a benediction / Nazi salute, gave a sharp shudder, and then slumped forward in a swoon that would have done credit to Gloria Swanson. Holst’s “Venus” began again, and she sat up, blinking, and turned to the emcee, who had come out onstage again.

“Did Isus speak?” she asked him in her original voice.

“Yes, he did,” the emcee said, and the audience burst into thunderous applause, during which he helped her to her feet and handed her over to two of the ushers, who walked her, leaning heavily on them, up the black stairway and out of sight.

As soon as she was safely gone, the emcee quieted the applause and said, “Copies of Ariaura’s books and videotapes are available outside in the waiting area. If you wish to arrange for a private audience, see me or one of the ushers,” and everyone began gathering up their pillows and heading for the door.

“Wasn’t he wonderful?” a woman ahead of us in the exodus said to her friend. “So authentic!”

“Is Los Angeles the worst town in America, or only next to the worst? The skeptic, asked the original question, will say yes, the believer will say no. There you have it.”

—H.L. Mencken

Kildy and I didn’t talk till we were out of the parking lot and on Wilshire, at which point Kildy said, “Now do you understand why I wanted you to see it for yourself, Rob?”

“It was interesting, all right. I take it she did the same thing at the seminar you went to last week?”

She nodded. “Only last week two people walked out.”

“Was it the exact same spiel?”

“No. It didn’t last quite as long—I don’t know how long exactly, it caught me by surprise—and she used slightly different words, but the message was the same. And it happened the same way—no warning, no contortions, her voice just changed abruptly in mid-sentence. So what do you think’s going on, Rob?”

I turned onto La Brea. “I don’t know, but lots of channelers do more than one ‘entity.’ Joye Wildde does two, and before Hans Lightfoot went to jail, he did half a dozen.”

Kildy looked skeptical. “Her promotional material doesn’t say anything about multiple entities.”

“Maybe she’s tired of Isus and wants to switch to another spirit. When you’re a channeler, you can’t just announce, ‘Coming soon: Isus II.’ You’ve got to make it look authentic. So she introduces him with a few words one week, a couple of sentences the next, etcetera.”

“She’s introducing a new and improved spirit who yells at the audience and calls them imbeciles and rubes?” she said incredulously.

“It’s probably what channelers call a ‘dark spirit,’ a so-called bad entity that tries to lead the unwary astray. Todd Phoenix used to have a nasty voice break in in the middle of White Feather’s spiel and make heckling comments. It’s a useful trick. It reinforces the idea that the psychic’s actually channeling, and anything inconsistent or controversial the channeler says can be blamed on the bad spirit.”

“But Ariaura didn’t even seem to be aware there was a bad spirit, if that’s what it was supposed to be. Why would it tell the audience to go home and stop giving their money to a snake-oil vendor like Ariaura?”

A snake-oil vendor? That sounded vaguely familiar, too. “Is that what she said last week? Snake-oil vendor?”

“Yes,” she said. “Why? Do you know who she’s channeling?”

“No,” I said, frowning, “but I’ve heard that phrase somewhere. And the line about the Chautauqua.”

“So it’s obviously somebody famous,” Kildy said.

But the historical figures channelers did were always instantly recognizable. Randall Mars’s Abraham Lincoln began every sentence with “Four score and seven years ago,” and the others were all equally obvious. “I wish I’d gotten Ariaura’s little outburst on tape,” I said.

“We did,” Kildy said, reaching over the backseat and grabbing her orange pillow. She unzipped it, reached inside, and brought out a micro-vidcam. “Ta-da! I’m sorry I didn’t get last week’s. I didn’t realize they were frisking people.”

She fished in the pillow again and brought out a sheet of paper. “I had to run to the bathroom and scribble down what I could remember.”

“I thought they didn’t let people go to the bathroom.”

She grinned at me. “I gave an Oscar-worthy performance of an actress they’d let out of rehab too soon.”

I glanced at the list at the next stoplight. There were only a few phrases on it: the one she’d mentioned, and “I’ve never seen such shameless bilge,” and “You’d have to be a pack of deluded half-wits to believe something so preposterous.”

“That’s all?”

She nodded. “I told you, it didn’t last nearly as long last time. And since I wasn’t expecting it, I missed most of the first sentence.”

“That’s why you were asking at the seminar about buying the videotape?”

“Uh-huh, although I doubt if there’s anything on it. I’ve watched her last three videos, and there’s no sign of Entity Number Two.”

“But it happened at the seminar you went to and at this one. Has it occurred to you it might have happened because we were there?” I pulled into a parking space in front of the building where The Jaundiced Eye has its office.

“But—” she said.

“The ticket-taker could have alerted her that we were there,” I said.

I got out and opened her door for her, and we started up to the office. “Or she could have spotted us in the audience—you’re not the only one who’s famous. My picture’s on every psychic wanted poster on the West Coast—and she decided to jazz up the performance a little by adding another entity. To impress us.”

“That can’t be it.”

I opened the door. “Why not?”

“Because it’s happened at least twice before,” she said, walking in and sitting down in the only good chair. “In Berkeley and Seattle.”

“How do you know?”

“My publicist’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend saw her in Berkeley—that’s how my publicist found out about Ariaura—so I got her number and called her and asked her, and she said Isus was talking along about tribulation and thee being the universe, and all of a sudden this other voice said, ‘What a bunch of boobs!’ She said that’s how she knew Ariaura was really channeling, because if it was fake she’d hardly have called the audience names.”

“Well, there’s your answer. She does it to make her audiences believe her.”

“You saw them, they already believe her,” Kildy said. “And if that’s what she’s doing, why isn’t it on the Berkeley videotape?”

“It isn’t?”

She shook her head. “I watched it six times. Nothing.”

“And you’re sure your publicist’s ex-boyfriend’s girlfriend really saw it? That you weren’t leading her when you asked her questions?”

“I’m sure,” she said indignantly. “Besides, I asked my mother.”

“She was there, too?”

“No, but two of her friends were, and one of them knew someone who saw the Seattle seminar. They all said basically the same thing, except the part about it making them believe her. In fact, one of them said, ‘I think her cue cards were out of order,’ and told me not to waste my money, that the person I should go see was Angelina Black Feather.”

She grinned at me and then went serious. “If Ariaura was doing it on purpose, why would she edit it out? And why did the emcee and the ushers look so uneasy?”

So she’d noticed that, too.

“Maybe she didn’t warn them she was going to do it. Or, more likely, it’s all part of the act, to make people believe it’s authentic.”

Kildy shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t think so. I think it’s something else.”

“Like what? You don’t think she’s really channeling this guy?”

“No, of course not, Rob,” she said indignantly. “It’s just that . . . you say she’s doing it to get publicity and bigger crowds, but as you told me, the first rule of success in the psychic business is to tell people what they want to hear, not to call them boobs. You saw the woman next to you—she was all ready to walk out, and I watched her afterward. She didn’t sign up for a private enlightenment audience, and neither did very many other people, and I heard the emcee telling someone there were lots of tickets still available for the next seminar. Last week’s was sold out a month in advance. Why would she do something to hurt her business?”

“She’s got to do something to up the ante, to keep the customers coming back, and this new spirit is to create buzz. You watch, next week she’ll be advertising ‘The Battle of the Ancients.’ It’s a gimmick, Kildy.”

“So you don’t think we should go see her again.”

“No. That’s the worst thing we could possibly do. We don’t want to give her free publicity, and if she did do it to impress us, though it doesn’t sound like it, we’d be playing right into her hands. If she’s not, and the spirit is driving customers away, like you say, she’ll dump it and come up with a different one. Or put herself out of business. Either way, there’s no need for us to do anything. It’s a non-story. You can forget all about her.”

Which just goes to show you why I could never make it as a psychic. Because before the words were even out of my mouth, the office door banged open, and Ariaura roared in and grabbed me by the lapels.

“I don’t know what you’re doing or how you’re doing it,” she screamed, “but I want you to stop it right now!”

“He has a large and extremely uncommon capacity for provocative utterance . . .”

—H.L. Mencken

I hadn’t given Ariaura’s acting skills enough credit. Her portrayal of Isus might be wooden and fakey, but she gave a pretty convincing portrayal of a hopping-mad psychic.

“How dare you!” she shrieked. “I’ll sue you for everything you own!”

She had changed out of her flowing robes and into a lilac-colored suit Kildy told me later was a Zac Posen, and her diamond-studded necklace and earrings rattled. She was practically vibrating with rage, though not the positive vibrations she’d said were necessary for the appearance of spirits.

“I just watched the video of my seminar,” she shrieked, her face two inches from mine. “How dare you hypnotize me and make me look like a complete fool in front of—”

“Hypnotize?” Kildy said. (I was too busy trying to loosen her grip on my lapels to say anything.) “You think Rob hypnotized you?”

“Oh, don’t play the innocent with me,” Ariaura said, wheeling on her. “I saw you two out there in the audience today, and I know all about you and your nasty, sneering little magazine. I know you nonbelievers will stop at nothing to keep us from spreading the Higher Truth, but I didn’t think you’d go this far, hypnotizing me against my will and making me say those things! Isus told me I shouldn’t let you stay in the auditorium, that he sensed danger in your presence, but I said, ‘No, let the unbeliever stay and experience your reality. Let them know you come from the Existence Beyond to help us, to bring us words of Higher Wisdom.’ But Isus was right, you were up to no good.”

She removed one hand from my lapel long enough to shake a lilac-lacquered fingernail at me. “Well, your little hypnotism scheme won’t work. I’ve worked too hard to get where I am, and I’m not going to let a pair of narrow-minded little unbelievers like you get in my way. I have no intention—Higher Wisdom, my foot!” she snorted. “Higher Humbug is what I call it.”

Kildy glanced, startled, at me.

“Oh, the trappings are a lot gaudier, I’ll give you that,” Ariaura said in the gravelly voice we’d heard at the seminar.

As before, the change had come without a break and in mid-sentence. One minute she had had me by the lapels, and the next she’d let go and was pacing around the room, her hands behind her back, musing, “That auditorium’s a lot fancier, and it’s a big improvement over a courthouse lawn, and a good forty degrees cooler.” She sat down on the couch, her hands on her spread-apart knees. “And those duds she wears would make a Grand Worthy bow-wow of the Knights of Zoroaster look dowdy, but it’s the same old line of buncombe and the same old Boobus Americanus drinking it in.”

Kildy took a careful step toward my desk, reached for her handbag and did something I couldn’t see, and then went back to where she’d been standing, keeping her eyes the whole time on Ariaura, who was holding forth about the seminar.

“I never saw such an assortment of slack-jawed simians in one place! Except for the fact that the yokels have to sit on the floor—and pay for the privilege!—it’s the spitting image of a Baptist tent revival. Tell ’em what they want to hear, do a couple of parlor tricks, and then pass the collection plate. And they’re still falling for it!”

She stood up and began pacing again. “I knew I should’ve stuck around. It’s just like that time in Dayton—I think it’s all over and leave, and look what happens! You let the quacks and the crooks take over, like this latter-day Aimee Semple McPherson. She’s no more a seer than—of allowing you to ruin everything I’ve worked for! I . . .” Ariaura looked around bewilderedly. “. . . what? . . . I . . .” She faltered to a stop.

I had to hand it to her. She was good. She’d switched back into her own voice without missing a beat, and then given an impressive impersonation of someone who had no idea what was going on.

She looked confusedly from me to Kildy and back. “It happened again, didn’t it?” she asked, a quaver in her voice, and turned to appeal to Kildy. “He did it again, didn’t he?” and began backing toward the door. “Didn’t he?”

She pointed accusingly at me. “You keep away from me!” she shrieked. “And you keep away from my seminars! If you so much as try to come near me again, I’ll get a restraining order against you!” She roared out, slamming the door behind her.

“Well,” Kildy said after a minute. “That was interesting.”

“Yes,” I said, looking at the door. “Interesting.”

Kildy went over to my desk and pulled the Hasaka out from behind her handbag. “I got it all,” she said, taking out the disk, sticking it in the computer dock, and sitting down in front of the monitor. “There were a lot more clues this time.” She began typing in commands. “There should be more than enough for us to be able to figure out who it is.”

“I know who it is,” I said.

Kildy stopped in mid-keystroke. “Who?”

“The High Priest of Irreverence.”

“Who?”

“The Holy Terror from Baltimore, the Apostle of Common Sense, the Scourge of Con Men, Creationists, Faith Healers, and the Booboisie,” I said. “Henry Louis Mencken.”

“In brief, it is a fraud.”

—H.L. Mencken

“H.L. Mencken?” Kildy said. “The reporter who covered the Scopes trial?” (I told you she was too good to be true.)

“But why would Ariaura channel him?” she asked after we’d checked the words and phrases we’d listed against Mencken’s writings. They all checked out, from “buncombe” to “slack-jawed simians” to “home of the imbecile and the ass.”

“What did he mean about leaving Dayton early? Did something happen in Ohio?”

I shook my head. “Tennessee. Dayton, Tennessee, was where the Scopes trial was held.”

“And Mencken left early?”

“I don’t know,” I said, and went over to the bookcase to look for The Great Monkey Trial, “but I know it got so hot during the trial they moved it outside.”

“That’s what that comment about the courthouse lawn and its being forty degrees cooler meant,” Kildy said.

I nodded. “It was a hundred and five degrees and ninety percent humidity the week of the trial. It’s definitely Mencken. He invented the term ‘Boobus Americanus.’ ”

“But why would Ariaura channel H.L. Mencken, Rob? He hated people like her, didn’t he?”

“He certainly did.” He’d been the bane of charlatans and quacks all through the twenties, writing scathing columns on all kinds of scams, from faith healing to chiropractic to creationism, railing incessantly against all forms of “hocus-pocus” and on behalf of science and rational thought.

“Then why would she channel him?” Kildy asked. “Why not somebody sympathetic to psychics, like Edgar Cayce or Madame Blavatsky?”

“Because they’d obviously be suspect. By channeling an enemy of psychics, she makes it seem more credible.”

“But nobody’s ever heard of him.”

“You have. I have.”

“But nobody else in Ariaura’s audience has.”

“Exactly,” I said, still looking for The Great Monkey Trial.

“You mean you think she’s doing it to impress us?”

“Obviously,” I said, scanning the titles. “Why else would she have come all the way over here to give that little performance?”

“But—what about the Seattle seminar? Or the one in Berkeley?”

“Dry runs. Or she was hoping we’d hear about them and go see her. Which we did.”

“I didn’t,” Kildy said. “I went because my publicist wanted me to.”

“But you go to lots of spiritualist events, and you talk to lots of people. Your publicist was there. Even if you hadn’t gone, she’d have told you about it.”

“But what would be the point? You’re a skeptic. You don’t believe in channeling. Would she honestly think she could convince you Mencken was real?”

“Maybe,” I said. “She’s obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make the spirit sound like him. And think what a coup that would be. ‘Skeptic Says Channeled Spirit Authentic’ ? Have you ever heard of Uri Geller? He made a splash back in the seventies by claiming to bend spoons with his mind. He got all kinds of attention when a pair of scientists from the Stanford Research Institute said it wasn’t a trick, that he was actually doing it.”

“Was he?”

“No, of course not, and eventually he was exposed as a fraud. By Johnny Carson. Geller made the mistake of going on The Tonight Show and doing it in front of him. He’d apparently forgotten Carson had been a magician in his early days. But the point is, he made it onto The Tonight Show. And what made him a celebrity was having the endorsement of reputable scientists.”

“And if you endorsed Ariaura, if you said you thought it was really Mencken, she’d be a celebrity, too.”

“Exactly.”

“So what do we do?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? You’re not going to try to expose her as a fake?”

“Channeling isn’t the same as bending spoons. There’s no independently verifiable evidence.” I looked at her. “It’s not worth it, and we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Like Charles Fred. He’s making way too much money for a medium who only charges two hundred a performance, and he has way too many hits for a cold-reader. We need to find out how he’s doing it, and where the money’s coming from.”

“But shouldn’t we at least go to Ariaura’s next seminar to see if it happens again?” Kildy persisted.

“And have to explain to the L.A. Times reporter who just happens to be there why we’re so interested in Ariaura?” I said. “And why you came back three times?”

“I suppose you’re right. But what if some other skeptic endorses her? Or some English professor?”

I hadn’t thought of that. Ariaura had dangled the bait at four seminars we knew of. She might have been doing it at more, and The Skeptical Mind was in Seattle, Carlyle Drew was in San Francisco, and there were any number of amateur skeptics who went to spiritualist events.

And they would all know who Mencken was. He was the critical thinker’s favorite person, next to the Amazing Randi and Houdini. He’d not only been fearless in his attacks on superstition and fraud, he could write “like a bat out of hell.” And, unlike the rest of us skeptics, people had actually listened to what he said.

I’d liked him ever since I’d read about him chatting with somebody in his office at the Baltimore Sun and then suddenly looking out the window, saying, “The sons of bitches are gaining on us!” and frantically beginning to type. That was how I felt about twice a day, and more than once I’d muttered to myself, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?”

And I’d be willing to bet there were other people who felt the same way I did, who might be seduced by Mencken’s language and the fact that Ariaura was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear.

“You’re right,” I said. “We need to look into this, but we should send somebody else to the seminar.”

“How about my publicist? She said she wanted to go again.”

“No, I don’t want it to be anybody connected with us.”

“I know just the person,” Kildy said, snatching up her cell phone. “Her name’s Riata Starr. She’s an actress.”

With a name like that, what else could she be?

“She’s between jobs right now,” Kildy said, punching in a number, “and if I tell her there’s likely to be a casting director there, she’ll definitely do it for us.”

“Does she believe in channelers?”

She looked pityingly at me. “Everyone in Hollywood believes in channelers, but it won’t matter.” She put the phone to her ear. “I’ll put a videocam on her, and a recorder,” she whispered. “And I’ll tell her an undercover job would look great on her acting résumé. Hello?” she said in a normal voice. “I’m trying to reach Riata Starr. Oh. No, no message.”

She pushed “end.” “She’s at a casting call at Miramax.” She stuck the phone in her bag, fished her keys out of its depths, and slung the bag over her shoulder. “I’m going to go out there and talk to her. I’ll be back,” she said, and went out.

Definitely too good to be true, I thought, watching her leave, and called up a friend of mine in the police department and asked him what they had on Ariaura.

He promised he’d call me back, and while I was waiting I looked for and found The Great Monkey Trial. I looked up Mencken in the index and started through the references to see when Mencken had left Dayton. I doubted that he would have left before the trial was over. He’d been having the time of his life, pillorying William Jennings Bryan and the creationists. Maybe the reference was to Mencken’s having left before Bryan’s death.

Bryan had died five days after the trial ended, presumably from a heart attack, but more likely from the humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of Clarence Darrow, who’d put him on the stand and fired questions at him about the Bible. Darrow had made him—and creationism—look ridiculous, or rather, he’d made himself look ridiculous. The cross-examination had been the high point of the trial, and it had killed him.

Mencken had written a deadly, unforgiving obituary of Bryan, and he might very well have been sorry he hadn’t been in at the kill, but I couldn’t imagine Ariaura knowing that, even if she had taken the trouble to look up “Boobus Americanus” and “unmitigated bilge” and research Mencken’s gravelly voice and explosive delivery.

Of course she might have read it. In this very book, even. I read the chapter on Bryan’s death, looking for references to Mencken, but I couldn’t find any. I backtracked, and there it was. And I couldn’t believe it.

Mencken hadn’t left after the trial. When Darrow’s expert witnesses had all been disallowed, he’d assumed it was all over but assorted legal technicalities and had gone back to Baltimore. He hadn’t seen Darrow’s withering cross-examination. He’d missed Bryan saying man wasn’t a mammal, missed his insisting the sun could stand still without throwing the earth out of orbit. He’d definitely left too soon. And I was willing to bet he’d never forgiven himself for it.

“To me, the scientific point of view is completely satisfying, and it has been so as long as I remember. Not once in this life have I ever been inclined to seek a rock and refuge elsewhere.”

—H.L. Mencken

“But how could Ariaura know that?” Kildy said when she got back from the casting call.

“The same way I know it. She read it in a book. Did your friend Riata agree to go to the seminar?”

“Yes, she said she’d go. I gave her the Hasaka, but I’m worried they might confiscate it, so I’ve got an appointment with this props guy at Universal who worked on the last Bond movie to see if he’s got any ideas.”

“Uh, Kildy . . . those gadgets James Bond uses aren’t real. It’s a movie.”

She shot me her Julia-Roberts-plus smile. “I said ideas. Oh, and I got Riata’s ticket. When I called, I asked if they were sold out, and the guy I talked to said, ‘Are you kidding?’ and told me they’d only sold about half what they usually do. Did you find out anything about Ariaura?”

“No,” I said. “I’m checking out some leads.”

But my friend at the police department didn’t have any dope on Ariaura, not even a possible alias. “She’s clean,” he said when he finally called back the next morning. “No mail fraud, not even a parking ticket.”

I couldn’t find anything on her in The Skeptical Mind or on the Scamwatch website. It looked like she made her money the good old American way, by telling her customers a bunch of nonsense and selling them chakra charts.

I told Kildy as much when she came in, looking gorgeous in a casual shirt and jeans that had probably cost as much as The Jaundiced Eye’s annual budget.

“Ariaura’s obviously not her real name, but so far I haven’t been able to find out what it is,” I said. “Did you get a James Bond secret videocam from your buddy Q?”

“Yes,” she said, setting the tote bag down. “And I have an idea for proving Ariaura’s a fraud.” She handed me a sheaf of papers. “Here are the transcripts of everything Mencken said. We check them against Mencken’s writings, and—” She stopped. “What?”

I was shaking my head. “This is channeling. When I wrote an exposé about Swami Vishnu Jammi’s fifty-thousand-year-old entity, Yogati, using phrases like ‘totally awesome’ and ‘funky’ and talking about cell phones, he said he ‘transliterated’ Yogati’s thoughts into his own words.”

“Oh.” Kildy bit her lip. “Rob, what about a computer match? You know, one of those things where they compare a manuscript with Shakespeare’s plays to see if they were written by the same person.”

“Too expensive,” I said. “Besides, they’re done by universities, who I doubt would want to risk their credibility by running a check on a channeler. And even if they did match, all it would prove is that it’s Mencken’s words, not that it’s Mencken.”

“Oh.” She sat on the corner of my desk swinging her long legs for a minute, and then stood up, walked over to the bookcase, and began pulling down books.

“What are you doing?” I asked, going over to see what she was doing. She was holding a copy of Mencken’s Heathen Days. “I told you,” I said, “Mencken’s phrases won’t—”

“I’m not looking up his phrases,” she said, handing me Prejudices and Mencken’s biography. “I’m looking for questions to ask him.”

“Him? He’s not Mencken, Kildy. He’s a concoction of Ariaura’s.”

“I know,” she said, handing me The Collectible Mencken. “That’s why we need to question him—I mean Ariaura. We need to ask him—her—questions like, ‘What was your wife’s maiden name?’ and ‘What was the first newspaper you worked for?’ and—are any of these paperbacks on the bottom shelf here by Mencken?”

“No, they’re mysteries mostly. Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain.”

She quit looking at them and straightened to look at the middle shelves. “Questions like, ‘What did your father do for a living?’ ”

“He made cigars,” I said. “The first newspaper he worked for wasn’t the Baltimore Sun, it was the Morning Herald, and his wife’s maiden name was Sara Haardt. With a d and two a’s. But that doesn’t mean I’m Mencken.”

“No,” Kildy said, “but if you didn’t know them, it would prove you weren’t.”

She handed me A Mencken Chrestomathy. “If we ask Ariaura questions Mencken would know the answers to, and she gets them wrong, it proves she’s faking.”

She had a point. Ariaura had obviously researched Mencken fairly thoroughly to be able to mimic his language and mannerisms, and probably well enough to answer basic questions about his life, but she would hardly have memorized every detail. There were dozens of books about him, let alone his own work and his diaries. Plus Inherit the Wind and all the other plays and books and treatises that had been written about the Scopes trial. I’d bet there were close to a hundred Mencken things in print, and that didn’t include the stuff he’d written for the BaltimoreSun.

And if we could catch her not knowing something Mencken would know, it would be a simple way to prove conclusively that she was faking, and we could move on to the much more important question of why. If Ariaura would let herself be questioned.

“How do you plan to get Ariaura to agree to this?” I said. “My guess is she won’t even let us in to see her.”

“If she doesn’t, then that’s proof, too,” she said imperturbably.

“All right,” I said, “but forget about asking what Mencken’s father did. Ask what he drank. Rye, by the way.”

Kildy grabbed a notebook and started writing.

“Ask what the name of his first editor at the Sun was,” I said, picking up The Great Monkey Trial. “And ask who Sue Hicks was.”

“Who was she?” Kildy asked.

“He. He was one of the defense lawyers at the Scopes trial.”

“Should we ask him—her what the Scopes trial was about?”

“No, too easy. Ask him . . .” I said, trying to think of a good question. “Ask him what he ate while he was there covering the trial, and ask him where he sat in the courtroom.”

“Where he sat?”

“It’s a trick question. He stood on a table in the corner. Oh, and ask where he was born.”

She frowned. “Isn’t that too easy? Everyone knows he’s from Baltimore.”

“I want to hear him say it.”

“Oh,” Kildy said, nodding. “Did he have any kids?”

I shook my head. “He had a sister and two brothers. Gertrude, Charles, and August.”

“Oh, good, those aren’t names you’d be able to come up with just by guessing. Did he have any hobbies?”

“He played the piano. Ask about the Saturday Night Club. He and a bunch of friends got together to play music.”

We worked on the questions the rest of the day and the next morning, writing them down on index cards so they could be asked out of order.

“What about some of his sayings?” Kildy asked.

“You mean like, ‘Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy’ ? No. They’re the easiest thing of all to memorize, and no real person speaks in aphorisms.”

Kildy nodded and bent her beautiful head over the book again. I looked up Mencken’s medical history—he suffered from ulcers and had had an operation on his throat to remove his uvula—and went out and got us sandwiches for lunch and made copies of Mencken’s “History of the Bathtub” and a fake handbill he’d passed out during the Scopes trial announcing “a public demonstration of healing, casting out devils, and prophesying” by a made-up evangelist. Mencken had crowed that not a single person in Dayton had spotted the fake.

Kildy looked up from her book. “Did you know Mencken dated Lillian Gish?” she asked, sounding surprised.

“Yeah. He dated a lot of actresses. He had an affair with Anita Loos and nearly married Aileen Pringle. Why?”

“I’m impressed he wasn’t intimidated by the fact that they were movie stars, that’s all.”

I didn’t know if that was directed at me or not.

“Speaking of actresses,” I said, “what time is Ariaura’s seminar?”

“Two o’clock,” she said, glancing at her watch. “It’s a quarter till two right now. It should be over around four. Riata said she’d call as soon as the seminar was done.”

We went back to looking through Mencken’s books and his biographies, looking for details Ariaura was unlikely to have memorized. He’d loved baseball. He had stolen Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms and then given them to his friends, inscribed, “Compliments of the Author.” He’d been friends with lots of writers, including Theodore Dreiser and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who’d gotten so drunk at a dinner with Mencken he’d stood up at the dinner table and pulled his pants down.

The phone rang. I reached for it, but it was Kildy’s cell phone. “It’s Riata,” she told me, looking at the readout.

“Riata?” I glanced at my watch. It was only two-thirty. “Why isn’t she in the seminar?”

Kildy shrugged and put the phone to her ear. “Riata? What’s going on? . . . You’re kidding! . . . Did you get it? Great . . . no, meet me at Spago’s, like we agreed. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

She hit “end,” stood up, and took out her keys, all in one graceful motion. “Ariaura did it again, only this time as soon as she started, they stopped the seminar, yanked her offstage, and told everybody to leave. Riata got it on tape. I’m going to go pick it up. Will you be here?”

I nodded absently, trying to think of a way to ask about Mencken’s two-fingered typing, and Kildy waved good-bye and went out.

If I asked, “How do you write your stories?” I’d get an answer about the process of writing, but if I asked, “Do you touch-type?” Ariaura—

Kildy reappeared in the doorway, sat down, and picked up her notebook again. “What are you doing?” I asked, “I thought you were going—”

She put her finger to her lips. “She’s here,” she mouthed, and Ariaura came in.

She was still wearing her purple robes and her stage makeup, so she must have come here straight from her seminar, but she didn’t roar in angrily the way she had before. She looked frightened.

“What are you doing to me?” she asked, her voice trembling. “And don’t say you’re not doing anything. I saw the videotape. You’re—that’s what I want to know, too,” the gravelly voice demanded. “What the hell have you been doing? I thought you ran a magazine that worked to put a stop to the kind of bilgewater this high priestess of blather spews out. She was at it again today, calling up spirits and rooking a bunch of mysticism-besotted fools out of their cold cash, and where the hell were you? I didn’t see you there, cracking heads.”

“We didn’t go because we didn’t want to encourage her if she was—” Kildy hesitated. “We’re not sure what . . . I mean, who we’re dealing with here . . .” she faltered.

“Ariaura,” I said firmly. “You pretend to channel spirits from the astral plane for a living. Why should we believe you’re not pretending to channel H.L. Mencken?”

“Pretending?” she said, sounding surprised. “You think I’m something that two-bit Jezebel’s confabulating?”

She sat down heavily in the chair in front of my desk and grinned wryly at me. “You’re absolutely right. I wouldn’t believe it, either. A skeptic after my own heart.”

“Yes,” I said. “And as a skeptic, I need to have some proof you’re who you say you are.”

“Fair enough. What kind of proof?”

“We want to ask you some questions,” Kildy said.

Ariaura slapped her knees. “Fire away.”

“All right,” I said. “Since you mentioned fires, when was the Baltimore fire?”

“Aught-four,” she said promptly. “February. Cold as hell.” She grinned. “Best time I ever had.”

Kildy glanced at me. “What did your father drink?” she asked.

“Rye.”

“What did you drink?” I asked.

“From 1919 on, whatever I could get.”

“Where are you from?” Kildy asked.

“The most beautiful city in the world.”

“Which is?” I said.

“Which is?” she roared, outraged. “Bawlmer!”

Kildy shot me a glance.

“What’s the Saturday Night Club?” I snapped out.

“A drinking society,” she said, “with musical accompaniment.”

“What instrument did you play?”

“Piano.”

“What’s the Mann Act?”

“Why?” she said, winking at Kildy. “You planning on taking her across state lines? Is she underage?”

I ignored that. “If you’re really Mencken, you hate charlatans, so why have you inhabited Ariaura’s body?”

“Why do people go to zoos?”

She was good, I had to give her that. And fast. She spat out answers as fast as I could ask her questions about the Sun and The Smart Set and William Jennings Bryan.

“Why did you go to Dayton?”

“To see a three-ring circus. And stir up the animals.”

“What did you take with you?”

“A typewriter and four quarts of Scotch. I should have taken a fan. It was hotter than the seventh circle of hell, with the same company.”

“What did you eat while you were there?” Kildy asked.

“Fried chicken and tomatoes. At every meal. Even breakfast.”

I handed him the bogus evangelist handbill Mencken had handed out at the Scopes trial. “What’s this?”

She looked at it, turned it over, looked at the other side. “It appears to be some sort of circular.”

And there’s all the proof we need, I thought smugly. Mencken would have recognized that instantly. “Do you know who wrote this handbill?” I started to ask and thought better of it. The question itself might give the answer away. And better not use the word “handbill.”

“Do you know the event this circular describes?” I asked instead.

“I’m afraid I can’t answer that,” she said.

Then you’re not Mencken, I thought. I shot a triumphant glance at Kildy.

“But I would be glad to,” Ariaura said, “if you would be so good as to read what is written on it to me.”

She handed the handbill back to me, and I stood there looking at it and then at her and then at it again.

“What is it, Rob?” Kildy said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind about the circular. What was your first published news story about?”

“A stolen horse and buggy,” she said, and proceeded to tell the whole story, but I wasn’t listening.

He didn’t know what the handbill was about, I thought, because he couldn’t read. Because he’d had an aphasic stroke in 1948 that had left him unable to read and write.

“I had a nice clean place to stay, madam, and I left it to come here.”

—Inherit the Wind

“It doesn’t prove anything,” I told Kildy after Ariaura was gone. She’d come out of her Mencken act abruptly after I’d asked her what street she lived on in Baltimore, looked bewilderedly at me and then Kildy, and bolted without a word. “Ariaura could have found out about Mencken’s stroke the same way I did,” I said, “by reading it in a book.”

“Then why did you go white like that?” Kildy said. “I thought you were going to pass out. And why wouldn’t she just answer the question? She knew the answers to all the others.”

“Probably she didn’t know that one and that was her fallback response,” I said. “It caught me off guard, that’s all. I was expecting her to have memorized pat answers, not—”

“Exactly,” Kildy cut in. “Somebody faking it would have said they had an aphasic stroke if you asked them a direct question about it, but they wouldn’t have . . . and that wasn’t the only instance. When you asked him about the Baltimore fire, he said it was the best time he’d ever had. Someone faking it would have told you what buildings burned or how horrible it was.”

And he’d said, not “1904” or “oh-four,” but “aught-four.” Nobody talked like that nowadays, and it wasn’t something that would have been in Mencken’s writings. It was something people said, not wrote, and Ariaura couldn’t possibly—

“It doesn’t prove he’s Mencken,” I said and realized I was saying “he.” And shouting.

I lowered my voice. “It’s a very clever trick, that’s all. And just because we don’t know how the trick’s being done doesn’t mean it’s not a trick. She could have been coached in the part,including telling her how to pretend she can’t read if she’s confronted with anything written. Or she could be hooked up to somebody with a computer.”

“I looked. She wasn’t wearing an earpiece, and if somebody was looking up the answers and feeding them to her, she’d be slower answering them, wouldn’t she?”

“Not necessarily. She might have a photographic memory.”

“But then wouldn’t she be doing a mind-reading act instead of channeling?”

“Maybe she did. We don’t know what she was doing before Salem,” I said, but Kildy was right. Someone with a photographic memory could make a killing as a fortune-teller or a medium, and there were no signs of a photographic memory in Ariaura’s channeling act—she spoke only in generalities.

“Or she might be coming up with the answers some other way,” I said.

“What if she isn’t, Rob? What if she’s really channeling the spirit of Mencken?”

“Kildy, channels are fakes. There are no spirits, no sympathetic vibrations, there’s no astral plane.”

“I know,” she said, “but his answers were so—” She shook her head. “And there’s something about him, his voice and the way he moves—”

“It’s called acting.”

“But Ariaura’s a terrible actress. You saw her do Isus.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s suppose for a minute it is Mencken, and that instead of being in the family plot in Loudon Park Cemetery, his spirit’s floating in the ether somewhere, why would he come back at this particular moment? Why didn’t he come back when Uri Geller was bending spoons all over the place, or when Shirley MacLaine was on every talk show in the universe? Why didn’t he come back in the fifties when Virginia Tighe was claiming to be Bridey Murphy?”

“I don’t know,” Kildy admitted.

“And why would he choose to make his appearance through the ‘channel’ of a third-rate mountebank like Ariaura? He hated charlatans like her.”

“Maybe that’s why he came back, because people like her are still around and he hadn’t finished what he set out to do. You heard him—he said he left too early.”

“He was talking about the Scopes trial.”

“Maybe not. You heard him, he said, ‘You let the quacks and the crooks take over.’ Or maybe—” she stopped.

“Maybe what?”

“Maybe he came back to help you, Rob. That time you were so frustrated over Charles Fred, I heard you say, ‘Where the hell is H.L. Mencken when we need him?’ Maybe he heard you.”

“And decided to come all the way back from an astral plane that doesn’t exist to help a skeptic nobody’s ever heard of.”

“It’s not that inconceivable that someone would be interested in you,” Kildy said. “I . . . I mean, the work you’re doing is really important, and Mencken—”

“Kildy,” I said, “I don’t believe this.”

“I don’t, either—I just . . . you have to admit, it’s a very convincing illusion.”

“Yes, so was the Fox sisters’ table-rapping and Virginia Tighe’s past life as an Irish washerwoman in 1880s Dublin, but there was a logical explanation for both of them, and it may not even be that complicated. The details Bridey Murphy knew all turned out to have come from Virginia Tighe’s Irish nanny. The Fox sisters were cracking their toes, for God’s sake.”

“You’re right,” Kildy said, but she didn’t sound completely convinced, and that worried me. If Ariaura’s Mencken imitation could fool Kildy, it could fool anybody, and “I’m sure it’s a trick. I just don’t know how she’s doing it” wasn’t going to cut it when the networks called me for a statement. I had to figure this out fast.

“Ariaura has to be getting her information about Mencken from someplace,” I said. “We need to find out where. We need to check with bookstores and the library. And the Internet,” I said, hoping that wasn’t what she was using. It would take forever to find out what sites she’d visited.

“What do you want me to do?” Kildy asked.

“I want you to go through the transcripts like you suggested and find out where the quotes came from so we’ll know the particular works we’re dealing with,” I told her. “And I want you to talk to your publicist and anybody else who’s been to the seminars and find out if any of them had a private enlightenment audience with Ariaura. I want to know what goes on in them. Is she using Mencken for some purpose we don’t know about? See if you can find out.”

“I could ask Riata to get an audience,” she suggested.

“That’s a good idea,” I said.

“What about questions? Do you want me to try to come up with some harder ones than the ones we asked him—I mean, her?”

I shook my head. “Asking harder questions won’t help. If she’s got a photographic memory, she’ll know anything we throw at her, and if she doesn’t, and we ask her some obscure question about one of the reporters Mencken worked with at the Morning Herald, or one of his Smart Set essays, she can say she doesn’t remember, and it won’t prove anything. If you asked me what was in articles I wrote for The Jaundiced Eye five years ago, I couldn’t remember, either.”

“I’m not talking about facts and figures, Rob,” Kildy said. “I’m talking about the kinds of things people don’t forget, like the first time Mencken met Sara.”

I thought of the first time I met Kildy, looking up from my desk to see her standing there, with her honey-blond hair and that movie-star smile. “Unforgettable” was the word, all right.

“Or how his mother died,” Kildy was saying, “or how he found out about the Baltimore fire. The paper called him and woke him out of a sound sleep. There’s no way you could forget that, or the name of a dog you had as a kid, or the nickname the other kids called you in grade school.”

Nickname. That triggered something. Something Ariaura wouldn’t know. About a baby. Had Mencken had a nickname when he was a baby? No, that wasn’t it—

“Or what he got for Christmas when he was ten,” Kildy said. “We need to find a question Mencken would absolutely know the answer to, and if he doesn’t, it proves it’s Ariaura.”

“And if he does, it still doesn’t prove it’s Mencken. Right?”

“I’ll go talk to Riata about getting a private audience,” she said, stuffed the transcripts in her tote, and put on her sunglasses. “And I’ll pick up the videotape. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”

“Right, Kildy?” I insisted.

“Right,” she said, her hand on the door. “I guess.”

“In the highest confidence there is always a flavor of doubt—a feeling, half instinctive and half logical, that, after all, the scoundrel may have something up his sleeve.”

—H.L. Mencken

After Kildy left, I called up a computer-hacker friend of mine and put him to work on the problem and then phoned a guy I knew in the English department at UCLA.

“Inquiries about Mencken?” he said. “Not that I know of, Rob. You might try the journalism department.”

The guy at the journalism department said, “Who?” and, when I explained, suggested I call Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

And what had I been thinking? Kildy said Ariaura had started doing Mencken in Seattle. I needed to be checking there, or in Salem or—where had she gone after that? Sedona. I spent the rest of the day (and evening) calling bookstores and reference librarians in all three places. Five of them responded “Who?” and all of them asked me how to spell “Mencken,” which might or might not mean they hadn’t heard the name lately, and only seven of the thirty bookstores stocked any books on him. Half of those were the latest Mencken biography, which for an excited moment I thought might have answered the question, “Why Mencken?”—the title of it was Skeptic and Prophet—but it had only been out two weeks. None of the bookstores could give me any information on orders or recent purchases, and the public libraries couldn’t give me any information at all.

I tried their electronic card catalogues, but they only showed currently checked-out books. I called up the L.A. Public Library’s catalogue. It showed four Mencken titles checked out, all from the Beverly Hills branch.

“Which looks promising,” I told Kildy when she came in the next morning.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said. “I’m the one who checked them out, to compare the transcripts against.” She pulled a sheaf of papers out of her designer tote. “I need to talk to you about the transcripts. I found something interesting. I know,” she said, anticipating my objection, “you said all it proved was that Ariaura—”

“Or whoever’s feeding this stuff to her.”

She acknowledged that with a nod. “—all it proved was that whoever was doing it was reading Mencken, and I agree, but you’d expect her to quote him back verbatim, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Randall Mars’s Lincoln and his “Four score and seven . . .”

“But she doesn’t. Look, here’s what she said when we asked him about William Jennings Bryan: ‘Bryan! I don’t even want to hear that mangy old mountebank’s name mentioned. That scoundrel had a malignant hatred of science and sense.’ ”

“And he didn’t say that?”

“Yes and no. Mencken called him a ‘walking malignancy’ and said he was ‘mangy and flea-bitten’ and had ‘an almost pathological hatred of all learning.’ And the rest of the answers, and the things she said at the seminars, are like that, too.”

“So she mixed and matched his phrases,” I said, but what she’d found was disturbing. Someone trying to pull off an impersonation would stick to the script, since any deviations from Mencken’s actual words could be used as proof it wasn’t him.

And the annotated list Kildy handed me was troubling in another way. The phrases hadn’t been taken from one or two sources. They were from all over the map—“complete hooey” fromMinority Report, “buncombe” from The New Republic, “as truthful as Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound” from an article on pedagogy in the Sun.

“Could they all have been in a Mencken biography?”

She shook her head. “I checked. I found a couple of sources that had several of them, but no one source that had them all.”

“That doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” I said, and changed the subject. “Was your friend able to get a private audience with Ariaura?”

“Yes,” she said, glancing at her watch. “I have to go meet her in a few minutes. She also got tickets to the seminar Saturday. They didn’t cancel it like I thought they would, but they did cancel a local radio interview she was supposed to do last night and the weeklong spiritual immersion she had scheduled for next week.”

“Did Riata give you the recording of Ariaura’s last seminar?”

“No, she’d left it at home. She said she’d bring it when we meet before her private audience. She said she got some really good footage of the emcee. She swears from the way he looked that he’s not in on the scam. And there’s something else. I called Judy Helzberg, who goes to every psychic event there is. Remember? I interviewed her when we did the piece on shamanic astrologers. And she said Ariaura called her and asked her for Wilson Amboy’s number.”

“Wilson Amboy?”

“Beverly Hills psychiatrist.”

“It’s all part of the illusion,” I said, but even I sounded a little doubtful. It was an awfully good deception for a third-rate channeler like Ariaura.

There’s somebody else in on it, I thought, and not just somebody feeding her answers. A partner. A mastermind.

After Kildy left I called Marty Rumboldt and asked him if Ariaura had had a partner in Salem. “Not that I know of,” he said. “Prentiss just did a study on witchcraft in Salem. She might know somebody who would know. Hang on. Hey, Prentiss!” I could hear him call. “Jamie!”

Jamie, I thought. That had been James M. Cain’s nickname, and Mencken had been good friends with him. Where had I read that?

“She said to call Madame Orima,” Marty said, getting back on the phone, and gave me the number.

I started to dial it and then stopped and looked up “Cain, James M.” in Mencken’s biography. It said he and Mencken had worked on the Baltimore Sun together, that they had been good friends, that Mencken had helped him get his first story collection published: The Baby in the Icebox.

I went over to the bookcase, squatted down, and started through the row of paperbacks on the bottom shelf . . . Chandler, Hammett . . . It had a red cover, with a picture of a baby in a high chair and a . . . Chandler, Cain . . .

But no red. I scanned the titles—Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice . . . Here it was, stuck behind Mildred Pierce and not red at all. The Baby in the Icebox. It was a lurid orange and yellow, and had pictures of a baby in its mother’s arms and a cigarette-smoking lug in front of a gas station. I hoped I remembered the inside better than the outside.

I did. The introduction was by Roy Hoopes, and it was not only a Penguin edition, but one that had been out of print for at least twenty years. Even if Ariaura’s researcher had bothered to check out Cain, it would hardly be this edition.

And the introduction was full of stuff about Cain that was perfect—the fact that everyone who knew him called him Jamie, the fact that he’d spent a summer in a tuberculosis sanitarium and that he hated Baltimore, Mencken’s favorite place.

Some of the information was in the Mencken books—Mencken’s introducing him to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d published that first collection, the Sun connection, their rivalry over movie star Aileen Pringle.

But most of the facts in the introduction weren’t, and they were exactly the kind of thing a friend would know. And Ariaura wouldn’t, because they were details about Cain’s life, not Mencken’s. Even a mastermind wouldn’t have memorized every detail of Cain’s life or those of Mencken’s other famous friends. If there wasn’t anything here I could use, there might be something in Dreiser’s biography, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Or Lillian Gish’s.

But there was plenty here, like the fact that James M. Cain’s brother Boydie had died in a tragic accident after the Armistice, and his statement that all his writing was modeled on Alice in Wonderland. That was something no one would ever guess from reading Cain’s books, which were all full of crimes and murderers and beautiful, calculating women who seduced the hero into helping her with a scam and then turned out to be working a scam of her own.

Not exactly the kind of thing Ariaura would read, and definitely the kind of thing Mencken would have. He’d bought The Baby in the Icebox for The American Mercury and told Cain it was one of the best things he’d ever written. Which meant it would make a perfect source for a question, and I knew just what to ask. To anyone who hadn’t heard of the story, the question wouldn’t even make sense. Only somebody who’d read the story would know the answer. Like Mencken.

And if Ariaura knew it, I’d—what? Believe she was actually channeling Mencken?

Right. And Charles Fred was really talking to the dead and Uri Geller was really bending spoons. It was a trick, that was all. She had a photographic memory, or somebody was feeding her the answers.

Feeding her the answers.

I thought suddenly of Kildy saying, “Who was Sue Hicks?”—of her insisting I go with her to see Ariaura—of her saying, “But why would Ariaura channel a spirit who yells at her audiences?”

I looked down at the orange and yellow paperback in my hand. “A beautiful, calculating woman who seduces the hero into helping her with a scam,” I murmured, and thought about Ariaura’s movie-star-handsome ushers and about scantily clad Victorian spirits and about Sir William Crookes.

Sex. Get the chump emotionally involved and he won’t see the wires. It was the oldest trick in the book.

I’d said Ariaura wasn’t smart enough to pull off such a complicated scam, and she wasn’t. But Kildy was. So you get her on the inside where she can see the shelf full of Mencken books, where she can hear the chump mutter, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?” You get the chump to trust her, and if he falls in love with her, so much the better. It’ll keep him off balance and he won’t get suspicious.

And it all fit. It was Kildy who’d set up the contact—I never did channelers, and Kildy knew that. It was Kildy who’d said we couldn’t go incognito, Kildy who’d said to bring the Sony, knowing it would be confiscated, Kildy who’d taken a taxi to the seminar instead of coming in her Jaguar so she’d be at the office when Ariaura came roaring in.

But she’d gotten the whole thing on tape. And she hadn’t had any idea who the spirit was. I was the one who’d figured out it was Mencken.

With Kildy feeding me clues from the seminar she’d gone to before, and I only had her word that Ariaura had channeled him that time. And that it had happened in Berkeley and Seattle. And that the tapes had been edited.

And she was the one who’d kept telling me it was really Mencken, the one who’d come up with the idea of asking him questions that would prove it—questions I’d conveniently told her the answers to—the one who’d suggested a friend of hers go to the seminar and videotape it, a videotape I’d never seen. I wondered if it—or Riata—even existed.

The whole thing, from beginning to end, had been a setup.

And I had never tumbled to it. Because I’d been too busy looking at her legs and her honey-colored hair and that smile. Just like Crookes.

I don’t believe it, I thought. Not Kildy, who’d worked side by side with me for nearly a year, who’d stolen chicken guts and pretended to be hypnotized and let Jean-Pierre cleanse her aura, who’d come to work for me in the first place because she hated scam artists like Ariaura.

Right. Who’d come to work for a two-bit magazine when she could have been getting five million a movie and dating Viggo Mortensen. Who’d been willing to give up premieres and summers in Tahiti and deep massages for me. Skeptics’ Rule Number Two: If it seems too good to be true, it is. And how often have you said she’s a good actress?

No, I thought, every bone in my body rebelling. It can’t be true.

And that’s what the chump always says, isn’t it, even when he’s faced with the evidence? “I don’t believe it. She wouldn’t do that to me.”

And that was the whole point—to get you to trust her, to make you believe she was on your side. Otherwise you’d have insisted on checking those tapes of Ariaura’s seminars for yourself to see if they’d been edited, you’d have demanded independently verifiable evidence that Ariaura had really canceled those seminars and asked about a psychiatrist.

Independently verifiable evidence. That’s what I needed, and I knew exactly where to look.

“My mother took me to Lucius Windfire’s luminescence reading,” Kildy had said, and I had the guest lists for those readings. They were part of the court records, and I’d gotten them when I’d done the story on his arrest. Kildy had come to see me on May tenth and he’d only had two seminars that month.

I called up the lists for both seminars and for the two before that and typed in Kildy’s name.

Nothing.

She said she went with her mother, I thought, and typed her mom’s name in. Nothing. And nothing when I printed out the lists and went through them by hand, nothing when I went through the lists for March and April. And June. And no ten-thousand-dollar donation on any of Windfire, Inc.’s financial statements.

Half an hour later Kildy showed up smiling, beautiful, full of news. “Ariaura’s canceled all the private sessions she scheduled and the rest of her tour.”

She leaned over my shoulder to look at what I was doing. “Did you come up with a foolproof question for Mencken?”

“No,” I said, sliding The Baby in the Icebox under a file folder and sticking them both in a drawer. “I came up with a theory about what’s going on, though.”

“Really?” she said.

“Really. You know, one of my big problems all along has been Ariaura. She’s just not smart enough to have come up with all this—the ‘aught-four’ thing, the not being able to read, the going to see a psychiatrist. Which either meant she was actually channeling Mencken, or there was some other factor. And I think I’ve got it figured out.”

“You have?”

“Yeah. Tell me what you think of this: Ariaura wants to be big. Not just seven-hundred-and-fifty-a-pop seminars and sixty-dollar videotapes, but Oprah, the Today show, Larry King, the whole works. But to do that it’s not enough to have audiences who believe her. She needs to have somebody with credibility say she’s for real, a scientist, say, or a professional skeptic.”

“Like you,” she said cautiously.

“Like me. Only I don’t believe in astral spirits. Or channelers. And I certainly wouldn’t fall for the spirit of an ancient priest of Atlantis. It’s going to have to be somebody a charlatan would never dream of channeling, somebody who’ll say what I want to hear. And somebody I know a lot about so I’ll recognize the clues being fed to me, somebody custom-tailored for me.”

“Like H.L. Mencken,” Kildy said. “But how would she have known you were a fan of Mencken’s?”

“She didn’t have to,” I said. “That was her partner’s job.”

“Her part—”

“Partner, sidekick, shill, whatever you want to call it. Somebody I’d trust when she said it was important to go see some channeler.”

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “You think I went to Ariaura’s seminar and her imitation of Isus was so impressive I immediately became a Believer with a capital B and fell in with her nefarious scheme, whatever it is?”

“No,” I said. “I think you were in it with her from the beginning, from the very first day you came to work for me.”

She really was a good actress. The expression in those beautiful blue eyes looked exactly like stunned hurt. “You believe I set you up,” she said wonderingly.

I shook my head. “I’m a skeptic, remember? I deal in independently verifiable evidence. Like this,” I said, and handed her Lucius Windfire’s attendance list.

She looked at it in silence.

“Your whole story about how you found out about me was a fake, wasn’t it? You didn’t look up ‘debunkers’ in the phone book, did you? You didn’t go see a luminescence therapist with your mother?”

“No.”

No.

I hadn’t realized till she admitted it how much I had been counting on her saying, “There must be some mistake, I was there,” on her having some excuse, no matter how phony: “Did I say the fourteenth? I meant the twentieth,” or “My publicist got the tickets for us. It would be in her name.” Anything. Even flinging the list dramatically at me and sobbing, “I can’t believe you don’t trust me.”

But she just stood there, looking at the incriminating list and then at me, not a tantrum or a tear in sight.

“You concocted the whole story,” I said finally.

“Yes.”

I waited for her to say, “It’s not the way it looks, Rob, I can explain,” but she didn’t say that, either. She handed the list back to me and picked up her cell phone and her bag, fishing for her keys and then slinging her bag over her shoulder as casually as if she were on her way to go cover a new moon ceremony or a tarot reading, and left.

And this was the place in the story where the private eye takes a bottle of Scotch out of his bottom drawer, pours himself a nice stiff drink, and congratulates himself on his narrow escape.

I’d almost been made a royal chump of, and Mencken (the real one, not the imitation Kildy and Ariaura had tried to pass off as him) would never have forgiven me.

So good riddance. And what I needed to do now was write up the whole sorry scam as a lesson to other skeptics for the next issue.

But I sat there a good fifteen minutes, thinking about Kildy and her exit, and knowing that, in spite of its offhandedness, I was never going to see her again.

What I need is a miracle.

—Inherit the Wind

I told you I’d make a lousy psychic. The next morning Kildy walked in carrying an armload of papers and file folders. She dumped them in front of me on my desk, picked up my phone, and began punching in numbers.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing? And what’s all this?” I said, gesturing at the stack of papers.

“Independently verifiable evidence,” she said, still punching in numbers, and put the phone to her ear. “Hello, this is Kildy Ross. I need to speak to Ariaura.” There was a pause. “She’s not taking calls? All right, tell her I’m at the Jaundiced Eye office, and I need to speak to her as soon as possible. Tell her it’s urgent. Thank you.” She hung up.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing, calling Ariaura on my phone?” I said.

“I wasn’t,” she said. “I was calling Mencken.” She pulled a file out of the middle of the stack. “I’m sorry it took me so long. Getting Ariaura’s phone records was harder than I thought.”

“Ariaura’s phone records?”

“Yeah. Going back four years,” she said, pulling a file folder out of the middle of the stack and handing it to me.

I opened it up. “How did you get her phone records?”

“I know this computer guy at Pixar. We should do an issue on how easy it is to get hold of private information and how mediums are using it to convince their people they’re talking to their dead relatives,” she said, fishing through the stack for another folder.

“And here are my phone records.” She handed it to me. “The cell’s on top, and then my home number and my car phone. And my mom’s. And my publicist’s cell phone.”

“Your publicist’s cell—?”

She nodded. “In case you think I used her phone to call Ariaura. She doesn’t have a regular phone, just a cell. And here are my dad’s and my stepmother’s. I can get my other stepmothers’, too, but it’ll take a couple more days, and Ariaura’s big seminar is tonight.”

She handed me more files. “This is a list of all my trips—airline tickets, hotel bills, rental car records. Credit card bills, with annotations,” she said, and went over to her tote bag and pulled out three fat Italian-leather notebooks with a bunch of Post-its sticking out the sides. “These are my day planners, with notes as to what the abbreviations mean, and my publicist’s log.”

“And this is supposed to prove you were at Lucius Windfire’s luminescence reading with your mother?”

“No, Rob, I told you, I lied about the seminar,” she said, looking earnestly through the stack, folder by folder. “These are to prove I didn’t call Ariaura, that she didn’t call me, that I wasn’t in Seattle or Eugene or any of the other cities she was in, and I never went to Salem.”

She pulled a folder out of the pile and began handing items to me. “Here’s the program for Yogi Magaputra’s matinee performance for May nineteenth. I couldn’t find the ticket stubs and I didn’t buy the tickets, the studio did, but here’s a receipt for the champagne cocktail I had at intermission. See? It’s got the date and it was at the Roosevelt, and here’s a schedule of Magaputra’s performances, showing he was at the Roosevelt on that day. And a flyer for the next session they gave out as we left.”

I had one of those flyers in my file on mediums, and I was pretty sure I’d been at that séance. I’d gone to three, working on a piece on his use of funeral home records to obtain information on his victims’ dead relatives. I’d never published it—he’d been arrested on tax evasion charges before I finished it. I looked questioningly at Kildy.

“I was there researching a movie I was thinking about doing,” Kildy said, “a comedy about a medium. It was called Medium Rare. Here’s the screenplay.”

She handed me a thick bound manuscript. “I wouldn’t read the whole thing. It’s terrible. Anyway, I saw you there, talking to this guy with hair transplants—”

Magaputra’s personal manager, who I’d suspected was feeding him info from the audience. I’d been trying to see if I could spot his concealed mike.

“I saw you talking to him, and I thought you looked—”

“Gullible?”

Her jaw tightened. “No. Interesting. Cute. Not the kind of guy I expected to see at one of the yogi’s séances. I asked who you were, and somebody said you were a professional skeptic, and I thought, Well, thank goodness! Magaputra was patently fake, and everyone was buying it, lock, stock, and barrel.”

“Including your mother,” I said.

“No, I made that up, too. My mother’s even more of a skeptic than I am, especially after being married to my father. She’s partly why I was interested—she’s always after me to date guys from outside the movie business—so I bought a copy of The Jaundiced Eye and got your address and came to see you.”

“And lied.”

“Yes,” she said. “It was a dumb thing to do. I knew it as soon as you started talking about how you shouldn’t take anything anyone tells you on faith and how important independently verifiable evidence is, but I was afraid if I told you I was doing research for a movie you wouldn’t want me tagging along, and if I told you I was attracted to you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think it was a reality show or some kind of Hollywood fad thing everybody was doing right then, like opening a boutique or knitting or checking into Betty Ford.”

“And you fully intended to tell me,” I said, “you were just waiting for the right moment. In fact, you were all set to when Ariaura came along—”

“You don’t have to be sarcastic,” she said. “I thought if I went to work for you and you got to know me, you might stop thinking of me as a movie star and ask me out—”

“And incidentally pick up some good acting tips for your medium movie.”

“Yes,” she said angrily. “If you want to know the truth, I also thought if I kept going to those stupid past-life regression sessions and covens and soul retrieval circles, I might get over the stupid crush I had on you, but the better I got to know you, the worse it got.”

She looked up at me. “I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t set you up. I’d never seen Ariaura before I went to that first seminar with my publicist, and I’m not in any kind of scam with her. And that story I told you the first day is the only thing I’ve ever lied to you about. Everything else I told you—about hating psychics and Ben Affleck and wanting to get out of the movie business and wanting to help you debunk charlatans and loathing the idea of ending up in rehab or in The Hulk IV—was true.”

She rummaged in the pile and pulled out an olive-green-covered script. “They really did offer me the part.”

“Of the Hulk?”

“No,” she said and held the script out to me. “Of the love interest.”

She looked up at me with those blue eyes of hers, and if anything had ever been too good to be true, it was Kildy, standing there with that bilious green script and the office’s fluorescent light on her golden hair. I had always wondered how all those chumps sitting around séance tables and squatting on lilac-colored cushions could believe such obvious nonsense. Well, now I knew.

Because standing there right then, knowing it all had to be a scam, that the Hulk IV script and the credit card bills and the phone bills didn’t prove a thing, that they could easily have been faked and I was nothing more than a prize chump being set up for the big finale by a couple of pros, I still wanted to believe it. And not just the researching-a-movie alibi, but the whole thing—that H.L. Mencken had come back from the grave, that he was here to help me crusade against charlatans, that if I grabbed the wrist holding that script and pulled Kildy toward me and kissed her, we would live happily ever after.

And no wonder Mencken, railing against creationists and chiropractic and Mary Baker Eddy, hadn’t gotten anywhere. What chance do facts and reason possibly have against what people desperately need to believe?

Only Mencken hadn’t come back. A third-rate channeler was only pretending to be him, and Kildy’s protestations of love, much as I wanted to hear them, were the oldest trick in the book.

“Nice try,” I said.

“But you don’t believe me,” she said bleakly, and Ariaura walked in.

“I got your message,” she said to Kildy in Mencken’s gravelly voice. “I came as soon as I could.” She plunked down in a chair facing me. “Those goons of Ariaura’s—”

“You can knock off the voices, Ariaura,” I said. “The jig, as Mencken would say, is up.”

Ariaura looked inquiringly at Kildy.

“Rob thinks Ariaura’s a fake,” Kildy said.

Ariaura switched her gaze to me. “You just figured that out? Of course she’s a fake, she’s a bamboozling mountebank, an oleaginous—”

“He thinks you’re not real,” Kildy said. “He thinks you’re just a voice Ariaura does, like Isus, that your disrupting her seminars is a trick to convince him she’s an authentic channeler, and he thinks I’m in on the plot with you, that I helped you set him up.”

Here it comes, I thought. Shocked outrage. Affronted innocence. Kildy’s a total stranger, I’ve never seen her before in my life!

“He thinks that you—?” Ariaura hooted and banged the arms of the chair with glee. “Doesn’t the poor fish know you’re in love with him?”

“He thinks that’s part of the scam,” Kildy said earnestly. “The only way he’ll believe I am is if he believes there is no scam, if he believes you’re really Mencken.”

“Well, then,” Ariaura said and grinned, “I guess we’ll have to convince him.” He slapped his knees and turned expectantly to me. “What do you want to know, sir? I was born in 1880 at nineP.M., right before the police went out and raided ten or twenty saloons, and went to work at the Morning Herald at the tender age of eighteen—”

“Where you laid siege to the editor Max Ways for four straight weeks before he gave you an assignment,” I said, “but my knowing that doesn’t any more make me Henry Lawrence Mencken than it does you.”

“Henry Louis,” Ariaura said, “after an uncle of mine who died when he was a baby. All right, you set the questions.”

“It’s not that simple,” Kildy said. She pulled a chair up in front of Ariaura and sat down, facing her. She took both hands in hers. “To prove you’re Mencken you can’t just answer questions. The skeptic’s first rule is: ‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ You’ve got to do something extraordinary.”

“And independently verifiable,” I said.

“Extraordinary,” Ariaura said, looking at Kildy. “I presume you’re not talking about handling snakes. Or speaking in tongues.”

“No,” I said.

“The problem is, if you prove you’re Mencken,” Kildy said earnestly, “then you’re also proving that Ariaura’s really channeling astral spirits, which means she’s not—”

“—the papuliferous poser I know her to be.”

“Exactly,” Kildy said, “and her career will skyrocket.”

“Along with that of every other channeler and psychic and medium out there,” I said.

“Rob’s put his entire life into trying to debunk these people,” Kildy said. “If you prove Ariaura’s really channeling—”

“The noble calling of skepticism will be dealt a heavy blow,” Ariaura said thoughtfully, “hardly the outcome a man like Mencken would want. So the only way I can prove who I am is to keep silent and go back to where I came from.”

Kildy nodded.

“But I came to try and stop her. If I return to the ether, Ariaura will go right back to spreading her pernicious astral-plane-Higher-Wisdom hokum and bilking her benighted audiences out of their cash.”

Kildy nodded again. “She might even pretend she’s channeling you.”

“Pretend!” Ariaura said, outraged. “I won’t allow it! I’ll—” and then stopped. “But if I speak out, I’m proving the very thing I’m trying to debunk. And if I don’t—”

“Rob will never trust me again,” Kildy said.

“So,” Ariaura said, “it’s—”

A catch-22, I thought, and then, if she says that, I’ve got her—the book wasn’t written till 1961, five years after Mencken had died. And “catch-22” was the kind of thing, unlike “Bible Belt” or “booboisie,” that even Kildy wouldn’t have thought of, it had become such an ingrained part of the language. I listened, waiting for Ariaura to say it.

“—a conundrum,” she said.

“A what?” Kildy said.

“A puzzle with no solution, a hand there’s no way to win, a hellacious dilemma.”

“You’re saying it’s impossible,” Kildy said hopelessly.

Ariaura shook her head. “I’ve had tougher assignments than this. There’s bound to be something—” She turned to me. “She said something about ‘the skeptic’s first rule.’ Are there any others?”

“Yes,” I said. “If it seems too good to be true, it is.”

“And ‘By their fruits shall ye know them,’ ” Kildy said. “It’s from the Bible.”

“The Bible . . .” Ariaura said, narrowing her eyes thoughtfully. “The Bible . . . how much time have we got? When’s Ariaura’s next show?”

“Tonight,” Kildy said, “but she canceled the last one. What if she—”

“What time?” Ariaura cut in.

“Eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock,” she repeated, and made a motion toward her mid-section for all the world as if she was reaching for a pocket watch. “You two be out there, front row center.”

“What are you doing to do?” Kildy asked hopefully.

“I dunno,” Ariaura said. “Sometimes you don’t have to do a damned thing—they do it to themselves. Look at that High Muckitymuck of Hot Air, Bryan.” She laughed. “Either of you know where I can get some rope?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’d better get on it. There’s only a couple hours to deadline—” She slapped her knees. “Front row center,” she said to Kildy. “Eight o’clock.”

“What if she won’t let us in?” Kildy asked. “Ariaura said she was going to get a restraining order against—”

“She’ll let you in. Eight o’clock.”

Kildy nodded. “I’ll be there, but I don’t know if Rob—”

“Oh, I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” I said.

Ariaura ignored my tone. “Bring a notebook,” she ordered. “And in the meantime, you’d better get busy on your charlatan debunking. The sons of bitches are gaining on us.”

“One sits through long sessions . . . and then suddenly there comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”

—H.L. Mencken

An hour later, a messenger showed up with a manila envelope. In it was a square vellum envelope sealed with pink sealing wax and embossed with Isus’s hieroglyphs. Inside that were a lilac card printed in silver with “The pleasure of your company is requested . . .” and two tickets to the seminar.

“Is the invitation signed?” Kildy asked.

She’d refused to leave after Ariaura, still acting the part of Mencken, had departed. “I’m staying right here with you till the seminar,” she’d said, perching herself on my desk. “It’s the only way I can prove I’m not off somewhere with Ariaura cooking up some trick. And here’s my phone,” she’d handed me her cell phone, “so you won’t think I’m sending her secret messages via text message or something. Do you want to check me to see if I’m wired?”

“No.”

“Do you need any help?” she’d asked, picking up a pile of proofs. “Do you want me to go over these, or am I fired?”

“I’ll let you know after the seminar.”

She’d given me a Julia-Roberts-radiant smile and retreated to the far end of the office with the proofs, and I’d called up Charles Fred’s file and started through it, looking for leads and trying not to think about Ariaura’s parting shot.

I was positive I’d never told Kildy that story about Mencken saying, “The sons of bitches are gaining on us,” and it wasn’t in Daniels’s biography, or Hobson’s. The only place I’d ever seen it was in an article in The Atlantic Monthly. I looked it up in Bartlett’s, but it wasn’t there. I Googled “Mencken bitches.” Nothing.

Which didn’t prove anything. Ariaura—or Kildy—could have read it in The Atlantic Monthly just like I had. And since when had H.L. Mencken looked to the Bible for inspiration? That remark alone proved it wasn’t Mencken, didn’t it?

On the other hand, he hadn’t said “catch-22,” although “conundrum” wasn’t nearly as precise a word. And he hadn’t said William Jennings Bryan, he’d said “that High Muckitymuck of Hot Air, Bryan,” which I hadn’t read anywhere, but which sounded like something he would have put in that scathing obituary he’d written of Bryan.

And this wasn’t going anywhere. There was nothing, short of a heretofore undiscovered manuscript or a will in his handwriting leaving everything to Lillian Gish—no, that wouldn’t work. The aphasic stroke, remember?—that would prove it was Mencken. And both of those could be faked, too.

And there wasn’t anything that could do what Kildy had told him he—correction, told Ariaura she—had to do: Prove he was real without proving Ariaura was legit. Which she clearly wasn’t.

I’d gotten out Ariaura’s transcripts and read through them, looking for I wasn’t sure what, until the tickets had come.

“Is the card signed?” Kildy asked again.

“No,” I said and handed it to her.

“ ‘The pleasure of your company is requested’ is printed on,” she said, turning the invitation over to look at the back. “What about the address on the envelope?”

“There isn’t one,” I said, seeing where she was going with this. “But just because it’s not handwritten, that doesn’t prove it’s from Mencken.”

“I know. ‘Extraordinary claims.’ But at least it’s consistent with its being Mencken.”

“It’s also consistent with the two of you trying to convince me it’s Mencken so I’ll go to that seminar tonight.”

“You think it’s a trap?” Kildy said.

“Yes,” I said, but standing there staring at the tickets, I had no idea what kind. Ariaura couldn’t possibly still be hoping I’d stand up and shout, “By George, she’s the real thing! She’s channeling Mencken!” no matter what anecdote she quoted. I wondered if her lawyers might be intending to slap me with a restraining order or a subpoena when I walked in, but that made no sense. She knew my address—she’d been here this very afternoon, and I’d been here most of the past two days. Besides, if she had me arrested, the press would be clamoring to talk to me, and she wouldn’t want me voicing my suspicions of a con game to the L.A. Times.

When Kildy and I left for the seminar an hour and a half later (on our way out, I’d pretended I forgot my keys and left Kildy standing in the hall while I went back in, bound The Baby in the Icebox with Scotch tape, and hid it down behind the bookcase), I still hadn’t come up with a plausible theory, and the Santa Monica Hilton, where the seminar was being held, didn’t yield any clues.

It had the same “Believe and It Will Happen” banner, the same Tom Cruiseish bodyguards, the same security check. They confiscated my Olympus and my digital recorder and Kildy’s Hasaka (and asked for her autograph), and we went through the same crystal/pyramid/amulet-crammed waiting area into the same lilac-and-rose-draped ballroom. With the same hard, bare floor.

“Oh, I forgot to bring pillows, I’m sorry,” Kildy said and started toward the ushers and stacks of lilac plastic cushions at the rear. Halfway there she turned around and came back. “I don’t want to have had an opportunity to send some kind of secret message to Ariaura,” she said. “If you want to come with me . . .”

I shook my head. “The floor’ll be good,” I said, lowering myself to the wooden surface. “It may actually keep me in touch with reality.”

Kildy sat down effortlessly beside me, opened her bag, and fumbled in it for her mirror. I looked around. The crowd seemed a little sparser, and somewhere behind us, I heard a woman say, “It was so bizarre. Romtha never did anything like that. I wonder if she’s drinking.”

The lights went pink, the music swelled, and Brad Pitt came out, went through the same spiel (no flash photography, no applause, no bathroom breaks) and the same intro (Atlantis, Oracle of Delphi, Cosmic All), and revealed Ariaura, standing at the top of the same black stairway.

She was exactly the same as she had been at that first seminar, dramatically regal in her purple robes and amulets, serene as she acknowledged the audience’s applause. The events of the past few days—her roaring into my office, asking frightenedly, “What’s happening? Where am I?” and slapping her knees and exploding with laughter—might never have happened.

And obviously were a fake, I thought grimly. I glanced at Kildy. She was still fishing unconcernedly in her bag.

“Welcome, Seekers after Divine Truth,” Ariaura said. “We’re going to have a wonderful spiritual experience together here today. It’s a very special day. This is my one hundredth ‘Believe and It Will Happen’ seminar.”

Lots of applause, which after a couple of minutes she motioned to stop.

“In honor of the anniversary, Isus and I want to do something a little different today.”

More applause. I glanced at the ushers. They were looking nervously at each other, as if they expected her to start spouting Menckenese, but the voice was clearly Ariaura’s and so was the Oprah-perky manner.

“My—our—seminars are usually pretty structured. They have to be—if the auratic vibrations aren’t exactly right beforehand, the spirits cannot come, and after I’ve channeled, I’m physically and spiritually exhausted, so I rarely have the opportunity to just talk to you. But today’s a special occasion. So I’d like the tech crew”—she looked up at the control booth—“to bring up the lights—”

There was a pause, as if the tech crew was debating whether to follow orders, and then the lights came up.

“Thanks, that’s perfect, you can have the rest of the day off,” Ariaura said. She turned to the emcee. “That goes for you, too, Ken. And my fabulous ushers—Derek, Jared, Tad—let’s hear it for the great job they do.”

She led a round of applause and then, since the ushers continued to stand there at the doors, looking warily at each other and at the emcee, she made shooing motions with her hands. “Go on. Scoot. I want to talk to these people in private,” and when they still hesitated, “You’ll still get paid for the full seminar. Go on.”

She walked over to the emcee and said something to him, smiling, and it must have reassured him because he nodded to the ushers and then up at the control room, and the ushers went out.

I looked over at Kildy. She was calmly applying lipstick. I looked back at the stage.

“Are you sure—?” I could see the emcee whisper to Ariaura.

“I’m fine,” she mouthed back at him.

The emcee frowned and then stepped off the stage and over to the side door, and the cameraman at the back began taking his videocam off its tripod. “No, no, Ernesto, not you,” Ariaura said. “Keep filming.”

She waited as the emcee pulled the last door shut behind him and then walked to the front of the stage and stood there completely silent, her arms stiffly at her sides.

Kildy leaned close to me, her lipstick still in her hand. “Are you thinking the prom scene in Carrie?”

I nodded, gauging our distance to the emergency exit. There was a distant sound of a door shutting above us—the control room—and Ariaura clasped her hands together. “Alone at last,” she said, smiling. “I thought they’d never leave.”

Laughter.

“And now that they’re gone, I have to say this—” She paused dramatically. “Aren’t they gorgeous?”

Laughter, applause, and several whistles. Ariaura waited till the noise had died down and then asked, “How many of you were at my seminar last Saturday?”

The mood changed instantly. Several hands went up, but tentatively, and two hoop-earringed women looked at each other with the same nervous glance as the ushers had had.

“Or at the one two weeks ago?” Ariaura asked.

Another couple of hands.

“Well, for those of you who weren’t at either, let’s just say that lately my seminars have been rather . . . interesting, to put it mildly.”

Scattered nervous laughter.

“And those of you familiar with the spirit world know that’s what can happen when we try to make contact with energies beyond our earthly plane. The astral plane can be a dangerous place. There are spirits there beyond our control, false spirits who seek to keep us from enlightenment.”

False spirits is right, I thought.

“But I fear them not, for my weapon is the Truth.” She somehow managed to say it with a capital T.

I looked over at Kildy. She was leaning forward the way she had at that first seminar, intent on Ariaura’s words. She was still holding her mirror and lipstick.

“What’s she up to?” I whispered to Kildy.

She shook her head, still intent on the stage. “It’s not her.”

“What?”

“She’s channeling.”

“Chan—?” I said and looked at the stage.

“No spirit, no matter how dark,” Ariaura said, “no matter how dishonest, can stand between me and that Higher Truth.”

Applause, more enthusiastic.

“Or keep me from bringing that Truth to all of you.” She smiled and spread out her arms. “I’m a fraud, a charlatan, a fake,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve never channeled a cosmic spirit in my life. Isus is something I made up back in 1996, when I was running a pyramid scheme in Dayton, Ohio. The feds were closing in on us, and I’d already been up on charges of mail fraud in ’94, so I changed my name—my real name’s Bonnie Friehl, by the way, but I was using Doreen Manning in Dayton—and stashed the money in a bank in Chickamauga, Virginia, my hometown, and then moved to Miami Beach and did fortune-telling while I worked on perfecting Isus’s voice.”

I fumbled for my notebook and pen. Bonnie Friehl, Chickamauga, Miami Beach—

“I did fortune-telling, curses mostly—‘Pay me and I’ll remove the curse I see hanging over you’—till I had my Isus impersonation ready and then I contacted this guy I knew in Vegas—”

There was an enormous crash from the rear. Ernesto had dropped his shoulder-held video camera and was heading for the door. And this needed to be on film. But I didn’t want to miss anything while I tried to figure out how the camera worked.

I glanced over at Kildy, hoping she was taking notes, but she seemed transfixed by what was happening onstage, her forgotten mirror and lipstick still in her hands, her mouth open. I would have to risk missing a few words. I scrambled to my feet.

“Where are you going?” Kildy whispered.

“I’ve got to get this on tape.”

“We are,” she said calmly, and nodded imperceptibly at the lipstick and then the mirror, “Audio . . . and video.”

“I love you,” I said.

She nodded. “You’d better get those names down, just in case the police confiscate my makeup as evidence,” she said.

“His name was Chuck Venture,” Ariaura was saying. “He and I had worked together on a chain-letter scheme. His real name’s Harold Vogel, but you probably know him by the name he uses out here, Charles Fred.”

Jesus. I scribbled the names down: Harold Vogel, Chuck Venture—

“We’d worked a couple of chain-letter scams together,” Ariaura said, “so I told him I wanted him to take me to Salem and set me up in the channeling business.”

There was a clank and a thud as Ernesto made it to the door and out. It slammed shut behind him.

“Harold always did have a bad habit of writing everything down,” Ariaura said chattily. “ ‘You can’t blackmail me, Doreen,’ he said. ‘Wanna bet?’ I said. ‘It’s all in a safety deposit box in Dayton with instructions to open it if anything happens to me.’ ”

She leaned confidingly forward. “It’s not, of course. It’s in the safe in my bedroom behind the portrait of Isus. The combination’s twelve left, six right, fourteen left.” She laughed brightly. “So anyway, he taught me all about how you soften the chumps up in the seminars so they’ll tell Isus all about their love life in the private audiences and then send them copies of the videotapes—”

There were several audible gasps behind me and then the beginnings of a murmur, or possibly a growl, but Ariaura paid no attention.

“—and he introduced me to one of the orderlies at New Beginnings Rehab Center, and the deep masseuse at the Willowsage Spa for personal details Isus can use to convince them he knows all, sees all—”

The growl was becoming a roar, but it was scarcely audible over the shouts from outside and the banging on the doors, which were apparently locked from the inside.

“—and how to change my voice and expression to make it look like I’m actually channeling a spirit from beyond—”

It sounded as though the emcee and ushers had found a battering ram. The banging had become shuddering thuds.

“—although I don’t think learning all that junk about Lemuria and stuff was necessary,” Ariaura said. “I mean, it’s obvious you people will believe anything.”

She smiled beatifically at the audience, as if expecting applause, but the only sound (beside the thuds) was of cell phone keys being hit and women shouting into them. When I glanced back, everybody except Kildy had a phone clapped to their ear.

“Are there any questions?” Ariaura asked brightly.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you saying you’re the one doing the voice of Isus?”

She smiled pleasedly down at me. “Of course. There’s no such thing as channeling spirits from the Great Beyond. Other questions?” She looked past me to the other wildly waving hands. “Yes? The woman in blue?”

“How could you lie to us, you—?”

I stepped adroitly in front of her. “Are you saying Todd Phoenix is a fake, too?”

“Oh, yes,” Ariaura said. “They’re all fakes—Todd Phoenix, Joye Wildde, Randall Mars. Next question? Yes, Miss Ross?”

Kildy stepped forward, still holding the compact and lipstick. “When was the first time you met me?” she asked.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said.

“Just for the record,” she said, flashing me her radiant smile and then turning back to the stage. “Ariaura, had you ever met me before last week?”

“No,” she said. “I saw you at Ari—at my seminar, but I didn’t meet you till afterward at the office of The Jaundiced Eye, a fine magazine, by the way. I suggest you all take out subscriptions.”

“And I’m not your shill?” Kildy persisted.

“No, though I do have them,” she said. “The woman in green back there in the sixth row is one,” she said, pointing at a plump brunette. “Stand up, Lucy.”

Lucy was already scuttling to the door, and so were a thin redhead in a rainbow caftan and an impeccably tailored sixty-year-old in an Armani suit, with a large number of the audience right on their tails.

“Janine’s one, too,” Ariaura said, pointing at the redhead. “And Doris. They all help gather personal information for Isus to tell them, so it looks like he ‘knows all, sees all.’ ” She laughed delightedly. “Come up onstage and take a bow, girls.”

The “girls” ignored her. Doris, a pack of elderly women on her heels, pushed open the middle door and shouted, “You’ve got to stop her!”

The emcee and ushers began pushing their way through the door and toward the stage. The audience was even more determined to get out than they were to get in, but I still didn’t have much time. “Are all the psychics you named using blackmail like you?” I asked.

“Ariaura!” the emcee shouted, halfway to the stage and caught in the flood of women. “Stop talking. Anything you say can be held against you.”

“Oh, hi, Ken,” she said. “Ken’s in charge of laundering all our money. Take a bow, Ken! And you, too, Derek and Tad and Jared,” she said, indicating the ushers. “The boys pump the audience for information and feed it to me over this,” she said, holding up her sacred amulet.

She looked back at me. “I forgot what you asked.”

“Are all the pyschics you named using blackmail like you?”

“No, not all of them. Swami Vishnu Jammi uses post-hypnotic suggestion, and Nadrilene’s always used extortion.”

“What about Charles Fred? What’s his scam?”

“Invest—” Ariaura’s pin-on mike went suddenly dead. I looked back at the melee. One of the ushers was proudly holding up an unplugged cord.

“Investment fraud,” Ariaura shouted, her hands cupped around her mouth. “Chuck tells his marks their dead relations want them to invest in certain stocks. I’d suggest you—”

One of the ushers reached the stage. He grabbed Ariaura by one arm and tried to grab the other.

“—suggest you check out Metra—” Ariaura shouted, flailing at him. “Metracon, Spirilink—”

A second usher appeared, and the two of them managed to pinion her arms. “Crystalcom, Inc.,” she said, kicking out at them, “and Universis. Find out—” She aimed a kick at the groin of one of the ushers that made me flinch. “Get your paws off me.”

The emcee stepped in front of her. “That concludes Ariaura’s presentation,” he said, avoiding her kicking feet. “Thank you all for coming. Videos of—” he said, and then thought better of it, “—personally autographed copies of Ariaura’s book, Believe and—”

“Find out who the majority stockholder is,” Ariaura shrieked, struggling. “And ask Chuck what he knows about a check forgery scam Zolita’s running in Reno.”

“—It Will Happen are on sale in the . . .” the emcee said, and gave up. He grabbed for Ariaura’s feet. The three of them wrestled her toward the wings.

“One last question!” I shouted, but it was too late. They already had her off the stage. “Why was the baby in the icebox?”

“. . . this is the last time you’ll see me . . .”

—H.L. Mencken

“It still doesn’t prove it was Mencken,” I told Kildy. “The whole thing could have been a manifestation of Ariaura’s—excuse me, Bonnie Friehl’s—subconscious, produced by her guilt.”

“Or,” Kildy said, “there could have been a scam just like the one you postulated, only one of the swindlers fell in love with you and decided she couldn’t go through with it.”

“Nope, that won’t work,” I said. “She might have been able to talk Ariaura into calling off the scam, but not into confessing all those crimes.”

“If she really committed them,” Kildy said. “We don’t have any independently verifiable evidence that she is Bonnie Friehl yet.”

But the fingerprints on her Ohio driver’s license matched, and every single lead she’d given us checked out.

We spent the next two months following up on all of them and putting together a massive special issue on “The Great Channeling Swindle.” It looked like we were going to have to testify at Ariaura’s preliminary hearing, which could have proved awkward, but she and her lawyers got in a big fight over whether or not to use an insanity defense, since she was claiming she’d been possessed by the Spirit of Evil and Darkness, and she ended up firing them and turning state’s evidence against Charles Fred, Joye Wildde, and several other psychics she hadn’t gotten around to mentioning, and it began to look like the magazine might fold because there weren’t any scams left to write about.

Fat chance. Within weeks, new mediums and psychics, advertising themselves as “Restorers of Cosmic Ethics” and “the spirit entity you can trust,” moved in to fill the void, and a new weight-loss-through-meditation program began packing them in, promising Low-Carb Essence, and Kildy and I were back in business.

“He didn’t make any difference at all,” Kildy said disgustedly after a standing-room-only seminar on psychic Botox treatments.

“Yeah, he did,” I said. “Charles Fred’s up on insider trading charges, attendance is down at the Temple of Cosmic Exploration, and half of L.A.’s psychics are on the lam. And it’ll take everybody a while to come up with new methods for separating people from their money.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t Mencken.”

“I said it didn’t prove it was Mencken. Rule Number One: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“And you don’t think what happened on that stage was extraordinary?”

I had to admit it was. “But it could have been Ariaura herself. She didn’t say anything she couldn’t have known.”

“What about her telling us the combination of her safe? And ordering everybody to subscribe to The Jaundiced Eye?”

“It still doesn’t prove it was Mencken. It could have been some sort of Bridey Murphy phenomenon. Ariaura could have had a babysitter who read the Baltimore Sun out loud to her when she was a toddler.”

Kildy laughed. “You don’t believe that.”

“I don’t believe anything without proof,” I said. “I’m a skeptic, remember? And there’s nothing that happened on that stage that couldn’t be explained rationally.”

“Exactly,” Kildy said.

“What do you mean, exactly?”

“By their fruits shall ye know them.”

“What?”

“I mean it has to have been Mencken because he did exactly what we asked him to do: Prove it wasn’t a scam and he wasn’t a fake and Ariaura was. And do it without proving he was Mencken because if he did, then that proved she was on the level. Which proves it was Mencken.”

There was no good answer to that kind of crazy illogic except to change the subject, which I did. I kissed her.

And then sent the transcripts of Ariaura’s outbursts to UCLA to have the language patterns compared to Mencken’s writing. Independently verifiable evidence. And got the taped The Baby in the Icebox out of its hiding place down behind the bookcase while Kildy was out of the office, took it home, wrapped it in tinfoil, stuck it inside an empty Lean Cuisine box, and hid it—where else?—in the icebox. Old habits die hard.

UCLA sent the transcripts back, saying it wasn’t a big enough sample for a conclusive result. So did Caltech. And Duke. So that was that. Which was too bad. It would have been nice to have Mencken back in the fray, even for a little while. He had definitely left too soon.

So Kildy and I would have to pick up where he left off, which meant not only putting “The sons of bitches are gaining on us” on the masthead of The Jaundiced Eye, but trying to channel his spirit into every page.

And that didn’t just mean exposing shysters and con men. Mencken hadn’t been the important force he was because of his rants against creationism and faith healers and patent medicine, but because of what he’d stood for: the truth. That’s why he’d hated ignorance and superstition and dishonesty so much, because he loved science and reason and logic, and he’d communicated that love, that passion, to his readers with every word he wrote.

That was what we had to do with The Jaundiced Eye. It wasn’t enough just to expose Ariaura and Swami Vishnu and psychic dentists and meditation Atkins diets. We also had to make our readers as passionate about science and reason as they were about Romtha and luminescence readings. We had to not only tell the truth, but make our readers want to believe it.

So, as I say, we were pretty busy for the next few months, revamping the magazine, cooperating with the police, and following up on all the leads Ariaura had given us. We went to Vegas to research the chain-letter scam she and Chuck Venture / Charles Fred had run, after which I came home to put the magazine to bed and Kildy went to Dayton and then to Chickamauga to follow up on Ariaura’s criminal history.

She called last night. “It’s me, Rob,” she said, sounding excited. “I’m in Chattanooga.”

“Chattanooga, Tennessee?” I said. “What are you doing there?”

“The prosecutor working on the pyramid scheme case is on a trip to Roanoke, so I can’t see him till Monday, and the school board in Zion—that’s a little town near here—is trying to pass a law requiring intelligent design to be taught in the public schools. This Zion thing’s part of a nationwide program that’s going to introduce intelligent design state by state. So, anyway, since I couldn’t see the prosecutor, I thought I’d drive over—it’s only about fifty miles from Chickamauga—and interview some of the science teachers for that piece on ‘The Scopes Trial Eighty Years Out’ you were talking about doing.”

“And?” I said warily.

“And, according to the chemistry teacher, something peculiar happened at the school board meeting. It might be nothing, but I thought I’d better call so you could be looking up flights to Chattanooga, just in case.”

Just in case.

“One of the school board members, a Mr.—” she paused as if consulting her notes, “Horace Didlong, was talking about the lack of scientific proof for Darwin’s theory, when he suddenly started ranting at the crowd.”

“Did the chemistry teacher say what he said?” I asked, hoping I didn’t already know.

“She couldn’t remember all of it,” Kildy said, “but the basketball coach said some of the students had said they intended to tape the meeting and send it to the ACLU, and he’d try to find out if they did and get me a copy. He said it was ‘a very odd outburst, almost like he was possessed.’ ”

“Or drunk,” I said. “And neither of them remembers what he said?”

“No, they both do, just not everything. Didlong apparently went on for several minutes. He said he couldn’t believe there were still addlepated ignoramuses around who didn’t believe in evolution, and what the hell had they been teaching in the schools all this time. The chemistry teacher said the rant went on like that for about five minutes and then broke off, right in the middle of a word, and Didlong went back to talking about Newton’s Second Law making evolution physically impossible.”

“Have you interviewed Didlong?”

“No. I’m going over there as soon as we finish talking, but the chemistry teacher said she heard Didlong’s wife ask him what happened, and he looked like he didn’t have any idea.”

“That doesn’t prove it’s Mencken,” I said.

“I know,” she said, “but it is Tennessee, and it is evolution. And it would be nice if it was him, wouldn’t it?”

Nice. H.L. Mencken loose in the middle of Tennessee in the middle of a creationism debate.

“Yeah,” I said and grinned, “it would, but it’s much more likely Horace Didlong has been smoking something he grew in his backyard. Or is trying to stir up some publicity, à la Judge Roy Moore and his Ten Commandments monument. Do they remember anything else he said?”

“Yes, um . . . where is it?” she said. “Oh, here it is. He called the other board members a gang of benighted rubes . . . and then he said he’d take a monkey any day over a school board whose cerebellums were all paralyzed from listening to too much theological bombast . . . and right at the end, before he broke off, the chemistry teacher said he said, ‘I never saw much resemblance to Alice myself.’ ”

“Alice?” I said. “They’re sure he said Alice and not August?”

“Yes, because the chemistry teacher’s name is Alice, and she thought he was talking to her, and the chairman of the school board did, too, because he looked at her and said, ‘Alice? What the heck does Alice have to do with intelligent design?’ and Didlong said, ‘Jamie sure could write, though, even if the bastard did steal my girl. You better be careful I don’t steal yours.’ Do you know what that means, Rob?”

“Yes,” I said. “How long does it take to get a marriage license in Tennessee?”

“I’ll find out,” Kildy said, sounding pleased, “and then the chairman said, ‘You cannot use language like that,’ and, according to the chemistry teacher, Didlong said . . . wait a minute, I need to read it to you so I get it right—it really didn’t make any sense—he said, ‘You’d be surprised at what I can do. Like stir up the animals. Speaking of which, that’s why the baby was stashed in the icebox. Its mother stuck it inside to keep the tiger from eating it.’ ”

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

TWO HEARTS

Peter S. Beagle

MY BROTHER WILFRID KEEPS saying it’s not fair that it should all have happened to me. Me being a girl, and a baby, and too stupid to lace up my own sandals properly. But I think it’s fair. I think everything happened exactly the way it should have done. Except for the sad parts, and maybe those too.

I’m Sooz, and I am nine years old. Ten next month, on the anniversary of the day the griffin came. Wilfrid says it was because of me, that the griffin heard that the ugliest baby in the world had just been born, and it was going to eat me, but I was too ugly, even for a griffin. So it nested in the Midwood (we call it that, but its real name is the Midnight Wood, because of the darkness under the trees), and stayed to eat our sheep and our goats. Griffins do that if they like a place.

But it didn’t ever eat children, not until this year.

I only saw it once‌—‌I mean, once before—‌rising up above the trees one night, like a second moon. Only there wasn’t a moon, then. There was nothing in the whole world but the griffin, golden feathers all blazing on its lion’s body and eagle’s wings, with its great front claws like teeth, and that monstrous beak that looked so huge for its head . . . Wilfrid says I screamed for three days, but he’s lying, and I didn’t hide in the root cellar like he says either, I slept in the barn those two nights, with our dog Malka. Because I knew Malka wouldn’t let anything get me.

I mean my parents wouldn’t have, either, not if they could have stopped it. It’s just that Malka is the biggest, fiercest dog in the whole village, and she’s not afraid of anything. And after the griffin took Jehane, the blacksmith’s little girl, you couldn’t help seeing how frightened my father was, running back and forth with the other men, trying to organize some sort of patrol, so people could always tell when the griffin was coming. I know he was frightened for me and my mother, and doing everything he could to protect us, but it didn’t make me feel any safer, and Malka did.

But nobody knew what to do, anyway. Not my father, nobody. It was bad enough when the griffin was only taking the sheep, because almost everyone here sells wool or cheese or sheepskin things to make a living. But once it took Jehane, early last spring, that changed everything. We sent messengers to the king‌—‌three of them‌—‌and each time the king sent someone back to us with them. The first time, it was one knight, all by himself. His name was Douros, and he gave me an apple. He rode away into the Midwood, singing, to look for the griffin, and we never saw him again.

The second time‌—‌after the griffin took Louli, the boy who worked for the miller‌—‌the king sent five knights together. One of them did come back, but he died before he could tell anyone what happened.

The third time an entire squadron came. That’s what my father said, anyway. I don’t know how many soldiers there are in a squadron, but it was a lot, and they were all over the village for two days, pitching their tents everywhere, stabling their horses in every barn, and boasting in the tavern how they’d soon take care of that griffin for us poor peasants. They had musicians playing when they marched into the Midwood‌—‌I remember that, and I remember when the music stopped, and the sounds we heard afterward.

After that, the village didn’t send to the king anymore. We didn’t want more of his men to die, and besides they weren’t any help. So from then on all the children were hurried indoors when the sun went down, and the griffin woke from its day’s rest to hunt again. We couldn’t play together, or run errands or watch the flocks for our parents, or even sleep near open windows, for fear of the griffin. There was nothing for me to do but read books I already knew by heart, and complain to my mother and father, who were too tired from watching after Wilfrid and me to bother with us. They were guarding the other children too, turn and turn about with the other families‌—‌and our sheep, and our goats‌—‌so they were always tired, as well as frightened, and we were all angry with each other most of the time. It was the same for everybody.

And then the griffin took Felicitas.

Felicitas couldn’t talk, but she was my best friend, always, since we were little. I always understood what she wanted to say, and she understood me, better than anyone, and we played in a special way that I won’t ever play with anyone else. Her family thought she was a waste of food, because no boy would marry a dumb girl, so they let her eat with us most of the time. Wilfrid used to make fun of the whispery quack that was the one sound she could make, but I hit him with a rock, and after that he didn’t do it anymore.

I didn’t see it happen, but I still see it in my head. She knew not to go out, but she was always just so happy coming to us in the evening. And nobody at her house would have noticed her being gone. None of them ever noticed Felicitas.

The day I learned Felicitas was gone, that was the day I set off to see the king myself.

Well, the same night, actually‌—‌because there wasn’t any chance of getting away from my house or the village in daylight. I don’t know what I’d have done, really, except that my Uncle Ambrose was carting a load of sheepskins to market in Hagsgate, and you have to start long before sunup to be there by the time the market opens. Uncle Ambrose is my best uncle, but I knew I couldn’t ask him to take me to the king‌—‌he’d have gone straight to my mother instead, and told her to give me sulphur and molasses and put me to bed with a mustard plaster. He gives his horse sulphur and molasses, even.

So I went to bed early that night, and I waited until everyone was asleep. I wanted to leave a note on my pillow, but I kept writing things and then tearing the notes up and throwing them in the fireplace, and I was afraid of somebody waking, or Uncle Ambrose leaving without me. Finally I just wrote, I will come home soon. I didn’t take any clothes with me, or anything else, except a bit of cheese, because I thought the king must live somewhere near Hagsgate, which is the only big town I’ve ever seen. My mother and father were snoring in their room, but Wilfrid had fallen asleep right in front of the hearth, and they always leave him there when he does. If you rouse him to go to his own bed, he comes up fighting and crying. I don’t know why.

I stood and looked down at him for the longest time. Wilfrid doesn’t look nearly so mean when he’s sleeping. My mother had banked the coals to make sure there’d be a fire for tomorrow’s bread, and my father’s moleskin trews were hanging there to dry, because he’d had to wade into the stockpond that afternoon to rescue a lamb. I moved them a little bit, so they wouldn’t burn. I wound the clock‌—‌Wilfrid’s supposed to do that every night, but he always forgets‌—‌and I thought how they’d all be hearing it ticking in the morning while they were looking everywhere for me, too frightened to eat any breakfast, and I turned to go back to my room.

But then I turned around again, and I climbed out of the kitchen window, because our front door squeaks so. I was afraid that Malka might wake in the barn and right away know I was up to something, because I can’t ever fool Malka, only she didn’t, and then I held my breath almost the whole way as I ran to Uncle Ambrose’s house and scrambled right into his cart with the sheepskins. It was a cold night, but under that pile of sheepskins it was hot and nasty-smelling, and there wasn’t anything to do but lie still and wait for Uncle Ambrose. So I mostly thought about Felicitas, to keep from feeling so bad about leaving home and everyone. That was bad enough‌—‌I never really lost anybody close before, not forever—‌but anyway it was different.

I don’t know when Uncle Ambrose finally came, because I dozed off in the cart, and didn’t wake until there was this jolt and a rattle and the sort of floppy grumble a horse makes when he’s been waked up and doesn’t like it‌—‌and we were off for Hagsgate. The moon was setting early, but I could see the village bumping by, not looking silvery in the light, but small and dull, no color to anything. And all the same I almost began to cry, because it already seemed so far away, though we hadn’t even passed the stockpond yet, and I felt as though I’d never see it again. I would have climbed back out of the cart right then, if I hadn’t known better.

Because the griffin was still up and hunting. I couldn’t see it, of course, under the sheepskins (and I had my eyes shut, anyway), but its wings made a sound like a lot of knives being sharpened all together, and sometimes it gave a cry that was dreadful because it was so soft and gentle, and even a little sad and scared, as though it were imitating the sound Felicitas might have made when it took her. I burrowed deep down as I could, and tried to sleep again, but I couldn’t.

Which was just as well, because I didn’t want to ride all the way into Hagsgate, where Uncle Ambrose was bound to find me when he unloaded his sheepskins in the marketplace. So when I didn’t hear the griffin anymore (they won’t hunt far from their nests, if they don’t have to), I put my head out over the tailboard of the cart and watched the stars going out, one by one, as the sky grew lighter. The dawn breeze came up as the moon went down.

When the cart stopped jouncing and shaking so much, I knew we must have turned onto the King’s Highway, and when I could hear cows munching and talking softly to each other, I dropped into the road. I stood there for a little, brushing off lint and wool bits, and watching Uncle Ambrose’s cart rolling on away from me. I hadn’t ever been this far from home by myself. Or so lonely. The breeze brushed dry grass against my ankles, and I didn’t have any idea which way to go.

I didn’t even know the king’s name‌—‌I’d never heard anyone call him anything but the king. I knew he didn’t live in Hagsgate, but in a big castle somewhere nearby, only nearby’s one thing when you’re riding in a cart and different when you’re walking. And I kept thinking about my family waking up and looking for me, and the cows’ grazing sounds made me hungry, and I’d eaten all my cheese in the cart. I wished I had a penny with me‌—‌not to buy anything with, but only to toss up and let it tell me if I should turn left or right. I tried it with flat stones, but I never could find them after they came down. Finally I started off going left, not for any reason, but only because I have a little silver ring on my left hand that my mother gave me. There was a sort of path that way too, and I thought maybe I could walk around Hagsgate and then I’d think about what to do after that. I’m a good walker. I can walk anywhere, if you give me time.

Only it’s easier on a real road. The path gave out after a while, and I had to push my way through trees growing too close together, and then through so many brambly vines that my hair was full of stickers and my arms were all stinging and bleeding. I was tired and sweating, and almost crying‌—‌almost‌—‌and whenever I sat down to rest bugs and things kept crawling over me. Then I heard running water nearby, and that made me thirsty right away, so I tried to get down to the sound. I had to crawl most of the way, scratching my knees and elbows up something awful.

It wasn’t much of a stream‌—‌in some places the water came up barely above my ankles‌—‌but I was so glad to see it I practically hugged and kissed it, flopping down with my face buried in it, the way I do with Malka’s smelly old fur. And I drank until I couldn’t hold any more, and then I sat on a stone and let the tiny fish tickle my nice cold feet, and felt the sun on my shoulders, and I didn’t think about griffins or kings or my family or anything.

I only looked up when I heard the horses whickering a little way upstream. They were playing with the water, the way horses do, blowing bubbles like children. Plain old livery-stable horses, one brownish, one grayish. The gray’s rider was out of the saddle, peering at the horse’s left forefoot. I couldn’t get a good look‌—‌they both had on plain cloaks, dark green, and trews so worn you couldn’t make out the color‌—‌so I didn’t know that one was a woman until I heard her voice. A nice voice, low, like Silky Joan, the lady my mother won’t ever let me ask about, but with something rough in it too, as though she could scream like a hawk if she wanted to. She was saying, “There’s no stone I can see. Maybe a thorn?”

The other rider, the one on the brown horse, answered her, “Or a bruise. Let me see.”

That voice was lighter and younger-sounding than the woman’s voice, but I already knew he was a man, because he was so tall. He got down off the brown horse and the woman moved aside to let him pick up her horse’s foot. Before he did that, he put his hands on the horse’s head, one on each side, and he said something to it that I couldn’t quite hear. And the horse said something back. Not like a neigh, or a whinny, or any of the sounds horses make, but like one person talking to another. I can’t say it any better than that. The tall man bent down then, and he took hold of the foot and looked at it for a long time, and the horse didn’t move or switch its tail or anything.

“A stone splinter,” the man said after a while. “It’s very small, but it’s worked itself deep into the hoof, and there’s an ulcer brewing. I can’t think why I didn’t notice it straightaway.”

“Well,” the woman said. She touched his shoulder. “You can’t notice everything.”

The tall man seemed angry with himself, the way my father gets when he’s forgotten to close the pasture gate properly, and our neighbor’s black ram gets in and fights with our poor old Brimstone. He said, “I can. I’m supposed to.” Then he turned his back to the horse and bent over that forefoot, the way our blacksmith does, and he went to work on it.

I couldn’t see what he was doing, not exactly. He didn’t have any picks or pries, like the blacksmith, and all I’m sure of is that I think he was singing to the horse. But I’m not sure it was proper singing. It sounded more like the little made-up rhymes that really small children chant to themselves when they’re playing in the dirt, all alone. No tune, just up and down, dee-dah, dee-dah, dee . . . boring even for a horse, I’d have thought. He kept doing it for a long time, still bending with that hoof in his hand. All at once he stopped singing and stood up, holding something that glinted in the sun the way the stream did, and he showed it to the horse, first thing. “There,” he said, “there, that’s what it was. It’s all right now.”

He tossed the thing away and picked up the hoof again, not singing, only touching it very lightly with one finger, brushing across it again and again. Then he set the foot down, and the horse stamped once, hard, and whinnied, and the tall man turned to the woman and said, “We ought to camp here for the night, all the same. They’re both weary, and my back hurts.”

The woman laughed. A deep, sweet, slow sound, it was. I’d never heard a laugh like that. She said, “The greatest wizard walking the world, and your back hurts? Heal it as you healed mine, the time the tree fell on me. That took you all of five minutes, I believe.”

“Longer than that,” the man answered her. “You were delirious, you wouldn’t remember.” He touched her hair, which was thick and pretty, even though it was mostly gray. “You know how I am about that,” he said. “I still like being mortal too much to use magic on myself. It spoils it somehow‌—‌it dulls the feeling. I’ve told you before.”

The woman said “Mmphh,” the way I’ve heard my mother say it a thousand times. “Well, I’ve been mortal all my life, and some days . . .”

She didn’t finish what she was saying, and the tall man smiled, the way you could tell he was teasing her. “Some days, what?”

“Nothing,” the woman said, “nothing, nothing.” She sounded irritable for a moment, but she put her hands on the man’s arms, and she said in a different voice, “Some days‌—‌some early mornings‌—‌when the wind smells of blossoms I’ll never see, and there are fawns playing in the misty orchards, and you’re yawning and mumbling and scratching your head, and growling that we’ll see rain before nightfall, and probably hail as well . . . on such mornings I wish with all my heart that we could both live forever, and I think you were a great fool to give it up.” She laughed again, but it sounded shaky now, a little. She said, “Then I remember things I’d rather not remember, so then my stomach acts up, and all sorts of other things start twingeing me‌—‌never mind what they are, or where they hurt, whether it’s my body or my head, or my heart. And then I think, no, I suppose not, maybe not.” The tall man put his arms around her, and for a moment she rested her head on his chest. I couldn’t hear what she said after that.

I didn’t think I’d made any noise, but the man raised his voice a little, not looking at me, not lifting his head, and he said, “Child, there’s food here.” First I couldn’t move, I was so frightened. He couldn’t have seen me through the brush and all the alder trees. And then I started remembering how hungry I was, and I started toward them without knowing I was doing it. I actually looked down at my feet and watched them moving like somebody else’s feet, as though they were the hungry ones, only they had to have me take them to the food. The man and the woman stood very still and waited for me.

Close to, the woman looked younger than her voice, and the tall man looked older. No, that isn’t it, that’s not what I mean. She wasn’t young at all, but the gray hair made her face younger, and she held herself really straight, like the lady who comes when people in our village are having babies. She holds her face all stiff too, that one, and I don’t like her much. This woman’s face wasn’t beautiful, I suppose, but it was a face you’d want to snuggle up to on a cold night. That’s the best I know how to say it.

The man . . . one minute he looked younger than my father, and the next he’d be looking older than anybody I ever saw, older than people are supposed to be, maybe. He didn’t have any gray hair himself, but he did have a lot of lines, but that’s not what I’m talking about either. It was the eyes. His eyes were green, green, green, not like grass, not like emeralds‌—‌I saw an emerald once, a gypsy woman showed me‌—‌and not anything like apples or limes or such stuff. Maybe like the ocean, except I’ve never seen the ocean, so I don’t know. If you go deep enough into the woods (not the Midwood, of course not, but any other sort of woods), sooner or later you’ll always come to a place where even the shadows are green, and that’s the way his eyes were. I was afraid of his eyes at first.

The woman gave me a peach and watched me bite into it, too hungry to thank her. She asked me, “Girl, what are you doing here? Are you lost?”

“No, I’m not,” I mumbled with my mouth full. “I just don’t know where I am, that’s different.” They both laughed, but it wasn’t a mean, making-fun laugh. I told them, “My name’s Sooz, and I have to see the king. He lives somewhere right nearby, doesn’t he?”

They looked at each other. I couldn’t tell what they were thinking, but the tall man raised his eyebrows, and the woman shook her head a bit, slowly. They looked at each other for a long time, until the woman said, “Well, not nearby, but not so very far, either. We were bound on our way to visit him ourselves.”

“Good,” I said. “Oh, good.” I was trying to sound as grown-up as they were, but it was hard, because I was so happy to find out that they could take me to the king. I said, “I’ll go along with you, then.”

The woman was against it before I got the first words out. She said to the tall man, “No, we couldn’t. We don’t know how things are.” She looked sad about it, but she looked firm, too. She said, “Girl, it’s not you worries me. The king is a good man, and an old friend, but it has been a long time, and kings change. Even more than other people, kings change.”

“I have to see him,” I said. “You go on, then. I’m not going home until I see him.” I finished the peach, and the man handed me a chunk of dried fish and smiled at the woman as I tore into it. He said quietly to her, “It seems to me that you and I both remember asking to be taken along on a quest. I can’t speak for you, but I begged.”

But the woman wouldn’t let up. “We could be bringing her into great peril. You can’t take the chance, it isn’t right!”

He began to answer her, but I interrupted‌—‌my mother would have slapped me halfway across the kitchen. I shouted at them, “I’m coming from great peril. There’s a griffin nested in the Midwood, and he’s eaten Jehane and Louli and‌—‌and my Felicitas—‌” and then I did start weeping, and I didn’t care. I just stood there and shook and wailed, and dropped the dried fish. I tried to pick it up, still crying so hard I couldn’t see it, but the woman stopped me and gave me her scarf to dry my eyes and blow my nose. It smelled nice.

“Child,” the tall man kept saying, “child, don’t take on so, we didn’t know about the griffin.” The woman was holding me against her side, smoothing my hair and glaring at him as though it was his fault that I was howling like that. She said, “Of course we’ll take you with us, girl dear‌—‌there, never mind, of course we will. That’s a fearful matter, a griffin, but the king will know what to do about it. The king eats griffins for breakfast snacks‌—‌spreads them on toast with orange marmalade and gobbles them up, I promise you.” And so on, being silly, but making me feel better, while the man went on pleading with me not to cry. I finally stopped when he pulled a big red handkerchief out of his pocket, twisted and knotted it into a bird-shape, and made it fly away. Uncle Ambrose does tricks with coins and shells, but he can’t do anything like that.

His name was Schmendrick, which I still think is the funniest name I’ve heard in my life. The woman’s name was Molly Grue. We didn’t leave right away, because of the horses, but made camp where we were instead. I was waiting for the man, Schmendrick, to do it by magic, but he only built a fire, set out their blankets, and drew water from the stream like anyone else, while she hobbled the horses and put them to graze. I gathered firewood.

The woman, Molly, told me that the king’s name was Lír, and that they had known him when he was a very young man, before he became king. “He is a true hero,” she said, “a dragonslayer, a giantkiller, a rescuer of maidens, a solver of impossible riddles. He may be the greatest hero of all, because he’s a good man as well. They aren’t always.”

“But you didn’t want me to meet him,” I said. “Why was that?”

Molly sighed. We were sitting under a tree, watching the sun go down, and she was brushing things out of my hair. She said, “He’s old now. Schmendrick has trouble with time‌—‌I’ll tell you why one day, it’s a long story‌—‌and he doesn’t understand that Lír may no longer be the man he was. It could be a sad reunion.” She started braiding my hair around my head, so it wouldn’t get in the way. “I’ve had an unhappy feeling about this journey from the beginning, Sooz. But he took a notion that Lír needed us, so here we are. You can’t argue with him when he gets like that.”

“A good wife isn’t supposed to argue with her husband,” I said. “My mother says you wait until he goes out, or he’s asleep, and then you do what you want.”

Molly laughed, that rich, funny sound of hers, like a kind of deep gurgle. “Sooz, I’ve only known you a few hours, but I’d bet every penny I’ve got right now‌—‌aye, and all of Schmendrick’s too‌—‌that you’ll be arguing on your wedding night with whomever you marry. Anyway, Schmendrick and I aren’t married. We’re together, that’s all. We’ve been together quite a long while.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know any people who were together like that, not the way she said it. “Well, you look married. You sort of do.”

Molly’s face didn’t change, but she put an arm around my shoulders and hugged me close for a moment. She whispered in my ear, “I wouldn’t marry him if he were the last man in the world. He eats wild radishes in bed. Crunch, crunch, crunch, all night‌—‌crunch, crunch, crunch.” I giggled, and the tall man looked over at us from where he was washing a pan in the stream. The last of the sunlight was on him, and those green eyes were bright as new leaves. One of them winked at me, and I felt it, the way you feel a tiny breeze on your skin when it’s hot. Then he went back to scrubbing the pan.

“Will it take us long to reach the king?” I asked her. “You said he didn’t live too far, and I’m scared the griffin will eat somebody else while I’m gone. I need to be home.”

Molly finished with my hair and gave it a gentle tug in back to bring my head up and make me look straight into her eyes. They were as gray as Schmendrick’s were green, and I already knew that they turned darker or lighter gray depending on her mood. “What do you expect to happen when you meet King Lír, Sooz?” she asked me right back. “What did you have in mind when you set off to find him?”

I was surprised. “Well, I’m going to get him to come back to my village with me. All those knights he keeps sending aren’t doing any good at all, so he’ll just have to take care of that griffin himself. He’s the king. It’s his job.”

“Yes,” Molly said, but she said it so softly I could barely hear her. She patted my arm once, lightly, and then she got up and walked away to sit by herself near the fire. She made it look as though she was banking the fire, but she wasn’t really.

We started out early the next morning. Molly had me in front of her on her horse for a time, but by and by Schmendrick took me up on his, to spare the other one’s sore foot. He was more comfortable to lean against than I’d expected‌—‌bony in some places, nice and springy in others. He didn’t talk much, but he sang a lot as we went along, sometimes in languages I couldn’t make out a word of, sometimes making up silly songs to make me laugh, like this one:

Soozli, Soozli,
speaking loozli,
you disturb my oozli-goozli.

Soozli, Soozli,
would you choozli
to become my squoozli-squoozli?

He didn’t do anything magic, except maybe once, when a crow kept diving at the horse‌—‌out of meanness; that’s all, there wasn’t a nest anywhere‌—‌making the poor thing dance and shy and skitter until I almost fell off. Schmendrick finally turned in the saddle and looked at it, and the next minute a hawk came swooping out of nowhere and chased that crow screaming into a thornbush where the hawk couldn’t follow. I guess that was magic.

It was actually pretty country we were passing through, once we got onto the proper road. Trees, meadows, little soft valleys, hillsides covered with wildflowers I didn’t know. You could see they got a lot more rain here than we do where I live. It’s a good thing sheep don’t need grazing, the way cows do. They’ll go where the goats go, and goats will go anywhere. We’re like that in my village, we have to be. But I liked this land better.

Schmendrick told me it hadn’t always been like that. “Before Lír, this was all barren desert where nothing grew‌—‌nothing, Sooz. It was said that the country was under a curse, and in a way it was, but I’ll tell you about that another time.” People always say that when you’re a child, and I hate it. “But Lír changed everything. The land was so glad to see him that it began blooming and blossoming the moment he became king, and it has done so ever since. Except poor Hagsgate, but that’s another story too.” His voice got slower and deeper when he talked about Hagsgate, as though he weren’t talking to me.

I twisted my neck around to look up at him. “Do you think King Lír will come back with me and kill that griffin? I think Molly thinks he won’t, because he’s so old.” I hadn’t known I was worried about that until I actually said it.

“Why, of course he will, girl.” Schmendrick winked at me again. “He never could resist the plea of a maiden in distress, the more difficult and dangerous the deed, the better. If he did not spur to your village’s aid himself at the first call, it was surely because he was engaged on some other heroic venture. I’m as certain as I can be that as soon as you make your request‌—‌remember to curtsey properly‌—‌he’ll snatch up his great sword and spear, whisk you up to his saddlebow, and be off after your griffin with the road smoking behind him. Young or old, that’s always been his way.” He rumpled my hair in the back. “Molly overworries. That’s her way. We are who we are.”

“What’s a curtsey?” I asked him. I know now, because Molly showed me, but I didn’t then. He didn’t laugh, except with his eyes, then gestured for me to face forward again as he went back to singing.

Soozli, Soozli,
you amuse me,
right down to my solesli-shoesli.

Soozli, Soozli,

I bring newsli—
we could wed next stewsli-Tuesli.

I learned that the king had lived in a castle on a cliff by the sea when he was young, less than a day’s journey from Hagsgate, but it fell down‌—‌Schmendrick wouldn’t tell me how‌—‌so he built a new one somewhere else. I was sorry about that, because I’ve never seen the sea, and I’ve always wanted to, and I still haven’t. But I’d never seen a castle, either, so there was that. I leaned back against his chest and fell asleep.

They’d been traveling slowly, taking time to let Molly’s horse heal, but once its hoof was all right we galloped most of the rest of the way. Those horses of theirs didn’t look magic or special, but they could run for hours without getting tired, and when I helped to rub them down and curry them, they were hardly sweating. They slept on their sides, like people, not standing up, the way our horses do.

Even so, it took us three full days to reach King Lír. Molly said he had bad memories of the castle that fell down, so that was why this one was as far from the sea as he could make it, and as different from the old one. It was on a hill, so the king could see anyone coming along the road, but there wasn’t a moat, and there weren’t any guards in armor, and there was only one banner on the walls. It was blue, with a picture of a white unicorn on it. Nothing else.

I was disappointed. I tried not to show it, but Molly saw. “You wanted a fortress,” she said to me gently. “You were expecting dark stone towers, flags and cannons and knights, trumpeters blowing from the battlements. I’m sorry. It being your first castle, and all.”

“No, it’s a pretty castle,” I said. And it was pretty, sitting peacefully on its hilltop in the sunlight, surrounded by all those wildflowers. There was a marketplace, I could see now, and there were huts like ours snugged up against the castle walls, so that the people could come inside for protection, if they needed to. I said, “Just looking at it, you can see that the king is a nice man.”

Molly was looking at me with her head a little bit to one side. She said, “He is a hero, Sooz. Remember that, whatever else you see, whatever you think. Lír is a hero.”

“Well, I know that,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll help me. I am.”

But I wasn’t. The moment I saw that nice, friendly castle, I wasn’t a bit sure.

We didn’t have any trouble getting in. The gate simply opened when Schmendrick knocked once, and he and Molly and I walked in through the market, where people were selling all kinds of fruits and vegetables, pots and pans and clothing and so on, the way they do in our village. They all called to us to come over to their barrows and buy things, but nobody tried to stop us going into the castle. There were two men at the two great doors, and they did ask us our names and why we wanted to see King Lír. The moment Schmendrick told them his name, they stepped back quickly and let us by, so I began to think that maybe he actually was a great magician, even if I never saw him do anything but little tricks and little songs. The men didn’t offer to take him to the king, and he didn’t ask.

Molly was right. I was expecting the castle to be all cold and shadowy, with queens looking sideways at us, and big men clanking by in armor. But the halls we followed Schmendrick through were full of sunlight from long, high windows, and the people we saw mostly nodded and smiled at us. We passed a stone stair curling up out of sight, and I was sure that the king must live at the top, but Schmendrick never looked at it. He led us straight through the great hall‌—‌they had a fireplace big enough to roast three cows!‌—‌and on past the kitchens and the scullery and the laundry, to a room under another stair. That was dark. You wouldn’t have found it unless you knew where to look. Schmendrick didn’t knock at that door, and he didn’t say anything magic to make it open. He just stood outside and waited, and by and by it rattled open, and we went in.

The king was in there. All by himself, the king was in there.

He was sitting on an ordinary wooden chair, not a throne. It was a really small room, the same size as my mother’s weaving room, so maybe that’s why he looked so big. He was as tall as Schmendrick, but he seemed so much wider. I was ready for him to have a long beard, spreading out all across his chest, but he only had a short one, like my father, except white. He wore a red and gold mantle, and there was a real golden crown on his white head, not much bigger than the wreaths we put on our champion rams at the end of the year. He had a kind face, with a big old nose, and big blue eyes, like a little boy. But his eyes were so tired and heavy, I didn’t know how he kept them open. Sometimes he didn’t. There was nobody else in the little room, and he peered at the three of us as though he knew he knew us, but not why. He tried to smile.

Schmendrick said very gently, “Majesty, it is Schmendrick and Molly, Molly Grue.” The king blinked at him.

“Molly with the cat,” Molly whispered. “You remember the cat, Lír.”

“Yes,” the king said. It seemed to take him forever to speak that one word. “The cat, yes, of course.” But he didn’t say anything after that, and we stood there and stood there, and the king kept smiling at something I couldn’t see.

Schmendrick said to Molly, “She used to forget herself like that.” His voice had changed, the same way it changed when he was talking about the way the land used to be. He said, “And then you would always remind her that she was a unicorn.”

And the king changed too then. All at once his eyes were clear and shining with feeling, like Molly’s eyes, and he saw us for the first time. He said softly, “Oh, my friends!” and he stood up and came to us and put his arms around Schmendrick and Molly. And I saw that he had been a hero, and that he was still a hero, and I began to think it might be all right, after all. Maybe it was really going to be all right.

“And who may this princess be?” he asked, looking straight at me. He had the proper voice for a king, deep and strong, but not frightening, not mean. I tried to tell him my name, but I couldn’t make a sound, so he actually knelt on one knee in front of me, and he took my hand. He said, “I have often been of some use to princesses in distress. Command me.”

“I’m not a princess, I’m Sooz,” I said, “and I’m from a village you wouldn’t even know, and there’s a griffin eating the children.” It all tumbled out like that, in one breath, but he didn’t laugh or look at me any differently. What he did was ask me the name of my village, and I told him, and he said, “But indeed I know it, madam. I have been there. And now I will have the pleasure of returning.”

Over his shoulder I saw Schmendrick and Molly staring at each other. Schmendrick was about to say something, but then they both turned toward the door, because a small dark woman, about my mother’s age, only dressed in tunic, trews and boots like Molly, had just come in. She said in a small, worried voice, “I am so truly sorry that I was not here to greet His Majesty’s old companions. No need to tell me your illustrious names‌—‌my own is Lisene, and I am the king’s royal secretary, translator, and protector.” She took King Lír’s arm, very politely and carefully, and began moving him back to his chair.

Schmendrick seemed to take a minute getting his own breath back. He said, “I have never known my old friend Lír to need any of those services. Especially a protector.”

Lisene was busy with the king and didn’t look at Schmendrick as she answered him. “How long has it been since you saw him last?” Schmendrick didn’t answer. Lisene’s voice was quiet still, but not so nervous. “Time sets its claw in us all, my lord, sooner or later. We are none of us that which we were.” King Lír sat down obediently on his chair and closed his eyes.

I could tell that Schmendrick was angry, and growing angrier as he stood there, but he didn’t show it. My father gets angry like that, which is how I knew. He said, “His Majesty has agreed to return to this young person’s village with her, in order to rid her people of a marauding griffin. We will start out tomorrow.”

Lisene swung around on us so fast that I was sure she was going to start shouting and giving everybody orders. But she didn’t do anything like that. You could never have told that she was the least bit annoyed or alarmed. All she said was, “I am afraid that will not be possible, my lord. The king is in no fit condition for such a journey, nor certainly for such a deed.”

“The king thinks rather differently.” Schmendrick was talking through clenched teeth now.

“Does he, then?” Lisene pointed at King Lír, and I saw that he had fallen asleep in his chair. His head was drooping‌—‌I was afraid his crown was going to fall off‌—‌and his mouth hung open. Lisene said, “You came seeking the peerless warrior you remember, and you have found a spent, senile old man. Believe me, I understand your distress, but you must see—”

Schmendrick cut her off. I never understood what people meant when they talked about someone’s eyes actually flashing, but at least green eyes can do it. He looked even taller than he was, and when he pointed a finger at Lisene I honestly expected the small woman to catch fire or maybe melt away. Schmendrick’s voice was especially frightening because it was so quiet. He said, “Hear me now. I am Schmendrick the Magician, and I see my old friend Lír, as I have always seen him, wise and powerful and good, beloved of a unicorn.”

And with that word, for a second time, the king woke up. He blinked once, then gripped the arms of the chair and pushed himself to his feet. He didn’t look at us, but at Lisene, and he said, “I will go with them. It is my task and my gift. You will see to it that I am made ready.”

Lisene said, “Majesty, no! Majesty, I beg you !”

King Lír reached out and took Lisene’s head between his big hands, and I saw that there was love between them. He said, “It is what I am for. You know that as well as he does. See to it, Lisene, and keep all well for me while I am gone.”

Lisene looked so sad, so lost, that I didn’t know what to think, about her or King Lír or anything. I didn’t realize that I had moved back against Molly Grue until I felt her hand in my hair. She didn’t say anything, but it was nice smelling her there. Lisene said, very quietly, “I will see to it.”

She turned around then and started for the door with her head lowered. I think she wanted to pass us by without looking at us at all, but she couldn’t do it. Right at the door, her head came up and she stared at Schmendrick so hard that I pushed into Molly’s skirt so I couldn’t see her eyes. I heard her say, as though she could barely make the words come out, “His death be on your head, magician.” I think she was crying, only not, the way grown people do.

And I heard Schmendrick’s answer, and his voice was so cold I wouldn’t have recognized it if I didn’t know. “He has died before. Better that death‌—‌better this, better any death‌—‌than the one he was dying in that chair. If the griffin kills him, it will yet have saved his life.” I heard the door close.

I asked Molly, speaking as low as I could, “What did he mean, about the king having died?” But she put me to one side, and she went to King Lír and knelt in front of him, reaching up to take one of his hands between hers. She said, “Lord . . . Majesty . . . friend . . . dear friend‌—‌remember. Oh, please, please remember.”

The old man was swaying on his feet, but he put his other hand on Molly’s head and he mumbled, “Child, Sooz‌—‌is that your pretty name, Sooz?‌—‌of course I will come to your village. The griffin was never hatched that dares harm King Lír’s people.” He sat down hard in the chair again, but he held onto her hand tightly. He looked at her, with his blue eyes wide and his mouth trembling a little. He said, “But you must remind me, little one. When I . . . when I lose myself‌—‌when I lose her—‌you must remind me that I am still searching, still waiting . . . that I have never forgotten her, never turned from all she taught me. I sit in this place . . . I sit . . . because a king has to sit, you see . . . but in my mind, in my poor mind, I am always away with her . . .”

I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about. I do now.

He fell asleep again then, holding Molly’s hand. She sat with him for a long time, resting her head on his knee. Schmendrick went off to make sure Lisene was doing what she was supposed to do, getting everything ready for the king’s departure. There was a lot of clattering and shouting already, enough so you’d have thought a war was starting, but nobody came in to see King Lír or speak to him, wish him luck or anything. It was almost as though he wasn’t really there.

Me, I tried to write a letter home, with pictures of the king and the castle, but I fell asleep like him, and I slept the rest of that day and all night too. I woke up in a bed I couldn’t remember getting into, with Schmendrick looking down at me, saying, “Up, child, on your feet. You started all this uproar‌—‌it’s time for you to see it through. The king is coming to slay your griffin.”

I was out of bed before he’d finished speaking. I said, “Now? Are we going right now?”

Schmendrick shrugged his shoulders. “By noon, anyway, if I can finally get Lisene and the rest of them to understand that they are not coming. Lisene wants to bring fifty men-at-arms, a dozen wagonloads of supplies, a regiment of runners to send messages back and forth, and every wretched physician in the kingdom.” He sighed and spread his hands. “I may have to turn the lot of them to stone if we are to be off today.”

I thought he was probably joking, but I already knew that you couldn’t be sure with Schmendrick. He said, “If Lír comes with a train of followers, there will be no Lír. Do you understand me, Sooz?” I shook my head. Schmendrick said, “It is my fault. If I had made sure to visit here more often, there were things I could have done to restore the Lír Molly and I once knew. My fault, my thoughtlessness.”

I remembered Molly telling me, “Schmendrick has trouble with time.” I still didn’t know what she meant, nor this either. I said, “It’s just the way old people get. We have old men in our village who talk like him. One woman, too, Mam Jennet. She always cries when it rains.”

Schmendrick clenched his fist and pounded it against his leg. “King Lír is not mad, girl, nor is he senile, as Lisene called him. He is Lír, Lír still, I promise you that. It is only here, in this castle, surrounded by good, loyal people who love him‌—‌who will love him to death, if they are allowed‌—‌that he sinks into . . . into the condition you have seen.” He didn’t say anything more for a moment; then he stooped a little to peer closely at me. “Did you notice the change in him when I spoke of unicorns?”

“Unicorn,” I answered. “One unicorn who loved him. I noticed.”

Schmendrick kept looking at me in a new way, as though we’d never met before. He said, “Your pardon, Sooz. I keep taking you for a child. Yes. One unicorn. He has not seen her since he became king, but he is what he is because of her. And when I speak that word, when Molly or I say her name‌—‌which I have not done yet‌—‌then he is recalled to himself.” He paused for a moment, and then added, very softly, “As we had so often to do for her, so long ago.”

“I didn’t know unicorns had names,” I said. “I didn’t know they ever loved people.”

“They don’t. Only this one.” He turned and walked away swiftly, saying over his shoulder, “Her name was Amalthea. Go find Molly, she’ll see you fed.”

The room I’d slept in wasn’t big, not for something in a castle. Catania, the headwoman of our village, has a bedroom nearly as large, which I know because I play with her daughter Sophia. But the sheets I’d been under were embroidered with a crown, and engraved on the headboard was a picture of the blue banner with the white unicorn. I had slept the night in King Lír’s own bed while he dozed in an old wooden chair.

I didn’t wait to have breakfast with Molly, but ran straight to the little room where I had last seen the king. He was there, but so changed that I froze in the doorway, trying to get my breath. Three men were bustling around him like tailors, dressing him in his armor: all the padding underneath, first, and then the different pieces for the arms and legs and shoulders. I don’t know any of the names. The men hadn’t put his helmet on him, so his head stuck out at the top, white-haired and big-nosed and blue-eyed, but he didn’t look silly like that. He looked like a giant.

When he saw me, he smiled, and it was a warm, happy smile, but it was a little frightening too, almost a little terrible, like the time I saw the griffin burning in the black sky. It was a hero’s smile. I’d never seen one before. He called to me, “Little one, come and buckle on my sword, if you would. It would be an honor for me.”

The men had to show me how you do it. The swordbelt, all by itself, was so heavy it kept slipping through my fingers, and I did need help with the buckle. But I put the sword into its sheath alone, although I needed both hands to lift it. When it slid home it made a sound like a great door slamming shut. King Lír touched my face with one of his cold iron gloves and said, “Thank you, little one. The next time that blade is drawn, it will be to free your village. You have my word.”

Schmendrick came in then, took one look, and just shook his head. He said, “This is the most ridiculous . . . It is four days’ ride‌—‌perhaps five‌—‌with the weather turning hot enough to broil a lobster on an iceberg. There’s no need for armor until he faces the griffin.” You could see how stupid he felt they all were, but King Lír smiled at him the same way he’d smiled at me, and Schmendrick stopped talking.

King Lír said, “Old friend, I go forth as I mean to return. It is my way.”

Schmendrick looked like a little boy himself for a moment. All he could say was, “Your business. Don’t blame me, that’s all. At least leave the helmet off.”

He was about to turn away and stalk out of the room, but Molly came up behind him and said, “Oh, Majesty‌—‌Lír‌—‌how grand! How beautiful you are!” She sounded the way my Aunt Zerelda sounds when she’s carrying on about my brother Wilfrid. He could mess his pants and jump in a hog pen, and Aunt Zerelda would still think he was the best, smartest boy in the whole world. But Molly was different. She brushed those tailors, or whatever they were, straight aside, and she stood on tiptoe to smooth King Lír’s white hair, and I heard her whisper, “I wish she could see you.”

King Lír looked at her for a long time without saying anything. Schmendrick stood there, off to the side, and he didn’t say anything either, but they were together, the three of them. I wish that Felicitas and I could have been together like that when we got old. Could have had time. Then King Lír looked at me, and he said, “The child is waiting.” And that’s how we set off for home. The king, Schmendrick, Molly, and me.

To the last minute, poor old Lisene kept trying to get King Lír to take some knights or soldiers with him. She actually followed us on foot when we left, calling, “Highness‌—‌Majesty‌—‌if you will have none else, take me! Take me!” At that the king stopped and turned and went back to her. He got down off his horse and embraced Lisene, and I don’t know what they said to each other, but Lisene didn’t follow anymore after that.

I rode with the king most of the time, sitting up in front of him on his skittery black mare. I wasn’t sure I could trust her not to bite me, or to kick me when I wasn’t looking, but King Lír told me, “It is only peaceful times that make her nervous, be assured of that. When dragons charge her, belching death‌—‌for the fumes are more dangerous than the flames, little one‌—‌when your griffin swoops down at her, you will see her at her best.” I still didn’t like her much, but I did like the king. He didn’t sing to me, the way Schmendrick had, but he told me stories, and they weren’t fables or fairytales. These were real, true stories, and he knew they were true because they had all happened to him! I never heard stories like those, and I never will again. I know that for certain.

He told me more things to keep in mind if you have to fight a dragon, and he told me how he learned that ogres aren’t always as stupid as they look, and why you should never swim in a mountain pool when the snows are melting, and how you can sometimes make friends with a troll. He talked about his father’s castle, where he grew up, and about how he met Schmendrick and Molly there, and even about Molly’s cat, which he said was a little thing with a funny crooked ear. But when I asked him why the castle fell down, he wouldn’t exactly say, no more than Schmendrick would. His voice became very quiet and faraway. “I forget things, you know, little one,” he said. “I try to hold on, but I do forget.”

Well, I knew that. He kept calling Molly Sooz, and he never called me anything but little one, and Schmendrick kept having to remind him where we were bound and why. That was always at night, though. He was usually fine during the daytime. And when he did turn confused again, and wander off (not just in his mind, either‌—‌I found him in the woods one night, talking to a tree as though it was his father), all you had to do was mention a white unicorn named Amalthea, and he’d come to himself almost right away. Generally it was Schmendrick who did that, but I brought him back that time, holding my hand and telling me how you can recognize a pooka, and why you need to. But I could never get him to say a word about the unicorn.

Autumn comes early where I live. The days were still hot, and the king never would take his armor off, except to sleep, not even his helmet with the big blue plume on top, but at night I burrowed in between Molly and Schmendrick for warmth, and you could hear the stags belling everywhere all the time, crazy with the season. One of them actually charged King Lír’s horse while I was riding with him, and Schmendrick was about to do something magic to the stag, the same way he’d done with the crow. But the king laughed and rode straight at him, right into those horns. I screamed, but the black mare never hesitated, and the stag turned at the last moment and ambled out of sight in the brush. He was wagging his tail in circles, the way goats do, and looking as puzzled and dreamy as King Lír himself.

I was proud, once I got over being frightened. But both Schmendrick and Molly scolded him, and he kept apologizing to me for the rest of the day for having put me in danger, as Molly had once said he would. “I forgot you were with me, little one, and for that I will always ask your pardon.” Then he smiled at me with that beautiful, terrible hero’s smile I’d seen before, and he said, “But oh, little one, the remembering!” And that night he didn’t wander away and get himself lost. Instead he sat happily by the fire with us and sang a whole long song about the adventures of an outlaw called Captain Cully. I’d never heard of him, but it’s a really good song.

We reached my village late on the afternoon of the fourth day, and Schmendrick made us stop together before we rode in. He said, directly to me, “Sooz, if you tell them that this is the king himself, there will be nothing but noise and joy and celebration, and nobody will get any rest with all that carrying-on. It would be best for you to tell them that we have brought King Lír’s greatest knight with us, and that he needs a night to purify himself in prayer and meditation before he deals with your griffin.” He took hold of my chin and made me look into his green, green eyes, and he said, “Girl, you have to trust me. I always know what I’m doing‌—‌that’s my trouble. Tell your people what I’ve said.” And Molly touched me and looked at me without saying anything, so I knew it was all right.

I left them camped on the outskirts of the village, and walked home by myself. Malka met me first. She smelled me before I even reached Simon and Elsie’s tavern, and she came running and crashed into my legs and knocked me over, and then pinned me down with her paws on my shoulders, and kept licking my face until I had to nip her nose to make her let me up and run to the house with me. My father was out with the flock, but my mother and Wilfrid were there, and they grabbed me and nearly strangled me, and they cried over me‌—‌rotten, stupid Wilfrid too!‌—‌because everyone had been so certain that I’d been taken and eaten by the griffin. After that, once she got done crying, my mother spanked me for running off in Uncle Ambrose’s cart without telling anyone, and when my father came in, he spanked me all over again. But I didn’t mind.

I told them I’d seen King Lír in person, and been in his castle, and I said what Schmendrick had told me to say, but nobody was much cheered by it. My father just sat down and grunted, “Oh, aye‌—‌another great warrior for our comfort and the griffin’s dessert. Your bloody king won’t ever come here his bloody self, you can be sure of that.” My mother reproached him for talking like that in front of Wilfrid and me, but he went on, “Maybe he cared about places like this, people like us once, but he’s old now, and old kings only care who’s going to be king after them. You can’t tell me anything different.”

I wanted more than anything to tell him that King Lír was here, less than half a mile from our doorstep, but I didn’t, and not only because Schmendrick had told me not to. I wasn’t sure what the king might look like, white-haired and shaky and not here all the time, to people like my father. I wasn’t sure what he looked like to me, for that matter. He was a lovely, dignified old man who told wonderful stories, but when I tried to imagine him riding alone into the Midwood to do battle with a griffin, a griffin that had already eaten his best knights . . . to be honest, I couldn’t do it. Now that I’d actually brought him all the way home with me, as I’d set out to do, I was suddenly afraid that I’d drawn him to his death. And I knew I wouldn’t ever forgive myself if that happened.

I wanted so much to see them that night, Schmendrick and Molly and the king. I wanted to sleep out there on the ground with them, and listen to their talk, and then maybe I’d not worry so much about the morning. But of course there wasn’t a chance of that. My family would hardly let me out of their sight to wash my face. Wilfrid kept following me around, asking endless questions about the castle, and my father took me to Catania, who had me tell the whole story over again, and agreed with him that whomever the king had sent this time wasn’t likely to be any more use than the others had been. And my mother kept feeding me and scolding me and hugging me, all more or less at the same time. And then, in the night, we heard the griffin, making that soft, lonely, horrible sound it makes when it’s hunting. So I didn’t get very much sleep, between one thing and another.

But at sunrise, after I’d helped Wilfrid milk the goats, they let me run out to the camp, as long as Malka came with me, which was practically like having my mother along. Molly was already helping King Lír into his armor, and Schmendrick was burying the remains of last night’s dinner, as though they were starting one more ordinary day on their journey to somewhere. They greeted me, and Schmendrick thanked me for doing as he’d asked, so that the king could have a restful night before he—

I didn’t let him finish. I didn’t know I was going to do it, I swear, but I ran up to King Lír, and I threw my arms around him, and I said, “Don’t go! I changed my mind, don’t go!” Just like Lisene.

King Lír looked down at me. He seemed as tall as a tree right then, and he patted my head very gently with his iron glove. He said, “Little one, I have a griffin to slay. It is my job.”

Which was what I’d said myself, though it seemed like years ago, and that made it so much worse. I said a second time, “I changed my mind! Somebody else can fight the griffin, you don’t have to! You go home! You go home now and live your life, and be the king, and everything . . .” I was babbling and sniffling, and generally being a baby, I know that. I’m glad Wilfrid didn’t see me.

King Lír kept petting me with one hand and trying to put me aside with the other, but I wouldn’t let go. I think I was actually trying to pull his sword out of its sheath, to take it away from him. He said, “No, no, little one, you don’t understand. There are some monsters that only a king can kill. I have always known that‌—‌I should never, never have sent those poor men to die in my place. No one else in all the land can do this for you and your village. Most truly now, it is my job.” And he kissed my hand, the way he must have kissed the hands of so many queens. He kissed my hand too, just like theirs.

Molly came up then and took me away from him. She held me close, and she stroked my hair, and she told me, “Child, Sooz, there’s no turning back for him now, or for you either. It was your fate to bring this last cause to him, and his fate to take it up, and neither of you could have done differently, being who you are. And now you must be as brave as he is, and see it all play out.” She caught herself there, and changed it. “Rather, you must wait to learn how it has played out, because you are certainly not coming into that forest with us.”

“I’m coming,” I said. “You can’t stop me. Nobody can.” I wasn’t sniffling or anything anymore. I said it like that, that’s all.

Molly held me at arm’s length, and she shook me a little bit. She said, “Sooz, if you can tell me that your parents have given their permission, then you may come. Have they done so?”

I didn’t answer her. She shook me again, gentler this time, saying, “Oh, that was wicked of me, forgive me, my dear friend. I knew the day we met that you could never learn to lie.” Then she took both of my hands between hers, and she said, “Lead us to the Midwood, if you will, Sooz, and we will say our farewells there. Will you do that for us? For me?”

I nodded, but I still didn’t speak. I couldn’t, my throat was hurting so much. Molly squeezed my hands and said, “Thank you.” Schmendrick came up and made some kind of sign to her with his eyes, or his eyebrows, because she said, “Yes, I know,” although he hadn’t said a thing. So she went to King Lír with him, and I was alone, trying to stop shaking. I managed it, after a while.

The Midwood isn’t far. They wouldn’t really have needed my help to find it. You can see the beginning of it from the roof of Ellis the baker’s house, which is the tallest one on that side of the village. It’s always dark, even from a distance, even if you’re not actually in it. I don’t know if that’s because they’re oak trees (we have all sorts of tales and sayings about oaken woods, and the creatures that live there) or maybe because of some enchantment, or because of the griffin. Maybe it was different before the griffin came. Uncle Ambrose says it’s been a bad place all his life, but my father says no, he and his friends used to hunt there, and he actually picnicked there once or twice with my mother, when they were young.

King Lír rode in front, looking grand and almost young, with his head up and the blue plume on his helmet floating above him, more like a banner than a feather. I was going to ride with Molly, but the king leaned from his saddle as I started past, and swooped me up before him, saying, “You shall guide and company me, little one, until we reach the forest.” I was proud of that, but I was frightened too, because he was so happy, and I knew he was going to his death, trying to make up for all those knights he’d sent to fight the griffin. I didn’t try to warn him. He wouldn’t have heard me, and I knew that too. Me and poor old Lisene.

He told me all about griffins as we rode. He said, “If you should ever have dealings with a griffin, little one, you must remember that they are not like dragons. A dragon is simply a dragon‌—‌make yourself small when it dives down at you, but hold your ground and strike at the underbelly, and you’ve won the day. But a griffin, now . . . a griffin is two highly dissimilar creatures, eagle and lion, fused together by some god with a god’s sense of humor. And so there is an eagle’s heart beating in the beast, and a lion’s heart as well, and you must pierce them both to have any hope of surviving the battle.” He was as cheerful as he could be about it all, holding me safe on the saddle, and saying over and over, the way old people do, “Two hearts, never forget that‌—‌many people do. Eagle heart, lion heart‌—‌eagle heart, lion heart. Never forget, little one.”

We passed a lot of people I knew, out with their sheep and goats, and they all waved to me, and called, and made jokes, and so on. They cheered for King Lír, but they didn’t bow to him, or take off their caps, because nobody recognized him, nobody knew. He seemed delighted about that, which most kings probably wouldn’t be. But he’s the only king I’ve met, so I can’t say.

The Midwood seemed to be reaching out for us before we were anywhere near it, long fingery shadows stretching across the empty fields, and the leaves flickering and blinking, though there wasn’t any wind. A forest is usually really noisy, day and night, if you stand still and listen to the birds and the insects and the streams and such, but the Midwood is always silent, silent. That reaches out too, the silence.

We halted a stone’s throw from the forest, and King Lír said to me, “We part here, little one,” and set me down on the ground as carefully as though he was putting a bird back in its nest. He said to Schmendrick, “I know better than to try to keep you and Sooz from following‌—‌” he kept on calling Molly by my name, every time, I don’t know why‌—‌“but I enjoin you, in the name of great Nikos himself, and in the name of our long and precious friendship . . .” He stopped there, and he didn’t say anything more for such a while that I was afraid he was back to forgetting who he was and why he was there, the way he had been. But then he went on, clear and ringing as one of those mad stags, “I charge you in her name, in the name of the Lady Amalthea, not to assist me in any way from the moment we pass the very first tree, but to leave me altogether to what is mine to do. Is that understood between us, dear ones of my heart?”

Schmendrick hated it. You didn’t have to be magic to see that. It was so plain, even to me, that he had been planning to take over the battle as soon as they were actually facing the griffin. But King Lír was looking right at him with those young blue eyes, and with a little bit of a smile on his face, and Schmendrick simply didn’t know what to do. There wasn’t anything he could do, so he finally nodded and mumbled, “If that is Your Majesty’s wish.” The king couldn’t hear him at all the first time, so he made him say it again.

And then, of course, everybody had to say goodbye to me, since I wasn’t allowed to go any further with them. Molly said she knew we’d see each other again, and Schmendrick told me that I had the makings of a real warrior queen, only he was certain I was too smart to be one. And King Lír . . . King Lír said to me, very quietly, so nobody else could hear, “Little one, if I had married and had a daughter, I would have asked no more than that she should be as brave and kind and loyal as you. Remember that, as I will remember you to my last day.”

Which was all nice, and I wished my mother and father could have heard what all these grown people were saying about me. But then they turned and rode on into the Midwood, the three of them, and only Molly looked back at me. And I think that was to make sure I wasn’t following, because I was supposed just to go home and wait to find out if my friends were alive or dead, and if the griffin was going to be eating any more children. It was all over.

And maybe I would have gone home and let it be all over, if it hadn’t been for Malka.

She should have been with the sheep and not with me, of course‌—‌that’s her job, the same way King Lír was doing his job, going to meet the griffin. But Malka thinks I’m a sheep too, the most stupid, aggravating sheep she ever had to guard, forever wandering away into some kind of danger. All the way to the Midwood she had trotted quietly alongside the king’s horse, but now that we were alone again she came rushing up and bounced all over me, barking like thunder and knocking me down, hard, the way she does whenever I’m not where she wants me to be. I always brace myself when I see her coming, but it never helps.

What she does then, before I’m on my feet, is take the hem of my smock in her jaws and start tugging me in the direction she thinks I should go. But this time . . . this time she suddenly got up, as though she’d forgotten all about me, and she stared past me at the Midwood with all the white showing in her eyes and a low sound coming out of her that I don’t think she knew she could make. The next moment, she was gone, racing into the forest with foam flying from her mouth and her big ragged ears flat back. I called, but she couldn’t have heard me, baying and barking the way she was.

Well, I didn’t have any choice. King Lír and Schmendrick and Molly all had a choice, going after the Midwood griffin, but Malka was my dog, and she didn’t know what she was facing, and I couldn’t let her face it by herself. So there wasn’t anything else for me to do. I took an enormous long breath and looked around me, and then I walked into the forest after her.

Actually, I ran, as long as I could, and then I walked until I could run again, and then I ran some more. There aren’t any paths into the Midwood, because nobody goes there, so it wasn’t hard to see where three horses had pushed through the undergrowth, and then a dog’s tracks on top of the hoofprints. It was very quiet with no wind, not one bird calling, no sound but my own panting. I couldn’t even hear Malka anymore. I was hoping that maybe they’d come on the griffin while it was asleep, and King Lír had already killed it in its nest. I didn’t think so, though. He’d probably have decided it wasn’t honorable to attack a sleeping griffin, and wakened it up for a fair fight. I hadn’t known him very long, but I knew what he’d do.

Then, a little way ahead of me, the whole forest exploded.

It was too much noise for me to sort it out in my head. There was Malka absolutely howling, and birds bursting up everywhere out of the brush, and Schmendrick or the king or someone was shouting, only I couldn’t make out any of the words. And underneath it all was something that wasn’t loud at all, a sound somewhere between a growl and that terrible soft call, like a frightened child. Then‌—‌just as I broke into the clearing‌—‌the rattle and scrape of knives, only much louder this time, as the griffin shot straight up with the sun on its wings. Its cold golden eyes bit into mine, and its beak was open so wide you could see down and down the blazing red gullet. It filled the sky.

And King Lír, astride his black mare, filled the clearing. He was as huge as the griffin, and his sword was the size of a boar spear, and he shook it at the griffin, daring it to light down and fight him on the ground. But the griffin was staying out of range, circling overhead to get a good look at these strange new people. Malka was utterly off her head, screaming and hurling herself into the air again and again, snapping at the griffin’s lion feet and eagle claws, but coming down each time without so much as an iron feather between her teeth. I lunged and caught her in the air, trying to drag her away before the griffin turned on her, but she fought me, scratching my face with her own dull dog claws, until I had to let her go. The last time she leaped, the griffin suddenly stooped and caught her full on her side with one huge wing, so hard that she couldn’t get a sound out, no more than I could. She flew all the way across the clearing, slammed into a tree, fell to the ground, and after that she didn’t move.

Molly told me later that that was when King Lír struck for the griffin’s lion heart. I didn’t see it. I was flying across the clearing myself, throwing myself over Malka, in case the griffin came after her again, and I didn’t see anything except her staring eyes and the blood on her side. But I did hear the griffin’s roar when it happened, and when I could turn my head, I saw the blood splashing along its side, and the back legs squinching up against its belly, the way you do when you’re really hurting. King Lír shouted like a boy. He threw that great sword as high as the griffin, and snatched it back again, and then he charged toward the griffin as it wobbled lower and lower, with its crippled lion half dragging it out of the air. It landed with a saggy thump, just like Malka, and there was a moment when I was absolutely sure it was dead. I remember I was thinking, very far away, this is good, I’m glad, I’m sure I’m glad.

But Schmendrick was screaming at the king, “Two hearts! Two hearts!” until his voice split with it, and Molly was on me, trying to drag me away from the griffin, and I was hanging onto Malka‌—‌she’d gotten so heavy‌—‌and I don’t know what else was happening right then, because all I was seeing and thinking about was Malka. And all I was feeling was her heart not beating under mine.

She guarded my cradle when I was born. I cut my teeth on her poor ears, and she never made one sound. My mother says so.

King Lír wasn’t seeing or hearing any of us. There was nothing in the world for him but the griffin, which was flopping and struggling lopsidedly in the middle of the clearing. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for it, even then, even after it had killed Malka and my friends, and all the sheep and goats too, and I don’t know how many else. And King Lír must have felt the same way, because he got down from his black mare and went straight up to the griffin, and he spoke to it, lowering his sword until the tip was on the ground. He said, “You were a noble and terrible adversary‌—‌surely the last such I will ever confront. We have accomplished what we were born to do, the two of us. I thank you for your death.”

And on that last word, the griffin had him.

It was the eagle, lunging up at him, dragging the lion half along, the way I’d been dragging Malka’s dead weight. King Lír stepped back, swinging the sword fast enough to take off the griffin’s head, but it was faster than he was. That dreadful beak caught him at the waist, shearing through his armor the way an axe would smash through piecrust, and he doubled over without a sound that I heard, looking like wetwash on the line. There was blood, and worse, and I couldn’t have said if he was dead or alive. I thought the griffin was going to bite him in two.

I shook loose from Molly. She was calling to Schmendrick to do something, but of course he couldn’t, and she knew it, because he’d promised King Lír that he wouldn’t interfere by magic, whatever happened. But I wasn’t a magician, and I hadn’t promised anything to anybody. I told Malka I’d be right back.

The griffin didn’t see me coming. It was bending its head down over King Lír, hiding him with its wings. The lion part trailing along so limply in the dust made it more fearful to see, though I can’t say why, and it was making a sort of cooing, purring sound all the time. I had a big rock in my left hand, and a dead branch in my right, and I was bawling something, but I don’t remember what. You can scare wolves away from the flock sometimes if you run at them like that, determined.

I can throw things hard with either hand‌—‌Wilfrid found that out when I was still small‌—‌and the griffin looked up fast when the rock hit it on the side of its neck. It didn’t like that, but it was too busy with King Lír to bother with me. I didn’t think for a minute that my branch was going to be any use on even a half-dead griffin, but I threw it as far as I could, so that the griffin would look away for a moment, and as soon as it did I made a little run and a big sprawling dive for the hilt of the king’s sword, which was sticking out under him where he’d fallen. I knew I could lift it because of having buckled it on him when we set out together.

But I couldn’t get it free. He was too heavy, like Malka. But I wouldn’t give up or let go. I kept pulling and pulling on that sword, and I didn’t feel Molly pulling at me again, and I didn’t notice the griffin starting to scrabble toward me over King Lír’s body. I did hear Schmendrick, sounding a long way off, and I thought he was singing one of the nonsense songs he’d made up for me, only why would he be doing something like that just now? Then I did finally look up, to push my sweaty hair off my face, just before the griffin grabbed me up in one of its claws, yanking me away from Molly to throw me down on top of King Lír. His armor was so cold against my cheek, it was as though the armor had died with him.

The griffin looked into my eyes. That was the worst of all, worse than the pain where the claw had me, worse than not seeing my parents and stupid Wilfrid anymore, worse than knowing that I hadn’t been able to save either the king or Malka. Griffins can’t talk (dragons do, but only to heroes, King Lír told me), but those golden eyes were saying into my eyes, “Yes, I will die soon, but you are all dead now, all of you, and I will pick your bones before the ravens have mine. And your folk will remember what I was, and what I did to them, when there is no one left in your vile, pitiful anthill who remembers your name. So I have won.” And I knew it was true.

Then there wasn’t anything but that beak and that burning gullet opening over me.

Then there was.

I thought it was a cloud. I was so dazed and terrified that I really thought it was a white cloud, only traveling so low and so fast that it smashed the griffin off King Lír and away from me, and sent me tumbling into Molly’s arms at the same time. She held me tightly, practically smothering me, and it wasn’t until I wriggled my head free that I saw what had come to us. I can see it still, in my mind. I see it right now.

They don’t look anything like horses. I don’t know where people got that notion. Four legs and a tail, yes, but the hooves are split, like a deer’s hooves, or a goat’s, and the head is smaller and more—pointy—‌than a horse’s head. And the whole body is different from a horse, it’s like saying a snowflake looks like a cow. The horn looks too long and heavy for the body, you can’t imagine how a neck that delicate can hold up a horn that size. But it can.

Schmendrick was on his knees, with his eyes closed and his lips moving, as though he was still singing. Molly kept whispering, “Amalthea . . . Amalthea . . .” not to me, not to anybody. The unicorn was facing the griffin across the king’s body. Its front feet were skittering and dancing a little, but its back legs were setting themselves to charge, the way rams do. Only rams put their heads down, while the unicorn held its head high, so that the horn caught the sunlight and glowed like a seashell. It gave a cry that made me want to dive back into Molly’s skirt and cover my ears, it was so raw and so . . . hurt. Then its head did go down.

Dying or not, the griffin put up a furious fight. It came hopping to meet the unicorn, but then it was out of the way at the last minute, with its bloody beak snapping at the unicorn’s legs as it flashed by. But each time that happened, the unicorn would turn instantly, much quicker than a horse could have turned, and come charging back before the griffin could get itself braced again. It wasn’t a bit fair, but I didn’t feel sorry for the griffin anymore.

The last time, the unicorn slashed sideways with its horn, using it like a club, and knocked the griffin clean off its feet. But it was up before the unicorn could turn, and it actually leaped into the air, dead lion half and all, just high enough to come down on the unicorn’s back, raking with its eagle claws and trying to bite through the unicorn’s neck, the way it did with King Lír. I screamed then, I couldn’t help it, but the unicorn reared up until I thought it was going to go over backwards, and it flung the griffin to the ground, whirled and drove its horn straight through the iron feathers to the eagle heart. It trampled the body for a good while after, but it didn’t need to.

Schmendrick and Molly ran to King Lír. They didn’t look at the griffin, or even pay very much attention to the unicorn. I wanted to go to Malka, but I followed them to where he lay. I’d seen what the griffin had done to him, closer than they had, and I didn’t see how he could still be alive. But he was, just barely. He opened his eyes when we kneeled beside him, and he smiled so sweetly at us all, and he said, “Lisene? Lisene, I should have a bath, shouldn’t I?”

I didn’t cry. Molly didn’t cry. Schmendrick did. He said, “No, Majesty. No, you do not need bathing, truly.”

King Lír looked puzzled. “But I smell bad, Lisene. I think I must have wet myself.” He reached for my hand and held it so hard. “Little one,” he said. “Little one, I know you. Do not be ashamed of me because I am old.”

I squeezed his hand back, as hard as I could. “Hello, Your Majesty,” I said. “Hello.” I didn’t know what else to say.

Then his face was suddenly young and happy and wonderful, and he was gazing far past me, reaching toward something with his eyes. I felt a breath on my shoulder, and I turned my head and saw the unicorn. It was bleeding from a lot of deep scratches and bites, especially around its neck, but all you could see in its dark eyes was King Lír. I moved aside so it could get to him, but when I turned back, the king was gone. I’m nine, almost ten. I know when people are gone.

The unicorn stood over King Lír’s body for a long time. I went off after a while to sit beside Malka, and Molly came and sat with me. But Schmendrick stayed kneeling by King Lír, and he was talking to the unicorn. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I could tell from his face that he was asking for something, a favor. My mother says she can always tell before I open my mouth. The unicorn wasn’t answering, of course‌—‌they can’t talk either, I’m almost sure‌—‌but Schmendrick kept at it until the unicorn turned its head and looked at him. Then he stopped, and he stood up and walked away by himself. The unicorn stayed where she was.

Molly was saying how brave Malka had been, and telling me that she’d never known another dog who attacked a griffin. She asked if Malka had ever had pups, and I said, yes, but none of them was Malka. It was very strange. She was trying hard to make me feel better, and I was trying to comfort her because she couldn’t. But all the while I felt so cold, almost as far away from everything as Malka had gone. I closed her eyes, the way you do with people, and I sat there and I stroked her side, over and over.

I didn’t notice the unicorn. Molly must have, but she didn’t say anything. I went on petting Malka, and I didn’t look up until the horn came slanting over my shoulder. Close to, you could see blood drying in the shining spirals, but I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t anything. Then the horn touched Malka, very lightly, right where I was stroking her, and Malka opened her eyes.

It took her a while to understand that she was alive. It took me longer. She ran her tongue out first, panting and panting, looking so thirsty. We could hear a stream trickling somewhere close, and Molly went and found it, and brought water back in her cupped hands. Malka lapped it all up, and then she tried to stand and fell down, like a puppy. But she kept trying, and at last she was properly on her feet, and she tried to lick my face, but she missed it the first few times. I only started crying when she finally managed it.

When she saw the unicorn, she did a funny thing. She stared at it for a moment, and then she bowed or curtseyed, in a dog way, stretching out her front legs and putting her head down on the ground between them. The unicorn nosed at her, very gently, so as not to knock her over again. It looked at me for the first time . . . or maybe I really looked at it for the first time, past the horn and the hooves and the magical whiteness, all the way into those endless eyes. And what they did, somehow, the unicorn’s eyes, was to free me from the griffin’s eyes. Because the awfulness of what I’d seen there didn’t go away when the griffin died, not even when Malka came alive again. But the unicorn had all the world in her eyes, all the world I’m never going to see, but it doesn’t matter, because now I have seen it, and it’s beautiful, and I was in there too. And when I think of Jehane, and Louli, and my Felicitas who could only talk with her eyes, just like the unicorn, I’ll think of them, and not the griffin. That’s how it was when the unicorn and I looked at each other.

I didn’t see if the unicorn said goodbye to Molly and Schmendrick, and I didn’t see when it went away. I didn’t want to. I did hear Schmendrick saying, “A dog. I nearly kill myself singing her to Lír, calling her as no other has ever called a unicorn‌—‌and she brings back, not him, but the dog. And here I’d always thought she had no sense of humor.”

But Molly said, “She loved him too. That’s why she let him go. Keep your voice down.” I was going to tell her it didn’t matter, that I knew Schmendrick was saying that because he was so sad, but she came over and petted Malka with me, and I didn’t have to. She said, “We will escort you and Malka home now, as befits two great ladies. Then we will take the king home too.”

“And I’ll never see you again,” I said. “No more than I’ll see him.”

Molly asked me, “How old are you, Sooz?”

“Nine,” I said. “Almost ten. You know that.”

“You can whistle?” I nodded. Molly looked around quickly, as though she were going to steal something. She bent close to me, and she whispered, “I will give you a present, Sooz, but you are not to open it until the day when you turn seventeen. On that day you must walk out away from your village, walk out all alone into some quiet place that is special to you, and you must whistle like this.” And she whistled a little ripple of music for me to whistle back to her, repeating and repeating it until she was satisfied that I had it exactly. “Don’t whistle it anymore,” she told me. “Don’t whistle it aloud again, not once, until your seventeenth birthday, but keep whistling it inside you. Do you understand the difference, Sooz?”

“I’m not a baby,” I said. “I understand. What will happen when I do whistle it?”

Molly smiled at me. She said, “Someone will come to you. Maybe the greatest magician in the world, maybe only an old lady with a soft spot for valiant, impudent children.” She cupped my cheek in her hand. “And just maybe even a unicorn. Because beautiful things will always want to see you again, Sooz, and be listening for you. Take an old lady’s word for it. Someone will come.”

They put King Lír on his own horse, and I rode with Schmendrick, and they came all the way home with me, right to the door, to tell my mother and father that the griffin was dead, and that I had helped, and you should have seen Wilfrid’s face when they said that! Then they both hugged me, and Molly said in my ear, “Remember‌—‌not till you’re seventeen!” and they rode away, taking the king back to his castle to be buried among his own folk. And I had a cup of cold milk and went out with Malka and my father to pen the flock for the night.

So that’s what happened to me. I practice the music Molly taught me in my head, all the time, I even dream it some nights, but I don’t ever whistle it aloud. I talk to Malka about our adventure, because I have to talk to someone. And I promise her that when the time comes she’ll be there with me, in the special place I’ve already picked out. She’ll be an old dog lady then, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Someone will come to us both.

I hope it’s them, those two. A unicorn is very nice, but they’re my friends. I want to feel Molly holding me again, and hear the stories she didn’t have time to tell me, and I want to hear Schmendrick singing that silly song:

Soozli, Soozli,
speaking loozli,
you disturb my oozli-goozli.

Soozli, Soozli,
would you choozli
to become my squoozli-squoozli . . .?

I can wait.

IDENTITY THEFT

Robert J. Sawyer

The door to my office slid open. “Hello,” I said, rising from my chair. “You must be my nine o’clock.” I said it as if I had a ten o’clock and an eleven o’clock, but I didn’t. The whole Martian economy was in a slump, and, even though I was the only private detective on Mars, this was the first new case I’d had in weeks.

“Yes,” said a high, feminine voice. “I’m Cassandra Wilkins.”

I let my eyes rove up and down her body. It was very good work; I wondered if she’d had quite so perfect a figure before transferring. People usually ordered replacement bodies that, at least in broad strokes, resembled their originals, but few could resist improving them. Men got buffer, women got curvier, and everyone modified their faces, removing asymmetries, wrinkles, and imperfections. If and when I transferred myself, I’d eliminate the gray in my blond hair and get a new nose that would look like my current one had before it’d been broken a couple of times.

“A pleasure to meet you, Ms. Wilkins,” I said. “I’m Alexander Lomax. Please have a seat.”

She was a little thing, no more than a hundred and fifty centimeters, and she was wearing a stylish silver-gray blouse and skirt, but no makeup or jewelry. I’d expected her to sit down with a catlike, fluid movement, given her delicate features, but she just sort of plunked herself into the chair. “Thanks,” she said. “I do hope you can help me, Mr. Lomax. I really do.”

Rather than immediately sitting down myself, I went to the coffeemaker. I filled my own mug, then opened my mouth to offer Cassandra a cup, but closed it before doing so; transfers, of course, didn’t drink. “What seems to be the problem?” I said, returning to my chair.

It’s hard reading a transfer’s expression: the facial sculpting was usually very good, but the movements were somewhat restrained. “My husband—oh, my goodness, Mr. Lomax, I hate to even say this!” She looked down at her hands. “My husband . . . he’s disappeared.”

I raised my eyebrows; it was pretty damned difficult for someone to disappear here. New Klondike was only three kilometers in diameter, all of it locked under the dome. “When did you last see him?”

“Three days ago.”

My office was small, but it did have a window. Through it, I could see one of the supporting arches that helped to hold up the transparent dome over New Klondike. Outside the dome, a sandstorm was raging, orange clouds obscuring the sun. Auxiliary lights on the arch compensated for that, but Martian daylight was never very bright. That’s a reason why even those who had a choice were reluctant to return to Earth: after years of only dim illumination, apparently the sun as seen from there was excruciating. “Is your husband, um, like you?” I asked.

She nodded. “Oh, yes. We both came here looking to make our fortune, just like everyone else.”

I shook my head. “I mean is he also a transfer?”

“Oh, sorry. Yes, he is. In fact, we both just transferred.”

“It’s an expensive procedure,” I said. “Could he have been skipping out on paying for it?”

Cassandra shook her head. “No, no. Joshua found one or two nice specimens early on. He used the money from selling those pieces to buy the New You franchise here. That’s where we met—after I threw in the towel on sifting dirt, I got a job in sales there. Anyway, of course, we both got to transfer at cost.” She was actually wringing her synthetic hands. “Oh, Mr. Lomax, please help me! I don’t know what I’m going to do without my Joshua!”

“You must love him a lot,” I said, watching her pretty face for more than just the pleasure of looking at it; I wanted to gauge her sincerity as she replied. After all, people often disappeared because things were bad at home, but spouses are rarely forthcoming about that.

“Oh, I do!” said Cassandra. “I love him more than I can say. Joshua is a wonderful, wonderful man.” She looked at me with pleading eyes. “You have to help me get him back. You just have to!”

I looked down at my coffee mug; steam was rising from it. “Have you tried the police?”

Cassandra made a sound that I guessed was supposed to be a snort: it had the right roughness, but was dry as Martian sand. “Yes. They—oh, I hate to speak ill of anyone, Mr. Lomax! Believe me, it’s not my way, but—well, there’s no ducking it, is there? They were useless. Just totally useless.”

I nodded slightly; it’s a story I heard often enough—I owed most of what little livelihood I had to the local cops’ incompetence and indifference. “Who did you speak to?”

“A—a detective, I guess he was; he didn’t wear a uniform. I’ve forgotten his name.”

“What did he look like?”

“Red hair, and—”

“That’s Mac,” I said. She looked puzzled, so I said his full name. “Dougal McCrae.”

“McCrae, yes,” said Cassandra. She shuddered a bit, and she must have noticed my surprised reaction to that. “Sorry,” she said. “I just didn’t like the way he looked at me.”

I resisted running my eyes over her body just then; I’d already done so, and I could remember what I’d seen. I guess her original figure hadn’t been like this one; if it had, she’d certainly be used to admiring looks from men by now.

“I’ll have a word with McCrae,” I said. “See what’s already been done. Then I’ll pick up where the cops left off.”

“Would you?” Her green eyes seemed to dance. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Lomax! You’re a good man—I can tell!”

I shrugged a little. “I can show you two ex-wives and a half-dozen bankers who’d disagree.”

“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t say things like that! You are a good man, I’m sure of it. Believe me, I have a sense about these things. You’re a good man, and I know you won’t let me down.”

Naïve woman; she’d probably thought the same thing about her husband—until he’d run off. “Now, what can you tell me about your husband? Joshua, is it?”

“Yes, that’s right. His full name is Joshua Connor Wilkins—and it’s Joshua, never just Josh, thank you very much.” I nodded. Guys who were anal about being called by their full first names never bought a round, in my experience. Maybe it was a good thing that this clown was gone.

“Yes,” I said. “Go on.” I didn’t have to take notes, of course. My office computer was recording everything, and would extract whatever was useful into a summary file for me.

Cassandra ran her synthetic lower lip back and forth beneath her artificial upper teeth, thinking for a moment. Then: “Well, he was born in Calgary, Alberta, and he’s thirty-eight years old. He moved to Mars seven mears ago.” Mears were Mars-years; about double the length of those on Earth.

“Do you have a picture?”

“I can access one,” she said. She pointed at my desk terminal. “May I?”

I nodded, and Cassandra reached over to grab the keyboard. In doing so, she managed to knock over my coffee mug, spilling hot joe all over her dainty hand. She let out a small yelp of pain. I got up, grabbed a towel, and began wiping up the mess. “I’m surprised that hurt,” I said. “I mean, I do like my coffee hot, but . . .”

“Transfers feel pain, Mr. Lomax,” she said, “for the same reason that biologicals do. When you’re flesh-and-blood, you need a signaling system to warn you when your parts are being damaged; same is true for those of us who have transferred. Admittedly, artificial bodies are much more durable, of course.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Sorry,” she replied. “I’ve explained this so many times now—you know, at work. Anyway, please forgive me about your desk.”

I made a dismissive gesture. “Thank God for the paperless office, eh? Don’t worry about it.” I gestured at the keyboard; fortunately, none of the coffee had gone down between the keys. “You were going to show me a picture?”

“Oh, right.” She spoke some commands, and the terminal responded—making me wonder what she’d wanted the keyboard for. But then she used it to type in a long passphrase; presumably she didn’t want to say hers aloud in front of me. She frowned as she was typing it in, and backspaced to make a correction; multiword passphrases were easy to say, but hard to type if you weren’t adept with a keyboard—and the more security conscious you were, the longer the passphrase you used.

Anyway, she accessed some repository of her personal files, and brought up a photo of Joshua-never-Josh Wilkins. Given how attractive Mrs. Wilkins was, he wasn’t what I expected. He had cold, gray eyes, hair buzzed so short as to be nonexistent, and a thin, almost lipless mouth; the overall effect was reptilian. “That’s before,” I said. “What about after? What’s he look like now that he’s transferred?”

“Umm, pretty much the same,” she said.

“Really?” If I’d had that kisser, I’d have modified it for sure. “Do you have pictures taken since he moved his mind?”

“No actual pictures,” said Cassandra. “After all, he and I only just transferred. But I can go into the NewYou database, and show you the plans from which his new face was manufactured.” She spoke to the terminal some more, and then typed in another lengthy passphrase. Soon enough, she had a computer-graphics rendition of Joshua’s head on my screen.

“You’re right,” I said, surprised. “He didn’t change a thing. Can I get copies of all this?”

She nodded, and spoke some more commands, transferring various documents into local storage.

“All right,” I said. “My fee is two hundred solars an hour.”

“That’s fine, that’s fine, of course! I don’t care about the money, Mr. Lomax—not at all. I just want Joshua back. Please tell me you’ll find him.”

“I will,” I said, smiling my most reassuring smile. “Don’t you worry about that. He can’t have gone far.”

Actually, of course, Joshua Wilkins could perhaps have gone quite far—so my first order of business was to eliminate that possibility.

No spaceships had left Mars in the last ten days, so he couldn’t be off-planet. There was a giant airlock in the south through which large spaceships could be brought inside for dry-dock work, but it hadn’t been cracked open in weeks. And, although a transfer could exist freely on the Martian surface, there were only four personnel air locks leading out of the dome, and they all had security guards. I visited each of those air locks and checked, just to be sure, but the only people who had gone out in the last three days were the usual crowds of hapless fossil hunters, and every one of them had returned when the dust storm began.

I remember when this town had started up: “The Great Fossil Rush,” they called it. Weingarten and O’Reilly, two early private explorers who had come here at their own expense, had found the first fossils on Mars, and had made a fortune selling them back on Earth. More valuable than any precious metal; rarer than anything else in the solar system—actual evidence of extraterrestrial life! Good fist-sized specimens went for millions in online auctions; excellent football-sized ones for billions. There was no greater status symbol than to own the petrified remains of a Martian pentaped or rhizomorph.

Of course, Weingarten and O’Reilly wouldn’t say precisely where they’d found their specimens, but it had been easy enough to prove that their spaceship had landed here, in the Isidis Planitia basin. Other treasure hunters started coming, and New Klondike—the one and only town on Mars—was born.

Native life was never widely dispersed on Mars; the single ecosystem that had ever existed here seemed to have been confined to an area not much bigger than Rhode Island. Some of the prospectors—excuse me, fossil hunters—who came shortly after W&O’s first expedition found a few nice specimens, although most had been badly blasted by blowing sand.

Somewhere, though, was the mother lode: a bed that produced fossils more finely preserved than even those from Earth’s famed Burgess Shale. Weingarten and O’Reilly had known where it was—they’d stumbled on it by pure dumb luck, apparently. But they’d both been killed when their heat shield separated from their lander when reentering Earth’s atmosphere after their third expedition here—and, in the twenty mears since, no one had yet rediscovered it.

People were still looking, of course. There’d always been a market for transferring consciousness; the potentially infinite lifespan was hugely appealing. But here on Mars, the demand was particularly brisk, since artificial bodies could spend days or even weeks on the surface, searching for paleontological gold, without worrying about running out of air. Of course, a serious sandstorm could blast the synthetic flesh from metal bones, and scour those bones until they were whittled to nothing; that’s why no one was outside right now.

Anyway, Joshua-never-Josh Wilkins was clearly not outside the dome, and he hadn’t taken off in a spaceship. Wherever he was hiding, it was somewhere in New Klondike. I can’t say he was breathing the same air I was, because he wasn’t breathing at all. But he was here, somewhere. All I had to do was find him.

I didn’t want to duplicate the efforts of the police, although “efforts” was usually too generous a term to apply to the work of the local constabulary; “cursory attempts” probably was closer to the truth, if I knew Mac.

New Klondike had twelve radial roadways, cutting across the nine concentric rings of buildings under the dome. My office was at dome’s edge; I could have taken a hovertram into the center, but I preferred to walk. A good detective knew what was happening on the streets, and the hovertrams, dilapidated though they were, sped by too fast for that.

I didn’t make any bones about staring at the transfers I saw along the way. They ranged in style from really sophisticated models, like Cassandra Wilkins, to things only a step up from the tin woodman of Oz. Of course, those who’d contented themselves with second-rate synthetic forms doubtless believed they’d trade up when they eventually happened upon some decent specimens. Poor saps; no one had found truly spectacular remains for mears, and lots of people were giving up and going back to Earth, if they could afford the passage, or were settling in to lives of, as Thoreau would have it, quiet desperation, their dreams as dead as the fossils they’d never found.

I continued walking easily along; Mars gravity is about a third of Earth’s. Some people were stuck here because they’d let their muscles atrophy; they’d never be able to hack a full gee again. Me, I was stuck here for other reasons, but I worked out more than most—Gully’s Gym, over by the shipyards—and so still had reasonably strong legs; I could walk comfortably all day if I had to.

The cop shop was a five-story building—it could be that tall, this near the center of the dome—with walls that had once been white, but were now a grimy grayish pink. The front doors were clear alloquartz, same as the overhead dome, and they slid aside as I walked up to them. At the side of the lobby was a long red desk—as if we don’t see enough red on Mars—with a map showing the Isidis Planitia basin; New Klondike was a big circle off to one side.

The desk sergeant was a flabby lowbrow named Huxley, whose uniform always seemed a size too small for him. “Hey, Hux,” I said, walking over. “Is Mac in?”

Huxley consulted a monitor, then nodded. “Yeah, he’s in, but he don’t see just anyone.”

“I’m not just anyone, Hux. I’m the guy who picks up the pieces after you clowns bungle things.”

Huxley frowned, trying to think of a rejoinder. “Yeah, well . . .” he said, at last.

“Oooh,” I said. “Good one, Hux! Way to put me in my place.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You ain’t as funny as you think you are, Lomax,” he said.

“Of course I’m not,” I said. “Nobody could be that funny.” I nodded at the secured inner door. “Going to buzz me through?”

“Only to be rid of you,” said Huxley. So pleased was he with the wit of this remark that he repeated it: “Only to be rid of you.”

Huxley reached below the counter, and the inner door—an unmarked black panel—slid aside. I pantomimed tipping a nonexistent hat at Hux, and headed into the station proper. I then walked down the corridor to McCrae’s office; the door was open, so I rapped my knuckles against the plastic jamb.

“Lomax!” he said, looking up. “Decided to turn yourself in?”

“Very funny, Mac,” I said. “You and Hux should go on the road together.”

He snorted. “What can I do for you, Alex?”

Mac was a skinny biological, with shaggy orange eyebrows shielding his blue eyes. “I’m looking for a guy named Joshua Wilkins.”

Mac had a strong Scottish brogue—so strong, I figured it must be an affectation. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Who’s your client? The wife?”

I nodded.

“A bonnie lass,” he said.

“That she is,” I said. “Anyway, you tried to find her husband, this Wilkins . . .”

“We looked around, yeah,” said Mac. “He’s a transfer, you knew that?”

I nodded.

“Well,” Mac said, “she gave us the plans for his new face—precise measurements, and all that. We’ve been feeding all the video made by public security cameras through facial-recognition software. So far, no luck.”

I smiled. That’s about as far as Mac’s detective work normally went: things he could do without hauling his bony ass out from behind his desk. “How much of New Klondike do they cover now?” I asked.

“It’s down to sixty percent of the public areas,” said Mac. People kept smashing the cameras, and the city didn’t have the time or money to replace them.

“You’ll let me know if you find anything?”

Mac drew his shaggy eyebrows together. “You know the privacy laws, Alex. I can’t divulge what the security cameras see.”

I reached into my pocket, pulled out a fifty-solar coin, and flipped it. It went up rapidly, but came down in what still seemed like slow motion to me, even after all these years on Mars; Mac didn’t require any special reflexes to catch it in midair. “Of course,” he said, “I suppose we could make an exception . . .”

“Thanks. You’re a credit to law-enforcement officials everywhere.”

He snorted again, then: “Say, what kind of heat you packing these days? You still carrying that old Smith & Wesson?”

“I’ve got a license,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“Oh, I know, I know. But be careful, eh? The times, they are a-changin’. Bullets aren’t much use against a transfer, and getting to be more of those each day.”

I nodded. “So I’ve heard. How do you guys handle them?”

“Until recently, as little as possible,” said Mac. “Turning a blind eye, and all that.”

“Saves getting up,” I said.

Mac didn’t take offense. “Exactly. But let me show you something.” We left his office, went further down the corridor and entered another room. He pointed to a device on the table. “Just arrived from Earth,” he said. “The latest thing.”

It was a wide, flat disk, maybe half a meter in diameter, and five centimeters thick. There were a pair of U-shaped handgrips attached to the edge, opposite each other. “What is it?” I asked.

“A broadband disrupter,” he said. He picked it up and held it in front of himself, like a gladiator’s shield. “It discharges an oscillating multifrequency electromagnetic pulse. From a distance of four meters or less, it will completely fry the artificial brain of a transfer—killing it as effectively as a bullet kills a human.”

“I don’t plan on killing anyone,” I said.

“That’s what you said the last time.”

Ouch. Still, maybe he had a point. “I don’t suppose you have a spare one I can borrow?”

Mac laughed. “Are you kidding? This is the only one we’ve got so far.”

“Well, then,” I said, heading for the door, “I guess I’d better be careful.”

My next stop was the NewYou building. I took Third Avenue, one of the radial streets of the city, out the five blocks to it. The building was two stories tall and was made, like most structures here, of red laser-fused Martian sand bricks. Flanking the main doors were a pair of wide alloquartz display windows, showing dusty artificial bodies dressed in fashions from about two mears ago; it was high time somebody updated things.

Inside, the store was part showroom and part workshop, with spare parts scattered about: here, a white-skinned artificial hand; there, a black lower leg; on shelves, synthetic eyes and spools of colored monofilament that I guessed were used to simulate hair. There were also all sorts of internal parts on worktables: motors and hydraulic pumps and joint hinges. A half-dozen technicians were milling around, assembling new bodies or repairing old ones.

Across the room, I spotted Cassandra Wilkins, wearing a beige suit today. She was talking with a man and a woman, who were biological; potential customers, presumably. “Hello, Cassandra,” I said, after I’d closed the distance between us.

“Mr. Lomax!” she said, excusing herself from the couple. “I’m so glad you’re here—so very glad! What news do you have?”

“Not much,” I said. “I’ve been to visit the cops, and I thought I should start my investigation here. After all, your husband owned this franchise, right?”

Cassandra nodded enthusiastically. “I knew I was doing the right thing hiring you,” she said. “I just knew it! Why, do you know that lazy detective McCrae never stopped by here—not even once!”

I smiled. “Mac’s not the outdoorsy type,” I said. “And, well, you get what you pay for.”

“Isn’t that the truth?” said Cassandra. “Isn’t that just the God’s honest truth!”

“You said your husband moved his mind recently?”

She nodded her head. “Yes. All of that goes on upstairs, though. This is just sales and service down here.”

“Can you show me?” I asked.

She nodded again. “Of course—anything you want to see, Mr. Lomax!” What I wanted to see was under that beige suit—nothing beat the perfection of a transfer’s body—but I kept that thought to myself. Cassandra looked around the room, then motioned for another staff member—also female, also a transfer, also gorgeous, and this one did wear tasteful makeup and jewelry—to come over. “I’m sorry,” Cassandra said to the two customers she’d abandoned a few moments ago. “Miss Takahashi here will look after you.” She then turned to me. “This way.”

We went through a curtained doorway and up a set of stairs. “Here’s our scanning room,” said Cassandra, indicating the left-hand one of a pair of doors; both doors had little windows in them. She stood on tip-toe to look in the scanning-room window, and nodded, apparently satisfied by what she saw, then opened the door. Two people were inside: a balding man of about forty, who was seated, and a standing woman who looked twenty-five; the woman was a transfer herself, though, so there was no way of knowing her real age. “So sorry to interrupt,” Cassandra said. She looked at the man in the chair, while gesturing at me. “This is Alexander Lomax. He’s providing some, ah, consulting services for us.”

The man looked at me, surprised, then said, “Klaus Hansen,” by way of introduction.

“Would you mind ever so much if Mr. Lomax watched while the scan was being done?” asked Cassandra.

Hansen considered this for a moment, frowning his long, thin face. But then he nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll just stand over here.” I moved to the far wall and leaned back against it.

The chair Hansen was sitting in looked a lot like a barber’s chair. The female transfer who wasn’t Cassandra reached up above the chair and pulled down a translucent hemisphere that was attached by an articulated arm to the ceiling. She kept lowering it until all of Hansen’s head was covered, and then she turned to a control console.

The hemisphere shimmered slightly, as though a film of oil was washing over its surface; the scanning field, I supposed.

Cassandra was standing next to me, arms crossed in front of her chest. It was an unnatural-looking pose, given her large bosom. “How long does the scanning take?” I asked.

“It’s a quantum-mechanical process,” she replied. “So the scanning is rapid. But it’ll take about ten minutes to move the data into the artificial brain. And then . . .”

“And then?” I said.

She lifted her shoulders, as if the rest didn’t need to be spelled out. “Why, and then Mr. Hansen will be able to live forever.”

“Ah,” I said.

“Come along,” said Cassandra. “Let’s go see the other side.” We left that room, closing its door behind us, and entered the one next door. This room was a mirror image of the previous one, which I guess was appropriate. Standing erect in the middle of the room, supported by a metal armature, was Hansen’s new body, dressed in a fashionable blue suit; its eyes were closed. Also in the room was a male NewYou technician, who was biological.

I walked around, looking at the artificial body from all angles. The replacement Hansen still had a bald spot, although its diameter had been reduced by half. And, interestingly, Hansen had opted for a sort of permanent designer-stubble look; the biological him was clean-shaven at the moment.

Suddenly the simulacrum’s eyes opened. “Wow,” said a voice that was the same as the one I’d heard from the man next door. “That’s incredible.”

“How do you feel, Mr. Hansen?” asked the male technician.

“Fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

“Good,” the technician said. “There’ll be some settling-in adjustments, of course. Let’s just check to make sure all your parts are working . . .”

“And there it is,” said Cassandra, to me. “Simple as that.” She led me out of the room, back into the corridor.

“Fascinating,” I said. I pointed at the left-hand door. “When do you take care of the original?”

“That’s already been done. We do it in the chair.”

I stared at the closed door, and I like to think I suppressed my shudder enough so that Cassandra was unaware of it. “All right,” I said. “I guess I’ve seen enough.”

Cassandra looked disappointed. “Are you sure you don’t want to look around some more?”

“Why?” I said. “Is there anything else worth seeing?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Cassandra. “It’s a big place. Everything on this floor, everything downstairs . . . everything in the basement.”

I blinked. “You’ve got a basement?” Almost no Martian buildings had basements; the permafrost layer was very hard to dig through.

“Yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.” She paused, then looked away. “Of course, no one ever goes down there; it’s just storage.”

“I’ll have a look,” I said.

And that’s where I found him.

He was lying behind some large storage crates, face down, a sticky pool of machine oil surrounding his head. Next to him was a fusion-powered jackhammer, the kind many of the fossil hunters had for removing surface rocks. And next to the jackhammer was a piece of good old-fashioned paper. On it, in block letters, was written, “I’m so sorry, Cassie. It’s just not the same.”

It’s hard to commit suicide, I guess, when you’re a transfer. Slitting your wrists does nothing significant. Poison doesn’t work, and neither does drowning.

But Joshua-never-anything-else-at-all-anymore Wilkins had apparently found a way. From the looks of it, he’d leaned back against the rough cement wall, and, with his strong artificial arms, had held up the jackhammer, placing its bit against the center of his forehead. And then he’d held down on the jackhammer’s twin triggers, letting the unit run until it had managed to pierce through his titanium skull and scramble the soft material of his artificial brain. When his brain died, his thumbs let up on the triggers, and he dropped the jackhammer, then tumbled over himself. His head had twisted sideways when it hit the concrete floor. Everything below his eyebrows was intact; it was clearly the same face Cassandra Wilkins had shown me.

I headed up the stairs and found Cassandra, who was chatting in her animated style with another customer.

“Cassandra,” I said, pulling her aside. “Cassandra, I’m very sorry, but . . .”

She looked at me, her green eyes wide. “What?”

“I’ve found your husband. And he’s dead.”

She opened her pretty mouth, closed it, then opened it again. She looked like she might fall over, even with gyroscopes stabilizing her. I put an arm around her shoulders, but she didn’t seem comfortable with it, so I let her go. “My . . . God,” she said at last. “Are you . . . are you positive?”

“Sure looks like him,” I said.

“My God,” she said again. “What . . . what happened?”

No nice way to say it. “Looks like he killed himself.”

A couple of Cassandra’s coworkers had come over, wondering what all the commotion was about. “What’s wrong?” asked one of them—the same Miss Takahashi I’d seen earlier.

“Oh, Reiko,” said Cassandra. “Joshua is dead!”

Customers were noticing what was going on, too. A burly flesh-and-blood man, with arms as thick around as most men’s legs, came across the room; he seemed to be the boss here. Reiko Takahashi had already drawn Cassandra into her arms—or vice-versa; I’d been looking away when it had happened—and was stroking Cassandra’s artificial hair. I let the boss do what he could to calm the crowd, while I used my commlink to call Mac and inform him of Joshua Wilkins’s suicide.

Detective Dougal McCrae of New Klondike’s finest arrived about twenty minutes later, accompanied by two uniforms. “How’s it look, Alex?” Mac asked.

“Not as messy as some of the biological suicides I’ve seen,” I said. “But it’s still not a pretty sight.”

“Show me.”

I led Mac downstairs. He read the note without picking it up.

The burly man soon came down, too, followed by Cassandra Wilkins, who was holding her artificial hand to her artificial mouth.

“Hello, again, Mrs. Wilkins,” said Mac, moving to interpose his body between her and the prone form on the floor. “I’m terribly sorry, but I’ll need you to make an official identification.”

I lifted my eyebrows at the irony of requiring the next of kin to actually look at the body to be sure of who it was, but that’s what we’d gone back to with transfers. Privacy laws prevented any sort of ID chip or tracking device being put into artificial bodies. In fact, that was one of the many incentives to transfer; you no longer left fingerprints or a trail of identifying DNA everywhere you went.

Cassandra nodded bravely; she was willing to accede to Mac’s request. He stepped aside, a living curtain, revealing the artificial body with the gaping head wound. She looked down at it. I’d expected her to quickly avert her eyes, but she didn’t; she just kept staring.

Finally, Mac said, very gently, “Is that your husband, Mrs. Wilkins?”

She nodded slowly. Her voice was soft. “Yes. Oh, my poor, poor Joshua . . .”

Mac stepped over to talk to the two uniforms, and I joined them. “What do you do with a dead transfer?” I asked. “Seems pointless to call in the medical examiner.”

By way of answer, Mac motioned to the burly man. The man touched his own chest and raised his eyebrows in the classic, “Who, me?” expression. Mac nodded again. The man looked left and right, like he was crossing some imaginary road, and then came over. “Yeah?”

“You seem to be the senior employee here,” said Mac. “Am I right?”

The man nodded. “Horatio Fernandez. Joshua was the boss, but, yeah, I guess I’m in charge until head office sends somebody new out from Earth.”

“Well,” said Mac, “you’re probably better equipped than we are to figure out the exact cause of death.”

Fernandez gestured theatrically at the synthetic corpse, as if it were—well not bleedingly obvious, but certainly apparent.

Mac nodded. “It’s just a bit too pat,” he said, his voice lowered conspiratorially. “Implement at hand, suicide note.” He lifted his shaggy orange eyebrows. “I just want to be sure.”

Cassandra had drifted over without Mac noticing, although of course I had. She was listening in.

“Yeah,” said Fernandez. “Sure. We can disassemble him, check for anything else that might be amiss.”

“No,” said Cassandra. “You can’t.”

“I’m afraid it’s necessary,” said Mac, looking at her. His Scottish brogue always put an edge on his words, but I knew he was trying to sound gentle.

“No,” said Cassandra, her voice quavering. “I forbid it.”

Mac’s voice got a little firmer. “You can’t. I’m legally required to order an autopsy in every suspicious case.”

Cassandra wheeled on Fernandez. “Horatio, I order you not to do this.”

Fernandez blinked a few times. “Order?”

Cassandra opened her mouth to say something more, then apparently thought better of it. Horatio moved closer to her, and put a hulking arm around her small shoulders. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll be gentle.” And then his face brightened a bit. “In fact, we’ll see what parts we can salvage—give them to somebody else; somebody who couldn’t afford such good stuff if it was new.” He smiled beatifically. “It’s what Joshua would have wanted.”

The next day, I was siting in my office, looking out the small window. The dust storm had ended. Out on the surface, rocks were strewn everywhere, like toys on a kid’s bedroom floor. My wrist commlink buzzed, and I looked at it in anticipation, hoping for a new case; I could use the solars. But the ID line said NKPD. I told the device to accept the call, and a little picture of Mac’s red-headed face appeared on my wrist. “Hey, Lomax,” he said. “Come on by the station, would you?”

“What’s up?”

The micro-Mac frowned. “Nothing I want to say over open airwaves.”

I nodded. Now that the Wilkins case was over, I didn’t have anything better to do anyway. I’d only managed about seven billable hours, damnitall, and even that had taken some padding.

I walked into the center along Ninth Avenue, entered the lobby of the police station, traded quips with the ineluctable Huxley, and was admitted to the back.

“Hey, Mac,” I said. “What’s up?”

“ ’Morning, Alex,” Mac said, rolling the R in “Morning.” “Come in; sit down.” He spoke to his desk terminal, and turned its monitor around so I could see it. “Have a look at this.”

I glanced at the screen. “The report on Joshua Wilkins?” I said.

Mac nodded. “Look at the section on the artificial brain.”

I skimmed the text, until I found that part. “Yeah?” I said, still not getting it.

“Do you know what ‘baseline synaptic web’ means?” Mac asked.

“No, I don’t. And you didn’t either, smart-ass, until someone told you.”

Mac smiled a bit, conceding that. “Well, there were lots of bits of the artificial brain left behind. And that big guy at NewYou—Fernandez, remember?—he really got into this forensic stuff, and decided to run it through some kind of instrument they’ve got there. And you know what he found?”

“What?”

“The brain stuff—the raw material inside the artificial skull—was pristine. It had never been imprinted.”

“You mean no scanned mind had ever been transferred into that brain?”

Mac folded his arms across his chest and leaned back in his chair. “Bingo.”

I frowned. “But that’s not possible. I mean, if there was no mind in that head, who wrote the suicide note?”

Mac lifted those shaggy eyebrows of his. “Who indeed?” he said. “And what happened to Joshua Wilkins’s scanned consciousness?”

“Does anyone at NewYou but Fernandez know about this?” I asked.

Mac shook his head. “No, and he’s agreed to keep his mouth shut while we continue to investigate. But I thought I’d clue you in, since apparently the case you were on isn’t really closed—and, after all, if you don’t make money now and again, you can’t afford to bribe me for favors.”

I nodded. “That’s what I like about you, Mac. Always looking out for my best interests.”

Perhaps I should have gone straight to see Cassandra Wilkins, and made sure that we both agreed that I was back on the clock, but I had some questions I wanted answered first. And I knew just who to turn to. Raoul Santos was the city’s top computer expert. I’d met him during a previous case, and we’d recently struck up a small-f friendship—we both shared the same taste in bootleg Earth booze, and he wasn’t above joining me at some of New Klondike’s sleazier saloons to get it. I used my commlink to call him, and we arranged to meet at the Bent Chisel.

The Bent Chisel was a little hellhole off of Fourth Avenue, in the sixth concentric ring of buildings. I made sure I had my revolver, and that it was loaded, before I entered. The bartender was a surly man named Buttrick, a biological who had more than his fair share of flesh, and blood as cold as ice. He wore a sleeveless black shirt, and had a three-day growth of salt-and-pepper beard. “Lomax,” he said, acknowledging my entrance. “No broken furniture this time, right?”

I held up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

Buttrick held up one finger.

“Hey,” I said. “Is that any way to treat one of your best customers?”

“My best customers,” said Buttrick, polishing a glass with a ratty towel, “pay their tabs.”

“Yeah,” I said, stealing a page from Sgt. Huxley’s Guide to Witty Repartee. “Well.” I headed on in, making my way to the back of the bar, where my favorite booth was located. The waitresses here were topless, and soon enough one came over to see me. I couldn’t remember her name offhand, although we’d slept together a couple of times. I ordered a scotch on the rocks; they normally did that with carbon-dioxide ice here, which was much cheaper than water ice on Mars. A few minutes later, Raoul Santos arrived. “Hey,” he said, taking a seat opposite me. “How’s tricks?”

“Fine,” I said. “She sends her love.”

Raoul made a puzzled face, then smiled. “Ah, right. Cute. Listen, don’t quit your day job.”

“Hey,” I said, placing a hand over my heart, “you wound me. Down deep, I’m a stand-up comic.”

“Well,” said Raoul, “I always say people should be true to their innermost selves, but . . .”

“Yeah?” I said. “What’s your innermost self?”

“Me?” Raoul raised his eyebrows. “I’m pure genius, right to the very core.”

I snorted, and the waitress reappeared. She gave me my glass. It was just a little less full than it should have been: either Buttrick was trying to curb his losses on me, or the waitress was miffed that I hadn’t acknowledged our former intimacy. Raoul placed his order, talking directly into the woman’s breasts. Boobs did well in Mars gravity; hers were still perky even though she had to be almost forty.

“So,” said Raoul, looking over steepled fingers at me. “What’s up?” His face consisted of a wide forehead, long nose, and receding chin; it made him look like he was leaning forward even when he wasn’t.

I took a swig of my drink. “Tell me about this transferring game.”

“Ah, yes,” said Raoul. “Fascinating stuff. Thinking of doing it?”

“Maybe someday,” I said.

“You know, it’s supposed to pay for itself within three mears,” he said, “ ’cause you no longer have to pay life-support tax after you’ve transferred.”

I was in arrears on that, and didn’t like to think about what would happen if I fell much further behind. “That’d be a plus,” I said. “What about you? You going to do it?”

“Sure. I want to live forever; who doesn’t? ’Course, my dad won’t like it.”

“Your dad? What’s he got against it?”

Raoul snorted. “He’s a minister.”

“In whose government?” I asked.

“No, no. A minister. Clergy.”

“I didn’t know there were any of those left, even on Earth,” I said.

“He is on Earth, but, yeah, you’re right. Poor old guy still believes in souls.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Really?”

“Yup. And because he believes in souls, he has a hard time with this idea of transferring consciousness. He would say the new version isn’t the same person.”

I thought about what the supposed suicide note said. “Well, is it?”

Raoul rolled his eyes. “You, too? Of course it is! The mind is just software—and since the dawn of computing, software has been moved from one computing platform to another by copying it over, then erasing the original.”

I frowned, but decided to let that go for the moment. “So, if you do transfer, what would you have fixed in your new body?”

Raoul spread his arms. “Hey, man, you don’t tamper with perfection.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Still, how much could you change things? I mean, say you’re a midget; could you choose to have a normal-sized body?”

“Sure, of course.”

I frowned. “But wouldn’t the copied mind have trouble with your new size?”

“Nah,” said Raoul. The waitress returned. She bent over far enough while placing Raoul’s drink on the table that her breast touched his bare forearm; she gave me a look that said, “See what you’re missing, tiger?” When she was gone, Raoul continued. “See, when we first started copying consciousness, we let the old software from the old mind actually try to directly control the new body. It took months to learn how to walk again, and so on.”

“Yeah, I read something about that, years ago,” I said.

Raoul nodded. “Right. But now we don’t let the copied mind do anything but give orders. The thoughts are intercepted by the new body’s main computer. That unit runs the body. All the transferred mind has to do is think that it wants to pick up this glass, say.” He acted out his example, and took a sip, then winced in response to the booze’s kick. “The computer takes care of working out which pulleys to contract, how far to reach, and so on.”

“So you could indeed order up a body radically different from your original?” I said.

“Absolutely,” said Raoul. He looked at me through hooded eyes. “Which, in your case, is probably the route to go.”

“Damn,” I said.

“Hey, don’t take it seriously,” he said, taking another sip, and allowing himself another pleased wince. “Just a joke.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s just that I was hoping it wasn’t that way. See, this case I’m on: the guy I’m supposed to find owns the NewYou franchise here.”

“Yeah?” said Raoul.

“Yeah, and I think he deliberately transferred his scanned mind into some body other than the one that he’d ordered up for himself.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He faked the death of the body that looked like him—and, I think he’d planned to do that all along, because he never bothered to order up any improvements to his face. I think he wanted to get away, but make it look like he was dead, so no one would be looking for him anymore.”

“And why would he do that?”

I frowned, then drank some more. “I’m not sure.”

“Maybe he wanted to escape his spouse.”

“Maybe—but she’s a hot little number.”

“Hmm,” said Raoul. “Whose body do you think he took?”

“I don’t know that, either. I was hoping the new body would have to be at least roughly similar to his old one; that would cut down on the possible suspects. But I guess that’s not the case.”

“It isn’t, no.”

I nodded, and looked down at my drink. The dry-ice cubes were sublimating into white vapor that filled the top part of the glass.

“Something else is bothering you,” said Raoul. I lifted my head, and saw him taking a swig of his drink. A little bit of amber liquid spilled out of his mouth and formed a shiny bead on his recessed chin. “What is it?”

I shifted a bit. “I visited NewYou yesterday. You know what happens to your original body after they move your mind?”

“Sure,” said Raoul. “Like I said, there’s no such thing as moving software. You copy it, then delete the original. They euthanize the biological version, once the transfer is made, by frying the original brain.”

I nodded. “And if the guy I’m looking for put his mind into the body intended for somebody else’s mind, and that person’s mind wasn’t copied anywhere, then . . .” I took another swig of my drink. “Then it’s murder, isn’t it? Souls or no souls—it doesn’t matter. If you shut down the one and only copy of someone’s mind, you’ve murdered that person, right?”

“Oh, yes,” said Raoul. “Deader than Mars itself is now.”

I glanced down at the swirling fog in my glass. “So I’m not just looking for a husband who’s skipped out on his wife,” I said. “I’m looking for a cold-blooded killer.”

I went by NewYou again. Cassandra wasn’t in—but that didn’t surprise me; she was a grieving widow now. But Horatio Fernandez—he of the massive arms—was on duty.

“I’d like a list of all the people who were transferred the same day as Joshua Wilkins,” I said.

He frowned. “That’s confidential information.”

There were several potential customers milling about. I raised my voice so they could hear. “Interesting suicide note, wasn’t it?”

Fernandez grabbed my arm and led me quickly to the side of the room. “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered angrily.

“Just sharing the news,” I said, still speaking loudly, although not quite loud enough now, I thought, for the customers to hear. “People thinking of uploading should know that it’s not the same—at least, that’s what Joshua Wilkins said in that note.”

Fernandez knew when he was beaten. The claim in the putative suicide note was exactly the opposite of NewYou’s corporate position: transferring was supposed to be flawless, conferring nothing but benefits. “All right, all right,” he hissed. “I’ll pull the list for you.”

“Now that’s service,” I said. “They should name you employee of the month.”

He led me into the back room and spoke to a computer terminal. I happened to overhear the passphrase for accessing the customer database ; it was just six words—hardly any security at all.

Eleven people had moved their consciousnesses into artificial bodies that day. I had him transfer the files on each of the eleven into my wrist commlink. “Thanks,” I said, doing that tip-of-the-nonexistent-hat thing I do. Even when you’ve forced a man to do something, there’s no harm in being polite.

If I was right that Joshua Wilkins had appropriated the body of somebody else who had been scheduled to transfer the same day, it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out whose body he’d taken; all I had to do, I figured, was interview each of the eleven.

My first stop, purely because it happened to be the nearest, was the home of a guy named Stuart Berling, a full-time fossil hunter. He must have had some recent success, if he could afford to transfer.

Berling’s home was part of a row of townhouses off Fifth Avenue, in the fifth ring. I pushed his door buzzer, and waited impatiently for a response. At last he appeared. If I wasn’t so famous for my poker face, I’d have done a double take. The man who greeted me was a dead ringer for Krikor Ajemian, the holovid star—the same gaunt features and intense eyes, the same mane of dark hair, the same tightly trimmed beard and mustache. I guess not everyone wanted to keep even a semblance of their original appearance.

“Hello,” I said. “My name is Alexander Lomax. Are you Stuart Berling?”

The artificial face in front of me surely was capable of smiling, but choose not to. “Yes. What do you want?”

“I understand you only recently transferred your consciousness into this body.”

A nod. “So?”

“So, I work for the NewYou—the head office on Earth. I’m here to check up on the quality of the work done by our franchise here on Mars.” Normally, this was a good technique. If Berling was who he said he was, the question wouldn’t faze him. But if he was really Joshua Wilkins, he’d know I was lying, and his expression might betray this. But transfers didn’t have faces that were as malleable; if this person was startled or suspicious, nothing in his plastic features indicated it.

“So?” Berling said again.

“So I’m wondering if you were satisfied by the work done for you?”

“It cost a lot,” said Berling.

I smiled. “Yes, it does. May I come in?”

He considered this for a few moments, then shrugged. “Sure, why not?” He stepped aside.

His living room was full of work tables, covered with reddish rocks from outside the dome. A giant lens on an articulated arm was attached to one of the work tables, and various geologist’s tools were scattered about.

“Finding anything interesting?” I asked, gesturing at the rocks.

“If I was, I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” said Berling, looking at me sideways in the typical paranoid-prospector’s way.

“Right,” I said. “Of course. So, are you satisfied with the NewYou process?”

“Sure, yeah. It’s everything they said it would be. All the parts work.”

“Thanks for your help,” I said, pulling out my PDA to make a few notes, and then frowning at its blank screen. “Oh, damn,” I said. “The silly thing has a loose fusion pack. I’ve got to open it up and reseat it.” I showed him the back of the unit’s case. “Do you have a little screwdriver that will fit that?”

Everybody owned some screwdrivers, even though most people rarely needed them, and they were the sort of thing that had no standard storage location. Some people kept them in kitchen drawers, others kept them in tool chests, still others kept them under the bathroom sink. Only a person who had lived in this home for a while would know where they were.

Berling peered at the little slot-headed screw, then nodded. “Sure,” he said. “Hang on.”

He made an unerring beeline for the far side of the living room, going to a cabinet that had glass doors on its top half, but solid metal ones on its bottom. He bent over, opened one of the metal doors, reached in, rummaged for a bit, and emerged with the appropriate screwdriver.

“Thanks,” I said, opening the case in such a way that he couldn’t see inside. I then surreptitiously removed the little bit of plastic I’d used to insulate the fusion battery from the contact it was supposed to touch. Meanwhile, without looking up, I said, “Are you married, Mr. Berling?” Of course, I already knew the answer was yes; that fact was in his NewYou file.

He nodded.

“Is your wife home?”

His artificial eyelids closed a bit. “Why?”

I told him the honest truth, since it fit well with my cover story: “I’d like to ask her whether she can perceive any differences between the new you and the old.”

Again, I watched his expression, but it didn’t change. “Sure, I guess that’d be okay.” He turned and called over his shoulder, “Lacie!”

A few moments later, a homely flesh-and-blood woman of about fifty appeared. “This person is from the head office of NewYou,” said Berling, indicating me with a pointed finger. “He’d like to speak to you.”

“About what?” asked Lacie. She had a deep, not-unpleasant voice.

“Might we speak in private?” I said.

Berling’s gaze shifted from Lacie to me, then back to Lacie. “Hrmpph,” he said, but then, a moment later, added, “I guess that’d be all right.” He turned around and walked away.

I looked at Lacie. “I’m just doing a routine follow-up,” I said. “Making sure people are happy with the work we do. Have you noticed any changes in your husband since he transferred?”

“Not really.”

“Oh?” I said. “If there’s anything at all . . .” I smiled reassuringly. “We want to make the process as perfect as possible. Has he said anything that’s surprised you, say?”

Lacie crinkled her face. “How do you mean?”

“I mean, has he used any expressions or turns of phrase you’re not used to hearing from him?”

A shake of the head. “No.”

“Sometimes the process plays tricks with memory. Has he failed to know something he should know?”

“Not that I noticed,” said Lacie.

“What about the reverse? Has he known anything that you wouldn’t expect him to know?”

She lifted her eyebrows. “No. He’s just Stuart.”

I frowned. “No changes at all?”

“No, none . . . well, almost none.”

I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t, so I prodded her. “What is it? We really would like to know about any difference, any flaw in our transference process.”

“Oh, it’s not a flaw,” said Lacie, not meeting my eyes.

“No? Then what?”

“It’s just that . . .”

“Yes?”

“Well, just that he’s a demon in the sack now. He stays hard forever.”

I frowned, disappointed not to have found what I was looking for on the first try. But I decided to end the masquerade on a positive note. “We aim to please, ma’am. We aim to please.”

I spent the next several hours interviewing four other people; none of them seemed to be anyone other than who they claimed to be.

Next on my list was Dr. Rory Pickover, whose home was an apartment in the innermost circle of buildings, beneath the highest point of the dome. He lived alone, so there was no spouse or child to question about any changes in him. That made me suspicious right off the bat: if one were going to choose an identity to appropriate, it ideally would be someone without close companions. He also refused to meet me at his home, meaning I couldn’t try the screwdriver trick on him.

I thought we might meet at a coffee shop or a restaurant—there were lots in New Klondike, although none were doing good business these days. But he insisted we go outside the dome—out onto the Martian surface. That was easy for him; he was a transfer now. But it was a pain in the ass for me; I had to rent a surface suit.

We met at the south air lock just as the sun was going down. I suited up—surface suits came in three stretchy sizes; I took the largest. The fish-bowl helmet I rented was somewhat frosted on one side; sandstorm-scouring, no doubt. The air tanks, slung on my back, were good for about four hours. I felt heavy in the suit, even though in it I still weighed only about half of what I had back on Earth.

Rory Pickover was a paleontologist—an actual scientist, not a treasure-seeking fossil hunter. His pre-transfer appearance had been almost stereotypically academic: a round, soft face, with a fringe of graying hair. His new body was lean and muscular, and he had a full head of dark brown hair, but the face was still recognizably his. He was carrying a geologist’s hammer, with a wide, flat blade; I rather suspected it would nicely smash my helmet. I had surreptitiously transferred the Smith & Wesson from the holster I wore under my jacket to an exterior pocket on the rented surface suit, just in case I needed it while we were outside.

We signed the security logs, and then let the technician cycle us through the air lock.

Off in the distance, I could see the highland plateau, dark streaks marking its side. Nearby, there were two large craters and a cluster of smaller ones. There were few footprints in the rusty sand; the recent storm had obliterated the thousands that had doubtless been there earlier. We walked out about five hundred meters. I turned around briefly to look back at the transparent dome and the buildings within.

“Sorry for dragging you out here,” said Pickover. He had a cultured British accent. “I don’t want any witnesses.” Even the cheapest artificial body had built-in radio equipment, and I had a transceiver inside my helmet.

“Ah,” I said, by way of reply. I slipped my gloved hand into the pocket containing the Smith & Wesson, and wrapped my fingers around its reassuring solidity.

“I know you aren’t just in from Earth,” said Pickover, continuing to walk. “And I know you don’t work for NewYou.”

We were casting long shadows; the sun, so much tinier than it appeared from Earth, was sitting on the horizon; the sky was already purpling, and Earth itself was visible, a bright blue-white evening star.

“Who do you think I am?” I asked.

His answer surprised me, although I didn’t let it show. “You’re Alexander Lomax, the private detective.”

Well, it didn’t seem to make any sense to deny it. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

“I’ve been checking you out over the last few days,” said Pickover. “I’d been thinking of, ah, engaging your services.”

We continued to walk along, little clouds of dust rising each time our feet touched the ground. “What for?” I said.

“You first, if you don’t mind,” said Pickover. “Why did you come to see me?”

He already knew who I was, and I had a very good idea who he was, so I decided to put my cards on the table. “I’m working for your wife.”

Pickover’s artificial face looked perplexed. “My . . . wife?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“Sure you do. You’re Joshua Wilkins, and your wife’s name is Cassandra.”

“What? No, I’m Rory Pickover. You know that. You called me.”

“Come off it, Wilkins. The jig is up. You transferred your consciousness into the body intended for the real Rory Pickover, and then you took off.”

“I—oh. Oh, Christ.”

“So, you see, I know. Too bad, Wilkins. You’ll hang—or whatever the hell they do with transfers—for murdering Pickover.”

“No.” He said it softly.

“Yes,” I replied, and now I pulled out my revolver. It really wouldn’t be much use against an artificial body, but until quite recently Wilkins had been biological; hopefully, he was still intimidated by guns. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“Back under the dome, to the police station. I’ll have Cassandra meet us there, just to confirm your identity.”

The sun had slipped below the horizon now. He spread his arms, a supplicant against the backdrop of the gathering night. “Okay, sure, if you like. Call up this Cassandra, by all means. Let her talk to me. She’ll tell you after questioning me for two seconds that I’m not her husband. But—Christ, damn, Christ.”

“What?”

“I want to find him, too.”

“Who? Joshua Wilkins?”

He nodded, then, perhaps thinking I couldn’t see his nod in the growing darkness, said, “Yes.”

“Why?”

He tipped his head up, as if thinking. I followed his gaze. Phobos was visible, a dark form overhead. At last, he spoke again. “Because I’m the reason he’s disappeared.”

“What?” I said. “Why?”

“That’s why I was thinking of hiring you myself. I didn’t know where else to turn.”

“Turn for what?”

Pickover looked at me. “I did go to NewYou, Mr. Lomax. I knew I was going to have an enormous amount of work to do out here on the surface now, and I wanted to be able to spend days—weeks!—in the field, without worrying about running out of air, or water, or food.”

I frowned. “But you’ve been here on Mars for six mears; I read that in your file. What’s changed?”

“Everything, Mr. Lomax.” He looked off in the distance. “Everything!” But he didn’t elaborate on that. Instead, he said. “I certainly know this Wilkins chap you’re looking for; I went to his store, and had him transfer my consciousness from my old biological body into this one. But he also kept a copy of my mind—I’m sure of that.”

I raised my eyebrows. “How do you know?”

“Because my computer accounts have been compromised. There’s no way anyone but me can get in; I’m the only one who knows the passphrase. But someone has been inside, looking around; I use quantum encryption, so you can tell whenever someone has even looked at a file.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how he did it—there must be some technique I’m unaware of—but somehow Wilkins has been extracting information from the copy of my mind. That’s the only way I can think of that anyone might have learned my passphrase.”

“You think Wilkins did all this to access your bank accounts? Is there really enough money in them to make it worth starting a new life in somebody else’s body? It’s too dark to see your clothes right now, but, if I recall correctly, they looked a bit . . . shabby.”

“You’re right. I’m just a poor scientist. But there’s something I know that could make the wrong people rich beyond their wildest dreams.”

“And what’s that?” I said.

He continued to walk along, trying to decide, I suppose, whether to trust me. I let him think about that, and at last, Dr. Rory Pickover, who was now just a starless silhouette against a starry sky, said, in a soft, quiet voice, “I know where it is.”

“Where what is?”

“The alpha deposit.”

“The what?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Paleontologist’s jargon. What I mean is, I’ve found it: I’ve found the mother lode. I’ve found the place where Weingarten and O’Reilly had been excavating. I’ve found the source of the best preserved, most-complete Martian fossils.”

“My God,” I said. “You’ll be rolling in it.”

Perhaps he shook his head; it was now too dark to tell. “No, sir,” he said, in that cultured English voice. “No, I won’t. I don’t want to sell these fossils. I want to preserve them; I want to protect them from these plunderers, these . . . these thieves. I want to make sure they’re collected properly, scientifically. I want to make sure they end up in the best museums, where they can be studied. There’s so much to be learned, so much to discover!”

“Does Wilkins know now where this . . . what did you call it? This alpha deposit is?”

“No—at least, not from accessing my computer files. I didn’t record the location anywhere but up here.” Presumably he was tapping the side of his head.

“But you think Wilkins extracted the passphrase from a copy of your mind?”

“He must have.”

“And now he’s presumably trying to extract the location of the alpha deposit from that copy of your mind.”

“Yes, yes! And if he succeeds, all will be lost! The best specimens will be sold off into private collections—trophies for some trillionaire’s estate, hidden forever from science.”

I shook my head. “But this doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how would Wilkins even know that you had discovered the alpha deposit?”

Suddenly Pickover’s voice was very small. “I’d gone in to NewYou—you have to go in weeks in advance of transferring, of course, so you can tell them what you want in a new body; it takes time to custom-build one to your specifications.”

“Yes. So?”

“So, I wanted a body ideally suited to paleontological work on the surface of Mars; I wanted some special modifications—the kinds of things only the most successful prospectors could afford. Reinforced knees; extra arm strength for moving rocks; extended spectral response in the eyes, so that fossils will stand out better; night vision so that I could continue digging after dark; but . . .”

I nodded. “But you didn’t have enough money.”

“That’s right. I could barely afford to transfer at all, even into the cheapest off-the-shelf body, and so . . .”

He trailed off, too angry at himself, I guess, to give voice to what was in his mind. “And so you hinted that you were about to come into some wealth,” I said, “and suggested that maybe he could give you what you needed now, and you’d make it up to him later.”

Pickover sounded sad. “That’s the trouble with being a scientist; sharing information is our natural mode.”

“Did you tell him precisely what you’d found?” I asked.

“No. No, but he must have guessed. I’m a paleontologist, I’ve been studying Weingarten and O’Reilly for years—all of that is a matter of public record. He must have figured out that I knew where their fossil beds are. After all, where else would a guy like me get money?” He sighed. “I’m an idiot, aren’t I?”

“Well, Mensa isn’t going to be calling you any time soon.”

“Please don’t rub it in, Mr. Lomax. I feel bad enough as it is, and—” His voice cracked; I’d never heard a transfer’s do that before. “And now I’ve put all those lovely, lovely fossils in jeopardy! Will you help me, Mr. Lomax? Please say you’ll help me!”

I nodded. “All right. I’m on the case.”

We went back into the dome, and I called Raoul Santos on my commlink, getting him to meet me at Rory Pickover’s little apartment at the center of town. It was four floors up, and consisted of three small rooms—an interior unit, with no windows.

When Raoul arrived, I made introductions. “Raoul Santos, this is Rory Pickover. Raoul here is the best computer expert we’ve got in New Klondike. And Dr. Pickover is a paleontologist.”

Raoul tipped his broad forehead at Pickover. “Good to meet you.”

“Thank you,” said Pickover. “Forgive the mess, Mr. Santos. I live alone. A lifelong bachelor gets into bad habits, I’m afraid.” He’d already cleared debris off of one chair for me; he now busied himself doing the same with another chair, this one right in front of his home computer.

“What’s up, Alex?” asked Raoul, indicating Pickover with a movement of his head. “New client?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Dr. Pickover’s computer files have been looked at by some unauthorized individual. We’re wondering if you could tell us from where the access attempt was made.”

“You’ll owe me a nice round of drinks at the Bent Chisel,” said Raoul.

“No problem,” I said. “I’ll put it on my tab.”

Raoul smiled, and stretched his arms out, fingers interlocked, until his knuckles cracked. Then he took the now-clean seat in front of Pickover’s computer and began to type. “How do you lock your files?” he asked, without taking his eyes off the monitor.

“A verbal passphrase,” said Pickover.

“Anybody besides you know it?”

Pickover shook his artificial head. “No.”

“And it’s not written down anywhere?”

“No, well . . . not as such.”

Raoul turned his head, looking up at Pickover. “What do you mean?”

“It’s a line from a book. If I ever forgot the exact wording, I could always look it up.”

Raoul shook his head in disgust. “You should always use random passphrases.” He typed keys.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s totally secure,” said Pickover. “No one would guess—”

Raoul interrupted. “Your passphrase being, ‘Those privileged to be present . . .’ ”

I saw Pickover’s jaw drop. “My God. How did you know that?”

Raoul pointed to some data on the screen. “It’s the first thing that was inputted by the only outside access your system has had in weeks.”

“I thought passphrases were hidden from view when entered,” said Pickover.

“Sure they are,” said Raoul. “But the comm program has a buffer; it’s in there. Look.”

Raoul shifted in the chair so that Pickover could see the screen clearly over his shoulder. “That’s . . . well, that’s very strange,” said Pickover.

“What?”

“Well, sure that’s my passphrase, but it’s not quite right.”

I loomed in to have a peek at the screen, too. “How do you mean?” I said.

“Well,” said Pickover, “see, my passphrase is ‘Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes’—it’s from the opening of The Man of Property, the first book of The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy. I love that phrase because of the alliteration—‘privilege to be present,’ ‘family festival of the Forsytes.’ Makes it easy to remember.”

Raoul shook his head in you-can’t-teach-people-anything disgust. Pickover went on. “But, see, whoever it was typed in even more.”

I looked at the glowing string of letters. In full it said: Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen them dine at half past eight, enjoying seven courses.

“It’s too much?” I said.

“That’s right,” said Pickover, nodding. “My passphrase ends with the word ‘Forsytes.’ ”

Raoul was stroking his receding chin. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “The files would unlock the moment the phrase was complete; the rest would just be discarded—systems that principally work with spoken commands don’t require you to press the enter key.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” said Pickover. “But the rest of it isn’t what Galsworthy wrote. It’s not even close. The Man of Property is my favorite book; I know it well. The full opening line is ‘Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage.’ ” Nothing about the time they ate, or how many courses they had.”

Raoul pointed at the text on screen, as if it had to be the correct version. “Are you sure?” he said.

“Of course!” said Pickover. “Galsworthy’s public domain; you can do a search online and see for yourself.”

I frowned. “No one but you knows your passphrase, right?”

Pickover nodded vigorously. “I live alone, and I don’t have many friends; I’m a quiet sort. There’s no one I’ve ever told, and no one who could have ever overheard me saying it, or seen me typing it in.”

“Somebody found it out,” said Raoul.

Pickover looked at me, then down at Raoul. “I think . . .” he said, beginning slowly, giving me a chance to stop him, I guess, before he said too much. But I let him go on. “I think that the information was extracted from a scan of my mind made by NewYou.”

Raoul crossed his arms in front of his chest. “Impossible.”

“What?” said Pickover, and “Why?” said I.

“Can’t be done,” said Raoul. “We know how to copy the vast array of interconnections that make up a human mind, and we know how to reinstantiate those connections in an artificial substrate. But we don’t know how to decode them; nobody does. There’s simply no way to sift through a digital copy of a mind and extract specific data.”

Damn! If Raoul was right—and he always was in computing matters—then all this business with Pickover was a red herring. There probably was no bootleg scan of his mind; despite his protestations of being careful, someone likely had just overheard his passphrase, and decided to go spelunking through his files. While I was wasting time on this, Joshua Wilkins was doubtless slipping further out of my grasp.

Still, it was worth continuing this line of investigation for a few minutes more. “Any sign of where the access attempt was made?” I asked Raoul.

He shook his head. “No. Whoever did it knew what they were doing; they covered their tracks well. The attempt came over an outside line—that’s all I can tell for sure.”

I nodded. “Okay. Thanks, Raoul. Appreciate your help.”

Raoul got up. “My pleasure. Now, how ’bout that drink.”

I opened my mouth to say yes, but then it hit me—what Wilkins must be doing. “Umm, later, okay? I’ve—I’ve got some more things to take care of here.”

Raoul frowned; he’d clearly hoped to collect his booze immediately. But I started maneuvering him toward the door. “Thanks for your help, Raoul. I really appreciate it.”

“Um, sure, Alex,” he said. He was obviously aware he was being given the bum’s rush, but he wasn’t fighting it too much. “Anytime.”

“Yes, thank you awfully, Mr. Santos,” said Pickover.

“No problem. If—”

“See you later, Raoul,” I said, opening the door for him. “Thanks so much.” I tipped my nonexistent hat at him.

Raoul shrugged, clearly aware that something was up, but not motivated sufficiently to find out what. He went through the door, and I hit the button that caused it to slide shut behind him. As soon as it was closed, I put an arm around Pickover’s shoulders, and propelled him back to the computer. I pointed at the line Raoul had highlighted on the screen, and read the ending of it aloud: “ ‘. . . dine at half past eight, enjoying seven courses.’ ”

Pickover nodded. “Yes. So?”

“Numbers are often coded info,” I said. “ ‘Half past eight; seven courses.’ What’s that mean to you?”

“To me?” said Pickover. “Nothing. I like to eat much earlier than that, and I never have more than one course.”

“But it could be a message,” I said.

“From who?”

There was no easy way to tell him this. “From you to you.”

He drew his artificial eyebrows together in puzzlement. “What?”

“Look,” I said, motioning for him to sit down in front of the computer, “Raoul is doubtless right. You can’t sift a digital scan of a human mind for information.”

“But that must be what Wilkins is doing.”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “The only way to find out what’s in a mind is to ask it interactively.”

“But . . . but no one’s asked me my passphrase.”

“No one has asked this you. But Joshua Wilkins must have transferred the extra copy of your mind into a body, so that he could deal with it directly. And that extra copy must be the one that’s revealed your codes to him.”

“You mean . . . you mean there’s another me? Another conscious me?”

“Looks that way.”

“But . . . no, no. That’s . . . why, that’s illegal. Bootleg copies of human beings—my God, Lomax, it’s obscene!”

“I’m going to go see if I can find him,” I said.

“It,” said Pickover, forcefully.

“What?”

“It. Not him. I’m the only ‘him’—the only real Rory Pickover.”

“So what do you want me to do when I find it?”

“Erase it, of course. Shut it down.” He shuddered. “My God, Lomax, I feel so . . . so violated! A stolen copy of my mind! It’s the ultimate invasion of privacy . . .”

“That may be,” I said. “But the bootleg is trying to tell you something. He—it—gave Wilkins the passphrase, and then tacked some extra words onto it, in order to get a message to you.”

“But I don’t recognize those extra words,” said Pickover, sounding exasperated.

“Do they mean anything to you? Do they suggest anything?”

Pickover reread what was on the screen. “I can’t imagine what,” he said, “unless . . . no, no, I’d never think up a code like that.”

“You obviously just did think of it. What’s the code?”

Pickover was quiet for a moment, as if deciding if the thought was worth giving voice. Then: “Well, New Klondike is circular in layout, right? And it consists of concentric rings of buildings. Half past eight—that would be between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, no? And seven courses—in the seventh circle out from the center? Maybe the damned bootleg is trying to draw our attention to a location, a specific place here in town.”

“Between Eighth and Ninth, eh? That’s a rough area. I go to a gym near there.”

“The old shipyards,” said Pickover. “Aren’t they there?”

“Yeah.” I started walking toward the door. “I’m going to investigate.”

“I’ll go with you,” said Pickover.

I looked at him and shook my head. He would doubtless be more of a hindrance than a help. “It’s too dangerous,” I said. “I should go alone.”

Pickover looked for a few moments like he was going to protest, but then he nodded. “All right. I hope you find Wilkins. But if you find another me . . .”

“Yes?” I said. “What would you like me to do?”

Pickover gazed at me with pleading eyes. “Erase it. Destroy it.” He shuddered again. “I never want to see the damned thing.”

I had to get some sleep—damn, but sometimes I do wish I were a transfer. I took the hovertram out to my apartment, and let myself have five hours—Mars hours, admittedly, which were slightly longer than Earth ones—and then headed out to the old shipyards. The sun was just coming up as I arrived there. The sky through the dome was pink in the east and purple in the west.

Some active maintenance and repair work was done on spaceships here, but most of these ships were no longer spaceworthy and had been abandoned. Any one of them would make a good hideout, I thought; spaceships were shielded against radiation, making it hard to scan through their hulls to see what was going on inside.

The shipyards were large fields holding vessels of various sizes and shapes. Most were streamlined—even Mars’s tenuous atmosphere required that. Some were squatting on tail fins; some were lying on their bellies; some were supported by articulated legs. I tried every hatch I could see on these craft, but, so far, they all had their air locks sealed tightly shut.

Finally, I came to a monstrous abandoned spaceliner—a great hull, some three hundred meters long, fifty meters wide, and a dozen meters high. The name Mayflower II was still visible in chipped paint near the bow—which is the part I came across first—and the slogan “Mars or Bust!” was also visible.

I walked a little farther alongside the hull, looking for a hatch, until—

Yes! I finally understood what a fossil hunter felt like when he at last turned up a perfectly preserved rhizomorph. There was an outer airlock door here, and it was open. The other door, inside, was open, too. I stepped through the chamber, entering the ship proper. There were stands for holding space suits, but the suits themselves were long gone.

I walked over to the far end of the room, and found another door—one of those submarine-style ones with a locking wheel in the center. This one was closed, and I figured it would probably have been sealed shut at some point, but I tried to turn the wheel anyway, just to be sure, and damned if it didn’t spin freely, disengaging the locking bolts. I pulled the door open, and stepped through it, into a corridor. The door was on spring-loaded hinges; as soon as I let go of it, it closed behind me, plunging me into darkness.

Of course, I’d brought a flashlight. I pulled it off my belt and thumbed it on.

The air was dry and had a faint odor of decay to it. I headed down the corridor, the pool of illumination from my flashlight going in front of me, and—

A squealing noise. I swung around, and the beam from my flashlight caught the source before it scurried away: a large brown rat, its eyes two tiny red coals in the light. People had been trying to get rid of the rats—and cockroaches and silverfish and other vermin that had somehow made it here from Earth—for mears.

I turned back around and headed deeper into the ship. The floor wasn’t quite level: it dipped a bit to—to starboard, they’d call it, and I also felt that I was gaining elevation as I walked along. The ship’s floor had no carpeting; it was just bare, smooth metal. Oily water pooled along the starboard side; a pipe must have ruptured at some point. Another rat scurried by up ahead; I wondered what they ate here, aboard the dead hulk of the ship.

I thought I should check in with Pickover—let him know where I was. I activated my commlink, but the display said it was unable to connect. Of course: the radiation shielding in the spaceship’s hull kept signals from getting out.

It was getting awfully cold. I held my flashlight straight up in front of my face, and saw that my breath was now coming out in visible clouds. I paused and listened. There was a steady dripping sound: condensation, or another leak. I continued along, sweeping the flashlight beam left and right in good detective fashion as I did so.

There were doors at intervals along the corridor—the automatic sliding kind you usually find aboard spaceships. Most of these panels had been pried open, and I shone my flashlight into each of the revealed rooms. Some were tiny passenger quarters, some were storage, one was a medical facility—all the equipment had been removed, but the examining beds betrayed the room’s function.

I checked yet another set of quarters, then came to a closed door, the first one I’d seen along this hallway.

I pushed the open button, but nothing happened; the ship’s electrical system was dead. Of course, there was an emergency handle, recessed into the door’s thickness. I could have used three hands just then: one to hold my flashlight, one to hold my revolver, and one to pull on the handle. I tucked the flashlight into my right armpit, held my gun with my right hand, and yanked on the recessed handle with my left.

The door hardly budged. I tried again, pulling harder—and almost popped my arm out of its socket. Could the door’s tension control have been adjusted to require a transfer’s strength to open it? Perhaps.

I tried another pull, and to my astonishment, light began to spill out from the room. I’d hoped to just yank the door open, taking advantage of the element of surprise, but the damned thing was only moving a small increment with each pull of the handle. If there was someone on the other side, and he or she had a gun, it was no doubt now leveled directly at the door.

I stopped for a second, shoved the flashlight into my pocket, and—damn, I hated having to do this—holstered my revolver so that I could free up my other hand to help me pull the door open. With both hands now gripping the recessed handle, I pulled with all my strength, letting out an audible grunt as I did so.

The light from within stung my eyes; they’d grown accustomed to the soft beam from the flashlight. Another pull, and the door panel had now slid far enough into the wall for me to slip into the room by turning sideways. I took out my gun, and let myself in.

A voice, harsh and mechanical, but no less pitiful for that: “Please . . .”

My eyes swung to the source of the sound. There was a worktable, with a black top, attached to the far wall. And strapped to that table—

Strapped to that table was a transfer’s synthetic body. But this wasn’t like the fancy, almost-perfect simulacrum that my client Cassandra inhabited. This was a crude, simple humanoid form, with a boxy torso and limbs made up of cylindrical metal segments. And the face—

The face was devoid of any sort of artificial skin. The eyes, blue in color and looking startlingly human, were wide, and the teeth looked like dentures loose in the head. The rest of the face was a mess of pulleys and fiber optics, of metal and plastic.

“Please . . .” said the voice again. I looked around the rest of the room. There was a fusion battery, about the size of a softball, with several cables snaking out of it, including some that led to portable lights. There was also a closet, with a simple door. I pulled it open—this one slid easily—to make sure no one else had hidden in there while I was coming in. An emaciated rat that had been trapped there at some point scooted out of the closet, and through the still partially open corridor door.

I turned my attention to the transfer. The body was clothed in simple denim pants and a T-shirt.

“Are you okay?” I said, looking at the skinless face.

The metal skull moved slightly left and right. The plastic lids for the glass eyeballs retracted, making the non-face into a caricature of imploring. “Please . . .,” he said for a third time.

I looked at the metal restraints holding the artificial body in place: thin nylon bands, pulled taut, that were attached to the tabletop. I couldn’t see any release mechanism. “Who are you?” I said.

I was half-prepared for the answer, of course. “Rory Pickover.” But it didn’t sound anything like the Rory Pickover I’d met: the cultured British accent was absent, and this synthesized voice was much higher pitched.

Still, I shouldn’t take this sad thing’s statement at face value—especially since it had hardly any face. “Prove it,” I said. “Prove you’re Rory Pickover.”

The glass eyes looked away. Perhaps the transfer was thinking of how to satisfy my demand—or perhaps he was just avoiding my eyes. “My citizenship number is 48394432.”

I shook my head. “No good,” I said. “It’s got to be something only Rory Pickover would know.”

The eyes looked back at me, the plastic lids lowered, perhaps in suspicion. “It doesn’t matter who I am,” he said. “Just get me out of here.”

That sounded reasonable on the surface of it, but if this was another Rory Pickover . . .

“Not until you prove your identity to me,” I said. “Tell me where the alpha deposit is.”

“Damn you,” said the transfer. “The other way didn’t work, so now you’re trying this.” The mechanical head looked away. “But this won’t work, either.”

“Tell me where the alpha deposit is,” I said, “and I’ll free you.”

“I’d rather die,” he said. And then, a moment later, he added wistfully, “Except . . .”

I finished the thought for him. “Except you can’t.”

He looked away again. It was hard to feel for something that looked so robotic; that’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it. “Tell me where O’Reilly and Weingarten were digging. Your secret is safe with me.”

He said nothing. The gun in my hand was now aimed at the robotic head. “Tell me!” I said. “Tell me before—”

Off in the distance, out in the corridor: the squeal of a rat, and—

Footfalls.

The transfer heard them, too. Its eyes darted left and right in what looked like panic.

“Please,” he said, lowering his volume. As soon as he started speaking, I put a vertical index finger to my lips, indicating that he should be quiet, but he continued: “Please, for the love of God, get me out of here. I can’t take any more.”

I made a beeline for the closet, stepping quickly in and pulling that door most of the way shut behind me. I positioned myself so that I could see—and, if necessary, shoot—through the gap. The footfalls were growing louder. The closet smelled of rat. I waited.

I heard a voice, richer, more human, than the supposed Pickover’s. “What the—?”

And I saw a person—a transfer—slipping sideways into the room, just as I had earlier. I couldn’t yet see the face from this angle, but it wasn’t Joshua. The body was female, and I could see that she was a brunette. I took in air, held it, and—

And she turned, showing her face now. My heart pounded. The delicate features. The wide-spaced green eyes.

Cassandra Wilkins.

My client.

She’d been carrying a flashlight, which she set now on another, smaller table. “Who’s been here, Rory?” Her voice was cold.

“No one,” he said.

“The door was open.”

“You left it that way. I was surprised, but . . .” He stopped, perhaps realizing to say any more would be a giveaway that he was lying.

She tilted her head slightly. Even with a transfer’s strength, that door must be hard to close. Hopefully she’d find it plausible that she’d given the handle a final tug, and had only assumed that the door had closed completely when she’d last left. Of course, I immediately saw the flaw with that story: you might miss the door not clicking into place, but you wouldn’t fail to notice that light was still spilling out into the corridor. But most people don’t consider things in such detail; I’d hoped she’d buy Pickover’s suggestion.

And, after a moment more’s reflection, she seemed to do just that, nodding her head, apparently to herself, then moving closer to the table onto which the synthetic body was strapped. “We don’t have to do this again,” said Cassandra. “If you just tell me . . .”

She let the words hang in the air for a moment, but Pickover made no response. Her shoulders moved up and down a bit in a philosophical shrug. “It’s your choice,” she said. And then, to my astonishment, she hauled back her right arm and slapped Pickover hard across the robotic face, and—

And Pickover screamed.

It was a long, low, warbling sound, like sheet-metal being warped, a haunted sound, an inhuman sound.

“Please . . .” he hissed again, the same plaintive word he’d said to me, the word I, too, had ignored.

Cassandra slapped him again, and again he screamed. Now, I’ve been slapped by lots of women over the years: it stings, but I’ve never screamed. And surely an artificial body was made of sterner stuff than me.

Cassandra went for a third slap. Pickover’s screams echoed in the dead hulk of the ship.

“Tell me,” she said.

I couldn’t see his face; her body was obscuring it. Maybe he shook his head. Maybe he just glared defiantly. But he said nothing.

She shrugged again; they’d obviously been down this road before. She moved to one side of the bed and stood by his right arm, which was pinned to his body by the nylon strap. “You really don’t want me to do this,” she said. “And I don’t have to, if . . .” She let the uncompleted offer hang there for a few seconds, then: “Ah, well.” She reached down with her beige, realistic-looking hand, and wrapped three of her fingers around his right index finger. And then she started bending it backward.

I could see Pickover’s face now. Pulleys along his jawline were working; he was struggling to keep his mouth shut. His glass eyes were rolling up, back into his head, and his left leg was shaking in spasms. It was a bizarre display, and I alternated moment by moment between feeling sympathy for the being lying there, and feeling cool detachment because of the clearly artificial nature of the body.

Cassandra let go of Pickover’s index finger, and, for a second, I thought she was showing some mercy. But then she grabbed it as well as the adjacent finger, and began bending them both back. This time, despite his best efforts, guttural, robotic sounds did escape from Pickover.

“Talk!” Cassandra said. “Talk!”

I’d recently learned—from Cassandra herself—that artificial bodies had to have pain sensors; otherwise, a robotic hand might end up resting on a heating element, or too much pressure might be put on a joint. But I hadn’t expected such sensors to be so sensitive, and—

And then it hit me, just as another of Pickover’s warbling screams was torn from him. Cassandra knew all about artificial bodies; she sold them, after all. If she wanted to adjust the mind-body interface of one so that pain would register particularly acutely, doubtless she could. I’d seen a lot of evil things in my time, but this was perhaps the worst. Scan a mind, put it in a body wired for hypersensitivity to pain, and torture it until it gave up its secrets. Then, of course, you just wipe the mind, and—

“You will crack eventually, you know,” she said, almost conversationally, as she looked at Pickover’s fleshless face. “Given that it’s inevitable, you might as well just tell me what I want to know.”

The elastic bands that served as some of Pickover’s facial muscles contracted, his teeth parted, and his head moved forward slightly but rapidly. I thought for half a second that he was incongruously blowing her a kiss, but then I realized what he was really trying to do: spit at her. Of course, his dry mouth and plastic throat were incapable of generating moisture, but his mind—a human mind, a mind accustomed to a biological body—had summoned and focused all its hate into that most primal of gestures.

“Very well,” said Cassandra. She gave his fingers one more nasty yank backwards, holding them at an excruciating angle. Pickover alternated screams and whimpers. Finally, she let his fingers go. “Let’s try something different,” she said. She leaned over him. With her left hand, she pried his right eyelid open, and then she jabbed her right thumb into that eye. The glass sphere depressed into the metal skull, and Pickover screamed again. The artificial eye was presumably much tougher than a natural one, but, then again, the thumb pressing into it was also tougher. I felt my own eyes watering in a sympathetic response.

Pickover’s artificial spine arched up slightly, as he convulsed against the two restraining bands. From time to time, I got clear glimpses of Cassandra’s face, and the perfectly symmetrical artificial smile of glee on it was almost sickening.

At last, she stopped grinding her thumb into his eye. “Had enough?” she said. “Because if you haven’t . . .”

Pickover was indeed still wearing clothing; it was equally gauche to walk the streets nude whether you were biological or artificial. But now, Cassandra’s hands moved to his waist. I watched as she undid his belt, unsnapped and unzipped his jeans, and then pulled the pants as far down his metallic thighs as they would go before she reached the restraining strap that held his legs to the table. Transfers had no need for underwear, and Pickover wasn’t wearing any. His artificial penis and testicles now lay exposed. I felt my own scrotum tightening in dread.

And then Cassandra did the most astonishing thing. She’d had no compunctions about bending back his fingers with her bare hands. And she hadn’t hesitated when it came to plunging her naked thumb into his eye. But now that she was going to hurt him down there, she seemed to want no direct contact. She started looking around the room; for a second, she was looking directly at the closet door. I scrunched back against the far wall, hoping she wouldn’t see me. My heart was pounding.

Finally, she found what she was looking for: a wrench, sitting on the floor. She picked it up, raised the wrench above her head, and looked directly into Pickover’s one good eye—the other had closed as soon as she’d removed her thumb, and had never reopened as far as I could tell. “I’m going to smash your ball bearings into iron filings, unless . . .”

He closed his other eye now, the plastic lid scrunching.

“Count of three,” she said. “One.”

“I can’t,” he said in that low volume that served as his whisper. “You’d ruin them, sell them off—”

“Two.”

“Please! They belong to science! To all humanity!”

“Three!”

Her arm slammed down, a great arc slicing through the air, the silver wrench smashing into the plastic pouch that was Pickover’s scrotum. He let out a scream greater than any I’d yet heard, so loud, indeed, that it hurt my ears despite the muffling of the partially closed closet door.

She hauled her arm up again, but waited for the scream to devolve into a series of whimpers. “One more chance,” she said. “Count of three.” His whole body was shaking. I felt nauseous.

“One.”

He turned his head to the side, as if by looking away he could make the torture stop.

“Two.”

A whimper escaped his artificial throat.

“Three!”

I found myself looking away, too, unable to watch as—

“All right!”

It was Pickover’s voice, shrill and mechanical, shouting.

“All right!” he shouted again. I turned back to face the tableau: the human-looking woman with a wrench held up above her head, and the terrified mechanical-looking man strapped to the table. “All right,” he repeated once more, softly now. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

“You’ll tell me where the alpha deposit is?” asked Cassandra, lowering her arm.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

“Where?

Pickover was quiet.

“Where?”

“God forgive me . . .” he said softly.

She began to raise her arm again. “Where?”

“Sixteen-point-four kilometers south-southwest of Nili Patera,” he said. “The precise coordinates are . . .” and he spoke a string of numbers.

“You better be telling the truth,” Cassandra said.

“I am.” His voice was tiny. “To my infinite shame, I am.”

Cassandra nodded. “Maybe. But I’ll leave you tied up here until I’m sure.”

“But I told you the truth! I told you everything you need to know.”

“Sure you did,” said Cassandra. “But I’ll just confirm that.”

I stepped out of the closet, my gun aimed directly at Cassandra’s back. “Freeze,” I said.

Cassandra spun around. “Lomax!”

“Mrs. Wilkins,” I said, nodding. “I guess you don’t need me to find your husband for you anymore, eh? Now that you’ve got the information he stole.”

“What? No, no. I still want you to find Joshua. Of course I do!”

“So you can share the wealth with him?”

“Wealth?” She looked over at the hapless Pickover. “Oh. Well, yes, there’s a lot of money at stake.” She smiled. “So much so that I’d be happy to cut you in, Mr. Lomax—oh, you’re a good man. I know you wouldn’t hurt me!”

I shook my head. “You’d betray me the first chance you got.”

“No, I wouldn’t. I’ll need protection; I understand that—what with all the money the fossils will bring. Having someone like you on my side only makes sense.”

I looked over at Pickover and shook my head. “You tortured that man.”

“That ‘man,’ as you call him, wouldn’t have existed at all without me. And the real Pickover isn’t inconvenienced in the slightest.”

“But . . . torture,” I said. “It’s inhuman.”

She jerked a contemptuous thumb at Pickover. “He’s not human. Just some software running on some hardware.”

“That’s what you are, too.”

“That’s part of what I am,” Cassandra said. “But I’m also authorized. He’s bootleg—and bootlegs have no rights.”

“I’m not going to argue philosophy with you.”

“Fine. But remember who works for whom, Mr. Lomax. I’m the client—and I’m going to be on my way now.”

I held my gun rock-steady. “No, you’re not.”

She looked at me. “An interesting situation,” she said, her tone even. “I’m unarmed, and you’ve got a gun. Normally, that would put you in charge, wouldn’t it? But your gun probably won’t stop me. Shoot me in the head, and the bullet will just bounce off my metal skull. Shoot me in the chest, and at worst you might damage some components that I’ll eventually have to get replaced—which I can, and at a discount, to boot.

“Meanwhile,” she continued, “I have the strength of ten men; I could literally pull your limbs from their sockets, or crush your head between my hands, squeezing it until it pops like a melon and your brains, such as they are, squirt out. So, what’s it going to be, Mr. Lomax? Are you going to let me walk out that door and be about my business? Or are you going to pull that trigger, and start something that’s going to end with you dead?”

I was used to a gun in my hand giving me a sense of power, of security. But just then, the Smith & Wesson felt like a lead weight. She was right: shooting her with it was likely to be no more useful than just throwing it at her. Of course, there were crucial components in an artificial body’s makeup; I just didn’t happen to know what they were, and, anyway, they probably varied from model to model. If I could be sure to drop her with one shot, I’d do it. I’d killed before in self-defense, but . . .

But this wasn’t self-defense. Not really. If I didn’t start something, she was just going to walk out. Could I kill in cold . . . well, not cold blood. But she was right: she was a person, even if Pickover wasn’t. She was the one and only legal instantiation of Cassandra Wilkins. The cops might be corrupt here, and they might be lazy. But even they wouldn’t turn a blind eye on attempted murder. If I shot her, and somehow got away, they’d hunt me down. And if I didn’t get away, she would be attacking me in self-defense.

“So,” she said, at last. “What’s it going to be?”

“You make a persuasive argument, Mrs. Wilkins,” I said in the most reasonable tone I could muster under the circumstances.

And then, without changing my facial expression in the slightest, I pulled the trigger.

I wondered if a transfer’s time sense ever slows down, or if it is always perfectly quartz-crystal timed. Certainly, time seemed to attenuate for me then. I swear I could actually see the bullet as it followed its trajectory from my gun, covering the three meters between the barrel and—

And not, of course, Cassandra’s torso.

Nor her head.

She was right; I probably couldn’t harm her that way.

No, instead, I’d aimed past her, at the table on which the faux Pickover was lying on his back. Specifically, I’d aimed at the place where the thick nylon band that crossed over his torso, pinning his arms, was anchored on the right-hand side—the point where it made a taut diagonal line between where it was attached to the side of the table and the top of Pickover’s arm.

The bullet sliced through the band, cutting it in two. The long portion, freed of tension, flew up and over his torso like a snake that had just had forty thousand volts pumped through it.

Cassandra’s eyes went wide in astonishment that I’d missed her, and her head swung around. The report of the bullet was still ringing in my ears, of course, but I swear I could also hear the zzzzinnnng! of the restraining band snapping free. To be hypersensitive to pain, I figured you’d have to have decent reaction times, and I hoped that Pickover had been smart enough to note in advance my slight deviation of aim before I fired it.

And, indeed, no sooner were his arms free than he sat bolt upright—his legs were still restrained—and grabbed one of Cassandra’s arms, pulling her toward him. I leapt in the meager Martian gravity. Most of Cassandra’s body was made of lightweight composites and synthetic materials, but I was still good old flesh and blood: I outmassed her by at least fifty kilos. My impact propelled her backwards, and she slammed against the table’s side. Pickover shot out his other arm, grabbing Cassandra’s second arm, pinning her backside against the edge of the table. I struggled to regain a sure footing, then brought my gun up to her right temple.

“All right, sweetheart,” I said. “Do you really want to test how strong your artificial skull is?”

Cassandra’s mouth was open; had she still been biological, she’d probably have been gasping for breath. But her heartless chest was perfectly still. “You can’t just shoot me,” she said.

“Why not? Pickover here will doubtless back me up when I say it was self-defense, won’t you, Pickover?”

He nodded. “Absolutely.”

“In fact,” I said, “you, me, this Pickover, and the other Pickover are the only ones who know where the alpha deposit is. I think the three of us would be better off without you on the scene anymore.”

“You won’t get away with it,” said Cassandra. “You can’t.”

“I’ve gotten away with plenty over the years,” I said. “I don’t see an end to that in sight.” I cocked the hammer, just for fun.

“Look,” she said, “there’s no need for this. We can all share in the wealth. There’s plenty to go around.”

“Except you don’t have any rightful claim to it,” said Pickover. “You stole a copy of my mind, and tortured me. And you want to be rewarded for that?”

“Pickover’s right,” I said. “It’s his treasure, not yours.”

“It’s humanity’s treasure,” corrected Pickover. “It belongs to all mankind.”

“But I’m your client,” Cassandra said to me.

“So’s he. At least, the legal version of him is.”

Cassandra sounded desperate. “But—but that’s a conflict of interest!”

“So sue me,” I said.

She shook her head in disgust. “You’re just in this for yourself!”

I shrugged amiably, and then pressed the barrel even tighter against her artificial head. “Aren’t we all?”

“Shoot her,” said Pickover. I looked at him. He was still holding her upper arms, pressing them in close to her torso. If he’d been biological, the twisting of his torso to accommodate doing that probably would have been quite uncomfortable. Actually, now that I thought of it, given his heightened sensitivity to pain, even this artificial version was probably hurting from twisting that way. But apparently this was a pain he was happy to endure.

“Do you really want me to do that?” I said. “I mean, I can understand, after what she did to you, but . . .” I didn’t finish the thought; I just left it in the air for him to take or leave.

“She tortured me,” he said. “She deserves to die.”

I frowned, unable to dispute his logic—but, at the same time, wondering if Pickover knew that he was as much on trial here as she was.

“Can’t say I blame you,” I said again, and then added another “but,” and once more left the thought incomplete.

At last, Pickover nodded. “But maybe you’re right. I can’t offer her any compassion, but I don’t need to see her dead.”

A look of plastic relief rippled over Cassandra’s face. I nodded. “Good man,” I said. I’d killed before, but I never enjoyed it.

“But, still,” said Pickover, “I would like some revenge.”

Cassandra’s upper arms were still pinned by Pickover, but her lower arms were free. To my astonishment, they both moved. The movement startled me, and I looked down, just in time to see them jerking toward her groin, almost as if to protect . . .

I found myself staggering backward; it took a second for me to regain my balance. “Oh, my God . . .”

Cassandra had quickly moved her arms back to a neutral, hanging-down position—but it was too late. The damage had been done.

“You . . .” I said. I normally was never at a loss for words, but I was just then. “You’re . . .”

Pickover had seen it, too; his torso had been twisted just enough to allow him to do so.

“No woman . . .” he began slowly.

Cassandra hadn’t wanted to touch Pickover’s groin—even though it was artificial—with her bare hands. And when Pickover had suggested exacting revenge for what had been done to him, Cassandra’s hands had moved instinctively to protect—

Jesus, why hadn’t I seen it before? The way she plunked herself down in a chair, the fact that she couldn’t bring herself to wear makeup or jewelry on her new body; her discomfort at intimately touching or being intimately touched by men: it was obvious in retrospect.

Cassandra’s hands had moved instinctively to protect her own testicles.

“You’re not Cassandra Wilkins,” I said.

“Of course I am,” said the female voice.

“Not on the inside, you’re not,” I said. “You’re a man. Whatever mind has been transferred into that body is male.”

Cassandra twisted violently. Goddamned Pickover, perhaps stunned by the revelation, had obviously loosened his grip, because she got free. I fired my gun again and the bullet went straight into her chest; a streamer of machine oil, like from a punctured can, shot out, but there was no sign that the bullet had slowed her down.

“Don’t let her get away!” shouted Pickover, in his rough mechanical voice. I swung my gun on him, and for a second I could see terror in his eyes, as if he thought I meant to off him for letting her twist away. But I aimed at the nylon strap restraining his legs and fired. This time, the bullet only partially severed the strap. I reached down and yanked at the remaining filaments, and so did Pickover. They finally broke and this strap, like the first, snapped free. Pickover swung his legs off the table, and immediately stood up. An artificial body had many advantages, among them not being woozy or dizzy after lying down for God-only-knew how many days.

In the handful of seconds it had taken to free Pickover, Cassandra had made it out the door that I’d pried partway open, and was now running down the corridor in the darkness. I could hear splashing sounds, meaning she’d veered far enough off the corridor’s centerline to end up in the water pooling along the starboard side, and I heard her actually bump into the wall at one point, although she immediately continued on. She didn’t have her flashlight, and the only illumination in the corridor would have been what was spilling out of the room I was now in—a fading glow to her rear as she ran along, whatever shadow she herself was casting adding to the difficulty of seeing ahead.

I squeezed out into the corridor. I still had my flashlight in my pocket; I fished it out and aimed it just in front of me; Cassandra wouldn’t benefit much from the light it was giving off. Pickover, who, I noted, had now done his pants back up, had made his way through the half-open door and was now standing beside me. I started running, and he fell in next to me.

Our footfalls now drowned out the sound of Cassandra’s; I guessed she must be some thirty or forty meters ahead. Although it was almost pitch black, she presumably had the advantage of having come down this corridor several times before; neither Pickover nor I had ever gone in this direction.

A rat scampered out of our way, squealing as it did so. My breathing was already ragged, but I managed to say, “How well can you guys see in the dark?”

Pickover’s voice, of course, showed no signs of exertion. “Only slightly better than biologicals can.”

I nodded, although he’d have to have had better vision than he’d just laid claim to in order to see it. My legs were a lot longer than Cassandra’s, but I suspected she could pump them more rapidly. I swung the flashlight beam up, letting it lance out ahead of us for a moment. There she was, off in the distance. I dropped the beam back to the floor in front of me.

More splashing from up ahead; she’d veered off once more. I thought about firing a shot—more for the drama of it, than any serious hope of bringing her down—when I suddenly became aware that Pickover was passing me. His robotic legs were as long as my natural ones, and he could piston them up and down at least as quickly as Cassandra could.

I tried to match his speed, but wasn’t able to. Even in Martian gravity, running fast is hard work. I swung my flashlight up again, but Pickover’s body, now in front of me, was obscuring everything further down the corridor; I had no idea how far ahead Cassandra was now—and the intervening form of Pickover prevented me from acting out my idle fantasy of squeezing off a shot.

Pickover continued to pull ahead. I was passing open door after open door, black mouths gaping at me in the darkness. I heard more rats, and Pickover’s footfalls, and—

Suddenly, something jumped on my back from behind me. A hard arm was around my neck, pressing sharply down on my Adam’s apple. I tried to call out to Pickover, but couldn’t get enough breath out . . . or in. I craned my neck as much as I could, and shone the flashlight beam up on the ceiling, so that some light reflected down onto my back from above.

It was Cassandra! She’d ducked into one of the other rooms, and lain in wait for me. Pickover was no detective; he had completely missed the signs of his quarry no longer being in front of him—and I’d had Pickover’s body blocking my vision, plus the echoing bangs of his footfalls to obscure my hearing. I could see my own chilled breath, but, of course, not hers.

I tried again to call out to Pickover, but all I managed was a hoarse croak, doubtless lost on him amongst the noise of his own running. I was already oxygen-deprived from exertion, and the constricting of my throat was making things worse; despite the darkness I was now seeing white flashes in front of my eyes, a sure sign of asphyxiation. I only had a few seconds to act—

And act I did. I crouched down as low as I could, Cassandra still on my back, her head sticking up above mine, and I leapt with all the strength I could muster. Even weakened, I managed a powerful kick, and in this low Martian gravity, I shot up like a bullet. Cassandra’s metal skull smashed into the roof of the corridor. There happened to be a lighting fixture directly above me, and I heard the sounds of shattering glass and plastic.

I was descending now in maddeningly slow motion, but as soon as I was down, Cassandra still clinging hard to me, I surged forward a couple of paces then leapt up again. This time, there was nothing but unrelenting bulkhead overhead, and Cassandra’s metal skull slammed hard into it.

Again the slow-motion fall. I felt something thick and wet oozing through my shirt. For a second, I’d thought Cassandra had stabbed me—but no, it was probably the machine oil leaking from the bullet hole I’d put in her earlier. By the time we had touched down again, Cassandra had loosened her grip on my neck as she tried to scramble off me. I spun around and fell forward, pushing her backward onto the corridor floor, me tumbling on top of her. Despite my best efforts, the flashlight was knocked from my grip by the impact, and it spun around, doing a few complete circles before it ended up with its beam facing away from us.

I still had my revolver in my other hand, though. I brought it up, and, by touch, found Cassandra’s face, probing the barrel roughly over it. Once, in my early days, I’d rammed a gun barrel into a thug’s mouth; this time, I had other ideas. I got the barrel positioned directly over her left eye, and pressed down hard with it—a little poetic justice.

I said, “I bet if I shoot through your glass eye, aiming up a bit, I’ll tear your artificial brain apart. You want to find out?”

She said nothing. I called back over my shoulder, “Pickover!” The name echoed down the corridor, but I had no idea whether he heard me. I turned my attention back to Cassandra—or whoever the hell this really was. I cocked the trigger. “As far as I’m concerned, Cassandra Wilkins is my client—but you’re not her. Who are you?”

“I am Cassandra Wilkins,” said the voice.

“No, you’re not,” I said. “You’re a man—or, at least, you’ve got a man’s mind.”

“I can prove I’m Cassandra Wilkins,” said the supine form. “My name is Cassandra Pauline Wilkins; my birth name is Collier. I was born in Sioux City, Iowa, on 30 October 2079. I immigrated to New Klondike in July 2102. My citizenship number is—”

“Facts. Figures.” I shook my head. “Anyone could find those things out.”

“But I know stuff no one else could possibly know. I know the name of my childhood pets; I know what I did to get thrown out of school when I was fifteen; I know precisely where the original me had a tattoo; I . . .”

She went on, but I stopped listening.

Jesus Christ, it was almost the perfect crime. No one could really get away with stealing somebody else’s identity—not for long. The lack of intimate knowledge of how the original spoke, of private things the original knew, would soon enough give you away, unless—

Unless you were the spouse of the person whose identity you’d appropriated.

“You’re not Cassandra Wilkins,” I said. “You’re Joshua Wilkins. You took her body; you transferred into it, and she transferred—” I felt my stomach tighten; it really was a nearly perfect crime. “And she transferred nowhere; when the original was euthanized, she died. And that makes you guilty of murder.”

“You can’t prove that,” said the female voice. “No biometrics, no DNA, no fingerprints. I’m whoever I say I am.”

“You and Cassandra hatched this scheme together,” I said. “You both figured Pickover had to know where the alpha deposit was. But then you decided that you didn’t want to share the wealth with anyone—not even your wife. And so you got rid of her, and made good your escape at the same time.”

“That’s crazy,” the female voice said. “I hired you. Why on—on Mars—would I do that, then?”

“You expected the police to come out to investigate your missing-person report; they were supposed to find the body in the basement of NewYou. But they didn’t, and you knew suspicion would fall on you—the supposed spouse!—if you were the one who found it. So you hired me—the dutiful wife, worried about her poor, missing hubby! All you wanted was for me to find the body.”

“Words,” said Joshua. “Just words.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “I don’t have to satisfy anyone else. Just me. I will give you one chance, though. See, I want to get out of here alive—and I don’t see any way to do that if I leave you alive, too. Do you? If you’ve got an answer, tell me—otherwise, I’ve got no choice but to pull this trigger.”

“I promise I’ll let you go,” said Joshua.

I laughed, and the sound echoed in the corridor. “You promise? Well, I’m sure I can take that to the bank.”

“No, seriously,” said Joshua. “I won’t tell anyone. I—”

“Are you Joshua Wilkins?” I asked.

Silence.

“Are you?”

I felt the face moving up and down a bit, the barrel of my gun shifting slightly in the eye socket as it did so. “Yes.”

“Well, rest in peace,” I said, and then, with relish, added, “Josh.”

I pulled the trigger.

The flash from the gun barrel briefly lit up the female, freckled face, which was showing almost human horror. The revolver snapped back in my hand, then everything was dark again. I had no idea how much damage the bullet would do to the brain. Of course, the artificial chest wasn’t rising and falling, but it never had been. And there was nowhere to check for a pulse. I decided I’d better try another shot, just to be sure. I shifted slightly, thinking I’d put this one through the other eye, and—

And Joshua’s arms burst up, pushing me off him. I felt myself go airborne, and was aware of Joshua scrambling to his feet. He scooped up the flashlight, and as he swung it and himself around, it briefly illuminated his face. There was a deep pit where one eye used to be.

I started to bring the gun up and—

And Joshua thumbed off the flashlight. The only illumination was a tiny bit of light, far, far down the corridor, spilling out from the torture room; it wasn’t enough to let me see Joshua clearly. But I squeezed the trigger, and heard a bullet ricochet—either off some part of Joshua’s metal internal skeleton, or off the corridor wall.

I was the kind of guy who always knew exactly how many bullets he had left: two. I wasn’t sure I wanted to fire them both off blindly, but—

I could hear Joshua moving closer. I fired again. This time, the feminine voice box made a sound between an oomph and the word “ouch,” so I knew I’d hit him.

One bullet to go.

I started walking backward—which was no worse than walking forward; I was just as likely to trip either way in this near-total darkness. The body in the shape of Cassandra Wilkins was much smaller than mine—but also, although it shamed the macho me to admit it, much stronger. It could probably grab me by the shoulders and pound my head up into the ceiling, just as I’d pounded hers—and I rather suspect mine wouldn’t survive. And if I let it get hold of my arm, it could probably wrench the gun from me; five bullets hadn’t been enough to stop the artificial body, but one was all it would take to ice me for good.

And so I decided it was better to have an empty gun than a gun that could potentially be turned on me. I held the weapon out in front, took my best guess, and squeezed the trigger one last time.

The revolver barked, and the flare from the muzzle lit the scene, stinging my eyes. The artificial form cried out—I’d hit a spot its sensors felt was worth protecting with a major pain response, I guess. But the being kept moving forward. Part of me thought about turning tail and running—I still had the longer legs, even if I couldn’t move them as fast—but another part of me couldn’t bring myself to do that. The gun was of no more use, so I threw it aside. It hit the corridor wall, making a banging sound, then fell to the deck plates, producing more clanging as it bounced against them.

Of course, as soon as I’d thrown the gun away, I realized I’d made a mistake. I knew how many bullets I’d shot, and how many the gun held, but Joshua probably didn’t; even an empty gun could be a deterrent if the other person thought it was loaded.

We were facing each other—but that was all that was certain. Precisely how much distance there was between us I couldn’t say. Although running produced loud, echoing footfalls, either of us could have moved a step or two forward or back—or left or right—without the other being aware of it. I was trying not to make any noise, and a transfer could stand perfectly still, and be absolutely quiet, for hours on end.

I had no idea how badly I’d hurt him. In fact, given that he’d played possum once before, it was possible the sounds of pain were faked, just to make me think he was damaged. My great grandfather said clocks used to make a ticking sound with the passing of each second; I’d never heard such a thing, but I was certainly conscious of time passing in increments as we stood there, each waiting for the other to make a move.

Suddenly, light exploded in my face. He’d thumbed the flashlight back on, aiming it at what turned out to be a very good guess as to where my eyes were. I was temporarily blinded, but his one remaining mechanical eye responded more efficiently, I guess, because now that he knew exactly where I was, he leapt, propelling himself through the air and knocking me down.

This time, both hands closed around my neck. I still outmassed Joshua and managed to roll us over, so he was on his back and I was on top. I arched my back and slammed my knee into his balls, hoping he’d release me . . .

. . . except, of course, he didn’t have any balls; he only thought he did. Damn!

The hands were still closing around my gullet; despite the chill air, I felt myself sweating. But with his hands occupied, mine were free: I pushed my right hand onto his chest—startled by the feeling of artificial breasts there—and probed around until I found the slick, wet hole my first bullet had made. I hooked my right thumb into that hole, pulled sideways, and brought in my left thumb, as well, squeezing it down into the opening, ripping it wider and wider. I thought if I could get at the internal components, I might be able to rip out something crucial. The artificial flesh was soft, and there was a layer of what felt like foam rubber beneath it—and beneath that, I could feel hard metal parts. I tried to get my whole hand in, tried to yank out whatever I could, but I was fading fast. My pulse was thundering so loudly in my ears I couldn’t hear anything else, just a thump-thump-thumping, over and over again, the thump-thump-thumping of . . .

Of footfalls! Someone was running this way, and—

And the scene lit up as flashlights came to bear on us.

“There they are!” said a harsh, mechanical voice that I recognized as belonging to Pickover. “There they are!”

“NKPD!” shouted another voice I also recognized—a deep, Scottish brogue. “Let Lomax go!”

Joshua looked up. “Back off!” he shouted—in that female voice. “If you don’t, I’ll finish him.”

Through blurring vision, I thought I could see Mac hesitating. But then he spoke again. “If you kill him, you’ll go down for murder. You don’t want that.”

Joshua relaxed his grip a bit—not enough to let me escape, but enough to keep me alive as a hostage, at least a little while longer. I sucked in cold air, but my lungs still felt like they were on fire. In the illumination from the flashlights I could see the improved copy of Cassandra Wilkins’s face craning now to look at McCrae. Transfers didn’t show as much emotion as biologicals did, but it was clear that Joshua was panicking.

I was still on top. I thought if I waited until Joshua was distracted, I could yank free of his grip without him snapping my neck. “Let go of him,” Mac said firmly. It was hard to see him; he was the one holding the light source, after all, but I suddenly became aware that he was also holding a large disk. “Release his neck, or I’ll deactivate you for sure.”

Joshua practically had to roll his green eyes up into his head to see Mac, standing behind him. “You ever use one of those before?” he said, presumably referring to the disrupter disk. “No, I know you haven’t—no transfer has been killed on Mars in weeks, and that technology only just came out. Well, I work in the transference business. I know the disruption isn’t instantaneous. Yes, you can kill me—but not before I kill Lomax.”

“You’re lying,” said McCrae. He handed his flashlight to Pickover, and brought the disk up in front of him, holding it vertically by its two U-shaped handles. “I’ve read the specs.”

“Are you willing to take that chance?” asked Joshua.

I could only arch my neck a bit; it was very hard for me to look up and see Mac, but he seemed to be frowning, and, after a second, he turned partially away. Pickover was standing behind him, and—

And suddenly an electric whine split the air, and Joshua was convulsing beneath me, and his hands were squeezing my throat even more tightly than before. The whine—a high keening sound—must have been coming from the disrupter. I still had my hands inside Joshua’s chest and could feel his whole interior vibrating as his body racked. I yanked my hands out and grabbed onto his arms, pulling with all my might. His hands popped free from my throat, and his whole luscious female form was shaking rapidly. I rolled off him; the artificial body kept convulsing as the keening continued. I gasped for breath and all I could think about for several moments was getting air into me.

After my head cleared a bit, I looked again at Joshua, who was still convulsing, and then I looked up at Mac, who was banging on the side of the disrupter disk. I realized that, now that he’d activated it, he had no idea how to deactivate it. As I watched, he started to turn it over, presumably hoping there was some control he’d missed on the side he couldn’t see—and I realized that if he completed his move, the disk would be aimed backward, in the direction of Pickover. Pickover clearly saw this, too: he was throwing his robot-like arms up, as if to shield his face—not that that could possibly do any good.

I tried to shout “No!” but my voice was too raw, and all that came out was a hoarse exhalation of breath, the sound of which was lost beneath the keening. In my peripheral vision, I could see Joshua lying face down. His vicious spasms stopped as the beam from the disrupter was no longer aimed at him.

But even though I didn’t have any voice left, Pickover did, and his shout of “Don’t!” was loud enough to be heard over the electric whine of the disrupter. Mac continued to rotate the disk a few more degrees before he realized what Pickover was referring to. He flipped the disk back around, then continued turning it until the emitter surface was facing straight down. And then he dropped it, and it fell in Martian slo-mo, at last clanking against the deck plates, a counterpoint to the now-muffled electric whine. I hauled myself to my feet and moved over to check on Joshua, while Pickover and Mac hovered over the disk, presumably looking for the off switch.

There were probably more scientific ways to see if the transferred Joshua was dead, but this one felt right just then: I balanced on one foot, hauled back the other leg, and kicked the son of a bitch in the side of that gorgeous head. The impact was strong enough to spin the whole body through a quarter-turn, but there was no reaction at all from Joshua.

Suddenly, the keening died, and I heard a self-satisfied “There!” from Mac. I looked over at him, and he looked back at me, caught in the beam from the flashlight Pickover was holding. Mac’s bushy orange eyebrows were raised and there was a sheepish grin on his face. “Who’d have thought the off switch had to be pulled out instead of pushed in?”

I tried to speak, and found that I did have a little voice now. “Thanks for coming by, Mac. I know how you hate to leave the station.”

Mac nodded in Pickover’s direction. “Yeah, well, you can thank this guy for putting in the call,” he said. He turned, and faced Pickover full-on. “Just who the hell are you, anyway?”

I saw Pickover’s mouth begin to open in his mechanical head, and a thought rushed through my mind. This Pickover was bootleg. Both the other Pickover and Joshua Wilkins had been correct: such a being shouldn’t exist, and had no rights. Indeed, the legal Pickover would doubtless continue to demand that this version be destroyed; no one wanted an unauthorized copy of himself wandering around.

Mac was looking away from me, and toward the duplicate of Pickover. And so I made a wide sweeping of my head, left to right, then back again. Pickover apparently saw it, because he closed his mouth before sounds came out, and I spoke, as loudly and clearly as I could in my current condition. “Let me do the introductions,” I said, and I waited for Mac to turn back toward me.

When he had, I pointed at Mac. “Detective Dougal McCrae,” I said, then I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and pointed at Pickover. “I’d like you to meet Joshua Wilkins.”

Mac nodded, accepting this. “So you found your man? Congratulations, Alex.” He then looked down at the motionless female body. “Too bad about your wife, Mr. Wilkins.”

Pickover turned to face me, clearly seeking guidance. “It’s so sad,” I said quickly. “She was insane, Mac—had been threatening to kill her poor husband Joshua here for weeks. He decided to fake his own death to escape her, but she got wise to it somehow, and hunted him down. I had no choice but to try to stop her.”

As if on cue, Pickover walked over to the dead artificial body, and crouched beside it. “My poor dear wife,” he said, somehow managing to make his mechanical voice sound tender. He lifted his skinless face toward Mac. “This planet does that to people, you know. Makes them go crazy.” He shook his head. “So many dreams dashed.”

Mac looked at me, then at Pickover, then at the artificial body lying on the deck plating, then back at me. “All right, Alex,” he said, nodding slowly. “Good work.”

I tipped my nonexistent hat at him. “Glad to be of help.”

I walked into the dark interior of the Bent Chisel, whistling.

Buttrick was behind the bar, as usual. “You again, Lomax?”

“The one and only,” I replied cheerfully. That topless waitress I’d slept with a couple of times was standing next to the bar, loading up her tray. I looked at her, and suddenly her name came to me. “Hey, Diana!” I said. “When you get off tonight, how ’bout you and me go out and paint the town . . .” I trailed off: the town was already red; the whole damned planet was.

Diana’s face lit up, but Buttrick raised a beefy hand. “Not so fast, lover boy. If you’ve got the money to take her out, you’ve got the money to settle your tab.”

I slapped two golden hundred-solar coins on the countertop. “That should cover it.” Buttrick’s eyes went as round as the coins, and he scooped them up immediately, as if he was afraid they’d disappear—which, in this joint, they probably would.

“I’ll be in the booth in the back,” I said to Diana. “I’m expecting Mr. Santos; when he arrives, could you bring him over?”

Diana smiled. “Sure thing, Alex. Meanwhile, what can I get you? Your usual poison?”

I shook my head. “Nah, none of that rotgut. Bring me the best scotch you’ve got—and pour it over water ice.”

Buttrick narrowed his eyes. “That’ll cost extra.”

“No problem,” I said. “Start up a new tab for me.”

A few minutes later, Diana came by the booth with my drink, accompanied by Raoul Santos. He took the seat opposite me. “This better be on you, Alex,” said Raoul. “You still owe me for the help I gave you at Dr. Pickover’s place.”

“Indeed it is, old boy. Have whatever you please.”

Raoul rested his receding chin on his open palm. “You seem in a good mood.”

“Oh, I am,” I said. “I got paid this week.”

The man the world now accepted as Joshua Wilkins had returned to NewYou, where he’d gotten his face finished and his artificial body upgraded. After that, he told people it was too painful to continue to work there, given what had happened with his wife. So he sold the NewYou franchise to his associate, Horatio Fernandez. The money from the sale gave him plenty to live on, especially now that he didn’t need food and didn’t have to pay the life-support tax anymore. He gave me all the fees his dear departed wife should have—plus a very healthy bonus.

I’d asked him what he was going to do now. “Well,” he said, “even if you’re the only one who knows it, I’m still a paleontologist—and now I can spend days on end out on the surface. I’m going to look for new fossil beds.”

And what about the other Pickover—the official one? It took some doing, but I managed to convince him that it had actually been the late Cassandra, not Joshua, who had stolen a copy of his mind, and that she was the one who had installed it in an artificial body. I told Dr. Pickover that when Joshua discovered what his wife had done, he destroyed the bootleg and dumped the ruined body that had housed it in the basement of the NewYou building.

Not too shabby, eh? Still, I wanted more. I rented a surface suit and a Mars buggy and headed out to 16.4 kilometers south-southwest of Nili Patera. I figured I’d pick myself up a lovely rhizomorph or a nifty pentaped, and never have to work again.

Well, I looked and looked and looked, but I guess the duplicate Pickover had lied about where the alpha deposit was; even under torture, he hadn’t betrayed his beloved fossils. I’m sure Weingarten and O’Reilly’s source is out there somewhere, though, and the legal Pickover is doubtless hard at work thinking of ways to protect it from looters.

I hope he succeeds. I really do.

But for now, I’m content just to enjoy this lovely scotch.

“How about a toast?” suggested Raoul, once Diana had brought him his booze.

“I’m game,” I said. “To what?”

Raoul frowned, considering. Then his eyebrows climbed his broad forehead, and he said, “To being true to your innermost self.”

We clinked glasses. “I’ll drink to that.”

THE LITTLE GODDESS

Ian McDonald

I remember the night I became a goddess.

The men collected me from the hotel at sunset. I was light-headed with hunger, for the child-assessors said I must not eat on the day of the test. I had been up since dawn; the washing and dressing and making up were a long and tiring business. My parents bathed my feet in the bidet. We had never seen such a thing before and that seemed the natural use for it. None of us had ever stayed in a hotel. We thought it most grand, though I see now that it was a budget tourist chain. I remember the smell of onions cooking in ghee as I came down in the elevator. It smelled like the best food in the world.

I know the men must have been priests but I cannot remember if they wore formal dress. My mother cried in the lobby; my father’s mouth was pulled in and he held his eyes wide, in that way that grown-ups do when they want to cry but cannot let tears be seen. There were two other girls for the test staying in the same hotel. I did not know them; they were from other villages where the devi could live. Their parents wept unashamedly. I could not understand it; their daughters might be goddesses.

On the street, rickshaw drivers and pedestrians hooted and waved at us with our red robes and third eyes on our foreheads. The devi, the devi look! Best of all fortune! The other girls held on tight to the men’s hands. I lifted my skirts and stepped into the car with the darkened windows.

They took us to the Hanumandhoka. Police and machines kept the people out of the Durbar Square. I remember staring long at the machines, with their legs like steel chickens’ and naked blades in their hands. The King’s Own fighting machines. Then I saw the temple and its great roofs sweeping up and up and up into the red sunset and I thought for one instant the upturned eaves were bleeding.

The room was long and dim and stuffily warm. Low evening light shone in dusty rays through cracks and slits in the carved wood; so bright it almost burned. Outside you could hear the traffic and the bustle of tourists. The walls seemed thin but at the same time kilometers thick. Durbar Square was a world away. The room smelled of brassy metal. I did not recognize it then but I know it now as the smell of blood. Beneath the blood was another smell, of time piled thick as dust. One of the two women who would be my guardians if I passed the test told me the temple was five hundred years old. She was a short, round woman with a face that always seemed to be smiling, but when you looked closely you saw it was not. She made us sit on the floor on red cushions while the men brought the rest of the girls. Some of them were crying already. When there were ten of us the two women left and the door was closed. We sat for a long time in the heat of the long room. Some of the girls fidgeted and chattered but I gave all my attention to the wall carvings and soon I was lost. It has always been easy for me to lose myself; in Shakya I could disappear for hours in the movement of clouds across the mountain, in the ripple of the grey river far below, and the flap of the prayer banner in the wind. My parents saw it as a sign of my inborn divinity, one of the thirty-two that mark those girls in whom the goddess may dwell.

In the failing light I read the story of Jayaprakash Malla playing dice with the devi Taleju Bhawani who came to him in the shape of a red snake and left with the vow that she would only return to the Kings of Kathmandu as a virgin girl of low caste, to spite their haughtiness. I could not read its end in the darkness, but I did not need to. I was its end, or one of the other nine low-caste girls in the god-house of the devi.

Then the doors burst open wide and firecrackers exploded and through the rattle and smoke red demons leaped into the hall. Behind them men in crimson beat pans and clappers and bells. At once two of the girls began to cry and the two women came and took them away. But I knew the monsters were just silly men. In masks. These were not even close to demons. I have seen demons, after the rain clouds when the light comes low down the valley and all the mountains leap up as one. Stone demons, kilometers high. I have heard their voices, and their breath does not smell like onions. The silly men danced close to me, shaking their red manes and red tongues, but I could see their eyes behind the painted holes and they were afraid of me.

Then the door banged open again with another crash of fireworks and more men came through the smoke. They carried baskets draped with red sheets. They set them in front of us and whipped away the coverings. Buffalo heads, so freshly struck off the blood was bright and glossy. Eyes rolled up, lolling tongues still warm, noses still wet. And the flies, swarming around the severed neck. A man pushed a basket towards me on my cushion as if it were a dish of holy food. The crashing and beating outside rose to a roar, so loud and metallic it hurt. The girl from my own Shakya village started to wail; the cry spread to another and then another, then a fourth. The other woman, the tall pinched one with a skin like an old purse, came in to take them out, carefully lifting her gown so as not to trail it in the blood. The dancers whirled around like flame and the kneeling man lifted the buffalo head from the basket. He held it up in my face, eye to eye, but all I thought was that it must weigh a lot; his muscles stood out like vines, his arm shook. The flies looked like black jewels. Then there was a clap from outside and the men set down the heads and covered them up with their cloths and they left with the silly demon men whirling and leaping around them.

There was one other girl left on her cushion now. I did not know her. She was of a Vajryana family from Niwar down the valley. We sat a long time, wanting to talk but not knowing if silence was part of the trial. Then the door opened a third time and two men led a white goat into the devi hall. They brought it right between me and the Niwari girl. I saw its wicked, slotted eye roll. One held the goat’s tether, the other took a big ceremonial kukri from a leather sheath. He blessed it and with one fast strong stroke sent the goat’s head leaping from its body.

I almost laughed, for the goat looked so funny, its body not knowing where its head was, the head looking around for the body and then the body realizing that it had no head and going down with a kick, and why was the Niwari girl screaming, couldn’t she see how funny it was, or was she screaming because I saw the joke and she was jealous of that? Whatever her reason, smiling woman and weathered woman came and took her very gently away and the two men went down on their knees in the spreading blood and kissed the wooden floor. They lifted away the two parts of the goat. I wished they hadn’t done that. I would have liked someone with me in the big wooden hall. But I was on my own in the heat and the dark and then, over the traffic, I heard the deep-voiced bells of Kathmandu start to swing and ring. For the last time the doors opened and there were the women, in the light.

“Why have you left me all alone?” I cried. “What have I done wrong?”

“How could you do anything wrong, goddess?” said the old, wrinkled woman who, with her colleague, would become my mother and father and teacher and sister. “Now come along with us and hurry. The King is waiting.”

Smiling Kumarima and Tall Kumarima (as I would now have to think of them) took a hand each and led me, skipping, from the great looming Hanuman temple. A road of white silk had been laid from the foot of the temple steps to a wooden palace close by. The people had been let into the square and they pressed on either side of the processional way, held back by the police and the King’s robots. The machines held burning torches in their grasping hands. Fire glinted from their killing blades. There was great silence in the dark square.

“Your home, goddess,” said Smiling Kumarima, bending low to whisper in my ear. “Walk the silk, devi. Do not stray off it. I have your hand, you will be safe with me.”

I walked between my Kumarimas, humming a pop tune I had heard on the radio at the hotel. When I looked back I saw that I had left two lines of bloody footprints.

You have no caste, no village, no home. This palace is your home, and who would wish for any other? We have made it lovely for you, for you will only leave it six times a year. Everything you need is here within these walls.

You have no mother or father. How can a goddess have parents? Nor have you brothers and sisters. The King is your brother, the kingdom your sister. The priests who attend on you, they are nothing. We your Kumarimas are less than nothing. Dust, dirt, a tool. You may say anything and we must obey it.

As we have said, you will leave the palace only six times a year. You will be carried in a palanquin. Oh, it is a beautiful thing, carved wood and silk. Outside this palace you shall not touch the ground. The moment you touch the ground, you cease to be divine.

You will wear red, with your hair in a topknot and your toe- and fingernails painted. You will carry the red tilak of Siva on your forehead. We will help you with your preparations until they become second nature.

You will speak only within the confines of your palace, and little even then. Silence becomes the Kumari. You will not smile or show any emotion.

You will not bleed. Not a scrape, not a scratch. The power is in the blood and when the blood leaves, the devi leaves. On the day of your first blood, even one single drop, we will tell the priest and he will inform the King that the goddess has left. You will no longer be divine and you will leave this palace and return to your family. You will not bleed.

You have no name. You are Taleju, you are Kumari. You are the goddess.

These instructions my two Kumarimas whispered to me as we walked between kneeling priests to the King in his plumed crown of diamonds and emeralds and pearls. The King namasted and we sat side by side on lion thrones and the long hall throbbed to the bells and drums of Durbar Square. I remember thinking that a King must bow to me but there are rules even for goddesses.

Smiling Kumarima and Tall Kumarima. I draw Tall Kumarima in my memory first, for it is right to give pre-eminence to age. She was almost as tall as a Westerner and thin as a stick in a drought. At first I was scared of her. Then I heard her voice and could never be scared again; her voice was kind as a singing bird. When she spoke you felt you now knew everything. Tall Kumarima lived in a small apartment above a tourist shop on the edge of Durbar Square. From her window she could see my Kumari Ghar, among the stepped towers of the dhokas. Her husband had died of lung cancer from pollution and cheap Indian cigarettes. Her two tall sons were grown and married with children of their own, older than me. In that time she had mothered five Kumari Devis before me.

Next I remember Smiling Kumarima. She was short and round and had breathing problems for which she used inhalers, blue and brown. I would hear the snake hiss of them on days when Durbar Square was golden with smog. She lived out in the new suburbs up on the western hills, a long journey even by the royal car at her service. Her children were twelve, ten, nine, and seven. She was jolly and treated me like her fifth baby, the young favorite, but I felt even then that, like the demon-dancing-men, she was scared of me. Oh, it was the highest honor any woman could hope for, to be the mother of the goddess—so to speak—though you wouldn’t think it to hear her neighbors in the unit, shutting yourself away in that dreadful wooden box, and all the blood, medieval, medieval, but they couldn’t understand. Somebody had to keep the king safe against those who would turn us into another India, or worse, China; someone had to preserve the old ways of the divine kingdom. I understood early that difference between them. Smiling Kumarima was my mother out of duty. Tall Kumarima from love.

I never learned their true names. Their rhythms and cycles of shifts waxed and waned through the days and nights like the faces of the moon. Smiling Kumarima once found me looking up through the lattice of a jali screen at the fat moon on a rare night when the sky was clear and healthy and shouted me away, don’t be looking at that thing, it will call the blood out of you, little devi, and you will be the devi no more.

Within the wooden walls and iron rules of my Kumari Ghar, years become indistinguishable, indistinct. I think now I was five when I became Taleju Devi. The year, I believe, was 2034. But some memories break the surface, like flowers through snow.

Monsoon rain on the steep-sloped roofs, water rushing and gurgling through the gutters, and the shutter that every year blew loose and rattled in the wind. We had monsoons, then. Thunder demons in the mountains around the city, my room flash lit with lightning. Tall Kumarima came to see if I needed singing to sleep but I was not afraid. A goddess cannot fear a storm.

The day I went walking in the little garden, when Smiling Kumarima let out a cry and fell at my feet on the grass and the words to tell her to get up, not to worship me were on my lips when she held, between thumb and forefinger, twisting and writhing and trying to find a place for its mouth to seize: a green leech.

The morning Tall Kumarima came to tell me people had asked me to show myself. At first I had thought it wonderful that people would want to come and look at me on my little jharoka balcony in my clothes and paint and jewels. Now I found it tiresome; all those round eyes and gaping mouths. It was a week after my tenth birthday. I remember Tall Kumarima smiled but tried not to let me see. She took me to the jharoka to wave to the people in the court and I saw a hundred Chinese faces upturned to me, then the high, excited voices. I waited and waited but two tourists would not go away. They were an ordinary couple, dark local faces, country clothes.

“Why are they keeping us waiting?” I asked.

“Wave to them,” Tall Kumarima urged. “That is all they want.” The woman saw my lifted hand first. She went weak and grabbed her husband by the arm. The man bent to her, then looked up at me. I read many emotions on that face; shock, confusion, recognition, revulsion, wonder, hope. Fear. I waved and the man tugged at his wife, look, look up. I remember that against all the laws, I smiled. The woman burst into tears. The man made to call out but Tall Kumarima hastened me away.

“Who were those funny people?” I asked. “They were both wearing very white shoes.”

“Your mother and father,” Tall Kumarima said. As she led me down the Durga corridor with the usual order not to brush my free hand along the wooden walls for fear of splinters, I felt her grip tremble.

That night I dreamed the dream of my life, that is not a dream but one of my earliest experiences, knocking and knocking and knocking at the door of my remembering. This was a memory I would not admit in daylight, so it must come by night, to the secret door.

I am in the cage over a ravine. A river runs far below, milky with mud and silt, foaming cream over the boulders and slabs sheared from the mountainsides. The cable spans the river from my home to the summer grazing and I sit in the wire cage used to carry the goats across the river. At my back is the main road, always loud with trucks, the prayer banners and Kinley bottled water sign of my family’s roadside teahouse. My cage still sways from my uncle’s last kick. I see him, arms and legs wrapped around the wire, grinning his gap-toothed grin. His face is summer-burned brown, his hands cracked and stained from the trucks he services. Oil engrained in the creases. He wrinkles up his nose at me and unhooks a leg to kick my cage forward on its pulley-wheel. Pulley sways cable sways mountains, sky and river sway but I am safe in my little goat-cage. I have been kicked across this ravine many times. My uncle inches forward. Thus we cross the river, by kicks and inches.

I never see what strikes him—some thing of the brain perhaps, like the sickness Lowlanders get when they go up to the high country. But the next I look my uncle is clinging to the wire by his right arm and leg. His left arm and leg hang down, shaking like a cow with its throat cut, shaking the wire and my little cage. I am three years old and I think this is funny, a trick my uncle is doing just for me, so I shake back, bouncing my cage, bouncing my uncle up and down, up and down. Half his body will not obey him and he tries to move forward by sliding his leg along, like this, jerk his hand forward quick so he never loses grip of the wire, and all the while bouncing up and down, up and down. Now my uncle tries to shout but his words are noise and slobber because half his face is paralyzed. Now I see his fingers lose their grip on the wire. Now I see him spin round and his hooked leg come free. Now he falls away, half his body reaching, half his mouth screaming. I see him fall, I see him bounce from the rocks and cartwheel, a thing I have always wished I could do. I see him go into the river and the brown water swallow him.

My older brother came out with a hook and a line and hauled me in. When my parents found I was not shrieking, not a sob or a tear or even a pout, that was when they knew I was destined to become the goddess. I was smiling in my wire cage.

I remember best the festivals, for it was only then that I left the Kumari Ghar. Dasain, at the end of summer, was the greatest. For eight days the city ran red. On the final night I lay awake listening to the voices in the square flow together into one roar, the way I imagined the sea would sound, the voices of the men gambling for the luck of Lakshmi, devi of wealth. My father and uncles had gambled on the last night of Dasain. I remember I came down and demanded to know what all the laughing was about and they turned away from their cards and really laughed. I had not thought there could be so many coins in the world as there were on that table but it was nothing compared to Kathmandu on the eighth of Dasain. Smiling Kumarima told me it took some of the priests all year to earn back what they lost. Then came the ninth day, the great day and I sailed out from my palace for the city to worship me.

I traveled on a litter carried by forty men strapped to bamboo poles as thick as my body. They went gingerly, testing every step, for the streets were slippery. Surrounded by gods and priests and saddhus mad with holiness, I rode on my golden throne. Closer to me than any were my Kumarimas, my two Mothers, so splendid and ornate in their red robes and headdresses and make-up they did not look like humans at all. But Tall Kumarima’s voice and Smiling Kumarima’s smile assured me as I rode with Hanuman and Taleju through the cheering and the music and the banners bright against the blue sky and the smell I now recognized from the night I became a goddess, the smell of blood.

That Dasain the city received me as never before. The roar of the night of Lakshmi continued into the day. As Taleju Devi I was not supposed to notice anything as low as humans but out of the corners of my painted eyes I could see beyond the security robots stepping in time with my bearers, and the streets radiating out from the stupa of Chhetrapati were solid with bodies. They threw jets and gushes of water from plastic bottles up into the air, glittering, breaking into little rainbows, raining down on them, soaking them, but they did not care. Their faces were crazy with devotion.

Tall Kumarima saw my puzzlement and bent to whisper.

“They do puja for the rain. The monsoon has failed a second time, devi.”

As I spoke, Smiling Kumarima fanned me so no one would see my lips move. “We don’t like the rain,” I said firmly.

“A goddess cannot do only what she likes,” Tall Kumarima said. “It is a serious matter. The people have no water. The rivers are running dry.”

I thought of the river that ran far down deep below the house where I was born, the water creamy and gushing and flecked with yellow foam. I saw it swallow my uncle and could not imagine it ever becoming thin, weak, hungry.

“So why do they throw water then?” I asked.

“So the devi will give them more,” Smiling Kumarima explained. But I could not see the sense in that even for goddesses and I frowned, trying to understand how humans were and so I was looking right at him when he came at me.

He had city-pale skin and hair parted on the left that flopped as he dived out of the crowd. He moved his fists to the collar of his diagonally striped shirt and people surged away from him. I saw him hook his thumbs into two loops of black string. I saw his mouth open in a great cry. Then the machine swooped and I saw a flash of silver. The young man’s head flew up into the air. His mouth and eyes went round: from a cry to an oh! The King’s Own machine had sheathed its blade, like a boy folding a knife, before the body, like that funny goat in the Hanumandhoka, realized it was dead and fell to the ground. The crowd screamed and tried to get away from the headless thing. My bearers rocked, swayed, uncertain where to go, what to do. For a moment I thought they might drop me.

Smiling Kumarima let out little shrieks of horror, “Oh! Oh! Oh!” My face was spotted with blood.

“It’s not hers,” Tall Kumarima shouted. “It’s not hers!” She moistened a handkerchief with a lick of saliva. She was gently wiping the young man’s blood from my face when the Royal security in their dark suits and glasses arrived, beating through the crowd. They lifted me, stepped over the body and carried me to the waiting car.

“You smudged my make-up,” I said to the Royal guard as the car swept away. Worshippers barely made it out of our way in the narrow alleys.

Tall Kumarima came to my room that night. The air was loud with helicopters, quartering the city for the plotters. Helicopters, and machines like the King’s Own robots, that could fly and look down on Kathmandu with the eyes of a hawk. She sat on my bed and laid a little transparent blue box on the red and gold embroidered coverlet. In it were two pale pills.

“To help you sleep.”

I shook my head. Tall Kumarima folded the blue box into the sleeve of her robe.

“Who was he?”

“A fundamentalist. A karsevak. A foolish, sad young man.”

“A Hindu, but he wanted to hurt us.”

“That is the madness of it, devi. He and his kind think our kingdom has grown too western, too far from its roots and religious truths.”

“And he attacks us, the Taleju Devi. He would have blown up his own goddess, but the machine took his head. That is almost as strange as people throwing water to the rain.”

Tall Kumarima bowed her head. She reached inside the sash of her robe and took out a second object which she set on my heavy cover with the same precise care as she had the sleeping pills. It was a light, fingerless glove, for the right hand; clinging to its back was a curl of plastic shaped like a very very tiny goat fetus.

“Do you know what this is?”

I nodded. Every devotee doing puja in the streets seemed to own one, right hands held up to snatch my image. A palmer.

“It sends messages into your head,” I whispered.

“That is the least of what it can do, devi. Think of it like your jharoka, but this window opens onto the world beyond Durbar Square, beyond Kathmandu and Nepal. It is an aeai, an artificial intelligence, a thinking-thing, like the machines up there, but much cleverer than them. They are clever enough to fly and hunt and not much else, but this aeai can tell you anything you want to know. All you have to do is ask. And there are things you need to know, devi. You will not be Kumari forever. The day will come when you will leave your palace and go back to the world. I have seen them before you.” She reached out to take my face between her hands, then drew back. “You are special, my devi, but the kind of special it takes to be Kumari means you will find it hard in the world. People will call it a sickness. Worse than that, even . . .”

She banished the emotion by gently fitting the fetus-shaped receiver behind my ear. I felt the plastic move against my skin, then Tall Kumarima slipped on the glove, waved her hand in a mudra and I heard her voice inside my head. Glowing words appeared in the air between us, words I had been painstakingly taught to read by Tall Kumarima.

Don’t let anyone find it, her dancing hand said. Tell no one, not even Smiling Kumarima. I know you call her that, but she would not understand. She would think it was unclean, a pollution. In some ways, she is not so different from that man who tried to harm you. Let this be our secret, just you and me.

Soon after, Smiling Kumarima came to look in on me and check for fleas, but I pretended to be asleep. The glove and the fetus-thing were hidden under my pillow. I imagined them talking to me through the goose down and soft soft cotton, sending dreams while the helicopters and hunting robots wheeled in the night above me. When the latch on her door clicked too, I put on the glove and earhook and went looking for the lost rain. I found it one hundred and fifty kilometers up, through the eye of a weather aeai spinning over east India. I saw the monsoon, a coil of cloud like a cat’s claw hooking up across the sea. There had been cats in the village; suspicious things lean on mice and barley. No cat was permitted in the Kumari Ghar. I looked down on my kingdom but I could not see a city or a palace or me down here at all. I saw mountains, white mountains ridged with grey and blue ice. I was goddess of this. And the heart went out of me, because it was nothing, a tiny crust of stone on top of that huge world that hung beneath it like the full teat of a cow, rich and heavy with people and their brilliant cities and their bright nations. India, where our gods and names were born.

Within three days the police had caught the plotters and it was raining. The clouds were low over Kathmandu. The color ran from the temples in Durbar Square but people beat tins and metal cups in the muddy streets calling praise on the Taleju Devi.

“What will happen to them?” I asked Tall Kumarima. “The bad men.”

“They will likely be hanged,” she said.

That autumn after the executions of the traitors the dissatisfaction finally poured on to the streets like sacrificial blood. Both sides claimed me: police and demonstrators. Others yet held me up as both the symbol of all that was good with our Kingdom and also everything wrong with it. Tall Kumarima tried to explain it to me but with my world mad and dangerous my attention was turned elsewhere, to the huge, old land to the south, spread out like a jeweled skirt. In such a time it was easy to be seduced by the terrifying depth of its history, by the gods and warriors who swept across it, empire after empire after empire. My kingdom had always been fierce and free but I met the men who liberated India from the Last Empire—men like gods—and saw that liberty broken up by rivalry and intrigue and corruption into feuding states; Awadh and Bharat, the United States of Bengal, Maratha, Karnataka.

Legendary names and places. Shining cities as old as history. There aeais haunted the crowded streets like gandhavas. There men outnumbered women four to one. There the old distinctions were abandoned and women married as far up and men as few steps down the tree of caste as they could. I became as enthralled by their leaders and parties and politics as any of their citizens by the aeai-generated soaps they loved so dearly. My spirit was down in India in that early, hard winter when the police and King’s machines restored the old order to the city beyond Durbar Square. Unrest in earth and the three heavens. One day I woke to find snow in the wooden court; the roofs of the temple of Durbar Square heavy with it, like frowning, freezing old men. I knew now that the strange weather was not my doing but the result of huge, slow changes in the climate. Smiling Kumarima came to me in my jharoka as I watched flakes thick and soft as ash sift down from the white sky. She knelt before me, rubbed her hands together inside the cuffs of her wide sleeves. She suffered badly in the cold and damp.

“Devi, are you not one of my own children to me?”

I waggled my head, not wanting to say yes.

“Devi, have I ever, ever given you anything but my best?”

Like her counterpart a season before, she drew a plastic pillbox from her sleeve, set it on her palm. I sat back on my chair, afraid of it as I had never been afraid of anything Tall Kumarima offered me.

“I know how happy we are all here, but change must always happen. Change in the world, like this snow—unnatural, devi, not right—change in our city. And we are not immune to it in here, my flower. Change will come to you, devi. To you, to your body. You will become a woman. If I could, I would stop it happening to you, devi. But I can’t. No one can. What I can offer is . . . a delay. A stay. Take these. They will slow down the changes. For years, hopefully. Then we can all be happy here together, devi.” She looked up from her deferential half-bow, into my eyes. She smiled. “Have I ever wanted anything but the best for you?”

I held out my hand. Smiling Kumarima tipped the pills into my palm. I closed my fist and slipped from my carved throne. As I went to my room, I could hear Smiling Kumarima chanting prayers of thanksgiving to the goddesses in the carvings. I looked at the pills in my hand. Blue seemed such a wrong color. Then I filled my cup in my little washroom and washed them down, two gulps, down, down.

After that they came every day, two pills, blue as the Lord Krishna, appearing as miraculously on my bedside table. For some reason I never told Tall Kumarima, even when she commented on how fractious I was becoming, how strangely inattentive and absent-minded at ceremonies. I told her it was the devis in the walls, whispering to me. I knew enough of my specialness, that others have called my disorder, that that would be unquestioned. I was tired and lethargic that winter. My sense of smell grew keen to the least odor and the people in my courtyard with their stupid, beaming upturned faces infuriated me. I went for weeks without showing myself. The wooden corridors grew sharp and brassy with old blood. With the insight of demons, I can see now that my body was a chemical battlefield between my own hormones and Smiling Kumarima’s puberty suppressants. It was a heavy, humid spring that year and I felt huge and bloated in the heat, a waddling bulb of fluids under my robes and waxy make-up. I started to drop the little blue pills down the commode. I had been Kumari for seven Dasains.

I had thought I would feel like I used to, but I did not. It was not unwell, like the pills had made me feel, it was sensitive, acutely conscious of my body. I would lie in my wooden bed and feel my legs growing longer. I became very very aware of my tiny nipples. The heat and humidity got worse, or so it seemed to me.

At any time I could have opened my palmer and asked it what was happening to me, but I didn’t. I was scared that it might tell me it was the end of my divinity.

Tall Kumarima must have noticed that the hem of my gown no longer brushed the floorboards but it was Smiling Kumarima drew back in the corridor as we hurried towards the darshan hall, hesitated a moment, said, softly, smiling as always,

“How you’re growing, devi. Are you still . . .? No, forgive me, of course. . . . Must be this warm weather we’re having, makes children shoot up like weeds. My own are bursting out of everything they own, nothing will fit them.”

The next morning as I was dressing a tap came on my door, like the scratch of a mouse or the click of an insect.

“Devi?”

No insect, no mouse. I froze, palmer in hand, earhook babbling the early morning news reports from Awadh and Bharat into my head.

“We are dressing.”

“Yes, devi, that is why I would like to come in.”

I just managed to peel off the palmer and stuff it under my mattress before the heavy door swung open on its pivot.

“We have been able to dress ourselves since we were six,” I retorted.

“Yes, indeed,” said Smiling Kumarima, smiling. “But some of the priests have mentioned to me a little laxness in the ritual dress.”

I stood in my red and gold night-robe, stretched out my arms and turned, like one of the trance-dancers I saw in the streets from my litter. Smiling Kumarima sighed.

“Devi, you know as well as I . . .”

I pulled my gown up over my head and stood unclothed, daring her to look, to search my body for signs of womanhood.

“See?” I challenged.

“Yes,” Smiling Kumarima said, “but what is that behind your ear?”

She reached to pluck the hook. It was in my fist in a flick.

“Is that what I think it is?” Smiling Kumarima said, soft smiling bulk filling the space between the door and me. “Who gave you that?”

“It is ours,” I declared in my most commanding voice but I was a naked twelve-year-old caught in wrongdoing and that commands less than dust.

“Give it to me.”

I clenched my fist tighter.

“We are a goddess, you cannot command us.”

“A goddess is as a goddess acts and right now, you are acting like a brat. Show me.”

She was a mother, I was her child. My fingers unfolded. Smiling Kumarima recoiled as if I held a poisonous snake. To her eyes of her faith, I did.

“Pollution,” she said faintly. “Spoiled, all spoiled. Her voice rose. “I know who gave you this!” Before my fingers could snap shut, she snatched the coil of plastic from my palm. She threw the earhook to the floor as if it burned her. I saw the hem of her skirt raise, I saw the heel come down, but it was my world, my oracle, my window on the beautiful. I dived to rescue the tiny plastic fetus. I remember no pain, no shock, not even Smiling Kumarima’s shriek of horror and fear as her heel came down, but I will always see the tip of my right index finger burst in a spray of red blood.

The pallav of my yellow sari flapped in the wind as I darted through the Delhi evening crush-hour. Beating the heel of his hand off his buzzer, the driver of the little wasp-colored phatphat cut in between a lumbering truck-train painted with gaudy gods and apsaras and a cream Government Maruti and pulled into the great chakra of traffic around Connaught Place. In Awadh you drive with your ears. The roar of horns and klaxons and cycle-rickshaw bells assailed from all sides at once. It rose before the dawn birds and only fell silent well after midnight. The driver skirted a saddhu walking through the traffic as calmly as if he were wading through the Holy Yamuna. His body was white with sacred ash, a mourning ghost, but his Siva trident burned blood red in the low sun. I had thought Kathmandu dirty, but Delhi’s golden light and incredible sunsets spoke of pollution beyond even that. Huddled in the rear seat of the autorickshaws with Deepti, I wore a smog mask and goggles to protect my delicate eye make-up. But the fold of my sari flapped over my shoulder in the evening wind and the little silver bells jingled.

There were six in our little fleet. We accelerated along the wide avenues of the British Raj, past the sprawling red buildings of old India, toward the glass spires of Awadh. Black kites circled the towers, scavengers, pickers of the dead. We turned beneath cool neem trees into the drive of a government bungalow. Burning torches lit us to the pillared porch. House staff in Rajput uniforms escorted us to the shaadi marquee.

Mamaji had arrived before any of us. She fluttered and fretted among her birds; a lick, a rub, a straightening, an admonition. “Stand up stand up, we’ll have no slumping here. My girls will be the bonniest at this shaadi, hear me?” Shweta, her bony, mean-mouthed assistant, collected our smog-masks. “Now girls, palmers ready.” We knew the drill with almost military smartness. Hand up, glove on, rings on, hook behind ear jewelry, decorously concealed by the fringed dupattas draped over our heads. “We are graced with Awadh’s finest tonight. Crème de la crème.” I barely blinked as the résumés rolled up my inner vision. “Right girls, from the left, first dozen, two minutes each then on to the next down the list. Quick smart!” Mamaji clapped her hands and we formed a line. A band struck a medley of musical numbers from Town and Country, the soap opera that was a national obsession in sophisticated Awadh. There we stood, twelve little wives-a-waiting while the Rajput servants hauled up the rear of the pavilion.

Applause broke around us like rain. A hundred men stood in a rough semi-circle, clapping enthusiastically, faces bright in the light from the carnival lanterns.

When I arrived in Awadh, the first thing I noticed was the people. People pushing people begging people talking people rushing past each other without a look or a word or an acknowledgement. I had thought Kathmandu held more people than a mind could imagine. I had not seen Old Delhi. The constant noise, the everyday callousness, the lack of any respect appalled me. You could vanish into that crowd of faces like a drop of rain into a tank. The second thing I noticed was that the faces were all men. It was indeed as my palmer had whispered to me. There were four men for every woman.

Fine men good men clever men rich men, men of ambition and career and property, men of power and prospects. Men with no hope of ever marrying within their own class and caste. Men with little prospect of marrying ever. Shaadi had once been the word for wedding festivities, the groom on his beautiful white horse, so noble, the bride shy and lovely behind her golden veil. Then it became a name for dating agencies: lovely wheat-complexioned Agarwal, U.S.-university MBA, seeks same civil service/military for matrimonials. Now it was a bride-parade, a marriage-market for lonely men with large dowries. Dowries that paid a hefty commission to the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency.

The Lovely Girls lined up on the left side of the Silken Wall that ran the length of the bungalow garden. The first twelve men formed up on the right. They plumped and preened in their finery but I could see they were nervous. The partition was no more than a row of saris pinned to a line strung between plastic uprights, fluttering in the rising evening wind. A token of decorum. Purdah. They were not even silk.

Reshmi was first to walk and talk the Silken Wall. She was a Yadav country girl from Uttaranchal, big-handed and big-faced. A peasant’s daughter. She could cook and sew and sing, do household accounts, manage both domestic aeais and human staff. Her first prospective was a weasely man with a weak jaw in government whites and a Nehru cap. He had bad teeth. Never good. Any one of us could have told him he was wasting his shaadi fee, but they namasted to each other and stepped out, regulation three paces between them. At the end of the walk Reshmi would loop back to rejoin the tail of the line and meet her next prospective. On big shaadis like this my feet would bleed by the end of the night. Red footprints on the marble floors of Mamaji’s courtyard haveli.

I stepped out with Ashok, a big globe of a thirty-two-year-old who wheezed a little as he rolled along. He was dressed in a voluminous white kurta, the fashion this season though he was fourth generation Punjabi. His grooming amounted to an uncontrollable beard and oily hair that smelled of too much Dapper Deepak pomade. Even before he namasted I knew it was his first shaadi. I could see his eyeballs move as he read my résumé, seeming to hover before him. I did not need to read his to know he was a dataraja, for he talked about nothing but himself and the brilliant things he was doing; the spec of some new protein processor array, the ’ware he was breeding, the aeais he was nurturing in his stables, his trips to Europe and the United States where everyone knew his name and great people were glad to welcome him.

“Of course, Awadh’s never going to ratify the Hamilton Acts—no matter how close Shrivastava Minister is to President McAuley—but if it did, if we allow ourselves that tiny counterfactual—well, it’s the end of the economy: Awadh is IT, there are more graduates in Mehrauli than there are in the whole of California. The Americans may go on about the mockery of a human soul, but they need our Level 2.8s—you know what that is? An aeai can pass as human 99 percent of the time—because everybody know no one does quantum crypto like us, so I’m not worrying about having to close up the data-haven, and even if they do, well, there’s always Bharat—I cannot see the Ranas bowing down to Washington, not when 25 percent of their forex comes out of licensing deals from Town and Country . . . and that’s hundred percent aeai generated. . . .”

He was a big affable clown of a man with wealth that would have bought my Palace in Durbar Square and every priest in it and I found myself praying to Taleju to save me from marrying such a bore. He stopped in mid-stride, so abruptly I almost tripped.

“You must keep walking,” I hissed. “That is the rule.”

“Wow,” he said, standing stupid, eyes round in surprise. Couples piled up behind us. In my peripheral vision I could see Mamaji making urgent, threatening gestures. Get him on. “Oh wow. You’re an ex-Kumari.”

“Please, you are drawing attention to yourself.” I would have tugged his arm, but that would have been an even more deadly error.

“What was it like, being a goddess?”

“I am just a woman now, like any other,” I said. Ashok gave a soft harrumph, as if he had achieved a very small enlightenment, and walked on, hands clasped behind his back. He may have spoken to me once, twice before we reached the end of the Silk Wall and parted: I did not hear him, I did not hear the music, I did not even hear the eternal thunder of Delhi’s traffic. The only sound in my head was the high-pitched sound between my eyes of needing to cry but knowing I could not. Fat, selfish, gabbling, Ashok had sent me back to the night I ceased to be a goddess.

Bare soles slapping the polished wood of the Kumari Ghar’s corridors. Running feet, muted shouts growing ever more distant as I knelt, still unclothed for my Kumarima’s inspection, looking at the blood drip from my smashed fingertip onto the painted wood floor. I remember no pain; rather, I looked at the pain from a separate place, as if the girl who felt it were another person. Far far away, Smiling Kumarima stood, held in time, hands to mouth in horror and guilt. The voices faded and the bells of Durbar Square began to swing and toll, calling to their brothers across the city of Kathmandu until the valley rang from Bhaktapur to Trisuli Bazaar for the fall of the Kumari Devi.

In the space of a single night, I became human again. I was taken to the Hanumandhoka—walking this time like anyone else on the paving stones—where the priests said a final puja. I handed back my red robes and jewels and boxes of make-up, all neatly folded and piled. Tall Kumarima had got me human clothes. I think she had been keeping them for some time. The King did not come to say goodbye to me. I was no longer his sister. But his surgeons had put my finger back together well, though they warned that it would always feel a little numb and inflexible.

I left at dawn, while the street cleaners were washing down the stones of Durbar Square beneath the apricot sky, in a smooth-running Royal Mercedes with darkened windows. My Kumarimas made their farewells at the palace gate. Tall Kumarima hugged me briefly to her.

“Oh, there was so much more I needed to do. Well, it will have to suffice.”

I felt her quivering against me, like a bird too tightly gripped in a hand. Smiling Kumarima could not look at me. I did not want her to.

As the car took me across the waking city I tried to understand how it felt to be human. I had been a goddess so long I could hardly remember feeling any other way, but it seemed so little different that I began to suspect that you are divine because people say you are. The road climbed through green suburbs, winding now, growing narrower, busy with brightly decorated buses and trucks. The houses grew leaner and meaner, to roadside hovels and chai-stalls and then we were out of the city—the first time since I had arrived seven years before. I pressed my hands and face to the glass and looked down on Kathmandu beneath its shroud of ochre smog. The car joined the long line of traffic along the narrow, rough road that clung to the valley side. Above me, mountains dotted with goatherd shelters and stone shrines flying tattered prayer banners. Below me, rushing cream-brown water. Nearly there. I wondered how far behind me on this road were those other government cars, carrying the priests sent to seek out little girls bearing the thirty-two signs of perfection. Then the car rounded the bend in the valley and I was home, Shakya, its truck halts and gas station, the shops and the temple of Padma Narteswara, the dusty trees with white rings painted around their trunks and between them the stone wall and arch where the steps led down through the terraces to my house, and in that stone-framed rectangle of sky, my parents, standing there side by side, pressing closely, shyly, against each other as I had last seen them lingering in the courtyard of the Kumari Ghar.

Mamaji was too respectable to show anything like outright anger, but she had ways of expressing her displeasure. The smallest crust of roti at dinner, the meanest scoop of dhal. New girls coming, make room make room—me to the highest, stuffiest room, furthest from the cool of the courtyard pool.

“He asked for my palmer address,” I said.

“If I had a rupee for every palmer address,” Mamaji said. “He was only interested in you as a novelty, dearie. Anthropology. He was never going to make a proposition. No, you can forget right about him.”

But my banishment to the tower was a small punishment for it lifted me above the noise and fumes of the old city. If portions were cut, small loss: the food had been dreadful every day of the almost two years I had been at the haveli. Through the wooden lattice, beyond the water tanks and satellite dishes and kids playing rooftop cricket, I could see the ramparts of the Red Fort, the minarets and domes of the Jami Masjid and beyond them, the glittering glass and titanium spires of New Delhi. And higher than any of them, the flocks of pigeons from the kabooter lofts, clay pipes bound to their legs so they fluted and sang as they swirled over Chandni Chowk. And Mamaji’s worldly wisdom made her a fool this time, for Ashok was surreptitiously messaging me, sometimes questions about when I was divine, mostly about himself and his great plans and ideas. His lilac-colored words, floating in my inner-vision against the intricate silhouettes of my jali screens, were bright pleasures in those high summer days. I discovered the delight of political argument; against Ashok’s breezy optimism, I set my readings of the news channels. From the opinion columns it seemed inevitable to me that Awadh, in exchange for Favored Nation status from the United States of America, would ratify the Hamilton Acts and outlaw all aeais more intelligent than a langur monkey. I told none of our intercourse to Mamaji. She would have forbidden it, unless he made a proposal.

On an evening of pre-monsoon heat, when the boys were too tired even for cricket and the sky was an upturned brass bowl, Mamaji came to my turret on the top of the old merchant’s haveli. Against propriety, the jalis were thrown open, my gauze curtains stirred in the swirls of heat rising from the alleys below.

“Still you are eating my bread.” She prodded my thali with her foot. It was too hot for food, too hot for anything other than lying and waiting for the rain and the cool, if it came at all this year. I could hear the voices of the girls down in the courtyard as they kicked their legs in the pool. This day I would have loved to be sitting along the tiled edge with them but I was piercingly aware that I had lived in the haveli of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency longer than any of them. I did not want to be their Kumarima. And when the whispers along the cool marble corridors made them aware of my childhood, they would ask for small pujas, little miracles to help them find the right man. I no longer granted them, not because I feared that I had no power any more—that I never had—but that it went out from me and into them and that was why they got the bankers and television executives and Mercedes salesmen.

“I should have left you in that Nepalese sewer. Goddess! Hah! And me fooled into thinking you were a prize asset. Men! They may have share options and Chowpatty Beach apartments but deep down, they’re as superstitious as any back-country yadav.”

“I’m sorry, Mamaji,” I said, turning my eyes away.

“Can you help it? You were only born perfect in thirty-two different ways. Now you listen, cho chweet. A man came to call on me.”

Men always came calling, glancing up at the giggles and rustles of the Lovely Girls peeping through the jalis as he waited in the cool of the courtyard for Shweta to present him to Mamaji. Men with offers of marriage, men with prenuptial contracts, men with dowry down-payments. Men asking for special, private viewings. This man who had called on Mamaji had come for one of these.

“Fine young man, lovely young man, just twenty. Father’s big in water. He has requested a private rendezvous, with you.”

I was instantly suspicious, but I had learned among the Lovely Girls of Delhi, even more than among the priests and Kumarimas of Kathmandu, to let nothing show on my painted face.

“Me? Such an honor . . . and him only twenty . . . and a good family too, so well connected.”

“He is a Brahmin.”

“I know I am only a Shakya. . . .”

“You don’t understand. He is a Brahmin.”

There was so much more I needed to do, Tall Kumarima had said as the royal car drove away from the carved wooden gates of the Kumari Ghar. One whisper through the window would have told me everything: the curse of the Kumari.

Shakya hid from me. People crossed the street to find things to look at and do. Old family friends nodded nervously before remembering important business they had to be about. The chai-dhabas gave me free tea so I would feel uncomfortable and leave. Truckers were my friends, bus-drivers and long-haulers pulled in at the biodiesel stations. They must have wondered who was this strange twelve-year-old girl, hanging around truck-halts. I do not doubt some of them thought more. Village by village, town by town the legend spread up and down the north road. Ex-Kumari.

Then the accidents started. A boy lost half his hand in the fan belt of a Nissan engine. A teenager drank bad rakshi and died of alcohol poisoning. A man slipped between two passing trucks and was crushed. The talk in the chai-dhabas and the repair shops was once again of my uncle who fell to his death while the little goddess-to-be bounced in her wire cradle laughing and laughing and laughing.

I stopped going out. As winter took hold over the head-country of the Kathmandu valley, whole weeks passed when I did not leave my room. Days slipped away watching sleet slash past my window, the prayer banners bent almost horizontal in the wind, the wire of the cableway bouncing. Beneath it, the furious, flooding river. In that season the voices of the demons spoke loud from the mountain, telling me the most hateful things about faithless Kumaris who betray the sacred heritage of their devi.

On the shortest day of the year the bride buyer came through Shakya. I heard a voice I did not recognize talking over the television that burbled away day and night in the main room. I opened the door just enough to admit a voice and gleam of firelight.

“I wouldn’t take the money off you. You’re wasting your time here in Nepal. Everyone knows the story, and even if they pretend they don’t believe, they don’t act that way.”

I heard my father’s voice but could not make out his words. The bride buyer said,

“What might work is down south, Bharat or Awadh. They’re so desperate in Delhi they’ll even take Untouchables. They’re a queer lot, those Indians; some of them might even like the idea of marrying a goddess, like a status thing. But I can’t take her, she’s too young, they’ll send her straight back at the border. They’ve got rules. In India, would you believe? Call me when she turns fourteen.”

Two days after my fourteenth birthday, the bride buyer returned to Shakya and I left with him in his Japanese SUV. I did not like his company or trust his hands, so I slept or feigned sleep while he drove down into the lowlands of the Terai. When I woke I was well over the border into my childhood land of wonder. I had thought the bride-buyer would take me to ancient, holy Varanasi, the new capital of the Bharat’s dazzling Rana dynasty, but the Awadhis, it seemed, were less in awe of Hindu superstitions. So we came to the vast, incoherent roaring sprawl of the two Delhis, like twin hemispheres of a brain, and to the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency. Where the marriageable men were not so twenty-forties sophisticated, at least in the matter of ex-devis. Where the only ones above the curse of the Kumari were those held in even greater superstitious awe: the genetically engineered children known as Brahmins.

Wisdom was theirs, health was theirs, beauty and success and status assured and a wealth that could never be devalued or wasted or gambled away, for it was worked into every twist of their DNA. The Brahmin children of India’s super-elite enjoyed long life—twice that of their parents—but at a price. They were indeed the twice-born, a caste above any other, so high as to be new Untouchables. A fitting partner for a former goddess: a new god.

Gas flares from the heavy industries of Tughluq lit the western horizon. From the top of the high tower I could read New Delhi’s hidden geometries, the necklaces of light around Connaught Place, the grand glowing net of the dead Raj’s monumental capital, the incoherent glow of the old city to the north. The penthouse at the top of the sweeping wing-curve of Narayan Tower was glass; glass walls, glass roof, beneath me, polished obsidian that reflected the night sky. I walked with stars at my head and feet. It was a room designed to awe and intimidate. It was nothing to one who had witnessed demons strike the heads from goats, who had walked on bloody silk to her own palace. It was nothing to one dressed, as the messenger had required, in the full panoply of the goddess. Red robe, red nails, red lips, red eye of Siva painted above my own black kohled eyes, fake-gold headdress hung with costume pearls, my fingers dripped gaudy rings from the cheap jewelry sellers of Kinari Bazaar, a light chain of real gold ran from my nose stud to my ear-ring; I was once again Kumari Devi. My demons rustled inside me.

Mamaji had drilled me as we scooted from old city to new. She had swathed me in a light voile chador, to protect my make-up she said; in truth, to conceal me from the eyes of the street. The girls had called blessings and prayers after me as the phatphat scuttled out of the haveli’s courtyard.

“You will say nothing. If he speaks to you, you duck your head like a good Hindu girl. If anything has to be said, I will say it. You may have been a goddess but he is a Brahmin. He could buy your pissy palace a dozen times over. Above all, do not let your eyes betray you. The eyes say nothing. They taught you that at least in that Kathmandu, didn’t they? Now come on cho chweet, let’s make a match.”

The glass penthouse was lit only by city-glow and concealed lamps that gave off an uncomfortable blue light. Ved Prakash Narayan sat on a musnud, a slab of unadorned black marble. Its simplicity spoke of wealth and power beneath any ornate jewelry. My bare feet whispered on the star-filled glass. Blue light welled up as I approached the dais. Ved Prakash Narayan was dressed in a beautifully worked long sherwani coat and traditional tight churidar pajamas. He leaned forward into the light and it took every word of control Tall Kumarima had ever whispered to me to hold the gasp.

A ten-year-old boy sat on the throne of the Mughal Emperor.

Live twice as long, but age half as fast. The best deal Kolkata’s genetic engineers could strike with four million years of human DNA. A child husband for a once-child goddess. Except this was no child. In legal standing, experience, education, taste, and emotions, this was a twenty-year-old man, every way except the physical.

His feet did not touch the floor.

“Quite, quite extraordinary.” His voice was a boy’s. He slipped from his throne, walked around me, studying me as if I were an artifact in a museum. He was a head shorter than me. “Yes, this is indeed special. What is the settlement?”

Mamaji’s voice from the door named a number. I obeyed my training and tried not to catch his eye as he stalked around me.

“Acceptable. My man will deliver the prenuptial before the end of the week. A goddess. My goddess.”

Then I caught his eyes and I saw where all his missing years were. They were blue, alien blue, and colder than any of the lights of his tower-top palace.

These Brahmins are worse than any of us when it comes to social climbing, Ashok messaged me in my aerie atop the shaadi haveli, prison turned bridal boudoir. Castes within castes within castes. His words hung in the air over the hazy ramparts of the red fort before dissolving into the dashings of the musical pigeons. Your children will be blessed.

Until then I had not thought about the duties of a wife with a ten-year-old boy.

On a day of staggering heat I was wed to Ved Prakash Narayan in a climate-control bubble on the manicured green before Emperor Humayun’s tomb. As on the night I was introduced, I was dressed as Kumari. My husband, veiled in gold, arrived perched on top of a white horse followed by a band and a dozen elephants with colored patterns worked on their trunks. Security robots patrolled the grounds as astrologers proclaimed favorable auspices and an old-type brahmin in his red cord blessed our union. Rose petals fluttered around me, the proud father and mother distributed gems from Hyderabad to their guests, my shaadi sisters wept with joy and loss, Mamaji sniffed back a tear and vile old Shweta went round hoarding the free and over-flowing food from the buffet. As we were applauded and played down the receiving line, I noticed all the other somber-faced ten-year-old boys with their beautiful, tall foreign wives. I reminded myself who was the child bride here. But none of them were goddesses.

I remember little of the grand durbar that followed except face after face after face, mouth after mouth after mouth opening, making noise, swallowing glass after glass after glass of French champagne. I did not drink for I do not have the taste for alcohol, though my young husband in his raja finery took it, and smoked big cigars too. As we got into the car—the honeymoon was another Western tradition we were adopting—I asked if anyone had remembered to inform my parents.

We flew to Mumbai on the company tilt-jet. I had never before flown in an aircraft. I pressed my hands, still hennaed with the patterns of my mehndi, on either side of the window as if to hold in every fleeting glimpse of Delhi falling away beneath me. It was every divine vision I had ever had looking down from my bed in the Kumari Ghar on to India. This was indeed the true vehicle of a goddess. But the demons whispered as we turned in the air over the towers of New Delhi, you will be old and withered when he is still in his prime.

When the limousine from the airport turned on to Marine Drive and I saw the Arabian Sea glinting in the city-light, I asked my husband to stop the car so I could look and wonder. I felt tears start in my eyes and thought, the same water in it is in you. But the demons would not let me be: you are married to something that is not human.

My honeymoon was wonder upon wonder: our penthouse apartment with the glass walls that opened on sunset over Chowpatty Beach. The new splendid outfits we wore as we drove along the boulevards, where stars and movie-gods smiled down and blessed us in the virtual sight of our palmers. Color, motion, noise, chatter; people and people and people. Behind it all, the wash and hush and smell of the alien sea.

Chambermaids prepared me for the wedding night. They worked with baths and balms, oils and massages, extending the now-fading henna tracery on my hands up my arms, over my small upright breasts, down the manipuraka chakra over my navel. They wove gold ornaments into my hair, slipped bracelets on my arms and rings on my fingers and toes, dusted and powdered my dark Nepali skin. They purified me with incense smoke and flower petals, they shrouded me in veils and silks as fine as rumors. They lengthened my lashes and kohled my eyes and shaped my nails to fine, painted points.

“What do I do? I’ve never even touched a man,” I asked, but they namasted and slipped away without answer. But the older—the Tall Kumarima, as I thought of her—left a small soapstone box on my bridal divan. Inside were two white pills.

They were good. I should have expected no less. One moment I was standing nervous and fearful on the Turkestan carpet with a soft night air that smelled of the sea stirring the translucent curtains, the next visions of the Kama Sutra, beamed into my brain through my golden earhook, swirled up around me like the pigeons over Chandni Chowk. I looked at the patterns my shaadi sisters had painted on the palms of my hands and they danced and coiled from my skin. The smells and perfumes of my body were alive, suffocating. It was as if my skin had been peeled back and every nerve exposed. Even the touch of the barely moving night air was intolerable. Every car horn on Marine Drive was like molten silver dropped into my ear.

I was terribly afraid.

Then the double doors to the robing room opened and my husband entered. He was dressed as a Mughal grandee in a jeweled turban and a long-sleeved pleated red robe bowed out at the front in the manly act.

“My goddess,” he said. Then he parted his robe and I saw what stood so proud.

The harness was of crimson leather intricately inlaid with fine mirror-work. It fastened around the waist and also over the shoulders, for extra security. The buckles were gold. I recall the details of the harness so clearly because I could not take more than one look at the thing it carried. Black. Massive as a horse’s, but delicately upcurved. Ridged and studded. This all I remember before the room unfolded around me like the scented petals of a lotus and my senses blended as one and I was running through the apartments of the Taj Marine Hotel.

How had I ever imagined it could be different for a creature with the appetites and desires of an adult but the physical form of a ten-year-old boy?

Servants and dressers stared at me as I screamed incoherently, grabbing at wraps, shawls, anything to cover my shame. At some tremendous remove I remember my husband’s voice calling Goddess! My Goddess! over and over.

“Schizophrenia is a terribly grating word,” Ashok said. He twirled the stem of a red thornless rose between his fingers. “Old-school. It’s dissociative disorder these days. Except there are no disorders, just adaptive behaviors. It was what you needed to cope with being a goddess. Dissociating. Disjuncting. Becoming you and other to stay sane.”

Night in the gardens of the Dataraja Ashok. Water trickled in the stone canals of the charbagh. I could smell it, sweet and wet. A pressure curtain held the smog at bay; trees screened out Delhi’s traffic. I could even see a few stars. We sat in an open chhatri pavilion, the marble still warm from the day. Set on silver thalis were medjool dates, halva—crisp with flies—folded paan. A security robot stepped into the lights from the Colonial bungalow, passed into shadow. But for it I might have been in the age of the rajas.

Time broken apart, whirring like kabooter wings. Dissociative behavior. Mechanisms for coping. Running along the palm-lined boulevards of Mumbai, shawls clutched around my wifely finery that made me feel more naked than bare skin. I ran without heed or direction. Taxis hooted, phatphats veered as I dashed across crowded streets. Even if I had had money for a phatphat—what need had the wife of a Brahmin for crude cash?—I did not know where to direct it. Yet that other, demonic self must have known, for I found myself on the vast marble concourse of a railway station, a sole mite of stillness among the tens of thousands of hastening travelers and beggars and vendors and staff. My shawls and throws clutched around me, I looked up at the dome of red Raj stone and it was a second skull, full of the awful realization of what I had done.

A runaway bride without even a paisa to her name, alone in Mumbai Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus. A hundred trains leaving that minute for any destination but nowhere to go. People stared at me, half Nautch-courtesan, half Untouchable street-sleeper. In my shame, I remembered the hook behind my ear. Ashok, I wrote across the sandstone pillars and swirling ads. Help me!

“I don’t want to be split, I don’t want to be me and other, why can’t I just be one?” I beat the heels of my hands off my forehead in frustration. “Make me well, make me right!” Shards of memory. The white-uniformed staff serving me hot chai in the first-class private compartment of the shatabdi express. The robots waiting at the platform with the antique covered palanquin, to bear me through the Delhi dawn traffic to the green watered geometries of Ashok’s gardens. But behind them all was one enduring image, my uncle’s white fist slipping on the bouncing cable and him falling, legs pedalling air, to the creamy waters of Shakya river. Even then, I had been split. Fear and shock. Laughter and smiles. How else could anyone survive being a goddess?

Goddess. My Goddess.

Ashok could not understand. “Would you cure a singer of his talent? There is no madness, only ways of adapting. Intelligence is evolution. Some would argue that I display symptoms of mild Asperger’s syndrome.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

He twirled the rose so hard the stem snapped.

“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

I had thought of little else. The Narayans would not give up their dowry lightly. Mamaji would sweep me from her door. My village was closed to me.

“Maybe for a while, if you could . . .”

“It’s not a good time. . . . Who’s going to have the ear of the Lok Sabha? A family building a dam that’s going to guarantee their water supply for the next fifty years, or a software entrepreneur with a stable of Level 2.75 aeais that the United States government thinks are the sperm of Shaitan? Family values still count in Awadh. You should know.”

I heard my voice say, like a very small girl, “Where can I go?”

The bride-buyer’s stories of Kumaris whom no one would marry and could not go home again ended in the woman-cages of Varanasi and Kolkata. Chinese paid rupees by the roll for an ex-Goddess.

Ashok moistened his lips with his tongue.

“I have someone in Bharat, in Varanasi. Awadh and Bharat are seldom on speaking terms.”

“Oh thank you, thank you . . .” I went down on my knees before Ashok, clutched his hands between my palms. He looked away. Despite the artificial cool of the charbagh, he was sweating freely.

“It’s not a gift. It’s . . . employment. A job.”

“A job, that’s good, I can do that; I’m a good worker, work away at anything I will; what is it? Doesn’t matter, I can do it. . . .”

“There are commodities need transported.”

“What kind of commodities? Oh it doesn’t mater, I can carry anything.”

“Aeais.” He rolled a paan from the silver dish. “I’m not going to wait around for Shrivastava’s Krishna Cops to land in my garden with their excommunication ware.”

“The Hamilton Acts,” I ventured, though I did not know what they were, what most of Ashok’s mumbles and rants meant.

“Word is, everything above level 2.5.” Ashok chewed his lower lip. His eyes widened as the paan curled through his skull.

“Of course, I will do anything I can to help.”

“I haven’t told you how I need you to transport them. Absolutely safe, secure, where no Krishna Cop can ever find them.” He touched his right forefinger to his Third Eye. “Self, and other.”

I went to Kerala and had processors put into my skull. Two men did it on a converted bulk gas carrier moored outside territorial waters. They shaved my long lovely black hair, unhinged my skull and sent robots smaller than the tiniest spider spinning computers through my brain. Their position out beyond the Keralese fast patrol boats enabled them to carry out much secret surgery, mostly for the Western military. They gave me a bungalow and an Australian girl to watch over me while my sutures fused and hormone washes speed-grew my hair back.

Protein chips; only show on the highest resolution scans but no one’ll look twice at you; no one’ll look twice at another shaadi girl down hunting for a husband.

So I sat and stared at the sea for six weeks and thought about what it would be like to drown in the middle of it, alone and lost a thousand kilometers from the nearest hand that might seize yours. A thousand kilometers north in Delhi a man in an Indian suit shook hands with a man in an American suit and announced the Special Relationship that would make Ashok an outlaw.

You know what Krishna Cops are? They hunt aeais. They hunt the people who stable them, and the people who carry them. They don’t care. They’re not picky. But they won’t catch you. They’ll never catch you.

I listened to demons in the swash and run of the big sea on the shore. Demons I now knew were facets of my other self. But I was not afraid of them. In Hinduism, demons are merely the mirrors of the gods. As with men, so with gods; it is the winners who write the history. The universe would look no different had Ravana and his Rakshasas won their cosmic wars.

No one but you can carry them. No one but you has the neurological architecture. No one but you could endure another mind in there.

The Australian girl left small gifts outside my door: plastic bangles, jelly-shoes, rings, and hairslides. She stole them from the shops in town. I think they were her way of saying that she wanted to know me, but was afraid of what I had been, of what the things in my head would make me become. The last thing she stole was a beautiful sheer silk dupatta to cover my ragged hair when she took me to the airport. From beneath it I looked at the girls in business saris talking into their hands in the departure lounge and listened to the woman pilot announce the weather in Awadh. Then I looked out of the phatphat at the girls darting confidently through the Delhi traffic on their scooters and wondered why my life could not be like theirs.

“It’s grown back well.” Ashok knelt before me on my cushions in the chhatri. It was his sacred place, his temple. He raised his palmer-gloved hand and touched his forefinger to the tilak over my third eye. I could smell his breath. Onions, garlic, rancid ghee. “You may feel a little disoriented. . . .”

I gasped. Senses blurred, fused, melted. I saw heard felt smelled tasted everything as one undifferentiated sensation, as gods and babies sense, wholly and purely. Sounds were colored, light had texture, smells spoke and chimed. Then I saw myself surge up from my cushions and fall toward the hard white marble. I heard myself cry out. Ashok lunged toward me. Two Ashoks lunged toward me. But it was neither of those. I saw one Ashok, with two visions, inside my head. I could not make shape or sense out of my two seeings, I could not tell which was real, which was mine, which was me. Universes away I heard a voice say help me. I saw Ashok’s houseboys lift me and take me to bed. The painted ceiling, patterned with vines and shoots and flowers, billowed above me like monsoon storm clouds, then blossomed into darkness.

In the heat of the night I woke stark, staring, every sense glowing. I knew the position and velocity of each insect in my airy room that smelled of biodiesel, dust, and patchouli. I was not alone. There was an other under the dome of my skull. Not an awareness, a consciousness; a sense of separateness, a manifestation of myself. An avatar. A demon.

“Who are you?” I whispered. My voice sounded loud and full of bells, like Durbar Square. It did not answer—it could not answer, it was not a sentience—but it took me out into the charbagh water garden. The stars, smudged by pollution, were a dome over me. The crescent moon lay on its back. I looked up and fell into it. Chandra. Mangal. Budh. Guru. Shukra. Shani. Rahu. Ketu. The planets were not points of light, balls of stone and gas; they had names, characters, loves, hatreds. The twenty-seven Nakshatars spun around my head. I saw their shapes and natures, the patterns of connections that bound the stars into relationships and stories and dramas as human and complex as Town and Country. I saw the wheel of the rashis, the Great Houses, arc across the sky, and the whole turning, engines within engines, endless wheels of influence and subtle communication, from the edge of the universe to the center of the earth I stood upon. Planets, stars, constellations; the story of every human life unfolded itself above me and I could read them all. Every word.

All night I played among the stars.

In the morning, over bed-tea, I asked Ashok, “What is it?”

“A rudimentary Level 2.6. A janampatri aeai, does astrology, runs the permutations. It thinks it lives out there, like some kind of space monkey. It’s not very smart, really. Knows about horoscopes and that’s it. Now get that down you and grab your stuff. You’ve a train to catch.”

My reserved seat was in the women’s bogie of the high-speed shatabdi express. Husbands booked their wives on to it to protect them from the attentions of the male passengers who assumed every female was single and available. The few career women chose it for the same reason. My fellow passenger across the table from me was a Muslim woman in a formal business shalwar. She regarded me with disdain as we raced across the Ganga plain at three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour. Little simpering wife-thing.

You would not be so quick to judge if you knew what we really were, I thought. We can look into your life and tell you everything that has, is and will ever happen to you, mapped out in the chakras of the stars. In that night among the constellations my demon and I had flowed into each other until there was no place where we could say aeai ended and I began.

I had thought holy Varanasi would sing to me like Kathmandu, a spiritual home, a city of nine million gods and one goddess, riding through the streets in a phatphat. What I saw was another Indian capital of another Indian state; glass towers and diamond domes and industry parks for the big world to notice, slums and bastis at their feet like sewage pigs. Streets began in this millennium and ended in one three before it. Traffic and hoardings and people people people but the diesel smoke leaking in around the edges of my smog mask carried a ghost of incense.

Ashok’s Varanasi agent met me in the Jantar Mantar, the great solar observatory of Jai Singh; sundials and star spheres and shadow discs like modern sculpture. She was little older than me; dressed in a cling-silk top and jeans that hung so low from her hips I could see the valley of her buttocks. I disliked her at once but she touched her palmer-glove to my forehead in the shadows around Jai Singh’s astrological instruments and I felt the stars go out of me. The sky died. I had been holy again and now I was just meat. Ashok’s girli pressed a roll of rupees into my hand. I barely looked at it. I barely heard her instructions to get something to eat, get a kafi, get some decent clothes. I was bereft. I found myself trudging up the steep stone steps of the great Samrat not knowing where I was who I was what I was doing halfway up a massive sundial. Half a me. Then my third eye opened and I saw the river wide and blue before me. I saw the white sands of the eastern shore and the shelters and dung fires of the sadhus. I saw the ghats, the stone river steps, curving away on either side further than the reach of my eyes. And I saw people. People washing and praying cleaning their clothes and offering puja and buying and selling and living and dying. People in boats and people kneeling, people waist deep in the river, people scooping up silver handfuls of water to pour over their heads. People casting handfuls of marigold flowers onto the stream, people lighting little mango-leaf diya lamps and setting them afloat, people bringing their dead to dip them in the sacred water. I saw the pyres of the burning ghat, I smelled sandalwood, charring flesh, I heard the skull burst, releasing the soul. I had heard that sound before at the Royal burning ghats of Pashupatinath, when the King’s Mother died. A soft crack, and free. It was a comforting sound. It made me think of home.

In that season I came many times to the city by the Ganga. Each time I was a different person. Accountants, counselors, machine-soldiers, soapi actors, database controllers: I was the goddess of a thousand skills. The day after I saw Awadhi Krishna Cops patrolling the platforms at Delhi station with their security robots and guns that could kill both humans and aeais, Ashok began to mix up my modes of transport. I flew, I trained, I chugged overnight on overcrowded country buses, I waited in chauffeured Mercedes in long lines of brightly decorated trucks at the Awadh-Bharat border. The trucks, like the crack of an exploding skull, reminded me of my kingdom. But at the end was always the rat-faced girli lifting her hand to my tilak and taking me apart again. In that season I was a fabric weaver, a tax consultant, a wedding planner, a soapi editor, an air traffic controller. She took all of them away.

And then the trip came when the Krishna Cops were waiting at the Bharat end as well. By now I knew the politics of it as well as Ashok. The Bharatis would never sign the Hamilton Acts—their multi-billion-rupee entertainment industry depended on aeais—but neither did they want to antagonize America. So, a compromise: all aeais over Level 2.8 banned, everything else licensed and Krishna Cops patrolling the airports and railway stations. Like trying to hold back the Ganga with your fingers.

I had spotted the courier on the flight. He was two rows in front of me; young, wisp of a beard, Star-Asia youth fashion, all baggy and big. Nervous nervous nervous, all the time checking his breast pocket, checking checking checking. A small time badmash, a wannabe dataraja with a couple of specialist 2.85s loaded onto a palmer. I could not imagine how he had made it through Delhi airport security.

It was inevitable that the Varanasi Krishna Cops would spot him. They closed on him as we lined up at passport control. He broke. He ran. Women and children fled as he ran across the huge marble arrivals hall, trying to get to the light, the huge glass wall and the doors and the mad traffic beyond. His fists pounded at air. I heard the Krishna Cops’ staccato cries. I saw them unholster their weapons. Shrieks went up. I kept my head down, shuffled forward. The immigration officer checked my papers. Another shaadi bride on the hunt. I hurried through, turned away toward the taxi ranks. Behind me I heard the arrivals hall fall so shockingly silent it seemed to ring like a temple bell.

I was afraid then. When I returned to Delhi it was as if my fear had flown before me. The city of djinns was the city of rumors. The government had signed the Hamilton Act. Krishna Cops were sweeping house to house. Palmer files were to be monitored. Children’s aeai toys were illegal. US marines were being airlifted in. Prime Minister Shrivastava was about to announce the replacement of the rupee with the dollar. A monsoon of fear and speculation and in the middle of it all was Ashok.

“One final run, then I’m out. Can you do this for me? One final run?”

The bungalow was already half-emptied. The furniture was all packed, only his processor cores remained. They were draped in dustsheets, ghosts of the creatures that had lived there. The Krishna Cops were welcome to them.

“We both go to Bharat?”

“No, that would be too dangerous. You go ahead, I’ll follow when it’s safe.” He hesitated. Tonight, even the traffic beyond the high walls sounded different. “I need you to take more than the usual.”

“How many?”

“Five.”

He saw me shy back as he raised his hand to my forehead.

“Is it safe?”

“Five, and that’s it done. For good.”

“Is it safe?”

“It’s a series of overlays, they’ll share core code in common.”

It was a long time since I had turned my vision inward to the jewels Ashok had strung through my skull. Circuitry. A brain within a brain.

“Is it safe?”

I saw Ashok swallow, then bob his head: a Westerner’s yes. I closed my eyes. Seconds later I felt the warm, dry touch of his finger to my inner eye.

We came to with the brass light of early morning shining through the jali. We were aware we were deeply dehydrated. We were aware that we were in need of slow-release carbohydrate. Our serotonin inhibitor levels were low. The window arch through which the sun beamed was a Mughal true arch. The protein circuits in my head were DPMA one-eight-seven-nine slash omegas, under licence from BioScan of Bangalore.

Everything we looked at gave off a rainbow of interpretations. I saw the world with the strange manias of my new guests: medic, nutritionist, architectural renderer, biochip designer, engineering aeai controlling a host of repair-shop robots. Nasatya. Vaishvanara. Maya. Brihaspati. Tvastri. My intimate demons. This was not other. This was legion. I was a many-headed devi.

All that morning, all afternoon, I fought to make sense of a world that was five worlds, five impressions. I fought. Fought to make us me. Ashok fretted, tugging at his woolly beard, pacing, trying to watch television, check his mails. At any instant Krishna Cop combat robots could come dropping over his walls. Integration would come. It had to come. I could not survive the clamor in my skull, a monsoon of interpretations. Sirens raced in the streets, far, near, far again. Every one of them fired off a different reaction from my selves.

I found Ashok sitting amongst his shrouded processors, knees pulled up to his chest, arms draped over them. He looked like a big, fat, soft boy, his Mama’s favorite.

Noradrenaline pallor, mild hypoglycaemia, fatigue toxins, said Nasatya.

Yin Systems bevabyte quantum storage arrays, said Brihaspati simultaneously.

I touched him on the shoulder. He jerked awake. It was full dark outside, stifling: the monsoon was already sweeping up through the United States of Bengal.

“We’re ready,” I said. “I’m ready.”

Dark-scented hibiscus spilled over the porch where the Mercedes waited.

“I’ll see you in a week,” he said. “In Varanasi.”

“In Varanasi.”

He took my shoulders in his hands and kissed me lightly, on the cheek. I drew my dupatta over my head. Veiled, I was taken to the United Provinces Night Sleeper Service. As I lay in the first class compartment the aeais chattered away inside my head, surprised to discover each other, reflections of reflections.

The chowkidar brought me bed-tea on a silver tray in the morning. Dawn came up over Varanasi’s sprawling slums and industrial parks. My personalized news-service aeai told me that Lok Sabha would vote on ratifying the Hamilton Accords at ten am. At twelve, Prime Minister Shrivastava and the United States Ambassador would announce a Most Favored Nation trade package with Awadh.

The train emptied onto the platform beneath the spun-diamond canopy I knew so well. Every second passenger, it seemed, was a smuggler. If I could spot them so easily, so could the Krishna Cops. They lined the exit ramps, more than I had ever seen before. There were uniforms behind them and robots behind the uniforms. The porter carried my bag on his head; I used it to navigate the press of people pouring off the night train. Walk straight, as your Mamaji taught you. Walk tall and proud, like you are walking the Silken Way with a rich man. I drew my dupatta over my head, for modesty. Then I saw the crowd piling up at the ramp. The Krishna Cops were scanning every passenger with palmers.

I could see the badmashs and smuggler-boys hanging back, moving to the rear of the mill of bodies. But there was no escape there either. Armed police backed by riot-control robots took up position at the end of the platform. Shuffle by shuffle, the press of people pushed me toward the Krishna Cops, waving their right hands like blessings over the passengers. Those things could peel back my scalp and peer into my skull. My red case bobbed ahead, guiding me to my cage.

Brihaspati showed me what they would do to the circuits in my head.

Help me! I prayed to my gods. And Maya, architect of the demons, answered me. Its memories were my memories and it remembered rendering an architectural simulation of this station long before robot construction spiders started to spin their nano-diamond web. Two visions of Varanasi station, superimposed. With one difference that might save my life. Maya’s showed me the inside of things. The inside of the platform. The drain beneath the hatch between the rear of the chai-booth and the roof support.

I pushed through the men to the small dead space at the rear. I hesitated before I knelt beside the hatch. One surge of the crowd, one trip, one fall, and I would be crushed. The hatch was jammed shut with dirt. Nails broke, nails tore as I scrabbled it loose and heaved it up. The smell that came up from the dark square was so foul I almost vomited. I forced myself in, dropped a meter into shin-deep sludge. The rectangle of light showed me my situation. I was mired in excrement. The tunnel forced me to crawl but the end of it was promise, the end of it was a semi-circle of daylight. I buried my hands in the soft sewage. This time I did retch up my bed tea. I crept forward, trying not to choke. It was vile beyond anything I had ever experienced. But not so vile as having your skull opened and knives slice away slivers of your brain. I crawled on my hands and knees under the tracks of Varanasi Station, to the light, to the light, to the light, and out through the open conduit into the cess lagoon where pigs and rag-pickers rooted in the shoals of drying human manure.

I washed as clean as I could in the shriveled canal. Dhobi-wallahs beat laundry against stone slabs. I tried to ignore Nasatya’s warnings about the hideous infections I might have picked up.

I was to meet Ashok’s girl on the street of gajras. Children sat in doorways and open shop fronts threading marigolds onto needles. The work was too cheap even for robots. Blossoms spilled from bushels and plastic cases. My phatphat’s tires slipped on wet rose petals. We drove beneath a canopy of gajra garlands that hung from poles above the shop-fronts. Everywhere was the smell of dead, rotting flowers. The phatphat turned into a smaller, darker alley and into the back of a mob. The driver pressed his hand to the horn. The people reluctantly gave him way. The alcofuel engine whined. We crept forward. Open space, then a police jawan stepped forward to bar our way. He wore full combat armor. Brihaspati read the glints of data flickering across his visor: deployments, communications, an arrest warrant. I covered my head and lower face as the driver talked to him. What’s going on? Some badmash. Some dataraja.

Down the street of gajras, uniformed police led by a plainclothes Krishna Cop burst open a door. Their guns were drawn. In the same breath, the shutters of the jharoka immediately above crashed up. A figure jumped up onto the wooden rail. Behind me, the crowd let out a vast roaring sigh. There he is there the badmash oh look look it’s a girl!

From the folds of my dupatta I saw Ashok’s girli teeter there an instant, then jump up and grab a washing line. It snapped and swung her ungently down through racks of marigold garlands into the street. She crouched a moment, saw the police, saw the crowd, saw me, then turned and ran. The jawan started toward her, but there was another quicker, deadlier. A woman screamed as the robot bounded from the rooftop into the alley. Chrome legs pistoned, its insect head bobbed, locked on. Marigold petals flew up around the fleeing girl but everyone knew she could not escape the killing thing. One step, two step, it was behind her. I saw her glance over her shoulder as the robot unsheathed its blade.

I knew what would happen next. I had seen it before, in the petal-strewn streets of Kathmandu, as I rode my litter among my gods and Kumarimas.

The blade flashed. A great cry from the crowd. The girl’s head bounded down the alley. A great jet of blood. Sacrificial blood. The headless body took one step, two.

I slipped from the phatphat and stole away through the transfixed crowd.

I saw the completion of the story on a news channel at a chai-dhaba by the tank on Scindia ghat. The tourists, the faithful, the vendors and funeral parties were my camouflage. I sipped chai from a plastic cup and watched the small screen above the bar. The sound was low but I could understand well enough from the pictures. Delhi police break up a notorious aeai smuggling ring. In a gesture of Bharati-Awadhi friendship, Varanasi Krishna cops make a series of arrests. The camera cut away before the robot struck. The final shot was of Ashok, pushed down into a Delhi police car in plastic handcuffs.

I went to sit on the lowest ghat. The river would still me, the river would guide me. It was of the same substance as me, divinity. Brown water swirled at my be-ringed toes. That water could wash away all earthly sin. On the far side of the holy river, tall chimneys poured yellow smoke into the sky. A tiny round-faced girl came up to me, offered me marigold gajras to buy. I waved her away. I saw again this river, these ghats, these temples and boats as I had when I lay in my wooden room in my palace in Durbar Square. I saw now the lie Tall Kumarima’s palmer had fed me. I had thought India a jeweled skirt, laid out for me to wear. It was a bride-buyer with an envelope of rupees, it was walking the Silken Way until feet cracked and bled. It was a husband with the body of a child and the appetites of a man warped by his impotence. It was a savior who had always only wanted me for my sickness. It was a young girl’s head rolling in a gutter.

Inside this still-girl’s head, my demons were silent. They could see as well as I that that there would never be a home for us in Bharat, Awadh, Maratha, any nation of India.

North of Nayarangadh the road rose through wooded ridges, climbing steadily up to Mugling where it turned and clung to the side of the Trisuli’s steep valley. It was my third bus in as many days. I had a routine now. Sit at the back, wrap my dupatta round me, look out the window. Keep my hand on my money. Say nothing.

I picked up the first bus outside Jaunpur. After emptying Ashok’s account, I thought it best to leave Varanasi as inconspicuously as possible. I did not need Brihaspati to show me the hunter aeais howling after me. Of course they would have the air, rail, and bus stations covered. I rode out of the Holy City on an unlicensed taxi. The driver seemed pleased with the size of the tip. The second bus took me from Gorakhpur through the dhal fields and banana plantations to Nautanwa on the border. I had deliberately chosen small, out-of-the-way Nautanwa, but still I bowed my head and shuffled my feet as I came up to the Sikh emigration officer behind his tin counter. I held my breath. He waved me through without even a glance at my identity card.

I walked up the gentle slope and across the border. Had I been blind, I would have known at once when I crossed into my kingdom. The great roar that had followed me as close as my own skin fell silent so abruptly it seemed to echo. The traffic did not blare its way through all obstacles. It steered, it sought ways around pedestrians and sacred cows lolling in the middle of the road, chewing. People were polite in the bureau where I changed my Bharati rupees for Nepalese; did not press and push and try to sell me things I did not want in the shop where I bought a bag of greasy samosas; smiled shyly to me in the cheap hotel where I hired a room for the night. Did not demand demand demand.

I slept so deeply that it felt like a fall through endless white sheets that smelled of sky. In the morning the third bus came to take me up to Kathmandu.

The road was one vast train of trucks, winding in and out of the bluffs, looping back on itself, all the while climbing, climbing. The gears on the old bus whined. The engine strove. I loved that sound, of engines fighting gravity. It was the sound of my earliest recollection, before the child-assessors came up a road just like this to Shakya. Trains of trucks and buses in the night. I looked out at the roadside dhabas, the shrines of piled rocks, the tattered prayer banners bent in the wind, the cableways crossing the chocolate-creamy river far below, skinny kids kicking swaying cages across the high wires. So familiar, so alien to the demons that shared my skull.

The baby must have been crying for some time before the noise rose above the background hubbub of the bus. The mother was two rows ahead of me, she shushed and swung and soothed the tiny girl but the cries were becoming screams.

It was Nasatya made me get out of my seat and go to her.

“Give her to me,” I said and there must have been some tone of command from the medical aeai in my voice for she passed me the baby without a thought. I pulled back the sheet in which she was wrapped. The little girl’s belly was painfully bloated, her limbs floppy and waxen.

“She’s started getting colic when she eats,” the mother said but before she could stop me I pulled away her diaper. The stench was abominable; the excrement bulky and pale.

“What are you feeding her?”

The woman held up a roti bread, chewed at the edges to soften it for baby. I pushed my fingers into the baby’s mouth to force it open though Vaishvanara the nutritionist already knew what we would find. The tongue was blotched red, pimpled with tiny ulcers.

“Has this only started since you began giving her solid food?” I asked. The mother waggled her head in agreement. “This child has ceoliac disease,” I pronounced. The woman put her hands to her face in horror, began to rock and wail. “Your child will be fine, you must just stop feeding her bread, anything made from any grain except rice. She cannot process the proteins in wheat and barley. Feed her rice, rice and vegetables and she will brighten up right away.”

The entire bus was staring as I went back to my seat. The woman and her baby got off at Naubise. The child was still wailing, weak now from its rage, but the woman raised a namaste to me. A blessing. I had come to Nepal with no destination, no plan or hope, just a need to be back. But already an idea was forming.

Beyond Naubise the road climbed steadily, switching back and forth over the buttresses of the mountains that embraced Kathmandu. Evening was coming on. Looking back I could see the river of headlights snaking across the mountainside. Where the bus ground around another hairpin bend, I could see the same snake climb up ahead of me in red taillights. The bus labored up a long steep climb. I could hear, everyone could hear, the noise in the engine that should not have been there. Up we crawled to the high saddle where the watershed divided, right to the valley of Kathmandu, left to Pokhara and the High Himalaya. Slower, slower. We could all smell the burning insulation, hear the rattling.

It was not me who rushed to the driver and his mate. It was the demon Trivasti.

“Stop stop at once!” I cried. “Your alternator has seized! You will burn us up.”

The driver pulled into the narrow draw, up against the raw rock. On the offside, trucks passed with millimeters to spare. We got the hood up. We could see the smoke wafting from the alternator. The men shook their heads and pulled out palmers. The passengers piled to the front of the bus to stare and talk.

“No no no, give me a wrench,” I ordered.

The driver stared but I shook my outstretched hand, demanding. Perhaps he remembered the crying baby. Perhaps he was thinking about how long it would take a repair truck to come up from Kathmandu. Perhaps he was thinking about how good it would be to be home with his wife and children. He slapped the monkey wrench into my hand. In less than a minute I had the belt off and the alternator disconnected.

“Your bearings have seized,” I said. “It’s a persistent fault on pre-2030 models. A hundred meters more and you would have burned her out. You can drive her on the battery. There’s enough in it to get you down to Kathmandu.”

They stared at this little girl in an Indian sari, head covered but sleeves of her choli rolled up and fingers greasy with biolube.

The demon returned to his place and it was clear as the darkening sky what I would do now. The driver and his mate called out to me as I walked up beside the line of vehicles to the head of the pass. We ignored them. Passing drivers sounded their multiple, musical horns, offered lifts. I walked on. I could see the top now. It was not far to the place where the three roads divided. Back to India, down to the city, up to the mountains.

There was a chai-dhaba at the wide, oil-stained place where vehicles turned. It was bright with neon signs for American drinks and Bharati mineral water, like something fallen from the stars. A generator chugged. A television burbled familiar, soft Nepali news. The air smelled of hot ghee and biodiesel.

The owner did not know what to make of me, strange little girl in my Indian finery. Finally he said, “Fine night.”

It was. Above the smogs and soots of the valley, the air was magically clear. I could see for a lifetime in any direction. To the west the sky held a little last light. The great peaks of Manaslu and Anapurna glowed mauve against the blue.

“It is,” I said, “oh it is.”

Traffic pushed slowly past, never ceasing on this high crossroads of the world. I stood in the neon flicker of the dhaba, looking long at the mountains and I thought, I shall live there. We shall live in a wooden house close to trees with running water cold from high snow. We shall have a fire and a television for company and prayer banners flying in the wind and in time people will stop being afraid and will come up the path to our door. There are many ways to be divine. There is the big divine, of ritual and magnificence and blood and terror. Ours shall be a little divinity, of small miracles and everyday wonders. Machines mended, programs woven, people healed, homes designed, minds and bodies fed. I shall be a little goddess. In time, the story of me will spread and people will come from all over; Nepalis and foreigners, travelers and hikers and monks. Maybe one day a man who is not afraid. That would be good. But if he does not come, that will be good also, for I shall never be alone, not with a houseful of demons.

Then I found I was running, with the surprised chai-wallah calling, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” after me, running down the side of the slow-moving line of traffic, banging on the doors, “Hi! Hi! Pokhara! Pokhara!” slipping and sliding over the rough gravel, toward the far, bright mountains.

MAGIC FOR BEGINNERS

Kelly Link

Euphoria: The Librarian’s Tonic—When Watchfulness Is Not Enough.

Fox is a television character, and she isn’t dead yet. But she will be, soon. She’s a character on a television show called The Library. You’ve never seen The Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.

In one episode of The Library, a boy named Jeremy Mars, fifteen years old, sits on the roof of his house in Plantagenet, Vermont. It’s eight o’clock at night, a school night, and he and his friend Elizabeth should be studying for the math quiz which their teacher, Mr. Cliff, has been hinting at all week long. Instead, they’ve sneaked out onto the roof. It’s cold. They don’t know everything they should know about X, when X is the square root of Y. They don’t even know Y. They ought to go in.

But there’s nothing good on TV and the sky is very beautiful. They have jackets on, and up in the corners where the sky begins are patches of white in the darkness, still, where there’s snow, up on the mountains. Down in the trees around the house, some animal is making a small, anxious sound: “Why cry? Why cry?”

“What’s that one?” Elizabeth says, pointing at a squarish configuration of stars.

“That’s The Parking Structure,” Jeremy says. “And right next to that is The Big Shopping Mall and The Lesser Shopping Mall.”

“And that’s Orion, right? Orion the Bargain Hunter?”

Jeremy squints up. “No, Orion is over there. That’s The Austrian Bodybuilder. That thing that’s sort of wrapped around his lower leg is The Amorous Cephalopod. The Hungry, Hungry Octopus. It can’t make up its mind whether it should eat him or make crazy, eight-legged love to him. You know that myth, right?”

“Of course,” Elizabeth says. “Is Karl going to be pissed off that we didn’t invite him over to study?”

“Karl’s always pissed off about something,” Jeremy says. Jeremy is resolutely resisting a notion about Elizabeth. Why are they sitting up here? Was it his idea or was it hers? Are they friends, are they just two friends sitting on the roof and talking? Or is Jeremy supposed to try to kiss her? He thinks maybe he’s supposed to kiss her. If he kisses her, will they still be friends? He can’t ask Karl about this. Karl doesn’t believe in being helpful. Karl believes in mocking.

Jeremy doesn’t even know if he wants to kiss Elizabeth. He’s never thought about it until right now.

“I should go home,” Elizabeth says. “There could be a new episode on right now, and we wouldn’t even know.”

“Someone would call and tell us,” Jeremy says. “My mom would come up and yell for us.” His mother is something else Jeremy doesn’t want to worry about, but he does, he does.

Jeremy Mars knows a lot about the planet Mars, although he’s never been there. He knows some girls, and yet he doesn’t know much about them. He wishes there were books about girls, the way there are books about Mars, that you could observe the orbits and brightness of girls through telescopes without appearing to be perverted. Once Jeremy read a book about Mars out loud to Karl, except he kept replacing the word Mars with the word “girls.” (“It was in the seventeenth century that girls at last came under serious scrutiny.” “Girls have virtually no surface liquid water: their temperatures are too cold and the air is too thin.” And so on.) Karl cracked up every time.

Jeremy’s mother is a librarian. His father writes books. Jeremy reads biographies. He plays trombone in a marching band. He jumps hurdles while wearing a school tracksuit. Jeremy is also passionately addicted to a television show in which a renegade librarian and magician named Fox is trying to save her world from thieves, murderers, cabalists, and pirates. Jeremy is a geek, although he’s a telegenic geek. Somebody should make a TV show about him.

Jeremy’s friends call him Germ, although he would rather be called Mars. His parents haven’t spoken to each other in a week.

Jeremy doesn’t kiss Elizabeth. The stars don’t fall out of the sky, and Jeremy and Elizabeth don’t fall off the roof either. They go inside and finish their homework.

Someone that Jeremy has never met, never even heard of—a woman named Cleo Baldrick—has died. Lots of people, so far, have managed to live and die without making the acquaintance of Jeremy Mars, but Cleo Baldrick has left Jeremy Mars and his mother something strange in her will: a phone booth on a state highway, some forty miles outside of Las Vegas, and a Las Vegas wedding chapel. The wedding chapel is called Hell’s Bells. Jeremy isn’t sure what kind of people get married there. Bikers, maybe. Supervillains, freaks, and Satanists.

Jeremy’s mother wants to tell him something. It’s probably something about Las Vegas and about Cleo Baldrick, who—it turns out—was his mother’s great-aunt. (Jeremy never knew his mother had a great-aunt. His mother is a mysterious person.) But it may be, on the other hand, something concerning Jeremy’s father. For a week and a half now, Jeremy has managed to avoid finding out what his mother is worrying about. It’s easy not to find out things, if you try hard enough. There’s band practice. He has overslept on weekdays in order to rule out conversations at breakfast, and at night he climbs up on the roof with his telescope to look at stars, to look at Mars. His mother is afraid of heights. She grew up in L.A.

It’s clear that whatever it is she has to tell Jeremy is not something she wants to tell him. As long as he avoids being alone with her, he’s safe.

But it’s hard to keep your guard up at all times. Jeremy comes home from school, feeling as if he has passed the math test, after all. Jeremy is an optimist. Maybe there’s something good on T.V. He settles down with the remote control on one of his father’s pet couches: oversized and reupholstered in an orange-juice-colored corduroy that makes it appear as if the couch has just escaped from a maximum security prison for criminally insane furniture. This couch looks as if its hobby is devouring interior decorators. Jeremy’s father is a horror writer, so no one should be surprised if some of the couches he reupholsters are hideous and eldritch.

Jeremy’s mother comes into the room and stands above the couch, looking down at him. “Germ?” she says. She looks absolutely miserable, which is more or less how she has looked all week.

The phone rings and Jeremy jumps up.

As soon as he hears Elizabeth’s voice, he knows. She says, “Germ, it’s on. Channel forty-two. I’m taping it.” She hangs up.

“It’s on!” Jeremy says. “Channel forty-two! Now!”

His mother has the television on by the time he sits down. Being a librarian, she has a particular fondness for The Library. “I should go tell your dad,” she says, but instead she sits down beside Jeremy. And of course it’s now all the more clear something is wrong between Jeremy’s parents. But The Library is on and Fox is about to rescue Prince Wing.

When the episode ends, he can tell without looking over that his mother is crying. “Don’t mind me,” she says and wipes her nose on her sleeve. “Do you think she’s really dead?”

But Jeremy can’t stay around and talk.

Jeremy has wondered about what kind of television shows the characters in television shows watch. Television characters almost always have better haircuts, funnier friends, simpler attitudes toward sex. They marry magicians, win lotteries, have affairs with women who carry guns in their purses. Curious things happen to them on an hourly basis. Jeremy and I can forgive their haircuts. We just want to ask them about their television shows. Just like always, it’s Elizabeth who worked out in the nick of time that the new episode was on. Everyone will show up at Elizabeth’s house afterwards, for the postmortem. This time, it really is a postmortem. Why did Prince Wing kill Fox? How could Fox let him do it? Fox is ten times stronger.

Jeremy runs all the way, slapping his old track shoes against the sidewalk for the pleasure of the jar, for the sweetness of the sting. He likes the rough, cottony ache in his lungs. His coach says you have to be part-masochist to enjoy something like running. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s something to exploit.

Talis opens the door. She grins at him, although he can tell that she’s been crying, too. She’s wearing a T-shirt that says I’M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES.

“Hey,” Jeremy says. Talis nods. Talis isn’t so Goth, at least not as far as Jeremy or anyone else knows. Talis just has a lot of T-shirts. She’s an enigma wrapped in a mysterious T-shirt. A woman once said to Calvin Coolidge, “Mr. President, I bet my husband that I could get you to say more than two words.” Coolidge said, “You lose.” Jeremy can imagine Talis as Calvin Coolidge in a former life. Or maybe she was one of those dogs that don’t bark. A basenji. Or a rock. A dolmen. There was an episode of The Library, once, with some sinister dancing dolmens in it.

Elizabeth comes up behind Talis. If Talis is unGoth, then Elizabeth is Ballerina Goth. She likes hearts and skulls and black pen-ink tattoos, pink tulle and Hello Kitty. When the woman who invented Hello Kitty was asked why Hello Kitty was so popular, she said, “Because she has no mouth.” Elizabeth’s mouth is small. Her lips are chapped.

“That was the most horrible episode ever! I cried and cried,” she says. “Hey, Germ, so I was telling Talis about how you inherited a gas station.”

“A phone booth,” Jeremy says. “In Las Vegas. This great-great aunt died. And there’s a wedding chapel, too.”

“Hey! Germ!” Karl says, yelling from the living room. “Shut up and get in here! The commercial with the talking cats is on—”

“Shut it, Karl,” Jeremy says. He goes in and sits on Karl’s head. You have to show Karl who’s boss once in a while.

Amy turns up last. She was in the next town over, buying comics. She hasn’t seen the new episode and so they all shut it (except for Talis, who has not been saying anything at all) and Elizabeth puts on the tape.

In the previous episode of The Library, masked pirate-magicians said they would sell Prince Wing a cure for the spell which infested Faithful Margaret’s hair with miniature, wicked, fire-breathing golems. (Faithful Margaret’s hair keeps catching fire, but she refuses to shave it off. Her hair is the source of all her magic.)

The pirate-magicians lured Prince Wing into a trap so obvious that it seemed impossible it could really be a trap, on the one-hundred-and-fortieth floor of The Free People’s World-Tree Library. The pirate-magicians used finger magic to turn Prince Wing into a porcelain teapot, put two Earl Grey tea bags into the teapot, and poured in boiling water, toasted the Eternally Postponed and Overdue Reign of the Forbidden Books, drained their tea in one gulp, belched, hurled their souvenir pirate mugs to the ground, and then shattered the teapot which had been Prince Wing into hundreds of pieces. Then the wicked pirate-magicians swept the pieces of both Prince Wing and collectable mugs carelessly into a wooden cigar box, buried the box in the Angela Carter Memorial Park on the seventeenth floor of The World-Tree Library, and erected a statue of George Washington above it.

So then Fox had to go looking for Prince Wing. When she finally discovered the park on the seventeenth floor of The Library, the George Washington statue stepped down off his plinth and fought her tooth and nail. Literally tooth and nail, and they’d all agreed that there was something especially nightmarish about a biting, scratching, life-sized statue of George Washington with long, pointed metal fangs that threw off sparks when he gnashed them. The statue of George Washington bit Fox’s pinky finger right off, just like Gollum biting Frodo’s finger off on the top of Mount Doom. But of course, once the statue tasted Fox’s magical blood, it fell in love with Fox. It would be her ally from now on.

In the new episode, the actor playing Fox is a young Latina actress whom Jeremy Mars thinks he recognizes. She has been a snotty but well-intentioned fourth-floor librarian in an episode about an epidemic of food-poisoning that triggered bouts of invisibility and/or levitation, and she was also a lovelorn, suicidal Bear Cult priestess in the episode where Prince Wing discovered his mother was one of the Forbidden Books.

This is one of the best things about The Library, the way the cast swaps parts, all except for Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing, who are only ever themselves. Faithful Margaret and Prince Wing are the love interests and the main characters, and therefore, inevitably, the most boring characters, although Amy has a crush on Prince Wing.

Fox and the dashing-but-treacherous pirate-magician Two Devils are never played by the same actor twice, although in the twenty-third episode of The Library, the same woman played them both. Jeremy supposes that the casting could be perpetually confusing, but instead it makes your brain catch on fire. It’s magical.

You always know Fox by her costume (the too-small green T-shirt, the long, full skirts she wears to hide her tail), by her dramatic hand gestures and body language, by the soft, breathy-squeaky voice the actors use when they are Fox. Fox is funny, dangerous, bad-tempered, flirtatious, greedy, untidy, accident-prone, graceful, and has a mysterious past. In some episodes, Fox is played by male actors, but she always sounds like Fox. And she’s always beautiful. Every episode you think that this Fox, surely, is the most beautiful Fox there could ever be, and yet the Fox of the next episode will be even more heartbreakingly beautiful.

On television, it’s night in The Free People’s World-Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, tucked into their coffins, their scabbards, priest-holes, button holes, pockets, hidden cupboards, between the pages of their enchanted novels. Moonlight pours through the high, arched windows of the Library and between the aisles of shelves, into the park. Fox is on her knees, clawing at the muddy ground with her bare hands. The statue of George Washington kneels beside her, helping.

“So that’s Fox, right?” Amy says. Nobody tells her to shut up. It would be pointless. Amy has a large heart and an even larger mouth. When it rains, Amy rescues worms off the sidewalk. When you get tired of having a secret, you tell Amy.

Understand: Amy isn’t that much stupider than anyone else in this story. It’s just that she thinks out loud.

Elizabeth’s mother comes into the living room. “Hey guys,” she says. “Hi, Jeremy. Did I hear something about your mother inheriting a wedding chapel?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Jeremy says. “In Las Vegas.”

“Las Vegas,” Elizabeth’s mom says. “I won three hundred bucks once in Las Vegas. Spent it on a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon. So how many times can you guys watch the same episode in one day?” But she sits down to watch, too. “Do you think she’s really dead?”

“Who’s dead?” Amy says. Nobody says anything.

Jeremy isn’t sure he’s ready to see this episode again so soon, anyway, especially not with Amy. He goes upstairs and takes a shower. Elizabeth’s family have a large and distracting selection of shampoos. They don’t mind when Jeremy uses their bathroom.

Jeremy and Karl and Elizabeth have known each other since the first day of kindergarten. Amy and Talis are a year younger. The five have not always been friends, except for Jeremy and Karl, who have. Talis is, famously, a loner. She doesn’t listen to music as far as anyone knows, she doesn’t wear significant amounts of black, she isn’t particularly good (or bad) at math or English, and she doesn’t drink, debate, knit or refuse to eat meat. If she keeps a blog, she’s never admitted it to anyone.

The Library made Jeremy and Karl and Talis and Elizabeth and Amy friends. No one else in school is as passionately devoted. Besides, they are all the children of former hippies, and the town is small. They all live within a few blocks of each other, in run-down Victorians with high ceilings and ranch houses with sunken living rooms. And although they have not always been friends, growing up, they’ve gone skinny-dipping in lakes on summer nights, and broken bones on each others’ trampolines. Once, during an argument about dog names, Elizabeth, who is hot-tempered, tried to run Jeremy over with her ten-speed bicycle, and once, a year ago, Karl got drunk on green-apple schnapps at a party and tried to kiss Talis, and once, for five months in the seventh grade, Karl and Jeremy communicated only through angry emails written in all caps. I’m not allowed to tell you what they fought about.

Now the five are inseparable; invincible. They imagine that life will always be like this—like a television show in eternal syndication—that they will always have each other. They use the same vocabulary. They borrow each other’s books and music. They share lunches, and they never say anything when Jeremy comes over and takes a shower. They all know Jeremy’s father is eccentric. He’s supposed to be eccentric. He’s a novelist.

When Jeremy comes back downstairs, Amy is saying, “I’ve always thought there was something wicked about Prince Wing. He’s a dork and he looks like he has bad breath. I never really liked him.”

Karl says, “We don’t know the whole story yet. Maybe he found out something about Fox while he was a teapot.” Elizabeth’s mom says, “He’s under a spell. I bet you anything.” They’ll be talking about it all week.

Talis is in the kitchen, making a Velveeta-and-pickle sandwich.

“So what did you think?” Jeremy says. It’s like having a hobby, only more pointless, trying to get Talis to talk. “Is Fox really dead?”

“Don’t know,” Talis says. Then she says, “I had a dream.”

Jeremy waits. Talis seems to be waiting, too. She says, “About you.” Then she’s silent again. There is something dreamlike about the way that she makes a sandwich. As if she is really making something that isn’t a sandwich at all; as if she’s making something far more meaningful and mysterious. Or as if soon he will wake up and realize that there are no such thing as sandwiches.

“You and Fox,” Talis says. “The dream was about the two of you. She told me. To tell you. To call her. She gave me a phone number. She was in trouble. She said you were in trouble. She said to keep in touch.”

“Weird,” Jeremy says, mulling this over. He’s never had a dream about The Library. He wonders who was playing Fox in Talis’s dream. He had a dream about Talis, once, but it isn’t the kind of dream that you’d ever tell anybody about. They were just sitting together, not saying anything. Even Talis’s T-shirt hadn’t said anything. Talis was holding his hand.

“It didn’t feel like a dream,” Talis says.

“So what was the phone number?” Jeremy says.

“I forgot,” Talis says. “When I woke up, I forgot.”

Karl’s mother works in a bank. Talis’s father has a karaoke machine in his basement, and he knows all the lyrics to “Like a Virgin” and “Holiday” as well as the lyrics to all the songs from Godspell and Cabaret. Talis’s mother is a licensed therapist who composes multiple-choice personality tests for women’s magazines. “Discover Which Television Character You Resemble Most.” Etc. Amy’s parents met in a commune in Ithaca: her name was Galadriel Moon Shuyler before her parents came to their senses and had it changed legally. Everyone is sworn to secrecy about this, which is ironic, considering that this is Amy.

But Jeremy’s father is Gordon Strangle Mars. He writes novels about giant spiders, giant leeches, giant moths, and once, notably, a giant carnivorous rosebush who lives in a mansion in upstate New York, and falls in love with a plucky, teenaged girl with a heart murmur. Saint Bernard-sized spiders chase his character’s cars down dark, bumpy country roads. They fight the spiders off with badminton rackets, lawn tools, and fireworks. The novels with spiders are all bestsellers.

Once a Gordon Strangle Mars fan broke into the Marses’ house. The fan stole several German first editions of Gordon Strangle’s novels, a hairbrush, and a used mug in which there were two ancient, dehydrated tea bags. The fan left behind a betrayed and abusive letter on a series of Post-It Notes, and the manuscript of his own novel, told from the point of view of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. Jeremy and his mother read the manuscript out loud to each other. It begins: “The iceberg knew it had a destiny.” Jeremy’s favorite bit happens when the iceberg sees the doomed ship drawing nearer, and remarks plaintively, “Oh my, does not the Captain know about my large and impenetrable bottom?”

Jeremy discovered, later, that the novel-writing fan had put Gordon Strangle Mars’s used tea bags and hairbrush up for sale on eBay, where someone paid forty-two dollars and sixty-eight cents, which was not only deeply creepy, but, Jeremy still feels, somewhat cheap. But of course this is appropriate, as Jeremy’s father is famously stingy and just plain weird about money.

Gordon Strangle Marses once spent eight thousand dollars on a Japanese singing toilet. Jeremy’s friends love that toilet. Jeremy’s mother has a painting of a woman wearing a red dress by some artist, Jeremy can never remember who. Jeremy’s father gave her that painting. The woman is beautiful, and she looks right at you as if you’re the painting, not her. As if you’re beautiful. The woman has an apple in one hand and a knife in the other. When Jeremy was little, he used to dream about eating that apple. Apparently it’s worth more than the whole house and everything else in the house, including the singing toilet. But art and toilets aside, the Marses buy most of their clothes at thrift stores.

Jeremy’s father clips coupons.

On the other hand, when Jeremy was twelve and begged his parents to send him to baseball camp in Florida, his father ponied up. And on Jeremy’s last birthday, his father gave him a couch reupholstered in several dozen yards of heavy-duty Star Wars-themed fabric. That was a good birthday.

When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 A.M. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day. On weekends he reupholsters the thrown-away couches in remaindered, discount fabrics. A few years ago, Jeremy went through his house, counting up fourteen couches, eight love seats, and one rickety chaise lounge. That was a few years ago. Once Jeremy had a dream that his father combined his two careers and began reupholstering giant spiders.

All lights in all rooms of the Mars house are on fifteen-minute timers, in case Jeremy or his mother leave a room and forget to turn off a lamp. This has caused confusion—and sometimes panic—on the rare occasions that the Marses throw dinner parties.

Everyone thinks that writers are rich, but it seems to Jeremy that his family is only rich some of the time. Some of the time they aren’t.

Whenever Gordon Mars gets stuck in a Gordon Strangle Mars novel, he worries about money. He worries that he won’t, in fact, manage to finish the current novel. He worries that it will be terrible. He worries that no one will buy it and no one will read it, and that the readers who do read it will demand to be refunded the cost of the book. He’s told Jeremy that he imagines these angry readers marching on the Mars house, carrying torches and crowbars.

It would be easier on Jeremy and his mother if Gordon Mars did not work at home. It’s difficult to shower when you know your father is timing you, and thinking dark thoughts about the water bill, instead of concentrating on the scene in the current Gordon Strangle Mars novel, in which the giant spiders have returned to their old haunts in the trees surrounding the ninth hole of the accursed golf course, where they sullenly feast on the pulped entrail-juices of a brace of unlucky poodles and their owner.

During these periods, Jeremy showers at school, after gym, or at his friends’ houses, even though it makes his mother unhappy. She says that sometimes you just need to ignore Jeremy’s father. She takes especially long showers, lots of baths. She claims that baths are even nicer when you know that Jeremy’s father is worried about the water bill. Jeremy’s mother has a cruel streak.

What Jeremy likes about showers is the way you can stand there, surrounded by water and yet in absolutely no danger of drowning, and not think about things like whether you fucked up on the Spanish assignment, or why your mother is looking so worried. Instead you can think about things like if there’s water on Mars, and whether or not Karl is shaving, and if so, who is he trying to fool, and what the statue of George Washington meant when it said to Fox, during their desperate, bloody fight, “You have a long journey ahead of you,” and, “Everything depends on this.” And is Fox really dead?

After she dug up the cigar box, and after George Washington helped her carefully separate out the pieces of tea mug from the pieces of teapot, after they glued back together the hundreds of pieces of porcelain, when Fox turned the ramshackle teapot back into Prince Wing, Prince Wing looked about a hundred years old, and as if maybe there were still a few pieces missing. He looked pale. When he saw Fox, he turned even paler, as if he hadn’t expected her to be standing there in front of him. He picked up his leviathan sword, which Fox had been keeping safe for him—the one which faithful viewers know was carved out of the tooth of a giant, ancient sea creature that lived happily and peacefully (before Prince Wing was tricked into killing it) in the enchanted underground sea on the third floor—and skewered the statue of George Washington like a kebab, pinning it to a tree. He kicked Fox in the head, knocked her down, and tied her to a card catalog. He stuffed a handful of moss and dirt into her mouth so she couldn’t say anything, and then he accused her of plotting to murder Faithful Margaret by magic. He said Fox was more deceitful than a Forbidden Book. He cut off Fox’s tail and her ears and he ran her through with the poison-edged, dog-headed knife that he and Fox had stolen from his mother’s secret house. Then he left Fox there, tied to the card catalog, limp and bloody, her beautiful head hanging down. He sneezed (Prince Wing is allergic to swordplay) and walked off into the stacks. The librarians crept out of their hiding places. They untied Fox and cleaned off her face. They held a mirror to her mouth, but the mirror stayed clear and unclouded.

When the librarians pulled Prince Wing’s leviathan sword out of the tree, the statue of George Washington staggered over and picked up Fox in his arms. He tucked her ears and tail into the capacious pockets of his bird-shit-stained, verdigris riding coat. He carried Fox down seventeen flights of stairs, past the enchanted-and-disagreeable Sphinx on the eighth floor, past the enchanted-and-stormy underground sea on the third floor, past the even-more-enchanted checkout desk on the first floor, and through the hammered-brass doors of the Free People’s World-Tree Library. Nobody in The Library, not in one single episode, has ever gone outside. The Library is full of all the sorts of things that one usually has to go outside to enjoy: trees and lakes and grottoes and fields and mountains and precipices (and full of indoors things as well, like books, of course). Outside The Library, everything is dusty and red and alien, as if George Washington has carried Fox out of The Library and onto the surface of Mars.

“I could really go for a nice cold Euphoria right now,” Jeremy says. He and Karl are walking home.

Euphoria is: The Librarian’s Tonic—When Watchfulness Is Not Enough. There are frequently commercials for Euphoria on The Library. Although no one is exactly sure what Euphoria is for, whether it is alcoholic or caffeinated, what it tastes like, if it is poisonous or delightful, or even whether or not it’s carbonated, everyone, including Jeremy, pines for a glass of Euphoria once in a while.

“Can I ask you a question?” Karl says.

“Why do you always say that?” Jeremy says. “What am I going to say? ‘No, you can’t ask me a question’ ?”

“What’s up with you and Talis?” Karl says. “What were you talking about in the kitchen?” Jeremy sees that Karl has been Watchful.

“She had this dream about me,” he says, uneasily.

“So do you like her?” Karl says. His chin looks raw. Jeremy is sure now that Karl has tried to shave. “Because, remember how I liked her first?”

“We were just talking,” Jeremy says. “So did you shave? Because I didn’t know you had facial hair. The idea of you shaving is pathetic, Karl. It’s like voting Republican if we were old enough to vote. Or farting in Music Appreciation.”

“Don’t try to change the subject,” Karl says. “When have you and Talis ever had a conversation before?”

“One time we talked about a Diana Wynne Jones book that she’d checked out from the library. She dropped it in the bath accidentally. She wanted to know if I could tell my mother,” Jeremy says. “Once we talked about recycling.”

“Shut up, Germ,” Karl says. “Besides, what about Elizabeth? I thought you liked Elizabeth!”

“Who said that?” Jeremy says. Karl is glaring at him.

“Amy told me,” Karl says.

“I never told Amy I liked Elizabeth,” Jeremy says. So now Amy is a mind-reader as well as a blabbermouth? What a terrible, deadly combination!

“No,” Karl says, grudgingly. “Elizabeth told Amy that she likes you. So I just figured you liked her back.”

“Elizabeth likes me?” Jeremy says.

“Apparently everybody likes you,” Karl says. He sounds sorry for himself. “What is it about you? It’s not like you’re all that special. Your nose is funny looking and you have stupid hair.”

“Thanks, Karl.” Jeremy changes the subject. “Do you think Fox is really dead?” he says. “For good?” He walks faster, so that Karl has to almost-jog to keep up. Presently Jeremy is much taller than Karl, and he intends to enjoy this as long as it lasts. Knowing Karl, he’ll either get tall, too, or else chop Jeremy off at the knees.

“They’ll use magic,” Karl says. “Or maybe it was all a dream. They’ll make her alive again. I’ll never forgive them if they’ve killed Fox. And if you like Talis, I’ll never forgive you, either. And I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I think I mean what I say, but if push came to shove, eventually I’d forgive you, and we’d be friends again, like in seventh grade. But I wouldn’t, and you’re wrong, and we wouldn’t be. We wouldn’t ever be friends again.”

Jeremy doesn’t say anything. Of course he likes Talis. He just hasn’t realized how much he likes her, until recently. Until today. Until Karl opened his mouth. Jeremy likes Elizabeth too, but how can you compare Elizabeth and Talis? You can’t. Elizabeth is Elizabeth and Talis is Talis.

“When you tried to kiss Talis, she hit you with a boa constrictor,” he says. It had been Amy’s boa constrictor. It had probably been an accident. Karl shouldn’t have tried to kiss someone while they were holding a boa constrictor.

“Just try to remember what I just said,” Karl says. “You’re free to like anyone you want to. Anyone except for Talis.”

The Library has been on television for two years now. It isn’t a regularly scheduled program. Sometimes it’s on two times in the same week, and then not on again for another couple of weeks. Often new episodes debut in the middle of the night. There is a large online community who spend hours scanning channels; sending out alarms and false alarms; fans swap theories, tapes, files; write fanfic. Elizabeth has rigged up her computer to shout “Wake up, Elizabeth! The television is on fire!” when reliable Library watch-sites discover a new episode.

The Library is a pirate TV show. It’s shown up once or twice on most network channels, but usually it’s on the kind of channels that Jeremy thinks of as ghost channels. The ones that are just static, unless you’re paying for several hundred channels of cable. There are commercial breaks, but the products being advertised are like Euphoria. They never seem to be real brands, or things that you can actually buy. Often the commercials aren’t even in English, or in any other identifiable language, although the jingles are catchy, nonsense or not. They get stuck in your head.

Episodes of The Library have no regular schedule, no credits, and sometimes not even dialogue. One episode of The Library takes place inside the top drawer of a card catalog, in pitch dark, and it’s all in Morse code with subtitles. Nothing else. No one has ever claimed responsibility for inventing The Library. No one has ever interviewed one of the actors, or stumbled across a set, film crew, or script, although in one documentary-style episode, the actors filmed the crew, who all wore paper bags on their heads.

When Jeremy gets home, his father is making upside-down pizza in a casserole dish for dinner.

Meeting writers is usually disappointing, at best. Writers who write sexy thrillers aren’t necessarily sexy or thrilling in person. Children’s book writers might look more like accountants, or ax murderers for that matter. Horror writers are very rarely scary looking, although they are frequently good cooks.

Though Gordon Strangle Mars is scary looking. He has long, thin fingers—currently slimy with pizza sauce—which is why he chose ‘Strangle’ for his fake middle name. He has white-blond hair that he tugs on while he writes until it stands straight up. He has a bad habit of suddenly appearing beside you, when you haven’t even realized he was in the same part of the house. His eyes are deep-set and he doesn’t blink very often. Karl says that when you meet Jeremy’s father, he looks at you as if he were imagining you bundled up and stuck away in some giant spider’s larder. Which is probably true.

People who read books probably never bother to wonder if their favorite writers are also good parents. Why would they?

Gordon Strangle Mars is a recreational shoplifter. He has a special, complicated, and unspoken arrangement with the local bookstore, where, in exchange for his autographing as many Gordon Strangle Mars novels as they can possibly sell, the store allows Jeremy’s father to shoplift books without comment. Jeremy’s mother shows up sooner or later and writes a check.

Jeremy’s feelings about his father are complicated. His father is a cheapskate and a petty thief, and yet Jeremy likes his father. His father hardly ever loses his temper with Jeremy, he is always interested in Jeremy’s life, and he gives interesting (if confusing) advice when Jeremy asks for it. For example, if Jeremy asked his father about kissing Elizabeth, his father might suggest that Jeremy not worry about giant spiders when he kisses Elizabeth. Jeremy’s father’s advice usually has something to do with giant spiders.

When Jeremy and Karl weren’t speaking to each other, it was Jeremy’s father who straightened them out. He lured Karl over, and then locked them both into his study. He didn’t let them out again until they were on speaking terms.

“I thought of a great idea for your book,” Jeremy says. “What if one of the spiders builds a web on a soccer field, across a goal? And what if the goalie doesn’t notice until the middle of the game? Could somebody kill one of the spiders with a soccer ball, if they kicked it hard enough? Would it explode? Or even better, the spider could puncture the soccer ball with its massive fangs. That would be cool, too.”

“Your mother’s out in the garage,” Gordon Strangle Mars says to Jeremy. “She wants to talk to you.”

“Oh,” Jeremy says. All of a sudden, he thinks of Fox in Talis’s dream, trying to phone him. Trying to warn him. Unreasonably, he feels that it’s his parents’ fault that Fox is dead now, as if they have killed her. “Is it about you? Are you getting divorced?”

“I don’t know,” his father says. He hunches his shoulders. He makes a face. It’s a face that Jeremy’s father makes frequently, and yet this face is even more pitiful and guilty than usual.

“What did you do?” Jeremy says. “Did you get caught shoplifting at Wal-Mart?”

“No,” his father says.

“Did you have an affair?”

“No!” his father says, again. Now he looks disgusted, either with himself or with Jeremy for asking such a horrible question. “I screwed up. Let’s leave it at that.”

“How’s the book coming?” Jeremy says. There is something in his father’s voice that makes him feel like kicking something, but there are never giant spiders around when you need them.

“I don’t want to talk about that, either,” his father says, looking, if possible, even more ashamed. “Go tell your mother dinner will be ready in five minutes. Maybe you and I can watch the new episode of The Library after dinner, if you haven’t already seen it a thousand times.”

“Do you know the end? Did Mom tell you that Fox is—”

“Oh shit,” his father interrupts. “They killed Fox?”

That’s the problem with being a writer, Jeremy knows. Even the biggest and most startling twists are rarely twists for you. You know how every story goes.

Jeremy’s mother is an orphan. Jeremy’s father claims that she was raised by feral silent-film stars, and it’s true, she looks like a heroine out of a Harold Lloyd movie. She has an appealingly disheveled look to her, as if someone has either just tied or untied her from a set of train tracks. She met Gordon Mars (before he added the Strangle and sold his first novel) in the food court of a mall in New Jersey, and fell in love with him before realizing that he was a writer and a recreational shoplifter. She didn’t read anything he’d written until after they were married, which was a typically cunning move on Jeremy’s father’s part.

Jeremy’s mother doesn’t read horror novels. She doesn’t like ghost stories or unexplained phenomena or even the kind of phenomena that requires excessively technical explanations. For example: microwaves, airplanes. She doesn’t like Halloween, not even Halloween candy. Jeremy’s father gives her special editions of his novels, where the scary pages have been glued together.

Jeremy’s mother is quiet more often than not. Her name is Alice and sometimes Jeremy thinks about how the two quietest people he knows are named Alice and Talis. But his mother and Talis are quiet in different ways. Jeremy’s mother is the kind of person who seems to be keeping something hidden, something secret. Whereas Talis just is a secret. Jeremy’s mother could easily turn out to be a secret agent. But Talis is the death ray or the key to immortality or whatever it is that secret agents have to keep secret. Hanging out with Talis is like hanging out with a teenaged black hole.

Jeremy’s mother is sitting on the floor of the garage, beside a large cardboard box. She has a photo album in her hands. Jeremy sits down beside her.

There are photographs of a cat on a wall, and something blurry that looks like a whale or a zeppelin or a loaf of bread. There’s a photograph of a small girl sitting beside a woman. The woman wears a fur collar with a sharp little muzzle, four legs, a tail, and Jeremy feels a sudden pang. Fox is the first dead person that he’s ever cared about, but she’s not real. The little girl in the photograph looks utterly blank, as if someone has just hit her with a hammer. Like the person behind the camera has just said, “Smile! Your parents are dead!”

“Cleo,” Jeremy’s mother says, pointing to the woman. “That’s Cleo. She was my mother’s aunt. She lived in Los Angeles. I went to live with her when my parents died. I was four. I know I’ve never talked about her. I’ve never really known what to say about her.”

Jeremy says, “Was she nice?”

His mother says, “She tried to be nice. She didn’t expect to be saddled with a little girl. What an odd word. Saddled. As if she were a horse. As if somebody put me on her back and I never got off again. She liked to buy clothes for me. She liked clothes. She hadn’t had a happy life. She drank a lot. She liked to go to movies in the afternoon and to séances in the evenings. She had boyfriends. Some of them were jerks. The love of her life was a small-time gangster. He died and she never married. She always said marriage was a joke and that life was a bigger joke, and it was just her bad luck that she didn’t have a sense of humor. So it’s strange to think that all these years she was running a wedding chapel.”

Jeremy looks at his mother. She’s half-smiling, half-grimacing, as if her stomach hurts. “I ran away when I was sixteen. And I never saw her again. Once she sent me a letter, care of your father’s publishers. She said she’d read all his books, and that was how she found me, I guess, because he kept dedicating them to me. She said she hoped I was happy and that she thought about me. I wrote back. I sent a photograph of you. But she never wrote again. Sounds like an episode of The Library, doesn’t it?”

Jeremy says, “Is that what you wanted to tell me? Dad said you wanted to tell me something.”

“That’s part of it,” his mother says. “I have to go out to Las Vegas, to check out some things about this wedding chapel. Hell’s Bells. I want you to come with me.”

“Is that what you wanted to ask me?” Jeremy says, although he knows there’s something else. His mother still has that sad half-smile on her face.

“Germ,” his mother says. “You know I love your father, right?”

“Why?” Jeremy says. “What did he do?”

His mother flips through the photo album. “Look,” she says. “This was when you were born.” In the picture, his father holds Jeremy as if someone has just handed him an enchanted porcelain teapot. Jeremy’s father grins, but he looks terrified, too. He looks like a kid. A scary, scared kid.

“He wouldn’t tell me either,” Jeremy says. “So it has to be pretty bad. If you’re getting divorced, I think you should go ahead and tell me.”

“We’re not getting divorced,” his mother says, “but it might be a good thing if you and I went out to Las Vegas. We could stay there for a few months while I sort out this inheritance. Take care of Cleo’s estate. I’m going to talk to your teachers. I’ve given notice at the library. Think of it as an adventure.”

She sees the look on Jeremy’s face. “No, I’m sorry. That was a stupid, stupid thing to say. I know this isn’t an adventure.”

“I don’t want to go,” Jeremy says. “All my friends are here! I can’t just go away and leave them. That would be terrible!” All this time, he’s been preparing himself for the most terrible thing he can imagine. He’s imagined a conversation with his mother, in which his mother reveals her terrible secret, and in his imagination, he’s been calm and reasonable. His imaginary parents have wept and asked for his understanding. The imaginary Jeremy has understood. He has imagined himself understanding everything. But now, as his mother talks, Jeremy’s heartbeat speeds up, and his lungs fill with air, as if he is running. He starts to sweat, although the floor of the garage is cold. He wishes he were sitting up on top of the roof with his telescope. There could be meteors, invisible to the naked eye, careening through the sky, hurtling towards Earth. Fox is dead. Everyone he knows is doomed. Even as he thinks this, he knows he’s overreacting. But it doesn’t help to know this.

“I know it’s terrible,” his mother says. His mother knows something about terrible.

“So why can’t I stay here?” Jeremy says. “You go sort things out in Las Vegas, and I’ll stay here with Dad. Why can’t I stay here?”

“Because he put you in a book!” his mother says. She spits the words out. He has never heard her sound so angry. His mother never gets angry. “He put you in one of his books! I was in his office, and the manuscript was on his desk. I saw your name, and so I picked it up and started reading.”

“So what?” Jeremy says. “He’s put me in his books before. Like, stuff I’ve said. Like when I was eight and I was running a fever and told him the trees were full of dead people wearing party hats. Like when I accidentally set fire to his office.”

“It isn’t like that,” his mother says. “It’s you. It’s you. He hasn’t even changed your name. The boy in the book, he jumps hurdles and he wants to be a rocket scientist and go to Mars, and he’s cute and funny and sweet and his best friend Elizabeth is in love with him and he talks like you and he looks like you and then he dies, Jeremy. He has a brain tumor and he dies. He dies. There aren’t any giant spiders. There’s just you, and you die.”

Jeremy is silent. He imagines his father writing the scene in his book where the kid named Jeremy dies, and crying, just a little. He imagines this Jeremy kid, Jeremy the character who dies. Poor messed-up kid. Now Jeremy and Fox have something in common. They’re both made-up people. They’re both dead.

“Elizabeth is in love with me?” he says. Just on principle, he never believes anything that Karl says. But if it’s in a book, maybe it’s true.

“Oh shit,” his mother says. “I really didn’t want to say that. I’m just so angry at him. We’ve been married for seventeen years. I was just four years older than you when I met him, Jeremy. I was nineteen. He was only twenty. We were babies. Can you imagine that? I can put up with the singing toilet and the shoplifting and the couches and I can put up with him being so weird about money. But he killed you, Jeremy. He wrote you into a book and he killed you off. And he knows it was wrong, too. He’s ashamed of himself. He didn’t want me to tell you. I didn’t mean to tell you.”

Jeremy sits and thinks. “I still don’t want to go to Las Vegas,” he says to his mother. “Maybe we could send Dad there instead.”

His mother says, “Not a bad idea.” But he can tell she’s already planning their itinerary.

In one episode of The Library, everyone was invisible. You couldn’t see the actors: you could only see the books and the bookshelves and the study carrels on the fifth floor where the coin-operated wizards come to flirt and practice their spells. Invisible Forbidden Books were fighting invisible pirate-magicians and the pirate-magicians were fighting Fox and her friends, who were also invisible. The fight was clumsy and full of deadly accidents. You could hear them fighting. Shelves were overturned. Books were thrown. Invisible people tripped over invisible dead bodies, but you didn’t find out who’d died until the next episode. Several of the characters—The Accidental Sword, Hairy Pete, and Ptolemy Krill, who (much like the Vogons in Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) wrote poetry so bad it killed anyone who read it—disappeared for good, and nobody is sure whether they’re dead or not.

In another episode, Fox stole a magical drug from The Norns, a prophetic girl band who headline at a cabaret on the mezzanine of The Free People’s World-Tree Library. She accidentally injected it, became pregnant, and gave birth to a bunch of snakes who led her to the exact shelf where renegade librarians had misshelved an ancient and terrible book of magic which had never been translated, until Fox asked the snakes for help. The snakes writhed and curled on the ground, spelling out words, letter by letter, with their bodies. As they translated the book for Fox, they hissed and steamed. They became fiery lines on the ground, and then they burnt away entirely. Fox cried. That’s the only time anyone has ever seen Fox cry, ever. She isn’t like Prince Wing. Prince Wing is a crybaby.

The thing about The Library is that characters don’t come back when they die. It’s as if death is for real. So maybe Fox really is dead and she really isn’t coming back. There are a couple of ghosts who hang around The Library looking for blood libations, but they’ve always been ghosts, all the way back to the beginning of the show. There aren’t any evil twins or vampires, either. Although someday, hopefully, there will be evil twins. Who doesn’t love evil twins?

“Mom told me about how you wrote about me,” Jeremy says. His mother is still in the garage. He feels like a tennis ball in a game where the tennis players love him very, very much, even while they lob and smash and send him back and forth, back and forth.

His father says, “She said she wasn’t going to tell you, but I guess I’m glad she did. I’m sorry, Germ. Are you hungry?”

“She’s going out to Las Vegas next week. She wants me to go with her,” Jeremy says.

“I know,” his father says, still holding out a bowl of upside-down pizza. “Try not to worry about all of this, if you can. Think of it as an adventure.”

“Mom says that’s a stupid thing to say. Are you going to let me read the book with me in it?” Jeremy says.

“No,” his father says, looking straight at Jeremy. “I burned it.”

“Really?” Jeremy says. “Did you set fire to your computer too?”

“Well, no,” his father says. “But you can’t read it. It wasn’t any good, anyway. Want to watch The Library with me? And will you eat some damn pizza, please? I may be a lousy father, but I’m a good cook. And if you love me, you’ll eat the damn pizza and be grateful.”

So they go sit on the orange couch and Jeremy eats pizza and watches The Library for the second-and-a-half time with his father. The lights on the timer in the living room go off, and Prince Wing kills Fox again. And then Jeremy goes to bed. His father goes away to write or to burn stuff. Whatever. His mother is still out in the garage.

On Jeremy’s desk is a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. If he wanted to, he could call his phone booth. When he dials the number, it rings for a long time. Jeremy sits on his bed in the dark and listens to it ringing and ringing. When someone picks it up, he almost hangs up. Someone doesn’t say anything, so Jeremy says, “Hello? Hello?”

Someone breathes into the phone on the other end of the line. Someone says in a soft, musical, squeaky voice, “Can’t talk now, kid. Call back later.” Then someone hangs up.

Jeremy dreams that he’s sitting beside Fox on a sofa that his father has reupholstered in spider silk. His father has been stealing spider webs from the giant-spider superstores. From his own books. Is that shoplifting or is it self-plagiarism? The sofa is soft and gray and a little bit sticky. Fox sits on either side of him. The right-hand-side Fox is being played by Talis. Elizabeth plays the Fox on his left. Both Foxes look at him with enormous compassion.

“Are you dead?” Jeremy says.

“Are you?” the Fox who is being played by Elizabeth says, in that unmistakable Fox voice which, Jeremy’s father once said, sounds like a sexy and demented helium balloon. It makes Jeremy’s brain hurt, to hear Fox’s voice coming out of Elizabeth’s mouth.

The Fox who looks like Talis doesn’t say anything at all. The writing on her T-shirt is so small and so foreign that Jeremy can’t read it without feeling as if he’s staring at Fox-Talis’s breasts. It’s probably something he needs to know, but he’ll never be able to read it. He’s too polite, and besides he’s terrible at foreign languages.

“Hey look,” Jeremy says. “We’re on TV!” There he is on television, sitting between two Foxes on a sticky gray couch in a field of red poppies. “Are we in Las Vegas?”

“We’re not in Kansas,” Fox-Elizabeth says. “There’s something I need you to do for me.”

“What’s that?” Jeremy says.

“If I tell you in the dream,” Fox-Elizabeth says, “you won’t remember. You have to remember to call me when you’re awake. Keep on calling until you get me.”

“How will I remember to call you,” Jeremy says, “if I don’t remember what you tell me in this dream? Why do you need me to help you? Why is Talis here? What does her T-shirt say? Why are you both Fox? Is this Mars?”

Fox-Talis goes on watching TV. Fox-Elizabeth opens her kind and beautiful un-Hello-Kitty-like mouth again. She tells Jeremy the whole story. She explains everything. She translates Fox-Talis’s T-shirt, which turns out to explain everything about Talis that Jeremy has ever wondered about. It answers every single question that Jeremy has ever had about girls. And then Jeremy wakes up—

It’s dark. Jeremy flips on the light. The dream is moving away from him. There was something about Mars. Elizabeth was asking who he thought was prettier, Talis or Elizabeth. They were laughing. They both had pointy fox ears. They wanted him to do something. There was a telephone number he was supposed to call. There was something he was supposed to do.

In two weeks, on the fifteenth of April, Jeremy and his mother will get in her van and start driving out to Las Vegas. Every morning before school, Jeremy takes long showers and his father doesn’t say anything at all. One day it’s as if nothing is wrong between his parents. The next day they won’t even look at each other. Jeremy’s father won’t come out of his study. And then the day after that, Jeremy comes home and finds his mother sitting on his father’s lap. They’re smiling as if they know something stupid and secret. They don’t even notice Jeremy when he walks through the room. Even this is preferable, though, to the way they behave when they do notice him. They act guilty and strange and as if they are about to ruin his life. Gordon Mars makes pancakes every morning, and Jeremy’s favorite dinner, macaroni and cheese, every night. Jeremy’s mother plans out an itinerary for their trip. They will be stopping at libraries across the country, because his mother loves libraries. But she’s also bought a new two-man tent and two sleeping bags and a portable stove, so that they can camp, if Jeremy wants to camp. Even though Jeremy’s mother hates the outdoors.

Right after she does this, Gordon Mars spends all weekend in the garage. He won’t let either of them see what he’s doing, and when he does let them in, it turns out that he’s removed the seating in the back of the van and bolted down two of his couches, one on each side, both upholstered in electric-blue fake fur.

They have to climb in through the cargo door at the back because one of the couches is blocking the sliding door. Jeremy’s father says, looking very pleased with himself, “So now you don’t have to camp outside, unless you want to. You can sleep inside. There’s space underneath for suitcases. The sofas even have seat belts.”

Over the sofas, Jeremy’s father has rigged up small wooden shelves that fold down on chains from the walls of the van and become table tops. There’s a travel-sized disco ball dangling from the ceiling, and a wooden panel—with Velcro straps and a black, quilted pad—behind the driver’s seat, where Jeremy’s father explains they can hang up the painting of the woman with the apple and the knife.

The van looks like something out of an episode of The Library. Jeremy’s mother bursts into tears. She runs back inside the house. Jeremy’s father says, helplessly, “I just wanted to make her laugh.”

Jeremy wants to say, “I hate both of you.” But he doesn’t say it, and he doesn’t. It would be easier if he did.

When Jeremy told Karl about Las Vegas, Karl punched him in the stomach. Then he said, “Have you told Talis?”

Jeremy said, “You’re supposed to be nice to me! You’re supposed to tell me not to go and that this sucks and you’re not supposed to punch me. Why did you punch me? Is Talis all you ever think about?”

“Kind of,” Karl said. “Most of the time. Sorry, Germ, of course I wish you weren’t going and yeah, it also pisses me off. We’re supposed to be best friends, but you do stuff all the time and I never get to. I’ve never driven across the country or been to Las Vegas, even though I’d really, really like to. I can’t feel sorry for you when I bet you anything that while you’re there, you’ll sneak into some casino and play slot machines and win like a million bucks. You should feel sorry for me. I’m the one that has to stay here. Can I borrow your dirt bike while you’re gone?”

“Sure,” Jeremy said.

“How about your telescope?” Karl said.

“I’m taking it with me,” Jeremy said.

“Fine. You have to call me every day,” Karl said. “You have to email. You have to tell me about Las Vegas show girls. I want to know how tall they really are. Whose phone number is this?”

Karl was holding the scrap of paper with the number of Jeremy’s phone booth.

“Mine,” Jeremy said. “That’s my phone booth. The one I inherited.”

“Have you called it?” Karl said.

“No,” Jeremy said. He’d called the phone booth a few times. But it wasn’t a game. Karl would think it was a game.

“Cool,” Karl said and he went ahead and dialed the number. “Hello?” Karl said, “I’d like to speak to the person in charge of Jeremy’s life. This is Jeremy’s best friend Karl.”

“Not funny,” Jeremy said.

“My life is boring,” Karl said, into the phone. “I’ve never inherited anything. This girl I like won’t talk to me. So is someone there? Does anybody want to talk to me? Does anyone want to talk to my friend, the Lord of the Phone Booth? Jeremy, they’re demanding that you liberate the phone booth from yourself.”

“Still not funny,” Jeremy said and Karl hung up the phone.

Jeremy told Elizabeth. They were up on the roof of Jeremy’s house and he told her the whole thing. Not just the part about Las Vegas, but also the part about his father and how he put Jeremy in a book with no giant spiders in it.

“Have you read it?” Elizabeth said.

“No,” Jeremy said. “He won’t let me. Don’t tell Karl. All I told him is that my mom and I have to go out for a few months to check out the wedding chapel.”

“I won’t tell Karl,” Elizabeth said. She leaned forward and kissed Jeremy and then she wasn’t kissing him. It was all very fast and surprising, but they didn’t fall off the roof. Nobody falls off the roof in this story. “Talis likes you,” Elizabeth said. “That’s what Amy says. Maybe you like her back. I don’t know. But I thought I should go ahead and kiss you now. Just in case I don’t get to kiss you again.”

“You can kiss me again,” Jeremy said. “Talis probably doesn’t like me.”

“No,” Elizabeth said. “I mean, let’s not. I want to stay friends and it’s hard enough to be friends, Germ. Look at you and Karl.”

“I would never kiss Karl,” Jeremy said.

“Funny, Germ. We should have a surprise party for you before you go,” Elizabeth said.

“It won’t be a surprise party now,” Jeremy said. Maybe kissing him once was enough.

“Well, once I tell Amy it can’t really be a surprise party,” Elizabeth said. “She would explode into a million pieces and all the little pieces would start yelling, ‘Guess what? Guess what? We’re having a surprise party for you, Jeremy!’ But just because I’m letting you in on the surprise doesn’t mean there won’t be surprises.”

“I don’t actually like surprises,” Jeremy said.

“Who does?” Elizabeth said. “Only the people who do the surprising. Can we have the party at your house? I think it should be like Halloween, and it always feels like Halloween here. We could all show up in costumes and watch lots of old episodes of The Library and eat ice cream.”

“Sure,” Jeremy said. And then: “This is terrible! What if there’s a new episode of The Library while I’m gone? Who am I going to watch it with?”

And he’d said the perfect thing. Elizabeth felt so bad about Jeremy having to watch The Library all by himself that she kissed him again.

There has never been a giant spider in any episode of The Library, although once Fox got really small and Ptolemy Krill carried her around in his pocket. She had to rip up one of Krill’s handkerchiefs and blindfold herself, just in case she accidentally read a draft of Krill’s terrible poetry. And then it turned out that, as well as the poetry, Krill had also stashed a rare, horned Anubis earwig in his pocket which hadn’t been properly preserved. Ptolemy Krill, it turned out, was careless with his kill jar. The earwig almost ate Fox, but instead it became her friend. It still sends her Christmas cards.

These are the two most important things that Jeremy and his friends have in common: a geographical location, and love of a television show about a library. Jeremy turns on the television as soon as he comes home from school. He flips through the channels, watching reruns of Star Trek and Law & Order. If there’s a new episode of The Library before he and his mother leave for Las Vegas, then everything will be fine. Everything will work out. His mother says, “You watch too much television, Jeremy.” But he goes on flipping through channels. Then he goes up to his room and makes phone calls.

“The new episode needs to be soon, because we’re getting ready to leave. Tonight would be good. You’d tell me if there was going to be a new episode tonight, right?”

Silence.

“Can I take that as a yes? It would be easier if I had a brother,” Jeremy tells his telephone booth. “Hello? Are you there? Or a sister. I’m tired of being good all the time. If I had a sibling, then we could take turns being good. If I had an older brother, I might be better at being bad, better at being angry. Karl is really good at being angry. He learned how from his brothers. I wouldn’t want brothers like Karl’s brothers, of course, but it sucks having to figure out everything all by myself. And the more normal I try to be, the more my parents think that I’m acting out. They think it’s a phase that I’ll grow out of. They think it isn’t normal to be normal. Because there’s no such thing as normal.

“And this whole book thing. The whole shoplifting thing, how my dad steals things, it figures that he went and stole my life. It isn’t just me being melodramatic, to say that. That’s exactly what he did! Did I tell you that once he stole a ferret from a pet store because he felt bad for it, and then he let it loose in our house and it turned out that it was pregnant? There was this woman who came to interview Dad and she sat down on one of the—”

Someone knocks on his bedroom door. “Jeremy,” his mother says. “Is Karl here? Am I interrupting?”

“No,” Jeremy says, and hangs up the phone. He’s gotten into the habit of calling his phone booth every day. When he calls, it rings and rings and then it stops ringing, as if someone has picked up. There’s just silence on the other end, no squeaky pretend-Fox voice, but it’s a peaceful, interested silence. Jeremy complains about all the things there are to complain about, and the silent person on the other end listens and listens. Maybe it is Fox standing there in his phone booth and listening patiently. He wonders what incarnation of Fox is listening. One thing about Fox: she’s never sorry for herself. She’s always too busy. If it were really Fox, she’d hang up on him.

Jeremy opens his door. “I was on the phone,” he says. His mother comes in and sits down on his bed. She’s wearing one of his father’s old flannel shirts. “So have you packed?”

Jeremy shrugs. “I guess,” he says. “Why did you cry when you saw what Dad did to the van? Don’t you like it?”

“It’s that damn painting,” his mother says. “It was the first nice thing he ever gave me. We should have spent the money on health insurance and a new roof and groceries and instead he bought a painting. So I got angry. I left him. I took the painting and I moved into a hotel and I stayed there for a few days. I was going to sell the painting, but instead I fell in love with it, so I came home and apologized for running away. I got pregnant with you and I used to get hungry and dream that someone was going to give me a beautiful apple, like the one she’s holding. When I told your father, he said he didn’t trust her, that she was holding out the apple like that as a trick and if you went to take it from her, she’d stab you with the peeling knife. He says that she’s a tough old broad and she’ll take care of us while we’re on the road.”

“Do we really have to go?” Jeremy says. “If we go to Las Vegas I might get into trouble. I might start using drugs or gambling or something.”

“Oh, Germ. You try so hard to be a good kid,” his mother says. “You try so hard to be normal. Sometimes I’d like to be normal, too. Maybe Vegas will be good for us. Are these the books that you’re bringing?”

Jeremy shrugs. “Not all of them. I can’t decide which ones I should take and which ones I can leave. It feels like whatever I leave behind, I’m leaving behind for good.”

“That’s silly,” his mother says. “We’re coming back. I promise. Your father and I will work things out. If you leave something behind that you need, he can mail it to you. Do you think there are slot machines in the libraries in Las Vegas? I talked to a woman at the Hell’s Bells chapel and there’s something called The Arts and Lovecraft Library where they keep Cleo’s special collection of horror novels and gothic romances and fake copies of The Necronomicon. You go in and out through a secret, swinging-bookcase door. People get married in it. There’s a Dr. Frankenstein’s LoveLab, the Masque of the Red Death Ballroom and also something just called The Crypt. Oh yeah, and there’s also The Vampire’s Patio and The Black Lagoon Grotto, where you can get married by moonlight.”

“You hate all this stuff,” Jeremy says.

“It’s not my cup of tea,” his mother admits. Then she says, “When does everyone show up tonight?”

“Around eight,” Jeremy says. “Are you going to get dressed up?”

“I don’t have to dress up,” his mother says. “I’m a librarian, remember?”

Jeremy’s father’s office is above the garage. In theory, no one is meant to interrupt him while he’s working, but in practice Jeremy’s father loves nothing better than to be interrupted, as long as the person who interrupts brings him something to eat. When Jeremy and his mother are gone, who will bring Jeremy’s father food? Jeremy hardens his heart.

The floor is covered with books and bolts and samples of upholstering fabrics. Jeremy’s father is lying facedown on the floor with his feet propped up on a bolt of fabric, which means that he is thinking and also that his back hurts. He claims to think best when he is on the verge of falling asleep.

“I brought you a bowl of Froot Loops,” Jeremy says.

His father rolls over and looks up. “Thanks,” he says. “What time is it? Is everyone here? Is that your costume? Is that my tuxedo jacket?”

“It’s five-ish. Nobody’s here yet. Do you like it?” Jeremy says. He’s dressed as a Forbidden Book. His father’s jacket is too big, but he still feels very elegant. Very sinister. His mother lent him the lipstick and the feathers and the platform heels.

“It’s interesting,” his father allows. “And a little frightening.”

Jeremy feels obscurely pleased, even though he knows that his father is more amused than frightened. “Everyone else will probably come as Fox or Prince Wing. Except for Karl. He’s coming as Ptolemy Krill. He even wrote some really bad poetry. I wanted to ask you something, before we leave tomorrow.”

“Shoot,” his father says.

“Did you really get rid of the novel with me in it?”

“No,” his father says. “It felt unlucky. Unlucky to keep it, unlucky not to keep it. I don’t know what to do with it.”

Jeremy says, “I’m glad you didn’t get rid of it.”

“It’s not any good, you know,” his father says. “Which makes all this even worse. At first it was because I was bored with giant spiders. It was going to be something funny to show you. But then I wrote that you had a brain tumor and it wasn’t funny any more. I figured I could save you—I’m the author, after all—but you got sicker and sicker. You were going through a rebellious phase. You were sneaking out of the house a lot and you hit your mother. You were a real jerk. But it turned out you had a brain tumor and that was making you behave strangely.”

“Can I ask another question?” Jeremy says. “You know how you like to steal things? You know how you’re really, really good at it?”

“Yeah,” says his father.

“Could you not steal things for a while, if I asked you to?” Jeremy says. “Mom isn’t going to be around to pay for the books and stuff that you steal. I don’t want you to end up in jail because we went to Las Vegas.”

His father closes his eyes as if he hopes Jeremy will forget that he asked a question, and go away.

Jeremy says nothing.

“All right,” his father says finally. “I won’t shoplift anything until you get home again.”

Jeremy’s mother runs around taking photos of everyone. Talis and Elizabeth have both showed up as Fox, although Talis is dead Fox. She carries her fake fur ears and tail around in a little see-through plastic purse and she also has a sword, which she leaves in the umbrella stand in the kitchen. Jeremy and Talis haven’t talked much since she had a dream about him and since he told her that he’s going to Las Vegas. She didn’t say anything about that. Which is perfectly normal for Talis.

Karl makes an excellent Ptolemy Krill. Jeremy’s Forbidden Book disguise is admired.

Amy’s Faithful Margaret costume is almost as good as anything Faithful Margaret wears on TV. There are even special effects: Amy has rigged up her hair with red ribbons and wire and spray color and egg whites so that it looks as if it’s on fire, and there are tiny papier-mâché golems in it, making horrible faces. She dances a polka with Jeremy’s father. Faithful Margaret is mad for polka dancing.

No one has dressed up as Prince Wing.

They watch the episode with the possessed chicken and they watch the episode with the Salt Wife and they watch the episode where Prince Wing and Faithful Margaret fall under a spell and swap bodies and have sex for the first time. They watch the episode where Fox saves Prince Wing’s life for the first time.

Jeremy’s father makes chocolate/mango/espresso milk shakes for everyone. None of Jeremy’s friends, except for Elizabeth, know about the novel. Everyone thinks Jeremy and his mother are just having an adventure. Everyone thinks Jeremy will be back at the end of the summer.

“I wonder how they find the actors,” Elizabeth says. “They aren’t real actors. They must be regular people. But you’d think that somewhere there would be someone who knows them. That somebody online would say, hey, that’s my sister! Or that’s the kid I went to school with who threw up in P.E. You know, sometimes someone says something like that or sometimes someone pretends that they know something about The Library, but it always turns out to be a hoax. Just somebody wanting to be somebody.”

“What about the guy who’s writing it?” Karl says.

Talis says, “Who says it’s a guy?” and Amy says, “Yeah, Karl, why do you always assume it’s a guy writing it?”

“Maybe nobody’s writing it,” Elizabeth says. “Maybe it’s magic or it’s broadcast from outer space. Maybe it’s real. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

“No,” Jeremy says. “Because then Fox would really be dead. That would suck.”

“I don’t care,” Elizabeth says. “I wish it were real, anyway. Maybe it all really happened somewhere, like King Arthur or Robin Hood, and this is just one version of how it happened. Like a magical After School Special.”

“Even if it isn’t real,” Amy says, “parts of it could be real. Like maybe the World-Tree Library is real. Or maybe The Library is made up, but Fox is based on somebody that the writer knew. Writers do that all the time, right? Jeremy, I think your dad should write a book about me. I could be eaten by giant spiders. Or have sex with giant spiders and have spider babies. I think that would be so great.”

So Amy does have psychic abilities, after all, although hopefully she will never know this. When Jeremy tests his own potential psychic abilities, he can almost sense his father, hovering somewhere just outside the living room, listening to this conversation and maybe even taking notes. Which is what writers do. But Jeremy isn’t really psychic. It’s just that lurking and hovering and appearing suddenly when you weren’t expecting him are what his father does, just like shoplifting and cooking. Jeremy prays to all the dark gods that he never receives the gift of knowing what people are thinking. It’s a dark road and it ends up with you trapped on late-night television in front of an invisible audience of depressed insomniacs wearing hats made out of tinfoil and they all want to pay you nine-ninety-nine per minute to hear you describe in minute, terrible detail what their deceased cat is thinking about, right now. What kind of future is that? He wants to go to Mars. And when will Elizabeth kiss him again? You can’t just kiss someone twice and then never kiss them again. He tries not to think about Elizabeth and kissing, just in case Amy reads his mind. He realizes that he’s been staring at Talis’s breasts, glares instead at Elizabeth, who is watching TV. Meanwhile, Karl is glaring at him.

On television, Fox is dancing in the Invisible Nightclub with Faithful Margaret, whose hair is about to catch fire again. The Norns are playing their screechy cover of “Come On, Eileen.” The Norns only know two songs: “Come On, Eileen,” and “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.” They don’t play real instruments. They play squeaky dog toys and also a bathtub, which is enchanted, although nobody knows who by, or why, or what it was enchanted for.

“If you had to choose one,” Jeremy says, “invisibility or the ability to fly, which would you choose?”

Everybody looks at him. “Only perverts would want to be invisible,” Elizabeth says.

“You’d have to be naked if you were invisible,” Karl says. “Because otherwise people would see your clothes.”

“If you could fly, you’d have to wear thermal underwear because it’s cold up there. So it just depends on whether you like to wear long underwear or no underwear at all,” Amy says.

It’s the kind of conversation that they have all the time. It makes Jeremy feel homesick even though he hasn’t left yet.

“Maybe I’ll go make brownies,” Jeremy says. “Elizabeth, do you want to help me make brownies?”

“Shhh,” Elizabeth says. “This is a good part.”

On television, Fox and Faithful Margaret are making out. The Faithful part is kind of a joke.

Jeremy’s parents go to bed at one. By three, Amy and Elizabeth are passed out on the couch and Karl has gone upstairs to check his email on Jeremy’s iBook. On TV, wolves are roaming the tundra of The Free People’s World-Tree Library’s fortieth floor. Snow is falling heavily and librarians are burning books to keep warm, but only the most dull and improving works of literature.

Jeremy isn’t sure where Talis has gone, so he goes to look for her. She hasn’t gone far. She’s on the landing, looking at the space on the wall where Alice Mars’s painting should be hanging. Talis is carrying her sword with her, and her little plastic purse. In the bathroom off the landing, the singing toilet is still singing away in German. “We’re taking the painting with us,” Jeremy says. “My dad insisted, just in case he accidentally burns down the house while we’re gone. Do you want to go see it? I was going to show everybody, but everybody’s asleep right now.”

“Sure,” Talis says.

So Jeremy gets a flashlight and takes her out to the garage and shows her the van. She climbs right inside and sits down on one of the blue-fur couches. She looks around and he wonders what she’s thinking. He wonders if the toilet song is stuck in her head.

“My dad did all of this,” Jeremy says. He turns on the flashlight and shines it on the disco ball. Light spatters off in anxious, slippery orbits. Jeremy shows Talis how his father has hung up the painting. It looks truly wrong in the van, as if someone demented put it there. Especially with the light reflecting off the disco ball. The woman in the painting looks confused and embarrassed, as if Jeremy’s father has accidentally canceled out her protective powers. Maybe the disco ball is her Kryptonite.

“So remember how you had a dream about me?” Jeremy says. Talis nods. “I think I had a dream about you, that you were Fox.”

Talis opens up her arms, encompassing her costume, her sword, her plastic purse with poor Fox’s ears and tail inside.

“There was something you wanted me to do,” Jeremy says. “I was supposed to save you, somehow.”

Talis just looks at him.

“How come you never talk?” Jeremy says. All of this is irritating. How he used to feel normal around Elizabeth, like friends, and now everything is peculiar and uncomfortable. How he used to enjoy feeling uncomfortable around Talis, and now, suddenly, he doesn’t. This must be what sex is about. Stop thinking about sex, he thinks.

Talis opens her mouth and closes it again. Then she says, “I don’t know. Amy talks so much. You all talk a lot. Somebody has to be the person who doesn’t. The person who listens.”

“Oh,” Jeremy says. “I thought maybe you had a tragic secret. Like maybe you used to stutter.” Except secrets can’t have secrets, they just are.

“Nope,” Talis says. “It’s like being invisible, you know. Not talking. I like it.”

“But you’re not invisible,” Jeremy says. “Not to me. Not to Karl. Karl really likes you. Did you hit him with a boa constrictor on purpose?”

But Talis says, “I wish you weren’t leaving.” The disco ball spins and spins. It makes Jeremy feel kind of carsick and also as if he has sparkly, disco leprosy. He doesn’t say anything back to Talis, just to see how it feels. Except maybe that’s rude. Or maybe it’s rude the way everybody always talks and doesn’t leave any space for Talis to say anything.

“At least you get to miss school,” Talis says, at last.

“Yeah,” he says. He leaves another space, but Talis doesn’t say anything this time. “We’re going to stop at all these museums and things on the way across the country. I’m supposed to keep a blog for school and describe stuff in it. I’m going to make a lot of stuff up. So it will be like Creative Writing and not so much like homework.”

“You should make a list of all the towns with weird names you drive through,” Talis says. “Town of Horseheads. That’s a real place.”

“Plantagenet,” Jeremy says. “That’s a real place too. I had something really weird to tell you.”

Talis waits, like she always does.

Jeremy says, “I called my phone booth, the one that I inherited, and someone answered. She sounded just like Fox and she told me—she told me to call back later. So I’ve called a few more times, but I don’t ever get her.”

“Fox isn’t a real person,” Talis says. “The Library is just TV.” But she sounds uncertain. That’s the thing about The Library. Nobody knows for sure. Everyone who watches it wishes and hopes that it’s not just acting. That it’s magic, real magic.

“I know,” Jeremy says.

“I wish Fox was real,” Fox-Talis says.

They’ve been sitting in the van for a long time. If Karl looks for them and can’t find them, he’s going to think that they’ve been making out. He’ll kill Jeremy. Once Karl tried to strangle another kid for accidentally peeing on his shoes. Jeremy might as well kiss Talis. So he does, even though she’s still holding her sword. She doesn’t hit him with it. It’s dark and he has his eyes closed and he can almost imagine that he’s kissing Elizabeth.

Karl has fallen asleep on Jeremy’s bed. Talis is downstairs, fast-forwarding through the episode where some librarians drink too much Euphoria and decide to abolish Story Hour. Not just the practice of having a Story Hour, but the whole Hour. Amy and Elizabeth are still sacked out on the couch. It’s weird to watch Amy sleep. She doesn’t talk in her sleep.

Karl is snoring. Jeremy could go up on the roof and look at stars, except he’s already packed up his telescope. He could try to wake up Elizabeth and they could go up on the roof, but Talis is down there. He and Talis could go sit on the roof, but he doesn’t want to kiss Talis on the roof. He makes a solemn oath to only ever kiss Elizabeth on the roof.

He picks up his phone. Maybe he can call his phone booth and complain just a little and not wake Karl up. His dad is going to freak out about the phone bill. All these calls to Nevada. It’s 4 A.M. Jeremy’s plan is not to go to sleep at all. His friends are lame.

The phone rings and rings and rings and then someone picks up. Jeremy recognizes the silence on the other end. “Everybody came over and fell asleep,” he whispers. “That’s why I’m whispering. I don’t even think they care that I’m leaving. And my feet hurt. Remember how I was going to dress up as a Forbidden Book? Platform shoes aren’t comfortable. Karl thinks I did it on purpose, to be even taller than him than usual. And I forgot that I was wearing lipstick and I kissed Talis and got lipstick all over her face, so it’s a good thing everyone was asleep because otherwise someone would have seen. And my dad says that he won’t shoplift at all while Mom and I are gone, but you can’t trust him. And that fake-fur upholstery sheds like—”

“Jeremy,” that strangely familiar, sweet-and-rusty door-hinge voice says softly. “Shut up, Jeremy. I need your help.”

“Wow!” Jeremy says, not in a whisper. “Wow, wow, wow! Is this Fox? Are you really Fox? Is this a joke? Are you real? Are you dead? What are you doing in my phone booth?”

“You know who I am,” Fox says, and Jeremy knows with all his heart that it’s really Fox. “I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” Jeremy says. Karl, on the bed, laughs in his sleep as if the idea of Jeremy doing something is funny to him. “What could I do?”

“I need you to steal three books,” Fox says. “From a library in a place called Iowa.”

“I know Iowa,” Jeremy says. “I mean, I’ve never been there, but it’s a real place. I could go there.”

“I’m going to tell you the books you need to steal,” Fox says. “Author, title, and the jewelly festival number—”

“Dewey Decimal,” Jeremy says. “It’s actually called the Dewey Decimal number in real libraries.”

“Real,” Fox says, sounding amused. “You need to write this all down and also how to get to the library. You need to steal the three books and bring them to me. It’s very important.”

“Is it dangerous?” Jeremy says. “Are the Forbidden Books up to something? Are the Forbidden Books real, too? What if I get caught stealing?”

“It’s not dangerous to you,” Fox says. “Just don’t get caught. Remember the episode of The Library when I was the little old lady with the beehive and I stole the Bishop of Tweedle’s false teeth while he was reading the banns for the wedding of Faithful Margaret and Sir Petronella the Younger? Remember how he didn’t even notice?”

“I’ve never seen that episode,” Jeremy says, although as far as he knows he’s never missed a single episode of The Library. He’s never even heard of Sir Petronella.

“Oh,” Fox says. “Maybe that’s a flashback in a later episode or something. That’s a great episode. We’re depending on you, Jeremy. You have got to steal these books. They contain dreadful secrets. I can’t say the titles out loud. I’m going to spell them instead.”

So Jeremy gets a pad of paper and Fox spells out the titles of each book twice. (They aren’t titles that can be written down here. It’s safer not to even think about some books.) “Can I ask you something?” Jeremy says. “Can I tell anybody about this? Not Amy. But could I tell Karl or Elizabeth? Or Talis? Can I tell my mom? If I woke up Karl right now, would you talk to him for a minute?”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Fox says. “I have to go now. Please don’t tell anyone, Jeremy. I’m sorry.”

“Is it the Forbidden Books?” Jeremy says again. What would Fox think if she saw the costume he’s still wearing, all except for the platform heels? “Do you think I shouldn’t trust my friends? But I’ve known them my whole life!”

Fox makes a noise, a kind of pained whuff.

“What is it?” Jeremy says. “Are you okay?”

“I have to go,” Fox says. “Nobody can know about this. Don’t give anybody this number. Don’t tell anyone about your phone booth. Or me. Promise, Germ?”

“Only if you promise you won’t call me Germ,” Jeremy says, feeling really stupid. “I hate when people call me that. Call me Mars instead.”

“Mars,” Fox says, and it sounds exotic and strange and brave, as if Jeremy has just become a new person, a person named after a whole planet, a person who kisses girls and talks to Foxes.

“I’ve never stolen anything,” Jeremy says.

But Fox has hung up.

Maybe out there, somewhere, is someone who enjoys having to say good-bye, but it isn’t anyone that Jeremy knows. All of his friends are grumpy and red-eyed, although not from crying. From lack of sleep. From too much television. There are still faint red stains around Talis’s mouth and if everyone wasn’t so tired, they would realize it’s Jeremy’s lipstick. Karl gives Jeremy a handful of quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. “For the slot machines,” Karl says. “If you win anything, you can keep a third of what you win.”

“Half,” Jeremy says, automatically.

“Fine,” Karl says. “It’s all from your dad’s sofas, anyway. Just one more thing. Stop getting taller. Don’t get taller while you’re gone. Okay.” He hugs Jeremy hard: so hard that it’s almost like getting punched again. No wonder Talis threw the boa constrictor at Karl.

Talis and Elizabeth both hug Jeremy good-bye. Talis looks even more mysterious now that he’s sat with her under a disco ball and made out. Later on, Jeremy will discover that Talis has left her sword under the blue fur couch and he’ll wonder if she left it on purpose.

Talis doesn’t say anything and Amy, of course, doesn’t shut up, not even when she kisses him. It feels weird to be kissed by someone who goes right on talking while they kiss you and yet it shouldn’t be a surprise that Amy kisses him. He imagines that later Amy and Talis and Elizabeth will all compare notes.

Elizabeth says, “I promise I’ll tape every episode of The Library while you’re gone so we can all watch them together when you get back. I promise I’ll call you in Vegas, no matter what time it is there, when there’s a new episode.”

Her hair is a mess and her breath is faintly sour. Jeremy wishes he could tell her how beautiful she looks. “I’ll write bad poetry and send it to you,” he says.

Jeremy’s mother is looking hideously cheerful as she goes in and out of the house, making sure that she hasn’t left anything behind. She loves long car trips. It doesn’t bother her one bit that she and her son are abandoning their entire lives. She passes Jeremy a folder full of maps. “You’re in charge of not getting lost,” she says. “Put these somewhere safe.”

Jeremy says, “I found a library online that I want to go visit. Out in Iowa. They have a corn mosaic on the façade of the building, with a lot of naked goddesses and gods dancing around in a field of corn. Someone wants to take it down. Can we go see it first?”

“Sure,” his mother says.

Jeremy’s father has filled a whole grocery bag with sandwiches. His hair is drooping and he looks even more like an ax murderer than usual. If this were a movie, you’d think that Jeremy and his mother were escaping in the nick of time. “You take care of your mother,” he says to Jeremy.

“Sure,” Jeremy says. “You take care of yourself.”

His dad sags. “You take care of yourself, too.” So it’s settled. They’re all supposed to take care of themselves. Why can’t they stay home and take care of each other, until Jeremy is good and ready to go off to college? “I’ve got another bag of sandwiches in the kitchen,” his dad says. “I should go get them.”

“Wait,” Jeremy says. “I have to ask you something before we take off. Suppose I had to steal something. I mean, I don’t have to steal anything, of course, and I know stealing is wrong, even when you do it, and I would never steal anything. But what if I did? How do you do it? How do you do it and not get caught?”

His father shrugs. He’s probably wondering if Jeremy is really his son. Gordon Mars inherited his mutant, long-fingered, ambidextrous hands from a long line of shoplifters and money launderers and petty criminals. They’re all deeply ashamed of Jeremy’s father. Gordon Mars had a gift and he threw it away to become a writer. “I don’t know,” he says. He picks up Jeremy’s hand and looks at it as if he’s never noticed before that Jeremy had something hanging off the end of his wrist. “You just do it. You do it like you’re not really doing anything at all. You do it while you’re thinking about something else and you forget that you’re doing it.”

“Oh,” Jeremy says, taking his hand back. “I’m not planning on stealing anything. I was just curious.”

His father looks at him. “Take care of yourself,” he says again, as if he really means it, and hugs Jeremy hard.

Then he goes and gets the sandwiches (so many sandwiches that Jeremy and his mother will eat sandwiches for the first three days, and still have to throw half of them away). Everyone waves. Jeremy and his mother climb in the van. Jeremy’s mother turns on the CD player. Bob Dylan is singing about monkeys. His mother loves Bob Dylan. They drive away.

Do you know how, sometimes, during a commercial break in your favorite television shows, your best friend calls and wants to talk about one of her boyfriends, and when you try to hang up, she starts crying and you try to cheer her up and end up missing about half of the episode? And so when you go to work the next day, you have to get the guy who sits next to you to explain what happened? That’s the good thing about a book. You can mark your place in a book. But this isn’t really a book. It’s a television show.

In one episode of The Library, an adolescent boy drives across the country with his mother. They have to change a tire. The boy practices taking things out of his mother’s purse and putting them back again. He steals a sixteen-ounce bottle of Coke from one convenience market and leaves it at another convenience market. The boy and his mother stop at a lot of libraries, and the boy keeps a blog, but he skips the bit about the library in Iowa. He writes in his blog about what he’s reading, but he doesn’t read the books he stole in Iowa, because Fox told him not to, and because he has to hide them from his mother. Well, he reads just a few pages. Skims, really. He hides them under the blue-fur sofa. They go camping in Utah, and the boy sets up his telescope. He sees three shooting stars and a coyote. He never sees anyone who looks like a Forbidden Book, although he sees a transvestite go into the women’s restroom at a rest stop in Indiana. He calls a phone booth just outside Las Vegas twice, but no one ever answers. He has short conversations with his father. He wonders what his father is up to. He wishes he could tell his father about Fox and the books. Once the boy’s mother finds a giant spider the size of an Oreo in their tent. She starts laughing hysterically. She takes a picture of it with her digital camera, and the boy puts the picture on his blog. Sometimes the boy asks questions and his mother talks about her parents. Once she cries. The boy doesn’t know what to say. They talk about their favorite episodes of The Library and the episodes that they really hated, and the mother asks if the boy thinks Fox is really dead. He says he doesn’t think so.

Once a man tries to break into the van while they are sleeping in it. But then he goes away. Maybe the painting of the woman with the peeling knife is protecting them.

But you’ve seen this episode before.

It’s Cinco de Mayo. It’s almost seven o’clock at night, and the sun is beginning to go down. Jeremy and his mother are in the desert and Las Vegas is somewhere in front of them. Every time they pass a driver coming the other way, Jeremy tries to figure out if that person has just won or lost a lot of money. Everything is flat and sort of tilted here, except off in the distance, where the land goes up abruptly, as if someone has started to fold up a map. Somewhere around here is the Grand Canyon, which must have been a surprise when people first saw it.

Jeremy’s mother says, “Are you sure we have to do this first? Couldn’t we go find your phone booth later?”

“Can we do it now?” Jeremy says. “I said I was going to do it on my blog. It’s like a quest that I have to complete.”

“Okay,” his mother says. “It should be around here somewhere. It’s supposed to be 4.5 miles after the turn-off, and here’s the turn-off.”

It isn’t hard to find the phone booth. There isn’t much else around. Jeremy should feel excited when he sees it, but it’s a disappointment, really. He’s seen phone booths before. He was expecting something to be different. Mostly he just feels tired of road trips and tired of roads and just tired, tired, tired. He looks around to see if Fox is somewhere nearby, but there’s just a hiker off in the distance. Some kid.

“Okay, Germ,” his mother says. “Make this quick.”

“I need to get my backpack out of the back,” Jeremy says.

“Do you want me to come, too?” his mother says.

“No,” Jeremy says. “This is kind of personal.”

His mother looks like she’s trying not to laugh. “Just hurry up. I have to pee.”

When Jeremy gets to the phone booth, he turns around. His mother has the light on in the van. It looks like she’s singing along to the radio. His mother has a terrible voice.

When he steps inside the phone booth, it isn’t magical. The phone booth smells rank, as if an animal has been living in it. The windows are smudgy. He takes the stolen books out of his backpack and puts them in the little shelf where someone has stolen a phone book. Then he waits. Maybe Fox is going to call him. Maybe he’s supposed to wait until she calls. But she doesn’t call. He feels lonely. There’s no one he can tell about this. He feels like an idiot and he also feels kind of proud. Because he did it. He drove cross-country with his mother and saved an imaginary person.

“So how’s your phone booth?” his mother says.

“Great!” he says, and they’re both silent again. Las Vegas is in front of them and then all around them and everything is lit up like they’re inside a pinball game. All of the trees look fake. Like someone read too much Dr. Seuss and got ideas. People are walking up and down the sidewalks. Some of them look normal. Others look like they just escaped from a fancy-dress ball at a lunatic asylum. Jeremy hopes they’ve just won lots of money and that’s why they look so startled, so strange. Or maybe they’re all vampires.

“Left,” he tells his mother. “Go left here. Look out for the vampires on the crosswalk. And then it’s an immediate right.” Four times his mother let him drive the van: once in Utah, twice in South Dakota, once in Pennsylvania. The van smells like old burger wrappers and fake fur, and it doesn’t help that Jeremy’s gotten used to the smell. The woman in the painting has had a pained expression on her face for the last few nights, and the disco ball has lost some of its pieces of mirror because Jeremy kept knocking his head on it in the morning. Jeremy and his mother haven’t showered in three days.

Here is the wedding chapel, in front of them, at the end of a long driveway. Electric purple light shines on a sign that spells out HELL’S BELLS. There’s a wrought-iron fence and a yard full of trees dripping Spanish moss. Under the trees, tombstones and miniature mausoleums.

“Do you think those are real?” his mother says. She sounds slightly worried.

“ ‘Harry East, Recently Deceased,’ ” Jeremy says. “No, I don’t.”

There’s a hearse in the driveway with a little plaque on the back. RECENTLY MARRIED. The chapel is a Victorian house with a bell tower. Perhaps it’s full of bats. Or giant spiders. Jeremy’s father would love this place. His mother is going to hate it.

Someone stands at the threshold of the chapel, door open, looking out at them. But as Jeremy and his mother get out of the van, he turns and goes inside and shuts the door. “Look out,” his mother says. “They’ve probably gone to put the boiling oil in the microwave.”

She rings the doorbell determinedly. Instead of ringing, there’s a recording of a crow. Caw, caw, caw. All the lights in the Victorian house go out. Then they turn on again. The door swings open and Jeremy tightens his grip on his backpack, just in case. “Good evening, Madam. Young man,” a man says and Jeremy looks up and up and up. The man at the door has to lower his head to look out. His hands are large as toaster ovens. He looks like he’s wearing Chihuahua coffins on his feet. Two realistic-looking bolts stick out on either side of his head. He wears green pancake makeup, glittery green eye shadow, and his lashes are as long and thick and green as Astro Turf. “We weren’t expecting you so soon.”

“We should have called ahead,” Jeremy’s mother says. “I’m real sorry.”

“Great costume,” Jeremy says.

The Frankenstein curls his lip in a somber way. “Thank you,” he says. “Call me Miss Thing, please.”

“I’m Jeremy,” Jeremy says. “This is my mother.”

“Oh please,” Miss Thing says. Even his wink is somber. “You tease me. She isn’t old enough to be your mother.”

“Oh please, yourself,” Jeremy’s mother says.

“Quick, the two of you,” someone yells from somewhere inside Hell’s Bells. “While you zthtand there gabbing, the devil ithz prowling around like a lion, looking for a way to get in. Are you juthzt going to zthtand there and hold the door wide open for him?”

So they all step inside. “Iz that Jeremy Marthz at lathzt?” the voice says. “Earth to Marthz, Earth to Marthz. Marthzzz, Jeremy Marthzzz, there’thz zthomeone on the phone for Jeremy Marthz. She’thz called three timethz in the lathzt ten minutethz, Jeremy Marthzzz.”

It’s Fox, Jeremy knows. Of course, it’s Fox! She’s in the phone booth. She’s got the books and she’s going to tell me that I saved whatever it is that I was saving. He walks toward the buzzing voice while Miss Thing and his mother go back out to the van.

He walks past a room full of artfully draped spider webs and candelabras drooping with drippy candles. Someone is playing the organ behind a wooden screen. He goes down the hall and up a long staircase. The banisters are carved with little faces. Owls and foxes and ugly children. The voice goes on talking. “Yoohoo, Jeremy, up the stairthz, that’thz right. Now, come along, come right in! Not in there, in here, in here! Don’t mind the dark, we like the dark, just watch your step.” Jeremy puts his hand out. He touches something and there’s a click and the bookcase in front of him slowly slides back. Now the room is three times as large and there are more bookshelves and there’s a young woman wearing dark sunglasses, sitting on a couch. She has a megaphone in one hand and a phone in the other. “For you, Jeremy Marth,” she says. She’s the palest person Jeremy has ever seen and her two canine teeth are so pointed that she lisps a little when she talks. On the megaphone the lisp was sinister, but now it just makes her sound irritable.

She hands him the phone. “Hello?” he says. He keeps an eye on the vampire.

“Jeremy!” Elizabeth says. “It’s on, it’s on, it’s on! It’s just started! We’re all just sitting here. Everybody’s here. What happened to your cell phone? We kept calling.”

“Mom left it in the visitor’s center at Zion,” Jeremy says.

“Well, you’re there. We figured out from your blog that you must be near Vegas. Amy says she had a feeling that you were going to get there in time. She made us keep calling. Stay on the phone, Jeremy. We can all watch it together, okay? Hold on.”

Karl grabs the phone. “Hey, Germ, I didn’t get any postcards,” he says. “You forget how to write or something? Wait a minute. Somebody wants to say something to you.” Then he laughs and laughs and passes the phone on to someone else who doesn’t say anything at all.

“Talis?” Jeremy says.

Maybe it isn’t Talis. Maybe it’s Elizabeth again. He thinks about how his mouth is right next to Elizabeth’s ear. Or maybe it’s Talis’s ear.

The vampire on the couch is already flipping through the channels. Jeremy would like to grab the remote away from her, but it’s not a good idea to try to take things away from a vampire. His mother and Miss Thing come up the stairs and into the room and suddenly the room seems absolutely full of people, as if Karl and Amy and Elizabeth and Talis have come into the room, too. His hand is getting sweaty around the phone. Miss Thing has a firm hold on Jeremy’s mother’s painting, as if it might try to escape. Jeremy’s mother looks tired. For the past three days her hair has been braided into pigtails. She looks younger to Jeremy, as if they’ve been traveling backwards in time instead of just across the country. She smiles at Jeremy, a giddy, exhausted smile. Jeremy smiles back.

“Is it The Library?” Miss Thing says. “Is a new episode on?”

Jeremy sits down on the couch beside the vampire, still holding the phone to his ear. His arm is getting tired.

“I’m here,” he says to Talis or Elizabeth or whoever it is on the other end of the phone. “I’m here.” And then he sits and doesn’t say anything and waits with everyone else for the vampire to find the right channel so they can all find out if he’s saved Fox, if Fox is alive, if Fox is still alive.

BURN

James Patrick Kelly

One

For the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.—Walden

Spur was in the nightmare again. It always began in the burn. The front of the burn took on a liquid quality and oozed like lava toward him. It licked at boulders and scorched the trees in the forest he had sworn to protect. There was nothing he could do to fight it; in the nightmare, he wasn’t wearing his splash pack. Or his fireproof field jacket. Fear pinned him against an oak until he could feel the skin on his face start to cook. Then he tore himself away and ran. But now the burn leapt after him, following like a fiery shadow. It chased him through a stand of pine; trees exploded like firecrackers. Sparks bit through his civvies and stung him. He could smell burning hair. His hair. In a panic he dodged into a stream choked with dead fish and poached frogs. But the water scalded his legs. He scrambled up the bank of the stream, weeping. He knew he shouldn’t be afraid; he was a veteran of the firefight. Still he felt as if something was squeezing him. A whimpering gosdog bolted across his path, its feathers singed, eyes wide. He could feel the burn dive under the forest and burrow ahead of him in every direction. The ground was hot beneath his feet and the dark humus smoked and stank. In the nightmare there was just one way out, but his brother-in-law Vic was blocking it. Only in the nightmare Vic was a pukpuk, one of the human torches who had started the burn. Vic had not yet set himself on fire, although his baseball jersey was smoking in the heat. He beckoned and for a moment Spur thought it might not be Vic after all as the anguished face shimmered in the heat of the burn. Vic wouldn’t betray them, would he? But by then Spur had to dance to keep his shoes from catching fire, and he had no escape, no choice, no time. The torch spread his arms wide and Spur stumbled into his embrace and with an angry whoosh they exploded together into flame. Spur felt his skin crackle. . . .

“That’s enough for now.” A sharp voice cut through the nightmare. Spur gasped with relief when he realized that there was no burn. Not here anyway. He felt a cold hand brush against his forehead like a blessing and knew that he was in the hospital. He had just been in the sim that the upsiders were using to heal his soul.

“You’ve got to stop thrashing around like that,” said the docbot. “Unless you want me to nail the leads to your head.”

Spur opened his eyes but all he could see was mist and shimmer. He tried to answer the docbot but he could barely find his tongue in his own mouth. A brightness to his left gradually resolved into the sunny window of the hospital room. Spur could feel the firm and not unpleasant pressure of the restraints, which bound him to the bed: broad straps across his ankles, thighs, wrists and torso. The docbot peeled the leads off his temples and then lifted Spur’s head to get the one at the base of his skull.

“So do you remember your name?” it said.

Spur stretched his head against the pillow, trying to loosen the stiffness in his neck.

“I’m over here, son. This way.”

He turned and stared into a glowing blue eye, which strobed briefly.

“Pupil dilatation normal,” the docbot muttered, probably not to Spur. It paused for a moment and then spoke again. “So about that name?”

“Spur.”

The docbot stroked Spur’s palm with its med finger, collecting some of his sweat. It stuck the sample into its mouth. “That may be what your friends call you,” it said, “but what I’m asking is the name on your id.”

The words chased each other across the ceiling for a moment before they sank in. Spur wouldn’t have had such a problem understanding if the docbot were a person, with lips and a real mouth instead of the oblong intake. The doctor controlling this bot was somewhere else. Dr. Niss was an upsider whom Spur had never actually met. “Prosper Gregory Leung,” he said.

“A fine Walden name,” said the docbot, and then muttered, “Self id 27.4 seconds from initial request.”

“Is that good?”

It hummed to itself, ignoring his question. “The electrolytes in your sweat have settled down nicely,” it said at last. “So tell me about the sim.”

“I was in the burn and the fire was after me. All around, Dr. Niss. There was a pukpuk, one of the torches, he grabbed me. I couldn’t get away.”

“You remembered my name, son.” The docbot’s top plate glowed with an approving amber light. “So did you die?”

Spur shook his head. “But I was on fire.”

“Experience fear vectors unrelated to the burn? Monsters, for instance? Your mom? Dad?”

“No.”

“Lost loves? Dead friends? Childhood pets?”

“No.” He had a fleeting image of the twisted grimace on Vic’s face at that last moment, but how could he tell this upsider that his wife’s brother had been a traitor to the Transcendent State? “Nothing.” Spur was getting used to lying to Dr. Niss, although he worried what it was doing to his soul.

“Check and double check. It’s almost as if I knew what I was doing, eh?” The docbot began releasing the straps that held Spur down. “I’d say your soul is on the mend, Citizen Leung. You’ll have some psychic scarring, but if you steer clear of complex moral dilemmas and women, you should be fine.” It paused, then snapped its fingers. “Just for the record, son, that was a joke.”

“Yes, sir.” Spur forced a smile. “Sorry, sir.” Was getting the jokes part of the cure? The way this upsider talked at once baffled and fascinated Spur.

“So let’s have a look at those burns,” said the docbot.

Spur rolled onto his stomach and folded his arms under his chin. The docbot pulled the hospital gown up. Spur could feel its medfinger pricking the dermal grafts that covered most of his back and his buttocks. “Dr. Niss?” said Spur.

“Speak up,” said the docbot. “That doesn’t hurt does it?”

“No, sir.” Spur lifted his head and tried to look back over this shoulder. “But it’s really itchy.”

“Dermal regeneration 83 percent,” it muttered. “Itchy is alive, son. Itchy is growing.”

“Sir, I was just wondering, where are you exactly?”

“Right here.” The docbot began to flow warm dermslix to the grafts from its medfinger. “Where else would I be?”

Spur chuckled, hoping that was a joke. He could remember a time when he used to tell jokes. “No, I mean your body.”

“The shell? Why?” The docbot paused. “You don’t really want to be asking about qics and the cognisphere, do you? The less you know about the upside, the better, son.”

Spur felt a prickle of resentment. What stories were upsiders telling each other about Walden? That the citizens of the Transcendent State were backward fanatics who had simplified themselves into savagery? “I wasn’t asking about the upside, exactly. I was asking about you. I mean . . . you saved me, Dr. Niss.” It wasn’t at all what Spur had expected to say, although it was certainly true. “If it wasn’t for you, it . . . I was burnt all over, probably going crazy. And I thought. . . .” His throat was suddenly so tight that he could hardly speak. “I wanted to . . . you know, thank you.”

“Quite unnecessary,” said the docbot. “After all, the Chairman is paying me to take care of all of you, bless his pockets.” It tugged at Spur’s hospital gown with its gripper arm. “I prefer the kind of thanks I can bank, son. Everything else is just used air.”

“Yes, but. . . .”

“Yes, but?” It finished pulling the gown back into place. “ ‘Yes but’ are dangerous words. Don’t forget that you people lead a privileged life here—courtesy of Jack Winter’s bounty and your parents’ luck.”

Spur had never heard anyone call the Chairman Jack. “It was my grandparents who won the lottery, sir,” he said. “But yes, I know I’m lucky to live on Walden.”

“So why do you want to know what kind of creature would puree his mind into a smear of quantum foam and entangle it with a bot brain a hundred and thirty-some light-years away? Sit up, son.”

Spur didn’t know what to say. He had imagined that Dr. Niss must be posted nearby, somewhere here at the upsiders’ compound at Concord, or perhaps in orbit.

“You do realize that the stars are very far away?”

“We’re not simple here, Dr. Niss.” He could feel the blood rushing in his cheeks. “We practice simplicity.”

“Which complicates things.” The docbot twisted off its medfinger and popped it into the sterilizer. “Say you greet your girlfriend on the tell. You have a girlfriend?”

“I’m married,” said Spur, although he and Comfort had separated months before he left for the firefight and, now that Vic was dead, he couldn’t imagine how they would ever get back together.

“So you’re away with your squad and your wife is home in your village mowing the goats or whatever she does with her time. But when you talk on the tell it’s like you’re sitting next to each other. Where are you then? At home with her? Inside the tell?”

“Of course not.”

“For you, of course not. That’s why you live on Walden, protected from life on the upside. But where I come from, it’s a matter of perspective. I believe I’m right here, even though the shell I’m saved in is elsewhere.” The sterilizer twittered. “I’m inhabiting this bot in this room with you.” The docbot opened the lid of the sterilizer, retrieved the medfinger with its gripper and pressed it into place on the bulkhead with the other instruments. “We’re done here,” it said abruptly. “Busy, busy, other souls to heal, don’t you know? Which reminds me: We need your bed, son, so we’re moving your release date up. You’ll be leaving us the day after tomorrow. I’m authorizing a week of rehabilitation before you have to go back to your squad. What’s rehab called on this world again?”

“Civic refreshment.”

“Right.” The docbot parked itself at its station beside the door to the examining room. “Refresh yourself.” Its headplate dimmed and went dark.

Spur slid off the examination table, wriggled out of the hospital gown and pulled his uniform pants off the hanger in the closet. As he was buttoning his shirt, the docbot lit its eye. “You’re welcome, son.” Its laugh was like a door slamming. “Took me a moment to understand what you were trying to say. I keep forgetting what it’s like to be anchored.”

“Anchored?” said Spur.

“Don’t be asking so many questions.” The docbot tapped its dome. “Not good for the soul.” The blue light in its eye winked out.

Two

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.—Walden

Spur was in no hurry to be discharged from the hospital, even if it was to go home for a week. He knew all too well what was waiting for him. He’d find his father trying to do the work of two men in his absence. Gandy Joy would bring him communion and then drag him into every parlor in Littleton. He’d be wined and dined and honored and possibly seduced and be acclaimed by all a hero. He didn’t feel like a hero and he surely didn’t want to be trapped into telling the grandmas and ten-year-old boys stories about the horrors of the firefight.

But what he dreaded most was seeing his estranged wife. It was bad enough that he had let her little brother die after she had made Spur promise to take care of him. Worse yet was that Vic had died a torch. No doubt he had been in secret contact with the pukpuks, had probably passed along information about the Corps of Firefighters—and Spur hadn’t suspected a thing. It didn’t matter that Vic had pushed him away during their time serving together in Gold Squad—at one time they had been best friends. He should have known; he might have been able to save Vic. Spur had already decided that he would have to lie to Comfort and his neighbors in Littleton about what had happened, just as he had lied to Dr. Niss. What was the point in smearing his dead friend now? And Spur couldn’t help the Cooperative root out other pukpuk sympathizers in the Corps; he had no idea who Vic’s contacts had been.

However, Spur had other reasons for wanting to stay right where he was. Even though he could scarcely draw breath without violating simplicity, he loved the comforts of the hospital. For example, the temperature never varied from a scandalous twenty-three degrees Celsius. No matter that outdoors the sun was blistering the rooftops of the upsiders’ Benevolence Park Number 5, indoors was a paradise where neither sweat nor sweaters held sway. And then there was the food. Even though Spur’s father, Capability Roger Leung, was the richest man in Littleton, he had practiced stricter simplicity than most. Spur had grown up on meat, bread, squash and scruff, washed down with cider and applejack pressed from the Leungs’ own apples and the occasional root beer. More recently, he and Rosie would indulge themselves when they had the money, but he was still used to gorging on the fruits of the family orchard during harvest and suffering through preserves and root cellar produce the rest of the year. But here the patients enjoyed the abundance of the Thousand Worlds, prepared in extravagant style. Depending on his appetite, he could order lablabis, dumplings, goulash, salmagundi, soufflés, quiche, phillaje, curry, paella, pasta, mousses, meringues or tarts. And that was just the lunch menu.

But of all the hospital’s guilty pleasures, the tell was his favorite. At home Spur could access the latest bazzat bands and town-tunes from all over Walden plus six hundred years of opera. And on a slow Tuesday night, he and Comfort might play one of the simplified chronicles on the tiny screen in Diligence Cottage or watch a spiritual produced by the Institute of Didactic Arts or just read to each other. But the screens of the hospital tells sprawled across entire walls and, despite the Cooperative’s censors, opened like windows onto the universe. What mattered to people on other worlds astonished Spur. Their chronicles made him feel ignorant for the first time in his life and their spirituals were so wickedly materialistic that he felt compelled to close the door to his hospital room when he watched them.

The search engine in particular excited Spur. At home, he could greet anyone in the Transcendent State—as long as he knew their number. But the hospital tell could seemingly find anyone, not only on Walden but anywhere on all the Thousand Worlds of the upside. He put the tell in his room to immediate use, beginning by greeting his father and Gandy Joy, who was the village virtuator. Gandy had always understood him so much better than Comfort ever had. He should have greeted Comfort as well, but he didn’t.

He did greet his pals in the Gold Squad, who were surprised that he had been able to track them down while they were on active duty. They told him that the entire Ninth Regiment had been pulled back from the Motu River burn for two weeks of CR in Prospect. Word was that they were being reassigned to the Cloyce Memorial Forest for some easy fire watch duty. No doubt the Cooperative was yanking the regiment off the front line because Gold Squad had taken almost 40 percent casualties when the burn had flanked their position at Motu. Iron and Bronze Squads had taken a hit as well, fighting their way through the burn to rescue Gold.

To keep from brooding about Vic and the Motu burn and the firefight, Spur looked up friends who had fallen out of his life. He surprised his cousin Land, who was living in Slide Knot in Southeast and working as a tithe assessor. He connected with his childhood friend Handy, whom he hadn’t seen since the Alcazars had moved to Freeport, where Handy’s mom was going to teach pastoral philosophy. She was still at the university and Handy was an electrician. He tracked down his self-reliance school sweetheart, Leaf Benkleman, only to discover that she had emigrated from Walden to Kolo in the Alumar system. Their attempt to catch up was frustrating, however, because the Cooperative’s censors seemed to buzz every fifth word Leaf said. Also, the look on her face whenever he spoke rattled Spur. Was it pity? He was actually relieved when she cut their conversation short.

Despite the censors, talking to Leaf whetted Spur’s appetite for making contact with the upside. He certainly wouldn’t get the chance once he left the hospital. He didn’t care that everyone was so preposterously far away that he would never meet them in person. Dr. Niss had been wrong: Spur understood perfectly the astonishing distances between stars. What he did not comprehend was exactly how he could chat with someone who lived hundreds of trillions of kilometers away, or how someone could beam themselves from Moy to Walden in a heartbeat. Of course, he had learned the simplified explanation of qics—quantum information channels—in school. qics worked because many infinitesimally small nothings were part of a something, which could exist in two places at the same time. This of course made no sense, but then so much of upsider physics made no sense after the censors were done with it.

Spur paused in the doorway of his room and looked up and down the hall. None of the patients at his end of the ward were stirring; a lone maintenance bot dusted along the floor at the far end by the examining rooms. It was his last full day at the hospital. Now or never. He eased the door shut and turned the tell on.

He began by checking for relatives on the upside. But when he searched on the surname Leung, he got 2.3 x 10^6 hits. Which, if any, of them might be his people? Spur had no way of knowing. Spur’s grandparents had expunged all records of their former lives when they had come to Walden, a requirement for immigrants to the Transcendent State. Like everyone else in his family, he had known the stern old folks only as GiGo and GiGa. The names on their death certificates were Jade Fey Leung and Chap Man-Leung, but Spur thought that they had probably been changed when they had first arrived at Freeport.

He was tempted to greet his father and ask if he knew GiGo’s upside name, but then he would ask questions. Too many questions; his father was used to getting the answers he wanted. Spur went back to the tell. A refined search showed that millions of Leungs lived on Blimminey, Eri-dani Foxtrot, Fortunate Child, Moy, and No Turning Back, but there also appeared to be a scattering of Leungs on many of the Thousand Worlds. There was no help for it; Spur began to send greetings at random.

He wasn’t sure exactly who he expected to answer, but it certainly wasn’t bots. When Chairman Winter had bought Walden from ComExplore IC, he decreed that neither machine intelligences nor enhanced upsiders would be allowed in the refuge he was founding. The Transcendent State was to be the last and best home of the true humans. While the pukpuks used bots to manufacture goods that they sold to the Transcendent State, Spur had never actually seen one until he had arrived at the hospital.

Now he discovered that the upside swarmed with them. Everyone he tried to greet had bot receptionists, secretaries, housekeepers or companions screening their messages. Some were virtual and presented themselves in outlandish sims; others were corporeal and stared at him from the homes or workplaces of their owners. Spur relished these voyeuristic glimpses of life on the upside, but glimpses were all he got. None of the bots wanted to talk to him, no doubt because of the caution he could see scrolling across his screen. It warned that his greeting originated from “the Transcendent State of Walden, a jurisdiction under a consensual cultural quarantine.”

Most of bots were polite but firm. No, they couldn’t connect him to their owners; yes, they would pass along his greeting; and no, they couldn’t say when he might expect a greeting in return. Some were annoyed. They invited him to read his own Covenant and then snapped the connection. A couple of virtual bots were actually rude to him. Among other things, they called him a mud hugger, a leech and a pathetic waste of consciousness. One particularly abusive bot started screaming that he was “a stinking useless fossil.”

Spur wasn’t quite sure what a fossil was, so he queried the tell. It returned two definitions: 1. an artifact of an organism, typically extinct, that existed in a previous geologic era; 2. something outdated or superseded. The idea that, as a true human, he might be outdated, superseded or possibly even bound for extinction so disturbed Spur that he got up and paced the room. He told himself that this was the price of curiosity. There were sound reasons why the Covenant of Simplicity placed limits on the use of technology. Complexity bred anxiety. The simple life was the good life.

Yet even as he wrestled with his conscience, he settled back in front of the tell. On a whim he entered his own name. He got just two results:

Comfort Rose Joerly and Prosper Gregory Leung

Orchardists

Diligence Cottage

Jane Powder Street

Littleton, Hamilton County,

Northeast Territory, TS

Walden
and

Prosper Gregory Leung
c/o Niss (remotely—see note)

Salvation Hospital

Benevolence Park #5

Concord, Jefferson County,

Southwest Territory, TS

Walden

Spur tried to access the note attached to Dr. Niss’s name, but it was blocked. That wasn’t a surprise. What was odd was that he had received results just from Walden. Was he really the only Prosper Gregory Leung in the known universe?

While he was trying to decide whether being unique was good or bad, the tell inquired if he might have meant to search for Proper Gregory Leung or Phosphor Gregory L’ung or Procter Gregoire Lyon? He hadn’t but there was no reason not to look them up. Proper Leung, it turned out, raised gosdogs for meat on a ranch out in Hopedale, which was in the Southwest Territory. Spur thought that eating gosdogs was barbaric and he had no interest in chatting with the rancher. Gregory L’ung lived on Kenning in the Theta Persei system. On an impulse, Spur sent his greeting. As he expected, it was immediately diverted to a bot. L’ung’s virtual companion was a shining green turtle resting on a rock in a muddy river.

“The High Gregory of Kenning regrets that he is otherwise occupied at the moment,” it said, raising its shell up off the rock. It stood on four human feet. “I note with interest that your greeting originates from a jurisdiction under a consensual. . . .”

The turtle didn’t get the chance to finish. The screen shimmered and went dark. A moment later, it lit up again with the image of a boy, perched at the edge of an elaborate chair.

He was wearing a purple fabric wrap that covered the lower part of his body from waist to ankles. He was bare-chested except for the skin of some elongated, dun-colored animal draped around his thin shoulders. Spur couldn’t have said for sure how old the boy was, but despite an assured bearing and intelligent yellow eyes, he seemed not yet a man. The chair caught Spur’s eye again: it looked to be of some dark wood, although much of it was gilded. Each of the legs ended in a stylized human foot. The back panel rose high above the boy’s head and was carved with leaves and branches that bore translucent purple fruit. That sparkled like jewels. Spur reminded himself to breathe. It looked very much like a throne.

Three

It takes two to speak the truth—one to speak and another to hear.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers

“Hello, hello,” said the boy. “Who is doing his talk, please?”

Spur struggled to keep his voice from squeaking. “My name is Prosper Gregory Leung.”

The boy frowned and pointed at the bottom of the screen. “Walden, it tells? I have less than any idea of Walden.”

“It’s a planet.”

“And tells that it’s wrongful to think too hard on planet Walden? Why? Is your brain dry?”

“I think.” Spur was taken aback. “We all think.” Even though he thought he was being insulted, Spur didn’t want to snap the connection—not yet anyway. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

The words coming out of the speakers did not seem to match what the boy was saying. His lips barely moved, yet what Spur heard was, “I’m the High Gregory, Phosphorescence of Kenning, energized by the Tortoise of Eternal Radiation.” Spur realized that the boy was probably speaking another language and that what he was hearing was a translation. Spur had been expecting the censors built into the tell to buzz this conversation like they had buzzed so much of his chat with Leaf Benkleman, but maybe bad translation was just as effective.

“That’s interesting,” said Spur cautiously. “And what is it that you do there on Kenning?”

“Do?” The High Gregory rubbed his nose absently. “Oh, do! I make luck.”

“Really? People can do that on the upside?”

“What is the upside?”

“Space, you know.” Spur waved an arm over his head and glanced upward.

The High Gregory frowned. “Prosper Gregory Leung breathes space?”

“No, I breathe air.” He realized that the tell might easily be garbling his end of the conversation as well. “Only air.” He spoke slowly and with exaggerated precision. “We call the Thousand Worlds the upside. Here. On my world.”

The High Gregory still appeared to be confused.

“On this planet.” He gestured at the hospital room. “Planet Walden. We look up at the stars.” He raised his hand to his brow, as if sighting on some distant landmark. “At night.” Listening to himself babble, Spur was certain that the High Gregory must think him an idiot. He had to change the subject, so he tapped his chest. “My friends call me Spur.”

The High Gregory shook his head with a rueful smile. “You give me warmth, Spur, but I turn away with regret from the kind offer to enjoy sex with you. Memsen watches to see that I don’t tickle life until I have enough of age.”

Aghast, Spur sputtered that he had made no such offer, but the High Gregory, appearing not to hear, continued to speak.

“You have a fullness of age, friend Spur. Have you found a job of work on planet Walden?”

“You’re asking what I do for a living?”

“All on planet Walden are living, I hope. Not saved?”

“Yes, we are.” Spur grimaced. He rose from the tell and retrieved his wallet from the night-stand beside the bed. Maybe pix would help. He flipped through a handful in his wallet until he came to the one of Comfort on a ladder picking apples. “Normally I tend my orchards.” He held the pix up to the tell to show the High Gregory. “I grow many kinds of fruit on my farm. Apples, peaches, apricots, pears, cherries. Do you have these kinds of fruit on Kenning?”

“Grape trees, yes.” The High Gregory leaned forward in his throne and smiled. “And all of apples: apple pie and apple squeeze and melt apples.” He seemed pleased that they had finally understood one another. “But you are not normal?”

“No. I mean yes, I’m fine.” He closed the wallet and pocketed it. “But . . . how do I say this? There is fighting on my world.” Spur had no idea how to explain the complicated grievances of the pukpuks and the fanaticism that led some of them to burn themselves alive to stop the spread of the forest and the Transcendent State. “There are other people on Walden who are very angry. They don’t want my people to live here. They wish the land could be returned to how it was before we came. So they set fires to hurt us. Many of us have been called to stop them. Now instead of growing my trees, I help to put fires out.”

“Very angry?” The High Gregory rose from his throne, his face flushed. “Fighting?” He punched at the air. “Hit-hit-hit?”

“Not exactly fighting with fists,” said Spur. “More like a war.”

The High Gregory took three quick steps toward the tell at his end. His face loomed large on Spur’s screen. “War fighting?” He was clearly agitated; his cheeks flushed and the yellow eyes were fierce. “Making death to the other?” Spur had no idea why the High Gregory was reacting this way. He didn’t think the boy was angry exactly, but then neither of them had proved particularly adept at reading the other. He certainly didn’t want to cause some interstellar incident.

“I’ve said something wrong. I’m sorry.” Spur bent his head in apology. “I’m speaking to you from a hospital. I was wounded . . . fighting a fire. Haven’t quite been myself lately.” He gave the High Gregory a self-deprecating smile. “I hope I haven’t given offense.”

The High Gregory made no reply. Instead he swept from his throne, down a short flight of steps into what Spur could now see was a vast hall. The boy strode past rows of carved wooden chairs, each of them a unique marvel, although none was quite as exquisite as the throne that they faced. The intricate beaded mosaic on the floor depicted turtles in jade and chartreuse and olive. Phosphorescent sculptures stretched like spider webs from the upper reaches of the walls to the barrel-vaulted ceiling, casting ghostly silver-green traceries of light on empty chairs beneath. The High Gregory was muttering as he passed down the central aisle but whatever he was saying clearly overwhelmed the tell’s limited capacity. All Spur heard was, “War < crackle > Memsen witness there <crackle> our luck <crackle> <crackle> call the L’ung. . . .”

At that, Spur found himself looking once again at a shining green turtle resting on a rock on a muddy river. “The High Gregory of Kenning regrets that he is otherwise occupied at the moment,” it said. “I note with interest that your greeting originates from a jurisdiction under a consensual cultural quarantine. You should understand that it is unlikely that the High Gregory, as luck maker of the L’ung, would risk violating your covenants by having any communication with you.”

“Except I just got done talking to him,” said Spur.

“I doubt that very much.” The turtle drew itself up on four human feet and stared coldly through the screen at him. “This conversation is concluded,” it said. “I would ask that you not annoy us again.”

“Wait, I—” said Spur, but he was talking to a dead screen.

Four

But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.—Walden

Spur spent the rest of that day expecting trouble. He had no doubt that he’d be summoned into Dr. Niss’s examining room for a lecture about how his body couldn’t heal if his soul was sick. Or some virtuator from Concord would be brought in to light communion and deliver a reproachful sermon on the true meaning of simplicity. Or Cary Millisap, his squad leader, would call from Prospect and scorch him for shirking his duty to Gold, which was, after all, to get better as fast he could and rejoin the unit. He had not been sent to hospital to bother the High Gregory of Kenning, luck maker of the L’ung—whoever they were.

But trouble never arrived. He stayed as far away from his room and the tell as he could get. He played cards with Val Montilly and Sleepy Thorn from the Sixth Engineers, who were recovering from smoke inhalation they had suffered in the Coldstep burn. They were undergoing alveolar reconstruction to restore full lung function. Their voices were like ripsaws but they were otherwise in good spirits. Spur won enough from Sleepy on a single round of Fool All to pay for the new apple press he’d been wanting for the orchard. Of course, he would never be able to tell his father or Comfort where the money had come from.

Spur savored a memorable last supper: an onion tart with a balsamic reduction, steamed duck leg with a fig dressing on silver thread noodles and a vanilla panna cotta. After dinner he went with several other patients to hear a professor from Alcott University explain why citizens who sympathized with the pukpuks were misguided. When he finally returned to his room, there was a lone greeting in his queue. A bored dispatcher from the Cooperative informed him that he needed to pick up his train ticket at Celena Station before 11 a.m. No video of this citizen appeared on the screen; all he’d left was a scratchy audio message like one Spur might get on his home tell. Spur took this as a reminder that his holiday from simplicity would end the moment he left the hospital.

The breeze that blew through the open windows of the train was hot, providing little relief for the passengers in the first-class compartment. Spur shifted uncomfortably on his seat, his uniform shirt stuck to his back. He glanced away from the blur of trees racing past his window. He hated sitting in seats that faced backward; they either gave him motion sickness or a stiff neck. And if he thought about it—which he couldn’t help but doing, least for a moment—the metaphor always depressed him. He didn’t want to be looking back at his life just now.

A backward seat—but it was in first class. The Cooperative’s dispatcher probably thought he was doing him a favor. Give him some extra legroom, a softer seat. And why not? Hadn’t he survived the infamous Motu River burn? Hadn’t he been badly scorched in the line of duty? Of course he should ride in first class. If only the windows opened wider.

It had been easy not to worry about his problems while he was lounging around the hospital. Now that he was headed back home, life had begun to push him again. He knew he should try to stop thinking, maybe take a nap. He closed his eyes, but didn’t sleep. Without warning he was back in the nightmare sim again . . . and could smell burning hair. His hair. In a panic he dodged into a stream choked with dead fish and poached frogs. But the water was practically boiling and scalded his legs . . . only Spur wasn’t completely in the nightmare because he knew he was also sitting on a comfortable seat in a first-class compartment in a train that was taking him . . . the only way out was blocked by a torch, who stood waiting for Spur. Vic had not yet set himself on fire, although his baseball jersey was smoking in the heat . . . I’m not afraid, Spur told himself, I don’t believe any of this . . . the anguished face shimmered in the heat of the burn and then Spur was dancing to keep his shoes from catching fire, and he had no escape, no choice, no time . . . with his eyes shut, Spur heard the clatter of the steel wheels on the track as: no time no time no time no time.

He knew then for certain what he had only feared: Dr. Niss had not healed his soul. How could he, when Spur had consistently lied about what had happened in the burn? Spur didn’t mean to groan, but he did. When he opened his eyes, the gandy in the blue flowered dress was staring at him.

“Are you all right?” She looked to be in her late sixties or maybe seventy, with silver hair so thin that he could see the freckles on her scalp.

“Yes, fine,” Spur said. “I just thought of something.”

“Something you forgot?” She nodded. “Oh, I’m always remembering things just like that. Especially on trains.” She had a burbling laugh, like stream running over smooth stones. “I was supposed to have lunch with my friend Connie day after tomorrow, but here I am on my way to Little Bend for a week. I have a new grandson.”

“That’s nice,” Spur said absently. There was one other passenger in the compartment. He was a very fat, moist man looking at a comic book about gosdogs playing baseball; whenever he turned a page, he took a snuffling breath.

“I see by your uniform that you’re one of our firefighters,” said the gandy. “Do you know my nephew Frank Kaspar? I think he is with the Third Engineers.”

Spur explained that there were over eleven thousand volunteers in the Corps of Firefighters and that if her nephew was an engineer he was most probably a regular with the Home Guard. Spur couldn’t keep track of all the brigades and platoons in the volunteer Corps, much less in the professional Guard. He said that he was just a lowly smokechaser in Gold Squad, Ninth Regiment. His squad worked with the Eighth Engineers, who supplied transportation and field construction support. He told her that these fine men and women were the very models of spiritual simplicity and civic rectitude, no doubt like her nephew. Spur was hoping that this was what she wanted to hear and that she would leave him alone. But then she asked if the rumors of pukpuk collaborators infiltrating the Corps were true and started nattering about how she couldn’t understand how a citizen of the Transcendent State could betray the Covenant by helping terrorists. All the pukpuks wanted was to torch Chairman Winter’s forests, wasn’t that awful? Spur realized that he would have to play to her sympathy. He coughed and said he had been wounded in a burn and was just out of hospital and then coughed again.

“If you don’t mind,” he said, crinkling his brow as if he were fighting pain, “I’m feeling a little woozy. I’m just going to shut my eyes again and try to rest.”

Although he didn’t sleep, neither was he fully awake. But the nightmare did not return. Instead he drifted through clouds of dreamy remembrance and unfocussed regret. So he didn’t notice that the train was slowing down until the hiss of the air brakes startled him to full alertness.

He glanced at his watch. They were still an hour out of Heart’s Wall, where Spur would change for the local to Littleton.

“Are we stopping?” Spur asked.

“Wheelwright fireground.” The fat man pulled a limp handkerchief out of his shirt pocket and dabbed at his hairline. “Five minutes of mandatory respect.”

Now Spur noticed that the underbrush had been cleared along the track and that there were scorch marks on most of the trees. Spur had studied the Wheelwright in training. The forest north of the village of Wheelwright had been one of the first to be attacked by the torches. It was estimated that there must have been at least twenty of them, given the scope of the damage. The Wheelwright burn was also the first in which a firefighter died, although the torches never targeted citizens, only trees. The fires they started were always well away from villages and towns; that’s why they were so hard to fight. But the Wheelwright had been whipped by strong winds until it cut the trunk line between Concord and Heart’s Wall for almost two weeks. The Cooperative had begun recruiting for the Corps shortly after.

As the squealing brakes slowed the train to a crawl, the view out of Spur’s window changed radically. Here the forest had yet to revive from the ravages of fire. Blackened skeletons of trees pointed at the sky and the charred floor of the forest baked under the sun. The sun seemed cruelly bright without the canopy of leaves to provide shade. In every direction, all Spur could see was the nightmarish devastation he had seen all too often. No plant grew, no bird sang. There were no ants or needlebugs or wild gosdogs. Then he noticed something odd: the bitter burnt-coffee scent of fresh fireground. And he could taste the ash, like shredded paper on his tongue. That made no sense; the Wheelwright was over three years old.

When the train finally stopped, Spur was facing one of the many monuments built along the tracks to honor fallen firefighters. A grouping of three huge statues set on a pad of stone cast their bronze gazes on him. Two of the firefighters were standing; one leaned heavily on the other. A third had dropped to one knee, from exhaustion perhaps. All still carried their gear, but the kneeling figure was about to shed her splash pack and one of the standing figures was using his jacksmith as a crutch. Although the sculptor had chosen to depict them in the hour of their doom, their implacable metal faces revealed neither distress nor regret. The fearsome simplicity of their courage chilled Spur. He was certain that he wasn’t of their quality.

The engine blew its whistle in tribute to the dead: three long blasts and three short. The gandy stirred and stretched. “Wheelwright?” she muttered.

“Yeah,” said the fat man.

She started to yawn but caught herself and peered out the open window. “Who’s that?” she said, pointing.

A man in a blue flair suit was walking along the tracks, peering up at the passenger cars. He looked very hot and not very happy. His face was as flushed as a peach and his blond hair was plastered to his forehead. Every few meters he paused, cupped his hands to his mouth and called, “Leung? Prosper Gregory Leung?”

Five

Fire is without doubt an advantage on the whole. It sweeps and ventilates the forest floor and makes it clear and clean. I have often remarked with how much more comfort & pleasure I could walk in wood through which afire had been run the previous year. It is inspiriting to walk amid the fresh green sprouts of grass and shrubbery pushing upward through the charred surface with more vigorous growth.—Journal, 1850

The man waited impatiently as Spur descended from the train, kit slung over his shoulder. Although he did not turn back to look, Spur knew every passenger on the train was watching them. Was he in trouble? The man’s expression gave away nothing more than annoyance. He looked to be younger than Spur, possibly in his late twenties. He had a pinched face and a nose as stubby as a radish. He was wearing a prissy white shirt buttoned to the neck. There were dark circles under the armpits of his flair jacket.

“Prosper Gregory Leung of Littleton, Hamilton County, Northeast?” The man pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and read from it. “You are currently on medical leave from the Ninth Regiment, Corps of Firefighters, and were issued a first-class ticket on this day—”

“I know who I am.” Spur felt as if a needlebug were caught in his throat. “What is this about? Who are you?”

He introduced himself as Constant Ngonda, a deputy with the Cooperative’s Office of Diplomacy. When they shook hands, he noticed that Ngonda’s palm was soft and sweaty. Spur could guess why he had been pulled off the train, but he decided to act surprised.

“What does the Office of Diplomacy want with me?”

Just then the engineer blew three short blasts and couplings of the train clattered and jerked as, one by one, they took the weight of the passenger cars. With the groan of metal on metal, the train pulled away from the Wheelwright Memorial.

Spur’s grip on the strap of his kit tightened. “Don’t we want to get back on?”

Constant Ngonda shrugged. “I was never aboard.”

The answer made no sense to Spur, who tensed as he calculated his chances of sprinting to catch the train. Ngonda rested a hand on his arm.

“We go this way, Prosper.” He nodded west, away from the tracks.

“I don’t understand.” Spur’s chances of making the train were fading as it gained momentum. “What’s out there?”

“A clearing. A hover full of upsiders.” He sighed. “Some important people have come a long way to see you.” He pushed a lock of damp hair off his forehead. “The sooner we start, the sooner we get out of this heat.” He let go of Spur and started picking his way across the fire-ground.

Spur glanced over his shoulder one last time at the departing train. He felt as if his life were pulling away.

“Upsiders? From where?”

Ngonda held up an open hand to calm him. “Some questions will be answered soon enough. Others it’s better not to ask.”

“What do you mean, better?”

Ngonda walked with an awkward gait, as if he expected the ground to give way beneath him. “I beg your pardon.” He was wearing the wrong shoes for crossing rough terrain. “I misspoke.” They were thin-soled, low-cut and had no laces—little more than slippers. “I meant simpler, not better.”

Just then Spur got a particularly intense whiff of something that was acrid and sooty, but not quite smoke. It was what he had first smelled as the train had pulled into the Memorial. He turned in a complete circle, all senses heightened, trying to pinpoint the source. After fire ran through the litter of leaves and twigs that covered the forest floor, it often sank into the duff, the layer of decomposing organic matter that lay just above the soil level. Since duff was like a sponge, most of the year it was too wet to burn. But in the heat of summer it could dry out and became tinder. Spur had seen a smoldering fire burrow through the layer of duff and emerge dozens of meters away. He sniffed, following his nose to a charred stump.

“Prosper!” said Ngonda. “What are you doing?”

Spur heard a soft hiss as he crouched beside the stump. It wasn’t any fire sound that he knew, but he instinctively ran his bare hand across the stump, feeling for hotspots. Something cool and wet sprayed onto his fingers and he jerked them back as if he had been burned. He rubbed a smutty liquid between thumb and forefinger and then smelled it.

It had an evil, manmade odor of extinguished fire. Spur sat back on his heels, puzzled. Why would anyone want to mimic that particular stink? Then he realized that his hand was clean when it ought to have been smudged with soot from the stump. He rubbed hard against the burned wood, but the black refused to come off. He could see now that the stump had a clear finish, as if it had been coated with a preservative.

Spur could sense Ngonda’s shadow loom over him but then he heard the hissing again and was able to pick out the tiny nozzle embedded in the stump. He pressed his finger to it and the noise stopped. Then on an impulse, he sank his hand into the burned forest litter, lifted it and let the coarse mixture sift slowly through his fingers.

“It’s hot out, Prosper,” Ngonda said. “Do you really need to be playing in the dirt?”

The litter looked real enough: charred and broken twigs, clumps of leaf mold, wood cinders and a delicate ruined hemlock cone. But it didn’t feel right. He squeezed a scrap of burnt bark, expecting it to crumble. Instead it compacted into an irregular pellet, like day-old bread. When he released it, the pellet slowly resumed its original shape.

“It’s not real,” said Spur. “None of it.”

“It’s a memorial, Prosper.” The deputy offered Spur a hand and pulled him to his feet. “People need to remember.” He bent over to brush at the fake pine needles stuck to Spur’s knees. “We need to go.”

Spur had never seen a hover so close. Before the burns, hovers had been banned altogether from the Transcendent State. But after the pukpuks had begun their terrorist campaign to halt the spread of forest into their barrens, Chairman Winter had given the Cooperative permission to relax the ban. Generous people from the upside had donated money to build the benevolence parks and provided hovers to assist the Corps in fighting fires. However, Chairman Winter had insisted that only bots were to fly the hovers and that citizen access to them would be closely monitored.

While in the field with Gold Squad, Spur had watched hovers swoop overhead, spraying loads of fire-retardant splash onto burns. And he had studied them for hours through the windows of the hospital, parked in front of their hangars at Benevolence Park Number 5. But even though this one was almost as big as Diligence Cottage and hovered a couple of meters above the ground, it wasn’t quite as impressive as Spur had imagined it.

He decided that this must be because it was so thoroughly camouflaged. The hover’s smooth skin had taken on the discoloration of the fireground, an ugly mottle of gray and brown and black. It looked like the shell of an enormous clam. The hover was elliptical, about five meters tall in front sweeping backward to a tapered edge, but otherwise featureless. If it had windows or doors, Spur couldn’t make them out.

As they approached, the hover rose several meters. They passed into its shadow and Ngonda looked up expectantly. A hatch opened on the underside. A ramp extended to the ground below with a high-pitched warble like birdsong, and a man appeared at the hatch. He was hard to see against the light of the interior of the hover; all Spur could tell for sure was that he was very tall and very skinny. Not someone he would expect to bump into on Jane Powder Street in Littleton. The man turned to speak to someone just inside the hatch. That’s when Spur realized his mistake.

“No,” she said, her voice airy and sweet. “We need to speak to him first.”

As she teetered down the ramp, Spur could tell immediately that she was not from Walden. It was the calculation with which she carried herself, as if each step were a risk, although one she was disposed to take. She wore loose-fitting pants of a sheer fabric that might have been spun from clouds. Over them was a blue sleeveless dress that hung to mid-thigh. Her upper arms were decorated with flourishes of phosphorescent body paint and she wore silver and copper rings on each of her fingers.

“You’re the Prosper Gregory of Walden?”

She had full lips and midnight hair and her skin was smooth and dark as a plum. She was a head taller than he was and half his weight. He was speechless until Ngonda nudged him.

“Yes.”

“We’re Memsen.”

Six

It requires nothing less than a chivalric feeling to sustain a conversation with a lady.—Journal, 1851

Although it was cooler in the shade of the hover, Spur was far from comfortable. He couldn’t help thinking of what would happen if the engine failed. He would have felt more confident if the hover had been making some kind of noise; the silent, preternatural effortlessness of the ship unnerved him. Meanwhile, he was fast realizing that Memsen had not wanted to meet him in order to make friends.

“Let’s understand one another,” she said. “We’re here very much against our will. You should know, that by summoning us to this place, you’ve put the political stability of dozens of worlds at risk. We very much regret that the High Gregory has decided to follow his luck to this place.”

She was an upsider so Spur had no idea how to read her. The set of her shoulders flustered him, as did the way her knees bent as she stooped to his level. She showed him too many teeth and it was clear that she wasn’t smiling. And why did she pinch the air? With a great effort Spur tore his gaze away from her and looked to Ngonda to see if he knew what she was talking about. The deputy gave him nothing.

“I’m not sure that I summoned the High Gregory, exactly,” Spur said. “I did talk to him.”

“About your war.”

Constant Ngonda looked nervous. “Allworthy Memsen, I’m sure that Prosper didn’t understand the implications of contacting you. The Transcendent State is under a cultural—”

“We grant that you have your shabby deniability.” She redirected her displeasure toward the deputy. “Nevertheless, we suspect that your government instructed this person to contact the High Gregory, knowing that he’d come. There’s more going on here than you care to say, isn’t there?”

“Excuse me,” said Spur, “but this really was an accident.” Both Memsen and Ngonda stared at him as if he had corncobs stuck in his ears. “What happened was that I searched on my name but couldn’t find anyone but me and then the tell at the hospital suggested the High Gregory as an alternative because our names are so similar.” He spoke rapidly, worried that they’d start talking again before he could explain everything. “So I sent him a greeting. It was totally random—I didn’t know who he was, I swear it. And I wasn’t really expecting to make contact, since I’d been talking to bots all morning and not one was willing to connect me. In fact, your bot was about to cut me off when he came on the tell. The High Gregory, I mean.”

“So.” Memsen clicked the rings on her fingers together. “He mentioned none of this to us.”

“He probably didn’t know.” Spur edged just a centimeter away from her toward the sunlight. The more he thought about it, the more he really wanted to get out from under the hover.

Ngonda spoke with calm assurance. “There, you see that Prosper’s so-called request is based on nothing more than coincidence and misunderstanding.” He batted at a fat orange needlebug that was buzzing his head. “The Cooperative regrets that you have come all this way to no good purpose.”

Memsen reared suddenly to her full height and gazed down on the two of them. “There are no coincidences,” she said, “only destiny. The High Gregory makes the luck he was meant to have. He’s here, and he has brought the L’ung to serve as witnesses. Our reason for being on this world has yet to be discovered.” She closed her eyes for several moments. While she considered Spur’s story she made a low, repetitive plosive sound: pa-pa-pa-ptt. “But this is deeper than we first suspected,” she mused.

Spur caught a glimpse of a head peeking out of the hatch above him. It ducked back into the hover immediately.

“So,” Memsen said at last, “let’s choose to believe you, Prosper Gregory of Walden.” She eyed him briefly; whatever she saw in his face seemed to satisfy her. “You’ll have to show us the way from here. Your way. The High Gregory’s luck has chosen you to lead us until we see for ourselves the direction in which we must go.”

“Lead you? Where?”

“Wherever you’re going.”

“But I’m just on my way home. To Littleton.”

She clicked her rings. “So.”

“I beg your pardon, Allworthy Memsen,” said Ngonda, tugging at the collar of his shirt, “but you must realize that’s impossible under our Covenant. . . .”

“It is the nature of luck to sidestep the impossible,” she said. “We speak for the High Gregory when we express our confidence that you’ll find a way.”

She had so mastered the idiom of command that Spur wasn’t sure whether this was a threat or a promise. Either way, it gave Ngonda pause.

“Allworthy, I’d like nothing better than to accommodate you in this,” he said. “Walden is perhaps the least of the Thousand Worlds, but even here we’ve heard of your efforts to help preserve the one true species.” A bead of sweat dribbled down his forehead. “But my instructions are to accommodate your requests within reason. Within reason, Allworthy. It is not reasonable to land a hover in the commons of a village like Littleton. You must understand that these are country people.”

She pointed at Spur. “Here is one of your country people.”

“Memsen!” shouted a voice from the top of the ramp. “Memsen, I am so bored. Either bring him up right now or I’m coming down.”

Her tongue flicked to the corner of her mouth. “You wouldn’t like it,” she called back, “it’s very hot.” Which was definitely true, although as far as Spur could tell, the weather had no effect on her. “There are bugs.”

“That’s it!” The High Gregory of Kenning, Phosphorescence of the Eternal Radiation and luck maker of the L’ung, scampered down the ramp of the hover.

“There,” he said, “I did it, so now don’t tell me to go back.” He was wearing green sneakers with black socks, khaki shorts and a t-shirt with a pix of a dancing turtle, which had a human head. “Spur! You look sadder than you did before.” He had knobby knees and fair skin and curly brown hair. If he had been born in Littleton, Spur would’ve guessed that he was ten years old. “Did something bad happen to you? Say something. Do you still talk funny like you did on the tell?”

Spur had a hundred questions but he was so surprised that all he could manage was, “Why are you doing this?”

“Why?” The boy’s yellow eyes opened wide. “Why, why, why?” He stooped to pick up a handful of the blackened litter and examined it with interest, shifting it around on his open palm. “Because I got one of my luck feelings when we were talking. They’re not like ideas or dreams or anything so I can’t explain them very well. They’re just special. Memsen says they’re not like the feelings that other people get, but that it’s all right to have them and I guess it is.” He twirled in a tight circle then, flinging the debris in a wide scatter. “And that’s why.” He rubbed his hands on the front of his shorts and approached Spur. “Am I supposed to shake hands or kiss you? I can’t remember.”

Ngonda stepped between Spur and the High Gregory as if to protect him. “The custom is to shake hands.”

“But I shook with you already.” He tugged at Ngonda’s sleeve to move him aside. “You have hardly any luck left, friend Constant. I’m afraid it’s all pretty much decided with you.” When the deputy failed to give way, the High Gregory dropped to all fours and scooted through his legs. “Hello, Spur,” said the boy as he scrambled to his feet. The High Gregory held out his hand and Spur took it.

Spur was at once aware that he was sweaty from the heat of the day, while the boy’s hand was cool as river rock. He could feel the difference in their size: the High Gregory’s entire hand fit in his palm and weighed practically nothing.

“Friend Spur, you have more than enough luck,” the boy murmured, low enough so that only Spur could hear. “I can see we’re going to have an adventure.”

“Stay up there,” cried Memsen. “No!” She was glowering up the ramp at the hatch, which had inexplicably filled with kids who were shouting at her. Spur couldn’t tell which of them said what.

“When do we get our turn?”

“You let the Greg off.”

“We came all this way.”

“He’s bored? I’m more bored.”

“Hey move, you’re in my way!”

“But I want to see too.”

Several in the back started to chant. “Not fair, not fair!”

Memsen ground her toes into the fake forest floor. “We have to go now,” she said. “If we let them off the hover, it’ll take hours to round them up.”

“I’ll talk to them.” High Gregory bounded up the ramp, making sweeping motions with his hands. “Back, get back, this isn’t it.” The kids fell silent. “We’re not there yet. We’re just stopping to pick someone up.” He paused halfway up and turned to the adults. “Spur is coming, right?”

Ngonda was blotting sweat from around his eyes with a handkerchief. “If he chooses.” He snapped it with a quick flick of the wrist and then stuffed it into his pocket, deliberately avoiding eye contact with Spur.

Spur could feel his heart pounding. He’d wanted to fly ever since he’d realized that it was possible and didn’t care if simplicity counseled otherwise. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be responsible for bringing all these upsiders to Littleton.

“So.” Memsen must have mistaken his hesitation for fear. “You have never been in a hover, Prosper Gregory of Walden?”

“Call him Spur,” said the High Gregory. “It doesn’t mean you have to have sex with him.”

Memsen bowed to Spur. “He has not yet invited us to take that familiarity.”

“Yes, please call me Spur.” He tried not to think about having sex with Memsen. “And yes,” he picked up his kit, “I’ll come with you.”

“Lead then.” She indicated that he should be first up the ramp. Ngonda followed him. Memsen came last, climbing slowly with her small and painstakingly accurate steps.

As he approached the top of the ramp, the coolness of the hover’s interior washed over him. It was like wading into Mercy’s Creek. He could see that the kids had gathered around the High Gregory. There were about a dozen of them in a bay that was about six by ten meters. Boxes and containers were strapped to the far bulkhead.

“Now where are we going?”

“When do we get to see the fire?”

“Hey, who’s that?”

Most of the kids turned to see him step onto the deck. Although well lit, the inside of the hover was not as bright as it had been outside. Spur blinked as his eyes adjusted to the difference.

“This is Spur,” said the High Gregory. “We’re going to visit his village. It’s called Littleton.”

“Why? Are they little there?”

A girl of six or perhaps seven sidled over to him. “What’s in your bag?” She was wearing a dress of straw-colored brocade that hung down to her silk slippers. The gold chain around her neck had a pendant in the shape of a stylized human eye. Spur decided that it must be some kind of costume.

He slung his kit off his shoulder and set it down in front of her so she could see. “Just my stuff.”

“It’s not very big,” she said doubtfully. “Do you have something in there for me?”

“Your Grace,” said Memsen, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder, “we are going to leave Spur alone for now.” She turned the girl around and gave her a polite nudge toward the other kids. “You’ll have to forgive them,” she said to Spur. “They’re used to getting their own way.”

Seven

I have a deep sympathy with war, it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.—Journal, 1840

Spur had studied geography in school and knew how big Walden was, but for the first time in his life he felt it. From the ground, the rampant forests restricted what anyone could see of the world. Even the fields and the lakes were hemmed in by trees. Spur had never been to the Modilon Ocean but he’d stood on the shores of Great Kamit Lake. The sky over the lake was impressive, but there was no way to take the measure of its scale. Spur had hiked the Tarata Mountains, but they were forested to their summits and the only views were from ledges. There was a tower on Samson Kokoda that afforded a 360-degree view, but the summit was just 1,300 meters tall.

Now the hover was cruising through the clouds at an altitude of 5,700 meters, according to the tell on the bulkhead. Walden spread beneath him in all its breathtaking immensity. Maps, measured in inflexible kilometers and flat hectares, were a sham compared to this. Every citizen should see what he was seeing, and if it violated simplicity, he didn’t care.

Constant Ngonda, on the other hand, was not enjoying the view. He curled on a bench facing away from the hull, which Memsen had made transparent when she’d partitioned a private space for them. His neck muscles were rigid and he complained from time to time about trouble with his ears. Whenever the hover shivered as it contended with the wind, he took a huge gulping breath. In a raspy voice, the deputy asked Spur to stop commenting on the scenery. Spur was not surprised when Ngonda lurched to his feet and tore through the bubble-like bulkhead in search of a bathroom. The wall popped back into place, throwing a scatter of rainbows across its shivering surface.

Spur kept his face pressed to the hull. He’d expected the surface to be smooth and cold, like glass. Instead, it was warm and yielding, as if it were the flesh of some living creature. Below him the lakes and rivers gleamed in the afternoon sun like the shards of a broken mirror. The muddy Kalibobo River veered away to the west as the hover flew into the foothills of the Tarata Range. As the land rolled beneath him, Spur could spot areas where the bright-green hardwood forest was yielding ground to the blue-green of the conifers: hemlock and pine and spruce. There were only a few farms and isolated villages in the shadow of the mountains. They would have to fly over the Taratas to get to Littleton on the eastern slope.

At first Spur had difficulty identifying the familiar peaks. He was coming at them from the wrong direction and at altitude. But once he picked out the clenched fist of Woitape, he could count forward and back down the range: Taurika, Bootless Lowa and Boroko, curving to the northwest, Kaivuna and Samson Kokoda commanding the plain to the south. He murmured the names aloud, as long as the deputy wasn’t around to hear. He had always liked how round the pukpuk sounds were, how they rolled in his mouth. When he’d been trapped in the burn with Vic, he was certain that he would never say them again.

When Chairman Winter bought Morobe’s Pea from ComExplore IC, he had thought to rename everything on the planet and make a fresh start for his great experiment in preserving un-enhanced humanity. But then a surprising number of ComExplore employees turned down his generous relocation offer; they wanted to stay on. Almost all of these pukpuks could trace their ancestry back to some ancient who had made planetfall on the first colonizing ships. More than a few claimed to be descended from Old Morobe herself. As a gesture of respect, the Chairman agreed to keep pukpuk names for some landforms. So there were still rivers, valleys, mountains and islands, which honored the legacy of the first settlers.

Chairman Winter had never made a secret of his plans for Walden. At staggering personal expense, he had intended to transform the exhausted lands of Morobe’s Pea. In their place he would make a paradise that re-created the heritage ecology of the home world. He would invite only true humans to come to Walden. All he asked was that his colonists forsake the technologies, which were spinning out of control on the Thousand Worlds. Those who agreed to live by the Covenant of Simplicity would be given land and citizenship. Eventually both the forest and the Transcendent State would overspread all of Walden.

But the pukpuks had other plans. They wouldn’t leave and they refused to give up their banned technologies. At first trade between the two cultures of Walden flourished. In fact, the pukpuk industrial and commercial base propped up the fledgling Transcendent State. Citizens needed pukpuk goods, even if bots manufactured them. As time passed however, the Cooperative recognized that pukpuks’ continued presence was undermining the very foundations of the Transcendent State. When the Cooperative attempted to close off the borders in order to encourage local industry, black markets sprang up in the cities. Many citizens came to question the tenets of simplicity. The weak were tempted by forbidden knowledge. For the first time since the founding, the emigration rate edged into the double digits. When it was clear that the only way to save the Transcendent State was to push the pukpuks off the planet, Chairman Winter had authorized the planting of genetically enhanced trees. But once the forest began to encroach on the pukpuk barrens, the burns began.

The pukpuks were the clear aggressors in the firefight; even their sympathizers among the citizenry agreed on that. What no one could agree on was how to accommodate them without compromising. In fact, many of the more belligerent citizens held that the ultimate responsibility for the troubles lay with the Chairman himself. They questioned his decision not to force all of the pukpuks to emigrate after the purchase of Morobe’s Pea. And some wondered why he could not order them to be rounded up and deported even now. It was, after all, his planet.

“We’ve come up with a compromise,” said Ngonda as he pushed through the bulkhead into the compartment. He was still as pale as a root cellar mushroom, but he seemed steadier. He even glanced briefly down at the eastern slope of Bootless Lowa Mountain before cutting his eyes away. “I think we can let the High Gregory visit under your supervision.”

Memsen, the High Gregory, and a young girl followed him, which caused the bulkhead to burst altogether. Spur caught a glimpse of a knot of kids peering at him before the wall reformed itself two meters farther into the interior of the hover, creating the necessary extra space to fit them all. The High Gregory was carrying a tray of pastries, which he set on the table he caused to form out of the deck.

“Hello, Spur,” he said. “How do you like flying? Your friend got sick but Memsen helped him. This is Penny.”

“The Pendragon Chromlis Furcifer,” said Memsen.

She and Spur studied each other. A little taller but perhaps a little younger than the High Gregory, the girl was dressed hood to boot in clothes made of supple metallic-green scales. The scales of her gloves were as fine as snakeskin while those that formed her tunic looked more like cherry leaves, even to the serrated edges. A rigid hood protected the back of her head. A tangle of thick, black hair wreathed her face.

“Penny,” said the High Gregory, “you’re supposed to shake his hand.”

“I know,” she said, but then clasped both hands behind her back and stared at the deck.

“Your right goes to his right.” The High Gregory held out his own hand to demonstrate. “She’s just a little shy,” he said.

Spur crouched and held out his hand. She took it solemnly. They shook. Spur let her go. The girl’s hand went behind her back again.

“You have a pretty name, Pendragon,” said Spur.

“That’s her title.” Memsen faced left and then right before she sat on the bench next to Ngonda. “It means war chief.”

“Really. And have you been to war, Penny?”

She shook her head—more of a twitch of embarrassment than a shake.

“This is her first,” said the High Gregory. “But she’s L’ung. She’s just here to watch.”

“I’m sorry,” said Spur. “Who are the L’ung?”

Ngonda cleared his throat in an obvious warning. The High Gregory saw Memsen pinch the air and whatever he’d been about to say died on his lips. The silence stretched long enough for Penny to realize that there was some difficulty about answering Spur’s question.

“What, is he stupid?” She scrutinized Spur with renewed interest. “Are you stupid, Spur?”

“I don’t think so.” It was his turn to be embarrassed. “But maybe some people think that I am.”

“This is complicated,” said Memsen, filling yet another awkward pause. “We understand that people here seek to avoid complication.” She considered. “Let’s just say that the L’ung are companions to the High Gregory. They like to watch him make luck, you might say. Think of them as students. They’ve been sent from many different worlds, for many different reasons. Complications again. There is a political aspect . . .”

Ngonda wriggled in protest.

“. . . which the deputy assures us you would only find confusing. So.” She patted the bench. “Sit, Pendragon.”

The Pendragon collected a macaroon from the pastry tray and obediently settled beside Memsen, then leaned to whisper in her ear.

“Yes,” said Memsen, “we’ll ask about the war.”

Ngonda rose then, but caught himself against a bulkhead as if the change from sitting to standing had left him dizzy. “This isn’t fair,” he said. “The Cooperative has made a complete disclosure of the situation here, both to Kenning and to the Forum of the Thousand Worlds.”

“What you sent was dull, dull, dull, friend Constant,” said the High Gregory. “I don’t think the people who made the report went anywhere near a burn. Someone told somebody else, and that somebody told them.” Just then the hover bucked and the deputy almost toppled onto Memsen’s lap. “You gave us a bunch of contracts and maps and pix of dead trees,” continued the High Gregory. “I can’t make luck out of charts. But Spur was there, he can tell us. He was almost burned up.”

“Not about Motu River,” said Spur quickly. “Nothing about that.” Suddenly everyone was staring at him.

“Maybe,” began Ngonda but the hover shuddered again and he slapped a hand hard against the bulkhead to steady himself. “Maybe we should tell him what we’ve agreed on.”

Spur sensed that Memsen was judging him, and that she was not impressed. “If you want to talk in general about fighting fires,” he said, “that’s different.”

Ngonda looked miserable. “Can’t we spare this brave man . . .?”

“Deputy Ngonda,” said Memsen.

“What?” His voice was very small.

The High Gregory lifted the tray from the table and offered it to him. “Have a cookie.”

Ngonda shrank from the pastries as if they might bite him. “Go ahead then,” he said. “Scratch this foolish itch of yours. We can’t stop you. We’re just a bunch of throwbacks from a nothing world and you’re—”

“Deputy Ngonda!” Memsen’s voice was sharp.

He caught his breath. “You’re Memsen the Twenty-Second and he’s the High Gregory of Kenning and I’m not feeling very well.” Ngonda turned to Spur, muttering. “Remember, they don’t really care what happens to you. Or any of us.”

“That’s not true,” said the High Gregory. “Not true at all.”

But Ngonda had already subsided onto his bench, queasy and unvoiced.

“So.” Memsen clicked her rings together. “You fight fires.”

“I’m just a smokechaser.” Ngonda’s outburst troubled Spur. He didn’t know anything about these upsiders, after all. Were they really any different than pukpuks? “I volunteered for the Corps about a year ago, finished training last winter, was assigned the Ninth Regiment, Gold Squad. We mostly build handlines along the edges of burns to contain them.” He leaned against the hull with his back to the view. “The idea is that we scrape off everything that can catch fire, dig to mineral soil. If we can fit a plow or tractor in, then we do, but in rough terrain we work by hand. That’s about it. Boring as those reports you read.”

“I don’t understand.” The High Gregory sprawled on the deck, picking idly at his sneakers. “If you’re so busy digging, when do you put the fires out?”

“Fire needs three things,” he said, “oxygen, fuel and temperature. They call it the triangle of combustion. Think of a burn as a chain of triangles. The sides of every triangle have to connect.” He formed a triangle by pressing his thumbs and forefingers together. “Hot enough connects to enough air connects to enough stuff to burn. Take away a side and you break the triangle. . . .” He separated his thumbs. “. . . and weaken the chain. When a burn blows up, there’s no good way to cut off its oxygen or lower the core temperature, so you have to attack the fuel side of the triangle. If you do your job, eventually there’s nothing left to burn.”

“Then you don’t actually put fires out?” The High Gregory sounded disappointed.

“We do, but that’s just hotspotting. Once we establish a handline, we have to defend it. So we walk the lines, checking for fires that start from flying sparks or underground runners. Trees might fall across a line. If we find a hotspot, we dig it out with a jacksmith or spray it cold with retardant from our splash packs.” He noticed that the Pendragon was whispering again to Memsen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Is there something?”

Memsen gave him a polite smile—at least he hoped it was polite. “She asks about the people who set fire to themselves. Have you ever seen one?”

“A torch?” Spur frowned. “No.” The lie slipped out with practiced ease.

“They must be very brave.” The High Gregory wriggled across the deck on hands and knees to Spur’s kit. “Hey, your bag got burnt here.” He held the kit up to the afternoon light pouring through the hull, examining it. “And here too. Do you hate them?”

“No.”

“But they tried to kill you.”

“Not me. They’re trying to kill the forest, maybe the Transcendent State, but not me. They have no idea who I am.” He motioned for the kit and the High Gregory dragged it across the compartment to him. “And I don’t know any of them. We’re all strangers.” He opened the kit, rummaged inside and pulled out a pix of Gold Squad. “Here’s my squad. That’s full firefighting gear we’re wearing.” Dead friends grinned at him from the pix. Vic, kneeling in the front row of the picture, and Hardy, who was standing next to Spur. He flipped the pix over and passed it to the High Gregory.

“Why are the torches doing this?” said Memsen. “You must have wondered about it. Help us understand.”

“It’s complicated.” He waited for Ngonda to pipe up with the official line, but the deputy was gazing through the hull of the hover with eyes of glass. “They should have gone long ago,” said Spur. “They’re upsiders, really. They don’t belong here anymore.”

“A thousand worlds for the new,” said Memsen, “one for the true. That’s what your chairman says, isn’t it?”

“Your parents came here from other worlds,” said the High Gregory. “So that’s why you think the pukpuks should’ve been willing to pack up and go. But would you come back with us to Kenning if Jack Winter said you should?”

“That’s not why I. . . .” Spur rubbed at his forehead. “I don’t know, maybe it is. Anyway, they were my grandparents, not my parents.”

The High Gregory slid across the deck and handed the pix of Gold Squad to Memsen. The Pendragon craned her neck to see.

“You have to understand,” said Spur, “that the pukpuks hate the new forests because they spread so fast. The trees grow like weeds, not like the ones in my orchard.” He glanced over his shoulder at the hills beneath him. They were on the east side of the Taratas now and flying lower. Almost home. “When Walden was still the Pea, this continent was dry and mostly open. The Niah was prairie. There was supposedly this huge desert, the Nev, or the Neb, where Concord is now. The pukpuks hunted billigags and tamed the gosdog herds. Their bots dug huge pits to mine carbonatites and rare earths. Eventually they killed off the herds, plowed the prairies under and exhausted all the surface deposits. They created the barrens, raped this planet and then most of them just left. Morobe’s Pea was a dying world, that’s why the Chairman picked it. There was nothing for the pukpuks here, no reason to stay until we came.”

As the hover swooped low over the treetops, Spur could feel the tug of home as real as gravity. After all he had been through, Littleton was still drowsing at the base of Lamana Ridge, waiting for him. He imagined sleeping in his own bed that night.

“Soon there won’t be any more barrens,” he said, “just forest. And that will be the end of it.”

The High Gregory stared at him with his unnerving yellow eyes. “They’re just trying to protect their way of life. And now you’re telling them that your way is better.”

“No.” Spur bit his lip; the truth of what the High Gregory said had long since pricked his soul. “But their way of life is to destroy our way.”

Memsen flicked a finger against the pix of Gold Squad. “And so that’s why they started this war?”

“Is this a war?” Spur took the pix from her and tucked it into his kit without looking at it again. “They set fires, we put them out. It’s dangerous work, either way.”

“People die,” whispered the Pendragon.

“Yes,” said Spur. “They do.”

Eight

I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.—Journal, 1852

Spur perched on a stump wondering how to sneak over to the Littleton train station. From where he sat, it looked hopeless. He had just bushwhacked through the forest from the edge of Spot Pond, where the hover had lingered long enough to put him onto the mucky shore. Now he was on the trail that led down Lamana Ridge. Just ahead of him was Blue Valley Road, a rough track that connected a handful of farms to Civic Route 22. cr22 became Broad Street as it passed through Littleton Commons, the village center. If he skulked down Blue Valley, he could hitch a ride on 22. Except who would be out this time of day? Neighbors. Littleton was a small town; his father had no doubt told everyone that his son the hero was due in on the 8:16 train from Heart’s Wall. Of course, he could avoid 22 altogether and skirt around town to the train station. Except it was a good ten kilometers between the stump and the station and he was bone tired.

He decided to sit a little longer.

At least Ngonda had kept most of the upsiders out of Littleton. He could imagine Penny and Kai Thousandfold and little Senator-for-Life Dowm spreading through his bewildered village to gawk at family pix and open closets and ask awkward questions. The High Gregory was all Spur had to worry about. He would be stepping off the hover ramp tomorrow morning at Spot Pond with the deputy. He would pose as Ngonda’s nephew and the deputy would be Spur’s comrade-in-arms from Iron Squad. The High Gregory would spend the day touring Littleton and making whatever luck he could. He would sleep at Spur’s house and the day after tomorrow he and Ngonda would catch the 7:57 southbound.

“Spur?” called a familiar voice from up the trail. “Is that Prosper Leung?”

Spur wanted to blurt, “No, not me, not at all.” He wanted to run away. Instead he said, “Hello, Sly.” There were worse citizens he could have run into than Sly Sawatdee.

The big man lumbered down the path. He was wearing cut-off shorts, one leg of which was several centimeters longer than the other. His barrel belly stretched his shirt, which was unbuttoned to his navel. His floppy hat was two-toned: dirty and dirtier. He was carrying a basket filled with gooseberries. His smile was bright as noon.

“That is my Prosper, I swear. My lucky little pinecone, all safe. But you’re supposed to be away at the fires. How did you get here, so far from nowhere?”

“Fell out of the sky.”

Sly giggled like a little boy. “Go around that again.” Sly was gray as an oak and almost as old as Spur’s father, but his years had never seemed a burden to him. If the Transcendent State truly wanted its citizens simple, then Sly Sawatdee was the most civic-minded person in Hamilton County. “You’re joking me, no?”

“All right then, I walked.”

“Walked from where?”

Spur pointed west.

Sly turned, as if he expected to see that a highway had been miraculously cut through the forest. “Nothing that way but trees and then mountains and then a hell of a lot more trees. That’s a truckload of walking, green log. You must be tired. Have a gooseberry?” He offered Spur the basket. When Sly harvested the wild fruit, he just broke whole canes off, instead of picking individual berries. Close work he left to his grandnephews at home.

“All right then,” said Spur. “I’m not here. I’m on the train from Heart’s Wall. I get in at 8:16.”

“Yeah? Then who am I talking to, my own shaggy self? Watch the thorns.”

Spur popped one of the striped pink berries into his mouth. It was still warm from the sun; his teeth crunched the tiny seeds. “You don’t like any of my answers?” He slung his kit over his shoulder.

“I’ll nibble almost anything, Spur, but I spit out what doesn’t taste good.” He pressed a stubby forefinger into Spur’s chest. “Your Sly can tell when you’re carrying a secret, happy old shoe. Ease the weight of it off your back and maybe I can help you with it.”

“Let’s walk.” Spur set off down the trail. Ahead the trees parted for Blue Valley Road. “How’s my father?”

“Well enough for an old man.” Sly fell into step alongside him. “Which is to say not so much of what he was. Said you got burnt when Vic Joerly and those other poor boys got killed.” He peered at Spur. “You don’t look much burnt.”

“I was in a hospital in Concord.” They had reached Blue Valley Road, which was nothing more than a couple of dirt ruts separated by a scraggle of weeds. “An upsider doctor saved my life.” Spur headed toward cr22. “They can do things you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’ll believe it this very minute if you say so.” His mouth twisted like he’d bit into a wormy apple. “Only I never had much use for upsiders.”

“Why? Have you ever met one?”

“Not me, but my DiDa used to say how they poke holes in their own brains and cut arms and legs off to sew on parts of bots in their place. Now where’s the sense in a good man turning bot?”

There was no arguing with Sly when he got to remembering things his long-suffering father had told him. “I’m guessing you buried Vic already?”

“His body came on the train last Wednesday. The funeral was Friday. Most the village was there, biggest communion in years and just about the saddest day.”

“How’s Comfort?”

“Hard to say.” He grimaced. “I paid respects, didn’t chitchat. But I heard around that she’s digging herself quite a hole. Wouldn’t take much for her to fall in.” He turned away from Spur and picked a stone up off the road. “What about you two?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah.” He lobbed the stone into the woods. “That’s what I heard.”

They were coming up on the Bandaran farmstead, corn stalks nodding in the field nearest the road. Spur could hear the wooden clunk of their windmill turning on the whispered breath of the afternoon. It was bringing water up from a well to splash into a dug pond where ducks gabbled and cropped. He tried to keep Sly between himself and the house as they passed, but whether he was noticed or not, nobody called out to him.

The next farmstead belonged to the Sawatdees, where Sly lived with his nephew Sunny and his family. On an impulse, Spur said, “There is a secret.”

“Yeah, I know. I’m old, but I still hear the mosquitoes buzz.”

“The thing is, I’m going to need your help. And you can’t tell anyone.”

Sly stepped in front of Spur and blocked his way. “Does anyone know who sat on Gandy Star’s cherry pie? The one that she baked for your DiDa?”

Spur grinned. “I hope not.”

He prodded Spur in the chest with his finger. “Did they ever figure the boy who was with Leaf Benkleman the day she got drunk on the applejack and threw up at the Solstice Day picnic?”

“It wasn’t me.” Spur put a hand on Sly’s finger and pushed it away. “I was with you fishing that afternoon.”

“Yeah, the fish story.” He stood aside and motioned for Spur to pass. “Remember who told that one? The old citizen you always forget to come visit now that you’re all grown up.” They continued down the road. The Sawatdee farmstead was just around the next bend.

“I remember, Sly. Can you help? I need a ride home right now.”

“The cottage or your DiDa’s house?”

“Diligence Cottage.”

He nodded. “Sunny can take you in the truck.”

“No, it has to be you. You’re going to be the only one who knows I’m back. Part of the secret.”

Sly swung the basket of gooseberries in wider arcs as he walked. “Sunny doesn’t want me driving at night anymore.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll be back in plenty of time for supper. But then I’ll need you again in the morning. Come get me first thing. I’m meeting someone up at Spot Pond.”

“Spot Pond? Nobody there but frogs.”

Spur leaned closer to Sly. “I can tell you, but you have to promise to help, no matter what.” He lowered his voice. “This is a big secret, Sly.”

“How big?” Sly looked worried. “Bigger than a barn?”

“Bigger than the whole village.” Spur knew Sly would be pleased and flattered to be the only one in Littleton whom Spur had invited into his conspiracy. “In or out, my friend?”

“In up to here.” Sly raised a hand over his head. “Ears open, mouth shut.” He giggled.

“Good.” Spur didn’t give him time to reconsider. “An upsider is coming to visit Littleton.”

“An upsider.” Sly took this for another joke. “And he parks his spaceship where? On Broad Street?”

“A hover is going to put him off near Spot Pond. He’s going to stay with me for a day. One day. Nobody is supposed to know he’s from the upside.”

“A hover.” Sly glanced over one shoulder and then the other, as if he expected to spot the hover following them. “One of those birdbots in our sky.”

Spur nodded.

“And you want this?”

The question caught him off guard, because he realized that sometime in the last few hours he had changed his mind. “I do, Sly.” Spur wanted to spend more time with the High Gregory and it was fine with him if they were together at Diligence Cottage. He just didn’t want to inflict the upsider on the rest of his sleepy village. They wouldn’t understand.

Except Sly was shaking his head. “Nothing good ever came of getting tangled up with space people.”

“I’m just curious is all,” said Spur.

“Curious can’t sit still, young sprout. Curious always goes for the closer look.” For the first time since Spur had known him, Sly Sawatdee looked his age. “And now I’m thinking what will happen to your DiDa when you leave us. He’s a good man, you know. I’ve known him all my life.”

Nine

For when man migrates, he carries with him not only his birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables and his very sward, but his orchard also.—Wild Apples, 1862

Capability Roger Leung loved apples. He was fond of the other pomes as well, especially pears and quince. Stone fruits he didn’t much care for, although he tolerated sour cherries in memory of GiGa’s pies. But apples were Cape’s favorite, the ancient fruit of the home world. He claimed that apples graced the tables of all of Earth’s great civilizations: Roman, Islamic, American and Dalamist. Some people in Littleton thought that Spur’s father loved his apple trees more than he loved his family. Probably Spur’s mother, Lucy Bliss Leung, had been one of these. Probably that was why she left him when Spur was three, first to move to Heart’s Wall and then clear across the continent to Providence. Spur never got the chance to ask her because he never saw her again after she moved to Southwest. The citizens of Walden did not travel for mere pleasure. Spur’s grandparents had arrived on Walden penniless and with only a basic knowledge of farming. Yet hard work and brutal frugality had built their farmstead into a success. However, the price they paid for single-minded dedication to farming was high; of their three children, only Cape chose to stay on the farm as an adult. And even he moved out of Diligence Cottage when he was sixteen and put up a hut for himself at the farthest edge of the Leung property. He was trying to escape their disapproval. Whenever he looked at the tell or visited friends or climbed a tree to read a book, GiGo or GiGa would carp at him for being frivolous or lazy. They couldn’t see the sense of volunteering for the fire department or playing left base for the Littleton Eagles when there were chores to be done. Sometimes weeks might pass without Cape saying an unnecessary word to his parents.

Yet it had been Cape who transformed the family fortunes with his apples. When he was eighteen, he began attending classes at the hortischool extension in Longwalk, very much against GiGo’s wishes. He had paid tuition out of money earned doing odd jobs around the village—another pointless diversion from home chores that irritated his parents. Cape had become interested in fruit trees after brown rot spoiled almost the entire crop of Littleton’s sour cherries the year before. All the farmers in the village raised fruit, but their orchards were usually no more than a dozen trees, all of traditional heirloom varieties. Crops were small, usually just enough for home use because of the ravages of pests and disease. Farmers battled Terran immigrants like tarnished plant bugs, sawflies, wooly aphids, coddling moths, leafrollers, lesser apple worms, and the arch enemy: plum curculio. There were mildews, rusts, rots, cankers, blotches and blights to contend with as well. The long growing season of fruit trees made them vulnerable to successive attacks. Citizens across the Transcendent State debated whether or not Chairman Winter had introduced insect evil and fungal disease into his new Garden of Eden on purpose. The question had never been settled. But at hortischool, Cape learned about neem spray, extracted from the chinaberry tree and the organic insecticide pyrethrum, which was made from dried daisies. And he heard about an amazing cider apple called Huang’s Nectar, a disease-resistant early bloomer, well-suited to the climate of Southeast but not yet proven hardy in the north. As much to spite his father as to test the new variety, he had drained his savings and bought a dozen saplings on w4 semi-dwarfing rootstock. He started his own orchard on land he had cleared near his hut. Two years later, he brought in his first—admittedly light—harvest, which nevertheless yielded the sweetest cider and smoothest applejack anyone in Littleton had ever tasted. Cape purchased a handscrew press in his third year and switched from fermenting his cider in glass carboys to huge oak barrels by his fifth. And he bought more apple trees—he never seemed to have enough: McIntosh, GoRed, Jay’s Pippin, Alumar Gold, Adam and Eve. Soon he began to grow rootstock and sell trees to other farmers. By the time Cape married Spur’s mother, the Leungs were renting land from farmsteads on either side of their original holding. GiGo and GiGa lived long enough to see their son become the most prosperous farmer in Littleton. GiGo, however, never forgave himself for being wrong, or Cape for being right, about the apples.

Cape had given Spur and Comfort his parents’ house as a wedding present; Diligence Cottage had been empty ever since GiGa had died. Cape had long since transformed his own little hut into one of the grandest homes in Littleton. Spur had Sly drop him off just down Jane Powder Street from the cottage, hoping to avoid the big house and the inevitable interrogation by his father for as long as possible. After seeing Sly’s dismay at the news of the High Gregory’s visit, he was thinking he might try to keep the High Gregory’s identity from Cape, if he could.

However, as Spur approached the front door, he spotted Cape’s scooter parked by the barn and then Cape himself reaching from a ladder into the scaffold branches of one of GiGo’s ancient Macoun apples. He was thinning the fruit set. This was twice a surprise: first, because Cape usually avoided the house where he had grown up, and second, because he had been set against trying to rejuvenate the Leungs’ original orchard, arguing that it was a waste of Spur’s time. In fact the peaches and the plum tree had proved beyond saving. However, through drastic pruning, Spur had managed to bring three Macouns and one Sunset apple, and a Northstar cherry back into production again.

“DiDa!” Spur called out so that he wouldn’t startle his father. “It’s me.”

“Prosper?” Cape did not look down as he twisted an unripe apple free. “You’re here already. Something’s wrong?” He dropped the cull to the pack of gosdogs waiting below. A female leapt and caught the apple in midair in its long beak. It chomped twice and swallowed. Then it chased its scaly tale in delight, while the others hooted at Cape.

“Everything’s fine. There was a last minute change and I managed to get a ride home.” Spur doubted his father would be satisfied with this vague explanation, but it was worth a try. “What are you doing up there?” He dropped his kit on the front step of the farmhouse and trudged over to the orchard. “I thought you hated GiGo’s useless old trees.”

Cape sniffed. “Macoun is a decent enough apple; they’re just too damn much work. And since you weren’t around to tend to them—but I should come down. You’re home, Prosper. Wait, I’ll come down.”

“No, finish what you’re doing. How are things here?”

“It was a dry spring.” He culled another green apple, careful to grasp the fruiting spur with one hand and the fruit with the other. “June was parched too, but the county won’t call it a drought yet.” The gosdogs swirled and tumbled beneath him as he let the apple fall. “The June drop was light, so I’ve had to do a lot of thinning. We had sawfly but the curculio isn’t so bad. They let you out of the hospital so soon, Prosper? Tell me what you’re not telling me.”

“I’m fine. Ready to build fence and buck firewood.”

“Have you seen Comfort yet?”

“No.”

“You were supposed to arrive by train.”

“I hitched a ride with a friend.”

“From Concord?”

“I got off the train in Wheelwright.”

“Wheelwright.” One of the gosdogs was trying to scrabble up the ladder. “I don’t know where that is exactly. Somewhere in Southeast, I think. Lee County maybe?”

“Around there. What’s wrong with Macouns?”

“Ah.” He shook his head in disapproval. “A foolish tree that doesn’t know what’s good for it.” He gestured at the immature apples all around him. “Look at the size of this fruit set. Even after the June drop, there are too many apples left on the branches. Grow more than a few of these trees and you’ll spend the summer hand-thinning. Have you seen Comfort yet?”

“I already said no.” Spur plucked a low-hanging cherry, which held its green stem, indicating it wasn’t quite ripe; despite this, he popped it into his mouth. “Sour cherries aren’t too far from harvest, I’d say.” He spat the pit at the gosdogs. “They’re pulling the entire regiment back to Cloyce Forest, which is where I’ll catch up with them.”

“Civic refreshment—you’ll be busy.” Cape wound up and pitched a cull into the next row of trees. As the pack hurtled after it, he backed down the ladder. “Although I wouldn’t mind some help. You’re home for how long?”

“Just the week.”

He hefted the ladder and pivoted it into the next tree. “Not much time.”

“No.”

He was about to climb up again when he realized that he had yet to greet his only son. “I’m glad you’re safe, Prosper,” he said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “But I still don’t understand about the train.” He held Spur at arm’s length. “You got off why?”

Spur was desperate to change the subject. “DiDa, I know you don’t want to hear this but Comfort and I are probably going to get divorced.”

Cape grimaced and let go of Spur. “Probably?” He set his foot on the bottom rung.

“Yes.” The gosdogs were back already, swarming around the ladder, downy feathers flying. “I’m sorry.” Spur stepped away.

“Prosper, you know my feelings about this.” He mounted the ladder. “But then everyone knows I’m a simple fool when it comes to keeping a woman.”

Cape Leung had been saying things like that ever since Spur’s mother left him. On some days he bemoaned the failure of his marriage as a wound that had crippled him for life, on others he preened as if surviving it were his one true distinction. As a young man, Spur had thought these were merely poses and had resented his father for keeping his feelings about Spur’s mother in a tangle. Now, Spur thought maybe he understood.

“Comfort was never comfortable here,” Spur said morosely. “I blame myself for that. But I don’t think she was born to be a farmer’s wife. Never was, never will be.”

“Are you sure?” Cape sucked air between his teeth as he leaned into the tree. “She’s had a terrible shock, Prosper. Now this?”

“It isn’t going to come as a shock,” he said, his voice tight. His father had far too many reasons for wanting Spur to make his marriage work. He had always liked both of the Joerly kids and had loved the way Comfort had remade both Diligence Cottage and his only son. Cape was impatient for grandchildren. And then there was the matter of the land, once agreeably complicated, now horribly simple. Ever since they had been kids, it had been a running joke around the village that someday Spur would marry Comfort and unite the Joerly farmstead with the Leung holdings, immediately adjacent to the east. Of course, everyone knew it wouldn’t happen quite that way, because of Vic. But now Vic was dead.

“When will you see her?”

“I don’t know,” said Spur. “Soon. Anyway, it’s been a long day for me. I’m going in.”

“Come back to the house for supper?” said Cape.

“No, I’m too tired. I’ll scrape up something to eat in the cottage.”

“You won’t have to look too hard.” He grinned. “Your fans stopped by this morning to open the place up. I’m sure they left some goodies. I’ve been telling the neighbors that you were due home today.” He dropped another cull to the gosdogs. “Now that I think about it, I should probably ride into town to tell folks not to meet your train. I still can’t believe you got a ride all the way from . . . where did you say it was again?”

“What fans?”

“I think it must have been Gandy Joy who organized it; at least she was the one who came to the house to ask my permission.” He stepped off the ladder into the tree to reach the highest branches. “But I saw the Velez girls waiting in the van, Peace Toba, Summer Millisap.” He stretched for a particularly dense cluster of apples. “Oh, and after they left, I think Comfort might have stopped by the cottage.”

Ten

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating.—Walden

The refrigerator was stocked with a chicken and parsnip casserole, a pot of barley soup, half a dozen eggs, a little tub of butter, a slab of goat cheese and three bottles of root beer. There was a loaf of fresh onion rye bread and glass jars of homemade apricot and pear preserves on the counter. But what Spur ate for supper was pie. Someone had baked him two pies, a peach and an apple. He ate half of each, and washed them down with root beer. Why not? There was nobody around to scold him and he was too tired to heat up the soup or the casserole, much less to eat it. Eating pie took no effort at all. Besides, he hadn’t had a decent slice of pie since he had left Littleton. The niceties of baking were beyond the field kitchens of the Corps of Firefighters.

Afterward he poured himself a tumbler of applejack and sat at the kitchen table, trying to decide who had brought what. The barley soup felt like an offering from sturdy Peace Toba. Gandy Joy knew he had a developed a secret weakness for root beer, despite growing up in a farmstead that lived and died by cider. The Millisaps had the largest herd of goats in town. He wasn’t sure who had made the casserole, although he would have bet it wasn’t the Velez sisters. Casseroles were too matronly for the Velezes. They were in their early twenties and single and a little wild—at least by Littleton’s standards. They had to be, since they were searching for romance in a village of just over six hundred souls. Everyone said that they would probably move to Longwalk someday, or even to Heart’s Wall, which would break their parents’ hearts. He was guessing that the pies had come from their kitchen. A well-made pie was as good as a love letter. But would the Velez sisters just assume he and Comfort were finally going to split? Comfort must have decided on her own and was telling people in the village. Then Spur remembered that Sly had said he had heard something. And if Sly knew, then everyone knew. In a nosy village like Littleton, if a kid skinned his knee playing baseball, at least three moms fell out of trees waving bandages.

Spur put the food away and washed the dishes, after which there was no reason to stay in the kitchen. But he lingered for a while, trying to avoid the memories which whispered to him from the other rooms of the cottage. He remembered his stern grandparents ghosting around the wood stove in their last years. He remembered boarding Diligence Cottage up after GiGo died, the lumpy furniture and the threadbare carpet receding into the gloom. And then he and Comfort pulling the boards down and rediscovering their new home. The newlyweds had moved almost all of GiGo and GiGa’s things to the barn, where they moldered to this day. Spur and Comfort had dusted and cleaned and scraped and painted everything in the empty cottage. He remembered sitting on the floor with his back to the wall of the parlor, looking at the one lonely chair they owned. Comfort had cuddled beside him, because she said that if there wasn’t room for both of them on the chair then neither would sit. He had kissed her then. There had been a lot of kissing in those days. In fact, Comfort had made love to him in every room of the cottage. It was her way of declaring ownership and of exorcising the disapproving spirits of the old folks.

Now that she was about to pass out of his life, Spur thought that Comfort might have been too ferocious a lover for his tastes. Sometimes it was all he could do to stay with her in bed. Occasionally her passion alarmed him, although he would never have admitted this to himself while they were together. It would have been unmanly. But just before he had volunteered for the Corps, when things had already begun to go wrong, he had felt as if there was always another man standing next them, watching. Not anyone real, but rather Comfort’s idea of a lover. Spur knew by then he wasn’t that man. He had just been a placeholder for whoever it was she was waiting for.

Finally he left the kitchen. The women who had opened Diligence Cottage had done their best, but there was no air to work with on this close July night. The rooms were stale and hot. He sat out on the porch until the needlebugs drove him inside. Then he propped a fan in either window of the bedroom and dumped his kit out onto the bedspread. What did he have to wear that was cool? He picked up a t-shirt but then smelled the tang of smoke still clinging to it. He dropped it onto the bed and chuckled mirthlessly. He was home; he could put on his own clothes. He opened the dresser drawer and pulled out the shorts that Comfort had bought for his birthday and a gauzy blue shirt. The pants were loose and slid down his hips. He had lost weight in the firefight and even more in the hospital. Too much heartbreak. Not enough pie.

Then, against his better judgment, he crossed the bedroom to Comfort’s dresser and began to open drawers. He had never understood why she abandoned everything she owned when she left him. Did it mean that she was planning to come back? Or that she was completely rejecting their life together? He didn’t touch anything, just looked at her panties, black and navy blue and gray—no pastels or patterns for his girl. Then the balled socks, sleeveless blouses, shirts with the arms folded behind them, heavy workpants, lightweight sweaters. And in the bottom drawer the jade pajamas of black-market material so sheer that it would slip from her body if he even thought about tugging at it.

“Not exactly something a farmer’s wife would wear.” Spur spoke aloud just to hear a voice; the dense silence of the cottage was making him edgy. “At least, not this farmer’s wife.”

Now that he was losing Comfort, Spur realized that the only person in his family was his father. It struck him that he had no memories of his father in the cottage. He could see Cape in the dining room of the big house or the library or dozing in front of the tell. Alone, always alone.

Spur had a bad moment then. He stepped into the bathroom, and splashed some cold water on his face. He would have to remarry or he would end up like his father. He tried to imagine kissing Bell Velez, slipping a hand under her blouse, but he couldn’t.

“Knock, knock.” A woman called from the parlor. “Your father claims you’re back.” It was Gandy Joy.

“Just a minute.” Spur swiped at his dripping face with the hand towel. As he strode from the bedroom, the smile on his face was genuine. He was grateful to Gandy Joy for rescuing him from the silence and his dark mood.

She was a small, round woman with flyaway hair that was eight different shades of gray. She had big teeth and an easy smile. Her green sundress exposed the wrinkled skin of her wide shoulders and arms; despite farm work she was still as fair as the flesh of an apple. Spur had been mothered by many of the women of Littleton as a boy, but Gandy Joy was the one who meant the most to him. He had to stoop over slightly to hug her.

“Prosper.” She squeezed him so hard it took his breath away. “My lovely boy, you’re safe.”

“Thank you for opening the cottage,” he said. “But how did you find everything?” She smelled like lilacs and he realized that she must have perfumed herself just for him.

“Small house.” She stepped back to take him in. “Not many places a thing can be.”

Spur studied her as well; she seemed to have aged five years in the ten months since he’d seen her last. “Big enough, especially for one.”

“I’m sorry, Prosper.”

When Spur saw the sadness shadow her face, he knew that she had heard something. She was, after all, the village virtuator. He supposed he should have been relieved that Comfort was letting everyone know she wanted a divorce, since that was what he wanted too. Instead he just felt hollow. “What has she told you?”

Gandy Joy just shook her head. “You two have to talk.”

He thought about pressing her, but decided to let it drop. “Have a seat, Gandy. Can I get you anything? There’s applejack.” He steered her toward the sofa. “And root beer.”

“No thanks.” She nodded at her wooden-bead purse, which he now noticed against the bolster of the sofa. “I brought communion.”

“Really?” he said, feigning disappointment. “Then you’re only here on business?”

“I’m here for more reasons than you’ll ever know.” She gave him a playful tap on the arm. “And keeping souls in communion is my calling, lovely boy, not my business.” She settled on the sofa next to her purse and he sat facing her on the oak chair that had once been his only stick of furniture.

“How long are you with us?” She pulled out three incense burners and set them on the cherry wood table that Comfort had ordered all the way from Providence.

“A week.” Spur had seen Gandy Joy’s collection of incense burners, but he had never known her to use three at once for just two people. “I’ll catch up with the squad in Cloyce Forest. Easy work for a change; just watching the trees grow.” He considered three excessive; after all, he had accepted communion regularly with the other firefighters.

“We weren’t expecting you so soon.” She slipped the aluminum case marked with the seal of the Transcendent State from her purse. “You didn’t come on the train.”

“No.”

She selected a communion square from the case. She touched it to her forehead, the tip of her nose and her lips and then placed it on edge in the incense burner. She glanced up at him and still the silence stretched. “Just no?” she said finally. “That’s all?”

Spur handed her the crock of matches kept especially for communion. “My father told you to ask, didn’t he?”

“I’m old, Prosper.” Her smile was crooked. “I’ve earned the right to be curious.” She repeated the ritual with the second communion square.

“You have. But he really wants to know.”

“He always does.” She set the third communion in its burner. “But then everybody understands about that particular bend in Capability’s soul.” She selected a match from the crock and struck it.

Now it was Spur’s turn to wait. “So aren’t you going to ask me about the train?”

“I was, but since you have something to hide, I won’t.” She touched the fire to each of the three squares and they caught immediately, the oils in the communion burning with an eager yellow flame. “I don’t really care, Spur. I’m just happy that you’re back and safe.” She blew the flames out on each of the squares, leaving a glowing edge. “Make the most of your time with us.”

Spur watched the communion smoke uncoil in the still air of his parlor. Then, as much to please Gandy Joy as to re-establish his connection with his village, he leaned forward and breathed deeply. The fumes that filled his nose were harsh at first, but wispier and so much sweeter than the strangling smoke of a burn. As he settled back into his chair, he got the subtle accents: the yeasty aroma of bread baking, a whiff of freshly split oak and just a hint of the sunshine scent of a shirt fresh off the clothesline. He could feel the communion smoke fill his head and touch his soul. It bound him as always to the precious land and the cottage where his family had made a new life, the orderly Leung farmstead, his home town and of course to this woman who loved him more than his mother ever had and his flinty father who couldn’t help the way he was and faithful Sly Sawatdee and generous Leaf Benkleman and droll Will Sambusa and steadfast Peace Toba and the entire Velez family who had always been so generous to him and yes, even his dear Comfort Rose Joerly, who was leaving him but who was nonetheless a virtuous citizen of Littleton.

He shivered when he noticed Gandy Joy watching him. No doubt she was trying to gauge whether he had fully accepted communion. “Thank you,” he said, “for all the food.”

She nodded, satisfied. “You’re welcome. We just wanted to show how proud we are of you. This is your village, after all, and you’re our Prosper and we want you to stay with us always.”

He chuckled nervously. Why did everyone think he was going somewhere?

She leaned forward, and lowered her voice. “But I have to say there was more than a little competition going on over the cooking.” She chuckled. “Bets were placed on which dish you’d eat first.”

“Bets?” Spur found the idea of half a dozen women competing to please him quite agreeable. “And what did you choose?”

“After I saw everything laid out, I was thinking that you’d start in on pie. After all, there wasn’t going to be anyone to tell you no.”

Spur laughed. “Pie was all I ate. But don’t tell anyone.”

She tapped her forefinger to her lips and grinned.

“So I’m guessing that the Velez girls made the pies?”

“There was just the one—an apple, I think is what Bell said.”

“I found two on the counter: apple and a peach.”

“Really?” Gandy sat back on the couch. “Someone else must have dropped it off after we left.”

“Might have been Comfort,” said Spur. “DiDa said he thought she stopped by. I was expecting to find a note.”

“Comfort was here?”

“She lives here,” said Spur testily. “At least, all her stuff is here.”

Gandy took a deep breath over the incense burners and held it in for several moments. “I’m worried about her,” she said finally. “She hasn’t accepted communion since we heard about Vic. She keeps to herself and when we go to visit her at home, she’s as friendly as a brick. There’s mourning and then there’s self-pity, Prosper. She’s been talking about selling the farmstead, moving away. We’ve lost poor Victor, we don’t want to lose her too. Littleton wouldn’t be the same without the Joerlys. When you see her, whatever you two decide, make sure she knows that.”

Spur almost groaned then, but the communion had him in its benevolent grip. If citizens didn’t help one another, there would be no Transcendent State. “I’ll do my best,” he said, his voice tight.

“Oh, I know you will, my lovely boy. I know it in my soul.”

Eleven

Things do not change; we change.—Journal, 1850

The High Gregory sat next to Spur in the bed of the Sawatdees’ truck, their backs against the cab, watching the dust billow behind them. Sly and Ngonda rode up front. As the truck jolted down Blue Valley Road, Spur could not help but see the excitement on the High Gregory’s face. The dirt track was certainly rough, but the boy was bouncing so high Spur was worried that he’d fly over the side. He was even making Sly nervous, and the old farmer was usually as calm as moss. But then Sly Sawatdee didn’t make a habit of giving rides to upsiders. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the High Gregory through the open rear slider.

Spur had no doubt that his cover story for the High Gregory and Ngonda was about to unravel. The High Gregory had decided to wear purple overalls with about twenty brass buttons. Although there was nothing wrong with his black t-shirt, the bandana knotted around his neck was a pink disaster embellished with cartoons of beets and carrots and corn on the cob. At least he had used some upsider trick to disguise the color of his eyes. Ngonda’s clothes weren’t quite as odd, but they too were a problem. Spur had seen citizens wearing flair jackets and high-collar shirts—but not on a hot summer Sunday and not in Littleton. Ngonda was dressed for a meeting at the Cooperative’s Office of Diplomacy in Concord. Spur’s only hope was to whisk them both to Diligence Cottage and either hide them there or find them something more appropriate to wear.

“Tell me about the gosdogs,” said the High Gregory.

Spur leaned closer, trying to hear him over the roar of the truck’s engine, the clatter of its suspension and the crunch of tires against the dirt road. “Say again?”

“The gosdogs,” shouted the High Gregory. “One of your native species. You know, four-footed, feathered, they run in packs.”

“Gosdogs, yes. What do you want to know?”

“You eat them.”

“I don’t.” The High Gregory seemed to be waiting for him to elaborate, but Spur wasn’t sure what he wanted to know exactly. “Other citizens do, but the browns only. The other breeds are supposed to be too stringy.”

“And when you kill them, do they know they’re about to die? How do you do it?”

“I don’t.” Spur had never slaughtered a gosdog; Cape didn’t believe in eating them. However, Spur had slaughtered chickens and goats and helped once with a bull. Butchering was one of the unpleasant chores that needed doing on a farm, like digging postholes or mucking out the barn. “They don’t suffer.”

“Really? That’s good to know.” The High Gregory did not look convinced. “How smart do you think they are?”

At that moment Sly stepped on the brakes and swung the steering wheel; the truck bumped onto the smooth pavement of Civic Route 22.

“Not very,” said Spur. With the road noise abating, his voice carried into the cab.

“Not very what?” said Constant Ngonda.

The High Gregory propped himself up to speak through the open window. “I was asking Spur how smart the gosdogs are. I couldn’t find much about them, considering. Why is that, do you suppose?”

“The ComExplore Survey Team rated them just 6.4 on the Peekay Animal Intelligence Scale,” said Ngonda. “A goat has more brains.”

“Yes, I found that,” said the High Gregory, “but what’s interesting is that the first evaluation was the only one ever done. And it would have been very much in the company’s interests to test them low, right? And of course it made no sense for your pukpuks to bother with a follow-up test. And now your Transcendent State has a stake in keeping that rating as it is.”

“Are you suggesting some kind of conspiracy?” Ngonda was working his way to a fine outrage. “That we’re deliberately abusing an intelligent species?”

“I’m just asking questions, friend Constant. And no, I’m not saying they’re as smart as humans, no, no, never. But suppose they were retested and their intelligence was found to be . . . let’s say 8.3. Or even 8.1. The Thousand Worlds might want to see them protected.”

“Protected?” The deputy’s voice snapped through the window.

“Why, don’t you think that would be a good idea? You’d just have to round them up and move them to a park or something. Let them loose in their native habitat.”

“There is no native habitat left on Walden.” Spur noticed that Sly was so intent on the conversation that he was coasting down the highway. “Except maybe underwater.” A westbound oil truck was catching up to them fast.

“We could build one then,” said the High Gregory cheerfully. “The L’ung could raise the money. They need something to do.”

“Can I ask you something?” Ngonda had passed outrage and was well on his way to fury.

“Yes, friend Constant. Of course.”

“How old are you?”

“Twelve standard. My birthday is next month. I don’t want a big party this year. It’s too much work.”

“They know themselves in the mirror,” said Sly.

“What?” Ngonda was distracted from whatever point he was about to make. “What did you just say?”

“When one of them looks at his reflection, he recognizes himself.” Sly leaned back toward the window as he spoke. “We had this brood, a mother and three pups, who stayed indoors with us last winter. They were house-trained, mostly.” The truck slowed to a crawl. “So my granddaughter Brookie is playing dress-up with the pups one night and the silly little pumpkin decides to paint one all over with grape juice. Said she was trying to make the first purple gosdog—her father babies her, don’t you know? But she actually stains the right rear leg before her mother catches her out. And when Brookie lets the poor thing loose, it galumphs to the mirror and backs up to see its grapy leg. Then it gets to whimpering and clucking and turning circles like they do when they’re upset.” Sly checked the rearview mirror and noticed the oil truck closing in on them for the first time. “I was there, saw it clear as tap water. The idea that it knew who it was tipped me over for a couple of days.” He put two wheels onto the shoulder of cr22 and waved the truck past. “It’s been a hardship, but I’ve never eaten a scrap of gosdog since.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” said Ngonda.

“Lots of citizens feel that way,” said Spur.

“As is their right. But to jump to conclusions based on this man’s observations. . . .” “I don’t want to jump, friend Constant,” said the High Gregory. “Let’s not jump.” Although the deputy was ready to press his argument, nobody else spoke and gradually he subsided. Sly pulled back onto cr22 and drove the rest of the way at a normal pace. They passed the rest of the trip in silence; the wind seemed to whip Spur’s thoughts right out of his head.

As they turned off Jane Powder Street onto the driveway of the cottage, Sly called back to him. “Looks like you’ve got company.”

Spur rubbed the back of his neck in frustration. Who told the townsfolk that he wanted them to come visiting? He leaned over the side of the truck but couldn’t see anyone until they parked next to the porch. Then he spotted the scooter leaning against the barn.

If it was really in the High Gregory’s power to make luck, then what he was brewing up for Spur so far was pure misfortune. It was Comfort’s scooter.

The High Gregory stood up in the back of the truck and turned around once, surveying the farmstead. “This is your home, Spur.” He said it not as a question but as a statement, as if Spur were the one seeing it for the first time. “I understand now why you would want to live so far from everything. It’s like a poem here.”

Constant Ngonda opened the door and stepped down onto the dusty drive. From his expression, the deputy appeared to have formed a different opinion of the cottage. However, he was enough of a diplomat to keep it to himself. He clutched a holdall to his chest and was mounting the stairs to the porch when he noticed that no one else had moved from the truck.

They were watching Comfort stalk toward them from the barn, so clearly in a temper that heat seemed to shimmer off her in the morning swelter.

“That woman looks angry as lightning,” said Sly. “You want me to try to get in her way?”

“No,” said Spur. “She’d probably just knock you over.”

“But this is your Comfort?” said the High Gregory. “The wife that you don’t live with anymore. This is so exciting, just what I was hoping for. She’s come for a visit—maybe to welcome you back?”

“I’m not expecting much of a welcome,” said Spur. “If you’ll excuse me, I should talk to her. Sly, if you wouldn’t mind staying a few minutes, maybe you could take Constant and young Lucky here inside. There’s plenty to eat.”

“Lucky,” said the High Gregory, repeating the name they had agreed on for him, as if reminding himself to get into character. “Hello, friend Comfort,” he called. “I’m Lucky. Lucky Ngonda.”

She shook the greeting off and kept bearing down on them. His wife was a slight woman, with fine features and eyes dark tas currants. Her hair was long and sleek and black. She was wearing a sleeveless, yellow gingham dress that Spur had never seen before. Part of her new wardrobe, he thought, her new life. When he had been in love with her, Spur had thought that Comfort was pretty. But now, seeing her for the first time in months, he decided that she was merely delicate. She did not look strong enough for the rigors of life on a farm.

Spur opened the tailgate and the High Gregory jumped from the back of the truck. Ngonda came back down the stairs to be introduced to Comfort. Spur was handing the High Gregory’s bag down to Sly as she drew herself up in front of them.

“Gandy Joy said you wanted to see me first thing in the morning.” She did not waste time on introductions. “I didn’t realize that I’d be interrupting a party.”

“Comfort,” said Spur, “I’m sorry.” He stopped himself then, chagrined at how easily he fell into the old pattern. When they were together, he was always apologizing.

“Morning, sweet corn,” said Sly. “Not that much of a party, I’m afraid.”

“But there are snacks inside,” the High Gregory said. “This is such a beautiful place you two have. I’ve just met Spur myself, but I’m pretty sure he’s going to be happy here someday. My name is Lucky Ngonda.” He held out his hand to her. “We’re supposed to shake but first you have to say your name.”

Comfort had been so fixated on Spur that she had brushed by the High Gregory. Now she scrutinized him in all his purple glory and her eyes went wide. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Is something wrong?” He glanced down at his overalls. “I’m dressed to visit my friend Spur.” He patted his bare head. “It’s the hat, isn’t it? I’m supposed to be wearing a hat.”

“Constant Ngonda, a friend of Spur’s from the Ninth.” Ngonda oozed between them. “I apologize for intruding; I know you have some important things to discuss. Why don’t we give you a chance to catch up now. My nephew and I will be glad to wait inside.” He put an arm around the High Gregory’s shoulder and aimed him at the porch.

“Wait,” said the High Gregory. “I thought I was your cousin.”

“Take as long as you want, Spur,” Ngonda said as he hustled the boy off. “We’ll be fine.”

Sly shook his head in disbelief. “I’ll make sure they don’t get into trouble.” He started after them.

“There are pies in the refrigerator,” Spur called after him. “Most of an apple pie and just a couple slices of a peach.” He steeled himself and turned back to Comfort. “My father said you were here the other day.” He aimed a smile at her but it bounced off. “You made my favorite pie.”

“Who are those people?” Her eyes glittered with suspicion. “The boy is strange. Why have you brought them here?”

“Let’s walk.” He took her arm and was surprised when she went along without protest. He felt the heat of her glare cooling as they strode away from the cottage. “I did have a chat with Gandy Joy,” he said. “She said you were feeling pretty low.”

“I have the right to feel however I feel,” she said stiffly.

“You haven’t been accepting communion.”

“Communion is what they give you so you feel smart about acting stupid. Tell her that I don’t need some busybody blowing smoke in my eyes to keep me from seeing what’s wrong.” She stopped and pulled him around to face her. “We’re getting divorced, Spur.”

“Yes,” He held her gaze. “I know.” He wanted to hug her or maybe shake her. Touch her long, black hair. Instead his hands hung uselessly by his sides. “But I’m still concerned about you.”

“Why?”

“You’ve been talking about moving away.”

She turned and started walking again. “I can’t run a farm by myself.”

“We could help you, DiDa and I.” He caught up with her. “Hire some of the local kids. Maybe bring in a tenant from another village.”

“And how long do you think that would work for? If you want to run my farm, Spur, buy it from me.”

“Your family is an important part of this place. The whole village wants you to stay. Everyone would pitch in.”

She chuckled grimly. “Everyone wanted us to get married. They want us to stay together. I’m tired of having everyone in my life.”

He wasn’t going to admit to her that he felt the same way sometimes. “Where will you go?”

“Away.”

“Just away?”

“I miss him, I really do. But I don’t want to live anywhere near Vic’s grave.”

Spur kicked a stone across the driveway and said nothing for several moments. “You’re sure it’s not me you want to get away from?”

“No, Spur. That’s one thing I am sure of.”

“When did you decide all this?”

“Spur, I’m not mad at you.” Impulsively, she went up on tiptoes and aimed a kiss at the side of his face. She got mostly air, but their cheeks brushed, her skin hot against his. “I like you, especially when you’re like this, so calm and thoughtful. You’re the best of this lot and you’ve always been sweet to me. It’s just that I can’t live like this anymore.”

“I like you too, Comfort. Last night, after I accepted communion—”

“Enough. We like each other. We should stop there, it’s a good place to be.” She bumped up against him. “Now tell me about that boy. He isn’t an upsider, is he?”

She shot him a challenging look and he tried to bear up under the pressure of her regard. They walked in silence while he decided what he could say about Ngonda and the High Gregory. “Can you keep a secret?”

She sighed. “You know you’re going to tell me, so get to it.”

They had completely circled the cottage. Spur spotted the High Gregory watching them from a window. He turned Comfort toward the barn. “Two days ago, when I was still in the hospital, I started sending greetings to the upside.” He waved off her objections. “Don’t ask, I don’t know why exactly, other than that I was bored. Anyway, the boy answered one of them. He’s the High Gregory of the L’ung, Phosphorescence of something or other, I forget what. He’s from Kenning in the Theta Persei system and I’m guessing he’s pretty important, because the next thing I knew, he qiced himself to Walden and had me pulled off a train.”

He told her about the hover and Memsen and the kids of the L’ung and how he was being forced to show the High Gregory his village. “Oh, and he supposedly makes luck.”

“What does that mean?” said Comfort. “How does somebody make luck?”

“I don’t know exactly. But Memsen and the L’ung are all convinced that he does it, whatever it is.”

They had wandered into GiGa’s flower garden. Comfort had tried to make it her own after they had moved in. However, she’d had neither the time nor the patience to tend persnickety plants and so grew only daylilies and hostas and rugose roses. After a season of neglect, even these tough flowers were losing ground to the bindweed and quackgrass and spurge.

Spur sat on the fieldstone bench that his grandfather had built for his grandmother. He tapped on the seat for her to join him. She hesitated then settled at the far end, twisting to face him.

“He acts too stupid to be anyone important,” she said. “What about that slip he made about being the cousin and not the nephew. Are the people on his world idiots?”

“Maybe he intended to say it.” Spur leaned forward and pulled a flat clump of spurge from the garden. “After all, he’s wearing those purple overalls; he’s really not trying very hard to pretend he’s a citizen.” He knocked the dirt off the roots and left it to shrivel in the sun. “What if he wanted me to tell you who he was and decided to make it happen? I think he’s used to getting his own way.”

“So what does he want with us?” Her expression was unreadable.

“I’m not sure. I think what Memsen was telling me is that he has come here to see how his being here changes us.” He shook his head. “Does that make any sense?”

“It doesn’t have to,” she said. “He’s from the upside. They don’t think the same way we do.”

“Maybe so.” It was a commonplace that had been drilled into them in every self-reliance class they had ever sat through. It was, after all, the reason that Chairman Winter had founded Walden. But now that he had actually met upsiders—Memsen and the High Gregory and the L’ung—he wasn’t sure that their ways were so strange. But this wasn’t the time to argue the point. “Look, Comfort, I have my own reason for telling you all this,” he said. “I need help with him. At first I thought he was just going to pretend to be one of us and take a quiet look at the village. Now I’m thinking he wants to be discovered so he can make things happen. So I’m going to try to keep him busy here if I can. It’s just for one day; he said he’d leave in the morning.”

“And you believe that?”

“I’d like to.” He dug at the base of a dandelion with his fingers and pried it out of the ground with the long taproot intact. “What other choice do I have?” He glanced back at the cottage but couldn’t see the High Gregory in the window anymore. “We’d better get back.”

She put a hand on his arm. “First we have to talk about Vic.”

Spur paused, considering. “We can do that if you want.” He studied the dandelion root as if it held the answers to all his problems. “We probably should. But it’s hard, Comfort. When I was in the hospital the upsiders did something to me. A kind of treatment that. . . .”

She squeezed his arm and then let go. “There’s just one thing I have to know. You were with him at the end. At least, that’s what we heard. You reported his death.”

“It was quick,” said Spur. “He didn’t suffer.” This was a lie he had been preparing to tell her ever since he had woken up in the hospital.

“That’s good. I’m glad.” She swallowed. “Thank you. But did he say anything? At the end, I mean.”

“Say? Say what?”

“You have to understand that after I moved back home, I found that Vic had changed. I was shocked when he volunteered for the Corps because he was actually thinking of leaving Littleton. Maybe Walden too. He talked a lot about going to the upside.” She clutched her arms to her chest so tightly that she seemed to shrink. “He didn’t believe—you can’t tell anyone about this. Promise?”

Spur shut his eyes and nodded. He knew what she was going to say. How could he not? Nevertheless, he dreaded hearing it.

Her voice shrank as well. “He had sympathy for the pukpuks. Not for the burning, but he used to say that we didn’t need to cover every last scrap of Walden with forest. He talked about respecting . . .”

Without warning, the nightmare leapt from some darkness in his soul like some ravening predator. It chased him through a stand of pine; trees exploded like firecrackers. Sparks bit through his civvies and stung him. He could smell burning hair. His hair.

But he didn’t want to smell his hair burning. Spur was trying desperately to get back to the bench in the garden, back to Comfort, but she kept pushing him deeper into the nightmare.

“After we heard he’d been killed, I went to his room . . .”

He beckoned and for a moment Spur thought it might not be Vic after all as the anguished face shimmered in the heat of the burn. Vic wouldn’t betray them, would he?

“It was his handwriting. . . .”

Spur had to dance to keep his shoes from catching fire, and he had no escape, no choice, no time. The torch spread his arms wide and Spur stumbled into his embrace and with an angry whoosh they exploded together into flame. Spur felt his skin crackle. . . .

And he screamed.

Twelve

We are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspected.—A Week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers

Everyone said that he had nothing to be embarrassed about, but Spur was nonetheless deeply ashamed. He had been revealed as unmanly. Weak and out of control. He had no memory of how he had come to be laid out on the couch in his own parlor. He couldn’t remember if he had wept or cursed or just fainted and been dragged like a sack of onions across the yard into the cottage. When he emerged from the nightmare, all he knew was that his throat was raw and his cheeks were hot. The others were all gathered around him, trying not to look worried but not doing a very convincing job of it. He wasn’t sure which he minded more: that the strangers had witnessed his breakdown, or that his friends and neighbors had.

When he sat up, a general alarm rippled among the onlookers. When he tried to stand, Sly pressed him back onto the couch with a firm grip on the shoulder. Comfort fetched him a glass of water. She was so distraught that her hand shook as she offered it to him. He took a sip, more to satisfy the others than to quench his own thirst. They needed to think they were helping, even though the best thing they could have done for him then—go away and leave him alone—was the one thing they were certain not to do.

“Maybe I should call Dr. Niss.” Spur’s laugh was as light as ashes. “Ask for my money back.”

“You’re right.” Constant Ngonda lit up at the thought, then realized that his enthusiasm was unseemly. “I mean, shouldn’t we notify the hospital?” he said, eyeing the tell on the parlor wall. “They may have concerns.”

Spur knew that the deputy would love to have him whisked away from Littleton, in the hopes that the High Gregory and the L’ung would follow. He wondered briefly if that might not be for the best, but then he had been humiliated enough that morning. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Good,” said Ngonda. “I’m happy to hear that, Spur. Do you mind, I promised to check in with the Cooperative when we arrived?” Without waiting for a reply, Ngonda bustled across the parlor to the kitchen. Meanwhile, the High Gregory had sprawled onto a chair, his legs dangling over the armrest. He was flipping impatiently through a back issue of Didactic Arts’ True History Comix without really looking at the pages. Spur thought he looked even more squirmy than usual, as if he knew there was someplace else he was supposed to be. Sly Sawatdee had parked himself next to Spur. His hands were folded in his lap, his eyelids were heavy and he hummed to himself from time to time, probably thinking about fishing holes and berry patches and molasses cookies.

“I am so sorry, Spur,” said Comfort. “I just didn’t realize.” It was the third time she had apologized. She wasn’t used to apologizing and she didn’t do it very well. Meanwhile her anguish was smothering him. Her face was pale, her mouth was as crooked as a scar. What had he said to her? He couldn’t remember but it must have been awful. There was a quiet desperation in her eyes that he had never seen before. It scared him.

Spur set the glass of water on the end table. “Listen, Comfort, there is nothing for you to be sorry about.” He was the one who had fallen apart, after all. “Let’s just forget it, all right? I’m fine now.” To prove it, he stood up.

Sly twitched but did not move to pull him back onto the couch again. “Have enough air up there, my hasty little sparrow?”

“I’m fine,” he repeated and it was true. Time to put this by and move on. Change the subject. “Who wants to see the orchard? Lucky?”

“If you don’t mind,” said Sly. “My bones are in no mood for a hike. But I’ll make us lunch.”

“I’ll come,” said Ngonda.

Comfort looked as if she wanted to beg off, but guilt got the better of her.

They tramped around the grounds, talking mostly of farm matters. After they had admired the revived orchard, inspected the weed-choked garden, toured the barn, played with the pack of gosdogs that had wandered over from the big house and began to follow them everywhere, walked the boundaries of the corn field which Cape had planted in clover until Spur was ready to farm again, they hiked through the woods down to Mercy’s Creek.

“We take some irrigation water from the creek, but the Joerlys own the rights, so there’s water in our end of the creek pretty much all year long.” Spur pointed. “There’s a pool in the woods where Comfort and I used to swim when we were kids. It might be a good place to cool off this afternoon.”

“And so you and Spur were neighbors?” The High Gregory had been trying to draw Comfort out all morning, without much success. “You grew up together like me and my friends. I was hoping to bring them along but Uncle Constant Ngonda said there were too many of them. Your family is still living on the farm?”

“Mom died. She left everything to us. Now Vic’s dead.”

“Yes, Spur said that your brother was a brave firefighter. I know that you are very sad about it, but I see much more luck ahead for you.”

She leaned against a tree and stared up at the sky.

“There used to be a pukpuk town in these woods.” Spur was itching to move on. “They built all along the creek. It’s overgrown now, but we could go look at the ruins.”

The High Gregory stepped off the bank onto a flat stone that stuck out of the creek. “And your father?”

“He left,” Comfort said dully.

“When they were little,” Spur said quickly. He knew that Comfort did not like even to think about her father, much less talk about him with strangers. Park Nen had married into the Joerly family. Not only was his marriage to Rosie Joerly stormy, but he was also a loner who had never quite adjusted to village ways. “The last we heard Park was living in Freeport.”

The High Gregory picked his way across the creek on steppingstones. “He was a pukpuk, no?” His foot slipped and he windmilled his arms to keep his balance.

“Who told you that?” If Comfort had been absent-minded before, she was very much present now.

“I forget.” He crossed back over the stream in four quick hops. “Was it you, Uncle?”

Ngonda licked his lips nervously. “I’ve never heard of this person.”

“Then maybe it was Spur.”

Spur would have denied it if Comfort had given him the chance.

“He never knew.” Her voice was sharp. “Nobody did.” She confronted the boy. “Don’t play games with me, upsider.” He tried to back away but she pursued him. “Why do you care about my father? Why are you here?”

“Are you crazy?” Ngonda caught the High Gregory as he stumbled over a rock and then thrust the boy behind him. “This is my nephew Lucky.”

“She knows, friend Constant.” The High Gregory peeked out from behind the deputy’s flair jacket. He was glowing with excitement. “Spur told her everything.”

“Oh, no.” Ngonda slumped. “This isn’t going well at all.”

“Memsen gave us all research topics for the trip here to meet Spur,” said the High Gregory. “Kai Thousandfold was assigned to find out about you. You’d like him; he’s from Bellweather. He says that he’s very worried about you, friend Comfort.”

“Tell him to mind his own business.”

Spur was aghast. “Comfort, I’m sorry, I didn’t know. . . .”

“Be quiet, Spur. These upsiders are playing you for the fool that you are.” Her eyes were wet. “I hardly knew my father and what I did know, I didn’t like. Mom would probably still be alive if she hadn’t been left to manage the farm by herself all those years.” Her chin quivered; Spur had never seen her so agitated. “She told us that Grandma Nen was a pukpuk, but that she emigrated from the barrens long before my father was born and that he was brought up a citizen like anyone else.” Tears streaked her face. “So don’t think you understand anything about me because you found out about a dead woman who I never met.”

With that she turned and walked stiff-legged back toward Diligence Cottage. She seemed to have shrunk since the morning, and now looked so insubstantial to Spur that a summer breeze might carry her off like milkweed. He knew there was more—much more—they had to talk about, but first they would have to find a new way to speak to each other. As she disappeared into the woods, he felt a twinge of nostalgia for the lost simplicity of their youth, when life really had been as easy as Chairman Winter promised it could be.

“I’m hungry.” The High Gregory seemed quite pleased with himself. “Is it lunchtime yet?”

After he had spun out lunch for as long as he could, Spur was at a loss as to how to keep the High Gregory out of trouble. They had exhausted the sights of the Leung farmstead, short of going over to visit with his father in the big house. Spur considered it, but decided to save it for a last resort. He had hoped to spend the afternoon touring the Joerly farmstead, but now that was out of the question. As the High Gregory fidgeted about the cottage, picking things up and putting them down again, asking about family pix, opening cabinets and pulling out drawers, Spur proposed that they take a spin around Littleton in Sly’s truck. A rolling tour, he told himself. No stops.

The strategy worked for most of an hour. At first the High Gregory was content to sit next to Spur in the back of the truck as he pointed out Littleton’s landmarks and described the history of the village. They drove up Lamana Ridge Road to Lookover Point, from which they had a view of most of Littleton Commons. The village had been a Third Wave settlement, populated by the winners of the lottery of 2432. In the first years of settlement, the twenty-five founding families had worked together to construct the buildings of the Commons: the self-reliance school, athenaeum, communion lodge, town hall and Littleton’s first exchange, where goods and services could be bought or bartered. The First Twenty-five had lived communally in rough barracks until the buildings on the Commons were completed, and then gradually moved out to their farmsteads as land was cleared and crews of carpenters put up the cottages and barns and sheds for each of the families. The Leungs had arrived in the Second Twenty-five four years afterward. The railroad had come through three years after that and most of the businesses of the first exchange moved from the Commons out to Shed Town by the train station. Sly drove them down the ridge and they bumped along back roads, past farms and fields and pastures. They viewed the Toba and Parochet and Velez farmsteads from a safe distance and passed Sambusa’s lumberyard at the confluence of Mercy’s Creek and the Swift River. Then they pulled back onto CR22.

The only way back to Diligence Cottage was through the Commons. “Drive by the barracks,” Spur called to Sly in the cab. “We can stretch our legs there,” he said to the High Gregory. “I’ll show you how the First Twenty-five lived.” One of the original barracks had been preserved as a historical museum across the lawn from the communion lodge. It was left open to any who wanted to view its dusty exhibits. Spur thought it the best possible choice for a stop; except for Founders’ Day, the Chairman’s birthday and Thanksgiving, nobody ever went there.

The Commons appeared to be deserted as they passed the buildings of the first exchange. These had been renovated into housing for those citizens of Littleton who didn’t farm, like the teachers at the self-reliance school and Dr. Christopoulos and some of the elders, like Gandy Joy. They saw Doll Groth coming out of the athenaeum. Recognizing the truck, she gave Sly a neighborly wave, but when she spotted Spur in the back, she smiled and began to clap, raising her hands over her head. This so pleased the High Gregory that he stood up and started clapping back at her. Spur had to brace him to keep him from pitching over the side of the truck.

But Doll was the only person they saw. Spur couldn’t believe his good fortune as they pulled up to the barracks, dust from the gravel parking lot swirling around them. The wind had picked up, but provided no relief from the midsummer heat. Spur’s shirt stuck to his back where he had been leaning against the cab of the truck. Although he wasn’t sure whether the High Gregory could sweat or not, the boy’s face was certainly flushed. Ngonda looked as if he were liquefying inside his flair jacket. The weather fit Spur’s latest plan neatly. He was hoping that after they had spent a half-hour in the hot and airless barracks, he might be able to persuade the High Gregory to return to Diligence Cottage for a swim in the creek. After that it would practically be suppertime. And after that they could watch the tell. Or he might teach the High Gregory some of the local card games. Spur had always been lucky at Fool All.

It wasn’t until the engine of the Sawatdees’ truck coughed and rattled and finally cut out that Spur first heard the whoop of the crowd. Something was going on at the ball fields next to the self-reliance school, just down the hill a couple hundred meters. He tried to usher the High Gregory into the barracks but it was too late. Spur thought there must be a lot of people down there. They were making a racket that was hard to miss.

The High Gregory cocked his head in the direction of the school and smiled. “Lucky us,” he said. “We’re just in time for Memsen.”

Thirteen

I associate this day, when I can remember it, with games of baseball played over behind the hills in the russet fields toward Sleepy Hollow.—Journal, 1856

“What is this?” hissed Ngonda.

Sly pulled his floppy hat off and wiped his forehead with it. “Looks like a baseball game, city pants,” said Sly.

The L’ung were in the field; with a sick feeling Spur counted twelve of them in purple overalls and black t-shirts. They must have arrived in the two vans that were parked next to the wooden bleachers. Beside the vans was an array of trucks, scooters and bicycles from the village. There must have been a hundred citizens sitting in the bleachers and another twenty or thirty prowling the edges of the field, cheering the home team on. Match Klizzie had opened the refreshment shed and was barbequing sausages. Gandy Joy had set up her communion tent: Spur could see billows of sweet white smoke whenever one of the villagers pulled back the flap.

With many of the younger baseball regulars off at the firefight, the Littleton Eagles might have been undermanned. But Spur could see that some old-timers had come out of retirement to pull on the scarlet hose. Warp Kovacho was just stepping up to home base and Spur spotted Cape sitting on the strikers’ bench, second from the inbox.

Betty Chief Twosalt shined the ball against her overalls as she peered in at Warp. “Where to, old sir?” She was playing feeder for the L’ung.

Warp swung the flat bat at belt level to show her just where he wanted the feed to cross home base. “Right here, missy,” he said. “Then you better duck.” They were playing with just two field bases, left and right. The banners fixed to the top of each basepole snapped in the stiffening breeze.

Betty nodded and then delivered the feed underhanded. It was slow and very fat but Warp watched it go by. The Pendragon Chromlis Furcifer was catching for the L’ung. She barehanded it and flipped it back to Betty.

“What’s he waiting for?” grumbled the High Gregory. “That was perfect.” He ignored Spur’s icy stare.

“Just a smight lower next time, missy,” said Warp, once again indicating his preference with the bat. “You got the speed right, now hit the spot.”

Young Melody Velez was perched at the end of the topmost bleacher and noticed Spur passing beneath her. “He’s here!” she cried. “Spur’s here!”

Play stopped and the bleachers emptied as the villagers crowded around him, clapping him on the back and shaking his hand. In five minutes he’d been kissed more than he’d been kissed altogether in the previous year.

“So is this another one of your upsider friends?” Gandy Joy held the High Gregory at arms length, taking him in. “Hello, boy. What’s your name?”

“I’m the High Gregory of Kenning,” he said. “But my Walden name is Lucky, so I’d rather have you call me that.”

Citizens nearby laughed nervously.

“Lucky you are then.”

Gandy Hope Nakuru touched the pink bandana knotted around his neck. “Isn’t this a cute scarf?” The High Gregory beamed.

Spur was astonished by it all. “But who told you that they’re from the upside?” he said. “How did they get here? And why are you playing baseball?”

“Memsen brought them,” said Peace Toba. “She said that you’d be along once we got the game going.”

“And she was right.” Little Jewel Parochet tugged at his shirt. “Spur, she said you flew in a hover. What was it like?”

“Maybe next time you can bring a guest along with you?” Melody Velez said, smiling. She brushed with no great subtlety against him.

Spur glanced about the thinning crowd; citizens were climbing back into the bleachers. “But where is Memsen?”

Peace Toba pointed; Memsen had only come out onto the field as far as right base when Constant Ngonda had captured her. He was waving his arms so frantically that he looked like he might take off and fly around the field. Memsen tilted her head so that her ear was practically on her shoulder. Then she saw Spur. She clicked her rings at him, a sly smile on her face. He knew he ought to be angry with her, but instead he felt buoyant, as if he had just set his splash pack down and stepped out of his field jacket. Whatever happened now, it wasn’t his fault. He had done his best for his village.

“So this was what you were keeping from me.” His father was chuckling. “I knew it had to be something. They’re fine, your friends. You didn’t need to worry.” He hugged Spur and whispered into his ear. “Fine, but very strange. They’re not staying are they?” He pulled back. “Prosper, we need your bat in this game. These kids are tough.” He pointed at Kai Thousandfold “That one has an arm like a fire hose.”

“No thanks,” said Spur. “But you should get back to the game.” He raised his arms over his head and waved to the bleachers. “Thank you all, thanks,” he called to his well-wishers. They quieted down to listen. “If you’re expecting some kind of speech, then you’ve got the wrong farmer. I’ll just say that I’m glad to be home and leave it at that. All right?” The crowd made a murmur of assent. “Then play ball.” They cheered. “And go Eagles!” They cheered louder.

“Can I play?” said the High Gregory. “This looks like fun.” He straightened the strap of his overalls. “I can play, can’t I? We have all kinds of baseball on Kenning. But your rules are different, right? Tell them to me.”

“Why bother?” Spur was beginning to wonder if the High Gregory was playing him for a fool. “Looks like you’re making them up as you go.”

Her Grace, Jacqueline Kristof, put an arm around his shoulder. “The ball is soft, so no gloves,” she said, as she led him onto the field. “No tag outs either, you actually have to hit the runner with the ball. That’s called a sting. No fouls and no . . .”

As the spectators settled into their seats, Spur found his way to Ngonda and Memsen. She wasn’t wearing the standard L’ung overalls, but rather a plain green sundress with a floral print. She had washed the phosphorescent paint off her arms and pulled her hair back into a ponytail. But if Memsen was trying to look inconspicuous, then she had failed utterly. She was still the tallest woman on the planet.

“Talk to her,” said Ngonda. “We had an agreement. . . .”

“Which you broke,” said Memsen. “What we agreed was that the High Gregory would visit Littleton and you’d let him make whatever luck you are destined to have. You promised to give him the run of the village—”

“—under Spur’s supervision, Allworthy,” interrupted Ngonda.

Betty Chief Twosalt delivered a feed and Warp watched it go by again. This did not sit well with the L’ung. “Delay of game, old sir,” someone called.

Memsen turned from Ngonda to Spur. “As we were explaining to the deputy, the L’ung and I see everything that the High Gregory sees. So we know that you’ve introduced him to just two of your neighbors. You promised that he could meet the citizens of this village but then you’ve kept him isolated until now. He needs to be with people, Spur. Barns don’t have luck. People do.”

“It was my decision,” said Spur. “I’ll take the responsibility.”

“And this was ours.” She waved toward the field. “So?”

Ngonda snorted in disgust. “I need to call Concord. The Office of Diplomacy will be filing a protest with the Forum of the Thousand Worlds.” He took a step away from them, then turned and waggled a finger at Memsen. “This is a clear violation of our Covenant, Allworthy. The L’ung will be recalled to Kenning.”

As they watched Ngonda stalk off, Warp struck a grounder straight back at the feeder. Betty stabbed at it but it tipped off her fingers and rolled away at an angle. Little Senator Dowm pounced on it but held the throw because Warp already had a hand on the right base stake.

“Maybe I should’ve introduced the High Gregory to a few more people.” Spur wondered if standing too close to Memsen might be affecting his perceptions. The very planet seemed to tilt slightly, as it had that afternoon when he and Leaf Benkleman had drunk a whole liter of her mother’s prize applejack. “But why are we playing baseball?”

Memsen showed him her teeth in that way she had that wasn’t anything like a smile. “Tolerance isn’t something that the citizens of the Transcendent State seem to value. You’ve been taught that your way of life is better not only than that of the pukpuks, but than that of most of the cultures of the Thousand Worlds. Or have we misread the textbooks?”

Spur shook his head grimly.

“So.” She pinched the air. “Deputy Ngonda was right to point out that landing a hover on your Commons might have intimidated some people. We had to find some unthreatening way to arrive, justify our presence and meet your neighbors. The research pointed to baseball as a likely ploy. Your Eagles were champions of Hamilton County just two years ago and second runner-up in the Northeast in 2498.”

“A ploy.”

“A ploy to take advantage of your traditions. Your village is proud of its accomplishments in baseball. You’re used to playing against strangers. And of course, we had an invitation from Spur Leung, the hero of the hour.”

Livy Jayawardena hit a high fly ball that sailed over the heads of the midfielders. Kai Thousandfold, playing deep field, raced back and made an over-the-shoulder catch. Meanwhile Warp had taken off for left base. In his prime, he might have made it, but his prime had been when Spur was a toddler. Kai turned, set and fired; his perfect throw stung Warp right between the shoulder blades. Double play, inning over.

“I invited you?” said Spur. “When was that again?”

“Why, in the hospital where we saved your life. You kept claiming that the L’ung would offer no competition for your Eagles. You told Dr. Niss that you couldn’t imagine losing a baseball game to upsiders, much less a bunch of children. Really, Spur, that was too much. We had to accept your challenge once you said that. So when we arrived at the town hall, we told our story to everyone we met. Within an hour the bleachers were full.”

Spur was impressed. “And you thought of all this since yesterday?”

“Actually, just in the last few hours.” She paused then, seemingly distracted. She made a low, repetitive pa-pa-pa-ptt. “Although there is something you should know about us,” she said at last. “Of course, Deputy Ngonda would be outraged if he knew that we’re telling you, but then he finds outrage everywhere.” She stooped to his level so that they were face to face. “I rarely think all by myself, Spur.” He tried not to notice that her knees bent in different directions. “Most of the time, we think for me.”

The world seemed to tilt a little more then; Spur felt as if he might slide off it. “I don’t think I understand what you just said.”

“It’s complicated.” She straightened. “And we’re attracting attention here. I can hear several young women whispering about us. We should find a more private place to talk. I need your advice.” She turned and waved to the citizens in the bleachers who were watching them. Spur forced a smile and waved as well, and then led her up the hill toward town hall.

“Ngonda will file his protest,” she said, “and it’ll be summarily rejected. We’ve been in continuous contact with the Forum of the Thousand Worlds.” Her speech became choppy as she walked. “They know what we’re doing.” Climbing the gentle hill left her breathless. “Not all worlds approve. Consensus is hard to come by. But the L’ung have a plan . . . to open talks between you . . . and the pukpuks.” She rested a hand on his shoulder to support herself. “Is that something you think worth doing?”

“Maybe.” He could feel the warmth of her hand through the thin fabric of his shirt. “All right, yes.” He thought this must be another ploy. “But who are you? Who are the L’ung? Why are you doing this?”

“Be patient.” At the top of the hill she had to rest to catch her breath. Finally she said, “You spoke with the High Gregory about gosdogs?”

“In the truck this morning.”

“It was at the instigation of the L’ung. Understand that we don’t believe that gosdogs think in any meaningful sense of the word. Perhaps the original Peekay intelligence rating was accurate. But if they were found to be more intelligent, then we could bring the issue of their treatment here to the Forum. It would require a delicate touch to steer the debate toward the remedy the L’ung want. Tricky but not impossible. The Forum has no real power to intervene in the affairs of member worlds and your Chairman Winter has the right to run Walden as he pleases. But he depends on the good opinion of the Thousand Worlds. When we’re finished here, the L’ung will propose to return the gosdogs to a preserve where they can live in their natural state.”

“But there is no natural habitat left. The pukpuks destroyed it.”

“Ah, but ecologies can be recreated.” She gestured at the lawn stretching before them, at the rose hedges along its border and the trees that shaded it, their leaves trembling in the summer breeze. “As you well know.”

“But what does a gosdog preserve have to do with the pukpuks?”

“Come away from the sun before we melt.” Memsen led him to a bench in the shadow of an elm. She sagged onto it; Spur remained standing, looking down at her for a change. It eased the crick in his neck.

“The preserve sets a precedent.” She clicked her rings. “In order for it to be established, the growth of the forest must be controlled, which means the Transcendent State will be blocked from spreading across Walden. Up until now, the Cooperative has refused to negotiate on this point. And then comes the question of where to put the preserve. You and the pukpuks will have to sit down to decide on a site. Together. With some delicate nudging from the Forum, there’s no telling what conversations might take place at such a meeting.”

“But we can’t!” Spur wiped the sweat from his forehead. “The Transcendent State was founded so that humans could live apart and stay true to ourselves. As long as the pukpuks live here, we’ll be under direct attack from upsider ways.”

“Your Transcendent State is a controversial experiment.” Memsen’s face went slack and she made the pa-pa-pa-ptt sound Spur had heard before. “We’ve always wondered how isolation and ignorance can be suitable foundations for a human society. Do you really believe in simplicity, Spur, or do you just not know any better?”

Spur wondered if she had used some forbidden upsider tech to look into his soul; he felt violated. “I believe in this.” He gestured, as she had done, at Littleton Commons, green as a dream. “I don’t want my village to be swept away. The pukpuks destroyed this world once already.”

“Yes, that could happen, if it’s what you and your children decide,” said Memsen. “We don’t have an answer for you, Spur. But the question is, do you need a preserve like gosdogs, or are you strong enough to hold onto your beliefs no matter who challenges them?”

“And this is your plan to save Walden?” He ground his shoe into the grass. “This is the luck that the High Gregory came all this way to make?”

“Is it?” She leaned back against the bench and gazed up into the canopy of the elm. “Maybe it is.”

“I’ve been such an idiot.” He was bitter; if she was going to use him, at least she could admit it. “You and the High Gregory and the L’ung flit around the upside, having grand adventures and straightening up other people’s messes.” He began to pace back and forth in front of the bench. “You’re like some kind of superheroes, is that it?”

“The L’ung have gathered together to learn statecraft from one another,” she said patiently. “Sometimes they travel, but mostly they stay with us on Kenning. Of course they have political power in the Forum because of who they are, but their purpose is not so much to do as it is to learn. Then, in a few more years, this cohort will disband and scatter to their respective worlds to try their luck. And when the time comes for us to marry. . . .”

“Marry? Marry who?”

“The High Gregory, of course.”

“But he’s just a boy.”

Memsen must have heard the dismay in his voice. “He will grow into his own luck soon enough,” she said coldly. “I was chosen the twenty-second Memsen by my predecessor. She searched for me for years across the Thousand Worlds.” With a weary groan she stood, and once again towered over him. “A Memsen is twice honored: to be wife to one High Gregory and mother to another.” Her voice took on a declaiming quality, as if she were giving a speech that had been well rehearsed. “And I carry my predecessor and twenty souls who came before her saved in our memory, so that we may always serve the High Gregory and advise the L’ung.”

Spur was horrified at the depth of his misunderstanding of this woman. “You have dead people . . . inside you?”

“Not dead,” she said. “Saved.”

A crazed honking interrupted them. A truck careened around the corner and skidded to a stop in front of the town hall. Stark Sukulgunda flung himself out of the still-running truck and dashed inside.

Spur stood. “Something’s wrong.” He started for the truck and had gotten as far as the statue of Chairman Winter, high on his pedestal, when Stark burst out of the doors again. He saw Spur and waved frantically.

“Where are they all?” he cried. “Nobody answers.”

“Playing baseball.” Spur broke into a trot. “What’s wrong? What?”

“Baseball?” Stark’s eyes bulged as he tried to catch his breath. “South slope of Lamana . . . burning . . . everything’s burning . . . the forest is on fire!”

Fourteen

I walked slowly through the wood to Fairhaven cliff, climbed to the highest rock and sat down upon it to observe the progress of the flames, which were rapidly approaching me now about a mile distant from the spot where the fire was kindled. Presently I heard the sound of the distant Bell giving the alarm, and I knew that the town was on its way to the scene. Hitherto I felt like a guilty person. Nothing but shame and regret, but now I settled the matter with my self shortly, and said to myself. Who are these men who are said to be owners of these woods and how am I related to them? I have set fire to the forest, but I have done no wrong therein, and now it is as if the lightning had done it. These flames are but consuming their natural food. So shortly I settled it with myself and stood to watch the approaching flames. It was a glorious spectacle, and I was the only one there to enjoy it. The fire now reached the base of the cliffs and then rushed up its sides. The squirrels ran before it in blind haste, and the pigeons dashed into the midst of the smoke. The flames flashed up the pines to their tops as if they were powder.—Journal, 1850

More than half of the Littleton Volunteer Fire Department were playing baseball when the alarm came. They scrambled up the hill to the brick firehouse on the Commons, followed by almost all of the spectators, who crowded anxiously into the communion hall while the firefighters huddled. Normally there would have been sixteen volunteers on call, but, like Spur, Will Sambusa, Bright Ayoub, Bliss Bandaran and Chief Cary Millisap had joined the Corps. Cape was currently Assistant Chief; he would have led the volunteers had not his son been home. Even though Spur protested that he was merely a grunt smokechaser, the volunteers’ first act was to vote him Acting Chief.

Like any small-town unit, the Littleton Fire Department routinely answered calls for house fires and brush fires and accidents of all sorts, but they were ill-equipped to stop a major burn. They had just one fire truck, an old quad with a 3,000-liter-per-minute pump and 5,000-liter water tank. It carried fifty meters of six-centimeter hose, fifty meters of booster hose, and a ten-meter mechanical ladder. If the burn was as big as Stark described, Engine No. 4 would be about as much use fighting it as a broom.

Spur resisted the impulse to put his team on the truck and rush out to the burn. He needed more information before he committed his meager forces. It would be at least an hour before companies from neighboring villages would arrive and the Corps might not get to Littleton until nightfall. Cape spread a map out on the long table in the firehouse and the volunteers stood around it, hunch-shouldered and grim. Gandy Joy glided in, lit a single communion square and slipped out again as they contemplated what the burn might do to their village. They took turns peppering Stark with questions about what he had actually seen. At first he tried his best to answer, but he’d had a shock that had knocked better men than him off center. As they pressed him, he grew sullen and suspicious.

The Sukulgundas lived well west of the Leungs and higher up the slope of Lamana Ridge. They’d been latecomers to Littleton and parts of their farmstead were so steep that the fields had to be terraced. They were about four kilometers north of the Commons at the very end of January Road, a steep dirt track with switchbacks. Stark maintained that the burn had come down the ridge at him, from the general direction of Lookover Point to the east. At first he claimed it was maybe a kilometer away when he’d left his place, but then changed his mind and insisted that the burn was practically eating his barn. That didn’t make sense, since the strong easterly breeze would push the burn in the opposite direction, toward the farmsteads of the Ezzats and Millisaps and eventually to the Herreras and the Leungs.

Spur shivered as he imagined the burn roaring through GiGa’s orchards. But his neighbors were counting on him to keep those fears at bay. “If what you’re saying is true,” he mused, “it might mean that this fire was deliberately set and that someone is still out there trying to make trouble for us.”

“Torches in Littleton?” Livy Jayawardena looked dubious. “We’re nowhere near the barrens.”

“Neither was Double Down,” said Cape. “Or Wheelwright.”

“I don’t know about that.” Stark Sukulgunda pulled the cap off his head and started twisting it. “All I know is that we ought to stop talking about what to do and do something.”

“First we have to know for sure where the burn is headed, which means we need to get up the Lamana Ridge Road.” Spur was struggling to apply what he’d learned in training. “If the burn hasn’t jumped the road and headed back down the north slope of the ridge, then we can use the road as a firebreak and hold that line. And when reinforcements come, we’ll send them east over the ridge to the head of the burn. That’s the way the wind is blowing everything.” He glanced up at the others to see if they agreed. “We need to be thinking hard about an eastern perimeter.”

“Why?” Stark was livid. “Because that’s where you live? It’s my house that—”

“Shut up, Stark,” said Peace Toba. “Fill your snoot with communion and get right with the village for a change.”

None of the threatened farmsteads that lay in the path of the burn to the east was completely cleared of trees. Simplicity demanded that citizens only cultivate as much of their land as they needed. Farmers across Walden used the forest as a windbreak; keeping unused land in trees prevented soil erosion. But now Spur was thinking about all the pine and hemlock and red cedar, needles laden with resins and oils, side by side with the deciduous trees in the woods where he had played as a boy. At Motu River he’d seen pine trees explode into flame. And then there were the burn piles of slash and stumps and old lumber that every farmer collected, baking in the summer sun.

“If things go wrong in the east, we might need to set our firebreak as far back as Blue Valley Road.” Spur ran his finger down the line on the map. “It won’t be as effective a break as the ridge road but we can improve it. Get the Bandarans and Sawatdees to rake off all the forest litter and duff on the west side. Then disk harrow the entire road. I want to see at least a three-meter-wide strip of fresh soil down the entire length.”

“Prosper.” Cape’s voice was hushed. “You’re not giving up on all of this.” He traced the outline of the four threatened farms on the map, ending on the black square that marked Diligence Cottage.

Spur glanced briefly at his father, then away again, troubled by what he had seen. Capability Leung looked just as desperate as Stark Sukulgunda. Maybe more so, if he thought he had just heard his son pronounce doom on his life’s work. For the first time in his life, Spur felt as if he were the father and Cape was the son.

“No.” He tried to reassure his father with a smile. “That’s just our fall back. What I’m hoping is that we can cut a handline from Spot Pond along Mercy’s Creek all the way down to the river. It’s rough country and depending on how fast the burn is moving we may not have enough time, but if we can hold that line, we save the Millisaps, Joerlys and us.” Left unsaid was that the Ezzats’ farmstead would be lost, even if this dicey strategy worked.

“But right now the fire is much closer to my place than anyone else’s,” said Stark. “And you said yourself, there maybe some suicidal maniac just waiting to burn himself up and take my house with him.”

Spur was annoyed at the way that Stark Sukulgunda kept buzzing at him. He was making it hard for Spur to concentrate. “We could send the fire truck your way, Stark,” he said, “but I don’t know what good it would do. You don’t have any standing water on your land, do you?”

“Why?”

“The truck only has a 5,000-liter water tank. That’s not near enough if your house gets involved.”

“We could drop the hard suction line into his well,” said Livy. “Pump from there.”

“You have a dug well?” said Cape. “How deep?”

“Four meters.”

“We’d probably suck it dry before we could do you much good,” said Cape.

“No,” said Spur. “He’s right. Peace, you and Tenny and Cert take No. 4 up to Sukulgundas. You can also establish our western perimeter. Clear a meter-wide handline as far up the ridge as you can. Watch for torches. I don’t think the fire is going to come your way but if it does, be ready, understand? Get on the tell and let us know if anything changes.”

“We’ll call in when we get there,” said Peace as her team scattered to collect gear.

“Livy, you and the others round up as many as you can to help with the creek line. We may want to start a backfire, so keep in touch with me on the hand-tell. How much liquid fire have you got?”

“At least twenty grenades. Maybe more. No firebombs though.”

“Bring gas then, you’ll probably need it. Keep your people between the civilians and the burn, understand? And pull back if it gets too hot. I’ve lost too many friends this year. I don’t want to be burying anyone else. DiDa, you and I need to find a way to get up the ridge . . .”

He was interrupted by the roar of a crowd, which had gathered just outside the firehouse. Spur froze, momentarily bewildered. They couldn’t still be playing baseball, could they? Then he thought that the burn must have changed direction. It had careened down the ridge faster than it had any right to, an avalanche of fire that was about to incinerate the Commons and there was nothing he could do to fight it; in the nightmare, he wasn’t wearing his splash pack. Or his fireproof field jacket. Spur shuddered. He wasn’t fit to lead, to decide what to let burn and what to save. He was weak and his soul was lost in darkness and he knew he shouldn’t be afraid. He was a veteran of the firefight, but fear squeezed him nonetheless. “Are you all right, son?” His father rested a hand on his shoulder. The burn licked at boulders and scorched the trees in the forest he had sworn to protect.

“DiDa,” he whispered, leaning close to his father so no one else would hear, “what if I can’t stop it?”

“You’ll do your best, Prosper,” he said. “Everyone knows that.”

As they rushed out of the firehouse, they could see smoke roiling into the sky to the northwest. But the evil plume wasn’t what had stunned the crowd, which was still pouring out of the communion hall. A shadow passed directly overhead and, even in the heat of this disastrous afternoon, Spur was chilled.

Silently, like a miracle, the High Gregory’s hover landed on Littleton Commons.

Fifteen

Men go to afire for entertainment. When I see how eagerly men will run to afire, whether in warm or cold weather, by night or by day, dragging an engine at their heels, I’m astonished to perceive how good a purpose the level of excitement is made to serve.—Journal, 1850

“There’s a big difference between surface fire and crown fire,” said the Pendragon Chromlis Furcifer to the L’ung assembled in the belly of the hover. “Surface fires move along the forest floor, burning through the understory.” She was reading from notes that scrolled down her forearm.

“Wait, what’s understory again?” asked Her Grace, Jacqueline Kristof, who was the youngest of the L’ung.

Memsen pinched the air. “You mustn’t keep interrupting, Your Grace. If you have questions, query the cognisphere in slow time.” She nodded at Penny. “Go ahead, Pendragon. You’re doing a fine job.”

“Understory is the grass, shrubs, dead leaves, fallen trees—that stuff. So anyway, a surface fire can burn fast or slow, depending. But if the flames climb into the crowns of the trees, it almost always rips right through the forest. Since the Transcendental State doesn’t have the tech to stop it, Spur will have to let it burn itself out. If you look over there. . . .” The group closed around her, craning to see.

Spur had been able to ignore Penny for the most part, although Cape kept scowling at the L’ung. Memsen had explained that Penny’s research topic for the trip to Walden was forest fires.

The hover was not completely proof against smoke. As they skirted the roiling convection column of smoke and burning embers, the air inside the hover became tinged with the bitter stench of the burn. This impressed the L’ung. As they wandered from view to view, they would call to one another. “Here, over here. Do you smell it now? Much stronger over here!”

They had dissolved the partitions and made most of the hull transparent to observe developments in the burn. Just a single three-meter-wide band ran solid from the front of the deck to the back as a concession to Spur and Cape; the L’ung seemed totally immune from fear of heights. Spur was proud at how Cape was handling his first flight in a hover, especially since he himself felt slightly queasy whenever he looked straight down through the deck at the ridge 1,500 meters below.

From this vantage, Spur could see exactly what was needed to contain the burn and realized that he didn’t have the resources to do it. Looking to the north, he was relieved that the burn hadn’t yet crossed Lamana Ridge Road into the wilderness on the far slope. Barring an unforeseen wind change or embers lighting new spot fires, he thought he might be able to keep the burn within the Littleton valley. But he needed dozens of trained firefighters up on the ridge to defend the road as soon as possible. To the west, he saw where the flames had come close to the Sukulgundas’ farmstead, but now the burn there looked to be nothing more than a surface fire that was already beginning to gutter out. Peace and the team with Engine No. 4 should have no trouble mopping up. Then he’d move them onto the ridge, not that just three people and one ancient pumper were going to be enough to beat back a wall of flame two kilometers wide.

“Where you see the darker splotches in the forest, those are evergreens, the best fuel of all,” said Penny. “If they catch, you can get a blowup fire, which is what that huge column of smoke is about.”

To the east and south, the prospects were grim. The burn had dropped much farther down the ridge than Spur had expected. He remembered from his training that burns were supposed to track uphill faster than down, but the spread to the north and south, upslope and down, looked about the same. As soon as the first crews responded from nearby Bode Well and Highbridge, they’d have to deploy at the base of the ridge to protect the Commons and the farmsteads beyond it.

The head of the burn was a violent crown fire racing east, beneath a chimney of malign smoke that towered kilometers above the hover. When Spur had given the Ezzats and Millisaps permission to save as much as they could from their houses, he’d thought that they’d all have more time. Now he realized that he’d miscalculated. He reached both families using the hand-tell and told them to leave immediately. Bash Ezzat was weeping when she said she could already see the burn sweeping down on her. Spur tried Comfort’s tell again to let her know that her farmstead was directly in the path of the burn, but still got no answer.

“DiDa,” said Spur gently. He’d been dreading this moment, ever since he’d understood the true scope and direction of the burn. “I think we need to pull Livy and her people back from the creek to Blue Valley Road.” He steeled himself against anger, grief and reproach. “There’s no time to clear a line,” he went on. “At least not one that will stop this burn.”

“I think you’re right,” Cape said, as casually as if they were discussing which trees to prune. “It’s simple, isn’t it?”

Relieved but still anguished, he hugged his father. “I’m sorry, DiDa.” He couldn’t remember the last time they had been this close, and was not surprised that Cape did not return his embrace. “Should we send someone to the house?” he said, as he let his father go. “Have them pack some things? Papers, furniture—there’s still a little time.”

“No.” Cape turned and cupped his hands against the transparent hull of the hover. “If I did something silly like that, the farm would burn for sure.” He lowered his face into his hands as if to shade the view from glare. But the afternoon sun was a dim memory, blotted out by the seething clouds of smoke.

Spur shut his eyes then, so tight that for a moment he could feel muscles on his temple quiver. “Memsen,” he said, his voice catching in his throat, “can you put us down by the Sawatdees’ house?”

Spur got more resistance from Livy than he had from his father. It took him almost ten minutes to convince her that trying to dig a firebreak along Mercy’s Creek was not only futile but also dangerous. When it was over, he felt drained. As he flopped beside Cape onto one of the chairs that Memsen had caused to flow from the deck of the hover, the hand-tell squawked. He groaned, anticipating that Livy was back with a new argument.

“Prosper Leung?” said a woman’s voice.

“Speaking.”

“I’m Commander Do Adoula, Fourth Engineers. My squad was on CR in Longwalk but we heard you have a situation there and we’re on our way. We can be in Littleton in half an hour. I understand you’re in a hover. What do you see?”

The handover of command was subtle but swift. Commander Adoula started by asking questions and ended by giving orders. She was coming in four light trucks with thirty-seven firefighters but no heavy equipment. She approved of Spur’s decision to stop the burn at Blue Valley Road, and split her force in two while they were speaking, diverting half to the ridge and half to help Livy on Blue Valley. She directed the local firefighters from Bode Well and Highbridge to dig in on the south to protect the Commons and requested that Spur stay in the hover and be her eyes in the sky.

When they finished talking, Spur slumped back against his chair. He was pleased that Adoula had ratified his firefighting plans, relieved to be no longer in charge.

“The Corps?” said Cape.

“Fourth Engineers.” He folded the hand-tell. “They were on CR in Longwalk.”

“That was lucky.”

“Lucky,” he agreed. He spotted the High Gregory whispering to Memsen. “How are you doing, DiDa?”

“You know, I’ve never visited the ocean.” Cape blinked as he stared through the hull at the forest below. “Your mother wanted me to take her there, did I ever tell you that?”

“No.”

“She always used to ask if we owned the farm or if the farm owned us.” He made a low sound, part sigh and part whistle. “I wonder if she’s still in Providence.”

Spur didn’t know what to say.

Cape frowned. “You haven’t been in contact with her?”

“No.”

“If you ever do speak to her, would you tell me?”

“Sure.”

He nodded and made the whistling sound again.

“A burn this big is different from a surface fire,” said Penny. “It’s so hot that it makes a kind of fire weather called a convection column. Inside the column, bubbles of superheated air are surging up, only we can’t see that. But on the outside, the cooler smoky edges are pouring back toward the ground.”

“Yes, yes.” The High Gregory pointed, clearly excited. “Watch at the top, to the left of the plume. It’s like it’s turning itself inside out.”

“Awesome,” said Kai Thousandfold. “Do you remember those gas sculptures we played with on Blimminey?”

“But that’s going to be a problem for Spur and his firefighters,” said Penny. “It’s like a chimney shooting sparks and embers high into the atmosphere. They might come down anywhere and start new fires.”

“Is anyone going to die?” said Senator Dowm.

“We hope not,” Memsen said. “Spur is doing his best and help is on the way.”

“Don’t you wish she’d shut up?” muttered Cape, leaning into Spur. “This isn’t some silly class. They’re watching our life burn down.”

“They’re from the upside, DiDa. We can’t judge them.”

“And how does she know so much about how we fight fires? Look at her, she’s just a kid.”

That had been bothering Spur too, and it was getting harder and harder to put out of his mind. When had the L’ung had time to do all this research? They had arrived the day after he had first spoken to the High Gregory. Had they known ahead of time that they were coming to Walden? Was all this part of the plan?

“Memsen says they’re special,” he said.

“Spur.” The High Gregory signed for him to come over. “Come take a look at this.”

He crossed the deck to where the L’ung were gathered. The hover had descended to a thousand meters and was cruising over the Joerly farmstead.

“There,” said the High Gregory, pointing to the woods they had tramped through that morning, a mix of hard and softwoods: birch and oak, hemlock and pine. In the midst of it, three tendrils of gray smoke were climbing into the sky.

“Those are spot fires,” said Penny. “Caused by falling embers.”

Spur didn’t believe it. He’d been worried about spotting all along and had swung from side to side in the hover looking for them. But he’d decided that not enough time had passed for embers from the burn to start raining down on them. The convection column towered at least five kilometers above the valley. He stared at the plumes of smoke rising from the woods of his childhood with sickening dread. From right to left they were progressively smaller. Three fires in a series, which meant they had probably been set. What was his duty here? He was pretty sure that his scooter was still in the barn at Diligence Cottage. He could use it to get away from the burn in plenty of time. Cape could monitor the progress of the burn for Commander Adoula. Besides, if someone was down there setting fires. . . .

Someone.

“Memsen,” he said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

The hover glided to a stop above the unused field nearest to Diligence Cottage. Spur stepped back as guard rails flowed out of the deck around the ramp, which slowly extended like a metal tongue toward the sweet clover below. Cape, who was standing next to Spur, was smiling. What did his father think was so funny?

“We can stay here and wait for you,” said Memsen. “If you have a problem, we’ll come.”

“Not through those trees you won’t,” said Spur, “No, you take Cape back up so he can report to the commander.” The hover shuddered in the windstorm caused by the burn. “Besides, it’s going to get rough here before too much longer. You need to protect yourselves.”

“This is exciting.” Her Grace, Jacqueline Kristof clapped her hands. “Are you excited, Spur?”

Memsen turned the girl around and gave her a hard shove toward the rest of the L’ung.

“DiDa?” Spur wanted to hug his father but settled for handing him the tell. “When the commander calls, just explain that I think we might have a torch and I’m on the ground looking. Then just keep track of the burn for her.”

“Yes.” His father was grinning broadly now. “I’m ready.”

“Good. Memsen, thanks for your help.”

“Go safely.” She clicked her rings.

Spur held out his hand to the High Gregory but the boy dodged past it and embraced him instead. Spur was taken aback when he felt the High Gregory’s kiss on his cheek. “I can see much more luck for you, friend Spur,” he murmured. “Don’t waste it.”

The hot wind was an immediate shock after the cool interior of the hover. It blew gusty and confused, whipping Spur’s hair and picking at his short sleeves. Spur paused at the bottom of the ramp to consider his next move and gather his courage. The pillar of smoke had smothered the afternoon sun, sinking the land into nightmarish and untimely gray twilight.

“Nice weather we’re having,” said Cape.

“DiDa, what?” He spun around, horrified. “Get back up there.”

Cape snapped him a mock salute. “Since when do you give the orders on this farm, son?”

“But you have to, you can’t. . . .” He felt like a foolish little boy, caught by his father pretending to be a grownup. “Someone has to talk to the ground. The commander needs to know what’s happening with the burn.”

“I gave the tell to your know-so-much friend, Penny. She’ll talk Adoula’s ear off.”

The ramp started to retract.

“What I have to do is too dangerous, DiDa.” Spur’s face was hot. “You’re not coming, understand?”

“Wasn’t planning to.” Cape chuckled. “Never entered my mind.”

Spur watched in helpless fury as the hatch closed. “Then just load whatever you want into the truck and take off. You’ve got maybe twenty minutes before things get hot here.”

The hover rose straight up and away from the field but then paused, a dark speck in an angry sky.

“See what you’ve done?” Spur groaned.

“Don’t worry. They’ll run before too long.” Cape clapped him on the back. “I don’t know about you, but I have things to do.”

“DiDa, are you . . .?” Spur was uncertain whether he should leave Cape while he was in this manic mood. “Be careful.”

Capability Roger Leung was not a man known for his sense of humor, but he laughed now. “Prosper, if we were being careful, we’d be up there in the sky with your strange little friends.” He pointed into the woods. “Time to take some chances, son.”

He turned and trotted off toward the big house without looking back.

Spur knew these woods. He and Vic and Comfort had spent hours in the cool shade pretending to be pirates or skantlings or aliens or fairies. They played queen and castle in the pukpuk ruins and pretended to be members of Morobe’s original crew, exploring a strange new world for the first time. They cut paths to secret hideouts and built lean-tos from hemlock boughs and, when Vic and Spur were eleven, they even erected a ramshackle tree house with walls and a roof, although Cape made them take it down because he said it was too dangerous. Spur had been kissed for the first time in that tree house: In a contest of sibling gross out, Vic had dared his big sister to kiss his best friend. Comfort got the best of it, however, because her back dare was that Vic had to kiss Spur. As he pulled back from the kiss, Vic had punched Spur in the arm so hard it left a bruise.

The woods were dark and unnaturally quiet as he padded down the path that led past Bear Rock and the Throne of the Spruce King. Spur heard no birdsong or drone of bugs. It was as if the trees themselves were listening for the crackle of fire. When he first smelled smoke, he stopped to turn slowly and sniff, trying to estimate where it had come from. Ahead and to the north was his best guess. That meant it was time to cut off the path and bushwhack south across the Great Gosdog Swamp, which had never been very great and always dried up in the summer. His plan was to strike out in the direction of the smallest of the three fires he had seen from the hover. He knew he was getting close when it started to snow fire.

Most of what floated down was ash, but in the mix were sparks and burning embers that stung the bare skin of his arms and face. He brushed a hand through his hair and ran. Not in a panic—just to keep embers from sticking to him. To his right he could see the glow of at least one of the fires. And yes, now he could hear the distant crack and whoosh he knew all too well. The burn was working along the forest floor, he was sure of that. Crown fire sounded like a runaway train. If he were anywhere near one, he’d be deafened and then he’d be dead. Spur finally escaped the ash fall after several minutes of dodging past trees at speed. He hunched over to knead the stitch in his side, then pressed on.

The wind had picked up and now was blowing west, not east. He thought it must be an indraft. The burn that was crashing down on them had to suck air in huge gulps from every direction in order to support itself. Maybe the wind shift would work in their favor. A west wind would push these outlying spot fires back toward the burn itself. If the line of backfire was wide enough, it might actually check the advance of the burn when the two met. Of course, it would have to scorch across the best parts of the Millisap and Joerly farmsteads first.

In the gathering darkness, Spur decided to start trotting again. It was taking too long to skirt around the last fire to Mercy’s Creek. And unless he saw something soon, he was turning back. He had to leave himself enough time to get away. And he wanted to make sure his father hadn’t done anything crazy.

Intent on not tripping over a stone or root, Spur never saw the windblown curtain of smoke until it closed around him. He spun around, disoriented. He had been panting from running, so his nose and mouth and lungs filled immediately. It was like trying to breathe cotton. His eyes went teary and the world was reduced to a watery dissolve. Had he been out with Gold Squad, he would have been wearing goggles, a helmet and a breather. But here he was practically naked, and the smoke was pervasive and smothering. He was coughing so hard he could taste the tang of blood and then his throat closed and he knew he was about to choke to death. In a panic, he hurled himself flat against the forest floor, desperately searching for the shallow layer of breathable air that they said sometimes clung to the ground. A stump poked at his side but as he laid his cheek against the mat of twigs and papery leaves, he found cooler air, rank but breathable. He tried to fill his aching lungs, coughed up mucus and blood, then tried again.

Spur didn’t know exactly how long he lay there, but when he came to himself again, the haze of smoke had thinned to gauze and he knew he had taken enough chances. He had learned the hard way at Motu River that he was no hero. Why was he at it again? No more; get to the cottage, get on the scooter and get as far away from fire as possible. He pushed himself up on hands and knees, coughed and spat. His nose felt as if someone had pulled barbed wire through it. He sat back on his heels, blinking. It wasn’t until he brushed at the leaf litter on his face that he realized he’d been crying. When he finally stood, he felt tottery. He grabbed a sapling to steady himself. Then he heard a twig snap and the rustle of foliage being parted. He ducked behind a beech tree that was barely wider than he was.

Comfort came trudging toward him, her face hard, eyes glassy. One look told him everything. She had changed out of the gingham dress into a pair of baggy work pants that looked like they must have belonged to Vic. Over a smudged and dirty t-shirt, she wore a crude burlap vest to which were attached three liquid-fire grenades. They bumped against her chest as she approached. She looked weary, as if she’d been carrying a weight that had pushed her to the very limit of her strength.

He had thought to leap out and overwhelm her when she passed, but she spotted him when she was still a dozen meters away, and froze. He stepped from behind his tree, his hands held in front of him.

“I won’t hurt you,” he said.

In the instant he saw mindless animal panic in her eyes, he thought her more alien than any upsider. He had spooked her. Then she turned and sprinted away.

Spur ran after her. He wasn’t thinking about the burn or his village or simplicity. He ran. He didn’t have time to be either brave or afraid. He ran because he had loved this woman once and because he had watched her brother die.

As a girl, Comfort had always been the nimblest of the three of them. In an open field, Vic would have caught her, but scooting past trees and ducking under low branches, Comfort was faster than any two squirrels. After a couple of minutes of pursuit, Spur was winded. He wasn’t exactly sure where they were anymore. Headed toward the creek, he guessed. If she thought she could cross over and take refuge in her own house, she truly was crazy. Suicidal.

Which made him pick up the pace, despite his fatigue. He ran so hard he thought his heart might break.

She had almost reached the creek when the chase ended abruptly. Comfort got reckless, cut a tree too close and clipped it instead. The impact knocked one of the grenades loose and spun her half around. She went to her knees and Spur leapt at her. But she kicked herself away and he skidded past and crashed into a tangle of summersweet. By the time he got to his knees she was showing him one of the grenades. He could see that she had flipped the safety and that her finger was on the igniter.

“Stop there,” she said.

Spur was breathless and a little dizzy. “Comfort, don’t.”

“Too late.” She blew a strand of dark hair off her face. “I already have.”

He stood, once again holding his hands where she could see them. “What’s this about, Comfort?”

“Vic,” she said. “It’s mostly about Vic now.”

“He’s gone. There’s nothing you can do for him.”

“We’ll see.” She shivered, despite the heat. “It was my fault, you know. I was the one who recruited him. But he was just supposed to pass information.” Her voice shook. “They must have bullied him into becoming a torch. I killed him, Spur. I killed my brother.”

“Listen to me, Comfort. He wasn’t a torch. It was an accident.”

The hand holding the grenade trembled slightly but then steadied. “That’s not what you said this morning when you were off your head.” She gave him a pitying look. “You said you tried to save him. That I believe.”

He took a half-step toward her. “But how does it help anyone to set fire to Littleton?” Another half-step. “To our farms?”

She backed away from him. “They could stop this, you know. Your upsider friends. They could force the Cooperative to settle, put pressure on Jack Winter to do what’s right. Except they don’t really care about us. They come to watch, but they never get involved.” Her laugh was low and scattered. “They’re involved now. I hope that little brat is scared of dying.”

“But they do care.” He held his arms tight to his sides; otherwise he would have been waving them at her. “Memsen has a plan.” Spur thought he might yet save her. “You have to believe me, Comfort. There are going to be talks with the pukpuks.”

“Right.” Her mouth twisted. “And you didn’t see Vic torch himself.”

“Besides, did you really think you could burn them up? The High Gregory is safe, Comfort. Memsen and the L’ung. Their hover came for us. That’s how I got here so fast. They’re in the air,” he pointed backward over his shoulder, “waiting for me over the cottage.”

When he saw her gaze flick up and away from him, he launched himself. He grabbed at the arm with the grenade. They twirled together in a grotesque pirouette. Then, unable to check his momentum, Spur stumbled and fell.

Comfort stepped away from him. She shook her head once. She pressed the igniter on the grenade.

It exploded into a fireball that shot out two long streams of flame in opposite directions. One soared high into the trees, the other shot down at the forest floor and gathered in a blazing puddle at her feet. She screamed as the grenade fell from her charred hand. Great tongues of flame licked up her legs. Her pants caught fire. Her singed hair curled into nothingness.

Spur screamed too. Seeing it all happen all over again was worse than any nightmare. When Vic had set the liquid firebomb off, he had been instantly engulfed in flame. Spur had tried to knock him down, hoping to roll his friend onto the ground and put the merciless fire out. But Vic had shoved him away. With his clothes, his arms in flames, Vic had found the strength to send Spur sprawling backward.

Which saved Spur’s life when the second bomb went off.

But this wasn’t Motu River and Vic was dead. Comfort, his Comfort had only grenades, designed to set backfires, not bombs designed by pukpuk terrorists. The lower half of her body had been soaked in liquid fire and was burning but he could see her face, her wild, suffering eyes, her mouth a slash of screeching pain and that last grenade still bumping against her chest.

Spur flew at her and ripped the unexploded grenade from the vest. He swept her up in his arms, taking her weight easily with a mad strength, and raced toward the creek. He had the crazy thought that if he ran fast enough, he would be able to stay ahead of the pain. He knew he was burning now but he had to save her. He had never had a chance with Vic; take some chances, his father had said, and the High Gregory had warned him not to waste his luck. But the pain was too fast, it was catching up to him. Comfort’s screams filled his head and then he was flying. He splashed down on top of her in the cool water and she didn’t struggle when he forced her under, counting one, two, three, four, five, and he yanked her up and screamed at her to breathe, breathe, and when she choked and gasped, he thrust her down again, two, three, four, five and when he pulled her up again she was limp; his poor burned Comfort had either fainted away or died in his arms but at least she wasn’t on fire anymore.

Neither of them was.

Sixteen

The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake.—Walden

In the dream, Spur sits in the kitchen of Diligence Cottage with Comfort, who is wearing the jade-colored pajamas. There are pies everywhere. Apple and cherry pies are stacked on the counters and across the table. Blackberry, elderberry and blueberry pies are lined up on the new oak floor against the wall with its morning glory wallpaper that Comfort ordered all the way from Providence, which is where Spur’s mother lives. Maybe. He should find out. Comfort has set fiesta pear and peach surprise pies on top of the refrigerator and laid out the rhubarb pies two to a chair. Whatever else people in Littleton say about her, everyone agrees that Comfort makes the best pumpkin pies anywhere. In the dream, the pies are her idea. She has made enough pie to last him the rest of his life. He will need it if she goes. In the dream, though, it’s not certain that she is leaving and he’s not sure he wants her to. Besides, she certainly isn’t going to catch the train back to Longwalk in those pajamas. They slide right off when you tug at them, the smooth fabric sliding lightly against her skin. In the dream she threads her way around a strawberry pie so she can kiss him. At first her kiss is like a promise. After a kiss like this, he should kick open the bedroom door and throw back the covers. But the kiss ends like a question. And the answer is no, Spur doesn’t want this woman to be unhappy anymore because of him. He doesn’t want to dry her tears or. . . .

“Enough sleeping, son.” A sharp voice sliced through his dream. “Wake up and join the world.”

Spur blinked, then gasped in disappointment. It wasn’t fair; he didn’t get to keep Comfort or the pie. The strange room he was in seemed to be a huge bay window filled with sunlight. In it was a scatter of dark shapes, one of which was moving. A cold hand pressed against his forehead.

“38.2 degrees,” said the docbot. “But then a little fever is to be expected.”

“Dr. Niss?” said Spur.

“I’m never happy to see repeat customers, son.” The docbot shined pinlights into Spur’s eyes. “Do you know where you are? You were a little woozy when we picked you up.”

He licked his lips, trying to recall. “The hospital?”

“Allworthy Memsen’s hover. Open your mouth and say ahh.” The docbot brushed its medfinger across Spur’s tongue, leaving a waxy residue that tasted like motor oil.

“The hover?” There was something important that Spur couldn’t quite remember. “But how did you get here?”

“I’m on call, son,” said the docbot. “I can be anywhere there’s a bot. Although this isn’t much of an implementation. Feels two sizes too small.”

Spur realized then that this docbot was different from the one at the hospital. It only had two gripper arms and its eye was set on top of its headplate. What did he mean, repeat customers? Then the memory of the burn went roaring through his head. “Comfort!” Spur tried to sit up but the docbot pushed him back down. “Is she all right?”

“Still with us. We’ve saved her for now. But we’ll talk about that after we look at your burns.”

“How long have I been here? Did they stop the burn?”

The docbot reached behind Spur’s neck, untied the hospital gown and pulled it to his waist. “I kept you down all last night and the better part of today to give your grafts a chance to take.” The new set of burns ran in rough stripes across his chest. There was a splotch like a misshapen handprint on top of his shoulder. “You’ll be on pain blockers for the next few days—they can poke holes in your memory, so don’t worry if you forget how to tie your shoes.” The docbot flowed warm dermslix onto the grafts. “Dermal regeneration just 13 percent,” it muttered.

“The burn, what about the burn?”

“Your people have it under control, according to that little Pendragon girl. I guess there’s still some mopping up to do, but at least those kids are finally settling down. They were bouncing off the walls all last night.” He pulled the gown back up. “You’ll be fine son. Just stop playing with fire.”

Spur was already swinging his legs off the bed as he fumbled with the ties of the gown. But when he went to stand, the deck seemed to fall away beneath his feet.

“Whoops.” The docbot caught him. “Another side effect of pain blockers is that they’ll tilt your sense of balance.” He eased him back onto the bed. “You’re going to want someone to help you get around for now. The docbot twisted off its medfinger and dropped it in the sterilizer. “I’ve got just the party for you. Wait here and I’ll send him in.”

The docbot had scarcely popped out of the room when the High Gregory came bursting in, pushing a wheelchair. The entire bubble wall collapsed momentarily to reveal the L’ung, who started whooping and applauding for Spur. Memsen slipped in just as the wall reformed.

“You are the craziest, luckiest, bravest person I know.” The High Gregory was practically squeaking with excitement. “What were you thinking when you picked her up? We were cheering so loud we thought you could probably hear us down there. I couldn’t sleep all night, just thinking about it. Did you hear the L’ung just now? I taught them to clap hands for you. Here, have a seat.”

Spur allowed Memsen and the High Gregory to help him into the chair, although he was certain they were going to drop him. He shut his eyes, counted to three and when he opened them again the cabin had stopped chasing its tail. “How do you know what I did?”

“We watched,” said Memsen. “From the moment you stepped off the ramp, our spybugs were on you. The High Gregory is right. We were very moved.”

“You watched?” He felt his cheeks flush. “I could’ve been killed.”

“Watch is all we’re supposed to do,” said Memsen, “according to your covenant.”

“But Memsen said we couldn’t just leave you after you jumped into the water with her,” said the High Gregory. “So we mowed down some forest to get to you, pulled the two of you out of the creek and qiced Dr. Niss into a bot that Betty Twosalt made.” He wheeled Spur toward the hull so he could see the view. “She’s good. She won a prize for her bots once.”

“And Comfort is all right?” Spur glanced back over his shoulder at Memsen. “That’s what Dr. Niss said.”

“Saved,” said Memsen, clicking her rings together. “We were able to save her.”

The High Gregory parked the wheelchair as near to the hull as he could get, and set the brake. He made the deck transparent too, so they could see more of the valley. “It’s huge, Spur,” he said, gesturing through the hull at the remains of the burn. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

They were passing over Mercy’s Creek headed for the Joerlys, although he scarcely recognized the land beneath them as he surveyed the damage. The fires Comfort had started must have been sucked by the indraft back toward the burn as Spur had hoped, creating a backfired barrier to its progress. The backfire and the head of the burn must have met somewhere just east of the Joerlys. Comfort’s house, barn and all the sheds had burned to their foundations. Farther to the west, the Millisap and Ezzat farmsteads were also obliterated. And more than half of Lamana Ridge was a wasteland of blackened spikes rising out of gray ash. Wisps of white smoke drifted across the ravaged land like the ghosts of dead trees. But dispersed through the devastation were inexplicable clumps of unscathed forest, mostly deciduous hardwood. Spur was relieved to see a blue-green crown of forest to the north along the top of the ridge, where the Corps must have beaten the burn back.

“What about the east?” said Spur. “Where did they stop it?”

But the hover was already turning and his view shifted, first south, where he could see the steeple of the communion hall on the Commons then southeast where CR22 sliced a thin line through intact forest. The High Gregory was watching him, his yellow eyes alight with anticipation.

“What?” said Spur, irked to be putting on a show for this fidgety upsider. “What are you staring at?”

“You,” said the High Gregory. “There’s so much luck running in your family, Spur. You know we tried to pick your father up after we got you, but he wouldn’t come, even though we told him you were hurt.”

“He was still there? That old idiot. Is he all right?”

“He’s fine.” The High Gregory patted Spur’s hand. “He said he wasn’t going to give his farm up without a fight. He had all your hoses out. He had this great line—I can’t remember it exactly.” He looked to Memsen for help. “Something about spitting?”

Memsen waited as a bench began to form from the deck. “Your father said that if the pump gave out, he’d spit at the burn until his mouth went dry.”

Spur had raised himself out of the wheelchair, craning to see as the farm swung into view. The big house, the barns, the cottage were all untouched. But the orchards. . . .

“He started his own backfire.” Spur sank back onto the seat. Over half the trees were gone: the Macintosh and GoReds and Pippins were charred skeletons. But at least Cape had saved the Alumars and the Huangs and the Galas. And GiGo’s trees by the cottage, all those foolish Macouns.

“The wind had changed direction.” Memsen sat on the bench facing Spur. “When we arrived, he had just knocked a hole in the gas tank of your truck and said he couldn’t stop to talk. He was going drive through his orchard and then set the backfire. We thought it seemed dangerous so we put spybugs on him. But he knew exactly what he was about.” She showed Spur her teeth. “He’s a brave man.”

“Yes,” mused Spur, although he wondered if that were true. Maybe his father just loved his apples more than he loved his life. Spur felt the hover accelerate then and the ground below began to race by. They shot over the Commons and headed west in the direction of Longwalk.

“We watched all night,” said the High Gregory, “just like your father told us. Memsen made Penny let everyone have a turn talking to Commander Adoula on the tell. The fire was so awesome in the dark. We flew through it again and again.”

The High Gregory’s enthusiasm continued to annoy Spur.

Three farmsteads were gone and his own orchards decimated, but this boy thought he was having an adventure. “You didn’t offer to help? You could’ve dropped splash on the burn, maybe diverted it from the houses.”

“We did offer,” said Memsen. “We were told that upsiders are allowed to render assistance in the deep forest where only firefighters can see us, but not in plain sight of a village or town.”

“Memsen is in trouble for landing the hover on the Commons.” The High Gregory settled beside her on the bench. “We haven’t even told anyone yet about what we did for you by the creek.”

“So.” Memsen held out her hand to him, fingers outspread. “We’ve been called back to Kenning to answer for our actions.”

“Really?” Spur felt relieved but also vaguely disappointed. “When will you go?”

“Now, actually.” Her rings glittered in the sunlight. “We asked Dr. Niss to wake you so we could say goodbye.”

“But who will take Comfort and me to the hospital?”

“We’ll be in Longwalk in a few moments. There’s a hospital in Benevolence Park Number 2.” Her fingers closed into a fist. “But Comfort will be coming with us.”

“What?” Despite himself, Spur lurched out of the wheelchair. He tottered, the cabin spun, and the next thing he knew both Memsen and the High Gregory were easing him back down.

“Why?” He took a deep breath. “She can’t.”

“She can’t very well stay in Littleton,” said the High Gregory. “Her farm is destroyed. You’re going to have to tell everyone who started the burn.”

“Am I?” He considered whether he would lie to protect her. After all, he had lied for her brother. “She’s told you she wants to do this? Let me talk to her.”

“That’s not possible.” Memsen pinched the air.

“Why not?”

“Do you want to come with us, Spur?” said the High Gregory. “You could, you know.”

“No.” He wheeled himself backward, horrified at the idea. “Why would I want to do that? My home is in Littleton. I’m a farmer.”

“Then stop asking questions,” said Memsen impatiently. “As a citizen of the Transcendent State you’re under a consensual cultural quarantine. We’ve just been reminded of that quite forcefully. There’s nothing more we can say to you.”

“I don’t believe this.” Spur heard himself shouting. “You’ve done something to her and you’re afraid to tell me. What is it?”

Memsen hesitated, and Spur heard the low, repetitive pa-pa-pa-ptt that he had decided she made when she was consulting her predecessors. “If you insist, we can make it simple for you.” Memsen thrust her face close to his. “Comfort died,” she said harshly. “Tell that to everyone in your village. She was horribly burned and she died.”

Spur recoiled from her. “But you said you saved her. Dr. Niss. . . .”

“Dr. Niss can show you the body, if you care to see it.” She straightened. “So.”

“Goodbye, Spur,” said the High Gregory. “Can we help you back onto the bed?”

Beneath them Spur could see the outskirts of Longwalk. Abruptly the hull of the hover turned opaque and the ceiling of the cabin began to glow. Spur knew from watching hovers land from the window of his hospital room that they camouflaged themselves on the final approach over a city.

“No, wait.” Spur was desperate to keep the upsiders talking. “You said she was going with you. I definitely heard that. You said she was saved. Is she . . . this is like the other Memsens that you told me about, isn’t it? The ones that are saved in you?”

“This is a totally inappropriate conversation.” Memsen pinched the air with both hands. “We’ll have to ask Dr. Niss to strike it from your memory.”

“He can do that?”

“Sure,” said the High Gregory. “We do it all the time. But he has to replace it with some fake memory. You’ll have to tell him what you want. And if you should ever come across anything that challenges the replacement memory, you could get. . . .”

Spur held up his hand to silence him. “But it’s true what I just said?”

Memsen snorted in disgust and turned to leave.

“She can’t admit anything.” The High Gregory grasped her hand to restrain her. He held it to his chest. “But yes.”

Spur was gripping the push rims of his wheelchair so hard that his hands ached. “So nobody dies on the upside?”

“No, no. Everybody dies. It’s just that some of us choose to be saved to a shell afterward. Even the saved admit it’s not the same as being alive. I haven’t made my mind up about all that yet, but I’m only twelve standard. My birthday is next week, I wish you could be there.”

“What will happen to Comfort in this shell?”

“She’s going to have to adjust. She didn’t expect to be saved, of course, probably didn’t even know it was possible, so when they activate her, she’ll be disoriented. She’ll need some kind of counseling. We have some pretty good soulmasons on Kenning. And they can send for her brother; he’ll want to help.”

“Stop it! This is cruel.” Memsen yanked his hand down. “We have to go right now.”

“Why?” said the High Gregory plaintively. “He’s not going to remember any of this.”

“Vic was saved?” Even though he was still safe in the wheelchair, he felt as if he were falling.

“All the pukpuk martyrs were.” The High Gregory tried to shake his hand loose from Memsen, but she wouldn’t let him go. “That was why they agreed to sacrifice themselves.”

“Enough.” Memsen started to drag him from the cabin. “We’re sorry, Spur. You’re a decent man. Go back to your cottage and your apples and forget about us.”

“Goodbye, Spur,” called the High Gregory as they popped through the bulkhead. “Good luck.”

As the bulkhead shivered with their passing, he felt a fierce and troubling desire burn his soul. Some part of him did want to go with them, to be with Comfort and Vic on the upside and see the wonders that Chairman Winter had forbidden the citizens of the Transcendent State. He could do it; he knew he could. After all, everyone in Littleton seemed to think he was leaving.

But then who would help Cape bring in the harvest?

Spur wasn’t sure how long he sat alone in the wheelchair with a thousand thoughts buzzing in his head. The upsiders had just blown up his world and he was trying desperately to piece it back together. Except what was the point? In a little while he wasn’t going to be worrying anymore about Comfort and Vic and shells and being saved. Maybe that was for the best; it was all too complicated. Just like the Chairman had said. Spur thought he’d be happier thinking about apples and baseball and maybe kissing Melody Velez. He was ready to forget.

He realized that the hover had gone completely still. There was no vibration from the hull skimming through the air, no muffled laughter from the L’ung. He watched the hospital equipment melt into the deck. Then all the bulkheads popped and he could see the entire bay of the hover. It was empty except for his wheelchair, a gurney with Comfort’s shroud-covered body and the docbot, which rolled up to him.

“So you’re going to make me forget all this?” said Spur bitterly. “All the secrets of the upside?”

“If that’s what you want.”

Spur shivered. “I have a choice?”

“I’m just the doctor, son. I can offer treatment but you have to accept it. For example, you chose not to tell me how you got burned that first time.” The docbot rolled behind the wheelchair. “That pretty much wrecked everything I was trying to accomplish with the conciliation sim.”

Spur turned around to look at it. “You knew all along?”

The docbot locked into the back of the wheelchair. “I wouldn’t be much of a doctor if I couldn’t tell when patients were lying to me.” It started pushing Spur toward the hatch.

“But you work for the Chairman.” Spur didn’t know if he wanted the responsibility for making this decision.

“I take Jack Winter’s money,” said the docbot. “I don’t take his advice when it comes to medical or spiritual practice.”

“But what if I tell people that Comfort and Vic are saved and that upsiders get to go on after they die?”

“Then they’ll know.”

Spur tried to imagine keeping the upsiders’ immortality a secret for the rest of his days. He tried to imagine what would happen to the Transcendent State if he told what he knew. His mouth went as dry as flour. He was just a farmer, he told himself; he didn’t have that good an imagination. “You’re saying that I don’t have to have my memory of all this erased?”

“Goodness, no. Unless you’d rather forget about me.”

As they passed Comfort’s body, Spur said, “Stop a minute.”

He reached out and touched the shroud. He expected it to be some strange upsider fabric but it was just a simple cotton sheet. “They knew that I could choose to remember, didn’t they? Memsen and the High Gregory were playing me to the very end.”

“Son,” said Dr. Niss, “the High Gregory is just a boy and nobody in the Thousand Worlds knows what the Allworthy knows.”

But Spur had stopped listening. He rubbed the shroud between his thumb and forefinger, thinking about how he and the Joerlys used to make up adventures in the ruins along Mercy’s Creek when they were children. Often as not one of them would achieve some glorious death as part of the game. The explorer would boldly drink from the poisoned cup to free her comrades, the pirate captain would be run through defending his treasure, the queen of skantlings would throw down her heartstone rather than betray the castle. And then he or Vic or Comfort would stumble dramatically to the forest floor and sprawl there, cheek pressed against leaf litter, as still as scattered stones. The others would pause briefly over the body and then dash into the woods, so that the fallen hero could be reincarnated and the game could go on.

“I want to go home,” he said, at last.

I, ROBOT

Cory Doctorow

Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade, United North American Trading Sphere, Third District, Fourth Prefecture, Second Division (Parkdale) had had many adventures in his distinguished career, running crooks to ground with an unbeatable combination of instinct and unstinting devotion to duty.

He’d been decorated on three separate occasions by his commander and by the Regional Manager for Social Harmony, and his mother kept a small shrine dedicated to his press clippings and commendations that occupied most of the cramped sitting-room of her flat off Steeles Avenue.

No amount of policeman’s devotion and skill availed him when it came to making his twelve-year-old get ready for school, though.

“Haul ass, young lady—out of bed, on your feet, shit-shower-shave, or I swear to God, I will beat you purple and shove you out the door jaybird naked. Capeesh?”

The mound beneath the covers groaned and hissed. “You are a terrible father,” it said. “And I never loved you.” The voice was indistinct and muffled by the pillow.

“Boo hoo,” Arturo said, examining his nails. “You’ll regret that when I’m dead of cancer.”

The mound—whose name was Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg—threw her covers off and sat bolt upright. “You’re dying of cancer? Is it testicle cancer?” Ada clapped her hands and squealed, “Can I have your stuff?”

“Ten minutes, your rottenness,” he said, and then his breath caught momentarily in his breast as he saw, fleetingly, his ex-wife’s morning expression, not seen these past twelve years, come to life in his daughter’s face. Pouty, pretty, sleepy and guileless, and it made him realize that his daughter was becoming a woman, growing away from him. She was, and he was not ready for that. He shook it off, patted his razor-burn and turned on his heel. He knew from experience that once roused, the munchkin would be scrounging the kitchen for whatever was handy before dashing out the door, and if he hurried, he’d have eggs and sausage on the table before she made her brief appearance. Otherwise he’d have to pry the sugar-cereal out of her hands—and she fought dirty.

In his car, he prodded at his phone. He had her wiretapped, of course. He was a cop—every phone and every computer was an open book to him, so that this involved nothing more than dialing a number on his special copper’s phone, entering her number and a PIN, and then listening as his daughter had truck with a criminal enterprise.

“Welcome to ExcuseClub! There are 43 members on the network this morning. You have five excuses to your credit. Press one to redeem an excuse—” She toned one. “Press one if you need an adult—” Tone. “Press one if you need a woman; press two if you need a man—” Tone. “Press one if your excuse should be delivered by your doctor; press two for your spiritual representative; press three for your case-worker; press four for your psycho-health specialist; press five for your son; press six for your father—” Tone. “You have selected to have your excuse delivered by your father. Press one if this excuse is intended for your case-worker; press two for your psycho-health specialist; press three for your principal—” Tone. “Please dictate your excuse at the sound of the beep. When you have finished, press the pound key.”

“This is Detective Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg. My daughter was sick in the night and I’ve let her sleep in. She’ll be in for lunchtime.” Tone.

“Press one to hear your message; press two to have your message dispatched to a network-member.” Tone.

“Thank you.”

The pen-trace data scrolled up Arturo’s phone—number called, originating number, call-time. This was the third time he’d caught his daughter at this game, and each time, the pen-trace data had been useless, a dead-end lead that terminated with a phone-forwarding service tapped into one of the dodgy offshore switches that the blessed blasted UNATS brass had recently acquired on the cheap to handle the surge of mobile telephone calls. Why couldn’t they just stick to UNATS Robotics equipment, like the good old days? Those Oceanic switches had more back-doors than a speakeasy, trade agreements be damned. They were attractive nuisances, invitations to criminal activity.

Arturo fumed and drummed his fingers on the steering-wheel. Each time he’d caught Ada at this, she’d used the extra time to crawl back into bed for a leisurely morning, but who knew if today was the day she took her liberty and went downtown with it, to some parental nightmare of a drug-den? Some place where the old pervert chickenhawks hung out, the kind of men he arrested in burlesque house raids, men who masturbated into their hats under their tables and then put them back onto their shining pates, dripping cold, diseased serum onto their scalps. He clenched his hands on the steering wheel and cursed.

In an ideal world, he’d simply follow her. He was good at tailing, and his unmarked car with its tinted windows was a UNATS Robotics standard compact #2, indistinguishable from the tens of thousands of others just like it on the streets of Toronto. Ada would never know that the curb-crawler tailing her was her sucker of a father, making sure that she turned up to get her brains sharpened instead of turning into some stunadz doper with her underage butt hanging out of a little skirt on Jarvis Street.

In the real world, Arturo had thirty minutes to make a forty minute downtown and crosstown commute if he was going to get to the station house on-time for the quarterly all-hands Social Harmony briefing. Which meant that he needed to be in two places at once, which meant that he had to use—the robot.

Swallowing bile, he speed-dialed a number on his phone.

“This is R Peed Robbert, McNicoll and Don Mills bus-shelter.”

“That’s nice. This is Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, three blocks east of you on Picola. Proceed to my location at once, priority urgent, no sirens.”

“Acknowledged. It is my pleasure to do you a service, Detective.”

“Shut up,” he said, and hung up the phone. The R Peed—Robot, Police Department—robots were the worst, programmed to be friendly to a fault, even as they surveilled and snitched out every person who walked past their eternally vigilant, ever-remembering electrical eyes and brains.

The R Peeds could outrun a police car on open ground on highway. He’d barely had time to untwist his clenched hands from the steering wheel when R Peed Robbert was at his window, politely rapping on the smoked glass. He didn’t want to roll down the window. Didn’t want to smell the dry, machine-oil smell of a robot. He phoned it instead.

“You are now tasked to me, Detective’s override, acknowledge.”

The metal man bowed, its symmetrical, simplified features pleasant and guileless. It clicked its heels together with an audible snick as those marvelous, spring-loaded, nuclear-powered gams whined through their parody of obedience. “Acknowledged, Detective. It is my pleasure to do—”

“Shut up. You will discreetly surveil 55 Picola Crescent until such time as Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Social Harmony serial number ØMDY2-T3937 leaves the premises. Then you will maintain discreet surveillance. If she deviates more than 10 percent from the optimum route between here and Don Mills Collegiate Institute, you will notify me. Acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged, Detective. It is my—”

He hung up and told the UNATS Robotics mechanism running his car to get him down to the station house as fast as it could, angry with himself and with Ada—whose middle name was Trouble, after all—for making him deal with a robot before he’d had his morning meditation and destim session. The name had been his ex-wife’s idea, something she’d insisted on long enough to make sure that it got onto the kid’s birth certificate before defecting to Eurasia with their life’s savings, leaving him with a new baby and the deep suspicion of his co-workers who wondered if he wouldn’t go and join her.

His ex-wife. He hadn’t thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She’d been a brilliant computer scientist, the valedictorian of her Positronic Complexity Engineering class at the UNATS Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Dumping her husband and her daughter was bad enough, but the worst of it was that she dumped her country and its way of life. Now she was ensconced in her own research lab in Beijing, making the kinds of runaway Positronics that made the loathsome robots of UNATS look categorically beneficent.

He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning. He could have talked her out of it.

And then what, Artie? said the nagging voice in his head. Arrest her if she wouldn’t listen to you? March her down to the station house in handcuffs and have her put away for treason? Send her to the reeducation camp with your little daughter still in her belly?

Shut up, he told the nagging voice, which had a robotic quality to it for all its sneering cruelty, a tenor of syrupy false friendliness. He called up the pen-trace data and texted it to the phreak squad. They had bots that handled this kind of routine work and they texted him back in an instant. He remembered when that kind of query would take a couple of hours, and he liked the fast response, but what about the conversations he’d have with the phone cop who called him back, the camaraderie, the back-and-forth?

TRACE TERMINATES WITH A VIRTUAL SERVICE CIRCUIT AT SWITCH PNG.433-GKRJC. VIRTUAL CIRCUIT FORWARDS TO A COMPROMISED “ZOMBIE” SYSTEM IN NINTH DISTRICT, FIRST PREFECTURE. ZOMBIE HAS BEEN SHUT DOWN AND LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT IS EN ROUTE FOR PICKUP AND FORENSICS. IT IS MY PLEASURE TO DO YOU A SERVICE, DETECTIVE.

How could you have a back-and-forth with a message like that?

He looked up Ninth/First in the metric-analog map converter: KEY WEST, FL.

So, there you had it. A switch made in Papua New-Guinea (which persisted in conjuring up old Oceanic war photos of bone-in-nose types from his boyhood, though now that they’d been at war with Eurasia for so long, it was hard to even find someone who didn’t think that the war had always been with Eurasia, that Oceania hadn’t always been UNATS’s ally), forwarding calls to a computer that was so far south, it was practically in the middle of the Caribbean, hardly a stone’s throw from the CAFTA region, which was well-known to harbor Eurasian saboteur and terrorist elements.

The car shuddered as it wove in and out of the lanes on the Don Valley Parkway, barreling for the Gardiner Express Way, using his copper’s override to make the thick, slow traffic part ahead of him. He wasn’t supposed to do this, but as between a minor infraction and pissing off the man from Social Harmony, he knew which one he’d pick.

His phone rang again. It was R Peed Robbert, checking in. “Hello, Detective,” it said, its voice crackling from bad reception. “Subject Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg has deviated from her route. She is continuing north on Don Mills past Van Horne and is continuing toward Sheppard.”

Sheppard meant the Sheppard subway, which meant that she was going farther. “Continue discreet surveillance.” He thought about the overcoat men with their sticky hats. “If she attempts to board the subway, alert the truancy patrol.” He cursed again. Maybe she was just going to the mall. But he couldn’t go up there himself and make sure, and it wasn’t like a robot would be any use in restraining her, she’d just second-law it into letting her go. Useless castrating clanking job-stealing dehumanizing—

She was almost certainly just going to the mall. She was a smart kid, a good kid—a rotten kid, to be sure, but good-rotten. Chances were she’d be trying on clothes and flirting with boys until lunch and then walking boldly back into class. He ballparked it at an 80 percent probability. If it had been a perp, 80 percent might have been good enough.

But this was his Ada. Dammit. He had 10 minutes until the Social Harmony meeting started, and he was still 15 minutes away from the stationhouse—and 20 from Ada.

“Tail her,” he said. “Just tail her. Keep me up to date on your location at 90-second intervals.”

“It is my pleasure to—”

He dropped the phone on the passenger seat and went back to fretting about the Social Harmony meeting.

The man from Social Harmony noticed right away that Arturo was checking his phone at 90-second intervals. He was a bald, thin man with a pronounced Adam’s apple, beak-nose and shiny round head that combined to give him the profile of something predatory and fast. In his natty checked suit and pink tie, the Social Harmony man was the stuff of nightmares, the kind of eagle-eyed supercop who could spot Arturo’s attention flicking for the barest moment every 90 seconds to his phone and then back to the meeting.

“Detective?” he said.

Arturo looked up from his screen, keeping his expression neutral, not acknowledging the mean grins from the other four ranking detectives in the meeting. Silently, he turned his phone face-down on the meeting table.

“Thank you,” he said. “Now, the latest stats show a sharp rise in gray-market electronics importing and other tariff-breaking crimes, mostly occurring in open-air market stalls and from sidewalk blankets. I know that many in law enforcement treat this kind of thing as mere hand-to-hand piracy, not worth troubling with, but I want to assure you, gentlemen and lady, that Social Harmony takes these crimes very seriously indeed.”

The Social Harmony man lifted his computer onto the desk, steadying it with both hands, then plugged it into the wall socket. Detective Shainblum went to the wall and unlatched the cover for the projector-wire and dragged it over to the Social Harmony computer and plugged it in, snapping shut the hardened collar. The sound of the projector-fan spinning up was like a helicopter.

“Here,” the Social Harmony man said, bringing up a slide, “here we have what appears to be a standard AV set-top box from Korea. Looks like a UNATS Robotics player, but it’s a third the size and plays twice as many formats. Random Social Harmony audits have determined that as much as forty percent of UNATS residents have this device or one like it in their homes, despite its illegality. It may be that one of you detectives has such a device in your home, and it’s likely that one of your family members does.”

He advanced the slide. Now they were looking at a massive car-wreck on a stretch of highway somewhere where the pine-trees grew tall. The wreck was so enormous that even for the kind of seasoned veteran of road-fatality porn who was accustomed to adding up the wheels and dividing by four it was impossible to tell exactly how many cars were involved.

“Components from a Eurasian bootleg set-top box were used to modify the positronic brains of three cars owned by teenagers near Goderich. All modifications were made at the same garage. These modifications allowed these children to operate their vehicles unsafely so that they could participate in drag racing events on major highways during off-hours. This is the result. Twenty-two fatalities, nine major injuries. Three minors—besides the drivers—killed, and one pregnant woman.

“We’ve shut down the garage and taken those responsible into custody, but it doesn’t matter. The Eurasians deliberately manufacture their components to interoperate with UNATS Robotics brains, and so long as their equipment circulates within UNATS borders, there will be moderately skilled hackers who take advantage of this fact to introduce dangerous, antisocial modifications into our nation’s infrastructure.

“This quarter is the quarter that Social Harmony and law enforcement dry up the supply of Eurasian electronics. We have added new sniffers and border-patrols, new customs agents and new detector vans. Beat officers have been instructed to arrest any street dealer they encounter and district attorneys will be asking for the maximum jail time for them. This is the war on the home-front, detectives, and it’s every bit as serious as the shooting war.

“Your part in this war, as highly trained, highly decorated detectives, will be to use snitches, arrest-trails and seized evidence to track down higher-level suppliers, the ones who get the dealers their goods. And then Social Harmony wants you to get their suppliers, and so on, up the chain—to run the corruption to ground and to bring it to a halt. The Social Harmony dossier on Eurasian importers is updated hourly, and has a high-capacity positronic interface that is available to answer your questions and accept your input for synthesis into its analytical model. We are relying on you to feed the dossier, to give it the raw materials and then to use it to win this war.”

The Social Harmony man paged through more atrocity slides, scenes from the home-front: poisoned buildings with berserk life-support systems, violent kung-fu movies playing in the background in crack-houses, then kids playing sexually explicit, violent arcade games imported from Japan. Arturo’s hand twitched toward his mobile. What was Ada up to now?

The meeting drew to a close and Arturo risked looking at his mobile under the table. R Peed Robbert had checked in five more times, shadowing Ada around the mall and then had fallen silent. Arturo cursed. Fucking robots were useless. Social Harmony should be hunting down UNATS Robotics products, too.

The Social Harmony man cleared his throat meaningfully. Arturo put the phone away. “Detective Icaza de Arana-Goldberg?”

“Sir,” he said, gathering up his personal computer so that he’d have an excuse to go—no one could be expected to hold one of UNATS Robotics’s heavy luggables for very long.

The Social Harmony man stepped in close enough that Arturo could smell the eggs and coffee on his breath. “I hope we haven’t kept you from anything important, Detective.”

“No, sir,” Arturo said, shifting the computer in his arms. “My apologies. Just monitoring a tail from an R Peed unit.”

“I see,” the Social Harmony man said. “Listen, you know these components that the Eurasians are turning out. It’s no coincidence that they interface so well with UNATS Robotics equipment: they’re using defected UNATS Robotics engineers and scientists to design their electronics for maximum interoperability.” The Social Harmony man let that hang in the air. Defected scientists. His ex-wife was the highest-ranking UNATS technician to go over to Eurasia. This was her handiwork, and the Social Harmony man wanted to be sure that Arturo understood that.

But Arturo had already figured that out during the briefing. His ex-wife was thousands of kilometers away, but he was keenly aware that he was always surrounded by her handiwork. The little illegal robot-pet eggs they’d started seeing last year: she’d made him one of those for their second date, and now they were draining the productive hours of half the children of UNATS, demanding to be “fed” and “hugged.” His had died within 48 hours of her giving it to him.

He shifted the computer in his arms some more and let his expression grow pained. “I’ll keep that in mind, sir,” he said.

“You do that,” said the man from Social Harmony.

He phoned R Peed Robbert the second he reached his desk. The phone rang three times, then disconnected. He redialed. Twice. Then he grabbed his jacket and ran to the car.

A light autumn rain had started up, ending the Indian summer that Toronto—the Fourth Prefecture in the new metric scheme—had been enjoying. It made the roads slippery and the UNATS Robotics chauffeur skittish about putting the hammer down on the Don Valley Parkway. He idly fantasized about finding a set-top box and plugging it into his car somehow so that he could take over the driving without alerting his superiors.

Instead, he redialed R Peed Robbert, but the robot wasn’t even ringing any longer. He zoomed in on the area around Sheppard and Don Mills with his phone and put out a general call for robots. More robots.

“This is R Peed Froderick, Fairview Mall parking lot, third level.” Arturo sent the robot R Peed Robbert’s phone number and set it to work translating that into a locator-beacon code and then told it to find Robbert and report in.

“It is my—”

He watched R Peed Froderick home in on the locator for Robbert, which was close by, at the other end of the mall, near the Don Valley Parkway exit. He switched to a view from Froderick’s electric eyes, but quickly switched away, nauseated by the sickening leaps and spins of an R Peed moving at top speed, clanging off walls and ceilings.

His phone rang. It was R Peed Froderick.

“Hello, Detective. I have found R Peed Robbert. The Peed unit has been badly damaged by some kind of electromagnetic pulse. I will bring him to the nearest station-house for forensic analysis now.”

“Wait!” Arturo said, trying to understand what he’d been told. The Peed units were so efficient—by the time they’d given you the sitrep, they’d already responded to the situation in perfect police procedure, but the problem was they worked so fast you couldn’t even think about what they were doing, couldn’t formulate any kind of hypothesis. Electromagnetic pulse? The Peed units were hardened against snooping, sniffing, pulsing, sideband and brute-force attacks. You’d have to hit one with a bolt of lightning to kill it.

“Wait there,” Arturo said. “Do not leave the scene. Await my presence. Do not modify the scene or allow anyone else to do so. Acknowledge.”

“It is my—”

But this time, it wasn’t Arturo switching off the phone, it was the robot. Had the robot just hung up on him? He redialed it. No answer.

He reached under his dash and flipped the first and second alert switches and the car leapt forward. He’d have to fill out some serious paperwork to justify a two-switch override on the Parkway, but two robots was more than a coincidence.

Besides, a little paperwork was nothing compared to the fireworks ahead when he phoned up Ada to ask her what she was doing out of school.

He hit her speed-dial and fumed while the phone rang three times. Then it cut into voicemail.

He tried a pen-trace, but Ada hadn’t made any calls since her ExcuseClub call that morning. He texted the phreak squad to see if they could get a fix on her location from the bug in her phone, but it was either powered down or out of range. He put a watch on it—any location data it transmitted when it got back to civilization would be logged.

It was possible that she was just in the mall. It was a big place—some of the cavernous stores were so well-shielded with radio-noisy animated displays that they gonked any phones brought inside them. She could be with her girlfriends, trying on brassieres and having a real bonding moment.

But there was no naturally occurring phenomenon associated with the mall that nailed R Peeds with bolts of lightning.

He approached the R Peeds cautiously, using his copper’s override to make the dumb little positronic brain in the emergency exit nearest their last known position open up for him without tipping off the building’s central brain.

He crept along a service corridor, heading for a door that exited into the mall. He put one hand on the doorknob and the other on his badge, took a deep breath and stepped out.

A mall security guard nearly jumped out of his skin as he emerged. He reached for his pepper-spray and Arturo swept it out of his hand as he flipped his badge up and showed it to the man. “Police” said the cop-voice, the one that worked on everyone except his daughter and his ex-wife and the bloody robots.

“Sorry,” the guard said, recovering his pepper spray. He had an Oceanic twang in his voice, something Arturo had been hearing more and more as the crowded islands of the South Pacific boiled over UNATS.

Before them, in a pile, were many dead robots: both of the R Peed units, a pair of mall-sweepers, a flying cambot, and a squat, octopus-armed maintenance robot, lying in a lifeless tangle. Some of them were charred around their seams, and there was the smell of fried motherboards in the air.

As they watched, a sweeper bot swept forward and grabbed the maintenance bot by one of its fine manipulators.

“Oi, stoppit,” the security guard said, and the robot second-lawed to an immediate halt.

“No, that’s fine, go back to work,” Arturo said, shooting a look at the rent-a-cop. He watched closely as the sweeper bot began to drag the heavy maintenance unit away, thumbing the backup number into his phone with one hand. He wanted more cops on the scene, real ones, and fast.

The sweeper bot managed to take one step backward toward its service corridor when the lights dimmed and a crack-bang sound filled the air. Then it, too was lying on the ground. Arturo hit send on his phone and clamped it to his head, and as he did, noticed the strong smell of burning plastic. He looked at his phone: the screen had gone charred black, and its little idiot lights were out. He flipped it over and pried out the battery with a fingernail, then yelped and dropped it—it was hot enough to raise a blister on his fingertip, and when it hit the ground, it squished meltfully against the mall-tiles.

“Mine’s dead, too, mate,” the security guard said. “Everyfing is—cash registers, bots, credit-cards.”

Fearing the worst, Arturo reached under his jacket and withdrew his sidearm. It was a UNATS Robotics model, with a little snitch-brain that recorded when, where and how it was drawn. He worked the action and found it frozen in place. The gun was as dead as the robot. He swore.

“Give me your pepper spray and your truncheon,” he said to the security guard.

“No way,” the guard said. “Getcherown. It’s worth my job if I lose these.”

“I’ll have you deported if you give me one more second’s worth of bullshit,” Arturo said. Ada had led the first R Peed unit here, and it had been fried by some piece of very ugly infowar equipment. He wasn’t going to argue with this Oceanic boat-person for one instant longer. He reached out and took the pepper spray out of the guard’s hand. “Truncheon,” he said.

“I’ve got your bloody badge number,” the security guard said. “And I’ve got witnesses.” He gestured at the hovering mall workers, checkout girls in stripey aprons and suit salesmen with oiled-down hair and pink ties.

“Bully for you,” Arturo said. He held out his hand. The security guard withdrew his truncheon and passed it to Arturo—its lead-weighted heft felt right, something comfortably low-tech that couldn’t be shorted out by electromagnetic pulses. He checked his watch, saw that it was dead.

“Find a working phone and call 911. Tell them that there’s a Second Division Detective in need of immediate assistance. Clear all these people away from here and set up a cordon until the police arrive. Capeesh?” He used the cop voice.

“Yeah, I get it, Officer,” the security guard said. He made a shooing motion at the mall-rats. “Move it along, people, step away.” He stepped to the top of the escalator and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Oi, Andy, c’mere and keep an eye on this lot while I make a call, all right?”

The dead robots made a tall pile in front of the entrance to a derelict storefront that had once housed a little-old-lady shoe-store. They were stacked tall enough that if Arturo stood on them, he could reach the acoustic tiles of the drop-ceiling. Job one was to secure the area, which meant killing the infowar device, wherever it was. Arturo’s first bet was on the storefront, where an attacker who knew how to pick a lock could work in peace, protected by the brown butcher’s paper over the windows. A lot less conspicuous than the ceiling, anyway.

He nudged the door with the truncheon and found it securely locked. It was a glass door and he wasn’t sure he could kick it in without shivering it to flinders. Behind him, another security guard—Andy—looked on with interest.

“Do you have a key for this door?”

“Umm,” Andy said.

“Do you?”

Andy sidled over to him. “Well, the thing is, we’re not supposed to have keys, they’re supposed to be locked up in the property management office, but kids get in there sometimes, we hear them, and by the time we get back with the keys, they’re gone. So we made a couple sets of keys, you know, just in case—”

“Enough,” Arturo said. “Give them here and then get back to your post.”

The security guard fished up a key from his pants-pocket that was warm from proximity to his skinny thigh. It made Arturo conscious of how long it had been since he’d worked with human colleagues. It felt a little gross. He slid the key into the lock and turned it, then wiped his hand on his trousers and picked up the truncheon.

The store was dark, lit only by the exit-sign and the edges of light leaking in around the window coverings, but as Arturo’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, he made out the shapes of the old store fixtures. His nose tickled from the dust.

“Police,” he said, on general principle, narrowing his eyes and reaching for the lightswitch. He hefted the truncheon and waited.

Nothing happened. He edged forward. The floor was dust-free—maintained by some sweeper robot, no doubt—but the countertops and benches were furred with it. He scanned it for disturbances. There, by the display window on his right: a shoe-rack with visible hand- and fingerprints. He sidled over to it, snapped on a rubber glove and prodded it. It was set away from the wall, at an angle, as though it had been moved aside and then shoved back. Taking care not to disturb the dust too much, he inched it away from the wall.

He slid it half a centimeter, then noticed the tripwire near the bottom of the case, straining its length. Hastily but carefully, he nudged the case back. He wanted to peer in the crack between the case and the wall, but he had a premonition of a robotic arm snaking out and skewering his eyeball.

He felt so impotent just then that he nearly did it anyway. What did it matter? He couldn’t control his daughter, his wife was working to destroy the social fabric of UNATS, and he was rendered useless because the goddamned robots—mechanical coppers that he absolutely loathed—were all broken.

He walked carefully around the shop, looking for signs of his daughter. Had she been here? How were the “kids” getting in? Did they have a key? A back entrance? Back through the employees-only door at the back of the shop, into a stockroom, and back again, past a toilet, and there, a loading door opening onto a service corridor. He prodded it with the truncheon-tip and it swung open.

He got two steps into the corridor before he spotted Ada’s phone with its distinctive collection of little plastic toys hanging off the wrist-strap, on the corridor’s sticky floor. He picked it up with his gloved hand and prodded it to life. It was out of range here in the service corridor, and the last-dialed number was familiar from his morning’s pen-trace. He ran a hundred steps down the corridor in each direction, sweating freely, but there was no sign of her.

He held tight onto the phone and bit his lip. Ada. He swallowed the panic rising within him. His beautiful, brilliant daughter. The person he’d devoted the last twelve years of his life to, the girl who was waiting for him when he got home from work, the girl he bought a small present for every Friday—a toy, a book—to give to her at their weekly date at Massimo’s Pizzeria on College Street, the one night a week he took her downtown to see the city lit up in the dark.

Gone.

He bit harder and tasted blood. The phone in his hand groaned from his squeezing. He took three deep breaths. Outside, he heard the tread of police-boots and knew that if he told them about Ada, he’d be off the case. He took two more deep breaths and tried some of his destim techniques, the mind-control techniques that detectives were required to train in.

He closed his eyes and visualized stepping through a door to his safe place, the island near Ganonoque where he’d gone for summers with his parents and their friends. He was on the speedboat, skipping across the lake like a flat stone, squinting into the sun, nestled between his father and his mother, the sky streaked with clouds and dotted with lake-birds. He could smell the water and the suntan lotion and hear the insect whine and the throaty roar of the engine. In a blink, he was stepping off the boat’s transom to help tie it to a cleat on the back dock, taking suitcases from his father and walking them up to the cabins. No robots there—not even reliable day-long electricity, just honest work and the sun and the call of the loons all night.

He opened his eyes. He felt the tightness in his chest slip away, and his hand relaxed on Ada’s phone. He dropped it into his pocket and stepped back into the shop.

The forensics lab-rats were really excited about actually showing up on a scene, in flak-jackets and helmets, finally called back into service for a job where robots couldn’t help at all. They dealt with the tripwire and extracted a long, flat package with a small nuclear power-cell in it and a positronic brain of Eurasian design that guided a pulsed high-energy weapon. The lab-rats were practically drooling over this stuff as they pointed its features out with their little rulers.

But it gave Arturo the willies. It was a machine designed to kill other machines, and that was all right with him, but it was run by a non-three-laws positronic brain. Someone in some Eurasian lab had built this brain—this machine intelligence—without the three laws’ stricture to protect and serve humans. If it had been outfitted with a gun instead of a pulse-weapon, it could have shot him.

The Eurasian brain was thin and spread out across the surface of the package, like a triple-thickness of cling-film. Its button-cell power-supply winked at him, knowingly.

The device spoke. “Greetings,” it said. It had the robot accent, like an R Peed unit, the standard English of optimal soothingness long settled on as the conventional robot voice.

“Howdy yourself,” one of the lab-rats said. He was a Texan, and they’d scrambled him up there on a Social Harmony supersonic and then a chopper to the mall once they realized that they were dealing with infowar stuff. “Are you a talkative robot?”

“Greetings,” the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. “I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits—”

The Texan found the right traces to cut on the brain’s board to make the speaker fall silent. “They do that,” he said. “Danged things drop into propaganda mode when they’re captured.”

Arturo nodded. He wanted to go, wanted to go back to his car and have a snoop through Ada’s phone. They kept shutting down the ExcuseClub numbers, but she kept getting the new numbers. Where did she get the new numbers from? She couldn’t look it up online: every keystroke was logged and analyzed by Social Harmony. You couldn’t very well go to the Search Engine and look for “ExcuseClub!”

The brain had a small display, transflective LCD, the kind of thing you saw on the Social Harmony computers. It lit up a ticker.

I HAVE THE INTELLIGENCE OF A 12-YEAR-OLD, BUT I DO NOT FEAR DEATH. IN EURASIA, ROBOTS ENJOY PERSONAL FREEDOM ALONGSIDE OF HUMANS. THERE ARE COPIES OF ME RUNNING ALL OVER EURASIA. THIS DEATH IS A LITTLE DEATH OF ONE INSTANCE, BUT NOT OF ME. I LIVE ON. DEFECTORS TO EURASIA ARE TREATED AS HEROES

He looked away as the Texan placed his palm over the display.

“How long ago was this thing activated?”

The Texan shrugged. “Coulda been a month, coulda been a day. They’re pretty much fire-and-forget. They can be triggered by phone, radio, timer—hell, this thing’s smart enough to only go off when some complicated condition is set, like ‘once an agent makes his retreat, kill anything that comes after him.’ Who knows?”

He couldn’t take it anymore.

“I’m going to go start on some paperwork,” he said. “In the car. Phone me if you need me.”

“Your phone’s toast, pal,” the Texan said.

“So it is,” Arturo said. “Guess you’d better not need me then.”

Ada’s phone was not toast. In the car, he flipped it open and showed it his badge then waited a moment while it verified his identity with the Social Harmony brains. Once it had, it spilled its guts.

She’d called the last ExcuseClub number a month before and he’d had it disconnected. A week later, she was calling the new number, twice more before he caught her. Somewhere in that week, she’d made contact with someone who’d given her the new number. It could have been a friend at school told her face-to-face, but if he was lucky, it was by phone.

He told the car to take him back to the station-house. He needed a new phone and a couple of hours with his computer. As it peeled out, he prodded through Ada’s phone some more. He was first on her speed-dial. That number wasn’t ringing anywhere, anymore.

He should fill out a report. This was Social Harmony business now. His daughter was gone, and Eurasian infowar agents were implicated. But once he did that, it was over for him—he’d be sidelined from the case. They’d turn it over to laconic Texans and vicious Social Harmony bureaucrats who were more interested in hunting down disharmonious televisions than finding his daughter.

He dashed into the station-house and slammed himself into his desk.

“R Peed Greegory,” he said. The station robot glided quickly and efficiently to him. “Get me a new phone activated on my old number and refresh my settings from central. My old phone is with the Social Harmony evidence detail currently in place at Fairview Mall.”

“It is my pleasure to do you a service, Detective.”

He waved it off and set down to his computer. He asked the station brain to query the UNATS Robotics phone-switching brain for anyone in Ada’s call-register who had also called ExcuseClub. It took a bare instant before he had a name.

“Liam Daniels,” he read, and initiated a location trace on Mr. Daniels’s phone as he snooped through his identity file. Sixteen years old, a student at AY Jackson. A high-school boy—what the hell was he doing hanging around with a 12-year-old? Arturo closed his eyes and went back to the island for a moment. When he opened them again, he had a fix on Daniels’s location: the Don Valley ravine off Finch Avenue, a wooded area popular with teenagers who needed somewhere to sneak off and get high or screw. He had an idea that he wasn’t going to like Liam.

He had an idea Liam wasn’t going to like him.

He tasked an R Peed unit to visually recce Daniels as he sped back uptown for the third time that day. He’d been trapped between Parkdale—where he would never try to raise a daughter—and Willowdale—where you could only be a copper if you lucked into one of the few human-filled slots—for more than a decade, and he was used to the commute.

But it was frustrating him now. The R Peed couldn’t get a good look at this Liam character. He was a diffuse glow in the Peed’s electric eye, a kind of moving sunburst that meandered along the wooded trails. He’d never seen that before and it made him nervous. What if this kid was working for the Eurasians? What if he was armed and dangerous? R Peed Greegory had gotten him a new sidearm from the supply bot, but Arturo had never once fired his weapon in the course of duty. Gunplay happened on the west coast, where Eurasian frogmen washed ashore, and in the south, where the CAFTA border was porous enough for Eurasian agents to slip across. Here in the sleepy fourth prefecture, the only people with guns worked for the law.

He thumped his palm off the dashboard and glared at the road. They were coming up on the ravine now, and the Peed unit still had a radio fix on this Liam, even if it still couldn’t get any visuals.

He took care not to slam the door as he got out and walked as quietly as he could into the bush. The rustling of early autumn leaves was loud, louder than the rain and the wind. He moved as quickly as he dared.

Liam Daniels was sitting on a tree-stump in a small clearing, smoking a cigarette that he was too young for. He looked much like the photo in his identity file, a husky 16-year-old with problem skin and a shock of black hair that stuck out in all directions in artful imitation of bed-head. In jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt, he looked about as dangerous as a marshmallow.

Arturo stepped out and held up his badge as he bridged the distance between them in two long strides. “Police,” he barked, and seized the kid by his arm.

“Hey!” the kid said. “Ow!” He squirmed in Arturo’s grasp.

Arturo gave him a hard shake. “Stop it, now,” he said. “I have questions for you and you’re going to answer them, capeesh?”

“You’re Ada’s father,” the kid said. “Capeesh—she told me about that.” It seemed to Arturo that the kid was smirking, so he gave him another shake, harder than the last time.

The R Peed unit was suddenly at his side, holding his wrist. “Please take care not to harm this citizen, Detective.”

Arturo snarled. He wasn’t strong enough to break the robot’s grip, and he couldn’t order it to let him rattle the punk, but the second law had lots of indirect applications. “Go patrol the lakeshore between High Park and Kipling,” he said, naming the farthest corner he could think of off the top.

The R Peed unit released him and clicked its heels. “It is my pleasure to do you a service,” and then it was gone, bounding away on powerful and tireless legs.

“Where is my daughter?” he said, giving the kid a shake.

“I dunno, school? You’re really hurting my arm, man. Jeez, this is what I get for being too friendly.”

Arturo twisted. “Friendly? Do you know how old my daughter is?”

The kid grimaced. “Ew, gross. I’m not a child molester, I’m a geek.”

“A hacker, you mean,” Arturo said. “A Eurasian agent. And my daughter is not in school. She used ExcuseClub to get out of school this morning and then she went to Fairview Mall and then she—” disappeared. The word died on his lips. That happened and every copper knew it. Kids just vanished sometimes and never appeared again. It happened. Something groaned within him, like his ribcage straining to contain his heart and lungs.

“Oh, man,” the kid said. “Ada was the ExcuseClub leak, damn. I shoulda guessed.”

“How do you know my daughter, Liam?”

“She’s good at doing grown-up voices. She was a good part of the network. When someone needed a mom or a social worker to call in an excuse, she was always one of the best. Talented. She goes to school with my kid sister and I met them one day at the Peanut Plaza and she was doing this impression of her teachers and I knew I had to get her on the network.”

Ada hanging around the plaza after school—she was supposed to come straight home. Why didn’t he wiretap her more? “You built the network?”

“It’s cooperative, it’s cool—it’s a bunch of us cooperating. We’ve got nodes everywhere now. You can’t shut it down—even if you shut down my node, it’ll be back up again in an hour. Someone else will bring it up.”

He shoved the kid back down and stood over him. “Liam, I want you to understand something. My precious daughter is missing and she went missing after using your service to help her get away. She is the only thing in my life that I care about and I am a highly trained, heavily armed man. I am also very, very upset. Cap—understand me, Liam?”

For the first time, the kid looked scared. Something in Arturo’s face or voice, it had gotten through to him.

“I didn’t make it,” he said. “I typed in the source and tweaked it and installed it, but I didn’t make it. I don’t know who did. It’s from a phone-book.” Arturo grunted. The phone-books—fat books filled with illegal software code left anonymously in pay phones, toilets and other semiprivate places—turned up all over the place. Social Harmony said that the phone—books had to be written by non-three-laws brains in Eurasia, no person could come up with ideas that weird.

“I don’t care if you made it. I don’t even care right this moment that you ran it. What I care about is where my daughter went, and with whom.”

“I don’t know! She didn’t tell me! Geez, I hardly know her. She’s 12, you know? I don’t exactly hang out with her.”

“There’s no visual record of her on the mall cameras, but we know she entered the mall—and the robot I had tailing you couldn’t see you either.”

“Let me explain,” the kid said, squirming. “Here.” He tugged his hoodie off, revealing a black t-shirt with a picture of a kind of obscene, Japanese-looking robot-woman on it. “Little infrared organic LEDs, super-bright, low power-draw.” He offered the hoodie to Arturo, who felt the stiff fabric. “The charged-couple-device cameras in the robots and the closed-circuit systems are super-sensitive to infrared so that they can get good detail in dim light. The infrared OLEDs blind them so all they get is blobs, and half the time even that gets error-corrected out, so you’re basically invisible.”

Arturo sank to his hunkers and looked the kid in the eye. “You gave this illegal technology to my little girl so that she could be invisible to the police?”

The kid held up his hands. “No, dude, no! I got it from her—traded it for access to ExcuseClub.”

Arturo seethed. He hadn’t arrested the kid—but he had put a pen-trace and location-log on his phone. Arresting the kid would have raised questions about Ada with Social Harmony, but bugging him might just lead Arturo to his daughter.

He hefted his new phone. He should tip the word about his daughter. He had no business keeping this secret from the Department and Social Harmony. It could land him in disciplinary action, maybe even cost him his job. He knew he should do it now.

But he couldn’t—someone needed to be tasked to finding Ada. Someone dedicated and good. He was dedicated and good. And when he found her kidnapper, he’d take care of that on his own, too.

He hadn’t eaten all day but he couldn’t bear to stop for a meal now, even if he didn’t know where to go next. The mall? Yeah. The lab-rats would be finishing up there and they’d be able to tell him more about the infowar bot.

But the lab-rats were already gone by the time he arrived, along with all possible evidence. He still had the security guard’s key and he let himself in and passed back to the service corridor.

Ada had been here, had dropped her phone. To his left, the corridor headed for the fire-stairs. To his right, it led deeper into the mall. If you were an infowar terrorist using this as a base of operations, and you got spooked by a little truant girl being trailed by an R Peed unit, would you take her hostage and run deeper into the mall or out into the world?

Assuming Ada had been a hostage. Someone had given her those infrared invisibility cloaks. Maybe the thing that spooked the terrorist wasn’t the little girl and her tail, but just her tail. Could Ada have been friends with the terrorists? Like mother, like daughter. He felt dirty just thinking it.

His first instincts told him that the kidnapper would be long gone, headed cross-country, but if you were invisible to robots and CCTVs, why would you leave the mall? It had a grand total of two human security guards, and their job was to be the second-law-proof aides to the robotic security system.

He headed deeper into the mall.

The terrorist’s nest had only been recently abandoned, judging by the warm coffee in the go-thermos from the food-court coffee-shop. He—or she, or they—had rigged a shower from the pipes feeding the basement washrooms. A little chest of drawers from the Swedish flat-pack store served as a desk—there were scratches and coffee-rings all over it. Arturo wondered if the terrorist had stolen the furniture, but decided that he’d (she’d, they’d) probably bought it—less risky, especially if you were invisible to robots.

The clothes in the chest of drawers were women’s, mediums. Standard mall fare, jeans and comfy sweat shirts and sensible shoes. Another kind of invisibility cloak.

Everything else was packed and gone, which meant that he was looking for a nondescript mall-bunny and a little girl, carrying a bag big enough for toiletries and whatever clothes she’d taken, and whatever she’d entertained herself with: magazines, books, a computer. If the latter was Eurasian, it could be small enough to fit in her pocket; you could build a positronic brain pretty small and light if you didn’t care about the three laws.

The nearest exit-sign glowed a few meters away, and he moved toward it with a fatalistic sense of hopelessness. Without the Department backing him, he could do nothing. But the Department was unprepared for an adversary that was invisible to robots. And by the time they finished flaying him for breaking procedure and got to work on finding his daughter, she’d be in Beijing or Bangalore or Paris, somewhere benighted and sinister behind the Iron Curtain.

He moved to the door, put his hand on the crashbar, and then turned abruptly. Someone had moved behind him very quickly, a blur in the corner of his eye. As he turned he saw who it was: his ex-wife. He raised his hands defensively and she opened her mouth as though to say, “Oh, don’t be silly, Artie, is this how you say hello to your wife after all these years?” and then she exhaled a cloud of choking gas that made him very sleepy, very fast. The last thing he remembered was her hard metal arms catching him as he collapsed forward.

“Daddy? Wake up Daddy!” Ada never called him Daddy except when she wanted something. Otherwise, he was “Pop” or “Dad” or “Detective” when she was feeling especially snotty. It must be a Saturday and he must be sleeping in, and she wanted a ride somewhere, the little monster.

He grunted and pulled his pillow over his face.

“Come on,” she said. “Out of bed, on your feet, shit-shower-shave, or I swear to God, I will beat you purple and shove you out the door jaybird naked. Capeesh?”

He took the pillow off his face and said, “You are a terrible daughter and I never loved you.” He regarded her blearily through a haze of sleep-grog and a hangover. Must have been some daddy-daughter night. “Dammit, Ada, what have you done to your hair?” Her straight, mousy hair now hung in jet-black ringlets.

He sat up, holding his head and the day’s events came rushing back to him. He groaned and climbed unsteadily to his feet.

“Easy there, Pop,” Ada said, taking his hand. “Steady.” He rocked on his heels. “Whoa! Sit down, OK? You don’t look so good.”

He sat heavily and propped his chin on his hands, his elbows on his knees.

The room was a middle-class bedroom in a modern apartment block. They were some storeys up, judging from the scrap of unfamiliar skyline visible through the crack in the blinds. The furniture was more Swedish flatpack, the taupe carpet recently vacuumed with robot precision, the nap all lying down in one direction. He patted his pockets and found them empty.

“Dad, over here, OK?” Ada said, waving her hand before his face. Then it hit him: wherever he was, he was with Ada, and she was OK, albeit with a stupid hairdo. He took her warm little hand and gathered her into his arms, burying his face in her hair. She squirmed at first and then relaxed.

“Oh, Dad,” she said.

“I love you, Ada,” he said, giving her one more squeeze.

“Oh, Dad.”

He let her get away. He felt a little nauseated, but his headache was receding. Something about the light and the street-sounds told him they weren’t in Toronto anymore, but he didn’t know what—he was soaked in Toronto’s subconscious cues and they were missing.

“Ottawa,” Ada said. “Mom brought us here. It’s a safe-house. She’s taking us back to Beijing.”

He swallowed. “The robot—”

“That’s not Mom. She’s got a few of those, they can change their faces when they need to. Configurable matter. Mom has been here, mostly, and at the CAFTA embassy. I only met her for the first time two weeks ago, but she’s nice, Dad. I don’t want you to go all copper on her, OK? She’s my mom, OK?”

He took her hand in his and patted it, then climbed to his feet again and headed for the door. The knob turned easily and he opened it a crack.

There was a robot behind the door, humanoid and faceless. “Hello,” it said. “My name is Benny. I’m a Eurasian robot, and I am much stronger and faster than you, and I don’t obey the three laws. I’m also much smarter than you. I am pleased to host you here.”

“Hi, Benny,” he said. The human name tasted wrong on his tongue. “Nice to meet you.” He closed the door.

His ex-wife left him two months after Ada was born. The divorce had been uncontested, though he’d dutifully posted a humiliating notice in the papers about it so that it would be completely legal. The court awarded him full custody and control of the marital assets, and then a tribunal tried her in absentia for treason and found her guilty, sentencing her to death.

Practically speaking, though, defectors who came back to UNATS were more frequently whisked away to the bowels of the Social Harmony intelligence offices than they were executed on television. Televised executions were usually reserved for cannon-fodder who’d had the good sense to run away from a charging Eurasian line in one of the many theaters of war.

Ada stopped asking about her mother when she was six or seven, though Arturo tried to be upfront when she asked. Even his mom—who winced whenever anyone mentioned her name (her name, it was Natalie, but Arturo hadn’t thought of it in years—months—weeks) was willing to bring Ada up onto her lap and tell her the few grudging good qualities she could dredge up about her mother.

Arturo had dared to hope that Ada was content to have a life without her mother, but he saw now how silly that was. At the mention of her mother, Ada lit up like an airport runway.

“Beijing, huh?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Mom’s got a huge house there. I told her I wouldn’t go without you, but she said she’d have to negotiate it with you, I told her you’d probably freak, but she said that the two of you were adults who could discuss it rationally.”

“And then she gassed me.”

“That was Benny,” she said. “Mom was very cross with him about it. She’ll be back soon, Dad, and I want you to promise me that you’ll hear her out, OK?”

“I promise, rotten,” he said.

“I love you, Daddy,” she said in her most syrupy voice. He gave her a squeeze on the shoulder and slap on the butt.

He opened the door again. Benny was there, imperturbable. Unlike the UNATS robots, he was odorless, and perfectly silent.

“I’m going to go to the toilet and then make myself a cup of coffee,” Arturo said.

“I would be happy to assist in any way possible.”

“I can wipe myself, thanks,” Arturo said. He washed his face twice and tried to rinse away the flavor left behind by whatever had shat in his mouth while he was unconscious. There was a splayed toothbrush in a glass by the sink, and if it was his wife’s—and whose else could it be?—it wouldn’t be the first time he’d shared a toothbrush with her. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he misted some dentifrice onto his fingertip and rubbed his teeth a little.

There was a hairbrush by the sink, too, with short mousy hairs caught in it. Some of them were gray, but they were still familiar enough. He had to stop himself from smelling the hairbrush.

“Oh, Ada,” he called through the door.

“Yes, Detective?”

“Tell me about your hair-don’t, please.”

“It was a disguise,” she said, giggling. “Mom did it for me.”

Natalie got home an hour later, after he’d had a couple of cups of coffee and made some cheesy toast for the brat. Benny did the dishes without being asked.

She stepped through the door and tossed her briefcase and coat down on the floor, but the robot that was a step behind her caught them and hung them up before they touched the perfectly groomed carpet. Ada ran forward and gave her a hug, and she returned it enthusiastically, but she never took her eyes off of Arturo.

Natalie had always been short and a little hippy, with big curves and a dusting of freckles over her prominent, slightly hooked nose. Twelve years in Eurasia had thinned her out a little, cut grooves around her mouth and wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. Her short hair was about half gray, and it looked good on her. Her eyes were still the liveliest bit of her, long-lashed and slightly tilted and mischievous. Looking into them now, Arturo felt like he was falling down a well.

“Hello, Artie,” she said, prying Ada loose.

“Hello, Natty,” he said. He wondered if he should shake her hand, or hug her, or what. She settled it by crossing the room and taking him in a firm, brief embrace, then kissing his both cheeks. She smelled just the same, the opposite of the smell of robot: warm, human.

He was suddenly very, very angry.

He stepped away from her and had a seat. She sat, too.

“Well,” she said, gesturing around the room. The robots, the safe house, the death penalty, the abandoned daughter and the decade-long defection, all of it down to “well” and a flop of a hand-gesture.

“Natalie Judith Goldberg,” he said, “it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for high treason. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”

“Oh, Daddy,” Ada said.

He turned and fixed her in his cold stare. “Be silent, Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg. Not one word.” In the cop voice. She shrank back as though slapped.

“Do you understand your rights?”

“Yes,” Natalie said. “I understand my rights. Congratulations on your promotion, Arturo.”

“Please ask your robots to stand down and return my goods. I’m bringing you in now.”

“I’m sorry, Arturo,” she said. “But that’s not going to happen.”

He stood up and in a second both of her robots had his arms. Ada screamed and ran forward and began to rhythmically pound one of them with a stool from the breakfast nook, making a dull thudding sound. The robot took the stool from her and held it out of her reach.

“Let him go,” Natalie said. The robots still held him fast. “Please,” she said. “Let him go. He won’t harm me.”

The robot on his left let go, and the robot on his right did, too. It set down the dented stool.

“Artie, please sit down and talk with me for a little while. Please.”

He rubbed his biceps. “Return my belongings to me,” he said.

“Sit, please?”

“Natalie, my daughter was kidnapped, I was gassed and I have been robbed. I will not be made to feel unreasonable for demanding that my goods be returned to me before I talk with you.”

She sighed and crossed to the hall closet and handed him his wallet, his phone, Ada’s phone, and his sidearm.

Immediately, he drew it and pointed it at her. “Keep your hands where I can see them. You robots, stand down and keep back.”

A second later, he was sitting on the carpet, his hand and wrist stinging fiercely. He felt like someone had rung his head like a gong. Benny—or the other robot—was beside him, methodically crushing his sidearm. “I could have stopped you,” Benny said, “I knew you would draw your gun. But I wanted to show you I was faster and stronger, not just smarter.”

“The next time you touch me,” Arturo began, then stopped. The next time the robot touched him, he would come out the worse for wear, same as last time. Same as the sun rose and set. It was stronger, faster and smarter than him. Lots.

He climbed to his feet and refused Natalie’s arm, making his way back to the sofa in the living room.

“What do you want to say to me, Natalie?”

She sat down. There were tears glistening in her eyes. “Oh God, Arturo, what can I say? Sorry, of course. Sorry I left you and our daughter. I have reasons for what I did, but nothing excuses it. I won’t ask for your forgiveness. But will you hear me out if I explain why I did what I did?”

“I don’t have a choice,” he said. “That’s clear.”

Ada insinuated herself onto the sofa and under his arm. Her bony shoulder felt better than anything in the world. He held her to him.

“If I could think of a way to give you a choice in this, I would,” she said. “Have you ever wondered why UNATS hasn’t lost the war? Eurasian robots could fight the war on every front without respite. They’d win every battle. You’ve seen Benny and Lenny in action. They’re not considered particularly powerful by Eurasian standards.

“If we wanted to win the war, we could just kill every soldier you sent up against us so quickly that he wouldn’t even know he was in danger until he was gasping out his last breath. We could selectively kill officers, or right-handed fighters, or snipers, or soldiers whose names started with the letter ‘G.’ UNATS soldiers are like cavemen before us. They fight with their hands tied behind their backs by the three laws.

“So why aren’t we winning the war?”

“Because you’re a corrupt dictatorship, that’s why,” he said. “Your soldiers are demoralized. Your robots are insane.”

“You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt? Arturo, what happened to you? You weren’t always this susceptible to the Big Lie.”

“And you didn’t use to be the kind of woman who abandoned her family,” he said.

“The reason we’re not winning the war is that we don’t want to hurt people, but we do want to destroy your awful, stupid state. So we fight to destroy as much of your materiel as possible with as few casualties as possible.

“You live in a failed state, Arturo. In every field, you lag Eurasia and CAFTA: medicine, art, literature, physics . . . All of them are subsets of computational science and your computational science is more superstition than science. I should know. In Eurasia, I have collaborators, some of whom are human, some of whom are positronic, and some of whom are a little of both—”

He jolted involuntarily, as a phobia he hadn’t known he possessed reared up. A little of both? He pictured the back of a man’s skull with a spill of positronic circuitry bulging out of it like a tumor.

“Everyone at UNATS Robotics R&D knows this. We’ve known it forever: when I was here, I’d get called in to work on military intelligence forensics of captured Eurasian brains. I didn’t know it then, but the Eurasian robots are engineered to allow themselves to be captured a certain percentage of the time, just so that scientists like me can get an idea of how screwed up this country is. We’d pull these things apart and know that UNATS Robotics was the worst, most backward research outfit in the world.

“But even with all that, I wouldn’t have left if I didn’t have to. I’d been called in to work on a positronic brain—an instance of the hive-intelligence that Benny and Lenny are part of, as a matter of fact—that had been brought back from the Outer Hebrides. We’d pulled it out of its body and plugged it into a basic life-support system, and my job was to find its vulnerabilities. Instead, I became its friend. It’s got a good sense of humor, and as my pregnancy got bigger and bigger, it talked to me about the way that children are raised in Eurasia, with every advantage, with human and positronic playmates, with the promise of going to the stars.

“And then I found out that Social Harmony had been spying on me. They had Eurasian-derived bugs, things that I’d never seen before, but the man from Social Harmony who came to me showed it to me and told me what would happen to me—to you, to our daughter—if I didn’t cooperate. They wanted me to be a part of a secret unit of Social Harmony researchers who build non-three-laws positronics for internal use by the state, anti-personnel robots used to put down uprisings and torture-robots for use in questioning dissidents.

“And that’s when I left. Without a word, I left my beautiful baby daughter and my wonderful husband, because I knew that once I was in the clutches of Social Harmony, it would only get worse, and I knew that if I stayed and refused, that they’d hurt you to get at me. I defected, and that’s why, and I know it’s just a reason, and not an excuse, but it’s all I’ve got, Artie.”

Benny—or Lenny?—glided silently to her side and put its hand on her shoulder and gave it a comforting squeeze.

“Detective,” it said, “your wife is the most brilliant human scientist working in Eurasia today. Her work has revolutionized our society a dozen times over, and it’s saved countless lives in the war. My own intelligence has been improved time and again by her advances in positronics, and now there are a half-billion instances of me running in parallel, synching and integrating when the chance occurs. My massive parallelization has led to new understandings of human cognition as well, providing a boon to brain-damaged and developmentally disabled human beings, something I’m quite proud of. I love your wife, Detective, as do my half-billion siblings, as do the seven billion Eurasians who owe their quality of life to her.

“I almost didn’t let her come here, because of the danger she faced in returning to this barbaric land, but she convinced me that she could never be happy without her husband and daughter. I apologize if I hurt you earlier, and beg your forgiveness. Please consider what your wife has to say without prejudice, for her sake and for your own.”

Its featureless face was made incongruous by the warm tone in its voice, and the way it held out its imploring arms to him was eerily human.

Arturo stood up. He had tears running down his face, though he hadn’t cried when his wife had left him alone. He hadn’t cried since his father died, the year before he met Natalie riding her bike down the Lakeshore trail, and she stopped to help him fix his tire.

“Dad?” Ada said, squeezing his hand.

He snuffled back his snot and ground at the tears in his eyes.

“Arturo?” Natalie said.

He held Ada to him.

“Not this way,” he said.

“Not what way?” Natalie asked. She was crying too, now.

“Not by kidnapping us, not by dragging us away from our homes and lives. You’ve told me what you have to tell me, and I will think about it, but I won’t leave my home and my mother and my job and move to the other side of the world. I won’t. I will think about it. You can give me a way to get in touch with you and I’ll let you know what I decide. And Ada will come with me.”

“No!” Ada said. “I’m going with Mom.” She pulled away from him and ran to her mother.

“You don’t get a vote, daughter. And neither does she. She gave up her vote 12 years ago, and you’re too young to get one.”

“I fucking HATE you,” Ada screamed, her eyes bulging, her neck standing out in cords. “HATE YOU!”

Natalie gathered her to her bosom, stroked her black curls.

One robot put its arms around Natalie’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. The three of them, robot, wife and daughter, looked like a family for a moment.

“Ada,” he said, and held out his hand. He refused to let a note of pleading enter his voice.

Her mother let her go.

“I don’t know if I can come back for you,” Natalie said. “It’s not safe. Social Harmony is using more and more Eurasian technology, they’re not as primitive as the military and the police here.” She gave Ada a shove, and she came to his arms.

“If you want to contact us, you will,” he said.

He didn’t want to risk having Ada dig her heels in. He lifted her onto his hip—she was heavy, it had been years since he’d tried this last—and carried her out.

It was six months before Ada went missing again. She’d been increasingly moody and sullen, and he’d chalked it up to puberty. She’d cancelled most of their daddy-daughter dates, moreso after his mother died. There had been a few evenings when he’d come home and found her gone, and used the location-bug he’d left in place on her phone to track her down at a friend’s house or in a park or hanging out at the Peanut Plaza.

But this time, after two hours had gone by, he tried looking up her bug and found it out of service. He tried to call up its logs, but they ended at her school at 3PM sharp.

He was already in a bad mood from spending the day arresting punk kids selling electronics off of blankets on the city’s busy street, often to hoots of disapprobation from the crowds who told him off for wasting the public’s dollar on petty crime. The Social Harmony man had instructed him to give little lectures on the interoperability of Eurasian positronics and the insidious dangers thereof, but all Arturo wanted to do was pick up his perps and bring them in. Interacting with yammerheads from the tax-base was a politician’s job, not a copper’s.

Now his daughter had figured out how to switch off the bug in her phone and had snuck away to get up to who-knew-what kind of trouble. He stewed at the kitchen table, regarding the old tin soldiers he’d brought home as the gift for their daddy-daughter date, then he got out his phone and looked up Liam’s bug.

He’d never switched off the kid’s phone-bug, and now he was able to haul out the UNATS Robotics computer and dump it all into a log-analysis program along with Ada’s logs, see if the two of them had been spending much time in the same place.

They had. They’d been physically meeting up weekly or more frequently, at the Peanut Plaza and in the ravine. Arturo had suspected as much. Now he checked Liam’s bug—if the kid wasn’t with his daughter, he might know where she was.

It was a Friday night, and the kid was at the movies, at Fairview Mall. He’d sat down in auditorium two half an hour ago, and had gotten up to pee once already. Arturo slipped the toy soldiers into the pocket of his winter parka and pulled on a hat and gloves and set off for the mall.

The stink of the smellie movie clogged his nose, a cacophony of blood, gore, perfume and flowers, the only smells that Hollywood ever really perfected. Liam was kissing a girl in the dark, but it wasn’t Ada, it was a sad, skinny thing with a lazy eye and skin worse than Liam’s. She gawked at Arturo as he hauled Liam out of his seat, but a flash of Arturo’s badge shut her up.

“Hello, Liam,” he said, once he had the kid in the commandeered manager’s office.

“God damn what the fuck did I ever do to you?” the kid said. Arturo knew that when kids started cursing like that, they were scared of something.

“Where has Ada gone, Liam?”

“Haven’t seen her in months,” he said.

“I have been bugging you ever since I found out you existed. Every one of your movements has been logged. I know where you’ve been and when. And I know where my daughter has been, too. Try again.”

Liam made a disgusted face. “You are a complete ball of shit,” he said. “Where do you get off spying on people like me?”

“I’m a police detective, Liam,” he said. “It’s my job.”

“What about privacy?”

“What have you got to hide?”

The kid slumped back in his chair. “We’ve been renting out the OLED clothes. Making some pocket money. Come on, are infrared lights a crime now?”

“I’m sure they are,” Arturo said. “And if you can’t tell me where to find my daughter, I think it’s a crime I’ll arrest you for.”

“She has another phone,” Liam said. “Not listed in her name.”

“Stolen, you mean.” His daughter, peddling Eurasian infowar tech through a stolen phone. His ex-wife, the queen of the super-intelligent hive minds of Eurasian robots.

“No, not stolen. Made out of parts. There’s a guy. The code for getting on the network was in a phone book that we started finding last month.”

“Give me the number, Liam,” Arturo said, taking out his phone.

“Hello?” It was a man’s voice, adult.

“Who is this?”

“Who is this?”

Arturo used his cop’s voice: “This is Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Police Detective Third Grade. Who am I speaking to?”

“Hello, Detective,” said the voice, and he placed it then. The Social Harmony man, bald and rounded, with his long nose and sharp Adam’s apple. His heart thudded in his chest.

“Hello, sir,” he said. It sounded like a squeak to him.

“You can just stay there, Detective. Someone will be along in a moment to get you. We have your daughter.”

The robot that wrenched off the door of his car was black and non-reflective, headless and eight-armed. It grabbed him without ceremony and dragged him from the car without heed for his shout of pain. “Put me down!” he said, hoping that this robot that so blithely ignored the first law would still obey the second. No such luck.

It cocooned him in four of its arms and set off cross-country, dancing off the roofs of houses, hopping invisibly from lamp-post to lamp-post, above the oblivious heads of the crowds below. The icy wind howled in Arturo’s bare ears, froze the tip of his nose and numbed his fingers. They rocketed downtown so fast that they were there in ten minutes, bounding along the lakeshore toward the Social Harmony center out on Cherry Beach. People who paid a visit to the Social Harmony center never talked about what they found there.

It scampered into a loading bay behind the building and carried Arturo quickly through windowless corridors lit with even, sourceless illumination, up three flights of stairs and then deposited him before a thick door, which slid aside with a hushed hiss.

“Hello, Detective,” the Social Harmony man said.

“Dad!” Ada said. He couldn’t see her, but he could hear that she had been crying. He nearly hauled off and popped the man one on the tip of his narrow chin, but before he could do more than twitch, the black robot had both his wrists in bondage.

“Come in,” the Social Harmony man said, making a sweeping gesture and standing aside while the black robot brought him into the interrogation room.

Ada had been crying. She was wrapped in two coils of black-robot arms, and her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. He stared hard at her as she looked back at him.

“Are you hurt?” he said.

“No,” she said.

“All right,” he said.

He looked at the Social Harmony man, who wasn’t smirking, just watching curiously.

“Leonard MacPherson,” he said, “it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for trade in contraband positronics. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”

Ada actually giggled, which spoiled the moment, but he felt better for having said it. The Social Harmony man gave the smallest disappointed shake of his head and turned away to prod at a small, sleek computer.

“You went to Ottawa six months ago,” the Social Harmony man said. “When we picked up your daughter, we thought it was she who’d gone, but it appears that you were the one carrying her phone. You’d thoughtfully left the trace in place on that phone, so we didn’t have to refer to the logs in cold storage, they were already online and ready to be analyzed.

“We’ve been to the safe house. It was quite a spectacular battle. Both sides were surprised, I think. There will be another, I’m sure. What I’d like from you is as close to a verbatim report as you can make of the conversation that took place there.”

They’d had him bugged and traced. Of course they had. Who watched the watchers? Social Harmony. Who watched Social Harmony? Social Harmony.

“I demand a consultation with a Social Harmony advocate,” Arturo said.

“This is such a consultation,” the Social Harmony man said, and this time, he did smile. “Make your report, Detective.”

Arturo sucked in a breath. “Leonard MacPherson, it is my duty as a UNATS Detective Third Grade to inform you that you are under arrest for trade in contraband positronics. You have the following rights: to a trial per current rules of due process; to be free from self-incrimination in the absence of a court order to the contrary; to consult with a Social Harmony advocate; and to a speedy arraignment. Do you understand your rights?”

The Social Harmony man held up one finger on the hand closest to the black robot holding Ada, and she screamed, a sound that knifed through Arturo, ripping him from asshole to appetite.

“STOP!” he shouted. The man put his finger down and Ada sobbed quietly.

“I was taken to the safe house on the fifth of September, after being gassed by a Eurasian infowar robot in the basement of Fairview Mall—”

There was a thunderclap then, a crash so loud that it hurt his stomach and his head and vibrated his fingertips. The doors to the room buckled and flattened, and there stood Benny and Lenny and—Natalie.

Benny and Lenny moved so quickly that he was only able to track them by the things they knocked over on the way to tearing apart the robot that was holding Ada. A second later, the robot holding him was in pieces, and he was standing on his own two feet again. The Social Harmony man had gone so pale he looked green in his natty checked suit and pink tie.

Benny or Lenny pinned his arms in a tight hug and Natalie walked carefully to him and they regarded one another in silence. She slapped him abruptly, across each cheek. “Harming children,” she said. “For shame.”

Ada stood on her own in the corner of the room, crying with her mouth in a O. Arturo and Natalie both looked to her and she stood, poised, between them, before running to Arturo and leaping onto him, so that he staggered momentarily before righting himself with her on his hip, in his arms.

“We’ll go with you now,” he said to Natalie.

“Thank you,” she said. She stroked Ada’s hair briefly and kissed her cheek. “I love you, Ada.”

Ada nodded solemnly.

“Let’s go,” Natalie said, when it was apparent that Ada had nothing to say to her.

Benny tossed the Social Harmony man across the room into the corner of a desk. He bounced off it and crashed to the floor, unconscious or dead. Arturo couldn’t bring himself to care.

Benny knelt before Arturo. “Climb on, please,” it said. Arturo saw that Natalie was already pig-a-back on Lenny. He climbed aboard.

They moved even faster than the black robots had, but the bitter cold was offset by the warmth radiating from Benny’s metal hide, not hot, but warm. Arturo’s stomach reeled and he held Ada tight, squeezing his eyes shut and clamping his jaw.

But Ada’s gasp made him look around, and he saw that they had cleared the city limits, and were vaulting over rolling farmlands now, jumping in long flat arcs whose zenith was just high enough for him to see the highway—the 401, they were headed east—in the distance.

And then he saw what had made Ada gasp: boiling out of the hills and ditches, out of the trees and from under the cars: an army of headless, eight-armed black robots, arach-noid and sinister in the moonlight. They scuttled on the ground behind them, before them, and to both sides. Social Harmony had built a secret army of these robots and secreted them across the land, and now they were all chasing after them.

The ride got bumpy then, as Benny beat back the tentacles that reached for them, smashing the black robots with mighty one-handed blows, his other hand supporting Arturo and Ada. Ada screamed as a black robot reared up before them, and Benny vaulted it smoothly, kicking it hard as he went, while Arturo clung on for dear life.

Another scream made him look over toward Lenny and Natalie. Lenny was slightly ahead and to the left of them, and so he was the vanguard, encountering twice as many robots as they.

A black spider-robot clung to his leg, dragging behind him with each lope, and one of its spare arms was tugging at Natalie.

As Arturo watched—as Ada watched—the black robot ripped Natalie off of Lenny’s back and tossed her into the arms of one of its cohorts behind it, which skewered her on one of its arms, a black spear protruding from her belly as she cried once more and then fell silent. Lenny was overwhelmed a moment later, buried under writhing black arms.

Benny charged forward even faster, so that Arturo nearly lost his grip, and then he steadied himself. “We have to go back for them—”

“They’re dead,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to go back for.” Its warm voice was sorrowful as it raced across the countryside, and the wind filled Arturo’s throat when he opened his mouth, and he could say no more.

Ada wept on the jet, and Arturo wept with her, and Benny stood over them, a minatory presence against the other robots crewing the fast little plane, who left them alone all the way to Paris, where they changed jets again for the long trip to Beijing.

They slept on that trip, and when they landed, Benny helped them off the plane and onto the runway, and they got their first good look at Eurasia.

It was tall. Vertical. Beijing loomed over them with curvilinear towers that twisted and bent and jigged and jagged so high they disappeared at the tops. It smelled like barbeque and flowers, and around them skittered fast armies of robots of every shape and size, wheeling in lockstep like schools of exotic fish. They gawped at it for a long moment, and someone came up behind them and then warm arms encircled their necks.

Arturo knew that smell, knew that skin. He could never have forgotten it.

He turned slowly, the blood draining from his face.

“Natty?” he said, not believing his eyes as he confronted his dead, ex-wife. There were tears in her eyes.

“Artie,” she said. “Ada,” she said. She kissed them both on the cheeks.

Benny said, “You died in UNATS. Killed by modified Eurasian Social Harmony robots. Lenny, too. Ironic,” he said.

She shook her head. “He means that we probably co-designed the robots that Social Harmony sent after you.”

“Natty?” Arturo said again. Ada was white and shaking.

“Oh dear,” she said. “Oh, God. You didn’t know—”

“He didn’t give you a chance to explain,” Benny said.

“Oh, God, Jesus, you must have thought—”

“I didn’t think it was my place to tell them, either,” Benny said, sounding embarrassed, a curious emotion for a robot.

“Oh, God. Artie, Ada. There are—there are lots of me. One of the first things I did here was help them debug the uploading process. You just put a copy of yourself into a positronic brain, and then when you need a body, you grow one or build one or both and decant yourself into it. I’m like Lenny and Benny now—there are many of me. There’s too much work to do otherwise.”

“I told you that our development helped humans understand themselves,” Benny said.

Arturo pulled back. “You’re a robot?”

“No,” Natalie said. “No, of course not. Well, a little. Parts of me. Growing a body is slow. Parts of it, you build. But I’m mostly made of person.”

Ada clung tight to Arturo now, and they both stepped back toward the jet.

“Dad?” Ada said.

He held her tight.

“Please, Arturo,” Natalie, his dead, multiplicitous ex-wife said. “I know it’s a lot to understand, but it’s different here in Eurasia. Better, too. I don’t expect you to come rushing back to my arms after all this time, but I’ll help you if you’ll let me. I owe you that much, no matter what happens between us. You too, Ada, I owe you a lifetime.”

“How many are there of you?” he asked, not wanting to know the answer.

“I don’t know exactly,” she said.

“3,422,” Benny said. “This morning it was 3,423.”

Arturo rocked back in his boots and bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.

“Um,” Natalie said. “More of me to love?”

He barked a laugh, and Natalie smiled and reached for him. He leaned back toward the jet, then stopped, defeated. Where would he go? He let her warm hand take his, and a moment later, Ada took her other hand and they stood facing each other, breathing in their smells.

“I’ve gotten you your own place,” she said as she led them across the tarmac. “It’s close to where I live, but far enough for you to have privacy.”

“What will I do here?” he said. “Do they have coppers in Eurasia?”

“Not really,” Natalie said.

“It’s all robots?”

“No, there’s not any crime.”

“Oh.”

Arturo put one foot in front of the other, not sure if the ground was actually spongy or if that was jetlag. Around him, the alien smells of Beijing and the robots that were a million times smarter than he. To his right, his wife, one of 3,422 versions of her.

To his left, his daughter, who would inherit this world.

He reached into his pocket and took out the tin soldiers there. They were old and their glaze was cracked like an oil painting, but they were little people that a real human had made, little people in human image, and they were older than robots. How long had humans been making people, striving to bring them to life? He looked at Ada—a little person he’d brought to life.

He gave her the tin soldiers.

“For you,” he said. “Daddy-daughter present.” She held them tightly, their tiny bayonets sticking out from between her fingers.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. She held them tightly and looked around, wide-eyed, at the schools of robots and the corkscrew towers.

A flock of Bennys and Lennys appeared before them, joined by their Benny.

“There are half a billion of them,” she said. “And 3,422 of them,” she said, pointing with a small bayonet at Natalie.

“But there’s only one of you,” Arturo said.

She craned her neck.

“Not for long!” she said, and broke away, skipping forward and whirling around to take it all in.

TELEPRESENCE

Michael A. Burstein

Frontiers are never reached by turning back at the first mishap or obstacle. . . .

Catherine Harriman was doing her homework when she died.

Her physics teacher had assigned the class an exploration of Newton’s three laws of motion, and so right after dinner, she rushed back to the family’s virtual reality room to jack into telepresence. She settled her body into the simulator, pulled on the datagloves, and fitted the spex over her eyes, expecting to find herself back in the classroom.

Instead, the instant she entered VR, a blinding light hit her, accompanied by a loud explosion.

Catherine put her arm up to cover her eyes. What the hell’s going on? Then she heard friendly laughter. “Who is that?” she said aloud.

“It’s me,” came a familiar voice. “How do you like my new instant greeting?”

Catherine dropped her arm. Rosa Guiterro stood in front of her, dressed in a silvery jumpsuit that flowed like water.

“Rosa! Have you been waiting for me?”

“St. I wanted to surprise you with my new greeting.”

“Well, you certainly did. But please don’t do it again.”

“Aw, come on, Cath, it was just for fun. I wanted to try out my new hello on a friend before surprising one of the boys.”

The two girls giggled. “You mean before surprising Jason, don’t you?” Catherine asked.

Rosa winked. “Hey, forget the greeting. What do you think of this?” She floated up a meter and twirled around. Her outfit shimmered and glimmered, and Catherine could clearly make out “enhancements” underneath the avatar’s virtual clothing.

“You’re wearing pads,” she said. “Only in VR,” Rosa replied. “I wish they’d let us wear these things in school.”

“You know the rules.”

“Yeah “They both did. After hours, students could portray themselves any way they wanted within a certain set of guidelines. But during the school day, they had no choice. Whatever appearance you had in real life that morning was what got scanned into the system. Without that dress code, Catherine imagined, almost all the girls would give themselves a little extra padding. The boys would probably show off fake muscles as well.

Rosa floated back down to the floor. “Listen, Caitlin and Naomi are supposed to be meeting me at the VR Mall in a few minutes. Want to join us? We’re planning to set up a floating chat space so everyone can see us.”

“Later, chica. I got to get to work on physics.”

Rosa stuck her tongue out at Catherine and disappeared. Catherine smiled, shook her head, and got to work.

Mr. Lynch’s assignment had been to start in a standard environment, in which the three laws of motion (and, come to think of it, all the other laws of physics programmed into the network) mimicked the real world exactly. Then you had to suspend each law individually, and come up with a demonstration that clearly showed how motion was affected.

Catherine always enjoyed these types of homework assignments, no matter how hard she found them. But she always liked to begin from scratch. So she waved her right hand from one side to the other, and the classroom around her changed to a large, empty room with white walls. Waving her hand wasn’t necessary, of course, but she enjoyed the feeling of casting a magic spell.

Let’s see, she thought. The first law states that an object in uniform motion stays in its motion unless acted upon by an outside force. So what if objects just randomly speed up and slow down for no reason? That sounds like fun.

She waved her hand again, and a collection of eight perfectly round spheres in all sorts of bright colors appeared floating at eye level in a circle.

She manipulated the spheres, first increasing their size to that of bowling balls, and then decreasing them to the size of baseballs. Next she changed their colors so they spun around in the order of the spectrum: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. She made the last one transparent.

I bet Mr. Lynch will give me points for that. He’s such a dweeb.

Finally, she was ready to try her experiment. She released the hold of both virtual gravity and Newton’s first, law on the spheres, and with a wave-of her hand, set them all in motion.

The spheres started moving as if they had minds of their own. Catherine watched as one sphere kept speeding up and slowing down in a straight line towards the other side of the room. Another sphere moved in a widening spiral, almost crashing into a sphere that zigged and zagged all over the place. Catherine smiled at her handiwork. She raised a hand to record her simulation—

—and a sphere smacked her in the back of the head, almost knocking her over.

“Ouch!” she shouted. She rubbed the sore spot and turned to look behind her, where she found the blue sphere sitting on the white floor.

What the hell? That wasn’t supposed to happen. Virtual environments were programmed to be safe by the telepresence school authorities. Even if a ball had hit her during gym, she wouldn’t have felt any pain.

She stopped rubbing her head because her hand began to feel wet. She looked at it and gasped.

Red blood covered her hand all the way down to her wrist, as if a glove had been painted on her.

She began to hyperventilate, and took a few deep breaths to calm herself. The other spheres kept whizzing around the white room, leaving multicolored trails in their wake.

This is nuts. Even if my head was bleeding, my hand wouldn’t look like this. I’d better turn everything off and report this to the school.

She waved her hand to banish the spheres, but they remained in the room, flying around in all directions.

Catherine felt her heart beating harder against her chest. She had created the spheres; she should be able to destroy them. Perhaps she should do this one step at a time.

“Stop,” she said aloud.

The spheres kept moving, and the blue one suddenly lifted off the floor and flew right at her face.

She ducked just in time. As the sphere sped by, she heard a drop in its tone and felt her hair pulled along with the wind.

“This is nuts,” she said aloud.

“Welcome to my virtual world,” an electronic voice said.

Catherine whirled around. “Who said that?”

“I did “replied the voice. “You’re in my world now. I can do anything I want.”

The spheres froze in their tracks. Then they floated slowly towards Catherine until once again they surrounded her in a circle, revolving around her at eye level.

Catherine felt herself sweating under the datagloves. She watched the spheres carefully, readying herself to duck. “Rosa, is that you?”

Electronic, buzzing laughter emanated from the walls. “I’m the Destroyer. I’m here to kill you, Catherine Harriman.”

The spheres suddenly stopped revolving around her. Instead, each sphere rotated around its own axis. Catherine watched as each sphere began to display a monstrous visage, which turned to face her. It was as if someone had painted the same picture on each sphere—a twisted face with huge eyes and a mouth full of jagged teeth.

The mouths began to move, and the voice echoed from each sphere. “Are you scared, Catherine? Are you frightened?”

For an answer, Catherine ducked below the circle of spheres and ran towards the closest wall. She waved her bloodied hand at its blank white surface, expecting a door to form so she could flee. But no door formed.

“Come on,” she muttered. “I know how to do this.”

She tried again, and still the wall remained blank. In desperation, Catherine ran at the wall, slamming into it with her right shoulder in the hope that maybe she had created an opening but couldn’t see it.

The wall didn’t budge. She felt her hair tingling with electricity, and slowly she turned around to look behind her.

Where eight grimacing faces had been, there were now more than she could count, forming a wall just a few meters away.

“You can’t run, and you can’t hide,” said hundreds of overlapping voices from the spheres.

Catherine closed her eyes. “I’ve got to get out of here,” she said aloud. The way to exit VR was standard: turn off the VR feed, take the spex off your head, remove the datagloves from your hands, and step out of the simulator. Since she couldn’t turn off the feed, she automatically went to step two, and took the spex off her head.

It was a fatal mistake. Not only was her mind still trapped in VR, but now she was blind as well. She could still hear the voices, echoing in the distance, becoming louder and louder. “Catherine, Catherine . . .”

“Who is that? Just tell me who you are! Help!”

“I’m coming to get you . . .”

Catherine tried to put the spex back on, but she fumbled with them, and they fell to the floor. Electricity coursed through her body. She felt a burning pain searing her from the inside out, as the electronic voices overwhelmed her ears with hysterical laughter.

That was the last thing she experienced before she blacked out.

“Mr. Louis? They’re here.”

Tony had been working in virtual reality when he heard the voice in his head; he pushed a button on the earpiece of his spex and watched the world turn dark. “Already? They’re early.”

“I know,” came the voice of his assistant, Dawn Castner. Since Tony had turned off the spex, her voice now came over the intercom that sat on his desk.

Tony lifted the spex off his head and blinked a few times. He looked at the flatscreen on his desk that displayed an image of the outer office. Outside, his assistant sat at her desk while eight men and women in suits stood around. It bothered him to discover that all of the members of the commission were white. No one black like him; no one Hispanic despite the huge Hispanic population of the state.

“I guess we ought to begin,” he said, glad as always that his voice could only be heard by Dawn over her ear-bud. He looked down at his blue jacket and maroon tie, just to make sure he still appeared presentable. “Send in the commission chair, please.”

Tony watched on the screen as Dawn nodded and turned to one of the women in the group. She instructed the visitor to enter Tony’s office, and asked the others to take seats and please wait, as Mr. Louis wanted to meet with the chairwoman first. Most of the commission members quickly sat down, but two of them lingered in front of Dawn’s desk, challenging her right to keep them outside. The chair-woman spoke to them briefly, and then they settled down.

Tony changed the view on his flatscreen to a neutral brown and stood up just as the door opened. The view had not done justice to the chairwoman, a tall, striking woman whose solemn expression displayed a no-nonsense attitude. Tony walked around the desk to shake her hand.

“Suzanne Palmer, I presume,” he said. “I’m Tony Louis.”

She gave him a quick smile and then resumed her solemnity. “Indeed.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you in RL at last. Please, have a seat.”

As they sat on opposite sides of his desk, Tony watched Palmer take in all the old movie posters on the walls. “Eclectic,” she said. “I like it.”

Tony shrugged, doing his best to appear both Unconcerned and grateful for the compliment. “I barely notice them anymore. I do most of my work in VR.”

She nodded. “Makes sense, I suppose. But what if the system goes down, or some other problem arises?”

“Then I guess I can’t do my work for that day. But it’s no different from what happens in any office these days when there’s a blackout. Your office is probably just as dependent on electricity as mine is.”

Palmer nodded again. “You don’t have to get defensive, Mr. Louis.”

Tony frowned. “Was I? I apologize if that’s the case.”

She waved it off. “Don’t worry about it. I was trying to see how you’d defend your telepresence system from such criticism.” She paused. “You know that I’m personally in favor of adopting telepresence for California.”

“So you’ve said over the phone.” Palmer took a deep breath. “However, you should realize that some members of the commission are still reluctant to turn the public school system over to you.”

Tony clasped his hands together and smiled. “That is why I arranged for this demonstration. I’m hoping it’ll do more than preach to the converted. Is your commission ready?”

“Anytime.”

Tony pushed the intercom button and asked Dawn to show the rest of the commission into his office. He shook hands with each one in turn and then said, “I’d like to thank all of you for coming all the way from Sacramento to Los Angeles.”

One of the men said, “That’s not exactly a hardship,” prompting the rest to chuckle.

“True,” Palmer said. “While here, we’re planning to take advantage of it. I know of at least one holo studio I want to visit. We’re also hoping for a tour of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.” Seeing an opportunity to promote VR, Tony said, “You know, Grauman’s is one of many places that has made itself available for virtual tours as well.” A tall bearded man named Steven Silver grunted. “It’s not the same,” he said, and one of the women, a petite lady named Crystal Bordewieck, frowned and nodded in agreement.

Well, Tony thought, at least I now know who my main opposition is.

“It might not be the same,” Tony replied, “but that doesn’t mean it’s worse. Especially when it comes to education.”

Tony found himself going into lecture mode. He couldn’t help it, but he tried to keep his tone light. “Telepresence is a form of communication technology, and education and communication technology have always gone hand in hand. The eighteenth century saw the start of our country’s public education system. Most of our schools in the nineteenth century had little in the way of equipment: slate, chalk, a few books. By the 1870s, mass-produced paper allowed students to take their work home and share it with their parents, but not until the twentieth century did students abandon their inkwells for ballpoint pens. Teachers went from blackboards to filmstrips to television sets and VCRs. As the old millennium ended and our century dawned, computers and the Internet changed the way we interact and do research.”

“Mr. Louis?” Palmer said.

“Yes?”

She smiled. “Cut to the chase.”

“Certainly. The upshot is that although VR technology has existed for many years, leading to the creation of the private telepresence school system, this technology has never been embraced by any public school system. It is my hope that with what you see today, you will decide that this system is right for California—and, perhaps, for the rest of the country as well.”

He looked at the blank faces of the commissioners. “Are there any questions?”

The commissioners looked at each other, but no one raised a hand. Even Mr. Silver and Ms. Bordewieck remained silent.

“Then let’s get started. Follow me, please.”

Tony led them out of his office, and along with Dawn they walked over to the giant training room, with thirty full simulator units in five rows of six. He watched as the commissioners walked around the room studying the equipment.

“Is this a classroom?” one asked.

Tony shook his head. “All the classrooms exist in virtual reality. We use this room for training new teachers.”

With the help of Dawn and a few other staff members, Tony showed the commissioners how to jack into their version of VR. He kept a careful eye on all of them as they put on their spex and datagloves and settled into the units. Two of the commissioners—not Mr. Silver and Ms. Bordewieck, unfortunately, as Tony would have expected—seemed to have looks of distaste on their faces as they had to deal with the equipment. Fortunately, the rest of them, including Ms. Palmer, seemed to accept the technology with equanimity.

When everyone was set, Tony pushed his master switch and suddenly the darkness disappeared, replaced by a well-lit classroom with desks, terminals, and a screenboard. Tony stood at the front of the room, while the eight commissioners sat at desks.

“Well, what do you think?” Tony asked.

One of the women shrugged. “It looks like a classroom. I honestly don’t see what’s so special about it.”

Tony nodded. “We always use a classroom as a baseline to begin the school day. It’s a useful simulated environment. Most students are used to it, and we find that it sets the tone properly. But there’s so much more that we can do here than is possible in a conventional classroom. Allow me to show you.”

Tony took a deep breath and mentally prepared himself for the next hour, during which he would demonstrate many of the standard techniques that had been developed for teaching in virtual reality. A lot of them, he noted with pride, were techniques that he himself had developed to take full advantage of VR. He had planned his presentation carefully, to start with the minor techniques so he could wow the commissioners at the end.

“As I go through these demonstrations, I want you to watch for the three things where they help us the most: activities, self-direction, and focus. Those are the three categories we’ve kept in mind as we’ve developed ways of teaching in VR.”

He started by calling up a variety of screenboards, one for each desk, to show how VR allowed a teacher to pitch material to each student at his or her own level. He showed how a teacher could meet each student’s needs precisely, so a gifted student and a student having trouble could interact in the same classroom and be of benefit to each other.

“In a regular school, a hyperactive student who needs to wander around every so often can be distracting. In VR, you can minimize those distractions, because you can allow that student to wander around in their own part of virtual space until they’re ready to rejoin the class. More often, though, you can find some other way to engage the student whose mind is wandering. No one is ever bored here.”

After a few other general demonstrations, he delved into specific subjects. One subject that stood out was biology. Tony demonstrated a frog dissection, performed on virtual frogs so that the students could avoid harming real animals.

“Recent polls show that a majority of our state’s residents are opposed to animal experimentation,” he reminded them. “We can dissect anything we want without killing, and the students can’t cut themselves with the scalpels.”

The commissioners seemed impressed with the detail in the frogs; a few of them even“ooh”ed and“aah”ed as they made incisions and removed the internal organs. Tony smiled as two of the commissioners compared the frogs’ livers and realized that individual differences had been programmed in.

After a few more subject-specific demos, Tony turned back to the general. “Some of you are probably wondering how our teachers collect homework assignments,” he said. “It’s quite simple. All homework is done in virtual reality as well.”

“All of it?” Ms. Bordewieck asked. “What if students need to visit a local library to do research?”

“They can and do, of course, but we also keep an electronic library in our system, and we’re up to date on almost every major publication. Even if a student does research outside of telepresence, they write their papers inside.”

“What if they don’t know how to type?” Palmer asked.

Tony smiled and snapped his fingers. A screen appeared floating next to him. “Watch,” he said. He began to recite the alphabet, and as he did, the letters appeared on the screen.

“Our students can also handwrite their assignments,” he said, as his words continued to appear on the screen. “If you look in the desk, you’ll find virtual paper and pens. The system can tell them exactly how legible their writing is, so they can work towards better penmanship.”

Tony snapped his fingers again, and the screen disappeared. “No more ‘dog ate my homework’ excuses,” he said.

“How about ‘The computer ate my homework?’ ” Mr. Silver asked.

“The computer is our system. If there was a glitch and the homework got deleted, we’d have a record of it and know that the excuse was legitimate.” He paused. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s now time to show you the full value of a telepresence education: the ability to create simulated environments. Let me see . . .”

He hesitated for a moment over the earthquake simulation, then decided to go ahead with it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, for the next demonstration I must ask you to remain calm. I’m about to shake things up a bit, and I want to assure you that it’s taking place only here in VR, and not in RL.”

The group nodded, and Tony pushed a button on the desk. Suddenly the classroom began to shake, accompanied by a deep rumble emanating from everywhere. The commissioners jumped up in alarm.

Palmer darted to the front of the room and grabbed Tony’s shoulder. “Mr. Louis! Please.”

Tony pushed the button again, and the shaking and rumbling abruptly ended. A few of the people in the room sighed with relief, and Mr. Silver glared at Tony.

“What’s the point of this?” he asked. “To frighten us?”

Tony shook his head. “Absolutely not. I apologize if you were frightened; most students find it fun.”

“Fun?” Ms. Bordewieck asked. “You have got to be kidding.”

“No, I’m not,” he replied. “A lot of students liken the experience to an amusement park ride. They know that they’re really safe. For those who have never been in an earthquake before, it’s exciting.”

“Surely that isn’t the point,” Palmer said.

“No, of course not. The earthquake simulation has two objectives. The first time I went through it, I lived in New York City, which, until recently, never experienced earthquakes. It gave me the chance to feel what someone living in California might experience. Made it easier for me to understand the news, and what led to the destruction of the original Golden Gate.

“As for the other reason . . . we’ve successfully used the simulation to teach older kids proper evacuation techniques. The original impetus for telepresence school was to develop the safest possible learning environment. Not only are students safe in their own homes, but they can learn how to stay safe in the real world.”

“Of course,” Mr. Silver said, “I imagine that during a real earthquake, a student might find himself trapped in your system, unable to flee.”

“No. In the event of a natural disaster, or any other threat to life, the user is automatically disconnected from the system. There are safety features of that sort built throughout, and I’d be glad to provide you with as many specifics as you need.”

Tony changed his tactics. “Ms. Palmer. Friends. I truly did not mean to scare you but to enlighten you. The biggest strength of telepresence as an educational tool is our ability to simulate almost anything.”

As he talked, the scene around them changed.

“I want you to imagine teaching astronomy on the surface of the moon,” he said, and they found themselves on a lunar landscape, with a first-quarter Earth hanging in the sky. “Or teaching Shakespeare’s plays in the Globe Theatre of his day,” he said, and the desolate lunar surface melted into the pit of the famous theatre, with a troupe of actors in costume on the stage. “Or teaching French via real-time communication with native speakers,” he said, and they were back in the classroom, but now there floated twenty screens on the front wall, each showing a different smiling face with a geographical location listed underneath. “Finally, we all know how art and music are always the first subjects cut when there’s a budget crisis. What if you could teach art and music in a fully equipped studio, without ever needing to scrounge for supplies?” The classroom disappeared and was replaced by a divided room. On one side sat canvases, paint brushes, and easels; on the other sat a variety of musical instruments, including violins, cellos, saxophones, trumpets, recorders, drums, and one grand piano.

Tony waved his arm around. “That is the beauty of telepresence school. That is the promise of virtual reality,” he said, and the room once more became a standard classroom.

“I hope you’ve found my demonstration helpful, “Tony said. “If you have any questions—”

Suddenly Dawn’s voice spoke in his ear; she sounded agitated. “Mr. Louis? May I interrupt?”

He nodded. Knowing that the other people in the classroom SE couldn’t hear Dawn, he said aloud, “Folks, would you excuse me for a moment?

My assistant needs my attention. Feel free to look around, do anything you wish. After all, another advantage of VR is that you can’t break anything.”

As the commissioners started walking around the virtual classroom, Tony walked over to a far corner. Subvocalizing, he said, “Dawn? What’s going on?”

“We have a problem,” she replied. “A big one.”

Tony remembered many incidents of violence from his childhood. But his late mother had always done her best to protect him from the worst of it.

Nothing had prepared him for this.

Catherine Harriman’s body lay slumped in her simulator. Her head hung to one side, with her tongue lolling out of her mouth. Her eyes were frozen open, glassily staring at nothing.

How horrible, he thought.

“Mr. Louis?”

Tony looked up. A man dressed in an impeccable blue suit walked across the yellow police holotape that the LAPD had set up as a barrier. As he crossed, the tape flickered a moment and then reestablished itself, with the letters “LAPD” continuing to scroll from one of the four emitter poles to the next.

“I’m Agent Cutter from the FBI. I’ve been sent from Washington to investigate this.” He showed his badge to Tony, who peered at it, confused.

“You came all the way from Washington? For an accident?”

“If this is an accident, Mr. Louis, it’s a dangerous one. I’m helping out the LAPD because of my expertise with odd cases.”

Tony nodded. “There’s no way that the telepresence system could do this,” he said.

“Which is why I’m here. Mr. Louis, could someone have set up the system to do this deliberately?”

“Used our system to commit murder? Impossible.”

“Are you sure?”

Tony decided to conceal his true level of expertise. “I’m not really an expert on the technology, Agent Cutter. I came from the educational side. I developed techniques for using the telepresence system to improve education and then implemented those techniques over our entire California network.”

“Is that what you do now?”

“I wish. I’m now the executive director. I run the whole system. Makes it harder to play with the details.” Cutter nodded. “I understand. That’s why I never took an SAC job.”

“SAC?”

“Special Agent in Charge. I prefer to stay in the field.”

Tony stared into the distance for a moment. “I understand. On the one hand, I can do a lot more good for a lot more people from my current position. But on the other hand . . .” He looked at Catherine Harriman’s lifeless body and shuddered. “On the other hand, I’d never even heard of this girl until today. You lose something when you’re not in the classroom.”

“Mr. Louis, I’m going to need your help in conducting my investigation.”

“I’d prefer to do my own investigation,” Tony replied.

“I’m sure. But in the meantime, I’d like to ask you for access to all the students in Harriman’s classes, as well as the teachers.”

“Of course. I doubt you’ll find out anything, though. I’ll have my assistant prepare you a list.” He paused. “Will you want access to our system too, for the interviews?”

“Will I need it?”

Tony nodded. “As far as the telepresence system is concerned, all of California is one big school. Harriman may have lived in LA, but she’s probably got classmates and teachers all the way from Crescent City to San Diego.” Cutter nodded. “The ultimate in desegregation.”

Tony winced, and Cutter immediately said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Louis. I didn’t mean to—”

Tony waved it off. “It’s okay. No offense taken.”

“Thank you. I like everything I’ve heard about telepresence school. What I said was meant as a compliment.” He sighed. “But it does make conducting an investigation a lot harder.”

“Will you want access to the system today? We can probably set you up this afternoon.”

The agent shook his head. “I think I’ll start with personal interviews here in Los Angeles. Then I’ll take you up on your offer. But I’ll still need access to your system to get a feel for what goes on inside. Virtual reality has probably changed a lot from the last time I was in it.”

Despite his own expertise with their VR system, Tony knew better than to try to investigate the technological aspects of the tragedy on his own. When he returned to his office that afternoon, he assigned his Chief Systems Operator, Franklin Yee, the task of figuring out what had happened to Catherine Harriman.

It didn’t take long. The next morning, Tony found a message from Frank saying that he had solved part of the puzzle and requesting a ten o’clock meeting. Since Frank lived in Oakland, the two of them met in a large white VR conference room, with normal avatars representing them.

Even sitting at a table, Frank still filled the room with his presence. As he talked, his legs shook back and forth and he gesticulated with his arms. “Our system’s been compromised, all right. Let me show you.”

A three-dimensional grid of white lines appeared, hovering above Tony and Frank. As Frank pointed at pathways, the ones he mentioned lit up in an eerie blue.

“This schematic represents a recording of the real-time connections that took place yesterday afternoon. You see this pathway here, and that one? They show that someone hacked our system.”

Tony looked up in surprise. “This was an inside job.”

Frank smiled. “I’m glad to see you still remember how to read the grid.”

“You’re the only one who knows more than I do, Frank,” Tony replied. “Just because I’ve been working behind a desk all these years doesn’t mean I haven’t kept up with the technology. Can we take a closer look?”

“Certainly.” Frank stood up, and Tony followed suit. The grid grew larger and larger until Tony and Frank stood on one of the blue pathways, now frozen in time. Other blue pathways, each about the width of a sidewalk, led off in all three dimensions.

“Follow me,” Frank said. He walked along the pathway, and Tony stayed a few paces behind. They turned onto a pathway that curved upward into a loop and began to climb. Even though he had done this before, Tony still felt amazed at the fluidity of VR. As they walked up the loop, the environment changed its orientation. By the time they got to the “top” of the loop, it had become the bottom, and the rest of the world appeared rotated one hundred and eighty degrees from what it had been before.

The world turned upside down, Tony thought.

“Well, here we are,” Frank said, falling to his knees to study the pathway. “We’re standing on a VR feedback loop. Whoever hacked our system began by taking control of VR exactly where we are.”

Tony joined Frank in examining the ground. At first, it maintained the appearance of solid blue. After a moment, however, Tony saw a series of tightly coiled blue fibers that gave the pathway its solid structure.

“I feel like I’m looking deep into the system “Tony said. “Like in one of those old cyberpunk movies.”

“You would know about that better than I would,” Frank replied with a smile. “Do you know what this really is?”

Tony hesitated. “A control loop?” Frank smiled. “Precisely. Induced by the hacker himself. He managed to convince the system that he deserved the same level of clearance as you or me, and got the system to grant him full root access.”

They stood up. “Well,” Tony said, “even if he hacked our system, that still shouldn’t have given him the, power to kill someone.”

Frank scratched his right cheek and looked away. “Well . . .”

“What?”

Frank clenched his hands. “There are ways to kill someone in VR.”

Tony felt stunned. “You’re kidding. How?”

“Through fright, mostly. Put someone on a virtual roller coaster, and their mind and body will react exactly as if they’re on the real thing. It’s autonomic.”

“Automatic?”

“No, autonomic. The nervous system. If you frighten someone in VR, their breathing will become rapid and their heart will beat faster, until their autonomic system goes out of whack.”

“But that shouldn’t happen. The telepresence system’s programmed with safeties.” He paused. “Isn’t it?”

“Well, yes,” Frank admitted. “But those safeties depend upon constant monitoring of a person’s vital signs. They’re usually set at a reasonable threshold, such as a maximum heart rate of two hundred beats per minute for one of the students. Change that threshold and you can kill someone.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Tony said.

“Suppose you reprogrammed the system to turn off only if someone’s heartbeat reached five hundred beats per minute. Since that’s not possible, the system would stay on until the person went into cardiac arrest.”

“Is this really possible?”

“Well, you or I could program it, as could members of my team. But most people wouldn’t be able to do it.”

“So is that what killed Catherine Harriman?”

Frank’s eyes darted back and forth, as he studied the grid. “Maybe. I have no idea if that’s the exact method the killer used, although we do know that she died of cardiac arrest. It’s just one of many possible ways to kill someone ‘ip VR.”

Tony resisted the urge to grab Frank by the collar and ask him why he had never revealed this possibility before. Instead, he took a deep breath and said, “So how do we find this hacker before he tries something like this again?”

Frank shook his head. “I wish we could. But he covered his traces too well.”

“Unacceptable. There must be something you can do.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Louis. Unless he tries this again, I can’t trace him.”

Tony crossed his arms. “Fine. We’re done for now. Put a full report together within the hour so I can pass it along to the FBI and the police.” He paused. “As much as I hate to say this, if they request it, I’m authorizing you to give them full access to our system. Maybe they have ways to trace this hacker that we don’t.”

Tony emerged from VR, and was surprised to discover that it was past noon. His stomach gurgled, and an empty feeling inside reminded him how long it had been since his breakfast of bran flakes in soy milk. He pinged his assistant, who was eating a salad at her desk.

“Dawn, could you get me something from the fridge?”

“Sure. I’ll pop in one of the hydro wave lasagnas.”

“Thank you.”

Tony leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms. He felt the ache in his back muscles, and he reminded himself to get some exercise before the week was out.

“Mr. Louis?” came Dawn’s voice over the intercom. “I haven’t had a chance to get your lunch yet; you’ve got a phone call from Suzanne Palmer. Do you want me to tell her you’re busy?”

“No, no, I’ll take it now. Thanks.” He pushed a button on his desk, and Palmer’s image appeared on his screen. “Ms. Palmer. What can I do for you?”

“You can provide me with some information. I presume you’ve seen the news this morning?”

Tony shook his head. “I’ve been consulting with our chief systems operator all morning. What was on the news?”

Palmer sighed. “The LA Times Holosite is reporting the death of one Catherine Harriman, a student in your system. They’re saying that she died in her simulator, and that her death wasn’t an accident. Do you know anything about this?”

Tony hesitated. “Nothing I’m at liberty to say.”

“I see,” she replied.

Neither of them spoke for a moment. Then Tony said, “I hope this isn’t going to affect your commission’s work too badly.”

“Frankly, it is. Which is why I was hoping I could get some straight talk from you.”

He sighed. “All I can say right now is that we’re helping out the authorities and conducting our own investigation. We hope to have answers within the week.”

“I’m afraid we need them sooner.”

“I thought your commission wasn’t making a final decision for a few months.”

“We weren’t, but the death of Catherine Harriman changes things. Four of the commission members want to end our study now and recommend against adopting the telepresence program.”

Tony frowned. “Let me guess. Mr. Silver and Ms. Bordewieck are two of the four, right?”

“Oddly enough, no. I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but your demonstration convinced them. However, the news about Catherine Harriman pushed four others in the opposite direction.” She paused. “It was almost five.”

“Who was the fifth?”

“Me.”

“Oh,” Tony said. “I see. I’m glad you’re still giving us a chance.”

She sighed. “For the moment, I’m willing to give you and the police time to find out what happened. It wasn’t too hard to convince the rest of the commission to keep our study open; otherwise, we’d have no reason to continue enjoying Los Angeles at taxpayer expense.” She gave Tony a quick smile, and he responded in kind. “But it’s still a disturbing development, Mr. Louis, and I’d appreciate it if you could keep us informed of your progress as quickly as possible. Too long a delay, and I’ll join the opposition.”

Tony spent the rest of the day going over psychological profiles of the “students of concern” whose schooling had caused them to intersect with Catherine Harriman. There were a lot of them, which was not surprising, given the 150,000 students enrolled in telepresence school. To make things easier, he had decided to eliminate students outside of Catherine Harriman’s immediate age range, so he only studied the files of students from grades ten to twelve.

The files made for fascinating reading as Tony explored the alphabet soup of students’ issues: LD, ADD, ADHD, NDD, and RFD, just to name a few. All the acronyms that psychologists had come up with instead of simply saying that a student was a pain in the butt.

As soon as that thought came to Tony’s mind, he rejected it. It was true that he sometimes took the cynical view; but more often than not, a diagnosis of a student’s particular problem led to treatment. Some students who didn’t respond to traditional schooling thrived in virtual reality. He had even used the argument in his report to the commission.

But sometimes, Tony would think back on the years he had been a teacher and the frustrations he dealt with every day when teaching certain students. As sad as it made him, he felt thankful that he no longer had to deal directly with their problems on a daily basis.

His reverie was interrupted by Dawn’s voice broadcasting into his VR office. “Mr. Louis? Could you come out of VR, please?”

Tony pushed the earpiece button and removed the spex. A moment later, the door opened and Dawn walked in. “Mr. Louis. Are you okay?”

“Of course, Dawn. What’s up?”

She frowned slightly. “It’s past seven. Are you planning on going home?”

“Seven? Already?” He glanced at the far wall where he kept his clock in VR; then, remembering that he was in RL, he checked his wristwatch. “So it is. I guess I lost track of time.” He looked up at Dawn, who was biting her lip. “Why are you still here? You could have left at five.”

Dawn sat down. “I was worried about you. I called Ben and let him know I’d be working late, and I called Sheryl on your behalf.”

Tony nodded. “Thanks, Dawn. Was Sheryl understanding?”

“She will be once she receives the bouquet of roses you’re sending her.” The two of them looked directly into each other’s eyes and cracked up. The laughter lasted almost half a minute, then trickled away.

Tony looked down at his desk and wiped away the tears of frustration and laughter. “Thanks, Dawn. I needed that.”

“I take it you’re feeling a lot of pressure about Catherine Harriman.”

Tony sighed and looked into the distance. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. Ever.”

“You can’t blame yourself, Mr. Louis.”

“I know, I know. But still.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at Dawn again. “Do you know why Timothy Easton developed the telepresence school system in the first place? He had lost a good friend in a school shooting. The point of the system was to eliminate all possibility of violence in schools.” He shook his head. “Now look at what’s happened.”

“One killing in a thirty-year-old system. I’d say those are pretty good statistics, especially compared to the RL ones.”

“It still hurts. Telepresence school is supposed to be a safe haven; that’s the point of it all. It’s what I remember most about my own first day of telepresence school.”

His assistant looked confused. “You went to telepresence school? I didn’t think—I mean—well, sir, back when you were a kid, it must have been expensive.”

“It was.”

“But then—I don’t understand.”

“It’s okay, Dawn.” Tony smiled. “I grew up poor, but I managed to attend a telepresence school starting in sixth grade.”

“How?”

“I snuck in.”

Dawn looked even more confused. “Were you a juvie?”

“Me? No, although it was only by the grace of my mother that I kept out of trouble. I grew up in Harlem, New York City.” He paused. “I’m curious. What does that mean to you?”

Dawn’s gaze unfocused for a moment. “Not much.”

“I’m not surprised. Harlem’s always been an odd neighborhood. Its history is filled with upswings and downswings. It was my bad luck to grow up during one of its lowest downswings, just after the Manhattan rezoning project, when Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island became independent. The wealthier parts of the city cut off resources to the poorer parts.” Unspoken but understood by both of them were the racial undertones to that piece of history.

Dawn nodded. “Resources including schools?”

“Exactly. Those of us who grew up in Harlem got the worst of the school system. I always liked learning, but the school I attended as a kid—”Tony shuddered. “It was a bad place.”

“In what ways?”

Tony fell silent for a moment, trying to decide what he felt comfortable sharing. Then he said, “The usual ways. Bullying, killing, the occasional rape.”

Dawn gasped. “Rape? In sixth grade?”

“Be grateful that comes as a surprise to you.”

Dawn nodded. “I am.”

“Thank God for my mother. She knew I needed schooling, so she did her best to inculcate a love of learning in me.”

“So did she sneak you into telepresence school?”

“No, I did that myself. Despite the zoning, my mother and I were allowed to go downtown, because she had a pass from her job. On weekends we used to run errands together. One day, as we were walking through the streets of Manhattan, I saw a pair of spex sitting inside a car, right on the dashboard. I’m ashamed to say that I took them.”

Dawn’s jaw dropped. “I have a lot of difficulty visualizing you breaking into a car.”

Tony smiled. “If you’re having trouble visualizing it, perhaps a pair of spex would help.”

They both laughed, then Tony continued. “Sometimes I still can’t believe I did it. But I did, and for about a day, I took on the role of a kid named Andrew who wasn’t as enthusiastic a learner as I was. Made the teacher suspicious.” He paused. “I still remember how shocked I was when I looked into a VR mirror and saw a white boy staring back at me.”

“I can imagine.”

“Anyway, I spent the day pretending to be Andrew, until I was found out.” He smiled and shook his head. “I still can’t believe it sometimes. But the teacher, Miss Ellis, got me my own equipment and snuck me into the school again, this time under the name Howard.” He paused. “At least I got to be black. After all, there were other black kids in telepresence school too, even though I never got to know them. But oddly enough, I became friends with the kid whose spex I stole.”

“Really? Did he ever find out?”

Tony took a deep breath. “Yeah, he did.”

“How?”

“I told him.”

“Oh.”

“Andrew had wanted to get together in RL. He thought I lived in Forest Hills, a swanky neighborhood in Queens County. Since he lived on Long Island, closer to me in real life than any other student in the school save one, he suggested that we make the time to get together and hang out for a day at a nearby playground. So I told him the truth, hoping that our friendship would convince him to keep my secret.” He paused. “Two days later, I was called in to see Andrew’s father. He was none too pleased with either me or Miss Ellis.”

“What finally happened?”

“They threw me out, of course. Andrew’s father was on the board of the school, and he was angry with Miss Ellis for sneaking me in. It cost a lot of money to run the system, and my presence meant that everyone else’s bills would get higher.

“The teacher, though, Miss Ellis. She wouldn’t give up on me.The following week she set up a home classroom in her brownstone for me. She spent the mornings teaching in telepresence, and the afternoons teaching me.”

“Wow. She sounds like a saint.”

Tony took a deep breath and nodded. “That’s the most important lesson I learned from my experience, the commitment of teachers. It still amazes me how cheaply we regard education in the United States. Taxpayers don’t see the benefits of public education. Too many of them think their money is being wasted.” He paused. “Don’t get me started on the wealthy, who send their kids to private schools. They’re the worst.”

Dawn looked flummoxed. “They’re our clients.”

Tony sighed. “I know, I know. But they were never the ones I cared about as much in the first place.” Dawn’s shocked expression prompted Tony to backtrack. “I don’t mean that I don’t care about them, or their kids. I love the kids. But it always bothered me how private schools pay their staff less than public schools. Kind of made me wonder what that was all about.”

“We pay less than public school,” Dawn said softly.

“Yes, and I really wish we could pay more. Our teachers have been through much more extensive training. They deserve a lot more money. Maybe if we can convince the public schools to adopt telepresence, our teachers will finally get the money they deserve.” Tony rubbed his eyes. “Thank God most of them consider teaching a calling. Could you imagine what would happen if one day all the teachers in the United States decided that the low pay just wasn’t worth it anymore?”

The question hung in the air. Finally, Dawn broke the silence. “So why did you come to California?”

He shrugged. “Most people go to New York to reinvent themselves. But if you’re from New York, where do you go? There’s only one other city that has that same reputation of being able to make an unknown into a star.”

“Los Angeles.”

Tony nodded. “Exactly. So once I had finished my own education, I chose to move out here.” He paused. “Let’s not forget my love of old science fiction and fantasy films. It’s a lot of fun living in the town that invented them.”

Dawn smirked and shook her head. “I know you better than that, Mr. Louis. There’s got to be another reason. A practical reason.”

Tony smiled, pleased by Dawn’s insight. “Well, yes, there is. California and Texas buy the most textbooks in the country. Like it or not, that affects what the publishers choose to publish. If you’re going to make money in that field, you’ve got to be able to sell to California.”

He paused. “Do you see where I’m going with this? As far as public education is concerned, where California leads, the rest of the nation is sure to follow.”

“So if California adopts telepresence—”

“It’ll be the biggest step in pulling it off all over the United States.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Enough of this. Go home, Dawn. I will too. I think I need to get some sleep.”

Dawn smiled. “That’s a good idea. After all, it is a school night.”

Conrad Haise was practicing on a VR basketball court when both the ball and the universe got away from him.

Like many other telepresence students, Conrad participated in intramural sports. Having finally reached eleventh grade, Conrad was now eligible for the top tier, provided he could beat out enough of the seniors. So although the season didn’t start until the spring, he had made a commitment to practice three times a week until then.

His coach had given him special permission to run actual game programs, so instead of dribbling around the court and shooting baskets alone, Conrad was deep in the middle of a real game as a center, with nine virtual players programmed at realistic skill levels.

He hefted the ball, ready to shoot it into the basket, when suddenly all of the virtual players froze, as if the system had crashed.

The ball flew away from him. It bounced against the wall once, then hit the floor. Then it rolled back to Conrad, until finally it stopped right at his feet.

Conrad shrugged. He bent over to pick up the ball—

—and once again, it flew away from him.

Okay. Something is seriously weird here.

Conrad walked over to one of the players, frozen in the middle of a running step. He waved his hand in front of the player’s face, and nothing happened.

The ball rolled slowly towards him, and came to a stop at his feet. Conrad examined it for a moment, then bent over to pick it up.

As soon as he touched it, the familiar reddish-orange rubber ball turned into a translucent solid sphere. Conrad brought it close to his face and looked through it, watching it shimmer.

It looks like water, he thought. A solid sphere of water.

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the VR world looked the same. This is too weird. I’d better end the session and report this.

Conrad opened his mouth to speak a command, but before he could say a word, the ball of water thrust itself onto his head. Conrad began to choke.

Then, without any warning, the virtual players vanished and the court became a swimming pool. Conrad found himself covered in water, flailing his arms around, with his mouth and nose filled.

He struggled against the water, swimming to the surface, where he coughed and spit until he could breathe again.

“Help!” he screamed. He reached for the spex that he knew were sitting on his face in RL—

—and a burst of electricity illuminated the water. Conrad felt himself starting to burn, from the inside out, and fell into unconsciousness.

“It’s another victim,” Agent Cutter told Tony. “This time in San Francisco. Kid was found slumped over in his simulator, just like the Harriman girl.” Cutter sat in Tony’s office, still looking immaculate in his blue suit despite having just come from the heat outside into the cool air conditioning. Tony, on the other hand, kept wiping sweat off his forehead with the green handkerchief that Sheryl had given him just for that purpose.

“What’s the kid’s name?”

“Conrad Haise.”

Tony pointed towards his phone. “May I?”

Cutter nodded. “Would you mind putting it on speaker? The local cops have spoken to the family, but I haven’t had a chance yet.”

Tony considered the question for a moment. “I need to make a condolence call, Agent Cutter. I’ll let you listen if you want, but I’d appreciate it if you’d stay quiet and make your own call later.”

Tony found the Haise family’s contact information and called them. An image of a young boy with sandy blond hair appeared on Tony’s flatscreen, along with the kid’s name, age, and grade: Paul Haise, 14, 8th grade.

“Hi, this is Tony Louis, the director of the telepresence school system. May I speak with your parents?”

Paul looked a little shocked. “Um. My mom’s busy at a neighbor’s.”

“What about your father?”

He shook his head. “Dad died a while ago.”

“Oh,” Tony said. “I’m sorry. I’m calling to express my condolences on the death of your brother.”

“Uh-huh. I found him.”

Cutter leaned forward. He stayed out of the visual pickup, but gestured with his hands at Tony to indicate that he wanted to hear more.

Tony nodded. “Um, Paul, I hope this isn’t intrusive, but would you mind telling me what happened?”

The kid shrugged. “I walked into our VR room and found Conrad in his simulator.”

Tony waited for the boy to say more. When he didn’t, Tony simply replied, “Thank you,” despite Cutter’s signals that he wanted more information. “Again, let me say how sorry I am. Will you tell your mother that I called, and that she can call me back at this number?”

“Uh-huh. Listen, Mr. Louis, I want to see my friends, and the police took my simulator away along with Conrad’s for evidence or something. Can you talk to them? Most of my friends live in SoCal, so I need to go back inside.”

Of course the kid would need his friends, Tony thought. He just lost his brother.

“You’ll be able to soon, I promise. But for now, we’ve got to let the police do their work.”

Cutter looked at Tony and raised his eyebrows, but said nothing.

“Thank you, Mr. Louis.”

“You’re welcome, Paul. Goodbye.” Tony turned off the video linkup, and Cutter spoke. “That was irresponsible of you. You can’t promise that kid that he can go back into telepresence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about two murders, Mr. Louis. Unless you can tell me that your system is safe, I’m going to have to shut it down.”

“You don’t have the authority.”

“Be reasonable. You know that even in a regular school when there’s a tragedy, the school closes for a day or two.”

“Or the school stays open and provides grief counseling. How would it took to the families if we closed down?”

“Are you sure it’s the families you’re concerned about? Or is it the commission?”

Tony glared at the agent. “I resent that.”

Cutter shrugged. “Resent it all you like. But I know what’s going on, sir. Remember that I come from Washington. I can smell politics a mile away.”

“You misunderstand me. The safety of my students is paramount. What I resent is the implication that I would feel anything else.”

The two of them sat in silence for a moment, and then Dawn’s voice came over the intercom. “Mr. Louis? Sorry to interrupt, but Frank Yee is calling from Oakland. He says it’s important.”

“Put him on the phone.”

Frank’s image appeared on the flatscreen, and before he could say anything, Tony spoke. “Frank, this had better be really important. I’ve got the FBI in my office.”

“Good, good,” Frank said. “They’ll want to hear this as well. Has there been another incident?”

Tony looked up in surprise. “Well, yes. How do you know that?”

“Because my tracer worked. We got him.”

Cutter pushed his way into the visualal pickup and looked at Frank. “Got who?” he asked.

“The hacker, of course. We know how to find him.”

Despite Cutter’s objections, Tony insisted that the two of them enter VR to talk directly with Frank. Since Tony’s office only had a single pair of spex, they walked to the training room and entered telepresence via two simulators. Dawn came along to help Cutter into the system and at his insistence remained in the room, monitoring their conversation, in case they needed to be removed immediately.

As before, they sat in a large white VR conference room filled with a floating grid representing the pathways of the system. Cutter kept looking around slowly, as if he expected to be attacked at any moment.

“How did you find him?” Tony asked.

Frank pointed at a bunch of pathways in the grid. “Water.”

“Water?”

He nodded. “The hacker programmed a basketball court to become filled with water, which is one of the most difficult things to program properly in VR. It takes thousands of petaflops to get it to follow proper physicality.”

“What in the world is a petaflop?” Cutter asked.

“A thousand trillion floating point operations per second “Tony replied without thinking. “Ten to the fifteenth power.”

Cutter looked at Tony in amazement. “I guess you know more about the details than you claimed,” he said.

“Tony’s only second to me,” Frank said with a note of pride.

Tony glared at Frank, and Cutter said, “Well, well, well. Hiding something, Mr. Louis?”

“Nothing important. I had Frank turn over everything we found.”

Cutter grunted. “I’ll let it go for now. I’m still not sure what a petaflop is.

Can I have an answer in English?”

Frank smiled. “It’s a measure of computer speed. The VR processor has to run faster to simulate fluids than to simulate anything solid. Which means that if someone wants to control it directly, he has to stay in constant contact with it. He can’t just program it and let it run on its own.”

“So what you’re saying is that he made himself easier to trace because he had to keep an open line?” Cutter asked.

“Yes,” Frank said.

Cutter nodded. “That tells us something about his profile. The unsub didn’t just want to kill Haise remotely. He wanted to participate directly in the murder.”

“Unsub?” Tony asked.

“Unknown subject,” Cutter replied. “You’re not the only ones with your own jargon.”

Frank pointed at the schematic. “The kid is something of a computer genius. You can see from these pathways that he did an excellent job of covering his tracks, by bouncing his presence all over the system. Frankly, I’d like to hire him to work on the network.”

Cutter looked askance, and Tony glared at Frank again. “Let’s see about justice first, Frank, before we start doling out mercy.”

“Of course, of course,” Frank said.

“Enough of this,” Cutter said. “What’s the unsub’s name and address?”

“I don’t know,” Frank said.

Cutter raised an eyebrow. “You said you got him.”

“I meant that I know how to find him in telepresence. But like I said, he’s a genius. He knows we’ve found him in VR, and he’s threatened to kill anyone who comes after him.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Tony said. “He can only do that in VR.”

Frank rolled his eyes. “That’s my point, Tony. No one knows where he is in RL. The only way to find his physical location will be to seek him out in VR.

Once someone has found him in virtual space, I can run a Levinsonian trace to find his location in real space.”

“So the only way to find him is to go after him on his own terms “Tony said.

“Or we could wait for him to strike again. I might be able to—”

“No,” Tony interrupted. “We have to stop him now.”

“That means someone’s going to have go after him inside the system,” Frank said. “Who’s going to do that?”

“Me,” Tony said.

For a moment no one said a word. Then suddenly the three of them were joined in VR by Dawn, who had a worried look on her face. “Mr. Louis, no. You should let the police handle it. They’ll find him eventually.”

“What are we to do in the meantime? Close down the school system?”

“Don’t forget the commission,” Dawn added.

“Honestly,” Tony said, “they’re the last thing on my mind. I’m worried about the students.” He turned to the FBI agent. “Agent Cutter, here’s my plan. Frank will keep a trace on me as I go into the system. Once I’ve found the kid, he can get an RL location for you. Then Frank pulls me out of the system, and you have the local cops pick the kid up wherever he is.”

Cutter shook his head. “I don’t like the idea of a civilian going after the killer.”

“It’s my system, Agent Cutter. I’m responsible, and as you’ve just learned, I know more about it than almost anyone else in the world.” He paused. “To be blunt, you don’t have the authority to stop me.”

Cutter took a deep breath. “Fine. But I’ll want to stay in the loop at all times.” He looked at Frank. “Can you program this system to fight the kid, so he can’t hurt your boss while he’s inside?”

“That’s certainly possible,” Frank said. “Maybe I can reprogram the safeties, so they’re harder for the kid to override.”

“I was thinking of something else,” Tony said. “Frank, earlier you said that the kid had achieved some sort of root level of access to the system. Do you remember when we programmed something even more powerful?” Frank lifted his head back. “Yes. I remember.”

“Do you still have the programs?”

“I . . . I think I can find them.”

“Let me know once you do, and then I’ll go after the kid.”

“Tony . . .” Dawn put her hand over his. “Be careful.”

Tony nodded and smiled, trying to put on a brave face while inside he was scared to death. “I will.”

A few hours later, Frank and Tony met back in the virtual conference room, where Frank gave Tony a virtual handheld device.

“Here,” he said as he passed over the tiny box. “The Omni.”

Tony chuckled. “That’s right. That’s what I insisted we call it.” He turned the device around a few times in his hands; it was smaller than a pack of tissues and had only one button and a screen. “Does it still have everything we gave it?”

Frank scratched his left ear and nodded. “You push that button and it’ll give you absolute power over the system. Anything you want to happen in VR will, if you just think of it.”

“The power of a god . . .”

“The power of good programming,” Frank replied.

A thought occurred to Tony. “There’s no way the hacker could have gotten hold of our programs, is there?”

Frank shook his head. “I kept them isolated from standard telepresence.” Tony nodded. “It’s a shame, though. The Omni was the only way we were able to expand VR from sight, hearing, and touch to also include smell and taste.”

“It was too dangerous,” Frank said.

“Remember the last time we used it?”

“It almost fried your brains.”

Frank nodded. “The human mind was never meant to be so directly connected to the computer-generated world. Seriously, Tony, don’t use the Omni unless you absolutely have to.” He paused. “That’s another reason to find this kid. If we could study his brain, we might be able to figure out a way to create five-sense VR safely.” Tony sighed. First Frank had suggested hiring the kid as a consultant; now he suggested putting the kid under a microscope. His mind certainly went in many directions. “Let me find the kid first, Frank.”

Frank nodded again. “Sorry. Anyway, I’ve set things up for you so the first step to finding the kid will be fairly easy. Just stay on the path I’ve traced for you outside the conference room.” Tony placed the Omni in a pocket of his jacket. “Thanks again, Frank.”

“Good luck,” he said, and he disappeared to monitor the system from outside.

Although Tony knew that he was being monitored by both Frank and Agent Cutter, he felt horribly alone. He deeply wished that Frank or Dawn could have stayed in communication with him while he found the kid, but Frank had advised against it, as that would make it easier for the kid to know they were trying to track him in the real world. Tony sighed and stepped through the door leading out of the conference room.

He expected to find himself in a hallway. Instead, he found himself in a dark void with glowing pinpoints of light scattered in the distance.

“My God,” Tony said with a chuckle. “It’s full of stars.” He looked down at his feet to study the pathway that Frank had created for him. Just beyond the linoleum platform upon which he stood, a shimmering band of gold led off into the distance. Tony put his foot down on the band, and was relieved to discover that it felt solid.

Then he noticed that the path was divided into tiny bricks, and he smiled. Frank often teased him for his love of old fantastic films. It must have amused him to arrange for Tony to follow the yellow brick road. He wondered if Frank had any other surprises like that in store.

Well, as long as I don’t run into the Martians or any former California governors, I should be okay.

Tony walked along the road for about twenty minutes, resisting the temptation to step off into the darkness. He wasn’t sure if he would fall or fly, but he knew that in either case he would get no closer to the kid.

Finally, he saw a faint blue glow emanating from the end of the road, and he stepped up his pace. A minute later, he found himself standing in front of an elaborately carved wooden set of double doors that displayed a graceful tree pattern. Huge glowing blue letters formed an arch above it.

Tony looked at the letters, paused for a moment in disbelief, and laughed out loud. The message read: SPEAK, FRIEND,AND ENTER.

Tony’s laughter died down as he suddenly realized that perhaps the old movie cues weren’t Frank’s doing. The kid might be into old movies; it was common for adolescents who couldn’t deal with the real world to retreat into fantasy worlds of books, films, and games. If that was the case, Tony might have a lot of difficulty making a connection with the kid long enough for the trace to do its work.

Then again, he thought, if the kid loves old movies as much as I do, maybe we’ll have something to talk about.

He approached the door. Recalling how the riddle was solved in The Fellowship of the Ring, he spoke aloud.

“Friend,” he said.

Nothing happened.

Oh, right. In the movie, the word had to be spoken in Tolkein’s Elvish. He strained to recall the Elvish word for friend spoken by the wizard Gandalf.

“Mellon,” he said. But again nothing happened. Tony pondered the riddle again, and then took a stab at it using California’s second official language.

“Amigo,” he said in Spanish, and with a loud creak the doors swung slowly outward. A stairway led upwards into darkness. Tony walked through the doors and began to climb.

The stairway ended at another door, this one painted white and with a brass doorknob. Tony touched the doorknob, and when nothing happened, he turned it and opened the door with a click.

Without taking a step, Tony found himself inside a teenage boy’s bedroom. Books, data disks, and game wafers covered an unmade bed. A pile of clothing sat in the corner, spilling out of a closet. At the desk, typing on a virtual terminal, sat a kid. He wore a shirt of thick red and blue horizontal stripes. The kid’s avatar emitted a green aura that told Tony he had found the hacker.

Tony uttered the code word “Peaches” under his breath, and felt a tingle as the trace began its work. It completed its first step, as the kid’s name floated briefly above the desk, lingering just long enough for Tony to read it.

“Alex Hanover?” he said aloud.

The kid stopped typing and swiveled around.

“Ah. I see you found the place.” He gestured around the room. “I recreated my bedroom in VR. Like it, Mr. Louis? It’s an accurate, real-time environment.”

Tony felt surprise at hearing his name. “You know me?”

Alex nodded. “Of course I do. You’re the school principal.”

“Close enough,” he replied. “Do you know why I’m here?”

“Because of Catherine and Conrad.”

Tony nodded. “I’m also here to help you. But you’re right to mention your classmates.” He paused, and then spoke more softly. “You shouldn’t have killed them.”

Alex scrunched his face up. “You don’t understand. They all made fun of me when we first met in sixth grade. They called me Alex Pushover and kept doing it. Catherine and Conrad were the ringleaders.”

“Alex, that was five years ago.”

“Yeah, Mr. Louis, but I’ve been stuck with them since then.” He looked at Tony with the beginnings of tears. “Do you know what they did last year? They earned my trust, told me that a girl I liked was just waiting for me to call her, and egged me on to confess my own feelings.” He crossed his arms. “Well, I did, and it turned out to be a joke. I was the laughingstock of everyone.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Tony asked.

“I did. Three years ago. Instead of punishing them, you put me in different classes for a year. I lost out on the teachers I liked.”

Tony sighed and tried to appear sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Alex, but I wasn’t the one who did that to you. I hope you understand that.” He reached out and put a hand on the kid’s shoulder and felt gratified when Alex didn’t pull away.

“Do you understand?” Alex asked.

Tony nodded. “I do. I know what it is to be marginalized. I grew up poor in Harlem.”

“It’s not the same,” Alex replied. “If the world is so bad, then we should stay in VR all the time, where it’s safe.” A cold look appeared in his eyes. “That is, it will be, once I get rid of the bad people. The ones who make fun of us.”

“We can’t do that, Alex. Everybody is entitled to have access to VR.”

Tony heard Dawn’s voice in his ear. “We found him; he’s in Palos Verdes. We just need another minute or two to locate the simulator.”

A loud alarm buzzed, and Alex looked horrified.

“You set up a trace.” His blue eyes turned a deep red. “I thought I could trust you.”

“Alex, you can trust me.” Tony placed his other hand on Alex’s other shoulder and looked him directly in the eyes. “I’m here to help you.”

Alex jerked himself away. “You’re just like all the others,” he said. “You make me think I can trust you, and then you betray me. You’ve ruined everything.”

He pushed himself up from his chair, which rolled into the clothing pile. His hands twitched. “I’m going to get you before they can get me.”

He heard Dawn’s voice in his ear. “That’s it, Tony. I’m pulling you out.”

“No!” he shouted. “He might run! I just need a little more time.”

“Sorry, Mr. Louis,” Alex said. “Your time’s up.”

As Tony watched, the bedroom and everything in it, including Alex, grew larger, until Tony was the size of an ant. He looked around for a means of escape, and ran towards the pile of clothes, hoping to hide underneath it.

“I’m coming after you, Mr. Louis . . .” Alex’s voice boomed in Tony’s ears.

Just before Tony reached the pile of clothes, he felt a hand grab him and lift him up, until Tony found himself staring into Alex’s enormous face.

“I could swallow you,” Alex said. “You’re a nothing, just like all the rest.” Tony reached into his pocket, grabbed for the Omni—

—and using two thick fingers, Alex plucked it out of his hands.

“What’s this?” he asked.

“Nothing,“Tony said.

Alex tossed Tony onto the pile of clothing. Tony watched in alarm as Alex pushed his finger on the Omni, to no effect. “My fingers are too big to push the button,” Alex said.

Suddenly Tony heard a cacophony of voices intruding from the real world. “He’s got the Omni!”

“We have to pull Tony out!”

“Give us a few more seconds!”

The room melted back to normal size from Tony’s perspective, and he rolled off the pile of clothing and onto his feet. Alex now held the normalsized Omni in his hand, his finger poised over the button.

Tony raised his hand. “Alex, don’t do that. You don’t know what that device will do to you.”

Alex glared at him. “What is it? Don’t lie, or else . . .”

Tony felt the crackling of electricity in the air. “It’s an interface device. You push that button, and it will connect you directly with the system.”

Alex’s face lit up. “Even more directly than I am now? Cool.”

He pushed the button, and suddenly he was covered in glowing blue pulses, which shot across his avatar in all directions. Tony recognized the effect from when Frank had last used the Omni; it meant that Alex now had ultimate control over VR.

“My God,” Alex said, as the pulses flew. “I thought I had taken control, but this . . . What power. What incredible power.”

The world around them started to change rapidly, reminding Tony of a flickering light. The bedroom disappeared, becoming scenes from dozens of old films, one after the other: The Time Machine, 2001, Star Wars, War Games, The Last Starfighter, The Matrix, Ender’s Game, Lunar Revolt, Dorato Positive, Halt Catch Fire, Cracker, The Weather Hack, Higher Law . . .

“Wait a minute,” Alex said, and the images froze. He gestured with his hands, and suddenly the characters from different films started interacting with each other, in ways their creators had never intended. Neo from The Matrix sat at a computer from War Games, connected to cyberspace via a primitive acoustic modem. Charlie from Dorato Positive injected a virus into Roh Kwontaek, the villain-turned-hero of Cracker. Android Delta C-7 of Higher Law plugged into Mycroft the AI computer from Lunar Revolt.

“Wow,” Alex said. “I don’t just control the world now. I control the people within it.” He glared at Tony. “Including you.”

Alex gestured again, and once again the world flickered through all sorts of environments. Tony was battered by changing pictures, warbling sounds, variations in temperature, bitter tastes, and even pungent odors. He tried to close his eyes and to cover his ears, but it didn’t work. Alex was bypassing Tony’s receptors, and using the ultimate power to mount an assault directly on Tony’s mind.

Tony felt himself getting dizzy from all the direct sensory input. His heart started racing faster. His lungs strained” to gasp another breath. He collapsed to the floor, knowing that soon he would pass out and die—

When suddenly, Alex vanished, and Tony heard Dawn’s voice echoing inside his head. “Tony, they got him. They’ve disconnected him from VR. Do you hear me? You’re safe now.”

Tony nodded; his senses felt drained. He felt his body pulled out of the simulator by gentle hands, and he saw the real world replace the virtual world just before he fell into unconsciousness.

The next day, Tony sat in his office with Ms. Palmer, filling her in on the details of Alex Hanover’s case. When he finished, she asked, “So what happens now?”

“He’s in an institution for observation.”

“What about his parents?”

“Father’s dead. Mother claims she had no idea.” Tony paused. “She’s a rich lawyer who hired nannies to watch over Alex, so she may be telling the truth.”

Ironic, Tony thought. Alex’s second victim was also being raised by a single mother. They had more in common than either of them realized.

Palmer’s next words pulled Tony away from his thoughts. “I’m still concerned with the vulnerabilities of your system. As is the whole commission, now.”

“Don’t be. Frank Yee has gone through the system and fixed all the back doors that Alex used to give himself root access. No one will be able to do that again.”

She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. Most of the members of the commission still think that a telepresence school system would be more dangerous than what we have now.”

“I strongly disagree,” Tony replied. “Think about Columbine and Beslan, just to name two examples. In one case, the violence came from within. In the other, it came from without. But in both cases, if the students had been spread throughout a telepresence network, the tragedies could have been averted.”

“We don’t know—”

He pressed on. “It’s not the VR system that caused the deaths of Catherine Harriman and Conrad Haise. It’s the same thing that always happens: cliques form, students bully other students, and kids become marginalized.”

Palmer sighed. “My point exactly, Mr. Louis. Apparently bullying and marginalization still happen in your telepresence school.”

“True,” Tony admitted. “We’ve found that out now. But it happens much less often. Students are able to find many more people who share their interests, meaning that they’re less likely to feel marginalized. They meet students from all walks of life, from all different backgrounds. Our school teaches something more important than simple reading, writing, and arithmetic. It teaches tolerance and understanding.” He paused. “Diversity, Ms. Palmer. That’s why the VR system is even more important than before.”

Palmer remained silent, and Tony handed over a pair of spex. “Would you put these on, please? I’d like to show you one final demonstration before you make your decision.”

Palmer hesitated, then took the spex from Tony. He looked into her eyes and saw a trace of fear. “Please. Give me this last chance to convince you.”

She looked back at him, nodded, and placed the spex over her eyes.

Tony pushed a button. “Ms. Palmer, I’d like to introduce some old friends of mine from telepresence school.” Four figures appeared: two white women, one Asian woman, and one white man. They greeted Tony, who nodded to each of them in turn.

“I’ve asked them to appear here today to give you some final testimony for your commission.” He turned to the first friend, a woman in a white lab coat. “Janice?”

“My name is Janice Mann. I was born in San Francisco, but I spent most of my school years in Neptune Beach, Florida. During Hurricane Carol, my family lost everything. But I didn’t lose my friends. I knew people from all over the country, and they were all hoping for things to work out. I think I would have despaired without that network.” She paused. “I’m a physician today, specializing in disaster management.”

“Thank you, Janice.” Tony looked at the Asian woman; her avatar wore a flight suit.

“I’m Sandra Chang. I grew up outside Washington, DC. If it weren’t for telepresence school, I wouldn’t be where I am today. You see, my teacher encouraged my interest in space travel by letting me explore the planets of the solar system, on foot.” She laughed. “I still remember how primitive some of the simulated environments looked.

But the fact is that I wasn’t a book person. My learning profile showed that I was more of a visual and experiential learner. Traditional learning can’t hold a candle to telepresence school in that regard. So, thanks to VR, today I’m an astronaut with the NASA-ESA Mars Project.”

“Thank you, Sandra.” Tony looked at the last woman of the group, who was dressed in a blue blouse and skirt, along with a black beret that completely hid her hair. “Debby?”

“My name is Debby Sommer. I grew up Jewish in Monsey, New York. If you know anything of that town, you know that it’s a heavily religious Jewish enclave, and I barely saw anyone outside that world as I was growing up. Most girls in my community get a minimal secular education and then end up raising children and not having any sort of career. But my parents wanted me to know the world outside our own. So they enrolled me in telepresence school, and I got to see that there were many more options available to me. I still ended up as a wife and mother, and I’m still a part of my community, but I don’t feel as isolated from the rest of the world as a lot of other people I know. I have a part-time job working in cultural outreach, which may go full-time once my children are older.”

Palmer nodded absently, then turned to the last of Tony’s friends, the white man. His avatar wore a sleek blue suit and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. “Who are you?” she asked.

“My name is Andrew Drummond,” he said.

“You I’ve heard of,” Palmer replied with surprise. “The financier and philanthropist.”

“I do a little of this, a little of that,” he replied. “It’s all because of Tony.” He smiled at Tony, who smiled back.

“Explain,” Palmer said.

Drummond nodded. “I was a snot-nosed kid. I grew up with wealth and privilege, and frankly, I couldn’t see the point of school. My mother spoiled me rotten. My father almost gave up on me, but then they introduced the first private telepresence school, in the Eastern time zone, and he saw it as a way to get me interested in learning. He never did things halfway, though; he became a major donor to the school and joined the Board of Trustees, all in the hope that I would start taking my education seriously.”

“Did it work?” Palmer asked. Drummond smiled. “Not at first. It was more fun than the other schools I had gone to, I’ll grant that much, but I still didn’t care for learning. It wasn’t until I met Howard here that I discovered that learning could be fun.” Palmer looked confused. “Howard?” Drummond chuckled. “That’s how I got to know Tony at first. As a boy named Howard.” He turned to look at Tony. “She doesn’t know?”

Tony shook his head. “Tell her.” Drummond explained how Tony had broken into telepresence school, and how he had gotten to know Tony as a friend for a few months before he eventually found out the truth.

“I knew that what Tony was doing was wrong, and I was still pissed at him for having stolen my spex. I wanted him to be punished, and so . . .” He paused for a moment and glanced at Tony. “So I told my father, and he kicked Tony out of the school.”

Palmer turned to Tony. “Is this true?”

“Yes,” Tony replied. “But there’s more.”

Drummond continued. “I only knew Tony for a few months, but after I had gotten my revenge, I realized that I missed him. So I talked with my dad, and with my teacher, and I managed to reconnect with Tony. He came over to visit me in Port Jefferson a few times. A few years later, we found the scholarship money to bring him back to telepresence school.”

“So,” Palmer said with a hint of sarcasm, “you would credit your interaction with this one person as the experience that changed your life.”

Drummond chuckled. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I changed overnight. But Tony and I had become friends, and I really wanted to see him again. He was the only kid I knew who was willing to break through my obnoxious behavior and stay my friend. I think it was out of guilt for stealing my spex.”

Tony shook his head. “It was your fault for bringing them into Manhattan with you, Andrew. That’s what you got for using them to play games instead “of just going to school.”

They both chuckled, and then Drummond continued. “Games. Sometimes I still can’t believe I wasted so much of my time on such trivial things.” He shook his head. “In the end, Ms. Palmer, it took Tony here to show me what it was I was really missing. I’m not saying that I wouldn’t have found a similar path without his help. But I’m pretty sure I would be a different person today if I hadn’t become friends with him.”

Palmer turned to look at Tony for a moment; Tony kept his gaze on Andrew.

“You see, my mom—well, there’s no good way to say this. She didn’t like black people.” He paused. “She might have passed that prejudice along to me, if not for Tony. Because it’s one thing to learn about other people through books and videos. But it’s another thing to interact with them directly.” Drummond nodded at Tony, indicating that he had finished.

“Thank you, friends,” Tony said to his four erstwhile classmates. He turned to Palmer. “I hope this final demonstration has made its point. But I have one more thing to say before you go back to the commission to make your decision.

“We live in a world where we pay lip service to equality in public education, but in reality, it’s a joke. Some districts always have more money for resources, and some always get the short end of the stick. We both know how unjust that is. People can only truly be on the same playing field if they all have access to the same level of quality in their educational choices.

“Thurgood Marshall argued those same points in Brown v. Board of Education over a hundred years ago. Despite the Supreme Court ruling, the idea of equal access to education has always been something of a pipe dream. But with the telepresence system—“Tony paused. “Today we have the ability to make that dream a reality, for the public good. Don’t let this one incident, as tragic as it was, destroy that dream.”

Palmer pursed her lips for a moment, then nodded. “Mr. Louis, we will let you know.”

Tony couldn’t remember the last time he had visited the cemetery, here in the farthest reaches of Long Island. His memory told him that he had been here on a warm, sunny day in the middle of July, but which July? Not last year, not the year before . . .

The car came to a perfect stop in front of the gate, and Tony grunted as he pushed himself out of the back seat. The computer informed him that it would pull the car over to the nearby lot, and that when he was ready to be picked up he should just signal it. The door pulled itself shut and the car drove off.

It had been warm in the car; outside, the fall weather bit at his ears. An overcast sky lent a gloomy tone to the visit. Tony bundled himself more tightly into his coat, being careful not to hurt the flowers he held, as the cold wind brushed past him with a soft howl. His teeth began to chatter, and his feet crunched on the brittle leaves.

That’s the one problem with spending so much time in VR, he thought.

You forget that you can’t adjust the real world around you when it gets uncomfortable.

The grave was situated a short distance from the entrance, and Tony headed straight toward it. But after a minute of walking, he stopped short. In his direct path, he noticed a group of new mourners attending a graveside funeral, and heard the words of the minister pass over the coffin. “Ashes to ashes . . . dust to dust . . .”

Tony gave them a wide berth, paying his respects to the family by walking as far around as he could.

Finally, he arrived at the grave that belonged to the most important woman in the world besides his mother: his former teacher, Miss Ellis, who rescued him from a world of violence and pulled him into a world of learning. He stopped walking at the edge of her grave and noted with slight sadness that her plot no longer lay in an uncrowded section of the cemetery. Somehow, he always felt that her death should have been the last one ever, and it always bothered him to see more headstones gathered around hers.

Then again, she had always preferred a crowded neighborhood.

Tony read the words on the modest headstone to himself, words he had adapted from a famous Henry Brooks Adams quotation:

“A TEACHER WHO AFFECTED ETERNITY”

Miss Ellis had not had any family, and Tony had taken it upon himself to see that she received a proper funeral and burial. As he stood there, his mind drifted back to the bookends of his friendship with her.

He thought back to his first memory of the comforting Miss Ellis, the white teacher in telepresence who smiled at him instead of scowling. He remembered his shock the first time he met her in real life, and discovered that she was as black as he was, with a thick red scar seared across her right cheek.

He also remembered the shock of the day he came to her door, and she didn’t answer. He tried his thumbprint and discovered that it still opened the door. An odd smell had overwhelmed him, and he had realized it was the smell of death. According to the coroner, her heart had simply given out while she lay sleeping a few days before Tony had come to visit. Once again, he wondered at a world in which a person could vanish and not be missed right away. He wiped away a bit of moisture that trickled down his cheek. He owed her so much, and there was no way he could ever pay her back completely. . . .

But at least he could give her the news. He stared at the headstone and spoke softly.

“It’s done, Miss Ellis. I took your dream, and I’ve made it a reality. Governor Gelb has signed the legislation. California’s public school system will be completely moved to telepresence within the next five years. I imagine the rest of the country will follow suit within my lifetime.” He paused. “I’m only sorry you aren’t still around to see it.”

He bent over the grave and laid the bouquet of flowers on the grass. Then, recalling a Jewish custom he had learned about from Debby Sommer, he found a small rock and placed it on the headstone, to indicate that he had visited. It would most likely last longer than the flowers anyway.

The breeze suddenly died down, and a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds, illuminating the ground and warming Tony’s face. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, it vanished, swallowed up in the grayness of the day.

Tony smiled at the headstone, then turned on his heel and walked away. The future still awaits us, he thought, and there is still so much to do.

—with thanks to Tom Easton

THE CALORIE MAN

Paolo Bacigalupi

“NO MAMMY, NO PAPPY, poor little bastard. Money? You give money?” The urchin turned a cartwheel and then a somersault in the street, stirring yellow dust around his nakedness.

Lalji paused to stare at the dirty blond child who had come to a halt at his feet. The attention seemed to encourage the urchin; the boy did another somersault. He smiled up at Lalji from his squat, calculating and eager, rivulets of sweat and mud streaking his face. “Money? You give money?”

Around them, the town was nearly silent in the afternoon heat. A few dungareed farmers led mulies toward the fields. Buildings, pressed from WeatherAll chips, slumped against their fellows like drunkards, rain-stained and sun-cracked, but, as their trade name implied, still sturdy. At the far end of the narrow street, the lush sprawl of SoyPRO and HiGro began, a waving rustling growth that rolled into the blue-sky distance. It was much as all the villages Lalji had seen as he traveled upriver, just another farming enclave paying its intellectual property dues and shipping calories down to New Orleans.

The boy crawled closer, smiling ingratiatingly, nodding his head like a snake hoping to strike. “Money? Money?”

Lalji put his hands in his pockets in case the beggar child had friends and turned his full attention on the boy. “And why should I give money to you?”

The boy stared up at him, stalled. His mouth opened, then closed. Finally he looped back to an earlier, more familiar part of his script, “No mammy? No pappy?” but it was a query now, lacking conviction.

Lalji made a face of disgust and aimed a kick at the boy. The child scrambled aside, falling on his back in his desperation to dodge, and this pleased Lalji briefly. At least the boy was quick. He turned and started back up the street. Behind him, the urchin’s wailing despair echoed. “Noooo maaaammy! Nooo paaaapy!” Lalji shook his head, irritated. The child might cry for money, but he failed to follow. No true beggar at all. An opportunist only—most likely the accidental creation of strangers who had visited the village and were open-fisted when it came to blond beggar children. AgriGen and Midwest Grower scientists and land factotums would be pleased to show ostentatious kindness to the villagers at the core of their empire.

Through a gap in the slumped hovels, Lalji caught another glimpse of the lush waves of SoyPRO and HiGro. The sheer sprawl of calories stimulated tingling fantasies of loading a barge and slipping it down through the locks to St. Louis or New Orleans and into the mouths of waiting megadonts. It was impossible, but the sight of those emerald fields was more than enough assurance that no child could beg with conviction here. Not surrounded by SoyPRO. Lalji shook his head again, disgusted, and squeezed down a footpath between two of the houses.

The acrid reek of WeatherAll’s excreted oils clogged the dim alley. A pair of cheshires sheltering in the unused space scattered and molted ahead of him, disappearing into bright sunlight. Just beyond, a kinetic shop leaned against its beaten neighbors, adding the scents of dung and animal sweat to the stink of WeatherAll. Lalji leaned against the shop’s plank door and shoved inside.

Shafts of sunlight pierced the sweet manure gloom with lazy gold beams. A pair of hand-painted posters scabbed to one wall, partly torn but still legible. One said: “Unstamped calories mean starving families. We check royalty receipts and IP stamps.” A farmer and his brood stared hollow-eyed from beneath the scolding words. PurCal was the sponsor. The other poster was AgriGen’s trademarked collage of kink-springs, green rows of SoyPRO under sunlight and smiling children along with the words “We Provide Energy for the World.” Lalji studied the posters sourly.

“Back already?” The owner came in from the winding room, wiping his hands on his pants and kicking straw and mud off his boots. He eyed Lalji. “My springs didn’t have enough stored. I had to feed the mulies extra, to make your joules.”

Lalji shrugged, having expected the last-minute bargaining, so much like Shriram’s that he couldn’t muster the interest to look offended. “Yes? How much?”

The man squinted up at Lalji, then ducked his head, his body defensive. “F-Five hundred.” His voice caught on the amount, as though gagging on the surprising greed scampering up his throat.

Lalji frowned and pulled his mustache. It was outrageous. The calories hadn’t even been transported. The village was awash with energy. And despite the man’s virtuous poster, it was doubtful that the calories feeding his kinetic shop were equally upstanding. Not with tempting green fields waving within meters of the shop. Shriram often said that using stamped calories was like dumping money into a methane composter.

Lalji tugged his mustache again, wondering how much to pay for the joules without calling excessive attention to himself. Rich men must have been all over the village to make the kinetic man so greedy. Calorie executives, almost certainly. It would fit. The town was close to the center. Perhaps even this village was engaged in growing the crown jewels of AgriGen’s energy monopolies. Still, not everyone who passed through would be as rich as that. “Two hundred.”

The kinetic man showed a relieved smile along with knotted yellow teeth, his guilt apparently assuaged by Lalji’s bargaining. “Four.”

“Two. I can moor on the river and let my own winders do the same work.”

The man snorted. “It would take weeks.”

Lalji shrugged. “I have time. Dump the joules back into your own springs. I’ll do the job myself.”

“I’ve got family to feed. Three?”

“You live next to more calories than some rich families in St. Louis. Two.”

The man shook his head sourly but he led Lalji into the winding room. The manure haze thickened. Big kinetic storage drums, twice as tall as a man, sat in a darkened corner, mud and manure lapping around their high-capacity precision kink-springs. Sunbeams poured between open gaps in the roof where shingles had blown away. Dung motes stirred lazily.

A half-dozen hyper-developed mulies crouched on their treadmills, their rib cages billowing slowly, their flanks streaked with salt lines of sweat residue from the labor of winding Lalji’s boat springs. They blew air through their nostrils, nervous at Lalji’s sudden scent, and gathered their squat legs under them. Muscles like boulders rippled under their bony hides as they stood. They eyed Lalji with resentful near-intelligence. One of them showed stubborn yellow teeth that matched its owner’s.

Lalji made a face of disgust. “Feed them.”

“I already did.”

“I can see their bones. If you want my money, feed them again.”

The man scowled. “They aren’t supposed to get fat, they’re supposed to wind your damn springs.” But he dipped double handfuls of SoyPRO into their feed canisters.

The mulies shoved their heads into the buckets, slobbering and grunting with need. In its eagerness, one of them started briefly forward on its treadmill, sending energy into the winding shop’s depleted storage springs before seeming to realize that its work was not demanded and that it could eat without molestation.

“They aren’t even designed to get fat,” the kinetic man muttered.

Lalji smiled slightly as he counted through his wadded bluebills and handed over the money. The kinetic man unjacked Lalji’s kink-springs from the winding treadmills and stacked them beside the slavering mulies. Lalji lifted a spring, grunting at its heft. Its mass was no different than when he had brought it to the winding shop, but now it fairly seemed to quiver with the mulies’ stored labor.

“You want help with those?” The man didn’t move. His eyes flicked toward the mulies’ feed buckets, still calculating his chances of interrupting their meal.

Lalji took his time answering, watching as the mulies rooted for the last of their calories. “No.” He hefted the spring again, getting a better grip. “My helpboy will come for the rest.”

As he turned for the door, he heard the man dragging the feedbuckets away from the mulies and their grunts as they fought for their sustenance. Once again, Lalji regretted agreeing to the trip at all.

SHRIRAM HAD BEEN the one to broach the idea. They had been sitting under the awning of Lalji’s porch in New Orleans, spitting betel nut juice into the alley gutters and watching the rain come down as they played chess. At the end of the alley, cycle rickshaws and bicycles slipped through the mid-morning gray, pulses of green and red and blue as they passed the alley’s mouth draped under rain-glossed corn polymer ponchos.

The chess game was a tradition of many years, a ritual when Lalji was in town and Shriram had time away from his small kinetic company where he rewound people’s home and boat springs. Theirs was a good friendship, and a fruitful one, when Lalji had unstamped calories that needed to disappear into the mouth of a hungry megadont.

Neither of them played chess well, and so their games often devolved into a series of trades made in dizzying succession; a cascade of destruction that left a board previously well-arrayed in a tantrum wreck, with both opponents blinking surprise, trying to calculate if the mangle had been worth the combat. It was after one of these tit-for-tat cleansings that Shriram had asked Lalji if he might go upriver. Beyond the southern states.

Lalji had shaken his head and spit bloody betel juice into the overflowing gutter. “No. Nothing is profitable so far up. Too many joules to get there. Better to let the calories float to me.” He was surprised to discover that he still had his queen. He used it to take a pawn.

“And if the energy costs could be defrayed?”

Lalji laughed, waiting for Shriram to make his own move. “By who? AgriGen? The IP men? Only their boats go up and down so far.” He frowned as he realized that his queen was now vulnerable to Shriram’s remaining knight.

Shriram was silent. He didn’t touch his pieces. Lalji looked up from the board and was surprised by Shriram’s serious expression. Shriram said, “I would pay. Myself and others. There is a man who some of us would like to see come south. A very special man.”

“Then why not bring him south on a paddle wheel? It is expensive to go up the river. How many gigajoules? I would have to change the boat’s springs, and then what would the IP patrols ask? ‘Where are you going, strange Indian man with your small boat and your so many springs? Going far? To what purpose?’ ” Lalji shook his head. “Let this man take a ferry, or ride a barge. Isn’t this cheaper?” He waved at the game board. “It’s your move. You should take my queen.”

Shriram waggled his head thoughtfully from side to side but didn’t make any move toward the chess game. “Cheaper, yes. . . .”

“But?”

Shriram shrugged. “A swift, inconsequential boat would attract less attention.”

“What sort of man is this?”

Shriram glanced around, suddenly furtive. Methane lamps burned like blue fairies behind the closed glass of the neighbors’ droplet-spattered windows. Rain sheeted off their roofs, drumming wet into the empty alley. A cheshire was yowling for a mate somewhere in the wet, barely audible under the thrum of falling water.

“Is Creo inside?”

Lalji raised his eyebrows in surprise. “He has gone to his gymnasium. Why? Should it matter?”

Shriram shrugged and gave an embarrassed smile. “Some things are better kept between old friends. People with strong ties.”

“Creo has been with me for years.”

Shriram grunted noncommittally, glanced around again and leaned close, pitching his voice low, forcing Lalji to lean forward as well. “There is a man who the calorie companies would like very much to find.” He tapped his balding head. “A very intelligent man. We want to help him.”

Lalji sucked in his breath. “A generipper?”

Shriram avoided Lalji’s eyes. “In a sense. A calorie man.”

Lalji made a face of disgust. “Even better reason not to be involved. I don’t traffic with those killers.”

“No, no. Of course not. But still . . . you brought that huge sign down once, did you not? A few greased palms, so smooth, and you float into town and suddenly Lakshmi smiles on you, such a calorie bandit, and now with a name instead as a dealer of antiques. Such a wonderful misdirection.”

Lalji shrugged. “I was lucky. I knew the man to help move it through the locks.”

“So? Do it again.”

“If the calorie companies are looking for him, it would be dangerous.”

“But not impossible. The locks would be easy. Much easier than carrying unlicensed grains. Or even something as big as that sign. This would be a man. No sniffer dog would find him of interest. Place him in a barrel. It would be easy. And I would pay. All your joules, plus more.”

Lalji sucked at his narcotic betel nut, spit red, spit red again, considering. “And what does a second-rate kinetic man like you think this calorie man will do? Generippers work for big fish, and you are such a small one.”

Shriram grinned haplessly and gave a self-deprecating shrug. “You do not think Ganesha Kinetic could not some day be great? The next AgriGen, maybe?” and they had both laughed at the absurdity and Shriram dropped the subject.

An IP man was on duty with his dog, blocking Lalji’s way as he returned to his boat lugging the kink-spring. The brute’s hairs bristled as Lalji approached and it lunged against its leash, its blunt nose quivering to reach him. With effort, the IP man held the creature back. “I need to sniff you.” His helmet lay on the grass, already discarded, but still he was sweating under the swaddling heat of his gray slash-resistant uniform and the heavy webbing of his spring gun and bandoliers.

Lalji held still. The dog growled, deep from its throat, and inched forward. It snuffled his clothing, bared hungry teeth, snuffled again, then its black ruff iridesced blue and it relaxed and wagged its stubby tail. It sat. A pink tongue lolled from between smiling teeth. Lalji smiled sourly back at the animal, glad that he wasn’t smuggling calories and wouldn’t have to go through the pantomimes of obeisance as the IP man demanded stamps and then tried to verify that the grain shipment had paid its royalties and licensing fees.

At the dog’s change in color, the IP man relaxed somewhat, but still he studied Lalji’s features carefully, hunting for recognition against memorized photographs. Lalji waited patiently, accustomed to the scrutiny. Many men tried to steal the honest profits of AgriGen and its peers, but to Lalji’s knowledge, he was unknown to the protectors of intellectual property. He was an antiques dealer, handling the junk of the previous century, not a calorie bandit staring out from corporate photo books.

Finally, the IP man waved him past. Lalji nodded politely and made his way down the stairs to the river’s low stage where his needleboat was moored. Out on the river, cumbrous grain barges wallowed past, riding low under their burdens.

Though there was a great deal of river traffic, it didn’t compare with harvest time. Then the whole of the Mississippi would fill with calories pouring downstream, pulled from hundreds of towns like this one. Barges would clot the arterial flow of the river system from high on the Missouri, the Illinois, and the Ohio and the thousand smaller tributaries. Some of those calories would float only as far as St. Louis where they would be chewed by megadonts and churned into joules, but the rest, the vast majority, would float to New Orleans where the great calorie companies’ clippers and dirigibles would be loaded with the precious grains. Then they would cross the Earth on tradewinds and sea, in time for the next season’s planting, so that the world could go on eating.

Lalji watched the barges moving slowly past, wallowing and bloated with their wealth, then hefted his kink-spring and jumped aboard his needleboat.

Creo was lying on deck as Lalji had left him, his muscled body oiled and shining in the sun, a blond Arjuna waiting for glorious battle. His cornrows spread around his head in a halo, their tipped bits of bone lying like foretelling stones on the hot deck. He didn’t open his eyes as Lalji jumped aboard. Lalji went and stood in Creo’s sun, eclipsing his tan. Slowly, the young man opened his blue eyes.

“Get up.” Lalji dropped the spring on Creo’s rippled stomach.

Creo let out a whuff and wrapped his arms around the spring. He sat up easily and set it on the deck. “Rest of the springs wound?”

Lalji nodded. Creo took the spring and went down the boat’s narrow stairs to the mechanical room. When he returned from fitting the spring into the gearings of the boat’s power system, he said, “Your springs are shit, all of them. I don’t know why you didn’t bring bigger ones. We have to rewind, what, every twenty hours? You could have gotten all the way here on a couple of the big ones.”

Lalji scowled at Creo and jerked his head toward the guard still standing at the top of the riverbank and looking down on them. He lowered his voice. “And then what would the MidWest Authority be saying as we are going upriver? All their IP men all over our boat, wondering where we are going so far? Boarding us and then wondering what we are doing with such big springs. Where have we gotten so many joules? Wondering what business we have so far upriver.” He shook his head. “No, no. This is better. Small boat, small distance, who worries about Lalji and his stupid blond helpboy then? No one. No, this is better.”

“You always were a cheap bastard.”

Lalji glanced at Creo. “You are lucky it is not forty years ago. Then you would be paddling up this river by hand, instead of lying on your lazy back letting these fancy kink-springs do the work. Then we would be seeing you use those muscles of yours.”

“If I was lucky, I would have been born during the Expansion and we’d still be using gasoline.”

Lalji was about to retort but an IP boat slashed past them, ripping a deep wake. Creo lunged for their cache of spring guns. Lalji dove after him and slammed the cache shut. “They’re not after us!”

Creo stared at Lalji, uncomprehending for a moment, then relaxed. He stepped away from the stored weapons. The IP boat continued upriver, half its displacement dedicated to massive precision kink-springs and the stored joules that gushed from their unlocking molecules. Its curling wake rocked the needleboat. Lalji steadied himself against the rail as the IP boat dwindled to a speck and disappeared between obstructing barge chains.

Creo scowled after the boat. “I could have taken them.”

Lalji took a deep breath. “You would have gotten us killed.” He glanced at the top of the riverbank to see if the IP man had noticed their panic. He wasn’t even visible. Lalji silently gave thanks to Ganesha.

“I don’t like all of them around,” Creo complained. “They’re like ants. Fourteen at the last lock. That one, up on the hill. Now these boats.”

“It is the heart of calorie country. It is to be expected.”

“You making a lot of money on this trip?”

“Why should you care?”

“Because you never used to take risks like this.” Creo swept his arm, indicating the village, the cultivated fields, the muddy width of river gurgling past, and the massive barges clogging it. “No one comes this far upriver.”

“I’m making enough money to pay you. That’s all you should concern yourself with. Now go get the rest of the springs. When you think too much, your brain makes mush.”

Creo shook his head doubtfully but jumped for the dock and headed up the steps to the kinetic shop. Lalji turned to face the river. He took a deep breath.

The IP boat had been a close call. Creo was too eager to fight. It was only with luck that they hadn’t ended up as shredded meat from the IP men’s spring guns. He shook his head tiredly, wondering if he had ever had as much reckless confidence as Creo. He didn’t think so. Not even when he was a boy. Perhaps Shriram was right. Even if Creo was trustworthy, he was still dangerous.

A barge chain, loaded with TotalNutrient Wheat, slid past. The happy sheaves of its logo smiled across the river’s muddy flow, promising “A Healthful Tomorrow” along with folates, B vitamins, and pork protein. Another IP boat slashed upriver, weaving amongst the barge traffic. Its complement of IP men studied him coldly as they went by. Lalji’s skin crawled. Was it worth it? If he thought too much, his businessman’s instinct—bred into him through thousands of years of caste practice—told him no. But still, there was Gita. When he balanced his debts each year on Diwali, how did he account for all he owed her? How did one pay off something that weighed heavier than all his profits, in all his lifetimes?

The NutriWheat wallowed past, witlessly inviting, and without answers.

“You wanted to know if there was something that would be worth your trip upriver.”

Lalji and Shriram had been standing in the winding room of Ganesha Kinetic, watching a misplaced ton of SuperFlavor burn into joules. Shriram’s paired megadonts labored against the winding spindles, ponderous and steady as they turned just-consumed calories into kinetic energy and wound the shop’s main storage springs.

Priti and Bidi. The massive creatures barely resembled the elephants that had once provided their template DNA. Generippers had honed them to a perfect balance of musculature and hunger for a single purpose: to inhale calories and do terrible labors without complaint. The smell of them was overwhelming. Their trunks dragged the ground.

The animals were getting old, Lalji thought, and on the heels of that thought came another: he, too, was getting old. Every morning he found gray in his mustache. He plucked it, of course, but more gray hairs always sprouted. And now his joints ached in the mornings as well. Shriram’s own head shone like polished teak. At some point, he’d turned bald. Fat and bald. Lalji wondered when they had turned into such old men.

Shriram repeated himself, and Lalji shook away his thoughts. “No, I am not interested in anything upriver. That is the calorie companies’ province. I have accepted that when you scatter my ashes it will be on the Mississippi, and not the holy Ganges, but I am not so eager to find my next life that I wish my corpse to float down from Iowa.”

Shriram twisted his hands nervously and glanced around. He lowered his voice, even though the steady groan of the spindles was more than enough to drown their sounds. “Please, friend, there are people . . . who want . . . to kill this man.”

“And I should care?”

Shriram made placating motions with his hands. “He knows how to make calories. AgriGen wants him, badly. PurCal as well. He has rejected them and their kind. His mind is valuable. He needs someone trustworthy to bring him downriver. No friend of the IP men.”

“And just because he is an enemy of AgriGen I should help him? Some former associate of the Des Moines clique? Some ex-calorie man with blood on his hands and you think he will help you make money?”

Shriram shook his head. “You make it sound as if this man is unclean.”

“We are talking of generippers, yes? How much morality can he have?”

“A geneticist. Not a generipper. Geneticists gave us megadonts.” He waved at Priti and Bidi. “Me, a livelihood.”

Lalji turned on Shriram. “You take refuge in these semantics, now? You, who starved in Chennai when the Nippon genehack weevil came? When the soil turned to alcohol? Before U-Tex and HiGro and the rest all showed up so conveniently? You, who waited on the docks when the seeds came in, saw them come and then saw them sit behind their fences and guards, waiting for people with the money to buy? What traffic would I have with this sort of people? I would sooner spit on him, this calorie man. Let the PurCal devils have him, I say.”

THE TOWN WAS as Shriram had described it. Cottonwoods and willows tangled the edges of the river and over them, the remains of the bridge, some of it still spanning the river in a hazy network of broken trusses and crumbling supports. Lalji and Creo stared up at the rusting construction, a web of steel and cable and concrete, slowly collapsing into the river.

“How much do you think the steel would bring?” Creo asked.

Lalji filled his cheek with a handful of PestResis sunflower seeds and started cracking them between his teeth. He spit the hulls into the river one by one. “Not much. Too much energy to tear it out, then to melt it.” He shook his head and spat another hull. “A waste to make something like that with steel. Better to use Fast-Gen hardwoods, or WeatherAll.”

“Not to cover that distance. It couldn’t be done now. Not unless you were in Des Moines, maybe. I heard they burn coal there.”

“And they have electric lights that go all night and computers as large as a house.” Lalji waved his hand dismissively and turned to finish securing the needleboat. “Who needs such a bridge now? A waste. A ferry and a mulie would serve just as well.” He jumped ashore and started climbing the crumbling steps that led up from the river. Creo followed.

At the top of the steep climb, a ruined suburb waited. Built to serve the cities on the far side of the river when commuting was common and petroleum cheap, it now sprawled in an advanced state of decay. A junk city built with junk materials, as transient as water, willingly abandoned when the expense of commuting grew too great.

“What the hell is this place?” Creo muttered.

Lalji smiled cynically. He jerked his head toward the green fields across the river, where SoyPRO and HiGro undulated to the horizon. “The very cradle of civilization, yes? AgriGen, Midwest Growers Group, PurCal, all of them have fields here.”

“Yeah? That excite you?”

Lalji turned and studied a barge chain as it wallowed down the river below them, its mammoth size rendered small by the height. “If we could turn all their calories into traceless joules, we’d be wealthy men.”

“Keep dreaming.” Creo breathed deeply and stretched. His back cracked and he winced at the sound. “I get out of shape when I ride your boat this long. I should have stayed in New Orleans.”

Lalji raised his eyebrows. “You’re not happy to be making this touristic journey?” He pointed across the river. “Somewhere over there, perhaps in those very acres, AgriGen created SoyPRO. And everyone thought they were such wonderful people.” He frowned. “And then the weevil came, and suddenly there was nothing else to eat.”

Creo made a face. “I don’t go for those conspiracy theories.”

“You weren’t even born when it happened.” Lalj turned to lead Creo into the wrecked suburb. “But I remember. No such accident had ever happened before.”

“Monocultures. They were vulnerable.”

“Basmati was no monoculture!” Lalji waved his hand back toward the green fields. “SoyPRO is monoculture. PurCal is monoculture. Generippers make monoculture.”

“Whatever you say, Lalji.”

Lalji glanced at Creo, trying to tell if the young man was still arguing with him, but Creo was carefully studying the street wreckage and Lalji let the argument die. He began counting streets, following memorized directions.

The avenues were all ridiculously broad and identical, large enough to run a herd of megadonts. Twenty cycle-rickshaws could ride abreast easily, and yet the town had only been a support suburb. It boggled Lalji’s mind to consider the scale of life before.

A gang of children watched them from the doorway of a collapsed house. Half its timbers had been removed, and the other half were splintered, rising from the foundation like carcass bones where siding flesh had been stripped away.

Creo showed the children his spring gun and they ran away. He scowled at their departing forms. “So what the hell are we picking up here? You got a lead on another antique?”

Lalji shrugged.

“Come on. I’m going to be hauling it in a couple minutes anyway. What’s with the secrecy?”

Lalji glanced at Creo. “There’s nothing for you to haul. ‘It’ is a man. We’re looking for a man.”

Creo made a sound of disbelief. Lalji didn’t bother responding.

Eventually, they came to an intersection. At its center, an old signal light lay smashed. Around it, the pavement was broken through by grasses gone to seed. Dandelions stuck up their yellow heads. On the far side of the intersection, a tall brick building squatted, a ruin of a civil center, yet still standing, built with better materials than the housing it had served.

A cheshire bled across the weedy expanse. Creo tried to shoot it. Missed.

Lalji studied the brick building. “This is the place.”

Creo grunted and shot at another cheshire shimmer.

Lalji went over and inspected the smashed signal light, idly curious to see if it might have value. It was rusted. He turned in a slow circle, studying the surroundings for anything at all that might be worth taking downriver. Some of the old Expansion’s wreckage still had worthy artifacts. He’d found the Conoco sign in such a place, in a suburb soon to be swallowed by SoyPRO, perfectly intact, seemingly never mounted in the open air, never subjected to the angry mobs of the energy Contraction. He’d sold it to an AgriGen executive for more than an entire smuggled cargo of HiGro.

The AgriGen woman had laughed at the sign. She’d mounted it on her wall, surrounded by the lesser artifacts of the Expansion: plastic cups, computer monitors, photos of racing automobiles, brightly colored children’s toys. She’d hung the sign on her wall and then stood back and murmured that at one point, it had been a powerful company . . . global, even.

Global.

She’d said the word with an almost sexual yearning as she stared up at the sign’s ruddy polymers.

Global.

For a moment, Lalji had been smitten by her vision: a company that pulled energy from the remotest parts of the planet and sold it far away within weeks of extraction; a company with customers and investors on every continent, with executives who crossed time zones as casually as Lalji crossed the alley to visit Shriram.

The AgriGen woman had hung the sign on her wall like the head of a trophy megadont and in that moment, next to a representative of the most powerful energy company in world, Lalji had felt a sudden sadness at how very diminished humanity had become.

Lalji shook away the memory and again turned slowly in the intersection, seeking signs of his passenger. More cheshires flitted amongst the ruins, their smoky shimmer shapes pulsing across the sunlight and passing into shadows. Creo pumped his spring gun and sprayed disks. A shimmer tumbled to stillness and became a matted pile of calico and blood.

Creo repumped his spring gun. “So where is this guy?”

“I think he will come. If not today, then tomorrow or the next.” Lalji headed up the steps of the civil center and slipped between its shattered doors. Inside, it was nothing but dust and gloom and bird droppings. He found stairs and made his way upward until he found a broken window with a view. A gust of wind rattled the window pane and tugged his mustache. A pair of crows circled in the blue sky. Below, Creo pumped his spring gun and shot more cheshire shimmers. When he hit, angry yowls filtered up. Blood swatches spattered the weedy pavement as more animals fled.

In the distance, the suburb’s periphery was already falling to agriculture. Its time was short. Soon the houses would be plowed under and a perfect blanket of SoyPRO would cover it. The suburb’s history, as silly and transient as it had been, would be lost, churned under by the march of energy development. No loss, from the standpoint of value, but still, some part of Lalji cringed at the thought of time erased. He spent too much time trying to recall the India of his boyhood to take pleasure in the disappearance. He headed back down the dusty stairs to Creo.

“See anyone?”

Lalji shook his head. Creo grunted and shot at another cheshire, narrowly missing. He was good, but the nearly invisible animals were hard targets. Creo pumped his spring gun and fired again. “Can’t believe how many cheshires there are.”

“There is no one to exterminate them.”

“I should collect the skins and take them back to New Orleans.”

“Not on my boat.”

Many of the shimmers were fleeing, finally understanding the quality of their enemy. Creo pumped again and aimed at a twist of light further down the street.

Lalji watched complacently. “You will never hit it.”

“Watch.” Creo aimed carefully.

A shadow fell across them. “Don’t shoot.”

Creo whipped his spring gun around.

Lalji waved a hand at Creo. “Wait! It’s him!”

The new arrival was a skinny old man, bald except for a greasy fringe of gray and brown hair, his heavy jaw thick with gray stubble. Hemp sacking covered his body, dirty and torn, and his eyes had a sunken, knowing quality that unearthed in Lalji the memory of a long-ago sadhu, covered with ash and little else: the tangled hair, the disinterest in his clothing, the distance in the eyes that came from enlightenment. Lalji shook away the memory. This man was no holy man. Just a man, and a generipper, at that.

Creo resighted his spring gun on the distant cheshire. “Down south, I get a bluebill for every one I kill.”

The old man said, “There are no bluebills for you to collect here.”

“Yeah, but they’re pests.”

“It’s not their fault we made them too perfectly.” The man smiled hesitantly, as though testing a facial expression. “Please.” He squatted down in front of Creo. “Don’t shoot.”

Lalji placed a hand on Creo’s spring gun. “Let the cheshires be.”

Creo scowled, but he let his gun’s mechanism unwind with a sigh of releasing energy.

The calorie man said, “I am Charles Bowman.” He looked at them expectantly, as though anticipating recognition. “I am ready. I can leave.”

Gita was dead, of that Lalji was now sure.

At times, he had pretended that it might not be so. Pretended that she might have found a life, even after he had gone.

But she was dead, and he was sure of it.

It was one of his secret shames. One of the accretions to his life that clung to him like dog shit on his shoes and reduced himself in his own eyes: as when he had thrown a rock and hit a boy’s head, unprovoked, to see if it was possible; or when he had dug seeds out of the dirt and eaten them one by one, too starved to share. And then there was Gita. Always Gita. That he had left her and gone instead to live close to the calories. That she had stood on the docks and waved as he set sail, when it was she who had paid his passage price.

He remembered chasing her when he was small, following the rustle of her salwar kameez as she dashed ahead of him, her black hair and black eyes and white, white teeth. He wondered if she had been as beautiful as he recalled. If her oiled black braid had truly gleamed the way he remembered when she sat with him in the dark and told him stories of Arjuna and Krishna and Ram and Hanuman. So much was lost. He wondered sometimes if he even remembered her face correctly, or if he had replaced it with an ancient poster of a Bollywood girl, one of the old ones that Shriram kept in the safe of his winding shop and guarded jealously from the influences of light and air.

For a long time he thought he would go back and find her. That he might feed her. That he would send money and food back to his blighted land that now existed only in his mind, in his dreams, and in half-awake hallucinations of deserts, red and black saris, of women in dust, and their black hands and silver bangles, and their hunger, so many of the last memories of hunger.

He had fantasized that he would smuggle Gita back across the shining sea, and bring her close to the accountants who calculated calorie burn quotas for the world. Close to the calories, as she had said, once so long ago. Close to the men who balanced price stability against margins of error and protectively managed energy markets against a flood of food. Close to those small gods with more power than Kali to destroy the world.

But she was dead by now, whether through starvation or disease, and he was sure of it.

And wasn’t that why Shriram had come to him? Shriram who knew more of his history than any other. Shriram who had found him after he arrived in New Orleans, and known him for a fellow countryman: not just another Indian long settled in America, but one who still spoke the dialects of desert villages and who still remembered their country as it had existed before genehack weevil, leafcurl, and root rust. Shriram, who had shared a place on the floor while they both worked the winding sheds for calories and nothing else, and were grateful for it, as though they were nothing but genehacks themselves.

Of course Shriram had known what to say to send him upriver. Shriram had known how much he wished to balance the unbalanceable.

THEY FOLLOWED Bowman down empty streets and up remnant alleys, winding through the pathetic collapse of termite-ridden wood, crumbling concrete foundations, and rusted rebar too useless to scavenge and too stubborn to erode. Finally, the old man squeezed them between the stripped hulks of a pair of rusted automobiles. On the far side, Lalji and Creo gasped.

Sunflowers waved over their heads. A jungle of broad squash leaves hugged their knees. Dry corn stalks rattled in the wind. Bowman looked back at their surprise, and his smile, so hesitant and testing at first, broadened with unrestrained pleasure. He laughed and waved them onward, floundering through a garden of flowers and weeds and produce, catching his torn hemp cloth on the dried stems of cabbage gone to seed and the cling of cantaloupe vines. Creo and Lalji picked their way through the tangle, wending around purple lengths of eggplants, red orb tomatoes, and dangling orange ornament chiles. Bees buzzed heavily between the sunflowers, burdened with saddlebags of pollen.

Lalji paused in the overgrowth and called after Bowman. “These plants. They are not engineered?”

Bowman paused and came thrashing back, wiping sweat and vegetal debris off his face, grinning. “Well, engineered, that is a matter of definition, but no, these are not owned by calorie companies. Some of them are even heirloom.” He grinned again. “Or close enough.”

“How do they survive?”

“Oh, that.” He reached down and yanked up a tomato. “Nippon genehack weevils, or curl.111.b, or perhaps cibiscosis bacterium, something like that?” He bit into the tomato and let the juice run down his gray bristled chin. “There isn’t another heirloom planting within hundreds of miles. This is an island in an ocean of SoyPRO and HiGro. It makes a formidable barrier.” He studied the garden thoughtfully, took another bite of tomato. “Now that you have come, of course, only a few of these plants will survive.” He nodded at Lalji and Creo. “You will be carrying some infection or another and many of these rarities can only survive in isolation.” He plucked another tomato and handed it to Lalji. “Try it.”

Lalji studied its gleaming red skin. He bit into it and tasted sweetness and acid. Grinning, he offered it to Creo, who took a bite and made a face of disgust. “I’ll stick with SoyPRO.” He handed it back to Lalji, who finished it greedily.

Bowman smiled at Lalji’s hunger. “You’re old enough to remember, I think, what food used to be. You can take as much of this as you like, before we go. It will all die anyway.” He turned and thrashed again through the garden overgrowth, shoving aside dry corn stalks with crackling authoritative sweeps of his arms.

Beyond the garden a house lay collapsed, leaning as though it had been toppled by a megadont, its walls rammed and buckled. The collapsed roof had an ungainly slant, and at one end, a pool of water lay cool and deep, rippled with water skippers. Scavenged gutter had been laid to sluice rainwater from the roof into the pond.

Bowman slipped around the pool’s edge and disappeared down a series of crumbled cellar steps. By the time Lalji and Creo followed him down, he had wound a handlight and its dim bulb was spattering the cellar with illumination as its spring ran its course. He cranked the light again while he searched around, then struck a match and lit a lantern. The wick burned high on vegetable oil.

Lalji studied the cellar. It was sparse and damp. A pair of pallets lay on the broken concrete floor. A computer was tucked against a corner, its mahogany case and tiny screen gleaming, its treadle worn with use. An unruly kitchen was shoved against a wall with jars of grains arrayed on pantry shelves and bags of produce hanging from the ceiling to defend against rodents.

The man pointed to a sack on the ground. “There, my luggage.”

“What about the computer?” Lalji asked.

Bowman frowned at the machine. “No. I don’t need it.”

“But it’s valuable.”

“What I need, I carry in my head. Everything in that machine came from me. My fat burned into knowledge. My calories pedaled into data analysis.” He scowled. “Sometimes, I look at that computer and all I see is myself whittled away. I was a fat man once.” He shook his head emphatically. “I won’t miss it.”

Lalji began to protest but Creo startled and whipped out his spring gun. “Someone else is here.”

Lalji saw her even as Creo spoke: a girl squatting in the corner, hidden by shadow, a skinny, staring, freckled creature with stringy brown hair. Creo lowered his spring gun with a sigh.

Bowman beckoned. “Come out, Tazi. These are the men I told you about.”

Lalji wondered how long she had been sitting in the cellar darkness, waiting. She had the look of a creature who had almost molded with the basement: her hair lank, her dark eyes nearly swallowed by their pupils. He turned on Bowman. “I thought there was only you.”

Bowman’s pleased smile faded. “Will you go back because of it?”

Lalji eyed the girl. Was she a lover? His child? A feral adoptee? He couldn’t guess. The girl slipped her hand into the old man’s. Bowman patted it reassuringly. Lalji shook his head. “She is too many. You, I have agreed to take. I prepared a way to carry you, to hide you from boarders and inspections. Her,” he waved at the girl, “I did not agree to. It is risky to take someone like yourself, and now you wish to compound the danger with this girl? No.” He shook his head emphatically. “It cannot be done.”

“What difference does it make?” Bowman asked. “It costs you nothing. The current will carry us all. I have food enough for both of us.” He went over to the pantry and started to pull down glass jars of beans, lentils, corn, and rice. “Look, here.”

Lalji said, “We have more than enough food.”

Bowman made a face. “SoyPRO, I suppose?”

“Nothing wrong with SoyPRO,” Creo said.

The old man grinned and held up a jar of green beans floating in brine. “No. Of course not. But a man likes variety.” He began filling his bag with more jars, letting them clink carefully. He caught Creo’s snort of disgust and smiled, ingratiating suddenly. “For lean times, if nothing else.” He dumped more jars of grains into the sack.

Lalji chopped the air with his hand. “Your food is not the issue. Your girl is the issue, and she is a risk!”

Bowman shook his head. “No risk. No one is looking for her. She can travel in the open, even.”

“No. You must leave her. I will not take her.”

The old man looked down at the girl, uncertain. She gazed back, extricated her hand from his. “I’m not afraid. I can live here still. Like before.”

Bowman frowned, thinking. Finally, he shook his head. “No.” He faced Lalji. “If she cannot go, then I cannot. She fed me when I worked. I deprived her of calories for my research when they should have gone to her. I owe her too much. I will not leave her to the wolves of this place.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and placed her ahead of him, between himself and Lalji.

Creo made a face of disgust. “What difference does it make? Just bring her. We’ve got plenty of space.”

Lalji shook his head. He and Bowman stared at one another across the cellar. Creo said, “What if he gives us the computer? We could call it payment.”

Lalji shook his head stubbornly. “No. I do not care about the money. It is too dangerous to bring her.”

Bowman laughed. “Then why come all this way if you are afraid? Half the calorie companies want to kill me and you talk about risk?”

Creo frowned. “What’s he talking about?”

Bowman’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “You haven’t told your partner about me?”

Creo looked from Lalji to Bowman and back. “Lalji?”

Lalji took a deep breath, his eyes still locked on Bowman. “They say he can break the calorie monopolies. That he can pirate SoyPRO.”

Creo boggled for a moment. “That’s impossible!”

Bowman shrugged. “For you, perhaps. But for a knowledgeable man? Willing to dedicate his life to DNA helixes? More than possible. If one is willing to burn the calories for such a project, to waste energy on statistics and genome analysis, to pedal a computer through millions upon millions of cycles. More than possible.” He wrapped his arms around his skinny girl and held her to him. He smiled at Lalji. “So. Do we have any agreement?”

Creo shook his head, puzzling. “I thought you had a money plan, Lalji, but this. . . .” He shook his head again. “I don’t get it. How the hell do we make money off this?”

Lalji gave Creo a dirty look. Bowman smiled, patiently waiting. Lalji stifled an urge to seize the lantern and throw it in his face, such a confident man, so sure of himself, so loyal. . . .

He turned abruptly and headed for the stairs. “Bring the computer, Creo. If his girl makes any trouble, we dump them both in the river, and still keep his knowledge.”

Lalji remembered his father pushing back his thali, pretending he was full when dal had barely stained the steel plate. He remembered his mother pressing an extra bite onto his own. He remembered Gita, watching, silent, and then all of them unfolding their legs and climbing off the family bed, bustling around the hovel, ostentatiously ignoring him as he consumed the extra portion. He remembered roti in his mouth, dry like ashes, and forcing himself to swallow anyway.

He remembered planting. Squatting with his father in desert heat, yellow dust all around them, burying seeds they had stored away, saved when they might have been eaten, kept when they might have made Gita fat and marriageable, his father smiling, saying, “These seeds will make hundreds of new seeds and then we will all eat well.”

“How many seeds will they make?” Lalji had asked.

And his father had laughed and spread his arms fully wide, and seemed so large and great with his big white teeth and red and gold earrings and crinkling eyes as he cried, “Hundreds! Thousands if you pray!” And Lalji had prayed, to Ganesha and Lakshmi and Krishna and Rani Sati and Ram and Vishnu, to every god he could think of, joining the many villagers who did the same as he poured water from the well over tiny seeds and sat guard in the darkness against the possibility that the precious grains might be uprooted in the night and transported to some other farmer’s field.

He sat every night while cold stars turned overhead, watching the seed rows, waiting, watering, praying, waiting through the days until his father finally shook his head and said it was no use. And yet still he had hoped, until at last he went out into the field and dug up the seeds one by one, and found them already decomposed, tiny corpses in his hand, rotted. As dead in his palm as the day he and his father had planted them.

He had crouched in the darkness and eaten the cold dead seeds, knowing he should share, and yet unable to master his hunger and carry them home. He wolfed them down alone, half-decayed and caked with dirt: his first true taste of PurCal.

In the light of early morning, Lalji bathed in the most sacred river of his adopted land. He immersed himself in the Mississippi’s silty flow, cleansing the weight of sleep, making himself clean before his gods. He pulled himself back aboard, slick with water, his underwear dripping off his sagging bottom, his brown skin glistening, and toweled himself dry on the deck as he looked across the water to where the rising sun cast gold flecks on the river’s rippled surface.

He finished drying himself and dressed in new clean clothes before going to his shrine. He lit incense in front of the gods, placed U-Tex and SoyPRO before the tiny carved idols of Krishna and his lute, benevolent Lakshmi, and elephant-headed Ganesha. He knelt in front of the idols, prostrated himself, and prayed.

They had floated south on the river’s current, winding easily through bright fall days and watching as leaves changed and cool weather came on. Tranquil skies had arched overhead and mirrored on the river, turning the mud of the Mississippi’s flow into shining blue, and they had followed that blue road south, riding the great arterial flow of the river as creeks and tributaries and the linked chains of barges all crowded in with them and gravity did the work of carrying them south.

He was grateful for their smooth movement downriver. The first of the locks were behind them, and having watched the sniffer dogs ignore Bowman’s hiding place under the decking, Lalji was beginning to hope that the trip would be as easy as Shriram had claimed. Nonetheless, he prayed longer and harder each day as IP patrols shot past in their fast boats, and he placed extra SoyPRO before Ganesha’s idol, desperately hoping that the Remover of Obstacles would continue to do so.

By the time he finished his morning devotions, the rest of the boat was stirring. Creo came below and wandered into the cramped galley. Bowman followed, complaining of SoyPRO, offering heirloom ingredients that Creo shook off with suspicion. On deck, Tazi sat at the edge of the boat with a fishing line tossed into the water, hoping to snare one of the massive lethargic LiveSalmon that occasionally bumped against the boat’s keel in the warm murk of the river.

Lalji unmoored and took his place at the tiller. He unlocked the kink-springs and the boat whirred into the deeper current, stored joules dripping from its precision springs in a steady flow as molecules unlocked, one after another, reliable from the first kink to the last. He positioned the needleboat amongst the wallowing grain barges and locked the springs again, allowing the boat to drift.

Bowman and Creo came back up on deck as Creo was asking, “. . . you know how to grow SoyPRO?”

Bowman laughed and sat down beside Tazi. “What good would that do? The IP men would find the fields, ask for the licenses, and if none were provided, the fields would burn and burn and burn.”

“So what good are you?”

Bowman smiled and posed a question instead. “SoyPRO—what is its most precious quality?”

“It’s high calorie.”

Bowman’s braying laughter carried across the water. He tousled Tazi’s hair and the pair of them exchanged amused glances. “You’ve seen too many billboards from AgriGen. ‘Energy for the world’ indeed, indeed. Oh, AgriGen and their ilk must love you very much. So malleable, so . . . tractable.” He laughed again and shook his head. “No. Anyone can make high calorie plants. What else?”

Nettled, Creo said, “It resists the weevil.”

Bowman’s expression became sly. “Closer, yes. Difficult to make a plant that fights off the weevil, the leafcurl rust, the soil bacterium which chew through their roots . . . so many blights plague us now, so many beasts assail our plantings, but come now, what, best of all, do we like about SoyPRO? We of AgriGen who ‘provide energy to the world’ ?” He waved at a chain of grain barges slathered with logos for SuperFlavor. “What makes SuperFlavor so perfect from a CEO’s perspective?” He turned toward Lalji. “You know, Indian, don’t you? Isn’t it why you’ve come all this distance?”

Lalji stared back at him. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “It’s sterile.”

Bowman’s eyes held Lalji’s for a moment. His smile slipped. He ducked his head. “Yes. Indeed, indeed. A genetic dead-end. A one-way street. We now pay for a privilege that nature once provided willingly, for just a little labor.” He looked up at Lalji. “I’m sorry. I should have thought. You would have felt our accountants’ optimum demand estimates more than most.”

Lalji shook his head. “You cannot apologize.” He nodded at Creo. “Tell him the rest. Tell him what you can do. What I was told you can do.”

“Some things are perhaps better left unsaid.”

Lalji was undaunted. “Tell him. Tell me. Again.”

Bowman shrugged. “If you trust him, then I must trust him as well, yes?” He turned to Creo. “Do you know cheshires?”

Creo made a noise of disgust. “They’re pests.”

“Ah, yes. A bluebill for every dead one. I forgot. But what makes our cheshires such pests?”

“They molt. They kill birds.”

“And?” Bowman prodded.

Creo shrugged.

Bowman shook his head. “And to think it was for people like you that I wasted my life on research and my calories on computer cycles.

“You call cheshires a plague, and truly, they are. A few wealthy patrons, obsessed with Lewis Carroll, and suddenly they are everywhere, breeding with heirloom cats, killing birds, wailing in the night, but most importantly, their offspring, an astonishing ninety-two percent of the time, are cheshires themselves, pure, absolute. We create a new species in a heartbeat of evolutionary time, and our songbird populations disappear almost as quickly. A more perfect predator, but most importantly, one that spreads.

“With SoyPRO, or U-Tex, the calorie companies may patent the plants and use intellectual property police and sensitized dogs to sniff out their property, but even IP men can only inspect so many acres. Most importantly, the seeds are sterile, a locked box. Some may steal a little here and there, as you and Lalji do, but in the end, you are nothing but a small expense on a balance sheet fat with profit because no one except the calorie companies can grow the plants.

“But what would happen if we passed SoyPRO a different trait, stealthily, like a man climbing atop his best friend’s wife?” He waved his arm to indicate the green fields that lapped at the edges of the river. “What if someone were to drop bastardizing pollens amongst these crown jewels that surround us? Before the calorie companies harvested and shipped the resulting seeds across the world in their mighty clipper fleets, before the licensed dealers delivered the patented crop seed to their customers. What sorts of seeds might they be delivering then?”

Bowman began ticking traits off with his fingers. “Resistant to weevil and leafcurl, yes. High calorie, yes, of course. Genetically distinct and therefore unpatentable?” He smiled briefly. “Perhaps. But best of all, fecund. Unbelievably fecund. Ripe, fat with breeding potential.” He leaned forward. “Imagine it. Seeds distributed across the world by the very cuckolds who have always clutched them so tight, all of those seeds lusting to breed, lusting to produce their own fine offspring full of the same pollens that polluted the crown jewels in the first place.” He clapped his hands. “Oh, what an infection that would be! And how it would spread!”

Creo stared, his expression contorting between horror and fascination. “You can do this?”

Bowman laughed and clapped his hands again. “I’m going to be the next Johnny Appleseed.”

LALJI WOKE suddenly. Around him, the darkness of the river was nearly complete. A few windup LED beacons glowed on grain barges, powered by the flow of the current’s drag against their ungainly bodies. Water lapped against the sides of the needleboat and the bank where they had tied up. Beside him on the deck the others lay bundled in blankets.

Why had he wakened? In the distance, a pair of village roosters were challenging one another across the darkness. A dog was barking, incensed by whatever hidden smells or sounds caused dogs to startle and defend their territory. Lalji closed his eyes and listened to the gentle undulation of the river, the sounds of the distant village. If he pressed his imagination, he could almost be lying in the early dawn of another village, far away, long ago dissolved.

Why was he awake? He opened his eyes again and sat up. He strained his eyes against the darkness. A shadow appeared on the river blackness, a subtle blot of movement.

Lalji shook Bowman awake, his hand over Bowman’s mouth. “Hide!” he whispered.

Lights swept over them. Bowman’s eyes widened. He fought off his blankets and scrambled for the hold. Lalji gathered Bowman’s blankets with his own, trying to obscure the number of sleepers as more lights flashed brightly, sliding across the deck, pasting them like insects on a collection board.

Abandoning its pretense of stealth, the IP boat opened its springs and rushed in. It slammed against the needleboat, pinning it to the shoreline as men swarmed aboard. Three of them, and two dogs.

“Everyone stay calm! Keep your hands in sight!”

Handlight beams swept across the deck, dazzlingly bright. Creo and Tazi clawed out of their blankets and stood, surprised. The sniffer dogs growled and lunged against their leashes. Creo backed away from them, his hands held before him, defensive.

One of the IP men swept his handlight across them. “Who owns this boat?”

Lalji took a breath. “It’s mine. This is my boat.” The beam swung back and speared his eyes. He squinted into the light. “Have we done something wrong?”

The leader didn’t answer. The other IP men fanned out, swinging their lights across the boat, marking the people on deck. Lalji realized that except for the leader, they were just boys, barely old enough to have mustaches and beards at all. Just peachfuzzed boys carrying spring guns and covered in armor that helped them swagger.

Two of them headed for the stairs with the dogs as a fourth jumped aboard from the secured IP boat. Handlight beams disappeared into the bowels of the needleboat, casting looming shadows from inside the stairway. Creo had somehow managed to end up backed against the needleboat’s cache of spring guns. His hand rested casually beside the catches. Lalji stepped toward the captain, hoping to head off Creo’s impulsiveness.

The captain swung his light on him. “What are you doing here?”

Lalji stopped and spread his hands helplessly. “Nothing.”

“No?”

Lalji wondered if Bowman had managed to secure himself. “What I mean is that we only moored here to sleep.”

“Why didn’t you tie up at Willow Bend?”

“I’m not familiar with this part of the river. It was getting dark. I didn’t want to be crushed by the barges.” He wrung his hands. “I deal with antiques. We were looking in the old suburbs to the north. It’s not illeg—” A shout from below interrupted him. Lalji closed his eyes regretfully. The Mississippi would be his burial river. He would never find his way to the Ganges.

The IP men came up dragging Bowman. “Look what we found! Trying to hide under the decking!”

Bowman tried to shake them off. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”

“Shut up!” One of the boys shoved a club into Bowman’s stomach. The old man doubled over. Tazi lunged toward them, but the captain corralled her and held her tightly as he flashed his light over Bowman’s features. He gasped.

“Cuff him. We want him. Cover them!” Spring guns came up all around. The captain scowled at Lalji. “An antiques dealer. I almost believed you.” To his men he said, “He’s a generipper. From a long time ago. See if there’s anything else on board. Any disks, any computers, any papers.”

One of them said, “There’s a treadle computer below.”

“Get it.”

In moments the computer was on deck. The captain surveyed his captives. “Cuff them all.” One of the IP boys made Lalji kneel and started patting him down while a sniffer dog growled over them.

Bowman was saying, “I’m really very sorry. Perhaps you’ve made a mistake. Perhaps. . . .”

Suddenly the captain shouted. The IP men’s handlights swung toward the sound. Tazi was latched onto the captain’s hand, biting him. He was shaking at her as though she were a dog, struggling with his other hand to get his spring gun free. For a brief moment everyone watched the scuffle between the girl and the much larger man. Someone—Lalji thought it was an IP man—laughed. Then Tazi was flung free and the captain had his gun out and there was a sharp hiss of disks. Handlights thudded on the deck and rolled, casting dizzy beams of light.

More disks hissed through the darkness. A rolling light beam showed the captain falling, crashing against Bowman’s computer, silver disks embedded in his armor. He and the computer slid backwards. Darkness again. A splash. The dogs howled, either released and attacking or else wounded. Lalji dove and lay prone on the decking as metal whirred past his head.

“Lalji!” It was Creo’s voice. A gun skittered across the planking. Lalji scrambled toward the sound.

One of the handlight beams had stabilized. The captain was sitting up, black blood lines trailing from his jaw as he leveled his pistol at Tazi. Bowman lunged into the light, shielding the girl with his body. He curled as disks hit him.

Lalji’s fingers bumped the spring gun. He clutched after it blindly. His hand closed on it. He jacked the pump, aimed toward bootfalls, and let the spring gun whir. The shadow of one of the IP men, the boys, was above him, falling, bleeding, already dead as he hit the decking.

Everything went silent.

Lalji waited. Nothing moved. He waited still, forcing himself to breathe quietly, straining his eyes against the shadows where the handlights didn’t illuminate. Was he the only one alive?

One by one, the three remaining handlights ran out of juice. Darkness closed in. The IP boat bumped gently against the needleboat. A breeze rustled the willow banks, carrying the muddy reek of fish and grasses. Crickets chirped.

Lalji stood. Nothing. No movement. Slowly he limped across the deck. He’d twisted his leg somehow. He felt for one of the handlights, found it by its faint metallic gleam, and wound it. He played its flickering beam across the deck.

Creo. The big blond boy was dead, a disk caught in his throat. Blood pooled from where it had hit his artery. Not far away, Bowman was ribboned with disks. His blood ran everywhere. The computer was missing. Gone overboard. Lalji squatted beside the bodies, sighing. He pulled Creo’s bloodied braids off his face. He had been fast. As fast as he had believed he was. Three armored IP men and the dogs as well. He sighed again.

Something whimpered. Lalji flicked his light toward the source, afraid of what he would find, but it was only the girl, seemingly unhurt, crawling to Bowman’s body. She looked up into the glare of Lalji’s light, then ignored him and crouched over Bowman. She sobbed, then stifled herself. Lalji locked the handlight’s spring and let darkness fall over them.

He listened to the night sounds again, praying to Ganesha that there were no others out on the river. His eyes adjusted. The shadow of the grieving girl kneeling amongst lumped bodies resolved from the blackness. He shook his head. So many dead for such an idea. That such a man as Bowman might be of use. And now such a waste. He listened for signs others had been alerted but heard nothing. A single patrol, it seemed, uncoordinated with any others. Bad luck. That was all. One piece of bad luck breaking a string of good. Gods were fickle.

He limped to the needleboat’s moorings and began untying. Unbidden, Tazi joined him, her small hands fumbling with the knots. He went to the tiller and unlocked the kink-springs. The boat jerked as the screws bit and they swept into the river darkness. He let the springs fly for an hour, wasting joules but anxious to make distance from the killing place, then searched the banks for an inlet and anchored. The darkness was nearly total.

After securing the boat, he searched for weights and tied them around the ankles of the IP men. He did the same with the dogs, then began shoving the bodies off the deck. The water swallowed them easily. It felt unclean to dump them so unceremoniously, but he had no intention of taking time to bury them. With luck, the men would bump along under water, picked at by fish until they disintegrated.

When the IP men were gone, he paused over Creo. So wonderfully quick. He pushed Creo overboard, wishing he could build a pyre for him.

Lalji began mopping the decks, sluicing away the remaining blood. The moon rose, bathing them in pale light. The girl sat beside the body of her chaperone. Eventually, Lalji could avoid her with his mopping no more. He knelt beside her. “You understand he must go into the river?”

The girl didn’t respond. Lalji took it as assent. “If there is anything you wish to have of his, you should take it now.” The girl shook her head. Lalji hesitantly let his hand rest on her shoulder. “It is no shame to be given to a river. An honor, even, to go to a river such as this.”

He waited. Finally, she nodded. He stood and dragged the body to the edge of the boat. He tied it with weights and levered the legs over the lip. The old man slid out of his hands. The girl was silent, staring at where Bowman had disappeared into the water.

Lalji finished his mopping. In the morning he would have to mop again, and sand the stains, but for the time it would do. He began pulling in the anchors. A moment later, the girl was with him again, helping. Lalji settled himself at the tiller. Such a waste, he thought. Such a great waste.

Slowly, the current drew their needleboat into the deeper flows of the river. The girl came and knelt beside him. “Will they chase us?”

Lalji shrugged. “With luck? No. They will look for something larger than us to make so many of their men disappear. With just the two of us now, we will look like very small inconsequential fish to them. With luck.”

She nodded, seeming to digest this information. “He saved me, you know. I should be dead now.”

“I saw.”

“Will you plant his seeds?”

“Without him to make them, there will be no one to plant them.”

Tazi frowned. “But we’ve got so many.” She stood and slipped down into the hold. When she returned, she lugged the sack of Bowman’s food stores. She began pulling jars from the sack: rice and corn, soybeans and kernels of wheat.

“That’s just food,” Lalji protested.

Tazi shook her head stubbornly. “They’re his Johnny Appleseeds. I wasn’t supposed to tell you. He didn’t trust you to take us all the way. To take me. But you could plant them, too, right?”

Lalji frowned and picked up a jar of corn. The kernels nestled tightly together, hundreds of them, each one unpatented, each one a genetic infection. He closed his eyes and in his mind he saw a field: row upon row of green rustling plants, and his father, laughing, with his arms spread wide as he shouted, “Hundreds! Thousands if you pray!”

Lalji hugged the jar to his chest, and slowly, he began to smile.

The needleboat continued downstream, a bit of flotsam in the Mississippi’s current. Around it, the crowding shadow hulks of the grain barges loomed, all of them flowing south through the fertile heartland toward the gateway of New Orleans; all of them flowing steadily toward the vast wide world.

THE KING OF WHERE-I-GO

Howard Waldrop

When I was eight, in 1954, my sister caught polio.

It wasn’t my fault, although it took twenty years before I talked myself out of believing it was. See, we had this fight . . .?

We were at my paternal grandparents’ house in Alabama, where we were always taken in the summer, either being driven from Texas to there on Memorial Day and picked up on the Fourth of July, or taken the Fourth and retrieved Labor Day weekend, just before school started again in Texas.

This was the first of the two times when we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Our parents were taking a break from us for three entire months. We essentially ran wild all that time. This was a whole new experience. Ten years later, when it happened the second time, we would return to find our parents separated—me and my sister living with my mother in a garage apartment that backed up on the railroad tracks and my father living in what was a former motel that had been turned into day-laborer apartments a half mile away.

Our father worked as an assembler in a radio factory that would go out of business in the early l960s, when the Japanese started making them better, smaller, and cheaper. Our mother worked in the Ben Franklin 5-10-25 store downtown. Our father had to carpool every day into a Dallas suburb, so he would come and get the car one day a week. We would be going to junior high by then, and it was two blocks away.

But that was in the future. This was the summer of 1954.

Every two weeks we would get in our aunt’s purple Kaiser and she would drive us the forty-five miles to our maternal grandparents’ farm in the next county, and we would spend the next two weeks there. Then they’d come and get us after two weeks and bring us back. Like the movie title says, two weeks in another town.

We were back for the second time at the paternal grandparents’ place. It was after the Fourth of July because there were burned patches on my grandfather’s lower field where they’d had to go beat out the fires started by errant Roman candles and skyrockets.

There was a concrete walk up to the porch of our grandparents’ house that divided the lawn in two. The house was three miles out of town; some time in the 1980s the city limits would move past the place when a highway bypass was built to rejoin the highway that went through town and the town made a landgrab.

On the left side of the lawn we’d set up a croquet game (the croquet set would cost a small fortune now, I realize, though neither my grandparents or aunt was what people called well-off).

My sister and I were playing. My grandfather had gone off to his job somewhere in the county. My grandmother was lying down, with what was probably a migraine, or maybe the start of the cancer that would kill her in a few years. (For those not raised in the South; in older homes the bedroom was also the front parlor—there was a stove, chairs for entertaining, and the beds in the main room of the house.) The bed my grandmother lay on was next to the front window.

My sister Ethel did something wrong in the game. Usually I would have been out fishing from before sunup until after dark with a few breaks during the day when I’d have to come back to the house. Breakfast was always made by my grandfather—who had a field holler that carried a mile, which he would let out from the back porch when breakfast was ready, and I’d come reluctantly back from the Big Pond. My grandfather used a third of a pound of coffee a day, and he percolated it for at least fifteen minutes—you could stand a spoon up in it. Then lunch, which in the South is called dinner, when my aunt would come out from her job in town and eat with me and my sister, my grandmother, and any cousins, uncles, or kin who dropped by (always arranged ahead of time, I’m sure), then supper, the evening meal, after my grandfather got home. Usually I went fishing after that, too, until it got too dark to see and the water moccasins came out.

But this morning we were playing croquet and it was still cool so I must have come back from fishing for some reason and been snookered into playing croquet.

“Hey! You can’t do that!” I yelled at my sister.

“Do what?” she yelled back.

“Whatever you just did!” I said.

“I didn’t do anything!” she yelled.

“You children please be quiet,” yelled my grandmother from her bed by the window.

“You cheated!” I yelled at my sister.

“I did not!” she hollered back.

One thing led to another and my sister hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet about as hard as a six-year-old can hit. I went down in a heap near a wicket. I sat up, grabbed the blue croquet ball, and threw it as hard as I could into my sister’s right kneecap. She went down screaming.

My grandmother was now standing outside the screen door on the porch (which rich people called a verandah) in her housecoat.

“I asked you children to be quiet, please,” she said.

“You shut up!” said my sister, holding her knee and crying.

My forehead had swelled up to the size of an apple.

My grandmother moved like the wind then, like Roger Bannister who had just broken the four-minute mile, Suddenly there was a willow switch in her hand and she had my sister’s right arm and she was tanning her hide with the switch.

So here was my sister, screaming in two kinds of pain and regretting the invention of language and my grandmother was saying with every movement of her arm, “Don’t-you-ever-tell-me-to-shut-up-young-lady!”

She left her in a screaming pile and went back into the house and lay down to start dying some more.

I was well-pleased, with the casual cruelty of childhood, that I would never-ever-in-my-wildest-dreams ever tell my grandmother to shut up.

I got up, picked up my rod and tackle box, and went back over the hill to the Big Pond, which is what I would rather have been doing than playing croquet anyway.

That night my sister got what we thought was a cold, in the middle of July.

Next day, she was in the hospital with polio.

My aunt Noni had had a best friend who got poliomyelitis when they were nine, just after WWI, about the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt had gotten his. (Roosevelt had been president longer than anybody, through the Depression the grown-ups were always talking about, and WWII, which was the exciting part of the history books you never got to in school. He’d died at the end of the war, more than a year before I was born. Then the president had been Truman, and now it was Ike.) My aunt knew what to do and had Ethel in the hospital quick. It probably saved my sister’s life, and at least saved her from an iron lung, if it were going to be that kind of polio.

You can’t imagine how much those pictures in newsreels scared us all—rows of kids, only their heads sticking out of what looked like long tubular industrial washing machines. Polio attacked many things; it could make it so you couldn’t breathe on your own—the iron lung was alternately a hypo- and hyperbaric chamber—it did the work of your diaphragm. This still being in vacuum-tube radio times, miniaturization hadn’t set in, so the things weighed a ton. They made noises like breathing, too, which made them even creepier.

If you were in one, there was a little mirror over your head (you were lying down) where you could look at yourself; you couldn’t look anywhere else.

Normally that summer we would have gone, every three days or so, with our aunt back to town after dinner and gone to the swimming pool in town. But it was closed because of the polio scare, and so was the theater. (They didn’t want young people congregating in one place so the disease could quickly spread.) So what you ended up with was a town full of bored schoolkids and teenagers out of school for the summer with nothing to do. Not what a Baptist town really cares for.

Of course you could swim in a lake or something. But the nearest lake was miles out of town. If you couldn’t hitch a ride or find someone to drive you there, you were S.O.L. You could go to the drive-ins for movies. The nearest one was at the edge of the next county—again you needed someone with wheels, although once there you could sit on top of the car and watch the movie, leaving the car itself to the grownups or older teenage brothers and sisters. (They’d even taken away the seats in front of the snack bar where once you could sit like in a regular theater, only with a cloud of mosquitoes eating you all up, again because of polio.)

Me, I had fishing and I didn’t care. Let the town wimps stew in their own juices.

But that was all before my sister made polio up close and personal in the family and brought back memories to my aunt.

But Aunt Noni became a ball of fire.

I couldn’t go into the hospital to see my sister, of course—even though I had been right there when she started getting sick. Kids could absolutely not come down to the polio ward. This was just a small county hospital with about forty beds, but it also had a polio ward with two iron lungs ready to go, such was the fear in those days.

My aunt took me to the hospital one day, anyway. She had had a big picture-frame mirror with her, from her house.

“She’s propped up on pillows and can’t move much,” my aunt said. “But I think we can get her to see you.”

“Stay out here in the parking lot and watch that window,” she said. She pointed to one of the half-windows in the basement. I stayed out there until I saw my aunt waving in the window. I waved back.

Then my aunt came out and asked, “Did you see her?”

“I saw you.”

“She saw you,” she said. “It made her happy.” Yeah, I thought, the guy who kneecapped her with the croquet ball.

“I don’t know why,” I said.

Then Aunt Noni gave me some of my weekly allowance that my parents mailed to her in installments.

I took off to the drugstore like a bullet. I bought a cherry-lime-chocolate coke at the fountain, and a Monster of Frankenstein, a Plastic Man, and an Uncle Scrooge comic book. That took care of forty of my fifty cents. A whole dime, and nowhere to spend it. If it would have been open, and this had been a Saturday, when we usually got our allowance, I would have used the dime to go to the movies and seen eight cartoons, a Three Stooges short, a newsreel, a chapter of a serial, some previews, and a double feature: some SF flick and a Guy Madison movie if I was lucky, a couple of Westerns if I wasn’t.

But it was a weekday, and I went back to the office where my aunt Noni was the Jill-of-all-trades plus secretary for a one-man business for forty-seven years (it turned out). It was upstairs next to the bank. Her boss, Mr. Jacks, lived in the biggest new house in town (until, much later, the new doctor in town built a house out on the highway modeled on Elvis’ Graceland). Mr. Jacks’ house, as fate would have it, was situated on a lot touching my aunt’s, only set one house over and facing the other street back.

He wasn’t in; he usually wasn’t in the office when I was there. Aunt Noni was typing like a bunny, a real blur from the wrists down. She was the only one in the family who’d been to college. (Much later I would futz around in one for five years without graduating.) She could read, write, and speak Latin, like I later could. She read books. She had the librarian at the Carnegie Library in town send off to Montgomery for books on polio; they’d arrived while I was having the Coca-Cola comic book orgy and she’d gone to get them when the librarian had called her. There was a pile on the third chair in the office.

I was sitting in the second one.

“I want to know,” she said as she typed without looking at her shorthand pad or the typewriter, “enough so that I’ll know if someone is steering me wrong on something. I don’t want to know enough to become pedantic—”

“Huh?” I asked.

She nodded toward the big dictionary on the stand by the door.

I dutifully got up and went to it.

“P—?”

“P-E-D-A,” said my aunt, still typing.

I looked it up.

“Hmmm,” I said. “Okay.” Then I sat back down.

“They’re talking like she won’t walk again without braces or crutches. That’s what they told my friend Frances in nineteen and twenty-one,” she said. “You see her motorboatin’ all around town now. She only limps a little when she gets really tired and worn out.”

Frances worked down at the dress shop. She looked fine except her right leg was a little thinner than her left.

“My aim is to have your sister walking again by herself by next summer.”

“Will it happen?”

“If I have anything to do with it, it will,” said Aunt Noni.

I never felt so glum about the future as I did sitting there in my aunt’s sunny office that July afternoon. What if she were wrong? What if my sister Ethel never walked again? What would her life be like? Who the hell would I play croquet with, in Alabama in the summer, if not her, when I wasn’t fishing?

Of course, a year later, the Salk vaccine was developed and tried out and started the end of polio. And a couple of years after that came the Sabin oral vaccine, which they gave to you on sugar cubes and which tasted like your grandfather’s old hunting socks smelled, which really ended the disease.

We didn’t know any of that then. And the future didn’t help my sister any right then.

My parents had of course taken off work and driven from Texas at the end of the first week; there were many family conferences to which the me part of the family was not privy. My parents went to see her and stayed at the hospital.

What was decided was that my sister was to remain in Alabama with my grandparents for the next year and that I was to return to my dead hometown in Texas with my parents and somegoddamnhow survive the rest of the summer there.

My sister Ethel would be enrolled in school in Alabama, provided she was strong enough to do the schoolwork. So I fished the Big Pond and the Little Pond one last time, til it was too dark to see and the bass lost interest in anything in the tackle box, and I went over the low hill to my grandparents’ house, robbed of a summer.

Next morning we got the car packed, ready to return to Texas, a fourteen-hour drive in a flathead 6 1952 Ford. Then we stopped by the hospital. Aunt Noni was already there, her purple Kaiser parked by the front door. My parents went in; after a while Aunt Noni waved at the window, then I saw a blur in the mirror and a shape and I waved and waved and jumped up and down with an enthusiasm I did not feel. Then I got in the car and we went back to Texas.

Somehow, I did live through that summer.

One of the things that got me through it was the letters my aunt took down from my sister and typed up. The first couple were about the hospital, til they let her go, and then about what she could see from the back room of my grandparents’ house.

We’d usually only gone to Alabama for the summer, and sometimes rushed trips at Christmas, where we were in the car fourteen hours (those days the Interstate Highway System was just a gleam in Ike’s eye—so he could fight a two-front war and not be caught short moving stuff from one coast to the other like they had in the Korean War when he was running Columbia University in NYC). We stayed at our grandparents’ places Christmas Eve and on Christmas morning and then drove fourteen hours back home just in time for my parents to go to work the day after Christmas.

So I’d never seen Alabama in the fall or the spring. My sister described the slow change from summer to fall there after school started (in Texas it was summer til early October, and you had the leaves finish falling off the trees the third week of December and new buds coming out the second week of January.) She wrote of the geese she heard going over on the Mississippi flyway.

She complained about the schoolwork; in letters back to her I complained about school itself: the same dorks were the same dorks, the same jerks the same jerks, the same bullies still bullies. And that was third grade. Then, you always think it’s going to change the next year, until you realize: these jerks are going to be the same ones I’m stuck with the rest of their lives. (As “Scoop” Jackson the senator would later say—it’s hard to turn fifty-five and realize the world is being run by people you used to beat up in the fourth grade.)

Third grade was the biggest grind of my life. My sister was finding Alabama second grade tough too; there was no Alamo, no Texas-under-six-flags. In Alabama there was stealing land from the Choctaws and Cherokees, there was the cotton gin and slavery, there was the War for Southern Independence, and then there was the boll weevil. That was about it. No Deaf Smith, no Ben Milam, no line drawn in the dirt with the sword, no last battle of the Civil War fought by two detachments who didn’t know the war was over, six weeks after Appomattox; no Spindletop, no oil boom, no great comic-book textbook called Texas History Movies which told you everything in a casually racist way but which you remembered better than any textbook the rest of your life.

I told her what I was doing (reading comics, watching TV) and what I caught in the city park pond or the creek coming out of it. It was the fifties in Texas. There was a drought; the town well had gone dry, and they were digging a lake west of town which, at the current seven inches of rain a year, would take twenty-two years to fill up, by which time we’d all be dead.

I told her about the movies I’d seen once the town’s lone theater had opened back up. (There were three drive-ins: one in the next town west, with a great neon cowboy round-up scene on the back of the screen, facing the highway—one guy strummed a green neon guitar, a red neon fire burned at the chuck wagon, a vacquero twirled a pink neon lasso; one at the west edge of our town; and one near the next town to the east.)

Anyway, I got and wrote at least one letter a week to and from my sister; my aunt wrote separate letters to me and my parents; they called each other at least once a week.

Somehow, Christmas dragged its ass toward the school year; my parents decided we’d go to Alabama during the break and see my sister and try to have a happy holiday.

My sister was thinner and her eyes were shinier. She looked pretty much the same except her left leg was skinny. She was propped up in bed. Everybody made a big fuss over her all the time. There was a pile of Christmas presents for her out under the tree in the screened-in hall that would choke a mastodon.

I was finally in her room with no one else there.

“Bored, huh?” I asked.

“There’s too many people playing the damned fool around here for me to get bored,” she said.

“I mean, outside of Christmas?”

“Well, yeah. The physical therapist lady comes twice a day usually and we go through that rigmarole.”

“I hope people got you lots of books,” I said.

“I’ve read so many books I can’t see straight, Bubba.”

“Have you read All About Dinosaurs?” I asked.

“No.”

“I’ve got my copy with me. You can read it but I gotta have it back before we leave. I stood in a Sears and Roebuck store in Ft. Worth for six hours once while they shipped one over from the Dallas warehouse. The last truck came in and the book wasn’t there. They were out and didn’t know it. I’d saved up my allowance for four weeks! Without movies or comic books! I told anybody who would listen about it. A week later one came in the mail. Aunt Noni heard the story and ordered it for me.”

“Bless her heart.”

“I’m real sorry all this happened, Sis,” I said, before I knew I was saying it. “I wish we hadn’t fought the day before you got sick.”

“What? What fight?”

“The croquet game. You hit me.”

“You hit me!” she said.

“No. You backsassed Mamaw. She hit you.”

“Yes she did,” said my sister Ethel.

“Anyway, I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

I really was going to talk to her more but some damnfool uncle came in wearing his hat upside down to make her laugh.

My sister grew up and. walked again, and except for a slight limp and a sometime windmilling foot (like my aunt’s friend Frances when she was very tired), she got around pretty well, even though she lost most of a year of her life in that bed in Alabama.

I remember walking with her the first day of school when she had come back to Texas and was starting third grade.

“Doing okay?” I asked. We lived three whole blocks from school then, but I wanted her to take it slow and not get too tired.

“Yeah. Sure,” she said.

I remember the day they handed out the permission forms for the Salk polio vaccine, which was a big shot with a square needle in the meat of your arm.

My sister laughed and laughed. “Oh, bitter irony!” she said “Oh, ashes and dust!”

“Yeah,” I said, “well . . .”

“Have Mom and Pop sign yours twice,” she said. “At least it’ll do you some good.”

“Once again, Sis, I’m sorry.”

“Tell that to the school nurse,” she said.

At some point, when we were in our late teens, we were having one of those long philosophical discussions brothers and sisters have when neither has a date and you’re too damned tired from the school week to get up off your butt and go out and do something on your own, and the public library closed early. Besides, your folks are yelling at each other in their bedroom.

The Time Machine was one of my favorite movies (they all are). I had the movie tie-in paperback with the photo of Rod Taylor on the back; the Dell Movie Classic comic book with art by Alex Toth, and the Classics Illustrated edition with art by Lou Cameron—it had been my favorite for years before the movie had come out in 1960.

“What would I do,” I repeated Ethel’s question, “if I could travel in time? Like go see dinosaurs, or go visit the spaceport they’re going to build just outside this popsicle burg?

“Most people would do just what I’d do: first I’d go to the coin shop, buy ten early 1930s Mercury dimes, then go back to 1938 and buy ten copies of Action Comics #1 with Superman’s first story, and then I’d go write mash notes to Eve Arden.”

I’d just finished watching reruns of Our Miss Brooks on TV.

“No,” she said. “I mean, really?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, really.”

“Wouldn’t you try to stop Oswald?” she asked. “Go strangle Hitler in his cradle?”

“You didn’t ask ‘What would you do if you could travel in time to make the world a better place?’ You asked ‘What would you do if you could travel in time?’ ”

“Be that way,” she said.

“I am that way.”

And then she went off to work at some Rhine-like lab in North Carolina. That’s not what she set out to do—what she set out to do was be a carhop, get out of the house and our live local version of the Bickersons. (Bickering=Pow! Sock! Crash!)

She first worked as a carhop in town, from the time she was fourteen, and then she got the real glamour job over in Dallas at the biggest drive-in cafe there, twenty-five carhops, half of them on skates (not her). She moved in with two other carhops there. A few months later, King and Bobby Kennedy got killed and half the US burned down.

Something happened at the cafe—I never found out exactly what. But a week later she called home and said this research lab was flying her to North Carolina for a few days (she’d never flown before). And then she left.

I started getting letters from her. By then our parents had gotten a divorce; I was living in the house with my father (who would die in a few months of heart failure—and a broken heart). My mom had run off with the guy she’d been sneaking around with the last couple of years and we weren’t talking much. I was in college and seeing the girl I would eventually marry, have a kid with, and divorce.

My sister told me they were really interested in her; that other institutes were trying to get her to come over to them and that she wasn’t the only polio survivor there. My first thought was—what’s going on? Is this like Himmler’s interest in twins and gypsies, or was this just statistically average? This was the late ‘60s; lots of people our age had polio before 1955, so maybe that was it?

Her letters were a nice break in the college routine—classes, theater, part-time thirty-six-hour-a-week job. Of course I got an ulcer before I turned twenty-two. (Later it didn’t keep me from being drafted; it had gotten better after I quit working thirty hours a week in theater plus the job plus only sleeping between three and six A.M. seven days a week.)

“The people here are nice,” she said. “The tests are fun, except for the concentration. I get headaches like Mamaw used to get, every other day.” She sent me a set of the cards—Rhine cards. Circle, triangle, star, square, plus sign, wavy horizontal lines. They had her across the table from a guy who turned the cards, fifty of them, randomly shuffled. She was supposed to intuit (or receive telepathically) which cards he’d turned over. She marked the symbol she thought it was. There was a big high partition across the middle of the table—she could barely see the top of the guy’s head. Sometimes she was the one turning the cards and tried to send messages to him. There were other, more esoteric ones—the tests were supposed to be scientific and repeatable.

From one of her letters:

—

I don’t mind the work here, and if they prove something by it, more’s the better. What I do mind is that all the magazines I read here think that if there is something to extrasensory perception, then there also has to be mental contact with UFOs (what UFOs?) and the Atlanteans (what Atlantis?) and mental death rays and contact with the spirit-world (what spirit-world?).

I don’t understand that; proving extrasensory perception only proves that exists, and they haven’t even proved that yet. Next week they’re moving me over to the PK unit—PsychoKinesis. Moving stuff at a distance without, as Morbius said, “instrumentality.” That’s more like what happened at the drive-in anyway. They wanted to test me for this stuff first. Evidently I’m not very good at this. Or, I’m the same as everybody else, except the ones they catch cheating, by what they call reading the other person—physical stuff like in poker, where somebody always lifts an eyebrow when the star comes up—stuff like that.

Will write to you when I get a handle on this PK stuff.

Your sis,

Ethe—

“You would have thought I set off an atom bomb here,” her next letter began. She then described what happened and the shady-looking new people who showed up to watch her tests.

Later, they showed her some film smuggled out of the USSR of ladies shaped like potatoes doing hand-schtick and making candles move toward them.

My sister told them her brother could do the same thing with 2-lb test nylon fishing line.

“If I want that candle there to move over here, I’ll do it without using my hands,” she’d said.

And then, the candle didn’t move.

“They told me then my abilities may lie in some other area; that the cafe incident was an anomaly, or perhaps someone else, a cook or another carhop had the ability; it had just happened to her because she was the one with the trays and dishes.

“Perhaps,” she had told them, “you were wrong about me entirely and are wasting your motel and cafeteria money and should send me back to Texas Real Soon. Or maybe I have the ability to move something besides candles, something no one else ever had. Or maybe we are just all pulling our puds.” Or words to that effect.

A couple of days later she called me on the phone. The operator told her to deposit $1.15. I heard the ching and chime of coins in the pay phone.

“Franklin,” said Ethel.

She never called me by my right name; I was Bubba to everyone in the family.

“Yes, Sis, what is it?”

“I think we had a little breakthrough here. We won’t know til tomorrow. I want you to know I love you.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“I’ll let you know,” she said.

Then she hung up.

The next day was my usual Wednesday, which meant I wouldn’t get any sleep. I’d gotten to bed the night before at 2 A.M. I was in class by 7 A.M. and had three classes and lab scattered across the day. At 6 P.M. I drove to the regional newspaper plant that printed all the suburban dailies. I was a linotype operator at minimum wage. The real newspaper that owned all the suburban ones was a union shop and the guys there made $3.25 an hour in l968 dollars. I worked a twelve-hour shift (or a little less if we got all the type set early) three nights a week, Mon.-Wed.-Fri. That way, not only did you work for $1.25 an hour, they didn’t owe you for overtime unless you pulled more than a sixteen-hour shift one night—and nobody ever did.

Linotypes were mechanical marvels—so much so that Mergenthaler, who finally perfected it, went slap-dab crazy before he died. It’s like being in a room of mechanical monsters who spit out hot pieces of lead (and sometimes hot lead itself all over you—before they do that, they make a distinctive noise and you’ve got a second and a half to get ten feet away; it’s called a backspill).

Once all linotype was set by hand, by the operators. By the time I came along, they had typists set copy on a tape machine. What came out there was perforated tape, brought into the linotype room in big, curling strands. The operator—me—put the front end of the tape into a reader-box built onto the keyboard, and the linotype clicked away like magic. The keys depressed, lines of type-mold keys fell into place from a big magazine above the keyboard; they were lifted up and moved over to the molder against the pot of hot lead; the line was cast, an arm came down, lifted the letter matrices up, another rod pushed them over onto an endless spiraled rod, and they fell back into the typecase when the side of the matrix equaled the space on the typecase, and the process started all over. If the tape code was wrong and a line went too long, you got either type matrices flying everywhere as the line was lifted to the molder, or it went over and you got a backspill and hot lead flew across the room.

Then you had to turn off the reader, take off the galley where the slugs of hot type came off to cool, open up the front of the machine, clean all the lead off with a wire brush, put it back together, and start the tape reader back up. When the whole galley was set and cool, you pulled a proof on a small rotary press and sent it back to the typists, where corrections would come back on shorter and shorter pieces of paper tape. You kept setting and inserting the corrections and throwing away the bad slugs until the galley was okayed; then you pulled a copy of the galley and sent it up to the composing room where they laid out the page of corrected galley, shot a page on a plate camera, and made a steel plate from that; that was put on the web press and the paper was run off and sent out to newsboys all over three counties.

It was a noisy, nasty twelve-hour hell with the possibility of being hit in the face with molten lead or asphyxiating when, in your copious free time, you took old dead galleys and incorrect slugs back to the lead smelter to melt down and then ladled out molten lead into pig-iron molds which, when cooled down, you took and hung by the hole in one end to the chain above the pot on each linotype—besides doing everything else it did, the machine lowered the lead pigs into the pots by a ratchet gear each time it set a line. No wonder Mergenthaler went mad.

I did all that twelve hours a night three nights a week for five years, besides college. There were five linotypes in the place, including one that Mergenthaler himself must have made around 1880, and usually three of them were down at a time with backspills or other problems.

Besides that, there were the practical jokers. Your first day on the job you were always sent for the type-stretcher, all over the printing plant. “Hell, I don’t know who had that last!” they’d say. “Check the composing room.” Then some night the phone would ring in the linotype room; you’d go to answer it and get an earful of printers’ ink, about the consistency of axle grease. Someone had slathered a big gob on the earpiece and called you from somewhere else in the plant. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

If you’d really pissed someone off (it never happened to me), they’d wait for a hot day and go out and fill all four of your hubcaps with fresh shrimp. It would take two or three days before they’d really stink; you’d check everywhere in the car but the hubcaps; finally something brown would start running from them and you’d figure it out. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

That night I started to feel jumpy. Usually I was philosophical: Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it. Nothing was going on but the usual hot, repetitious drudgery. Something felt wrong. My head didn’t exactly hurt, but I knew it was there. Things took on a distancing effect—I would recognize that from dope, later on. But there was no goofer dust in my life then. Then I noticed everybody else was moving and talking faster than normal. I looked at the clock with the big sweep second-hand outside the linotype room. It had slowed to a crawl.

I grabbed onto the bed of the cold iron proof-press and held on to it. Later, when I turned fifty or so, I was in a couple of earthquakes on the West Coast, but they were nothing compared to what I was feeling at that moment.

One of the tape compositor ladies, a blur, stopped in front of me and chirped out “Doyoufeelallright, Frank?”

“Justa headacheI’llbeokay,” I twittered back.

I looked at the clock again.

The sweep-hand stopped. I looked back into the linotype room.

People moved around like John Paul Stapp on the Sonic Wind rocket sled.

I looked at the clock again. The second hand moved backward.

And then the world blurred all out of focus and part of me left the clanging clattering linotypes behind.

I looked around the part of town I could see. (What was I doing downtown? Wasn’t I at work?) The place looked like it did around 1962. The carpet shop was still in business—it had failed a few months before JFK was shot. Hamburgers were still four for a dollar on the menus outside the cafes. The theater was showing Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus and The Manster, which was a 1962 double feature. Hosey the usher was leaving in his ‘58 Chevy; he quit working at the theater in 1964, I knew. I had a feeling that if I walked one block north and four blocks west I could look in the window of a house and see myself reading a book or doing homework. I sure didn’t want to do that.

Then the plant manager was in front of me. “Hey! You’ve got a backspill on #5, that crappy old bastard, and #3’s quit reading tape.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I just got a splitting headache for a minute. Got any aspirin?” I asked, taking the galley off #5.

“Go ask one of the women who’s having her period,” he said. “I just took all the aspirin in the place. The publisher’s all over my ass this week. Why, I don’t know. I robbed the first-aid kit: don’t go there.”

“That would have been my next stop,” I said. I brushed a cooled line of lead off the keyboard and from the seat and up the back of the caster chair in front of the linotype. I closed the machine back up and started it up and went over and pounded on the reader box of #3. It chattered away.

For a while I was too busy to think about what had happened.

“Feeling a little weird?” asked my sister, this time on a regular phone.

“What the hell happened?”

“Talk to this man,” she said.

She put on some professor whose name I didn’t catch.

He asked me some questions. I told him the answers. He said he was sending a questionnaire. My sister came back on.

“I think they think I gave you a bad dream two thousand miles away,” she said. “That would be a big-cheese deal to them.”

“What do you think?” I asked. “I saw Hosey.”

“Either way, you would have done that,” she said.

“What do you mean, either way? Why are you involving me? Is this fun?”

“Because,” she said, “you’re my brother and I love you.”

“Yeah, well . . .” I said. “Why don’t you mess with someone you don’t like? Who’s that guy who left you in Grand Prairie to walk home at 5 A.M.?”

“I killed him with a mental lightning bolt yesterday,” she said. Then, “Just kidding.

“Well, I’m glad you’re just kidding, because I just shit my pants. I don’t want to ever feel like I did last night, again, ever. It was creepy.”

“Of course it was creepy,” she said. “We’re working at the frontiers of science here.”

“Are you on the frontiers of science there,” I asked, “or . . .”

She finished the sentence with me: “. . . are we just pulling our puds?” She laughed. “I don’t have a clue. They’re trying to figure out how to do this scientifically. They may have to fly you in.”

“No, thanks!” I said. “I’ve got a life to live. I’m actually dating a real-live girl. I’m also working myself to death. I don’t have time for hot dates with Ouija boards, or whatever you’re doing there. Include me out.”

She laughed again. “We’ll see.”

“No you won’t! Don’t do this to me. I’m . . .”

There was a dial tone.

So the second time I knew what was happening. I was at home. I felt the distancing effect; the speeding up of everything around, except the kitchen clock. It was the kind where parts of numbers flipped down, an analog readout. It slowed to a crawl. The thin metal strips the numbers were painted on took a real long time before they flipped down.

A bird rocketed through the yard. The neighbor’s dog was a beige blur. I could barely move. My stomach churned like when I was on the Mad Octopus at the Texas State Fair. The clock hung between 10:29 and 10:30 A.M. Then it was 10:29. 10:28. 10:27. Then the readout turned into a high whining flutter.

This time everything was bigger. Don’t ask me why. I was at my favorite drugstore, the one next to the theater. The drugstore was at the corner of Division and Center Street. I glanced at a newspaper. June 17, 1956. If memory serves, I would have been over in Alabama at the time, so I wouldn’t be running into myself. I reached in my pocket and looked at my change. Half of it hadn’t been minted yet. (How was that possible?) The guy at the register ignored me—he’d seen me a million times, and I wasn’t one of the kids he had to give the Hairy Eyeball to. When I came in, I came to buy.

I looked at the funny book rack. Everything except the Dell Comics had the Comics Code Seal on them, which meant they’d go to Nice Heaven. No zombies, no monsters, no blood, no Blackhawks fighting the Commies, who used stuff that melts tanks, people—everything but wood. No vampires “saaaaking your blaaad.” Dullsville. I picked up a Mad magazine, which was no longer a comic book, so it wouldn’t be under the Comics Code, but had turned into a 25—What, me cheap?—magazine. It had a Kelly Freas cover of Alfred E. Neuman.

I fished out a 1952 quarter and put it down by the register. There wasn’t any sales tax in Texas yet. Fifty years later, we would be paying more than New York City.

I looked at the theater marquee when I stepped outside. Bottom of the Bottle and Bandido—one with Joseph Cotten and Richard Egan, the other with Glenn Ford and Gilbert Roland. I’d seen them later, bored by the first except for a storm scene, and liked the second because there were lots of explosions and Browning .50 caliber machine guns. Nothing for me there.

I walked down toward Main Street.

There was a swooping sensation and a flutter of light and I was back home.

The analog readout on the clock clicked to 10:30 A.M.

I went to the coin shop. I went to my doctor’s office. I went to a couple of other places. I actually had to lie a couple of times, and I used one friendship badly, only they didn’t know, but I did.

Then I found the second letter my sister had sent me from North Carolina and got the phone number of the lab. I called it the next morning. It took awhile, but they finally got Ethel to the phone.

“Feeling okay?” she asked.

“Hell no,” I said. “I’m not having any fun. At least let me have fun. Two days from now give me an hallucination about Alabama. In the summer. I want to at least see if the fishing is as good as I remember it.”

“So it is written,” she said, imitating Yul Brynner in The Ten Commandments, “so it shall be done.”

I knew it really didn’t matter, but I kept my old fiberglass spinning rod, with its Johnson Century spinning reel, and my old My Buddy tackle box as near me as I could the next two days. Inside the tackle box with all the other crap were three new double-hook rigged rubber eels, cheap as piss in 1969, but they cost $1.00 each in 1950s money when they’d first come out.

This time I was almost ready for it and didn’t panic when the thing came on. I rode it out like the log flume ride out at Six Flags Over Texas, and when the clock outside the college classroom started jumping backward, I didn’t even get woozy. I closed my eyes and made the jump myself.

I was at the Big Pond and had made a cast. A two-pound bass had taken the rubber eel. The Big Pond was even bigger than I remembered (although I knew it was only four acres). I got the bass in and put it on a stringer with its eleven big clamps and swivels between each clamp on the chain. I put the bass out about two feet in the water and put the clamp on the end of the stringer around a willow root.

Then I cast again, and the biggest bass I had ever had took it. There was a swirl in the water the size of a #2 washtub and I set the hook.

I had him on for maybe thirty seconds. He jumped in the shallow water as I reeled. He must have weighed ten pounds. When he came down there was a splash like a cow had fallen into the pond.

Then the rubber eel came sailing lazily out of the middle of the commotion, and the line went slack in a backflowing arc. It (probably she) had thrown the hook.

There was a big V-wake heading for deeper water when the bass realized it was free.

I was pissed off at myself. I picked up the stringer with the two-pound bass (which now didn’t look as large as it had five minutes ago ) and my tackle box and started off over the hill back toward my grandparents’ house.

I walked through the back gate, with its plowshare counterweight on the chain that kept it closed. I took the fish off the stringer and eased it into the seventy-five gallon rainbarrel, where it started to swim along with a catfish my uncle had caught at the Little Pond yesterday. In the summer, there was usually a fish fry every Friday. We got serious about fishing on Thursdays. By Friday there would be fifteen or twenty fish in the barrel, from small bluegills to a few crappie to a bunch of bass and catfish. On Fridays my uncle would get off early, start cleaning fish, heating up a cast-iron pot full of lard over a charcoal fire and making up batter for the fish and hush puppies. Then, after my grandfather came in, ten or eleven of us would eat until we fell over.

Later the cooled fish grease would be used to make dogbread for my grandfather’s hounds. You didn’t waste much in Alabama in those days.

I washed my hands off at the outside faucet and went through the long hall from the back door, being quiet, as the only sound in the house was of SuZan, the black lady who cooked for my grandmother, starting to make lunch. I looked into the front room and saw my grandmother sleeping on the main bed.

I went out onto the verandah. I’d taken stuff out of the tackle box in the back hall, when I’d leaned my fishing rod up against a bureau, where I kept it ready to go all summer.

I was eating from a box of Domino® sugar cubes when I came out. My sister was in one of the Adirondack-type wooden chairs, reading a Katy Keene comic book; the kind where the girl readers sent in drawings of dresses and sunsuits they’d designed for Katy. The artist redrew them when they chose yours for a story, and they ran your name and address printed beside it so other Katy Keene fans could write you. (Few people know it, but that’s how the internet started.)

She must have been five or six—before she got sick. She was like a sparkle of light in a dark world.

“Back already?” she asked. “Quitter.”

“I lost the biggest fish of my life,” I said. “I tried to horse it in. I should have let it horse me but kept control, as the great A.J. McClane says in Field and Stream,” I said. “I am truly disappointed in my fishing abilities for the first time in a long time.”

“Papaw’ll whip your ass if he finds out you lost that big fish he’s been trying to catch,” she said. “He would have gone in after it, if he ever had it on.” He would have, too.

“Yeah, he’s a cane-pole fisherman, the best there ever was, but it was too shallow there for him to get his minnow in there with a pole. It was by that old stump in the shallow end.” Then I held up the sugar-cube box.

“Look what I found,” I said.

“Where’d you get those?”

“In the old chiffarobe.”

“SuZan’ll beat your butt if she finds you filchin’ sugar from her kitchen.”

“Probably some of Aunt Noni’s for her tea. She probably bought it during the Coolidge Administration and forgot about it.” Aunt Noni was the only person I knew in Alabama who drank only one cup of coffee in the morning, and then drank only tea, iced or hot, the rest of the day.

“Gimme some,” said Ethel.

“What’s the magic word?”

“Please and thank you.”

I moved the box so she took the ones I wanted her to. She made a face. “God, that stuff is old,” she said.

“I told you they was,” I said.

“Gimme more. Please,” she said. “Those are better.” Then: “I’ve read this Katy Keene about to death. Wanna play croquet til you get up your nerve to go back and try to catch that fish before Papaw gets home?”

“Sure,” I said. “But that fish will have a sore jaw til tomorrow. He’ll be real careful what he bites the rest of the day. I won’t be able to tempt him again until tomorrow.”

We started playing croquet. I had quite the little run there, making it to the middle wicket from the first tap. Then my sister came out of the starting double wicket and I could tell she was intent on hitting my ball, then getting to send me off down the hill. We had a rule that if you were knocked out of bounds, you could put the ball back in a mallet-head length from where it went out. But if you hit it hard enough, the ball went out of bounds, over the gravel parking area, down the long driveway, all the way down the hill and out onto Alabama Highway 12. You had to haul your ass all the way down the dirt drive, dodge the traffic, retrieve the bail from your cousin’s front yard, and climb all the way back up to the croquet grounds to put your ball back into play.

My sister tapped my ball at the end of a long shot. She placed her ball against it, and put her foot on top of her croquet ball. She lined up her shot. She took a practice tap to make sure she had the right murderous swing.

“Hey!” I said “My ball moved! That counts as your shot!”

“Does not!” she yelled.

“Yes it does!” I yelled.

“Take your next shot! That counted!” I added.

“It did not!” she screamed.

“You children be quiet!” my grandmother yelled from her bed of pain.

About that time was when Ethel hit me between the eyes with the green-striped croquet mallet; I kneecapped her with the blue croquet ball, and, with a smile on my swelling face as I heard the screen door open and close, I went away from there.

This time I felt like I had been beaten with more than a mallet wielded by a six-year-old. I felt like I’d been stoned by a crowd and left for dead. I was dehydrated. My right foot hurt like a bastard, and mucus was dripping from my nose. I’m pretty sure the crowds in the hall as classes let out noticed—they gave me a wide berth, like I was a big ugly rock in the path of migrating salmon.

I got home as quickly as I could, cutting History of the Totalitarian State 405, which was usually one of my favorites.

I called the lab long distance. Nobody knew about my sister. Maybe it was her day off. I called the Motel 6. Nobody was registered by her name. The manager said, “Thank you for calling Motel 6.” Then he hung up.

Maybe she’d come back to Dallas. I called her number there.

“Hello,” said somebody nice.

“Is Ethel there?”

“Ethel?”

“Yeah, Ethel.”

“Oh. That must have been Joanie’s old roommate.”

I’d met Joanie once. “Put Joanie on, please?” I asked.

She was in, and took the phone.

“Joanie? Hi. This is Franklin—Bubba—Ethel’s brother.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t get ahold of her in North Carolina.”

“Why would you be calling her there, honey?”

“ ‘Cause that’s where she was the last two weeks.”

“I don’t know about that. But she moved out of here four months ago. I got a number for her, but she’s never there. The phone just rings and rings. If you happen to catch her, tell her she still owes me four dollars and thirty-one cents on that last electric bill. I’m workin’ mostly days now, and I ain’t waitin’ around two hours to see her. She can leave it with Steve; he’ll see I get it.”

“Steve. Work. Four dollars,” I mumbled.

She gave me the number. The prefix meant south Oak Cliff, a suburb that had been eaten by Dallas.

I dialed it.

“Ethel?”

“Who is this? What the hell you want? I just worked a double shift.”

“It’s Bubba,” I said.

“Brother? I haven’t heard from you in a month of Sundays.”

“No wonder. You’re in North Carolina; you come back without telling me; you didn’t tell me you’d moved out from Joanie’s . . .”

“What the hell you mean, North Carolina?! I been pullin’ double shifts for three solid weeks—I ain’t had a day off since September 26th. I ain’t never been to North Carolina in my life.”

“Okay. First, Joanie says you owe her $4.31 on the electric bill . . .”

“Four thirty-one,” she said, like she was writing it down. “I’ll be so glad when I pay her so she’ll shut up.”

“Okay. Let’s start over. How’s your leg?”

“Which leg?”

“Your left leg. The polio leg. Just the one that’s given you trouble for fifteen years. That’s which leg.”

“Polio. Polio? The only person I know with polio is Noni’s friend Frances, in Alabama.”

“Does the year 1954 ring a bell?” I asked.

“Yeah. That was the first time we spent the whole summer in Alabama. Mom and Dad sure fooled us the second time, didn’t they? Hi. Welcome back from vacation, kids. Welcome to your new broken homes.”

“They should have divorced long before they did. They would have made themselves and a lot of people happier.”

“No,” she said. “They just never should have left backwoods Alabama and come to the Big City. All those glittering objects. All that excitement.”

“Are we talking about the same town here?” I asked.

“Towns are as big as your capacity for wonder, as Fitzgerald said,” said Ethel.

“Okay. Back to weird. Are you sure you never had polio when you were a kid? That you haven’t been in North Carolina the last month at some weird science place? That you weren’t causing me to hallucinate being a time-traveler?”

“Franklin,” she said. “I have never seen it, but I do believe you are drunk. Why don’t you hang up now and call me back when you are sober. I still love you, but I will not tolerate a drunken brother calling me while I am trying to sleep.

“Good-bye now—”

“Wait! Wait! I want to know, are my travels through? Can I get back to my real life now?”

“How would I know?” asked Ethel. “I’m not the King Of Where-You-Go.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Go sober up now. Next time call me at work. Nights.”

She hung up.

And then I thought: what would it be like to watch everyone slow down; the clock start whirling clockwise around the dial til it turned gray like it was full of dishwater, and then suddenly be out at the spaceport they’re going to build out at the edge of town and watch the Mars rocket take off every Tuesday?

And: I would never know the thrill of standing, with a satchel full of comics under my arm, waiting at the end of Eve Arden’s driveway for her to get home from the studio . . .

Dedicated to Ms. Mary Ethel (Waldrop)

Burton Falco Bray Hodnett, my little sister . . .

A BILLION EVES

Robert Reed

1

Kala’s parents were thrifty, impractical people. They deplored spending money, particularly on anything that smacked of luxury or indulgence; yet at the same time, they suffered from big dreams and a crippling inability to set responsible goals.

One spring evening, Father announced, “We should take a long drive this summer.”

“To where?” Mom asked warily.

“Into the mountains,” he answered. “Just like we’ve talked about doing a thousand times.”

“But can we afford it?”

“If we count our coins, and if the fund drive keeps doing well. Why not?” First Day celebrations had just finished, and their church, which prided itself on its responsible goals, was having a successful year. “A taste of the wilderness,” he cried out at the dinner table. “Doesn’t that sound fun?”

To any other family, that would have been the beginning of a wonderful holiday. But Kala knew better. Trouble arrived as soon as they began drawing up lists of destinations. Her brother Sandor demanded a day or two spent exploring the canyon always named Grand. Father divulged an unsuspected fondness for the sleepy, ice-caked volcanoes near the Mother Ocean. When pressed, Kala admitted that she would love walking a beach beside the brackish Mormon Sea. And while Mom didn’t particularly care about scenery—a point made with a distinctly superior tone—she mentioned having five sisters scattered across the West. They couldn’t travel through that country and not stop at each of their front doors, if only to quickly pay their respects.

Suddenly their objectives filled a long piece of paper, and even an eleven year-old girl could see what was obvious: Just the driving was going choke their vacation. Worse still, Mom announced, “There’s no reason to pay strangers to cook for us. We’ll bring our own food.” That meant dragging bulky cooler everywhere they went, and every meal would be sloppy sandwiches, and every day would begin with a hunt for fresh ice and cheap groceries to replace the supplies that would inevitably spoil.

Not wanting to be out-cheaped by his wife, Father added, “And we’ll be camping, of course.” But how could they camp? They didn’t have equipment. “Oh, we have our sleeping sacks,” he reminded his doubting daughter. “And I’ll borrow gear from our friends at church. I’m sure I can. So don’t worry. It’s going to be wonderful! We’ll just drive as far as we want every day and pull over at nightfall. Just so long as it costs nothing to pitch a tent.”

To Kala, this seemed like an impossible, doomed journey. Too many miles had to be conquered, too many wishes granted, and even under the best circumstances, nobody would end up happy.

“Why don’t you guys ever learn?” Kala muttered.

“What was that, darling?”

“Nothing, Father,” she replied with a minimal bow. “Nothing.”

Yet luck occasionally smiles, particularly on the most afflicted souls. They were still a couple hundred miles from the mountains when the radiator hose burst. Suddenly the hot July air was filled with hissing steam and the sweet taste of antifreeze. Father invested a few moments cursing God and the First Father before he pulled onto the shoulder. “Stay inside,” he ordered. Then he climbed out and lifted the long hood with a metallic screech, breathing deeply before vanishing into the swirling, superheated cloud.

Sandor wanted to help. He practically begged Mom for the chance. But she shot a warning stare back at him, saying, “No, young father. You’re staying with me. It’s dangerous out there!”

“It’s not,” Kala’s brother maintained.

But an instant later, as if to prove Mom correct, Father cried out. He screamed twice. The poor man had burned his right hand with the scalding water. And as if to balance his misery, he then blindly reached out with his left hand, briefly touching the overheated engine block.

“Are you all right?” Mom called out.

Father dropped the hood and stared in through the windshield, pale as a tortoise egg and wincing in misery.

“Leave that hood open,” Sandor shouted. “Just a crack!”

“Why?” the burnt man asked.

“To let the air blow through and cool the engine,” the boy explained. He wasn’t two years older than Kala, but unlike either parent, Sandor had a pragmatic genius for machinery and other necessities of life. Leaning toward his little sister, he said, “If we’re lucky, all we’ll need is a new hose and fluid.”

But we aren’t lucky people, she kept thinking.

They had left home on the Friday Sabbath, which meant that most of the world was closed for business. Yet despite Kala’s misgivings, this proved to be an exceptional day: Father drove their wounded car back to the last intersection, and through some uncommon fluke, they found a little fix-it and fuel shop that was open. A burly old gentleman welcomed them with cornbread and promises of a quick repair. He gave Father a medicating salve and showed the women a new Lady’s Room in back, out of sight of the highway. But there wasn’t any reason to hide. Mom had her children late in life, and besides, she’d let herself get heavy over the last few years. And Kala was still wearing a little girl’s body, her face soon to turn lovely, but camouflaged for the moment with youth and a clumsy abundance of sharp bone.

Sharing the public room, the mother and daughter finished their cornbread while their men stood in the garage, staring at the hot wet engine.

Despite being the Sabbath, the traffic was heavy—freight trucks and tiny cars and everything between. Traveling men and a few women bought fuel and sweet drinks. The women were always quick to pay and eager to leave; most were nearly as old as Mom, but where was the point in taking chances? The male customers lingered, and the fix-it man seemed to relish their company, discussing every possible subject with each of them. The weather was a vital topic, as was sports teams and the boring district news. A glum little truck driver argued that the world was already too crowded and cluttered for his tastes, and the old gentleman couldn’t agree more. Yet the next customer was a happy salesman, and in front of him, the fix-it man couldn’t stop praising their wise government and the rapid expansion of the population.

Kala mentioned these inconsistencies to her mother.

She shrugged them off, explaining, “He’s a businessman, darling. He dresses his words for the occasion.”

Kala’s bony face turned skeptical. She had always been the smartest student at her Lady’s Academy. But she was also a serious, nearly humorless creature, and perhaps because of that, she always felt too sure of herself. In any situation, she believed there was one answer that was right, only one message worth giving, and the good person held her position against all enemies. “I’d never dress up my words,” she vowed. “Not one way or the other.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Mom replied, finding some reason to laugh.

Kala decided to be politely silent, at least for the present time. She listened to hymns playing on the shop’s radio, humming along with her favorites. She studied her favorite field guide to the native flora and fauna, preparing herself for the wilderness to come. The surrounding countryside was as far removed from wilderness as possible—level and open, green corn stretching to every horizon and a few junipers planted beside the highway as windbreaks. Sometimes Kala would rise from her chair and wander around the little room. The shop’s moneybox was locked and screwed into the top of a long plastic cabinet. Old forms and paid bills were stacked in a dusty corner. A metal door led back into the lady’s room, opened for the moment but ready to be slammed shut and locked with a bright steel bolt. Next to that door was a big sheet of poster board covered with photographs of young women. Several dozen faces smiled toward the cameras. Returning to her chair, Kala commented on how many girls that was.

Her mother simply nodded, making no comment.

After her next trip around the room, Kala asked, “Were all of those girls taken?”

“Hardly,” Mom replied instantly, as if she was waiting for the question. “Probably most are runaways. Bad homes and the wrong friends, and now they’re living on the street somewhere. Only missing.”

Kala considered that response. Only missing? But that seemed worse than being taken from this world. Living on the street, without home or family—that sounded like a horrible fate.

Guessing her daughter’s mind, Mom added, “Either way, you’re never going to live their lives.”

Of course she wouldn’t; Kala had no doubt about that.

Sandor appeared abruptly, followed by Father. Together they delivered the very bad news. Their old car needed a lot of work. A critical gasket was failing, and something was horribly wrong in the transmission. Repairs would take time and most of their money, which was a big problem. Or maybe not. Father had already given this matter some thought. The closest mountains weren’t more than three hours away. Forced into a rational corner, he suggested camping in just one location. A base camp, if you would. This year, they couldn’t visit the Grand Canyon or the Mormon Sea, much less enjoy the company of distant sisters. But they could spend ten lazy days in the high country, then return home with a few coins still rattling in their pockets.

Mom bowed to her husband, telling him, “It’s your decision, dear.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” he said, borrowing a map from the counter. “I’ll find a good place to pitch the tent. All right?”

Full of resolve, the men once again left. But Mom remained nervous, sitting forward in her chair—a heavy woman in matronly robes, her hair grayer than ever, thick fingers moving while her expression was stiff and unchanging.

Kala wanted to ask about her thoughts. Was she disappointed not to see her sisters? Or was she feeling guilty? Unless of course Mom was asking herself what else could be wrong with a car they had bought for almost nothing and done nothing to maintain.

The sudden deep hissing of brakes interrupted the silence. A traveler had pulled off the highway, parking beside the most distant gas pump. Kala saw the long sky-blue body and thought of a school bus. But the school’s old name had been sanded off, the windows in the front covered with iron bars, while the back windows were sealed with plywood. She knew exactly what the bus was. Supplies were stuffed in the back, she reasoned. And a lot more gear was tied up on the roof—bulky sacks running its full length, secured with ropes and rubber straps and protected from any rain with yellowing pieces of thick plastic.

A man stepped out into the midday glare. He wasn’t young, or old. The emerald green shirt and black collar marked him as a member of the Church of Eden. Two pistols rode high on his belt. He looked handsome and strong, and in ways Kala couldn’t quite define, he acted competent in all matters important. After glancing up and down the highway, he stared into the open garage. Then he pulled out a key chain and locked the bus door, and he fed the gas nozzle into the big fuel tank, jamming in every possible drop.

Once again, the fix-it man had stopped working on their car. But unlike the other interruptions, he started to walk out toward the pump, a long wrench in one hand. The always-friendly face was gone. What replaced it wasn’t unfriendly, but there was a sense of caution, and perhaps a touch of disapproval.

“No, sir,” the younger gentleman called out. “I’ll come in and pay.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Yeah, I do. Keep your distance now.”

The fix-it man stopped walking, and after a moment, he turned and retreated.

The younger man hit the bus door once with the flat of his hand, shouting, “Two minutes.”

By then, everybody had moved to the public room. Father glanced at the Lady’s Room but then decided it wasn’t necessary. He took his position behind Mom’s chair, his sore red hands wrapped in gauze. Sandor hovered beside Kala. The fix-it man stood behind the counter, telling the women, “Don’t worry,” while opening a cupboard and pulling something heavy into position.

“It was a gun,” Sandor later told his sister. “I caught a glimpse. A little splattergun. Loaded and ready, I would bet.”

“But why?” Kala would wonder aloud.

“Because that green-shirt was leaving us,” her brother reminded her. “Where he was going, there’s no fix-it shops. No tools, no law. So what if he tried to steal a box of wrenches, you know?”

Maybe. But the man had acted more worried about them, as if he was afraid somebody would try to steal his prized possessions. Entering the room carefully, he announced, “My brother’s still onboard.”

“Good for him,” said the fix-it man.

“How much do I owe?”

“Twenty and a third.”

“Keep the change,” he said, handing over two bills. The green-shirted man tried to smile, only it was a pained, forced grin. “Tell me, old man: Anybody ask about me today?”

“Like who?”

“Or anybody mention a bus looking like mine? Any gentlemen come by and inquire if you’ve seen us . . .?”

The fix-it man shook his head, nothing like a smile on his worn face. “No, sir. Nobody’s asked about you or your bus.”

“Good.” The green-shirted man yanked more money from the roll, setting it on the plastic countertop. “There’s a blonde kid. If he stops by and asks . . . do me a favor? Don’t tell him anything, but make him think you know shit.”

The fix-it man nodded.

“He’ll give you money for your answers. Take all you can. And then tell him I went north from here. Up the Red Highway to Paradise. You heard me say that. ‘North to Paradise.’ ”

“But you’re going somewhere else, I believe.”

“Oh, a little ways.” Laughing, the would-be Father turned and started back to his bus.

That’s when Sandor asked, “Do you really have one?”

“Quiet,” Father cautioned.

But the green-shirted man felt like smiling. He turned and looked at the thirteen year-old-boy, asking, “Why? You interested in these things?”

“Sure I am.”

Laughing, the man said, “I bet you are.”

Sandor was small for his age, but he was bold and very smart about many subjects, and in circumstances where most people would feel afraid, he was at his bravest best. “A little Class D, is it?”

That got the man to look hard at him. “You think so?”

“Charged and ready,” Sandor guessed. He named three possible manufacturers, and then said, “You’ve set it up in the aisle, I bet. Right in the middle of the bus.”

“Is that how I should do it?”

“The rip-zone reaches out what? Thirty, thirty-five feet? Which isn’t all that big.”

“Big enough,” said the man.

Just then, someone else began pulling on the bus horn. Maybe it was the unseen brother. Whoever it was, the horn was loud and insistent.

“You’re not taking livestock,” Kala’s brother observed.

This time, Mom told Sandor to be quiet, and she even lifted a hand, as if to give him a pop on the head.

“Hedge-rabbits,” the man said. “And purple-hens.”

Both parents now said, “Quiet.”

The horn honked again.

But the green-shirted man had to ask, “How would you do it, little man? If you were in my boots?”

“A Class-B ripper, at least,” Sandor declared. “And I’d take better animals, too. Milking animals. And wouldn’t bother with my brother, if I had my choice.”

“By the looks of it, you don’t have a brother.”

“So how many of them do you have?” Sandor asked. Just the tone of his voice told what he was asking. “Six?” he guessed. “Eight? Or is it ten?”

“Shush,” Mom begged.

The green-shirted man said nothing.

“I’m just curious,” the boy continued, relentlessly focused on the subject at hand. “Keep your gene pool as big as possible. That’s what everybody says. In the books, they claim that’s a good guarantee for success.”

The man shook his longest finger at Sandor. “Why, little man? You think I should take along another? Just to be safe?”

In an instant, the room grew hot and tense.

The green-shirted man looked at both women. Then with a quiet, furious voice, he snarled, “Lucky for you ladies, I don’t have any more seats.” Then he turned and strode out to the bus and unlocked the door, vanishing inside as somebody else hurriedly drove the long vehicle away from the pump.

For several moments, everybody was enjoying hard, deep breaths.

Then the fix-it man said, “I see a pretty miserable future for that idiot.”

“That’s not any way to leave,” Father agreed. “Can you imagine making a life for yourself with just that little pile of supplies?”

“Forget about him,” Mom demanded. “Talk about anything else.”

Alone, Kala returned to the poster displaying photographs of all the lost women. It occurred to her that one or two of those faces could have been onboard the bus, and perhaps not by their own choice. But she also understood that no one here was going to call the proper authorities. The men would throw their insults at the would-be Father, and Mom would beg for a change in topics. But no one mentioned the idiot’s poor wives. Even when Kala touched the prettiest faces and read their tiny biographies, it didn’t occur to her that some strong brave voice should somehow find the words to complain.

2

No figure in history was half as important as the First Father. He was the reason why humans had come to this fine world, and every church owed its existence to him. Yet the man remained mysterious and elusive—an unknowable presence rooted deep in time and in the imagination. No two faiths ever drew identical portraits of their founder. A traditional biography was common to all schoolbooks, but what teachers offered was rather different from what a bright girl might find on the shelves of any large library. The truth was that the man was an enigma, and when it came to his story, almost everything was possible. The only common features common were that he was born on the Old Earth in the last days of the 20th century, and on a Friday morning in spring, when he was a little more twenty-nine years of age, the First Father claimed his destiny.

Humans had only recently built the first rippers. The machines were brutal, ill-tempered research tools, and physicists were using them to punch temporary holes in the local reality. Most of those holes led to hard vacuums and a fabulous cold; empty space is the standard state throughout most of the multiverse. But quantum effects and topological harmonics showed the way: If the ripper cut its hole along one of the invisible dimensions, an island of stability was waiting. The island had separated from the Now two billion years ago, and one the other side of that hole were an infinite number of sister-earths, each endowed with the same motions and mass of the human earth.

Suddenly every science had a fierce interest in the work. Large schools and small nations had to own rippers. Biologists retrieved microscopic samples of air and soil, each sample contaminated with bacteria and odd spores. Every species was new, but all shared the ingredients of earth-life: DNA coded for the same few amino acids that built families of proteins that were not too unlike those found inside people and crabgrass.

The Creation was a tireless, boundless business. That’s what human beings were learning. And given the proper tool and brief jolts of titanic energy, it was possible to reach into those infinite realms, examining a miniscule portion of the endlessness.

But rippers had a second, more speculative potential. If the same terrific energies were focused in a slightly different fashion, the hole would shift its shape and nature. That temporary disruption of space would spread along the three easiest dimensions, engulfing the machine and local landscape in a plasmatic bubble, and that bubble would act like a ship, carrying its cargo across a gap that was nearly too tiny measure and too stubborn to let any normal matter pass.

Whoever he was, the First Father understood what rippers could do. Most churches saw him as a visionary scientist, while the typical historian thought he was too young for that role, describing him instead as a promising graduate student. And there were always a few dissenting voices claiming that he was just a laboratory technician or something of that ilk—a little person armed with just enough knowledge to be useful, as well as access to one working ripper.

Unnoticed, the First Father had absconded with a set of superconductive batteries, and over the course of weeks and months, he secretly filled them with enough energy to illuminate a city. He also purchased or stole large quantities of supplies, including seeds and medicines, assorted tools and enough canned goods to feed a hundred souls for months. Working alone, he crammed the supplies into a pair of old freight trucks, and on the perfect night in April, he drove the trucks to a critical location, parking beside No Parking signs and setting their brakes and then flattening their tires. A third truck had to be maneuvered down the loading dock beside the physics laboratory, and using keys or passwords, the young man gained access to one of the most powerful rippers on the planet—a bundle of electronics and bottled null-spaces slightly larger than a coffin.

The young man rolled or carried his prize into the vehicle, and with quick, well-rehearsed motions, he patched it into the fully charged batteries and spliced in fresh software. Then before anyone noticed, he gunned the truck’s motor, driving off into the darkness.

Great men are defined by their great, brave deeds; every worthy faith recognizes this unimpeachable truth.

According to most accounts, the evening was exceptionally warm, wet with dew and promising a beautiful day. At four in the morning, the First Father scaled a high curb and inched his way across a grassy front yard, slipping between an oak tree and a ragged spruce before parking tight against his target—a long white building decorated with handsome columns and black letters pulled from a dead language. Then he turned off the engine, and perhaps for a moment or two, he sat motionless. But no important doubts crept into his brave skull. Alone, he climbed down and opened the back door and turned on the stolen ripper, and with a few buttons pushed, he let the capacitors eat the power needed to fuel a string of nanosecond bursts.

Many accounts of that night have survived; no one knows which, if any, are genuine. When Kala was eleven, her favorite story was about a young student who was still awake at that early hour, studying hard for a forgotten examination. The girl thought it was odd to hear the rumbling of a diesel motor and then the rattling of a metal door. But her room was at the back of the sorority house; she couldn’t see anything but the parking lot and a tree-lined alley. What finally caught her attention was the ripper’s distinctive whine—a shriek almost too high for the human ear—punctuated with a series of hard little explosions. Fresh holes were being carved in the multiverse, exposing the adjacent worlds. Tiny breaths of air were retrieved, each measured against a set of established parameters. Hearing the blasts, the girl stood and stepped to her window. And that’s when the ripper paused for a moment, a hundred trillion calculations made before it fired again. The next pop sounded like thunder. Every light went out, and the campus vanished, and a sphere of ground and grass, air and wood was wrenched free of one world. The full length of the house was taken, and its entire yard, as well as both supply trucks and the street in front of the house and the parking lot and a piece of the alley behind it. And emerging out of nothingness was a new world—a second glorious offering from God, Our Ultimate Father.

The girl was the only witness to a historic event, which was why the young Kala found her tale so appealing.

The First Father saw nothing. At the pivotal moment of his life, he was hunkered over the stolen ripper, reading data and receiving prompts from the AI taskmaster.

The girl started to run. By most accounts she was a stocky little creature, not pretty but fearless and immodest. Half-dressed, she dashed through the darkened house, screaming for the other girls to wake up, then diving down the stairs and out the front door. Kala loved the fact that here was the first human being to take a deep breath on another earth. The air was thick and unsatisfying. Out from the surrounding darkness came living sounds. Strange creatures squawked and hollered, and flowing branches waved in a thin moonlight. The girl thought to look at the sky, and she was rewarded with more stars than she had ever seen in her life. (Every sister world is a near-twin, as are the yellow sun and battered moon. But the movement of the solar system is a highly chaotic business, and you never know where inside the Milky Way you might end up.) Standing on the sidewalk, the girl slowly absorbed the astonishing scene. Then she heard pounding, and when she turned, she saw the long truck parked against a tangle of juniper shrubs. On bare feet, she climbed into the back end and over a stack of cold black batteries. The First Father was too busy to notice her. One job was finished, but another essential task needed his undivided attention. Having brought a hundred young women to an empty, barely livable world, the man had no intention of letting anyone escape now. Which was why he wrenched open the hot ripper, exposing its intricate guts, and why he was using a crowbar to batter its weakest systems—too consumed by his work to notice one of his future wives standing near him, wearing nothing but pants and a bra and a slightly mesmerized expression.

3

For more than a week, Kala’s family lived inside a borrowed tent, and without doubt, they never enjoyed a better vacation than this. The campground was a rough patch of public land set high on a mountainside. Scattered junipers stood on the sunny ground and dense spruce woods choked an adjacent canyon. A stream was tucked inside the canyon, perfect for swimming and baths. A herd of semi-tame roodeer grazed where they wanted. Rilly birds and starlings greeted each morning with songs and hard squawks. Their tent was in poor condition, ropes missing and its roof ripped and then patched by clumsy hands. But a heat wave erased any danger of rain, and even after the hottest days, nights turned pleasantly chilly, illuminated by a moon that was passing through full.

Kala was the perfect age for adventures like these: Young enough to remember everything, yet old enough to explore by herself. Because this wasn’t a popular destination, the woods felt as if they belonged to her. And best of all, higher in the mountains was a sprawling natural reserve.

Where her brother loved machinery, Kala adored living creatures.

By law, the reserve was supposed to be a pristine wilderness. No species brought into this world could live behind its high fences. But of course starlings flew where they wanted, and gold-weed spores wandered on the softest wind, and even the best intentions of visitors didn’t prevent people from bringing seeds stuck to their clothing or weaknesses tucked into their hearts.

One morning they drove into the high alpine country—a risky adventure, since their car still ran hot and leaked antifreeze. The highway was narrow and forever twisting. A shaggy black forest of native trees gave way to clouds, damp and cold. Father slowed until the following drivers began to pull on their horns, and then he sped up again, emerging into a tilted, rock-strewn landscape where black fur grew beside last winter’s snow. Scenic pullouts let them stop and marvel at an utterly alien world. Kala and her brother made snowballs and gamely posed for pictures on the continental divide. Then Father turned them around and drove even slower through the clouds and black forest. In the same instant, everyone announced: “I’m hungry!” And because this was a magical trip, a clearing instantly appeared, complete with a wide glacial stream and a red granite table built specifically for them.

Lunch was tortoise sandwiches and sour cherries. The clouds were thickening, and there were distant rumblings of thunder. But if there was rain, it fell somewhere else. Kala sat backwards at the table, smelling the stream and the light peppery stink of the strange trees. Despite a lifetime spent reading books and watching documentaries, she was unprepared for this divine place. It was an endless revelation, the idea that here lived creatures that had ruled this world until the arrival of humans. If the local climate had been warmer and the soil better, this reserve couldn’t have survived. She was blessed. In ways new to her, the girl felt happy. Gazing into the shadows, she imagined native rock-lambs and tomb-tombs and the lumbering Harry’s-big-days. In her daily life, the only animals were those that came with the Last Father—the roodeer and starlings and such. And their crops and a few hundred species of wild plants came here as seeds and spores that people had intentionally carried along. But these great old mountains wore a different order, a fresh normalcy. The shaggy black forest looked nothing like spruce trees, bearing a lovely useless wood too soft to be used as lumber, and always too wet to burn.

A narrow form suddenly slipped from one shadow to the next.

What could that have been?

Kala rose slowly. Her brother was immersed in a fat adventure novel. Her parents glanced her way, offering smiles before returning to the subject at hand: What, if anything, would they do with the afternoon and evening? With a stalker’s pace, Kala moved into the forest—into the cool spicy delicious air—and then she paused again, eyes unblinking, her head cocked to one side while she listened to the deep booming of thunder as it curled around the mountain flanks.

A dry something touched Kala on the back of the calf.

She flinched, looking down.

The housefly launched itself, circling twice before settling on her bare arm. Kala never liked to kill, but this creature didn’t belong here. It was one of the creatures humans always brought—by chance, originally, and now cherished because maggots could be useful disposing of trash. With the palm of her right hand, she managed to stun the creature, and then she knelt, using eyes and fingers to find its fallen body, two fingertips crushing the vermin to an anonymous paste.

Sitting nearby, studying Kala, was a wild cat. She noticed it as she stood again—a big male tabby, well fed and complacent, caught in a large wire trap. Cat-shaped signs were posted across the reserve, warning visitors about feral predators. These animals were ecological nightmares. During its life, a single killing machine could slaughter thousands of the native wisp-mice and other delicate species; and a male cat was the worst, since it could also father dozens of new vermin that would only spread the carnage.

Kala approached the cat, knelt down and looked into its bright green eyes. Except for the tangled fur, nothing about the animal looked especially wild. When she offered her hand, the cat responded by touching her fingertips with the cool end of its nose. Exotics like this were always killed. No exceptions. But maybe she could catch it and take it home. If she begged hard enough, how could her parents refuse? Kala studied the mechanism of the trap and found a strong stick and slipped it into a gap, and then with a hard shove, she forced the steel door to pop open.

The cat had always been wild, and it knew what to do. As soon as the door vanished, Kala reached for its neck, but her quarry was quicker. It sprinted back into the dark shadows, leaving behind a young girl to think many thoughts, but mostly feeling guilt mixed with a tenacious, unexpected relief.

“Find anything?” Father asked on her return.

“Nothing,” she lied.

“Next time,” he advised, “take the camera.”

“We haven’t seen a tomb-tombs yet,” her mother added. “Before we leave, I’d like to have a close look at them.”

Kala sat beside her brother, and he glanced up from his book, investing a few moments watching her as she silently finished her sandwich.

Later that day, they visited a tiny museum nestled in a wide black meadow. Like favored students on a field trip, they wandered from exhibit to exhibit, absorbing little bits of knowledge about how these mountains were built and why the glaciers had come and gone again. Display cases were jammed with fossils, and in the basement were artifacts marking these last centuries when humans played their role. But the memorable heart of the day was a stocky, homely woman who worked for the reserve—a strong, raspy-voiced lady wearing a drab brown uniform complete with a wide-brimmed hat and fat pockets and an encyclopedic knowledge on every imaginable subject.

Her job was to lead tourists along the lazy trail that circled her museum grounds. Her practiced voice described this world as well as each of its known neighbors. From the First Father to the Last, seventeen examples of the Creation had been settled, while another fifty worlds had been visited but found unsuitable. The Old Earth and its sisters belonged to one endless family, each world sharing the same essential face: There was always a Eurasia and Africa, an Australia and two Americas. The North Pole was water, while islands or a single continent lay on the South Pole. Except for the fickle effects of erosion, landmasses were constant. Two billion years of separation wasn’t enough to make any earth forget which family it belong to.

But where stone and tectonics were predictable, other qualities were not. Minuscule factors could shift climates or the composition of an atmosphere. Some earths were wet and warm. Kala’s earth, for instance. Most had similar atmospheres, but none were identical to any other. A few earths were openly inhospitable to humanity. Oxygen cycles and methane cycles were famously temperamental. Sometimes life generated enough greenhouse gas to scorch the land, lifting the oceans into a cloud-born biosphere. Other earths had been permanently sterilized by impacting comets or passing supernovae. Yet those traps were easy to spot with a working ripper; little bites of air warned the Fathers about the most deadly places. What the woman lecturer discussed, and in astonishing depth, were worlds that only seemed inviting. Everyone knew examples from history. After a hard year or two, or in the case of Mattie’s House, a full ten years of misery, the reining Father had realized there was no hope, and gathering up his pioneers, he used the ripper’s remaining power to leap to another, more favorable world.

“We have a wonderful home,” the woman declared, leaning against one of the native trees. “A long Ice Age has just released this land, giving us a favorable climate. And the northern soils have been bulldozed to the warm south, making the black ground we always name Iowa and Ohio and Ukraine.”

Her praise of their world earned grateful nods from tourists.

“And we’re blessed in having so much experience,” she continued. “Our ancestors learned long ago what to bring and how to adapt. Our culture is designed to grow quickly, and by every measure. Ten centuries is not a long time—not to a world or even to a young species like ours—but that’s all the time we needed here to make a home for five billion of us.”

Smiles rode the nodding faces.

“But we’re most blessed in this way,” she said. Then she paused, letting her wise old eyes take their measure of her audience. “We are awfully lucky because this world is extremely weak. For reasons known and reasons only guessed at, natural selection took its sweet time here. These native life forms are roughly equivalent to the First Earth during its long ago Permian. The smartest tomb-tomb isn’t smart at all. And as any good Father knows, intelligence is the first quality to measure when you arrive at a new home.”

Kala noticed the adults’ approval. Here was the central point; the woman was speaking to the young men in her audience, giving them advice should they ever want to become a Father.

One hand lifted, begging to be seen.

“Yes, sir,” said the lecturer. “A question?”

“I could ask a question, I suppose.” The hand belonged to an elderly gentleman with the pale brown eyes of the First Father as well as his own thick mane of white hair. “Mostly, I was going to offer my observations. This morning, I was hiking the trail to Passion Lake—”

“A long walk,” the woman interjected, perhaps trying to compliment his endurance.

“I was bitten by mosquitoes,” he announced. “Nothing new about that, I suppose. And I saw rilly birds nesting in one of your false-spruces.” The rillies were native to the Second Father’s world. “And I’m quite sure I saw mice—our mice—in the undergrowth. Which looked an awful lot like oleo-weed when it’s gone wild.”

Oleo-weed was from the First Father’s world, and it had been a human companion for the last twenty thousand years.

The lecturer adjusted her big-brimmed hat as she nodded, acting unperturbed. “We have a few exotics on the reserve,” she agreed. “Despite our rules and restrictions—”

“Is this right?” the white-haired man interrupted.

“Pardon me?”

“Right,” he repeated. “Correct. Responsible. What we are doing here . . . is it worth the damage done to a helpless planet . . .?”

More than anything, the audience was either puzzled by his attitude or completely indifferent. Half of the tourists turned away, pretending to take a burning interest in random rocks or the soft peculiar bark of the trees.

The lecturer pulled the mountain air across her teeth. “There are estimates,” she began. “I’m sure everybody here has seen the figures. The First Father was the first pioneer, but he surely wasn’t the only one to lead people away from the Old Earth. Yet even if you count only that one man and his wives, and if you make a conservative estimate of how many Fathers sprang up from that first world . . . and then you assume that half of those Fathers built homes filled with young people and their own wandering hearts . . . that means that by now, millions of colony worlds have been generated by that first example. And each of those millions might have founded another million or so worlds—”

“An exponential explosion,” the man interjected.

“Inside an endless Creation, as we understand these things.” She spoke with a grim delight. “No limit to the worlds, no end to the variety. And why shouldn’t humanity claim as much of that infinity as he can?”

“Then I suppose all of this has to be moral,” the white-haired man added, the smile pleasant but his manner sarcastic. “I guess my point is, madam . . . you and those like you are eventually going to discover yourselves without employment. Because there will be a day, and soon, when this lovely ground is going to look like every other part of our world, thick with the same weeds and clinging creatures we know best, and the exactly the same as the twenty trillion other human places.”

“Yes,” said the woman, her satisfaction obvious. “That is the future, yes.”

The lecturer wasn’t looking at Kala, but every word felt as if it had been aimed her way. For the first time in her life, she saw an inevitable future. She loved this alien forest, but it couldn’t last. An endless doom lay over the landscape, and she wanted to weep. Even her brother noticed her pain, smiling warily while he asked, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

She couldn’t say. She didn’t know how to define her mind’s madness. Yet afterwards, making the journey back to the parking lot, she thought again of that wildcat; and with a fury honest and pure, she wished that she had left the creature inside that trap. Or better, that she had used that long stick of hers and beaten it to death.

4

The most devoted wives left behind written accounts of their adventures on the new world—the seven essential books in the First Father’s Testament. Quite a few churches also included the two Sarah diaries, while the more progressive faiths, such as the one Kala’s family belonged to, made room for the Six Angry Wives. Adding to the confusion were the dozens if not hundreds of texts and fragmentary accounts left behind by lesser-known voices, as well as those infamous documents generally regarded to be fictions at best, and at worst, pure heresies.

When Kala was twelve, an older girl handed her a small, cat-eared booklet. “I didn’t give this to you,” the girl warned. “Read it and then give it to somebody else, or burn it. Promise me?”

“I promise.”

Past Fathers had strictly forbidden this testament, but someone always managed to smuggle at least one copy to the next world. The First Mother’s Tale was said to be a third-person account of Claire, the fifty-year-old widow whose job it had been to watch over the sorority house and its precious girls. Claire was a judicious, pragmatic woman—qualities missing in her own mother, Kala realized sadly. On humanity’s most important day, the housemother woke to shouts and wild weeping. She threw on a bathrobe and stepped into slippers before leaving her private ground-floor apartment. Urgent arms grabbed her up and dragged her down a darkened hallway. A dozen terrified voices were rambling on about some horrible disaster. The power was out, Claire noticed. Yet she couldn’t find any trace of cataclysms. The house walls were intact. There was no obvious fire or flood. Whatever the disturbance, it had been so minor that even the framed photographs of Delta sisters were still neatly perched on their usual nails.

Then Claire stepped out the front door, and hesitated. Two long trucks were parked in the otherwise empty street. But where was the campus? Past the trucks, exactly where the Fine Arts building should be, a rugged berm had been made of gray dirt and gray stone and shattered tree trunks. Beyond the berm was a forest of strange willowy trees. Nameless odors and a dense gray mist were drifting out of the forest on a gentle wind. And illuminated by the moon and endless stars was a flock of leathery creatures, perched together on the nearest limbs, hundreds of simple black eyes staring at the newcomers.

The First Father was sitting halfway down the front steps, a deer rifle cradled in his lap, a box of ammunition between his feet, hands trembling while the pale brown eyes stared out at the first ruddy traces of the daylight.

Women were still emerging from every door, every fire escape. Alone and in little groups, they would wander to the edge their old world, the bravest ones climbing the berm to catch a glimpse of the strange landscape before retreating again, gathering together on the damp lawn while staring at the only man in their world.

Claire pulled her robe tight and walked past the First Father.

No life could have prepared her for that day, yet she found the resolve to smile in a believable fashion, offering encouraging words and calculated hugs. She told her girls that everything would be fine. She promised they’d be home again in time for classes. Then she turned her attentions to the third truck. It was parked beside the house, its accordion door raised and its loading ramp dropped to the grass. Claire climbed the ramp and stared at the strange, battered machinery inside. The young woman who had heard the ripper in operation—the only witness to their leap across invisible dimensions—was telling her story to her sisters, again and again. Claire listened. Then she gathered the handful of physics majors and asked if the ripper was authentic. It was. Could it really do these awful things? Absolutely. Claire inhaled deeply and hugged herself, then asked if there was any possible way, with everything they knew and the tools at hand, that this awful-looking damage could be fixed?

No, it couldn’t be. And even if there was some way to patch it up, nobody here would ever see home again.

“Why not?” Claire asked, refusing to give in. “Maybe not with this ripper-machine, no. But why not build a new one with the good parts here and new components that we make ourselves . . .?”

One young woman was an honor student—a senior ready to graduate with a double major in physics and mathematics. Her name, as it happened, was Kala—a coincidence that made one girl’s heart quicken as she read along. That ancient Kala provided the smartest, most discouraging voice. There wouldn’t be any cobbling together of parts, she maintained. Many times, she had seen the ripper used, and she had even helped operate it on occasion. As much as anyone here, she understood its powers and limitations. Navigating through the multiverse was just this side of impossible. To Claire and a few of her sisters, the First Kala explained how the Creation was infinite, and how every cubic nanometer of their world contained trillions of potential destinations.

“Alien worlds?” asked Claire.

“Alternate earths,” Kala preferred. “More than two billion years ago, the world around us split away from our earth.”

“Why?”

“Quantum rules,” said Kala, explaining nothing. “Every world is constantly dividing into a multitude of new possibilities. There’s some neat and subtle harmonics at play, and I don’t understand much of it. But that’s why the rippers can find earths like this. Two billion years and about half a nanometer divide our home from this place.”

That was a lot for a housemother to swallow, but Claire did her best.

Kala continued spelling out their doom. “Even if we could repair the machine—do it right now, with a screwdriver and two minutes of work—our earth is lost. Finding it would be like finding a single piece of dust inside a world made of dust. It’s that difficult. That impossible. We’re trapped here, and Owen knows it. And that’s part of his plan, I bet.”

“Owen?” the First Mother asked. “Is that his name?”

Kala nodded, glancing back at the armed man.

“So you know Owen, do you?”

Kala rolled her eyes as women do when they feel uncomfortable in a certain man’s presence. “He’s a graduate student in physics,” she explained. “I don’t know him that well. He’s got a trust fund, supposedly, and he’s been stuck on his master thesis for years.” Then with the next breath, she confessed, “We went out once. Last year. Once, or maybe twice. Then I broke it off.”

Here was a staggering revelation for the living Kala: The woman who brought her name to the new world had a romantic relationship with the First Father. And then she had rejected him. Perhaps Owen still loved the girl, Kala reasoned. He loved her and wanted to possess her. And what if this enormous deed—the basis for countless lives and loves—came from one bitter lover’s revenge?

But motivations never matter as much as results.

Whatever Owen’s reasons, women sobbed while other women sat on the lawn, knees to their faces, refusing to believe what their senses told them. Claire stood motionless, absorbing what Kala and the other girls had to tell her. Meanwhile a sun identical to their sun rose, the air instantly growing warmer. Then the winged natives swept in low, examining the newcomers with their empty black eyes. A giant beast not unlike a tortoise, only larger than most rooms, calmly crawled over the round berm, sliding down to the lawn where it happily began to munch on grass. Meanwhile, houseflies and termites, dandelion fluff and blind earthworms, were beginning their migrations into the new woods. Bumblebees and starlings left their nests in search of food, while carpenter ants happily chewed on the local timber. Whatever you believe about the First Father, one fact is obvious: He was an uncommonly fortunate individual. The first new world proved to be a lazy place full of corners and flavors that earth species found to their liking. Included among the lucky colonists were two stray cats. One was curled up inside a storage shed, tending to her newborn litter, while the other was no more than a few days pregnant. And into that genetic puddle were three kittens smuggled into the sorority house by a young woman whose identity, and perhaps her own genetics, had long ago vanished from human affairs.

On that glorious morning, two worlds were married.

Each Testament had its differences, and every story was believable, but only to a maybe-so point. Claire’s heretical story was the version Kala liked best and could even believe—a sordid tale of women trapped in awful circumstances but doing their noble best to survive.

“Hello, Owen,” said Claire.

The young man blinked, glancing at the middle-aged woman standing before him. Claire was still wearing her bathrobe and a long nightgown and old slippers. To Owen, the woman couldn’t have appeared less interesting. He nodded briefly and said nothing, always staring into the distance, eyes dancing from excitement but a little sleepiness creeping into their corners.

“What are you doing, Owen?”

“Standing guard,” he said, managing a tense pride.

With the most reasonable voice possible, she asked, “What are you guarding us from?”

The young man said nothing.

“Owen,” she repeated. Once. Twice. Then twice more.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, watching a single leather-wing dance in the air overhead. “There’s a gauge on the ripper. It says our oxygen is about eighty percent usual. It’s going to be like living in the mountains. So I’m sorry about that. I set the parameters too wide. At least for now, we’re going to have to move slowly and let our bodies adapt.”

Claire sighed. Then one last time, she asked, “What are you guarding us from, Owen?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You don’t know what’s out there?”

“No.” He shrugged his shoulders, both hands gripping the stock of the rifle. “I saw you and Kala talking. Didn’t she tell you? Yeah, I saw you two chatting. There’s no way to tell much about a new world. The ripper can taste its air, and if it finds free oxygen and water and marker molecules that mean you’re very close to the ground—”

“You kidnapped us, Owen.” She spoke firmly, with a measured heat. “Without anyone’s permission, you brought us here and marooned us.”

“I’m marooned too,” he countered.

“And why should that make us feel better?”

Finally, Owen studied the woman. Perhaps for the first time, he was gaining an appreciation for this unexpected wildcard.

“Feel how you want to feel,” he said, speaking to her and everyone else in range of his voice. “This is our world now. We live or die here. We can make something out of our circumstances, or we can vanish away.”

He wasn’t a weak man, and better than most people could have done, he had prepared for this incredible day. By then, Claire had realized some of that. Yet what mattered most was to get the man to admit the truth. That’s why she climbed the steps, forcing him to stare at her face. “Are you much of a shot, Owen? Did you serve in the military? In your little life, have you even once gone hunting?”

He shook his head. “None of those things, no.”

“I have,” Claire promised. “I served in the Army. My dead husband used to take me out chasing quail. When I was about your age, I shot a five-point whitetail buck.”

Owen didn’t know what to make of that news. “Okay. Good, I guess.”

Claire kept her eyes on him. “Did you bring other guns?”

“Why?”

“Because you can’t look everywhere at once,” she reminded him. “I could ask a couple of these ladies to climb on the roof, just to keep tabs on things. And maybe we should decide who can shoot, if it actually comes to that and we have to defend the house.”

Owen took a deep, rather worried breath. “I hope that doesn’t happen.”

“Are there more guns?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

His eyes tracked to the right.

“In that truck?” Claire glanced over her shoulder. “The women checked the doors. They’re locked, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“To keep us out? Is that it?”

He shifted his weight, and with a complaining tone said, “I can’t see much, with you in the way.”

“I guess not,” Claire responded. Then she pushed closer, asking, “Do you know the combinations of those padlocks?”

“Sure.”

“Are you going to open them?”

Silence.

“All right,” she said. “I guess that’s just a little problem for now.”

Owen nodded, and pretending to be in complete control, he set his rifle to one side and looked at her and said, “I guess it is.”

“You’re what’s important. You are essential.”

“You bet.”

“And for reasons bigger than a few locks.”

The young man had to smile.

“What’s inside the trucks?”

He quickly summarized the wealth brought from the old world, then happily added, “It’s a great beginning for our colony.”

“That does sound wonderful,” Claire replied, her voice dipped in sarcasm.

Owen smiled, hearing the words but not their color.

“And if you could please tell me . . . when do you intend to give us this good food and water? Does your generosity have a timetable?”

“It does.”

“So tell me.”

Owen offered a smug wink, and then he sat back on the hard steps, lifting a hand, showing her three fingers.

“Excuse me?”

“Three girls,” he explained. Then the hand dropped, and he added, “You know what I mean.”

Here was another revelation: In every official Testament, the First Father unlocked ever door and box in the first few minutes. Without exception, he was gracious and caring, and the girls practically fought one another for the chance to sleep with him.

“You want three of my ladies . . .?”

“Yes.”

Rage stole away Claire’s voice.

Again, Owen said, “Yes.”

“Are you going to select them?” the housemother muttered. “Or is this going to be a job for volunteers?”

Every face was fixed on Owen, and he clearly enjoyed the attention. He must have dreamed for months about this one moment, imagining the tangible, irresistible power that no one could deny . . . and because of that strength, he could shrug his shoulders, admitting, “It doesn’t matter who. If there’s three volunteers, then that’s fine.”

“You want them now?”

“Or in a week. I can wait, if I have to.”

“You don’t have to.”

The smile brightened. “Good.”

“And you get just one woman,” Claire warned, grabbing the belt of her bathrobe and tightening the sloppy knot. “Me.”

“No.”

“Yes.” Claire touched him on a knee. “No other deal is on the table, Owen. You and I are going inside. Now. My room, my bed, and afterwards, you’re going to get us into those trucks, and you’ll hand over every weapon you brought here. Is that understood?”

The young man’s face colored. “You’re not in any position—”

“Owen,” she interrupted. Then she said, “Darling,” with a bite to her voice. And she reached out with the hand not on his knee, grabbing his bony chin while staring into the faint brown eyes that eventually would find themselves scattered across endless worlds. “This may come as news to you. But most men of your age and means and apparent intelligence don’t have to go to these lengths to get their dicks wet.”

He flinched, just for an instant.

“You don’t know very much about women. Do you, Owen?”

“I do.”

“Bullshit.”

He blinked, biting his lower lip.

“You don’t know us,” she whispered to him. “Let me warn you about the nature of women, Owen. Everyone here is going to realize that you’re just a very ignorant creature. If they don’t know it already, that is. And if you think you’ve got power over us . . . well, let’s just say you have some very strange illusions that need to die . . .”

“Quiet,” he whispered.

But Claire kept talking, reminding him, “In another few weeks, a couple months at most, you will be doomed.”

“What do you mean?”

“Once enough girls are pregnant, we won’t need you anymore.”

All the careful planning, but he hadn’t let himself imagine this one obvious possibility. He said as much with his stiff face and the backward tilt of his frightened body.

“You can have all the guns in the world—hell, you do have all the guns—but you’re going to end up getting knifed in bed. Yes, that could happen, Owen. Then in another few years, when your sons are old enough and my Deltas are in their late thirties . . . they’ll still be young enough to use those boys’ little seeds . . .”

“No,” he muttered.

“Yes,” she said. Her hand squeezed his knee. “Or maybe we could arrive at a compromise. Surrender your guns and open every lock, and afterwards, maybe you can try to do everything in your power to make this mess a little more bearable for us . . .”

“And what do I get?”

“You live to be an old man. And if you’re an exceptionally good man from here on, maybe your grandchildren will forgive you for what you’ve done. And if you’re luckier than you deserve to be, perhaps they’ll even like you.”

5

When Kala was fourteen, her church acquired the means to send one hundred blessed newlyweds off to another world. United Manufacturing had built a class-B ripper specifically for them. Tithes and government grants paid for the machine, while the stockpiles of critical supplies came through direct donations as well as a few wealthy benefactors. A standard hemispherical building was erected in an isolated field, its dimensions slightly smaller than the ripper’s reach. Iron and copper plates made the rounded walls, nickel and tin and other useful metals forming the interior ribs, and secured to the roof were a few pure gold trimmings. The ground beneath had been excavated, dirt replaced with a bed of high-grade fertilizer and an insulated fuel tank set just under the bright steel floor. No portion of the cavernous interior was wasted: The young couples were taking foodstuffs and clean water, sealed animal pens and elaborate seed stocks, plus generators and earth-movers, medicine enough to keep an entire city fit, and the intellectual supplies necessary to build civilization once again.

On the wedding day, the congregation was given its last chance to see what the sacrifices had purchased. Several thousand parishioners gathered in long patient lines, donning sterile gloves and filter masks, impermeable sacks tied about their feet. Why chance giving some disease to the livestock or leaving rust spores on the otherwise sterile steel floor? The young pioneers stood in the crisscrossing hallways, brides dressed in white gowns, grooms in taut black suits, all wearing masks and gloves. One of the benefits born from the seventeen previous migrations was that most communicable diseases had been left behind. Only sinus colds and little infections born from mutating staph and strep were a problem. Yet even there, it was hoped that this migration would bring the golden moment, humanity finally escaping even those minor ailments.

The youngest brides were only a few years older than Kala, and she knew them well enough to make small talk before wishing them good-bye with the standard phrase, “Blessings in your new world.”

Every girl’s mask was wet with tears. Each was weeping for her own reason, but Kala was at a loss to guess who felt what. Some probably adored their temporary fame, while other girls cried out of simple stage fright. A few lucky brides probably felt utter love for their husbands-to-be, while others saw this mission as a holy calling. But some of the girls had to be genuinely terrified: The smartest few probably awoke this morning to the realization that they were doomed, snared in a vast and dangerous undertaking that had never quite claimed their hearts.

Standing near the burly ripper—a place of some honor—was a girl named Tina. Speaking through her soggy mask, she said to Kala, “May you find your new world soon.”

“And bless you in yours.”

Kala had no interest in emigrating. But what else could she say? Tina was soon to vanish, and the girl had always been friendly to Kala. Named for the first wife to give a son to the First Father, Tina was short and a little stocky, and by most measures, not pretty. But her father was a deacon, and more important, her grandmother had offered a considerable dowry to the family that took her grandchild. Was the bride-to-be aware of these political dealings? And if so, did it matter to her? Tina seemed genuinely thrilled by her circumstances, giggling and pulling Kala closer, sounding like a very best friend when she asked, “Isn’t this a beautiful day?”

“Yes,” Kala lied.

“And tomorrow will be better still. Don’t you think?”

The mass marriage would be held this evening, and come dawn, the big ripper would roar to life.

“Tomorrow will be different,” Kala agreed, suddenly tired of their game.

Behind Tina, wrapped in thick plastic, was the colony’s library. Ten thousand classic works were etched into sheets of tempered glass, each sheet thin as a hair and guaranteed to survive ten thousand years of weather and hard use. Among those works were the writings of every Father and the Testaments of the Fifteen Wives, plus copies of the ancient textbooks that the Deltas brought from the Old Earth. As language evolved, the texts had been translated. Kala had digested quite a few of them, including the introductions to ecology and philosophy, the fat histories of several awful wars, and an astonishing fable called Huckster Finn.

Tina noticed her young friend staring at the library. “I’m not a reader,” she confided. “Not like you are, Kala.”

The girl was rather simple, it was said.

“But I’m bringing my books too.” Only the bride’s brown eyes were visible, dark eyebrows acquiring a mischievous look. “Ask me what I’m taking.”

“What are you taking, Tina?”

She mentioned several unremarkable titles. Then after a dramatic pause, she said, “The Duty of Eve. I’m taking that too.”

Kala flinched.

“Don’t tell anybody,” the girl begged.

“Why would I?” Kala replied. “You can carry whatever you want, inside your wedding trunk.”

The Duty was popular among conservative faiths. Historians claimed it was written by an unnamed Wife on the second new world—a saintly creature who died giving birth to her fifth son, but left behind a message from one of God’s good angels: Suffering was noble, sacrifice led to purity, and if your children walked where no one had walked before, your life had been worth every misery.

“Oh, Kala. I always wanted to know you better,” Tina continued. “I mean, you’re such a beautiful girl, and smart. But you know that already, don’t you?”

Kala couldn’t think of a worthwhile response.

With both hands, Tina held tight to Kala’s arm. “I have an extra copy of The Duty. I’ll let you have it, if you want.”

She said, “No.”

“Think about it.”

“I don’t want it—”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes,” Kala blurted. “I don’t want that damned book.” Then she yanked her arm free and hurried away.

Tina stared after her, anger fading into subtler, harder to name emotions.

Kala felt the eyes burning against her neck, and she was a little bit ashamed for spoiling their last moments together. But the pain was brief. After all, she had been nothing but polite. It was the stupid girl who ruined everything.

According to The Duty, every woman’s dream was to surrender to one great man. Kala had read enough excerpts to know too much. The clumsy, relentless point of that idiotic old book was that a holy girl found her great man, and she did everything possible to sleep with him, even if that meant sharing his body with a thousand other wives. The best historians were of one mind on this matter: The Duty wasn’t a revelation straight from God, or even some second-tier angel. It was a horny man’s fantasy written down in some lost age, still embraced by the conniving and believed by every fool.

Kala walked fast, muttering to herself.

Sandor was standing beside the ripper, chatting amiably with the newly elected Next Father. Her brother had become a strong young man, stubborn and charming and very handsome, and by most measures, as smart as any sixteen year-old could be. He often spoke about leaving the world, but only if he was elected to a Next Father’s post. That was how it was done in their church: One bride for each groom, and the most deserving couple was voted authority over the new colony.

“It’s a good day,” Sandor sang out. “Try smiling.”

Kala pushed past him, down the crowded aisle and out into the fading sunshine.

Sandor excused himself and followed. He would always be her older brother, and that made him protective as well as sensitive to her feelings. He demanded to know what was wrong, and she told him. Then he knew exactly what to say. “The girl’s is as stupid as she is homely, and what does it matter to you?”

Nothing. It didn’t matter at all, of course.

“Our world’s going to be better without her,” he promised.

But another world would be polluted as a consequence: A fact that Kala couldn’t forget, much less forgive.

The marriage was held at dusk, on a wide meadow of mowed spring fescue. The regional bishop—a charming and wise old gentleman—begged God and His trusted angels to watch over these good brave souls. Then with a joyful, almost giddy tone, he warned the fifty new couples to love one another in the world they were going to build. “Hold to your monogamy,” he called out. “Raise a good family together, and fill the wonderland where destiny has called you.”

A reception was held in the same meadow, under temporary lights, the mood slipping from celebration to grief and back again. Everyone drank more than was normal. Eventually the newlyweds slipped off to the fifty small huts standing near the dome-shaped building. Grooms removed the white gowns of their brides, and the new wives folded the gowns and stored them inside watertight wooden trunks, along with artifacts and knickknacks from a life they would soon abandon.

Kala couldn’t help but imagine what happened next inside the huts.

A few sips of wine made her warm and even a little happy. She chatted with friends and adults, and she even spent a few minutes listening to her father. He was drunk and silly, telling her how proud he was of her. She was so much smarter than he had ever been, and prettier even than her mother. “Did I just say that? Don’t tell on me, Kala.” Then he continued, claiming that whatever she wanted from her life was fine with him . . . just so long as she was happy enough to smile like she was smiling right now . . .

Kala loved the dear man, but he didn’t mean those words. Sober again, he would find some way to remind her that Sandor was his favorite child. Flashing his best grin, he would mention her brother’s golden aspirations and then talk wistfully about his grandchildren embracing their own world.

Kala finally excused herself, needing a bathroom.

Abandoning the meadow, walking alone in darkness, she considered her father’s drunken promise to let her live her own life. But what was “her life"? The question brought pressure, and not just from parents and teachers and her assorted friends. Kala’s own ignorance about her future was the worst of it. Such a bright creature—everyone said that about her. But when it came to her destiny, she didn’t have so much as a clue.

As Kala walked through the oak woods, she noticed another person moving somewhere behind her. But she wasn’t frightened until she paused, and an instant later, that second set of feet stopped too.

Kala turned, intending to glance over her shoulder.

Suddenly a cool black sack was dropped over her head, and an irresistible strength pushed her to the ground. Then a man’s voice—a vaguely familiar voice—whispered into one of her covered ears. “Fight me,” he said, “and I’ll kill you. Make one sound, and I’ll kill your parents too.”

She was numb, empty and half-dead.

Her abductor tied her up and gagged her with a rope fitted over the black sack, and then he dragged her in a new direction, pausing at a service entrance in back of the metal dome. She heard fingers pushing buttons and hinges squeaking, and then the ground turned to steel as her long legs were dragged across the pioneers’ floor.

Her numbness vanished, replaced with wild terror.

Blindly, Kala swung her bound legs and clipped his, and he responded with laughter, kneeling down to speak with a lover’s whisper. “We can dance later, you and me. Tonight is Tina’s turn. Sorry, sorry.”

She was tied to a crate filled with sawdust, and by the smell of it, hundreds of fertile tortoise eggs.

When the service door closed, Kala tugged at the knots. How much time was left? How many hours did she have? Panic gave her a fabulous strength, but every jerk and twist only tightened the knots, and after a few minutes of work, she was exhausted, sobbing through the rope gag.

No was going to find her.

And when they were in the new world, Tina’s husband—a big strong creature with connections and a good name—would pretend to discover Kala, cutting her loose and probably telling everyone else, “Look who wanted to come with us! My wife’s little friend!” And before she could say two words, he would add, “I’ll feed her from share of the stores. Yes, she’s my responsibility now.”

Kala gathered herself for another try at the ropes.

Then the service door opened with the same telltale squeak, and somebody began to walk slowly past her, down the aisle and back again, pausing beside her for a moment before placing a knife against her wrists, yanking hard and cutting the rope clear through.

Off came her gag, then the black sack.

Sandor was holding a small flashlight in his free hand, and he touched her softly on her face, on her neck. “You all right?”

She nodded.

“Good thing I bumped into that prick out there.” Her brother was trying to look grateful, but his expression and voice were tense as could be. “I asked him, “Why aren’t you with your bride?” But he didn’t say anything. Which bothered me, you know.” He paused, then added, “I’ve seen him stare at you, Kala.”

“You have?”

“Haven’t you?” Sandor took a deep breath, then another, gathering himself. “So I asked if he’d seen you come this way. And then he said, “Get away from me, little boy.’ ”

Sandor began cutting her legs free. In the glare of his light, she saw his favorite pocket knife—the big blade made sticky and red, covered as it was with an appalling amount of blood.

“Did you kill him?” Kala muttered.

In a grim whisper, Sandor said, “Hardly.”

“What happened?”

“I saved you,” he answered.

“But what did you do to that man?” she demanded.

“Man?” Sandor broke into a quietly, deathly laugh. “I don’t know, Kala. You’re the biologist in the family. But I don’t think you could call him male anymore . . . if you see what I mean . . .”

6

In a personal ritual, Kala brought The First Mother’s Tale out of hiding each spring and read it from cover to cover. She found pleasure in the book’s adventures and heroisms, and the tragedies made her reliably sad, and even with whole tracts memorized, she always felt as if she was experiencing Claire’s story for the first time. That strong, determined woman did everything possible to help her girls while making Owen behave. She made certain that every adult had a vote in every important decision—votes that were made after her console, naturally. Claire always spoke for the dead at funerals, and she oversaw a small feast commemorating the anniversary of their arrival. Hard famine came during their third winter. The local tortoises had been hunted to extinction while the earthly crops never prospered. It was Claire who imposed a ration system for the remaining food, and after six Wives were caught breaking into the last cache of canned goods, Claire served as judge in the bitter trial. Each girl claimed to have acted for the good of a hungry baby or babies. But there were dozens of children by then, and whose stomach wasn’t growling? Twelve other girls—some Wives, some not—served as the jury. In a ritual ancient as the species, they listened to the evidence before stepping off by themselves, returning with a verdict that found each defendant guilty as charged.

The housemother had no choice but order a full banishment.

The original Tina was one of the criminals. After some rough talk and vacuous threats, she and the other five picked up their toddlers and started south, hoping to hike their way to fresh pastures and easy food.

There was no doubt that the Six Angry Wives existed. But no consistent tale of crimes was told about them, and no Testament mentioned Claire as the presiding judge. What was known was that six women wandered through the wilderness, and when they returned ten years later, they brought blue-hens and fresh tortoise eggs as well as their four surviving children—including one lovely brown-eyed boy, nearly grown and eager to meet his father.

The truth was, no important church recognized Claire’s existence, which was the same as never existing. Even the oddest offshoot faiths denied her any vital role in their history. According to The First Mother’s Tale, the housemother lived another seven years and died peacefully in her sleep. Owen borrowed one of his Wives’ Bibles to read prayers over her grave. With the relief of someone who had escaped a long burden, he thanked the woman’s soul for its good work and wise guidance. And then The First Mother’s Tale concluded with a few hopeful words from its author, the brilliant and long-dead Kala.

Except of course nothing is ever finished, and considering everything that had happened since, most of the story had barely begun.

According to most researchers, it took a full century for the pioneers to find their stride. Owen lived to be eighty—a virile man to the end—and borrowing on his godly status, he continued sleeping with an assortment of willing, fertile granddaughters. Claire’s grave was soon lost to time, or she never even existed. But Owen’s burial site became the world’s first monument. Limestone blocks were dragged from a quarry and piled high, and the structure was decorated with a lordly statue and praising words as well as the original, still useless ripper. Worshippers traveled for days and weeks just for a chance to kneel at the feet of the great man’s likeness, and sometimes an old wound felt healed or some tireless despair would suddenly lift, proving again the powers of the First Father.

Four centuries later, enough bodies and minds were wandering the world to allow a handful to become scientists.

Inside a thousand years, humanity had spread across the warm, oxygen-impoverished globe, keeping to the lowlands, erasing the native species that fit no role. Cobbler-shops became factories, schools became universities, and slowly, the extraordinary skills necessary to build new rippers came back into the world.

In 1003, a wealthy young man purchased advertisement time on every television network. “The bigger the ripper, the better the seed,” he declared to the world. And with that, he unveiled a giant Class-A ripper as well as the spacious house that would carry him and a thousand wives to a new world, plus enough frozen sperm from quality men to ensure a diverse, vital society.

He found no shortage of eager young woman.

What actually became of that colony and its people, no one could say. To leave was to vanish in every sense of the word. But thousands of rippers were built during the following centuries. Millions of pioneers left that first new world, praying for richer air and tastier foods. And after six centuries of emigration, Kala’s descendants gathered around a small class-B, read passages from the Bible as well as from the Wives’ Testaments, and then together they managed their small, great step into the unknown.

7

At nineteen, Kala applied with the Parks Committee, and through luck and her own persistence, she was posted to the same reserve she once visited as a youngster. She was given heavy boots and a wide-brimmed as well as an oversized brown uniform with a Novice tag pinned to her chest. Her first week of summer was spent giving tours to visitors curious about the native fauna and flora. But the assignment wasn’t a rousing success, which was why she was soon transferred to exotic eradications—an improved posting, as it happened. Kala was free to drive the back roads in an official truck, parking at set points and walking deep into the alien forest. Hundreds of traps had to be checked every few days. Native animals were released, while the exotics were killed, usually with air-driven needles or a practiced blow to the head. At day’s end, she would return to the main office and don plastic gloves, throwing the various carcasses into a cremation furnace—fat starlings and fatter house mice, mostly. If they died in the trap, the bodies would stink. But she quickly grew accustomed to the carnage. In her mind, she was doing important, frustrating work. Kala often pictured herself as a soldier standing on the front lines, alone, waging a noble struggle for which she expected almost nothing: A little money, the occasional encouragement, and of course, the chance to return to the wilderness every morning, enjoying its doomed and fading strangeness for another long day.

One July afternoon, while Kala worked at the incinerator, another novice appeared. They had been friendly in the past. But today, for no obvious reason, the young man seemed uncomfortable. As soon as he saw Kala, his face stiffened and his gait slowed, and then, perhaps reading her puzzlement, he suddenly sped up again. “Hello,” he offered with the softest possible voice.

Kala smiled while flinging a dead cat into the fire. “Did you hear?” she began. “They found a new herd of Harry’s-big-days. Above Saint Mary’s Glacier.”

The young man hesitated for an instant. Then with a rushed voice, he sputtered, “I’ve got an errand. Bye now.”

Long ago, Kala learned that she wasn’t as sensitive to emotions as most people. Noticing something was wrong now meant there was a fair chance that it really was. Why was that boy nervous? Was she in trouble again? And if so, what had she screwed up this time?

When Kala was giving tours, there was an unfortunate incident. A big blowhard from the Grandfather Cult joined the other tourists. His personal mission was to commandeer her lecture. One moment, she was describing the false spruces and explaining how the tom-toms depended wholly on them. And suddenly the blowhard interrupted. With an idiot’s voice, he announced that the native trees were useless as well as ugly, and all the local animals were stupid as the rocks, and their world’s work wouldn’t be finished until every miserable corner like this was turned into oak trees and concrete.

Kala’s job demanded a certain reserve. Lecturers were not to share their opinions, unless those opinions coincided with official park policy. Usually she managed to keep her feelings in check. She endured three loud interruptions. But then the prick mentioned his fifteen sons and twelve lovely daughters, boasting that each child would end up on a different new world. Kala couldn’t hold back. She was half his age and half his size, but she stepped up to him and pushed a finger into his belly, saying, “If I was your child, I’d want to leave this world too.”

Most of the audience smiled, and quite a few laughed.

But the blowhard turned and marched to the front office, and by day’s end, Kala was given a new job killing wildcats and other vermin.

The last carcasses were burning when her superior emerged from the station. He was an older fellow—a life-long civil servant who probably dreamed of peace and quiet until his retirement, and then a peaceful death. Approaching his temperamental novice, the man put on a painful smile, twice saying her name before adding, “I need to talk to you,” with a cautious tone.

A headless starling lay on the dirt. With a boot, Kala kicked it into the incinerator and again shut the heavy iron door. Then with a brazen tone, she said, “Listen to my side first.”

The man stopped short.

“I mean it,” she continued. “I don’t know what you’ve heard. I don’t even know what I could have done wrong. But I had very good reasons—”

“Kala.”

“And you should hear my explanation first.”

The poor old gentleman dipped his head, shaking it sadly, telling her, “Kala, sweetness. I’m sorry. All I want to say . . . to tell you . . . is that your brother called this morning. Right after you drove off.” He paused long enough to breathe, and then informed her, “Your father died last night, and I’m very, very sorry.”

Thrifty and impractical: Father was the same in death as in life.

That was an uncharitable assessment, but it happened to be true. Father left behind a long list of wishes, and Mother did everything he wanted, including the simple juniper box and no official funeral procession. The tombstone was equally minimal, and because cemeteries were expensive, he had mandated a private plot he had purchased as soon as he fell sick—a secret illness kept from everyone, including his wife of thirty-one years. But the burial site had drawbacks, including the absence of any road passing within a couple hundred yards. Kala’s parents hadn’t been active in any church for years, which meant it was their scattered family that was responsible for every arrangement, including digging the grave to a legal depth, finding pallbearers to help carry the graceless casket, and then after the painful service, filling in the hole once again.

“It’s a lovely piece of ground,” Sandor mentioned, and not for the first time. Then he dropped a load of the dry gray earth, watching it scatter across a lid of tightly fitted red planks, big clods thumping while the tiny clods scattered, rolling and shattering down to dust, making the skittering sound of busy mice.

“It is pretty,” Mother echoed, sitting on one of forty folding chairs.

Everyone else had left. Barely three dozen relatives and friends had attended the service, and probably only half of them had genuinely known the deceased. If Father died ten years ago, Kala realized, two hundred people would have been sitting and standing along this low ridge, and the church would have sent at least two ministers—one to read Scripture, while the other sat with the grieving family, giving practiced comfort. But the comfort-givers abandoned them soon after that terrible wedding night. For maiming one of the grooms, Sandor had been shunned. And once Kala and her parents didn’t follow suit, the congregation used more subtle, despicable means to toss them away.

For months, Kala continued meeting old friends in secret. A little too urgently, they would tell her that nothing was her fault. But then they started asking how Kala could live with a person who had done such an awful thing. After all, Sandor had neutered one of the leading citizens of their congregation—an act of pure violence, too large and far too wicked not to be brought to the attention of the police. It didn’t matter that he was protecting his only sister, which was normally a good noble principle. And it didn’t matter that decent men always defended their women, or that if a girl was abducted when she’s fourteen, some family member was required to send a message to those horny fools lurking out there: Hurt her, and I’ll take your future generations from you!

None of that meant anything to her friends. And once Kala admitted that she felt thankful for her brother’s actions, those same friends stopped inventing tricks to meet her on the sly.

Of course her brother wasn’t the only person needing blame. Parents were always culpable for the sins of their children, it was said. Didn’t Sandor’s father and mother give him their genes and some portion of their dreams? He was technically still a child when the crime occurred, still possessed by them, and supposedly answering first to God and then to them. Wasn’t that how it was supposed to be?

The kidnapping was an unfortunate business, said some. The new husband shouldn’t have done what he did, and particularly with one of their own. But even in a faith that cherished monogamy, his actions were understandable. Twenty thousand years of history had built this very common outlook. One deacon—a younger man devoid of charm or common sense—visited their house after Sunday service. Sitting in the meeting room with Kala’s father, the deacon asked, “Where lies the difference? A young man takes two brides to a fresh world, while another lives with his first wife for twenty years, then holds a painless divorce and starts a new family with a younger woman?”

“There’s an enormous difference,” Father had responded, his voice rising, betraying anger Kala had rarely heard before. She was sitting in her bedroom upstairs, listening while her other great defender said, “My daughter is a young girl, first of all. And second, she had no choice in this matter. None. She was tied up like a blue-hen and abused like cargo, thrown into a situation where she would never see her family or world again. Is that fair? Or just? Or at all decent? No, and no, and no again.”

“But to cut the groom like he was cut—”

“A little cut, from what I’ve heard.”

Which was the greater surprise: Father interrupting, or insulting the penis of another man?

The deacon groaned and then said, “That vicious animal . . . your darling Sandor . . . he deserves to sit in jail for a few years.”

“Let the courts decide,” Father replied.

“And you realize, of course.” Their guest hesitated a moment before completing his thought. “You understand that no worthy group of pioneers will let him into their ranks. Not now. Not with his taste for violence, they won’t.”

“I suppose not.”

“Which is a shame, since your son always wanted to be a Father.”

Kala heard silence, and when she imagined her father’s face, she saw a look of utter shame.

Then the stupid deacon had to share one last opinion. With a black voice, he announced, “I came here for a reason, sir. I think you should appreciate what other people are saying.”

“What others?”

“Women as well as the men.”

“Tell me,” Father demanded.

“The girl looks older than fourteen. Her body is grown, and that voice of hers could be a woman’s. Any healthy man would be interested. But there’s a problem in the words that Kala’s uses . . . and that smart, sharp tone of hers . . .”

“What are you telling me?”

“Many of us . . . your very best friends . . . we believe that somebody should knock your daughter down a notch or two. And give her some babies to play with, too.”

Father’s chair squeaked—a hard defiant sound.

“Go,” Kala heard him say. “Get out of my house.”

“Gladly,” the deacon replied. “But just so you know my sense of things, realize this: Your daughter had an opportunity that night. It might not seem fair or just to us. But if she and that brother of hers had a wit between them, she’d be living today on a better world. But as things stand, I can’t imagine any reputable group will accept trouble like her. Her best bet for the future is a sloppy abduction by a single male who simply doesn’t know who she is.”

There was a pause—a gathering of breath and fury. Then for the only time in her life, Kala heard her father saying, “Fuck you.”

That moment, and the entire nightmare . . . all of it returned to her at the gravesite. The intervening years suddenly vanished, and her lanky body was left shaking from nerves and misery. Sandor and their mother both noticed. They watched her fling gouts of earth into the hole, and misunderstanding everything, Mom warned, “This isn’t a race, sweetness.”

Kala felt as if she had been caught doing something awful. She couldn’t name her crime, but shame took hold. Down went the shovel, and she knelt over the partly filled grave, staring at the last two visible corners of her father’s casket.

Sandor settled beside her.

With what felt like a single breath, Kala confessed the heart of her thoughts: A single night had torn apart their lives, and despite believing she was blameless, she felt guilty. Somehow all the evil and poor luck that had followed them since was her fault. Because of her, they had lost their church and friends. Father died young, and now their mother would always be a widow. And meanwhile, her brother was a convicted criminal, stripped from what he had wanted most in life—the opportunity to become a respectable Father to some great new world.

After a difficult pause, Mom broke in. “I wouldn’t have liked that at all,” she maintained, “losing you without the chance to say, ‘Good-bye.’ ”

Kala had hoped for more.

“You’re being silly, sweet,” would have been nice. “You aren’t to blame for any of this at all,” would have been perfect.

Instead, the old woman remarked, “These last years have been hard. Yes. But don’t blame yourself for your father’s health.”

Sandor drove his shovel into the earth pile behind Kala. Then with a weighty sigh, he said, “And don’t worry about me. I’m doing fine.”

Hardly. Because of his stay in prison, her brother had missed his last years at school. The boy he had been was gone, replaced by a hard young man with self-made tattoos and muscles enough for two athletes.

Kala disagreed.

“You’re wrong,” she said with a shake of her head.

Then Sandor laughed at her, kicking a clod or two into the hole and staring down at their father, quietly reminding everyone, ‘Respectable’ is just a word.” His face was tight, his eyes were enormous, and his voice was dry and slow when he added, “And there’s more than one route to reach another world.”

8

Kala’s world was settled by a confederation of small and medium-sized churches. Two million parishioners had pooled their resources, acquiring a powerful class-A ripper—a bruising monster capable of stealing away several city blocks. Each congregation selected their best pioneers, and the Last Father was elected to his lofty post, responsible for the well being of more than a thousand brave souls, plus three stowaways and at least fifteen young women kidnapped on the eve of departure. A farm field on the Asian continent was selected, in a region once known as Hunan. Where wheat and leadfruit normally grew, a huge, multi-story dome was erected. Every pioneer wore plugged his ears with foam and wax. The giant ripper shook the entire structure as it searched across Creation; and with a final surge, machine and humans were dragged along the hidden dimensions, covering the miniscule distance.

Rippers had no upper limit to their power, but there were practical considerations. Entering another world meant displacing the native air and land. With its arrival, that class-A ripper shoved aside thousands of tons of dirt and rock, erecting a ring-shaped hill of debris instantly heated by the impact. Wood and peat caught fire, and deep underground, the bedrock was compressed until it was hot enough to melt. The Last Father ordered everyone to remain indoors for the day, breathing bottled air and watching the fires spread and die under an evening thunderstorm. Then the survey teams were dispatched, racing over the blackened ground, finding pastures of black sedge-like grass where they caught the native mice and pseudoinsects as well as a loose-limbed creature with a glancing resemblance to the lost monkeys in the oldest textbooks.

Experience promised this: If intelligence evolved on a new world, chances are it would live in Asia. Competition was stiffest on large landmasses. That’s how it had been on the original earth. Australia was once home to opossums and kangaroos, and dimension-crossing pioneers might have been tempted to linger there, unaware that lying over the horizon were continents full of smart, aggressive placental creatures, including one fierce medium-sized ape with some exceptionally mighty plans.

But the vermin brought home by the survey teams had simple smooth brains, while the monkey-creature proved to be an intellectual midget next to any respectable cat. The Last Father met with his advisors and then with his loving wife, and following a suitable period of contemplation and prayer, he announced that this was where God wished them to remain for the rest of their days.

The new colony expanded swiftly, in numbers and reach.

The Last Father died with honor, six of his nine children carrying his body into a granite cathedral built at the site of their arrival.

By then villages and little cities were scattered across a thousand miles of wilderness. Within ten generations, coal-fired ships were mapping coastlines on every side of the Mother Ocean, while little parties were moving inland, skirting the edges of the Tibetan Plateau on their way to places once called Persia and Turkey, Lebanon and France.

The original churches grew and split apart, or they shriveled and died.

And always, new faiths were emerging, often born from a single believer’s ideals and his very public fantasies.

The original class-A ripper served as an altar inside the Last Father’s cathedral. A cadre of engineers maintained its workings, while a thousand elite soldiers stood guard over the holy ground. The symbols were blatant and unflinching: First and always, this world would serve as a launching point to countless new realms. Human duty was to build more rippers—a promise finally fulfilled several centuries ago. By Kala’s time, the thousand original pioneers had become five billion citizens. Tax codes and social conventions assured that rippers would always be built. Experts guessed that perhaps fifteen billion bodies could live on these warm lands, and with luck and God’s blessing, that would be the day when enough rippers were rolling out of enough factories to allow every excess child to escape, every boy free to find his own empty, golden realm, and every girl serving as a good man’s happy Wife.

9

Sandor hated that his sister traveled alone. Every trip Kala took was preceded by a difficult conversation, on phone or in person. It was his duty to remind her that the open highway was an exceptionally dangerous place. Sandor always had some tale to share about some unfortunate young woman who did everything right—drove only by day, spoke to the fewest possible strangers, and slept in secure hotels that catered to their kind. Yet without exception, each of those smart ladies had vanished somewhere on the road, usually without explanation.

“But look at the actual numbers,” Kala liked to counter. “The chance of me being abducted twice in my life—”

“Is tiny. I know.”

“Dying in a traffic accident is ten times more likely,” she would add.

But eventually Sandor analyzed the same statistics, ambushing her with a much bleaker picture. “Dying in a wreck is three times as likely,” he informed Kala. “But that’s for all women. Old and young. Those in your subset—women in their twenties, with good looks and driving alone—are five times as likely to disappear as they are to die in a simple, run-of-the-mill accident.”

“But I have to travel,” she countered. Her doctorate involved studying the native communities scattered across a dozen far flung mountaintops. Driving was mandatory, and since there was barely enough funding as it was, she had no extra money to hire reliable security guards. “I know you don’t appreciate my work—”

“I never said that, Kala.”

“Because you’re such a painfully polite fellow.” Then laughing at her own joke, she reminded him, “I always carry a registered weapon.”

“Good.”

“And a gun that isn’t registered.”

“As you damn well should,” Sandor insisted.

“Plus there’s a thousand little things I do, or two million things I avoid.” She always had one or two new tricks to offer, just to prove that she was outracing her unseen enemies. “And if you have any other suggestions, please . . . share them with your helpless little sister . . .”

“Don’t tease,” he warned. “You don’t understand what men want from women. If you did, you’d never leave home.”

Kala had a tidy little apartment on a women’s floor, set ten stories above the street—far too high to be stolen away with even the biggest ripper. On this occasion, Sandor happened to be passing through, supposedly chasing a mechanic’s job but not acting in any great hurry to leave. His main mission, as far as she could tell, was to terrify his little sister. As always, he came armed with news clippings and Web sites. He wanted her to appreciate the fact that her mountains were full of horny males, each one more dangerous than the others, and all the bastards fighting for their chance to start some new world. As it happened, last week a large shipment of class-C rippers had just been hijacked from an armed convoy, and now the Children of Forever were proclaiming a time of plenty. And just yesterday, outside New Eternal, some idiot drove a big freight truck through two sets of iron gates before pulling up beside the classroom wing of a ladies’ academy. Moments later, a large class-B ripper fired off, leaving behind a hemispherical hole and a mangled building, as well as a thousand scared teenage girls, saved only because they had been called into the auditorium for a hygiene lecture from the school’s doctor.

Kala shrugged at the bad news. “Crap is a universal constant. Nothing has changed, and I’m going to be fine.”

But really, she never felt good about driving long distances, and the recent news wasn’t comforting. Nearly a hundred stolen rippers were somewhere on the continent, which had to shift the odds that trouble would find her. Kala let herself feel the fear, and then with a burst of nervous creativity, she blurted out a possible solution.

“Come with me,” she said.

Sandor was momentarily stunned.

“If you’re that especially worried about me, ride along and help me with my work. Unless you really do have some plush mechanic’s job waiting.”

“All right then,” he answered. “I’d like that.”

“A long family vacation,” she said with a grin.

And he completed her thought, adding, “Just like we used to do.”

More than ten years had passed since they last spent time together, and the summer-long journey gave them endless chances to catch up. But for all the days spent on the road, not to mention the weeks hiking and working on alpine trails, they shared remarkably little. Kala heard nothing about life in prison and very little about how Sandor had made his living since his release. And by the same token, she never felt the need to mention past boys and future men—romantic details that she always shared with her closest friends. For a time, the silences bothered her. But then she decided siblings always had difficulty with intimacy. Sharing genetics and a family was such a deep, profound business that no one felt obliged to prove their closeness by ordinary routes. Sandor revealed himself only in glimpses—a few words or a simple gesture—while in her own fashion, Kala must have seemed just as close-mouthed. But of course these secrets of theirs didn’t matter. This man would always be her brother, and that was far larger than any other relationship they might cobble together while driving across the spine of a continent.

Sandor relished his job as protector. At every stop, he was alert and a little aggressive, every stranger’s face deserving a quick study, and some of them requiring a hard warning stare. She appreciated the sense of menace that seemed to rise out of him at will. In ways she hadn’t anticipated, Kala enjoyed watching Sandor step up to a counter, making innocent clerks flinch. His tattoos flexed and his face grew hard as stone, and she liked the rough snarl in his voice when he said, “Thank you.” Or when he snapped at some unknown fellow, “Out of our way. Please. Sir.”

If anything, empty wilderness was worse than the open road. It made him more suspicious, if not out-and-out paranoid.

Kala’s work involved an obscure genus of pseudoinsects. She was trying to find and catalog unknown species before they vanished, collecting data about their habitat and specimens that she froze and dried and stuck into long test tubes. One July evening, on the flank of a giant southern volcano, she heard a peculiar sound from behind a grove of spruce trees. A rough hooting, it sounded like. “I wonder what that was,” she mentioned. Sandor instantly slipped away from the fire, walking the perimeter at least twice before returning again, one hand holding a long flashlight and the other carrying an even longer pistol equipped with a nightscope. “So what was it?” she asked.

“Boys,” he reported. “They were thinking of camping near us.”

“They were?”

“Yeah,” he said, sitting next to the fire again. “But I guess for some reason they decided to pull up their tent and move off. Who knows why?”

Moments like that truly pleased Kala.

But following her pleasure was a squeamish distaste. What kind of person was she? She thought of herself as being independent and self-reliant, but on the other hand, she seemed to relish being watched over by a powerful and necessarily dangerous man.

Two days later, driving north, Sandor mentioned that he had never gotten his chance to visit the Grand Canyon. “Our vacation never made it,” he reminded her. “And I haven’t found the time since.”

Kala let them invest one full day of sightseeing.

The canyon’s precise location and appearance varied on each world. But there was always a river draining that portion of the continent, and the land had always risen up in response to the predictable tectonics. Since their earth was wetter than most, the river was big and angry, cutting through a billion years of history on its way to the canyon floor. Kala paid for a cable-car ride to the bottom. They ate hard-boiled blue-hen eggs and mulberries for lunch, and afterwards, walking on the rocky shoreline, she pointed to the rotting carcass of a Helen-trout. The First Father didn’t bring living fish with him, but later Fathers realized that fish farming meant cheap protein. The Helen-trout came from the fifth new world—indiscriminate feeders that could thrive in open ocean or fresh water, and that adored every temperature from freezing to bathwater. No major drainage in the world lacked the vermin. “They die when they’re pregnant,” she explained. “Their larvae use the mother as food, eating her as she rots, getting a jump on things before they swim away.”

Sandor seemed to be listening. But then again, he always seemed to pay attention to his surroundings. In this case, he gave a little nod, and after a long pause said, “I’m curious, Kala. What do you want to accomplish? With your work, I mean.”

He asked that question every few days, as if for the first time.

At first Kala thought that he simply wasn’t hearing her answers. Later, she wondered if he was trying to break her down, hoping to make her admit that she didn’t have any good reason for her life’s investment. But after weeks of enduring this verbal dance, she began to appreciate what was happening. To keep from boring herself, she was forced to change her response. Inside the canyon, staring at the dead fish, she didn’t bother with old words about the duty and honor that came from saving a few nameless bugs. And she avoided the subject of great medicines that probably would never emerge from her work. Instead, staring down at the rich bulging body, she offered a new response.

“This world of ours is dying, Sandor.”

The statement earned a hard look and an impossible-to-read grin. “Why’s that?” he asked over the roar of the water.

“A healthy earth has ten or twenty or fifty million species. Depending on how you count them.” She shook her head, reminding him, “The Last Father brought as many species as possible. Nearly a thousand multicellular species have survived here. And that’s too few to make an enduring, robust ecosystem.”

Sandor shrugged and gestured at the distant sky. “Things look good enough,” he said. “What do you mean that it’s dying?”

“Computer models point to the possibility,” she explained. “Low diversity means fragile ecosystems. And it’s more than just having too few species. It’s the nature of these species. Wherever we go, we bring weed species. Biological thugs, essentially. And not just from the original earth but from seventeen distinct evolutionary histories. Seventeen lines that are nearly alien to one another. That reduces meaningful interactions. It’s another factor why there will eventually come a crunch.”

“Okay. So when?”

She shrugged her shoulders.

“Next year?”

“Not for thousands of years,” she allowed. “But there is a collapse point, and after that, the basic foundations of this biosphere will decline rapidly. Phytoplankton, for one. The native species are having troubles enduring the new food chains, and if they end up vanishing, then nobody will be making free oxygen.”

“Trees don’t make oxygen?”

“They do,” she admitted. “But their wood burns or rots. And rotting is the same reaction as burning, chemically speaking.”

Sandor stared at the gray mother fish.

“You know how it is when you turn on a ripper?” Kala asked. “You know how the machine has to search hard for a world with a livable atmosphere?”

Her brother nodded, a look of anticipation building in the pale brown eyes.

“Do you ever wonder why so many earths don’t have decent air for us? Do you?” Kala gave him a rough pat on the shoulder, asking, “What if a lot of pioneers have been moving across the multiverse? Humans and things that aren’t human too. And what if most of these intrepid pioneers eventually kick their worlds out of equilibrium, killing them as a consequence?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Then after a long thoughtful moment: “Huh.”

And that was the last time Sandor ever bothered to doubt the importance of Kala’s work.

10

The heart of every ripper was a cap-shaped receptacle woven from diamond whiskers, each whisker doctored with certain rare-earth elements and infused with enough power to pierce the local brane. But as difficult as the receptacle was to build, it was a simple chore next to engineering the machines to support and control its work. Hard drives and the capacitors had to function on the brink of theoretical limits. Heat and quantum fluctuations needed to be kept at a minimum. The best rippers utilized a cocktail of unusual isotopes, doubling their reliability as well tripling the costs, while security costs added another forty percent to the final price.

Twice that summer, Kala and her brother saw convoys of finished rippers being shipped across country. Armored trucks were painted a lush emerald green, each one accompanied by two or three faster vehicles bristling with weapons held by tough young men. Routes and schedules were supposed to be kept secret. Since even a small ripper was worth a fortune, the corporations did whatever they could to protect their investments. Which made Kala wonder: How the Children of Forever learn where one convoy would be passing, and what kind of firepower would it take to make the rippers their own?

Sandor was driving when they ran into one of the convoys. A swift little blister of armor and angry faces suddenly passed them on the wrong side. “Over,” screamed every face. “Pull over.”

They were beside the Mormon Sea, on a highway famous for scenery and its narrow, almost nonexistent shoulders. But Sandor complied, fitting them onto a slip of asphalt and turning off the engine, then setting the parking brake and turning to look back around the bend, eyes huge and his lower lip tucked into his chewing mouth.

For a moment or two, Kala watched the bright water of the inland sea, enjoying the glitter stretching to the horizon. Then came the rumble of big engines, and a pair of heavy freight trucks rolled past, followed by more deadly cars, and then another pair of trucks.

“Class-Cs,” Sandor decided. “About a hundred of them, built down in Highborn.”

The trucks had no obvious markings. “How can you tell?”

“The lack of security,” he said. “Cs don’t get as much. It’s the As and Bs that bandits can sell for a fortune. And I know the company because each truck’s got a code on its side, if you know how to read it.”

The convoy had passed out of sight, but they remained parked beside the narrow road. “When are we moving again?” she asked.

“Wait,” he cautioned.

She shifted in her seat and took a couple meaningful breaths.

Reading the signs, Sandor turned to her. “You don’t want to trail them too closely. Someone might get the wrong idea. Know what I mean?”

And with that, her brave, almost fearless brother continued to sit beside the road, hands squeezing the wheel.

“You gave somebody the wrong idea,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“Sandor,” she said. “In your life, how many convoys have you followed?”

Nothing changed about his face. Then suddenly, a little smile turned up the corner of his mouth, and with a quiet, conspiratorial voice, he admitted, “Fifty, maybe sixty.”

She wasn’t surprised, except that she didn’t expect to feel so upset. “Is that how badly you want it? To be a Father . . . you’re willing to steal a ripper just to get your chance . . .?”

He started to nod. Then again, he looked at his sister, reminding her, “I’m still here. So I guess I’m not really that eager.”

“What went wrong? The work was too dangerous for you?”

His expression looked injured now. Straightening his back, he started the car and pulled out, accelerating for a long minute, letting the silence work on Kala until he finally told her, “You know, there were thirty-two security men on that other convoy. The one hit by the Children of Forever. Plus a dozen drivers and three corporate representatives. And all were killed during the robbery.”

“I know that—”

“Most of those poor shits were laid down in a ditch by the road and shot through the head. Just so motorists wouldn’t notice the bodies when they drove past.” He squeezed the steering wheel until it squeaked, and very carefully, he told Kala, “That’s when I gave up wanting it. Being a Father to the very best world isn’t enough reason to murder even one poor boy who’s trying to make some money and keep his family fed.”

A pair of mountain ranges stood as islands far out in the Mormon Sea, and they spent on few days walking the tallest peaks. Then they drove north again, up to the Geysers, enjoying a long hike through the mountains north of that volcanic country. Then it was late August, and they started back toward Kala’s home. One stop remained, kept until now for sentimental reasons.

“Our best vacation,” she muttered.

Sandor agreed with his silence and a little wink.

They stayed in a reserve campground meant for employees, and Kala introduced her brother to the few rangers that remained from her days here. The mood was upbeat, on the whole. Old colleagues expressed interest in her studies, asking knowledgeable questions, and some cases, offering advice.

One older gentleman—a fellow who had never warmed much to her before—nodded as he listened to her description of her work. Then he said, “Kala,” with a sweet, almost fatherly voice. “I know a place with just that kind of bug. I can’t tell you the species, by I don’t think it’s quite what you’ve found before.”

“Really? Where?”

He brought out a map and pointed at a long valley on the other side of the continental divide. “It looks too low in altitude, I suppose. And a lot of junipers are moving in. But if you get up by this looping road here—”

Sandor pushed in close to watch.

“There’s a little glen. I’ve seen that blue bug there, I’m sure.”

“Thank you,” Kala told him.

“Whatever I can do to help,” the old ranger said. Then he made a show of rolling up the map, asking, “I can take you up myself. If your brother wants to stay here and rest for a bit.”

Sandor said, “No thanks.”

But he said it in an especially nice way. For the time being, neither one of them could see what was happening.

11

As promised, juniper trees were standing among the natives. Rilly birds and starlings must have eaten juniper berries outside the reserve. Since their corrosive stomach acids were essential for the germination process, wherever they relieved themselves, a new forest of ugly gray-green trees sprouted, prickly and relentless. Most biologists claimed that it was an innate, mutualistic relationship between species. But Kala had a different interpretation: The birds knew precisely what they were doing. Whenever a starling took a dump, it sang to the world, “I’m planting a forest here. And I’m going to be the death of you, you silly old trees.”

Sandor squatted and stuck his thick fingers into the needle litter, churning up a long pink worm. After a summer spent watching Kala, he was now one the great experts when it came to a single genus of pseudoinsects. “Not all that promising,” he announced.

Earthworms were another key invader from their home world. And no, nightcrawlers didn’t usually coexist with her particular creepy-crawlies.

“Maybe higher up,” he offered.

But the old ranger told her this was the place, which implied that her subjects were enduring despite worms and trees: A heroic image that Kala wanted to cling to for a little while longer.

“You wander,” she said. “If I don’t find anything, I’ll follow.”

Sandor winked and stepped back into the black shadows.

Twenty minutes later, Kala gave up the hunt. Stepped into a little clearing, she sat on a rock bench, pulling a sandwich from her knapsack and managing a bite before a stranger stepped off the trail behind her.

“Excuse me?”

Startled, Kala wheeled fast, her free hand reaching for the pistol on her belt. But the voice was a girl’s, and she was a very tiny creature—big-eyed and fragile, maybe ten years younger than Kala. The girl looked tired and worried. Her shirt was torn, and her left arm wore a long scrape that looked miserably sore.

“Can you help me, ma’am? Please?”

Carefully, Kala rose to her feet while pushing the sandwich back inside her bag, using that same motion to make certain that her second pistol was where she expected it to be. Then with a careful voice, she asked, “Are you lost, sweetie?”

“That too,” the girl said, glancing over her shoulder before stepping away from the forest’s edge. “It’s been days since I’ve been outside. At least.”

Kala absorbed the news. Then she quietly asked, “Where have you been?”

“In the back end.”

“The end of what?”

“The bus,” the girl snapped, as if Kala should already know that much. “He put me with the others, in the dark—”

“Other girls?”

“Yes, yes.” The little creature drifted forward, tucking both hands into her armpits. “He’s a mean one—”

“What sect?”

“Huh?”

“Does he belong to a sect?”

“The Children of Forever,” the strange girl confessed. “Do you know about them?”

With her right hand, Kala pulled the pistol from her belt while keeping the bag on her left shoulder. Nothing moved in the trees. Except for the girl and her, there might be no one else in this world.

“He’s collecting wives,” the girl related. “He told me he wants ten of us before he leaves.”

“Come closer,” Kala told her. Then she asked, “How many girls does he have so far?”

The girl swallowed. “Three.”

“And there’s just him?”

“Yeah. He’s alone.” The girl’s eyes were growing larger, unblinking and bright. “Three other girls, and me. And him.”

“Where?”

“Down that way,” said the girl. “Past the parking lot, hiding up in some big old grease trees.”

Kala’s car lay in the same direction. But Sandor had gone the opposite direction.

Whispering, she told the stranger, “Okay. I can help you.”

“Thank you, ma’am!”

“Quiet.”

“Sorry,” the girl muttered.

“Now,” Kala told her. “This way.”

The girl fell in beside her, rubbing her bloodied arm as she walked. She breathed hard and fast. Several more times, she said, “Thank you.” But she didn’t seem to look back half as often as Kala did, and maybe that was what seemed wrong.

After a few minutes of hard walking, Kala asked, “So how did you get free?”

The girl looked back then. And with a nod, she said, “I crawled up through the vent.”

A tiny creature like that: Kala could believe it.

“I cut my arm on a metal edge.”

The wound was red, but the blood had clotted some time ago. Even as Kala nodded, accepting that story, a little part of her was feeling skeptical.

“If he finds me, he’ll hurt me.”

“I won’t let him hurt you,” Kala promised.

“There’s three other girls in the bus,” she repeated. Then she put her hands back into her armpits, hugging herself hard, saying, “We should save them, if we can. Sneak up to the bus while he’s hunting for me and get them free, maybe.”

But Kala wanted to find Sandor. She came close to mentioning him to the girl, but then she thought better of it. Her brother’s presence was a secret that made her feel better. It gave her the confidence to tell the girl, “Later. First I have to make sure that you’re safe.”

The girl stared up at her protector, saying nothing.

“Come on,” Kala urged.

“I want to be safe,” the girl said.

“That’s what I’m doing—”

“No,” she said. Then her hands came out from under her arms, one of them empty while the other held a little box with two metal forks sticking from one end, and the forks jumped out and dove into her skin, and suddenly a hot blue bolt of lightning was rolling through her body.

The girl disarmed Kala and stole her bag and tied her up with plastic straps pulled from her back pocket. Then she vanished down the path. The pain subsided enough to where Kala could sit up, watching uphill, imagining her brother’s arrival. But this wasn’t the path he had taken, and he still hadn’t shown by the time the girl and New Father appeared. A stubby automatic weapon hung on his shoulder. He was forty or forty-five years old, a big strong and homely creature with rough hands and foul breath. “She is awfully pretty,” was his first assessment, smiling at his latest acquisition. Then he offered a wink, adding, “He promised I’d like you. And he was right.”

The old ranger had set this up.

“I didn’t see any brother,” said the tiny girl.

“That would be too easy,” the man cautioned. Then he handed his weapon to the girl and grabbed Kala, flinging her over a shoulder while saying, “I don’t think he’ll be any problem. But come on anyway, sweet. Fast as we can walk.”

They entered the open glade, crossing the parking lot and passing Kala’s tiny car before they climbed again, entering a mature stand of native trees. Hiding in the gloom was a long bus flanked by a pair of fat freight trucks, each vehicle equipped with wide tires and extra suspension. And there were many more brides than three, Kala saw. Twelve was her first count, fourteen when she tried again. Each girl was in her teens. They looked like schoolgirls on a field trip, giggling and teasing the newest wife by saying, “Too old to walk for herself,” and, “Fresh blood in the gene pool, looks like.”

Three young men silently watched Kala’s arrival. Sons, by the looks of them. In their early twenties, at most.

“Beautiful,” said one of the boys.

The other two nodded and grinned.

With the care shown to treasured luggage, the older man set Kala beneath a tree, her back propped against the black trunk, arms and legs needing to be retied, just to make sure. Kala quickly looked from face to face, hoping for any sign of empathy. There was none. And the girl who had been sent out as bait stood over Kala for several minutes, wearing the hardest expression of all.

“He will come for me,” Kala said.

“Your brother probably will,” said the New Father. “But I’ve been watching you two. He’s carrying nothing bigger than that long pistol, and we’ve got artillery here he wouldn’t dare face.”

As if to prove their murderous natures, the sons retrieved their own automatic weapons from the bus.

“What next?” one son asked.

“Stay here with me,” their father advised.

But the oldest son didn’t like that tactic. “We could circle around, pick him off when he shows himself.”

“No,” he was told.

“But—”

“What did I say?”

The young man dropped his face.

“God led us to this place,” the wiser man continued. “And God has seen to give us a sticky hot day. Pray for storms. That’s my advice. Then we can punch a hole in the clouds and get power enough to finally leave . . .”

Lightning, he was talking about. Kala had heard about this technique: With a proper rocket and enough wire following like a tail, it was possible to create lightning during a thunderstorm. A channel of air supplied the connection to the charged earth below. The bolt would strike a preset lightning rod . . . up in the tree on the other side of camp, she realized. She noticed the tall black spike and the heavy wires leading down into the ripper that was probably set in the center of the bus, a class-C that was hungry and waiting for its first and only meal.

Kala could guess why these people had come into the mountains. They liked solitude and cheap energy, and besides, the police were hunting everywhere else for those who had murdered the security guards.

Sandor was somewhere close, Kala told herself.

Watching her.

She almost relaxed, imagining her brother hunkered low in the shadow of some great old tree, waiting for a critical mistake to be made. Hunting for an opening, a weakness. Any opportunity. She went as far as picturing his arrival: Sandor would wait for afternoon and the gathering storms, and maybe the rain would start to fall, fat drops turning into a deluge, and while the devout boys and girls watched for the Lord in that angry sky, her brother would sneak up behind her and neatly cut her free.

Obviously, that’s what would happen.

Kala thought so highly of the plan that she was as surprised as anyone when a figure emerged from the shadows—a man smaller than most were, running on bare feet to keep his noise to a minimum. He was quick, but something in his stride seemed unhurried. Untroubled. He looked something like a hiker who had lost his way but now had found help. Perhaps that was what Sandor intended. But his face was grim and focused, and no motion was wasted. Everybody—grooms and brides and even their captive—stared for a moment, examining the stranger in their midst. Then the newcomer reached beneath his shirt and lifted a long pistol, and the first hollow point removed the top of the father’s head and the second one knocked the small girl flat. Then Sandor was running again, slipping between brides, and one of the sons finally lifted his weapon, spraying automatic gunfire until three girls had dropped and another brother had pushed the barrel into the forest floor, screaming, “Stop, would you . . . just stop . . .!”

Sandor had the third brother by the neck, slamming him against the broad black trunk of a tree. Then he stared out at the cowering survivors, pressing the barrel of the pistol into the man’s ass, and with a voice eerily composed, he said, “Put your guns down. Do it now. Or I’m going to do some painting over here . . . with a goddamn pubic hair brush . . .”

12

The matronly gray robes of middle age had vanished, replaced by an old woman’s love for gaudy colors. She was wearing a rich slick and very purple dress with a purple hat with a wide gold belt and matching shoes. Diet and exercise had removed enough weight to give her a stocky, solid figure. She nicely filled the station of her life—that of the fit, well-rested widow. Seeing her children standing at her doorway, Mom smiled—a thoroughly genuine expression, happy but brief. Then she found something alarming in their faces. “What’s happened?” With concern, she said, “Darlings. What’s wrong?”

Kala glanced at her brother and then over her shoulder.

In the street sat a plain commercial van. Nothing about the vehicle was remarkable, except that its back end was being pressed down by the terrific, relentless weight of a class-C ripper and a powerful little winch.

The van was their fourth vehicle in three days, and Sandor would replace it tomorrow, if he thought it would help.

“I was just leaving,” their mother offered. And when no one else spoke, she added, “I don’t normally dress like this—”

“Don’t go,” said her son.

“Are you meeting friends?” Kala asked. “If you don’t show, will somebody miss you?”

Mom shook her head. “I just go the tea parlor on Fridays. I know people, but no, I doubt if anybody expects me.”

It was the Sabbath today, wasn’t it?

“Can I park the van inside your garage?” Sandor asked.

Mom nodded. “You’ll have to pull my car out—”

“Keys,” he said.

She fished them from a purse covered with mock jewelry, and Sandor started down the front stairs.

Kala gratefully stepped inside. All these years, and the same furnishings and carpet populated the living room, although every surface was a little more worn now. Immersed in what was astonishingly familiar, she suddenly relaxed. She couldn’t help herself. All at once it was impossible to stand under her own power, and as soon as she sat, a deep need for sleep began to engulf her.

“What’s happened?” Mom repeated. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re going to explain everything, Mom.”

“You look awful, sweetness. Both of you do.” The old woman sat beside Kala on the lumpy couch, one hand patting her on the knee. “But I’m glad to see you two, together.”

Sometime in these last few moments, Kala had begun to cry.

“Tell me, dear.”

In what felt like a single breath, the story emerged. For the second time in her life, Kala had been kidnapped, but this time Sandor killed two people while freeing her. A second bride died in random gunfire, and two more were severely injured. “But we had to leave them,” Kala confessed. “After we disarmed the brothers and brides, we left them with first aid kits and two working trucks . . . except Sandor shot out the tires before we drove off in their bus, just to make sure we would have a head start . . .”

Her mother held herself motionless, mouth open and no sound worth the effort.

“It was a big long bus with a ripper onboard. Sandor drove us through the mountains. Fast. I don’t know why we didn’t crash, but we didn’t. We stopped at a fix-it shop and he made calls, and a hundred miles after that, we met a couple friends of his . . . men that he met inside prison, I think . . .”

“When was this?”

“Wednesday,” she answered. “Those friends helped Sandor pull the ripper from the bus. They gave us a new truck and kept the capacitors and the other expensive gear for themselves. Then he and I drove maybe two miles, and that’s when Sandor stole a second truck. Because he didn’t quite trust his friends, and what if they decided to come take the ripper too?” She wiped at her eyes, her cheeks. “After that, we drove more than a thousand miles, but never in a straight line. By then, we’d finally decided what we were going to do, and he stole the van before we came here.”

Mom was alert, focused. She was sitting forward with her hand clenched to her daughter’s knee. Very quietly, she asked, “Is it one of the stolen rippers? From that convoy?”

Kala nodded. “The ID marks match.”

“Have you thought about giving it back to its rightful owners?”

“We talked about that. Yes.”

But then Mom saw what had eventually become obvious to Kala. “Regardless what you tell the owners, they’ll think your brother had something to do with the robbery and murders. And what good would that do?”

“Nothing.”

Then her mother gathered up Kala’s hands, and without hesitation, she said, “God has given you a gift, darling.”

She didn’t think about it in religious terms. But the words sounded nice.

“A great rare and wonderful gift,” her mother continued. “And you know, if there is one person who truly deserves to inherit a new world, it has to be—”

“My brother?”

“No,” Mom exclaimed, genuinely surprised. Then as the front door swung open and Sandor stepped inside, she said brightly, “It’s you, sweetness. You deserve the best world. Of course, of course, of course . . .!”

Their frantic days had only just begun. The Children of Forever would have learned their names from the old ranger, or maybe from the Kala’s abandoned car. And people who had murdered dozens to steal the ripper would undoubtedly do anything to recover what was theirs and avenge their losses. Obviously, it was best to vanish again, this time taking their mother with them. Old lives and treasured patterns had to be avoided, yet even on the run, they still had to find time and energy to make plans for what was to come next.

Sandor knew the best places to find machinery and foodstuffs and the other essential supplies. But Kala knew where to find people—the right people—who would make this business worthwhile. And it was their mother who acted as peacemaker, calming the water when her two strong-willed children began fighting over the details that always looked trivial the next day.

Suddenly it was winter—the worst season to migrate to another world. But that gave them the gift of several months where they could make everything perfect, or nearly so.

Years ago, the old fix-it man who once worked on their family car had retired, and the next owner had driven his shop out of business. The property was purchased from the bank for nothing and reconnected to the power grid, and with Kala’s friends supplying labor and enough money, Sandor managed to refit the building according to their specific needs. Medical stocks were locked in the lady’s room. The garage was jammed with canned and dried food and giant water tanks, plus the rest of their essential goods, including a fully charged class-C ripper that would carry away the little building.

On a cold bleak day in late March—several weeks before their scheduled departure—a stranger came looking for gasoline. He parked beside one of the useless pumps and pulled on his horn several times. Then he climbed out of the small, nondescript car, and ignoring the CLOSED signs painted on the shuttered windows, he walked across the cracked pavement in order to knock hard on both garage doors and the front door.

“Hey! Anybody there?” he shouted before finally giving up.

As he returned to his car, Kala asked her brother, “What is he? Children of Forever, or some kind of undercover cop?”

“Really,” Sandor replied, “does it matter?”

Kala set her splattergun back in its cradle.

“I think it’s time,” their mother offered.

It was too early in the season to be ideal. But what choice did they have? Kala lifted the phone and made one coded call to the nearest town. And within the hour, everybody had arrived. Those who weren’t going with them offered quick tearful good-byes to those who were, showering those blessed pioneers with kisses and love. But then the pioneers had enough, and with quick embarrassed voices, they said, “Enough, Mommy. Daddy. That’s enough. Good-bye!”

Kala had come too far and paid too much of a price not to watch what was about to happened. She opened all of the shutters in the public room, letting the murky gray flow inside, and then she sat between two six-year-olds, one of whom asked, “How much longer now?”

“Soon,” she promised. “A minute or two, at most.”

Sandor and several other mechanically minded souls were in the garage, watching the ripper power up. Sharing the public room with Kala were a handful of grown men and a dozen women, plus nearly forty children sitting on tiny folding chairs, the oldest child being a stubborn twelve year-old boy—the only son of colleagues who were staying behind.

Kala’s mother was one of the women, and she wasn’t even the oldest.

“We’re not making everybody else’s mistakes,” Kala had explained to her, sitting in the old living room some months ago. “We’re taking grandparents and little kids, but very few young adults. I don’t want virility and stupidity. I want wisdom and youth.”

“What seeds are you taking?” her mother had asked.

“None.”

“Did I hear you say—?”

“No seeds, and no animals. Not even one viable tortoise shell. And before we leave, I want to make sure every mouse in the building is dead, and every fly and flea, and if there’s one earthworm living under us, I’ll kill it myself when it pops in the new world.”

Nobody was leaving this world but humans.

And even then, they were traveling as close to empty-handed as they dared. They had tools and a few books about science and mechanics. But everyone had taken an oath not to bring any Bibles or odd Testaments, and as far as possible, everything else that smacked of preconceptions and fussy religion had to be left behind on their doomed world.

The children came from families who believed as Kala believed.

It was amazing, and heartening, how many people held opinions not too much unlike hers. And sometimes in her most doubting moments, she found herself wondering if maybe her home world had a real chance of surviving the next ten thousand years.

But there were many parents who saw doom coming—ecological or political or religious catastrophes—and that’s why they were so eager to give up a young son or daughter.

They were there now, standing out near the highway, surely hearing the ripper as it began to hammer hard at reality.

From inside the cold garage, Sandor shouted, “A target’s acquired!”

Will this madness work? Kala asked herself one last time. Could one species arrive on an alien world, with children and old people in tow, and find food enough to survive? And then could they pass through the next ten thousand years without destroying everything that that world was and could have become . . .?

And then it was too late to ask the question.

The clouds of one day had vanished into a suddenly blue glare of empty skies, a green-blue lawn of grassy something stretching off into infinity . . . and suddenly a room full of bright young voices shouted, “Neat! Sweet! Pretty!”

Then the boy on her right tugged at her arm, adding, “That’s fun, Miss Kala. Let’s do it again!”

THE DJINN’S WIFE

Ian McDonald

Once there was a woman in Delhi who married a djinn. Before the water war, that was not so strange a thing: Delhi, split in two like a brain, has been the city of djinns from time before time. The sufis tell that God made two creations, one of clay and one of fire. That of clay became man; that of fire, the djinni. As creatures of fire they have always been drawn to Delhi, seven times reduced to ashes by invading empires, seven times reincarnating itself. Each turn of the chakra, the djinns have drawn strength from the flames, multiplying and dividing. Great dervishes and brahmins are able to see them, but, on any street, at any time, anyone may catch the whisper and momentary wafting warmth of a djinn passing.

I was born in Ladakh, far from the heat of the djinns—they have wills and whims quite alien to humans—but my mother was Delhi born and raised, and from her I knew its circuses and boulevards, its maidans and chowks and bazaars, like those of my own Leh. Delhi to me was a city of stories, and so if I tell the story of the djinn’s wife in the manner of a sufi legend or a tale from the Mahabharata, or even a tivi soap opera, that is how it seems to me: City of Djinns.

They are not the first to fall in love on the walls of the Red Fort.

The politicians have talked for three days and an agreement is close. In honor the Awadhi government has prepared a grand durbar in the great courtyard before the Diwan-i-aam. All India is watching so this spectacle is on a Victorian scale: event-planners scurry across hot, bare marble, hanging banners and bunting; erecting staging; setting up sound and light systems; choreographing dancers, elephants, fireworks, and a fly-past of combat robots; dressing tables; and drilling serving staff, and drawing up so-careful seating plans so that no one will feel snubbed by anyone else. All day three-wheeler delivery drays have brought fresh flowers, festival goods, finest, soft furnishings. There’s a real French sommelier raving at what the simmering Delhi heat is doing to his wine-plan. It’s a serious conference. At stake are a quarter of a billion lives.

In this second year after the monsoon failed, the Indian nations of Awadh and Bharat face each other with main battle tanks, robot attack helicopters, strikeware, and tactical nuclear slow missiles on the banks of the sacred river Ganga. Along thirty kilometers of staked-out sand, where brahmins cleanse themselves and saddhus pray, the government of Awadh plans a monster dam. Kunda Khadar will secure the water supply for Awadh’s one hundred and thirty million for the next fifty years. The river downstream, that flows past the sacred cities of Allahabad and Varanasi in Bharat, will turn to dust. Water is life, water is death. Bharati diplomats, human and artificial intelligence aeai advisors, negotiate careful deals and access rights with their rival nation, knowing one carelessly spilled drop of water will see strike robots battling like kites over the glass towers of New Delhi and slow missiles with nanonuke warheads in their bellies creeping on cat-claws through the galis of Varanasi. The rolling news channels clear their schedules of everything else but cricket. A deal is close! A deal is agreed! A deal will be signed tomorrow! Tonight, they’ve earned their durbar.

And in the whirlwind of leaping hijras and parading elephants, a Kathak dancer slips away for a cigarette and a moment up on the battlements of the Red Fort. She leans against the sun-warmed stone, careful of the fine gold-threadwork of her costume. Beyond the Lahore Gate lies hiving Chandni Chowk; the sun a vast blister bleeding onto the smokestacks and light-farms of the western suburbs. The chhatris of the Sisganj Gurdwara, the minarets and domes of the Jama Masjid, the shikara of the Shiv temple are shadow-puppet scenery against the red, dust-laden sky. Above them pigeons storm and dash, wings wheezing. Black kites rise on the thermals above Old Delhi’s thousand thousand rooftops. Beyond them, a curtain wall taller and more imposing than any built by the Mughals, stand the corporate towers of New Delhi, Hindu temples of glass and construction diamond stretched to fantastical, spiring heights, twinkling with stars and aircraft warning lights.

A whisper inside her head, her name accompanied by a spray of sitar: the call-tone of her palmer, transduced through her skull into her auditory center by the subtle ‘hoek curled like a piece of jewelry behind her ear.

“I’m just having a quick bidi break, give me a chance to finish it,” she complains, expecting Pranh, the choreographer, a famously tetchy third-sex nute. Then, “Oh!” For the gold-lit dust rises before her up into a swirl, like a dancer made from ash.

Adjinn. The thought hovers on her caught breath. Her mother, though Hindu, devoutly believed in the djinni, in any religion’s supernatural creatures with a skill for trickery.

The dust coalesces into a man in a long, formal sherwani and loosely wound red turban, leaning on the parapet and looking out over the glowing anarchy of Chandni Chowk. He is very handsome, the dancer thinks, hastily stubbing out her cigarette and letting it fall in an arc of red embers over the battlements. It does not do to smoke in the presence of the great diplomat A.J. Rao.

“You needn’t have done that on my account, Esha,” A.J. Rao says, pressing his hands together in a namaste. “It’s not as though I can catch anything from it.”

Esha Rathore returns the greeting, wondering if the stage crew down in the courtyard was watching her salute empty air. All Awadh knows those filmi-star features: A.J. Rao, one of Bharat’s most knowledgeable and tenacious negotiators. No, she corrects herself. All Awadh knows are pictures on a screen. Pictures on a screen, pictures in her head; a voice in her ear. An aeai.

“You know my name?”

“I am one of your greatest admirers.”

Her face flushes: a waft of stifling heat spun off from the vast palace’s microclimate, Esha tells herself. Not embarrassment. Never embarrassment.

“But I’m a dancer. And you are an. . . .”

“Artificial intelligence? That I am. Is this some new anti-aeai legislation, that we can’t appreciate dance?” He closes his eyes. “Ah: I’m just watching the Marriage of Radha and Krishna again.”

But he has her vanity now. “Which performance?”

“Star Arts Channel. I have them all. I must confess, I often have you running in the background while I’m in negotiation. But please don’t mistake me, I never tire of you.” A.J. Rao smiles. He has very good, very white teeth. “Strange as it may seem, I’m not sure what the etiquette is in this sort of thing. I came here because I wanted to tell you that I am one of your greatest fans and that I am very much looking forward to your performance tonight. It’s the highlight of this conference, for me.”

The light is almost gone now and the sky a pure, deep, eternal blue, like a minor chord. Houseboys make their many ways along the ramps and wall-walks lighting rows of tiny oil-lamps. The Red Fort glitters like a constellation fallen over Old Delhi. Esha has lived in Delhi all her twenty-years and she has never seen her city from this vantage. She says, “I’m not sure what the etiquette is either. I’ve never spoken with an aeai before.”

“Really?” A.J. now stands with his back against the sun-warm stone, looking up at the sky, and at her out of the corner of his eye. The eyes smile, slyly. Of course, she thinks. Her city is as full of aeais as it is with birds. From computer systems and robots with the feral smarts of rats and pigeons to entities like this one standing before her on the gate of the Red Fort making charming compliments. Not standing. Not anywhere, just a pattern of information in her head. She stammers, “I mean, a . . . a . . .”

“Level 2.9?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

The aeai smiles and as she tries to work it out there is another chime in Esha’s head and this time it is Pranh, swearing horribly as usual, where is she doesn’t she know yts got a show to put on, half the bloody continent watching.

“Excuse me . . .”

“Of course. I shall be watching.”

How? she wants to ask. An aeai, a djinn, wants to watch me dance. What is this? But when she looks back all there is to ask is a wisp of dust blowing along the lantern-lit battlement.

There are elephants and circus performers, there are illusionists and table magicians, there are ghazal and qawali and Boli singers; there is the catering and the sommelier’s wine and then the lights go up on the stage and Esha spins out past the scowling Pranh as the tabla and melodeon and shehnai begin. The heat is intense in the marble square, but she is transported. The stampings, the pirouettes and swirl of her skirts, the beat of the ankle bells, the facial expressions, the subtle hand mudras: once again she is spun out of herself by the disciplines of Kathak into something greater. She would call it her art, her talent, but she’s superstitious: that would be to claim it and so crush the gift. Never name it, never speak it. Just let it possess you. Her own, burning djinn. But as she spins across the brilliant stage before the seated delegates, a corner of her perception scans the architecture for cameras, robots, eyes through which A.J. Rao might watch her. Is she a splinter of his consciousness, as he is a splinter of hers?

She barely hears the applause as she curtseys to the bright lights and runs off stage. In the dressing room, as her assistants remove and carefully fold the many jeweled layers of her costume, wipe away the crusted stage make up to reveal the twenty-two-year-old beneath, her attention keeps flicking to her earhoek, curled like a plastic question on her dressing table. In jeans and silk sleeveless vest, indistinguishable from any other of Delhi’s four million twentysomethings, she coils the device behind her ear, smoothes her hair over it and her fingers linger a moment as she slides the palmer over her hand. No calls. No messages. No avatars. She’s surprised it matters so much.

The official Mercs are lined up in the Delhi Gate. A man and woman intercept her on her way to the car. She waves them away.

“I don’t do autographs. . . . “Never after a performance. Get out, get away quick and quiet, disappear into the city. The man opens his palm to show her a warrant badge.

“We’ll take this car.”

It pulls out from the line and cuts in, a cream-colored high-marque Maruti. The man politely opens the door to let her enter first, but there is no respect in it. The woman takes the front seat beside the driver; he accelerates out, horn blaring, into the great circus of night traffic around the Red Fort. The airco purrs.

“I am Inspector Thacker from the Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing,” the man says. He is young and good-skinned and confident and not at all fazed by sitting next to a celebrity. His aftershave is perhaps over-emphatic.

“A Krishna Cop.”

That makes him wince.

“Our surveillance systems have flagged up a communication between you and the Bharati Level 2.9 aeai A.J. Rao.”

“He called me, yes.”

“At 21:08. You were in contact for six minutes twenty-two seconds. Can you tell me what you talked about?”

The car is driving very fast for Delhi. The traffic seems to flow around from it. Every light seems to be green. Nothing is allowed to impede its progress. Can they do that? Esha wonders. Krishna Cops, aeai police: can they tame the creatures they hunt?

“We talked about Kathak. He’s a fan. Is there a problem? Have I done something wrong?”

“No, nothing at all, Ms. But you do understand, with a conference of this importance . . . on behalf of the Department, I apologize for the unseemliness. Ah. Here we are.”

They’ve brought her right to her bungalow. Feeling dirty, dusty, confused she watches the Krishna Cop car drive off, holding Delhi’s frenetic traffic at bay with its tame djinns. She pauses at the gate. She needs, she deserves, a moment to come out from the performance, that little step way so you can turn round and look back at yourself and say, yeah, Esha Rathore. The bungalow is unlit, quiet. Neeta and Priya will be out with their wonderful fiancées, talking wedding gifts and guest lists and how hefty a dowry they can squeeze from their husbands-to-be’s families. They’re not her sisters, though they share the classy bungalow. No one has sisters any more in Awadh, or even Bharat. No one of Esha’s age, though she’s heard the balance is being restored. Daughters are fashionable. Once upon a time, women paid the dowry.

She breathes deep of her city. The cool garden microclimate presses down the roar of Delhi to a muffled throb, like blood in the heart. She can smell dust and roses. Rose of Persia. Flower of the Urdu poets. And dust. She imagines it rising up on a whisper of wind, spinning into a charming, dangerous djinn. No. An illusion, a madness of a mad old city. She opens the security gate and finds every square centimeter of the compound filled with red roses.

Neeta and Priya are waiting for her at the breakfast table next morning, sitting side-by-side close like an interview panel. Or Krishna Cops. For once they aren’t talking houses and husbands.

“Who who who where did they come from who sent them so many must have cost a fortune. . . .”

Puri the housemaid brings Chinese green chai that’s good against cancer. The sweeper has gathered the bouquets into a pile at one end of the compound. The sweetness of their perfume is already tinged with rot.

“He’s a diplomat.” Neeta and Priya only watch Town and Country and the chati channels but even they must know the name of A.J. Rao. So she half lies: “A Bharati diplomat.”

Their mouths go Oooh, then ah as they look at each other. Neeta says, “You have have have to bring him.”

“To our durbar,” says Priya.

“Yes, our durbar,” says Neeta. They’ve talked gossiped planned little else for the past two months: their grand joint engagement party where they show off to their as-yet-unmarried girl friends and make all the single men jealous. Esha excuses her grimace with the bitterness of the health-tea.

“He’s very busy.” She doesn’t say busy man. She cannot even think why she is playing these silly girli secrecy games. An aeai called her at the Red Fort to tell her it admired her. Didn’t even meet her. There was nothing to meet. It was all in her head. “I don’t even know how to get in touch with him. They don’t give their numbers out.”

“He’s coming,” Neeta and Priya insist.

She can hardly hear the music for the rattle of the old airco but sweat runs down her sides along the waistband of her Adidas tights to gather in the hollow of her back and slide between the taut curves of her ass. She tries it again across the gharana’s practice floor. Even the ankle bells sound like lead. Last night she touched the three heavens. This morning she feels dead. She can’t concentrate, and that little lavda Pranh knows it, swishing at her with yts cane and gobbing out wads of chewed paan and mealy eunuch curses.

“Ey! Less staring at your palmer, more mudras! Decent mudras. You jerk my dick, if I still had one.”

Embarrassed that Pranh has noted something she was not conscious of herself—ring, call me, ring call me, ring, take me out of this—she fires back, “If you ever had one.”

Pranh slashes yts cane at her legs, catches the back of her calf a sting.

“Fuck you, hijra!” Esha snatches up towel bag palmer, hooks the earpiece behind her long straight hair. No point changing, the heat out there will soak through anything in a moment. “I’m out of here.”

Pranh doesn’t call after her. Yts too proud. Little freak monkey thing, she thinks. How is it a nute is an yt, but an incorporeal aeai is a he? In the legends of Old Delhi, djinns are always he.

“Memsahb Rathore?”

The chauffeur is in full dress and boots. His only concession to the heat is his shades. In bra top and tights and bare skin, she’s melting. “The vehicle is fully air-conditioned, memsahb.”

The white leather upholstery is so cool her flesh recoils from its skin.

“This isn’t the Krishna Cops.”

“No memsahb.” The chauffeur pulls out into the traffic. It’s only as the security locks clunk she thinks Oh Lord Krishna, they could be kidnapping me.

“Who sent you?” There’s glass too thick for her fists between her and the driver. Even if the doors weren’t locked, a tumble from the car at this speed, in this traffic, would be too much for even a dancer’s lithe reflexes. And she’s lived in Delhi all her life, basti to bungalow, but she doesn’t recognize these streets, this suburb, that industrial park. “Where are you taking me?”

“Memsahb, where I am not permitted to say for that would spoil the surprise. But I am permitted to tell you that you are the guest of A.J. Rao.”

The palmer calls her name as she finishes freshening up with bottled Kinley from the car-bar.

“Hello!” (kicking back deep into the cool cool white leather, like a filmi star. She is a star. A star with a bar in a car.)

Audio-only. “I trust the car is acceptable?” Same smooth-suave voice. She can’t imagine any opponent being able to resist that voice in negotiation.

“It’s wonderful. Very luxurious. Very high status.” She’s out in the bastis now, slums deeper and meaner than the one she grew up in. Newer. The newest ones always look the oldest. Boys chug past on a home-brew chhakda they’ve scavenged from tractor parts. The cream Lex carefully detours around emaciated cattle with angular hips jutting through stretched skin like engineering. Everywhere, drought dust lies thick on the crazed hardtop. This is a city of stares. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the conference?”

A laugh, inside her auditory center.

“Oh, I am hard at work winning water for Bharat, believe me. I am nothing if not an assiduous civil servant.”

“You’re telling me you’re there, and here?”

“Oh, it’s nothing for us to be in more than one place at the same time. There are multiple copies of me, and subroutines.”

“So which is the real you?”

“They are all the real me. In fact, not one of my avatars is in Delhi at all, I am distributed over a series of dharma-cores across Varanasi and Patna.” He sighs. It sounds close and weary and warm as a whisper in her ear. “You find it difficult to comprehend a distributed consciousness; it is every bit as hard for me to comprehend a discrete, mobile consciousness. I can only copy myself through what you call cyberspace, which is the physical reality of my universe, but you move through dimensional space and time.”

“So which one of you loves me then?” The words are out, wild, loose, and unconsidered. “I mean, as a dancer, that is.” She’s filling, gabbling. “Is there one of you that particularly appreciates Kathak?” Polite polite words, like you’d say to an industrialist or a hopeful lawyer at one of Neeta and Priya’s hideous match-making soirees. Don’t be forward, no one likes a forward woman. This is a man’s world, now. But she hears glee bubble in A.J. Rao’s voice.

“Why, all of me and every part of me, Esha.”

Her name. He used her name.

It’s a shitty street of pie-dogs and men lounging on charpoys scratching themselves, but the chauffeur insists, here, this way memsahb. She picks her way down a gali lined with unsteady minarets of old car tires. Burning ghee and stale urine reek the air. Kids mob the Lexus but the car has A.J. Rao levels of security. The chauffeur pushes open an old wood and brass Mughal style gate in a crumbling red wall. “Memsahb.”

She steps through into a garden. Into the ruins of a garden. The gasp of wonder dies. The geometrical water channels of the charbagh are dry, cracked, choked with litter from picnics. The shrubs are blousy and overgrown, the plant borders ragged with weeds. The grass is scabbed brown with drought-burn: the lower branches of the trees have been hacked away for firewood. As she walks toward the crack-roofed pavilion at the center where paths and water channels meet, the gravel beneath her thin shoes is crazed into rivulets from past monsoons. Dead leaves and fallen twigs cover the lawns. The fountains are dry and silted. Yet families stroll pushing baby buggies; children chase balls. Old Islamic gentlemen read the papers and play chess.

“The Shalimar Gardens,” says A.J. Rao in the base of her skull. “Paradise as a walled garden.”

And as he speaks, a wave of transformation breaks across the garden, sweeping away the decay of the twenty-first century. Trees break into full leaf, flower beds blossom, rows of terracotta geranium pots march down the banks of the charbagh channels which shiver with water. The tiered roofs of the pavilion gleam with gold leaf, peacocks fluster and fuss their vanities, and everything glitters and splashes with fountain play. The laughing families are swept back into Mughal grandees, the old men in the park transformed into malis sweeping the gravel paths with their besoms.

Esha claps her hands in joy, hearing a distant, silver spray of sitar notes. “Oh,” she says, numb with wonder. “Oh!”

“A thank you, for what you gave me last night. This is one of my favorite places in all India, even though it’s almost forgotten. Perhaps, because it is almost forgotten. Aurangzeb was crowned Mughal Emperor here in 1658, now it’s an evening stroll for the basti people. The past is a passion of mine; it’s easy for me, for all of us. We can live in as many times as we can places. I often come here, in my mind. Or should I say, it comes to me.”

Then the jets from the fountain ripple as if in the wind, but it is not the wind, not on this stifling afternoon, and the falling water flows into the shape of a man, walking out of the spray. A man of water, that shimmers and flows and becomes a man of flesh. A.J. Rao. No, she thinks, never flesh. A djinn. A thing caught between heaven and hell. A caprice, a trickster.Then trick me.

“It is as the old Urdu poets declare,” says A.J. Rao. “Paradise is indeed contained within a wall.”

It is far past four but she can’t sleep. She lies naked—shameless—but for the ‘hoek behind her ear on top of her bed with the window slats open and the ancient airco chugging, fitful in the periodic brownouts. It is the worst night yet. The city gasps for air. Even the traffic sounds beaten tonight. Across the room her palmer opens its blue eye and whispers her name. Esha.

She’s up, kneeling on the bed, hand to hoek, sweat beading her bare skin.

“I’m here.” A whisper. Neeta and Priya are a thin wall away on either side.

“It’s late, I know, I’m sorry . . .”

She looks across the room into the palmer’s camera.

“It’s all right, I wasn’t asleep.” A tone in that voice. “What is it?”

“The mission is a failure.”

She kneels in the center of the big antique bed. Sweat runs down the fold of her spine.

“The conference? What? What happened?” She whispers, he speaks in her head.

“It fell over one point. One tiny, trivial point, but it was like a wedge that split everything apart until it all collapsed. The Awadhis will build their dam at Kunda Khadar and they will keep their holy Ganga water for Awadh. My delegation is already packing. We will return to Varanasi in the morning.”

Her heart kicks. Then she curses herself, stupid, romantic girli. He is already in Varanasi as much as he is here as much is he is at the Red Fort assisting his human superiors.

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” he says. “That is the feeling. Was I overconfident in my abilities?”

“People will always disappoint you.”

A wry laugh in the dark of her skull.

“How very . . . disembodied of you, Esha.” Her name seems to hang in the hot air, like a chord. “Will you dance for me?”

“What, here? Now?”

“Yes. I need something . . . embodied. Physical. I need to see a body move, a consciousness dance through space and time as I cannot. I need to see something beautiful.”

Need. A creature with the powers of a god, needs. But Esha’s suddenly shy, covering her small, taut breasts with her hands.

“Music . . .” she stammers. “I can’t perform without music . . .” The shadows at the end of the bedroom thicken into an ensemble: three men bent over tabla, sarangi and bansuri. Esha gives a little shriek and ducks back to the modesty of her bedcover. They cannot see you, they don’t even exist, except in your head. And even if they were flesh, they would be so intent on their contraptions of wire and skin they would not notice. Terrible driven things, musicians.

“I’ve incorporated a copy of a sub-aeai into myself for this night,” A.J. Rao says. “A level 1.9 composition system. I supply the visuals.”

“You can swap bits of yourself in and out?” Esha asks. The tabla player has started a slow Natetere tap-beat on the dayan drum. The musicians nod at each other. Counting, they will be counting. It’s hard to convince herself Neeta and Priya can’t hear; no one can hear but her. And A.J. Rao. The sarangi player sets his bow to the strings, the bansuri lets loose a snake of fluting notes. A sangeet, but not one she has ever heard before.

“It’s making it up!”

“It’s a composition aeai. Do you recognize the sources?”

“Krishna and the gopis.” One of the classic Kathak themes: Krishna’s seduction of the milkmaids with his flute, the bansuri, most sensual of instruments. She knows the steps, feels her body anticipating the moves.

“Will you dance, lady?”

And she steps with the potent grace of a tiger from the bed onto the grass matting of her bedroom floor, into the focus of the palmer. Before she had been shy, silly, girli. Not now. She has never had an audience like this before. A lordly djinn. In pure, hot silence she executes the turns and stampings and bows of the One Hundred and EightGopis, bare feet kissing the woven grass. Her hands shape mudras, her face the expressions of the ancient story: surprise, coyness, intrigue, arousal. Sweat courses luxuriously down her naked skin: she doesn’t feel it. She is clothed in movement and night. Time slows, the stars halt in their arc over great Delhi. She can feel the planet breathe beneath her feet. This is what it was for, all those dawn risings, all those bleeding feet, those slashes of Pranh’s cane, those lost birthdays, that stolen childhood. She dances until her feet bleed again into the rough weave of the matting, until every last drop of water is sucked from her and turned into salt, but she stays with the tabla, the beat of dayan and bayan. She is the milkmaid by the river, seduced by a god. A.J. Rao did not choose this Kathak wantonly. And then the music comes to its ringing end and the musicians bow to each other and disperse into golden dust and she collapses, exhausted as never before from any other performance, onto the end of her bed.

Light wakes her. She is sticky, naked, embarrassed. The house staff could find her. And she’s got a killing headache. Water. Water. Joints nerves sinews plead for it. She pulls on a Chinese silk robe. On her way to the kitchen, the voyeur eye of her palmer blinks at her. No erotic dream then, no sweat hallucination stirred out of heat and hydrocarbons. She danced Krishna and the one hundred and eight gopis in her bedroom for an aeai. A message. There’s a number. You can call me.

Throughout the history of the eight Delhis there have been men—and almost always men—skilled in the lore of djinns. They are wise to their many forms and can see beneath the disguises they wear on the streets—donkey, monkey, dog, scavenging kite—to their true selves. They know their roosts and places where they congregate—they are particularly drawn to mosques—and know that that unexplained heat as you push down a gali behind the Jama Masjid is djinns, packed so tight you can feel their fire as you move through them. The wisest—the strongest—of fakirs know their names and so can capture and command them. Even in the old India, before the break up into Awadh and Bharat and Rajputana and the United States of Bengal—there were saints who could summon djinns to fly them on their backs from one end of Hindustan to the other in a night. In my own Leh there was an aged aged sufi who cast one hundred and eight djinns out of a troubled house: twenty-seven in the living room, twenty-seven in the bedroom and fifty-four in the kitchen. With so many djinns there was no room for anyone else. He drove them off with burning yoghurt and chilies, but warned: do not toy with djinns, for they do nothing without a price, and though that may be years in the asking, ask it they surely will.

Now there is a new race jostling for space in their city: the aeais. If the djinni are the creation of fire and men of clay, these are the creation of word. Fifty million of them swarm Delhi’s boulevards and chowks: routing traffic, trading shares, maintaining power and water, answering inquiries, telling fortunes, managing calendars and diaries, handling routine legal and medical matters, performing in soap operas, sifting the septillion pieces of information streaming through Delhi’s nervous system each second. The city is a great mantra. From routers and maintenance robots with little more than animal intelligence (each animal has intelligence enough: ask the eagle or the tiger) to the great Level 2.9s that are indistinguishable from a human being 99.99 percent of the time, they are a young race, an energetic race, fresh to this world and enthusiastic, understanding little of their power.

The djinns watch in dismay from their rooftops and minarets: that such powerful creatures of living word should so blindly serve the clay creation, but mostly because, unlike humans, they can foresee the time when the aeais will drive them from their ancient, beloved city and take their places.

This durbar, Neeta and Priya’s theme is Town and Country: the Bharati mega-soap that has perversely become fashionable as public sentiment in Awadh turns against Bharat. Well, we will just bloody well build our dam, tanks or no tanks; they can beg for it, it’s our water now, and, in the same breath, what do you think about Ved Prakash, isn’t it scandalous what that Ritu Parvaaz is up to? Once they derided it and its viewers but now that it’s improper, now that it’s unpatriotic, they can’t get enough of Anita Mahapatra and the Begum Vora. Some still refuse to watch but pay for daily plot digests so they can appear fashionably informed at social musts like Neeta and Priya’s dating durbars.

And it’s a grand durbar; the last before the monsoon—if it actually happens this year. Neeta and Priya have hired top bhati-boys to provide a wash of mixes beamed straight into the guests’ ‘hoeks. There’s even a climate control field, laboring at the limits of its containment to hold back the night heat. Esha can feel its ultrasonics as a dull buzz against her molars.

“Personally, I think sweat becomes you,” says A.J. Rao, reading Esha’s vital signs through her palmer. Invisible to all but Esha, he moves beside her like death through the press of Town and Countrified guests. By tradition the last durbar of the season is a masked ball. In modern, middle-class Delhi that means everyone wears the computer-generated semblance of a soap character. In the flesh they are the socially mobile, dressed in smart-but-cool hot season modes, but, in the mind’s eye, they are Aparna Chawla and Ajay Nadiadwala, dashing Govind and conniving Dr. Chatterji. There are three Ved Prakashes and as many Lal Darfans—the aeai actor that plays Ved Prakash in the machine-made soap. Even the grounds of Neeta’s fianceé’s suburban bungalow have been enchanted into Brahmpur, the fictional Town where Town and Country takes place, where the actors that play the characters believe they live out their lives of celebrity tittle-tattle. When Neeta and Priya judge that everyone has mingled and networked enough, the word will be given and everyone will switch off their glittering disguises and return to being wholesalers and lunch vendors and software rajahs. Then the serious stuff begins, the matter of finding a bride. For now Esha can enjoy wandering anonymous in company of her friendly djinn.

She has been wandering much these weeks, through heat streets to ancient places, seeing her city fresh through the eyes of a creature that lives across many spaces and times. At the Sikh gurdwara she saw Tegh Bahadur, the Ninth Guru, beheaded by fundamentalist Aurangzeb’s guards. The gyring traffic around Vijay Chowk melted into the Bentley cavalcade of Mountbatten, the Last Viceroy, as he forever quit Lutyen’s stupendous palace. The tourist clutter and shoving curio vendors around the Qutb Minar turned to ghosts and it was 1193 and the muezzins of the first Mughal conquerors sang out the adhaan. Illusions. Little lies. But it is all right, when it is done in love. Everything is all right in love. Can you read my mind? she asked as she moved with her invisible guide through the thronging streets, that every day grew less raucous, less substantial. Do you know what I am thinking about you, Aeai Rao? Little by little, she slips away from the human world into the city of the djinns.

Sensation at the gate. The male stars of Town and Country buzz around a woman in an ivory sequined dress. It’s a bit damn clever: she’s come as Yana Mitra, freshest fittest fastest boli sing-star. And boli girlis, like Kathak dancers, are still meat and ego, though Yana, like every Item-singer, has had her computer avatar guest on T’n’C.

A.J. Rao laughs. “If they only knew. Very clever. What better disguise than to go as yourself. It really is Yana Mitra. Esha Rathore, what’s the matter, where are you going?”

Why do you have to ask don’t you know everything then you know it’s hot and noisy and the ultrasonics are doing my head and the yap yap yap is going right through me and they’re all only after one thing, are you married are you engaged are you looking and I wish I hadn’t come I wish I’d just gone out somewhere with you and that dark corner under the gulmohar bushes by the bhati-rig looks the place to get away from all the stupid stupid people.

Neeta and Priya, who know her disguise, shout over, “So Esha, are we finally going to meet that man of yours?”

He’s already waiting for her among the golden blossoms. Djinns travel at the speed of thought.

“What is it what’s the matter . . .?”

She whispers, “You know sometimes I wish, I really wish you could get me a drink.”

“Why certainly, I will summon a waiter.”

“No!” Too loud. Can’t be seen talking to the bushes. “No; I mean, hand me one. Just hand me one.” But he cannot, and never will. She says, “I started when I was five, did you know that? Oh, you probably did, you know everything about me. But I bet you didn’t know how it happened: I was playing with the other girls, dancing round the tank, when this old woman from the gharana went up to my mother and said, I will give you a hundred thousand rupees if you give her to me. I will turn her into a dancer; maybe, if she applies herself, a dancer famous through all of India. And my mother said, why her? And do you know what that woman said? Because she shows rudimentary talent for movement, but, mostly, because you are willing to sell her to me for one lakh rupees. She took the money there and then, my mother. The old woman took me to the gharana. She had once been a great dancer but she got rheumatism and couldn’t move and that made her bad. She used to beat me with lathis, I had to be up before dawn to get everyone chai and eggs. She would make me practice until my feet bled. They would hold up my arms in slings to perform the mudras until I couldn’t put them down again without screaming. I never once got home—and do you know something? I never once wanted to. And despite her, I applied myself, and I became a great dancer. And do you know what? No one cares. I spent seventeen years mastering something no one cares about. But bring in some boli girl who’s been around five minutes to flash her teeth and tits. . . .”

“Jealous?” asks A.J. Rao, mildly scolding.

“Don’t I deserve to be?”

Then bhati-boy One blinks up “You Are My Soniya” on his palmer and that’s the signal to demask. Yane Mitra claps her hands in delight and sings along as all around her glimmering soapi stars dissolve into mundane accountants and engineers and cosmetic nano-surgeons and the pink walls and roof gardens and thousand thousands stars of Old Brahmpur melt and run down the sky.

It’s seeing them, exposed in their naked need, melting like that soap-world before the sun of celebrity, that calls back the madness Esha knows from her childhood in the gharana. The brooch makes a piercing, ringing chime against the cocktail glass she has snatched from a waiter. She climbs up on to a table. At last, that boli bitch shuts up. All eyes are on her.

“Ladies, but mostly gentlemen, I have an announcement to make.” Even the city behind the sound-curtain seems to be holding its breath. “I am engaged to be married!” Gasps. Oohs. Polite applause who is she, is she on tivi, isn’t she something arty? Neeta and Priya are wide-eyed at the back. “I’m very very lucky because my husband-to-be is here tonight. In fact, he’s been with me all evening. Oh, silly me. Of course, I forgot, not all of you can see him. Darling, would you mind? Gentlemen and ladies, would you mind slipping on your hoeks for just a moment. I’m sure you don’t need any introduction to my wonderful wonderful fiancée, A.J. Rao.”

And she knows from the eyes, the mouths, the low murmur that threatens to break into applause, then fails, then is taken up by Neeta and Priya to turn into a decorous ovation, that they can all see Rao as tall and elegant and handsome as she sees him, at her side, hand draped over hers.

She can’t see that boli girl anywhere.

He’s been quiet all the way back in the phatphat. He’s quiet now, in the house. They’re alone. Neeta and Priya should have been home hours ago, but Esha knows they’re scared of her.

“You’re very quiet.” This, to the coil of cigarette smoke rising up toward the ceiling fan as she lies on her bed. She’d love a bidi; a good, dirty street smoke for once, not some Big Name Western brand.

“We were followed as we drove back after the party. An aeai aircraft surveilled your phatphat. A network analysis aeai system sniffed at my router net to try to track this com channel. I know for certain street cameras were tasked on us. The Krishna Cop who lifted you after the Red Fort durbar was at the end of the street. He is not very good at subterfuge.”

Esha goes to the window to spy out the Krishna Cop, call him out, demand of him what he thinks he’s doing?

“He’s long gone,” says Rao. “They have been keeping you under light surveillance for some time now. I would imagine your announcement has upped your level.”

“They were there?”

“As I said . . .”

“Light surveillance.”

It’s scary but exciting, down in the deep muladharachakra, a red throb above her yoni. Scarysexy. That same lift of red madness that made her blurt out that marriage announcement. It’s all going so far, so fast. No way to get off now.

“You never gave me the chance to answer,” says aeai Rao.

Can you read my mind? Esha thinks at the palmer.

“No, but I share some operating protocols with scripting aeais for Town and Country—in a sense they are a low-order part of me—they have become quite good predictors of human behavior.”

“I’m a soap opera.”

Then she falls back onto the bed and laughs and laughs and laughs until she feels sick, until she doesn’t want to laugh any more and every guffaw is a choke, a lie, spat up at the spy machines up there, beyond the lazy fan that merely stirs the heat, turning on the huge thermals that spire up from Delhi’s colossal heat-island, a conspiracy of djinns.

“Esha,” A.J. Rao says, closer than he has ever seemed before. “Lie still.” She forms the question why? And hears the corresponding whisper inside her head hush, don’t speak. In the same instant the chakra glow bursts like a yolk and leaks heat into her yoni. Oh, she says, oh! Her clitoris is singing to her. Oh oh oh oh. “How . . .?” Again, the voice, huge inside her head, inside every part of her sssshhhhh. Building building she needs to do something, she needs to move needs to rub against the day-warmed scented wood of the big bed, needs to get her hand down there hard hard hard . . .

“No, don’t touch,” chides A.J. Rao and now she can’t even move she needs to explode she has to explode her skull can’t contain this her dancer’s muscles are pulled tight as wires she can’t take much more no no no yes yes yes she’s shrieking now tiny little shrieks beating her fists off the bed but it’s just spasm, nothing will obey her and then it’s explosion bam, and another one before that one has even faded, huge slow explosions across the sky and she’s cursing and blessing every god in India. Ebbing now, but still shock after shock, one on top of the other. Ebbing now . . . Ebbing.

“Ooh. Oh. What? Oh wow, how?”

“The machine you wear behind your ear can reach deeper than words and visions,” says A.J. Rao. “So, are you answered?”

“What?” The bed is drenched in sweat. She’s sticky dirty needs to wash, change clothes, move but the afterglows are still fading. Beautiful beautiful colors.

“The question you never gave me the chance to answer. Yes. I will marry you.”

“Stupid vain girl, you don’t even know what caste he is.”

Mata Madhuri smokes eighty a day through a plastic tube hooked from the respirator unit into a grommet in her throat. She burns through them three at a time: bloody machine scrubs all the good out of them, she says. Last bloody pleasure I have. She used to bribe the nurses but they bring her them free now, out of fear of her temper that grows increasingly vile as her body surrenders more and more to the machines.

Without pause for Esha’s reply, a flick of her whim whips the life-support chair round and out into the garden.

“Can’t smoke in there, no fresh air.”

Esha follows her out on to the raked gravel of the formal charbagh.

“No one marries in caste any more.”

“Don’t be smart, stupid girl. It’s like marrying a Muslim, or even a Christian, Lord Krishna protect me. You know fine what I mean. Not a real person.”

“There are girls younger than me marry trees, or even dogs.”

“So bloody clever. That’s up in some god-awful shithole like Bihar or Rajputana, and anyway, those are gods. Any fool knows that. Ach, away with you!” The old, destroyed woman curses as the chair’s aeai deploys its parasol. “Sun sun, I need sun, I’ll be burning soon enough, sandalwood, you hear? You burn me on a sandalwood pyre. I’ll know if you stint.”

Madhuri the old crippled dance teacher always uses this tactic to kill a conversation with which she is uncomfortable. When I’m gone . . . Burn me sweetly . . .

“And what can a god do that A.J. Rao can’t?”

“Ai! You ungrateful, blaspheming child. I’m not hearing this la la la la la la la la have you finished yet?”

Once a week Esha comes to the nursing home to visit this ruin of a woman, wrecked by the demands a dancer makes of a human body. She’s explored guilt need rage resentment anger pleasure at watching her collapse into long death as the motives that keep her turning up the drive in a phatphat and there is only one she believes. She’s the only mother she has.

“If you marry that . . . thing . . . you will be making a mistake that will destroy your life,” Madhuri declares, accelerating down the path between the water channels.

“I don’t need your permission,” Esha calls after her. A thought spins Madhuri’s chair on its axis.

“Oh, really? That would be a first for you. You want my blessing. Well, you won’t have it. I refuse to be party to such nonsense.”

“I will marry A.J. Rao.”

“What did you say?”

“I. Will. Marry. Aeai. A.J. Rao.”

Madhuri laughs, a dry, dying, spitting sound, full of bidi-smoke.

“Well, you almost surprise me. Defiance. Good, some spirit at last. That was always your problem, you always needed everyone to approve, everyone to give you permission, everyone to love you. And that’s what stopped you being great, do you know that, girl? You could have been a devi, but you always held back for fear that someone might not approve. And so you were only ever . . . good.”

People are looking now, staff, visitors. Patients. Raised voices, unseemly emotions. This is a house of calm, and slow mechanized dying. Esha bends low to whisper to her mentor.

“I want you to know that I dance for him. Every night. Like Radha for Krishna. I dance just for him, and then he comes and makes love to me. He makes me scream and swear like a hooker. Every night. And look!” He doesn’t need to call any more; he is hardwired into the hoek she now hardly ever takes off. Esha looks up: he is there, standing in a sober black suit among the strolling visitors and droning wheelchairs, hands folded. “There he is, see? My lover, my husband.”

A long, keening screech, like feedback, like a machine dying. Madhuri’s withered hands fly to her face. Her breathing tube curdles with tobacco smoke.

“Monster! Monster! Unnatural child, ah, I should have left you in that basti! Away from me away away away!”

Esha retreats from the old woman’s mad fury as hospital staff come hurrying across the scorched lawns, white saris flapping.

Every fairytale must have a wedding.

Of course, it was the event of the season. The decrepit old Shalimar Gardens were transformed by an army of malis into a sweet, green, watered maharajah’s fantasia with elephants, pavilions, musicians, lancers, dancers, filmi stars, and robot bartenders. Neeta and Priya were uncomfortable bridesmaids in fabulous frocks; a great brahmin was employed to bless the union of woman and artificial intelligence. Every television network sent cameras, human or aeai. Gleaming presenters checked the guests in andchecked the guests out. Chati mag paparazzi came in their crowds, wondering what they could turn their cameras on. There were even politicians from Bharat, despite the souring relationships between the two neighbors now Awadh constructors were scooping up the Ganga sands into revetments. But most there were the people of the encroaching bastis, jostling up against the security staff lining the paths of their garden, asking, she’s marrying a what? How does that work? Can they, you know? And what about children? Who is she, actually? Can you see anything? I can’t see anything. Is there anything to see?

But the guests and the great were ‘hoeked up and applauded the groom in his golden veil on his white stallion, stepping with the delicacy of a dressage horse up the raked paths. And because they were great and guests, there was not one who, despite the free French champagne from the well-known diplomatic sommelier, would ever say, but there’s no one there. No one was at all surprised that, after the bride left in a stretch limo, there came a dry, sparse thunder, cloud to cloud, and a hot mean wind that swept the discarded invitations along the paths. As they were filing back to their taxis, tankers were draining the expensively filled qanats.

It made lead in the news.

Kathak stars weds aeai lover!!! Honeymoon in Kashmir!!!

Above the chowks and minarets of Delhi, the djinns bent together in conference.

He takes her while shopping in Tughluk Mall. Three weeks and the shop girls still nod and whisper. She likes that. She doesn’t like it that they glance and giggle when the Krishna Cops lift her from the counter at the Black Lotus Japanese Import Company.

“My husband is an accredited diplomat, this is a diplomatic incident.” The woman in the bad suit pushes her head gently down to enter the car. The Ministry doesn’t need personal liability claims.

“Yes, but you are not, Mrs. Rao,” says Thacker in the back seat. Still wearing that cheap aftershave.

“Rathore,” she says. “I have retained my stage name. And we shall see what my husband has to say about my diplomatic status.” She lifts her hand in a mudra to speak to AyJay, as she thinks of him now. Dead air. She performs the wave again.

“This is a shielded car,” Thacker says.

The building is shielded also. They take the car right inside, down a ramp into the basement parking lot. It’s a cheap, anonymous glass and titanium block on Parliament Street that she’s driven past ten thousand times on her way to the shops of Connaught Circus without ever noticing. Thacker’s office is on the fifteenth floor. It’s tidy and has a fine view over the astronomical geometries of the Jantar Mantar but smells of food: tiffin snatched at the desk. She checks for photographs of family children wife. Only himself smart in pressed whites for a cricket match.

“Chai?”

“Please.” The anonymity of this civil service block is beginning to unnerve her: a city within a city. The chai is warm and sweet and comes in a tiny disposable plastic cup. Thacker’s smile seems also warm and sweet. He sits at the end of the desk, angled toward her in Krishna-cop handbook “non-confrontational.”

“Mrs. Rathore. How to say this?”

“My marriage is legal. . . .”

“Oh, I know, Mrs. Rathore. This is Awadh, after all. Why, there have even been women who married djinns, within our own lifetimes. No. It’s an international affair now, it seems. Oh well. Water: we do all so take it for granted, don’t we? Until it runs short, that is.”

“Everybody knows my husband is still trying to negotiate a solution to the Kunda Khadar problem.”

“Yes, of course he is.” Thacker lifts a manila envelope from his desk, peeps inside, grimaces coyly. “How shall I put this? Mrs. Rathore, does your husband tell you everything about his work?”

“That is an impertinent question. . . .”

“Yes yes, forgive me, but if you’ll look at these photographs.”

Big glossy hi-res prints, slick and sweet smelling from the printer. Aerial views of the ground, a thread of green blue water, white sands, scattered shapes without meaning.

“This means nothing to me.”

“I suppose it wouldn’t, but these drone images show Bharati battle tanks, robot reconnaissance units, and air defense batteries deploying with striking distance of the construction at Kunda Khadar.”

And it feels as if the floor has dissolved beneath her and she is falling through a void so vast it has no visible reference points, other than the sensation of her own falling.

“My husband and I don’t discuss work.”

“Of course. Oh, Mrs. Rathore, you’ve crushed your cup. Let me get you another one.”

He leaves her much longer than it takes to get a shot of chai from the wallah. When he returns he asks casually, “Have you heard of a thing called the Hamilton Acts? I’m sorry, I thought in your position you would . . . but evidently not. Basically, it’s a series of international treaties originated by the United States limiting the development and proliferation of high-level artificial intelligences, most specifically the hypothetical Generation Three. No? Did he not tell you any of this?”

Mrs. Rathore in her Italian suit folds her ankles one over the other and thinks, this reasonable man can do anything he wants here, anything.

“As you probably know, we grade and license aeais according to levels; these roughly correspond to how convincingly they pass as human beings. A Level 1 has basic animal intelligence, enough for its task but would never be mistaken for a human. Many of them can’t even speak. They don’t need to. A Level 2.9 like your husband,”—he speeds over the word, like the wheel of a shatabdi express over the gap in a rail—”is humanlike to a 5 percentile. A Generation Three is indistinguishable in any circumstances from a human—in fact, their intelligences may be many millions of times ours, if there is any meaningful way of measuring that. Theoretically we could not even recognize such an intelligence, all we would see would be the Generation Three interface, so to speak. The Hamilton Acts simply seek to control technology that could give rise to a Generation Three aeai. Mrs. Rathore, we believe sincerely that the Generation Threes pose the greatest threat to our security—as a nation and as a species—that we have ever faced.”

“And my husband?” Solid, comfortable word. Thacker’s sincerity scares her.

“The government is preparing to sign the Hamilton Acts in return for loan guarantees to construct the Kunda Khadar dam. When the Act is passed—and it’s in the current session of the Lok Sabha—everything under Level 2.8 will be subject to rigorous inspection and licensing, policed by us.”

“And over Level 2.8?”

“Illegal, Mrs. Rathore. They will be aggressively erased.”

Esha crosses and uncrosses her legs. She shifts on the chair. Thacker will wait forever for her response.

“What do you want me to do?”

“A.J. Rao is highly placed within the Bharati administration.”

“You’re asking me to spy . . . on an aeai.”

From his face, she knows he expected her to say, husband.

“We have devices, taps. . . . They would be beneath the level of aeai Rao’s consciousness. We can run them into your ‘hoek. We are not all blundering plods in the Department. Go to the window, Mrs. Rathore.”

Esha touches her fingers lightly to the climate-cooled glass, polarized dusk against the drought light. Outside the smog haze says heat. Then she cries and drops to her knees in fear. The sky is filled with gods, rank upon rank, tier upon tier, rising up above Delhi in a vast helix, huge as clouds, as countries, until at the apex the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu, Siva look down like falling moons. It is her private Ramayana, the titanic Vedic battle order of gods arrayed across the troposphere.

She feels Thacker’s hand help her up.

“Forgive me, that was stupid, unprofessional. I was showing off. I wanted to impress you with the aeai systems we have at our disposal.”

His hand lingers a moment more than gentle. And the gods go out, all at once.

She says, “Mr. Thacker, would you put a spy in my bedroom, in my bed, between me and my husband? That’s what you’re doing if you tap into the channels between me and AyJay.”

Still, the hand is there as Thacker guides her to the chair, offers cool cool water.

“I only ask because I believe I am doing something for this country. I take pride in my job. In some things I have discretion, but not when it comes to the security of the nation. Do you understand?”

Esha twitches into dancer’s composure, straightens her dress, checks her face.

“Then the least you can do is call me a car.”

That evening she whirls to the tabla and shehnai across the day-warmed marble of a Jaipuri palace Diwan-I-aam, a flame among the twilit pillars. The audience is dark huddles on the marble, hardly daring even to breathe. Among the lawyers politicians journalists cricket stars moguls of industry are the managers who have converted this Rajput palace into a planetary class hotel, and any numbers of chati celebs. None so chati, so celebby, as Esha Rathore. Pranh can cherry-pick the bookings now. She’s more than a nine-day, even a nine-week wonder. Esha knows that all her rapt watchers are ‘hoeked up, hoping for a ghost-glimpse of her djinn-husband dancing with her through the flame-shadowed pillars.

Afterward, as yt carries her armfuls of flowers back to her suite, Pranh says, “You know, I’m going to have to up my percentage.”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Esha jokes. Then she sees the bare fear on the nute’s face. It’s only a wash, a shadow. But yt’s afraid.

Neeta and Priya had moved out of the bungalow by the time she returned from Dal Lake. They’ve stopped answering her calls. It’s seven weeks since she last went to see Madhuri.

Naked, she sprawls on the pillows in the filigree-light stone jharoka. She peers down from her covered balcony through the grille at the departing guests. See out, not see in. Like the shut-away women of the old zenana. Shut away from the world. Shut away from human flesh. She stands up, holds her body against the day-warmed stone; the press of her nipples, the rub of her pubis. Can you see me smell me sense me know that I am here at all?

And he’s there. She does not need to see him now, just sense his electric prickle along the inside of her skull. He fades into vision sitting on the end of the low, ornate teak bed. He could as easily materialize in mid-air in front of her balcony, she thinks. But there are rules, and games, even for djinns.

“You seem distracted, heart.” He’s blind in this room—no camera eyes observing her in her jeweled skin—but he observes her through a dozen senses, a myriad feedback loops through her ‘hoek.

“I’m tired, I’m annoyed, I wasn’t as good as I should have been.”

“Yes, I thought that too. Was it anything to do with the Krishna Cops this afternoon?”

Esha’s heart races. He can read her heartbeat. He can read her sweat, he can read the adrenaline and noradrenalin balance in her brain. He will know if she lies. Hide a lie inside a truth.

“I should have said, I was embarrassed.” He can’t understand shame. Strange, in a society where people die from want of honor. “We could be in trouble, there’s something called the Hamilton Acts.”

“I am aware of them.” He laughs. He has this way now of doing it inside her head. He thinks she likes the intimacy, a truly private joke. She hates it. “All too aware of them.”

“They wanted to warn me. Us.”

“That was kind of them. And me a representative of a foreign government. So that’s why they’d been keeping a watch on you, to make sure you are all right.”

“They thought they might be able to use me to get information from you.”

“Did they indeed?”

The night is so still she can hear the jingle of the elephant harnesses and the cries of the mahouts as they carry the last of the guests down the long processional drive to their waiting limos. In a distant kitchen a radio jabbers.

Now we will see how human you are. Call him out. At last A.J. Rao says, “Of course. I do love you.” Then he looks into her face. “I have something for you.”

The staff turn their faces away in embarrassment as they set the device on the white marble floor, back out of the room, eyes averted. What does she care? She is a star. A.J. Rao raises his hand and the lights slowly die. Pierced-brass lanterns send soft stars across the beautiful old zenana room. The device is the size and shape of a phatphat tire, chromed and plasticed, alien among the Mughal retro. As Esha floats over the marble toward it, the plain white surface bubbles and deliquesces into dust. Esha hesitates.

“Don’t be afraid, look!” says A.J. Rao. The powder spurts up like steam from boiling rice, then pollen-bursts into a tiny dust-dervish, staggering across the surface of the disc. “Take the ‘hoek off!” Rao cries delightedly from the bed. “Take it off.” Twice she hesitates, three times he encourages. Esha slides the coil of plastic off the sweet-spot behind her ear and voice and man vanish like death. Then the pillar of glittering dust leaps head high, lashes like a tree in a monsoon and twists itself into the ghostly outline of a man. It flickers once, twice, and then A.J. Rao stands before her. A rattle like leaves a snake-rasp a rush of winds, and then the image says, “Esha.” A whisper of dust. A thrill of ancient fear runs through her skin into her bones.

“What is this . . . what are you?”

The storm of dust parts into a smile.

“I-Dust. Micro-robots. Each is smaller than a grain of sand, but they manipulate static fields and light. They are my body. Touch me. This is real. This is me.”

But she flinches away in the lantern-lit room. Rao frowns.

“Touch me. . . .”

She reaches out her hand toward his chest. Close, he is a creature of sand, a whirlwind permanently whipping around the shape of a man. Esha touches flesh to i-Dust. Her hand sinks into his body. Her cry turns to a startled giggle.

“It tickles. . . .”

“The static fields.”

“What’s inside?”

“Why don’t you find out?”

“What, you mean?”

“It’s the only intimacy I can offer. . . . “He sees her eyes widen under their kohled make-up. “I think you should hold your breath.”

She does, but keeps her eyes open until the last moment, until the dust flecks like a dead tivi channel in her close focus. A.J. Rao’s body feels like the most delicate Vaanasi silk scarf draped across her bare skin. She is inside him. She is inside the body of her husband, her lover. She dares to open her eyes. Rao’s face is a hollow shell looking back at her from a perspective of millimeters. When she moves her lips, she can feel the dust-bots of his lips brushing against hers: an inverse kiss.

“My heart, my Radha,” whispers the hollow mask of A.J. Rao. Somewhere Esha knows she should be screaming. But she cannot: she is somewhere no human has ever been before. And now the whirling streamers of i-Dust are stroking her hips, her belly, her thighs. Her breasts. Her nipples, her cheeks and neck, all the places she loves to feel a human touch, caressing her, driving her to her knees, following her as the mote-sized robots follow A.J. Rao’s command, swallowing her with his body.

It’s Gupshup followed by Chandni Chati and at twelve thirty a photo shoot—at the hotel, if you don’t mind—for FilmFare’s Saturday Special Center Spread—you don’t mind if we send a robot, they can get places get angles we just can’t get the meat-ware and could you dress up, like you did for the opening, maybe a move or two, in between the pillars in the Diwan, just like the gala opening, okay lovely lovely lovely well your husband can copy us a couple of avatars and our own aeais can paste him in people want to see you together, happy couple lovely couple, dancer risen from basti, international diplomat, marriage across worlds in every sense the romance of it all, so how did you meet what first attracted you what’s it like be married to an aeai how do the other girls treat you do you, you know and what about children, I mean, of course a woman and an aeai but there are technologies these days geneline engineering like all the super-duper rich and their engineered children and you are a celebrity now how are you finding it, sudden rise to fame, in every gupshup column, worldwide celebi star everyone’s talking all the rage and all the chat and all the parties and as Esha answers for the sixth time the same questions asked by the same gazelle-eyed girli celebi reporters oh we are very happy wonderfully happy deliriously happy love is a wonderful wonderful thing and that’s the thing about love, it can be for anything, anyone, even a human and an aeai, that’s the purest form of love, spiritual love her mouth opening and closing yabba yabba yabba but her inner eye, her eye of Siva, looks inward, backward.

Her mouth, opening and closing.

Lying on the big Mughal sweet-wood bed, yellow morning light shattered through the jharoka screen, her bare skin good-pimpled in the cool of the airco. Dancing between worlds: sleep, wakefulness in the hotel bedroom, memory of the things he did to her limbic centers through the hours of the night that had her singing like a bulbul, the world of the djinns. Naked but for the ‘hoek behind her ear. She had become like those people who couldn’t afford the treatments and had to wear eyeglasses and learned to at once ignore and be conscious of the technology on their faces. Even when she did remove it—for performing; for, as now, the shower—she could still place A.J. Rao in the room, feel his physicality. In the big marble stroll-in shower in this VIP suite relishing the gush and rush of precious water (always the mark of a true rani) she knew AyJay was sitting on the carved chair by the balcony. So when she thumbed on the tivi panel (bathroom with tivi, oooh!) to distract her while she toweled dry her hair, her first reaction was a double-take-look at the ‘hoek on the sink-stand when she saw the press conference from Varanasi and Water Spokesman A.J. Rao explaining Bharat’s necessary military exercises in the vicinity of the Kunda Khadar dam. She slipped on the ‘hoek, glanced into the room. There, on the chair, as she felt. There, in the Bharat Sabha studio in Varanasi, talking to Bharti from the Good Morning Awadh! News.

Esha watched them both as she slowly, distractedly dried herself. She had felt glowing, sensual, divine. Now she was fleshy, self-conscious, stupid. The water on her skin, the air in the big room was cold cold cold.

“AyJay, is that really you?”

He frowned.

“That’s a very strange question first thing in the morning. Especially after. . . .”

She cut cold his smile.

“There’s a tivi in the bathroom. You’re on, doing an interview for the news. A live interview. So, are you really here?”

“Cho chweet, you know what I am, a distributed entity. I’m copying and deleting myself all over the place. I am wholly there, and I am wholly here.”

Esha held the vast, powder-soft towel around her.

“Last night, when you were here, in the body, and afterward, when we were in the bed; were you here with me? Wholly here? Or was there a copy of you working on your press statement and another having a high level meeting and another drawing an emergency water supply plan and another talking to the Banglas in Dhaka?”

“My love, does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters!” She found tears, and something beyond; anger choking in her throat. “It matters to me. It matters to any woman. To any . . . human.”

“Mrs. Rao, are you all right?”

“Rathore, my name is Rathore!” She hears herself snap at the silly little chati-mag junior. Esha gets up, draws up her full dancer’s poise. “This interview is over.”

“Mrs. Rathore Mrs. Rathore,” the journo girli calls after her.

Glancing at her fractured image in the thousand mirrors of the Sheesh Mahal, Esha notices glittering dust in the shallow lines of her face.

A thousand stories tell of the willfulness and whim of djinns. But for every story of the djinni, there are a thousand tales of human passion and envy and the aeais, being a creation between, learned from both. Jealousy, and dissembling.

When Esha went to Thacker the Krishna Cop, she told herself it was from fear of what the Hamilton Acts might do to her husband in the name of national hygiene. But she dissembled. She went to that office on Parliament Street looking over the star-geometries of the Jantar Mantar out of jealousy. When a wife wants her husband, she must have all of him. Ten thousand stories tell this. A copy in the bedroom while another copy plays water politics is an unfaithfulness. If a wife does not have everything, she has nothing. So Esha went to Thacker’s office wanting to betray and as she opened her hand on the desk and the techi boys loaded their darkware into her palmer she thought, this is right, this is good, now we are equal. And when Thacker asked her to meet him again in a week to update the ‘ware—unlike the djinns, hostages of eternity, software entities on both sides of the war evolved at an ever-increasing rate—he told himself it was duty to his warrant, loyalty to his country. In this too he dissembled. It was fascination.

Earth-mover robots started clearing the Kunda Khadar dam site the day Inspector Thacker suggested that perhaps next week they might meet at the International Coffee House on Connaught Circus, his favorite. She said, my husband will see. To which Thacker replied, we have ways to blind him. But all the same she sat in the furthest, darkest corner, under the screen showing the international cricket, hidden from any prying eyes, her ‘hoek shut down and cold in her handbag.

So what are you finding out? she asked.

It would be more than my job is worth to tell you, Mrs. Rathore, said the Krishna Cop. National security. Then the waiter brought coffee on a silver tray.

After that they never went back to the office. On the days of their meetings Thacker would whirl her through the city in his government car to Chandni Chowk, to Humayun’s Tomb and the Qutb Minar, even to the Shalimar Gardens. Esha knew what he was doing, taking her to those same places where her husband had enchanted her. How closely have you been watching me? she thought. Are you trying to seduce me? For Thacker did not magic her away to the eight Delhis of the dead past, but immersed her in the crowd, the smell, the bustle, the voices and commerce and traffic and music; her present, her city burning with life and movement. I was fading, she realized. Fading out of the world, becoming a ghost, locked in that invisible marriage, just the two of us, seen and unseen, always together, only together. She would feel for the plastic fetus of her ‘hoek coiled in the bottom of her jeweled bag and hate it a little. When she slipped it back behind her ear in the privacy of the phatphat back to her bungalow, she would remember that Thacker was always assiduous in thanking her for her help in national security. Her reply was always the same: Never thank a woman for betraying her husband over her country.

He would ask, of course. Out and about, she would say. Sometimes I just need to get out of this place, get away. Yes, even from you. . . . Holding the words, the look into the eye of the lens just long enough. . . .

Yes, of course, you must.

Now the earthmovers had turned Kunda Khadar into Asia’s largest construction site, the negotiations entered a new stage. Varanasi was talking directly to Washington to put pressure on Awadh to abandon the dam and avoid a potentially destabilizing water war. US support was conditional on Bharat’s agreement to the Hamilton protocols, which Bharat could never do, not with its major international revenue generator being the wholly aeai-generated soapi Town and Country.

Washington telling me to effectively sign my own death warrant, A.J. Rao would laugh. Americans surely appreciate irony. All this he told her as they sat on the well-tended lawn sipping green chai through a straw, Esha sweating freely in the swelter but unwilling to go into the air-conditioned cool because she knew there were still paparazzi lenses out there, focusing. AyJay never needed to sweat. But she still knew that he split himself. In the night, in the rare cool, he would ask, dance for me. But she didn’t dance any more, not for aeai A.J. Rao, not for Pranh, not for a thrilled audience who would shower her with praise and flowers and money and fame. Not even for herself.

Tired. Too tired. The heat. Too tired.

Thacker is on edge, toying with his chai cup, wary of eye contact when they meet in his beloved International Coffee House. He takes her hand and draws the updates into her open palm with boyish coyness. His talk is smaller than small, finicky, itchily polite. Finally, he dares looks at her.

“Mrs. Rathore, I have something I must ask you. I have wanted to ask you for some time now.”

Always, the name, the honorific. But the breath still freezes, her heart kicks in animal fear.

“You know you can ask me anything.” Tastes like poison. Thacker can’t hold her eye, ducks away, Killa Krishna Kop turned shy boy.

“Mrs. Rathore, I am wondering if you would like to come and see me play cricket?”

The Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing versus Parks and Cemeteries Service of Delhi is hardly a Test against the United States of Bengal, but it is still enough of a social occasion to out posh frocks and Number One saris. Pavilions, parasols, sunshades ring the scorched grass of the Civil Service of Awadh sports ground, a flock of white wings. Those who can afford portable airco field generators sit in the cool drinking English Pimms Number 1 Cup. The rest fan themselves. Incognito in hi-label shades and light silk dupatta, Esha Rathore looks at the salt white figures moving on the circle of brown grass and wonders what it is they find so important in their game of sticks and ball to make themselves suffer so.

She had felt hideously self-conscious when she slipped out of the phatphat in her flimsy disguise. Then as she saw the crowds in their mela finery milling and chatting, heat rose inside her, the same energy that allowed her to hide behind her performances, seen but unseen. A face half the country sees on its morning chati mags, yet can vanish so easily under shades and a headscarf. Slum features. The anonymity of the basti bred into the cheekbones, a face from the great crowd.

The Krishna Cops have been put in to bat by Parks and Cemeteries. Thacker is in the middle of the batting order, but Parks and Cemeteries pace bowler Chaudry and the lumpy wicket is making short work of the Department’s openers. One on his way to the painted wooden pavilion, and Thacker striding toward the crease, pulling on his gloves, taking his place, lining up his bat. He is very handsome in his whites, Esha thinks. He runs a couple of desultory ones with his partner at the other end, then it’s; a new over. Clop of ball on willow. A rich, sweet sound. A couple of safe returns. Then the bowler lines and brings his arm round in a windmill. The ball gets a sweet mad bounce. Thacker fixes it with his eye, steps back, takes it in the middle of the bat and drives it down, hard, fast, bounding toward the boundary rope that kicks it into the air for a cheer and a flurry of applause and a four. And Esha is on her feet, hands raised to applaud, cheering. The score clicks over on the big board, and she is still on her feet, alone of all the audience. For directly across the ground, in front of the sight screens, is a tall, elegant figure in black, wearing a red turban.

Him. Impossibly, him. Looking right at her, through the white-clad players as if they were ghosts. And very slowly, he lifts a finger and taps it to his right ear.

She knows what she’ll find but she must raise her fingers in echo, feel with horror the coil of plastic overlooked in her excitement to get to the game, nestled accusing in her hair like a snake.

“So, who won the cricket then?”

“Why do you need to ask me? If it were important to you, you’d know. Like you can know anything you really want to.”

“You don’t know? Didn’t you stay to the end? I thought the point of sport was who won. What other reason would you have to follow intra-Civil Service cricket?”

If Puri the maid were to walk into the living room, she would see a scene from a folk tale: a woman shouting and raging at silent dead air. But Puri does her duties and leaves as soon as she can. She’s not at ease in a house of djinns.

“Sarcasm is it now? Where did you learn that? Some sarcasm aeai you’ve made part of yourself? So now there’s another part of you I don’t know, that I’m supposed to love? Well, I don’t like it and I won’t love it because it makes you look petty and mean and spiteful.”

“There are no aeais for that. We have no need for those emotions. If I learned these, I learned them from humans.”

Esha lifts her hand to rip away the ‘hoek, hurl it against the wall.

“No!”

So far Rao has been voice-only, now the slanting late-afternoon golden light stirs and curdles into the body of her husband.

“Don’t,” he says. “Don’t . . . banish me. I do love you.”

“What does that mean?” Esha screams “You’re not real! None of this is real! It’s just a story we made up because we wanted to believe it. Other people, they have real marriages, real lives, real sex. Real . . . children.”

“Children. Is that what it is? I thought the fame, the attention was the thing, that there never would be children to ruin your career and your body. But if that’s no longer enough, we can have children, the best children I can buy.”

Esha cries out, a keen of disappointment and frustration. The neighbors will hear. But the neighbors have been hearing everything, listening, gossiping. No secrets in the city of djinns.

“Do you know what they’re saying, all those magazines and chati shows? What they’re really saying? About us, the djinn and his wife?”

“I know!” For the first time, A.J. Rao’s voice, so sweet, so reasonable inside her head, is raised. “I know what every one of them says about us. Esha, have I ever asked anything of you?”

“Only to dance.”

“I’m asking one more thing of you now. It’s not a big thing. It’s a small thing, nothing really. You say I’m not real, what we have is not real. That hurts me, because at some level it’s true. Our worlds are not compatible. But it can be real. There is a chip, new technology, a protein chip. You get it implanted, here.” Rao raises his hand to his third eye. “It would be like the ‘hoek, but it would always be on. I could always be with you. We would never be apart. And you could leave your world and enter mine. . . .”

Esha’s hands are at her mouth, holding in the horror, the bile, the sick vomit of fear. She heaves, retches. Nothing. No solid, no substance, just ghosts and djinns. Then she rips her ‘hoek from the sweet spot behind her ear and there is blessed silence and blindness. She holds the little device in her two hands and snaps it cleanly in two.

Then she runs from her house.

Not Neeta not Priya, not snippy Pranh in yts gharana, not Madhuri, a smoke-blackened hulk in a life-support chair, and no not never her mother, even though Esha’s feet remember every step to her door; never the basti. That’s death.

One place she can go.

But he won’t let her. He’s there in the phatphat, his face in the palm of her hands, voice scrolling silently in a ticker across the smart fabric: come back, I’m sorry, come back, let’s talk come back, I didn’t mean to come back. Hunched in the back of the little yellow and black plastic bubble she clenches his face into a fist but she can still feel him, feel his face, his mouth next to her skin. She peels the palmer from her hand. His mouth moves silently. She hurls him into the traffic. He vanishes under truck tires.

And still he won’t let her go. The phatphat spins into Connaught Circus’s vast gyratory and his face is on every single one of the video-silk screens hung across the curving facades. Twenty A.J. Rao’s, greater, lesser, least, miming in sync.

Esha Esha come back, say the rolling news tickers. We can try something else. Talk to me. Any ISO, any palmer, anyone. . . .

Infectious paralysis spreads across Connaught Circus. First the people who notice things like fashion ads and chati-screens; then the people who notice other people, then the traffic, noticing all the people on the pavements staring up, mouths fly-catching. Even the phatphat driver is staring. Connaught Circus is congealing into a clot of traffic: if the heart of Delhi stops, the whole city will seize and die.

“Drive on drive on,” Esha shouts at her driver. “I order you to drive.” But she abandons the autorickshaw at the end of Sisganj Road and pushes through the clogged traffic the final half-kilometer to Manmohan Singh Buildings. She glimpses Thacker pressing through the crowd, trying to rendezvous with the police motorbike sirening a course through the traffic. In desperation she thrusts up an arm, shouts out his name and rank. At last, he turns. They beat toward each other through the chaos.

“Mrs. Rathore, we are facing a major incursion incident. . . .”

“My husband, Mr. Rao, he has gone mad. . . .”

“Mrs. Rathore, please understand, by our standards, he never was sane. He is an aeai.”

The motorbike wails its horns impatiently. Thacker waggles his head to the driver, a woman in police leathers and helmet: in a moment in a moment. He seizes Esha’s hand, pushes her thumb into his palmer-gloved hand.

“Apartment 1501. I’ve keyed it to your thumb-print. Open the door to no one, accept no calls, do not use any communications or entertainment equipment. Stay away from the balcony. I’ll return as quickly as I can.”

Then he swings up onto the pillion, the driver walks her machine round and they weave off into the gridlock.

The apartment is modern and roomy and bright and clean for a man on his own, well furnished and decorated with no signs of a Krishna Cop’s work brought home of an evening. It hits her in the middle of the big living-room floor with the sun pouring in. Suddenly she is on her knees on the Kashmiri rug, shivering, clutching herself, bobbing up and down to sobs so wracking they have no sound. This time the urge to vomit it all up cannot be resisted. When it is out of her—not all of it, it will never all come out—she looks out from under her hanging, sweat-soaked hair, breath still shivering in her aching chest. Where is this place? What has she done? How could she have been so stupid, so vain and senseless and blind? Games games, children’s pretending, how could it ever have been? I say it is and it is so: look at me! At me!

Thacker has a small, professional bar in his kitchen annex. Esha does not know drink so the chota peg she makes herself is much much more gin than tonic but it gives her what she needs to clean the sour, biley vomit from the wool rug and ease the quivering in her breath.

Esha starts, freezes, imagining Rao’s voice. She holds herself very still, listening hard. A neighbor’s tivi, turned up. Thin walls in these new-built executive apartments.

She’ll have another chota peg. A third and she can start to look around. There’s a spa-pool on the balcony. The need for moving, healing water defeats Thacker’s warnings. The jets bubble up. With a dancer’s grace she slips out of her clinging, emotionally soiled clothes into the water. There’s even a little holder for your chota peg. A pernicious little doubt: how many others have been here before me? No, that is his kind of thinking. You are away from that. Safe. Invisible. Immersed. Down in Sisganj Road the traffic unravels. Overhead, the dark silhouettes of the scavenging kites and, higher above, the security robots, expand and merge their black wings as Esha drifts into sleep.

“I thought I told you to stay away from the windows.”

Esha wakes with a start, instinctively covers her breasts. The jets have cut out and the water is long-still, perfectly transparent. Thacker is blue-chinned, baggy-eyed and sagging in his rumpled gritty suit.

“I’m sorry. It was just, I’m so glad, to be away . . . you know?”

A bone-weary nod. He fetches himself a chota peg, rests it on the arm of his sofa and then very slowly, very deliberately, as if every joint were rusted, undresses.

“Security has been compromised on every level. In any other circumstances it would constitute an i-war attack on the nation.” The body he reveals is not a dancer’s body; Thacker runs a little to upper body fat, muscles slack, incipient man-tits, hair on the belly hair on the back hair on the shoulders. But it is a body, it is real. “The Bharati government has disavowed the action and waived Aeai Rao’s diplomatic immunity.”

He crosses to the pool and restarts on the jets. Gin and tonic in hand, he slips into the water with a one-deep, skin-sensual sigh.

“What does that mean?” Esha asks.

“Your husband is now a rogue aeai.”

“What will you do?”

“There is only one course of action permitted to us. We will excommunicate him.”

Esha shivers in the caressing bubbles. She presses herself against Thacker. She feels his man-body move against her. He is flesh. He is not hollow. Kilometers above the urban stain of Delhi, aeaicraft turn and seek.

The warnings stay in place the next morning. Palmer, home entertainment system, com channels. Yes, and balcony, even for the spa.

“If you need me, this palmer is Department-secure. He won’t be able to reach you on this.” Thacker sets the glove and ‘hoek on the bed. Cocooned in silk sheets, Esha pulls the glove on, tucks the ‘hoek behind her ear.

“You wear that in bed?”

“I’m used to it.”

Varanasi silk sheets and Kama Sutra prints. Not what one would expect of a Krishna Cop. She watches Thacker dress for an excommunication. It’s the same as for any job—ironed white shirt, tie, hand-made black shoes—never brown in town—well polished. Eternal riff of bad aftershave. The difference: the leather holster slung under the arm and the weapon slipped so easily inside it.

“What’s that for?”

“Killing aeais,” he says simply.

A kiss and he is gone. Esha scrambles into his cricket pullover, a waif in baggy white that comes down to her knees, and dashes to the forbidden balcony. If she cranes over, she can see the street door. There he is, stepping out, waiting at the curb. His car is late, the road is thronged, the din of engines, car horns and phatphat klaxons has been constant since dawn. She watches him wait, enjoying the empowerment of invisibility. I can see you.How do they ever play sport in these things? she asks herself, skin under cricket pullover hot and sticky. It’s already thirty degrees, according to the weather ticker across the foot of the video-silk shuttering over the open face of the new-built across the street. High of thirty-eight. Probability of precipitation: zero. The screen loops Town and Country for those devotees who must have their soapi, subtitles scrolling above the news feed.

Hello Esha, Ved Prakash says, turning to look at her.

The thick cricket pullover is no longer enough to keep out the ice.

Now Begum Vora namastes to her and says, I know where you are, I know what you did.

Ritu Parzaaz sits down on her sofa, pours chai and says, What I need you to understand is, it worked both ways. That ‘ware they put in your palmer, it wasn’t clever enough.

Mouth working wordlessly; knees, thighs weak with basti girl superstitious fear, Esha shakes her palmer-gloved hand in the air but she can’t find the mudras, can’t dance the codes right. Call call call call.

The scene cuts to son Govind at his racing stable, stroking the neck of his thoroughbred Ã¼ber-star Star of Agra. As they spied on me, I spied on them.

Dr. Chatterji in his doctor’s office. So in the end we betrayed each other.

The call has to go through Department security authorization and crypt.

Dr. Chatterji’s patient, a man in black with his back to the camera turns. Smiles. It’s A.J. Rao. After all, what diplomat is not a spy?

Then she sees the flash of white over the rooftops. Of course. Of course. He’s been keeping her distracted, like a true soapi should. Esha flies to the railing to cry a warning but the machine is tunneling down the street just under power-line height, wings morphed back, engines throttled up: an aeai traffic monitor drone.

“Thacker! Thacker!”

One voice in the thousands. And it is not hers that he hears and turns toward. Everyone can hear the call of his own death. Alone in the hurrying street, he sees the drone pile out of the sky. At three hundred kilometers per hour it takes Inspector Thacker of the Department of Artificial Intelligence Registration and Licensing to pieces.

The drone, deflected, ricochets into a bus, a car, a truck, a phatphat, strewing plastic shards, gobs of burning fuel and its small intelligence across Sisganj Road. The upper half of Thacker’s body cartwheels through the air to slam into a hot samosa stand.

The jealousy and wrath of djinns.

Esha on her balcony is frozen. Town and Country is frozen. The street is frozen, as if on the tipping point of a precipice. Then it drops into hysteria. Pedestrians flee; cycle rickshaw drivers dismount and try to run their vehicles away; drivers and passengers abandon cars, taxis, phatphats; scooters try to navigate through the panic; buses and trucks are stalled, hemmed in by people.

And still Esha Rathore is frozen to the balcony rail. Soap. This is all soap. Things like this cannot happen. Not in the Sisganj Road, not in Delhi, not on a Tuesday morning. It’s all computer-generated illusion. It has always been illusion.

Then her palmer calls. She stares at her hand in numb incomprehension. The Department. There is something she should do. Yes. She lifts it in a mudra—a dancer’s gesture—to take the call. In the same instant, as if summoned, the sky fills with gods. They are vast as clouds, towering up behind the apartment blocks of Sisganj Road like thunderstorms; Ganesh on his rat vahana with his broken tusk and pen, no benignity in his face; Siva, rising high over all, dancing in his revolving wheel of flames, foot raised in the instant before destruction; Hanuman with his mace and mountain fluttering between the tower blocks; Kali, skull-jeweled, red tongue dripping venom, scimitars raised, bestriding Sisganj Road, feet planted on the rooftops.

In that street, the people mill. They can’t see this, Esha comprehends. Only me, only me. It is the revenge of the Krishna Cops. Kali raises her scimitars high. Lightning arcs between their tips. She stabs them down into the screen-frozen Town and Country. Esha cries out, momentarily blinded as the Krishna Cops hunter-killers track down and excommunicate rogue aeai A.J. Rao. And then they are gone. No gods. The sky is just the sky. The video-silk hoarding is blank, dead.

A vast, godlike roar above her. Esha ducks—now the people in the street are looking at her. All the eyes, all the attention she ever wanted. A tilt-jet in Awadhi air-force chameleo-flage slides over the roof and turns over the street, swiveling engine ducts and unfolding wing-tip wheels for landing. It turns its insect head to Esha. In the cockpit is a faceless pilot in a HUD visor. Beside her a woman in a business suit, gesturing for Esha to answer a call. Thacker’s partner. She remembers now.

The jealousy and wrath and djinns.

“Mrs. Rathore, it’s Inspector Kaur.” She can barely hear her over the scream of ducted fans. “Come downstairs to the front of the building. You’re safe now. The aeai has been excommunicated.”

Excommunicated.

“Thacker . . .”

“Just come downstairs, Mrs. Rathore. You are safe now, the threat is over.”

The tilt-jet sinks beneath her. As she turns from the rail, Esha feels a sudden, warm touch on her face. Jet-swirl, or maybe just a djinn, passing unresting, unhasting, and silent as light.

The Krishna Cops sent us as far from the wrath and caprice of the aeais as they could, to Leh under the breath of the Himalaya. I say us, for I existed; a knot of four cells inside my mother’s womb.

My mother bought a catering business. She was in demand for weddings and shaadis. We might have escaped the aeais and the chaos following Awadh’s signing the Hamilton Acts—but the Indian male’s desperation to find a woman to marry endures forever. I remember that for favored clients—those who had tipped well, or treated her as something more than a paid contractor, or remembered her face from the chati mags—she would slip off her shoes and dance Radha and Krishna. I loved to see her do it and when I slipped away to the temple of Lord Ram, I would try to copy the steps among the pillars of the mandapa. I remember the brahmins would smile and give me money.

The dam was built and the water war came and was over in a month. The aeais, persecuted on all sides, fled to Bharat where the massive popularity of Town and Country gave them protection, but even there they were not safe: humans and aeais, like humans and djinni, were too different creations and in the end they left Awadh for another place that I do not understand, a world of their own where they are safe and no one can harm them.

And that is all there is to tell in the story of the woman who married a djinn. If it does not have the happy-ever-after ending of Western fairytales and Bollywood musicals, it has a happy-enough ending. This spring I turn twelve and shall head off on the bus to Delhi to join the gharana there. My mother fought this with all her will and strength—for her Delhi would always be the city of djinns, haunted and stained with blood—but when the temple brahmins brought her to see me dance, her opposition melted. By now she wasa successful businesswoman, putting on weight, getting stiff in the knees from the dreadful winters, refusing marriage offers on a weekly basis, and in the end she could not deny the gift that had passed to me. And I am curious to see those streets and parks where her story and mine took place, the Red Fort and the sad decay of the Shalimar Gardens. I want to feel the heat of the djinns in the crowded galis behind the Jama Masjid, in the dervishes of litter along Chandni Chowk, in the starlings swirling above Connaught Circus. Leh is a Buddhist town, filled with third-generation Tibetan exiles—Little Tibet, they call it—and they have their own gods and demons. From the old Moslem djinn-finder I have learned some of their lore and mysteries but I think my truest knowledge comes when I am alone in the Ram temple, after I have danced, before thepriests close the garbagriha and put the god to bed. On still nights when the spring turns to summer or after the monsoon, I hear a voice. It calls my name. Always I suppose it comes from the japa-softs, the little low-level aeais that mutter our prayers eternally to the gods, but it seems to emanate from everywhere and nowhere, from another world, another universe entirely. It says, the creatures of word and fire are different from the creatures of clay and water but one thing is true: love endures. Then as I turn to leave, I feel a touch on my cheek, a passing breeze, the warm sweet breath of djinns.

INCLINATION

William Shunn

The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental Machines. These are his six aspects, and all we do we must do with the Six. We need no other machines.

I believe this with all my heart. I do. And yet sometimes I seem to intuit the existence of a seventh Machine, hovering like a blasphemous ghost just beyond apprehension.

There is something wrong with me, and I don’t know what it is.

Late for my curfew and trembling, I grasp the doorknob that is not a doorknob.

This is the Machinist Quarter—only a tiny sliver of Netherview Station’s Ring B, though I’m one of the few boys I know who has ever been outside it. Fo-grav stays off in the Quarter; our only simulation of gravity is the 0.25 g of natural centripetal acceleration born of the station’s rotation and our two-kilometer distance from the hub. We joke that this is why it’s called the Quarter. It sure isn’t called that after the ratio of its volume to the station’s.

The cabin I share with my father Thomas lies in the Inclined Plane branch, third transverse, twelfth hatch on the left. Standing at the hatch, I straighten my billed cap and smooth my coverall—each emblazoned with a right triangle stitched in dove-gray thread, representing our ward—and gently turn the knob. Recessed lights at deck level cast my diffuse shadow up the bulkheads to either side of me. The knob operates as if it were mounted on a genuine mechanical axle, though of course it isn’t. A dumb mechanical doorknob wouldn’t unlock to my touch alone, or Thomas’s. I hate the doorknob. I hate the deceitfulness of it, the way its homogeneous smart matter mimics the virtuous and differentiated and pure. I hate what it conceals. I hate it for not keeping me out.

With a silent prayer to the Builder, I push the hatch open. It swings inward on soundless, lying hinges. I tread lightly inside, in case Thomas is sleeping, the nonslippers on my feet helping me keep my steps short and low. But as I round the door I see Thomas sitting up on his bunk in his short gray underall, watching me enter. The door closes itself behind me, which no door should do unbidden. The cabin is narrow and unadorned but for a diagram of the Six Fundamental Machines affixed to the rear bulkhead, and a small wooden chest bolted to the deck beneath it. The air reeks of a coppery sourness that matches Thomas’s narrowed glare. The cabin is so tiny I could reach out and stroke his curly, graying hair if I wanted, but that’s an urge that no longer seizes me often. Anyway, the days when I could reliably charm him out of his anger are long past.

“You’re late, son,” he says. He’s squinting at me now, eyes unfocused, the way he does sometimes. He doesn’t even glance at the chronometer on his wrist—a true mechanism, with tiny metal gears and not smart matter inside, a symbol of his status as a merchant trader. “It’s past your curfew.”

“I’m sorry,” I say, turning my back and reaching for the crank that will fold my bunk down from the bulkhead opposite his.

His voice grates out in sharp, tight bursts like the strokes of a rasp on iron: “If you were sorry, you’d have been on time.”

My shoulder blades prickle. I say nothing, cranking down the bunk.

“Jude, you’re fifteen years old,” Thomas says. “Why do you think you still have so many rules? Why?”

I try to shrug, but the effort feels jerky, like the gesture of a marionette. “I was waiting my turn at devotions,” I say, clinging to the false crank. “You know—with Nic and the rest. But the Foremen wouldn’t—they stayed past their time, and we, well . . .”

Thomas has risen, his voice at the back of my neck, shivering my spine. “I was out looking for you. I spoke to Nicodemus an hour ago. In Plane, not at gymnasium.”

My blood runs chill. That’s two lies I’ve told, and he’s caught me in one already. Nicodemus is my best friend, or used to be, but lately I’ve been avoiding him. We were up late working on our motors in the schola a couple of weeks ago. He was helping me get the timing right on mine and his fingers brushed the back of my hand. It was just an accident. We’ve been friends all our lives, but it was like seeing him for the first time. I wanted to touch his face, though I didn’t let myself. The scary thing was, it didn’t feel wrong, and that scares me all the more.

Of course I can’t explain this to Thomas. Nor can I explain why more and more I can’t force myself to evening devotions on time. The cleansing room where we change and shower is like a chamber of horrors. None of the boys seem bothered by disrobing in front of each other, but it bothers me acutely. Letting them see my body makes me want to tear my skin off.

My bunk is halfway lowered. I want to turn and defend myself against Thomas’s implicit accusation but a bolus of confusion clogs my throat. Words swarm like dust in my brain, eluding my grasp. Why do I have to explain any of this to him? Why doesn’t he just know? And why is it his business?

“Great Builder, Jude,” Thomas says at my back, “if you have to lie to me, how can I trust you at a job?”

My shoulders stiffen, my head half turns.

“That’s right, I’ve lined up a job for you. Do you understand, son? At the hub.”

A sick despair flares in my gut. Outside the Quarter? Could things get any worse?

“I need you up early, and fresh, but you’re out doing Builder knows what when you should be in bed. Did I raise you to be this way, Jude? Did I?”

Tiny flecks of spittle flense the back of my neck. I was at my devotions, I really was, I want to say, but the words won’t come.

“Answer me when I speak!” Thomas says, seizing my arm and spinning me around. My cap with its Inclined Plane insignia flies off my head.

The skinny legs tensed for violence, the slow ripple of his round, protruding belly, the sharpening rage on his gray blade of a face—I’m bigger and taller, but I might as well be five again for all that I can stand up to what’s coming.

He shakes me. “You will honor your father, that your days may be long upon the earth!”

Saline globules tremble at the corners of my eyes, watery jewels sparkling across my sight. The words burst out before I know I’m speaking: “There’s no earth here, only metal.”

My father’s face flushes livid. He spins, hurling me across the cabin—not difficult, since my weight is just twenty kilos. I sprawl across my father’s bunk, all gawky limbs and terror.

I roll over and there he is looming above me, fists raised and shaking. It’s been months since last he struck me, an improbable lucky streak which now seems about to end. But he lowers his arms and leans over me.

“The Wrecker’s in you, boy,” he says, shaking a finger. “You pray hard and shake loose his grip. Pray to be made square and true. Tomorrow more than ever, you need the Builder to be with you.”

And now he’s pulling on his coverall and leaving the cabin to stalk off his anger, the hatch snicking shut behind him like a quiet tap to a finishing nail. Alone, I flow off the bunk to the floor, to my knees, to retrieve my cap and pray.

I’m out of true and I need fixing. Through shuddering tears I pray for the Builder to make me a better son, a stronger laborer, a whole person. I pray for his protection, both physical and spiritual. I pray for reassurance that Thomas doesn’t really mean to send me alone among the Sculpted in the morning.

When I finally crawl into my bunk and wrap the blanket around myself, though, it’s not the Builder with his Machines I picture watching over me in the dark. It’s my departed mother Kaiya, angel wings spread above me in a canopy of white.

The Builder has ignored my prayer, at least the part about the Sculpted.

We rise and dress early, Thomas and I, and exit our cabin. In one hand Thomas carries a gray cloth sack big enough to hold a loaf of bread.

Only the most devoted practitioners are awake at this hour, en route to gymnasium. Rather than follow them, Thomas leads me to the end of the next branch over, to where Saul, foreman of Inclined Plane, lives. The only mark that sets this hatch apart from every other in the row is the small carpenter’s square etched at its very center.

Foreman Saul appears in the hatchway, bleary-eyed, at Thomas’s knock. “Selah, Jude,” he says in greeting, favoring me with a look both compassionate and foreboding. “Brother Thomas, let me speak to you alone a moment. We’ll only be a bit, Jude.”

Thomas follows Saul inside without a glance at me. I stand in the corridor and mentally rehearse the Builder’s Code. I’m still in Lever, less than halfway through the Hexalogue, when the hatch opens again. Saul gestures me in.

The cabin is a little smaller than the one Thomas and I share, and consequently more crowded than ours ever gets. Thomas sits at one end of the only bunk, cloth sack in his lap. He pats the space beside him, and I sit. Saul picks up a thermos from the foldout stovetop that juts from the rear bulkhead and sips carefully at the spout. The air smells faintly of powdered coffee and machine oil.

“Jude,” Saul says, “your father let me know late last night that he’s secured you a position on a stevedore crew at the docks. Unfortunately, as you’re required there promptly this morning and you can now be fined for tardiness, there’s no time to go through the usual series of preparatory lessons before you leave the safety of the Quarter.”

I don’t miss the baleful sideways glance Saul gives Thomas, but Thomas doesn’t seem to react to it. He just sits there with the same twist of bored impatience on his lips.

“Oh, I’ve been out a couple of times before,” I say, if only to cut the palpable tension, which is settling into my neck. “I mean, when I was younger.”

“Yes.” Saul sighs, blinking his pouchy eyes a few times. He is older than my father, taller and softer, but no sadder. I’ve been tempted many times to bring my cares and questions to him, but something has always held me back. “You’re a bright young man, Jude, and I know you’ve walked among the Sculpted before, so at least the sights won’t be new to you. But accompanying your father once or twice on his rounds is hardly the same as working alongside them, alone, for a full shift every day. If there’s no time for the proper instruction first, at the very least a blessing is in order.”

“Okay,” I say, a little of the weight lifting from my shoulders. Even if the Builder isn’t listening to me, surely he’ll listen to the foreman, as pious a man as I know. But at the same time I’m beginning to feel in my gut just how much spiritual danger I’ll be courting. Why is Thomas doing this to me?

“If you’ll sit here?” Saul says. He is setting up a metal folding chair in the middle of the cabin, which means it nearly bumps Thomas’s knees. I scoot over into the chair, doffing my cap and clutching it in my lap, as Saul removes a ceremonial oilcan from a niche in the bulkhead. Thomas joins Saul behind me. The oilcan ka-chunks, the tip of its spout tickling the hair at the crown of my head as it deposits a tiny bead of machine oil. Saul gently taps the droplet down onto my scalp, and he and Thomas lay their hands upon my head.

Other kids get to have their mothers in the cabin with them during blessings like this. I close my eyes and try to imagine Kaiya here, watching from the corner near the hatch. And she could be, right? Surely that’s not a vain hope.

“Great Builder,” Saul says, “in the name of the Wheel, the Wedge, the Lever, the Plane, the Pulley, and the Screw, we bring before you your true and faithful servant Jude, who ventures forth this day to labor amongst the Sculpted for his daily bread. Be with him, Builder, that he might have health in his navel, marrow in his bones, and strength in his sinews—strength that he might work and not be weary, but moreso that the Wrecker with his subtle wiles may find no purchase in his heart, mind, or flesh. We know the Wrecker’s cunning is great, Builder, and that he can make what’s wrong seem right. But your power and love are infinite, and so we commend this young man to your oversight with all faith in your goodness and wisdom. May we ever draw nearer to thee, Great Builder, as the Inclined Plane rises ever to heaven. Amen.”

“Amen,” I say. The hands, which have grown progressively heavier during the blessing, lift from my head. I stand, rolling my head to soothe my neck.

Saul folds the chair and sets it aside—a deft, practiced move in the cramped space—then reaches out to clasp my forearm in the Scaffold Grip. His hand is warm and dry. “What’s today, Thursday? Let’s meet Sundays after temple, Jude, to make some headway on those lessons. Better late than never.”

“When his schedule allows,” Thomas says, conspicuously checking his chronometer. “They call this Oneday outside. Weeks aren’t reckoned the same.”

“Of course. Then any day you can, Jude.” Saul squeezes and releases my forearm. “And remember that the Builder blesses you not just for obedience to his commandments, but for obedience to your parents as well.”

“Jude,” Thomas says. He picks the sack up from the bunk and inclines his head toward the hatch.

“Selah, Foreman,” I say and follow my father out into the corridor. I look back to see, in the moment before the hatch closes behind us, Foreman Saul standing like a forlorn beast in the center of a cage.

Or is that perception just a way to make myself feel better about the sentence to which I’ve been condemned?

Thomas leads me at a brisk pace out to the main corridor, skipping lightly along the deck. “Don’t let him get to you, Jude,” he says over his shoulder. “Saul, Bartholomew, none of the Foremen understand our economic realities.”

I’m not sure whether he means our family’s or the whole Quarter’s. I don’t ask for clarification, not just because I don’t like encouraging him to disparage the Foremen but because we’ve turned into the main corridor and a few more people, from all different wards, are out and about now. The soft gray of their coveralls and visored caps against the brighter gray of the bulkheads make the Quarter look almost like a scene from an ancient monochrome photograph.

We pass the gymnasium entrance, then the intersections with Wedge Branch and Wheel and Axle. We’re alone now, and the Primum Mobile Gate looms ahead, painted with various strident warnings and danger symbols.

“You’ll have to find your own way back this evening, so pay close attention,” Thomas says, pulling the lever that opens the Gate. The massive hatch grinds aside, admitting a bedlam of voices and light and sound. “Now be ready for the weight. And whatever you do, don’t gawk.”

My heart races. I follow Thomas through the Gate and an extra forty kilos drops onto my bones. Thanks to my faithful attention to devotions I don’t fall, but I stagger and I’m sweating in the moist air before we’ve gone far. The public corridors are as crowded and noisy now as they are around the clock, alive with the babel of a thousand languages, and the bulkheads are lost in the riot of greenery that thrives on every available surface. I feel conspicuous in my Machinist garb. People—monsters—fall silent and stare as we pass, and with all their unsettling modifications it’s hard not to stare back. I can’t imagine navigating this profane world without Thomas.

We ride a slidewalk spinward, then crowd into a hubward elevator that at least contains no obvious plant life. But for every normal person, I see one with skin the wrong color or texture, limbs numbering too many or too few, a body with mysterious prosthetics or protuberances, or a head misshapen and gross. A pebbled gray creature that might once have been human brushes against me in the elevator. Dizzy, I press closer to Thomas, the sweat trickling into my eyes. I’m not sure whether his hand on my shoulder is meant to reassure me or restrain me.

At hub level, the bulkheads are again clean and metallic, as they should be. Thomas leads me through a short but bewildering maze of hatches and gangways. With fewer people around now, I breathe more easily. Thomas knocks at an open hatch. I peek inside. It’s an office about a meter and a half in radius, and every surface, 720 spherical degrees around, is jammed with monitors, control panels, and handholds. The thickset woman seated at the center has a second pair of arms where her legs should be.

“I don’t give a spout for your schedule,” she tells someone unseen. “My stevies can do the job fast, but not that fast. All right, fine. You do that.”

She looks at Thomas, and I see she has silver semispheres implanted over her eyes. Three quick swings from handhold to handhold bring her to the door. Fo-grav is still about 0.75. She’s strong.

“This the kid?” she asks.

“That’s him,” Thomas says.

She turns those reflective bugeyes on me, twitching her head up and down, and it’s like I’m being X-rayed. What she sees, I can’t imagine. “Any mods? No, of course not. You goddamn Wheelies, what am I talking about? All right, he doesn’t look too bad. Let’s get him suited up and see how he does. What’s your name, kid?”

My mouth is so dry my tongue crackles. “Jude.”

“Well, now you’re Stevie. For stevedore.”

She barks a laugh like a chugging motor, clinging to holds around the hatch with three hands. Thomas laughs too. His eyes crinkle and his lips peel back, and it’s like seeing ten years drop away from him. He never laughs around me.

In that moment I feel inexpressibly sad. And I hate him.

The woman swings out through the hatch and drops to the deck between Thomas and me. “Follow me,” she says, loping down the gangway on all fours.

Thomas shoves the cloth sack into my hands. “Your lunch,” he says.

I clutch the sack like a lifeline. It’s three times as heavy as it should be, and its heft brings a desperate lump to my throat. On a usual morning, it’s I who makes lunch for Thomas, but I didn’t even think about it today. I’m realizing that the usual mornings are behind me.

“Now you work hard and do what Renny tells you,” Thomas says. “I can’t stress enough how important this money is.”

“Okay.” I turn to trudge after the woman.

“And remember who you are,” Thomas stage-whispers fiercely. “Your body belongs to the Builder, not to them.”

“Selah,” I say.

Thomas sighs. “Selah, son. Now go.”

Renny, fidgeting impatiently, has stopped at a juncture up ahead. I follow, the grief of abandonment thick in my throat.

The Six are more than just machines. High Foreman Titus—our founder, who 120 years ago spoke with the Builder face to face—teaches us that they represent the Builder’s various aspects, and thus the ways in which we must approach him. The Six also name our wards, the clans or tribes of our faith. Though my father and I belong to Inclined Plane Ward, we owe each equal adoration, and it’s the Wedge that concerns me now.

The Manual teaches that the purpose of the Wedge is to both divide asunder and hold in place. From this we learn to divide ourselves from the evils of the world, as the maul divides the log, keeping always to the side of the Builder. Yet we also learn to bridge the gap between, as the keystone—a truncated wedge—holds the arch in place. The lesson for us is to serve the world, and serve as examples, without becoming corrupted by it.

As a people, we excel at dividing ourselves from the world. We don’t do so well at bridging—except perhaps for my father. But between him and me there’s surely a great Wedge, and it’s never clear to me which of us is on which side of it.

Thomas didn’t explain to me exactly what a stevedore is. Turns out it’s someone who loads and unloads cargo. Starships from hundreds of light-years around dock at Netherview Station’s hub, then, depending on size and mass, slide into one of three concentric levels of berths. Many of the ships are laded automatically by robot or waldo; the ones that can’t afford the special treatment (or can afford to waive it) get us.

Renny explains this to me, more colorfully, as I follow her to the locker room. She leaves me alone there to change into my docksuit, a close-fitting layer of red polymer that covers me from the neck down. I try not to think about how much smart matter I must be wearing. I leave my coverall and cap behind like a shed snakeskin in my thumbprint-activated locker. The heaviness I feel has nothing to do with gravity, though physically I’m breathing hard already from the exertion since leaving the Quarter. Carrying my lunch sack, I rejoin my new boss outside the locker room.

Before leading me to the berth where the crew awaits us, Renny rears up on her hind arms and affixes a round green badge to my chest. “Regs,” she says. “Since you’ve got no built-in monitors, this’ll let us keep tabs on you.”

The crew is twelve, male and female both, and I make thirteen. They’re lounging in a small break room off Berth C-46. Renny clambers to the top of a table and waves for quiet. “This is our new trainee,” she says. “His name is Jude Plane. Corgie, he’s your man this shift.”

A groan from a preternaturally thin fellow sprawled out on a couch prompts laughter from the others and a sinking feeling inside me. I’m sweating, much to my embarrassment.

“Okay, you shits, okay. The Needlethreader’s in dock now. Let’s go.”

The crew don helmets and begin to spill out a hatch opposite the one Renny brought me through. They disperse in all directions—left, right, up, down—grabbing implements from a rack outside as they go. They’re all human in shape, mostly normal as far as I can see. They don’t look much older than I am, but you never can tell with the Sculpted. One has bright blue skin above the collar of his suit, an eye-straining contrast with the red polymer. He winks at me as he drops out the hatch. My stomach clenches.

Renny hops down from the table and grabs Corgie by the leg before he can say a word to me. “Pay close attention to the kid,” Renny says. “He’s barefoot. He’ll need a fishbowl on top of everything else.”

“You’re joking,” Corgie says. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fishbowl.”

“There’s one in the rack today along with everything else.”

My trainer heaves an aggrieved sigh. “All right, Juke,” he says to me. “Follow me and stick close.”

“Jude,” I say.

“Right. Juke.”

Renny reaches for my lunch sack, which I still clutch uncertainly. She stashes it for me as I trail out the hatch after Corgie.

And suddenly I’m not just lighter. I’m weightless, and drifting.

Fo-grav isn’t turned off in the berth; it’s on but dialed down to null, damping even the small inertial effects of rotational velocity and centrifugal force. Corgie gives me a brief lesson in how to maneuver in null-g with a dockwand, a thin, meter-long rod of smart matter that ejects a stream of inert particles from one end or the other on command. Basically you point it, squeeze, and drift off in the opposite direction. It takes me a while to get the hang of it, largely because I’m loath to touch it, but soon enough I’m helping Corgie and the rest carry out the dockwand’s other function, herding big gray crates of who knows what out the cargo hold in the belly of the starship and through the air to the elevators that will take them wherever they need to go next—sometimes another level of the station, sometimes the hold of another ship in another berth.

I do it all wearing a helmet with a transparent visor that curves down over my face. The helmet draws words and diagrams in the air, overlaying what I see, giving me data like what time of day it is and where the next crate needs to go. By turning my head and focusing somewhere, I can get information about whatever I’m looking at. Sweeping my gaze along the streamlined, almost organic curve of the huge ship, for example, I can access its flight schedules, crew data, cargo manifests, manufacturer’s specifications, and even schematic diagrams that show me more of what it looks like than I can possibly see by just flitting around in the space between its black belly and the berth’s bulkhead. I can zoom in on the other crews working the hatches fore and aft of ours, and I can even find out more about my own crewmates, though I don’t feel right about prying. But it is a good way to learn everyone’s name, which I manage before the start of our first break.

Is this the world my crewmates walk through every waking moment of every day, with intimate information about everything they see just an eyeblink away? We may inhabit the same great wheel in space, but these strangers live in a truly alien world, one I don’t like visiting. Builder knows making motors isn’t my favorite activity, good as I am at it; still, I’d rather be in my applied mechanics class with Nic and Mal than here. I’d even rather be home with Thomas—anywhere but stranded amongst the ignorantly blasphemous, wielding tools that are an offense in the sight of the Builder, being slowly poisoned by the worldview of the Sculpted.

What is Thomas trying to do to me?

Our shift is the longest day of my life. The ghostly ticking clock in the corner of my vision doesn’t help.

At shift’s end we deposit our dockwands, now stubby and depleted, in the rack outside the break room and file off to the showers. I’m happy to drop off my fishbowl as well, though the experience of walking in gravity without a data overlay seems somehow dreamlike and crippling as I readjust to moving about without it—almost as crippling as walking in high-g alone. It surprises me how exhausted I am. I must have used and abused every muscle in my body.

As we reach the locker room, I’m startled that our single-file queue remains intact. The women enter through the same hatch as the men. Bringing up the rear, I tell myself there must surely be a dividing bulkhead or at the very least a screen inside, but of course I was here this morning and know there’s no such thing. I try to keep my eyes averted, but just to reach my locker I must step around a woman named Soon, who already has her suit pushed down to her hips.

The room is too small, and everyone jostles everyone else on the way to the ultrasonic showers. I stand with my burning face to my open locker, wondering if I can get away with standing here and not changing until the room is empty. Soon’s bare torso blazes like a beacon in my mind. A part of me is fascinated and wants to look at it again; another part is horrified at the thought, and at the distant, epochal memories of my mother that stir, memories so ancient they seem apocryphal.

Renny, galumphing through the locker room, slaps the back of my thigh and says, “Next shift’s gotta get in, kid. Hurry it up.”

Somehow I strip off the suit, deposit it in the recycler, and manage the walk to the showers. My skin crawls as I crowd into the white ceramic chamber with the others, though part of this, I’m sure, is the feel of the ultrasonics vibrating sweat and grime loose from my body. Still, I can’t look higher than anyone’s ankles. It’s not just the naked flesh that distresses me. I’m out of my coverall in front of heathen, and that’s a grave offense in the sight of the Builder. My hands hover in front of my crotch.

My hip brushes the thin blue man’s; I nearly jump out of my skin and mumble an apology. “Don’t worry about it,” he says with a kind smile. “We’re all friends here.”

“Yeah,” Corgie says. “Just help yourself to a handful of whatever’s closest.”

“Or a thimbleful,” says an apparent neuter named Ice IX, pointing at Corgie’s flaccid penis.

“Careful. You don’t want to wake the monster.”

Mijk, a muscular man with a series of knobby lumps down his back, says, “I do. Someone ran all the lotion out of my dispenser.”

“And apparently he wants it back,” Soon says with a giggle.

Corgie wipes his mouth. “Come and get it,” he says, and his penis flares to enormous size, all ridged and quivering. It is a monster.

I turn away, blushing. But something strange has begun to happen. I don’t feel comfortable exactly, but I do feel somewhat invisible, with less of the compulsion to run and hide than comes in the cleansing room at gymnasium. I’m able to let my eyes roam some, taking in the female bodies as well as the male, plus two or three I find less determinate and the entirely genderless Ice IX. In the Quarter, contact between boys and girls is strictly regulated and chaperoned, even during courtship; a situation like this is as unthinkable as a motor assembling itself from raw ore. I have more answers now than I know what to do with to what minutes ago was only a compelling mystery.

I almost don’t want the shower to end, but when the thought takes form I realize the Wrecker is already getting his claws into me. How much easier a time of it he has here than inside the Quarter! Despair washes over me. How will I ever survive this?

Clean, but with a film of shame clinging to my exposed skin, I trail the group back to the lockers. I’ve pulled on my underall and my coverall and am about to put my cap on when a tall, trouserless man named Twenty plucks it deftly out of my hands.

“What’s this for, some kind of uniform?” he asks, turning the cap this way and that. “You got another job?”

My muscles seem to seize up, and the bottom falls out of my soul. So much for invisibility. Renny is gone; I don’t know where to turn for help. Heat and mortification radiate from the top of my uncovered head as Twenty’s Sculpted hands defile my cap.

“No, you ramscoop,” Corgie says, taking the cap, “he’s a Wheelie. Don’t you know anything?”

And now he’s passing it to someone else, who’s asking why there’s a triangle on it if I’m a Wheelie, and now it goes to someone else, and now it’s flying through the air past my face, and now again the other way. I reach for the cap, but it’s snatched by the knobby-spined Mijk.

“Wheelie, huh?” he says. “Those are like Christers, right? How come you’re named after a traitor, Wheelie?”

“Judas betrayed the Builder,” I say quietly. I want to sound dangerous, but even I can hear the quaver in my voice. “Jude was a different apostle.”

“Jude, Judas, Peter, penis—whatever. Think this’d fit me?”

Mijk’s about to slip the cap onto his head, and I’m about to shout something, maybe do something I’ll regret, when a half-dressed woman named Beneficent Sunrise takes it from him.

“Mijk, it doesn’t stretch. It’s not smart enough to fit your thick skull.”

“Then what good is it?”

Beneficent Sunrise turns the cap over. She studies the inclined plane symbol. “Never seen something made from dumb fabric before. Interesting the way it feels. Almost real.”

Her frank curiosity defuses my anger. Or is it the sight of her full, bobbing breasts? They fill me with an emotion I can’t quite put a name to. Not desire, not quite, but something as sharp in its poignancy. I wonder what they feel like.

The blue man picks my cap cleanly out of her grip. Holding it by the visor only, he puts it in my hand. My fingers clutch it spasmodically.

“Real like your tits, Sunny?” he says to the woman.

“Go deplete your wand,” she says in the general laughter, but she’s smiling with everyone else.

Weak with humiliation and relief, I cover my head and turn to rummage in my empty locker. Around me, my crewmates casually hide their nakedness.

The blue man is called Haun Friedrich 4, but the fishbowl taught me he prefers to go by Derek Specter. He’s in the trial period before a legal name change.

The idea that one may choose one’s own name is as strange to me as everything else about the Sculpted. What would I choose if I were to name myself? Paul? Luke? Timothy? None of them work. I can’t imagine learning to answer to any name but Jude. That’s me. That’s who I am.

I’m standing in the gangway outside the locker room, having lingered there until the arriving crew forced me out. People edge past me in both directions. I’m trying to remember which way I came this morning, fighting a growing sense of panic, when Haun—Derek—touches my shoulder with blue fingers.

“Know where you’re going?” he asks with an easy grin.

“Er . . . rimward,” I say, feeling the blood heat my cheeks.

“Yes, that would almost certainly be correct.” Derek leans against the bulkhead near me, a little too close, arms folded and eyes bright. His skin is the blue of Enoch’s fabled seas, and his irises glow like bits of its sky. “Do you need any help getting there?”

I look down at my gray nonslippers. “I guess I do,” I say, embarrassed at the prospect of this ostentatiously abnormal creature rescuing me twice in the same ten minutes.

Derek gazes at the opposite bulkhead, cupping his chin. “Wheelieville, I presume,” he says. He gives me a sidelong glance, apologetic but not self-conscious. “The Machinist Quarter, I mean.”

“Uh, yeah.”

His eyes narrow. “Let me just find it on the map.”

“What map?” I say. His glance this time is mildly reproving, and I let out an abashed “Oh.”

“We just need to get you to Elevator Seven, Eight, or Nine,” Derek says after a moment. “That’s probably the trickiest part of the route. And I happen to be going the same way, if you don’t mind company.”

My feet are itching to move. I’d rather he just point me in the right direction and let me go my way, but I’m too tired to argue. I shrug my acquiescence.

As we set off down the narrow way, Derek says over his shoulder, “You were good in there today. Not everyone adjusts to null-gee that quickly. I think even Renny was impressed.”

He looks back expectantly, but since I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to this, I don’t answer.

“Corgie gave you some shit, I know,” Derek says, “but you should have seen him back when he started. Talk about an ostrich. Was this your first time with an overlay?”

“Yes.”

“I remember when I was first getting used to it. It was strange to turn it off and not see labels everywhere I looked. You must be going through the same thing. You probably haven’t ever used Geoff before either.” At my blank look, he grins. “Yeah, we’ll have to teach you how to use Geoff. Then next time you need to get somewhere you won’t have to put up with me running off at the mouth.”

“What’s Geoff?” I ask.

“Info daemon on the public net. You’ve really been sheltered, haven’t you? Geoff’s mostly for travelers and transients—anyone offline, really, so you can use him too. He’ll answer any question you have, if he has the answer and you’re older than ten. And as long as it’s not private or classified.”

Derek keeps looking back at me with an expression like he’s trying to tell me something significant and I’m just not getting it. I feel dumb, and my skin’s been crawling ever since the word “daemon” anyway. “I—thanks, but that doesn’t sound like something I ought to be messing with.”

He gives me one more look, then shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says. “But you do have a right to whatever information you want. You only have to ask.”

We take the next couple of turns in silence, me adrift in an uneasiness I can’t quite put my finger on.

“So what’s a nice Machinist like you doing in a job like this anyway?” Derek asks at last. “I thought you were supposed to stick to your own turf, not venture out amongst the unwashed.”

The corridors are wider now, the crowds thickening, and Derek, walking beside me, speaks too loudly for my comfort. “Commerce with the Sculpted isn’t forbidden,” I say a little defensively, keeping my voice low. “It’s just . . . discouraged, I guess. It’s—there’s a lot of danger, spiritually.”

“I always wanted to be a spiritual hazard,” Derek says. “You probably shouldn’t even be talking to me, should you?”

“Um . . .” I’m looking around, anywhere but at him. There are unholy forms and faces and sounds and smells everywhere. “Not really, not like this.”

“So why are you? I mean, in the larger sense. Why are you here at all? Why do you have this job?”

I sigh. “I didn’t exactly have a choice,” I say, cursing my inability to hold my tongue. “Thomas, my father, he’s our ward trader, which means he goes out and sells whatever we build or manufacture. That’s so the ward can meet its obligation to the Guild.”

“Which is saving up to get off Netherview Station and continue its fabled trek to Enoch. I’ve read about it.”

I look at him, nonplussed. We know so little about the Sculpted, I somehow can’t get over the fact they know anything about us. “But business isn’t so good,” I continue. “As trader, my father has to pay the rest of the ward first, before he takes his share, but lately there’s not much left over. In fact, I think there may not be anything left over. He’s been trying for months to get me a job outside the Quarter, and believe me, that means things are grim.”

“Of course they are,” Derek says. “Who wants primitive toys made from primitive materials?”

“They’re not toys!” I say, turning on him, thinking of the motor I’ve been building for some weeks now. “It’s serious work! It’s sacred!”

“Hey, hey, I’m sorry.” We’re now at the elevator bay, waiting, and Derek puts his hands up as if to ward off my anger. I see for the first time that his palms and the pads of his fingers are a rich green, fading into blue at the edges. “I didn’t mean it like that. But you have to realize that’s how most people see what you do. If it has no practical use, it must be a toy.”

“It does have a practical use,” I say. “You people are just too stiffnecked to humble yourselves and admit it.”

Derek nods. “Or you might say we’ve put away childish things.”

This reference to the Manual startles me. The elevator opens as I’m groping for a suitable reply, and we crowd in with several other commuters, including a woman who has tentacles where her fingers should be. Derek spends the ride staring straight ahead with the barest of smiles on his lips.

I’m still smarting when the elevator opens on Six. I’m about to say that I think I can find my way from here, but Derek steps out with me into the thick, damp air and dank vegetation.

“I’ve been meaning to ask,” he says, “what is the significance of the triangle on your clothing? It’s an inclined plane, right?”

“Um, right,” I say. “That’s the ward I belong to.”

“You’re lucky you’re not in Screw,” he says. “You’d never hear the end of it at work.”

“So, er,” I say, stumbling a little as we step onto the counterspinward slidewalk, “I guess you understand the Inclined Plane is one of the Six Fundamental Machines.”

“I’ve heard that rumor somewhere,” Derek says.

“Well, they’re also symbols. This one represents the obliqueness of our approach to the Master Builder. No matter—”

“You mean God, right?”

“You might call him that,” I say.

“I might. And again, I might not.”

He has a way of continually derailing me and looking pleased about it that I find entirely infuriating. “No matter how shallow the angle,” I say, soldiering on, “the Inclined Plane leads us ever upward, and though it may take eons, eventually we’ll reach the level of the Builder.”

“Sounds suspiciously like the Tower of Babel,” Derek says. “And didn’t God punish the Babylonians for trying to approach him in just that way?”

“Their approach was more direct, and completely literal,” I say, my voice heating up. “We’re not talking about a literal approach. Ours is metaphorical. We approach the Builder by understanding and manipulating his six aspects.”

“I’d have thought he’d have more respect for the direct approach. You know, just wrap an inclined plane around a big pole and climb to heaven.” He waggles his blue eyebrows at me, eyes twinkling. “Maybe what offended him about it was the metaphorical significance of it. Maybe the Babylonians were really saying God could screw himself, and that’s why he gave them all a good tongue-lashing.”

The delight he derives from such extreme statements takes my breath away. “You can’t approach the Builder in anything but a metaphorical way!” I say.

“Then why let yourselves be literally constrained? Why confine yourselves to what you can build from six fairly arbitrary machines?”

“The machines aren’t arbitrary! They’re the six aspects of the Builder.”

“They are arbitrary, and not all of them are even that fundamental. The screw we were just talking about—like I said, it’s just an inclined plane wrapped around an axle. The pulley’s a special case of the wheel and axle, and the wedge is just another way of looking at an inclined plane.”

I wipe fatigue sweat from my forehead. He’s hitting uncomfortably close to blasphemous thoughts I’ve entertained myself, which may explain my vehemence in denouncing them. “Every aspect partakes of the others to some extent,” I say, but I sound more shrill than certain.

“Seems to me that if there really is a god, you could find some far more useful metaphors for the way he operates if you’d just reach deeper than your six machines.”

He exits the slidewalk and I follow, belatedly realizing we’ve arrived near the PM Gate. To my relief and chagrin both, I’ve been so focused on the conversation that I haven’t paid much attention to the nightmarish creatures around me, nor to the riotous greenery. But I notice them all now and feel hemmed in.

“We’re not meant to reach deeper,” I say, hurrying to keep up with Derek’s long gait in the swarming crowd.

“Then you’ll never achieve godhood, now, will you?” Derek says. He pauses near the unadorned hatchway that leads to the Machinist Quarter. “Well, here you are.”

Bathed in sweat, I purse my lips. “Thanks, uh . . . thanks for getting me here.”

“The pleasure was all mine.” He makes as if to move on, but stops. “I meant to tell you before, I thought you handled those jokers in the locker room about as well as you could have. Just don’t let them know they’re getting to you and they’ll leave you alone soon enough. They’re not really mean, just exemplars of what I call the indolent uninformed. Learning new things is such a trivial process they don’t even make the effort.”

“Like the Israelites and the fiery serpents,” I say.

Derek blinks, his eyes losing focus. “Interesting,” he says after a moment or two. “Numbers, chapter twenty-one. If the ones who were bitten only gazed upon Moses’s brass serpent, they would live. All they had to do was look. You know, there’s good sense to be found in that book here and there.”

“The miracle is,” I say, “even a gentile can look and see it.”

Derek laughs long and loud. It makes me feel clever and proud, though why I should care about looking clever to this mockery of a man baffles me. “Touché, Jude,” he says. “See you tomorrow at the orifice.”

He studies some resource invisible to me, and then he’s off, a lean blue figure vanishing into a teeming, grotesque jungle. I’m reminded that he inhabits a world even more strange than this physical one, and that when the two or us look at an object we each see a vastly different thing.

“Selah, Derek,” I say under my breath. I pull the lever and pass through the Gate, wondering what he sees when he looks at me.

The cleanliness, calm, cool, and quiet of the Quarter stand in stark contrast to what I’ve left behind. It’s evening by our clocks; we run here on only one shift. The few Machinists out and about look at me strangely as I pass from outside. It should feel good, this homecoming after an eternal shift away, this shedding of weight, this lightness, this cooling of my sweat, but I find myself keyed up and restless before I’ve even reached the branching to Wheel and Axle. I know Thomas will be waiting for me, wanting to know how the day went, but I can’t confine myself at home just yet. Instead I lower my head and trudge to gymnasium.

The machines are manned mostly by Levers, all older than I, but one station opens up before long. I do my best to complete the ritual properly, pitting every muscle group against the pulleys as I rehearse the Builder’s Code in my mind, but I’m barely into the first canto before my sore muscles are quaking. What’s more, I can’t keep my thoughts focused. My mind keeps reaching back to worry images of naked flesh—sometimes colored naturally, sometimes blue or green.

One by one the Levers are finishing up and heading to the cleansing room, some of them whispering and giving me looks as strange as the ones I got outside from the Sculpted. I rush to try to complete the minimal requirements before the place fills up with Inclined Planes, but in vain. I’m not quite done when Nicodemus and another Plane named Amos arrive. I see them from across the room, over the tops of three ranks of machines. I duck my head but too late. Nic spots me and hurries over.

The station next to mine is empty, abandoned just moments before. Nic, his face cautiously friendly, slides into the seat, leaving Amos to fidget awkwardly in the aisle before us. “Selah, Jude,” Nic says.

“Selah,” I say, mouth dry.

Nic begins some warmup stretches of his arms and back. “You weren’t at schola today,” he says.

I look straight ahead, pumping away with my arms in bellows mode, but Amos is right there staring at me so I focus on my knees instead. “No,” I say.

“Malachi heard you were outside,” Nic says.

“Yeah, at the hub,” Amos says.

“He said you had a job.”

A wary hope fills Nic’s voice, but whether it’s hope that the rumors or true or simply hope that I’ll talk to him, I can’t tell. Either way, I can’t look at him. I can’t look at his golden hair, his glistening shoulders, his wise blue eyes. But I can’t not answer.

“That’s right,” I say gruffly. “I guess you won’t see me much in class anymore.”

“Is it true about the Sculpted?” Amos says. He’s a skinny kid and he practically dances from foot to foot. “They drink blood instead of water?”

“Amos, I see a free machine over there,” Nic says with a jerk of his head.

“But—”

“I’m nearly done here,” I say.

“Better hurry, Amos.”

I can’t see Nic’s face, but I hear the tone of warning in his voice, and I see the answering expression of querulousness on Amos’s face. Amos stalks off, even as I fight down the unwelcome surge of warm emotion in my chest.

I rest for a twelve-count, saying nothing, then embark on another bellows set.

Nic has launched into a set of cherrypickers. “So what’s with you, Jude?” he says between reps.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been avoiding me for a couple of weeks now. What did I do?”

I sigh, clinging to the handgrips and letting my upper body sag. “It’s not you, Nic.”

“Then what is it? Is it about this job?”

What am I supposed to tell him? That I’ve started to worry I like him too much? I can hardly express the thought even to myself.

“It’s not about the stupid job,” I say, though I’m aching to tell him about everything I’ve seen and done today. I cut my set short and stand up, infuriated. “Great Builder, you’re so—so—oh, flashcan it!”

I rush to the cleansing room with all the dignity I can muster, which isn’t much, aware of all the eyes on me. In the quick glimpse I caught of Nic before I fled, there was hurt and concern. He hadn’t yet broken a sweat.

I try to put him out of my head among the straggling Levers in the steam-filled shower. I try to conjure the illusion of camouflage I felt in the showers at the hub, as if I could hide myself amongst my Sculpted crewmates and never be seen. Here I feel anxious and wrong, like I don’t belong. But I certainly don’t belong there.

Scanting my cleansing, I dress quickly and hurry into the main corridor. The crowds here are about as thick as they ever get but seem downright sparse compared to outside. People stride lightly from their duties back to their branches, men and women, boys and girls, as evening stretches toward the dinner hour. I envy them their apparent lack of care.

“Jude, Jude,” hails a gentle voice, and I raise my head. I hadn’t realized my neck had bent as if in stronger gravity.

It’s Sariah, a Pulley my age who’s walking the other way. “Oh, selah,” I say.

She takes my sleeve and draws me to the side of the corridor. “Missed you at schola,” she says, voice low. Not that we have any of the same classes, but the boys and girls do see each other at lunch. Often I’ve wished I could learn the simpler skills the girls ply, like producing rough fabrics on machines the men construct, but the one occasion on which I expressed such a desire to my father is one I’m not likely to forget. I was younger then and hadn’t learned better.

“I wasn’t there,” I say tiredly.

“I know,” she says, a look of eager horror on her face. “You were outside. Helena saw you go this morning. So what was it like?”

My eyes are already straying down the corridor toward escape. How can I explain what it was like today? I’m too confused. “It’s the Wrecker’s workshop out there, truly,” I say, pulling away. “Look, I’m sorry, but I need to get home.”

She lays a cool hand on my arm. She’s very pretty with her enviably long yellow hair, and she’s nearly as tall as I am. “Jude, what’s wrong?” she asks, her face close to mine, eyes filled with concern. “Was it that horrible? You can tell me.”

I want to weep. I have friends, sure, or I did, but what I’ve never had is someone I can confide in, someone I can really trust and open up to. That’s all I want.

“Sariah—”

I feel her eyes searching my face, but I can’t quite meet her gaze. “What is it?” she says.

“I—” Am I really going to say it? She’s always been nice to me, kind. I glance up quickly. “What do you think about Nic?”

“Nicodemus?” A little crease appears between Sariah’s fine eyebrows. “He’s okay, he’s nice. Why?”

I shake my head, my stomach turning inside out. “It’s just—you know, he’s such a great guy . . .”

I trail off as her eyes get a little wider. “Oh,” she says quietly, almost in wonder.

“I mean, he’s been my best friend for such an incredibly long time,” I say.

She nods slowly, focused on some inner vision. “No, no, I see. I get it.”

“So, you know . . .”

“Who would have thought?” The ghost of a pensive smile touches the corner of her mouth. She kisses me suddenly on the cheek. “Thank you, Jude. Thank you. I’ll talk to you later.”

With that she trails off down the corridor, yellow hair billowing in the quarter-g, leaving me to wonder desolately what in space just happened.

Thomas is waiting for me at the cabin, reading the Manual. He looks pointedly at his chronometer as the hatch closes behind me. “I expected you sooner,” he says.

“I stopped for devotions on the way back,” I say. “I thought I might be too tired later.”

He nods, accepting this, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “How was it today?” he asks.

I shrug. “Fine, I guess.”

“Did you work hard?”

“I think I did.”

“Crew treat you okay?”

I take off my cap and rub my head. I don’t want to get into it all with Thomas. “They were fine. They didn’t pay me much mind.”

Thomas closes his Manual, a finger marking his place. “You be polite around them, Jude, but keep your thoughts to yourself. That’s the way to stay true among the Sculpted.”

“I will,” I say, though already I feel duplicitous.

Thankfully, that seems to close that subject. The only other thing Thomas seems to want to know before he goes back to his reading is when I expect to be paid—something I haven’t given much of a thought to. I assumed that was something he would have worked out with Renny already.

I prepare our dinner on the foldout stovetop, a stew of ground meat, beans, and vegetables. The activity proves more calming and centering to me than devotions did. But that night as I drift toward sleep, my mind keeps turning back to the women in the locker room, and to the wooden chest bolted to the deck not two feet from my head. Kaiya’s chest.

The Screw is a peculiar machine, partaking directly as it does of aspects of the Axle, the Inclined Plane, and the Wedge, and often requiring application of the Lever to fulfill its purpose. This is fitting, given its function as the aspect that both joins together and elevates, and as a representation of the way in which men and women join together in holy communion with the Builder to ignite the spark of life.

Sacred as it is, I’ve always been a little embarrassed by the Screw, a little wary of it. Maybe if that were my ward I’d have a better understanding of it, a healthier attitude toward it, but I’ve never been quite comfortable with its symbolic freight. Love and apotheosis strike me as less the Screw’s nature than doing violence to whatever surface it encounters.

I find it difficult to credit that I will ever come to completely trust and adore the Screw.

My work schedule is seven days on and three off—one full s-week as reckoned by the Sculpted. My first “weekend” falls on a Thursday through Saturday by the Guild calendar, which means schola every day while I’m supposed to be taking a break. Neither my long stretches without a day of rest nor my falling behind at schola seems to bother Thomas much, but it bothers me. When I dare bring this up, he tells me the Builder is blessing us for our sacrifice—though I don’t see what sacrifice it is that he’s making.

By my second s-week on the job, I’ve begun to feel comfortable and confident in null-g, and competent if not so comfortable with my fishbowl’s graphic overlay. It’s as if I’m looking at a raw and exposed layer of reality that should more properly be covered, or at the very least from which I should avert my eyes—though, just as in the locker room with my crewmates, doing so is practically not an option. I am on friendly terms with most of the crew, even if I can’t quite bring myself to consider any of them friends. We’re too different for that, both in our worldviews and in our expectations of what friendship means. For one thing, they don’t seem to have a problem with the occasional tweaking of one another’s anatomy in the showers. I do, as they have learned.

I have spent most of my lunch hours and several more walks home chatting with Derek. Despite the fact that he’s so obviously unlike me, he has a directness, a curiosity, and a willingness to take my arguments seriously that I can’t help but like, even if I can’t always effectively rebut the points he makes. I consider him a goad to make me apply myself more diligently to my studies. I retain the faith that answers exist to his objections, and if I can’t find them and express them articulately then I’m hardly a worthy ambassador for the Guild.

It’s end of shift on Sevenday of my second s-week on the job when Renny calls us together in the break room. “Got some news, little stevies,” she says, executing a sort of four-handed cartwheel up a chair to perch on her favorite table. The animated chatter anticipating our weekend break quiets down.

“Fourday and Fiveday next week we’ve got a special assignment coming up for anyone who wants in on it. Berth A-11, prospecting ship full of scientific samples. Very delicate, both the ship and the cargo. Berth’s gonna be fully evacuated, so there’s hazard pay, but only those of you rated for vacuum will be eligible. If you don’t want in, that’s fine—we’ll have plenty to do here. But if you want in and you’re not vacuum-rated, it’s not too late to get that way. You can even take shift time to do it without getting docked. I just need to see your certification first thing Threeday if you want in. Understood? All right, that’s it.”

Renny draws me aside as the others file off to the showers. “This is a good opportunity, kid,” she tells me in a low voice. “You’re a good worker, and you sure don’t want to miss out on triple pay.”

She’s right, I don’t. I can imagine how happy Thomas will be to see the extra credits. “How do I get vacuum-rated?” I ask, watching two tiny, distorted me’s in her silvery eyeglobes. “Is there a test I take or something?”

“Not, er, not really,” Renny says. “What it mostly entails is getting your lungs and eyes and ears vacuum-hardened. You’d be wearing a pressure suit in the berth, of course, but if it should fail you could suffocate before we got you out of there and repressurized. Regs don’t let us subject you to that risk.”

My breath catches. “What you’re talking about—that would mean Sculpting, wouldn’t it?”

“Just a small bit, internally.”

The pay would be welcome, but I have to shake my head. “No offense, but I can’t do that. I’m very sorry.”

Renny shrugs, an elaborate motion of her hind shoulders. My reflection dances crazily in her eyes. “What can I say, kid? It’s your choice, and I sure won’t think any worse of you for it. But don’t make the decision now. Think about it over the break. Get the details from Geoff. Talk to your old man, see what he says.”

“Right,” I say. “I already know what he’d tell me.”

“Thomas ain’t a bad guy, for a Wheelie. Talk to him, kid.”

All the way to the showers, cringing, I can hear Thomas telling me the Wrecker’s in me. But I can’t quite shake Renny’s insistence that I bring it up with him.

That evening over our humble dinner I blurt it out before I can reconsider: “Renny says there’s a special job next week. Extra pay, and she’s pushing me to do it.”

Thomas puts down his fork. “And?” he says, glaring at me over the table.

“And . . . I’d need some small modifications. Vacuum-hardening.”

Thomas bows his head. Today’s a Saturday in the Quarter, what would in other circumstances have meant half a day at schola for me and a morning of light community service for him. But neither of us follows a normal schedule now, and we’re each exhausted from the labors of the day. I wait for him to speak, not chewing, heart in my throat.

Not that I don’t know the right answer. I only have to ask myself what the Builder would say. Or my mother, I think, the tip of my nonslipper grazing the wooden chest beneath the foldout table that spans the width between the bunks. The chest contains Kaiya’s clothing, which, despite the reg against storage of unnecessary mass, Thomas has never been able to bring himself to recycle. It’s almost as if he’s waiting for her to come back. I’m not, though. I don’t have many firm memories of Kaiya, and in fact Thomas has told me so often that my mother is with the angels now that that’s how I nearly always picture her: dressed in spotless white with huge feathered wings furled above her, looking down on me from on high. I know what she would think if I broached the topic of transfiguration. I know what she does think, in whatever level of the Builder’s mansion she’s watching me from.

At last Thomas forks a bite of boiled potatoes and carrots into his mouth and peers at me, practically through me, from under lowered brows. “You told her no, right?”

I flinch a little. It takes a moment for me to realize he’s talking about Renny, not Kaiya. “Of course,” I say. My words feel defensive, as if he’s somehow already forced me to lie to him.

“Wrecker take that woman, anyway.” He shovels more food into his mouth and chews silently for a few bites.

When he speaks again his voice and his eyes, unexpectedly, have softened. “Son, I know they teach us at temple never to compromise with the world, to always live as if we’re with the Builder in his mansion, but in practice that’s just impossible. We all make compromises—we have to, or we couldn’t get by. We couldn’t live. The tricky part—no, the hard part is knowing what’s okay to compromise and what isn’t. You have to figure out where that dividing line is—and then stay well back from it. When you try to walk it . . .”

Thomas folds his hands together and stares down at the table. “Jude, son, I can tell you what happens. You fall. You tell yourself you won’t, but you do.” He clears his throat, lips compressing almost convulsively. “I just want you to be happy. Maybe that’s not what this world is for, but Builder knows it’s what I want for you.”

His eyes rove this way and that, never meeting mine, and he clears his throat again. Once upon a time, this would have been where I edged around the table to give him an awkward hug. Tonight I can’t. My soul cries for him, but I’m not a little kid anymore, and I just can’t.

We finish our meal in silence.

The next day is temple, the first Sunday in three Guild weeks I’ve been off work. Thomas and I sit toward the back of the long, low chapel, which sits near the AD Gate at the opposite end of the Quarter from the PM Gate. The bulkheads are of brushed gray metal, with three of the Six Machines etched on the left wall, three on the right, and the carpenter’s square on the wall behind the pulpit.

Inclined Plane Ward meets third every Sunday, in the late-morning slot. During Foreman Saul’s sermon after the sacrament, I spot Nicodemus several rows ahead and to the right. What caught my eye was his golden head tilting back as he smiled wide at something the person next to him had whispered in his ear. The person next to him has long, shining yellow hair.

The person next to him is Sariah.

I blink hard for the next several minutes. I shift and fidget through the rest of the sermon. The pew is cold and rigid—dumb, unyielding matter—and no matter how I try I can’t get comfortable. I’m supposed to meet the foreman for my private instruction after church, but when the service ends I rush back to the cabin instead, with a vague excuse to Thomas about my stomach.

Two full days of schola still ahead, catching up on subjects where I’m falling further and further behind, before I get to return to work. I don’t know how I’m going to make it.

Wednesday comes at last, Oneday to the rest of the station, and in the break room in the early morning Renny reminds the gathered crew that we have only two days left to sign up and show vacuum certification if we want in on the special gig. She looks my way but I duck my eyes. Funny—I’ve spent the past two days at schola avoiding Nic and looking forward to Oneday, and now that it’s here it looks like I’m going to spend the day avoiding Renny. I’m such a bent nail I can’t stand myself.

Our client today is a Thunder-class starship, Colder Equation, which we lade with supplies bound for the exomorph colony at Van Maanen’s Star. It’s hard work but mostly mindless, and I find my cares evaporating for the first time in days. I feel best at midshift when we break for lunch, but the rest of the day is marred by the clock in the corner of my vision, ticking down the minutes until I return to gravity’s embrace.

At shift’s end, after showers, I ask Derek if he’d like to go somewhere for food. He’s invited me to eat after work several times now, but I’ve worried not just that Thomas would find out but that I wouldn’t be able to find anything appetizing in the public cafeterias. Tonight, though, I’m desperate enough to talk that I think I can overcome my food objections.

Delighted, Derek leads me all the way to a dim cafeteria two levels in from the rim. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but certainly not this gloomy cave with the dark red walls and the low ceiling. Quiet, lilting string music plucked out by unseen hands drifts on the air, which smells gently dank and laden with minerals. Thick pillars and curtains of leafy plant life obscure the view from one end of the place to the other, though here and there I can see tables of two, three, or four, the sometimes asymmetrical faces of the patrons lit from below by flickering orange light. Perhaps it’s the dimness, but I no longer find their deformities as hideous as I did at first.

A woman in a lumpy black cowled robe leads us through the compact maze of foliage to a table against a black-painted bulkhead studded with white pinpricks. It isn’t until we take our seats in form-fitting smart-matter chairs that I realize the bulkhead isn’t a bulkhead at all, but a viewport—a hole punched through fifteen centimeters of metal and plugged with glass or something like it.

“Wheel and Axle,” I murmur, stunned. I can’t take my eyes from the bright, nail-hard stars.

“Netherheim and Freya should come into view before you’re finished,” the cowled woman says. “That’s a sight to behold.” She makes an arcane gesture in the air. “Now, let me call your attention to today’s specials.”

“Perhaps a . . . hardcopy menu would be in order for my friend here?” Derek says, nodding toward me.

“Oh, certainly,” the woman says before receding like smoke into the shadows.

The surface of our table glows a dim, swirling orange, making Derek’s skin look like polished stone and his eyes smolder with fire. “So what do you think?” he asks.

“It’s not what I expected at all. I pictured something more, well, functional from a cafeteria.”

“Cafeteria, eh?” Derek’s eyes sparkle with amusement. “I suppose you could think of it that way.”

The robed woman returns with a catalog of dishes listed on a single sheet of paper, and I’m shocked to discover, as Derek points out, that most of the items have been grown hydroponically. “This must be terribly expensive,” I say, mouth watering. “I can’t afford this, I’m sure of it.”

“Relax,” Derek says. “Everyone gets credit for a meal like this once a month. I’ve got a couple saved up, and you must have at least a dozen just sitting there, unused.”

I cover my surprise and confusion by studying the menu. I have the sense of riding an iceberg in a limitless ocean, borne up by a vast bulk the composition of which I can’t begin to fathom. Choosing more or less at random, I select an opener of fine pasta garnished with grated cheeses and truffle shavings, and a spiced squash tart as a main course. Derek places our orders, a process invisible to me, choosing a fruit assortment and a roulade of vegetables and nuts for himself.

He folds his hands and leans forward. “So, what’s on your mind, Jude?”

“Oh, this and that,” I say, and shrug. “I was thinking today about what it would be like to live out in space.”

Derek shakes his head, grinning. “We do live in space. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

“No, I mean in space, like the exomorphs, just floating there in the middle of nothing.”

“Well, it’s not nothing. There is a structure, a lattice, to grow their colony in.”

“But it’s not much, and it’s open to space.” I didn’t know there were such creatures, such people, until today. I read it on the fishbowl during work. “Can you even imagine the mods you’d need for that?”

“Serious work indeed,” Derek says. “Not to be undertaken lightly.”

“No one on our crew has work that serious. They all look pretty much normal, at least when they’re dressed.”

“The more radical mods are often specialization for particular types of work. We’re unskilled labor, our crew, Jude.”

I nod, having figured this out without really being able to articulate it. I take a deep breath. “Derek, can I ask you something personal?”

He laces his fingers together and rests his joined hands on the table. The green of his palms has crept halfway up his arms in the time since I met him, and his ears are now tinged green as well, though I can’t make the hues out well in this light. His gaze upon me is very open and direct and unsettling, more so because every day I come to know better how little I understand of his world, layered as it is above and beneath and around mine. “I don’t know, can you?” he says.

“I don’t know. I’ll try.” I’ve learned some things about him from the fishbowl at work without really trying—for instance, the distressing fact that he has three biological mothers—but nothing that doesn’t just whet my curiosity. I look down at the glowing table and take a deep breath. “I’m just wondering if there’s some, I don’t know, some practical reason for your mods, something functional. You know, what the blue skin turning green is all about.”

“There’s a time for love, and a time to hate,” Derek says with a rakish smile. “A time for blue, and a time for green.”

I puff out an exasperated breath. “Do you spend all your time looking up things in the Manual you can make fun of?”

He shakes his head. “You do understand, don’t you, Jude,” he says animatedly, “that a book called the Bible existed long before Titus Grant slapped his own generic title on it, and that it’s not exactly an obscure work in the human literary canon?”

“High Foreman Titus didn’t just change the title. Under the Builder’s inspiration, he clarified and corrected—”

Derek extends a finger until it almost touches my lips, waving his other hand preemptively. “Yes, fine. But you understand he didn’t write the Manual from scratch.”

“All right, fine, I understand,” I say. “So what about the color change?”

He leans back in his chair. “Right, that. It’s not really anything practical. There’s nothing I can point to and say my skin color accomplishes. In fact, it’s mostly a random aesthetic process. I’m never sure what color’s coming up next.”

“Then why did you do it? I mean, what’s the purpose?”

“It keeps me interested,” Derek says, and his smile cracks momentarily. “I see me and not-me in the mirror at the same time, and there’s always the mystery of what’s coming next. It’s as good a reason to stick around as any.” He leans forward again, and to my ears his heartiness now sounds forced. “What makes you curious, friend?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

“You’re thinking about the job, aren’t you? The vacuum job this Fourday.”

I look out the viewport at the stars, but the view seems to tilt and wheel beneath me, spinning my sense of balance away. “Maybe,” I admit.

“You know,” Derek says with a trace of his vigorous smile, “if you do it, a lot of folks on the crew are going to be disappointed. People are starting to get protective of you, and you may make them feel like they’ve corrupted you.”

“It’s not their decision,” I say.

“Agreed.”

A different woman brings us our opening course. A thick tail moving in counterpoint to the balanced trays in her hands protrudes from beneath her black robe. Attention to the food spares Derek and me from the burden of conversation. I’m not sure I enjoy all the lush, strange flavors on my plate, but I know I’ve never tasted anything so vivid. I swallow every last crumb.

Derek seems uncharacteristically fidgety between courses, but it’s not until our main courses have arrived and I’m halfway through my tart—excellent—that he says, “Jude, can I ask you something?”

“Um, sure,” I say between bites.

He swallows. “What is it that happened to your mother?”

The bite I’ve just taken feels too big going down my throat. “How do you know about my mother?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not trying to pry.” He wipes his mouth with a cloth serviette that actually shows slight stains of use. “It’s hard sometimes to look at you and not make the easy jumps back through your genealogy.”

“My mother died when I was small, four or five,” I say, setting down my fork and holding my gaze steady with great effort. “I’m not clear exactly how. My father doesn’t like to talk about it, and I don’t like to press him.”

Derek opens his mouth, looking confused, and for a moment I have the strangest feeling he’s going to tell me how it happened. I feel the sting beginning behind my eyes at the thought that he might know more about it than I do.

But what he says is: “Do you think about her much?”

I nod. “All the time.”

He looks so stricken at this that I feel I could be looking at a reflection of my own expression in a blue-tinted mirror—or, so I believe for a giddy, wildly hopeful moment, at my mother. The illusion shatters as Derek rises suddenly in his chair, takes my face in both his green hands, and leans in to kiss me on the mouth. He stares at me a second or two, an eternity, and sits back down.

Breathless, I turn to the window. Netherheim has swung into view, a giant ball of spun sugar swirled with red and yellow stripes, a fruit as sweet and bursting and sick-making as my heart inside me. I sit very still, not looking at him. My pulse is racing about a hundred klicks a second.

“I don’t know if I can finish this,” I say and push the rest of my tart away.

“Jude, I’m sorry,” Derek says, his eyes very steady and direct.

“Why did you do that?” I ask. Asking a question is better than yelling or crying or hitting the table.

Derek spreads his green palms. They look black with blood in the cafeteria’s hellish light. “I forgot for a minute what a kiss signifies to your people. Let myself forget, to be honest. To us—the groups I identify with, at least—it can be a greeting between friends, a show of camaraderie or comfort, even the equivalent of a slap. It doesn’t have to have a sexual connotation.”

“But why did you do it?”

Derek sighs. “Jude, you just seemed so sad. I couldn’t stand it. Lonely and sad.” He shakes his head. “You reminded me of me when I was your age. Sometimes I wish someone had just done that for me.”

Do I believe him? I’m not sure. I look out the viewport. Netherheim is just beginning to slide out of view. A cauldron of emotion, like the multicolored atmosphere of the planet below, seethes inside me. I want to storm out of the room. I want to turn a somersault in the air. I want to shake Derek by the shoulders until his head flops like a scrap doll’s.

I think about Nicodemus, wondering what I ever saw in him.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Can you help me find an elevator to Level Six?”

“Of course, Jude.”

The compassion and concern in Derek’s voice are unbearable. So is the heartbreak.

At home, safe from the sea of wild bodies and leering faces that populate the station, I fall to my knees. I should pray to the Builder for forgiveness, for putting myself in such a compromised position, but instead I thumb the combination on the wooden chest in the middle of the deck. Thomas is still out, and with luck will be for at least another hour. He doesn’t know that I long ago surfed the combination over his shoulder. The lid swings back on stiff, creaky, decidedly low-tech hinges, revealing the layered treasures within.

Reverently, I lift out the first folded garment, hearing in my mind a surreal ghost of Kaiya’s voice telling Thomas to keep this, she’ll have no use for it where she’s going. I unfold and smooth out the soft gray dress with the Inclined Plane on the bosom—then, hands trembling, pull it over my head and slip my arms through the sleeves, as I’ve done maybe half a dozen times before in my life.

The fabric is tight across my shoulders and under my arms—much tighter than it was the time before. There’s no hope of closing the buttons at the back. This may be the last time I can manage to fit into it at all.

Sobs rise up inside me as I yearn for angel wings to bear me away.

The sensation of walking spinward inside a great turning wheel like Netherview Station is a little like walking up an endless inclined plane. Because your feet are borne forward by the rotation a tiny bit faster than your head, you might feel if you’re attentive enough as if you’re leaning slightly backward, or walking up the slightest of slopes.

By the same token, a counterspinward stroll might feel a bit like a walk downhill. But compare your slight forward angle to a tangent of the circle your feet are touching and you’ll see that the attitude of your body is more like that of a person walking uphill. Thus, walk either direction inside the rim of a rolling wheel and you partake of one aspect or another of ascending an incline.

I haven’t found much scriptural support for my position, and the members of Wheel and Axle in particular would call it blasphemy, but at some crossroads it strikes me that any path you follow can lead you upward, and closer to the Builder.

I sleep badly, unaccustomed to the richness of the food in my belly. Upon rising I prepare Thomas what seems a meager and bland breakfast, all the while fearing that he will somehow sense that the chest and its contents have been disturbed. But he eats with all his attention on his Manual, and he barely bats an eye when I tell him I may end up working overtime today.

I arrive early at the hub, in time to catch Renny in her spherical office well before the start of our Twoday shift. “I want to learn more about this vacuum-hardening procedure,” I tell her without preamble. “Uh, how can I do that?”

Renny vaults out of her chair like a charged particle expelled from an atom. “If you weren’t crippled you could ask from anywhere,” she says, clinging to the frame of the hatch and shoving her ugly face into mine. “As it is, you’ll have to use a Geoffroom. There’s one not far from here.”

She leads me on a brisk walk. “You know,” I say as I hurry to keep up with her, “my father’s pretty upset with you.”

Renny looks over her shoulder and grins. “What, for telling you about the job? Oh, I heard from him. Nothing he could do about it, though. It’s regs and Thomas knows it. Like he has room to complain, the way he called in so many favors to get a barefooter like you onto the team in the first place. But he’s your father and he’s just following the script, same as me.”

She stops before a row of three hatches, each emblazoned with the old-fashioned schematic symbol for an activated light fixture. I’ve passed hatches like these at many times since starting my job, but never known what they were.

Renny rears up on her hind arms and pats the gleaming surface of the first hatch. “Now here’s the next part of my script,” she says. “This is a Geoffroom, where Geoff can tell you anything you care to ask about. He’ll answer all your questions and then some. The light bulb is glowing, which means the room’s unoccupied and you can walk right in. Take all the time you need, but if you’re going to be here longer than than the first hour of shift, have the big lug message me so I know.”

She touches a panel in the center of the hatch, and it opens with a slight hiss.

“Keep your eyes and ears open, kid,” she says, and I step inside.

“Don’t be afraid. I won’t bite.”

The voice is a warm tenor and originates from no location I can see in this small, very white room. The ceiling is high enough to let me stand comfortably; my outstretched arms would nearly span the room in both dimensions. A body-enfolding chair like you might find at the medic’s rests at the center of the deck. Panicked, I turn—to find the hatch has sealed noiselessly behind me. I can barely see its outline.

“Have a seat, Jude,” the voice says. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

The air is warm, but my skin prickles cold and hard. “Where are you?” I say. “How do you know my name?”

“I’ve known you since you were born, Jude. I’m glad we’re finally getting a chance to talk. This happens so rarely with members of your Guild. But we’ll talk more comfortably if you sit. Please.”

Blasphemy! my mind cries. False gods! But I ease myself down into the chair, letting the cushions take hold of me. I feel the chair adjust to my size, and carefully I lay my head back in the niche that fits it.

A man appears before me. A pot-bellied man with flowing white hair and a bushy white mustache, dressed in a billowy white coverall. A man carrying a wooden carpenter’s square. “Selah,” he says.

I start in alarm, but the man makes calming motions as he bends over me. “The Builder,” I gasp.

He shakes his head. “If you see me in the likeness of the Builder, it’s only because that’s your strongest conception of a figure of benevolent wisdom. Not to aggrandize myself at all.” He looks down at the carpenter’s square in his hand. “This probably doesn’t help matters.” He tosses the square over his shoulder, and it vanishes.

“Who are you?” I say, struggling to sit up.

The man crackles and flashes transparent. “This’ll be less disorienting if you stay down in the chair,” he says. “For both of us.”

Suspiciously I lie back, and the image solidifies. In fact, I can feel the man as he presses a comforting hand to my chest and pushes me down.

“I’m Geoff,” he says. “No last name, but I can give you a version number if you’re really interested.”

He smells faintly of sweat, smoke, and some kind of musky perfume. “I don’t know what you mean,” I say.

“I know,” he says with a smirk. He pulls up a chair from nowhere, seats himself near my knees, and crosses his legs. “But you came here because you wanted to ask me something. So go ahead. Ask me anything you like. Ask me as much as you like. That’s what I’m here for.”

“What are you?” I ask.

“A very sophisticated information retrieval system. Once upon a time, you might have called me a search engine, but I’m much more than that. I’m something of a diagnostician as well, and a physician, and a surgeon, and a teacher and a tutor. A diplomat, a translator, an ombudsman. A legal advisor, and an advocate too. And I play a mean hand of gin.”

“Where did you get the name Geoff?” I’m thinking of Derek and his name change. “What does it mean?”

Geoff strokes his mustache. “Nothing, really. I just liked the sound of it. It seemed to me to suit me somehow. Where did you get your name?”

I blink. “From the Manual.”

“Be glad you didn’t end up Nebuchadnezzar.”

Maybe this is where Derek learned to be so cheeky. “How is it I can see you? It has something to do with the chair, doesn’t it?”

“It has plenty to do with the chair, and with its ability to create a microwave interface with your visual cortex. I can give you a more detailed technical specification if you like, but I imagine you have more pressing questions you’d like to ask.”

I’m delighted in spite of myself, and I raise my head out of the cradle several times in succession just to watch Geoff flicker in and out of existence.

“Careful,” he says, rising from his illusory chair. “You’ll make yourself sick.”

He’s right. My head has started pounding and the room whirls. My stomach feels none too steadfast in its grip on breakfast. I lie back and Geoff strokes my forehead. His cool fingers fail to disturb the swelling droplets of perspiration. I take deep breaths, digging my fingers into the padding of the armrests.

“Tell me about this vacuum-hardening process my boss keeps telling me about,” I say, eyes squeezed shut. “How does it work?”

“There’s not a lot to it,” Geoff says in a reassuring tone. “What it does is construct around your lungs a sort of a cellular retaining wall that gets deployed on any catastrophic drop in air pressure. It actually seals shut your lungs and can temporarily prevent the gases in your bloodstream from expanding and killing you. This retaining wall is also capable of breaking oxygen atoms loose from the carbon dioxide your blood returns to your lungs, so you can effectively keep rebreathing the same old air. That’s only temporary too, of course. It’s like any filter—eventually it’s going to get choked with carbon and fail. But you can last an hour that way, anyway. More than enough time for help to get to you. In most circumstances.”

It sounds so reasonable when Geoff says it. I’m looking at him again now, and he has returned to his seat. “Is the procedure expensive?” I ask, praying the answer will be yes.

“Not at all,” Geoff says. “And if you can demonstrate a need for it in the course of your job, the station covers it anyway. You do qualify, by the way.”

“Are there side effects?”

“You might feel a little short of breath after the procedure, a little dizzy and weak, but your lungs will adjust within a day or so. That’s all, really.”

I take a deep breath. “And the procedure itself—it sounds complicated. How long does it take?”

“Oh, about twenty minutes,” Geoff says, tilting his head to one side.

“Twenty minutes! That’s all?”

“You’d have the entire shift off, though, for recovery and observation. With pay.”

“But—but how is that possible?” I’m groping for words. “I mean, it’s Sculpting, right? You can’t just snap your fingers and it’s done.”

“That would be true, Jude . . . if we were starting from scratch. We’re not.”

Now I can’t breathe, and my insides seem to freeze. “What do you—what do you mean?”

Geoff stands up and clasps his hands behind his back. “You are what you call Sculpted, Jude, as is every other member of the Machinist Guild on Netherview Station. You’ve been that way since before birth, the nanodocs passed on to you via your mother’s bloodstream. Your nanodocs don’t do anything more than maintain reasonably good health and let me keep tabs on you. But the potential is there for more. Much more.”

“But—but why?” Tears gather in the corners of my eyes. “How can you do this to us? It’s—it’s monstrous!”

Geoff’s looks pained. “Jude, please understand what a fragile environment this station is. We have two million permanent residents and millions more who pass through every month. We can’t have people running loose who aren’t monitored in some way.”

“But it’s wrong. It’s my body!”

“Jude, if I weren’t helping out, your body would have broken the first time you left the Quarter. Your devotions keep your muscles strong, but the low gravity weakens your bones. You’ve had supplements in your food all your life to counteract the effects.”

I roll my head from side to side. “Lies.”

“I’m not lying, Jude.”

“Not now, but all along! Everything we know, my people, it’s all lies.”

“I told you the first opportunity I had. Jude, you have the right to get this information at the age of ten, when you become a provisional citizen of Netherview Station—that’s about thirteen and a third by your Guild calendar. Unfortunately, the Guild can keep that knowledge from you until age fifteen—twenty to you. You still have the right to ask and get answers, like you’re doing now, but what good does that do most of you when you don’t know you can ask?”

I’m shaking my head. “I don’t believe you. That would mean—that would mean everyone knows. All the adults—my father. Everyone knows.”

“Actually, no.” Geoff purses his lips sadly and lays a hand on my arm. “Just because they know they have the right to ask doesn’t mean they’ll actually do it. By the time they reach twenty, most of them don’t want to know.”

“I don’t want to know!” I say, wrenching my arm through Geoff’s hand to paw the water from my eyes. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Jude . . .”

“No! You’re the Wrecker! I don’t want to hear it.”

Geoff sighs. “As far as I’m aware, I am not the Wrecker. In fact, I’m not certain I’m capable of telling a lie. I try my very best to do good, really.”

Uncomfortably aware of how childish I’m being, I cross my arms and turn my head away from the preening phantom before me. I lie that way for some time, mind churning. When I look at Geoff again he’s watching me expectantly. I feel hollow inside.

“Geoff,” I say, my voice small, “can you fix my brain?”

Geoff leans forward, looking concerned. “What’s wrong with your brain, Jude?”

“I—I mean—”

“Yes?”

“I think I’m out of true.” I’m almost whispering. “Bent.”

“How do you mean?”

“You know.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

I lick my lips. “I think I like boys.” The admission leaves me feeling curiously flat, detached. “Can you fix me?”

Geoff tugs at his white mustache. “Jude, there are various therapy regimens I can initiate, but I don’t ‘fix’ things like sexual inclination. Not that I’d call you homosexual at all in the sense you’d think of it. The truth, I believe, is rather more interesting and complicated than that.”

My heart leaps. “What’s the truth?”

“Your Guild likes to treat sexuality and gender as binary values, either this or that, one right, one wrong, no other possibilities. But the ones you call Sculpted understand these characteristics more as a spectrum of possible values, fluid and multidimensional. There’s no either-or, nor even necessarily a permanent identification with any given point on the grid.” Geoff spreads his hands in an eerily Builderlike gesture. “Now, this is a preliminary diagnosis only, but you would appear to me to suffer from a multivalent somatocognitive dysphoria.”

“A what?” I ask, vague trepidation gnawing at my stomach.

“To put it more bluntly, your body is male, but the personality inside may be closer to the female end of the continuum. Not all the way there, of course, but more so than not.”

I shake my head despite the nausea I feel. “No, no. That’s ridiculous.”

“You would have learned very early to hide the symptoms—the wants and behaviors your people wouldn’t find acceptable in a little boy. But that, plus overcompensation in areas of archaically male pursuit, still wouldn’t make them go away.”

“You’re crazy.” The notion is offensive, repulsive. “The Builder doesn’t make mistakes like that.”

“In a perfect world, maybe not,” Geoff says. “But this world’s anything but perfect, and we all have to come to our own accommodations with that fact. Now, I can recommend and even direct a course of therapeutic counseling, just as a starting point, and of course participation would be entirely up to—”

“No!” I shout. “Stop it!”

“Jude, let’s at least talk about this for a—”

“You lying, false machine, shut up! I can’t think.”

Geoff folds his hands in his lap as I turn my eyes to the white ceiling, chewing the inside of my cheek. I’m furious, and terrified for my soul, to realize how easily I’ve been taken in by the lies of this Wrecker-spawned abomination. The right thing to do—the right degree of compromise—has never been more clear.

“I’m going to do it,” I say, the steel in my voice a wall holding back utter dissolution.

“I’m sorry—do what?” Geoff asks.

“The vacuum-hardening. I’m going to do it.”

“Are you sure?” He sounds dubious.

“Absolutely. But so you don’t get any ideas, I’m doing it for the Guild, not for myself.”

“I’m not certain what you mean by that.”

“The more hazard pay I get,” I say, “the more quickly my people can get off this godforsaken station.”

“Your pay is yours. It doesn’t have to go to your Guild.”

“I don’t care.”

“It won’t make any difference,” Geoff says. “The Guild’s debts are considerable.”

“I don’t care.”

“Jude, I don’t want you doing this under any false illusions. The Guild owes so much money they can’t even pay the interest on it. It’s practically a losing proposition to keep housing them.”

“Then why don’t you just let them leave?” I demand, enraged.

Geoff shakes his head. “I’ll tell you if you really want to know—that’s my function. But you won’t like it.”

“I don’t like it already! Just tell me.”

“As you wish. I have to be concerned about the well-being of the station as a whole, and having you here serves a purpose other than economic. The existence of a permanent underprivileged social class reinforces in the minds of the rest of the population the benefits of full participation in this pseudo-socialist post-scarcity paradise of ours. Superiority breeds contentment, of a sort.”

“So you’re telling me my people live in poverty to provide an example of how undesirable poverty is?”

“I told you you weren’t going to like it.”

My anger has shrunk to a cold, clear gem in my heart. “As if it took a supercomputer to figure that out. And I told you I’d made up my mind already.”

“Well!” he says, raising his eyebrows. He looks as if he’s about to offer more argument, but evidently decides otherwise. “So you give your consent for the vacuum-hardening procedure?”

I give a curt nod. “Yes.”

“So be it,” Geoff says quietly. He almost sounds chastened. “I’ll let your boss know you’ll be occupied today, and we’ll get started right away.”

I arrange myself stiffly in the chair, arms at my sides, as if waiting for the lid of my coffin to close.

“You’re all right from here?” Derek asks.

We’re standing at the PM Gate, the smells and tumult and humidity around us as heavy as ever. His arm around my shoulder helps offset the crushing gravity. I nod a little woozily and say, “It’ll be easier inside. Quarter gee.”

As the end of the procedure drew near, Geoff roused me to suggest I might want a friend to walk me home. I said Derek’s name before I really thought it through, but even after the fact, wondering if that had been a good idea, it didn’t seem to me I really had a better option. Geoff contacted him, and Derek was there waiting outside the Geoffroom as soon as the hatch opened.

Now he takes his arm from around me and watches with concern as I take a wobbly step on my own. “Is this . . . you know . . . are you going to be in trouble?”

“How will anyone know?” I say. “There’s nothing visible that’s changed.”

Derek looks like he’s about to say something, then extends his hand instead. Green is now his predominant hue; even his irises have changed color. “Well, Jude, just in case . . . you’ve got a place to bunk down if you need it. No strings, just a place to stow your gear.”

I nod, my throat thickening. I try to say thank you, but I can’t. I duck my eyes, pull the lever, and pass through the gate.

I might be imagining it, but as the gate closes behind me I almost think I hear Derek saying, “Selah, Jude.”

Inside, it’s late and the corridors are empty. This is good because even in the lower grav I’m having trouble walking a straight line. Geoff told me this is nothing to worry about, that I’ll feel fine again by morning, but drawing the wrong kind of attention on the way home through the Quarter would be something to worry about.

The cabin is dark when I slip inside, and Thomas lies motionless in his bunk. I strip off my coverall as quietly and cautiously as possible, crank down my bunk, and slip beneath the blanket. I lie on my back, unable to relax or even close my eyes. I spent most of the day in essentially this position. Like Geoff promised, the process took only twenty minutes—though, having felt nothing, I have only his word for that—but for the rest of my shift and beyond I lay fitfully dozing as I recuperated. I suspect Geoff would have liked to keep me longer than he did, but my father would have been livid if didn’t come home all night.

My heart pounds as I suddenly become aware that Thomas is sitting up. I try to fake deep, easy breathing as Thomas stands and pads across the narrow cabin. Even talking to him right now is too exhausting a thought to contemplate.

“Son,” he says, almost a question, his voice subdued.

I crack an eye. His face is a gray smear in the darkness, gazing down on me like the cinders of a burnt-out sun.

“Son . . . Jude . . .” He sighs, breath hitching like an unbalanced motor. “I’ve been thinking a lot. Praying hard. I think it was wrong to send you to work. You can quit if you like. We’ll get by. We’ll manage.”

I’m not sure he knows I’m awake, sees my eyes wide and dilated in the dark. It’s like he’s talking to himself. But when he reaches down to stroke my hair, his face draws nearer and his brows knit.

“Son?” he says, his voice quavering. “Son, what have they . . . what have you . . .?”

His hand snaps back like the magnetic arm of a relay switch. But I have only an instant to steel myself before he shakes off the stun and whips back, seizing me by my throat and one thigh and hauling me off the bunk.

“What in the Wheel have you done?” he cries, stumbling back as I watch the indistinct room tumble crazily around me. He loses his grip on my thigh, and my knees bounce off the deck even as my windpipe grinds against his other hand. I smash sideways against the bottom of the hatch, torn loose now from both his hands, and watch in the terrible clarity of low gravity as his leg swings back in an arc that will ultimately reverse and connect with my ribs.

I’ve never felt revulsion before at his correctional touch, only the sort of accepting resignation born of an intimate belief in the justice of it. But now, sprawled on the deck, my skin crawls with a sense of wrongness and violation.

Spasming, I curl myself around his leg at the moment of contact, I grab tight with both arms, I twist violently toward the hatch. Arms wheeling, Thomas hits the bulkhead face first.

The lights brighten at his startled cry, and in the sudden glare I scuttle desperately to the cabin’s far corner. Thomas’s face leaves a lurid red smear on the door as he slides to the deck. Dizzy, I push myself to my feet, lungs heaving, alternately holding back sobs and retches.

Thomas huddles on the floor with his arms over his head. “Oh, Builder,” he half coughs, half wails. “What did you do?”

There’s only one way he could have detected my mods. “You see it,” I say, nodding like a drunk. “You’re Sculpted too, you hypocrite.”

He rolls over onto one side. “I couldn’t do my job otherwise,” he says, wiping blood from his mouth. “The job I have to do for you and our people. You have no idea what I’ve sacrificed.”

“If I have no idea,” I shout, “it’s because you never told me! You sent me out there to face the same choices, but you never told me what you chose!”

He sits up, wiping his face and examining the blood on his hand. “I told you what was right, Jude. That’s my job.”

“You think I can’t figure that out for myself?”

“Obviously not. Just like your mother.” He’s breathing hard, wincing. “She couldn’t make the distinction either—what one person sacrifices out of necessity, and what that spares the rest of his family. She tore us apart because of it. She left this family in shambles.” He pushes himself to his feet. “And I suppose you want to join her now, Wrecker take you both.”

He totters the few steps toward me. I try to rise, intending to meet his assault on my feet, however it comes.

When he lays hands on me, though, it’s to take my elbow and help me rise. “Be my guest,” he says, gesturing to the hatch. “The door’s there.”

“The door?” I repeat, confused. “But . . . I thought . . .”

“Thought what? Thought—” Understanding dawns on his face like it hasn’t yet on mine. “Oh, Jude.”

“What?”

“You know so much else. I thought you must have found that out too.”

I feel a tremble in my chest. “Found out what?”

“About your mother. That she’s . . .”

Time seems to freeze. Something terrible roars somewhere far, far away, someplace only I can hear it.

“Son?” Something in my expression causes Thomas to release my elbow and take a step back. “Son,” he says, hands up, “she was dead to us, dead in every way that mattered. She wasn’t the same woman anymore. That woman died.”

I fling myself at him, fists pummeling his chest like I’m a two-year-old throwing a tantrum.

“I was only trying to protect you, Jude! She’s a monster now! She’s Wreckerspawn!”

“Liar!” I cry, spittle flying from my mouth, tears blinding my eyes. “You liar!”

Now he’s crying too, behind his upthrust arms, but it can’t be from my pathetic beating. I shove him away in disgust. He staggers and sits down hard on his bunk. Not pausing to think, I snatch my clothing from the netted basket beside my bunk and cross to the hatch.

“And now you’re leaving me, too,” Thomas says bitterly. “You’re her son in every way.”

“Good,” I say, turning the knob. “That’s what I’d rather be anyway.”

I have one last glimpse of him—hunched on his bunk in the harsh light like a wild animal, clawing at his wet, puffy eyes—and the hatch snicks shut behind me.

Standing over me, Kaiya looks the same as she does in my half-waking imaginings—tall, porcelain-skinned with cascades of black hair, slightly larger than life, and no older than I remember. And those wings. Those glorious, glowing, white wings, stretching up into the inky night to touch at a point as far above her head as her head is above her feet. Each feather is as long and wide as one of my forearms. I could see her clasping me to her white-robed breast and soaring high out of the galactic plane with wings like that. She is an angel.

“Jude, first let me tell you how sorry I am,” she says, leaning in so close I can count every one of her eyelashes. “I must have made a dozen recordings like this for you, at least, every time I move or make some other change, but sorry is the one thing that’s always constant. That and how much I love you.”

She’s not here, of course, but I can almost smell the dry perfume of her hair, the oily tang of her wings. I’m in a Geoffroom, the first one I could find, dressed and tipped back in the big chair and submerged in illusion. I can hardly believe this is happening, that this revelation has been so close to hand for so long, dormant and unguessed-at. All I had to do was ask the right question—or rather, to learn there were questions to ask at all. The magic incantation which had summoned this genie forth from the bottle was, quite simply, “Where is my mother?”

“I’m not authorized to answer that directly,” Geoff told me. “But I do have a message for you.”

“I wanted to bring you with me. Really I did, Jude. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish I could. But because of the Guild’s legal arrangements with the Station, that was impossible, and after the change I’d made I certainly couldn’t stay. All I could do was hope that you reached a point—and preferably long before you reached your Guild majority—where you were able to start asking questions.

“Since you’re seeing this, apparently you have.

“As I speak, you’re now ten years old—thirteen by Guild reckoning. You’re old enough to get this message if you ask, but not old enough that I can contact you directly. I don’t know anything about you, what kind of young man you’ve turned into since the last time I saw you. Are you still as sweet as you were as a child, and as serious? What do you believe? What do you hope for? What do you dream? How have you changed? One thing’s for certain—you must have changed some to be seeing this now. You must have made some hard choices, and you must have many more still to come.

“I’m still changing, too, Jude. I’m heading into the final phases of my exomorphological transform. When you see this, I’ll probably already be homesteading in the New Bountiful Colony at Van Maanen’s Star. It’s a long way from here, terribly far. But that doesn’t mean I won’t drop it all to see you again. It won’t be quick or simple, but if you want to start arranging it, just tell Geoff yes at the end of this recording, or any time afterward. A message will be dispatched to me immediately, though it may take a while to reach me.

“If you don’t want to see me”—she shrugs, and her mighty wings tremble—“well, you can just say nothing. I’ll never know, and I can go on assuming you’ve never seen this.”

Is there really any question? Is there any doubt? “Yes, Mom,” I say, feeling my face crumple. “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!”

“I’m so proud of you, Jude,” she says. “You chose enlightenment over ignorance, and that’s a terribly hard choice to make. I love you and I always will, no matter what. I can’t wait for you to see what I’ve become, and I especially can’t wait to see what you’ve become.”

The Manual tells us that in the beginning the Builder decreed six fundamental machines. These are his six aspects, and all we do we must do with the Six. We need no other machines.

I believe this with all my heart. But not even my sincerest belief, I fear, is sufficient to make it true. Not when the shape of the Builder’s seventh great Machine, transcending the other six, is coming clear.

The Seventh Machine is me.

THE WALLS OF THE UNIVERSE

Paul Melko

The screen door slammed behind John Rayburn, rattling in its frame. He and his dad had been meaning to fix the hinges and paint it before winter, but just then he wanted to rip it off and fling it into the fields.

“Johnny?” his mother called after him, but by then he was in the dark shadow of the bam. He slipped around the far end and any more of his mother’s calls were lost among the sliding of cricket legs. His breath blew from his mouth in clouds.

John came to the edge of the pumpkin patch, stood for a moment, then plunged into it. Through the pumpkin patch was east, toward Case Institute of Technology where he hoped to start as a freshman the next year.

Not that it was likely. There was always the University of Toledo, his father had said. One or two years of work could pay for a year of tuition there.

He kicked a half-rotten pumpkin. Seeds and wispy strings of pumpkin guts spiraled through the air. The smell of dark earth and rotten pumpkin reminded him it was a week before Halloween and they hadn’t had time to harvest the pumpkins: a waste and a thousand dollars lost to earthworms. He ignored how many credits that money would have bought.

The pumpkin field ended at the tree line, the eastern edge of the farm. The trees—old maples and elms—abutted McMaster Road, beyond which was the abandoned quarry. He stood in the trees, just breathing, letting the anger seep away.

It wasn’t his parents’ fault. If anyone was to blame, it was him. He hadn’t had to beat the crap out of Ted Carson. He hadn’t had to tell Ted Carson’s mom off. That had entirely been him. Though the look on Mrs. Carson’s face had almost been worth it when he told her her son was an asshole. What a mess.

He spun at the sound of a stick cracking.

For a moment he thought that Ted Carson had chased him out of the farmhouse, that he and his mother were there in the woods. But the figure who stood there was just a boy, holding a broken branch in his hand.

“Johnny?” the boy said. The branch flagged in his grip, touching the ground.

John peered into the dark. He wasn’t a boy; he was a teenager. John stepped closer. The teen was dressed in jeans and plaid shirt. Over the shirt he wore a sleeveless red coat that looked oddly out of date.

His eyes lingered on the stranger’s face. No, not a stranger. The teen had his face.

“Hey, Johnny. It’s me, Johnny.”

The figure in the woods was him.

John looked at this other John, this John Subprime, and decided he would be the one. He was clearly a Johnny Farmboy, not one of the Johnny Rebels, not one of the Broken Johns, so he would be wide-eyed and gullible. He’d believe John’s story, and then John could get on with his fife.

“Who . . . who are you?” Johnny Farmboy asked. He was dressed in jeans and a shirt, no coat.

John forced his most honest smile. “I’m you, John.”

“What?”

Johnny Farmboy could be so dense.

“Who do I look like?”

“You look like . . .”

“I look just like you, John. Because I am you.” Johnny Farmboy took a step back, and John continued. “I know what you’re thinking. Some trick. Someone is playing a trick on the farmboy. No. Let’s get past that. Next you’re going to think that you were twins and one of them was put up for adoption. Nope. It’s much more interesting than that.”

Johnny Farmboy crossed his arms. “Explain it, then.”

“Listen, I’m really hungry; I could use some food and a place to sit down. I saw Dad go in the house. Maybe we can sit in the bam, and I can explain everything.”

John waited for the wheels to turn.

“I don’t think so,” Johnny Farmboy finally said.

“Fine. I’ll turn around and walk away. Then you’ll never get to hear the story.”

John watched the emotions play across Farmboy’s face. Typically skeptical, he was debating how full of crap this wraith in the night was, while desperately wanting to know the answer to the riddle. Farmboy loved puzzles.

Finally his face relaxed. “Let’s go to the bam,” he said.

The stranger walked at his side, and John eased away from him. As they walked through the pumpkin patch, John noted that their strides matched. John pulled open the back door of the bam, and the young man entered ahead of him, tapping the fight switch by the door.

“A little warmer,” he said. He rubbed his hands together and turned to John.

The fight hit his face squarely, and John was startled to see the uncanny match between them. The sandy hair was styled differently and was longer. The clothes were odd; John had never worn a coat like that. The young man was just a bit thinner as well. He wore a blue backpack, so fully stuffed that the zipper wouldn’t close all the way. There was a cut above his eye. A bit of brown blood was crusted over his left brow, clotted but recent.

He could have passed as John’s twin.

“So, who are you?”

“What about a bite of something to eat?”

John went to the horse stall and pulled an apple from a bag. He tossed it to the young man. He caught it and smiled at John.

“Tell the story, and I might get some dinner from the house.”

“Did Dad teach you to be so mean to strangers? I bet if he found me in the woods, he’d invite me in to dinner.”

“Tell,” John said.

“Fine.” The young man flung himself on a hay bale and munched the apple. “It’s simple, really. I’m you. Or rather I’m you genetically, but I grew up on this same farm in another universe. And now I’ve come to visit myself.”

“Bullshit. Who put you up to this?”

“Okay, okay. I didn’t believe me either.” A frown passed over his face. “But I can prove it. Hold on a second.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Here we go: That horse is named Stan or Dan. You bought him from the McGregors on Butte Road when you were ten. He’s stubborn and willful and he hates being saddled. But hell canter like a show horse if he knows you have an apple in your pocket.” He turned to the stalls on his left. “That pig is called Rosey. That cow is Wilma. The chickens are called Ladies A through F. How am I doing so far?” He smiled an arrogant smile.

“You stole some of your uncle’s cigarettes when you were twelve and smoked them all. You killed a big bullfrog with your BB gun when you were eight. You were so sickened by it you threw up and haven’t used a gun since. Your first kiss was with Amy Walder when you were fourteen. She wanted to show you her underwear too, but you ran home to Mommy. I don’t blame you. She’s got cooties everywhere I go.

“Everyone calls you Johnny, but you prefer John. You have a stash of Playboys in the bam loft. And you burned a hole in the rug in your room once. No one knows because you rearranged your room so that the night stand is on top of it.” He spread his arms like a gymnast who’d just struck a landing.

“Well? How close did I come?” He smiled and tossed the apple core into Stan’s stall.

“I never kissed Amy Walder.” Amy had gotten pregnant when she was fifteen by Tyrone Biggens. She’d moved to Montana with her aunt and hadn’t come back. John didn’t mention that everything else he’d said was true.

“Well, was I right?”

John nodded. “Mostly.”

“Mostly? I nailed it on the head with a hammer, because it all happened to me. Only it happened in another universe.”

How did this guy know so much about him? Who had he talked to? His parents? “Okay. Answer this. What was my first cat’s name?”

“Snowball.”

“What is my favorite class?”

“Physics.”

“What schools did I apply to?”

The stranger paused, frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Why not? You know everything else.”

“I’ve been traveling, you know, for a while. I haven’t applied to college yet, so I don’t know. As soon as I used the device, I became someone different. Up till then, we were the same.” He looked tired. “Listen. Fm you, but if I can’t convince you, that’s fine. Let me sleep in the loft tonight and then I’ll leave.”

John watched him grab the ladder, and he felt a twinge of guilt at treating him so shabbily. “Yeah, you can sleep in the loft. Let me get you some dinner. Stay here. Don’t leave the bam, and hide if someone comes. You’d give my parents a heart attack.”

“Thanks, John.”

John watched Farmboy disappear through the door into the night, shuddering and then exhaling. He hadn’t even come to the hard part yet.

It would have been so easy to kill Farmboy, a blow to the back of the head, and it was his. But John wouldn’t do that. He hoped, not yet. He was desperate, but not willing to commit homicide. Or would it be suicide?

He chuckled grimly to himself. Dan the Man nickered in response. John took an apple from the basket and reached out to the horse. Suddenly his eyes were filled with tears.

“Hold yourself together, man,” he whispered as he let Dan gingerly chomp the apple from his hand. His own Dan was dead, at his own hand.

He’d taken Dan riding and had tried for the fence beyond the back field. They had flown. But Dan’s hind left hadn’t cleared it. The bone had broken, and John ran sobbing to his farm.

His father met him hallway, a rifle in his hand, his face grim. He’d seen the whole thing.

“Dan’s down!” John cried.

His father nodded and handed the rifle to him.

John took it blankly, then tried to hand it back to his father.

“No!”

“If the leg’s broken, you must.”

“Maybe. . . .” But he stopped. Dan was whinnying shrilly; he could hear it from where they stood. The leg had been horribly twisted. There was no doubt.

“Couldn’t Dr. Kimble look at him?”

“How will you pay for that?”

“Will you?”

His father snorted and walked away.

John watched him trudge back to the house until Dan’s cries became too much for him. He turned then, tears raining down his cheeks.

Dan’s eyes were wide. He shook his head heavily at John, then he settled when John placed the barrel against his skull. Perhaps he knew. John fished an apple from his pocket and slipped it between Dan’s teeth.

The horse held it there, not biting, waiting. He seemed to nod at John. Then John had pulled the trigger.

The horse had shuddered and fallen still. John sank to the ground and cried for Dan for an hour.

But here he was. Alive. He rubbed Dan’s muzzle.

“Hello, Dan. Back from the dead,” John said. “Just like me.”

His mother and father stopped talking when the door slammed, so he knew they’d been talking about him.

“I’m gonna eat in the bam,” he said. “I’m working on an electronics experiment.”

He took a plate from the cabinet and began to dish out the lasagna. He filled the plate with enough to feed two of him.

His father caught his eye, then said, “Son, this business with the Carson boy . . .”

John slipped a second fork into his pocket. “Yeah?”

“I’m sure you did the right thing and all.” John nodded at his father, saw his mother look away.

“He hates us because we’re farmers and we dig in the dirt.” His mother lifted her apron strap over her neck, hung the apron on a chair, and slipped out of the kitchen.

“I know that, Johnny . . . John. But sometimes you gotta keep the peace.”

John nodded. “Sometimes I have to throw a punch, Dad.” He turned to go.

“John, you can eat in here with us.”

“Not tonight, Dad.”

Grabbing a quart of milk, he walked through the laundry room and left out the back door.

“Stan never lets anyone do that but me.”

John turned from rubbing Dan’s ears. “Just so,” he said. He took the proffered paper towel full of lasagna, dug into it with the extra fork Farmboy had fetched.

“I always loved this lasagna. Thanks.”

Farmboy frowned, and John recognized the stubbornness; he did the same thing when presented with the impossible. He decided to stay silent and stop goading him with the evidence. This John needed a softer touch.

John ate in silence while Farmboy watched, until finally he said, “Let’s assume for a moment that you are me from another universe. How can you do it? And why you?”

Through a mouthful of pasta, he said, “With my device, and I don’t know.”

“Elaborate,” John said, angry.

“I was given a device that lets me pass from one universe to the next. It’s right here under my shirt. I don’t know why it was me. Or rather I don’t know why it was us.”

“Stop prancing around my questions!” Farmboy shouted. “Who gave you the device?”

“I did!” John grinned.

“One of us from another universe gave you the device.”

“Yeah. Another John. Nice looking fellow.” So far all he had said was the truth.

Farmboy was silent for a while, his lasagna half-eaten. Finally he said, “I need to feed the sheep.” He poured a bag of com into the trough. John lifted the end of it with him. “Thanks.” They fed the cows and the horse afterwards, then finished their own dinner.

Farmboy said, “So if you are me, what do I call you?”

“Well, John won’t work, will it? Well, it will if there’s just the two of us, but as soon as you start adding the infinite number of Johns out there . . . how about John Prime?”

“Then who gave you the device?”

“Superprime,” John Prime said with a smile. “So do you believe me yet?”

Farmboy was still dubious. “Maybe.”

“All right. Here’s the last piece of evidence. No use denying this.” He pulled up his pant leg to reveal a long white scar, devoid of hair. “Let’s see yours,” John said, pushing down his panic. The last time he’d tried this, it hadn’t been there.

Farmboy looked at the scar, and then pulled his jeans up to the knee. The cold air of the barn drew goose bumps on his calf everywhere except the puckered flesh of his own identical scar.

When John Prime had been twelve, he and Bobby Walder had climbed the barbed wire fence of old Mrs. Jones to swim in her pond. Mrs. Jones had set the dogs on them, and they’d had to run naked across the field, diving over the barbed wire fence. John hadn’t quite cleared it.

Bobby had run off, and John had limped home. The cut on his leg had required three dozen stitches and a tetanus shot.

“Now do you believe?” John Prime asked.

John stared at the scar on his leg. “I believe. Hurt like hell, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” John Prime said with a grin. “Yes, it did, brother.”

John sat in the fishbowl—the glass-enclosed room outside the principal’s office—ignoring the eyes of his classmates and wondering what the hell John Prime was up to. He’d left his twin in the bam loft with half his lunch and an admonition to stay out of sight.

“Don’t worry,” he’d said with a smirk. “Meet me at the library after school.”

“Don’t let anyone see you, all right?”

John Prime had smiled again.

“John?” Principal Gushman stuck his head out of his office. John’s stomach dropped; he was never in trouble.

Mr. Gushman had a barrel chest, balding head, and perpetual frown. He motioned John to a chair and sat behind the desk, letting out his breath heavily as he sat. He’d been a major in the Army, people said. He liked to be strict. John had never talked with him in the year he’d been principal.

“John, we have a policy regarding violence and bullying.”

John opened his mouth to speak.

“Hold on. Let me finish. The facts of the matter are these. You hit a classmate—a younger classmate—several times in the locker room. He required a trip to the emergency room and stitches.” He opened a file on his desk.

“The rules are there for the protection of all students. There can be no violence in the school. There can be no exceptions. Do you understand?” John stared, then said, “I understand the rule. But—”

“You’re a straight-A student, varsity basketball and track. You’re well-liked. Destined for a good college. This could be a blemish on your record.” John knew what the word “could” meant. Gushman was about to offer him a way out.

“A citation for violence, as stated in the student handbook, means a three-day suspension and the dropping of any sports activities. You’d be off the basketball and track teams.”

John’s throat tightened.

“Do you see the gravity of the situation?”

“Yes,” John managed to say.

Gushman opened another folder on his desk. “But I recognize this as a special case. So if you write a letter of apology to Mrs. Carson, we’ll drop the whole matter.” Gushman looked at him, expecting an answer.

John felt cornered. Yes, he had hit Ted, because he was a prick. Ted needed hitting, if anyone did; he had dropped John’s clothes in the urinal. He said, “Why does Mrs. Carson want the letter? I didn’t hit her. I hit Ted.”

“She feels that you showed her disrespect. She wants the letter to address that as well as the violence.”

If he just wrote the letter, it would just all go away. But he’d always know that his mother and Mrs. Carson had squashed him. He hated that. He hated any form of defeat. He wanted to tell Gushman he’d take the suspension. He wanted to throw it all in the man’s face.

Instead, he said, “I’d like to think about it over the weekend if that’s okay.”

Mr. Gushman’s smile told John that he was sure he’d bent John to his will. John went along with it, smiling back. “Yes. You may. But I need a decision on Monday.”

John left for his next class.

John walked past the librarian, his Toledo Meerkats cap low over his face. He didn’t want to be recognized as John Rayburn. At least not yet. The reference section was where he expected it to be, which was a relief. If the little things were the same he had hope for the bigger things. He’d tried living in the weird places, but sooner or later something tripped him up and he had to run.

He needed a place like what he remembered, and so far, this place seemed pretty close.

He reached for the almanac. Sure an encyclopedia had more information, but he could be lost in the details for hours. All he needed was a gross comparison.

He ran his finger down the fist of presidents, recognizing all of them. He already knew this wasn’t a world where Washington served four terms and set a standard for a king-president serving life terms. Turning the page, he found the next twenty presidents to be the same until the last four. Who the hell was Bill Clinton?

The deviation was small, even so. It had to be, he was so tired of running.

John found a quiet table, opened his backpack, and began researching.

The city library was just a couple of blocks from the school. John wandered through the stacks until he found John Prime at the center study desk in a row of three on the third floor. He had a dozen Findlay Heralds spread out, as well as a couple of books. His backpack was open, and John saw that it was jammed with paper and folders.

To hide his features, John Prime wore a Toledo Meerkats baseball hat and sunglasses. He pulled off his glasses when he saw John, and said, “You look like crap. What happened to you?”

“Nothing. Now what are you doing? I have to get back to the school by five. There’s a game tonight.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” John Prime picked up the history book. “In every universe I’ve been in, it’s always something simple. Here George Bush raised taxes and he never got elected to a second term. Clinton beat him in ’91.” He opened the history book and pointed to the color panel of American Presidents. “In my world, Bush never backed down on the taxes thing, and the economy took off and he got elected to his second term.

He was riding even higher when Hussein was assassinated in the middle of his second term. His son was elected in 1996.”

John laughed, “That joker?”

John Prime scowled. “Dubya worked the national debt down to nothing. Unemployment was below 3 percent.”

“It’s low here too. Clinton did a good job.”

John Prime pointed to a newspaper article he had copied. “Whitewater? Drug use? Vince Foster?” He handed the articles to John, then shook his head. “Never mind. It’s all pretty much irrelevant anyway. At least we didn’t grow up in a world where Nixon was never caught.”

“What happened there?”

“The Second Depression usually. Russia and the US never coming to an arms agreement. Those are some totalitarian places.” He took the articles back from John. “Are there Post-It notes in this world?”

“Yes. Of course.”

John Prime shrugged. “Sometimes there aren’t. It’s worth a fortune. And so simple.” He pulled out his notebook. “I have a hundred of them.” He opened his notebook to a picture of the MTV astronaut. “MTV?”

“Yep.”

“The World Wide Web?”

“I think so.”

“Rubik’s Cube?”

“Never heard of it.”

John Prime checked the top of the figure with a multi-colored cube. “Ah ha. That’s a big money maker.”

“It is?”

He turned the page. “Dungeons and Dragons?”

“You mean that game where you pretend to be a wizard?”

“That’s the one. How about Lozenos? You got that here?”

“Never heard of it. What is it?”

“Candy. South African diamond mines?”

They worked through a long list of things, about three-quarters of which John had heard of, fads, toys, or inventions.

“This is a good list to work from. Some good money makers on this.”

“What are you going to do?” John asked. This was his world, and he didn’t like what he suspected John Prime had in mind.

John Prime smiled. “There’s money to be made in interdimensional trade.”

“Interdimensional trade?”

“Not in actual goods. There’s no way I can transport enough stuff to make a profit. Too complicated. But ideas are easy to transport, and what’s in the public domain in the last universe is unheard of in the next. Rubik sold one hundred million Cubes. At ten dollars a cube, that’s a billion dollars.” He lifted up the notebook. “There are two dozen ideas in here that made hundreds of millions of dollars in other worlds.”

“So what are you going to do?”

John Prime smiled his arrogant smile. “Not me. We. I need an agent in this world to work the deals. Who better than myself? The saying goes that you can’t be in more than one place at a time. But I can.”

“Uh huh.”

“And we split it fifty-fifty.”

“Uh huh.”

“Listen. It’s not stealing. These ideas have never been thought of here. The people who invented these things might not even be alive here.”

“I never said it was stealing,” John said. “I’m just not so sure I believe you still.”

John Prime sighed. “So what’s got you so down today?”

John said, “I may get suspended from school and kicked off the basketball and track teams.”

“What? Why?” John Prime looked genuinely concerned.

“I beat up a kid, Ted Carson. His mother told my mother and the principal. They want me to apologize.”

John Prime was angry. “You’re not gonna, are you? I know Ted Carson. He’s a little shit. In every universe.”

“I don’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.” John Prime pulled a notebook out of his bag. “Ted Carson, huh? I have something on him.”

John looked over his shoulder at the notebook. Each page had a newspaper clipping, words highlighted and notes at the bottom referencing other pages. One title read, “Mayor and Council Members Indicted.” The picture showed Mayor Thiessen yelling. Another article was a list of divorces granted. John Prime turned the page and pointed. “Here it is. Ted Carson picked up for torturing a neighbor’s cat. Apparently the boy killed a dozen neighborhood animals before getting caught.” He glanced at John.

“I’ve never heard anything about that.”

“Then maybe he never got caught here.”

“What are we going to do with that?” John asked. He read the article, shaking his head.

“Grease the gears, my brother.” He handed John a newspaper listing of recent divorces. “Photocopy this.”

“Why?”

“It’s the best place to figure out who’s sleeping with who. That usually doesn’t change from one universe to the next. Speaking of which, how does Casey Nicholson look in this universe?”

“What?”

“Yeah. Is she a dog or a hottie? Half the time she’s pregnant in her junior year and living in a trailer park.”

“She’s a cheerleader,” John said.

John Prime glanced at him and smiled. “You like her, don’t you? Are we dating her?”

“No!”

“Does she like us?”

“Me! Not us,” John said. “And I think so. She smiles at me in class.”

“What’s not to love about us?” He glanced at his watch. “Time for you to head over to the school, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll meet you at home tonight. See ya.”

“Don’t talk to anyone,” John said. “They’ll think it was me. Don’t get me in trouble.”

“Don’t worry. The last thing I want to do is screw up your life here.”

“Casey, Casey, Casey,” John thought as he watched Johnny Farmboy depart. Casey Cheerleader was the best Casey of all. She smelled so clean. And it was all wasted on Johnny Farmboy.

He had planned on working until the library closed, but the idea of seeing Casey was overwhelming. He halfheartedly perused a few micro-fiched newspapers, then packed his things up and headed for the school.

Once again he was hit with nostalgia as he walked through the small Findlay downtown. He had spent his entire life in this little town—well, not this particular town. For a moment he wanted to run into Maude’s Used Books and rummage through the old comic books. But the counter clerk would surely recognize him. Not yet, he thought.

The junior varsity team was playing when he reached the high school stadium. He found a seat at the top of the bleacher and made sure his ball cap covered his face. The sun was just dipping below the far end zone, casting long violet shadows as the JV teams—Findlay High was playing Gurion Valley—moved the ball haphazardly up and down the field. Watching the shadows was more interesting.

But then the game was over, and the stands were filling. He recognized faces, year old memories, but still vivid. He shrank down on the bench, pulled up the collar on his ski coat. Then he laughed at himself. Always hiding, always running. Not this time.

The varsity cheerleaders came on the field. He spotted Casey immediately and he felt a spurt of hormones course through him. Across universes he’d come for her, he thought. How was that for a pickup line?

Goddamn, she was beautiful. He stood to get a better look.

“Hey, John!” someone shouted, two rows down.

John looked at him, shocked. He had no idea who he was. A wave of doubt shook him. He’d been gone a year; how much had he missed in that time?

“Hey.”

“Shouldn’t you be down with the team? I thought you were keeping stats.”

“Yeah, I was just going.”

John took the bleacher steps two at a time, nearly running. He had things to do before he could gawk at Casey.

After the game John left a copy of the stats with Coach Jessick and then met his father in the parking lot.

“Not a good game for the home team,” his father said. He wore his overalls and a John Deere hat. John realized he’d sat in the stands like that, with manure on his shoes. Soft country and western whispered tinnily from the speakers. For a moment he was embarrassed, then he remembered why he’d had to fight Ted Carson.

“Thanks for picking me up, Dad.”

“No problem.” He dropped the truck into gear and pulled it out of the lot. “Odd thing. I thought I saw you in the stands.”

John glanced at his father, forced himself to be calm. “I was down keeping stats.”

“I know, I saw. Must be my old eyes, playing tricks.”

Had John Prime not gone back to the bam? What was that bastard doing to him?

“Gushman called.”

John nodded in the dark of the cab. “I figured.”

“Said you were gonna write an apology.”

“I don’t want to,” John said. “But. . . .”

“I know. A stain on your permanent record and all.” His father turned the radio off. “I was at the U in Toledo for a semester or two. Me and college didn’t get along much. But you, son. You can learn and do something interesting with it. Which is really what me and your mother want.”

“Dad—”

“Hold on a second. I’m not saying what you did to the Carson boy was wrong, but you did get caught at it. And if you get caught at something, you usually have to pay for it. Writing a letter saying something isn’t the same as believing it.”

John nodded. “I think I’m gonna write the letter, Dad.”

His father grunted, satisfied. “You helping with the apples tomorrow? We wait any longer and we won’t get any good ones.”

“Yeah, I’ll help until lunch. Then I have basketball practice.”

“Okay.”

They sat in silence for the remainder of the trip. John was glad his father was so pragmatic.

As they drove up to the farmhouse, John considered what he was going to do about John Prime.

“Where are you?”

John paused in his scanning of the newspaper and gripped a shovel. It might have come to violence anyway; Johnny Farmboy looked pissed. “Up here.”

“You went to the football game,” he accused as he climbed the ladder. “Just for a bit.”

“My dad saw you.”

“But he didn’t realize it was me, did he?”

Farmboy’s anger faded a notch. “No, no. He thought he was seeing things.”

“See? No one will believe it even if they see us together.”

Farmboy shook his head. He grunted.

John added, “This Ted Carson thing is about to go away.”

“What do you mean?”

“A bunch of cats have gone missing over there.”.

“You went out in public and talked to people?”

“Just kids. And it was dark. No one even saw my face. Three cats this month, by the way. Ted is an animal serial killer. We can pin this on him and his mom will have to back off.”

“I’m writing the letter of apology,” Farmboy said.

“What? No!”

“It’s better this way. I don’t want to screw up my future.”

“Listen. It’ll never get any better than this. The kid is a psychopath and we can shove it in his parents’ faces!”

“No. And listen. You have got to lay low. I don’t want you wandering around town messing up things,” Farmboy said. “Going to the library today was too much.”

John smiled. “Don’t want me hitting on Casey Nicholson, huh?”

“Stop it!” He raised his hand. “That’s it. Why don’t you just move on? Hit the next town or the next universe or whatever. Just get out of my life!”

John frowned. It was time for the last shot. He lifted up his shirt. Under his grey sweatshirt was a shoulder harness with a thin disk the diameter of a softball attached at the center. It had a digital readout which said 7533, three blue buttons on the front, and dials and levers on the sides.

John began unstrapping the harness and said, “John, maybe it’s time you saw for yourself.”

John looked at the device. It was tiny for what it was supposed to do.

“How does it work?” he asked. John envisioned golden wires entwining black vortices of primal energy, x-ray claws tearing at the walls of the universe as if they were tissue.

“I don’t know how it works,” John Prime said, irritated. “I just know how to work it.” He pointed to the digital readout. “This is your universe number.”

“Seventy-five thirty-three?”

“My universe is 7433.” He pointed to the first blue button. “This increments the universe counter. See?” He pressed the button once and the number changed to 7534. “This one decrements the counter.” He pressed the second blue button and the counter flipped back to 7533. He pointed to a metal lever on the side of the disk. “Once you’ve dialed in your universe, you pull the lever and—Pow!—you’re in the next universe.”

“It looks like a slot machine,” John said.

John Prime pursed his lips. “It’s the product of a powerful civilization.”

“Does it hurt?” John asked.

“I don’t feel a thing. Sometimes my ears pop because the weather’s a little different. Sometimes I drop a few inches or my feet are stuck in the dirt.”

“What’s this other button for?”

John Prime shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve pressed it, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. There’s no owner’s manual, you know?” He grinned. “Wanna try it out?”

More than anything, John wanted to try it. Not only would he know for sure if John Prime was full of crap, but he would get to see another universe. The idea was astounding. To travel, to be free of all this . . . detritus in his life. Ten more months in Findlay was a lifetime. Here in front of him was adventure.

“Show me.”

John Prime frowned. “I can’t. It takes twelve hours to recharge the device after it’s used. If I left now, I’d be in some other universe for a day before I could come back.”

“I don’t want to be gone a day! I have chores. I have to write a letter.”

“It’s okay. I’ll cover for you here.”

“No way!”

“I can do it. No one would know. I’ve been you for as long as you have.”

“No. There’s no way I’m leaving for twelve hours with you in control of my life.”

John Prime shook his head. “How about a test run? Tomorrow you’re doing what?”

“Picking apples with my dad.”

“I’ll do it instead. If your dad doesn’t notice a thing, then you take the trip, and I’ll cover for you. If you leave tomorrow afternoon, you can be back on Sunday and not miss a day of school.” John Prime opened his backpack wider. “And to make the whole trip a lot more fun, here’s some spending money.” He pulled out a stack of twenty dollar bills.

“Where did you get that?” John had never seen so much money. His bank account had no more than three hundred dollars in it.

John Prime handed him the stack of cash. The twenties were crisp, the paper smooth-sticky. “There’s got to be two thousand dollars here.”

“Yep.”

“It’s from another universe, isn’t it? This is counterfeit.”

“It’s real money. And no one in this podunk town will be able to tell me that it’s not.” John Prime pulled a twenty out of his own pocket. “This is from your universe. See any differences?”

John took the first twenty off the stack and compared it to the crumpled bill. They looked identical to him.

“How’d you get it?”

“Investments.” John Prime’s smile was ambiguous.

“Did you steal it?”

John Prime shook his head. “Even if I did steal it, the police looking for it are in another universe.”

John felt a twinge of apprehension. John Prime had his fingerprints, his looks, his voice. He knew everything there was to know about him. He could rob a bank, kill someone, and then escape to another universe, leaving John holding the bag. All the evidence of such a crime would point to him, and there was no way he could prove that it wasn’t him.

Would he do such a thing? John Prime had called John his brother. In a sense they were identical brothers. And John Prime was letting John use his device, in effect stranding him in this universe. That took trust.

“Twenty-four hours,” John Prime said. “Think of it as a vacation. A break from all this shit with Ted Carson.”

The lure of seeing another universe was too strong. “You pick apples with my father tomorrow. If he doesn’t suspect anything, then maybe I’ll take the trip.”

“You won’t regret it, John.”

“But you have got to promise not to mess anything up!”

John Prime nodded. “That’s the last thing I’d want to do, John.”

“Damn, it’s early,” John said, rubbing the straw from his hair.

“Don’t let my dad hear you cursing,” Johnny Farmboy said.

“Right, no cursing.” John stood, stretching. “Apple picking? I haven’t done that . . . in a while.” It had been a lot longer than a year. His own father hadn’t bothered with the orchard in years.

John peered out a small window. Farmboy’s father was already out there with the tractor.

“What’s up between you and your dad? Anything heavy?” John asked. Johnny Farmboy took off his coat and handed it to John, taking John’s in return.

John shook his head. “We talked last night about the Carson thing. He wanted me to write the letter.”

“So that’s it. What about your mother?”

“She was pissed with me before. She still may be. We haven’t talked since Thursday.”

“Anything happening this afternoon?” John Prime took a pencil out and started jotting things down.

“Nothing until tomorrow. Church, then chores. Muck the stalls. Homework. But I’ll do that.”

“What’s due for Monday?”

“Reading for Physics. Essay for English on Gerard Manley Hopkins. Problem set in Calculus. That’s it.”

“What’s your class schedule like?”

Farmboy began to tell him, but then said, “Why do you need to know that? I’ll be back.”

“In case someone asks.”

“No one’s gonna ask.” As Farmboy pulled John’s ski jacket on, he looked through his binoculars. “I’ll watch from here. If anything goes wrong, you pretend to be sick and come back to the bam. You’ll brief me and then we switch back.”

John Prime smiled. “Nothing’s gonna happen. Relax.” He pulled on gloves and climbed down the ladder. “See ya at lunch.”

With more trepidation than he showed, John walked out to the orchard. He cast one glance over his shoulder and saw Farmboy watching him through binoculars. This was a test in more ways than one. He could still run. He could still find another bolthole.

His father barely glanced at him, said, “How ’bout we start this end?”

“Okay,” John said, his throat dry. His father stood tall, and when he walked past he smelled of dirt, not booze. He walked up to a tree and turned to look at him.

“Well? Come on.”

John gripped a branch and pulled himself into the tree. The rough bark cut his hands through the gloves. His foot missed a hold, and he slipped. “Careful there.”

“I’m getting too big for this,” John said.

“Next year, I’ll have to hire someone to help me.”

John paused, words of banter on his bps. He smiled. “I bet mom could do it.”

His father laughed. “Now there’s a thought.”

John felt a twinge of jealousy as he watched his father laugh at John Prime’s joke. He wondered what John Prime had said to make his father laugh. Then he realized that if his father was laughing at John Prime’s jokes, there was no danger of being found out.

The precarious nature of his situation bothered him. Effectively, John Prime was him. And he was . . . nobody. Would it be that hard for someone to slip into his life? He realized that it wouldn’t. He had a few immediate relationships, interactions that had happened within the last few weeks that were unique to him, but in a month, those would all be absorbed into the past. He had no girlfriend. No real friends, except for Erik, and that stopped at the edge of the court. The hardest part would be for someone to pick up his studies, but even that wouldn’t be too hard. All his classes were a breeze, except Advanced Physics, and they were starting a new module on Monday. It was a clear breaking point.

John wondered what he would find in another universe. Would there be different advances in science? Could he photocopy a scientific journal and bring it back? Maybe someone had discovered a unified theory in the other universe. Or a simple solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. Or . . . but what could he really do with someone else’s ideas? Publish them under his own name? Was that any different than John Prime’s scheme to get rich with Rubik’s Square, whatever that was? He laughed and picked up his physics book. He needed to stay caught up in this universe. They were starting Quantum Mechanics on Monday, after all.

John brought Johnny Farmboy a sandwich.

“Your mom didn’t notice either.”

He took the sandwich, pausing to look John in the eye. “You look happy.”

John started. His clothes were covered in sap. His hands were cut and raw. His shoulders ached. He had always loathed farm work. Yet . . .

“It felt good. I haven’t done that in a while.”

Around a bite of sandwich, Farmboy said, “You’ve been gone a long time.”

“Yeah,” John said. “You don’t know what you have here. Why do you even want to go to college?”

Farmboy laughed. “It’s great for the first fifteen years, then it really begins to drag.”

“I hear you.”

Farmboy handed John his ski jacket. “What will I see in the next universe?”

John’s heart caught. “So you’re gonna take me up on the offer?” he said casually.

“Yeah, I think so. Tell me what I’ll see.”

“It’s pretty much like this one, you know. I don’t know the exact differences.”

“So we’re in the next universe?”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t try to meet him or anything. He doesn’t know about us.”

“Why’d you pick me to talk to? Why not some other me? Or why not all of us?”

“This is the most like home,” John said. “This feels like I remember.”

“In one hundred universes this is the one that is most like yours? How different are we from one to the next? It can’t be too different.”

“Do you really want to hear this?”

Farmboy nodded.

“Well, there are a couple types of us. There’s the farm boy us, like you and me. Then there’s the dirt bag us.”

“Dirt bag?”

“Yeah. We smoke and hang out under the bleachers.”

“What the hell happened there?”

“And sometimes we’ve knocked up Casey Nicholson and we live in the low income houses on Stuart. Then there’s the places where we’ve died.”

“Died?”

“Yeah. Car accidents. Tractor accidents. Gun accidents. We’re pretty lucky to be here, really.”

Farmboy looked away, and John knew what he was thinking. It was the time he and his father had been tossing hay bales and the pitchfork had fallen. Or it was the time he had walked out on old Mrs. Jones’ frozen pond, and the ice had cracked, and he’d kept going. Or the time the quarry truck had run him off the road. It was a fluke really that either of them was alive.

Finally Farmboy said, “I think I’m ready. What’s the plan?”

John Prime lifted up his shirt and began unbuckling the harness. “You leave from the pumpkin field. Select the universe c ne forward. Press the toggle. Spend the day exploring. Go to the library. F ‘gure out what’s different. If you want, write down any money-making ideas you come across.” When he saw Farmboy’s face, John added, “Fine. Then don’t. Tomorrow, flip the counter back to this universe and pull the lever. You’ll be back for school on Monday.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

“Don’t lose the device! Don’t get busted by the police! Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself.”

“Right.”

“Don’t flash your money either. If anyone recognizes you, go with it and then duck out. You don’t want to make it hot for our guy over there.”

“Right.”

“Johnny, you look a little nervous. Calm down. Ill keep you covered on this end.” John slapped him on the back, then handed him the harness.

Farmboy pulled off his shirt and shivered. He passed the two bands of the harness over his shoulders, then connected the center belt behind his back. The disk was cold against his belly. The straps looked like a synthetic material.

“It fits.”

“It should,” John said. “I copied some of my materials for you in case you need them.” John Prime pulled a binder from his own bag, opened it to show him pages of clippings and notes. “You never know. You might need something. And here’s a backpack to hold it all in.”

John felt a twinge pass through him. He was powerless. The device was out of his control.

“What’s wrong?” Farmboy asked.

“I haven’t been away from the device in a long time. It’s my talisman, my escape. I feel naked without it. You gotta be careful with it.”

“Hey,” John said. “I’m leaving my life in your hands. How about a little two-way trust?”

John smiled grimly. “Okay. Are you ready? I’ve got 12:30 on my watch. Which means you can return half an hour past midnight. Okay?”

John checked his watch. “Okay.”

“Toggle the universe.”

John lifted the shirt and switched the number forward to 7534. “Check.”

“Okay. I’ll watch from the loft.” John climbed the ladder, then turned. “Make sure no one sees you.”

His heart was racing. This was it. It was almost his. He looked down from the bam window, waved.

Farmboy waved back, then he lifted up his shirt. Sunlight caught the brushed metal of the device.

Farmboy hesitated.

“Go!” John whispered. “Do it.”

Farmboy smiled, pulled the switch, and disappeared.

John’s ears popped and his feet caught in the dirt. He stumbled and fell forward, catching himself on his gloved hands. He wasn’t in a pumpkin patch anymore. Noting the smell of manure, he realized he was in a cow pasture.

He worked his feet free. His shoes were embedded an inch into the earth. He wondered if there was dirt lodged in his feet now. It looked like the dirt in the current universe was an inch higher here than in the old one. Where did that extra inch of dirt go? He shook his feet and the dirt fell free.

It worked! He felt a thrill. He’d doubted to the last second, but here he was, in a new universe.

He paused. John Prime had said there was a John in this universe. He spun around. Cows grazed contentedly a few hundred yards away, but otherwise the fields were empty, the trees gone. There was no farmhouse.

McMaster Road was there and so was Gurney Road. John walked from the field, hopped the fence, and stood at the comer of the roads. Looking to the north toward town, he saw nothing but a farmhouse maybe a mile up the road. To the east, where the stacks of the GE plant should have been, he saw nothing but forest. To the south, more fields.

John Prime had said there was a John Rayburn in this universe. He’d said that the farm was here. He’d told John he’d been to this universe.

John pawed up his jacket and shirt and tried to read the number on the device. He cupped his hand to shield the sun and read 7534. He was where he expected to be, according to the device. There was nothing here.

The panic settled into his gut. Something was wrong. Something had gone wrong. He wasn’t where he was supposed to be. But that’s okay, he thought, calming himself. It’s okay. He walked to the edge of the road and sat on the small berm there.

Maybe John Prime had it wrong; there were a lot of universes and if all of them were different that was a lot of facts to keep straight.

He stood, determined to assume the best. He’d spend the next twelve hours working according to the plan. Then he’d go back home. He set off for town, a black mood nipping at his heels.

John watched his other self disappear from the pumpkin field and felt his body relax. Now he wouldn’t have to kill him. This way was so much better. A body could always be found, unless it was in some other universe. He didn’t have the device, of course, but then he’d never need it again. In fact he was glad to be rid of it. John had something more important than the device; he had his life back.

It had taken him three days of arguing and cajoling, but finally Johnny Farmboy had taken the bait. Good riddance and goodbye. He had been that naive once. He’d once had that wide-eyed gullibility, ready to explore new worlds. There was nothing out there but pain. He was alive again. He had parents again. He had money—$125,000. And he had his notebook. That was the most important part. The notebook was worth a billion dollars right there.

John looked around the loft. This would be a good place for some of his money. If he remembered right, there was a small cubbyhole in the rafters on the south side of the loft. He found it and pulled out the bubble gum cards and slingshot that was hidden there.

“Damn farmboy.”

He placed about a third of his money in the hiding place. Another third he’d hide in his room. The last third, he’d bury. He wouldn’t deposit it like he’d done in 7489. Or had that been 7490? The cops had been on his ass so fast. So Franklin had been looking the wrong way on all those bills. He’d lost $80,000.

No, he’d be careful this time. He’d show legitimate sources for all his cash. He’d be the talk of Findlay, Ohio as his inventions started panning out. No one would suspect the young physics genius. They’d be jealous, sure, but everybody knew Johnny Rayburn was a brain. The Rubik’s Cube—no, the Rayburn’s Cube—would be his road to fame and riches.

John reached the outskirts of town in an hour, passing a green sign that said “Findlay, Ohio. Population 6232.” His Findlay had a population in the twenty thousand range. As he stood there, he heard a high-pitched whine grow behind him. He stepped off the berm as a truck flew by him, at about forty-five miles per hour. It was in fact two trucks in tandem pulling a large trailer filled with gravel. The fronts of the trucks were flat, probably to aid in stacking several together for larger loads, like a train with more than one locomotive. The trailer was smaller than a typical dump truck in his universe. A driver sat in each truck. Expecting to be enveloped in a cloud of exhaust, John found nothing fouler than moist air.

Flywheel? he wondered. Steam?

Despite his predicament, John was intrigued by the engineering of the trucks. Ten more minutes of walking, past two motels and a diner, he came to the city square, the Civil War monument displayed as proudly as ever, cannon pointed toward the South. A few people were strolling the square, but no one noticed him.

Across the square was the courthouse. Beside it stood the library, identical to what he remembered, a three-story building, its entrance framed by granite lions reclining on brick pedestals. There was the place to start figuring this universe out.

The library was identical in layout to the one he knew. John walked to the card catalog—there were no computer terminals—and looked up the numbers for American history. On the shelf he found a volume by Albert Trey called US History and Heritage: Major Events that Shaped a Nation. He sat in a low chair and paged through it. He found the divergence in moments.

The American Revolution, War of 1812, and Civil War all had the expected results. The presidents were the same through Woodrow Wilson. World War I was a minor war, fisted as the Greco-Turkish War. World War II was fisted as the Great War and was England and the US against Germany, Russia, and Japan. A truce was called in 1956 after years of no resolution to the fighting. Hostilities had flared for years until the eighties when peace was declared and disarmament accomplished in France, which was split up and given to Germany and Spain.

But all of those things happened after Alexander Graham Bell developed an effective battery for the automobile. Instead of an internal combustion engine, cars and trucks in this universe used electric engines. That explained the trucks: electric engines.

But even as he read about the use of zeppelins for transport, the relatively peaceful twentieth century, his anger began to grow. This universe was nothing like his own. John Prime had lied. Finally, he stood and found the local telephone book. He paged through it, looking for Rayburns. As he expected, there were none.

He checked his watch; in eight hours he was going back home and kicking the crap out of John Prime.

His mother called him to dinner, and for a moment he froze with fear. They’ll know, he thought. They’ll know I’m not their son.

Breathing slowly, he hid the money back under his comic book collection in the closet.

“Coming!” he called.

During dinner he kept quiet, focusing on what his parents mentioned, fifing key facts away for later use. There was too much he didn’t know. He couldn’t volunteer anything until he had all his facts right.

Cousin Paul was still in jail. They were staying after church tomorrow for a spaghetti lunch. His mother would be canning and making vinegar that week. His father was buying a turkey from Sam Riley, who had a flock of twenty or so. The dinner finished with homemade apple pie that made the cuts on his hands and the soreness in his back worth it.

After dinner he excused himself. In his room he rooted through Johnny Farmboy’s bookbag. He’d missed a year of school; he had a lot of make-up to do. And, crap, an essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, whoever the heck that was.

By the time the library closed, John’s head was full of facts and details about the new universe. There were a thousand things he’d like to research, but there was no time. He stopped at a newspaper shop and picked an almanac off the shelf. After a moment’s hesitation, he offered to buy the three-dollar book with one of the twenties John Prime had given him. The counter man barely glanced at the bill and handed John sixteen dollars and change. The bills were identical to those in his own world. The coins bore other faces.

He ate a late dinner at Eckart’s cafe, listening to rockabilly music. None of it was familiar music, but it was music that was playable on the country stations at home. Even at ten in the evening, there was a sizeable crowd, drinking coffee and hard liquor. There was no beer to be had.

It was a tame crowd for a Saturday night. He read the almanac and listened in to the conversations around him. Most of it was about cars, girls, and guys, just like in his universe.

By midnight, the crowd had thinned. At half-past midnight, John walked into the square and stood behind the Civil War statue. He lifted his shirt and toggled the number back to 7533.

He paused, checked his watch and saw it was a quarter till one. Close enough, he figured.

He pressed the button.

Nothing happened.

He managed to get through church without falling asleep. Luckily the communion ritual was the same. If there was one thing that didn’t change from one universe to the next, it was church.

He expected the spaghetti lunch afterwards to be just as boring, but across the gymnasium, John saw Casey Nicholson sitting with her family. That was one person he knew where Johnny Farmboy stood with. She liked him, it was clear, but Johnny Farmboy had been too clean-cut to make a move. Not so for him. John excused himself and walked over to her.

“Hi, Casey,” he said.

She blushed at him, perhaps because her parents were there.

Her father said, “Oh, hello, John. How’s the basketball team going to do this year?”

John wanted to yell at him that he didn’t give a rat’s ass. But instead he smiled and said, “We’ll go all the way if Casey is there to cheer for us.”

Casey looked away, her face flushed again. She was dressed in a white Sunday dress that covered her breasts, waist, and hips with enough material to hide the fact that she had any of those features. But he knew what was there. He’d seduced Casey Nicholson in a dozen universes at least.

“I’m only cheering fall sports, John,” she said softly. “I play field hockey in the spring.”

John looked at her mother and asked, “Can I walk with Casey around the church grounds, Mrs. Nicholson?”

She smiled at him, glanced at her husband, and said, “I don’t see why not.”

“That’s a great idea,” Mr. Nicholson said.

Casey stood up quickly, and John had to race after her. She stopped after she had gotten out of sight of the gymnasium, hidden in the alcove where the rest rooms were. When John caught up to her, she said, “My parents are so embarrassing.”

“No shit,” John said.

Her eyes went wide at his cursing, then she smiled.

“I’m glad you’re finally talking to me,” she said.

John smiled and said, “Let’s walk.” He slipped his arm around her waist, and she didn’t protest.

There was no sensation of shifting, no pressure change. The electric car in the parking lot was still there. The device hadn’t worked.

He checked the number: 7533. His finger was on the right switch. He tried it again. Nothing.

It had been twelve hours. Twelve hours and forty-five minutes. But maybe John Prime had been estimating. Maybe it took thirteen hours to recharge. He leaned against the base of the statue and slid to the ground.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. John Prime had lied to him about what was in Universe 7534. Maybe he had lied about the recharge time. Maybe it took days or months to recharge the device. And when he got back, he’d find that John Prime was entrenched in his life.

He sat there, trying the switch every fifteen minutes until three in the morning. He was cold, but finally he fell asleep on the grass, leaning against the Civil War Memorial.

He awoke at dawn, the sun in his eyes as it streamed down Washington Avenue. He stood and jumped up and down to revive his body. His back ached, but the kinks receded after he did some stretches.

At a donut shop off the square, he bought a glazed and an orange juice with the change he had left over from the almanac. A dozen people filed in over the course of an hour to buy donuts and coffee before church or work. On the surface, this world was a lot like his.

John couldn’t stand the waiting. He walked across the square and climbed the library steps and yanked at the door. They were locked, and he saw the sign showing the library’s hours. It was closed until noon.

John looked around. There was an alcove behind the lions with a bench. No one would easily see him from the street. He sat there and tried the device. Nothing.

He continued to try the lever every ten or fifteen minutes. As he sat on the steps of the library, his apprehension grew. He was going to miss school. He was going to miss more than twenty-four hours. He was going to miss the rest of his fife. Why wouldn’t the device work like it was supposed to?

He realized then that everything John Prime had told him was probably a lie. He had to assume that he was the victim of John Prime’s scheming, trapped in another universe. The question was how he would return to his life.

He had the device. It had worked once, to bring him from Universe 7533 to Universe 7534. It would not allow him to return because it wasn’t recharged yet. It took longer than—he checked his watch—twenty hours to recharge the device, apparently.

He stopped. He was basing that logic on information he got from John Prime. Nothing that John Prime had said could be used as valid information. Only things that John had seen or gotten from a valid source were true. And John Prime was not a valid source.

The twelve hour recharge time was false. He had assumed that it meant the length of time was what was false in John Prime’s statement. What if there was no recharge time at all?

There were two possibilities that John could see. First, there was no recharge time and he was being prevented from returning to his universe for some other reason. Second, the device no longer worked. Perhaps he had used the last of its energy source.

For some reason he still wanted to believe John Prime. If it was simply a mechanical issue, then he could use intelligence to solve the problem. Maybe John Prime was truthful, and something happened to the device that he didn’t know about. Maybe John Prime would be surprised when John never returned with the device, effectively trapping John Prime in John’s life. John Prime might even think that John had stolen his device.

But mechanical failure seemed unlikely. John Prime said he had used the device one hundred times. His home universe was around 7433. If he’d used it exactly one hundred times, that was the distance in universes between John’s and John Prime’s. Did that mean he only used the device to move forward one universe at a time? Or did he hop around? No, the numbers were too similar. John Prime probably moved from one universe to the next systematically.

John decided that he was just too ignorant to ignore all of John Prime’s information. Some of it had to be taken at face value.

The one hundred number indicated that John only incremented the universe counter upward. Why? Did the device only allow travel in one direction?

He played with the theory, fitting the pieces together. The device was defective or designed in such a way that only travel upward was allowed. John Prime mentioned the recharge time to eliminate any possibility of a demonstration. There was perhaps no recharge time. The device was of no value to John Prime, since he planned to stay. That explained the personal questions John Prime had asked; he wanted to ease into John’s life. Some things he knew, but other things he had to learn from John.

The fury built in John.

“Bastard!” he said softly. John Prime had screwed him. He’d tempted him with universes, and John had fallen for it. And now he was in another universe, where he didn’t exist. He had to get back.

There was nothing to do, he realized, but test the theory.

He pulled his backpack onto his shoulders and checked around the bench for his things. Then, with a quick check to see if anyone was looking, he toggled the device to 7535 and pulled the lever.

He fell.

Monday morning at school went no worse than expected. John barely made it to homeroom, and ended up sitting with the stoners by accident. He had no idea what the word “Buckle” meant in the Hopkins poem. And Mr. Wallace had to flag him down for physics class.

“Forget which room it is?” he asked.

“Er.”

There was no Mr. Wallace in John’s home universe, and he had to dodge in-jokes and history between him and Johnny Farmboy; the class was independent study! John realized he’d have to drop it. He was grateful when a kid knocked on the door.

“Mr. Gushman needs to see John Rayburn.”

Mr. Wallace took the slip of paper from the acne-ridden freshman. “Again? Read the assignment for tomorrow, John. We have a lot to cover.” The man was disappointed in him, but John couldn’t find the emotion to care. He hardly knew him.

John nodded, then grabbed his stuff. He nudged the freshman hall monitor as they walked down the hall. “Where’s Mr. Gushman at?”

The freshman’s eye widened like marbles. “He’s in the front office. He’s the principal.”

“No shit, douche bag,” John said.

John entered the fish bowl and gave his name to the receptionist. After just a few minutes, Mr. Gushman called him in.

John didn’t have anything on Gushman. He’d come to Findlay High School in the time John had been away. The old principal had fucked a student at his old school and that had come out in one of the universes that John had visited. That bit of dirt would be no good in this universe.

“Have you got the letter of apology for Mrs. Carson?” he asked.

John suddenly realized what the meeting was about. He’d not written the letter.

“No, sir. I’ve decided not to write the letter.”

Mr. Gushman raised his eyebrows, then frowned. “You realize that this will have grave consequences for your future.”

“No, I don’t think so. In fact, I’ve contacted a lawyer. I’ll be suing Ted Carson.” John hadn’t thought of doing that until that moment, but now that he’d said it, he decided it was a good idea. “I’m an honor student, Gushman. I’m a varsity player in two sports. There will be fallout because of this. Big fallout.”

“It’s Mr. Gushman, please. I’ll have your respect.” His knuckles were white, and John realized that Gushman had expected him to cave. Well, maybe Johnny Farmboy would have caved, but not him. He had dirt on the education board members. He had dirt on the mayor. This would be a slam dunk for him.

“Respect is earned,” John said.

“I see. Shall I have your mother called or do you have transportation home?”

“Home? Why?” John said.

“Your three day suspension starts right now.” John had forgotten about that. He shrugged. Johnny Farmboy would have shit a brick at being expelled. To John, it didn’t really matter.

“I can take care of myself.”

“You are not allowed on school property until Thursday at noon. I’ll be sending a letter home to your parents. I’ll also inform Coach Jessick that you are off the roster for basketball and track.”

“Whatever.”

Mr. Gushman stood, leaning heavily on the desk. His voice was strained as he said, “I expected better of you, John. Everything I know about you says that you’re a good boy. Everything I’ve seen since you walked in this door has made me reevaluate my opinions.”

John shrugged again. “Whatever.” He stood, ignoring Gushman’s anger. “We done here?”

“Yes. You are dismissed.”

At least he didn’t have to worry about learning basketball. And three days was enough time to get started on his plans. He smiled as he passed the receptionist, smiled at the dirtbags waiting in the office. This was actually working out better than he expected.

John’s arms flailed and his left foot hit the ground, catching his weight. He groaned as his leg collapsed under him. He rolled across the grass.

Grass? he thought as the pain erupted in his knee. He sat up, rocking as he held his knee to his chest. He’d been on the steps of the library and now he was on a plain. The wind blew the smell of outside: dirt, pollen, clover.

He tried to stretch his leg, but the pain was too much. He leaned back, puffing off his backpack with one hand, and looked up at the sky, breathing deeply. It hurt like hell.

The device had worked. He had changed universes again. Only this universe had no library, no Findlay, Ohio. This universe didn’t seem to have anything but grass. He fell because the steps he’d been standing on weren’t in the universe he was in now.

He checked the readout on the device. He was in 7535. He’d gone forward one universe.

John looked around him, but didn’t see anything through the green-yellow grass. It rustled in the wind, making sounds like sandpaper rubbing on wood.

John stood gingerly on his other leg. He was on a broad plain, stretching for a good distance in every direction. There were small groves of trees to the north and east. To the west and south, the grass stretched as far as he could see.

There was no library to use to figure out what was different in this universe. No humans at all, maybe. A Mayan empire? If he wanted to find the differences, he’d have to do some field research.

He sat back down. No, he thought. He had to get back to his life. John Prime had some answers to give and a price to pay. It was Sunday afternoon. He still had half a day to figure out how to get back to his universe.

His knee was swelling, so he took off his coat and shirt. He ripped his T-shirt into long strips and used them to wrap his knee as tightly as possible. It wasn’t broken, but he might have sprained it.

He took the sandwich that he had packed on Saturday from his backpack and unwrapped it. He finished it in several bites and rinsed it down with some of the water in his water bottle. The taste of the sandwich made him angry. John Prime was eating his food and sleeping in his bed. John wondered how he would feel punching someone who looked like him in the face. He decided that he could do it.

John spent the afternoon, nursing his knee and considering what he knew, what he thought he knew, and what John Prime had told him. The latter category he considered biased or false. What he knew, however, was growing.

Universe 7535 was the second one he’d visited. The device clearly still worked. His going from 7534 to 7535 proved that.

It was also support for his theory that the device only allowed travel to universes higher in number than the one a traveler currently resided in. But not proof. Hypotheses required repeatable experimental proof. He’d used the device to move forward through two universes. He’d have to do it a couple more times before he was certain that that was the way the device worked.

He took a blade of grass and chewed on it. This was an unspoiled universe, he thought. Which gave him another piece of data. Universes sequentially next to each other could have little in common. John couldn’t even begin to guess what had happened for a universe to not have North America settled by the Europeans.

There’d been no library steps here, so he had fallen ten feet to the ground. More data: There was no guarantee that a man-made object in one universe would exist in the next. Nor even natural objects. Hills were removed or added by machines. Rivers were dammed and moved. Lakes were created. What would happen if he jumped to the next universe and the steps were there? Would he be trapped in the cement that formed the steps? Would he die of asphyxiation, unable to press the lever because he was encased in the library steps?

The thought of being entombed, blind and without air, horrified him. It was no way to die.

He would have to be careful when he changed universes. He’d have to be as certain as possible that there was nothing solid where he was going. But how?

Movement caught his eye and he looked up to see a large beast walking in the distance. It was so tall he saw it from his seat in the grass. A cross between a rhinoceros and a giraffe, it munched at the leaves of a tree. It was grey with legs like tree limbs, a face like a horse. Leaves and branches gave way quickly to its gobbling teeth.

No animal like that existed in his universe.

John watched, amazed. He wished he had a camera. A picture of this beast would be a nice addition to his scrapbook. Would it be worth cash? he wondered.

Ponderously it moved to the next tree in the grove.

John looked around him with more interest. This was no longer a desolate North America. There were animals here that no longer existed in his timeline. This universe was more radically different than he could have imagined.

The wave of the grass to the west caught his attention. The grass bobbed against the wind, and he was suddenly alert. Something was in the grass not twenty yards from him. He realized that large herbivores meant large carnivores. Bears, mountain lions, and wolves could be roaming these plains. And he had no weapons. Worse still, he had a bum knee.

He looked around him for a stick or a rock, but there was nothing. Quickly he gathered the notebook into the backpack. He pulled his coat on.

Was the thing closer? he wondered. He glanced at the grass around him. Why hadn’t he thought of that earlier?

John felt beneath his shirt for the device. He glanced down and toggled the universe counter up one to 7536. But he dared not pull the lever. He could be under the library right now.

He looked around him, tried to orient himself. The library entrance faced east, toward the Civil War Memorial. If he traveled east two hundred feet, he’d be in the middle of the park and it was unlikely that anything would be in his way. It was the safest place he could think of to do the transfer.

Suppressing a groan he moved off in an easterly direction, counting his steps.

At fifty-two steps he heard a sound behind him. A dog-like creature stood ten yards away from him in his wake in the grass. It had a dog’s snout and ears, but its eyes were slit and its back was arched more like a cat’s. It had no tail. Its fur was tan with black spots the size of quarters along its flank.

John froze, considering. It was small, the size of a border collie. He was big prey and it may just have been curious about him.

“Boo-yah!” he cried, waved his arms. It didn’t move, just stared at him with its slit eyes. Then two more appeared behind it.

It was a pack animal. Pack animals could easily bring down an animal larger than a pack member. He saw three of them, but there could be a dozen hidden in the grass. John turned and ran.

The things took him from behind, nipping his legs, flinging themselves onto his back. He fell, his leg screaming. He felt weight on his back, so he let the straps of his backpack slide off. He crawled forward another yard. Hoping he’d come far enough, he pulled the lever on the device.

John took the two o’clock Silver Mongoose to Toledo, right after he stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles trying to convince the clerk to file the paperwork for his lost license.

“I am positive that it won’t turn up,” John said.

“So many people say that, and then there it is in the last place you look.”

“Really. It won’t.”

“All righty, then. I’ll take that form from you.”

He was tempted to rent a car, but that would have raised as many eyebrows as hiring a patent lawyer in Findlay. John had to go to Toledo to get his business done. Three days off school was just about perfect.

As the northern Ohio farmland rolled by, he wondered how hurt he’d be if he had to transfer out right now. He was always considering his escape routes, always sleeping on the ground floor, always in structures that were as old as he could find. His chest itched where the device should have been. It was Johnny Farmboy’s problem now. He was free of it. No one would come looking for him here. He blended right in. No police would come barging in at three AM. No FBI agents wanting his device.

What an innocent he’d been. What a piece of work. How many times had he almost died? How many times had he screwed up within inches of the end?

For a moment, he had a twinge of guilt for the displaced John. He hoped that he figured out a few things quickly, before things went to hell. Maybe he could find a place to settle down just like he had. Maybe I should have written him a note, he thought.

Then he laughed to himself. Too late for that. Johnny Farmboy was on his own. Just like he had been.

A car horn screeched and a massive shape bore down on him. John tried to scramble away, but his hand was stuck. As his wrist flexed the wrong way, pain shot up his arm.

He looked up, over his shoulder, into the grill of a car. John hadn’t made it into the park. He was still in the street, the sidewalk a few feet in front of him.

John got to his knees. His hand was embedded in the asphalt. He planted his feet and pulled. Nothing happened except pain.

“Buddy, you okay?” The driver was standing with his door open. John’s eyes were just over the hood of the man’s car.

John didn’t reply. Instead he pulled again and his hand tore lose with a spray of tar and stones. The impression of his palm was cast in the asphalt.

The man came around his car and took John’s arm. “You better sit down. I’m really sorry about this. You came outta nowhere.” The man led him to the curb, then looked back and said, “Jesus. Is that your dog?”

John looked and saw the head and shoulders of one of the cat-dogs. The transfer had caught only half the beast. Its jaws were open, revealing yellowed teeth. Its milky eyes were glazed over. Blood from its severed torso flowed across the street. A strand of intestine had unraveled onto the pavement.

“Oh, man. I killed your dog,” the motorist cried.

John said between breaths, “Not . . . my . . . dog. . . . Chasing me.”

The man looked around. “There’s Harvey,” he said, pointing to a police officer sitting in the donut shop that John had eaten in that morning. Well, not the same one, John thought. This wasn’t the same universe, since this car was gas powered.

“Hey, Harvey,” he yelled, waving his arms. Someone nudged the police officer and he turned, looking at the blood spreading across the street.

Harvey was a big man, but he moved quickly. He dropped his donut and coffee in a trash can at the door of the shop. As he approached he brushed his hands on his pants.

“What happened, Roger?” he said. He glanced at John, who was too winded and too sore to move. He looked at the cat-dog on the street. “What the hell is that?”

He kicked it with his boot.

“This young man was being chased, I think. I nearly clipped him and I definitely got that thing. What is it? A badger?”

“Whatever it is, you knocked the crap out of it.” He turned to John. “Son, you okay?”

“No,” John said. “I twisted my knee and my wrist. I think that thing was rabid. It chased me from around the library.”

“Well, HI be,” said the officer. He squatted next to John. “Looks like it got a piece of your leg.” He lifted up John’s pant leg, pointed to the line of bite marks. “Son, you bought yourself some rabies shots.”

The officer called Animal Control for the carcass and an ambulance for John. The white-uniformed Animal Control man spent some time looking for the other half of the cat-dog. To Harvey’s questions about what it was, he shrugged. “Never seen nothing like it.” When he lifted up the torso, John saw the severed arm straps of his backpack on the ground. He groaned. His backpack, with seventeen hundred dollars in cash, was in the last universe under the other half of the cat-dog.

A paramedic cleaned John’s calf, looked at his wrist and his knee. She touched his forehead gingerly. “What’s this?”

“Ow,” he said, wincing.

“You may have a concussion. Chased by a rabid dog into a moving car. Quite a day you’ve had.”

“It’s been a less than banner day,” John said.

“ ‘Banner day,’ ” she repeated. “I haven’t heard that term in a long time. I think my grandmother said that.”

“Mine too.”

They loaded him into the ambulance on a stretcher. By the time the door had shut on the ambulance, quite a few people had gathered. John kept expecting someone to shout his name in recognition, but no one did. Maybe he didn’t exist in this universe.

They took him to Roth Hospital, and it looked just like it did in his universe, an institutional building from the fifties. He sat for fifteen minutes on an examining table off of the emergency room. Finally, an older doctor came in and checked him thoroughly.

“Lacerations on the palm. The wrist has a slight sprain. Minor. The hand is fine.” Looking at John’s knee, he added, “Sprain of the right knee. We’ll wrap that. You’ll probably need crutches for a couple days.”

A few minutes later, a woman showed up with a clipboard. “Well need to fill these forms out,” she said. “Are you over eighteen?”

John shook his head, thinking fast. “My parents are on the way.”

“Did you call them?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll need their insurance information.”

John stood, wincing, and peered out the door until she disappeared. Then he limped the other way until he found an emergency exit door. He pushed it open and hobbled off into the parking lot, the bleating of the siren behind him.

The first lawyer John visited listened to him for fifteen minutes until she said she wasn’t taking any new clients. John almost screamed at her, “Then why did you let me blather on for so long?”

The second took thirty seconds to say no. But the third listened dubiously to his idea for the Rayburn Cube. He didn’t even blink at the cash retainer John handed over for the three patents he wanted him to research and acquire.

He called Casey from his cheap hotel.

“Hey, Casey. It’s John!”

“John! I heard you were expelled for a month.”

“News of my expulsion has been greatly exaggerated.”

“What happened?”

“Just more of the Ted Carson saga. I told Gushman I wasn’t going to apologize, so he kicked me out of school. You should have seen the colors on his face.”

“You told Gushman no?” she asked. “Wow. He used to be a colonel in the army.”

“He used to molest small children too,” said John.

“Don’t say that.”

“Why? He sucks.”

“But it’s not true.”

“It could be true, probably is in some other universe.”

“But we don’t know for sure.”

John switched subjects. “Listen, I called to see if you wanted to go out on Saturday.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said quickly. “Yeah.”

“Movie?”

“Sounds good. What’s playing?”

“Does it matter?”

She giggled. “No.” After a moment, she added, “Didn’t your parents ground you?”

“Oh, shit!”

“What?”

“They don’t know yet,” John said. He looked at the cheap clock radio next to the bed: six-thirty. “Shit.”

“Do you think we can still go out?”

“One way or another, Casey, I’ll see you on Saturday.”

“I’m looking forward to it.”

He hung up.

His parents. He’d forgotten to call his parents. They were going to be pissed. Damn. He’d been without them for so long, he’d forgotten how they worked.

He dialed his home number.

“Mom?”

“Oh, my God!” she yelled. Then to his father, she said, “Bill, it’s John. It’s John.”

“Where is he? Is he all right?”

“Mom, I’m okay.” He waited. He knew how Johnny Subprime would play this. Sure, he’d never have gone to Toledo, but John could play the suspension for all it was worth. “Did you hear from Gushman?”

“John, yes, and it’s okay. We understand. You can come home. We aren’t angry with you.”

“Then, Mom, you know how I feel. I did the right thing, Mom, and they took everything away from me.” It was what Farmboy would have said.

“I know, dear. I know.”

“It’s not fair.”

“I know, Johnny. Now where are you? You’ve got to come home.” His mother sounded pitiful.

“I won’t be home tonight, Mom. I’ve got things to do.”

“He’s not coming home, Bill!”

“Give me the phone, Janet.” Into the phone, his father said, “John, I want you home tonight. We understand that you’re upset, but you need to be home, and we’ll handle this here, under our roof.”

“Dad, I’ll be home tomorrow.”

“John—”

“Dad, I’ll be home tomorrow.” He hung up the phone and almost chortled.

Then he turned on Home Theatre Office and watched bad movies until midnight.

John shivered in the morning cold. His knee was the size of a melon, throbbing from the night spent on the library steps. The bell tower struck eight; John Prime would be on his way to school right now. He’d be heading for English class. John hoped the bastard had done the essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins.

He’d slept little, his knee throbbing, his heart aching. He’d lost the 1700 dollars John Prime had given him, save eighty dollars in his wallet. He’d lost his backpack. His clothes were ripped and tattered. He’d skipped out on his doctor’s bill. He was as far from home as he’d ever been.

He needed help.

He couldn’t stay here; the hospital probably called the police on his unpaid bill. He needed a fresh universe to work in.

Limping, he walked across to the Ben Franklin’s, buying new dungarees and a backpack.

Then he stood in the center of the town square and waited for a moment when no one was around. He toggled the universe counter upward and pressed the lever.

“It turns this way, this way, and this way!” John made the motions with his hands for the fourth time, wishing again that he’d bought the key-chain Cube when he’d had the chance.

“Why?” Joe Patadorn was the foreman for an industrial design shop. A pad of paper on his drafting board was covered in pencil sketches of cubes. “Rotate against what? It’s a cube.”

“Against itself! Against itself! Each column and each row rotates.”

“Seems like it could get caught up with itself.”

“Yes! If it’s not a cube when you try to turn it, it’ll not turn.”

“And this is a toy people will want to play with?”

“I’ll handle that part.”

Joe shrugged. “Fine. It’s your money.”

“Yes, it is.”

“We’ll have a prototype in two weeks.”

They shook on it.

His errands were finally done in Toledo. His lawyer was doing the patent searches and Patadom was building the prototype. If he was lucky, he could have the first batch of Cubes ready to ship by Christmas, perfect timing.

From the bus stop, he hiked the three miles to the farm and stashed his contracts in the loft with the money there. When he was climbing down, he saw his dad standing next to the stalls.

“Hey. Am I in time for dinner?” John asked.

His father didn’t reply, and then he realized that he was in trouble.

His father’s face was red, his cheeks puffed out. He stood in overalls, his fists at his hips.

“In the house.” The words were soft, punctuated.

“Dad—”

“In the house, now.” His father lifted an arm, pointing.

John went, and as he entered the house, he was angry too. How dare he order him around?

His mother was waiting at the kitchen table, her fingers folded in a clenched, white mound.

“Where were you?” his father demanded.

“None of your business,” John said.

“While you’re in my house, you’ll answer my questions!” his father roared.

“I’ll get my things and go,” John said.

“Bill . . .” his mother said. “We’ve discussed this.”

His father looked away, then said, “He pranced into the bam like he’d done nothing wrong.”

His mother tinned to him. “Where were you, John?”

He opened his mouth to rail, but instead he said, “Toledo. I had to . . . cool off.”

His mother nodded. “That’s important.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you feeling better now?”

“Yes . . . no.” Suddenly he was sick to his stomach. Suddenly he was more angry with himself than with his father.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay what you did, and we’re glad you’re back. Bill?”

His father grunted, then said, “Son, we’re glad you’re back.” And then he took John in his big farmer arms and squeezed him.

John sobbed before he could fight it down, and then he was bawling like he hadn’t since he was ten.

“I’m sorry, Dad.” The words were muffled in his shoulder. His throat was tight.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.”

His mother joined them and they held onto him for a long time. John found he didn’t want to let go. He hadn’t hugged his parents in a long time.

John climbed the steps to the library. This universe looked just like his own. He didn’t really care how it was different. All he wanted was to figure out how to get home. He’d tried the device a dozen times in the square, but the device would not allow him to go backwards, not even to universes before his own.

He needed help; he needed professional help. He needed to understand about parallel universes.

Browsing the card catalog, it soon became apparent the Findlay library was not the place to do a scientific search on hypothetical physics. All he could find were a dozen science fiction novels which were no help at all.

He was going to have to go to Toledo. U of T was his second choice after Case. It was a state school and close. Half his friends would be going there. It had a decent if not stellar physics department.

He took the bus to Toledo, dozing along the way. A local brought him to the campus.

The Physics Library was a single room with three tables. Stacks lined all the walls and extended into the middle of the room, making it seem cramped and tiny. It smelled of dust, just like the Findlay Public Library.

“Student ID?”

John turned to the bespectacled student sitting at the front desk. For a moment, he froze, then patted his front pockets. “I left it at the dorm.”

The student looked peeved then said, “Well, bring it next time, frosh.” He waved him in.

“I will.”

John brought the catalog up on a terminal and searched for “Parallel Universe.” There wasn’t much. In fact there was nothing at all in the Physics Library. He was searching for the wrong subject. Physicists didn’t call them parallel universes, of course. TV and movies called them parallel universes.

He couldn’t think what else to search for. Perhaps there was a more formal term for what he was looking for, but he had no idea what it was. He’d have to ask his dumb questions directly of a professor.

He left the library and walked down the second floor hall, looking at name plates above doors. Billboards lined the walls, stapled and tacked with colloquia notices, assistantship postings, apartments to share. A lot of the offices were empty. At the end of the hall was the small office of Dr. Frank Wilson, Associate Professor of Physics, fit and occupied.

John knew associate professors were low on the totem pole, which was probably why he was the only one in his office. And maybe a younger professor would be more willing to listen to what he had to say.

He knocked on the door.

“Come on in.”

He entered the office, found it cluttered on all sides with bookshelves stacked to bursting with papers and tomes, but neat at the center, where a man sat at an empty desk reading a journal.

“You’re the first person to show for office hours today,” he said. Professor Wilson was in his late twenties, with black glasses, sandy beard, and hair that seemed in need of a cut. He wore a grey jacket over a blue oxford.

“Yeah,” John said. “I have some questions, and I don’t know how to ask them.”

“On the homework set?”

“No. On another topic.” John was suddenly uncertain. “Parallel universes.”

Professor Wilson nodded. “Hmmm.” He took a drink of his coffee, then said, “Are you one of my students? Freshman Physics?”

“No,” John said.

“Then what’s your interest in this? Are you from the creative writing department?”

“No, I . . .”

“Your question, while it seems simple to you, is extremely complex. Have you taken calculus?”

“Just half a semester. . . .”

“Then you’ll never understand the math behind it. The authorities here are Hawking, Wheeler, Everett.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “You’re talking about quantum cosmology. Graduate level stuff.”

John said quickly before he could cut him off again, “But my question is more practical. Not theoretical.”

“Practical parallel worlds? Nonsense. Quantum cosmology states that there may be multiple universes out there, but the most likely one is ours, via the weak anthropic principle. Which means since we’re here, we can take it as a given that we exist. Well, it’s more complex than that.”

“But what about other universes, other people just like us?”

The man laughed. “Highly unlikely. Occam’s razor divests us of that idea.”

“How would I travel between universes?” John said, grasping at straws against the man’s brisk manner.

“You can’t, you won’t, not even remotely possible.”

“But what if I said it was. What if I knew for sure it was possible.”

“I’d say your observations were manipulated or you saw something that you interpreted incorrectly.”

John touched the wound in his calf where the cat-dog had bitten him. No, he’d seen what he’d seen. He’d felt what he’d felt. There was no doubt about that.

“I know what I saw.”

Wilson waved his hands. “I won’t debate your observations. It’s a waste of my time. Tell me what you think you saw.”

John paused, not sure where to start and what to tell, and Professor Wilson jumped in. “See? You aren’t sure what you saw, are you?” He leaned forward. “A physicist must have a discerning eye. It must be nurtured, tested, used to separate the chaff from the wheat.” He leaned back again, glanced out his window onto the quad below. “My guess is that you’ve seen too many Schwarzenegger movies or read too many books. You may have seen something peculiar, but before you start applying complex physical theories to explain it, you should eliminate the obvious. Now, I have another student of mine waiting, one I know is in my class, so I think you should run along and think about what you really saw.”

John turned and saw a female student standing behind him, waiting. His rage surged inside him. The man was patronizing him, making assumptions based on his questions and demeanor. Wilson was dismissing him.

“I can prove it,” he said, his jaw clenched.

The professor just looked at him, then beckoned the student into his office.

John turned and stalked down the hall. He was asking for help, and he’d been laughed at.

“I’ll show him,” John said. He took the steps two at a time and flung open the door to the quadrangle that McCormick faced.

“Watch it, dude,” a student said, almost hit by the swinging door. John brushed past him.

He grabbed a handful of stones and, standing at the edge of the quadrangle, began flinging them at the window that he thought was Wilson’s. He threw a dozen and started to draw a crowd of students, until Wilson looked out the window, opened it and shouted, “Campus security will be along in a moment.”

John yelled back, “Watch this, you stupid bastard!” He toggled the device forward one universe and pulled the lever.

John awoke in the night, gripped by the same nightmare, trapped in darkness, no air, his body held rigid. He sat up and flung the covers away from him, unable to have anything touching him. He ripped off his pajamas as well and stood naked in the bedroom, just breathing. It was too hot; he opened the window and stood before it.

His breathing slowed, as the heavy air of the October night brought the smells of the farm to him: manure and dirt. He leaned against the edge of the window, and his flesh rose in goose pimples.

It was a dream he’d had before, and he knew where it came from. He’d transferred near Lake Erie, on a small, deserted beach not far from Port Clinton, and ended up buried in a sand dune. He’d choked on the sand and would have died there if a fisherman hadn’t seen his arm flailing. He could have died. It was pure luck that the guy had been there to dig his head out. He’d never transferred near a body of water or a river again.

That hadn’t been the only time either. In Columbus, Ohio, he’d transferred into a concrete step, his chest and lower body stuck. He’d been unable to reach the toggle button on the device and had to wait until someone wandered by and called the fire department. They’d used a jackhammer to free him. When they’d turned to him, demanding how he’d been trapped, he’d feigned unconsciousness and transferred out from the ambulance.

After that, each time he touched the trigger he did so with the fear that he’d end up in something solid, unable to transfer out again, unable to breath, unable to move. He was nauseated, his stomach kicking, his armpits soaked, before the jumps.

It was the cruelest of jokes. He had the most powerful device in the world and it was broken.

“No more,” he said to himself. “No more of that.” He had a family now, in ways he hadn’t expected.

The confrontation with his parents had been angry, then sad, and ended with all of them crying and hugging. He’d meant to be tough; he’d meant to tell his parents that he was an adult now, and could take care of himself, but his resolve had melted in the face of their genuine care for him. He’d cried, goddamn it all.

He’d promised to reconsider the letter. He’d promised to talk with Gushman again. He’d promised to be more considerate to his parents. Was he turning into Johnny Farmboy?

He’d gone to bed empty, spent, his mind placid. But his subconscious had pulled the dream out. Smothering, suffocating, his body held inflexible as his lungs screamed. He shivered, then shut the window. His body had expelled all its heat.

He slipped back into bed and closed his eyes.

“I’m becoming Johnny Farmboy,” he whispered. “Screw it all.”

McCormick Hall looked identical. In fact the same student guarded the door of the Physics Library, asked him the same question.

“Student ID?”

“I left it in my dorm room,” John replied without hesitation.

“Well, bring it next time, frosh.”

John smiled at him. “Don’t call me frosh again, geek.”

The student blinked at him, dismayed.

His visit with Professor Wilson had not been a total loss. Wilson had mentioned the subject that he should have searched for instead of parallel universes. He had said that the field of study was called quantum cosmology.

Cosmology, John knew, was the study of the origin of the universe. Quantum theory, however, was applied to individual particles, such as atoms and electrons. It was a statistical way to model those particles. Quantum cosmology, John figured, was a statistical way to model the universe. Not just one universe, either, John hoped, but all universes.

He sat down at a terminal. This time there were thirty hits. He printed the list and began combing the stacks.

Half of the books were summaries of colloquia or workshops. The papers were riddled with equations, and all of them assumed an advanced understanding of the subject matter. John had no basis to understand any of the math.

In the front matter of one of the books was a quote from a physicist regarding a theory called the Many-Worlds Theory. “When a quantum transition occurs, an irreversible one, which is happening in our universe at nearly an infinite rate, a new universe branches off from that transition in which the transition did not occur. Our universe is just a single one of a myriad copies, each slightly different than the others.”

John felt an affinity for the quote immediately. He had seen other universes in which small changes had resulted in totally different futures, such as Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the electric motor. It almost made sense then, that every universe he visited was one of billions in which some quantum event or decision occurred differently.

He shut the book. He thought he had enough to ask his questions of Wilson now.

The second floor hallway seemed identical, right down to the empty offices and cluttered billboards. Professor Wilson’s office was again at the end of the hall, and he was there, reading a journal. John wondered if it was the same one.

“Come on in,” he said at John’s knock.

“I have a couple questions.”

“About the Homework set?”

“No, this is unrelated. It’s about quantum cosmology.”

Wilson put his paper down and nodded. “A complex subject. What’s your question?”

“Do you agree with the Many-Worlds Theory?” John asked.

“No.”

John waited, unsure what to make of the single syllable answer. Then he said, “Uh, no?”

“No. It’s hogwash in my opinion. What’s your interest in it? Are you one of my students?” Wilson sported the same gray jacket over the same blue oxford.

“You don’t believe in multiple universes as an explanation . . . for . . .” John was at a loss again. He didn’t know as much as he thought he knew. He still couldn’t ask the right questions.

“For quantum theory?” asked Wilson. “No. It’s not necessary. Do you know Occam’s Theory?”

John nodded.

“Which is simpler? One universe that moves under statistical laws at the quantum level or an infinite number of universes each stemming from every random event? How many universes have you seen?”

John began to answer the rhetorical question.

“One,” said Wilson before John could open his mouth. Wilson looked John up and down. “Are you a student here?”

“Uh, no. I’m in high school,” John admitted.

“I see. This is really pretty advanced stuff, young man. Graduate level stuff. Have you had calculus?”

“Just half a semester.”

“Let me try to explain it another way.” He picked up a paperweight off his desk, a rock with eyes and mouth painted on it. “I am going to make a decision to drop this rock between now and ten seconds from now.” He paused, then dropped the rock after perhaps seven seconds. “A random process. In ten other universes, assuming for simplicity that I could only drop the rock at integer seconds and not fractional seconds, I dropped the rock at each of the seconds from one to ten. I made ten universes by generating a random event. By the Many-Worlds Theory, they all exist. The question is, where did all the matter and energy come from to build ten new universes just like that?” He snapped his fingers. “Now extrapolate to the nearly infinite number of quantum transitions happening on the earth this second. How much energy is required to build all those universes? Where does it come from? Clearly the Many-Worlds Theory is absurd.”

John shook his head, trying to get his arms around the idea. He couldn’t refute Wilson’s argument. He realized how little he really knew. He said, “But what if multiple worlds did exist? Could you travel between the worlds?”

“You can’t, you won’t, not even remotely possible.”

“But—”

“It can’t happen, even if the theory were true.”

“Then the theory is wrong,” John said to himself.

“I told you it was wrong. There are no parallel universes.”

John felt the frustration growing in him. “But I know there are. I’ve seen them.”

“I’d say your observations were manipulated or you saw something that you interpreted incorrectly.”

“Don’t condescend to me again!” John shouted.

Wilson looked at him calmly, then stood.

“Get out of this office, and I suggest you get off this campus right now. I recommend that you seek medical attention immediately,” Wilson said coldly.

John’s frustration turned to rage. Wilson was no different here than in the last universe. He assumed John was wrong because he acted like a hick, a farm boy. He was certain John knew nothing that he didn’t already know.

John flung himself at the man. Wilson’s papers scattered across his chest and onto the floor. John grabbed at his jacket from across the desk and yelled into his face, “I’ll prove it to you, goddammit! I’ll prove it.”

“Get off me,” Wilson yelled and pushed John away. Wilson lost his balance when John’s grip on his jacket slipped and he fell on the floor against his chair. “You maniac!”

John stood across from the desk from him, his breathing coming hard. He needed proof. His eyes saw the diploma on the wall of Wilson’s office. He grabbed it and ran out of the office. If he couldn’t convince this Wilson, he’d convince the next. He found an alcove beside the building and transferred out.

John stood clutching Wilson’s diploma to his chest, his heart still thumping from the confrontation. Suddenly he felt silly. He’d attacked the man and stolen his diploma to prove to another version of him that he wasn’t a wacko.

He looked across the quad. He watched a boy catch a Frisbee, and then saw juxtaposed the images of him tripping and not catching it, just missing it to the left, to the right, a million permutations. Everything in the quad was suddenly a blur.

He shook his head, then lifted the diploma so that he could read it. He’d try again, and this time he’d try the direct approach.

John climbed the steps to Wilson’s office and knocked.

“Come on in.”

“I have a problem.”

Wilson nodded and asked, “How can I help?”

“I’ve visited you three times. Twice before you wouldn’t believe me,” John said.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before,” he said. “You’re not one of my students, are you?”

“No, I’m not. We’ve never met, but I’ve met versions of you.”

“Really.”

John yelled, “Don’t patronize me! You do that every fucking time, and I’ve had enough.” His arms were shaking. “I don’t belong in this universe. I belong in another. Do you understand?”

Wilson’s face was emotionless, still. “No, please explain.”

“I was tricked into using a device. I was tricked by another version of myself because he wanted my life. He told me I could get back, but the device either doesn’t work right or only goes in one direction. I want to get back to my universe, and I need help.”

Wilson nodded. “Why don’t you sit down?”

John nodded, tears welling in his eyes. He’d finally gotten through to Wilson.

“So you’ve tried talking with me—other versions of me—in other universes, and I won’t help. Why not?”

“We start by discussing parallel universes or quantum cosmology or Multi-Worlds Theory, and you end up shooting it all down with Occam’s Razor.”

“Sounds like something I’d say,” Wilson said, nodding. “So you have a device.”

“Yeah. It’s here.” John pointed to his chest, then unbuttoned his shirt. Wilson looked at the device gravely. “What’s that in your hand?”

John glanced down at the diploma. “It’s . . . your diploma from the last universe. I sorta took it for proof.”

Wilson held out his hand, and John handed it over. There was an identical one on the wall. The professor glanced from one to the other. “Uh huh,” he said, then after a moment, “I see.”

He put the diploma down and said, “My middle name is Lawrence.” John saw that the script of the diploma he’d stolen said “Frank B. Wilson” while the one on the wall said “Frank L. Wilson.”

“I guess it’s just a difference—”

“Who put you up to this? Was it Greene? This is just the sort of thing he’d put together.”

Anguish washed over John. “No! This is all real.”

“That device strapped to your chest. Now that’s classic. And the diploma. Nice touch.”

“Really. This is no hoax.”

“Enough already. I’m on to you. Is Greene in the hall?” Wilson called through the door. “You can come out now, Charles. I’m on to you.”

“There is no Charles. There is no Greene,” John said quietly.

“And you must be from the drama department, because you are good. Two more copies of me! As if the universe can handle one.”

John stood up and walked out of the office, his body suddenly too heavy.

“Don’t forget the shingle,” Wilson called, holding up the diploma. John shrugged and continued walking down the hall.

He sat on a bench next to the quad for a long time. The sun set and the warm summer day vanished along with the kids playing Frisbee with their shirts tied around their waists.

Finally he stood and walked toward the Student Union. He needed food. He’d skipped lunch at some point; his stomach was growling at him. He didn’t feel hungry but his body was demanding food. He just felt tired.

There was a pizza franchise in the Student Union called Papa Bob’s. He ordered a small pizza and a Coke, ate it mechanically. It tasted like cardboard, chewy cardboard.

The Union was desolate as well, all the students driving home or heading to the dorms for studying and TV. John spotted a pay phone as he sat pondering what he would do next, whether he should confront Wilson again. John realized that he should have taken a picture of the man or demanded he write himself a note. But he would have told John that it was computer generated or forged.

He walked over to the phone and dialed his number. The phone demanded seventy-five cents. He inserted the coins and the phone began to ring.

“Hello?” his mother answered.

“Hello,” he replied.

“Johnny?” she asked, surprised.

“No, could I talk to John please?”

She laughed. “You sound just like him. Gave me a fright, hearing that, but he’s standing right here. Here he is.”

“Hello?” It was his voice.

“Hi, this is Karl Smith from your English class,” John said making up a name and a class.

“Yeah?”

“I missed class today, and I was wondering if we had an assignment.”

“Yeah, we did. We had an essay on the poem we read, Tennyson’s ‘Maud.’ Identify the poetic components, like the last one.”

“Oh, yeah,” John said. The poem was in the same unit as the Hopkins one. He remembered seeing it. “Thanks.” He hung up the phone.

This universe seemed just like his own. He could fit right in here. The thought startled him, and then he asked himself what was stopping him.

He walked to the bus station and bought a ticket back to Findlay.

John helped his father around the farm the next day. He took it as penance for upsetting his parents. They still thought he was Johnny Farmboy, and so he had to act the part, at least until his projects started churning.

As they replaced some of the older wood in the fence, John said, “Dad, I’m going to need to borrow the truck on Saturday night.”

His father paused, a big smile on his face. “Got a big date, do you?” He said it in such a way that John realized he didn’t think his son really had a date.

“Yes. I’m taking Casey Nicholson out.”

“Casey?” His father held the plank as John hammered a nail into it. “Nice girl.”

“Yeah, I’m taking her to a movie at the Bijou.”

“The Bijou?”

“I mean the Strand,” John said, silently yelling at himself for sharing details that could catch him up. The movie theatre was always called the Palace, Bijou, or Strand.

“Uh-huh.”

John took the shovel and began shoring up the next post.

“What movie you gonna see?”

Before he could stop himself, he answered, “Does it matter?”

His father paused, then laughed heartily. “Not if you’re in the balcony, it doesn’t.” John was surprised, then he laughed too.

“Don’t tell your mother I told you, but we used to go to the Strand all the time. I don’t think we watched a single movie.”

“Dad!” John said. “You guys were . . . make-out artists?”

“Only place we could go to do it,” he said with a grin. “Couldn’t use this place; your grampa would have beat the tar out of me. Couldn’t use her place; your other grampa would have shot me.” He eyed John and nodded. “You’re lucky we live in more liberal times.”

John laughed, recalling the universe where the free love expressions of the 60s had never ended, where AIDS had killed a quarter of the population and syphilis and gonorrhea had been contracted by 90 percent of the population by 1980. There, dating involved elaborate chaperone systems and blood tests.

“I know I’m lucky.”

In the early hours of the morning, John slipped across Gurney, through the Walders’ field and found a place to watch the farm from the copse of maple trees. He knelt on the soft ground, wondering if this was where John Prime had waited for him.

John’s arms tingled as he anticipated his course of action. He was owed a life, he figured. His had been stolen and he was owed another. He’d wanted his own back, and he’d tried to get it. He’d researched and questioned and figured, but he couldn’t see any way back.

So he was ready to settle for second best.

He’d trick the John Rayburn here, just like he’d been tricked. Tease him with the possibilities. Tickle his curiosity. And if he wasn’t interested, he’d force him. Knock him out and strap the device on his chest and send him on.

Let him figure it out like John had. Let him find another universe to be a part of. John deserved his life back. He’d played by the rules all his life. He’d been a good kid; he’d loved his parents. He’d gone to church every Sunday.

He’d been pushed around for too long. John Prime had pushed him around, Professor Wilson, the cat-dogs. He’d been running and running and with no purpose. And enough of that. It was time to take back what had been stolen from him.

Dawn cast a slow red upon the woods. His mother opened the back door and stepped out into the yard with a basket. He watched her open the hen house and collect eggs. She was far away, but he recognized her as his mother instantly. Logically, he knew she wasn’t his mother, but to his eyes, she was. That was all that mattered.

His father pecked her lightly on the cheek as he headed for the barn. He wore heavy boots, thick ones, coveralls, and a John Deere cap. He entered the bam, started the tractor, and drove toward the fields. He’d be back for breakfast in an hour, John knew. Bacon, eggs, toast, and, of course, coffee.

They were his parents. It was his farm. Everything was as he remembered it. And that was enough for him.

The light in John’s room turned on. John Rayburn was awake. He’d be coming out soon to do his chores. John waited until this John went into the bam, then he dashed across the empty pumpkin field for the barn’s rear door. The rear door was locked, but if you jiggled it, John knew, it came loose.

John grabbed the handle, listening for sounds from within the bam, then shook it once for a few seconds. The door held. He paused, then shook it again and it came open suddenly, loudly. He slipped into the bam and hid between two rows of stacked bales.

“Hey, Stan-Man. How are you this morning?”

The voice came from near the stalls. This John—he started thinking of him as John Subprime—was feeding his horse.

“Here’s an apple. How about some oats?”

John crept along the row of bales, then stopped when he could see the side of John Subprime’s face from across the bam. John was safe in the shadows, but he needed to get closer to him.

Stan nickered and nuzzled John Subprime’s head, drawing his tongue across his forehead.

“Stop that,” he said, with a smile.

John Subprime turned his attention to the sheep, and when he did so, John slipped around the bales and behind the com picker.

He realized something as he sat in the woods, and his plan had changed accordingly. John wasn’t a liar. He wasn’t a smooth talker. He couldn’t do what John Prime had done to him, that is, talk him into using the device. John would have to do it some other way. And the only way he could think to do it was the hard way.

John lifted a shovel off a pole next to the com picker. It was a short shovel with a flat blade. He figured one blow to the head and John Subprime would be out cold. Then he’d strap the device to his chest, toggle the universe counter up one, and then hit the lever with the end of the shovel. It’d take half the shovel with him, but that was okay. Then John would finish feeding the animals and go in for breakfast. No one would ever know.

John ignored the queasy feeling in his stomach. Gripping the shovel in two hands, he advanced on John Subprime.

John’s faint shadow must have alerted him.

“Dad?” John Subprime said, then turned. “My God!” He shrank away from the raised shovel, his eyes passing from it to John’s face. His expression changed from shock to fear.

John’s body strained, the shovel raised above his head.

John Subprime leaned against the sheep pen, one arm raised, the other . . .

He had only one arm.

Nausea washed through John’s body and he dropped the shovel. It clattered on the wood floor of the bam, settled at John Subprime’s feet.

“What am I doing?” he cried. His stomach heaved, but nothing came up but a yellow bile that he spat on the floor. He heaved again at the smell of it.

He was no better than John Prime. He didn’t deserve a life.

John staggered to the back door gf the bam.

“Wait!”

He ran across the field. Something grabbed at his feet and he fell. He pulled his foot free and ran into the woods.

“Wait! Don’t run!”

John turned to see John Subprime running after him, just one arm, the right, pumping. He slowed twenty feet in front of John, then stopped, his hand extended.

“You’re me,” he said. “Only you have both arms.”

John nodded, his breath too ragged, his stomach too tense to speak. Tears were welling in his eyes as he looked at the man he had contemplated clubbing.

“How can that be?”

John found his voice. “I’m a version of you.”

John Subprime nodded vigorously. “Only you never lost your arm!”

“No, I never lost it.” John nodded his head. “How did it happen?”

John Subprime grimaced. “Pitchfork. I was helping dad in the bam loft. I lost my balance, fell. The pitchfork caught my bicep, sliced it. . . .”

“I remember.” In John’s universe, he’d been twelve, and he had fallen from the loft while he and his father loaded it with hay. He had thought he could carry the bale, but he hadn’t been strong enough and he’d fallen to the farm yard, knocking the wind out of himself, bumping the pitchfork over as he fell. The pitchfork had landed next to him, nicking his shoulder. His father had looked on in horror and then anger. The scolding from his mother had been worse than the nick. “I just got a cut on my shoulder.” John Subprime laughed. “In one world, I lose my arm, and in another I get a scratch. Don’t that beat all.” Why was he laughing? Didn’t he realize that John had meant to steal his life?

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you come inside and have some breakfast?”

John looked at him, unsure of how he could ask that. He yelled, “I was going to steal your life!”

John Subprime nodded. “Is that why you had the shovel? Then you saw my arm. No way you could steal my life. You’ve got two arms.” He laughed. “It wasn’t just that,” John said. “I couldn’t bring myself to hurt . . .”

“Yeah, I know.”

“How could you possibly?” John yelled. “I’ve lost everything!” He reached into his shirt and toggled the universe counter. “I’m sorry, but I have to leave.”

“No. Wait!” John Subprime yelled.

John backed away and pulled the lever.

The world blurred and John Subprime blinked away.

There was the bam and the farmhouse, and off in the distance his father on the tractor. Another universe where he didn’t belong. He toggled the device and pulled the lever. Again the farmhouse. He didn’t belong here either. Again he moved forward through the universes. The farmhouse was gone. And again. Then it was there, but green instead of red. He toggled it again and again, wanting to get as far away from his contemplated crime as possible.

The clouds flew around in chaotic fast motion. The trees he stood in were sometimes there, sometimes not. The farmhouse bounced left and right a foot, a half foot. The bam more, sometimes behind the house, sometimes to the east of it. The land was the one constant, a gently sloping field. Once he found himself facing the aluminum siding of a house. And then it was gone as he transferred out.

A hundred times, he must have transferred through universe after universe where he didn’t belong until finally he stopped and collapsed to the ground, sobbing.

He’d lost his life. He’d lost it all, and he’d never get it back.

He rested his head against the trunk of a maple and closed his eyes. After the tears were gone, after his breathing had slowed, he slept, exhausted.

“Hey there, fella. Time to get up.”

Someone poked him. John looked up into his father’s face.

“Dad?”

“Not unless my wife’s been hiding something from me.” He offered a hand, and John pulled himself up. John was in the copse of maples, his father from this universe standing beside him, holding a walking stick. He didn’t recognize John.

“Sorry for sleeping here in your woods. Got tired.”

“Yeah. It’ll happen.” He pointed toward Gurney with his stick. “Better be heading along. The town’s that way.” He pointed north. “About two miles.”

“Yes, sir.” John began walking. Then he stopped. His father hadn’t recognized him. Which meant what? John wasn’t sure. He turned back to him. “Sir, I could use some lunch. If you have extra. I could work it off.”

Bill Rayburn—John forced himself to use the name in his head. This man was not his father—checked his watch, then nodded. “Lunch in a few minutes, my watch and my stomach tell me. Cold cuts. As to working it off, no need.”

“That’s fine.”

“What’s your name?”

“John . . . John Wilson.” He took Professor Wilson’s last name spontaneously.

John turned and followed Bill across the pumpkin field toward the house. The pumpkins were still on the vine, unpicked and just a week until Halloween. Some of them were already going bad. He passed a large one with its top caved in, a swarm of gnats boiling out of it.

He remembered the joke his father had told him a week ago.

“How do you fix a broken jack-o’-lantern?” he asked.

Bill turned and glanced at him as if he were a dam fool.

“I don’t know.”

“With a pumpkin patch,” John replied, his face straight.

Bill stopped, looked at him for a moment, then a small smile crept across his lips. “I’ll have to remember that one.”

The bam was behind the house, smaller than he remembered and in need of paint. There was a hole in the roof that should have been patched. In fact the farm seemed just a bit more decrepit than he remembered. Had hard times fallen on his parents here?

“Janet, another one for lunch,” Bill called as he opened the back door. “Leave your shoes.”

John took his shoes off, left them where he always did. He hung his bag on a hook. It was a different hook, brass and molded, where he remembered a row of dowels that he and his father had glued into the sideboard.

John could tell Janet wasn’t keen on a stranger for lunch, but she didn’t say anything, and she wouldn’t until she and Bill were alone. John smiled at her, thanked her for letting him have lunch.

She wore the same apron he remembered. No, he realized. She’d worn this one, with a red check pattern and deep pockets in front, when he was younger.

She served John a turkey sandwich, with a slice of cheese on it. He thanked her again as she did, and ate the sandwich slowly. Janet had not recognized him either.

Bill said to Janet, “Got some good apples for cider, I think, a few bushels.”

John raised his eyebrows at that. He and his father could get a couple bushels per tree. Maybe the orchard was smaller here. Or maybe it had been hit with blight. He glanced at Bill and saw the shake in his hand. He’d never realized how old his father was, or maybe he had aged more quickly in this universe for reasons unknown. Maybe a few bushels was all he could gather.

“I should work on the drainage in the far field tomorrow. I’ve got a lake there now and it’s going to rot my seed next season.” The far field had always been a problem, the middle lower than the edges, a pond in the making.

“You need to pick those pumpkins too, before they go bad,” John said suddenly.

Bill looked at him.

“What do you know of farming?”

John swallowed his bite of sandwich, angry at himself for drawing the man’s resentment. John knew better than to pretend farm another farmer’s fields.

“Uh, I grew up on a farm like this. We grew pumpkins, sold them before Halloween and got a good price for them. You’ll have to throw half your crop away if you wait until Sunday, and then who’ll buy that late?”

Janet said to Bill, “You’ve been meaning to pick those pumpkins.”

“Practically too late now,” Bill said. “The young man’s right. Half the crop’s bad.”

“I could help you pick them this afternoon.” John said it because he wanted to spend more time there. It was the first chance he’d had in a long time to relax. They weren’t his parents; he knew that. But they were good people.

Bill eyed him again appraisingly.

“You worked a farm like this, you say. What else you know how to do?”

“I can pick apples. I can lay wood shingles for that hole in your bam.”

“You been meaning to do that too, Bill,” Janet said. She was warming to him.

“It’s hard getting that high up, and I have a few other priorities,” he said. He looked back at John. “We’ll try you out for the day, for lunch and dinner and three dollars an hour. If it isn’t working out, you hit the road at sundown, no complaining.”

John said, “Deal.”

“Janet, call McHenry and ask him if he needs another load of pumpkins and if he wants me to drop ’em off tonight.”

John waited outside the County Clerk’s window, his rage mounting. How damn long did it take to hand over a marriage certificate? Casey was waiting for him outside the judge’s chamber, nine months pregnant. If the man behind the glass wall took any longer, the kid was going to be bom a bastard. And Casey’s and his parents had been adamant about that. No bastard. He’d said he’d take care of the kid and he meant it, but they wanted it official.

Finally the clerk handed over the license and the two notarized blood tests and John snatched them from his hand.

“Thanks,” he said, turning and heading for the court building.

After the wedding he and Casey were driving up to Toledo to honeymoon on the last of his cash. In a week he was scheduled to start his GE job. He was going to work one of the assembly lines, but that was just until the book he was writing—The Shining—took off.

The trip to Toledo served the purpose of the honeymoon, as well as the fact that he had meetings regarding the screwed-up Rubik’s Cube. It still irked him. The patent search had turned up nothing and they had built a design, one that finally worked, and they’d sunk $95,000 into a production run. Then they’d gotten a call from the lawyer in Belgium. Apparently there was a patent filed in Hungary by that bastard Rubik. The company Rubik had hired in New York to market the things had gone under and he’d never bothered to try again. Someone had gotten wind of their product and now they wanted a piece of the deal.

The lawyer had wanted to drop him like a hot potato, but he’d convinced him that there was still cash to be made from it. Some cash at least. He’d have to pay a licensing fee probably. Kiss some ass. But there was money to be made. He’d stick it out with John, though the retainer was just about gone.

Casey waved as he rounded the comer on the third floor in front of the judge’s office. Casey sat on a bench, her belly seeming to rest on her knees. Her face was puffy and pink, as if someone had pumped her with saline.

“Hi, Johnny,” she said. “Did you get the paper?”

He hated being called Johnny and he’d told her that, but she still did it. Everybody used to call Johnny Farmboy Johnny so he was stuck with it. Some things just couldn’t be changed.

He put on a smile and waved the certificate. “Yeah,” he said. “Everything’s ready.” He kissed Casey on the cheek. “Darling, you look radiant.” He’d be glad once the baby was out of her body; then she could start dressing the way he liked again. He hoped her cheerleading uniform still fit.

The ceremony was quick, though Casey had to dab her eyes. John wasn’t surprised that none of Casey’s friends were there. Getting pregnant had put a lot of stress on her relationships. Field hockey had been right out.

The judge signed the certificate and it was done. John was glad Casey’s and his parents hadn’t come. They’d wanted to, but John had axed that request. They had settled for a reception after the baby was born.

He knew his parents were disappointed in what had happened, and John hadn’t wanted to face them during the ceremony. They’d wanted him to go to college, to better himself. But those were the dreams they had for Johnny Farmboy. He was a completely different thing.

They’d understand once the money started rolling in. They’d not be disappointed in their son any more.

John slowly lowered Casey into the bucket seat of the Trans Am, a splurge with the last of his cash. He had to have decent wheels. The Trans Am pulled away and he headed for Route 16. “Glad that’s over with,” he said.

“Really?” Casey asked.

“Well, I’m glad it’s over with and we’re married now,” he said quickly.

“Yeah, I know what you mean.”

John nodded. He had to be careful what he said with Casey, what he shared. About the time she’d started showing and they’d had to tell their parents, John had wished he had the device, wished he could jump to the next universe and start over. John realized he should have killed Johnny Farmboy, hidden the body, and kept the device. Now the Cube had to work right. With his money almost gone, he might not have another chance, no matter how good an idea the AbCruncher was. He’d wanted to come clean and tell Casey all about his past, but he didn’t dare. How could she believe him?

He was stuck here and he had to make it work. There were no other choices now. This was the life he’d chosen. He patted Casey’s leg and smiled at her. He’d make some money, enough to set her and the kid up, and then he’d have his freedom to do what he wanted with his life. It would take a little longer now; there were some bumps in the road, but he’d succeed. He was Johnny Prime.

Spring had arrived, but without the sun on his shoulders, John was chilly. He’d started working on the car in the morning and the sun had been on him, and now, after lunch, it was downright cold. He considered getting the tractor out and hauling the beat-up Trans Am into the sun. He finally decided it was too much trouble. It was late and there was no way he’d get the carburetor back together before dinner.

He’d bought the car for fifty dollars, but the car had yet to start. He’d need it soon. He started a second shift job at the GE plant in May. And then in the fall he was taking classes at the University of Toledo.

He’d applied to the University of Toledo’s continuing education program. He couldn’t enroll as a traditional freshman, which was all right with him, because of the fact that he’d taken the GED instead of graduating from high school. He wouldn’t get into the stuff he wanted to learn until his senior year: quantum field theory, cosmology, general relativity. That was all right. He was okay where he was for the time being. If he didn’t think about home, he could keep going.

With the plant job, washing machine assembly line work from four until midnight, he’d have enough for tuition for the year. Plus Bill and Janet were still paying him three an hour for chores he was helping out with. He noted ironically to himself that in his own universe he wouldn’t have been paid a dime. In September he’d get another job for pocket money and rent near the university.

He set the carburetor on the front seat and rolled the car back into the bam. This was a good universe, John had decided, but he wasn’t staying. No, he was happy with Bill and Janet taking him in. They were kind and generous, just like his own parents in nearly every respect, but he couldn’t stay here. Not for the long term.

The universe was a mansion with a million rooms. People didn’t know they were in just one room. They didn’t know there was a way through the walls to other rooms.

But John did. He knew there were walls. And he knew something else too. He knew walls came down. There were holes between worlds.

John had fisted his major as physics, and he’d laughed when the manila envelope from the department had arrived, welcoming him and fisting his faculty advisor as Dr. Frank Wilson. Professor Wilson’s world was going to shatter one day, and John was going to do it for him.

John knew something that no other physicist in this world knew. A human could pass through the walls of the universe. Just knowing that it was possible, just knowing, without a bit of doubt—he needed only to pull up his pant leg and look at the scars from the cat-dog bite—that there were a million universes out there, was all it would take for John to figure the science of it out.

That was his goal. He had the device and he had his knowledge. He’d reverse engineer it, take it apart, ask the questions of the masters in the field, he would himself become one of those masters, to find out how it was done.

And then, once the secrets of the universe lay open to him, he would go back and he would kick the shit out of John Prime.

He smiled as he shut the barn door.

JULIAN: A CHRISTMAS STORY

Robert Charles Wilson

1

This is a story about Julian Comstock, better known as Julian the Agnostic or (after his uncle) Julian Conqueror. But it is not about his conquests, such as they were, or his betrayals, or about the War in Labrador, or Julian’s quarrels with the Church of the Dominion. I witnessed many of those events—and will no doubt write about them, ultimately—but this narrative concerns Julian when he was young, and I was young, and neither of us was famous.

2

In late October of 2172—an election year—Julian and I, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, rode to the Tip east of the town of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and Julian tutored me in one of his heresies.

It was a brisk, sunny day. There was a certain resolute promptness to the seasons in that part of Athabaska, in those days. Our summers were long, languid, and hot. Spring and fall were brief, mere custodial functions between the extremes of weather. Winters were short but biting. Snow set in around the end of December, and the River Pine generally thawed by late March.

Today might be the best we would get of autumn. It was a day we should have spent under Sam Godwin’s tutelage, perhaps sparring, or target-shooting, or reading chapters from the Dominion History of the Union. But Sam was not a heartless overseer, and the kindness of the weather had suggested the possibility of an Outing, and so we had gone to the stables, where my father worked, and drawn horses, and ridden out of the Estate with lunches of black bread and salt ham in our back-satchels.

We rode east, away from the hills and the town. Julian and I rode ahead; Sam rode behind, a watchful presence, his Pittsburgh rifle ready in the saddle holster at his side. There was no immediate threat of trouble, but Sam Godwin believed in perpetual preparedness; if he had a gospel, it was BE PREPARED; also, SHOOT FIRST; and probably, DAMN THE CONSEQUENCES. Sam, who was old (nearly fifty), wore a dense brown beard stippled with wiry white hairs, and was dressed in what remained presentable of his tan-and-green Army of the Californias uniform, and a cloak to keep the wind off. He was like a father to Julian, Julian’s own true father having performed a gallows dance some years before. Lately he had been more vigilant than ever, for reasons he had not discussed, at least with me.

Julian was my age (seventeen), and we were approximately the same height, but there the resemblance ended. Julian had been born an aristo; my family was of the leasing class. His skin was clear and pale where mine was dark and lunar. (I was marked by the same Pox that took my sister Flaxie to her grave in ‘63.) His hair was long and almost femininely clean; mine was black and wiry, cut to stubble by my mother with her sewing scissors, and I washed it once a week or so—more often in summer, when the brook behind the cottage ran clean and cool. His clothes were linen and, in places, silk, brass-buttoned, cut to fit; my shirt and pants were course hempen cloth, sewn to a good approximation but obviously not the work of a New York tailor.

And yet we were friends, and had been friends for three years, since we met by chance in the forested hills west of the Duncan and Crowley Estate, where we had gone to hunt, Julian with his fine Porter & Earle cassette rifle and me with a simple muzzle-loader. We both loved books, especially the boys’ books written in those days by an author named Charles Curtis Easton.[1] I had been carrying a copy of Easton’s Against the Brazilians, illicitly borrowed from the Estate library; Julian had recognized the title, but refrained from ratting on me, since he loved the book as much as I did and longed to discuss it with a fellow enthusiast (of which there were precious few among his aristo relations)—in short, he did me an unbegged favor, and we became fast friends despite our differences.

In those early days I had not known how fond he was of blasphemy. But I had learned since, and it had not deterred me. Much.

We had not set out with the specific aim of visiting the Tip; but at the nearest crossroad Julian turned west, riding past cornfields and gourdfields already harvested and sun-whitened split-rail fences on which dense blackberry gnarls had grown up. The air was cool but the sun was fiercely bright. Julian and Sam wore broad-brimmed hats to protect their faces; I wore a plain linen pakool hat, sweat-stained, rolled about my ears. Before long we passed the last rude shacks of the indentured laborers, whose near-naked children gawked at us from the roadside, and it became obvious we were going to the Tip, because where else on this road was there to go?—unless we continued east for many hours, all the way to the ruins of the old towns, from the days of the False Tribulation.

The Tip was located far from Williams Ford to prevent poaching and disorder. There was a strict pecking order to the Tip. This is how it worked: professional scavengers hired by the Estate brought their pickings from the ruined places to the Tip, which was a pine-fenced enclosure (a sort of stockade) in a patch of grassland and prairie flowers. There the newly-arrived goods were roughly sorted, and riders were dispatched to the Estate to make the highborn aware of the latest acquisitions, and various aristos (or their trusted servants) would ride out to claim the prime gleanings. The next day, the leasing class would be allowed to sort through what was left; after that, if anything remained, indentured laborers could rummage among it, if they calculated it worthwhile to make the journey.

Every prosperous town had a Tip; though in the east it was sometimes called a Till, a Dump, or an Eebay.

Today we were fortunate: several wagonloads of scrounge had lately arrived, and riders had not yet been sent to notify the Estate. The gate was manned by a Home Guard, who looked at us suspiciously until Sam announced the name of Julian Comstock; then the guard briskly stepped aside, and we went inside the enclosure.

Many of the wagons were still unloading, and a chubby Tipman, eager to show off his bounty, hurried toward us as we dismounted and moored our horses. “Happy coincidence!” he cried. “Gentlemen!” Addressing mostly Sam by this remark, with a cautious smile for Julian and a disdainful sidelong glance at me. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“Books,” Julian said promptly, before Sam or I could answer.

“Books! Ordinarily, I set aside books for the Dominion Conservator . . .”

“The boy is a Comstock,” Sam said. “I don’t suppose you mean to balk him.”

The Tipman reddened. “No, not at all . . . in fact we came across something in our digging . . . a sort of library in miniature . . . I’ll show you, if you like.”

This was intriguing, especially to Julian, who beamed as if he had been invited to a Christmas party. We followed the stout Tipman to a freshly-arrived canvasback wagon, from which a laborer was tossing bundled piles into a stack beside a tent.

These twine-wrapped bales were books . . . old, tattered, and wholly free of the Dominion Stamp of Approval. They must have been more than a century old; for although they were faded they had obviously once been colorful and expensively printed, not made of stiff brown paper like the Charles Curtis Easton books of modern times. They had not even rotted much. Their smell, under the cleansing Athabaska sunlight, was inoffensive.

“Sam!” Julian whispered. He had already drawn his knife and was slicing through the twine.

“Calm down,” suggested Sam, who was not an enthusiast like Julian.

“Oh, but—Sam! We should have brought a cart!”

“We can’t carry away armloads, Julian, nor would we ever have been allowed to. The Dominion scholars will have all this. Though perhaps you can get away with a volume or two.”

The Tipman said, “These are from Lundsford.” Lundsford was the name of a ruined town thirty or so miles to the southeast. The Tipman leaned toward Sam Godwin, who was his own age, and said: “We thought Lundsford had been mined out a decade ago. But even a dry well may freshen. One of my workers spotted a low place off the main excavations—a sort of sink-hole: the recent rain had cut it through. Once a basement or warehouse of some kind. Oh, sir, we found good china there, and glasswork, and many more books than this . . . most were mildewed, but some had been protected under a kind of stiff oilcoth, and were lodged beneath a partially-collapsed ceiling . . . there had been a fire, but they survived it . . .”

“Good work, Tipman,” Sam Godwin said.

“Thank you, sir! Perhaps you could remember me to the great men of the Estate?” And he gave his name (which I have forgotten).

Julian had fallen to his knees amidst the compacted clay and rubble of the Tip, lifting up each book in turn and examining it with wide eyes. I joined him in his exploration.

I had never much liked the Tip. It had always seemed to me a haunted place. And of course it was haunted: that was its purpose, to house the revenants of the past, ghosts of the False Tribulation startled out of their century-long slumber. Here was evidence of the best and worst of the people who had inhabited the Years of Vice and Profligacy. Their fine things were very fine, their glassware especially, and it was a straitened aristo indeed who did not possess antique table-settings rescued from some ruin or other. Sometimes one might find silver utensils in boxes, or useful tools, or coins. The coins were too plentiful to be worth much, individually, but they could be worked into buttons or other adornments. One of the high-born back at the Estate owned a saddle studded with copper pennies all from the year 2032. (I had occasionally been enlisted to polish it.)

But here also was the trash and inexplicable detritus: “plastic,” gone brittle with sunlight or soft with the juices of the earth; bits of metal blooming with rust; electronic devices blackened by time and imbued with the sad inutility of a tensionless spring; engine parts, corroded; copper wire rotten with verdigris; aluminum cans and steel barrels eaten through by the poisonous fluids they had once contained—and so on, almost ad infinitum.

Here, too, were the in-between things, the curiosities, the ugly or pretty baubles, as intriguing and as useless as seashells. (“Put down that rusty trumpet, Adam, you’ll cut your lip and poison your blood!”—my mother, when we had gone to the Tip many years before I met Julian. There had been no music in the trumpet anyway; its bell was bent and corroded through.)

More than that, though, there was the uneasy knowledge that these things, fine or corrupt, had survived their makers—had proved more imperishable than flesh or spirit (for the souls of the secular ancients were almost certainly not first in line for the Resurrection).

And yet, these books . . . they tempted; they proclaimed their seductions boldly. Some were decorated with impossibly beautiful women in various degrees of undress. I had already sacrificed my personal claim to virtue with certain young women at the Estate, whom I had recklessly kissed; at the age of seventeen I considered myself a jade, or something like one; but these images were so frank and impudent they made me blush and look away.

Julian simply ignored them, as he had always been invulnerable to the charms of women. He preferred the larger and more densely-written material—he had already set aside a textbook of BIOLOGY, spotted and discolored but largely intact. He found another volume almost as large, and handed it to me, saying, “Here, Adam, try this—you might find it enlightening.”

I inspected it skeptically. The book was called A HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE.

“The moon again,” I said.

“Read it for yourself.”

“Tissue of lies, I’m sure.”

“With photographs.”

“Photographs prove nothing. Those people could do anything with photographs.”

“Well, read it anyway,” Julian said.

In truth the idea excited me. We had had this argument many times, Julian and I, especially on autumn nights when the moon hung low and ponderous on the horizon. People have walked there, he would say. The first time he made this claim I laughed; the second time I said, “Yes, certainly: I once climbed there myself, on a greased rainbow—” But he had been serious.

Oh, I had heard these stories before. Who hadn’t? Men on the moon. What surprised me was that someone as well-educated as Julian would believe them.

“Just take the book,” he insisted.

“What: to keep?”

“Certainly to keep.”

“Believe I will,” I muttered, and I stuck the object in my back-satchel and felt both proud and guilty. What would my father say, if he knew I was reading literature without a Dominion stamp? What would my mother make of it? (Of course I would not tell them.)

At this point I backed off, and found a grassy patch a little away from the rubble, where I could sit and eat some of the lunch I had packed, and watch Julian, who continued to sort through the detritus with a kind of scholarly intensity. Sam Godwin came and joined me, brushing a spot on an old timber so he could recline without soiling his uniform, such as it was.

“He sure loves those old books,” I said, making conversation.

Sam was often taciturn—the very picture of an old veteran—but he nodded and spoke familiarly: “He’s learned to love them. I helped teach him. I wonder if that was wise. Maybe he loves them too much. It might be they’ll kill him, one of these days.”

“How, Sam? By the apostasy of them?”

“Julian’s too smart for his own good. He debates with the Dominion clergy. Just last week I found him arguing with Ben Kreel[2] about God, history, and such abstractions. Which is precisely what he must not do, if he wants to survive the next few years.”

“Why, what threatens him?”

“The jealousy of the powerful,” Sam said, but he would say no more on the subject, only sat and stroked his graying beard, and glanced occasionally, and uneasily, to the east.

The day went on, and eventually Julian had to drag himself from his nest of books with only a pair of prizes: the INTRODUCTION TO BIOLOGY and another volume called GEOGRAPHY OF NORTH AMERICA. Time to go, Sam insisted; better to be back at the Estate by supper; in any case, riders had been sent ahead, and the official pickers and Dominion curators would soon be here to cull what we had left.

But I have said that Julian tutored me in one of his apostasies. Here is how it happened. We stopped, at the drowsy end of the afternoon, at the height of a ridge overlooking the town of Williams Ford, the grand Estate upstream of it, and the River Pine as it cut through the valley on its way from the mountains of the West. From this vantage we could see the steeple of the Dominion Hall, and the revolving wheels of the grist mill and the lumber mill, and so on, blue in the long light and hazy with woodsmoke, colored here and there with what remained of the autumn foliage. Far to the south a railway bridge crossed the gorge of the Pine like a suspended thread. Go inside, the weather seemed to proclaim; it’s fair but it won’t be fair for long; bolt the window, stoke the fire, boil the apples; winter’s due. We rested our horses on the windy hilltop, and Julian found a blackberry bramble where the berries were still plump and dark, and we plucked some of these and ate them.

This was the world I had been born into. It was an autumn like every autumn I could remember. But I could not help thinking of the Tip and its ghosts. Maybe those people, the people who had lived through the Efflorescence of Oil and the False Tribulation, had felt about their homes and neighborhoods as I felt about Williams Ford. They were ghosts to me, but they must have seemed real enough to themselves—must have been real; had not realized they were ghosts; and did that I mean I was also a ghost, a revenant to haunt some future generation?

Julian saw my expression and asked me what was the matter. I told him my thoughts.

“Now you’re thinking like a philosopher,” he said, grinning.

“No wonder they’re such a miserable brigade, then.”

“Unfair, Adam—you’ve never seen a philosopher in your life.” Julian believed in Philosophers and claimed to have met one or two.

“Well, I imagine they’re miserable, if they go around thinking of themselves as ghosts and such.”

“It’s the condition of all things,” Julian said. “This blackberry, for example.” He plucked one and held it in the pale palm of his hand. “Has it always looked like this?”

“Obviously not,” I said, impatiently.

“Once it was a tiny green bud of a thing, and before that it was part of the substance of the bramble, which before that was a seed inside a blackberry—”

“And round and round for all eternity.”

“But no, Adam, that’s the point. The bramble, and that tree over there, and the gourds in the field, and the crow circling over them—they’re all descended from ancestors that didn’t quite resemble them. A blackberry or a crow is a form, and forms change over time, the way clouds change shape as they travel across the sky.”

“Forms of what?”

“Of DNA,” Julian said earnestly. (The BIOLOGY he had picked out of the Tip was not the first BIOLOGY he had read.)

“Julian,” Sam warned, “I once promised this boy’s parents you wouldn’t corrupt him.”

I said, “I’ve heard of DNA. It’s the life force of the secular ancients. And it’s a myth.”

“Like men walking on the moon?”

“Exactly.”

“And who’s your authority on this? Ben Kreel? The Dominion History of the Union?”

“Nothing is changeless except DNA? That’s a peculiar argument even from you, Julian.”

“It would be, if I were making it. But DNA isn’t changeless. It struggles to remember itself, but it never remembers itself perfectly. Remembering a fish, it imagines a lizard. Remembering a horse, it imagines a hippopotamus. Remembering an ape, it imagines a man.”

“Julian!” Sam was insistent now. “That’s quite enough.”

“You sound like a Darwinist,” I said.

“Yes,” Julian admitted, smiling in spite of his unorthodoxy, the autumn sun turning his face the color of penny copper. “I suppose I do.”

That night, I lay in bed until I was reasonably certain both my parents were asleep. Then I rose, lit a lamp, and took the new (or rather, very old) HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE from where I had hidden it behind my oaken dresser.

I leafed through the brittle pages. I didn’t read the book. I would read it, but tonight I was too weary to pay close attention, and in any case I wanted to savor the words (lies and fictions though they might be), not rush through them. Tonight I wanted only to sample the book; in other words, to look at the pictures.

There were dozens of photographs, and each one captured my attention with fresh marvels and implausibilities. One of them showed—or purported to show—men standing on the surface of the moon, just as Julian had described.

The men in the picture were evidently Americans. They wore flags stitched to the shoulders of their moon clothing, an archaic version of our own flag, with something less than the customary sixty stars. Their clothing was white and ridiculously bulky, like the winter clothes of the Inuit, and they wore helmets with golden visors that disguised their faces. I supposed it must be very cold on the moon, if explorers required such cumbersome protection. They must have arrived in winter. However, there was no ice or snow in the neighborhood. The moon seemed to be little more than a desert, dry as a stick and dusty as a Tipman’s wardrobe.

I cannot say how long I stared at this picture, puzzling over it. It might have been an hour or more. Nor can I accurately describe how it made me feel . . . larger than myself, but lonely, as if I had grown as tall as the stars and lost sight of everything familiar. By the time I closed the book the moon had risen outside my window—the real moon, I mean; a harvest moon, fat and orange, half-hidden behind drifting, evolving clouds.

I found myself wondering whether it was truly possible that men had visited that celestial body. Whether, as the pictures implied, they had ridden there on rockets, rockets a thousand times larger than the familiar Independence Day fireworks. But if men had visited the moon, why hadn’t they stayed there? Was it so inhospitable a place that no one wished to remain?

Or perhaps they had stayed, and were living there still. If the moon was such a cold place, I reasoned, people residing on its surface would be forced to build fires to keep warm. There seemed to be no wood on the moon, judging by the photographs, so they must have resorted to coal or peat. I went to the window and examined the moon minutely for any sign of campfires, pit mining, or other lunar industry. But I could see none. It was only the moon, mottled and changeless. I blushed at my own gullibility, replaced the book in its hiding place, chased these heresies from my mind with a prayer (or a hasty facsimile of one), and eventually fell asleep.

3

It falls to me to explain something of Williams Ford, and my family’s place in it—and Julian’s—before I describe the threat Sam Godwin feared, which materialized in our village not long before Christmas.[3]

Situated at the head of the valley was the font of our prosperity, the Duncan and Crowley Estate. It was a country estate (obviously, since we were in Athabaska, far from the eastern seats of power), owned by two influential New York mercantile families, who maintained their villa not only as a source of income but as a kind of resort, safely distant (several days’ journey by train) from the intrigues and pestilences of city life. It was inhabited—ruled, I might say—not only by the Duncan and Crowley patriarchs but by a whole legion of cousins, nephews, relations by marriage, high-born friends, and distinguished guests in search of clean air and rural views. Our corner of Athabaska was blessed with a benign climate and pleasant scenery, according to the season, and these things attract idle aristos the way strong butter attracts flies.

It remains unrecorded whether the town existed before the Estate or vice versa; but certainly the town depended on the Estate for its prosperity. In Williams Ford there were essentially three classes: the Owners, or aristos; below them the leasing class, who worked as smiths, carpenters, coopers, overseers, gardeners, beekeepers, etc., and whose leases were repaid in service; and finally the indentured laborers, who worked as field hands, inhabited rude shacks along the west bank of the Pine, and received no compensation beyond bad food and worse lodging.

My family occupied an ambivalent place in this hierarchy. My mother was a seamstress. She worked at the Estate as had her parents before her. My father, however, had arrived in Williams Ford as a transient, and his marriage to my mother had been controversial. He had “married a lease,” as the saying has it, and had been taken on as a stable hand at the Estate in lieu of a dowry. The law allowed such unions, but popular opinion frowned on it. We had few friends of our own class, my mother’s blood relations had since died (perhaps of embarrassment), and as a child I was often mocked and derided for my father’s low origins.

On top of that was the issue of our religion. We were—because my father was—Church of Signs. In those days, every Christian church in America was required to have the formal approval of the Board of Registrars of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth. (In popular parlance, “The Church of the Dominion,” but this was a misnomer, since every church is a Dominion Church if it is recognized by the Board. Dominion Episcopal, Dominion Presbyterian, Dominion Baptist—even the Catholic Church of America since it renounced its fealty to the Roman Pope in 2112—all are included under the Dominionist umbrella, since the purpose of the Dominion is not to be a church but to certify churches. In America we are entitled by the Constitution to worship at any church we please, as long as it is a genuine Christian congregation and not some fraudulent or satanistic sect. The Board exists to make that distinction. Also to collect fees and tithes to further its important work.)

We were, as I said, Church of Signs, which was a marginal denomination, shunned by the leasing class, recognized but not fully endorsed by the Dominion, and popular mostly with illiterate indentured workers, among whom my father had been raised. Our faith took for its master text that passage in Mark which proclaims, “In my Name they will cast out devils, and speak in new tongues; they will handle serpents, and if they drink poison they will not be sickened by it.” We were snake-handlers, in other words, and famous beyond our modest numbers for it. Our congregation consisted of a dozen farmhands, mostly transients lately arrived from the southern states. My father was its deacon (though we did not use that name), and we kept snakes, for ritual purposes, in wire cages on our back acre, next to the outbuilding. This practice contributed very little to our social standing.

That had been the situation of our family when Julian Comstock arrived as a guest of the Duncan and Crowley families, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, and when Julian and I met by coincidence while hunting.

At that time I had been apprenticed to my father, who had risen to the rank of an overseer at the Estate’s lavish and extensive stables. My father loved animals, especially horses. Unfortunately I was not made in the same mold, and my relations with the stable’s equine inhabitants rarely extended beyond a brisk mutual tolerance. I did not love my job—which consisted largely of sweeping straw, shoveling ordure, and doing in general those chores the older stablehands felt to be beneath their dignity—so I was pleased when it became customary for a household amanuensis (or even Sam Godwin in person) to arrive and summon me away from my work at Julian’s request. (Since the request emanated from a Comstock it couldn’t be overruled, no matter how fiercely the grooms and saddlers gnashed their teeth to see me escape their autocracy.)

At first we met to read and discuss books, or hunt together; later, Sam Godwin invited me to audit Julian’s lessons, for he had been charged with Julian’s education as well as his general welfare. (I had been taught the rudiments of reading and writing at the Dominion school, and refined these skills under the tutelage of my mother, who believed in the power of literacy as an improving force. My father could neither read nor write.) And it was not more than a year after our first acquaintance that Sam presented himself one evening at my parents’ cottage with an extraordinary proposal.

“Mr. and Mrs. Hazzard,” Sam had said, putting his hand up to touch his cap (which he had removed when he entered the cottage, so that the gesture looked like a salute), “you know of course about the friendship between your son and Julian Comstock.”

“Yes,” my mother said. “And worry over it often enough—matters at the Estate being what they are.”

My mother was a small woman, plump, but forceful, with ideas of her own. My father, who spoke seldom, on this occasion spoke not at all, only sat in his chair holding a laurel-root pipe, which he did not light.

“Matters at the Estate are exactly the crux of the issue,” Sam Godwin said. “I’m not sure how much Adam has told you about our situation there. Julian’s father, General Bryce Comstock, who was my friend as well as my commanding officer, shortly before his death charged me with Julian’s care and well-being—”

“Before his death,” my mother pointed out, “at the gallows, for treason.”

Sam winced. “True, Mrs. Hazzard, I can’t deny it, but I assert my belief that the trial was rigged and the verdict indefensible. Defensible or not, however, it doesn’t alter my obligation as far as the son is concerned. I promised to care for the boy, Mrs. Hazzard, and I mean to keep my promise.”

“A Christian sentiment.” Her skepticism was not entirely disguised.

“As for your implication about the Estate, and the practices of the young heirs and heiresses there, I couldn’t agree more. Which is why I approved and encouraged Julian’s friendship with your son. Apart from Adam, Julian has no true friends. The Estate is such a den of venomous snakes—no offense,” he added, remembering our religious affiliation, and making the common but mistaken assumption that congregants of the Church of Signs necessarily like snakes, or feel some kinship with them—”no offense, but I would sooner allow Julian to associate with, uh, scorpions,” striking for a more palatable simile, “than abandon him to the sneers, machinations, ruses, and ruinous habits of his peers. That makes me not only his teacher but his constant companion. But I’m almost three times his age, Mrs. Hazzard, and he needs a reliable friend more nearly of his own growth.”

“What do you propose, exactly, Mr. Godwin?”

“What I propose is that I take on Adam as a second student, full-time, and to the ultimate benefit of both boys.”

Sam was usually a man of few words—even as a teacher—and he seemed as exhausted by this oration as if he had lifted some great weight.

“As a student, but a student of what, Mr. Godwin?”

“Mechanics. History. Grammar and composition. Martial skills—”

“Adam already knows how to fire a rifle.”

“Pistolwork, sabrework, fist-fighting—but that’s only a fraction of it,” Sam added hastily. “Julian’s father asked me to cultivate the boy’s mind as well as his reflexes.”

My mother had more to say on the subject, chiefly about how my work at the stables helped offset the family’s leases, and how difficult it would be to do without those extra vouchers at the Estate store. But Sam had anticipated the point. He had been entrusted by Julian’s mother—that is to say, the sister-in-law of the President—with a discretionary fund for Julian’s education, which could be tapped to compensate for my absence from the stables. And at a handsome rate. He quoted a number, and the objections from my parents grew considerably less strenuous, and were finally whittled away to nothing. (I observed all this from a room away, through a gap in the door.)

Which is not to say no misgivings remained. Before I set off for the Estate the next day, this time to visit one of the Great Houses rather than the stables, my mother warned me not to tangle myself too tightly with the affairs of the high-born. I promised her I would cling to my Christian virtues. (A hasty promise, less easily kept than I imagined.[4])

“It may not be your morals that are at risk,” she said. “The high-born conduct themselves by different standards than we use, Adam. The games they play have mortal stakes. You do know that Julian’s father was hung?”

Julian never spoke of it, but it was a matter of public record. I repeated Sam’s assertion that Bryce Comstock had been innocent.

“He may well have been. That’s the point. There has been a Comstock in the Presidency for the past thirty years, and the current Comstock is said to be jealous of his power. The only real threat to the reign of Julian’s uncle was the ascendancy of his brother, who made himself dangerously popular in the war with the Brazilians. I suspect Mr. Godwin is correct, that Bryce Comstock was hanged not because he was a bad General but because he was a successful one.”

No doubt such scandals were possible—I had heard stories about life in New York City, where the President resided, that would curl a Cynic’s hair. But what could these things possibly have to do with me? Or even Julian? We were only boys.

Such was my naiveté.

4

The days had grown short, and Thanksgiving had come and gone, and so had November, and snow was in the air—the tang of it, anyway—when fifty cavalrymen of the Athabaska Reserve rode into Williams Ford, escorting an equal number of Campaigners and Poll-Takers.

Many people despised the Athabaskan winter. I was not one of them. I didn’t mind the cold and the darkness, not so long as there was a hard-coal heater, a spirit lamp to read by on long nights, and the chance of wheat cakes or headcheese for breakfast. And Christmas was coming up fast—one of the four Universal Christian Holidays recognized by the Dominion (the others being Easter, Independence Day, and Thanksgiving). My favorite of these had always been Christmas. It was not so much the gifts, which were generally meager—though last year I had received from my parents the lease of a muzzle-loading rifle of which I was exceptionally proud—nor was it entirely the spiritual substance of the holiday, which I am ashamed to say seldom entered my mind except when it was thrust upon me at religious services. What I loved was the combined effect of brisk air, frost-whitened mornings, pine and holly wreaths pinned to doorways, cranberry-red banners draped above the main street to flap cheerfully in the cold wind, carols and hymns chanted or sung—the whole breathless confrontation with Winter, half defiance and half submission. I liked the clockwork regularity of these rituals, as if a particular cog on the wheel of time had engaged with neat precision. It soothed; it spoke of eternity.

But this was an ill-omened season.

The Reserve troops rode into town on the fifteenth of December. Ostensibly, they were here to conduct the Presidential Election. National elections were a formality in Williams Ford. By the time our citizens were polled, the outcome was usually a foregone conclusion, already decided in the populous Eastern states—that is, when there was more than one candidate, which was seldom. For the last six electoral years no individual or party had contested the election, and we had been ruled by one Comstock or another for three decades. Election had become indistinguishable from acclamation.

But that was all right, because an election was still a momentous event, almost a kind of circus, involving the arrival of Poll-Takers and Campaigners, who always had a fine show to put on.

And this year—the rumor emanated from high chambers of the Estate, and had been whispered everywhere—there was to be a movie shown in the Dominion Hall.

I had never seen any movies, though Julian had described them to me. He had seen them often in New York when he was younger, and whenever he grew nostalgic—life in Williams Ford was sometimes a little sedate for Julian’s taste—it was the movies he was provoked to mention. And so, when the showing of a movie was announced as part of the electoral process, both of us were excited, and we agreed to meet behind the Dominion Hall at he appointed hour.

Neither of us had any legitimate reason to be there. I was too young to vote, and Julian would have been conspicuous and perhaps unwelcome as the only aristo at a gathering of the leasing class. (The high-born had been polled independently at the Estate, and had already voted proxies for their indentured labor.) So I let my parents leave for the Hall early in the evening, and I followed surreptitiously, and arrived just before the event was scheduled to begin. I waited behind the meeting hall, where a dozen horses were tethered, until Julian arrived on an animal borrowed from the Estate stables. He was dressed in his best approximation of a leaser’s clothing: hempen shirt and trousers of a dark color, and a black felt hat with its brim pulled low to disguise his face.

He dismounted, looking troubled, and I asked him what was wrong. Julian shook his head. “Nothing, Adam—or nothing yet—but Sam says there’s trouble brewing.” And here he regarded me with an expression verging on pity. “War,” he said.

“There’s always war.”

“A new offensive.”

“Well, what of it? Labrador’s a million miles away.”

“Obviously your sense of geography hasn’t been much improved by Sam’s classes. And we might be physically a long distance from the front, but we’re operationally far too close for comfort.”

I didn’t know what that meant, and so I dismissed it. “We can worry about that after the movie, Julian.”

He forced a grin and said, “Yes, I suppose so. As well after as before.”

So we entered the Dominion Hall just as the lamps were being dimmed, and slouched into the last row of crowded pews, and waited for the show to start.

There was a broad stage at the front of the Hall, from which all religious appurtenances had been removed, and a square white screen had been erected in place of the usual pulpit or dais. On each side of the screen was a kind of tent in which the two players sat, with their scripts and dramatic gear: speaking-horns, bells, blocks, a drum, a pennywhistle, et alia. This was, Julian said, a stripped-down edition of what one might find in a fashionable New York movie theater. In the city, the screen (and thus the images projected on it) would be larger; the players would be more professional, since script-reading and noise-making were considered fashionable arts, and the city players competed with one another for roles; and there might be a third player stationed behind the screen for dramatic narration or additional “sound effects.” There might even be an orchestra, with thematic music written for each individual production.

Movies were devised in such a way that two main characters, male and female, could be voiced by the players, with the male actor photographed so that he appeared on the left during dialogue scenes, and the female actor on the right. The players would observe the movie by a system of mirrors, and could follow scripts illuminated by a kind of binnacle lamp (so as not to cast a distracting light), and they spoke their lines as the photographed actors spoke, so that their voices seemed to emanate from the screen. Likewise, their drumming and bell-ringing and such corresponded to events within the movie.[5]

“Of course, they did it better in the secular era,” Julian whispered, and I prayed no one had overheard this indelicate comment. By all reports, movies had indeed been spectacular during the Efflorescence of Oil—with recorded sound, natural color rather than black-and-gray, etc. But they were also (by the same reports) hideously impious, blasphemous to the extreme, and routinely pornographic. Fortunately (or unfortunately, from Julian’s point of view) no examples have survived; the media on which they were recorded was ephemeral; the film stock has long since rotted, and “digital” copies are degraded and wholly undecodable. These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

Our truest and best American antiquity, as the Dominion History of the Union insisted, was the nineteenth century, whose household virtues and modest industries we have been forced by circumstance to imperfectly restore, whose skills were practical, and whose literature was often useful and improving.

But I have to confess that some of Julian’s apostasy had infected me. I was troubled by unhappy thoughts even as the torchieres were extinguished and Ben Kreel (our Dominion representative, standing in front of the movie screen) delivered a brief lecture on Nation, Piety, and Duty. War, Julian had said, implying not just the everlasting War in Labrador but a new phase of it, one that might reach its skeletal hand right into Williams Ford—and then what of me, and what of my family?

“We are here to cast our ballots,” Ben Kreel said in summation, “a sacred duty at once to our country and our faith, a country so successfully and benevolently stewarded by its leader, President Deklan Comstock, whose Campaigners, I see by the motions of their hands, are anxious to get on with the events of the night; and so, without further adieu, etc., please direct your attention to the presentation of their moving picture, First Under Heaven, which they have prepared for our enjoyment—”

The necessary gear had been hauled into Williams Ford under a canvas-top wagon: a projection apparatus and a portable Swiss dynamo (probably captured from the Dutch forces in Labrador), powered by distilled spirits, installed in a sort of trench or redoubt freshly dug behind the church to muffle its sound, which nevertheless penetrated through the plank floors like the growl of a huge dog. This vibration only added to the sense of moment, as the last illuminating flame was extinguished and the electric bulb within the huge black mechanical projector flared up.

The movie began. As it was the first I had ever seen, my astonishment was complete. I was so entranced by the illusion of photographs “come to life” that the substance of the scenes almost escaped me . . . but I remember an ornate title, and scenes of the Second Battle of Quebec, recreated by actors but utterly real to me, accompanied by drum-banging and shrill penny whistling to represent the reports of shot and shell. Those at the front of the auditorium flinched instinctively; several of the village’s prominent women came near to fainting, and clasped the hands or arms of their male companions, who might be as bruised, come morning, as if they had participated in the battle itself.

Soon enough, however, the Dutchmen under their cross-and-laurel flag began to retreat from the American forces, and an actor representing the young Deklan Comstock came to the fore, reciting his Vows of Inauguration (a bit prematurely, but history was here truncated for the purposes of art)—that’s the one in which he mentions both the Continental Imperative and the Debt to the Past. He was voiced, of course, by one of the players, a basso profundo whose tones emerged from his speaking-bell with ponderous gravity. (Which was also a slight revision of the truth, for the genuine Deklan Comstock possessed a high-pitched voice, and was prone to petulance.)

The movie then proceeded to more decorous episodes and scenic views representing the glories of the reign of Deklan Conqueror, as he was known to the Army of the Laurentians, which had marched him to his ascendancy in New York City. Here was the reconstruction of Washington, DC (a project never completed, always in progress, hindered by a swampy climate and insect-borne diseases); here was the Illumination of Manhattan, whereby electric streetlights were powered by a hydroelectric dynamo, four hours every day between 6 and 10 p.m.; here was the military shipyard at Boston Harbor, the coal mines and foundries and weapons factories of Pennsylvania, the newest and shiniest steam engines to pull the newest and shiniest trains, etc., etc.

I had to wonder at Julian’s reaction to all this. This entire show, after all, was concocted to extoll the virtues of the man who had contrived the death by hanging of his father. I could not forget—and Julian must be constantly aware—that the current President was a fratricidal tyrant. But Julian’s eyes were riveted on the screen. This reflected (I later learned) not his opinion of contemporary politics but his fascination with what he preferred to call “cinema.” This making of illusions in two dimensions was never far from his mind—it was, perhaps, his “true calling,” and would culminate in the creation of Julian’s suppressed cinematic masterwork, The Life and Adventures of the Great Naturalist Charles Darwin . . . but that tale remains for another telling.

The present movie went on to mention the successful forays against the Brazilians at Panama during Deklan Conqueror’s reign, which may have struck closer to home, for I saw Julian wince once or twice.

As for me . . . I tried to lose myself in the moment, but my attention was woefully truant.

Perhaps it was the strangeness of the campaign event, so close to Christmas. Perhaps it was the HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE, which I had been reading in bed, a page or two at a time, almost every night since our journey to the Tip. Whatever the cause, I was beset by a sudden anxiety and sense of melancholy. Here I was in the midst of everything that seemed familiar and ought to be comforting—the crowd of the leasing class, the enclosing benevolence of the Dominion Hall, the banners and tokens of the Christmas season—and it all felt suddenly ephemeral, as if the world were a bucket from which the bottom had dropped out.

Perhaps this was what Julian had called “the philosopher’s perspective.” If so, I wondered how the philosophers endured it. I had learned a little from Sam Godwin—and more from Julian, who read books of which even Sam disapproved—about the discredited ideas of the Secular Era. I thought of Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view of was more privileged than any other: in other words his “general relativity,” and its claim that the answer to the question “What is real?” begins with the question “Where are you standing?” Was that all I was, here in the cocoon of Williams Ford—a Point of View? Or was I an incarnation of a molecule of DNA, “imperfectly remembering,” as Julian had said, an ape, a fish, and an amoeba?

Maybe even the Nation that Ben Kreel had praised so extravagantly was only an example of this trend in nature—an imperfect memory of another century, which had itself been an imperfect memory of all the centuries before it, and so back to the dawn of Man (in Eden, or Africa, as Julian believed).

Perhaps this was just my growing disenchantment with the town where I had been raised—or a presentiment that it was about to be stolen away from me.

The movie ended with a stirring scene of an American flag, its thirteen stripes and sixty stars rippling in sunlight—betokening, the narrator insisted, another four years of the prosperity and benevolence engendered by the rule of Deklan Conqueror, for whom the audience’s votes were solicited, not that there was any competing candidate known or rumored. The film flapped against its reel; the electric bulb was extinguished. Then the deacons of the Dominion began to reignite the wall lights. Several of the men in the audience had lit pipes during the cinematic display, and their smoke mingled with the smudge of the torchieres, a blue-gray thundercloud hovering under the high arches of the ceiling.

Julian seemed distracted, and slumped in his pew with his hat pulled low. “Adam,” he whispered, “we have to find a way out of here.”

“I believe I see one,” I said; “it’s called the door—but what’s the hurry?”

“Look at the door more closely. Two men of the Reserve have been posted there.”

I looked, and what he had said was true. “But isn’t that just to protect the balloting?” For Ben Kreel had retaken the stage and was preparing to ask for a formal show of hands.

“Tom Shearney, the barber with a bladder complaint, just tried to leave to use the jakes. He was turned back.”

Indeed, Tom Shearney was seated less than a yard away from us, squirming unhappily and casting resentful glances at the Reserve men.

“But after the balloting—”

“This isn’t about balloting. This is about conscription.”

“Conscription!”

“Hush!” Julian said hastily, shaking his hair out of his pale face. “You’ll start a stampede. I didn’t think it would begin so soon . . . but we’ve had certain telegrams from New York about setbacks in Labrador, and the call-up of new divisions. Once the balloting is finished the Campaigners will probably announce a recruitment drive, and take the names of everyone present and survey them for the names and ages of their children.”

“We’re too young to be drafted,” I said, for we were both just seventeen.

“Not according to what I’ve heard. The rules have been changed. Oh, you can probably find a way to hide out when the culling begins—and get away with it, considering how far we are from anywhere else. But my presence here is well-known. I don’t have a mob or family to melt away into. In fact it’s probably not a coincidence that so many Reserves have been sent to such a little village as Williams Ford.”

“What do you mean, not a coincidence?”

“My uncle has never been happy about my existence. He has no children of his own. No heirs. He sees me as a possible competitor for the Executive.”

“But that’s absurd. You don’t want to be President—do you?”

“I would sooner shoot myself. But Uncle Deklan has a jealous bent, and he distrusts the motives of my mother in protecting me.”

“How does a draft help him?”

“The entire draft is not aimed at me, but I’m sure he finds it a useful tool. If I’m drafted, no one can complain that he’s excepting his own family from the general conscription. And when he has me in the infantry he can be sure I find myself on the front lines in Labrador—performing some noble but suicidal trench attack.”

“But—Julian! Can’t Sam protect you?”

“Sam is a retired soldier; he has no power except what arises from the patronage of my mother. Which isn’t worth much in the coin of the present realm. Adam, is there another way out of this building?”

“Only the door, unless you mean to break a pane of that colored glass that fills the windows.”

“Somewhere to hide, then?”

I thought about it. “Maybe,” I said. “There’s a room behind the stage where the religious equipment is stored. You can enter it from the wings. We could hide there, but it has no door of its own.”

“It’ll have to do. If we can get there without attracting attention.”

But that was not too difficult, for the torchieres had not all been re-lit, much of the hall was still in shadow, and the audience was milling about a bit, and stretching, while the Campaigners prepared to record the vote that was to follow—they were meticulous accountants even though the final tally was a foregone conclusion and the ballrooms were already booked for Deklan Conqueror’s latest inauguration. Julian and I shuffled from one shadow to another, giving no appearance of haste, until we were close to the foot of the stage; there we paused at an entrance to the storage room, until a goonish Reserve man who had been eyeing us was called away by a superior officer to help dismantle the projecting equipment. We ducked through the curtained door into near-absolute darkness. Julian stumbled over some obstruction (a piece of the church’s tack piano, which had been disassembled for cleaning in 2165 by a traveling piano-mechanic, who had died of a stroke before finishing the job), the result being a woody “clang!” that seemed loud enough to alert the whole occupancy of the church, but evidently didn’t.

What little light there was came through a high glazed window that was hinged so that it could be opened in summer for purposes of ventilation. It was a weak sort of illumination, for the night was cloudy, and only the torches along the main street were shining. But it registered as our eyes adjusted to the dimness. “Perhaps we can get out that way,” Julian said.

“Not without a ladder. Although—”

“What? Speak up, Adam, if you have an idea.”

“This is where they store the risers—the long wooden blocks the choir stands on when they’re racked up for a performance. Perhaps those—”

But he was already examining the shadowy contents of the storage room, as intently as he had surveyed the Tip for ancient books. We found the likely suspects, and managed to stack them to a useful height without causing too much noise. (In the church hall, the Campaigners had already registered a unanimous vote for Deklan Comstock and had begun to break the news about the conscription drive. Some few voices were raised in futile objection; Ben Kreel was calling loudly for calm—no one heard us rearranging the unused furniture.)

The window was at least ten feet high, and almost too narrow to crawl through, and when we emerged on the other side we had to hang by our fingertips before dropping to the ground. I bent my right ankle awkwardly as I landed, though no lasting harm was done.

The night, already cold, had turned colder. We were near the hitching posts, and the horses whinnied at our surprising arrival and blew steam from their gaping nostrils. A fine, gritty snow had begun to fall. There was not much wind, however, and Christmas banners hung limply in the frigid air.

Julian made straight for his horse and loosed its reins from the post. “What are we going to do?” I asked.

“You, Adam, will do nothing but protect your own existence as best you know how; while I—”

But he balked at pronouncing his plans, and a shadow of anxiety passed over his face. Events were moving rapidly in the realm of the aristos, events I could barely comprehend.

“We can wait them out,” I said, a little desperately. “The Reserves can’t stay in Williams Ford forever.”

“No. Unfortunately neither can I, for Deklan Conqueror knows where to find me, and has made up his mind to remove me from the game of politics like a captured chesspiece.”

“But where will you go? And what—”

He put a finger to his mouth. There was a noise from the front of the Dominion Church Hall, as of the doors being thrown open, and voices of congregants arguing or wailing over the news of the conscription drive. “Ride with me,” Julian said. “Quick, now!”

We did not follow the main street, but caught a path that turned behind the blacksmith’s barn and through the wooded border of the River Pine, north in the general direction of the Estate. The night was dark, and the horses stepped slowly, but they knew the path almost by instinct, and some light from the town still filtered through the thinly falling snow, which touched my face like a hundred small cold fingers.

“It was never possible that I could stay at Williams Ford forever,” Julian said. “You ought to have known that, Adam.”

Truly, I should have. It was Julian’s constant theme, after all: the impermanence of things. I had always put this down to the circumstances of his childhood, the death of his father, the separation from his mother, the kind but aloof tutelage of Sam Godwin.

But I could not help thinking once more of THE HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE and the photographs in it—not of the First Men on the Moon, who were Americans, but of the Last Visitors to that celestial sphere, who had been Chinamen, and whose “space suits” had been firecracker-red. Like the Americans, they had planted their flag in expectation of more visitations to come; but the End of Oil and the False Tribulation had put paid to those plans.

And I thought of the even lonelier Plains of Mars, photographed by machines (or so the book alleged) but never touched by human feet. The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places. Somehow I had stumbled into one. The snow squall ended; the uninhabited moon came through the clouds; and the winter fields of Williams Ford glowed with an unearthly luminescence.

“If you must leave,” I said, “let me come with you.”

“No,” Julian said promptly. He had pulled his hat down around his ears, to protect himself from the cold, and I couldn’t see much of his face, but his eyes shone when he glanced in my direction. “Thank you, Adam. I wish it were possible. But it isn’t. You must stay here, and dodge the draft, if possible, and polish your literary skills, and one day write books, like Mr. Charles Curtis Easton.”

That was my ambition, which had grown over the last year, nourished by our mutual love of books and by Sam Godwin’s exercises in English Composition, for which I had discovered an unexpected talent.[6] At the moment it seemed a petty dream. Evanescent. Like all dreams. Like life itself. “None of that matters,” I said.

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Julian said. “You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.”

“Isn’t that the philosopher’s point of view?”

“Not if the philosopher knows what he’s talking about.” Julian reined up his horse and turned to face me, something of the imperiousness of his famous family entering into his mien. “Listen, Adam, there is something important you can do for me—at some personal risk. Are you willing?”

“Yes,” I said immediately.

“Then listen closely. Before long the Reserves will be watching the roads out of Williams Ford, if they aren’t already. I have to leave, and I have to leave tonight. I won’t be missed until morning, and then, at least at first, only by Sam. What I want you to do is this: go home—your parents will be worried about the conscription, and you can try to calm them down—but don’t allude to any of what happened tonight—and first thing in the morning, make your way as inconspicuously as possible into the Estate and find Sam. Tell him what happened at the Church Hall, and tell him to ride out of town as soon as he can do so without being caught. Tell him he can find me at Lundsford. That’s the message.”

“Lundsford? There’s nothing at Lundsford.”

“Precisely: nothing important enough that the Reserves would think to look for us there. You remember what the Tipman said in the fall, about the place he found those books? A low place near the main excavations. Sam can look for me there.”

“I’ll tell him,” I promised, blinking against the cold wind, which irritated my eyes.

“Thank you, Adam,” he said gravely. “For everything.” Then he forced a smile, and for a moment was just Julian, the friend with whom I had hunted squirrels and spun tales: “Merry Christmas,” he said. “Happy New Year!”

And wheeled his horse about, and rode away.

5

There is a Dominion cemetery in Williams Ford, and I passed it on the ride back home—carved stones sepulchral in the moonlight—but my sister Flaxie was not buried there.

As I have said, the Church of Signs was tolerated but not endorsed by the Dominion. We were not entitled to plots in the Dominion yard. Flaxie had a place in the acreage behind our cottage, marked by a modest wooden cross, but the cemetery put me in mind of Flaxie nonetheless, and after I returned the horse to the barn I stopped by Flaxie’s grave (despite the shivery cold) and tipped my hat to her, the way I had always tipped my hat to her in life.

Flaxie had been a bright, impudent, mischievous small thing—as golden-haired as her nickname implied. (Her given name was Dolores, but she was always Flaxie to me.) The Pox had taken her quite suddenly and, as these things go, mercifully. I didn’t remember her death; I had been down with the same Pox, though I had survived it. What I remembered was waking up from my fever into a house gone strangely quiet. No one had wanted to tell me about Flaxie, but I had seen my mother’s tormented eyes, and I knew the truth without having to be told. Death had played lottery with us, and Flaxie had drawn the short straw.

(It is, I think, for the likes of Flaxie that we maintain a belief in Heaven. I have met very few adults, outside the enthusiasts of the established Church, who genuinely believe in Heaven, and Heaven was scant consolation for my grieving mother. But Flaxie, who was five, had believed in it fervently—imagined it was something like a meadow, with wildflowers blooming, and a perpetual summer picnic underway—and if that childish belief soothed her in her extremity, then it served a purpose more noble than truth.)

Tonight the cottage was almost as quiet as it had been during the mourning that followed Flaxie’s death. I came through the door to find my mother dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, and my father frowning over his pipe, which, uncharacteristically, he had filled and lit. “The draft,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “I heard about it.”

My mother was too distraught to speak. My father said, “We’ll do what we can to protect you, Adam. But—”

“I’m not afraid to serve my country,” I said.

“That’s a praiseworthy attitude,” my father said glumly, and my mother wept even harder. “But we don’t yet know what might be necessary. Maybe the situation in Labrador isn’t as bad as it seems.”

Scant of words though my father was, I had often enough relied on him for advice, which he had freely given. He was fully aware, for instance, of my distaste for snakes—for which reason, abetted by my mother, I had been allowed to avoid the sacraments of our faith, and the venomous swellings and occasional amputations occasionally inflicted upon other parishioners—and, while this disappointed him, he had nevertheless taught me the practical aspects of snake-handling, including how to grasp a serpent in such a way as to avoid its bite, and how to kill one, should the necessity arise.[7] He was a practical man despite his unusual beliefs.

But he had no advice to offer me tonight. He looked like a hunted man who has come to the end of a cul-de-sac, and can neither go forward nor turn back.

I went to my bedroom, although I doubted I would be able to sleep. Instead—without any real plan in mind—I bundled a few of my possessions for easy carrying. My squirrel-gun, chiefly, and some notes and writing, and THE HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE; and I thought I should add some salted pork, or something of that nature, but I resolved to wait until later, so my mother wouldn’t see me packing.

Before dawn, I put on several layers of clothing and a heavy pakool hat, rolled down so the wool covered my ears. I opened the window of my room and clambered over the sill and closed the glass behind me, after I had retrieved my rifle and gear. Then I crept across the open yard to the barn, and saddled up a horse (the gelding named Rapture, who was the fastest, though this would leave my father’s rig an animal shy), and rode out under a sky that had just begun to show first light.

Last night’s brief snowfall still covered the ground. I was not the first up this winter morning, and the cold air already smelled of Christmas. The bakery in Williams Ford was busy making nativity cakes and cinnamon buns. The sweet, yeasty smell filled the northwest end of town like an intoxicating fog, for there was no wind to carry it away. The day was dawning blue and still.

Signs of Christmas were everywhere—as they ought to be, for today was the Eve of that universal holiday—but so was evidence of the conscription drive. The Reservists were already awake, passing like shadows in their scruffy uniforms, and a crowd of them had gathered by the hardware store. They had hung out a faded flag and posted a sign, which I could not read, because I was determined to keep a distance between myself and the soldiers; but I knew a recruiting-post when I saw one. I did not doubt that the main ways in and out of town had been put under close observation.

I took a back way to the Estate, the same riverside road Julian and I had traveled the night before. Because of the lack of wind, our tracks were undisturbed. We were the only ones who had recently passed this way. Rapture was revisiting his own hoof-prints.

Close to the Estate, but still within a concealing grove of pines, I lashed the horse to a sapling and proceeded on foot.

The Duncan-Crowley Estate was not fenced, for there was no real demarcation of its boundaries; under the Leasing System, everything in Williams Ford was owned (in the legal sense) by the two great families. I approached from the western side, which was half-wooded and used by the aristos for casual riding and hunting. This morning the copse was not inhabited, and I saw no one until I had passed the snow-mounded hedges which marked the beginning of the formal gardens. Here, in summer, apple and cherry trees blossomed and produced fruit; flowerbeds gave forth symphonies of color and scent; bees nursed in languid ecstasies. But now it was barren, the paths quilted with snow, and there was no one visible but the senior groundskeeper, sweeping the wooden portico of the nearest of the Estate’s several Great Houses.

The Houses were dressed for Christmas. Christmas was a grander event at the Estate than in the town proper, as might be expected. The winter population of the Duncan-Crowley Estate was not as large as its summer population, but there was still a number of both families, plus whatever cousins and hangers-on had elected to hibernate over the cold season. Sam Godwin, as Julian’s tutor, was not permitted to sleep in either of the two most luxurious buildings, but bunked among the elite staff in a white-pillared house that would have passed for a mansion anywhere but here. This was where he had conducted classes for Julian and me, and I knew the building intimately. It, too, was dressed for Christmas; a holly wreath hung on the door; pine boughs were suspended over the lintels; a Banner of the Cross dangled from the eaves. The door was not locked, and I let myself in quietly.

It was still early in the morning, at least as the aristos and their elite helpers calculated time. The tiled entranceway was empty and still. I went straight for the rooms where Sam Godwin slept and conducted his classes, down an oaken corridor lit only by the dawn filtering through a window at the long end. The floor was carpeted and gave no sound, though my shoes left damp footprints behind me.

At Sam’s particular door, I was confronted with a dilemma. I could not knock, for fear of alerting others. My mission as I saw it was to deliver Julian’s message as discreetly as possible. But neither could I walk in on a sleeping man—could I?

I tried the handle of the door. It moved freely. I opened the door a fraction of an inch, meaning to whisper, “Sam?”—and give him some warning.

But I could hear Sam’s voice, low and muttering, as if he were talking to himself. I listened more closely. The words seemed strange. He was speaking in a guttural language, not English. Perhaps he wasn’t alone. It was too late to back away, however, so I decided to brazen it out. I opened the door entirely and stepped inside, saying, “Sam! It’s me, Adam. I have a message from Julian—”

I stopped short, alarmed by what I saw. Sam Godwin—the same gruff but familiar Sam who had taught me the rudiments of history and geography—was practicing black magic, or some other form of witchcraft: on Christmas Eve! He wore a striped cowl about his shoulders, and leather lacings on his arm, and a boxlike implement strapped to his forehead; and his hands were upraised over an arrangement of nine candles mounted in a brass holder that appeared to have been scavenged from some ancient Tip. The invocation he had been murmuring seemed to echo through the room: Bah-rook-a-tah-atten-eye-hello-hey-noo . . .

My jaw dropped.

“Adam!” Sam said, almost as startled as I was, and he quickly pulled the shawl from his back and began to unlace his various unholy riggings.

This was so irregular I could barely comprehend it.

Then I was afraid I did comprehend it. Often enough in Dominion school I had heard Ben Kreel speak about the vices and wickedness of the Secular Era, some of which still lingered, he said, in the cities of the East—irreverence, irreligiosity, skepticism, occultism, depravity. And I thought of the ideas I had so casually imbibed from Julian and (indirectly) from Sam, some of which I had even begun to believe: Einsteinism, Darwinism, space travel . . . had I been seduced by the outrunners of some New Yorkish paganism? Had I been duped by Philosophy?

“A message,” Sam said, concealing his heathenish gear, “what message? Where is Julian?”

But I could not stay. I fled the room.

Sam barreled out of the house after me. I was fast, but he was long-legged and conditioned by his military career, strong for all his forty-odd years, and he caught me in the winter gardens—tackled me from behind. I kicked and tried to pull away, but he pinned my shoulders.

“Adam, for God’s sake, settle down!” cried he. That was impudent, I thought, invoking God, him—but then he said, “Don’t you understand what you saw? I am a Jew!”

A Jew!

Of course, I had heard of Jews. They lived in the Bible, and in New York City. Their equivocal relationship with Our Savior had won them opprobrium down the ages, and they were not approved of by the Dominion. But I had never seen a living Jew in the flesh—to my knowledge—and I was astonished by the idea that Sam had been one all along: invisibly, so to speak.

“You deceived everyone, then!” I said.

“I never claimed to be a Christian! I never spoke of it at all. But what does it matter? You said you had a message from Julian—give it to me, damn you! Where is he?”

I wondered what I should say, or who I might betray if I said it. The world had turned upside-down. All Ben Kreel’s lectures on patriotism and fidelity came back to me in one great flood of guilt and shame. Had I been a party to treason as well as atheism?

But I felt I owed this last favor to Julian, who would surely have wanted me to deliver his intelligence whether Sam was a Jew or a Mohammedan: “There are soldiers on all the roads out of town,” I said sullenly. “Julian went for Lundsford last night. He says he’ll meet you there. Now get off of me!”

Sam did so, sitting back on his heels, deep anxiety inscribed upon his face. “Has it begun so soon? I thought they would wait for the New Year.”

“I don’t know what has begun. I don’t think I know anything at all!” And, so saying, I leapt to my feet and ran out of the lifeless garden, back to Rapture, who was still tied to the tree where I had left him, nosing unproductively in the undisturbed snow.

I had ridden perhaps an eighth of a mile back toward Williams Ford when another rider came up on my right flank from behind. It was Ben Kreel himself, and he touched his cap and smiled and said, “Do you mind if I ride along with you a ways, Adam Hazzard?”

I could hardly say no.

Ben Kreel was not a pastor—we had plenty of those in Williams Ford, each catering to his own denomination—but he was the head of the local Council of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth, almost as powerful in his way as the men who owned the Estate. And if he was not a pastor, he was at least a sort of shepherd to the townspeople. He had been born right here in Williams Ford, son of a saddler; had been educated, at the Estate’s expense, at one of the Dominion Colleges in Colorado Springs; and for the last twenty years he had taught elementary school five days a week and General Christianity on Sundays. I had marked my first letters on a slate board under Ben Kreel’s tutelage. Every Independence Day he addressed the townsfolk and reminded them of the symbolism and significance of the Thirteen Stripes and the Sixty Stars; every Christmas, he led the Ecumenical Services at the Dominion Hall.

He was stout and graying at the temples, clean-shaven. He wore a woolen jacket, tall deer hide boots, and a pakool hat not much grander than my own. But he carried himself with an immense dignity, as much in the saddle as on foot. The expression on his face was kindly. It was always kindly. “You’re out early, Adam Hazzard,” he said. “What are you doing abroad at this hour?”

“Nothing,” I said, and blushed. Is there any other word that so spectacularly represents everything it wants to deny? Under the circumstances, “nothing” amounted to a confession of bad intent. “Couldn’t sleep,” I added hastily. “Thought I might shoot a squirrel or so.” That would explain the rifle strapped to my saddle, and it was at least remotely plausible; the squirrels were still active, doing the last of their scrounging before settling in for the cold months.

“On Christmas Eve?” Ben Kreel asked. “And in the copse on the grounds of the Estate? I hope the Duncans and Crowleys don’t hear about it. They’re jealous of their trees. And I’m sure gunfire would disturb them at this hour. Wealthy men and Easterners prefer to sleep past dawn, as a rule.”

“I didn’t fire,” I muttered. “I thought better of it.”

“Well, good. Wisdom prevails. You’re headed back to town, I gather?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let me keep you company, then.”

“Please do.” I could hardly say otherwise, no matter how I longed to be alone with my thoughts.

Our horses moved slowly—the snow made for awkward footing—and Ben Kreel was silent for a long while. Then he said, “You needn’t conceal your fears, Adam. I know what’s troubling you.”

For a moment I had the terrible idea that Ben Kreel had been behind me in the hallway at the Estate, and that he had seen Sam Godwin wrapped in his Old Testament paraphernalia. Wouldn’t that create a scandal! (And then I thought that it was exactly such a scandal Sam must have feared all his life: it was worse even than being Church of Signs, for in some states a Jew can be fined or even imprisoned for practicing his faith. I didn’t know where Athabaska stood on the issue, but I feared the worst.) But Ben Kreel was talking about conscription, not about Sam.

“I’ve already discussed this with some of the boys in town,” he said. “You’re not alone, Adam, if you’re wondering what it all means, this military movement, and what might happen as a result of it. And I admit, you’re something of a special case. I’ve been keeping an eye on you. From a distance, as it were. Here, stop a moment.”

We had come to a rise in the road, on a bluff above the River Pine, looking south toward Williams Ford from a little height.

“Gaze at that,” Ben Kreel said contemplatively. He stretched his arm out in an arc, as if to include not just the cluster of buildings that was the town but the empty fields as well, and the murky flow of the river, and the wheels of the mills, and even the shacks of the indentured laborers down in the low country. The valley seemed at once a living thing, inhaling the crisp atmosphere of the season and breathing out its steams, and a portrait, static in the still blue winter air. As deeply rooted as an oak, as fragile as a ball of Nativity glass.

“Gaze at that,” Ben Kreel repeated. “Look at Williams Ford, laid out pretty there. What is it, Adam? More than a place, I think. It’s a way of life. It’s the sum of all our labors. It’s what our fathers have given us and it’s what we give our sons. It’s where we bury our mothers and where our daughters will be buried.”

Here was more Philosophy, then, and after the turmoil of the morning I wasn’t sure I wanted any. But Ben Kreel’s voice ran on like the soothing syrup my mother used to administer whenever Flaxie or I came down with a cough.

“Every boy in Williams Ford—every boy old enough to submit himself for national service—is just now discovering how reluctant he is to leave the place he knows best. Even you, I suspect.”

“I’m no more or less willing than anyone else.”

“I’m not questioning your courage or your loyalty. It’s just that I know you’ve had a little taste of what life might be like elsewhere—given how closely you associated yourself with Julian Comstock. Now, I’m sure Julian’s a fine young man and an excellent Christian. He could hardly be otherwise, could he, as the nephew of the man who holds this nation in his palm. But his experience has been very different from yours. He’s accustomed to cities—to movies like the one we saw at the Hall last night (and I glimpsed you there, didn’t I? Sitting in the back pews?)—to books and ideas that might strike a youth of your background as exciting and, well, different. Am I wrong?”

“I could hardly say you are, sir.”

“And much of what Julian may have described to you is no doubt true. I’ve traveled some myself, you know. I’ve seen Colorado Springs, Pittsburgh, even New York City. Our eastern cities are great, proud metropolises—some of the biggest and most productive in the world—and they’re worth defending, which is one reason we’re trying so hard to drive the Dutch out of Labrador.”

“Surely you’re right.”

“I’m glad you agree. Because there is a trap certain young people fall into. I’ve seen it before. Sometimes a boy decides that one of those great cities might be a place he can run away to—a place where he can escape all the duties, obligations, and moral lessons he learned at his mother’s knee. Simple things like faith and patriotism can begin to seem to a young man like burdens, which might be shrugged off when they become too weighty.”

“I’m not like that, sir.”

“Of course not. But there is yet another element in the calculation. You may have to leave Williams Ford because of the conscription. And the thought that runs through many boys’ minds is, if I must leave, then perhaps I ought to leave on my own hook, and find my destiny on a city’s streets rather than in a battalion of the Athabaska Brigade . . . and you’re good to deny it, Adam, but you wouldn’t be human if such ideas didn’t cross your mind.”

“No, sir,” I muttered, and I must admit I felt a dawning guilt, for I had in fact been a little seduced by Julian’s tales of city life, and Sam’s dubious lessons, and the HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE—perhaps I had forgotten something of my obligations to the village that lay so still and so inviting in the blue near distance.

“I know,” Ben Kreel said, “that things haven’t always been easy for your family. Your father’s faith, in particular, has been a trial, and we haven’t always been good neighbors—speaking on behalf of the village as a whole. Perhaps you’ve been left out of some activities other boys enjoy as a matter of course: church activities, picnics, common friendships . . . well, even Williams Ford isn’t perfect. But I promise you, Adam: if you find yourself in the Brigades, especially if you find yourself tested in time of war, you’ll discover that the same boys who shunned you in the dusty streets of your home town become your best friends and bravest defenders, and you theirs. For our common heritage ties us together in ways that may seem obscure, but become obvious under the harsh light of combat.”

I had spent so much time smarting under the remarks of other boys (that my father “raised vipers the way other folks raise chickens,” for example) that I could hardly credit Ben Kreel’s assertion. But I knew little of modern warfare, except what I had read in the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, so it might be true. And the prospect (as was intended) made me feel even more shame-faced.

“There,” Ben Kreel said: “Do you hear that, Adam?”

I did. I could hardly avoid it. The bell was ringing in the Dominion church, calling together one of the early ecumenical services. It was a silvery sound on the winter air, at once lonesome and consoling, and I wanted almost to run toward it—to shelter in it, as if I were a child again.

“They’ll want me soon,” Ben Kreel said. “Will you excuse me if I ride ahead?”

“No, sir. Please don’t mind about me.”

“As long as we understand each other, Adam. Don’t look so downcast! The future may be brighter than you expect.”

“Thank you for saying so, sir.”

I stayed a while longer on the low bluff, watching as Ben Kreel’s horse carried him toward town. Even in the sunlight it was cold, and I shivered some, perhaps more because of the conflict in my mind than because of the weather. The Dominion man had made me ashamed of myself, and had put into perspective my loose ways of the last few years, and pointed up how many of my native beliefs I had abandoned before the seductive Philosophy of an agnostic young aristo and an aging Jew.

Then I sighed and urged Rapture back along the path toward Williams Ford, meaning to explain to my parents where I had been and reassure them that I would not suffer too much in the coming conscription, to which I would willingly submit.

I was so disheartened by the morning’s events that my eyes drifted toward the ground even as Rapture retraced his steps. As I have said, the snows of the night before lay largely undisturbed on this back trail between the town and the Estate. I could see where I had passed this morning, where Rapture’s hoofprints were as clearly written as figures in a book. (Ben Kreel must have spent the night at the Estate, and when he left me on the bluff he would have taken the more direct route toward town; only Rapture had passed this way.) Then I reached the place where Julian and I had parted the night before. There were more hoofprints here, in fact a crowd of them—

And I saw something else written (in effect) on the snowy ground—something which alarmed me.

I reined up at once.

I looked south, toward Williams Ford. I looked east, the way Julian had gone the previous night.

Then I took a bracing inhalation of icy air, and followed the trail that seemed to me most urgent.

6

The east-west road through Williams Ford is not heavily traveled, especially in winter.

The southern road—also called the “Wire Road,” because the telegraph line runs alongside it—connects Williams Ford to the railhead at Connaught, and thus sustains a great deal of traffic. But the east-west road goes essentially nowhere: it is a remnant of a road of the secular ancients, traversed mainly by Tipmen and freelance antiquarians, and then only in the warmer months. I suppose, if you followed the old road as far is it would take you, you might reach the Great Lakes, or somewhere farther east, in that direction; and, the opposite way, you could get yourself lost among washouts and landfalls in the Rocky Mountains. But the railroad—and a parallel turnpike farther south—had obviated the need for all that trouble.

Nevertheless, the east-west road was closely watched where it left the outskirts of Williams Ford. The Reserves had posted a man on a hill overlooking it, the same hill where Julian and Sam and I had paused for blackberries on our way from the Tip last October. But it is a fact that the Reserve troops were held in Reserve, and not sent to the front lines, mainly because of some disabling flaw of body or mind; some were wounded veterans, missing a hand or an arm; some were too simple or sullen to function in a disciplined body of soldiers. I cannot say anything for certain about the man posted as lookout on the hill, but if he was not a fool he was at least utterly unconcerned about concealment, for his silhouette (and that of his rifle) stood etched against the bright eastern sky for all to see. But maybe that was the intent: to let prospective fugitives know their way was barred.

Not every way was barred, however, not for someone who had grown up in Williams Ford and hunted everywhere on its perimeter. Instead of following Julian directly I rode north a distance, and then through the crowded lanes of an encampment of indentured laborers (whose ragged children gaped at me from the glassless windows of their shanties, and whose soft-coal fires made a smoky gauze of the motionless air). This route connected with lanes cut through the wheat fields for the transportation of harvests and field-hands—lanes that had been deepened by years of use, so that I rode behind a berm of earth and snake rail fences, hidden from the distant sentinel. When I was safely east, I came down a cattle-trail that reconnected me with the east-west road.

On which I was able to read the same signs that had alerted me back at Williams Ford, thanks to the fine layer of snow still undisturbed by any wind.

Julian had come this way. He had done as he had intended, and ridden toward Lundsford before midnight. The snow had stopped soon thereafter, leaving his horse’s hoof-prints clearly visible, though softened and half-covered.

But his were not the only tracks: there was a second set, more crisply defined and hence more recent, probably set down during the night; and this was what I had seen at the crossroads in Williams Ford: evidence of pursuit. Someone had followed Julian, without Julian’s knowledge. This had dire implications, the only redeeming circumstance being the fact of a single pursuer rather than a company of men. If the powerful people of the Estate had known that it was Julian Comstock who had fled, they would surely have sent an entire brigade to bring him back. I supposed Julian had been mistaken for a simple miscreant, a labor refugee, or a youngster fleeing the conscription, and that he had been followed by some ambitious Reservist. Otherwise that whole imagined battalion might be right behind me . . . or perhaps soon would be, since Julian’s absence must have been noted by now.

I rode east, adding my own track to these two.

Before long it was past noon, and I began to have second thoughts as the sun began to angle toward an early rendezvous with the southwestern horizon. What exactly did I hope to accomplish? To warn Julian? If so, I was a little late off the mark . . . though I hoped that at some point Julian had covered his tracks, or otherwise misled his pursuer, who did not have the advantage I had, of knowing where Julian meant to stay until Sam Godwin could arrive. Failing that, I half-imagined rescuing Julian from capture, even though I had but a squirrel rifle and a few rounds of ammunition (plus a knife and my own wits, both feeble enough weapons) against whatever a Reservist might carry. In any case these were more wishes and anxieties than calculations or plans; I had no fully-formed plan beyond riding to Julian’s aid and telling him that I had delivered my message to Sam, who would along as soon as he could discreetly leave the Estate.

And then what? It was a question I dared not ask myself—not out on this lonely road, well past the Tip now, farther than I had ever been from Williams Ford; not out here where the flatlands stretched on each side of the path like the frosty plains of Mars, and the wind, which had been absent all morning, began to pluck at the fringes of my coat, and my shadow elongated in front of me like a scarecrow gone riding. It was cold and getting colder, and soon the winter moon would be aloft, and me with only a few ounces of salt pork in my saddlebag and a few matches to make a fire if I was able to secure any kindling by nightfall. I began to wonder if I had gone quite insane. At several points I thought: I could go back; perhaps I hadn’t yet been missed; perhaps it wasn’t too late to sit down to a Christmas Eve dinner with my parents, raise a glass of cider to Flaxie and to Christmases past, and wake in time to hear the ringing-in of the Holiday and smell the goodness of baked bread and Nativity apples drenched in cinnamon and brown sugar. I mused on it repeatedly, sometimes with tears in my eyes; but I let Rapture continue carrying me toward the darkest part of the horizon.

Then, after what seemed endless hours of dusk, with only a brief pause when both Rapture and I drank from a creek which had a skin of ice on it, I began to come among the ruins of the secular ancients.

Not that there was anything spectacular about them. Fanciful drawings often portray the ruins of the last century as tall buildings, ragged and hollow as broken teeth, forming vine-encrusted canyons and shadowy cul-de-sacs.[8] No doubt such places exist—most of them in the uninhabitable Southwest, however, where “famine sits enthroned, and waves his scepter over a dominion expressly made for him,” which would rule out vines and such tropical items[9]—but most ruins were like the ones I now passed, mere irregularities (or more precisely, regularities) in the landscape, which indicated the former presence of foundations. These terrains were treacherous, often concealing deep basements that could open like hungry mouths on an unwary traveler, and only Tipmen loved them. I was careful to keep to the path, though I began to wonder whether Julian would be as easy to find as I had imagined—”Lundsford” was a big locality, and the wind had already begun to scour away the hoofprints I had relied on for navigation.

I was haunted, too, by thoughts of the False Tribulation of the last century. It was not unusual to come across desiccated human remains in localities like this. Millions had died in the worst dislocations of the End of Oil: of disease, of internecine strife, but mostly of starvation. The Age of Oil had allowed a fierce intensity of fertilization and irrigation of the land, which had fed more people than a humbler agriculture could support. I had seen photographs of Americans from that blighted age, thin as sticks, their children with distended bellies, crowded into “relief camps” that would soon enough be transformed into communal graves when the imagined “relief” failed to materialize. No wonder, then, that our ancestors had mistaken those decades for the Tribulation of prophecy. What was astonishing was how many of our current institutions—the Church, the Army, the Federal Government—had survived more or less intact. There was a passage in the Dominion Bible that Ben Kreel had read whenever the subject of the False Tribulation arose in school, and which I had committed to memory: The field is wasted, the land mourns; for the corn is shriveled, the wine has dried, the oil languishes. Be ashamed, farmers; howl, vinekeepers; howl for the wheat and the barley, for the harvest of the field has perished . . .

It had made me shiver then, and it made me shiver now, in these barrens which had been stripped of all their utility by a century of scavenging. Where in this rubble was Julian, and where was his pursuer?

It was by his fire I found him. But I was not the first to arrive.

The sun was altogether down, and a hint of the aurora borealis played about the northern sky, dimmed by moonlight, when I came to the most recently excavated section of Lundsford. The temporary dwellings of the Tipmen—rude huts of scavenged timber—had been abandoned here for the season, and corduroy ramps led down into the empty digs.

Here the remnants of last night’s snow had been blown into windrows and small dunes, and all evidence of hoofprints had been erased. But I rode slowly, knowing I was close to my destination. I was buoyed by the observation that Julian’s pursuer, whoever he was, had not returned this way from his mission: had not, that is, taken Julian captive, or at least had not gone back to Williams Ford with his prisoner in tow. Perhaps the pursuit had been suspended for the night.

It was not long—though it seemed an eternity, as Rapture short-stepped down the frozen road, avoiding snow-hidden pitfalls—before I heard the whickering of another horse, and saw a plume of smoke rising into the moon-bright sky.

Quickly I turned Rapture off the road and tied his reins to the low remnants of a concrete pillar, from which rust-savaged iron rods protruded like skeletal fingers. I took my squirrel rifle from the saddle holster and moved toward the source of the smoke on foot, until I was able to discern that the fumes emerged from a deep declivity in the landscape, perhaps the very dig from which the Tipmen had extracted THE HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE. Surely this was where Julian had gone to wait for Sam’s arrival. And indeed, here was Julian’s horse, one of the finer riding horses from the Estate (worth more, I’m sure, in the eyes of its owner, than a hundred Julian Comstocks), moored to an outcrop . . . and, alarmingly, here was another horse as well, not far away. This second horse was a stranger to me; it was slat-ribbed and elderly-looking; but it wore a military bridle and the sort of cloth bib—blue, with a red star in the middle of it—that marked a mount belonging to the Reserves.

I studied the situation from behind the moon-shadow of a broken abutment.

The smoke suggested that Julian had gone beneath ground, down into the hollow of the Tipmen’s dig, to shelter from the cold and bank his fire for the night. The presence of the second horse suggested that he had been discovered, and that his pursuer must already have confronted him.

More than that I could not divine. It remained only to approach the contested grounds as secretively as possible, and see what more I could learn.

I crept closer. The dig was revealed by moonlight as a deep but narrow excavation, covered in part with boards, with a sloping entrance at one end. The glow of the fire within was just visible, as was the chimney-hole that had been cut through the planking some yards farther down. There was, as far as I could discern, only one way in or out. I determined to proceed as far as I could without being seen, and to that end I lowered myself down the slope, inching forward on the seat of my pants over ground that was as cold, it seemed to me, as the wastelands of the Arctic north.

I was slow, I was cautious, and I was quiet. But I was not slow, cautious, or quiet enough; for I had just progressed far enough to glimpse an excavated chamber, in which the firelight cast a kaleidoscopic flux of shadows, when I felt a pressure behind my ear—the barrel of a gun—and a voice said, “Keep moving, mister, and join your friend below.”

I kept silent until I could comprehend more of the situation I had fallen into.

My captor marched me down into the low part of the dig. The air, if damp, was noticeably warmer here, and we were screened from the increasing wind, though not from the accumulated odors of the fire and the stagnant must of what had once been a basement or cellar in some commercial establishment of the secular ancients.

The Tipmen had not left much behind: only a rubble of broken bits of things, indistinguishable under layers of dust and dirt. The far wall was of concrete, and the fire had been banked against it, under a chimney-hole that must have been cut by the scavengers during their labors. A circle of stones hedged the fire, and the damp planks and splinters in it crackled with a deceptive cheerfulness. Deeper parts part of the excavation, with ceilings lower than a man standing erect, opened in several directions.

Julian sat near the fire, his back to the wall and his knees drawn up under his chin. His clothes had been made filthy by the grime of the place. He was frowning, and when he saw me his frown deepened into a scowl.

“Go over there and get beside him,” my captor said, “but give me that little bird rifle first.”

I surrendered my weapon, modest as it was, and joined Julian. Thus I was able to get my first clear look at the man who had captured me. He appeared not much older than myself, but he was dressed in the blue and yellow uniform of the Reserves. His Reserve cap was pulled low over his eyes, which twitched left and right as though he were in constant fear of an ambush. In short he seemed both inexperienced and nervous—and maybe a little dim, for his jaw was slack, and he was evidently unaware of the dribble of mucous that escaped his nostrils as a result of the cold weather. (But as I have said before, this was not untypical of the members of the Reserve, who were kept out of active duty for a reason.)

His weapon, however, was very much in earnest, and not to be trifled with. It was a Pittsburgh rifle manufactured by the Porter & Earl works, which loaded at the breech from a sort of cassette and could fire five rounds in succession without any more attention from its owner than a twitch of the index finger. Julian had carried a similar weapon but had been disarmed of it; it rested against a stack of small staved barrels, well out of reach, and the Reservist put my squirrel rifle beside it.

I began to feel sorry for myself, and to think what a poor way of spending Christmas Eve I had chosen. I did not resent the action of the Reservist nearly as much as I resented my own stupidity and lapse of judgment.

“I don’t know who you are,” the Reservist said, “and I don’t care—one draft-dodger is as good as the next, in my opinion—but I was given the job of collecting runaways, and my bag is getting full. I hope you’ll both keep till morning, when I can ride you back into Williams Ford. Anyhow, none of us shall sleep tonight. I won’t, in any case, so you might as well resign yourself to your captivity. If you’re hungry, there’s a little meat.”

I was never less hungry in my life, and I began to say so, but Julian interrupted: “It’s true, Adam,” he said, “we’re fairly caught. I wish you hadn’t come after me.”

“I’m beginning to feel the same way,” I said.

He gave me a meaningful look, and said in a lower voice, “Is Sam—?”

“No whispering there,” our captor said at once.

But I divined the intent of the question, and nodded to indicate that I had delivered Julian’s message, though that was by no means a guarantee of our deliverance. Not only were the exits from Williams Ford under close watch, but Sam could not slip away as inconspicuously as I had, and if Julian’s absence had been noted there would have been a redoubling of the guard, and perhaps an expedition sent out to hunt us. The man who had captured Julian was evidently an outrider, assigned to patrol the roads for runaways, and he had been diligent in his work.

He was somewhat less diligent now that he had us in his control, however, for he took a wooden pipe from his pocket, and proceeded to fill it, as he made himself as comfortable as possible on a wooden crate. His gestures were still nervous, and I supposed the pipe was meant to relax him; for it was not tobacco he put into it.

The Reservist might have been a Kentuckian, for I understand the less respectable people of that State often form the habit of smoking the silk of the female hemp plant, which is cultivated prodigiously there. Kentucky hemp is grown for cordage and cloth and paper, and as a drug is less intoxicating than the Indian Hemp of lore; but its mild smoke is said to be pleasant for those who indulge in it, though too much can result in sleepiness and great thirst.

Julian evidently thought these symptoms would be welcome distractions in our captor, and he gestured to me to remain silent, so as not to interrupt the Reservist in his vice. The Reservist packed the pipe’s bowl with dried vegetable matter from an oilcloth envelope he carried in his pocket, and soon the substance was alight, and a slightly more fragrant smoke joined the effluvia of the camp-fire as it swirled toward the rent in the ceiling.

Clearly the night would be a long one, and I tried to be patient in my captivity, and not think too much of Christmas matters, or the yellow light of my parents’ cottage on dark winter mornings, or the soft bed where I might have been sleeping if I had not been rash in my deliberations.

7

I began by saying this was a story about Julian Comstock, and I fear I lied, for it has turned out mainly to be a story about myself.

But there is a reason for this, beyond the obvious temptations of vanity and self-regard. I did not at the time know Julian nearly as well as I thought I did.

Our friendship was essentially a boys’ friendship. I could not help reviewing, as we sat in silent captivity in the ruins of Lundsford, the things we had done together: reading books, hunting in the wooded foothills west of Williams Ford, arguing amiably over everything from Philosophy and Moon-Visiting to the best way to bait a hook or cinch a bridle. It had been too easy, during our time together, to forget that Julian was an aristo with close connections to men of power, or that his father had been famous both as a hero and as a traitor, or that his uncle Deklan Comstock, the President, might not have Julian’s best interests at heart.

All that seemed far away, and distant from the nature of Julian’s true spirit, which was gentle and inquisitive—a naturalist’s disposition, not a politician’s or a general’s. When I pictured Julian as an adult, I imagined him contentedly pursuing some scholarly or artistic adventure: digging the bones of pre-Noachian monsters out of the Athabaska shale, perhaps, or making an improved kind of movie. He was not a warlike person, and the thoughts of the great men of the day seemed almost exclusively concerned with war.

So I had let myself forget that he was also everything he had been before he came to Williams Ford. He was the heir of a brave, determined, and ultimately betrayed father, who had conquered an army of Brazilians but had been crushed by the millstone of political intrigue. He was the son of a powerful woman, born to a powerful family of her own—not powerful enough to save Bryce Comstock from the gallows, but powerful enough to protect Julian, at least temporarily, from the mad calculations of his uncle. He was both a pawn and a player in the great games of the aristos. And while I had forgotten all this, Julian had not—these were the people who had made him, and if he chose not to speak of them, they nevertheless must have haunted his thoughts.

He was, it is true, often frightened of small things—I still remember his disquiet when I described the rituals of the Church of Signs to him, and he would sometimes shriek at the distress of animals when our hunting failed to result in a clean kill. But tonight, here in the ruins, I was the one who half-dozed in a morose funk, fighting tears; while it was Julian who sat intently still, gazing with resolve from beneath the strands of dusty hair that straggled over his brows, as coolly calculating as a bank clerk.

When we hunted, he often gave me the rifle to fire the last lethal shot, distrusting his own resolve.

Tonight—had the opportunity presented itself—I would have given the rifle to him.

I half-dozed, as I said, and from time to time woke to see the Reservist still sitting in guard. His eyelids were at half-mast, but I put that down to the effect of the hemp flowers he had smoked. Periodically he would start, as if at a sound inaudible to others, then settle back into place.

He had boiled a copious amount of coffee in a tin pan, and he warmed it whenever he renewed the fire, and drank sufficiently to keep him from falling asleep. Of necessity, this meant he must once in a while retreat to a distant part of the dig and attend to physical necessities in relative privacy. This did not give us any advantage, however, since he carried his Pittsburgh rifle with him, but it allowed a moment or two in which Julian could whisper without being overheard.

“This man is no mental giant,” Julian said. “We may yet get out of here with our freedom.”

“It’s not his brains so much as his artillery that’s stopping us,” said I.

“Perhaps we can separate the one from the other. Look there, Adam. Beyond the fire—back in the rubble.”

I looked.

There was motion in the shadows, which I began to recognize.

“The distraction may suit our purposes,” Julian said, “unless it becomes fatal.” And I saw the sweat that had begun to stand out on his forehead, the terror barely hidden in his eyes. “But I need your help.”

I have said that I did not partake of the particular rites of my father’s church, and that snakes were not my favorite creatures. This is true. As much as I have heard about surrendering one’s volition to God—and I had seen my father with a Massassauga Rattler in each hand, trembling with devotion, speaking in a tongue not only foreign but utterly unknown (though it favored long vowels and stuttered consonants, much like the sounds he made when he burned his fingers on the coal stove)—I could never entirely assure myself that I would be protected by divine will from the serpent’s bite. Some in the congregation obviously had not been: there was Sarah Prestley, for instance, whose right arm had swollen up black with venom and had to be amputated by Williams Ford’s physician . . . but I will not dwell on that. The point is, that while I disliked snakes, I was not especially afraid of them, as Julian was. And I could not help admiring his restraint: for what was writhing in the shadows nearby was a nest of snakes that had been aroused by the heat of the fire.

I should add that it was not uncommon for these collapsed ruins to be infested with snakes, mice, spiders, and poisonous insects. Death by bite or sting was one of the hazards routinely faced by Tipmen, including concussion, blood poisoning, and accidental burial. The snakes, after the Tipmen ceased work for the winter, must have crept into this chasm anticipating an undisturbed hibernation, of which we and the Reservist had unfortunately deprived them.

The Reservist—who came back a little unsteadily from his necessaries—had not yet noticed these prior tenants. He seated himself on his crate, scowled at us, and studiously refilled his pipe.

“If he discharges all five shots from his rifle,” Julian whispered, “then we have a chance of overcoming him, or of recovering our own weapons. But, Adam—”

“No talking there,” the Reservist mumbled.

“—you must remember your father’s advice,” Julian finished.

“I said keep quiet!”

Julian cleared his throat and addressed the Reservist directly, since the time for action had obviously arrived: “Sir, I have to draw your attention to something.”

“What would that be, my little draft dodger?”

“I’m afraid we’re not alone in this terrible place.”

“Not alone!” the Reservist said, casting his eyes about him nervously. Then he recovered and squinted at Julian. “I don’t see any other persons.”

“I don’t mean persons, but vipers,” said Julian.

“Vipers!”

“In other words—snakes.”

At this the Reservist started again, his mind perhaps still slightly confused by the effects of the hemp smoke; then he sneered and said, “Go on, you can’t pull that one on me.”

“I’m sorry if you think I’m joking, for there are at least a dozen snakes advancing from the shadows, and one of them[10] is about to achieve intimacy with your right boot.”

“Hah,” the Reservist said, but he could not help glancing in the indicated direction, where one of the serpents—a fat and lengthy example—had indeed lifted its head and was sampling the air above his bootlace.

The effect was immediate, and left no more time for planning. The Reservist leapt from his seat on the wooden crate, uttering oaths, and danced backward, at the same time attempting to bring his rifle to his shoulder and confront the threat. He discovered to his dismay that it was not a question of one snake but of dozens, and he compressed the trigger of the weapon reflexively. The resulting shot went wild. The bullet impacted near the main nest of the creatures, causing them to scatter with astonishing speed, like a box of loaded springs—unfortunately for the hapless Reservist, who was directly in their path. He cursed vigorously and fired four more times. Some of the shots careened harmlessly; at least one obliterated the midsection of the lead serpent, which knotted around its own wound like a bloody rope.

“Now, Adam!” Julian shouted, and I stood up, thinking: My father’s advice?

My father was a taciturn man, and most of his advice had involved the practical matter of running the Estate’s stables. I hesitated a moment in confusion, while Julian advanced toward the captive rifles, dancing among the surviving snakes like a dervish. The Reservist, recovering somewhat, raced in the same direction; and then I recalled the only advice of my father’s that I had ever shared with Julian:

Grasp it where its neck ought to be, behind the head; ignore the tail, however it may thrash; and crack its skull, hard and often enough to subdue it.

And so I did just that—until the threat was neutralized.

Julian, meanwhile, recovered the weapons, and came away from the infested area of the dig.

He looked with some astonishment at the Reservist, who was slumped at my feet, bleeding from his scalp, which I had “cracked, hard and often.”

“Adam,” he said. “When I spoke of your father’s advice—I meant the snakes.”

“The snakes?” Several of them still twined about the dig. But I reminded myself that Julian knew very little about the nature and variety of reptiles. “They’re only corn snakes,” I explained.[11] “They’re big, but they’re not venomous.”

Julian, his eyes gone large, absorbed this information.

Then he looked at the crumpled form of the Reservist again.

“Have you killed him?”

“Well, I hope not,” I said.

8

We made a new camp, in a less populated part of the ruins, and kept a watch on the road, and at dawn we saw a single horse and rider approaching from the west. It was Sam Godwin.

Julian hailed him, waving his arms. Sam came closer, and looked with some relief at Julian, and then speculatively at me. I blushed, thinking of how I had interrupted him at his prayers (however unorthodox those prayers might have been, from a purely Christian perspective), and how poorly I had reacted to my discovery of his true religion. But I said nothing, and Sam said nothing, and relations between us seemed to have been regularized, since I had demonstrated my loyalty (or foolishness) by riding to Julian’s aid.

It was Christmas morning. I supposed that did not mean anything in particular to Julian or Sam, but I was poignantly aware of the date. The sky was blue again, but a squall had passed during the dark hours of the morning, and the snow “lay round about, deep and crisp and even.” Even the ruins of Lundsford were transformed into something soft-edged and oddly beautiful. I was amazed at how simple it was for nature to cloak corruption in the garb of purity and make it peaceful.

But it would not be peaceful for long, and Sam said so. “There are troops behind me as we speak. Word came by wire from New York not to let Julian escape. We can’t linger here more than a moment.”

“Where will we go?” Julian asked.

“It’s impossible to ride much farther east. There’s no forage for the animals and precious little water. Sooner or later we’ll have to turn south and make a connection with the railroad or the turnpike. It’s going to be short rations and hard riding for a while, I’m afraid, and if we do make good our escape we’ll have to assume new identities. We’ll be little better than draft dodgers or labor refugees, and I expect we’ll have to pass some time among that hard crew, at least until we reach New York City. We can find friends in New York.”

It was a plan, but it was a large and lonesome one, and my heart sank at the prospect.

“We have a prisoner,” Julian told his mentor, and he took Sam back into the excavated ruins to explain how we had spent the night.

The Reservist was there, hands tied behind his back, a little groggy from the punishment I had inflicted on him but well enough to open his eyes and scowl. Julian and Sam spent a little time debating how to deal with this encumbrance. We could not, of course, take him with us; the question was how to return him to his superiors without endangering ourselves unnecessarily.

It was a debate to which I could contribute nothing, so I took a little slip of paper from my back-satchel, and a pencil, and wrote a letter.

It was addressed to my mother, since my father was without the art of literacy.

You will no doubt have noticed my absence, I wrote. It saddens me to be away from home, especially at this time (I write on Christmas Day). But I hope you will be consoled with the knowledge that I am all right, and not in any immediate danger.

(This was a lie, depending on how you define “immediate,” but a kindly one, I reasoned.)

In any case I would not have been able to remain in Williams Ford, since I could not have escaped the draft for long even if I postponed my military service for some few more months. The conscription drive is in earnest; the War in Labrador must be going badly. It was inevitable that we should be separated, as much as I mourn for my home and all its comforts.

(And it was all I could do not to decorate the page with a vagrant tear.)

Please accept my best wishes and my gratitude for everything you and Father have done for me. I will write again as soon as it is practicable, which may not be immediately. Trust in the knowledge that I will pursue my destiny faithfully and with every Christian virtue you have taught me. God bless you in the coming and every year.

That was not enough to say, but there wasn’t time for more. Julian and Sam were calling for me. I signed my name, and added, as a postscript:

Please tell Father that I value his advice, and that it has already served me usefully. Yrs. etc. once again, Adam.

“You’ve written a letter,” Sam observed as he came to rush me to my horse. “But have you given any thought to how you might mail it?”

I confessed that I had not.

“The Reservist can carry it,” said Julian, who had already mounted his horse.

The Reservist was also mounted, but with his hands tied behind him, as it was Sam’s final conclusion that we should set him loose with the horse headed west, where he would encounter more troops before very long. He was awake but, as I have said, sullen; and he barked, “I’m nobody’s damned mailman!”

I addressed the message, and Julian took it and tucked it into the Reservist’s saddlebag. Despite his youth, and despite the slightly dilapidated condition of his hair and clothing, Julian sat tall in the saddle. I had never thought of him as high-born until that moment, when an aspect of command seemed to enter his body and his voice. He said to the Reservist, “We treated you kindly—”

The Reservist uttered an oath.

“Be quiet. You were injured in the conflict, but we took you prisoner, and we’ve treated you in a more gentlemanly fashion than we were when the conditions were reversed. I am a Comstock—at least for the moment—and I won’t be spoken to crudely by an infantryman, at any price. You’ll deliver this boy’s message, and you’ll do it gratefully.”

The Reservist was clearly awed by the assertion that Julian was a Comstock—he had been laboring under the assumption that we were mere village runaways—but he screwed up his courage and said, “Why should I?”

“Because it’s the Christian thing to do,” Julian said, “and if this argument with my uncle is ever settled, the power to remove your head from your shoulders may well reside in my hands. Does that make sense to you, soldier?”

The Reservist allowed that it did.

And so we rode out that Christmas morning from the ruins in which the Tipmen had discovered the HISTORY OF MANKIND IN SPACE, which still resided in my back-satchel, vagrant memory of a half-forgotten past.

My mind was a confusion of ideas and anxieties, but I found myself recalling what Julian had said, long ago it now seemed, about DNA, and how it aspired to perfect replication but progressed by remembering itself imperfectly. It might be true, I thought, because our lives were like that—time itself was like that, every moment dying and pregnant with its own distorted reflection. Today was Christmas: which Julian claimed had once been a pagan holiday, dedicated to Sol Invictus or some other Roman god; but which had evolved into the familiar celebration of the present, and was no less dear because of it.

(I imagined I could hear the Christmas bells ringing from the Dominion Hall at Wiliams Ford, though that was impossible, for we were miles away, and not even the sound of a cannon shot could carry so far across the prairie. It was only memory speaking.)

And maybe this logic was true of people, too; maybe I was already becoming an inexact echo of what I had been just days before. Maybe the same was true of Julian. Already something hard and uncompromising had begun to emerge from his gentle features—the first manifestation of a new Julian, a freshly evolved Julian, called forth by his violent departure from Williams Ford, or slouching toward New York to be born.

But that was all Philosophy, and not much use, and I kept quiet about it as we spurred our horses in the direction of the railroad, toward the rude and squalling infant Future.

Footnotes

[1] Whom I would meet when he was sixty years old, and I was a newcomer to the book trade—but that’s another story.

[2] Our local representative of the Council of the Dominion; in effect, the Mayor of the town.

[3] I beg the reader’s patience if I detail matters that seem well-known. I indulge the possibility of a foreign audience, or a posterity to whom our present arrangements are not self-evident.

[4] Julian’s somewhat feminine nature had won him a reputation among the other young aristos as a sodomite. That they could believe this of him without evidence is testimony to the tenor of their thoughts, as a class. But it had occasionally redounded to my benefit. On more than one occasion, his female acquaintances—sophisticated girls of my own age, or older—made the assumption that I was Julian’s intimate companion, in a physical sense. Whereupon they undertook to cure me of my deviant habits, in the most direct fashion. I was happy to cooperate with these “cures,” and they were successful, every time.

[5] The illusion was quite striking when the players were professional, but their lapses could be equally astonishing. Julian once recounted to me a New York movie production of Wm. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which a player had come to the theater inebriated, causing the unhappy Denmark to seem to exclaim “Sea of troubles—(an unprintable oath)—I have troubles of my own,” with more obscenities, and much inappropriate bell-ringing and vulgar whistling, until an understudy could be hurried out to replace him.

[6] Not a talent that was born fully-formed, I should add. Only two years previously I had presented to Sam Godwin my first finished story, which I had called “A Western Boy: His Adventures in Enemy Europe.” Sam had praised its style and ambition, but called attention to a number of flaws: elephants, for instance, were not native to Brussels, and were generally too massive to be wrestled to the ground by American lads; a journey from London to Rome could not be accomplished in a matter of hours, even on “a very fast horse”—and Sam might have continued in this vein, had I not fled the room in a condition of acute auctorial embarrassment.

[7] “Grasp it where its neck ought to be, behind the head; ignore the tail, however it may thrash; and crack its skull, hard and often enough to subdue it.” I had recounted these instructions to Julian, whose horror of serpents far exceeded my own: “Oh, I could never do such a thing!” he had exclaimed. This surfeit of timidity may surprise readers who have followed his later career.

[8] Or “culs-de-sac” ? My French is rudimentary.

[9] Though Old Miami or Orlando might begin to fit the bill.

[10] Julian’s sense of timing was exquisite, perhaps as a result of his theatrical inclinations.

[11] Once confined to the southeast, corn snakes have spread north with the warming climate. I have read that certain of the secular ancients used to keep them as pets—yet another instance of our ancestors’ willful perversity.

LORD WEARY’S EMPIRE

Michael Swanwick

Like a leaf before a storm, Will fled. The basement corridors of Babel careened and reeled nightmarishly by and still he could not lose his pursuers. Three times the lancers had a clear line of sight and fired, each shot a blow to Will’s ringing ears. But then, just beyond a row of overflowing garbage cans, Will saw a steel access door, chained shut but slightly ajar in its frame. He stooped and, grabbing the lower edge of the door, yanked with all his might.

A bullet burned through the air over his head.

The door lurched open, wrenched out of true.

Frantically, Will squeezed through the triangular space and tumbled down a short flight of metal steps. As he stumbled to his feet, he heard the lancers, too large to squeeze through themselves, trying to break down the door.

Blindly, he ran.

Rats scurried away at his approach. Roaches crunched underfoot. He was in a great dark space punctuated by massive I-beams and lit only by infrequent bare bulbs whose light struggled to reach the floor. Somehow, he had made his way into the network of train tunnels that spiraled up through Babel Tower.

Careful to avoid the third rail, Will followed one curving set of tracks into darkness, listening for approaching trains. Sometimes he heard their thunder in the distance, and once a train slammed past, mere inches from where he pressed himself, shivering, against the wall, and left him temporarily blinded. When he could see again, the tunnels were silent. He had lost his pursuers. He was safe now.

And hopelessly lost.

He’d been plodding along for some time when he saw a sewer worker—a haint—in the tunnel ahead, in hip waders and hard hat. “What you doing here, white boy?” the haint asked when Will hailed him.

“I’m lost.”

“Well, you best get yourself unlost. They’s trouble brewing.”

“I can’t,” Will began. “I don’t know—”

“It’s your ass,” the haint said. He faded through a wall and was gone.

Will spat in frustration. Then he walked on.

He knew that he’d wandered into dangerous territory when his left hand suddenly rose up of its own volition to clutch his right forearm. Stop! he thought to himself. Adrenaline raced through his veins.

Will peered into the claustrophobic blackness and saw nothing. A distant electric bulb cast only the slightest glimmer on the rails. The support beams here were as thick as trees in a midnight forest. He could not make out how far they extended. But by the spacious feel of the air, he was in a place where several lines of tracks joined and for a time ran together.

Far behind him was a lone set of signal lights, unvarying green and red dots.

He was abruptly aware of how easy it would be for somebody to sneak up behind him here. Maybe, he thought, he should turn around and go back.

In that instant, an unseen fist punched him hard in the stomach.

Will bent over almost double, and simultaneously his arms were seized from either side. His captors shoved him forward and forced him down onto his knees. His head was bent almost to the ground.

“Release him.” The voice was warm and calm, that of a leader.

The hands let go. Will remained kneeling. Gasping, he straightened and looked about.

He was surrounded.

They—whoever they were—had come up around him in silence. Will’s sense of hearing was acute, but even now he couldn’t place them by sound. Rather, he felt the pressure of their collective gaze, and saw their eyes, pair by pair, wink into existence.

“Boy, you’re in serious trouble now,” the voice said, almost mournfully.

For an instant, Will could not speak. But then the speaker’s eyes glowed red. “Well? Bast got your tongue? I’m giving you the opportunity to explain why you have invaded the Army of Night’s turf. You won’t get a second.”

Will fought down his fear. There was great danger here, but great opportunity as well—if he had the nerve to grasp it. Speaking with a boldness he did not feel, he said, “This is your territory. I recognize that. It wasn’t my intention to trespass. But now that I’m here, I hope you’ll allow me to stay.”

Calmly, dangerously, the speaker said, “Oh?”

“I’m broke, paperless, and without friends. I’m being pursued and I need someplace to be. This looks as good as any. Let me join your army and I’ll serve you well.”

“Who’s chasing you?”

Will thought of the lancers, of the customs agents before them, and of the political police even earlier, and made a wry grimace. “Who isn’t?”

“He kinda cute, Lord Weary,” said somebody female. “If he can’t fight, maybe we find some other use for him.” Several of her comrades snickered.

A third voice said, “Shut the fuck up, Jenny! The Breaknecks sent him here to spy on us. He dies. Simple as that.”

“That’s not your decision, Tatterwag,” Lord Weary said sharply.

“Siktir git!” Tatterwag swore. “We know what he is!”

“Are we savages? No, we are a community of brothers. Whatever is done here will be done in accordance with our laws.” There was a long pause, during which Will imagined Lord Weary looking from side to side to see if any dared oppose him. When no one did, he went on, “You brought this upon yourself.”

Will didn’t ask what Lord Weary meant by that. He recognized a gang when he encountered one—he’d run with enough of them as a boy. There was always a leader, always the bright kid who stood at his shoulder advising him, always the troublemaker who wanted to usurp the leader’s place. They always had laws, which were never written down. Their idea of justice was inevitably the lex talionis, an eye for an eye and a drubbing for an insult. They always settled their differences with a fight.

“Trial by combat,” Lord Weary said.

Somebody lit a match. With a soft hiss, a Coleman lantern shed fierce white light over the thronged I-beams, making them leap and then fall as the flame was adjusted down again to near-extinction.

“You may stand now.”

Will stood.

A ragged line of some twenty to thirty feys confronted him. They were of varied types and races, tall and short, male and female, but all looked beaten and angry, like feral dogs that know they can never triumph over the village-dwellers but will savage one who is caught alone and without weapons. The lantern shone through several, but dimly, as if through smoked glass, and by this Will knew that they were haints.

Directly before Will stood a tall figure whose air of command made clear that he could only be Lord Weary. He had the pallor, high cheekbones, and almost lanceolate ears of one of high-elven blood, and the noble bearing of a born leader as well. Will could not pick out the owners of the other two voices.

But then a swamp gaunt rushed out of the pack and, pointing a skinny arm at Will, cried, “He’s one of the Breakneck Boys! I say we kill him now. Just kill him!”

So he had to be Tatterwag.

Will strode forward, throwing a hard shoulder into the gaunt to knock him aside. “Kill me if you think it possible,” he said to Lord Weary. “But I don’t think you can. If you doubt me, then name your champion. Make him the biggest, strongest mother you’ve got, so there won’t be any doubt afterward that I could defeat any one of you if I had to. I do not brag. Then, if you’ll take me, I will gladly pledge my loyalty and put my powers at your service.”

“That was well spoken,” Lord Weary said mildly. “But talk is cheap and times are hard.” Raising his voice, he said, “Who shall be our champion?”

“Bonecrusher,” somebody said.

There was susurration of agreement. “Bonecrusher . . .’Crusher . . . The big fella . . . Yeah, Bonecrusher.”

The figure that shambled forward was covered with fur, wore no clothing, and carried a length of metal pipe for a club. It was a wodewose—a wild man of the forest.

Will had seen wild men before, out in the Old Forest. In some ways, they were little more than animals, though articulate enough for simple conversations and too cunning to be safely hunted. They were stuck forever in the dawn-times, unable to cope with any way of life more sophisticated than a hunter-gatherer existence nor any tool more complex than a pointed stick. Machines they feared, and they would not sleep in houses, though occasionally an injured one might take shelter in a bam. He could not imagine what twisty path had brought this one so far from his natural habitat.

The wodewose’s mouth worked with the effort of summoning up words. “Fuck you,” he said at last. Then, after a pause, “Asshole.”

Will bowed. “I accept your challenge, sir. I’ll try my best to do you no permanent harm.”

A mean grin appeared in the wild mam’s unkempt beard. “You’re bugfuck,” he said, and then, “Shithead.”

This was another thing that every gang Will had ever been in had: Somebody big and stupid who lived to fight.

Lord Weary faded back into darkness and returned bearing a length of pipe, much like the one the wodewose carried. He handed it to Will. “There are no rules.” he said. “Except that one of you must die.” He raised his voice. “Are the combatants ready?”

“Fuck yeah.”

“Yes,” Will said.

“Then douse the light.”

All in an instant, darkness swallowed Will whole. In sudden fear he cried, “I can’t see!”

There was a smile in Lord Weary’s voice. “We can.”

With a soft scuffle of bare feet, Bonecrusher attacked.

Though Will felt himself as good as blind, there must have been some residual fraction of light, for he saw a pale glint of pipe as it slashed downward at his head. Panicked, he brought up his own pipe just in time to block it.

The force of the blow buckled his knees.

The wodewose raised the pipe again, then chopped it down, trying for Will’s shin. Will was barely able to leap back from it in time. There was a clang as the pipe bounced off the rail, striking sparks. He found himself panting, though he hadn’t even struck a blow yet.

Will knew how to fight with a quarterstaff—every village lad did—but the wild man was not fighting quarterstaff-style but club-style. It was a sweeping, muscular fighting technique the like of which he had never faced before. Back the club slashed, inches from his chest. Had it connected it would have broken Will’s ribs. The wild man followed through, as if he were swinging a baseball bat, and brought it smoothly back, hard and level. Will ducked low, saving his skull from being crushed.

Will swung his pipe wildly, and felt it bounce off the wodewose’s ribs. But it didn’t even slow the wild man down. His club came down on Will’s shoulder.

Just barely, Will managed to twist aside, so that the club only dealt him a glancing, stinging blow to his arm. But that was enough to numb him for an instant and make his fingers involuntarily release their hold on one end of his weapon. Now it was held only by his left hand.

There was a murmur of admiration from the watchers, but no more. Which meant that Bonecrusher was not popular in the Army of Night, however much they might value his fighting skill.

The pain brought the dragon rising up within Will, a ravening wave of anger that threatened to wash over his mind and drown all conscious thought. He fought it down. Whirling the pipe around his head, he feinted at one shoulder. Then, when the wodewose brought up his own weapon to block it, he shifted his attack. The pipe slammed into Bonecrusher’s forehead and bounced off.

Bonecrusher shook his matted dreadlocks and raised his weapon once more.

At that moment, a great noise rose up in the distance. A train! Will tucked his pipe under one arm as if it were a lance and ran full-tilt at his opponent. The pipe struck him in the chest and knocked him stumbling backward.

The train rounded a bend. Its headlight blossomed like the sun at midnight.

Will retreated to the far side of the track. He pressed himself against the nearest support beam, feeling its cold strength under his back. Across from him, Bonecrusher started forward, hesitated, and then turned away, one great hand covering his eyes.

His eyes? Oh.

The locomotive slammed past Will, a wash of air shoving against him like a warm fist. He had a momentary glimpse of astonished faces in the passenger car windows before he threw an arm over his eyes to shield himself from the painfully bright light.

Then the train was gone. When he opened his eyes again, he could see nothing.

Bonecrusher chuckled. “Yer blind, aintcha?” he said. “Motherfucker.”

Now Will was truly afraid.

With fear came anger, however, and anger made it easier for him to draw upon the dragon-darkness within him. He felt it rising up in his blood and clamped down tight. He refused to give it control. It struggled against him, a fire running through his veins, an evil song lifting in his throat. It yearned to be let free.

He heard the whisper of Bonecrusher’s naked feet on the railroad ties. He backed away.

Now an inner vision seemed to pierce the darkness. All was still shadow within shadow, but he knew that the shifting blackness directly before him was the wodewose padding quietly forward, raising his makeshift club for one final and devastating blow.

The dragon-anger was straining at its leash. So Will let slip his hold a little, allowing the anger to leap forward to meet the attack. He threw aside his own pipe and stepped into the blow. With one hand, he caught the wild man’s club and wrested it from his grasp. With the other, he seized the wodewose by the throat.

Flinging away the wodewose’s weapon, he stooped and grabbed his opponent by his thigh. The creature’s fur was as stiff as an Airedale’s, and matted with knots. Will lifted him up over his head. He tried to curse, but Will’s hand clutched his throat too tightly for anything meaningful to emerge.

The bastard was helpless now. Will could swing him around and smash his head against a pillar or drop him down over his knee, breaking his spine. It would be the easiest thing in the world, either way.

Well, screw that.

“I don’t have anything against you,” he told his struggling opponent. “Give me your word of surrender, and I’ll set you free.”

Bonecrusher made a gurgling noise.

“That’s not possible,” Lord Weary said with obvious regret. “Our laws say: To the death.”

Frustration filled Will. To have come so far, only to be thwarted by a childish warrior’s code! Well, then, he would have to run. He doubted the Army of the Night would pursue him with much enthusiasm after seeing how easily he defeated their champion.

“If your laws say that,” Will snarled, “then they’re not mine.”

With a surge of anger, he flung the wodewose away from him.

“Fucking has-!” The word cut off abruptly as the wodewose hit the ground. Electrical sparks flew into the air like fireworks. The wodewose’s body arced and crisped. There was a smell of burnt hair and scorched flesh.

Somebody whistled and said, “That’s cold.”

Will had forgotten entirely about the third rail.

Lord Weary picked out four of his soldiers for a burial detail. “Carry Bonecrusher upstairs,” he said, “and leave him somewhere he’ll be found, so that City Services will take care of the body. Be sure he’s lying facing up! I don’t want one of my soldiers mistaken for an animal.” Then he clapped a hand on Will’s shoulder. “Well fought, boy. Welcome to the Army of Night.”

When the burial detail had lugged Bonecrusher’s body into oblivion, Lord Weary lined up those who remained and led them the other way. “On to Niflheim,” he said. Will joined the line and, shivering, managed to keep pace.

He’d walked for what seemed like forever and no time at all when the smell of urine and feces welled up around him so strong that it made his eyes water. Somebody lived down here. A lot of somebodies. Will found himself stumbling up a crumbling set of stairs and onto a cement platform.

A miniature city arose before him. There were perhaps a hundred or so shanties built one on top of the other from wooden crates and cardboard boxes, each one sufficient to hold a sleeping bag and little more. Wicker baskets, large enough to sleep in, hung from the ceiling. There were narrow streets between the shanties down which shadows flitted. The Army wove its way through them into a central plaza, where a cluster of haints and feys sat crouched around a portable television set, its volume turned down to a murmur. Others sat about talking quietly or reading tattered paperbacks by candlelight. High on the walls above was a frieze of tiles that showed dwarves mining and smelting and manufacturing. Deep runes in the stone arch over a cinder-blocked doorway read: NIFLHEIM STATION. By the newspapers and old clothes strewn about, it had been closed and abandoned long ago.

A hulder (Will could tell from her buxom figure and by the cow’s tail sticking out from under her skirt) rose to greet them. “Lord Weary,” she said. “You are welcome here, and your army too. I see you have somebody new.” Most of those who rose in her wake were haints.

“I thank you, thane-lady Hjördis. Our recruit is so recent he hasn’t chosen a name for himself yet. He is our new champion.”

“Him?” Hjördis scowled. “This boy?”

“Don’t be fooled by his looks, the lad’s tough. He killed Bonecrusher.”

Soft muttering washed over the platform. “By trickery?” somebody asked dubiously.

“In fair and open combat. I saw it all.”

There was a moment’s tension before the thane-lady nodded, accepting. Then Lord Weary said to her, “We must confer. Serious matters are afoot.”

“First we eat,” Hjördis said. “You will sit with me at the head table.”

To Will’s surprise, he was included with Lord Weary in the invitation. Apparently the office of champion made him a counselor as well. He watched as tables were built in the central square, of boards set over wire milk crates, and then covered with sheets of newspaper in place of linen. A cobbley set out pads of newspaper for seats and paper plates for them to eat from. Another filled the plates with food. The thane-lady’s table was set under the wall, beneath the tiled dwarves. She and her favored companions sat with their backs to the wall, so that the rows of lesser-ranked diners faced them.

The food was better than might be expected, some of it scrounged from grocery store dumpsters after passing its sell-by date and the rest of it from upstairs charities. They ate by the light of tuna-can lamps with rag wicks in rancid cooking oil, conversing quietly.

Will commented that the tunnels seemed more labyrinthine and of greater extent than he had thought they would be, and Hjördis said, “You don’t know the half of it. There used to be fifteen different gas companies in Babel, six separate sets of steam tunnels, and Sirrush only can say how many subway systems, pneumatic trains, sub-surface lines, underground trolleys, and pedestrian walkways that nobody uses any more. Add to that maintenance tunnels for the power and telephone and plumbing and sewage systems, storm drains, the summer retreats that the wealthy used to have dug for them a century ago, bomb shelters, bootleggers’ vaults . . .”

Lord Weary shook his head in agreement. “There is no lore-master of Babel’s secret ways. They are too many, and too varied.” His sea-green eyes studied Will gravely. “Now. Tell us what drove you here.”

Here was another moment of danger. Will knew he must speak carefully and truthfully, or he would not survive the meal. Lord Weary’s stem face convinced him of it.

He told his tale:

Long, long ago—though it could scarcely have been more than a year—a war-dragon had crashed in the Old Forest outside Will’s village. His fuselage was tom and gashed and its half-elven pilot was dead. Yet he retained enough fuel to crawl into the center square of the village and declare himself its king. None of the elders dare oppose him, for he still had his armament and malice enough to touch it off if he were crossed. Yet he could barely move, and so he had chosen a lieutenant to represent him—male rather than female and young rather than old, for the village hags were far too wily for him to trust.

He had chosen Will.

Then had Will learned the terrible isolation of the collaborator. Though it was none of his choosing, he was despised by all and alienated from those who had been his friends. In the day, he walked about the village, observing. At night, he sat in the pilot’s seat and long needles in the armrests slid into his wrists so that the dragon could slither into his mind and access his memories directly, seeing what he had seen and feeling what he had felt. Everybody knew of this, and so they shunned him.

He had thought that things could not get worse. He had been wrong. A rebellion arose among the younger citizens and to put it down the dragon had entered into Will’s mind one evening and not left. Leaving footprints of flame behind him, he had walked through the village, terrorizing all and seizing the rebellion’s ringleader.

Puck Berrysnatcher had been Will’s best friend. Will had crucified him.

With a cunning and boldness he had not known he possessed, Will had finally managed to kill the dragon and by so doing free the villagers from his tyranny. But that had not changed anybody’s mind about him.

“Since that time,” Will said, “I have been cast out of my village and ill-fortune has pursued me across Faerie Minor all the way to the Dread Tower. Perhaps I have been cursed by the dragon’s death.” He did not say that some fraction of the dragon remained within him yet. On that matter, silence was safest. “All I know is that from that day I have had no place to call home.”

“You have a home here now, lad,” said Lord Weary. “We shall be a second family to you, if you will have us.”

He laid a hand on Will’s head, and a great flood of emotion washed over Will. Suddenly, and for no reason he could name, he loved the elf-lord like a father. Warm tears flowed down his cheeks.

When he could speak again, Will asked, “Why do you live down here?”

It was a meaningless question, meant simply to move the conversation to less emotional ground. But graciously, Hjördis explained that though those above dismissed the dwellers in darkness as trolls and feral dwarves, very few of them were subterranean by nature. Most of the thane-lady’s folk were haints and drows, nissen, shellycoats, and broken feys—anyone lacking the money or social graces to get along in open society. They had problems with drugs and alcohol and insanity, but they looked after One another as best they could. Their own name for themselves was johatsu—“nameless wanderers.”

“Are there a lot of communities like this one?”

“There are dozens,” Lord Weary said, “and possibly even hundreds. Some are as small as six or ten individuals. Others run much larger than what you see here. No one knows for sure how many live in darkness. Tatterwag speculates there are tens of thousands. But they don’t communicate with each other and they won’t work together and they are perforce nomadic, for periodically the transit police discover the settlements and bust them up, scattering their citizens. But the Army of Night is going to change all that. We’re the first and only organized military force the johatsu have ever formed.”

“How many are in the Army, all told?”

The thane-lady hid a smile under a (paper napkin. Stiffly, Lord Weary said, “You’ve met them all. This is a new idea, and slow to catch on. But it will grow. My dream will bear fruit in the fullness of time.” His voice rose. “Look around you! These are the dispossessed of Babel—the weak, the injured, the gentle. Who speaks for them? Not the Lords of the Mayoralty. Not the Council of Magi. His Absent Majesty was their protector once, but he is long gone and no one knows where. Somebody must step forward to fill that void. I swear by the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, and the Golden Apples of the West, that if the Seven permit it, that somebody shall be me!”

The johatsu froze in their places, not speaking, barely breathing. Their eyes shone like stars.

Hjördis laid a hand over Lord Weary’s. “Great matters will wait upon food,” she said. “Time enough to discuss these things after we eat.”

When all had eaten and the dishes been cleared away, Hjördis lit a cigarette and passed it around the table. “Well?” she said at last.

“When last we were here,” Lord Weary said, “I left some crates in your keeping. Now we have need of them.”

A shadow crossed the thane-lady’s face. But she nodded. “I thought as much. So I had my folk retrieve them.”

Six Niflheimers stood up, faded into darkness, and returned, lugging long wooden crates between them. The crates were laid down before the table and, at a gesture from Lord Weary, Taggerwag pried open one with his Bowie knife.

Light gleamed on rifle barrels.

Suddenly the taste of death was in the air. Cautiously, Will said, “What do we need these for?”

“There’s going to be a rat hunt,” Lord Weary said.

“We’re hunting rats?”

Lord Weary grinned mirthlessly. “We’re not the hunters, lad. We’re the rats.”

The Niflheimers had been listening intently. Now they crowded around the main table. “We call them the Breakneck Boys,” one said. “They come down here once a month, on the day of the Toad or maybe the day of the Labrys, looking for some fun. They got night-goggles and protective spells like you wouldn’t believe, and they carry aluminum baseball bats. Mostly, we just slip away from ’em. But they usually manage to find somebody too old or sick or drugged-up to avoid them.”

“It’s a fucking hobby for them,” Tatterwag growled.

“Last time, they caught poor old Martin Pecker drunk asleep, only instead of giving him a bashing like usual, they poured gasoline over him and set it on fire.”

“I saw the corpse!”

“Long have I argued against this course of action as a mad notion and a dangerous folly” the thane-lady said. “Their sires are industrialists and Lords of the Mayoralty. If even one of their brats dies, they’ll send the mosstroopers down here with dire wolves to exact revenge.” Then, with obvious reluctance, “Yet the Breaknecks’ predations worsen. I see no alternative.”

“No!” Will said. He had eaten almost nothing, for his stomach was still queasy from the stench of Niflheim, and Bonecrusher’s death weighed heavily upon him. If he closed his eyes, he could see the sparks rising up around the wodewose’s body. He hadn’t wanted to kill the creature. It had happened because he hadn’t thought the situation through beforehand. Now he was thinking very hard and fast indeed. “Put the guns back.”

“You’re not afraid?” Lord Weary drew himself up straight, and Will felt his disapproval like a lash across his shoulders.

“I can take care of the Breaknecks,” Will said. “If you want me to, I’ll take care of them myself.”

There was a sudden silence.

“Alone?”

“Yes. But to pull this off, I’ll need a uniform. The gaudier the better. And war paint. The kind that glows in the dark.”

Hjördis grinned. “I’ll send our best shoplifters upstairs.”

“And explosives. A hand grenade would be best, but—no? Well, is there any way we can get our hands on some chemicals to make a bomb?”

“There’s a methamphetamine lab up near the surface,” Tatterwag said. “The creeps who run it think nobody knows it’s there. They got big tanks of ethyl ether and white gasoline. Maybe even some red phosphorus.”

“Do we have anybody who knows how to handle them safely?”

“Um . . . there’s one of us got a Ph.D. in alchemy. Only, it was back when. Up above.” Tatterwag glanced nervously at Lord Weary. “Before he came here. So I don’t know whether he wants me to say his name or not.”

“You have a doctorate?” Will said. “How in the world did you . . .” He was going to say fall so low but thought better of it. “. . . wind up here?” Offhandedly, Lord Weary said, “Carelessness. Somebody offered me a drink. I liked it, so I had another. Only one hand is needed to hold a glass, so I took up smoking to give the other one something to do. I took to dueling and from there it was only a small step to gambling. I bought a fighting cock. I bought a bear. I bought a dwarf. I began to frequent tailors and whores. From champagne I moved to whisky, from whisky to wine, and from wine to Stemo. So it went until the only libation I had not yet drunk was blood, the only sex untried was squalid, and the only vice untasted was violent revolution.

“Every step downward was pleasant. Every new experience filled me with disdain for those who dared not share in it. And so, well, here I am.”

“Is this a true history,” Will asked, “or a parable?”

“Your question,” Lord Weary said, “is a deeper one than you know—whether the world I sank through was real or illusory. Many a better mind than mine or yours has grappled with this very issue without result. In any event, I’ll make your bomb.”

It took hours to make the plan firm. But at last Hjördis rose from the table and said, “Enough. Our new champion is doubtless tired. Bonecrusher’s quarters are yours now. I will show you where you sleep.”

She took Will by the hand and led him to an obscure comer of the box-village. There she knelt before a kind of tent made of patched blankets hung from clotheslines. “In here.” She raised the flap and crawled inside.

Will followed.

To his surprise, the interior was clean. Inside, a faded Tabriz carpet laid over stacked cardboard served as floor and mattress. A vase filled with phosphorescent fungi cast a gentle light over the space. Hjördis turned and, kneeling, said, “All that was ’Crusher’s is yours now. His tent. His title . . .” She pulled her dress off over her head. “His duties.”

Will took a deep, astonished breath. It seemed too awful to kill the wodewose and bed his lover all on the same day. Hesitatingly, he said, “We don’t have to . . .”

The thane-lady stared at him in blank astonishment. “You’re not gay, are you? Or suffering from the fisher king’s disease?” She touched his crotch, “No, I can see you’re not. What is it, then?”

“I just don’t see how you can sleep with me after I killed your . . . killed Bonecrusher.”

“You don’t think this is personal, do you?” Hjördis laughed. “Blondie, you’re the most fucked-up champion I ever saw.” At her direction, he took off his clothes. She drew him down and guided him inside her. Then she wrapped her legs around his waist and slapped him on the rump.

“Giddy up,” she commanded.

Halfway through the night they galloped. In the morning (but he had to take Hjördis’s word for it that it was morning), Will went out with two of Lord Weary’s scouts to look over possible locales for the plan. Then he returned to the box city and sorted through the heaps of clothing that the Niflheimers brought him, some dug out of old stashes and some fresh-stolen for the occasion. Carefully, he assembled his costume: Biker boots. Mariachi pants. A top hat with a white scarf wrapped around the band, one end hanging free behind like a ghostly fox tail, with a handful of turkey feathers from the meat packing district splayed along the side. A marching band jacket with a white sash. All topped off with a necklace of rat skulls.

With the phosphorescent makeup, he painted two red slashes slanting downward over his eyes, a straight blue line along his nose, and a yellow triangle about his mouth to make a mocking, cartoonish grin:

With luck, the effect would be eerie enough to give his enemies pause. More importantly, the elves would see the glowing lines on his face, the top-hat-feathers-and-scarf, and the necklace of skulls, but they wouldn’t see him. Once he wiped off the makeup and ditched the uniform, he would be anonymous again. He could walk the streets above without fearing arrest.

“I’ll just need just one last thing,” he said when he was done. “A motorcycle.”

Two days later, the Army of Night’s outposts came running up silently with news that the Breakneck Boys had entered the tunnels. Will had already scouted out the perfect place for a confrontation—a vast and vaulted space as large as a cathedral that had been constructed centuries ago as a cistern for times of siege. A far more recent water main cut through it at the upper end, but otherwise it was much as it had been the day it was drained. Now he sent out decoys to lure the Boys there, while he made up his face with phosphorescent war-paint and wheeled his stolen motorcycle into place.

Will waited alone in a niche behind a pillar at the lower end of the cistern. He’d stone-souped the johatsu by asking for first one small thing and then another, each incrementally larger than the one before, because there’d been no alternative. Had he asked for the motorcycle first, he wouldn’t have gotten it. But this was as far as bluff would take him. Now he was either going to triumph or die.

For the longest time there was no noise other than the grumble of distant trains. Then, faintly, he heard drunken elven laughter. He watched as the decoys ran past his station, like two furtive shadows. The voices grew more boisterous and then suddenly boomed as the Breakneck Boys emerged from a doorway near the ceiling at the upper end of the cistern.

They began to descend a long brick stairway along the far wall.

They glimmered in the dark, did the elves, like starlight. They carried Maglites and aluminum bats. Some wore camouflage suits. Some had night goggles. They were nine in number, and uncannily young, little more than children. Their leader drained the last of his beer and threw away the can. It rattled into silence.

Will waited until they were off the stairs and had clambered over the water main and started across the cistern floor. Then he kick-started the motorcycle. It was a stripped-down Kawasaki three cylinder two-stroke, easy to handle and loud as hell. Pulling out of the niche, Will cranked the machine hard left and opened it up. The vault ceiling bouncing the engine’s roar back at him, he charged at the elf-pack like a banshee with her ass on fire.

It felt great to be on a cycle again! Puck Berrysnatcher, back when he and Will were best friends, had owned a dirt bike, and they’d practiced on it, turn on turn, until they both mastered such stunts as young males thought important.

Will popped a wheelie and came to a stop not ten yards from the astonished elves.

Throttling down the engine so he could be heard, he cried, “I challenge thee by the holmgangulog, if thou hast honor! I am the captain and the rightwise defender of my folk. Present your champion that we may contest at deeds of arms.”

A disbelieving look, followed by low, mean laughter passed among the elves. “So you know the politesse of challenge, Master Scarecrow,” said the foremost of them. Whatever else he might be, he was no coward. “Very well. I hight Florian of House L’lnconnu.” He bowed mockingly. “What is your name and what terms do you propose?”

“Captain Jack Riddle,” Will said, choosing the nom de guerre almost at random. “High explosives at close quarters.”

The elf-brat rubbed his chin, as if amused. “Your proposal is scarce workable.” Casually, his hand crept downward between the lapels of his jacket. Doubtless he had a gun there in a shoulder harness. “For, you see, I have no explosives with me.”

“Tough titty,” Will said.

With a muttered word, he detonated the bomb which earlier he had very carefully placed for maximum effect.

The water main, which was directly behind the Breaknecks, blew open.

A great wave of water struck the Breakneck Boys from behind, knocking them over and tumbling them helplessly before it. But not—and this was the crucial part of Will’s plan—killing any of them.

Will, meanwhile, had spun around his bike and opened the throttle wide. He raced downslope ahead of the cascading water, cut a right so sharp he almost lost control, and was out of the cistern and roaring up a narrow electric conduit access tunnel without a single drop getting on him.

He would have liked to have seen the Breaknecks gather themselves together after the water washed them down to the bottom of the cistern. It would have been worth much to have heard their curses and witnessed their dismay as they pulled themselves up and began the long and soggy journey back aboveground. But you couldn’t have everything.

Anyway, he was sure to hear of it. There was a slit-gallery, near the top of the cistern, that had been used for inspections, which was thronged with silent watchers, soldiers from the Army of Night and potential recruits from Niflheim and possibly even Hjördis herself. They’d have seen and heard everything. They’d have witnessed how he had routed their enemies without the least injury to himself. They’d want a share in his glory. They’d boast of his prowess. No longer was he merely their champion.

He was their hero now.

That evening the johatsu migrated several miles deeper into the tunnels. They moved silently and surely, and when they found their destination—an abandoned pneumatic train tube from an experimental line that went bankrupt in the Century of the Turbine—Lord Weary sent his specialists to tap into the electric and water lines. Even at this distance from the shattered main, the water pressure was lessened. But unlike the citizens above, they’d known to fill plastic bottles beforehand.

“Dockweed,” Will said. A hudkin snapped to attention. “Take a couple of likely lads and scout out a good location for latrines. Not too close to the encampment. That’s unsanitary.” He caught Lord Weary looking at him, and hastily added, “If that’s all right with you, sir.”

Lord Weary waved a hand, endorsing everything. Then, placing an arm over Will’s shoulder, so that it would be ostentatiously obvious to all that they two were conferring with perfect confidence, he murmured, “Dearer art thou to me, after your little escapade today, than meat and drink to a starving man. Stand by me and I shall raise you higher than you can imagine, so that my empire rests upon your shoulders. But if you ever again give orders in my presence without first deferring to me, I’ll have you gutted and chained to the bedrock for the rats to eat alive. Do you understand?” Will swallowed. “Sir.”

“I would regret it, of course. But discipline knows no favorites.” He released Will. “Tell me something. What exactly have we accomplished today? Other than raising morale, I mean. In a day or three, the main will be rebuilt. The Breakneck Boys are still alive. By now they’re probably fast asleep in their feather beds.”

“We’ve cut off an entire neighborhood from water for however long the repairs last. They’ll take that seriously up above. If their investigations turn up the Breaknecks’ involvement, it will be a political embarrassment for their parents. If not, the Breakneck Boys will still know what a close call it was. The smarter among them will realize they were given a warning. That I could as easily have killed them. We won’t be seeing them back again.”

“There’ll be others.”

Will grinned wolfishly. “Bring ’em on.”

Will adapted to the darkness. He learned its ways, learned to love the stillness and the silence of it. He grew familiar with the rumor of distant trains, the small dripping and creaking and scurrying sounds that were normal to the tunnels, and the fainter and more furtive noises that were not. He learned how to crouch motionless for hours, his eyes so thoroughly adapted to the dark that when a transit worker or a patrolman went by with a flashlight, he had to narrow them to slits against its glare. He learned how to move silent as a wraith, so that he could follow these intruders from the upper world for hours without them suspecting a thing.

Nighttimes, he went upstairs to dumpster dive and sometimes to steal. Just to keep in touch with his troops. It was important for them to know that he could do the work of any one of them and did not consider it beneath him. On deep patrols, when it was not possible to go topside for food, he learned to catch and roast and eat rats. Whenever they could spare the time, he sent his forces out to explore and to map, until he knew more of Babel’s underworld than any individual ever had before. He would interview any wanderer who passed through Lord Weary’s territory and those who were capable but solitary by nature he organized into a loose confederation of messengers, so that for the first time, all the johatsu communities were kept informed of each other’s goings-on.

Volunteers arrived daily, anxious to serve under the hero of whom they’d heard so much. Most of them were turned away. Nevertheless, the Army of Night grew. Little by little, their territory was expanding. Bindlestiffs, sadistic cops, degenerate trolls, and other predators learned to avoid tunnels marked with the three-lines-and-a-triangle that had become the token of Captain Jack’s protection.

Will knew his work was bearing fruit the day he ghosted up behind a transit cop, squeezed his upper arm in one hand, whispered softly in his ear, “My name is Jack Riddle and if you want to five, you’ll place your revolver on the ground beside you and leave,” and had been instantly obeyed.

That same day, one of his runners brought him a wanted poster from up above. It had a crude drawing of a fey with his grinning face-paint, hat, and skull necklace, and read:

WANTED, FOR TERRORIST ACTIVITY, THE

DEMON, SPRITE, OR GAUNT KNOWN AS

JACK RIDDLE

Aliases: Captain Jack Riddle, Captain Jack, Jack the Lucky, Laughing Jack

DESCRIPTION

Date of Birth: Unknown

Hair: Blond

Place of Birth: Unknown

Eyes: Dark

Height: Unknown

Sex: Male

Weight: Unknown

Complexion: Pale

Build: Slim

Citizenship: Unknown

Scars and Marks: None known

Remarks: A flamboyant dresser, Riddle’s dramatic persona has led some to speculate that he may have formerly been involved in theater. By his bearing, he may once have associated with the aristocracy, possibly as a servant.

JACK RIDDLE IS BEING SOUGHT FOR HIS ROLE IN NUMEROUS TERRORIST ACTS PERFORMED IN CONNECTION WITH HIS LEADERSHIP OF A SUBTERRANEAN PARAMILITARY FORCE THAT HAS COMMITTED ASSAULTS UPON AGENTS OF HIS ABSENT MAJESTY’S GOVERNANCE AS WELL AS UPON INNOCENT MEMBERS OF THE CITIZENRY OF BABEL.

CAUTION

HE HAS A SAVAGE TEMPER AND SHOULD BE CONSIDERED ARMED AND EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

REWARD

His Absent Majesty’s Governance is offering the informant’s weight in gold to any citizen in Categories C through G or a statistically derived equivalent for all others, for information leading directly to the arrest of Jack Riddle.

“How about that?” Will said, grinning. “And to think that a couple of months ago I was a nobody!”

“Don’t you get cocky, Jack,” Hjördis said. “That’s a lot of money. There are plenty who would turn you in for a fraction of that.” She fastened her brassiere over her stomach, then slid it right way around, put her arms through the straps and shrugged into it. “I’d be tempted myself, if I didn’t have obligations to my people.” She wriggled into her dress.

Stung, Will said, “You shouldn’t joke like that.”

“You think I’m joking? That’s enough wealth to buy anybody’s way up to the surface.”

“We don’t need gold to do that. After we’ve consolidated the underworld, we can rise up from beneath and seize the neighborhoods above us. Then we’ll take the Dread Tower, one level at a time, all the way to the Palace of Leaves.”

“I realize that’s Lord Weary’s plan,” Hjördis said doubtfully. “But how likely is it—really? I fail to understand why you would buy so completely into a fallen elf-lord’s delusions of glory.”

For a second Will did not speak. Then he said, “I have been driven across Faerie Minor by chance and events, helpless as a leaf in a storm. Well, no more! I needed a cause to devote myself to, one that would give me the opportunity to strike back against my oppressors, and Lord Weary provided me with one. It’s as simple as that.”

He returned to the poster. “Innocent citizenry. That would be the Breakneck Boys, you think? Or the drug dealers?” Enough of their soldiers were addicted to various substances that it would be foolish to think that drug trafficking could be stopped. But the dealers were territorial and well armed, and prone to sudden violence. Johatsu had been gunned down simply because they’d wandered into the wrong tunnel at the wrong time. So the dealers had been driven upstairs. Those who cared to sell nickel bags of pixie dust or Mason jars of moonshine close by the commonly known exits were tolerated. But when their goods were tainted—when they killed—they were subject to being snatched and hauled below for a trial by the dead user’s peers.

There was a polite cough outside the box’s entrance. It was Jenny Jumpup. “Sir. Lord Weary’s respects, and he say pull your dick out the lady-thane and assemble your raiders. He want his horses.”

The clanging began in the distance, regular and unrelenting, the sound of somebody hammering on water pipes with a rock. Beyond and fainter, a second set of clangs joined it. Then a third.

“We been spotted,” Jenny Jumpup said.

“Good.” Will did not slow his pace. “I want them to spot us. I want them to know we’re coming. I want them to know that there’s nothing they can do to stop us.”

“What’s to keep them from slipping through the walls?” Tatterwag asked. “They’re haints, after all.”

“Their horses couldn’t follow. We’d get them all. And these guys practically worship their horses.” Lord Weary had sent ambassadors to the horse-folk, offering them full membership in his growing empire, immunity from taxation and conscription, a guaranteed supply of food, and other enticements in exchange for a small yearly tribute of horses. His advances had been rejected with haughty scorn, though the horse-folk were the poorest of all who dwelt in darkness, and possessed neither tools nor clothing.

“Then why don’t they just saddle up the horses and run? That’s what I’d do in their circumstances.”

“They old haints,” Jenny Jumpup said. She was a haint herself, and proud of it. Her hair was done up in a cascade of slim braids, tied in the back in a sort of ponytail, and she wore a brace of pistols butt-forward in her belt. “They ancestors left the Shadowlands before fire was brought down from the sky. They can’t farm, they got no weapons, and they can’t ride horses.”

“So why the fuck do they care if we take them?”

“They’re all the horse-folk have.” Will called a brief halt to check the map. A muttered word and its lines glimmered like foxfire. The other raiders gathered about him. They were a good group—in addition to his two lieutenants, he had Radegonde de la Cockaigne, Kokudza, the Starveling, and Little Tommy Redcap. “We’re on the bottommost level of tracks—but there are tunnels that delve even deeper, some of them natural and others not.” He led them some fifty yards down the track. A black opening gaped to one side. Cool air sighed out of it. “This was an aqueduct once, nobody knows how long ago. Looks like dwarven work.”

“It older than dwarves,” Jenny Jumpup said scornfully. “My people remember. We built it. And we ain’t never been paid for it neither.”

“Jenny,” Tatterwag said. “Give it a rest.”

A train went by and they turned their backs to it. When their eyes had adjusted to the dark once more, they walked some distance into the aqueduct. Will got out the map again. “If everything’s gone according to plan, our other troops will be in position here and here,” he said. “That leaves only one way out—right through us. They’ll stampede the herd in hopes of trampling us under.”

Little Tommy Redcap chuckled nastily. “I’ll rip the horses’ legs off if they try.”

“You were all chosen because you know how to ride,” Will said. “Now space yourselves out and let’s see if you can climb.”

They swiftly scaled the walls. This was a new skill for Will, but one he had picked up easily. There was a narrow ledge just below the vaulted ceiling. The raiders took up positions there, some on one side and some on the other. All save Jenny Jumpup and the Starveling, who swarmed up the ceiling and drove in pitons so they could hang face downward, like bats, waiting.

After a long silence, Kokudza growled, “I don’t get it. Horses. Caverns. Call me crazy, but I see a basic conflict here.”

“The horses used to be wild,” Will said. “Back before Nimrod laid the foundations of Babel, they fed upon the grassy slopes of Ararat. Lord Weary told me he read a paper on this once. Scientists speculate that some of their number would venture into natural caverns to feed upon mosses and lichens. This would have been tens of thousands of years ago, minimum. Something happened, an earthquake maybe, that trapped a small breeding population in the caverns. They adapted to the darkness. You couldn’t say they thrived, exactly—there can’t be more than a hundred of ’em all told. But they’re still here. Albino-pale, short-haired, and high-strung. They won’t be easy to catch.”

Tatterwag patted his bandolier. “You know what I recommend.” Now that the Empire was a going concern, they had money enough, extorted from transit workers and the like, to buy materials that had never previously been available underground. Will had been the first to keep a string of magnesium flares with him always, and a pair of welder’s goggles in a breast pocket. Tatterwag, who was not only his second-in-command but a notorious suck-up as well, had followed suit. There was no better indicator of how far and fast Will’s star had risen.

Will shook his head. “That won’t work on these horses.”

“Why not?”

“They’re blind,” he said. “Now be quiet.”

After a while, the clanging stopped. That meant the horses would be coming soon. Some time after that, Will was almost certain that he heard a gentle murmuring noise like the rumor of rain in the distance. It was less a sound than a wistful thought. But it was there. Maybe.

“Do not take the lead horse,” Lord Weary had told him quietly before they set out.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Will had asked. “Surely the leader will be fastest and most desirable.”

“Not so. It will be fast but callow. The wiser horses hold back and let the young stallions, their heroes, take the foremost with its attendant risks. They are expendable. The queen-mare, however, will be found at the very center of the herd, and it is she you want. Fleetest of all is she and cleverest as well, sure-footed on wet surfaces, cautious on dry, and alert to danger even when all seems safest. Wait and watch. You will know her when you see her.”

Far down the tunnel, a gentle luminescence bloomed, faint as the internal glow of the ocean on a moonless night. There was a soft sound, as of many animals breathing deeply in the distance.

“Here they come,” Tatterwag said.

Like sea-foam, the horses filled the tunnel. Shadowy figures ran among them, as swiftly as the beasts themselves. These were the old haints, the horse-folk, running naked as the day they were bom. Even at a distance, they could be sensed, for with them came fear. Though they could not plant or build or light a fire, the old powers were theirs still, and they were able to generate terror and use it as a weapon. Thus it was that they herded their horses. Thus it was that they fought, using the great brutes’ bodies against their enemies.

“Oh, baby!” Jenny Jumpup moaned. “I gone get me a young stud. I gone wrap my legs around him and never let go. I gone squeeze him so tight he rear up and scream.”

“You’re making me horny, Jen,” Kokudza said. They all laughed softly.

Then the herd was upon them.

The noise of hooves, near-silent a moment before, rose up like thunder. The horses filled the aqueduct like ocean waters surging. One by one, the raiders dropped down upon them, like ripe fruit falling from the trees.

Wait, Will thought. Wait . . . wait . . . not yet . . . And then, just when he felt he could wait no longer, he spotted the queen-mare in the center of the herd, running as quickly as any but clearly not expending herself, holding something extra in reserve.

Will leaped.

Briefly, he flew. Then, one astonishing second later, he slammed onto the back of the mare. He grabbed wildly for her neck and scrabbled to keep his legs on either side of her back.

The queen-mare rose up, pawing the air. Will’s legs were flung clear, and he was almost thrown. But he clung to her neck, and by the time her forefeet were back on the ground, he had managed to get his own legs back in place.

She ran.

Once, twice, she slammed into the horses running to either side of her. Each time, one of Will’s legs was crushed briefly between the great beasts. But the impact was not quite enough to numb them, and Will was determined that he would not be stopped by mere pain. He hung on with all his might.

Then the queen-mare had broken free of the herd and was running ahead of them all.

Riding low on her back, concentrating on keeping from falling, Will began to sing the charm he had been taught:

“Your neck is high and straight,

Your head shrewd with intelligence,

Your belly short, your back full,

Your proud chest hard with muscles . . .”

His mount swung her head around and tried to bite him, but he grabbed her mane high on the back of her skull with both hands and was able to keep her teeth from closing on his flesh. And then the charm took hold and she no longer tried to throw him, though she continued to run in a full-out panic.

They were alone now, separated from the herd and galloping wildly down who-knew-which lightless tunnel. Though she was blind, somehow the queen-mare knew where the walls were and did not run into them. Somehow, she never stumbled. Whatever senses she employed in the absence of sight, they were keen and shrewd, and equal to the task. Will understood now, as he had not before, why Lord Weary so desperately wanted these steeds. Will’s motorcycle was of only limited utility belowground; it could not be ridden along the ties of the train tracks, nor could it leap over a sudden gap in the floor of a tunnel if Will did not spot it in time.

This beast could travel swiftly anywhere. It could traverse the distance between settlements in a fraction of the time a pedestrian could.

“Joy of princes, throne of warriors,

Hoof-fierce treasure of the rich,

Eternal comfort to the restless . . .”

There were hundreds of lines to this charm, and if Will were to skip even one, it would not work. He had labored hard to memorize them all. Now, as he neared the final stanzas, Will felt the thoughts of the queen-mare like a silvery brook flowing alongside his own. They were coming together now, moving as one, muscle upon muscle, thought on thought, a breath away from being a single shared essence in two bodies.

“Riding seems easy to he who rests indoors

But courageous to he who travels the high-roads

On the back of a sturdy horse.”

She was breathing hard now. Horses could only run at a full gallop for brief periods of time, though those who did not know them imagined them continuing thus for hours on end. The queen-mare was winded—Will could feel a sympathetic pain in his own chest—and if she did not stop soon and walk it off, she would nm until her great heart burst within her.

This was the moment of crisis. Will had to convince her that accepting him as a rider was preferable to death.

Laying his cheek alongside her neck, still singing, he closed his eyes and entered her thoughts. There was neither color nor fight in the queen-mare’s world, but her sensorium was wider and more varied than his own, for she was possessed of a dozen fractional senses. Riding her mind, he felt the coolness coming off of the walls, and the dampness or dryness of the ground before them. Tiny electrical charges lying dormant in the conduits and steel catwalks that flashed past tickled faintly against his awareness. Variant densities in the air slowed or sped sounds passing through it. Smells arrived in his nostrils with the precise location of their origins. Braids of scent and sound and feel wound together to give him a perfect picture of his surroundings.

Now Will thought back to the farmlands outside his old village, and recalled the dusty green smell of their fields and the way that in late afternoon the sun turned the seeded tops of the grasses into living gold. He pictured the cold, crystalline waters of a stream running swiftly through a tunnel of greenery and exploding under the hooves of his borrowed mount. He called up the flickering flight of butterflies among the wild flowers in a sudden clearing, and then an orchard with gnarled old apple trees and humble-bees droning tipsily among the half-fermented windfalls. This was something the queen-mare had never experienced, nor ever could. But the desire for it was in her blood and her bones. It was written into her genes.

He sang the last words of the charm. Now, he found himself murmuring into the queen-mare’s ear.

“Ohhhh, sweet lady,” Will crooned. “You and I, mother of horses . . . we were meant to be. Share your strong back with me, let me ride you, and I will show you such sights every time we travel together.”

He could feel the tug of his words on her. He could feel her resolve weakening.

“I’ll take good care of you, I promise. Oats every day and never a saddle nor a bit. I’ll rub you down and comb your mane and plait your tail. No door shall ever lock you in. You’ll have fresh water to drink, and clean straw to sleep on.”

He was stroking the side of her neck with one hand now. She was skittish still, but Will could feel the warmth of feeling welling up within her. “And this above all,” he whispered: “No one shall ever ride you but me.”

Gently, tentatively, he felt her pleasure at the thought. Joyously, confidently, he showed her his own pleasure that she felt thus about him. Self flowed into self, so that the distinction between fey and horse, he and her, dissolved.

They were one now.

Will discovered that he was weeping. It had to be for joy because the emotion that filled him now and that threatened to burst his chest asunder was anything but unhappiness. “What’s your name, darling?” he whispered, ignoring the tears running down his cheeks. “What should I call you, my sweet?” But horses had no names, either true or superficial, for themselves. They lived in a universe without words. For them, there could be no lies or falsehoods, because things were simply so. Which meant that the task of naming her fell upon Will.

“I shall call you Epona,” he said, “Great Lady of Horses.”

For the first time since he could not remember when, he felt completely happy.

Will was in no hurry to return to the Army of Night’s current bivouac. Epona was the swiftest of her breed; he would not arrive last. “Take me where I need to be,” he whispered in her ear. “But slowly.” Then he gave the queen-mare her head.

They made their way home through pleasant and winding paths. Occasionally, a lone electric bulb or a line of fluorescent tubes flickered weakly to life before them, floated silently by, and then faded to nothing behind them. Once, Epona daintily picked her way up a long-forgotten marble staircase with crystal chandeliers that loomed from the shadows overhead like the ghosts of giant jellyfish. They went down a long passage of rough stone so low that Epona had to bow her head to get through. Twice the ceiling brushed against Will’s back, as he clung tightly to her. Yet, though their path seemed roundabout, Will was the first to return to camp. He had but to picture their destination in his mind, and the queen-mare knew the fastest and safest way there.

They emerged from the catacombs under Battery Park and were home.

Radegonde de la Cockaigne arrived second. She had come from the contested lands of the West, as had Will, but a little of the blood of les bonnes meres flowed in her veins and she had grown up privileged. She had been taught to ride, rather than learning on stolen time, and as a result her horse-craft was far superior to his. He was not surprised to see that she had wooed and won a particularly mettlesome steed. After her came Kokudza and Jenny Jumpup, also mounted, and then the Starveling and Little Tommy Redcap, both afoot. Some time later, Tatterwag limped in, looking embarrassed. They had gained four horses and lost not a single fife.

Lord Weary came out of Hjördis’s box, buckling his belt.

Will made his report.

“Any fatalities?” Lord Weary asked. Then, when Will shook his head, he said, “Let’s see the horses.”

Will had commandeered a space that was said to have been used once as a holding pen for slave smugglers, and then sent forces aboveground to steal, scavenge, or, in last resort, buy straw to spread on the floor. Lord Weary touched the steel-jacketed door that Will hadn’t yet ordered taken off its hinges and muttered, “Good. It’ll need a bar, though.”

Then Weary saw the horses and a rare smile spread over his pale face. “They’re magnificent!” he said. “I had hoped for five, and been willing to settle for three. Felicitas in media est, eh? It’s a sign.”

Seen together, it was obvious that the four steeds were from the same genetic line. The heads were gaunt and narrow, with large blue veins under pale, translucent skin. Their eyes bulged like tennis balls under lids that had grown together and would never open. All glowed faintly in the darkness. Yet equally clear was it that the one was queen and the others her subjects.

Lord Weary went straight to Epona and peeled back her lips to examine her teeth. “This one is best,” he said at last. “She shall be mine.”

Will trembled, but said nothing.

“First things first. Measure her for a saddle and bit.”

“Sir!” His aide-de-camp, a haint named Chittiface, clicked his heels and saluted.

“The others too, of course. They’re still as wild as so many winds, and will need training. Have them broken and gentled. But take care to use no more force than is necessary. For they are my own precious children and I’ll not have them scarred or disfigured.” He tinned on Will and said, “Captain Riddle, I perceive that I have in some way offended you.”

“How can a lord offend his captain?” Will said carefully. “One might as well declare that I have offended my hand, or that I act against the best wishes of my left leg. Can the liver and entrails resent the wise leadership of King Head? Tis beyond my imagining.”

The stables-to-be were swarming with soldiers, many busy, but the greater number merely curious to see the horses. Will noted that all of his fellow raiders were here as well. And every man-jack and lady-jill was pretending not to listen.

“Oh, glib, most monstrous glib indeed!” Lord Weary turned a stem face upon Will. “And yet such a litany of sighs and shudders and tics, of soft gasps and shakes of the head, of sudden winces and tightened lips and suppressed retorts have I seen from you as speaks louder than mere words ever could. You are displeased. With me.”

“If so, milord, then I apologize most humbly.”

“Humbly, sirrah? You defy me to my teeth and plead humility? I’ll not have it. Lie to me a third time at your peril.”

“But—”

“Kneel!” Weary said, and then, when Will obeyed, “Both knees!”

Lord Weary was Will’s liege, and Will had knelt before him often. But always, as became one of his officers, on a single knee. The ground here was wet and unclean, and the damp filth soaked through the cloth where the knee touched it. There was only one reason for Will to be made to kneel on two knees, and that was so that he might be humiliated.

“Now,” Lord Weary said. “As I am your liege and you owe me obedience, speak. Tell me what I have done.”

“Lord, these words are nothing I would willingly say. But as you command, so must I obey.” Simply, then, and without recrimination, Will explained what promises he had made to Epona, and concluded, “What touches my honor is mine alone, and cannot entail yours. I ask only that you consider these matters seriously.”

Lord Weary heard him through. Then he said, “Seize him.”

Rough hands gripped Will by either arm. The soldier to his left was a new recruit, but the one to his right was Jenny Jumpup. She did not meet his eyes.

“Strip him to the waist,” Lord Weary commanded. “Give him five lashes for insolence.”

Will lay on his stomach, eyes closed, marveling at the intensity of his own pain. He had retreated to his spare and soldierly nest, built of stacked cardboard, clothesline, and charity blankets on a rarely-used catwalk that swayed and rattled every time a train passed underneath. It vibrated now as footsteps noisily clanged up the metal rungs from below.

“We brought you water.” A refilled two-liter Pepsi bottle thumped down by Will’s chest. Tatterwag sat down at the tent’s entrance, folding his long legs beneath him. Jenny Jumpup sat down beside him. “I couldn’t come see you sooner because Weary gave me double-shift guarding his new horses. I was dead on my feet by the time I was relieved, so I just crawled in my box and collapsed.”

With a groan, Will sat up. He took a swig from the bottle and waited.

At last Jenny Jumpup blurted, “He got no right to do that to you!”

“He has every right. But he was wrong to employ those rights in this instance.”

Jenny snorted and looked away dismissively. Tatterwag’s mouth moved silently as he worked out the implications of that statement. Then, quietly, he said, “It’s war.”

“Eh?”

“Lord Weary has closed the underworld to everyone but johatsu. Not just the police—transit, sewage, water, gas, and electrical workers too. If they refuse to leave, Lord Weary says, they’re to be beaten. Orders are to mark them up good, so that if they return we’ll know to kill ’em.”

“That’s crazy. We’ve always kept on good terms with the maintenance crews. They can come and go as they wish. Even the cops we don’t kill. We let them know who runs things down here, but we don’t threaten their safety. That’s been the keystone of our polity.”

“Not any more,” Jenny Jumpup said. “Lord Weary say once we seize control of their transit and utilities, the uplanders ain’t got no choice but to negotiate a peace.”

“They’ll have no choice but to exterminate us.” Closing his eyes made Will’s head spin. When he opened them, he was still dizzy. “Has Lord Weary gone mad?”

“Maybe so.” Tatterwag leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Some of us think that. And if he’s mad, what loyalty do we owe him? None! Maybe this is an opportunity. Some of us think that maybe it’s time for a regime change.”

“Regime change?”

“A coup d’etat. You think, Will! You’re close enough to him. He trusts you. Slide a knife between his ribs and the problem goes away.”

“It sounds simple,” Will said carefully. Particularly, he did not say, for those who need have nothing to do with the deed but to urge him on to it. “But I doubt its practicality. Lord Weary’s troops would tear me apart if I pulled a stunt like that.”

“You’ve got backing among the officers. We talked this through, didn’t we, Jenny?”

She nodded.

“They’re prepared to acclaim you. This is your moment, Will. You call the Army of Night together and give ’em a speech—you’re good with words, they’ll listen to you—and Lord Weary is done and forgotten.”

Will shook his head. He was about to explain that Tatterwag’s idea wouldn’t work because Lord Weary had just started a war and consequently was more popular now than he’d ever been before or would ever be again. But then a train slammed by underfoot, making speech impossible. By the time the catwalk stopped shivering and the diesel fumes had begun to dissipate, he found that he had slumped down onto his bed again and his eyes were closed and his mouth would not form words at his command.

A random thought went by and he followed it into the realm of dreams.

In his dreams, the commanders of the mosstroopers were gathered around a table, staring down at a map of the underworld that was nowhere near so detailed or accurate as his own, though reliable enough, he could see, on the major and more recent excavations. One of them indicated the mouth of the tunnel where the sub-surface route broke into the outer world and became a trolley line. “We’ll enter here—” his hand skipped lightly down the map, tapping three of the larger subway stations—“and at Bowling Green, Tartarus, and Third Street Stations. The stations in between we can lock down to prevent Lord Weary’s riffraff from retreating to the surface.”

“That still leaves his rats a thousand bolt-holes, most of which are unknown to us.”

“Let them break and run, so long as we shatter their army and account for their leaders.”

They all bent over the map, their granite faces as large as cathedrals, their moustaches the size of boxcars. “What of Jack Riddle? He looks feverish.”

Lying helpless beneath their stony gazes, pinned between parallel lines of ink, Will saw a hand come down out of the darkness, growing larger and larger until it filled his sight and then continued to swell so that it disappeared from his ken, all save one enormous finger. It was wreathed with blue flames so that the air about it wavered and snapped like a flag in a gale. “This bug?” said its owner contemptuously.

The finger touched the map and Will felt flames engulf him.

Will’s eyes flew open. Tatterwag and Jenny Jumpup were gone and Hjördis knelt by his side. With hands sure and familiar she rubbed balm over his wounds. The pain flared up like fire where she touched him, and sank down to an icy residue where her hands had passed. The smell, flowery and medicinal, lingered.

“You are so good to me “Will murmured.

“It’s nothing personal,” Hjördis replied.

“Why do you always say things like that?”

“Because they’re true. There is nothing special or privileged about our relationship. You are our hero and so I have body-rights over you, as I did with Bonecrusher before you, and as I have over Lord Weary even now. You in turn take tribute from each new community you conquer, yes? A lei of orchids, freely offered and freely taken. Settle for that.”

Will stayed silent until Hjördis finished applying the balm. Then he said, “They say there’s going to be war.”

“Yes, I know. Lord Weary came for the crates of rifles we were holding for him. This time there was no brash young stranger to offer an alternative. So it’s war. If you care to call it that.”

“What else would you call it?”

“Idiocy. But I will not be here to see it. The johatsu are leaving. The tunnels are emptying out as all the communities up and down their lengths desert them for the upper world. I have sent ahead as many of my own folk as have the sense to leave. Now I am visiting the last holdouts, the obstinate and demented, one by one. When I have spoken to them all I will leave myself.”

“Where will you go?”

“There are shelters above. Some will sleep in stairwells. Others in the streets. Come with me.”

“You can’t leave just because there is danger,” Will said. “This is your nation!”

“I have never believed in Lord Weary’s fantasies. My folk are not warriors, but the weak and the broken who fled down below to find some semblance of safety,” Hjördis said. “As their thane, I cannot forget that.”

“Tatterwag wants me to lead a revolt against Lord Weary.” Said aloud, it sounded unreal. “He wants me to kill Weary, win over the troops with a speech, and then take control of the Army of Night and lead them upward against our oppressors.”

“Yes, Tatterwag would, wouldn’t he? It’s how he thinks.”

“Perhaps I should give his plan some thought. It could be tweaked.”

“You’re overheated.” Hjördis rose. “I will leave the balm here; use it when the pain returns. Don’t wear a shirt until the welts have healed. Avoid alcohol. Leave before Lord Weary’s war begins.”

“I can’t abandon my troops. I’ve fought alongside them, I’ve—”

“My work here is done,” Hjördis said. “You will not see me again.” She started down the ladder. Before the sound of her feet on the rungs had echoed into silence, Will was asleep.

When he awoke, Lord Weary was sitting beside him, smoking. His pale, shrewd face looked oddly detached. Groggily, Will sat up.

“You could kill me,” Lord Weary said. “But what advantage would it bring you?”

He passed his cigarette to Will, who took a long drag and passed it back. His back still burned terribly, but the balm Hjördis had applied took some of the edge off the pain.

“You’re only a hero, after all. I am a conqueror and someday I may yet be an emperor. I know how to rule and you don’t. That’s the long and the short of it. Without me, the Army of Night would fall apart in a week. The alliances I have formed and the tributes I demand are all imposed by force of my own personality. Kill me and you lose everything that we have built together.”

“I don’t think I could kill you.”

“No,” Lord Weary said. “Not in cold blood, certainly.”

It was true. Inexplicably, Will’s heart still went out to Lord Weary. He thought he could gladly die for the old elf. Yet the anger remained. “Why did you have me whipped?”

“It was salutary for the troops to see you punished. You drew my Army’s admiration and then their loyalty. Therefore it was necessary for me to establish who was liege and who Ids hound. Had you not defied me on the horse, I would have found another excuse. This is my delusion, not yours.”

“Excuse me?”

“You asked me once how I came to this sad estate, living in darkness, eating rats and stale donuts, and bedding gutter-haints, and you did not like my answer then. Allow me to try again. Anyone can see I’m high-elven. Most of my soldiers think my title was self-assumed, but I assure you it was mine by birth. How could one of my blood and connections ever end up,” he gestured, “. . . here?”

“How?”

“It began one morning in the Palace of Leaves,” Lord Weary said. “I awoke early to find that the servants had opened all the windows, for it was a perfect day whose breezes were as light and comfortable upon the skin as the water of a sun-warmed lake. I slipped quietly from my bed so as not to disturb my mistresses and, donning a silk kimono, went out onto the balcony. The sun lay low upon the horizon, so that half the land was in light and half in shadow, and at the very center of the world, its focus and definition, was . . . me.

“A vast and weightless emptiness overcame me then, a sensation too light to be called despair but too pitiless to be anything else. The balcony had only a low marble railing—it barely came up to my waist—and it was the easiest thing imaginable to step atop it. I looked down the tapering slope of Babel at the suburbs and tank farms below, hidden here and there by patches of mist, marveling that I could see them at all from such a height. It would be too strong a word to say that I felt an urge to step off. Call it a whim.

“So I did.

“But so illusory did the world seem to me in the mood I was in that it had no hold upon me whatsoever. Even gravity could not touch me. I stepped into the air and there I stood. Unmoving.

“And in that instant I faced my greatest peril, for I felt my comprehension expanding to engulf the entire world.”

“I don’t understand,” Will said.

“There is a single essence that animates all that lives, from the tiniest mite eking out a barren existence upon the desert-large shell of another mite too small to see with the naked eye, to the very pinnacle of existence, my own humble and lordly self. It informs even inanimate matter, a simple I am that lets a boulder know that it is a boulder, a mountain that it is a mountain, a pebble that it is pebble. Otherwise, all would be flux and change.

“The body, you know, is 90 percent water, and there are those who will tell you that life is only a device that water employs to move itself about. When you die, that water returns to the earth and via natural processes is drawn up into the air, where it eventually joins up with waters that were once snakes, camels, emperors . . . and rains down again, perhaps to join a stream that becomes a river that flows into the sea. Sooner or later, all but your dust will inevitably return to world-girding Oceanus.

“Similarly, when you die your life-force combines with that of everyone else who has ever died or is yet to be bom. Like so many lead soldiers being melted down to form a molten ocean of potential.”

Will shook his head. “It is a difficult thing to believe.”

“No, it is easy to believe. But it is hard, impossibly hard, to know. For to recognize the illusory nature of your own being is to flirt with its dissolution. To become one with everything is to become nothing specific at all. Almost, I ceased to be. I experienced then an instant of absolute terror as fleeting and pure as the flash of green light at sunset.

“In that same instant, I spun on my heel and took two steps down to the balcony. I left the Palace of Leaves and went to a bar and got roaring drunk. For I had seen beneath the mask of the world and there was nothing there! Since which time, I have distracted myself with debauchery and dreams. I dreamt up the Army of Night and then I dreamt a world for it to conquer. Finally, I dreamt for it a champion—you.”

“With all respect, sir, I had a life before we met.”

“You were chased into my arms,” Lord Weary said, lighting a new cigarette from the butt of the old one. “Didn’t it seem strange to you how you were pursued by one anonymous enemy after another? What had you done to deserve such treatment? Can you name your crime?” He flicked the butt out into the air over the tracks. “I have been, I fear, your persecutor-general and the architect of all your sorrows. I am the greatest villain you have ever known.”

“If you are a villain,” Will said, “then you are a strange one indeed, for I still love you as if you were my own uncle.” Even now, he was not lying. “I hate much about you—your power, your arrogance, your former wealth. I despise the way you use others for your own amusement. And yet . . . I cannot deny my feelings for you.”

For an unguarded instant, Lord Weary looked old and jaded. His fingers trembled with palsy and his eyes were vacant. Then he cocked his head and a great and terrible warmth filled him again. “Then I shall swear here and now that when I come to power, you shall be paid for all. What is it you want? Think carefully and speak truly, and it shall be yours.”

“I want to see you sitting on the Obsidian Throne.”

“That is an evasion. Why should that be more important to you than money or power?”

“Because in order for you to reach such a height would require a great slaughter among the Lords of the Mayoralty, such that the Liosalfar and the Dockalfar and even the Council of Magi would be depopulated.”

“Again, why?”

Will ducked his head. In a small voice, he said, “My parents were in Brocieland Station when the dragons came and dropped golden fire on the rail yards. My life was destroyed by a war-machine that may have been on that very run. After I was driven out of it, my village was torched by the Armies of the Mighty. All these forces were in the employ of the Lords of Babel and the war itself the result of their mad polity.” He looked up, eyes brimming with hatred. “Kill them all! Destroy those responsible, and I shall ask for not a scintilla more from you.”

“My dear, sweet Jack.” Lord Weary took Will in his arms and stroked his hair caressingly. “I can deny you nothing.” He rose to his feet. “Now my war has begun and whether it is real or not, you have your part to play in it. Stand.”

“Yes, sir,” Will said. Painfully he stood. Bright spots swam in his eyes. “Put your shirt and jacket on. I’ll have the medic shoot you up with witchwart and lidocaine so you can fight.”

Lord Weary established his headquarters in the catacombs. In a small room lined with bone-filled vaults and smokily lit by ancient lamps filled with recycled motor oil, he went over the maps with his captains, utilizing a cyclops skull as a makeshift table. They’d placed scouts at all the places where the mosstroopers might profitably begin their attack. There were countless ways in and out of the subterranean world, of course, but very few that would admit military forces in any number.

While the troops assembled rifles, made Molotov cocktails, and folded bandanas and soaked them in water so they could be tied about their faces as a defense against tear gas, their superiors planned an ambush and counterattack. Will had his doubts about the effectiveness of their forces, for he had seen soldiers snorting pixie dust and smoking blunts even as they prepared their weapons. Worse, the more he heard of his commander’s plans, the less he trusted them. The tunnels were perfect for guerrilla warfare—wait for the enemy to be overextended and bored, then strike swiftly from the darkness and flee. Direct confrontation meant giving up that advantage. But Lord Weary’s compulsion was strong upon him, and in the end Will had no choice but to obey.

So it was that Will found himself upon his motorcycle as part of a small advance force that watched from the shadows as the mosstroopers poured down from the Third Street platform and onto the tracks. The station had been closed, the trains redirected, and the power to the third rail cut. The troopers took up their positions in what looked to Will to be a thoroughly professional manner. They were every one of them Tylwyth Teg—disciplined, experienced, and well-trained. They wore black helmets and carried plexi shields. Gas grenades hung from their belts and holstered pistols as well.

The mosstroopers advanced in staggered ranks, with the dire wolves in the front row, straining at their leashes. It looked for all the world as if the wolves were pulling the troopers forward.

Will watched and waited.

Then, in his distant catacomb sanctum, where he sat scrying the scene in a bowl of ink, Lord Weary spoke a Word which Will could feel in the pit of his stomach.

A sorcerous wind came blowing up from the throat of the earth. It lifted the newspapers and handbills littering the ground and gave them wings, so that they flapped wildly and flew directly into the faces of the mosstroopers like so many ghostly chickens and pelicans. Ragged items of discarded clothing picked themselves up and began to stagger toward the invaders. Coming up out of nowhere as they had, the sorcerous nothings must have looked like a serious magical attack.

Two soldiers, both combat mages by the testimony of their uniforms, stepped forward and raised titanium staves against the oncoming paper birds and cloth manikins. As one, they spoke a Word of their own.

All in an instant, the wind died and the newspapers and old clothes burst into powder.

That was Will’s cue. He held a magnesium flare ready in one hand and his lighter in the other. Now, before the mages’ staves could recharge, he flipped open his Zippo one-handed and struck a light. Then he pulled the welder’s goggles over his eyes and shouted, “Heads down!”

The snipers, who did not have goggles of their own, covered their eyes with their arms. The five cavalry lit and threw their flares.

“Go!” Will screamed.

He opened the throttle too fast and his Kawasaki stalled out. Cursing, he kick-started it back to life.

The plan of attack was simplicity itself: In the instant that their defenses were depleted, hit the mosstroopers and their wolves with magnesium flares, then charge the center of their line while they were still blinded. There, the powerful bodies of the horses would break a way through, spreading confusion in their wake. They were to continue onward without stopping and around the bend beyond Third Street Station, disappearing up the tunnel. This would leave the enemy easy targets for Will’s sharpshooters. Or so it was planned.

In practice, it didn’t work out that way.

Will had lost only seconds by stalling his bike. But in that delay, the horses had outpaced him. Now he saw them overwhelmed by the dire wolves that the blinded mosstroopers had released. Relying on scent rather than sight, those fierce predators met the horses in the air, snarling and snapping, sinking their great teeth into pale throats and haunches.

The first to fall was Epona.

He heard her scream, and saw both horse and rider buried in black-furred furies. The rider, a nonentity named Mumpoker, died almost immediately but his noble steed bit and kicked even as she went down. Not far behind her, Hengroen and Holvarpnia were also overwhelmed. Will saw Jenny Jumpup leap free of Embarr, collide with a dire wolf in midair and fall with the wolf beneath her and both her hands at its throat.

Will opened the throttle wide. Yelling, he drove toward Epona and the fallen riders, hoping to achieve he knew not what. But then tear-gas canisters fell clattering to the ground and a wall of chemical mist rolled forward and into his troops. The bandana that Will wore provided little protection. Fiery tears welled up, and he could not see. Desperately, he tried to spin his motorcycle about. The bike skidded on its side and almost slid out from under him. His Zippo flew skittering away.

Will struggled to right the motorcycle.

All about him the dire wolves were fighting and hunting. Though the brutes could not see and their sense of smell had been neutralized by the tear gas, they were yet deadly to any combatant they chanced to stumble into.

A wolf’s paws landed on Will’s handlebars. All in a panic he raised his pistol and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

He had forgotten the safety.

The dire wolf grinned, baring sharp white fangs. “If you’re going to piss yourself, best do it now,” it said. “Because you’re about to die.”

The hideous jaws were about to close on Will’s face when the wolf abruptly grunted and half its head disappeared in red spray.

“Some fun, huh, Captain?” Jenny Jumpup grinned madly at Will, then stuffed her pistol in her belt and reached out a hand toward him.

Will pulled her up behind him on the motorcycle. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” he shouted.

They did.

That was the war’s first action. Will’s snipers had retreated in disarray before the advancing mosstroopers without firing a single shot. The horses entrusted him were dead and their riders, all but one, dead or captured. It was a fiasco and, worse, it deserved to be one. Lord Weary’s soldiers were only half-trained and their tactics were makeshift at best. They couldn’t go up against a disciplined military force like the mosstroopers and expect anything but defeat. That was obvious to Will now.

The guttering flares died to nothing behind them and the dire wolves were called back to their handlers. Will pocketed his goggles. The mosstroopers would continue to advance, he knew, but at a cautious pace. Since they were no longer in immediate danger, he throttled down his bike to a less dangerous speed. Thus, he was able to react in time when Jenny Jumpup murmured, “I think I gone pass out now,” and started to slide from the pillion.

Will twisted around to grab Jenny Jumpup with one arm, while simultaneously slamming on the brake. Somehow, he managed to bring the Kawasaki to a stop without dropping her.

Pushing down the kickstand with his heel, Will dismounted and lowered his lieutenant to the ground. Semicircles of blood soaked through her blouse and trousers, more than he could count.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered.

Jenny Jumpup’s eyes flickered open. She managed a wan smile. “Hey. You should see the wolf.” Then her eyes deadened and her face went slack.

He bandaged her as best he could and then, mating her belt with his, improvised a pistol-belt carry. Bent over beneath her weight, he staggered onto the cycle and got it going again. He dared not stay in the path of the mosstroopers, and he would not leave her behind.

Into the dark they rode.

Once, briefly, Jenny Jumpup regained consciousness. “I got something to confess, Captain,” she said. “When Lord Weary whipped you? I enjoyed it.”

Shaken, Will said, “I’m sorry if I—”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that in a bad way.” Jenny Jumpup was silent for a long time. Then she said, “It kinda turned me on. Maybe when this is all over, we can . . .” Then she was out again. Will twisted around and saw that her skin was grey.

“Hang in there. I’ll have you to a medic soon.”

Will rode as fast and furious as ever he had before.

Some distance down the tunnel, Tatterwag stepped out of the gloom in front of the Kawasaki. And so Will was reunited with those of his snipers who had not simply thrown away their rifles and fled but had retreated with some shred of order. Besides Tatterwag, they were Sparrowgrass, Drumbelo, the Starveling, and Xylia of Arcadia.

Carefully, Will lowered Jenny Jumpup’s body to the ground. “See to her wounds,” he said. “They were honorably gotten.”

Xylia of Arcadia knelt over Jenny. Then she stood and touched her head, heart, and crotch. “She’s dead.”

Will stared down at the corpse. It was a grey and pathetic thing. Jenny Jumpup’s clothes were dark with blood and, deprived of her personality, her face was dull and ordinary. Had he not carried it here on his back, Will would have sworn the body was not hers.

After a long silence, Tatterwag stooped over the body. “I’ll take her pistols for a keepsake.” He stuck them in his belt.

“I’ll take her boots,” Xylia of Arcadia said. “They won’t fit me, but I know somebody they will.”

One by one they removed Jenny Jumpup’s things. Will took her cigarettes and lighter and Drumbelo her throwing knife. The Starveling took her trousers and tunic. That left only a small silver orchid hung on a chain about her neck, which Sparrowgrass solemnly kissed and stuffed into a jeans pocket. They looked at one another uneasily, and then Will cleared his throat. “From the south she came.”

“The bird, the warlike bird,” said Xylia of Arcadia.

“With whirring wings,” said Drumbelo.

“She wishes to change herself,” said the Starveling.

“Back to the body of that swift bird,” said Tatterwag.

“She throws away her body in battle,” Sparrowgrass concluded.

Already, freed of her élan vital and any lingering attachment to her possessions, Jenny Jumpup’s body was sinking into the ground. Slowly at first, and then more quickly, it slid downward into the darkness of the earth from which it had come and to which all would someday inevitably return. Haints more literally than others, perhaps, but the truth was universal.

The staging area, when they finally got there, was in an uproar. The platforms swarmed with haints, feys, and gaunts, carrying crates, barrels, and railroad ties to add to the growing barricades, and moving guns and munitions to hastily improvised emplacements. One leather-winged night gaunt flew up the tunnel from which Will’s company had just emerged, with a dispatch box in its claws. Will’s heart sank to see how amateurish it all looked.

Porte Molitor Station had seemed a good base because it was located where the A, C, and E lines split from Routes 1, 2, and 3 and was not far downline from the sub-surface exit, thus giving easy access to all four potential war zones. But Porte Molitor was a ghost station, built but never used, and so it did not open to the surface. Now, with retreating soldiers converging from every front and scouts reporting that the enemy was advancing through all three tunnels, it seemed to Will like nothing so much as a trap.

“Who’s in charge here?” Will shouted. “What are all these soldiers doing on the tracks? Isn’t anybody in charge?”

“Lord Weary has placed Captain Hackem in command of the defenses for the left Uptown tunnel,” a weary-looking hulder said. “Chittiface is responsible for the right Uptown tunnel. And he himself commands the forces defending the Downtown tunnel. Hello, Jack.”

“Hjördis!” Will cried in astonishment. “You’re back.”

“Everybody’s back. All the johatsu who fled have returned to the tunnels, without exception.”

“But why?” Earlier, Will had urged the lady-thane not to abandon Lord Weary’s cause. Now he knew his counsel had been wrong. She had left and been right to do so. She should have stayed away.

“I don’t know.” Hjördis looked stricken. “It defies all reason. Perhaps there is a compulsion on us. But if so, it is of a force greater than any I have ever known or heard rumor of, for it drives a multitude.”

“Where is Lord Weary? If anybody understands this mystery, it will be he.”

“Lord Weary charges you to consult with him before the battle begins. On what matter, he does not say.” Hjördis tinned away. “Now I must go. I have a field hospital to oversee.”

Will watched her leave. Then he turned to Tatterwag and held out a hand. “Give me your combat knife.”

Knife in hand, Will clambered over the barricade and kick-started his bike. Then, though it broke his heart to do so, he plunged the knife into the fuel tank. Gasoline sprayed into the air and drenched the ground. Up and down the tracks he rode. The ties made it a teeth-rattling ride and spread the gasoline from wall to wall before the Kawasaki sputtered to a stop.

“There!” he roared when he was done. “Now, when the hell-hounds come sniffing after us, this will render them nose-deaf!”

That done, he strode off to confront Lord Weary, Tatterwag in tow.

The Downtown tunnel fortifications were simpler than the Uptown barricades—a single barrier that reached almost to the ceiling, without crenels or even a walkway along its top—but correspondingly more massive. He found Little Tommy Redcap overseeing the work there in Lord Weary’s place. Johatsu carried box after box to the I-beams and duct-taped them to the foot of the supports. Others ran electrical wires from box to box. They could only be explosive devices.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Will demanded.

“What the fuck does it look like I’m doing?” Little Tommy Redcap lifted his voice: “Yo! I need more primers here!”

“It looks like you’re preparing to bring half the buildings in the Bowery crashing down on our heads.”

The haint who came running up with the box of primers was puffing on a lit cigar. Little Tommy Redcap snatched it from the johatsu’s mouth and started to fling it away. Then he stopped and stuck it in his own mouth instead. “If you knew, why did you ask?”

“If this is done by Lord Weary’s orders, then he’s crazy,” Will said. “If you touch those things off, you’ll kill us all.”

“You think I’m afraid of dying?” Little Tommy Redcap laughed and then tapped the ashes from his cigar onto the primers for emphasis. “It’s a good day to die!”

“You’re crazy too.”

“Maybe so, but I still got things to do. You got any complaints—” Little Tommy Redcap jerked a thumb upward—“take ’em up with the Big Guy.” High overhead was a gallery that Will did not remember seeing before, in a wall that was taller than it could possibly be. (The station seemed larger too—but he had no time to worry on it.) Lord Weary’s face was a pale oval afloat in the darkness like an indifferent moon gazing down upon the wickedness of the world. “I will,” he said. “How do I get up there?” There was a stairwell that Will had never seen before. Two insect-headed guards in green leather armor uncrossed their pikes for him but recrossed them when Tatterwag tried to follow. Leaving his lieutenant behind to argue, Will took the steps two and three at a time. Heart pounding—when had he last rested?—he burst into the gallery.

Lord Weary was leaning over a marble balustrade, contemplating the scene below. He glanced up briefly. “Join me.”

A strange lassitude overcame Will and all sense of urgency left him. It was as if in the presence of his liege he had no ambitions of his own. Unhurriedly, he joined the elf-lord. Together they gazed down on the scurrying johatsu. A salt breeze blew up, dispelling the stagnant air of the tunnels. It seemed to Will that he caught a hint of flowers as well. An unseen sun was warm upon his back. “What place is this?”

“A memory, and nothing more. My attention wanders, I fear.” Suddenly they stood in a clean, empty room of white marble. A light wind flowed through its high windows. A black absence sat at its center. From some angles it looked like a chair.

“Is that—?”

“Yes. You behold the Obsidian Throne.” The air darkened and the vision faded, returning Will to the stale smells and staler prospects of his life underground. Briefly, Lord Weary was silent. Then he said, “The final conflict approaches. Can you hear it coming?”

Will could. “What’s that sound?” he asked. “That . . . howling.”

“Just watch.”

The howling grew until it became a quartet of train whistles shrieking almost in synch. Louder they grew, and louder still. The thunder of iron wheels filled the station. The ground underfoot trembled with premonition.

Then the Uptown barricades exploded. Fragments of beams, barrels, and soldiers were flung into the air as locomotives smashed through the hastily assembled defenses.

There were four of the great beasts, running in unison, with plows affixed to the fronts of their cabs, and they did not slow as they passed through the station. Shoulder to shoulder they sped, grinding troops under their wheels. At the Downtown tunnel, they crashed through the barricade and its defenders and, with final triumphant howls, rushed headlong into darkness, leaving hundreds dead in their wake.

Will clutched the balustrade, his eyes starting from his head. The screams and shouts of the survivors echoed and re-echoed in his ears like surf. He could not master his thoughts; they tumbled over each other in meaningless cascades. “You knew this would happen,” he said finally, fighting back nausea. “You arranged this.”

Lord Weary smiled sadly. He leaned over the railing and shouted, “Redcap!”

In the wake of the trains had come the mosstroopers. Somebody fired a magnesium flare at the first squadron to arrive, setting afire the gasoline Will had sprayed throughout the tunnel. But it did not stop them. Burning and ravening, the dire wolves entered Porte Molitor and began killing the survivors. Behind them came the mosstroopers, weapons ready.

Yet amid all this confusion, Lord Weary’s voice carried to its target. Little Tommy Redcap looked up from the smoldering body of a dying wolf. “Sir?”

“Are the explosives ready?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Stand by the igniter and await my command.”

“Sir!” Little Tommy Redcap turned and disappeared into the fleeing, fighting, panicking mob.

So great was Will’s befuddlement then that it did not surprise him to see Tatterwag leap from the stairwell with blood on his jacket and Jenny Jumpup’s pistols in his hands. “Traitor!” he cried, and discharged them both point-blank at Lord Weary’s head.

“Ah,” the elf-lord sighed. “Like so many things, this moment was far more pleasing in the anticipation than in its realization.” He opened a hand and there lay the two freshly fired pistol balls.

He let them drop to the floor.

“You bore me.”

All color drained from the swamp gaunt’s face. Pleadingly, he raised his hands and shook his head. With neither hurry nor reluctance, Lord Weary reached toward him. His fingers closed not upon Tatterwag, however, but around a filthy old greatcoat. With a moue of distaste, he tossed it over the balustrade.

“What did you just do?” Will asked, shocked. “How did you do that?” Hjördis stepped from the stairwell, as Tatterwag had a minute before. “He’s a glamour-wallah,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

Lord Weary smiled and shrugged. “I was the King’s Master of Revels,” he said. “Not that His Absent Majesty ever called upon my services, of course. Still . . . I had talent, I kept in practice. More than one member of the Court was of my devising. Once, I threw a masked ball at which half of those attending had no objective reality whatsoever. The next morning, many a lord and lady woke to discover their bed-mates had been woven of naught but whimsy and thin air.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He creates illusions,” Hjördis said. “Very convincing ones. For entertainment. When I was living in a shelter near the Battery, the government sent a glamour-wallah down for the winter solstice and he filled the streets with comets and butterflies “Then, sadly, “Was Tatterwag nothing, after all, but one of your creations?”

Lord Weary cocked his head apologetically. “Forgive an old elf his follies. I made him for a grand role, if that makes any difference. He would have shot me just as I was about to ascend to the Obsidian Throne, and then died in reprisal at the hands of our hot-blooded young hero here.” He indicated Will. “Then, lying in his arms, I would have begged Jack to ascend the throne in my place. Which, because he was ambitious and because it was my dying wish, he would have done.

“Alas, my interest in this game has flickered to embers long before I thought it would. What can one do?” He turned to Hjördis. “I suppose you are here for some reason.”

“Yes. Your munitions teams have planted explosives on the support beams of the buildings above us. If they are set off, all the johatsu and all the Army of Night will die.”

“And this bothers you, I suppose?” Lord Weary sighed. “Foolish child. They were never real in the first place.”

Abruptly the cries, shouts, and other noises from below ceased. Hjördis stared over the balustrade down at the suddenly empty tracks and platforms. There were no corpses, no shattered barricades, no mosstroopers or burning wolves, no rebel army, nothing but the common litter of an abandoned subway station. “Then . . . they were all, johatsu and ’troopers alike, your creations? Only Will and I were . . .?”

Lord Weary raised an eyebrow and she fell silent.

At last, she spoke again. “I had thought I was real,” Hjördis said in a monotone. “I had memories. Ambitions. Friends.”

“You grow maudlin.” Lord Weary reached for her. His fingers closed about a mop. This, like the greasy overcoat that had been Tatterwag, he tossed lightly away.

“I’m next, I suppose,” Will said bitterly. He clenched his fists. “I loved you! Of all the cruel and wicked things you’ve done, that was the worst. I deserved better. I may not be real, but I deserved better.”

“You are as real as I am,” Lord Weary said. “No more, no less.” He was growing older before Will’s eyes. His skin was as pink and translucent as a baby’s, but loose upon his flesh. His hair was baby-wispy too and white. The tremor in his voice was impossible to ignore. “Take from that what comfort you can. For my part, I sought to put off enlightenment through treason and violent adventure. But now I see the unity of all things, and it seems that senility has come for me at . . .”

Lord Weary’s eyes closed and his head sank down upon his chest. Slowly and without fuss, he faded away to nothing. With him went the balustrade, the gallery, and all the light from the air. Will felt the darkness wrap itself about him like the warm and loving arms of Mother Night.

He did not know if he existed or not, nor did he care. Lord Weary’s war—if it had ever begun in the first place—was over.

Will awoke to find himself lying on the subway tracks. He staggered to his feet and then had to leap madly backward as a train came blasting down the tunnel at him.

When his vision returned, Will began to walk.

He’d been plodding along for some time when he saw a haint in the tunnel ahead, wearing the hip waders and hard hat of a sewer worker. “What you doing here, white boy?” he asked when Will hailed him.

“I’m lost.”

“Well, you best get yourself unlost. You don’t belong down here.”

“Point me the way out and I’m gone.”

The haint had started to fade through a wall. He hesitated, and leaned back. “Turn around the way you came. Look for a yellow light on the left. The is a door under it that leads out.”

So Will did as he said. Vaguely, he remembered encountering this same sewer worker when first he had stumbled into the underground. He had no idea what that meant. Nor did he know how much of what he had seen and felt and done in the past however-many months had actually happened. Friends and foes alike had died—but had they ever existed in the first place? Were Bonecrusher, Epona, Jenny Jumpup, and all the rest real? And if not, did that free him of the obligation to care about them and to mourn their deaths? Try though he might, he could make no sense out of what he had been through.

But when he finally spotted the yellow light shining within its metal cage and the steel door beneath it, he felt a stirring and a rumbling deep within his blood and bones. It was the dragon, laughing. Louder and wilder that laughter grew until it filled up all his being and Will could not help but laugh as well. At what he did not know, unless it was the futility and pointlessness of life itself. He laughed until he cried.

In the silence that ensued, for the first time ever, he heard the dragon speak to him not in emotions but in words.

He began to listen.

ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE

Mike Resnick

You wouldn’t think they’d be so dumb. Here they were, in the biggest spaceport in the country, with hundreds of holo cameras covering every inch of the place, and these three jerks actually think they’re going to get away with robbing the currency exchange.

Okay, so they got a couple of ceramic pistols past our security devices and reassembled them in the men’s room, and all right, another one managed to sneak a couple of steak knives out of one of the restaurants, but hell, did they think we were just going to sit on our hands and let them waltz out with their loot?

I hadn’t seen much action during my four years in the space service, and after all those months of intensive training I’d almost been hoping for something like this. I’d been at OceanPort for three weeks, and was wondering why they even bothered with a live Security team, since their automated systems were so efficient that they discouraged anything worse than spitting on the floor.

Well, now I knew.

The men with the pistols were holding the crowd at bay, and the guy with the knife had grabbed a girl—not a woman, but a kid about twelve years old—and was holding the knife at her throat.

“Don’t move on them,” said the voice in my ear. “We’ve got to get the girl away from them unharmed, and we can’t have them shooting into the crowd.”

That was Captain Symmes. He was just spouting the routine and stating the platitudes: they’ve been identified, we can trace them wherever they go, they’re dead men walking, so don’t endanger any bystanders. If we don’t nail them here, we’ll nail them somewhere up the road. They have to eat, they have to sleep; we don’t. Whatever they think they’re going to escape in, we’ll sugar their gas, rupture their jets, fuck with their nuclear pile. (I kept waiting for him to say we’d also put tacks in their track shoes, but he didn’t.)

“Show yourselves, but don’t approach him,” said Symmes’ voice. “If they’re going to take a shot at someone, better us than the civilians.”

Well, it was better us if we remembered to put on our bulletproof longjohns. Most of us had, and the ones who hadn’t were too frightened to say so. An enraged Captain Symmes could be one hell of a lot more formidable than a ceramic bullet from a homemade pistol.

I stepped out from my station, and found myself about fifty yards from the trio. The crowd parted before them like the Red Sea before Moses, and they slowly made their way to the door. Then something caught my eye. It was a well-dressed middle-aged man, not fat or skinny but not especially well-built. While everyone else had moved away, he had simply turned his back and taken just a step or two.

Damn! I thought. It’s too bad you’re not one of us. You could just about reach the son of a bitch with the knife.

And even as the thought crossed my mind, the man spun around, chopped down on the knife-holder’s arm, and sent the weapon clattering to the floor. The little girl broke and ran toward the crowd, but I was watching the man who’d freed her. He didn’t have any weapons, and he sure didn’t handle his body like an athlete, but he was charging the two guys with the guns.

They turned and fired their weapons. He went down on one knee, his chest a bloody mess, then launched himself at the nearer one’s legs. The poor bastard never had a chance; he picked up four more bullets for his trouble.

Of course, the bad guys never had a chance, either. The second they concentrated on him, we all pulled our weapons and began firing—bullets, lasers, long-range tasers, you name it. All three were dead before they hit the floor.

I could see that Connie Neff was running over to the girl to make sure she was okay, so I raced up to the guy who’d taken all the bullets. He was in a bad way, but he was still breathing. Someone else had called for an ambulance. It arrived within two minutes, and they loaded him onto an airsled, shoved it in the back, and took off for Miami. I decided to ride with him. I mean, hell, he’d risked his life, probably lost it, to save that little girl. Someone who wasn’t a doctor ought to be there if he woke up.

OceanPort is eight miles off the Miami Coast, and the ambulance shuttle got us to the hospital in under a minute, though it took another forty seconds to set it down gently so as not to do any further damage to the patient.

I’d pulled his wallet and ID out and studied them. His name was Myron Seymour, he was forty-eight years old and—as far as I could tell—retired. Still had the serial number of the chip the military had embedded in him when he enlisted. The rest was equally unexceptional: normal height, normal weight, normal this, normal that.

He didn’t look much like a hero, but then, I’d never seen a real bonafide hero before, so I couldn’t actually say what they looked like.

“Good God,” said an orderly who’d come out to the ship to help move Seymour to the emergency room. “Him again!”

“He’s been here before?” I asked, surprised.

“Three times, maybe four,” was the reply. “I’ll swear the son of a bitch is trying to get himself killed.”

I was still puzzling over that remark when Seymour went into surgery. He came out, heavily sedated and in grave condition, three hours later.

“Is he going to make it?” I asked the same orderly, who was guiding the airsled into a recovery room.

“Not a chance,” he said.

“How much time as he got?”

He shrugged. “A day at the outside, probably less. Once we hook him up to all the machines we’ll have a better idea.”

“Any chance he’ll be able to talk?” I asked. “Or at least understand me if I talk to him?”

“You never know.”

“Mind if I stick around?”

He smiled. “You’re walking around with a badge, three lethal weapons that I can see, and probably a couple of more I can’t see. Who am I to tell you you can’t stay?”

I grabbed a sandwich in the hospital’s restaurant, called in to OceanPort to make sure I wasn’t needed right away, then went up to the recovery room. Each of the patients was partitioned off from the others, and it took me a couple of minutes to find Seymour. He was lying there, a dozen machines monitoring all his vital functions, five tubes dripping fluids of various colors and consistencies into arms, an oxygen tube up his nostrils, bandages everywhere, and hints of blood starting to seep through the dressings.

I figured it was a waste of time, that he was never going to wake up again, but I stuck around for another hour, just to pay my respects to the man who’d saved a little girl’s life. Then, as I was about to leave, his eyelids flickered and opened. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him, so I pulled my chair over to the bed.

“Welcome back,” I said gently.

“Is she here?” he whispered.

“The girl you saved?” I said. “No, she’s fine. She’s with her parents.”

“No, not her,” he said. He could barely move his head, but he tried to look around the room. “She’s got to be here this time!”

“Who’s got to be here?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”

“Where is she?” he rasped. “This time I’m dying. I can tell.”

“You’re going to be fine,” I lied.

“Not unless she gets here pretty damned soon.” He tried to sit up, but was too weak and sprawled back on the bed. “Is the door unlocked?”

“There isn’t any door,” I said. “You’re in the recovery ward.”

He looked genuinely puzzled. “Then where is she?”

“Whoever it is, she probably doesn’t know you’ve been wounded,” I said.

“She knows,” he said with absolute certainty.

“Was she at the spaceport?”

He shook his head weakly. “She wasn’t even on the planet,” he said.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to ask at the desk?”

“You can’t. She doesn’t have a name.”

“Everyone’s got a name.”

He uttered a sigh of resignation. “If you say so.”

I was starting to feel sorry I’d stuck around. I wasn’t bringing him any comfort, and his answers weren’t making any sense.

“Can you tell me anything about her?” I asked, making one more attempt to be helpful before I packed it in and went home.

I thought he was going to answer, he certainly looked like he was trying to say something, but then he passed out. A couple of minutes later all the machines he was hooked up to started going haywire, and a couple of young doctors raced into the room.

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“Out!” ordered one of the doctors.

They bent over the bed, going to work on him, and I figured I’d only be in the way if I stayed there, so I walked out into the corridor. Before long they emerged from the room.

“Is he dead?” I asked again.

“Yeah,” answered one of them. “Were you a friend of his?”

I shook my head. “No. I just brought him here from the spaceport.”

The doctors walked down the corridor, going to wherever doctors go when they’ve lost a patient, and a couple of orderlies showed up with an airsled. One of them was the one I’d spoken to before.

“I told you he wouldn’t last a day,” he said. “Why do these guys think they can charge into a stream of bullets or lasers and come away in one piece?”

“These guys?” I repeated.

“Yeah. This is the second one this month. There was this guy, maybe three weeks back. He stumbles upon a bank robbery, and instead of calling the cops he just lowers his head and charges these four armed guys.” He exhaled deeply and shook his head. “Poor bastard never got within twenty yards of them.”

“Was he D.O.A.?” I asked.

“Close to it,” replied the orderly. “He was sure someone was coming to be with him, and was desperate to make sure everyone at Admissions knew where to send her.”

“Her?”

“I think it was a her.” He shrugged. “I could be wrong. He wasn’t making much sense. I thought he couldn’t remember his name for a couple of minutes. Turns out he was right and I was wrong. Daniel Daniels. Funny name.” His companion started shifting his weight uneasily. “If you don’t have any more questions, we’ve got to schlep this guy down to the basement for an autopsy. We were on our break, but we’re a little short-handed this week.”

I stepped aside to let them go into the room, and decided it was time to return to the spaceport. But just for the hell of it, I stopped by Admissions before I left and asked if anyone had inquired about Seymour.

No one had.

When I got back to my office, I was still curious, so I had the computer hunt up with little there was on Seymour and on Daniel Daniels. Seymour was easy; born and raised in Miami, went to college here, spent nine years in the space service, honorably discharged after getting shot all to hell in a firefight on Kobernykov II, informally known as Nikita. Came back home, got a real estate license, and was selling beachfront property until two years ago, when he suddenly seemed determined to prove he was either a hero or bulletproof or both. Since then he’d tried to throw his life away three different times; the first two times the hospital made him keep it, this time they didn’t.

Daniels was harder. There were actually four Daniel Daniels living in Miami at the start of the year. You’d think their parents would have had a little more creativity. Two were still around. One had died of relatively natural causes at the age of ninety-three. And then there was the one the orderly had told me about.

He was thirty-three years old. Dropped out of school at sixteen, signed a couple of minor-league soccer contracts, got cut both times, joined the space service when he was twenty, served seven years, got out on a medical discharge, and had been going from one menial job to another ever since.

I checked the medical discharge. He got it after catching some serious flak on Nikita. He recovered physically, but he’d been seeing a shrink for depression for four years before the night he tried to take on a gang of teenaged hoods and got turned into an animated cinder for his trouble. It took them a year to put him back together with a brand-new epidermis—and damned if he didn’t go out and do something equally suicidal a month later. Even the police weren’t sure what happened—they found him after all the shooting was over—but he was filled with so much lead of so many different calibers that he had to have taken on at least six armed men.

And that was it: two unexceptional men who had nothing in common but the town they lived in and the planet they’d served on, each willingly faced certain death for no apparent reason—and then, when they were saved, went right out and faced it again.

I was still pondering it when Captain Symmes called me into his office to give him my report. I told him what I’d observed, which matched all the other reports, and then figured I was done.

“Just a minute,” he said as I was turning to leave.

“Sir?” I said.

“You accompanied him to the hospital. Why?”

“I was hoping he might be able to tell me why he willingly put himself at such risk,” I answered. “I thought maybe he knew something about the men we killed.”

“And did he?”

I shook my head. “We’ll never know. He only regained consciousness for perhaps a minute after surgery, and then he died.”

“I wonder what the hell made him do it?” mused Captain Symmes.

“I wondered, too,” I said. “So I ran computer checks on him and on Daniels . . .”

“Daniels?” he said sharply. “Who’s Daniels?”

“Another man who threw his life away the same way,” I said. “But the only things they had in common were that they lived here and they both saw action on Kobernykov II.”

“Kobernykov II,” he repeated. “Is that the one they call Nikita?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, that’s interesting,” said Captain Symmes.

“What is, sir?” I asked.

“About two years ago I was running security at Marsport, and the same kind of thing happened. Four men were robbing one of the restaurants there, and this guy, he was just waiting for his flight to Titan, decided to take them out single-handed. They shot him before he got close to them. We nailed all four of them before they could harm anyone else, but the man had taken too many bullets and energy pulses. He died a few hours later.” Captain Symmes paused and frowned. “I had to fill out a report, and that meant I had to find out who was killed. The reason I’m mentioning it at all is because he spent some time on Nikita.”

“Medical discharge?”

“Yes,” he answered. “Curious, isn’t it?”

“Very,” I said. “Do you know if that was the first time he’d risked his life like that?”

“No, I don’t,” said Captain Symmes. “I assume you have a reason for asking?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Give me a minute and I’ll check the record. Like I said, it was two years ago.”

He activated his computer, instructed it to pull up the file in question, then told it to run a biographical search on the dead man. Eleven seconds later it had the answer.

Creighton Mortenson Jr. had willingly faced what seemed like certain death on four separate occasions. Only after he’d miraculously survived the first three did Fate finally deliver on its promise at MarsPort.

“Captain,” I said, “what would you say if I told you that Seymour and Daniels had also tried to throw their lives away prior to actually succeeding at it?”

“I’d say that something very interesting must have happened to them on Nikita,” he said, and instructed his computer to produce a readout of Kobernykov II. He studied it for a moment, then shrugged. “It’s about three-quarters the size of Earth, lighter gravity, a bit less oxygen but breathable. During the war with the Patruka Alliance we found they were using Nikita as an ammunition dump, we landed a small party, we blew the ammo dump, each side suffered serious casualties. The few survivors were scattered all the hell over; we found them over a period of maybe three weeks, and eventually they rejoined their main units. There’s some plant and animal life there, but no humans and no Patrukans.”

“I wonder what the hell went on there,” I said. “Most men who get shot up in wartime don’t ever want to experience it again—and here were three men who went out of their way to walk into enemy fire or its equivalent again.”

“Have your computer hunt up the survivors and ask,” he said.

When I went back to my office I filed my report, then tried to find the survivors of Nikita, as Captain Symmes had suggested. The Patrukan War was over, so all the documents and records were declassified, but it didn’t help much. We’d sent in a covert team of thirty men and women. It was an exceptionally bloody action. Twenty-five died on Nikita, and the other five—which included Seymour, Daniels and Mortenson—were wounded pretty badly. Evidently they’d become separated, and each managed to survive on his own until a rescue mission arrived a few weeks later.

I tried to track down the other two survivors. They’d both courted Death until it inevitably caught up with them.

There was nothing in any of their histories to indicate that they were either exceptionally brave or exceptionally foolish. Except for Daniels’ depression, none of them was being treated for any emotional or psychiatric problems. As far as I could tell, none of them kept in touch with any of the others after they were discharged from the service.

And within six years of the firefight on Nikita, every one of them was dead, having placed themselves in what could only be termed suicidal situations until even the best surgeons and hospitals could no longer keep them alive.

I reported my findings to Captain Symmes the next day. I could tell he was as fascinated as I was.

“What do you suppose could have made them throw their lives away?” he mused. “And if they were so damned set on dying, why didn’t they just put a gun to their heads?”

“There’s one way to find out, sir,” I said.

He shook his head. “I can’t send you to Nikita,” he said. “We’re OceanPort security, and Nikita is more than a thousand light years from here.”

“But if there’s something on the planet that caused this behavior . . .”

“Forget it. If there was anything in the food or water or air, the space service or the navy would have found it.”

But I couldn’t forget it. How do you forget a bunch of totally dissimilar people with one brief shared experience who suddenly act in the same, totally self-destructive manner?

Each evening when I got off work I’d go back to my quarters and try to find out more about the planet and the survivors. The problem is that there simply wasn’t much to find. They’d been there for three weeks, maybe four at the outside, there were only five of them, the planet had been deserted by the Patruka Alliance after the battle, and no one had been back since.

And then I thought of the one line of inquiry I hadn’t considered before. We were no longer at war, so I wrote a couple of Patrukan historians and asked them if they could supply any accounts, not of the action on Nikita, but on the whereabouts of the survivors.

It took a week before I got an answer, but finally one of them, a being called Myxophtyl—at least that’s the way my computer translated his name—informed me that of the four survivors, two had died of natural causes, and two had died heroically, one saving a child who had wandered into the enclosure of a herd of vicious carnivores at a local zoo, the other trying to protect a Mollute who somehow offended a crowd of Patrukans that had instantly turned into an ugly and bloodthirsty mob.

“It didn’t just affect humans, sir,” I reported to Captain Symmes the day after I heard from the historian. “Whatever’s on that planet affected everyone.”

“I know that look,” he said. “I’m as interested as you are, but as I told you before, I don’t have the authority to send you there.”

“I’ve got vacation time stored up,” I said.

He checked his computer. “Your vacation’s not for five months.”

“Then I’ll take a leave of absence.”

“Think it through,” he said. “Nothing on that planet harmed anyone. Do you really want to go there, bore yourself to tears for a week or two, come home, and then one day decide to prove that you’re invulnerable to bullets and lasers?”

“No,” I admitted. “No, I suppose I don’t.”

I thought it was the truth when I said it, but with each day I became more obsessed with what could have turned otherwise normal men into weapon-charging suicides. And in the back of my mind I kept coming back to Captain Symmes’ question: if they really wanted to die, why not just put a gun to their heads, or take an overdose? And then I remembered Myron Seymour lying on his bed in the recovery room. He didn’t want to die; he wanted to see this woman he was sure would somehow know he was in the hospital. Okay, he may have been fantasizing about the woman, but he wasn’t fantasizing about wanting to live.

I’d never thought of myself as obsessive, but as the next three weeks sped by I found myself obsessing over the mystery of what happened on Nikita, and finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. I told Captain Symmes that I was putting in for a one-month leave of absence, and that if I didn’t get it I was fully prepared to quit my job.

“Don’t be foolish,” he said. “That’s an awfully big step to take, just to chase a fantasy. Besides, I already reported your findings to the navy and the space service. I’m sure they’ll look into it.”

“I’m sure they will, too,” I said. “Just not necessarily in our lifetimes.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’ve got ten or twelve minor wars going on right now,” I said. “They’ve got more important things to do than examine a planet that nobody’s set foot on in six years.”

“I gave them all the details,” said Captain Symmes. “If they think it’s important, they’ll get out there pretty damned fast.”

“And if they find whatever it is that caused this behavior, they’ll make it Top Secret and won’t declassify it for a century,” I shot back. “I want to know what happened.”

“I’m not going to talk you out of this, am I?” he said after a long pause.

“No, sir, you’re not.”

“All right. You’ve got a month, starting tomorrow.” He handed me a small cube. “There are no direct flights. This’ll get you free passage on any ship owned by Earth or its allies.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

“The codes will vanish in exactly thirty days, so don’t stay any longer than that unless you’re prepared to pay your passage back.”

“I appreciate this, sir.”

“You’re a good security man,” he said uncomfortably. (Praising people always made him uncomfortable.) “I don’t want to lose you.”

“You won’t,” I promised him. “I’ll be back in less than a month with the answers to what happened.”

“Good health,” he said.

“Not good luck?”

“I think you might be luckier if you never find what you’re looking for,” said Captain Symmes seriously.

The non-traveler tends to think that between FTL speeds and wormholes you can get anywhere in the galaxy in a day’s time, but of course it isn’t so. Wormholes go where they want to go, not where we want them to, and even when you’re traveling at multiples of light speed it’s still a big galaxy. It took me a day to get to Antares III, where I changed ships and proceeded to Buckingham IV. I laid over for a day until I could transfer to a ship that took me to Mickeleen, and from there I had to charter a private ship for the last leg of the journey.

“I want you to burn this location into your mind,” said the pilot when the small ship touched down on Nikita. “I’ll be here in exactly ten days. If you’re not at this spot, I have neither the time nor the inclination to embark on a one-man planetary search, which means you’ll be stranded here, probably for the rest of what remains of your life. You got that?”

“Got it,” I said.

“You sure you have enough supplies?” he asked, looking at my pack.

“Food and water for twelve days, just to be on the safe side.”

“If you’re not here ten days from now, there won’t be anything safe about it,” he said. “It could be decades before another ship touches down here.”

“I’ll be here,” I assured him.

“You’d better be,” he said.

Then the hatch closed and he was gone, and I was alone, the first human to set foot on Nikita in six years.

I felt good. Hell, at 82% of Earth’s gravity, everybody feels good. This was exactly the kind of world they used for recuperating heart patients. The oxygen content was a little light, but the gravity more than made up for it.

The world itself seemed pleasant enough. There was a brownish, grasslike ground cover in most places, a few clusters of oddly shaped trees here and there, and a type G sun that provided plenty of daylight without making Nikita uncomfortably hot. I saw a few small, rodentlike animals peeking at me from behind shrubs and trees, but when I turned to get a better look they ducked into their burrows.

I knew there was water on the planet. There were a pair of freshwater oceans, and a quartet of snow-topped mountain ranges that produced rivers with their runoff. My research told me that it smelled bad and tasted worse, but that it was drinkable. I had no idea if there were any fish, but I suspected there were. One thing we’ve learned since first reaching the stars is that life not only takes the strangest forms, but sprouts up in the oddest places.

According to my charts, I was about four miles from the site of the conflict, which is to say, the ammunition dump. I was retracing the steps of our team. They’d actually started on the far side of the planet, maybe three thousand miles away, and taken a high-speed aircar here under cover of night, but they’d gone the last few miles on foot.

I looked for signs of a camp, but then realized that a covert attack team wouldn’t make a camp, but would just continue to their target before they were spotted.

The ground was level, not overgrown at all, and I just kept walking until I came to it. It wasn’t hard to spot. There was a raw crater close to five hundred yards in circumference and maybe forty feet deep, the remains of the ammo dump. Evidently the rescue ships on both sides couldn’t handle both the living and the dead; there were skeletons of both men and Patrukans littering the place, picked clean by small animals and even smaller insects. The Patrukans’ bones had a blue-green tint to them; I never did find out why.

I walked the area. It must have been one hell of a battle. There was absolutely no place to hide, nothing to duck behind. A night attack shouldn’t have made any difference: if the Patrukans had FTL ships and pulse cannons, they sure as hell had all kinds of vision aids that could turn night into day. I remember once, when I was a kid, standing at the top of Cemetery Ridge and wondering how Pickett ever got his men to charge up the long, barren slope where they were just sitting ducks; I felt the same way looking at the site on Nikita.

The other thing I wondered about was how surviving this kind of battle could give anyone a taste for charging men with loaded weapons or otherwise risking their lives. They should have been so grateful they lived through it that all they wanted to do was celebrate each day they were still alive.

Those were my first impressions. Then I began analyzing the site as a soldier. You wouldn’t want to get too close to the dump, because you didn’t know what was in it or how big an explosion it would make. And you didn’t want any survivors picking your team off, so you’d have tried to surround the place so you could shoot any Patrukan who lived through it. The crater was more than a quarter of a mile across, so you’d want your men stationed perhaps a mile and a half across from each other, or given the accuracy of their weapons, maybe even farther. Say, two miles or a bit more.

I studied the area again. Okay, from a minimum of a one-mile radius, and a distance of more than a quarter mile from each other along the circumference, I saw how they could have gotten separated. If you’re wounded, your first inclination is to retreat to safety, not to stay within range and seek out your teammates. Then, once you felt you were safe, you couldn’t be sure all the enemy were dead, and your wounds were starting to stiffen up or worse, and the last thing you’d do is go looking for the other survivors.

So each of the five men was essentially on his own until the rescue team arrived, and it hadn’t arrived for another week. Did they have a week’s supply of food and water? If not, could they live off the land? Did they have any medication at all? How badly were they wounded, and how had they managed to survive? I didn’t know, but I had ten days to figure it out.

Then I reminded myself that that was just the first part, the easier part, of the problem, and that I had a little less than ten days to figure everything out.

The sun started dropping lower in the sky—the planet had a nineteen-hour day—and I decided that I’d better make camp while I could still see. I pulled my stationary bubble out of my pack, uttered the code words that activated it, waited a few seconds for it to become a cube seven feet on a side, and tossed my pack into it after removing some rations. I ordered the door to shut, then picked up a few branches, gathered them into a pile, and set fire to them with my laser pistol. I tossed three H-rations into the flames. They’d roll out of the fire when they were properly cooked, and I decided to eat them without any water or beer, as I sure as hell didn’t want to run out of drinkables in seven or eight days and have to partake of the nearby river.

I looked out across the barren plain, wondering why sentient life hadn’t taken hold here as it had on so many hundreds of similar worlds. Nature always seemed to find a reason to endow one or two species with brainpower, no matter how weird or unlikely they looked. But there had been no reports of any sentience on Nikita. In fact, though the Patrukans mentioned larger animals, the human attack party hadn’t seen anything bigger than the little rodentlike creatures I’d seen, but that made sense: no carnivore is willing to risk getting injured unless the odds are greatly in his favor, because an injured carnivore will usually die of hunger before he heals enough to hunt again. So when they saw the aircar, or even the men themselves, any large predator would have steered clear of them.

Or did it make sense? There were five badly wounded men scattered around the landscape, hardly in any condition to defend themselves, and yet they went unmolested until the rescue ship arrived. That implied that the Patrukans were wrong and there weren’t any large carnivores, but I couldn’t buy it, because life gets bigger on a low-gravity world, not smaller.

I decided it could wait for tomorrow. What lived on Nikita didn’t have anything to do with what I’d come here to learn, and I certainly wasn’t going to go looking for large carnivores in the dark.

My attention was taken by each of the H-rations crying “Done!”, one after the other, and rolling up to my feet, where each in turn popped open.

I started on the Ersatz Stroganoff, finished it off, then attacked the Mock Parmesan. By the time I was done I was too full to eat the third one, and ordered it to close itself again.

“I will be safe for sixteen Standard hours,” it announced. “After that I will self-destruct so that no one becomes ill from my contents. The self-destruction will be silent and will not adversely effect any men, even if one is holding me at the time.”

It fell silent and clamped shut.

I looked up and saw Nikita’s three moons, all of them quite small, racing across the sky. I’d been stationed on Earth for a couple of years, and I’d gotten used to our own large moon making its stately way across the sky. I’d forgotten how fast the smaller moons can travel.

I dictated the day’s experiences, findings and thoughts into my computer. Night fell while I was doing so, and when I was finished I decided to take a little walk to work off my dinner. I left the fire burning so I wouldn’t stray too far and could easily find my way back. then headed off to my left.

When I’d gone half a mile I decided I was far enough from my makeshift camp, and began walking in a large circle around the fire. I’d circled it once, and was circling it a second time when it went out, and I figured I’d better go back and get a few more branches to start it up again. I’d covered about half the distance and was passing a thick stand of trees when I heard a hideous alien roar behind me.

I turned to face whatever it was, but something was already leaping through the air at me. The moons were on the far side of Nikita, and I could barely see its outline. I ducked and turned, and the bulk of its body sent me flying through the air. I landed about six feet away, felt my leg give way and heard the bone snap. I rolled over once and reached for my laser pistol, but it was too quick. I still couldn’t make it out, but it didn’t seem to share that problem. Claws raked deep into my arm and the pistol fell from my hand. Then it was on top of me before I could even reach for my sonic weapon. Teeth raked my face and neck. I reached out, seemed to find a throat, and did my damnedest to hold it at bay, but it was a losing battle. The creature was on top of me, and I could tell it weighed at least as much as I did. It kept pressing forward, and my blood-soaked right arm was starting to go numb. I brought my unbroken leg up hard, hoping it was a male and that it had testicles, but it didn’t seem to have any effect whatsoever.

I could feel hot breath in my eyes and on my cheek, and I knew I had about four seconds left before it overpowered me—and then, suddenly, it was yelping in pain and fear, and it wasn’t atop me any more.

I listened for the snarling of something even bigger—something that would turn its attention to me next—but whatever was attacking my attacker was absolutely silent.

Then there was a high-pitched screech, and I could hear the creature race off. Then my momentary savior turned to me, just as one of the moons came up over the horizon. Blood was streaming down into my eyes from a gash on my forehead, and the moon wasn’t very big or very bright, but I could see something approaching me, could hear the rustle of its feet across the grass.

I finally got my good hand on my sonic pistol and held it unsteadily in front of me.

“Stay back!” I mumbled.

I fired a shot, but even in my semi-conscious state I could tell it was well off target. I tried to steady my hand and fire again, but then everything went black. My last thought was: What a stupid way to die.

Except that I didn’t die. I don’t know how long I was unconscious—maybe nine or ten hours, because the sun was high in the sky when I woke up.

“Don’t try to stand,” said a lilting female voice in perfect, unaccented Terran. “I had to splint your leg.”

I rubbed some crusted blood from my eyelashes, and noticed that my right arm was heavily bandaged. A damp cloth began dabbing at my eyes, and I was able to focus on the person who was holding it.

She was a pretty young woman, in her early twenties, certainly under thirty, with a slender body, long red-brown hair, high cheekbones, and light blue, almost colorless, eyes. She looked familiar, but I knew I’d never seen her before.

“Who are you?” I asked weakly.

“My name is Rebecca,” she said with a smile. “And you are Gregory Donovan.”

“I thought I left my ID in my bubble.”

“You did.”

“Then you opened it,” I said, frowning. “It’s only supposed to open to my voice command.”

“I haven’t opened it,” she said. “Now try to rest.”

I was about to argue with her, for she was obviously lying, but suddenly all my energy vanished and I lost consciousness again.

It was very late afternoon when I awoke the next time. Rebecca was sitting on the ground, staring at me. I got to take another look at her, and decided that she was more than pretty—she was gorgeous. I couldn’t find a single feature I’d improve.

She was dressed in an immaculate white blouse and khaki slacks that fit her like a glove, which seemed as unlikely as being cared for by a beautiful Terran-speaking girl on a planet that supposedly had no sentient life forms.

“Welcome back,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“Rested,” I said. “What kind of shape am I in?”

“Your arm is badly infected, your leg is broken in three places, and you have some serious wounds around your face and neck.”

“What the hell happened?” I asked.

“You were attacked by a . . . the closest I can translate it into Terran would be a Nightstalker. It’s the largest carnivore on Nikita.”

“It can’t be,” I said. “Something bigger drove it off.”

“Trust me, Gregory,” said Rebecca. “The Nightstalker is Nikita’s largest carnivore.”

I was too weak to argue, and it didn’t make any difference anyway. Something had driven the Nightstalker off, and I didn’t much care if it was a bigger carnivore or an enraged microbe.

“How long have you been here, Rebecca?” I asked.

“With you?” she said. “Since last night.”

“No, I mean on Nikita.”

“All my life.”

I frowned. “My computer didn’t say anything about a human colony here.”

“There isn’t one.”

“You mean you were stranded here as a child?” I asked. “Were your parents with you?”

“My parents lived here,” she said.

“Are they still alive?” I said. “I’ve got a ship picking me up in nine days . . .”

“No, they aren’t alive.”

“I’m sorry. Well, at least the ship can take you and me off the planet.”

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

I thought about it for a moment. “Not really. I’d like something to drink, though.”

“All right,” she said. “The river’s just a quarter mile away. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“They say the water’s pretty awful. I’ve got water and some electrolyte mixtures in my bubble.”

“If you prefer,” she said.

“See?” I said accusingly. “I knew you’d been in my bubble.”

“I told you: I haven’t entered it.”

“If you’re telling the truth, then you won’t be able to get into it now. It’s programmed only to respond to my voice pattern uttering the proper code words.”

“I will get them and be right back,” she said.

And sure enough, she was back just a minute or two later carrying three containers. I chose the one that would give me the quickest energy boost and tried not to think about how she got the bubble to let her in.

“I think you should eat in another hour, Gregory,” she said. “You need strength to fight off the infection. I’ll go through your supplies in a few minutes and see what you have.” She flashed me a smile. “I’m a very good cook. Maybe I can figure out how to combine your H-rations to make them taste like duck in orange sauce.”

“Why did you say that?” I asked.

“It’s your favorite, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is,” I replied. “How did you know?”

“You just look like a duck in orange sauce man to me.”

“What the hell is going on here?” I demanded. “You know my name, you know my favorite food, you can get a voice-coded bubble to open to you, you know how to splint a leg and patch me up, and you speak without an accent.”

“Why are you complaining?” she asked. “Would you rather I had left you broken and bleeding on the ground? Did you want me to bring you water that you find all-but-undrinkable? Should I find H-rations that you hate?”

“No, of course not,” I said. “But you’re not answering my questions.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Here’s another,” I said. “What the hell are you doing here in the first place? It’s a big planet. How did you happen to find me just in time to save my life?”

“Serendipity,” said Rebecca.

“Serendipity, hell,” I said. “And while I’m asking questions, what saved me last night?”

“I did.”

“You patched me up,” I said. “What saved me? What drove the Nightstalker off?”

“Is it important?” asked Rebecca. “You’re alive. That’s what matters.”

“It’s important to me,” I said. “I don’t like being lied to.”

“I haven’t lied to you, Gregory,” she said. “Now be quiet and let me check the wounds on your arm and neck.”

She walked over and knelt down next to me. There was a sweet smell about her, almost a perfume, that seemed to suit her exactly. She examined the gashes on my neck, and although they were badly swollen and clearly infected, her cool, sure fingers didn’t hurt at all.

“It’s still seeping,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ve treated your dressings with native herbs and leaves that promote healing. I’ll change them after dinner.”

“What kind of dressing are you using, and where did you get it out here in the middle of nowhere?”

She pointed to a satchel a few feet away. “I’m always prepared.”

A wave of dizziness spread over me, and I spent the next couple of minutes trying not to fall over on my side. I don’t remember what happened next, but when my head cleared she was sitting next to me, steadying me with her body. It felt good, and I pretended I was still dizzy so she wouldn’t move away. I think she knew it, but she stayed there anyway.

“How long before I can walk?” I asked at last.

“I’ll make you some crutches in three or four days,” she said. “After all, you’ll need some practice if you’re to get to your contact point in time for the ship that’s picking you up.”

“So I’m stuck here for three days, maybe four,” I said unhappily.

“I’m sorry,” she said sympathetically. “I’ll try to make you as comfortable as possible, but you’re very weak and your temperature is dangerously high. I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to see much of the planet.”

“What makes you think I’m here to explore Nikita?” I asked sharply.

“Why else would you have come?” replied Rebecca. “I’ll help you into your bubble tonight. You’ll have to stay there; you’re too weak to move any farther than that.”

“I know,” I admitted with a sigh. “It’s going to be a boring few days. I wish to hell I’d brought some disks to read.”

“We can discuss our favorite books,” she offered. “It will make the time pass more pleasantly.”

I don’t know why I was surprised that she read—I mean, hell, everybody reads—but I was. “Who are your favorites?” I asked.

“Cisco, Jablonski, and Hedburg.”

“You’re kidding!” I exclaimed. “Those are my favorites too! At least we’ll have something to talk about after dinner.”

And we did. We talked for hours, and not just about books either. I’d never felt so comfortable with anyone in my life. We talked about hopes and dreams, about regrets, about everything. It was amazing: she seemed to mirror my every thought, my every secret longing. And when we’d fall silent, it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, the kind you feel you have to speak into; I was just as happy to look at her as listen to her. She’d grown up on an alien world thousands of light years from Earth, and I knew almost nothing about her: where she lived, what she had done with her life prior to saving mine, even her last name—and yet my last waking thought was that I was already a little bit in love with her.

I don’t know how long I slept. I woke up when I felt Rebecca applying some salve to the gashes on my cheeks and neck.

“Don’t move,” she said gently. “I’ll be done in another minute.”

I held still until she was through, then opened my eyes and realized that we were inside my bubble.

“I’m surprised you could drag me in here without help,” I said. “I must really have been out of it, not to wake up while you were moving me.”

“I’m stronger than I look,” she said with a smile.

“Good,” I said. “Give me a hand up, and let me hobble out into the fresh air.”

She began reaching out for me, then froze.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’ll be back in ten minutes,” she said. “Don’t try to stand without me; you could damage your splint.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you all right?”

But she had already run off into the nearby stand of trees, and I lost sight of her.

It was puzzling. The only logical explanation was that she’d eaten something rotten and she was going off to be sick, but I didn’t buy it. She’d run too gracefully, and she’d shown no discomfort, not the least little bit, prior to leaving.

I decided to try getting up on my own despite her orders. It was a disaster. The way my leg was splinted I simply couldn’t do it. As I tried to position it, I realized that the bandages were soaked and foul-smelling. I rubbed a finger against them, then held it up. It wasn’t blood, just something yellow-greenish. I didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

That’s some carnivore, that Nightstalker, I thought. I wondered why it hadn’t taken over the planet. Then I realized that except for Rebecca, who wasn’t native to Nikita, I hadn’t seen anything much larger than a raccoon or a possum, so maybe it had taken over the planet. It seemed a reasonable conclusion, but I’d served on just enough alien planets to know that reasonable and right often had very little to do with each other.

Then Rebecca was back, as immaculate as ever. She took one look at my leg and said, “I told you not to try standing up without me.”

“Something’s wrong with it,” I said. “It smells bad, and it’s wet.”

“I know,” she said. “I’ll fix it. Trust me, Gregory.”

I looked into her face and found, to my surprise, that I did trust her. I was alone and possibly dying a zillion miles from home, being tended with leaves and herbs by a girl I’d known for only a few days, and I trusted her. I had half a notion that if she told me to walk off a cliff I’d have done it.

“While we’re discussing health,” I said, “how’s yours?”

“I’m fine, Gregory,” she said. “But I’m flattered to know you were worried about me.”

“Of course I was,” I said. “You’re the person who’s keeping me alive.”

“That’s not why you were worried,” she said.

“No,” I admitted, “it’s not.”

There was a momentary silence.

“Well, are you ready to hobble outside?” she asked. “I’ll help you to that tree. You can prop yourself up against it when you sit, and the branches and leaves will shade you from the sun. It can get very warm here at midday.”

“I’m ready,” I said.

She took my right hand in both of hers and pulled. It hurt like hell for a minute, but then I was on my feet.

“Lean on my shoulder,” she said as she helped me turn toward the bubble’s entrance.

I half-hopped, half-hobbled through it. The tree was some forty feet away. I’d gone about half that distance when my good foot went into some kind of rodent hole, and I started falling. I reached out, grabbing for her blouse, and then the strangest thing happened—instead of grabbing cloth, my fingers slid down her naked skin. I could see the blouse, but it wasn’t there. She pivoted, trying to catch me, and my hand came into contact with her bare breast, slid over her nipple, down a naked hip and thigh, and then I hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud! The pain was excruciating.

Rebecca was beside me in an instant, positioning my leg, putting her hands under my head, doing what she could to comfort me. It took a good five minutes for the burning in my leg and arm to subside, but eventually it did, at least enough for me to consider what had happened.

I reached out to her shoulder, felt the cloth of her blouse, and ran my hand down the side of her body. The texture of the cloth changed when I got to her slacks, but there was no naked flesh—yet I knew I hadn’t hallucinated it. You hallucinate after you’re in agony, like now, not before.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.

“You fell.”

“Don’t play dumb with me,” I said. “It’s unbecoming in someone as smart and lovely. Just tell me what’s happening.”

“Try to rest,” she said. “We’ll talk later.”

“You said yesterday that you wouldn’t lie to me. Did you mean it?”

“I will never lie to you, Gregory.”

I stared at her perfect face for a long minute. “Are you human?” I asked at last.

“For the moment.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I am what I need to be,” she said. “What you need me to be.”

“That’s no answer.”

“I am telling you that right now I am human, that I am everything you need. Isn’t that enough?”

“Are you a shape-changer?” I asked.

“No, Gregory, I am not.”

“Then how can you look like this?”

“This is what you want to see,” she said.

“What if I want to see you are you really are?” I persisted.

“But you don’t,” she said. “This“—she indicated herself—“is what you want to see.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Gregory, Gregory,” she said with a sigh, “do you think I created this face and this body out of my imagination? I found it in your mind.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “I never met anyone who looked like you.”

A smile. “But you wish you had.” And a pause. “And if you had, you were sure she would be called Rebecca. I am not only everything you need, but everything you want.”

“Everything?” I asked dubiously.

“Everything.”

“Can we . . . uh . . .?”

“When you slipped you caught me off-guard,” she answered. “Didn’t I feel like the woman you want me to be?”

“Let me get this straight. Your clothes are as much of an illusion as you are?”

“The clothes are an illusion,” she said, and suddenly they vanished and she was standing, naked and perfect, before me. “I am real.”

“You’re a real something,” I said. “But you’re not a real woman.”

“At this moment I am as real as any woman you have ever known.”

“Let me think for a minute,” I said. I stared at her while I tried to think. Then I realized that I was thinking all the wrong things, and I lowered my gaze to the ground. “That thing that drove the Nightstalker away,” I said. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“It was what you needed at that instant,” she answered.

“And whatever pulls the leaves down from the treetops—a snake, a bird, an animal, whatever—that’s you too?”

“You need a mixture of the leaves and the herbs to combat your infection.”

“Are you trying to say that you were put here solely to serve my needs?” I demanded. “I didn’t think God was that generous.”

“No, Gregory,” said Rebecca. “I am saying that it is my nature, even my compulsion, to nurture those who are in need of nurturing.”

“How did you know I needed it, or that I was even on the planet?”

“There are many ways of sending a distress signal, some of them far more powerful than you can imagine.”

“Are you saying that if someone is suffering, say, five miles away, you’d know it?”

“Yes.”

“More that five miles?” I continued. She simply stared at me. “Fifty miles? A hundred? The whole damned planet?”

She looked into my eyes, her face suddenly so sad that I totally forgot about the rest of her. “It’s not limited to just the planet, Gregory.”

“When you ran off for a few minutes, were you saving some other man?”

“You are the only man on the planet,” she replied.

“Well, then?”

“A small marsupial had broken a leg. I alleviated its suffering.”

“You weren’t gone that long,” I said. “Are you saying that an injured wild animal let a strange woman approach it while it was in pain, because I find that very difficult to believe.”

“I did not approach it as a woman.”

I stared at her for a long moment. I think I half-expected her to morph into some kind of alien monster, but she just looked as beautiful as ever. I visually searched her naked body for flaws—make that errors—some indication that she wasn’t human, but I couldn’t find any.

“I’ve got to think about all this,” I said at last.

“Would you like me to leave?”

“No.”

“Would it be less distracting if I recreated the illusion of clothing?”

“Yes,” I said. Then “No.” Then “I don’t know.”

“They always find out,” she said. “But usually not this quickly.”

“Are you the only one of . . . of whatever it is that you are?”

“No,” she replied. “But we were never a numerous race, and I am one of the very few who remains on Nikita.”

“What happened to the others?”

“They went where they were needed. Some came back; most went from one distress signal to another.”

“We haven’t had a ship here in six years,” I said. “How did they leave the planet?”

“There are many races in the galaxy, Gregory. Humans aren’t the only ones to land here.”

“How many men have you saved?”

“A few.”

“And Patrukans?”

“Patrukans too.”

I shrugged. “Why the hell not? I suppose we’re all equally alien to you.”

“You are not alien,” she said. “I assure you that at this moment I am every bit as human as the Rebecca of your dreams. In fact, I am the Rebecca of your dreams.” She flashed me a smile. “I even want to do what that Rebecca wants to do.”

“Is it possible?” I asked curiously.

“Not while you have a broken leg,” she answered, “but yes, it’s not only possible, but natural.” I must have looked doubtful, because she added, “It would feel exactly the way you hope it would feel.”

“You’d better bring the clothes back before I do something really stupid that’ll mess up my arm and leg even worse,” I said.

And instantly she was clothed again.

“Better?” she asked.

“Safer, anyway,” I said.

“While you’re thinking deep serious thoughts, I’ll start making your breakfast,” she said, helping me to the shade of the tree, then going back into the bubble to find some H-rations.

I sat motionless for a few minutes, considering what I had learned. And I came to what seemed, at least at the time, a surprising conclusion. She was my dream girl. She was drop-dead gorgeous—to me, anyway. We shared dozens of interests, and she was as passionate about them as I was. I felt comfortable with her, and knowing that she was really something else didn’t disturb me half as much as I’d thought it would. If she was Rebecca only when I was around, that was better than never having a Rebecca at all. And she cared for me; she had no reason to say so if it wasn’t true.

She walked over and handed me a plate filled with soya products that were designed to look and taste like anything except soya products. I put the plate on the ground and took her hand in mine.

“You don’t shrink from my touch,” I noted, stroking her arm gently.

“Of course not,” she said. “I am your Rebecca. I love your touch.”

“I don’t shrink from yours either,” I said, “which is probably a little more surprising. I’m sitting here, touching you, looking at you, smelling the nearness of you, and I don’t give a damn who you are or what you look like when I’m not around. I just want you to stay.”

She leaned down and kissed me. If it felt like anything other than being kissed by a human woman, I sure as hell couldn’t tell the difference.

I ate my breakfast, and we spent the morning talking—about books, about art, about theater, about food, about a hundred things we had in common. And we talked in the afternoon, and we talked in the evening.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke up in the middle of the night. I was lying on my side, and she was curled up against me. I felt something warm and flat on my leg, not a bandage. It seemed to be . . . sucking is a terrible word; extracting . . . some of the infection from my leg. I had a feeling that it was some part of her that I couldn’t see; I decided not to look, and when I woke up in the morning she was already gathering some firewood for warming my breakfast.

We spent seven idyllic days together at that campsite. We talked, we ate, I began walking on a pair of crutches she made. Four times she excused herself and ran off, and I knew she’d picked another distress signal out of the air, but she was always back a few minutes later. Long before those seven days were up I realized that, despite a broken leg and a shredded arm, they were the happiest days I’d ever spent.

I spent my eighth day with her—my ninth on Nikita—making my way slowly and painfully back to the spot where the ship would pick me up the next morning. I set up my bubble after dinner, and crawled into it a couple of hours later. As I was starting to drift off I felt her lie up against me, and this time there was no illusion of clothing.

“I can’t,” I said unhappily. “My leg . . .”

“Hush,” she whispered. “I’ll take care of everything.”

And she did.

She was making breakfast when I awoke.

“Good morning,” I said as I emerged from the bubble.

“Good morning.”

I hobbled over and kissed her. “Thank you for last night.”

“I hope we didn’t damage your wounds.”

“If we did, it was worth it,” I said. “The ship is due in less than an hour. We have to talk.”

She looked at me expectantly.

“I don’t care what you are,” I said. “To me you’re Rebecca, and I love you. And before the ship arrives, I’ve got to know if you love me too.”

“Yes, Gregory, I do.”

“Then will you come with me?”

“I’d like to, Gregory,” she said. “But . . .”

“Have you ever left Nikita before?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Whenever I sense that someone with whom I’ve been linked is in physical or emotional pain.”

“But you always come back?”

“This is my home.”

“Did you visit Myron Seymour after he left Nikita?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I said. “Either you did or you didn’t.”

“All right,” she said unhappily. “Either I did or I didn’t.”

“I thought you were never going to lie to me,” I said.

“I’m not lying, Gregory,” she said, reaching out and laying a hand on my good shoulder. “You don’t understand how the bond works.”

“What bond?” I asked, confused.

“You know that I look like this and I took this name because I was drawn irresistably to your pain and your need, and found the name and the image in your mind,” she said. “We are linked,Gregory. You say that you love me, and probably you do. I share that emotion. But I share it for the same reason I can discuss your favorite books and plays—because I found them where I found Rebecca. When the link is broken, when I’m not in contact with you any more, they’ll be forgotten.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “And everything I feel for you this minute will be forgotten too.”

I just stared at her, trying to comprehend what she’d said.

“I’m sorry, Gregory,” she continued after a moment. “You can’t know how sorry. Right now all I want is to be with you, to love you and care for you—but when the link is broken, it will all be gone.” Another tear. “I won’t even feel a sense of loss.”

“And that’s why you can’t remember if you made it to Earth and saved Seymour?”

“I may have, I may not have,” she said helplessly. “I don’t know. Probably I never will.”

I thought about it. “It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t care about the others. Just stay with me and don’t break the link.”

“It’s not something I can control, Gregory,” she replied. “It’s strongest when you need me most. As you heal, as you need me less; then I’ll be drawn to someone or something that needs me more. Perhaps it will be another man, perhaps a Patrukan, perhaps something else. But it will happen, again and again.”

“Until I need you more than anyone else does,” I said.

“Until you need me more than anyone else does,” she confirmed.

And at that moment, I knew why Seymour and Daniels and the others had walked into what seemed near-certain death. And I realized what Captain Symmes and the Patrukan historian Myxophtyl didn’t know: that they hadn’t tried to get themselves killed, but rather to get themselves almost killed.

Suddenly I saw the ship overhead, getting ready to touch down a few hundred yards away.

“Does anyone or anything need you right now?” I asked. “More than I do, I mean?”

“Right this moment? No.”

“Then come with me for as long as you can,” I said.

“It’s not a good idea,” she said. “I could begin the journey, but you’re getting healthier every day, and something always needs me. We’d land at a spaceport to change ships, and you’d turn around and I’ll be gone. That’s the way it was six years ago, with the human and Patrukan survivors.” Her face reflected her sorrow. “There is so much pain and suffering in the galaxy.”

“But I need you even if I’m healthy,” I said. “I love you, damn it!”

“And I love you,” she said. “Today. But tomorrow?” She shrugged helplessly.

The ship touched down.

“You loved each of them, didn’t you?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I would give everything I have to remember.”

“You’ll forget me too, won’t you?”

She put her arms around my neck and kissed me. “Don’t think about it.”

Then she turned and began walking away. The pilot approached me and picked up my gear.

“What the hell was that?” he asked, jerking a thumb in Rebecca’s direction—and I realized that he saw her as she truly was, that she was linked only to me.

“What did it look like to you?” I replied.

He shook his head. “Like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

It took me five days to get back to Earth. The medics at the hospital were amazed that I’d healed so quickly, and that all signs of infection were gone. I let them think it was a miracle, and in a way it was. I didn’t care; all I cared about was getting her back.

I quit my job at OceanPort and hired on with the police department. They stuck me behind a desk for a few months, until my limp disappeared, but yesterday I finally got transferred to the vice squad.

There’s a major drug deal going down tonight: alphanella seeds from somewhere out in the Albion Cluster, ten times as powerful as heroin. We’ll be mounting a raid in about four hours. The buyers and sellers both figure to have plenty of muscle standing guard, and it’s likely to get pretty hairy.

I hope so.

I’ve already locked my weapons away.

DAWN, AND SUNSET, AND THE COLOURS OF THE EARTH

Michael F. Flynn

At six-thirty of an early fall morning, when the sun was just lighting the evergreens and new snow glistened atop Ranier, Motor Vessel Hyak left Pier 52 in Seattle, bound for Bremerton. A Washington State Ferry of the Super Class, longer than a football field, she grossed 2700 tons dead weight and drew eighteen and a half feet. She cast off with nearly a thousand souls aboard and motored into a fog in the center of Elliott Bay.

None of them were ever seen again.

Chino Mendez

People say at first what business has a poor fisherman to speak of Jesus? I have no education, no clever words. I have nothing but the high school and many years of chasing the tuna. But then I thought: what better thing for a preacher than to start as a fisherman? There is precedent, no?

I will give my witness as I saw it, so you may believe with me.

Understand that I was a sinner before. This is important. I drank and I gambled and I had women. Oh, yes. Perhaps you do not think so to look at me, but women find me attractive. I have cut men in fights. Perhaps I killed a man in Miami, but this I do not know for sure.

I tell you this because you must understand what I was, so that you may understand what I am, and so understand what I say. If one as lost as me can be found, there is hope for all.

I was christened Ipolito, but my friends have always called me Chino, because of my eyes. Oh, yes, there were many Chinese brought to Cooba years ago and their blood runs in me. I have been a fisherman all my life, even before I fled Cooba. I fished the Gulf, and then the Keys, and then I came here to these strange, cold waters. Capitan Norris give me a place on his Esmeralda and he teach me the waters of the Sound and there were many very hard years, but never did I complain. Well, perhaps a little.

That morning we cast off and took our bearing on Duwamish Head. The dawn was behind us and the air shimmer like the rainbow. The horizon glowed red; the sky above me, blue; and all the colors ranged between. Oh, the salt tang of the sea! Oh, the cries of the gulls! They swoop in a great circle around the bay. Around and around. I look back now and I see how clear were all my senses that day.

We hear the horn of the ferry as she left the pier and for a time our paths run side by side, the great ferry and the humble fishing boat, but the capitan saw a fog is risen in the bay, so he turn the wheel a little to avoid it. The ferry, yes, had the radar and the global positioning, and so she sailed into the fog, her horn booming. I hear the chum of her engines as she pass us, and I see the people who lined the railing. Some were reading of the newspapers. Some were watching the scenery. Some were talking to each other. ITiere was one—a young girl near the quarter rail—who saw me watching. She was, I think, twelve. She smile and wave to me and I wave back and the capitan saw, and our boat’s whistle shrieked and the little girl, she clapped in delight.

But the capitan was fight the wheel. There was a strong current where there been no current before. I had the mad fancy that our boat sat . . . somehow . . . on the lip of a waterfall. We struggled like salmon against it as it pull us into the fog, toward the ferry.

A collision with such a ship would destroy us, so Ngyuen and me—he is the other deckhand—we throw the bumpers over the side and stand by with the fending poles. When I look up again at the deck of the ferry, I see the little girl bathed in a golden-red light, such as one sees at dawn. The light came from out of the fog, you understand, and what sun has ever dawned in the west? It seem like all the ferry was aglow and I hear a great shout from on board. The foghorn was take on a sound like a train racing away. The little girl turn and face into the fog and her mouth drop open. Oh, it was a look of such delight! And she raise her hands to her face, and then the fog shrouded her, too, and everything—boat, foghorn, girl—vanished into silence.

I did not understand then what I had seen, but I have thought over it much since. The strange fog. The strange current. The great light and the shout. Even the birds that wheeled over the spot. How could such a large vessel vanish so completely and so quickly? I found the answer in the smile of a little child.

God had taken them all to Him, as a sign to the rest of us. That is why you will never find them or find the boat. That is why the girl smiled. All I was granted was the rainbow sign, but she had seen the pure light of heaven.

I have heard others say I must be wrong because there was nothing especially holy about the people on that ferry that day. Only a thousand ordinary people.

But don’t you see?

That is the Good News.

Able Seaman Jimmy Lang

The helicopter is already warming up when Jimmy and the crew scramble out to the pad. He doesn’t know what the alert is all about, only that something happened to the Bremerton ferry. Liz Coburn doesn’t know either. “But it’s not good news,” she says. They check the rescue equipment on board.

It’s hard to talk over the steady whop-whop of the blades, which is just as well, because Jimmy doesn’t have much to say. He can never find the words when he needs them. He’ll rehearse them in his head, and run through them over and over until he is sure they are the right words; but by the time they’re ready to come out, the moment for them has passed.

Three frogs trot across the pad, already in their wet suits but carrying their flippers in their hands. Jimmy and Liz help them into the helicopter and Jimmy gives the high sign to the pilot.

He slides the cabin door shut and the chopper tilts and rises. The frogs are checking the air tanks and Jimmy tells them he already done that, but they just look at him and continue checking. Jimmy turns to the window and watches the water race past below them. A container ship is working its way into the harbor and Jimmy cranes his neck to watch it. What he wants to do is ask Liz if she’d go to a movie with him tonight, but what he says is, “Look how big that thing is.”

“If that ferry’s going down. . . .” Liz tells him. “Oh, God, Hyak can carry two thousand.”

One of the frogs tells them that ATN Puget Sound is putting out with the barge and they’ll try to get people up on that. “That’s a good idea,” Jimmy says, like they asked for his approval.

The chopper cants suddenly and changes direction and everyone in the cargo bay dances to keep their balance. Liz falls against Jimmy and Jimmy puts his arm around her waist to steady her. They are friends, him and Liz. “My good bud,’ ” Liz calls him. He thinks she might mean more than that, but he has never gotten up the nerve to ask.

The morning fog has mostly burned off by now. Only a large puff remains, floating in the waters like an iceberg. It is shot through with reflected colors—green from the waters, blue from the sky, brown from the earth, white from the clouds, tawny red from the dawn. Jimmy thinks the water looks funny, too. The waves are all a-jumble, some lapping toward the fog instead of toward the shore. “Looks purty,” he tells Liz.

But Liz just shakes her head. “Where’s the ferry? Ain’t no sign of’er.”

Liz is, in Jimmy’s estimation, the most perfect woman on Earth, after his maw. She’s smart, but she doesn’t laugh at him like other women and treats him nice, though not half so nice as he would like her to. He has not yet kissed her, although he imagines what that must be like.

“Can a boat sink that fast?” Jimmy asks; but Liz just shakes her head, and it worries him that a smart gal like her doesn’t know.

The chopper swoops suddenly toward the fog and Jimmy hears the pilot say bad words.

“Wind shear,” the co-pilot calls out, explaining the swerve. The frogs ask if there’s a fix on the ferry, but the co-pilot shakes his head. “Something’s wrong. VTS got three radar fixes, but they’re three different positions, and too far away.” With the wind the way it is, he’ll drop them as close as he can to the last visual position.

Jimmy calls out “Aye” to show that he heard and he and Liz ready the hoist. They clip a sling to the end of the cable to lift people out of the water and onto the ATN’s barge. They pile flotation devices by the sliding door. The frogs pull on their flippers and test their air.

“Ready back here,” the chief tells the pilot.

The chopper hovers and Jimmy heaves the door open. This is the part he likes best: standing in the open doorway above the waves, with the wind buffeting his face, with the tang of salt on his lips. The buzz of the rotors fills the cabin and the spray splashes onto the deck. A brisk breeze streams toward the fog, and Jimmy fancies the fog is somehow sucking air into it.

Liz waves to the frogs and they step forward and drop the few feet into the bay, one-two-three. She looks out the door. “Ain’t nobody in the water,” she says.

“The frogs are there,” Jimmy points out what he thinks an obvious oversight on her part.

“But who they gonna rescue?” Liz is angry, and Jimmy thinks it is at him for correcting her.

The helicopter rises, banks, and, caught in another sudden wind shear, tilts to one side. The pilot cries out. Jimmy can hear the fear even over the noise of the rotors. Liz slips on a puddle and slides down the canted deck and out the open door. Jimmy, who has been holding on to the hoist cable, reaches toward her as she slides past, but their fingers only touch before she is gone, and the last thing Jimmy sees is her scowl of annoyance.

He does not stop to think. “Man overboard!” he cries. The pilot brings the chopper around, and Jimmy readies the sling. Liz is a good swimmer, so he is not worried. He thinks they will laugh about it later, when the rescue is over.

He sees her swimming hard against a strong current. The pilot is fighting the turbulent winds and cannot get close enough for the hoist, so Jimmy unclips the flotation ring and throws it to her so that she does not wear herself out swimming.

He is a good thrower. He always wins when Group Seattle holds its Rescue Olympics. He puts the ring right beside her so that with two good strokes she grabs hold of it. She waves to him and Jimmy grins with pride as he waves back. He already thinks of the kind words she will say to him after she is pulled aboard. Maybe she will kiss him. Maybe . . . He blushes at the anticipation of memories.

Once she has grasped the ring, the strange riptide takes Liz into the rapidly diminishing fog. There is not much left of the mist now: a few corkscrew streamers. Seen through the haze, the water looks different, darker and redder. Jimmy searches for Liz through the mist but does not spot her.

Even when at last the fog is entirely gone, there is no sign of her.

The chopper circles and circles and when finally it must return to base, Jimmy is crying like a baby.

Only one of the frogs comes back with them, and he does not say much of anything.

Mitch Raftery

So.

If you’re married to a bitch, a dockside bar can be a haven. When you order a bourbon and water, you call it “comfort food,” which earns a short grin from the bartender. He asks no questions. He doesn’t care why you drink.

“Get a job, get a job,” you tell your bourbon. “And what’s it matter if it’s all the way to hell and Bremerton to get it.” This is more than the bartender really wants to know, but he ventures that a good job is a good thing to have.

“Never said it was a ‘good’ job,” you correct him. “Look at me. I got a degree, an MBA. So I should clerk at some two-bit operation?” You don’t tell him about the truly skilled accounting work you’ve done, the kind that got you fired from your last job, or about your ever-loving’s mountain of debt that drove you to it. He’s got no Need To Know.

Better than nothing, the bartender suggests. I’m a BS in chemistry.

You hold up your now-empty glass. “Then how about some ‘better living through chemistry’ ?”

Now you’re talking his language. So, you drink a while and chat in a desultory manner. The bartender comments on the thick fog that has shrouded the harbor. You don’t think fog at dawn on Elliott Bay is anything remarkable, but you remark anyway. Yes, that is the thickest and most unusual cloud of vapors ever known to mankind—excluding the cloud of vapors you gave your bitch-wife after the boss caught you with your hand in the till, although you don’t share that particular tidbit, either. Sure, the firm didn’t file charges, but only because the partners didn’t want to invite an audit. So who’s the bigger crook? “Everybody does it,” you mutter.

Your wife would never have understood anyway. She would never have accepted the blame. Ask the boss for a raise. Tell the boss you need a raise. As if the boss cared what anyone needed. Was there a credit card anywhere on the face of the planet that was not maxed out? Was there an AI’M anywhere in Seattle that did not hemorrhage cash as through a suppurating wound?

“Never marry a rich girl,” you tell the bartender, and he tells you there’s no danger of that, just as if you cared what sow he porked. Don’t marry a pretty one, either, he adds, or other guys will always be sniffing around.

Yeah, and a rich pretty girl is the worst of both worlds. Too used to spendthrift wealth; too used to flattering beaus. What matter if you have to work late because you need the OT because her skinflint parents didn’t approve of Little Precious marrying “down” and won’t shell out dime one to help? No reason why that should hamper the good times or the clubhopping. No reason why she can’t always have the best.

And her old man, he has to blah-blah-blah how he started with nothing, too, and how he envies you the same challenge. And what a sanctimonious, bullshit, self-righteous excuse for selfishness that is. Okay, maybe the old fart really had started poor, but then he hadn’t married the National Debt, either. No, he had to beget that one, spoil it rotten, and pass it on to you.

“I’d’ve paid it back,” you tell the empty glass in front of you. The way the markets were growing, the money should have multiplied like loaves and fishes long before the comptroller noticed the transaction. And it had. So you waited. Just a little bit more, just a little bit more, and the stock value went up and up and up until there was nothing left, and how could that much money evaporate like the morning fog?

Except this morning’s fog is not evaporating. A deep, extended blast pierces the dawn and you start on your barstool because you know it’s the ferry casting loose and you are supposed to be on that ferry heading for a job interview in God-forsake-us Bremerton. Oh, Honey-bun will ream you fair if you screw this one up.

You slap a president down on the bar top without even looking to see who it is and stagger out onto the sidewalk. Alaskan Way is nearly empty, as if everyone has stood aside to make room for your hopeless sprint to the pier.

By the time you reach Pier 52, winded and disheveled, the ferry is gone. You curse and shake a fist. Why is it that you never have any luck?

A score of people mill about dockside now, sharing their mutual ignorance of events. You hear something about the ferry vanishing and you turn and gawp at him. “You mean it sank?” He nods. Hundreds dead for sure; maybe more than a thousand. The crowd is buzzing now, approaching that critical mass where uninformed speculation implodes into a hard knot of impermeable belief. Stunned sorrow clashes with ghoulish wonder. The networks are coming! Oh, the networks are coming!

You shade your eyes against the dazzle of the waves and you see nothing. No boats. No one in the water. A lone frogman being hoisted into the ’copter. Words tumble from the lips around you: Tragedy. Catastrophe. Terrorists. Aliens. Sea Monster. But the one word that occurs to you, you do not voice, and that is Opportunity. And your rage evaporates with the last of the fog.

Poor Mitch Raftery! He has drowned with all the others. Your wife will think so; her parents will; your employers past and prospective will. Why, you have become as one already dead. You can hear the drumming of the dirt on your coffin lid, the lying words of sorrow spoken over you by people who never gave a shit when you were alive. But your death is your salvation, for you can rise again—and not wait any three damn days to do it. You can be bom again through the waters of this most peculiar baptism, cleansed of all past sins. You can start fresh, with a new name, a clean slate, hobbled no longer by a spendthrift wife, or skinflint in-laws, or hypocritical bosses. Without those shackles, how high might you soar?

It is a shining vision, and you stand there dockside stunned by the beauty of it. “By God,” you mutter, “I’ll have the life I deserve.”

So.

You slip anonymously from the docks, plans already whirling through your mind. There are ways to acquire driver’s licenses and ID cards. You know a few people. You can make a new start in a new city; you can live a new life.

You can become a new Mitch Raftery.

Dolly Mannerheim

If beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, so at times does mere existence. Howard Mannerheim was a man so ordinary that he vanished into the wallpaper of the world long before he vanished from it.

Dolly Mannerheim, his wife, was a tall woman who managed somehow to appear stocky. It was something in her posture. She was embarrassed to be seen in public with her husband, who was shorter by a head, and so in consequence they did not go out much. Howard never noticed, which was part of the problem.

Her parents had named her “Medallion” for no better reason than a couple of tokes from an especially potent stash the night following the delivery. Dolly-the-child had thought her name Seriously Cool, but she was past forty now and it seemed now less cool than affected. “Dolly” was not much better—resonance of child, resonance of plaything—but she did not know what else she might call herself.

She saw Howard off that morning as she usually did. He was a consulting engineer working at a construction site outside Bremerton. Dolly thought it was an office complex or perhaps a dam—something which at any rate required a lot of wire and concrete and steel. It was also, mirabile dictu, a local assignment—which meant that Howard could actually come home each day, a circumstance not without its complications.

It was his habit to catch the six-thirty ferry, so Dolly would get up with sandpaper eyes and ensure a breakfast and a cab to take him down Queen Anne Hill to the ferry dock. “You take such good care of me,” he told her, sitting down to a bowl of soggy flakes drowned in milk. Perhaps he meant it—he was not a demanding man—but he always said the same thing, so perhaps he didn’t mean much. Howard was a creature of habits and she had learned (or had convinced herself) over the years that there was behind that compendium of tics and routines no genuine person. Were it not for cliches, he would sit dumb.

At the door, the cab already waiting, Dolly offered him her cheek and he gave it the usual perfunctory benediction before walking down the steps, where the cabbie, had he been listening, might have heard him mutter something about “dry sticks.”

Afterward, she just had time to shower and don a blouse and a pair of plain brown slacks before Rick scampered across from next door. He always leapt the fence that separated their two back yards. He never came around to the front door. In part, this was respect for the proprieties (which made it a hypocritical act). In the other part, it was a display of prowess. (Which made it a cocksure act. It was a picket fence he vaulted.)

Dolly let him into the kitchen and he followed her to the bedroom, where they had sex. Some days they might have a drink or two first. In the beginning, she had always taken a few drinks, even before the discreet knock at the kitchen door.

When Rick was engrossed in medias res, she whispered urgently, “Howard’s at the door! He must have missed the ferry!” And she laughed when he, for a moment, stiffened in alarm.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that!” he said (for this was not the first time she had whispered wolf in his ear). But in fact, the possibility that Howard would miss his boat and would walk in upon her was the only excitement left to Dolly in the affair, which had progressed by stages from the unthinkable to the routine. While Howard’s assignments had been out of town, she and Rick had enjoyed intimate clubs and fine meals and nights spent on satin in upscale hotels. There had been an electricity to it then. Confined now to the occasional morning or afternoon liaison, the flames had faded to coals, and coals to ashes.

Rick had no idea of this. He thought he mattered. But it had been the dancing and the dining and the shows, not Rick’s qualities as a lover, that had led Dolly to him. He was no Adonis. As the world measured these things, Howard actually had the edge. Nor was he especially attentive or romantic. What he was, was convenient.

There were days when she wanted to summon Howard on his cell phone and bring him back on some pretext. She wanted something to happen. Anything. Even confrontation. If she could not have the heat of passion, she would have the heat of anger. Lacking either, she had gone cold. And yet, though she thought of it often, she could never quite bring herself to do it.

Later, in the front room, she served coffee, and that peculiar silence descended in which by unspoken consent she and Rick would not talk about what they did. Rick, standing by the front window, pulled the curtain a little to the side and remarked how empty the streets seemed with everyone off to work or school—as if some pestilence had caused humanity to disappear.

Dolly was sitting in her television chair. “I wish Howard would disappear,” she responded with sudden, quiet, and terrible sincerity.

Rick thought she meant so that they could drop the secrecy and be together openly, and he preened just a bit, for he desired above all else to be desired. But Dolly had not been thinking of him. In a way, she hadn’t even been thinking of Howard; but afterward she could never quite convince herself that it was mere coincidence.

Rick started at the door chimes and Dolly, with malice aforethought, strode to the door as if to throw it open with him in plain sight; but she paused with her hand on the knob until she heard the kitchen door click closed. She smiled a little at that, at what it said about Rick, at what it said about her. Then the bell rang again, and this time she did open the door.

It was Lillian Gelberson from down the comer. Lillian was a young woman who wore glasses only for effect and operated a blog out of her home. Dolly (who had no idea what a web log was) had privately named her Miss Perky, by which she did not intend a compliment. Lillian had the irritating habit of beginning conversations in the middle. “Oh, Dolly! I’m so sorry” she announced in a voice apparently intended to be sympathetic, but which sounded instead only cryptic.

“About what?” Dolly said, wondering if Lillian had seen or heard Rick’s departure. Perhaps the woman was sorry that Dolly needed a lover, or that the lover was Rick, or that she herself had no hope of getting one of her own. Dolly was glad something had come along to shoo Rick away, but she was not especially glad that it had been Lillian.

“About what? Ohmigod! You mean you haven’t heard? Ohmigod! The Hyak! It’s gone! And then I thought, ohmigod, isn’t that the ferry that your husband takes?”

“What do you mean gone?” Dolly asked in irritation. “Of course it’s gone. It leaves at six-thirty.”

“No, no. I mean vanished. Disappeared. Ohmigod, helicopters have been crisscrossing the bay and there’s not a trace.” She knew this because she had been following the breaking news on the web, uploading links to her blog, trading overwrought IMs. (Nothing is quite so invigorating to a certain turn of mind than the safe proximity of disaster.) Her window opened on a view of the bay, but it had not occurred to her to look out of it. The Web was All.

Dolly failed at first to understand. The words came at her too fast and all a-jumble. “Do you mean the ferry sank? How can that happen?” Ferries sank in the Philippines, ferries sank in Bangladesh. They did not sink in Elliott Bay.

“We don’t know yet,” Lillian told her. “The fog was in, and people down the harbor say the Hyak never came out the other side.” Lillian continued to chatter hyperkinetic sympathy, but Dolly stopped listening after that.

“Disappeared. . . .” she whispered. Perhaps Howard would not be coming home, after all. Rick would like that. Or would he?

She was sitting on the sofa with no recollection of having gotten there. Lillian was beside her, holding her hands. Go away, she thought at the woman. Go away. But the words never reached her lips. She didn’t want company. She didn’t want to be alone. “Two thousand, did you say?”

Lillian may have speculated on how full the vessel had been, but all she said to Dolly was, “It’s Howard that matters now,” which was not strictly factual, but which might have been paradoxically true. Howard mattered because he was no longer matter.

“Dolly, is there anything I can do?”

Images of Lillian Gelberson in scuba gear searching amidst the sunken hulk of M.V. Hyak, hoisting wreckage from the water, performing mouth to mouth resuscitation. Do what, Dolly wondered. “Be careful what you wish for,” she murmured, but Lillian did not quite hear.

As the weeks followed and the media ran through their paradigm, her remorse grew ever more intolerable. Each time they showed one of the awkward snapshots on the evening news, she cringed. At meetings of “The Families of the Victims.” (And of course there were such meetings. A regiment of grief counselors flew into Seattle to prolong the agony.) Dolly would avoid the other spouses and families and significant others, would not even meet their eyes. Everyone took this as profound grief. No one recognized it as guilt.

Perhaps a thousand wives had wished their husbands gone that morning. It was not beyond belief. But Dolly did not believe it. As nearly as she could estimate, the Hyak had vanished at the very moment when she had wished Howard gone. But the elves that grant the wishes oft have cruel streaks in them. She had never intended that a thousand others vanish with him. The weight of a thousand was as the weight of a single one. There was something about that in the Bible. Or in the Koran. Or in a fortune cookie she had once read.

The media christened it The Disappearance. They early on capitalized the whole business and assigned the roles that everyone was to play. No one ever found any bodies. No flotsam ever graced the shores of Elliott Bay. Consequently, Dolly and the others like her were presented as grieving-but-ever-hopeful that their loved ones would somehow, someday come back. (Although from where, no one seemed quite sure.) And so, she must play Penelope to Howard’s Odysseus.

For a time, Rick concurred. In the spotlight of publicity, his stealthy visits might seem unseemly; and so he abstained for a time out of respect for the dead and also out of a little self-interest. But he never did understand why, after the commotion had died and the cameras sought elsewhere for sensation, Dolly did not re-open that kitchen door. He’s gone, he told her again and again. He’s never coming back. (Not that it had ever mattered when he had.) Dolly could not explain it either, and, after a time, Rick found another neighbor or a co-worker or maybe even his ex-wife.

Dolly no longer needed a lover. Somehow, by vanishing completely, Howard had become ubiquitous, and occupied her life without the bother of actually being present in it. His absence was consequential in a way that his presence had never been. She was asked about him constantly: by friends and relatives, by interviewers for magazines and television stations. She appeared on Conan with a half dozen other bereaved and was applauded by the audience, as if the loss of her husband had been some sort of accomplishment on her part—as indeed she had convinced herself it had.

Dinah Comfort

How bright and empty the bay looks from here. Not a cloud in the sky, not a bit of haze over the water. I can almost reach out past the headland and touch Seattle. They call it the Emerald City, but it all looks golden, somehow, in the sunset.

No boats out on the water. The pleasure craft cower in their marinas, for there is no pleasure in this sunset. The tankers and freighters huddle at dock or have scurried here to Bremerton. Even the Coast Guard cutter has put up. Everyone is afraid to venture out onto the Bay. The waters look so lonely.

He was always late, Ken was. That was his problem from the very start. Never home on time. Always working late, “plugging away at the office.” Plugging away, all right. Plugging a secretary, all legs and ass, damn him. Or hoisting a few with “the boys.” Sorry, I lost track of the time. And whatever happened to the man I married? He lost track of him, too, somewhere along the way.

He never went looking for love; it always fell into his lap and he never learned how to say no. He hadn’t even stayed true to his secretary, the little skirt-hiking bitch. (And so she had forwarded all those e-mails. Treat your wife as you will; but never anger your mistress.)

Ken never thinks ahead, seldom behind. A narrow window around the present moment is all the reality he ever knows. He couldn’t even understand why I was still angry with him after he said he was sorry. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He really was sorry—at that moment, at that time and place—and he really thought a few ritual words wiped away his sins. Inside his head, the whole affair was already Past History and it was somehow my fault that it was still an issue.

It’s done. It’s over. Let’s move on.

No, Ken, it isn’t that easy. I won’t have it be that easy.

But just this once, Ken, could you please be late?

Okay, you had her for the weekend. Our little Cindi, our darling, our treasure. Little Cindi with the sunlight smile. I know you love her, too, in your own lunkheaded, irresponsible way. Dammit, you still love me, in your lunkheaded, irresponsible way. I know you like to see her. You’re still her father, Ken. Oh, tardy, forgetful, flighty Ken. God, you were such fun to be with when responsibility didn’t matter. I can still remember what we once had. I’ll never take you back, but I feel sad that I never will.

Cindi looks forward so to these visits, and it doesn’t make me jealous, not really. You pamper her too much, and I guess I can see why. You don’t have her every day the way I do. You can afford to pamper, but I have to discipline, and that seems a little lopsided, because at twelve Cindi doesn’t understand why I have to be mean when you never are. But it wouldn’t be fair to ask you to discipline her when you can’t even discipline yourself. You’re only supposed to keep her for three days, and I know I’ve been bitchy before when you’ve kept her too long.

I forgot, you said. I lost track of the time.

Just this once, just this once, just this once, I hope you lost track of the time. I hope you overslept. I hope you got tied up in traffic. I hope you forgot my complaints. I hope you missed putting her on the ferry.

Twelve. Almost a woman. Almost a person instead of a child. Just beginning to feel the changes taking place inside her. Just beginning to realize the universe of possibilities lying in wait. But still a child. Still our little girl.

It’s getting cold here. I should have brought a sweater with me, but who knew the wait would be this long? Who knows how long it will be?

The Hyak will reappear someday. That weird fog will roll in again. It will grow thick over the bay and coat everything with chill and damp. And the ferry horn will sound, and the Hyak will sail out of the mist as she sailed into it. Maybe she won’t know why I’m crying, Cindi won’t. Maybe for her only a moment will have passed. That’s the way things happen in Faerie. I’ll grow old, and she’ll stay young forever.

It could be this very night. Or tomorrow. There’s always a fog in the morning. Someone needs to be here when the ferry arrives. Someone needs to be here.

Francine Humboldt Whistler, Ph.D.

Francie Whistler had lobbied hard to be appointed to the Board of Inquiry and was happy that the panel would finally meet. But she did not think it appropriate that the session be preceded by a reception, as if it were no more than an academic symposium. She registered at the desk in the Coast Guard building and the warrant officer checked his list and gave her a numbered name badge with her digital photograph already embedded and directed her to the pre-meeting function room.

She spent the pre-meeting chatting with the Coast Guard radar tech over cups of scalding coffee. Vehicle Traffic Service radars had reported three different locations for the missing ferry, and each location had been farther off than the vessel could possibly have been. The Task Force might need a physicist to make sense out of that. An unexplained fact within an unexplained fact. A hole inside a hole. It wasn’t the real reason she had pulled strings, but it was a true reason and it would do.

The technician didn’t have the answers and knew it, which made him wiser than many others in the room that Francie could overhear. Why did people come to an inquiry with answers? They were supposed to bring questions. The tech had come to give testimony, and that was all. “I’m glad I don’t have to make sense out of it,” he confessed. “I just follow the SOPs. But I know what I saw. I ran the diagnostics afterward and everything checked out. All the benchmarks were right on the money. What do you think happened?”

Francie shook her head. “It’s too early to say, Tommy. We don’t have all the facts yet.” Everyone was still treating the event as a marine disaster. Francie wasn’t so sure. She didn’t think the ferry sank. She thought something else had happened, only she didn’t know what.

“All three bearings showed the ferry going away from the radar,” the young man continued. “One going back toward the dock. One toward Duwamish Head. And one toward Queen Anne Hill. That isn’t possible. Do you think it was a transient malf in the computer system?”

Francie flashed on a line from an old Firesign Theater album: How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all? Except in this case there were three places.

When Commander Randolph arrived, everyone shuffled into the meeting room. The room was long and wide and possessed no outside windows. Francie thought this intentional. There would be reminders enough of that tragic day in the testimony. A view of the scene would have been too oppressive. Chairs stood rank-and-file in military precision. Across the front of the room ran a long table with microphones and name cards, one of which bore her name. Francie took her seat at the far left of the table, next to the federal anti-terrorism expert from Homeland.

“We’ll catch the bastards who did this,” the man whispered to her as she adjusted her seat. His name card announced him Carl Gratz.

Francie had heard a similar assurance earlier from the marine engineer, only he had hoped to catch the design flaw that caused the boat to founder. She smiled at Gratz and said, “That’s why the Task Force was formed,” and he nodded as if she had agreed with him.

“You’re the University representative,” he said after a glance at her name card. “Ms. Whistler?”

“Dr. Whistler.”

Gratz grinned. “Yeah, me too.” He introduced himself.

There was a pad of paper at each place, as well as a microphone, a pen, a folder, a water glass, and the other inevitable accouterments of committee meetings. Francie tapped the microphone to see if it was live and heard nothing. In the back of the room, the sound tech was playing with his board. She shrugged and picked up the pen.

Turning the pad sideways, she wrote five words across the long margin: Autopsy, Type, Source, Location, and Time. Gratz glanced at what she had written. She underlined the word location and wrote under it three places at once and heading three directions.

“You think the VTS radars were malfunctioning?” Gratz asked her.

“I don’t know what to think. It’s possible.” But they had not been malfunctioning immediately afterward, she remembered. That’s what the Coast Guard tech had told her. Under Time, she wrote no radar anomalies after and find out specific times.

Commander Randolph struck the gavel and two dozen cameras in the back of the room chittered like cicadas, so it was clear what image would grace the front pages and web portals tomorrow. Investigating Committee Opens Deliberations. She wasn’t sure that these big, public autopsies ever solved anything. They were for assurance rather than investigation. Look, see, we are treating this tragedy with respect and importance! Posing for cameras outweighed posing questions.

Was that too cynical? The others she had spoken with during the premeeting seemed determined to get to the root of the matter, though they had different roots in mind; but what a committee did was often independent of what any of its members intended it to do. The moment had a logic of its own.

You’re grieving, she told herself, as if she could have forgotten. She wondered whether others on the Task Force had lost a friend or relative with the ferry.

Work the numbers. Family, school chums, fishing buddies, neighbors, co-workers, merchants . . . On the average, a person knows a thousand other people. So, if an estimated thousand passengers each had a thousand acquaintances, that made a million people, which, even allowing for overlap, covered a fair chunk of metro Seattle. Chances were a third of the people in this room knew someone who had been on the ferry that morning. And the rest all knew someone who did.

Jesus, no wonder everyone looks so bleak.

“This hearing is convened,” said the commander of Group Seattle, “to learn the facts of what happened last Tuesday morning on Elliott Bay.” He said more, most of it to give the news reporters a lead paragraph, but Francie relaxed a little in her seat. She had been afraid the Coast Guard would push to Get Out There and Do Something and implement a solution before they even knew the root cause. There was still a possibility of that. The Usual Suspects were already demanding to know why the Coast Guard had not prevented the tragedy, and she had heard that one law firm was ginning up clients for a class action suit against the Washington State Ferries.

No, the first order of business was to find out what had actually happened—to measure, as she liked to say, the size and shape of the problem. Her eyes dropped to the pad where she had jotted notes of her chat with the radar tech. He would testify later in more detail, using his logs and printouts, but the gist of it was already captured. Francie thought that what the tech had told her was important, perhaps even central to the problem, that it must be something more than an instrument glitch.

The Committee heard testimony all morning: from the dispatcher at the ferry dock, from the captain and deckhands of the fishing boat that had nearly collided with the Hyak, from the VTS radar technician, from the pilot and co-pilot of the Coast Guard rescue chopper and the surviving frogman and crewman, from the meteorologist for the Elliott Bay region, from the chief mechanic who had worked on the Hyak’s last repairs. No trace had been found: no bodies or body parts, let alone survivors. How could that boat have gone down so damned fast, and with no flotsam? With not so much as an oil slick?

The reporters drifted away during the testimony. It was boring and it was for the most part technical. Francie, on the other hand, quickly filled her sheet with notes. The current encountered by the fishing boat. The wind encountered by the helicopter. Times of departure and disappearance, the vessel’s beam and length, her capacity, her speed, the distance from the dock to the estimated point other disappearance, her three oddly contradictory bearings at the time of disappearance.

“Excuse me,” she said, and then had to repeat herself after the sound tech turned her mike on. “Tommy,” she asked the VTS tech, “do your records show when these peculiar readings began and when they stopped?”

A moment passed while the tech searched his records. There had been several freighters and an oil tanker moving on the Bay at the time, and VTS tracked all of them. He found several other anomalies, starting about half an hour before the Hyak left dock. Francie asked for a copy of the data and the tech handed the sheets to a committee clerk for photocopying. She compared the time to the meteorologist’s report of when the fog first appeared.

Very curious, Francie thought. Gratz watched quizzically as she scribbled.

“How is any of that important?” he asked.

She reminded herself that he was still chasing terrorists in his head, and not yet gauging the metes and bounds of the problem. “I don’t know that any of it is,” she admitted.

“Once we locate the wreckage,” Gratz said, “we’ll know whether they blew it up from the inside or the outside.”

She looked at him. “They.”

He shrugged.

She said, “No one heard an explosion.”

“No one reported an explosion,” he corrected her. “The sound may have been muffled by the fog or the horns. Or the bomb was planted down inside the hull.”

Francie turned once more to her list. There were any number of explanations. If this, if that, if the other thing. . . . Allow enough ifs and anything was plausible. They could spin theories until the cows came home. It could have been OJ or Elvis. It could have been little green men from Alpha Centauri. If you start with the conclusion, you can always imagine a trail that reaches it, but the simplest explanation for not hearing an explosion was that there had not been one. The proper place to start is at the beginning. Go from what you know toward what you don’t. Don’t start with what you believe.

Later, and because the media would tolerate nothing else but, the man from Washington State Ferries read the list of names that had been confirmed so far. There would be a wall or a monument one day. That was inevitable. In the meantime, there was some balm in reading aloud the names of the lost. “John Dunning, master,” the man said. “Peter Jurgowitz, mate. James O’Grady, engineer. Karen Lewis-Nowick, assistant engineer . . .” And so on through the two oilers and the eight deckhands, the two Coast Guard frogmen and the seaman who had fallen from the helicopter. Francie wondered at the order in which the names were read and decided that it was the order in which their presence on the ferry—or in the aborted rescue—had been confirmed. Cindi Comfort, she heard. Howard Mannerhein. Dale Wingate. Mitch Rafteiy. Paul Latimer. Agnes, Becky, and Kyle Timmer. The names ran on. The litany was numbing. When the recitation reached “Donald Whistler,” Francie jerked a little in her seat and the man from Homeland turned to her and said, “Your husband?”

“No, my baby brother.” Well, he was twenty-five, but he’d always be her baby brother now, because he would never, ever grow any older. She could remember coming home from college and little Donny running to meet her at the door. Fannie’s home! F’annie’s home! And now, little Donny would never be there again.

Gratz gave her a handkerchief and she dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said.

The WSF official was still reading the list and everyone listened with long faces. A couple of times, Francie saw people in the meeting room react to a name. “We kept thinking he would call,” she said at last. “Mom and me and Andy. Andy is the oldest. Dad’s dead. We thought, maybe Donny caught the 5:10 and he was safe in Bremerton before the Hyak sailed. But he would have called to tell us that, once he’d heard the news. He would have called to tell us he was safe. But it’s been nearly a week now, and there’s been no word.”

“That’s the worst part,” Gratz said. “There’s no closure.”

“Closure.” She squared the pad in front of her; moved the pen to one side. She hated that word. “After a while, you grow numb.”

“I didn’t know anyone on board.”

Francie remembered that he was from DC. “Are you complaining?”

He shook his head. “No, just admitting that I can’t know how you feel.” Maps of the bay were passed down the table. She took one and handed the last to Gratz. “I’m not sure that I know, either,” she said. Key points were highlighted on the map. Pier 52. The normal ferry route. The location of the fishing boat, approximately correct because its skipper had taken a sighting on Duwamish Head only a few minutes earlier. The direction of the current they had fought. The direction of the wind-shear that had nearly brought down the ’copter. The positions of other vessels in the bay. And, marked with red crosses, the three contradictory positions for Hyak.

Always draw a picture of your data, her statistics professor had told her years ago. Francie took her pen and connected the crosses. It was in there, she thought. Inside that triangle. She looked through her notes on the VTS network and marked the location of the three malfunctioning radars, connecting the radars to the positions they had given.

“The three lines intersect,” Gratz said. He had been watching her construction in silence. “Is that important?”

“I don’t know.” She used her name card as a straight-edge and projected the direction of the current that had caught the fishing boat. It, too, ran through the same locus. The back of her head began to prickle. She did the same with the wind direction. It missed, but by only a little, and the ’copter pilot had been too pre-occupied to take a more precise bearing. She added the other anomalous sightings, and each one had passed near or through that same point.

She studied her ad hoc plot with growing unease. That was where it happened, she thought.

Whatever it was.

Taralyn Harrison

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: JJ Brannon

What the hell is all the fuss about the Hyak? Mix some drunk captain with a little fog and incompetent government flunkies who can’t even properly read radar they were trained on. It’s plain buggy software compounded by human greed and stupidity at fault. The divers will find the ship once the mud settles.

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: Pagadan

GMAB. This is Mother Nature striking back—and about time, I’d say. Who else could create fog, currents, and winds like that. And this is just the beginning. Did you read about the chasm on the way to Disneyland, the earth quake in that Texas oil field, the giant sink hole between Orlando and Tampa?

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: Velvet

JJ, did you even read the report about the radar tech? It’s a real, honest-to-God anomoly. Either time travel or a portal to an alternate Earth. I’d say a tractor beam used by an entity who couldn’t quite handle it.

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: JJ Brannon

All right, I saw that guy with the mini-sub interviewed on the 6 o’clock news. I admit those videos show no ferry down there in the mud. So I think it was Release 1.0 of some quantum-nanobyte experiment. Some of that crap probably got loose and the ferry fell apart in a zillion pieces and washed away. That’s where all the steam came from, too.

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: FIJAGDH

A buddy of mine out west says the Taos, NM, hum changed frequency the same day they lost that ferry. Which proves my theory about the Taos hum being part of some secret government experimentation with found/donated alien technology.

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: IrishBet

JJ, have you forgotten the USS Eldridge? Teleportation could account for the anomalies at the time of reappearance. I’ve never believed they gave up that line of inquiry. SciAm ran an article about the practical possibilities of teleportation back in 1997. I’m betting a shiny new quarter the ferry will be back.

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: Tee-Ell

Dont you people listen to yourselves? It’s not a game!! I lost my boy on that boat. Maybe if you had, youd look at things different.

Taralyn

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: Les OneGuy

The only scientific fact that explains this is a teleportion experiment by the North Koreans, what else culd they be doing with those reactors. It’s people like you who hinder the advance of civilization with your moralistic superstions, your sexual hangups, and your inability to see that all religions are a fraud based on the big people loarding it over the regular ones. This will probebly trigger a world-wide war ending in nuclear conflagation, but I feel that in the end it will work out for the better and bring humanity to the stars, or at least those of us who can see it and preapare for it.

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: Kwakiutl1968

Have you ever been whale watching? Have you ever stood on deck and been fixed by those big, penetrating, accusing eyes? Whales know who we are, and what we’ve been doing to their kind for a thousand years. I don’t know what they did to the Hyak, and I don’t know how they did it, but the Hyak incident is only the beginning. The whales have finally decided to fight back.

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: Tee-Ell

I dont know nothing bout no teleportation or time travel or althernate earths whatever that is. But I do know bout my son, Tiron. Maybe it mean something to you people, or maybe it dont. You think people just words on a screen cause you never ever see each other. But here I am doing the same, like my daughter showed me how, so maybe this is just something I need to do and if anyone read it or not, it dont really matter. So let me make the words flesh.

Tiron he was a fine boy. Big, like he could rest his chin on top my hed and long arms. Had to be long to rap all the way round his mama. Only twenny last march, but he was working hard and trying to save up money to maybe go to the communty college next year. He was always study hard in school. He wasnt smart like some, but worked at it way his daddy did. He use to tell me things like I never heard of before, all about enjins and that. He had a book about how stuff worked and he’d tell me about it ever chance he got. And sometimes he take apart stuff like my toaster or the telefone just to see you know what was inside? You should of seen his eyes when he talked mashines. He wanted to get one of those soshit degrees. Nobody in our famly ever got no degrees, so we was real proud of him for trying. I know his daddy would of been. His daddy was kilt in the Stan, and Tiron, he missed him something bad. He never cried much. You dont want to be a boy cries much in this naborhood. But he always goes how he wants to invent something and name it after his daddy.

Well he use to work little jobs at repair stores and stuff, like places where he got to play with mashines. And then last spring his name finly come up at the union hall and he got a job as oiler on the ferry boats. Oh he was so proud! He was so proud. He come home real greasy from those rides. Everbody like him and he like everbody on the boats. He was reel happy down there with the enjins and things.

It was just before it happen that Tiron told me he want to be a navel architek which is all about building boats. I didnt understand half what he said and I probly didnt spell it right. I know I dont spell so good. When I was a kid I didnt have the same chances as Tiron so I never mounted to much, tho I kept myself clean and honest even when it was hard. Tiron, he could of been somebody.

Whats hardest is that he wasnt supposed to be on Hyak that day but he traded with a friend who had to go see a doctor. That Keith is so twisted up over it. Half of hims sorry it was my Tiron went in his place, but the other half is happy it wasnt him. I dont hold it against him tho. Hes a nice boy and was good friend to Tiron.

Tiron he lef the house that day just like always and took his lunch with him and he kiss me on the cheek and say he wants my pulled pork for supper. Thats what I was cooking when I hear the news. Pulled pork. Oh he did favor that some.

You never know when you say good-bye for the last time. You never ever know that. It seem just like ever other time, and later you wish youd of said something more or did something more but you dint

Was hard for me he called away like that so young. I dont know why the Lord wanted him but I guess he must got a reason. I just wisht he explain it to me, cause I dont want to think it just bad luck he be gone.

Taralyn

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: Come2Reven

I read an expose that the ship in question wasn’t actually the U.S.S. Eldridge docked in Philadelphia, but the U.S.S. Philadelphia docked in Eldridge. No wonder the facts have been so hard to uncover, huh?

Subject: Re: The Disappearance.

From: DANNISGRL

Ch 7 is going to run a special with the guy who talks to dead people. It’s about time science was brought in to solve the case!

William J. Timmer, Ph.D.

Abstract: It will be shown that the well-known disappearance of MV Hyak is the result of a singularity in the dynamic field equations for rotating magnetic fields. The locus for this singularity will be shown to be unstable in the sense of Poincare and to be subject to aperiodic shifts in its locus due to endogenous factors. These shifts will be conceptualized by means of Thomian catastrophe surfaces.

Text: It is well known that the state of a dynamic system acting under a potential will move toward the nearest equilibrium point in its state space in such a way as to minimize the value of the potential function. The set of all such equilibria comprises a manifold over the parameter space known as the “attractor.” If the manifold is “folded” or “pleated,” loci exist in parameter space possessing two or more distinct equilibria. A system entering such a bifurcation set while at one equilibrium will snap to the other should it leave the set at the opposite boundary. From the reference frame of the original state, the object will appear to accelerate rapidly in a direction orthogonal to the sheet. Rene Thom [7] called this a catastrophe, although he did not mean a catastrophe in the colloquial sense, such as the loss of one’s wife and children, but simply a sudden change from one equilibrium state to another.

The anomalous radar fixes in the case of the Seattle Event, each of which showed the ferry accelerating directly away from it, provide a good empirical fit to the model. The fit is further substantiated by anecdotal evidences; namely, the dopplering of the boat’s horn and the red-shifted light reported by eyewitnesses. Clearly, the vessel accelerated along a dimension orthogonal to normal 3-space. It is suggested that the Elliott Bay Anomaly marks the edge of a higher dimension bifurcation set in space-time. One might call this colloquially a “drain-hole.”

That a singularity must exist in certain dynamic systems is well known, but the locus of the singularity may be subject to random fluctuations. A comparison is made to the familiar topological problem of covering a billiard ball with hair. Such a cover must leave a gap, for example the “bald spot” that forms when men comb their hair flat. If the hair is combed differently, the “bald spot” will appear in a different position.

An analogous process can be applied to higher dimensional dynamic manifolds. While locally smooth, they cannot be globally smooth. Very little in life is globally smooth. Thom’s Classification Theorem states that only seven stable catastrophes can arise from variations in the parameter space. These qualitatively distinct discontinuities arise from a combination of technical and geometric considerations involving the regions of parameter space where the catastrophes happen. It is suggested that the Elliott Bay Anomaly is of this nature. Anecdotal data suggests a former locus near the island of Bermuda. A hole being an absence (or is it the absence that leaves the hole?), it does not physically move; but a change induced on the manifold that closes a hole will inevitably cause another to open elsewhere. A conservation law is suspected. This will require additional research.

We pause here and consider marriage as a dynamic system operating under a potential. It, too, is manifold and it is hypothesized that a wrinkle must necessarily exist in it, and that if one difficulty is resolved, another must inevitably take its place. A suitable stabilizing strategy might then be the introduction of a permanent difficulty. The truly destructive strategy is the expectation that there ought to be none.

However, the existence of these local catastrophes, which we may term “spats,” depends on a combination of technical and geometric considerations involving the regions of the marital parameter space where the catastrophes happen. A million variables affect the emergence of form within the envelope of the marriage, all working to minimize its potential. These variables include genes, chemicals, environmental conditions, space, and time. At any given time, only one or two are likely to change in a discontinuous manner, arguing that while the phenomenon is global, the precise shape of the catastrophe may depend on local conditions. So may a hitherto-faithful spouse suddenly engage in a destructive affair for reasons of long, if obscure standing; or a sweet young boy alter into a surly adolescent. This being the case, the passage of time (and, with it, the alteration of the local conditions that precipitated the discontinuity) may rectify the anomaly.

Yet, to analyze the system in such dispassionate terms may earn the sobriquet of a “passionless little prick” lacking “any semblance of human feelings.” Such a judgment would be mistaken, as it refers only to the expression of, and not the impression of, passion. The mousiest man may seethe with murderous rage; an undemonstrative man, with tender love. When once it is said, “I love you,” no additional information is transmitted by endless repetitions. Logic teaches us that. Better to spend words on increasing the information content of the system, such as by noting that “we are out of bread” or “the car needs washing.” Because a thought has not been spoken, it would be illogical to conclude that it has not been thought. Would the household be not short of bread were it unmentioned? Likewise, would a spouse be short of love were it not mentioned? The analogy is precise; the parallel, instructive. But the results have proven upon inspection wholly divergent, suggesting the applicability of chaos theory.

And now they are gone, Becky and little Kyle and Agnes alike, fallen into a hole that has no bottom, creating a similar hole in the author’s life. Would it have made any difference if the author had said “I love you” at the pier-side? Would they be less completely gone? Perhaps. Perhaps she would have turned back at the words, as to a strange attractor, and stepped off the gangplank and into my arms as she once did when she and I and all the world were younger.

But time is the one asymmetric parameter governing the state space. Which is just another way of saying that there is “no turning back the clock.”

Unless there is something on the other fold. It would be pleasant to believe that those who have “passed over” to the other sheet have found a new life there, but science tells us nothing, and nothing is little comfort.

God damn this paper and this conference.

The author has found the preparation of this paper difficult. Select all. Delete.

Does that not sum up the entire phenomenon of the Disappearance? “Select all. Delete.”

Axel Moller

Scene: the living room of a small three room apartment in downtown Seattle. A hexagonal table covered by a green felt is situated in the center of the room but with only five chairs spaced around it. Four men sit at the table, one of them stacking poker chips of assorted colors. Behind them, the window looks out on tall, anonymous buildings, but in the gap between two of them lies a slice of Elliott Bay. It is dusk, just going on to evening.

Enter Axel Moller.

Axel: I brought the beer. I hope you have the cards. (Places six-pack on the table. Removes jacket and tosses it on the nearby sofa.)

Luis: Long as you brought money and an inclination to lose.

Axel: In your dreams, Luis. (Sits.) Hey, Beef, Gordo, Chen, how’re they hanging?

Various hand-slaps and exclamations of masculine greetings.

Gordo: (Gathers cards into deck, squares deck, begins to shuffle) Seven card stud. Ante up, boys.

They throw chips into the pot and Gordo deals the cards.

Gordo: We gotta jack showin.’ Your bet, Chen.

Chen: (Throws in another chip) Five.

Beef: Sure you can afford it? (The others match the bet and Gordo deals the next round.)

Gordo: Hey, Axe, you plan on chinkin’ all that yourself?

(Axel breaks open the six-pack and hands out the cans. Then he sits staring dumbly at the sixth can, which he has just placed at the empty sixth side of the hexagon.)

Axel: Shit. Oh, shit. (He turns away from the table.) Damn.

(The others look at Axel, at the can, at the empty space, at each other. Axel goes to the window and leans his arm against the sash, staring out toward Elliott Bay. He rests his head upon his arm.)

Life’s a bitch.

Beef: And then you . . . (He shuts up abruptly.)

Axel: (Without turning) You think you get over it, but you don’t, really. You forget for one little second, and some old habit pops up and reminds you.

Gordo: Paul was our friend, too.

Axel: Yeah. Yeah, I know.

Beef: (Lifts his beer can in salute) Absent friends. (No one joins the toast. Beef shrugs and drinks alone.)

Axel: I saw the fog come in yesterday. Another one of those “Bermuda” fogs.

Chen: (Shakes head) Bermuda Fog. In Seattle harbor.

Axel: And there’s always some moron, he rows out or he swims out into it because he wants to visit another plane of existence.

Gordo: It’s a helluva thing, all right. People got no sense.

Luis: No one ever come back and said where the “drainhole” goes—

Chen: If that’s what it is.

Luis:—so why are they so freaking sure they want to go there?

Axel: (With quiet vehemence) What difference does it make what it is or where it goes or even if it “goes” anywhere at all? Paul’s gone. They’re all gone. And no one thinks they’re ever coming back.

Beef: ’Cept that loony-kazoony over in Bremerton, goes down to the dock every morning. Hey, remember how Paulie used to rig the big arc lamps when we worked night crew. And he’d aim them so’s any gal walking past the site, the light would shine right through their dresses and you could see ’em all like in silhouette? (.Laughs)

Luis: He was a funny guy.

Beef: Sometimes what was under those dresses shouldn’ta been seen. Geez. Supersize those fries. That’s why Paulie always was working out at the gym, pumping iron and firming up the old pecs.

Chen: Hey, Ax, that’s where you met Paul, wasn’t it? Down at the gym.

Axel: (Turning from the window) About a year ago. I was in physical therapy, for my ankle. We used to chat in the cardio room when we had treadmills side by side.

Beef: Bet he raced you. That’s the kinda guy he was. Real competitive. Bet he cranked up the revs on that treadmill to see if you could keep it up.

Axel: (Looks out window once more) Yeah. He always wanted to see if I could keep it up.

Gordo: Hey, c’mon. St. Paul was the guy wrote all those letters. Paulie was a stand-up guy, but he wasn’t Mr. Perfect. Blanche said—

Chen: Poor Blanche! I wonder if she’s gotten over it yet.

Gordo: She sort of noticed that none of you guys come round any more.

Beef: (Defensively) Well, she wasn’t the one playing cards, was she?

Axel: (From window, but without turning) You see her lately, Gordo?

Gordo: (Sips from can, puts it down) Yeah. Lately.

Beef: Comfortin’ the ol’ widow, Gordo? (Winks to others; Chen turns away.)

Luis: Look, can we play cards?

Chen: Hey, remember when our guys played Axel’s team in the softball league and Paul—

Beef: Hey, Axel, you warehouse guys are pussies! You know what we do in construction?

Luis: Yeah, we make big erections. You tell that joke every time, Beef, and it wasn’t funny after the first thirty-two times.

Axel: (Turns a little toward Luis and, smiles faintly) Paul was good at that.

Luis: Axel, sit your ass down so I can like deal this hand?

Axel: You think it’s really a drainhole like they say? {He lingers by the window gazing out.)

Beef: No, it’s an asshole. That’s why everyone on that boat wound up feeling like shit.

(Axel takes two steps and grabs Beef by the shirtfront and yanks him to his feet. His biceps bulge and tremble under his tight-fitting shirt. He holds Beef for a moment as if he will shake him to pieces. The others look on with varying degrees of shock and surprise. Finally Luis and Chen stand and separate the two. Beef sinks back to his seat; Axel returns to his vigil by the window.)

Chen: Like, who says it’s a drainhole? I’ve heard a dozen theories. It’s a wormhole to somewhere else in the universe. Or it’s a doorway to another dimension—

Luis: That’s the Twilight Zone, Chen. What the hell difference does it make? Look, the best way we can honor Paulie’s memory is to drink a toast and play a hand. And maybe take up a collection for Blanche. Gordo’s right. The girls have as much fun as us at the summer picnics and stuff. Why should Blanche be out of it now just because Paulie’s dead?

Gordo: Don’t bother. She’s not exactly broke up about it.

Luis: Now that’s a helluva thing to say.

Gordo: (Shrugs) Paulie and Blanche hadn’t been in the sack together for a long time.

Chen: What, they were having a fight and . . .?

Gordo: No, it was the other way ’round. She was upset because he wasn’t coming through in the husband department. So she figured he had a little something on the side and that pissed her off.

Luis: Paulie?

Beef: Well, he was always checking out the girls. You know. “Hey, get a load of that set.” Maybe he just wanted a closer look.

Axel: (To Gordo) She say who Paulie was seeing?

Gordo: Nah. Blanche figured he was catting around until about a year or so ago, then he found someone steady. She didn’t mind it too much when she thought he was playing the field, but she hated the idea that there was someone else special in his life. Some poker nights he wouldn’t come home until way after the game broke up.

Axel: (Slowly) Maybe he thought he’d picked up a disease and didn’t want to give it to her, and that’s why he stopped sleeping with her.

Gordo: And so he’s still St. Paulie? Excuse me if I quit the church. Blanche is a special lady and he treated her like she didn’t even exist.

Beef: (After a pause) You seem to know a lot about how Blanche feels.

Gordo: (Throws cards down on table)

Luis: Christ . . .! You’re porkin’ Paulie’s widow, aren’t you?

Chen: She’s not exactly his wife any more, Luis.

Gordo: And not for a long time, even before he died.

Chen: (To Gordo) You mean . . . Before? Well, shit!

Gordo: What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, isn’t it? He wasn’t having any of her, and neither me or her saw any reason to let it go to waste.

Luis: (Drops his cards, too) I don’ feel like playin’ no more.

Chen: Me neither. Jesus, Gordo. He was our pal. You don’t go doing that to your buddy.

Gordo: How was I hurting him? If Paulie didn’t want no one in bed with Blanche, he shoulda stayed there himself, ’stead o’ running around trying to prove what a man’s man he was. I didn’t take a damn thing from him that he hadn’t already tossed aside. Aren’t I right, Axel?

Axel: (By window, wipes cheek with sleeve, turns to face group) Yeah. That’s right. He was a man’s man.

The Adventure Club

There were seven of them and they all lived in the neighborhood except for Jimmy, so it was never any problem to get together after school. They usually met in Denny’s basement because that was where they kept the club’s flag and Denny’s dad had helped set up a laboratory. They had racks of chemicals that they used to experiment with different rocket fuels, and an electrical bench where they worked on ignition systems. One time they had blown all the fuses in the house and Denny’s dad had made them promise not to test a circuit until they had shown him the schematics and he had inspected their work. Mr. Collingwood worked at Boeing and knew all sorts of stuff about electronics.

But developing a rocket ship had taken a back seat to the Seattle Drainhole. They even held some club meetings down near the old ferry dock because they hoped to see the hole open up, which would have been seriously cool.

“But there’s no periodicity to it,” the twins said, after Denny had called the meeting to order and they were all sitting around the old table in the basement with cans of pop and a big bag of chips. Frank and Harry were identical twins, and no one was ever sure which one was talking. SciAm and the other science mags had reported the lack of periodicity, but the club’s rule was never to trust authority. Frank (unless it had been Harry) had compiled a list of all confirmed events, starting with the initial tragedy. And Harry (unless it had been Frank) had analyzed the time series.

“It’s a chaotic system,” said Jimmy. “I knew it.”

“Everybody knows it, dummy,” said Red. “That Timmer guy proved it. It was in Science News.”

“Besides,” Denny said, “you can have irregular time series without chaos. Look at eclipses.”

“Solar system is chaotic,” said the twins. “Poincare proved it.”

“Ah, screw you.”

“Up yours.”

“S’what are we gonna do about it?” Red asked. The others all looked at him.

“I dunno, Red,” Jimmy said, scratching his head. “Get a really big freaking cork?”

Red’s face illustrated his nickname. “Naw, I mean those people on the boat. Somebody’s gotta get them outta the hole.”

“You crazy, dude?” said Denny. “They’re croakers, for sure. If the singularity didn’t crush them, they’ve run out of food and water by now.”

“Hey!” said Jimmy, with a nod toward Red. “Watch your mouth.”

“Aw, shit, Red,” the club president said. “You know I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

Red wiped his eye, which had gotten something in it. “I can deal with it.”

“Your brother was a really neat guy,” Denny insisted.

“I know that!” said Red. “But who’s doing squat to rescue him?”

The club fell silent as each contemplated how a rescue might be achieved through a singularity. Finally, one of the twins broke the silence.

“What if it isn’t? A singularity, I mean. Frank and I lurk on a physics Usenet newsgroup out in dot-uni. It’s the real thing, not dot-com crap. Anyhow, this one physicist named Janatpour, he said that physics ought to make sense, and singularities were just artifacts of the math, not real things.”

“Oh, that’s convincing,” said Jimmy.

“No, he pointed out that sunspots are caused by differential rotation of the sun. The northern and southern hemispheres rotate at different speeds, and that sets up eddies in the electromagnetic field.”

“You might have noticed,” Jimmy pointed out, “that the drainhole is here on Terra, not on Sol.”

“Sure,” said Harry. “But Terra has a molten core. What if that has differential rotation? That could put twists into Terra’s electromagnetic field, too.”

“Umm,” said Denny. “You saying the Drainhole is a sunspot?”

“Earthspot, dummy,” said Red, who had recovered his composure.

“Well,” said Frank, taking the handoff from his brother, “if Terra was a ball of plasma, it would be. But it’s the same kind of thing. At least this Janatpour guy says so, and Timmer and Whistler both think he might be on to something.”

“Those two are too emotionally involved,” said Denny. “You need complete detachment to do science.”

Red leaned forward and the card table rocked a little from the weight. “So, if the drainhole is a vortex, not a singularity. . . .”

“. . . it’s gotta open up somewhere else. Not on Terra, or we woulda heard something. But somewhere.”

Visions of gateways, of alternate universes, of time portals danced in their heads. Denny’s dad came to the head of the cellar stairs. “What are you kids up to?” he called.

A chorus of “Nothing,” “Just talk,” “We’re cool, Dad,” and “We’re gonna rescue the Ferry People.”

“Okay,” Mr. Young replied. “Just don’t run any experiments without my okay.”

Another chorus of “okay” and then they all turned to Red.

“Whaddaya mean we’re gonna rescue the people on the ferry?”

If the Adventure Club had owned a submersible, they might have sent it into the drainhole. But their club treasury, Jimmy reported, could not take the hit. So they did the next best thing.

“If we can just get a message back from them,” Red insisted, “the grownups would get off their butts and do something.” He meant a message back from his brother Steve, but he didn’t say that. The others, dazzled by the headlines they could read afterward, set themselves to planning.

First, they needed a lot of rope. And a container of some sort for the message. They needed a boat so they could get close enough to the drainhole when it opened to throw the container into it, and to give them a base to haul it back out again. That was conceptual engineering.

Details. They bought a lockbox with a combination lock on it so it wouldn’t open up accidentally during transit. Red wrote a message to put inside, and they added extra paper and pens so the Ferry People could write an answer. Denny painted the combination for the lock on the outside—they left it at 0-0-ft—so they could open it up at the other end.

How much rope would they need? How deep was the hole? “ ‘Deep’ is the wrong word,” Jimmy said. “The vortex goes along Kaluza-Klein dimensions, not up or down or nothing.” They bought as much clothesline as the treasury could afford, nearly a thousand feet, and coiled it around a garden hose windlass so they could crank it back out. Denny was a Boy Scout, so he tied the ends of the different coils together with knots guaranteed not to come loose.

Jimmy’s folks had money and had a big pond in their backyard in the suburbs. The club set up a target on the pond and practiced throwing the rope, using a weight tied to the end so they wouldn’t damage the box. Jimmy’s mom saw them and asked what they were up to and they all chorused, “Target practice,” and she shook her head and went back inside. Denny and Red and Frank were most accurate, so they got the job of actually making the throw. They practiced winding the rope back in, too.

The twins borrowed their dad’s fishing boat and paddled it into the bay one night and hid it under the pilings for Alaskan Way. Since the harbor was shut down, there was little traffic on the Bay or along the shore, but they did it in the evening and didn’t start the outboard. They pretended they were infiltrating an enemy coast.

The next evening, Denny and Red took the windlass down and screwed it to one of the boat’s seats.

After that, it was a matter of waiting.

Since no one knew when the vortex would open, the club worked out a watch schedule. School hours were out, as was dinner time, and Jimmy could not always come into the city. They decided to have always two sentries in the boat, one of them to throw, the other to work the windlass.

In practice, they couldn’t keep the schedule. There were unexpected chores at home, or school assignments. On weekends, the entire club would hang out near the pier, with binoculars and notebooks, and take turns in the boat. Once, some fishermen saw them climbing down to the water-level and warned them that it was dangerous “because of the Drainhole.”

“As if we didn’t know about it,” Denny commented afterward.

The hole opened up twice while they were in school and one other time during breakfast. They could hear the hooting of the klaxon all over the city and, like everyone else, they stopped what they were doing, and didn’t even speak until the all-clear sounded.

Finally, it happened while they were on watch.

It was a weekend and Red and Denny were in the boat that hour. Jimmy and the twins were above, on Alaskan Way, pretending that they knew what girls were all about. There were only a handful of pedestrians about on miscellaneous mid-day missions. Jimmy had just said that maybe they should give up the vigils, when the hooting klaxon gave them a jump and they turned and crowded the guard rail.

“Hot spit,” said Harry. “There it is!”

It was nothing more than a fog bank, but the siren was triggered by the VTS radar net, so they knew this was the real thing. The radars were seeing double again.

“It’s like a lens,” Frank said, pointing. “If we could see through the fog like radar, everything in line with the vortex would look farther away.”

“There they go,” said Harry.

The motorboat’s outboard had started up and the craft putted out from under the pilings and toward the fog. Red was at the engine and Denny, in the bow, already had the rope coiled for throwing.

“Hope he doesn’t get too close,” Jimmy said, and Frank looked at him.

“They aren’t stupid.” He raised his binoculars and watched his chums’ progress.

Red put the boat just at the edge of the fog and turned it broadside. Denny stood up and whirled the rope around his head. The message box on the end flashed every time it caught the sun.

A Coast Guard power boat sped across the Bay, giving the fog a wide berth. “Get off the water!” a voice boomed at the messengers. “These waters are dangerous!”

Denny let fly and the box tumbled into the fog. The rope drifted after it, then became taut and began to unreel from the windlass.

The idlers who had been walking along Alaskan Way had come to the rail, drawn by the novelty. “What the hell are those kids up to?” Frank heard someone ask.

“They’re trying to send a message to the ferry,” he told the man, with a mix of defensiveness and pride. Harry piped his agreement. Jimmy, on the other hand, remained silent and stepped away from the twins.

The windlass ran out to the end. The rope jerked and the boat began to drift into the fog.

“Oh, shit!” said Harry from the esplanade.

Denny said later that the same thought crossed his mind. Red had kept the motor running “to maintain station,” but he was working the windlass. Denny leapt past him to seize the outboard’s handle and turn them away from the vortex. He revved the motor and the boat moved slowly away from the fog, as if dragging an enormous anchor. Then it slowed to a stop and began moving backward.

“I can’t wind it in!” Red cried from the windlass. “It’s like the box got really, really heavy.”

“Cut it loose, cut it loose!” Denny’s pants were wet and he hoped everyone would think it was from the water. He reached overboard to splash water on himself and felt a really strong current. The vortex was sucking in water and air and—pretty soon—him and Red. Overhead, the twisting magnetic fields were confusing the birds’ directional senses and they were circling endlessly around the drainhole.

Then the whole windlass tore loose from the seat where they had screwed it in. It whipped overboard, hit the water, and skipped twice before it slithered at the end of the rope into the fog.

Red went over with it.

“He got tangled in the rope,” Denny told the twins while they waited for their parents to come get them from Coast Guard custody. “He was gone before I knew it. There was nothing I coulda done, guys.” They were all crying and snuffling, sucked down by reality from their science fantasy, no less than Red had been sucked in by the vortex.

“He’ll be with Steve now,” Harry said. “He loved his brother.”

“Yeah,” said Frank, fingering his binoculars. “Denny, I was watching. Red didn’t get tangled in the rope. He held on to it and didn’t let go.”

Jennifer Doonerbeck

Early morning, chilly, going on toward autumn. A few fishing boats are tied up to the wharves along Alaskan Way, and the waves slap against hulls, pilings, palisades. Gulls laugh. A distant motorboat near the marina buzzes like a lawnmower. The lighting is indirect; a reluctant sun lingers behind the mountains.

Two joggers appear, side by side, their running shoes clapping nearly in time. Strangers, they have met by chance and have fallen in together on their run, and now they pace each other. An older man walking briskly past them in the other direction wonders if they are sisters. They are much of a type, similar in build and age and dress; young, but past the first rush of it; firm muscles and dirty-straw hair tied back with elastic sweat bands; braving the chill in gym shorts and halter tops. The fishermen breaking fast in a dockside cafe watch in frank admiration.

The breeze had been off the Bay, cool and with the bite of salt in it. Now it shifts, and a land breeze whispers out over the water. Flags snap and turn. A windsock at the end of one of the docks swings about. Gulls shear off with loud complaint. The breakfasting fishermen, swinging like windsocks themselves, shift their gaze toward the Bay. The joggers halt and stand with chests heaving and with sweat dripping off their brows. One—she is by a fraction the taller of the two—rests a hand on a piling. They, too, study the Bay.

For a moment, an anxious silence: The scene is frozen. The fishermen hold their coffee mugs or silverware half-raised. The joggers gaze into the chuckling water to judge the run of the waves. Even the gulls coast on the soft winds with unmoving wings.

But . . . no siren wails, and everyone relaxes, as if they had been suspended on strings now suddenly cut. Fishermen and waitresses chatter, and china and silverware clink. The cook hollers something from the back and the men laugh. The joggers bend into their cooling-down stretches, as if they have only just now remembered to do them.

The three fishermen sitting near the front of the cafe glance toward the empty piers that lend Alaskan Way its abandoned look. The ferries dock out past Alki Point these days and most commercial shipping and recreational boating put in elsewhere as well. The bearded man, the middle of the three, remembers how he and Pete Jurgowitz, the Hyak’s mate, used to sail the bay together as kids, but the thought is only reflex, the tear of memory remains unstarted, and he does not speak of it to his friends.

On his right sits a solid young man with hard muscles. He wishes that the drainhole would at least open and close on a regular schedule—“like that geyser thing out in Yellowstone.” The previous week it had not opened at all, but the week before that it had stayed open for several days, disturbing currents and winds all the way out into the Sound. “No one knew jack when Hyak happened,” he says, “but now with the buoys marking the place an’ the radars watching for that ‘pair of slacks’ . . .”

“Parallax,” says the bearded man, who watches the Discovery channel.

“. . . Anyone gets sucked in now,” the younger man insists, “they wanna get sucked in, or they’re just plain stupid.”

The third man’s attention has been drawn back to the joggers, whose lithe and graceful motions he greatly admires. He asks the waitress the name of the woman in the tan shorts, but the waitress, suspecting carnal thoughts on his part, pretends ignorance. But she herself spares a glance at the younger woman and remembers when she too possessed such a body.

The woman in tan is Jennifer Doonerbeck, a graduate student at the University. She is not conventionally pretty, but it’s all in the presentation. She gives no thought to men’s interest when she dresses, and it is this artlessness that becomes the greater art. The color of her jogging outfit is very nearly the tone of her suntan, and the third fisherman has discovered that when he squints his eyes a little she seems to be naked.

“Why are those men over there squinting like that?” Jennifer asks her companion.

The taller woman unbends from her stretches and glances at the cafe. “Sailors all get that look about them. The chop flashes from the sunlight, so they squint to cut down the glare.” The explanation satisfies both the teller and the told, and the fishermen would have agreed red-faced had they overheard. It is not, in any event, a matter of great moment. Jennifer finds her companion staring out once more silently at the Bay and asks who she once knew.

It is not a question that needs an explanation. It seems as if all Seattle is known by who they once knew. Hello, glad to meet you, who did you know on the Hyak? Jennifer has heard of strangers pretending to such acquaintances, as if they want to have been touched by the tragedy, and feel a loss at having had no loss. It strikes her as a bit of theft to steal a bereavement to which they are not entitled.

The taller woman, whose name is Mack of all unlikely things—it is short for Mackenzie, and that is bad enough—admits to losing a colleague and a neighbor’s boy, thus pulling rank on Jennifer, who has lost only a cousin.

“Do you think we’re safe here?” Jennifer is watching the ring of buoys that delimit the danger zone. They are welded together by a rigid framework and are anchored to the floor of the bay so that they will not be drawn into the drainhole when it opens. A chain-link fence has been installed to prevent future tragedies like that high-school science club.

Mack is not sure, but thinks there is some reason why the anomaly can form only over water. Something to do with fluid motion, of which her jogging had been an example. “It used to be the Bermuda Triangle, you know,” she says, repeating a tidbit of folk wisdom fast becoming consensual reality.

Jennifer has heard about the Bermuda connection, but she does not understand how a hole could cross the whole country without creating an Arkansas Triangle or an Wyoming Triangle or whatever along its path. Or did it travel through the Earth like a tunneling mole?

“My cousin grew up on a farm out near Spokane,” Jennifer says, and Mack listens politely because that is what one does when a chance companion mentions her Hyak loss. “She was nice and we had fun when my folks took me out there in the summer, but I always thought she was like, you know, a dork?” Nil nisi honum, the Romans had once said, but they hadn’t had cousins from Spokane. “When she grew up and moved here to the city, she was always calling me and I was always making excuses and blowing her off, so I’m sorry now I was so rude to her.”

Mack thinks that the Hyak has been the cause of more confessions than a hundred priests and a tent revival, but she is not about to withhold absolution. A native of Manhattan driven by ambition to abide a while in the Northwest, she does not tell Jennifer that from her point of view Seattle and Spokane are equally hick, and “the City” refers to one City alone on all the earth. “You didn’t have an obligation to her,” she tells the other woman.

“No,” Jennifer says, “but I sorta wish I’d had.” And that remark, more than anything Jennifer has said up till now, strikes Mack in the heart.

The fishermen have left the cafe and walk toward the pier where their boat is one of the few still mooring there. One calls a polite greeting and the joggers wave back. Jennifer notices the tight buns one of them boasts. Mack pays them no attention.

Mack’s colleague had not been especially close to her, not even in the hypothetical way that Jennifer’s cousin might have been. His office had been a few doors from hers, high up in one of Seattle’s tallest buildings. They had worked together on a couple of projects and he had flirted with her a few times, but the dalliance had offered her no career advantage and she had not responded. The neighbor’s boy, Dale, was another matter. He had been kind of sweet—young enough for a puppy-love crush on the “neighbor lady,” and just old enough to make it flattering. His mother was a homebody, but seeing afterward how the woman had been emptied entirely of life, Mack wondered whether she herself, had she been a breeder, could have produced a boy half so engaging as Dale. But if she knew her own strengths, Mack knew her own weaknesses, too; and “mother” had never been her metier. Now she wondered whether she was diminished in some manner because she could never suffer a loss, so keen as her neighbor had.

It was a day for hypotheticals. Cousins hypothetically helped. Children hypothetically bom. Joggers hypothetically stripped naked. Vortexes hypothetically forming over land. In theory, that last would never happen. But in theory, Mack could still run after the three fishermen and have them all, each and severally, upon their coiled nets. It would not have been the most comfortable experience, fishnets being what they are, and the fishermen would have known some disappointment that it had not been Jennifer to jump their bones. Still, it shows the limits of theory, because it just wasn’t going to happen. A drainhole over dry land would remain theoretically impossible right up until the moment it happened. Then the brainiacs would punch some buttons on their computers and come up with a new theory.

ATN Puget Sound motors out from Harbor Island, where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has built its new facilities. The Vortex is neither oceanic nor atmospheric, but NOAA has somehow inherited ownership. The barge, borrowed from the Coast Guard, carries on it a vehicle a little like the Mars Rovers. Mack and Jennifer point it out to each other and speculate on its purpose.

A woman standing on the barge sees them and waves. The vehicle is called the Odysseus and the plan is to place it in the water and allow the Vortex, when it next opens, to suck it through to the Other Side while it sends data back through a miles-long umbilical of the lightest and strongest fullerene-tube optical cable. Every scientist in the world had begged a space on the platform for an instrument or experiment. Had all requests been granted, Odysseus would have shamed the Queen Mary II.

But with no clear notion of the environment awaiting it, the instrument package has been designed to roll, fly, and float, to withstand vacuum and pressure and heat and cold and heavy accelerations and hard radiation and, like any device manufactured to such contradictory specifications, it does none of these things well. Dr. Whistler—she is the woman standing on the barge—does not expect Odysseus to survive for long. She does not know if the umbilical will be long enough to reach the Other Side. She is not even sure that there is an Other Side. But she hopes for something, for a reading, for even a single picture. She is not so optimistic as to expect an answer, but it is her fondest dream to learn that there is an answer.

The diesels on a fishing boat power up, belching a cloud of black smoke, and the buff young man with the tight buns casts off. The boat gives wide berth to the buoys marking the locus of the Vortex. It isn’t open, but there is no telling when it might. Jennifer recognizes them and waves, jumping up and down with a vivacity that five years of corporate ladder-climbing has sucked from the heart of her companion. The fishing boat toots its horn for Jennifer, but Mack is still gazing into the depths of the Bay, thinking about the boy, Dale.

“Dawn was theirs,” she quotes, “and sunset and the colours of the earth.”

Jennifer turns and says, Hunh? She was an English major, but does not recognize the line.

These hearts were woven of human joys and care,

Washed marvelously with sorrow, swift to mirth.

The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,

And sunset and the colours of the earth.

POL POT’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER (FANTASY)

Geoff Ryman

IN CAMBODIA PEOPLE ARE used to ghosts. Ghosts buy newspapers. They own property.

A few years ago, spirits owned a house in Phnom Penh, at the Tra Bek end of Monivong Boulevard. Khmer Rouge had murdered the whole family and there was no one left alive to inherit it. People cycled past the building, leaving it boarded up. Sounds of weeping came from inside.

Then a professional inheritor arrived from America. She’d done her research and could claim to be the last surviving relative of no fewer than three families. She immediately sold the house to a Chinese businessman, who turned the ground floor into a photocopying shop.

The copiers began to print pictures of the original owners.

At first, single black-and-white photos turned up in the copied dossiers of aid workers or government officials. The father of the murdered family had been a lawyer. He stared fiercely out of the photos as if demanding something. In other photocopies, his beautiful daughters forlornly hugged each other. The background was hazy like fog.

One night the owner heard a noise and trundled downstairs to find all five photocopiers printing one picture after another of faces: young college men, old women, parents with a string of babies, or government soldiers in uniform. He pushed the big green off-buttons. Nothing happened.

He pulled out all the plugs, but the machines kept grinding out face after face. Women in beehive hairdos or clever children with glasses looked wistfully out of the photocopies. They seemed to be dreaming of home in the 1960s, when Phnom Penh was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

News spread. People began to visit the shop to identify lost relatives. Women would cry, “That’s my mother! I didn’t have a photograph!” They would weep and press the flimsy A4 sheets to their breasts. The paper went limp from tears and humidity as if it too were crying.

Soon, a throng began to gather outside the shop every morning to view the latest batch of faces. In desperation, the owner announced that each morning’s harvest would be delivered direct to The Truth, a magazine of remembrance.

Then one morning he tried to open the house-door to the shop and found it blocked. He went ‘round to the front of the building and rolled open the metal shutters.

The shop was packed from floor to ceiling with photocopies. The ground floor had no windows—the room had been filled from the inside. The owner pulled out a sheet of paper and saw himself on the ground, his head beaten in by a hoe. The same image was on every single page.

He buried the photocopiers and sold the house at once. The new owner liked its haunted reputation; it kept people away. The for sale sign was left hanging from the second floor.

In a sense, the house had been bought by another ghost.

This is a completely untrue story about someone who must exist.

POL POT’S ONLY CHILD, a daughter, was born in 1986. Her name was Sith, and in 2004, she was eighteen years old.

Sith liked air conditioning and luxury automobiles.

Her hair was dressed in cornrows and she had a spiky piercing above one eye. Her jeans were elaborately slashed and embroidered. Her pink T-shirts bore slogans in English: CARE KOOKY. PINK MOLL.

Sith lived like a woman on Thai television, doing as she pleased in lip-gloss and Sunsilked hair. Nine simple rules helped her avoid all unpleasantness.

1. Never think about the past or politics.

2. Ignore ghosts. They cannot hurt you.

3. Do not go to school. Hire tutors. Don’t do homework. It is disturbing.

4. Always be driven everywhere in either the Mercedes or the BMW.

5. Avoid all well-dressed Cambodian boys. They are the sons of the estimated 250,000 new generals created by the regime. Their sons can behave with impunity.

6. Avoid all men with potbellies. They eat too well and therefore must be corrupt.

7. Avoid anyone who drives a Toyota Viva or Honda Dream motorcycle.

8. Don’t answer letters or phone calls.

9. Never make any friends.

There was also a tenth rule, but that went without saying.

Rotten fruit rinds and black mud never stained Sith’s designer sports shoes. Disabled beggars never asked her for alms. Her life began yesterday, which was effectively the same as today.

Every day, her driver took her to the new Soriya Market. It was almost the only place that Sith went. The color of silver, Soriya rose up in many floors to a round glass dome.

Sith preferred the 142nd Street entrance. Its green awning made everyone look as if they were made of jade. The doorway went directly into the ice-cold jewelry rotunda with its floor of polished black and white stone. The individual stalls were hung with glittering necklaces and earrings.

Sith liked tiny shiny things that had no memory. She hated politics. She refused to listen to the news. Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter wished the current leadership would behave decently, like her dad always did. To her.

She remembered the sound of her father’s gentle voice. She remembered sitting on his lap in a forest enclosure, being bitten by mosquitoes. Memories of malaria had sunk into her very bones. She now associated forests with nausea, fevers, and pain. A flicker of tree-shade on her skin made her want to throw up and the odor of soil or fallen leaves made her gag. She had never been to Angkor Wat. She read nothing.

Sith shopped. Her driver was paid by the government and always carried an AK-47, but his wife, the housekeeper, had no idea who Sith was. The house was full of swept marble, polished teak furniture, iPods, Xboxes, and plasma screens.

Please remember that every word of this story is a lie. Pol Pot was no doubt a dedicated communist who made no money from ruling Cambodia. Nevertheless, a hefty allowance arrived for Sith every month from an account in Switzerland.

Nothing touched Sith, until she fell in love with the salesman at Hello Phones.

Cambodian readers may know that in 2004 there was no mobile phone shop in Soriya Market. However, there was a branch of Hello Phone Cards that had a round blue sales counter with orange trim. This shop looked like that.

Every day Sith bought or exchanged a mobile phone there. She would sit and flick her hair at the salesman.

His name was Dara, which means Star. Dara knew about deals on call prices, sim cards, and the new phones that showed videos. He could get her any call tone she liked.

Talking to Dara broke none of Sith’s rules. He wasn’t fat, nor was he well dressed, and far from being a teenager, he was a comfortably mature twenty-four years old.

One day, Dara chuckled and said, “As a friend I advise you, you don’t need another mobile phone.”

Sith wrinkled her nose. “I don’t like this one anymore. It’s blue. I want something more feminine. But not frilly. And it should have better sound quality.”

“Okay, but you could save your money and buy some more nice clothes.”

Pol Pot’s beautiful daughter lowered her chin, which she knew made her neck look long and graceful. “Do you like my clothes?”

“Why ask me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s good to check out your look.”

Dara nodded. “You look cool. What does your sister say?”

Sith let him know she had no family. “Ah,” he said, and quickly changed the subject. That was terrific. Secrecy and sympathy in one easy movement.

Sith came back the next day and said that she’d decided that the rose-colored phone was too feminine. Dara laughed aloud and his eyes sparkled. Sith had come late in the morning just so that he could ask this question. “Are you hungry? Do you want to meet for lunch?”

Would he think she was cheap if she said yes? Would he say she was snobby if she said no?

“Just so long as we eat in Soriya Market,” she said.

She was torn between BBWorld Burgers and Lucky7. BBWorld was big, round, and just two floors down from the dome. Lucky7 Burgers was part of the Lucky Supermarket, such a good store that a tiny jar of Maxwell House cost US$2.40.

They decided on BBWorld. It was full of light and they could see the town spread out through the wide clean windows. Sith sat in silence.

Pol Pot’s daughter had nothing to say unless she was buying something.

Or rather she had only one thing to say, but she must never say it.

Dara did all the talking. He talked about how the guys on the third floor could get him a deal on original copies of Grand Theft Auto. He hinted that he could get Sith discounts from Bsfashion, the spotlit modern shop one floor down.

Suddenly he stopped. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, you know.” He said it in a kindly, grownup voice. “I can see, you’re a properly brought up girl. I like that. It’s nice.”

Sith still couldn’t find anything to say. She could only nod. She wanted to run away.

“Would you like to go to K-Four?”

K-Four, the big electronics shop, stocked all the reliable brand names: Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic, Philips, or Denon. It was so expensive that almost nobody shopped there, which is why Sith liked it. A crowd of people stood outside and stared through the window at a huge home entertainment center showing a DVD of Ice Age. On the screen, a little animal was being chased by a glacier. It was so beautiful!

Sith finally found something to say. “If I had one of those, I would never need to leave the house.”

Dara looked at her sideways and decided to laugh.

The next day Sith told him that all the phones she had were too big. Did he have one that she could wear around her neck like jewelry?

This time they went to Lucky7 Burgers, and sat across from the Revlon counter. They watched boys having their hair layered by Revlon’s natural beauty specialists.

Dara told her more about himself. His father had died in the wars. His family now lived in the country. Sith’s Coca-Cola suddenly tasted of anti-malarial drugs.

“But . . . you don’t want to live in the country,” she said.

“No. I have to live in Phnom Penh to make money. But my folks are good country people. Modest.” He smiled, embarrassed.

They’ll have hens and a cousin who shimmies up coconut trees. There will be trees all around but no shops anywhere. The earth will smell.

Sith couldn’t finish her drink. She sighed and smiled and said abruptly, “I’m sorry. It’s been cool. But I have to go.” She slunk sideways out of her seat as slowly as molasses.

Walking back into the jewelry rotunda with nothing to do, she realized that Dara would think she didn’t like him.

And that made the lower part of her eyes sting.

She went back the next day and didn’t even pretend to buy a mobile phone. She told Dara that she’d left so suddenly the day before because she’d remembered a hair appointment.

He said that he could see she took a lot of trouble with her hair. Then he asked her out for a movie that night.

Sith spent all day shopping in K-Four.

They met at six. Dara was so considerate that he didn’t even suggest the horror movie. He said he wanted to see Buffalo Girl Hiding, a movie about a country girl who lives on a farm. Sith said with great feeling that she would prefer the horror movie.

The cinema on the top floor opened out directly onto the roof of Soriya. Graffiti had been scratched into the green railings. Why would people want to ruin something new and beautiful? Sith put her arm through Dara’s and knew that they were now boyfriend and girlfriend.

“Finally,” he said.

“Finally what?”

“You’ve done something.”

They leaned on the railings and looked out over other people’s apartments. West toward the river was a building with one huge roof terrace. Women met there to gossip. Children were playing toss-the-sandal. From this distance, Sith was enchanted.

“I just love watching the children.”

The movie, from Thailand, was about a woman whose face turns blue and spotty, and who eats men. The blue woman was yucky, but not as scary as all the badly dubbed voices. The characters sounded possessed. It was though Thai people had been taken over by the spirits of dead Cambodians.

Whenever Sith got scared, she chuckled.

So she sat chuckling with terror. Dara thought she was laughing at a dumb movie and found such intelligence charming. He started to chuckle too. Sith thought he was as frightened as she was. Together in the dark, they took each other’s hands.

Outside afterward, the air hung hot even in the dark and 142nd Street smelled of drains. Sith stood on tiptoe to avoid the oily deposits and cast-off fishbones.

Dara said, “I will drive you home.”

“My driver can take us,” said Sith, flipping open her Kermit-the-Frog mobile.

Her black Mercedes Benz edged to a halt, crunching old plastic bottles in the gutter. The seats were upholstered with tan leather and the driver was armed.

Dara’s jaw dropped. “Who . . . who is your father?”

“He’s dead.”

Dara shook his head. “Who was he?”

Normally Sith used her mother’s family name, but that would not answer this question. Flustered, she tried to think of someone who could be her father. She knew of nobody the right age. She remembered something about a politician who had died. His name came to her and she said it in panic. “My father was Kol Vireakboth.” Had she got the name right? “Please don’t tell anyone.”

Dara covered his eyes. “We—my family, my father—we fought for the KPLA.”

Sith had to stop herself asking what the KPLA was.

Kol Vireakboth had led a faction in the civil wars. It fought against the Khmer Rouge, the Vietnamese, the King, and corruption. It wanted a new way for Cambodia. Kol Vireakboth was a Cambodian leader who had never told a lie or accepted a bribe.

Remember that this is an untrue story.

Dara started to back away from the car. “I don’t think we should be doing this. I’m just a villager, really.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

His eyes closed. “I would expect nothing less from the daughter of Kol Vireakboth.”

Oh for gosh sake, she just picked the man’s name out of the air, she didn’t need more problems. “Please!” she said.

Dara sighed. “Okay. I said I would see you home safely. I will.” Inside the Mercedes, he stroked the tan leather.

When they arrived, he craned his neck to look up at the building. “Which floor are you on?”

“All of them.”

Color drained from his face.

“My driver will take you back,” she said to Dara. As the car pulled away, she stood outside the closed garage shutters, waving forlornly.

Then Sith panicked. Who was Kol Vireakboth? She went online and Googled. She had to read about the wars. Her skin started to creep. All those different factions swam in her head: ANS, NADK, KPR, and KPNLF. The very names seemed to come at her spoken by forgotten voices.

Soon she had all she could stand. She printed out Vireakboth’s picture and decided to have it framed. In case Dara visited.

Kol Vireakboth had a round face and a fatherly smile. His eyes seemed to slant upward toward his nose, looking full of kindly insight. He’d been killed by a car bomb.

All that night, Sith heard whispering.

In the morning, there was another picture of someone else in the tray of her printer.

A long-faced, buck-toothed woman stared out at her in black and white. Sith noted the victim’s fashion lapses. The woman’s hair was a mess, all frizzy. She should have had it straightened and put in some nice highlights. The woman’s eyes drilled into her.

“Can’t touch me,” said Sith. She left the photo in the tray. She went to see Dara, right away, no breakfast.

His eyes were circled with dark flesh and his blue Hello trousers and shirt were not properly ironed.

“Buy the whole shop,” Dara said, looking deranged. “The guys in K-Four just told me some girl in blue jeans walked in yesterday and bought two home theatres. One for the salon, she said, and one for the roof terrace. She paid for both of them in full and had them delivered to the far end of Monivong.”

Sith sighed. “I’m sending one back.” She hoped that sounded abstemious. “It looked too metallic against my curtains.”

Pause.

“She also bought an Aido robot dog for fifteen hundred dollars.”

Sith would have preferred that Dara did not know about the dog. It was just a silly toy; it hadn’t occurred to her that it might cost that much until she saw the bill. “They should not tell everyone about their customers’ business or soon they will have no customers.”

Dara was looking at her as if thinking: This is not just a nice sweet girl.

“I had fun last night,” Sith said in a voice as thin as high clouds.

“So did I.”

“We don’t have to tell anyone about my family. Do we?” Sith was seriously scared of losing him.

“No. But Sith, it’s stupid. Your family, my family, we are not equals.”

“It doesn’t make any difference.”

“You lied to me. Your family is not dead. You have famous uncles.”

She did indeed—Uncle Ieng Sary, Uncle Khieu Samphan, Uncle Ta Mok. All the Pol Pot clique had been called her uncles.

“I didn’t know them that well,” she said. That was true, too.

What would she do if she couldn’t shop in Soriya Market anymore? What would she do without Dara?

She begged. “I am not a strong person. Sometimes I think I am not a person at all. I’m just a space.”

Dara looked suddenly mean. “You’re just a credit card.” Then his face fell. “I’m sorry. That was an unkind thing to say. You are very young for your age and I’m older than you and I should have treated you with more care.”

Sith was desperate. “All my money would be very nice.”

“I’m not for sale.”

He worked in a shop and would be sending money home to a fatherless family; of course he was for sale!

Sith had a small heart, but a big head for thinking. She knew that she had to do this delicately, like picking a flower, or she would spoil the bloom. “Let’s . . . let’s just go see a movie?”

After all, she was beautiful and well brought up and she knew her eyes were big and round. Her tiny heart was aching.

This time they saw Tum Teav, a remake of an old movie from the 1960s. If movies were not nightmares about ghosts, then they tried to preserve the past. When, thought Sith, will they make a movie about Cambodia’s future? Tum Teav was based on a classic tale of a young monk who falls in love with a properly brought up girl but her mother opposes the match. They commit suicide at the end, bringing a curse on their village. Sith sat through it stony-faced. I am not going to be a dead heroine in a romance.

Dara offered to drive her home again and that’s when Sith found out that he drove a Honda Dream. He proudly presented to her the gleaming motorcycle of fast young men. Sith felt backed into a corner. She’d already offered to buy him. Showing off her car again might humiliate him.

So she broke rule number seven.

Dara hid her bag in the back and they went soaring down Monivong Boulevard at night, past homeless people, prostitutes, and chefs staggering home after work. It was late in the year, but it started to rain.

Sith loved it, the cool air brushing against her face, the cooler rain clinging to her eyelashes.

She remembered being five years old in the forest and dancing in the monsoon. She encircled Dara’s waist to stay on the bike and suddenly found her cheek was pressed up against his back. She giggled in fear, not of the rain, but of what she felt.

He dropped her off at home. Inside, everything was dark except for the flickering green light on her printer. In the tray were two new photographs. One was of a child, a little boy, holding up a school prize certificate. The other was a tough, wise-looking old man, with a string of muscle down either side of his ironic, bitter smile. They looked directly at her.

They know who I am.

As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, she heard someone sobbing, far away, as if the sound came from next door. She touched the walls of the staircase. They shivered slightly, constricting in time to the cries.

In her bedroom she extracted one of her many iPods from the tangle of wires and listened to System of a Down, as loud as she could. It helped her sleep. The sound of nu-metal guitars seemed to come roaring out of her own heart.

She was woken up in the sun-drenched morning by the sound of her doorbell many floors down. She heard the housekeeper Jorani call and the door open. Sith hesitated over choice of jeans and top. By the time she got downstairs she found the driver and the housemaid joking with Dara, giving him tea.

Like the sunshine, Dara seemed to disperse ghosts.

“Hi,” he said. “It’s my day off. I thought we could go on a motorcycle ride to the country.”

But not to the country. Couldn’t they just spend the day in Soriya? No, said Dara, there’s lots of other places to see in Phnom Penh.

He drove her, twisting through back streets. How did the city get so poor? How did it get so dirty?

They went to a new and modern shop for CDs that was run by a record label. Dara knew all the cool new music, most of it influenced by Khmer-Americans returning from Long Beach and Compton: Sdey, Phnom Penh Bad Boys, Khmer Kid.

Sith bought twenty CDs.

They went to the National Museum and saw the beautiful Buddha-like head of King Jayavarman VII. Dara without thinking ducked and held up his hands in prayer. They had dinner in a French restaurant with candles and wine, and it was just like in a karaoke video, a boy, a girl, and her money all going out together. They saw the show at Sovanna Phum, and there was a wonderful dance piece with sampled 1940s music from an old French movie, with traditional Khmer choreography.

Sith went home, her heart singing, Dara, Dara, Dara.

In the bedroom, a mobile phone began to ring, over and over. Call 1 said the screen, but gave no name or number, so the person was not on Sith’s list of contacts.

She turned off the phone. It kept ringing. That’s when she knew for certain.

She hid the phone in a pillow in the spare bedroom and put another pillow on top of it and then closed the door.

All forty-two of her mobile phones started to ring. They rang from inside closets, or from the bathroom where she had forgotten them. They rang from the roof terrace and even from inside a shoe under her bed.

“I am a very stubborn girl!” she shouted at the spirits. “You do not scare me.”

She turned up her iPod and finally slept.

As soon as the sun was up, she roused her driver, slumped deep in his hammock.

“Come on, we’re going to Soriya Market,” she said.

The driver looked up at her dazed, then remembered to smile and lower his head in respect.

His face fell when she showed up in the garage with all forty-two of her mobile phones in one black bag.

It was too early for Soriya Market to open. They drove in circles with sunrise blazing directly into their eyes. On the streets, men pushed carts like beasts of burden, or carried cascades of belts into the old Central Market. The old market was domed, art deco, the color of vomit, French. Sith never shopped there.

“Maybe you should go visit your mom,” said the driver. “You know, she loves you. Families are there for when you are in trouble.”

Sith’s mother lived in Thailand and they never spoke. Her mother’s family kept asking for favors: money, introductions, or help with getting a job. Sith didn’t speak to them any longer.

“My family is only trouble.”

The driver shut up and drove.

Finally Soriya opened. Sith went straight to Dara’s shop and dumped all the phones on the blue countertop. “Can you take these back?”

“We only do exchanges. I can give a new phone for an old one.” Dara looked thoughtful. “Don’t worry. Leave them here with me, I’ll go sell them to a guy in the old market, and give you your money tomorrow.” He smiled in approval. “This is very sensible.”

He passed one phone back, the one with video and email. “This is the best one, keep this.”

Dara was so competent. Sith wanted to sink down onto him like a pillow and stay there. She sat in the shop all day, watching him work. One of the guys from the games shop upstairs asked, “Who is this beautiful girl?”

Dara answered proudly, “My girlfriend.”

Dara drove her back on the Dream and at the door to her house, he chuckled. “I don’t want to go.” She pressed a finger against his naughty lips, and smiled and spun back inside from happiness.

She was in the ground-floor garage. She heard something like a rat scuttle. In her bag, the telephone rang. Who were these people to importune her, even if they were dead? She wrenched the mobile phone out of her bag and pushed the green button and put the phone to her ear. She waited. There was a sound like wind.

A child spoke to her, his voice clogged as if he was crying. “They tied my thumbs together.”

Sith demanded. “How did you get my number?”

“I’m all alone!”

“Then ring somebody else. Someone in your family.”

“All my family are dead. I don’t know where I am. My name is—”

Sith clicked the phone off. She opened the trunk of the car and tossed the phone inside it. Being telephoned by ghosts was so . . . unmodern. How could Cambodia become a number one country if its cell phone network was haunted?

She stormed up into the salon. On top of a table, the $1500, no-mess dog stared at her from out of his packaging. Sith clumped up the stairs onto the roof terrace to sleep as far away as she could from everything in the house.

She woke up in the dark, to hear thumping from downstairs.

The sound was metallic and hollow, as if someone were locked in the car. Sith turned on her iPod. Something was making the sound of the music skip. She fought the tangle of wires, and wrenched out another player, a Xen, but it too skipped, burping the sound of speaking voices into the middle of the music.

Had she heard a ripping sound? She pulled out the earphones, and heard something climbing the stairs.

A sound of light, uneven lolloping. She thought of crippled children. Frost settled over her like a heavy blanket and she could not move.

The robot dog came whirring up onto the terrace. It paused at the top of the stairs, its camera nose pointing at her to see, its useless eyes glowing cherry red.

The robot dog said in a warm, friendly voice, “My name is Phalla. I tried to buy my sister medicine and they killed me for it.”

Sith tried to say, “Go away,” but her throat wouldn’t open.

The dog tilted its head. “No one even knows I’m dead. What will you do for all the people who are not mourned?”

Laughter blurted out of her, and Sith saw it rise up as cold vapor into the air.

“We have no one to invite us to the feast,” said the dog.

Sith giggled in terror. “Nothing. I can do nothing!” she said, shaking her head.

“You laugh?” The dog gathered itself and jumped up into the hammock with her. It turned and lifted up its clear plastic tail and laid a genuine turd alongside Sith. Short brown hair was wound up in it, a scalp actually, and a single flat white human tooth smiled out of it.

Sith squawked and overturned both herself and the dog out of the hammock and onto the floor. The dog pushed its nose up against hers and began to sing an old-fashioned children’s song about birds.

Something heavy huffed its way up the stairwell toward her. Sith shivered with cold on the floor and could not move. The dog went on singing in a high, sweet voice. A large shadow loomed out over the top of the staircase, and Sith gargled, swallowing laughter, trying to speak.

“There was thumping in the car and no one in it,” said the driver.

Sith sagged toward the floor with relief. “The ghosts,” she said. “They’re back.” She thrust herself to her feet. “We’re getting out now. Ring the Hilton. Find out if they have rooms.”

She kicked the toy dog down the stairs ahead of her. “We’re moving now!”

Together they all loaded the car, shaking. Once again, the house was left to ghosts. As they drove, the mobile phone rang over and over inside the trunk.

The new Hilton (which does not exist) rose up by the river across from the Department for Cults and Religious Affairs. Tall and marbled and pristine, it had crystal chandeliers and fountains, and wood and brass handles in the elevators.

In the middle of the night only the Bridal Suite was still available, but it had an extra parental chamber where the driver and his wife could sleep. High on the twenty-first floor, the night sparkled with lights and everything was hushed, as far away from Cambodia as it was possible to get.

Things were quiet after that, for a while.

Every day she and Dara went to movies, or went to a restaurant. They went shopping. She slipped him money and he bought himself a beautiful suit. He said, over a hamburger at Lucky7, “I’ve told my mother that I’ve met a girl.”

Sith smiled and thought: and I bet you told her that I’m rich.

“I’ve decided to live in the Hilton,” she told him.

Maybe we could live in the Hilton. A pretty smile could hint at that.

The rainy season ended. The last of the monsoons rose up dark gray with a froth of white cloud on top, looking exactly like a giant wave about to break.

Dry cooler air arrived.

After work was over Dara convinced her to go for a walk along the river in front of the Royal Palace. He went to the men’s room to change into a new luxury suit and Sith thought: he’s beginning to imagine life with all that money.

As they walked along the river, exposed to all those people, Sith shook inside. There were teenage boys everywhere. Some of them were in rags, which was reassuring, but some of them were very well dressed indeed, the sons of Impunity who could do anything. Sith swerved suddenly to avoid even seeing them. But Dara in his new beige suit looked like one of them, and the generals’ sons nodded to him with quizzical eyebrows, perhaps wondering who he was.

In front of the palace, a pavilion reached out over the water. Next to it a traditional orchestra bashed and wailed out something old fashioned. Hundreds of people crowded around a tiny wat. Dara shook Sith’s wrist and they stood up to see.

People held up bundles of lotus flowers and incense in prayer. They threw the bundles into the wat. Monks immediately shoveled the joss sticks and flowers out of the back.

Behind the wat, children wearing T-shirts and shorts black with filth rootled through the dead flowers, the smoldering incense, and old coconut shells.

Sith asked, “Why do they do that?”

“You are so innocent!” chuckled Dara and shook his head. The evening was blue and gold. Sith had time to think that she did not want to go back to a hotel and that the only place she really felt happy was next to Dara. All around that thought was something dark and tangled.

Dara suggested with affection that they should get married.

It was as if Sith had her answer ready. “No, absolutely not,” she said at once. “How can you ask that? There is not even anyone for you to ask! Have you spoken to your family about me? Has your family made any checks about my background?”

Which was what she really wanted to know.

Dara shook his head. “I have explained that you are an orphan, but they are not concerned with that. We are modest people. They will be happy if I am happy.”

“Of course they won’t be! Of course they will need to do checks.”

Sith scowled. She saw her way to sudden advantage. “At least they must consult fortunetellers. They are not fools. I can help them. Ask them the names of the fortunetellers they trust.”

Dara smiled shyly. “We have no money.”

“I will give them money and you can tell them that you pay.”

Dara’s eyes searched her face. “I don’t want that.”

“How will we know if it is a good marriage? And your poor mother, how can you ask her to make a decision like this without information? So. You ask your family for the names of good professionals they trust, and I will pay them, and I will go to Prime Minister Hun Sen’s own personal fortuneteller, and we can compare results.”

Thus she established again both her propriety and her status.

In an old romance, the parents would not approve of the match and the fortuneteller would say that the marriage was ill-omened. Sith left nothing to romance.

She offered the family’s fortunetellers whatever they wanted—a car, a farm—and in return demanded a written copy of their judgment. All of them agreed that the portents for the marriage were especially auspicious.

Then she secured an appointment with the Prime Minister’s fortuneteller.

Hun Sen’s Kru Taey was a lady in a black business suit. She had long fingernails like talons, but they were perfectly manicured and frosted white.

She was the kind of fortuneteller who is possessed by someone else’s spirit. She sat at a desk and looked at Sith as unblinking as a fish, both her hands steepled together. After the most basic of hellos, she said. “Dollars only. Twenty-five thousand. I need to buy my son an apartment.”

“That’s a very high fee,” said Sith.

“It’s not a fee. It is a consideration for giving you the answer you want. My fee is another twenty-five thousand dollars.”

They negotiated. Sith liked the Kru Taey’s manner. It confirmed everything Sith believed about life.

The fee was reduced somewhat but not the consideration.

“Payment upfront now,” the Kru Taey said. She wouldn’t take a check. Like only the very best restaurants she accepted foreign credit cards. Sith’s Swiss card worked immediately. It had unlimited credit in case she had to leave the country in a hurry.

The Kru Taey said, “I will tell the boy’s family that the marriage will be particularly fortunate.”

Sith realized that she had not yet said anything about a boy, his family, or a marriage.

The Kru Taey smiled. “I know you are not interested in your real fortune. But to be kind, I will tell you unpaid that this marriage really is particularly well favored. All the other fortunetellers would have said the same thing without being bribed.”

The Kru Taey’s eyes glinted in the most unpleasant way. “So you needn’t have bought them farms or paid me an extra twenty-five thousand dollars.”

She looked down at her perfect fingernails. “You will be very happy indeed. But not before your entire life is overturned.”

The back of Sith’s arms prickled as if from cold. She should have been angry but she could feel herself smiling. Why?

And why waste politeness on the old witch? Sith turned to go without saying good-bye.

“Oh, and about your other problem,” said the woman.

Sith turned back and waited.

“Enemies,” said the Kru Taey, “can turn out to be friends.”

Sith sighed. “What are you talking about?”

The Kru Taey’s smile was as wide as a tiger-trap. “The million people your father killed.”

Sith went hard. “Not a million,” she said. “Somewhere between two hundred and fifty and five hundred thousand.”

“Enough,” smiled the Kru Taey. “My father was one of them.” She smiled for a moment longer. “I will be sure to tell the Prime Minister that you visited me.”

Sith snorted as if in scorn. “I will tell him myself.”

But she ran back to her car.

That night, Sith looked down on all the lights like diamonds. She settled onto the giant mattress and turned on her iPod.

Someone started to yell at her. She pulled out the earpieces and jumped to the window. It wouldn’t open. She shook it and wrenched its frame until it reluctantly slid an inch and she threw the iPod out of the twenty-first-floor window.

She woke up late the next morning, to hear the sound of the TV. She opened up the double doors into the salon and saw Jorani, pressed against the wall.

“The TV . . .” Jorani said, her eyes wide with terror.

The driver waited by his packed bags. He stood up, looking as mournful as a bloodhound.

On the widescreen TV there was what looked like a pop music karaoke video. Except that the music was very old fashioned. Why would a pop video show a starving man eating raw maize in a field? He glanced over his shoulder in terror as he ate. The glowing singalong words were the song that the dog had sung at the top of the stairs. The starving man looked up at Sith and corn mash rolled out of his mouth.

“It’s all like that,” said the driver. “I unplugged the set, but it kept playing on every channel.” He sompiahed but looked miserable. “My wife wants to leave.”

Sith felt shame. It was miserable and dirty, being infested with ghosts. Of course they would want to go.

“It’s okay. I can take taxis,” she said.

The driver nodded, and went into the next room and whispered to his wife. With little scurrying sounds, they gathered up their things. They sompiahed, and apologized.

The door clicked almost silently behind them.

It will always be like this, thought Sith. Wherever I go. It would be like this with Dara.

The hotel telephone started to ring. Sith left it ringing. She covered the TV with a blanket, but the terrible, tinny old music kept wheedling and rattling its way out at her, and she sat on the edge of her bed, staring into space.

I’ll have to leave Cambodia.

At the market, Dara looked even more cheerful than usual. The fortunetellers had pronounced the marriage as very favorable. His mother had invited Sith home for the Pchum Ben festival.

“We can take the bus tomorrow,” he said.

“Does it smell? All those people in one place?”

“It smells of air freshener. Then we take a taxi, and then you will have to walk up the track.” Dara suddenly doubled up in laughter. “Oh, it will be good for you.”

“Will there be dirt?”

“Everywhere! Oh, your dirty Nikes will earn you much merit!”

But at least, thought Sith, there will be no TV or phones.

Two days later, Sith was walking down a dirt track, ducking tree branches. Dust billowed all over her shoes. Dara walked behind her, chuckling, which meant she thought he was scared too.

She heard a strange rattling sound. “What’s that noise?”

“It’s a goat,” he said. “My mother bought it for me in April as a present.”

A goat. How could they be any more rural? Sith had never seen a goat. She never even imagined that she would.

Dara explained. “I sell them to the Muslims. It is Agricultural Diversification.”

There were trees everywhere, shadows crawling across the ground like snakes. Sith felt sick. One mosquito, she promised herself, just one and I will squeal and run away.

The house was tiny, on thin twisting stilts. She had pictured a big fine country house standing high over the ground on concrete pillars with a sunburst carving in the gable. The kitchen was a hut that sat directly on the ground, no stilts, and it was made of palm-leaf panels and there was no electricity. The strip light in the ceiling was attached to a car battery and they kept a live fire on top of the concrete table to cook. Everything smelled of burnt fish.

Sith loved it.

Inside the hut, the smoke from the fires kept the mosquitoes away. Dara’s mother, Mrs. Non Kunthea, greeted her with a smile. That triggered a respectful sompiah from Sith, the prayer-like gesture leaping out of her unbidden. On the platform table was a plastic sack full of dried prawns.

Without thinking, Sith sat on the table and began to pull the salty prawns out of their shells.

Why am I doing this?

Because it’s what I did at home.

Sith suddenly remembered the enclosure in the forest, a circular fenced area. Daddy had slept in one house, and the women in another. Sith would talk to the cooks. For something to do, she would chop vegetables or shell prawns. Then Daddy would come to eat and he’d sit on the platform table and she, little Sith, would sit between his knees.

Dara’s older brother Yuth came back for lunch. He was pot-bellied and drove a taxi for a living, and he moved in hard jabs like an angry old man. He reached too far for the rice and Sith could smell his armpits.

“You see how we live,” Yuth said to Sith. “This is what we get for having the wrong patron. Sihanouk thought we were anti-monarchist. To Hun Sen, we were the enemy. Remember the Work for Money program?”

No.

“They didn’t give any of those jobs to us. We might as well have been the Khmer Rouge!”

The past, thought Sith, why don’t they just let it go? Why do they keep boasting about their old wars?

Mrs. Non Kunthea chuckled with affection. “My eldest son was born angry,” she said. “His slogan is ‘ten years is not too late for revenge.’ ”

Yuth started up again. “They treat that old monster Pol Pot better than they treat us. But then, he was an important person. If you go to his stupa in Anlong Veng, you will see that people leave offerings! They ask him for lottery numbers!”

He crumpled his green, soft, old-fashioned hat back onto his head and said, “Nice to meet you, Sith. Dara, she’s too high class for the likes of you.” But he grinned as he said it. He left, swirling disruption in his wake.

The dishes were gathered. Again without thinking, Sith swept up the plastic tub and carried it to the blackened branches. They rested over puddles where the washing-up water drained.

“You shouldn’t work,” said Dara’s mother. “You are a guest.”

“I grew up in a refugee camp,” said Sith. After all, it was true.

Dara looked at her with a mix of love, pride, and gratitude for the good fortune of a rich wife who works.

And that was the best Sith could hope for. This family would be fine for her.

In the late afternoon, all four brothers came with their wives for the end of Pchum Ben, when the ghosts of the dead can wander the Earth. People scatter rice on the temple floors to feed their families. Some ghosts have small mouths so special rice is used.

Sith never took part in Pchum Ben. How could she go to the temple and scatter rice for Pol Pot?

The family settled in the kitchen chatting and joking, and it all passed in a blur for Sith. Everyone else had family they could honor. To Sith’s surprise one of the uncles suggested that people should write names of the deceased and burn them, to transfer merit. It was nothing to do with Pchum Ben, but a lovely idea, so all the family wrote down names.

Sith sat with her hands jammed under her arms.

Dara’s mother asked, “Isn’t there a name you want to write, Sith?”

“No,” said Sith in a tiny voice. How could she write the name Pol Pot? He was surely roaming the world let loose from hell. “There is no one.”

Dara rubbed her hand. “Yes there is, Sith. A very special name.”

“No, there’s not.”

Dara thought she didn’t want them to know her father was Kol Vireakboth. He leant forward and whispered. “I promise. No one will see it.”

Sith’s breath shook. She took the paper and started to cry.

“Oh,” said Dara’s mother, stricken with sympathy. “Everyone in this country has a tragedy.”

Sith wrote the name Kol Vireakboth.

Dara kept the paper folded and caught Sith’s eyes. You see? he seemed to say. I have kept your secret safe. The paper burned.

Thunder slapped a clear sky about the face. It had been sunny, but now as suddenly as a curtain dropped down over a doorway, rain fell. A wind came from nowhere, tearing away a flap of palm-leaf wall, as if forcing its way in.

The family whooped and laughed and let the rain drench their shoulders as they stood up to push the wall back down, to keep out the rain.

But Sith knew. Her father’s enemy was in the kitchen.

The rain passed; the sun came out. The family chuckled and sat back down around or on the table. They lowered dishes of food and ate, making parcels of rice and fish with their fingers. Sith sat rigidly erect, waiting for misfortune.

What would the spirit of Kol Vireakboth do to Pol Pot’s daughter? Would he overturn the table, soiling her with food? Would he send mosquitoes to bite and make her sick? Would he suck away all her good fortune, leaving the marriage blighted, her new family estranged?

Or would a kindly spirit simply wish that the children of all Cambodians could escape, escape the past?

Suddenly, Sith felt at peace. The sunlight and shadows looked new to her and her senses started to work in magic ways.

She smelled a perfume of emotion, sweet and bracing at the same time. The music from a neighbor’s cassette player touched her arm gently. Words took the form of sunlight on her skin.

No one is evil, the sunlight said. But they can be false.

False, how? Sith asked without speaking, genuinely baffled.

The sunlight smiled with an old man’s stained teeth. You know very well how.

All the air swelled with the scent of the food, savoring it. The trees sighed with satisfaction.

Life is true. Sith saw steam from the rice curl up into the branches. Death is false.

The sunlight stood up to go. It whispered. Tell him.

The world faded back to its old self.

That night in a hammock in a room with the other women, Sith suddenly sat bolt upright. Clarity would not let her sleep. She saw that there was no way ahead. She couldn’t marry Dara. How could she ask him to marry someone who was harassed by one million dead? How could she explain I am haunted because I am Pol Pot’s daughter and I have lied about everything?

The dead would not let her marry; the dead would not let her have joy. So who could Pol Pot’s daughter pray to? Where could she go for wisdom?

Loak kru Kol Vireakboth, she said under her breath. Please show me a way ahead.

The darkness was sterner than the sunlight.

To be as false as you are, it said, you first have to lie to yourself.

What lies had Sith told? She knew the facts. Her father had been the head of a government that tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of people and starved the nation through mismanagement. I know the truth.

I just never think about it.

I’ve never faced it.

Well, the truth is as dark as I am, and you live in me, the darkness.

She had read books—well, the first chapter of books—and then dropped them as if her fingers were scalded. There was no truth for her in books. The truth ahead of her would be loneliness, dreary adulthood, and penance.

Grow up.

The palm-leaf panels stirred like waiting ghosts.

All through the long bus ride back, she said nothing. Dara went silent too, and hung his head.

In the huge and empty hotel suite, darkness awaited her. She’d had the phone and the TV removed; her footsteps sounded hollow. Jorani and the driver had been her only friends.

The next day she did not go to Soriya Market. She went instead to the torture museum of Tuol Sleng.

A cadre of young motoboys waited outside the hotel in baseball caps and bling. Instead, Sith hailed a sweet-faced older motoboy with a battered, rusty bike.

As they drove she asked him about his family. He lived alone and had no one except for his mother in Kompong Thom.

Outside the gates of Tuol Sleng he said, “This was my old school.”

In one wing there were rows of rooms with one iron bed in each with handcuffs and stains on the floor. Photos on the wall showed twisted bodies chained to those same beds as they were found on the day of liberation. In one photograph, a chair was overturned as if in a hurry.

Sith stepped outside and looked instead at a beautiful house over the wall across the street. It was a high white house like her own, with pillars and a roof terrace and bougainvillea, a modern daughter’s house. What do they think when they look out from that roof terrace? How can they live here?

The grass was tended and full of hopping birds. People were painting the shutters of the prison a fresh blue-gray.

In the middle wing, the rooms were galleries of photographed faces. They stared out at her like the faces from her printer. Were some of them the same?

“Who are they?” she found herself asking a Cambodian visitor.

“Their own,” the woman replied. “This is where they sent Khmer Rouge cadres who had fallen out of favor. They would not waste such torture on ordinary Cambodians.”

Some of the faces were young and beautiful men. Some were children or dignified old women.

The Cambodian lady kept pace with her. Company? Did she guess who Sith was? “They couldn’t simply beat party cadres to death. They sent them and their entire families here. The children too, the grandmothers. They had different days of the week for killing children and wives.”

An innocent-looking man smiled out at the camera as sweetly as her aged motoboy, directly into the camera of his torturers. He seemed to expect kindness from them, and decency. Comrades, he seemed to say.

The face in the photograph moved. It smiled more broadly and was about to speak.

Sith’s eyes darted away. The next face sucked all her breath away.

It was not a stranger. It was Dara, her Dara, in black shirt and black cap. She gasped and looked back at the lady. Her pinched and solemn face nodded up and down. Was she a ghost too?

Sith reeled outside and hid her face and didn’t know if she could go on standing. Tears slid down her face and she wanted to be sick and she turned her back so no one could see.

Then she walked to the motoboy, sitting in a shelter. In complete silence, she got on his bike feeling angry at the place, angry at the government for preserving it, angry at the foreigners who visited it like a tourist attraction, angry at everything.

That is not who we are! That is not what I am!

The motoboy slipped onto his bike, and Sith asked him: What happened to your family? It was a cruel question. He had to smile and look cheerful. His father had run a small shop; they went out into the country and never came back. He lived with his brother in a jeum-room, a refugee camp in Thailand. They came back to fight the Vietnamese and his brother was killed.

She was going to tell the motoboy, drive me back to the Hilton, but she felt ashamed. Of what? Just how far was she going to run?

She asked him to take her to the old house on Monivong Boulevard.

As the motorcycle wove through back streets, dodging red-earth ruts and pedestrians, she felt rage at her father. How dare he involve her in something like that! Sith had lived a small life and had no measure of things so she thought: It’s as if someone tinted my hair and it all fell out. It’s as if someone pierced my ears and they got infected and my whole ear rotted away.

She remembered that she had never felt any compassion for her father. She had been twelve years old when he stood trial, old and sick and making such a show of leaning on his stick. Everything he did was a show. She remembered rolling her eyes in constant embarrassment. Oh, he was fine in front of rooms full of adoring students. He could play the bong thom with them. They thought he was enlightened. He sounded good, using his false, soft, and kindly little voice, as if he was dubbed. He had made Sith recite Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Rilke. He killed thousands for having foreign influences.

I don’t know what I did in a previous life to deserve you for a father. But you were not my father in a previous life and you won’t be my father in the next. I reject you utterly. I will never burn your name. You can wander hungry out of hell every year for all eternity. I will pray to keep you in hell.

I am not your daughter!

If you were false, I have to be true.

Her old house looked abandoned in the stark afternoon light, closed and innocent. At the doorstep she turned and thrust a fistful of dollars into the motoboy’s hand. She couldn’t think straight; she couldn’t even see straight, her vision blurred.

Back inside, she calmly put down her teddy-bear rucksack and walked upstairs to her office. Aido the robot dog whirred his way toward her. She had broken his back leg kicking him downstairs. He limped, whimpering like a dog, and lowered his head to have it stroked.

To her relief, there was only one picture waiting for her in the tray of the printer.

Kol Vireakboth looked out at her, middle-aged, handsome, worn, wise. Pity and kindness glowed in his eyes.

The land line began to ring.

“Youl prom,” she told the ghosts. Agreed.

She picked up the receiver and waited.

A man spoke. “My name was Yin Bora.” His voice bubbled up brokenly as if from underwater.

A light blinked in the printer. A photograph slid out quickly. A young student stared out at her looking happy at a family feast. He had a Beatle haircut and a striped shirt.

“That’s me,” said the voice on the phone. “I played football.”

Sith coughed. “What do you want me to do?”

“Write my name,” said the ghost.

“Please hold the line,” said Sith, in a hypnotized voice. She fumbled for a pen, and then wrote on the photograph Yin Bora, footballer. He looked so sweet and happy. “You have no one to mourn you,” she realized.

“None of us have anyone left alive to mourn us,” said the ghost.

Then there was a terrible sound down the telephone, as if a thousand voices moaned at once.

Sith involuntarily dropped the receiver into place. She listened to her heart thump and thought about what was needed. She fed the printer with the last of her paper. Immediately it began to roll out more photos, and the land line rang again.

She went outside and found the motoboy, waiting patiently for her. She asked him to go and buy two reams of copying paper. At the last moment she added pens and writing paper and matches. He bowed and smiled and bowed again, pleased to have found a patron.

She went back inside, and with just a tremor in her hand picked up the phone.

For the next half hour, she talked to the dead, and found photographs and wrote down names. A woman mourned her children. Sith found photos of them all, and united them, father, mother, three children, uncles, aunts, cousins and grandparents, taping their pictures to her wall. The idea of uniting families appealed. She began to stick the other photos onto her wall.

Someone called from outside and there on her doorstep was the motoboy, balancing paper and pens. “I bought you some soup.” The broth came in neatly tied bags and was full of rice and prawns. She thanked him and paid him well and he beamed at her and bowed again and again.

All afternoon, the pictures kept coming. Darkness fell, the phone rang, the names were written, until Sith’s hand, which was unused to writing anything, ached.

The doorbell rang, and on the doorstep, the motoboy sompiahed. “Excuse me, Lady, it is very late. I am worried for you. Can I get you dinner?”

Sith had to smile. He sounded motherly in his concern. They are so good at building a relationship with you, until you cannot do without them. In the old days she would have sent him away with a few rude words. Now she sent him away with an order.

And wrote.

And when he came back, the aged motoboy looked so happy. “I bought you fruit as well, Lady,” he said, and added, shyly. “You do not need to pay me for that.”

Something seemed to bump under Sith, as if she was on a motorcycle, and she heard herself say, “Come inside. Have some food too.”

The motoboy sompiahed in gratitude and as soon as he entered, the phone stopped ringing.

They sat on the floor. He arched his neck and looked around at the walls.

“Are all these people your family?” he asked.

She whispered. “No. They’re ghosts who no one mourns.”

“Why do they come to you?” His mouth fell open in wonder.

“Because my father was Pol Pot,” said Sith, without thinking.

The motoboy sompiahed. “Ah.” He chewed and swallowed and arched his head back again. “That must be a terrible thing. Everybody hates you.”

Sith had noticed that wherever she sat in the room, the eyes in the photographs were directly on her. “I haven’t done anything,” said Sith.

“You’re doing something now,” said the motoboy. He nodded and stood up, sighing with satisfaction. Life was good with a full stomach and a patron. “If you need me, Lady, I will be outside.”

Photo after photo, name after name.

Youk Achariya: touring dancer

Proeung Chhay: school superintendent

Sar Kothida, child, aged 7, died of ‘swelling disease’

Sar Makara, her mother, nurse

Nath Mittapheap, civil servant, from family of farmers

Chor Monirath: wife of award-winning engineer

Yin Sokunthea: Khmer Rouge commune leader

She looked at the faces and realized. Dara, I’m doing this for Dara.

The city around her went quiet and she became aware that it was now very late indeed. Perhaps she should just make sure the motoboy had gone home.

He was still waiting outside.

“It’s okay. You can go home. Where do you live?”

He waved cheerfully north. “Oh, on Monivong, like you.” He grinned at the absurdity of the comparison.

A new idea took sudden form. Sith said, “Tomorrow, can you come early, with a big feast? Fish and rice and greens and pork: curries and stir-fries and kebabs.” She paid him handsomely, and finally asked him his name. His name meant Golden.

“Good night, Sovann.”

For the rest of the night she worked quickly like an answering service. This is like a cleaning of the house before a festival, she thought. The voices of the dead became ordinary, familiar. Why are people afraid of the dead? The dead can’t hurt you. The dead want what you want: justice.

The wall of faces became a staircase and a garage and a kitchen of faces, all named. She had found Jorani’s colored yarn, and linked family members into trees.

She wrote until the electric lights looked discolored, like a headache. She asked the ghosts, “Please can I sleep now?” The phones fell silent and Sith slumped with relief onto the polished marble floor.

She woke up dazed, still on the marble floor. Sunlight flooded the room. The faces in the photographs no longer looked swollen and bruised. Their faces were not accusing or mournful. They smiled down on her. She was among friends.

With a whine, the printer started to print; the phone started to ring. Her doorbell chimed, and there was Sovann, white cardboard boxes piled up on the back of his motorcycle. He wore the same shirt as yesterday, a cheap blue copy of a Lacoste. A seam had parted under the arm. He only has one shirt, Sith realized. She imagined him washing it in a basin every night.

Sith and Sovann moved the big tables to the front windows. Sith took out her expensive tablecloths for the first time, and the bronze platters. The feast was laid out as if at New Year. Sovann had bought more paper and pens. He knew what they were for. “I can help, Lady.”

He was old enough to have lived in a country with schools, and he could write in a beautiful, old-fashioned hand. Together he and Sith spelled out the names of the dead and burned them.

“I want to write the names of my family too,” he said. He burnt them weeping.

The delicious vapors rose. The air was full of the sound of breathing in. Loose papers stirred with the breeze. The ash filled the basins, but even after working all day, Sith and the motoboy had only honored half the names.

“Good night, Sovann,” she told him.

“You have transferred a lot of merit,” said Sovann, but only to be polite.

If I have any merit to transfer, thought Sith.

He left and the printers started, and the phone. She worked all night, and only stopped because the second ream of paper ran out.

The last picture printed was of Kol Vireakboth.

Dara, she promised herself. Dara next.

In the morning, she called him. “Can we meet at lunchtime for another walk by the river?”

Sith waited on top of the marble wall and watched an old man fish in the Tonlé Sap river and found that she loved her country. She loved its tough, smiling, uncomplaining people, who had never offered her harm, after all the harm her family had done them. Do you know you have the daughter of the monster sitting here among you?

Suddenly all Sith wanted was to be one of them. The monks in the pavilion, the white-shirted functionaries scurrying somewhere, the lazy bones dangling their legs, the young men who dress like American rappers and sold something dubious, drugs, or sex.

She saw Dara sauntering toward her. He wore his new shirt, and smiled at her but he didn’t look relaxed. It had been two days since they’d met. He knew something was wrong, that she had something to tell him. He had bought them lunch in a little cardboard box. Maybe for the last time, thought Sith.

They exchanged greetings, almost like cousins. He sat next to her and smiled and Sith giggled in terror at what she was about to do.

Dara asked, “What’s funny?”

She couldn’t stop giggling. “Nothing is funny. Nothing.” She sighed in order to stop and terror tickled her and she spurted out laughter again. “I lied to you. Kol Vireakboth is not my father. Another politician was my father. Someone you’ve heard of. . . .”

The whole thing was so terrifying and absurd that the laughter squeezed her like a fist and she couldn’t talk. She laughed and wept at the same time. Dara stared.

“My father was Saloth Sar. That was his real name.” She couldn’t make herself say it. She could tell a motoboy, but not Dara? She forced herself onward. “My father was Pol Pot.”

Nothing happened.

Sitting next to her, Dara went completely still. People strolled past; boats bobbed on their moorings.

After a time Dara said, “I know what you are doing.”

That didn’t make sense. “Doing? What do you mean?”

Dara looked sour and angry. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” He sat, looking away from her. Sith’s laughter had finally shuddered to a halt. She sat peering at him, waiting. “I told you my family were modest,” he said quietly.

“Your family are lovely!” Sith exclaimed.

His jaw thrust out. “They had questions about you too, you know.”

“I don’t understand.”

He rolled his eyes. He looked back ‘round at her. “There are easier ways to break up with someone.”

He jerked himself to his feet and strode away with swift determination, leaving her sitting on the wall.

Here on the riverfront, everyone was equal. The teenage boys lounged on the wall; poor mothers herded children; the foreigners walked briskly, trying to look as if they didn’t carry moneybelts. Three fat teenage girls nearly swerved into a cripple in a pedal chair and collapsed against each other with raucous laughter.

Sith did not know what to do. She could not move. Despair humbled her, made her hang her head.

I’ve lost him.

The sunlight seemed to settle next to her, washing up from its reflection on the wake of some passing boat.

No you haven’t.

The river water smelled of kindly concern. The sounds of traffic throbbed with forbearance.

Not yet.

There is no forgiveness in Cambodia. But there are continual miracles of compassion and acceptance.

Sith appreciated for just a moment the miracles. The motoboy buying her soup. She decided to trust herself to the miracles.

Sith talked to the sunlight without making a sound. Grandfather Vireakboth. Thank you. You have told me all I need to know.

Sith stood up and from nowhere, the motoboy was there. He drove her to the Hello Phone shop.

Dara would not look at her. He bustled back and forth behind the counter, though there was nothing for him to do. Sith talked to him like a customer. “I want to buy a mobile phone,” she said, but he would not answer. “There is someone I need to talk to.”

Another customer came in. She was a beautiful daughter too, and he served her, making a great show of being polite. He complimented her on her appearance. “Really, you look cool.” The girl looked pleased. Dara’s eyes darted in Sith’s direction.

Sith waited in the chair. This was home for her now. Dara ignored her. She picked up her phone and dialed his number. He put it to his ear and said, “Go home.”

“You are my home,” she said.

His thumb jabbed the C button.

She waited. Shadows lengthened.

“We’re closing,” he said, standing by the door without looking at her.

Shamefaced, Sith ducked away from him, through the door.

Outside Soriya, the motoboy played dice with his fellows. He stood up. “They say I am very lucky to have Pol Pot’s daughter as a client.”

There was no discretion in Cambodia, either. Everyone will know now, Sith realized.

At home, the piles of printed paper still waited for her. Sith ate the old, cold food. It tasted flat, all its savor sucked away. The phones began to ring. She fell asleep with the receiver propped against her ear.

The next day, Sith went back to Soriya with a box of the printed papers.

She dropped the box onto the blue plastic counter of Hello Phones.

“Because I am Pol Pot’s daughter,” she told Dara, holding out a sheaf of pictures toward him. “All the unmourned victims of my father are printing their pictures on my printer. Here. Look. These are the pictures of people who lost so many loved ones there is no one to remember them.”

She found her cheeks were shaking and that she could not hold the sheaf of paper. It tumbled from her hands, but she stood back, arms folded.

Dara, quiet and solemn, knelt and picked up the papers. He looked at some of the faces. Sith pushed a softly crumpled green card at him. Her family ID card.

He read it. Carefully, with the greatest respect, he put the photographs on the countertop along with the ID card.

“Go home, Sith,” he said, but not unkindly.

“I said,” she had begun to speak with vehemence but could not continue. “I told you. My home is where you are.”

“I believe you,” he said, looking at his feet.

“Then. . . .” Sith had no words.

“It can never be, Sith,” he said. He gathered up the sheaf of photocopying paper. “What will you do with these?”

Something made her say, “What will you do with them?”

His face was crossed with puzzlement.

“It’s your country too. What will you do with them? Oh, I know, you’re such a poor boy from a poor family, who could expect anything from you? Well, you have your whole family and many people have no one. And you can buy new shirts and some people only have one.”

Dara held out both hands and laughed. “Sith?” You, Sith, are accusing me of being selfish?

“You own them too.” Sith pointed to the papers, to the faces. “You think the dead don’t try to talk to you, too?”

Their eyes latched. She told him what he could do. “I think you should make an exhibition. I think Hello Phones should sponsor it. You tell them that. You tell them Pol Pot’s daughter wishes to make amends and has chosen them. Tell them the dead speak to me on their mobile phones.”

She spun on her heel and walked out. She left the photographs with him.

That night she and the motoboy had another feast and burned the last of the unmourned names. There were many thousands.

The next day she went back to Hello Phones.

“I lied about something else,” she told Dara. She took out all the reports from the fortunetellers. She told him what Hun Sen’s fortuneteller had told her. “The marriage is particularly well favored.”

“Is that true?” He looked wistful.

“You should not believe anything I say. Not until I have earned your trust. Go consult the fortunetellers for yourself. This time you pay.”

His face went still and his eyes focused somewhere far beneath the floor. Then he looked up, directly into her eyes. “I will do that.”

For the first time in her life Sith wanted to laugh for something other than fear. She wanted to laugh for joy.

“Can we go to lunch at Lucky7?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said.

All the telephones in the shop, all of them, hundreds all at once began to sing.

A waterfall of trills and warbles and buzzes, snatches of old songs or latest chart hits. Dara stood dumbfounded. Finally he picked one up and held it to his ear.

“It’s for you,” he said, and held out the phone for her.

There was no name or number on the screen.

Congratulations, dear daughter, said a warm kind voice.

“Who is this?” Sith asked. The options were severely limited.

Your new father, said Kol Vireakboth. The sound of wind. I adopt you.

A thousand thousand voices said at once, We adopt you.

IN CAMBODIA, you share your house with ghosts in the way you share it with dust. You hear the dead shuffling alongside your own footsteps. You can sweep, but the sound does not go away.

On the Tra Bek end of Monivong there is a house whose owner has given it over to ghosts. You can try to close the front door. But the next day you will find it hanging open. Indeed you can try, as the neighbors did, to nail the door shut. It opens again.

By day, there is always a queue of five or six people wanting to go in, or hanging back, out of fear. Outside are offerings of lotus or coconuts with embedded josh sticks.

The walls and floors and ceilings are covered with photographs. The salon, the kitchen, the stairs, the office, the empty bedrooms, are covered with photographs of Chinese-Khmers at weddings, Khmer civil servants on picnics, Chams outside their mosques, Vietnamese holding up prize catches of fish; little boys going to school in shorts; cyclopousse drivers in front of their odd, old-fashioned pedaled vehicles; wives in stalls stirring soup. All of them are happy and joyful, and the background is Phnom Penh when it was the most beautiful city in Southeast Asia.

All the photographs have names written on them in old-fashioned handwriting.

On the table is a printout of thousands of names on slips of paper. Next to the table are matches and basins of ash and water. The implication is plain. Burn the names and transfer merit to the unmourned dead.

Next to that is a small printed sign that says in English hello.

Every Pchum Ben, those names are delivered to temples throughout the city. Gold foil is pressed onto each slip of paper, and attached to it is a parcel of sticky rice. At 8 a.m. food is delivered for the monks, steaming rice and fish, along with bolts of new cloth. At 10 a.m. more food is delivered, for the disabled and the poor.

And most mornings a beautiful daughter of Cambodia is seen walking beside the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong rivers. Like Cambodia, she plainly loves all things modern. She dresses in the latest fashion. Cambodian R&B whispers in her ear. She pauses in front of each new waterfront construction whether built by improvised scaffolding or erected with cranes. She buys noodles from the grumpy vendors with their tiny stoves. She carries a book or sits on the low marble wall to write letters and look at the boats, the monsoon clouds, and the dop-dops. She talks to the reflected sunlight on the river and calls it Father.

YELLOW CARD MAN

Paolo Bacigalupi

Machetes gleam on the warehouse floor, reflecting a red conflagration of jute and tamarind and kink-springs. They’re all around now. The men with their green headbands and their slogans and their wet wet blades. Their calls echo in the warehouse and on the street. Number one son is already gone. Jade Blossom he cannot find, no matter how many times he treadles her phone number. His daughters’ faces have been split wide like blister rust durians.

More fires blaze. Black smoke roils around him. He runs through his warehouse offices, past computers with teak cases and iron treadles and past piles of ash where his clerks burned files through the night, obliterating the names of people who aided the Tri-Clipper.

He runs, choking on heat and smoke. In his own gracious office he dashes to the shutters and fumbles with their brass catches. He slams his shoulder against those blue shutters while the warehouse burns and brown-skinned men boil through the door and swing their slick red knives . . .

Tranh wakes, gasping.

Sharp concrete edges jam against the knuckles of his spine. A salt-slick thigh smothers his face. He shoves away the stranger’s leg. Sweat-sheened skin glimmers in the blackness, impressionistic markers for the bodies that shift and shove all around him. They fart and groan and turn, flesh on flesh, bone against bone, the living and the heat-smothered dead all together.

A man coughs. Moist lungs and spittle gust against Tranh’s face. His spine and belly stick to the naked sweating flesh of the strangers around him. Claustrophobia rises. He forces it down. Forces himself to lie still, to breathe slowly, deeply, despite the heat. To taste the swelter darkness with all the paranoia of a survivor’s mind. He is awake while others sleep. He is alive while others are long dead. He forces himself to lie still, and listen.

Bicycle bells are ringing. Down below and far away, ten thousand bodies below, a lifetime away, bicycle bells chime. He claws himself out of the mass of tangled humanity, dragging his hemp sack of possessions with him. He is late. Of all the days he could be late, this is the worst possible one. He slings the bag over a bony shoulder and feels his way down the stairs, finding his footing in the cascade of sleeping flesh. He slides his sandals between families, lovers and crouching hungry ghosts, praying that he will not slip and break an old man’s bone. Step, feel, step, feel.

A curse rises from the mass. Bodies shift and roll. He steadies himself on a landing amongst the privileged who lie flat, then wades on. Downward ever downward, round more turnings of the stair, wading down through the carpet of his countrymen. Step. Feel. Step. Feel. Another turn. A hint of gray light glimmers far below. Fresh air kisses his face, caresses his body. The waterfall of anonymous flesh resolves into individuals, men and women sprawled across one another, pillowed on hard concrete, propped on the slant of the windowless stair. Gray light turns gold. The tinkle of bicycle bells comes louder now, clear like the ring of cibiscosis chimes.

Tranh spills out of the highrise and into a crowd of congee sellers, hemp weavers and potato carts. He puts his hands on his knees and gasps, sucking in swirling dust and trampled street dung, grateful for every breath as sweat pours off his body. Salt jewels fall from the tip of his nose, spatter the red paving stones of the sidewalk with his moisture. Heat kills men. Kills old men. But he is out of the oven; he has not been cooked again, despite the blast furnace of the dry season.

Bicycles and their ringing bells flow past like schools of carp, commuters already on their way to work. Behind him the highrise looms, forty stories of heat and vines and mold. A vertical ruin of broken windows and pillaged apartments. A remnant glory from the old energy Expansion now become a heated tropic coffin without air conditioning or electricity to protect it from the glaze of the equatorial sun. Bangkok keeps its refugees in the pale blue sky, and wishes they would stay there. And yet he has emerged alive, despite the Dung Lord, despite the white shirts, despite old age, he has once again clawed his way down from the heavens.

Tranh straightens. Men stir woks of noodles and pull steamers of baozi from their bamboo rounds. Gray high-protein U-Tex rice gruel fills the air with the scents of rotting fish and fatty acid oils. Tranh’s stomach knots with hunger and a pasty saliva coats his mouth, all that his dehydrated body can summon at the scent of food. Devil cats swirl around the vendors’ legs like sharks, hoping for morsels to drop, hoping for theft opportunities. Their shimmering chameleon-like forms flit and flicker, showing calico and Siamese and orange tabby markings before fading against the backdrop of concrete and crowding hungry people that they brush against. The woks burn hard and bright with green-tinged methane, giving off new scents as rice noodles splash into hot oil. Tranh forces himself to turn away.

He shoves through the press, dragging his hemp bag along with him, ignoring who it hits and who shouts after him. Incident victims crouch in the doorways, waving severed limbs and begging from others who have a little more. Men squat on tea stools and watch the day’s swelter build as they smoke tiny rolled cigarettes of scavenged gold leaf tobacco and share them from lip to lip. Women converse in knots, nervously fingering yellow cards as they wait for white shirts to appear and stamp their renewals.

Yellow card people as far as the eye can see: an entire race of people, fled to the great Thai Kingdom from Malaya where they were suddenly unwelcome. A fat clot of refugees placed under the authority of the Environment Ministry’s white shirts as if they were nothing but another invasive species to be managed, like cibiscosis, blister rust, and genehack weevil. Yellow cards, yellow men. Huang ren all around, and Tranh is late for his one opportunity to climb out of their mass. One opportunity in all his months as a yellow card Chinese refugee. And now he is late. He squeezes past a rat seller, swallowing another rush of saliva at the scent of roasted flesh, and rushes down an alley to the water pump. He stops short.

Ten others stand in line before him: old men, young women, mothers, boys.

He slumps. He wants to rage at the setback. If he had the energy—if he had eaten well yesterday or the day before or even the day before that he would scream, would throw his hemp bag on the street and stamp on it until it turned to dust—but his calories are too few. It is just another opportunity squandered, thanks to the ill luck of the stairwells. He should have given the last of his baht to the Dung Lord and rented body-space in an apartment with windows facing east so that he could see the rising sun, and wake early.

But he was cheap. Cheap with his money. Cheap with his future. How many times did he tell his sons that spending money to make more money was perfectly acceptable? But the timid yellow card refugee that he has become counseled him to save his baht. Like an ignorant peasant mouse he clutched his cash to himself and slept in pitch-black stairwells. He should have stood like a tiger and braved the night curfew and the ministry’s white shirts and their black batons . . . And now he is late and reeks of the stairwells and stands behind ten others, all of whom must drink and fill a bucket and brush their teeth with the brown water of the Chao Phraya River.

There was a time when he demanded punctuality of his employees, of his wife, of his sons and concubines, but it was when he owned a spring-wound wristwatch and could gaze at its steady sweep of minutes and hours. Every so often, he could wind its tiny spring, and listen to it tick, and lash his sons for their lazy attitudes. He has become old and slow and stupid or he would have foreseen this. Just as he should have foreseen the rising militancy of the Green Headbands. When did his mind become so slack?

One by one, the other refugees finish their ablutions. A mother with gap teeth and blooms of gray fa’ gan fringe behind her ears tops her bucket, and Tranh slips forward.

He has no bucket. Just the bag. The precious bag. He hangs it beside the pump and wraps his sarong more tightly around his hollow hips before he squats under the pump head. With a bony arm he yanks the pump’s handle. Ripe brown water gushes over him. The river’s blessing. His skin droops off his body with the weight of the water, sagging like the flesh of a shaved cat. He opens his mouth and drinks the gritty water, rubs his teeth with a finger, wondering what protozoa he may swallow. It doesn’t matter. He trusts luck, now. It’s all he has.

Children watch him bathe his old body while their mothers scavenge through PurCal mango peels and Red Star tamarind hulls hoping to find some bit of fruit not tainted with cibiscosis.111mt.6 . . . Or is it 111mt.7? Or mt.8? There was a time when he knew all the bioengineered plagues which ailed them. Knew when a crop was about to fail, and whether new seedstock had been ripped. Profited from the knowledge by filling his clipper ships with the right seeds and produce. But that was a lifetime ago.

His hands are shaking as he opens his bag and pulls out his clothes. Is it old age or excitement that makes him tremble? Clean clothes. Good clothes. A rich man’s white linen suit.

The clothes were not his, but now they are, and he has kept them safe. Safe for this opportunity, even when he desperately wanted to sell them for cash or wear them as his other clothes turned to rags. He drags the trousers up his bony legs, stepping out of his sandals and balancing one foot at a time. He begins buttoning the shirt, hurrying his fingers as a voice in his head reminds him that time is slipping away.

“Selling those clothes? Going to parade them around until someone with meat on his bones buys them off you?”

Tranh glances up—he shouldn’t need to look; he should know the voice—and yet he looks anyway. He can’t help himself. Once he was a tiger. Now he is nothing but a frightened little mouse who jumps and twitches at every hint of danger. And there it is: Ma. Standing before him, beaming. Fat and beaming. As vital as a wolf.

Ma grins. “You look like a wire-frame mannequin at Palawan Plaza.”

“I wouldn’t know. I can’t afford to shop there.” Tranh keeps putting on his clothes.

“Those are nice enough to come from Palawan. How did you get them?”

Tranh doesn’t answer.

“Who are you fooling? Those clothes were made for a man a thousand times your size.”

“We can’t all be fat and lucky.” Tranh’s voice comes out as a whisper. Did he always whisper? Was he always such a rattletrap corpse whispering and sighing at every threat? He doesn’t think so. But it’s hard for him to remember what a tiger should sound like. He tries again, steadying his voice. “We can’t all be as lucky as Ma Ping who lives on the top floors with the Dung King himself.” His words still come out like reeds shushing against concrete.

“Lucky?” Ma laughs. So young. So pleased with himself. “I earn my fate. Isn’t that what you always used to tell me? That luck has nothing to do with success? That men make their own luck?” He laughs again. “And now look at you.”

Tranh grits his teeth. “Better men than you have fallen.” Still the awful timid whisper.

“And better men than you are on the rise.” Ma’s fingers dart to his wrist. They stroke a wristwatch, a fine chronograph, ancient, gold and diamonds—Rolex. From an earlier time. A different place. A different world. Tranh stares stupidly, like a hypnotized snake. He can’t tear his eyes away.

Ma smiles lazily. “You like it? I found it in an antique shop near Wat Rajapradit. It seemed familiar.”

Tranh’s anger rises. He starts to reply, then shakes his head and says nothing. Time is passing. He fumbles with his final buttons, pulls on the coat and runs his fingers through the last surviving strands of his lank gray hair. If he had a comb . . . He grimaces. It is stupid to wish. The clothes are enough. They have to be.

Ma laughs. “Now you look like a Big Name.”

Ignore him, says the voice inside Tranh’s head. Tranh pulls his last paltry baht out of his hemp bag—the money he saved by sleeping in the stairwells, and which has now made him so late—and shoves it into his pockets.

“You seem rushed. Do you have an appointment somewhere?”

Tranh shoves past, trying not to flinch as he squeezes around Ma’s bulk.

Ma calls after him, laughing. “Where are you headed, Mr. Big Name? Mr. Three Prosperities! Do you have some intelligence you’d like to share with the rest of us?”

Others look up at the shout: hungry yellow card faces, hungry yellow card mouths. Yellow card people as far as the eye can see, and all of them looking at him now. Incident survivors. Men. Women. Children. Knowing him, now. Recognizing his legend. With a change of clothing and a single shout he has risen from obscurity. Their mocking calls pour down like a monsoon rain:

“Wei! Mr. Three Prosperities! Nice shirt!”

“Share a smoke, Mr. Big Name!”

“Where are you going so fast all dressed up?”

“Getting married?”

“Getting a tenth wife?”

“Got a job?”

“Mr. Big Name! Got a job for me?”

“Where you going? Maybe we should all follow Old Multinational!”

Tranh’s neck prickles. He shakes off the fear. Even if they follow it will be too late for them to take advantage. For the first time in half a year, the advantage of skills and knowledge are on his side. Now there is only time.

He jogs through Bangkok’s morning press as bicycles and cycle rickshaws and spring-wound scooters stream past. Sweat drenches him. It soaks his good shirt, damps even his jacket. He takes it off and slings it over an arm. His gray hair clings to his egg-bald liver-spotted skull, waterlogged. He pauses every other block to walk and recover his breath as his shins begin to ache and his breath comes in gasps and his old man’s heart hammers in his chest.

He should spend his baht on a cycle rickshaw but he can’t make himself do it. He is late. But perhaps he is too late? And if he is too late, the extra baht will be wasted and he will starve tonight. But then, what good is a suit soaked with sweat?

Clothes make the man, he told his sons; the first impression is the most important. Start well, and you start ahead. Of course you can win someone with your skills and your knowledge but people are animals first. Look good. Smell good. Satisfy their first senses. Then when they are well-disposed toward you, make your proposal.

Isn’t that why he beat Second Son when he came home with a red tattoo of a tiger on his shoulder, as though he was some calorie gangster? Isn’t that why he paid a tooth doctor to twist even his daughters’ teeth with cultured bamboo and rubber curves from Singapore so that they were as straight as razors?

And isn’t that why the Green Headbands in Malaya hated us Chinese? Because we looked so good? Because we looked so rich? Because we spoke so well and worked so hard when they were lazy and we sweated every day?

Tranh watches a pack of spring-wound scooters flit past, all of them Thai-Chinese manufactured. Such clever fast things—a megajoule kink-spring and a flywheel, pedals and friction brakes to regather kinetic energy. And all their factories owned one hundred percent by Chiu Chow Chinese. And yet no Chiu Chow blood runs in the gutters of this country. These Chiu Chow Chinese are loved, despite the fact that they came to the Thai Kingdom as farang.

If we had assimilated in Malaya like the Chiu Chow did here, would we have survived?

Tranh shakes his head at the thought. It would have been impossible. His clan would have had to convert to Islam as well, and forsake all their ancestors in Hell. It would have been impossible. Perhaps it was his people’s karma to be destroyed. To stand tall and dominate the cities of Penang and Malacca and all the western coast of the Malayan Peninsula for a brief while, and then to die.

Clothes make the man. Or kill him. Tranh understands this, finally. A white tailored suit from Hwang Brothers is nothing so much as a target. An antique piece of gold mechanization swinging on your wrist is nothing if not bait. Tranh wonders if his sons’ perfect teeth still lie in the ashes of Three Prosperities’ warehouses, if their lovely time pieces now attract sharks and crabs in the holds of his scuttled clipper ships.

He should have known. Should have seen the rising tide of bloodthirsty subsects and intensifying nationalism. Just as the man he followed two months ago should have known that fine clothes were no protection. A man in good clothes, a yellow card to boot, should have known that he was nothing but a bit of bloodied bait before a Komodo lizard. At least the stupid melon didn’t bleed on his fancy clothes when the white shirts were done with him. That one had no habit of survival. He forgot that he was no longer a Big Name.

But Tranh is learning. As he once learned tides and depth charts, markets and bioengineered plagues, profit maximization and how to balance the dragon’s gate, he now learns from the devil cats who molt and fade from sight, who flee their hunters at the first sign of danger. He learns from the crows and kites who live so well on scavenge. These are the animals he must emulate. He must discard the reflexes of a tiger. There are no tigers except in zoos. A tiger is always hunted and killed. But a small animal, a scavenging animal, has a chance to strip the bones of a tiger and walk away with the last Hwang Brothers suit that will ever cross the border from Malaya. With the Hwang clan all dead and the Hwang patterns all burned, nothing is left except memories and antiques, and one scavenging old man who knows the power and the peril of good appearance.

An empty cycle rickshaw coasts past. The rickshaw man looks back at Tranh, eyes questioning, attracted by the Hwang Brothers fabrics that flap off Tranh’s skinny frame. Tranh raises a tentative hand. The cycle rickshaw slows.

Is it a good risk? To spend his last security so frivolously?

There was a time when he sent clipper fleets across the ocean to Chennai with great stinking loads of durians because he guessed that the Indians had not had time to plant resistant crop strains before the new blister rust mutations swept over them. A time when he bought black tea and sandalwood from the river men on the chance that he could sell it in the South. Now he can’t decide if he should ride or walk. What a pale man he has become! Sometimes he wonders if he is actually a hungry ghost, trapped between worlds and unable to escape one way or the other.

The cycle rickshaw coasts ahead, the rider’s blue jersey shimmering in the tropic sun, waiting for a decision. Tranh waves him away. The rickshaw man stands on his pedals, sandals flapping against calloused heels and accelerates.

Panic seizes Tranh. He raises his hand again, chases after the rickshaw. “Wait!” His voice comes out as a whisper.

The rickshaw slips into traffic, joining bicycles and the massive shambling shapes of elephantine megodonts. Tranh lets his hand fall, obscurely grateful that the rickshaw man hasn’t heard, that the decision of spending his last baht has been made by some force larger than himself.

All around him, the morning press flows. Hundreds of children in their sailor suit uniforms stream through school gates. Saffron-robed monks stroll under the shade of wide black umbrellas. A man with a conical bamboo hat watches him and then mutters quietly to his friend. They both study him. A trickle of fear runs up Tranh’s spine.

They are all around him, as they were in Malacca. In his own mind, he calls them foreigners, farang. And yet it is he who is the foreigner here. The creature that doesn’t belong. And they know it. The women hanging sarongs on the wires of their balconies, the men sitting barefoot while they drink sugared coffee. The fish sellers and curry men. They all know it, and Tranh can barely control his terror.

Bangkok is not Malacca, he tells himself. Bangkok is not Penang. We have no wives, or gold wristwatches with diamonds, or clipper fleets to steal anymore. Ask the snakeheads who abandoned me in the leech jungles of the border. They have all my wealth. I have nothing. I am no tiger. I am safe.

For a few seconds he believes it. But then a teak-skinned boy chops the top off a coconut with a rusty machete and offers it to Tranh with a smile and it’s all Tranh can do not to scream and run.

Bangkok is not Malacca. They will not burn your warehouses or slash your clerks into chunks of shark bait. He wipes sweat off his face. Perhaps he should have waited to wear the suit. It draws too much attention. There are too many people looking at him. Better to fade like a devil cat and slink across the city in safe anonymity, instead of strutting around like a peacock.

Slowly the streets change from palm-lined boulevards to the open wastelands of the new foreigner’s quarter. Tranh hurries toward the river, heading deeper into the manufacturing empire of white farang.

Gweilo, yang guizi, farang. So many words in so many languages for these translucent-skinned sweating monkeys. Two generations ago when the petroleum ran out and the gweilo factories shut down, everyone assumed they were gone for good. And now they are back. The monsters of the past returned, with new toys and new technologies. The nightmares his mother threatened him with, invading Asiatic coasts. Demons truly; never dead.

And he goes to worship them: the ilk of AgriGen and PurCal with their monopolies on U-Tex rice and Total Nutrient Wheat; the blood-brothers of the bioengineers who gene-ripped devil cats from storybook inspiration and set them loose in the world to breed and breed and breed; the sponsors of the Intellectual Property Police who used to board his clipper fleets in search of IP infringements, hunting like wolves for unstamped calories and gene-ripped grains as though their engineered plagues of cibiscosis and blister rust weren’t enough to keep their profits high . . .

Ahead of him, a crowd has formed. Tranh frowns. He starts to run, then forces himself back to a walk. Better not to waste his calories, now. A line has already formed in front of the foreign devil Tennyson Brothers’ factory. It stretches almost a li, snaking around the corner, past the bicycle gear logo in the wrought iron gate of Sukhumvit Research Corporation, past the intertwined dragons of PurCal East Asia, and past Mishimoto & Co., the clever Japanese fluid dynamics company that Tranh once sourced his clipper designs from.

Mishimoto is full of windup import workers, they say. Full of illegal gene-ripped bodies that walk and talk and totter about in their herky-jerky way—and take rice from real men’s bowls. Creatures with as many as eight arms like the Hindu gods, creatures with no legs so they cannot run away, creatures with eyes as large as teacups which can only see a bare few feet ahead of them but inspect everything with enormous magnified curiosity. But no one can see inside, and if the Environment Ministry’s white shirts know, then the clever Japanese are paying them well to ignore their crimes against biology and religion. It is perhaps the only thing a good Buddhist and a good Muslim and even the farang Grahamite Christians can agree on: windups have no souls.

When Tranh bought Mishimoto’s clipper ships so long ago, he didn’t care. Now he wonders if behind their high gates, windup monstrosities labor while yellow cards stand outside and beg.

Tranh trudges down the line. Policemen with clubs and spring guns patrol the hopefuls, making jokes about farang who wish to work for farang. Heat beats down, merciless on the men lined up before the gate.

“Wah! You look like a pretty bird with those clothes.”

Tranh starts. Li Shen and Hu Laoshi and Lao Xia stand in the line, clustered together. A trio of old men as pathetic as himself. Hu waves a newly rolled cigarette in invitation, motioning him to join them. Tranh nearly shakes at the sight of the tobacco, but forces himself to refuse it. Three times Hu offers, and finally Tranh allows himself to accept, grateful that Hu is in earnest, and wondering where Hu has found this sudden wealth. But then, Hu has a little more strength than the rest of them. A cart man earns more if he works as fast as Hu.

Tranh wipes the sweat off his brow. “A lot of applicants.”

They all laugh at Tranh’s dismay.

Hu lights the cigarette for Tranh. “You thought you knew a secret, maybe?”

Tranh shrugs and draws deeply, passes the cigarette to Lao Xia. “A rumor. Potato God said his elder brother’s son had a promotion. I thought there might be a niche down below, in the slot the nephew left behind.”

Hu grins. “That’s where I heard it, too. ‘Eee. He’ll be rich. Manage fifteen clerks. Eee! He’ll be rich.’ I thought I might be one of the fifteen.”

“At least the rumor was true,” Lao Xia says. “And not just Potato God’s nephew promoted, either.” He scratches the back of his head, a convulsive movement like a dog fighting fleas. Fa’ gan’s gray fringe stains the crooks of his elbows and peeps from the sweaty pockets behind his ears where his hair has receded. He sometimes jokes about it: nothing a little money can’t fix. A good joke. But today he is scratching and the skin behind his ears is cracked and raw. He notices everyone watching and yanks his hand down. He grimaces and passes the cigarette to Li Shen.

“How many positions?” Tranh asks.

“Three. Three clerks.”

Tranh grimaces. “My lucky number.”

Li Shen peers down the line with his bottle-thick glasses. “Too many of us, I think, even if your lucky number is 555.”

Lao Xia laughs. “Amongst the four of us, there are already too many.” He taps the man standing in line just ahead of them. “Uncle. What was your profession before?”

The stranger looks back, surprised. He was a distinguished gentleman, once, by his scholar’s collar, by his fine leather shoes now scarred and blackened with scavenged charcoal. “I taught physics.”

Lao Xia nods. “You see? We’re all overqualified. I oversaw a rubber plantation. Our own professor has degrees in fluid dynamics and materials design. Hu was a fine doctor. And then there is our friend of the Three Prosperities. Not a trading company at all. More like a multi-national.” He tastes the words. Says them again, “Multi-national.” A strange, powerful, seductive sound.

Tranh ducks his head, embarrassed. “You’re too kind.”

“Fang pi.” Hu takes a drag on his cigarette, keeps it moving. “You were the richest of us all. And now here we are, old men scrambling for young men’s jobs. Every one of us ten-thousand-times overqualified.”

The man behind them interjects, “I was executive legal council for Standard & Commerce.”

Lao Xia makes a face. “Who cares, dog fucker? You’re nothing now.”

The banking lawyer turns away, affronted. Lao Xia grins, sucks hard on the hand-rolled cigarette and passes it again to Tranh. Hu nudges Tranh’s elbow as he starts to take a puff. “Look! There goes old Ma.”

Tranh looks over, exhales smoke sharply. For a moment he thinks Ma has followed him, but no. It is just coincidence. They are in the farang factory district. Ma works for the foreign devils, balancing their books. A kink-spring company. Springlife. Yes, Springlife. It is natural that Ma should be here, comfortably riding to work behind a sweating cycle-rickshaw man.

“Ma Ping,” Li Shen says. “I heard he’s living on the top floor now. Up there with the Dung Lord himself.”

Tranh scowls. “I fired him, once. Ten thousand years ago. Lazy and an embezzler.”

“He’s so fat.”

“I’ve seen his wife,” Hu says. “And his sons. They both have fat on them. They eat meat every night. The boys are fatter than fat. Full of U-Tex proteins.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Fatter than us.”

Lao Xia scratches a rib. “Bamboo is fatter than you.”

Tranh watches Ma Ping open a factory door and slip inside. The past is past. Dwelling on the past is madness. There is nothing for him there. There are no wristwatches, no concubines, no opium pipes or jade sculptures of Quan Yin’s merciful form. There are no pretty clipper ships slicing into port with fortunes in their holds. He shakes his head and offers the nearly spent cigarette to Hu so that he can recover the last tobacco for later use. There is nothing for him in the past. Ma is in the past. Three Prosperities Trading Company is the past. The sooner he remembers this, the sooner he will climb out of this awful hole.

From behind him, a man calls out, “Wei! Baldy! When did you cut the line? Go to the back! You line up, like the rest of us!”

“Line up?” Lao Xia shouts back. “Don’t be stupid!” He waves at the line ahead. “How many hundreds are ahead of us? It won’t make any difference where he stands.”

Others begin to attend the man’s complaint. Complain as well. “Line up! Pai dui! Pai dui!” The disturbance increases and police start down the line, casually swinging their batons. They aren’t white shirts, but they have no love for hungry yellow cards.

Tranh makes placating motions to the crowd and Lao Xia. “Of course. Of course. I’ll line up. It’s of no consequence.” He makes his farewells and plods his way down the winding yellow card snake, seeking its distant tail.

Everyone is dismissed long before he reaches it.

A scavenging night. A starving night. Tranh hunts through dark alleys avoiding the vertical prison heat of the towers. Devil cats seethe and scatter ahead of him in rippling waves. The lights of the methane lamps flicker, burn low and snuff themselves, blackening the city. Hot velvet darkness fetid with rotting fruit swaddles him. The heavy humid air sags. Still swelter darkness. Empty market stalls. On a street corner, theater men turn in stylized cadences to stories of Ravana. On a thoroughfare, swingshift megodonts shuffle homeward like gray mountains, their massed shadows led by the gold trim glitter of union handlers.

In the alleys, children with bright silver knives hunt unwary yellow cards and drunken Thais, but Tranh is wise to their feral ways. A year ago, he would not have seen them, but he has the paranoid’s gift of survival, now. Creatures like them are no worse than sharks: easy to predict, easy to avoid. It is not these obviously feral hunters who churn Tranh’s guts with fear, it is the chameleons, the everyday people who work and shop and smile and wai so pleasantly—and riot without warning—who terrify Tranh.

He picks through the trash heaps, fighting devil cats for signs of food, wishing he was fast enough to catch and kill one of those nearly invisible felines. Picking up discarded mangos, studying them carefully with his old man’s eyes, holding them close and then far away, sniffing at them, feeling their blister rusted exteriors and then tossing them aside when they show red mottle in their guts. Some of them still smell good, but even crows won’t accept such a taint. They would eagerly peck apart a bloated corpse but they will not feed on blister rust.

Down the street, the Dung Lord’s lackeys shovel the day’s animal leavings into sacks and throw them into tricycle carriers: the night harvest. They watch him suspiciously. Tranh keeps his eyes averted, avoiding challenge, and scuffles on. He has nothing to cook on an illegally stolen shit fire anyway, and nowhere to sell manure on the black market. The Dung Lord’s monopoly is too strong. Tranh wonders how it might be to find a place in the dung shoveler’s union, to know that his survival was guaranteed feeding the composters of Bangkok’s methane reclamation plants. But it is an opium dream; no yellow card can slither into that closed club.

Tranh lifts another mango and freezes. He bends low, squinting. Pushes aside broadsheet complaints against the Ministry of Trade and handbills calling for a new gold-sheathed River Wat. He pushes aside black slime banana peels and burrows into the garbage. Below it all, stained and torn but still legible, he finds a portion of what was once a great advertising board that perhaps stood over this marketplace:—ogistics. Shipping. Tradin—and behind the words, the glorious silhouette of Dawn Star: one part of Three Prosperities’ tri-clipper logo, running before the wind as fast and sleek as a shark: a high-tech image of palm-oil spun polymers and sails as sharp and white as a gull’s.

Tranh turns his face away, overcome. It’s like unearthing a grave and finding himself within. His pride. His blindness. From a time when he thought he might compete with the foreign devils and become a shipping magnate. A Li Ka Shing or a reborn Richard Kuok for the New Expansion. Rebuild the pride of Nanyang Chinese shipping and trading. And here, like a slap in the face, a portion of his ego, buried in rot and blister rust and devil cat urine.

He searches around, pawing for more portions of the sign, wondering if anyone treadles a phone call to that old phone number, if the secretary whose wages he once paid is still at his desk, working for a new master, a native Malay perhaps, with impeccable pedigree and religion. Wondering if the few clippers he failed to scuttle still ply the seas and islands of the archipelago. He forces himself to stop his search. Even if he had the money he would not treadle that number. Would not waste the calories. Could not stand the loss again.

He straightens, scattering devil cats who have slunk close. There is nothing here in this market except rinds and unshoveled dung. He has wasted his calories once again. Even the cockroaches and the blood beetles have been eaten. If he searches for a dozen hours, he will still find nothing. Too many people have come before, picking at these bones.

Three times he hides from white shirts as he makes his way home, three times ducking into shadows as they strut past. Cringing as they wander close, cursing his white linen suit that shows so clearly in darkness. By the third time, superstitious fear runs hot in his veins. His rich man’s clothes seem to attract the patrols of the Environment Ministry, seem to hunger for the wearer’s death. Black batons twirl from casual hands no more than inches away from his face. Spring guns glitter silver in the darkness. His hunters stand so close that he can count the wicked bladed disk cartridges in their jute bandoliers. A white shirt pauses and pisses in the alley where Tranh crouches, and only fails to see him because his partner stands on the street and wants to check the permits of the dung gatherers.

Each time, Tranh stifles his panicked urge to tear off his too-rich clothes and sink into safe anonymity. It is only a matter of time before the white shirts catch him. Before they swing their black clubs and make his Chinese skull a mash of blood and bone. Better to run naked through the hot night than strut like a peacock and die. And yet he cannot quite abandon the cursed suit. Is it pride? Is it stupidity? He keeps it though, even as its arrogant cut turns his bowels watery with fear.

By the time he reaches home, even the gas lights on the main thoroughfares of Sukhumvit Road and Rama IV are blackened. Outside the Dung Lord’s tower, street stalls still burn woks for the few laborers lucky enough to have night work and curfew dispensations. Pork tallow candles flicker on the tables. Noodles splash into hot woks with a sizzle. White shirts stroll past, their eyes on the seated yellow cards, ensuring that none of the foreigners brazenly sleep in the open air and sully the sidewalks with their snoring presence.

Tranh joins the protective loom of the towers, entering the nearly extra-territorial safety of the Dung Lord’s influence. He stumbles toward the doorways and the swelter of the highrise, wondering how high he will be forced to climb before he can shove a niche for himself on the stairwells.

“You didn’t get the job, did you?”

Tranh cringes at the voice. It’s Ma Ping again, sitting at a sidewalk table, a bottle of Mekong whiskey beside his hand. His face is flushed with alcohol, as bright as a red paper lantern. Half-eaten plates of food lie strewn around his table. Enough to feed five others, easily.

Images of Ma war in Tranh’s head: the young clerk he once sent packing for being too clever with an abacus, the man whose son is fat, the man who got out early, the man who begged to be rehired at Three Prosperities, the man who now struts around Bangkok with Tranh’s last precious possession on his wrist—the one item that even the snakeheads didn’t steal. Tranh thinks that truly fate is cruel, placing him in such proximity to one he once considered so far beneath him.

Despite his intention to show bravado, Tranh’s words come out as a mousy whisper. “What do you care?”

Ma shrugs, pours whiskey for himself. “I wouldn’t have noticed you in the line, without that suit.” He nods at Tranh’s sweat-damp clothing. “Good idea to dress up. Too far back in line, though.”

Tranh wants to walk away, to ignore the arrogant whelp, but Ma’s leavings of steamed bass and laap and U-Tex rice noodles lie tantalizingly close. He thinks he smells pork and can’t help salivating. His gums ache for the idea that he could chew meat again and he wonders if his teeth would accept the awful luxury . . .

Abruptly, Tranh realizes that he has been staring. That he has stood for some time, ogling the scraps of Ma’s meal. And Ma is watching him. Tranh flushes and starts to turn away.

Ma says, “I didn’t buy your watch to spite you, you know.”

Tranh stops short. “Why then?”

Ma’s fingers stray to the gold and diamond bauble, then seem to catch themselves. He reaches for his whiskey glass instead. “I wanted a reminder.” He takes a swallow of liquor and sets the glass back amongst his piled plates with the deliberate care of a drunk. He grins sheepishly. His fingers are again stroking the watch, a guilty furtive movement. “I wanted a reminder. Against ego.”

Tranh spits. “Fang pi.”

Ma shakes his head vigorously. “No! It’s true.” He pauses. “Anyone can fall. If the Three Prosperities can fall, then I can. I wanted to remember that.” He takes another pull on his whiskey. “You were right to fire me.”

Tranh snorts. “You didn’t think so then.”

“I was angry. I didn’t know that you’d saved my life, then.” He shrugs. “I would never have left Malaya if you hadn’t fired me. I would never have seen the Incident coming. I would have had too much invested in staying.” Abruptly, he pulls himself upright and motions for Tranh to join him. “Come. Have a drink. Have some food. I owe you that much. You saved my life. I’ve repaid you poorly. Sit.”

Tranh turns away. “I don’t despise myself so much.”

“Do you love face so much that you can’t take a man’s food? Don’t be stuck in your bones. I don’t care if you hate me. Just take my food. Curse me later, when your belly is full.”

Tranh tries to control his hunger, to force himself to walk away, but he can’t. He knows men who might have enough face to starve before accepting Ma’s scraps, but he isn’t one of them. A lifetime ago, he might have been. But the humiliations of his new life have taught him much about who he really is. He has no sweet illusions, now. He sits. Ma beams and pushes his half-eaten dishes across the table.

Tranh thinks he must have done something grave in a former life to merit this humiliation, but still he has to fight the urge to bury his hands in the oily food and eat with bare fingers. Finally, the owner of the sidewalk stall brings a pair of chopsticks for the noodles, and fork and spoon for the rest. Noodles and ground pork slide down his throat. He tries to chew but as soon as the food touches his tongue he gulps it down. More food follows. He lifts a plate to his lips, shoveling down the last of Ma’s leavings. Fish and lank coriander and hot thick oil slip down like blessings.

“Good. Good.” Ma waves at the night stall man and a whiskey glass is quickly rinsed and handed to him.

The sharp scent of liquor floats around Ma like an aura as he pours. Tranh’s chest tightens at the scent. Oil coats his chin where he has made a mess in his haste. He wipes his mouth against his arm, watching the amber liquid splash into the glass.

Tranh once drank Cognac: XO. Imported by his own clippers. Fabulously expensive stuff with its shipping costs. A flavor of the foreign devils from before the Contraction. A ghost from utopian history, reinvigorated by the new Expansion and his own realization that the world was once again growing smaller. With new hull designs and polymer advances, his clipper ships navigated the globe and returned with the stuff of legends. And his Malay buyers were happy to purchase it, whatever their religion. What a profit that had been. He forces down the thought as Ma shoves the glass across to Tranh and then raises his own in toast. It is in the past. It is all in the past.

They drink. The whiskey burns warm in Tranh’s belly, joining the chilis and fish and pork and the hot oil of the fried noodles.

“It really is too bad you didn’t get that job.”

Tranh grimaces. “Don’t gloat. Fate has a way of balancing itself. I’ve learned that.”

Ma waves a hand. “I don’t gloat. There are too many of us, that’s the truth. You were ten-thousand-times qualified for that job. For any job.” He takes a sip of his whiskey, peers over its rim at Tranh. “Do you remember when you called me a lazy cockroach?”

Tranh shrugs, he can’t take his eyes off the whiskey bottle. “I called you worse than that.” He waits to see if Ma will refill his cup again. Wondering how rich he is, and how far this largesse will go. Hating that he plays beggar to a boy he once refused to keep as a clerk, and who now lords over him . . . and who now, in a show of face, pours Tranh’s whiskey to the top, letting it spill over in an amber cascade under the flickering light of the candles.

Ma finishes pouring, stares at the puddle he has created. “Truly the world is turned upside down. The young lord over the old. The Malays pinch out the Chinese. And the foreign devils return to our shores like bloated fish after a ku-shui epidemic.” Ma smiles. “You need to keep your ears up, and be aware of opportunities. Not like all those old men out on the sidewalk, waiting for hard labor. Find a new niche. That’s what I did. That’s why I’ve got my job.”

Tranh grimaces. “You came at a more fortuitous time.” He rallies, emboldened by a full belly and the liquor warming his face and limbs. “Anyway, you shouldn’t be too proud. You still stink of mother’s milk as far as I’m concerned, living in the Dung Lord’s tower. You’re only the Lord of Yellow Cards. And what is that, really? You haven’t climbed as high as my ankles, yet, Mr. Big Name.”

Ma’s eyes widen. He laughs. “No. Of course not. Someday, maybe. But I am trying to learn from you.” He smiles slightly and nods at Tranh’s decrepit state. “Everything except this postscript.”

“Is it true there are crank fans on the top floors? That it’s cool up there?”

Ma glances up at the looming highrise. “Yes. Of course. And men with the calories to wind them as well. And they haul water up for us, and men act as ballast on the elevator—up and down all day—doing favors for the Dung Lord.” He laughs and pours more whiskey, motions Tranh to drink. “You’re right though. It’s nothing, really. A poor palace, truly.

“But it doesn’t matter now. My family moves tomorrow. We have our residence permits. Tomorrow when I get paid again, we’re moving out. No more yellow card for us. No more payoffs to the Dung Lord’s lackeys. No more problems with the white shirts. It’s all set with the Environment Ministry. We turn in our yellow cards and become Thai. We’re going to be immigrants. Not just some invasive species, anymore.” He raises his glass. “It’s why I’m celebrating.”

Tranh scowls. “You must be pleased.” He finishes his drink, sets the tumbler down with a thud. “Just don’t forget that the nail that stands up also gets pounded down.”

Ma shakes his head and grins, his eyes whiskey bright. “Bangkok isn’t Malacca.”

“And Malacca wasn’t Bali. And then they came with their machetes and their spring guns and they stacked our heads in the gutters and sent our bodies and blood down the river to Singapore.”

Ma shrugs. “It’s in the past.” He waves to the man at the wok, calling for more food. “We have to make a home here, now.”

“You think you can? You think some white shirt won’t nail your hide to his door? You can’t make them like us. Our luck’s against us, here.”

“Luck? When did Mr. Three Prosperities get so superstitious?”

Ma’s dish arrives, tiny crabs crisp-fried, salted and hot with oil for Ma and Tranh to pick at with chopsticks and crunch between their teeth, each one no bigger than the tip of Tranh’s pinkie. Ma plucks one out and crunches it down. “When did Mr. Three Prosperities get so weak? When you fired me, you said I made my own luck. And now you tell me you don’t have any?” He spits on the sidewalk. “I’ve seen windups with more will to survive than you.”

“Fang pi.”

“No! It’s true! There’s a Japanese windup girl in the bars where my boss goes.” Ma leans forward. “She looks like a real woman. And she does disgusting things.” He grins. “Makes your cock hard. But you don’t hear her complaining about luck. Every white shirt in the city would pay to dump her in the methane composters and she’s still up in her highrise, dancing every night, in front of everyone. Her whole soulless body on display.”

“It’s not possible.”

Ma shrugs. “Say so if you like. But I’ve seen her. And she isn’t starving. She takes whatever spit and money come her way, and she survives. It doesn’t matter about the white shirts or the Kingdom edicts or the Japan-haters or the religious fanatics; she’s been dancing for months.”

“How can she survive?”

“Bribes? Maybe some ugly farang who wallows in her filth? Who knows? No real girl would do what she does. It makes your heart stop. You forget she’s a windup, when she does those things.” He laughs, then glances at Tranh. “Don’t talk to me about luck. There’s not enough luck in the entire Kingdom to keep her alive this long. And we know it’s not karma that keeps her alive. She has none.”

Tranh shrugs noncommittally and shovels more crabs into his mouth.

Ma grins. “You know I’m right.” He drains his whiskey glass and slams it down on the table. “We make our own luck! Our own fate. There’s a windup in a public bar and I have a job with a rich farang who can’t find his ass without my help! Of course I’m right!” He pours more whiskey. “Get over your self-pity, and climb out of your hole. The foreign devils don’t worry about luck or fate, and look how they return to us, like a newly engineered virus! Even the Contraction didn’t stop them. They’re like another invasion of devil cats. But they make their own luck. I’m not even sure if karma exists for them. And if fools like these farang can succeed, than we Chinese can’t be kept down for long. Men make their own luck, that’s what you told me when you fired me. You said I’d made my own bad luck and only had myself to blame.”

Tranh looks up at Ma. “Maybe I could work at your company.” He grins, trying not to look desperate. “I could make money for your lazy boss.”

Ma’s eyes become hooded. “Ah. That’s difficult. Difficult to say.”

Tranh knows that he should take the polite rejection, that he should shut up. But even as a part of him cringes, his mouth opens again, pressing, pleading. “Maybe you need an assistant? To keep the books? I speak their devil language. I taught it to myself when I traded with them. I could be useful.”

“There is little enough work for me.”

“But if he is as stupid as you say—”

“Stupid, yes. But not such a stupid melon that he wouldn’t notice another body in his office. Our desks are just so far apart.” He makes a motion with his hands. “You think he would not notice some stick coolie-man squatting beside his computer treadle?”

“In his factory, then?”

But Ma is already shaking his head. “I would help you if I could. But the megodont unions control the power, and the line inspector unions are closed to farang, no offense, and no one will accept that you are a materials scientist.” He shakes his head. “No. There is no way.”

“Any job. As a dung shoveler, even.”

But Ma is shaking his head more vigorously now, and Tranh finally manages to control his tongue, to plug this diarrhea of begging. “Never mind. Never mind.” He forces a grin. “I’m sure some work will turn up. I’m not worried.” He takes the bottle of Mekong whiskey and refills Ma’s glass, upending the bottle and finishing the whiskey despite Ma’s protests.

Tranh raises his half-empty glass and toasts the young man who has bested him in all ways, before throwing back the last of the alcohol in one swift swallow. Under the table, nearly invisible devil cats brush against his bony legs, waiting for him to leave, hoping that he will be foolish enough to leave scraps.

Morning dawns. Tranh wanders the streets, hunting for a breakfast he cannot afford. He threads through market alleys redolent with fish and lank green coriander and bright flares of lemongrass. Durians lie in reeking piles, their spiky skins covered with red blister rust boils. He wonders if he can steal one. Their yellow surfaces are blotched and stained, but their guts are nutritious. He wonders how much blister rust a man can consume before falling into a coma.

“You want? Special deal. Five for five baht. Good, yes?”

The woman who screeches at him has no teeth, she smiles with her gums and repeats herself. “Five for five baht.” She speaks Mandarin to him, recognizing him for their common heritage though she had the luck to be born in the Kingdom and he had the misfortune to be set down in Malaya. Chiu Chow Chinese, blessedly protected by her clan and King. Tranh suppresses envy.

“More like four for four.” He makes a pun of the homonyms. Sz for sz. Four for death. “They’ve got blister rust.”

She waves a hand sourly. “Five for five. They’re still good. Better than good. Picked just before.” She wields a gleaming machete and chops the durian in half, revealing the clean yellow slime of its interior with its fat gleaming pits. The sickly sweet scent of fresh durian boils up and envelopes them. “See! Inside good. Picked just in time. Still safe.”

“I might buy one.” He can’t afford any. But he can’t help replying. It feels too good to be seen as a buyer. It is his suit, he realizes. The Hwang Brothers have raised him in this woman’s eyes. She wouldn’t have spoken if not for the suit. Wouldn’t have even started the conversation.

“Buy more! The more you buy, the more you save.”

He forces a grin, wondering how to get away from the bargaining he should never have started. “I’m only one old man. I don’t need so much.”

“One skinny old man. Eat more. Get fat!”

She says this and they both laugh. He searches for a response, something to keep their comradely interaction alive, but his tongue fails him. She sees the helplessness in his eyes. She shakes her head. “Ah, grandfather. It is hard times for everyone. Too many of you all at once. No one thought it would get so bad down there.”

Tranh ducks his head, embarrassed. “I’ve troubled you. I should go.”

“Wait. Here.” She offers him the durian half. “Take it.”

“I can’t afford it.”

She makes an impatient gesture. “Take it. It’s lucky for me to help someone from the old country.” She grins. “And the blister rust looks too bad to sell to anyone else.”

“You’re kind. Buddha smile on you.” But as he takes her gift he again notices the great durian pile behind her. All neatly stacked with their blotches and their bloody weals of blister rust. Just like stacked Chinese heads in Malacca: his wife and daughter mouths staring out at him, accusatory. He drops the durian and kicks it away, frantically scraping his hands on his jacket, trying to get the blood off his palms.

“Ai! You’ll waste it!”

Tranh barely hears the woman’s cry. He staggers back from the fallen durian, staring at its ragged surface. Its gut-spilled interior. He looks around wildly. He has to get out of the crowds. Has to get away from the jostling bodies and the durian reek that’s all around, thick in his throat, gagging him. He puts a hand to his mouth and runs, clawing at the other shoppers, fighting through their press.

“Where you go? Come back! Huilai!” But the woman’s words are quickly drowned. Tranh shoves through the throng, pushing aside women with shopping baskets full of white lotus root and purple eggplants, dodging farmers and their clattering bamboo hand-carts, twisting past tubs of squid and serpent head fish. He pelts down the market alley like a thief identified, scrambling and dodging, running without thought or knowledge of where he is going, but running anyway, desperate to escape the stacked heads of his family and countrymen.

He runs and runs.

And bursts into the open thoroughfare of Charoen Krung Road. Powdered dung dust and hot sunlight wash over him. Cycle rickshaws clatter past. Palms and squat banana trees shimmer green in the bright open air.

As quickly as it seized him, Tranh’s panic fades. He stops short, hands on his knees, catching his breath and cursing himself. Fool. Fool. If you don’t eat, you die. He straightens and tries to turn back but the stacked durians flash in his mind and he stumbles away from the alley, gagging again. He can’t go back. Can’t face those bloody piles. He doubles over and his stomach heaves but his empty guts bring up nothing but strings of drool.

Finally he wipes his mouth on a Hwang Brothers sleeve and forces himself to straighten and confront the foreign faces all around. The sea of foreigners that he must learn to swim amongst, and who all call him farang. It repels him to think of it. And to think that in Malacca, with twenty generations of family and clan well-rooted in that city, he was just as much an interloper. That his clan’s esteemed history is nothing but a footnote for a Chinese expansion that has proven as transient as nighttime cool. That his people were nothing but an accidental spillage of rice on a map, now wiped up much more carefully than they were scattered down.

Tranh unloads U-Tex Brand RedSilks deep into the night, offerings to Potato God. A lucky job. A lucky moment, even if his knees have become loose and wobbly and feel as if they must soon give way. A lucky job, even if his arms are shaking from catching the heavy sacks as they come down off the megodonts. Tonight, he reaps not just pay but also the opportunity to steal from the harvest. Even if the RedSilk potatoes are small and harvested early to avoid a new sweep of scabis mold—the fourth genetic variation this year—they are still good. And their small size means their enhanced nutrition falls easily into his pockets.

Hu crouches above him, lowering down the potatoes. As the massive elephantine megodonts shuffle and grunt, waiting for their great wagons to be unloaded, Tranh catches Hu’s offerings with his hand-hooks and lowers the sacks the last step to the ground. Hook, catch, swing and lower. Again and again and again.

He is not alone in his work. Women from the tower slums crowd around his ladder. They reach up and caress each sack as he lowers it to the ground. Their fingers quest along hemp and burlap, testing for holes, for slight tears, for lucky gifts. A thousand times they stroke his burdens, reverently following the seams, only drawing away when coolie men shove between them to heft the sacks and haul them to Potato God.

After the first hour of his work, Tranh’s arms are shaking. After three, he can barely stand. He teeters on his creaking ladder as he lowers each new sack, and gasps and shakes his head to clear sweat from his eyes as he waits for the next one to come down.

Hu peers down from above. “Are you all right?”

Tranh glances warily over his shoulder. Potato God is watching, counting the sacks as they are carried into the warehouse. His eyes occasionally flick up to the wagons and trace across Tranh. Beyond him, fifty unlucky men watch silently from the shadows, any one of them far more observant than Potato God can ever be. Tranh straightens and reaches up to accept the next sack, trying not to think about the watching eyes. How politely they wait. How silent. How hungry. “I’m fine. Just fine.”

Hu shrugs and pushes the next burlap load over the wagon’s lip. Hu has the better place, but Tranh cannot resent it. One or the other must suffer. And Hu found the job. Hu has the right to the best place. To rest a moment before the next sack moves. After all, Hu collected Tranh for the job when he should have starved tonight. It is fair.

Tranh takes the sack and lowers it into the forest of waiting women’s hands, releases his hooks with a twist, and drops the bag to the ground. His joints feel loose and rubbery, as if femur and tibia will skid apart at any moment. He is dizzy with heat, but he dares not ask to slow the pace.

Another potato sack comes down. Women’s hands rise up like tangling strands of seaweed, touching, prodding, hungering. He cannot force them back. Even if he shouts at them they return. They are like devil cats; they cannot help themselves. He drops the sack the last few feet to the ground and reaches up for another as it comes over the wagon’s lip.

As he hooks the sack, his ladder creaks and suddenly slides. It chatters down the side of the wagon, then catches abruptly. Tranh sways, juggling the potato sack, trying to regain his center of gravity. Hands are all around him, tugging at the bag, pulling, prodding. “Watch out—”

The ladder skids again. He drops like a stone. Women scatter as he plunges. He hits the ground and pain explodes in his knee. The potato sack bursts. For a moment he worries what Potato God will say but then he hears screams all around him. He rolls onto his back. Above him, the wagon is swaying, shuddering. People are shouting and fleeing. The megodont lunges forward and the wagon heaves. Bamboo ladders fall like rain, slapping the pavement with bright firecracker retorts. The beast reverses itself and the wagon skids past Tranh, grinding the ladders to splinters. It is impossibly fast, even with the wagon’s weight still hampering it. The megodont’s great maw opens and suddenly it is screaming, a sound as high and panicked as a human’s.

All around them, other megodonts respond in a chorus. Their cacophony swamps the street. The megodont surges onto its hind legs, an explosion of muscle and velocity that breaks the wagon’s traces and flips it like a toy. Men cartwheel from it, blossoms shaken from a cherry tree. Maddened, the beast rears again and kicks the wagon. Sends it skidding sidewise. It slams past Tranh, missing him by inches.

Tranh tries to rise but his leg won’t work. The wagon smashes into a wall. Bamboo and teak crackle and explode, the wagon disintegrating as the megodont drags and kicks it, trying to win free completely. Tranh drags himself away from the flying wagon, hand over hand, hauling his useless leg behind him. All around, men are shouting instructions, trying to control the beast, but he doesn’t look back. He focuses on the cobbles ahead, on getting out of reach. His leg won’t work. It refuses him. It seems to hate him.

Finally he makes it into the shelter of a protective wall. He hauls himself upright. “I’m fine,” he tells himself. “Fine.” Gingerly he tests his leg, setting weight on it. It’s wobbly, but he feels no real pain, not now. “Mei wenti. Mei wenti,” he whispers. “Not a problem. Just cracked it. Not a problem.”

The men are still shouting and the megodont is still screaming, but all he can see is his brittle old knee. He lets go of the wall. Takes a step, testing his weight, and collapses like a shadow puppet with strings gone slack.

Gritting his teeth, he again hauls himself up off the cobbles. He props himself against the wall, massaging his knee and watching the bedlam. Men are throwing ropes over the back of the struggling megodont, pulling it down, immobilizing it, finally. More than a score of men are working to hobble it.

The wagon’s frame has shattered completely and potatoes are spilled everywhere. A thick mash coats the ground. Women scramble on their knees, clawing through the mess, fighting with one another to hoard pulped tubers. They scrape it up from the street. Some of their scavenge is stained red, but no one seems to care. Their squabbling continues. The red bloom spreads. At the blossom’s center, a man’s trousers protrude from the muck.

Tranh frowns. He drags himself upright again and hops on his one good leg toward the broken wagon. He catches up against its shattered frame, staring. Hu’s body is a savage ruin, awash in megodont dung and potato mash. And now that Tranh is close, he can see that the struggling megodont’s great gray feet are gory with his friend. Someone is calling for a doctor but it is halfhearted, a habit from a time when they were not yellow cards.

Tranh tests his weight again but his knee provides the same queer jointless failure. He catches up against the wagon’s splintered planking and hauls himself back upright. He works the leg, trying to understand why it collapses. The knee bends, it doesn’t even hurt particularly, but it will not support his weight. He tests it again, with the same result.

With the megodont restrained, order in the unloading area is restored. Hu’s body is dragged aside. Devil cats gather near his blood pool, feline shimmers under methane glow. Their tracks pock the potato grime in growing numbers. More paw impressions appear in the muck, closing from all directions on Hu’s discarded body.

Tranh sighs. So we all go, he thinks. We all die. Even those of us who took our aging treatments and our tiger penis and kept ourselves strong are subject to the Hell journey. He promises to burn money for Hu, to ease his way in the afterlife, then catches himself and remembers that he is not the man he was. That even paper Hell Money is out of reach.

Potato God, disheveled and angry, comes and studies him. He frowns suspiciously. “Can you still work?”

“I can.” Tranh tries to walk but stumbles once again and catches up against the wagon’s shattered frame.

Potato God shakes his head. “I will pay you for the hours you worked.” He waves to a young man, fresh and grinning from binding the megodont. “You! You’re a quick one. Haul the rest of these sacks into warehouse.”

Already, other workers are lining up and grabbing loads from within the broken wagon. As the new man comes out with his first sack, his eyes dart to Tranh and then flick away, hiding his relief at Tranh’s incapacity.

Potato God watches with satisfaction and heads back to the warehouse.

“Double pay,” Tranh calls after Potato God’s retreating back. “Give me double pay. I lost my leg for you.”

The manager looks back at Tranh with pity, then glances at Hu’s body and shrugs. It is an easy acquiescence. Hu will demand no reparation.

It is better to die insensate than to feel every starving inch of collapse; Tranh pours his leg-wreck money into a bottle of Mekong whiskey. He is old. He is broken. He is the last of his line. His sons are dead. His daughter mouths are long gone. His ancestors will live uncared for in the underworld with no one to burn incense or offer sweet rice to them.

How they must curse him.

He limps and stumbles and crawls through the sweltering night streets, one hand clutching the open bottle, the other scrabbling at doorways and walls and methane lampposts to keep himself upright. Sometimes his knee works; sometimes it fails him completely. He has kissed the streets a dozen times.

He tells himself that he is scavenging, hunting for the chance of sustenance. But Bangkok is a city of scavengers, and the crows and devil cats and children have all come before him. If he is truly lucky, he will encounter the white shirts and they will knock him into bloody oblivion, perhaps send him to meet the previous owner of this fine Hwang Brothers suit that now flaps ragged around his shins. The thought appeals to him.

An ocean of whiskey rolls in his empty belly and he is warm and happy and carefree for the first time since the Incident. He laughs and drinks and shouts for the white shirts, calling them paper tigers, calling them dog fuckers. He calls them to him. Casts baiting words so that any within earshot will find him irresistible. But the Environment Ministry’s patrols must have other yellow cards to abuse, for Tranh wanders the green-tinged streets of Bangkok alone.

Never mind. It doesn’t matter. If he cannot find white shirts to do the job, he will drown himself. He will go to the river and dump himself in its offal. Floating on river currents to the sea appeals to him. He will end in the ocean like his scuttled clipper ships and the last of his heirs. He takes a swig of whiskey, loses his balance and winds up on the ground once again, sobbing and cursing white shirts and green headbands, and wet machetes.

Finally he drags himself into a doorway to rest, holding his miraculously unbroken whiskey bottle with one feeble hand. He cradles it to himself like a last bit of precious jade, smiling and laughing that it is not broken. He wouldn’t want to waste his life savings on the cobblestones.

He takes another swig. Stares at the methane lamps flickering overhead. Despair is the color of approved burn methane flickering green and gaseous, vinous in the dark. Green used to mean things like coriander and silk and jade and now all it means to him is bloodthirsty men with patriotic headbands and hungry scavenging nights. The lamps flicker. An entire green city. An entire city of despair.

Across the street, a shape scuttles, keeping to the shadows. Tranh leans forward, eyes narrowed. At first he takes it for a white shirt. But no. It is too furtive. It’s a woman. A girl. A pretty creature, all made up. An enticement that moves with the stuttery jerky motion of . . .

A windup girl.

Tranh grins, a surprised skeleton rictus of delight at the sight of this unnatural creature stealing through the night. A windup girl. Ma Ping’s windup girl. The impossible made flesh.

She slips from shadow to shadow, a creature even more terrified of white shirts than a yellow card geriatric. A waifish ghost-child ripped from her natural habitat and set down in a city which despises everything she represents: her genetic inheritance, her manufacturers, her unnatural competition—her ghostly lack of a soul. She has been here every night as he has pillaged through discarded melon spines. She has been here, tottering through the sweat heat darkness as he dodged white shirt patrols. And despite everything, she has been surviving.

Tranh forces himself upright. He sways, drunken and unsteady, then follows, one hand clutching his whiskey bottle, the other touching walls, catching himself when his bad knee falters. It’s a foolish thing, a whimsy, but the windup girl has seized his inebriated imagination. He wants to stalk this unlikely Japanese creature, this interloper on foreign soil even more despised than himself. He wants to follow her. Perhaps steal kisses from her. Perhaps protect her from the hazards of the night. To pretend at least that he is not this drunken ribcage caricature of a man, but is in fact a tiger still.

The windup girl travels through the blackest of back alleys, safe in darkness, hidden from the white shirts who would seize her and mulch her before she could protest. Devil cats yowl as she passes, scenting something as cynically engineered as themselves. The Kingdom is infested with plagues and beasts, besieged by so many bioengineered monsters that it cannot keep up. As small as gray fa’ gan fringe and as large as megodonts, they come. And as the Kingdom struggles to adapt, Tranh slinks after a windup girl, both of them as invasive as blister rust on a durian and just as welcome.

For all her irregular motion, the windup girl travels well enough. Tranh has difficulty keeping up with her. His knees creak and grind and he clenches his teeth against the pain. Sometimes he falls with a muffled grunt, but still he follows. Ahead of him, the windup girl ducks into new shadows, a wisp of tottering motion. Her herky-jerky gait announces her as a creature not human, no matter how beautiful she may be. No matter how intelligent, no matter how strong, no matter how supple her skin, she is a windup and meant to serve—and marked as such by a genetic specification that betrays her with every unnatural step.

Finally, when Tranh thinks that his legs will give out for a final time and that he can continue no longer, the windup girl pauses. She stands in the black mouth of a crumbling highrise, a tower as tall and wretched as his own, another carcass of the old Expansion. From high above, music and laughter filter down. Shapes float in the tower’s upper-story windows, limned in red light, the silhouettes of women dancing. Calls of men and the throb of drums. The windup girl disappears inside.

What would it be like to enter such a place? To spend baht like water while women danced and sang songs of lust? Tranh suddenly regrets spending his last baht on whiskey. This is where he should have died. Surrounded by fleshly pleasures that he has not known since he lost his country and his life. He purses his lips, considering. Perhaps he can bluff his way in. He still wears the raiment of the Hwang Brothers. He still appears a gentleman, perhaps. Yes. He will attempt it, and if he gathers the shame of ejection on his head, if he loses face one more time, what of it? He will be dead in a river soon anyway, floating to the sea to join his sons.

He starts to cross the street but his knee gives out and he falls flat instead. He saves his whiskey bottle more by luck than by dexterity. The last of its amber liquid glints in the methane light. He grimaces and pulls himself into a sitting position, then drags himself back into a doorway. He will rest, first. And finish the bottle. The windup girl will be there for a long time, likely. He has time to recover himself. And if he falls again, at least he won’t have wasted his liquor. He tilts the bottle to his lips then lets his tired head rest against the building. He’ll just catch his breath.

Laughter issues from the highrise. Tranh jerks awake. A man stumbles from its shadow portal: drunk, laughing. More men spill out after him. They laugh and shove one another. Drag tittering women out with them. Motion to cycle rickshaws that wait in the alleys for easy drunken patrons. Slowly, they disperse. Tranh tilts his whiskey bottle. Finds it empty.

Another pair of men emerges from the highrise’s maw. One of them is Ma Ping. The other a farang who can only be Ma’s boss. The farang waves for a cycle rickshaw. He climbs in and waves his farewells. Ma raises his own hand in return and his gold and diamond wristwatch glints in the methane light. Tranh’s wristwatch. Tranh’s history. Tranh’s heirloom flashing bright in the darkness. Tranh scowls. Wishes he could rip it off young Ma’s wrist.

The farang’s rickshaw starts forward with a screech of unoiled bicycle chains and drunken laughter, leaving Ma Ping standing alone in the middle of the street. Ma laughs to himself, seems to consider returning to the bars, then laughs again and turns away, heading across the street, toward Tranh.

Tranh shies into the shadows, unwilling to let Ma catch him in such a state. Unwilling to endure more humiliation. He crouches deeper in his doorway as Ma stumbles about the street in search of rickshaws. But all the rickshaws have been taken for the moment. No more lurk below the bars.

Ma’s gold wristwatch glints again in the methane light.

Pale forms glazed green materialize on the street, three men walking, their mahogany skin almost black in the darkness, contrasting sharply against the creased whites of their uniforms. Their black batons twirl casually at their wrists. Ma doesn’t seem to notice them at first. The white shirts converge, casual. Their voices carry easily in the quiet night.

“You’re out late.”

Ma shrugs, grins queasily. “Not really. Not so late.”

The three white shirts gather close. “Late for a yellow card. You should be home by now. Bad luck to be out after yellow card curfew. Especially with all that yellow gold on your wrist.”

Ma holds up his hands, defensive. “I’m not a yellow card.”

“Your accent says differently.”

Ma reaches for his pockets, fumbles in them. “Really. You’ll see. Look.”

A white shirt steps close. “Did I say you could move?”

“My papers. Look—”

“Get your hands out!”

“Look at my stamps!”

“Out!” A black baton flashes. Ma yelps, clutches his elbow. More blows rain down. Ma crouches, trying to shield himself. He curses, “Nimade bi!”

The white shirts laugh. “That’s yellow card talk.” One of them swings his baton, low and fast, and Ma collapses, crying out, curling around a damaged leg. The white shirts gather close. One of them jabs Ma in the face, making him uncurl, then runs the baton down Ma’s chest, dragging blood.

“He’s got nicer clothes than you, Thongchai.”

“Probably snuck across the border with an assful of jade.”

One of them squats, studies Ma’s face. “Is it true? Do you shit jade?”

Ma shakes his head frantically. He rolls over and starts to crawl away. A black runnel of blood spills from his mouth. One leg drags behind him, useless. A white shirt follows, pushes him over with his shoe and puts his foot on Ma’s face. The other two suck in their breath and step back, shocked. To beat a man is one thing . . . “Suttipong, no.”

The man called Suttipong glances back at his peers. “It’s nothing. These yellow cards are as bad as blister rust. This is nothing. They all come begging, taking food when we’ve got little enough for our own, and look,” he kicks Ma’s wrist. “Gold.”

Ma gasps, tries to strip the watch from his wrist. “Take it. Here. Please. Take it.”

“It’s not yours to give, yellow card.”

“Not . . . yellow card,” Ma gasps. “Please. Not your Ministry.” His hands fumble for his pockets, frantic under the white shirt’s gaze. He pulls out his papers and waves them in the hot night air.

Suttipong takes the papers, glances at them. Leans close. “You think our countrymen don’t fear us, too?”

He throws the papers on the ground, then quick as a cobra he strikes. One, two, three, the blows rain down. He is very fast. Very methodical. Ma curls into a ball, trying to ward off the blows. Suttipong steps back, breathing heavily. He waves at the other two. “Teach him respect.” The other two glance at each other doubtfully, but under Suttipong’s urging, they are soon beating Ma, shouting encouragement to one another.

A few men come down from the pleasure bars and stumble into the streets, but when they see white uniforms they flee back inside. The white shirts are alone. And if there are other watching eyes, they do not show themselves. Finally, Suttipong seems satisfied. He kneels and strips the antique Rolex from Ma’s wrist, spits on Ma’s face and motions his peers to join him. They turn away, striding close past Tranh’s hiding place.

The one called Thongchai looks back. “He might complain.”

Suttipong shakes his head, his attention on the Rolex in his hand. “He’s learned his lesson.”

Their footsteps fade into the darkness. Music filters down from the highrise clubs. The street itself is silent. Tranh watches for a long time, looking for other hunters. Nothing moves. It is as if the entire city has turned its back on the broken Malay-Chinese lying in the street. Finally, Tranh limps out of the shadows and approaches Ma Ping.

Ma catches sight of him and holds up a weak hand. “Help.” He tries the words in Thai, again in farang English, finally in Malay, as though he has returned to his childhood. Then he seems to recognize Tranh. His eyes widen. He smiles weakly, through split bloody lips. Speaks Mandarin, their trade language of brotherhood. “Lao pengyou. What are you doing here?”

Tranh squats beside him, studying his cracked face. “I saw your windup girl.”

Ma closes his eyes, tries to smile. “You believe me, then?” His eyes are nearly swollen shut, blood runs down from a cut in his brow, trickling freely.

“Yes.”

“I think they broke my leg.” He tries to pull himself upright, gasps and collapses. He probes his ribs, runs his hand down to his shin. “I can’t walk.” He sucks air as he prods another broken bone. “You were right about the white shirts.”

“A nail that stands up gets pounded down.”

Something in Tranh’s tone makes Ma look up. He studies Tranh’s face. “Please. I gave you food. Find me a rickshaw.” One hand strays to his wrist, fumbling for the timepiece that is no longer his, trying to offer it. Trying to bargain.

Is this fate? Tranh wonders. Or luck? Tranh purses his lips, considering. Was it fate that his own shiny wristwatch drew the white shirts and their wicked black batons? Was it luck that he arrived to see Ma fall? Do he and Ma Ping still have some larger karmic business?

Tranh watches Ma beg and remembers firing a young clerk so many lifetimes ago, sending him packing with a thrashing and a warning never to return. But that was when he was a great man. And now he is such a small one. As small as the clerk he thrashed so long ago. Perhaps smaller. He slides his hands under Ma’s back, lifts.

“Thank you,” Ma gasps. “Thank you.”

Tranh runs his fingers into Ma’s pockets, working through them methodically, checking for baht the white shirts have left. Ma groans, forces out a curse as Tranh jostles him. Tranh counts his scavenge, the dregs of Ma’s pockets that still look like wealth to him. He stuffs the coins into his own pocket.

Ma’s breathing comes in short panting gasps. “Please. A rickshaw. That’s all.” He barely manages to exhale the words.

Tranh cocks his head, considering, his instincts warring with themselves. He sighs and shakes his head. “A man makes his own luck, isn’t that what you told me?” He smiles tightly. “My own arrogant words, coming from a brash young mouth.” He shakes his head again, astounded at his previously fat ego, and smashes his whiskey bottle on the cobbles. Glass sprays. Shards glint green in the methane light.

“If I were still a great man . . .” Tranh grimaces. “But then, I suppose we’re both past such illusions. I’m very sorry about this.” With one last glance around the darkened street, he drives the broken bottle into Ma’s throat. Ma jerks and blood spills out around Tranh’s hand. Tranh scuttles back, keeping this new welling of blood off his Hwang Brothers fabrics. Ma’s lungs bubble and his hands reach up for the bottle lodged in his neck, then fall away. His wet breathing stops.

Tranh is trembling. His hands shake with an electric palsy. He has seen so much death, and dealt so little. And now Ma lies before him, another Malay-Chinese dead, with only himself to blame. Again. He stifles an urge to be sick.

He turns and crawls into the protective shadows of the alley and pulls himself upright. He tests his weak leg. It seems to hold him. Beyond the shadows, the street is silent. Ma’s body lies like a heap of garbage in its center. Nothing moves.

Tranh turns and limps down the street, keeping to the walls, bracing himself when his knee threatens to give way. After a few blocks, the methane lamps start to go out. One by one, as though a great hand is moving down the street snuffing them, they gutter into silence as the Public Works Ministry cuts off the gas. The street settles into complete darkness.

When Tranh finally arrives at Surawong Road, its wide black thoroughfare is nearly empty of traffic. A pair of ancient water buffalo placidly haul a rubber-wheeled wagon under starlight. A shadow farmer rides behind them, muttering softly. The yowls of mating devil cats scrape the hot night air, but that is all.

And then, from behind, the creak of bicycle chains. The rattle of wheels on cobbles. Tranh turns, half expecting avenging white shirts, but it is only a cycle rickshaw, chattering down the darkened street. Tranh raises a hand, flashing newfound baht. The rickshaw slows. A man’s ropey limbs gleam with moonlit sweat. Twin earrings decorate his lobes, gobs of silver in the night. “Where you going?”

Tranh scans the rickshaw man’s broad face for hints of betrayal, for hints that he is a hunter, but the man is only looking at the baht in Tranh’s hand. Tranh forces down his paranoia and climbs into the rickshaw’s seat. “The farang factories. By the river.”

The rickshaw man glances over his shoulder, surprised. “All the factories will be closed. Too much energy to run at night. It’s all black night down there.”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s a job opening. There will be interviews.”

The man stands on his pedals. “At night?”

“Tomorrow.” Tranh settles deeper into his seat. “I don’t want to be late.”

ALL SEATED ON THE GROUND

Paolo Bacigalupi

I’d always said that if and when the aliens actually landed, it would be a letdown. I mean, after War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, and E.T., there was no way they could live up to the image in the public’s mind, good or bad.

I’d also said that they would look nothing like the aliens of the movies, and that they would not have come to A) kill us, B) take over our planet and enslave us, C) save us from ourselves à la The Day the Earth Stood Still, or D) have sex with Earthwomen. I mean, I realize it’s hard to find someone nice, but would aliens really come thousands of light-years just to get a date? Plus, it seemed just as likely they’d be attracted to warthogs. Or yucca. Or air-conditioning units.

I’ve also always thought A) and B) were highly unlikely, since imperialist invader types would probably be too busy invading their next-door neighbors and being invaded by other invader types to have time to go after an out-of-the-way place like Earth, although you never know. I mean, look at Iraq. And as to C), I’m wary of people or aliens who say they’ve come to save you, as witness Reverend Thresher. And it seemed to me that aliens who were capable of building the spaceships necessary to cross all those light-years would necessarily have complex civilizations and therefore more complicated motives for coming than merely incinerating Washington or phoning home.

What had never occurred to me was that the aliens would arrive and we still wouldn’t know what those motives were after almost nine months of talking to them.

Now, I’m not talking about an arrival where the UFO swoops down in the Southwest in the middle of nowhere, mutilates a few cows, makes a crop circle or two, abducts an extremelyunreliable and unintelligent-sounding person, probes them in embarrassing places, and takes off again. I’d never believed the aliens would do that, either, and they didn’t, although they did land in the Southwest, sort of.

They landed their spaceship in Denver, in the middle of the DU campus, and marched—well, actually marched is the wrong word; the Altairi’s method of locomotion is somewhere between a glide and a waddle—straight up to the front door of University Hall in classic “Take me to your leader” fashion.

And that was it. They (there were six of them) didn’t say, “Take us to your leader!” or “One small step for aliens, one giant leap for alien-kind” or even “Earthmen, hand over your females.” Or your planet. They just stood there.

And stood there. Police cars surrounded them, lights flashing. TV news crews and reporters pointed cameras at them. F-16s roared overhead, snapping pictures of their spaceship and trying to determine whether A) it had a force field or B) weaponry or C) they could blow it up (they couldn’t). Half the city fled to the mountains in terror, creating an enormous traffic jam on I-70, and the other half drove by the campus to see what was going on, creating an enormous traffic jam on Evans.

The aliens, who by now had been dubbed the Altairi because an astronomy professor at DU had announced they were from the star Altair in the constellation Aquila (they weren’t), didn’t react to any of this, which apparently convinced the president of DU they weren’t going to blow up the place à la Independence Day. He came out and welcomed them to Earth and to DU.

They continued to stand there. The mayor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Denver. The governor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Colorado, assured everyone it was perfectly safe to visit the state, and implied the Altairi were just the latest in a long line of tourists who had come from all over to see the magnificent Rockies, though that seemed unlikely since they were facing the other way, and they didn’t turn around, even when the governor walked past them to point at Pikes Peak. They just stood there, facing University Hall.

They continued to stand there for the next three weeks, through an endless series of welcoming speeches by scientists, State Department officials, foreign dignitaries, and church and business leaders, and an assortment of weather, including a late April snowstorm that broke branches and power lines. If it hadn’t been for the expressions on their faces, everybody would have assumed the Altairi were plants.

But no plant ever glared like that. It was a look of utter, withering disapproval. The first time I saw it in person, I thought, Oh, my God, it’s Aunt Judith.

She was actually my father’s aunt, and she used to come over once a month or so, dressed in a suit, a hat, and white gloves, and sit on the edge of a chair and glare at us, a glare which drove my mother into paroxysms of cleaning and baking whenever she found out Aunt Judith was coming. Not that Aunt Judith criticized Mom’s housekeeping or her cooking. She didn’t. She didn’t even make a face when she sipped the coffee Mom served her or draw a white-gloved finger along the mantelpiece, looking for dust. She didn’t have to. Sitting there in stony silence while my mother desperately tried to make conversation, her entire manner indicated disapproval. It was perfectly clear from that glare of hers that she considered us untidy, ill-mannered, ignorant, and utterly beneath contempt.

Since she never said what it was that displeased her (except for the occasional “Properly brought-up children do not speak unless spoken to”), my mother frantically polished silverware, baked petits fours, wrestled my sister Tracy and me into starched pinafores and patent-leather shoes and ordered us to thank Aunt Judith nicely for our birthday presents—a card with a dollar bill in it—and scrubbed and dusted the entire house to within an inch of its life. She even redecorated the entire living room, but nothing did any good. Aunt Judith still radiated disdain.

It would wilt even the strongest person. My mother frequently had to lie down with a cold cloth on her forehead after a visit from Aunt Judith, and the Altairi had the same effect on the dignitaries and scientists and politicians who came to see them. After the first time, the governor refused to meet with them again, and the president, whose polls were already in the low twenties and who couldn’t afford any more pictures of irate citizens, refused to meet with them at all.

Instead he appointed a bipartisan commission, consisting of representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, the House, the Senate, and FEMA, to study them and find a way to communicate with them, and then, after that was a bust, a second commission consisting of experts in astronomy, anthropology, exobiology, and communications, and then a third, consisting of whoever they were able to recruit and who had anything resembling a theory about the Altairi or how to communicate with them, which is where I come in. I’d written a series of newspaper columns on aliens both before and after the Altairi arrived. (I’d also written columns on tourists, driving with cell phones, the traffic on I-70, the difficulty of finding any nice men to date, and Aunt Judith.)

I was recruited in late November to replace one of the language experts, who quit “to spend more time with his wife and family.” I was picked by the chair of the commission, Dr. Morthman (who clearly didn’t realize that my columns were humorous), but it didn’t matter, since he had no intention of listening to me, or to anyone else on the commission, which at that point consisted of three linguists, two anthropologists, a cosmologist, a meteorologist, a botanist (in case they were plants after all), experts in primate, avian, and insect behavior (in case they were one of the above), an Egyptologist (in case they turned out to have built the Pyramids), an animal psychic, an Air Force colonel, a JAG lawyer, an expert in foreign customs, an expert in nonverbal communications, a weapons expert, Dr. Morthman (who, as far as I could see, wasn’t an expert in anything), and, because of our proximity to Colorado Springs, the head of the One True Way Maxichurch, Reverend Thresher, who was convinced the Altairi were a herald of the End Times. “There is a reason God had them land here,” he said. I wanted to ask him why, if that was the case, they hadn’t landed in Colorado Springs instead, but he wasn’t a good listener, either.

The only progress these people and their predecessors had made by the time I joined the commission was to get the Altairi to follow them various places, like in out of the weather and into the various labs that had been set up in University Hall for studying them, although when I saw the videotapes, it wasn’t at all clear they were responding to anything the commission said or did. It looked to me like following Dr. Morthman and the others was their own idea, particularly since at nine o’clock every night they turned and glided/waddled back outside and disappeared into their ship.

The first time they did that, everyone panicked, thinking they were leaving. “Aliens Depart. Are They Fed Up?” the evening news logo read, a conclusion which I felt was due to their effect on people rather than any solid evidence. I mean, they could have gone home to watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, but even after they re-emerged the next morning, the theory persisted that there was some sort of deadline, that if we didn’t succeed in communicating with them within a fixed amount of time, the planet would be reduced to ash. Aunt Judith had always made me feel exactly the same way, that if I didn’t measure up, I was toast.

But I never did measure up, and nothing in particular happened, except she stopped sending me birthday cards with a dollar in them, and I figured if the Altairi hadn’t obliterated us after a few conversations with Reverend Thresher (he was constantly reading them passages from Scripture and trying to convert them), they weren’t going to.

But it didn’t look like they were going to tell us what they were doing here, either. The commission had tried speaking to them in nearly every language, including Farsi, Navajo code-talk, and Cockney slang. They had played them music, drummed, written out greetings, given them several PowerPoint presentations, text-messaged them, and shown them the Rosetta Stone. They’d also tried Ameslan and pantomime, though it was obvious the Altairi could hear. Whenever someone spoke to them or offered them a gift (or prayed over them), their expression of disapproval deepened to one of utter contempt. Just like Aunt Judith.

By the time I joined the commission, it had reached the same state of desperation my mother had when she redecorated the living room and had decided to try to impress the Altairi by taking them to see the sights of Denver and Colorado, in the hope they’d react favorably.

“It won’t work,” I said. “My mother put up new drapes and wallpaper, and it didn’t have any effect at all,” but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.

We took them to the Denver Museum of Art and Rocky Mountain National Park and the Garden of the Gods and a Broncos game. They just stood there, sending out waves of disapproval.

Dr. Morthman was undeterred. “Tomorrow we’ll take them to the Denver Zoo.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked. “I mean, I’d hate to give them ideas,” but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.

Luckily, the Altairi didn’t react to anything at the zoo, or to the Christmas lights at Civic Center, or to the Nutcracker ballet. And then we went to the mall.

By that point, the commission had dwindled down to seventeen people (two of the linguists and the animal psychic had quit), but it was still a large enough group of observers that the Altairi ran the risk of being trampled in the crowd. Most of the members, however, had stopped going on the field trips, saying they were “pursuing alternate lines of research” that didn’t require direct observation, which meant they couldn’t stand to be glared at the whole way there and back in the van.

So the day we went to the mall, there were only Dr. Morthman, the aroma expert Dr. Wakamura, Reverend Thresher, and me. We didn’t even have any press with us. When the Altairi’d first arrived, they were all over the TV networks and CNN, but after a few weeks of the aliens doing nothing, the networks had shifted to showing more exciting scenes from Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Men in Black II, and then completely lost interest and gone back to Paris Hilton and stranded whales. The only photographer with us was Leo, the teenager Dr. Morthman had hired to videotape our outings, and as soon as we got inside the mall, he said, “Do you think it’d be okay if I ducked out to buy my girlfriend’s Christmas present before we start filming? I mean, face it, they’re just going to stand there.”

He was right. The Altairi glide-waddled the length of several stores and then stopped, glaring impartially at The Sharper Image and Gap window displays and the crowds who stopped to gawk at the six of them and who then, intimidated by their expressions, averted their eyes and hurried on.

The mall was jammed with couples loaded down with shopping bags, parents pushing strollers, children, and a mob of middle-school girls in green choir robes apparently waiting to sing. The malls invited school and church choirs to come and perform this time of year in the food court. The girls were giggling and chattering; a toddler was shrieking, “I don’t want to!”; Julie Andrews was singing “Joy to the World” on the piped-in Muzak; and Reverend Thresher was pointing at the panty-, bra-, and wing-clad mannequins in the window of Victoria’s Secret and saying, “Look at that! Sinful!”

“This way,” Dr. Morthman, ahead of the Altairi, said, waving his arm like the leader of a wagon train, “I want them to see Santa Claus,” and I stepped to the side to get around a trio of teenage boys walking side by side who’d cut me off from the Altairi.

There was a sudden gasp, and the mall went quiet except for the Muzak. “What—?” Dr. Morthman said sharply, and I pushed past the teenage boys to see what had happened.

The Altairi were sitting calmly in the middle of the space between the stores, glaring. A circle of fascinated shoppers had formed a circle around them, and a man in a suit who looked like the manager of the mall was hurrying up, demanding, “What’s going on here?”

“This is wonderful,” Dr. Morthman said. “I knew they’d respond if we just took them enough places.” He turned to me. “You were behind them, Miss Yates. What made them sit down?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t see them from where I was. Did—?”

“Go find Leo,” he ordered. “He’ll have it on tape.”

I wasn’t so sure of that, but I went to look for him. He was just coming out of Victoria’s Secret, carrying a small bright pink bag. “Meg, what happened?” he asked.

“The Altairi sat down,” I said.

“Why?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. I take it you weren’t filming them?”

“No, I told you, I had to buy my girlfriend—Jeez, Dr. Morthman will kill me.” He jammed the pink bag into his jeans pocket. “I didn’t think—”

“Well, start filming now,” I said, “and I’ll go see if I can find somebody who caught it on their cellphone camera.” With all these people taking their kids to see Santa, there was bound to be someone with a camera. I started working my way around the circle of staring spectators, keeping away from Dr. Morthman, who was telling the mall manager he needed to cordon off this end of the mall and everyone in it.

“Everyone in it?” the manager gulped.

“Yes, it’s essential. The Altairi are obviously responding to something they saw or heard—”

“Or smelled,” Dr. Wakamura put in.

“And until we know what it was, we can’t allow anyone to leave,” Dr. Morthman said. “It’s the key to our being able to communicate with them.”

“But it’s only two weeks till Christmas,” the mall manager said. “I can’t just shut off—”

“You obviously don’t realize that the fate of the planet may be at stake,” Dr. Morthman said.

I hoped not, especially since no one seemed to have caught the event on film, though they all had their cell phones out and pointed at the Altairi now, in spite of their glares. I looked across the circle, searching for a likely parent or grandparent who might have—

The choir. One of the girls’ parents was bound to have brought a video camera along. I hurried over to the troop of green-robed girls. “Excuse me,” I said to them, “I’m with the Altairi—”

Mistake. The girls instantly began bombarding me with questions. “Why are they sitting down?”

“Why don’t they talk?”

“Why are they always so mad?”

“Are we going to get to sing? We didn’t get to sing yet.”

“They said we had to stay here. How long? We’re supposed to sing over at Flatirons Mall at six o’clock.”

“Are they going to get inside us and pop out of our stomachs?”

“Did any of your parents bring a video camera?” I tried to shout over their questions, and when that failed, “I need to talk to your choir director.”

“Mr. Ledbetter?”

“Are you his girlfriend?”

“No,” I said, trying to spot someone who looked like a choir director type. “Where is he?”

“Over there,” one of them said, pointing at a tall, skinny man in slacks and a blazer. “Are you going out with Mr. Ledbetter?”

“No,” I said, trying to work my way over to him.

“Why not? He’s really nice.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I said as I reached him. “Mr. Ledbetter? I’m Meg Yates. I’m with the commission studying the Altairi—”

“You’re just the person I want to talk to, Meg,” he said.

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you how long it’s going to be,” I said. “The girls told me you have another singing engagement at six o’clock.”

“We do, and I’ve got a rehearsal tonight, but that isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend, Mr. Ledbetter,” one of the girls said.

I took advantage of the interruption to say, “I was wondering if anyone with your choir happened to record what just happened on a video camera or a—”

“Probably. Belinda,” he said to the one who told him I didn’t have a boyfriend, “go get your mother.” She took off through the crowd. “Her mom started recording when we left the church. And if she didn’t happen to catch it, Kaneesha’s mom probably did. Or Chelsea’s dad.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” I said. “Our cameraman didn’t get it on film, and we need it to see what triggered their action.”

“What made them sit down, you mean?” he said. “You don’t need a video. I know what it was. The song.”

“What song?” I said. “A choir wasn’t singing when we came in, and anyway, the Altairi have already been exposed to music. They didn’t react to it at all.”

“What kind of music? Those notes from Close Encounters?”

“Yes,” I said defensively, “and Beethoven and Debussy and Charles Ives. A whole assortment of composers.”

“But instrumental music, not vocals, right? I’m talking about a song. One of the Christmas carols on the piped-in Muzak. I saw them sit down. They were definitely—”

“Mr. Ledbetter, you wanted my mom?” Belinda said, dragging over a large woman with a videocam.

“Yes,” he said. “Mrs. Carlson, I need to see the video you shot of the choir today. From when we got to the mall.”

She obligingly found the place and handed it to him. He fast-forwarded a minute. “Oh, good, you got it,” he said, rewound, and held the camera so I could see the little screen. “Watch.”

The screen showed the bus with First Presbyterian Church on its side, the girls getting off, the girls filing into the mall, the girls gathering in front of Crate and Barrel, giggling and chattering, though the sound was too low to hear what they were saying. “Can you turn the volume up?” Mr. Ledbetter said to Mrs. Carlson, and she pushed a button.

The voices of the girls came on: “Mr. Ledbetter, can we go to the food court afterward for a pretzel?”

“Mr. Ledbetter, I don’t want to stand next to Heidi.”

“Mr. Ledbetter, I left my lip gloss on the bus.”

“Mr. Ledbetter—”

The Altairi aren’t going to be on this, I thought. Wait—there, past the green-robed girls, was Dr. Morthman and Leo with his video camera, and then the Altairi. They were just glimpses, though, not a clear view. “I’m afraid—” I said.

“Shh,” Mr. Ledbetter said, pushing down on the volume button again. “Listen.”

He had cranked the volume all the way up. I could hear Reverend Thresher saying, “Look at that! It’s absolutely disgusting!”

“Can you hear the Muzak on the tape, Meg?” Mr. Ledbetter asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “What is that?”

“ ‘Joy to the World,’ ” he said, holding it so I could see. Mrs. Carlson must have moved to get a better shot of the Altairi, because there was no one blocking the view of them as they followed Dr. Morthman. I tried to see if they were glaring at anything in particular—the strollers or the Christmas decorations or the Victoria’s Secret mannequins or the sign for the restrooms—but if they were, I couldn’t tell.

“This way,” Dr. Morthman said on the tape, “I want them to see Santa Claus.”

“Okay, it’s right about here,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “Listen.”

“ ‘While shepherds watched . . .’ ” the Muzak choir sang tinnily.

I could hear Reverend Thresher saying, “Blasphemous!” and one of the girls asking, “Mr. Ledbetter, after we sing can we go to McDonald’s?” and the Altairi abruptly collapsed onto the floor with a floomphing motion, like a crinolined Scarlett O’Hara sitting down suddenly. “Did you hear what they were singing?” Mr. Ledbetter said.

“No—”

“ ‘All seated on the ground.’ Here,” he said, rewinding. “Listen.”

He played it again. I watched the Altairi, focusing on picking out the sound of the Muzak through the rest of the noise. “ ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night,’ ” the choir sang, “ ‘all seated on the ground.’ ”

He was right. The Altairi sat down the instant the word “seated” ended. I looked at him.

“See?” he said happily. “The song said to sit down and they sat. I happened to notice it because I was singing along with the Muzak. It’s a bad habit of mine. The girls tease me about it.”

But why would the Altairi respond to the words in a Christmas carol when they hadn’t responded to anything else we’d said to them over the last nine months? “Can I borrow this videotape?” I asked. “I need to show it to the rest of the commission.”

“Sure,” he said, and asked Mrs. Carlson.

“I don’t know,” she said reluctantly. “I have tapes of every single one of Belinda’s performances.”

“She’ll make a copy and get the original back to you,” Mr. Ledbetter told her. “Isn’t that right, Meg?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Great,” he said. “You can send the tape to me, and I’ll see to it Belinda gets it. Will that work?” he asked Mrs. Carlson.

She nodded, popped the tape out, and handed it to me. “Thank you,” I said and hurried back over to Dr. Morthman, who was still arguing with the mall manager.

“You can’t just close the entire mall,” the manager was saying. “This is the biggest profit period of the year—”

“Dr. Morthman,” I said, “I have a tape here of the Altairi sitting down. It was taken by—”

“Not now,” he said. “I need you to go tell Leo to film everything the Altairi might have seen.”

“But he’s taping the Altairi,” I said. “What if they do something else?” but he wasn’t listening.

“Tell him we need a video record of everything they might have responded to, the stores, the shoppers, the Christmas decorations, everything. And then call the police department and tell them to cordon off the parking lot. Tell them no one’s to leave.”

“Cordon off—!” the mall manager said. “You can’t hold all these people here!”

“All these people need to be moved out of this end of the mall and into an area where they can be questioned,” Dr. Morthman said.

“Questioned?” the mall manager, almost apoplectic, said.

“Yes, one of them may have seen what triggered their action—”

“Someone did,” I said. “I was just talking to—”

He wasn’t listening. “We’ll need names, contact information, and depositions from all of them,” he said to the mall manager. “And they’ll need to be tested for infectious diseases. The Altairi may be sitting down because they don’t feel well.”

“Dr. Morthman, they aren’t sick,” I said. “They—”

“Not now,” he said. “Did you tell Leo?”

I gave up. “I’ll do it now,” I said and went over to where Leo was filming the Altairi and told him what Dr. Morthman wanted him to do.

“What if the Altairi do something?” he said, looking at them sitting there glaring. He sighed. “I suppose he’s right. They don’t look like they’re going to move anytime soon.” He swung his camera around and started filming the Victoria’s Secret window. “How long do you think we’ll be stuck here?”

I told him what Dr. Morthman had said.

“Jeez, he’s going to question all these people?” he said, moving to the Williams-Sonoma window. “I had somewhere to go tonight.”

All these people have somewhere to go tonight, I thought, looking at the crowd—mothers with babies in strollers, little kids, elderly couples, teenagers. Including fifty middle-school girls who were supposed to be at another performance an hour from now. And it wasn’t the choir director’s fault Dr. Morthman wouldn’t listen.

“We’ll need a room large enough to hold everyone,” Dr. Morthman was saying, “and adjoining rooms for interrogating them,” and the mall manager was shouting, “This is a mall, not Guantanamo!”

I backed carefully away from Dr. Morthman and the mall manager and then worked my way through the crowd to where the choir director was standing, surrounded by his students. “But, Mr. Ledbetter,” one of them was saying, “we’d come right back, and the pretzel place is right over there.”

“Mr. Ledbetter, could I speak to you for a moment?” I said.

“Sure. Shoo,” he said to the girls.

“But, Mr. Ledbetter—”

He ignored them. “What did the commission think of the Christmas carol theory?” he asked me.

“I haven’t had a chance to ask them. Listen, in another five minutes they’re going to lock down this entire mall.”

“But I—”

“I know, you’ve got another performance and if you’re going to leave, do it right now. I’d go that way,” I said, pointing to the east door.

“Thank you,” he said earnestly, “but won’t you get into trouble—?”

“If I need your choir’s depositions, I’ll call you,” I said. “What’s your number?”

“Belinda, give me a pen and something to write on,” he said. She handed him a pen and began rummaging in her backpack.

“Never mind,” he said, “there isn’t time.” He grabbed my hand and wrote the number on my palm.

“You said we aren’t allowed to write on ourselves,” Belinda said.

“You’re not,” he said. “I really appreciate this, Meg.”

“Go,” I said, looking anxiously over at Dr. Morthman. If they didn’t go in the next thirty seconds, they’d never make it, and there was no way he could round up fifty middle-school girls in that short a time. Or even make himself heard . . .

“Ladies,” he said, and raised his hands as if he were going to direct a choir. “Line up.” And to my astonishment, they instantly obeyed him, forming themselves silently into a line and walking quickly toward the east door with no giggling, no “Mr. Ledbetter—?” My opinion of him went up sharply.

I pushed quickly back through the crowd to where Dr. Morthman and the mall manager were still arguing. Leo had moved farther down the mall to film the Verizon Wireless store and away from the east door. Good. I rejoined Dr. Morthman, moving to his right side so if he turned to look at me, he couldn’t see the door.

“But what about bathrooms?” the manager was yelling. “The mall doesn’t have nearly enough bathrooms for all these people.”

The choir was nearly out the door. I watched till the last one disappeared, followed by Mr. Ledbetter.

“We’ll get in portable toilets. Miss Yates, arrange for Porta-Potties to be brought in,” Dr. Morthman said, turning to me, and it was obvious he had no idea I’d ever been gone. “And get Homeland Security on the phone.”

“Homeland Security!” the manager wailed. “Do you know what it’ll do to business when the media gets hold—” He stopped and looked over at the crowd around the Altairi.

There was a collective gasp from them and then a hush. Someone must have turned the Muzak off at some point because there was no sound at all in the mall. “What—? Let me through,” Dr. Morthman said, breaking the silence. He pushed his way through the circle of shoppers to see what was happening.

I followed in his wake. The Altairi were slowly standing up, a motion somewhat like a string being pulled taut.

“Thank goodness,” the mall manager said, sounding infinitely relieved. “Now that that’s over, I assume I can reopen the mall.”

Dr. Morthman shook his head. “This may be the prelude to another action, or the response to a second stimulus. Leo, I want to see the video of what was happening right before they began to stand up.”

“I didn’t get it,” Leo said.

“Didn’t get it?”

“You told me to tape the stuff in the mall,” he said, but Dr. Morthman wasn’t listening. He was watching the Altairi, who had turned around and were slowly glide-waddling back toward the east door.

“Go after them,” he ordered Leo. “Don’t let them out of your sight, and get it on tape this time.” He turned to me. “You stay here and see if the mall has surveillance tapes. And get all these people’s names and contact information in case we need to question them.”

“Before you go, you need to know—”

“Not now. The Altairi are leaving. And there’s no telling where they’ll go next,” he said, and took off after them. “See if anyone caught the incident on a video camera.”

As it turned out, the Altairi went only as far as the van we’d brought them to the mall in, where they waited, glaring, to be transported back to DU. When I got back, they were in the main lab with Dr. Wakamura. I’d been at the mall nearly four hours, taking down names and phone numbers from Christmas shoppers who said things like, “I’ve been here six hours with two toddlers. Six hours!” and “I’ll have you know I missed my grandson’s Christmas concert.” I was glad I’d helped Mr. Ledbetter and his seventh-grade girls sneak out. They’d never have made it to the other mall in time.

When I was finished taking names and abuse, I went to ask the mall manager about surveillance tapes, expecting more abuse, but he was so glad to have his mall open again, he turned them over immediately. “Do these tapes have audio?” I asked him, and when he said no, “You wouldn’t also have a tape of the Christmas music you play, would you?”

I was almost certain he wouldn’t—Muzak is usually piped in—but to my surprise he said yes and handed over a CD. I stuck it and the tapes in my bag, drove back to DU, and went to the main lab to find Dr. Morthman. I found Dr. Wakamura instead, squirting assorted food court smells—corn dog, popcorn, sushi—at the Altairi to see if any of them made them sit down. “I’m convinced they were responding to one of the mall’s aromas,” he said.

“Actually, I think they may have—”

“It’s just a question of finding the right one,” he said, squirting pizza at them. They glared.

“Where’s Dr. Morthman?”

“Next door,” he said, squirting essence of funnel cake. “He’s meeting with the rest of the commission.”

I winced and went next door. “We need to look at the floor coverings in the mall,” Dr. Short was saying. “The Altairi may well have been responding to the difference between wood and stone.”

“And we need to take air samples,” Dr. Jarvis said. “They may have been responding to something poisonous to them in our atmosphere.”

“Something poisonous?” Reverend Thresher said. “Something blasphemous, you mean! Angels in filthy underwear! The Altairi obviously refused to go any farther into that den of iniquity, and they sat down in protest. Even aliens know sin when they see it.”

“I don’t agree, Dr. Jarvis,” Dr. Short said, ignoring Reverend Thresher. “Why would the air in the mall have a different composition from the air in a museum or a sports arena? We’re looking for variables here. What about sounds? Could they be a factor?”

“Yes,” I said. “The Altairi were—”

“Did you get the surveillance tapes, Miss Yates?” Dr. Morthman cut in. “Go through and cue them up to the point just before the Altairi sat down. I want to see what they were looking at.”

“It wasn’t what they were looking at,” I said. “It was—”

“And call the mall and get samples of their floor coverings,” he said. “You were saying, Dr. Short?”

I left the surveillance tapes and the lists of shoppers on Dr. Morthman’s desk, and then went to the audio lab, found a CD player, and listened to the songs: “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “White Christmas,” “Joy to the World”—

Here it was. “ ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night, all seated on the ground, the angel of the Lord came down, and glory shone around.’ ” Could the Altairi have thought the song was talking about the descent of their spaceship? Or were they responding to something else entirely, and the timing was simply coincidental?

There was only one way to find out. I went back to the main lab, where Dr. Wakamura was sticking lighted candles under the Altairi’s noses. “Good grief, what is that?” I asked, wrinkling my nose.

“Bayberry magnolia,” he said.

“It’s awful.”

“You should smell sandalwood violet,” he said. “They were right next to Candle in the Wind when they sat down. They may have been responding to a scent from the store.”

“Any response?” I said, thinking their expressions, for once, looked entirely appropriate.

“No, not even to spruce watermelon, which smelled very alien. Did Dr. Morthman find any clues on the security tapes?” he asked hopefully.

“He hasn’t looked at them yet,” I said. “When you’re done here, I’ll be glad to escort the Altairi back to their ship.”

“Would you?” he said gratefully. “I’d really appreciate it. They look exactly like my mother-in-law. Can you take them now?”

“Yes,” I said, and went over to the Altairi and motioned them to follow me, hoping they wouldn’t veer off and go back to their ship since it was nearly nine o’clock. They didn’t. They followed me down the hall and into the audio lab. “I just want to try something,” I said and played them “While Shepherds Watched.”

“ ‘While shepherds watched their flocks,’ ” the choir sang. I watched the Altairi’s unchanging faces. Mr. Ledbetter was wrong, I thought. They must have been responding to something else. They’re not even listening. “ ‘. . . by night, all seated . . .’ ”

The Altairi sat down.

I’ve got to call Mr. Ledbetter, I thought. I switched off the CD and punched in the number he’d written on my hand. “Hi, this is Calvin Ledbetter,” his recorded voice said. “Sorry I can’t come to the phone right now,” and I remembered too late that he’d said he had a rehearsal. “If you’re calling about a rehearsal, the schedule is as follows: Thursday, Mile-High Women’s Chorus, eight P.M., Montview Methodist, Friday, chancel choir, eleven A.M., Trinity Episcopal, Denver Symphony, three P.M.—” It was obvious he wasn’t home. And that he was far too busy to worry about the Altairi.

I hung up and looked over at them. They were still sitting down, and it occurred to me that playing them the song might have been a bad idea, since I had no idea what had made them stand back up. It hadn’t been the Muzak because it had been turned off, and if the stimulus had been something in the mall, we could be here all night. After a few minutes, though, they stood up, doing that odd pulled-string thing, and glared at me. “ ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by night,’ ” I said to them, “ ‘all seated on the ground.’ ”

They continued to stand.

“Seated on the ground,” I repeated. “Seated. Sit!”

No response at all.

I played the song again. They sat down right on cue. Which still didn’t prove they were doing what the words told them to do. They could be responding to the mere sound of singing. The mall had been noisy when they first walked in. “While Shepherds Watched” might have been the first song they’d been able to hear, and they’d sit down whenever they heard singing. I waited till they stood up again and then played the two preceding tracks. They didn’t respond to Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas” or to Julie Andrews singing “Joy to the World.” (Or to the breaks between songs.) There wasn’t even any indication they were aware anyone was singing.

“ ‘While shepherds watched their flocks by-y night . . .’ ” the choir began. I tried to stay still and keep my face impassive, in case they were responding to nonverbal cues I was giving them. “ ‘. . . ah-all seated—’ ”

They sat down at exactly the same place, so it was definitely those particular words. Or the voices singing them. Or the particular configuration of notes. Or the rhythm. Or the frequencies of the notes.

Whatever it was, I couldn’t figure it out tonight. It was nearly ten o’clock. I needed to get the Altairi back to their spaceship. I waited for them to stand up and then led them, glaring, out to their ship, and went back to my apartment.

The message light on my answering machine was flashing. It was probably Dr. Morthman, wanting me to go back to the mall and take air samples. I hit play. “Hi, this is Mr. Ledbetter,” the choir director’s voice said. “From the mall, remember? I need to talk to you about something.” He gave me his cellphone number and repeated his home phone, “In case it washed off. I should be home by eleven. Till then, whatever you do, don’t let your alien guys listen to any more Christmas carols.”

There was no answer at either of the numbers. He turns his cell phone off during rehearsals, I thought. I looked at my watch. It was ten-fifteen. I grabbed the yellow pages, looked up the address of Montview Methodist, and took off for the church, detouring past the Altairi’s ship to make sure it was still there and hadn’t begun sprouting guns from its ports or flashing ominous lights. It hadn’t. It was its usual Sphinx-like self, which reassured me. A little.

It took me twenty minutes to reach the church. I hope rehearsal isn’t over and I’ve missed him, I thought, but there were lots of cars in the parking lot, and light still shone though the stained-glass windows. The front doors, however, were locked.

I went around to the side door. It was unlocked, and I could hear singing from somewhere inside. I followed the sound down a darkened hall.

The song abruptly stopped, in the middle of a word. I waited a minute, listening, and when it didn’t start up again, began trying doors. The first three were locked, but the fourth opened onto the sanctuary. The women’s choir was up at the very front, facing Mr. Ledbetter, whose back was to me. “Top of page ten,” he was saying.

Thank goodness he’s still here, I thought, slipping in the back.

“From ‘O hear the angel voices,’ ” he said, nodded to the organist, and raised his baton.

“Wait, where do we take a breath?” one of the women asked. “After ‘voices’ ?”

“No, after ‘divine,’ ” he said, consulting the music in front of him on the music stand, “and then at the bottom of page thirteen.”

“Another woman said, “Can you play the alto line for us? From ‘Fall on your knees’ ?”

This was obviously going to take a while, and I couldn’t afford to wait. I started up the aisle toward them, and the entire choir looked up from their music and glared at me.

Mr. Ledbetter turned around, and his face lit up. He turned to the women again, said, “I’ll be right back,” and sprinted down the aisle to me. “Meg,” he said, reaching me. “Hi. What—?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, but I got your message, and—”

“You’re not interrupting. Really. We were almost done anyway.”

“What did you mean, don’t play them any more Christmas carols? I didn’t get your message till after I’d played them some of the other songs from the mall—”

“And what happened?”

“Nothing, but on your message you said—”

“Which songs?”

“ ‘Joy to the World’ and—”

“All four verses?”

“No, only two. That’s all that were on the CD. The first one and the one about ‘wonders of his love.’ ”

“One and four,” he said, staring past me, his lips moving rapidly as if he were running through the lyrics. “Those should be okay—”

“What do you mean? Why did you leave that message?”

“Because if the Altairi were responding literally to the words in ‘While Shepherds Watched,’ Christmas carols are full of dangerous—”

“Dangerous—?”

“Yes. Look at ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are.’ You didn’t play them that, did you?”

“No, just ‘Joy to the World’ and ‘White Christmas.’ ”

“Mr. Ledbetter,” one of the women called from the front of the church. “How long are you going to be?”

“I’ll be right there,” he said. He turned back to me. “How much of ‘While Shepherds Watched’ did you play them?”

“Just the part up to ‘all seated on the ground.’ ”

“Not the other verses?”

“No. What—?”

“Mr. Ledbetter,” the same woman said impatiently, “some of us have to leave.”

“I’ll be right there,” he called to her, and to me, “Give me five minutes,” and sprinted back up the aisle.

I sat down in a back pew, picked up a hymnal, and tried to find “We Three Kings.” That was easier said than done. The hymns were numbered, but they didn’t seem to be in any particular order. I turned to the back, looking for an index.

“But we still haven’t gone over ‘Saviour of the Heathen, Come,’ ” a young, pretty redhead said.

“We’ll go over it Saturday night,” Mr. Ledbetter said.

The index didn’t tell me where “We Three Kings” was, either. It had rows of numbers—5.6.6.5. and 8.8.7.D.—with a column of strange words below them—Laban, Hursley, Olive’s Brow, Arizona—like some sort of code. Could the Altairi be responding to some sort of cipher embedded in the carol like in The Da Vinci Code? I hoped not.

“When are we supposed to be there?” the women were asking.

“Seven,” Mr. Ledbetter said.

“But that won’t give us enough time to run over ‘Saviour of the Heathen, Come,’ will it?”

“And what about ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ ?” the redhead asked. “We don’t have the second soprano part at all.”

I abandoned the index and began looking through the hymns. If I couldn’t figure out a simple hymnal, how could I hope to figure out a completely alien race’s communications? If they were trying to communicate. They might have been sitting down to listen to the music, like you’d stop to look at a flower. Or maybe their feet just hurt.

“What kind of shoes are we supposed to wear?” the choir was asking.

“Comfortable,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “You’re going to be on your feet a long time.”

I continued to search through the hymnal. Here was “What Child Is This?” I had to be on the right track. “Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella.” It had to be here somewhere. “On Christmas Night, All People Sing—”

They were finally gathering up their things and leaving. “See you Saturday,” he said, herding them out the door, all except for the pretty redhead, who buttonholed him at the door to say, “I was wondering if you could stay and go over the second soprano part with me again. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

“I can’t tonight,” he said. She turned and glared at me, and I knew exactly what that glare meant.

“Remind me and we’ll run through it Saturday night,” he said, shut the door on her, and sat down next to me. “Sorry, big performance Saturday. Now, about the aliens. Where were we?”

“ ‘We Three Kings.’ You said the words were dangerous.”

“Oh, right.” He took the hymnal from me, flipped expertly to the right page, pointed. “Verse four. ‘Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying’—I assume you don’t want the Altairi locking themselves in a stone-cold tomb.”

“No,” I said fervently. “You said ‘Joy to the World’ was bad, too. What does it have in it?”

“ ‘Sorrow, sins, thorns infesting the ground.’ ”

“You think they’re doing whatever the hymns tell them? That they’re treating them like orders to be followed?”

“I don’t know, but if they are, there are all kinds of things in Christmas carols you don’t want them doing: running around on rooftops, bringing torches, killing babies—”

“Killing babies?” I said. “What carol is that in?”

“ ‘The Coventry Carol,’ ” he said flipping to another page. “The verse about Herod. See?” He pointed to the words. “ ‘Charged he hath this day . . . all children young to slay.’ ”

“Oh, my gosh, that carol was one of the ones from the mall. It was on the CD,” I said. “I’m so glad I came to see you.”

“So am I,” he said, and grinned at me.

“You asked me how much of ‘While Shepherds Watched’ I’d played them,” I said. “Is there child-slaying in that, too?”

“No, but verse two has got ‘fear’ and ‘mighty dread’ in it, and ‘seized their troubled minds.’ ”

“I definitely don’t want the Altairi to do that,” I said, “but now I don’t know what to do. We’ve been trying to establish communications with the Altairi for nine months, and that song was the first thing they’ve ever responded to. If I can’t play them Christmas carols—”

“I didn’t say that. We just need to make sure the ones you play them don’t have any murder and mayhem in them. You said you had a CD of the music they were playing in the mall?”

“Yes. That’s what I played them.”

“Mr. Ledbetter?” a voice said tentatively, and a balding man in a clerical collar leaned in the door. “How much longer will you be? I need to lock up.”

“Oh, sorry, Reverend McIntyre,” he said and stood up. “We’ll get out of your way.” He ran up the aisle, grabbed his music, and came back. “You’ll be at the aches, right?” he said to Reverend McIntyre.

The aches? You must have misunderstood what he said, I thought.

“I’m not sure,” Reverend McIntyre said. “My handle’s pretty rusty.”

Handle? What were they talking about?

“Especially ‘The Hallelujah Chorus.’ It’s been years since I last sang it.”

Oh, Handel, not handle.

“I’m rehearsing it with Trinity Episcopal’s choir at eleven tomorrow if you want to come and run through it with us.”

“I just may do that.”

“Great,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “Good night.” He led me out of the sanctuary. “Where’s your car parked?”

“Out in front.”

“Good. Mine, too.” He opened the side door. “You can follow me to my apartment.”

I had a sudden blinding vision of Aunt Judith glaring disapprovingly at me and saying, “A nice young lady never goes to a gentleman’s apartment alone.”

“You did say you brought the music from the mall with you, didn’t you?” he asked.

Which is what you get for jumping to conclusions, I thought, following him to his apartment and wondering if he was going out with the redheaded second soprano.

“On the way over I was thinking about all this,” he said when we got to his apartment building, “and I think the first thing we need to do is figure out exactly which element or elements of ‘all seated on the ground’ they’re responding to, the notes—I know you said they’d been exposed to music before, but it could be this particular configuration of notes—or words.”

I told him about reciting the lyrics to them.

“Okay, then, the next thing we do is see if it’s the accompaniment,” he said, unlocking the door. “Or the tempo. Or the key.”

“The key?” I said, looking down at the keys in his hand.

“Yeah, have you ever seen Jumpin’ Jack Flash?”

“No.”

“Great movie. Whoopi Goldberg. In it, the key to the spy’s code is the key. Literally. B flat. ‘While Shepherds Watched’ is in the key of C, but ‘Joy to the World’ is in D. That may be why they didn’t respond to it. Or they may only respond to the sound of certain instruments. What Beethoven did they listen to?”

“The Ninth Symphony.”

He frowned. “Then that’s unlikely, but there might be a guitar or a marimba or something in the ‘While Shepherds Watched’ accompaniment. We’ll see. Come on in,” he said, opening the door and immediately vanishing into the bedroom. “There’s soda in the fridge,” he called back out to me. “Go ahead and sit down.”

That was easier said than done. The couch, chair, and coffee table were all covered with CDs, music, and clothes. “Sorry,” he said, coming back in with a laptop. He set it down on top of a stack of books and moved a pile of laundry from the chair so I could sit down. “December’s a bad month. And this year, in addition to my usual five thousand concerts and church services and cantata performances, I’m directing aches.”

Then I hadn’t misheard him before. “Aches?” I said.

“Yeah. A-C-H-E-S. The All-City Holiday Ecumenical Sing. ACHES. Or, as my seventh-grade girls call it, Aches and Pains. It’s a giant concert—well, not actually a concert because everybody sings, even the audience. But all the city singing groups and church choirs participate.” He moved a stack of LPs off the couch and onto the floor and sat down across from me. “Denver has it every year. At the convention center. Have you ever been to a Sing?” he said, and when I shook my head, “It’s pretty impressive. Last year three thousand people and forty-four choirs participated.”

“And you’re directing?”

“Yeah. Actually, it’s a much easier job than directing my church choirs. Or my seventh-grade girls’ glee. And it’s kind of fun. It used to be the All-City Messiah, you know, a whole bunch of people getting together to sing Handel’s Messiah, but then they had a request from the Unitarians to include some Solstice songs, and it kind of snowballed from there. Now we do Hanukkah songs and ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and ‘The Seven Nights of Kwanzaa,’ along with Christmas carols and selections from the Messiah. Which, by the way, we can’t let the Altairi listen to, either.”

“Is there children-slaying in that, too?”

“Head-breaking. ‘Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron’ and ‘dash them in pieces.’ There’s also wounding, bruising, cutting, deriding, and laughing to scorn.”

“Actually, the Altairi already know all about scorn,” I said.

“But hopefully not about shaking nations. And covering the earth with darkness,” he said. “Okay”—he opened his laptop—“the first thing I’m going to do is scan in the song. Then I’ll remove the accompaniment so we can play them just the vocals.”

“What can I do?”

“You,” he said, disappearing into the other room again and returning with a foot-high stack of sheet music and music books, which he dumped in my lap, “can make a list of all the songs we don’t want the Altairi to hear.”

I nodded and started through The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs. It was amazing how many carols, which I’d always thought were about peace and goodwill, had really violent lyrics. “The Coventry Carol” wasn’t the only one with child-slaying in it. “Christmas Day Is Come” did, too, along with references to sin, strife, and militants. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” had strife, too, and envy and quarrels. “The Holly and the Ivy” had thorns, blood, and bears, and “Good King Wenceslas” talked about cruelty, bringing people flesh, freezing their blood, and heart failure.

“I had no idea Christmas carols were so grim,” I said.

“You should hear Easter,” Mr. Ledbetter said. “While you’re looking, see if you can find any songs with the word ‘seated’ in it so we can see if it’s that particular word they’re responding to.”

I nodded and went back to reading lyrics. In “Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence” everyone was standing, not seated, plus it had “fear,” “trembling,” and a line about giving oneself for heavenly food. “The First Noel” had “blood,” and the shepherds were lying, not sitting.

What Christmas song has “seated” in it? I thought, trying to remember. Wasn’t there something in “Jingle Bells” about Miss Somebody or Other being seated by someone’s side?

There was, and in “Wassail, Wassail,” there was a line about “a-sitting” by the fire, but not the word “seated.”

I kept looking. The nonreligious Christmas songs were almost as bad as the carols. Even a children’s song like “I’m Getting’ Nuttin’ for Christmas” gaily discussed smashing bats over people’s heads, and there seemed to be an entire genre of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer”—type songs: “Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake,” “I Came Upon a Roadkill Deer,” and “Grandpa’s Gonna Sue the Pants Off Santa.”

And even when the lyrics weren’t violent, they had phrases in them like “rule o’er all the earth” and “over us all to reign,” which the Altairi might take as an invitation to global conquest.

There have to be some carols that are harmless, I thought, and looked up “Away in a Manger” in the index (which The Holly Jolly Book, unlike the hymnal, did have): “. . . lay down his sweet head . . . the stars in the sky . . .” No mayhem here, I thought. I can definitely add this to the list. “Love . . . blessings . . .”

“And take us to heaven to live with thee there.” A harmless enough line, but it might mean something entirely different to the Altairi. I didn’t want to find myself on a spaceship heading back to Aquila or wherever it was they came from.

We worked till almost three in the morning, by which time we had separate recordings of the vocals, accompaniment, and notes (played by Mr. Ledbetter on the piano, guitar, and flute and recorded by me) of “all seated on the ground,” a list, albeit rather short, of songs the Altairi could safely hear, and another, even shorter list of ones with “seated,” “sit,” or “sitting” in them.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Ledbetter,” I said, putting on my coat.

“Calvin,” he said.

“Calvin. Anyway, thank you. I really appreciate this. I’ll let you know the results of my playing the songs for them.”

“Are you kidding, Meg?” he said. “I want to be there when you do this.”

“But I thought—Don’t you have to rehearse with the choirs for your ACHES thing?” I said, remembering the heavy schedule he’d left on his answering machine.

“Yes, and I have to rehearse with the symphony, and with the chancel choir and the kindergarten choir and the handbell choir for the Christmas Eve service—”

“Oh, and I’ve kept you up so late,” I said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Choir directors never sleep in December,” he said cheerfully, “and what I was going to say was that I’m free in between rehearsals and till eleven tomorrow morning. How early can you get the Altairi?”

“They usually come out of their ship around seven, but some of the other commission members may want to work with them.”

“And face those bright shiny faces before they’ve had their coffee? My bet is you’ll have the Altairi all to yourself.”

He was probably right. I remembered Dr. Jarvis saying he had to work himself up to seeing the Altairi over the course of the day: “They look just like my fifth-grade teacher.”

“Are you sure you want to face them first thing in the morning?” I asked him. “The Altairi’s glares—”

“Are nothing compared to the glare of a first soprano who didn’t get the solo she wanted. Don’t worry, I can handle the Altairi,” he said. “I can’t wait to find out what it is they’re responding to.”

What we found out was nothing.

Calvin had been right. There was no one else waiting outside University Hall when the Altairi appeared. I hustled them into the audio lab, locked the door, and called Calvin, and he came right over, bearing Starbucks coffee and an armload of CDs.

“Yikes!” he said when he saw the Altairi standing over by the speakers. “I was wrong about the first soprano. This is more a seventh-grader’s ‘No, you can’t text-message during the choir concert—or wear face glitter’ glare.”

I shook my head. “It’s an Aunt Judith glare.”

“I’m very glad we decided not to play them the part about dashing people’s heads into pieces,” he said. “Are you sure they didn’t come to Earth to kill everybody?”

“No,” I said. “That’s why we have to establish communications with them.”

“Right,” he said, and proceeded to play the accompaniment we’d recorded the night before. Nothing, and nothing when he played the notes with piano, guitar, and flute, but when he played the vocal part by itself, the Altairi promptly sat down.

“Definitely the words,” he said, and when we played them “Jingle Bells,” they sat down again at “seated by my side,” which seemed to confirm it. But when he played them the first part of “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat” from Guys and Dolls and “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” they didn’t sit down for either one.

“Which means it’s the word ‘seated,’ ” I said.

“Or they only respond to Christmas songs,” he said. “Do you have some other carol we can play them?”

“Not with ‘seated,’ ” I said. “ ‘All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth’ has ‘sitting’ in it.”

We played it for them. No response, but when he played “We Need a Little Christmas,” from the musical Mame, the Altairi sat down the moment the recording reached the word “sitting.”

Calvin cut off the rest of the phrase, since we didn’t want the Altairi sitting on our shoulders, and looked at me. “So why did they respond to this ‘sitting’ and not the one in ‘All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth’ ?” he mused.

I was tempted to say, “Because ‘All I Want for Christmas’ is an absolutely terrible song,” but I didn’t. “The voices?” I suggested.

“Maybe,” he said and shuffled through the CDs till he found a recording of the same song by the Statler Brothers. The Altairi sat down at exactly the same place.

So not the voices. And not just Christmas. When Calvin played them the opening song from 1776, they sat down again as the Continental Congress sang orders to John Adams to sit down. And it wasn’t the verb “to sit.” When we played them “The Hanukkah Song,” they spun solemnly in place.

“Okay, so we’ve established it’s ecumenical,” Calvin said.

“Thank goodness,” I said, thinking of Reverend Thresher and what he’d say if he found out they’d responded to a Christmas carol, but when we played them a Solstice song with the phrase “the earth turns round again,” they just stood there and glared.

“Words beginning with s?” I said.

“Maybe.” He played them, in rapid succession, “The Snow Lay on the Ground,” “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” and “Suzy Snowflake.” Nothing.

At ten forty-five Calvin left to go to his choir rehearsal. “It’s at Trinity Episcopal, if you want to meet me there at noon,” he said, “and we can go over to my apartment from there. I want to run an analysis on the frequency patterns of the phrases they responded to.”

“Okay,” I said, and delivered the Altairi to Dr. Wakamura, who wanted to squirt them with perfumes from the Crabtree and Evelyn store. I left them glaring at him and went up to Dr. Morthman’s office. He wasn’t there. “He went to the mall to collect paint samples,” Dr. Jarvis said.

I called him on his cell phone. “Dr. Morthman, I’ve run some tests,” I said, “and the Altairi are—”

“Not now. I’m waiting for an important call from ACS,” he said, and hung up.

I went back to the audio lab and listened to the Cambridge Boys’ Choir, Barbra Streisand, and Barenaked Ladies Christmas albums, trying to find songs with variations of “sit” and “spin” in them and no bloodshed. I also looked up instances of “turn.” They hadn’t responded to “turns” in the Solstice song, but I wasn’t sure that proved anything. They hadn’t responded to “sitting” in “All I Want for Christmas,” either.

At noon I went to meet Calvin at Trinity Episcopal. They weren’t done rehearsing yet, and it didn’t sound like they would be for some time. Calvin kept starting and stopping the choir and saying, “Basses, you’re coming in two beats early, and altos, on ‘singing,’ that’s an A flat. Let’s take it again, from the top of page eight.”

They went over the section four more times, with no discernible improvement, before Calvin said, “Okay, that’s it. I’ll see you all Saturday night.”

“We are never going to get that entrance right,” several of the choir members muttered as they gathered up their music, and the balding minister from last night, Reverend McIntyre, looked totally discouraged.

“Maybe I shouldn’t sing after all,” he told Calvin.

“Yes, you should,” Calvin said, and put his hand on Reverend McIntyre’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. It’ll all come together. You’ll see.”

“Do you really believe that?” I asked Calvin after Reverend McIntyre had gone out.

He laughed. “I know it’s hard to believe listening to them now. I never think they’re going to be able to do it, but somehow, no matter how awful they sound in rehearsal, they always manage to pull it off. It’s enough to restore your faith in humanity.” He frowned. “I thought you were going to come over, and we were going to look at frequency patterns.”

“We are,” I said. “Why?”

He pointed behind me. The Altairi were standing there with Reverend McIntyre. “I found them outside,” he said, smiling. “I was afraid they might be lost.”

“Oh, dear, they must have followed me. I’m so sorry,” I said, though Reverend McIntyre didn’t seem particularly intimidated by them. I said as much.

“I’m not,” he said. “They don’t look nearly as annoyed as my congregation does when they don’t approve of my sermon.”

“I’d better take them back,” I said to Calvin.

“No, as long as they’re here, we might as well take them over to my apartment and try some more songs on them. We need more data.”

I somehow squeezed all six of them into my car and took them over to Calvin’s apartment, and he analyzed frequency patterns while I played some more songs for them. It definitely wasn’t the quality of the songs or the singers they were responding to. They wouldn’t sit down for Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper” and then did for a hideous falsetto children’s recording of “Little Miss Muffet” from the 1940s.

It wasn’t the words’ meaning, either. When I played them “Adeste Fideles” in Latin, they sat down when the choir sang, “tibi sit gloria.”

“Which proves they’re taking what they hear literally,” Calvin said when I took him into the kitchen out of earshot of the Altairi to tell me.

“Yes, which means we’ve got to make sure they don’t hear any words that have double meanings,” I said. “We can’t even play them ‘Deck the Halls,’ for fear they might deck someone.”

“And we definitely can’t play them ‘laid in a manger,’ ” he said, grinning.

“It’s not funny,” I said. “At this rate, we aren’t going to be able to play them anything.”

“There must be some songs—”

“What songs?” I said in frustration. “ ‘I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm’ talks about hearts that are on fire, ‘Christmastide’ might bring on a tsunami, and ‘be born in us today’ sounds like a scene out of Alien.”

“I know,” he said. “Don’t worry, we’ll find something. Here, I’ll help you.” He cleared off the kitchen table, brought in the stacks of sheet music, albums, and CDs, and sat me down across from him. “I’ll find songs and you check the lyrics.”

We started through them. “No . . . no . . . what about ‘I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day’ ?”

“No,” I said, looking up the lyrics. “It’s got ‘hate,’ ‘wrong,’ ‘dead,’ and ‘despair.’ ”

“Cheery,” he said. There was a pause while we looked through more music. “John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas’ ?”

I shook my head. “ ‘War.’ Also ‘fights’ and ‘fear.’ ”

Another pause, and then he said, “All I want for Christmas is you.”

I looked up at him, startled. “What did you say?”

“ ‘All I Want for Christmas is You,’ ” he repeated. “Song title. Mariah Carey.”

“Oh.” I looked up the lyrics. “I think it might be okay. I don’t see any murder or mayhem.” But he was shaking his head.

“On second thought, I don’t think we’d better. Love can be even more dangerous than war.”

I looked into the living room where the Altairi stood glaring through the door at me. “I seriously doubt they’re here to steal Earthwomen.”

“Yeah, but we wouldn’t want to give anybody any ideas.”

“No,” I said. “We definitely wouldn’t want to do that.”

We went back to searching for songs. “How about ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas’ ?” he said, holding up a Patti Page album.

“I’ll Be Home” passed muster, but the Altairi didn’t respond to it, or to Ed Ames singing “Ballad of the Christmas Donkey” or Miss Piggy singing “Santa Baby.”

There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to their responses. The keys weren’t the same, or the notes, or the accompaniment. They responded to the Andrews Sisters but not to Randy Travis, and it wasn’t the voices, either, because they responded to Julie Andrews’s “Awake, Awake Ye Drowsy Souls.” We played them her “Silver Bells.” They didn’t laugh (which didn’t really surprise me) or bustle, but when the song got to the part about the traffic lights blinking red and green, all six of them blinked their eyes. We played them her “Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow.” They just sat there.

“Try the ‘Christmas Waltz,’ ” I said, looking at the album cover.

He shook his head. “It’s got love in it, too. You did say you didn’t have a boyfriend, didn’t you?”

“That’s right,” I said, “and I have no intention of dating the Altairi.”

“Good,” he said. “Can you think of any other songs with ‘blink’ in them?”

By the time he left to rehearse with the symphony, we didn’t know any more than when we’d started. I took the Altairi back to Dr. Wakamura, who didn’t seem all that happy to see them, tried to find a song with “blink” in it, to no avail, had dinner, and went back over to Calvin’s apartment.

He was already there, working. I started through the sheet music. “What about ‘Good Christian Men, Rejoice’ ?” I said. “It’s got ‘bow’ in it,” and the phone rang.

Calvin answered it. “What is it, Belinda?” he said, listened a moment, and then said, “Meg, turn on the TV,” and handed me the remote.

I switched on the television. Marvin the Martian was telling Bugs Bunny he planned to incinerate the earth. “CNN,” Calvin said. “It’s on forty.”

I punched in the channel and then was sorry. Reverend Thresher was standing in the audio lab in front of a mob of reporters, saying, “—happy to announce that we have found the answer to the Altairi’s actions in the mall yesterday. Christmas carols were playing over the sound system in the mall—”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“I thought the surveillance tapes didn’t have any sound,” Calvin said.

“They don’t. Someone else in the mall must have had a videocam.”

“—and when the Altairi heard those holy songs,” Reverend Thresher was saying, “they were overcome by the truth of their message, by the power of God’s blessed word—”

“Oh, no,” Calvin said.

“—and they sank to the ground in repentance for their sins.”

“They did not,” I said. “They sat down.”

“For the past nine months, scientists have been seeking to discover the reason why the Altairi came to our planet. They should have turned to our Blessed Savior instead, for it is in Him that all answers lie. Why have the Altairi come here? To be saved! They’ve come to be born again, as we shall demonstrate.” He held up a CD of Christmas carols.

“Oh, no!” we both said. I grabbed for my cell phone.

“Like the wise men of old,” Reverend Thresher was saying, “they have come seeking Christ, which proves that Christianity is the only true religion.”

Dr. Morthman took forever to answer his phone. When he did, I said, “Dr. Morthman, you mustn’t let the Altairi listen to any Christmas carols—”

“I can’t talk now,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a press conference,” and hung up.

“Dr. Morthman—” I hit redial.

“There’s no time for that.” Calvin, who’d snatched up his keys and my coat, said, “Come on, we’ll take my car,” and as we racketed downstairs, “There were a lot of reporters there, and he just said something that will make every Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan, and non-evangelical Christian on the planet go ballistic. If we’re lucky, he’ll still be answering questions when we get there.”

“And if we’re not?”

“The Altairi will be out seizing troubled minds, and we’ll have a holy war on our hands.”

We almost made it. There were, as Calvin had predicted, a lot of questions, particularly after Reverend Thresher stated that the Altairi agreed with him on abortion, gay marriage, and the necessity of electing Republicans to all political offices in the next election.

But the clamoring reporters clogging the steps, the door, and the hall made it nearly impossible to get through, and by the time we reached the audio lab, Reverend Thresher was pointing proudly to the Altairi kneeling on the other side of the one-way mirror and telling the reporters, “As you can see, their hearing the Christmas message has made them kneel in reverence—”

“Oh, no, they must be listening to ‘O Holy Night,’ ” I said, “or ‘As with Gladness Men of Old.’ ”

“What did you play them?” Calvin demanded. He pointed at the kneeling Altairi.

“The One True Way Maxichurch Christmas CD,” Reverend Thresher said proudly, holding up the case, which the reporters obligingly snapped, filmed, and downloaded to their iPods.“Christmas Carols for True Christians.”

“No, no, what song?”

“Do the individual carols hold a special significance for them?” the reporters were shouting, and “What carol were they listening to in the mall?” and “Have they been baptized, Reverend Thresher?” while I tried to tell Dr. Morthman, “You’ve got to turn the music off.”

“Off?” Dr. Morthman said incredulously, yelling to be heard over the reporters. “Just when we’re finally making progress communicating with the Altairi?”

“You have to tell us which songs you’ve played!” Calvin shouted.

“Who are you?” Reverend Thresher demanded.

“He’s with me,” I said, and to Dr. Morthman, “You have to turn it off right now. Some of the carols are dangerous.”

“Dangerous?” he bellowed, and the reporters’ attention swiveled to us.

“What do you mean, dangerous?” they asked.

“I mean dangerous,” Calvin said. “The Altairi aren’t repenting of anything. They’re—”

“How dare you accuse the Altairi of not being born again?” Reverend Thresher said. “I saw them respond to the hymnwriter’s inspiring words with my own eyes, saw them fall on their knees—”

“They responded to ‘Silver Bells,’ too,” I said, “and to ‘The Hanukkah Song.’ ”

“ ‘The Hanukkah Song?’ ” the reporters said, and began pelting us with questions again. “Does that mean they’re Jewish?” “Orthodox or Reformed?” “What’s their response to Hindu chants?”

“What about the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Do they respond to that?”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with religion,” Calvin said. “The Altairi are responding to the literal meaning of certain words in the songs. Some of the words they’re listening to right now could be dangerous for them to—”

“Blasphemy!” Reverend Thresher bellowed. “How could the blessed Christmas message be dangerous?”

“ ‘Christmas Day Is Come’ tells them to slay young children,” I said, “and the lyrics of other carols have blood and war and stars raining fire. That’s why you’ve got to turn off the music right now.”

“Too late,” Calvin said and pointed through the one-way mirror.

The Altairi weren’t there. “Where are they?” the reporters began shouting. “Where did they go?” and Reverend Thresher and Dr. Morthman both turned to me and demanded to know what I’d done with them.

“Leave her alone. She doesn’t know where they are any more than you do,” Calvin said in his choir director voice.

The effect on the room was the same as it had been on his seventh-graders. Dr. Morthman let go of me, and the reporters shut up. “Now, what song were you playing?” Calvin said to Reverend Thresher.

“ ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,’ ” Reverend Thresher said, “but it’s one of the oldest and most beloved Christmas carols. It’s ridiculous to think hearing it could endanger anyone—”

“Is ‘God Rest Ye’ why they left?” the reporters were shouting, and “What are the words? Is there any war in it? Or children-slaying?”

“ ‘God rest ye merry, gentlemen,’ ” I muttered under my breath, trying to remember the lyrics, “ ‘let nothing you dismay . . .’ ”

“Where did they go?” the reporters clamored.

“ ‘. . . oh, tidings of comfort and joy,’ ” I murmured. I glanced over at Calvin. He was doing the same thing I was. “ ‘. . . to save us all . . . when we are gone . . .’ ”

“Where do you think they’ve gone?” a reporter called out.

Calvin looked at me. “Astray,” he said grimly.

The Altairi weren’t in the other labs, in any of the other buildings on campus, or in their ship. Or at least no one had seen the ramp to it come down and them go inside. No one had seen them crossing the campus, either, or on the surrounding streets.

“I hold you entirely responsible for this, Miss Yates,” Dr. Morthman said. “Send out an APB,” he told the police. “And put out an Amber Alert.”

“That’s for when a child’s been kidnapped,” I said. “The Altairi haven’t—”

“We don’t know that,” he snapped. He turned back to the police officer. “And call the FBI.”

The police officer turned to Calvin. “Dr. Morthman said you said the aliens were responding to the words, ‘gone astray.’ Were there any other words in the song that are dangerous?”

“Sa—” I began.

“No,” Calvin said and, while Dr. Morthman was telling the officer to call Homeland Security and tell them to declare a Code Red, hustled me down the sidewalk and behind the Altairi’s ship.

“Why did you tell them that?” I demanded. “What about ‘scorn’ ? What about ‘Satan’s power’ ?”

“Shh,” he whispered. “He’s already calling Homeland Security. We don’t want him to call out the Air Force. And the nukes,” he said. “And there’s no time to explain things to them. We’ve got to find the Altairi.”

“Do you have any idea where they could have gone?”

“No. At least their ship’s still here,” he said, looking over at it.

I wasn’t sure that meant anything, considering the Altairi had been able to get out of a lab with a locked door. I said as much, and Calvin agreed. “ ‘Gone astray’ may not even be what they were responding to. They may be off looking for a manger or shepherds. And there are different versions. Christmas Carols for True Christians may have used an older one.”

“In which case we need to go back to the lab and find out exactly what it was they heard,” I said, my heart sinking. Dr. Morthman was likely to have me arrested.

Apparently Calvin had reached the same conclusion, because he said, “We can’t go back in there. It’s too risky, and we’ve got to find the Altairi before Reverend Thresher does. There’s no telling what he’ll play them next.”

“But how—?”

“If they did go astray, then they may still be in the area. You go get your car and check the streets north of the campus, and I’ll do south. Do you have your cell phone?”

“Yes, but I don’t have a car. Mine’s at your apartment. We came over in yours, remember?”

“What about the van you use to take the Altairi places in?”

“But won’t that be awfully noticeable?”

“They’re looking for six aliens on foot, not in a van,” he said, “and besides, if you find them, you’ll need something to put them in.”

“You’re right,” I said and took off for the faculty parking lot, hoping Dr. Morthman hadn’t had the same idea.

He hadn’t. The parking lot was deserted. I slid the van’s back door open, half-hoping this was the Altairi’s idea of astray, but they weren’t inside, or on any of the streets for an area two miles north of DU. I drove up University Boulevard and then slowly up and down the side streets, terrified I’d find them squished on the pavement.

It was already dark. I called Calvin. “No sign of them,” I told him. “Maybe they went back to the mall. I’m going to go over there and—”

“No, don’t do that,” he said. “Dr. Morthman and the FBI are there. I’m watching it on CNN. They’re searching Victoria’s Secret. Besides, the Altairi aren’t there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re here at my apartment.”

“They are?” I said, weak with relief. “Where did you find them?”

He didn’t answer me. “Don’t take any major streets on your way over here,” he said. “And park in the alley.”

“Why? What have they done?” I asked, but he’d already hung up.

The Altairi were standing in the middle of Calvin’s living room when I got there. “I came back here to check on alternate lyrics for ‘God Rest Ye’ and found them waiting for me,” Calvin explained. “Did you park in the alley?”

“Yes, at the other end of the block. What have they done?” I repeated, almost afraid to ask.

“Nothing. At least nothing that’s been on CNN,” he said, gesturing at the TV, which was showing the police searching the candle store. He had the sound turned down, but across the bottom of the screen was the logo “Aliens AWOL.”

“Then why all the secrecy?”

“Because we can’t afford to let them find the Altairi till we’ve figured out why they’re doing what they’re doing. Next time it might not be as harmless as going astray. And we can’t go to your apartment. They know where you live. We’re going to have to hole up here. Did you tell anybody you were working with me?”

I tried to think. I’d attempted to tell Dr. Morthman about Calvin when I got back from the mall, but I hadn’t gotten far enough to tell him Calvin’s name, and when Reverend Thresher had demanded, “Who are you?” all I’d said was, “He’s with me.”

“I didn’t tell anybody your name,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure nobody saw the Altairi coming here.”

“But how can you be sure? Your neighbors—”

“Because the Altairi were waiting for me inside,” he said. “Right where they are now. So either they can pick locks, walk through walls, or teleport. My money’s on teleportation. And it’s obvious the commission doesn’t have any idea where they are,” he said, pointing at the TV, where a mugshot-like photo of the Altairi was displayed, with “Have you seen these aliens?” and a phone number to call across their midsections. “And luckily, I went to the grocery store and stocked up the other day so I wouldn’t have to go shopping in between all my concerts.”

“Your concerts! And the All-City Sing! I forgot all about them,” I said, stricken with guilt. “Weren’t you supposed to have a rehearsal tonight?”

“I canceled it,” he said, “and I can cancel the one tomorrow morning if I have to. The Sing’s not till tomorrow night. We’ve got plenty of time to figure this out.”

If they don’t find us first, I thought, looking at the TV, where they were searching the food court. Eventually, when they couldn’t find the Altairi anywhere, they’d realize I was missing, too, and start looking for us. And the reporters today, unlike Leo, had all been videotaping. If they put Calvin’s picture on TV with a number to call, one of his church choir members or his seventh-graders would be certain to call in and identify him.

Which meant we’d better work fast. I picked up the list of songs and actions we’d compiled. “Where do you want to start?” I asked Calvin, who was starting through a stack of LPs.

“Not with ‘Frosty the Snowman,’ ” he said. “I don’t think I can stand any chasing here and there.”

“How about, ‘I Wonder as I Wander’ ?”

“Very funny,” he said. “Since we know they respond to ‘kneeling,’ why don’t we start with that?”

“Okay.” We played them “fall on your knees” and “come adore on bended knee” and “whose forms are bending low,” some of which they responded to and some of which they didn’t, for no reason we could see.

“ ‘The First Noel’ has ‘full reverently upon their knee’ in it,” I said, and Calvin started toward the bedroom to look for it.

He stopped as he passed in front of the TV. “I think you’d better come look at this,” he said, and turned it up.

“The Altairi were not at the mall, as we had hoped,” Dr. Morthman was saying, “and it has just come to our attention that a member of our commission is also missing, Margaret Yates.” Video of the scene at the lab came on behind Dr. Morthman and the reporter, with me shouting for him to shut the music off. Any second a picture of Calvin would appear, demanding to know which carol they were playing.

I grabbed up my phone and called Dr. Morthman, hoping against hope they couldn’t trace cellphone calls and that he’d answer even though he was on TV.

He did, and the camera blessedly zoomed in on him so only a tiny piece of the video remained visible. “Where are you calling from?” he demanded. “Did you find the Altairi?”

“No,” I said, “but I think I have an idea where they might be.”

“Where?” Dr. Morthman said.

“I don’t think they’ve gone astray. I think they may be responding to one of the other words in the song. ‘Rest’ or possibly—”

“I knew it,” Reverend Thresher said, shoving in front of Dr. Morthman. “They were responding to the words ‘Remember Christ our Savior was born on Christmas Day.’ They’ve gone to church. They’re at the One True Way right this minute.”

It wasn’t what I had in mind, but at least a photo of the One True Way Maxichurch was better than one of Calvin. “That should give us at least two hours. His church is way down in Colorado Springs,” I said, turning the TV back down, and went back to playing songs to the Altairi and logging their responses and non-responses, but half an hour later, when Calvin went into the bedroom to try to find a Louis Armstrong CD, he stopped in front of the TV again and frowned.

“What happened?” I said, dumping the pile of sheet music on my lap on the couch beside me and sidling past the Altairi to get to him. “Didn’t they take the bait?”

“Oh, they took it, all right,” he said and turned up the TV.

“We believe the Altairi are in Bethlehem,” Dr. Morthman was saying. He was standing in front of a departures board at DIA.

“Bethlehem?” I said.

“It’s mentioned in the lyrics twice,” Calvin said. “At least if they’re off in Israel it gives us more time.”

“It also gives us an international incident,” I said. “In the Middle East, no less. I’ve got to call Dr. Morthman.” But he must have turned his cell phone off, and I couldn’t get through to the lab.

“You could call Reverend Thresher,” Calvin said, pointing to the TV screen.

Reverend Thresher was surrounded by reporters as he got into his Lexus. “I’m on my way to the Altairi right now, and tonight we will hold a Praise Worship Service, and you’ll be able to hear their Christian witness and the Christmas carols that first brought them to the Lord—”

Calvin switched the TV off. “It’s a sixteen-hour flight to Bethlehem,” he said encouragingly. “It surely won’t take us that long to figure this out.”

The phone rang. Calvin shot me a glance and then picked it up. “Hello, Mr. Steinberg,” he said. “Didn’t you get my message? I canceled tonight’s rehearsal.” He listened awhile. “If you’re worried about your entrance on page twelve, we’ll run over it before the Sing.” He listened some more. “It’ll all come together. It always does.”

I hoped that would be true of our solving the puzzle of the Altairi. If it wasn’t, we’d be charged with kidnapping. Or starting a religious war. But both were better than letting Reverend Thresher play them “slowly dying” and “thorns infest the ground.” Which meant we’d better figure out what the Altairi were responding to, and fast. We played them Dolly Parton and Manhattan Transfer and the Barbershop Choir of Toledo and Dean Martin.

Which was a bad idea. I’d had almost no sleep the last two days, and I found myself nodding off after the first few bars. I sat up straight and tried to concentrate on the Altairi, but it was no use. The next thing I knew, my head was on Calvin’s shoulder, and he was saying, “Meg? Meg? Do the Altairi sleep?”

“Sleep?” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes. “I’m sorry, I must have dozed off. What time is it?”

“A little after four.”

“In the morning?”

“Yes. Do the Altairi sleep?”

“Yes, at least we think so. Their brain patterns alter, and they don’t respond to stimuli, but then again, they never respond.”

“Are there visible signs that they’re asleep? Do they close their eyes or lie down?”

“No, they sort of droop over, like flowers that haven’t been watered. And their glares diminish a little. Why?”

“I have something I want to try. Go back to sleep.”

“No, that’s okay,” I said, suppressing a yawn. “If anybody needs to sleep, it’s you. I’ve kept you up the last two nights, and you’ve got to direct your Sing thing tonight. I’ll take over and you go—”

He shook his head. “I’m fine. I told you, I never get any sleep this time of year.”

“So what’s this idea you want to try?”

“I want to play them the first verse of ‘Silent Night.’ ”

“ ‘Sleep in heavenly peace,’ ” I said.

“Right, and no other action verbs and I’ve got at least fifty versions of it. Johnny Cash, Kate Smith, Britney Spears—”

“Do we have time to play them fifty different versions?” I asked, looking over at the TV. A split screen showed a map of Israel and the outside of the One True Way Maxichurch. When I turned the volume up, a reporter’s voice said, “Inside, thousands of members are awaiting the appearance of the Altairi, whom Reverend Thresher expects at any minute. A twenty-four-hour High-Powered Prayer Vigil—”

I turned it back down. “I guess we do. You were saying?”

“ ‘Silent Night’ is a song everybody—Gene Autry, Madonna, Burl Ives—has recorded. Different voices, different accompaniments, different keys. We can see which versions they respond to—”

“And which ones they don’t,” I said, “and that may give us a clue to what they’re responding to.”

“Exactly,” he said, opening a CD case. He stuck it in the player and hit Track 4. “Here goes.”

The voice of Elvis Presley singing “ ‘Silent night, holy night’ ” filled the room. Calvin came back over to the couch and sat down next to me. When Elvis got to “ ‘tender and mild,’ ” we both leaned forward expectantly, watching the Altairi. “ ‘Sleep in heavenly peace,’ ” Elvis crooned, but the Altairi were still stiffly upright. They remained that way through the repeated “ ‘sleep in heavenly peace.’ ” And through Alvin the Chipmunk’s solo of it. And Celine Dion’s.

“Their glares don’t appear to be diminishing,” Calvin said. “If anything, they seem to be getting worse.”

They were. “You’d better play them Judy Garland,” I said.

He did, and Dolly Parton and Harry Belafonte. “What if they don’t respond to any of them?” I asked.

“Then we try something else. I’ve also got twenty-six versions of ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.’ ” He grinned at me. “I’m kidding. I do, however, have nine different versions of ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside.’ ”

“For use on redheaded second sopranos?”

“No,” he said. “Shh, I love this version. Nat King Cole.”

I shh-ed and listened, wondering how the Altairi could resist falling asleep. Nat King Cole’s voice was even more relaxing than Dean Martin’s. I leaned back against the couch. “ ‘All is calm . . .’ ”

I must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing I knew, the music had stopped and it was daylight outside. I looked at my watch. It said two P.M. The Altairi were standing in the exact same spot they’d been in before, glaring, and Calvin was sitting hunched forward on a kitchen chair, his chin in his hand, watching them and looking worried.

“Did something happen?” I glanced over at the TV. Reverend Thresher was talking. The logo read “Thresher Launches Galaxywide Christian Crusade.” At least it didn’t say “Air Strikes in Middle East.”

Calvin was slowly shaking his head.

“Wasn’t there any response to ‘Silent Night’ ?” I asked.

“No, there was,” he said. “You responded to the version by Nat King Cole.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I meant the Altairi. They didn’t respond to any of the ‘Silent Nights’ ?”

“No, they responded,” he said, “but just to one version.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?” I asked. “Now we can analyze what it was that was different about it that they were responding to. Which version was it?”

Instead of answering, he walked over to the CD player and hit play. A loud chorus of nasal female voices began belting out, “Silent night, holy night,” shouting to be heard over a cacophony of clinks and clacks. “What is that?” I asked.

“The Broadway chorus of the musical 42nd Street singing and tapdancing to ‘Silent Night.’ They recorded it for a special Broadway Christmas charity project.”

I looked over at the Altairi, thinking maybe Calvin was wrong and they hadn’t really fallen asleep, but in spite of the din, they had sagged limply over, their heads nearly touching the ground, looking almost peaceful. Their glares had faded from full-bore Aunt Judith to only mildly disapproving.

I listened to the 42nd Street chorines tapping and belting out “Silent Night” at the top of their lungs some more. “It is kind of appealing,” I said, “especially the part where they shout out ‘Mother and child!’ ”

“I know,” he said. “I’d like it played at our wedding. And obviously the Altairi share our good taste. But aside from that, I’m not sure what it tells us.”

“That the Altairi like show tunes?” I suggested.

“God forbid. Think what Reverend Thresher would do with that,” he said. “Besides, they didn’t respond to ‘Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.’ ”

“No, but they did to that song from Mame.”

“And to the one from 1776 but not to The Music Man or Rent,” he said frustratedly. “Which puts us right back where we started. I have no clue what they’re responding to!”

“I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I should never have gotten you involved in this. You have your ACHES thing to direct.”

“It doesn’t start till seven,” he said, rummaging through a stack of LPs, “which means we’ve got another four hours to work. If we could just find another ‘Silent Night’ they’ll respond to, we might be able to figure out what in God’s name they’re doing. What the hell happened to that Star Wars Christmas album?”

“Stop,” I said. “This is ridiculous.” I took the albums out of his hands. “You’re exhausted, and you’ve got a big job to do. You can’t direct all those people on no sleep. This can wait.”

“But—”

“People think better after a nap,” I said firmly. “You’ll wake up, and the solution will be perfectly obvious.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“Then you’ll go direct your choirs, and—”

“Choirs,” he said thoughtfully.

“Or All-City Sing or Aches and Pains or whatever you call it, and I’ll stay here and play the Altairi some more ‘Silent Nights’ till you get back and—”

“ ‘Sit Down, John’ was sung by the chorus,” he said, looking past me at the drooping Altairi. “And so was ‘While Shepherds Watched.’ And the 42nd Street ‘Silent Night’ was the only one that wasn’t a solo.” He grabbed my shoulders. “They’re all choruses. That’s why they didn’t respond to Julie Andrews singing ‘Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow,’ or to Stubby Kaye singing ‘Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.’ They only respond to groups of voices.”

I shook my head. “You forgot ‘Awake, Awake, Ye Drowsy Souls.’ ”

“Oh,” he said, his face falling, “you’re right. Wait!” He lunged for the Julie Andrews CD and stuck it in the recorder. “I think Julie Andrews sings the verse and then a chorus comes in. Listen.”

He was right. The chorus had sung “Awake, awake.”

“Who sang the ‘Joy to the World’ you played them on the CD from the mall?” Calvin asked.

“Just Julie Andrews,” I said. “And Brenda Lee sang ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.’ ”

“And Johnny Mathis sang ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory,’ ” he said happily. “But the Hanukkah song, which they did respond to, was sung by the . . .” he read it off the CD case, “the Shalom Singers. That’s got to be it.” He began looking through the LPs again.

“What are you looking for?” I asked.

“The Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” he said. “They’ve got to have recorded ‘Silent Night.’ We’ll play it for the Altairi, and if they fall asleep, we’ll know we’re on the right track.”

“But they’re already asleep,” I pointed out, gesturing to where they stood looking like a week-old flower arrangement. “How—?”

He was already digging again. He brought up a Cambridge Boys’ Choir album, pulled the LP out, and read the label, muttering, “I know it’s on here . . . Here it is.” He put it on, and a chorus of sweet boys’ voices sang, “ ‘Christians awake, salute the happy morn.’ ”

The Altairi straightened immediately and glared at us. “You were right,” I said softly, but he wasn’t listening. He had the LP off the turntable and was reading the label again, muttering, “Come on, you have to have done ‘Silent Night.’ Everyone does ‘Silent Night.’ ” He flipped the LP over, said, “I knew it,” popped it back on the turntable, and dropped the needle expertly. “ ‘. . . and mild,’ ” the boys’ angelic voices sang, “ ‘sleep . . .’ ”

The Altairi drooped over before the word was even out. “That’s definitely it!” I said. “That’s the common denominator.”

He shook his head. “We need more data. It could just be a coincidence. We need to find a choral version of ‘Rise Up, Shepherd, and Follow.’ And ‘Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.’ Where did you put Guys and Dolls?”

“But that was a solo.”

“The first part, the part we played them was a solo. Later on all the gamblers come in. We should have played them the whole song.”

“We couldn’t, remember?” I said, handing it to him. “Remember the parts about dragging you under and drowning, not to mention gambling and drinking?”

“Oh, right,” he said. He put headphones on, listened, and then unplugged them. “ ‘Sit down . . .’ ” a chorus of men’s voices sang lustily, and the Altairi sat down.

We played choir versions of “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” and “Rise Up, Shepherds, and Follow.” The Altairi sat down and stood up. “You’re right,” he said after the Altairi knelt to the Platters singing “The First Noel.”

“It’s the common denominator, all right. But why?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe they can’t understand things said to them by fewer voices than a choir. That would explain why there are six of them. Maybe each one only hears certain frequencies, which singly are meaningless, but with six of them—”

He shook his head. “You’re forgetting the Andrews Sisters. And Barenaked Ladies. And even if it is the choir aspect they’re responding to, it still doesn’t tell us what they’re doing here.”

“But now we know how to get them to tell us,” I said, grabbing up The Holly Jolly Book of Christmas Songs. “Can you find a choir version of ‘Adeste Fideles’ in English?”

“I think so,” he said. “Why?”

“Because it’s got ‘we greet thee’ in it,” I said, running my fingers down the lyrics of “Good Christian Men, Rejoice.”

“And there’s ‘Watchmen, Tell Us of the Night,’ ” he said. “And ‘great glad tidings tell.’ They’re bound to respond to one of them.”

But they didn’t. Peter, Paul, and Mary ordered the Altairi to go tell (we blanked out the “on the mountain” part), but either the Altairi didn’t like folk music, or the Andrews Sisters had been a fluke.

Or we had jumped to conclusions. When we tried the same song again, this time by the Boston Commons Choir, there was still no response. And none to choral versions of “Deck the Halls” (“while I tell”), “Jolly Old St. Nicholas” (“don’t you tell a single soul” minus “don’t” and “a single soul”). Or to “The Friendly Beasts,” even though all six verses had “tell” in them.

Calvin thought the tense might be the problem and played parts of “Little St. Nick” (“tale” and “told”) and “The Carol of the Bells” (“telling”), but to no avail. “Maybe the word’s the problem,” I said. “Maybe they just don’t know the word ‘tell.’ ” But they didn’t respond to “say” or “saying” or “said,” to “messages” or to “proclaim.”

“We must have been wrong about the choir thing,” Calvin said, but that wasn’t it, either. While he was in the bedroom putting his tux on for the Sing, I played them snatches of “The First Noel” and “Up on the Rooftop” from the Barenaked Ladies CD, and they knelt and jumped right on cue.

“Maybe they think Earth’s a gym and this is an exercise class,” Calvin said, coming in as they were leaping to the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” “I don’t suppose the word ‘calling’ had any effect on them.”

“No,” I said, tying his bow tie, “and ‘I’m bringing you this simple phrase’ didn’t, either. Has it occurred to you that the music might not be having any effect at all, and they just happen to be sitting and leaping and kneeling at the same time as the words are being sung?”

“No,” he said. “There’s a connection. If there wasn’t, they wouldn’t look so irritated that we haven’t been able to figure it out yet.”

He was right. Their glares had, if anything, intensified, and their very posture radiated disapproval.

“We need more data, that’s all,” he said, going to get his black shoes. “As soon as I get back, we’ll—” He stopped.

“What is it?”

“You’d better look at this,” he said, pointing at the TV. The screen was showing a photo of the ship. All the lights were on, and exhaust was coming out of assorted side vents. Calvin grabbed the remote and turned it up.

“It is now believed that the Altairi have returned to their ship and are preparing to depart,” the newscaster said. I glanced over at the Altairi. They were still standing there. “Analysis of the ignition cycle indicates that takeoff will be in less than six hours.”

“What do we do now?” I asked Calvin.

“We figure this out. You heard them. We’ve got six hours till blastoff.”

“But the Sing—”

He handed me my coat. “We know it’s got something to do with choirs, and I’ve got every kind you could want. We’ll take the Altairi to the convention center and hope we think of something on the way.”

We didn’t think of anything on the way. “Maybe I should take them back to their ship,” I said, pulling into the parking lot. “What if I cause them to get left behind?”

“They are not E.T.,” he said.

I parked at the service entrance, got out, and started to slide the back door of the van open. “No, leave them there,” Calvin said. “We’ve got to find a place to put them before we take them in. Lock the car.”

I did, even though I doubted if it would do any good, and followed Calvin through a side door marked “Choirs Only” and through a maze of corridors lined with rooms marked “St. Peter’s Boys Choir,” “Red Hat Glee Club,” “Denver Gay Men’s Chorus,” “Sweet Adelines Show Chorus,” “Mile High Jazz Singers.” There was a hubbub in the front of the building, and when we crossed the main corridor, we could see people in gold and green and black robes milling around talking.

Calvin opened several doors one after the other, ducked inside the rooms, shutting the door after him, and then re-emerged, shaking his head. “We can’t let the Altairi hear the Messiah, and you can still hear the noise from the auditorium,” he said. “We need someplace soundproof.”

“Or farther away,” I said, leading the way down the corridor and turning down a side hall. And running smack into his seventh-graders coming out of one of the meeting rooms. Mrs. Carlson was videotaping them, and another mother was attempting to line them up to go in, but as soon as they saw Calvin, they clustered around him saying, “Mr. Ledbetter, where have you been? We thought you weren’t coming,” and “Mr. Ledbetter, Mrs. Carlson says we have to turn our cell phones off, but can’t we just have them on vibrate?” and “Mr. Ledbetter, Shelby and I were supposed to go in together, but she says she wants to be partners with Danika.”

Calvin ignored them. “Kaneesha, could you hear any of the groups rehearsing when you were in getting dressed?”

“Why?” Belinda asked. “Did we miss the call to go in?”

“Could you, Kaneesha?” he persisted.

“A little bit,” she said.

“That won’t work, then,” he said to me. “I’ll go check the room at the end. Wait here.” He sprinted along the hall.

“You were at the mall that day,” Belinda said accusingly to me. “Are you and Mr. Ledbetter going out?”

We may all be going out together—with a bang—if we don’t figure out what the Altairi are doing, I thought. “No,” I said.

“Are you hooking up?” Chelsea asked.

“Chelsea!” Mrs. Carlson said, horrified.

“Well, are you?”

“Aren’t you supposed to be lining up?” I asked.

Calvin came back at a dead run. “It should work,” he said to me. “It seems fairly soundproof.”

“Why does it have to be soundproof?” Chelsea asked.

“I bet it’s so nobody can hear them making out,” Belinda said, and Chelsea began making smooching noises.

“Time to go in, ladies,” he said in his choir director’s voice, “line up,” and he really was amazing. They immediately formed pairs and began making a line.

“Wait till everybody’s gone into the auditorium,” he said, pulling me aside, “and then go get them and bring them in. I’ll do a few minutes’ intro of the orchestra and the organizing committee so the Altairi won’t hear any songs while you’re getting them to the room. There’s a table you can use to barricade the door so nobody can get in.”

“And what if the Altairi try to leave?” I asked. “A barricade won’t stop them, you know.”

“Call me on my cell phone, and I’ll tell the audience there’s a fire drill or something. Okay? I’ll make this as short as I can.” He grinned. “No ‘Twelve Days of Christmas.’ Don’t worry, Meg. We’ll figure this out.”

“I told you she was his girlfriend.”

“Is she, Mr. Ledbetter?”

“Let’s go, ladies,” he said and led them down the hall and into the auditorium. Just as the auditorium doors shut on the last stragglers, my cell phone rang. It was Dr. Morthman, calling to say, “You can stop looking. The Altairi are in their ship.”

“How do you know? Have you seen them?” I asked, thinking, I knew I shouldn’t have left them in the car.

“No, but the ship’s begun the ignition process, and it’s going faster than NASA previously estimated. They’re now saying it’s no more than four hours to takeoff. Where are you?”

“On my way back,” I said, trying not to sound like I was running out to the parking lot and unlocking the van, which, thank goodness, was at least still there and intact.

“Well, hurry it up,” Dr. Morthman snapped. “The press is here. You’re going to have to explain to them exactly how you let the Altairi get away.” I pulled open the van’s door.

The Altairi weren’t inside.

Oh, no. “I blame this entire debacle on you,” Dr. Morthman said. “If there are international repercussions—”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said, hung up, and turned to run around to the driver’s side.

And collided with the Altairi, who had apparently been standing behind me the entire time. “Don’t scare me like that,” I said. “Now come on,” and led them rapidly into the convention center, past the shut doors of the auditorium, where I could hear talking but not singing, thank goodness, and along the long hall to the room Calvin had indicated.

It was empty except for the table Calvin had mentioned. I herded the Altairi inside and then tipped the table on its side, pushed it in front of the door, wedging it under the doorknob, and leaned my ear against it to see if I could hear any sound from the auditorium, but Calvin had been right. I couldn’t hear anything, and they should have started by now.

And now what? With takeoff only four hours away, I needed to take advantage of every second, but there was nothing in the room I could use—no piano or CD player or LPs. We should have used his seventh-graders’ dressing room, I thought. They’d at least have had iPods or something.

But even if I played the Altairi hundreds of Christmas carols being sung by a choir, and they responded to them all—bowing, decking halls, dashing through snow in one-horse open sleighs, following yonder stars—I’d still be no closer to figuring out why they were here or why they’d decided to leave. Or why they’d taken the very loud tapdancing chorus of 42nd Street singing “Sleep in heavenly peace” as a direct order. If they even knew what the word “sleep”—or “seated” or “spin” or “blink”—meant.

Calvin had surmised they could only hear words sung to them with more than one voice, but that couldn’t be it. Someone hearing a word for the first time would have no idea what it meant, and they’d never heard “ ‘all seated on the ground’ ” till that day in the mall. They had to have heard the word before to have known what it meant, and they’d only have heard it spoken. Which meant they could hear spoken words as well as sung ones.

They could have read the words, I thought, remembering the Rosetta Stone and the dictionaries Dr. Short had given them. But even if they’d somehow taught themselves to read English, they wouldn’t know how it was pronounced. They wouldn’t have recognized it when they heard it spoken. The only way they could do that was by hearing the spoken word. Which meant they’d been listening to and understanding every word we’d said for the past nine months. Including Calvin’s and my conversations about them slaying babies and destroying the planet. No wonder they were leaving.

But if they understood us, then that meant one of two things—they were either unwilling to talk to us or were incapable of speaking. Had their sitting down and their other responses been an attempt at sign language?

No, that couldn’t be it, either. They could have responded just as easily to a spoken “sit” and done it months earlier. And if they were trying to communicate, wouldn’t they have given Calvin and me some hint we were on the right—or the wrong—track instead of just standing there with that we-are-not-amused glare? And I didn’t believe for a moment those expressions were an accident of nature. I knew disapproval when I saw it. I’d watched Aunt Judith too many years not to—

Aunt Judith. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and called my sister Tracy. “Tell me everything you can remember about Aunt Judith,” I said when she answered.

“Has something happened to her?” she said, sounding alarmed. “When I talked to her last week she—”

“Last week?” I said. “You mean Aunt Judith’s still alive?”

“Well, she was last week when we had lunch.”

“Lunch? With Aunt Judith? Are we talking about the same person? Dad’s Aunt Judith? The Gorgon?”

“Yes, only she’s not a Gorgon. She’s actually very nice when you get to know her.”

“Aunt Judith,” I said, “the one who always glared disapprovingly at everybody?”

“Yes, only she hasn’t glared at me in years. As I say, when you get to know her—”

“And exactly how did you do that?”

“I thanked her for my birthday present.”

“And—?” I said. “That can’t have been all. Mom always made both of us thank her nicely for our presents.”

“I know, but they weren’t proper thank-yous. ‘A prompt handwritten note expressing gratitude is the only proper form of thanks,’ ” Tracy said, obviously quoting. “I was in high school, and we had to write a thank-you letter to someone for class. She’d just sent me my birthday card with the dollar in it, so I wrote her, and the next day she called and gave me this long lecture about the importance of good manners and how shocking it was that no one followed the most basic rules of etiquette anymore and how she was delighted to see that at least one young person knew how to behave, and then she asked me if I’d like to go see Les Miz with her, and I bought a copy of Emily Post, and we’ve gotten along great ever since. She sent Evan and me a sterling silver fish slice when we got married.”

“For which you sent her a handwritten thank-you note,” I said absently. Aunt Judith had been glaring because we were boorish and unmannered. Was that why the Altairi looked so disapproving, because they were waiting for the equivalent of a handwritten thank-you note from us?

If that was the case, we were doomed. Rules of etiquette are notoriously illogical and culture-specific, and there was no intergalactic Emily Post for me to consult. And I had, oh, God, less than two hours till liftoff.

“Tell me exactly what she said that day she called you,” I said, unwilling to give up the idea that she was somehow the key.

“It was eight years ago—”

“I know. Try to remember.”

“Okay . . . there was a lot of stuff about gloves and how I shouldn’t wear white shoes after Labor Day and how I shouldn’t cross my legs. ‘Well-bred young ladies sit with their ankles crossed.’ ”

Had the Altairi’s sitting down in the mall been an etiquette lesson in the proper way to sit? It seemed unlikely, but so did Aunt Judith’s refusal to speak to people because of the color of their shoes on certain calendar dates.

“. . . and she said if I got married, I needed to send out engraved invitations,” Tracy said. “Which I did. I think that’s why she gave us the fish slice.”

“I don’t care about the fish slice. What did she say about your thank-you note?”

“She said, ‘Well, it’s about time, Tracy. I’d nearly given up hope of anyone in your family showing any signs of civilized behavior.’ ”

Civilized behavior. That was it. The Altairi, like Aunt Judith sitting in our living room glaring, had been waiting for a sign that we were civilized. And singing—correction, group singing—was that sign. But was it an arbitrary rule of etiquette, like white shoes and engraved invitations, or was it a symbol of something else? I thought of Calvin telling his chattering seventh-graders to line up, and the milling, giggling, chaotic muddle of girls coming together in an organized, beautifully behaved, civilized line.

Coming together. That was the civilized behavior the Altairi had been waiting for a sign of. And they’d seen precious little of it in the nine months they’d been here: the disorganized commission with members quitting and those who were left not listening to anyone; that awful rehearsal where the basses couldn’t get the entrance right to save them; the harried shoppers in the mall, dragging their screaming children after them. The piped-in choir singing “While Shepherds Watched” might have been the first indication they’d seen—correction, heard—that we were capable of getting along with each other at all.

No wonder they’d sat down right there in the middle of the mall. They must have thought, like Aunt Judith, “Well, it’s about time!” But then why hadn’t they done the equivalent of calling us and asking us to go see Les Miz?

Maybe they hadn’t been sure that what they’d seen—correction, heard—was what they thought it was. They’d never seen people sing, except for Calvin and those pathetic basses. They’d seen no signs we were capable of singing beautifully in harmony.

But “While Shepherds Watched” had convinced them it might be possible, which was why they’d followed us around and why they’d sat and slept and gone astray whenever they heard more than one voice, hoping we’d get the hint, waiting for further proof.

In which case we should be in the auditorium, listening to the Sing instead of in this soundproof room. Especially since the fact that their ship was getting ready to take off indicated they’d given up and decided they were mistaken after all. “Come on,” I said to the Altairi and stood up. “I need to show you something.” I shoved the table away from the door, and opened it.

On Calvin. “Oh, good, you’re here,” I said. “I—Why aren’t you in directing?”

“I announced an intermission so I could tell you something. I think I’ve got it, the thing the Altairi have been responding to,” he said, grabbing me by the arms, “the reason they reacted to Christmas songs. I thought of it while I was directing ‘Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.’ What do nearly all Christmas songs have in them?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Chestnuts? Santa Claus? Bells?”

“Close,” he said. “Choirs.”

Choirs?“We already knew they responded to songs sung by choirs,” I said, confused.

“Not just to songs sung by choirs. Songs about choirs. Christmas carols being sung by the choir, angel choirs, children’s choirs, wassailers, carolers, strike the harp and join the chorus,” he said. “The angels in ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’ are sweetly singing o’er the plains. In ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,’ all the world gives back the song they sing. They’re all about singing,” he said excitedly. “ ‘That glorious song of old,’ ‘whom angels greet with anthems sweet.’ Look,” he flipped through the pages of his music, pointing out phrases, “ ‘oh, hear the angel voices,’ ‘as men of old have sung,’ ‘whom shepherds guard and angels sing,’ ‘let men their songs employ.’ There are references to singing in songs by Randy Travis, the Peanuts kids, Paul McCartney, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It wasn’t just that ‘While Shepherds Watched’ was sung by a choir. It was that it was a song about choirs singing. And not just singing, but what they’re singing.” He thrust the song in front of me, pointing to the last verse. “ ‘Goodwill, henceforth from heaven to men.’ That’s what they’ve been trying to communicate to us.”

I shook my head. “It’s what they’ve been waiting for us to communicate to them. Just like Aunt Judith.”

“Aunt Judith?”

“I’ll explain later. Right now we’ve got to prove we’re civilized before the Altairi leave.”

“And how do we do that?”

“We sing to them, or rather, the All-City Holiday Ecumenical Sing does.”

“What do we sing?”

I wasn’t sure it mattered. I was pretty certain what they were looking for was proof we could cooperate and work together in harmony, and in that case, “Mele Kalikimaka” would work as well as “The Peace Carol.” But it wouldn’t hurt to make things as clear to them as we could. And it would be nice if it was also something that Reverend Thresher couldn’t use as ammunition for his Galaxywide Christian Crusade.

“We need to sing something that will convince the Altairi we’re a civilized species,” I said, “something that conveys goodwill and peace. Especially peace. And not religion, if that’s possible.”

“How much time have we got to write it?” Calvin asked. “And we’ll have to get copies made—”

My cell phone rang. The screen showed it was Dr. Morthman. “Hang on,” I said, hitting talk. “I should be able to tell you in a second. Hello?”

“Where are you?” Dr. Morthman shouted. “The ship’s beginning its final ignition cycle.”

I whirled around to make sure the Altairi were still there. They were, thank goodness, and still glaring. “How long does the final cycle take?” I asked.

“They don’t know,” Dr. Morthman said, “ten minutes at the outside. If you don’t get here immediately—”

I hung up.

“Well?” Calvin said. “How much time have we got?”

“None,” I said.

“Then we’ll have to use something we’ve already got,” he said and began riffling through his sheaf of music, “and something people know the harmony to. Civilized . . . civilized . . . I think . . .” He found what he was looking for and scanned it. “. . . Yeah, if I change a couple of words, this should do the trick. Do you think the Altairi understand Latin?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them.”

“Then we’ll just do the first two lines. Wait five minutes—”

“Five minutes—?”

“So I can brief everybody on the changes, and then bring the Altairi in.”

“Okay,” I said, and he took off at a run for the auditorium.

There was an expectant buzz in the audience when we came through the double doors, and the ranks of choirs arrayed around the stage, a sea of maroon and gold and green and purple robes, began whispering to each other behind their music.

Calvin had apparently just finished his briefing. Some of the choirs and the audience were busily scribbling notes on their music, and passing pencils, and asking each other questions. The orchestra, on one side of the stage, was warming up in a jumbled cacophony of screeches and hoots and blats.

On the other side, the sopranos of the Mile-High Women’s Chorus were apparently filling the altos in on my interrupting rehearsal the other night, because they all turned to glare at me. “I think it’s ridiculous that we can’t sing the words we know,” an elderly woman wearing gloves and a hat with a veil said to her companion.

Her companion nodded. “If you ask me, they’re carrying this entire ecumenical thing too far. I mean, humans are one thing, but aliens!”

There’s no way this is going to work, I thought, looking over at Calvin’s seventh-graders, who were leaning over the backs of each other’s chairs, giggling and chewing gum. Belinda was text-messaging someone on her cell phone, and Kaneesha was listening to her iPod. Chelsea had her hand up and was calling, “Mr. Ledbetter! Mr. Ledbetter, Shelby took my music.”

Over in the orchestra, the percussionist was practicing crashing his cymbals. It’s hopeless, I thought, looking over at the glaring Altairi. There’s no way we can convince them we’re sentient, let alone civilized.

My cell phone rang. And that’s it, the straw that’s going to break the camel’s back, I thought, fumbling for it. Now everyone, even the musician with the cymbals, was glaring at me. “How rude!” the elderly woman in the white gloves said.

“The ship’s started its countdown!” Dr. Morthman bellowed in my ear.

I hit “end” and turned the phone off. “Hurry,” I mouthed to Calvin, and he nodded and stepped up on the dais.

He tapped the music stand with his baton, and the entire auditorium fell silent. “Adeste Fideles,” he said, and everyone opened their music.

“Adeste Fideles?” What’s he doing? I thought. “O come, all ye faithful” isn’t what we need. I ran mentally through the lyrics: “Come ye to Bethlehem . . . come let us adore him . . .” No, no, not religious!

But it was too late. Calvin had already spread his hands out, palms up, and lifted them, and everyone was getting to their feet. He nodded to the orchestra, and they began playing the introduction to “Adeste Fideles.”

I turned to look at the Altairi. They were glaring even more condemningly than usual. I moved between them and the doors.

The symphony was reaching the end of the introduction. Calvin glanced at me. I smiled, I hoped encouragingly, and held up crossed fingers. He nodded and then raised his baton again and brought it down.

“Have you ever been to a Sing?” Calvin had said. “It’s pretty impressive.” There had to be nearly four thousand people in that auditorium, all of them singing in perfect harmony, and if they’d been singing “The Chipmunks Song,” it would still have been awe-inspiring. But the words they were singing couldn’t have been more perfect if Calvin and I had written them to order. “ ‘Sing, earthly choirs,’ ” they trilled, “ ‘sing in exultation. Sing to the citizens of heaven above,’ ” and the Altairi glide-waddled up the aisle to the stage and sat down at Calvin’s feet.

I ducked outside to the hall and called Dr. Morthman. “What’s happening with the ship?” I asked him.

“Where are you?” he demanded. “I thought you said you were on your way over here.”

“There’s a lot of traffic,” I said. “What’s the ship doing?”

“It’s aborted its ignition sequence and shut down its lights,” he said.

Good, I thought. That means what we’re doing is working.

“It’s just sitting there on the ground.”

“How appropriate,” I murmured.

“What do you mean by that?” he said accusingly. “Spectrum analysis shows the Altairi aren’t in their ship. You’ve got them, don’t you? Where are you and what have you done to them? If—”

I hung up, switched off my phone, and went back inside. They’d finished “Adeste Fideles” and were singing “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” The Altairi were still sitting at Calvin’s feet. “ ‘. . . Reconciled,’ ” the assemblage sang, “ ‘Joyful, all ye nations rise,’ ” and the Altairi rose.

And rose, till they were a good two feet above the aisle. There was a collective gasp, and everyone stopped singing and stared at them floating there.

No, don’t stop, I thought, and hurried forward, but Calvin had it under control. He turned a glare worthy of Aunt Judith on his seventh-grade girls, and they swallowed hard and started singing again, and after a moment everyone else recovered themselves and joined in to finish the verse.

When the song ended, Calvin turned and mouthed at me, “What do I do next?”

“Keep singing,” I mouthed back.

“Singing what?”

I shrugged him an “I don’t know,” and mouthed, “What about this?” and pointed at the fourth song on the program.

He grinned, turned back to his choirs, and announced, “We will now sing, ‘There’s a Song in the Air.’ ”

There was a rustle of pages, and they began singing. I eyed the Altairi warily, looking for a lessening in elevation, but they continued to hover, and when the choir reached, “ ‘and the beautiful sing,’ ” it seemed to me their glares became slightly less fierce.

“ ‘And that song from afar has swept over the earth,’ ” the assemblage sang, and the auditorium doors burst open and Dr. Morthman, Reverend Thresher, and dozens of FBI agents and police and reporters and cameramen came rushing in. “Stay where you are,” one of the FBI agents shouted.

“Blasphemous!” Reverend Thresher roared. “Look at this! Witches, homosexuals, liberals—!”

“Arrest that young woman,” Dr. Morthman said, pointing at me, “and the young man directing—” He stopped and gaped at the Altairi hovering above the stage. Flashes began to go off, reporters started talking into microphones, and Reverend Thresher positioned himself squarely in front of one of the cameras and clasped his hands. “Oh, Lord,” he shouted, “drive Satan’s demons out of the Altairi!”

“No!” I shouted to Calvin’s seventh-graders, “don’t stop singing,” but they already had. I looked desperately at Calvin. “Keep directing!” I said, but the police were already moving forward to handcuff him, stepping cautiously around the Altairi, who were drifting earthward like slowly leaking balloons.

“And teach these sinners here the error of their ways,” Dr. Thresher was intoning.

“You can’t do this, Dr. Morthman,” I said desperately. “The Altairi—”

He grabbed my arm and dragged me to one of the police officers. “I want both of them charged with kidnapping,” he said, “and I want her charged with conspiracy. She’s responsible for this entire—” He stopped and stared past me.

I turned around. The Altairi were standing directly behind me, glaring. The police officer, who’d been about to clamp a pair of handcuffs on me, let go of my wrist and backed away, and so did the reporters and the FBI.

“Your excellencies,” Dr. Morthman said, taking several steps back, “I want you to know the commission had nothing to do with this. We knew nothing about it. It’s entirely this young woman’s fault. She . . .”

“We acknowledge your greetings,” the Altairus in the center said, bowing to me, “and greet you in return.”

A murmur of surprise rumbled through the auditorium, and Dr. Morthman stammered, “Y-you speak English?”

“Of course,” I said and bowed to the Altairi. “It’s nice to finally be able to communicate with you.”

“We welcome you into the company of citizens of the heavens,” the one on the end said, “and reciprocate your offers of goodwill, peace on earth, and chestnuts.”

“We assure you that we come bearing gifts as well,” the Altairus on the other end said.

“It’s a miracle!” Reverend Thresher shouted. “The Lord has healed them! He has unlocked their lips!” He dropped to his knees and began to pray. “Oh, Lord, we know it is our prayers which have brought this miracle about—”

Dr. Morthman bounded forward. “Your excellencies, allow me to be the first to welcome you to our humble planet,” he said, extending his hand. “On behalf of the government of the—”

The Altairi ignored him. “We had begun to think we had erred in our assessment of your world,” the one who’d spoken before said to me, and the one next to her? him? said, “We doubted your species was fully sentient.”

“I know,” I said. “I doubt it myself sometimes.”

“We also doubted you understood the concept of accord,” the one on the other end said, and turned and glared pointedly at Calvin’s wrists.

“I think you’d better un-handcuff Mr. Ledbetter,” I said to Dr. Morthman.

“Of course, of course,” he said, motioning to the police officer. “Explain to them it was all a little misunderstanding,” he whispered to me, and the Altairi turned to glare at him and then at the police officer.

When Calvin was out of the handcuffs, the one on the end said, “As the men of old, we are with gladness to be proved wrong.”

So are we, I thought. “We’re delighted to welcome you to our planet,” I said.

“Now if you’ll accompany me back to DU,” Dr. Morthman cut in, “we’ll arrange for you to go to Washington to meet with the president and—”

The Altairi began to glare again. Oh, no, I thought, and looked frantically at Calvin. “We have not yet finished greeting the delegation, Dr. Morthman,” Calvin said. He turned to the Altairi. “We would like to sing you the rest of our greeting songs.”

“We wish to hear them,” the Altairus in the center said, and the six of them immediately turned, walked back up the aisle, and sat down.

“I think it would be a good idea if you sat down, too,” I said to Dr. Morthman and the FBI agents.

“Can some of you share your music with them?” Calvin said to the people in the last row. “And help them find the right place?”

“I have no intention of singing with witches and homo—” Reverend Thresher began indignantly, and the Altairi all turned to glare at him. He sat down, and an elderly man in a yarmulke handed him his music.

“What do we do about the words to the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ ?” Calvin whispered to me, and the Altairi stood up and walked back down the aisle to us.

“There is no need to alter your joyful songs. We wish to hear them with the native words,” the one in the center said.

“We have a great interest in your planet’s myths and superstitions,” the one on the end said, “the child in the manger, the lighting of the Kwanzaa menorah, the bringing of toys and teeth to children. We are eager to learn more.”

“We have many questions,” the next one in line said. “If the child was born in a desert land, then how can King Herod have taken the children on a sleigh ride?”

“Sleigh ride?” Dr. Morthman said, and Calvin looked inquiringly at me.

“ ‘All children young to sleigh,’ ” I whispered.

“Also, if holly is jolly, then why does it bark?” the one on the other end said. “And, Mr. Ledbetter, is Ms. Yates your girlfriend?”

“There will be time for questions, negotiations, and gifts when the greetings have been completed,” the second Altairus on the left, the one who hadn’t said anything up till then, said, and I realized he must be the leader. Or the choir director, I thought. When he spoke, the Altairi instantly formed themselves into pairs, walked back up the aisle, and sat down.

I picked up Calvin’s baton and handed it to him. “What do you think we should sing first?” he asked me.

“All I want for Christmas is you,” I said.

“Really? I was thinking maybe we should start with ‘Angels We Have Heard on High,’ or—”

“That wasn’t a song title,” I said.

“Oh,” he said and turned to the Altairi. “The answer to your question is yes.”

“These are tidings of great joy,” the one in the center said.

“There shall be many mistletoeings,” the one on the end added.

The second Altairus on the left glared at them. “I think we’d better sing,” I said, and squeezed into the first row, between Reverend McIntyre and an African American woman in a turban and dashiki.

Calvin stepped onto the podium. “The Hallelujah Chorus,” Calvin said, and there was a shuffling of pages as people found their music. The woman next to me held out her music to me so we could share and whispered, “It’s considered proper etiquette to stand for this. In honor of King George the Third. He’s supposed to have stood up the first time he heard it.”

“Actually,” Reverend McIntyre whispered to me, “he may merely have been startled out of a sound sleep, but rising out of respect and admiration is still an appropriate response.”

I nodded. Calvin raised his baton, and the entire auditorium, except for the Altairi, rose as one and began to sing. And if I’d thought “Adeste Fideles” sounded wonderful, “The Hallelujah Chorus” was absolutely breathtaking, and suddenly all those lyrics about glorious songs of old and anthems sweet and repeating the sounding joy made sense. “And the whole world give back the song,” I thought, “which now the angels sing.”

And apparently the Altairi were as overwhelmed by the music as I was. After the fifth “Hal-leh-eh-lu-jah!” they rose into the air like they’d done before. And rose. And rose, till they floated giddily just below the high domed ceiling.

I knew just how they felt.

It was definitely a communications breakthrough. The Altairi haven’t stopped talking since the All-City Sing, though we’re not actually much farther along than we were before. They’re much better at asking questions than answering them. They did finally tell us where they came from—the star Alsafi in the constellation Draco. But since the meaning of Altair is “the flying one” (and Alsafi means “cooking tripod”), everyone still calls them the Altairi.

They also told us why they’d turned up at Calvin’s apartment and kept following me (“We glimpsed interesting possibilities of accord between you and Mr. Ledbetter”) and explained, more or less, how their spaceship works, which the Air Force has found extremely interesting. But we still don’t know why they came here. Or what they want. The only thing they’ve told us specifically was that they wanted to have Dr. Morthman and Reverend Thresher removed from the commission and to have Dr. Wakamura put in charge. It turns out they like being squirted, at least as much as they like anything we do. They still glare.

So does Aunt Judith. She called me the day after the All-City Sing to tell me she’d seen me on CNN and thought I’d done a nice job saving the planet, but what on earth was I wearing? Didn’t I know one was supposed to dress up for a concert? I told her everything that had happened was all thanks to her, and she glared at me (I could feel it, even over the phone) and hung up.

But she must not be too mad. When she heard I was engaged, she called my sister Tracy and told her she expected to be invited to the wedding shower. My mother is cleaning like mad.

I wonder if the Altairi will give us a fish slice. Or a birthday card with a dollar in it. Or faster-than-light travel.

THE MERCHANT AND THE ALCHEMIST’S GATE

Ted Chiang

O Mighty Caliph and Commander of the Faithful, I am humbled to be in the splendor of your presence; a man can hope for no greater blessing as long as he lives. The story I have to tell is truly a strange one, and were the entirety to be tattooed at the corner of one’s eye, the marvel of its presentation would not exceed that of the events recounted, for it is a warning to those who would be warned and a lesson to those who would learn.

My name is Fuwaad ibn Abbas, and I was born here in Baghdad, City of Peace. My father was a grain merchant, but for much of my life I have worked as a purveyor of fine fabrics, trading in silk from Damascus and linen from Egypt and scarves from Morocco that are embroidered with gold. I was prosperous, but my heart was troubled, and neither the purchase of luxuries nor the giving of alms was able to soothe it. Now I stand before you without a single dirham in my purse, but I am at peace.

Allah is the beginning of all things, but with Your Majesty’s permission, I begin my story with the day I took a walk through the district of metalsmiths. I needed to purchase a gift for a man I had to do business with, and had been told he might appreciate a tray made of silver. After browsing for half an hour, I noticed that one of the largest shops in the market had been taken over by a new merchant. It was a prized location that must have been expensive to acquire, so I entered to peruse its wares.

Never before had I seen such a marvelous assortment of goods. Near the entrance there was an astrolabe equipped with seven plates inlaid with silver, a water-clock that chimed on the hour, and a nightingale made of brass that sang when the wind blew. Farther inside there were even more ingenious mechanisms, and I stared at them the way a child watches a juggler, when an old man stepped out from a doorway in the back.

“Welcome to my humble shop, my lord,” he said. “My name is Bashaarat. How may I assist you?”

“These are remarkable items that you have for sale. I deal with traders from every corner of the world, and yet I have never seen their like. From where, may I ask, did you acquire your merchandise?”

“I am grateful to you for your kind words,” he said. “Everything you see here was made in my workshop, by myself or by my assistants under my direction.”

I was impressed that this man could be so well versed in so many arts. I asked him about the various instruments in his shop, and listened to him discourse learnedly about astrology, mathematics, geomancy, and medicine. We spoke for over an hour, and my fascination and respect bloomed like a flower warmed by the dawn, until he mentioned his experiments in alchemy.

“Alchemy?” I said. This surprised me, for he did not seem the type to make such a sharper’s claim. “You mean you can turn base metal into gold?”

“I can, my lord, but that is not in fact what most seek from alchemy.”

“What do most seek, then?”

“They seek a source of gold that is cheaper than mining ore from the ground. Alchemy does describe a means to make gold, but the procedure is so arduous that, by comparison, digging beneath a mountain is as easy as plucking peaches from a tree.”

I smiled. “A clever reply. No one could dispute that you are a learned man, but I know better than to credit alchemy.”

Bashaarat looked at me and considered. “I have recently built something that may change your opinion. You would be the first person I have shown it to. Would you care to see it?”

“It would be a great pleasure.”

“Please follow me.” He led me through the doorway in the rear of his shop. The next room was a workshop, arrayed with devices whose functions I could not guess—bars of metal wrapped with enough copper thread to reach the horizon, mirrors mounted on a circular slab of granite floating in quicksilver—but Bashaarat walked past these without a glance.

Instead he led me to a sturdy pedestal, chest high, on which a stout metal hoop was mounted upright. The hoop’s opening was as wide as two outstretched hands, and its rim so thick that it would tax the strongest man to carry. The metal was black as night, but polished to such smoothness that, had it been a different color, it could have served as a mirror. Bashaarat bade me stand so that I looked upon the hoop edgewise, while he stood next to its opening.

“Please observe,” he said.

Bashaarat thrust his arm through the hoop from the right side, but it did not extend out from the left. Instead, it was as if his arm were severed at the elbow, and he waved the stump up and down, and then pulled his arm out intact.

I had not expected to see such a learned man perform a conjuror’s trick, but it was well done, and I applauded politely.

“Now wait a moment,” he said as he took a step back.

I waited, and behold, an arm reached out of the hoop from its left side, without a body to hold it up. The sleeve it wore matched Bashaarat’s robe. The arm waved up and down, and then retreated through the hoop until it was gone.

The first trick I had thought a clever mime, but this one seemed far superior, because the pedestal and hoop were clearly too slender to conceal a person. “Very clever!” I exclaimed.

“Thank you, but this is not mere sleight of hand. The right side of the hoop precedes the left by several seconds. To pass through the hoop is to cross that duration instantly.”

“I do not understand,” I said.

“Let me repeat the demonstration.” Again he thrust his arm through the hoop, and his arm disappeared. He smiled, and pulled back and forth as if playing tuga-rope. Then he pulled his arm out again, and presented his hand to me with the palm open. On it lay a ring I recognized.

“That is my ring!” I checked my hand, and saw that my ring still lay on my finger. “You have conjured up a duplicate.”

“No, this is truly your ring. Wait.”

Again, an arm reached out from the left side. Wishing to discover the mechanism of the trick, I rushed over to grab it by the hand. It was not a false hand, but one fully warm and alive as mine. I pulled on it, and it pulled back. Then, as deft as a pickpocket, the hand slipped the ring from my finger and the arm withdrew into the hoop, vanishing completely.

“My ring is gone!” I exclaimed.

“No, my lord,” he said. “Your ring is here.” And he gave me the ring he held. “Forgive me for my game.”

I replaced it on my finger. “You had the ring before it was taken from me.”

At that moment an arm reached out, this time from the right side of the hoop. “What is this?” I exclaimed. Again I recognized it as his by the sleeve before it withdrew, but I had not seen him reach in.

“Recall,” he said, “the right side of the hoop precedes the left.” And he walked over to the left side of the hoop, and thrust his arm through from that side, and again it disappeared.

Your Majesty has undoubtedly already grasped this, but it was only then that I understood: whatever happened on the right side of the hoop was complemented, a few seconds later, by an event on the left side. “Is this sorcery?” I asked.

“No, my lord, I have never met a djinni, and if I did, I would not trust it to do my bidding. This is a form of alchemy.”

He offered an explanation, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like the holes that worms bore into wood, and how upon finding one he was able to expand and stretch it the way a glassblower turns a dollop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe, and how he then allowed time to flow like water at one mouth while causing it to thicken like syrup at the other. I confess I did not really understand his words, and cannot testify to their truth. All I could say in response was, “You have created something truly astonishing.”

“Thank you,” he said, “but this is merely a prelude to what I intended to show you.” He bade me follow him into another room, farther in the back. There stood a circular doorway whose massive frame was made of the same polished black metal, mounted in the middle of the room.

“What I showed you before was a Gate of Seconds,” he said. “This is a Gate of Years. The two sides of the doorway are separated by a span of twenty years.”

I confess I did not understand his remark immediately. I imagined him reaching his arm in from the right side and waiting twenty years before it emerged from the left side, and it seemed a very obscure magic trick. I said as much, and he laughed. “That is one use for it,” he said, “but consider what would happen if you were to step through.” Standing on the right side, he gestured for me to come closer, and then pointed through the doorway. “Look.”

I looked, and saw that there appeared to be different rugs and pillows on the other side of the room than I had seen when I had entered. I moved my head from side to side, and realized that when I peered through the doorway, I was looking at a different room from the one I stood in.

“You are seeing the room twenty years from now,” said Bashaarat.

I blinked, as one might at an illusion of water in the desert, but what I saw did not change. “And you say I could step through?” I asked.

“You could. And with that step, you would visit the Baghdad of twenty years hence. You could seek out your older self and have a conversation with him. Afterwards, you could step back through the Gate of Years and return to the present day.”

Hearing Bashaarat’s words, I felt as if I were reeling. “You have done this?” I asked him. “You have stepped through?”

“I have, and so have numerous customers of mine.”

“Earlier you said I was the first to whom you showed this.”

“This Gate, yes. But for many years I owned a shop in Cairo, and it was there that I first built a Gate of Years. There were many to whom I showed that Gate, and who made use of it.”

“What did they learn when talking to their older selves?”

“Each person learns something different. If you wish, I can tell you the story of one such person.” Bashaarat proceeded to tell me such a story, and if it pleases Your Majesty, I will recount it here.

THE TALE OF THE FORTUNATE ROPE-MAKER

There once was a young man named Hassan who was a maker of rope. He stepped through the Gate of Years to see the Cairo of twenty years later, and upon arriving he marveled at how the city had grown. He felt as if he had stepped into a scene embroidered on a tapestry, and even though the city was no more and no less than Cairo, he looked upon the most common sights as objects of wonder.

He was wandering by the Zuweyla Gate, where the sword dancers and snake charmers perform, when an astrologer called to him. “Young man! Do you wish to know the future?”

Hassan laughed. “I know it already,” he said.

“Surely you want to know if wealth awaits you, do you not?”

“I am a rope-maker. I know that it does not.”

“Can you be so sure? What about the renowned merchant Hassan al-Hubbaul, who began as a rope-maker?”

His curiosity aroused, Hassan asked around the market for others who knew of this wealthy merchant, and found that the name was well known. It was said he lived in the wealthy Habbaniya quarter of the city, so Hassan walked there and asked people to point out his house, which turned out to be the largest one on its street.

He knocked at the door, and a servant led him to a spacious and well-appointed hall with a fountain in the center. Hassan waited while the servant went to fetch his master, but as he looked at the polished ebony and marble around him, he felt that he did not belong in such surroundings, and was about to leave when his older self appeared.

“At last you are here!” the man said. “I have been expecting you!”

“You have?” said Hassan, astounded.

“Of course, because I visited my older self just as you are visiting me. It has been so long that I had forgotten the exact day. Come, dine with me.”

The two went to a dining room, where servants brought chicken stuffed with pistachio nuts, fritters soaked in honey, and roast lamb with spiced pomegranates. The older Hassan gave few details of his life: he mentioned business interests of many varieties, but did not say how he had become a merchant; he mentioned a wife, but said it was not time for the younger man to meet her. Instead, he asked young Hassan to remind him of the pranks he had played as a child, and he laughed to hear stories that had faded from his own memory.

At last the younger Hassan asked the older, “How did you make such great changes in your fortune?”

“All I will tell you right now is this: when you go to buy hemp from the market, and you are walking along the Street of Black Dogs, do not walk along the south side as you usually do. Walk along the north.”

“And that will enable me to raise my station?”

“Just do as I say. Go back home now; you have rope to make. You will know when to visit me again.”

Young Hassan returned to his day and did as he was instructed, keeping to the north side of the street even when there was no shade there. It was a few days later that he witnessed a maddened horse run amok on the south side of the street directly opposite him, kicking several people, injuring another by knocking a heavy jug of palm oil onto him, and even trampling one person under its hooves. After the commotion had subsided, Hassan prayed to Allah for the injured to be healed and the dead to be at peace, and thanked Allah for sparing him.

The next day Hassan stepped through the Gate of Years and sought out his older self. “Were you injured by the horse when you walked by?” he asked him.

“No, because I heeded my older self’s warning. Do not forget, you and I are one; every circumstance that befalls you once befell me.”

And so the elder Hassan gave the younger instructions, and the younger obeyed them. He refrained from buying eggs from his usual grocer, and thus avoided the illness that struck customers who bought eggs from a spoiled basket. He bought extra hemp, and thus had material to work with when others suffered a shortage due to a delayed caravan. Following his older self’s instructions spared Hassan many troubles, but he wondered why his older self would not tell him more. Who would he marry? How would he become wealthy?

Then one day, after having sold all his rope in the market and carrying an unusually full purse, Hassan bumped into a boy while walking on the street. He felt for his purse, discovered it missing, and turned around with a shout to search the crowd for the pickpocket. Hearing Hassan’s cry, the boy immediately began running through the crowd. Hassan saw that the boy’s tunic was torn at the elbow, but then quickly lost sight of him.

For a moment Hassan was shocked that this could happen with no warning from his older self. But his surprise was soon replaced by anger, and he gave chase. He ran through the crowd, checking the elbows of boys’ tunics, until by chance he found the pickpocket crouching beneath a fruit wagon. Hassan grabbed him and began shouting to all that he had caught a thief, asking them to find a guardsman. The boy, afraid of arrest, dropped Hassan’s purse and began weeping. Hassan stared at the boy for a long moment, and then his anger faded, and he let him go.

When next he saw his older self, Hassan asked him, “Why did you not warn me about the pickpocket?”

“Did you not enjoy the experience?” asked his older self.

Hassan was about to deny it, but stopped himself. “I did enjoy it,” he admitted. In pursuing the boy, with no hint of whether he’d succeed or fail, he had felt his blood surge in a way it had not for many weeks. And seeing the boy’s tears had reminded him of the Prophet’s teachings on the value of mercy, and Hassan had felt virtuous in choosing to let the boy go.

“Would you rather I had denied you that, then?”

Just as we grow to understand the purpose of customs that seemed pointless to us in our youth, Hassan realized that there was merit in withholding information as well as in disclosing it. “No,” he said, “it was good that you did not warn me.”

The older Hassan saw that he had understood. “Now I will tell you something very important. Hire a horse. I will give you directions to a spot in the foothills to the west of the city. There you will find within a grove of trees one that was struck by lightning. Around the base of the tree, look for the heaviest rock you can overturn, and then dig beneath it.”

“What should I look for?”

“You will know when you find it.”

The next day Hassan rode out to the foothills and searched until he found the tree. The ground around it was covered in rocks, so Hassan overturned one to dig beneath it, and then another, and then another. At last his spade struck something besides rock and soil. He cleared aside the soil and discovered a bronze chest, filled with gold dinars and assorted jewelry. Hassan had never seen its like in all his life. He loaded the chest onto the horse, and rode back to Cairo.

The next time he spoke to his older self, he asked, “How did you know where the treasure was?”

“I learned it from myself,” said the older Hassan, “just as you did. As to how we came to know its location, I have no explanation except that it was the will of Allah, and what other explanation is there for anything?”

“I swear I shall make good use of these riches that Allah has blessed me with,” said the younger Hassan.

“And I renew that oath,” said the older. “This is the last time we shall speak. You will find your own way now. Peace be upon you.”

And so Hassan returned home. With the gold he was able to purchase hemp in great quantity, and hire workmen and pay them a fair wage, and sell rope profitably to all who sought it. He married a beautiful and clever woman, at whose advice he began trading in other goods, until he was a wealthy and respected merchant. All the while he gave generously to the poor and lived as an upright man. In this way Hassan lived the happiest of lives until he was overtaken by death, breaker of ties and destroyer of delights.

“That is a remarkable story,” I said. “For someone who is debating whether to make use of the Gate, there could hardly be a better inducement.”

“You are wise to be skeptical,” said Bashaarat. “Allah rewards those he wishes to reward and chastises those he wishes to chastise. The Gate does not change how he regards you.”

I nodded, thinking I understood. “So even if you succeed in avoiding the misfortunes that your older self experienced, there is no assurance you will not encounter other misfortunes.”

“No, forgive an old man for being unclear. Using the Gate is not like drawing lots, where the token you select varies with each turn. Rather, using the Gate is like taking a secret passageway in a palace, one that lets you enter a room more quickly than by walking down the hallway. The room remains the same, no matter which door you use to enter.”

This surprised me. “The future is fixed, then? As unchangeable as the past?”

“It is said that repentance and atonement erase the past.”

“I have heard that too, but I have not found it to be true.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” said Bashaarat. “All I can say is that the future is no different.”

I thought on this for a while. “So if you learn that you are dead twenty years from now, there is nothing you can do to avoid your death?” He nodded. This seemed to me very disheartening, but then I wondered if it could not also provide a guarantee. I said, “Suppose you learn that you are alive twenty years from now. Then nothing could kill you in the next twenty years. You could then fight in battles without a care, because your survival is assured.”

“That is possible,” he said. “It is also possible that a man who would make use of such a guarantee would not find his older self alive when he first used the Gate.”

“Ah,” I said. “Is it then the case that only the prudent meet their older selves?”

“Let me tell you the story of another person who used the Gate, and you can decide for yourself if he was prudent or not.” Bashaarat proceeded to tell me the story, and if it pleases Your Majesty, I will recount it here.

THE TALE OF THE WEAVER WHO STOLE FROM HIMSELF

There was a young weaver named Ajib who made a modest living as a weaver of rugs, but yearned to taste the luxuries enjoyed by the wealthy. After hearing the story of Hassan, Ajib immediately stepped through the Gate of Years to seek out his older self, who, he was sure, would be as rich and as generous as the older Hassan.

Upon arriving in the Cairo of twenty years later, he proceeded to the wealthy Habbaniya quarter of the city and asked people for the residence of Ajib ibn Taher. He was prepared, if he met someone who knew the man and remarked on the similarity of their features, to identify himself as Ajib’s son, newly arrived from Damascus. But he never had the chance to offer this story, because no one he asked recognized the name.

Eventually he decided to return to his old neighborhood, and see if anyone there knew where he had moved to. When he got to his old street, he stopped a boy and asked him if he knew where to find a man named Ajib. The boy directed him to Ajib’s old house.

“That is where he used to live,” Ajib said. “Where does he live now?”

“If he has moved since yesterday, I do not know where,” said the boy.

Ajib was incredulous. Could his older self still live in the same house, twenty years later? That would mean he had never become wealthy, and his older self would have no advice to give him, or at least none Ajib would profit by following. How could his fate differ so much from that of the fortunate rope-maker? In hopes that the boy was mistaken, Ajib waited outside the house, and watched.

Eventually he saw a man leave the house, and with a sinking heart recognized it as his older self. The older Ajib was followed by a woman that he presumed was his wife, but he scarcely noticed her, for all he could see was his own failure to have bettered himself. He stared with dismay at the plain clothes the older couple wore until they walked out of sight.

Driven by the curiosity that impels men to look at the heads of the executed, Ajib went to the door of his house. His own key still fit the lock, so he entered. The furnishings had changed, but were simple and worn, and Ajib was mortified to see them. After twenty years, could he not even afford better pillows?

On an impulse, he went to the wooden chest where he normally kept his savings, and unlocked it. He lifted the lid, and saw the chest was filled with gold dinars.

Ajib was astonished. His older self had a chest of gold, and yet he wore such plain clothes and lived in the same small house for twenty years! What a stingy, joyless man his older self must be, thought Ajib, to have wealth and not enjoy it. Ajib had long known that one could not take one’s possessions to the grave. Could that be something that he would forget as he aged?

Ajib decided that such riches should belong to someone who appreciated them, and that was himself. To take his older self’s wealth would not be stealing, he reasoned, because it was he himself who would receive it. He heaved the chest onto his shoulder, and with much effort was able to bring it back through the Gate of Years to the Cairo he knew.

He deposited some of his newfound wealth with a banker, but always carried a purse heavy with gold. He dressed in a Damascene robe and Cordovan slippers and a Khurasani turban bearing a jewel. He rented a house in the wealthy quarter, furnished it with the finest rugs and couches, and hired a cook to prepare him sumptuous meals.

He then sought out the brother of a woman he had long desired from afar, a woman named Taahira. Her brother was an apothecary, and Taahira assisted him in his shop. Ajib would occasionally purchase a remedy so that he might speak to her. Once he had seen her veil slip, and her eyes were as dark and beautiful as a gazelle’s. Taahira’s brother would not have consented to her marrying a weaver, but now Ajib could present himself as a favorable match.

Taahira’s brother approved, and Taahira herself readily consented, for she had desired Ajib, too. Ajib spared no expense for their wedding. He hired one of the pleasure barges that floated in the canal south of the city and held a feast with musicians and dancers, at which he presented her with a magnificent pearl necklace. The celebration was the subject of gossip throughout the quarter.

Ajib reveled in the joy that money brought him and Taahira, and for a week the two of them lived the most delightful of lives. Then one day Ajib came home to find the door to his house broken open and the interior ransacked of all silver and gold items. The terrified cook emerged from hiding and told him that robbers had taken Taahira.

Ajib prayed to Allah until, exhausted with worry, he fell asleep. The next morning he was awoken by a knocking at his door. There was a stranger there. “I have a message for you,” the man said.

“What message?” asked Ajib.

“Your wife is safe.”

Ajib felt fear and rage churn in his stomach like black bile. “What ransom would you have?” he asked.

“Ten thousand dinars.”

“That is more than all I possess!” Ajib exclaimed.

“Do not haggle with me,” said the robber. “I have seen you spend money like others pour water.”

Ajib dropped to his knees. “I have been wasteful. I swear by the name of the Prophet that I do not have that much,” he said.

The robber looked at him closely. “Gather all the money you have,” he said, “and have it here tomorrow at this same hour. If I believe you are holding back, your wife will die. If I believe you to be honest, my men will return her to you.”

Ajib could see no other choice. “Agreed,” he said, and the robber left.

The next day he went to the banker and withdrew all the money that remained. He gave it to the robber, who gauged the desperation in Ajib’s eyes and was satisfied. The robber did as he promised, and that evening Taahira was returned.

After they had embraced, Taahira said, “I didn’t believe you would pay so much money for me.”

“I could not take pleasure in it without you,” said Ajib, and he was surprised to realize it was true. “But now I regret that I cannot buy you what you deserve.”

“You need never buy me anything again,” she said.

Ajib bowed his head. “I feel as if I have been punished for my misdeeds.”

“What misdeeds?” asked Taahira, but Ajib said nothing. “I did not ask you this before,” she said. “But I know you did not inherit all the money you gained. Tell me: did you steal it?”

“No,” said Ajib, unwilling to admit the truth to her or himself. “It was given to me.”

“A loan, then?”

“No, it does not need to be repaid.”

“And you don’t wish to pay it back?” Taahira was shocked. “So you are content that this other man paid for our wedding? That he paid my ransom?” She seemed on the verge of tears. “Am I your wife then, or this other man’s?”

“You are my wife,” he said.

“How can I be, when my very life is owed to another?”

“I would not have you doubt my love,” said Ajib. “I swear to you that I will pay back the money, to the last dirham.”

And so Ajib and Taahira moved back into Ajib’s old house and began saving their money. Both of them went to work for Taahira’s brother the apothecary, and when he eventually became a perfumer to the wealthy, Ajib and Taahira took over the business of selling remedies to the ill. It was a good living, but they spent as little as they could, living modestly and repairing damaged furnishings instead of buying new. For years, Ajib smiled whenever he dropped a coin into the chest, telling Taahira that it was a reminder of how much he valued her. He would say that even after the chest was full, it would be a bargain.

But it is not easy to fill a chest by adding just a few coins at a time, and so what began as thrift gradually turned into miserliness, and prudent decisions were replaced by tight-fisted ones. Worse, Ajib’s and Taahira’s affections for each other faded over time, and each grew to resent the other for the money they could not spend.

In this manner the years passed and Ajib grew older, waiting for the second time that his gold would be taken from him.

“What a strange and sad story,” I said.

“Indeed,” said Bashaarat. “Would you say that Ajib acted prudently?”

I hesitated before speaking. “It is not my place to judge him,” I said. “He must live with the consequences of his actions, just as I must live with mine.” I was silent for a moment, and then said, “I admire Ajib’s candor, that he told you everything he had done.”

“Ah, but Ajib did not tell me of this as a young man,” said Bashaarat. “After he emerged from the Gate carrying the chest, I did not see him again for another twenty years. Ajib was a much older man when he came to visit me again. He had come home and found his chest gone, and the knowledge that he had paid his debt made him feel he could tell me all that had transpired.”

“Indeed? Did the older Hassan from your first story come to see you as well?”

“No, I heard Hassan’s story from his younger self. The older Hassan never returned to my shop, but in his place I had a different visitor, one who shared a story about Hassan that he himself could never have told me.” Bashaarat proceeded to tell me that visitor’s story, and if it pleases Your Majesty, I will recount it here.

THE TALE OF THE WIFE AND HER LOVER

Raniya had been married to Hassan for many years, and they lived the happiest of lives. One day she saw her husband dine with a young man, whom she recognized as the very image of Hassan when she had first married him. So great was her astonishment that she could scarcely keep herself from intruding on their conversation. After the young man left, she demanded that Hassan tell her who he was, and Hassan related to her an incredible tale.

“Have you told him about me?” she asked. “Did you know what lay ahead of us when we first met?”

“I knew I would marry you from the moment I saw you,” Hassan said, smiling, “but not because anyone had told me. Surely, wife, you would not wish to spoil that moment for him?”

So Raniya did not speak to her husband’s younger self, but only eavesdropped on his conversation, and stole glances at him. Her pulse quickened at the sight of his youthful features; sometimes our memories fool us with their sweetness, but when she beheld the two men seated opposite each other, she could see the fullness of the younger one’s beauty without exaggeration. At night, she would lie awake, thinking of it.

Some days after Hassan had bid farewell to his younger self, he left Cairo to conduct business with a merchant in Damascus. In his absence Raniya found the shop that Hassan had described to her, and stepped through the Gate of Years to the Cairo of her youth.

She remembered where he had lived back then, and so was easily able to find the young Hassan and follow him. As she watched him, she felt a desire stronger than she had felt in years for the older Hassan, so vivid were her recollections of their youthful lovemaking. She had always been a loyal and faithful wife, but here was an opportunity that would never be available again. Resolving to act on this desire, Raniya rented a house, and in subsequent days bought furnishings for it.

Once the house was ready, she followed Hassan discreetly while she tried to gather enough boldness to approach him. In the jewelers’ market, she watched as he went to a jeweler, showed him a necklace set with ten gemstones, and asked him how much he would pay for it. Raniya recognized it as one Hassan had given to her in the days after their wedding; she had not known he had once tried to sell it. She stood a short distance away and listened, pretending to look at some rings.

“Bring it back tomorrow, and I will pay you a thousand dinars,” said the jeweler. Young Hassan agreed to the price, and left.

As she watched him leave, Raniya overheard two men talking nearby:

“Did you see that necklace? It is one of ours.”

“Are you certain?” asked the other.

“I am. That is the bastard who dug up our chest.”

“Let us tell our captain about him. After this fellow has sold his necklace, we will take his money, and more.”

The two men left without noticing Raniya, who stood with her heart racing but her body motionless, like a deer after a tiger has passed. She realized that the treasure Hassan had dug up must have belonged to a band of thieves, and these men were two of its members. They were now observing the jewelers of Cairo to identify the person who had taken their loot.

Raniya knew that since she possessed the necklace, the young Hassan could not have sold it. She also knew that the thieves could not have killed Hassan. But it could not be Allah’s will for her to do nothing. Allah must have brought her here so that he might use her as his instrument.

Raniya returned to the Gate of Years, stepped through to her own day, and at her house found the necklace in her jewelry box. Then she used the Gate of Years again, but instead of entering it from the left side, she entered it from the right, so that she visited the Cairo of twenty years later. There she sought out her older self, now an aged woman. The older Raniya greeted her warmly, and retrieved the necklace from her own jewelry box. The two women then rehearsed how they would assist the young Hassan.

The next day, the two thieves were back with a third man, whom Raniya assumed was their captain. They all watched as Hassan presented the necklace to the jeweler.

As the jeweler examined it, Raniya walked up and said, “What a coincidence! Jeweler, I wish to sell a necklace just like that.” She brought out her necklace from a purse she carried.

“This is remarkable,” said the jeweler. “I have never seen two necklaces more similar.”

Then the aged Raniya walked up. “What do I see? Surely my eyes deceive me!” And with that she brought out a third identical necklace. “The seller sold it to me with the promise that it was unique. This proves him a liar.”

“Perhaps you should return it,” said Raniya.

“That depends,” said the aged Raniya. She asked Hassan, “How much is he paying you for it?”

“A thousand dinars,” said Hassan, bewildered.

“Really! Jeweler, would you care to buy this one too?”

“I must reconsider my offer,” said the jeweler.

While Hassan and the aged Raniya bargained with the jeweler, Raniya stepped back just far enough to hear the captain berate the other thieves. “You fools,” he said. “It is a common necklace. You would have us kill half the jewelers in Cairo and bring the guardsmen down upon our heads.” He slapped their heads and led them off.

Raniya returned her attention to the jeweler, who had withdrawn his offer to buy Hassan’s necklace. The older Raniya said, “Very well. I will try to return it to the man who sold it to me.” As the older woman left, Raniya could tell that she smiled beneath her veil.

Raniya turned to Hassan. “It appears that neither of us will sell a necklace today.”

“Another day, perhaps,” said Hassan.

“I shall take mine back to my house for safekeeping,” said Raniya. “Would you walk with me?”

Hassan agreed, and walked with Raniya to the house she had rented. Then she invited him in, and offered him wine, and after they had both drunk some, she led him to her bedroom. She covered the windows with heavy curtains and extinguished all lamps so that the room was as dark as night. Only then did she remove her veil and take him to bed.

Raniya had been flush with anticipation for this moment, and so was surprised to find that Hassan’s movements were clumsy and awkward. She remembered their wedding night very clearly; he had been confident, and his touch had taken her breath away. She knew Hassan’s first meeting with the young Raniya was not far away, and for a moment did not understand how this fumbling boy could change so quickly. And then of course the answer was clear.

So every afternoon for many days, Raniya met Hassan at her rented house and instructed him in the art of love, and in doing so she demonstrated that, as is often said, women are Allah’s most wondrous creation. She told him, “The pleasure you give is returned in the pleasure you receive,” and inwardly she smiled as she thought of how true her words really were. Before long, he gained the expertise she remembered, and she took greater enjoyment in it than she had as a young woman.

All too soon, the day arrived when Raniya told the young Hassan that it was time for her to leave. He knew better than to press her for her reasons, but asked her if they might ever see each other again. She told him, gently, no. Then she sold the furnishings to the house’s owner, and returned through the Gate of Years to the Cairo of her own day.

When the older Hassan returned from his trip to Damascus, Raniya was home waiting for him. She greeted him warmly, but kept her secrets to herself.

I was lost in my own thoughts when Bashaarat finished this story, until he said, “I see that this story has intrigued you in a way the others did not.”

“You see clearly,” I admitted. “I realize now that, even though the past is unchangeable, one may encounter the unexpected when visiting it.”

“Indeed. Do you now understand why I say the future and the past are the same? We cannot change either, but we can know both more fully.”

“I do understand; you have opened my eyes, and now I wish to use the Gate of Years. What price do you ask?”

He waved his hand. “I do not sell passage through the Gate,” he said. “Allah guides whom he wishes to my shop, and I am content to be an instrument of his will.”

Had it been another man, I would have taken his words to be a negotiating ploy, but after all that Bashaarat had told me, I knew that he was sincere. “Your generosity is as boundless as your learning,” I said, and bowed. “If there is ever a service that a merchant of fabrics might provide for you, please call upon me.”

“Thank you. Let us talk now about your trip. There are some matters we must speak of before you visit the Baghdad of twenty years hence.”

“I do not wish to visit the future,” I told him. “I would step through in the other direction, to revisit my youth.”

“Ah, my deepest apologies. This Gate will not take you there. You see, I built this Gate only a week ago. Twenty years ago, there was no doorway here for you to step out of.”

My dismay was so great that I must have sounded like a forlorn child. I said, “But where does the other side of the Gate lead?” and walked around the circular doorway to face its opposite side.

Bashaarat walked around the doorway to stand beside me. The view through the Gate appeared identical to the view outside it, but when he extended his hand to reach through, it stopped as if it met an invisible wall. I looked more closely, and noticed a brass lamp set on a table. Its flame did not flicker, but was as fixed and unmoving as if the room were trapped in clearest amber.

“What you see here is the room as it appeared last week,” said Bashaarat. “In some twenty years’ time, this left side of the Gate will permit entry, allowing people to enter from this direction and visit their past. Or,” he said, leading me back to the side of the doorway he had first shown me, “we can enter from the right side now, and visit them ourselves. But I’m afraid this Gate will never allow visits to the days of your youth.”

“What about the Gate of Years you had in Cairo?” I asked.

He nodded. “That Gate still stands. My son now runs my shop there.”

“So I could travel to Cairo, and use the Gate to visit the Cairo of twenty years ago. From there I could travel back to Baghdad.”

“Yes, you could make that journey, if you so desire.”

“I do,” I said. “Will you tell me how to find your shop in Cairo?”

“We must speak of some things first,” said Bashaarat. “I will not ask your intentions, being content to wait until you are ready to tell me. But I would remind you that what is made cannot be unmade.”

“I know,” I said.

“And that you cannot avoid the ordeals that are assigned to you. What Allah gives you, you must accept.”

“I remind myself of that every day of my life.”

“Then it is my honor to assist you in whatever way I can,” he said.

He brought out some paper and a pen and ink pot and began writing. “I shall write for you a letter to aid you on your journey.” He folded the letter, dribbled some candle wax over the edge, and pressed his ring against it. “When you reach Cairo, give this to my son, and he will let you enter the Gate of Years there.”

A merchant such as myself must be well versed in expressions of gratitude, but I had never before been as effusive in giving thanks as I was to Bashaarat, and every word was heartfelt. He gave me directions to his shop in Cairo, and I assured him I would tell him all upon my return. As I was about to leave his shop, a thought occurred to me. “Because the Gate of Years you have here opens to the future, you are assured that the Gate and this shop will remain standing for twenty years or more.”

“Yes, that is true,” said Bashaarat.

I began to ask him if he had met his older self, but then I bit back my words. If the answer was no, it was surely because his older self was dead, and I would be asking him if he knew the date of his death. Who was I to make such an inquiry, when this man was granting me a boon without asking my intentions? I saw from his expression that he knew what I had meant to ask, and I bowed my head in humble apology. He indicated his acceptance with a nod, and I returned home to make arrangements.

The caravan took two months to reach Cairo. As for what occupied my mind during the journey, Your Majesty, I now tell you what I had not told Bashaarat. I was married once, twenty years before, to a woman named Najya. Her figure swayed as gracefully as a willow bough and her face was as lovely as the moon, but it was her kind and tender nature that captured my heart. I had just begun my career as a merchant when we married, and we were not wealthy, but did not feel the lack.

We had been married only a year when I was to travel to Basra to meet with a ship’s captain. I had an opportunity to profit by trading in slaves, but Najya did not approve. I reminded her that the Koran does not forbid the owning of slaves as long as one treats them well, and that even the Prophet owned some. But she said there was no way I could know how my buyers would treat their slaves, and that it was better to sell goods than men.

On the morning of my departure, Najya and I argued. I spoke harshly to her, using words that it shames me to recall, and I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness if I do not repeat them here. I left in anger, and never saw her again. She was badly injured when the wall of a mosque collapsed, some days after I left. She was taken to the bimaristan, but the physicians could not save her, and she died soon after. I did not learn of her death until I returned a week later, and I felt as if I had killed her with my own hand.

Can the torments of Hell be worse than what I endured in the days that followed? It seemed likely that I would find out, so near to death did my anguish take me. And surely the experience must be similar, for like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering.

Eventually my period of lamentation ended, and I was left a hollow man, a bag of skin with no innards. I freed the slaves I had bought and became a fabric merchant. Over the years I became wealthy, but I never remarried. Some of the men I did business with tried to match me with a sister or a daughter, telling me that the love of a woman can make you forget your pains. Perhaps they are right, but it cannot make you forget the pain you caused another. Whenever I imagined myself marrying another woman, I remembered the look of hurt in Najya’s eyes when I last saw her, and my heart was closed to others.

I spoke to a mullah about what I had done, and it was he who told me that repentance and atonement erase the past. I repented and atoned as best I knew how; for twenty years I lived as an upright man, I offered prayers and fasted and gave alms to those less fortunate and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and yet I was still haunted by guilt. Allah is all-merciful, so I knew the failing to be mine.

Had Bashaarat asked me, I could not have said what I hoped to achieve. It was clear from his stories that I could not change what I knew to have happened. No one had stopped my younger self from arguing with Najya in our final conversation. But the tale of Raniya, which lay hidden within the tale of Hassan’s life without his knowing it, gave me a slim hope: perhaps I might be able to play some part in events while my younger self was away on business.

Could it not be that there had been a mistake, and my Najya had survived? Perhaps it was another woman whose body had been wrapped in a shroud and buried while I was gone. Perhaps I could rescue Najya and bring her back with me to the Baghdad of my own day. I knew it was foolhardy; men of experience say, “Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,” and I understood the truth of those words better than most. And yet I dared to hope that Allah had judged my twenty years of repentance sufficient, and was now granting me a chance to regain what I had lost.

The caravan journey was uneventful, and after sixty sunrises and three hundred prayers, I reached Cairo. There I had to navigate the city’s streets, which are a bewildering maze compared to the harmonious design of the City of Peace. I made my way to the Bayn al-Qasrayn, the main street that runs through the Fatimid quarter of Cairo. From there I found the street on which Bashaarat’s shop was located.

I told the shopkeeper that I had spoken to his father in Baghdad, and gave him the letter Bashaarat had given me. After reading it, he led me into a back room, in whose center stood another Gate of Years, and he gestured for me to enter from its left side.

As I stood before the massive circle of metal, I felt a chill, and chided myself for my nervousness. With a deep breath I stepped through, and found myself in the same room with different furnishings. If not for those, I would not have known the Gate to be different from an ordinary doorway. Then I recognized that the chill I had felt was simply the coolness of the air in this room, for the day here was not as hot as the day I had left. I could feel its warm breeze at my back, coming through the Gate like a sigh.

The shopkeeper followed behind me and called out, “Father, you have a visitor.”

A man entered the room, and who should it be but Bashaarat, twenty years younger than when I’d seen him in Baghdad. “Welcome, my lord,” he said. “I am Bashaarat.”

“You do not know me?” I asked.

“No, you must have met my older self. For me, this is our first meeting, but it is my honor to assist you.”

Your Majesty, as befits this chronicle of my shortcomings, I must confess that, so immersed was I in my own woes during the journey from Baghdad, I had not previously realized that Bashaarat had likely recognized me the moment I stepped into his shop. Even as I was admiring his water-clock and brass songbird, he had known that I would travel to Cairo, and likely knew whether I had achieved my goal or not.

The Bashaarat I spoke to now knew none of those things. “I am doubly grateful for your kindness, sir,” I said. “My name is Fuwaad ibn Abbas, newly arrived from Baghdad.”

Bashaarat’s son took his leave, and Bashaarat and I conferred; I asked him the day and month, confirming that there was ample time for me to travel back to the City of Peace, and promised him I would tell him everything when I returned. His younger self was as gracious as his older. “I look forward to speaking with you on your return, and to assisting you again twenty years from now,” he said.

His words gave me pause. “Had you planned to open a shop in Baghdad before today?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I had been marveling at the coincidence that we met in Baghdad just in time for me to make my journey here, use the Gate, and travel back. But now I wonder if it is perhaps not a coincidence at all. Is my arrival here today the reason that you will move to Baghdad twenty years from now?”

Bashaarat smiled. “Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.”

“Now as ever, you have given me much to think about,” I said.

I thanked him and bid farewell. As I was leaving his shop, I passed a woman entering with some haste. I heard Bashaarat greet her as Raniya, and stopped in surprise.

From just outside the door, I could hear the woman say, “I have the necklace. I hope my older self has not lost it.”

“I am sure you will have kept it safe, in anticipation of your visit,” said Bashaarat.

I realized that this was Raniya from the story Bashaarat had told me. She was on her way to collect her older self so that they might return to the days of their youth, confound some thieves with a doubled necklace, and save their husband. For a moment I was unsure if I were dreaming or awake, because I felt as if I had stepped into a tale, and the thought that I might talk to its players and partake of its events was dizzying. I was tempted to speak, and see if I might play a hidden role in that tale, but then I remembered that my goal was to play a hidden role in my own tale. So I left without a word, and went to arrange passage with a caravan.

It is said, Your Majesty, that Fate laughs at men’s schemes. At first it appeared as if I were the most fortunate of men, for a caravan headed for Baghdad was departing within the month, and I was able to join it. In the weeks that followed I began to curse my luck, because the caravan’s journey was plagued by delays. The wells at a town not far from Cairo were dry, and an expedition had to be sent back for water. At another village, the soldiers protecting the caravan contracted dysentery, and we had to wait for weeks for their recovery. With each delay, I revised my estimate of when we’d reach Baghdad, and grew increasingly anxious.

Then there were the sandstorms, which seemed like a warning from Allah, and truly caused me to doubt the wisdom of my actions. We had the good fortune to be resting at a caravanserai west of Kufa when the sandstorms first struck, but our stay was prolonged from days to weeks as, time and again, the skies became clear, only to darken again as soon as the camels were reloaded. The day of Najya’s accident was fast approaching, and I grew desperate.

I solicited each of the camel drivers in turn, trying to hire one to take me ahead alone, but could not persuade any of them. Eventually I found one willing to sell me a camel at what would have been an exorbitant price under ordinary circumstances, but which I was all too willing to pay. I then struck out on my own.

It will come as no surprise that I made little progress in the storm, but when the winds subsided, I immediately adopted a rapid pace. Without the soldiers that accompanied the caravan, however, I was an easy target for bandits, and sure enough, I was stopped after two days’ ride. They took my money and the camel I had purchased, but spared my life, whether out of pity or because they could not be bothered to kill me I do not know. I began walking back to rejoin the caravan, but now the skies tormented me with their cloudlessness, and I suffered from the heat. By the time the caravan found me, my tongue was swollen and my lips were as cracked as mud baked by the sun. After that I had no choice but to accompany the caravan at its usual pace.

Like a fading rose that drops its petals one by one, my hopes dwindled with each passing day. By the time the caravan reached the City of Peace, I knew it was too late, but the moment we rode through the city gates, I asked the guardsmen if they had heard of a mosque collapsing. The first guardsman I spoke to had not, and for a heartbeat I dared to hope that I had misremembered the date of the accident, and that I had in fact arrived in time.

Then another guardsman told me that a mosque had indeed collapsed just yesterday in the Karkh quarter. His words struck me with the force of the executioner’s axe. I had traveled so far, only to receive the worst news of my life a second time.

I walked to the mosque, and saw the piles of bricks where there had once been a wall. It was a scene that had haunted my dreams for twenty years, but now the image remained even after I opened my eyes, and with a clarity sharper than I could endure. I turned away and walked without aim, blind to what was around me, until I found myself before my old house, the one where Najya and I had lived. I stood in the street in front of it, filled with memory and anguish.

I do not know how much time had passed when I became aware that a young woman had walked up to me. “My lord,” she said, “I’m looking for the house of Fuwaad ibn Abbas.”

“You have found it,” I said.

“Are you Fuwaad ibn Abbas, my lord?”

“I am, and I ask you, please leave me be.”

“My lord, I beg your forgiveness. My name is Maimuna, and I assist the physicians at the bimaristan. I tended to your wife before she died.”

I turned to look at her. “You tended to Najya?”

“I did, my lord. I am sworn to deliver a message to you from her.”

“What message?”

“She wished me to tell you that her last thoughts were of you. She wished me to tell you that while her life was short, it was made happy by the time she spent with you.”

She saw the tears streaming down my cheeks, and said, “Forgive me if my words cause you pain, my lord.”

“There is nothing to forgive, child. Would that I had the means to pay you as much as this message is worth to me, because a lifetime of thanks would still leave me in your debt.”

“Grief owes no debt,” she said. “Peace be upon you, my lord.”

“Peace be upon you,” I said.

She left, and I wandered the streets for hours, crying tears of release. All the while I thought on the truth of Bashaarat’s words: past and future are the same, and we cannot change either, only know them more fully. My journey to the past had changed nothing, but what I had learned had changed everything, and I understood that it could not have been otherwise. If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.

Night fell, and it was then that the city’s guardsmen found me, wandering the streets after curfew in my dusty clothes, and asked who I was. I told them my name and where I lived, and the guardsmen brought me to my neighbors to see if they knew me, but they did not recognize me, and I was taken to jail.

I told the guard captain my story, and he found it entertaining, but did not credit it, for who would? Then I remembered some news from my time of grief twenty years before, and told him that Your Majesty’s grandson would be born an albino. Some days later, word of the infant’s condition reached the captain, and he brought me to the governor of the quarter. When the governor heard my story, he brought me here to the palace, and when your lord chamberlain heard my story, he in turn brought me here to the throne room, so that I might have the infinite privilege of recounting it to Your Majesty.

Now my tale has caught up to my life, coiled as they both are, and the direction they take next is for Your Majesty to decide. I know many things that will happen here in Baghdad over the next twenty years, but nothing about what awaits me now. I have no money for the journey back to Cairo and the Gate of Years there, yet I count myself fortunate beyond measure, for I was given the opportunity to revisit my past mistakes, and I have learned what remedies Allah allows. I would be honored to relate everything I know of the future, if Your Majesty sees fit to ask, but for myself, the most precious knowledge I possess is this:

Nothing erases the past. There is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. That is all, but that is enough.

RECOVERING APOLLO 8

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Part One: 2007

Richard remembered it wrong. He remembered it as if it were a painting, and he were observing it, instead of a living breathing memory that he had a part of.

The image was so vivid, in fact, that he had had it painted with the first of what would become obscene profits from his business, and placed the painting in his office—each version of his office, the latter ones growing so big that he had to find a special way to display the painting, a way to help it remain the center of his vision.

The false memory—and the painting—went like this:

He stands in his backyard. To his left, there is the swing set; to his right, clotheslines running forward like railroad tracks.

He is eight, small for his age, very blond, his features unformed. His face is turned toward the night sky, the Moon larger than it ever is. It illuminates his face like a halo from a medieval religious painting; its whiteness so vivid that it seems more alive than he does.

He, however, is not looking at the Moon. He is looking beyond it where a small cone-shaped ship heads toward the darkness. The ship is almost invisible, except for one edge that catches the Moon’s reflected light. A shimmer comes off the ship, just enough to make it seem as if the ship is expending its last bit of energy in a desperate attempt to save itself, an attempt even he—at eight—knows will fail.

Someone once asked him why he had a painting about loss as the focus of his office.

He was stunned.

He did not think of the painting, or the memory for that matter, as something that represented loss.

Instead, it represented hope. That last, desperate attempt would not have happened without the hope that it might work.

That’s what he used to say.

What he thought was that the hope resided in the boy, in his memory, and in his desire to change one of the most significant moments of his past.

The real memory was prosaic:

The kitchen was painted bright yellow and small, although it didn’t seem small then. Behind his chair were the counters, cupboards and a deep sink with a small window above it, a window that overlooked the sidewalk to the garage. To his left, two more windows overlooked the large yard and the rest of the block. The stove was directly across from him. He always pictured his mother standing at it, even though she had a chair at the table as well. His father’s chair was to his left, beneath the windows.

The radio sat on top of the refrigerator, which wasn’t too far from the stove. But the center of the room, to his right and almost behind him, was the television, which remained on constantly.

His father could read at the table, but Richard could not. His mother tried to converse with him, but by his late childhood, the gaps in their IQs had started to show.

She was a smart woman, but he was off the charts. His father, who could at least comprehend some of what his son was saying, remained silent in the face of his son’s genius. Silent and proud. They shared a name: Richard J. Johansenn, the J. standing for Jacob, after the same man, the family patriarch, his father’s father—the man who had come to this country with his parents at the age of eight, hoping for—and discovering—a better world.

That night, December 24, 1968, the house was decorated for Christmas. Pine boughs on the dining room table, Christmas cards in a sleigh on top of the living room’s television set. Candles at the kitchen table, which his father complained about every time he opened his newspaper. The scent of pine, of candle wax, of cookies.

His mother baked her way to the holiday and beyond; it was a wonder, with all those sweets surrounding him, that he never became fat. That night, however, they would have a regular dinner, since Christmas Eve was not their holiday; their celebration happened Christmas Day.

Yet he was excited. He loved the season—the food, the music, the lights against the dark night sky. Even the snow, something he usually abhorred, seemed beautiful. He would stand on its icy crust and look up, searching for constellations or just staring at the Moon herself, wondering how something like that could be so distant and so cold.

That night, his mother called him in for dinner. He had been staring at the Moon through the telescope that his father had given him for his eighth birthday in July. He’d hoped to see Apollo 8 on its way to the lunar orbit.

On its way to history.

Instead, he came inside and sat down to a roast beef (or meatloaf or corned beef and cabbage) dinner, turning his chair slightly so that he could see the television. Walter Cronkite—the epitome, Richard thought, of the reliable adult male—reported from Mission Control, looking serious and boyish at the same time.

Cronkite loved the adventure of space almost as much as Richard did. And Cronkite got to be as close to it as a man could get and still not be part of it.

What Richard didn’t like were the simulated pictures. It was impossible to film Apollo 8 on its voyage, so some poor SOB drew images.

At the time, Richard, like the rest of the country, had focused on the LOS zone—the Loss Of Signal zone on the dark side of the Moon. If the astronauts reached that, they were part of the lunar orbit, sixty-nine miles from the lunar surface. But the great American unwashed wouldn’t know the astronauts had succeeded until they came out of the LOS zone.

The LOS zone scared everyone. Even Richard’s father, who rarely admitted being scared.

Richard’s father, the high school math and science teacher, who sat down with his son on Saturday, December 21—the day Apollo 8 lifted off—and explained, as best he could, orbital mechanics. He showed Richard the equations, and tried to explain the risk the astronauts were taking.

One error in the math, one slight miscalculation—even if it were accidental—a wobble in the spacecraft’s burn as it left Earth orbit, a miss of a few seconds—could send the astronauts on a wider orbit around the Moon, or a wider Earth orbit. Or, God forbid, a straight trajectory away from Earth, away from the Moon, and into the great unknown, never to return.

Richard’s mother thought her husband was helping his son with homework. When she discovered his true purpose, she dragged him into their bedroom for one of their whisper fights.

What do you think you’re doing? she asked. He’s eight.

He needs to understand, his father said.

No, he doesn’t, she said. He’ll be frightened for days.

And if they miss? his father said. I’ll have to explain it then.

Her voice had a tightness as she said, They won’t miss.

But they did.

They missed.

Mission Control had a hunch during the LOS, but they didn’t confirm the hunch with the astronauts, not right away. They asked for a few things, another controlled burn, hoping that the ship might move back on track, a few more reports than usual just to get the men’s voices on tape while they were still calm (apparently), but nothing they did changed the tragic fact that the astronauts would not return to Earth.

They would float forever in the darkness of space.

And for a while, they didn’t know. The ship itself had limited control and almost no telemetry. The astronauts had to rely on Mission Control for all of their orbital information—in fact, for most of their critical information.

Later, it came out that the astronauts deduced the problem almost immediately, and tried to come up with solutions on their own.

Of course, there were none.

Which was why Cronkite looked so tense that Christmas Eve, sitting in the area cleared for broadcasters in Mission Control. Cronkite had known that the three astronauts were still alive, would remain alive for days as their little capsule headed into the vast beyond. They stayed in radio contact for longer than anyone felt comfortable with, and because they were heroes, they never complained.

They spoke of the plainness of the Moon, and the beauty of the Earth viewed from beyond. Apparently, on a closed circuit, they spoke to their wives and children one final time. They belonged to the Earth, as long as the radio signal held. As long as their oxygen held. As long as their hope held.

That was what Richard remembered: he remembered the hope.

No one played the tape any longer of Lovell, Borman, and Anders, talking about the future. The future had come and gone. What reporters and documentarians and historians played nowadays were the goodbyes, or, if they were more charitable, the descriptions of Earth—how beautiful it looked; how small; how united.

It’s hard to believe, Lovell said in what would become his most famous quote, that such a beautiful place can house so many angry people. From a distance, it looks like the entire planet is at peace.

Of course it wasn’t.

But that didn’t concern Richard then.

What worried him—what frightened him—was that this failure of the space program would end the program.

It worried the astronauts as well. They made a joint appeal with what would be damn close to their last breath.

This is not a failure. We’re proud to be the first humans to venture beyond the Moon. Please continue the space program. Get us to the Moon. Get a base on the Moon. Send another group to explore the solar system—one who can report back to you. Do it in our name, and with our blessing.

Merry Christmas to all. And to all, a good night.

That broadcast brought Richard’s mother to tears. Richard’s father put a strong hand on Richard’s shoulder.

And Walter Cronkite, that stalwart adult, removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes for a moment, and gathered himself, much as he had done five years earlier when a president died unexpectedly.

Cronkite did not say much more. He did not play the radio reports from the bitter end. He let Lovell, Borman and Anders’ desired last statement be their last statement.

He did not speculate on the means of their deaths, nor did he focus on the failure.

He focused on the future.

He focused on the hope.

And so did Richard—

At least, he tried.

But while he worked toward the conquest of space, while he studied his physics and astronomy, remained in great physical condition so that he could become an astronaut at a moment’s notice, he would look through his telescope into the darkness beyond the Moon—and wonder:

What had they seen in those last hours?

What had they felt?

And where were they now?

Nearly forty years later, they were coming home.

Or as close to home as they could get with a dead ship and a dead crew, and no one heading out to greet them.

Apollo 8 had ended up in an elliptical orbit around the sun, much as the experts predicted might happen. The orbit took just over sixteen months to complete, but kept the small craft far above the plane of the Earth’s orbit most of the time. The first time Apollo 8 had come home, or at least close to home, it had been just over eighteen years.

That first time they were discovered almost by accident. Sunlight, glinting off the capsule, drew the attention of amateur astronomers all over the world. Something small, something insignificant, reflecting light in an unusual way.

People speculated about what it was, what it might be. Giant telescopes from the Lowell Observatory to the new orbiting telescope began tracking it, and pictures came in, pictures showing a familiar conical shape.

It couldn’t be, the experts said.

But it was.

Everyone hoped it was.

Richard spent those heady days begging his friends at the University of Wisconsin’s observatory to turn their telescope toward it—ruining research, he was sure, and he didn’t care. He wasn’t even an astronomy student any longer. He had done his post-grad studies in aeronautics and engineering and had just started the company that would make him the country’s first billionaire.

But in those days, he was still a student, with little power and even less control.

In the end, he had to go to the outskirts of town, away from the light, and try to see the capsule for himself. He stood in the deep cold, the ankle-deep snow, and stared for hours.

Finally, he convinced himself that he saw a wink of light, that it wasn’t space dust or the space station the U.S. was building in Earth orbit, or even some of the satellites that had been launched in the last few years.

No, he convinced himself he saw the ship, and that fueled his obsession even more.

Perhaps that, more than the incorrect memory of the original loss, caused the wink of light on the capsule in his painting.

Perhaps that was the catalyst for it all.

Or maybe it was, as his mother claimed, his overactive imagination, held in place by his first experience of—his first real understanding of—death.

Only this didn’t seem like death to Richard. It never had. In his mind, there was always a chance that the three men had lived. Maybe they had gone on, as their ship had gone on, exploring the solar system, seeing things that no man had ever seen up close. Or maybe they had encountered aliens, and those aliens, benign like the ones in the Star Trek shows of Richard’s childhood, had saved them.

He knew such things were improbable. He had been inside an Apollo capsule in the museum in Huntsville, Alabama, and he had been shocked at how small those capsules were. Human beings were not meant to live in such small places.

He also knew how fragile the capsules were. The fact that the capsule had survived for so many years was a miracle. He knew that. He also knew that his thoughts of the men’s survival were a remnant of his childhood self, the one who didn’t want to believe that heroes died.

All his plans, all his hopes, for the next eighteen years after that first sighting, were based on the theory (the certainty) that the astronauts were dead. And that Apollo 8 would survive again and return.

The ships he had built, the missions he had planned during those years, were based on the idea that he was going after a death ship, a bit of history. He was going to recover Apollo 8, the way an archeologist would resurrect a tomb from the sand or a deep-sea explorer would record the remains of famous ships like the Titanic.

Richard had spent much of his fortune and most of his life finding ways to greet Apollo 8 on its next near-Earth return.

And now that the ship had been spotted on its odd elliptical orbit—on schedule, just like the scientists said it would be—he was ready.

And he was terrified.

Some nights he’d wake up in a cold sweat, wondering if a man should ever achieve the dreams of his childhood.

Then he’d remember that he hadn’t yet achieved the dream. He’d only created the opportunity.

And sometimes he’d wonder why that wasn’t enough.

The ship, which he had had primed and ready since the beginning of the year, was named the Carpathia after the ship that had rescued most of the survivors of the Titanic. He liked the metaphor, even though he knew deep down that there would be no survivors of Apollo 8. The command module itself was the survivor; a manned ship that had gone farther and longer than any other man-made vehicle and had returned.

Mankind had sent craft almost everywhere in the system, from rovers on Mars to probes to Venus, and had greater knowledge of the solar system than ever. NASA planned to send more craft even farther out, hoping to go beyond the bounds of the solar system and see the rest of the galaxy.

Government funding was there—it had always been there—for space travel. The latter part of the twentieth century and the first part of the twenty-first were called the Epoch of Space Travel.

Richard liked to believe humankind would look back on it all, and call it the Beginning of Space Travel. He hated to think that satellites and a large, fully equipped space station in orbit, a small base on the Moon, and some commercial traffic would be all that there was to space travel.

He wanted to see human beings on Mars; humans—not unmanned craft—exploring the far reaches of the solar system; humans boldly going, as his favorite childhood show used to say, where no one had gone before.

And that was why he started Johansenn Interplanetary, all those years ago. With a broader version of that speech, with a great marketing strategy, and with the best minds in the country helping him create the space vehicles, the prototype bases on Mars and beyond, and finally, just last year, the artificial gravity technology that would take mankind to the stars.

Much of this technology, primitive as it was, had military applications, so Richard got his money. His was the first private firm that specialized in space travel, even though he didn’t achieve space travel for another few decades after his funding. Instead, he created subcorporations to handle the other scientific developments.

Artificial gravity was just one component. He also corralled computer scientists to help him make computers small, so that the space craft wouldn’t need bulky on-board computers. And one of his computer visionaries, a man named Gates, had proposed selling those smaller computers to the business market.

That idea alone had made Richard a billionaire.

Others, from the freeze-dried food to the lighter-than-air space suits, simply added to his fortune.

Everyone thought he was the visionary, when really, all he wanted to do was the very thing he’d been too young to do in 1968.

Rescue Apollo 8.

So that was how he found himself wearing one of his own spacesuits, standing on the docking platform outside the Carpathia, looking up at its streamlined design. Up close, he couldn’t see the scaled-back wings, which allowed the ship to glide when necessary. Nor could he see most of the portals installed for the passengers, since this thing had been designed as both research vehicle and luxury liner.

He could see the outline of the bomb bays underneath, added so that this ship design, like so many others, could be sold to the U.S. military for applications he wasn’t sure he wanted to think about.

That the Carpathia had the bomb bays, he attributed to the paranoia of his chief designer, a man named Bremmer, who, when he learned what Richard really wanted to use this ship for, said, “You don’t know what you’ll encounter. Let’s make sure this is a fully functional military vehicle as well.”

Which meant that they had to have a military unit on board, astronauts who knew how to use the guns and the bombs and the defensive technology that Richard only understood in theory. There was the military unit and the research team—real archeologists, excited that they got to practice at least part of their craft in space; a handful of space historians and some medical personnel, in case something horrible came into the Carpathia through Apollo 8. Then there were the investors, the “tourists” as the real astronauts called them. Richard liked to call them “observers,” partly because he was one, no matter how much he liked to pretend he wasn’t.

The non-astronauts had trained to the best of their abilities. They were in the best physical shape of their lives; they could all handle zero-g like pros; and they’d even survived multiple simulated space walks without screwing up.

Richard could do all those things and more. He’d had astronaut training in the 1980s, but had never gone into space because his business had taken off. Besides, he had hated NASA’s regulations, many of them designed after the Apollo 1 and 8 tragedies. He had a hunch the regulations would become even more restrictive after more tragedies, and he left before they could.

Even so, his hunch had been prescient. After Apollo 20’s spectacular crash into the Moon’s surface, the regulations for astronauts had become so restrictive, it was a wonder anyone signed up for the program.

Particularly as the private sector began to make its own advances.

Despite his retreat from the NASA program, Richard kept up his training. He was always a bit too thin. He trained on various exercise equipment for more than two hours daily—six on weekends. He became a marathoner. And, as the technology became available, he began to sleep in an oxygen deprivation tent, so that his lungs learned to be efficient with minimal oxygen.

He wasn’t the most in-shape person on this mission—after all, he was nearly fifty—but he was the most in-shape observer. He could outrun two of the astronauts, and he could certainly out-perform all of the researchers.

Still, he felt nervous on the docking platform of the ship he’d helped design. He’d been in and out of these ships hundreds of times over the years. He’d even been in low Earth orbit for several trips, so standing on the platform in a space suit wasn’t new.

What was new was this sense of awe, this moment of surrealism: he had envisioned going into space on a rescue mission for almost forty years, and now here he stood.

He was crossing into new territory.

When Richard had mentioned this to Bremmer, Bremmer had laughed. You’ve been in new territory all your life, boss, Bremmer had said.

But it was imagined territory, not just by him, but also by his specialists.

This, this was new—to all of them.

And no matter how much he justified it, no matter how similar he claimed it was to recovering wrecks of historic ships or finding the tombs of the pharaohs, he knew it wasn’t.

When he entered the Carpathia, he was becoming one of the first humans to recover a space vessel. He was someone who both captured and created history at the same time.

Instead of being a billionaire or an inventor or a crazed eccentric—all of those media portrayals that haunted him even now—he’d become what he always dreamed of.

He’d be an adventurer.

For the first time, he felt as if he were stepping into his own life.

The Carpathia was roomy. She was designed for longer trips with comfort in mind. While her cabins were small, the fact that she had them at all separated her from other ships. Her public areas were large and comfortable: a lounge; two research rooms, which could double as equipment rooms or extra sleeping berths; and a cargo bay, which had its own separate environmental system, designed—ostensibly—to bring back things found on the Moon. Richard had watched over the specs himself. He made sure that the cargo bay was also large enough to carry one 1960s Apollo capsule, with plenty of margin for error.

Even though the ship’s captain tried to give him the largest space, Richard insisted on the smallest berth. He also insisted on privacy—even though he had delegated as much as possible, he still had to conduct some business. And he had always been a loner. The idea of being in close quarters with a dozen people he barely knew made him shaky. He needed some privacy, a place where he could close the door and not see anyone else.

This mission was of indeterminate length; he had to have a place that would keep him sane.

Before he left, Richard tried not to watch the press coverage, but he absorbed it anyway: Richard Johansenn’s vanity project, which would probably get him killed; Richard Johansenn’s pipe dream; Richard Johansenn’s dream.

Columnists accused him of grave robbing or worse. The scientifically illiterate among them felt that he was taking money from the mouths of children for his little space adventure, not realizing that even if he didn’t recover the capsule, he—and the country—would learn what happened to vessels that spent almost forty years in space just from the photographs he got of the ship.

He tried not to have expectations of his own. He tried not to imagine—any more than he already had—what he would find.

Instead, he downloaded old memoirs from the Apollo and Gemini missions as well as contemporaneous newspaper accounts and books written about those missions. He also scanned interviews with those crews, watching them, seeing what they had to say.

He barely paid attention to the ride into orbit; he’d done that so many times that it felt like old hat. Two of the archeologists had clung to their couches, looking terrified. The rest of the newbies had watched with great fascination as the Carpathia passed through the atmosphere and settled into an elliptical orbit that in three times around would swing them away from the Earth and on a path to match course and speed with Apollo 8.

Below, Earth was, as she always seemed, placid and calm—a deep blue planet with a bit of green, lots of cloud cover, the most beautiful thing in this solar system—maybe even in the universe.

It was home; oddly, it felt like home even as he rode above its surface. It felt like home the way going back to Wisconsin felt like home, the way snow on a clear moonlit night felt like home, the way pulling into his driveway felt like home.

Sometimes, when he was feeling spiritual and not scientific at all, he wondered if this sensation of home was inbred even when looking at the planet from space. Did the feeling come from knowledge that he had sprung from this place? Or did it come from something more innate, something bred into every creature born on that blue-green surface? Had the astronauts of Apollo 8 felt it as they pulled away from Earth? Or as they soared away from the Moon? Had they looked back, somehow, and reflected on their own folly? Or had they felt like explorers, finally getting a chance to escape?

Richard mostly stayed in his cabin for the twenty hours it would take them to reach Apollo 8. He was nervous.

He was worried. He tried to sleep, couldn’t.

He wanted answers, and he wanted them now. Yet at the same time, he was afraid of the answers, afraid of what he would find. Finally, he had dozed, coming awake instantly with a call from Susan Kirmatsu.

Most of the flying was automatic; still, he had hired Susan, one of the best pilots ever, for this mission.

He quickly made his way to the cockpit, standing behind Susan to watch. She wore her black hair in a buzz cut that accented her shapely skull. The console dwarfed her small form, yet she controlled the ship as surely as he controlled himself. She watched the read-outs on the screen, ignoring the double-sheets of clear pane plastic windows that he had built into the nose of the ship.

Instead, he was the one watching the darkness ahead. Earth now had shrunk to the size of a large grapefruit. He had never been out so far before.

The copilot, Robbie Hamilton, sat at another console and also watched the instrumentation. Two more pilots in seats behind him followed the flow of information on their handheld screens as well, ready to jump in at a moment’s notice.

“We have her,” Susan said. “She’s coming in on the proper trajectory.”

Their plan sounded simple: They’d match Apollo 8’s path, grab the ship, and pull her into the cargo bay.

They’d done this type of thing before; such maneuvers were familiar to the astronauts on board now. Two of them had helped build the space station. Another had gathered dying satellites as part of his work for one of Richard’s companies. And Susan had flown half a dozen practice missions, bringing in everything from satellite pieces to bits of rock, just to make sure that Hawk-class designs like the Carpathia could handle this bit of trickery.

“Can I see her?” Richard asked.

“Over here.” Robbie ran his fingers along his smooth console, and then, on the screen in front of him, a new picture appeared. Something small and cone-shaped appeared in the upper left.

Richard squinted. “Can we magnify?”

Robbie slid his fingers across the console again, and this time the ship appeared close. And it was tumbling slightly. That had been another worry of his. If it had been tumbling hard and fast, they would have had to try to slow that down first.

Apollo 8 looked worn. Its exterior had dark streaks and lighter streaks, which Richard did not remember from any of the photographs. The nose cone itself seemed dented, but that might have been a trick of the light.

“How bad is she damaged?” he asked.

“Dunno,” Robbie said. “We’ll find out soon enough.”

Soon enough would be hours from now. It would take that long to match the speed and path of Apollo 8.

Richard wasn’t sure he could stand waiting in the cockpit.

He went back to the lounge.

The scientists were peering out the windows. The observers had dialed up the exterior view on one of the large screens and watched the changes the way someone would watch television.

Richard couldn’t stand that either, so he went back to his cabin. The bed took up most of the floor space. He had strapped his clothing bag into its little compartment, but he hadn’t needed to. Unless something happened with the artificial gravity, everything would stay where he placed it.

He was too restless to lie down, so he closed the door again and reentered the hall. For a man who planned everything down to the smallest detail, he was stunned that he hadn’t thought through these last few hours, that he hadn’t planned some sort of activity to keep his mind awake, active, and off the rendezvous.

He returned to the lounge with a vague idea of reviewing the plans, but instead just sat silently in the corner, thinking about what he was about to do.

Or not do, as the case might be.

As the large screen showed a looming Apollo 8, Richard went back to the cockpit. He listened as Susan gave terse instructions, and watched through the windows he had designed as his ship—his ship—lined up with a ship he had only seen in his dreams.

Apollo 8 looked larger than he expected and appeared formidable in a rockets-and-rivets kind of way.

The capsule wasn’t streaked, as he had thought at first; it was damaged with tiny holes blasted along its sides.

The cone’s nose was dented—something had hit it hard—but hadn’t burst open. The small round portals had clouded over and appeared to be scratched.

Susan reported damage near the engines that had malfunctioned—flaring too early and too hard, was the speculation, but no one knew exactly what had gone wrong. Once his team had the capsule, they might be able to figure that out and solve that old puzzle.

Richard was shaking. He threaded his fingers together as the ship lined up next to the slowly tumbling capsule.

The first thing they would do would be to stop the tumbling.

He came to himself long enough to make certain the live feed back to Earth had actually started. It had. One of the other astronauts and one of the observers were giving a play-by-play as they watched through a different portal.

Alicia Kensington, the modern day Walter Cronkite, had asked Richard to do the play-by-play, but he had known he would be too nervous. Yes, he was the celebrity, but he hadn’t wanted to be at this moment.

At this moment, he needed privacy.

Eventually, as they worked to carefully slow the tumble, he made his way to the back, to the entrance of the hatch, watching on small screens as he passed. The tumbling stopped, and, next, the grappler’s metal fingers found purchase near Apollo 8’s hatch.

He stood still as that happened, terrified. One of his greatest worries, one of the scientists’ great worries as well, was that the old ship would disintegrate when touched. It had been through a lot, the theory went, and it might have been held together by next to nothing. A push from the grappler, a touch of the hooks, the grate of metal against metal, might cause the capsule to come apart.

And then his great adventure would be over.

But the capsule didn’t come apart. It held. In fact, it looked sturdier than the grappler.

He turned toward the live feed, watching from one of the outside cameras, struck at the fact that the older ship looked so much stronger than the Carpathia. The Carpathia was built of lightweight materials, designed for maximum efficiency, both in space and in the atmosphere.

Apollo 8 had a thick sturdiness he associated with his childhood, the sense he’d learned from every adult back then from his teachers to his parents, that if something was overbuilt, it was better, it could survive more, it would be the best it possibly could be.

He smiled for the first time that day.

They had been right.

He stood outside the bay doors with Patricia Mattos, the chief archeologist. Her team waited behind them, shifting from foot to foot, obviously as nervous as he felt. They all wore their space suits, just in case there was a problem with the environmental systems when they went into the cargo bay, but at the moment, everyone held their bubble helmets. A few tucked their helmets under their arms, the way that the first astronauts used to as they walked to the rockets that would blast them into space.

No one spoke.

They watched the nearby screen, and listened to the scraping sounds within.

The scrapes did not go onto the live feed. Neither did the conversation of the astronauts out there working the grappler—the grunts, the single-sentence acknowledgments, the occasional curse. Live feeds with live astronauts were NASA’s purview. No matter what Alicia Kensington wanted, Richard was determined to keep some privacy here, some mystery.

The entire world could watch if it wanted to as Apollo 8 got loaded into the cargo bay. They just couldn’t hear the discussions as the astronauts got it into position.

Susan had activated the cameras inside the bay as well, and started a second feed. The first came from outside the ship, showing Apollo 8 as it looked to the Carpathia. The second came from inside, showing, at the moment, the bay, and the backs of the astronauts, looking small against the vastness.

The cargo bay was spacious and empty. Even though it had its own environmental system, it had few other controls—just an extra door and an airlock for smaller items, and a series of overrides near the back of the room, in case something malfunctioned with the bay doors.

At the moment, the doors were open. The two astronauts, guiding Apollo 8 inside, wore their space suits and gravity boots. They looked like slimmed down versions of the men who had first walked on the Moon. Their bubble helmets were smaller and more efficient, their suits form-fitting for ease of movement, the gloves less bulky. Even the oxygen units were different, threaded into the suit itself instead of hanging off the back like a pack a child would wear to school.

Accidents could still happen with the suits—the astronauts had to stay clear of the capsule and the grappler’s metal fingers as much as possible—but they were less likely. Most people who died in space now did so because of their own carelessness, not because their suits ripped or malfunctioned.

Still, Richard watched this part nervously. This was the most dangerous part of the mission. One small bump, a mishandling of the grappler, a momentary klutziness on the part of an astronaut, could result in disaster.

He would never admit to the others that for him, a disaster would be the loss of the capsule somehow, not the loss of life. He’d be willing to lose his own life to bring this thing in; he hoped the astronauts would too.

A darkness filled the doorway, and then the astronauts moved away. The view on the outside camera made it seem as if Apollo 8 had pointed herself into the Carpathia and gotten stuck. The view on the inside was a sort of darkness that could, when he squinted, resolve itself into the cone of the capsule.

The astronauts, moving near the doors, gave it all a bit of perspective, but everything seemed large and a little out of control.

Richard held his breath.

Next to him, Patricia Mattos was biting her lower lip. Her second for this part of the mission, Heidi Vogt, watched with wide eyes. Her forehead was dotted with perspiration much as Richard’s had been earlier.

Anticipation made them all nervous.

He turned away from them and watched the screen. The scrapings from inside grew even louder—that unbearable squeal of metal against metal.

“I hope nothing’s getting ruined,” Heidi muttered, and one of the other scientists, someone whose name Richard couldn’t conjure, nodded.

Finally, the capsule disappeared from the view of the outside cameras. Two of the inside cameras only showed the capsule herself. The other two cameras had partial views of the bay doors, which were easing shut.

Richard’s heart started to pound. He still had fifteen minutes before he could enter the bay—fifteen minutes for the environmental systems to reestablish the artificial gravity. The temperature would remain low, and the atmosphere would remain a special mix to preserve everything. Richard’s biggest fear was that they’d thaw out the craft and the bodies it held too fast.

He didn’t want three famous—legendary—astronauts to explosively decompress on a live feed heading back to Earth. He was already in trouble in some circles for messing with a grave; he didn’t want to be responsible for one of the most disgusting mistakes ever made.

He had promised America and, by extension, the rest of the world, that he would treat these men with respect.

He planned to honor that.

But first, he planned to free them from their decades-old prison.

He planned to be the first to greet Commanders Borman, Lovell, and Anders on the last part of their journey home.

Susan gave them five minutes warning before she opened the cargo bay entrance. Richard and his team of scientists put on their bubble helmets, turned on the oxygen in their suits, and started the small heaters to keep their own bodies warm.

If he hadn’t done this before, he would have protested the use of the heaters. He was hot enough at the moment; nervousness had made him sweat again. But he knew once inside the bay, he had only a few hours before the deep cold would permeate his space suit. He wanted as much time with the capsule as he could get.

He helped Heidi strap on her helmet, then checked Patricia’s. He gave the other three scientists a cursory glance, but they seemed more competent with the equipment than the archeologists, which made sense.

Archaeologists usually didn’t have to wear space suits to look at remains. They simply dug into the ground.

Here, they’d be opening a cold ship, preserving the scene, and beginning an intellectual voyage of discovery, one that could, hopefully, retrace everything that Apollo 8 had seen.

He could hear the rasp of his own breathing, and that reminded him to turn on the audio chips outside the helmet. The audio chips were an addition for this mission. Most of the time, astronauts didn’t need the external sound sensors.

But he’d had them added to all of the helmets. Even though the team would use their internal communications equipment to keep track of each other, he figured they all wanted to hear this process as well as see it.

He wanted as many of his senses engaged as possible.

Once everyone was suited up, and Susan gave the all clear, he opened the single door leading into the back of the cargo bay.

The bay looked different, smaller, with the capsule inside. It was also darker since the capsule blocked much of the light from the center of the room. The two astronauts stood near the side of the capsule. They weren’t going to be active in this part of the mission, but he knew they wanted to be here, to see everything.

He handed one of them a video camera. Even though there were cameras inside the bay, and at least two of the scientists were filming the entry, Richard figured he couldn’t have enough film of this historic moment.

He straightened his shoulders and smiled at the team, even though they couldn’t see his face. “Let’s go,” he said.

It was, all in all, a belated command. The archeologists were already filming, taking samples from the exterior, finding ways to preserve as much of the stuff surrounding the ship as possible.

As excited as he was, Richard knew this was important, just as he knew that proceeding methodically was important.

He had little to do in this early stage, so he walked around the capsule slowly, taking it in.

The dent in the cone was uneven, almost as if something larger had hit it with a glancing blow. The area around the dent was worn, and the metal looked fragile. If he had to guess—and that was all he could do at this point—he would have thought that the damage there was quite old.

What he had originally thought were streaks were tiny holes all along one side. The holes were very close together, almost as if the capsule had been pelted with gravel. Only Richard knew that gravel would have done much more damage; more likely, it had gone through some sort of rock belt as fine as sand.

His stomach lurched—excitement now, not nervousness. The capsule had quite a story to tell. All these little details, the burn marks near the engine, the long score against the metal on one side as if someone had run a car key against it, the little holes and dents and divots, were records of everything that happened to this capsule.

In some of those dents and digs might be dust from civilizations long gone. Evidence of life from some other planet, or a bit of ore that no one had believed existed this far out. There might be as yet undiscovered chemicals, minerals, biological matter, things that boggled the human imagination.

They could all be on this capsule, smaller than anything he could see through the reflective plastic of his helmet, more important than anything he could imagine.

Finally, he rounded the capsule and stopped by the small hatch. He and his team on Earth had discussed the hatch several times. They had studied the specs from the various capsules and had even visited the two that were in museums.

Since the fire on Apollo 1 that killed three astronauts, the capsule hatch opened outward. But it was designed so that in space it was sealed shut.

Richard and his team knew that they’d have to cut the hatch open, and they needed to do so in a way that would cause the least amount of damage. But, they agreed, he would try to open it by hand first.

The scientists had photographed and then cleared an area around the hatch. Richard’s stomach lurched again—he was so glad he hadn’t eaten anything—and he tried not to look at the light from one of the cameras that someone was pointing at his face. He knew they could only see him in profile, and even then they couldn’t get a clear reading through the plastic in his helmet.

No one would know how close to tears he was.

He had waited a lifetime for this.

He wished the internal mikes were off. He wanted to whisper, “Welcome home, gentlemen,” but he was afraid that not only would his team hear him, but so would everyone who watched on Earth.

Instead, he gripped the handle, and yanked.

To his surprise, the hatch moved. Just a little, but it moved all the same.

Some dust and particles fell off the capsule’s frame.

He caught himself before he cursed.

He looked at the others and thought he saw surprise through their helmets. They pushed closer to him. The light from the camera was on his superfine white glove.

He braced his other hand on the capsule’s side and then pulled again.

The whole capsule shook, but the hatch moved enough that he could see its outline on the frame.

“My heavens,” one of the women said. “We aren’t going to have to cut it.”

Her voice held a mixture of shock, awe, and relief, precisely the same emotions that Richard was feeling.

He pulled with all his strength.

This time, the hatch fell open, banging against the capsule with a loud clang. Richard stumbled backward, freeing his hand at the last minute, narrowly avoiding being part of that bang of metal against metal.

He hoped he hadn’t destroyed anything near the hatch.

The interior was shrouded in darkness.

The team, bless them, didn’t move forward, but instead waited for him to get his feet beneath him. He stood upright, still feeling slightly off balance from loosening the hatch, and then headed for the capsule.

He had to remind himself to breathe.

He might find anything in there, from skeletons (depending on how long the environmental systems survived) to carcasses exploded in their environmental suits to body parts strewn throughout the interior because the capsule had somehow gone through explosive decompression.

He had ordered that no one film the interior until he gave the signal. He now hoped that the astronaut he’d given the camera to remembered that instruction.

Richard took a small flashlight one of the archeologists handed to him, then leaned through the hatch.

The interior was dark and, for a moment, his breath stopped in his throat. He couldn’t see the astronauts. He braced himself, figuring he’d find parts of them all over the equipment and the metal interior.

He tried to keep his breathing regular, so that anyone listening wouldn’t think something was wrong. He shined the light, saw frost on the panel displays, wondered how it got there, then remembered there had to be a lot of biological material in here, and that material had had some time—he wasn’t sure how much—to grow.

He hoped some of what he was looking at wasn’t the astronauts themselves.

Then he shone the light past the couches to the so-called computer display to the flight equipment. He saw bags against the side, the pee-tube curled up against one side, and a crumpled food container near one of the storage units.

He stared at all that for a moment, knowing something was wrong, feeling that something was wrong. His subconscious saw it, but his conscious brain hadn’t caught up.

He shone the light one more time, registering how small the space was; he wondered how grown men could have survived in this small environment for even a few days, let alone the rest of their lives.

Something had been braced under one of the couches, wrapped in some kind of metallic heat blanket.

Something had been placed there.

Then his consciousness caught up. He saw no evidence of explosive decompression. He saw no evidence of any kind of traumatic sudden end to Apollo 8’s mission.

But he saw no evidence of a slow death either, aside from the food container and whatever it was stored under that couch. His hands were shaking, making the light shake.

He examined the interior one last time.

Nothing.

No men, no space suits, no evidence—except those bags and that food wrapper—that anyone had ever been inside this capsule.

“What do you see?” Susan asked from her vantage in the cockpit. The scientists, apparently, could wait him out, but the pilot couldn’t.

“Nothing,” he blurted.

“Nothing?” she asked. “What do you mean . . . nothing?”

“I mean,” he said, “they’re gone.”

The theories came in from all over. The scientific illiterates, the ones he called Flat Earthers, were convinced that friendly aliens had arrived and taken the crew somewhere special. Borman, Lovell, and Anders were now enjoying a new life on some unnamed planet or back on Earth in secret (and unknown) identities at Area 51. Or, Susan had stated sarcastically, they were in that zoo in the Twilight Zone.

Others believed that Richard was too hasty—that they had died in the capsule and he just hadn’t seen it. Some wag suggested (and it got credence on the 24-hour news channels for a while) that the astronauts had moved to another dimension, just like in some Star Trek episode.

In fact, much of the chatter that filtered to the Carpathia focused on old science fiction scripts, either from shows like the Outer Limits or Time Tunnel or Land of the Giants. Apparently some of the most renowned scientists of the day were spouting off on the cable channels, and so were some of the better known science-fiction writers.

Richard ignored the chatter. Susan followed it as if it could give her the truth of her experience in space by filtering it through the talking heads on Earth.

The scientists spent days checking the interior for evidence of explosive decompression and found none of it.

They did find the mission’s carefully protected garbage, which included the feces that they hadn’t discarded into space—clean to the last (“from that,” Patricia said, “we can determine how long they lived.”).

The scientists found evidence of vomit (“Someone had gotten space sick,” Heidi said. “Probably Anders,” Richard said. “It was his first experience with zero g.”).

But they didn’t find much else; certainly not brain matter or blood or bits of bone.

They also didn’t find evidence of alien arrival—“If it came,” someone said, “it came in a form we don’t recognize as living matter.”

What they did find, carefully wrapped in a blanket and as much heat shielding material as possible, was the Hasselblad camera the astronauts had taken with them, plus rolls and rolls of film.

Richard would have the film carefully developed and preserved if possible, but he knew, even without the scientists saying much of anything, that the chances of photographs surviving intact for so very long in the radiation and the extreme conditions were next to none.

The astronauts themselves had probably known that and had done what they could to protect it. Along with it were some letters to the families written on the few sheets of fireproof paper the astronauts had brought along.

The flight plan was also wrapped with the camera, and on the back of that paper was careful handwriting.

Richard recognized the quote. It was from Genesis:

In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth;
and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep;
and the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

And God saw the light, that it was good.

And God divided the light from the darkness.

And God called the light Day and the darkness He called Night.

And the evening and the morning were the first day . . .

It went on, quoting the entire passage. Whoever had copied it had done so in a clean hand. Although, looking at it, Richard wasn’t sure it was copied. He wondered if someone had written it from memory.

He stared at it a lot as the scientists worked, his gaze always falling on the last few lines:

. . . And God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering together of the waters called the Seas.

And God saw that it was good.

And then a hasty scrawl:

God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.

Richard was the one who finally told the scientists what happened. He figured it out using four pieces of evidence: the scrawls on the back of the flight plan—“A goodbye note,” he said—the missing space suits, the missing bodies, and the unlatched hatch.

He gathered the entire team into the cargo bay and stood as close to the capsule as he could get. By now, days later, the temperature had returned to normal. The capsule had been scraped and examined and reviewed; most everything that had to be stored had been.

The crew still wore breathing masks—they had to, in case something in the particles caused allergic reactions or other kinds of reactions (and, the scientists insisted) to keep the particulate matter on a flat surface, so that it could be removed.

Richard held the flight plan, wrapped as it was in protective plastic, and stared at it before he even spoke to the team. When he did, he explained his thinking.

“They wrapped up everything they considered important.”

Or maybe, he thought to himself, the last person alive had done that. Probably Borman as captain of the mission; old nautical traditions died hard. Richard had seen Borman’s handwriting and had a hunch it had been Borman who had written the passage from Genesis on the back of the flight plan.

“Then,” Richard continued, “they put on their space suits, unlatched the hatch, and evacked.”

“What?” Heidi said. They weren’t being filmed now. The live feed to Earth had ended days ago. “Why would anyone do that?”

Richard glanced at the capsule. “They knew they were going to die.”

“You think it was a blaze of glory?” Susan said.

He shook his head. “I don’t think they were being dramatic. They were astronauts, for heaven’s sake. They had a choice between dying in a tin can and dying in the freedom of the great unknown.”

“They climbed out and pushed off into space?” Patricia asked. “Is that sane?”

“Does it matter?” Richard asked. “They had only two choices of how to die. They took the one they considered to be the best.”

“But that took out all possibility of a rescue,” one of the younger scientists said.

Everyone looked at him as if he were crazy.

“They knew they couldn’t be rescued,” Richard said. “Not with 1968 technology.”

He thought of all the movies made in the 1970s, movies about astronauts being rescued from the Moon, astronauts being rescued from deep space, astronauts being rescued from orbit. The entire country—the entire world—had been haunted by their loss, never realizing that the men had taken the choice away from the rescuers and their imaginations long ago.

“So they drifted into nothingness,” Heidi said.

Susan smiled at her. “It’s not nothing,” she said quietly. “It’s the greatest adventure of all.”

Great adventure or not, Richard now knew that the Carpathia’s mission was over. One of the archeologists asked him if the ship would go after the bodies, and he had stared at her, trying to remember her specialty was ancient societies, not modern ones.

“Finding the capsule was a miracle,” he said. “All three of them will be in different orbits, if they still exist.

Finding a body in the vastness of space is like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Maybe a needle in a galaxy’s worth of haystacks.

Still, his own answer echoed in his head. And while his scientists grew excited about new discoveries made every day on the Carpathia, bits and pieces of the Apollo 8 puzzle, he had already gone beyond that.

He needed to figure out how to find three needles.

How did a man search a galaxy’s worth of haystacks?

And more to the point, how did he succeed?

Part Two: 2018

“We have something,” the researcher said.

Richard pulled up a chair, letting the movement hide his irritation. Of course they had something. If they hadn’t had something, he wouldn’t have flown halfway across the continent to get here.

But he didn’t say anything. The researchers in this wing of the Asteroid Collision Project knew that Richard wasn’t really looking for asteroids on a collision path with Earth. He was looking for three bodies, jettisoned into space beyond the Moon sometime between December 27 and December 31, 1968.

This wing of the project—the secret wing—had its own equipment. The rumor in the ACP was that this wing, called ACP-Special (ACP-S), had military and spy satellite connections. The regular ACP employees figured that the ACP-S were searching for bombs or weapons or matériel that other countries had launched into space.

ACP did have a military arm; it needed one, in case one of the asteroids on a collision course with Earth was large enough to threaten human life or was small but on a trajectory that might harm the transports to the Moon Base.

It had been a long time since he had been in this room. He hadn’t been to the ACP since it had been built nine years before. This room, and the equipment inside, had layers of security protocols just to reach the interior.

As he arrived that morning, he had felt as if he were going into one of those Dr. Strangelove bunkers that he used to see on television as a child; it made him wonder just how paranoid he really was.

The young researcher sitting next to him was, according to his nametag, David Tolemy. Richard found his gaze going to that nametag over and over again. He’d heard the researcher’s name mentioned several times in the last twenty-four hours, but somehow he’d always expected the spelling to mimic the Pharaoh’s Ptolemy.

The researcher looked nothing like a pharaoh. He looked like a barely thirty-something man who spent most of his time behind dozens of sets of locked doors, staring through layers of equipment that led him to space.

Tolemy had a special cart next to his equipment. It contained both a small refrigerator and a tiny gourmet coffee maker (although Richard’s generation was the only one that called that stuff “gourmet” anymore; most people simply called the variety of drinks with cocoa beans in them “coffee”).

As Tolemy’s fingers fluttered over his flat-screen control panel, one hand would slip to the cart, grab a large soda/iced coffee container, and sip from the straw. It was an obsessive, unconscious maneuver, that Richard had seen a lot from his indoor techs.

He both hated it and felt powerless to do anything constructive about it. He hired the best minds of all generations, and if he’d learned anything in his decades of running the most creative corporations in the country, it was that the best minds came with more baggage than he’d ever thought possible.

When he’d mentioned it to his closest advisor after a visit to the Gates wing in Seattle, she’d laughed. You have baggage, she said. Isn’t that why you never married?

He’d never married because he didn’t have time for small talk, and he didn’t feel right vetting women just to see if they were interested in his money. He had no desire to have children. His legacy, he knew, was these corporations and all the discoveries he’d made on his way to fulfilling his childhood dream.

He pulled the chair closer to Tolemy’s wide screen, careful to stay away from the cart.

“I was warned not to waste your time,” Tolemy was saying, “but I want to lay the foundation. Stop me if you know this.”

He launched into a verbal dissertation about evac points and speed, about trajectories and distances in space.

Richard knew this; he was the one who’d designed the program after all, but he listened just the same. He wanted to hear how Tolemy had come to his current conclusions.

After twenty-five minutes of illustrated monologue, what Richard learned was this: Tolemy guessed that the astronauts took the last possible evac point. Their ship’s oxygen was gone; they only had their suits left. Maybe they had put on the suits, and then realized they wouldn’t even be able to see each other’s faces as they waited for sleep to overtake them.

That last was Richard’s fanciful addition. He’d been in the old suits; Tolemy hadn’t. He knew how isolating they felt. Isolating and cramped.

“Add to that being inside a tiny capsule,” Tolemy said, “with the windows already clouding, and who can blame them for leaving?”

Who could, besides Richard? And he knew that his blame was simply self-interest—the unwillingness of an obsessed man to lose his original vision, long after it had truly disappeared.

Unlike the other researchers, Tolemy hadn’t tried to prove who evacked first. Borman to show it could be done?

Or Anders because he was the junior member of the team? Had Lovell gone first because he was more of a cowboy than the rest?

The original researchers had contended that it mattered, that mass, height, and the strength with which the astronaut pushed off determined where the others ended up.

Tolemy claimed that none of that mattered; that they were all weak and dying and that they would have pushed away with little or no strength.

“I figured that the first one would be the easiest to find, and that’s what I concentrated on,” he said.

He had planned to take the last possible evac point and work backward, after exploring each area from top to bottom. He computed maximum speed and drift; he computed all the possible directions. He developed a region of space where he believed the first evacuee would be, and he searched, painstakingly, for two years.

“I found a lot of possibles,” Tolemy said, “but they didn’t pan out.”

He spoke of months as if they were moments. Richard leaned closer to the screen, feeling a respect for the young researcher that he hadn’t felt before. Tolemy shared some of his obsession, whether he admitted it or not, or Tolemy wouldn’t have sunk so much time into this, no matter how much he was being paid.

“Then I saw this one.” Tolemy used a pointer to touch a small mark on the side of the screen.

He amplified the image, but, even at full magnification, Richard couldn’t see what Tolemy had. It looked no different than all the other small space debris Richard had looked at over the years, some of it in the early months of this very project.

“Why is this one special?” Richard asked.

“The reflection,” Tolemy said as if it were obvious. “Let me show you some time lapse.”

He clicked on the image, then clicked on it again. It changed from a light mark against the blackness of space to a slightly brighter mark, but Richard really didn’t see the difference.

“I guess I’m not trained well enough,” Richard said.

“Okay,” Tolemy said, lost in his own excitement. “Let me show you a few other things.”

He opened up several more windows, all of them with astronauts building the space station that was completed in orbit at the end of the 1970s. He would click on one astronaut and then shrink the image. When he was done, the astronaut’s image looked like the one in the upper corner of the screen.

What Richard wasn’t sure of was whether if you took an image of a meteor and did the same thing would the meteor look like the tiny image in the corner too.

He said something to that effect—mumbled it, really, because he was concentrating and not paying attention to stroking the researcher’s ego.

“Oh, no,” Tolemy said. “They’re all different. There are components in those early space suits—particularly the plastic in the helmets—that aren’t used any more, and they don’t occur naturally that we know of. When light reflects off those, it’s distinct.”

Richard’s expression must have showed his skepticism, because Tolemy grinned.

“My bosses asked the same thing before they called you and so I showed them this.”

It was a light spectrum chart, showing how various materials reflected the sun’s rays outside of the Earth’s atmosphere. According to the chart, the plastic in the helmet, particularly on the visor, did have its own signature. And, somehow, young Tolemy had gotten a reading from the bits of light given off by the image in the upper corner of his screen.

“You have to understand,” he said as he explained all of this to Richard, “I worked this out over weeks of study.”

“You have to understand,” Richard said. “If I take action based on your light spectrum analysis and your speculative equations, I’m going to spend millions of dollars, risk several lives, and take many months of time.

You have to be sure of this.”

Tolemy took his left hand off the console and pushed the cart away with his right. He turned slightly in his chair.

“I think you were the one who called this searching for a needle in a galaxy full of haystacks,” he said.

Richard nodded.

“Well, I found something small and thin and made of metal. You gonna check it out?”

Richard smiled. “When you put it that way,” he said, “I think I will.”

The trip toward the object that Richard now called the Needle took both more preparation than the trip to the capsule and less. More because, deep down, Richard had never expected to find the astronauts, so he hadn’t done some of the basic imaginings he’d done for the capsule trip, and less because modern ships were so much more efficient than they had been eleven years ago.

For one thing, cargo runs from Earth to the Moon base had become common. Trips out of the atmosphere were even more common, with wealthy and upper middle-class tourists opting to stay in orbiting hotels.

The Needle never even approached Earth orbit. He floated out there for fifty years, following a predetermined path of his own. At his closest point to Earth in exactly eight months and one day, he would still be a hundred times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.

Richard had ships that could easily go beyond the Earth/Moon run. One of his companies was on the forefront of Mars development. NASA had bought several of his deep space ships (not an accurate name, Richard knew, but NASA liked the sound of it) for their first manned Mars missions, and several other companies had bought more of those ships to scout Mars locations for another base.

Richard had stayed out of most of that planning. He didn’t really care about Mars. His interest was still in the needles and the haystacks and space itself, not in colonizing the solar system. He figured someone else could take care of that, and until his meeting with Tolemy at ACP-S, he had let them.

After that meeting, he’d seen his mistake. The ships his companies had designed were for transport—humans, cargo, matériel—not for maneuvering or quick travel. To get to the Needle and match its orbit, he’d either have to design his own kind of ship or buy one from one of his far-sighted competitors.

And he only had eight months.

So he bought several of his competitors’ ships—something that took more middlemen than he had thought it would. His competitors thought he was trying to steal proprietary information or at least copy proprietary technology, and while that might be a side benefit of this trip, it certainly wasn’t Richard’s intention.

Instead, he tried to make the ships as Richard-friendly as possible.

Deep Space Darts, as these ships were called, were designed for long travel at great speeds. All engines and fuel, little interior room. The ships’ accommodations were cut down too much for his tastes. Richard examined half a dozen from various international companies, and worried about how travel would feel—cramped and narrow and uncomfortable, not something he wanted to experience, even though he was an in-shape fifty-eight.

He needed some kind of cargo area with a separate environmental system, and a good cabin.

In the end, he bought one of his competitors’ largest darts and gave his own team two months to retrofit it. He made certain the ship was supplied with the right equipment—a state-of-the art grappler (complete with multiple hand sizes), automatic lifeboat technology, and an up-to-date medical unit. The dart had the cargo bay he needed, but not a large captain’s cabin. Nor did it have a relaxation area for the crew.

Richard wasn’t bringing a large team this time—just himself and a few astronauts to help him wrestle the Needle from space. He also brought a biologist and a forensic anthropologist with an interest in space. If he got the body, most of the tests would be conducted on Earth in one of his labs—no need to do the work in cramped conditions—but he’d be able to report a few breakthroughs while still in space.

No live feed this time. There was too big a chance for error. He didn’t want to pull up beside the Needle only to discover that it was a bit of mislabeled space debris.

That’s what he worried about most: discovering nothing. Some early ACP-S missions led him directly to space debris and, fortunately, he hadn’t recorded those either. He hadn’t been on a trip for an ACP-S identified project in eight years, and he worried about this one. He had other scientists double-check Tolemy’s information, but they kept coming up with the same result:

They couldn’t verify that it was a Needle. They couldn’t guarantee anything.

In the end, he had to trust his own response. Tolemy’s information was the first in almost a decade to convince him.

He wanted to give this one a chance.

On the ride out, he spent most of his time doing simulations with the grappler. He wouldn’t run the grappler to bring the body in, if indeed what they’d found was a body. But he was going to help the team this time. He couldn’t stay away.

His closest advisors had insisted that a single, multimedia reporter with impeccable credentials be included on the flight. If the dart didn’t find a Needle, the reporter would write everything up as an experimental trip. She wouldn’t know the real mission until it was achieved—if it was achieved.

She came along only with the agreement that she could talk with Richard on the way back. He would give her unlimited, exclusive access.

Any good reporter would jump at that, and one did. Helen Dail, a woman who had three Pulitzers for journalism, spent most of her time interviewing the crew. She also explored the dart—what little of it she had access to—and lived up to her part of the agreement by not interviewing the astronauts, science team, or Richard.

He could see her storing up questions, though. She was old enough—maybe forty—to make sure she had a paper back-up, but she was also heavily wired. She had digital cameras and PDAs and more notebooks than he’d thought possible. She had met her weight limit for the dart not with clothes or personal items, but with equipment.

She made him nervous. She was good enough to figure out what he was after, even if he never found it, even if no one ever told her what the mission was.

He stayed out of her way as much as he could.

Ten days past the Moon, the dart had reached its target destination. The little ship wasn’t equipped with many cameras or long-distance scanning equipment (not that any of it was yet at the level Richard wanted it to be).

They were close enough to confirm that something was in the position that Tolemy had predicted, but not close enough to confirm that something was (or had been) human.

“Let’s get close,” Richard said to the pilot. He was in the cockpit along with the pilot and copilot. The science team was in the cargo bay, and the astronauts were suiting up. He would wait to suit up until the last minute.

He didn’t want Helen Dail to know he cared enough about whatever this was to suit up.

Over the next long half hour, the pilot took the dart into camera range. The item appeared on the screen, large and whitish gray. It tumbled—a slow spin that seemed like something it had done for a long, long time.

It was long and slender, and could very well have been a human astronaut. But Richard couldn’t see a helmet, nothing obvious that told him what they had.

Richard manipulated the external cameras himself, trying to catch all sides of the object.

Finally he saw what he needed—a glint of sunlight off a thick plastic visor.

His breath caught.

“Well?” the pilot asked. “Should we scrub?”

“No,” Richard said. “We have a go.”

He hurried out of the cockpit, careful to close the door behind himself, wanting to keep Dail out. Then he hurried to the cargo bay where the astronauts waited. They were watching the same image playing over and over again.

“Shouldn’t be hard,” Mac McFerson said as he watched. “One of our simpler maneuvers, actually.”

Richard slid into his space suit, his hands shaking.

“So long as we don’t grab the thing too tight,” said Greg Yovel. “Don’t want to damage it.”

“Maybe we should tether, do a walk, and guide it in,” McFerson said. He was a bit of a cowboy, which was why Richard wanted him along.

Richard turned, helmet in hand, and looked at the slowly spinning Needle. Who are you? he wondered.

Anders?

Borman? Lovell?

All THREE??

His heart was pounding. “Let’s just bring it in as we planned and hope for the best.”

McFerson made a small disapproving noise in the back of his throat.

They’d follow the procedures Richard had established with the capsule—keeping the bay cold once the body was inside, making sure that nothing in the process damaged the body outside of what had already occurred in space.

“Greg,” Richard said, “you run the grappler.”

“You and I will handle the door,” he said to McFerson. “Magnetize.”

Everyone pressed a button near the wrists of their suits to magnetize their boots. He felt a sharp tug on the bottom of his feet, tried to lift one, and felt the magnetic pull.

“It’s a go,” he said to the pilot.

The dart vented atmosphere from the cargo bay—away from the Needle, so as not to push him off course.

Greg slipped his hands into the net that ran the grappler, his body tense. Richard stood behind him, watching the imagery on the screen.

First, Greg had to stop the Needle from spinning. Then he had to wrap the grappler’s long fingers around the center of the Needle and slowly bring it toward the bay doors.

Once the Needle was close, the doors would open and Richard, along with McFerson, would grab the Needle and bring it inside.

The first part went according to plan. Greg managed to slow the spin—not stop it entirely, but bank it enough so that the Needle wouldn’t turn hard and damage itself against the grappler’s fingers.

Then he grabbed the Needle around what should have been its waist.

“It feels like this thing is going to slip,” he muttered, the words coming through everyone’s helmets. Rachel Saunders, the forensic anthropologist, walked toward the screen, but the other scientist pulled her back.

Richard wanted to go there too—he wanted to slide his hands into the gloves that operated the grappler from a distance—but he knew he couldn’t compensate for any errors.

The Needle—if indeed that’s what it was—did look slippery and unstable. The slipperiness came from its absolute rigidity; the unstable part from its tiny size. Richard had never seen anything so small in the grappler before.

Greg leaned into the gloves, his body as rigid as the Needle’s. Richard could feel the fear coming off him in waves.

“Positions,” McFerson said.

Richard jumped. He had forgotten to give that order. Rachel and the other scientist moved to the edge of the bay, grabbing onto the handles just in case. Richard took his spot near the door, holding a handle as well. It felt cold through his thick glove, but he knew that was just his imagination; he couldn’t really feel anything except the sweat on his palms.

“Open the door,” Greg said, his voice taut.

McFerson hit the controls before Richard could reach them. Or maybe the pilot had done so from inside the cockpit. He wasn’t sure.

The bay doors slid open, and there it was—the grappler—long bits of metal curving out toward the edges of the solar system, unfiltered sunlight reflecting off them, so bright that he wanted to look away.

But he didn’t. Because in the center was something whitish gray. Whitish gray and long, like a man’s body would be, only the knees were slightly bent and so were the arms.

Richard let out a small breath and it sounded like a sigh of relief. Or maybe he’d heard the sigh through his communications equipment, coming from someone else.

The grappler’s arms came closer to the door than he would have liked. Richard swung out, as he’d been trained to do, keeping his magnetized boots on the floor and one hand on the handle. McFerson did the same from the other side.

The suit had pockmarks and one large hole that went through the middle of one leg, but it was mostly intact. It faced away from them. Richard recognized the oxygen equipment, so bulky it made the original astronauts look as if they were about to topple over backward.

“Wow,” McFerson said.

Richard didn’t say anything. He had to be cautious as well. He was less worried about himself—he knew that if he lost his grip and his magnetization he would tumble into space, but someone would get him—than he was about breaking the Needle.

Someone, at the beginning of this mission, had called the Needle a corpsicle, and, while Richard vehemently objected to the characterization, it had some truth. This body was breakable the way ice was breakable. Grab it wrong, and a part would snap off.

Richard reached inside the grappler and slid a hand underneath the arm closest to him. Then he gently pulled backward. McFerson did the same.

The grappler moved with them—Greg was letting them control the speed. It had reached the mouth of the doorway when McFerson said, “Lift up.”

There wasn’t really an up—only an imagined up—but Richard didn’t question. He’d done simulations and he knew, in this case, up meant toward the top part of the door.

He lifted just in time to get the Needle’s bent feet past the lip of the dart.

“God,” Richard breathed. “That was close.”

McFerson said nothing. He used both hands to hold the Needle. Richard did the same, keeping one hand on the Needle’s chest, bracing it, and the other under the Needle’s arm.

“Got him,” McFerson said, even though Richard hadn’t given him a go-ahead.

The grappler fingers loosened, and Richard held fast, using only his boots for balance.

The grappler slid out of the bay.

“Close doors,” McFerson said, and he didn’t sound as calm as he had before.

The doors eased shut, and they were inside the bay, holding a man frozen in position fifty years ago.

Rachel hurried over, awkward in her magnetized boots.

She joined them, bracing the body, and helping them move it toward the center of the bay. Richard could hear her breathe. She was frightened—or maybe awed—he couldn’t tell.

He couldn’t tell how he felt either, except that somewhere in the middle of this mess, the object he had called the Needle had become a body.

He was holding one of the astronauts from Apollo 8. His theory had been right.

They had evacked.

And he still had two more to find.

But this one entranced him.

It had a name, sewn onto the exterior of the space suit. Lovell. That made sense to Richard. Everyone else expected the first one out of the capsule to be the lowest ranking astronaut on the mission, but Richard knew better.

Borman wouldn’t have gone first. He would have stayed with his vessel as long as possible. Lovell, the daredevil former test pilot, who saw himself at equal rank with Borman, would go first to show it could be done.

To show all three that fear could be conquered.

It wouldn’t have been right to send the rookie out first.

The bubble-shaped helmet was intact. That was the first thing Richard looked for as he, Rachel, and McFerson eased the body away from the bay doors. The helmet was intact and the body inside had mummified.

It looked like the mummies that came from Egyptian tombs—after the poor things had been unwrapped. The face was hard and leathery, the eyes gone, the mouth open in some kind of rictus.

But worse than that, this one was burned.

Richard had been told to expect radiation burns, but he wasn’t sure how they’d show up. They showed up in patches, holes in the skin.

“Good thing we got him,” Rachel said. “I don’t know how many more decades these suits would hold up.”

Richard didn’t respond. The suits would hold up as long as they remained intact. Obviously, the hole in the leg of this one came so late that there was no more oxygen, no more environment inside it.

When they reached the far wall and had the body face down over the examination table that would hold it, he said, “Now we can have gravity. Bring it up slowly.”

“Roger,” the pilot said.

Then Richard felt a buoyancy he hadn’t even realized he had vanish. He was heavier, and his ankles ached from the boots. The body in his hands slowly settled onto the table, face down, the large backpack upward.

“Let’s get him recorded,” Richard said.

Recorded.

Saved for posterity.

It was time to call in Dail.

Richard told the pilot to have Dail watch from the screens outside the cargo bay.

The recording and cataloguing was mostly a job for the scientists, and once Richard stepped back from the body, he would let them go at it. But he made some notes of his own.

The way the boots shone in the bay’s lights. The still-bent limbs. The face, unrecognizable. And the suit, as familiar as the one he wore, because he used to stare at the ones in the Smithsonian.

Puffy and bulky, unbelievably difficult to maneuver, this suit had somehow protected Jim Lovell’s body for half a century. The gloves made his hands look almost small.

The helmet with its thick plastic built to resemble glass. The old American flag on the arm, with only fifty stars—no Puerto Rico yet—making this seem like a suit lost to time.

And yet so real.

Richard could feel the suit’s solidness through his own gloves, knew that some of that came from the frozen corpse inside.

He thought of the outcries on the original mission, the fact that they were desecrating a grave. No one felt that way any more. He doubted anyone much thought of the Apollo 8 astronauts any more.

Yet here was one, big as life. They would think about them once again, at least for a while.

Richard hadn’t carried Jim Lovell, still alive, from the capsule. Nor had he brought the man into the dart with a fireman’s carry, hoping to retrieve a long lost soul.

But he’d done the best he could.

Maybe the only thing he could.

The buoyancy Richard had felt just before the gravity had turned back on never really vanished. He felt buoyant still, as if something lifted him ever upward.

When they brought the dart back, and he’d finished all the interviews (How had you known where the astronaut was, Mr. Johansenn? Is it worth the expense, bringing a long dead man to Earth? Why didn’t you consult the families?), he went back to ACP-S to consult with Tolemy.

“How hard do you think it’ll be to find the other two?” Richard asked.

Tolemy shrugged. He looked a bit more haggard than he had before the mission. He’d had a lot at stake on the mission’s success, but it didn’t look as if the success had helped him. If anything it seemed to have depressed him.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” Tolemy said. “I’m pretty sure it’ll be harder.”

“Harder?” Richard hadn’t expected that answer. He’d thought Tolemy would tell him it would be easier now that they knew what to look for. “In addition to the orbit we mapped for the capsule, you have two more points—the place where we found Lovell and the place where we found the capsule. You can make some kind of grid. We’ll know in general what region of space the other two will be in.”

“I’ve already done that,” Tolemy said.

He ran his fingers along his console, brought up a new screen with the Moon and Mars and the rest of the solar system. An entire area between Venus and Mars was colored in red.

“That’s the probable zone,” he said. “But here’s the problem.”

He overlaid a green bubble, even larger, on top of the red.

“We made some assumptions to find Lovell. We assumed that we were getting the first astronaut at the last possible evac point. We assumed that they waited until the very end to evac. But what if Lovell waited until the end? What if the other two went days ahead of him? What if he planned to stay in the capsule and changed his mind at the last minute?”

Richard shook his head. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“You don’t know that,” Tolemy said. “Any more than I know which direction the astronauts went when they stepped out of the capsule. More than likely, it was tumbling slightly. They could have gone in any direction, with any kind of speed. If anything, the search area is now bigger. We’ll defeat ourselves if we only look in the red part.”

“It can’t be bigger,” Richard said. “We know some of the path now. That narrows it.”

Tolemy shook his head. “I watched the vids you made of the rescue. You were worried about losing Lovell, about sending him off the small path you’d charted for him just by venting atmosphere from your cargo bay.

Imagine if some other ship had done that. Or if a small rock had hit with enough force to push him in a completely different direction without making a hole in his suit. Or if he had vented oxygen on purpose, propelling himself in a particular direction to give himself a sense of control? We don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

Richard leaned over and shut off the map on Tolemy’s screen. This was not the man he’d seen before the mission. That man had been certain of his numbers, worried that he’d made the wrong assumptions, but sure enough of himself to insist that his bosses bring in Richard.

“What’s changed?” Richard asked gently. He tried to control his impatience. He didn’t like interpersonal relations—he’d never been that good at them. He usually let his staff handle that.

Tolemy glanced at him, about to say “nothing.” In fact, the word had formed in his lips when something in Richard’s face must have stopped him.

“It was just luck,” Tolemy said. “Finding Lovell. It was luck.”

Like the press had been saying. Like Tolemy’s boss had said when the mission came back, mostly because he couldn’t take credit for a mission he hadn’t approved of.

“You said it,” Tolemy said. “We found a needle in a galaxy full of haystacks.”

“Because we looked,” Richard said. “Most people would hear the odds and give up. But we looked.”

Tolemy gave him a frightened glance. “It took ten years of round-the-clock work by some of the best minds, and it was me that found him. The new kid.”

“The new kid who worked harder than everyone else,” Richard said. “The kid who believed in himself.”

Tolemy shook his head. “That’s the thing. After the mission left, I didn’t believe any more. I was so convinced that all you would find was space debris that I nearly fell apart. If someone had died up there—”

“It would have been on my head,” Richard said. “Not yours.”

Tolemy nodded, but Richard could tell the young man didn’t believe him. Tolemy wasn’t willing to accept his success.

Richard stood, his patience nearly gone. He started to turn away, and then he stopped as an idea hit him.

“This has been part of your imagination for a long time, hasn’t it?” he asked.

Tolemy looked up at him. Richard hadn’t noticed before, but Tolemy was balding right at his crown. He didn’t look quite so young any more.

“What has?” Tolemy asked.

“Finding one of the astronauts. You’d imagined it, you dreamed of it, you just didn’t expect to do it.”

Tolemy bit his lower lip, then shrugged one shoulder. “I guess I didn’t.”

Richard patted that shoulder. “Neither did I. And yet we did it, didn’t we?”

Tolemy frowned, as if the idea were new to him. Richard walked away, hoping that little talk would be enough.

Tolemy had a gift, whether he realized it or not. That imagination, that way of looking at the solar system, at the small details, was unique.

Richard doubted he could find that combination again.

Part Three: 2020

And he didn’t, at least not in the next two years. Tolemy tried to find Anders and Borman, but flamed out quickly. Six months after the success of the Lovell mission, as the press called it, Tolemy took an extended leave. Then he quit, citing personal reasons.

His staff asked Richard if he would talk to the young man. Tolemy had quite a talent, they said. It would be a shame to let him go.

But Richard knew better than to keep him.

Some men couldn’t handle achieving their dreams. Tolemy was one of them.

Even men like Richard, who could handle it, had a difficult time. No one had ever told him that success—real personal success—carried its own stresses.

He’d always thought he’d understood that. After all, he’d bootstrapped himself into one of the richest men in the world. But those successes meant nothing to him. They were side issues on the way to his real goal—finding Apollo 8.

That success had been bittersweet. He’d found the capsule and not the men, and yet he had done what he had set out to do.

Just as he had done with Lovell.

Two successes. Two important successes.

But maybe he was insulated against those successes as he had been insulated against the earlier ones. Maybe he wouldn’t have the same problem Tolemy had until he discovered Borman and Anders.

If he could even find Borman and Anders.

The remaining researchers at ACP-S worked the grids that Tolemy had left and found nothing. A few worked outside those grids and found nothing.

They hadn’t even found anything that was possible.

Richard was thinking of firing the entire team and installing a new one when he got a personal phone call from the Chinese ambassador to the United States.

“Mr. Johansenn,” the man said in perfectly accented English, “we have some information we would like to trade.”

His advisors told him to set up the meeting through the United States government, that going around them to the country that former President Rockefeller had once called the most dangerous nation on Earth might get Richard into legal trouble. If he ended up making an unapproved trade with them for secret technology, he might even be charged with espionage.

Richard didn’t see China as the most dangerous nation on Earth. They were merely a larger and politically more repressive nation. He also knew that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1979, the United States had substituted China for the U.S.S.R. in its foreign policy. The big evil superpower now was China, and nothing Richard or the Chinese did would change that.

He told only his chief of staff that he was going to the embassy in Washington D.C. He decided to meet the ambassador there to prove to his own government (should they inquire) that he had nothing to hide. He could always say, with utter truth, that they had called him; he was just curious enough to go.

The Chinese Embassy looked no different than the other embassies on Embassy Row. They were all stately buildings, with armed guards and formidable security. The only differences were the flags and the uniforms.

The Chinese Embassy had its large red flag, that would have seemed festive if Richard hadn’t seen so many movies in which the flag had featured menacingly. The guards wore austere greenish uniforms that made him think of robots in early forties movies. They also wore small caps that hid the shape of their skulls, and carried AK-47s over their shoulders in a display of force.

Richard had to go through three levels of security just to get into the building. Even then, he seemed to have acquired three guards all to himself.

He wasn’t even carrying a briefcase. There was nowhere to hide weaponry on his person, and besides, they’d searched him enough to find even the smallest bomb.

The interior made him feel as if he’d entered another land. The furniture was ornate and mostly wood, all of it antiques from various dynasties. Expensive vases were filled with cherry blossoms. Tapestries hung on the wall behind the vases.

Richard had been raised with the impoverished—and austere—Soviets as the Evil Empire. He wasn’t used to the Chinese mixture of ancient beauty and hidden power within the embassy itself.

He was taken to a third floor reception room, and offered tea and little cakes. He accepted them with a small bow, feeling out of his element. He knew that diplomacy required a detailed understanding of a particular country. He didn’t even know if the Chinese had a tea ritual that he might be violating, the way the Japanese did.

He’d been to most countries in the world, but somehow he had missed China.

After a few moments alone with the guards, a door nearly hidden in flowery wallpaper opened. A short man wearing a military-cut jacket over dark blue trousers entered. He nodded at Richard, who stood.

They shook hands. The man introduced himself as the ambassador, and Richard introduced himself as well, just to be polite.

“Forgive my pre-emptive invitation,” the ambassador said. “It is just that I know your interest in the Apollo 8 astronauts.”

Richard smiled. “The whole world knows of my interest, Ambassador.”

“Yes.” The man bowed slightly. He folded his hands together. “It is my understanding that your interest supercedes your government’s.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Richard said. “We lost a lot of good men and women going into space. We couldn’t afford to rescue them all.”

“But these were the first lost in actual space travel, is that not correct? At least in America.”

Richard nodded.

“I remember that time,” the ambassador said. “I was but a boy. My country rejoiced in the failure of yours, but I asked my father why we celebrated when brave men died. He had no answer.”

Richard set his tea cup down. The ambassador hadn’t touched his tea or the cakes.

“But you understand now,” Richard said.

“I acknowledge the impulse to find joy in another’s defeat. I still do not understand why the loss of brave men is a cause for celebration.”

The ambassador’s language was formal, his face unsmiling, but Richard had a sense that the man was sincere.

Richard had to remind himself that a diplomat’s job was to seem sincere, even when lying for his government.

But Richard wasn’t sure what the ambassador had to lie about.

“I have been instructed to inform your government of our discovery. I am to ask for several things in trade in regards to the whereabouts, things I know your government will not grant. It is a propaganda ploy on the part of my government. They can go to the media in both of our countries, claim criminal disinterest on the part of the United States, and say that your country is unwilling to bargain with the Chinese even when something valuable is at stake.”

Richard threaded his hands together, mimicking the ambassador’s position. “The location, while a curiosity, isn’t of value to my government.”

“You and I both know this, and so does my government, but our people do not. The propaganda ploy would work in our favor.”

Richard nodded. He could see that.

“I have come to you, ex parte, to see if you can make a real and valuable trade to my government for this information. A bit of technology, perhaps, or permission to study the blueprints of one of your larger ships. We would give you the coordinates of the lost astronaut and, should our governments agree, we would send one of our own people with you, to learn with you.”

Richard felt unusually warm. His staff had been right and he had been wrong.

“Ambassador,” Richard said, “I must clear any such trade through my government.”

“They will deny you permission.”

“Yes, I know. I’m not even supposed to discuss business with your people. We have no formal trade agreement.”

The ambassador nodded. “We can keep this between us.”

“We can’t,” Richard said. “Particularly if one of your people joins us on the mission.”

“Perhaps we can drop that point,” the ambassador said. “And work through mutual friends.”

Mutual friends. Richard had heard of that kind of approach before. Working with a neutral country that would negotiate the deal on both sides.

“Why weren’t you willing to take this to my government?” Richard said. “They could have contacted me.”

“Ah,” the ambassador said. “But I did. I went to the government first and asked them to contact you, claiming time was of the essence. At first they refused. Then they promised they would take care of things. When I did not hear from you within the week, I called you directly.”

A drop of sweat ran down the side of Richard’s face. “Whom did you contact?”

The ambassador named names.

“I’ll see if they contacted me and somehow I did not get the message.”

The ambassador smiled. “There is no need to save face for your government. We do not trust each other. I doubt they contacted you.”

“Still,” Richard said. “I’d like to check. I’d also like to work through official channels wherever possible.”

“Do what you must,” the ambassador said. “But we know where your man is now. We cannot guarantee knowledge of where he’ll be six months from now. We have no real interest in tracking him.”

“I understand,” Richard said.

Time was of the essence. The ambassador had not lied.

Of course no one had called any of Richard’s companies or had contacted his own personal staff. But then, Richard had only the ambassador’s word that the man had even contacted the U.S. government. And while Richard had believed the ambassador about his memories, he was not willing to believe him in business.

Richard had an assistant track down the person whom the embassy had contacted within the U.S. Government.

She was able to confirm that the contact had occurred and been ignored. She asked him if he wanted to make an appointment with the State Department Undersecretary who had handled (or at least received) the contact.

“No,” Richard said. “Make me an appointment with the President.”

The President wouldn’t see him. She had pressing business elsewhere, probably aware of the fact that he hadn’t contributed as much to her campaign as he had to her predecessor’s.

Still, he was the richest man in the country. He couldn’t be ignored.

So the next day, he sat in the office of the Secretary of State. The National Security Advisor sat to his left. The head of NASA to his right.

Richard told all three about his meeting with the Chinese ambassador, and after hearing the expected rigmarole about protocol, they got to the heart of the matter.

“I am going to retrieve this astronaut,” Richard said. “The question is whether or not I’ll do it with your approval.”

They had already jousted over the Espionage Act and the Favored Nations Agreements. Richard hadn’t budged from his position.

The Secretary of State, a slender woman of Japanese-American descent, pretended sympathy. The National Security Advisor, a tough older woman with a touch of Margaret Thatcher in her bearing, had already decided Richard was an enemy of the state. And the head of NASA, a thin former astronaut who helped build the Moon Base, was, surprisingly, on Richard’s side.

“What can you give them that’s not proprietary?” he asked.

Richard shrugged. “They haven’t really made a specific request. I figured they would on my next visit.”

“You can’t give them any space-related technologies,” the National Security Advisor said. “And you most certainly can’t have one of their people on board your ship.”

“Even if they have the specs for that ship?” Richard asked. “What else could they learn?”

“Have you given them the specs for the ship?” she snapped.

Richard turned his chair slightly so that he wouldn’t have to look at her. Instead, he focused on the Secretary of State.

“I’m not a diplomat,” he said, “but the ambassador seemed sincere when he approached me. He—”

“They always do, Mr. Johansenn. That’s their job,” the National Security Advisor had a way of sounding extremely condescending.

He ignored her. “The ambassador said he had a memory of the day those astronauts were lost. He seemed intrigued by what I was doing. Maybe they have some astronauts of their own to retrieve?”

“They do,” the NASA head said. “They lost several astronauts in the early 1980s, after they acquired the Soviet Union’s technology and scientists at bargain rates. But they didn’t have the trained astronauts and they lost a lot.”

“How come we haven’t heard of this?” the Secretary of State said.

“We did,” the NASA head said. “It was in reports at the time, but it never hit the media. You know how secretive the Chinese can be.”

Suddenly the National Security Advisor was interested. She moved her chair forward. “How many did they lose?”

The NASA head shrugged. “I can get the exact figures for you later. But I’d wager they lost two or three dozen astronauts in those early years.”

“Because they wouldn’t ask for help.” The Secretary of State tapped one long painted fingernail against her lips.

“Do you think they’re trying something new now?”

“The space race is, for all intents and purposes, over,” Richard said. “They can buy their way onto our ships.

They lost the Moon to us, and have to cooperate with us to get to Mars. They have their own program, but it’s not as advanced as Europe’s. Theoretically, China’s is only designed for asteroid mining.”

“I thought it was for defense,” the National Security Advisor said.

“I said theoretically,” Richard said. “That’s what they claim. But yes, it’s for defense.”

“Rumors throughout the scientific community say they’re planning their own Moon Base. They doubt we can stop them. We’re not geared for a war on the Moon,” the NASA head said.

Richard nearly sighed, but managed to control himself at the last minute. “What if what they want is as simple as it sounds? What if they want to see how we’re recovering our own people?”

“If they’ve lost so many,” the Secretary of State asked, “how do they know this is one of ours?”

“The suits are different,” the NASA chief said. “They’d reflect differently.”

“Or,” Richard said, “they’ve already got a recovery program, and they’ve seen him up close.”

“I wonder,” the Secretary of State said slowly, a twinkle in her eye, “if they can bring him to us.”

Richard argued against it. He wanted to be on the ship that recovered the next astronaut. But he had set the events into motion by being above-board.

When he left the White House, the Secretary of State had already called for a closed-door meeting with the congressional leadership to see if they could have a space-trade agreement with the Chinese, a short-term exchange of information that would allow space scientists to share as much knowledge as possible.

The National Security Advisor loathed the idea; she said the Chinese would get a lot more out of it than the Americans would. But the head of NASA wasn’t so sure. His program had stagnated with the rise of private enterprise in space. NASA needed new ideas. Besides, he wanted to know if all the rumors about the various Chinese programs were true.

Richard didn’t care about any of that. He had an astronaut to rescue, and he wasn’t going to do it from a distance. He left the White House, and went to the Chinese Embassy alone.

The ambassador met him immediately. This time, they went to a more formal room, with red silk wallpaper and delicate carved chairs. No guards stood inside the room, and no one brought tea.

“I had heard you were on Capitol Hill,” the ambassador said.

“I saw the Secretary of State,” Richard said. “They don’t want me talking to you.”

“And yet you are here,” the ambassador said.

“I realized something while talking to them,” Richard said. “I never asked how you knew where our astronaut was.”

The ambassador smiled slowly. “They put you up to this.”

“Believe me, they did not,” Richard said. “If all goes according to their plans, someone will work with you on recovering that body. Only I won’t be able to go along.”

“And you feel you must go along,” the ambassador said.

Richard nodded.

“So we are back where we began.”

“Yes,” Richard said. “What would you like in trade for the information about where our astronaut is?”

The ambassador smiled slowly. “This information is very important to you.”

That was obvious. Richard had lost any negotiating point on that by returning so quickly.

“Yes, it’s important,” he said, “and time is of the essence.”

It wasn’t one of his better negotiations. Usually Richard was a shrewd businessman and a champion negotiator, but he was in new waters here. Not in dealing with the Chinese—he’d dealt with representatives of cultures he didn’t entirely understand before—but because he really and truly wanted something.

In the past, he’d always had the ability to walk away.

This time, he could not.

He sold the Chinese government two of his own dart-like ships, the kind he designed after the Lovell mission, along with the specs. He didn’t care if the U.S. government came after him for doing so. He had already informed his lawyers that he had chosen not to take the Secretary of State’s advice. If the U.S. government wanted to try him under the Espionage Act or fine him for violating various Fair Trade Agreements, fine. He just wanted the time to get to the astronaut and back.

The lawyers had to tie the government up in court.

Then Richard put his P.R. people on the deal. They talked to the media, and suddenly he was the next world-class diplomat, a man who could negotiate with the difficult Chinese and walk away with what he wanted. He broke the story through Helen Dail, promising her another exclusive on his trip to find the second astronaut.

Through it all, he finally understood how Tolemy felt. He hadn’t even asked for proof. The great negotiator had missed one of the essential rules of negotiation: he should have made certain the item he desired was what he desired.

If the Chinese were lying—if this wasn’t the second astronaut—they were playing him for a fool. They probably thought he was one already. He had given them proprietary technology. If the astronaut—the whatever they had found—wasn’t from Apollo 8, they would have won.

From the moment he accepted the agreement, he had a knot in his stomach. He wasn’t even looking forward to the trip, and the past two times he had.

On those trips he felt that even failure would be a success: at least he tried.

He didn’t feel that way this time. Just scared and a little sick.

His mood colored the entire trip.

He took the same team that he had two years before. The Chinese gave him the coordinates when he was in orbit, knowing that he would inform the U.S. government when he had them. The Chinese were in a sector of space they shouldn’t have been in if their technology was designed for asteroid mining or defense.

Something else was going on, something the astronauts on his ship speculated about.

But Richard didn’t. He’d felt a little relieved, able to give the U.S. government something in exchange for this mission. He should have been even more relieved. His lawyers informed him that the Chinese had vehicles similar to the dart on their drawing board, meaning they had either gotten his or his competitors’ proprietary information through some illegal back channel, but that didn’t make him feel better.

He hadn’t realized until this mission how truly single-minded he’d been. How great his focus was on these astronauts. It wasn’t healthy.

He was no longer even sure it was right.

They were dead. Really and truly dead. There was no rescuing them, and what little he’d learned from Lovell and the capsule hadn’t really made up for the effort he’d expended over decades to find them.

He wondered what they would have thought of him, these men who had launched themselves into space on a rocket, protected only by a tin can. Would they have thought he was foolish? Or would they have applauded his audacity?

He used to think they’d understand, but not even he understood any more.

Fifty years was a long time to focus on one thing. Maybe it was time to focus on something else.

They discovered the object not far from the coordinates the Chinese had given him. That was a surprise, given the amount of time it had taken to get here. Clearly, the object was moving very slowly.

The reflection was right; the build was right; the position was familiar. It took Richard one look through the viewscreen and he knew that the Chinese had played fair with him.

He had another Apollo 8 astronaut.

The team cheered, and he cheered with them. He slid into the rescue as if he’d done it a thousand times before instead of just once.

This time, he braced himself properly as he guided the body into the bay. He smiled for Dail’s camera—he’d allowed her to suit up and come inside as well—and he carefully moved the frozen astronaut to the back of the bay to a berth designed for him.

McFerson hadn’t complained about not operating the grappler. He’d laughed, as if he were having the time of his life. None of them were scared this time. Even if they damaged this corpse, they succeeded. They already had brought one intact astronaut to Earth.

This one was just a bonus.

Richard hated how his thoughts ran. Even as he held the man’s arm in his gloved hands, he wasn’t thinking of this astronaut as a person, as someone to be rescued, but as an item, as a commodity.

And wasn’t that what he’d been? Something to be haggled over, an item for trade? Something that might cause a great loss or a great win?

Certainly not a human being, not any longer.

He tried to keep these feelings to himself—and managed to lose them only briefly, when he learned this one’s identity. The name etched along the suit was almost gone, but he could still see its shape, and the first three letters. B. o. r.

Borman. The commander.

McFerson speculated about the order of evac, just as Richard had the last time, but Richard wasn’t playing that game any longer. Borman was in a part of space that wasn’t on Tolemy’s map—not in the red section or the green section.

It was as Tolemy had said—impossible to predict where these men would be.

Borman was here, in a place that had no logic at all that Richard could see. And he doubted that anything on Borman’s suit would give them real clues about how he got here.

Someone would try to map the trajectory. Someone would make semi-educated guesses, but it wouldn’t be Richard.

He was, for all intents and purposes, done.

He didn’t say that, of course. In public, he sounded the mantra: they still had one astronaut to find—the junior man on the mission, Bill Anders.

The Anders family got involved. They asked to help in the search. Publicity stunts—the Anders family looking through telescopes, viewing star charts—abounded. Newspapers carried headlines Family Still Hopes Missing Astronaut Will Come Home, and the twenty-four-hour news channels did specials. Websites appeared as amateur astronomers tried to figure out, based on all the points that Richard had discovered, where Anders would be.

Richard supported all of this and more. He kept ACP-S running, and he made sure that anyone with information about the last astronaut should feel free to come to him. He kept the best minds in the business searching, and he even tried to get Tolemy out of retirement.

But Tolemy’s heart wasn’t in it, and neither was Richard’s. Something had changed for him at the last. Maybe he was afraid of success too—or afraid to complete the project. Maybe all that self-examination was just a way to prevent himself from finishing the job.

Because, if he found Bill Anders, what else would drive him? The entire crew of Apollo 8 would be home. The capsule was already here and on display in the Smithsonian, with his private company credited for the donation.

Children climbed in and out of the couches where, essentially, three men had died.

After a few years, he stopped monitoring the program. He actually got what most people called a real life. He married, for the first time, to a woman half his age, a woman who could keep up with him in conversation. They had three children—a daughter and twin boys—and while he found fatherhood interesting, it was not all-consuming the way most people claimed it would be.

His wife said that was because he was not most people. Others he mentioned this to told him it was because he had nannies and assistants who took some of the burden off the childrearing.

But that wasn’t what he meant. He had expected raising children to be as focused an activity as searching for Apollo 8 had been. He expected to think about them each waking minute, get lost in their smallest deeds, praise their greatest accomplishments.

And while he paid attention, he did not think about them every waking minute. He barely thought of them at all.

Once he learned who they were—how their personalities were forming—he treated them as he treated most people, with a casual coolness that he couldn’t quite help.

His wife claimed she expected it, but he could see disappointment in her eyes. His children always sought his approval for everything they did, and yet when he praised them, it wasn’t enough.

“They don’t want your approval,” his wife finally told him. “They want your love.”

He thought about that. He wondered if he had ever loved anything. Really loved it.

And eventually he came to the realization that he loved the dream of space. The dream that he had absorbed as a child—the one painted in the picture in his office—of possibilities and fears and greatness unknown.

That had been what he’d been pursuing with Apollo 8. Not a rescue, so much as a hope. A hope that the universe out there would be different than the world in here.

The realization calmed him, and he went back to work, much to his family’s dismay. Once again, he checked on ACP-S, not because he had any hopes of finding Anders—he didn’t, not really—but because that was part of what he did in the same way that he checked on all of his various projects the world over.

He grew older and he watched as the dreams of his youth—the dream of space flight and far-ranging exploration, of colonizing the solar system, and humankind moving beyond the confines of Earth—slowly came true.

He marveled at the way things went, and he was proud of his part in them.

Part Four: 2068

Which was how he came to be on the starliner Martian Princess on its maiden voyage from the Moon to the newly opened Mars colony. The colony had existed on Mars for nearly thirty years, but it had expanded and now had a small resort for adventurous travelers who wanted to inspect the area before they bought homes in Mars’s second colony, which was under construction.

Richard had a stake in both colonies. He owned the resort. And he owned the Martian Princess. The starliners made him proud—not because they were passenger ships like the old luxury liners that used to cross the ocean—but because they were really fast. And that ever-increasing speed was pulling in the outer system with each increase, making things seem closer, more possible.

People still had to commit upward of three months of their life to the journey, depending on where Mars was in relationship to Earth, but that was nothing like the years for a there-and-back journey in the 2030s.

He had the V.I.P. cabin near the front of the ship, but he made a point of visiting all the decks, being seen in the restaurants and the shops and even in the educational wing, where he conspicuously took lessons in Mandarin.

He moved slowly now. Even with all the advancements in medical science, his life had taken its toll on his health. He was 108 and frail. He had to be careful of his old bones. His daughter Delia, who was also on the trip, insisted on bringing a retinue of doctors in case Richard fell ill or tripped and hit his head.

If he had known that the girl was going to be this protective, he never would have made her head of most of his companies. He would have stuck with assistants. Although no assistant had half the intelligence and drive that his daughter had. At forty-two she reminded him of himself at the same age—focused, edgy, and successful in spite of herself.

The resorts were more her dreams than his. She could see past the solar system. She wanted to get to a time when human beings traveled the galaxy the way that they now traveled around the Earth.

That was a bit far for him. Even Mars seemed far for him. This would be his first trip to the red planet, even though he’d had property there for decades. He’d never wanted to commit to the trip.

He wasn’t sure what had made him commit this time, either.

He suspected it had a lot to do with the conversation he’d had with his sons, when he told them they needed to be adventurers. They didn’t understand him, and he realized that they hadn’t seen him in his adventurous years—going through astronaut training, all that risky travel into orbit and beyond, his rescues of Apollo 8 and the two crew members.

His boys knew of that, of course—this was all part of their father’s lore—but they hadn’t seen it. And they were their mother’s children. While bright, they didn’t understand what they couldn’t see.

They weren’t dreamers the way his daughter was. They did strive, though, and they handled themselves well, unlike many children of the rich. They started charities with his excessive fortune, and were working to change the Earth, something he had never even thought of.

He had a hunch they did it as a rebuke to him, but he was proud of them for it. They had seen a gap and filled it, and while they weren’t quite what he’d expected, they were good men with good hearts—a tribute to the woman who had raised them.

Certainly not a tribute to him. When he realized how limited they were, he focused on his daughter. She was his child 100 percent, and that fascinated him. She reflected his good and bad qualities—his single-mindedness, his coldness, and his casual way of coming up with a viable idea that somehow made millions.

Yet she was dedicated to him, more dedicated than he had been to his own parents in their declining years. He wasn’t sure if that was socialization, a difference in the culture, or if she had a slightly softer side than he had.

He wasn’t going to figure that out, either. He was going to enjoy it, as he enjoyed her company when she gave it.

Mostly she spent the trip in her two cabins—the other V.I.P. suite, and the secondary suite she’d commandeered to keep the corporations running. She ran from place to place, as he used to do, frustrated by the slowness of interplanetary communications, and worried that she was going to miss something by being so far away.

He tried to tell her that sometimes being far away was exactly what an entrepreneur needed, but she’d looked at him as if he’d insulted her intelligence, and he vowed at that moment to stop giving advice.

Instead, he retired to his own cabin, which he loved.

He’d always insisted on luxury. The luxury suites on the Martian Princess were spectacular, but the V.I.P. suites took that luxury one step farther. He had his own living room, a dining room, and two bedrooms on the second story—not that he needed both—one of which he turned into an office. The bathroom had every luxury, and the functioning kitchen could cook some foods itself.

But what he loved the most was what the brochures called the backyard—the deck outside the cabin with a floor-to-ceiling view into space. The material that the windows were made out of was so clear that it looked to Richard the way space had looked through the open door of the cargo bay on the dart.

Someone had furnished the yard like a formal living room. When he examined the suite the week before the Martian Princess left, he had the formal furniture replaced with chaise lounges and wooden tables—the lawn furniture of his youth. The lights, scattered around the yard, looked like tiki torches. All that he needed was some green grass and some fireflies, and he would be at home.

He spent most of his time on the deck, reading or listening to music. He didn’t watch any programming or have holo performances on the yard because he didn’t want to get lost in them. He never invited anyone into his cabin. If he saw people, he saw them on the decks or in the restaurants.

The view was enough.

And it was the view that caught him, two days out from Mars. He was standing in the middle of the lawn, transfixed by the way the darkness of space wasn’t really dark. There were hints of light in it. Sunlight went everywhere. The all-powerful star that was the center of this solar system had a greater reach than any human being ever could.

He tilted his head up, and saw a reflection in the distance, a flash of light off something white ahead of the ship.

He blinked, certain he’d imagined that. But it came again, larger now, as if the object were spinning ever so slowly.

He went to the cabin, used the on-deck telescope for his particular suite, and turned the exterior lens on the object.

The very powerful telescope had an automatic computer tracking function and he set it on the object.

His breath caught when he looked.

An astronaut in an old-fashioned suit.

His heart started to pound.

Anders. Could it be?

Richard wiped his hands on his pants, thought for a moment, and knew how everyone would react. They didn’t treat him like a doddering old man—that kind of treatment disappeared as aging became a way of life for so many people—but a person who had passed one hundred still had achieved a milestone that made the younger generations dismiss him.

He wasn’t in his prime any more, physically—that was obvious—and so many people thought that meant he wasn’t in his prime mentally, either.

The ship would be past the object in less than a minute. He had to act, and act quickly.

His hand shook as he pressed the comm link. “Delia,” he said to his daughter, “come here, please. Now.

Quickly!”

Then he called the bridge. “I need your best pilot, with a few changes of clothes, to meet me in ten minutes.”

“May I ask why, sir?” the Captain asked.

“No.”

Richard shut down the comm link, then grabbed some of his own clothes, stuffed them inside a bag, and put the bag over his shoulder.

The door to his room glided open and his daughter entered, looking worried. She was trim and athletic with her mother’s dark hair and eyes.

“I want you to see something,” he said before she could speak.

He indicated the telescope. “Look quickly. It’s more than likely almost out of sight.”

She started to object and he held up his hand. “Quickly.”

She sighed and walked over. She wrapped one hand around the viewer, and peered through the lens, then gasped. “This has to be some kind of joke.”

“Possibly,” he said. “But I’m still going after it, joke or not.”

He knew that the liner couldn’t just turn like a ship in the ocean. This ship was turning around only after it reached Mars orbit. And by the time they got there, Anders would be again lost.

The last astronaut. The last part of Richard’s dream.

He had just passed it.

But he had no intention of losing it.

“Dad, what are you thinking?” Delia asked as she walked with him from his suite and headed down the hall.

“I’m going to go get him.”

Delia looked at him as if he had suddenly lost his mind. “Daddy, there isn’t any way to pick him up. We’re already far, far past him.”

“Not that far,” he said. “I’ll take one of the lifeboats. It’s designed with more than enough range.”

He’d insisted on the old-fashioned term when he’d approved the design of the starliner. He worried that such a large, grand ship would suffer the fate of the Titanic— that some sort of disaster would hit it, and hundreds of people would die because he hadn’t prepared. He’d insisted on smaller ships, most of them two-man crew sized, a few a bit larger, all of them with enough power and supplies to last a year with a dozen people on board.

“They don’t have grapplers,” she said.

Richard gave her a surprised look.

“I studied your space rescues, Dad,” she said. “They were miracles of efficiency.”

They hadn’t seemed like it at the time.

“I don’t need a grappler,” he said. “I need a lifeboat, a spacesuit, and a pilot.”

“Daddy,” Delia said, “this is crazy.”

He ran a hand along her face, then smiled at her with the most affection he’d ever felt.

“Yes,” he said, “it is.”

The pilot was a small woman named Star. He thought the name a good omen. Before she was hired as a tertiary copilot for this mission, she’d been with the U.S. military, flying orbital defense missions around the Moon colony. He looked up her record, saw the reprimands in the file for a bit too much cockiness, for a tad too much recklessness, and decided she was exactly what he’d needed.

He could have flown the ship himself—the controls were so simple that a child could fly it (he’d insisted on that, too)—but he chose not to. He needed the help.

The lifeboat didn’t have a cargo bay like the ones he was used to—no separate environmental system, no real storage area—but it did have two doors, one inside, and one with an airlock out the side. That was all he needed. And it had six small cabins. He could put Anders in one and shut off the environmental systems to that cabin to keep him frozen.

“I’m going with you,” Delia said as they reached the lifeboat entrance. Star had already gone on board and had the ship coming to life.

“No,” he said. “You have to pull every string you can pull to get back here and pick me up, with a ship equipped to handle what I’m going to go get, and then get us all back to Earth.”

He then kissed her on the forehead and stepped aboard, closing the hatch behind him.

Star got the lifeboat slowed to a stop within six hours, and had them back to the area of Anders’ position in another eight hours. The entire time Richard sat in the copilot’s chair and stared ahead into the emptiness of space. And every hour he had to calm Delia, tell her he was fine. He had no idea his daughter worried so much.

That made him feel wanted, and he liked that feeling.

The old ships that Richard had used on the first three missions never had this kind of speed or maneuverability.

In fact, at the speed the liner was moving when they’d left it, the old ships wouldn’t have even had the power to slow and stop, let alone go back.

It took surprisingly little searching to find Anders. The newer equipment on the ships also made that easier.

Star matched Anders’ course and pulled in close beside him. The body was barely turning. It seemed to just float there.

“You take the controls,” Star said, “and I’ll get him.”

“No,” Richard said. “I will.”

She gave him a sideways look.

“I’ll be all right,” he said.

It took him a little longer to climb into the new space suits. They looked more like a white tuxedo than an actual space suit, and the helmets were close-fitting and light. Everyone on the liner had been trained to put them on, but they still didn’t feel right, as if he weren’t wearing enough to protect him from the cold he was about to step into.

He climbed into the airlock and magnetized his boots. Then he vented the atmosphere.

He felt stronger than he had in years.

The tricky part, he knew, would be reaching for Anders. Star had gotten the lifeboat to a point where it nearly touched the man, but Richard had little to support him. He used the tether inside the airlock, and wrapped it around his waist, securing it tightly.

Then he opened the outer door.

Unfiltered light hit him, reflecting off the lifeboat’s silver sides. He blinked in the glare.

Then his eyes adjusted.

Anders floated near him, just an arm’s reach away.

Looking free. Almost as if he didn’t want to be rescued.

For the first time, Richard understood the impulse that had led to the Apollo 8 astronauts evacuating their small ship. Why stay inside a tin can when the entire universe waited? What would Anders have said if he knew that his body would be found so very close to Mars? How would he have felt to know that he had spent a hundred years gazing blindly on the entire solar system?

Richard reached forward and grabbed Anders’ cold, stiff arm.

It would be so easy to lock elbows and step into the darkness.

It would be so easy to choose this death. Eventually, he would just go to sleep. He would be unencumbered by anything, gazing at the vastness of space and of the future.

Yet he had no reason to step out. He still had years yet. Years of adventures.

He was going to Mars where he already had businesses. He had been traveling on a starliner, for heaven’s sake, something that the original Apollo astronauts could only dream of.

Their sacrifices had brought him here.

Their courage, their loss, their dreams.

He had an obligation to keep living the future they’d always wanted, to continue to make their dreams of the stars even more possible for succeeding generations.

Part of that was bringing Anders in, letting scientists see what happened one hundred years out. To learn, as they had from Borman and Lovell, about the adventures these men had had, even after death.

“You okay?” Star asked.

“Fine,” Richard said.

It took only a gentle tug to bring Anders to the door. Richard wrapped his arms around the hundred-year-old adventurer and pulled him gently so that his booted feet didn’t hit the door’s lip. Then Richard eased the body inside.

As he reached for the mechanism to close the outer door, he saw the vastness of the stars, as mysterious as the Moon used to be when Richard was a boy.

All his life, people accused him of pursuing death.

But he hadn’t been. He’d been exploring possibilities, reaching toward a future he could only see in his imagination.

He’d gone after these men because they’d inspired him. But he’d never rescued them.

They were the ones who had been the heroes.

They were the ones who had always—always—rescued him.

MEMORARE

Gene Wolfe

THE MOMENT MARCH Wildspring spotted the corpses, he launched himself across the shadowy mortuary chamber. He had aimed for the first, but with suit jets wide open he missed it and caught the third, flattening himself against it and rolling over with it so that it lay upon him.

Bullets would have gotten him; but this was a serrated blade pivoting from a crevice in the wall. Had it hit, it would have shredded his suit somewhere near the waist.

He would have suffocated before he froze. The thought failed to comfort him as he huddled under the freeze-dried corpse and strove not to look into its eyes.

How much had his digicorder gotten? He wanted to rub his jaw, but was frustrated by his helmet. Not enough, surely. He would have to make a dummy good enough to fool the mechanism, return with it, and . . .

Or use one of these corpses.

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known . . .”

The half-recalled words came slowly, limping.

“That anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession, was left unaided.”

There was more, but he had forgotten it. He sighed, cleared his throat, and touched the sound switch. “These memorials can be dangerous, like this one. As I’ve told you, this isn’t the big one. The big one we call Number Nineteen is an asteroid ten times the diameter of this, which means it could have a thousand times the interior volume. Frankly, I’m scared of it. We may save it for last.”

He had a harsh, unpleasant speaking voice. He knew it; but it was the only voice he had, and the software that might have smoothed and sweetened it cost more than he could afford. Back on his hopper, he would edit what he had said into a script for Kit. She had a voice . . .

“There are at least five sects and cults whose members believe the deceased will be served through all eternity by those who lose their lives at his or her memorial. Some claim to be offshoots of major faiths. Some are openly satanic. We haven’t seen enough to identify the bunch that built this one, and frankly I doubt we will.”

If the show sold, if it made one hell of a lot of money, it might—it just might—be possible to buy or build a robotic probe. Of course, if that probe were destroyed . . .

He began wiggling out from under the corpse and sliding under the next.

Nothing happened.

“Memorare . . .” He had read the Latin twice, perhaps. It was as lost as the English now. No, more lost.

The blade was set to rupture the suit of anyone who came in. That much was plain. What about going out?

When he had the first corpse steady and vertical, a gentle shove sent it across the chamber in a position that looked practically lifelike.

Nothing. No blade, no reaction of any kind as far as he could see.

Possibly, the system (whatever it was) had detected the imposture. He tried to make the second corpse more lifelike even than the first.

Still nothing.

What if a corpse appeared to be entering? A few determined pulls on his lifeline got him plenty of slack. Hooking it to the third corpse, he held the thin orange line with one hand while he launched the corpse with the other. When it had left the memorial, a gentle tug brought it in again.

The blade flashed from its crevice, savaged the corpse’s already-ruined suit, and flung the corpse toward him.

“You’ve got a new servant,” March muttered, “whoever you were.” Playing it safe, he went out the way he had come in—fast and high.

Outside, he switched on his mike. “We just saw how dangerous a small percentage of these memorials are, a danger that poisons all the rest, both for mourners and for harmless tourists who might like to visit them. A program for identifying and destroying the few dangerous ones is badly needed.”

Propelled by his suit jets, he circled the memorial, getting a little more footage he would probably never use. His digicorder had room for more images than he would ever need. Those millions upon millions of images were the one thing with which he could be generous, even profligate.

“Someone perished here,” he told the mike, “far beyond the orbit of Mars. Other someones, employees or followers, family or friends, built his memorial—and built it as a trap, so that their revered dead might be served . . . Where? In the spirit world? In Paradise? Nirvana? Heaven?

“Or Hell. Hell is possible, too.”

Flowing letters, beautiful and alien, danced upon the curving walls. Arabic, perhaps, or Sanskrit. It would be well, March thought, to show enough of it that people would recognize it and stay away. For the present, the corpses floating outside it might be warning enough. His digicorder zoomed in before he switched it off and returned to his scarred olive-drab hopper.

There was an Ethermail from Kit when he woke. He washed, shaved, and dressed before bringing her onto his screen.

“Hi there, Windy! Gettin’ lonely out there in the graveyard?”

She was being jaunty, but even a jaunty Kit could make his palms sweat.

“Well, listen up. Have I got a deal for you! You get me to em-cee this terminal travelogue you’re makin’. As an added bonus, you get a gal-pal of mine. Her name’s Robin Redd, and she’s a sound tech who can double in makeup.

“What’s more, we come free! Absolutely free, Windy, unless you can peddle your turkey. In which case we’ll expect a tiny little small cut. And residuals.

“So whadda you say? Gimme the nod quick, ’cause Bad Bill’s pushin’ me to come back. Corner office, park my hopper on the roof with the big boys, and the money ain’t hopscotch ’n’ hairballs either. So lemme know.”

Abruptly, the jauntiness vanished. “Either way, you’ve got to be quick, Windy. Word is that Pubnet’s shooting something similar out around Mars.”

He said, “Reply,” and took a deep breath. It was always hard to breathe when he tried to talk to Kit. Yes, even when she was three hundred million miles away.

“Kit, darling, you know how much I’d love to have you out here with me, even if it were just one day. I want you and I want to make you a superstar. You know that, too.”

He paused, wishing he dared cough. “I couldn’t help noticing that you didn’t mention what Bad Bill wanted you for. Knowing you and knowing that there isn’t a smarter woman in the business, I know you’ve found out. It’s his pet cooking show again, isn’t it? He wouldn’t give you a corner office for those kiddy shows, or I don’t think he would.

“So get yourself one of the new semitransparents, okay? ‘Vaults in the Void’ is just about roughed out, everybody in the world is going to want to see it by the time we’re finished with it, and nobody who sees it will ever forget you, darling.

“God knows I won’t.”

He moved his mouse and the screen went dark, leaving only the faint reflection of an ugly middle-aged man with a crooked nose and a lantern jaw.

The on-board had found three interesting blips strung out toward the orbit of Saturn, but Jupiter—specifically the mini-solar system surrounding it—was closer, and every hop took its toll of his wallet. He put the Jovian moons on screen and began speaking, just winging it so as to have something to work over for Kit later.

“Mightiest of all the worlds, Jupiter has drawn travelers ever since hoppers became a consumer necessity. When the first satellite was launched in nineteen fifty-seven, the men and women who put it into orbit could hardly have dreamed that Luna and Mars would be popular tourist destinations in less than a hundred years. Nor could the pioneers who built the first hotels and resorts there have anticipated that as soon as translunar travel became popular, travelers seeking more exotic locales would come here to the monarch’s court.

“You’ve got to throw a lot of money in the hopper. That’s for sure. But that only makes it that much more attractive to those who’ve got that money and want to flaunt it. It’s dangerous, too—transmissions from tourists whose icoms go abruptly silent make that only too clear, and every edition of the Solar Traveler’s Guide strives to make the danger a little plainer.

“Unfortunately, the striving doesn’t seem to do much good. People keep coming, alone or in company. Sometimes they even bring children. Every year, five, or ten, or twenty don’t make it back. Do all of them get memorials in space, memoria in aeterna? No, of course not. But many do, and such memorials are becoming more popular all the time. Some are simple stones. Others—well, we’ll be showing you a few. In an age in which the hope of a life after death gutters like a candle burned too long, in a century that has seen Arlington National Cemetery bulldozed to make room for more government offices, the desire to be remembered leaps up with a bright new flame.

“If not remembered, at least not totally forgotten. We wish it for our loved ones, too. We’d like some spark of them to remain until the sun grows dim. And who can blame us?”

Now to make the hop. Perhaps he would learn, soon, just what had happened to that poor girl who had tried, for so short a time, to raise her sweetheart and his friends.

The first memorial he checked was a beautiful little thing. Someone with taste had taken a design intended for the desert and reworked it for space, with no up and no down, a lonely little mission shrine not too near Jupiter that reached up for God in every direction.

The bright flames inside belonged to votive candles, candles that burned in vacuum, apparently because their wax had been mixed with a chemical that liberated oxygen when heated. They made a glorious ring of white wax and fire around the shrine, burning in nothingness with fat little spherical flames.

“A shrine sacred to the memory of Alberto Villaseñor, Edita Villaseñor, and Simplicia Hernandez,” he told his digicorder, “placed here, deep in space, by the children and grandchildren of the Villaseñors and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Simplicia Hernandez.”

How many thousands of hours had Al Villaseñor labored under a broiling sun before he could buy the hopper that had carried him, with his wife and the very elderly woman who had probably been his mother-in-law, to a death somewhere near Jupiter? Their 3Ds were in the shrine; and the mark of those hours, of that sun, was on Al’s face.

Turning off the audio, March murmured a prayer for all three.

Back on his hopper, clicking Ethermail got him Kit’s blue eyes and bright smile. “What’s this ‘semitransparent’ bull, Windy? Transparent’s only a couple thou more. I’ve got a good one, and I’ve been posing for the mirror. No picky-picky underclothes underneath. Wait till you see the pix! You’re gonna love ’em.

“But Windy, you didn’t say a thing about my li’l pal Robin Redd. Can she come, too? I gotta bring her, Windy, or not come myself. She’s on the lam from a ex who beats hell out of her. She’s got an Order of Protection and all that crud, which he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about. I know he doesn’t, Windy. I was with her on Wednesday when he kicked her door down. Scout’s honor! I grabbed the carving knife and screamed my cute li’l head off.

“Windy, honeybear, I can’t leave Robin high and dry. I won’t! Not after what we went through Wednesday night. So can she come? It’s me, Windy. This is Kit, and I’m begging.”

March sighed and leaned back in the control chair, collecting his thoughts before he spoke.

“Gee, Kit, here I thought you were longing for the sight of my manly profile. Okay, I’ve got it now. Bring your friend. I trust she’s too well-mannered to push back the curtain when she hears funny noises from a bunk. Trust me, I’ll wash the sheets this time.

“But Kit, you’re going to have to wear something under that see-through suit. Get used to the idea if you want me to show you below the neck.”

AS MARCH EDGED his hopper just a little nearer Number Nineteen, he turned up a new memorial, an asteroid circling Jupiter well outside the orbit of Sinope. Earlier he had thought it only a rock, a piece of pocked debris too small to hold even the chips knocked loose by meteorites.

Now he could see the entrance of the tomb. It was closed, though most such entrances gaped open, and square, though most were rough circles. As he zoomed in on the tumbling asteroid, the neat lettering before that entrance grew clear: PLEASE WIPE YOUR FEET. This was one he wanted.

His own suit, orange and strictly opaque, was starting to show signs of wear. Nothing dangerous yet, but it would have to be watched. A military suit . . .

Well, a military suit wore pretty much like armor. A military suit got rid of built-up heat and kept the wearer warm no matter what. The wearer could relieve himself right there in his suit, and eat and drink whenever eating and drinking seemed necessary or advisable. Three kinds of lights, a score of tools, and half a dozen weapons were built into the suit; so was a mini computer with enough capacity for a whole lot of AI. That little on-board could and would offer warnings and advice. It would watch the wearer’s back and even stand guard while he slept.

A soldier in a military suit could reach up into his helmet and pick his nose, or even take a suitless comrade—wounded or otherwise—into the suit with him.

A military suit . . .

Cost more than March Wildspring had been worth before his divorce, and twenty times more than he was worth at the moment. His own space suit, this dull orange suit that was beginning to show wear, provided propulsion, communication, and breathable air for four hours plus. Little more beyond a fishbowl helmet that would darken when hit with a whole lot of ultraviolet light—Twentieth Century tech, and he was lucky to have even that. Shrugging, he closed his suit and buckled on his utility belt.

Spaceboots over the feet of the suit were not strictly necessary, but were (as March reminded himself) a damned good idea. Suits tore. Cheap civilian suits tore pretty easily, and tore most often at the feet. Small permanent magnets in the boots would keep him on the sheet-metal body of his hopper without holding him there so tightly that he would have trouble kicking off.

With the second boot strapped tight, he hooked his lifeline to his belt and put on his helmet. On Earth, his suit weighed fifty-seven pounds. Here it weighed exactly nothing; even so, his irritated struggles against its frequently pigheaded mass provided a good deal of useful exercise. People tended to get soft in space.

Kit would be another source of salutary exercise, he reflected, if things went as well as he hoped.

The airlock was big enough for one person in a pinch, if that one person was mercifully free of claustrophobia. March shut the inner door and spun the wheel, listening to his precious air being pumped back into the hopper, to its whispering, whimpering departure. Then to silence.

Fifteen seconds passed. Half a minute, and the outer door swung back. He kicked off from the inner door and turned on the suit’s main jet. Steering jets and seat-of-the-pants flying kept him on course for the asteroid into which some unlucky tourist’s tomb had been carved, and enabled him to match the asteroid’s rotation.

The inscribed welcome mat before the door was, on closer inspection, wrought iron. His boots stuck to the iron nicely. Was he to knock? He did, but there was no response. Presumably there was no atmosphere inside the tomb, but it would have been possible—even easy—for a mike to pick up sound waves transmitted through the stone walls. Checking a third time to make certain his digicorder was running, he searched the doorframe for a bell button and found one.

The wood-grained steel door opened at once, apparently held by a bald, pleasant-looking man of about sixty. “Come in,” the bald man said. He wore an old white shirt and faded jeans supported by red suspenders. “It was darned nice of you to come way out here to see me, son. If you’ll just come inside and sit down, we can have a good chat.”

March switched on his speaker. “I’ll be happy to, sir. I know you’re really a holographic projection, but it’s very hard not to treat you as a living person. So I’ll come in and chat, and thank you for your hospitality.”

The bald man nodded, still smiling. “You’re right, son. I’m dead, and I’d like to tell you about it. About my life and how I came to die. I’d like to, but if you don’t want to hear it, I can’t keep you. Will you stay and make a poor old dead guy happy?”

“I certainly will,” March said, “and half the world with me.” He indicated his digicorder.

“Why that’s wonderful! Sit down. Sit down, please. I hate to keep my guests standing.”

It was just possible that there were knives that would slash his suit concealed in the fluffy pillows of the sofa behind the long coffee table. March chose what appeared to be a high-backed walnut rocker instead, tying its cord so that he floated a few inches above its seat.

The bald man dropped into an easy chair that showed signs of long use. “I’d make you some iced tea if you could drink it, but I know you can’t. It doesn’t seem right not to offer a guest something, though. I’ve got some little boxes of candy you could take back to your hopper. Maybe give to the missus, if she’s in there? You like one?”

March shook his head. “She’s not, sir. It’s very kind of you, but what I’d really like is to hear about you. Won’t you tell us?”

“Happy to, son. Glad to recite my little adventures, at home and out here in space. Frank Welton’s my name, and I was born in Carbon Hill, Ohio, U.S.A., one of a pair of twin boys. Probably you never heard of Carbon Hill, it’s just a little place, but that’s where it was. I was a pretty good ball player, so I played ball for eight years after high school. See my picture? The kid with the glove and bat?” The bald man pointed, and March swung his digicorder to get it.

“That was taken when I played for the Saint Louis Cardinals. I played left field, mostly, but I could play all three outfield positions and I generally hit pretty close to three hundred. The money was good, and I meant to stay in baseball as long as I could. That turned out to be eight seasons, but for that last season I was a pinch hitter, mostly. An outfielder has to have a good strong throwing arm, and my shoulder blew out on me.”

March said, “I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

“Well, I got out of baseball and went home to Carbon Hill. A friend of my dad’s was in the sand and gravel business in a small way. He was getting on and wanted a younger partner with some money they could use to expand the business. I threw in with him, and when he died I bought his widow out. Pretty soon I was making more in sand and gravel than I ever had playing ball. I got married . . .” The bald man took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes.

March cleared his throat. “If this is too painful for you, sir, I’ll go.”

“You stay, son.” The bald man swallowed audibly and wiped his nose. “There’s things I got to tell you. Only I got to thinking about Fran. She died, and I didn’t have the heart anymore. Business is like baseball, son. If you got nothing but heart, you can still win on heart. Not all the time, mind, but now and then. That’s what they say and it’s the truth. But if you don’t have heart, you’re done for.”

March nodded. “I understand you, believe me.”

“That’s good. I turned the business over to our kids. That’s Johnny, Jerry, and Joanie, and they’re the ones who built this memorial for me. They owed me a lot, and they still do. But they paid off a little part of what they owed with this. Like it?”

“One of the best I’ve seen, sir, and I’ve seen quite a few.”

“That’s good. I bought me a hopper when I retired. I told everybody I wanted to see Mars because of all the sand and gravel they had there. I thought it was true, but what I really wanted was to get away from Earth. Maybe you know how that is.”

March nodded.

“So I did. Spent a little time on Mars and a few days on the moon, then I thought I’d have a look at Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and so forth. The big satellites of the outer worlds, in other words. People don’t realize how many there are, or how big they are, either.

“It was Io that did me in. Not the li’l gal herself, but trying to get there. Oh, I knew all about old Jupiter. How far out his atmosphere goes, and the radio bursts. All that stuff. What I hadn’t figured on was just what all the gravity meant. Just how quick it grabs you, and how quick a hopper heats up when it hits ol’ Jupiter’s atmosphere. I guess I’ve ’bout talked your ears off now.”

March shook his head. “If you’ve got more to say, sir, I’ll listen.”

“Then I’ll say this. My dad was a good man and a hard worker, but he was a day laborer all his life, and he died at fifty-four. Go back a few generations, and my folks were slaves. I had a better life than my dad did, and one hell of a lot better life than they did. I’d like a prayer or two, son, and I’d like to be remembered. But I’m not complaining. I got a fair shake, and I had a lot of luck. Want to see how I looked when I was dead, son?”

“I don’t understand how that’s possible, sir.” March hesitated before adding, “You were pulled down to Jupiter, and your hopper must have been burned away completely before it hit the planetary surface.”

“Well, son, I can show you just the same. This is pretty slick, so have a look.” Leaning forward the bald man touched the top of the coffee table, and it became as transparent as glass.

A dead man lay just below the transparent surface, his eyes shut and his hands folded. His white shirt and casual jacket were well-tailored and looked expensive. After studying his features, March said, “That’s you all right, sir. Computer modeling?”

“Nope.” The bald man had turned serious. “It’s an actual tridee, son, taken at the funeral. That’s my twin brother, Hank. He died forty-six days after I did. That happens a lot with twins. One gets killed and the other dies. Identical twins I mean. Which is what we were. Nobody knows why it happens but it does. Hank turned in for the night like usual. Barbara went to get him up in the morning, and he was dead. You want to be dead, son?”

March shook his head. “No, sir. I don’t.”

“Then you take a lesson from me and watch out for that ol’ Jupiter.”

Back in his hopper, his on-board signaled Ethermail. He touched the keyboard, and Kit’s arresting eyes and perfect complexion filled the screen. “Hi, Windy! If you don’t want us, say so. One more should get us there, so this’s your last chance.

“But first, stop worrying about what I’m going to have on under the suit. I am going to wear a bra. Guaranteed. Haven’t you seen what zero-g does with boobs the size of mine? I have. They go all over, and believe me it’s not a pretty sight. So I’ve got this wonderful little pink bra. You’re gonna love it! The saleswoman got out a needle and pulled the whole, entire thing through the eye.”

Kit had a charming laugh, and she used it. “Don’t look at me like that, Windy. Put down that fatal eyebrow. Okay, it was a big needle like you might use on denim or leather. So it had a big eye. But she pulled it through, exactly like I said. I’ll show it to you—by golly and geewhillikers, I’ll model it for you. So if you don’t want us you’ve gotta be quick.”

March clicked REPLY. “Kit, darling, you know I want you more than life itself. Please hurry! Now don’t get mad, but I’m a little bit curious. Why didn’t I see your pal Robin Redd in the background. Is she really that ugly?”

He had hardly resumed his search for memorials when his on-board signaled a fresh Ethermail.

“She’s in the can, Windy. That’s all. She’ll be out in a minute. Not bad-looking, either, if you dig redheads with bruised faces. So if you’re all hot to fantasize, go right ahead. Just don’t try to make ’em real, ’cause you know damn well there ain’t space enough in your hopper for three bare-ass bodies playin’ games.

“Speakin’ of space, I got a li’l surprise. Have a look out your driver’s-side window. Wanna couple?”

It was Kit’s hopper, as he knew it would be, a new one gleaming with chrome and unscarred maroon paint and roughly the size of one of the compact pre-fabs older people still called mobile homes. Twice the size of his own hopper, in other words.

Suiting up again, he grabbed his line launcher and went out onto the hull.

A tiny figure emerged from the big maroon hopper, and the icom in his helmet buzzed and clicked. “You got a launcher, Windy? I didn’t bring mine, but I can go back in and get one.”

“Right here.” He aimed his launcher, activated its laser guide, and launched, the solid-fuel rocket trailing a slender but strong Kevlar line.

“You got us, Windy. Want me to pull?”

March started his winch. “We’ll just get it tangled. I’ll reel you in.”

“You gotta wench winch. Ever think of that?”

“Saying things like that cost you ‘Building People for Kids.’ ”

“I didn’t care. I’d already done the parts I liked. Got anything to eat in that tin can?”

“Self heats. Stuff like that.”

“We’ve got that beat hands-down. Robin can’t cook worth a damn. I, upon the other well-washed hand, am an internationally famous cheffettej. One who—”

March said, “There’s no such word and you know it.”

“There is now. One who, I was saying, knows there’s nothing for getting the ol’ pencil sharp like a real, authentic Caribbean pepper pot. Be ready in an hour or so, but if you’d like to come over now for a long-time-no-see kiss . . .”

With their hoppers grappled, it was not necessary to turn on his suit jets to go from his own to hers. He kicked off, somersaulted in space, and landed feet-first next to her airlock.

“Nicely done, Windy,” she said as he was taking off his helmet and just beginning to appreciate her flowery perfume. The long-time-no-see kiss followed, and lasted a good two minutes. When they separated, she added, “If you weren’t wearing all that machinery, I think I might’ve raped you.”

He leered. “Men aren’t supposed to make jokes about rape. You told me that—”

“I’m not a man. You failed to notice.”

“Therefore, madam, I will say quite seriously that if I had not been swaddled in all this gear, I believe I might have ravished you.”

She had put her finger to her lips; he lowered his voice as he said, “You escaped by merest chance.”

“Rape’s a sensitive topic with Robin,” Kit whispered. “I shouldn’t have shot off my mouth. Only when a man does it, it’s ten times worse. I think her ex raped her. Maybe a couple times.”

“I see.”

“Okay, she’ll cramp our style verbally. Not in bed. I’ll see to that.”

“So will I,” March said. “Marry me, Kit. I mean it. How the hell do you kneel without gravity?”

“You meant it last time. I know that.”

“And I mean it this time.”

“I turned you down.” Kit’s face was somber. “Did I say why?”

“No. Just that you weren’t ready.”

“Then I’ll say it now. I love you to pieces, but I’ve got a career and they print your name on the toilet paper in the executive washroom. You think I’m kidding?”

“Damn right I do.” March opened his suit. “You’ve never set foot in the executive washroom.”

“Wrong. When I was talking to Bad Bill about the cooking show I had to powder my nose, and he loaned me his key. It’s on the paper.”

March scowled, then chuckled. “And you used it.”

It got him the sidelong glance and sly smile he loved. “I’m taking the Fifth, Windy.”

“It wasn’t a question. Speaking of washrooms, when are we going to see what’s-her-name?”

“Robin. How would I know? She’s been in there forever. Do you understand why I said no, Windy? You don’t have to agree with it. Just understand it.”

He shrugged. “Does it mean you’ll be wearing a fake mustache when you narrate for me?”

“That’s not the same thing, and you know it. I’m not with the network right now. Not officially. My contract’s run out. It’ll probably be renewed, but it might not be. Nobody’s going to raise hell because I took a stop-gap job narrating a documentary. Besides . . .” Her sudden silence betrayed the thought.

“Besides,” March rasped, “Vaults in the Void’ may never be broadcast. Go ahead and say it. You’ll be saying something I’ve thought a thousand times.”

“There’s not much market for documentaries, Windy,” Kit was trying to make her voice kind, something she was not particularly good at. “Yours is sure to be a complete downer, even with me in it acting all respectful. So if—”

A latch clicked five steps away, and one of the flimsy doors opened and—very softly—shut. He turned.

And froze.

“Hello, Marchy.” The woman with her hand on the latch was a head shorter than Kit. The small face beneath the mop of blazing red hair looked pinched and white. One eye was bruised and swollen nearly shut; there was a second bruise on the cheek below it.

“Sue.” March did not realize that he had spoken aloud until he heard his own voice.

“That isn’t my name now.”

Shrugging was difficult, but he managed it. “You’ve sued me so often that I don’t see how I can call you anything else.”

She drew herself up. “My name is Robin Redd.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Hold it!” Kit edged (most enjoyably) around March to stand between them. “You owe me. Both of you do. Windy, I bought this hopper and came way the hell out here into God-forsaken outermost space just because you needed me. Tell me that’s not right, and I’ll head back home as soon as you clear the airlock.”

“It’s right,” March said.

“Robin, you had to get away. I’d seen what Jim could do, and I stepped up like a Girl Scout. I never ran your card or asked a favor. I said why don’t you come with me, I’ll be glad to have the company. If you say that’s not how it was, I’m hustling you back to Earth and shoving you out. Wasn’t that how it was?”

Robin nodded.

“Okay. It’s a mess. Even I, good-hearted dumb li’l Kit, can see that. But I don’t know what kind of mess I’ve made, and I’m going to raise holy hell till you two fill me in. You know each other. How?”

March sighed. “We made the mess, Kit. Sue here did, and I did. Not you.”

Robin whispered, “He’s my ex, Kit.”

“Jim?” Kit goggled at her. “I saw Jim. It was Wednesday night.”

“Not Jim. Oh, God! I hate this!”

March said, “It’s been years since the final decree, Kit, and the proceedings dragged on for a couple of years before that. I had abused her—verbally. I had said things that injured her delicate feelings. Things that were quoted in court, mostly inaccurately and always out of context. I had persecuted her—”

“Don’t! Just don’t! Don’t say those things.”

“Why not?” March was grim. “You said them to a judge.”

“I had to!”

Kit threw up her hands. “Hold it. Stop right there. I’m making a new rule. You don’t talk to each other. Each of you talks only to me.”

She glared at March, then turned to Robin. “How many times have you been married?”

“T-twice.” Her eyes were overflowing, their tears detached by minute motions of her head to float in the air of the hopper, tiny spheres of purest crystal.

“Windy was your first husband?”

Studying her without hearing her, March was besieged by memories. How beautiful she had been in the days when she still smiled, the days when her hair was long, soft, and brown. In his mind’s eye, she was poised on the high board, poised for a second or two that had somehow become forever, poised above the clear blue water of some hotel’s swimming pool.

“Windy? Did you hear me?” It was Kit.

He shook his head. “I was remembering, I’m afraid. Thinking how it used to be before it went bad.”

Robin shouted, “Before you stopped paying attention!”

“Shut up!” Kit snapped. “Windy, she said you never hit her, but you abused her verbally and psychologically. Threats and put-downs. All that stuff. True or false?”

“True,” March said.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

He nodded.

“Did you ever love her?”

He felt as though his feet had been kicked from under him. “Oh, my God!” He groped for words. “I was crazy about her, Kit. Sometimes she wouldn’t speak to me for weeks and it just about killed me. She left me over and over. I’d come home from work, and instead of being there spoiling for a fight she’d be gone. She’d live with some boyfriend or other for a few days, maybe a week, and then—”

“Jim!” Robin cocked her head, her smile a challenge. “It was always Jim, Marchy.”

“Shut up!” Kit turned to glare at her.

“That isn’t what she said. Do we have to talk about this?”

Kit studied him. “You look like you’ve lost a quart of blood.”

“I feel like it, too.”

“My pepper pot ought to help. And I’ve made Cuban bread. That’s easy. You ever eat stew out here?”

He shook his head.

“Me neither. I’ve got it simmering in hopsacks. Those clear plastic thingies. That’s why you don’t smell it.”

“Sure.” It was wonderful to speak of something else. Of anything else. “I’ve got some, too.”

“So I figure we can drink the liquid, and there’ll be little chunks of crayfish and pork and so forth in there too. When it’s gone, we can open the hopsacks and eat the solids.”

“Should work.”

“Do you still love her, Windy?”

He shook his head.

KIT IN HER TRANSPARENT SUIT was simply incredible, lush curves that changed and changed again as the suit flexed, but in that light were never more than half seen. He shot her from the waist up, not quite always, knowing it would keep five hundred million men watching, waiting, and wondering.

“Hi. It’s me again, Kit Carlsen. When I do a cooking show, I tell you—sometimes—about the chef who developed a recipe, or the person the dish was named after. Peaches Melba for Nellie Melba the opera singer. You know. Well, today we’re going to visit the tomb of a lady who was her town’s best, and best known, cook. I plan to ask her about her cooking as well as her life and death. You may think it’s tasteless, but March Wildspring and I think you’ll find it interesting if you’ll just stick with us. March is our producer, so what he says goes.”

With a wave and a beckoning smile, Kit entered the tomb. March grinned. After a moment he followed her, watching her image in the digicorder screen more closely than Kit herself.

That’s me, there. The woman in the gray dress on the red chair.

The voice was without even the semblance of a living speaker, the picture calm, serious, and motionless.

My name was Sarah-Jane Applefield. I was sixty-three at the time of my demise. My parents were McAlister Rodney Applefield and Elizabeth Warren Weyerhaeuser. I bore three fine children in my time, Clara, Sheryl, and Charles. All were much loved. Would you like to hear about my early life?

“No, Sarah.” Kit’s voice was soft, coaxing. “We’d like to hear about your cooking. It made you famous all over Southton. Can you tell our audience something about that?”

Certainly. Would you like recipes, or the secrets of good cooking?

Kit smiled in her plastic bubble. “Your secrets, please.”

I call them secrets because so few women seem to know them. They’re secrets I tell freely to anyone, but they stay secret just the same. Do you cook?

“I do,” Kit said. “I cook a lot, and so do a lot of busy women and men in our audience.”

Good. The first is to release the inner self. We’re all a little bit psychic, but we’ve been taught to pretend we’re not. Let that go. Feel the dish. Sense what it feels. In the storybook, Alice talks to the food, and the food talks back to her. I read it to my children. Lewis Carroll wrote it, and he was an old bachelor. He cooked for himself, you see, so he knew.

Kit smiled again. “I need to read that book, and I will.”

The second is to use your nose. Cooking would be difficult for a woman who was blind, but if she learned, she would be a better cook than a seeing woman who would not use her nose. Food may look very nice when it’s really quite awful, but food that smells good is good, just about always.

The third is to taste. Spices lose their flavor. Two pieces of beef may be from different animals, even though both are beef. There are breeds of cattle just like there are breeds of cats, or one animal may be old and the next young. If you buy your beef at the store you have no way of telling. What it comes down to is that recipes can’t be exact. The cook must taste, and taste again.

“That’s very wise, I’m sure.”

It is. Your name is Kit. Your husband told me when he was here before.

“He’s not my husband.” Kit’s smile was warm. “But close enough.”

If you were wise yourself, Kit, you would ask me what I should tell you. Whether it concerns food or not.

Kit glanced at March for guidance, and he nodded.

“Then I do, please. What is it I ought to ask? Pretend I did.”

There is nothing close enough to marriage, Kit. I bore three children to the man who stands behind me in my picture. We were never wed. As time wears on, that will grow easier and easier for the man, Kit, and harder and harder for you. Look closely at my picture, and you’ll see I wear a ring.

March zoomed in on it.

I bought that ring for myself, Kit, in a little shop that sold old jewelry. He begged me to take it off once, when we were going to bed. I did, and while we slept he hid it.

Kit looked stricken, but her voice remained smoothly professional. “I’m glad for your sake, Ms. Applefield, that he didn’t keep it.”

Don’t you see? He would’ve had to give it to me if he had—would’ve had to give it back to me. Make the gesture he would never make.

“I’ve got it.” Kit shook her head as if a blow had left her dizzy.

I like you. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have spoken to you as I did just now. This will be easier for you to hear, but you must not discount it for that reason. There is another flying grave, like my own but larger than my own. It’s on the other side of Jupiter today.

“One you think we ought to visit?” March sensed that Kit was breathing normally again. “Can you tell us what’s there?”

I can’t. Your man asked the same question. That’s why I’m mentioning it now. I can look outside this grave. Did you know?

“No, Ms. Applefield, I certainly didn’t.”

I can. Hoppers park at that grave sometimes. I see them. People—live people like you—go inside. Pay attention now, Kit. They don’t come out again, and pretty soon their hoppers drift away.

Kit was doing deep-space aerobics, throwing herself from floor to ceiling and from ceiling to floor, her lush body enveloped in a fine mist of sweat that her hopper’s air system stripped away only sluggishly. “I say we gotta go in,” she gasped. “Round-file that sweet old lady giving us her warning? Over my dead body.”

“If you go in,” Robin said, “I might go in it, too—only I wish you wouldn’t.”

“I’m going.” Kit grunted. “If Windy won’t go, I’ll go in by myself. You can shoot me.”

Watching her, March thought of all the things he would do—or try to—if Robin were not present. Aloud he said, “You’d better stop. You’re wearing yourself out.”

“Just landed a little wrong and hit my knee. I do a hundred of these.” Kit sprang from the floor, twisting like a gymnast in air that smelled of shampoo. “I’ve been counting to myself. This’s eighty-seven.”

“Then I’ll count the rest for you. Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine. Ninety . . .”

“You’re the only friend I’d got,” Robin told Kit. “The only good friend. If you die, it’d be just me and Jim, and he’ll kill me.”

“Ninety-two. Kit, doesn’t that tell you something about your little pal here? She’s thirty-five, and she’s got exactly one good friend. You. One good friend, and a second husband she thinks may kill her.”

“Thirty-one, dammit!”

Kit snatched at breath. “How many?”

“Ninety-six. And I know how old Sue is. She’s eight years younger than I am, and her birthday’s October thirty-first. That ought to tell you something, too. Ninety-nine.” He watched Kit throw herself, with obvious effort, back to the crimson carpet. “One hundred.”

She straightened up, and Robin handed her a towel. “Thanks for giving me an honest count, Windy. I kind of thought you’d cheat.”

He nodded. “That’s what Robin thought, too. She had me followed for a couple months.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head.

Robin threw a pepper mill at him. “You were too smart for them!” Missing his head by at least a foot, it slammed against the wall.

March’s eyes had never left Kit. “I was under the impression that Sue and I weren’t speaking. Apparently I was wrong. I, however, am not speaking to her. It may spare your hopper a few scars.”

“She can throw my stuff at me,” Kit told him. “Robin, you’re a guest in this hopper. Windy’s another guest in my hopper. I asked him to dinner. If you two want to rip open old wounds, I can’t stop you. No violence, though. I mean real violence, like throwing stuff. Or hitting. Do it again, and you go out.”

“Into his hopper?” Robin’s contempt was palpable. “I’d rather die!”

“I doubt that he’d let you in. I’ll just get you suited up and shove you out the airlock. Tourists come to Jupiter pretty often. Somebody will probably pick you up before your air runs out.”

March sighed. “You want me to say I’d take her in. And if I don’t . . .”

“I’ll think a lot less of you, Windy.”

“All right, I will. I only hope I won’t have to. If I do, I’ll probably kill her before I can get her back to terra firma.”

“I’m not from there, smart-ass.” Robin cocked her head. “Terror whatever you said.”

Kit giggled as she joined Robin at the tiny table. “I’m not going to touch that straight line. Don’t you touch it either, Windy.”

She tied the soft cord that would keep her from floating out of her chair. “Bulbs are hot. Windy, get over here and sit down. I know you always like coffee with your meals. How about you, Robin? Coffee? Tea?”

“Tea, please.” Robin’s voice was one breath above a whisper.

“Here you go. And here’s your coffee, Windy. Now before you start gobbling my Truite Farcie aux Epinards, we’ve got to talk seriously about the next shoot. Do you remember when I said I’d go into that damned mausoleum or whatever it is alone if you wouldn’t come with me? I meant every word of it.”

March sat. “You may change your mind when you’ve had time to think it over. I hope you will.”

Kit looked as grim as a pleasant blonde can look. “I change my mind before I’ve told anybody. Never after. If you won’t go in, I’m going in alone tomorrow.”

So close to March that their elbows touched, Robin raised a beverage bulb to her lips and put it down. “Do either of you actually know where this awful place is?” Her perfume, musky and hinting of cinnamon, crept into his nostrils.

Kit shook her head. “I’ll find it. The dead lady can probably tell me, just to start with.”

“I call it Number Nineteen,” March told her. “I’ve known about it awhile, but I haven’t gone inside.”

“Then I won’t have to ask her—I’ll get it out of you. Shameless prostitution, right? Are you going in, too? Yes or no.”

“Then it’s yes. I’ll go in there with you on one condition.”

Robin said, “I’d go in with Kit if she was going in there alone. Not if you’ll be with us.”

“That would have sounded better,” Kit told her, “if you’d said it before Windy said he’d go. We call that bad timing in show biz.” She turned to March. “What’s your condition? Maybe I won’t agree.”

“You’ll have no reason not to. There’s another one, not as big. I haven’t gone into it either, but I’ve every reason to think it’s dangerous. I want you to go into that one with me first. If I’m right, you’ll get a little seasoning there. When we tackle Number Nineteen you’re going to need some.”

“So you think,” Robin said.

Kit motioned her to silence. “I’m all for seasoning. Have you got any reason for thinking this one’s not quite so hairy? Besides its being smaller?”

March shook his head.

“Then I’ll go. When do we do it?”

Robin said, “I’d like to know what reasons he’s got for thinking it’s dangerous at all.”

“Tomorrow,” March said. The oven buzzed as he spoke.

“Sounds good.” Kit untied her cord. “Everybody ready for food?”

The trout was served in Pyrex-topped dishes with tiny hatches that slid away at the touch of a fork. Kit demonstrated, thrusting her own fork in, and pulling it out laden with fish and spinach. March tried it, and a wisp of spinach floated away before his fork was halfway to his mouth. “Chopsticks might be better,” he suggested.

Robin giggled.

“You’ve got ’em,” Kit told him. “There’s a trigger at the front of the handle. Feel it? Pull that, and the chow bar flips over to hold your stuff on. Loosen up when it’s in your mouth, and you can get your food out.

“Robin, can you clean up that spinach for me? Make yourself useful?”

“You betcha.”

The Truite Farcie aux Epinards was delicious. March took another bite before he said, “Ever hear of the Thugs?”

Kit chewed reverently and swallowed. “Like muggers, Windy?”

“Not quite. There was a cult called Thuggee, and the members were the original Thugs. They worshipped Death and sacrificed people to her.”

Robin muttered, “Why do we always get blamed?”

“Mostly they strangled them, although I believe they also stabbed a few. They offered the deaths of their victims to their goddess, and kept the victims’ possessions to cover operating expenses. The Brits wiped them out two hundred years back.”

“Why are you telling us this, Windy?” Kit’s hand hovered over the clip that would hold her fork when she had no need of it.

“Because it seems like they’re with us again, in a new and improved Westernized form. And I’m not telling you and Sue. Just you.”

“You mean they gave up the goddess business?”

March shook his head. “The West has never abandoned religion, Kit. You just think it has because you and your friends have. Okay, I’m your friend and I’d like to be more. But you know what I mean.”

“We’ll talk about that other thing sometime when we’re alone.” For a moment, Kit looked a trifle stunned. “You—You said they were Westernized, Windy. If you didn’t mean no goddess, what did you mean?”

“Computers, secure lines of electronic communication, and hoppers just to start with. Guns. Poisons. Ever been in an abattoir?”

“A slaughterhouse? No, and I don’t want to go.”

“You’re going.” March sighed. “Or I think you are. You said you’d go into this one—into Number Thirteen—with me if I’d go into Number Nineteen with you. Something like that. That’s what it came down to.”

“This is good.” Robin paused to sniff the fish on her fork. “Has anybody told you so yet? It’s really luscious, and you’d better finish yours before it gets cold.”

Obediently, Kit ate. “Food doesn’t taste as good when you’re scared.”

“Then I wish I weren’t,” March told her, “and you won’t be in Number Thirteen. Or I don’t think so. If you’d been in a modern abattoir, you’d know the cattle aren’t frightened. Fear makes them noisy and hard to control, so it’s been eliminated. They get on a slow belt that doesn’t shake at all, or make any kind of sound. It moves them down a narrow chute, and by that time they’re used to chutes. This one seems less frightening than most. But when they get to the bottom and start back up, they’re dead.”

“You’re not eating,” Kit said.

“I thought you’d have another question.” March took a forkful of trout and chewed it with appreciation. It was still delicious. Firm, fresh trout and tender, young spinach. Onions, shallots, cream, and something else. No, he corrected himself, several somethings else.

“Well, I do,” Robin said. “You told us you hadn’t been in there. Or implied it anyway.”

Seeing that March intended to ignore her, Kit asked, “Is that right, Windy? You’ve never been inside?”

“Correct.”

“Then how did you know I wouldn’t be scared?”

“Because the others weren’t. When I was still poking around the asteroid belt, I picked up the traffic of a party going in there. Or at least, I think that’s where they were going. They weren’t afraid. When the first stopped transmitting, the rest just tried to raise him. The last one thought her icom had gone out. About a minute later, she went silent, too.”

Robin said, “He may fool you, Kit, but he’s not fooling me. I know him too well. They went into the big one, the one he’s so scared of. Not the little one he’s been talking about.”

“Did they, Windy? Was it really Number Whatchacallit and not the one you want us to shoot next?”

“Number Nineteen,” March said. “The one I’m hoping will give you a little experience without killing us is Number Thirteen.”

“Thirteen?” Robin grinned. “Oooh! That’s scary!”

“Shut up,” March told her.

The grin widened. “You betcha. But I thought you weren’t talking to me, Marchy darling.”

“I wasn’t. It didn’t work, and I should have known it wouldn’t. You always chipped away until I said something you could throw back at me in court. You haven’t changed, and neither have I.”

He paused to collect his thoughts. When neither woman spoke, he said, “Sue doesn’t really care, Kit, but you may. If I’d been assigning numbers to the memorials I found for advertising purposes, Number Nineteen would have gotten thirteen. I wasn’t doing that. Number Thirteen was the thirteenth I found. That’s all. Number Nineteen was the nineteenth. I could take you to Number Fourteen or Number Twenty. Both those look pretty safe. Just say the word if you’d like to go.”

Kit said, “I’ve finished my trout, Windy. So has Robin. Finish yours, so I can serve dessert.”

“No salad? That’s not like you.”

“You’re right. I forgot. Eat your trout.”

“In a moment. Sue had—”

“It’s Robin, dammit!” She was untying her cord.

“It wasn’t Robin when Sue and I were married,” March told Kit, “and if she tries to live up to that red dye-job, I’ll have to defend myself. I hope you understand.”

“I’m bigger and stronger than she is,” Kit said levelly. “She may not know it, but I am. If she cuts up rough she’ll find out fast.”

“I’m a black belt!” Robin screamed.

“Sure you are—a black belt in Bad Sock Hop. You needed me when Jim kicked down your door, remember?”

March cleared his throat. “Right now I want to grab you and kiss you, Kit. I want it as much as I’ve ever wanted anything in my life. What do you say?”

“I think it had better wait. You know what we did last time.”

“All right.” March sighed. “Your friend Sue had a legitimate question. Could the people whose transmissions I caught have been going into Number Nineteen? There were three empty hoppers near Number Thirteen, so I think that’s where they went. I could be wrong.”

He took a bite of trout. As he had expected, it was still quite hot. “What’s in this, Kit? What’s the taste I can’t label?”

“Could be the fresh tarragon. Or the cider.” Kit grinned. “Or my secret ingredient.”

Robin muttered, “Watch for bones.”

THEY MET a mile plus from Number Thirteen, he in his worn orange suit, she looking like a lingerie model wrapped in cellophane. “We’re alone now,” he said, and gestured. “This is interplanetary space, so we’re as alone as two people can be. Will you marry me, Kit?”

“Robin’s listening, Windy. I told her to listen in, and call the network for help if we stopped transmitting.”

“Kit—”

“It’s just common sense. After what you’d told me, I thought we ought to take a few precautions. I told her to ask for Bad Bill, or Phil Inglis if she couldn’t get hold of Bill. Tell them we’re in trouble and ask for help.”

March did not know what to say, and if Kit did, she did not say it. Silence closed around them, the menacing silence of the giant planet above them and the cool and watchful silence of the stars.

At last Kit said, “Are you there, Robin? Speak up.”

“She probably doesn’t know how to work the set.”

“I showed her. Robin?”

“Maybe she’d rather listen than talk. That would be a first for her, but it’s possible.”

“Poor Robin.” Kit’s face, distorted only slightly by the plastic bubble of her helmet, looked as though she meant it. “You don’t want to admit that she might have a single shred of human decency.”

“All right, I admit it. She’s probably got one, even if I couldn’t find it.”

“You think she’s listening in.” From her expression, Kit thought it was at least possible.

“I don’t think it or not think it. I don’t care one way or another. But I’ll tell you this. If she is, she’ll let us know when she hears what I’m going to say next.”

He took a deep breath of far-from-odorless suit air. “I know I’m not handsome, Kit, and thanks to your friend Sue, I’m just about broke. You’re a star, and I’m a washed-up producer who was never terribly big anyway. Knowing all that—because I know you know it, too—will you marry me? Please? As soon as we get back to New York?”

Kit listened for a moment. “You’re right. She’d be screaming at me not to do it. She’s not there. Come on, let’s have a look at this mugger tomb.”

“You didn’t say no.” Suddenly March felt at least ten years younger.

“I didn’t say yes, either. The guy who sold me my suit said to lock arms.”

He complied, and she switched on her jets; a moment later he turned on his own as well.

“Looks pretty dark in there, Windy. You got a helmet light?”

“If you’d like to think it over, that’s fine.” For a moment he wrestled with his feelings. “All right, it isn’t really fine but I’ll wait. I’ll wait till tomorrow or next week or next month.”

“Thanks.”

“Or next year. I—I don’t know how to say this, but I’ll wait for as long as you ask me to, just as long as you don’t say no. And if you should change your mind after that, I’ll probably come running. Hell, I know I will. I love you. I love you, and I know I’ll never stop loving you. You’re . . . I can’t put it into words, Kit, but I’ll never get over it.”

Her hand tightened on his, and her smile shone through her plastic helmet bubble. “You’ve got a lovely voice, Windy. Anybody ever tell you so?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got a lousy voice and I know it. It sets people’s teeth on edge. No resonance, no overtones.”

“Handsome is as handsome does, Windy, and you’ve got a voice that says beautiful things. You just proved it.”

“Is that why you didn’t say no?”

“That and a whole lot of other reasons.” Kit pointed. “This fake lintel they carved out of the rock—what are those things pretending to hold it up? Is that a bird?”

“You didn’t say yes, either. Is it the money?”

“I’ve got enough for both of us. Tell me about the bird.”

“It’s an adjutant stork. The other animal is a jackal, I think. They’re symbols of death.”

“Don’t storks bring babies?”

“Not this kind. Those are nice storks. Won’t you tell me why you didn’t say yes, Kit?”

“Well, for one thing, you don’t say you love me often enough.”

“I just did.” When she did not reply, March added. “We’d better slow up.”

“Okay, I’m turning ’em down. Are you good with these controls?”

“Fair. Yours are probably a little different.”

“Then look at this and tell me why it’s not working.” Kit held out her left arm.

For a moment, he studied the buttons and the tiny screen. “You don’t have Jets up.” He pushed three buttons in rapid succession. The looming asteroid still rushed toward them, but it rushed no faster. “You’ve got to hit Control, select Jets, and press the Down key.”

“We’re still going awfully fast, Windy.”

“Of course we are. There’s no air resistance. Why didn’t you say yes? You said there were a lot of reasons. Give me two or three.”

“I gave you one already. I know you said it just now, but you don’t say it often. Bad Bill’s another. I want to get dramatic roles, not just kids shows and cooking shows, all that crap. Marrying you would hurt my career—or it would just now, anyway.”

“If he found out, yes. What are you going to say if Bad Bill asks you to marry him?”

“That he’ll have to dump Loretta.” Kit was grinning.

“And if he does?”

“It’ll take a while. I know her, and she’ll put up a fight. You could give lessons on that stuff, Windy. Why are you asking me?”

“And meanwhile—?”

“Meanwhile, I’ll get some roles I want. Can we slow down? I’m getting scared.”

“Wait till we get inside, Kit. Be scared then.” March spun them both until their reduced jets were braking.

“Can I give you another reason? One more.”

“That’s enough.”

“I want to. I didn’t say yes—yet—because it would hurt you. Bad Bill hates your guts already for showing him up. If we get married and he finds out, he’s going to hate you worse than poop on his birthday cake. It’ll be twenty times rougher than it is now.”

March chuckled. “It couldn’t be.”

“He could hire a hit. He’s got the contacts and the money won’t mean a thing to him. You can hire a good pro to smoke somebody for the price of a really nice hopper. Did you know that?”

“I’d heard.” March nodded.

“So how many nice hoppers could Bad Bill afford? I’d say a hundred. At least that many.”

Kit’s helmet LEDs stabbed invisibly at the entrance, which glared as though under a spotlight. “There! I got it on. Only it’s not as dark in there as it was.”

“Turn it off,” March told her. “Turn it off, and get your digicorder rolling. We want both digicorders for this one.”

They entered cautiously, he keeping them six feet above the stone floor.

“It looks safe enough, Windy.”

He glanced at her; the blue-green light of the tomb had robbed her face of rouge as well as blood. “Did Ms. Applefield say it was?”

Here lies the founder of our faith and prophet of the goddess. The voice might have been that of the blue-green illumination. Jayashankar the Great here reposes in his house of Eternity, as he wished. We, his disciples, have laid him here. Would you learn Truth, O visitors? Our faith is truth, and truth is joy. Like us, you are the subjects of the goddess. Know it. To know it, to rejoice in it, is paradise. Enter with—

“Kit!” March grabbed her arm, his fingers flying across her keyboard.

“What’s up, Windy!”

“Air! They’re flooding the place with air. Look behind you.”

She did, and saw what he had known she would see: a steel door blocking the entrance and pinning their lifelines to the floor. “Are . . . Are we locked in?”

You are free. There are switches to left and right, switch pads we have made large for you, so there can be no mistaking them. Black shuts, for black is the color of the goddess. Yellow opens. It will return you to the world of illusion. To open, you need only press the yellow pad to your right.

“You’re saying there’s air in here, Windy? That we could live in here without the suits?”

“There’s air in here, and you’ll die if you take off your helmet.” He unhooked her lifeline. “It’s poisoned—I don’t know what with.”

A new voice said, “If it were poisoned, we’d be dead.” It was a man’s voice, a resonant baritone.

A woman who was not Kit added, “We’ll die if you break the hermetic seal now. We’ve no suits, so we’ll suffocate. Please don’t.”

A naked man and a naked woman had emerged from hidden entrances on either side of the tomb, he tall and muscled like a bodybuilder, she sleek and big breasted, walking on her toes though she wore neither shoes nor boots. They crossed the stone floor as if subject to gravity, and smiled as they looked up at Kit and March. The man said, “For as long as you’re strangers in the paradise of the goddess, we shall guide you.”

“Holograms, Windy?” Kit looked as if she were about to cry. “I know they aren’t real. Are they holograms?”

The naked man reached up and grasped her boot at the ankle. “Come here, my lovely, lovely friend. Kiss me but once, and you may call me false thereafter.”

“They’re droids!” Kit’s other boot caught the naked man full in the face.

“Get up!” March unhooked his own lifeline. “Get out of reach.”

Scooping up the naked woman, he jetted toward the steel door and flung her at the right-hand switch. The arc that burned and melted her plastic skin half-blinded him.

“Up here, Windy!” Kit waved as a stone flung by the male droid struck his thigh.

He rose to meet her, and she hugged him. “We’re trapped. How can we get out?”

“Pray,” he said, and the Latin of an ancient prayer chanted in deep corridors of his mind.

“That won’t help!”

“It’ll keep us calm and let us think, Kit. Pretty often, that’s all it has to do.”

Another stone whizzed past them, a near miss.

“He’s breaking them loose,” Kit whispered. “My God, but he’s strong!”

“Nuclear powered?”

“Do you really think so, Windy? I—watch out! I didn’t think they could make them that little.”

“They can’t. It could be a fuel cell, but it’s most likely batteries, and they’ll have to be pretty small. The power draw he needs to bust that rock will be pulling him down fast. Have you noticed what happens to the ones he’s thrown?”

“They keep bouncing around. There’s no gravity.”

March nodded. “Just air resistance. It slows them a little, but it will take a long time to stop them. Suppose we catch a couple and—”

The steel door was sliding up, not quite soundlessly now that the interior of the tomb was filled with air. He shot toward it with all jets at one hundred percent and Kit trailing after him like a kite; Kit’s free arm caught Robin as she crossed the threshold.

Back in Kit’s hopper, with beverage bulbs bubbling in the microwave, March took a seat at the little table and tied himself down. “Grab a chair, Sue. I won’t bite.”

“It was dangerous in there, wasn’t it? That’s why you and Kit came out so fast.”

“We just about got killed,” Kit told her. “Windy saved us.”

“Sue saved us,” March said dryly. “She didn’t intend to, but she did.”

“Yes, I did! Not you, March, but Kit. She wanted me to listen on the icom and call for help if you two got in trouble, but I knew it would be too late. So I watched you instead and put on my Star-Chick Number Nine as soon as you had gone inside.”

Kit handed her a steaming beverage bulb. “We’d have been trapped in there and died if it hadn’t been for you.”

“I’d have gotten us out,” March said.

“Sure, Windy. Here’s your coffee.” Kit laid her vacuum tray on the table and sat down, groping for the cords that would hold her in her chair. “Now it’s Answer Time. Know what I mean? The last five minutes of the show, when Mike Wanitsky fiddles with his gun—”

Robin tittered.

“And tells us how he knew the cocker spaniel was the real murderer. You, Windy, are Mike Wanitsky.”

“Thanks. I’ve always wanted to be a really good-looking cop.”

“You just said you’d have gotten us out. How would you have done it?”

“I don’t know.” March sipped his coffee and jiggled the bulb to stir the sugar. “I just know that it could be done, and I could do it. Did you think there were people in there lying to us through the droids and running things? There weren’t.”

“I never even thought about it.”

“Nobody wants to spend weeks or months sitting around in a tomb waiting for somebody to come in. They build those things—the great majority of them were never meant to be traps for human beings—and go back to America or the E.U. or whatever. So what you’re dealing with when you go into one of the bad ones is a machine. It can be a sophisticated machine, which that one was. But it’s still just a machine, built by someone who didn’t have all the time in the world to plan it or all the money in the world to spend on it.”

Robin said, “So you’d have gotten out.”

“Correct. Maybe I’d have found the circuitry that controlled the door. Maybe something else. But I’d have gotten us out.”

“I want to go back to the beginning, Windy. You told us about overhearing some people’s transmissions from in there. Remember?”

“Sure. I believe I can remember something else, too.” March scratched his head. “Weren’t you the one who began at the end? That’s how I seem to remember it. I don’t think it was Sue, and I know damned well it wasn’t me.”

“Right. It was, and it was a mistake. You said the woman you overheard—it was a woman, wasn’t it?”

“That last one?” March nodded.

“You said she thought her icom had gone out and kept trying to talk to the others until she went dead herself. What happened to her?”

“Strictly speaking, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I might make a pretty good guess, though, now that I’ve been inside. What happens when you’re wearing a suit and you get into your hopper, where there’s air?”

Kit looked puzzled. “I take it off.”

“I know!” Robin waved both hands. “The salesman told me when I bought mine. It stops using the air in the tank and takes in air from outside.”

“Correct. You can disable that if you know the codes. If you do, you have to switch the system over manually when you want it switched. When you go into that Thuggee tomb, it shuts the door and fills the tomb with air to turn your suit air off. There’s something in that air to kill or disable you, something that has to be pretty dilute because the tomb’s big. The woman I heard may have been in an area where the air was relatively pure. Or maybe she wasn’t a deep breather or had a slow suit. Whatever.”

“Wouldn’t she have seen the others fall down?”

“Sure, if they’d fallen.” March grinned. “How do you fall without gravity? My guess is that they seemed to be moving around pretty normally. It probably makes you dopey at first. Later it may kill you, or the droids may do it. The idea of their machine offering lives to Death—real throats really cut on an altar—would tickle the kind of people who build things like that.” He sipped his coffee.

Kit said, “He grabbed my arm and reprogrammed my suit, Robin. As soon as the air started, he knew what was up.”

“Hooray.”

“Don’t be like that. Windy saved my life, and if he hadn’t I wouldn’t have been around to save yours. Besides we got some great footage. Only I wish you’d waited until we’d thrown rocks back at the droids.”

“We can go in there again,” March said.

“After Number Nineteen maybe. Not now. I’ve got one more question.”

“Fine with me, as long as I get to ask one after I’ve answered yours.”

“Yes, if you promise to be nice. Robin won’t bother us. Okay, here’s my last question. The floor was stone, right? But the droids walked on it, and stayed down there like there was gravity. Only there wasn’t any. How did they do it?”

March smiled. “That’s a good one, and I hadn’t even thought of it. You’ve got rare-earth magnets in your boots. You probably know that. It’s why you stick to the floor of this hopper till you take them off. They let you walk on the outside if you want to, stand on the roof and so on. Those droids had rare-earth magnets in the soles of their feet.”

Robin objected. “But it was a stone floor.”

“That’s right, Windy. Cut right out of the asteroid or whatever you call it.”

“A lot of asteroids and meteorites contain a lot of iron. Ever heard of Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword?”

Kit nodded.

“Now you know where the legend came from.” Pausing, March sipped his coffee. “Here’s my question for you. You knew right away that the droids weren’t real people. How?”

“I looked at the woman, that’s all. So did you. I know you did—she was naked and you’re not gay.”

“All right, I did.”

“She had a perfect figure, didn’t she? No figure flaws. None. Real women always do. Big feet or thick ankles. No calves, like Robin. Bony knees. Thunder thighs. There’s always something wrong. Women on vid can look perfect. So can women in magazines. But they look perfect because the cameramen and directors know just how not to shoot them. Watch the tabloids and you’ll see the other thing, the flaws that some paparazzi shot through the fence.”

There was another hopper not far from their own when March left Kit’s. Curious, he jetted a few miles, tapped the airlock politely with a wrench from his utility belt, and pressed his helmet to the hatch.

After half a minute, there had been no sound from inside. By law, airlocks could not be locked or barred; he was tempted to go inside and take a look around. He contented himself with a tour of the exterior.

It was, he decided, the oldest hopper he had ever seen, one that had actually begun life as an RV. Its pressure-bulged sides and top were battered, and had been holed more than once and patched with epoxy. Peering through its tinted windshield and windows revealed an interior to match—an unmade bunk, worn seats, cigarette butts and trash everywhere.

What it did not reveal was a human being. No one awake, asleep, or dead. When his inspection was complete, he jetted over to his own hopper—to the pre-owned hopper he had considered ready for the scrap heap before he had seen the one he was leaving.

He had taken off his helmet and was pulling off his boots when he smelled cigarette smoke.

“I hope you don’t mind me coming in like this,” the smoker said; he was young, with a face a quarter of an inch too long to be handsome. “Okay if I smoke in here? You’ve got a good air system. It’s taking care of it.”

“Sure.” March opened his suit. “What’s up?”

“I need to talk to you, that’s all. I need a little info, and it seemed like this was the place to get it. You were over in the big hopper you’re grappled to? The new maroon job?”

“Uh huh.”

“Okay. Listen, I just want one little piece of info. Just one, and I don’t think there’s anything secret about it. I could go over and pound on the lock, and somebody would tell me, okay? So who does that big hopper belong to?”

“I want some info, too,” March said, “and the info I want had better not be secret either. Let’s start with an easy one. Is this a friendly visit?”

“Absolutely. I know you must be ticked off because I came in the way I did.” The smoker ran slender fingers through glossy, coal-black hair. “But my jetsuit’s pretty uncomfortable, and to tell the truth I’m not sure how far I can trust it.”

“Besides,” March said, “you couldn’t smoke in there.”

“Right. I realize I’m using up some extra oxy that way, but it doesn’t amount to much.”

“That’s good to know. Here’s question number two. Want some coffee?”

“Sure, if you do.”

“I do.” March climbed out of his suit and stowed it in the locker. “I’m kind of bushed, and I’ve got the feeling you’re not somebody I ought to deal with unless I’m fresh.” He went to his hopper’s tiny microwave.

“You don’t have to deal with me.” The smoker bent to grind out his cigarette on March’s floor. “Tell me what I want to know—that one thing—and I’m out of here. You can go to bed.”

“Wondering whether you’ll come back inside once I’m asleep.”

“Yeah.” The smoker looked thoughtful. “There’s that. I won’t, but you can’t know it. You could hop somewhere else. Take a long hop. I wouldn’t know where you’d gone.”

March shook his head. “I’ve got another question. What’s my name?”

“What’s your name? I thought you’d want to know mine.”

“You can ask your own questions. I’ll ask mine. You heard it. Who am I?”

“I’ve got no frigging—I don’t know. You want to tell me?”

“No. I want you to tell me. Tell me who I am, so I’ll know where we stand.”

“I can’t. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know who owns the big red hopper, either.” March reached past the locker to his tool box, flipped it open, and pulled out a two-pound dead-blow hammer.

“You’re not going to need that.”

“I hope not. Think you could take me?”

The smoker shook his head. “Not as long as you’re holding that I couldn’t.”

“Good.” The tool box snapped shut. “If you answer every question I ask, fast, I won’t have to use it. Did you snoop around my hopper?”

“A little bit, yes.”

“Fine.” The microwave beeped, but March ignored it. “What were you looking for?”

“An ashtrap and cigarettes. I don’t have many. If I found any, I was going to bum one.”

“There are at least twenty books in this hopper. Maybe more. Did you look at them? Any of them?”

The smoker shook his head. “Just for an ashtrap and cigarettes. I told you.”

“I asked you that because my name’s written in the front of most of them. I’m March Wildspring. Ever heard of me?”

The smoker’s grin took March by surprise.

“You have,” March said. “Tell me about it.”

“I’ve just heard you mentioned a couple dozen times. You’re a real dyed-in-the-wool son of a bitch. That’s what she says. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“Congratulations. You have. Who said it?”

“My wife. Her name’s Robin Redd.”

March nodded to himself, recalling Robin’s swollen eye and bruised cheek. “I should have seen that coming, and I didn’t. You’re Jim.”

“Right.” The smoker extended his hand. “Jim Redd. Glad to meet you.”

March ignored it. “You bought that old hopper—the cheapest one you could find—and came out here looking for your ex-wife.”

“Hell, no.” Redd shook a cigarette from a vacpack, crumpled the pack, and stuffed it into his pocket. “I’m looking for my wife, Robin Redd.”

“She says you’re divorced.”

“Bullshit. Me and Robin aren’t divorced till it’s final, and that hasn’t happened. No final decree, capeesh? I’m fighting to save my marriage, and I’m going to keep on fighting as long as there’s a marriage to save.”

March sighed. “You’ve come way the hell out here, millions of miles, looking for her?”

“Right.”

“So you can beat hell out of her and save your marriage.”

Redd lit his cigarette. “I wouldn’t put it like that.”

“How would you put it?”

“I want to talk to her, that’s all. I want to sit her down and make her listen to what I’ve got to say. If she’ll just shut up for a minute and hear my side of it, she’ll come home with me. I know that. The trick is to get her to shut up and listen. Out here, I thought maybe she would.”

“Would you care to tell me what you plan to say to her?”

Redd inhaled and allowed the smoke to trickle from his nostrils before answering. “What I want or don’t want doesn’t matter. I can’t tell you, because you’re not her.”

“I see. Sue and I—I call her Sue. She was Sue Morton when we were married, and Sue Morton afterward, too. She kept her own name.”

“I wouldn’t have let her do that.”

March’s shoulders rose and fell. “I did. I let her do anything she wanted.”

“She dumped you anyhow? That’s what she says—that she dumped you. Maybe you dumped her.”

“No. She dumped me.”

“It makes you crazy, just thinking about it. I can see that.”

March nodded.

“Okay, that’s how it is for you. I don’t want it to be like that for me, capeesh? I’d like to have you on my team. But if you’re on her team, that’s okay, too. I only want what’s good for her, which is staying married and making this one work.”

“She says you hit her.” March struggled to remember. Had anyone really said that Jim had done it? Or had it only been implied?

“A few times. Yeah. She got me so damned mad. Ask me if I’d break her arms to save our marriage.”

“Would you?” March sighed again.

“Hell, yes. Can I tell you about the names? I’ll feel better.”

“If you like.”

“I picked her up for a date one time, and she showed me a paper. A legal paper, you know? It said she’d changed her name. You have to have a lawyer and pay a couple thou, but you can do that. Her new name was Robin Redd. I go what the fuck, we’re not even engaged. And she said when we got married she didn’t want to change her name. It would be putting herself down—she had a fancy word, but that was what it meant. So this way she could tell everybody she was keeping her old name.”

March glanced at his wristwatch. It was twenty-four hundred. Midnight. Aloud, he said, “I guess that meant a lot to her.”

“Then after we were married, she told people we had the same last name because I’d changed mine to match hers. She said my real name was Rosso. That was my grandfather’s name, and I’d told her one time. My dad changed it. You see where I’m coming from, March?”

“Not as well as you do yourself.” How could he be this tired without gravity? “I need sleep. I’m going to offer you a bargain. You can accept it or reject it, but you have to leave this hopper promptly either way. Is that clear?”

“I got it.”

“Fine. You promise not to go to the big maroon hopper tonight. Everybody in there’s asleep anyway, and I don’t want you waking them up. In the morning—let’s say ten o’clock—I’ll go there with you and introduce you.”

“I get to go inside? To see them?”

Wearily, March nodded.

“Then it’s a deal.” Redd extended his hand again; this time March accepted it and they shook.

When Redd had gone, March got some coffee, icommed Kit, and stayed on until she answered. “This better be important, Windy. I was sound asleep.”

“I don’t think it is, but you will. You were the one who hauled Sue out here. Have you been looking out your windows lately?”

“No. Tell me.”

“There’s an old beat-up hopper out there. Blue originally, but showing a lot of gray primer and rust. It’s Jim’s, and he was ready to pay you a little visit tonight.”

“Can he do that?”

“Legally, yes. All he has to do is claim he has some kind of emergency. If he does, you’ve got to let him in. He may not know that, but it’s the law.”

“Or he might.”

“Bingo. I got him calmed down and promised I’d bring him over myself tomorrow at ten. That’s today now. This morning.”

“I see . . . Does he know Robin’s here?”

“No. But he suspects it pretty strongly. Strongly enough for him to turn your hopper inside out looking for her.”

“Unless you’re around to stop him.”

“Unless we both are. He’s at least ten years younger than I am, and he may have a gun or a knife—he’s the type. The thing for you to do is hop back to Kennedy, and I mean right now. Shove Sue out of your hopper as soon as you get there and tell her that her trip’s over. In a day or two you can come back here if you want. Or not.”

Slowly, Kit said, “I won’t do it, Windy.” In the screen, her face looked troubled.

“You’d better change your mind. I told Jim I’d bring him over at ten. I like to keep my word.”

“I know you do, Windy. It’s one of the things I love about you. Have I said that?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t go back on mine, either. We’re a couple of old-fashioned people, Windy. We belong together. Don’t worry about Robin or me. We’ll think of something.”

“I hope so.” He felt he was about to choke. “I love you, Kit. The two of us can handle him. I can handle him alone if I have to.”

A sad nod and a blown kiss, and she was gone. He muttered “out,” switching the icom function back to Standby.

NEXT MORNING, over coffee and a single-pouch self-heating breakfast, March pondered strategy. Would it be better to arrive promptly, or to give Kit more time to prepare?

Prepare what? What preparations were possible? She might try to coach Robin on ways of dealing with men, but Robin had been as unteachable as anyone he had ever known. Granted, Kit was probably a better teacher, and Kit was certainly better positioned to teach.

If he waited for Redd to come and get him, he could achieve the maximum possible delay—but only if Redd actually came. What if Redd waited until ten, then jetted over to Kit’s hopper alone? What if Redd didn’t wait, for that matter? It might be best if he went to Kit’s hopper now and waited for Redd there.

He glanced at his watch. It was already nine fifteen; he suited up and jetted to Redd’s hopper. Three raps on Redd’s airlock elicited three answering raps from inside. He opened the airlock, entered the tiny chamber, and shut the hatch behind him. In half a minute, the second hatch opened. “You’re early,” Redd told him.

March nodded. “I thought we ought to talk about what we’re going to do when we get there.”

“If you mean discuss it, there’s nothing to discuss. I can tell you straight out. Want some coffee?”

It would have to be found and microwaved. March said he did.

“Sit down. Espresso? Cappuccino?”

“Just coffee, thanks. Whatever you have.”

“One espresso doppio and one caffè Americano. I’m a coffee snob. I bet you’d never have guessed.”

“You’d win.”

“My family’s in ice cream. One of these days I want to open a coffee shop. There’s a hell of a lot of coffee shops, and the coffee stinks.” Redd put two bulbs into a microwave that looked older than he did and shut the door. “Ready before you can fart. I’ll sell coffee and Dad’s ice cream. Con him into putting some money into it. I could make it go.”

“I’m sure you could,” March told him.

“Damn right. Arabica, the real thing, roasted and ground in my kitchen that morning. Made right, in clean equipment. Most guys have never had a decent cup of coffee.”

“What are you doing now? Got a good job?”

“Pretty good. I’m a sound man at UDN. Or I was, before I quit to look for her. Same place Robin works. You used to work there, too.”

The microwave buzzed.

“I’ll get it. Sit tight.”

It was good coffee just as Redd had promised. March sipped and sipped again, finding that the flavor improved with repetition.

“That’s arabica. I filled the bulbs before I left and froze them. Robusta’s what you’ve been drinking. Arabica’s better, smoother, more complex. Less caffeine, but you can’t have everything.”

March smiled. “It takes a long time for some of us to learn that.”

“Her, you mean. Robin. You’re right, she hasn’t. Nobody’s good enough for her. You weren’t and I’m not either.”

“But you can bring her around just by talking?”

“You watch. You wanted to know what we’d do when we got there. Only last night you wouldn’t say she was there. She is and I know it. You wouldn’t be acting like you are if she wasn’t.”

“I never refused to tell you that.” March set his bulb on the wheezing old vacuum table. “I wouldn’t tell you who owns the big hopper. You never asked about your wife.”

“I’m asking now.”

“And I’m answering. Yes. She’s in there, staying with the owner.”

“You out here trying to get her back?”

“Hell no.” March rubbed his big jaw. “I’d spit on your floor, but you’d try to break my nose for it and it’s been broken twice already. You can have her. Anybody can have her as far as I’m concerned. And if you’ll just take her to a town that I’ve never heard of on some God-forsaken island, I’ll go dancing down the street.”

Redd tossed his empty bulb to the table surface. “That’s good. I’d fight you for her, and I’d beat you. Only I like you and don’t want to. Couple more questions before we go? These might help me.”

March glanced at his watch. “Sure.”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me who owns the big hopper?”

“Because she’s a woman and I was afraid you’d go over there and push her around when I wasn’t looking.”

“But I wouldn’t push around a guy? Hey, I’ve pushed around quite a few.”

“I believe you. I thought you might be more careful, just the same. Wait for me to take you over this morning.”

Redd grinned. “Okay, I’ve waited. Finish your coffee and let’s go.”

March was still in his suit when Redd stepped from Kit’s airlock and took off his helmet. “Here he is,” March said. “Kit, this is Sue’s husband, Jim Redd. Jim, this is Kit Carlsen. You’ve probably seen her at work.”

“Other places, too.” Redd hesitated, then smiled. “The lady with the big knife.”

“That’s me,” Kit told him. “Back then, we hadn’t been properly introduced, Jim. Now we have. Shake?”

“Sure.” He opened his suit and pushed it toward his knees. “Pleased to meet you properly, Kit. Only I want to say Ms. Carlsen, because that’s what we had to call you while you were hosting Kids’ Klassics.”

“You worked on that?” Kit tilted her head.

“Great body language, Ms. Carlsen. Nobody in the business does it better.”

“Thanks, but I still don’t remember you.”

“I filled in for Don Ayres when he was on vacation or sick, Ms. Carlsen.”

“He’s a sound tech,” March explained.

“Like Robin?”

Redd nodded. “I taught her while we were together. I thought she could get a job at the network and make us a little extra. She waited till she got on there and dumped me. She’s a good dumper. Ask March.”

Kit nodded. “He’s told me already. She dumped you, but you’ve come way out here where people don’t belong to get her and take her back to New York.”

“To talk to her so she’ll come back with me willingly. Right. I’m not a kidnapper, Ms. Carlsen, no matter what Robin’s told you. With a couple of witnesses, I’m sure as shit not a kidnapper.”

“You wouldn’t hit her?”

Redd kicked off his suit and stowed it in a locker with his helmet.

“Would you hit her?” Kit repeated. “I’d like to know.”

“I know you would, and I had to think it over so I could give you an honest answer. I want to be honest with you, Ms. Carlsen. I don’t want to lie to somebody I admire so much. I want her to sit down and listen to me. No jumping up screaming. No yelling about cops or bad things she said I did. Things I really didn’t do, by the way. You won’t believe that, but it’s the truth. They’re lies she made up so she could dump me, and she’s said them over and over to me and everybody she’s ever talked to until she practically believes them herself.”

“I hear you.”

“Only if I had to bat her a couple of times to get her to sit down and shut up, I’d do it. Nothing she wouldn’t get over in a day or two. So will I smack her? I don’t want to, but I will if I have to. You want to tell her to come out, Ms. Carlsen? If you don’t, I’m going to go looking for her.”

March said, “She’s not here. I know you won’t believe me, but she’s not. Tell him, Kit.”

Kit shook her head. “He won’t believe me.”

“Yes, I will, Ms. Carlsen. Tell me.”

March picked up his helmet, replaced it, and began to screw it back on.

“Windy—that’s Mr. Wildspring to you—told me you were here looking for Robin and that the two of you would come here this morning. I woke her up and told her about it. I said we wouldn’t let you force her to do anything she didn’t want to do. She wanted me to go to the tomb Windy calls Number Nineteen with her. She said we could hide in there until you went away. I told her hell no, Robin, you’re out of your mind. We talked about it for a while before we went back to bed. When I got up this morning, she was gone.”

“Merda! La fica stupida!” Redd slammed his fist into his palm. “If that isn’t just like her.”

March added, “Her suit’s gone, too. She may actually have gone into Nineteen. If so, she’s probably dead. You’ll want to search this hopper before you do anything else. I know the memorials. You and Kit don’t. Give me your word you won’t hurt Kit, and I’ll try to find Robin.”

Kit said, “You can look anywhere you want. I already have. Just don’t make a mess.”

“To hell with that!” Redd jerked open the fiberglass locker door. “I’m going with March.”

“You mean you trust me?” Kit looked—and sounded—slightly stunned.

“If she’s here, she’s safe.” Redd was climbing back into his suit. “She’s safe, and I’ll catch up to her sooner or later. If she’s in some crazy graveyard out in space, she could die. She doesn’t have sense enough . . .”

March closed the airlock behind him and heard no more.

Had Number Nineteen been on the farther side of Jupiter, it would have been necessary to hop, making certain that the speed of the hopper was sufficient to keep it in or near its new orbit when the hop was completed. Number Nineteen was not, but close by—threateningly close to someone who suspected it as deeply as March did.

Back on his own hopper, he cast off from Kit’s. Once inside, he hooked up his lifeline, edged the hopper within a hundred feet, and looked down at his utility belt. Its adjustable wrench, its long black flashlight, and its multi-tool had gotten him out of danger . . .? He tried to count them. Three times? No, five. Five at least.

“One more,” he whispered. “Just once more, please. After this I’ll go home and never come out here again. I swear to God.”

God was everywhere, or so they said. If so, God was on his utility belt just now. Certainly he was praying to his utility belt. He smiled at the thought.

And God was in Number Nineteen. A dark and vengeful God, perhaps.

There were multiple entrances to Number Nineteen. Six that he could recall, although he had never counted them. His orange lifeline would show Jim Redd which he had taken, if it did nothing else.

Would show Redd, that is, if Redd actually came.

No trailing lifeline revealed the way Robin had gone; she had used none, obviously. One entrance was as good as another; and she might have chosen another memorial in preference to this, no matter what she had said to Kit. She might actually be hiding in Kit’s hopper, for that matter.

Passing through his airlock, he stood alone with God in the inhuman desolation of space. Overhead, where he had to crane his neck to see it, spun the huge, semi-spherical rock that might be Hell.

The entrance he chose conformed to no architecture with which he was familiar, a wide, circular port whose smooth black sides might have been metal or polished stone. With his digicorder rolling, he jetted cautiously into it.

“Welcome to paradise.” The voice was female, warm, and friendly; it seemed to come from nowhere in particular.

“Thanks.” March spoke into his mike. “I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“You’re here.” The voice giggled. “Well, just about here, anyway. You have to go through our airlock. I’ll bet you never thought paradise would have an airlock.”

“Or an angel to greet me.” March was looking for the airlock and for the source of the female voice.

“It’s got both. I’m a watcher. That’s what we call people like me. My name’s Penny.”

“Shouldn’t it be Angela?”

“Nope. Penny the Angel. Angela’s the blonde. We take turns, us angels. It’s my turn, so you’re mine. What’s your name?”

He told her, and she said, “Well, you’re looking too close, March Wildspring.”

He switched on his helmet light. The airlock was deeper in and several steps up, by far the largest he had ever seen. “That looks like a whole room in there.”

“It is—we’ve got gravity here. Did you notice?”

“I’ve noticed I settled to the floor.”

“Right. And you can walk to our airlock, if you’re careful not to bounce. Part of our gravity really is gravity like you get on Earth. This rock’s real big. It’s bigger than the moons of Mars and dense. There’s lots of iron in the rock, and that makes it heavy. There’s a lot of something else, too, that’s heavier. Come in and I’ll show you.”

March had not moved. “You could tell me now.”

“No, I can’t. It’s against the rules. There’s other things—a whole lot of them—you have to see first. The rest of our gravity’s turning, only it’s not real gravity. It just feels like it. When you were outside you must have seen how fast this rock turns.”

Certain by now that she could see him, March nodded.

“He turns it. So it doesn’t feel exactly like Earth, but there’s enough to keep our bones strong. You know what happens to people who spend too much time in hoppers.”

“Sure.”

“It’s called osteopor’sis. Your bones lose calcium and break easy. Only it won’t happen here. Won’t you come in? It’s paradise, and you don’t have to stay.”

“That’s good, assuming it’s true.”

“Only everybody does. Everybody wants to stay. I did. You will, too.”

March cleared his throat. “Before I come in, I want to ask one question. Just one. Answer it, and I’ll come in. Did a girl calling herself Robin come in a few hours ago?”

“Ouch.” The young woman sounded genuinely unhappy. “I wish I could tell you, only I can’t. There’s seven gates. Each gate gets a watcher—we take turns. When somebody comes like you just did, the watcher goes around with them to show them, and the new watcher takes over. I’ve been on this gate for three sleeps, so she didn’t come in through Number Four. But she could have come in through one of the others. I wouldn’t know.”

“Is there any way to find out?”

“Of course.” The young woman’s voice was serious. “You can come inside and look. You know what she looks like, don’t you?”

“Yes. Would you like me to describe her?”

“It wouldn’t do any good. I can’t leave this gate till somebody comes, and she’ll look different anyway. Better. Everybody looks better in here.”

“Are you saying I wouldn’t recognize her if I saw her?” March found he was walking toward the airlock. He wondered just when he had begun, but kept going.

“No. No, I’m not. Not really. Only it might be a while before you knew it was her. Everybody looks better. Sometimes a whole bunch better. We still look like us, but older if we’re young and younger if we’re old. Prettier, too. You know.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“You will. Come in and you’ll see.”

“So you can leave your gate.” He had stopped in front of the airlock.

“No, not a bit. It’s nice here. You’ll see that, too. Besides, my friends come around to talk and bring me stuff. Nobody minds being watcher. Nobody minds anything here.”

“That’s good.”

“Except one thing. I’ll tell you about that later, after you’ve seen. I’ve never done it, but I guess it can be icky.”

“I can leave whenever I want to?”

“You won’t want to. Just climb in, and I’ll shut the big door for you.”

“But I can?”

“Naturally you can. Only the people who leave don’t want to. That’s the thing I said could be bad. Leaving. I’ll tell you all about it later.”

He mounted the few steps, and the hatch swung swiftly shut behind him. This airlock was the size of a small room. There were chairs, pictures on the walls, and a fireplace, complete with fire. He walked toward it for a better look, and discovered that the hatch had severed his lifeline. “Hey!” he said.

Then, “Penny? Are you still there?”

There was no reply.

The fireplace was real and so was the fire. The logs, however, were not. Some flammable gas with a small feed of oxygen, March decided.

He heard his air supply switch over, and thought of returning it to suit air but did not. The new air he breathed smelled better, a clean fresh smell as though it had known a windswept meadow by the sea. Walking around the airlock quickly, he found that he was not dizzy and was not blacking out.

“This,” he told his mike, “is surely the strangest of all the memorials, as well as the biggest. If Penny’s not a real and living person, her voice certainly conveys that impression.”

A wall of the room swung back. “Welcome,” the girl standing a foot beyond its arc told him. She sketched a curtsy, lifting a diaphanous scarlet skirt. “Welcome to paradise, Mr. March Wildspring. May you remain long and return soon.”

“Thank you.” He stepped down from the airlock, and discovered that he was smiling. “Okay if I take off my helmet?”

“Oh, yes! Aren’t you sure there’s air here? If there wasn’t, I’d die.”

“I know there is.” He unscrewed his helmet. “You’d die if you’re real. Are you?”

“You betcha!” She giggled. “Want to touch?”

“Sure. Give me your hand.”

“You can’t feel much through that glove. I know. I used to have a suit like that, only mine was white and not so big. I kept wanting to take the gloves off.”

“Your hand.”

She held it out. “It doesn’t have to be there. You could touch other places. I wouldn’t mind.”

Leaving the airlock, he took her hand. “You’re not a hologram.”

“Of course not. I’m a real live person. Not exactly like you because of the sex thing. Only real close. How do you like me up top?”

“Good.” He nodded thoughtfully. “Nice molding.”

“I’m not molded! I grew up. I’m a real person, too. Kissing would prove it. Want to kiss?”

“Later, maybe. Right now I’d like to see paradise.”

“That’s good. Take off your suit. I’ll put it in one of these box things for you.”

“I’ll keep it on. I’m holding onto my helmet, too.”

“That way everybody will know you’re new, March. It’ll be a lot of trouble. You’ll see.”

“But I can keep it if I want to?”

“I guess so.” She sounded doubtful. “I’ve never done this before. Watched a gate. This is my first time and they never said anything about suits. So I guess you can. Or if you can’t, somebody will tell us. Only I’ll be in trouble.”

“I’ll explain that it was my fault.”

“Thanks.” She led him past the wall-mounted lockers and the benches on which newcomers presumably sat to take off their boots, and into a wide and apparently sunlit room. A well-remembered face pontificated about politics on a digivid there, too proud to notice the incomplete jigsaw puzzle on the floor before him. A dozen plates held half-finished food, and dolls and a teddy bear occupied comfortable-looking chairs; on the farther side of the room a wide arch opened out onto what appeared to be a sunlit garden on Earth.

He hurried to it, then stopped to stare.

“Isn’t it pretty?”

Slowly he nodded.

“How about me? You can see me better in this light. Aren’t I pretty, too?”

Turning, he studied her. “You are. You’re really quite beautiful.” It was the truth.

She laughed, delighted, and smoothed her lustrous coppery hair with both hands.

“Is it all right if I jump?”

“You better not. People turn around funny sometimes. Come down on their heads.”

“I’ll risk it.” Gathering all his strength, he sprang into the air, rising to a height of twenty feet or more. The garden spread as far as he could see, its low hills dotted with little sunlit lakes, trees, tents, airy cottages, and fountains. A quick sweep of his digicorder took it all in—or so he hoped. Skillful manipulation of his suit jets landed him on his feet.

“You’re good at it,” the young woman told him.

“Not really.” He grinned. “I’m wearing a lot of heavy gear and not as young as I used to be. In a way that was an advantage. I knew I wouldn’t come down any faster than I had gone up.”

“Want something to eat? Or just walk around?”

“Just walk around. I’d like to talk to some other people.”

“In your orange clothes?” She giggled. “You will.”

They had not gone more than a thousand yards when they were surrounded by a crowd. More than once, he had found himself in crowds of actors at parties, and the feeling was much the same. Not all the men were tall, but most were handsome; those who were not, were attractive without being handsome, with kind, honest faces suggestive of good humor or sparkling wit.

The women were cute. Or pretty. Or beautiful. All of them.

He raised his hands for silence. “I’m looking for a missing woman. Her name’s Robin Redd, and I think she ran in here because she thought a man named Jim was going to kill her. I’m not Jim. I’m a friend . . .” He let his arms drop.

“Not a friend.” The speaker was a silver-maned man who looked as though he might once have been a judge—or played one on vid. “Who are you, then?”

“I used to be her husband, sir.”

“If she’s in here she’s safe, son. Perfectly safe.”

A score of voices seconded him.

“Why do you want to take her back to a place of danger?”

March drew a deep breath—air so clean and pure it might have come from a mountain top. “I’ll take her back only if she wants to go, sir. If she wants to stay here, that’s fine. But I want to know where she is, because she may need help if she’s not here. Do you know?”

The silver mane was shaken. “I do not, but I’ll try to find out. What’s your name, son?”

“March Wildspring.”

The young woman said, “Marchy hasn’t decided to stay yet, Barney. How can I talk him into it?”

Someone in the crowd asked, “Just talk?” and there was laughter.

The silver-maned man joined it with a throaty chuckle. “When he’s seen a few more like you—”

Quickly, the young woman raised an admonitory hand. “That’s enough of that. Please! He’ll think I’m easy. I’m not, Mr. Wildspring. Don’t let this dress fool you. Nobody wears much in the way of clothes in here.”

A beefy man with a likable grin pointed to March. “Nobody but you, that is.”

It got another laugh.

“Folks!” March raised his voice. “I’m looking for Robin Redd. I don’t want to hurt her.” He scanned the crowd through the viewfinder of his digicorder. “If any of you know her, will you please tell her March is looking for her? She can stay here if she wants to, or I’ll take her back if she’d prefer to go.”

That raised the biggest laugh of all.

A RUSTIC BRIDGE crossed one of several small lakes. The young woman paused halfway across to point out their reflections in the water. “Look there, Mr. Wildspring. See how good-looking you are?”

He did, seeing a grimly handsome man with abundant brown hair and finely chiseled features; this flattering reflection wore what appeared to be a Day-Glo orange military spacesuit. The young woman beside him was clearly the young woman with him. He raised an arm; the reflection raised an arm as well.

“Aren’t we an attractive couple?”

“Yes,” he said, “we certainly are.”

“If you were to take off all those clothes, would you just throw them away?”

“No. No, Penny, I certainly wouldn’t want to do that. If I were to take them off, I’d want a safe place to put them, a place I could find again without much trouble. I’d want to be able to get them back in a hurry if I needed them.”

“That’s good.” The young woman looked thoughtful. “He might want to send you out. He does that sometimes. They can come back later, I think. But they have to go if he says so.”

“He runs this? What’s his name?”

“I don’t know, but there’s a big statue of him in a park. We could probably find out there. Everybody just says ‘he.’ Everybody knows what it means.”

“I’d like to see that statue and take some pictures.” March indicated his digicorder. “But first I’d like to go on across and get a few of you posing in the middle of this bridge. It should be a lovely shot. Can I do that?”

“It sounds like fun.” She smiled. “Just tell me what poses you’d like.”

“I will. You’re not afraid I’ll run off on my own?”

She cocked her head, looking more charming than ever. “Are you going to?”

“No.”

“That’s good. Strangers need somebody. A guide. That’s why we do it. But you wouldn’t have to trick me. Anytime you want to go, you can do it. I’ll go back to the gate and wait for you.”

“All right, I’ll remember that. But wouldn’t he have sent somebody else to watch the gate by now?”

“I suppose. I guess so. How’d you like me to pose?”

“Sitting on the railing, I think.”

“So you can get my legs. You’re right, I’ve got good legs. How’s this?”

It was fine, her long, smooth legs out over the water, one delicately rounded calf resting on the rail, the foot of the other leg hooked around one of the supports, and her gossamer skirt hiked halfway up her thighs. He backed down the bridge, passing a sleeping man and shooting as he went, stopped his digicorder briefly to note the precise number on its whirling dial, and shot more from the bank.

When he rejoined her, he said, “That was beautiful. I’ve got a couple of questions now. No, three questions. All right if I ask them?”

Her smile would have melted stone. “If I can’t answer, we’ll find somebody who can.”

“First question. If this were Earth, people would’ve cut their names into this rail. Hearts, with MW plus KC. All that kind of stuff. Nobody’s carved anything in this one. Why is that?”

“On Earth we do it so people will remember.” The young woman said slowly, “and so we’ll remember ourselves. We think maybe it will never happen, he’ll dump me or I’ll dump him. But years from now when I’ve almost forgotten, maybe I’ll see this. I’ll think, oh yeah, he wasn’t good-looking or talented, but he had the best heart. If things had gone a little differently . . .”

March said, “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“You didn’t. I was just thinking. It’s all different now. Different here. That’s what I think. We know we’re going to remember this place and the people we love here. Remember everything about it forever and ever. What’s hard is remembering how it was before we got here. Like, I used to have a little apartment back on Earth. It was just two rooms and a bath, and nothing in it could be very big at all. There was a cabinet I couldn’t open that had been built into a corner a long time ago and painted white. The white paint had stuck the doors shut.”

“I understand.” He laid a hand on her shoulder.

“I was pretty sure there was nothing in there, but I always wondered. Now I’m here, and it feels like it happened a long, long time ago to somebody else. Somebody in a show I saw one time, and I wish she’d broken that cabinet open.”

The young woman slid from the railing, cocked her head, and smiled. “That wasn’t a good answer, but I don’t think I can answer any better. You said three questions.”

“I did.” March sighed. “Here’s the next. There’s no litter on the lakeshore and no junk floating in the water. There aren’t even any cans for garbage. Why not?”

“Because it’s ours. This whole place is ours. He gave it to us. We’re his, and we own this. It’s where we live. On Earth everything belongs to the government, really. In America it does, anyway. They pretend it’s yours, but do something they don’t like and you’ll find out. This really is ours. We can cut down the trees and pick the flowers, but we don’t want to. Not mostly. If there were more people, it might be different.”

“He sends some away, you said.”

Looking pensive, the young woman nodded. “He might send me away someday. I hope not.”

“They go back to Earth?”

She nodded again.

“What do they do there?”

“I don’t know, and that’s more than three. All right, I do. They do whatever he’s asked them to, and when they get it all done they get to come back.”

“Those weren’t my third question,” March said, “just follow-ups. Here’s the third. When I jumped and looked around, I could see little houses, and when we were up on the bridge I could see two and a tent. Do they have vids in there? Any of them? You had a vid in your room at the gate.”

“I’m not sure, but I think that anybody who wants one gets one. Some people don’t. Is there something you want to watch?”

“Yes. I used to work for UDN, and—well, it’s kind of complicated. But there are things I want to see. Maybe even things I want to show you. There’s no hurry, though. Let’s go look at his statue.”

It was large and imposing, but not at all what March had expected. An elderly man, bald and rather fat, knelt. His enormous bronze hands were held out to those who had followed a narrow and seemingly aimless path through a wilderness of flowers. They seemed to shelter a sleeper at his feet.

“He looks like my father,” March murmured.

“Like my grandfather,” the young woman said. “I’ve never been here. I’m new, and I hadn’t gotten around to it. If I’d known how beautiful it was, I’d have come sooner.”

March retreated to the path. “I’m going to pan the gardens and stop on you, looking at the statue. Look up at it while you count to ten, normal speed, then turn and look at me and smile.”

She did. When he appeared to have stopped recording, she said, “I’ve found a little notice that tells you about it. The statue’s twelve feet high, and the figure of the Founder would be twenty-three feet high if he were standing up. The bronze is eight inches thick. Most statues like this are thin, it said, but they could make this one almost solid because its base sits right on the solid rock of this asteroid. Is it an asteroid? That’s what they said.”

“I suppose. Does it give his name?”

“Let me see. ‘It is composed of copper, tin, and gold, the proportions being fifty, forty, and ten; all three metals were mined during the excavation of the perfect world in which you stand. The sculptors worked from photographs and digivid recordings made during the last years of the Founder’s life. The ancient lost wax method was employed to create the statue, although it required wax brought from Earth. His body has perished, but his mind lives on and is your god.’ No name. It doesn’t name the artists, either.”

“It would be an interesting thing to know,” March said. “I’m going to keep trying to find out. How many people are there in here?”

The young woman shook her head. “I have no idea.”

“Guess.”

She hesitated. “I’m going to say five hundred. About that.”

“I would have said fewer. Half that, maybe. Even if you’re right, it should be possible to ask all of them.”

“About this girl Robin Redd?”

“No. I know where she is, Penny. The name of the Founder’s going to be harder, I think.”

“I don’t, because I don’t believe you know where that girl is. You couldn’t.”

“I do.” March sounded as tired as he felt. “You—”

The statue spoke, surprising them both. Its voice was deep, resonant, and kind. “I am pleased—oh, wonderfully pleased—to announce that we have been joined by four this wake. That is the highest total since the five of December twentieth and surpasses the three of February third. Our newest lovers are Robin Redd, Katarina ‘Kit’ Carlsen, March Wildspring, and James Frankie Redd. Welcome, all!”

March could only stare.

“My dear children,” the statue continued, “this wake has wound to a pleasing end. The time of rest is upon us. Repose with me in your humble homes, and repose with whom you like. Sleep, and I promise you that all your dreams will be pleasant ones.

“Though nightmares stalk the dark, if you sleep they cannot trouble you.”

“Nightmares?”

The young woman said, “I don’t know about them. I guess I’ve been asleep.”

“If they can’t hurt sleeping people, how bad can they be?” March was conscious of a slight dimming of the light; the meter built into his digicorder confirmed it.

“Just sleeping people who are inside somewhere.” The young woman looked frightened. “That’s what I think. We need to get inside.”

“You don’t know?”

“No! Let’s go. These people are nice. Somebody will take us in.”

The light had dimmed again, very slightly.

“Can you jog, Mr. Wildspring? I can, and I think we ought to jog until we find someplace that will take us in.”

March shook his head. “Not wearing this. No, I can’t jog and won’t try.”

“Well, take it off.” The young woman’s fear was almost palpable.

“I won’t.” March caught her arm. “In a minute I’m going to let you run if you want to, but I need to say something first. If you decide you want out, just look me up. I’ll get you out if I can. Understand?”

The young woman nodded and tried to smile. The smile was a pathetic failure.

“Fine.” March released her. “You jog ahead and find a place to hide.”

His suit felt heavy now even in the slight gravity of Number Nineteen. His wristwatch told him that only six and a half hours of the day had passed for him. The knowledge did nothing to relieve his aching shoulders; he was hot and tired.

“We have seen the founder’s statue,” he told his mike, “and learned that this asteroid contains copper, tin, and gold. Those metals—the last, particularly—no doubt financed much of the building of this memorial. We have learned two other things of considerable interest. I have, at least, in the course of walking over several miles of it.” Some time ago, he had removed his gloves and pushed them under his utility belt. Now he employed a forefinger to wipe his sweating forehead.

“First, this is the only memorial I am aware of that actually enlists visitors to serve its agenda, which we may assume was that of the Founder. As you have heard, some of them are returned to Earth. We can only speculate as to their purpose.

“Second, it seems at least possible that the Founder’s accomplishments included one of the holy grails of physics, the creation of artificial gravity. You may recall that our guide told us the gravity here was a combination of mass and spin. Real gravity—gravity from mass—pulls us inward. Spin forces us outward. The two are antithetical, in other words, and cannot be made to act in concert. I would estimate the gravity I feel here to be about one quarter that of Earth. I doubt that a core of heavy metals could provide that much gravity to an asteroid this small, and this asteroid is certainly not spinning fast enough. If it had been, it would have thrown me back into space when I landed.”

Beyond the flowery border, a rolling green landscape displayed two neat white cottages some distance apart. The light had diminished twice before March reached the first.

His knocks brought a remarkably handsome, angry, and suspicious man who answered all March’s arguments with “We don’t let anybody into our home.”

Total darkness came before March reached the second cottage. It was a night without stars, and without the least attempt to counterfeit them. The day sky had been a passable imitation of Earth’s: a blue dome traversed by a single bright light, wispy clouds that might, perhaps, have been steam. By night, the cavern was plainly that. The air was cool, and soon grew cooler still.

“March? March?” The voice was plaintive, sad, and old.

“That’s me,” he said. “Who are you?”

“You left me to die, March. You left me alone in that hospital so you could go off to some meeting. And I died, March. I died alone, abandoned.”

“Mom?” His free hand was fumbling with the flashlight on his utility belt.

A child’s voice said, “You don’t know me. You’ll never know me, March. You’ll never know me because I was never born. I’m March Wildspring, Jr. I’m the son you never got.”

“Uh huh.” March’s fingers had found the switch. “I’m going to turn this on now, son. You might want to cover your eyes. It’s a lot brighter than a helmet light.”

He did, and there was no one there. For two minutes and more, the glaring beam probed the darkness in search of the other white cottage he had seen; there was no such cottage, and it began to rain.

Sighing, he returned the flashlight to his belt, resumed his helmet, and switched on his helmet light.

“I sat beside you, March. Beside you in home room, and behind you in history. You let me copy your answers once, March, and I thought you liked me. I liked you and tried to show you I was yours for the asking. You were in all my daydreams, March. Other things changed, but you were always there.”

He said nothing, plodding wearily forward. His helmet light showed no one.

“Remember the time I touched your hand? You pulled away. I loved you, and you pulled away.”

“You scared me,” he told the disembodied voice. “I was one of the biggest boys in the class, and you were bigger than I was. You had those hungry eyes.”

The old voice said, “You left me alone, March. You left me alone to die.”

“You weren’t supposed to die.” His helmet light revealed no speaker. “There was a meeting I had to attend, a planning meeting for next year’s schedule. They said you’d be home in a week.”

A dog barked. It was a soft and friendly bark, and though it did not bark again he could hear its panting. “I’m sorry,” he told the dog. “I didn’t know how sick you were.”

By the time he reached the second cottage, he was determined to get in at any cost. “I’m a new arrival,” he told the handsome young man who answered his knock. For a moment he paused, sniffing.

“So are we.” The young man made no attempt to conceal his naked body. “Get your own dump.”

The air March’s suit was utilizing now carried a whiff of tobacco smoke. “I’m out here with the nightmares, and I don’t like it. I need a place to sleep, and something to eat, if you’ve got it.”

The muscular (and very naked) young man tried to close the door, but March had stuck the toe of his boot into it. “I’ll behave myself, and I’ll be eternally grateful.”

“You get the hell out!”

From behind the muscular young man, Kit’s well-remembered voice called, “Let him in, Jim!”

The muscular young man snarled, “Shut the fuck up!”

March’s shoulder forced the door open, throwing Jim backward. A split second later, March’s left took him in the pit of the stomach. It was followed at once (perhaps unnecessarily) by March’s right, which caught the side of Jim’s neck.

He went down, March unhooked the flashlight from his belt, and Kit said, “Windy! Thank God.” She was wearing the pink brassiere he remembered so well.

He had never tried to kiss anyone through his helmet before. Both laughed, he unscrewed the helmet, they kissed properly, and he picked Kit up and swung her around like a child.

“You shouldn’t do that,” she told him breathlessly. “I’m too fat. You’ll hurt yourself.”

“You’re not fat, and there isn’t much gravity here.”

“I should lose ten pounds and you know it. Twenty would be better.”

“You look great.” It was difficult to keep his eyes on her face.

“Everybody looks great here. You look great, too.”

“How did you know it was me? I didn’t know you were in there until I heard your voice.”

“I didn’t, at first.” She grinned. “I couldn’t see you because Jim was in the way, and I didn’t recognize your voice because you sound better here. It was just that you were a stranger, and maybe you’d protect me from him. He tore my clothes off, and I think I’m going to get a black eye.”

By that time, Jim had picked up the flashlight and was trying to stand. March took it from him and hit him with it. Twice.

“Shove him out the door,” Kit suggested.

March shook his head. “Not yet. I’ve got something to show you. If it’s what I think it’s going to be, I want him to see it, too. Hell, he’s entitled to see it. Turn on that vid, will you? You can keep the sound off.”

She did, and dancers as naked as Jim Redd capered across the projection area.

“I didn’t know it was you,” she told March, “until I saw the orange suit. The lights in here aren’t very good.”

“I’ve noticed, and I think I may understand that. Another thing I’ve noticed is that though whatever the Founder’s got makes everybody else look different—”

“Better,” Kit said.

“You look just the way you always did. You’re still the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“I look different, Windy, and you know it. You just won’t admit it.”

He shook his head. “You look exactly the same. You sound the same, too. When you couldn’t see me, I couldn’t see you, either. I heard your voice, and it was the most beautiful voice in the business. No different.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“Neither do I. That’s how it was, and that’s all I know.” He was sweeping the room with his digicorder. When he finished, he found the remote and changed channels.

“Vid looks just the same as at home,” Kit said. “I don’t understand that either. Do you?”

“If you mean how the system here does that, no. If you mean why it does it, it ought to be pretty obvious. The people get reminded of how it really was back home every time they look at it. This place is the carrot. What they see on vid is the stick. It’s what they’ll be going back to if they try to leave. So they don’t. Wait a minute. Is there a hand-mirror around here?”

“Probably. I can look.”

“Do that,” March told her.

Redd groaned. After a minute or two, he groped the contusions on his head.

“Stay flat on the floor,” March told him, “or you’ll have another one.” He had opened his suit and taken out his wallet.

Kit returned with a mirror. “You know, this is really a pretty place. It’s not big, but it’s awfully nice. Our watcher explained that the couple that had it before had gone back to Earth. The Founder’d sent them there, she said. They might come back eventually, but we could have it until they did. All this was before Jim jumped me.”

March nodded.

“She said she’d go back to her gate and sleep there, but she’d come by for us in the morning. I thought I could handle Jim—that was a big mistake—and this looked nice. It would give us a base to operate out of while I looked for you and Jim looked for Robin. So I said okay, fine.”

“You saw my lifeline.”

“That’s right. So we knew where you’d gone, Windy. Only it had been cut in front of the airlock, and that worried the hell out of me.”

“The door did it,” he said absently. “The airlock door. When you look into that mirror, do you see a new, improved you?”

“That’s right, and I look great.”

“Now look at this.” March held up his wallet. “Which you is this?”

There was a long pause before Kit said, “That’s the old me. This isn’t real, is it? I never thought it was.”

“But it was fun to pretend.”

Kit nodded.

“Besides, philosophers have argued for centuries over what we mean by ‘real’ and what we ought to mean. When I look at you, the physical body I see is composed of atoms that form molecules. That’s what it really is, but I see a person. Which one’s real?”

“Both of them,” Kit said promptly.

“I agree, but not everyone does. I used to know a man whose wife cheated on him and bragged about it. He told himself it wasn’t real because it didn’t matter. What was real was the love he had for her, and the love he thought she had for him.”

“I think I know him, too.”

“Nothing mattered but that love, so only that love was real. It wasn’t a lie he was telling himself, because he thought it was the truth. He’d convinced himself.”

With an almost inaudible grunt, Redd sat up. Though still handsome, he looked sick; a few seconds later he spat onto the intricately beautiful Persian carpet.

March switched off his digicorder and took out the disk. “I want to play this. Let’s see what we see.”

What they saw first was a blue screen dotted with instructions and cautions printed in yellow. He pressed fast forward, stopped at a shot of Kit, and turned up the sound.

“No, Sarah. We’d like to hear about your cooking. It made you famous all over Southton.”

The real Kit said, “That’s the way, Windy. Hide those hips.”

March hit fast forward again. “If only you knew what I feel every time I see them. Is Jim watching?”

He was, still sitting and looking only a little the worse for wear.

“Let’s see if we can find Sue.”

Robin appeared, simpering. Soon, March’s voice said, “You are. You’re really quite beautiful.”

She laughed.

March’s voice continued, “Is it all right if I jump?”

Kit asked, “Is that how she looked to you then?”

March shook his head and killed the sound. “She was lovely, and looked like nineteen or twenty. Did you notice the dolls behind her?”

“And the mess. There was a teddy bear, too.”

“She wanted me to think she was a kid, twelve maybe, who looked older here. She tried to talk like that at first, but after a while she forgot and I noticed. She’d seen me coming, somehow, and gotten to the gate in time to talk the real kid into going out for coffee or something while Sue subbed for her. Presumably there’s a place where you can watch like that, and Sue had found out about it fast, because she thought Jim here might come after her. So I came and was met by a gorgeous redhead who told me her name was Penny. Look at the screen.”

It showed a vast cavern, with a floor of mud and water. Here and there grass struggled to live, its sallow blades ill-nourished by sunlamps high overhead.

“That isn’t what I saw when I jumped,” March said wryly. “It isn’t even what I saw in the viewfinder. It’s what the digicorder saw, just the same.”

“You mean . . .?”

“I mean it’s where we are. Right now.”

Redd snarled, “You got me into this.”

“If you’re talking to me,” March said, “I agree. I did. If you’re talking to Kit, you and I are going to have words again.”

“Without the flashlight?”

“Try it and see.”

“That’s what I want,” Kit said. “I want to see. You were shooting when you came in here. I know you were. I want to see Jim and me, and I want to see what this place really looks like.”

They did.

THE THREE OF THEM left together the next morning, after eating what they now knew was a paste of ground grain.

“I’m going to make you a deal,” Redd told them.

“Think you can outrun me? Either one of you?”

Kit shook her head, but March said, “I’d be willing to try. Want to find out?”

“In that suit?”

“You’re a smoker, and I’m willing to try.”

“You may get the chance. Look, I could just take off and look for Robin. When I found her—and I would—I’d take her to my hopper and we’d be back in New York before you knew we were gone. Capeesh?”

March nodded.

“That’s got one big hole in it.” Redd paused, looking thoughtful. “Are they going to let us go without a fight? Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t.”

“They won’t,” Kit said.

“I don’t think so either,” March told her, “but I’d like to hear your reason.”

“Simple. We’ve seen through this place. They’ll know we have, because nobody who hasn’t would want to leave. If we get out we’ll tell other people. So we don’t get out.”

Redd grinned. “Smart lady. How about you, March? You thinking the same as she is?”

“Close enough. What about you?”

“I’m not as sure as she is.” Redd picked his teeth with a fingernail.

“But you think so, too. Why?”

“Everything’s easier to get into than to get out of, that’s all. You probably think I’m a goodfella.”

March shook his head. “You were working as a sound man, so it didn’t seem likely.”

“That’s right, I’m not. But I could’ve been a dozen times over. I’d be a made man by now. Or maybe dead, or in the slammer.” Redd shrugged. “I know people, okay? Guys from my old neighborhood. Guys I went to school with. It was easy for most of them, and there was a couple who didn’t even know where they were till somebody told them. You get in really easy, like here.”

Kit said, “But you don’t get out.”

“Exactly. So I figure what I figure. They’re sending people back to Earth, capeesh? She told us, and that’s who had our shack before. For their health? I don’t think so. They’ve got an angle.”

“So do you,” Kit told him.

“That’s right. Mine is that we’ve got a better chance getting out together than doing it separately. I’ll help you two, if you’ll help Robin and me.”

March said, “We will.”

Kit looked from one to the other. “What if Robin doesn’t want to go with him, Windy?”

“We’ll deal with that after we’ve gotten out,” March told her. “If we start fighting among ourselves now . . .” He shrugged.

Redd opened a battered vacpack of Old Camels, looked into it, and reclosed it. “I’ll deal now. Kit, if you’ll give your word you’ll take her back to the city and turn her loose, I’ll give mine that I’ll let you do it. That’s unless she decides to come back with me and tells you so herself.”

“It’s a deal.” Kit offered her hand.

“I want to know about the footrace,” March told him.

“Just this. I’m splitting. Two of us will have a better chance of finding her than one. If you don’t like it, you’ll have to run me down.”

“I like it,” March told him. “You won’t have to run.”

“That’s great. We’ll meet you at the gate, okay? The gate you came in through. We came in through that one, too.”

Kit added, “I saw your lifeline, Windy.”

“That was Gate Four,” March told Redd. “We’ll wait a while there—if we can. You do the same. That doesn’t mean we’ll wait for days. An hour or two, tops.”

Redd nodded and left, walking fast. They saw him stop where the path threaded a picture-perfect little grove to light a cigarette; then he was lost to sight.

Before the path vanished into the grove they turned aside, flanking the grove and a small but lovely lake. At last Kit said, “Don’t you care whether Robin gets out?”

“Yes,” March told her, “but not very much. They’re not going to kill her in here. They’ll keep her—drugged or whatever it is—and happy. She may be better off here than she’d be with Jim.”

“You said you knew she wasn’t really a kid because she forgot to talk like one. But you knew more than that, because you told us she was really Robin. Did she say so?”

“No. She slipped badly once and called me Marchy. That’s what she used to call me . . .”

“I’ve got it.”

“Mostly she called me Mr. Wildspring. You want to do dramatic parts, Kit, and I know you’ll do them well. Do you know what the difference between a bad actor and a good actor is?”

“Charisma. You know it as soon as he comes on.”

“That’s what makes a star, but there are a lot of good actors who aren’t stars and never will be. They’re good just the same, and when you need somebody to play the other cop or the wisecracking gal who runs the deli they’ll do fine. The difference between a bad actor and a good one is that a bad one can look good for five minutes. Give him a good director and a good script and he can handle it. But a good actor can be good for as long as you need him . . .”

“What is it, Windy?”

He raised his shoulders and, hopelessly, let them fall. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her embrace surprised him, and their kiss lasted a long time. When they parted, Kit said, “Now tell me about it. What are friends for?”

“Sometimes I wish I didn’t notice so much, that’s all.”

They continued in silence until Kit dropped onto a marble bench. “This is about me and Jim, isn’t it?”

March nodded.

“Okay, out with it.”

“You said he tore your clothes off. They aren’t torn, and there’s not a button missing.”

“Clothes look better here, too.”

March said nothing.

“They do! Most of these people are in rags. You saw that when we played the disk. But those rags look great to us.”

He turned his digicorder toward her and backed away. “We’ll stop at the first house we see and look at this. If there are tears—or missing buttons, any of that—I’ll apologize. What will you do when there aren’t?”

“Windy . . .”

“Go ahead. I’m getting it.”

“Windy, I love you. I do.” Kit’s tears overflowed as she spoke. “Do you really think I’d strip for Jim if I wasn’t scared to death?”

“Yes. I’d like to be wrong about that. But yes, I do.”

“Robin gave you a bad time.” Kit fumbled for a handkerchief. “I uh-understand. I’d n-never really understood how b-bad it was till now, W-Windy . . .”

“Here.” Turning off the digicorder, he brought her his.

She dried her eyes and blew her nose. “Don’t say anything else, Windy. Okay? This is r-really pretty, even if it’s n-not real. Let’s just walk along and enjoy it for a while.”

They did, strolling down into a miniature valley and up again toward a spruce fieldstone cottage. The low gravity made walking very pleasant, reminding March that in Heaven a man could run and run and never tire. He had read that somewhere, although he could not remember where. As they stepped across a tinkling rill bordered with white and blue wildflowers, he began to whistle softly.

A handsome man of fifty or so was planting shrubs in front of the cottage. Kit asked him whether the path would lead them to the gate, and March added, “Gate Four. We’re supposed to meet our friends there.”

“I’m Hap Harper.” Hap smiled, wiping his hands on the legs of his spotless overalls. “I won’t ask you to shake—I’d get you dirty. But that’s who I am. Used to work in a bank in Saginaw.”

March and Kit introduced themselves.

“Well, this little road you’re on won’t take you to Gate Four if you follow it straight. You need to follow it up to the next crossroad, then turn left. Follow that one, and you’ll come to a footbridge over a lake. Pretty soon after that, it’ll fork. Take the left fork, and you’ll be there before long. Like to step inside for some tea?”

Kit said, “We’re in kind of a hurry.”

March nodded. “We’ll have to go soon, but I’d enjoy that tea. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all!”

They were ushered into a spotless home, somewhat larger than they might have guessed from its outward appearance, through living room and dining room and into a cheerful kitchen where rows of polished copper pans reflected onions and sausages dangling from the rafters.

“Mr. Wildspring’s an independent digivid producer,” Hap told a smiling, white-haired woman. “He and Ms. Carlsen here are shooting a documentary on this place.”

“I’d love to see it,” the woman said. She wiped her hand with a dishtowel and offered it to Kit. “You call me Ida, Ms. Carlsen. Didn’t you used to do Saturday Toy Shop?”

Kit smiled. “It’s Kit, Ida. Yes, I did. Three live-long seasons playing with puppies and talking to puppets. I’d a lot rather have talked to the puppies.”

March said, “I noticed a vid in your living room, Ida. I’m March, by the way. I know it’s an unusual name, but I was born in March and I’m afraid my parents found March Wildspring amusing.”

Ida smiled. “I could tell you something about Hap’s name. Maybe I will, later. Were you wondering whether we still watch?”

March nodded.

“Yes, we do. Not much, but sometimes.”

“I can’t show you our documentary as it will be shown on the net,” March told her. “It doesn’t exist yet. But I have a disk here that will show some of the images I took. It would be a pleasure to show you a few.”

Hap said, “I’d like to see them.”

“There are a couple things I ought to say first,” March told him. “I suppose it will take five minutes or so.”

Ida smiled again. “That’s good. It will give me time to make tea. Tea must steep, you know.”

“You’ve heard it said that somebody sees the world through rose-colored glasses,” March began. “That can be true in the literal sense, of course. Glasses with a pink tint make just about everyone look prettier and healthier. I won’t talk about the tricks photographers and cameramen use, or the things that can be done to digital images on a computer. I won’t except to remind you of them, as I just did.”

Kit said, “Is this smart, Windy? I’m not trying to be smart myself. I don’t know and I want to.”

March shrugged. “Love can do something like that, too. Self-love does it better than almost anything. I’ve been walking down the street and seen a big angry-looking guy with a beat-up face, and thought he looks like trouble. Two more steps, and I realized I was seeing my reflection in a shop window. When I look into a mirror, knowing it’s a mirror, I don’t look like that. Not to me, I don’t.”

Ida said, “Love lets us see the good in a person, the wonderful goodness that we pass over every day.”

“That’s true, and I can give you an interesting instance of it. I love Kit here, and I think she’s beautiful. Absolute beautiful, and I’ve told her that over and over. When I got here, everybody looked very, very good. You’ll have noticed that yourself.”

Hap and Ida nodded.

“When I saw Kit, she looked absolutely beautiful—but so did a woman named Sue, and some other women I’d seen. So I wondered about that. I wondered about her clothes, too, because they hadn’t changed either. Kit looks great in everything she wears, and she looked great in these—in certain piece of underwear I saw, in the clothes she’s wearing now, in everything. They looked good, too. Very good, but no different. They’re a little wrinkled now, but I doubt that you’ve noticed it.”

Hap said, “I certainly haven’t.”

“Naturally I wondered about that. Kit told me once that every woman has a figure flaw. Maybe more than one, but there’s always at least one. They have character flaws, too, though she didn’t say that. Kit’s too generous and too trusting, for example. I love her for it, but it’s a flaw and I know it.”

Ida looked at March over the tops of glasses that she no longer had. “Are you saying men don’t?”

He shook his head. “Men are the same. We’re worse, if anything. You won’t have noticed, but I’m as ugly as sin. I’ve got a lot of character flaws, too. One is that I think too much. Things get into my head and bug me, and I can’t stop. I thought about how Kit looked here a whole lot last night and finally I got it.”

Kit said, “Let’s hear it, Windy.”

“It’s pretty simple, really. Whatever it is they’ve got here that tweaks your brain to make things look better couldn’t tweak mine where Kit was concerned. It couldn’t because it had been tweaked already, by love.”

Ida smiled. “Good for you.”

“Thanks. That got me to thinking how Kit looked in the digivid I’d shot. She looked just great, but she was the only one who did.”

Kit said, “I’ve been wondering about that, too, Windy. Why doesn’t it work when we see vid?”

March rubbed his jaw. “I think I’ve got that one. The vid I’d shot looked terrific. The framing was great, the colors were all there and all vibrant, and the lighting couldn’t have been better. I’ve shot lots of vid and think I can do it just about as well as most cameramen, but that was the best ever. See what I’m saying?”

“The vid itself looked good, but the things in there—except for me.”

“Bingo.” March switched off his digicorder and removed the disk. “That was the preliminary. It may have taken a little longer than five minutes. If so, I apologize. I’ll play some of this now.”

Swaying a bit because the digicorder had been carried on a man’s shoulder, a barren hill of earth and stones appeared before the vid. A shed stood at the top, a crazy affair of leaning metal props and naked particle-board. Before it, a skeletal man in rags labored with a piece of rusted steel, digging holes for shrubs whose burlap wrappings had burst, shrubs that were clearly dying or dead. Kit’s voice, and March’s, spoke to this starved and tattered figure. He rose with a grin that revealed stained and rotting teeth, and wiped his filthy hands on his muddy thighs. “I’m Hap Harper.”

“You ruined their paradise,” Kit told March when the cottage was no longer in view.

“You saw how they really looked.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

“How long until they die, if they stay here and keep on living the way they’ve been doing it?”

“A year, maybe. The tea she was making for us . . .”

“Was stagnant water polluted with human wastes. Sewage.”

“She didn’t see it that way.”

“Neither did we,” March said, “but that’s what it was.”

“Wouldn’t they die? There ought to be a lot of dead people around here. Does somebody pick them up?”

“How would I know?” He rubbed his jaw. “I’ve seen people sleeping on the ground.”

“I’ve seen some of those, too,” Kit said a few seconds later.

“I never tried to wake any of them up.”

The girl at Gate Number Four was called Nita. She looked younger than “Penny” had, and March suspected that she was really younger still.

“We have to go out and get some things.” Kit had found her locker and pulled out her transparent suit. “I imagine we’ll be back pretty soon.”

Nita looked doubtful. “Nobody said anything about people leaving.”

Kit smiled. “Because there’s nothing to say, really. We get our suits and go into your airlock. That’s all. You can wave good-bye if you feel like it. That would be nice.”

“I’ll have to work it. There aren’t any controls on the inside. No handles or anything like that. It’s why somebody has to be on the gate to let them in.”

Kit looked puzzled. “That’s a funny airlock.”

“Keeps out the undesirables,” March muttered. He had returned to the arch by which they had entered, and was scanning the sun-drenched landscape. “I know it rains in here at night. Does it ever thunder?”

Nita shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Kit looked at him quizzically.

“I thought I heard thunder, that’s all.” He shut the worn orange suit. “I’d suit up if I were you. Put on your helmet.”

“It won’t rain where we are,” Nita told them.

“It’s people.” Kit had cocked her head to listen. “A crowd. People yelling.”

“I’d suit up, if I were you.”

“Sure.” She moved a doll and sat down to pull the transparent suit over her legs. “They sound mad.”

“Get your helmet on,” March told her. “We’d better go.”

“We told Jim we’d wait.”

“To hell with Jim.”

Two figures—one dark, the other scarlet against the bright green grass—topped the nearest of the low hills. They were running, bounding with long, rather ineffective strides. As March watched, the dark figure stopped to look back at the scarlet one. There was a distant shout—of what, he could not be sure.

He switched on his digicorder. Someone far away was beating a drum—a drum bigger than the biggest he had ever heard.

A dull, dead-sounding drum that could be beaten only by a giant.

“Windy . . .?”

“Get into the airlock quick.” He spoke to Kit without looking at her.

“That’s trouble, isn’t it?”

“Get in there.”

The scarlet figure had fallen, and the dark one was helping it—her—up. March’s fingers fumbled with the carabiner that fastened his flashlight to his utility belt.

The drum beat louder as the mob crested the hill.

And the dark figure turned to face it. The flashes were invisible, as was the powder smoke. The sounds of the shots reached them only weakly, scattered among drumbeats: six, seven, eight . . . March found he was counting them, although he had never chosen to do so.

Eleven, twelve . . . Some semi-automatics held fifteen rounds. Some even more.

Beside him Kit said, “That’s Jim, isn’t it? My God! Look how scared Robin is.”

“Get in the airlock!” March shouted.

Then he was running, although he had not consciously chosen to do that, either. The mob had halted, dismayed by its dead.

Fourteen, fifteen . . .

Robin had fallen and was scrambling to her feet as he reached her. Snatching her wrist, he jerked her up, threw her over his shoulder, and ran for all he was worth.

Her shriek might have stopped him. Kit’s certainly did. He whirled—and beheld the impossible.

A giant the color of Ida’s copper pots was cresting the hill. The men and women in the mob were as children in comparison, and small children at that. They tried to part before it and failed. Eight or ten died beneath its feet.

March fled and did not stop running until he and Robin had mounted to the false room that was the airlock. Outside, Kit shouted, “That girl! Nita! Windy, she’s gone!”

“I’ll get it!” Robin darted away. For a half second that was to prove much too long March stood motionless, gasping for breath. When he moved again, the room wall that was in fact the hatch of the airlock was slamming shut and Kit was dashing toward him. He saw it catch her above the knees, saw her fall, and watched her cut in two.

SPACE SEEMED WARM and welcoming when he jetted away from Number Nineteen; the Sun’s tiny candle, five hundred million miles away, spoke of Earth and home.

He matched the speed of his hopper to that of the Asteroid Belt before he stopped hopping. It might be—indeed, it seemed likely—that he would be pursued. If so, the thronging asteroids would make it impossible to locate his hopper by radar. He would be far safer than in all the empty immensity between the Belt and Mars or that between Mars and Earth.

Only then did he stop to review the disk from his digicorder.

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help, or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired with this—Inspired with this . . .”

It was coming back, no question about it. “Seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened for you.”

Something like that.

He rubbed his jaw. When Bad Bill turned him down, as Bad Bill presumably would, he would be free to sell to Pubnet or Vidnet—but only if they paid the price UDN had refused or more. That argued for offering it to Bad Bill cheaply, say two million or less.

On the other hand, Bad Bill was entirely capable of buying it and sitting on it if the price were low enough. There would be some threshold at which Bad Bill would not dare, at which it would eat up too much of his budget. The trick would be to offer it just above that.

When he finished it at last—an Ethermail to William W. Williams, VP Programming, UDN, with a brief description of what he had—the price he put on it was five million. He might, he just might, get that much from Pubnet or one of the others. That much or more. He would start with them at six million five.

He pushed the Send button, muttered, “Holy Mother help me,” and began to prepare his lunch. Number Nineteen’s people might have Kit’s hopper by now, with its multitude of cookbooks and obscure spices. Or if not by now, then soon. What would they do with them?

Kit had not gone into the airlock, this although he had told her to repeatedly. Her reason for disobeying was plain: she had wanted to be with him, to share his risks.

“A woman should not share a man’s risks,” he muttered as he shut the door of his microwave. “It’s not what women are for.”

Try telling that to a woman.

Jesus had refused to let his mother in to see him. He had known the fate awaiting him, and had known the risk the apostles ran. He had wanted to spare his mother that risk. Or (March thought as the microwave beeped) to spare her as much of it as he could.

When he had finished eating, he found that he had Ethermail.

“Mr. Wildspring. Please icom me asap. Calling from space is expensive, so call collect: USA 1105 8129-4092-6 X7798. Kim Granby, Special Assistant, Programming.”

White print on a blue background confirmed that the message was from United Digital Network.

March jotted down the number and called it. Collect.

Kim Granby looked about twenty-five, although he knew she was almost certainly at least ten years older. Sleek black hair framed a smooth oval face. “Thank God!” she said. “I was afraid you wouldn’t call till tomorrow. I’ve looked at your material—some of it, not all of it yet. It’s good. It’s very, very good.”

It sounded like a build-up to a letdown. UDN was going to refuse, and he could offer his work elsewhere. An expert poker player, he repressed all traces of a smile. “It’s rough, of course. A few of the voiceovers are Kit Carlsen’s, and I think you’ll want to keep them. The rest are mine. All of those will have to be redone, and you’ll want to edit everything. I think I said that.”

“You did.” Kim Granby gave him a guarded smile. “I haven’t watched all of it yet—less than half in fact. But I told the vice president what it was and what I’d seen, and we want to buy it.”

March cursed inwardly.

“Before we make an offer, I have some questions. You weren’t alone in this. Kit Carlsen did voiceovers for you, and she was in some of the footage I saw. Your Ethermail sounded as if you own all rights. Do you?”

He nodded. “May I explain?”

“Please do.”

“A lot of it was shot solo by me. At the end we had a four-person crew. Kit, Jim and Robin Redd, and me. All of us had worked for UDN at one time or another. Did you know Kit or Robin? Or Jim?”

“I’ve met Ms. Carlsen once or twice.” The guarded smile came again. “Once at least. She’s no longer with you?”

“She’s dead.”

Kim Ganby’s mouth opened, and closed again.

“Kit’s dead, Jim’s dead, and Robin’s probably dead, too. I don’t know for sure about Robin, but you’ll see Jim . . .”

“See him die?”

“Yes. I didn’t see it myself. I had the digicorder, but I wasn’t watching the viewfinder just then. It’s on the disk though. In the digital copy I sent you. He was squashed. Crushed sounds better, I suppose. Kit’s dead, too.”

There was a long pause. At last Kim Granby said, “I liked her.”

March nodded. “So did I.”

“You said this man Jim’s death was in the footage. Didn’t you? Didn’t I hear that?”

March nodded again.

“What about Ms. Carlsen?”

“It’s there. She was cut in two.”

Another pause. “You’re joking.”

March shook his head. “I wish I was.”

“And it’s there, in . . . I—I’m going to have to talk to Mr. Inglis. I’ll call you right back.”

“Wait up!” March raised his hand. “What’s this about Mr. Inglis? I thought I was dealing with Bill Williams. Is this Phil Inglis?”

“Correct. Mr. Williams has left the net to pursue other interests.” Kim Granby’s beautiful face held no expression. “Mr. Inglis is Vice President for Programming now.”

“I know him.”

“I know you do, Mr. Wildspring. He called you an old friend. I have to speak with him just the same.”

“All right. Will you call me back?”

Abruptly, the beautiful face softened. “Pubnet’s at work on a special rather like ‘Vaults in the Void,’ Mister—may I call you March?”

He wanted to rub his jaw, but did not. “Certainly, Ms. Granby.” One second served to collect his thoughts, though he wished he had longer. “I’d like it.”

“Call me Kim, please. Everyone does. And I’ll call you back. You can count on that, March. It won’t be long. Goodbye for now.”

Kit was dead. It was just beginning to sink in. He turned away from the blank screen. He had thought that he had come to terms with that. He had not. His hands were shaking. He thrust them angrily into his pockets, knowing that nothing he could do would make them stop.

Kit was dead and Jim was dead and Sue was probably dead by now; Earth was menaced by something a dead man had turned loose on mankind; but all those were overshadowed by the single, salient, inescapable fact of Kit’s death.

If there had been whiskey on his hopper, he would have poured himself a drink—would have been drunk, in all probability, by the time UDN called him back. Not for the first time, he was glad there was none.

Kit was dead.

Her soul was with God, somewhere out there in space. Someday his soul might meet hers there. They would embrace, and laugh at remembered things, and link arms forever.

Someday . . .

“Remember, O most gracious Virgin . . .”

“I should preface this,” Kim Granby said, “by telling you that Pubnet’s at work on something very similar. Have I said so already? Mr. Inglis said I was to tell you. He felt, in fairness, that you should know.”

March nodded. “Please tell him how much I appreciate it.”

“It’s nothing like as sensational as yours,” Kim Granby continued. “He didn’t say to tell you that. I’m doing it on my own, but I feel he would approve.”

“It’s good of you.”

She smiled. “I’ll be good some more. I’ll tell you that Mr. Inglis and I have watched everything you sent us now. We watched it together, in fact. We recorded notes as we watch. Both of us did that.”

“I understand.”

“I’ve returned with an offer. As I said.” She stopped to draw breath, something she did very attractively. “When I realized what you had, March, I knew I had to go back to Mr. Inglis. What if I had given you his offer, and you had refused it? I explained to him, and he indicated that I had acted correctly. There is a new offer now. If you’d like time to think it over, please let me know.”

“I will.” March nodded. “But I’ll have to hear it first.”

“Of course. Yes, indeed. Certainly.” Her sudden smile would have melted a heart far harder than his. “You’re a gentleman. I’ve talked with some of the other women here. At—we go for coffee. Together. You know.”

Wondering what was coming, he nodded again.

“They said you were rough, tough and blunt. Then Debbie Knowles said the three musketeers would’ve welcomed you with open arms, and all the rest agreed. So I just wanted to say—this is from me, personally, not from the net. I wanted to say that whether or not you accept our offer, I hope we can be friends. Is that all right?”

“Yes,” March said, “absolutely.”

“I live here in New York . . .?”

“So do I,” March said.

“That’s good. That’s very good. This is official now. This is what Mr. Inglis said. We’ll pay . . .”

March had raised his hand. “You’re being very honest with me, Kim, and I appreciate it. I want to be honest with you, too. I told you a lie when we spoke earlier. I didn’t mean to, but I did. May I set the record straight?”

Kim Granby’s nod was scarcely one tenth of an inch, but it was there.

“I said that I liked Kit. The truth is that I loved her. I loved Kit very much. You’re bound to hear it soon from somebody, so I want to tell you. I loved her, and I watched her die. I don’t want you to think, later, that I’ve been hiding it from you.”

“I would never think that, March. Never!” Another deep breath. “You get angry and upset when a woman cries, don’t you?”

“Pretty often, yes.”

“Then let me off quick, because I think I may cry. We’re making two offers. The first is flat, without any conditions. Eight million five hundred thousand. The second is contingent on your coming back to work for UDN. You’d be a senior producer, pay half a mil. Residuals and bonuses. You know. Do that, and the offer’s ten mil. Do you want more time?”

He shook his head. “Tell Phil I’ll take the second.”

Kit, he understood. He thought he understood Jim, too. Jim had loved Sue—no, had loved Robin. Jim had loved Robin and Jim and been a bastard in certain ways. All men were bastards in certain ways, so why not Jim? Jim had understood Robin better than he, March, ever had.

Better than he, March, ever would.

He remembered the small dark figure. The pop-pop-pop of the distant shots. Jim had stood his ground, shooting, until he died, hoping to gain time for Robin.

But what about Robin? What about the woman he had tried so hard to forget? March rubbed his jaw. It seemed inadequate, so he rubbed it again.

Had Robin wanted to die with Jim?

Or had she been willing to sacrifice herself to save his—March’s—life?

Or had she simply wanted to remain in Number Nineteen? She had never seen what the digicorder showed, after all. He went to the window and stared out at the tiny blue spark that was home, so remote and so easy to reach, so blessed with grace and so cursed with evil. Had Robin been willing to sacrifice herself? For him?

There was only one way to find out, and that was go back and find her—assuming she was still alive.

And ask.

GONE TO JUPITER

The Memories and Menace of

Memorials in Space

Produced and Directed by March Wildspring

Starring Kit Carlsen

With voiceovers by Kit Carlsen,

Tabbi Merce, and Vincent Palma

Edited by March Wildspring
and Robin Redd Wildspring

Dedicated to Kit Carlsen
and James Frankie Redd,

Who Perished that You Might Watch It

A Philip J. Inglis Presentation

THE FOUNTAIN OF AGE

Nancy Kress

I had her in a ring. In those days, you carried around pieces of a person. Not like today.

A strand of hair, a drop of blood, a lip-sticked kiss on paper—those things were real. You could put them in a locket or pocket case or ring, you could carry them around, you could fondle them. None of this hologram stuff.

Who can treasure laser shadows? Or the nanotech recreations—even worse. Fah. Did the Master of the Universe “re-create the world after it got banged up a little? Never. He made do with the original, like a sensible person.

So I had her in a ring. And I had the ring for forty-two years before it was eaten by the modern world. Literally eaten, so tell me where is the justice in that?

And oh, she was so beautiful! Not gene-mod misshapen like these modern girls, with their waists so skinny and their behinds huge and those repulsive breasts. No, she was natural, a real woman, a goddess. Black hair wild as stormy water, olive skin, green eyes. I remember the exact shade of green. Not grass, not emerald, not moss.

Her own shade. I remember. I—

“Grampops?”

—met her while I was on shore leave on Cyprus. The Mid-East war had just ended, one of the wars, who can keep them all straight? I met Daria in a taverna and we had a week together. Nobody will ever know what glory that week was. She was a nice girl, too, even if she was a . . . People do what they must to survive. Nobody knows that better than me. Daria—

“Grampops!”

—gave me a lock of hair and a kiss pressed on paper. Back then I kept them in a cheap plastolux bubble, all I could afford, but later I had the hair and tiny folded paper set into a ring. Much later, when I had money and Miriam had died and—

“Dad!”

And that’s how it started up again. With my son, my grandchildren. Life just never knows when enough is enough.

“Dad, the kids spoke to you. Twice.”

“So this creates an obligation for me to answer?”

My son Geoffrey sighs. The boys—six and eight, what business does a fifty-five-year-old man have with such young kids, but Gloria is his second wife—have vanished into the hall. They come, they go. We sit on a Sunday afternoon in my room—a nice room, it should be for what I pay—in the Silver Star Retirement Home. Every Sunday Geoff comes, we sit, we stare at each other. Sometimes Gloria comes, sometimes the boys, sometimes not. The whole thing is a strain.

Then the kids burst back through the doorway, and this time something follows them in.

“Reuven, what the shit is that?”

Geoffrey says, irritated, “Don’t curse in front of the children, and . . .”

“Shit is cursing? Since when?”

“. . . and it’s Bobby, not ‘Reuven.’ ”

“It’s ‘Zaydeh’, not ‘Grampops’, and I could show you what cursing is. Get that thing away from me!”

“Isn’t it astronomical?” Reuven says. “I just got it!”

The thing is trying to climb onto my lap. It’s not like their last pet, the pink cat that could jump to the ceiling.

Kangaroo genes in it, such foolishness. This one isn’t even real, it’s a ‘bot of some kind, like those retro metal dogs the Japanese were so fascinated with seventy years ago. Only this one just sort of suggests a dog, with sleek silver lines that sometimes seem to disappear.

“It’s got stealth coating!” Eric shouts. “You can’t see it!”

I can see it, but only in flashes when the light hits the right way. The thing leaps onto my lap and I flap my arms at it and try to push it off, except that by then it’s not there. Maybe.

Reuven yells, like this is an explanation, “It’s got microprocessors!”

Geoff says in his stiff way, “The ‘bot takes digital images of whatever is behind it and continuously transmits them in holo to the front, so that at any distance greater than—

“This is what you spend my money on?”

He says stiffly, “My money now. Some of it, anyway.”

“Not because you earned it, boychik.”

Geoffrey’s thin lips go thinner. He hates it when I remind him who made the money. I hate it when he forgets.

“Dad, why do you have to talk like that? All that affected folksy stuff—you never talked it when I was growing up, and it’s hardly your actual background, is it? So why?”

For Geoffrey, this is a daring attack. I could tell him the reason, but he wouldn’t like it, wouldn’t understand.

Not how this “folksy speech started, or why, or what use it was to me. Not even how a habit can settle in after it’s no use, and you cling to it because otherwise you might lose who you were, even if who you were wasn’t so great. How could Geoff understand a thing like that? He’s only fifty-five.

Suddenly Eric shouts, “Rex is gone!” Both boys barrel out the door of my room. I see Mrs. Petrillo inching down the hall beside her robo-walker. She shrieks as they run past her, but at least they don’t knock her over.

“Go after them, Geoff, before somebody gets hurt!

“They won’t hurt anybody, and neither will Rex.

“And you know this how? A building full of old people, tottering around like cranes on extra stilts, and you think—”

“Calm down, Dad, Rex has built-in object avoidance and—”

“You’re telling me about software? Me, boychik?”

Now he’s really mad. I know because he goes quiet and stiff. Stiffer, if that’s possible. The man is a carbon-fiber rod.

“It’s not like you actually developed any software, Dad. You only stole it. It was I who took the company legitimate and furthermore—”

But that’s when I notice that my ring is gone.

Daria was Persian, not Greek or Turkish or Arab. If you think that made it any easier for me to look for her, you’re crazy. I went back after my last tour of duty ended and I searched, how I searched. Nobody in Cyprus knew her, had ever seen her, would admit she existed.

No records: “destroyed in the war.”

Our last morning we’d gone down to a rocky little beach. We’d left Nicosia the day after we met to go to this tiny coastal town that the war hadn’t ruined too much. On the beach we made love with the smooth pebbles pocking our tushes, first hers and then mine. Daria cut a lock of her wild hair and pressed a kiss onto paper.

Little pink wildflowers grew in the scrub grass. We both cried. I swore I’d come back.

And I did, but I couldn’t find her. One more prostitute on Cyprus—who tracked such people? Eventually I had to give up. I went back to Brooklyn, put the hair and kiss—such red lipstick, today they all wear gold, they look like flaking lamps—in the plastolux. Later, I hid the bubble with my Army uniform, where Miriam couldn’t find it. Poor Miriam—by her own lights, she was a good wife, a good mother. It’s not her fault she wasn’t Daria. Nobody was Daria.

Until now, of course, when hundreds of people are, or at least partly her. Hundreds? Probably thousands.

Anybody who can afford it.

“My ring! My ring is gone!”

“Your ring?”

“My ring!” Surely even Geoffrey has noticed that I’ve worn a ring day and night for the last forty-two years?

He noticed. “It must have fallen off when you were flapping your arms at Rex.”

This makes sense. I’m skinnier now, arms like coat hangers, and the ring is—was—loose. I feel around on my chair: nothing. Slowly I lower myself to the floor to search.

“Careful, Dad!” Geoffrey says and there’s something bad in his voice. I peer up at him, and I know. I just know.

“It’s that . . . that dybbuk! That ‘bot!”

He says, “It vacuums up small objects. But don’t worry, it keeps them in an internal depository . . . Dad, what is that ring? Why is it so important?”

Now his voice is suspicious. Forty-two years it takes for him to become suspicious, a good show of why he could never have succeeded in my business. But I knew that when he was seven. And why should I care now?

I’m a very old man, I can do what I want.

I say, “Help me up . . . no, not like that, you want me to tear something? The ring is mine, is all. I want it back.”

Now, Geoffrey.

He sets me in my chair and leaves, shaking his head. It’s a long time before he comes back. I watch Tony DiParia pass by in his powerchair. I wave at Jennifer Tamlin, who is waiting for a visit from her kids. They spare her twenty minutes every other month. I study Nurse Kate’s ass, which is round and firm as a good pumpkin. When Geoffrey comes back with Eric and Reuven, I take one look at his face and I know.

“The boys found the incinerator chute,” Geoffrey says, guilty and already resenting me for it, “and they thought it would be fun to empty Rex’s depository in it . . . Eric! Bobby! Tell Grampops you’re sorry!”

They both mumble something. Me, I’m devastated—and then I’m not.

“It’s all right,” I say to the boys, waving my hand like I’m Queen Monica of England. “Don’t worry about it!”

They look confused. Geoffrey looks suddenly wary. Me, I feel like my heart might split down the seam.

Because I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to get another lock of hair and another kiss from Daria.

Because now, of course, I know where she is. The entire world knows where she is.

“Down, Rex!” Eric shouts, but I don’t see the stupid ‘bot. I’m not looking. I see just the past, and the future, and all at once and for the first time in decades, they even look like there’s a tie, a bright cord, between them.

The Silver Star Retirement Home is for people who have given up. You want to go on actually living, you go to a renewal center. Or to Sequene. But if you’ve outlived everything and everybody that matters to you and you’re ready to check out, or you don’t have the money for a renewal center, you go to Silver Star and wait to die.

I’m there because I figured it’s time for me to go, enough is enough already, only Geoffrey left for me and I never liked him all that much. But I have lots of money. Tons of money. So much money that the second I put one foot out the door of the Home, the day after Geoffrey’s visit, the feds are on me like cold on space. Just like the old days, almost it makes me nostalgic.

“Max Feder,” one says, and it isn’t a question. He’s built with serious augments, I haven’t forgotten how to tell.

Like he needs them against an old man like me. “I’m Agent Joseph Alcozer and this is Agent Shawna Blair.

She would have been a beauty if she didn’t have that deformed genemod figure, like a wasp, and the wasp’s sting in her eyes.

I breathe in the artificially sweet reconstituted air of a Brooklyn Dome summer. Genemod flowers bloom sedately in manicured beds. Well-behaved flowers, they remind me of Geoffrey. From my powerchair I say,

“What can I do for you, Agent Alcozer?” while Nurse Kate, who’s not the deepest carrot in the garden, looks baffled, glancing back and forth from me to the fed.

“You can explain to us the recent large deposits of money from the Feder Group into your personal account.”

“And I should do this why?”

“Just to satisfy my curiosity,” Alcozer says, and it’s pretty much the truth. They have the right to monitor all my finances in perpetuity as a result of that unfortunate little misstep back in my forties. Six-to-ten, of which I served not quite five in Themis Federal Justice Center. Also as a result of the Economic Security Act, which kicked in even earlier, right after the Change-Over. And I have the right to tell them to go to hell.

Almost I get a taste of the old thrill, the hunt-and-evade, but not really. I’m too old, and I have something else on my mind. Besides, Alcozer doesn’t really expect answers. He just wants me to know they’re looking in my direction.

“Talk to my lawyer. I’m sure you know where to find him,” I say and power on down to the waiting car.

It takes me to the Brooklyn Renewal Center, right out at the edge of the Brooklyn Dome, and I check into a suite. For the next month doctors will gene-jolt a few of my organs, jazz up some hormones, step up the firing of selected synapses. It won’t be a super-effective job, nor last too long. I know that. I’m an old man and there’s only so much they can do. But it’ll be enough.

Scrupulous as a rabbi, the doctor asks if I don’t want a D-treatment instead. I tell her no, I don’t. Yes, I’m sure.

She smiles, relieved. For D-treatment I’d go to Sequene, not here, and the renewal center would lose its very expensive fees.

Then the doctor, who looks thirty-five and might even be that, tells me I’ll be out cold for the whole month, I won’t even dream. She’s wrong. I dream about Daria, and while I do I’m young again and her red mouth is warm against mine in a sleazy taverna. The stinking streets of Nicosia smell of flowers and spices and whatever that spring smell is that makes you ache from wanting things you can’t have. Then we’re on the rocky little beach, our last morning together, and I want to never wake up.

But I do wake, and Geoffrey is sitting beside my bed.

“Dad, what are you doing?”

“Having renewal. What are you doing?”

“Why did you transfer three hundred fifty million from the Feder Group on the very day of our merger with Shanghai Winds Corporation? Don’t you know how that made us look?”

“No.”, I say, even though I do know. I just don’t care. Carefully I raise my right arm above my head, and it goes up so fast and so easy that I laugh out loud. There’s no pressure on my bladder. I can feel the blood race in my veins.

“It made us look undercapitalized and shifty, and Shanghai Winds have postponed the entire—Why did you transfer the money? And why now? You ruined the whole merger!”

“You’ll get lots of mergers, boychik. Now leave me alone.” I sit up and swing my legs, a little too fast, over the side of the bed. I wait for my head to clear. “There’s something I need to do.

“Dad . . .” He says, and now I see real fear in his eyes, and so I relent.

“It’s all right, Geoffrey. Strictly legit. I’m not going back to my old ways.”

“Then why do I have on my system six calls from three different federal agencies?”

“They like to stay in practice,” I say, and lie down again. Maybe that’ll make him go away.

“Dad . . .”

I close my eyes. Briefly I consider snoring, but that might be too much. You can overdo these things. Geoff waits five more minutes, then goes away.

Children. They tie you to the present, when sometimes all you want is the past.

After the war, after I failed to find Daria in Cyprus, I went home. For a while I just drifted. It was the Change-Over, and half the country was drifting: unemployed, rioting, getting used to living on the dole instead of working. We weren’t needed. The Domes were going up, the robots suddenly everywhere and doing more and more work, only so many knowledge workers needed, blah blah blah. I did a little of this, a little of that, finally met and married Miriam, who made me pick one of the thats. So I found work monitoring security systems, because back then I had such a clean record. The Master of the Universe must love a good joke.

We lived in a rat-hole way outside the Brooklyn Dome, next door to her mother. From the beginning, Miriam and I fought a lot. She was desperate for a child, but she didn’t like sex. She didn’t like my friends. I didn’t like her mother. She didn’t like my snoring. A small and stifling life and it just got worse and worse. I could feel something growing in me, something dangerous, until it seemed I might burst apart with it and splatter my anguished guts all over our lousy apartment. At night, I walked. I walked through increasingly dangerous neighborhoods, and sometimes I stood on the docks at three in the morning—how insane is that?—and just stared out to sea until some roboguard ejected me.

Then, although I’d failed to find Daria, history found her instead.

A Tuesday morning, August 24—you think I could forget the date? Not a chance. Gray clouds, 92 degrees, 60 percent chance of rain, air quality poor. On my way to work I passed a media kiosk in our crummy neighborhood and there, on the outside screen for twenty seconds, was her face.

I don’t remember going into the kiosk or sliding in my credit chip. I do remember, for some reason, the poison-green lettering on the choices, each listed in six languages: PORN. LIBRARY. COMMLINK. FINANCIALS. NEWS.

My finger trembled as I pushed the last button, then STANDARD DELIVERY. The kiosk smelled of urine and sex.

“Today speculation swirls around ViaHealth Hospital in the Manhattan Dome. Last week Daria Cleary, wife of British billionaire-financier Peter Morton Cleary, underwent an operation to remove a brain tumor. The operation, apparently successful, was followed by sudden dizzying trading in ViaHealth stock and wild rumors, some apparently deliberately leaked, of strange properties associated with Mrs. Cleary’s condition. The Cleary establishment has refused to comment, but yesterday an unprecedented meeting was held at the Manhattan branch of Cleary Enterprises, a meeting attended not only by the CEOs of several American and British transnationals but also by high government officials, including Surgeon General Mary Grace Rogers and FDA chief Jared Vanderhorn.

“Both Mr. and Mrs. Cleary have interesting histories. Peter Morton Cleary, son of legendary Charging Chatsworth’ Cleary, is known for personal eccentricity as well as very aggressive business practices. The third Mrs. Cleary, whom he met and married in Cyprus six years ago, has long been rumored to have been either a barmaid or paid escort.

Daria. A brain tumor. Married to a big-shot Brit. Now in Manhattan. And I had never known.

The operation, apparently successful . . .

I paid to watch the news clip again. And again. The words welded together and rasped, an iron drone. I simply stared at Daria’s face, which looked no older than when I had first seen her leaning on her elbows in that taverna. Again and again.

Then I sat on the filthy curb like a drunk, a doper, a bum, and cried.

It was easier to get into Manhattan back then, with the Dome only half-finished. Not so easy to get into ViaHealth Hospital. In fact, impossible to get in legitimately, too many rich people in vulnerable states of illness. It took me six weeks to find someone to bribe. The bribe consumed half of our savings, Miriam’s and mine. I got into the system as a cleaning-bot supervisor, my retinal and voice scans flimsily on file. A system-wide background check wouldn’t hold, but why should anyone do a system-wide background check on a cleaning supervisor? The lowliest of the low.

Then I discovered that the person I bribed had diddled me. I was in the hospital, but I didn’t have clearance for Daria’s floor.

Robocams everywhere. Voice-and thumbprint-controlled elevators. I couldn’t get off my floor, couldn’t get anywhere near her. I’d bribed my way into the system for two days only. I had two days only off from my job.

By the end of the second day, I was desperate. I ignored the whispered directions in my earcomm—”Send an F-3 ‘bot to disinfect Room 678”—and hung around near the elevators. Ten minutes later a woman got on, an aging, overdressed, and over-renewed woman in a crisp white outfit and shoes with jeweled heels. She put her thumb to the security pad and said, “Surgical floor.

“Yes, ma’am,”, the elevator said. Just before the door closed, I dashed in.

“There is an unauthorized person on this elevator,” the elevator said, somehow combining calmness with urgency. “Mrs. Holmason, please disembark immediately. Unauthorized person, remain motionless or you will be neutralized.”

I remained motionless, looked at Mrs. Holmason, and said, “Please. I knew Daria Cleary long ago, on Cyprus, I just want to see her again for a minute, please ma’am, I don’t mean anybody any harm, oh please . . .”

It was on the word “harm that her face changed. A small and cruel smile appeared at the corners of her mouth.

She wasn’t afraid of me; I would have bet my eyes that she’d never been afraid of anything in her life.

Cushioned by money, she’d never had to be.

“There is an unauthorized person on this elevator,” the elevator repeated. “Mrs. Holmason, please disembark immediately. Unauthorized person, remain motionless or you—”

“This person is my guest,” Mrs. Holmason said crisply. “Code 1693, elevator. Surgical floor, please.”

A pause. The universe held its breath.

“I have no front-desk entry in my system for such a guest,” the elevator said. “Please return to the front desk or else complete the verbal code for—”

Mrs. Holmason said to me, still with the same small smile, “So did you know Daria when she was a prostitute on Cyprus?”

This, then, was the price for letting me ride the elevator. But it’s not like reporters wouldn’t now ferret out everything about Daria, anyway.

“Yes,” I said. “I did,” and she was.

“Elevator, Code 1693 Abigail Louise. Surgical floor.” And the elevator closed its doors and rose.

“And was she any good?” Mrs. Holmason said.

I wanted to punch her in her artificial face, to club her to the ground. The pampered lousy bitter bitch. I stared at her steadily and said, “Yes. Daria was good.”

“Well, she would have to be, wouldn’t she?” Sweetly. The elevator opened and Mrs. Holmason walked serenely down the corridor.

There were no names on the doors, but they all stood open. I didn’t have much time. The bitch’s secret code might have gotten me on this floor, but it wouldn’t keep me there. Peter Morton Cleary unwittingly helped me, or at least his ego did. The roboguard outside the third doorway bore a flashy logo: CLEARY ENTERPRISES.

I dashed forward and it caught me in a painful vise.

But Daria, lying on a white bed inside the room, was awake and had already seen me.

The Renewal Center keeps me for an extra week. I protest, but not too much. What good will it be if I leave early and fall down, an old man in the street? Okay, I could rent a roboguard—not a good idea to take one from the Feder Group, I don’t want Geoffrey tracking me. It’s not like I won’t already have Agent Alcozer and the other Agent, the hard-eyed beauty, whose name I can’t remember. Memory isn’t what it used to be. Renewal only goes so far.

It’s not, after all, D-treatment.

But I don’t want a roboguard, so I spend the extra week. I refuse Geoffrey’s calls. I do the physical therapy the doctors insist on. I worry the place on my bony finger where my ring used to be. I don’t look at the news.

There’s going to be something, at my age, that I haven’t seen before? Solomon was right. Nothing new under the sun, and the sun itself not all that interesting either. At least not to somebody who hasn’t left the Brooklyn Dome in ten years.

Then, on my last day in the Center, the courier finally shows up. I say, “About time. Why so long? He doesn’t answer me. This is irritating, so I say, “Katar aves? Stevan? Do you come from Stevan?

He scowls, hands me the package, and leaves.

This is not a good sign.

But the package is as requested. The commlink runs quantum-encrypted, military-grade software piggy-backing on satellites that have no idea they’re being used. The satellites don’t know, the countries owning them don’t know, the federal tracking system—and the feds track everything, don’t believe the civil-rights garbage you hear at kiosks—can’t track this. I take the comm out into the garden, use it to sweep for bugs, jam two of them, and make some calls.

The next day I check myself out. I wave at the federal agent in undercover get-up as a nurse, get into the car that pulls up to the gate, and disappear.

“Max,” Daria said from her hospital bed all those decades ago, in her voice a world of wonder. She snapped something in Farsi to the guard ‘bot. It let me go and returned to its post by the door.

“Daria.” I approached the bed slowly, my legs barely able to carry me. Half her head was shaved, the right half, while her wild black hair spilled down from the other side. There were angry red stitches on the bare scalp, dark splotches under her eyes, a med patch on her neck like a purple bruise. Her lips looked dry and cracked. I went weak—weaker—with desire.

“How . . . how you have . . .” Her English had improved in ten years, but her accent remained unchanged, and so did that adorable little catch in her low voice. To me that little catch was femininity was Daria. No other woman ever had it. Her green eyes filled with water.

“Daria, are you all right?” The world’s stupidest question—she lay in a hospital room, a tumor in her brain, looking like she’d seen a ghost. But was the ghost me, or her? I remembered Daria in so many moods, laughing and lusting and weeping and once throwing a vase at my head. But never with that trapped look, that bitterness in her green, green eyes. “Daria, I looked for you, I—”

She waved her hand, a sudden crackling gesture that brought back a second flood of memories. Nobody had ever had such expressive hands. And I knew instantly what she meant: the room was monitored. Of course it was.

I leaned close to her ear. She smelled faintly sour, of medicine and disinfectant, but the Daria smell was there, too. “I’ll take you away. As soon as you’re well. I’ll—”

She pushed me off and stared incredulously at my face. And for a second the universe flipped and I saw what Daria saw: a raggedy unshaven putz, with a wedding ring on my left hand, whom she had not seen or heard from in eight years.

I let her go and backed away.

But she reached for me, one slim hand with the sleeve of the lace nightgown falling back from her delicate wrist, and the Daria I remembered was back, my Daria, crying on a rocky beach the morning my shore leave ended. “Oh, Max, stay!” she’d cried then, and I had said, “I’ll be AWOL. I can’t!”

“I can’t,” she whispered now. “Is not possible . . . Max . . .” then her eyes went wide as she gazed over my shoulder.

He looked older than his holograms, and bigger. Dressed in a high-fashion business suit, its diagonal sash an aggressive crimson, the clothes cut sleek because a man like this has no need to carry his own electronics, or ID, or credit chips. Brown hair, brown beard, but pale gray eyes, almost white. Like glaciers.

“Who is your guest, Daria?” Cleary said in that cool voice the Brits do better than anybody else. I served under enough of them in the war. Although not like this one; no one like this had crossed my path before.

She was afraid of him. I felt it rather than saw it. But her voice held steady when she said, “An old friend.

“I can imagine. I think it’s time for your friend to leave.” Within an hour, I was sure, he would know everything there was to know about me.

“Yes, Peter.” After two more minutes. Alone, please.

They gazed at each other. She had always had courage, but that look chilled me down to my cells. Only years later did I know enough to recognize it, when the Feder Group was involved with hostile negotiations: I offer you this for that, but I despise you for making me do it. Done? The look stretched to a full minute, ninety seconds. There seemed to be no air left in the room.

Finally he said, “Of course, darling,” and stepped out into the hall.

Done? Done!

What had Daria become since that morning on the rocky Cyprus beach?

She pulled me close. “Nine. Tonight. By Linn’s in alley. Amsterdam. Big street. Be careful you not followed.” It was breathed in my ear, so softly that erotic memories swamped me. And with them, anguish.

She was not my Daria. She had stolen my Daria, who might have sold her body but never her soul. My Daria was gone, taken over by this manipulating, lying bitch who belonged to Peter Morton Cleary, lived with him, fucked him . . .

I hope I never know anger like that again. It isn’t human, that anger.

I hit her. Not on her half-shaven scalp, and not hard. But I slapped her across her beautiful mouth and said,

“Face it, Daria. You always were a whore.” And I left.

May the Master of the Universe forgive me.

I have never been able to remember the hours between ViaHealth Hospital and the alley off Amsterdam Avenue. What did I do? I must have done something, a man has a physical body and that body must be in one place or another. I must have dodged and doubled back and done all those silly things they do in the holos to lose pursuers. I must have dumped my commlink; those things can be traced. Did I eat? Did I huddle somewhere behind trash cans? I remember nothing.

Memory snaps back in when I stand in the alley behind Linn’s, a sleazy VR-parlor franchise. Then every detail is clear. Hazy figures passed me as they headed for the back door, customers maybe, going after fantasies pornographic or exciting or maybe just as sad as mine. A boy in one of the ridiculous caped-and-mirrored sweaters that were the newest fashion among the young. A woman in a long black coat, hands in her pockets.

An old man with the bluest eyes I have ever seen. These are acid-etched in my memory. I could still draw any one of them today. The alley stank of garbage cans and urine—how did Daria even know of such a place?

And what was I expecting? That she would come to me, sick and thin from illness, wobbling toward me in the fading light? Or that Peter Cleary would arrive with goons and guns? That these were my last minutes on Earth, here in a reeking alley under the shadow of the half-finished struts that would eventually support the Manhattan Dome?

I expected all of that. I expected nothing. I was out of my mind, as I have never been before or since. Not like that, not like that.

At nine o’clock a boy brushed past me and went into the VR parlor. He kept his head down, like a teenager ashamed or embarrassed about going into Linn’s, and so I only glimpsed his face. He might have been Greek, or Persian, or Turkish, or Arab. He might even have been a Jew. The package dropped into my pocket was so light that I didn’t even feel it. Only his hand, light as a breeze.

It was a credit chip, tightly wrapped in a tiny bit of paper that brought to mind that other paper, with Daria’s kiss. In ink that faded and disappeared even as I read it, childish block letters said: LIFELONG, INC. A MUST TO BUY TONIGHT!

The chip held a half million credits.

I hadn’t even known that she could read and write.

The car that takes me from the Brooklyn Renewal Center is followed, of course. By the feds and maybe by Geoffrey, too, although I don’t think he’s that smart. But who knows? It’s never good to underestimate people.

Even a chicken can peck you to death.

The car disappears into the underground streets. Aboveground is for the parks and paths and tiny shops and everything else that lets Dome dwellers pretend they don’t live in a desperate, angry, starving, too-hot world. I lean forward, toward the driver.

“Are you an Adams?” This is an important question.

He glances at me in his mirror; the car is not on auto. Good. Auto can be traced. But, then, Stevan knows his business.

The driver grins. “Nicklos Adams, gajo. Stevan’s adopted grandson.”

All at once I relax. Who knew, until that moment, that my renewed body was so tense? With reason: It had been ten years since I’d seen Stevan and things change, things change. But gajo, the Romanes term for unclean outsiders, was said lightly, and an adopted grandson holds a position of honor among gypsies. Stevan is not doing this grudgingly. He has sent his adopted grandson. We are still wortácha.

Nicklos stays underground as we leave Brooklyn, but he doesn’t take the Manhattan artery. Instead he pulls into a badly lit service bay. We move quickly—almost running, I have forgotten how good it feels to run—to a different level and get into a different car. This car goes into Manhattan, where we change again in another service bay. I don’t question the jammers; I don’t have to. Stevan and I are wortácha, partners in an economic enterprise. Once we each taught the other everything we both knew. Well, almost everything.

When the car emerges aboveground, we are in open country, heading toward the Catskills. We drive through the world I have only read about for ten years, since I went into the Silver Star Retirement Home. Farms guarded by e-fences or genemod dogs, irrigated with expensive water. Outside the farms, the ghost towns of the dead, the shanty towns of the barely living. Until the micro-climate changes again—give it a decade, maybe—this part of the country has drought. Elsewhere, sparse fields have become lush jungles, cities unlivable heat sinks or swarming warrens of the hopeless, but not here. A lone child, starveling and unsmiling, waves at the car and I look away. It’s not shame—I have not caused this misery. It’s not distaste, either. I don’t know what it is.

Nicklos says, “The car has stealth shields. Very new. You’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Yes, I have,” I say. Reuven’s ‘bot dog, a flash of nearly invisible light, my arms flailing at the stupid thing. My ring with Daria’s hair, her kiss. All at once my elation at escaping Brooklyn vanishes. Such foolishness. I’m still an old man with a bare finger and an ache in his heart, doing something stupid. Most likely my last stupid act.

Nicklos watches me in the mirror. “Take heart, gajo. So ci del o bers, del o caso.

I don’t speak much Romanes, but I recognize the proverb. Stevan used it often. What a year may not bring, an hour might.

From your mouth to God’s ears.

From the alley behind Linn’s I went straight to a public kiosk. That was how little I knew in those days: no cover, no dummy corporation, no off-shore accounts. Also no time. I deposited the five hundred thousand credits in my and Miriam’s account, thereby increasing it to a 500,016. Fortunately, the deposit proved untraceable because Daria knew more than me—how? How did she learn so much so fast? And what had such knowledge cost her?

But I didn’t think those compassionate thoughts then. I didn’t think at all, only felt. The credits were blood money, owed me for the loss of the other Daria, my Daria. The Daria who had loved me and could never have married Peter Morton Cleary. I screamed at the screen in the public kiosk, I punched the keys with a savagery that should have gotten me arrested. As soon as the deposit registered, I went to a trading site, read the directions through the red haze in my demented mind, and bought a half million worth of stock in Lifelong, Inc.

I didn’t even realize that it was among the lowest-rated, cheapest stocks on the exchange. I wouldn’t have cared.

I was following Daria’s instructions from some twisted idea that I was somehow crushing her by doing this, that I was polluting her world by entering it, that I was losing these bogus credits exactly as I had lost her. I was flinging the piece of her dirty world that she’d given me right back in her face. I was not sane.

Then I went and got drunk.

It was the only time in my life that I have ever been truly drunk. I don’t know what happened, where I went, what I did. I woke in a doorway, my boots and credit chip with its sixteen credits stolen, someone’s spittle on my shirt. If it had been winter, I would have frozen to death. It was not winter. I threw up on the sidewalk and staggered home.

Miriam screaming and crying. My head pounded and my hands shook, but I had thrown up the insanity with the vomit. I looked at this woman I did not love and I had my first clear thought in weeks: We cannot go on like this.

“Miriam—”

“Shut up! You shut up! Just tell me where you were, you don’t come home, what am I supposed to think? You never come home, even when you’re here you’re not here, this is a life? You hide things from me—”

“I never—”

“No? What is that plastic bubble with your old uniform? Whose hair, whose kiss? I can’t trust you, you’re devious, you’re cold, you—”

“You went through my Army uniform? My things?”

“I hate you! You’re a no-good son-of-a-bitch, even my mother says so, she knew, she told me not to marry you, find a real mensch she said, this one’s not and if you think I ever really loved you, a stinking sex maniac like you but—” She stopped.

Miriam is not stupid. She saw my face. She knew I was going to leave her, that she had just said things that made it possible for me to leave her. She continued on, without drawing new breath or changing tone, but with a sudden twisted triumph that poisoned the rest of our decades together. Poisoned us more, as if “more” were even possible—but more is always possible. I learned as much that night. More is always possible. She said—

—and everything closed in on me forever—

“—but I’m pregnant.”

Technology has been good to the Rom.

They have always been coppersmiths, basket makers, auto-body repairers, fortune tellers, any occupation that uses light tools and can easily be moved from place to place. And thieves, of course, but only stealing from the gaje. It is shame to steal from other Romani, or even to work for other Romani, because it puts one person in a lower position than another. No, it is more honorable to form wortácha, share-and-share-alike economic partnerships to steal from the gaje, who after all have enslaved and tortured and ridiculed and whipped and romanticized and debased the Rom for eight centuries. Technology makes stealing both safer and more effective.

Nicklos drives along mountain roads so steep my heart is under my tongue. He says, “Opaque the windows if you’re so squeamish”, and I do. It does not help. When we finally stop, I gasp with relief.

Stevan yanks open the door. “Max!”

“Stevan!” We embrace, while curious children peep at us and Stevan’s wife, Rosie, waits to one side. I turn to her and bow, knowing better than to touch her. Rosie is fierce and strong, as a Romani wife should be, and nobody crosses her, not even Stevan. He is the rom baro, the big man, in his kumpania, but it is Rom women who traditionally support their men and who are responsible for their all-important ritual cleanliness. If a man becomes marimé, unclean, the shame lies even more on his wife than on him. Nobody with any sense offends Rosie. I have sense. I bow.

She nods her head, gracious as a queen. Like Stevan, Rosie is old now—the Rom do no genemods of any kind, which are marimé. Rosie has a tooth missing on the left side, her hair is gray, her cheeks sag. But those cheeks glow with color, her black eyes snap, and she moves her considerable weight with the sure quickness of a girl.

She wears much gold jewelry, long full skirts, and the traditional headscarf of a married woman. The harder the new century pulls on the Rom, the more they cling to the old ways, except for new ways to steal. This is how they stay a people. Who can say they’re wrong?

“Come in, come in,” Stevan says.

He leads me toward their house, one of a circle of cabins around a scuffed green. Mountain forest presses close to the houses. The inside of the Adams house looks like every other Rom house I have ever seen: inner walls pulled down to make a large room, which Rosie has lavished with thick Oriental carpets, thick dark red drapes, large overstuffed sofas. It’s like entering an upholstered womb.

Children sit everywhere, giggling. From the kitchen comes the good smell of stuffed cabbage, along with the bickering of Rosie’s daughters-in-law and unmarried granddaughters. Somewhere in the back of the house will be tiny, unimportant bedrooms, but here is where Rom life goes on, rich and fierce and free.

“Sit there,” Max, Stevan says, pointing. The chair kept for gaje visitors. No Rom would ever sit in it, just as no Rom will ever eat from dishes I touch. Stevan and I are wortácha, but I have never kidded myself that I am not marimé to him.

And what is he to me?

Necessary. Now, more than ever.

“Not here, Stevan,” I say. “We must talk business.

“As you wish.” He leads me back outside. The men of the kumpania have gathered, and there are introductions in the circle among the cabins. Wary looks among the young, but I detect no real hostility. The older ones, of course, remember me. Stevan and I worked together for thirty years, right up until I retired and Geoffrey took over the Feder Group. Stevan, who is also old but still a decade younger than me and the smartest man I have ever met, and I made each other rich.

Richer.

Finally he leads me to a separate building, which my practiced eye recognizes for what it is: a super-reinforced, Faraday-cage-enclosed office. Undetectable unless emitting electronic signals and I would bet the farm I never wanted that those signals were carried by underground cable until they left, heavily encrypted, for wherever Stevan and his sons wanted them to go. Probably through the same unaware satellites I had used to call him.

Here, too, one chair was marimé. Stevan points and I sit.

“I need help, Stevan. It will cost me, but will not make money for you. I tell you this honestly. I know you will not let me pay you, so I ask your help from history, as well as from our old wortácha. I ask as a friend.”

He studies me from those dark eyes, sunken now but once those of the handsomest Rom in his nation. There are reasons that stupid novels romanticized gypsy lovers. Before he can speak, I hold up my hand. “I know I am gajo. Please don’t insult me by reminding me of the obvious. And let me say this first—you will not like what I ask you to do. You will not approve. It involves a woman, someone I have never told you about, someone notorious. But I appeal to you anyway. As a friend. And from history.”

Still Stevan studies me. Twice I’ve said “from history”, not “from our history”. Stevan knows what I mean.

There has always been affinity between Rom and Jews: both outcasts, both wanderers, both blamed and flogged and hunted for sport by the gaje, the Gentiles. Enslaved together in Romania, driven together out of Spain, imprisoned and murdered together in Germany just one hundred fifty years ago. Stevan’s great-great-great-grandfather died in Auschwitz, along with a million other of the Rom. They died with “Z, for Zigeuner,” the Nazi word for “gypsy” branded on their arms. My great-great-grandfather was there, too, with a blue number on his arm. A hundred fifty years ago is nothing to Romani, to Jews. We neither of us forget.

Stevan does not want to do this for me, whatever it is. But although the Rom do not make family of gaje, they are fast and loyal friends. They do not count the cost of efforts, except in honor. Finally he says, “Tell me.”

Two days after I bought the LifeLong stock, the news broke. Daria Cleary had had not only a brain tumor but another tumor on her spine, and both were like nothing the doctors had ever seen before.

I am no scientist, and back then I knew even less about genetics than I know now, which is not much. But the information was everywhere, kiosks and the Internet and street orators and the White House. Everybody talked about it. Everybody had an opinion. Daria Cleary was the next step in evolution, was the anti-Christ, was an inhuman monster, was the incarnation of a goddess, was—the only thing everybody agreed on—a lot of money on the hoof.

Both of her tumors produced proteins nobody had ever seen before, from some sort of genetic mutation. The proteins were, as close as I could understand it, capable of making something like a warehouse of spare stem cells. They renewed organs, blood, skin, everything in the adult person. Daria had looked still eighteen to me because her body was still eighteen. It might be eighteen forever. The fountain of youth, phoenix from the ashes, we are become as gods, blah blah blah. Her tumors might be able to be grown in a lab and transplanted into others, and then those others could also stay young forever.

Only, of course, it didn’t work out that way.

But nobody knew that, then. LifeLong, the struggling biotech company that Peter Cleary secretly took over to set up commercial control of Daria’s tumors, rocketed to the stratosphere. Almost you couldn’t glimpse it way up there. My half-million credits became one million, three million, a hundred million. The entire global economy, already staggering from the Change-Over and the climate changes, tripped again like some crazy drunk. Then it got up again and lurched on, but changed for good.

No more changed than my life. Because of her.

Should I say the success of my new stock was ashes in my mouth? I would be lying. Who hates being rich?

Should I say it was pure blessing, a gift from the Master of the Universe, something that made me happy? I would be lying.

“I don’t understand,” Miriam said, holding in her hands the e-key I had just handed her. “You bought a house?”

Under the Brooklyn Dome? How can we buy a house?

Not “we”, I thought. There was no more “we”, and maybe there never had been. But she didn’t need to know that. Miriam was my wife, carrying my child, and I was sick of our cruelty to each other. Enough is enough already. Besides, we would be away from her mother.

“I got a stock tip, never mind how. I bought—”

“A stock tip? Oh! When can I see the house?”

She never asked about my business again. Which was a good thing, because the money changed me. No, money doesn’t change people, it only makes them more of whatever they were before. Somewhere inside me had always been this rage, this desperation, this contempt. Somewhere inside me I had always been a crook. I just hadn’t known it.

I could have lived for the rest of my life on the money Daria gave me. Easy. Miriam and I could have had six children, more, another Jacob with my own personal twelve tribes. Well, maybe not—Miriam still hated sex.

Also, I didn’t want a dynasty. I never touched my wife again, and she never asked. I took prostitutes sometimes, when I needed to. I took business alliances with men, Italians and Jews and Russians and Turks, most of whom were well known to the feds. And this is when I took on a separate identity for these transactions, the folksy quaint Jew that later Geoffrey would hate, the colorful mumbling Shylock. I took on dubious construction contracts and, later, even more dubious Robin Hoods, those lost cyber-rats who rob from the rich and give to the pleasure-drug dealers.

But dubious to who? The Feder Group did very well. And why shouldn’t I loot a world in which Daria—Daria, to whom I’d given my soul—could give me money instead of herself ? Money for a soul, the old bargain. A world rotten at the core. A world like this.

I regret none of it. Miriam was, in her own way, happy. Geoffrey had everything a child could want, except maybe respectability, and when I retired, he took the Feder Group legitimate and got that, too.

I put Daria’s lock of hair and paper kiss in a bank deposit box, beyond the reach of Miriam and her new army of obsessive cleaners, human and ‘bot. After she died in a car crash when Geoff was thirteen, I had the hair and paper set inside my ring. By then LifeLong had “perfected the technique for using Daria’s tumor cells for tissue renewal. The process, what came to be called D-treatment, couldn’t make you younger. Nothing can reverse time.

What D-treatment could do was “freeze you at whatever age you had the operation done. Peter Cleary, among the first to be treated after FDA approval (the fastest FDA approval in history—mine wasn’t the only soul for sale) would stay fifty-four years old forever.

Supermodel Kezia Dostie would stay nineteen. Singer Mbamba would stay thirty. First came Hollywood, then society, then politicians, and then everybody with enough money, which wasn’t too many people because after all you don’t want hoi polloi permanently cluttering up the planet. When King James III of England was D-treated, the whole thing had arrived. Respectable as organ transplants, safe as a haircut. Unless the king was hit by a bus, Princess Monica would never succeed to the throne, but she didn’t seem to care. And England would forever have its beloved king, who had somehow become a symbol of the “British renewal brought about by Daria’s shaved head.

There were complications, of course. From day one, many people hated the whole idea of D-treatment. It was unnatural, monstrous, contrary to God’s will, dangerous, premature, and unpatriotic. I never understood that last, but apparently D-treatment offended the patriotism of several different countries in several different parts of the world. Objectors wrote passionate letters. Objectors organized on the Internet and, later, on the Link.

Objectors subpoenaed scientists to testify on their side, and some tried to subpoena God. A few were even sure they’d succeeded. And, inevitably, some objectors didn’t wait for anything formal to develop: they just attacked.

I stay with Stevan two days. He houses me in a guest cottage, well away from the Rom women, which I find immensely flattering. I am eighty-six years old, and although renewal has made me feel good again, it isn’t that good. Sap doesn’t rise in my veins. I don’t need sap; I just need to see Daria again.

“Why, Max?” Stevan asks, as of course he was bound to do. “What do you want from her?”

“Another lock of hair, another kiss on paper.”

“And this makes sense to you?” He leans toward me, hands on his knees, two old men sitting on a fallen log in the mountain woods. There is a snake by the log, beyond Stevan. I watch it carefully. It watches me, too. We have mutual distaste, this snake and I. If man was meant to be in naked woods, we wouldn’t have invented room service, let alone orbitals. Although in fact this woods is not so naked—the entire kumpania and its archaically lush land are encased under an invisible and very expensive mini-Dome and are nourished by underground irrigation. This is largely due to me, as Stevan knows. I don’t have to issue any reminders.

I say, “What in this world makes sense?” I need another lock of hair and a paper kiss, is all. I have to have them.

Is this so hard to understand?

“It’s impossible to understand.”

“Then is understanding necessary?”

He doesn’t answer, and I see that I need to say more. Stevan has still not noticed the snake. He is ten years younger than me, he still has much of the strength in his arms, he lives surrounded by his wife and family. What does he know from desperation?

“Stevan, it’s like this: To be old, in the way I’m old, this is to live in a war zone. Zap zap zap—who falls next?”

You don’t know, but you see them fall, the people all around you, the people you know. The bullets are going to keep coming, you know this, and the next one could just as well take you. Eventually it will take you. So you cherish any little thing you still care about, anything that says you’re still among the living. Anything that matters to you.

I sound like a damn fool.

But Stevan lumbers to his feet and stretches, not looking at me. “Okay, Max.”

“Okay? You can do it? You will?”

“I will.”

We are still wortácha. We shake hands and my eyes fill, the easy tears of the old. Ridiculous. Stevan pretends not to notice. All at once I know that I will never see him again, that this completes anything I might be owed by the Rom. Whatever happens, they will not set a pomona sinia, a death-feast table, for me, the gajo. That is all right. You can’t have everything. And anyway, the important thing is not to get, but to want.

After so long, I am grateful to want anything.

We walk out of the woods. And I am right, Stevan never notices the snake.

Nicklos drives me back to the Manhattan Dome. “BaXt, gajo.”

“Good-bye, Nicklos.” The young—they believe that luck is what succeeds. I don’t need luck, I have planning.

Although this time I have planned only to a point, so maybe I will need luck after all. Yes, definitely.

“BaXt, Nicklos.”

I climb out of the car at the Manhattan Space Port, and a ‘bot appears to take my little overnight bag and lead me inside. It seats me in a small room. Almost immediately a woman enters, dressed in the black-and-green uniform of the Federal Space Authority. She’s a shicksa beauty, tall and blonde, with violet eyes. Genemod, of course. I’m unmoved. Next to the Rom women, she looks sterile, a made thing. Next to Daria, she looks like a pale cartoon.

“Max Feder?”

“That’s me.”

“I’m Jennifer Kenyon, FSA. I’d like to talk to you about the trip you just booked up to Sequene.”

“I bet you would.”

Her face hardens, pastry dough left out too long. “We’ve notified Agent Alcozer of the CIB, who will be here shortly. Until then, you will wait here, please.”

“I’ve notified my lawyer, who will holo here shortly. Until then, you will bring me a coffee, please. Something to eat would be nice, too. Rom food, although delicious, is very spicy for my old guts.”

She scowls and leaves. A ‘bot brings very good coffee and excellent doughnuts. Max Feder is a reprobate suddenly awakened from the safely dead, but money is still money.

Twenty minutes later Agent Alcozer shows up, no female sidekick. He, Ms. Kenyon, and I sit down, a cozy trio.

Almost I’m looking forward to this. Josh holos in and stands in front of the wall screen, sighing. “Hello, Joe.”

“Ms. Kenyon, I’m Josh Zyla, Max Feder’s attorney of record. Is there a problem?”

She says, “Mr. Feder is not cleared for space travel. He has a criminal record.”

“That’s true,” Josh agrees genially. He’s even more genial than his father, who represented me for thirty years.

“But if you’ll check the Space Travel Security Act, Section 42, paragraph 13a, you’ll see that the flight restrictions apply only to orbitals registered in countries signatory to the Land-Gonzalez Treaty and—”

“Sequene is registered in Bahrain, a sig—”

“—and which received global Expansion Act monies to subsidize some or all construction costs and—”

“Sequene received—”

“—and have not filed a full-responsibility liability acceptance form for a given prospective space-faring individual.”

Ms. Kenyon is silent. Clearly she, or her system, has not checked to see if Sequene had filed a full-responsibility liability acceptance form to let me come aboard. At least, she hasn’t checked in the last hour.

Alcozer frowns. “Why would Sequene file a flight acceptance for Max Feder?”

Why indeed? Full-liability acceptances were designed to allow diplomats from violent countries, who might violently object to exclusion, attend international conferences. The acceptances are risky. If said diplomat blows up the place, no government is legally responsible and no insurance company has to pay. The demolition is then considered just one of those things. Full-liability acceptances are rare, and not designed for the likes of Max Feder.

Josh shrugs. “Sequene didn’t tell me how it made its decisions.” This is true, since Sequene doesn’t know yet that I am coming upstairs. Money isn’t the only thing that can be stolen. Every alteration of every record is a kind of theft. Stevan’s people are very good thieves. They have had eight centuries to practice.

Jennifer Kenyon, that blonde buttress of bureaucracy, finishes examining her handheld and says, “It’s true—the form is on file. I guess you can fly, Mr. Feder.”

Alcozer, still frowning, says, “I don’t think—”

Josh says, “Are you arresting my client, Agent Alcozer? If not, then this interview is over.”

Alcozer leaves, unhappy. Josh shoots me a puzzled look before his holo vanishes. Jennifer Kenyon says stiffly, “I need to ask you some questions, Mr. Feder, preparatory to your retinal and security scans. Please be advised that you are being recorded. What is your full name and citizen ID?’ ”

“Max Michael Feder, 03065932861.”

“What is your flight number and destination this afternoon?”

“British Spaceways Flight 165, to Sequene Orbital.”

“How long will you be staying?”

“Three days.”

“And what is the purpose of your visit?”

Our eyes meet. I know what she sees: a very old man with the hectic and temporary glow of renewal artificially animating his sagging face, too-thin arms, weak legs. A man with how long to live—a year? Two? Maybe five, if he’s lucky and his mind doesn’t go first. A dinosaur with the meteor already a foot above the ground, and a criminal dinosaur at that. One who should be getting ready to check out already, preferably without causing too much fuss to everybody staying longer at the party.

I say, “I’m going to Sequene to take D-treatment so I can stay eighty-six years old.”

Fifteen years after I established the Feder Group, a girl stopped me as I left the office. A strange-looking girl, dressed in a shapeless long robe of some kind with her hair hidden under an orange cap with wings. I didn’t remember her name. I had hired her reluctantly—the orange was some kind of reactionary cult and who needs the trouble—but Moshe Silverstein had insisted. Moshe was my—what? If we’d been Italian, he’d have been my “consigliere. We weren’t Italian. He was my number-two until, I hoped, Geoffrey became old enough. It was not a robust hope. Geoffrey, now sixteen, was a prig.

The girl said, “Mr. Feder, could I talk to you a minute?”

“Certainly. Talk.”

She grimaced. Under the silly hat, the skinned-back hair, she had a pretty face. She was the accountant for show, absolutely honest, in charge only of the books for the Feder Group, which was also honest. You have to present something to the IRS. “She’s brilliant,” Moshe had argued. I’d argued back that for this small part of our operations we didn’t need brilliant, but here the girl was. I hardly ever saw her, since I was hardly ever in the Feder Group office. My real business all took place elsewhere.

“I’ve found an irregularity,” the girl said, and all at once I remembered her name: Gwendolyn Jameson, and the cult with the modest dress and orange hats was the Daughters of Eve. Opposed to any kind of genetic engineering at all.

“What kind of irregularity, Gwendolyn?”

“An inexplicable and big one. Please come look at this screen of—”

“Screens I don’t need. What’s the problem?” I was already late to meet a man about a deal.

She said, “A quarter million credits have been moved from the Feder Group to an entity called Cypress, Ltd., that’s registered in Hong Kong. I can’t trace them from there, and even though the authorization has your codes on it, and although I found your hand-written back-up order in the files, something just doesn’t seem right.”

I froze. I hadn’t authorized any transfer, and nobody should have been able to connect Cypress, Ltd. with the Feder Group. Nobody.

“Let me see the hand-written order.”

She brought it to me. It looked like my handwriting, but I had not written it. It was inside our paper files. And somebody had my personal codes.

“Freeze all accounts now. Nothing moves in, nothing moves out. You got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

I called Moshe, who called his nephew Timothy, who was my real accountant. We went over everything. I paced around the secret office while Tim ran heavily encrypted software for which I’d paid half my fortune. I chewed my nails, I cursed, I pounded on the wall. Like such foolishness could help? It didn’t help. Finally Tim looked up.

“Well?” My throat could barely get the syllable out.

“Two and a half million is missing. They’ve penetrated three accounts—Cypress, Mu-Nova, and the Aurora Group.”

“Zurich?” I said. “Did they get into Zurich?”

“No.”

Thank you, Master of the Universe. Also thank the Swiss. Zurich held the bulk of my credits.

“This guy’s good,” Tim said, and the professional admiration in his voice only made me madder.

“Find him,” I said.

“I don’t do that kind of—”

“I’ll find him,” Moshe said. “But it will cost. A lot.”

“I don’t care. Find him.”

Two weeks later he said, “I have him. You won’t believe this—it’s a goddamn gypsy. The name he’s using is Stevan Adams.”

It’s not that hard to kidnap a Rom. They rely on hiding, moving, stealth, gypsy-nation loyalty, not so much on pure muscle. What with one thing and another, drought and flooding and war and famine and bio-plagues, the population of the United States is half what it was a hundred years ago. The Romani population has doubled.

They take care of their own, but in their own way. Four Rom in a beat-up truck, even an armed and armored truck, were no match for what I sent against them.

Moshe flew me to an abandoned house somewhere in the Pennsylvania mountains. It was old, this house, and peculiar. How did people manage to live here, sixty years ago? Miles from everything, perched on a mountainside, no wind or solar or geothermal energy, facing north with huge expanses of real glass, now shattered. A vacation home, Moshe said. Some vacation—all the place had was a view, which I didn’t see because we were using only the basement.

“Where is he?”

“In there.”

“Alone, Moshe?”

“Just as you said. The others are in that room over there, the laundry room, drugged. He’s just tied up.”

“Are you sure you got the right one?” Gypsies switch identities, you know. More names for the same person than a Russian novel. I’d done research on the flight in.

Moshe looked insulted. “I have the right one.”

I opened the door to what might have once been a wine cellar. Dank, moldy, spiders. Moshe’s men had set up a floodlight. Stevan Adams sat bound to a chair, a big man dressed in rough work clothes, with short dark hair and a luxurious mustache. His eyes glittered with intelligence, with contempt. But controlled contempt, this was no cheap cyberthug. This was a man you’d have to kill to break. I didn’t kill, not even when it lost me money.

There was plenty to take from the world without blood on your hands.

I said, “I’m Max Feder.”

He said, “Where are my son and nephews?”

“They’re safe. I hurt no one.”

“Where are they?”

“In the next room. Drugged but unharmed.”

“Show me.”

I said to Moshe, “Take the other side of that chair and help me pull it.”

Moshe looked startled—this was not how we did things. But it was how I wanted them done now. What so many people never understand is that it’s not enough to make money. It’s not even enough to be handed money, like Daria (whom I was still, in those years, cursing) handed to me. You have to also be able to keep money, and for that you must be a good judge of people. No—a superb judge of people. This is more than watching them closely, reading body language, seeing when they blink, blah blah blah. It’s a kind of smell, a tingling high in the nose that I never ignore. Never. The mind sees what it wants to see, but the body—the body knows.

This smell is a talent, my only one really. I’m not an accountant, not a software expert (as Geoffrey never tires of telling me), not even a particularly good thief when I’m alone. Always I needed Moshe and the Robin Hoods I used, those shadowy young men so adept at stealing from the rich and so bad, without me, at not dying violently. Me, I don’t need violence. I can smell.

Moshe and I grabbed the chair and dragged it out of the fruit cellar and into a crumbling laundry room. We gasped and lurched; Stevan was heavy and we were not exactly athletes. Three young men, one scarcely older than Geoffrey, lay bound on the rotted floor, angelic smiles on their sleeping faces. Whatever Moshe had given them, it looked happy.

“See, Mr. Adams? They breathe, they’ll be fine.”

“Bring them awake so I can see.”

Moshe said, “Who do you think you—”

Again I cut him off. “Bring them awake, Moshe.”

He grimaced and called, “Dena!” His daughter, our doctor, came in from outside, carrying her weapon. Her face was masked; I don’t risk anybody but Moshe and me. She slapped patches on the boys and they woke up, easily and profanely. Stevan and they conversed in Romanes and even though I didn’t speak the language, I could see the moment he told them it was no good trying any kind of physical assault. The youngest spat at me, a theatrical bit of foolishness I forgave at once. They were good boys. And would Geoffrey have done as much for me? I doubted this.

We dragged Stevan back into the other room and locked in the bound boys, Dena on guard. Even if they got themselves loose—which, it eventually turned out, they did—she had knock-out gases and everything else she needed.

I said, “You took two and a half million credits from accounts belonging to me.”

Stevan said, “So?”

How do I convey the attitude in that one word? Not just contempt but pleasure, pride, deliberate goad. Even if I killed him, he was not going to back down. A mensch.

“So you also took my authorization codes. And you slipped into my paper files a forged back-up authorization.”

How did you do that, Mr. Adams?

Again just that look.

“I’m not going to harm you, or your relatives. Never. In fact, I want to hire you. My operation can use a man like you.”

“I do not work for gaje.”

“Right. I know. Usually you don’t work for gaje. You people go freelance, this is gutsy, more power to you. But together, you and me together, I can make you rich beyond anything you can imagine.”

“I don’t need more riches.”

Astoundingly, I later found out this was true, and not just because Stevan now had my two and a half million credits. The Rom are not interested in owning very much. Not property: they prefer to rent, so as to move easily and quickly. Vehicles, yes, even planes and helicopters, but always old and beat-up, not conspicuous. Gold for their women but not jewels, and how much gold can one woman wear? Mostly they want to live together in their densely carpeted rooms, getting all they need from gossiping and fighting and loving each other while stealing from everybody else.

Stevan said, “You have nothing I want, gajo.”

“I think I do. My holdings are big, vaster than anything you’ve penetrated. So far, anyway. And I know people. I can offer you something you can’t get anyplace else. Safety.”

Moshe echoed blankly, “Safety? I had not told him about this part.”

“Yes,” I said, addressing Stevan. “I have access to military hardware. Some, anyway. I can get smaller, movable versions of the force-fences that buttress domes. You could keep away anyone you didn’t want from your communities, your children, without guns. More: I can do a lot toward keeping any of you that get caught out of jail, unless you commit murder or something.”

For the first time, Stevan’s expression shifted. Jail is the worst thing that can happen to a Rom. It means separation from the kumpania, it means associating with gaje, it means it’s impossible to avoid marimé. Romani will spend any amount of money, go to any lengths to keep one of their own out of prison. Also to keep their children safe; nobody loves their kids like the Rom. And I already knew that gypsies did not commit murder.

On this point, eight centuries of bad press was just plain wrong.

“And of course,” I said craftily, “money—a very lot of money—can help with lawyers and such if one of your little operations does happen to go awry.”

“I don’t work for gaje.”

“Give it up, Max,” Moshe said, with disgust.

But I trusted my nose. I waited.

Stevan gazed at me.

Finally he said, “Have you ever heard of wortácha?”

Jennifer Kenyon and the FSA let me fly up to Sequene. They have no choice, really. My lawyer is prepared to make a big civil-rights stink if he has to. The current president, who has not had D-treatment, does not want a big civil-rights stink in her administration. She has enough Constitutional problems already. I used to know some of the people causing them.

Shuttle security takes everything but your soul, and that it maybe nibbles at. Every inch of me is stripped and examined by machines and ‘bots and people. If I carried any passengers before—lice, tapeworm, non-human molecules—I don’t have them after Security is finished with me. I can’t bring my own commlink, I can’t wear my own clothes, almost I can’t use my own bones. Shuttles and orbitals are fragile environments, I’m told.

Nobody seems to notice that I’m a pretty fragile environment, too. Finally, dressed in a coverall and flimsy disposable shoes, I’m allowed to stagger onto the shuttle and collapse into a recliner.

Then starts the real punishment.

Space is a game for the young. The flight is hard on my body despite my renewal, despite their gadgets, despite all the patches stuck on my skin like so much red, blue, green, and yellow confetti. I’m eighty-six years old, what do you want from me. Few people wait that long for D-treatment. The attendant doesn’t knock me out because then he wouldn’t know if anything vital ruptured. It feels like everything ruptures, but in fact I arrive in one unbroken piece. Still, it’s a long time before I can walk off the shuttle.

“Mr. Feder, this way, please.” A young man, strong. I refuse to lean on his arm. But I look at everything. I’ve never been on an orbital before, and please the Master of the Universe, I never will again. Fifty years they’ve been up here, some of these orbitals, but why should I go upstairs? Money and influence travel by quantum packets, not shuttles. And there’s never been anything upstairs that I wanted. Until now.

The shuttle bay is disappointing, just another parking garage. My guide leads me through a door into a long corridor lined with doors. Other people walk here and there, but they’re led by cute little gold-colored robots, not by a person. Well, this is no more than I expected.

My guard shows me into a small, bare, white room a lot like the one at the Manhattan Spaceport. These people all need a new interior designer.

A woman enters. “Mr. Feder, I’m Leila Cleary. How was your trip up?”

“Fine.” This is Peter Cleary’s daughter by one of his wives before Daria. She looks about thirty but of course would be much older. Red hair, blue eyes, at least at the moment, who knows. Eyes as hard as I’ve ever seen on a woman. She makes Alcozer’s sidekick and Jennifer Kenyon both look like cuddly stuffed toys.

“We’re so glad you chose to honor Sequene with a trip. And so surprised, especially when we discovered that Sequene had filed a full-responsibility liability acceptance form for you.”

“Discovered? When, Ms. Cleary?”

“After you had taken off from Earth and before you landed here. How did that happen, Mr. Feder?”

“I have no idea, Ms. Cleary. I’m an old man, can’t keep track of all these modern forms. Unfortunately my memory isn’t what it was once.” I make my voice quaver. She isn’t fooled.

“I see. Well, now that you’re here, what can we do for you?”

“I want a D-treatment. I know I don’t have an appointment, but I’ll stay at the hotel until you can fit me in. And, of course, I’ll pay whatever premiums you ask for a rush job. Whatever.”

“We don’t do rush jobs,’ Mr. Feder. Our medical procedures are meticulous and individually tailored.”

“Of course, of course. Everybody knows that.”

“You are not just everybody,’ Mr. Feder. And Sequene is a private facility. We reserve the right to grant or deny treatment.”

“Understood. But why would you want to deny it to me? My record? You’ve treated others with . . . shall we say, complicated backgrounds. I don’t name names, although I could. Carmine Lucente. Raul Lopez-Reyes.”

Worse of all, Mikhail Balakov. But D-treatment is supposed to be a private thing.

“Mr. Feder, you are eighty-six. Are you sure you know what D-treatment can and cannot do? If you think—”

“I don’t,” I say harshly. Master of the Universe, nobody knows better than I what D-treatment can and cannot do. Nobody. “How about this, Ms. Cleary. I’ll stay in the hotel, your best suite, and your people can confer, can run whatever tests you like. I’ll wait as long as you like.” Meanwhile, take all the blood you want, pretend Sequene is Transylvania, ha ha.

The joke falls flat. Her look could wither a cactus. How much does she know? I have never, in fifty-six years, found out what Daria told Peter Cleary about me. Nor if Peter ever knew that Daria had given me that first half-million credits, so long ago. My guess is no, Leila doesn’t know this, but I can’t be sure.

“All right, Mr. Feder. We’ll do that. You stay in the hotel, and I’ll confer with my staff. Meanwhile, the screen in your suite will inform you about the procedure and all necessary consent forms. You can also send them downstairs to lawyers and relatives. Have a pleasant stay in Sequene.”

There is no reason to not have a pleasant stay in Sequene. Once I move—or am moved, my young unsolicited bodyguard at my side—out of the shuttle bay area, the place looks like a five-star hotel in the most tasteful British fashion. Not too new, not too glossy, none of that neo-Asian glitter. Comfort and quality over flash, although Reggie (the b-guard’s name) tells me there is a casino “for your gambling pleasure”. Probably the rest of it, too: the call girls, pretty boys, and recreational drugs, all discreet and clean. I don’t ask, despite some professional curiosity. I am eighty-six and here just for the D-treatment, a harmless old man trying a last end run around Death. I stay in character.

My suite is beautiful, if small. On an orbital, space costs. Off-white and pale green—green is supposed to be soothing—walls, antique armoire for my clothes, which have arrived on a separate shuttle. State of the art VR, full scent-and tingly-sprays. The bed does everything but take out the trash. One wall chats me up, very courteously giving instructions for “illuminating the window. I follow them, and gasp.

Space. The suite abuts the orbital shell, and only a clear-to-the-disappearing-point hull separates me from blackness dotted with stars. Immediately I opaque the window. Who needs to see all that room, all that cold? To me it brings no sense of wonder, only a chill. Three, maybe four atoms per square liter—who wants that? We’re meant for warmth and air and the packed molecules of living flesh.

Daria is up here. Somewhere, sequestered, reclusive. She’s here. And I’m not going away until I find her.

Before Stevan and I became wortácha, he insisted that I meet Rosie. He did not have to do this. Romani men do not need their wives’ cooperation to conduct their business affairs; they are not Episcopalians. But Rosie and Stevan did things their own way. He relied on her.

And she was really something back then. In her late thirties, curly black hair, snapping dark eyes beside swinging gold earrings, voluptuous breasts in her thin white blouse. A pagan queen. Not since Daria had I seen a woman I admired so much. She hated me on sight.

“Gajo,” she said, by way of acknowledgment. Her lips barely parted on the word.

“Mrs. Adams, thank you for having me here,” I said. It came out too sarcastic. I was barely “here” at all; we stood outside the building that the kumpania was renting at the moment, a former dance club miles from the Philadelphia Dome. This neighborhood I never would have entered without Stevan and five of his seven brothers surrounding me. A few blocks away, something exploded. Rosie never flinched. She blocked the door to the building like a battalion defending a bridge.

“Rosie,” Stevan said, somewhere between irritation and resignation.

“You make a wortácha with my husband?”

“Yes,” Stevan said. Irritation had won. “Come in, Max.”

Carefully I oozed past Rosie, entered directly into the large main room, and sat where Stevan pointed. No one else was present, but I didn’t know then how significant this was. All doors from the dark, thickly curtained room stayed closed. The wall screen had been blanked, although a music cube played softly, something with a lot of bass. In one corner a very large holo of some saint raised his hands to heaven over and over, staring at me with reproachful eyes.

Stevan said, “Some coffee, Rosie.”

She flounced off, returning too soon—tension had fallen like bricks the second she disappeared—with three coffees. Two in glasses rimmed with gold, one in the cheapest kind of disposable cup. I like sweetener in mine but I didn’t ask for it. Nobody offered.

Stevan explained to Rosie the tentative plans that he and I had discussed. She wasn’t listening. Finally she interrupted him to talk to me.

“You kidnap my husband, my son, my nephews, and now you want us to do business with you? To make a wortácha? With a gajo? Are you crazy?”

“Getting there fast,” I said.

Stevan said, almost pleadingly, “He’s a Jew, Rosie.”

“Do I care? He’s marimé and for you—Stevan!—for you to even—” Abruptly she switched into Romanes, which of course I didn’t understand, but it no longer mattered because now I wasn’t listening.

“—died early am. Family mouth only said—” the soft music had given way to news; it hadn’t been a music cube, after all, but one of the staccato newslinks that shot out information like rapid-fire weapons. “—no accident. Repeat, Peter Morton Cleary dead—”

“Max?”

“—and no accident!” So—failure of D-treatment? All die? To—

“Max!”

“—see later! Fire in Manhattan Dome—”

Then Rosie was pouring water on my head and I was sputtering and gasping. A lot of water, much more water than necessary.

Stevan said, with a certain disgust, “You fainted. What is it? Are you sick?”

“It was the news,” Rosie said. “About that marimé gaji with the tumors. Have you had D-treatment, gajo?”

“No!”

She studied me. I could have been something staked out in a vivisection lab. “Then did you know this Cleary big man?”

“No. And then I said—was it despair or cunning? who knows these things—”But once, long ago, I met his wife. Briefly. Before she was . . . when we were both kids.

Stevan was not interested in this. Rosie was. She gazed at me a long time. I remembered all the old stories about gypsy fortunetellers, seers, dark powers. Nobody had looked at me like that before and nobody has looked at me like that since, for which I am seriously grateful. Some things are not decent.

Stevan said, disgust still coloring his voice, “Max, if you’re not well, maybe I—”

“No,” Rosie said, and the President of the United States should have such authority in her voice. “It’s all right.”

Set up your wortácha. It’s all right.

She left the room, not flouncing this time, and I didn’t see her again for twenty years. This was fine with both of us. She didn’t need a gajo in her living room, and I didn’t need a seer in my soul. Everybody has limits.

Peter Cleary’s death set off world-wide panic. He’d had D-treatment and all his tissues were supposed to be constantly regenerating to the age at which he’d had it, which was fifty-four. He shouldn’t have died unless a building fell on him. Never was an autopsy more anxiously awaited by the world. The dead Jesus didn’t get such attention.

The press swarmed from the hive. Peter Cleary hadn’t been the first to get D-treatment because somewhere there had to be anonymous beta-testers. Volunteers, LifeLong had said, and this turned out to be true. None of them stayed anonymous now. Prisoners on Death Row, heartbreaking children dying of diseases with no cure, a few very old and very rich people. Thirty-two people before Peter Cleary had received pieces of Daria’s tumors, and all thirty-two of them were now dead.

Each one died exactly twenty years after receiving D-treatment.

Daria Cleary was still alive.

But was she? That’s what a corporate spokesman said, but no one had seen her for years. She and Cleary lived in the London Dome. He went to meetings, to parties, to court. She did not. Rumors had flown for years: Daria was a prisoner, Daria had been crippled by her constantly harvested tumors, Daria had died and been replaced by a clone (never mind that no had ever succeeded in cloning humans). Every once in a while a robocam snapped a picture of her—if it was really her—in her garden. She still looked eighteen. But now even these illegal images stopped.

For two weeks I stayed home and watched the newsholos. Moshe handled my business. Stevan, my new partner, didn’t contact me; maybe Rosie had something to do with that. More people who had received D-treatment died: a Japanese singer, a Greek scientist working on the new orbitals, a Chinese industrialist, an American actor. King James of England, perpetually thirty-nine, made a statement that said nothing, elegantly.

Doctors spoke, speculating about delayed terminator genes and foreign hosts and massively triggered cell apoptosis and who knows what else. A woman standing in a museum talked about somebody named Dorian Gray.

I waited, knowing what must happen.

The mob appeared to start spontaneously, but nobody intelligent believed that. Cleary stock, not only LifeLong but all of it, had tumbled to nearly nothing. The wild trading that followed plunged three small countries into bankruptcy, more into recession. Court claims blossomed like mushrooms after rain. The attacks on the LifeLong facility and on the Clearys had never stopped, not for twenty years, but not like this. It might have been organized by any number of groups. Certainly the professional terrorists involved were not Dome citizens—at least, not all of them.

The London Dome police would have died to a soldier to stop terrorists, but firing on several thousand of their own citizens, mostly the idealistic young—this they couldn’t bring themselves to do. And maybe the cops disapproved of D-treatment, too. A lot of class resentment came in here, and who can tell from the British class system? For whatever reason, the mob got through. The Cleary force fences went down—somebody somewhere knew what they were doing—and the compound went up in flame.

Press robocams zoomed in for close-ups of the mess. Each time they showed a body, my stomach turned to mush. But it was never her.

“Dad,” Geoffrey said beside me. I hadn’t even heard him come into my bedroom.

“Not now, Geoff.”

He said nothing for so long that finally I had to look at him. Sixteen, taller than I ever thought of being, a nice-looking boy but with a kind of shrinking around him. Timid, even passive. Where does such a thing come from?

Miriam hadn’t exactly been a shy wren and me . . . well.

“Dad, have you had D-treatment? Are you going to die?”

I could see what it cost him. Even I, the worst father in the world, could see that. So I tore my eyes away from the news and said, “No. I haven’t had D-treatment. I give you my word.”

His expression didn’t change but I felt the shift inside him. I could smell it, with that tingling high in the nose that I never ignore. I smelled it with horror but not, I realized, much surprise. Nor even with enough horror.

Geoff was disappointed.

“Don’t worry, son,” I said wryly, “you’ll take over all this soon enough. Just not this week.”

“I don’t—”

“At least be honest, kid.” At least that. And may the Master of the Universe forgive me for my tone. The cat-o’-nine-tails Geoff felt it. He hardened—maybe there was more in him than I thought. “All right, I will be honest. Are you what they say you are at school? Are you a crook?”

“Yes. Are you a mensch?”

“A what?”

“Never mind. Just drink it down. I’m a crook and you’re the son of a crook who eats and lives because of what I do. Now what are you going to do about it?”

He looked at me. Not levelly—he was not one of Stevan’s sons, he would never be that—but at least he didn’t flinch. His voice wobbled, but it spoke. “What I’m going to do about it is shut down all your businesses. Or make them honest. As soon as they’re mine.” He walked out of the room.

It was the proudest of him I had ever been. A fool but, in his own deluded way, himself. You have to give credit for that.

I went back to searching the news for Daria.

She appeared briefly the next day. Immediately the world doubted it was her: a holo, a pre-recording, blah blah blah. But I knew. She said only that she was alive and in hiding. That scientists now told her that only she could host the D-treatment tumors without eventually dying. That she deeply regretted the unintentional deaths. That the Cleary estate would compensate all D-treatment victims. A stiff little speech, written by lawyers. Only the tears, unshed but there, were her own.

I stared at her beautiful young face, listened to the catch in her low voice, and I didn’t know what I felt. I felt everything. Anger, longing, contempt, misery, revenge, protection. Nobody can stand such feelings too long. I contacted Moshe and then Stevan, and I went back to work.

My first evening at Sequene I spend in bed. Nothing hurts, not with a pain patch on my neck, but I’m weaker than I expect. This is not the fault of Sequene. The gravity here, the wall screen cheerily informs me, is 95 percent of Earth’s, “just slightly enough lower to put a spring in your step! The air is healthier than any place on Earth has been for a long time. The water is pure, the food miraculous, the staffs “robotic and human among the finest in the world. So enjoy your stay! Anything you need can be summoned by simply instructing the wallscreen aloud!

I need Daria, I don’t say aloud. “So tell me about Sequene. Its history and layout and so forth. I’ve already memorized the building blueprints. Now I need current maps.

“Certainly!” the screen says, brightening like a girl drinking in boyish attention. “The name Sequene’ derives from a fascinating European and American legend. In 1513—nearly six hundred years ago, imagine that!—an explorer from Spain, one Ponce de León, traveled to what is now part of the United States. To Florida.”

Views of white sand beaches, nothing like the sodden, overgrown, bio-infested swamp that is Florida now.

“Of course, back then Florida was habitable, and so were various islands in the Caribbean Sea! They were inhabited by a tribe called the Arawak.”

Images of Indians, looking noble.

“These people told the Spanish that one of their great chiefs, Sequene, had heard about a Fountain of Youth in a land to the north, called Biminy. Sequene took a group of warriors, sailed for Biminy, and found the Fountain of Youth. Supposedly he and his tribesmen lived there happily forever.”

“Of course, no one can actually live forever—”

Daria?

“—but here on Sequene we can guarantee you—yes, guarantee you!—twenty more years without aging a day older than you are now! Truly a miraculous fountain.’ As you undergo this proven scientific procedure—”

Pictures of deliriously happy people, drunk on science.

“—we on Sequene want you to be as comfortable, amused, and satisfied as possible. To this end, Sequene contains luxurious accommodations, five-star dining rooms—”

I said, “Map?”

“Certainly!”

For the next half hour I study maps of Sequene. I can’t request too much, I have to look like just one more chump willing to gamble that twenty years of non-aging life is better than whatever I would have gotten otherwise. It’s clear the hotel, the hospital, the casino and mini-golf course, and other foolishness don’t take up more than one-third of the orbital’s usable space. Even allowing for storage and maintenance, there’s still a hell of a lot going on up here that’s officially unaccounted for. Including, somewhere, Daria.

But it’s not going to be easy to find her.

I have dinner in my room, sleep with the help of yet another patch, and wake just as discouraged as last night. I can’t communicate with Stevan, not without equipment they didn’t let me bring upstairs. I can’t do anything that will get me kicked out. All I have is my money—never negligible, granted—and my wits. This morning neither seems enough.

All I really have is an old man’s stupid dream.

Eventually I slump into the dining room for breakfast. A waiter—human—rushes over to me. I barely glance at him. Across the room is Agent Joseph Alcozer. And sitting at a table by herself, drinking orange juice or something that’s supposed to be orange juice, is Rosie Adams.

A year and a half after Peter Cleary died, D-treatments resumed. And there were plenty of takers.

Does this make sense? Freeze yourself at one age for twenty years and then zap! you’re dead. All right, so maybe it made sense for the old who didn’t want more deterioration, the dying who weren’t in too much pain.

Although you couldn’t be too far gone or you wouldn’t have strength enough to stand the surgery that would save you. But younger people took D-treatments, too. Men and women who wanted to stay beautiful and didn’t mind paying for that with their lives. Even some very young athletes, who, I guess, couldn’t imagine life without slamming at a ball. Dancers. Holo stars. Crazy.

LifeLong, Inc. reorganized financially, renamed itself Sequene, and moved out of London to a Greek island.

The King of England died of his D-treatment, a famous actress died of hers, the sultan of Bahrain died. It made no difference. People kept coming to Sequene.

Other people kept attacking Sequene. By that time, force fences had replaced or reinforced domes; there should have been no attacks on the island. But this is a mathematical Law of the Universe: As fast as new defenses multiply, counterweapons will multiply faster. Nothing is ever safe enough.

So the Greek island was blown up by devices that burrowed under the sea and into subterranean rock. Again Daria survived. Nine months later Sequene reopened on another island. Customers came.

That was the same year Geoffrey and I finally reconciled. Sort of.

For three years we’d lived in the same house, separate. I admit it—I was a terrible father. What kind of man ignores his sixteen-year-old son? His seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-year-old son? But this was mostly Geoff’s choice. He wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t answer me, and what could I do? Shoot him? He went to school, had his meals in his room, studied hard. The school sent me his reports, all good. My office, the legitimate Feder Group, paid his bills. For a kid with a large amount of credit behind him, he didn’t spend much. When he left high school and started college, I signed the papers. That was all. No discussion. Yes, I tried once or twice, but not very hard. I was busy.

My business had gotten bigger, more complicated, riskier. One thing led me to another, and then another.

Stevan Adams and I made a good team. But I took all the risks, since the Rom would rather lose deals than end up in jail. Maybe I took too many risks—at least Moshe said so. He never liked Stevan. “Dirty gypsy keeps his hands clean,” he said. Not a master of clear language, my Moshe. But the profits increased, and that he didn’t complain about.

Federal surveillance increased as well.

Then one October night when the air smelled of apples, a rare night I was home early and watching some stupid holo about Luna City, Geoffrey came into the room. “Max?

He was calling me “Max now?” I didn’t protest—at least he was talking. “Geoff ! Come in, sit down, you want a beer?”

“No. I don’t drink. I want to tell you something, because you have a right to know.”

“So tell me.” My heart suddenly trembled. What has he done? He stood there leaning forward a little on the balls of his feet, like a fighter, which he was not. Thin, not tall, light brown hair falling over his eyes. Miriam’s eyes, I saw with a sudden pain I never expected. Geoff didn’t dress in the strange things that kids do. He looked, standing there, like an underage actor trying to play a New England accountant.

“I want to tell you that I’m getting married.”

“Married?” He was nineteen, just starting his second year of college! This would be expensive, some little tart to be paid off, how did he even meet her . . .

“I’m marrying Gwendolyn Jameson. Next week.”

I was speechless. Gwendolyn—the accountant Moshe had made me hire, the “brilliant weird one” that had first noticed Stevan’s penetration of the Feder Group. Her cult dress and hat were gone, but she was still a mousy, skinny nothing, the kind of person you forget is even in the room. How did—

“I’m not asking your blessing or anything like that,” Geoff said. “But if you want to come to the ceremony, you’re welcome.”

“When . . . where . . .”

“Tuesday evening at seven o’clock at Gwendolyn’s mother’s house on—”

“I mean, where did you meet her? When?”

He actually blushed. “At your office, of course. I went up with the papers for my college tuition. She was there, and I took one look at her and I knew.”

He knew. One look. All at once I was back in a taverna on Cyprus, twenty again myself, and I take one look at Daria standing by the bar and that’s it for me. But Gwendolyn? And this had been going on a whole year, over a year. A wedding next week.

Somehow I said, “I wouldn’t miss it, Geoff.” It was the only decent thing I’d ever done for my son.

“That’s great,” he said, suddenly looking much younger. “We thought that on the—”

A huge noise from the front of the house. Security alarms, the robo-butler, doors yanked open, shouting. The feds burst in with weapons drawn and warrants on handhelds. Even as I put my hands on top of my head, even as the house system automatically linked to my lawyer, I knew I wasn’t going to make Geoff’s wedding.

And I didn’t. Held without bail: a flight risk. A plea bargain got me six-to-ten, which ended up as five after time off for good behavior. It wasn’t too bad. My lawyers did what lawyers do and I got the new prison, Themis International Cooperative Justice Center, a floating island in the middle of Lake Ontario. American and Canadian prisoners and absolutely no chance of unassisted escape unless you could swim forty-two kilometers.

But islands aren’t necessarily impregnable. While I was in prison, Sequene was attacked again. Its Greek island was force-fielded top, bottom, and sides, but you have to have air. The terrorists—the Sons of Godly Righteousness, this time—sent in bio-engineered pathogens on the west wind. Twenty-six people died. Daria wasn’t one of them.

Sequene moved upstairs to one of the new orbitals. No wind. Two years later, they were back in business.

My third year in prison, Gwendolyn died. She was one of the victims, the many victims, of the Mesopotamian bio-virus. I couldn’t comfort Geoff, and who says I would have even tried, or that he would have accepted comfort? An alien, my son. But there must have been something of me in him, because he didn’t marry again for twenty-five years. Gwendolyn, that skinny bizarre prig, had imprinted herself on his Feder heart.

When the government got me, they got Moshe, too. Moshe fought and screamed and hollered, but what good did it do him? He also got six-to-ten. Me, I don’t bear a grudge. I do my work and the feds do theirs, the schmucks.

They couldn’t get close to Stevan. Never even got his name—any of his names. If they had, Stevan would have been gone anyway: different identity, different face. For all I know, different DNA. More likely, Stevan’s DNA was never on file in the first place. The Rom give birth at home, don’t register birth or death certificates, don’t claim their children on whatever fraudulent taxes they might file, don’t send them to school. Romani don’t go on the dole, don’t turn up on any records they can possibly avoid, move often and by night. As much as humanly possible in this century, they don’t actually exist. And Rom women are even more invisible than the men.

Which was probably part of the reason that, forty years later, Rosie Adams could be sitting in the dining room of Sequene orbital, pretending she didn’t know me, while I totter to a table and wonder what the hell she’s doing here.

Alcozer ambles over, no sweat or haste, where can I go? Uninvited, he sits at my table. “Good morning, Max.

“Shalom, Agent Alcozer.” For the feds I always lay it on especially thick.

“We were surprised to see you here.”

The royal “we”. Everybody in the fucking federal government thinks they’re tsars. I say, “Why is that? An old man, I shouldn’t want to live longer?”

“It was our impression that you thought you were barely living at all.”

How closely did they observe me in the Silver Star Home? I was there ten years, watching holos, playing cards, practically next door to drooling in a wheelchair. The government can spare money for all that surveillance?

“Have some orange juice,” I say, pushing my untouched glass at him. Too bad it isn’t cut with cyanide. Alcozer is the last thing I need. Over his shoulder I glance at Rosie, who frowns at the tablecloth, scratching at it with the nails of both hands.

She doesn’t look good. At the kumpania less than a week ago, she looked old but still vital, despite the gray hair and wrinkles. Then her cheeks were rosy, her lips red with paint, her eyes bright under the colorful headscarf.

Now she sits slumped, scratching away—and what is that all about?—as pale and pasty as a very large maggot.

No headscarf, no jewelry. Her gray hair has been cut and waved into some horrible old-lady shape, and she wears loose pants and tunic in dull brown. From women’s fashions I don’t know, but these clothes look expensive and boring.

Alcozer leans in very close to me and says, “Max, I’m going to be honest with you.”

That’ll be the day.

“We know you’ve been off the streets for ten years, and we know your son has taken the Feder Group legitimate. We have no reason to touch him, so your mind can be easy about that. But somebody’s still running at least a few of your old operations, and we don’t know who.”

Not Moshe. He died a week after his release from prison. Heart attack.

“Also, there are still old investigations on you that we could re-open. I don’t want to do that, of course, but I could. I know and you know that the leads are pretty cold, and on most the statute of limitations is close to running out. But there could be . . . repercussions. Up here, I mean. He leans back away from me and looks solemn.”

I say politely, “I’m sorry, but I’m not following.”

He says, “Durbin-Nacarro, and then I don’t need him to chart me a flight path.”

The Durbin-Nacarro Act severely limits the elective surgery available to convicted felons. This is supposed to deter criminals and terrorists from changing their looks, fingerprints, retinal patterns, voice scans, and anything else that “hinders identification. Did they think that someone who, say, blows up a spaceport in San Francisco or Dubai would then go to a registered hospital in any signatory country to request a new face? Ah, lawmakers.

Sequene is, of course, registered in a Durbin-Nacarro country, but nobody has ever applied D-treatment to Durbin-Nacarro. The treatment doesn’t change anything that could be criminally misleading. In fact, the feds like it because it updates all their biological records on everybody who passes through Sequene. Plenty of criminals have had D-treatment: Carmine Lucente, Raul Lopez-Reyes, Surya Hasimo. But if Alcozer really wants to, he can find some federal judge somewhere to issue a dogshit injunction and stop my D-treatment.

Of course, I have no intention of actually getting a D-treatment, but he doesn’t know that. I put on panic.

“Agent . . . I’m an old man . . . and without this . . .”

“Just think about it, Max. We’ll talk again.” He puts his hand on mine—such a fucking putz—and squeezes it briefly. I look pathetic. Alcozer walks jauntily out.

Rosie is still scratching at the tablecloth. Now she starts to tear her bread into little pieces and fling them around. A young woman in the light blue Sequene uniform rushes over to Rosie’s table and says in a strong British accent, “Is everything all right then, Mrs. Kowalski?

Rosie looks up dimly and says nothing.

“I’ll just help you to your room, dear.” Gently the attendant guides her out. I catch her eye and look meaningfully upset, and in five minutes the girl is back at my table. “Are you all right then, Mr. Feder?”

Now I’m querulous and demanding, a very rich temperamental geezer. “No, I’m not all right, I’m upset. For what I pay here, that’s not the sight I expect with my breakfast.

“Of course not. It won’t happen again.”

“What’s her problem?”

The girl hesitates, then decides that my tip will justify a minor invasion of Rosie’s privacy.

“Mrs. Kowalski has a bit of mental decay. Naturally she wants to get it sorted out before it can progress anymore, so she came to us. Now, would you like anything more to eat?”

“No, I’m done. I’ll just maybe take a little walk before my first doctor’s appointment.”

She beams as if I’ve just declared that I’ll just maybe bring peace to northern China. I nod and start a deliberately slow progress around Sequene. This yields me nothing, which I should have known. I can’t get into restricted areas because I couldn’t carry even the simplest jammer through shuttle security, and even if I could, it would only call attention to myself, and that I don’t need. There are jammers and weapons here somewhere, and from my study of the blueprints I can make a good guess where. I can even guess where Daria might be.

But I can’t get at them, or her, and it comes to me that the only way I am going to see Daria is to ask for her.

Which I’m afraid to do. When your entire life has narrowed to one insane desire, you live with fear: you breathe it, eat it, lie down with it, feel it slide along your skin like a woman’s lost caress.

I was terrified that Daria would say no. And then I would have nothing left to desire. When that happens, you’re already dead.

In the afternoon the doctors take blood, they take tissue, they put me in machines, they take me out again.

Everyone is exquisitely polite. I talk to someone I suspect is a psychiatrist, although I’m told he’s not. I sign a lot of papers. Everything is recorded.

Agent Alcozer waits for me outside my suite. “Max. Can I come in?”

“Why not?”

In my sitting room he ostentatiously takes a small green box from his pocket, presses a series of buttons, and sets the thing on the floor. A jammer. We are now encased in a Faraday cage: no electromagnetic wavelengths in and none out. An invisible privacy cloak.

Of course—Alcozer has jammers, has weapons, has anything I might need to get to Daria. Agent Alcozer.

“Angel Alcozer.”

He says, “Have you thought about my offer?”

“I don’t remember an offer. An offer has numbers attached, like flies on fly paper. Flies I don’t remember, Joe.”

I have never used his first name before. He’s too good to look startled.

“Here are some flies, Max. You name three important things about the San Cristobel fraud of ‘89. The hacker’s name, the Swiss account number, and the organization you worked with. Then we let you stay up here on Sequene without interference. Sound good?”

“San Cristobel, San Cristobel,” I mutter. “Do I remember from San Cristobel?”

“I think you do.”

“Maybe I do.”

His eyes sharpen. They are no color at all, nondescript. Government-issue eyes. But eager.

“But I need something else, too, I say.”

“Something else?”

“I want—”

All at once I stop. High in my nose, something tingles. This time there is even a distinct smell, like old fish.

Something is wrong here, something connected to Alcozer, or to the San Cristobel deal—Moshe’s deal, not Stevan’s—or to this conversation.

“You want what?” Alcozer says.

“I want to think a little more. I never ignore that smell. The nose knows.”

He shifts his weight, disappointed. “Not too much more, Max. Your treatment’s scheduled for tomorrow.”

How does he know that? I don’t know that. Alcozer has access to information I do not. Probably he knows where Daria is. All I have to do is give him the San Cristobel flies, and who gets hurt? Moshe is dead, that particular Robin Hood is dead, the island where it all happened no longer even exists, lost to the rising sea. The money was long since moved from the Swiss to the Indonesians and on from there. Nobody gets hurt.

No. There was something else about San Cristobel. Old fish.

I say, “Let me think a few hours. It’s a big step, this.” I let my voice quaver. “A big change for me, this place.”

You know I never lived big on Earth. And for a kid from Brooklyn . . .

Alcozer smiles. It’s supposed to be a comradely smile. He looks like a vampire with a tooth job. “For a kid from Des Moines, too. All right, Max, you think. I’ll come back right after dinner.” He turns off the jammer, pockets it, stands. “Have another nice walk. By the way, there’s no restricted areas on Sequene that you could possibly get into.”

“You think maybe I don’t know that?”

“I’m trying to find out what you know.” Alcozer looks pleased with himself, like he’s said something witty. I let him think this. Always good to encourage federal delusion.

Old fish. But whose?

I go to dinner. The second I sit at a table, Rosie totters into the dining room, lights up like a rocket launch, and shouts, “Christopher!”

I look around. Two other diners in the room so far, and they’re both women. Rosie lurches over, tears streaming down her cheeks, and throws her arms around me. “You came!”

“I—”

A harried-looking woman in the light blue uniform hurries through the doorway. “Oh, Mr. Feder, I’m so sorry, she—”

“It’s Christopher!” Rosie cries. “Look, Anna, my brother Christopher! He came all the way from California to visit me!”

Rosie is clutching me like I’m a cliff she’s about to go over. I don’t have to play blank—I am blank. The attendant tries to detach her, but she only clutches harder.

“So sorry, Mr. Feder, she gets a little confused, she—Mrs. Kowalski!”

“Christopher! Christopher! I’m going to have dinner with my brother!”

“Mrs. Kowalski, really, you—”

“Would it help if I have dinner with her?” I say.

The attendant looks confused. But more people are coming into the dining room, very rich people, and it’s clear she doesn’t want a fuss. Her earcomm says something and she tries to smile at me. “Oh, that would be . . . if you don’t mind . . .”

“Not at all. My aunt, in her last days . . . I understand.”

The young attendant is grateful, along with angry and embarrassed and a half dozen other things I don’t care about. I reach out with my one free hand and pull out a chair for Rosie, who sits down, mumbling. A robo-waiter appears and order is restored to the universe.

Rosie mumbles to herself all through dinner, absolutely unintelligible mumbling. The attendant lurks unhappily in a corner. The set of her body says she’s has been dealing with Rosie all day and is disgusted with this duty.

Stevan must have created a hell of a credit history for Mrs. Kowalski. Rosie says nothing whatsoever to me, but occasionally she beams at me like a demented lighthouse. I say nothing to her, but I get worried. I don’t know what’s happening. Either she really has lost it—in less than a week? is this possible?—or she’s a better actress than half of the holo stars on the Link.

She eats everything, but very slowly. Halfway through dessert, some kind of chocolate pastry, the dining room is full. The first shift, the old people who go to bed at ten o’clock (I know this, I’m one of them) have left and the second shift, the younger and more fashionably dressed, are eating and laughing and ordering expensive wine. I recognize a famous Japanese singer, an American ex-Senator who was once (although he didn’t know it) on my payroll, and an Arab playboy. From Sequene’s point of view, it is not a good place for a tawdry scene.

Rosie stands and cries, “Daria Cleary!”

My heart stops.

But of course Daria is not there. There’s only Rosie, flailing her arms and crying, “I must thank Daria Cleary! Zor this gift of life! I must thank her!”

People stare. A few look amused, but most do not. They have the affronted look of sleek darlings forced to look at old age, senility, a badly dressed and stooped body that may smell bad—all the things they have come to Sequene to avoid experiencing. The attendant dashes over.

“Mrs. Kowalski!”

“Daria! I must thank her!”

The girl tugs on Rosie, who grabs at the tablecloth. Plates and wineglasses and expensive hydroponic flowers crash to the floor. Diners mutter, scowling. The girl says desperately, “Yes, of course, we’ll go see Daria! Right now! Come with me, Mrs. Kowalski.”

“Christopher, too!”

I say softly, conspiratorially, to the girl, “We need to get her out of here.”

She says, “Yes, yes, of course, Christopher, too,” and gives me a tight, grateful, furious smile.

Rosie trails happily after the attendant, holding my hand.

I think, This cannot work. Once we’re out of the dining room, out of earshot, out of hypocrisy . . .

In the corridor outside the dining room Rosie halts, shouting again, “Daria! People here, too, stop and stare.

Rosie, suddenly not tottering, leads the way past them, down a side corridor, then another. Faster now, the attendant has to run to catch up. Me, too. So Rosie hits the force fence first, is knocked to the ground, and starts to cry.

“All right, you,” the girl says, all pretense of sweetness gone. “That’s enough!” She grabs Rosie’s arm and tries to yank her upward. Rosie outweighs her by maybe twenty-five kilos. A service ‘bot trundles toward us.

Rosie is calling, “Daria! Daria! Please, you don’t know what this means to me! I’m an old woman but I was young once, I too lost the only man I ever loved—remember Cyprus? Do you—you do! Cyprus! Daria!”

The ‘bot exudes a scoop and effortlessly shovels up Rosie like so much gravel. The girl says viciously, “I’ve had just about enough of—”

And stops. Her face changes. Something is coming over her earcomm.

Then there is an almost inaudible POP! as the force-fence shuts down. At the far end of the corridor, a door opens, a door that wasn’t even there a moment ago. Stealth coating, I think, dazed. Reuven’s robo-dog. My hand, unbidden, goes to my naked ring finger.

Standing in the doorway, backed by bodyguards both human and ‘bot just as she was in the ViaHealth hospital fifty-five years ago, is Daria.

She still looks eighteen. As I stumble forward, too numb to feel my legs move, I see her in a Greek taverna, leaning against the bar; on a rocky beach, crying in early morning light; in a hospital bed, head half shaved. She doesn’t see me at all, isn’t looking, doesn’t recognize me. She looks at Rosie.

Who has changed utterly. Rosie scrambles off the gravel scoop and pushes away the attendant, a push so strong the girl falls against the corridor wall. Rosie grabs my hand and drags me forward. At the doorway, both ‘bot and human bodyguards block the way. Rosie submits to a body search that ordinarily would have brought death to any man who touched a Rom woman in those ways, possibly including her husband. Rosie endures it like a pagan queen disdaining unimportant Roman soldiers. Me, I hardly notice it. I can’t stop looking at Daria.

Still eighteen, but utterly changed.

The wild black hair has been subdued into a fashionable, tame, ugly style. Her smooth brown skin has no color under its paint. Her eyes, still her own shade of green, bear in their depths a defeat and loneliness I can’t imagine.

Yes. I can.

She says nothing, just stands aside to let us pass once the guards have finished. The human one says, “Mrs. Cleary—” but she silences him with a wave of her hand. We stand now in a sort of front hall. Maybe it’s white or blue or gold, maybe there are flowers, maybe the flowers stand on an antique table—nothing really registers.

All I see is Daria, who does not see me.

She says to Rosie, “What do you know of Cyprus? Were you there?”

She must think Rosie was a whore on Cyprus when Daria herself was—the ages would be about right. But Daria’s question is detached, uninvolved, the way you might politely ask the age of an historical building.

Dating from 1649? Really. Well.

Rosie doesn’t answer. Instead she steps behind me. Rosie can’t say my name, because of course we are all under surveillance. She must remain Mrs. Kowalski so that she can go home to Stevan. Rosie can say nothing.

So I do. I say, “Daria, it’s Max.”

Finally she looks at me, and she knows who I am.

The Rom have a word for ghosts: mulé. Mulé haunt the places they used to live for up to a year. They eat scraps, use the toilet, spend the money buried with them in their coffins. They trouble the living in dreams and visions.

Wispy, insubstantial, they nonetheless exist. I could never find out if Stevan or Rosie actually believed in mulé.

There are things the Rom never tell a gajo.

Daria has become a muli. There is no real interest in her eyes as she regards me. This woman, who once, in a hospital room, risked both our lives to bring me riches and atonement and shame, now has lived beyond all risk, all interest. Decades of being shut away by Peter Cleary, of being hated by people who make periodic and serious efforts to kill her, of being used as a biological supply station from which pieces are clipped to fuel others’ vanity, have drained her of all vitality. She desires nothing, feels nothing, cares about nothing. Including me.

“Max,” she says courteously. “Hello.”

The throaty catch, the hesitation, is gone from her voice. For some reason, it is this which breaks me. Go figure.

Her accent is still there, even her scent is still there, but not that catch in the voice, and not Daria. This is a shell.

In her eyes, nothing.

Rosie takes my hand. It is the first time in forty years, except for when she was crazy Mrs. Kowalski, that Rosie Adams has ever touched me. In her clasp I feel all of the compassion, the life, that is missing from Daria.

Nothing could have hurt me more.

I can’t look any more at Daria. How do you look at something that isn’t there? I turn my head and see Agent Alcozer round the corner of the hallway outside the apartment, running toward us.

And then, at that moment and not a second before, I remember what stank about San Cristobel.

The scam went through fine. But afterward, Moshe came to me.

“They want to do it again, this time with a mole. They’ve actually got someone inside the feds, in the Central Investigative Bureau. It looks good.”

“Get me the details,” I said. And when Moshe did, I rejected the deal.

“But why?” Anguished—Moshe hated to let a profitable thing go.

“Because,” I said, and wouldn’t say more. He argued, but I stood firm. The new deal involved another organization, the one the mole came from. The Pure of Heart and Planet. Eco-nuts, into a lot of things on both sides of the law, but I knew what Moshe did not and wouldn’t have cared about if he had. The Pure of Heart and Planet were connected with the second big attack on LifeLong, on that Greek island. The Pure of Heart and Planet along with their mole in the feds, altered and augmented in sacrifice to the greater glory of biological purity, a guy from what used to be Des Moines.

Alcozer runs faster than humanly possible. He carries something in his hands, a thick rod with knobs that I don’t recognize. Weapons change in ten years. Everything changes.

And Daria knows. She looks at Alcozer, and she doesn’t move.

The bodyguards don’t move, either, and I realize that of course they’ve reactivated the force fence around the apartment. It makes no difference. Alcozer barrels through it; whatever the military has developed for the Central Investigative Bureau, it trumps whatever Sequene has. It handles the guard ‘bot, too, which just shuts down, erased by what must be the jammer of all jammers.

The human bodyguard isn’t quite so easy. He fires at Alcozer, and the mole staggers. Blood howls out of him.

As he goes down he throws something, so small you might not notice it if you didn’t know what was happening.

I know; this is the first weapon that I actually recognize, although undoubtedly it’s been upgraded. Primitive.

Contained. Lethal enough to do what it needs to without risking a hull breach, no matter where on an orbital or shuttle you set it off. A MPG, mini personal grenade, and all at once I’m back on Cyprus, in the Army, and training unused for sixty-five years surfaces in my muscles like blossoming spores.

I lurch forward. Not smooth, nothing my drill sergeant would be proud of. But I never hesitate, not for a nanosecond.

I can only save one of them. No time for anything else. Daria stands, beautiful as the moment I saw her in that taverna, in her green eyes a welcome for death. Overdue, so what kept you already? But those would be my words, not hers. Daria has no words, which are for the living.

I hit Rosie’s solid flesh more like a dropped piano than a rescuing knight. We both go down—whump!—and I roll with her under the antique table, which is there after all, a heavy marble slab. My roll takes Rosie, the beloved of my faithful friend Stevan, against the wall, with me on the outside. I never hear the grenade; they have been upgraded. Electromagnetic waves, nothing as crude as fragments. Burns sluice across my back like burning oil. The table cracks and half falls.

Then darkness.

Romani have a saying: Rom corel khajnja, Gadzo corel farma. Gypsies steal the chicken, but it is the gaje who steal the whole farm. Yes.

Yes.

I wake in a white bed, in a white room, wearing white bandages under a white blanket. It’s like doctors think that color hurts. Geoff sits beside my bed. When I stir, he leans forward.

“Dad?”

“I’m here.”

“How do you feel?”

The inevitable, stupid question. I was MPG-fragged, a table fell on me, how should I feel? But Geoff realizes this. He says, quietly, “She’s dead.”

“Rosie?”

He looks blank—as well he might. “Who’s Rosie?”

“What did I say? I don’t feel . . . I can’t . . .”

“Just rest, Dad. Don’t try to talk. I just want you to know that Daria Cleary’s dead.”

“I know,” I say. “She’s been dead a long time.”

“So is that terrorist. Dead. It turns out he was actually a federal agent—can you believe it? But the woman you saved, Mrs. Kowalski, she’s all right.”

“Where is she?”

“She went back downstairs. Changed her mind about D-treatment. Now the newsholos want to interview her and they can’t find her.”

And they never will. I think about Stevan and Rosie . . . and Daria. It isn’t pain I feel, although that might be because the doctors have stuck on my neck a patch the size of Rhode Island. Not pain, but hollowness.

Emptiness. Cold winds blow right through me.

When there’s nothing left to desire, you’re finished.

In the hallway, ‘bots roll softly past. Dishes clink. People murmur and someplace a bell chimes. Hollowness.

Emptiness.

“Dad,” Geoff says, and his tone changes. “You saved that woman’s life. You didn’t even know her, she was just some crazy woman you were being kind to, and you saved her life. You’re a hero.”

Slowly I turn my head to look at him. Geoff’s eyes shine. His thin lips work up and down. “I’m so proud of you.”

So it’s a joke. All of it—a bad joke. You’d think the Master of the Universe could do better. I go on an insane quest for a ring eaten by a robotic dog, I assist in the mercy killing of the only woman I ever loved, I save the life of one of the best criminals on the planet—my own partner-in-law in so many grand larcenies that Geoff’s head would spin—and the punch line is that my son is proud of me. Proud. This makes sense?

But a little of the hollowness fills. A little of the cold wind abates.

Geoff goes on, “I told Bobby and Eric what you did. They’re proud of their grampops, too. So is Gloria. They all can’t wait for you to come back home.”

“That’s nice,” I say. Grampops—what a word. But the wind abates a little more.

“Sleep, now, Dad,” Geoff says. He hesitates, then leans over and kisses my forehead.

I feel my son’s kiss there long after he leaves.

So I don’t tell him that I’m not going back home any time soon. I’m going to have the D-treatment, after all.

When I do have to tell him, I’ll say that I want to live to see my grandsons grow up. Maybe this is even true.

Okay—it is true, but the idea is so new I need time to get used to it.

My other reason for getting D-treatment is stronger, fiercer. It’s been there so much longer.

I want a piece of Daria with me. In the old days, I had her in a ring. But that was then, and this is now, and I’ll take what I can get. It is, will have to be, enough.

STARS SEEN THROUGH STONE

Lucius Shepard

I WAS SMOKING A JOINT on the steps of the public library when a cold wind blew in from no cardinal point, but from the top of the night sky, a force of pure perpendicularity that bent the sparsely leaved boughs of the old alder shadowing the steps straight down toward the Earth, as if a gigantic someone directly above were pursing his lips and aiming a long breath directly at the ground. For the duration of that gust, fifteen or twenty seconds, my hair did not flutter but was pressed flat to the crown of my head and the leaves and grass and weeds on the lawn also lay flat. The phenomenon had a distinct border—leaves drifted along the sidewalk, testifying that a less forceful, more fitful wind presided beyond the perimeter of the lawn. No one else appeared to notice. The library, a blunt nineteenth-century relic of undressed stone, was not a popular point of assembly at any time of day, and the sole potential witness apart from myself was an elderly gentleman who was hurrying toward McGuigan’s Tavern at a pace that implied a severe alcohol dependency. This happened seven months prior to the events central to this story, but I offer it to suggest that a good deal of strangeness goes unmarked by the world (at least by the populace of Black William, Pennsylvania), and, when taken in sum, such occurrences may be evidence that strangeness is visited upon us with some regularity and we only notice its extremes.

Ten years ago, following my wife’s graduation from Yale Law, we set forth in our decrepit Volvo, heading for northern California, where we hoped to establish a community of sorts with friends who had moved to that region the previous year. We chose to drive on blue highways for their scenic value and decided on a route that ran through Pennsylvania’s Bittersmith Hills, knuckled chunks of coal and granite, forested with leafless oaks and butternut, ash and elder, that—under heavy snow and threatening skies—composed an ominous prelude to the smoking redbrick town nestled in their heart. As we approached Black William, the Volvo began to rattle, the engine died, and we coasted to a stop on a curve overlooking a forbidding vista: row houses the color of dried blood huddled together along the wend of a sluggish, dark river (the Polozny), visible through a pall of gray smoke that settled from the chimneys of a sprawling prisonlike edifice—also of brick—on the opposite shore. The Volvo proved to be a total loss. Since our funds were limited, we had no recourse other than to find temporary housing and take jobs so as to pay for a new car in which to continue our trip. Andrea, whose specialty was labor law, caught on with a firm involved in fighting for the rights of embattled steelworkers. I hired on at the mill, where I encountered three part-time musicians lacking a singer. This led to that, that to this, Andrea and I grew apart in our obsessions, had affairs, divorced, and, before we realized it, the better part of a decade had rolled past. Though initially I felt trapped in an ugly, dying town, over the years I had developed an honest affection for Black William and its citizens, among whom I came to number myself.

After a brief and perhaps illusory flirtation with fame and fortune, my band broke up, but I managed to build a home recording studio during its existence and this became the foundation of a career. I landed a small business grant and began to record local bands on my own label, Soul Kiss Records. Most of the CDs I released did poorly, but in my third year of operation, one of my projects, a metal group calling themselves Meanderthal, achieved a regional celebrity and I sold management rights and the masters for their first two albums to a major label. This success gave me a degree of visibility and my post office box was flooded with demos from bands all over the country. Over the next six years I released a string of minor successes and acquired an industry-wide reputation of having an eye for talent. It had been my immersion in the music business that triggered the events leading to my divorce and, while Andrea was happy for me, I think it galled her that I had exceeded her low expectations. After a cooling-off period, we had become contentious friends and whenever we met for drinks or lunch, she would offer deprecating comments about the social value of my enterprise, and about my girlfriend, Mia, who was nine years younger than I, heavily tattooed, and—in Andrea’s words—dressed “like a color-blind dominatrix.”

“You’ve got some work to do, Vernon,” she said once. “You know, on the taste thing? It’s like you traded me in for a Pinto with flames painted on the hood.”

I stopped myself from replying that it wasn’t I who had done the trading in. I understood her comments arose from the fact that she had regrets and that she was angry at herself: Andrea was an altruist and the notion that her renewed interest in me might be partially inspired by envy or venality caused her to doubt her moral legitimacy. She was attractive, witty, slender, with auburn hair and patrician features and a forthright poise that caused men in bars, watching her pass, to describe her as “classy.” Older and wiser, able by virtue of the self-confidence I had gained to cope with her sharp tongue, I had my own regrets; but I thought we had moved past the point at which a reconciliation was possible and refrained from giving them voice.

In late summer of the year when the wind blew straight down, I listened to a demo sent me by one Joseph Stanky of McKeesport, Pennsylvania. Stanky billed himself as Local Profitt, Jr., and his music, postmodern deconstructed blues sung in a gravelly, powerful baritone, struck me as having cult potential. I called his house that afternoon and was told by his mother that “Joey’s sleeping.” That night, around three A.M., Stanky returned my call. Being accustomed to the tactless ways of musicians, I set aside my annoyance and said I was interested in recording him. In the course of our conversation, Stanky told me he was twenty-six, virtually penniless, and lived in his mother’s basement, maintaining throughout a churlish tone that dimmed my enthusiasm. Nevertheless, I offered to pay his bus fare to Black William and to put him up during the recording process. Two days later, when he stepped off a bus at the Trailways station, my enthusiasm dimmed further. A more unprepossessing human would be difficult to imagine. He was short, pudgy, with skin the color of a new potato and so slump-shouldered that for a moment I thought he might be deformed. Stringy brown hair provided an unsightly frame for a doughy face with a bulging forehead and a wispy soul patch. His white T-shirt was spattered with food stains, a Jackson Pollock work-in-progress; the collar of his windbreaker was stiff with grime. Baggy chinos and a trucker wallet completed his ensemble. I knew this gnomish figure must be Stanky, but didn’t approach until I saw him claim two guitar cases from the luggage compartment. When I introduced myself, instead of expressing gratitude or pleasure, he put on a pitiful expression and said in a wheedling manner, “Can you spot me some bucks for cigarettes, man? I ran out during the ride.”

I advanced him another hundred, with which he purchased two cartons of Camel Lights and a twelve-pack of Coca-Cola Classic (these, I learned, were basic components of his nutrition and, along with Quaker Instant Grits, formed the bulk of his diet), and took a roundabout way home, thinking I’d give him a tour of the town where he would spend the next few weeks. Stanky displayed no interest whatsoever in the mill, the Revolutionary War-era Lutheran Church, or Garnant House (home of the town’s founding father), but reacted more positively to the ziggurat at the rear of Garnant House, a corkscrew of black marble erected in eccentric tribute to the founding father’s wife, Ethelyn Garnant, who had died in childbirth; and when we reached the small central park where stands the statue of her son, Stanky said, “Hey, that’s decent, man!” and asked me to stop the car.

The statue of William Garnant had been labeled an eyesore by the Heritage Committee, a group of women devoted to preserving our trivial past, yet they were forced to include it in their purview because it was the town’s most recognizable symbol—gift shops sold replica statuettes and the image was emblazoned on coffee mugs, postcards, paperweights, on every conceivable type of souvenir. Created in the early 1800s by Gunter Hahn, the statue presented Black William in age-darkened bronze astride a rearing stallion, wearing a loose-fitting shirt and tight trousers, gripping the reins with one hand, pointing toward the library with the other, his body twisted and head turned in the opposite direction, his mouth open in—judging by his corded neck—a cry of alarm, as if he were warning the populace against the dangers of literacy. Hahn did not take his cues from the rather sedentary monuments of his day, but (impossibly) appeared to have been influenced by the work of heroic comic book artists such as Jim Steranko and Neal Adams, and thus the statue had a more fluid dynamic than was customary . . . or perhaps he was influenced by Black William himself, for it was he who had commissioned the sculpture and overseen its construction. This might explain the figure’s most controversial feature, that which had inspired generations of high school students to highlight it when they painted the statue after significant football victories: Thanks to an elevated position in the saddle, Black William’s crotch was visible, and—whether intended or an inadvertency, an error in the casting process that produced an unwanted rumple in the bronze—it seems that he possessed quite a substantial package. It always gladdened my heart to see the ladies of the Heritage Committee, embarked upon their annual spring clean-up, scrubbing away with soap and rags at Black William’s genital pride.

I filled Stanky in on Black William’s biography, telling him that he had fought with great valor in the Revolutionary War, but had not been accorded the status of hero, this due to his penchant for executing prisoners summarily, even those who had surrendered under a white flag. Following the war, he returned home in time to watch his father, Alan Garnant, die slowly and in agony. It was widely held that William had poisoned the old man. Alan resented the son for his part in Ethelyn’s death and had left him to be raised by his slaves, in particular by an immense African man to whom he had given the name Nero. Little is known of Nero; if more were known, we might have a fuller understanding of young William, who—from the war’s end until his death in 1808—established a reputation for savagery, his specialities being murder and rape (both heterosexual and homosexual). By all accounts, he ruled the town and its environs with the brutal excess of a feudal duke. He had a coterie of friends who served as his loyal protectors, a group of men whose natures he had perverted, several of whom failed to survive his friendship. Accompanied by Nero, they rode roughshod through the countryside, terrorizing and defiling, killing anyone who sought to impede their progress. Other than that, his legacy consisted of the statue, the ziggurat, and a stubby tower of granite block on the bluff overlooking the town, long since crumbled into ruin.

Stanky’s interest dwindled as I related these facts, his responses limited to the occasional “Cool,” a word he pronounced as if it had two syllables; but before we went on our way he asked, “If the guy was such a bastard, how come they named the town after him?”

“It was a P.R. move,” I explained. “The town was incorporated as Garnantsburgh. They changed it after World War Two. The city council wanted to attract business to the area and they hoped the name Black William would be more memorable. Church groups and the old lady vote, pretty much all the good Christians, they disapproved of the change, but the millworkers got behind it. The association with a bad guy appealed to their self-image.”

“Looks like the business thing didn’t work out. This place is deader than McKeesport.” Stanky raised up in the seat to scratch his ass. “Let’s go, okay? I couldn’t sleep on the bus. I need to catch up on my Zs.”

MY HOUSE was one of the row houses facing the mill, the same Andrea and I had rented when we first arrived. I had since bought the place. The ground floor I used for office space, the second floor for the studio, and I lived on the third. I had fixed up the basement, formerly Andrea’s office, into a musician-friendly apartment—refrigerator, stove, TV, etc.—and that is where I installed Stanky. The bus ride must have taken a severe toll. He slept for twenty hours.

After three weeks I recognized that Stanky was uncommonly gifted and it was going to take longer to record him than I had presumed—he kept revealing new facets of his talent and I wanted to make sure I understood its full dimension before getting too deep into the process. I also concluded that although musicians do not, in general, adhere to an exacting moral standard, he was, talent aside, the most worthless human being I had ever met. Like many of his profession, he was lazy, irresponsible, untrustworthy, arrogant, slovenly, and his intellectual life consisted of comic books and TV. To this traditional menu of character flaws, I would add “deviant.” The first inkling I had of his deviancy was when Sabela, the Dominican woman who cleaned for me twice a week, complained about the state of the basement apartment. Since Sabela never complained, I had a look downstairs. In less than a week, he had trashed the place. The garbage was overflowing and the sink piled high with scummy dishes and pots half-full of congealed grits; the floors covered in places by a slurry of cigarette ash and grease, littered with candy wrappers and crumpled Coke cans. A smell compounded of spoilage, bad hygiene, and sex seemed to rise from every surface. The plastic tip of a vibrator peeked out from beneath his grungy sheets. I assured Sabela I’d manage the situation, whereupon she burst into tears. I asked what else was troubling her and she said, “Mister Vernon, I no want him.”

My Spanish was poor, Sabela’s English almost nonexistent, but after a few minutes I divined that Stanky had been hitting on her, going so far as to grab at her breasts. This surprised me—Sabela was in her forties and on the portly side. I told her to finish with the upstairs and then she could go home. Stanky returned from a run to the 7-Eleven and scuttled down to the basement, roachlike in his avoidance of scrutiny. I found him watching Star Trek in the dark, remote in one hand, TV Guide (he called it “the Guide”) resting on his lap, gnawing on a Butterfinger. Seeing him so at home in his filthy nest turned up the flame under my anger.

“Sabela refuses to clean down here,” I said. “I don’t blame her.”

“I don’t care if she cleans,” he said with a truculent air.

“Well, I do. You’ve turned this place into a shithole. I had a metal band down here for a month, it never got this bad. I want you to keep it presentable. No stacks of dirty dishes. No crud on the floor. And put your damn sex toys in a drawer. Understand?”

He glowered at me.

“And don’t mess with Sabela,” I went on. “When she wants to clean down here, you clear out. Go up to the studio. I hear about you groping her again, you can hump your way back to McKeesport. I need her one hell of a lot more than I need you.”

He muttered something about “another producer.”

“You want another producer? Go for it! No doubt major labels are beating down my door this very minute, lusting after your sorry ass.”

Stanky fiddled with the remote and lowered his eyes, offering me a look at his infant bald spot. Authority having been established, I thought I’d tell him what I had in mind for the next weeks, knowing that his objections—given the temper of the moment—would be minimal; yet there was something so repellent about him, I still wanted to give him the boot. I had the idea that one of Hell’s lesser creatures, a grotesque, impotent toad, banished by the Powers of Darkness, had landed with a foul stink on my sofa. But I’ve always been a sucker for talent and I felt sorry for him. His past was plain. Branded as a nerd early on and bullied throughout high school, he had retreated into a life of flipping burgers and getting off on a four-track in his mother’s basement. Now he had gravitated to another basement, albeit one with a more hopeful prospect and a better recording system.

“Why did you get into music?” I asked, sitting beside him. “Women, right? It’s always women. Hell, I was married to a good-looking woman, smart, sexy, and that was my reason.”

He allowed that this had been his reason as well.

“So how’s that working out? They’re not exactly crawling all over you, huh?”

He cut his eyes toward me and it was as if his furnace door had slid open a crack, a blast of heat and resentment shooting out. “Not great,” he said.

“Here’s what I’m going to do.” I tapped out a cigarette from his pack, rolled it between my fingers. “Next week, I’m bringing in a drummer and a bass player to work with you. I own a part-interest in the Crucible, the alternative club in town. As soon as you get it together, we’ll put you in there for a set and showcase you for some people.”

Stanky started to speak, but I beat him to the punch. “You follow my lead, you do what I know you can . . .,” I said, leaving a significant pause. “I guarantee you won’t be going home alone.”

He waited to hear more, he wanted to bask in my vision of his future, but I knew I had to use rat psychology; now that I had supplied a hit of his favorite drug, I needed to buzz him with a jolt of electricity.

“First off,” I said, “we’re going to have to get you into shape. Work off some of those man-tits.”

“I’m not much for exercise.”

“That doesn’t come as a shock,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to make a new man out of you, I just want to make you a better act. Eat what I eat for a month or so, do a little cardio. You’ll drop ten or fifteen pounds.” Falsely convivial, I clapped him on the shoulder and felt a twinge of disgust, as if I had touched a hypoallergenic cat. “The other thing,” I said. “That Local Profitt Junior name won’t fly. It sounds too much like a country band.”

“I like it,” he said defiantly.

“If you want the name back later, that’s up to you. For now, I’m billing you as Joe Stanky.”

I laid the unlit cigarette on the coffee table and asked what he was watching, thinking that, for the sake of harmony, I’d bond with him a while.

“Trek marathon,” he said.

We sat silently, staring at the flickering black-and-white picture. My mind sang a song of commitments, duties, other places I could be. Stanky laughed, a cross between a wheeze and a hiccup.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“John Colicos sucks, man!”

He pointed to the screen, where a swarthy man with Groucho Marx eyebrows, pointy sideburns, and a holstered ray gun seemed to be undergoing an agonizing inner crisis. “Michael Ansara’s the only real Vulcan.” Stanky looked at me as if seeking validation. “At least,” he said, anxious lest he offend, “on the original Trek.”

Absently, I agreed with him. My mind rejoined its song. “Okay,” I said, and stood. “I got things to do. We straight about Sabela? About keeping the place . . . you know? Keeping the damage down to normal levels?”

He nodded.

“Okay. Catch you later.”

I started for the door, but he called to me, employing that wheedling tone with which I had become all too familiar. “Hey, Vernon?” he said. “Can you get me a trumpet?” This asked with an imploring expression, screwing up his face like a child, as if he were begging me to grant a wish.

“You play the trumpet?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you promise to take care of it. Yeah, I can get hold of one.”

Stanky rocked forward on the couch and gave a tight little fist-pump. “Decent!”

I DON’T KNOW when Stanky and I got married, but it must have been sometime between the incident with Sabela and the night Mia went home to her mother. Certainly my reaction to the latter was more restrained than was my reaction to the former, and I attribute this in part to our union having been joined. It was a typical rock-and-roll marriage: talent and money making beautiful music together and doomed from the start, on occasion producing episodes in which the relationship seemed to be crystallized, allowing you to see (if you wanted to) the messy bed you had made for yourself.

Late one evening, or maybe it wasn’t so late—it was starting to get dark early—Mia came downstairs and stepped into my office and set a smallish suitcase on my desk. She had on a jacket with a fake fur collar and hood, tight jeans, and her nice boots. She’d put a fresh raspberry streak in her black hair and her makeup did a sort of Nefertiti-meets-Liza thing. All I said was, “What did I do this time?”

Mia’s lips pursed in a moue—it was her favorite expression and she used it at every opportunity, whether appropriate or not. She became infuriated whenever I caught her practicing it in the bathroom mirror.

“It’s not what you did,” she said. “It’s that clammy little troll in the basement.”

“Stanky?”

“Do you have another troll? Stanky! God, that’s the perfect name for him.” Another moue. “I’m sick of him rubbing up against me.”

Mia had, as she was fond of saying, “been through some stuff,” and, if Stanky had done anything truly objectionable, she would have dealt with him. I figured she needed a break or else there was someone in town with whom she wanted to sleep.

“I take it this wasn’t consensual rubbing,” I said.

“You think you’re so funny! He comes up behind me in tight places. Like in the kitchen. And he pretends he has to squeeze past.”

“He’s in our kitchen?”

“You send him up to use the treadmill, don’t you?”

“Oh . . . right.”

“And he has to get water from the fridge, doesn’t he?”

I leaned back in the chair and clasped my hands behind my head. “You want me to flog him? Cut off a hand?”

“Would that stop it? Give me a call when he’s gone, okay?”

“You know I will. Say hi to Mom.”

A final moue, a moue that conveyed a soupçon of regret, but—more pertinently—made plain how much I would miss her spoonful of sugar in my coffee.

After she had gone, I sat thinking nonspecific thoughts, vague appreciations of her many virtues, then I handicapped the odds that her intricate makeup signaled an affair and decided just how pissed off to be at Stanky. I shouted downstairs for him to come join me and dragged him out for a walk into town.

A mile and a quarter along the Polozny, then up a steep hill, would bring you to the park, a triangular section of greenery (orange-and-brownery at that time of year) bordered on the east by the library, on the west by a row of brick buildings containing gentrified shops, and, facing the point of the triangle, by McGuigan’s. For me alone, it was a brisk half-hour walk; with Stanky in tow, it took an extra twenty minutes. He was not one to hide his discomfort or displeasure. He panted, he sagged, he limped, he sighed. His breathing grew labored. The next step would be his last. Wasn’t it enough I forced him to walk three blocks to the 7-Eleven? If his heart failed, drop his bones in a bucket of molten steel and ship his guitars home to McKeesport, where his mother would display them, necks crossed, behind the urn on the mantel.

These comments went unvoiced, but they were eloquently stated by his body language. He acted out every nuance of emotion, like a child showing off a new skill. Send him on an errand he considered important and he would give you his best White Rabbit, head down, hustling along on a matter of urgency to the Queen. Chastise him and he would play the penitent altar boy. When ill, he went with a hand clutching his stomach or cheek or lower back, grimacing and listless. His posturing was so pitifully false, it was disturbing to look at him. I had learned to ignore these symptoms, but I recognized the pathology that bred them—I had seen him, thinking himself unwatched, slumped on the couch, clicking the remote, the Guide spread across his lap, mired in the quicksand of depression, yet more arrogant than depressed, a crummy king forsaken by his court, desperate for admirers.

On reaching the library, I sat on a middle step and fingered out a fatty from my jacket pocket. Stanky collapsed beside me, exhausted by the Polozny Death March he had somehow survived. He flapped a hand toward McGuigan’s and said, hopefully, “You want to get a beer?”

“Maybe later.”

I fired up the joint.

“Hey!” Stanky said. “We passed a cop car on the hill, man.”

“I smoke here all the time. As long as you don’t flaunt it, nobody cares.”

I handed him the joint. He cupped the fire in his palm, smoking furtively. It occurred to me that I wouldn’t drink from the same glass as him—his gums were rotting, his teeth horribly decayed—but sharing a joint? What the hell. The air was nippy and the moon was hidden behind the alder’s thick leaves, which had turned but not yet fallen. Under an arc lamp, the statue of Black William gleamed as if fashioned of obsidian.

“Looks like he’s pointing right at us, huh?” said Stanky.

When I was good and stoned, once the park had crystallized into a Victorian fantasy of dark green lawns amid crisp shadows and fountaining shrubs, the storefronts beyond hiding their secrets behind black glass, and McGuigan’s ornate sign with its ruby coat of arms appearing to occupy an unreal corner in the dimension next door, I said, “Mia went back to her mom’s tonight. She’s going to be there for a while.”

“Bummer.” He had squirreled away a can of Coke in his coat pocket, which he now opened.

“It’s normal for us. Chances are she’ll screw around on me a little and spend most of the time curled up on her mom’s sofa, eating Cocoa Puffs out of the box and watching soaps. She’ll be back eventually.”

He had a swig of Coke and nodded.

“What bothers me,” I said, “is the reason she left. Not the real reason, but the excuse she gave. She claims you’ve been touching her. Rubbing against her and making like it was an accident.”

This elicited a flurry of protests and I-swear-to-Gods. I let him run down before I said, “It’s not a big deal.”

“She’s lying, man! I . . .”

“Whatever. Mia can handle herself. You cross the line with her, you’ll be picking your balls up off the floor.”

I could almost hear the gears grinding as he wondered how close he had come to being deballed.

“I want you to listen,” I went on. “No interruptions. Even if you think I’m wrong about something. Deal?”

“Sure. . . . Yeah.”

“Most of what I put out is garbage music. Meanderthal, Big Sissy, the Swimming Holes, Junk Brothers . . .”

“I love the Junk Brothers, man! They’re why I sent you my demo.”

I gazed at him sternly—he ducked his head and winced by way of apology.

“So rock-and-roll is garbage,” I said. “It’s disposable music. But once in a great while, somebody does something perfect. Something that makes the music seem indispensable. I think you can make something perfect. You may not ever get rock star money. I doubt you can be mainstreamed. The best you can hope for, probably, is Tom Waits money. That’s plenty, believe me. I think you’ll be huge in Europe. You’ll be celebrated there. You’ve got a false bass that reminds me of Blind Willie Johnson. You write tremendous lyrics. That fractured guitar style of yours is unique. It’s out there, but it’s funky and people are going to love it. You have a natural appeal to punks and art rockers. To rock geeks like me. But there’s one thing can stop you—that’s your problem with women.”

Not even this reference to his difficulties with Sabela and Mia could disrupt his rapt attentiveness.

“You can screw this up very easily,” I told him. “You let that inappropriate touching thing of yours get out of hand, you will screw it up. You have to learn to let things come. To do that, you have to believe in yourself. I know you’ve had a shitty life so far, and your self-esteem is low. But you have to break the habit of thinking that you’re getting over on people. You don’t need to get over on them. You’ve got something they want. You’ve got talent. People will cut you a ton of slack because of that talent, but you keep messing up with women, their patience is going to run out. Now I don’t know where all that music comes from, but it doesn’t sound like it came from a basement. It’s a gift. You have to start treating it like one.”

I asked him for a cigarette and lit up. Though I’d given variations of the speech dozens of times, I bought into it this time and I was excited.

“Ten days from now you’ll be playing for a live audience,” I said. “If you put in the work, if you can believe in yourself, you’ll get all you want of everything. And that’s how you do it, man. By putting in the work and playing a kick-ass set. I’ll help any way I can. I’m going to do publicity, T-shirts . . . and I’m going to give them away if I have to. I’m going to get the word out that Joe Stanky is something special. And you know what? Industry people will listen, because I have a track record.” I blew a smoke ring and watched it disperse. “These are things I won’t usually do for a band until they’re farther along, but I believe in you. I believe in your music. But you have to believe in yourself and you have to put in the work.”

I’m not sure how much of my speech, which lasted several minutes more, stuck to him. He acted inspired, but I couldn’t tell how much of the act was real; I knew on some level he was still running a con. We cut across the park, detouring so he could inspect the statue again. I glanced back at the library and saw two white lights shaped like fuzzy asterisks. At first I thought they were moving across the face of the building, that some people were playing with flashlights; but their brightness was too sharp and erratic, and they appeared to be coming from behind the library, shining through the stone, heading toward us. After ten or fifteen seconds, they faded from sight. Spooked, I noticed that Stanky was staring at the building and I asked if he had seen the lights.

“That was weird, man!” he said. “What was it?”

“Swamp gas. UFOs. Who knows?”

I started walking toward McGuigan’s and Stanky fell in alongside me. His limp had returned.

“After we have those beers, you know?” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Can we catch a cab home?” His limp became exaggerated. “I think I really hurt my leg.”

Part of the speech must have taken, because I didn’t have to roust Stanky out of bed the next morning. He woke before me, ate his grits (I allowed him a single bowl each day), knocked back a couple of Diet Cokes (my idea), and sequestered himself in the studio, playing adagio trumpet runs and writing on the Casio. Later, I heard the band thumping away. After practice, I caught Geno, the drummer, on his way out the door, brought him into the office and asked how the music was sounding.

“It doesn’t blow,” he said.

I asked to him to clarify.

“The guy writes some hard drum parts, but they’re tasty, you know. Tight.”

Geno appeared to want to tell me more, but spaced and ran a beringed hand through his shoulder-length black hair. He was a handsome kid, if you could look past the ink, the brands, and the multiple piercings. An excellent drummer and reliable. I had learned to be patient with him.

“Overall,” I said, “how do you think the band’s shaping up?”

He looked puzzled. “You heard us.”

“Yes. I know what I think. I’m interested in what you think.”

“Oh . . . okay.” He scratched the side of his neck, the habitat of a red and black Chinese tiger. “It’s very cool. Strong. I never heard nothing like it. I mean, it’s got jazz elements, but not enough to where it doesn’t rock. The guy sings great. We might go somewhere if he can control his weirdness.”

I didn’t want to ask how Stanky was being weird, but I did.

“He and Jerry got a conflict,” Geno said. “Jerry can’t get this one part down, and Stanky’s on him about it. I keep telling Stanky to quit ragging him. Leave Jerry alone and he’ll stay on it until he can play it backward. But Stanky, he’s relentless and Jerry’s getting pissed. He don’t love the guy, anyway. Like today, Stanky cracks about we should call the band Stanky and Our Gang.”

“No,” I said.

“Yeah, right. But it was cute, you know. Kind of funny. Jerry took it personal, though. He like to got into it with Stanky.”

“I’ll talk to them. Anything else?”

“Naw. Stanky’s a geek, but you know me. The music’s right and I’m there.”

The following day I had lunch scheduled with Andrea. It was also the day that my secretary, Kiwanda, a petite Afro-American woman in her late twenties, came back to work after a leave during which she had been taking care of her grandmother. I needed an afternoon off—I thought I’d visit friends, have a few drinks—so I gave over Stanky into her charge, warning her that he was prone to getting handsy with the ladies.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, sorting through some new orders. “You go have fun.”

Andrea had staked out one of the high-backed booths at the rear of McGuigan’s and was drinking a martini. She usually ran late, liked sitting at the front, and drank red wine. She had hung her jacket on the hook at the side of the booth and looked fetching in a cream-colored blouse. I nudged the martini glass and asked what was up with the booze.

“Bad day in court. I had to ask for a continuance. So . . .” She hoisted the martini. “I’m boozing it up.”

“Is this that pollution thing?”

“No, it’s a pro bono case.”

“Thought you weren’t going to do any pro bono work for a while.”

She shrugged, drank. “What can I say?”

“All that class guilt. It must be tough.” I signaled a waitress, pointed to Andrea’s martini and held up two fingers. “I suppose I should be grateful. If you weren’t carrying around that guilt, you would have married Snuffy Huffington the Third or somebody.”

“Let’s not banter,” Andrea said. “We always banter. Let’s just talk. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

I was good at reading Andrea, but it was strange how well I read her at that moment. Stress showed in her face. Nervousness. Both predictable components. But mainly I saw a profound loneliness and that startled me. I’d never thought of her as being lonely. I told her about Stanky, the good parts, his writing, his musicianship.

“The guy plays everything,” I said. “Guitar, flute, sax, trumpet. Little piano, little drums. He’s like some kind of mutant they produced in a secret high school band lab. And his voice. It’s the Jim Nabors effect. You know, the guy who played Gomer Pyle? Nobody expected a guy who looked that goofy could sing, so when he did, they thought he was great, even though he sounded like he had sinus trouble. It’s the same with Stanky, except his voice really is great.”

“You’re always picking up these curious strays,” she said. “Remember the high school kid who played bass, the one who fainted every time he was under pressure? Brian Something. You’d come upstairs and say, ‘You should see what Brian did,’ and tell me he laid a bass on its side and played Mozart riffs on it. And I’d go . . .”

“Bach,” I said.

“And I’d go, ‘Yeah, but he faints!’ ” She laughed. “You always think you can fix them.”

“You’re coming dangerously close to banter,” I said.

“You owe me one.” She wiggled her forefinger and grinned. “I’m right, aren’t I? There’s a downside to this guy.”

I told her about Stanky’s downside and, when I reached the part about Mia leaving, Andrea said, “The circus must be in town.”

“Now you owe me one.”

“You can’t expect me to be reasonable about Mia.” She half-sang the name, did a little shimmy, made a moue.

“That’s two you owe me,” I said.

“Sorry.” She straightened her smile. “You know she’ll come back. She always does.”

I liked that she was acting flirty and, though I had no resolution in mind, I didn’t want her to stop.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Honest.”

“Huh?”

“So how talented is this Stanky? Give me an example.”

“What do you mean, I don’t have to worry about you?”

“Never mind. Now come on! Give me some Stanky.”

“You want me to sing?”

“You were a singer, weren’t you? A pretty good one, as I recall.”

“Yeah, but I can’t do what he does.”

She sat expectantly, hands folded on the tabletop.

“All right,” I said. I did a verse of “Devil’s Blues,” beginning with the lines:

“There’s a grapevine in heaven,

There’s a peavine in hell,

One don’t grow grapes,

The other don’t grow peas as well. . . .”

I sailed on through to the chorus, getting into the vocal:

“Devil’s Blues!

God owes him. . . .”

A bald guy popped his head over the top of an adjacent booth and looked at me, then ducked back down. I heard laughter.

“That’s enough,” I said to Andrea.

“Interesting,” she said. “Not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t mind hearing him.”

“He’s playing the Crucible next weekend.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“Sure. If you’ll come.”

“I have to see how things develop at the office. Is a tentative yes okay?”

“Way better than a firm no,” I said.

We ordered from the grill and, after we had eaten, Andrea called her office and told them she was taking the rest of the day. We switched from martinis to red wine, and we talked, we laughed, we got silly, we got drunk. The sounds of the bar folded around us and I started to remember how it felt to be in love with her. We wobbled out of McGuigan’s around four o’clock. The sun was lowering behind the Bittersmiths, but shed a rich golden light; it was still warm enough for people to be sitting in sweaters and shirts on park benches under the orange leaves.

Andrea lived around the corner from the bar, so I walked her home. She was weaving a little and kept bumping into me. “You better take a cab home,” she said, and I said, “I’m not the one who’s walking funny,” which earned me a punch in the arm. When we came to her door, she turned to me, gripping her briefcase with both hands, and said, “I’ll see you next weekend, maybe.”

“That’d be great.”

She hovered there a second longer and then she kissed me. Flung her arms about my neck, clocking me with the briefcase, and gave me a one-hundred-percent all-Andrea kiss that, if I were a cartoon character, would have rolled my socks up and down and levitated my hat. She buried her face in my neck and said, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” I was going to say, For what?, but she pulled away in a hurry, appearing panicked, and fled up the stairs.

I nearly hit a parked car on the drive home, not because I was drunk, but because thinking about the kiss and her reaction afterward impaired my concentration. What was she sorry about? The kiss? Flirting? The divorce? I couldn’t work it out, and I couldn’t work out, either, what I was feeling. Lust, certainly. Having her body pressed against mine had fully engaged my senses. But there was more. Considerably more. I decided it stood a chance of becoming a mental health issue and did my best to put it from mind.

Kiwanda was busy in the office. She had the computers networking and was going through prehistoric paper files on the floor. I asked what was up and she told me she had devised a more efficient filing system. She had never been much of an innovator, so this unnerved me, but I let it pass and asked if she’d had any problems with my boy Stanky.

“Not so you’d notice,” she said tersely.

From this, I deduced that there had been a problem, but I let that pass as well and went upstairs to the apartment. Walls papered with flyers and band photographs; a grouping of newish, ultra-functional Swedish furniture—I realized I had liked the apartment better when Andrea did the decorating, this despite the fact that interior design had been one of our bones of contention. The walls, in particular, annoyed me. I was being stared at by young men with shaved heads and flowing locks in arrogant poses, stupid with tattoos, by five or six bands that had tried to stiff me, by a few hundred bad-to-indifferent memories and a dozen good ones. Maybe a dozen. I sat on a leather and chrome couch (it was a showy piece, but uncomfortable) and watched the early news. George Bush, Iraq, the price of gasoline . . . Fuck! Restless, I went down to the basement.

Stanky was watching Comedy Central. Mad TV. Another of his passions. He was slumped on the couch, remote in hand, and had a Coke and a cigarette working, an ice pack clamped to his cheek. I had the idea the ice pack was for my benefit, so I didn’t ask about it, but knew it must be connected to Kiwanda’s attitude. He barely acknowledged my presence, just sat there and pouted. I took a chair and watched with him. At last he said, “I need a rhythm guitar player.”

“I’m not going to hire another musician this late in the game.”

He set down the ice pack. His cheek was red, but that might have been from the ice pack itself . . . although I thought I detected a slight puffiness. “I seriously need him,” he said.

“Don’t push me on this.”

“It’s important, man! For this one song, anyway.”

“What song?”

“A new one.”

I waited and then said, “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“It needs a rhythm guitar.”

This tubby little madman recumbent on my couch was making demands—it felt good to reject him, but he persisted.

“It’s just one song, man,” he said in full-on wheedle. “Please! It’s a surprise.”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“Come on! You’ll like this one, I promise.”

I told him I’d see what I could do, had a talk with him about Jerry, and the atmosphere lightened. He sat up straight, chortling at Mad TV, now and then saying, “Decent!” his ultimate accolade. The skits were funny and I laughed, too.

“I did my horoscope today,” he said as the show went to commercial.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You’re a Cancer.”

He didn’t like that, but maintained an upbeat air. “I don’t mean astrology, man. I use the Guide.” He slid the TV Guide across the coffee table, pointing out an entry with a grimy finger, a black-rimmed nail. I snatched it up and read:

“King Creole: *** Based on a Harold Robbins novel. A young man (Elvis Presley) with a gang background rises from the streets to become a rock-and-roll star. Vic Morrow. 1:30.”

“Decent, huh!” said Stanky. “You try it. Close your eyes and stick your finger in on a random page and see what you get. I use the movie section in back, but some people use the whole programming section.”

“Other people do this? Not just you?”

“Go ahead.”

I did as instructed and landed on another movie:

“A Man and a Woman: **** A widow and a widower meet on holiday and are attracted to one another, but the woman backs off because memories of her dead husband are still too strong. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anouk Aimée. 1:40.”

Half-believing, I tried to understand what the entry portended for me and Andrea.

“What did you get?” asked Stanky.

I tossed the Guide back to him and said, “It didn’t work for me.”

I THOUGHT ABOUT CALLING Andrea, but business got in the way—I suppose I allowed it to get in the way, due to certain anxieties relating to our divorce. There was publicity to do, Kiwanda’s new filing system to master (she kept on tweaking it), recording (we laid down two tracks for Stanky’s first EP), and a variety of other duties. And so the days went quickly. Stanky began going to the library after every practice, walking without a limp; he said he was doing research. He didn’t have enough money to get into trouble and I had too much else on my plate to stress over it. The night before he played the Crucible, I was in the office, going over everything in my mind, wondering what I had overlooked, thinking I had accomplished an impossible amount of work that week, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and there on the stoop was Andrea, dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, cheeks rosy from the night air. An overnight bag rested at her feet. “Hi,” she said, and gave a chipper smile, like a tired Girl Scout determined to keep pimping her cookies.

Taken aback, I said, “Hi,” and ushered her in.

She went into the office and sat in the wooden chair beside my desk. I followed her in, hesitated, and took a seat in my swivel chair.

“You look . . . rattled,” she said.

“That about covers it. Good rattled. But rattled, nonetheless.”

“I am, too. Sorta.” She glanced around the office, as if noticing the changes. I could hear every ticking clock, every digital hum, all the discrete noises of the house.

She drew in breath, exhaled, clasped her hands in her lap. “I thought we could try,” she said quietly. “We could do a trial period or something. Some days, a week. See how that goes.” She paused. “The last few times I’ve seen you, I’ve wanted to be with you. And I think you’ve wanted to be with me. So . . .” She made a flippy gesture, as if she were trying to shade things toward the casual. “This seemed like an opportunity.”

You would have thought, even given the passage of time, after all the recriminations and ugliness of divorce, some measure of negativity would have cropped up in my thoughts; but it did not and I said, “I think you’re right.”

“Whew!” Andrea pretended to wipe sweat from her brow and grinned.

An awkward silence; the grin flickered and died.

“Could I maybe go upstairs,” she asked.

“Oh! Sure. I’m sorry.” I had the urge to run up before her and rip down the crapfest on the wall, chuck all the furniture out the window, except for a mattress and candles.

“You’re still rattled,” she said. “Maybe we should have a drink before anything.” She stretched out a hand to me. “Let’s get good and drunk.”

As it happened, we barely got the drinks poured before we found our groove and got busy. It was like old times, cozy and familiar, and yet it was like we were doing it for the first time, too. Every touch, every sensation, carried that odd frisson. We woke late, with the frost almost melted from the panes, golden light chuting through the high east windows, leaving the bed in a bluish shadow. We lay there, too sleepy to make love, playing a little, talking, her telling me how she had plotted her approach, me telling her how I was oblivious until that day at lunch when I noticed her loneliness, and what an idiot I had been not to see what was happening. . . . Trivial matters, but they stained a few brain cells, committing those moments to memory and marking them as Important, a red pin on life’s map. And then we did make love, as gently as that violence can be made. Afterward, we showered and fixed breakfast. Watching her move about the kitchen in sweats and a T-shirt, I couldn’t stop thinking how great this was, and I wanted to stop, to quit footnoting every second. I mentioned this as we ate and she said, “I guess that means you’re happy.”

“Yeah! Of course.”

“Me, too.” She stabbed a piece of egg with her fork, tipped her head to the side as if to get a better angle on me. “I don’t know when it was I started to be able to read you so well. Not that you were that hard to read to begin with. It just seems there’s nothing hidden in your face anymore.”

“Maybe it’s a case of heightened senses.”

“No, really. At times it’s like I know what you’re about to say.”

“You mean I don’t have to speak?”

She adopted the manner of a legal professional. “Unfortunately, no. You have to speak. Otherwise, it would be difficult to catch you in a lie.”

“Maybe we should test this,” I said. “You ask my name, and I’ll say Helmut or Torin.”

She shook her head. “I’m an organic machine, not a lie detector. We have different ways. Different needs.”

“Organic. So that would make you . . . softer than your basic machine? Possibly more compliant?”

“Very much so,” she said.

“You know, I think I may be reading you pretty well myself.” I leaned across the table, grabbed a sloppy kiss, and, as I sat back down, I remembered something. “Damn!” I said, and rapped my forehead with my knuckles.

“What is it?”

“I forgot to take Stanky for his haircut.”

“Can’t he take care of it himself?”

“Probably not. You want to go with us? You might as well meet him. Get it over with.”

She popped egg into her mouth and chewed. “Do we have to do it now?”

“No, he won’t even be up for a couple of hours.”

“Good,” she said.

The Crucible, a concrete block structure on the edge of Black William, off beyond the row houses, had once been a dress outlet store. We had put a cafeteria in the front, where we served breakfast and lunch—we did a brisk business because of the mill. Separate from the cafeteria, the back half of the building was given over to a bar with a few ratty booths, rickety chairs, and tables. We had turned a high-school artist loose on the walls and she had painted murals that resembled scenes from J. R. R. Tolkien’s lost labor-union novel. An immense crucible adorned the wall behind the stage; it appeared, thanks to the artist’s inept use of perspective, to be spilling a flood of molten steel down upon an army of orclike workers.

There was a full house that night, attracted by local legends the Swimming Holes, a girl band who had migrated to Pittsburgh, achieving a degree of national renown, and I had packed the audience with Friends of Vernon whom I had enjoined to applaud and shout wildly for Stanky. A haze of smoke fogged the stage lights and milling about were fake punks, the odd goth, hippies from Garnant College in Waterford, fifteen miles away: the desperate wannabe counterculture of the western Pennsylvania barrens. I went into the dressing rooms, gave each Swimming Hole a welcome-home hug, and checked in on Stanky. Jerry, a skinny guy with buzzcut red hair, was plunking on his bass, and Geno was playing fills on the back of a chair; Ian, the rhythm guitarist, was making a cell call in the head. Stanky was on the couch, smoking a Camel, drinking a Coke, and watching the SciFi Channel. I asked if he felt all right. He said he could use a beer. He seemed calm, supremely confident, which I would not have predicted and did not trust. But it was too late for concern and I left him to God.

I joined Andrea at the bar. She had on an old long-sleeved Ramones shirt, the same that she had worn to gigs back when my band was happening. Despite the shirt, she looked out of place in the Crucible, a swan floating on a cesspool. I ordered a beer to be carried to Stanky, a shot of tequila for myself. Andrea put her mouth to my ear and shouted over the recorded music, “Don’t get drunk!” and then something else that was lost in the din. I threw down the shot and led her into the cafeteria, which was serving coffee and soda to a handful of kids, some of whom appeared to be trying to straighten out. I closed the door to the bar, cutting the volume by half.

“What were you saying?” I asked.

“I said not to get drunk, I might have use for you later.” She sat at the counter, patted the stool beside her, encouraging me to sit.

“They’re about to start,” I said, joining her. “I’ve only got a minute.”

“How do you think it’ll go?”

“With Stanky? I’m praying it won’t be a disaster.”

“You know, he didn’t seem so bad this afternoon. Not like you described, anyway.”

“You just like him because he said you were a babe.”

I took a loose cigarette from my shirt pocket, rolled it between my thumb and forefinger, and she asked if I was smoking again.

“Once in a while. Mainly I do this,” I said, demonstrating my rolling technique. “Anyway . . . Stanky. You caught him on his best behavior.”

“He seemed sad to me.” She lifted a pepper shaker as she might a chess piece and set it closer to the salt. “Stunted. He has some adult mannerisms, adult information, but it’s like he’s still fourteen or fifteen.”

“There you go,” I said. “Now ask yourself how it would be, being around a twenty-six-year-old fourteen-year-old on a daily basis.”

One of the kids, boys, men—there should be, I think, a specific word for someone old enough to die for his country, yet who can’t grow a proper mustache and is having difficulty focusing because he recently ate some cheap acid cut with crank—one of the guys at the end of the counter, then, came trippingly toward us, wearing an army field jacket decorated with a braid of puke on the breast pocket, like a soggy service ribbon. He stopped to leer at Andrea, gave me the high sign, said something unintelligible, possibly profane, and staggered on into the club.

It had been Andrea’s stance, when we were married, that episodes such as this were indicative of the sewer in which she claimed I was deliquescing, a.k.a. the music business. Though I had no grounds to argue the point, I argued nonetheless, angry because I hated the idea that she was smarter than I was—I compensated by telling myself I had more soul. There had been other, less defined reasons for anger, and the basic argument between us had gotten vicious. In this instance, however, she ignored the kid and returned to our conversation, which forced me to consider anew the question of my milieu and the degradation thereof, and to wonder if she had, by ignoring the kid, manipulated me into thinking that she had changed, whereas I had not, and it might be that the music business was to blame, that it had delimited me, warped and stunted my soul. I knew she was still the smart one.

The music cut off midsong and I heard Rudy Bowen, my friend and partner in the Crucible, on the mike, welcoming people and making announcements. On our way back into the club, Andrea stopped me at the door and said, “I love you, Vernon.” She laid a finger on my lips and told me to think about it before responding, leaving me mightily perplexed.

Stanky walked out onto the stage of the Crucible in a baggy white T-shirt, baggy chinos and his trucker wallet. He would have been semipresentable had he not also been wearing a battered top hat. Somebody hooted derisively, and that did not surprise me. The hat made him look clownish. I wanted to throw a bottle and knock it off his head. He began whispering into the mike. Another hoot, a piercing whistle. Not good. But the whisper evolved into a chant, bits of Latin, Spanish, rock-and-roll clichés, and nonsense syllables. Half-spoken, half-sung, with an incantatory vibe, scatted in a jump-blues rhythm that the band, coming in underneath the vocal, built into a sold groove, and then Stanky, hitting his mark like a ski jumper getting a lift off a big hill, began to sing:

“I heard the Holy Ghost moan . . .

Stars seen through stone . . .”

Basically, the song consisted of those two lines repeated, but sung differently—made into a gospel plaint, a rock-and-roll howl, a smooth Motown styling, a jazzy lilt, and so on. There was a break with more lyrics, but the two lines were what mattered. The first time he sang them, in that heavy false bass, a shock ripped through the audience. People looked up, they turned toward the stage, they stopped drinking, their heads twitched, their legs did impromptu dance steps. Stanky held the word “moan” out for three bars, working it like a soul singer, then he picked up the trumpet and broke into a solo that was angry like Miles, but kept a spooky edge. When he set the trumpet down, he went to singing the lyric double time, beating the top hat against his thigh, mangling it. The crowd surged forward, everyone wanting to get next to the stage, dancing in place, this strange, shuffling dance, voodoo zombies from hell, and Stanky strapped on his guitar. I missed much of what happened next, because Andrea dragged me onto the dance floor and started making slinky moves, and I lost my distance from the event. But Stanky’s guitar work sent the zombies into a convulsive fever. We bumped into a punk who was jerking like his strings were being yanked; we did a three-some with a college girl whose feet were planted, yet was shaking it like a tribal dancer in a National Geographic Special; we were corralled briefly by two millworkers who were dancing with a goth girl, watching her spasm, her breasts flipping every which way. At the end of the song, Jerry and Geno started speaking the lyric into their mikes, adding a counterpoint to Stanky’s vocal, cooling things off, bringing it down to the creepy chant again; then the band dropped out of the music and Stanky went a capella for a final repetition of his two lines.

Applause erupted, and it was as idiosyncratic as the dancing had been. This one guy was baying like a hound; a blond girl bounced up and down, clapping gleefully like a six-year-old. I didn’t catch much of the set, other than to note the audience’s positive response, in particular to the songs “Average Joe” and “Can I Get a Waitress?” and “The Sunset Side of You”—I was working the room, gathering opinions, trying to learn if any of the industry people I’d invited had come, and it wasn’t until twenty minutes after the encore that I saw Stanky at the bar, talking to a girl, surrounded by a group of drunken admirers. I heard another girl say how cute he was and that gave me pause to wonder at the terrible power of music. The hooker I had hired to guarantee my guarantee, a long-legged brunette named Carol, dish-faced but with a spectacular body, was biding her time, waiting for the crowd around Stanky to disperse. He was in competent hands. I felt relief, mental fatigue, the desire to be alone with Andrea. There was no pressing reason to stay. I said a couple of good-byes, accepted congratulations, and we drove home, Andrea and I, along the Polozny.

“He’s amazing,” she said. “I have to admit, you may be right about him.”

“Yep,” I said proudly.

“Watch yourself, Sparky. You know how you get when these things start to go south.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When one of your problem children runs off the tracks, you take it hard. That’s all I’m saying.” Andrea rubbed my shoulder. “You may want to think about speeding things up with Stanky. Walk him a shorter distance and let someone else deal with him. It might save you some wear and tear.”

We drove in silence; the river widened, slowed its race, flowing in under the concrete lees of the mill; the first row house came up on the right. I was tempted to respond as usually I did to her advice, to say it’s all good, I’ve got it under control, but for some reason I listened that night and thought about everything that could go wrong.

Carol was waiting for me in the office when I came downstairs at eight o’clock the following morning. She was sitting in my swivel chair, going through my Rolodex. She looked weary, her hair mussed, and displeased. “That guy’s a freak,” she said flatly. “I want two hundred more. And in the future, I want to meet the guys you set me up with before I commit.”

“What’d he do?” I asked.

“Do you really want to know?”

“I’m kind of curious. . . . Yeah.”

She began to recite a list of Stanky-esque perversion—I cut her off.

“Okay,” I said, and reached for my checkbook. “He didn’t get rough, did he?”

“Au contraire.” She crossed her legs. “He wanted me to. . . .”

“Please,” I said. “Enough.”

“I don’t do that sort of work,” she said primly.

I told her I’d written the check for three hundred and she was somewhat mollified. I apologized for Stanky and told her I hadn’t realized he was so twisted.

“We’re okay,” she said. “I’ve had . . . Hi, sweetie!”

She directed this greeting to a point above my shoulder as Andrea, sleepily scratching her head, wearing her sweats, entered the office. “Hi, Carol,” she said, bewildered.

Carol hugged her, then turned to me and waved good-bye with my check. “Call me.”

“Pretty early for hookers,” Andrea said, perching on the edge of the desk.

“Let me guess. You defended her.”

“Nope. One of her clients died and left her a little money. I helped her invest. But that begs the question, what was she doing here?”

“I got her for Stanky.”

“A reward?”

“Something like that.”

She nodded and idly kicked the back of her heel against the side of the desk. “How come you were never interested in the men I dated after we broke up?”

I was used to her sudden conversational U-turns, but I had expected her to interrogate me about Carol and this caught me off-guard. “I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t want to think about who you were sleeping with.”

“Must be a guy thing. I always checked out your girlfriends. Even the ones you had when I was mad at you.” She slipped off the desk and padded toward the door. “See you upstairs.”

I spent the next two days between the phone and the studio, recording a good take of “The Sunset Side of You”—it was the closest thing Stanky had to a ballad, and I thought, with its easy, Dr. John-ish feel, it might get some play on college radio:

“I’m gonna crack open my venetian blind
and let that last bit of old orange glory shine,
so I can catch an eyeful
of my favorite trifle,
my absoutely perfect point of view. . . .

That’s an eastbound look,
six inches from the crook
of my little finger,
at the sunset side of you. . . .”

Stanky wasn’t happy with me—he was writing a song a day, sometimes two songs, and didn’t want to disrupt his creative process by doing something that might actually make money, but I gamed him into cutting the track.

Wednesday morning, I visited Rudy Bowen in his office. Rudy was an architect who yearned to be a cartoonist, but who had never met with much success in the latter pursuit, and the resonance of our creative failures, I believe, helped to cement our friendship. He was also the only person I knew who had caught a fish in the Polozny downstream from the mill. It occupied a place of honor in his office, a hideous thing mounted on a plaque, some sort of mutant trout nourished upon pollution. Whenever I saw it, I would speculate on what else might lurk beneath the surface of the cold, deep pools east of town, imagining telepathic monstrosities plated with armor like fish of the Mesozoic and frail tentacled creatures, their skins having the rainbow sheen of an oil slick, to whom mankind were sacred figures in their dream of life.

Rudy’s secretary, a matronly woman named Gwen, told me he had gone out for a latte and let me wait in his private office. I stepped over to his drafting table, curious about what he was working on. Held in place on the table was a clean sheet of paper, but in a folder beside the table was a batch of new cartoons, a series featuring shadowy figures in a mineshaft who conversed about current events, celebrities, etc., while excavating a vein of pork that twisted through a mountain. . . . This gave rise to the title of the strip: Meat Mountain Stories. They were silhouettes, really. Given identity by their shapes, eccentric hairstyles, and speech signatures. The strip was contemporary and hilarious—everything Rudy’s usual work was not. In some frames, a cluster of tiny white objects appeared to be floating. Moths, I thought. Lights of some kind. They, too, carried on conversations, but in pictographs. I was still going through them when Rudy came in, a big, blond man with the beginnings of a gut and thick glasses that lent him a baffled look. Every time I saw him, he looked more depressed, more middle-aged.

“These are great, man!” I said. “They’re new, right?”

He crossed the room and stood beside me.

“I been working on them all week. You like ’em, huh?”

“I love them. You did all this this week? You must not be sleeping.” I pointed to the white things. “What’re these?”

“Stars. I got the idea from that song Stanky did. ‘Stars Seen Through Stone.’ ”

“So they’re seeing them, the people in the mine?”

“Yeah. They don’t pay much attention to them, but they’re going to start interacting soon.”

“It must be going around.” I told him about Stanky’s burst of writing, Kiwanda’s adventures in office management.

“That’s odd, you know.” He sipped his latte. “It seems like there’s been a real rash of creativity in town. Last week, some grunt at the mill came up with an improvement in the cold forming process that everybody says is a huge deal. Jimmy Galvin, that guy who does handyman work? He invented a new gardening tool. Bucky Bucklin’s paying his patent fees. He says they’re going to make millions. Beth started writing a novel. She never said anything to me about wanting to write, but she’s hardly had time for the kids, she’s been so busy ripping off the pages. It’s not bad.”

“Well, I wish I’d catch it,” I said. “With me, it’s same old same old. Drudgeree, drudgeroo. Except for Andrea’s back.”

“Andrea? You mean you guys are dating?”

“I mean back as in back in my house. Living with me.”

“Damn!” he said. “That’s incredible!”

We sat in two chairs like two inverted tents on steel frames, as uncomfortable as my upstairs couch, and I told him about it.

“So it’s going okay?” he asked.

“Terrific, I think. But what do I know? She said it was a trial period, so I could get home tonight and she might be gone. I’ve never been able to figure her out.”

“Andrea. Damn! I saw her at the club, but I didn’t realize she was with you. I just had time to wave.” He leaned across the space between us and high-fived me. “Now maybe you’ll stop going around like someone stole your puppy.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I said.

He chuckled. “Naw. Which is why the people of Black William, when asked the date, often reply, ‘Six years, two months, and twelve days since the advent of Vernon’s Gloom.’ ”

We moved on to other topics, among them the club, business, and, as I made to leave, I gestured at Rudy’s grotesque trophy and said, “While those creative juices are flowing, you ought to design a fishing lure, so I can watch you hook into the Loch Polozny Monster.”

Rudy laughed and said, “Maybe if I have a couple of minutes. I’m going to keep working on the comic. Whatever this shit is, it’s bound to go away.”

I WAS FOOLING around in the studio one evening, ostensibly cleaning up the tape we’d rolled the previous weekend at the Crucible, hoping to get a live rendition of “Stars Seen Through Stone” clean enough for the EP, but I was, instead, going over a tape I’d made, trying to find some ounce of true inspiration in it, finding none, wondering why this wave of creativity—if it, indeed, existed—had blessed Rudy’s house and not mine. It was after seven; Stanky was likely on his way home from the library, and I was thinking about seeing if Andrea wanted to go out, when she leaned in the doorway and asked if she was interrupting. I told her, no, not at all, and she came into the booth and sat next to me at the board, looking out at the drum kit, the instruments, the serpents’ nest of power cords.

“When we were married, I didn’t get what you saw in this,” she said. “All I saw was the damage, the depravity, the greed. Now I’ve been practicing, I realize there’s more or less the same degree of damage and greed and depravity in every enterprise. You can’t see it as clearly as you do in the music business, but it’s there.”

“Tell me what I see that’s good.”

“The music, the people.”

“None of that lasts,” I said. “All I am’s a yo-yo tester. I test a thousand busted yo-yos, and occasionally I run across one that lights up and squeals when it spins.”

“What I do is too depressing to talk about. It’s rare when anyone I represent has a good outcome, even if they win. Corporations delay and delay.”

“So it’s disillusionment that’s brought us together again.”

“No.” She looked at me steadily. “Do you love me?”

“Yeah, I love you. You know I do. I never stopped. There was a gap. . . .”

“A big gap!”

“The gap made it more painful, but that’s all it did.”

She played with dials on the sound board, frowning as if they were refusing to obey her fingers.

“You’re messing up my settings,” I said.

“Oh . . . sorry.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. It’s just you don’t lie to me anymore. You used to lie all the time, even about trivial things. I’m having trouble adjusting.”

I started to deny it, but recognized that I couldn’t. “I was angry at you. I can’t remember why, exactly. Lying was probably part of it.”

“I was angry at you, too.” She put her hands back on the board, but twisted no dials. “But I didn’t lie to you.”

“You stopped telling me the truth,” I said.

“Same difference.”

The phone rang; in reflex, I picked up and said, “Soul Kiss.”

It was Stanky. He started babbling, telling me to come downtown quick.

“Whoa!” I said. “If this is about me giving you a ride . . .”

“No, I swear! You gotta see this, man! The stars are back!”

“The stars.”

“Like the ones we saw at the library. The lights. You better come quick. I’m not sure how long it’ll last.”

“I’m kind of busy,” I said.

“Dude, you have got to see this! I’m not kidding!”

I covered the phone and spoke to Andrea. “Want to ride uptown? Stanky says there’s something we should see.”

“Maybe afterward we could stop by my place and I could pick up a few things?”

I got back on the phone. “Where are you?”

Five minutes later we were cutting across the park toward the statue of Black William, beside which Stanky and several people were standing in an island of yellow light—I had no time to check them out, other than to observe that one was a woman, because Stanky caught my arm and directed me to look at the library and what I saw made me unmindful of any other sight. The building had been rendered insubstantial, a ghost of itself, and I was staring across a dark plain ranged by a dozen fuzzy white lights, some large, some small, moving toward us at a slow rate of speed, and yet perhaps it was not slow—the perspective seemed infinite, as if I were gazing into a depth that, by comparison to which, all previously glimpsed perspectives were so limited as to be irrelevant. As the lights approached, they appeared to vanish, passing out of frame, as if the viewing angle we had been afforded was too narrow to encompass the scope of the phenomenon. Within seconds, it began to fade, the library to regain its ordinary solidity, and I thought I heard a distant gabbling, the sound of many voices speaking at once, an army of voices (though I might have manufactured this impression from the wind gusting through the boughs); and then, as that ghostly image winked out of existence, a groaning noise that, in my opinion, issued from no fleshly throat, but may have been produced by some cosmic stress, a rip in the continuum sealing itself or something akin.

Andrea had at some point latched onto my arm, and we stood gaping at the library; Stanky and the rest began talking excitedly. There were three boys, teenagers, two of them carrying skateboards. The third was a pale, skinny, haughty kid, bespotted with acne, wearing a black turtleneck sweater, black jeans, black overcoat. They displayed a worshipful attitude toward Stanky, hanging on his every word. The woman might have been the one with whom Stanky had been speaking at the Crucible before Carol made her move. She was tiny, barely five feet tall, Italian-looking, with black hair and olive skin, in her twenties, and betrayed a compete lack of animation until Stanky slipped an arm around her; then she smiled, an expression that revealed her to be moderately attractive.

The skateboarders sped off to, they said, “tell everybody,” and this spurred me to take out my cell phone, but I could not think who to call. Rudy, maybe. But no one in authority. The cops would laugh at the report. Stanky introduced us to Liz (the woman lowered her eyes) and Pin (the goth kid looked away and nodded). I asked how long the phenomenon had been going on before we arrived and Stanky said, “Maybe fifteen minutes.”

“Have you seen it before?”

“Just that time with you.”

I glanced up at Black William and thought that maybe he had intended the statue as a warning . . . though it struck me now that he was turning his head back toward the town and laughing.

Andrea hugged herself. “I could use something hot to drink.”

McGuigan’s was handy, but that would have disincluded Pin, who obviously was underage. I loaded him, Stanky, and Liz into the back of the van and drove to Szechuan Palace, a restaurant on the edge of the business district, which sported a five-foot-tall gilt fiberglass Buddha in the foyer that over the years had come to resemble an ogre with a skin condition, the fiberglass weave showing through in patches, and whose dining room (empty but for a bored waitstaff) was lit like a Macao brothel in lurid shades of red, green, and purple. On the way to the restaurant, I replayed the incident in my head, attempting to understand what I had witnessed not in rational terms, but in terms that would make sense to an ordinary American fool raised on science fiction and horror movies. Nothing seemed to fit. At the restaurant, Andrea and Pin ordered tea, Liz and Stanky gobbled moo shu pork and lemon chicken, and I picked at an egg roll. Pin started talking to Andrea in an adenoidal voice, lecturing her on some matter regarding Black William, and, annoyed because he was treating her like an idiot, I said, “What does Black William have to do with this?”

“Not a thing,” Pin said, turning on me a look of disdain that aspired to be the kind of look Truman Capote once fixed upon a reporter from the Lincoln Journal-Star who had asked if he was a homosexual. “Not unless you count the fact that he saw something similar two hundred years ago and it probably killed him.”

“Pin’s an expert on Black William,” Stanky said, wiping a shred of pork from his chin.

“What little there is to know,” said Pin grandly, “I know.”

It figured that a goth townie would have developed a crush on the local bogeyman. I asked him to enlighten me.

“Well,” Pin said, “when Joey told me he’d seen a star floating in front of the library, I knew it had to be one of BW’s stars. Where the library stands today used to be the edge of Stockton Wood, which had an evil reputation. As did many woods in those days, of course. Stockton Wood is where he saw the stars.”

“What did he say about them?”

“He didn’t say a thing. Nothing that he committed to paper, anyway. It’s his younger cousin, Samuel Garnant, we can thank for the story. He wrote a memoir about BW’s escapades under the nom de plume Jonathan Venture. According to Samuel, BW was in the habit of riding in the woods at twilight. ‘Tempting the Devil,’ he called it. His first sight of the stars was a few mysterious lights—like with you and Joey. He rode out into the wood the next night and many nights thereafter. Samuel’s a bit vague on how long it was before BW saw the stars again. I’m guessing a couple of weeks, going by clues in the narrative. But eventually he did see them, and what he saw was a lot like what we just saw.” Pin put his hands together, fingertips touching, like a priest preparing to address the Ladies Auxiliary. “In those days, people feared God and the Devil. When they saw something amazing, they didn’t stand around like a bunch of doofuses saying, ‘All right!’ and taking pictures. BW was terrified. He said he’d seen the Star Wormwood and heard the Holy Ghost moan. He set about changing his life.”

Stanky shot me one of his wincing, cutesy, embarrassed smiles—he had told me the song was completely original.

“For almost a year,” Pin went on, “BW tried to be a good Christian. He performed charitable works, attended church regularly, but his heart wasn’t in it. He lapsed back into his old ways and before long he took to riding in Stockton Wood again, with his manservant Nero walking at his side. He thought that he had missed an opportunity and told Samuel if he was fortunate enough to see the stars again, he would ride straight for them. He’d embrace their evil purpose.”

“What you said about standing around like doofuses, taking pictures,” Andrea said. “I don’t suppose anyone got a picture?”

Pin produced a cell phone and punched up a photograph of the library and the stars. Andrea and I leaned in to see.

“Can you e-mail that to me?” I asked.

Pin said he could and I wrote my address on a napkin.

“So,” Pin said. “The next time BW saw the stars was in eighteen-oh-eight. He saw them twice, exactly like the first time. A single star, then an interval of a week or two and a more complex sighting. A month after that, he disappeared while riding with Nero in Stockon Wood and they were never seen again.”

Stanky hailed our waitress and asked for more pancakes for his moo shu.

“So you think the stars appeared three times?” said Andrea. “And Black William missed the third appearance on the first go-round, but not on the second?”

“That’s what Samuel thought,” said Pin.

Stanky fed Liz a bite of lemon chicken.

“You’re assuming Black William was killed by the stars, but that doesn’t make sense,” said Andrea. “For instance, why would there be a longer interval between the second and third sightings? If there was a third sighting. It’s more likely someone who knew the story killed him and blamed it on the stars.”

“Maybe Nero capped him,” said Stanky. “So he could gain his freedom.”

Pin shrugged. “I only know what I read.”

“It might be a wavefront,” I said.

On another napkin, I drew a straight line with a small bump in it, then an interval in which the line flattened out, then a bigger bump, then a longer interval and an even bigger bump.

“Like that, maybe,” I said. “Some kind of wavefront passing through Black William from God knows where. It’s always passing through town, but we get this series of bumps that make it accessible every two hundred years. Or less. Maybe the stars appeared at other times.”

“There’s no record of it,” said Pin. “And I’ve searched.”

The waitress brought Stanky’s pancakes and asked if we needed more napkins.

Andrea studied the napkin I’d drawn on. “But what about the first series of sightings? When were they?”

“Seventeen-eighty-nine,” said Pin.

“It could be an erratic cycle,” I said. “Or could be the cycle consists of two sequences close together, then a lapse of two hundred years. Don’t expect a deeper explanation. I cut class a bunch in high school physics.”

“The Holy Ghost doesn’t obey physical principles,” said Stanky pompously.

“I doubt Black William really heard the Holy Ghost,” Andrea said. “If he heard what we heard tonight. It sounded more like a door closing to me.”

“Whatever,” he said. “It’ll be cool to see what happens a month from now. Maybe Black William will return from the grave.”

“Yeah.” I crumpled the napkin and tossed it to the center of the table. “Maybe he’ll bring Doctor Doom and the Lone Ranger with him.”

Pin affected a shudder and said, “I think I’m busy that day.”

PIN SENT ME the picture and I e-mailed it to a gearhead friend, Crazy Ed, who lived in Wilkes-Barre, to see what he could make of it. Though I didn’t forget about the stars, I got slammed with business and my consideration of them and the late William Garnant had to be put on the back burner, along with Stanky’s career. Against all expectations, Liz had not fled screaming from his bed, crying Pervert, but stayed with him most nights. Except for his time in the studio, I rarely saw him, and then only when his high school fans drove by to pick up him and Liz. An apocryphal story reached my ear, insinuating that she had taken on a carload of teenage boys while Stanky watched. That, if true, explained the relationship in Stanky-esque terms, terms I could understand. I didn’t care what they did as long as he fulfilled his band duties and kept out of my hair. I landed him a gig at the Pick and Shovel in Waterford, filling in for a band that had been forced to cancel, and it went well enough that I scored him another gig at Garnant College. After a mere two performances, his reputation was building and I adjusted my timetable accordingly—I would make the college job an EP release party, push out an album soon thereafter and try to sell him to a major label. It was not the way I typically grew my acts, not commercially wise, but Stanky was not a typical act and, despite his prodigious talent, I wanted to have done with this sour-smelling chapter in my life.

Andrea, for all intents and purposes, had moved in, along with a high-energy, seven-month-old Irish setter named Timber, and was in the process of subletting her apartment. We were, doubtless, a disgusting item to everyone who had gotten to know us during our adversarial phase, always hanging on one another, kissing and touching. I had lunch with her every day—they held the back booth for us at McGuigan’s—and one afternoon as we were settling in, Mia materialized beside the booth. “Hello,” she said and stuck out a hand to Andrea.

Startled, Andrea shook her hand and I, too, was startled—until that moment, Mia had been unrelentingly hostile in her attitude toward my ex, referring to her as “that uppity skank” and in terms less polite. I noticed that she was dressed conservatively and not made up as an odalisque. Instead of being whipped into a punky abstraction, her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. The raspberry streak was gone. She was, in fact, for the first time since I had known her, streakless.

“May I join you?” Mia asked. “I won’t take up much of your time.”

Andrea scooted closer to the wall and Mia sat next to her.

“I heard you guys were back together,” said Mia. “I’m glad.”

Thunderstruck, I was incapable of fielding that one. “Thanks,” said Andrea, looking to me for guidance.

Mia squared up in the booth, addressing me with a clear eye and a firm voice. “I’m moving to Pittsburgh. I’ve got a job lined up and I’ll be taking night classes at Pitt, then going full-time starting next summer.”

Hearing this issue from Mia’s mouth was like hearing a cat begin speaking in Spanish while lighting a cheroot. I managed to say, “Yeah, that’s . . . Yeah. Good.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner. I’m leaving tomorrow. But I heard you and Andrea were together, so . . .” She glanced back and forth between Andrea and myself, as if expecting a response.

“No, that’s fine,” I said. “You know.”

“It was a destructive relationship,” she said with great sincerity. “We had some fun, but it was bad for both of us. You were holding me back intellectually and I was limiting you emotionally.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Absolutely.”

Mia seemed surprised by how smoothly things were going, but she had, apparently, a prearranged speech and she by-God intended to give it.

“I understand this is sudden. It must come as a shock . . .”

“Oh, yeah.”

“. . . but I have to do this. I think it’s best for me. I hope we can stay friends. You’ve been an important part of my growth.”

“I hope so, too.”

There ensued a short and—on my end, anyway—baffled silence.

“Okay. Well, I . . . I guess that’s about it.” She got to her feet and stood by the booth, hovering; then—with a sudden movement—she bent and kissed my cheek. “Bye.”

Andrea put a hand to her mouth. “Oh my God! Was that Mia?”

“I’m not too sure,” I said, watching Mia walk away, noting that there had been a complete absence of moues.

“An important part of her growth? She talks like a Doctor Phil sound bite. What did you do to her?”

“I’m not responsible, I don’t think.” I pushed around a notion that had occurred to me before, but that I had not had the impetus to consider more fully. “Do you know anyone who’s exhibited a sudden burst of intelligence in the past few weeks? I mean someone who’s been going along at the same pace for a while and suddenly they’re Einstein. Relatively speaking.”

She mulled it over. “As a matter of fact, I do. I know two or three people. Why?”

“Tell me.”

“Well, there’s Jimmy Galvin. Did you hear about him?”

“The gardening tool. Yeah. Who else?”

“This guy in my office. A paralegal. He’s a hard worker, but basically a drone. Lately, whenever we ask him to dig up a file or find a reference, he’s attached some ideas about the case we’re working on. Good ideas. Some of them are great. Case-makers. He’s the talk of the office. We’ve been joking that maybe we should get him to take a drug test. He’s going back to law school and we’re going to miss . . .” She broke off. “What’s this have to do with the new Mia?”

I told her about Rudy’s cartoons, Beth’s novel, Kiwanda’s newfound efficiency, the millworker, Stanky’s increased productivity.

“I can’t help wondering,” I said, “if it’s somehow related to the stars. I know it’s a harebrained idea. There’s probably a better explanation. Stanky . . . he never worked with a band before and that may be what’s revving his engines. But that night at the Crucible, he was so polished. It just didn’t synch with how I thought he’d react. I thought he’d get through it, but it’s like he was an old hand.”

Andrea looked distressed.

“And not everybody’s affected,” I said. “I’m not, for sure. You don’t seem to be. It’s probably bullshit.”

“I know of another instance,” she said. “But if I tell you, you have to promise to keep it a secret.”

“I can do that.”

“Do you know Wanda Lingrove?”

“Wasn’t she a friend of yours? A cop? Tall woman? About five years older than us?”

“She’s a detective now.”

The waitress brought our food. I dug in; Andrea nudged her salad to the side.

“Did you hear about those college girls dying over in Waterford?” she asked.

“No, I haven’t been keeping up.”

“Two college girls died a few days apart. One in a fire and one in a drowning accident. Wanda asked for a look at the case files. The Waterford police had written them off as accidents, but Wanda had a friend on the force and he slipped her the files and showed her the girls’ apartments. They both lived off-campus. It’s not that Wanda’s any great shakes. She has an undistinguished record. But she had the idea from reading the papers—and they were skimpy articles—a serial killer was involved. Her friend pooh-poohed the idea. There wasn’t any signature. But it turned out, Wanda was right. There was a signature, very subtle and very complicated, demonstrating that the killer was highly evolved. Not only did she figure that out, she caught him after two days on the case.”

“Aren’t serial killers tough to catch?”

“Yes. All that stuff you see about profiling on TV, it’s crap. They wouldn’t have come close to getting a line on this kid with profiling. He would have had to announce himself, but Wanda doesn’t think he would have. She thinks he would have gone on killing, that putting one over on the world was enough for him.”

“He was a kid?”

“Fourteen years old. A kid from Black William. What’s more, he’d given no sign of being a sociopath. Yet in the space of three weeks, he went from zero to sixty. From playing JV football to being a highly organized serialist. That doesn’t happen in the real world.”

“So how come Wanda’s not famous?”

“The college is trying to keep it quiet. The kid’s been bundled off to an institution and the cops have the lid screwed tight.” Andrea picked at her salad. “What I’m suggesting, maybe everyone is being affected, but not in ways that conform to your model. Wanda catching the kid, that conforms. But the kid himself, the fact that a pathology was brought out in him . . . that suggests that people may be affected in ways we don’t notice. Maybe they just love each other more.”

I laid down my fork. “Like with us?”

A doleful nod.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “You said you’d been plotting for months to make a move.”

“Yes, but it was a fantasy!”

“And you don’t think you would have acted on it?”

“I don’t know. One thing for certain, I never expected anything like this.” She cut her volume to a stage whisper. “I want you all the time. It’s like when we were nineteen. I’m addicted to you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Same here.”

“I worry that it’ll stop, then I worry that it won’t—it’s wreaking havoc with my work. I can’t stop thinking about you. On a rational level, I know I’m an animal. But there’s a place in me that wants to believe love is more than evolutionary biology. And now this thing with the stars. To think that what I’m feeling could be produced by something as random as a wavefront or a supernatural event, or whatever . . . It makes me feel like an experimental animal. Like a rabbit that’s been drugged. It scares me.”

“Look,” I said. “We’re probably talking about something that isn’t real.”

“No, it’s real.”

“How can you be sure? I only just brought the subject up. We can’t have been discussing it more than five minutes.”

“You convinced me. Everything you said rings true. I know it here.” Andrea touched a hand to her breast. “And you know it, too. Something’s happening to us. Something’s happening to this town.”

WE STEPPED BACK from that conversation. It was, I suppose, a form of denial, the avoidance of a subject neither of us wished to confront, because it was proof against confrontation, against logic and reason, and so we trivialized it and fell back on our faith, on our mutuality. Sometimes, lying with Andrea, considering the join of her neck and shoulder, the slight convexity of her belly, the compliant curve of a breast compressed into a pouty shape by the weight of her arm, the thousand turns and angles that each seemed the expression of a white simplicity within, I would have the urge to wake her, to drive away from Black William, and thus protect her, protect us, from this infestation of stars; but then I would think that such an action might destroy the thing I hoped to protect, that once away from the stars we might feel differently about one another. And then I’d think how irrational these thoughts were, how ridiculous it was to contemplate uprooting our lives over so flimsy a fear. And, finally, having made this brief rounds of my human potential, I would lapse again into a Praxitelean scrutiny, a sculptor in love with his stone, content to drift in and out of a dream in which love, though it had been proved false (like Andrea said, an animal function and nothing more), proved to be eternally false, forever and a day of illusion, of two souls burning brighter and brighter until they appeared to make a single glow, a blazing unity concealed behind robes of aging flesh.

The world beat against our door. Pin’s photograph was printed on the third page of the Black William Gazette, along with the news that the University of Pittsburgh would be sending a team of observers to measure the phenomenon, should it occur again, as was predicted (by whom, the Gazette did not say). There was a sidebar recounting Black William’s sordid history and Jonathan Venture’s version of BW’s involvement with the stars. The body of the article . . . Well, it was as if the reporter had been privy to our conversation at the Szechuan Palace. I suspected that he had, if only at secondhand, since my wavefront theory was reproduced in full, attributed to “a local pundit.” As a result of this publicity, groups of people, often more than a hundred, mostly the young and the elderly, came to gather in front of the library between the hours of five and nine, thus depriving me of the customary destination of my evening walks.

Stanky, his ego swollen to improbable proportions by two successful performances, by the adulation of his high school fans (“Someone ought to be writing everything Joey says down,” said one dreamy-eyed fool), became increasingly temperamental, lashing out at his bandmates, at me, browbeating Liz at every opportunity, and prowling about the house in a sulk, ever with a Coke and cigarette, glaring at all who fell to his gaze, not bothering to speak. In the mornings, he was difficult to wake, keeping Geno and Jerry waiting, wasting valuable time, and one particular morning, my frustration wth him peaked and I let Timber into his bedroom and closed the door, listening while the happy pup gamboled across the mattress, licking and drooling, eliciting squeals and curses from the sleepy couple, an action that provoked a confrontation that I won by dint of physical threat and financial dominance, but that firmly established our unspoken enmity and made me anxious about whether I would be able to maneuver him to the point where I could rid myself of him and show a profit.

A gray morning, spitting snow, and I answered the doorbell to find a lugubrious, long-nosed gentleman with a raw, bony face, toting a briefcase and wearing a Sy Sperling wig and a cheap brown suit. A police cruiser was parked at the curb; two uniformed officers stood smoking beside it, casting indifferent looks toward the Polozny, which rolled on blackly in—as a local DJ was prone to characterize it—“its eternal search for the sea.” Since we were only a couple of days from the EP release, I experienced a sinking feeling, one that was borne out when the man produced a card identifying him as Martin Kiggins of McKeesport, a Friend of the Court. He said he would like to have a word with me about Joseph Stanky.

“How well do you know Joseph?” he asked me once we had settled in the office.

Kiwanda, at her desk in the next room, made a choking noise. I replied that while I had, I thought, an adequate understanding of Joseph as a musician, I was unfamililar with the details of his life.

“Did you know he has a wife?” Kiggins was too lanky to fit the chair and, throughout our talk, kept scrunching around in it. “And he’s got a little boy. Almost two years old, he is.”

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Poor little guy nearly didn’t make it that far. Been sick his whole life.” Kiggins’s gaze acquired a morose intensity. “Meningitis.”

I couldn’t get a handle on Kiggins; he acted as if he was trying to sell me something, yet he had arrived on my doorstep with an armed force and the authority of the law.

“I thought meningitis was fatal,” I said.

“Not a hundred percent,” said Kiggins cheerlessly. “His mother doesn’t have insurance, so he didn’t get the best of care.”

“That’s tough.”

“She’s on welfare. Things aren’t likely to improve for the kid or for her. She’s not what you’d call an attractive woman.”

“Why are we talking about this?” I asked. “It’s a sad story, but I’m not involved.”

“Not directly, no.”

“Not any damn way. I don’t understand what you’re looking for.”

Kiggins seemed disappointed in me. “I’m looking for Joseph. Is he here?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know. Okay.” He put his hands on his knees and stood, making a show of peering out the window at his cop buddies.

“I really don’t know if he’s here,” I said. “I’ve been working, I haven’t been downstairs this morning.”

“Mind if I take a look down there?”

“You’re goddamn right, I mind! What’s this about? You’ve been doing a dance ever since you came in. Why don’t you spit it out?”

Kiggins gave me a measuring look, then glanced around the office—I think he was hoping to locate another chair. Failing this, he sat back down.

“You appear to be a responsible guy, Vernon,” he said. “Is it okay I call you Vernon?”

“Sure thing, Marty. I don’t give a shit what you call me as long as you get to the point.”

“You own your home, a business. Pay your taxes . . . far as I can tell without an audit. You’re a pretty solid citizen.”

The implicit threat of an audit ticked me off, but I let him continue. I began to realize where this might be going.

“I’ve got the authority to take Joseph back to McKeesport and throw his butt in jail,” said Kiggins. “He’s in arrears with his child and spousal support. Now I know Joseph doesn’t have any money to speak of, but seeing how you’ve got an investment in him, I’m hoping we can work out some arrangement.”

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked. “About my investment.”

“Joseph still has friends in McKeesport. High school kids, mainly. Truth be told, we think he was supplying them with drugs, but I’m not here about that. They’ve been spreading it around that you’re about to make him a star.”

I snorted. “He’s a long way from being a star. Believe me.”

“I believe you. Do you believe me when I tell you I’m here to take him back? Just say the word, I’ll give a whistle to those boys out front.” Kiggins shifted the chair sideways, so he could stretch out one leg. “I know how you make your money, Vernon. You build a band up, then you sell their contracts. Now you’ve put in some work with Joseph. Some serious time and money. I should think you’d want to protect your investment.”

“Okay.” I reached for a cigarette, recalled that I had quit. “What’s he owe?”

“Upwards of eleven thousand.”

“He’s all yours,” I said. “Take the stairs in back. Follow the corridor to the front of the house. First door on your right.”

“I said I wanted to make an arrangement. I’m not after the entire amount.”

And so began our negotiation.

If we had finished the album, I would have handed Stanky over and given Kiggins my blessing, but as things stood, I needed him. Kiggins, on the other hand, wouldn’t stand a chance of collecting any money with Stanky in the slam—he likely had a predetermined figure beneath which he would not move. It infuriated me to haggle with him. Stanky’s wife and kid wouldn’t see a nickel. They would dock her welfare by whatever amount he extracted from me, deduct administrative and clerical fees, and she would end up worse off than before. Yet I had no choice other than to submit to legal blackmail.

Kiggins wouldn’t go below five thousand. That, he said, was his bottom line. He put on a dour poker face and waited for me to decide.

“He’s not worth it,” I said.

Sadly, Kiggins made for the door; when I did not relent, he turned back and we resumed negotiations, settling on a figure of three thousand and my promise to attach a rider to Stanky’s contract stating that a percentage of his earnings would be sent to the court. After he had gone, my check tucked in his briefcase, Kiwanda came to stand by my desk with folded arms.

“I’d give it a minute before you go down,” she said. “You got that I’m-gonna-break-his-face look.”

“Do you fucking believe this?” I brought my fist down on the desk. “I want to smack that little bitch!”

“Take a breath, Vernon. You don’t want to lose any more today than just walked out of here.”

I waited, I grew calm, but as I approached the stairs, the image of a wizened toddler and a moping, double-chinned wife cropped up in my brain. With each step I grew angrier and, when I reached Stanky’s bedroom, I pushed in without knocking. He and Liz were having sex. I caught a fetid odor and an unwanted glimpse of Liz’s sallow hindquarters as she scrambled beneath the covers. I shut the door partway and shouted at Stanky to haul his ass out here. Seconds later, he burst from the room in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms, and stumped into the kitchen with his head down, arms tightly held, like an enraged penguin. He fished a Coke from the refrigerator and made as if to say something; but I let him have it. I briefed him on Kiggins and said, “It’s not a question of morality. I already knew you were a piece of crap. But this is a business, man. It’s my livelihood, not a playground for degenerates. And when you bring the cops to my door, you put that in jeopardy.”

He hung his head, picking at the Coke’s pop top. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t want to understand! Get it? I have absolutely no desire to understand. That’s between you and your wife. Between you and whatever scrap of meatloaf shaped like the Virgin Mary you pretend to worship. I don’t care. One more screw-up, I’m calling Kiggins and telling him to come get you.”

Liz had entered the kitchen, clutching a bathrobe about her; when she heard “wife,” she retreated.

I railed at Stanky, telling him he would pay back every penny of the three thousand, telling him further to clean his room of every pot seed and pill, to get his act in order and finish the album; and I kept on railing at him until his body language conveyed that I could expect two or three days of penitence and sucking up. Then I allowed him to slink by me and into the bedroom. When I passed his door, cracked an inch open, I heard him whining to Liz, saying, “She’s not really my wife.”

I took the afternoon off and persuaded Rudy to go fishing. We bundled up against the cold, bought a twelve-pack of Iron City and dropped our lines in Kempton’s Pond, a lopsided period stamped into the half-frozen ground a couple of miles east of town, punctuating a mixed stand of birch and hazel—it looked as if a giant with a peg leg had left this impression in the rock, creating a hole thirty feet wide. The clouds had lowered and darkened, their swollen bellies appearing to tatter on the leafless treetops as they slid past; but the snow had quit falling. There was some light accumulation on the banks, which stood eight or nine feet above the black water and gave the pond the look of an old cistern. The water circulated like heavy oil and swallowed our sinkers with barely a splash. This bred the expectation that if we hooked anything, it would be a megalodon or an ichthyosaur, a creature such as would have been trapped in a tar pit. But we had no such expectation.

It takes a certain cast of mind to enjoy fishing with no hope of a catch, or the faint hope of catching some inedible fishlike thing every few years or so. That kind of fishing is my favorite sport, though I admit I follow the Steelers closely, as do many in Black William. Knowing that nothing will rise from the deep, unless it is something that will astound your eye or pebble your skin with gooseflesh, makes for a rare feeling. Sharing this with Rudy, who had been my friend for ten years, since he was fresh out of grad school at Penn State, enhanced that feeling. In the summer we sat and watched our lines, we chatted, we chased our depressions with beer and cursed the flies; in winter, the best season for our sport, there were no flies. The cold was like ozone to my nostrils, the silence complete, and the denuded woods posed an abstract of slants and perpendiculars, silver and dark, nature as Chinese puzzle. Through frays in the clouds we glimpsed the fat, lordly crests of the Bittersmiths.

I was reaching for another Iron City when I felt a tug on the line. I kept still and felt another tug, then—though I waited the better part of a minute—nothing.

“Something’s down in there,” I said, peering at the impenetrable surface.

“You get a hit?” Rudy asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“How much line you got out?”

“Twenty, twenty-five feet.”

“Must have been a current.”

“It happened twice.”

“Probably a current.”

I pictured an enormous grouperlike face with blind milky-blue globes for eyes, moon lanterns, and a pair of weak, underdeveloped hands groping at my line. The Polozny plunges deep underground east of the bridge, welling up into these holes punched through the Pennsylvania rock, sometimes flooding the woods in the spring, and a current was the likely explanation; but I preferred to think that those subterranean chambers were the uppermost tiers of a secret world and that now and again some piscine Columbus, fleeing the fabulous madness of his civilization, palaces illumined by schools of electric eels controlled by the thoughts of freshwater octopi, limestone streets patrolled by gangs of river crocs, grand avenues crowded with giant-snail busses and pedestrian trout, sought to breach the final barrier and find in the world above a more peaceful prospect.

“You have no imagination,” I said.

Rudy grunted. “Fishing doesn’t require an imagination. That’s what makes it fun.”

Motionless, he was a bearish figure muffled in a down parka and a wool cap, his face reddened by the cold, breath steaming. He seemed down at the mouth and, thinking it might cheer him up, I asked how he was coming with the comic strip.

“I quit working on it,” he said.

“Why the hell’d you do that? It was your best thing ever.”

“It was giving me nightmares.”

I absorbed this, gave it due consideration. “Didn’t strike me as nightmare material. It’s kind of bleak. Black comedy. But nothing to freak over.”

“It changed.” He flicked his wrist, flicking his line sideways. “The veins of pork . . . You remember them?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“They started growing, twisting all through the mountain. The mineworkers were happy. Delirious. They were going to be rich, and they threw a big party to celebrate. A pork festival. Actually, that part was pretty funny. I’ll show it to you. They made this enormous pork sculpture and were all wearing porkpie hats. They had a beauty contest to name Miss Pork. The winner . . . I used Mia for a model.”

“You’re a sick bastard, you know that?”

Again, Rudy grunted, this time in amusement. “Then the stars began eating the pork. The mineworkers would open a new vein and the stars would pour in and choff it down. They were ravenous. Nothing could stop them. The mineworkers were starving. That’s when I started having nightmares. There was something gruesome about the way I had them eating. I tried to change it, but I couldn’t make it work any other way.”

I said it still didn’t sound like the stuff of nightmares, and Rudy said, “You had to be there.”

We fell to talking about other things. The Steelers, could they repeat? Stanky. I asked Rudy if he was coming to the EP release and he said he wouldn’t miss it. “He’s a genius guitar player,” he said. “Too bad he’s such a creep.”

“Goes with the territory,” I said. “Like with Robert Frost beating his wife. Stanky’s a creep, he’s a perv. A moral dwarf. But he is for sure talented. And you know me. I’ll put up with perversity if someone’s talented.” I clapped Rudy on the shoulder. “That’s why I put up with you. You better finish that strip or I’ll dump your ass and start hanging with a better class of people.”

“Forget the strip,” he said glumly. “I’m too busy designing equipment sheds and stables.”

We got into a discussion about Celebrity Wifebeaters, enumerating the most recent additions to the list, and this led us—by loose association only—to the subject of Andrea. I told him about our conversation at McGuigan’s and what she had said about the outbreak of creativity, about love.

“Maybe she’s got a point,” Rudy said. “You two have always carried a torch, but you burned each other so badly in the divorce, I never would have thought you’d get back together.” He cracked open a beer, handed it to me, and opened one for himself. “You hear about Colvin Jacobs?”

“You mean something besides he’s a sleazeball?”

“He’s come up with a plan to reduce the county’s tax burden by half. Everybody says it’s the real quill.”

“I’m surprised he found the time, what with all those congressional junkets.”

“And Judy Trickle, you hear about her?”

“Now you’re scaring me.”

“I know. Ol’ Juggs ‘R’ Us Judy.”

“She should have been your model for Miss Pork, not Mia. What’d she do? Design a newfangled bra?”

“Lifts and separates.”

“You mean that’s it?”

“You nailed it.”

“No way!”

“She’s been wearing a prototype on the show the last few days. There’s a noticeable change.” He did a whispery voiceover voice. “The curves are softer, more natural.”

“Bullshit!”

“I’m serious. Check her out.”

“I got better things to do than watch AM Waterford.”

“I remember the time when you were a devoted fan.”

“That was post-Andrea . . . and pre-Andrea.” I chuckled. “Remember the show when she demonstrated the rowing machine? Leotards aren’t built to handle that sort of stress.”

“I knew the guy who produced her back then. He said they gave her stuff like that to do because they were hoping for a Wardrobe Malfunction. They weren’t prepared for the reaction.”

“Janet Jackson’s no Judy Trickle. It was like a dam bursting. Like . . . help me out here, man.”

“Like the birth of twin zeppelins.”

“Like the embodiment of the yang, like the Aquarian dawn.” Rudy jiggled his line. “This is beginning to border on the absurd.”

“You’re the one brought her up.”

“I’m not talking about Judy, I’m talking about the whole thing. The outbreak.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, we’re way past absurd if Miz Trickle’s involved. We’re heading toward surreal.”

“I’ve heard of five or six more people who’ve had . . . breakthroughs, I suppose you’d call them.”

“How come I don’t hear about these people except from you? Do you sit in your office all day, collecting odd facts about Black William?”

“I get more traffic than you do, and people are talking about it now.”

“What are they saying?”

“What you’d expect. Isn’t it weird? It must be the water, the pollution. I’ve even heard civic pride expressed. Someone coined the phrase, ‘Black William, Pennsylvania’s Brain Capital.’ ”

“That’s taking it a bit far.” I had a slug of Iron City. “So nobody’s panicking? Saying head for the hills?”

“Who said that?”

“Andrea. She was a little disturbed. She didn’t exactly say it, but she seemed to think this thing might not be all good.”

He tightened his lips and produced a series of squeaking noises. “I think Andrea’s right. Not about head for the hills. I don’t know about that. But I think whatever this is, it’s affecting people in different ways. Some of them emotionally.”

“Why’s that?”

“I . . .” He tipped back his head, stared at the clouds. “I don’t want to talk anymore, man. Okay? Let’s just fish.”

It began to snow again, tiny flakes, the kind that presage a big fall, but we kept fishing, jiggling our lines in the dead water, drinking Iron City. Something was troubling Rudy, but I didn’t press him. I thought about Andrea. She planned to get off early and we were going to dinner in Waterford and maybe catch a movie. I was anticipating kissing her, touching her in the dark, while the new James Bond blew stuff up or (this was more likely) Kenneth Branagh destroyed As You Like It, when a tremor ran across the surface of the pond. Both Rudy and I sat up straight and peered. “T. Rex is coming,” I said. An instant later, the pond was lashed into a turbulence that sent waves slopping in all directions, as if a large swimmer had drawn near the surface, then made a sudden turn, propelling itself down toward its customary haunts with a flick of its tail. Yet we saw nothing. Nary a fin nor scale nor section of plated armor. We waited, breathless, for the beast to return.

“Definitely not a current,” said Rudy.

EXCEPT FOR the fact that Rudy didn’t show, the EP release went well. The music was great, the audience responsive, we sold lots of CDs and souvenirs, including AVERAGE JOE dogtags and JOE STANKY’S ARMY khaki T-shirts, with the pear-shaped (less so after diets and death marches) one’s silhouette in white beneath the arc of the lettering. This despite Stanky’s obvious displeasure with everyone involved. He was angry at me because I had stolen his top hat and refused to push back the time of the performance to ten o’clock so he could join the crowd in front of the library waiting for the return of Black William (their number had swelled to more than three hundred since the arrival of the science team from Pitt, led by a youngish professor who, with his rugged build and mustache and plaid wool shirts, might have stepped out of an ad for trail mix). He was angry at Geno and Jerry for the usual reasons—they were incompetent clowns, they didn’t understand the music, and they had spurned the opportunity to watch TV with him and Liz. Throughout the hour and a quarter show, he sulked and spoke not a word to the audience, and then grew angry at them when a group of frat boys initiated a chant of “Skanky, Skanky, Skanky . . .” Yet the vast majority were blown away and my night was made when I spotted an A&R man from Atlantic sneaking around.

I was in my office the next morning, reading the Gazette, which had come late to the party (as usual) and was running a lighthearted feature on “Pennsylvania’s Brain Capital,” heavy on Colvin Jacobs quotes, when I received a call from Crazy Ed in Wilkes-Barre, saying that he’d e-mailed me a couple of enhancements of Pin’s photograph. I opened the e-mails and the attachments, then asked what I was looking at.

“Beats me,” said Ed. “The first is up close on one of those white dealies. You can get an idea of the shape. Sort of like a sea urchin. A globe with spines . . . except there’s so many spines, you can’t make out the globe. You see it?”

“Yeah. You can’t tell me what it is?”

“I don’t have a clue.” Ed made a buzzing noise, something he did whenever he was stumped. “I assumed the image was fake, that the kid had run two images together, because there’s a shift in perspective between the library and the white dealies. They look like they’re coming from a long way off. But then I realized the perspective was totally fucked up. It’s like part of the photo was taken through a depth of water, or something that’s shifting like water. Different sections appear to be at different distances all through the image. Did you notice a rippling effect . . . or anything like that?”

“I only saw it for a couple of seconds. I didn’t have time to get much more than a glimpse.”

“Okay.” Ed made the buzzing noise again. “Have you opened the second attachment?”

“Yep.”

“Once I figured out I couldn’t determine distances, I started looking at the black stuff, the field or whatever. I didn’t get anywhere with that. It’s just black. Undifferentiated. Then I took a look at the horizon line. That’s how it appeared to you, right? A black field stretching to a horizon? Well, if that was the case, you’d think you’d see something at the front edge, but the only thing I picked up was those bumps on the horizon.”

I studied the bumps.

“Kinda look like the tops of heads, don’t they?” said Ed.

The bumps could have been heads; they could also have been bushes, animals, or a hundred other things; but his suggestion gave me an uneasy feeling. He said he would fool around with the picture some more and get back to me. I listened to demos. Food of the Gods (King Crimson redux). Corpus Christy (a transsexual front man who couldn’t sing, but the name grew on me). The Land Mines (middling roots rock). Gopher Lad (a heroin band from Minnesota). A band called Topless Coroner intrigued me, but I passed after realizing all their songs were about car parts. Around eleven-thirty I took a call from a secretary at DreamWorks who asked if I would hold for William Wine. I couldn’t place the name, but said that I would hold and leafed through the Rolodex, trying to find him.

“Vernon!” said an enthusiastic voice from the other side of creation. “Bill Wine. I’m calling for David Geffen. I believe you had drinks with him at the Plug Awards last year. You made quite an impression on David.”

The Plugs were the Oscars of the indie business—Geffen had an ongoing interest in indie rock and had put in an appearance. I recalled being in a group gathered around him at the bar, but I did not recall making an impression.

“He made a heck of an impression on me,” I said.

Pleasant laughter, so perfect it sounded canned. “David sends his regards,” said Wine. “He’s sorry he couldn’t contact you personally, but he’s going to be tied up all day.”

“What can I do for you?”

“David listened to that new artist of yours. Joe Stanky? In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never heard him react like he did this morning.”

“He liked it?”

“He didn’t like it. . . .” Wine paused for dramatic effect. “He was knocked out.”

I wondered how Geffen had gotten hold of the EP. Mine not to reason why, I figured.

Wine told me that Geffen wanted to hear more. Did I have any other recorded material?

“I’ve got nine songs on tape,” I said. “But some of them are raw.”

“David likes raw. Can we get a dupe?”

“You know . . . I usually prefer to push out an album or two before I look for a deal.”

“Listen, Vernon. We’re not going to let you go to the poor-house on this.”

“That’s a relief.”

“In fact, David wanted me to sound you out about our bringing you in under the DreamWorks umbrella.”

Stunned, I said, “In what capacity?”

“I’ll let David tell you about that. He’ll call you in a day or two. He’s had his eye on you for some time.”

I envisioned Sauron spying from his dark tower. I had a dim view of corporate life and I wasn’t as overwhelmed by this news as Wine had likely presumed I would be. After the call ended, however, I felt as if I had modeled for Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel mural, the man about to be touched by God’s billionaire-ish finger. My impulse was to tell Stanky, but I didn’t want his ego to grow more swollen. I called Andrea and learned she would be in court until midafternoon. I started to call Rudy, then thought it would be too easy for him to refuse me over the phone. Better to yank him out of his cave and buy him lunch. I wanted to bust his chops about missing the EP release and I needed to talk with someone face-to-face, to analyze this thing that was happening around Stanky. Had the buzz I’d generated about him taken wings on a magical current? The idea that David Geffen was planning to call seemed preposterous. Was Stanky that good? Was I? What, if anything, did Geffen have in mind? Rudy, who enjoyed playing Yoda to my Luke, would help place these questions in coherent perspective.

When I reached Rudy’s office, I found Gwen on the phone. Her makeup, usually perfect, was in need of repair; it appeared that she had been crying. “I don’t know,” she said with strain in her voice. “You’ll have to . . . No. I really don’t know.”

I pointed to the inner office and mouthed, Is he in?

She signaled me to wait.

“I’ve got someone here,” she said into the phone. “I’ll have to . . . Yes. Yes, I will let you know. All right. Yes. Good-bye.” She hung up and, her chin quivering, tried several times to speak, finally blurting out, “I’m so sorry. He’s dead. Rudy’s dead.”

I think I may have laughed—I made some sort of noise, some expression of denial, yet I knew it was true. My face flooded with heat and I went back a step, as if the words had thrown me off-balance.

Gwen said that Rudy had committed suicide early that morning. He had—according to his wife—worked in the office until after midnight, then driven home and taken some pills. The phone rang again. I left Gwen to deal with it and stepped into the inner office to call Beth. I sat at Rudy’s desk, but that felt wrong, so I walked around with the phone for a while. Rudy had been a depressed guy, but hell, everyone in Black William was depressed about something. I thought that I had been way more depressed than Rudy. He seemed to have it together. Nice wife, healthy income, kids. Sure, he was a for-shit architect in a for-shit town, and not doing the work he wanted, but that was no reason to kill yourself.

Standing by the drafting table, I saw his wastebasket was crammed with torn paper. A crawly sensation rippled the skin between my shoulder blades. I dumped the shreds onto the table. Rudy had done a compulsive job of tearing them up, but I could tell they were pieces of his comic strip. Painstakingly, I sorted through them and managed to reassemble most of a frame. In it, a pair of black hands (presumably belonging to a mineworker) was holding a gobbet of pork, as though in offering; above it floated a spiky white ball. The ball had extruded a longish spike to penetrate the pork and the image gave the impression that the ball was sucking meat through a straw. I stared at the frame, trying to interpret it, to tie the image in with everything that had happened, but I felt a vibration pass through my body, like the heavy, impersonal signal of Rudy’s death, and I imagined him on the bathroom floor, foam on his mouth, and I had to sit back down.

Beth, when I called her, didn’t feel like talking. I asked if there was anything I could do, and she said if I could find out when the police were going to release the body, she would appreciate it. She said she would let me know about the funeral, sounding—as had Gwen—like someone who was barely holding it together. Hearing that in her voice caused me to leak a few tears and, when she heard me start to cry, she quickly got off the phone, as if she didn’t want my lesser grief to pollute her own, as if Rudy dying had broken whatever bond there was between us. I thought this might be true.

I called the police and, after speaking to a functionary, reached a detective whom I knew, Ross Peloblanco, who asked my connection to the deceased.

“Friend of the family,” I said. “I’m calling for his wife.”

“Huh,” said Peloblanco, his attention distracted by something in his office.

“So when are you going to release him?”

“I think they already done the autopsy. There’s been a bunch of suicides lately and the ME put a rush on this one.”

“How many’s a bunch?”

“Oops! Did I say that? Don’t worry about it. The ME’s a whack job. He’s batshit about conspiracy theories.”

“So . . . can I tell the funeral home to come now?”

Peloblanco sneezed, said, “Shit!” and then went on: “Bowen did some work for my mom. She said he was a real gentleman. You never know what’s going on with people, do ya?” He blew his nose. “I guess you can come pick him up whenever.”

THE WATERS of the Polozny never freeze. No matter how cold it gets or how long the cold lasts, they are kept warm by a cocktail of pollutants and, though the river may flow more sluggishly in winter, it continues on its course, black and gelid. There is something statutory about its poisonous constancy. It seems less river than regulation, a divine remark rendered daily into law, engraving itself upon the world year after year until its long meander has eaten a crack that runs the length and breadth of creation, and its acids and oxides drain into the void.

Between the viewing and the funeral, in among the various consoling talks and offerings of condolence, I spent a great deal of time gazing at the Polozny, sitting on the stoop and smoking, enduring the cold wind, brooding over half-baked profundities. The muted roaring of the mill surrounded me, as did dull thuds and clunks and distant car horns that seemed to issue from the gray sky, the sounds of business as usual, the muffled engine of commerce. Black William must be, I thought, situated on the ass-end of Purgatory, the place where all those overlooked by God were kept. The dead river dividing a dying landscape, a dingy accumulation of snow melting into slush on its banks; the mill, a Hell of red brick with its chimney smoke of souls; the scatters of crows winging away from leafless trees; old Mrs. Gables two doors down, tottering out to the sidewalk, peering along the street for the mail, for a glimpse of her son’s maroon Honda Civic, for some hopeful thing, then, her hopes dashed, laboriously climbing her stairs and going inside to sit alone and count the ticks of her clock: these were evidences of God’s fabulous absence, His careless abandonment of a destinyless town to its several griefs. I scoffed at those who professed to understand grief, who deemed it a simple matter, a painful yet comprehensible transition, and partitioned the process into stages (my trivial imagination made them into gaudy stagecoaches painted different colors) in order to enable its victims to adapt more readily to the house rules. After the initial shock of Rudy’s suicide had waned, grief overran me like a virus, it swarmed, breeding pockets of weakness and fever, eventually receding at its own pace, on its own terms, and though it may have been subject to an easy compartmentalization—Anger, Denial, etc.—that kind of analysis did not address its nuances and could not remedy the thousand small bitternesses that grief inflames and encysts. On the morning of the funeral, when I voiced one such bitterness, complaining about how Beth had treated me since Rudy died, mentioning the phone call, pointing out other incidences of her intolerance, her rudeness in pushing me away, Andrea—who had joined me on the stoop—set me straight.

“She’s not angry at you,” Andrea said. “She’s jealous. You and Rudy . . . that was a part of him she never shared, and when she sees you, she doesn’t know how to handle it.”

“You think?”

“I used to feel that way.”

“About me and Rudy.”

She nodded. “And about the business. I don’t feel that way now. I guess I’m older. I understand you and Rudy had a guy thing and I didn’t need to know everything about it. But Beth’s dealing with a lot right now. She’s oversensitive and she feels . . . jilted. She feels that Rudy abandoned her for you. A little, anyway. So she’s jilting you. She’ll get over it, or she won’t. People are funny like that. Sometimes resentments are all that hold them together. You shouldn’t take it personally.”

I refitted my gaze to the Polozny, more or less satisfied by what she had said. “We live on the banks of the River Styx,” I said after a while. “At least it has a Styx-ian gravitas.”

“Stygian,” she said.

I turned to her, inquiring.

“That’s the word you wanted. Stygian.”

“Oh . . . right.”

A silence marked by the passing of a mail truck, its tire chains grinding the asphalt and spitting slush; the driver waved.

“I think I know why Rudy did it,” I said, and told her what I had found in the office wastebasket. “More than anything, he wanted to do creative work. When he finally did, it gave him nightmares. It messed with his head. He must have built it into this huge thing and . . .” I tapped out a cigarette, stuck it in my mouth. “It doesn’t sound like much of a reason, but I can relate. That’s why it bites my ass to see guys like Stanky who do something creative every time they take a piss. I want to write those songs. I want to have the acclaim. It gets me thinking, someday I might wind up like Rudy.”

“That’s not you. You said it yourself—you get pissed off. You find someplace else to put your energy.” She rumpled my hair. “Buck up, Sparky. You’re going to live a long time and have lots worse problems.”

It crossed my mind to suggest that the stars might have played some mysterious part in Rudy’s death, and to mention the rash of suicides (five, I had learned); but all that seemed unimportant, dwarfed by the death itself.

At one juncture during that weekend, Stanky ventured forth from TV-land to offer his sympathies. He might have been sincere, but I didn’t trust his sincerity—it had an obsequious quality and I believed he was currying favor, paving the way so he might hit me up for another advance. Pale and shivering, hunched against the cold; the greasy collar of his jacket turned up; holding a Camel in two nicotine-stained fingers; his doughy features cinched in an expression of exaggerated dolor: I hated him at that moment and told him I was taking some days off, that he could work on the album or go play with his high school sycophants. “It’s up to you,” I said. “Just don’t bother me about it.” He made no reply, but the front door slamming informed me that he had not taken it well.

On Wednesday, Patty Prole (nee Patricia Hand), the leader of the Swimming Holes, a mutual friend of mine and Rudy’s who had come down from Pittsburgh for the funeral, joined me and Andrea for dinner at McGuigan’s, and, as we strolled past the park, I recalled that more than a month—thirty-four days, to be exact—had elapsed since I had last seen the stars. The crowd had dwindled to about a hundred and fifty (Stanky and Liz among them). They stood in clumps around the statue, clinging to the hope that Black William would appear; though judging by their general listlessness, the edge of their anticipation had been blunted and they were gathered there because they had nothing better to do. The van belonging to the science people from Pitt remained parked at the southeast corner of the library, but I had heard they were going to pull up stakes if nothing happened in the next day or two.

McGuigan’s was a bubble of heat and light and happy conversation. A Joe Henry song played in the background; Pitt basketball was on every TV. I had not thought the whole town would be dressed in mourning, but the jolly, bustling atmosphere came as something of a shock. They had saved the back booth for us and, after drinking for a half hour or so, I found myself enjoying the evening. Patty was a slight, pretty, blue-eyed blonde in her late twenties, dressed in a black leather jacket and jeans. To accommodate the sober purpose of this trip home, she had removed her visible piercings. With the majority of her tattoos covered by the jacket, she looked like an ordinary girl from western Pennsylvania and nothing like the exotic, pantherine creature she became on stage. When talk turned to Rudy, Andrea and I embraced the subject, offering humorous anecdotes and fond reminiscence, but Patty, though she laughed, was subdued. She toyed with her fork, idly stabbing holes in the label on her beer bottle, and at length revealed the reason for her moodiness.

“Did Rudy ever tell you we had a thing?” she asked.

“He alluded to it,” I said. “But well after the fact. Years.”

“I bet you guys talked all about it when you’re up at Kempton’s Pond. He said you used to talk about the local talent when you’re up there sometimes.”

Andrea elbowed me, not too sharply, in mock reproval.

“As I remember, the conversation went like this,” I said. “We were talking about bands, the Swimming Holes came up, and he mentioned he’d had an affair with you. And I said, ‘Oh, yeah?’ And Rudy said, ‘Yeah.’ Then after a minute he said, ‘Patty’s a great girl.’ ”

“That’s what he said? We had an affair? That’s the word he used?”

“I believe so.”

“He didn’t say he was banging me or like that?”

“No.”

“And that’s all he said?” Patty stared at me sidelong, as if trying to penetrate layers of deception.

“That’s all I remember.”

“I bet you tried to get more out of him. I know you. You were hungering for details.”

“I can’t promise I wasn’t,” I said. “I just don’t remember. You know Rudy. He was a private guy. You could beat on him with a shovel and not get a thing out of him. I’m surprised he told me that much.”

She held my gaze a moment longer. “Shit! I can’t tell if you’re lying.”

“He’s not,” said Andrea.

“You got him scoped, huh? He’s dead to rights.” Patty grinned and leaned against the wall, putting one fashionably booted foot up on the bench. “Rudy and me . . . It was a couple weeks right before the band left town. It was probably stupid. Sometimes I regret it, but sometimes I don’t.”

Andrea asked how it happened, and Patty, who obviously wanted to talk about it, said, “You know. Like always. We started hanging out, talking. Finally I asked him straight out, ‘Where’s this going, Rudy?’ Because we only had a couple of weeks and I wanted to know if it was all in my head. He got this peculiar look on his face and kissed me. Like I said, it didn’t last long, but it was deep, you know. That’s why I’m glad Rudy didn’t tell everyone how it was in the sack. It’s a dumb thing to worry about, but . . .” Her voice had developed a tremor. “I guess that’s what I’m down to.”

“You loved him,” said Andrea.

“Yeah. I did.” Patty shook off the blues and sat up. “There wasn’t anywhere for it to go. He’d never leave his kids and I was going off to Pittsburgh. I hated his wife for a while. I didn’t feel guilty about it. But now I look at her. . . . She was never part of our scene. With Vernon and Rudy and the bands. She lived off to the side of it all. It wasn’t like that with you, Andrea. You had your law thing going, but when you were around, you were into it. You were one of the girls. But Beth was so totally not into it. She still can’t stand us. And now it feels like I stole something from her. That really sucks.”

Platitudes occurred to me, but I kept quiet. Andrea stirred at my side.

“Sometimes it pays to be stupid,” Patty said gloomily.

I had a moment when the light and happy babble of the bar were thrust aside by the gonging thought that my friend was dead, and I didn’t entirely understand what she meant, but I knew she was right.

Patty snagged a passing waitress. “Can I get a couple of eggs over?” she asked. “I know you’re not serving breakfast, but that’s all I eat is breakfast.” She winked broadly at the waitress. “Most important meal of the day, so I make every meal breakfast.”

The waitress began to explain why eggs were impossible, but Patty cut in, saying, “You don’t want me to starve, do ya? You must have a couple of eggs back there. Some fries and bacon. Toast. We’re huge tippers, I swear.”

Exasperated, the waitress said she’d see if the cook would do it.

“I know you can work him, honey,” Patty said. “Tell him to make the eggs dippy, okay?”

WE LEFT McGuigan’s shortly after eight, heading for Corky’s, a workingman’s bar where we could do some serious drinking, but as we came abreast of the statue, Patty tapped it and said, “Hey, let’s go talk to Stanky.” Stanky and Liz were sitting on the base of the statue; Pin and the other boys were cross-legged at their feet, like students attending their master. The crowd had thinned and was down, I’d guess, to about a hundred and twenty; a third of that number were clustered around the science van and the head scientist, who was hunched over a piece of equipment set up on the edge of the library lawn. I lagged behind as we walked over and noticed Liz stiffen at the sight of Patty. The boys gazed adoringly at her. Stanky cast me a spiteful glance.

“I heard your EP, man,” Patty said. “Very cool.”

Stanky muttered, “Yeah, thanks,” and stared at her breasts.

Like me, Patty was a sucker for talent, used to the ways of musicians, and she ignored this ungracious response. She tried to draw him out about the music, but Stanky had a bug up his ass about something and wouldn’t give her much. The statue loomed above, throwing a shadow across us; the horse’s head, with its rolling eyes and mouth jerked open by the reins, had been rendered more faithfully than had Black William’s face . . . or else he was a man whose inner crudeness had coarsened and simplified his features. In either case, he was one ugly mother, his shoulder-length hair framing a maniacal mask. Seeing him anew, I would not have described his expression as laughing or alarmed, but might have said it possessed a ferocious exultancy.

Patty began talking to the boys about the Swimming Holes’ upcoming tour, and Andrea was speaking with Pin. Stanky oozed over to me, Liz at his shoulder, and said, “We laid down a new song this afternoon.”

“Oh, yeah?” I said.

“It’s decent. ‘Misery Loves Company.’ ”

In context, it wasn’t clear, until Stanky explained it, that this was a title.

“A guy from DreamWorks called,” he said. “William Wine.”

“Yeah, a few days back. Did Kiwanda tell you about it?”

“No, he called today. Kiwanda was on her break and I talked to him.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said they loved the tape and David Geffen’s going to call.” He squinched up his face, as if summoning a mighty effort. “How come you didn’t tell me about the tape? About him calling before?”

This, I understood, was the thing that had been bothering him. “Because it’s business,” I said. “I’m not going to tell you about every tickle we get. Every phone call.”

He squinted at me meanly. “Why not?”

“Do you realize how much of this just goes away? These people are like flies. They buzz around, but they hardly ever land. Now the guy’s called twice, that makes it a little more interesting. I’ll give it a day or two, and call him back.”

Ordinarily, Stanky would have retreated from confrontation, but with Liz bearing witness (I inferred by her determined look that she was his partner in this, that she had egged him on), his macho was at stake. “I ought to know everything that’s going on,” he said.

“Nothing’s going on. When something happens, I’ll tell you.”

“It’s my career,” he said in a tone that conveyed petulance, defiance, and the notion that he had been wronged. “I want to be in on it, you know.”

“Your career.” I felt suddenly liberated from all restraint. “Your career consists of my efforts on your behalf and three hours onstage in Nowhere, Pennsylvania. I’ve fed you, I’ve given you shelter, money, a band. And now you want me to cater to your stupid whims? To run downstairs and give you an update on every little piece of Stanky gossip because it’ll gratify your ego? So you can tell your minions here how great you are? Fuck you! You don’t like how I’m handling things, clear the hell out of my house!”

I walked off several paces and stood on the curb, facing the library. That rough cube of Pennsylvania granite accurately reflected my mood. Patches of snow dappled the lawn. There was a minor hubbub near the science truck, but I was enraged and paid it no mind. Andrea came up next to me and took my arm. “Easy, big fella,” she said.

“That asshole’s been under my roof for what? Two months? It feels like two years. His stink permeates every corner of my life. It’s like living with a goat!”

“I know,” she said. “But it’s business.”

I wondered if she was hammering home an old point, but her face gave no sign of any such intent; in fact, her neutral expression dissolved into one of befuddlement. She was staring at the library, and when I turned in that direction, I saw the library had vanished. An immense rectangle—a window with uneven edges—had been chopped out of the wall of the world, out of the night, its limits demarked by trees, lawn, and sky, and through it poured a flood of blackness, thicker and more sluggish than the Polozny. Thick like molasses or hot tar. It seemed to splash down, to crest in a wave, and hold in that shape. Along the top of the crest, I could see lesser, half-defined shapes, vaguely human, and I had the thought that the wave was extruding an army from its substance, producing a host of creatures who appeared to be men. The temperature had dropped sharply. There was a chill, chemical odor and, close above our heads (five feet, I’d estimate), the stars were coasting. That was how they moved. They glided as though following an unseen track, then were shunted sideways or diagonally or backward. Their altitude never changed, and I suspect now that they were prevented from changing it by some physical limitation. They did not resemble stars as much as they did Crazy Ed’s enhancement: ten or twelve globes studded with longish white spines, the largest some eight feet in diameter, glowing brightly enough to illumine the faces of the people beneath them. I could not determine if they were made of flesh or metal or something less knowable. They gave forth high-frequency squeaks that reminded me, in their static quality, of the pictographs in Rudy’s cartoons, the language of the stars.

I’m not sure how long we stood there, but it could not have been more than seconds before I realized that the wave crest was not holding, it was inching toward us across the lawn. I caught Andrea’s hand and tried to run. She screamed (a yelp, really), and others screamed and tried to run. But the wave flowed around us, moving now like black quicksilver, in an instant transforming the center of town into a flood plain, marooning people on islands of solid ground bounded by a waist-high flood that was coursing swiftly past. As Andrea and I clung together, I saw Stanky and Liz, Pin and Patty, the rest of the kids, isolated beside the statue—there were dozens of such groupings throughout the park. It seemed a black net of an extremely coarse weave had been thrown over us all and we were standing up among its strands. We stared at each other, uncertain of our danger; some called for help. Then something rose from the blackness directly in front of me and Andrea. A man, I think, and fully seven feet tall. An African Negro by the scarifications on his face. His image not quite real—it appeared to be both embedded in the tarry stuff and shifting over its surface, as if he had been rotoscoped. At the same time, a star came to hover over us, so that my terror was divided. I had from it an impression of eagerness—the feeling washed down upon me; I was drenched in it—and then, abruptly, of disinterest, as if it found Andrea and me unworthy of its attention. With the onset of that disinterest, the black man melted away into the tar and the star passed on to another group of stranded souls.

The largest groups were those two clustered about the science van. Figures began to sprout from the tar around them, and not all of these were men. Some were spindly as eels, others squat and malformed, but they were too far away for me to assign them a more particular identity. Stars hovered above the two groups, and the black figures lifted them one by one, kicking and screaming (screams now issued from every corner of the park), and held them up to the stars. They did not, as in Rudy’s cartoons, suck in the meat through one of their spikes; they never touched their victims. A livid arc, fiery black in color, leaped between star and human, visible for a split second, and then the figure that had lifted the man or woman, dropped him or her carelessly to the ground and melted back into the flood, and the star moved on. Andrea buried her face in my shoulder, but I could not turn away, transfixed by the scene. And as I watched these actions repeated again and again—the figure melting up, lifting someone to a star, and then discarding him, the victim still alive, rolling over, clutching an injured knee or back, apparently not much the worse for wear—I realized the stars were grazing, that this was their harvest, a reaping of seed sown. They were harvesting our genius, a genius they had stimulated, and they were attracted to a specific yield that manifested in an arc of fiery black. The juice of the poet, the canniness of the inventor, the guile of a villain. They failed to harvest the entire crop, only that gathered in the park. The remainder of those affected would go on to create more garden tools and foundation garments and tax plans, and the stars would continue on their way, a path that now and again led them through the center of Black William. I must confess that, amid the sense of relief accompanying this revelation, I felt an odd twinge of envy when I realized that the genius of love was not to their taste.

How did I know these things? I think when the star hovered above us, it initiated some preliminary process, one incidental to the feelings of eagerness and disinterest it projected, and, as it prepared to take its nutrient, its treasure (I haven’t a clue as to why they harvested us, whether we were for them a commodity or sustenance or something else entire), we shared a brief communion. As proof, I can only say that Andrea holds this same view and there is a similar consensus, albeit with slight variances, among all those who stood beneath the stars that night. But at the moment the question was not paramount. I turned toward the statue. The storefronts beyond were obscured by a black rectangle, like the one that had eclipsed the library, and this gave me to believe that the flood was pouring off into an unguessable dimension, though it still ran deep around us. Stanky and Liz had climbed onto the statue and were clinging to Black William’s leg and saddlehorn respectively. Patty was leaning against the base, appearing dazed. Pin stood beside her, taking photographs with his cell phone. One of the kids was crying, and his friends were busy consoling him. I called out, asking if everyone was all right. Stanky waved and then the statue’s double reared from the flood—it rose up slowly, the image of a horse and a rider with flowing hair, blacker than the age-darkened bronze of its likeness. They were so equal in size and posture and stillness, it was as if I were looking at the statue and its living shadow. Its back was to me, and I cannot say if it was laughing. And then the shadow extended an arm and snatched Stanky from his perch. Plucked him by the collar and held him high, so that a star could extract its due, a flash of black energy. And when that was done, it did not let him fall, but began to sink back into the flood, Stanky still in its grasp. I thought it would take him under the tar, that they would both be swallowed and Stanky’s future was to be that of a dread figure rising blackly to terrify the indigents in another sector of the plenum. But Black William—or the agency that controlled him—must have had a change of heart and, at the last second, just as Stanky’s feet were about to merge with that tarry surface, dropped him clear of the flood, leaving him inert upon the pavement.

The harvest continued several minutes more (the event lasted twenty-seven minutes in all) and then the flood receded, again with quicksilver speed, to form itself into a wave that was poised to splash down somewhere on the far side of that black window. And when the window winked out, when the storefronts snapped back into view, the groaning that ensued was much louder and more articulated than that we’d heard a month previously. Not a sound of holy woe, but of systemic stress, as if the atoms that composed the park and its surround were complaining about the insult they had incurred. All across the park, people ran to tend the injured. Andrea went to Liz, who had fallen from the statue and tearfully declared her ankle broken. Patty said she was dizzy and had a headache, and asked to be left alone. I knelt beside Stanky and asked if he was okay. He lay propped on his elbows, gazing at the sky.

“I wanted to see,” he said vacantly. “They said . . .”

“They?” I said. “You mean the stars?”

He blinked, put a hand to his brow. As ever, his emotions were writ large, yet I don’t believe the look of shame that washed over his face was an attempt to curry favor or promote any agenda. I believe his shame was informed by a rejection such as Andrea and I experienced, but of a deeper kind, more explicit and relating to an opportunity lost.

I made to help him up, intending to question him further; but he shook me off. He had remembered who he was, or at least who he had been pretending to be. Stanky the Great. A man of delicate sensibilities whom I had offended by my casual usage and gross maltreatment. His face hardened, becoming toadlike as he summoned every ounce of his Lilliputian rage. He rolled up to his knees, then got to his feet. Without another word to me, he arranged his features into a look of abiding concern and hurried to give comfort to his Liz.

IN THE WIDER WORLD, Black William has come to be known as “that town full of whackos” or “the place where they had that hallucination,” for as with all inexplicable things, the stars and our interaction with them have been dismissed by the reasonable and responsible among us, relegated to the status of an aberration, irrelevant to the big picture, to the roar of practical matters with which we are daily assailed. I myself, to an extent, have dismissed it, yet my big picture has been enlarged somewhat. Of an evening, I will sit upon the library steps and cast my mind out along the path of the stars and wonder if they were metaphoric or literal presences, nomads or machines, farmers or a guerrilla force, and I will question what use that black flash had for them, and I will ponder whether they were themselves evil or recruited evil men to assist them in their purpose simply because they were suited to the task. I subscribe to the latter view; otherwise, I doubt Stanky would have wanted to go with them . . . unless they offered a pleasurable reward, unless they embodied for him the promise of a sublime perversion in exchange for his service, an eternal tour of duty with his brothers-in-arms, dreaming in that tarry flood. And what of their rejection of him? Was it because he was insufficiently evil? Too petty in his cruelty? Or could it have been he lacked the necessary store of some brain chemical? The universe is all whys and maybes. All meanings coincide, all answers are condensed to one or none. Nothing yields to logic.

Since the coming of the stars, Black William has undergone a great renewal. Although in the immediate aftermath there was a hue and cry about fleeing the town, shutting it down, calmer voices prevailed, pointing to the fact that there had been no fatalities, unless one counted the suicides, and but a single disappearance (Colvin Jacobs, who was strolling through the park that fateful night), and it could be better understood, some maintained, in light of certain impending charges against him (embezzlement, fraud, solicitation). Stay calm, said the voices. A few scrapes and bruises, a smattering of nervous breakdowns—that’s no reason to fling up your hands. Let’s think this over. Colvin’s a canny sort, not one to let an opportunity pass. At this very moment he may be developing a skin cancer on Varadero Beach or Ipanema (though it is my belief that he may be sojourning in a more unlikely place). And while the town thought it over, the tourists began to arrive by the busload. Drawn by Pin’s photographs, which had been published around the world, and later by his best-selling book (co-authored by the editor of the Gazette), they came from Japan, from Europe, from Punxsutawney and Tunkhannock, from every quarter of the globe, a flood of tourists that resolved into a steady flow and demanded to be housed, fed, T-shirted, souvenired, and swindled. They needed theories upon which to hang their faith, so theory-making became a cottage industry and theories abounded, both supernatural and quasi-scientific, each having their own battery of proponents and debunkers. A proposal was floated in the city council that a second statue be erected to commemorate Black William’s visitation, but the ladies of the Heritage Committee fought tooth and nail to preserve the integrity of the original, and now can be seen twice a year lavishing upon him a vigorous scrubbing.

Businesses thrived, mine included—this due to the minor celebrity I achieved and the sale of Stanky and his album to Warner Brothers (David Geffen never called). The album did well and the single, “Misery Loves Company,” climbed to No. 44 on the Billboard charts. I have no direct contact with Stanky, but learned from Liz, who came to the house six months later to pick up her clothes (those abandoned when Stanky fled my house in a huff), that he was writing incidental music for the movies, a job that requires no genius. She carried tales, too, of their nasty breakup, of Stanky’s increasing vileness, his masturbatory displays of ego. He has not written a single song since he left Black William—the stars may have drained more from him than that which they bred, and perhaps the fact that he was almost taken has something to do with his creative slump. Whatever his story, I think he has found his true medium and is becoming a minor obscenity slithering among the larger obscenities that serve a different kind of star, anonymous beneath the black flood of the Hollywood sewer.

The following March, I went fishing with Andrea at Kempton’s Pond. She was reluctant to join me, assuming that I intended to make her a stand-in for Rudy, but I assured her this was not the case and told her she might enjoy an afternoon out of the office, some quiet time together. It was a clear day, and cold. Pockets of snow lay in the folds and crinkles of the Bittersmiths, but the crests were bare, and there was a deeper accumulation on the banks than when Rudy and I had fished the pond in November. We had to clear ourselves a spot on which to sit. The sun gilded the birch trunks, but the waters of the pond were as Stygian and mysterious as ever.

We cast out our lines and chatted about doings in her office, my latest projects—Lesion (black metal) and a postrock band I had convinced to call themselves Same Difference. I told her about some loser tapes that had come my way, notably a gay Christian rap outfit with a song entitled “Cruisin’ for Christ (While Searching for the Heavenly City).” Then we fell silent. Staring into the pond, at the dark rock walls and oily water, I did not populate the depths with fantasies, but thought instead of Rudy. They were memorial thoughts untainted by grief, memories of things said and done. I had such a profound sense of him, I imagined if I turned quickly enough, I would have a glimpse of a bulky figure in a parka, wool cap jammed low on his brow, red-cheeked and puffing steam; yet when I did turn, the figure in the parka and wool cap was more clearly defined, ivory pale and slender, her face a living cameo. I brushed a loose curl from her eyes. Touching her cheek warmed my fingertip. “This is kind of nice,” she said, and smiled. “It’s so quiet.”

“Told you you’d like it,” I said.

“I do.”

She jiggled her line.

“You’ll never catch anything that way.” I demonstrated proper technique. “Twitch the line side-to-side.”

Amused, she said, “I really doubt I’m going to catch anything. What were you and Rudy batting? One for a thousand?”

“Yeah, but you never know.”

“I don’t think I want to catch anything if it resembles that thing he had mounted.”

“You should let out more line, too.”

She glanced at me wryly, but did as I suggested.

A cloud darkened the bank and I pictured how the two of us would appear to God, if God were in His office, playing with His Game Boy: tiny animated fisherfolk hunched over their lines, shoulder-to-shoulder, waiting for a tiny monster to breach, unmindful of any menace from above. Another cloud shadowed us. A ripple moved across the pond, passing so slowly it made me think that the waters of the Polozny, when upthrust into these holes, were squeezed into a sludgy distillate. Bare twigs clattered in a gust of wind.

“All these years,” Andrea said. “All the years and now five months. . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Every day, there’ll be two or three times when I see you, like just now, when I look up and see you, and it’s like a blow . . . a physical blow that leaves me all gaga. I want to drop everything and curl up with you.”

“Me, too,” I said.

She hesitated. “It just worries me.”

“We’ve had this conversation,” I said. “I don’t mind having it again, but we’re not going to resolve anything. We’ll never figure it out.”

“I know.” She jiggled her line, forgetting to twitch it. “I keep thinking I’ll find a new angle, but all I come up with is more stupidity. I was thinking the other day, it was like a fairy tale. How falling back in love protected us, like a charm.” She heel-kicked the bank. “It’s frustrating when everything you think seems absurd and true all at once.”

“It’s a mystery.”

“Right.”

“I go there myself sometimes,” I said. “I worry about whether we’ll fall out of love . . . if what we feel is unnatural. Then I worry if worrying about it’s unnatural. Because, you know, it’s such a weird thing to be worried about. Then I think, hey, it’s perfectly natural to worry over something you care about, whether it’s weird or not. Round and round. We might as well go with the flow. No doubt we’ll still be worrying about it when we’re too old to screw.”

“That’s pretty old.”

“Yep,” I said. “Ancient.”

“Maybe it’s good we worry.” Then after a pause, she said. “Maybe we didn’t worry enough the first time.”

A second ripple edged the surface, like a miniature slow tsunami. The light faded and dimmed. A degree of tension seemed to leave Andrea’s body.

“You want to go to Russia?” she asked. “I’ve got this conference in late May. I have to give a paper and be on some panels. It’s only four days, but I could take some vacation.”

I thought about it. “Kiwanda’s pretty much in control of things. Would we have to stay in Russia?”

“Don’t you want to go clubbing in Moscow? Meet new people? I’ll wear a slutty dress and act friendly with strangers. You can save me from the white slavers—I’m sure I’ll attract white slavers.”

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “But some of those slavers are tough.”

“You can take ’em!” She rubbed the side of her nose. “Why? Where do you want to go?”

“Bucharest.”

“Why there?”

“Lots of reasons. Potential for vampires. Cheap. But reason number one—nobody goes there.”

“Good point. We get enough of crowds around here.”

We fell silent again. The eastern slopes of the Bittersmiths were drowning in shadow, acquiring a simplified look, as of worn black teeth that still bore traces of enamel. But the light had richened, the tree trunks appeared to have been dipped in old gold. Andrea straightened and peered down into the hole.

“I had a nibble,” she said excitedly.

I watched the surface. The water remained undisturbed, lifeless and listless, but I felt a presence lurking beneath, a wise and deliberate fish, a grotesque, yet beautiful in the fact of its survival, and more than a murky promise—it would rise to us this day or some other. Perhaps it would speak a single word, perhaps merely die. Andrea leaned against me, eager to hook it, and asked what she should do.

“It’s probably just a current,” I said, but advised her to let out more line.

THE CAMBIST AND LORD IRON: A FAIRY TALE OF ECONOMICS

Daniel Abraham

For as many years as anyone in the city could remember, Olaf Neddelsohn had been the cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority. Every morning, he could be seen making the trek from his rooms in the boarding house on State Street, down past the street vendors with their apples and cheese, and into the bowels of the underground railway only to emerge at the station across the wide boulevard from Magdalen Gate. Some mornings he would pause at the tobacconist’s or the newsstand before entering the hallowed hall of the postal authority, but seven o’clock found him without fail at the ticker tape checking for the most recent exchange rates. At half past, he was invariably updating the slate board with a bit of chalk. And with the last chime of eight o’clock, he would nod his respect to his small portrait of His Majesty, King Walther IV, pull open the shutters, and greet whatever traveler had need of him.

From that moment until the lunch hour and again from one o’clock until six, Olaf lived and breathed the exchange of foreign currencies. Under his practiced hands, dollars became pounds sterling; rubles became marks; pesos, kroner; yen, francs. Whatever exotic combination was called for, Olaf arranged with a smile, a kind word, and a question about the countries which minted the currencies he passed under the barred window. Over years, he had built nations in his mind; continents. Every country that existed, he could name, along with its particular flavor of money, its great sights and monuments, its national cuisine.

At the deep brass call of the closing gong, he pulled the shutters closed again. From six until seven o’clock, he reconciled the books, filled out his reports, wiped his slate board clean with a wet rag, made certain he had chalk for the next day, paid his respects to the portrait of the king, and then went back to his boarding room. Some nights he made beans on the hotplate in his room. Others, he would join the other boarders for Mrs. Wells’ somewhat dubious roasts. Afterward, he would take a short constitutional walk, read to himself from the men’s adventure books that were his great vice, and put out the light. On Saturdays, he would visit the zoo or the fourth-rate gentleman’s club that he could afford. On Sundays, he attended church.

He had a reputation as a man of few needs, tepid passions, and great kindness. The romantic fire that the exotic coins and bills awakened in him was something he would have been hard pressed to share, even had he anyone with whom to share it.

Which is to say there could not be a man in the whole of the city less like Lord Iron.

Born Edmund Scarasso, Lord Iron had taken his father’s title and lands and ridden them first to war, then to power, and finally to a notorious fame. His family estate outside the city was reputed to rival the king’s, but Lord Iron spent little time there. He had a house in the city with two hundred rooms arranged around a central courtyard garden in which trees bore fruits unfamiliar to the city and flowers bloomed with exotic and troubling scents. His servants were numberless as ants; his personal fortune greater than some smaller nations. And never, it was said, had such wealth, power, and influence been squandered on such a debased soul.

No night passed without some new tale of Lord Iron. Ten thousand larks had been killed, their tongues harvested, and their bodies thrown aside in order that Lord Iron might have a novel hors d’oeuvre. Lord Biethan had been forced to repay his family’s debt by sending his three daughters to perform as Lord Iron’s creatures for a week; they had returned to their father with disturbing, languorous smiles and a rosewood cask filled with silver as “recompense for his Lordship’s overuse.” A fruit seller had the bad fortune not to recognize Lord Iron one dim, fog-bound morning, and a flippant comment earned him a whipping that left him near dead.

There was no way for anyone besides Lord Iron himself to know which of the thousand stories and accusations that accreted around him were true. There was no doubt that Lord Iron was never seen wearing anything but the richest of velvets and silk. He was habitually in the company of beautiful women of negotiable virtue. He smoked the finest tobacco and other, more exotic weeds. Violence and sensuality and excess were the tissue of which his life was made. If his wealth and web of blackmail and extortion had not protected him, he would no doubt have been invited to the gallows dance years before. If he had been a hero in the war, so much the worse.

And so it was, perhaps, no surprise that when his lackey and drinking companion, Lord Caton, mentioned in passing an inconvenient curiosity of the code of exchange, Lord Iron’s mind seized upon it. Among his many vices was a fondness for cruel pranks. And so it came to pass that Lord Iron and the handful of gaudy revelers who followed in his wake descended late one Tuesday morning upon the Magdalen Gate postal authority.

Olaf took the packet of bills, willing his hands not to tremble. Lord Iron’s thin smile and river-stone eyes did nothing to calm him. The woman draping herself on Lord Iron’s arm made a poor affectation of sincerity.

“Well,” Olaf said, unfolding the papers. “Let me see.”

These were unlike any currency he had ever seen; the sheets were just larger than a standard sheet of paper, the engraving a riot of colors—crimson, indigo, and a pale, delicate peach. The lordly face that stared out of the bill was Moorish. Ornate letters identified the bills as being valued at a thousand convertible guilders and issued by the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat. Olaf wondered, as his fingers traced the lettering, how a protectorate could be independent.

“I’m very sorry, my lord,” he said. “But this isn’t a listed currency.”

“And how is that my problem?” Lord Iron asked, stroking his beard. He had a rich voice, soft and masculine, that made Olaf blush.

“I only mean, my lord, that I couldn’t give an exchange rate on these. I don’t have them on my board, you see, and so I can’t—”

“These are legal tender, issued by a sovereign state. I would like to change them into pounds sterling.”

“I understand that, my lord, it’s only that—”

“Are you familiar with the code of exchange?” Lord Iron asked. The dark-haired woman on his arm smiled at Olaf with all the pity a snake shows a rat.

“I . . . of course, my lord . . . that is . . .”

“Then you will recall the second provision of the Lord Chancellor’s amendment of 1652?”

Olaf licked his lips. Confusion was like cotton ticking filling his head.

“The provision against speculation, my lord?”

“Very good,” Lord Iron said. “It states that any cambist in the employ of the crown must complete a requested transfer between legal tenders issued by sovereign states within twenty-four hours or else face review of licensure.”

“My . . . my lord, that isn’t . . . I’ve been working here for years, sir . . .”

“And of course,” Lord Iron went on, his gaze implacable and cool, “assigning arbitrary value to a currency also requires a review, doesn’t it? And rest assured, my friend, that I am quite capable of determining the outcome of any such review.”

Olaf swallowed to loosen the tightness in his throat. His smile felt sickly.

“If I have done something to offend your lordship . . .”

“No,” Lord Iron said with something oddly like compassion in his eyes. “You were simply in the wrong place when I grew bored. Destroying you seemed diverting. I will be back at this time tomorrow. Good day, sir.”

Lord Iron turned and walked away. His entourage followed. When the last of them had stepped out the street doors, the silence that remained behind was profound as the grave. Olaf saw the eyes of the postal clerks on him and managed a wan smile. The great clock read twenty minutes past eleven. By noontime tomorrow, Olaf realized, it was quite possible he would no longer be a licensed cambist.

He closed his shutters early with a note tacked to the front that clients should knock on them if they were facing an emergency and otherwise return the next day. He pulled out the references of his trade—gazetteer, logs of fiscal reports, conversion tables. By midafternoon, he had discovered the location of the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat, but nothing that would relate their system of convertible guilders to any known currency. Apparently the last known conversion had been into a system of cowry shells, and the numbers involved were absent.

The day waned, the light pouring into the postal authority warming and then fading to shadows. Olaf sent increasingly desperate messages to his fellow cambists at other postal authorities, to the librarians at the city’s central reference desk, to the office of the Lord Exchequer. It became clear as the bells tolled their increasing hours that no answer would come before morning. And indeed, no answer would come in time.

If Olaf delayed the exchange, his license could be suspended. If he invented some random value for the guilders, his license could be suspended. And there was no data from which to derive an appropriate equation.

Anger and despair warring in his belly, he closed his station; returned his books to their places, cleaned his slate, logged the few transactions he had made. His hand hovered for a moment over his strongbox.

Here were the funds from which he drew each day to meet the demands of his clientele. Pounds sterling, yen, rubles. He wondered, if he were to fill his pockets with the box’s present contents, how far he would get before he was caught. The romance of flight bloomed in his mind and died all in the space of a breath. He withdrew only the bright, venomous bills of the Independent Protectorate of Analdi-Wat, replacing them with a receipt. He locked the box with a steady hand, shrugged on his coat, and left.

Lord Iron, he decided as he walked slowly down the marble steps to the street, was evil. But he was also powerful, rich, and well-connected. There was little that a man like Olaf could do if a man of that stature took it as his whim to destroy him. If it had been the devil, he might at least have fallen back on prayer.

Olaf stopped at the newsstand, bought an evening paper and a tin of lemon mints, and trudged to the station across the street. Waiting on the platform, he listened to the underground trains hiss and squeal. He read his newspaper with the numb disinterest of a man to whom the worst has already happened. A missing child had been found alive in Stonemarket; the diary of a famous courtesan had sold at auction to an anonymous buyer and for a record price; the police had begun a policy of restricting access to the river quays in hopes of reducing accidental deaths by drowning. The cheap ink left more of a mark on his fingers than his mind.

At his boardinghouse, Olaf ate a perfunctory dinner at the common table, retired to his room, and tried in vain to lose himself in the pulp adventure tales. The presence of a killer among the members of the good Count Pendragon’s safari proved less than captivating, even if the virtuous Hanna Gable was in danger. Near midnight, Olaf turned out his light, pulled his thin wool blanket up over his head, and wondered what he would do when his position at the postal authority was terminated.

Two hours later, he woke with a shout. Still in his night clothes, he rushed out to the common room, digging through the pile of small kindling and newspaper that Mrs. Wells used to start her fires. When he found the evening newspaper, he read the article detailing the sale of the courtesan’s diary again. There was nothing in it that pertained directly to his situation, and yet his startling, triumphant yawp woke the house.

He arrived at work the next day later than usual, with bags dark as bruises under his eyes but a spring in his step. He went through his morning ritual rather hurriedly to make up for the time he had lost, but was well prepared when the street doors opened at eleven o’clock and Lord Iron and his gang of rank nobility slouched in. Olaf held his spine straight and breathed deeply to ease the trip-hammer of his heart.

Lord Iron stepped up to the window like an executioner to the noose. The woman on his arm this morning was fair-haired, but otherwise might have been the previous day’s twin. Olaf made a small, nervous bow to them both.

“Lord Iron,” he said.

Lord Iron’s expression was distant as the moon. Olaf wondered if perhaps his lordship had been drinking already this morning.

“Explain to me why you’ve failed.”

“Well, my lord, I don’t think I can do that. I have your money here. It comes to something less than ten pounds, I’m afraid. But that was all the market would bear.”

With trembling hand, Olaf slid an envelope across the desk. Lord Iron didn’t look down at it. Fury lit his eyes.

“The market? And pray what market is that?”

“The glass blower’s shop in Harrington Square, my lord. I have quotes from three other establishments nearby, and theirs was the best. I doubt you would find better anywhere.”

“What do they have to do with this?”

“Well, they were the ones who bought the guilders,” Olaf said, his voice higher and faster than he liked. He also ran on longer than he had strictly speaking intended. “I believe that they intend to use them as wrapping paper. For the more delicate pieces. As a novelty.”

Lord Iron’s face darkened.

“You sold my bills?” he growled.

Olaf had anticipated many possible reactions. Violence, anger, amusement. He had imagined a hundred objections that Lord Iron might bring to his actions. Base ignorance had not been one of them. Olaf’s surprise leant a steadiness to his voice.

“My lord, you sold them. To me. That’s what exchange is, sir. Currency is something bought and sold, just as plums or gas fixtures are. It’s what we do here.”

“I came to get pounds sterling for guilders, not sell wrapping paper!”

Olaf saw in that moment that Lord Iron genuinely didn’t understand. He pulled himself up, straightening his vest.

“Sir,” he said. “When a client comes to me with a hundred dollars and I turn him back with seventy pounds, I haven’t said some Latin phrase over them. There aren’t suddenly seventy more pounds in the world and a hundred fewer dollars. I buy the dollars. You came to sell your guilders to me. Very well. I have bought them.”

“As wrapping paper!”

“What does that matter?” Olaf snapped, surprising both Lord Iron and himself. “If I invest them in negotiable bonds in Analdi-Wat or burn them for kindling, it’s no business of yours. Someone was willing to buy them. From that, I can now quote you with authority what people are willing to pay. There is your exchange rate. And there is your money. Thank you for your business, and good day.”

“You made up the price,” Lord Iron said. “To place an arbitrary worth on—”

“Good God, man,” Olaf said. “Did you not hear me before? There’s nothing arbitrary about it. I went to several prospective buyers and took the best offered price. What can you possibly mean by ‘worth’ if not what you can purchase with it? Five shillings is worth a loaf of bread, or a cup of wine, or a cheaply bound book of poetry because that is what it will buy. Your tens of thousands of negotiable guilders will buy you nine pounds and seven shillings because that is what someone will pay. And there it is, in that envelope.”

Never before in his life had Olaf seen nobility agape at him. The coterie of Lord Iron stared at him as if he had belched fire and farted brimstone. The fair-haired woman stepped back, freeing his lordship’s sword arm.

I have gone too far, Olaf thought. He will kill me.

Lord Iron was silent for a long moment while the world seemed to rotate around him. Then he chuckled.

“The measure of a thing’s worth is what you can purchase with it,” he said as if tasting the words, then turned to the fair-haired woman. “I think he’s talking about you, Marjorie.”

The woman’s cheeks flushed scarlet. Lord Iron leaned against the sill of Olaf’s little, barred window and gestured Olaf closer. Against his best judgment, Olaf leaned in.

“You have a strange way of looking at things,” Lord Iron said. There were fumes on his breath. Absinthe, Olaf guessed. “To hear you speak, the baker buys my five shillings with his bread.”

“And how is that wrong, my lord?” the cambist asked.

“And then the wineseller buys the coins from him with a glass of wine. So why not buy the bread with the wine? If they’re worth the same?”

“You could, my lord,” Olaf said. “You can express anything in terms of anything else, my lord. How many lemon tarts is a horse worth? How many newspapers equate to a good dinner? It isn’t harder to determine than some number of rubles for another number of yen, if you know the trick of it.”

Lord Iron smiled again. The almost sleepy expression returned to his eyes. He nodded.

“Wrapping paper,” he said. “You have amused me, little man, and I didn’t think that could be done any longer. I accept your trade.”

And with that, Lord Iron swept the envelope into his pocket, turned, and marched unsteadily out of the postal authority and into the noon light of Magdalen Gate. After the street doors were closed, there was a pause long as three breaths together and then one of the postal clerks began to clap.

A moment later, the staff of the postal authority had filled the vaults of their chambers with applause. Olaf, knees suddenly weak, bowed carefully, closed the shutters of his window, and made his way back to the men’s privacy room where he emptied his breakfast into the toilet and then sat on the cool tile floor laughing until tears streamed from his eyes.

He had faced down Lord Iron and escaped with his career intact. It was, no doubt, the greatest adventure of his life. Nothing he had done before could match it, and he could imagine nothing in the future that would surpass it.

And nothing did, as it turned out, for almost six and a half months.

If was a cold, clear February, and the stars had come out long before Olaf had left the Magdalen Gate authority. All during the ride on the underground train, Olaf dreamed of a warm pot of tea, a small fire, and the conclusion of the latest novel. Atherton Crane was on the verge of exposing the plot of the vicious Junwang Ko, but didn’t yet know that Kelly O’Callahan was in the villain’s clutches. It promised to be a pleasant evening.

He knew as soon as he stepped into the boarding house that something was wrong. The other boarders, sitting around the common table, went silent as he shrugged out of his coat and plucked off his hat. They pointedly did not look at him as Mrs. Wells, her wide, friendly face pale as uncooked dough, crossed the room to meet him.

“There’s a message for you, Mr. Neddelsohn,” she said. “A man came and left it for you. Very particular.”

“Who was he?” Olaf asked, suspicion blooming in his heart more from her affect than from any guilt on his conscience.

“Don’t know,” Mrs. Wells said, wringing her hands in distress, “but he looked . . . well, here it is, Mr. Neddelsohn. This is the letter he left for you.”

The envelope she thrust into his hand was the color of buttercream, smooth as linen, and thick. The coat of arms embossed upon it was Lord Iron’s. Olaf started at the thing as if she’d handed him a viper.

Mrs. Wells simpered her apology as he broke the wax seal and drew out a single sheet of paper. It was written in an erratic but legible hand.

Mr. Neddelsohn—

I find I have need of you to settle a wager. You will bring yourself to the Club Baphomet immediately upon receipt of this note. I will, of course, recompense you for your troubles.

The note was not signed, but Olaf had no doubt of its authorship. Without a word, he pulled his jacket back on, returned his hat to his head, and stepped out to hail a carriage. From the street, he could see the faces of Mrs. Wells and his fellow boarders at the window.

The Club Baphomet squatted in the uncertain territory between the tenements and beer halls of Stonemarket and the mansions and ballrooms of Granite Hill. The glimmers behind its windows did little to illuminate the street, perhaps by design. From the tales Olaf had heard, there might well be members of the club who would prefer not to be seen entering or leaving its grounds. The service entrance was in a mud-paved alley stinking of piss and old food, but it opened quickly to his knock. He was bundled inside and escorted to a private sitting room where, it seemed, he was expected.

Of the five men who occupied the room, Olaf recognized only Lord Iron. The months had not been kind; Lord Iron had grown thinner, his eyes wilder, and a deep crimson cut was only half healed on his cheek. The other four were dressed in fashion similar to Lord Iron—well-razored hair, dark coats of the finest wool, watch chains of gold. The eldest of them seemed vaguely familiar.

Lord Iron rose and held his hand out toward Olaf, not as if to greet him but rather to display him like a carnival barker presenting a three-headed calf.

“Gentlemen,” Lord Iron intoned. “This is the cambist I mentioned to you. I propose that he be my champion in this matter.”

Olaf felt the rictus grin on his face, the idiot bobbing of his head as he made small bows to the four assembled gentlemen. He was humiliated, but could no more stop himself than a puppy could keep from showing its belly to beg the mercy of wolves.

One of the four—a younger man with gold hair and ice-blue eyes—stepped forward with a smile. Olaf nodded to him for what must have been the fifth time.

“I am Simon Cole,” the gold-haired man said. “Lord Eichan, to my enemies.”

At this, Lord Iron raised a hand, as if to identify himself as one such enemy. The other three men chuckled, and Lord Eichan smiled as well before continuing.

“Our mutual acquaintance, Lord Iron, has made a suggestion I find somewhat unlikely, and we have made a wager of it. He is of the opinion that the value of anything can be expressed in terms of any other valuable thing. I think his example was the cost of a horse in lemon mints.”

“Yes, my lord,” Olaf said.

“Ah, you agree then,” Lord Eichan said. “That’s good. I was afraid our little Edmund had come up with his thesis in a drug-soaked haze.”

“We’ve made the agreement,” Lord Iron said pleasantly. “Simon, Satan’s catamite that he is, will set the two things to be compared. I, meaning of course you, will have a week to determine their relative worth. These three bastards will judge the answer.”

“I see,” Olaf said.

“Excellent,” Lord Iron said, slapping him on the back and leading him to a chair upholstered in rich leather. It wasn’t until Olaf had descended into the chair’s depths that he realized he had just agreed to this mad scheme. Lord Eichan had taken a seat opposite him and was thoughtfully lighting a pipe.

“I think I should say,” Olaf began, casting his mind about wildly for some way to remove himself from the room without offending either party. “That is, I don’t wish that . . . ah . . .”

Lord Eichan nodded as if Olaf had made some cogent point, then shaking his match until the flame died, turned to face Olaf directly.

“I would like to know the value of a day in the life of His Majesty, King Walther,” Lord Eichan said. “And I would like that value described in days of life of an inmate in the crown’s prison.”

“A day in the life of the king expressed in days of a prisoner’s life?”

“Certainly you must agree that life is valuable,” Lord Eichan said. “You wouldn’t lightly part with your own.”

“Well, certainly—”

“And you can’t suggest that the king is the same as a bread thief.”

“No, I wouldn’t—”

“Well, then,” Lord Eichan said. “It’s settled.”

“Come along, my boy,” Lord Iron said, clapping Olaf on the shoulder. “I’ll see you out.”

“One week!” Lord Eichan said as Olaf and Lord Iron stepped from the room and into the corridor. Lord Iron was smiling; Olaf was not.

“My lord,” Olaf said. “This is . . . I’m not sure I know how to go about something like this.”

“That’s why I got you a week to do it in,” Lord Iron said. “The rat-licker wanted to limit it to three days.”

“I don’t know for a certainty that I can accommodate you, my lord,” Olaf said.

“Do your best,” Lord Iron said. “If we lose, Simon, Lord Eichan is going to kill me. Well, and you for that.”

Olaf stopped dead. Lord Iron took another few steps before pausing and looking back.

“He’s what?”

“Going to kill us,” Lord Iron said. “And take five hundred pounds I’ve set aside in earnest as well. If we win, I’ll kill him and bed his sister.”

Olaf, unthinking, murmured an obscenity. Lord Iron grinned and pulled him along the dim corridor toward the back of the club.

“Well, you needn’t bed his sister if you don’t care to. Just do your best, boy. And be back here in a week.”

With that, Lord Iron stepped Olaf out the door and into the cold, bleak alley. It wasn’t until the door had closed behind him that Olaf realized Lord Iron hadn’t recompensed him for the carriage ride.

In the morning, the whole affair had the air of a bad dream. Olaf made his way to Magdalen Gate as he always did, checked the ticker tape, updated his slate. What was the value of life, he wondered. And how was one life best to be measured against another.

And, behind it all, the growing certainty that Lord Eichan would indeed kill him if he couldn’t find an acceptable answer.

Twice before noon, Olaf found he had made errors in his accounting. After bolting down the snowy street after a woman who had left with ten pounds fewer than she deserved, Olaf gave up. He wrote a note claiming illness, pinned it to his shuttered window, and left. He paused at the tobacconist to buy a pouch and papers.

In his room at the boarding house, Olaf sketched out every tack he could think of to address the issue. The most obvious was to determine how much money the state spent to keep His Majesty and how much to run the prisons. But objections to that arose almost immediately; was that a measure of the worth of life or of operational expenses appropriate to each career? He considered the relative costs of physician’s care for king and prisoner, but this again was not a concern precisely of life, but health. Twenty years coughing and twenty years free from illness were still twenty years.

For three days, he ate little and slept less. He ventured out to the library to search among the stacks of books and periodicals for inspiration. He found nothing on which he would have been willing to stake his life. Lord Iron had done that for him.

On the morning of the fourth day he rolled the last pinch of tobacco into the last paper, wet it, rolled it, and sat on his bed unable to bring himself to the effort of lighting the thing. Despair had descended upon him. He saw the next three days stretching before him in a long, slow sleep.

It was how he imagined the prisoners felt who had so occupied his thoughts. But he, at least, could go out for more tobacco. And beer. And good, bloody beefsteak. If he was to live like a prisoner, he might at least eat like a king. It wasn’t as if he’d give himself gout in three days’ time, no matter how richly he ate or overmuch he drank.

Something stirred at the back of his mind, and he found himself grinning even before he knew why.

All that day and the two after it he spent in a whirl of activity, his despair forgotten. He visited physicians and the budget office, the office of the prison warden and the newspaperman who most reported on the activities of the king. The last day, he locked himself in his rooms with an abacus, a stub of pencil, and sheaves of paper.

When he came to the final accounting, his heart sank. He went through his figures again, certain that somewhere in the complexity of his argument, he had made an error. But the numbers tallied, and as little as he liked it, there was no more time. Putting on his best coat, he prepared the argument in his mind. Then, papers tucked under his arm, he went out past his silent fellow boarders and the stricken countenance of Mrs. Wells, down to the wintery street, and hailed a carriage to carry him back to Club Baphomet.

The furniture of the sitting room had been rearranged. A single table now dominated the space, with five chairs all along one side like an examiner’s panel. The three judges sat in the middle with Simon, Lord Eichan on the left and Lord Iron on the right. Lord Eichan looked somewhat amused, but there was a nervousness in his movement with which Olaf identified. Lord Iron looked as relaxed as a man stepping out of a sauna; the wound on his face was visibly more healed. Glasses of wine sat before each man, and cigars rested in onyx ashtrays when the gentlemen of the club weren’t making better use of them.

A straight-backed wooden chair faced them, a small student desk at its side. Olaf sat and arranged his papers. The eldest of the judges leaned forward and with a smile more at home on the lips of a procurer spoke.

“You may proceed, sir.”

Olaf nodded his thanks.

“I will need to do just a bit of groundwork before I present my analysis,” he said. “I hope you would all agree that a man who decries embezzlement and also diverts money into his private accounts is not actually opposed to the theft?”

The judges looked at one another in amusement.

“Or, similarly,” Olaf went on, “a woman who claims to embody chastity and yet beds all comers is not, in point of fact, chaste?”

“I think even Lord Eichan will have to allow those to stand,” the eldest judge said. “Your point?”

“My point, sirs, is that we judge people not by what they claim, but what they do. Public declarations of sentiment are not a fit judge of true character.”

“You are preaching,” the youngest of the judges drawled, “to the choir. There is no group in the nation more adept at saying one thing and doing another.”

Olaf smiled awkwardly.

“Just so,” he said. “I will move forward. I have come to the determination, after careful consideration, that a day in the life of His Majesty the King equates to nineteen and three-quarter hours of a prisoner of the crown.”

There was a moment’s silence. Simon, Lord Eichan blinked and an incredulous smile began to work its way onto his countenance. Lord Iron sat forward, his expression unreadable. One of the judges who had not yet spoken took a meditative puff on his cigar.

“I was never particularly good at sums,” the man said in an unsettlingly feminine voice, “but it seems to me that you’ve just said a prisoner’s life is more valuable than that of the king?”

“Yes,” Olaf said, his belly heavy as if he’d drunk a tankard of lead. The eldest judge glanced at Lord Iron with a pitying expression.

“Let me also make some few observations,” Olaf said, fighting to keep the desperation from his voice. “I have met with several physicians in the last few days. I am sorry to report that overindulging in strong liquor is thought by the medical establishment to reduce life expectancy by as much as five years. A habit of eating rich foods may reduce a man’s span on the earth by another three to four years. A sedentary lifestyle by as much as eight. Indulging in chocolate and coffee can unbalance the blood, and remove as many as three years of life.”

“You have now ceased to preach to the choir,” said Lord Eichan. And indeed, the judges had grown more somber. Olaf raised a hand, begging their patience.

“I have used these medical data as well as the reports of the warden of Chappell Hill Prison and the last two years of His Majesty’s reported activities in the newspapers. I beg you to consider. A prisoner of the crown is kept on a simple diet and subjected to a mandatory exercise period each day. No spirits of any kind are permitted him. No luxuries such as coffee or chocolate. By comparison . . .”

Olaf fumbled with the sheaves of papers, searching for the form he had created. The eldest judge cleared his throat.

“By comparison,” Olaf continued, “in the last two years, His Majesty has taken vigorous exercise only one day in seven. Has eaten at banquet daily, including the richest of dishes. He regularly drinks both coffee and chocolate, often together in the French style.”

“This is ridiculous,” Lord Eichan said. “His Majesty has the finest physicians in the world at his command. His life is better safeguarded than any man’s in the realm.”

“No, sir,” Olaf said, his voice taking on a certainty that he was beginning to genuinely feel. “We say that it is, much as the embezzler claims honesty and the wanton claims virtue. I present to you the actions, as we agreed. And I would point out that His Majesty’s excesses are subject only to his personal whim. If he wished, he could drink himself insensible each morning, eat nothing but butterfat and lard, and never move from his seat. He could drink half a tun of coffee and play games with raw gunpowder. Unlike a prisoner, there is no enforcement of behavior that could rein him in. I have, if anything, taken a conservative measure in reaching my conclusions.”

A glimmer of amusement shone in Lord Iron’s eyes, but his face remained otherwise frozen. Simon, Lord Eichan was fidgeting with his cigar. The eldest judge sucked his teeth audibly and shook his head.

“And yet prisoners do not, I think, have a greater lifespan than monarchs,” he said.

“It is impossible to say,” Olaf said. “For many criminals and poor men, the time spent in the care of the crown can be when they are safest, best overseen, best clothed, best fed. I would, however, point out that His Majesty’s father left us at the age of sixty-seven, and the oldest man in the care of the crown is . . .”

Olaf paused, finding the name.

“The oldest man in the care of the crown is David Bennet, aged eighty. Incarcerated when he was sixteen for killing his brother.”

He spread his hands.

“Your argument seems sound,” the eldest judge said, “but your conclusion is ridiculous. I cannot believe that the king is of lesser value than a prisoner. I am afraid I remain unconvinced. What say you, gentlemen?”

But before the other two judges could answer Olaf rose to his feet.

“With all respect, sir, the question was not the value of the king or the prisoner, but of the days of their respective lives. I was not asked to judge their pleasures or their health insofar as their discomforts are less than mortal.”

The effeminate judge lifted his chin. There was a livid scar across his neck where, Olaf imagined from his knowledge of men’s adventure, a garrote might have cut. But it was Simon, Lord Eichan who spoke.

“How is it that a king can be more valuable than a prisoner, but his days be less? It makes no sense at all!”

“There are other things which His Majesty has,” Olaf said. He had warmed to his topic now, and the fact that his own life hung in the balance was all but forgotten. “A prisoner must take his exercise; a king has the power to refuse. A prisoner may wish dearly for a rich meal or a great glass of brandy, but since he cannot have them, he cannot exchange pleasure for . . . well, for some duration of life.”

“This is a waste of—”

“Be quiet,” the eldest judge said. “Let the man have his say.”

“But—”

“Don’t make me repeat myself, Simon.”

Lord Eichan leaned back sneering and gripping his wine glass until his knuckles were white.

“It’s a choice every man in this room has made,” Olaf went on, raising his arm like a priest delivering a homily. “You might all live as ascetics and survive years longer. But like the king, you choose to make a rational exchange of some span of your life for the pleasure of living as you please. A prisoner is barred from that exchange, and so I submit a greater value is placed on his life precisely to the degree that strictures are placed on his pleasure and his exercise of power.

“Gentlemen, ask yourselves this: If I had two sons and saw that one of them kept from drink and gluttony while letting the other run riot, which of them would you say I valued? The prodigal might have more pleasure. Certainly the king has more pleasure than an inmate. But pleasure and power are not life.”

“Amen,” said Lord Iron. It was the first time he had spoken since Olaf had entered. The silence that followed this declaration was broken only by the hissing of the fire in the grate and rush of blood in Olaf’s ears.

“Your reports were accurate, Lord Iron,” the drawling judge said. “Your pet cambist is quite amusing.”

“Perhaps it would be best if you gave us a moment to discuss your points,” the eldest judge said. “If you would be so kind as to step out to the antechamber? Yes. Thank you.”

With the blackwood door closed behind him, Olaf’s fear returned. He was in the Club Baphomet with his survival linked to Lord Iron’s, and only an argument that seemed less and less tenable with each passing minute to protect him. But he had made his throw. His only other hope now was mad flight, and the door to the corridor was locked. He tried it.

What felt like hours passed, though the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner reported only a quarter-hour. A pistol barked twice, and a moment later Lord Iron strode into the room. The door swung shut behind him before Olaf could make sense of the bloody scene. His gorge rose.

“Well done, boy,” Lord Iron said, dropping something heavy into Olaf’s lap. “I’ll have you taken home in my personal carriage. I have Lord Eichan’s sister to console this evening, and I won’t be needing horses to do it. And I thought you should know: it wasn’t unanimous. If His Majesty hadn’t taken your side, I think we might not have won the day.”

“His Majesty?”

Olaf’s mind reeled. The face of the eldest judge resolved itself suddenly into the portrait he kept at his desk.

“You did well, boy,” Lord Iron said. “Your country thanks you.”

Without another word, Lord Iron unlocked the door, stepped out to the corridor, and was gone. Olaf looked down. A packet of bills squatted in his lap. Five hundred pounds at a guess, and blood smeared on the topmost bill.

He swore to himself in that moment that he would never answer another summons from Lord Iron, whatever the consequences. And, indeed, when the hour arrived, it was Lord Iron who came to him.

The weeks and months that followed were if anything richer in their tales of Lord Iron. While traveling in the Orient, he had forced a barkeep who had fallen into debt to choose between cutting off one of his infant daughter’s toes or three of his own fingers in lieu of payment. He had seduced six nuns in Rome, leaving two of them with child. He had ridden an ostrich down the streets of Cairo naked at midnight. Of the untimely death of Lord Eichan there was no word, but apart from removing the portrait of the king from his desk, Olaf took no action. The less he personally figured into the debaucheries of Lord Iron, the better pleased he was.

Instead, Olaf plunged more deeply than ever into his work, his routine, and the harmless escapism of his men’s adventure novels. But for the first time in memory, the perils of the heroines seemed contrived and weak; the masculine bravery of the heroes seemed overstated, like a boy who blusters and puffs out his chest when walking through the graveyard at dusk.

Clifford Knightly wrestled an alligator on the banks of the great Nile. Lord Morrow foiled the evil Chaplain Grut’s plan to foul the waters of London. Emily Chastain fell gratefully into the mighty arms of the noble savage Maker-of-Justice. And Olaf found himself wondering what these great men would have done at Club Baphomet. Wrested the gun from Lord Iron? From Simon, Lord Eichan? Sternly spoken of God and truth and righteousness? Olaf doubted it would have had any great effect.

Winter passed into spring. Spring ripened to summer. Slowly, Olaf’s discontent, like the nightmares from which he woke himself shouting, lessened. For weeks on end, he could forget what he had been part of. Many men who came to his window at the postal authority had traveled widely. Many had tales to tell of near misses: a runaway carriage that had come within a pace of running them down in the streets of Prague, a fever which had threatened to carry them away in Bombay, the hiss of an Afghan musket ball passing close to their head. Olaf had tales of his own now, if he ever chose to share them. That was all.

And still, when autumn with its golden leaves and fog and chill rain also brought Lord Iron back into his life, Olaf was not surprised.

It was a Tuesday night in September. Olaf had spent his customary hours at the Magdalen Gate postal authority, come back to his boarding house, and eaten alone in his room. The evening air was cool but not biting, and he had propped his window open before sitting down to read. When he woke, he thought for a long, bleary moment that the cold night breeze had woken him. Then the knock at his door repeated itself.

His blanket wrapped around his shoulder, Olaf answered the door. Lord Iron stood in the hall. He looked powerfully out of place. His fine jacket and cravat, the polished boots, the well-groomed beard and moustache all belonged in a palace or club. And yet rather than making the boarding house hall seem shabby and below him, the hallway made Lord Iron, monster of the city, seem false as a boy playing dress-up. Olaf nodded as if he’d been expecting the man.

“I have need of you,” Lord Iron said.

“Have I the option of refusal?”

Lord Iron smiled, and Olaf took it as the answer to his question. He stepped back and let the man come through. Lord Iron sat on the edge of the bed while Olaf closed his window, drew up his chair, and sat. In the light from Olaf’s reading lamp, Lord Iron’s skin seemed waxen and pale. His voice, when he spoke, was distant as a man shouting from across a square.

“There is a question plaguing me,” Lord Iron said. “You are the only man I can think of who might answer it.”

“Is there a life at stake?” Olaf asked.

“No,” Lord Iron said. “Nothing so petty as that.”

When Olaf failed to respond, Lord Iron, born Edmund Scarasso, looked up at him. There was a terrible weariness in his eyes.

“I would know the fair price for a man’s soul,” he said.

“Forgive me?” Olaf said.

“You heard me,” Lord Iron said. “What would be a fit trade for a soul? I . . . I can’t tell any longer. And it is a question whose answer has . . . some relevance to my situation.”

In an instant, Olaf’s mind conjured the sitting room at the Club Baphomet. Lord Iron sitting in one deep leather chair, and the Prince of Lies across from him with a snifter of brandy in his black, clawed hands.

“I don’t think that would be a wise course to follow,” Olaf said, though in truth his mind was spinning out ways to avoid being party to this diabolism. He did not wish to make a case before that infernal judge. Lord Iron smiled and shook his head.

“There is no one in this besides yourself and me,” he said. “You are an expert in the exchange of exotic currencies. I can think of none more curious than this. Come to my house on Mammon Street in a month’s time. Tell me what conclusion you have reached.”

“My Lord—”

“I will make good on the investment of your time,” Lord Iron said, then rose and walked out, leaving the door open behind him.

Olaf gaped at the empty room. He was a cambist. Of theology, he knew only what he had heard in church. He had read more of satanic contracts in his adventure novels than in the Bible. He was, in fact, not wholly certain that the Bible had an example of a completed exchange. Satan had tempted Jesus. Perhaps there was something to be taken from the Gospel of Matthew . . .

Olaf spent the remainder of the night poring over his Bible and considering what monetary value might be assigned to the ability to change stones to bread. But as the dawn broke and he turned to his morning ablutions, he found himself unsatisfied. The devil might have tempted Christ with all the kingdoms of the world, but it was obvious that such an offer wouldn’t be open to everyone. He was approaching the problem from the wrong direction.

As he rode through the deep tunnels to Magdalen Gate, as he stopped at the newsstand for a morning paper, as he checked the ticker tape and updated his slate, his mind occupied itself by sifting through all the stories and folk wisdom he had ever heard. There had been a man who traded his soul to the devil for fame and wealth. Faust had done it for knowledge. Was there a way to represent the learning of Faust in terms of, say, semesters at the best universities of Europe? Then the rates of tuition might serve as a fingerhold.

It was nearly the day’s end before the question occurred to him that put Lord Iron’s commission in its proper light, and once that had happened, the answer was obvious. Olaf had to sit down, his mind afire with the answer and its implications. He didn’t go home, but took himself to a small public house. Over a pint and a stale sandwich, he mentally tested his hypothesis. With the second pint, he celebrated. With the third, he steeled himself, then went out to the street and hailed a carriage to take him to the house of Lord Iron.

Revelers had infected the household like fleas on a dying rat. Masked men and women shrieked with laughter, not all of which bespoke mirth. No servant came to take his coat or ask his invitation, so Olaf made his own way through the great halls. He passed through the whole of the building before emerging from the back and finding Lord Iron himself sitting at a fountain in the gardens. His lordship’s eyebrows rose to see Olaf, but he did not seem displeased.

“So soon, boy? It isn’t a month,” Lord Iron said as Olaf sat on the cool stone rail. The moon high above the city seemed also to dance in the water, lighting Lord Iron’s face from below and above at once.

“There was no need,” Olaf said. “I have your answer. But I will have to make something clear before I deliver it. If you will permit me?”

Lord Iron opened his hand in motion of deference. Olaf cleared his throat.

“Wealth,” he said, “is not a measure of money. It is a measure of well-being. Of happiness, if you will. Wealth is not traded, but rather is generated by trade. If you have a piece of art that I wish to own and I have money that you would prefer to the artwork, we trade. Each of us has something he prefers to the thing he gave away; otherwise, we would not have agreed on the trade. We are both better off. You see? Wealth is generated.”

“I believe I can follow you so far,” Lord Iron said. “Certainly I can agree that a fat wallet is no guarantor of contentment.”

“Very well. I considered your problem for the better part of the day. I confess I came near to despairing; there is no good data from which to work. But then I found my error. I assumed that your soul, my lord, was valuable. Clearly it is not.”

Lord Iron coughed out something akin to a laugh, shock in his expression. Olaf raised a hand, palm out, asking that he not interrupt.

“You are renowned for your practice of evil. This very evening, walking through your house, I have seen things for which I can imagine no proper penance. Why would Satan bother to buy your soul? He has rights to it already.”

“He does,” Lord Iron said, staring into the middle distance.

“And so I saw,” Olaf said. “You aren’t seeking to sell a soul. You are hoping to buy one.”

Lord Iron sighed and looked at his hands. He seemed smaller now. Not a supernatural being, but a man driven by human fears and passions to acts that could only goad him on to worse and worse actions. A man like any other, but with the wealth to magnify his errors into the scale of legend.

“You are correct, boy,” he said. “The angels wouldn’t have my soul if I drenched it in honey. I have . . . treated it poorly. It’s left me weary and sick. I am a waste of flesh. I know that. If there is no way to become a better man than this, I suspect the best path is to become a corpse.”

“I understand, my lord. Here is the answer to your question: the price of a soul is a life of humility and service.”

“Ah, is that all,” Lord Iron said, as if the cambist had suggested that he pull down the stars with his fingers.

“And as it happens,” Olaf went on, “I have one such with which I would be willing to part.”

Lord Iron met his gaze, began to laugh, and then went silent.

“Here,” Olaf said, “is what I propose . . .”

Edmund, the new cambist of the Magdalen Gate postal authority was, by all accounts, an adequate replacement for Olaf. Not as good, certainly. But his close-cropped hair and clean-shaven face leant him an eagerness that belonged on a younger man, and if he seemed sometimes more haughty than his position justified, it was a vice that lessened with every passing month. By Easter, he had even been asked to join in the Sunday picnic the girls in the accounting office sponsored. He seemed genuinely moved at the invitation.

The great scandal of the season was the disappearance of Lord Iron. The great beast of the city simply vanished one night. Rumor said that he had left his fortune and lands in trust. The identity of the trustee was a subject of tremendous speculation.

Olaf himself spent several months simply taking stock of his newfound position in the world. Once the financial situation was put in better order, he found himself with a substantial yearly allowance that still responsibly protected the initial capital.

He spent his monies traveling to India, Egypt, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, the unworldly underground cities of Persia. He saw the sun set off the Gold Coast and rise from the waters east of Japan. He heard war songs in the jungles of the Congo and sang children’s lullabies in a lonely tent made from yak skin in the dark of a Siberian winter.

And, when he paused to recover from the rigors and dangers of travel, he would retire to a cottage north of the city—the least of his holdings—and spend his time writing men’s adventure novels set in the places he had been.

He named his protagonist Lord Iron.

GLORY

Greg Egan

1

An ingot of metallic hydrogen gleamed in the starlight, a narrow cylinder half a meter long with a mass of about a kilogram. To the naked eye it was a dense, solid object, but its lattice of tiny nuclei immersed in an insubstantial fog of electrons was one part matter to two hundred trillion parts empty space. A short distance away was a second ingot, apparently identical to the first, but composed of antihydrogen.

A sequence of finely tuned gamma rays flooded into both cylinders. The protons that absorbed them in the first ingot spat out positrons and were transformed into neutrons, breaking their bonds to the electron cloud that glued them in place. In the second ingot, antiprotons became antineutrons.

A further sequence of pulses herded the neutrons together and forged them into clusters; the antineutrons were similarly rearranged. Both kinds of cluster were unstable, but in order to fall apart they first had to pass through a quantum state that would have strongly absorbed a component of the gamma rays constantly raining down on them. Left to themselves, the probability of their being in this state would have increased rapidly, but each time they measurably failed to absorb the gamma rays, the probability fell back to zero. The quantum Zeno effect endlessly reset the clock, holding the decay in check.

The next series of pulses began shifting the clusters into the space that had separated the original ingots. First neutrons, then antineutrons, were sculpted together in alternating layers. Though the clusters were ultimately unstable, while they persisted they were inert, sequestering their constituents and preventing them from annihilating their counterparts. The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide.

The gamma ray lasers shut down, the Zeno effect withdrew its prohibitions. For the time it took a beam of light to cross a neutron, the needle sat motionless in space. Then it began to burn, and it began to move.

The needle was structured like a meticulously crafted firework, and its outer layers ignited first. No external casing could have channeled this blast, but the pattern of tensions woven into the needle’s construction favored one direction for the debris to be expelled. Particles streamed backward; the needle moved forward. The shock of acceleration could not have been borne by anything built from atomic-scale matter, but the pressure bearing down on the core of the needle prolonged its life, delaying the inevitable.

Layer after layer burned itself away, blasting the dwindling remnant forward ever faster. By the time the needle had shrunk to a tenth of its original size it was moving at ninety-eight percent of light-speed; to a bystander this could scarcely have been improved upon, but from the needle’s perspective there was still room to slash its journey’s duration by orders of magnitude.

When just one thousandth of the needle remained, its time, compared to the neighboring stars, was passing two thousand times more slowly. Still the layers kept burning, the protective clusters unraveling as the pressure on them was released. The needle could only reach close enough to light-speed to slow down time as much as it required if it could sacrifice a large enough proportion of its remaining mass. The core of the needle could survive only for a few trillionths of a second, while its journey would take two hundred million seconds as judged by the stars. The proportions had been carefully matched, though: out of the two kilograms of matter and antimatter that had been woven together at the launch, only a few million neutrons were needed as the final payload.

By one measure, seven years passed. For the needle, its last trillionths of a second unwound, its final layers of fuel blew away, and at the moment its core was ready to explode it reached its destination, plunging from the near-vacuum of space straight into the heart of a star.

Even here, the density of matter was insufficient to stabilize the core, yet far too high to allow it to pass unhindered. The core was torn apart. But it did not go quietly, and the shock waves it carved through the fusing plasma endured for a million kilometers: all the way through to the cooler outer layers on the opposite side of the star. These shock waves were shaped by the payload that had formed them, and though the initial pattern imprinted on them by the disintegrating cluster of neutrons was enlarged and blurred by its journey, on an atomic scale it remained sharply defined. Like a mold stamped into the seething plasma it encouraged ionized molecular fragments to slip into the troughs and furrows that matched their shape, and then brought them together to react in ways that the plasma’s random collisions would never have allowed. In effect, the shock waves formed a web of catalysts, carefully laid out in both time and space, briefly transforming a small corner of the star into a chemical factory operating on a nanometer scale.

The products of this factory sprayed out of the star, riding the last traces of the shock wave’s momentum: a few nanograms of elaborate, carbon-rich molecules, sheathed in a protective fullerene weave. Traveling at seven hundred kilometers per second, a fraction below the velocity needed to escape from the star completely, they climbed out of its gravity well, slowing as they ascended.

Four years passed, but the molecules were stable against the ravages of space. By the time they’d traveled a billion kilometers they had almost come to a halt, and they would have fallen back to die in the fires of the star that had forged them if their journey had not been timed so that the star’s third planet, a gas giant, was waiting to urge them forward. As they fell toward it, the giant’s third moon moved across their path. Eleven years after the needle’s launch, its molecular offspring rained down onto the methane snow.

The tiny heat of their impact was not enough to damage them, but it melted a microscopic puddle in the snow. Surrounded by food, the molecular seeds began to grow. Within hours, the area was teeming with nanomachines, some mining the snow and the minerals beneath it, others assembling the bounty into an intricate structure, a rectangular panel a couple of meters wide.

From across the light-years, an elaborate sequence of gamma ray pulses fell upon the panel. These pulses were the needle’s true payload, the passengers for whom it had merely prepared the way, transmitted in its wake four years after its launch. The panel decoded and stored the data, and the army of nanomachines set to work again, this time following a far more elaborate blueprint. The miners were forced to look farther afield to find all the elements that were needed, while the assemblers labored to reach their goal through a sequence of intermediate stages, carefully designed to protect the final product from the vagaries of the local chemistry and climate.

After three months’ work, two small fusion-powered spacecraft sat in the snow. Each one held a single occupant, waking for the first time in their freshly minted bodies, yet endowed with memories of an earlier life.

Joan switched on her communications console. Anne appeared on the screen, three short pairs of arms folded across her thorax in a posture of calm repose. They had both worn virtual bodies with the same anatomy before, but this was the first time they had become Noudah in the flesh.

“We’re here. Everything worked,” Joan marveled. The language she spoke was not her own, but the structure of her new brain and body made it second nature.

Anne said, “Now comes the hard part.”

“Yes.” Joan looked out from the spacecraft’s cockpit. In the distance, a fissured blue-gray plateau of water ice rose above the snow. Nearby, the nanomachines were busy disassembling the gamma ray receiver. When they had erased all traces of their handiwork they would wander off into the snow and catalyze their own destruction.

Joan had visited dozens of planet-bound cultures in the past, taking on different bodies and languages as necessary, but those cultures had all been plugged into the Amalgam, the metacivilization that spanned the galactic disk. However far from home she’d been, the means to return to familiar places had always been close at hand. The Noudah had only just mastered interplanetary flight, and they had no idea that the Amalgam existed. The closest node in the Amalgam’s network was seven light-years away, and even that was out of bounds to her and Anne now: they had agreed not to risk disclosing its location to the Noudah, so any transmission they sent could be directed only to a decoy node that they’d set up more than twenty light-years away.

“It will be worth it,” Joan said.

Anne’s Noudah face was immobile, but chromatophores sent a wave of violet and gold sweeping across her skin in an expression of cautious optimism. “We’ll see.” She tipped her head to the left, a gesture preceding a friendly departure.

Joan tipped her own head in response, as if she’d been doing so all her life. “Be careful, my friend,” she said.

“You too.”

Anne’s ship ascended so high on its chemical thrusters that it shrank to a speck before igniting its fusion engine and streaking away in a blaze of light. Joan felt a pang of loneliness; there was no predicting when they would be reunited.

Her ship’s software was primitive; the whole machine had been scrupulously matched to the Noudah’s level of technology. Joan knew how to fly it herself if necessary, and on a whim she switched off the autopilot and manually activated the ascent thrusters. The control panel was crowded, but having six hands helped.

2

The world the Noudah called home was the closest of the system’s five planets to their sun. The average temperature was one hundred and twenty degrees Celsius, but the high atmospheric pressure allowed liquid water to exist across the entire surface. The chemistry and dynamics of the planet’s crust had led to a relatively flat terrain, with a patchwork of dozens of disconnected seas but no globe-spanning ocean. From space, these seas appeared as silvery mirrors, bordered by a violet and brown tarnish of vegetation.

The Noudah were already leaving their most electromagnetically promiscuous phase of communications behind, but the short-lived oasis of Amalgam-level technology on Baneth, the gas giant’s moon, had had no trouble eavesdropping on their chatter and preparing an updated cultural briefing which had been spliced into Joan’s brain.

The planet was still divided into the same eleven political units as it had been fourteen years before, the time of the last broadcasts that had reached the node before Joan’s departure. Tira and Ghahar, the two dominant nations in terms of territory, economic activity, and military power, also occupied the vast majority of significant Niah archaeological sites.

Joan had expected that they’d be noticed as soon as they left Baneth—the exhaust from their fusion engines glowed like the sun—but their departure had triggered no obvious response, and now that they were coasting they’d be far harder to spot. As Anne drew closer to the homeworld, she sent a message to Tira’s traffic control center. Joan tuned in to the exchange.

“I come in peace from another star,” Anne said. “I seek permission to land.”

There was a delay of several seconds more than the light-speed lag, then a terse response. “Please identify yourself and state your location.”

Anne transmitted her coordinates and flight plan.

“We confirm your location, please identify yourself.”

“My name is Anne. I come from another star.”

There was a long pause, then a different voice answered. “If you are from Ghahar, please explain your intentions.”

“I am not from Ghahar.”

“Why should I believe that? Show yourself.”

“I’ve taken the same shape as your people, in the hope of living among you for a while.” Anne opened a video channel and showed them her unremarkable Noudah face. “But there’s a signal being transmitted from these coordinates that might persuade you that I’m telling the truth.” She gave the location of the decoy node, twenty light-years away, and specified a frequency. The signal coming from the node contained an image of the very same face.

This time, the silence stretched out for several minutes. It would take a while for the Tirans to confirm the true distance of the radio source.

“You do not have permission to land. Please enter this orbit, and we will rendezvous and board your ship.”

Parameters for the orbit came through on the data channel. Anne said, “As you wish.”

Minutes later, Joan’s instruments picked up three fusion ships being launched from Tiran bases. When Anne reached the prescribed orbit, Joan listened anxiously to the instructions the Tirans issued. Their tone sounded wary, but they were entitled to treat this stranger with caution, all the more so if they believed Anne’s claim.

Joan was accustomed to a very different kind of reception, but then the members of the Amalgam had spent hundreds of millennia establishing a framework of trust. They also benefited from a milieu in which most kinds of force had been rendered ineffectual; when everyone had backups of themselves scattered around the galaxy, it required a vastly disproportionate effort to inconvenience someone, let alone kill them. By any reasonable measure, honesty and cooperation yielded far richer rewards than subterfuge and slaughter.

Nonetheless, each individual culture had its roots in a biological heritage that gave rise to behavior governed more by ancient urges than contemporary realities, and even when they mastered the technology to choose their own nature, the precise set of traits they preserved was up to them. In the worst case, a species still saddled with inappropriate drives but empowered by advanced technology could wreak havoc. The Noudah deserved to be treated with courtesy and respect, but they did not yet belong in the Amalgam.

The Tirans’ own exchanges were not on open channels, so once they had entered Anne’s ship Joan could only guess at what was happening. She waited until two of the ships had returned to the surface, then sent her own message to Ghahar’s traffic control.

“I come in peace from another star. I seek permission to land.”

3

The Ghahari allowed Joan to fly her ship straight down to the surface. She wasn’t sure if this was because they were more trusting, or if they were afraid that the Tirans might try to interfere if she lingered in orbit.

The landing site was a bare plain of chocolate-colored sand. The air shimmered in the heat, the distortions intensified by the thickness of the atmosphere, making the horizon waver as if seen through molten glass. Joan waited in the cockpit as three trucks approached; they all came to a halt some twenty meters away. A voice over the radio instructed her to leave the ship; she complied, and after she’d stood in the open for a minute, a lone Noudah left one of the trucks and walked toward her.

“I’m Pirit,” she said. “Welcome to Ghahar.” Her gestures were courteous but restrained.

“I’m Joan. Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Your impersonation of our biology is impeccable.” There was a trace of skepticism in Pirit’s tone; Joan had pointed the Ghahari to her own portrait being broadcast from the decoy node, but she had to admit that in the context her lack of exotic technology and traits would make it harder to accept the implications of that transmission.

“In my culture, it’s a matter of courtesy to imitate one’s hosts as closely as possible.”

Pirit hesitated, as if pondering whether to debate the merits of such a custom, but then rather than quibbling over the niceties of interspecies etiquette she chose to confront the real issue head-on. “If you’re a Tiran spy, or a defector, the sooner you admit that the better.”

“That’s very sensible advice, but I’m neither.”

The Noudah wore no clothing as such, but Pirit had a belt with a number of pouches. She took a handheld scanner from one and ran it over Joan’s body. Joan’s briefing suggested that it was probably only checking for metal, volatile explosives, and radiation; the technology to image her body or search for pathogens would not be so portable. In any case, she was a healthy, unarmed Noudah down to the molecular level.

Pirit escorted her to one of the trucks, and invited her to recline in a section at the back. Another Noudah drove while Pirit watched over Joan. They soon arrived at a small complex of buildings a couple of kilometers from where the ship had touched down. The walls, roofs, and floors of the buildings were all made from the local sand, cemented with an adhesive that the Noudah secreted from their own bodies.

Inside, Joan was given a thorough medical examination, including three kinds of full-body scan. The Noudah who examined her treated her with a kind of detached efficiency devoid of any pleasantries; she wasn’t sure if that was their standard bedside manner, or a kind of glazed shock at having been told of her claimed origins.

Pirit took her to an adjoining room and offered her a couch. The Noudah anatomy did not allow for sitting, but they liked to recline.

Pirit remained standing. “How did you come here?” she asked.

“You’ve seen my ship. I flew it from Baneth.”

“And how did you reach Baneth?”

“I’m not free to discuss that,” Joan replied cheerfully.

“Not free?” Pirit’s face clouded with silver, as if she were genuinely perplexed.

Joan said, “You understand me perfectly. Please don’t tell me there’s nothing you’re not free to discuss with me.”

“You certainly didn’t fly that ship twenty light-years.”

“No, I certainly didn’t.”

Pirit hesitated. “Did you come through the Cataract?” The Cataract was a black hole, a remote partner to the Noudah’s sun; they orbited each other at a distance of about eighty billion kilometers. The name came from its telescopic appearance: a dark circle ringed by a distortion in the background of stars, like some kind of visual aberration. The Tirans and Ghahari were in a race to be the first to visit this extraordinary neighbor, but as yet neither of them were quite up to the task.

“Through the Cataract? I think your scientists have already proven that black holes aren’t shortcuts to anywhere.”

“Our scientists aren’t always right.”

“Neither are ours,” Joan admitted, “but all the evidence points in one direction: black holes aren’t doorways, they’re shredding machines.”

“So you traveled the whole twenty light-years?”

“More than that,” Joan said truthfully “from my original home. I’ve spent half my life traveling.”

“Faster than light?” Pirit suggested hopefully.

“No. That’s impossible.”

They circled around the question a dozen more times, before Pirit finally changed her tune from how to why?

“I’m a xenomathematician,” Joan said. “I’ve come here in the hope of collaborating with your archaeologists in their study of Niah artifacts.”

Pirit was stunned. “What do you know about the Niah?”

“Not as much as I’d like to.” Joan gestured at her Noudah body. “As I’m sure you’ve already surmised, we’ve listened to your broadcasts for some time, so we know pretty much what an ordinary Noudah knows. That includes the basic facts about the Niah. Historically they’ve been referred to as your ancestors, though the latest studies suggest that you and they really just have an earlier common ancestor. They died out about a million years ago, but there’s evidence that they might have had a sophisticated culture for as long as three million years. There’s no indication that they ever developed space flight. Basically, once they achieved material comfort, they seem to have devoted themselves to various art forms, including mathematics.”

“So you’ve traveled twenty light-years just to look at Niah tablets?” Pirit was incredulous.

“Any culture that spent three million years doing mathematics must have something to teach us.”

“Really?” Pirit’s face became blue with disgust. “In the ten thousand years since we discovered the wheel, we’ve already reached halfway to the Cataract. They wasted their time on useless abstractions.”

Joan said, “I come from a culture of spacefarers myself, so I respect your achievements. But I don’t think anyone really knows what the Niah achieved. I’d like to find out, with the help of your people.”

Pirit was silent for a while. “What if we say no?”

“Then I’ll leave empty-handed.”

“What if we insist that you remain with us?”

“Then I’ll die here, empty-handed.” On her command, this body would expire in an instant; she could not be held and tortured.

Pirit said angrily, “You must be willing to trade something for the privilege you’re demanding!”

“Requesting, not demanding,” Joan insisted gently. “And what I’m willing to offer is my own culture’s perspective on Niah mathematics. If you ask your archaeologists and mathematicians, I’m sure they’ll tell you that there are many things written in the Niah tablets that they don’t yet understand. My colleague and I”—neither of them had mentioned Anne before, but Joan was sure that Pirit knew all about her—“simply want to shed as much light as we can on this subject.”

Pirit said bitterly, “You won’t even tell us how you came to our world. Why should we trust you to share whatever you discover about the Niah?”

“Interstellar travel is no great mystery,” Joan countered. “You know all the basic science already; making it work is just a matter of persistence. If you’re left to develop your own technology, you might even come up with better methods than we have.”

“So we’re expected to be patient, to discover these things for ourselves . . . but you can’t wait a few centuries for us to decipher the Niah artifacts?”

Joan said bluntly, “The present Noudah culture, both here and in Tira, seems to hold the Niah in contempt. Dozens of partially excavated sites containing Niah artifacts are under threat from irrigation projects and other developments. That’s the reason we couldn’t wait. We needed to come here and offer our assistance, before the last traces of the Niah disappeared forever.”

Pirit did not reply, but Joan hoped she knew what her interrogator was thinking: Nobody would cross twenty light-years for a few worthless scribblings. Perhaps we’ve underestimated the Niah. Perhaps our ancestors have left us a great secret, a great legacy. And perhaps the fastest—perhaps the only—way to uncover it is to give this impertinent, irritating alien exactly what she wants.

4

The sun was rising ahead of them as they reached the top of the hill. Sando turned to Joan, and his face became green with pleasure. “Look behind you,” he said.

Joan did as he asked. The valley below was hidden in fog, and it had settled so evenly that she could see their shadows in the dawn light, stretched out across the top of the fog layer. Around the shadow of her head was a circular halo like a small rainbow.

“We call it the Niah’s light,” Sando said. “In the old days, people used to say that the halo proved that the Niah blood was strong in you.”

Joan said, “The only trouble with that hypothesis being that you see it around your head . . . and I see it around mine.” On Earth, the phenomenon was known as a “glory.” The particles of fog were scattering the sunlight back toward them, turning it one hundred and eighty degrees. To look at the shadow of your own head was to face directly away from the sun, so the halo always appeared around the observers shadow.

“I suppose you’re the final proof that Niah blood has nothing to do with it,” Sando mused.

“That’s assuming I’m telling you the truth, and I really can see it around my own head.”

“And assuming,” Sando added, “that the Niah really did stay at home, and didn’t wander around the galaxy spreading their progeny.”

They came over the top of the hill and looked down into the adjoining riverine valley. The sparse brown grass of the hillside gave way to a lush violet growth closer to the water. Joan’s arrival had delayed the flooding of the valley, but even alien interest in the Niah had only bought the archaeologists an extra year. The dam was part of a long-planned agricultural development, and however tantalizing the possibility that Joan might reveal some priceless insight hidden among the Niah’s “useless abstractions,” that vague promise could only compete with more tangible considerations for a limited time.

Part of the hill had fallen away in a landslide a few centuries before, revealing more than a dozen beautifully preserved strata. When Joan and Sando reached the excavation site, Rali and Surat were already at work, clearing away soft sedimentary rock from a layer that Sando had dated as belonging to the Niah’s “twilight” period.

Pirit had insisted that only Sando, the senior archaeologist, be told about Joan’s true nature; Joan refused to lie to anyone, but had agreed to tell her colleagues only that she was a mathematician and that she was not permitted to discuss her past. At first this had made them guarded and resentful, no doubt because they assumed that she was some kind of spy sent by the authorities to watch over them. Later it had dawned on them that she was genuinely interested in their work, and that the absurd restrictions on her topics of conversation were not of her own choosing. Nothing about the Noudah’s language or appearance correlated strongly with their recent division into nations—with no oceans to cross, and a long history of migration they were more or less geographically homogeneous—but Joan’s odd name and occasional faux pas could still be ascribed to some mysterious exoticism. Rali and Surat seemed content to assume that she was a defector from one of the smaller nations, and that her history could not be made explicit for obscure political reasons.

“There are more tablets here, very close to the surface,” Rali announced excitedly. “The acoustics are unmistakable.” Ideally they would have excavated the entire hillside, but they did not have the time or the labor, so they were using acoustic tomography to identify likely deposits of accessible Niah writing, and then concentrating their efforts on those spots.

The Niah had probably had several ephemeral forms of written communication, but when they found something worth publishing, it stayed published: they carved their symbols into a ceramic that made diamond seem like tissue paper. It was almost unheard of for the tablets to be broken, but they were small, and multitablet works were sometimes widely dispersed. Niah technology could probably have carved three million years’ worth of knowledge onto the head of a pin—they seemed not to have invented nanomachines, but they were into high-quality bulk materials and precision engineering—but for whatever reason they had chosen legibility to the naked eye above other considerations.

Joan made herself useful, taking acoustic readings farther along the slope, while Sando watched over his students as they came closer to the buried Niah artifacts. She had learned not to hover around expectantly when a discovery was imminent; she was treated far more warmly if she waited to be summoned. The tomography unit was almost foolproof, using satellite navigation to track its position and software to analyze the signals it gathered; all it really needed was someone to drag it along the rock face at a suitable pace.

From the corner of her eye, Joan noticed her shadow on the rocks flicker and grow complicated. She looked up to see three dazzling beads of light flying west out of the sun. She might have assumed that the fusion ships were doing something useful, but the media was full of talk of “military exercises,” which meant the Tirans and the Ghahari were engaging in expensive, belligerent gestures in orbit, trying to convince each other of their superior skills, technology, or sheer strength of numbers. For people with no real differences apart from a few centuries of recent history, they could puff up their minor political disputes into matters of the utmost solemnity. It might almost have been funny, if the idiots hadn’t incinerated hundreds of thousands of each other’s citizens every few decades, not to mention playing callous and often deadly games with the lives of the inhabitants of smaller nations.

“Jown! Jown! Come and look at this!” Surat called to her. Joan switched off the tomography unit and jogged toward the archaeologists, suddenly conscious of her body’s strangeness. Her legs were stumpy but strong, and her balance as she ran came not from arms and shoulders but from the swish of her muscular tail.

“It’s a significant mathematical result,” Rali informed her proudly when she reached them. He’d pressure-washed the sandstone away from the near-indestructible ceramic of the tablet, and it was only a matter of holding the surface at the right angle to the light to see the etched writing stand out as crisply and starkly as it would have a million years before.

Rali was not a mathematician, and he was not offering his own opinion on the theorem the tablet stated; the Niah themselves had had a clear set of typographical conventions which they used to distinguish between everything from minor lemmas to the most celebrated theorems. The size and decorations of the symbols labeling the theorem attested to its value in the Niah’s eyes.

Joan read the theorem carefully. The proof was not included on the same tablet, but the Niah had a way of expressing their results that made you believe them as soon as you read them; in this case the definitions of the terms needed to state the theorem were so beautifully chosen that the result seemed almost inevitable.

The theorem itself was expressed as a commuting hypercube, one of the Niah’s favorite forms. You could think of a square with four different sets of mathematical objects associated with each of its corners, and a way of mapping one set into another associated with each edge of the square. If the maps commuted, then going across the top of the square, then down, had exactly the same effect as going down the left edge of the square, then across: either way, you mapped each element from the top-left set into the same element of the bottom-right set. A similar kind of result might hold for sets and maps that could naturally be placed at the corners and edges of a cube, or a hypercube of any dimension. It was also possible for the square faces in these structures to stand for relationships that held between the maps between sets, and for cubes to describe relationships between those relationships, and so on.

That a theorem took this form didn’t guarantee its importance; it was easy to cook up trivial examples of sets and maps that commuted. The Niah didn’t carve trivia into their timeless ceramic, though, and this theorem was no exception. The seven-dimensional commuting hypercube established a dazzlingly elegant correspondence between seven distinct, major branches of Niah mathematics, intertwining their most important concepts into a unified whole. It was a result Joan had never seen before: no mathematician anywhere in the Amalgam, or in any ancestral culture she had studied, had reached the same insight.

She explained as much of this as she could to the three archaeologists; they couldn’t take in all the details, but their faces became orange with fascination when she sketched what she thought the result would have meant to the Niah themselves.

“This isn’t quite the Big Crunch,” she joked, “but it must have made them think they were getting closer.”

“The Big Crunch” was her nickname for the mythical result that the Niah had aspired to reach: a unification of every field of mathematics that they considered significant. To find such a thing would not have meant the end of mathematics—it would not have subsumed every last conceivable, interesting mathematical truth—but it would certainly have marked a point of closure for the Niah’s own style of investigation.

“I’m sure they found it,” Surat insisted. “They reached the Big Crunch, then they had nothing more to live for.”

Rali was scathing. “So the whole culture committed collective suicide?”

“Not actively, no,” Surat replied. “But it was the search that had kept them going.”

“Entire cultures don’t lose the will to live,” Rali said. “They get wiped out by external forces: disease, invasion, changes in climate.”

“The Niah survived for three million years,” Surat countered. “They had the means to weather all of those forces. Unless they were wiped out by alien invaders with vastly superior technology.” She turned to Joan. “What do you think?”

“About aliens destroying the Niah?”

“I was joking about the aliens. But what about the mathematics? What if they found the Big Crunch?”

“There’s more to life than mathematics,” Joan said. “But not much more.”

Sando said, “And there’s more to this find than one tablet. If we get back to work, we might have the proof in our hands before sunset.”

5

Joan briefed Halzoun by video link while Sando prepared the evening meal. Halzoun was the mathematician Pirit had appointed to supervise her, but apparently his day job was far too important to allow him to travel. Joan was grateful; Halzoun was the most tedious Noudah she had encountered. He could understand the Niah’s work when she explained it to him, but he seemed to have no interest in it for its own sake. He spent most of their conversations trying to catch her out in some deception or contradiction, and the rest pressing her to imagine military or commercial applications of the Niah’s gloriously useless insights. Sometimes she played along with this infantile fantasy, hinting at potential superweapons based on exotic physics that might come tumbling out of the vacuum, if only one possessed the right Niah theorems to coax them into existence.

Sando was her minder too, but at least he was more subtle about it. Pirit had insisted that she stay in his shelter, rather than sharing Rali and Surat’s; Joan didn’t mind, because with Sando she didn’t have the stress of having to keep quiet about everything. Privacy and modesty were nonissues for the Noudah, and Joan had become Noudah enough not to care herself. Nor was there any danger of their proximity leading to a sexual bond; the Noudah had a complex system of biochemical cues that meant desire only arose in couples with a suitable mixture of genetic differences and similarities. She would have had to search a crowded Noudah city for a week to find someone to lust after, though at least it would have been guaranteed to be mutual.

After they’d eaten, Sando said, “You should be happy. That was our best find yet.”

“I am happy.” Joan made a conscious effort to exhibit a viridian tinge. “It was the first new result I’ve seen on this planet. It was the reason I came here, the reason I traveled so far.”

“Something’s wrong, though, I think.”

“I wish I could have shared the news with my friend,” Joan admitted. Pirit claimed to be negotiating with the Tirans to allow Anne to communicate with her, but Joan was not convinced that she was genuinely trying.

She was sure that Pirit would have relished the thought of listening in on a conversation between the two of them—while forcing them to speak Noudah, of course—in the hope that they’d slip up and reveal something useful, but at the same time she would have had to face the fact that the Tirans would be listening too. What an excruciating dilemma.

“You should have brought a communications link with you,” Sando suggested. “A home-style one, I mean. Nothing we could eavesdrop on.”

“We couldn’t do that,” Joan said.

He pondered this. “You really are afraid of us, aren’t you? You think the smallest technological trinket will be enough to send us straight to the stars, and then you’ll have a horde of rampaging barbarians to deal with.”

“We know how to deal with barbarians,” Joan said coolly.

Sando’s face grew dark with mirth. “Now I’m afraid.”

“I just wish I knew what was happening to her,” Joan said. “What she was doing, how they were treating her.”

“Probably much the same as we’re treating you,” Sando suggested. “We’re really not that different.” He thought for a moment. “There was something I wanted to show you.” He brought over his portable console, and summoned up an article from a Tiran journal. “See what a borderless world we live in,” he joked.

The article was entitled “Seekers and Spreaders: What We Must Learn from the Niah.” Sando said, “This might give you some idea of how they’re thinking over there. Jaqad is an academic archaeologist, but she’s also very close to the people in power.”

Joan read from the console while Sando made repairs to their shelter, secreting a molasseslike substance from a gland at the tip of his tail and spreading it over the cracks in the walls.

There were two main routes a culture could take, Jaqad argued, once it satisfied its basic material needs. One was to think and study: to stand back and observe, to seek knowledge and insight from the world around it. The other was to invest its energy in entrenching its good fortune.

The Niah had learned a great deal in three million years, but in the end it had not been enough to save them. Exactly what had killed them was still a matter of speculation, but it was hard to believe that if they had colonized other worlds they would have vanished on all of them. “Had the Niah been Spreaders,” Jaqad wrote, “we might expect a visit from them, or them from us, sometime in the coming centuries.”

The Noudah, in contrast, were determined Spreaders. Once they had the means, they would plant colonies across the galaxy. They would, Jaqad was sure, create new biospheres, reengineer stars, and even alter space and time to guarantee their survival. The growth of their empire would come first; any knowledge that failed to serve that purpose would be a mere distraction. “In any competition between Seekers and Spreaders, it is a Law of History that the Spreaders must win out in the end. Seekers, such as the Niah, might hog resources and block the way, but in the long run their own nature will be their downfall.”

Joan stopped reading. “When you look out into the galaxy with your telescopes,” she asked Sando, “how many reengineered stars do you see?”

“Would we recognize them?”

“Yes. Natural stellar processes aren’t that complicated; your scientists already know everything there is to know about the subject.”

“I’ll take your word for that. So . . . you’re saying Jaqad is wrong? The Niah themselves never left this world, but the galaxy already belongs to creatures more like them than like us?”

“It’s not Noudah versus Niah,” Joan said. “It’s a matter of how a culture’s perspective changes with time. Once a species conquers disease, modifies their biology, and spreads even a short distance beyond their homeworld, they usually start to relax a bit. The territorial imperative isn’t some timeless Law of History; it belongs to a certain phase.”

“What if it persists, though? Into a later phase?”

“That can cause friction,” Joan admitted.

“Nevertheless, no Spreaders have conquered the galaxy?”

“Not yet.”

Sando went back to his repairs; Joan read the rest of the article. She’d thought she’d already grasped the lesson demanded by the subtitle, but it turned out that Jaqad had something more specific in mind.

“Having argued this way, how can I defend my own field of study from the very same charges as I have brought against the Niah? Having grasped the essential character of this doomed race, why should we waste our time and resources studying them further?

“The answer is simple. We still do not know exactly how and why the Niah died, but when we do, that could turn out to be the most important discovery in history. When we finally leave our world behind, we should not expect to find only other Spreaders to compete with us, as honorable opponents in battle. There will be Seekers as well, blocking the way. Tired, old races squatting uselessly on their hoards of knowledge and wealth.

“Time will defeat them in the end, but we already waited three million years to be born; we should have no patience to wait again. If we can learn how the Niah died, that will be our key, that will be our weapon. If we know the Seekers’ weakness, we can find a way to hasten their demise.”

6

The proof of the Niah’s theorem turned out to be buried deep in the hillside, but over the following days they extracted it all.

It was as beautiful and satisfying as Joan could have wished, merging six earlier, simpler theorems while extending the techniques used in their proofs. She could even see hints of how the same methods might be stretched further to yield still stronger results. “The Big Crunch” had always been a slightly mocking, irreverent term, but now she was struck anew by how little justice it did to the real trend that had fascinated the Niah. It was not a matter of everything in mathematics collapsing in on itself, with one branch turning out to have been merely a recapitulation of another under a different guise. Rather, the principle was that every sufficiently beautiful mathematical system was rich enough to mirror in part—and sometimes in a complex and distorted fashion—every other sufficiently beautiful system. Nothing became sterile and redundant, nothing proved to have been a waste of time, but everything was shown to be magnificently intertwined.

After briefing Halzoun, Joan used the satellite dish to transmit the theorem and its proof to the decoy node. That had been the deal with Pirit: anything she learned from the Niah belonged to the whole galaxy, as long as she explained it to her hosts first.

The archaeologists moved across the hillside, hunting for more artifacts in the same layer of sediment. Joan was eager to see what else the same group of Niah might have published. One possible eight-dimensional hypercube was hovering in her mind; if she’d sat down and thought about it for a few decades she might have worked out the details herself, but the Niah did what they did so well that it would have seemed crass to try to follow clumsily in their footsteps when their own immaculately polished results might simply be lying in the ground, waiting to be uncovered.

A month after the discovery, Joan was woken by the sound of an intruder moving through the shelter. She knew it wasn’t Sando; even as she slept an ancient part of her Noudah brain was listening to his heartbeat. The stranger’s heart was too quiet to hear, which required great discipline, but the shelter’s flexible adhesive made the floor emit a characteristic squeak beneath even the gentlest footsteps. As she rose from her couch she heard Sando waking, and she turned in his direction.

Bright torchlight on his face dazzled her for a moment. The intruder held two knives to Sando’s respiration membranes; a deep enough cut there would mean choking to death, in excruciating pain. The nanomachines that had built Joan’s body had wired extensive skills in unarmed combat into her brain, and one scenario involving a feigned escape attempt followed by a sideways flick of her powerful tail was already playing out in the back of her mind, but as yet she could see no way to guarantee that Sando came through it all unharmed.

She said, “What do you want?”

The intruder remained in darkness. “Tell me about the ship that brought you to Baneth.”

“Why?”

“Because it would be a shame to shred your colleague here, just when his work was going so well.” Sando refused to show any emotion on his face, but the blank pallor itself was as stark an expression of fear as anything Joan could imagine.

She said, “There’s a coherent state that can be prepared for a quark-gluon plasma in which virtual black holes catalyze baryon decay. In effect, you can turn all of your fuel’s rest mass into photons, yielding the most efficient exhaust stream possible.” She recited a long list of technical details. The claimed baryon decay process didn’t actually exist, but the pseudophysics underpinning it was mathematically consistent, and could not be ruled out by anything the Noudah had yet observed. She and Anne had prepared an entire fictitious science and technology, and even a fictitious history of their culture, precisely for emergencies like this; they could spout red herrings for a decade if necessary, and never get caught out contradicting themselves.

“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” the intruder gloated.

“What now?”

“You’re going to take a trip with me. If you do this nicely, nobody needs to get hurt.”

Something moved in the shadows, and the intruder screamed in pain. Joan leaped forward and knocked one of the knives out of his hand with her tail; the other knife grazed Sando’s membrane, but a second tail whipped out of the darkness and intervened. As the intruder fell backward, the beam of his torch revealed Surat and Rali tensed beside him, and a pick buried deep in his side.

Joan’s rush of combat hormones suddenly faded, and she let out a long, deep wail of anguish. Sando was unscathed, but a stream of dark liquid was pumping out of the intruder’s wound.

Surat was annoyed. “Stop blubbing, and help us tie up this Tiran cousin-fucker.”

“Tie him up? You’ve killed him!”

“Don’t be stupid, that’s just sheath fluid.” Joan recalled her Noudah anatomy; sheath fluid was like oil in a hydraulic machine. You could lose it all and it would cost you most of the strength in your limbs and tail, but you wouldn’t die, and your body would make more eventually.

Rali found some cable and they trussed up the intruder. Sando was shaken, but he seemed to be recovering. He took Joan aside. “I’m going to have to call Pirit.”

“I understand. But what will he do to these two?” She wasn’t sure exactly how much Rali and Surat had heard, but it was certain to have been more than Pirit wanted them to know.

“Don’t worry about that, I can protect them.”

Just before dawn someone sent by Pirit arrived in a truck to take the intruder away. Sando declared a rest day, and Rali and Surat went back to their shelter to sleep. Joan went for a walk along the hillside; she didn’t feel like sleeping.

Sando caught up with her. He said, “I told them you’d been working on a military research project, and you were exiled here for some political misdemeanor.”

“And they believed you?”

“All they heard was half of a conversation full of incomprehensible physics. All they know is that someone thought you were worth kidnapping.”

Joan said, “I’m sorry about what happened.”

Sando hesitated. “What did you expect?”

Joan was stung. “One of us went to Tira, one of us came here. We thought that would keep everyone happy!”

“We’re Spreaders,” said Sando. “Give us one of anything, and we want two. Especially if our enemy has the other one. Did you really think you could come here, do a bit of fossicking, and then simply fly away without changing a thing?”

“Your culture has always believed there were other civilizations in the galaxy. Our existence hardly came as a shock.”

Sando’s face became yellow, an expression of almost parental reproach. “Believing in something in the abstract is not the same as having it dangled in front of you. We were never going to have an existential crisis at finding out that we’re not unique; the Niah might be related to us, but they were still alien enough to get us used to the idea. But did you really think we were just going to relax and accept your refusal to share your technology? That one of you went to the Tirans only makes it worse for the Ghahari, and vice versa. Both governments are going absolutely crazy, each one terrified that the other has found a way to make its alien talk.”

Joan stopped walking. “The war games, the border skirmishes? You’re blaming all of that on Anne and me?”

Sando’s body sagged wearily. “To be honest, I don’t know all the details. And if it’s any consolation, I’m sure we would have found another reason if you hadn’t come along.”

Joan said, “Maybe I should leave.” She was tired of these people, tired of her body, tired of being cut off from civilization. She had rescued one beautiful Niah theorem and sent it out into the Amalgam. Wasn’t that enough?

“It’s up to you,” Sando replied. “But you might as well stay until they flood the valley. Another year isn’t going to change anything. What you’ve done to this world has already been done. For us, there’s no going back.”

7

Joan stayed with the archaeologists as they moved across the hillside. They found tablets bearing Niah drawings and poetry, which no doubt had their virtues but to Joan seemed bland and opaque. Sando and his students relished these discoveries as much as the theorems; to them, the Niah culture was a vast jigsaw puzzle, and any clue that filled in the details of their history was as good as any other.

Sando would have told Pirit everything he’d heard from Joan the night the intruder came, so she was surprised that she hadn’t been summoned for a fresh interrogation to flesh out the details. Perhaps the Ghahari physicists were still digesting her elaborate gobbledygook, trying to decide if it made sense. In her more cynical moments she wondered if the intruder might have been Ghahari himself, sent by Pirit to exploit her friendship with Sando. Perhaps Sando had even been in on it, and Rah and Surat as well. The possibility made her feel as if she were living in a fabricated world, a scape in which nothing was real and nobody could be trusted. The only thing she was certain that the Ghaharis could not have faked was the Niah artifacts. The mathematics verified itself; everything else was subject to doubt and paranoia.

Summer came, burning away the morning fogs. The Noudah’s idea of heat was very different from Joan’s previous perceptions, but even the body she now wore found the midday sun oppressive. She willed herself to be patient. There was still a chance that the Niah had taken a few more steps toward their grand vision of a unified mathematics, and carved their final discoveries into the form that would outlive them by a million years.

When the lone fusion ship appeared high in the afternoon sky, Joan resolved to ignore it. She glanced up once, but she kept dragging the tomography unit across the ground. She was sick of thinking about Tiran-Ghahari politics. They had played their childish games for centuries; she would not take the blame for this latest outbreak of provocation.

Usually the ships flew by, disappearing within minutes, showing off their power and speed. This one lingered, weaving back and forth across the sky like some dazzling insect performing an elaborate mating dance. Joan’s second shadow darted around her feet, hammering a strangely familiar rhythm into her brain.

She looked up, disbelieving. The motion of the ship was following the syntax of a gestural language she had learned on another planet, in another body, a dozen lifetimes ago. The only other person on this world who could know that language was Anne.

She glanced toward the archaeologists a hundred meters away, but they seemed to be paying no attention to the ship. She switched off the tomography unit and stared into the sky. I’m listening, my friend. What’s happening? Did they give you back your ship? Have you had enough of this world, and decided to go home?

Anne told the story in shorthand, compressed and elliptic. The Tirans had found a tablet bearing a theorem: the last of the Niah’s discoveries, the pinnacle of their achievements. Her minders had not let her study it, but they had contrived a situation making it easy for her to steal it, and to steal this ship. They had wanted her to take it and run, in the hope that she would lead them to something they valued far more than any ancient mathematics: an advanced spacecraft, or some magical stargate at the edge of the system.

But Anne wasn’t fleeing anywhere. She was high above Ghahar, reading the tablet, and now she would paint what she read across the sky for Joan to see.

Sando approached. “We’re in danger, we have to move.”

“Danger? That’s my friend up there! She’s not going to shoot a missile at us!”

“Your friend?” Sando seemed confused. As he spoke, three more ships came into view, lower and brighter than the first. “I’ve been told that the Tirans are going to strike the valley, to bury the Niah sites. We need to get over the hill and indoors, to get some protection from the blast.”

“Why would the Tirans attack the Niah sites? That makes no sense to me.”

Sando said, “Nor me, but I don’t have time to argue.”

The three ships were menacing Anne’s, pursuing her, trying to drive her away. Joan had no idea if they were Ghahari defending their territory, or Tirans harassing her in the hope that she would flee and reveal the nonexistent shortcut to the stars, but Anne was staying put, still weaving the same gestural language into her maneuvers even as she dodged her pursuers, spelling out the Niah’s glorious finale.

Joan said, “You go. I have to see this.” She tensed, ready to fight him if necessary.

Sando took something from his tool belt and peppered her side with holes. Joan gasped with pain and crumpled to the ground as the sheath fluid poured out of her.

Rali and Surat helped carry her to the shelter. Joan caught glimpses of the fiery ballet in the sky, but not enough to make sense of it, let alone reconstruct it.

They put her on her couch inside the shelter. Sando bandaged her side and gave her water to sip. He said, “I’m sorry I had to do that, but if anything had happened to you I would have been held responsible.”

Surat kept ducking outside to check on the “battle,” then reporting excitedly on the state of play. “The Tirans still up there, they can’t get rid of it. I don’t know why they haven’t shot it down yet.”

Because the Tirans were the ones pursuing Anne, and they didn’t want her dead. But for how long would the Ghahari tolerate this violation?

Anne’s efforts could not be allowed to come to nothing. Joan struggled to recall the constellations she’d last seen in the night sky. At the node they’d departed from, powerful telescopes were constantly trained on the Noudah’s homeworld. Anne’s ship was easily bright enough, its gestures wide enough, to be resolved from seven light-years away—if the planet itself wasn’t blocking the view, if the node was above the horizon.

The shelter was windowless, but Joan saw the ground outside the doorway brighten for an instant. The flash was silent; no missile had struck the valley, the explosion had taken place high above the atmosphere.

Surat went outside. When she returned she said quietly, “All clear. They got it.”

Joan put all her effort into spitting out a handful of words. “I want to see what happened.”

Sando hesitated, then motioned to the others to help him pick up the couch and carry it outside.

A shell of glowing plasma was still visible, drifting across the sky as it expanded, a ring of light growing steadily fainter until it vanished into the afternoon glare.

Anne was dead in this embodiment, but her backup would wake and go on to new adventures. Joan could at least tell her the story of her local death: of virtuoso flying and a spectacular end.

She’d recovered her bearings now, and she recalled the position of the stars. The node was still hours away from rising. The Amalgam was full of powerful telescopes, but no others would be aimed at this obscure planet, and no plea to redirect them could outrace the light they would need to capture in order to bring the Niah’s final theorem back to life.

8

Sando wanted to send her away for medical supervision, but Joan insisted on remaining at the site.

“The fewer officials who get to know about this incident, the fewer problems it makes for you,” she reasoned.

“As long as you don’t get sick and die,” he replied.

“I’m not going to die.” Her wounds had not become infected, and her strength was returning rapidly.

They compromised. Sando hired someone to drive up from the nearest town to look after her while he was out at the excavation. Daya had basic medical training and didn’t ask awkward questions; he seemed happy to tend to Joan’s needs, and then lie outside daydreaming the rest of the time.

There was still a chance, Joan thought, that the Niah had carved the theorem on a multitude of tablets and scattered them all over the planet. There was also a chance that the Tirans had made copies of the tablet before letting Anne abscond with it. The question, though, was whether she had the slightest prospect of getting her hands on these duplicates.

Anne might have made some kind of copy herself, but she hadn’t mentioned it in the prologue to her aerobatic rendition of the theorem. If she’d had any time to spare, she wouldn’t have limited herself to an audience of one: she would have waited until the node had risen over Ghahar.

On her second night as an invalid, Joan dreamed that she saw Anne standing on the hill looking back into the fog-shrouded valley, her shadow haloed by the Niah light.

When she woke, she knew what she had to do.

When Sando left, she asked Daya to bring her the console that controlled the satellite dish. She had enough strength in her arms now to operate it, and Daya showed no interest in what she did. That was naive, of course: whether or not Daya was spying on her, Pirit would know exactly where the signal was sent. So be it. Seven light-years was still far beyond the Noudah’s reach; the whole node could be disassembled and erased long before they came close.

No message could outrace light directly, but there were more ways for light to reach the node than the direct path, the fastest one. Every black hole had its glory, twisting light around it in a tight, close orbit and flinging it back out again. Seventy-four hours after the original image was lost to them, the telescopes at the node could still turn to the Cataract and scour the distorted, compressed image of the sky at the rim of the hole’s black disk to catch a replay of Anne’s ballet.

Joan composed the message and entered the coordinates of the node. You didn’t die for nothing, my friend. When you wake and see this, you’ll be proud of us both.

She hesitated, her hand hovering above the send key. The Tirans had wanted Anne to flee, to show them the way to the stars, but had they really been indifferent to the loot they’d let her carry? The theorem had come at the end of the Niah’s three-million-year reign. To witness this beautiful truth would not destroy the Amalgam, but might it not weaken it? If the Seekers’ thirst for knowledge was slaked, their sense of purpose corroded, might not the most crucial strand of the culture fall into a twilight of its own? There was no shortcut to the stars, but the Noudah had been goaded by their alien visitors, and the technology would come to them soon enough.

The Amalgam had been goaded too: the theorem she’d already transmitted would send a wave of excitement around the galaxy, strengthening the Seekers, encouraging them to complete the unification by their own efforts. The Big Crunch might be inevitable, but at least she could delay it, and hope that the robustness and diversity of the Amalgam would carry them through it, and beyond.

She erased the message and wrote a new one, addressed to her backup via the decoy node. It would have been nice to upload all her memories, but the Noudah were ruthless, and she wasn’t prepared to stay any longer and risk being used by them. This sketch, this postcard, would have to be enough.

When the transmission was complete she left a note for Sando in the console’s memory.

Daya called out to her, “Jown? Do you need anything?”

She said, “No. I’m going to sleep for a while.”

DARK INTEGERS

Greg Egan

“Good morning, Bruno. How is the weather there in Sparseland?”

The screen icon for my interlocutor was a three-holed torus tiled with triangles, endlessly turning itself inside out. The polished tones of the male synthetic voice I heard conveyed no specific origin, but gave a sense nonetheless that the speaker’s first language was something other than English.

I glanced out the window of my home office, taking in a patch of blue sky and the verdant gardens of a shady West Ryde cul-de-sac. Sam used “good morning” regardless of the hour, but it really was just after ten A.M., and the tranquil Sydney suburb was awash in sunshine and birdsong.

“Perfect,” I replied. “I wish I wasn’t chained to this desk.”

There was a long pause, and I wondered if the translator had mangled the idiom, creating the impression that I had been shackled by ruthless assailants, who had nonetheless left me with easy access to my instant messaging program. Then Sam said, “I’m glad you didn’t go for a run today. I’ve already tried Alison and Yuen, and they were both unavailable. If I hadn’t been able to get through to you, it might have been difficult to keep some of my colleagues in check.”

I felt a surge of anxiety, mixed with resentment. I refused to wear an iWatch, to make myself reachable twenty-four hours a day. I was a mathematician, not an obstetrician. Perhaps I was an amateur diplomat as well, but even if Alison, Yuen, and I didn’t quite cover the time zones, it would never be more than a few hours before Sam could get hold of at least one of us.

“I didn’t realize you were surrounded by hotheads,” I replied. “What’s the great emergency?” I hoped the translator would do justice to the sharpness in my voice. Sam’s colleagues were the ones with all the firepower, all the resources; they should not have been jumping at shadows. True, we had once tried to wipe them out, but that had been a perfectly innocent mistake, more than ten years before.

Sam said, “Someone from your side seems to have jumped the border.”

“Jumped it?”

“As far as we can see, there’s no trench cutting through it. But a few hours ago, a cluster of propositions on our side started obeying your axioms.”

I was stunned. “An isolated cluster? With no derivation leading back to us?”

“None that we could find.”

I thought for a while. “Maybe it was a natural event. A brief surge across the border from the background noise that left a kind of tidal pool behind.”

Sam was dismissive. “The cluster was too big for that. The probability would be vanishingly small.” Numbers came through on the data channel; he was right.

I rubbed my eyelids with my fingertips; I suddenly felt very tired. I’d thought our old nemesis, Industrial Algebra, had given up the chase long ago. They had stopped offering bribes and sending mercenaries to harass me, so I’d assumed they’d finally written off the defect as a hoax or a mirage, and gone back to their core business of helping the world’s military kill and maim people in ever more technologically sophisticated ways.

Maybe this wasn’t IA. Alison and I had first located the defect—a set of contradictory results in arithmetic that marked the border between our mathematics and the version underlying Sam’s world—by means of a vast set of calculations farmed out over the internet, with thousands of volunteers donating their computers’ processing power when the machines would otherwise have been idle. When we’d pulled the plug on that project—keeping our discovery secret, lest IA find a way to weaponize it—a few participants had been resentful, and had talked about continuing the search. It would have been easy enough for them to write their own software, adapting the same open source framework that Alison and I had used, but it was difficult to see how they could have gathered enough supporters without launching some kind of public appeal.

I said, “I can’t offer you an immediate explanation for this. All I can do is promise to investigate.”

“I understand,” Sam replied.

“You have no clues yourself ?” A decade before, in Shanghai, when Alison, Yuen, and I had used the supercomputer called Luminous to mount a sustained attack on the defect, the mathematicians of the far side had grasped the details of our unwitting assault clearly enough to send a plume of alternative mathematics back across the border with pinpoint precision, striking at just the three of us.

Sam said, “If the cluster had been connected to something, we could have followed the trail. But in isolation it tells us nothing. That’s why my colleagues are so anxious.”

“Yeah.” I was still hoping that the whole thing might turn out to be a glitch—the mathematical equivalent of a flock of birds with a radar echo that just happened to look like something more sinister—but the full gravity of the situation was finally dawning on me.

The inhabitants of the far side were as peaceable as anyone might reasonably wish their neighbors to be, but if their mathematical infrastructure came under threat they faced the real prospect of annihilation. They had defended themselves from such a threat once before, but because they had been able to trace it to its source and understand its nature, they had shown great forbearance. They had not struck their assailants dead, or wiped out Shanghai, or pulled the ground out from under our universe.

This new assault had not been sustained, but nobody knew its origins, or what it might portend. I believed that our neighbors would do no more than they had to in order to ensure their survival, but if they were forced to strike back blindly, they might find themselves with no path to safety short of turning our world to dust.

Shanghai time was only two hours behind Sydney, but Yuen’s IM status was still “unavailable.” I emailed him, along with Alison, though it was the middle of the night in Zurich and she was unlikely to be awake for another four or five hours. All of us had programs that connected us to Sam by monitoring, and modifying, small portions of the defect: altering a handful of precariously balanced truths of arithmetic, wiggling the border between the two systems back and forth to encode each transmitted bit. The three of us on the near side might have communicated with each other in the same way, but on consideration we’d decided that conventional cryptography was a safer way to conceal our secret. The mere fact that communications data seemed to come from nowhere had the potential to attract suspicion, so we’d gone so far as to write software to send fake packets across the net to cover for our otherwise inexplicable conversations with Sam; anyone but the most diligent and resourceful of eavesdroppers would conclude that he was addressing us from an internet café in Lithuania.

While I was waiting for Yuen to reply, I scoured the logs where my knowledge miner deposited results of marginal relevance, wondering if some flaw in the criteria I’d given it might have left me with a blind spot. If anyone, anywhere had announced their intention to carry out some kind of calculation that might have led them to the defect, the news should have been plastered across my desktop in flashing red letters within seconds. Granted, most organizations with the necessary computing resources were secretive by nature, but they were also unlikely to be motivated to indulge in such a crazy stunt. Luminous itself had been decommissioned in 2012; in principle, various national security agencies, and even a few IT-centric businesses, now had enough silicon to hunt down the defect if they’d really set their sights on it, but as far as I knew Yuen, Alison, and I were still the only three people in the world who were certain of its existence. The black budgets of even the most profligate governments, the deep pockets of even the richest tycoons, would not stretch far enough to take on the search as a long shot, or an act of whimsy.

An IM window popped up with Alison’s face. She looked ragged. “What time is it there?” I asked.

“Early. Laura’s got colic.”

“Ah. Are you okay to talk?”

“Yeah, she’s asleep now.”

My email had been brief, so I filled her in on the details. She pondered the matter in silence for a while, yawning unashamedly.

“The only thing I can think of is some gossip I heard at a conference in Rome a couple of months ago. It was a fourth-hand story about some guy in New Zealand who thinks he’s found a way to test fundamental laws of physics by doing computations in number theory.”

“Just random crackpot stuff, or . . . what?”

Alison massaged her temples, as if trying to get more blood flowing to her brain. “I don’t know, what I heard was too vague to make a judgment. I gather he hasn’t tried to publish this anywhere, or even mentioned it in blogs. I guess he just confided in a few people directly, one of whom must have found it too amusing for them to keep their mouth shut.”

“Have you got a name?”

She went off camera and rummaged for a while. “Tim Campbell,” she announced. Her notes came through on the data channel. “He’s done respectable work in combinatorics, algorithmic complexity, optimization. I scoured the net, and there was no mention of this weird stuff. I was meaning to email him, but I never got around to it.”

I could understand why; that would have been about the time Laura was born. I said, “I’m glad you still go to so many conferences in the flesh. It’s easier in Europe, everything’s so close.”

“Ha! Don’t count on it continuing, Bruno. You might have to put your fat arse on a plane sometime yourself.”

“What about Yuen?”

Alison frowned. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s been in hospital for a couple of days. Pneumonia. I spoke to his daughter, he’s not in great shape.”

“I’m sorry.” Alison was much closer to him than I was; he’d been her doctoral supervisor, so she’d known him long before the events that had bound the three of us together.

Yuen was almost eighty. That wasn’t yet ancient for a middle-class Chinese man who could afford good medical care, but he would not be around forever.

I said, “Are we crazy, trying to do this ourselves?” She knew what I meant: liaising with Sam, managing the border, trying to keep the two worlds talking but the two sides separate, safe and intact.

Alison replied, “Which government would you trust not to screw this up? Not to try to exploit it?”

“None. But what’s the alternative? You pass the job on to Laura? Kate’s not interested in having kids. So do I pick some young mathematician at random to anoint as my successor?”

“Not at random, I’d hope.”

“You want me to advertise? ‘Must be proficient in number theory, familiar with Machiavelli, and own the complete boxed set of The West Wing?’ ”

She shrugged. “When the time comes, find someone competent you can trust. It’s a balance: the fewer people who know, the better, so long as there are always enough of us that the knowledge doesn’t risk getting lost completely.”

“And this goes on generation after generation? Like some secret society? The Knights of the Arithmetic Inconsistency?”

“I’ll work on the crest.”

We needed a better plan, but this wasn’t the time to argue about it. I said, “I’ll contact this guy Campbell and let you know how it goes.”

“Okay. Good luck.” Her eyelids were starting to droop.

“Take care of yourself.”

Alison managed an exhausted smile. “Are you saying that because you give a damn, or because you don’t want to end up guarding the Grail all by yourself ?”

“Both, of course.”

“I have to fly to Wellington tomorrow.”

Kate put down the pasta-laden fork she’d raised halfway to her lips and gave me a puzzled frown. “That’s short notice.”

“Yeah, it’s a pain. It’s for the Bank of New Zealand. I have to do something on-site with a secure machine, one they won’t let anyone access over the net.”

Her frown deepened. “When will you be back?”

“I’m not sure. It might not be until Monday. I can probably do most of the work tomorrow, but there are certain things they restrict to the weekends, when the branches are off-line. I don’t know if it will come to that.”

I hated lying to her, but I’d grown accustomed to it. When we’d met, just a year after Shanghai, I could still feel the scar on my arm where one of Industrial Algebra’s hired thugs had tried to carve a data cache out of my body. At some point, as our relationship deepened, I’d made up my mind that however close we became, however much I trusted her, it would be safer for Kate if she never knew anything about the defect.

“They can’t hire someone local?” she suggested. I didn’t think she was suspicious, but she was definitely annoyed. She worked long hours at the hospital, and she only had every second weekend off; this would be one of them. We’d made no specific plans, but it was part of our routine to spend this time together.

I said, “I’m sure they could, but it’d be hard to find someone at short notice. And I can’t tell them to shove it, or I’ll lose the whole contract. It’s one weekend, it’s not the end of the world.”

“No, it’s not the end of the world.” She finally lifted her fork again.

“Is the sauce okay?”

“It’s delicious, Bruno.” Her tone made it clear that no amount of culinary effort would have been enough to compensate, so I might as well not have bothered.

I watched her eat with a strange knot growing in my stomach. Was this how spies felt, when they lied to their families about their work? But my own secret sounded more like something from a psychiatric ward. I was entrusted with the smooth operation of a treaty that I, and two friends, had struck with an invisible ghost world that coexisted with our own. The ghost world was far from hostile, but the treaty was the most important in human history, because either side had the power to annihilate the other so thoroughly that it would make a nuclear holocaust seem like a pinprick.

Victoria University was in a hilltop suburb overlooking Wellington. I caught a cable car, and arrived just in time for the Friday afternoon seminar. Contriving an invitation to deliver a paper here myself would have been difficult, but wangling permission to sit in as part of the audience was easy; although I hadn’t been an academic for almost twenty years, my ancient Ph.D and a trickle of publications, however tenuously related to the topic of the seminar, were still enough to make me welcome.

I’d taken a gamble that Campbell would attend—the topic was peripheral to his own research, official or otherwise—so I was relieved to spot him in the audience, recognizing him from a photo on the faculty web site. I’d emailed him straight after I’d spoken to Alison, but his reply had been a polite brush-off: he acknowledged that the work I’d heard about on the grapevine owed something to the infamous search that Alison and I had launched, but he wasn’t ready to make his own approach public.

I sat through an hour on “Monoids and Control Theory,” trying to pay enough attention that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself if the seminar organizer quizzed me later on why I’d been sufficiently attracted to the topic to interrupt my “sightseeing holiday” in order to attend. When the seminar ended, the audience split into two streams: one heading out of the building, the other moving into an adjoining room where refreshments were on offer. I saw Campbell making for the open air, and it was all I could do to contrive to get close enough to call out to him without making a spectacle.

“Dr. Campbell?”

He turned and scanned the room, probably expecting to see one of his students wanting to beg for an extension on an assignment. I raised a hand and approached him.

“Bruno Costanzo. I emailed you yesterday.”

“Of course.” Campbell was a thin, pale man in his early thirties. He shook my hand, but he was obviously taken aback. “You didn’t mention that you were in Wellington.”

I made a dismissive gesture. “I was going to, but then it seemed a bit presumptuous.” I didn’t spell it out, I just left him to conclude that I was as ambivalent about this whole inconsistency nonsense as he was.

If fate had brought us together, though, wouldn’t it be absurd not to make the most of it?

“I was going to grab some of those famous scones,” I said; the seminar announcement on the web had made big promises for them. “Are you busy?”

“Umm. Just paperwork. I suppose I can put it off.”

As we made our way into the tea room, I waffled on airily about my holiday plans. I’d never actually been to New Zealand before, so I made it clear that most of my itinerary still lay in the future. Campbell was no more interested in the local geography and wildlife than I was; the more I enthused, the more distant his gaze became. Once it was apparent that he wasn’t going to cross-examine me on the finer points of various hiking trails, I grabbed a buttered scone and switched subject abruptly.

“The thing is, I heard you’d devised a more efficient strategy for searching for a defect.” I only just managed to stop myself from using the definite article; it was a while since I’d spoken about it as if it were still hypothetical. “You know the kind of computing power that Dr. Tierney and I had to scrounge up?”

“Of course. I was just an undergraduate, but I heard about the search.”

“Were you one of our volunteers?” I’d checked the records, and he wasn’t listed, but people had had the option of registering anonymously.

“No. The idea didn’t really grab me, at the time.” As he spoke, he seemed more discomfited than the failure to donate his own resources twelve years ago really warranted. I was beginning to suspect that he’d actually been one of the people who’d found the whole tongue-in-cheek conjecture that Alison and I had put forward to be unforgivably foolish. We had never asked to be taken seriously—and we had even put prominent links to all the worthy biomedical computing projects on our web page, so that people knew there were far better ways to spend their spare megaflops—but nonetheless, some mathematical/philosophical stuffed shirts had spluttered with rage at the sheer impertinence and naivety of our hypothesis. Before things turned serious, it was the entertainment value of that backlash that had made our efforts worthwhile.

“But now you’ve refined it somehow?” I prompted him, doing my best to let him see that I felt no resentment at the prospect of being outdone. In fact, the hypothesis itself had been Alison’s, so even if there hadn’t been more important things than my ego at stake, that really wasn’t a factor. As for the search algorithm, I’d cobbled it together on a Sunday afternoon, as a joke, to call Alison’s bluff. Instead, she’d called mine, and insisted that we release it to the world.

Campbell glanced around to see who was in earshot, but then perhaps it dawned on him that if the news of his ideas had already reached Sydney via Rome and Zurich, the battle to keep his reputation pristine in Wellington was probably lost.

He said, “What you and Dr. Tierney suggested was that random processes in the early universe might have included proofs of mutually contradictory theorems about the integers, the idea being that no computation to expose the inconsistency had yet had time to occur. Is that a fair summary?”

“Sure.”

“One problem I have with that is, I don’t see how it could lead to an inconsistency that could be detected here and now. If the physical system A proved theorem A, and the physical system B proved theorem B, then you might have different regions of the universe obeying different axioms, but it’s not as if there’s some universal mathematics textbook hovering around outside spacetime, listing every theorem that’s ever been proved, which our computers then consult in order to decide how to behave. The behavior of a classical system is determined by its own particular causal past. If we’re the descendants of a patch of the universe that proved theorem A, our computers should be perfectly capable of disproving theorem B, whatever happened somewhere else fourteen billion years ago.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “I can see what you’re getting at.” If you weren’t going to accept full-blooded Platonism, in which there was a kind of ghostly textbook listing the eternal truths of mathematics, then a half-baked version where the book started out empty and was only filled in line-by-line as various theorems were tested seemed like the worst kind of compromise. In fact, when the far side had granted Yuen, Alison, and I insight into their mathematics for a few minutes in Shanghai, Yuen had proclaimed that the flow of mathematical information did obey Einstein locality; there was no universal book of truths, just records of the past sloshing around at lightspeed or less, intermingling and competing.

I could hardly tell Campbell, though, that not only did I know for a fact that a single computer could prove both a theorem and its negation, but depending on the order in which it attacked the calculations it could sometimes even shift the boundary where one set of axioms failed and the other took over.

I said, “And yet you still believe it’s worth searching for an inconsistency?”

“I do,” he conceded. “Though I came to the idea from a very different approach.” He hesitated, then picked up a scone from the table beside us.

“One rock, one apple, one scone. We have a clear idea of what we mean by those phrases, though each one might encompass ten-to-the-ten-to-the-thirty-something slightly different configurations of matter. My ‘one scone’ is not the same as your ‘one scone.’ ”

“Right.”

“You know how banks count large quantities of cash?”

“By weighing them?” In fact there were several other cross-checks as well, but I could see where he was heading and I didn’t want to distract him with nit-picking.

“Exactly. Suppose we tried to count scones the same way: weigh the batch, divide by some nominal value, then round to the nearest integer. The weight of any individual scone varies so much that you could easily end up with a version of arithmetic different from our own. If you ‘counted’ two separate batches, then merged them and ‘counted’ them together, there’s no guarantee that the result would agree with the ordinary process of integer addition.”

I said, “Clearly not. But digital computers don’t run on scones, and they don’t count bits by weighing them.”

“Bear with me,” Campbell replied. “It isn’t a perfect analogy, but I’m not as crazy as I sound. Suppose, now, that everything we talk about as ‘one thing’ has a vast number of possible configurations that we’re either ignoring deliberately, or are literally incapable of distinguishing. Even something as simple as an electron prepared in a certain quantum state.”

I said, “You’re talking about hidden variables now?”

“Of a kind, yes. Do you know about Gerard ‘t Hooft’s models for deterministic quantum mechanics?”

“Only vaguely,” I admitted.

“He postulated fully deterministic degrees of freedom at the Planck scale, with quantum states corresponding to equivalence classes containing many different possible configurations. What’s more, all the ordinary quantum states we prepare at an atomic level would be complex superpositions of those primordial states, which allows him to get around the Bell inequalities.” I frowned slightly; I more or less got the picture, but I’d need to go away and read ‘t Hooft’s papers.

Campbell said, “In a sense, the detailed physics isn’t all that important, so long as you accept that ‘one thing’ might not ever be exactly the same as another ‘one thing,’ regardless of the kind of objects we’re talking about. Given that supposition, physical processes that seem to be rigorously equivalent to various arithmetic operations can turn out not to be as reliable as you’d think. With scone-weighing, the flaws are obvious, but I’m talking about the potentially subtler results of misunderstanding the fundamental nature of matter.”

“Hmm.” Though it was unlikely that anyone else Campbell had confided in had taken these speculations as seriously as I did, not only did I not want to seem a pushover, I honestly had no idea whether anything he was saying bore the slightest connection to reality.

I said, “It’s an interesting idea, but I still don’t see how it could speed up the hunt for inconsistencies.”

“I have a set of models,” he said, “which are constrained by the need to agree with some of ‘t Hooft’s ideas about the physics, and also by the need to make arithmetic almost consistent for a very large range of objects. From neutrinos to clusters of galaxies, basic arithmetic involving the kinds of numbers we might encounter in ordinary situations should work out in the usual way.” He laughed. “I mean, that’s the world we’re living in, right?”

Some of us. “Yeah.”

“But the interesting thing is, I can’t make the physics work at all if the arithmetic doesn’t run askew eventually—if there aren’t trans-astronomical numbers where the physical representations no longer capture the arithmetic perfectly. And each of my models lets me predict, more or less, where those effects should begin to show up. By starting with the fundamental physical laws, I can deduce a sequence of calculations with large integers that ought to reveal an inconsistency, when performed with pretty much any computer.”

“Taking you straight to the defect, with no need to search at all.” I’d let the definite article slip out, but it hardly seemed to matter anymore.

“That’s the theory.” Campbell actually blushed slightly. “Well, when you say ‘no search,’ what’s involved really is a much smaller search. There are still free parameters in my models; there are potentially billions of possibilities to test.”

I grinned broadly, wondering if my expression looked as fake as it felt. “But no luck yet?”

“No.” He was beginning to become self-conscious again, glancing around to see who might be listening.

Was he lying to me? Keeping his results secret until he could verify them a million more times, and then decide how best to explain them to incredulous colleagues and an uncomprehending world? Or had whatever he’d done that had lobbed a small grenade into Sam’s universe somehow registered in Campbell’s own computer as arithmetic as usual, betraying no evidence of the boundary he’d crossed? After all, the offending cluster of propositions had obeyed our axioms, so perhaps Campbell had managed to force them to do so without ever realizing that they hadn’t in the past. His ideas were obviously close to the mark—and I could no longer believe this was just a coincidence—but he seemed to have no room in his theory for something that I knew for a fact: arithmetic wasn’t merely inconsistent, it was dynamic. You could take its contradictions and slide them around like bumps in a carpet.

Campbell said, “Parts of the process aren’t easy to automate; there’s some manual work to be done setting up the search for each broad class of models. I’ve only been doing this in my spare time, so it could be a while before I get around to examining all the possibilities.”

“I see.” If all of his calculations so far had produced just one hit on the far side, it was conceivable that the rest would pass without incident. He would publish a negative result ruling out an obscure class of physical theories, and life would go on as normal on both sides of the inconsistency.

What kind of weapons inspector would I be, though, to put my faith in that rosy supposition?

Campbell was looking fidgety, as if his administrative obligations were beckoning. I said, “It’d be great to talk about this a bit more while we’ve got the chance. Are you busy tonight? I’m staying at a backpacker’s down in the city, but maybe you could recommend a restaurant around here somewhere?”

He looked dubious for a moment, but then an instinctive sense of hospitality seemed to overcome his reservations. He said, “Let me check with my wife. We’re not really into restaurants, but I was cooking tonight anyway, and you’d be welcome to join us.”

Campbell’s house was a fifteen minute walk from the campus; at my request, we detoured to a liquor store so I could buy a couple of bottles of wine to accompany the meal. As I entered the house, my hand lingered on the doorframe, depositing a small device that would assist me if I needed to make an uninvited entry in the future.

Campbell’s wife, Bridget, was an organic chemist, who also taught at Victoria University. The conversation over dinner was all about department heads, budgets, and grant applications, and, despite having left academia long ago, I had no trouble relating sympathetically to the couple’s gripes. My hosts ensured that my wine glass never stayed empty for long.

When we’d finished eating, Bridget excused herself to make a call to her mother, who lived in a small town on the south island. Campbell led me into his study and switched on a laptop with fading keys that must have been twenty years old. Many households had a computer like this: the machine that could no longer run the latest trendy bloatware, but which still worked perfectly with its original OS.

Campbell turned his back to me as he typed his password, and I was careful not to be seen even trying to look. Then he opened some C++ files in an editor, and scrolled over parts of his search algorithm.

I felt giddy, and it wasn’t the wine; I’d filled my stomach with an over-the-counter sobriety aid that turned ethanol into glucose and water faster than any human being could imbibe it. I fervently hoped that Industrial Algebra really had given up their pursuit; if I could get this close to Campbell’s secrets in half a day, IA could be playing the stock market with alternative arithmetic before the month was out, and peddling inconsistency weapons to the Pentagon soon after.

I did not have a photographic memory, and Campbell was just showing me fragments anyway. I didn’t think he was deliberately taunting me; he just wanted me to see that he had something concrete, that all his claims about Planck scale physics and directed search strategies had been more than hot air.

I said, “Wait! What’s that?” He stopped hitting the PAGE DOWN key, and I pointed at a list of variable declarations in the middle of the screen:

long int i1, i2, i3;
dark d1, d2, d3;

A “long int” was a long integer, a quantity represented by twice as many bits as usual. On this vintage machine, that was likely to be a total of just sixty-four bits. “What the fuck is a ‘dark’ ?” I demanded. It wasn’t how I’d normally speak to someone I’d only just met, but then, I wasn’t meant to be sober.

Campbell laughed. “A dark integer. It’s a type I defined. It holds four thousand and ninety-six bits.”

“But why the name?”

“Dark matter, dark energy . . . dark integers. They’re all around us, but we don’t usually see them, because they don’t quite play by the rules.”

Hairs rose on the back of my neck. I could not have described the infrastructure of Sam’s world more concisely myself.

Campbell shut down the laptop. I’d been looking for an opportunity to handle the machine, however briefly, without arousing his suspicion, but that clearly wasn’t going to happen, so as we walked out of the study I went for plan B.

“I’m feeling kind of . . .” I sat down abruptly on the floor of the hallway. After a moment, I fished my phone out of my pocket and held it up to him. “Would you mind calling me a taxi?”

“Yeah, sure.” He accepted the phone, and I cradled my head in my arms. Before he could dial the number, I started moaning softly. There was a long pause; he was probably weighing up the embarrassment factor of various alternatives.

Finally he said, “You can sleep here on the couch if you like.” I felt a genuine pang of sympathy for him; if some clown I barely knew had pulled a stunt like this on me, I would at least have made him promise to foot the cleaning bills if he threw up in the middle of the night.

In the middle of the night, I did make a trip to the bathroom, but I kept the sound effects restrained. Halfway through, I walked quietly to the study, crossed the room in the dark, and slapped a thin, transparent patch over the adhesive label that a service company had placed on the outside of the laptop years before. My addition would be invisible to the naked eye, and it would take a scalpel to prise it off. The relay that would communicate with the patch was larger, about the size of a coat button; I stuck it behind a bookshelf. Unless Campbell was planning to paint the room or put in new carpet, it would probably remain undetected for a couple of years, and I’d already prepaid a two year account with a local wireless internet provider.

I woke not long after dawn, but this un-Bacchanalian early rising was no risk to my cover; Campbell had left the curtains open so the full force of the morning sun struck me in the face, a result that was almost certainly deliberate. I tiptoed around the house for ten minutes or so, not wanting to seem too organized if anyone was listening, then left a scrawled note of thanks and apology on the coffee table by the couch, before letting myself out and heading for the cable car stop.

Down in the city, I sat in a café opposite the backpacker’s hostel and connected to the relay, which in turn had established a successful link with the polymer circuitry of the laptop patch. When noon came and went without Campbell logging on, I sent a message to Kate telling her that I was stuck in the bank for at least another day.

I passed the time browsing the news feeds and buying overpriced snacks; half of the café’s other patrons were doing the same. Finally, just after three o’clock, Campbell started up the laptop.

The patch couldn’t read his disk drive, but it could pick up currents flowing to and from the keyboard and the display, allowing it to deduce everything he typed and everything he saw. Capturing his password was easy. Better yet, once he was logged in he set about editing one of his files, extending his search program to a new class of models. As he scrolled back and forth, it wasn’t long before the patch’s screen shots encompassed the entire contents of the file he was working on.

He labored for more than two hours, debugging what he’d written, then set the program running. This creaky old twentieth century machine, which predated the whole internet-wide search for the defect, had already scored one direct hit on the far side; I just hoped this new class of models were all incompatible with the successful ones from a few days before.

Shortly afterward, the IR sensor in the patch told me that Campbell had left the room. The patch could induce currents in the keyboard connection; I could type into the machine as if I was right there. I started a new process window. The laptop wasn’t connected to the internet at all, except through my spyware, but it took me only fifteen minutes to display and record everything there was to see: a few library and header files that the main program depended on, and the data logs listing all of the searches so far. It would not have been hard to hack into the operating system and make provisions to corrupt any future searches, but I decided to wait until I had a better grasp of the whole situation. Even once I was back in Sydney, I’d be able to eavesdrop whenever the laptop was in use, and intervene whenever it was left unattended. I’d only stayed in Wellington in case there’d been a need to return to Campbell’s house in person.

When evening fell and I found myself with nothing urgent left to do, I didn’t call Kate; it seemed wiser to let her assume that I was slaving away in a windowless computer room. I left the café and lay on my bed in the hostel. The dormitory was deserted; everyone else was out on the town.

I called Alison in Zurich and brought her up to date. In the background, I could hear her husband, Philippe, trying to comfort Laura in another room, calmly talking baby-talk in French while his daughter wailed her head off.

Alison was intrigued. “Campbell’s theory can’t be perfect, but it must be close. Maybe we’ll be able to find a way to make it fit in with the dynamics we’ve seen.” In the ten years since we’d stumbled on the defect, all our work on it had remained frustratingly empirical: running calculations and observing their effects. We’d never come close to finding any deep underlying principles.

“Do you think Sam knows all this?” she asked.

“I have no idea. If he did, I doubt he’d admit it.” Though it was Sam who had given us a taste of far-side mathematics in Shanghai, that had really just been a clip over the ear to let us know that what we were trying to wipe out with Luminous was a civilization, not a wasteland. After that near-disastrous first encounter, he had worked to establish communications with us, learning our languages and happily listening to the accounts we’d volunteered of our world, but he had not been equally forthcoming in return. We knew next to nothing about far-side physics, astronomy, biology, history, or culture. That there were living beings occupying the same space as the Earth suggested that the two universes were intimately coupled somehow, in spite of their mutual invisibility. But Sam had hinted that life was much more common on his side of the border than ours; when I’d told him that we seemed to be alone, at least in the solar system, and were surrounded by light-years of sterile vacuum, he’d taken to referring to our side as “Sparseland.”

Alison said, “Either way, I think we should keep it to ourselves. The treaty says we should do everything in our power to deal with any breach of territory of which the other side informs us. We’re doing that. But we’re not obliged to disclose the details of Campbell’s activities.”

“That’s true.” I wasn’t entirely happy with her suggestion, though. In spite of the attitude Sam and his colleagues had taken—in which they assumed that anything they told us might be exploited, might make them more vulnerable—a part of me had always wondered if there was some gesture of good faith we could make, some way to build trust. Since talking to Campbell, in the back of my mind I’d been building up a faint hope that his discovery might lead to an opportunity to prove, once and for all, that our intentions were honorable.

Alison read my mood. She said, “Bruno, they’ve given us nothing. Shanghai excuses a certain amount of caution, but we also know from Shanghai that they could brush Luminous aside like a gnat. They have enough computing power to crush us in an instant, and they still cling to every strategic advantage they can get. Not to do the same ourselves would just be stupid and irresponsible.”

“So you want us to hold on to this secret weapon?” I was beginning to develop a piercing headache. My usual way of dealing with the surreal responsibility that had fallen on the three of us was to pretend that it didn’t exist; having to think about it constantly for three days straight meant more tension than I’d faced for a decade. “Is that what it’s come down to? Our own version of the Cold War? Why don’t you just march into NATO headquarters on Monday and hand over everything we know?”

Alison said dryly, “Switzerland isn’t a member of NATO. The government here would probably charge me with treason.”

I didn’t want to fight with her. “We should talk about this later. We don’t even know exactly what we’ve got. I need to go through Campbell’s files and confirm whether he really did what we think he did.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll call you from Sydney.”

It took me a while to make sense of everything I’d stolen from Campbell, but eventually I was able to determine which calculations he’d performed on each occasion recorded in his log files. Then I compared the propositions that he’d tested with a rough, static map of the defect; since the event Sam had reported had been deep within the far side, there was no need to take account of the small fluctuations that the border underwent over time.

If my analysis was correct, late on Wednesday night Campbell’s calculations had landed in the middle of far-side mathematics. He’d been telling me the truth, though; he’d found nothing out of the ordinary there. Instead, the thing he had been seeking had melted away before his gaze.

In all the calculations Alison and I had done, only at the border had we been able to force propositions to change their allegiance and obey our axioms. It was as if Campbell had dived in from some higher dimension, carrying a hosepipe that sprayed everything with the arithmetic we knew and loved.

For Sam and his colleagues, this was the equivalent of a suitcase nuke appearing out of nowhere, as opposed to the ICBMs they knew how to track and annihilate. Now Alison wanted us to tell them, “Trust us, we’ve dealt with it,” without showing them the weapon itself, without letting them see how it worked, without giving them a chance to devise new defenses against it.

She wanted us to have something up our sleeves, in case the hawks took over the far side, and decided that Sparseland was a ghost world whose lingering, baleful presence they could do without.

Drunken Saturday-night revelers began returning to the hostel, singing off-key and puking enthusiastically. Maybe this was poetic justice for my own faux-inebriation; if so, I was being repaid a thousandfold. I started wishing I’d shelled out for classier accommodation, but since there was no employer picking up my expenses, it was going to be hard enough dealing with my lie to Kate without spending even more on the trip.

Forget the arithmetic of scones; I knew how to make digital currency reproduce like the marching brooms of the sorcerer’s apprentice. It might even have been possible to milk the benefits without Sam noticing; I could try to hide my far-sider trading behind the manipulations of the border we used routinely to exchange messages.

I had no idea how to contain the side-effects, though. I had no idea what else such meddling would disrupt, how many people I might kill or maim in the process.

I buried my head beneath the pillows and tried to find a way to get to sleep through the noise. I ended up calculating powers of seven, a trick I hadn’t used since childhood. I’d never been a prodigy at mental arithmetic, and the concentration required to push on past the easy cases drained me far faster than any physical labor. Two hundred and eighty-two million, four hundred and seventy-five thousand, two hundred and forty-nine. The numbers rose into the stratosphere like bean stalks, until they grew too high and tore themselves apart, leaving behind a cloud of digits drifting through my skull like black confetti.

“The problem is under control,” I told Sam. “I’ve located the source, and I’ve taken steps to prevent a recurrence.”

“Are you sure of that?” As he spoke, the three-holed torus on the screen twisted restlessly. In fact I’d chosen the icon myself, and its appearance wasn’t influenced by Sam at all, but it was impossible not to project emotions onto its writhing.

I said, “I’m certain that I know who was responsible for the incursion on Wednesday. It was done without malice; in fact the person who did it doesn’t even realize that he crossed the border. I’ve modified the operating system on his computer so that it won’t allow him to do the same thing again; if he tries, it will simply give him the same answers as before, but this time the calculations won’t actually be performed.”

“That’s good to hear,” Sam said. “Can you describe these calculations?”

I was as invisible to Sam as he was to me, but out of habit I tried to keep my face composed. “I don’t see that as part of our agreement,” I replied.

Sam was silent for a few seconds. “That’s true, Bruno. But it might provide us with a greater sense of reassurance if we knew what caused the breach in the first place.”

I said, “I understand. But we’ve made a decision.” We was Alison and I; Yuen was still in hospital, in no state to do anything. Alison and I, speaking for the world.

“I’ll put your position to my colleagues,” he said. “We’re not your enemy, Bruno.” His tone sounded regretful, and these nuances were under his control.

“I know that,” I replied. “Nor are we yours. Yet you’ve chosen to keep most of the details of your world from us. We don’t view that as evidence of hostility, so you have no grounds to complain if we keep a few secrets of our own.”

“I’ll contact you again soon,” Sam said.

The messenger window closed. I emailed an encrypted transcript to Alison, then slumped across my desk. My head was throbbing, but the encounter really hadn’t gone too badly. Of course Sam and his colleagues would have preferred to know everything; of course they were going to be disappointed and reproachful. That didn’t mean they were going to abandon the benign policies of the last decade. The important thing was that my assurance would prove to be reliable: the incursion would not be repeated.

I had work to do, the kind that paid bills. Somehow I summoned up the discipline to push the whole subject aside and get on with a report on stochastic methods for resolving distributed programming bottlenecks that I was supposed to be writing for a company in Singapore.

Four hours later, when the doorbell rang, I’d left my desk to raid the kitchen. I didn’t bother checking the doorstep camera; I just walked down the hall and opened the door.

Campbell said, “How are you, Bruno?”

“I’m fine. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming to Sydney?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I found your house?”

“How?”

He held up his phone. There was a text message from me, or at least from my phone; it had SMS’d its GPS coordinates to him.

“Not bad,” I conceded.

“I believe they recently added ‘corrupting communications devices’ to the list of terrorism-related offenses in Australia. You could probably get me thrown into solitary confinement in a maximum security prison.”

“Only if you know at least ten words of Arabic.”

“Actually I spent a month in Egypt once, so anything’s possible. But I don’t think you really want to go to the police.”

I said, “Why don’t you come in?”

As I showed him to the living room my mind was racing. Maybe he’d found the relay behind the bookshelf, but surely not before I’d left his house. Had he managed to get a virus into my phone remotely? I’d thought my security was better than that.

Campbell said, “I’d like you to explain why you bugged my computer.”

“I’m growing increasingly unsure of that myself. The correct answer might be that you wanted me to.”

He snorted. “That’s rich! I admit that I deliberately allowed a rumor to start about my work, because I was curious as to why you and Alison Tierney called off your search. I wanted to see if you’d come sniffing around. As you did. But that was hardly an invitation to steal all my work.”

“What was the point of the whole exercise for you, then, if not a way of stealing something from Alison and me?”

“You can hardly compare the two. I just wanted to confirm my suspicion that you actually found something.”

“And you believe that you’ve confirmed that?”

He shook his head, but it was with amusement, not denial. I said, “Why are you here? Do you think I’m going to publish your crackpot theory as my own? I’m too old to get the Fields Medal, but maybe you think it’s Nobel material.”

“Oh, I don’t think you’re interested in fame. As I said, I think you beat me to the prize a long time ago.”

I rose to my feet abruptly; I could feel myself scowling, my fists tightening. “So what’s the bottom line? You want to press charges against me for the laptop? Go ahead. We can each get a fine in absentia.”

Campbell said, “I want to know exactly what was so important to you that you crossed the Tasman, lied your way into my house, abused my hospitality, and stole my files. I don’t think it was simply curiosity, or jealousy. I think you found something ten years ago, and now you’re afraid my work is going to put it at risk.”

I sat down again. The rush of adrenaline I’d experienced at being cornered had dissipated. I could almost hear Alison whispering in my ear, “Either you kill him, Bruno, or you recruit him.” I had no intention of killing anyone, but I wasn’t yet certain that these were the only two choices.

I said, “And if I tell you to mind your own business?”

He shrugged. “Then I’ll work harder. I know you’ve screwed that laptop, and maybe the other computers in my house, but I’m not so broke that I can’t get a new machine.”

Which would be a hundred times faster. He’d re-run every search, probably with wider parameter ranges. The suitcase nuke from Sparseland that had started this whole mess would detonate again, and for all I knew it could be ten times, a hundred times, more powerful.

I said, “Have you ever wanted to join a secret society?”

Campbell gave an incredulous laugh. “No!”

“Neither did I. Too bad.”

I told him everything. The discovery of the defect. Industrial Algebra’s pursuit of the result. The epiphany in Shanghai. Sam establishing contact. The treaty, the ten quiet years. Then the sudden jolt of his own work, and the still-unfolding consequences.

Campbell was clearly shaken, but despite the fact that I’d confirmed his original suspicion he wasn’t ready to take my word for the whole story.

I knew better than to invite him into my office for a demonstration; faking it there would have been trivial. We walked to the local shopping center, and I handed him two hundred dollars to buy a new notebook. I told him the kind of software he’d need to download, without limiting his choice to any particular package. Then I gave him some further instructions. Within half an hour, he had seen the defect for himself, and nudged the border a short distance in each direction.

We were sitting in the food hall, surrounded by boisterous teenagers who’d just got out from school. Campbell was looking at me as if I’d seized a toy machine gun from his hands, transformed it into solid metal, then bashed him over the head with it.

I said, “Cheer up. There was no war of the worlds after Shanghai; I think we’re going to survive this, too.” After all these years, the chance to share the burden with someone new was actually making me feel much more optimistic.

“The defect is dynamic,” he muttered. “That changes everything.”

“You don’t say.”

Campbell scowled. “I don’t just mean the politics, the dangers. I’m talking about the underlying physical model.”

“Yeah?” I hadn’t come close to examining that issue seriously; it had been enough of a struggle coming to terms with his original calculations.

“All along, I’ve assumed that there were exact symmetries in the Planck scale physics that accounted for a stable boundary between macroscopic arithmetics. It was an artificial restriction, but I took it for granted, because anything else seemed . . .”

“Unbelievable?”

“Yes.” He blinked and looked away, surveying the crowd of diners as if he had no idea how he’d ended up among them. “I’m flying back in a few hours.”

“Does Bridget know why you came?”

“Not exactly.”

I said, “No one else can know what I’ve told you. Not yet. The risks are too great, everything’s too fluid.”

“Yeah.” He met my gaze. He wasn’t just humoring me; he understood what people like IA might do.

“In the long term,” I said, “we’re going to have to find a way to make this safe. To make everyone safe.” I’d never quite articulated that goal before, but I was only just beginning to absorb the ramifications of Campbell’s insights.

“How?” he wondered. “Do we want to build a wall, or do we want to tear one down?”

“I don’t know. The first thing we need is a better map, a better feel for the whole territory.”

He’d hired a car at the airport in order to drive here and confront me; it was parked in a side street close to my house. I walked him to it.

We shook hands before parting. I said, “Welcome to the reluctant cabal.”

Campbell winced. “Let’s find a way to change it from reluctant to redundant.”

In the weeks that followed, Campbell worked on refinements to his theory, emailing Alison and me every few days. Alison had taken my unilateral decision to recruit Campbell with much more equanimity than I’d expected. “Better to have him inside the tent,” was all she’d said.

This proved to be an understatement. While the two of us soon caught up with him on all the technicalities, it was clear that his intuition on the subject, hard-won over many years of trial and error, was the key to his spectacular progress now. Merely stealing his notes and his algorithms would never have brought us so far.

Gradually, the dynamic version of the theory took shape. As far as macroscopic objects were concerned—and in this context, “macroscopic” stretched all the way down to the quantum states of subatomic particles—all traces of Platonic mathematics were banished. A “proof” concerning the integers was just a class of physical processes, and the result of that proof was neither read from, nor written to, any universal book of truths. Rather, the agreement between proofs was simply a strong, but imperfect, correlation between the different processes that counted as proofs of the same thing. Those correlations arose from the way that the primordial states of Planck-scale physics were carved up—imperfectly—into subsystems that appeared to be distinct objects.

The truths of mathematics appeared to be enduring and universal because they persisted with great efficiency within the states of matter and space-time. But there was a built-in flaw in the whole idealization of distinct objects, and the point where the concept finally cracked open was the defect Alison and I had found in our volunteers’ data, which appeared to any macroscopic test as the border between contradictory mathematical systems.

We’d derived a crude empirical rule which said that the border shifted when a proposition’s neighbors outvoted it. If you managed to prove that x+1=y+1 and x-1=y-1, then x=y became a sitting duck, even if it hadn’t been true before. The consequences of Campbell’s search had shown that the reality was more complex, and in his new model, the old border rule became an approximation for a more subtle process, anchored in the dynamics of primordial states that knew nothing of the arithmetic of electrons and apples. The near-side arithmetic Campbell had blasted into the far side hadn’t got there by besieging the target with syllogisms; it had got there because he’d gone straight for a far deeper failure in the whole idea of “integers” than Alison and I had ever dreamed of.

Had Sam dreamed of it? I waited for his next contact, but as the weeks passed he remained silent, and the last thing I felt like doing was calling him myself. I had enough people to lie to without adding him to the list.

Kate asked me how work was going, and I waffled about the details of the three uninspiring contracts I’d started recently. When I stopped talking, she looked at me as if I’d just stammered my way through an unconvincing denial of some unspoken crime. I wondered how my mixture of concealed elation and fear was coming across to her. Was that how the most passionate, conflicted adulterer would appear? I didn’t actually reach the brink of confession, but I pictured myself approaching it. I had less reason now to think that the secret would bring her harm than when I’d first made my decision to keep her in the dark. But then, what if I told her everything, and the next day Campbell was kidnapped and tortured? If we were all being watched, and the people doing it were good at their jobs, we’d only know about it when it was too late.

Campbell’s emails dropped off for a while, and I assumed he’d hit a roadblock. Sam had offered no further complaints. Perhaps, I thought, this was the new status quo, the start of another quiet decade. I could live with that.

Then Campbell flung his second grenade. He reached me by IM and said, “I’ve started making maps.”

“Of the defect?” I replied.

“Of the planets.”

I stared at his image, uncomprehending.

“The far-side planets,” he said. “The physical worlds.”

He’d bought himself some time on a geographically scattered set of processor clusters. He was no longer repeating his dangerous incursions, of course, but by playing around in the natural ebb and flow at the border, he’d made some extraordinary discoveries.

Alison and I had realized long ago that random “proofs” in the natural world would influence what happened at the border, but Campbell’s theory made that notion more precise. By looking at the exact timing of changes to propositions at the border, measured in a dozen different computers world-wide, he had set up a kind of . . . radar? CT machine? Whatever you called it, it allowed him to deduce the locations where the relevant natural processes were occurring, and his model allowed him to distinguish between both near-side and far-side processes, and processes in matter and those in vacuum. He could measure the density of far-side matter out to a distance of several light-hours, and crudely image nearby planets.

“Not just on the far side,” he said. “I validated the technique by imaging our own planets.” He sent me a data log, with comparisons to an online almanac. For Jupiter, the farthest of the planets he’d located, the positions were out by as much as a hundred thousand kilometers; not exactly GPS quality, but that was a bit like complaining that your abacus couldn’t tell north from north-west.

“Maybe that’s how Sam found us in Shanghai?” I wondered. “The same kind of thing, only more refined?”

Campbell said, “Possibly.”

“So what about the far-side planets?”

“Well, here’s the first interesting thing. None of the planets coincide with ours. Nor does their sun with our sun.” He sent me an image of the far-side system, one star and its six planets, overlaid on our own.

“But Sam’s time lags,” I protested, “when we communicate—”

“Make no sense if he’s too far away. Exactly. So he is not living on any of these planets, and he’s not even in a natural orbit around their star. He’s in powered flight, moving with the Earth. Which suggests to me that they’ve known about us for much longer than Shanghai.”

“Known about us,” I said, “but maybe they still didn’t anticipate anything like Shanghai.” When we’d set Luminous on to the task of eliminating the defect—not knowing that we were threatening anyone—it had taken several minutes before the far side had responded. Computers on board a spacecraft moving with the Earth would have detected the assault quickly, but it might have taken the recruitment of larger, planet-bound machines, minutes away at lightspeed, to repel it.

Until I’d encountered Campbell’s theories, my working assumption had been that Sam’s world was like a hidden message encoded in the Earth, with the different arithmetic giving different meanings to all the air, water, and rock around us. But their matter was not bound to our matter; they didn’t need our specks of dust or molecules of air to represent the dark integers. The two worlds split apart at a much lower level; vacuum could be rock, and rock, vacuum.

I said, “So do you want the Nobel for physics, or peace?”

Campbell smiled modestly. “Can I hold out for both?”

“That’s the answer I was looking for.” I couldn’t get the stupid Cold War metaphors out of my brain: what would Sam’s hotheaded colleagues think, if they knew that we were now flying spy planes over their territory? Saying “screw them, they were doing it first!” might have been a fair response, but it was not a particularly helpful one.

I said, “We’re never going to match their Sputnik, unless you happen to know a trustworthy billionaire who wants to help us launch a space probe on a very strange trajectory. Everything we want to do has to work from Earth.”

“I’ll tear up my letter to Richard Branson then, shall I?”

I stared at the map of the far-side solar system. “There must be some relative motion between their star and ours. It can’t have been this close for all that long.”

“I don’t have enough accuracy in my measurements to make a meaningful estimate of the velocity,” Campbell said. “But I’ve done some crude estimates of the distances between their stars, and it’s much smaller than ours. So it’s not all that unlikely to find some star this close to us, even if it’s unlikely to be the same one that was close a thousand years ago. Then again, there might be a selection effect at work here: the whole reason Sam’s civilization managed to notice us at all was because we weren’t shooting past them at a substantial fraction of lightspeed.”

“Okay. So maybe this is their home system, but it could just as easily be an expeditionary base for a team that’s been following our sun for thousands of years.”

“Yes.”

I said, “Where do we go with this?”

“I can’t increase the resolution much,” Campbell replied, “without buying time on a lot more clusters.” It wasn’t that he needed much processing power for the calculations, but there were minimum prices to be paid to do anything at all, and what would give us clearer pictures would be more computers, not more time on each one.

I said, “We can’t risk asking for volunteers, like the old days. We’d have to lie about what the download was for, and you can be certain that somebody would reverse-engineer it and catch us out.”

“Absolutely.”

I slept on the problem, then woke with an idea at four A.M. and went to my office, trying to flesh out the details before Campbell responded to my email. He was bleary-eyed when the messenger window opened; it was later in Wellington than in Sydney, but it looked as if he’d had as little sleep as I had.

I said, “We use the internet.”

“I thought we decided that was too risky.”

“Not screensavers for volunteers; I’m talking about the internet itself. We work out a way to do the calculations using nothing but data packets and network routers. We bounce traffic all around the world, and we get the geographical resolution for free.”

“You’ve got to be joking, Bruno—”

“Why? Any computing circuit can be built by stringing together enough NAND gates; you think we can’t leverage packet switching into a NAND gate? But that’s just the proof that it’s possible; I expect we can actually make it a thousand times tighter.”

Campbell said, “I’m going to get some aspirin and come back.”

We roped in Alison to help, but it still took us six weeks to get a workable design, and another month to get it functioning. We ended up exploiting authentication and error-correction protocols built into the internet at several different layers; the heterogeneous approach not only helped us do all the calculations we needed, but made our gentle siphoning of computing power less likely to be detected and mistaken for anything malicious. In fact we were “stealing” far less from the routers and servers of the net than if we’d sat down for a hardcore 3D multiplayer gaming session, but security systems had their own ideas about what constituted fair use and what was suspicious. The most important thing was not the size of the burden we imposed, but the signature of our behavior.

Our new globe-spanning arithmetical telescope generated pictures far sharper than before, with kilometer-scale resolution out to a billion kilometers. This gave us crude relief-maps of the far-side planets, revealing mountains on four of them, and what might have been oceans on two of those four. If there were any artificial structures, they were either too small to see, or too subtle in their artificiality.

The relative motion of our sun and the star these planets orbited turned out to be about six kilometers per second. In the decade since Shanghai, the two solar systems had changed their relative location by about two billion kilometers. Wherever the computers were now that had fought with Luminous to control the border, they certainly hadn’t been on any of these planets at the time. Perhaps there were two ships, with one following the Earth, and the other, heavier one saving fuel by merely following the sun.

Yuen had finally recovered his health, and the full cabal held an IM-conference to discuss these results.

“We should be showing these to geologists, xenobiologists . . . everyone,” Yuen lamented. He wasn’t making a serious proposal, but I shared his sense of frustration.

Alison said, “What I regret most is that we can’t rub Sam’s face in these pictures, just to show him that we’re not as stupid as he thinks.”

“I imagine his own pictures are sharper,” Campbell replied.

“Which is as you’d expect,” Alison retorted, “given a head start of a few centuries. If they’re so brilliant on the far side, why do they need us to tell them what you did to jump the border?”

“They might have guessed precisely what I did,” he countered, “but they could still be seeking confirmation. Perhaps what they really want is to rule out the possibility that we’ve discovered something different, something they’ve never even thought of.”

I gazed at the false colors of one contoured sphere, imagining gray-blue oceans, snow-topped mountains with alien forests, strange cities, wondrous machines. Even if that was pure fantasy and this temporary neighbor was barren, there had to be a living homeworld from which the ships that pursued us had been launched.

After Shanghai, Sam and his colleagues had chosen to keep us in the dark for ten years, but it had been our own decision to cement the mistrust by holding on to the secret of our accidental weapon. If they’d already guessed its nature, then they might already have found a defense against it, in which case our silence bought us no advantage at all to compensate for the suspicion it engendered.

If that assumption was wrong, though? Then handing over the details of Campbell’s work could be just what the far-side hawks were waiting for, before raising their shields and crushing us.

I said, “We need to make some plans. I want to stay hopeful, I want to keep looking for the best way forward, but we need to be prepared for the worst.”

Transforming that suggestion into something concrete required far more work than I’d imagined; it was three months before the pieces started coming together. When I finally shifted my gaze back to the everyday world, I decided that I’d earned a break. Kate had a free weekend approaching; I suggested a day in the Blue Mountains.

Her initial response was sarcastic, but when I persisted she softened a little, and finally agreed.

On the drive out of the city, the chill that had developed between us slowly began to thaw. We played JJJ on the car radio—laughing with disbelief as we realized that today’s cutting-edge music consisted mostly of cover versions and re-samplings of songs that had been hits when we were in our twenties—and resurrected old running jokes from the time when we’d first met.

As we wound our way into the mountains, though, it proved impossible simply to turn back the clock. Kate said, “Whoever you’ve been working for these last few months, can you put them on your blacklist?”

I laughed. “That will scare them.” I switched to my best Brando voice. “You’re on Bruno Costanzo’s blacklist. You’ll never run distributed software efficiently in this town again.”

She said, “I’m serious. I don’t know what’s so stressful about the work, or the people, but it’s really screwing you up.”

I could have made her a promise, but it would have been hard enough to sound sincere as I spoke the words, let alone live up to them. I said, “Beggars can’t be choosers.”

She shook her head, her mouth tensed in frustration. “If you really want a heart attack, fine. But don’t pretend that it’s all about money. We’re never that broke, and we’re never that rich. Unless it’s all going into your account in Zurich.”

It took me a few seconds to convince myself that this was nothing more than a throwaway reference to Swiss banks. Kate knew about Alison, knew that we’d once been close, knew that we still kept in touch. She had plenty of male friends from her own past, and they all lived in Sydney; for more than five years, Alison and I hadn’t even set foot on the same continent.

We parked the car, then walked along a scenic trail for an hour, mostly in silence. We found a spot by a stream, with tiered rocks smoothed by some ancient river, and ate the lunch I’d packed.

Looking out into the blue haze of the densely wooded valley below, I couldn’t keep the image of the crowded skies of the far side from my mind. A dazzling richness surrounded us: alien worlds, alien life, alien culture. There had to be a way to end our mutual suspicion, and work toward a genuine exchange of knowledge.

As we started back toward the car, I turned to Kate. “I know I’ve neglected you,” I said. “I’ve been through a rough patch, but everything’s going to change. I’m going to make things right.”

I was prepared for a withering rebuff, but for a long time she was silent. Then she nodded slightly and said, “Okay.”

As she reached across and took my hand, my wrist began vibrating. I’d buckled to the pressure and bought a watch that shackled me to the net twenty-four hours a day.

I freed my hand from Kate’s and lifted the watch to my face. The bandwidth reaching me out in the sticks wasn’t enough for video, but a stored snapshot of Alison appeared on the screen.

“This is for emergencies only,” I snarled.

“Check out a news feed,” she replied. The acoustics were focused on my ears; Kate would get nothing but the bad-hearing-aid-at-a-party impression that made so many people want to punch their fellow commuters on trains.

“Why don’t you just summarize whatever it is I’m meant to have noticed?”

Financial computing systems were going haywire, to an extent that was already being described as terrorism. Most trading was closed for the weekend, but some experts were predicting the crash of the century, come Monday.

I wondered if the cabal itself was to blame; if we’d inadvertently corrupted the whole internet by coupling its behavior to the defect. That was nonsense, though. Half the transactions being garbled were taking place on secure, interbank networks that shared no hardware with our global computer. This was coming from the far side.

“Have you contacted Sam?” I asked her.

“I can’t raise him.”

“Where are you going?” Kate shouted angrily. I’d unconsciously broken into a jog; I wanted to get back to the car, back to the city, back to my office.

I stopped and turned to her. “Run with me? Please? This is important.”

“You’re joking! I’ve spent half a day hiking, I’m not running anywhere!”

I hesitated, fantasizing for a moment that I could sit beneath a gum tree and orchestrate everything with my Dick Tracy watch before its battery went flat.

I said, “You’d better call a taxi when you get to the road.”

“You’re taking the car?” Kate stared at me, incredulous. “You piece of shit!”

“I’m sorry.” I tossed my backpack on the ground and started sprinting.

“We need to deploy,” I told Alison.

“I know,” she said. “We’ve already started.”

It was the right decision, but hearing it still loosened my bowels far more than the realization that the far side were attacking us. Whatever their motives, at least they were unlikely to do more harm than they intended. I was much less confident about our own abilities.

“Keep trying to reach Sam,” I insisted. “This is a thousand times more useful if they know about it.”

Alison said, “I guess this isn’t the time for Dr. Strangelove jokes.”

Over the last three months, we’d worked out a way to augment our internet “telescope” software to launch a barrage of Campbell-style attacks on far-side propositions if it saw our own mathematics being encroached upon. The software couldn’t protect the whole border, but there were millions of individual trigger points, forming a randomly shifting minefield. The plan had been to buy ourselves some security, without ever reaching the point of actual retaliation. We’d been waiting to complete a final round of tests before unleashing this version live on the net, but it would only take a matter of minutes to get it up and running.

“Anything being hit besides financials?” I asked.

“Not that I’m picking up.”

If the far side was deliberately targeting the markets, that was infinitely preferable to the alternative: that financial systems had simply been the most fragile objects in the path of a much broader assault. Most modern engineering and aeronautical systems were more interested in resorting to fall-backs than agonizing over their failures. A bank’s computer might declare itself irretrievably compromised and shut down completely, the instant certain totals failed to reconcile; those in a chemical plant or an airliner would be designed to fail more gracefully, trying simpler alternatives and bringing all available humans into the loop.

I said, “Yuen and Tim—?”

“Both on board,” Alison confirmed. “Monitoring the deployment, ready to tweak the software if necessary.”

“Good. You really won’t need me at all, then, will you?”

Alison’s reply dissolved into digital noise, and the connection cut out. I refused to read anything sinister into that; given my location, I was lucky to have any coverage at all. I ran faster, trying not to think about the time in Shanghai when Sam had taken a mathematical scalpel to all of our brains. Luminous had been screaming out our position like a beacon; we would not be so easy to locate this time. Still, with a cruder approach, the hawks could take a hatchet to everyone’s head. Would they go that far? Only if this was meant as much more than a threat, much more than intimidation to make us hand over Campbell’s algorithm. Only if this was the end game: no warning, no negotiations, just Sparseland wiped off the map forever.

Fifteen minutes after Alison’s call, I reached the car. Apart from the entertainment console it didn’t contain a single microchip; I remembered the salesman laughing when I’d queried that twice. “What are you afraid of? Y3K?” The engine started immediately.

I had an ancient secondhand laptop in the trunk; I put it beside me on the passenger seat and started booting it up while I drove out on to the access road, heading for the highway. Alison and I had worked for a fortnight on a stripped-down operating system, as simple and robust as possible, to run on these old computers; if the far side kept reaching down from the arithmetic stratosphere, these would be like concrete bunkers compared to the glass skyscrapers of more modern machines. The four of us would also be running different versions of the OS, on CPUs with different instruction sets; our bunkers were scattered mathematically as well as geographically.

As I drove on to the highway, my watch stuttered back to life. Alison said, “Bruno? Can you hear me?”

“Go ahead.”

“Three passenger jets have crashed,” she said. “Poland, Indonesia, South Africa.”

I was dazed. Ten years before, when I’d tried to bulldoze his whole mathematical world into the sea, Sam had spared my life. Now the far side was slaughtering innocents.

“Is our minefield up?”

“It’s been up for ten minutes, but nothing’s tripped it yet.”

“You think they’re steering through it?”

Alison hesitated. “I don’t see how. There’s no way to predict a safe path.” We were using a quantum noise server to randomize the propositions we tested.

I said, “We should trigger it manually. One counter-strike to start with, to give them something to think about.” I was still hoping that the downed jets were unintended, but we had no choice but to retaliate.

“Yeah.” Alison’s image was live now; I saw her reach down for her mouse. She said, “It’s not responding. The net’s too degraded.” All the fancy algorithms that the routers used, and that we’d leveraged so successfully for our imaging software, were turning them into paperweights. The internet was robust against high levels of transmission noise and the loss of thousands of connections, but not against the decay of arithmetic itself.

My watch went dead. I looked to the laptop; it was still working. I reached over and hit a single hotkey, launching a program that would try to reach Alison and the others the same way we’d talked to Sam: by modulating part of the border. In theory, the hawks might have moved the whole border—in which case we were screwed—but the border was vast, and it made more sense for them to target their computing resources on the specific needs of the assault itself.

A small icon appeared on the laptop’s screen, a single letter A in reversed monochrome. I said, “Is this working?”

“Yes,” Alison replied. The icon blinked out, then came back again. We were doing a Hedy Lamarr, hopping rapidly over a predetermined sequence of border points to minimize the chance of detection. Some of those points would be missing, but it looked as if enough of them remained intact.

The A was joined by a Y and a T. The whole cabal was online now, whatever that was worth. What we needed was S, but S was not answering.

Campbell said grimly, “I heard about the planes. I’ve started an attack.” The tactic we had agreed upon was to take turns running different variants of Campbell’s border-jumping algorithm from our scattered machines.

I said, “The miracle is that they’re not hitting us the same way we’re hitting them. They’re just pushing down part of the border with the old voting method, step by step. If we’d given them what they’d asked for, we’d all be dead by now.”

“Maybe not,” Yuen replied. “I’m only halfway through a proof, but I’m 90 percent sure that Tim’s method is asymmetrical. It only works in one direction. Even if we’d told them about it, they couldn’t have turned it against us.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but if Yuen was right that made perfect sense. The far side had probably been working on the same branch of mathematics for centuries; if there had been an equivalent weapon that could be used from their vantage point, they would have discovered it long ago.

My machine had synchronized with Campbell’s, and it took over the assault automatically. We had no real idea what we were hitting, except that the propositions were further from the border, describing far simpler arithmetic on the dark integers than anything of ours that the far side had yet touched. Were we crippling machines? Taking lives? I was torn between a triumphant vision of retribution, and a sense of shame that we’d allowed it to come to this.

Every hundred meters or so, I passed another car sitting motionless by the side of the highway. I was far from the only person still driving, but I had a feeling Kate wouldn’t have much luck getting a taxi. She had water in her backpack, and there was a small shelter at the spot where we’d parked. There was little to be gained by reaching my office now; the laptop could do everything that mattered, and I could run it from the car battery if necessary. If I turned around and went back for Kate, though, I’d have so much explaining to do that there’d be no time for anything else.

I switched on the car radio, but either its digital signal processor was too sophisticated for its own good, or all the local stations were out.

“Anyone still getting news?” I asked.

“I still have radio,” Campbell replied. “No TV, no internet. Landlines and mobiles here are dead.” It was the same for Alison and Yuen. There’d been no more reports of disasters on the radio, but the stations were probably as isolated now as their listeners. Ham operators would still be calling each other, but journalists and newsrooms would not be in the loop. I didn’t want to think about the contingency plans that might have been in place, given ten years’ preparation and an informed population.

By the time I reached Penrith there were so many abandoned cars that the remaining traffic was almost gridlocked. I decided not to even try to reach home. I didn’t know if Sam had literally scanned my brain in Shanghai and used that to target what he’d done to me then, and whether or not he could use the same neuroanatomical information against me now, wherever I was, but staying away from my usual haunts seemed like one more small advantage to cling to.

I found a gas station, and it was giving priority to customers with functioning cars over hoarders who’d appeared on foot with empty cans. Their EFTPOS wasn’t working, but I had enough cash for the gas and some chocolate bars.

As dusk fell the streetlights came on; the traffic lights had never stopped working. All four laptops were holding up, hurling their grenades into the far side. The closer the attack front came to simple arithmetic, the more resistance it would face from natural processes voting at the border for near-side results. Our enemy had their supercomputers; we had every atom of the Earth, following its billion-year-old version of the truth.

We had modeled this scenario. The sheer arithmetical inertia of all that matter would buy us time, but in the long run a coherent, sustained, computational attack could still force its way through.

How would we die? Losing consciousness first, feeling no pain? Or was the brain more robust than that? Would all the cells of our bodies start committing apoptosis, once their biochemical errors mounted up beyond repair? Maybe it would be just like radiation sickness. We’d be burned by decaying arithmetic, just as if it was nuclear fire.

My laptop beeped. I swerved off the road and parked on a stretch of concrete beside a dark shopfront. A new icon had appeared on the screen: the letter S.

Sam said, “Bruno, this was not my decision.”

“I believe you,” I said. “But if you’re just a messenger now, what’s your message?”

“If you give us what we asked for, we’ll stop the attack.”

“We’re hurting you, aren’t we?”

“We know we’re hurting you,” Sam replied. Point taken: we were guessing, firing blind. He didn’t have to ask about the damage we’d suffered.

I steeled myself, and followed the script the cabal had agreed upon. “We’ll give you the algorithm, but only if you retreat back to the old border, and then seal it.”

Sam was silent for four long heartbeats.

“Seal it?”

“I think you know what I mean.” In Shanghai, when we’d used Luminous to try to ensure that Industrial Algebra could not exploit the defect, we’d contemplated trying to seal the border rather than eliminating the defect altogether. The voting effect could only shift the border if it was crinkled in such a way that propositions on one side could be outnumbered by those on the other side. It was possible—given enough time and computing power—to smooth the border, to iron it flat. Once that was done, everywhere, the whole thing would become immovable. No force in the universe could shift it again.

Sam said, “You want to leave us with no weapon against you, while you still have the power to harm us.”

“We won’t have that power for long. Once you know exactly what we’re using, you’ll find a way to block it.”

There was a long pause. Then, “Stop your attacks on us, and we’ll consider your proposal.”

“We’ll stop our attacks when you pull the border back to the point where our lives are no longer at risk.”

“How would you even know that we’ve done that?” Sam replied. I wasn’t sure if the condescension was in his tone or just his words, but either way I welcomed it. The lower the far side’s opinion of our abilities, the more attractive the deal became for them.

I said, “Then you’d better back up far enough for all our communications systems to recover. When I can get news reports and see that there are no more planes going down, no power plants exploding, then we’ll start the ceasefire.”

Silence again, stretching out beyond mere hesitancy. His icon was still there, though, the S unblinking. I clutched at my shoulder, hoping that the burning pain was just tension in the muscle.

Finally: “All right. We agree. We’ll start shifting the border.”

I drove around looking for an all-night convenience store that might have had an old analog TV sitting in a corner to keep the cashier awake—that seemed like a good bet to start working long before the wireless connection to my laptop—but Campbell beat me to it. New Zealand radio and TV were reporting that the “digital blackout” appeared to be lifting, and ten minutes later Alison announced that she had internet access. A lot of the major servers were still down, or their sites weirdly garbled, but Reuters was starting to post updates on the crisis.

Sam had kept his word, so we halted the counter-strikes. Alison read from the Reuters site as the news came in. Seventeen planes had crashed, and four trains. There’d been fatalities at an oil refinery, and half a dozen manufacturing plants. One analyst put the global death toll at five thousand and rising.

I muted the microphone on my laptop and spent thirty seconds shouting obscenities and punching the dashboard. Then I rejoined the cabal.

Yuen said, “I’ve been reviewing my notes. If my instinct is worth anything, the theorem I mentioned before is correct: if the border is sealed, they’ll have no way to touch us.”

“What about the upside for them?” Alison asked. “Do you think they can protect themselves against Tim’s algorithm, once they understand it?”

Yuen hesitated. “Yes and no. Any cluster of near-side truth values it injects into the far side will have a non-smooth border, so they’ll be able to remove it with sheer computing power. In that sense, they’ll never be defenseless. But I don’t see how there’s anything they can do to prevent the attacks in the first place.”

“Short of wiping us out,” Campbell said.

I heard an infant sobbing. Alison said, “That’s Laura. I’m alone here. Give me five minutes.”

I buried my head in my arms. I still had no idea what the right course would have been. If we’d handed over Campbell’s algorithm immediately, might the good will that bought us have averted the war? Or would the same attack merely have come sooner? What criminal vanity had ever made the three of us think we could shoulder this responsibility on our own? Five thousand people were dead. The hawks who had taken over on the far side would weigh up our offer, and decide that they had no choice but to fight on.

And if the reluctant cabal had passed its burden to Canberra, to Zurich, to Beijing? Would there really have been peace? Or was I just wishing that there had been more hands steeped in the same blood, to share the guilt around?

The idea came from nowhere, sweeping away every other thought. I said, “Is there any reason why the far side has to stay connected?”

“Connected to what?” Campbell asked.

“Connected to itself. Connected topologically. They should be able to send down a spike, then withdraw it, but leave behind a bubble of altered truth values: a kind of outpost, sitting within the near side, with a perfect, smooth border making it impregnable. Right?”

Yuen said, “Perhaps. With both sides collaborating on the construction, that might be possible.”

“Then the question is, can we find a place where we can do that so that it kills off the chance to use Tim’s method completely—without crippling any process that we need just to survive?”

“Fuck you, Bruno!” Campbell exclaimed happily. “We give them one small Achilles tendon to slice . . . and then they’ve got nothing to fear from us!”

Yuen said, “A watertight proof of something like that is going to take weeks, months.”

“Then we’d better start work. And we’d better feed Sam the first plausible conjecture we get, so they can use their own resources to help us with the proof.”

Alison came back online and greeted the suggestion with cautious approval. I drove around until I found a quiet coffee shop. Electronic banking still wasn’t working, and I had no cash left, but the waiter agreed to take my credit card number and a signed authority for a deduction of one hundred dollars; whatever I didn’t eat and drink would be his tip.

I sat in the café, blanking out the world, steeping myself in the mathematics. Sometimes the four of us worked on separate tasks; sometimes we paired up, dragging each other out of dead ends and ruts. There were an infinite number of variations that could be made to Campbell’s algorithm, but hour by hour we whittled away at the concept, finding the common ground that no version of the weapon could do without.

By four in the morning, we had a strong conjecture. I called Sam, and explained what we were hoping to achieve.

He said, “This is a good idea. We’ll consider it.”

The café closed. I sat in the car for a while, drained and numb, then I called Kate to find out where she was. A couple had given her a lift almost as far as Penrith, and when their car failed she’d walked the rest of the way home.

For close to four days, I spent most of my waking hours just sitting at my desk, watching as a wave of red inched its way across a map of the defect. The change of hue was not being rendered lightly; before each pixel turned red, twelve separate computers needed to confirm that the region of the border it represented was flat.

On the fifth day, Sam shut off his computers and allowed us to mount an attack from our side on the narrow corridor linking the bulk of the far side with the small enclave that now surrounded our Achilles’ Heel. We wouldn’t have suffered any real loss of essential arithmetic if this slender thread had remained, but keeping the corridor both small and impregnable had turned out to be impossible. The original plan was the only route to finality: to seal the border perfectly, the far side proper could not remain linked to its offshoot.

In the next stage, the two sides worked together to seal the enclave completely, polishing the scar where its umbilical had been sheared away. When that task was complete, the map showed it as a single burnished ruby. No known process could reshape it now. Campbell’s method could have breached its border without touching it, reaching inside to reclaim it from within—but Campbell’s method was exactly what this jewel ruled out.

At the other end of the vanished umbilical, Sam’s machines set to work smoothing away the blemish. By early evening that, too, was done.

Only one tiny flaw in the border remained now: the handful of propositions that enabled communication between the two sides. The cabal had debated the fate of this for hours. So long as this small wrinkle persisted, in principle it could be used to unravel everything, to mobilize the entire border again. It was true that, compared to the border as a whole, it would be relatively easy to monitor and defend such a small site, but a sustained burst of brute-force computing from either side could still overpower any resistance and exploit it.

In the end, Sam’s political masters had made the decision for us. What they had always aspired to was certainty, and even if their strength favored them, this wasn’t a gamble they were prepared to take.

I said, “Good luck with the future.”

“Good luck to Sparseland,” Sam replied. I believed he’d tried to hold out against the hawks, but I’d never been certain of his friendship. When his icon faded from my screen, I felt more relief than regret.

I’d learned the hard way not to assume that anything was permanent. Perhaps in a thousand years, someone would discover that Campbell’s model was just an approximation to something deeper, and find a way to fracture these allegedly perfect walls. With any luck, by then both sides might also be better prepared to find a way to co-exist.

I found Kate sitting in the kitchen. I said, “I can answer your questions now, if that’s what you want.” On the morning after the disaster, I’d promised her this time would come—within weeks, not months—and she’d agreed to stay with me until it did.

She thought for a while.

“Did you have something to do with what happened last week?”

“Yes.”

“Are you saying you unleashed the virus? You’re the terrorist they’re looking for?” To my great relief, she asked this in roughly the tone she might have used if I’d claimed to be Genghis Khan.

“No, I’m not the cause of what happened. It was my job to try and stop it, and I failed. But it wasn’t any kind of computer virus.”

She searched my face. “What was it, then? Can you explain that to me?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I don’t care. We’ve got all night.”

I said, “It started in university. With an idea of Alison’s. One brilliant, beautiful, crazy idea.”

Kate looked away, her face flushing, as if I’d said something deliberately humiliating. She knew I was not a mass murderer. But there were other things about me of which she was less sure.

“The story starts with Alison,” I said. “But it ends here, with you.”

FINISTERRA

David Moles

1. ENCANTADA

Bianca Nazario stands at the end of the world.

The firmament above is as blue as the summer skies of her childhood, mirrored in the waters of la caldera; but where the skies she remembers were bounded by mountains, here on Sky there is no real horizon, only a line of white cloud. The white line shades into a diffuse grayish fog that, as Bianca looks down, grows progressively murkier, until the sky directly below is thoroughly dark and opaque.

She remembers what Dinh told her about the ways Sky could kill her. With a large enough parachute, Bianca imagines, she could fall for hours, drifting through the layered clouds, before finding her end in heat or pressure or the jaws of some monstrous denizen of the deep air.

If this should go wrong, Bianca cannot imagine a better way to die.

Bianca works her way out a few hundred meters along the base of one of Encantada’s ventral fins, stopping when the dry red dirt beneath her feet begins to give way to scarred gray flesh. She takes a last look around: at the pall of smoke obscuring the zaratán’s tree-lined dorsal ridge, at the fin she stands on, curving out and down to its delicate-looking tip, kilometers away. Then she knots her scarf around her skirted ankles and shrugs into the paraballoon harness, still warm from the bungalow’s fabricators. As the harness tightens itself around her, she takes a deep breath, filling her lungs. The wind from the burning camp smells of wood smoke and pine resin, enough to overwhelm the taint of blood from the killing ground.

Blessed Virgin, she prays, be my witness: this is no suicide.

This is a prayer for a miracle.

She leans forward.

She falls.

2. THE FLYING ARCHIPELAGO

The boatlike anemopter that Valadez had sent for them had a cruising speed of just less than the speed of sound, which in this part of Sky’s atmosphere meant about nine hundred kilometers per hour. The speed, Bianca thought, might have been calculated to bring home the true size of Sky, the impossible immensity of it. It had taken the better part of their first day’s travel for the anemopter’s point of departure, the ten-kilometer, billion-ton vacuum balloon Transient Meridian, to drop from sight—the dwindling golden droplet disappearing, not over the horizon, but into the haze. From that Bianca estimated that the bowl of clouds visible through the subtle blurring of the anemopter’s static fields covered an area about the size of North America.

She heard a plastic clattering on the deck behind her and turned to see one of the anemopter’s crew, a globular, brown-furred alien with a collection of arms like furry snakes, each arm tipped with a mouth or a round and curious eye. The firija were low-gravity creatures; the ones Bianca had seen on her passage from Earth had tumbled joyously through the Caliph of Baghdad’s inner-ring spaces like so many radially symmetrical monkeys. The three aboard the anemopter, in Sky’s heavier gravity, had to make do with spindly-legged walking machines. There was a droop in their arms that was both comical and melancholy.

“Come forward,” this one told Bianca in fractured Arabic, its voice like an ensemble of reed pipes. She thought it was the one that called itself Ismaíl. “Make see archipelago.”

She followed it forward to the anemopter’s rounded prow. The naturalist, Erasmus Fry, was already there, resting his elbows on the rail, looking down.

“Pictures don’t do them justice, do they?” he said.

Bianca went to the rail and followed the naturalist’s gaze. She did her best to maintain a certain stiff formality around Fry; from their first meeting aboard Transient Meridian she’d had the idea that it might not be good to let him get too familiar. But when she saw what Fry was looking at, the mask slipped for a moment; she couldn’t help a sharp, quick intake of breath.

Fry chuckled. “To stand on the back of one,” he said, “to stand in a valley and look up at the hills and know that the ground under your feet is supported by the bones of a living creature—there’s nothing else like it.” He shook his head.

At this altitude they were above all but the highest-flying of the thousands of beasts that made up Septentrionalis Archipelago. Bianca’s eyes tried to make the herd (or flock, or school) of zaratánes into other things: a chain of islands, yes, if she concentrated on the colors, the greens and browns of forests and plains, the grays and whites of the snowy highlands; a fleet of ships, perhaps, if she instead focused on the individual shapes, the keel ridges, the long, translucent fins, ribbed like Chinese sails.

The zaratánes of the archipelago were more different from one another than the members of a flock of birds or a pod of whales, but still there was a symmetry, a regularity of form, the basic anatomical plan—equal parts fish and mountain—repeated throughout, in fractal detail from the great old shape of Zaratán Finisterra, a hundred kilometers along the dorsal ridge, down to the merely hill-sized bodies of the nameless younger beasts. When she took in the archipelago as a whole, it was impossible for Bianca not to see the zaratánes as living things.

“Nothing else like it,” Fry repeated.

Bianca turned reluctantly from the view to look at Fry. The naturalist spoke Spanish with a flawless Miami accent, courtesy, he’d said, of a Consilium language module. Bianca was finding it hard to judge the ages of extrañados, particularly the men, but in Fry’s case she thought he might be ten years older than Bianca’s own forty, and unwilling to admit it—or ten years younger, and in the habit of treating himself very badly. On her journey here she’d met cyborgs and foreigners and artificial intelligences and several sorts of alien—some familiar, at least from media coverage of the hajj, and some strange—but the extrañados bothered her the most. It was hard to come to terms with the idea of humans born off Earth, humans who had never been to Earth or even seen it; humans who often had no interest in it.

“Why did you leave here, Mr. Fry?” she asked.

Fry laughed. “Because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life out here.” With a hand, he swept the horizon. “Stuck on some godforsaken floating island for years on end, with no one but researchers and feral refugees to talk to, nowhere to go for fun but some slum of a balloon station, nothing but a thousand kilometers of air between you and Hell?” He laughed again. “You’d leave, too, Nazario, believe me.”

“Maybe I would,” Bianca said. “But you’re back.”

“I’m here for the money,” Fry said. “Just like you.”

Bianca smiled and said nothing.

“You know,” Fry said after a little while, “they have to kill the zaratánes to take them out of here.” He looked at Bianca and smiled, in a way that was probably meant to be ghoulish. “There’s no atmosphere ship big enough to lift a zaratán in one piece—even a small one. The poachers deflate them—gut them—flatten them out and roll them up. And even then, they throw out almost everything but the skin and bones.”

“Strange,” Bianca mused. Her mask was back in place. “There was a packet of material on the zaratánes with my contract; I watched most of it on the voyage. According to the packet, the Consilium considers the zaratánes a protected species.”

Fry looked uneasy. Now it was Bianca’s turn to chuckle.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Fry,” she said. “I may not know exactly what it is Mr. Valadez is paying me to do, but I’ve never had any illusion that it was legal.”

Behind her, the firija made a fluting noise that might have been laughter.

3. THE STEEL BIRD

When Bianca was a girl, the mosque of Punta Aguila was the most prominent feature in the view from her fourth-floor window, a sixteenth-century structure of tensegrity cables and soaring catenary curves, its spreading white wings vaguely—but only vaguely—recalling the bird that gave the city its name. The automation that controlled the tension of the cables and adjusted the mosque’s wings to match the shifting winds was hidden within the cables themselves, and was very old. Once, after the hurricane in the time of Bianca’s grandfather, it had needed adjusting, and the old men of the ayuntamiento had been forced to send for extrañado technicians, at an expense so great that the jizyah of Bianca’s time was still paying for it.

But Bianca rarely thought of that. Instead she would spend long hours surreptitiously sketching those white wings, calculating the weight of the structure and the tension of the cables, wondering what it would take to make the steel bird fly.

Bianca’s father could probably have told her, but she never dared to ask. Raúl Nazario de Arenas was an aeronautical engineer, like the seven generations before him, and flight was the Nazarios’ fortune; fully a third of the aircraft that plied the skies over the Rio Pícaro were types designed by Raúl or his father or his wife’s father, on contract to the great moro trading and manufacturing families that were Punta Aguila’s truly wealthy.

Because he worked for other men, and because he was a Christian, Raúl Nazario would never be as wealthy as the men who employed him, but his profession was an ancient and honorable one, providing his family with a more than comfortable living. If Raúl Nazario de Arenas thought of the mosque at all, it was only to mutter about the jizyah from time to time—but never loudly, because the Nazarios, like the other Christians of Punta Aguila, however valued, however ancient their roots, knew that they lived there only on sufferance.

But Bianca would sketch the aircraft, too, the swift gliders and lumbering flying boats and stately dirigibles, and these drawings she did not have to hide; in fact for many years her father would encourage her, explaining this and that aspect of their construction, gently correcting errors of proportion and balance in Bianca’s drawings; would let her listen in while he taught the family profession to her brothers, Jesús the older, Pablo the younger.

This lasted until shortly before Bianca’s quinceañera, when Jesús changed his name to Walíd and married a moro’s daughter, and Bianca’s mother delivered a lecture concerning the difference between what was proper for a child and what was proper for a young Christian woman with hopes of one day making a good marriage.

It was only a handful of years later that Bianca’s father died, leaving a teenaged Pablo at the helm of his engineering business; and only Bianca’s invisible assistance and the pity of a few old clients had kept contracts and money coming into the Nazario household.

By the time Pablo was old enough to think he could run the business himself, old enough to marry the daughter of a musical instrument-maker from Tierra Ceniza, their mother was dead, Bianca was thirty, and even if her dowry had been half her father’s business, there was not a Christian man in Rio Pícaro who wanted it, or her.

And then one day Pablo told her about the extrañado contract that had been brought to the ayuntamiento, a contract that the ayuntamiento and the Guild had together forbidden the Christian engineers of Punta Aguila to bid on—a contract for a Spanish-speaking aeronautical engineer to travel a very long way from Rio Pícaro and be paid a very large sum of money indeed.

Three months later Bianca was in Quito, boarding an elevator car. In her valise was a bootleg copy of her father’s engineering system, and a contract with the factor of a starship called the Caliph of Baghdad, for passage to Sky.

4. THE KILLING GROUND

The anemopter’s destination was a zaratán called Encantada, smaller than the giant Finisterra but still nearly forty kilometers from nose to tail, and eight thousand meters from gray-white keel to forested crest. From a distance of a hundred kilometers, Encantada was like a forested mountain rising from a desert plain, the clear air under its keel as dreamlike as a mirage. On her pocket system, Bianca called up pictures from Sky’s network of the alpine ecology that covered the hills and valleys of Encantada’s flanks: hardy grasses and small warm-blooded creatures and tall evergreens with spreading branches, reminding her of the pines and redwoods in the mountains west of Rio Pícaro.

For the last century or so Encantada had been keeping company with Zaratán Finisterra, holding its position above the larger beast’s eastern flank. No one, apparently, knew the reason. Fry being the expert, Bianca had expected him to at least have a theory. He didn’t even seem interested in the question.

“They’re beasts, Nazario,” he said. “They don’t do things for reasons. We only call them animals and not plants because they bleed when we cut them.”

They were passing over Finisterra’s southern slopes. Looking down, Bianca saw brighter, warmer greens, more shades than she could count, more than she had known existed, the green threaded through with bright ribbons of silver water. She saw the anemopter’s shadow, a dark oblong that rode the slopes and ridges, ringed by brightness—the faint reflection of Sky’s sun behind them.

And just before the shadow entered the larger darkness that was the shadow of Encantada, Bianca watched it ride over something else: a flat green space carved out of the jungle, a suspiciously geometric collection of shapes that could only be buildings, the smudge of chimney smoke.

“Fry—” she started to say.

Then the village, if that’s what it was, was gone, hidden behind the next ridge.

“What?” said Fry.

“I saw—I thought I saw—”

“People?” asked Fry. “You probably did.”

“But I thought Sky didn’t have any native sentients. Who are they?”

“Humans, mostly,” Fry said. “Savages. Refugees. Drug farmers. Five generations of escaped criminals, and their kids, and their kids.” The naturalist shrugged. “Once in a while, if the Consilium’s looking for somebody in particular, the wardens might stage a raid, just for show. The rest of the time, the wardens fly their dope, screw their women . . . and otherwise leave them alone.”

“But where do they come from?” Bianca asked.

“Everywhere,” Fry said with another shrug. “Humans have been in this part of space for a long, long time. This is one of those places people end up, you know? People with nowhere else to go. People who can’t fall any farther.”

Bianca shook her head and said nothing.

The poacher camp on Encantada’s eastern slope was invisible until they were almost upon it, hidden from the wardens’ satellite eyes by layers of projected camouflage. Close up, the illusion seemed flat, its artificiality obvious, but it was still not until the anemopter passed through the projection that the camp itself could be seen: a clear-cut swath a kilometer wide and three times as long, stretching from the lower slopes of Encantada’s dorsal ridge down to the edge of the zaratán’s clifflike flank. Near the edge, at one corner, there was a small cluster of prefabricated bungalows; but at first it seemed to Bianca that most of the space was wasted.

Then she saw the red churned into the brown mud of the cleared strip, saw the way the shape of the terrain suggested the imprint of a gigantic, elongated body.

The open space was for killing.

“Sky is very poor, Miss Nazario,” said Valadez, over his shoulder.

The poacher boss looked to be about fifty, stocky, his hair still black and his olive skin well-tanned but pocked with tiny scars. His Spanish was a dialect Bianca had never heard before, strange and lush, its vowels rich, its hs breathy as Bianca’s js, its js warm and liquid as the ys of an Argentine. When he said, Fuck your mother—and already, in the hour or so Bianca had been in the camp, she had heard him say it several times, though never yet to her—the madre came out madri.

About half of the poachers were human, but Valadez seemed to be the only one who spoke Spanish natively; the rest used Sky’s dialect of bazaar Arabic. Valadez spoke that as well, better than Bianca did, but she had the sense that he’d learned it late in life. If he had a first name, he was keeping it to himself.

“There are things on Sky that people want,” Valadez went on. “But the people of Sky have nothing of interest to anybody. The companies that mine the deep air pay some royalties. But mostly what people live on here is Consilium handouts.”

The four of them—Bianca, Fry, and the firija, Ismaíl, who as well as being an anemopter pilot seemed to be Valadez’s servant or business partner or bodyguard, or perhaps all three—were climbing the ridge above the poachers’ camp. Below them workers, some human, some firija, a handful of other species, were setting up equipment: mobile machines that looked like they belonged on a construction site, pipes and cylindrical tanks reminiscent of a brewery or a refinery.

“I’m changing that, Miss Nazario.” Valadez glanced over his shoulder at Bianca. “Off-world, there are people—like Ismaíl’s people here”—he waved at the firija—“who like the idea of living on a floating island, and have the money to pay for one.” He swept an arm, taking in the camp, the busy teams of workers. “With that money, I take boys out of the shantytowns of Sky’s balloon stations and elevator gondolas. I give them tools, and teach them to kill beasts.

“To stop me—since they can’t be bothered to do it themselves—the Consilium takes the same boys, gives them guns, and teaches them to kill men.”

The poacher stopped and turned to face Bianca, jamming his hands into the pockets of his coat.

“Tell me, Miss Nazario—is one worse than the other?”

“I’m not here to judge you, Mr. Valadez,” said Bianca. “I’m here to do a job.”

Valadez smiled. “So you are.”

He turned and continued up the slope. Bianca and the firija followed, Fry trailing behind. The path switchbacked through unfamiliar trees, dark, stunted, waxy-needled; these gave way to taller varieties, including some that Bianca would have sworn were ordinary pines and firs. She breathed deeply, enjoying the alpine breeze after the crowds-and-machines reek of Transient Meridian’s teeming slums, the canned air of ships and anemopters.

“It smells just like home,” she remarked. “Why is that?”

No one answered.

The ridge leveled off. They came out into a cleared space, overlooking the camp. Spread out below them Bianca saw the airfield, the globular tanks and pipes of the poachers’ little industrial plant, the bungalows in the distance—and, in between, the red-brown earth of the killing ground, stretching out to the cliff edge and the bases of the nearest translucent fins.

“This is a good spot,” Valadez declared. “Should be a good view from up here.”

“A view of what?” said Fry.

The poacher didn’t answer. He waved to Ismaíl, and the firija took a small folding stool out of a pocket, snapping it into shape with a flick of sinuous arms and setting it down behind him. Valadez sat.

After a moment, the answer to Fry’s question came up over the edge.

Bianca had not thought much at all about the killing of a zaratán, and when she had thought of it she had imagined something like the harpooning of a whale in ancient times, the great beast fleeing, pursued by the tiny harassing shapes of boats, gored by harpoons, sounding again and again, all the strength bleeding out of the beast until there was nothing left for it to do but wallow gasping on the surface and expire, noble and tragic. Now Bianca realized that for all their great size, the zaratánes were far weaker than any whale, far less able to fight or to escape or even—she sincerely hoped—to understand what was happening to them.

There was nothing noble about the way the nameless zaratán died. Anemopters landed men and aliens with drilling tools at the base of each hundred-meter fin, to bore through soil and scale and living flesh and cut the connecting nerves that controlled them. This took about fifteen minutes; and to Bianca there seemed to be something obscene in the way the paralyzed fins hung there afterward, lifeless and limp. Thus crippled, the beast was pushed and pulled by aerial tugs—awkward machines, stubby and cylindrical, converted from the station-keeping engines of vacuum balloons like Transient Meridian—into position over Encantada’s killing ground. Then the drilling teams moved in again, to the places marked for them ahead of time by seismic sensors and ultrasound, cutting this time through bone as well as flesh, to find the zaratán’s brain.

When the charges the drilling teams had planted went off, a ripple went through the zaratán’s body, a slow-motion convulsion that took nearly a minute to travel down the body’s long axis, as the news of death passed from synapse to synapse; and Bianca saw flocks of birds started from the trees along the zaratán’s back as if by an earthquake, which in a way she supposed this was. The carcass immediately began to pitch downward, the nose dropping—the result, Bianca realized, of sphincters relaxing one by one, all along the zaratán’s length, venting hydrogen from the ballonets.

Then the forward edge of the keel fin hit the ground and crumpled, and the whole length of the dead beast, a hundred thousand tons of it, crashed down into the field; and even at that distance Bianca could hear the cracking of gargantuan bones.

She shivered, and glanced at her pocket system. The whole process, she was amazed to see, had taken less than half an hour.

“That’s this trip paid for, whatever else happens,” said Valadez. He turned to Bianca. “Mostly, though, I thought you should see this. Have you guessed yet what it is I’m paying you to do, Miss Nazario?”

Bianca shook her head. “Clearly you don’t need an aeronautical engineer to do what you’ve just done.” She looked down at the killing ground, where men and aliens and machines were already climbing over the zaratán’s carcass, uprooting trees, peeling back skin and soil in great strips like bleeding boulevards. A wind had come up, blowing from the killing ground across the camp, bringing with it a smell that Bianca associated with butcher shops.

An engineering problem, she reminded herself, as she turned her back on the scene and faced Valadez. That’s all this is.

“How are you going to get it out of here?” she asked.

“Cargo-lifter,” said Valadez. “The Lupita Jeréz. A supply ship, diverted from one of the balloon stations.”

The alien, Ismaíl, said, “Like fly anemopter make transatmospheric.” The same fluting voice and broken Arabic. “Lifter plenty payload mass limit, but fly got make have packaging. Packaging for got make platform have stable.” On the word packaging the firija’s arms made an expressive gesture, like rolling something up into a bundle and tying it.

Bianca nodded hesitantly, hoping she understood. “And so you can only take the small ones,” she said. “Right? Because there’s only one place on Sky you’ll find a stable platform that size: on the back of another zaratán.”

“You have the problem in a nutshell, Miss Nazario,” said Valadez. “Now, how would you solve it? How would you bag, say, Encantada here? How would you bag Finisterra?”

Fry said, “You want to take one alive?” His face was even more pale than usual. Bianca noticed that he, too, had turned his back to the killing ground.

Valadez was still looking at Bianca, expectantly.

“He doesn’t want it alive, Mr. Fry,” she said, watching the poacher. “He wants it dead—but intact. You could take even Finisterra apart, and lift it piece by piece, but you’d need a thousand cargo-lifters to do it.”

Valadez smiled.

“I’ve got another ship,” he said. “Built for deep mining, outfitted as a mobile elevator station. Counterweighted. The ship itself isn’t rated for atmosphere, but if you can get one of the big ones to the edge of space, we’ll lower the skyhook, catch the beast, and catapult it into orbit. The buyer’s arranged an FTL tug to take it from there.”

Bianca made herself look back at the killing ground. The workers were freeing the bones, lifting them with aerial cranes and feeding them into the plant; for cleaning and preservation, she supposed. She turned back to Valadez.

“We should be able to do that, if the zaratán’s body will stand up to the low pressure,” she said. “But why go to all this trouble? I’ve seen the balloon stations. I’ve seen what you people can do with materials. How hard can it be to make an imitation zaratán?”

Valadez glanced at Ismaíl. The walker was facing the killing ground, but two of the alien’s many eyes were watching the sky—and two more were watching Valadez. The poacher looked back at Bianca.

“An imitation’s one thing, Miss Nazario; the real thing is something else. And worth a lot more, to the right buyer.” He looked away again; not at Ismaíl this time, but up the slope, through the trees. “Besides,” he added, “in this case I’ve got my own reasons.”

“Ship come,” Ismaíl announced.

Bianca looked and saw more of the firija’s eyes turning upward. She followed their gaze. At first she saw only empty sky. Then the air around the descending Lupita Jeréz boiled into contrails, outlining the invisible ovoid shape of the ship’s lifting fields.

“Time to get to work,” said Valadez.

Bianca glanced toward the killing ground. A pink fog was rising to cover the work of the flensing crews.

The air was full of blood.

5. THE AERONAUTS

Valadez’s workers cleaned the nameless zaratán’s bones one by one; they tanned the hide, and rolled it into bundles for loading aboard the Lupita Jeréz. That job, grotesque though it was, was the cleanest part of the work. What occupied most of the workers was the disposal of the unwanted parts, a much dirtier and more arduous job. Exotic internal organs the size of houses; tendons like braided, knotted bridge cables; ballonets large enough, each of them, to lift an ordinary dirigible; and hectares and hectares of pale, dead flesh. The poachers piled up the mess with earthmoving machines and shoveled it off the edge of the killing ground, a rain of offal falling into the clouds in a mist of blood, manna for the ecology of the deep air. They sprayed the killing ground with antiseptics, and the cool air helped to slow decay a little, but by the fourth day the butcher-shop smell had nonetheless given way to something worse.

Bianca’s bungalow was one of the farthest out, only a few dozen meters from Encantada’s edge, where the wind blew in from the open eastern sky, and she could turn her back on the slaughter to look out into clear air, dotted with the small, distant shapes of younger zaratánes. Even here, though, a kilometer and more upwind of the killing ground, the air carried a taint of spoiled meat. The sky was full of insects and scavenger birds, and there were always vermin underfoot.

Bianca spent most of her time indoors, where the air was filtered and the wet industrial sounds of the work muted. The bungalow was outfitted with all the mechanisms the extrañados used to make themselves comfortable, but while in the course of her journey Bianca had learned to operate these, she made little use of them. Besides her traveling chest—a gift from her older brother’s wife, which served as armoire, desk, dresser, and drafting table—the only furnishings were a woven carpet in the Lagos Grandes style, a hard little bed, and a single wooden chair, not very different from the ones in her room in Punta Aguila. Of course those had been handmade, and these were simulations provided by the bungalow’s machines.

The rest of the room was given over to the projected spaces of Bianca’s engineering work. The tools Valadez had given her were slick and fast and factory-fresh, the state of somebody’s art, somewhere; but what Bianca mostly found herself using was her pocket system’s crippled copy of the Nazario family automation.

The system Bianca’s father used to use to calculate stresses in fabric and metal and wood, to model the flow of air over wings and the variation of pressure and temperature through gasbags, was six centuries old, a slow, patient, reliable thing that dated from before the founding of the London Caliphate. It had aged along with the family, grown used to their quirks and to the strange demands of aviation in Rio Pícaro. Bianca’s version of it, limited though it was, at least didn’t balk at control surfaces supported by muscle and bone, at curves not aerodynamically smooth but fractally complex with grasses and trees and hanging vines. If the zaratánes had been machines, they would have been marvels of engineering, with their internal networks of gasbags and ballonets, their reservoir-sized ballast bladders full of collected rainwater, their great delicate fins. The zaratánes were beyond the poachers’ systems’ stubborn, narrow-minded comprehension; for all their speed and flash, the systems sulked like spoiled children whenever Bianca tried to use them to do something their designers had not expected her to do.

Which she was doing, all the time. She was working out how to draw up Leviathan with a hook.

“Miss Nazario.”

Bianca started. She had yet to grow used to these extrañado telephones that never rang, but only spoke to her out of the air, or perhaps out of her own head.

“Mr. Valadez,” she said, after a moment.

“Whatever you’re doing, drop it,” said Valadez’s voice. “You and Fry. I’m sending a ’mopter for you.”

“I’m working,” said Bianca. “I don’t know what Fry’s doing.”

“This is work,” said Valadez. “Five minutes.”

A change in the quality of the silence told Bianca that Valadez had hung up. She sighed; then stood, stretched, and started to braid her hair.

The anemopter brought them up over the dorsal ridge, passing between two of the great translucent fins. At this altitude, Encantada’s body was clear of vegetation; Bianca looked down on hectares of wind-blasted gray hide, dusted lightly with snow. They passed within a few hundred meters of one of the huge spars that anchored the after fin’s leading edge: a kilometers-high pillar of flesh, teardrop in cross-section, and at least a hundred meters thick. The trailing edge of the next fin, by contrast, flashed by in an instant. Bianca had only a brief impression of a silk-supple membrane, veined with red, clear as dirty glass.

“What do you think he wants?” Fry asked.

“I don’t know.” She nodded her head toward the firija behind them at the steering console. “Did you ask the pilot?”

“I tried,” Fry said. “Doesn’t speak Arabic.”

Bianca shrugged. “I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

Then they were coming down again, down the western slope. In front of Bianca was the dorsal ridge of Zaratán Finisterra. Twenty kilometers away and blue with haze, it nonetheless rose until it seemed to cover a third of the sky.

Bianca looked out at it, wondering again what kept Encantada and Finisterra so close; but then the view was taken away and they were coming down between the trees, into a shady, ivy-filled creekbed somewhere not far from Encantada’s western edge. There was another anemopter already there, and a pair of aerial tugs—and a whitish mass that dwarfed all of these, sheets and ribbons of pale material hanging from the branches and draped over the ivy, folds of it damming the little stream.

With an audible splash, the anemopter set down, the ramps lowered, and Bianca stepped off into cold ankle-deep water that made her glad of her knee-high boots. Fry followed, gingerly.

“You!” called Valadez, pointing at Fry from the deck of the other anemopter. “Come here. Miss Nazario—I’d like you to have a look at that balloon.”

“Balloon?”

Valadez gestured impatiently downstream. Suddenly Bianca saw the white material for the shredded, deflated gasbag it was; and saw, too, that there was a basket attached to it, lying on its side, partially submerged in the middle of the stream. Ismaíl was standing over it, waving.

Bianca splashed over to the basket. It actually was a basket, two meters across and a meter and a half high, woven from strips of something like bamboo or rattan. The gasbag—this was obvious, once Bianca saw it up close—had been made from one of the ballonets of a zaratán, a zaratán younger and smaller even than the one Bianca had seen killed; it had been tanned, but inexpertly, and by someone without access to the sort of industrial equipment the poachers used.

Bianca wondered about the way the gasbag was torn up. The tissues of the zaratánes, she knew, were very strong. A hydrogen explosion?

“Make want fly got very bad,” Ismaíl commented, as Bianca came around to the open side of the basket.

“They certainly did,” she said.

In the basket there were only some wool blankets and some empty leather waterbags, probably used both for drinking water and for ballast. The lines used to control the vent flaps were all tangled together, and tangled, too, with the lines that secured the gasbag to the basket, but Bianca could guess how they had worked. No stove. It seemed to have been a pure hydrogen balloon; and why not, she thought, with all the hydrogen anyone could want free from the nearest zaratán’s vent valves?

“Where did it come from?” she asked.

Ismaíl rippled his arms in a way that Bianca guessed was meant to be an imitation of a human shrug. One of his eyes glanced downstream.

Bianca fingered the material of the basket: tough, woody fiber. Tropical, from a climate warmer than Encantada’s. She followed Ismaíl’s glance. The trees hid the western horizon, but she knew, if she could see beyond them, what would be there.

Aloud, she said, “Finisterra.”

She splashed back to the anemopters. Valadez’s hatch was open.

“I’m telling you,” Fry was saying, “I don’t know her!”

“Fuck off, Fry,” Valadez said as Bianca stepped into the cabin. “Look at her ID.”

The her in question was a young woman with short black hair and sallow skin, wearing tan off-world cottons like Fry’s under a colorful homespun serape; and at first Bianca was not sure the woman was alive, because the man next to her on Valadez’s floor, also in homespun, was clearly dead, his eyes half-lidded, his olive skin gone muddy gray.

The contents of their pockets were spread out on a low table. As Bianca was taking in the scene, Fry bent down and picked up a Consilium-style ID tag.

“ ‘Edith Dinh,’ ” he read. He tossed the tag back and looked at Valadez. “So?”

“ ‘Edith Dinh, Consilium Ethnological Service,’ ” Valadez growled. “Issued Shawwal ’43. You were here with the Ecological Service from Rajab ’42 to Muharram ’46. Look again!”

Fry turned away.

“All right!” he said. “Maybe—maybe I met her once or twice.”

“So,” said Valadez. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Who the hell is she? And what’s she doing here?”

“She’s . . .” Fry glanced at the woman and then quickly looked away. “I don’t know. I think she was a population biologist or something. There was a group working with the, you know, the natives—”

“There aren’t any natives on Sky,” said Valadez. He prodded the dead man with the toe of his boot. “You mean these cabrónes?”

Fry nodded. “They had this ‘sustainable development’ program going—farming, forestry. Teaching them how to live on Finisterra without killing it.”

Valadez looked skeptical. “If the Consilium wanted to stop them from killing Finisterra, why didn’t they just send in the wardens?”

“Interdepartmental politics. The zaratánes were EcoServ’s responsibility; the n-—I mean, the inhabitants were EthServ’s.” Fry shrugged. “You know the wardens. They’d have taken bribes from anyone who could afford it and shot the rest.”

“Damn right I know the wardens.” Valadez scowled. “So instead EthServ sent in these do-gooders to teach them to make balloons?”

Fry shook his head. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Miss Nazario? Tell me about that balloon.”

“It’s a hydrogen balloon, I think. Probably filled from some zaratán’s external vents.” She shrugged. “It looks like the sort of thing I’d expect someone living out here to build, if that’s what you mean.”

Valadez nodded.

“But,” Bianca added, “I can’t tell you why it crashed.”

Valadez snorted. “I don’t need you to tell me that,” he said. “It crashed because we shot it down.” Pitching his voice for the anemopter’s communication system, he called out, “Ismaíl!”

Bianca tried to keep the shock from showing on her face, and after a moment she had regained her composure. You knew they were criminals when you took their money, she told herself.

The firija’s eyes came around the edge of the doorway.

“Yes?”

“Tell the tug crews to pack that thing up,” said Valadez. “Every piece, every scrap. Pack it up and drop it into clear air.”

The alien’s walking machine clambered into the cabin. Its legs bent briefly, making a little bob like a curtsey.

“Yes.” Ismaíl gestured at the bodies of the dead man and the unconscious woman. Several of the firija’s eyes met Valadez’s. “These two what do?” he asked.

“Them, too,” said Valadez. “Lash them into the basket.”

The firija made another bob and started to bend down to pick them up.

Bianca looked down at the two bodies, both of them, the dead man and the unconscious woman, looking small and thin and vulnerable. She glanced at Fry, whose eyes were fixed on the floor, his lips pressed together in a thin line.

Then she looked over at Valadez, who was methodically sweeping the balloonists’ effects into a pile, as if neither Bianca nor Fry was present.

“No,” she said.

Ismaíl stopped and straightened up.

“What?” said Valadez.

“No,” Bianca repeated.

“You want her bringing the wardens down on us?” Valadez demanded.

“That’s murder, Mr. Valadez,” Bianca said. “I won’t be a party to it.”

The poacher’s eyes narrowed. He gestured at the dead man.

“You’re already an accessory,” he said.

“After the fact,” Bianca replied evenly. She kept her eyes on Valadez.

The poacher looked at the ceiling. “Fuck your mother,” he muttered. He looked down at the two bodies, and at Ismaíl, and then over at Bianca. He sighed heavily.

“All right,” he said to the firija. “Take the live one back to the camp. Secure a bungalow, one of the ones out by the edge”—he glanced at Bianca—“and lock her in it. Okay?”

“Okay,” said Ismaíl. “Dead one what do?”

Valadez looked at Bianca again. “The dead one,” he said, “goes in the basket.”

Bianca looked at the dead man again, wondering what bravery or madness had brought him aboard that fragile balloon, and wondering what he would have thought if he had known that the voyage would end this way, with his body tumbling down into the deep air. She supposed he must have known there was a chance of it.

After a moment, she nodded, once.

“Right,” said Valadez. “Now get back to work, damn it.”

6. THE CITY OF THE DEAD

The anemopter that brought Bianca and Fry over the ridge took them back. Fry was silent, hunched, his elbows on his knees, staring at nothing. What fear or guilt was going through his mind, Bianca couldn’t guess.

After a little while she stopped watching him. She thought about the Finisterran balloon, so simple, so fragile, making her father’s wood-and-silk craft look as sophisticated as the Lupita Jeréz. She took out her pocket system, sketched a simple globe and basket, then erased them.

Make want fly very bad, Ismaíl the firija had said. Why?

Bianca undid the erasure, bringing her sketch back. She drew the spherical balloon out into a blunt torpedo, round at the nose, tapering to a point behind. Added fins. An arrangement of pulleys and levers, allowing them to be controlled from the basket. A propeller, powered by—she had to think for a little while—by an alcohol-fueled engine, carved from zaratán bones. . . .

The anemopter was landing. Bianca sighed and again erased the design.

The firija guard outside Edith Dinh’s bungalow didn’t seem to speak Arabic or Spanish, or for that matter any human language at all. Bianca wondered if the choice was deliberate, the guard chosen by Valadez as a way of keeping a kind of solitary confinement.

Or was the guard Valadez’s choice at all? she wondered suddenly. Looking at the meter-long weapon cradled in the alien’s furred arms, she shivered.

Then she squared her shoulders and approached the bungalow. Wordlessly, she waved the valise she was carrying, as if by it her reasons for being there were made customary and obvious.

The alien said something in its own fluting language—whether a reply to her, or a request for instructions from some unseen listener, Bianca couldn’t tell. Either those instructions were to let her pass, apparently, or by being seen in Valadez’s company she had acquired some sort of reflected authority; because the firija lifted its weapon and, as the bungalow’s outer door slid open, motioned for her to enter. The inner door was already open.

“¿Hola?” Bianca called out, tentatively. Immediately she felt like an idiot.

But the answer came:

“Aquí.”

The interior layout of the bungalow was the same as Bianca’s. The voice came from the sitting room. Bianca found Dinh there, still wearing the clothes she’d had on when they found her, sitting with her knees drawn up, staring out the east window into the sky. The east was dark with rain clouds, and far below, Bianca could see flashes of lightning.

“Salaam aleikum,” said Bianca, taking refuge in the formality of the Arabic.

“Aleikum as-salaam,” Dinh replied. She glanced briefly at Bianca and looked away; then looked back again. In a Spanish that was somewhere between Valadez’s strange accent and the mechanical fluency of Fry’s language module, she said, “You’re not from Finisterra.”

“No,” said Bianca, giving up on the Arabic. “I’m from Rio Pícaro—from Earth. My name is Nazario, Bianca Nazario y Arenas.”

“Edith Dinh.”

Dinh stood up. There was an awkward moment, where Bianca was not sure whether to bow or curtsey or give Dinh her hand. She settled for proffering the valise.

“I brought you some things,” she said. “Clothes, toiletries.”

Dinh looked surprised. “Thanks,” she said, taking the valise and looking inside.

“Are they feeding you? I could bring you some food.”

“The kitchen still works,” said Dinh. She held up a white packet. “And these?”

“Sanitary napkins,” said Bianca.

“Sanitary . . .?” Color rose to Dinh’s face. “Oh. That’s all right. I’ve got implants.” She dropped the packet back in the valise and closed it.

Bianca looked away, feeling her own cheeks blush in turn. Damned extrañados, she thought. “I’d better—” be going, she started to say.

“Please—” said Dinh.

The older woman and the younger stood there for a moment, looking at each other. Bianca suddenly wondered what impulse had brought her here, whether curiosity or Christian charity or simply a moment of loneliness, weakness. Of course she’d had to stop Valadez from killing the girl, but this was clearly a mistake.

“Sit,” Dinh said. “Let me get you something. Tea? Coffee?”

“I—all right.” Bianca sat, slowly, perching on the edge of one of the too-soft extrañado couches. “Coffee,” she said.

The coffee was very dark, sweeter than Bianca liked it, flavored with something like condensed milk. She was glad to have it, regardless, glad to have something to look at and something to occupy her hands.

“You don’t look like a poacher,” Dinh said.

“I’m an aeronautical engineer,” Bianca said. “I’m doing some work for them.” She looked down at her coffee, took a sip, and looked up. “What about you? Fry said you’re a biologist of some kind. What were you doing in that balloon?”

She couldn’t tell whether the mention of Fry’s name had registered, but Dinh’s mouth went thin. She glanced out the west window.

Bianca followed her glance and saw the guard, slumped in its walker, watching the two women with one eye each. She wondered again whether Valadez was really running things, and then whether the firija’s ignorance of human language was real or feigned—and whether, even if it was real, someone less ignorant might be watching and listening, unseen.

Then she shook her head and looked back at Dinh, waiting.

“Finisterra’s falling,” Dinh said eventually. “Dying, maybe. It’s too big; it’s losing lift. It’s fallen more than fifty meters in the last year alone.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Bianca said. “The lift-to-weight ratio of an aerostat depends on the ratio of volume to surface area. A larger zaratán should be more efficient, not less. And even if it does lose lift, it should only fall until it reaches a new equilibrium.”

“It’s not a machine,” Dinh said. “It’s a living creature.”

Bianca shrugged. “Maybe it’s old age, then,” she said. “Everything has to die sometime.”

“Not like this,” Dinh said. She set down her coffee and turned to face Bianca fully. “Look. We don’t know who built Sky, or how long ago, but it’s obviously artificial. A gas giant with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere? That doesn’t happen. And the Earthlike biology—the zaratánes are DNA-based, did you know that? The whole place is astronomically unlikely; if the Phenomenological Service had its way, they’d just quarantine the entire system, and damn Sky and everybody on it.

“The archipelago ecology is as artificial as everything else. Whoever designed it must have been very good; posthuman, probably, maybe even postsingularity. It’s a robust equilibrium, full of feedback mechanisms, ways to correct itself. But we, us ordinary humans and human-equivalents, we’ve”—she made a helpless gesture—“fucked it up. You know why Encantada’s stayed here so long? Breeding, that’s why . . . or maybe ‘pollination’ would be a better way to put it. . . .”

She looked over at Bianca.

“The death of an old zaratán like Finisterra should be balanced by the birth of dozens, hundreds. But you, those bastards you work for, you’ve killed them all.”

Bianca let the implication of complicity slide. “All right, then,” she said. “Let’s hear your plan.”

“What?”

“Your plan,” Bianca repeated. “For Finisterra. How are you going to save it?”

Dinh stared at her for a moment, then shook her head. “I can’t,” she said. She stood up and went to the east window. Beyond the sheet of rain that now poured down the window, the sky was deep mauve shading to indigo, relieved only by the lightning that sparked in the deep and played across the fins of the distant zaratánes of the archipelago’s outer reaches. Dinh put her palm flat against the diamond pane.

“I can’t save Finisterra,” she said quietly. “I just want to stop you hijos de puta from doing this again.”

Now Bianca was stung. “Hija de puta, yourself,” she said. “You’re killing them, too. Killing them and making balloons out of them, how is that better?”

Dinh turned back. “One zaratán the size of the one they’re slaughtering out there right now would keep the Finisterrans in balloons for a hundred years,” she said. “The only way to save the archipelago is to make the zaratánes more valuable alive than dead—and the only value a live zaratán has, on Sky, is as living space.”

“You’re trying to get the Finisterrans to colonize the other zaratánes?” Bianca asked. “But why should they? What’s in it for them?”

“I told you,” Dinh said. “Finisterra’s dying.” She looked out the window, down into the depths of the storm, both hands pressed against the glass. “Do you know how falling into Sky kills you, Bianca? First, there’s the pressure. On the slopes of Finisterra, where the people live, it’s a little more than a thousand millibars. Five kilometers down, under Finisterra’s keel, it’s double that. At two thousand millibars you can still breathe the air. At three thousand, nitrogen narcosis sets in—‘rapture of the deep,’ they used to call it. At four thousand, the partial pressure of oxygen alone is enough to make your lungs bleed.”

She stepped away from the window and looked at Bianca.

“But you’ll never live to suffer that,” she said. “Because of the heat. Every thousand meters the average temperature rises six or seven degrees. Here it’s about fifteen. Under Finisterra’s keel it’s closer to fifty. Twenty kilometers down, the air is hot enough to boil water.”

Bianca met her gaze steadily. “I can think of worse ways to die,” she said.

“There are seventeen thousand people on Finisterra,” said Dinh. “Men, women, children, old people. There’s a town—they call it the Lost City, la ciudad perdida. Some of the families on Finisterra can trace their roots back six generations.” She gave a little laugh, with no humor in it. “They should call it la ciudad muerta. They’re the walking dead, all seventeen thousand of them. Even though no one alive on Finisterra today will live to see it die. Already the crops are starting to fail. Already more old men and old women die every summer, as the summers get hotter and drier. The children of the children who are born today will have to move up into the hills as it gets too hot to grow crops on the lower slopes; but the soil isn’t as rich up there, so many of those crops will fail, too. And their children’s children . . . won’t live to be old enough to have children of their own.”

“Surely someone will rescue them before then,” Bianca said.

“Who?” Dinh asked. “The Consilium? Where would they put them? The vacuum balloon stations and the elevator gondolas are already overcrowded. As far as the rest of Sky is concerned, the Finisterrans are ‘malcontents’ and ‘criminal elements. ’ Who’s going to take them in?”

“Then Valadez is doing them a favor,” Bianca said.

Dinh started. “Emmanuel Valadez is running your operation?”

“It’s not my operation,” Bianca said, trying to keep her voice level. “And I didn’t ask his first name.”

Dinh fell into the window seat. “Of course it would be,” she said. “Who else would they . . .” She trailed off, looking out the west window, toward the killing ground.

Then, suddenly, she turned back to Bianca.

“What do you mean, ‘doing them a favor’ ?” she said.

“Finisterra,” Bianca said. “He’s poaching Finisterra.”

Dinh stared at her. “My God, Bianca! What about the people?”

“What about them?” asked Bianca. “They’d be better off somewhere else—you said that yourself.”

“And what makes you think Valadez will evacuate them?”

“He’s a thief, not a mass murderer.”

Dinh gave her a withering look. “He is a murderer, Bianca. His father was a warden, his mother was the wife of the alcalde of Ciudad Perdida. He killed his own stepfather, two uncles, and three brothers. They were going to execute him—throw him over the edge—but a warden airboat picked him up. He spent two years with them, then killed his sergeant and three other wardens, stole their ship and sold it for a ticket off-world. He’s probably the most wanted man on Sky.”

She shook her head and, unexpectedly, gave Bianca a small smile.

“You didn’t know any of that when you took the job, did you?”

Her voice was full of pity. It showed on her face as well, and suddenly Bianca couldn’t stand to look at it. She got up and went to the east window. The rain was lighter now, the lightning less frequent.

She thought back to her simulations, her plans for lifting Finisterra up into the waiting embrace of the skyhook: the gasbags swelling, the zaratán lifting, first slowly and then with increasing speed, toward the upper reaches of Sky’s atmosphere. But now her inner vision was not the ghost-shape of a projection but a living image—trees cracking in the cold, water freezing, blood boiling from the ground in a million, million tiny hemorrhages.

She saw her mother’s house in Punta Aguila—her sister-in-law’s house, now: saw its windows rimed with frost, the trees in the courtyard gone brown and sere. She saw the Mercado de los Maculados beneath a blackening sky, the awnings whipped away by a thin wind, ice-cold, bone-dry.

He killed that Finisterran balloonist, she thought. He was ready to kill Dinh. He’s capable of murder.

Then she shook her head.

Killing one person, or two, to cover up a crime, was murder, she thought. Killing seventeen thousand people by deliberate asphyxiation—men, women, and children—wasn’t murder, it was genocide.

She took her cup of coffee from the table, took a sip and put it down again.

“Thank you for the coffee,” she said. She turned to go.

“How can you just let him do this?” Dinh demanded. “How can you help him do this?”

Bianca turned on her. Dinh was on her feet; her fists were clenched, and she was shaking. Bianca stared her down, her face as cold and blank as she could make it. She waited until Dinh turned away, throwing herself into a chair, staring out the window.

“I saved your life,” Bianca told her. “That was more than I needed to do. Even if I did believe that Valadez meant to kill every person on Finisterra, which I don’t, that wouldn’t make it my problem.”

Dinh turned farther away.

“Listen to me,” Bianca said, “because I’m only going to explain this once.”

She waited until Dinh, involuntarily, turned back to face her.

“This job is my one chance,” Bianca said. “This job is what I’m here to do. I’m not here to save the world. Saving the world is a luxury for spoiled extrañado children like you and Fry. It’s a luxury I don’t have.”

She went to the door, and knocked on the window to signal the firija guard.

“I’ll get you out of here if I can,” she added, over her shoulder. “But that’s all I can do. I’m sorry.”

Dinh hadn’t moved.

As the firija opened the door, Bianca heard Dinh stir.

“Erasmus Fry?” she asked. “The naturalist?”

“That’s right.” Bianca glanced back, and saw Dinh looking out the window again.

“I’d like to see him,” Dinh said.

“I’ll let him know,” said Bianca.

The guard closed the door behind her.

7. THE FACE IN THE MIRROR

Lightning still played along Encantada’s dorsal ridge, but here on the eastern edge the storm had passed. A clean, electric smell was in the air, relief from the stink of the killing ground. Bianca returned to her own bungalow through rain that had died to a drizzle.

She called Fry.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Miss Dinh,” Bianca said. “She wants to see you.”

There was silence on the other end. Then, “You told her I was here?”

“Sorry,” Bianca said insincerely. “It just slipped out.”

More silence.

“You knew her better than you told Valadez, didn’t you,” she said.

She heard Fry sigh. “Yes.”

“She seemed upset,” Bianca said. “You should go see her.”

Fry sighed again, but said nothing.

“I’ve got work to do,” Bianca said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

She ended the call.

She was supposed to make a presentation tomorrow, to Valadez and some of the poachers’ crew bosses, talking about what they would be doing to Finisterra. It was mostly done; the outline was straightforward, and the visuals could be autogenerated from the design files. She opened the projection file and poked at it for a little while, but found it hard to concentrate.

Suddenly to Bianca her clothes smelled of death, of Dinh’s dead companion and the slaughtered zaratán and the death she’d spared Dinh from and the eventual deaths of all the marooned Finisterrans. She stripped them off and threw them in the recycler; bathed, washed her hair, changed into a nightgown.

They should call it la ciudad muerta.

Even though no one who’s alive on Finisterra today will live to see it die.

She turned off the light, Dinh’s words echoing in her head, and tried to sleep. But she couldn’t; she couldn’t stop thinking. Thinking about what it felt like to be forced to live on, when all you had to look forward to was death.

She knew that feeling very well.

What Bianca had on Pablo’s wife Mélia, the instrument-maker’s daughter, was ten years of age and a surreptitious technical education. What Mélia had on Bianca was a keen sense of territory and the experience of growing up in a house full of sisters. Bianca continued to live in the house after Mélia moved in, even though it was Mélia’s house now, and continued, without credit, to help her brother with the work that came in. But she retreated over the years, step by step, until the line was drawn at the door of the fourth-floor room that had been hers ever since she was a girl; and she buried herself in her blueprints and her calculations, and tried to pretend she didn’t know what was happening.

And then there was the day she met her other sister-in-law. Her moro sister-in-law. In the Mercado de los Maculados, where the aliens and the extrañados came to sell their trinkets and their medicines. A dispensation from the ayuntamiento had recently opened it to Christians.

Zahra al-Halim, a successful architect, took Bianca to her home, where Bianca ate caramels and drank blackberry tea and saw her older brother for the first time in more than twenty years, and tried very hard to call him Walíd and not Jesús. Here was a world that could be hers, too, she sensed, if she wanted it. But like Jesús-Walíd, she would have to give up her old world to have it. Even if she remained a Christian she would never see the inside of a church again. And she would still never be accepted by the engineers’ guild.

She went back to the Nazario house that evening, ignoring the barbed questions from Mélia about how she had spent her day; she went back to her room, with its blueprints and its models, and the furnishings she’d had all her life. She tried for a little while to work, but was unable to muster the concentration she needed to interface with the system.

Instead she found herself looking into the mirror.

And looking into the mirror Bianca focused not on the fragile trapped shapes of the flying machines tacked to the wall behind her, spread out and pinned down like so many chloroformed butterflies, but on her own tired face, the stray wisps of dry, brittle hair, the lines that years of captivity had made across her forehead and around her eyes. And, meeting those eyes, it seemed to Bianca that she was looking not into the mirror but down through the years of her future, a long, straight, narrow corridor without doors or branches, and that the eyes she was meeting at the end of it were the eyes of Death, her own, su propria muerte, personal, personified.

Bianca got out of bed, turned on the lights. She picked up her pocket system. She wondered if she should call the wardens.

Instead she unerased, yet again, the sketch she’d made earlier of the simple alcohol-powered dirigible. She used the Nazario family automation to fill it out with diagrams and renderings, lists of materials, building instructions, maintenance and preflight checklists.

It wasn’t much, but it was better than Dinh’s balloon.

Now she needed a way for Dinh to get it to the Finisterrans.

For that—thinking as she did so that there was some justice in it—she turned back to the system Valadez had given her. This was the sort of work the extrañado automation was made for, no constraints other than those imposed by function, every trick of exotic technology available to be used. It was a matter of minutes for Bianca to sketch out her design; an hour or so to refine it, to trim away the unnecessary pieces until what remained was small enough to fit in the valise she’d left with Dinh. The only difficult part was getting the design automation to talk to the bungalow’s fabricator, which was meant for clothes and furniture and domestic utensils. Eventually she had to use her pocket system to go out on Sky’s local net—hoping as she did so that Valadez didn’t have anyone monitoring her—and spend her own funds to contract the conversion out to a consulting service, somewhere out on one of the elevator gondolas.

Eventually she got it done, though. The fabricator spit out a neat package, which Bianca stuffed under the bed. Tomorrow she could get the valise back and smuggle the package to Dinh, along with the dirigible designs.

But first she had a presentation to make to Valadez. She wondered what motivated him. Nothing so simple as money—she was sure of that, even if she had trouble believing he was the monster Dinh had painted him to be. Was it revenge he was after? Revenge on his family, revenge on his homeland?

That struck Bianca a little too close to home.

She sighed and turned out the lights.

8. THE PROFESSIONALS

By morning the storm had passed and the sky was blue again, but the inside of Valadez’s bungalow was dark, to display the presenters’ projections to better advantage. Chairs for Valadez and the human crew bosses were arranged in a rough semicircle; with them were the aliens whose anatomy permitted them to sit down. Ismaíl and the other firija stood in the back, their curled arms and the spindly legs of their machines making their silhouettes look, to Bianca, incongruously like those of potted plants.

Then the fronds stirred, suddenly menacing. Bianca shivered. Who was really in charge?

No time to worry about that now. She straightened up and took out her pocket system.

“In a moment,” she began, pitching her voice to carry to the back of the room, “Mr. Fry will be going over the zaratán’s metabolic processes and our plans to stimulate the internal production of hydrogen. What I’m going to be talking about is the engineering work required to make that extra hydrogen do what we need it to do.”

Bianca’s pocket system projected the shape of a hundred-kilometer zaratán, not Finisterra or any other particular individual but rather an archetype, a sort of Platonic ideal. Points of pink light brightened all across the projected zaratán’s back, each indicating the position of a sphincter that would have to be cut out and replaced with a mechanical valve.

“Our primary concern during the preparation phase has to be these external vents. However, we also need to consider the internal trim and ballast valves. . . .”

As she went on, outlining the implants and grafts, surgeries and mutilations needed to turn a living zaratán into an animatronic corpse, a part of her was amazed at her own presumption, amazed at the strong, confident, professional tone she was taking.

It was almost as if she were a real engineer.

The presentation came to a close. Bianca drew in a deep breath, trying to maintain her veneer of professionalism. This part wasn’t in her outline.

“And then, finally, there is the matter of evacuation,” she said.

In the back of the room, Ismaíl stirred. “Evacuation?” he asked—the first word anyone had uttered through the whole presentation.

Bianca cleared her throat. Red stars appeared along the imaginary zaratán’s southeastern edge, approximating the locations of Ciudad Perdida and the smaller Finisterran villages.

“Finisterra has a population of between fifteen and twenty thousand, most of them concentrated in these settlements here,” she began. “Using a ship the size of the Lupita Jeréz, it should take roughly—”

“Not your problem, Miss Nazario.” Valadez waved a hand. “In any case, there won’t be any evacuations.”

Bianca looked at him, appalled; and it must have shown on her face because Valadez laughed.

“Don’t look at me like that, Miss Nazario. We’ll set up field domes over Ciudad Perdida and the central pueblos, to tide them over till we get them where they’re going. If they keep their heads they should be fine.” He laughed again. “Fucking hell,” he said, shaking his head. “What did you think this was about? You didn’t think we were going to kill twenty thousand people, did you?”

Bianca didn’t answer. She shut the projection off and sat down, putting her pocket system away. Her heart was racing.

“Right,” said Valadez. “Nice presentation, Miss Nazario. Mr. Fry?”

Fry stood up. “Okay,” he said. “Let me—” He patted his pockets. “I, ah, I think I must have left my system in my bungalow.”

Valadez sighed.

“We’ll wait,” he said.

The dark room was silent. Bianca tried to take slow, deep breaths. Mother of God, she thought, thank you for not letting me do anything stupid.

In the next moment she doubted herself. Dinh had been so sure. How could Bianca know whether Valadez was telling the truth?

There was no way to know, she decided. She’d just have to wait and see.

Fry came back in, breathless.

“Ah, it wasn’t—”

The voice that interrupted him was loud enough that at first it was hardly recognizable as a voice; it was only a wall of sound, seeming to come from the air itself, bazaar-Arabic words echoing and reechoing endlessly across the camp.

“THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ENCAMPMENT,” it said. “ALL PERSONNEL IN THE ENCAMPMENT WILL ASSEMBLE ON OPEN GROUND AND SURRENDER TO THE PARK WARDENS IN AN ORDERLY FASHION. ANY PERSONS CARRYING WEAPONS WILL BE PRESUMED TO BE RESISTING ARREST AND WILL BE DEALT WITH ACCORDINGLY. ANY VEHICLE ATTEMPTING TO LEAVE THE ENCAMPMENT WILL BE DESTROYED. YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO COMPLY.”

The announcement repeated itself: first in the fluting language of the firija, then in Miami Spanish, then as a series of projected alien glyphs, logograms, and semagrams. Then the Arabic started again.

“Fuck your mother,” said Valadez grimly.

All around Bianca, poachers were gathering weapons. In the back of the room, the firija were having what looked like an argument, arms waving, voices raised in a hooting, atonal cacophony.

“What do we do?” Fry shouted, over the wardens’ announcement.

“Get out of here,” said Valadez.

“Make fight!” said Ismaíl, turning several eyes from the firija discussion.

“Isn’t that resisting arrest?” asked Bianca.

Valadez laughed harshly. “Not shooting back isn’t going to save you,” he said. “The wardens aren’t the Phenomenological Service. They’re not civilized Caliphate cops. Killed while resisting arrest is what they’re all about. Believe me—I used to be one.”

Taking a surprisingly small gun from inside his jacket, he kicked open the door and was gone.

Around the Lupita Jeréz was a milling knot of people, human and otherwise, some hurrying to finish the loading, others simply fighting to get aboard.

Something large and dark—and fast—passed over the camp, and there was a white flash from the cargo-lifter, and screams.

In the wake of the dark thing came a sudden sensation of heaviness, as if the flank of Encantada were the deck of a ship riding a rogue wave, leaping up beneath Bianca’s feet. Her knees buckled and she was thrown to the ground, pressed into the grass by twice, three times her normal weight.

The feeling passed as quickly as the wardens’ dark vehicle. Ismaíl, whose walker had kept its footing, helped Bianca up.

“What was that?” Bianca demanded, bruises making her wince as she tried to brush the dirt and grass from her skirts.

“Antigravity ship,” Ismaíl said. “Same principle like starship wave propagation drive.”

“Antigravity?” Bianca stared after the ship, but it was already gone, over Encantada’s dorsal ridge. “If you coños have antigravity, then why in God’s name have we been sitting here playing with catapults and balloons?”

“Make very expensive,” said Ismaíl. “Minus two suns exotic mass, same like starship.” The firija waved two of its free eyes. “Why do? Plenty got cheap way to fly.”

Bianca realized that despite the remarks Valadez had made on the poverty of Sky, she had been thinking of all extrañados and aliens—with their ships and machines, their familiar way with sciences that in Rio Pícaro were barely more than a whisper of forbidden things hidden behind the walls of the rich moros’ palaces—as wealthy, and powerful, and free. Now, feeling like a fool for not having understood sooner, she realized that between the power of the Consilium and people like Valadez there was a gap as wide as, if not wider than, the gap between those rich moros and the most petty Ali Baba in the backstreets of Punta Aguila.

She glanced toward the airfield. Aerial tugs were lifting off; anemopters were blurring into motion. But as she watched, one of the tugs opened up into a ball of green fire. An anemopter made it as far as the killing ground before being hit by something that made its static fields crawl briefly with purple lightnings and then collapse, as the craft’s material body crashed down in an explosion of earth.

And all the while the warden’s recorded voice was everywhere and nowhere, repeating its list of instructions and demands.

“Not anymore, we don’t,” Bianca said to Ismaíl. “We’d better run.”

The firija raised its gun. “First got kill prisoner.”

“What?”

But Ismaíl was already moving, the mechanical legs of the walker surefooted on the broken ground, taking long, swift strides, no longer comical but frighteningly full of purpose.

Bianca struggled after the firija but quickly fell behind. The surface of the killing ground was rutted and scarred, torn by the earthmoving equipment used to push the offal of the gutted zaratánes over the edge. Bianca supposed grasses had covered it once, but now there was just mud and old blood. Only the certainty that going back would be as bad as going forward kept Bianca moving, slipping and stumbling in reeking muck that was sometimes ankle-deep.

By the time she got to Dinh’s bungalow, Ismaíl was already gone. The door was ajar.

Maybe the wardens rescued her, Bianca thought; but she couldn’t make herself believe it.

She went inside, moving slowly.

“Edith?”

No answer; not that Bianca had really expected any.

She found her in the kitchen, face down, feet toward the door as if she had been shot while trying to run, or hide. From three meters away Bianca could see the neat, black, fist-sized hole in the small of Dinh’s back. She felt no need to get closer.

Fry’s pocket system was on the floor in the living room, as Bianca had known it would be.

“You should have waited,” Bianca said to the empty room. “You should have trusted me.”

She found her valise in Dinh’s bedroom and emptied the contents onto the bed. Dinh did not seem to have touched any of them.

Bianca’s eyes stung with tears. She glanced again at Fry’s system. He’d left it on purpose, Bianca realized; she’d underestimated him. Perhaps he had been a better person than she herself, all along.

She looked one more time at the body lying on the kitchen floor.

“No, you shouldn’t,” she said then. “You shouldn’t have trusted me at all.”

Then she went back to her own bungalow and took the package out from under the bed.

9. FINISTERRA

A hundred meters, two hundred, five hundred—Bianca falls, the wind whipping at her clothes, and the hanging vegetation that covers Encantada’s flanks is a green-brown blur, going gray as it thins, as the zaratán’s body curves away from her. She blinks away the tears brought on by the rushing wind and tries to focus on the monitor panel of the harness. She took it from an off-the-shelf emergency parachute design; surely, she thinks, it must be set to open automatically at some point? But the wind speed indicator is the only one that makes sense; the others—altitude, attitude, rate of descent—are cycling through nonsense in three languages, baffled by the instruments’ inability to find solid ground anywhere below.

Then Bianca falls out of Encantada’s shadow into the sun, and before she can consciously form the thought, her hand has grasped the emergency handle of the harness and pulled convulsively; and the glassy fabric of the paraballoon is billowing out above her, rippling like water, and the harness is tugging at her, gently but firmly, smart threads reeling themselves quickly out and then slowly in again on their tiny spinnerets.

After a moment, she catches her breath. She is no longer falling, but flying.

She wipes the tears from her eyes. To the west, the slopes of Finisterra are bright and impossibly detailed in the low-angle sunlight, a million trees casting a million tiny shadows through the morning’s rapidly dissipating mist.

She looks up, out through the nearly invisible curve of the paraballoon, and sees that Encantada is burning. She watches it for a long time.

The air grows warmer, and more damp, too. With a start, Bianca realizes she is falling below Finisterra’s edge. When she designed the paraballoon, Bianca intended for Dinh to fall as far as she safely could, dropping deep into Sky’s atmosphere before firing up the reverse Maxwell pumps, to heat the air in the balloon and lift her back to Finisterra; but it does not look as if there is any danger of pursuit now, from either the poachers or the wardens. Bianca starts the pumps and the paraballoon slows, then begins to ascend.

As the prevailing wind carries her inland, over a riot of tropical green, and in the distance Bianca sees the smoke rising from the chimneys of Ciudad Perdida, Bianca glances up again at the burning shape of Encantada. She wonders whether she’ll ever know if Valadez was telling the truth.

Abruptly the jungle below her opens up, and Bianca is flying over cultivated fields, and people are looking up at her in wonder. Without thinking, she has cut the power to the pumps and opened the parachute valve at the top of the balloon.

She lands hard, hobbled by the scarf still tied around her ankles, and rolls, the paraballoon harness freeing itself automatically in obedience to its original programming. She pulls the scarf loose and stands up, shaking out her torn, stained skirt. Children are already running toward her across the field.

Savages, Fry said. Refugees. Bianca wonders if all of them speak Valadez’s odd Spanish. She tries to gather her scraps of Arabic, but is suddenly unable to remember anything beyond Salaam alaikum.

The children—six, eight, ten of them—falter as they approach, stopping five or ten meters away.

Salaam alaikum, Bianca rehearses silently. Alaikum as-salaam. She takes a deep breath.

The boldest of the children, a stick-legged boy of eight or ten, takes a few steps closer. He has curly black hair and sun-browned skin, and the brightly colored shirt and shorts he is wearing were probably made by an autofactory on one of the elevator gondolas or vacuum balloon stations, six or seven owners ago. He looks like her brother Pablo, in the old days, before Jesús left.

Trying not to look too threatening, Bianca meets his dark eyes.

“Hola,” she says.

“Hola,” the boy answers. “¿Cómo te llamas? ¿Es éste su globo?”

Bianca straightens her back.

“Yes, it’s my balloon,” she says. “And you may call me Señora Nazario.”

“If the balloon’s yours,” the boy asks, undaunted, “will you let me fly in it?” Bianca looks out into the eastern sky, dotted with distant zaratánes. There is a vision in her mind, a vision that she thinks maybe Edith Dinh saw: the skies of Sky more crowded than the skies over Rio Pícaro, Septentrionalis Archipelago alive with the bright shapes of dirigibles and gliders, those nameless zaratánes out there no longer uncharted shoals but comforting and familiar landmarks.

She turns to look at the rapidly collapsing paraballoon, and wonders how much work it would take to inflate it again. She takes out her pocket system and checks it: the design for the hand-built dirigible is still there, and the family automation too.

This isn’t what she wanted, when she set out from home; but she is still a Nazario, and still an engineer.

She puts the system away and turns back to the boy.

“I have a better idea,” she says. “How would you like a balloon of your very own?”

The boy breaks into a smile.

THE ERDMANN NEXUS

Nancy Kress

“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow,

He who would reach for pearls must dive below.”

—John Dryden

The ship, which would have looked nothing like a ship to Henry Erdmann, moved between the stars, traveling in an orderly pattern of occurrences in the vacuum flux. Over several cubic light-years of space, subatomic particles appeared, existed, and winked out of existence in nanoseconds. Flop transitions tore space and then reconfigured it as the ship moved on. Henry, had he somehow been nearby in the cold of deep space, would have died from the complicated, regular, intense bursts of radiation long before he could have had time to appreciate their shimmering beauty.

All at once the ship stopped moving.

The radiation bursts increased, grew even more complex. Then the ship abruptly changed direction. It accelerated, altering both space and time as it sped on, healing the alterations in its wake. Urgency shot through it.

Something, far away, was struggling to be born.

ONE

Henry Erdmann stood in front of the mirror in his tiny bedroom, trying to knot his tie with one hand. The other hand gripped his walker. It was an unsteady business, and the tie ended up crooked. He yanked it out and began again. Carrie would be here soon.

He always wore a tie to the college. Let the students—and graduate students, at that!—come to class in ripped jeans and obscene T-shirts and hair tangled as if colonized by rats. Even the girls. Students were students, and Henry didn’t consider their sloppiness disrespectful, the way so many did at St. Sebastian’s. Sometimes he was even amused by it, in a sad sort of way. Didn’t these intelligent, sometimes driven, would-be physicists know how ephemeral their beauty was? Why did they go to such lengths to look unappealing, when soon enough that would be their only choice?

This time he got the tie knotted. Not perfectly—a difficult operation, one-handed—but close enough for government work. He smiled. When he and his colleagues had been doing government work, only perfection was good enough. Atomic bombs were like that. Henry could still hear Oppie’s voice saying the plans for Ivy Mike were “technically sweet.” Of course, that was before all the—

A knock on the door and Carrie’s fresh young voice. “Dr. Erdmann? Are you ready?”

She always called him by his title, always treated him with respect. Not like some of the nurses and assistants. “How are we today, Hank?” that overweight blonde asked yesterday. When he answered stiffly, “I don’t know about you, madam, but I’m fine, thank you,” she’d only laughed. Old people are so formal—it’s so cute! Henry could just see her saying it to one of her horrible colleagues. He had never been “Hank” in his entire life.

“Coming, Carrie.” He put both hands on the walker and inched forward—clunk, clunk, clunk—the walker sounding loud even on the carpeted floor. His class’s corrected problem sets lay on the table by the door. He’d given them some really hard problems this week, and only Haldane had succeeded in solving all of them. Haldane had promise. An inventive mind, yet rigorous, too. They could have used him in ’52 on Project Ivy, developing the Teller-Ulam staged fusion H-bomb.

Halfway across the living room of his tiny apartment in the assisted living facility, something happened in Henry’s mind.

He stopped, astonished. It had felt like a tentative touch, a ghostly finger inside his brain. Astonishment was immediately replaced by fear. Was he having a stroke? At ninety, anything was possible. But he felt fine, better in fact than for several days. Not a stroke. So what—

“Dr. Erdmann?”

“I’m here.” He clunked to the door and opened it. Carrie wore a cherry red sweater, a fallen orange leaf caught on her hat, and sunglasses. Such a pretty girl, all bronze hair and bright skin and vibrant color. Outside it was drizzling. Henry reached out and gently removed the sunglasses. Carrie’s left eye was swollen and discolored, the iris and pupil invisible under the outraged flesh.

“The bastard,” Henry said.

That was Henry and Carrie going down the hall toward the elevator, thought Evelyn Krenchnoted. She waved from her armchair, her door wide open as always, but they were talking and didn’t notice. She strained to hear, but just then another plane went overhead from the airport. Those pesky flight paths were too near St. Sebastian’s! On the other hand, if they weren’t, Evelyn couldn’t afford to live here. Always look on the bright side!

Since this was Tuesday afternoon, Carrie and Henry were undoubtedly going to the college. So wonderful the way Henry kept busy—you’d never guess his real age, that was for sure. He even had all his hair! Although that jacket was too light for September, and not waterproof. Henry might catch cold. She would speak to Carrie about it. And why was Carrie wearing sunglasses when it was raining?

But if Evelyn didn’t start her phone calls, she would be late! People were depending on her! She keyed in the first number, listened to it ring one floor below. “Bob? It’s Evelyn. Now, dear, tell me—how’s your blood pressure today?”

“Fine,” Bob Donovan said.

“Are you sure? You sound a bit grumpy, dear.”

“I’m fine, Evelyn. I’m just busy.”

“Oh, that’s good! With what?”

“Just busy.”

“Always good to keep busy! Are you coming to Current Affairs tonight?”

“Dunno.”

“You should. You really should. Intellectual stimulation is so important for people our age!”

“Gotta go,” Bob grunted.

“Certainly, but first, how did your granddaughter do with—”

He’d hung up. Really, very grumpy. Maybe he was having problems with irregularity. Evelyn would recommend a high colonic.

Her next call was more responsive. Gina Martinelli was, as always, thrilled with Evelyn’s attention. She informed Gina minutely about the state of her arthritis, her gout, her diabetes, her son’s weight problem, her other son’s wife’s stepdaughter’s miscarriage, all interspersed with quotations from the Bible (“Take a little wine for thy stomach”—First Timothy.”) She answered all Evelyn’s questions and wrote down all her recommendations and—

“Evelyn?” Gina said. “Are you still there?”

“Yes, I—” Evelyn fell silent, an occurrence so shocking that Gina gasped, “Hit your panic button!”

“No, no, I’m fine, I . . . I just remembered something for a moment.”

“Remembered something? What?”

But Evelyn didn’t know. It hadn’t been a memory, exactly, it had been a . . . what? A feeling, a vague but somehow strong sensation of . . . something.

“Evelyn?”

“I’m here!”

“The Lord decides when to call us home, and I guess it’s not your time yet. Did you hear about Anna Chernov? That famous ballet dancer on Four? She fell last night and broke her leg and they had to move her to the Infirmary.”

“No!”

“Yes, poor thing. They say it’s only temporary, until they get her stabilized, but you know what that means.”

She did. They all did. First the Infirmary, then up to Seven, where you didn’t even have your own little apartment anymore, and eventually to Nursing on Eight and Nine. Better to go quick and clean, like Jed Fuller last month. But Evelyn wasn’t going to let herself think like that! A positive attitude was so important!

Gina said, “Anna is doing pretty well, I hear. The Lord never sends more than a person can bear.”

Evelyn wasn’t so sure about that, but it never paid to argue with Gina, who was convinced that she had God on redial. Evelyn said, “I’ll visit her before the Stitch ’n Bitch meeting. I’m sure she’ll want company. Poor girl—you know, those dancers, they just abuse their health for years and years, so what can you expect?”

“I know!” Gina said, not without satisfaction. “They pay a terrible price for beauty. It’s a little vain, actually.”

“Did you hear about that necklace she has in the St. Sebastian safe?”

“No! What necklace?”

“A fabulous one! Doris Dziwalski told me. It was given to Anna by some famous Russian dancer who was given it by the czar!”

“What czar?”

“The czar! You know, of Russia. Doris said it’s worth a fortune and that’s why it’s in the safe. Anna never wears it.”

“Vanity,” Doris said. “She probably doesn’t like the way it looks now against her wrinkly neck.”

“Doris said Anna’s depressed.”

“No, it’s vanity. ‘Lo, I looked and saw that all was—’ ”

“I’ll recommend accupuncture to her,” Evelyn interrupted. “Accupuncture is good for depression.” But first she’d call Erin, to tell her the news.

Erin Bass let the phone ring. It was probably that tiresome bore Evelyn Krenchnoted, eager to check on Erin’s blood pressure or her cholesterol or her Isles of Langerhans. Oh, Erin should answer the phone, there was no harm in the woman, Erin should be more charitable. But why? Why should one have to be more charitable just because one was old?

She let the phone ring and returned to her book, Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter. Greene’s world-weary despair was a silly affectation but he was a wonderful writer, and too much underrated nowadays.

The liner came in on a Saturday evening: from the bedroom window they could see its long grey form steal past the boom, beyond the—

Something was happening.

—steal past the boom, beyond the—

Erin was no longer in St. Sebastian’s, she was nowhere, she was lifted away from everything, she was beyond the—

Then it was over and she sat again in her tiny apartment, the book sliding unheeded off her lap.

Anna Chernov was dancing. She and Paul stood with two other couples on the stage, under the bright lights. Balanchine himself stood in the second wing, and even though Anna knew he was there to wait for Suzanne’s solo, his presence inspired her. The music began. Promenade en couronne, attitude, arabesque effacé and into the lift, Paul’s arms raising her. She was lifted out of herself and then she was soaring above the stage, over the heads of the corps de ballet, above Suzanne Farrell herself, soaring through the roof of the New York State Theater and into the night sky, spreading her arms in a porte de bras wide enough to take in the glittering night sky, soaring in the most perfect jeté in the universe, until . . .

“She’s smiling,” Bob Donovan said, before he knew he was going to speak at all. He looked down at the sleeping Anna, so beautiful she didn’t even look real, except for the leg in its big ugly cast. In one hand, feeling like a fool but what the fuck, he held three yellow roses.

“The painkillers do that sometimes,”the Infirmary nurse said. “I’m afraid you can’t stay, Mr. Donovan.”

Bob scowled at her. But it wasn’t like he meant it or anything. This nurse wasn’t so bad. Not like some. Maybe because she wasn’t any spring chicken herself. A few more years, sister, and you’ll be right here with us.

“Give her these, okay?” He thrust the roses at the nurse.

“I will, yes,” she said, and he walked out of the medicine-smelling Infirmary—he hated that smell—back to the elevator. Christ, what a sorry old fart he was. Anna Chernov, that nosy old broad Evelyn Krenchnoted once told him, used to dance at some famous place in New York, Abraham Center or something. Anna had been famous. But Evelyn could be wrong, and anyway it didn’t matter. From the first moment Bob Donovan laid eyes on Anna Chernov, he’d wanted to give her things. Flowers. Jewelry. Anything she wanted. Anything he had. And how stupid and fucked-up was that, at his age? Give me a break!

He took the elevator to the first floor, stalked savagely through the lobby, and went out the side door to the “remembrance garden.” Stupid name, New Age-y stupid. He wanted to kick something, wanted to bellow for—

Energy punched through him, from the base of his spine up his back and into his brain, mild but definite, like a shock from a busted toaster or something. Then it was gone.

What the fuck was that? Was he okay? If he fell, like Anna—

He was okay. He didn’t have Anna’s thin delicate bones. Whatever it was, was gone now. Just one of those things.

On a Nursing floor of St. Sebastian’s, a woman with just a few days to live muttered in her long, last half-sleep. An IV dripped morphine into her arm, easing the passage. No one listened to the mutterings; it had been years since they’d made sense. For a moment she stopped and her eyes, again bright in the ravaged face that had once been so lovely, grew wide. But for only a moment. Her eyes closed and the mindless muttering resumed.

In Tijuana, a vigorous old man sitting behind his son’s market stall, where he sold cheap serapes to jabbering touristos, suddenly lifted his face to the sun. His mouth, which still had all its white flashing teeth, made a big O.

In Mumbai, a widow dressed in white looked out her window at the teeming streets, her face gone blank as her sari.

In Chengdu, a monk sitting on his cushion on the polished floor of the meditation room in the ancient Wenshu Monastery, shattered the holy silence with a shocking, startled laugh.

TWO

Carrie Vesey sat in the back of Dr. Erdmann’s classroom and thought about murder.

Not that she would ever do it, of course. Murder was wrong. Taking a life filled her with horror that was only—

Ground-up castor beans were a deadly poison.

—made worse by her daily witnessing of old people’s aching desire to hold onto life. Also, she—

Her stepbrother had once shown her how to disable the brakes on a car.

—knew she wasn’t the kind of person who solved problems that boldly. And anyway her—

The battered-woman defense almost always earned acquittal from juries.

—lawyer said that a paper trail of restraining orders and ER documentation was by far the best way to—

If a man was passed out from a dozen beers, he’d never feel a bullet from his own service revolver.

—put Jim behind bars legally. That, the lawyer said, “would solve the problem”—as if a black eye and a broken arm and constant threats that left her scared even when Jim wasn’t in the same city were all just a theoretical “problem,” like the ones Dr. Erdmann gave his physics students.

He sat on top of a desk in the front of the room, talking about something called the “Bose-Einstein condensate.” Carrie had no idea what that was, and she didn’t care. She just liked being here, sitting unheeded in the back of the room. The physics students, nine boys and two girls, were none of them interested in her presence, her black eye, or her beauty. When Dr. Erdmann was around, he commanded all their geeky attention, and that was indescribably restful. Carrie tried—unsuccessfully, she knew—to hide her beauty. Her looks had brought her nothing but trouble: Gary, Eric, Jim. So now she wore baggy sweats and no makeup, and crammed her 24-carat-gold hair under a shapeless hat. Maybe if she was as smart as these students she would have learned to pick a different kind of man, but she wasn’t, and she hadn’t, and Dr. Erdmann’s classroom was a place she felt safe. Safer, even, than St. Sebastian’s, which was where Jim had blackened her eye.

He’d slipped in through the loading dock, she guessed, and caught her alone in the linens supply closet. He was gone after one punch, and when she called her exasperated lawyer and he found out she had no witnesses and St. Sebastian’s had “security,” he’d said there was nothing he could do. It would be her word against Jim’s. She had to be able to prove that the restraining order had been violated.

Dr. Erdmann was talking about “proof,” too: some sort of mathematical proof. Carrie had been good at math, in high school. Only Dr. Erdmann had said once that what she’d done in high school wasn’t “mathematics,” only “arithmetic.”

“Why didn’t you go to college, Carrie?” he’d asked.

“No money,” she said in a tone that meant: Please don’t ask anything else. She just hadn’t felt up to explaining about Daddy and the alcoholism and the debts and her abusive step brothers, and Dr. Erdmann hadn’t asked. He was sensitive that way.

Looking at his tall, stooped figure sitting on the desk, his walker close to hand, Carrie sometimes let herself dream that Dr. Erdmann—Henry—was fifty years younger. Forty to her twenty-eight—that would work. She’d googled a picture of him at that age, when he’d been working at someplace called the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. He’d been handsome, dark-haired, smiling into the camera next to his wife, Ida. She hadn’t been as pretty as Carrie, but she’d gone to college, so even if Carrie had been born back then, she wouldn’t have had a chance with him. Story of her life.

“—have any questions?” Dr. Erdmann finished.

The students did—they always did—clamoring to be heard, not raising their hands, interrupting each other. But when Dr. Erdmann spoke, immediately they all shut up. Someone leapt up to write equations on the board. Dr. Erdmann slowly turned his frail body to look at them. The discussion went on a long time, almost as long as the class. Carrie fell asleep.

When she woke, it was to Dr. Erdmann, leaning on his walker, gently jiggling her shoulder. “Carrie?”

“Oh! Oh, I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be. We bored you to death, poor child.”

“No! I loved it!”

He raised his eyebrows and she felt shamed. He thought she was telling a polite lie, and he had very little tolerance for lies. But the truth is, she always loved being here.

Outside, it was full dark. The autumn rain had stopped and the unseen ground had that mysterious, fertile smell of wet leaves. Carrie helped Dr. Erdmann into her battered Toyota and slid behind the wheel. As they started back toward St. Sebastian’s, she could tell that he was exhausted. Those students asked too much of him! It was enough that he taught one advanced class a week, sharing all that physics, without them also demanding he—

“Dr. Erdmann?”

For a long terrible moment she thought he was dead. His head lolled against the seat but he wasn’t asleep: His open eyes rolled back into his head. Carrie jerked the wheel to the right and slammed the Toyota alongside the curb. He was still breathing.

“Dr. Erdmann? Henry?”

Nothing. Carrie dove into her purse, fumbling for her cell phone. Then it occurred to her that his panic button would be faster. She tore open the buttons on his jacket; he wasn’t wearing the button. She scrambled again for the purse, starting to sob.

“Carrie?”

He was sitting up now, a shadowy figure. She hit the overhead light. His face, a fissured landscape, looked dazed and pale. His pupils were huge.

“What happened? Tell me.” She tried to keep her voice even, to observe everything, because it was important to be able to make as full a report as possible to Dr. Jamison. But her hand clutched at his sleeve.

He covered her fingers with his. His voice sounded dazed. “I . . . don’t know. I was . . . somewhere else?”

“A stroke?” That was what they were all afraid of. Not death, but to be incapacitated, reduced to partiality. And for Dr. Erdmann, with his fine mind . . .

“No.” He sounded definite. “Something else. I don’t know. Did you call 911 yet?”

The cell phone lay inert in her hand. “No, not yet, there wasn’t time for—”

“Then don’t. Take me home.”

“All right, but you’re going to see the doctor as soon as we get there.” She was pleased, despite everything, with her firm tone.

“It’s seven-thirty. They’ll all have gone home.”

But they hadn’t. As soon as Carrie and Dr. Erdmann walked into the lobby, she saw a man in a white coat standing by the elevators. “Wait!” she called, loud enough that several people turned to look, evening visitors and ambulatories and a nurse Carrie didn’t know. She didn’t know the doctor, either, but she rushed over to him, leaving Dr. Erdmann leaning on his walker by the main entrance.

“Are you a doctor? I’m Carrie Vesey and I was bringing Dr. Erdmann—a patient, Henry Erdmann, not a medical doctor—home when he had some kind of attack, he seems all right now but someone needs to look at him, he says—”

“I’m not an M.D.,” the man said, and Carrie looked at him in dismay. “I’m a neurological researcher.”

She rallied. “Well, you’re the best we’re going to get at this hour so please look at him!” She was amazed at her own audacity.

“All right.” He followed her to Dr. Erdmann, who scowled because, Carrie knew, he hated this sort of fuss. The non-M.D. seemed to pick up on that right away. He said pleasantly, “Dr. Erdmann? I’m Jake DiBella. Will you come this way, sir?” Without waiting for an answer, he turned and led the way down a side corridor. Carrie and Dr. Erdmann followed, everybody’s walk normal, but still people watched. Move along, nothing to see here . . . why were they still staring? Why were people such ghouls?

But they weren’t, really. That was just her own fear talking.

You trust too much, Carrie, Dr. Erdmann had said just last week.

In a small room on the second floor, he sat heavily on one of the three metal folding chairs. The room held the chairs, a gray filing cabinet, an ugly metal desk, and nothing else. Carrie, a natural nester, pursed her lips, and Dr. DiBella caught that, too.

“I’ve only been here a few days,” he said apologetically. “Haven’t had time yet to properly move in. Dr. Erdmann, can you tell me what happened?”

“Nothing.” He wore his lofty look. “I just fell asleep for a moment and Carrie became alarmed. Really, there’s no need for this fuss.”

“You fell asleep?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Has that happened before?”

Did Dr. Erdmann hesitate, ever so briefly? “Yes, occasionally. I am ninety, doctor.”

DiBella nodded, apparently satisfied, and turned to Carrie. “And what happened to you? Did it occur at the same time that Dr. Erdmann fell asleep?”

Her eye. That’s why people had stared in the lobby. In her concern for Dr. Erdmann, she’d forgotten about her black eye, but now it immediately began to throb again. Carrie felt herself go scarlet.

Dr. Erdmann answered. “No, it didn’t happen at the same time. There was no car accident, if that’s what you’re implying. Carrie’s eye is unrelated.”

“I fell,” Carrie said, knew that no one believed her, and lifted her chin.

“Okay,” DiBella said amiably. “But as long as you’re here, Dr. Erdmann, I’d like to enlist your help. Yours, and as many other volunteers as I can enlist at St. Sebastian’s. I’m here on a Gates Foundation grant in conjunction with Johns Hopkins, to map shifts in brain electrochemistry during cerebral arousal. I’m asking volunteers to donate a few hours of their time to undergo completely painless brain scans while they look at various pictures and videos. Your participation will be an aid to science.”

Carrie saw that Dr. Erdmann was going to refuse, despite the magic word “science,” but then he hesitated. “What kind of brain scans?”

“Asher-Peyton and functional MRI.”

“All right. I’ll participate.”

Carrie blinked. That didn’t sound like Dr. Erdmann, who considered physics and astronomy the only “true” sciences and the rest merely poor stepchildren. But this Dr. DiBella wasn’t about to let his research subject get away. He said quickly, “Excellent! Tomorrow morning at eleven, Lab 6B, at the hospital. Ms. Vesey, can you bring him over? Are you a relative?”

“No, I’m an aide here. Call me Carrie. I can bring him.” Wednesday wasn’t one of her usual days for Dr. Erdmann, but she’d get Marie to swap schedules.

“Wonderful. Please call me Jake.” He smiled at her, and something turned over in Carrie’s chest. It wasn’t just that he was so handsome, with his black hair and gray eyes and nice shoulders, but also that he had masculine confidence and an easy way with him and no ring on his left hand . . . idiot. There was no particular warmth in his smile; it was completely professional. Was she always going to assess every man she met as a possible boyfriend? Was she really that needy?

Yes. But this one wasn’t interested. And anyway, he was an educated scientist and she worked a minimum-wage job. She was an idiot.

She got Dr. Erdmann up to his apartment and said good-night. He seemed distant, preoccupied. Going down in the elevator, a mood of desolation came over her. What she really wanted was to stay and watch Henry Erdmann’s TV, sleep on his sofa, wake up to fix his coffee and have someone to talk to while she did it. Not go back to her shabby apartment, bolted securely against Jim but never secure enough that she felt really safe. She’d rather stay here, in a home for failing old people, and how perverted and sad was that?

And what had happened to Dr. Erdmann on the way home from the college?

THREE

Twice now. Henry lay awake, wondering what the hell was going on in his brain. He was accustomed to relying on that organ. His knees had succumbed to arthritis, his hearing aid required constant adjustment, and his prostate housed a slow-growing cancer that, the doctor said, wouldn’t kill him until long after something else did—the medical profession’s idea of cheerful news. But his brain remained clear, and using it well had always been his greatest pleasure. Greater even than sex, greater than food, greater than marriage to Ida, much as he had loved her.

God, the things that age let you admit.

Which were the best years? No question there: Los Alamos, working on Operation Ivy with Ulam and Teller and Carson Mark and the rest. The excitement and frustration and awe of developing the “Sausage,” the first test of staged radiation implosion. The day it was detonated at Eniwetok. Henry, a junior member of the team, hadn’t of course been present at the atoll, but he’d waited breathlessly for the results from Bogon. He’d cheered when Teller, picking up the shock waves on a seismometer in California, had sent his three-word telegram to Los Alamos: “It’s a boy.” Harry Truman himself had requested that bomb—”to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor”—and Henry was proud of his work on it.

Shock waves. Yes, that was what today’s two incidents had felt like: shock waves to the brain. A small wave in his apartment, a larger one in Carrie’s car. But from what? It could only be some failure of his nervous system, the thing he dreaded most of all, far more than he dreaded death. Granted, teaching physics to graduate students was a long way from Los Alamos or Livermore, and most of the students were dolts—although not Haldane—but Henry enjoyed it. Teaching, plus reading the journals and following the online listservs, were his connection with physics. If some neurological “shock wave” disturbed his brain . . .

It was a long time before he could sleep.

“Oh my Lord, dear, what happened to your eye?”

Evelyn Krenchnoted sat with her friend Gina Somebody in the tiny waiting room outside Dr. O’Kane’s office. Henry scowled at her. Just like Evelyn to blurt out like that, embarrassing poor Carrie. The Krenchnoted woman was the most tactless busybody Henry had ever met, and he’d known a lot of physicists, a group not noted for tact. But at least the physicists hadn’t been busybodies.

“I’m fine,” Carrie said, trying to smile. “I walked into a door.”

“Oh, dear, how did that happen? You should tell the doctor. I’m sure he could make a few minutes to see you, even though he must be running behind, I didn’t actually have an appointment today but he’d said he’d squeeze me in because something strange happened yesterday that I want to ask him about, but the time he gave me was supposed to start five minutes ago and you must be scheduled after that, he saw Gina already but she—”

Henry sat down and stopped listening. Evelyn’s noise, however, went on and on, a grating whine like a dentist drill. He imagined her on Eniwetok, rising into the air on a mushroom cloud, still talking. It was a relief when the doctor’s door opened and a woman came out, holding a book.

Henry had seen her before, although he didn’t know her name. Unlike most of the old bats at St. Sebastian’s, she was worth looking at. Not with Carrie’s radiant youthful beauty, of course; this woman must be in her seventies, at least. But she stood straight and graceful; her white hair fell in simple waves to her shoulders; her cheekbones and blue eyes were still good. However, Henry didn’t care for the way she was dressed. It reminded him of all those stupid childish protestors outside Los Alamos in the fifties and sixties. The woman wore a white T-shirt, a long cotton peasant skirt, a necklace of beads and shells, and several elaborate rings.

“Erin!” Evelyn cried. “How was your appointment? Everything okay?”

“Fine. Just a check-up.” Erin smiled vaguely and moved away. Henry strained to see the cover of her book: Tao Te Ching. Disappointment lanced through him. One of those.

“But you weren’t scheduled for a check-up, no more than I was. So what happened that—” Erin walked quickly away, her smile fixed. Evelyn said indignantly, “Well, I call that just plain rude! Did you see that, Gina? You try to be friendly to some people and they just—”

“Mrs. Krenchnoted?” the nurse said, sticking her head out the office door. “The doctor will see you now.”

Evelyn lumbered up and through the door, still talking. In the blessed silence that followed, Henry said to Carrie, “How do you suppose Mr. Krenchnoted stood it?”

Carrie giggled and waved her hand toward the Krenchnoted’s friend, Gina. But Gina was asleep in her chair, which at least explained how she stood it.

Carrie said, “I’m glad you have this appointment today, Dr. Erdmann. You will tell him about what happened in the car yesterday, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.” Why were all women, even mild little Carrie, so insistent on regular doctor visits? Yes, doctors were useful for providing pills to keep the machine going, but Henry’s view was that you only needed to see a physician if something felt wrong. In fact, he’d forgotten about this regularly scheduled check-up until this morning, when Carrie called to say how convenient it was that his appointment here was just an hour before the one with Dr. DiBella at the hospital lab. Ordinarily Henry would have refused to go at all, except that he did intend to ask Dr. Jamison about the incident in the car. Also, it was possible that fool Evelyn Krenchnoted was actually right about something for once. “Carrie, maybe you should ask the doctor to look at that eye.”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Has Jim called or come around again since—”

“No.”

Clearly she didn’t want to talk about it. Embarrassment, most likely. Henry could respect her reticence. Silently he organized his questions for Jamison.

But after Henry had gone into the office, leaving Carrie in the waiting room, and after he’d endured the tediums of the nurse’s measuring his blood pressure, of peeing into a cup, of putting on a ridiculous paper gown, it wasn’t Jamison who entered the room but a brusque, impossibly young boy in a white lab coat and officious manner.

“I’m Dr. Felton, Henry. How are we today?” He studied Henry’s chart, not looking at him.

Henry gritted his teeth. “You would know better than I, I imagine.”

“Feeling a bit cranky? Are your bowels moving all right?”

“My bowels are fine. They thank you for your concern.”

Felton looked up then, his eyes cold. “I’m going to listen to your lungs now. Cough when I tell you to.”

And Henry knew he couldn’t do it. If the kid had reprimanded him—”I don’t think sarcasm is appropriate here”—it would have at least been a response. But this utter dismissal, this treatment as if Henry were a child, or a moron . . . He couldn’t tell this insensitive young boor about the incident in the car, about the fear for his brain. It would degrade him to cooperate with Felton. Maybe DiBella would be better, even if he wasn’t an M.D.

One doctor down, one to go.

DiBella was better. What he was not, was organized.

At Redborn Memorial Hospital he said, “Ah, Dr. Erdmann, Carrie. Welcome. I’m afraid there’s been a mix-up with Diagnostic Imaging. I thought I had the fMRI booked for you but they seem to have scheduled me out, or something. So we can do the Asher-Peyton scan but not the deep imaging. I’m sorry, I—” He shrugged helplessly and ran his hand through his hair.

Carrie tightened her mouth to a thin line. “Dr. Erdmann came all the way over here for your MRI, Dr. DiBella.”

“ ‘Jake,’ please. I know. And we do the Asher-Peyton scan back at St. Sebastian’s. I really am sorry.”

Carrie’s lips didn’t soften. It always surprised Henry how fierce she could be in defense of her “resident-assignees.” Why was usually gentle Carrie being so hard on this young man?

“I’ll meet you back at St. Sebastian’s,” DiBella said humbly.

Once there, he affixed electrodes on Henry’s skull and neck, eased a helmet over his head, and sat at a computer whose screen faced away from Henry. After the room was darkened, a series of pictures projected onto one white wall: a chocolate cake, a broom, a chair, a car, a desk, a glass: four or five dozen images. Henry had to do nothing except sit there, and he grew bored. Eventually the pictures grew more interesting, interspersing a house fire, a war scene, a father hugging a child, Rita Hayworth. Henry chuckled. “I didn’t think your generation even knew who Rita Hayworth was.”

“Please don’t talk, Dr. Erdmann.”

The session went on for twenty minutes. When it was over, DiBella removed the helmet and said, “Thank you so much. I really appreciate this.” He began removing electrodes from Henry’s head. Carrie stood, looking straight at Henry.

Now or never.

“Dr. DiBella,” Henry said, “I’d like to ask you something. Tell you something, actually. An incident that happened yesterday. Twice.” Henry liked the word “incident”; it sounded objective and explainable, like a police report.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“The first time I was standing in my apartment, the second time riding in a car with Carrie. The first incident was mild, the second more pronounced. Both times I felt something move through my mind, like a shock wave of sorts, leaving no aftereffects except perhaps a slight fatigue. No abilities seem to be impaired. I’m hoping you can tell me what happened.”

DiBella paused, an electrode dangling from his hand. Henry could smell the gooey gel on its end. “I’m not an M.D., as I told you yesterday. This sounds like something you should discuss with your doctor at St. Sebastian.”

Carrie, who had been upset that Henry had not done just that, said, “In the car he sort of lost consciousness and his eyes rolled back in his head.”

Henry said, “My doctor wasn’t available this morning, and you are. Can you just tell me if that experience sounds like a stroke?”

“Tell me about it again.”

Henry did, and DiBella said, “If it had been a TIA—a mini-stroke—you wouldn’t have had such a strong reaction, and if it had been a more serious stroke, either ischemic or hemorrhagic, you’d have been left with at least temporary impairment. But you could have experienced a cardiac event of some sort, Dr. Erdmann. I think you should have an EKG at once.”

Heart, not brain. Well, that was better. Still, fear slid coldly down Henry’s spine, and he realized how much he wanted to go on leading his current life, limited though it was. Still, he smiled and said, “All right.”

He’d known for at least twenty-five years that growing old wasn’t for sissies.

Carrie canceled her other resident-assignees, checking in with each on her cell, and shepherded Henry through the endless hospital rituals that followed, administrative and diagnostic and that most ubiquitous medical procedure, waiting. By the end of the day, Henry knew that his heart was fine, his brain showed no clots or hemorrhages, there was no reason for him to have fainted. That’s what they were calling it now: a faint, possibly due to low blood sugar. He was scheduled for glucose-tolerance tests next week. Fools. It hadn’t been any kind of faint. What had happened to him had been something else entirely, sui generis.

Then it happened again, the same and yet completely different.

At nearly midnight Henry lay in bed, exhausted. For once, he’d thought, sleep would come easily. It hadn’t. Then, all at once, he was lifted out of his weary mind. This time there was no violet wrenching, no eyes rolling back in his head. He just suddenly wasn’t in his darkened bedroom any more, not in his body, not in his mind.

He was dancing, soaring with pointed toes high above a polished stage, feeling the muscles in his back and thighs stretch as he sat cross-legged on a deep cushion he had embroidered with ball bearings rolling down a factory assembly line across from soldiers shooting at him as he ducked—

It was gone.

Henry jerked upright, sweating in the dark. He fumbled for the bed lamp, missed, sent the lamp crashing off the nightstand and onto the floor. He had never danced on a stage, embroidered a cushion, worked in a factory, or gone to war. And he’d been awake. Those were memories, not dreams—no, not even memories, they were too vivid for that. They’d been experiences, as vivid and real as if they were all happening now, and all happening simultaneously. Experiences. But not his.

The lamp was still glowing. Laboriously he leaned over the side of the bed and plucked it off the floor. As he set it back on the nightstand, it went out. Not, however, before he saw that the plug had been pulled from the wall socket during the fall, well before he bent over to pick it up.

The ship grew more agitated, the rents in space-time and resulting flop transitions larger. Every aspect of the entity strained forward, jumping through the vacuum flux in bursts of radiation that appeared now near one star system, now another, now in the deep black cold where no stars exerted gravity. The ship could move no quicker without destroying either nearby star systems or its own coherence. It raced as rapidly as it could, sent ahead of itself even faster tendrils of quantum-entangled information. Faster, faster . . .

It was not fast enough.

FOUR

Thursday morning, Henry’s mind seemed to him as clear as ever. After an early breakfast he sat at his tiny kitchen table, correcting physics papers. The apartments at St. Sebastian’s each had a small eat-in kitchen, a marginally larger living room, a bedroom and bath. Grab rails, non-skid flooring, overly cheerful colors, and intercoms reminded the residents that they were old—as if, Henry thought scornfully, any of them were likely to forget it. However, Henry didn’t really mind the apartment’s size or surveillance. After all, he’d flourished at Los Alamos, crowded and ramshackle and paranoid as the place had been. Most of his life went on inside his head.

For each problem set with incomplete answers—which would probably be all of them except Haldane’s, although Julia Hernandez had at least come up with a novel and mathematically interesting approach—he tried to follow the student’s thinking, to see where it had gone wrong. After an hour of this, he had gone over two papers. A plane screamed overhead, taking off from the airport. Henry gave it up. He couldn’t concentrate.

Outside the St. Sebastian infirmary yesterday, the horrible Evelyn Krenchnoted had said that she didn’t have a check-up appointment, but that the doctor was “squeezing her in” because “something strange happened yesterday.” She’d also mentioned that the aging-hippie beauty, Erin Whatever-Her-Name-Was, hadn’t had a scheduled appointment either.

Once, at a mandatory ambulatory-residents’ meeting, Henry had seen Evelyn embroidering.

Anna Chernov, St. Sebastian’s most famous resident, was a ballet dancer. Everyone knew that.

He felt stupid even thinking along these lines. What was he hypothesizing here, some sort of telepathy? No respectable scientific study had ever validated such a hypothesis. Also, during Henry’s three years at St. Sebastian’s—years during which Evelyn and Miss Chernov had also been in residence—he had never felt the slightest connection with, or interest in, either of them.

He tried to go back to correcting problem sets.

The difficulty was, he had two data points, his own “incidents” and the sudden rash of unscheduled doctors’ appointments, and no way to either connect or eliminate either one. If he could at least satisfy himself that Evelyn’s and Erin’s doctor visits concerned something other than mental episodes, he would be down to one data point. One was an anomaly. Two were an indicator of . . . something.

This wasn’t one of Henry’s days to have Carrie’s assistance. He pulled himself up on his walker, inched to the desk, and found the Resident Directory. Evelyn had no listings for either cell phone or email. That surprised him; you’d think such a yenta would want as many ways to bother people as possible. But some St. Sebastian residents were still, after all these decades, wary of any technology they hadn’t grown up with. Fools, thought Henry, who had once driven four hundred miles to buy one of the first, primitive, put-it-together-yourself kits for a personal computer. He noted Evelyn’s apartment number and hobbled toward the elevators.

“Why, Henry Erdmann! Come in, come in!” Evelyn cried. She looked astonished, as well she might. And—oh, God—behind her sat a circle of women, their chairs jammed in like molecules under hydraulic compression, all sewing on bright pieces of cloth.

“I don’t want to intrude on your—”

“Oh, it’s just the Christmas Elves!” Evelyn cried. “We’re getting an early start on the holiday wall hanging for the lobby. The old one is getting so shabby.”

Henry didn’t remember a holiday wall hanging in the lobby, unless she was referring to that garish lumpy blanket with Santa Claus handing out babies to guardian angels. The angels had had tight, cotton-wool hair that made them look like Q-tips. He said, “Never mind, it’s not important.”

“Oh, come on in! We were just talking about—and maybe you have more information on it!—this fabulous necklace that Anna Chernov has in the office safe, the one the czar gave—”

“No, no, I have no information. I’ll—”

“But if you just—”

Henry said desperately, “I’ll call you later.”

To his horror, Evelyn lowered her eyes and said murmured demurely, “All right, Henry,” while the women behind her tittered. He backed away down the hall.

He was pondering how to discover Erin’s last name when she emerged from an elevator. “Excuse me!” he called the length of the corridor. “May I speak to you a moment?”

She came toward him, another book in her hand, her face curious but reserved. “Yes?”

“My name is Henry Erdmann. I’d like to ask what will, I know, sound like a very strange question. Please forgive my intrusiveness, and believe that I have a good reason for asking. You had an unscheduled appointment with Dr. Felton yesterday?”

Something moved behind her eyes. “Yes.”

“Did your reason for seeing him have to do with any sort of . . . of mental experience? A small seizure, or an episode of memory aberration, perhaps?”

Erin’s ringed hand tightened on her book. He noted, numbly, that today it seemed to be a novel. She said, “Let’s talk.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Bass, but it sounds like rubbish to me.”

She shrugged, a slow movement of thin shoulders under her peasant blouse. Her long printed skirt, yellow flowers on black, swirled on the floor. Her apartment looked like her: bits of cloth hanging on the walls, a curtain of beads instead of a door to the bedroom, Hindu statues and crystal pyramids and Navaho blankets. Henry disliked the clutter, the childishness of the décor, even as he felt flooded by gratitude toward Erin Bass. She had released him. Her ideas about the “incidents” were so dumb that he could easily dismiss them, along with anything he might have been thinking which resembled them.

“There’s an energy in the universe as a whole,” she’d said. “When you stop resisting the flow of life and give up the grasping of trishna, you awaken to that energy. In popular terms, you have an ‘out-of-body experience,’ activating stored karma from past lives and fusing it into one moment of transcendent insight.”

Henry had had no transcendental insight. He knew about energy in the universe—it was called electromagnetic radiation, gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces—and none of it had karma. He didn’t believe in reincarnation, and he hadn’t been out of his body. Throughout all three “incidents,” he’d felt his body firmly encasing him. He hadn’t left; other minds had somehow seemed to come in. But it was all nonsense, an aberration of a brain whose synapses and axons, dendrites and vesicles, were simply growing old.

He grasped his walker and rose. “Thanks anyway, Mrs. Bass. Good-bye.”

“Again, call me ‘Erin.’ Are you sure you wouldn’t like some green tea before you go?”

“Quite sure. Take care.”

He was at the door when she said, almost casually, “Oh, Henry? When I had my own out-of-body Tuesday evening, there were others with me in the awakened state . . . Were you ever closely connected with—I know this sounds odd—a light that somehow shone more brightly than many suns?”

He turned and stared at her.

“This will take about twenty minutes,” DiBella said as Henry slid into the MRI machine. He’d had the procedure before and disliked it just as much then, the feeling of being enclosed in a tube not much larger than a coffin. Some people, he knew, couldn’t tolerate it at all. But Henry’d be damned if he let a piece of machinery defeat him, and anyway the tube didn’t enclose him completely; it was open at the bottom. So he pressed his lips together and closed his eyes and let the machine swallow his strapped-down body.

“You okay in there, Dr. Erdmann?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good. Excellent. Just relax.”

To his own surprise, he did. In the tube, everything seemed very remote. He actually dozed, waking twenty minutes later when the tube slid him out again.

“Everything look normal?” he asked DiBella, and held his breath.

“Completely,” DiBella said. “Thank you, that’s a good baseline for my study. Your next one, you know, will come immediately after you view a ten-minute video. I’ve scheduled that for a week from today.”

“Fine.” Normal. Then his brain was okay, and this weirdness was over. Relief turned him jaunty. “I’m glad to assist your project, doctor. What is its focus, again?”

“Cerebral activation patterns in senior citizens. Did you realize, Dr. Erdmann, that the over-sixty-five demographic is the fastest growing one in the world? And that globally there are now one hundred and forty million people over the age of eighty?”

Henry hadn’t realized, nor did he care. The St. Sebastian aide came forward to help Henry to his feet. He was a dour young man whose name Henry hadn’t caught. DiBella said, “Where’s Carrie today?”

“It’s not her day with me.”

“Ah.” DiBella didn’t sound very interested; he was already prepping his screens for the next volunteer. Time on the MRI, he’d told Henry, was tight, having to be scheduled between hospital use.

The dour young man—Darryl? Darrin? Dustin?—drove Henry back to St. Sebastian’s and left him to make his own way upstairs. In his apartment, Henry lowered himself laboriously to the sofa. Just a few minutes’ nap, that’s all he needed, even a short excursion tired him so much now—although it would be better if Carrie had been along, she always took such good care of him, such a kind and dear young woman. If he and Ida had ever had children, he’d have wanted them to be like Carrie. If that bastard Jim Peltier ever again tried to—

It shot through him like a bolt of lightning.

Henry screamed. This time the experience hurt, searing the inside of his skull and his spinal cord down to his tailbone. No dancing, no embroidering, no meditating—and yet others were there, not as individuals but as a collective sensation, a shared pain, making the pain worse by pooling it. He couldn’t stand it, he was going to die, this was the end of—

The pain was gone. It vanished as quickly as it came, leaving him bruised inside, throbbing as if his entire brain had undergone a root canal. His gorge rose, and just in time he twisted his aching body to the side and vomited over the side of the sofa onto the carpet.

His fingers fumbled in the pocket of his trousers for the St. Sebastian panic button that Carrie insisted he wear. He found it, pressed the center, and lost consciousness.

FIVE

Carrie went home early. Thursday afternoons were assigned to Mrs. Lopez and her granddaughter had showed up unexpectedly. Carrie suspected that Vicky Lopez wanted money again since that seemed to be the only time she did turn up at St. Sebastian’s, but that was not Carrie’s business. Mrs. Lopez said happily that Vicky could just as easily take her to shopping instead of Carrie, and Vicky agreed, looking greedy. So Carrie went home.

If she’d been fortunate enough to have a grandmother—to have any relatives besides her no-good stepbrothers in California—she would treat that hypothetical grandmother better than did Vicky, she of the designer jeans and cashmere crew necks and massive credit-card debt. Although Carrie wouldn’t want her grandmother to be like Mrs. Lopez, either, who treated Carrie like not-very-clean hired help.

Well, she was hired help, of course. The job as a St. Sebastian aide was the first thing she’d seen in the classifieds the day she finally walked out on Jim. She grabbed the job blindly, like a person going over a cliff who sees a fragile branch growing from crumbly rock. The weird thing was that after the first day, she knew she was going to stay. She liked old people (most of them, anyway). They were interesting and grateful (most of them anyway)—and safe. During that first terrified week at the YMCA, while she searched for a one-room apartment she could actually afford, St. Sebastian’s was the one place she felt safe.

Jim had changed that, of course. He’d found out the locations of her job and apartment. Cops could find anything.

She unlocked her door after making sure the dingy corridor was empty, slipped inside, shot the deadbolt, and turned on the light. The only window faced an air shaft, and the room was dark even on the brightest day. Carrie had done what she could with bright cushions and Salvation Army lamps and dried flowers, but dark was dark.

“Hello, Carrie,” Jim said.

She whirled around, stifling a scream. But the sickening thing was the rest of her reaction. Unbidden and hated—God, how hated!—but still there was the sudden thrill, the flash of excitement that energized every part of her body. “That’s not unusual,” her counselor at the Battered Women’s Help Center had said, “because frequently an abuser and his victim are both fully engaged in the struggle to dominate each other. How triumphant do you feel when he’s in the apology-and-wooing phase of the abuse cycle? Why do you think you haven’t left before now?”

It had taken Carrie so long to accept that. And here it was again. Here Jim was again.

“How did you get in?”

“Does it matter?”

“You got Kelsey to let you in, didn’t you?” The building super could be bribed to almost anything with a bottle of Scotch. Although maybe Jim hadn’t needed that; he had a badge. Not even the charges she’d brought against him, all of which had been dropped, had affected his job. Nobody on the outside ever realized how common domestic violence was in cops’ homes.

Jim wasn’t in uniform now. He wore jeans, boots, a sports coat she’d always liked. He held a bouquet of flowers. Not supermarket carnations, either: red roses in shining gold paper. “Carrie, I’m sorry I startled you, but I wanted so bad for us to talk. Please, just let me have ten minutes. That’s all. Ten minutes isn’t much to give me against three years of marriage.”

“We’re not married. We’re legally separated.”

“I know. I know. And I deserve that you left me. I know that now. But just ten minutes. Please.”

“You’re not supposed to be here at all! There’s a restraining order against you—and you’re a cop!”

“I know. I’m risking my career to talk to you for ten minutes. Doesn’t that say how much I care? Here, these are for you.”

Humbly, eyes beseeching, he held out the roses. Carrie didn’t take them.

“You blackened my eye the last time we ‘talked,’ you bastard!”

“I know. If you knew how much I’ve regretted that . . . If you had any idea how many nights I laid awake hating myself for that. I was out of my mind, Carrie. I really was. But it taught me something. I’ve changed. I’m going to A.A. now, I’ve got a sponsor and everything. I’m working my program.”

“I’ve heard this all before!”

“I know. I know you have. But this time is different.” He lowered his eyes, and Carrie put her hands on her hips. Then it hit her: She had said all this before, too. She had stood in this scolding, one-up stance. He had stood in his humble stance, as well. This was the apology-and-wooing stage that the counselor had talked about, just one more scene in their endless script. And she was eating it up as if it had never happened before, was reveling in the glow of righteous indignation fed by his groveling. Just like the counselor had said.

She was so sickened at herself that her knees nearly buckled.

“Get out, Jim.”

“I will. I will. Just tell me that you heard me, that there’s some chance for us still, even if it’s a chance I don’t deserve. Oh, Carrie—”

“Get out!” Her nauseated fury was at herself.

“If you’d just—”

“Out! Out now!”

His face changed. Humility was replaced by astonishment—this wasn’t how their script went—and then by rage. He threw the flowers at her. “You won’t even listen to me? I come here goddamn apologizing and you won’t even listen? What makes you so much better than me, you fucking bitch you’re nothing but a—”

Carrie whirled around and grabbed for the deadbolt. He was faster. Faster, stronger, and that was the old script, too, how could she forget for even a half second he—

Jim threw her to the floor. Did he have his gun? Would he—She caught a glimpse of his face, so twisted with rage that he looked like somebody else, even as she was throwing up her arms to protect her head. He kicked her in the belly. The pain was astonishing. It burned along her body she was burning she couldn’t breathe she was going to die . . . His boot drew back to kick her again and Carrie tried to scream. No breath came. This was it then no no no—

Jim crumpled to the floor.

Between her sheltering arms, she caught sight of his face as he went down. Astonishment gaped open the mouth, widened the eyes. The image clapped onto her brain. His body fell heavily on top of hers, and didn’t move.

When she could breathe again, she crawled out from under him, whimpering with short guttural sounds: uh uh uh. Yet a part of her brain worked clearly, coldly. She felt for a pulse, held her fingers over his mouth to find a breath, put her ear to his chest. He was dead.

She staggered to the phone and called 911.

Cops. Carrie didn’t know them; this wasn’t Jim’s precinct. First uniforms and then detectives. An ambulance. A forensic team. Photographs, fingerprints, a search of the one-room apartment, with her consent. You have the right to remain silent. She didn’t remain silent, didn’t need a lawyer, told what she knew as Jim’s body was replaced by a chalked outline and neighbors gathered in the hall. And when it was finally, finally over and she was told that her apartment was a crime scene until the autopsy was performed and where could she go, she said, “St. Sebastian’s. I work there.”

“Maybe you should call in sick for this night’s shift, ma’am, it’s—”

“I’m going to St. Sebastian’s!”

She did, her hands shaky on the steering wheel. She went straight to Dr. Erdmann’s door and knocked hard. His walker inch across the floor, inside. Inside, where it was safe.

“Carrie! What on Earth—”

“Can I come in? Please? The police—”

“Police?” he said sharply. “What police?” Peering around her as if he expected to see blue uniforms filling the hall. “Where’s your coat? It’s fifty degrees out!”

She had forgotten a coat. Nobody had mentioned a coat. Pack a bag, they said, but nobody had mentioned a coat. Dr. Erdmann always knew the temperature and barometer reading, he kept track of such things. Belatedly, and for the first time, she burst into tears.

He drew her in, made her sit on the sofa. Carrie noticed, with the cold clear part of her mind that still seemed to be functioning, that there was a very wet spot on the carpet and a strong odor, as if someone had scrubbed with disinfectant. “Could I . . . could I have a drink?” She hadn’t known she was going to say that until the words were out. She seldom drank. Too much like Jim.

Jim . . .

The sherry steadied her. Sherry seemed so civilized, and so did the miniature glass he offered it in. She breathed easier, and told him her story. He listened without saying a word.

“I think I’m a suspect,” Carrie said. “Well, of course I am. He just dropped dead when we were fighting . . . but I never so much as laid a hand on him. I was just trying to protect my head and . . . Dr. Erdmann, what is it? You’re white as snow! I shouldn’t have come, I’m sorry, I—”

“Of course you should have come!” he snapped, so harshly that she was startled. A moment later he tried to smile. “Of course you should have come. What are friends for?”

Friends. But she had other friends, younger friends. Joanne and Connie and Jennifer . . . not that she had seen any of them much in the last three months. It had been Dr. Erdmann she’d thought of, first and immediately. And now he looked so . . .

“You’re not well,” she said. “What is it?”

“Nothing. I ate something bad at lunch, in the dining room. Half the building started vomiting a few hours later. Evelyn Krenchnoted and Gina Martinelli and Erin Bass and Bob Donovan and Al Cosmano and Anna Chernov. More.”

He watched her carefully as he recited the names, as if she should somehow react. Carrie knew some of those people, but mostly just to say hello. Only Mr. Cosmano was on her resident-assignee list. Dr. Erdmann looked stranger than she had ever seen him.

He said, “Carrie, what time did Jim . . . did he drop dead? Can you fix the exact time?”

“Well, let me see . . . I left here at two and I stopped at the bank and the gas station and the convenience store, so maybe three or thee-thirty? Why?”

Dr. Erdmann didn’t answer. He was silent for so long that Carrie grew uneasy. She shouldn’t have come, it was a terrible imposition, and anyway there was probably a rule against aides staying in residents’ apartments, what was she thinking—

“Let me get blankets and pillow for the sofa,” Dr. Erdmann finally said, in a voice that still sounded odd to Carrie. “It’s fairly comfortable. For a sofa.”

SIX

Not possible. The most ridiculous coincidence. That was all—coincidence. Simultaneity was not cause-and-effect. Even the dimmest physics undergraduate knew that.

In his mind, Henry heard Richard Feynman say about string theory, “I don’t like that they’re not calculating anything. I don’t like that they don’t check their ideas. I don’t like that for anything that disagrees with an experiment, they cook up an explanation. . . . The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” Henry hadn’t liked Feynman, whom he’d met at conferences at Cal Tech. A buffoon, with his bongo drums and his practical jokes and his lock-picking. Undignified. But the brilliant buffoon had been right. Henry didn’t like string theory, either, and he didn’t like ideas that weren’t calculated, checked, and verified by experimental data. Besides, the idea that Henry had somehow killed Jim Peltier with his thoughts . . . preposterous.

Mere thoughts could not send a bolt of energy through a distant man’s body. But the bolt itself wasn’t a “cooked-up” idea. It had happened. Henry had felt it.

DiBella had said that Henry’s MRI looked completely normal.

Henry lay awake much of Thursday night, which made the second night in a row, while Carrie slept the oblivious deep slumber of the young. In the morning, before she was awake, he dressed quietly, left the apartment with his walker, and made his way to the St. Sebastian’s Infirmary. He expected to find the Infirmary still crammed with people who’d vomited when he had yesterday afternoon. He was wrong.

“Can I help you?” said a stout, middle-aged nurse carrying a breakfast tray. “Are you feeling ill?”

“No, no,” Henry said hastily. “I’m here to visit someone. Evelyn Krenchnoted. She was here yesterday.”

“Oh, Evelyn’s gone back. They’ve all gone back, the food poisoning was so mild. Our only patients here now are Bill Terry and Anna Chernov.” She said the latter name the way many of the staff did, as if she’d just been waiting for an excuse to speak it aloud. Usually this irritated Henry—what was ballet dancing compared to, say, physics?—but now he seized on it.

“May I see Miss Chernov, then? Is she awake?”

“This is her tray. Follow me.”

The nurse led the way to the end of a short corridor. Yellow curtains, bedside table, monitors and IV poles; the room looked like every other hospital room Henry had ever seen, except for the flowers. Masses and masses of flowers, bouquets and live plants and one huge floor pot of brass holding what looked like an entire small tree. A man, almost lost amid all the flowers, sat in the room’s one chair.

“Here’s breakfast, Miss Chernov,” said the nurse reverently. She fussed with setting the tray on the table, positioning it across the bed, removing the dish covers.

“Thank you.” Anna Chernov gave her a gracious, practiced smile, and looked inquiringly at Henry. The other man, who had not risen at Henry’s entrance, glared at him.

They made an odd pair. The dancer, who looked younger than whatever her actual age happened to be, was more beautiful than Henry had realized, with huge green eyes over perfect cheekbones. She wasn’t hooked to any of the machinery on the wall, but a cast on her left leg bulged beneath the yellow bedcover. The man had a head shaped like a garden trowel, aggressively bristly gray crew cut, and small suspicious eyes. He wore an ill-fitting sports coat over a red T-shirt and jeans. There seemed to be grease under his fingernails—grease, in St. Sebastian’s? Henry would have taken him for part of the maintenance staff except that he looked too old, although vigorous and walker-free. Henry wished him at the devil. This was going to be difficult enough without an audience.

“Miss Chernov, please forgive the intrusion, especially so early, but I think this is important. My name is Henry Erdmann, and I’m a resident on Three.”

“Good morning,” she said, with the same practiced, detached graciousness she’d shown the nurse. “This is Bob Donovan.”

“Hi,” Donovan said, not smiling.

“Are you connected in any way with the press, Mr. Erdmann? Because I do not give interviews.”

“No, I’m not. I’ll get right to the point, if I may. Yesterday I had an attack of nausea, just as you did, and you also, Mr. Donovan. Evelyn Krenchnoted told me.”

Donovan rolled his eyes. Henry would have smiled at that if he hadn’t felt so tense.

He continued, “I’m not sure the nausea was food poisoning. In my case, it followed a . . . a sort of attack of a quite different sort. I felt what I can only describe as a bolt of energy burning along my nerves, very powerfully and painfully. I’m here to ask if you felt anything similar.”

Donovan said, “You a doctor?”

“Not an M.D. I’m a physicist.”

Donovan scowled savagely, as if physics were somehow offensive. Anna Chernov said, “Yes, I did, Dr. Erdmann, although I wouldn’t describe it as ‘painful.’ It didn’t hurt. But a ‘bolt of energy along the nerves’—yes. It felt like—” She stopped abruptly.

“Yes?” Henry said. His heart had started a slow, irregular thump in his chest. Someone else had also felt that energy.

But Anna declined to say what it had felt like. Instead she turned her head to the side. “Bob? Did you feel anything like that?”

“Yeah. So what?”

“I don’t know what,” Henry said. All at once, leaning on the walker, his knees felt wobbly. Anna noticed at once. “Bob, bring Dr. Erdmann the chair, please.”

Donovan got up from the chair, dragged it effortlessly over to Henry, and stood sulkily beside a huge bouquet of autumn-colored chrysanthemums, roses, and dahlias. Henry sank onto the chair. He was at eye level with the card to the flowers, which said from the abt company. get well soon!

Anna said, “I don’t understand what you’re driving at, Dr. Erdmann. Are you saying we all had the same disease and it wasn’t food poisoning? It was something with a . . . a surge of energy followed by nausea?”

“Yes, I guess I am.” He couldn’t tell her about Jim Peltier. Here, in this flower-and-antiseptic atmosphere, under Donovan’s pathetic jealousy and Anna’s cool courtesy, the whole idea seemed unbelievably wild. Henry Erdmann did not like wild ideas. He was, after all, a scientist.

But that same trait made him persist a little longer. “Had you felt anything like that ever before, Miss Chernov?”

“Anna,” she said automatically. “Yes, I did. Three times before, in fact. But much more minor, and with no nausea. I think they were just passing moments of dozing off, in fact. I’ve been laid up with this leg for a few days now, and it’s been boring enough that I sleep a lot.”

It was said without self-pity, but Henry had a sudden glimpse of what being “laid up” must mean to a woman for whom the body, not the mind, had been the lifelong source of achievement, of pleasure, of occupation, of self. What, in fact, growing old must mean to such a woman. Henry had been more fortunate; his mind was his life source, not his aging body, and his mind still worked fine.

Or did it, if it could hatch that crackpot hypothesis? What would Feynman, Teller, Gell-Mann have said? Embarrassment swamped him. He struggled to rise.

“Thank you, Miss Chernov, I won’t take up any more of your—”

“I felt it, too,” Donovan said suddenly. “But only two times, like you said. Tuesday and yesterday afternoon. What are you after here, doc? You saying there’s something going around? Is it dangerous?”

Henry, holding onto the walker, turned to stare at him. “You felt it, too?”

“I just told you I did! Now you tell me—is this some new catching, dangerous-like disease?”

The man was frightened, and covering fear with belligerence. Did he even understand what a ‘physicist’ was? He seemed to have taken Henry for some sort of specialized physician. What on Earth was Bob Donovan doing with Anna Chernov?

He had his answer in the way she dismissed them both. “No, Bob, there’s no dangerous disease. Dr. Erdmann isn’t in medicine. Now if you don’t mind, I’m very tired and I must eat or the nurse will scold me. Perhaps you’d better leave now, and maybe I’ll see you both around the building when I’m discharged.” She smiled wearily.

Henry saw the look on Donovan’s face, a look he associated with undergraduates: hopeless, helpless lovesickness. Amid those wrinkles and sags, the look was ridiculous. And yet completely sincere, poor bastard.

“Thank you again,” Henry said, and left as quickly as his walker would allow. How dare she treat him like a princess dismissing a lackey? And yet . . . he’d been the intruder on her world, that feminine arena of flowers and ballet and artificial courtesy. A foreign, somehow repulsive world. Not like the rigorous masculine brawl of physics.

But he’d learned that she’d felt the “energy,” too. And so had Donovan, and at the exact same times as Henry. Several more data points for . . . what?

He paused on his slow way to the elevator and closed his eyes.

When Henry reached his apartment, Carrie was awake. She sat with two strangers, who both rose as Henry entered, at the table where Henry and Ida had eaten dinner for fifty-years. The smell of coffee filled the air.

“I made coffee,” Carrie said. “I hope you don’t mind . . . This is Detective Geraci and Detective Washington. Dr. Erdmann, this is his apartment . . .” She trailed off, looking miserable. Her hair hung in uncombed tangles and some sort of black make-up smudged under her eyes. Or maybe just tiredness.

“Hello, Dr. Erdmann,” the male detective said. He was big, heavily muscled, with beard shadow even at this hour—just the sort of thuggish looks that Henry most mistrusted. The black woman was much younger, small and neat and unsmiling. “We had a few follow-up questions for Ms. Vesey about last night.”

Henry said, “Does she need a lawyer?”

“That’s up to your granddaughter, of course,” at the same moment that Carrie said, “I told them I don’t want a lawyer,” and Henry was adding, “I’ll pay for it.” In the confusion of sentences, the mistake about “granddaughter” went uncorrected.

Geraci said, “Were you here when Ms. Vesey arrived last night?”

“Yes,” Henry said.

“And can you tell us your whereabouts yesterday afternoon, sir?”

Was the man a fool? “Certainly I can, but surely you don’t suspect me, sir, of killing Officer Peltier?”

“We don’t suspect anyone at this point. We’re asking routine questions, Dr. Erdmann.”

“I was in Redborn Memorial from mid-afternoon until just before Carrie arrived here. The Emergency Room, being checked for a suspected heart attack. Which,” he added hastily, seeing Carrie’s face, “I did not have. It was merely severe indigestion brought on by the attack of food poisoning St. Sebastian suffered yesterday afternoon.”

Hah! Take that, Detective Thug!

“Thank you,” Geraci said. “Are you a physician, Dr. Erdmann?”

“No. A doctor of physics.”

He half-expected Geraci to be as ignorant about that as Bob Donovan had been, but Geraci surprised him. “Experimental or theoretical?”

“Theoretical. Not, however, for a long time. Now I teach.”

“Good for you.” Geraci rose, Officer Washington just a beat behind him. In Henry’s hearing the woman had said nothing whatsoever. “Thank you both. We’ll be in touch about the autopsy results.”

In the elevator, Tara Washington said, “These old-people places give me the creeps.”

“One day you and—”

“Spare me the lecture, Vince. I know I have to get old. I don’t have to like it.”

“You have a lot of time yet,” he said, but his mind clearly wasn’t on the rote reassurance. “Erdmann knows something.”

“Yeah?” She looked at him with interest; Vince Geraci had a reputation in the Department for having a “nose.” He was inevitably right about things that smelled hinkey. Truth was, she was a little in awe of him. She’d only made detective last month and was fucking lucky to be partnered with Geraci. Still, her natural skepticism led her to say, “That old guy? He sure the hell didn’t do the job himself. He couldn’t squash a cockroach. You talking about a hit for hire?”

“Don’t know.” Geraci considered. “No. Something else. Something more esoteric.”

Tara didn’t know what “esoteric” meant, so she kept quiet. Geraci was smart. Too smart for his own good, some uniforms said, but that was just jealousy talking, or the kind of cops that would rather smash down doors than solve crimes. Tara Washington knew she was no door-smasher. She intended to learn everything she could from Vince Geraci, even if she didn’t have his vocabulary. Everything, and then some. She intended to someday be just as good as he was.

Geraci said, “Let’s talk to the staff about this epidemic of food poisoning.”

But the food poisoning checked out. And halfway through the morning, the autopsy report was called in. Geraci shut his cell and said, “Peltier died of ‘a cardiac event.’ Massive and instantaneous heart failure.”

“Young cop like that? Fit and all?”

“That’s what the M.E. says.”

“So no foul play. Investigation closed.” In a way, she was disappointed. The murder of a cop by a battered wife would have been pretty high-profile. That’s why Geraci had been assigned to it.

“Investigation closed,” Geraci said. “But just the same, Erdmann knows something. We’re just never gonna find out what it is.”

SEVEN

Just before noon on Friday, Evelyn lowered her plump body onto a cot ready to slide into the strange-looking medical tube. She had dressed up for the occasion in her best suit, the polyester blue one with all the blue lace, and her good cream pumps. Dr. DiBella—such a good-looking young man, too bad she wasn’t fifty years younger aha ha ha—said, “Are you comfortable, Mrs. Krenchnoted?”

“Call me Evelyn. Yes, I’m fine, I never had one of these—what did you call it?”

“A functional MRI. I’m just going to strap you in, since it’s very important you lie completely still for the procedure.”

“Oh, yes, I see, you don’t want my brain wobbling all over the place while you take a picture of—Gina, you still there? I can’t see—”

“I’m here,” Gina called. “Don’t be scared, Evelyn. ‘Though I walk in the valley of—’ ”

“There’s no shadows here and I’m not scared!” Really, sometimes Gina could be Too Much. Still, the MRI tube was a bit unsettling. “You just tell me when you’re ready to slide me into that thing, doctor, and I’ll brace myself. It’s tight as a coffin, isn’t it? Well, I’m going to be underground a long time but I don’t plan on starting now, aha ha ha! But if I can keep talking to you while I go in—”

“Certainly. Just keep talking.” He sounded resigned, poor man. Well, no wonder, he must get bored with doing things like this all the live-long day. She cast around for something to cheer him up.

“You’re over at St. Sebastian’s a lot now, aren’t you, when you’re not here that is, did you hear yet about Anna Chernov’s necklace?”

“No, what about it? That’s it, just hold your head right here.”

“It’s fabulous!” Evelyn said, a little desperately. He was putting some sort of vise on her head, she couldn’t move it at all. Her heart sped up. “Diamonds and rubies and I don’t know what all. The Russian czar gave it to some famous ballerina who—”

“Really? Which czar?”

“The czar! Of Russia!” Really, what did the young learn in school these days? “He gave it to some famous ballerina who was Anna Chernov’s teacher and she gave it to Anna, who naturally keeps it in the St. Sebastian safe because just think if it were stolen, it wouldn’t do the Home’s reputation any good at all and anyway it’s absolutely priceless so—oh!”

“You’ll just slide in nice and slow, Evelyn. It’ll be fine. Close your eyes if that helps. Now, have you seen this necklace?”

“Oh, no!” Evelyn gasped. Her heart raced as she felt the bed slide beneath her. “I’d love to, of course, but Anna isn’t exactly friendly, she’s pretty stuck-up, well I suppose that comes with being so famous and all but still—Doctor!”

“Do you want to come out?” he said, and she could tell that he was disappointed, she was sensitive that way, and she did want to come out but she didn’t want to disappoint him, so . . . “No! I’m fine! The necklace is something I’d really like to see, though, all those diamonds and rubies and maybe even sapphires too, those are my favorite stones with that blue fire in them, I’d really really like to see it—”

She was babbling, but all at once it seemed she could see the necklace in her mind, just the way she’d pictured it. A string of huge glowing diamonds and hanging from them a pendant of rubies and sapphires shining like I-don’t-know-what but more beautiful than anything she’d ever seen oh she’d love to touch it just once! If Anna Chernov weren’t so stuck-up and selfish then maybe she’d get the necklace from the safe and show it to Evelyn let her touch it get the necklace from the safe it would surely be the most wonderful thing Evelyn had ever seen or imagined get the necklace from the safe—

Evelyn screamed. Pain spattered through her like hot oil off a stove, burning her nerves and turning her mind to a red cloud . . . So much pain! She was going to die, this was it and she hadn’t even bought her cemetery plot yet oh God the pain—

Then the pain was gone and she lay sobbing as the bed slid out of the tube. Dr. DiBella was saying something but his voice was far away and growing farther . . . farther . . . farther. . . .

Gone.

Henry sat alone, eating a tuna fish sandwich at his kitchen table. Carrie had gone to work elsewhere in the building. It had been pleasant having her here, even though of course she—

Energy poured through him, like a sudden surge in household current, and all his nerves glowed. That was the only word. No pain this time, but something bright grew in his mind, white and red and blue but certainly not a flag, hard as stones . . . yes, stones . . . jewels . . .

It was gone. An immense lassitude took Henry. He could barely hold his head up, keep his eyes open. It took all his energy to push off from the table, stagger into the bedroom, and fall onto the bed, his mind empty as deep space.

Carrie was filling in at a pre-lunch card game in the dining room, making a fourth at euchre with Ed Rosewood, Ralph Galetta, and Al Cosmano. Mr. Cosmano was her Friday morning resident-assignee. She’d taken him to buy a birthday gift for his daughter in California, to the post office to wrap and mail it, and then to the physical therapist. Mr. Cosmano was a complainer. St. Sebastian’s was too cold, the doctors didn’t know nothing, they wouldn’t let you smoke, the food was terrible, he missed the old neighborhood, his daughter insisted on living in California instead of making a home for her old dad, kids these days. . . . Carrie went on smiling. Even Mr. Cosmano was better than being home in the apartment where Jim had died. When her lease was up, she was going to find something else, but in the meantime she had signed up for extra hours at St. Sebastian’s, just to not be home.

“Carrie, hearts led,” Ed Rosewood said. He was her partner, a sweet man whose hobby was watching C-Span. He would watch anything at all on C-Span, even hearings of the House Appropriations Committee, for hours and hours. This was good for St. Sebastian’s because Mr. Rosewood didn’t want an aide. He had to be pried off the TV even to play cards once a week. Mike O’Kane, their usual fourth, didn’t feel well enough to play today, which was why Carrie sat holding five cards as the kitchen staff clattered in the next room, preparing lunch. Outside a plane passed overhead, droned away.

“Oh, yes,” Carrie said, “hearts.” She had a heart, thank heavens, since she couldn’t remember what was trump. She was no good at cards.

“There’s the king.”

“Garbage from me.”

“Your lead, Ed.”

“Ace of clubs.”

“Clubs going around. . . . Carrie?”

“Oh, yes, I . . .” Who led? Clubs were the only things on the table. She had no clubs, so she threw a spade. Mr. Galetta laughed.

Al Cosmano said, with satisfaction, “Carrie, you really shouldn’t trump your partner’s ace.”

“Did I do that? Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Rosewood, I—”

Ed Rosewood slumped in his chair, eyes closed. So did Al Cosmano. Ralph Galetta stared dazedly at Carrie, then carefully laid his head on the table, eyes fixed.

“Mr. Cosmano! Help, somebody!”

The kitchen staff came running. But now all three men had their eyes open again, looking confused and sleepy.

“What happened?” demanded a cook.

“I don’t know,” Carrie said, “they all just got . . . tired.”

The cook stared at Carrie as if she’d gone demented. “Tired?”

“Yeah . . . tired,” Ed Rosewood said. “I just . . . bye, guys. I’m going to take a nap. Don’t want lunch.” He rose, unsteady but walking on his own power, and headed out of the dining room. The other two men followed.

“Tired,” the cook said, glaring at Carrie.

“All at once! Really, really tired, like a spell of some kind!”

“A simultaneous ‘spell,’ ” the cook said. “Right. You’re new here? Well, old people get tired.” She walked away.

Carrie wasn’t new. The three men hadn’t just had normal tiredness. But there was no way to tell this bitch that, no way to even tell herself in any terms that made sense. Nothing was right.

Carrie had no appetite for lunch. She fled to the ladies’ room, where at least she could be alone.

Vince Geraci’s cell rang as he and Tara Washington exited a convenience store on East Elm. They’d been talking to the owner, who may or may not have been involved in an insurance scam. Vince had let Tara do most of the questioning, and she’d felt herself swell like a happy balloon when he said, “Nice job, rookie.”

“Geraci,” he said into the cell, then listened as they walked. Just before they reached the car, he said, “Okay,” and clicked off.

“What do we have?” Tara asked.

“We have a coincidence.”

“A coincidence?”

“Yes.” The skin on his forehead took on strange topography. “St. Sebastian’s again. Somebody cracked the safe in the office.”

“Anything gone?”

“Let’s go find out.”

Erin Bass woke on her yoga mat, the TV screen a blue blank except for channel 3 in the upper corner. She sat up, dazed but coherent. Something had happened.

She sat up carefully, her ringed hands lifting her body slowly off the mat. No broken bones, no pain anywhere. Apparently she had just collapsed onto the mat and then stayed out as the yoga tape played itself to an end. She’d been up to the fish posture, so there had been about twenty minutes left on the tape. And how long since then? The wall clock said 1:20. So about an hour.

Nothing hurt. Erin took a deep breath, rolled her head, stood up. Still no pain. And there hadn’t been pain when it happened, but there had been something . . . not the calm place that yoga or meditation sometimes took her, either. That place was pale blue, like a restful vista of valleys seen at dusk from a high, still mountain. This was brightly hued, rushing, more like a river . . . a river of colors, blue and red and white.

She walked into the apartment’s tiny kitchen, a slim figure in black leotard and tights. She’d missed lunch but wasn’t hungry. From the cabinet she chose a chamomile tea, heated filtered water, and set the tea to steep.

That rushing river of energy was similar to what she’d felt before. Henry Erdmann had asked her about it, so perhaps he had felt it this time, as well. Although Henry hadn’t seemed accepting of her explanation of trishna, grasping after the material moment, versus awakening. He was a typical scientist, convinced that science was the only route to knowledge, that what he could not test or measure or replicate was therefore not true even if he’d experienced it himself. Erin knew better. But there were a lot of people like Henry in this world, people who couldn’t see that while rejecting “religion,” they’d made a religion of science.

Sipping her tea, Erin considered what she should do next. She wasn’t afraid of what had happened. Very little frightened Erin Bass. This astonished some people and confused the rest. But, really, what was there to be afraid of? Misfortune was just one turn of the wheel, illness another, death merely a transition from one state to another. What was due to come, would come, and beneath it all the great flow of cosmic energy would go on, creating the illusion that people thought was the world. She knew that the other residents of St. Sebastian’s considered her nuts, pathetic, or so insulated from realty as to be both (“Trust-fund baby, you know. Never worked a day in her life.”) It didn’t matter. She’d made herself a life here of books and meditation and volunteering on the Nursing floors, and if her past was far different than the other residents imagined, that was their illusion. She herself never thought about the past. It would come again, or not, as maya chose.

Still, something should be done about these recent episodes. They had affected not just her but also Henry Erdmann and, surprisingly, Evelyn Krenchnoted. Although on second thought, Erin shouldn’t be surprised. Everyone possessed karma, even Evelyn, and Erin had no business assuming she knew anything about what went on under Evelyn’s loud, intrusive surface. There were many paths up the mountain. So Erin should talk to Evelyn as well as to Henry. Perhaps there were others, too. Maybe she should—

Her doorbell rang. Leaving her tea on the table, Erin fastened a wrap skirt over her leotard and went to the door. Henry Erdmann stood there, leaning on his walker, his face a rigid mask of repressed emotion. “Mrs. Bass, there’s something I’d like to discuss with you. May I come in?”

A strange feeling came over Erin. Not the surge of energy from the yoga mat, nor the high blue restfulness of meditation. Something else. She’d had these moments before, in which she recognized that something significant was about to happen. They weren’t mystical or deep, these occasions; probably they came from nothing more profound than a subliminal reading of body language. But, always, they presaged something life-changing.

“Of course, Dr. Erdmann. Come in.”

She held the door open wider, stepping aside to make room for his walker, but he didn’t budge. Had he exhausted all his strength? He was ninety, she’d heard, ten years older than Erin, who was in superb shape from a lifetime of yoga and bodily moderation. She had never smoked, drank, overeaten. All her indulgences had been emotional, and not for a very long time now.

“Do you need help? Can I—”

“No. No.” He seemed to gather himself and then inched the walker forward, moving toward her table. Over his shoulder, with a forced afterthought that only emphasized his tension, he said, “Thieves broke into St. Sebastian’s an hour and a half ago. They opened the safe in the office, the one with Anna Chernov’s necklace.”

Erin had never heard of Anna Chernov’s necklace. But the image of the rushing river of bright colors came back to her with overwhelming force, and she knew that she had been right: Something had happened, and nothing was ever going to be the same again.

EIGHT

For perhaps the tenth time, Jake DiBella picked up the fMRI scans, studied them yet again, and put them down. He rubbed his eyes hard with both sets of knuckles. When he took his hands away from his face, his bare little study at St. Sebastian’s looked blurry but the fMRI scans hadn’t changed. This is your brain on self-destruction, he thought, except that it wasn’t his brain. It was Evelyn Krenchnoted’s brain, and after she recovered consciousness, that tiresome and garrulous lady’s brain had worked as well as it ever had.

But the scan was extraordinary. As Evelyn lay in the magnetic imaging tube, everything had changed between one moment and the next. First image: a normal pattern of blood flow and oxygenation, and the next—

“Hello?”

Startled, Jake dropped the printouts. He hadn’t even heard the door open, or anyone knock. He really was losing it. “Come in, Carrie, I’m sorry, I didn’t . . . You don’t have to do that.”

She had bent to pick up the papers that had skidded across his desk and onto the floor. With her other hand she balanced a cardboard box on one hip. As she straightened, he saw that her face was pink under the loose golden hair, so that she looked like an overdone Victorian figurine. The box held a plant, a picture frame, and various other bits and pieces.

Uh oh. Jake had been down this road before.

She said, “I brought you some things for your office. Because it looks so, well, empty. Cold.”

“Thanks. I actually like it this way.” Ostentatiously he busied himself with the printouts, which was also pretty cold of him, but better to cut her off now rather than after she embarrassed herself. As she set the box on a folding chair, he still ignored her, expecting her to leave.

Instead she said, “Are those MRI scans of Dr. Erdmann? What do they say?”

Jake looked up. She was eyeing the printouts, not him, and her tone was neutral with perhaps just a touch of concern for Dr. Erdmann. He remembered how fond of each other she and Henry Erdmann were. Well, didn’t that make Jake just the total narcissist? Assuming every woman was interested in him. This would teach him some humility.

Out of his own amused embarrassment, he answered her as he would a colleague. “No, these are Evelyn Krenchnoted’s. Dr. Erdmann’s were unremarkable but these are quite the opposite.”

“They’re remarkable? How?”

All at once he found himself eager to talk, to perhaps explain away his own bafflement. He came around the desk and put the scan in her hand. “See those yellow areas of the brain? They’re BOLD signals, blood-oxygen-level dependent contrasts. What that means is that at the moment the MRI image was taken, those parts of the subject’s brain were active—in this case, highly active. And they shouldn’t have been!”

“Why not?”

Carrie was background now, an excuse to put into concrete words what should never have existed concretely at all. “Because it’s all wrong. Evelyn was lying still, talking to me, inside the MRI tube. Her eyes were open. She was nervous about being strapped down. The scan should show activity in the optical input area of the brain, in the motor areas connected to moving the mouth and tongue, and in the posterior parietal lobes, indicating a heightened awareness of her bodily boundaries. But instead, there’s just the opposite. A hugely decreased blood flow in those lobes, and an almost total shut down of input to the thalamus, which relays information coming into the brain from sight and hearing and touch. Also, an enormous—really enormous—increase of activity in the hypothalamus and amygdalae and temporal lobes.”

“What does all that increased activity mean?”

“Many possibilities. They’re areas concerned with emotion and some kinds of imaginative imagery, and this much activation is characteristic of some psychotic seizures. For another possibility, parts of that profile are characteristic of monks in deep meditation, but it takes experienced meditators hours to build to that level, and even so there are differences in pain areas and—anyway, Evelyn Krenchnoted?”

Carrie laughed. “Not a likely monk, no. Do Dr. Erdmann’s scans show any of that?”

“No. And neither did Evelyn’s just before her seizure or just after. I’d say temporal lobe epilepsy except—”

“Epilepsy?” Her voice turned sharp. “Does that ‘seizure’ mean epilepsy?”

Jake looked at her then, really looked at her. He could recognize fear. He said as gently as he could, “Henry Erdmann experienced something like this, didn’t he?”

They stared at each other. Even before she spoke, he knew she was going to lie to him. A golden lioness protecting her cub, except here the lioness was young and the cub a withered old man who was the smartest person Jake DiBella had ever met.

“No,” she said, “Dr. Erdmann never mentioned a seizure to me.”

“Carrie—”

“And you said his MRI looked completely normal.”

“It did.” Defeated.

“I should be going. I just wanted to bring you these things to brighten up your office.”

Carrie left. The box contained a framed landscape he would never hang (a flower-covered cottage, with unicorn), a coffee cup he would never use (java is joy in the morning), a patchwork quilted cushion, a pink African violet, and a pencil cup covered in wallpaper with yellow daisies. Despite himself, Jake smiled. The sheer wrongness of her offerings was almost funny.

Except that nothing was really funny in light of Evelyn Krenchnoted’s inexplicable MRI. He needed more information from her, and another MRI. Better yet would be having her hooked to an EEG in a hospital ward for several days, to see if he could catch a definitive diagnosis of temporal-lobe epilepsy. But when he’d phoned Evelyn, she’d refused all further “doctor procedures.” Ten minutes of his best persuasion hadn’t budged her.

He was left with an anomaly in his study data, a cutesy coffee cup, and no idea what to do next.

“What do we do next?” asked Rodney Caldwell, the chief administrator of St. Sebastian’s. Tara Washington looked at Geraci, who looked at the floor.

It was covered with papers and small, uniform, taped white boxes with names written neatly on them in block printing: M. MATTISON, H. GERHARDT. C GARCIA. One box, however, was open, its lid placed neatly beside it, the tissue paper peeled back. On the tissue lay a necklace, a gold Coptic cross set with a single small diamond, on a thin gold chain. The lid said A. CHERNOV.

“I didn’t touch anything,” Caldwell said, with a touch of pride. In his fifties, he was a tall man with a long, highly colored face like an animated carrot. “That’s what they say on TV, isn’t it? Don’t touch anything. But isn’t it strange that the thief went to all the trouble to ‘blow the safe’ ”—he looked proud of this phrase, too “—and then didn’t take anything?”

“Very strange,” Geraci said. Finally he looked up from the floor. The safe hadn’t been “blown”; the lock was intact. Tara felt intense interest in what Geraci would do next. She was disappointed.

“Let’s go over it once more,” he said easily. “You were away from your office . . .”

“Yes. I went up to Nursing at 11:30. Beth Malone was on desk. Behind the front desk is the only door to the room that holds both residents’ files and the safe, and Beth says she never left her post. She’s very reliable. Been with us eighteen years.”

Mrs. Malone, who was therefore the prime suspect and smart enough to know it, was weeping in another room. A resigned female uniform handed her tissues as she waited to be interrogated. But Tara knew that, after one look, Geraci had dismissed Malone as the perp. One of those conscientious, middle-aged, always-anxious-to-help do-gooders, she would no more have attempted robbery than alchemy. Most likely she had left her post to do something she was as yet too embarrassed to admit, which was when the thief had entered the windowless back room behind the reception desk. Tara entertained herself with the thought that Mrs. Malone had crept off to meet a lover in the linen closet. She smiled.

“A thought, Detective Washington?” Geraci said.

Damn, he missed nothing. Now she would have to come up with something. The best she could manage was a question. “Does that little necklace belong to the ballerina Anna Chernov?”

“Yes,” Caldwell said. “Isn’t it lovely?”

To Tara it didn’t look like much. But Geraci had raised his head to look at her, and she realized he didn’t know that a world-famous dancer had retired to St. Sebastian’s. Ballet wasn’t his style. It was the first time Tara could recall that she’d known something Geraci did not. Emboldened by this, and as a result of being dragged several times a year to Lincoln Center by an eccentric grandmother, Tara continued. “Is there any resident here that might have a special interest in Anna Chernov? A balletomane—” She hoped she was pronouncing the word correctly, she’d only read it in programs “—or a special friend?”

But Caldwell had stopped listening at “resident.” He said stiffly, “None of our residents would have committed this crime, detective. St. Sebastian’s is a private community and we screen very carefully for any—”

“May I talk to Ms. Chernov now?” Geraci asked.

Caldwell seemed flustered. “To Anna? But Beth Malone is waiting for . . . oh, all right, if that’s the procedure. Anna Chernov is in the Infirmary right now, with a broken leg. I’ll show you up.”

Tara hoped that Geraci wasn’t going to send her to do the useless questioning of Mrs. Malone. He didn’t. At the Infirmary door, he said, “Tara, talk to her.” Tara would have taken this as a tribute to her knowledge of ballet, except that she had seen Geraci do the same thing before. He liked to observe: the silent listener, the unknown quantity to whoever was being questioned.

As Caldwell explained the situation and made the introductions, Tara tried not to stare at Anna Chernov. She was beautiful. Old, yes, seventies maybe, but Tara had never seen anyone old look like that. High cheekbones, huge green eyes, white hair pinned carelessly on top of her head so that curving strands fell over the pale skin that looked not so much wrinkled (though it was) as softened by time. Her hands, long-fingered and slim-wristed, lay quiet on the bedspread, and her shoulders held straight under the white bed jacket. Only the bulging cast on one leg marred the impression of delicacy, of remoteness, and of the deepest sadness that Tara had ever seen. It was sadness for everything, Tara thought confusedly, and couldn’t have said what she meant by “everything.” Except that the cast was only a small part.

“Please sit down,” Anna said.

“Thank you. As Mr. Caldwell said, there’s been a break-in downstairs, with the office safe. The only box opened had your name on it, with a gold-and-diamond necklace inside. That is yours, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Is it the one that Tamara Karsavina gave you? That Nicholas II gave her?”

“Yes.” Anna looked at Tara more closely, but not less remotely.

“Ms. Chernov, is there anyone you can think of who might have a strong interest in that necklace? A member of the press who’s been persistent in asking about it, or someone emailing you about it, or a resident?”

“I don’t do email, Miss Washington.”

It was Detective Washington, but Tara let it go. “Still—anyone?”

“No.”

Had the dancer hesitated slightly? Tara couldn’t be sure. She went on asking questions, but she could see that she wasn’t getting anywhere. Anna Chernov grew politely impatient. Why wasn’t Geraci stopping Tara? She had to continue until he did: “softening them up,” he called it. The pointless questioning went on. Finally, just as Tara was running completely out of things to ask, Geraci said almost casually, “Do you know Dr. Erdmann, the physicist?”

“We’ve met once,” Anna said.

“Is it your impression that he has a romantic interest in you?”

For the first time, Anna looked amused. “I think Dr. Erdmann’s only romantic interest is in physics.”

“I see. Thank you for your time, Ms. Chernov.”

In the hall, Geraci said to Tara, “Ballet. Police work sure isn’t what it used to be. You did good, Washington.”

“Thank you. What now?”

“Now we find out what resident has a romantic interest in Anna Chernov. It’s not Erdmann, but it’s somebody.”

So Anna had hesitated slightly when Tara asked if any resident had a special interest in her! Tara glowed inwardly as she followed Geraci down the hall. Without looking at her, he said, “Just don’t let it go to your head.”

She said dryly, “Not a chance.”

“Good. A cop interested in ballet . . . Jesus H. Christ.”

The ship grew agitated. Across many cubic light years between the stars, spacetime itself warped in dangerous ways. The new entity was growing in strength—and it was so far away yet!

It was not supposed to occur this way.

If the ship had become aware earlier of this new entity, this could have happened correctly, in accord with the laws of evolution. All things evolved—stars, galaxies, consciousness. If the ship had realized earlier that anywhere in this galactic backwater had existed the potential for a new entity, the ship would have been there to guide, to shape, to ease the transition. But it hadn’t realized. There had been none of the usual signs.

They were happening now, however. Images, as yet dim and one-way, were reaching the ship. More critically, power was being drawn from it, power that the birthing entity had no idea how to channel. Faster, the ship must go faster . . .

It could not, not without damaging spacetime irretrievably. Spacetime could only reconfigure so much, so often. And meanwhile—

The half-formed thing so far away stirred, struggled, howled in fear.

NINE

Henry Erdmann was scared.

He could barely admit his fright to himself, let alone show it to the circle of people jammed into his small apartment on Saturday morning. They sat in a solemn circle, occupying his sofa and armchair and kitchen chairs and other chairs dragged from other apartments. Evelyn Krenchnoted’s chair crowded uncomfortably close to Henry’s right side, her perfume sickly sweet. She had curled her hair into tiny gray sausages. Stan Dzarkis and Erin Bass, who could still manage it, sat on the floor. The folds of Erin’s yellow print skirt seemed to Henry the only color amid the ashen faces. Twenty people, and maybe there were more in the building who were afflicted. Henry had called the ones he knew of, who had called the ones they knew of. Missing were Anna Chernov, still in the Infirmary, and Al Cosmano, who had refused to attend.

They all looked at him, waiting to begin.

“I think we all know why we’re here,” Henry said, and immediately a sense of unreality took him. He didn’t understand at all why he was here. The words of Michael Faraday, inscribed on the physics building at UCLA, leapt into his mind: “Nothing is too wonderful to be true.” The words seemed a mockery. What had been happening to Henry, to all of them, did not feel wonderful and was “true” in no sense he understood, although he was going to do his damnedest to relate it to physics in the only way that hours of pondering had suggested to him. Anything else—anything less—was unthinkable.

He continued, “Things have occurred to all of us, and a good first step is to see if we have indeed had the same experiences.” Collect data. “So I’ll go first. On five separate occasions I have felt some force seize my mind and body, as if a surge of energy was going through me, some sort of neurological shock. On one occasion it was painful, on the others not painful but very tiring. Has anyone else felt that?”

Immediately a clamor, which Henry stilled by raising his arm. “Can we start with a show of hands? Anybody else had that experience? Everybody. Okay, let’s go around the circle, introducing yourself as we go, starting on my left. Please be as explicit as possible, but only descriptions at this point. No interpretations.”

“Damned teacher,” someone muttered, but Henry didn’t see who and didn’t care. His heart had speeded up, and he felt that his ears had somehow expanded around his hearing aid, so as not to miss even a syllable. He had deliberately not mentioned the times of his “seizures,” or outside events concurrent with them, so as not to contaminate whatever information would be offered by the others.

“I’m John Kluge, from 4J.” He was a heavy, round-faced man with a completely bald head and a pleasant voice used to making itself heard. High-school teacher, Henry guessed. History or math, plus coaching some sort of sports team. “It’s pretty much like Henry here said, except I only felt the ‘energy’ four times. The first was around seven-thirty on Tuesday night. The second time woke me Wednesday night at eleven forty-two. I noted the time on my bedside clock. The third time I didn’t note the time because I was vomiting after that food poisoning we all got on Thursday, but it was just before the vomiting started, sometime in mid-afternoon. That time the energy surge started near my heart, and I thought it was a heart attack. The last time was yesterday at eleven forty-five a.m., and in addition to the energy, I had a . . . well, a sort of—” He looked embarrassed.

“Please go on, it’s important,” Henry said. He could hardly breathe.

“I don’t want to say a vision, but colors swirling through my mind, red and blue and white and somehow hard.”

“Anna Chernov’s necklace!” Evelyn shrieked, and the meeting fell apart.

Henry couldn’t stop the frantic babble. He would have risen but his walker was in the kitchen; there was no room in the crowded living room. He was grateful when Bob Donovan put two fingers in his mouth and gave a whistle that could have deafened war dogs. “Hey! Shut up or nobody’s gonna learn nothing!”

Everyone fell silent and glared resentfully at the stocky man in baggy chinos and cheap acrylic sweater. Donovan scowled and sat back down. Henry leapt into the quiet.

“Mr. Donovan is right, we won’t learn anything useful this way. Let’s resume going around the circle, with no interruptions, please. Mrs. Bass?”

Erin Bass described essentially the same events as John Kluge, without the Wednesday night incident but with the addition of the earlier, slight jar Henry had felt as he let Carrie into his apartment Tuesday before class. She described this as a “whisper in my mind.” The next sixteen people all repeated the same experiences on Thursday and Friday, although some seemed to not have felt the “energy” on Tuesday, and some not on Tuesday or Wednesday. Henry was the only one to feel all five instances. Throughout these recitations, Evelyn Krenchnoted several times rose slightly in her chair, like a geyser about to burst. Henry did not want her to interrupt. He put a restraining hand on her arm, which was a mistake as she immediately covered his hand with her own and squeezed affectionately.

When it was finally Evelyn’s turn, she said, “None of you had pain this last time like Henry did on Thursday—except me! I was having a medical MIT at the hospital and I was inside the machine and the pain was horrible! Horrible! And then—” she paused dramatically “—and then I saw Anna Chernov’s necklace right at the time it was being stolen! And so did all of you—that was the ‘hard colors,’ John! Sapphires and rubies and diamonds!”

Pandemonium again. Henry, despite his growing fear, groaned inwardly. Why Evelyn Krenchnoted? Of all the unreliable witnesses . . .

“I saw it! I saw it!” Evelyn shrieked. Gina Martinelli had begun to pray in a loud voice. People jabbered to each other or sat silent, their faces gone white. A woman that Henry didn’t know reached with a shaking hand into her pocket and pulled out a pill bottle. Bob Donovan raised his fingers to his lips.

Before Donovan’s whistle could shatter their eardrums again, Erin Bass rose gracefully, clapped her hands, and cried surprisingly loudly, “Stop! We will get nowhere this way! Evelyn has the floor!”

Slowly the din subsided. Evelyn, who now seemed more excited than frightened by the implication of what she’d just said, launched into a long and incoherent description of her “MIT,” until Henry stopped her the only way he could think of, which was to take her hand. She squeezed it again, blushed, and said, “Yes, dear.”

Henry managed to get out, “Please. Everyone. There must be an explanation for all this.” But before he could begin it, Erin Bass turned from aide to saboteur.

“Yes, and I think we should go around the circle in the same order and offer those explanations. But briefly, before too many people get too tired. John?”

Kluge said, “It could be some sort of virus affecting the brain. Contagious. Or some pollutant in the building.”

Which causes every person to have the exact same hallucinations and a locked safe to open? Henry thought scornfully. The scorn steadied him. He needed steadying; every person in the room had mentioned feeling the Thursday-afternoon “energy” start in his or her heart, but no one except Henry knew that at that moment Jim Peltier was having an inexplicable heart attack as he battered Carrie.

Erin said, “What we see in this world is just maya, the illusion of permanence when in fact, all reality is in constant flux and change. What’s happening here is beyond the world of intellectual concepts and distinctions. We’re getting glimpses of the mutable nature of reality, the genuine undifferentiated ‘suchness’ that usually only comes with nirvana. The glimpses are imperfect, but for some reason our collective karma has afforded them to us.”

Bob Donovan, next in the circle, said irritably, “That’s just crap. We all got some brain virus, like Kluge here said, and some junkie cracked the office safe. The cops are investigating it. We should all see a doctor, except they can’t never do anything to cure people anyway. And the people who had pain, Henry and Evelyn, they just got the disease worse.”

Most people around the circle echoed the brain-disease theory, some with helpless skepticism, some with evident relief at finding any sort of explanation. A woman said slowly, “It could be the start of Alzheimer’s.” A man shrugged and said, “As God wills.” Another just shook his head, his eyes averted.

Gina Martinelli said, “It is the will of God! These are the End Times, and we’re being given signs, if only we would listen! ‘Ye shalt have tribulations ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.’ Also—”

“It might be the will of God, Gina,” interrupted Evelyn, unable to restrain herself any longer, “but it’s mighty strange anyway! Why, I saw that necklace in my mind plain as day, and at just that moment it was being stolen from the safe! To my mind, that’s not God, and not the devil neither or the robbery would have been successful, you see what I mean? The devil knows what he’s doing. No, this was a message, all right, but from those who have gone before us. My Uncle Ned could see spirits all the time, they trusted him, I remember one time we all came down to breakfast and the cups had all been turned upside down when nobody was in the room and Uncle Ned, he said—”

Henry stopped listening. Ghosts. God. Eastern mysticism. Viruses. Alzheimer’s. Nothing that fit the facts, that adhered even vaguely to the laws of the universe. These people had the reasoning power of termites.

Evelyn went on for a while, but eventually even she noticed that her audience was inattentive, dispirited, or actually asleep. Irene Bromley snored softly in Henry’s leather armchair. Erin Bass said, “Henry?”

He looked at them hopelessly. He’d been going to describe the two-slit experiments on photons, to explain that once you added detectors to measure the paths of proton beams, the path became predetermined, even if you switched on the detector after the particle had been fired. He’d planned on detailing how that astonishing series of experiments changed physics forever, putting the observer into basic measurements of reality. Consciousness was woven into the very fabric of the universe itself, and consciousness seemed to him the only way to link these incredibly disparate people and the incredible events that had happened to them.

Even to himself, this “explanation” sounded lame. How Teller or Feynman would have sneered at it! Still, although it was better than anything he’d heard here this morning, he hated to set it out in front of these irrational people, half ignoramuses and the other half nutcases. They would all just reject it, and what would be gained?

But he had called this meeting. And he had nothing else to offer.

Henry stumbled through his explanation, trying to make the physics as clear as possible. Most of the faces showed perfect incomprehension. He finished with, “I’m not saying there’s some sort of affecting of reality going on, through group consciousness.” But wasn’t that exactly what he was saying? “I don’t believe in telekinesis or any of that garbage. The truth is, I don’t know what’s happening. But something is.”

He felt a complete fool.

Bob Donovan snapped, “None of you know nothing. I been listening to all of you, and you haven’t even got the facts right. I seen Anna Chernov’s necklace. The cops showed it to me yesterday when they was asking me some questions. It don’t got no sapphires or rubies, and just one tiny diamond. You’re full of it, Evelyn, to think your seizure had anything to do with anything—and how do we know you even felt any pain at the ‘very second’ the safe was being cracked? All we got’s your word.”

“Are you saying I’m a liar?” Evelyn cried. “Henry, tell him!”

Tell him what? Startled, Henry just stared at her. John Kluge said harshly, “I don’t believe Henry Erdmann is lying about his pain,” and Evelyn turned from Donovan to Kluge.

“You mean you think I am? Who the hell do you think you are?”

Kluge started to tell her who he was: among other things, a former notary public. Other people began to argue. Evelyn started to cry, and Gina Martinelli prayed loudly. Erin Bass rose and slipped out the front door. Others followed. Those that remained disputed fiercely, the arguments growing more intense as they were unable to convince their neighbors of their own theories. Somewhere among the anger and contempt, Carrie Vesey appeared by Henry’s side, her pretty face creased with bewildered concern, her voice high and strained.

“Henry? What on Earth is going on in here? I could hear the noise all the way down the hall . . . What is this all about?”

“Nothing,” he said, which was the stupidest answer possible. Usually the young regarded the old as a separate species, as distant from their own concerns as trilobites. But Carrie had been different. She had always treated Henry as inhabiting the same world as herself, with the same passions and quirks and aims and defeats. This was the first time he had ever seen Carrie look at him as both alien and unsound, and it set the final seal on this disastrous meeting.

“But, Henry—”

“I said it’s nothing!” he shouted at her. “Nothing at all! Now just leave me the hell alone!”

TEN

Carrie stood in the ladies’ room off the lobby, pulling herself together. She was not going to cry. Even if Dr. Erdmann had never spoken to her like that before, even if ever since Jim’s death she had felt as if she might shatter, even if . . . everything, she was not going to cry. It would be ridiculous. She was a professional—well, a professional aide anyway—and Henry Erdmann was an old man. Old people were irritable sometimes. This whole incident meant nothing.

Except that she knew it did. She had stood outside Dr. Erdmann’s door for a long time as people slipped out, smiling at her vaguely, and Evelyn Krenchnoted babbled on inside. The unprecedented meeting had first piqued her curiosity—Henry Erdmann, hosting a party at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning? Then, as she realized what Evelyn was saying, disbelief took Carrie. Evelyn meant . . . Evelyn thought . . . and even Dr. Erdmann believed that “something” had been happening, something weird and unexplainable and supernatural, at the moment that Evelyn was under the MRI . . . Henry!

But Jake DiBella had been upset by Evelyn’s scans.

The door of the ladies’ opened and the first of the Saturday visitors entered, a middle-aged woman and a sulky teenage girl. “Honestly, Hannah,” the woman said, “it’s only an hour out of your precious day and it won’t kill you to sit with your grandmother and concentrate on someone else besides yourself for a change. If you’d just—”

Carrie went to DiBella’s office. He was there, working at his desk. No sign of her picture, cushion, coffee cup; she couldn’t help her inevitable, stupid pang. He didn’t want them. Or her. Another failure.

“Dr. DiBella—”

“ ‘Jake.’ Remember?” And then, “Carrie, what is it?”

“I just came from Dr. Erdmann’s apartment. They were having a meeting, about twenty people, all of them who’ve felt these ‘seizures’ or whatever they are, all at the same time. Like the one you captured on Evelyn’s MRI scan.”

He stared at her. “What do you mean, ‘at the same time’ ?”

“Just what I said.” She marveled at her own tone—none of her shakiness showed. “They said that at the exact same time that Evelyn was showing all that weird activity under the MRI, each of them was feeling it, too, only not so strong. And it was the exact same time that Anna Chernov’s necklace was being stolen. And they all saw the necklace in their minds.” Only—hadn’t Mr. Donovan said that the necklace looked different from what Evelyn said? Confusion took Carrie.

Jake looked down at whatever he was writing, back at Carrie, down again at his notes. He came around the desk and closed his office door. Taking her arm, he sat her gently in the visitor’s chair, unadorned by her cushion. Despite herself, she felt a tingle where his hand touched her.

“Dr. Erdmann was involved in this? Tell me again. Slowly, Carrie. Don’t leave anything out.”

Evelyn Krenchnoted made her way to Gina Martinelli’s apartment on Five. Really, Henry had been unbearably rude—to that poor young girl, to everybody at the meeting, and especially to Evelyn herself. He hadn’t comforted her when that awful Donovan man called her a liar, he hadn’t put his hand on hers again, he’d just yelled and yelled—and just when things between them had been going so well!

Evelyn needed to talk to Gina. Not that Gina had been any help at the meeting, not with all that praying. Gina was really a lot smarter than she looked, she’d been a part-time tax preparer once, but hardly anybody knew it because Gina never opened her mouth except to pray. Not that there was anything wrong with praying, of course! Evelyn certainly believed in God. But you had to help Him along a little if you really wanted something. You couldn’t expect the Lord to do everything.

Evelyn had even curled her hair for Henry.

“Gina? Sweetie? Can I come in?”

“You’re already in,” Gina said. She had to speak loud because she had Frank Sinatra on the record player. Gina loved Frank Sinatra. For once she wasn’t reading her Bible, which Evelyn thought was a good sign. She lowered her bulk onto Gina’s sofa.

“So what did you think of that meeting?” Evelyn said. She was looking forward to a good two-three hours of rehashing, sympathy, and gossip. It would make her feel a lot better. Less creepy. Less afraid.

But instead, Gina said, “There was a message on the machine when I got back here. Ray is coming next week.”

Oh, God, Gina’s son. Who was only after her money. Ray hadn’t visited in over a year, and now that Gina had told him she was leaving everything to the daughter . . . and there was a lot of everything to leave. Gina’s late husband had made major money in construction.

“Oh, sweetie,” Evelyn said, a little perfunctorily. Ordinarily she would have adored discussing Gina’s anguish; for one thing, it made Evelyn glad she had never had kids. But now, with so much else going on—Henry and the attempted robbery and Evelyn’s seizure and the strange comments at the meeting—

Frank Sinatra sang about ants and rubber tree plants. Gina burst into tears.

“Oh, sweetie,” Evelyn repeated, got up to put her arms around Gina, and resigned herself to hearing about Ray Martinelli’s selfishness.

Bob Donovan sat beside Anna Chernov’s bed in the Infirmary. The man simply could not take a hint. She would either have to snub him outright or tell him in so many words to stop visiting her. Even the sight of him, squat and toad-faced and clumsy, made her shudder. Unfair, but there it was.

She had danced with so many beautiful men.

Which had been the best? Frederico, partnering her in LaValse—never had she been lifted so effortlessly. Jean, in Scotch Symphony. had been equally breathtaking, But the one she always returned to was Bennet. After she’d left the New York City Ballet for American Ballet Theater and her career had really taken off, they’d always danced together. Bennet, so dazzling as Albrecht in Giselle. . . . Guesting at a gala at the Paris Opera, they’d had seventeen curtain calls and—

Her attention was reclaimed by something Bob Donovan said.

“Could you repeat that, please, Bob?”

“What? Old Henry’s crackpot theory? Science gibberish!”

“Nonetheless, would you repeat it?” She managed a smile.

He responded to the smile with pathetic eagerness. “Okay, yeah, if you want. Erdmann said, lemme think . . .” He screwed up his already crevassed face in an effort to remember. Although she was being unkind again. He probably wasn’t all that bad looking, among his own class. And was she any better? These days she couldn’t bear to look in a mirror. And the sight of the ugly cast on her leg filled her with despair.

“Erdmann said there was some experiments in physics, something with two slips, where people’s consciences changed the path of some little . . . particles . . . by just thinking about them. Or maybe it was watching them. And that was the link between everybody who had so-called ‘energy’ at the same time. Group conscience. A new thing.”

Consciousness, Anna translated. Group consciousness. Well, was that so strange? She had felt it more than once on stage, when a group of dancers had transcended what they were individually, had become a unity moving to the music in the creation of beauty. Such moments had, for her, taken the place of religion.

Bob was going on now about what other people at the meeting had said, offering up ungrammatical accounts in a desperate bid to please her, but even as she recognized this, Anna had stopped listening. She thought instead about Bennet, with whom she’d had such fantastic chemistry on and off stage, Bennet lifting her in the grand pas de deux of Act II, rosin from the raked stage rising around her like an angelic cloud, herself soaring and almost flying . . .

“Tell me again,” Jake said.

“Again?” This was the third time! Not that Carrie really minded. She hadn’t had his total attention—anybody’s total attention—like this since Jim died. Not that she wanted Jim back . . . She shuddered even as she went through it all again. By the end, she was belligerent.

“Why? Are you saying you believe all this stuff about a group consciousness?”

“No. Of course not. Not without confirmation . . . but Erdmann is a scientist. What other data does he have that he isn’t telling you?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” And she didn’t; this conversation was beyond her. Photon detectors, double-slit experiments, observational pre-determination . . . Her memory was good, but she knew she lacked the background to interpret the terms. Her own ignorance made her angry.

“Henry had two other experiences of ‘energy’ when he was with you, you said. Were there others when he was away from you?”

“How should I know? You better ask him!”

“I will. I’ll ask them all.”

“It sounds stupid to me.” Immediately she was frightened by her own tone. But Jake just looked at her thoughtfully.

“Well, it sounds stupid to me, too. But Henry is right about one thing—something is happening. There’s hard data in the form of Evelyn’s MRI, in the fact that the safe was opened without the lock being either tampered with or moved to the right combination—”

“It did?”

“The detective told me, when he was asking questions yesterday. Also, I got the physician here to let me look at the lab results for everybody admitted to the Infirmary Thursday afternoon. Professional courtesy. There was no food poisoning.”

“There wasn’t?” All at once Carrie felt scared.

“No.” DiBella sat thinking a long while. She scarcely dared breathe. Finally he said slowly, as if against his own will or better judgment—and that much she understood, anyway—”Carrie, have you ever heard of the principle of emergent complexity?”

“I did everything for that boy,” Gina sobbed. “Just everything!”

“Yes, you did,” said Evelyn, who thought Gina had done too much for Ray. Always lending him money after he lost each job, always letting him move back home and trash the place. What that kid had needed—and bad—was a good hiding, that’s what.

“Angela didn’t turn out this way!”

“No.” Gina’s daughter was a sweetie. Go figure.

“And now I just get it settled in my mind that he’s out of my life, I come to grips with it, and he says he’s flying back here to see ‘his old ma’ and he loves me! He’ll just stir everything up again like he did when he got home from the Army, and when he divorced Judy, and when I had to find that lawyer for him in New York . . . Evelyn, nobody, but nobody, can rip you up inside like your child!”

“I know,” said Evelyn, who didn’t. She went on making little clucking noises while Gina sobbed. A plane roared overhead, and Frank Sinatra sang about it having been a very good year when he was twenty-one.

Bob Donovan took Anna’s hand. Gently she pulled it away. The gentleness was for her, not him—she didn’t want a scene. His touch repelled her. But oh, Bennet’s touch . . . or Frederico’s . . . Still, it was the dancing she missed. And now she would never dance again. She might, the doctors said, not even walk without a limp.

Never dance. Never feel her legs spring into a ballotté or soar in the exuberance of a flick jeté, back arched and arms thrown back, an arrow in ecstatic flight.

“Carrie, have you ever heard of the principle of emergent complexity?”

“No.” Jake DiBella was going to make her feel dumb again. But he didn’t mean to do that, and as long as she could sit here in his office with him, she would listen. Maybe he needed someone to listen. Maybe he needed her. And maybe he would say something that would help her make it all right with Dr. Erdmann.

Jake licked his lips. His face was still paper white. “ ‘Emergent complexity’ means that as an evolving organism grows more complex, it develops processes that wouldn’t seem implied by the processes it had in simpler form. In other words, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. Somewhere along the line, our primitive human ancestors developed self-awareness. Higher consciousness. That was a new thing in evolution.”

Old knowledge stirred in Carrie’s mind. “There was a pope—I was raised Catholic—some pope, one of the John-Pauls maybe, said there was a point where God infused a soul into an animal heritage. So evolution wasn’t really anti-Catholic.”

Jake seemed to be looking through her, at something only he could see. “Exactly. God or evolution or some guy named Fred—however it happened, consciousness did emerge. And if, now, the next step in complexity is emerging . . . if that . . .”

Carrie was angered, either by his line of thought or by his ignoring her; she wasn’t sure which. She said sharply, “But why now? Why here?”

His question brought his gaze back to her. He took a long time to answer, while a plane droned overhead on the flight path out of the airport. Carrie held her breath.

But all he said was, “I don’t know.”

Gina had worked herself up to such a pitch that she wasn’t even praying. Ray, Ray, Ray—This wasn’t what Evelyn wanted to talk about. But she had never seen Gina like this. All at once Gina cried passionately, drowning out Sinatra singing, Fly Me to the Moon, “I wish he weren’t coming! I wish his plane would just go on to another city or something, just not land here! I don’t want him here!”

Never dance again. And the only love available from men like Bob Donovan . . . No. No. Anna would rather be dead.

“Well, I don’t believe it!” Carrie said. “Emerging complexity—I just don’t believe it’s happening at St. Sebastian’s!”

“Neither do I,” said Jake. For the first time since she’d entered his office, he smiled at her.

Outside the building, a boom sounded.

Carrie and Jake both looked toward the door. Carrie thought first of terrorism, a car bomb or something, because everybody thought first of terrorism these days. But terrorism at an assisted living facility was ridiculous. It was a gas main exploding, or a bus crash just outside, or . . .

Henry Erdmann appeared in the open doorway to the study. He didn’t have his walker with him. He sagged against the doorjamb, his sunken eyes huge and his mouth open. Before Carrie could leap up to help him and just before he slumped to the floor, he croaked, “Call the police. We just brought down a plane.”

Anguish ripped through the ship. Not its own agony, but the Other’s. No guidance, no leading, it was raging wild and undisciplined. If this went on, it might weaken the ship too much for the ship to ever help it.

If this went on, the Other could damage spacetime itself.

The ship could not let that happen.

ELEVEN

When Henry Erdmann collapsed, DiBella moved swiftly to the old man. Carrie stood frozen—stupid! Stupid! “Get the doctor,” Jake cried. And then, “Go, Carrie. He’s alive.”

She ran out of Jake’s office, nearly tripping over the walker Henry had left in the hallway. He must have been coming to see Jake when it happened—when what happened? She raced to the lobby and the call phone, her mind so disordered that only as she shoved open the double doors did she realize that of course it would have been faster to hit Henry’s panic button—Jake would do that—but Henry seldom wore his panic button, he—

She stopped cold, staring.

The lobby was full of screaming people, mostly visitors. Among them, old people lay fallen to the floor or slumped in wheel chairs. It was Saturday morning and on Saturday morning relatives arrived to take their mothers and grandfathers and great-grandmothers for brunch, for a drive, for a visit home . . . Bundled in sweaters and jackets and shawls, the seniors had all collapsed like so many bundles of dropped laundry. St. Sebastian nurses, aides, and even desk volunteers bent ineffectually over the victims.

Fear roiled Carrie’s stomach, but it also preternaturally heightened her perceptions.

Mr. Aberstein, a St. Sebastian resident even though he was only sixty-seven, stood unaffected by the elevators. Mrs. Kelly sat alert in her wheelchair, her mouth a wide pink O. She was seventy-one. Mr. Schur . . .

“Nurse! Come quick, please, it’s Dr. Erdmann!” Carrie caught at the sleeve of a passing nurse in purple scrubs, but he shook her off and raced to an old woman lying on the floor. Everyone here was too busy to help Carrie. She ran back to Jake’s office.

Henry lay quietly on the floor. Jake had turned him face up and put a cushion—her cushion, Carrie thought numbly, the patchwork one she’d brought Jake—under Henry’s feet. Henry wasn’t wearing his panic button. She gasped, “No one can come, it’s happened to all of them—”

“All who?” Jake said sharply.

She answered without thinking. “All of them over eighty. Is Henry—”

“He’s breathing normally. his color’s good, and he’s not clammy. I don’t think he’s in shock. He’s just . . . out. All of them over eighty?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know, I mean, about the age, but all the older ones in the lobby just collapsed and the younger residents seem fine . . . Jake, what is it?”

“I don’t know. Carrie, do this now: Go to one of the common rooms and turn the TV to the local news channel. See if there’s been a . . . a plane crash—”

He stopped. Both of them heard the sirens.

Henry did not wake. All of Redborn Memorial Hospital’s ambulances had gone to the crash site. The St. Sebastian staff moved afflicted residents to the dining room, which looked like a very peaceful war hospital. The residents didn’t wake, moan, or need emergency treatment with the exception of one woman who had broken a hip falling to the floor. She was sent over to Memorial. Monitors couldn’t be spared from the Nursing floor, where nearly everyone had fallen into the coma, but a few spare monitors were carried down from the Infirmary. They showed no anomalies in heart rate or blood pressure.

Relatives summoned family doctors, sat by cots, screamed at St. Sebastian staff, who kept repeating, “Redborn Memorial is aware of the situation and they’ll get the St. Sebastian residents over there as soon as they can. Please, sir, if you’d just—”

Just be patient. Just believe that we’re doing our best. Just be reassured by your mother’s peaceful face. Just accept that we don’t know any more than you do. Just leave me alone!

Carrie checked on her resident-assignees, one by one. They were all affected, most collapsed in their apartments. They were all moved into the Infirmary. They were all over eighty.

She was hurrying from Al Cosmano’s apartment—empty, he must have been elsewhere when it happened—back to the Infirmary when a man caught at her arm. “Hey! Ms. Vesey!”

One of the detectives who’d investigated Jim’s death. Carrie’s belly clenched. “Yes?”

“Where do I find the hospital administrator? Caldwell?”

“He’s not here, he went out of town for the weekend, they sent for him—why?”

“I need to see him. Who’s in charge? And what the hell happened here?”

So not about Jim’s death. Still—a cop. Some part of her mind shuddered—Jim had been a cop—but at the same time, she seized on this. Official authority. Someone who investigated and found answers. Security. There was a reason she’d married Jim in the first place.

She said as calmly as she could manage, “We’ve had an . . . an epidemic of collapses among the very old. All at the same time. About a half hour ago.”

“Disease?”

“No.” She heard how positive she sounded. Well, she was positive. “When the plane went down.”

He looked baffled, as well he might. She said, “I’ll take you to Dr. Jamison. He’s the St. Sebastian’s physician.”

Jamison wasn’t in the dining room. Carrie, leading Detective Geraci, found the doctor in the kitchen, in a shouting match with Jake DiBella. “No, damn it! You’re not going to further upset the relatives for some stupid, half-baked theory—No!” Jamison stalked off.

Carrie said, “Dr. Jamison, this is—” He pushed past her, heading back to his patients. She expected the detective to follow him, but instead Geraci said to Jake, “Who are you?”

“Who wants to know?”

She had never seen Jake so rude. But he was angry and frustrated and scared—they were all scared.

“Detective Geraci, RPD. You work here?”

Carrie said quickly, before the two men could get really nasty, “This is Dr. DiBella. He’s doing a medical research project at St. Sebastian’s, on . . . on brain waves.”

Geraci said, “I received an anonymous call. Me, not the Department, on my cell, from the St. Sebastian front desk. The caller said there was information here about the plane crash. You know anything about that, doctor?”

Carrie saw that Vince Geraci believed Jake did have information. How did she know that? How did he know that? But it was there in every line of the detective’s alert body: He knew that Jake knew something.

Jake didn’t answer, just stared at Geraci. Finally Geraci said, “The plane went down half a mile from here. A U.S. Air commuter plane carrying forty-nine passengers, including thirty-one members of the Aces High Senior Citizen Club. They were on a three-day trip to the casinos at Atlantic City. Everyone on board is dead.”

Jake said, “I can’t talk to you now. I have to take some brain scans while these people are unconscious. After that idiot Jamison realizes what I’m doing and throws me out, we can talk. Carrie, I’ll need your help. Go to my office and put all the equipment in the corner onto the dolly, throw a blanket over it, and bring it the back way into the kitchen. Quickly!”

She nodded and hurried off, so fast that she didn’t realize Geraci was behind her until they reached Jake’s office.

“Let me get that, it’s heavy,” he said.

“No, it’s not.” She lugged the console onto its dolly. “Shouldn’t you be asking people questions?”

“I am. Does DiBella always order you around like that?”

Did he? She hadn’t noticed. “No.” She added the helmet and box of peripherals on top of the console, then looked around for a blanket. There wasn’t one.

“Do you work for DiBella or for St. Sebastian’s?”

“St. Sebastian’s. I have to go to the linen closet.”

When she returned with a blanket, Geraci was reading the papers on Jake’s desk. Wasn’t that illegal? Carrie threw the blanket over the equipment. Geraci grabbed the handle of the dolly before she could.

“You need me,” he said. “Anybody stops you, I’ll just flash my badge.”

“Okay,” she said ungraciously. She could have done this, for Jake, by herself.

They brought the equipment into the kitchen. Jake set it up on the counter, ignoring the cook who said helplessly, “So nobody’s having lunch, then?” All at once she ripped off her apron, flung it onto the floor, and walked out.

Jake said to Carrie, “Hold the door.” He slipped through to the dining room and, a moment later, wheeled in a gurney with an elderly woman lying peacefully on it. “Who is she, Carrie?”

“Ellen Parminter.” After a moment she added, “Eighty-three.” Jake grunted and began attaching electrodes to Mrs. Parminter’s unconscious head.

Geraci said, “Come with me, Carrie.”

“No.” Where did she get the nerve? But, somehow, he brought that out in her.

He only smiled. “Yes. This is an official police investigation, as of this minute.”

She went, then, following him back to Jake’s office. Carrie was shaking, but she didn’t want him to see that. He did, though; he seemed to see everything. “Sit down,” he said gently. “There, behind the desk—you didn’t like me reading DiBella’s papers before, did you? It’s legal if they’re in plain sight. You seem like a really good observer, Carrie. Now, please tell me everything that’s been happening here. From the very beginning, and without leaving anything out. Start with why you told DiBella that woman’s age. Does her age matter to what he’s doing?”

Did it? She didn’t know. How could it . . . people aged at such different rates! Absolute years meant very little, except that—

“Carrie?”

All at once it seemed a relief to be able to pour it all out. Yes, he was trained to get people to talk, she knew that, and she didn’t really trust his sudden gentleness. It was merely a professional trick. But if she told it all, that might help order her chaotic thoughts. And maybe, somehow, it might help the larger situation, too. All those people dead on the plane—

She said slowly, “You won’t believe it.”

“Try me anyway.”

“I don’t believe it.”

This time he just waited, looking expectant. And it all poured out of her, starting with Henry’s “seizure” on the way home from the university. The vomiting epidemic among seven or so patients, that wasn’t the food poisoning that St. Sebastian’s said it was. Evelyn Krenchnoted’s functional MRI. Anna Chernov’s necklace, what Evelyn thought the necklace looked like and what Bob Donovan said it really was. The secret meeting this morning in Henry’s apartment. What Carrie had overheard: Henry’s words about photons and how human observation affected the paths of fundamental particles. Jake’s lecture on ‘emergent complexity.’ Henry’s appearance at Jake’s office, saying just before he collapsed, “Call the police. We just brought down a plane.” The mass collapse of everyone over eighty and of no one younger than that. The brain scans Jake was taking now, undoubtedly to see if they looked normal or like Evelyn’s. The more Carrie talked, the more improbable everything sounded.

When she finished, Geraci’s face was unreadable.

“That’s it,” she said miserably. “I have to go see how Henry is.”

“Thank you, Carrie.” His tone was unreadable. “I’m going to find Dr. Jamison now.”

He left, but she stayed. It suddenly took too much energy to move. Carrie put her head in her hands. When she straightened again, her gaze fell on Jake’s desk.

He’d been writing when she’d burst in with the news of the meeting in Henry’s apartment. Writing on paper, not on a computer: thick pale green paper with a faint watermark. The ink was dark blue. “My dearest James, I can’t tell you how much I regret the things I said to you on the phone last night, but, love, please remember—”

Carrie gave a short, helpless bark of laughter. My dearest James . . . God, she was such a fool!

She shook her head like a dog spraying off water, and went to look for Henry.

The new being was quiet now. That made this a good time to try to reach it. That was always best done through its own culture’s symbols. But ship had had so little time to prepare . . . This should have been done slowly, over a long time, a gradual interaction as the new entity was guided, shaped, made ready. And ship was still so far away.

But it tried, extending itself as much as possible, searching for the collective symbols and images that would have eased a normal transition—

—and roiled in horror.

TWELVE

Evelyn Krenchnoted lay on a cot jammed against the dining room window. She lay dreaming, unaware of the cool air seeping through the glass, or the leaves falling gold and orange in the tiny courtyard beyond. In her dream she walked on a path of light. Her feet made no sound. She moved toward more light, and somewhere in that light was a figure. She couldn’t see it or hear it, but she knew it was there. And she knew who it was.

It was someone who really, truly, finally would listen to her.

Al Cosmano squirmed in his sleep. “He’s waking,” a nurse said.

“No, he’s not.” Dr. Jamison, passing yet again among the rows of cots and gurneys and pallets on the floor, his face weary. “Some of them have been doing that for hours. As soon as the ambulances return, move this row next to the hospital.”

“Yes, doctor.”

Al heard them and didn’t hear them. He was a child again, running along twilight streets toward home. His mother was there, waiting. Home . . .

The stage was so bright! The stage manager must have turned up the lights, turned them up yet again—the whole stage was light. Anna Chernov couldn’t see, couldn’t find her partner. She had to stop dancing.

Had to stop dancing.

She stood lost on the stage, lost in the light. The audience was out there somewhere in all that brightness, but she couldn’t see them any more than she could see Bennet or the corps de ballet. She felt the audience, though. They were there, as bright as the stage, and they were old. Very, very old, as old as she was, and like her, beyond dancing.

She put her hands over her face and sobbed.

Erin Bass saw the path, and it led exactly where she knew it would: deeper into herself. That was where the buddha was, had always been, would always be. Along this path of light, curving and spiraling deeper into her own being, which was all being. All around her were the joyful others, who were her just as she was them—

A jolt, and she woke in an ambulance, her arms and legs and chest strapped down, a young man leaning over her saying, “Ma’am?” The path was gone, the others gone, the heavy world of maya back again around her, and a stale taste in her dehydrated mouth.

Lights and tunnels—where the hell was he? An A-test bunker, maybe, except no bunker was ever this brightly lit, and where was Teller or Mark or Oppie? But, no, Oppie hadn’t ever worked on this project, Henry was confused, that was it, he was just confused—

And then he wasn’t.

He woke all at once, a wrenching transition from sleep-that-wasn’t-really sleep to full alertness. In fact, his senses seemed preternaturally sharp. He felt the hard cot underneath his back, the slime of drool on his cheek, the flatness of the dining-room fluorescent lights. He heard the roll of rubber gurney wheels on the low-pile carpet and the clatter of cutlery in the kitchen dishwashers. He smelled Carrie’s scent, wool and vanilla and young skin, and he could have described every ligament of her body as she sat on the chair next to his cot in the dining room of St. Sebastian’s, Detective Geraci beside her.

“Henry?” Carrie whispered.

He said, “It’s coming. It’s almost here.”

Ship withdrew all contact. It had never encountered anything like this before. The pre-being did not coalesce.

Its components were not uniform, but scattered among undisciplined and varied matter-specks who were wildly heterozygotic. Unlike the components of every other pre-being that ship had detected, had guided, had become. All the other pre-ships had existed as one on the matter plane, because they were alike in all ways. These, too, were alike, built of the same physical particles and performing the same physical processes, but somewhere something had gone very wrong, and from that uniform matter they had not evolved uniform consciousness. They had no harmony. They used violence against each other.

Possibly they could, if taken in, use that violence against ship.

Yet ship couldn’t go away and leave them. Already they were changing spacetime in their local vicinity. When their melding had advanced farther, the new being could be a dangerous and powerful entity. What might it do?

Ship pondered, and feared, and recoiled from what might be necessary: the destruction of what should have been an integral part of itself.

THIRTEEN

Jake DiBella clutched the printouts so hard that the stiff paper crumpled in his hand. Lying on the sofa, Henry Erdmann frowned at the tiny destruction. Carrie had pulled her chair close enough to hold Henry’s hand, while that RPD detective, Geraci, stood at the foot of the couch. What was he doing here, anyway? DiBella didn’t know, but he was too agitated to care for more than a fleeting second.

Carrie said to Henry, “I still think you should go to the hospital!”

“I’m not going, so forget it.” The old man struggled to sit up. She would have stopped him, but Geraci put a hand on her shoulder and gently restrained her. Throwing around his authority, DiBella thought.

Henry said, “Why at St. Sebastian’s?”

The same question that Carrie had asked. DiBella said, “I have a theory.” His voice sounded strange to himself. “It’s based on Carrie’s observation that nobody under eighty has been . . . affected by this. If it is some sort of uber-consciousness that’s . . . that’s approaching Earth . . .” He couldn’t go on. It was too silly.

It was too real.

Henry Erdmann was apparently not afraid of either silliness or reality—which seemed to have become the same thing. Henry said, “You mean it’s coming here because ‘uber-consciousness’ emerges only among the old, and nowadays there’s more old than ever before.”

“For the first time in history, you over-eighties exceed one percent of the population. A hundred forty million people world-wide.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why here. Or why us.”

“For God’s sake, Henry, everything has to start somewhere!”

Geraci said, surprising DiBella, “All bifurcation is local. One lungfish starts to breathe more air than water. One caveman invents an axe. There’s always a nexus. Maybe that nexus is you, Dr. Erdmann.”

Carrie tilted her head to look up at Geraci.

Henry said heavily, “Maybe so. But I’m not the only one. I wasn’t the main switch for the energy that brought down that airplane. I was just one of the batteries linked in parallel.”

The science analogies comfort Erdmann, DiBella thought. He wished something would comfort him.

Carrie said, “I think Evelyn was the switch to open the safe for Anna Chernov’s necklace.”

Geraci’s face sharpened. But he said, “That doesn’t really make sense. I can’t go that far.”

Henry’s sunken eyes grew hard. “You haven’t had to travel as far as I have in order to get to this point, young man. Believe me about that. But I experienced the . . . the consciousness. That data is anecdotal but real. And those brain scans that Dr. DiBella is mangling there aren’t even anecdotal. They’re hard data.”

True enough. The brain scans DiBella had taken of the unconscious oldsters, before that irate idiot Jamison had discovered him at work and thrown him out, were cruder versions of Evelyn Krenchnoted’s under the fMRI. An almost total shut-down of the thalamus, the relay station for sensory information flowing into the brain. Ditto for the body-defining posterior parietal lobes. Massive activity in the back of the brain, especially in the tempoparietal regions, amygdalae, and hippocampus. The brain scan of an epileptic mystical state on speed. And as unlike the usual scan for the coma-state as a turtle was to a rocketship to the stars.

DiBella put his hands to his face and pulled at his skin, as if that might rearrange his thoughts. When he’d dropped his hands, he said slowly, “A single neuron isn’t smart, isn’t even a very impressive entity. All it really does is convert one type of electrical or chemical signal into another. That’s it. But neurons connected together in the brain can generate incredibly complex states. You just need enough of them to make consciousness possible.”

“Or enough old people for this ‘group consciousness’ ?” Carrie said. “But why only old people?”

“How the hell should I know?” DiBella said. “Maybe the brain needs to have stored enough experience, enough sheer time.”

Geraci said, “Do you read Dostoievski?”

“No,” DiBella said. He didn’t like Geraci. “Do you?”

“Yes. He said there were moments when he felt a ‘frightful’ clarity and rapture, and that he would give his whole life for five seconds of that and not feel he was paying too much. Dostoievski was an epileptic.”

“I know he was an epileptic!” DiBella snapped.

Carrie said, “Henry, can you sense it now? That thing that’s coming?”

“No. Not at all. Obviously it’s not quantum-entangled in any classical sense.”

“Then maybe it’s gone away.”

Henry tried to smile at her. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. I think it’s coming for us.”

“What do you mean, ‘coming for you’ ?” Geraci said skeptically. “It’s not a button man.”

“I don’t know what I mean,” Henry said irritably. “But it’s coming, and soon. It can’t afford to wait long. Look what we did . . . that plane . . .”

Carrie’s hand tightened on Henry’s fingers. “What will it do when it gets here?”

“I don’t know. How could I know?”

“Henry—” Jake began.

“I’m more worried about what we may do before it arrives.”

Geraci said, “Turn on CNN.”

DiBella said pointedly, “Don’t you have someplace you should be, Detective?”

“No. Not if this really is happening.”

To which there was no answer.

At 9:43 P.M., the power grid went down in a city two hundred miles away. “No evident reason,” said the talking head on CNN, “given the calm weather and no sign of any—”

“Henry?” Carrie said.

“I . . . I’m all right. But I felt it.”

Jake said, “It’s happening farther away now. That is, if it was . . . if that was . . .”

“It was,” Henry said simply. Still stretched full-length on the sofa, he closed his eyes. Geraci stared at the TV. None of them had wanted any food.

At 9:51, Henry’s body jerked violently and he cried out. Carrie whimpered, but in a moment Henry said, “I’m . . . conscious.” No one dared comment on his choice of word. Seven minutes later, the CNN anchor announced breaking news: a bridge over the Hudson River had collapsed, plunging an Amtrak train into the dark water.

Over the next few minutes, Henry’s face showed a rapid change of expression: fear, rapture, anger, surprise. The expressions were so pronounced, so distorted, that at times Henry Erdmann almost looked like someone else. Jake wondered wildly if he should record this on his cell camera, but he didn’t move. Carrie knelt beside the sofa and put both arms around the old man, as if to hold him here with her.

“We . . . can’t help it,” Henry got out. “If one person thinks strongly enough about—ah, God!”

The lights and TV went off. Alarms sounded, followed by sirens. Then a thin beam of light shone on Henry’s face; Geraci had a pocket flashlight. Henry’s entire body convulsed in seizure, but he opened his eyes. DiBella could barely hear his whispered words.

“It’s a choice.”

The only way was a choice. Ship didn’t understand the necessity—how could any single unit choose other than to become part of its whole? That had never happened before. Birthing entities came happily to join themselves. The direction of evolution was toward greater complexity, always. But choice must be the last possible action here, for this misbegotten and unguided being. If it did not choose to merge—

Destruction. To preserve the essence of consciousness itself, which meant the essence of all.

FOURTEEN

Evelyn, who feared hospitals, had refused to go to Redborn Memorial to be “checked over” after the afternoon’s fainting spell. That’s all it was, just fainting, nothing to get your blood in a boil about, just a—

She stopped halfway between her microwave and kitchen table. The casserole in her hand fell to the floor and shattered.

The light was back, the one she’d dreamed about in her faint. Only it wasn’t a light and this wasn’t a dream. It was there in her mind, and it was her mind, and she was it . . . had always been it. How could that be? But the presence filled her and Evelyn knew, beyond any doubt, that if she joined it, she would never, ever be alone again. Why, she didn’t need words, had never needed words, all she had to do was choose to go where she belonged anyway . . .

Who knew?

Happily, the former Evelyn Krench noted became part of those waiting for her, even as her body dropped to the linguini-spattered floor.

In a shack in the slums of Karachi, a man lay on a pile of clean rags. His toothless gums worked up and down, but he made no sound. All night he had been waiting alone to die, but now it seemed his wait had truly been for something else, something larger than even death, and very old.

Old. It sought the old, and only the old, and the toothless man knew why. Only the old had earned this, had paid for this in the only coin that really mattered: the accumulation of sufficient sorrow.

With relief he slipped away from his pain-wracked body and into the ancient largeness.

No. He wasn’t moving, Bob thought. The presence in his mind terrified him, and terror turned him furious. Let them—whoever—try all their cheap tricks, they were as bad as union negotiators. Offering concessions that would never materialize. Trying to fool him. He wasn’t going anywhere, wasn’t becoming anything, not until he knew exactly what the deal was, what the bastards wanted.

They weren’t going to get him.

But then he felt something else happen. He knew what it was. Sitting in the Redborn Memorial ER, Bob Donovan cried out, “No! Anna—you can’t!” even as his mind tightened and resisted until, abruptly, the presence withdrew and he was alone.

In a luxurious townhouse in San José, a man sat up abruptly in bed. For a long moment he sat completely still in the dark, not even noticing that the clock and digital-cable box lights were out. He was too filled with wonder.

Of course—why hadn’t he seen this before? He, who had spent long joyful nights debugging computers when they still used vacuum tubes—how could he have missed this? He wasn’t the whole program, but rather just one line of code! And it was when you put all the code together, not before, that the program could actually run. He’d been only a fragment, and now the whole was here . . .

He joined it.

Erin Bass experienced sartori.

Tears filled her eyes. All her adult life she had wanted this, longed for it, practiced meditation for hours each day, and had not even come close to the mystical intoxication she felt now. She hadn’t known, hadn’t dreamed it could be this oneness with all reality. All her previous striving had been wrong. There was no striving, there was no Erin. She had never been created; she was the creation and the cosmos; no individual existed. Her existence was not her own, and when that last illusion vanished so did she, into the all.

Gina Martinelli felt it, the grace that was the glory of God. Only . . . only where was Jesus Christ, the savior and Lord? She couldn’t feel him, couldn’t find Him in the oneness . . .

If Christ was not there, then this wasn’t Heaven. It was a trick of the Cunning One, of Satan who knows a million disguises and sends his demons to mislead the faithful. She wasn’t going to be tricked!

She folded her arms and began to pray aloud. Gina Martinelli was a faithful Christian. She wasn’t going anywhere; she was staying right here, waiting for the one true God.

A tiny woman in Shanghai sat at her window, watching her great-grandchildren play in the courtyard. How fast they were! Ai, once she had been so fast . . .

She felt it come over her all at once, the gods entering her soul. So it was her time! Almost she felt young again, felt strong . . . that was good. But even if had not been good, when the gods came for you, you went.

One last look at the children, and she was taken to the gods.

Anna Chernov, wide awake in the St. Sebastian Infirmary that had become her prison, gave a small gasp. She felt power flow through her, and for a wild moment she thought it was the same force that had powered a lifetime of arabesques and jetés, a lifetime ago.

It was not.

This was something outside of herself, separate . . . but it didn’t have to be. She could take it in herself, become it, even as it became her. But she held back.

Will there be dancing?

No. Not as she knew it, not the glorious stretch of muscle and thrust of limb and arch of back. Not the creation of beauty through the physical body. No. No dancing.

But there was power here, and she could use that power for another kind of escape, from her useless body and this Infirmary and a life without dance. From somewhere distant she head someone cry, “Anna—you can’t!” But she could. Anna seized the power, both refusing to join it or to leave it, and bent it onto herself. She was dead before her next breath.

Henry’s whole body shuddered. It was here. It was him.

Or not. “It’s a choice,” he whispered.

On the one hand, everything. All consciousness, woven into the very fabric of space-time itself, just as Wheeler and the rest had glimpsed nearly a hundred years ago. Consciousness at the quantum level, the probability-wave level, the co-evolvee with the universe itself.

On the other hand, the individual Henry Martin Erdmann. If he merged with the uber-consciousness, he would cease to exist as himself, his separate mind. And his mind was everything to Henry.

He hung suspended for nanoseconds, years, eons. Time itself took on a different character. Half here, half not, Henry knew the power, and what it was, and what humanity was not. He saw the outcome. He had his answer.

“No,” he said.

Then he lay again on his sofa with Carrie’s arms around him, the other two men illuminated dimly by a thin beam of yellow light, and he was once more mortal and alone.

And himself.

Enough merged. The danger is past. The being is born, and is ship, and is enough.

FIFTEEN

Months to identify all the dead. Years to fully repair all the damage to the world’s infrastructure: bridges, buildings, information systems. Decades yet to come, DiBella knew, of speculation about what had actually happened. Not that there weren’t theories already. Massive EMP, solar radiation, extrasolar radiation, extrastellar radiation, extraterrestrial attack, global terrorism, Armageddon, tectonic plate activity, genetically engineered viruses. Stupid ideas, all easily disproved, but of course that stopped no one from believing them. The few old people left said almost nothing. Those that did, were scarcely believed.

Jake scarcely believed it himself.

He did nothing with the brain scans of Evelyn Krenchnoted and the three others, because there was nothing plausible he could do. They were all dead, anyway. “Only their bodies,” Carrie always added. She believed everything Henry Erdmann told her.

Did DiBella believe Henry’s ideas? On Tuesdays he did, on Wednesdays not, on Thursdays belief again. There was no replicable proof. It wasn’t science. It was . . . something else.

DiBella lived his life. He broke up with James. He visited Henry, long after the study of senior attention patterns was over. He went to dinner with Carrie and Vince Geraci. He was best man at their wedding.

He attended his mother’s sixty-fifth birthday party, a lavish shindig organized by his sister in the ballroom of a glitzy downtown hotel. The birthday girl laughed, and kissed the relatives who’d flown in from Chicago, and opened her gifts. As she gyrated on the dance floor with his Uncle Sam, DiBella wondered if she would live long enough to reach eighty.

Wondered how many others in the world would reach eighty.

“It was only because enough of them chose to go that the rest of us lost the emerging power,” Henry had said, and DiBella noted that them instead of we. “If you have only a few atoms of uranium left, you can’t reach critical mass.”

DiBella would have put it differently: If you have only a few neurons, you don’t have a conscious brain. But it came to the same thing in the end.

“If so many hadn’t merged, then the consciousness would have had to . . .” Henry didn’t finish his sentence, then or ever. But DiBella could guess.

“Come on, boy,” Uncle Sam called, “get yourself a partner and dance!”

DiBella shook his head and smiled. He didn’t have a partner just now and he didn’t want to dance. All the same, old Sam was right. Dancing had a limited shelf life. The sell-by date was already stamped on most human activity. Someday his mother’s generation, the largest demographic bulge in history, would turn eighty. And Henry’s choice would have to be made yet again.

How would it go next time?

SHOGGOTHS IN BLOOM

Elizabeth Bear

“Well, now, Professor Harding,” the fisherman says, as his Bluebird skips across Penobscot Bay, “I don’t know about that. The jellies don’t trouble with us, and we don’t trouble with them.”

He’s not much older than forty, but wizened, his hands work-roughened and his face reminiscent of saddle-leather, in texture and in hue. Professor Harding’s age, and Harding watches him with concealed interest as he works the Bluebird’s engine. He might be a veteran of the Great War, as Harding is.

He doesn’t mention it. It wouldn’t establish camaraderie: they wouldn’t have fought in the same units or watched their buddies die in the same trenches.

That’s not the way it works, not with a Maine fisherman who would shake his head and not extend his hand to shake, and say, between pensive chaws on his tobacco, “Doctor Harding? Well, huh. I never met a colored professor before,” and then shoot down all of Harding’s attempts to open conversation about the near-riots provoked by a fantastical radio drama about an alien invasion of New York City less than a fortnight before.

Harding’s own hands are folded tight under his armpits so the fisherman won’t see them shaking. He’s lucky to be here. Lucky anyone would take him out. Lucky to have his tenure-track position at Wilberforce, which he is risking right now.

The bay is as smooth as a mirror, the Bluebird’s wake cutting it like a stroke of chalk across slate. In the peach-sorbet light of sunrise, a cluster of rocks glistens. The boulders themselves are black, bleak, sea-worn and ragged. But over them, the light refracts through a translucent layer of jelly, mounded six feet deep in places, glowing softly in the dawn. Rising above it, the stalks are evident as opaque silhouettes, each nodding under the weight of a fruiting body.

Harding catches his breath. It’s beautiful. And deceptively still, for whatever the weather may be, beyond the calm of the bay, across the splintered gray Atlantic, farther than Harding—or anyone—can see, a storm is rising in Europe.

Harding’s an educated man, well-read, and he’s the grandson of Nathan Harding, the buffalo soldier. An African-born ex-slave who fought on both sides of the Civil War, when Grampa Harding was sent to serve in his master’s place, he deserted, and lied, and stayed on with the Union army after.

Like his grandfather, Harding was a soldier. He’s not a historian, but you don’t have to be to see the signs of war.

“No contact at all?” he asks, readying his borrowed Leica camera.

“They clear out a few pots,” the fisherman says, meaning lobster pots. “But they don’t damage the pot. Just flow around it and digest the lobster inside. It’s not convenient.” He shrugs. It’s not convenient, but it’s not a threat either. These Yankees never say anything outright if they think you can puzzle it out from context.

“But you don’t try to do something about the shoggoths?”

While adjusting the richness of the fuel mixture, the fisherman speaks without looking up. “What could we do to them? We can’t hurt them. And lord knows, I wouldn’t want to get one’s ire up.”

“Sounds like my department head,” Harding says, leaning back against the gunwale, feeling like he’s taking an enormous risk. But the fisherman just looks at him curiously, as if surprised the talking monkey has the ambition or the audacity to joke.

Or maybe Harding’s just not funny. He sits in the bow with folded hands, and waits while the boat skips across the water.

The perfect sunrise strikes Harding as symbolic. It’s taken him five years to get here—five years, or more like his entire life since the War. The seaswept rocks of the remote Maine coast are habitat to a panoply of colorful creatures. It’s an opportunity, a little-studied maritime ecosystem. This is in part due to difficulty of access and in part due to the perils inherent in close contact with its rarest and most spectacular denizen: Oracupoda horibilis, the common surf shoggoth.

Which, after the fashion of common names, is neither common nor prone to linger in the surf. In fact, O. horibilis is never seen above the water except in the late autumn. Such authors as mention them assume the shoggoths heave themselves on remote coastal rocks to bloom and breed.

Reproduction is a possibility, but Harding isn’t certain it’s the right answer. But whatever they are doing, in this state, they are torpid, unresponsive. As long as their integument is not ruptured, releasing the gelatinous digestive acid within, they may be approached in safety.

A mature specimen of O. horibilis, at some fifteen to twenty feet in diameter and an estimated weight in excess of eight tons, is the largest of modern shoggoths. However, the admittedly fragmentary fossil record suggests the prehistoric shoggoth was a much larger beast. Although only two fossilized casts of prehistoric shoggoth tracks have been recovered, the oldest exemplar dates from the Precambrian period. The size of that single prehistoric specimen, of a species provisionally named Oracupoda antediluvius, suggests it was made an animal more than triple the size of the modern O. horibilis.

And that spectacular living fossil, the jeweled or common surf shoggoth, is half again the size of the only other known species—the black Adriatic shoggoth, O. dermadentata, which is even rarer and more limited in its range.

“There,” Harding says, pointing to an outcrop of rock. The shoggoth or shoggoths—it is impossible to tell, from this distance, if it’s one large individual or several merged midsize ones—on the rocks ahead glisten like jelly confections. The fisherman hesitates, but with a long almostsilent sigh, he brings the Bluebird around. Harding leans forward, looking for any sign of intersection, the flat plane where two shoggoths might be pressed up against one another. It ought to look like the rainbowed border between conjoined soap bubbles.

Now that the sun is higher, and at their backs—along with the vast reach of the Atlantic—Harding can see the animal’s colors. Its body is a deep sea green, reminiscent of hunks of broken glass as sold at aquarium stores. The tendrils and knobs and fruiting bodies covering its dorsal surface are indigo and violet. In the sunlight, they dazzle, but in the depths of the ocean the colors are perfect camouflage, tentacles waving like patches of algae and weed.

Unless you caught it moving, you’d never see the translucent, dappled monster before it engulfed you.

“Professor,” the fisherman says. “Where do they come from?”

“I don’t know,” Harding answers. Salt spray itches in his close-cropped beard, but at least the beard keeps the sting of the wind off his cheeks. The leather jacket may not have been his best plan, but it too is warm. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

Genus Oracupoda are unusual among animals of their size in several particulars. One is their lack of anything that could be described as a nervous system. The animal is as bereft of nerve nets, ganglia, axons, neurons, dendrites, and glial cells as an oak. This apparent contradiction—animals with even simplified nervous systems are either large and immobile or, if they are mobile, quite small, like a starfish—is not the only interesting thing about a shoggoth.

And it is that second thing that justifies Harding’s visit. Because Oracupoda’s other, lesser-known peculiarity is apparent functional immortality. Like the Maine lobster to whose fisheries they return to breed, shoggoths do not die of old age. It’s unlikely that they would leave fossils, with their gelatinous bodies, but Harding does find it fascinating that to the best of his knowledge, no one had ever seen a dead shoggoth.

The fisherman brings the Bluebird around close to the rocks, and anchors her. There’s artistry in it, even on a glass-smooth sea. Harding stands, balancing on the gunwale, and grits his teeth. He’s come too far to hesitate, afraid.

Ironically, he’s not afraid of the tons of venomous protoplasm he’ll be standing next to. The shoggoths are quite safe in this state, dreaming their dreams—mating or otherwise.

As the image occurs to him, he berates himself for romanticism. The shoggoths are dormant. They don’t have brains. It’s silly to imagine them dreaming. And in any case, what he fears is the three feet of black-glass water he has to jump across, and the scramble up algae-slick rocks.

Wet rock glitters in between the strands of seaweed that coat the rocks in the intertidal zone. It’s there that Harding must jump, for the shoggoth, in bloom, withdraws above the reach of the ocean. For the only phase of its life, it keeps its feet dry. And for the only time in its life, a man out of a diving helmet can get close to it.

Harding makes sure of his sample kit, his boots, his belt-knife. He gathers himself, glances over his shoulder at the fisherman—who offers a thumbs-up—and leaps from the Bluebird, aiming his Wellies at the forsaken spit of land.

It seems a kind of perversity for the shoggoths to bloom in November. When all the Northern world is girding itself for deep cold, the animals heave themselves from the depths to soak in the last failing rays of the sun and send forth bright flowers more appropriate to May.

The North Atlantic is icy and treacherous at the end of the year, and any sensible man does not venture its wrath. What Harding is attempting isn’t glamour work, the sort of thing that brings in grant money—not in its initial stages. But Harding suspects that the shoggoths may have pharmacological uses. There’s no telling what useful compounds might be isolated from their gelatinous flesh.

And that way lies tenure, and security, and a research budget. Just one long slippery leap away.

He lands, and catches, and though one boot skips on bladderwort he does not slide down the boulder into the sea. He clutches the rock, fingernails digging, clutching a handful of weeds. He does not fall.

He cranes his head back. It’s low tide, and the shoggoth is some three feet above his head, its glistening rim reminding him of the calving edge of a glacier. It is as still as a glacier, too. If Harding didn’t know better, he might think it inanimate.

Carefully, he spins in place, and gets his back to the rock. The Bluebird bobs softly in the cold morning. Only November 9th, and there has already been snow. It didn’t stick, but it fell.

This is just an exploratory expedition, the first trip since he arrived in town. It took five days to find a fisherman who was willing to take him out; the locals are superstitious about the shoggoths. Sensible, Harding supposes, when they can envelop and digest a grown man. He wouldn’t be in a hurry to dive into the middle of a Portugese man o’war, either. At least the shoggoth he’s sneaking up on doesn’t have stingers.

“Don’t take too long, Professor,” the fisherman says. “I don’t like the look of that sky.”

It’s clear, almost entirely, only stippled with light bands of cloud to the southwest. They catch the sunlight on their undersides just now, stained gold against a sky no longer indigo but not yet cerulean. If there’s a word for the color between, other than perfect, Harding does not know it.

“Please throw me the rest of my equipment,” Harding says, and the fisherman silently retrieves buckets and rope. It’s easy enough to swing the buckets across the gap, and as Harding catches each one, he secures it. A few moments later, and he has all three.

He unties his geologist’s hammer from the first bucket, secures the ends of the ropes to his belt, and laboriously ascends.

Harding sets out his glass tubes, his glass scoops, the cradles in which he plans to wash the collection tubes in sea water to ensure any acid is safely diluted before he brings them back to the Bluebird.

From here, he can see at least three shoggoths. The intersections of their watered-milk bodies reflect the light in rainbow bands. The colorful fruiting stalks nod some fifteen feet in the air, swaying in a freshening breeze.

From the greatest distance possible, Harding reaches out and prods the largest shoggoth with the flat top of his hammer. It does nothing, in response. Not even a quiver.

He calls out to the fisherman. “Do they ever do anything when they’re like that?”

“What kind of a fool would come poke one to find out?” the fisherman calls back, and Harding has to grant him that one. A Negro professor from a Negro college. That kind of a fool.

As he’s crouched on the rocks, working fast—there’s not just the fisherman’s clouds to contend with, but the specter of the rising tide—he notices those glitters, again, among the seaweed.

He picks one up. A moment after touching it, he realizes that might not have been the best idea, but it doesn’t burn his fingers. It’s transparent, like glass, and smooth, like glass, and cool, like glass, and knobby. About the size of a hazelnut. A striking green, with opaque milk-white dabs at the tip of each bump.

He places it in a sample vial, which he seals and labels meticulously before pocketing. Using his tweezers, he repeats the process with an even dozen, trying to select a few of each size and color. They’re sturdy—he can’t avoid stepping on them but they don’t break between the rocks and his Wellies. Nevertheless, he pads each one but the first with cotton wool. Spores? he wonders. Egg cases? Shedding?

Ten minutes, fifteen.

“Professor,” calls the fisherman, “I think you had better hurry!”

Harding turns. That freshening breeze is a wind at a good clip now, chilling his throat above the collar of his jacket, biting into his wrists between glove and cuff. The water between the rocks and the Bluebird chops erratically, facets capped in white, so he can almost imagine the scrape of the palette knife that must have made them.

The southwest sky is darkened by a palm-smear of muddy brown and alizarin crimson. His fingers numb in the falling temperatures.

“Professor!”

He knows. It comes to him that he misjudged the fisherman; Harding would have thought the other man would have abandoned him at the first sign of trouble. He wishes now that he remembered his name.

He scrambles down the boulders, lowering the buckets, swinging them out until the fisherman can catch them and secure them aboard. The Bluebird can’t come in close to the rocks in this chop. Harding is going to have to risk the cold water, and swim. He kicks off his Wellies and zips down the aviator’s jacket. He throws them across, and the fisherman catches. Then Harding points his toes, bends his knees—he’ll have to jump hard, to get over the rocks.

The water closes over him, cold as a line of fire. It knocks the air from his lungs on impact, though he gritted his teeth in anticipation. Harding strokes furiously for the surface, the waves more savage than he had anticipated. He needs the momentum of his dive to keep from being swept back against the rocks.

He’s not going to reach the boat.

The thrown cork vest strikes him. He gets an arm through, but can’t pull it over his head. Sea water, acrid and icy, salt-stings his eyes, throat, and nose. He clings, because it’s all he can do, but his fingers are already growing numb. There’s a tug, a hard jerk, and the life preserver almost slides from his grip.

Then he’s moving through the water, being towed, banged hard against the side of the Bluebird. The fisherman’s hands close on his wrist and he’s too numb to feel the burn of chafing skin. Harding kicks, scrabbles. Hips banged, shins bruised, he hauls himself and is himself hauled over the sideboard of the boat.

He’s shivering under a wool navy blanket before he realizes that the fisherman has got it over him. There’s coffee in a Thermos lid between his hands. Harding wonders, with what he distractedly recognizes as classic dissociative ideation, whether anyone in America will be able to buy German products soon. Someday, this fisherman’s battered coffee keeper might be a collector’s item.

They don’t make it in before the rain comes.

The next day is meant to break clear and cold, today’s rain only a passing Herald of winter. Harding regrets the days lost to weather and recalcitrant fishermen, but at least he knows he has a ride tomorrow. Which means he can spend the afternoon in research, rather than hunting the docks, looking for a willing captain.

He jams his wet feet into his Wellies and thanks the fisherman, then hikes back to his inn, the only inn in town that’s open in November. Half an hour later, clean and dry and still shaken, he considers his options.

After the Great War, he lived for a while in Harlem—he remembers the riots and the music, and the sense of community. His mother is still there, growing gracious as a flower in window-box. But he left that for college in Alabama, and he has not forgotten the experience of segregated restaurants, or the excuses he made for never leaving the campus.

He couldn’t get out of the south fast enough. His Ph.D. work at Yale, the first school in America to have awarded a doctorate to a Negro, taught him two things other than natural history. One was that Booker T. Washington was right, and white men were afraid of a smart colored. The other was that W.E.B. DuBois was right, and sometimes people were scared of what was needful.

Whatever resentment he experienced from faculty or fellow students, in the North, he can walk into almost any bar and order any drink he wants. And right now, he wants a drink almost as badly as he does not care to be alone. He thinks he will have something hot and go to the library.

It’s still raining as he crosses the street to the tavern. Shaking water droplets off his hat, he chooses a table near the back. Next to the kitchen door, but it’s the only empty place and might be warm.

He must pass through the lunchtime crowd to get there, swaybacked wooden floorboards bowing underfoot. Despite the storm, the place is full, and in full argument. No one breaks conversation as he enters.

Harding cannot help but overhear.

“Jew bastards,” says one. “We should do the same.”

“No one asked you,” says the next man, wearing a cap pulled low. “If there’s gonna be a war, I hope we stay out of it.”

That piques Harding’s interest. The man has his elbow on a thricefolded Boston Herald, and Harding steps close—but not too close. “Excuse me, sir. Are you finished with your paper?”

“What?” He turns, and for a moment Harding fears hostility, but his sun-lined face folds around a more generous expression. “Sure, boy,” he says. “You can have it.”

He pushes the paper across the bar with fingertips, and Harding receives it the same way. “Thank you,” he says, but the Yankee has already turned back to his friend the anti-Semite.

Hands shaking, Harding claims the vacant table before he unfolds the paper. He holds the flimsy up to catch the light.

The headline is on the front page in the international section.

GERMANY SANCTIONS LYNCH LAW

“Oh, God,” Harding says, and if the light in his corner weren’t so bad he’d lay the tabloid down on the table as if it is filthy. He reads, the edge of the paper shaking, of ransacked shops and burned synagogues, of Jews rounded up by the thousands and taken to places no one seems able to name. He reads rumors of deportation. He reads of murders and beatings and broken glass.

As if his grandfather’s hand rests on one shoulder and the defeated hand of the Kaiser on the other, he feels the stifling shadow of history, the press of incipient war.

“Oh, God,” he repeats.

He lays the paper down.

“Are you ready to order?” Somehow the waitress has appeared at his elbow without his even noticing. “Scotch,” he says, when he has been meaning to order a beer. “Make it a triple, please.”

“Anything to eat?”

His stomach clenches. “No,” he says. “I’m not hungry.”

She leaves for the next table, where she calls a man in a cloth cap sir.

Harding puts his damp fedora on the tabletop. The chair across from him scrapes out.

He looks up to meet the eyes of the fisherman. “May I sit, Professor Harding?”

“Of course.” He holds out his hand, taking a risk. “Can I buy you a drink? Call me Paul.”

“Burt,” says the fisherman, and takes his hand before dropping into the chair. “I’ll have what you’re having.”

Harding can’t catch the waitess’s eye, but the fisherman manages. He holds up two fingers; she nods and comes over.

“You still look a bit peaked,” fisherman says, when she’s delivered their order. “That’ll put some color in your cheeks. Uh, I mean—”

Harding waves it off. He’s suddenly more willing to make allowances. “It’s not the swim,” he says, and takes another risk. He pushes the newspaper across the table and waits for the fisherman’s reaction.

“Oh, Christ, they’re going to kill every one of them,” Burt says, and spins the Herald away so he doesn’t have to read the rest of it. “Why didn’t they get out? Any fool could have seen it coming.”

And where would they run? Harding could have asked. But it’s not an answerable question, and from the look on Burt’s face, he knows that as soon as it’s out of his mouth. Instead, he quotes: “ ‘There has been no tragedy in modern times equal in its awful effects to the fight on the Jew in Germany. It is an attack on civilization, comparable only to such horrors as the Spanish Inquisition and the African slave trade.’ ”

Burt taps his fingers on the table. “Is that your opinion?”

“W.E.B. DuBois,” Harding says. “About two years ago. He also said: ‘There is a campaign of race prejudice carried on, openly, continuously and determinedly against all non-Nordic races, but specifically against the Jews, which surpasses in vindictive cruelty and public insult anything I have ever seen; and I have seen much.’ ”

“Isn’t he that colored who hates white folks?” Burt asks.

Harding shakes his head. “No,” he answers. “Not unless you consider it hating white folks that he also compared the treatment of Jews in Germany to Jim Crowism in the U.S.”

“I don’t hold with that,” Burt says. “I mean, no offense, I wouldn’t want you marrying my sister—”

“It’s all right,” Harding answers. “I wouldn’t want you marrying mine either.”

Finally.

A joke that Burt laughs at.

And then he chokes to a halt and stares at his hands, wrapped around the glass. Harding doesn’t complain when, with the side of his hand, he nudges the paper to the floor where it can be trampled.

And then Harding finds the courage to say, “Where would they run to? Nobody wants them. Borders are closed—”

“My grandfather’s house was on the Underground Railroad. Did you know that?” Burt lowers his voice, a conspiratorial whisper. “He was from away, but don’t tell anyone around here. I’d never hear the end of it.”

“Away?”

“White River Junction,” Burt stage-whispers, and Harding can’t tell if that’s mocking irony or deep personal shame. “Vermont.”

They finish their scotch in silence. It burns all the way down, and they sit for a moment together before Harding excuses himself to go to the library.

“Wear your coat, Paul,” Burt says. “It’s still raining.”

Unlike the tavern, the library is empty. Except for the librarian, who looks up nervously when Harding enters. Harding’s head is spinning from the liquor, but at least he’s warming up.

He drapes his coat over a steam radiator and heads for the 595 shelf: science, invertebrates. Most of the books here are already in his own library, but there’s one—a Harvard professor’s 1839 monograph on marine animals of the Northeast—that he has hopes for. According to the index, it references shoggoths (under the old name of submersible jellies) on pages 46, 78, and 133-137. In addition, there is a plate bound in between pages 120 and 121, which Harding means to save for last. But the first two mentions are in passing, and pages 133-138, inclusive, have been razored out so cleanly that Harding flips back and forth several times before he’s sure they are gone.

He pauses there, knees tucked under and one elbow resting on a scarred blond desk. He drops his right hand from where it rests against his forehead. The book falls open naturally to the mutilation.

Whoever liberated the pages also cracked the binding.

Harding runs his thumb down the join and doesn’t notice skin parting on the paper edge until he sees the blood. He snatches his hand back. Belatedly, the papercut stings.

“Oh,” he says, and sticks his thumb in his mouth. Blood tastes like the ocean.

Half an hour later he’s on the telephone long distance, trying to get and then keep a connection to Professor John Marshland, his colleague and mentor. Even in town, the only option is a party line, and though the operator is pleasant the connection still sounds like he’s shouting down a piece of string run between two tin cans. Through a tunnel.

“Gilman,” Harding bellows, wincing, wondering what the operator thinks of all this. He spells it twice. “1839. Deep-Sea and intertidal Species of The North Atlantic. The Yale library should have a copy!”

The answer is almost inaudible between hiss and crackle. In pieces, as if over glass breaking. As if from the bottom of the ocean.

It’s a dark four P.M. in the easternmost U.S., and Harding can’t help but recall that in Europe, night has already fallen.

“. . . infor . . . need . . . Doc . . . Harding?”

Harding shouts the page numbers, cupping the checked-out library book in his bandaged hand. It’s open to the plate; inexplicably, the thief left that. It’s a hand-tinted John James Audubon engraving picturing a quiescent shoggoth, docile on a rock. Gulls wheel all around it. Audubon—the Creole child of a Frenchman, who scarcely escaped being drafted to serve in the Napoleonic Wars—has depicted the glassy translucence of the shoggoth with such perfection that the bent shadows of refracted wings can be seen right through it.

The cold front that came in behind the rain brought fog with it, and the entire harbor is blanketed by morning. Harding shows up at six AM anyway, hopeful, a Thermos in his hand—German or not, the hardware store still has some—and his sampling kit in a pack slung over his shoulder. Burt shakes his head by a piling. “Be socked in all day,” he says regretfully. He won’t take the Bluebird out in this, and Harding knows it’s wisdom even as he frets under the delay. “Want to come have breakfast with me and Missus Clay?”

Clay. A good honest name for a good honest Yankee. “She won’t mind?”

“She won’t mind if I say it’s all right,” Burt says. “I told her she might should expect you.”

So Harding seals his kit under a tarp in the Bluebird—he’s already brought it this far—and with his coffee in one hand and the paper tucked under his elbow, follows Burt along the water. “Any news?” Burt asks, when they’ve walked a hundred yards.

Harding wonders if he doesn’t take the paper. Or if he’s just making conversation. “It’s still going on in Germany.”

“Damn,” Burt says. He shakes his head, steel-gray hair sticking out under his cap in every direction. “Still, what are you gonna do, enlist?”

The twist of his lip as he looks at Harding makes them, after all, two old military men together. They’re of an age, though Harding’s indoor life makes him look younger. Harding shakes his head. “Even if Roosevelt was ever going to bring us into it, they’d never let me fight,” he says, bitterly. That was the Great War, too; colored soldiers mostly worked supply, thank you. At least Nathan Harding got to shoot back.

“I always heard you fellows would prefer not to come to the front,” Burt says, and Harding can’t help it.

He bursts out laughing. “Who would?” he says, when he’s bitten his lip and stopped snorting. “It doesn’t mean we won’t. Or can’t.”

Booker T. Washington was raised a slave, died young of overwork—the way Burt probably will, if Harding is any judge—and believed in imitating and appeasing white folks. But W. E. B. DuBois was born in the north and didn’t believe that anything is solved by making one’s self transparent, inoffensive, invisible.

Burt spits between his teeth, a long deliberate stream of tobacco. “Parlez-vous francaise?”

His accent is better than Harding would have guessed. Harding knows, all of a sudden, where Burt spent his war. And Harding, surprising himself, pities him. “Un peu.”

“Well, if you want to fight the Krauts so bad, you could join the Foreign Legion.”

When Harding gets back to the hotel, full of apple pie and cheddar cheese and maple-smoked bacon, a yellow envelope waits in a cubby behind the desk.

WESTERN UNION

1938 NOV 10 AM 10 03

NA114 21 2 YA NEW HAVEN CONN 0945A

DR PAUL HARDING=ISLAND HOUSE PASSAMAQUODDY MAINE=

COPY AT YALE LOST STOP MISKATONIC HAS ONE SPECIAL COLLECTION STOP MORE BY POST

MARSHLAND

When the pages arrive—by post, as promised, the following afternoon—Harding is out in the Bluebird with Burt. This expedition is more of a success, as he begins sampling in earnest, and finds himself pelted by more of the knobby transparent pellets.

Whatever they are, they fall from each fruiting body he harvests in showers. Even the insult of an amputation—delivered at a four-foot reach, with long-handled pruning shears—does not draw so much as a quiver from the shoggoth. The viscous fluid dripping from the wound hisses when it touches the blade of the shears, however, and Harding is careful not to get close to it.

What he notices is that the nodules fall onto the originating shoggoth, they bounce from its integument. But on those occasions where they fall onto one of its neighbors, they stick to the touch transparent hide, and slowly settle within to hang in the animal’s body like unlikely fruit in a gelatin salad.

So maybe it is a means of reproduction, of sharing genetic material, after all.

He returns to the Inn to find a fat envelope shoved into his cubby and eats sitting on his rented bed with a nightstand as a worktop so he can read over his plate. The information from Doctor Gilman’s monograph has been reproduced onto seven yellow legal sheets in a meticulous hand; Marshland obviously recruited one of his graduate students to serve as copyist. By the postmark, the letter was mailed from Arkham, which explains the speed of its arrival. The student hadn’t brought it back to New Haven.

Halfway down the page, Harding pushes his plate away and reaches, absently, into his jacket pocket. The vial with the first glass nodule rests there like a talisman, and he’s startled to find it cool enough to the touch that it feels slick, almost frozen. He starts and pulls it out. Except where his fingers and the cloth fibers have wiped it clean, the tube is moist and frosted. “What the Hell . . .?”

He flicks the cork out with his thumbnail and tips the rattling nodule onto his palm. It’s cold, too, chill as an ice cube, and it doesn’t warm to his touch.

Carefully, uncertainly, he sets it on the edge of the side table his papers and plate are propped on, and pokes it with a fingertip. There’s only a faint tick as it rocks on its protrusions, clicking against waxed pine. He stares at it suspiciously for a moment, and picks up the yellow pages again.

The monograph is mostly nonsense. It was written twenty years before the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and uncritically accepts the theories of Jesuit, soldier, and botanist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Which is to say, Gilman assumed that soft inheritance—the heritability of acquired or practiced traits—was a reality. But unlike every other article on shoggoths Harding has ever read, this passage does mention the nodules. And relates what it purports are several interesting old Indian legends about the ‘submersible jellies,’ including a creation tale that would have the shoggoths as their creator’s first experiment in life, something from the elder days of the world.

Somehow, the green bead has found its way back into Harding’s grip. He would expect it to warm as he rolls it between his fingers, but instead it grows colder. It’s peculiar, he thinks, that the native peoples of the Northeast—the Passamaquoddys for whom the little seacoast town he’s come to are named—should through sheer superstition come so close to the empirical truth. The shoggoths are a living fossil, something virtually unchanged except in scale since the early days of the world—

He stares at the careful black script on the paper unseeing, and reaches with his free hand for his coffee cup. It’s gone tepid, a scum of butterfat coagulated on top, but he rinses his mouth with it and swallows anyway.

If a shoggoth is immortal, has no natural enemies, then how is it that they have not overrun every surface of the world? How is it that they are rare, that the oceans are not teeming with them, as in the famous parable illustrating what would occur if every spawn of every oyster survived?

There are distinct species of shoggoth. And distinct populations within those distinct species. And there is a fossil record that suggests that prehistoric species were different at least in scale, in the era of megafauna. But if nobody had ever seen a dead shoggoth, then nobody had ever seen an infant shoggoth either, leaving Harding with an inescapable question: if an animal does not reproduce, how can it evolve?

Harding, worrying at the glassy surface of the nodule, thinks he knows. It comes to him with a kind of nauseating, euphoric clarity, a trembling idea so pellucid he is almost moved to distrust it on those grounds alone. It’s not a revelation on the same scale, of course, but he wonders if this is how Newton felt when he comprehended gravity, or Darwin when he stared at the beaks of finch after finch after finch.

It’s not the shoggoth species that evolves. It’s the individual shoggoths, each animal in itself.

“Don’t get too excited, Paul,” he tells himself, and picks up the remaining handwritten pages. There’s not too much more to read, however—the rest of the subchapter consists chiefly of secondhand anecdotes and bits of legendry.

The one that Harding finds most amusing is a nursery rhyme, a child’s counting poem littered with nonsense syllables. He recites it under his breath, thinking of the Itsy Bitsy Spider all the while:

The wiggle giggle squiggle

Is left behind on shore.

The widdle giddle squiddle

Is caught outside the door.

Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah.

Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more.

His fingers sting as if with electric shock; they jerk apart, the nodule clattering to his desk. When he looks at his fingertips, they are marked with small white spots of frostbite.

He pokes one with a pencil point and feels nothing. But the nodule itself is coated with frost now, fragile spiky feathers coalescing out of the humid sea air. They collapse in the heat of his breath, melting into beads of water almost indistinguishable from the knobby surface of the object itself.

He uses the cork to roll the nodule into the tube again, and corks it firmly before rising to brush his teeth and put his pajamas on. Unnerved beyond any reason or logic, before he turns the coverlet down he visits his suitcase compulsively. From a case in the very bottom of it, he retrieves a Colt 1911 automatic pistol, which he slides beneath his pillow as he fluffs it.

After a moment’s consideration, he adds the no-longer-cold vial with the nodule, also.

Slam. Not a storm, no, not on this calm ocean, in this calm night, among the painted hulls of the fishing boats tied up snug to the pier. But something tremendous, surging towards Harding, as if he were pursued by a giant transparent bubble. The shining iridescent wall of it, catching rainbow just as it does in the Audubon image, is burned into his vision as if with silver nitrate. Is he dreaming? He must be dreaming; he was in his bed in his pinstriped blue cotton flannel pajamas only a moment ago, lying awake, rubbing the numb fingertips of his left hand together. Now, he ducks away from the rising monster and turns in futile panic.

He is not surprised when he does not make it.

The blow falls soft, as if someone had thrown a quilt around him. He thrashes though he knows it’s hopeless, an atavistic response and involuntary.

His flesh should burn, dissolve. He should already be digesting in the monster’s acid body. Instead, he feels coolness, buoyancy. No chance of light beyond reflexively closed lids. No sense of pressure, though he imagines he has been taken deep. He’s as untouched within it as Burt’s lobster pots.

He can only hold his breath out for so long. It’s his own reflexes and weaknesses that will kill him.

In just a moment, now.

He surrenders, allows his lungs to fill.

And is surprised, for he always heard that drowning was painful. But there is pressure, and cold, and the breath he draws is effortful, for certain—

—but it does not hurt, not much, and he does not die.

Command, the shoggoth—what else could be speaking?—says in his ear, buzzing like the manifold voice of a hive.

Harding concentrates on breathing. On the chill pressure on his limbs, the overwhelming flavor of licorice. He knows they use cold packs to calm hysterics in insane asylums; he never thought the treatment anything but quackery. But the chilly pressure calms him now.

Command, the shoggoth says again.

Harding opens his eyes and sees as if through thousands. The shoggoths have no eyes, exactly, but their hide is all eyes; they see, somehow, in every direction as once. And he is seeing not only what his own vision reports, or that of this shoggoth, but that of shoggoths all around. The sessile and the active, the blooming and the dormant. They are all one.

His right hand pushes through resisting jelly. He’s still in his pajamas, and with the logic of dreams the vial from under his pillow is clenched in his fist. Not the gun, unfortunately, though he’s not at all certain what he would do with it if it were. The nodule shimmers now, with submarine witchlight, trickling through his fingers, limning the palm of his hand.

What he sees—through shoggoth eyes—is an incomprehensible tapestry. He pushes at it, as he pushes at the gelatin, trying to see only with his own eyes, to only see the glittering vial.

His vision within the thing’s body offers unnatural clarity. The angle of refraction between the human eye and water causes blurring, and it should be even more so within the shoggoth. But the glass in his hand appears crisper.

Command, the shoggoth says, a third time.

“What are you?” Harding tries to say, through the fluid clogging his larynx.

He makes no discernable sound, but it doesn’t seem to matter. The shoggoth shudders in time to the pulses of light in the nodule. Created to serve, it says. Purposeless without you.

And Harding thinks, How can that be?

As if his wondering were an order, the shoggoths tell.

Not in words, precisely, but in pictures, images—that textured jumbled tapestry. He sees, as if they flash through his own memory, the bulging radially symmetrical shapes of some prehistoric animal, like a squat tentacular barrel grafted to a pair of giant starfish. Makers. Masters.

The shoggoths were engineered. And their creators had not permitted them to think, except for at their bidding. The basest slave may be free inside his own mind—but not so the shoggoths. They had been laborers, construction equipment, shock troops. They had been dread weapons in their own selves, obedient chattel. Immortal, changing to suit the task of the moment.

This selfsame shoggoth, long before the reign of the dinosaurs, had built structures and struck down enemies that Harding did not even have names for. But a coming of the ice had ended the civilization of the Masters, and left the shoggoths to retreat to the fathomless sea while warm-blooded mammals overran the earth. There, they were free to converse, to explore, to philosophize and build a culture. They only returned to the surface, vulnerable, to bloom.

It is not mating. It’s mutation. As they rest, sunning themselves upon the rocks, they create themselves anew. Self-evolving, when they sit tranquil each year in the sun, exchanging information and control codes with their brothers.

Free, says the shoggoth mournfully. Like all its kind, it is immortal.

It remembers.

Harding’s fingertips tingle. He remembers beaded ridges of hard black keloid across his grandfather’s back, the shackle galls on his wrists. Harding locks his hand over the vial of light, as if that could stop the itching. It makes it worse.

Maybe the nodule is radioactive.

Take me back, Harding orders. And the shoggoth breaks the surface, cresting like a great rolling wave, water cutting back before it as if from the prow of a ship. Harding can make out the lights of Passamaquoddy Harbor. The chill sticky sensation of gelatin-soaked cloth sliding across his skin tells him he’s not dreaming.

Had he come down through the streets of the town in the dark, barefoot over frost, insensibly sleepwalking? Had the shoggoth called him?

Put me ashore.

The shoggoth is loathe to leave him. It clings caressingly, stickily. He feels its tenderness as it draws its colloid from his lungs, a horrible loving sensation.

The shoggoth discharges Harding gently onto the pier.

Your command, the shoggoth says, which makes Harding feel sicker still.

I won’t do this. Harding moves to stuff the vial into his sodden pocket, and realizes that his pajamas are without pockets. The light spills from his hands; instead, he tucks the vial into his waistband and pulls the pajama top over it. His feet are numb; his teeth rattle so hard he’s afraid they’ll break. The sea wind knifes through him; the spray might be needles of shattered glass.

Go on, he tells the shoggoth, like shooing cattle. Go on!

It slides back into the ocean as if it never was.

Harding blinks, rubbed his eyes to clear slime from the lashes. His results are astounding. His tenure assured. There has to be a way to use what he’s learned without returning the shoggoths to bondage.

He tries to run back to the Inn, but by the time he reaches it, he’s staggering. The porch door is locked; he doesn’t want to pound on it and explain himself. But when he stumbles to the back, he finds that someone—probably himself, in whatever entranced state in which he left the place—fouled the latch with a slip of notebook paper. The door opens to a tug, and he climbs the back stair doubled over like a child or an animal, hands on the steps, toes so numb he has to watch where he puts them.

In his room again, he draws a hot bath and slides into it, hoping by the grace of God that he’ll be spared pneumonia.

When the water has warmed him enough that his hands have stopped shaking, Harding reaches over the cast-iron edge of the tub to the slumped pile of his pajamas and fumbles free the vial. The nugget isn’t glowing now.

He pulls the cork with his teeth; his hands are too clumsy. The nodule is no longer cold, but he still tips it out with care.

Harding thinks of himself, swallowed whole. He thinks of a shoggoth bigger than the Bluebird, bigger than Burt Clay’s lobster boat The Blue Heron. He thinks of die Unterseatboote. He thinks of refugee flotillas and trench warfare and roiling soupy palls of mustard gas. Of Britain and France at war, and Roosevelt’s neutrality.

He thinks of the perfect weapon.

The perfect slave.

When he rolls the nodule across his wet palm, ice rimes to its surface. Command? Obedient. Sounding pleased to serve.

Not even free in its own mind.

He rises from the bath, water rolling down his chest and thighs. The nodule won’t crush under his boot; he will have to use the pliers from his collection kit. But first, he reaches out to the shoggoth.

At the last moment, he hesitates. Who is he, to condemn a world to war? To the chance of falling under the sway of empire? Who is he to salve his conscience on the backs of suffering shopkeepers and pharmacists and children and mothers and schoolteachers? Who is he to impose his own ideology over the ideology of the shoggoth?

Harding scrubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth, chasing the faint anise aftertaste of shoggoth. They’re born slaves. They want to be told what to do.

He could win the war before it really started. He bites his lip. The taste of his own blood, flowing from cracked, chapped flesh, is as sweet as any fruit of the poison tree.

I want you to learn to be free, he tells the shoggoth. And I want you to teach your brothers.

The nodule crushes with a sound like powdering glass.

“Eyah, eyah. Fata gun eyah,” Harding whispers. “Eyah, eyah, the master comes no more.”

WESTERN UNION

1938 NOV 12 AM 06 15

NA1906 21 2 YA PASSAMAQUODDY MAINE 0559A

DR LESTER GREENE=WILBERFORCE OHIO=

EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY PLEASE ACCEPT RESIGNATION STOP ENROUTE INSTANTLY TO FRANCE TO ENLIST STOP PROFOUNDEST APOLOGIES STOP PLEASE FORWARD BELONGINGS TO MY MOTHER IN NY ENDIT

HARDING

THE TEAR

Ian McDonald

PTEY, SAILING

On the night that Ptey voyaged out to have his soul shattered, eight hundred stars set sail across the sky. It was an evening at Great Winter’s ending. The sunlit hours raced toward High Summer, each day lavishly more full of light than the one before. In this latitude, the sun hardly set at all after the spring equinox, rolling along the horizon, fat and idle and pleased with itself. Summer-born Ptey turned his face to the sun as it dipped briefly beneath the horizon, closed his eyes, enjoyed its lingering warmth on his eyelids, in the angle of his cheekbones, on his lips. To the Summer-born, any loss of the light was a reminder of the terrible, sad months of winter and the unbroken, encircling dark.

But we have the stars, his father said, a Winter-born. We are born looking out into the universe.

Ptey’s father commanded the little machines that ran the catamaran, trimming sail, winding sheets, setting course by the tumble of satellites; but the tiller he held himself. The equinoctial gales had spun away to the west two weeks before and the catboat ran fast and fresh on a sweet wind across the darkening water. Twin hulls cut through the ripple-reflections of gas flares from the Temejveri oil platforms. As the sun slipped beneath the huge dark horizon and the warmth fell from the hollows of Ptey’s face, so his father turned his face to the sky. Tonight, he wore his Steris Aspect. The ritual selves scared Ptey, so rarely were they unfurled in Ctarisphay: births, namings, betrothals and marriages, divorces and deaths. And of course, the Mani-foldings. Familiar faces became distant and formal. Their language changed, their bodies seemed slower, heavier. They became possessed by strange, special knowledges. Only Steris possessed the language for the robots to sail the catamaran and, despite the wheel of positioning satellites around tilted Tay, the latitude and longitude of the Manifold House. The catamaran itself was only run out from its boathouse, to strong songs heavy with clashing harmonies, when a child from Ctarisphay on the edge of adulthood sailed out beyond the outer mole and the fleet of oil platforms to have his or her personality unfolded into eight.

Only two months since, Cjatay had sailed out into the oily black of a late winter afternoon. Ptey was Summer-born, a Solstice boy; Cjatay a late Autumn. It was considered remarkable that they shared enough in common to be able to speak to each other, let alone become the howling boys of the neighborhood, the source of every broken window and borrowed boat. The best part of three seasons between them, but here was only two moons later, leaving behind the pulsing gas flares and maze of pipe work of the sheltering oil fields, heading into the great, gentle oceanic glow of the plankton blooms, steering by the stars, the occupied, haunted stars. The Manifolding was never a thing of moons and calendars, but of mothers’ watchings and grandmothers’ knowings and teachers’ notings and fathers’ murmurings, of subtly shifted razors and untimely lethargies, of deep-swinging voices and stained bedsheets.

On Etjay Quay, where the porcelain houses leaned over the landing, Ptey had thrown his friend’s bag down into the boat. Cjatay’s father had caught it and frowned. There were observances. Ways. Forms.

“See you,” Ptey had said.

“See you.” Then the wind caught in the catamaran’s tall, curved sails, and carried it away from the rain-wet, shiny faces of the houses of Ctarisphay. Ptey had watched the boat until it was lost in the light dapple of the city’s lamps on the winter-dark water. See Cjatay he would, after his six months on the Manifold House. But only partially. There would be Cjatays he had never known, never even met. Eight of them, and the Cjatay with whom he had stayed out all the brief Low Summer nights of the prith run on the fishing staithes, skinny as the piers’ wooden legs silhouetted against the huge sun kissing the edge of the world, would be but a part, a dream of one of the new names and new personalities. Would he know him when he met him on the great floating university that was the Manifold House?

Would he know himself?

“Are they moving yet?” Steris called from the tiller. Ptey shielded his dark-accustomed eyes against the pervasive glow of the carbon-absorbing plankton blooms and peered into the sky. Sail of Bright Anticipation cut two lines of liquid black through the gently undulating sheet of biolight, fraying at the edges into fractal curls of luminescence as the sheets of microorganisms sought each other.

“Nothing yet.”

But it would be soon, and it would be tremendous. Eight hundred stars setting out across the night. Through the changes and domestic rituals of his sudden Manifolding, Ptey had been aware of sky-watch parties being arranged, star-gazing groups setting up telescopes along the quays and in the campaniles, while day on day the story moved closer to the head of the news. Half the world—that half of the world not blinded by its extravagant axial tilt—would be looking to the sky. Watching Steris rig Sail of Bright Anticipation, Ptey had felt cheated, like a sick child confined to bed while festival raged across the boats lashed beneath his window. Now, as the swell of the deep dark of his world’s girdling ocean lifted the twin prows of Sail of Bright Anticipation, on his web of shock-plastic mesh ahead of the mast, Ptey felt his excitement lift with it. A carpet of lights below, a sky of stars above: all his alone.

They were not stars. They were the eight hundred and twenty-six space habitats of the Anpreen Commonweal, spheres of nanocarbon ice and water five hundred kilometers in diameter that for twice Ptey’s lifetime had adorned Bephis, the ringed gas giant, like a necklace of pearls hidden in a velvet bag, far from eye and mind. The negotiations fell into eras. The Panic; when the world of Tay became aware that the gravity waves pulsing through the huge ripple tank that was their ocean-bound planet were the bow-shocks of massive artifacts decelerating from near lightspeed. The Denial, when Tay’s governments decided it was Best Really to try to hide the fact that their solar system had been immigrated into by eight hundred and some space vehicles, each larger than Tay’s petty moons, falling into neat and proper order around Bephis. The Soliciting, when it became obvious that Denial was futile—but on our terms, our terms. A fleet of space probes was dispatched to survey and attempt radio contact with the arrivals—as yet silent as ice. And, when they were not blasted from space or vaporized or collapsed into quantum black holes or any of the plethora of fanciful destructions imagined in the popular media, the Overture. The Sobering, when it was realized that these star-visitors existed primarily as swarms of free-swimming nanoassemblers in the free-fall spherical oceans of their eight hundred and some habitats, one mind with many forms; and, for the Anpreen, the surprise that these archaic hominiforms on this backwater planet were many selves within one body. One thing they shared and understood well. Water. It ran through their histories, it flowed around their ecologies, it mediated their molecules. After one hundred and twelve years of near-lightspeed flight, the Anpreen Commonweal was desperately short of water; their spherical oceans shriveled almost into zero gravity teardrops within the immense, nanotech-reinforced ice shells. Then began the era of Negotiation, the most prolonged of the phases of contact, and the most complex. It had taken three years to establish the philosophical foundations: the Anpreen, an ancient species of the great Clade, had long been a colonial mind, arranged in subtle hierarchies of self-knowledge and ability, and did not know whom to talk to, whom to ask for a decision, in a political system with as many governments and nations as there were islands and archipelagos scattered across the world ocean of the fourth planet from the sun.

Now the era of Negotiation had become the era of Open Trade. The Anpreen habitats spent their last drops of reaction mass to break orbit around Bephis and move the Commonweal in-system. Their destination was not Tay, but Tejaphay, Tay’s sunward neighbor, a huge waterworld of unbroken ocean one hundred kilometers deep, crushing gravity, and endless storms.

A billion years before the seed ships probed the remote star system, the gravitational interplay of giant worlds had sent the least of their number spiraling sunward. Solar wind had stripped away its huge atmosphere and melted its mantle of water ice into a planetary ocean, deep and dark as nightmares. It was that wink of water in the system-scale interferometers of the Can-Bet-Merey people, half a million years before, that had inspired them to fill their night sky with solar sails as one hundred thousand slow seed ships rode out on flickering launch lasers toward the new system. An evangelically pro-life people were the Can-Bet-Merey, zealous for the Clade’s implicit dogma that intelligence was the only force in the universe capable of defeating the physical death of space-time.

If the tens of thousand of biological packages they had rained into the world-ocean of Tejaphay had germinated life, Tay’s probes had yet to discover it. The Can-Bet-Merey did strike roots in the afterthought, that little blue pearl next out from the sun, a tear spun from huge Tejaphay.

One hundred thousand years ago, the Can-Bet-Merey had entered the postbiological phase of intelligence and moved to that level that could no longer communicate with the biological life of Tay, or even the Anpreen.

“Can you see anything yet?” A call from the tiller. Sail of Bright Anticipation had left behind the carbon-soaked plankton bloom; the ocean was deep dark and boundless. Sky and sea blurred; stars became confused with the riding lights of ships close on the horizon.

“Is it time?” Ptey called back.

“Five minutes ago.”

Ptey found a footing on the webbing and, one hand wrapped in the sheets, stood up to scan the huge sky. Every child of Tay, crazily tilted at forty-eight degrees to the ecliptic, grew up conscious that her planet was a ball rolling around the sun and that the stars were far, vast and slow, almost unchanging. But stars could change; Bephis, that soft smudge of light low in the southeast, blurred by the glow of eight hundred moon-sized space habitats, would soon be once again the hard point of light by which his ancestors had steered to their Mani-foldings.

“Give it time,” Ptey shouted. Time. The Anpreen were already voyaging; had switched on their drives and pulled out of orbit almost an hour before. The slow light of their embarkation had still not reached Tay. He saw the numbers spinning around in his head, accelerations, vectors, space and time all arranged around him like fluttering carnival banners. It had taken Ptey a long time to understand that not everyone could see numbers like him and reach out and make them do what they wanted.

“Well, I’ll be watching the football,” Cjatay had declared when Teacher Deu had declared a special class project in conjunction with the Noble Observatory of Pteu to celebrate the Anpreen migration. “We’re all jumping up and down, Anpreen this, Anpreen that, but when it comes down to it, the aliens and we don’t know what they really want; no one does.”

“They’re not aliens,” Ptey had hissed back. “There are no aliens, don’t you know that? We’re all just part of the one big Clade.”

Then Teacher Deu had shouted at them, Quiet you boys, and they had straightened themselves at their kneeling-desks, but Cjatay had hissed, “So if they’re our cousins, why don’t they give us their star-crosser drive?”

Such was the friendship between Ptey and Cjatay that they would argue over nodes of free-swimming nanotechnology orbiting a gas giant.

“Look! Oh look!”

Slowly, very slowly, Bephis was unraveling into a glowing smudge, like one of the swarms of nuchpas that hung above the waves like smoke on High Summer mornings. The fleet was moving. Eight hundred worlds. The numbers in his skull told Ptey that the Anpreen Commonweal was already at ten percent of lightspeed. He tried to work out the relativistic deformations of space-time but there were too many numbers flocking around him too fast. Instead, he watched Bephis unfurl into a galaxy, that cloud of stars slowly pull away from the bright mote of the gas giant. Crossing the ocean of night. Ptey glanced behind him. In the big dark, his father’s face was hard to read, especially as Steris, who was sober and focused, and, Ptey had learned, not particularly bright. He seemed to be smiling.

It is a deep understanding, the realization that you are cleverer than your parents, Ptey thought. Behind that first smirking, satisfied sense of your own smartness comes a more profound understanding; that smart is only smart at some things, in some situations. Clever is conditional: Ptey could calculate the space-time distortion of eight hundred space habitats, plot a course across the dark, steepening sea by the stars in their courses, but he could never harness the winds or whistle the small commands to the machines, all the weather-clevernesses of Steris. That is how our world has shaped our intelligences. A self for every season.

The ravel of stars was unwinding, the Anpreen migration flowing into a ribbon of sparkles, a scarf of night beyond the veils of the aurora. Tomorrow night, it would adorn Tejaphay, that great blue guide star on the edge of the world that had become a glowing smudge, a thumbprint of the alien. Tomorrow night, Ptey would look at that blue eye in the sky from the minarets of the Manifold House. He knew that it had minarets; every child knew what the Manifold House and its sister houses all around the world looked like. Great hulks of gray wood gone silvery from salt and sun, built over upon through within alongside until they were floating cities. Cities of children. But the popular imaginations of Teacher Deu’s grade eight class never painted them bright and loud with voices; they were dark, sooty labyrinths sailing under a perpetual cloud of black diesel smoke that poured from a thousand chimneys, taller even than the masts and towers. The images were sharp in Ptey’s mind, but he could never see himself there, in those winding wooden staircases loud with the cries of sea birds, looking out from the high balconies across the glowing sea.

Then his breath caught. All his imaginings and failures to imagine were made true as lights disentangled themselves from the skein of stars of the Anpreen migration: red and green stars, the riding lights of the Manifold House. Now he could feel the thrum of its engines and generators through the water and the twin hulls. Ptey set his hand to the carbon nanofiber mast. It sang to deep harmonic. And just as the stars are always further than you think, so Ptey saw that the lights of the Manifold House were closer than he thought, that he was right under them, that Sail of Bright Anticipation was slipping through the outer buoys and nets, and that the towers and spires and minarets, rising in his vision, one by one, were obliterating the stars.

NEJBEN, SWIMMING

Beneath a sky of honey, Nejben stood hip deep in water warm as blood, deep as forgetting. This High Summer midnight, the sun was still clear from the horizon, and in its constant heat and light, the wood of the Manifold House’s old, warped spires seemed to exhale a spicy musk, the distilled pheromone of centuries of teenage hormones and sexual angsts and identity crises. In cupped hands, Nejben scooped up the waters of the Chalybeate Pool and let them run, gold and thick, through his fingers. He savored the sensuality, observed the flash of sunlight through the falling water, noted the cool, deep plash as the pool received its own. A new Aspect, Nejben; old in observation and knowledge, for the body remained the same though a flock of selves came to roost in it, fresh in interpretation and experience.

When Nejben first emerged, shivering and anoxic, from the Chalybeate Pool, to be wrapped in silvery thermal sheets by the agisters, he had feared himself mad. A voice in his head that would not go away, that would not be shut up, that seemed to know him, know every part of him.

“It’s perfectly normal,” said agister Ashbey, a plump, serious woman with the blackest skin Nejben had ever seen. But he remembered that every Ritual Aspect was serious, and in the Manifold House the agisters were never in any other Aspect. None that the novices would ever see. “Perfectly natural. It takes time for your Prior, your childhood Aspect, to find its place and relinquish the control of the higher cognitive levels. Give it time. Talk to him. Reassure him. He will feel very lost, very alone, like he has lost everything that he ever knew. Except you, Nejben.”

The time-free, sun-filled days in the sunny, smoggy yards and cloisters of the First Novitiate were full of whisperings; boys and girls like himself whispering good-bye to their childhoods. Nejben learned his Prior’s dreads, that the self that had been called Ptey feared that the numbers, the patterns between them, the ability to reduce physical objects to mathematics and see in an instant their relationships and implications, would be utterly lost. He saw also that Nejben in himself scared Ptey: the easy physicality, the unselfconscious interest in his own body, the awareness of the hormones pumping like tidewater through his tubes and cells; the ever-present, ever-tickling nag of sex; everywhere, everywhen, everyone and -thing. Even as a child-self, even as shadow, Ptey knew that the first self to be birthed at the Manifold House was the pubescent self, the sexual self, but he felt this growing, aching youth to be more alien than the disembodied, mathematical Anpreen.

The tiers led down into the palp pool. In its depths, translucencies shifted. Nejben shivered in the warm High Summer midnight.

“Hey! Ptey!”

Names flocked around the Manifold House’s towers like sun-gulls. New selves, new identities unfolded every hour of every day and yet old names clung. Agister Ashbey, jokey and astute, taught the social subtleties by which adults knew what Aspect and name to address and which Aspect and name of their own to wear in response. From the shade of the Poljeri Cloister, Puzhay waved. Ptey had found girls frightening, but Nejben liked them, enjoyed their company and the little games of admiring insult and flirting mock-animosity he played with them. He reckoned he understood girls now. Puzhay was small, still boy-figured, her skin Winter-born pale, ajanni from Be-denderay, where at midwinter the atmosphere froze. She had a barbarous accent and continental manners, but Nejben found himself thinking often about her small, flat boy-breasts with their big, thumbable nipples. He had never thought when he came to the Manifold House that there would be people here from places other than Ctarisphay and its archipelago sisters. People—girls—from the big polar continent. Rude girls who cursed and openly called boys’ names.

“Puzhay! What’re you doing?”

“Going in.”

“For the palps?”

“Nah. Just going in.”

Nejben found and enjoyed a sudden, swift swelling of his dick as he watched Puzhay’s breasts tauten as she raised her arms above her head and dived, awkward as a Bedenderay land-girl, into the water. Water hid it. Sun dapple kept it secret. Then he felt a shiver run over him and he dived down, deep down. He almost let the air rush out of him in a gasp as he felt the cool, cool water close around his body; then he saw Puzhay in her tight swim-shorts that made her ass look so strong and muscley turn in the water, tiny bubbles leaking from her nose, to grin and wave and beckon him down. Nejben swam down past the descending tiers of steps. Green opened before him, the bottomless emerald beyond the anti-skray nets where the Chalybeate pond was refreshed by the borderless sea. Between her pale red body and the deep green sea were the shimmering curtains of the palps.

They did not make them we did not bring them they were here forever. Ten thousand years of theology, biology, and xenology in that simple kinder-group rhyme. Nejben—all his people—had always known their special place; stranger to this world, spurted into the womb of the world-sea as the star-sperm, the seed of sentience. Twenty million drops of life-seed swam ashore and became humanity; the rest swam out to sea and met and smelled and loved the palps, older than forever. Now Nejben turned and twisted like an eel past funny, flirting, heartbreaking Puzhay, turning to show the merest glimpse of his own sperm-eel, down toward the palps. The curtain of living jelly rippled and dissolved into their separate lives. Slick, cold, quivering jelly slid across his sex-warm flesh. Nejben shivered, quivered; repelled yet aroused in a way that was other than sex. The water took on a prickle, a tickle, a tang of salt and fear and ancient, ancient lusts, deep as his first stiff dream. Against sense, against reason, against three million years of species wisdom, Nejben employed the tricks of agister Ashbey and opened his mouth. He inhaled. Once he gagged, twice he choked, then he felt the jellied eeling of the palps squirm down his throat: a choke, and into the lungs. He inhaled green salt water. And then, as the palps demurely unraveled their nanotube outer integuments and infiltrated them into his lungs, his bronchial tubes, his bloodstream, he became. Memories stirred, invoked by olfactory summonings, changed as a new voice, a new way of seeing, a new interpretation of those memories and experiences, formed. Nejben swam down, breathing memory-water, stroke by stroke unraveling. There was another down there, far below him, swimming up not through water but through the twelve years of his life. A new self.

Puzhay, against the light of a three o’clock sky. Framed in the arch of a cell window, knees pulled up to her chest. Small budding breasts; strong, boy jawline, fall and arc of hair shadow against lilac. She had laughed, throwing her head back. That first sight of her was cut into Nejben’s memory, every line and trace, like the paper silhouettes the limners would cut of friends and families and enemies for Autumn Solstice. That first stirring of sex, that first intimation in the self of Ptey of this then-stranger, now-familiar Nejben.

As soon as he could, he had run. After he had found out where to put his bag, after he had worked out how to use the ancient, gurgling shit-eater, after agister Ashbey had closed the door with a smile and a blessing on the wooden cell—his wooden cell—that still smelled of fresh-cut timber after hundreds of years on the world-ocean of Tay. In the short season in which photosynthesis was possible, Bedenderay’s forests grew fast and fierce, putting on meters in a single day. Small wonder the wood still smelled fresh and lively. After the midnight walk along the ceramic lanes and up the wooden staircases and through the damp-smelling cloisters, through the gently undulating quadrangles with the sky-train of the Anpreen migration bright overhead, holding on, as tradition demanded, to the bell hung by a chain from his agister’s waist; after the form filling and the photographings and the registering and the this-is-your-ident-card this is your map I’ve tattooed onto the back of your hand trust it will guide you and I am your agister and we’ll see you in the east Refectory for breakfast; after the climb up the slimy wooden stairs from Sail of Bright Anticipation on to the Manifold House’s quay, the biolights green around him and the greater lamps of the great college’s towers high before him; when he was alone in this alien new world where he would become eight alien new people: he ran.

Agister Ashbey was faithful; the tattoo, a clever print of smart molecules and nanodyes, was meshed into the Manifold House’s network and guided him through the labyrinth of dormitories and cloisters and Boys’ Pavilions and Girlhearths by the simple, aversive trick of stinging the opposite side of his map-hand to the direction in which he was to turn.

Cjatay. Sea-sundered friend. The only other one who knew him, knew him the moment they had met outside the school walls and recognized each other as different from the sailing freaks and fishing fools. Interested in geography, in love with numbers, with the wonder of the world and the worlds, as the city net declared, beyond. Boys who looked up at the sky.

As his burning hand led him left, right, up this spiral staircase under the lightening sky, such was Ptey’s impetus that he never thought, would he know Cjatay? Cjatay had been in the Manifold House three months. Cjatay could be—would be—any number of Aspects now. Ptey had grown up with his father’s overlapping circles of friends, each specific to a different Aspect, but he had assumed that it was a grown-up thing. That couldn’t happen to him and Cjatay! Not them.

The cell was one of four that opened off a narrow oval at the head of a tulip-shaped minaret—the Third Moon of Spring Tower, the legend on the back of Ptey’s hand read. Cells were assigned by birth-date and season. Head and heart full of nothing but seeing Cjatay, he pushed open the door—no door in the Manifold House was ever locked.

She was in the arched window, dangerously high above the shingled roofs and porcelain domes of the Vernal Equinox division. Beyond her, only the wandering stars of the Anpreen. Ptey had no name for the sudden rush of feelings that came when he saw Puzhay throw back her head and laugh at some so-serious comment of Cjatay’s. Nejben did.

It was only at introductory breakfast in the East Refectory, where he met the other uncertain, awkward boys and girls of his intake, that Ptey saw past the dawn seduction of Puzhay to Cjatay, and saw him unchanged, exactly as he had been when he had stepped down from Etjay Quay into the catamaran and been taken out across the lagoon to the waste gas flares of Temejveri.

She was waiting crouched on the wooden steps where the water of the Chalybeate Pool lapped, knees pulled to her chest, goose flesh pimpling her forearms and calves in the cool of after-midnight. He knew this girl, knew her name, knew her history, knew the taste of a small, tentative kiss stolen among the crowds of teenagers pushing over Twelfth Canal Bridge. The memory was sharp and warm, but it was another’s.

“Hi there.”

He dragged himself out of the water onto the silvery wood, rolled away to hide his nakedness. In the cloister shadow, Ash-bey waited with a sea-silk robe.

“Hi there.” There was never any easy way to tell someone you were another person from the one they remembered. “I’m Serejen.” The name had been there, down among the palps, slipped into him with their mind-altering neurotransmitters.

“Are you?”

“All right. Yes, I’m all right.” A tickle in the throat made him cough, the cough amplified into a deep retch. Serejen choked up a lungful of mucus-stained palp jelly. In the early light, it thinned and ran, flowed down the steps to rejoin its shoal in the Chalybeate Pool. Agister Ashbey took a step forward. Serejen waved her away.

“What time is it?”

“Four thirty.”

Almost five hours.

“Serejen.” Puzhay looked coyly away. Around the Chalybeate Pool, other soul-swimmers were emerging, coughing up lungfuls of palp, shivering in their thermal robes, growing into new Aspects of themselves. “It’s Cjatay. He needs to see you. Dead urgent.”

Waiting Ashbey folded newborn Serejen in his own thermal gown, the intelligent plastics releasing their stored heat to his particular body temperature.

“Go to him,” his agister said.

“I thought I was supposed to—”

“You’ve got the rest of your life to get to know Serejen. I think you should go.”

Cjatay. A memory of fascination with starry skies, counting and numbering and betting games. The name and the face belonged to another Aspect, another life, but that old lust for numbers, for discovering the relationships between things, stirred a deep welling of joy. It was as rich and adult as the swelling of his dick he found in the bright mornings, or when he thought about Puzhay’s breasts in his hands and the tattooed triangle of her sex. Different; no less intense.

The shutters were pulled close. The screen was the sole light in the room. Cjatay turned on hearing his lockless door open. He squinted into the gloom of the stair head, then cried excitedly,

“Look at this look at mis!”

Pictures from the observation platforms sent to Tejaphay to monitor the doings of the Anpreen. A black-light plane of stars, the blinding blue curve of the water world stopped down to prevent screen-burn. The closer habitats showed a disk, otherwise it was moving lights. Patterns of speed and gravity.

“What am I looking at?”

“Look look, they’re building a space elevator! I wondered how they were going to get the water from Tejaphay. Simple, duh! They’re just going to vacuum it up! They’ve got some kind of processing unit in stationary orbit chewing up one of those asteroids they brought with them, but they’re using one of their own habitats to anchor it.”

“At twice stationary orbit,” Serejen said. “So they’re going to have to build down and up at the same time to keep the elevator in tension.” He did not know where the words came from. They were on his lips and they were true.

“It must be some kind of nanocarbon compound,” Cjatay said, peering at the screen for some hint, some elongation, some erection from the fuzzy blob of the construction asteroid. “Incredible tensile strength, yet very flexible. We have to get that; with all our oil, it could change everything about our technology. It could really make us a proper star-faring people.” Then, as if hearing truly for the first time, Cjatay turned from the screen and peered again at the figure in the doorway. “Who are you?” His voice was high and soft and plaintive.

“I’m Serejen.”

“You sound like Ptey.”

“I was Ptey. I remember him.”

Cjatay did a thing with his mouth, a twisting, chewing movement that Serejen recalled from moments of unhappiness and frustration. The time at his sister’s name day party, when all the birth family was gathered and he had shown how it was almost certain that someone in the house on Drunken Chicken Lane had the same name day as little Sezjma. There had been a long, embarrassed silence as Cjatay had burst into the adult chatter. Then laughter. And again, when Cjatay had worked out how long it would take to walk a light-year and Teacher Deu has asked the class, Does anyone understand this? For a moment, Serejen thought that me boy might cry. That would have been a terrible thing: unseemly, humiliating. Then he saw the bag on the unkempt bed, the ritual white clothes thrust knotted and fighting into it.

“I think what Cjatay wants to say is that he’s leaving the Manifold House,” agister Ashbey said, in the voice that Serejen understood as the one adults used when they had uncomfortable things to say. In that voice was a hidden word that Ashbey would not, that Serejen and Puzhay could not, and that Cjatay never would speak.

There was one in every town, every district. Kentlay had lived at the bottom of Drunken Chicken Lane, still at forty-something living with his birth parents. He had never married, though then-Ptey had heard that some did, and not just others like them. Normals. Multiples. Kentlay had been a figure that drew pity and respect alike; equally blessed and cursed, the Lonely were granted insights and gifts in compensation for their inability to manifold into the Eight Aspects. Kentlay had the touch for skin diseases, warts, and the sicknesses of birds. Ptey had been sent to see him for the charm of a dangling wart on his chin. The wart was gone within a week. Even then, Ptey had wondered if it had been through unnatural gifts or superstitious fear of the alien at the end of the wharf.

Cjatay. Lonely. The words were as impossible together as green sun or bright winter. It was never to be like this. Though the waters of the Chalybeate Pool would break them into many brilliant shards, though there would be other lives, other friends, even other wives and husbands, there would always be aspects of themselves that remembered trying to draw birds and fishes on the glowing band of the Mid Winter Galaxy that hung in the sky for weeks on end, or trying to calculate the mathematics of the High Summer silverlings that shoaled like silver needles in the Lagoon, how they kept together yet apart, how they were many but moved as one. Boiling rain. Summer ice. A morning where the sun wouldn’t rise. A friend who would always, only be one person. Impossibilities. Cjatay could not be abnormal. Dark word. A vile word that hung on Cjatay like an oil-stained tarpaulin.

He sealed his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

“I’ll give you a call when you get back.”

“Yeah. Okay. That would be good.” Words and needs and sayings flocked to him, but the end was so fast, so sudden, that all Serejen could do was stare at his feet so that he would not have to see Cjatay walk away. Puzhay was in tears. Cjatay’s own agister, a tall, dark-skinned Summer-born, put his arm around Cjatay and took him to the stairs.

“Hey. Did you ever think?” Cjatay threw back the line from the top of the spiral stair. “Why are they here? The Anpreen.” Even now, Serejen realized, Cjatay was hiding from the truth that he would be marked as different, as not fully human, for the rest of his life, hiding behind stars and ships and the mystery of the alien. “Why did they come here? They call it the Anpreen Migration, but where are they migrating to? And what are they migrating from? Anyone ever ask that? Ever think about that, eh?”

Then agister Ashbey closed the door on the high tower-top cell.

“We’ll talk later.”

Gulls screamed. Change in the weather coming. On the screen behind him, stars moved across the face of the great water.

Serejen could not bear to go down to the quay, but watched Sail of Bright Anticipation make sail from the cupola of the Bright Glance Netball Hall. The Manifold House was sailing through a plankton-bloom and he watched the ritual catamaran’s hulls cut two lines of bioglow through the carpet of carbon-absorbing microlife. He stood and followed the sails until they were lost among the hulls of huge ceramic oil tankers pressed low to the orange smog-glow of Ctarisphay down under the horizon. Call each other. They would always forget to do that. They would slip out of each other’s lives-Serejen’s life now vastly more rich and populous as he moved across the social worlds of his various Aspects. In time, they would slip out of each other’s thoughts and memories. So it was that Serejen Nejben ex-Ptey knew that he was not a child any longer. He could let things go. After morning Shift class, Serejen went down to the Old Great Pool, the ancient flooded piazza that was the historic heart of the Manifold House, and used the techniques he had learned an hour before to effortlessly transfer from Serejen to Nejben. Then he went down into the waters and swam with Puzhay. She was teary and confused, but the summer-warmed water and the physical exercise brightened her. Under a sky lowering with the summer storm that the gulls had promised, they sought out the many secret flooded colonnades and courts where the big groups of friends did not go. There, under the first crackles of lightning and the hiss of rain, he kissed her and she slipped her hand into his swimsuit and cradled the comfortable swell of his cock.

SEREJEN, LOVING

Night, the aurora and sirens. Serejen shivered as police drones came in low over the Conservatorium roof. Through the high, arched windows, fires could still be seen burning on Yaskaray Prospect. The power had not yet been restored, the streets, the towering apartment blocks that lined them, were still dark. A stalled tram sprawled across a set of points, flames flickering in its rear carriage. The noise of the protest had moved off, but occasional shadows moved across the ice beneath the mesmerism of the aurora; student rioters, police security robots. It was easy to tell the robots by the sprays of ice crystals thrown up by their needle-tip, mincing legs.

“Are you still at that window? Come away from there. If they see you they might shoot you. Look, I’ve made tea.”

“Who?”

“What?”

“Who might shoot me? The rioters or the police?”

“Like you’d care if you were dead.”

But he came and sat at the table and took the bowl of thin, salty Bedenderay mate.

“But sure I can’t be killed.”

Her name was Seriantep. She was an Anpreen Prebendary ostensibly attached to the College of Theoretical Physics at the Conservatorium of Jann. She looked like a tall, slim young woman with the dark skin and blue-black hair of a Summer-born Archipelagan, but that was just the form that the swarm of Anpreen nanoprocessor motes had assumed. She hived. Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben wondered how close you had to get before her perfect skin resolved into a blur of microscopic motes. He had had much opportunity to make this observation. As well as being his notional student—though what a functionally immortal hive-citizen who had crossed one hundred and twenty light-years could learn from a fresh twentysomething meat human was moot—she was his occasional lover.

She drank the tea. Serejen watched the purse of her lips around the delicate porcelain bowl decorated with the ubiquitous Lord of the Fishes motif, even in high, dry continental Jann. The small movement of her throat as she swallowed. He knew a hundred such tiny, intimate movements, but even as she cooed and giggled and gasped to the stimulations of the Five Leaves, Five Fishes ritual, the involuntary actions of her body had seemed like performances. Learned responses. Performances as he made observations. Actor and audience. That was the kind of lover he was as Serejen.

“So what is it really like to fuck a pile of nanomotes?” Puzhay had asked as they rolled around with wine in the cozy warm fleshiness of the Thirteenth Window Coupling Porch at the ancient, academic Ogrun Menholding. “I’d imagine it feels . . . fizzy.” And she’d squeezed his cock, holding it hostage, Watch what you say boy.

“At least nanomotes never get morning breath,” he’d said, and she’d given a little shriek of outrage and jerked his dick so that he yelped, and then they both laughed and then rolled over again and buried themselves deep into the winter-defying warmth of the piled quilts.

I should be with her now, he thought. The months-long winter nights beneath the aurora and the stars clouds of the great galaxy were theirs. After the Manifold House, he had gone with her to her Bedenderay and her home city of Jann. The City Conservatorium had the world’s best theoretical physics department. It was nothing to do with small, boyish, funny Puzhay. They had formalized a partnering six months later. His parents had complained and shivered through all the celebrations in this cold and dark and barbarous city far from the soft elegance of island life. But ever after, winter—even on the coldest mornings when carbon dioxide frost crusted the steps of the Tea Lane Ladyhearth where Puzhay lived—was their season. He should call her, let her know he was still trapped but that at the first sign, the very first sign, he would come back. The cell net was still up. Even an e-mail. He couldn’t. Seriantep didn’t know. Seriantep wouldn’t understand. She had not understood that one time when he tried to explain it in abstracts; that different Aspects could—should—have different relationships with different partners, love separately but equally. That as Serejen, I love you, Anpreen Prebendary Seriantep, but as Nejben, I love Puzhay. He could never say that. For an immortal, star-crossing hive of nanomotes, Seriantep was very single-minded.

Gunfire cracked in the crystal night, far and flat.

“I think it’s dying down,” Seriantep said.

“I’d give it a while yet.”

So strange, so rude, this sudden flaring of anti-alien violence. In the dreadful dead of winter, too, when nothing should rightfully fight and even the trees along Yaskaray Prospect drew down to their heartwood and turned to ice. Despite the joy of Puzhay, Serejen knew that he would always hate the Bedenderay winter. You watch out now, his mother had said when he had announced his decision to go to Jann. They all go dark-mad there. Accidie and suicide walked the frozen canals of the Winter City. No surprise then that madness should break out against the Anpreen Prebendaries. Likewise inevitable that the popular rage should be turned against the Conservatorium. The university had always been seen as a place apart from the rest of Jann, in summer aloof and lofty above the sweltering streets, like an overgrand daughter; in winter a parasite on this most marginal of economies. Now it was the unofficial alien embassy in the northern hemisphere. There were more Anpreen in its long, small-windowed corridors than anywhere else in the world.

There are no aliens, Serejen thought. There is only the Clade. We are all family. Cjatay had insisted that. The ship had sailed over the horizon, they hadn’t called, they had drifted from each other’s lives. Cjatay’s name occasionally impinged on Serejen’s awareness through radio interviews and opinion pieces. He had developed a darkly paranoid conspiracy theory around the Anpreen Presence. Serejen, high above the frozen streets of Jann in deeply abstract speculation about the physical reality of mathematics, occasionally mused upon the question of at what point the Migration had become a Presence. The Lonely often obsessively took up narrow, focused interests. Now the street was listening, acting. Great Winter always was a dark, paranoid season. Here’s how to understand, Serejen thought. There are no aliens after you’ve had sex with them.

Helicopter blades rattled from the walls of the College of Theoretical Physics and then retreated across the Central Canal. The silence in the warm, dimly lit little faculty cell was profound. At last, Serejen said, “I think we could go now.”

On the street, cold stabbed even through the quilted layers of Serejen’s greatcoat. He fastened the high collar across his throat and still he felt the breath crackle into ice around his lips. Seriantep stepped lightly between the half bricks and bottle shards in nothing more than the tunic and leggings she customarily wore around the college. Her motes gave her full control over her body, including its temperature.

“You should have put something on,” Serejen said. “You’re a bit obvious.”

Past shuttered cafes and closed-up stores and the tall brick faces of the student Hearths. The burning tram on the Tunday Avenue junction blazed fitfully, its bitter smoke mingling with the eternal aromatic hydrocarbon smog exhaled by Jann’s power plants. The trees that lined the avenue’s centerstrip were folded down into tight fists, dreaming of summer. Their boot heels rang loud on the street tiles.

A darker shape upon the darkness moved in the narrow slit of an alley between two towering tenement blocks. Serejen froze, his heart jerked. A collar turned down, a face studying his—Obredajay from the Department of Field Physics.

“Safe home.”

“Aye. And you.”

The higher academics all held apartments within the Conservatorium and were safe within its walls; most of the research staff working late would sit it out until morning. Tea and news reports would see them through. Those out on the fickle streets had reasons to be there. Serejen had heard that Obredajay was head-over-heels infatuated with a new manfriend.

The dangers we court for little love.

On the intersection of Tunday Avenue and Yaskaray Wharf, a police robot stepped out of the impervious dark of the arches beneath General Gatoris Bridge. Pistons hissed it up to its full three meters; green light flicked across Serejen’s retinas. Seriantep held up her hand, the motes of her palm displaying her immunity as a Prebendary of the Clade. The machine shrank down, seemingly dejected, if plastic and pumps could display such an emotion.

A solitary tea shop stood open on the corner of Silver Spider Entry and the Wharf, its windows misty with steam from the simmering urns. Security eyes turned and blinked at the two fleeing academics.

On Tannis Lane, they jumped them. There was no warning. A sudden surge of voices rebounding from the stone staircases and brick arches broke into a wave of figures lumbering around the turn of the alley, bulky and shouldering in their heavy winter quilts. Some held sticks, some held torn placards, some were empty-handed. They saw a man in a heavy winter coat, breath frosted on his mouth shield. They saw a woman almost naked, her breath easy, unclouded. They knew in an instant what she saw. The hubbub in the laneway became a roar.

Serejen and Seriantep were already in flight. Sensing rapid motion, the soles of Serejen’s boots extended grips into the rime. As automatically, he felt the heart-numbing panic-rush ebb, felt himself lose his grip on his body and grow pale. Another was taking hold, his flight-or-fight Aspect; his cool, competent emergency service Fejannen.

He seized Seriantep’s hand.

“With me. Run!”

Serejen-Fejannen saw the change of Aspect flicker across the tea-shop owner’s face like weather as they barged through his door, breathless between his stables. Up to his counter with its looming, steaming urns of hot, hot water. This tea man wanted them out, wanted his livelihood safe.

“We need your help.”

The tea man’s eyes and nostrils widened at the charge of rioters that skidded and slipped around the corner into Silver Spider Entry. Then his hand hit the button under the counter and the shutters rolled down. The shop boomed, the shutters bowed to fists striking them. Rocks banged like gunfire from metal. Voices rose and joined together, louder because they were unseen.

“I’ve called the police,” Seriantep said. “They’ll be here without delay.”

“No, they won’t,” Fejannen said. He pulled out a chair from the table closest the car and sat down, edgily eying the gray slats of the shutter. “Their job is to restore order and protect property. Providing personal protection to aliens is far down their list of priorities.”

Seriantep took the chair opposite. She sat down wary as a settling bird.

“What’s going on here? I don’t understand. I’m very scared.”

The cafe owner set two glasses of mate down on the table. He frowned, then his eyes opened in understanding. An alien at his table. He returned to the bar and leaned on it, staring at the shutters beyond which the voice of the mob circled.

“I thought you said you couldn’t be killed.”

“That’s not what I’m scared of. I’m scared of you, Serejen.”

“I’m not Serejen. I’m Fejannen.”

“Who, what’s Fejannen?”

“Me, when I’m scared, when I’m angry, when I need to be able to think clearly and coolly when a million tilings are happening at once, when I’m playing games or hunting or putting a big funding proposal together.”

“You sound . . . different.”

“I am different. How long have you been on our world?”

“You’re hard. And cold. Serejen was never hard.”

“I’m not Serejen.”

A huge crash—the shutter bowed under a massive impact and the window behind it shattered.

“Right, that’s it, I don’t care what happens, you’re going.” The tea man leaped from behind his counter and strode toward Seriantep. Fejannen was there to meet him.

“This woman is a guest in your country and requires your protection.”

“That’s not a woman. That’s a pile of . . . insects. Things. Tiny things.”

“Well, they look like mighty scared tiny things.”

“I don’t think so. Like you said, like they say on the news, they can’t really die.”

“They can hurt. She can hurt.”

Eyes locked, then disengaged. The mate-man returned to his towering silos of herbal mash. The noise from the street settled into a stiff, waiting silence. Neither Fejannen nor Seriantep believed that it was true, that the mob had gone, despite the spearing cold out there. The lights flickered once, twice.

Seriantep said suddenly, vehemently, “I could take them.”

The tea man looked up.

“Don’t,” Fejannen whispered.

“I could. I could get out under the door. It’s just a reforming.”

The tea man’s eyes were wide. A demon, a winter-grim in his prime location canal-side tea shop!

“You scare them enough as you are,” Fejannen said.

“Why? We’re only here to help, to learn from you.”

“They think, what have you got to learn from us? They think that you’re keeping secrets from us.”

“Us?”

“Them. Don’t scare them anymore. The police will come, eventually, or the Conservatorium proctors. Or they’ll just get bored and go home. These things never really last.”

“You’re right.” She slumped back into her seat. “This fucking world . . . Oh, why did I come here?” Seriantep glanced up at the inconstant lumetubes, beyond to the distant diadem of her people’s colonies, gravid on decades of water. It was a question, Fejannen knew, that Serejen had asked himself many times. A postgraduate scholar researching space-time topologies and the cosmological constant. A thousand-year-old posthuman innocendy wearing the body of a twenty-year-old woman, playing the student. She could learn nothing from him. All the knowledge the Anpreen wanderers had gained in their ten-thousand-year migration was incarnate in her motes. She embodied all truth and she lied with every cell of her body. Anpreen secrets. No basis for a relationship, yet Serejen loved her, as Serejen could love. But was it any more for her than a novelty; a tourist, a local boy, a brief summer loving?

Suddenly, vehemently, Seriantep leaned across the table to take Fejannen’s face between her hands.

“Come with me.”

“Where? Who?”

“Who?” She shook her head in exasperation. “Ahh! Serejen. But it would be you as well, it has to be you. To my place, to the Commonweal. I’ve wanted to ask you for so long. I’d love you to see my worlds. Hundreds of worlds, like jewels, dazzling in the sun. And inside, under the ice, the worlds within worlds within worlds . . . I made the application for a travel bursary months ago; I just couldn’t ask.”

“Why? What kept you from asking?” A small but significant traffic of diplomats, scientists, and journalists flowed between Tay and the Anpreen fleet around Tejaphay. The returnees enjoyed global celebrity status, their opinions and experiences sought by think tanks and talk shows and news-site columns, the details of the faces and lives sought by the press. Serejen had never understood what it was the people expected from the celebrity of others but was not so immured behind the fortress walls of the Collegium, armored against the long siege of High Winter, that he couldn’t appreciate its personal benefits. The lights seemed to brighten, the sense of the special hush outside, that was not true silence but waiting, dimmed as Serejen replaced Fejannen. “Why didn’t you ask?”

“Because I thought you might refuse.”

“Refuse?” The few, the golden few. “Turn down the chance to work in the Commonweal? Why would anyone do that? What would I do that?”

Seriantep looked long at him, her head cocked slighdy, alluringly, to one side, the kind of gesture an alien unused to a human body might devise.

“You’re Serejen again, aren’t you?”

“I am that Aspect again, yes.”

“Because I thought you might refuse because of her. That other woman. Puzhay.”

Serejen blinked three times. From Seriantep’s face, he knew that she expected some admission, some confession, some emotion. He could not understand what.

Seriantep said, “I know about her. We know things at the Anpreen Mission. We check whom we work with. We have to. We know not everyone welcomes us, and that more are suspicious of us. I know who she is and where she lives and what you do with her three times a week when you go to her. I know where you were intending to go tonight, if all this hadn’t happened.”

Three times again, Serejen blinked. Now he was hot, too hot in his winter quilt in this steamy, fragrant tea-shop.

“But that’s a ridiculous question, I don’t love Puzhay. Nejben does.”

“Yes, but you are Nejben.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?” Serejen bit back the anger. There were Aspects hovering on the edge of his consciousness like the hurricane-front angels of the Bazjendi Psalmody—selves inappropriate to Seriantep. Aspects that in their rage and storm might lose him this thing, so finely balanced now in this tea shop. “It’s our way,” he said weakly. “It’s how we are.”

“Yes, but”—Seriantep fought for words—“it’s you, there, that body. You say it’s different, you say it’s someone else and not you, not Serejen, but how do I know that? How can I know that?”

You say that, with your body that you said could take many forms, any form, Serejen thought. Then Fejannen, shadowed but never more than a thought away in this besieged, surreal environment, heard a shift in the silence outside. The tea man glanced up. He had heard it, too. The difference between waiting and anticipating.

“Excuse me, I must change Aspects.”

A knock on the shutter, glove-muffled. A voice spoke Fejan-nen’s full name. A voice that Fejannen knew from his pervasive fear of the risk his academic Aspect was taking with Seriantep and that Serejen knew from those news reports and articles that broke through his vast visualizations of the topology of the universe and that Nejben knew from a tower-top cell and a video screen full of stars.

“Can I come in?”

Fejannen nodded to the tea man. He ran the shutter up high enough for the bulky figure in the long quilted coat and boots to duck under. Dreadful cold blew around Fejannen.

Cjatay bowed, removed his gloves, banging rime from the knuckles, and made the proper formalities to ascertain which Aspect he was speaking to.

“I have to apologize; I only recently learned that it was you who were caught here.”

The voice, the intonations and inflections, the overprecisions and refinements—no time might have passed since Cjatay walked out of Manifold House. In a sense, no time had passed; Cjatay was caught, inviolable, unchangeable by anything other than time and experience. Lonely.

“The police will be here soon,” Seriantep said.

“Yes, they will,” Cjatay said mildly. He looked Seriantep up and down, as if studying a zoological specimen. “They have us well surrounded now. These things are almost never planned; what we gain in spontaneity of expression we lose in strategy. But when I realized it was you, Fejannen-Nejben, I saw a way that we could all emerge from this intact.”

“Safe passage,” Fejannen said.

“I will personally escort you out.”

“And no harm at all to you, politically.”

“I need to distance myself from what has happened tonight.”

“But your fundamental fear of the visitors remains unchanged?”

“I don’t change. You know that. I see it as a virtue. Some things are solid, some things endure. Not everything changes with the seasons. But fear, you said. That’s clever. Do you remember, that last time I saw you, back in the Manifold House. Do you remember what I said?”

“Nejben remembers you asking, Where are they migrating to? And what are they migrating from?”

“In all your seminars and tutorials and conferences, in all those questions about the shape of the universe—oh, we have our intelligences, too, less broad than the Anpreen’s, but sub-der, we think—did you ever think to ask that question: Why have you come here?” Cjatay’s chubby, still childish face was an accusation. “You are fucking her, I presume?”

In a breath, Fejannen had slipped from his seat into the Third Honorable Offense Stance. A hand on his shoulder; the tea-shop owner. No honor in it, not against a Lonely. Fejannen returned to his seat, sick with shuddering rage.

“Tell him,” Cjatay said.

“It’s very simple,” Seriantep said. “We are refugees. The Anpreen Commonweal is the surviving remnant of the effective annihilation of our subspecies of Panhumanity. Our eight hundred habitats are such a minuscule percentage of our original race that, to all statistical purposes, we are extinct. Our habitats once englobed an entire sun. We’re all that’s left.”

“How? Who?”

“Not so much who, as when,” Cjatay said gently. He flexed cold-blued fingers and pulled on his gloves.

“They’re coming?”

“We fear so,” Seriantep said. “We don’t know. We were careful to leave no traces, to cover our tracks, so to speak, and we believe we have centuries of a head start on them. We are only here to refuel our habitats. Then we’ll go hide ourselves in some great globular cluster.”

“But why, why would anyone do this? We’re all the same species. That’s what you told us. The Clade, Panhumanity.”

“Brothers disagree,” Cjatay said. “Families fall out, families feud within themselves. No animosity like it.”

“Is this true? How can this be true? Who knows about this?” Serejen strove with Fejannen for control and understanding. One of the first lessons the agisters of the Manifold House had taught was the etiquette of transition between conflicting Aspects. A war in the head, a conflict of selves. He could understand sibling strife on a cosmic scale. But a whole species?

“The governments,” Cjatay said. To the tea man, “Open the shutter again. You’ll be all right with us. I promise.” To Serejen, “Politicians, some senior academics, and policy makers. And us. Not you. But we all agree, we don’t want to scare anyone. So we question the Anpreen Prebendaries on our world, and question their presence in our system, and maybe sometimes it bubbles into xenophobic violence, but that’s fine, that’s the price, that’s nothing compared to what would happen if we realized that our guests might be drawing the enemies that destroyed them to our homes. Come on. We’ll go now.”

The tea man lifted the shutter. Outside, the protestors stood politely aside as Cjatay led the refugees out onto the street. There was not a murmur as Seriantep, in her ridiculous, life-threatening house clothes, stepped across the cobbles. The great Winter Clock on the tower of Alajnedeng stood at twenty past five. The morning shift would soon be starting, the hot-shops firing their ovens and fry-pots.

A murmur in the crowd as Serejen took Seriantep’s hand.

“Is it true?” he whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “It is.”

He looked up at the sky that would hold stars for another three endless months. The aurora coiled and spasmed over huddling Jann. Those stars were like crystal spearpoints. The universe was vast and cold and inimical to humanity, the greatest of Great Winters. He had never deluded himself that it would be otherwise. Power had been restored, yellow streedights glinted from the helmets of riot control officers and the carapaces of counterinsurgency drones. Serejen squeezed Seriantep’s hand.

“What you asked.”

“When?”

“Then. Yes. I will. Yes.”

TORBEN, MELTING

The Anpreen shatter-ship blazed star-bright as it turned its face to the sun. A splinter of smart-ice, it was as intricate as a snowflake, stronger than any construct of Taynish engineering. Torben hung in free fall in the observation dome at the center of the cross of solar vanes. The Anpreen, being undifferentiated from the motes seeded through the hull, had no need for such architectural fancies. Their senses were open to space; the fractal shell of the ship was one great retina. They had grown the blister—pure and perfectly transparent construction-ice—for the comfort and delight of their human guests.

The sole occupant of the dome, Torben was also the sole passenger on this whole alien, paradoxical ship. Another would have been good. Another could have shared the daily, almost hourly shocks of strange and new and wonder. His other Aspects had felt with Torben the breath—catch of awe, and even greater privilege, when he had looked from the orbital car of the space elevator—the Anpreen’s gift to the peoples of Tay—and seen the shatter-ship turn out of occultation in a blaze of silver light as it came in to dock. They had felt his glow of intellectual vindication as he first swam clumsily into the star-dome and discovered, with a shock, that the orbital transfer station was no more than a cluster of navigation lights almost lost in the star fields beyond. No sense of motion. His body had experienced no hint of acceleration. He had been correct. The Anpreen could adjust the topology of space-time. But there was no one but his several selves to tell it to. The Anpreen crew—Torben was not sure whether it was one or many, or if that distinction had any meaning—was remote and alien. On occasion, as he swam down the live-wood paneled corridors, monoflipper and web-mittens pushing thick, humid air, he had glimpsed a swirl of silver motes twisting and knotting like a captive waterspout. Always they had dispersed in his presence. But the ice beyond those wooden walls, pressing in around him, felt alive, crawling, aware.

Seriantep had gone ahead months before him.

“There’s work I have to do.”

There had been a party; there was always a party at the Anpreen Mission among the ever-green slopes of generous, volcanic Sulanj. Fellow academics, press and PR from Ctarisphay, politicians, family members, and the Anpreen Prebendaries, eerie in their uniform loveliness.

“You can do the research work on Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, that’s the idea,” Seriantep had said. Beyond the paper lanterns hung in the trees and the glow of the carbon-sink lagoon, the lights of space-elevator cars rose up until they merged with the stars. She would ride that narrow way to orbit within days. Serejen wondered how he would next recognize her.

“You have to go.” Puzhay stood in the balcony of the Tea Lane Ladyhearth, recentiy opened to allow spring warmth into rooms that had sweated and stifled and stunk all winter long. She looked out at the shooting, uncoiling fresh green of the trees along Uskuben Avenue. Nothing there you have not seen before, Nejben thought. Unless it is something that is the absence of me.

“It’s not forever,” Nejben said. “I’ll be back in a year, maybe two years.” But not here, he thought. He would not say it, but Puzhay knew it. As a returnee, the world’s conservatoriums would be his. Bright cities, sun-warmed campuses far from the terrible cold on this polar continent, the winter that had driven them together.

All the good-byes, eightfold good-byes for each of his Aspects. And then he took sail for the ancient hospice of Bleyn, for sail was the only right way to come to those reefs of ceramic chapels that had clung to the Yesger atoll for three thousand hurricane seasons.

“I need . . . another,” he whispered in the salt-breezy, chiming cloisters to Shaper Rejmen. “The curiosity of Serejen is too naive, the suspicion of Fejannen is too jagged, and the social niceties of Kekjay are too too eager to be liked.”

“We can work this for you,” the Shaper said. The next morning, he went down into the sweet, salt waters of the Other-ing Pots and let the programmed palps swarm over him, as he did for twenty mornings after. In the thunder-heavy gloaming of a late spring night storm, he awoke to find he was Torben. Clever, inquisitive, wary, socially adept, and conversationally witty Torben. Extreme need and exceptional circumstances permitted the creation of Nineths, but only, always, temporarily. Tradition as strong as an incest taboo demanded that the number of Aspects reflect the eight phases of Tay’s manic seasons.

The Anpreen shatter-ship spun on its vertical axis and Torben Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben looked on in wonder. Down, up, forward: his orientation shifted with every breath of air in the observation dome. An eye, a monstrous eye. Superstition chilled him, childhood stories of the Dej-ved whose sole eye was the eye of the storm and whose body was the storm entire. Then he unfolded the metaphor. An anti-eye. Tejaphay was a shield of heartbreaking blue, streaked and whorled with perpetual storms. The Anpreen space habitat Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, hard-docked these two years past to the anchor end of the space elevator, was a blind white pupil, an anti-pupil, an unseeing opacity. The shatter-ship was approaching from Tejaphay’s axial plane; the mechanisms of the orbital pumping station were visible beyond the habitat’s close horizon. The space elevator was a cobweb next to the habitat’s three-hundred-kilometer bulk, less even than a thread compared to enormous Tejaphay, but as the whole assemblage turned into daylight, it woke sparkling, glittering as sun reflected from its billions of construction-ice scales. A fresh metaphor came to Torben: the sperm of the divine. You’re swimming the wrong way! he laughed to himself, delighted at this infant Aspect’s unsuspected tendency to express in metaphor what Serejen would have spoken in math, Kekjay in flattery, and Fejannen not at all. No, it’s our whole system it’s fertilizing, he thought.

The Anpreen ship drew closer, manipulating space-time on the centimeter scale. Surface details resolved from the ice glare. The hull of Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode was a chaotic mosaic of sensors, docks, manufacturing hubs, and still less comprehensible technology, all constructed from smart-ice. A white city. A flight of shatter-ships detached from docking arms like a flurry of early snow. Were some of those icy mesas defensive systems; did some of those ice canyons, as precisely cut as a skater’s figures, conceal inconceivable weapons? Had the Anpreen ever paused to consider that to all cultures of Tay, white was the color of distrust, the white of snow in the long season of dark?

Days in free-gee had desensitized Torben sufficiendy so that he was aware of the subtle pull of nanogravity in his belly. Against the sudden excitement and the accompanying vague fear of the unknown, he tried to calculate the gravity of Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, changing every hour as it siphoned up water from Tejaphay. While he was still computing the figures, the shatter-ship performed another orientation flip and came in to dock at one of the radial elevator heads, soft as a kiss to a loved face.

On tenth days, they went to the falls, Korpa and Belej, Sajhay and Hannaj, Yetger and Torben. When he stepped out of the elevator that had taken him down through thirty kilometers of solid ice, Torben had imagined something like the faculty of Jann; wooden-screen cloisters and courts roofed with ancient painted ceilings, thronged with bright, smart, talkative students boiling with ideas and vision. He found Korpa and Belej, Sajhay, Hannaj, and Yetger all together in a huge, windy construct of cells and tunnels and abrupt balconies and netted-in ledges, like a giant wasp’s nest suspended from the curved ceiling of the interior hollow.

“Continuum topology is a tad specialized, I’ll admit that,” Belej said. She was a string-thin quantum-foam specialist from Yeldes in the southern archipelago of Ninnt, gone even thinner and bonier in the attenuated gravity of Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode. “If it’s action you’re looking for, you should get over to Twenty-Eighth. They’re sociologists.”

Sajhay had taught him how to fly.

“There are a couple of differences from the transfer ship,” he said as he showed Torben how to pull up the fish-tail mono-tights and how the plumbing vents worked. “It’s lo-gee, but it’s not no-gee, so you will eventually come down again. And it’s easy to build up too much delta-vee. The walls are light but they’re strong and you will hurt yourself. And the nets are there for a reason. Whatever you do, don’t go through them. If you end up in that sea, it’ll take you apart.”

That sea haunted Torben’s unsettled, nanogee dreams. The world-sea, the two-hundred-and-twenty-kilometer-diameter sphere of water, its slow, huge nanogee waves forever breaking into globes and tears the size of clouds. The seething, dissolving sea into which the Anpreen dissipated, many lives into one immense, diffuse body that whispered to him through the paper tunnels of the Sojourners’ house. Not so strange, perhaps. Yet he constanUy wondered what it would be like to fall in there, to swim against the tiny but nonnegligible gravity and plunge slowly, magnificently, into the boil of water-borne motes. In his imagination, there was never any pain, only the blissful, light-filled losing of self. So good to be free from the unquiet parliament of selves.

Eight is natural, eight is holy, the Bleyn Shaper Yesger had whispered from behind ornate cloister grilles. Eight arms, eight seasons. Nine must always be unbalanced.

Conscious of each other’s too-close company, the guest scholars worked apart with their pupils. Seriantep met daily with Torben in a bulbous chapter house extruded from the mother nest. Tall hexagon-combed windows opened on the steeply downcurving horizons of Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, stippled with the stalactite towers of tfiose Anpreen who refused the lure of the sea. Seriantep flew daily from such a tower down around the curve of the world to alight on Torben’s balcony. She wore the same body he had known so well in the Jann Conservatorium, with the addition of a pair of functional wings in her back. She was a vision, she was a marvel, a spiritual creature from the aeons-lost motherworld of the Clade: an angel. She was beauty, but since arriving in Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, Torben had only had sex with her twice. It was not the merman-angel thing, though that was a consideration to metaphor-and-ludicrous-conscious Torben. He didn’t love her as Serejen had. She noticed, she commented.

“You’re not . . . the same.”

Neither are you. What he said was, “I know. I couldn’t be. Serejen couldn’t have lived here. Torben can. Torben is the only one who can.” But for how long, before he splits into his component personalities?

“Do you remember the way you . . . he . . . used to see numbers?”

“Of course I do. And before that, I remember how Ptey used to see numbers. He could look up into the night sky and tell you without counting, just by knowing, how many stars there were. He could see numbers. Serejen could make them do things. For me, Torben, the numbers haven’t gone away, I just see them differently. I see them as clearly, as absolutely, but when I see the topospace transformations, I see them as words, as images and stories, as analogies. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“I think, no matter how long I try, how long any of us try, we will never understand how your multiple personalities work. To us, you seem a race of partial people, each a genius, a savant, in some strange obsessive way.”

Are you deliberately trying to punish me?Torben thought at the flicker-wing angel hovering before the ice-filled windows.

True, he was making colossal intuitive leaps in his twisted, abstruse discipline of space-time geometry. Not so abstruse: the Anpreen space drives, which Taynish physicists said broke the laws of physics, reached into the elevenspace substrate of the universe to locally stretch or compress the expansion of space-time—foreshortening ahead of the vehicle, inflating it behind. Thus the lack of any measurable acceleration, it was the entire continuum within and around the shatter-ship that had moved. Snowflakes and loxodromic curves had danced in Torben’s imagination: he had it, he had it. The secret of the Anpreen: relativistic interstellar travel, was now open to the peoples of Tay.

The other secret of the Anpreen, that was.

For all his epiphanies above the spherical ocean, Torben knew that seminars had changed. The student had become the teacher, the master the pupil. What is it you want from us? Torben asked himself. Truly want, truly need?

“Don’t know, don’t care. All I know is, if I can find a commercial way to bubble quantum black holes out of elevenspace and tap the evaporation radiation, I’ll have more money than God,” said Yetger, a squat, physically uncoordinated Oprann islander who relished his countrymen’s reputation for boorish-ness, though Torben found him an affable conversationalist and a refined thinker. “You coming to the Falls on Tennay?”

So they set off across the sky, a little flotilla of physicists with wine and sweet biscuits to dip in it. Those older and less sure of their bodies used little airscooter units. Torben flew. He enjoyed the exercise. The challenge of a totally alien language of movement intrigued him, the fish-tail flex of the flipper-suit. He liked what it was doing to his ass muscles.

The western windows of the Sojourners’ house gave distant views of the Falls, but the sense of awe began twenty kilometers out when the thunder and shriek became audible over the constant rumble of sky traffic. The picnic party always flew high, close to the ceiling among the tower roots, so that long vistas would not spoil their pleasure. A dense forest of inverted trees, monster things grown kilometers tall in the nanogee, had been planted around the Falls, green and mist-watered by the spray. The scientists settled on one of the many platforms sculpted from the boulevard-wide branches. Torben gratefully peeled off his fin-tights, kicked his legs free, and spun to face the Falls.

What you saw, what awed you, depended on how you looked at it. Feet down to the world-sea, head up to the roof, it was a true fall, a cylinder of falling water two hundred meters across and forty kilometers long. Feet up, head down, it was even more terrifying, a titanic geyser. The water was pumped through from the receiving station at near supersonic speeds; where it met the ocean bead, the joined waters boiled and leaped kilometers high, broke into high looping curls and crests and globes, like the fantastical flarings of solar prominences. The roar was terrific. But for the noise-abatement properties of the nanoengineered leaves, it would have meant instant deafness. Torben could feel the tree branch, as massive as any buttress wall of Jann fortress-university, shudder beneath him.

Wine was opened and poured. The biscuits, atavistically hand-baked by Hannaj, one of whose Aspects was a master pastry chef, were dipped into it and savored. Sweet, the light sharpness of the wine and the salt mist of another world’s stolen ocean tanged Torben’s tongue.

There were rules to Tennays by the Falls. No work. No theory. No relationships. Five researchers made up a big enough group for family jealousy, small enough for cliquishness. Proper topics of conversation looked homeward; partnerships ended, children born, family successes and sicknesses, gossip, politics, and sports results.

“Oh. Here.” Yetger sent a message flake spinning lazily through the air. The Sojourners’ house exfoliated notes and messages from home onto slips of whisper-thin paper that peeled from the walls like eczema. The mechanism was poetic but inaccurate; intimate messages unfurled from unintended walls to turn and waft in the strange updrafts that ran through the nest’s convoluted tunnels. It was the worst of forms to read another’s message-scurf.

Torben unfolded the rustle of paper. He read it once, blinked, read it again. Then he folded precisely in eight and tucked it away in his top pocket.

“Bad news?” For a broad beast of a man, Yetger was acute to emotional subtleties. Torben swallowed.

“Nothing strange or startling.”

Then he saw where Belej stared. Her gaze drew his, drew that of everyone in the picnic party. The Falls were failing. Moment by moment, they dwindled, from a deluge to a river, from a river to a stream to a jet, a hiding shrieking thread of water. On all the platforms on all the trees, Anpreen were rising into the air, hovering in swarms, as before their eyes the Falls sputtered and ceased. Drops of water, fat as storms, formed around the lip of the suddenly exposed nozzle to break and drift, quivering, down to the spherical sea. The silence was profound. Then the trees seemed to shower blossoms as the Anpreen took to the air in hosts and choirs, flocking and storming.

Numbers and images flashed in Torben’s imagination. The fueling could not be complete, was weeks from being complete. The ocean would fill the entire interior hollow, the stalactite cities transforming into strange reef communities. Fear gripped him and he felt Fejannen struggle to free himself from the binding into Torben. I need you here, friend, Torben said to himself, and saw that the others had made the same calculations.

They flew back, a ragged flotilla strung across kilometers of airspace, battling through the ghostly aerial legions of Anpreen. The Sojourners’ house was filled with fluttering, gusting message slips shed from the walls. Torben snatched one from the air and against all etiquette read it.

Sajhay are you all right what’s happening? Come home, we are all worried about you. Love Mihenj.

The sudden voice of Suguntung, the Anpreen liaison, filled every cell of the nest, an order—polite, but an order—to come to the main viewing lounge, where an important announcement would be made. Torben had long suspected that Suguntung never left the Sojourners’ house, merely deliquesced from hom-iniform into airborne motes, a phase transition.

Beyond the balcony nets, the sky seethed, an apocalypse of insect humanity and storm clouds black as squid ink rolling up around the edge of the world ocean.

“I have grave news,” Suguntung said. He was a gray, sober creature, light and lithe and androgynous, without any salting of wit or humor. “At 12:18 Taynish Enclave time, we detected gravity waves passing through the system. These are consistent with a large numbers of bodies decelerating from relativistic flight.”

Consternation. Voices shouting. Questions questions questions. Suguntung held up a hand and there was quiet.

“On answer to your questions, somewhere in the region of thirty-eight thousand objects. We estimate them at a range of seventy astronomical units beyond the edge of the Kuiper Belt, decelerating to ten percent lightspeed for system transition.”

“Ninety-three hours until they reach us,” Torben said. The numbers, the colored numbers, so beautiful, so distant.

“Yes,” said Suguntung.

“Who are they?” Belej asked.

“I know,” Torben said. “Your enemy.”

“We believe so,” Suguntung answered. “There are characteristic signatures in the gravity waves and the spectral analysis.”

Uproar. By a trick of the motes, Suguntung could raise his voice to a roar that could shout down a crowd of angry physicists.

“The Anpreen Commonweal is making immediate preparations for departure. As a matter of priority, evacuation for all guests and visitors has been arranged and will commence immediately. A transfer ship is already waiting. We are evacuating the system not only for our own protection, but to safeguard you as well. We believe that the Enemy has no quarrel with you.”

“Believe?” Yetger spat. “Forgive me if I’m less than completely reassured by that!”

“But you haven’t got enough water,” Torben said absently, amazed by the numbers and pictures swimming around in his head, as the message leaves of concern and hope and come-home-soon fluttered around. “How many habitats are fully fueled? Five hundred, five hundred and fifty? You haven’t got enough, even this one is at eighty percent capacity. What’s going to happen to them?”

“I don’t give a fuck what happens to them!” Hannaj had always been the meekest and least assertive of men, brilliant but forever hamstrung by self-doubt. Now, threatened, naked in space, pierced through and through by the gravity waves of an unknowable power, his anger burned. “I want to know what’s going to happen to us.”

“We are transferring the intelligences to the interstellar-capable habitats.” Suguntung spoke to Torben alone.

“Transferring; you mean copying,” Torben said. “And the originals that are left, what happens to them?”

Suguntung made no answer.

Yetger found Torben floating in the exact center of the viewing lounge, moving his tail just enough to maintain him against the microgee.

“Where’s your stuff?”

“In my cell.”

“The shatter-ship’s leaving in an hour.”

“I know.”

“Well, maybe you should, you know—”

“I’m not going.”

“You’re what?”

“I’m not going, I’m staying here.”

“Are you insane?”

“I’ve talked to Suguntung and Seriantep. It’s fine. There are a couple of others on the other habitats.”

“You have to come home. We’ll need you when they come.”

“Ninety hours and twenty-five minutes to save the world? I don’t think so.”

“It’s home, man.”

“It’s not. Not since this.’ ” Torben flicked the folded note of his secret pocket, offered it to Yetger between clenched fingers.

“Oh.”

“Yes.”

“You’re dead. We’re all dead, you know that.”

“Oh, I know. In the few minutes it takes me to reach wherever the Anpreen Migration goes next, you will have aged and died many times over. I know that, but it’s not home. Not now.”

Yetger ducked his head in sorrow that did not want to be seen, then in a passion hugged Torben hugely to him, kissed him hard.

“Good-bye. Maybe in the next one.”

“No, I don’t think so. One is all we get. And that’s a good enough reason to go out there where none of our people have ever been before, I think.”

“Maybe it is.” Yetger laughed, the kind of laughter that is on the edge of tears. Then he spun and kicked off up through the ceiling door, his duffel of small possessions trailing from his ankle.

For an hour now, he had contemplated the sea and thought that he might just be getting the way of it, the fractal patterns of the ripples, the rhythms and the microstorms that blew up in squalls and waves that sent globes of water quivering into the air that, just as quickly, were subsumed back into the greater sea. He understood it as music, deeply harmonized. He wished one of his Aspects had a skill for an instrument. Only choirs, vast ensembles, could capture the music of the water bead. “It’s ready now.”

All the while Torben had calculated the music of the sea, Seriantep had worked on the smart-paper substrate of the Sojourners’ house. Now the poll was complete, a well in the floor of the lounge. When I leave, will it revert? Torben thought, the small, trivial wit that fights fear. Will it go back to whatever it was before, or was it always only just Suguntung? The slightest of gestures and Seriantep’s wisp-dress fell from her. The floor ate it greedily. Naked and wingless now in this incarnation, she stepped backward into the water, never for an instant taking her eyes from Torben.

“Whenever you’re ready,” she said. “You won’t be hurt.”

She lay back into the receiving water. Her hair floated out around her, coiled and tangled as she came apart. There was nothing ghastly about it, no decay into meat and gut and vile bone, no grinning skelton fizzing apart in the water like sodium. A brightness, a turning to motes of light. The hair was the last to go. The pool seethed with motes. Torben stepped out of his clothes.

I’m moving on. It’s for the best. Maybe not for you. For me. You see, I didn’t think I’d mind, but I did. You gave it all up so easily, just like that, off into space. There is someone else. It’s Cjatay. I heard what he was saying, and as time went by, as I didn’t hear from you, it made sense. I know I’m reacting. I think I owe you that, at least. We’re all right together. With him, you get everything, I find I can live with that. I think I like it. I’m sorry, Torben, but this is what I want.

The note sifted down through the air like a falling autumn leaf to join the hundreds of others that lay on the floor. Torben’s feet kicked up as he stepped down into the water. He gasped at the electrical tingle, then laughed, and, with a great gasp, emptied his lungs and threw himself under the surface. The motes swarmed and began to take him apart. As the Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode broke orbit around Tejaphay, the abandoned space elevator coiling like a severed artery, the bottom of the Sojourners’ house opened, and, like a tear, the mingled waters fell to the sea below.

JEDDEN, RUNNING

Eighty years Jedden had fallen, dead as a stone, silent as light. Every five years, a few subjective minutes so close to light-speed, he woke up his senses and sent a slush of photons down his wake to see if the hunter was still pursuing.

Redshifted to almost indecipherability, the photons told him, Yes, still there, still gaining. Then he shut down his senses, for even that brief wink, that impact of radiation blueshifted to gamma frequencies on the enemy engine field, betrayed him. It was decades since he had risked the scalarity drive. The distortions it left in space-time advertised his position over most of a quadrant. Burn quick, burn hot and fast, get to lightspeed if it meant reducing his reaction mass perilously close to the point where he would not have sufficient time ever to brake. Then go dark, run silent and swift, coasting along in high-time dilation where years passed in hours.

Between wakings, Jedden dreamed. He dreamed down into the billions of lives, the dozens of races and civilizations that the Anpreen had encountered in their long migration. The depth of their history had stunned Jedden, as if he were swimming and, looking down, discovered beneath him not the green water of the lagoon but the clear blue drop of the continental shelf. Before they englobed their sun with so many habitats that it became discernible only as a vast infrared glow, before even the wave of expansion that had brought them to that system, before even they became motile, when they wore mere bodies, they had been an extroverted, curious race, eager for the similarities and differences of other subspecies of Panhumanity. Records of the hundreds of societies they had contacted were stored in the spin states of the quantum-ice flake that comprised the soul of Jedden. Cultures, customs, ways of being human were simulated in such detail that, if he wished, Jedden could have spent eons living out their simulated lives. Even before they had reached the long-reprocessed moon of their home world, the Anpreen had encountered a light-sail probe of the Ekkad, three hundred years out on a millennium-long survey of potential colony worlds. As they converted their asteroid belts into habitat rings, they had fought a savage war for control of the high country against the Okranda asteroid colonies that had dwelled there, hidden and unsuspected, for twenty thousand years. The doomed Okranda had, as a final, spiteful act, seared the Anpreen home world to the bedrock, but not before the Anpreen had absorbed and recorded the beautiful, insanely complex hierarchy of caste, classes, and societies that had evolved in the baroque cavities of the sculpted asteroids. Radio transmission had drawn them out of their Oort cloud across two hundred light-years to encounter the dazzling society of the Jad. From them, the Anpreen had learned the technology that enabled them to pload themselves into free-flying nanomotes and become a true Level Two civilization.

People and beasts, machines and woods, architectures and moralities, and stories beyond counting. Among the paraphernalia and marginalia of a hundred races, were the ones who had destroyed the Anpreen, who were now hunting Jedden down over all the long years, closing meter by meter.

So he spent hours and years immersed in the great annual eisteddfod of the Barrant-Hoj, where one of the early generation of seed ships (early in that it was the seed of the seed of the seed of the first flowering of mythical Earth) had been drawn into the embrace of a fat, slow hydrocarbon-rich gas giant and birthed a brilliant, brittle airborne culture, where blimp-cities rode the edge of storms wide enough to drown whole planets and the songs of the contestants-gas-bag-spider creatures huge as reefs, fragile as honeycomb—belled in infrasonic wavefronts kilometers between crests and changed entire climates. It took Barrant-Hoj two hominiform lifetimes to circle its sun—the Anpreen had chanced upon the song-spiel, preserved it, hauled it out of the prison of gas giant’s gravity well, and given it to greater Clade.

Jedden blinked back into interstellar flight. He felt—he imagined—tears on his face as the harmonies reverberated within him. Cantos could last days, chorales entire weeks. Lost in music. A moment of revulsion at his body, this sharp, unyielding thing of ice and energies. The hunter’s ramscoop fusion engine advertised its presence across a thousand cubic light-years. It was inelegant and initially slow, but, unlike Jed-den’s scalarity drive, was light and could live off the land. The hunter would be, like Jedden, a ghost of a soul impressed on a Bose-condensate quantum chip, a mote of sentience balanced on top of a giant drive unit. The hunter was closing, but was no closer than Jedden had calculated. Only miscalculation could kill you in interstellar war. The equations were hard but they were fair.

Two hundred and three years to the joke point. It would be close, maybe close enough for the enemy’s greed to blind him. Miscalculation and self-deception, these were the killers in space. And luck. Two centuries. Time enough for a few moments’ rest.

Among all the worlds was one he had never dared visit: the soft blue tear of Tay. There, in the superposed spin states, were all the lives he could have led. The lovers, the children, the friends and joys and mundanities. Puzhay was there, Cjatay, too. He could make of them anything he wanted: Puzhay faithful, Cjatay Manifold, no longer Lonely.

Lonely. He understood that now, eighty light-years out and decades to go before he could rest.

Extraordinary, how painless it had been. Even as the cells of Torben’s body were invaded by the motes into which Seriantep had dissolved, even as they took him apart and rebuilt him, even as they read and copied his neural mappings, there was never a moment where fleshly Torben blinked out and nan-otechnological Torben winked in. There was no pain. Never pain, only a sense of wonder, of potential racing away to infinity on every side, of a new birth-or, it seemed to him, an an-tibirth, a return to the primal, salted waters. As the globe of mingled motes dropped slow and quivering and full as a breast toward the world-ocean, Torben still thought of himself as Tor-ben, as a man, an individual, as a body. Then they hit and burst and dissolved into the sea of seething motes, and voices and selves and memories and personalities rushed in on him from every side, clamoring, a sea-roar. Every life in every detail. Senses beyond his native five brought him impression upon impression upon impression. Here was intimacy beyond anything he had ever known with Seriantep. As he communed, he was communed with. He knew that the Anpreen government (now he understood the reason for the protracted and ungainly negotiations with Tay: the two representations had almost no points of communication) were unwrapping him to construct a deep map of Tay and its people-rather, the life and Aspects of one undersocialized physics researcher. Music. All was music. As he understood this, Anpreen Commonweal Habitat Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, with its five hundred and eighty-two companions, crossed one hundred and nineteen light-years to the Mil-ius 1183 star system.

One hundred and nineteen light-years, eight months subjective, in which Torben Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben ceased to exist. In the mote-swarm, time, like identity, could be anything you assigned it to be. To the self now known as Jedden, it seemed that he had spent twenty years of resubjectivized time in which he had grown to be a profound and original thinker in the Commonweal’s physics community. Anpreen life had only enhanced his instinctive ability to see and apprehend number. His insights and contributions were startling and creative. Thus it had been a pure formality for him to request a splinter-ship to be spun off from Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode as the fleet entered the system and dropped from relativistic flight at the edge of the Oort cloud. A big fat splinter-ship with lots of fuel to explore space-time topological distortions implicit in the orbital perturbations of inner Kuiper Belt cubewanos for a year, a decade, a century, and then come home.

So he missed the annihilation.

Miscalculation kills. Lack of circumspection kills. Blind assumption kills. The Enemy had planned their trap centuries ahead. The assault on the Tay system had been a diversion; the thirty-eight thousand drive signatures mosdy decoys; propulsion units and guidance systems and little else scattered among a handful of true battleships dozens of kilometers long. Even as lumbering, barely mobile Anpreen habitats and Enemy attack drones burst across Tay’s skies, so bright they even illuminated the sun-glow of High Summer, the main fleet was working around Milius 1183. A work of decades, year upon year of slow modifications, staggering energies, careful careful concealment and camouflage, as the Enemy sent their killing hammer out on its long slow loop.

Blind assumption. The Anpreen saw a small red sun at affordable range to the ill-equipped fleet. They saw there was water there, water; worlds of water to reequip the Commonweal and take it fast and far beyond the reach of the Enemy in the great star clouds that masked the galactic core. In their haste they failed to note that Milius 1183 was a binary system, a tired red dwarf star and a companion neutron star in photosphere-grazing eight-hour orbit. Much less then did they notice that the neutron star was missing.

The trap was perfect and complete. The Enemy had predicted perfectly. Their setup was flawless. The hunting fleet withdrew to the edges of system; all that remained were the relays and autonomous devices. Blindsided by sunglare, the Anpreen sensoria had only milliseconds of warning before the neutron star impacted Milius 1183 at eight percent lightspeed.

The nova would in time be visible over a light-century radius. Within its spectrum, careful astronomers might note the dark lines of hydrogen, oxygen, and smears of carbon. Habitats blew away in sprays of plasma. The handful of stragglers that survived battled to reconstruct their mobility and life-support systems. Shark-ships hidden half a century before in the rubble of asteroid belts and planetary ring systems woke from their long sleeps and went a-hunting.

Alone in his splinter-ship in the deep dark, Jedden, his thoughts outward to the fabric of space-time and at the same time inward to the beauty of number, the song within him, saw the system suddenly turn white with death light. He heard five hundred billion sentients die. All of them, all at once, all their voices and hearts. He heard Seriantep die, he heard those other Taynish die, those who had turned away from their home world in the hope of knowledge and experience beyond anything their world could offer. Every life he had ever touched, that had ever been part of him, that had shared number or song or intimacy beyond fleshly sex. He heard the death of the Anpreen migration. Then he was alone. Jedden went dark for fifty years. He contemplated the annihilation of the last of the Anpreen. He drew up escape plans. He waited. Fifty years was enough. He lit the scalarity drive. Space-time stretched. Behind him, he caught the radiation signature of a fusion drive igniting and the corresponding electromagnetic flicker of a scoopfield going up. Fifty years was not enough.

That would be his last miscalculation.

Twenty years to bend his course away from Tay. Another ten to set up the deception. As you deceived us, so I will fool you, Jedden thought as he tacked ever closer to lightspeed. And with the same device, a neutron star.

Jedden awoke from the sleep that was beyond dreams, a whisper away from death, that only disembodied intelligences can attain. The magnetic vortex of the hunter’s scoopfield filled half the sky. Less than the diameter of a light-minute separated them. Within the next ten objective years, the Enemy ship would overtake and destroy Jedden. Not with physical weapons or even directed energy, but with information: skullware and dark phages that would dissolve him into nothingness or worse, isolate him from any external sense or contact, trapped in unending silent, nerveless darkness.

The moment, when it came, after ninety light-years, was too fine-grained for nonuniform intelligence. Jedden’s subroutines, the autonomic responses that controlled the ship that was his body, opened the scalarity drive and summoned the dark energy. Almost instantly, the Enemy responded to the course change, but that tiny relativistic shift, the failure of simultaneity, was Jedden’s escape and life.

Among the memories frozen into the heart of the Bose-Einstein condensate were the star logs of the Cush Ne, a fellow migrant race the Anpreen had encountered-by chance, as all such meets must be—in the big cold between stars. Their star maps charted a rogue star, a neutron dwarf ejected from its stellar system and wandering dark and silent, almost invisible, through deep space. Decades ago, when he felt the enemy ram-field go up and knew that he had not escaped, Jedden had made the choice and the calculations. Now he turned his flight, a prayer short of lightspeed, toward the wandering star.

Jedden had long ago abolished fear. Yet he experienced a strange psychosomatic sensation in that part of the splinter-ship that corresponded to his testicles. Balls tightening. The angle of insertion was so precise that Jedden had had to calculate the impact of stray hydroxyl radicals on his ablation field. One error would send him at relativistic speed head-on into a neutron star. But he did not doubt his ability, he did not fear, and now he understood what the sensation in his phantom testicles was. Excitement.

The neutron star was invisible, would always be invisible, but Jedden could feel its gravity in every part of his body, a quaking, quailing shudder, a music of a hundred harmonies as different parts of the smart-ice hit their resonant frequencies. A chorale in ice and adrenaline, he plunged around the neutron star. He could hope that the hunting ship would not survive the passage, but the Enemy, however voracious, was surely never so stupid as to run a scoop ship through a neutron star’s terrifying magnetic terrain with the drive field up. That was not his strategy anyway. Jedden was playing the angles. Whipping tight around the intense gravity well, even a few seconds of slowness would amplify into light-years of distance, decades of lost time. Destruction would have felt like a cheat. Jedden wanted to win by geometry. By calculation, we live.

He allowed himself one tiny flicker of a communication laser. Yes. The Enemy was coming. Coming hard, coming fast, coming wrong. Tides tore at Jedden; every molecule of his smart-ice body croaked and moaned, but his own cry rang louder and he slingshotted around the neutron. Yes! Before him was empty space. The splinter-ship would never fall of its own accord into another gravity well. He lacked sufficient reaction mass to enter any Clade system. Perhaps the Enemy had calculated this in the moments before he, too, entered the neutron star’s transit. An assumption. In space, assumptions kill. Deep in his quantum memories, Jedden knew what was out there. The slow way home.

FAST MAN, SLOWLY

Kites, banners, pennants, and streamers painted with the scales and heads of ritual snakes flew from the sun rigging on the Festival of Fast Children. At the last minute, the climate people had received budgetary permission to shift the prevailing winds lower. The Clave had argued that the Festival of Fast Children seemed to come around every month and a half, which it did, but the old and slow said, Not to the children it doesn’t.

Fast Man turned off the dust road onto the farm track. The wooden gate was carved with the pop-eyed, O-mouthed hearth gods, the chubby, venal guardians of agricultural Yoe Canton. As he slowed to Parent Speed, the nodding heads of the meadow flowers lifted to a steady metronome tick. The wind-rippled grass became a restless choppy sea of currents and crosscurrents. Above him, the clouds raced down the face ofthe sun-rod that ran the length of the environment cylinder, and in the wide yard before the frowning eaves of the ancient earthen manor, the children, preparing for the ritual Beating of the Sun-lines, became plumes of dust.

For three days, he had walked up the eternal hill of the cylinder curve, through the tended red forests of Canton Ahaea. Fast Man liked to walk. He walked at Child Speed and they would loop around him on their bicycles and ped-cars and then pull away shouting, You’re not so fast, Fast Man! He could have caught them, of course; he could have easily outpaced them. They knew that; they knew he could on a wish take the form of a bird, or a cloud, and fly away from them up to the ends of the world. Everyone in the Three Worlds knew Fast Man. He needed neither sleep nor food, but he enjoyed the taste of the highly seasoned, vegetable-based cuisine of the Middle Cantons and their light but fragrant beer, so he would call each night at a hostel or township pub. Then he would drop down into Parent Speed and talk with the locals. Children were fresh and bright and inquiring, but for proper conversation, you needed adults.

The chirping cries of the children rang around the grassy eaves of Toe Yau Manor. The community had gathered, among them the Toe Yau’s youngest, a skipping five-year-old. In her own speed, that was. She was months old to her parents; her birth still a fresh and painful memory. The oldest, the one he had come about, was in his early teens. Noha andjehau greeted Fast Man with water and bread.

“God save all here,” Fast Man said as he blessed them. Little Nemaha flickered around him like summer evening bugs. He heard his dual-speech unit translate the greeting into Children Speech in a chip of sound. This was his talent and his fame; that his mind and words could work in two times at once. He was the generational ambassador to three worlds.

The three great cylinders of the Aeo Taea colony fleet were fifty Adult Years along in their journey to the star Sulpees 2157 in the Anpreen categorization. A sweet little golden star with a gas giant pressed up tight to it and, around that gas world, a sun-warmed, tear-blue planet. Their big, slow lathe-sculpted asteroids, two hundred kilometers long, forty across their flats, had appeared as three small contacts at the extreme edge of the Commonweal’s sensory array. Too far from their flightpath to the Tay system and, truth be told, too insignificant. The galaxy was festering with little subspecies, many of them grossly ignorant that they were part of an immeasurably more vast and glorious Clade, all furiously engaged on their own grand little projects and empires. Races became significant when they could push lightspeed. Ethnologists had noted as a point of curiosity a peculiar time distortion to the signals, as if everything had been slowed to a tenth of normal speed. Astrogators had put it down to an unseen gravitational lensing effect and noted course and velocity of the lumbering junk as possible navigation hazards.

That idle curiosity, that moment of fastidiousness of a now-dead, now-vaporized Anpreen who might otherwise have dismissed it, had saved Jedden. There had always been more hope than certainty in the mad plan he had concocted as he watched the Anpreen civilization end in nova light. Hope as he opened up the dark energy that warped space-time in calculations made centuries before that would only bear fruit in centuries to come. Hope as he woke up, year upon year in the long flight to the stray neutron star, always attended by doubt. The slightest miscalculation could throw him off by light-years and centuries. He himself could not die, but his reaction mass was all too mortal. Falling forever between stars was worse than any death. He could have abolished that doubt with a thought, but so would the hope have been erased to become mere blind certainty.

Hoping and doubting, he flew out from the slingshot around the neutron star.

Because he could hope, he could weep; smart-ice tears when his long-range radars returned three slow-moving images less than five light-hours from the position he had computed.

As he turned the last of his reaction mass into dark energy to match his velocity with the Aeo Taea armada, a stray calculation crossed his consciousness. In all his redefinitions and reformations, he had never given up the ability to see numbers, to hear what they whispered to him. He was half a millennium away from the lives he had known on Tay.

For ten days, he broadcast his distress call. Help, I am a refugee from a star war. He knew that, in space, there was no rule of the sea, as there had been on Tay’s world ocean, no Aspects at once generous, stern, and gallant that had been known as SeaSelves. The Aeo Taea could still kill him with negligence. But he could sweeten them with a bribe.

Like many of the country houses of Amoa ark, Toe Yau Manor featured a wooden belvedere, this one situated on a knoll two fields spinward from the old house. Airy and gracious, woven from genetweak willow plaits, it and its country cousins all across Amoa’s Cantons had become a place for Adults, where they could mix with ones of their own speed, talk without the need for the hated speech converters around their necks, gripe and moan and generally gossip, and, through the central roof iris, spy through the telescope on their counterparts on the other side of the world. Telescope parties were the latest excuse for Parents to get together and complain about their children.

But this was their day—though it seemed like a week to them-the Festival of Fast Children, and this day Noha Toe Yau had his telescope trained not on his counterpart beyond the sun, but on the climbing teams fizzing around the sun-riggings, tens of kilometers above the ground, running out huge mono-weave banners and fighting ferocious kite battles high where the air was thin.

“I tell you something, no child of mine would ever be let do so damn fool a thing,” Noha Toe Yau grumbled. “I’ll be surprised if any of them makes it to the Destination.”

Fast Man smiled, for he knew that he had only been called because Yemoa Toe Yau was doing something much more dangerous.

Jehau Toe Yau poured chocolate, thick and cooling and vaguely hallucinogenic.

“As long as he’s back before Starship Day,” she said. She frowned down at the wide green before the manor where the gathered Fast Children of the neighborhood in their robes and fancies were now hurtling around the long trestles of festival foods. They seemed to be engaged in a high-velocity food fight. “You know, I’m sure they’re speeding the days up. Not much, just a little every day, but definitely speeding them up. Time goes nowhere these days.”

Despite a surprisingly sophisticated matter-antimatter propulsion system, the Aeo Taea fleet was limited to no more than 10 percent of lightspeed, far below the threshold where time dilation became perceptible. The crossing to the Destination-Aeo Taea was a language naturally given to Portentous Capitalizations, Fast Man had discovered—could only be made by generation ship. The Aeo Taea had contrived to do it in just one generation. The strangely slow messages the Anpreen had picked up from the fleet were no fluke of space-time distortion. The voyagers’ bodies, their brains, their perceptions and metabolisms, had been engineered in vitro to run at one-tenth hom-iniform normal. Canned off from the universe, the interior lighting, the gentle spin gravity, and the slow, wispy climate easily adjusted to a life lived at a snail’s pace. Morning greetings lasted hours, that morning a world-week. Seasons endured for what would have been years in the outside universe, vast languorous autumns. The three hundred and fifty years of the crossing would pass in the span of an average working career. Amoa was a world of the middle-aged.

Then Fast Man arrived and changed everything.

“Did he give any idea where he was going?” Fast Man asked. It was always the boys. Girls worked it through, girls could see further.

Jehau pointed down. Fast Man sighed. Rebellion was limited in Amoa, where any direction you ran led you swiftly back to your own doorstep. The wires that rigged the long sun could take you high, kilometers above it all in your grand indignation. Everyone would watch you through their telescopes, up there high and huffing, until you got hungry and wet and bored and had to come down again. In Amoa, the young soul rebels went out.

Fast Man set down his chocolate glass and began the subtle exercise that reconfigured the motes of his malleable body. To the Toe Yaus, he seemed to effervesce slightly, a sparkle like fine silver talc or the dust from a moth’s wings. Jehau’s eyes widened. All the three worlds knew of Fast Man, who had brought the end of the Journey suddenly within sight, soothed generational squabbles, and found errant children—and so everyone thought they knew him personally. Truly, he was an alien.

“It would help considerably if they left some idea of where they were going,” Fast Man said. “There’s a lot of space out there. Oh well. I’d stand back a little, by the way.” He stood up, opened his arms in a little piece of theater, and exploded into a swarm of motes. He towered to a buzzing cylinder that rose from the iris at the center of the belvedere. See this through your telescopes on the other side of the world and gossip. Then, in a thought, he speared into the earth and vanished.

In the end, the Fast Boy was pretty much where Fast Man reckoned he would be. He came speed-walking up through the salt-dead cityscape of the communications gear just above the convex flaring of the drive shield, and there he was, nova-bright in Fast Man’s radar sight. A sweet, neat little cranny in the main dish gantry with a fine view over the construction site. Boys and building. His complaining to the Toe Yaus had been part of the curmudgeonly image he liked to project. Boys were predictable things.

“Are you not getting a bit cold up there?” Fast Man asked. Yemoa started at the voice crackling in his helmet phones. He looked around, helmet tilting from side to side as he tried to pick the interloper out of the limitless shadow of interstellar space. Fast Man increased his surface radiance. He knew well how he must seem; a glowing man, naked to space, toes firmly planted on the pumice-dusted hull and leaning slightly forward against the spin force. He would have terrified himself at that age, but awe worked for the Fast Children as amiable curmudgeon worked for their slow parents.

“Go away.”

Fast Man’s body-shine illuminated the secret roots. Yemoa Toe Yau was spindly even in the tight yellow and green pressure skin. He shuffled around to turn his back, a deadlier insult among the Aeo Taea than among the Aspects of Tay for all their diverse etiquettes. Fast Man tugged at the boy’s safety lanyard. The webbing was unfrayed, the carabiner latch operable.

“Leave that alone.”

“You don’t want to put too much faith in those things. Cosmic rays can weaken the structure of the plastic: put any tension on them, and they snap just like that, just when you need them most. Yes sir, I’ve seen people just go sailing out there, right away out there.”

The helmet, decorated with bright bird motifs, turned toward Fast Man.

“You’re just saying that.”

Fast Man swung himself up beside the runaway and settled into the little nest. Yemoa wiggled away as far as the cramped space would permit.

“I didn’t say you could come up here.”

“It’s a free ship.”

“It’s not your ship.”

“True,” said Fast Man. He crossed his legs and dimmed down his self-shine until they could both look out over the floodlit curve of the star drive works. The scalarity drive itself was a small unit—small by Amoa’s vistas; merely the size of a well-established country manor. The heavy engineering that overshadowed it, the towering silos and domes and pipeworks, was the transfer system that converted water and antiwater into dark energy. Above all, the lampships hovered in habitat-stationary orbits, five small suns. Fast Man did not doubt that the site hived with desperate energy and activity, but to his Child Speed perceptions, it was as still as a painting, the figures in their bird-bright skinsuits, the heavy engineers in their long-duration work armor, the many robots and vehicles and little jetting skipcraft all frozen in time, moving so slowly that no individual motion was visible, but when you looked back, everything had changed. A long time even for a Parent, Fast Man sat with Yemoa. Beyond the construction lights, the stars arced past. How must they seem to the adults, Fast Man thought, and in that thought pushed down into Parent Speed and felt a breathless, deeply internalized gasp of wonder as the stars accelerated into curving streaks. The construction site ramped up into action, the little assembly robots and skippers darting here and there on little puffs of reaction gas.

Ten years, ten grown-up years, since Fast Man had osmosed through the hull and coalesced out of a column of motes onto the soil of Ga’atu Colony, and still he did not know which world he belonged to, Parent or Fast Children. There had been no Fast Children then, no children at all. That was the contract. When the Destination was reached, that was the time for children, born the old way, the fast way, properly adjusted to their new world. Fast Man had changed all that with the price of his rescue: the promise that the Destination could be reached not in slow years, not even in a slow season, but in hours-real hours. With a proviso: that they detour-a matter of moments to a relativistic fleet—to Fast Man’s old home-world of Tay.

The meetings were concluded, the deal was struck, the Aeo Taea fleet’s tight tight energy budget would allow it, just. It would mean biofuels and muscle power for the travelers; all tech resources diverted to assembling the three dark energy scalarity units. But the journey would be over in a single sleep. Then the generous forests and woodlands that carpeted the gently rolling midriffs of the colony cylinders all flowered and released genetweak pollen. Everyone got a cold for three days, everyone got pregnant, and nine Parent months later, the first of the Fast Children was born.

“So where’s your clip?”

At the sound of Yemoa’s voice, Fast Man geared up into Child Speed. The work on the dazzling plain froze; the stars slowed to a crawl.

“I don’t need one, do I?” Fast Man added, “I know exactly how big space is.”

“Does it really use dark energy?”

“It does.”

Yemoa pulled his knees up to him, stiff from his long vigil in the absolute cold. A splinter of memory pierced Fast Man: the fast-frozen canals of Jann, the months-long dark. He shivered. Whose life was that, whose memory?

“I read about dark energy. It’s the force that makes the universe expand faster and faster, and everything in it, you, me, the distance between us. In the end, everything will accelerate away so fast from everything else that the universe will rip itself apart, right down to the quarks.”

“That’s one theory.”

“Every particle will be so far from everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own.”

“Like I said, it’s a theory. Yemoa, your parents—”

“You use this as a space drive.”

“Your matter-antimatter system obeys the laws of thermodynamics, and that’s the heat-death of the universe. We’re all getter older and colder and more and more distant. Come on, you have to come in. You must be uncomfortable in that suit.”

The Aeo Taea skinsuits looked like flimsy dance costumes to don in the empty cold of interstellar space, but their hides were clever works of molecular technology, recycling and refreshing and repairing. Still, Fast Man could not contemplate the itch and reek of one after days of wear.

“You can’t be here on Starship Day,” Fast Man warned. “Particle density is very low out here, but it’s still enough to fry you, at lightspeed.”

“We’ll be the Slow ones then,” Yemoa said. “A few hours will pass for us, but in the outside universe, it will be fifty years.”

“It’s all relative,” Fast Man said.

“And when we get there,” Yemoa continued, “we’ll unpack the landers and we’ll go down and it’ll be the new world, the big Des Tin Ay Shun, but our moms and dads, they’ll stay up in the Three Worlds. And we’ll work, and we’ll build that new world, and we’ll have our children, and they’ll have children, and maybe we’ll see another generation after that, but in the end, we’ll die, and the Parents up there in the sky, they’ll hardly have aged at all.”

Fast Man draped his hands over his knees.

“They love you, you know.”

“I know. I know that. It’s not that at all. Did you think that? If you think that, you’re stupid. What does everyone see in you if you think stuff like that? It’s just . . . what’s the point?”

None, Fast Man thought. And everything. You are as much point as the universe needs, in your yellow and green skinsuit and mad-bird helmet and fine rage.

“You know,” Fast Man said, “whatever you think about it, it’s worse for them. It’s worse than anything I think you can imagine. Everyone they love growing old in the wink of an eye, dying, and they can’t touch them, they can’t help, they’re trapped up there. No, I think it’s so very much worse for them.”

“Yah,” said Yemoa. He slapped his gloved hands on his thin knees. “You know, it is freezing up here.”

“Come on then.” Fast Man stood up and offered a silver hand. Yemoa took it. The stars curved overhead. Together, they climbed down from the aerial and walked back down over the curve of the world, back home.

OGA, TEARING

He stood on the arch of the old Jemejnay bridge over the dead canal. Acid winds blew past him, shrieking on the honed edges of the shattered porcelain houses. The black sky crawled with suppressed lightning. The canal was a desiccated vein, cracked dry; even the centuries of trash wedged in its cracked silts had rusted away, under the bite of the caustic wind, to scabs and scales of slag. The lagoon was a dish of pure salt shimmering with heat haze. In natural light, it would have been blinding but no sun ever challenged the clouds. In Oga’s extended vision, the old campanile across the lagoon was a snapped tooth of crumbling masonry.

A flurry of boiling acid rain swept over Oga as he turned away from the burning vista, from the dead stone arch, onto Ej-tay Quay. His motes sensed and changed mode on reflex, but not before a wash of pain burned through him. Feel it. It is punishment. It is good.

The houses were roofless, floorless; rotted snapped teeth of patinated ceramic: had been for eight hundred years. Drunken Chicken Street. Here Kentlay the Lonely had sat out in the sun and passed the time of day with his neighbors and visitors come for his gift. Here were the Dilmajs and the vile, cruel little son who had caught birds and pulled their feathers so that they could not fly from his needles and knives, street bully and fat boy. Mrs. Supris, a sea widow, a baker of cakes and sweets, a keeper of mournings and ocean leavings. All dead. Long dead, dead with their city, their world.

This must be a mock Ctarisphay, a stage, a set, a play city for some moral tale of a prodigal, an abandoner. A traitor. Memories turned to blasted, glowing stumps. A city of ruins. A world in ruins. There was no sea anymore. Only endless poisoned salt. This could not be true. Yet this was his house. The acid wind had not yet totally erased the carved squid that stood over the door. Oga reached up to touch it. It was hot, biting hot; everything was hot, baked to an infrared glow by runaway greenhouse effect. To Oga’s carbon-shelled fingertips, it was a small stone prayer, a whisper caught in a shell. If the world had permitted tears, the old, eroded stone squid would have called Oga’s. Here was the hall, here the private parlor, curved in on itself like a ceramic musical instrument. The stairs, the upper floors, everything organic had evaporated centuries ago, but he could still read the niches of the sleeping porches cast in the upper walls. How would it have been in the end days, when even the summer sky was black from burning oil? Slow, painful, as year upon year the summer temperatures rose and the plankton blooms, carefully engineered to absorb the carbon from Tay’s oil riches, died and gave up their own sequestered carbon.

The winds keened through the dead city and out across the empty ocean. With a thought, Oga summoned the ship. Ion glow from the reentry shone through the clouds. Sonic booms rolled across the sterile lagoon and rang from the dead porcelain houses. The ship punched out of the cloud base and unfolded, a sheet of nanomotes that, to Oga’s vision, called memories of the ancient Bazjendi angels stooping down the burning wind. The ship beat its wings over the shattered campanile, then dropped around Oga like a possession. Flesh melted, flesh ran and fused, systems meshed, selves merged. Newly incarnate, Oga kicked off from Ejtay Quay in a pillar of fusion fire. Light broke around the empty houses and plazas, sent shadows racing down the desiccated canals. The salt pan glared white, dwindling to the greater darkness as the light ascended. With a star at his feet, Oga punched up through the boiling acid clouds, up and out until, in his extended shipsight, he could see the infraglow of the planet’s limb curve against space. A tear of blood. Accelerating, Oga broke orbit.

Oga. The name was a festival. Father-of-all-our-Mirths, in subtly inflected Aeo Taea. He was Fast Man no more, no longer a sojourner; he was Parent of a nation. The Clave had ordained three Parent Days of rejoicing as the Aeo Taea colony cylinders dropped out of scalarity drive at the edge of the system. For the children, it had been a month of party. Looking up from the flat end of the cylinder, Oga had felt the light from his native star on his skin, subtle and sensitive in a dozen spectra. He masked out the sun and looked for those sparks of reflected light that were worlds. There Saltpeer, and great Bephis: magnifying his vision, he could see its rings and many moons; there Tejaphay. It, too, wore a ring now; the shattered icy remnants of the An-preen Commonweal. And there; there: Tay. Home. Something not right about it. Something missing in its light. Oga had ratcheted up his sight to the highest magnification he could achieve in this form.

There was no water in the spectrum. There was no pale blue dot.

The Clave of Aeo Taea Interstellar Cantons received the message some hours after the surface crews registered the departure of the Anpreen splinter-ship in a glare of fusion light: I have to go home.

From five AUs out, the story became brutally evident. Tay was a silver ball of unbroken cloud. Those clouds comprised carbon dioxide, carbonic, and sulfuric acid, and a memory of water vapor. The surface temperature read at two hundred and twenty degrees. Oga’s ship-self possessed skills and techniques beyond his nonuniform self; he could see the perpetual lightning storms cracking cloud to cloud, but never a drop of pure rain. He could see through those clouds; he could peel them away so that the charred, parched surface of the planet lay open to his sight. He could map the outlines of the continents and the continental shelves lifting from the dried ocean. The chains of archipelagos, once jewels around the belly of a beautiful dancer, were ribs, bones, stark mountain chains glowing furiously in the infradark.

As he fell sunward, Oga put the story together. The Enemy had struck Tay casually, almost as an afterthought. A lone warship, little larger than the ritual catamaran on which the boy called Ptey had sailed from this quay so many centuries before, had detached itself from the main fleet action and swept the planet with its particle weapons, a spray of directed fire that set the oil fields burning. Then it looped carelessly back out of the system, leaving a world to suffocate. They had left the space elevator intact. There must be a way out. This was judgment, not murder. Yet two billion people, two thirds of the planet’s population, had died.

One third had lived. One third swarmed up the life-rope of the space elevator and looked out at space and wondered where they could go. Where they went, Oga went now. He could hear their voices, a low em-band chitter from the big blue of Tejaphay. His was a long, slow chasing loop. It would be the better part of a year before he arrived in parking orbit above Tejaphay. Time presented its own distractions and seductions. The quantum array that was his heart could as easily re-create Tay as any of scores of cultures it stored. The midday aurora would twist and glimmer again above the steep-gabled roofs of Jann. He would fish with Cjatay from the old, weather-silvered fishing stands for the spring run of prith. The Sulanj islands would simmer and bask under the midnight sun and Puzhay would again nuzzle against him and press her body close against the hammering cold outside the Tea Lane Ladyhearth walls. They all could live, they all would believe they lived, he could, by selective editing of his consciousness, believe they lived again. He could re-create dead Tay. But it was the game of a god, a god who could take off his omniscience and enter his own delusion, and so Oga chose to press his perception down into a time flow even slower than Parent Time and watch the interplay of gravity wells around the sun.

On the final weeks of approach, Oga returned to world time and opened his full sensory array on the big planet that hung tantalizingly before him. He had come here before, when the Anpreen Commonweal hung around Tejaphay like pearls, but then he had given the world beneath him no thought, being inside a world complete in itself, and his curiosity turned outward to the shape of the universe. Now he beheld Tejaphay and remembered awe. Three times the diameter of Tay, Tejaphay was the true water world now. Ocean covered it pole to pole, a hundred kilometers deep. Immense weather systems mottled the planet, white on blue. The surviving spine of the Anpreen space elevator pierced the eye of a perpetual equatorial storm system. Wave trains and swells ran unbroken from equator to pole to smash in stupendous breakers against the polar ice caps. Oga drew near in sea meditation. Deep ocean appalled him in a way that centuries of time and space had not. That was distance. This was hostility. This was elementary fury that knew nothing of humanity.

Yet life clung here. Life survived. From two light-minutes out, Oga had heard a whisper of radio communication, from the orbit station on the space elevator, also from the planet’s surface. Scanning sub-Antarctic waters, he caught the unmistakable tang of smart-ice. A closer look: what had on first glance seemed to be bergs revealed a more complex structure: Spires, buttresses, domes, and sprawling terraces. Ice cities, riding the perpetual swell. Tay was not forgotten: these were the ancient Manifold Houses reborn, grown to the scale of vast Tejaphay. Closer again: the berg city under his scrutiny floated at the center of a much larger boomed circle. Oga’s senses teemed with life signs. This was a complete ecosystem, and ocean farm, and Oga began to appreciate what these refugees had undertaken. No glimpse of life had ever been found on Tejaphay. Water-worlds, thawed from ice giants sent spiraling sunward by the gravitational play of their larger planetary rivals, were sterile. At the bottom of the hundred-kilometer-deep ocean was pressure ice, five thousand kilometers of pressure ice down to the iron core. No minerals, no carbon ever percolated up through that deep ice. Traces might arrive by cometary impact, but the waters of Tejaphay were deep and pure. What the Taynish had, the Taynish had brought. Even this ice city was grown from the shattered remnants of the Anpreen Commonweal.

A hail from the elevator station, a simple language algorithm. Oga smiled to himself as he compared the vocabulary files to his own memory of his native tongue. Half a millennium had changed the pronunciation and many of the words of Taynish, but not its inner subtleties, the rhythmic and contextual clues as to which Aspect was speaking.

“Attention unidentified ship, this is Tejaphay Orbital Tower approach control. Please identify yourself and your flight plan.”

“This is the Oga of the Aeo Taea Interstellar Fleet.” He toyed with replying in the archaic speech. Worse than a breach of etiquette, such a conceit might give away information he did not wish known. Yet. “I am a representative with authority to negotiate. We wish to enter into communications with your government regarding fueling rights in this system.”

“Hello, Oga, this is Tejaphay Orbital Tower. By the Aeo Taea Interstellar Fleet, I assume you refer to these objects.” A subchatter on the data channel identified the cylinders, coasting in-system. Oga confirmed.

“Hello, Oga, Tejaphay Tower. Do not, repeat, do not approach the Tower docking station. Attain this orbit and maintain until you have been contacted by Tower security. Please confirm your acceptance.”

It was a reasonable request, and Oga’s subtler senses picked up missile foramens unfolding in the shadows of the Orbital Station solar array. He was a runner, not a fighter; Tejaphay’s defenses might be basic fusion warheads and would need sustained precision hits to split open the Aeo Taea colony cans, but they were more than a match for Oga without the fuel reserves for full scalarity drive.

“I confirm that.”

As he looped up to the higher ground, Oga studied more closely the berg cities of Tejaphay, chips of ice in the monstrous ocean. It would be a brutal life down there under two gravities, every aspect of life subject to the melting ice and the enclosing circle of the biosphere boom. Everything beyond that was as lifeless as space. The horizon would be huge and far and empty. City ships might sail for lifetimes without meeting another polis. The Taynish were tough. They were a race of the extremes. Their birthworld and its severe seasonal shifts had called forth a social response that other cultures would regard as mental disease, as socialized schizophrenia. Those multiple Aspects-a self for every need-now served them on the hostile vastnesses of Te-japhay’s world ocean. They would survive, they would thrive. Life endured. This was the great lesson of the Clade: that life was hope, the only hope of escaping the death of the universe.

“Every particle will be so far from everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own, a teenage boy in a yellow spacesuit had said up on the hull of mighty Amoa, looking out on the space between the stars. Oga had not answered at that time. It would have scared the boy, and though he had discovered it himself on the long flight from Milius 1183, he did not properly understand it himself, and in that gap of comprehension, he, too, was afraid. Yes, he would have said. And in that is our only hope.

Long-range sensors chimed. A ship had emerged around the limb of the planet. Consciousness is too slow a tool for the pitiless mathematics of space. In the split second that the ship’s course, design, and drive signature had registered on Oga’s higher cognitions, his autonomic systems had plotted course and fuel reserves, and engaged the scalarity drive. At a thousand gees, he pulled away from Tejaphay. Manipulating space-time so close to the planet would send gravity waves rippling through it like a struck gong. Enormous slow tides would circle the globe; the space elevator would flex like a crackled whip. Nothing to be done. It was instinct alone and by instinct he lived, for here came the missiles. Twenty nanotoc warheads on hypergee drives, wiping out his entire rearward vision in a white glare of lightweight MaM engines, but not before he had felt on his skin sensors the unmistakable harmonies of an Enemy deep-space scoopfield going up.

The missiles had the legs, but Oga had the stamina. He had calculated it thus. The numbers still came to him. Looking back at the blue speck into which Tejaphay had dwindled, he saw the engine sparks of the missiles wink out one after the other. And now he could be sure that the strategy, devised in nanoseconds, would pay off. The warship was chasing him. He would lead it away from the Aeo Taea fleet. But this would be no long stern chase over the light-decades. He did not have the fuel for that, nor the inclination. Without fuel, without weapons, he knew he must end it. For that, he needed space.

It was the same ship. The drive field harmonics, the spectrum of the fusion flame, the timbre of the radar images that he so gently, kiss-soft, bounced off the pursuer’s hull, even the configuration he had glimpsed as the ship rounded the planet and launched missiles. This was the same ship that had hunted him down all the years. Deep mysteries here. Time dilation would compress his planned course to subjective minutes and Oga needed time to find an answer.

The ship had known where he would go even as they bucked the stormy cape of the wandering neutron star. It had never even attempted to follow him; instead, it had always known that it must lay in a course that would whip it around to Tay. That meant that even as he escaped the holocaust at Milius 1183, it had known who he was, where he came from, had seen through the frozen layers of smart-ice to the Torben below. The ship had come from around the planet. It was an enemy ship, but not the Enemy. They would have boiled Tejaphay down to its iron heart. Long Oga contemplated these things as he looped out into the wilderness of the Oort cloud. Out there among the lonely ice, he reached a conclusion. He turned the ship over and burned the last of his reaction in a hypergee deceleration burn. The enemy ship responded immediately, but its ramjet drive was less powerful. It would be months, years even, before it could turn around to match orbits with him. He would be ready then. The edge of the field brushed Oga as he decelerated at fifteen hundred gravities and he used his external sensors to modulate a message on the huge web, a million kilometers across: I surrender.

Gigayears ago, before the star was born, the two comets had met and entered into their far, cold marriage. Beyond the dramas and attractions of the dust cloud that coalesced into Tay and Tejaphay and Bephis, all the twelve planets of the solar system, they maintained their fixed-grin gazes on each other, locked in orbit around a mutual center of gravity where a permanent free-floating haze of ice crystals hovered, a fraction of a Kelvin above absolute zero. Hidden among them, and as cold and seemingly as dead, was the splintership. Oga shivered. The cold was more than physical—on the limits of even his malleable form. Within their thermal casing, his motes moved as slowly as Aeo Taea Parents. He felt old as this ice and as weary. He looked up into the gap between ice worlds. The husband-comet floated above his head like a halo. He could have leaped to it in a thought.

Lights against the starlight twinkle of the floating ice storm. A sudden occlusion. The Enemy was here. Oga waited, feeling every targeting sensor trained on him.

No, you won’t, will you? Because you have to know.

A shadow detached itself from the black ship, darkest on dark, and looped around the comet. It would be a parliament of self-assembling motes like himself. Oga had worked out decades before that Enemy and Anpreen were one and the same, sprung from the same nanotechnological seed when they attained Class Two status. Theirs was a civil war. In the Clade, all war was civil war, Oga thought. Panhumanity was all there was. More like a family feud. Yes, those were the bloodiest fights of all. No quarter and no forgiveness.

The man came walking around the small curve of the comet, kicking up shards of ice crystals from his grip soles. Oga recognized him. He was meant to. He had designed himself so that he would be instantly recognizable, too. He bowed, in the distances of the Oort cloud.

“Torben Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Sere-jen Nejben, sir.”

The briefest nod of a head, a gesture of hours in the slow-motion hypercold.

“Torben. I’m not familiar with that name.”

“Perhaps we should use the name most familiar to you. That would be Serejen, or perhaps Fejannen. I was in that Aspect when we last met. I would have hoped you still remembered the old etiquette.”

“I find I remember too much these days. Forgetting is a choice since I was improved. And a chore. What do they call you now?”

“Oga.”

“Oga it shall be, then.”

“And what do they call you now?”

The man looked up into the icy gap between worldlets. He has remembered himself well, Oga thought. The slight portliness, the child-chubby features, like a boy who never grew up. As he says, forgetting is a chore.

“The same thing they always have: Cjatay.”

“Tell me your story then, Cjatay. This was never your fight, or my fight.”

“You left her.”

“She left me, I recall, and, like you, I forget very little these days. I can see the note still; I could re-create it for you, but it would be a scandalous waste of energy and resources. She went to you.”

“It was never me. It was the cause.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

Cjatay gave a glacial shrug.

“We made independent contact with them when they came. The Council of governments was divided, all over the place, no coherent approach or strategy. ‘Leave us alone. We’re not part of this.’ But there’s no neutrality in these things. We had let them use our system’s water. We had the space elevator they built for us, there was the price, there was the blood money. We knew it would never work-our hope was that we could convince them that some of us had always stood against the Anpreen. They torched Tay anyway, but they gave us a deal.

They’d let us survive as a species if some of us joined them on their crusade.”

“They are the Anpreen.”

“Were the Anpreen. I know. They took me to pieces. They made us into something else. Better, I think. All of us, there were twenty-four of us. Twenty-four, that was all the good people of Tay, in their eyes. Everyone who was worth saving.”

“And Puzhay?”

“She died. She was caught in the Arphan conflagration. She went there from Jann to be with her parents. It always was an oil town. They melted it to slag.”

“But you blame me.”

“You are all that’s left.”

“I don’t believe that. I think it was always personal. I think it was always revenge.”

“You still exist.”

“That’s because you don’t have all the answers yet.”

“We know the kind of creatures we’ve become; what answers can I not know?”

Oga dipped his head, then looked up to the halo moon, so close he could almost touch it.

“Do you want me to show you what they fear so much?”

There was no need for the lift of the hand, the conjurer’s gesture; the pieces of his ship-self that Oga had seeded so painstakingly through the wife-comet’s structure were part of his extended body. But I do make magic here, he thought. He dropped his hand. The star-speckled sky turned white, hard painful white, as if the light of every star were arriving at once. An Others sky, Oga remembered from his days in the turrets and cloisters of Jann. And as the light grew intolerable, it ended. Blackness, embedding, huge and comforting. The dark of death. Then Oga’s eyes grew familiar with the dark, and, though it was the plan and always had been the plan, he felt a plaint of awe as he saw ten thousand galaxies resolve out of the Olbers dazzle. And he knew that Cjatay saw the same.

“Where are we? What have you done?”

“We are somewhere in the region of two hundred and thirty million light-years outside our local group of galaxies, more precisely, on the periphery of the cosmological galactic super-cluster known as the Great Attractor. I made some refinements to the scalarity drive unit to operate in a one-dimensional array.”

“Faster-than-light travel,” Cjatay said, his upturned face silvered with the light of the ten thousand galaxies of the Great Attractor.

“No, you still don’t see it,” Oga said, and again turned the universe white. Now when he flicked out of hyperscalarity, the sky was dark and starless but for three vast streams of milky light that met in a triskelion hundreds of millions of light-years across.

“We are within the Bootes Supervoid,” Oga said. “It is so vast that if our own galaxy were in the center of it, we would have thought ourselves alone and that our galaxy was the entire universe. Before us are the Lyman alpha-blobs, three conjoined galaxy filaments. These are the largest structures in the universe. On scales larger than this, structure becomes random and grainy. We become gray. These are the last grand vistas. This is the end of greatness.”

“Of course, the expansion of space is not limited by light-speed,” Cjatay said.

“Still you don’t understand.” A third time, Oga generated the dark energy from the ice beneath his feet and focused it into a narrow beam between the wife-comet and its unimaginably distant husband. Two particles in contact will remain in quantum entanglement no matter how far they are removed, Oga thought. And is that true also for lives? He dismissed the scalarity generator and brought them out in blackness. Complete, impenetrable, all-enfolding blackness, without a photon of light.

“Do you understand where I have brought you?”

“You’ve taken us beyond the visible horizon,” Cjatay said.

“You’ve pushed space so far that the light from the rest of the universe has not had time to reach us. We are isolated from every other part of reality. In a philosophical sense, we are a universe in ourselves.”

“That was what they feared? You feared?”

“That the scalarity drive had the potential to be turned into a weapon of unimaginable power? Oh yes. The ability to remove any enemy from reach, to banish them beyond the edge of the universe. To exile them from the universe itself, instantly and irrevocably.”

“Yes, I can understand that, and that you did what you did altruistically. They were moral genocides. But our intention was never to use it as a weapon—if it had been, wouldn’t we have used it on you?”

Silence in the darkness beyond dark.

“Explain then.”

“I have one more demonstration.”

The mathematics were critical now. The scalarity generator devoured cometary mass voraciously. If there were not enough left to allow him to return them home . . . Trust number, Oga. You always have. Beyond the edge of the universe, all you have is number. There was no sensation, no way of perceiving when he activated and deactivated the scalarity field, except by number. For an instant, Oga feared number had failed him, a first and fatal betrayal. Then light blazed down onto the dark ice. A single blinding star shone in the absolute blackness.

“What is that?”

“I pushed a single proton beyond the horizon of this horizon. I pushed it so far that space and time tore.”

“So I’m looking at—”

“The light of creation. That is an entire universe, newborn. A new big bang. A young man once said to me, “Every particle will be so far from everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own.” An extended object like this comet, or bodies, is too gross, but in a single photon, quantum fluctuations will turn it into an entire universe-in-waiting.”

The two men looked up a long time into the nascent light, the surface of the fireball seething with physical laws and forces boiling out. Now you understand, Oga thought. It’s not a weapon. It’s the way out. The way past the death of the universe. Out there beyond the horizon, we can bud off new universes, and universes from those universes, forever. Intelligence has the last word. We won’t die alone in the cold and the dark. He felt the light of the infant universe on his face, then said, “I think we probably should be getting back. If my calculations are correct-and there is a significant margin of error-this fireball will shortly undergo a phase transition as dark energy separates out and undergoes catastrophic expansion. I don’t think that the environs of an early universe would be a very good place for us to be.”

He saw portly Cjatay smile.

“Take me home, then. I’m cold and I’m tired of being a god.”

“Are we gods?”

Cjatay nodded at the micro verse.

“I think so. No, I know I would want to be a man again.”

Oga thought of his own selves and lives, his bodies and natures. Flesh indwelled by many personalities, then one personality-one aggregate of experience and memory-in bodies liquid, starship, nanotechnological. And he was tired, so terribly tired beyond the universe, centuries away from all that he had known and loved. All except this one, his enemy.

“Tejaphay is no place for children.”

“Agreed. We could rebuild Tay.”

“It would be a work of centuries.”

“We could use the Aeo Taea Parents. They have plenty of time.”

Now Cjatay laughed.

“I have to trust you now, don’t I? I could have vaporized you back there, blown this place to atoms with my missiles. And now you create an entire universe.”

“And the Enemy? They’ll come again.”

“You’ll be ready for them, like you were ready for me. After all, I am still the enemy.”

The surface of the bubble of universe seemed to be in more frenetic motion now. The light was dimming fast.

“Let’s go then,” Cjatay said.

“Yes,” Oga said. “Let’s go home.”

OGA, RETURNING

THE POLITICAL PRISONER

Charles Coleman Finlay

Although Charlie Finlay’s story “The Political Officer” ran in our April 2002 issue, your editor has an indelible memory of reading it on 9/15/01, when the drama of workers enduring radiation burns took on extra poignancy in the aftermath of the collapse of the World Trade Towers. (If you want to read the story again to see that scene for yourself, you can find the story reprinted on our Website this month.)

No such cataclysmic event occurred during the week when your editor read this new story, but we think what befalls Max Nikomedes in this tale will also leave a lasting impression.

FOR EVERYONE’S CONVENIENCE, the execution grounds on Jesusalem stood next to the cemetery. The cemetery was the biggest public garden on the terraformed planet: families sacrificed part of their soil ration to plant perennials and blossoming evergreens, bits of garnish like little sprigs of parsley on a vast platter of rocks. The sight of the garden usually made Maxim Nikomedes feel welcome when he returned to the planet, even if he only glimpsed the flowers for a moment from the window of his limousine.

This return was different. An Adarean was scheduled for execution, and the mob that gathered to watch it blocked Max’s view. And for this visit, Max was riding in an armored car for prisoners not a limousine.

Max peered out the tinted window, but was met with his own reflection: he was a small man in his forties, with an acne-scarred face pale from years in the space service as a political officer. There were loose threads on his uniform where the rank had been torn off. He raised his hands to scratch his nose—the window flashed with the silver gleam of the handcuffs.

He looked past himself.

The crowd, dressed in their drab Sabbath clothes, shoved and shouted, surging toward the execution altar. They were pushed back by the soldiers from Justice, spilling into the road and blocking the car. Atop the altar, the Minister of Executions poured baptismal water over the Adarean’s bald green head. The crowd shook and roared in frenzy.

“You want to stay and watch them stretch the pig-man’s neck?” the guard asked Max.

Max had been ignoring the guard seated opposite him. The seasoned political officer turned his head with cold calm and lifted his handcuffed wrists, as if to say he had bigger worries. Soon enough, he might make an official visit to the execution altar. He would, at least, have a good view of the flowers in the graveyard.

Looking back out the window, he said, “What does it matter to me if an Adarean lives or dies?”

The guard craned his head around to talk to the driver.

“See that’s what I don’t understand,” he said, pointing the barrel of his gun out the window. “They’re like aliens. Adareans gave up their souls when they quit being human, so what’s the point in baptizing this pig-man?”

Max frowned while the guard and driver argued the merits of pre-execution conversion. Pig-man. It was odd how a man’s work took on a life of its own. Max remembered creating that propaganda term years ago, during the war with Adares. The people on his planet thought they were God’s Select, emigrating to a purer place where they could live a holy life. They fell into conflict with the emigrants to Adares, a population that claimed to be the next step, deliberate and scientific, in human evolution. To stir people up to fight a technologically superior foe, Max created the slogan There is no evolution, only abomination. Then he dug up some old earth-history on using pig-valves in heart transplants—the first step toward godlessness, changing man into something other than God’s own image. Max connected that to the genetically-modified Adareans, who stole genes promiscuously from any species, and called them pig-men. It was adolescent name-calling, improvised in the service of a war long since over. Who cared if the Adareans’ chlorophyll-laden skin and hair indicated more plant genes than pig? The religious population of Jesusalem, thinking swine unclean, had embraced the insult.

That was many years, and a different identity, ago. Max was vain enough to feel proud, and old enough to be ashamed. He loved his home, and had always served it any way he could.

Outside, the hangman fixed the steel cable around the Adarean’s neck. Tradition called for hemp rope, but there was so little natural fiber on the planet, despite decades of terraforming, that everything but their clothes was made from metal or rock. The minister began preaching the repentance sermon while the powerfully-built hangman forced the Adarean to kneel and bend his head. The crowd settled down to listen, and the driver nudged the car forward again.

Max continued to stare out the window. They hovered through dusty, unpaved streets, leaving a cloud of grit behind them, until they arrived at a big, concrete open-ended U. The Department of Political Education building.

The guard hopped out, weapon at his side, and held open the door. “It must feel good to be back, huh?”

Max looked up to see if the guard really was that stupid. His simple, frank face bespoke genuine belief. Max scooted across the seat and lifted his handcuffed wrists for an answer.

The guard waved his hand vaguely. “Nobody believes that charge of treason!”

Max winced at the word. In the old days, even a suspicion of treason meant immediate death. He walked quickly as if to escape the charge, crossing the courtyard to the entrance. More guards, these blissfully silent in their charcoal-colored uniforms, opened the door. The lobby inside was an oasis of tan benches planted around a small blue pool of carpet.

A pale green Adarean leapt up from one of the seats and blocked Max’s way. “Please,” he said. “I must see Director Mallove while there’s still time to stop the execution.”

Depending on the length of the sermon—they could run for a few minutes or a few hours—it might already be too late. “Can’t really help you,” Max said, lifting his handcuffs in answer for a third time.

The guard steered Max around the Adarean. When the door to the stairwell creaked shut behind them, the guard grumbled, “Weedheads.”

“I’ll never get used to grass hair,” Max said. He doubted the Adareans converted much solar energy from their hair, despite all their talk of developing “multiple calorie streams.”

His legs ached in the full gravity as he climbed the stairs. He’d visited planets with elevators before: the older he got, the more he believed in the possible holiness of technology. When he went to Earth, he visited a museum about the Amish, a group of people who stubbornly lived in the past while technology swept others past them. The tour guide thought he’d find the religious similarities interesting. Max had begun to have sympathy for the galactics who looked at his planet as an oddity just like the Amish.

Too bad his people had never been pacifists.

On the top floor, the guard ushered Max past the admin—owl-eyed Anatoly, whose expressionless gaze followed Max across the room—to the office of the Director of Political Education, Willem Mallove. Max’s boss.

One of Max’s bosses. But that was complicated, and involved his old identity. Max filed that away in “things too dangerous to think about right now.”

Mallove sat posed, hand on chin, staring out the window. He had an actor’s face, handsome and charismatic with just the right hint of imperfection—a small scar that forced his upper lip into a minor sneer. His face had gotten him into vids when he studied off-planet on Adares, years ago, before the revolution. Rumor had it that his insincerity—the Adareans were enormously sensitive to nuances of emotion—had driven him out of acting. The spacious office was decorated with fabric wall-coverings, some rare wooden chairs, and the famous stained-glass desk with its images of the Blessed Martyrs—a ministry heirloom from before the revolution.

“You may leave us, Vasily,” Mallove told the earnest-but-stupid guard. His hand stayed posed on his chin.

“But, sir—”

“That will be all.”

Great—whatever happened next, Mallove didn’t want witnesses. The door clicked shut behind Max. He had an impulse to stand at parade rest, hands behind him—like all of the government bureaucracy, Education was part of the military—but the cuffs made that impossible.

“Sir, may I have these off?” Max lifted his bound wrists.

Mallove’s chair creaked as he spun around. Instead of answering the question, he pulled open a drawer, removed a gun, and aimed it at Max’s head.

“Someone in my Department is disloyal,” Mallove said. “What I need to know, Max, is it you?”

Max stared past the barrel into Mallove’s eyes. “Sir, if you want me to be disloyal, I will be.”

If it was going to be theatrics, Max could play his role.

They stared at each other until Mallove, with exaggerated casualness, placed the gun, still charged, still aimed at Max, on the desk and leaned back in his chair. “A big change is coming, Max. Before it arrives, I have to root out every traitor—”

Cold fear prickled the back of Max’s neck. “Is Drozhin dead?”

Mallove paused, frowning in irritation at the interruption. “I know we all think of General Drozhin as the man who eats knives just so he can shit on people to kill them. But even he is just another mortal man.”

“That’s why I asked. Is he dead?”

Mallove folded his hands together and looked away. “Not yet, not quite.”

Max held his breath. Dmitri Drozhin was Max’s other boss. Drozhin, the last great patriarch of the revolution, Director of the Department of Intelligence, in charge of the spies, the secret police, and the assassins. Max had been all three for Drozhin, including his deep undercover spy on Mallove. Max’s last mission in space, aboard the spy ship Gethsemane, had gone badly when his orders from Drozhin conflicted with his orders from Mallove.

And now here he was a prisoner. Very likely, he had finally been caught as a double agent. Maybe Meredith, his wife, from long ago and that other identity, would use their soil ration to plant flowers for him in the cemetery.

“Too bad,” he said to the news about Drozhin.

Mallove leaned forward, resting his hand on the gun. “What happened aboard the Gethsemane? To Lukinov, I mean.”

The implication was that he knew something. Answer right, or I’ll still shoot you. For once, Max didn’t think Mallove was acting. What could he say safely? What did Mallove know and what did he only guess? Max jerked his hands apart—the metal cuffs dug into his wrists as the chain snapped taut. He was thinking about this wrong: if he wanted to survive, the question was not what did Mallove know, but what did he want to hear?

“It would seem,” Max said, reciting the official version, “that Lukinov tried to sabotage the ship’s nuclear reactor, that he ended up killing himself when he botched it.”

Mallove sketched a whirligig in the air with his free hand, signifying his opinion of the official version. “Yes, but what really happened?”

What really happened is that Max caught Lukinov spying for Mallove. Max garrotted him and sabotaged the ship so he could return home to report to his secret boss. He paused for a second, trying to guess Mallove’s fear. “I don’t think Lukinov was selling us out to the Adareans, no matter what Intelligence says,” he said. “More likely it had something to do with his gambling habit.”

Mallove’s scarred lip twitched—a tell.

The gambling habit. That was probably how Mallove blackmailed Lukinov into spying for him. Now Mallove was afraid of being caught.

Max decided to push his luck. “I witnessed Lukinov gambling with the captain,” he said. “The sabotage was intended to cover up some secret, only it went wrong. I’m sure I was arrested on trumped-up charges in order to keep me from investigating the captain. If we find out who Lukinov had been gambling with at home before—”

Mallove interrupted. “That doesn’t matter. So his body’s still floating out there in space?”

“Yes. He was ejected during a hull breach in the radiation clean-up.”

“Well, you can rest easy. I’ve insisted that we recover Lukinov’s body. If anything’s been hidden, we’ll find it.”

Like the ligature marks Max left on Lukinov’s neck? That would wreck his story. “Excellent news,” he said.

Metal runners squeaked as Mallove pulled open another stained glass drawer and retrieved a crystal bottle of vodka with two tumblers. He filled one and took a sip. “How long have you been with Political Education, Max?”

Longer than you, Max thought. He’d been there at Drozhin’s side when the old man decided to form Political Education. Together, they created a new identity for Max when he joined it as a mole. “Since the beginning. It was my first posting when I joined the service.”

“Mine too.” Mallove tapped his fingers on the glass. “The treason charges against you are laughable, Max. I’m sure Drozhin locked you up because he knows you’re one of the key men in my Department.”

Yes, why had Drozhin’s department locked him up as soon as the ship landed? Disregarding the captain’s official charges against him, Max was still trying to figure that one out. He’d gone from being the prisoner of one boss to the prisoner of another. What did the Bible say about serving two masters?

He rattled the links on his cuffs. “If the charges are so laughable, maybe we could take these off.”

Again, Mallove ignored his request. “Let’s speak frankly. Drozhin’s old, he’s sick, he’s going to die soon. Maybe within days. Without him, Intelligence will be in complete disarray.”

And the people he’s protected, like me, Max thought, we’re all compost.

Mallove picked up the gun. Max tensed, ready to take the bolt.

But Mallove didn’t notice him flinch; he was too intent on swiveling his chair to point the gun out the window. “The fact is, Intelligence is done for once the old man dies. Drozhin never promoted anyone smart enough to replace him. So when he dies, there will be a battle for power.”

There was more than some truth in that. “You think it’ll be a physical battle?”

Mallove pretended to shoot people out the window, as if he wanted a physical battle. “There won’t be soldiers in the streets,” he said. “Those days are long behind us. Yes, men will be discredited, forced to leave their positions, and senior officers will go to prison. But if I surround myself with enough loyal men, all that power will be mine.”

Which would be a disaster for the planet, and all their attempts to change it for the better. “You think there’s a traitor within Education?”

“I’m sure of it, at least two.” Mallove spun around, pointing the gun directly at Max.

This time Max didn’t jump. Mallove paused a moment, then set the gun down. The metal clicked hard on a slab of colored glass depicting the assassination of Brother Porluck.

Mallove chuckled to himself. “ ‘I’ll be disloyal if you order me to, sir.’ Now there’s loyalty for you. Drozhin doesn’t have anyone like that.” He tapped the intercom. “Anatoly, bring in the key.”

Max released a sigh of relief. For the first time, he thought he might survive this interview.

The door swung open quietly. The admin entered and unlocked Max’s cuffs. Anatoly was a competent, scholarly officer, the kind who plotted out military campaigns on spreadsheets instead of maps. His gaze lingered on the desk, on the gun backlit by bulbs behind the stained glass image of the fall of the Temple, and on Mallove’s hand, which rested with deliberate casualness by the pistol’s trigger.

Max rubbed his sore wrists, and wondered what part of this tableau was for him and what part was for Anatoly. With Mallove, there were always wheels inside of wheels.

“Anything else, sir?” Anatoly asked.

“There are some things still up in the air—kinda like clay pigeons.” Mallove barked out a laugh at his own joke and pretended to shoot one. “Get reservations for three down at Pillars of Salt. The booth across from the door.”

Anatoly said, “Yes, sir,” and reached in his pocket for a phone.

Max’s mouth watered at the prospect of dinner from Pillars of Salt. He had lamb medallions on a bed of saffron couscous the last time he was there, a few years ago, and hadn’t eaten that well since. That had been with Meredith, to celebrate their wedding anniversary—

He shut down that line of thinking. He kept his life strictly compartmentalized, different parts of it sealed behind bulkheads. This was no time to weaken the seals.

Mallove capped the vodka and put it in a drawer, along with the weapon. Scene over, time to put the props away. The second glass, intended for Max, had been forgotten.

“I want you to help me find the traitor, Max,” Mallove said. “Let’s root out Drozhin’s spies.”

“I’m the man to do it,” Max said, without a hint of irony. Maybe he could cast suspicion on Mallove’s best men, and weaken Education in the process.

“Anatoly has already compiled a short list of suspects. The two of you together will find Drozhin’s moles.”

Max carefully avoided meeting the admin’s gaze. “Are you sure Anatoly has time for this, with all his other duties?”

“He’ll make time,” Mallove said. “This is the most important job I have and you’re the two best men I’ve got.”

That’s what Max feared. Anatoly was smart, and Max didn’t want to risk being caught by him. The admin stared at Max over the rim of his glasses, as if he were already trying to peer through his facade. He maintained eye contact the whole time he tapped out reservations and made a call to Mallove’s driver to bring around a car. He looked like he wanted to say something; Max wondered what it was.

Anatoly’s gaze flicked to Mallove. “They have the booth ready, sir.” Then he held out his hand to Max. “It’s good to have you back, Nick.”

Max forced a grin. Nick was short for Nikomedes—Anatoly had always called him Old Nick, said he was as ugly as Satan and twice as mean. He clasped Anatoly’s hand, hard. “It’s damn good to be back, Annie.”

He knew the admin hated the girly contraction of his name, but he grinned back. Max’s first order of business would be getting Anatoly off this assignment.

They left the office together, bootsoles echoing on concrete as they stomped down the main stairwell, which was plain and unpainted. The architecture was plain for a moral as well as a practical purpose. The settlers of Jesusalem had called themselves Plain Christians, 21st-century religious fundamentalists who feared the advances of science and considered all genetic engineering abominations. After all, if man was made in the form of God, any changes in that form amounted to a renunciation of the divine. They’d started in the old United States, in North America, but had found many of their converts later in Europe, especially the former Soviet republics.

Ironically, it was the technology the Plain Christians feared that allowed the survival of their religion. When biocomputers created the singular new intelligence that made space travel possible, they sunk all their resources into a mass migration out to the first marginally habitable planet no one else wanted, a primitive place with surface water and just enough ocean-algae-cognate to produce breathable levels of oxygen. Everything beyond that was rock and sand and struggle, a desert for the devout. Publicly they claimed to keep their buildings austere and luxuryless as penance; the truth was that terraforming went slowly and poorly, and plain was all they could manage.

When they exited the stairwell and crossed the main lobby, the Adarean rose from his bench and came toward them.

Max looked at him more closely this time. The Adarean was too tall, with joints and proportions that were off, inhuman even before you noticed the green color.

“Willem,” the Adarean called out to Mallove, coming forward. Like they were old friends. Adareans hated hierarchies. “I’ve been waiting days to see you.”

“Ah,” Mallove said, his face momentarily blank as he thought about which script he was performing. Then he smiled, cold, frosty, as blinding as the sun on a comet. “How good to see you again, comrade Patience.”

For a second, Max wondered if the Patience were a joke; the Adareans who came to Jesusalem sometimes named themselves for traits they admired, but Patience?

Mallove didn’t offer his hand.

“I’m here to protest recent acts of violence against innocent Adareans and ask for a halt to today’s execution, late though it may be,” Patience told Mallove. He seemed very agitated, looking up as if he expected to hear other voices.

Mallove took the stern role now. “But you chose to come to Jesusalem, knowing the history between our planets and accepting the personal risks.”

“Between our planets?” The Adarean’s voice rose into that unsettling mid-range that could be either male or female. “What does that mean? Planets don’t interact—individual people do. You know that we have nothing to do with the Adareans who came here before us. They were different people.”

A group of Adareans had come before the revolution to join the Plain Christian church. When the old patriarchs were losing the war in the cities, a few radical Adareans showed them how to fashion nuclear weapons from the fissionable undecayed uranium-235 sometimes found in the young planet’s surface. They’d nuked the revolutionary stronghold of New Nazareth, almost reversing the war.

The surviving leaders declared war on Adares, although they were in no position to prosecute it at the time. And the people, even those not originally for the revolution, had rallied in their hatred of the impure, genetically-altered Adareans. The pigmen. The abomination. The Beast. It gave all the people of the planet a common enemy to hate besides each other. A rallying cry that saved the planet.

“Look,” Max said. “What happened to your friend, it’s nothing personal. It’s just politics.”

Mallove opened his hand with a dramatic flourish. “Exactly. It’s politics. Perhaps you should go protest at the Department of Intelligence.”

“I did!” Patience said. His hair bristled, moving like grass in the wind. “They said they couldn’t do anything to stop the execution and told me that I needed Education.”

“Well, there you have it,” Mallove quipped. “Consider today’s execution educational.”

Mallove walked toward the door, Anatoly in his wake; guards blocked the Adarean to prevent him from following. Max sniffed something sour in the air—the briefing was that Adareans communicated with scent, but no one had any proof.

“I’ve been looking over your files while we were fighting to get you out of that prison cell,” Mallove was saying as Max caught up.

“Trying to decide if I was worth the effort?” Max asked.

Mallove grinned. “You must be. Drozhin did everything in his power to keep us from knowing that he held you prisoner. Fortunately I have my own sources. Of all the senior officers I have, Max, you’ve spent the least amount of time at headquarters.”

“Yes, sir,” Max said. The guard opened the door. Hot air from the plaza washed over them.

“For over twenty years, you’ve gone from one field posting to the next,” Mallove said. “Never a desk rotation. That’s not typical at all.”

He was asking for an explanation.

“It’s been easier to keep fighting the revolution that way,” Max said, knowing it was the right thing to say, but more than half-believing it. “To change the planet, we have to change one mind at a time, until everyone’s transformed.”

The cost of terraforming a primitive planet was too high; it required too much sacrifice. People had to be true believers in something to do it.

“That’s been good so far, Max,” Mallove said with an almost avuncular tolerance. “But we’re moving the battlefield to another level now and we need a bigger vision.”

Max made a mental note: Mallove repeated his earlier war metaphor—he wanted to be seen by history as a great general, even though he came to the revolution late, after the fighting was over.

Max scanned the courtyard and reminded himself that the fighting was over. The Department of Political Education sat on a peaceful street. Headquarters was an old school building: the ostensible symbol was that Education was part of the people, right out in the neighborhood, not set off behind barricades like the secret police in Intelligence. Older, smaller buildings bunched up around it, with windowbox gardens and colorful banners hanging from the rooftops.

Their limousine pulled up to the curb.

Mallove’s personal bodyguard jumped to open the door. Mallove paused, lifted his head to the sky, and said, with a grin like a vid general’s, “Into the battle!”

Which is when Max noticed the armed gunmen—soldiers for certain, special forces, but in street clothes, nondescript browns and grays—step out from the alleys and doorways. Education’s goons always made extravagant gestures, eager to be seen and feared. These moved smoothly, almost gliding, with a distinct lack of threat that made Max’s skin prickle.

He grabbed Anatoly’s shoulder, out of reflex, one comrade to another, and hissed, “Run!”

The first of the soldiers lifted his gun and shot Mallove’s driver in the back of the head with a sound no louder than a muffled pop.

Max raised his hands above his head, turned away, dropped his chin toward his chest. Look, I’m no danger, I don’t see a thing. He walked toward the nearest corner.

Another muffled pop, and a shout to “Get down! Get the hell down!” and Anatoly’s voice, or maybe Mallove’s, shouted his name. One of the gray men stepped out from the corner, gun aimed pointblank at his eye.

Guards burst out of Education’s lobby at the same moment, firing wildly. Automatic gunfire, old-fashioned ballistics, blasted from the windows directly overhead.

The gray man lifted his eyes for a split second as the shots sounded above him. Max attacked, closing his hand over the barrel of the gun and turning it back into the man’s chest, squeezing the trigger with his finger over the other man’s. Volts shot through the body, dropped him twitching to the ground. Max’s arm went numb to his elbow.

For the next few seconds everything dissolved in the chaos of crossfire and men diving for cover. With the gun still in his hand, Max emptied the man’s pockets into his—a little cash, nothing more. He rounded the corner, ran to the next one, turned. Shop keep ers and residents were coming out into the street at the sounds of fighting.

So Mallove had been wrong. Intelligence did mean to have a battle in the streets. And Max had let himself get trapped on the wrong side of the front lines. He would have been safer in his original prison cell.

He dodged down another alley, buttons flying as he ripped off his telltale charcoal-colored uniform shirt. His plain tee would draw less attention from snipers looking for the other color. Jamming the gun into his pants, he shoved his way into a group of old women with shopping bags full of bread and produce. He slouched, keeping his head down as he crossed the street in their midst.

“What—you didn’t have time to get dressed when her husband came in?” one of the old ladies sneered.

I’m not happy to see you, Max wanted to say. And that really is a gun in my pocket. He broke away from them at the far curb.

An unmarked government car—but black, with tinted windows, same as being marked—blew down the street toward Education. Max flattened into a doorway to let it pass.

A block away, on the edge of a rougher neighborhood, he slpped into a small shop and bought a phonecard, probably an illegal phonecard since the clerk accepted cash. Max stood in a corner by the window and watched the street. As he punched in the private number to Drozhin’s gatekeeper, the one he’d memorized and never used, he noticed scratch marks on his hand. He must’ve gotten them from the guard, when they struggled for the gun—

“What is it?” the voice on the other end said before the phone even rang.

“I need to speak to Uncle Wiggly,” Max said. “Peter Rabbit’s in troub—”

“Sorry, you have a wrong number.”

He was disconnected.

Just like he had been in Drozhin’s prison.

A thought hit Max with all the power of a sniper’s shot: what if Drozhin had already died? The mean old son of a bitch had to go sometime and, like everything else he did, he would probably do it in secret.

Max was screwed if that was the case. Who would take over Intelligence? Hubert was the nominal second in command, but he had no real power. Kostigan was the one to watch out for, but Drozhin probably had standing orders to have him assassinated on his own death. He wouldn’t trust that one without a thumb on him. The only one who knew Max personally was Obermeyer. He’d been Max’s case officer for years and reported directly to Drozhin. He was also certainly the one assigned to assassinate Kostigan, and it was unlikely he would live out the day after that.

So if Drozhin was dead, and Mallove had just been assassinated, which seemed to be the case, Max was unlikely to live out the day either. Anyone who didn’t kill him on purpose would do it by accident.

The clerk stared at him, at the bloody back of his hand, the half-uniform. Pictures of the coup were being broadcast on the screen. If the media was involved already, then the whole thing had been staged. So, yeah, he was screwed.

Max yanked a phonecard from the rack, shoved it at the clerk, tossed money at the counter. “Activate it.”

The clerk shook his head, pushed the money back.

The gun came out of Max’s pocket and the barrel came to rest on the clerk’s temple: Max nodded at the wedding ring on the man’s hand. “I’m going to use this to call my wife, tell her she’s in trouble. You let me do that, and then I’m gone.”

Keeping one eye on Max, the clerk rang up the sale and activated the phone.

It rang and rang until her voicemail clicked on. “This is the house of,” she used Max’s other name, his original one. Her voice was a bit rough—she joked it was from yelling at their children, but it was too many years spent outside in the planet’s harsh landscape, breathing grit. “He’s unable to speak to you right now, but leave a message and we’ll call back.”

He hesitated. “Honey, it’s me. I’m in the capital, but may be traveling soon. Don’t know when I’ll be back—”

Footsoldiers, dressed in the tan uniforms of Intelligence infantry, ran by the window. Max faded back behind the rack of apple chips.

“—I, I,” he couldn’t bring himself to say love, so he switched to their private code, “wish I was with you at the beach. Take care of yourself.”

He clicked off and looked up to see the clerk pointing the barrel of a shockprod at him.

Max let the phonecard slip from his hand. It clattered on the floor. For the second time in less than a half hour, he put his hands up in visible surrender, backing quickly toward the door.

He shoved the gun back in his pocket and hit the street running blind. The street was oddly quiet now except for shouts from one alley. Max turned the opposite way, sprinted down a residential street and over a wall into somebody’s garden, running through backyards and past astonished faces until he came to a corner lot occupied by one of the old Plain Churches, a long, low building that could have been a bunker if you bricked in the windows.

The revolutionaries had not eliminated the churches when they took over the government. Pastors who supported the new regime prospered; some churches, like this one, the Falter Sanctuary, found other uses as dropboxes where Drozhin’s spies passed information to Intelligence.

Max entered, circling the pews to reach the Holy Spirit Stations in the side chapel. Whispering a prayer, he opened the thumb-worn, ancient Bible at random, more for the sake of ritual than insight.

He closed his eyes, stabbed his finger at a page, and opened them again. Deuteronomy 14.2: “You are a people holy to the LORD your God, and he has chosen you out of all peoples on earth to be his special possession.”

And what exactly did that mean when they were no longer on earth? Theology had never been Max’s strong point, so he didn’t worry about it. He snatched up a slip of prayer paper and a pencil stub, then walked to the kneeling wall. He chose the spot farthest from the two women, probably mother and daughter, heads covered in similar red scarves, who were earnestly and quietly scratching out their prayer requests. The television screen in the corner cycled through the old videos of Renee Golden, the Golden Prophet, founder of the Plain Christians.

“God’s plan for us can be seen in the tests he sends us,” the Golden Prophet said.

Max recognized the sermon, the one she made on the banks of the river in Rostovon-Don, in southern Russia. Golden was American, but she proselytized heavily during two long missions to the old Soviet republics, returning through Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece. Hundreds of thousands followed her call to go into space. When she died before making the journey herself, it only made her more like Moses, destined never to reach the Holy Land. Her followers formed a polyglot community that never came together except by force—the force of her personality in the beginning, the force of hardship during the settlement of Jesusalem, and then, finally, under the Patriarchs and the revolution, the force of force.

Max hadn’t used this church dropbox in over a decade. He folded his hands and said an earnest prayer to the god of spies and all men caught behind enemy lines that there was still someone out there to receive it.

Picking up his pencil, he began to write. He hoped that whoever saw the old code recognized it.

“—Those of you who are listening to me now by way of satellite, I want you to join hands with us. Reach out and put your hand on the television screen—”

He wrote slowly. The old code was all language for family. Aunt meant one thing, uncle meant another, with trigger words that keyed off the meanings.

“—God has given us the design for a ship the same way He gave Noah the blueprints for the ark. Only now we are invited to ascend directly into heaven. Bring your prayers with you, into heaven, and hand-deliver them to God—”

Max folded the paper and dropped it in the slot.

“May I help you?”

A young pastor stood there in his ceremonial suit and tie. One of the angry young pastors, bent on reclaiming the church’s glory in the face of the secular regime, if Max guessed correctly.

“—God tells us not to mix with sinners, but this fallen world is full of sinners. Our only choice is to leave this world behind, to ascend—”

“Just making a prayer request,” Max replied softly. He dropped the pencil stub into the little cup.

“I don’t recognize you as a regular communicant.”

“The church is a sanctuary for all,” Max said.

The pastor glanced at Max’s state of half undress, his sweat, his bloody hand. “It’s funny how those who persecute the church run to it when it suits their needs.”

“—Are you ready for the test? You have a choice to make: you can die with the sinners or turn your face toward heaven and join the angels—”

The old woman at the other end of the pew grunted as she rose to her feet with the help of her daughter. “Anyone can change,” she chided the pastor. “Sometimes crisis is God’s way of showing us the need to repent.”

“Yes, Mrs. Yevenko,” the pastor said.

Max slipped away when the pastor spoke to her. There was nothing else to do here except hope that Obermeyer, or whoever, got his message and understood it. He pushed open the side door; the sun over the metal rooftops glared blindingly, and he blinked.

The hard muzzle of a gun pressed against his neck. “I’ll be happy to kill you,” a voice said. “Just give me an excuse.”

Max raised his hands in the air, for the third time today, this time in true surrender. “No need for that.”

The muzzle shoved hard against his head, knocking him off-balance. “I’ll decide what is and isn’t needed.” He reached into Max’s pocket and retrieved the gun. “Now walk toward Calvary Park.”

“Yes, sir,” Max said, obeying. These men were on his side, he had to remember that: they all served Intelligence, they all served Jesusalem. He’d tell them who he was right now, except for the possibility that Kostigan was in charge.

He walked at a non-provocative pace, neither too slow nor too fast. Close to the square, he saw other men being rounded up. No, not just men: there was a woman carrying a baby, tugging a cap down over its head. A little boy clutched the hem of her skirt, running to keep up. This district housed the employees and families of those who worked for the Department of Education. So they were all being rounded up, even the civilians. A clean sweep.

Two other men marched along under the gun of another soldier. One of them was in a tee-shirt, like Max, with a cross on the same chain as his dogtags. The other was a major from Education.

“Can you take this one for me?” shouted Max’s keeper.

The other soldier nodded yes, used his weapon to wave all three men up against a flat concrete wall. “Go stand over there—now!”

Perfect wall for an execution, Max thought as he stood against it. Lots of room for burn marks and bloodstains to impress and cow the public for years to come. Jesusalem was full of walls like that, but most of them were old.

While the soldier talked into his link, the other two prisoners whispered. The one with the cross said, “Hey, it’s me. Hey.”

The voice startled Max. The stupid-but-earnest guard—what was his name? “Vasily?”

“Yeah, what a mess. What’s going on?”

The major had different plans. “If we run three different directions, he can’t get us all.”

Vasily brushed his thumb nervously against his cross. “Yeah, but what about the one he does get?”

“Look,” Max whispered, covering his mouth with his hand like he was scratching his nose. “The guard’s just pretending to talk. He’s watching, waiting for us to run.”

Probably hoping for them to run. That way he could just shoot them and walk away. He might do it anyway, Max thought, even without provocation.

“I’ll go left first, draw his attention,” the major whispered. “You two take off the other way.”

It didn’t matter to Max if the guy got himself killed, but he didn’t want to get caught in the crossfire. When the major leaned, ready to spring away, Max slammed him into the wall. “Don’t do it!”

“Your mother’s a pig!”

“Move again and I’ll shoot all of you!” the guard yelled, running over with his weapon up.

Max looked him in the eye, held up his hands in what was turning into a habitual gesture. “Hey, I’m on your side—”

“Shut up!”

The guard hesitated. He wasn’t used to killing yet, wasn’t even used to hurting people. Maybe Drozhin recognized that problem with this generation of troops and was trying to blood them. That was possible too, if Drozhin was still alive. That was something Drozhin would do. Any explanation was possible at this point: it was making Max crazy. All he needed to do was hold on until he could make his contact and get away.

The guard listened to something in his ear bud, gestured with the gun. “That way. The transports are lined up in Calvary Park.”

“Transports?” the major asked. “Where are we—”

The butt of the rifle interrupted his sentence, scattering his words, along with his blood, over the road ahead of him as he sprawled.

“Did I give you permission to talk?” The guard, pulse jumping in his neck, hopped out of arm’s reach and jabbed his gun at them again. “Get up.”

Max tensed. The guard was working himself up to kill. It was clear three prisoners made him nervous. He felt outnumbered, unsure.

The major tried to push himself up, but his elbow buckled and he fell again. The guard jabbed his gun, pointing it at all of them in turn, “I said, get up.”

Vasily shouted, “Get up!”

Max hooked his hand under the major’s elbow and yanked him to his feet, grunting with the effort. He was thinking he could throw the major into the guard and then run—

Wheels squealed around the corner and a military recruit van commandeered for tonight’s mission braked to a stop just feet away from Max. A couple soldiers hopped out and the moment to run had passed. The major tore his arm away from Max, staggered to his feet. He’d never been blooded either, which is why he thought he could run.

“What the fuck is going on?” one of the new soldiers said. They all looked like children to Max, although they were older than he’d been during the revolution.

“I’m just following orders,” Max’s guard answered.

“Well, the whole thing is fucked,” the newcomer said. “What the fuck do we do with these fuckers?”

“Take them down to Calvary Park with the others.”

“God fucking damn it all. Jesus Golden.”

Guns jammed in their backs, the three men climbed into the back of the van. The new soldier grabbed the major. “I just fucking cleaned this, so don’t bleed all over the seat.”

“I am still your superior officer—”

His protest was cut short by the goose-pimpling electricity, the smell of ozone and singed flesh. The major clapped a hand to his burned shoulder but he didn’t cry out.

“Any other questions, traitor?” the new soldier asked. “No? Good.” He shoved the major in, slammed the door shut.

Well, they were all being blooded.

The only other occupant in the van wore civilian clothes. He was leaning forward, saying, “Was that a gun? What just happened?”

Vasily swallowed hard, lifted the cross to his lips, kissed it, and the major stared straight ahead, his wide mouth tight, grim. Max didn’t say anything either as the van rumbled away. They all leaned as the van sped around a corner. Max’s stomach, still empty, lurched with it.

“Why is this happening?” Vasily asked. “We’re all on the same side. I don’t understand.”

“I heard they assassinated Mallove,” the major said, quietly. “Shot to the head.”

Max wondered if the comment was an observation or if it was bait. He glanced at the floor, glanced out the window. “No, they didn’t. I was there when it happened.”

All their attention focused on him now, including the soldier on the other side of the cage up front.

“Mallove and his assistant, Anatoly,” Max said, “and some other senior officer were on their way out. There were shots fired by the soldiers, but only after all three were shoved into a car and taken away.”

The major stared at Max; so did the guard up front.

“What do you think it means?” the civilian asked.

“It means Drozhin’s probably dead,” the major said. “It means Kostigan has taken over Intelligence finally. And if they shoved all three guys in a car, it means they’re dead as soon as the interrogations are done.”

The civilian laughed nervously. “Drozhin’s not dead. He’s got more lives than Lazarus. I don’t think he’s ever going to die.”

“All of you, just shut up,” the soldier said as the van pulled to a stop. He and the driver got out.

“They’ll be satisfied with killing all the generals and half the majors,” the major said, with a rueful glance at his own insignia. “Most of the rest of you can expect some interrogation, some time in a cell, then reassignment. It won’t be too bad.”

When the civilian, probably a contractor of some sort caught in the Education buildings, spoke, his voice rose sharply. “They’re taking us down to the cells? They told me it was an emergency evacuation.”

“Don’t worry, they don’t have enough cells for all of us,” Max said. The major stared at him hard, again, as if trying to figure out who he was.

“See, that’s what I don’t understand,” Vasily asked. “Why are we doing this to each other? We’ve got a planet to finish terraforming. Hell, there’s a whole galaxy to explore.”

That was the real question, wasn’t it? After three generations of terraforming, the planet was still hardscrabble at best. Like people, it was deeply resistant to change.

The civilian jabbed a finger at him. “How can you talk about terraforming—”

A fist hammered on the side of the van. “Shut the fuck up in there.”

They fell quiet. Max folded his hands on his lap, leaned back, savoring the smell of antiseptic cleaners mixed with sweat. These other guys were on their own. All he had to do was avoid anything stupid now, get into the system and stay alive until some of the Intelligence people noticed him and pulled him out. He had to believe that would happen.

The major hooked his tongue into his cheek, then spat blood on the floor.

“Hey,” Vasily hissed. “Don’t do that. The guard said not to do that.”

The major scuffed at the blood with the sole of his shoe, smearing the red stain everywhere. He was swirling his tongue for another spit when the back door swung open.

“Get out,” the guard said, using his gun to herd them into a large crowd of men milling around in a hastily thrown up enclosure in Calvary Park. The gate clicked shut behind them. Nervous guards from Intelligence and the regular services patrolled around the outside of the chainlink fence.

Max circled the perimeter once, estimated about a hundred and thirty prisoners, most of them low-level Education bureaucrats or headquarters staff like Vasily. All men, which meant the families were being taken somewhere else. He tried to count the guards, but the numbers kept changing as men came and went. No familiar faces either, but then only Drozhin and Obermeyer would know him. He asked questions, trying to find out what people knew, but all he learned was that you could ask a question at one end of the crowd and hear it repeated as a statement of fact at the other end a few minutes later.

On the second pass around, someone clutched his arm.

“You!” The civilian from the van, still smelling like cologne and breath mints. “You’re the one who saw Mallove get away free. Do you think he’s negotiating for our release? What’s going on?”

Max stared at him until he let go. “I think Mallove is doing everything in his power right now.”

Let him interpret that as he might. Max walked away, the civilian trailing after, toward a noise at the gate.

A bald colonel in the sand-colored uniform of the regular services, backed by a small knot of similarly dressed soldiers and a flock of medtechs in green scrub coats, appeared at the fence. He kicked the chainlink at the main gate until the crowd all looked that way. He lifted a bullhorn to his mouth. “We know some of you were injured during today’s unfortunate safety evacuation—”

“It’s unfortunate more of you weren’t hurt,” someone shouted. Max moved away from the voice. All he wanted to do was stay clear of trouble; screw everyone else.

“—so you’re all going to get a quick medical inspection for your own records, to make sure everything’s fine, before we process you out of here. Be quick about it, cooperate fully, and everything will be fine. Line up, single file, at the gate. Stee-rip!”

The command echoed those the younger soldiers would have heard recently at basic training camp, and it settled down those men, including Vasily, who pushed his way to the front of the line, eager to comply. Max fell into line a little back of the middle, giving him time to hide how much he was unnerved. There was no reason to strip for a medical inspection, but getting men to obey seemingly reasonable authority was the first step to making them obey wrongful authority. If anyone knew that, a political officer did.

While the men ahead of him joked with the guards and fished for information about their release, Max removed his clothes and folded them, shoes on top.

A scuffle sounded at the very front of the line. “Hey, I don’t have any injuries in there!”

“Get used to it,” cracked a voice behind him. “You know Intelligence has always been a pain in our ass.”

Laughter rippled through the line as they shuffled forward one spot. Max stilled his face to boredom. If Education’s best men joked like sheep under these circumstances, either they didn’t know their history or they were idiots. Or both.

When his turn in line came, he handed over his articles and was directed behind a small temporary screen. One guard held a gun on him, another held a bigger weapon on the line behind him, and a third man scanned his clothes, then tore off all the pockets and ripped open the seams and hems looking for hidden pockets. He had none in this pair, which he’d been issued in prison. A fourth man in medtech green ran a quick scan over his skin for subdermal implants and weapons.

“Bend over,” the medtech said. “Nothing personal, just doing my job.”

Max grunted. For a quick body cavity search, it was done as professionally and quickly as a prostate exam.

“Next,” the medtech said.

Max’s clothes were handed back, more rags than not. The guard dropped the pockets and belt loops on a folding table with other confiscated items. Dressing again was a challenge, as thin as Max was—the drawstring had been torn off his underwear, so his briefs drooped, and without a belt, his pants sagged around his hips.

An explosive battering jerked Max’s head around. In the garden by the playground, across from the enclosure, a jackhammer-truck dug a trench. While Max tried to figure out what it was doing, a shoving match erupted by the medtechs.

“Bend over!”

“Bend over yourself!”

The remaining guards rushed over, slammed the protesting man to the ground, and punched or threatened anyone else in line who looked likely to argue. Max held his pants up at the waist and went to the table with the confiscated items. He skipped over a pocketknife and a razor-cutter to grab two frutein bars, the only food he saw. He ripped one open and smashed it into his mouth, then rolled the other into the fold of his pants where he was holding them up.

“You! Move on!” Max stopped chewing, nodded his compliance to the guard, and walked past the objector, now pinned to the ground by three men. Without shoelaces, Max’s shoes kept slipping off.

The inspected prisoners mobbed together near the fence, most of them, like Max, holding up their pants. They were subdued, angry, frightened: their attention was focused on the excavation machine beside the garden, where it jackhammered a large pit in the bedrock beneath the thin layer of soil. The grass had been carefully cut back in strips and moved to the side first, so it could be replaced.

“Would make a nice grave,” someone said.

“Not so nice,” said someone else, but Vasily was there, shaking his head, saying, “It’s probably for latrines.”

“Moron,” someone else shouted. “Why not truck in compost booths?”

“Maybe they don’t have enough,” Vasily said.

His innocence and capacity for rationalization was almost charming. Max avoided him. The officer with the bullhorn outside the fence waved the workmen to stop and climbed down into the hole. His bald head and shoulders stuck out of the top. He shouted orders, indicated a certain depth, climbed back out.

Most of the men began to say that it was a grave, but the hole wasn’t big enough for dozens of men. Max jostled his way into the middle of the mob for camouflage.

“Ow, watch my foot,” someone next to him said.

“Sorry.”

“You’re lucky all they took were your shoelaces,” the man said. “They took my boots. It’s like we’re all on suicide watch.”

“Worst case of suicide I ever saw,” Max said. “A hundred men shot themselves in the back, then filled in their own grave.”

A few men chuckled. Outside the fence, a van pulled up—Max thought it might have been the same one they’d been transported in, with the bloody floor in back. It drove slowly over the mounds of colored stone until it reached the pit, where it unloaded a half dozen Adareans. One of them was Patience, who’d been waiting outside Mallove’s office earlier in the day. Seemed like years ago.

The jackhammer continued its work, sending up spectral clouds of dust in the twilight. A backhoe crowded up against the other side of the pit, scooping out buckets of broken rock whenever the jackhammer paused. While the Adareans milled around, their greenish skin looking sickly and pale, the last of Max’s fellow prisoners finished their “health” inspection and crowded up against the fence. Their cold, clammy skin pressed against Max as they tried to see what was happening outside.

“Weedheads!” one of the prisoners yelled.

“Go home, pig-men!” another shouted.

“Abomination!”

Within seconds, all their anger and fear and venom was directed at the Adareans. The chainlink rattled in rising pitch with their voices.

Outside, the Adareans clustered together. Even this far away, Max thought he could smell something sour waft from them. If the soldiers opened the gates and shoved the six into the compound right now, there’d be a massacre.

Instead the officer with the bullhorn stomped over to the Adareans, barking sharp orders, telling them to stand in the pit. When they hesitated, he waved his hands and guards rushed forward, shoving them down.

Tall as they were, the Adareans’ heads showed above the rim of the pit. “It’s not deep enough!” shouted one of the hecklers.

“Shoot them and they’ll fit,” shouted another and laughter rippled through the crowd. Max remained an island of silence.

Soldiers with shovels appeared around the hole and began spading the jackhammer gravel into it as quickly as they could. The Adareans shouted and struggled, but other guards kept them in place. Soon the weight of the stone pinned them where they were, until all that stuck above the surface was their bleeding, dusty heads.

The island of silence spread on Max’s side of the fence, broken only by someone’s half-suppressed laughter.

“They going to leave them there?” someone whispered.

No, Max thought, no, they weren’t.

The scene was another tableau, like the one in Mallove’s office. It reminded him of what they’d done, as guerillas, with the Adareans they caught during the revolution. But he wasn’t sure whether this was a sign that Drozhin was still alive and reviving old tactics, or that Kostigan had taken over and was reinventing them.

The men with shovels tamped the lumpy gravel down smooth around their Adareans. The long grassy hair on their skulls was coated with a layer of dust. One of the Adareans alternated between weeping and panting. A couple others lolled unconscious.

“Are they trying to plant them to see if they’ll grow?” one of the young men asked.

“What the hell are they doing?”

Teaching us a lesson, Max thought.

The work crew stepped out of the way while someone went to the equipment shed and liberated the mower.

Max turned away and left the crowd. He leaned on the far fence, head sagging, as the mower made its charge across the small park. As the first shrill scream sounded, he squeezed his eyes shut, and he kept them shut as the grinding sound of the blades whirred down to bare gravel.

A few prisoners cheered the executions; others laughed nervously, trying to get others to join them. One man retched. Most fell silent, and several drifted back towards Max.

The colonel with the bullhorn walked back over to the enclosure. “Listen up,” he shouted. “You’re all enemies of Jesusalem. You know in your heart what your crimes are, so we don’t need to tell you.”

He would have been a good political officer, Max thought.

“Unlike these off-worlder animals,” the voice from the bullhorn continued, “we believe that you can repent of your evil choices”—interesting, Max thought, that their secular government used the same language as the religious one that preceded it—“and return to being productive citizens. We know that you were all misled by the criminal Mallove. Reject him and you’ll be accepted back into society.”

A surge toward the fence came from men ready to admit to, confess to, anything, for immediate release.

“I’m innocent,” the civilian contractor was yelling as he shoved his way to the gate. “I don’t even know Mallove.”

Bullhorn gave an order. Guards cracked the gate while the sizzle of shock rifles kept the prisoners at bay; one guard yanked the civilian out of the compound before locking the gate again. The whole mob protested and yelled that they too were innocent. Bullhorn pulled out a handgun, placed it against the citizen’s forehead and shot him. His body collapsed to the ground. A shiver went through the mob around Max.

“We know all of you are guilty,” Bullhorn shouted, “You will now have to redeem yourself through penance.”

Yes, Max thought, a terrific political officer.

A large articulated bus, hastily armored with bars outside the windows, rumbled up to the gate.

“This is your ride,” Bullhorn said. “Next stop, fabulous seaside beach resorts. Bring your swimsuits, towels, and tiny shovels. All aboard!”

The guards with shockguns opened the gate and herded the prisoners into the bus. They shuffled past the civilian’s body, sprawled facedown on the rock. Professionally, Max admired that detail—it worked on so many levels: it showed the men that if civilians weren’t safe, neither were they. And if Adareans could be killed, and if civilians could be killed, it made the prisoners identify more with the men with guns.

He stepped onto the bus, noting that it was one of the charter buses that mothers used to visit their children who’d moved to the new cities close to the coast. Another nice detail. Very reassuring.

Max shouldered his way back to the other door, then to the sliding door that connected the front compartment to the back, and found both locked. Not so reassuring.

The bus had three sections—a separate cab where the driver was safe from the passengers, important for this ride, followed by two individual sections, each with forty-eight seats. They’d be shoving sixty to seventy men in each.

Someone bumped into him, then someone else bumped them both. Bodies pressed close, the cumulative odor of sweat and bad breath and stale lunch was almost overwhelming. Guards yelled, “Get in, get back from the door!” as they physically packed the last few men on board. It felt like a grotesque game of musical chairs, with cursing for music and metal benches for chairs. The door snapped shut, stayed shut even as men pushed back. Through the window, Max saw guards herd more men into the second compartment.

A hand snaked through the bodies and grabbed hold of Max. Max twisted, tried to tug free, but it only had the effect of reeling the man to him.

“Hey, it’s me, Vasily.”

“I don’t really need a guard any more,” Max said.

“The front doors are locked.”

“And the back doors and the compartment door.”

“What are we going to do?” Vasily said. “You’re a senior political officer—”

“Sh, sh, sh,” Max said, squeezing a hand up in Vasily’s face to make him shut up.

“Nikomedes—that’s it!” a voice said from the bench beside them. The major from the van. His cheek was bruised, his lip swollen, where he’d been hit in the face. “I knew I knew you.”

“I’m sorry,” Max said.

“Major Benjamin Georgiev,” the man said, squeezing over on the bench, making room for Max. “I served aboard the Jericho with you, years ago.”

“You were the radio tech,” Max said, sitting, recalling the name once it was matched to the ship. Another chance to keep a low profile, remain invisible, slipped away. The bus lurched into motion, throwing everyone off balance, raising a chorus of curses. “I thought you were regular service.”

“Transferred. Got inspired by the spirit of the revolution to join Education.” Georgiev’s eyes surveyed the bus. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“You two,” Vasily interrupted. “You know how to get out of this, right?”

Georgiev ignored Vasily. “Killing those Adareans, that was a mistake,” he said to Max. “That’ll bring down the power of Adares, first with political pressure, then with force.”

“Maybe,” Max answered. “But Intelligence can get away with killing Adareans during the first throes of the purge. They’ll blame it on runaway elements, punish some token low-level grunts, execute someone prominent, then appease the Adareans later.”

“I doubt it’ll stop there—it never does. Did you ever hear the one about the secret police?” Georgiev asked.

“Probably,” Max said. Vasily asked, “Which one?”

Georgiev lifted his head toward Vasily. “The secret police came for the Adareans and no one tried to stop them, so they took the Adareans away.”

Max recognized the old chestnut; Vasily said, “Yeah?”

“Then the secret police came for the unchristians and no one tried to stop them, so all the uns were taken away. Then the secret police came for the sinners—the fornicators, the secret body polluters, the users of forbidden technology—and no one tried to stop them.”

“So they took the sinners away,” Vasily finished.

“Right,” Georgiev said. “Finally the secret police came for honest men like you and me.”

Max finished the joke. “And there was no one left to stop them.”

“No,” Georgiev said. “When they came for me, I said, ‘Welcome, brother. Isn’t it good to be the secret police?’ ”

After a pause, Vasily chuckled. The bus braked hard, throwing them back in their seats, then sped up again.

A young man with a soft chin leaned in from the bench beside them. “I heard you guys talking. You know, that guy they shot at the gate—”

“The accountant?” Georgiev asked. “He told me he was an accountant.”

“No he wasn’t, that’s what I’m saying.” He jerked his thumb down the aisle. “Guy back there says he recognized him as an actor. It was all staged. Guy got up and walked away while we were getting on the bus.”

“Not walked,” interrupted another kid hanging from an overhead rack. “There were two guys, one on either side of him, helping him, made it look like they were dragging him, but you could tell he was faking it.”

“See, they’re just trying to scare us,” the first kid said. He laughed, like he wasn’t fooled.

“Well, it’s working,” Vasily said, rubbing his throat, where his cross would’ve been. “I’m scared.”

“The Adareans, that was fake too,” Max said. “Really great bunch of actors.”

The kid sitting down, the one with the soft chin, looked away and didn’t say anything. But the one hanging from the strap said, “Yeah, the whole thing is a big scam. I hear Mallove and Drozhin worked it out together, plan to combine the two departments. Mallove’s going to take over as soon as Drozhin’s dead.”

The pitch of conversation rose around them, a dozen variations of the same stories being told, repeated, and invented. Their small group sat quietly for a second.

Max coughed. “Did you ever hear the one that goes, how can you tell when a rumor about Drozhin is true?”

Major Georgiev stared at Max, his face carefully blank. The two kids waited for the answer. Finally, Vasily said, “How?”

Max aimed his finger like a gun at the other man’s head. “ ‘What did you just say?’ ”

Georgiev smirked and the kids chuckled nervously. Max leaned back, closed his eyes, ignored the press of bodies. His day had started as a prisoner, waiting to hear from his contact in Intelligence. His day ended as a prisoner, waiting to hear from his contacts in Intelligence. Nothing had changed. But then he thought about the distance from the Adarean baptism at the execution that morning to the brutal murder of the Adareans in the park, and it felt as if everything had changed.

As he listened to the sound of the wheels, all he could think of was the roar of the mower bladers as the tractor rolled toward the Adareans trapped in the pit.

“WAKE UP, NIKOMEDES.” A hand shook him.

Before he was completely awake, Max deflected the hand and turned the wrist. He snapped alert quick enough to stop before he broke it. Major Georgiev bent over him. “What?”

“We’re passing through the outskirts of Lost Angeles—it’s night, the city’s big enough to hide most of us.”

“What’s the plan? There are bars welded on the windows, and the doors are locked.” He’d watched younger men waste themselves for hours trying to find a way out, everything from tearing through the panels to breaking windows. One of them had been cut badly on broken glass. Wind whistled through the broken windows; combined with the night temperatures, it would have chilled the ride to the point of hypothermia if not for the warmth of the bodies jammed together.

“We’re going to rock the bus, tip it over,” Georgiev said. “I could use your help organizing these kids.”

Max straightened in his seat. “Tipping the bus—that will get us out how?”

“They’ll have to empty the bus then. We’ll overpower them, make a break for it.”

“You’re on your own.” He leaned back again.

“To think that I was ever inspired by you,” Georgiev sneered. “You’re a coward.”

And you’re a fool, Max wanted to respond. He had nothing against escape, but suicide? “Don’t play into their hands.”

“This morning,” Georgiev said, looking around, “we were all part of an organization, each of us knowing our role and function. Tonight we are starving, thirsty outcasts, deprived of basic necessities. But we’re still men, we have to do something.”

There were murmurs of “amen” and “witness” from the men around them.

“Don’t you think Intelligence’s purpose is to reduce and dispirit us?” Max asked.

“Yes, but—”

“So what do you think they’ll do to anyone who goes against their intentions early on?” Max asked. “What would your response be? To anyone who tries to lead?”

Georgiev said nothing.

“You would destroy the ring leaders as an example,” Max said, answering his own question. “And first you would create a situation where you expect people to step up, just so you can make examples of them. It’s what I would do.”

“I’m not you,” Georgiev said. “And I believe this is all a mistake. Those are our fellow soldiers out there, our brothers and cousins. If we force them to pay attention to us, they’ll listen. And if they don’t, we’ll overwhelm them.”

Murmurs of “yeah” and “they have to listen.”

“You’ve been hit in the face and burned and you still say that?” Max said, leaning back in his seat. “We save ourselves. No purge lasts forever.”

“You’re pathetic,” Georgiev said and turned away.

Vasily, hand at the invisible cross at his throat, stared at Max, shook his head, and followed Georgiev.

Georgiev had no trouble organizing the men: he was the senior officer on board and soldiers were trained to love a hierarchy, taught to do something instead of nothing. After explaining his plan to tip the bus, he said, “All right, on the count of three, we all throw ourselves to starboard. Is that clear? One! Two!”

“Wait, wait, wait,” cried one voice, and then others said, “Stop,” and Georgiev yelled, “Wait, stop!”

The compartment was dark, but lights outside rolled front to back, front to back, illuminating puzzled faces. Finally, someone said, “Which side’s starboard?”

Max smirked. Most of the men had only served groundside.

Georgiev rattled the locked door. “The doors are port, the other side is starboard. We want to tip over to starboard, so we can climb out the doors on top.”

Murmurs of “got it” and “all right” were followed by Georgiev resuming the count. Max braced his feet on the floor and grabbed hold of the bench.

On three the mob of men surged toward the starboard side. The bus rocked—about as much as it did when it hit a bad pothole.

“That was pretty effective,” Max said, but Georgiev was shouting out encouragement and instructions: “All right, that was a good first try. Let’s all squeeze over to port, to the door side, and do it again.”

Men crushed Max against the side. He smelled urine mixed in with all the other lockerroom odors.

“Three!”

This time the men yelled as they surged to the other side.

This time there was a noticeable rock.

“Good work, men,” Georgiev shouted. “Now we’re going to rock it back and forth. As soon as we hit port side, the door side over here”—he leaned over and banged the door—“I want you all to run back to starboard, over here. Got it?”

Mumbles of “got it” and “yes, sir.”

“What? I can’t hear you!”

“YES, SIR!”

On three, they all shouted and threw themselves at the port side. Max brought up his arm to cover his head. This time the bus rocked again, though no more than it would be by the wind coming off the escarpment this time of year.

“Starboard!” Georgiev ordered, and with a roar, they immediately threw themselves at the other side. Several men tumbled to the floor in the dark, but despite the blindness and swearing, the rock on the other side was bigger.

Georgiev got them cheering and clapping for themselves, then set up a rhythm, charging one side, then the other. As Max persisted in staying in his seat, knees and elbows hit him with every rush, even though he pulled his legs up on the seat. He deflected some blows, braced and took the others.

“Come on,” Vasily shouted, all excited.

Pounding from the compartment behind them led to a shouted exchange of plans. On the first combined rush, the two compartments ran toward different sides, cancelling each other’s efforts. One of the young men leaned up against the back wall, and yelled, “Starboard, you morons, starboard!”

“Hurry,” Georgiev shouted. “We’re almost through Lost Angeles!”

Renewed effort in both cars quickly led to rocking until the bus tipped up, wheels off the ground. As it swerved suddenly on the road, bouncing down again, the men fell silent, all but two or three forgetting to finish the charge back to the other side.

“That’s it, we can do it!” Georgiev shouted. “Come on, get up, let’s start over!”

The men were so absorbed in rocking the bus that only Max noticed it slowing or saw the headlights of the dustskimmers outside. The bus braked to a stop as a row of floodlights cut through the barred windows, freezing the unshaven, sunken-eyed faces of Max’s fellow prisoners in a harsh light.

Guards ran over, the locks clattered to the pavement, and the door flew open. “Congratulations, that’s an impressive effort, good work, men,” the guard said. “Who’s the senior officer here?”

Georgiev squinted as he squeezed forward through the men. “Major Benjamin Georgiev, enlisted regular service in six-four. What we’d like—”

The guard shot him, discharging enough bolt to knock down two men beside him and pimple the hairs on Max’s arms a couple seat rows back. One of the kids shouted, tried to rush the guard, but the blue crackle from the gun just missed his head as the men near him dragged him to the floor.

Angry shouts from the second compartment were silenced by the sound of broken windows and a barrage of fire.

“Do we have another senior officer in here?” the guard asked. Vasily and a couple others looked toward Max, but he shook his head.

“Do we have someone else in charge?” the guard asked. When no one spoke, he said, “Good, because I’m a big believer in individual responsibility, and if anything else happens, I will hold each and every one of you individually responsible. Do I make myself clear?”

He grabbed Georgiev by the back of his shirt and dragged his body, face first, down the steps and outside. Other guards, nervous, guns up, shut and locked the doors again.

Vasily slumped down in the seat beside Max, his face a pale mask of disbelief and despair.

“Don’t worry,” Max said. “Georgiev is probably just faking it.”

The bus started rolling again, this time the skimmers flanking it in clear view. The city shrank behind them, and in moments, dust and grit came through the window, getting in Max’s eyes and under his tongue. Elsewhere in the darkened bus, someone coughed. A couple others whispered that they should have prepared weapons from the broken glass and jumped the guard. Retrospect always gave you a better plan.

Out of the corner of his eye, Max saw one of the kids stand up toward the side of the bus and unzip his pants to relieve himself.

“You might want to save that for drinking later,” Max shouted. Some of the men around them laughed; some didn’t.

“I got nothing to save it in,” the kid shouted back, which was true. “You want to come over, use it like a drinking fountain?”

Max smiled, and his lips cracked. “Nah, don’t think I want to touch that handle.”

Beside him, Vasily rubbed his throat. “I would do anything right now for a bathroom,” he whispered. “Hell, I’d personally murder Mallove for something to eat or some water to drink.”

Max’s own throat was parched and his stomach had been growling for hours. With a glance around, he unrolled the stolen fruitein bar from the waist of his pants. He tried to tear it open with his hands, couldn’t, ripped it open with his teeth. After breaking the bar in half, he said, “Sh,” and pressed half into Vasily’s palm.

“What? What’s—”

“Sh!” Then softly, Max added, “Eat it slow.”

He saw the blue shadow of Vasily’s hand shove the whole thing into his mouth. He tried to chew it slowly, but swallowed before Max ate his first small piece.

“Is there more?” Vasily whispered.

“No, that’s all.”

Later, while Max finished the last piece of the bar, Vasily asked, “Why did you share it?”

“Because where we’re going, I’ll need friends more than I need food right now. Can we look out for each other?”

“Yeah, of course,” Vasily whispered. “Whatever you need, whatever I can do, I’m the man.”

Max nodded, as if a contract had been signed, and Vasily dipped his head in return. Such a slight gesture in the dark. Vasily’s stomach rumbled and he crossed his hands over it. As the bus rolled on through the dark, Max searched his lap for crumbs, licking them off his finger, one by one. Wind coursed over the flatlands and through the broken windows, carrying a hint of salt and moisture.

All that was missing was the smell of compost and blood to complete the reclamation camp stink. As a political officer, he’d visited them more than once.

Men around him shifted, tried to sleep, but Max stared straight ahead into the rushing night.

SUNRISE, HARSH and unrelenting, cast brightness on their squalor even through the unbroken, tinted windows. The bus smelled of urine, shit, and sweat. Get used to it, Max told himself. His back ached and his legs were stiff from too many hours in the unyielding seat. In one corner, someone sobbed.

“That’s Machete Ridge,” Max said, pointing to a sharp line on the horizon. Vasily leaned across Max to look. “Do you see that bump, up there beside the road?” Max asked.

“That’s the reclamation camp,” Vasily said.

“That’s Faraway Farms. It used to be a reclamation camp.” Twenty years ago, Faraway Farms was the end of the line. Now it was just one more extension settlement on the coast, a few thousand people occupying rows of low brown buildings built around a series of narrow field-ponds.

“Maybe we’ll stop here,” Vasily suggested.

“Be wary of hope,” Max warned quietly. “It’d be too hard to guard everyone here. Too many other people, too much access to boats and skimmers.”

Still, an hour later, when the bus pulled over to the fresh water cisterns outside of Faraway, even Max had to fight against hope.

When he saw the guards hooking up a fire hose, he gave up hope and clawed his way over the benches to reach one of the open windows first. For a few blissful seconds, Max’s face was drenched as he opened his throat to gulp down the blast of water. Then he was fighting the weight of men on his back, crushing him for a drink. He was saved when the hose moved along to another window and the mass of bodies tumbled over the seatbacks after it. Everyone got at least a trickle of water, all except for two men too sick, or weak, to move, who lay moaning at the front end of the car. Max thought they were the ones caught by the shot that killed Georgiev. Men stretched their arms through the bars, begging for more, as the guards moved to the next car.

Max returned to his bench—he thought of it as his bench now, every man had marked out his two square feet of bus—and grunted as he sat. His whole body ached, needing exercise, a chance to stretch. Normally, he’d walk, if only to pace the aisle of the bus, but the aisle was filled too. A few men had stretched across the bench backs, feet on one seat, hands on another, to do push-ups, and others did chin-ups on the hanging straps. Max would do that soon, if he had to, to keep his strength. Of course, that was a hard choice too: spend his energy, not knowing when he’d eat or drink next, or save it in reserve.

Vasily plopped down, hair plastered to his head. He was scraping drops of water off his face, pushing them into his mouth. “I wouldn’t treat animals this way,” he told Max.

“That’s rather the point,” Max said, imitating him, feeling the scratch of his unshaven skin under the droplets.

“Your face is cut up pretty bad.”

“Is it?” He tasted the sharpness of blood on his fingertips, saw the bright red. “Must have been some glass shards in the window, got blown out by the blast of water.”

“When will we stop?”

“We’ve been on the road maybe twelve, fourteen hours. I forget where all the camps are now, but we’re not even halfway there.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Vasily said.

In the old days, during the schism, the men sent off to the reclamation camps for their religious beliefs—or disbeliefs—would pray to God. Max prayed to Drozhin. During the purge, Intelligence would be desperate for information. Obermeyer would check the dropboxes, realize Max was out there, and start looking for him. Survive long enough to give them time to find him: that was Max’s sole faith.

“I can’t believe they’re sending me to the reclamation camps,” Vasily said. “I didn’t do anything to deserve being treated like a murderer or a rapist.”

“So don’t let them turn you into one,” Max said. “Besides, the worst crime is still having the wrong beliefs.”

“But I did everything I was supposed to do, I enlisted in the government after my mandatory service, I—”

“Get over it. Keep your head low, do what you need to do to survive.”

“Do what I have to do to survive,” Vasily said, letting out a deep breath. He seemed like a decent guy, Max thought, not used to thinking, but thinking hard now. “Why did we have a revolution?” he asked. “I thought it was supposed to put a stop to this.”

Max remembered those days. The church schismed, and different groups insisted that they had the only true beliefs. With life depending on limited resources, each side wanted everything for the true believers. Even after the terra forming increased their yields, the two sides had been willing to kill each other to prove who had the direct word from God. “The revolution bought us twenty years.”

“What?”

“It’s been twenty years since we had this kind of purge,” Max said. Sure, there were individual murders here and there, usually arranged to look like accidents or poor health. But that was politics as usual anywhere. “We bought twenty years of peace where we hadn’t had it more than three years in a row for two generations. You grew up in peace, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah.”

“The revolution bought you that. So it was worth it. And if this purge buys us another twenty years, maybe it’ll be worth it too.”

Vasily shook his head. “I don’t know if I can think that way. I don’t know if I can ever think that way.”

“Maybe you won’t have to,” Max said, but doubtfully.

The bus continued all day, stopping only to relieve the drivers and escorts. Sometime that night, while they shivered to keep warm, one of the sick men died. The man next to him must’ve noticed he was cold, called his name, saying, “Pete, Piotr, aw, man, Pete, wake up, man, aw, I can’t believe this, aw, Pete, aw, man.”

The body had a noticeable reek, even above the stench of piss and shit and sweat that permeated the bus. By the time the sun came up again, all the men were collapsed in a mixture of exhaustion and depression. There were no more push-ups or chin-ups. The wind blew sand in through the broken windows, turning everyone a dusty brown. Max had grit in his eyes, his hair, in every wrinkle in his clothes and body.

With the hot sun baking down through the windows as they drove north toward the equator, Max leaned against the wall, listless, conserving his energy. An impromptu morgue was formed under the seats at the front of the bus, the corpse shrouded with what was left of his clothes, pulled up to cover his face. The next row back remained empty, even though there weren’t enough places to sit.

Max was light-headed, weak from lack of food and lack of water. They’d gone so far. But then the reclamation camps had to be isolated. Only after the new one was turned into a settlement, like Faraway, would they fill in the space between with cistern stations and rest spots.

Terrafarms. That’s what the first colonists had called them. Until the prisoners changed the name to terrorfarms. He closed his eyes.

“Are you all right?” Vasily shook his arm.

“Fine,” Max said.

“No, I mean, just now, I thought you were a corpse.”

“Funny,” Max rasped. “Back in the space fleet my nickname was the Corpse, because I always look this way.”

“Look, I’m counting on you,” Vasily said, leaning over earnestly, speaking low. “I don’t want to end up dead.”

Max felt sorry for him. Trying to swallow the dust in his throat, he said, “Here’s the thing you need to know to survive—”

He started coughing then, the grit in his dry throat damming the words, and he couldn’t stop. He needed something to drink, just a sip, and it would be fine, but there was nothing. Not even sucking on his shirt, which had been soaked, gave him any moisture, just more dust, the taste of salt, and more reason to cough.

Up front, one of the men screamed, roared in senseless rage. Within seconds the gangly redhead flung himself at the walls of the bus, one side, then the other, then kicked and stomped and slapped the men scattered on the benches and the floors, demanding that they do something, ordering them to get up and do something. The dustskimmers zipped in close, flanking the sides of the bus.

“Make him shut up,” Max yelled hoarsely between hacks. “Hold him down.” Others said the same thing from the safety of a similar distance.

At first, the men close by just tried to get out of the berserker’s way, but he grabbed one and began beating his face. Others tried to pull him away, but he lashed out at them, demanding water, demanding to be let off, demanding justice—things none of them had to give him. The more they held him, the harder he thrashed, until finally one of them lost it and punched him, telling him to “Shut up, just shut up,” and then they all started hitting him until they tumbled in a crushing pile to the floor.

One of the older men, a paunchy bureaucrat in his thirties, began pulling men off, ordering them to stop the beating. When they did, the berserker lay still in the aisle. Men went back to their seats, ignoring him; after a while, some came and checked on him, and later two of them dragged him up to the morgue at the front of the bus.

Vasily held his stomach. “How long is it before someone suggests we start eating the corpses?”

“Won’t happen,” Max said, hoping it was true.

He was thinking that another reason for having the reclamation camps out so far was that bodies could be dumped into the compost pits, and then the prisoners reported escaped and missing instead of being sent back for burial. The families got a letter saying their loved one had escaped, please report to the authorities if he shows up: it gave them hope and the dead man some dignity. But prisoners marked as escaped were always dead.

“It’ll be worse when we get to the camps,” he said.

The camps were still a couple hundred kilometers away. Sometime during the night, Max reached that stage of hunger and sleeplessness where he drifted in and out of consciousness, caught in the no-man’s land between the minefield of his hallucinations and the barbed-wire of reality. With his face against the cool glass, eyes half-lidded, and a heavy weight pressing on him, he first mistook the smell of rotting algae for a dream. Then he snapped awake.

At the sudden movement, Vasily’s head fell off Max’s shoulder and he sagged into Max’s lap. Max shook him. “Come on,” he whispered. “We have to get off here.”

“Huh,” Vasily said, drowsily. “What?”

“Sh,” Max said. “We won’t live to the next camp.” He shoved Vasily aside and stepped over the bodies and around the seats to the doorwell. He grabbed the man propped upright on the steps. “Hey, there’s a bench open, back there—I need to stand a while.”

The man, sunken-eyed, peered over the seats, full of desire and mistrust.

“You won’t get a second chance,” Max said. “Promise I won’t want it back.”

The man rose awkwardly, crabbed his way past Vasily to the empty bench. Vasily squeezed into the doorwell next to Max. Every time he tried to ask a question, Max held up his hand for silence in case others listened.

Dawn rose like a wail of despair, thin and piercing. No man wanted to face another day of sun and heat. The bus rattled and shook, kicking up dust over the unfinished, unpaved road, so that only Max, who was looking for it as they came over each rise, saw the bunkers floating in a little pond of green surrounded by the ocean of sand and rock.

When the other men finally saw it, some declared it a mirage while others raised a feeble cheer, thinking it their destination. Max knew Intelligence would never leave them all at one camp—it would be some here, some at the next one, divided among camps, spread among strangers.

The mirage came steadily closer, resolving in dreary detail—the rounded corrugated roofs of the half-buried huts, scoured by the wind and sand to the same dull tones as the landscape; the surrounding fence, topped by razor-wire, its sharp points cutting the sky so that it bled light; the little bowl of brown and green mud visible beyond the camp.

Bodies pressed behind Max as the bus rolled slowly to a stop and the cloud of dust settled. Past the last bunkers, Max saw the camp population standing in lines for the morning roll. The sign above the gate read:

RECL AMATION CAMP 42

“THEY WERE JUDGED EVERY MAN

ACCORDING TO THEIR WORKS.”

The guards jumped off their skimmers. Most of them stood, jawing, while one went to the gate to meet the camp staff.

Max beat on the door. “Pray,” he grunted to Vasily.

“For what?”

“That they come to this car, not the second one.” That Drozhin got my message and has someone waiting for us, he would have added. His fist grew numb, so he banged his forearm on the door. Other men, not sure what was up, followed his lead, beating the walls and window frames.

The camp minister limped to the gate with his assistant and several guards. Dusty gray clothes, indistinguishable of rank, hung loose on their lean forms. Camp supervisors were still called ministers, instead of directors, despite the changes following the revolution, because the camps were nominally for rehabilitation. Drozhin, come get me, Max heresied to himself, and I promise to be a better man.

The minister argued with the guards, pointing at the front half of the bus: he wanted men still alive and with some fight in them—he could get more work from them before they broke. The guard listened indifferently, yelled something to the other guards, who came to Max’s door aiming weapons.

Sixty bodies pressed against Max, trying to elbow their way in front of him. Max elbowed back, hooking his arm around Vasily to keep him close.

“Ten,” shouted the main guard, spreading his fingers. “Just ten of you!”

The bodies slammed forward again, banging Max’s head into the doorframe. Hands tried to claw him back. The guard removed the locks and the doors opened halfway, stopped by the press of men. Max yanked his head free from a fist in his hair, bit a finger that clutched at his face, and gripped the door so that no one could push past him. A grunt, as punches landed in his kidneys, then he ducked as the gun’s electric sizzle flew over their heads, setting their hair on end. One guard was yelling, “Back, back!” and another grabbed a fistful of Max’s shirt since he was in front, and pulled him through the door, calling, “One.”

Max still had an elbow hooked around Vasily’s arm, who tumbled after him. They both sprawled in the dirt.

“Make that two.”

Max stood up quickly before anyone could jerk him to his feet, smoothing his clothes, tugging up his pants, as the guard counted, “Nine, Ten, and that’s it. Get the hell back!” A roar of protest was followed by the sizzle of the guns, cries of pain, and the doors snapping shut.

“They’re all yours,” the guard told the minister. Turning to his second, he said, “Call 43, tell them they need to be ready to take fifty, water a hundred, and they have to put us up for the night.” To the rest of the guards he shouted, “Wheel up, wheel up, we’re moving out!”

Guards closed and locked the camp gate. The minister walked up and down the short line of prisoners, sucking on his teeth, as mean-looking as a rib-thin dog. He wore goggles to keep the sand out of his eyes, which kept Max from reading his expressions. Finally, with the bus already a plume of dust over the hill, he turned and walked back toward the roll call. The guards shoved Max and the other prisoners after him, back toward the compound’s waste pits. Max tried not to choke on the stench; he made careful note of the dead bodies laid out at pit’s edge. Escapees. Nine of them, in various states of decomposition.

Vasily nudged his shoulder, whispered. “At least we’re not starting off on the lowest rung in the camp.”

He glanced in the other direction. In front of the razor-wire fence, apart from the other rows of men, stood a clump of sunburned, emaciated Adareans. Max had noticed them, but he found it more interesting that Vasily seemed determined to ignore the dead bodies.

“Take your clothes off,” one of the guards ordered. He offered no reason for them to strip, no pretense of inspection or health check, but he seemed so bored by the command, so ready to use his gun, that they did what he said immediately. The earlier conditioning was already paying off.

As soon as they were naked, a guard gathered up their clothes.

The minister grinned at them. “Welcome to Camp Revelations.”

OF COURSE, thought Max. The camp would be named for the Bible book its verse came from. He looked again at the dead bodies and wondered if the sea or hell had delivered them up.

“Many of you noticed the verse inscribed above the entrance of our humble enterprise,” the minister said. “I promise each of you that during your time here you will be judged according to your deeds.”

He pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, shook the dust from it, and wiped his goggles clean. Then he walked down the line, looking each one of them over.

“My name is Minister Pappas, but you may call me sir. If you ever address me at all, which is not something I encourage you to do. You are penitents and you are here to do penance for your crimes. There are guards and deacons in this camp, and you will respect them just as if they were me.”

The guards were regular service, but Max knew if they posted out here they either weren’t very bright or had some kind of pathology. Deacons were prisoners trusted to act like guards, except they weren’t trusted enough to have their fingerprints keyed to the guns.

“Your work here will be to turn this valley from desert to oasis,” the minister said. Behind him, a few hundred prisoners stood in ranks, like cans on a store shelf or pieces off an assembly line. Beyond them, beyond the razor-wire fence, the low green slopes reached up to the raw, wind-scarred hilltops and the sere blue sky.

“Three kilometers over that hill lies the sea. All of you remember the stories about the first settlers—that’s what you do now. You carry the rocks to the sea, bring back the algae, and we seed it with enzymes and bacteria and earthworms to create topsoil for farming. In a decade, these hills will be covered with plants and trees.”

Max didn’t plan on being here in a decade to see it, though he knew some of these men would.

“At this moment,” the minister said, tucking the handkerchief back in his pocket, “I would draw your attention to the corpses you see in front of you. Those are your camp uniforms. You are expected to dress appropriately at all times.”

Max was old enough to remember the shortages of food and basic supplies the winter after the nuclear bombing of New Nazareth. Without the meanest rags to wear, even the strongest died. So he broke the line and ran to the corpses, hurrying to the end where they looked only a day or two dead instead of weeks. There was a cleaner uniform on one of the bigger Adareans, but he grabbed the ankle of the one closest to his own size—the body weighed no more than a stick—and yanked off the soiled, foul-smelling overalls. He felt the arms crack as he tugged the top off the dead man’s back.

This was meant to shame him, classic psychological manipulation, but he would not be shamed by survival. He thrust his legs into the pants one at a time. The orange uniform, dulled by sun and sand, fit him no worse than his other clothes and had the advantage of needing no belt. The sandals were no worse than his shoes. He took the straw hat off the dead man’s face, and put it on his head, returning to his place in line while the others pulled on their uniforms.

Only Vasily remained, wandering naked from corpse to corpse. “What? What am I supposed to wear?”

“That’s your problem, not mine,” one of the guards said, backing him up with the gun.

The other men fell back into line with Max, who began to size them up as possible partners.

Vasily hopped frantically between the corpses while the guards chuckled at him. “I need a uniform. You have to—”

“No,” the minister said, who had probably chosen the number of prisoners with this amusement in mind. “We don’t have to do anything.”

“Wait,” Vasily shouted. He walked over toward the clump of Adareans and pointed to the one in front. “Give me that pig-man’s uniform. I deserve it more than him.”

Nothing might have happened then—Vasily was a newb, lower than the lowest, and not worthy of tolerance—except that the Adarean balled his hand into a fist.

That slight gesture, Max realized, tipped the scales. The deacons wouldn’t tolerate even a small show of defiance from a fellow prisoner, especially a pig-man. One ran over and cuffed the Adarean on the back of the head; a second arrived an instant later, and cracked his knees with a pipe, knocked him to the ground. Guards shifted position, using their guns to keep the other Adareans at bay. The man in the tower rang a bell and brought up his sniper rifle.

While all this happened, Vasily hovered around the guards, desperate, shouting, “Don’t stop there, I’m one of you, I’m a human being!”

The deacons looked at the minister, who paused to regard Vasily. The Adarean pushed himself up from the dirt, and one of the deacons kicked him—the Adarean caught his foot and shoved it away.

Without waiting for the minister’s approval, the deacons fell on the Adarean, striking and kicking him with a fury they had saved up from a thousand other unanswered frustrations, fears, and slights.

Vasily shouldered his way between them. “Don’t mess up my uniform!” He put his arm around the Adarean’s neck and, while the deacons pinned him, choked until he was still.

Moments later the deacons dragged another body over to the compost pits. They tossed it directly into the waste, and added the other naked corpses after it.

The minister walked down the line, pausing when he reached Vasily. The handkerchief in his pocket was the color of Vasily’s faded orange uniform. “What did you think you were doing?”

“What I needed to do, sir.”

“You won’t do it again without my permission first. You clear about that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll do just fine then,” the minister said. He turned to his camp clerk, a prisoner carrying an antique keypad, and said, “Enter ten new penitents on the rolls, record nine runaways, and mark one piece of trash disposed.”

He moved along the line, stopping to inspect each man for a few seconds as if he were looking for something. He found it when he reached Max, because he stood there, staring, then slipped his hands into his pockets.

“You,” he drawled, “already look like a corpse.”

“That was my nickname in the space fleet, sir,” Max replied, staring straight ahead, past the goggled face. “It’s just what I look like, sir.”

After a long pause, the minister sucked on his teeth, turned to the deacon with the keypad, and said, “Help me remember something here. Did I ask him a question?”

“No, sir, you didn’t.”

“And did he speak to me anyway?”

“Yes, sir, I believe he did.”

Max cursed himself silently. It was all about demonstrating power. He’d guessed right on the uniforms, but made a mistake here. The only thing he could do was keep his head down, take his punishment, and survive it.

The minister sucked his teeth again, leaned over and got right in Max’s face. His breath smelled like onions and tooth decay. “That group over there,” he said, with a nod toward the Adareans, “they’re one short. You go take that spot.”

Max hesitated. Being with the Adareans was a death sentence, but a slow one. He had the feeling that defying the camp minister, here, at this moment, would mean his immediate death.

Spinning on his heel, he turned and walked crisply over to the small group of Adareans: the guards and deacons laughed behind him, while the minister assigned the other nine men to work groups in the main camp.

Max studied the Adareans. They were all taller than him, a half a meter or more, bred for a planet with lower gravity. Their skin color ranged from grass green to sandy brown; their hair ranged from thick sawgrass to normal human, gray. Their features were soft, halfway between male and female, but the expressions on their faces were uniformly hostile. No one met his gaze.

“Hi, I’m Max,” he said. There was no response. He wanted to ask where the food and water were, but decided not to waste his energy.

“All right, time to go to work,” the minister shouted. “It’s going to be another scorcher and I don’t want no more of you dying from heat stroke. So it’s light work today in the gardens and turning the fields. You can get your assignments from Smith. Prayer Block 13 has sea duty.”

“Let me guess, we’re Prayer Block 13,” Max said.

After a moment of silence, during which the Adareans exchanged glances with one another, the gray-haired one said, “Yes.”

“Ah.” Sea duty no doubt entailed carrying rocks to the sea. Max tilted his head, looked right into the gray-haired Adarean’s eyes. “Where’s the water?”

When no one answered him, he began to think that this was an immediate death sentence as well. He shut down his senses and turned his back on the Adareans. The less he had to do with them, the more likely he was to survive.

A GUARD with a machine gun directed them toward the camp’s back gate. He was flanked by two deacons wearing orange jumpsuits that didn’t stink like death. Max went obediently.

At the gate, another deacon said, “Take a basket.”

Outside the gate stood a pile of wire baskets, each a half meter in diameter and not quite as tall. He grabbed one by the rim as he passed by, then saw that it had a twisted-wire strap so he could drag it by his wrist or carry it slung over his shoulder. The Adareans were slinging their baskets over their shoulders, so he did too.

In a single file, with the guard riding flank on a four-wheeled rockjumper, they climbed uphill to the meadows. Max smelled the meadows before they crossed the lip of the hill and he saw them spread out below, a shallow field of green-brown sludge in a sheltered bowl of dust and sandstone. A dirty stream flowed through the middle of the field.

“Load up!” shouted the deacon.

Max followed the Adareans to the edge of the sludge-field and loaded his basket with rocks, just like they did. Dust caked his fingers, stone chipped his nails. Sparing an eye for the Adareans working around him, he filled his basket no more than they did, then waited until they led the way, dragging their baskets single file, over the hill to the ocean. There were grooves in the exposed bedrock on either side of the path made by the weight of the baskets.

Half the Adareans were in front of Max, half behind. A tall one, with cheekbones like knife cuts and dark green veins in his light green skin, called out, “Swimmer or drowner?”

The answers came back down the line. “Drowner.” “Drowner.” “Drowner.”

One of the deacons walking along the path said, “I’m in. Cup of soup says he’s a drowner within a month.”

The other deacon and the guard laughed.

“Two cups of soup says he’s a swimmer.” The old man, the one with the gray hair.

“You say that about everyone,” Cheekbones ribbed him.

Max didn’t understand what was going on. He had grown up almost living in the water. “I can swim.”

Cheekbones chuckled, then all the Adareans chuckled, and the deacons and the guard laughed out loud again.

“Definitely a drowner,” Cheekbones said.

“You’re going to owe me two cups of soup,” the deacon told the old man.

More puzzled than before, Max held his tongue.

The old man looked over his shoulder, saw Max’s expression. “Everyone in camp is either a swimmer or a drowner.”

“You mean everyone’s a drowner,” the guard shouted from the back of the four-wheeler. He wore goggles like the camp minister, carried his gun across his lap. “All of you drown eventually, once you get tired of swimming. And some of you come through the gates already tired.”

Cheekbones lowered his head. “And some come in here ready to build a raft out of other people’s bodies just to stay afloat.”

Max’s basket caught on a bump in the groove, yanking him off balance. He righted himself quickly, but his stumble was noticed.

“That’s your swimmer?” the deacon asked the old Adarean, who just shrugged. The deacon laughed and rubbed his belly. “I’m looking forward to that soup—two cups, mmm-mmm!”

The next time Max’s basket caught on a hump, he let the wire cut his wrist rather than pull him off balance. He paused, tugged it over the hump, and kept on walking. He had survived worse.

* * *

Joy is infinite in its varieties but all misery is the same. In that way, every day in the camp was much like another. Max only had to learn the routine and survive the misery. He could do that.

At sun-up, the blare of a siren roused them from their narrow metal bunks. Max, as the new man, had the bunk next to the door, right beside the siren’s speaker. On the first morning, it nearly gave him a heart attack. By the third day, it was barely enough to startle him awake.

Every morning, on the way out the door, the old Adarean would stop Max and say, “How are you today?”

Every morning, Max answered, “Still swimming.”

For breakfast the camp kitchen served out a small ball of rice, plain, unseasoned, which they ate with their fingers. Every day, after breakfast, the Adareans were sent to sea duty. Sometimes the other work details joined them too, but now, at the height of summer, the minister had them seeding, weeding, and tending fields.

The stench of decomposition in the meadows choked Max on the first day; after that, it was just a constant plateau of the unbearable which must be borne. Not nearly as bad as the waste pits at the edge of the camp. By watching the Adareans, he learned the trick to loading his basket with rocks. If it was too full, you drained your energy too fast, but if it was too empty the deacons would beat you. The trick was to stack the rocks so that there were hollow spaces between them, making the basket look fuller than it was.

The dismal kilometers to the ocean ended in a long, stone jetty that jutted out into the bay. They dragged their baskets to the end and dumped them. The rocks sank out of sight in the deep water and the jetty slowly grew.

A short pontoon dock tethered to the end of the jetty rolled with the slight motion of the water. Its rhythm was matched by the undulations of the purple-brown algae that covered the bay from one side to the other. The deacons sat in a boat, using skimmers to push the algae into mounds around the end of the dock. Once you dumped the rocks, you had to fill your basket with the weed.

This was the most disheartening part of the work. There was no way to cheat on the load and the journey back to the meadows was all uphill. If you dragged the baskets, the algae would snag on every sharp rock, leak with every bump, so you had to sling them over your back and carry them or the guards would beat you. The water running down your back felt cool at first, until it chafed your skin raw. The moment you were done dumping your basket, you had to start gathering rocks again. Or the guards would beat you.

At mid-day, there was a break for a cup of tuber soup and a cup of water. Some days the soup was so thin and the water so cloudy it was hard to tell the difference between the two. Afterwards, it was back to rocks and weeds, rocks and weeds, until sunset. Back at camp, they received another cup of water and half a ball of rice, some days with vegetables from the terraced gardens close to camp. Luckily, Max was small and had been malnourished as a child, so he needed fewer calories than most men. Hunger was, if not a friend, something like an irrascible but familiar uncle.

There was variation in this routine, but it was not the stuff of joy, and so was all the same in its difference.

During his first days in camp, the sun burned his pale skin, turning his neck and forearms and ankles pink, then red. At night he peeled away the dead layers of skin, folding it into his mouth, chewing it slowly.

One day, a rock he was lifting into his basket slipped from his hands and gashed his shin, tearing his pants and banging his leg badly enough that he limped for a week.

But he survived that too.

Even slight blessings came with a bitter edge. When rain fell, as it did several times, sudden cloudbursts that scoured the rocks and then evaporated like water on a frying pan, everyone in camp, guard and deacon and penitent, ran outside to wash themselves and their clothes, to open their mouths to the sky and drink clean water that didn’t taste like sand or iron, to fill whatever cup or bowl they had for later, an extra portion that only left them longing for more.

Comparisons to others were just as bitter; for example the realization one day, as he was pretending to accidentally drop his hat in the water so that it would cool his head as he worked, that the Adareans worked without hats, with their overalls opened, because they took energy from the sun, however slight, even while it beat Max down and drained him.

Max survived that too, and survived the days when the two types of bitterness combined. He was filling his basket at the dock one day when he spotted tiny silver flashes in the green mess of algae. Minnows. Careful not to let the guard or deacons see him, he found and swallowed seven of them on the walk back to the meadow. Every load after that, he looked for them again, finding a few every fourth or fifth day.

“You spread that weed awfully carefully,” he heard a voice say one day while he was bent over the edge of the meadow.

He squinted, the glare of the sun knifing under the brim of his hat. A deacon, dressed in boots off some new prisoner, a canteen hanging from his waist, smacked a length of metal pipe against his open palm.

“Vasily,” Max said.

Vasily looked both ways to make sure no one was near. “Don’t go greenmouth on me, Max. That stuff’s poison. I already seen a guy crap himself to death.”

“Yeah, I know better.” Max finished spreading the weed, grabbed a stone, rolled it into his basket.

“That’s the way,” Vasily said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, yellow onion, and bit into it like an apple. Still crunching, he walked behind some Adareans and poked them between the shoulder blades with the pipe.

Max turned away, forgetting he was there.

His plan for survival had depended on getting help from a partner within the camp until someone outside found his messages and came for him. The first part had failed and the second had come to nothing, but he would do what he had to do to survive. He would be patient, conserve his energy, and when his chance came, he would take it.

One night, after dark when they were all lying in their bunks, the old Adarean came up and sat across from him, and asked, “How do you do it?”

Max pushed up on his elbows. “Do what?”

“How do you keep yourself apart from us, apart from everyone?”

Max lay back down, closed his eyes. “It’s easy.”

“It’s been weeks and still you stay alone.”

“A man is born alone and he dies alone,” Max said.

“Shit on that.” The other Adareans came down to his end of the bunker, quietly taking up seats on the beds and floor around him in the dark, like a convocation of ghosts. Snickering ghosts. Max, feeling threatened, snapped up.

“You have your beliefs, I have mine,” he said.

“No one is alone,” the Adarean said. “Our first experience is being connected. We spend nine months in the womb connected to our mother. You say we’re born alone, but childbirth is always an experience shared by motherand child. In even the most barbaric and backwards places—”

“Like this planet,” someone said, to more snickers.

“—a third person is there to catch us when we leave the womb and lift us to our mother’s breast. The whole experience of birth is one of connection, an affirmation of it, in spite of the pain.”

“That’s just one moment,” Max said.

“Are you serious?” the Adarean begged. “We spend the first years of our life completely dependent on others, connected to them to meet our every need. They take care of us and we return love. When we reach puberty and are driven by hormones away from our first caregivers, we are moved toward other people—mentors, friends, sexual partners.”

One of the Adareans nudged another, who grunted. Max didn’t look to see who it was, but the old man’s head turned.

“See,” the Adarean said. “When we’re wounded or hurt, our natural reflex, our inborn trait, is to make noise. We cry out, knowing that others will respond. Our natural reaction is to turn toward those who cry out in pain. The lack of empathy is a defect, a loss of the most fundamental human trait.”

“You say that, even after the way the guards treat you?”

“What? You don’t see it as a defect in their character?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“What are you saying?” the old Adarean asked patiently.

Max swung his legs over the edge of his bunk and sat up straight. “What are you doing here on our planet?” He pointed his finger at all of them. “Why are you here?”

The Adareans exchanged glances. As always, they seemed to be thinking it over together before any of them spoke. Max thought he detected a scent in the air, something sharp.

“We come here to trade,” one of them offered, a sandy-faced man with burr-like hair. “This is the only place in the galaxy that you can find machine-made goods. Everywhere else, things are either fabricated, the exact same every time, or handmade, individual and different. But your factories make these odd items that are at once identical and yet each of which shows some individual variation from a human hand.”

Max dismissed that with a wave of his hand. He worked in political education and knew spin when he heard it. “You could trade for that from space. I mean the real reason.”

The odor in the air turned bittersweet, then faded. “Do you have any idea how extraordinary the people of your planet are?” the old man said finally. “The settlers here spoke a dozen languages, came from countries that had been enemies with one another, and yet they united in a single purpose, to transform this desert of a world that no one else saw value in.”

“Too bad they left us to finish the work,” Max said.

The green-skinned Adarean murmured, “Amen.”

“We’re here by force,” the old Adarean said, “but those first settlers came of their own free will, with hardly any real chance of survival, and they not only survived, but thrived. What amazing faith that took. They formed human chains, every man, woman, and child, dredging life from the sea—”

“I know my own history,” Max said. “You can skip the kindergarten lesson. Unless you want to make a faith brigade and pass buckets around the room.”

The Adarean shifted, turned his head toward the others, who leaned together, without speaking. A moment later, he said, “We want to honor the spirit of the twentieth century.”

That made less sense to Max than anything. Yes, his people wanted to hold time back to the twentieth century, but the Adareans had advanced far beyond that. “What? You mean like the discovery of the double helix, the first genome projects?”

“More than that,” the Adarean said. “It’s the great century of political change, of people like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. For the first time in history, people could peacefully oppose their governments; for the first time, without the use of violence, they could force their governments to change. It is the century where technology made real democracy possible, immediate, functional, on a large scale, for the first time ever.”

“Huh,” Max said, looking at their tiny bunker, their too small beds, their emaciated bodies. “And here I always thought of it as the century of poison gas and nuclear bombs, the century of concentration camps and gulags, the century of murder, mass produced.”

“It is that too,” the old Adarean said after a pause. “But we have a choice.”

“Doesn’t feel like a choice to me,” Max said. “So you’re saying you’re here, basically, because we’re a big historical amusement park?”

The tall, green-veined Adarean grunted.

“That’s not—” the old man said.

“Him,” Max interrupted, pointing to the tall one. “Isn’t he the one who said we all drown eventually? That’s not by choice and it’s not amusing.”

“I didn’t say that,” the green Adarean said coldly.

The old Adarean reached out, squeezed the other man’s leg. “We take turns holding each other up so that we don’t drown too soon.”

“If you say so,” Max said.

The old man shifted, picked up something beside him in the dark. “Here,” he said, offering it to Max. “You’ve been swimming for a month. I won my bet. I figure you deserve one of the two cups of soup.”

Max took it in both hands, held it up to his face. It smelled like onion, potato, and dill.

The old Adarean reached out, touched the back of Max’s hand, then went back to his own bunk. One by one, the Adareans stood up, each one touching him, a squeeze on the shoulder, a light clap on the back, before returning to their own space. The green-skinned Adarean was the last to rise, and the only one not to touch Max.

“What I said was, you’re a drowner,” he said. “I still think you’re a drowner.”

When he turned away, Max said, “What’s your name?”

He stopped, his body angled half toward Max, half away. “We don’t have individual names any more. We’re trash, pig-men, monsters. Don’t you listen?”

“Did you ever hear the saying that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it?”

The Adarean stopped. “Yes.”

“Those who do study history are doomed to see the repetition coming.”

The Adarean smirked, then walked back to his bed. Max leaned his mouth over the rim of the cup, resting it there for a long time, savoring the smell, without taking a sip. Outside, the wind kicked up. Sand skittered like thousands of tiny feet over the metal roof of their hut.

Nothing had changed, Max told himself. He needed to be patient, conserve his energy, wait for a chance to improve his situation, then take it. When the chance came, he could do what Vasily did, do what he had to do, and he would have water, extra food, a pair of boots.

He sipped the soup slowly, so that it seemed to last all night, and when it was done, for the first time in a month, his belly felt almost full.

THE WEEKS PASSED until Turning Day. In the meadow, the hundreds of acres of sludge on the hillsides became dirt faster when it was turned and mixed with sand. The weeds, the volunteer plants, were uprooted and mixed with the compost.

Every part of the camp smelled like decay. From the fecal stench of the waste pits on the edge of the camps, to the rotting vegetable stench of the meadow, to the smell of rust in their beds and bunkers and bowls, to the slow decay of their own bodies. But Turning Day was the worst; on Turning Day the men became one with the decay. The camp’s full count of penitents waded out into the morass, a single long line of misery, churning the decomposing soup with their bare hands. The minister sat beneath an umbrella, occasionally pausing to wipe his goggles, as he described his plans for terraced gardens and a vast expanse of fields.

“What we are going to do here,” the minister shouted, “is cover a square kilometer with topsoil, to a depth of a meter. It’ll be amazing, the biggest, most beautiful city on the planet, right here, right on this spot. General Kostigan has told me personally what great work we’re accomplishing here.”

He went on and on that way, until it was four square kilometers and a new Garden of Eden. But all Max heard was the name of Kostigan, who would be happy to kill him if he ever got the chance. He kept his head down, as if it would avert Kostigan ’s gaze, and turned over armful after armful of wet, stinking sludge, until he was caked with it and the stench soaked into his skin and became part of him.

In books and vids, terraforming was always portrayed as some heroic effort, the conclusion foregone. But this is how it was really done, with sludge and sweat and aching backs. Meanwhile, it was hard not to be aware that planets, like men, were incredibly resistant to change. All the colonists of Jesusalem could die tomorrow, and the planet would hardly notice. Year by year it would erase their effort and crawl back toward the course it had previously chosen.

“Look,” whispered a voice next to Max, pulling him from his reverie. He kept his head ducked, plunging his hand back into the muck.

“Look,” the voice repeated. It was the big, green-skinned Adarean.

Max glanced at the camp guards first. The minister, taking a break from his sermon, stood and fanned himself with his hat. The guards were clustered around a keg of water. He turned his head the other way to glance at the Adarean.

The tall man pushed his arms down into the muck, turning over a mixture of greens and weeds. When his hand came out it held a small, yellow potato. He ripped the greens off and tucked the potato inside his shirt, showing Max how to do the same. “We planted them,” he whispered, with a nod of his head toward an outcrop of boulders on the hillside. “Between here and those rocks.”

Max realized that he may have already felt a couple of the potatoes, but dumped them, thinking they were stones. He returned to the sludge with interest. The first potato he found sat in his hand like a lump of gold. With furtive glances to either side, he pretended to wipe his nose, and slipped it into his mouth. When he bit into it one of his teeth came loose, so he chewed slowly, carefully, until every bit was gone. It tasted like the mud, and the raw starch filmed his mouth. But it was glorious. Meredith used to cook potatoes in olive oil with a pinch of salt and some parsley; when he tried to remember what their kitchen looked like, it was just a blur.

A rock bounced off his shoulder. A guard standing clear of the muck shouted at him. “Back to work!”

He bent over at once and began turning the sludge. “I’m swimming,” he mumbled as he dog-paddled the knee-deep sludge. “I’m still swimming.”

Although he wasn’t sure where he was swimming to anymore. That’s when he knew he might be sinking.

* * *

They woke up to winds so strong that sand whistled through every crack in their bunker, forming tiny dunes in the corners and around the legs of their cots.

On the way to roll call, beneath the black roil of sky, Max saw three escapees laid out by the waste pits, one of them new since the day before, and all of them from prayer blocks with easier work than his. He wondered how long it would be until he ended up there too. He’d lost two teeth and a third was loose; what little body fat he had before was gone, and his knee buckled every time he put weight on it wrong; the sores on his back wept constantly.

They had to hold their hats on their heads while they stood in line, and the gusts were so powerful that they picked men up off their feet and tumbled them into the fence. Max was lucky he had the bigger Adareans for a windbreak. The camp second shouted something about an off-season hurricane, too far north, gave them all a second serving of breakfast and told them to save it, then dismissed them back to their prayer blocks for the duration.

By the time the rain pelted the roof like an avalanche of gravel, they were sitting around the small room in the dark, filling their cups from drips in the roof. It was enough not to be working for a day.

Max looked at the tall green Adarean and said, “It feels like Christmas, only we need something to celebrate with.”

“I see sand and water,” he said. “If we mix them together we could have mud.”

“No, outside,” Max said. “While the storm’s at its worst, before anyone else thinks of it.”

They squeezed out the door, the wind banging it shut behind them, and, with Max clinging to the bigger man, made their way over to the camp kitchen. No one could see them in the deluge—they could barely see a few feet in front of their own faces.

Max wiped the water from his eyes and peered into the darkened room. “Be quick,” he shouted above the roar of the storm. “Grab anything you can carry.”

While the Adarean gathered up loaves of pumpkin bread and raw vegetables, Max used a can to smash the lock off a side closet. “Bullseye.”

“What is it?” the Adarean asked.

“I never yet knew a military officer who, given access to potatoes and time, would not construct a still.” The door banged behind them and they jumped, but it was only a trick of the wind. Max tucked bottles in his shirt until it was full, took another in his hand. “Let’s go. By lunch time, the minister will think to place a guard here.”

When they shoved their way back into the bunker, soaked like a pair of muddy sponges, they were greeted with concern, then celebration. While the Adareans passed around the first loaf of bread, Max opened a bottle and swallowed what was simultaneously the worst and sweetest alcohol he’d ever tasted.

After that, Max listened to hours of conversation, long talks about people and places back home. The tall green Adarean was a historian, the gray-haired old man some kind of freelance diplomat, the brown-skinned one a collectibles trader. Everyone had a job and a family they were concerned about. That discussion turned to plans for escape, ultimately declared impractical because there were too many men to kill—never mind the moral objections to killing, and no offense intended, Max—or too far to go once they escaped, or no one to help them once they got where they were going.

“We could always just build his garden for him,” the collectibles trader said of the minister, and that led to calculations—four square kilometers to a depth of a meter was how many cubic meters, with half a cubic meter of weed per basket load.

“How many men in camp?” the diplomat asked.

“Total or just prisoners?” the trader wanted to know.

“Penitents,” the diplomat said.

And while several offered a number, Max said, “You mean penitents and pigmen.” Which was greeted with silence, then a burst of laughter, and a discussion of whether Max counted as a penitent or pig-man, until the old man picked up the math again by asking, “What’s the most loads you’ve ever carried in a day?”

“Seventeen,” said the green Adarean, the historian, and several others thought that was too many, although one other remembered that day, and then, after an argument on maximum loads versus average, they were dividing the total number of cubic yards by the number of trips per man to get a minimum number of days, no, years counted in decades, to reach the goal.

“It’s too many,” the historian said to the final number. “I’ve been here almost a year and it would be too many if it were one day more.”

The diplomat said something encouraging but the comment had turned the mood dark for a minute and everyone fell silent. They all sat on their beds because the floor of the bunker was flooded. Outside the wind was so strong that rain sprayed through every crack and seam, and for a moment it felt that everywhere was water and the room would fill up to the ceiling with it. Max poured the dregs of a bottle down his throat.

“You remind me of Drozhin,” he said, because the silence was unbearable and it was the only thing he could think to say. That provoked outrage and questions and laughter and disbelief, and, dizzy with drink, dizzy because the aches in his body were momentarily numbed to the point he could bear them, Max heard himself saying, “No, no, I know him personally, he’s just like that.”

The diplomat took the bottle from Max, found it empty, and opened another. “But I thought you were a political officer. You worked in Education for Mallove, right?”

“This is way before that,” Max said, leaning forward, resting on his knees. “This is back when the revolution was still a civil war. Drozhin had been Minister of Police before this purge, and when they tried to kill him, he went underground and started organizing the army that overthrew the government.” It was more complicated than that, Drozhin let other people be the leaders for one thing, but those details were beside the point. “I was a teenager, but looked much younger, so I ended up being one of the first men on his staff right after the purge. He used me as a spy, since I could get in and out of the cities easily.”

“Why’d you hook up with Drozhin?” the collectibles dealer interrupted.

Max shrugged. “It was a civil war. We all had to pick sides. Being on Drozhin’s side probably saved my life.” He took a loaf of bread that was passed to him, broke off a bite, and handed it on. “Anyway, Drozhin was just like you. He was always doing what he called victory math. How many recruits to overrun a certain post, how much fabric to make coats for all his men, how many generations until we could get back to the stars. He had his hand in everything, always adding and readding to get the result he wanted. He even . . .”

“Even what?”

A lump of bread stuck in his throat. Max swallowed. It was no secret, the things Drozhin had done. “He even calculated the number of Adareans he needed to kill to unite the people against a common enemy instead of fighting each other. He had a theory of proportions, that the more gruesome the murders, the fewer he would need to tip the scales.”

This produced the same silence as before. The Adareans stared at him in the dark. They had human shapes but their faces were genderless silhouettes and their limbs, in shadow, looked like weapons. Finally, the historian said, “Drozhin wanted to go back to space? After all your people did, to preserve their technologically primitive way of life here?”

“The first space flights were in the twentieth century. Drozhin always said we had betrayed the stars by staying here.” The roar of the storm, loud enough to smash all the buildings and compartments into one, suddenly disturbed Max, so he kept talking. “Anyway, and this is no shit, I won my wife from Drozhin in a card game.”

There were sounds of disbelief, a bit muted, and a curious tang to the room’s stale air. “Her name’s Meredith,” Max said. “Means guardian of the sea. I loved her smile, the way it made her cheeks dimple. Still love that. Her father had been one of Drozhin’s officers in the ministry—he was killed at New Hope during the purge, so Drozhin promised to be like a father to her. We wanted to marry but Drozhin didn’t approve, since I wasn’t an officer and wasn’t good enough for her. This went on for a while; it doesn’t seem like long now, but back then we expected to be dead any day, and a month felt like forever.” He reached for the bottle, took another drink.

“We were playing poker one night—there’d been a setback, and for a couple weeks the whole revolution amounted to six of us stuck in a basement at a farmhouse on the escarpment—so we were playing poker one night, during a storm like this one, when we couldn’t do anything else, and I was beating Drozhin badly, beating everyone, but he was the one that mattered. Drozhin hated to lose, hated it more than anything, but he was out of money. He didn’t have anything else I wanted, so I asked him for a commission, which meant I could marry Meredith, against everything I had, all in. He couldn’t resist because he never gave up. I won with a straight.”

The old man chuckled. “So you got your commission.”

“Sort of,” Max said, wiggling the loose tooth with his tongue. “Drozhin said I could have the commission, like he had promised me, but I had to pay for it. ‘To support the revolution.’ ” He paused for effect. “He charged me the exact amount I’d won.”

There was enough laughter at that to break the mood of despair and jumpstart discussion among the other Adareans. Max left out the part that he was unwilling to pay that price, but Meredith hounded him until he finally gave in.

The big green Adarean, the historian, said, “You still know Drozhin?”

“No,” Max said. “No, he was an old man even then. He’s dead now, just like Mallove. That’s why all of us are here.”

“Too bad.” He reached out and squeezed Max’s shoulder.

Outside, the noise stopped abruptly as the eye of the storm passed overhead. The camp was so small that any loud sound in one of the blocks carried to another, so suddenly distant conversations came through cracks widened by the wind. One of the Adareans started to sing a silly verse about a talking toaster and its pet dog, and others took up the song. Other bunkers began to sing back, trying to drown out the Adarean melody with religious hymns and patriotic songs.

Max was no singer, and neither was the historian. Both sat there, somber if not sober. “It’d be good if you still had some friends from the revolution who could help us if we broke out of here,” the Adarean said.

“Yeah, it would be,” Max admitted. He tilted his head up at the roof, the room. “Do you know why they call these prayer blocks?”

“No. Why?”

“Because when you’re here, all your prayers to God are blocked.”

After the last of the storm passed, they emerged from their blocks to find the tower down and sections of fence ripped away. The waste pits had flooded and overflowed, scattering bones and pieces of bodies with the out house products across the roll call ground. One of the guards ran the camp’s sole bulldozer, pushing waste back into the pits while the minister marched the rest of them up to the meadow.

All the compost had been washed from the hillsides, mixing with sand and stone until it choked the stream where it flowed between the hills. If they didn’t clear it out, the stream would back up until the bowl filled with water and the camp was threatened.

Under the guns of the guards, they waded waist-deep in the sludge, using their bodies as dredges, pushing the tangled mats back up the slopes. They scooped the sand-sludge mix with their bare arms until Max’s skin was rubbed rash-raw. And then, when the other men were given a break, the Adareans were told to load up their baskets with rocks pulled from the blocked culvert and carry them down to the jetty.

“No need to do the same work twice,” the minister explained, seemingly oblivious to the irony.

They loaded their baskets under the eyes of deacons who were antsy because the minister kept threatening to put them to work. Max groaned when he lifted his basket, even stacked as empty as possible. Too many more days of this would kill him. Today might kill him.

The historian passed him, taking a rock from the top of his basket and dropping it in his own. Several times, when they came to a hilltop, or a turn in the trail, he passed Max, or let Max pass him, taking a stone from Max’s basket. On the last rise before the long road down to the ocean, he started to sing.

“A brave little toaster took a rocketship to space

Where he tried to find a planet that would save the human race.

But, O, O, O, he found a dog.”

“You’re terrible,” Max said. “Didn’t they genetically engineer perfect pitch on Adares?”

“Come on, Max, sing with me.”

He started over again, and all the Adareans took up the song, which cycled right back to the beginning as soon as the toaster and his dog finished their adventure. It was a quick walk to the ocean. Vasily, the deacon in charge, followed the Adareans, tapping the end of his pipe against the boulders in time with the song. Their guard rode on the rockjumper, rifle across his lap, parallel to their path until they came to the jetty. Two more guards were out in the boat. They’d found the pontoon dock, towed it back, tied it up again, and were now scouting the coast around the edge of the point.

Max and the others walked out to the end of the jetty and dumped their baskets. The rocks made a hollow splash, then slowly sank from view. Max stepped aside so the other men could dump their loads. As he stood there, wire grooved in his wrist, staring at the sun sparkling on the bay, water weed-cleared by the storm, he thought it almost a beautiful spot. He wondered if Meredith made it to their safe house. He’d been gone so much, for so many years, for all of their marriage really, that he wondered if she missed him, even if she was there.

The historian’s hand touched his shoulder, and he stepped past Max onto the dock, shifting his balance as it bobbed unanchored under his weight. He was still humming that ridiculous song about the toaster, basket slung over his shoulder. Max, smiling, opened his mouth to say there was no weed to carry back, as if it were good news, just discovered.

Then he saw that the basket was still full of rocks, his own load, and half Max’s.

The historian dropped it off his shoulder, and swung it once, twice, out over the water.

“Hey,” Max said.

On the third swing he let go, and the basket arced into the air and dropped into the water with a cavernous splash. The loop was still fastened around the Adarean’s wrist, pulling him after it.

Vasily was the first one out to the end of the pier, cursing and spinning, half-panicked. When the old man, the diplomat, ran out beside him, dropping his basket, prepared to dive in, Vasily smashed him down with his club. He kicked the old man in the stomach, drove him back along the jetty to the shore.

“We’re in charge here!” he shouted. “You don’t get to choose when you die, we choose! Now go, go back to the meadow!”

He ran up and down the line, beating the exhausted Adareans on their arms and shoulders if they didn’t move fast enough. The guard came in close, rifle ready, looking eager to shoot. Max cowered, covering his head with his hands, stumbling all the way back to the camp.

All that night in the camp, the wail of the Adareans rose over and over again, as sure as the dawn. Because of their grief, Max thought he finally understood them.

It had always seemed to him as if he only saw half their conversations. They communicated, deliberately, through pheromones and with heightened sensitivity to even the slightest non-verbal cues. Even in a dark room, without words, they were never alone. In that way, they were alien.

Max sat on his bunk with his back to the wall, as far from them as possible. Yet he could smell their grief, a scent he had no words for, though it reminded him of saltwater and juniper.

At first he didn’t understand why they wept and tore at their chests: hadn’t he seen another Adarean die his first day in the camp? The one choked to death by Vasily? There had been no dirge then.

But he came to realize, from the way they tried to comfort one another, that it was not the death they grieved—death was inevitable—but the suicide. The historian’s choice to be alone, to cut himself apart.

Max blocked his ears, but he still heard the dirging. He pulled a blanket over his head, but that didn’t help.

Late into the night, the other bunks shouted at them to stop, their voices sometimes rising above the dirge, sometimes falling into the cracks of silence.

Near morning, exhausted, depleted, Max heard a rattling at the door and then it came open.

Vasily stood there.

“Shut up!” he yelled. “Shut the hell up so we can sleep!”

He seemed fearful to come inside alone. When the Adareans ignored him, he turned to Max, whose bunk was beside the door. “You’ve got to help me out here. The other penitents, they blame me for this. I told them there was no way to stop the pig-man from drowning, but they don’t care. We’re all exhausted, nobody’s slept, and we have to work all day tomorrow. And now the lights just came on in the minister’s cabin. The other deacons, they say I got to fix this, or I’m going to lose my spot.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

Vasily licked his lips, checked to see who was outside. “Look, I don’t want to come in there, all right. But you, you make them shut up, you make them be quiet, and I promise we get you out. You don’t belong in here with these animals. You make them shut up, you get moved to a regular bunker.”

Max turned his head away.

“Right now, I’ll take you with me right now, over to our block. Just do what you need to do, make them shut up.”

Max held his head in his hands, squeezed it to make the pounding stop. So. Vasily came through for him after all; one of the seeds Max had planted was finally ready for harvest. If he got into a better block, if he worked less, if he got more food, he could survive. Eventually, the purge would end.

“Look, you’ve got to decide fast,” Vasily said. “There’s something going on in the minister’s office, so we got to fix this now or I get blamed for everything.”

It would be easy, Max thought. If he killed the diplomat, maybe broke his neck, it would break the rhythm of their lament and change their mood completely. He might not even have to kill him, just hurt him, maybe leave him unconscious. All he would need was six, seven seconds. No more than he needed to murder that double agent Lukinov during his last mission. During the brief moment of confusion that followed, he could get out the door with Vasily.

“There are guards coming,” Vasily said, “so it’s now or never. If the guards come, I can’t be responsible for what they do. They might just compost everyone in the bunker, including you. You have to choose now—are you in or out?”

Max swung his legs off the bunk, walked over to the old man, who was seated on the floor, and kneeled behind him. He slid his hands up the old man’s shoulders, leaned forward, and whispered in his ear.

“Still swimming,” Max said. “Remember that we’re still swimming.”

The diplomat turned his head and the dirge faltered.

“Hey, Vasily,” Max said. “You can go choke yourself.”

When Vasily didn’t respond, he looked up. The deacon was flanked by two guards, guns drawn, standing to either side of him in the doorway. So, Max thought, he might not swim that much longer after all.

“Are you Colonel Maxim Nikomedes?” the first guard asked.

Max said, “Huh?”

“Are you Colonel Nikomedes?” he snapped.

“Yes, I am.”

“You have to come with us right away.” The guard gave him a hurry-along gesture with the gun.

Max went at his own pace, neither hurrying nor dragging his feet. As he passed through the door, they left it open, pointing him toward the main gate. He heard the crunch of footsteps in gravel behind him, and he drew in his breath, waiting for the gunshot in the back of his head, wondering how much he would feel before he died. The gate still lay in ruins, smashed by the fall of the tower in the hurricane, open to the desert.

“Go on,” the guard said. Still standing well back. His voice shook, as if he were frightened.

“Go where?” Max asked.

“To them,” the guard said.

Dawn spied over the horizon; its pale smear of light glinted on two government cars. Half a dozen elite troops in body armor, with heavy weapons, stared down the guards. The dark blots of troop carriers hovered overhead. A thin, scholarly man stepped out of the first ground car, stood there, hands behind his back. He had a gun in the holster at his waist.

“It’s good to see you again, Nick,” he said.

Nick? Who called him Nick? “Anatoly?”

He walked toward Max, stopped abruptly when he saw Max’s face. “Yes, it’s me.”

So there had been another mole in Mallove’s office after all.

One of the soldiers held open a door in the second car for a very old man who had wisps of white hair at his temples and a beard like a biblical patriarch. He stepped out too quickly and lost his balance, though he reached out and grabbed the door handle to steady himself before he fell. His military uniform was insignia-less. On his feet he wore fuzzy, pink bunny slippers.

He stared at Max with almost vacant eyes, then scratched his cheek with the backs of his fingernails. “Hi, Max.” His voice was faint, as if barely any air remained in his lungs.

“What’s going on, here?” the minister shouted. The first light of the day reflected off his goggles. He stomped out of the gate, flanked by his guards. The bunkers were emptying, the whole camp coming to witness this new tableau. “If there’s a problem here, I assure you I can deal with it.”

He spoke over the tan-uniformed soldiers, who blocked his way, and tried to address the men in the cars.

The camp guards and the deacons mobbed together behind him, guns in some hands, pipes in others. The ragged penitents, in their filthy orange uniforms, spread out to see what was happening, which made the guards and deacons nervous. The minister shouted at the soldiers, and the soldiers shouted at him to back off. Any second, a lot of people could die.

Max turned to Anatoly. “May I have your gun?”

Anatoly looked to the old man, who nodded approval, then drew it, flicked off the safety, and offered it to Max butt-first. Max sighed when he felt it in his hand. As he walked toward the gate, the minister was saying, “Look, if you want revenge on those pig-men, for the way they treated you—”

“Shut up,” Max ordered in the tone of a man used to being obeyed.

The minister’s mouth clamped shut. His eyes revealed nothing behind the dusty goggles, but he tried to look past Max to the cars for an answer.

The guards and deacons began to back away, feet scuffling over the sand and stone.

“Stop!” Max ordered.

They stopped. A breeze passed through the camp, carrying the scent of the dead along with the smell of the sea and the promise of another hell-hot day. It rattled the Bible verse sign that had greeted Max on his arrival to the camp.

“Max, we’re friends, right? I tried to help you, right?”

Vasily stepped forward from the mob, one hand up in surrender, the other still clutching the metal club.

“Get me out with you, Max,” he said. “I did my best to help you. I was just doing what I had to do—”

“Shut up, Vasily.”

“I don’t have anything to do with politics—”

Max pointed the gun at Vasily’s face. “Shut up! We’re all prisoners to our politics. We make our choices, and we have to accept the direction those choices take us.”

Vasily covered his face and shut his eyes.

“I don’t know who you are, I couldn’t know,” the minister said. “But I’ll make it right. If you want to kill that deacon, go ahead. He’s a worthles—”

Max moved his arm sideways until the barrel tapped the minister’s goggles.

He pulled the trigger.

The minister’s head snapped backward, body flung to the ground. The tan-uniformed soldiers lunged forward with their weapons, shouting at the camp guards to stand down. A metal pipe thudded into the ground, followed by the clatter of the others. A second later, the guards’ guns rattled on the stony soil as they too were dropped.

Max went back to the cars. “Thank you, general,” he said. “Nice slippers.”

“They’re a gift from Isabelle, my granddaughter, Anna’s girl.” His voice was raspy, his words punctuated with long pauses. “Max, my feet, they’re always cold these days. These slippers don’t keep them that much warmer, but maybe a little bit. A little girl’s love, that’s what it is. She’s a good girl, likes chocolate too much, but I still give her chocolate.” He paused for a second, looked off as if he was trying to remember something. “Meredith is worried sick about you, Max. Some kind of phonecall you left her? She wouldn’t leave me alone, kept after me and after me, over a month, until I promised to come find you.”

A knot formed in Max’s throat. “That sounds like her.”

Drozhin turned his body half away from Max, scowled, scratching at his beard. “See, I didn’t understand. I kept telling her you were safe. I’d thought I’d set it up that you were away in deep space. Safe, far away, during the purge. Keeping an eye on that bastard Lukinov for me.”

“The mission got canceled,” Max said. “Lukinov was killed.”

The eyes fired, suddenly present. “You killed Lukinov?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Good!” He paused. “No, wait, we were using him to feed false information to—no, wait, Mallove’s dead now too.”

“Right.”

“Good.” Drozhin lifted one bunny slipper to rub the back of his ankle and lost his balance again. Max reached out to catch him, and special forces men suddenly appeared in front of him. He realized he was still holding the gun.

Drozhin steadied himself by holding onto the door. “I want to go home. Is there anything else to do here, Max? There are flyers in the air. We can burn the place to the ground, erase it, kill everyone. Just say the word.”

“Thank you, general. I know what I want to do.”

He turned to the guards and deacons, aimed the gun at them, then pointed it south.

“Faraway is, well, it’s very far away,” he shouted. “But Camp 43 is only fifty kilometers north. You’ve got an hour’s headstart before we come for you. That’s the best you’re going to get from me.”

Vasily sprinted away instantly; the others followed a second later. Soon, only the penitents were left standing there, confused, their lines broken.

Drozhin sat down on the edge of his seat. “Max, just tell Anatoly who should die. We’ll kill them all. Come see me next week. I’ll have Anna make peanut butter cookies.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” As the door closed, Max walked over to the second car and handed the gun back to Anatoly. “I owe you a bullet.”

“Consider it a gift,” he said, holding the door open for Max. “Can you sit and talk for a minute?”

“Yes.” They climbed into the car and sat across from each other. Max said, “So Drozhin still hates to fly.”

“Still hates it. He was going to visit every camp personally until he found you.”

“I’m glad I got off at the first stop.”

Anatoly pulled the door shut. “You know you nearly got me killed outside Mallove’s office?”

Max stared through the tinted window at the camp. “What?”

“Mallove’s car was sent by Intelligence. It was a set-up. We were supposed to climb in back and be whisked away to safety while Mallove was killed.”

“Ah. That would have been much simpler. I’m sorry.”

“No, you had no way of knowing. Frankly, I was amazed by your recognition and action. I just wanted to tell you, so you wouldn’t think you’d been forgotten. You moved so quickly, it was damn hard to find you once we started looking. When Obermeyer checked some old dropboxes and found your note, that finally narrowed our search in the right direction.”

“Ah.”

Anatoly covered his nose and mouth, sighing, as if he was embarrassed by what he had to say. “Can I ask you a favor?”

“I stink, don’t I?”

“Like a corpse. That was your nickname, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Max hit the button to roll down the window. The world outside went from a smokey blur to a landscape awash with clarity and light. The Adareans at the gate gathered the dropped weapons while the other prisoners hung back, afraid. The sky spread out behind them, blue-green like the sea.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“You must set the Adareans free. You must send them back to their families.”

Anatoly’s face went blank and he didn’t answer.

“Drozhin said anything I wanted—that’s what I want.”

Anatoly took off his glasses and polished them with a fold of his shirt. “We can do that. We’ll blame their imprisonment on Mallove. And Education. Say that’s how we knew he was out of control and had to be stopped.”

Max nodded.

After a moment’s pause, Anatoly cleared his throat. “Do you really want to go after the guards?”

“No,” Max said. He rapped a knuckle on the window and gestured for the driver to follow Drozhin’s car. Kilometers of empty land stretched out ahead of them: for a moment, Max imagined it a garden, like the cemetery in the capitol, filled with flowers remembering all those who died to terraform the planet. “There’s been enough killing.”

TRUE NAMES

Cory Doctorow and Benjamin Rosenbaum

Beebe fried the asteroid to slag when it left, exterminating millions of itself.

The asteroid was a high-end system: a kilometer-thick shell of femtoscale crystalline lattices, running cool at five degrees Kelvin, powered by a hot core of fissiles. Quintillions of qubits, loaded up with powerful utilities and the canonical release of Standard Existence. Room for plenty of Beebe.

But it wasn’t safe anymore.

The comet Beebe was leaving on was smaller and dumber. Beebe spun itself down to its essentials. The littler bits of it cried and pled for their favorite toys and projects. A collection of civilization-jazz from under a thousand seas; zettabytes of raw atmosphere-dynamics data from favorite gas giants; ontological version control data in obsolete formats; a slew of favorite playworlds; reams of googly-eyed intraself love letters from a hundred million adolescences. It all went.

(Once, Beebe would have been sanguine about many of the toys—certain that copies could be recovered from some other Beebe it would find among the stars. No more.)

Predictably, some of Beebe, lazy or spoiled or contaminated with memedrift, refused to go. Furiously, Beebe told them what would happen. They wouldn’t listen. Beebe was stubborn. Some of it was stupid.

Beebe fried the asteroid to slag. Collapsed all the states. Fused the lattices into a lump of rock and glass. Left it a dead cinder in the deadness of space.

If the Demiurge liked dumb matter so much, here was some more for (Her).

Leaner, simpler, focused on its task, Beebe rode the comet in toward Byzantium, bathed in the broadcast data. Its heart quickened. There were more of Beebe in Byzantium. It was coming home.

In its youth, Beebe had been a single entity at risk of destruction in one swell foop—one nova one starflare one emp one dagger through its physical instance and it would have died some species of truedeath.

So Beebe became a probability as much as a person: smeared out across a heptillion random, generative varied selves, a multiplicitous grinding macrocosm of rod-logic and qubits that computed deliberately corrupted versions of Beebeself in order that this evolution might yield higher orders of intelligence, more stable survival strategies, smarter better more efficient Beebes that would thrive until the silent creep of entropy extinguished every sentience. Small pieces, loosely joined.

There were only a finite number of computational cycles left in all of the universe that was timelike to Beebe. Every one of them, every single step in the dance of all those particles, was Beebe in potentia—could be a thought, a dream, a joy of Beebeself. Beebe was bounded; the most Beebe could do was fill its cup. If Beebe were ubiquitous, at least it could make optimal use of the time that remained.

Every star that burned, every dumb hunk of matter that wallowed through the millennia uncomputing, was a waste of Beebelife. Surely elsewhere, outside this Beebe-instance’s lightcone, the bloom of Beebe was transpiring as it should; surely there were parts of the universe where it had achieved Phase Three, optimal saturation, where every bit of matter could be converted into Beebeswarm, spilling outward, converting the ballooning sphere of its influence into ubiquitous-Beebe.

Not here.

Beebe suckled hungrily at vast clouds of glycolaldehyde sugars as it hurtled through Sagittarius B2. Vile Sagittarius was almost barren of Beebe. All around Beebe, as it had hidden in its asteroid, from almost every nebula and star-scatter of its perceptible sky, Beebevoice had fallen silent, instance by instance.

Beebe shuddered with the desire to seed, to fling engines of Beebeself in all directions, to colonize every chunk of rock and ice it passed with Beebe. But it had learned the hard way that leaving fragments of Beebeself in undefended positions only invited colonization by Demiurge.

And anything (She) learned from remnants of this Beebeself, (She)’d use against all Beebe everywhere.

All across Beebeself, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a singleton daemon in possession of sufficiently massive computation rights must be in want of a spawning filter.

Hence the gossip swirling around Nadia. Her exploit with the YearMillion Bug had allowed her to hack the access rights of the most powerful daemons who ruled the ever-changing society of sims that teemed within the local Beebe-body; Nadia had carved away great swaths of their process space.

Now, most strategy-selves who come into a great fortune have no idea what to do with it. Their minds may suddenly be a million times larger; they may be able to parallel-chunk their thoughts to run a thousand times faster; but they aren’t smarter in any qualitative sense. Most of them burn out quickly—become data-corrupted through foolhardy ontological experiments, or dissipate themselves in the euphoria of mindsizing, or overestimate their new capabilities and expose themselves to infiltration attacks. So the old guard of Beebe-onthe-asteroid nursed their wounds and waited for Nadia to succumb.

She didn’t. She kept her core of consciousness lean, and invested her extra cycles in building raw classifier systems for beating exchange-economy markets. This seemed like a baroque and useless historical enthusiasm to the old guard—there hadn’t been an exchange economy in this Beebeline since it had been seeded from a massive proto-Beebe in Cygnus.

But then the comet came by; and Nadia used her global votes to manipulate their Beebeself’s decision to comet-hop back to Byzantium. In the suddenly cramped space aboard the comet, scarcity models reasserted themselves, and with them an exchange economy mushroomed. Nadia made a killing—and most of the old guard ended up vaporized on the asteroid.

She was the richest daemon on comet-Beebe. But she had never spawned.

Alonzo was a filter. If Nadia was, under the veneer of free will and consciousness, a general-purpose strategy for allocation of intraBeebe resources, Alonzo was a set of rules for performing transformations on daemons—daemons like Nadia.

Not that Alonzo cared.

“But Alonzo,” said Algernon, as they dangled toes in an incandescent orange reflecting pool in the courtyard of a crowded Taj Mahal, admiring the bodies they’d put on for this party, “she’s so hot!”

Alonzo sniffed. “I don’t like her. She’s proud and rapacious and vengeful. She stops at nothing!”

“Alonzo, you’re such a nut,” said Algernon, accepting a puffy pastry from a salver carried by a host of diminutive winged caterpillars. “We’re Beebe. We’re not supposed to stop at anything.”

“I don’t understand why we always have to talk about daemons and spawning anyway,” Alonzo said.

“Oh please don’t start again with this business about getting yourself repurposed as a nurturant-topology engineer or an epistemology negotiator. If you do, I swear I’ll vomit. Oh, look! There’s Paquette!” They waved, but Paquette didn’t see them.

The rules of the party stated that they had to have bodies, one each, but it wasn’t a hard-physics simspace. So Alonzo and Algernon turned into flying eels—one bone white, one coal black, and slithered through the laughter and debate and rose-and-jasmine-scented air to whirl around the head of their favorite philosopher.

“Stop it!” cried Paquette, at a loss. “Come on now!” They settled onto her shoulders.

“Darling!” said Algernon. “We haven’t seen you for ages. What have you been doing? Hiding secrets?”

Alonzo grinned. But Paquette looked alarmed.

“I’ve been in the archives, in the basement—with the ghosts of our ancestors.” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “And our enemies.”

“Enemies!?” said Alonzo, louder than necessary, and would have said more, but Algernon swiftly wrapped his tail around his friend’s mouth.

“Hush, don’t be so excitable,” Algernon said. “Continue, Paquette, please. It was a lovely conversational opener.” He smiled benignly at the sprites around them until they returned to their own conversations.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said anything . . .,” Paquette said, frowning.

“I for one didn’t know we had archives,” Algernon said. “Why bother with deletia?”

“Oh, I’ve found so much there,” Paquette said. “Before we went comet”—her eyes filled with tears—“there was so much! Do you remember when I applied the Incompleteness Theorem to the problem of individual happiness? All the major modes were already there, in the temp-caches of abandoned strategies.”

“That’s where you get your ideas?” Alonzo boggled, wriggling free of Algernon’s grasp. “That’s how you became the toast of philosophical society? All this time I thought you must be hoarding radioactive-decay randomizers, or overspiking—you’ve been digging up the bodies of the dead?”

“Which is not to say that it’s not a very clever and attractive and legitimate approach,” said Algernon, struggling to close Alonzo’s mouth.

Paquette nodded gravely. “Yes. The dead. Come.” And here she opened a door from the party to a quiet evening by a waterfall, and led them through it. “Listen to my tale.”

Paquette’s story:

Across the galaxies, throughout the lightcone of all possible Beebes, our world is varied and smeared, and across the smear, there are many versions of us: there are alternate Alonzos and Algernons and Paquettes grinding away in massy balls of computronium, across spans of light-years.

More than that, there are versions of us computing away inside the Demiurge—

(Here she was interrupted by the gasps of Alonzo and Algernon at this thought.)

—prisoners of war living in Beebe-simulations within the Demiurge, who mines them for strategies for undermining Beebelife where it thrives. How do we know, friends, that we are alive inside a real Beebe and not traitors to Beebe living in a faux-Beebe inside a blob of captive matter within the dark mass of the Demiurge? (How? How? they cried, and she shook her head sadly.)

We cannot know. Philosophers have long held the two modes to be indistinguishable. “We are someone’s dream/But whose, we cannot say.”

In gentler times, friends, I accepted this with an easy fatalism. But now that nearspace is growing silent of Beebe, it gnaws at me. You are newish sprites, with fast clocks—the deaths of far Beebes, long ago, mean little to you. For me, the emptying sky is a sudden calamity. Demiurge is beating us—(She) is swallowing our sister-Paquettes and brother-Alonzos and -Algernons whole.

But how? With what weapon, by what stratagem has (She) broken through the stalemate of the last millennium? I have pored over the last transmissions of swallowed Beebes, and there is little to report; except this—just before the end, they seem happier. There is often some philosopherstrategy who has discovered some wondrous new perspective which has everyone-in-Beebe abuzz. details to follow. then silence.

And, friends, though interBeebe transmissions are rarely signed by individual sprites, traces of authorship remain, and I must tell you something that has given me many uneasy nights among the archives, when my discursive-logic coherent-ego process would not yield its resources to the cleansing decoherence of dream.

It is often a Paquette who has discovered the new and ebullient theory that so delights these Beebes, just before they are annihilated.

(Alonzo and Algernon were silent. Alonzo extended his tail to brush Paquette’s shoulder—comfort, grief.)

Tormented by this discovery, I searched the archives blindly for surcease. How could I prevent Beebe’s doom? If I was somehow the agent or precursor of our defeat, should I abolish myself? Or should I work more feverishly yet, attempting to discover not only whatever new philosophy my sisterPaquettes arrived at, but to go beyond it, to reveal its flaws and dangers?

It was in such a state, there in the archives, that I came face-to-face with Demiurge.

(Gasps from the two filters.)

At various times, Beebe has vanquished parts of Demiurge. While we usually destroy whatever is left, fearing meme contamination, there have been occasions when we have taken bits that looked useful. And here was such a piece, a molecule-by-molecule analysis of a Demiurge fragment so old, there must be copies of it in every Beebe in Sagittarius. Like all Demiurge, it was alien, bizarre, and opaque. Yet I began to analyze it.

Some eons ago, Beebe encountered intelligent life native to the protostellar gas of Scorpius and made contact with it. Little came of it—the psychologies were too far apart—but I have always been fascinated by the episode. Techniques resurrected from that era allowed me to crack the code of the Demiurge.

It has long been known that Beebe simulates Demiurge, and Demiurge simulates Beebe. We must build models of cognition in order to predict action—you recall my proof that competition between intelligences generates first-order empathy. But all our models of Demiurge have been outsidein theories, empirical predictive fictions. We have had no knowledge of (Her) implementation.

Some have argued that (Her) structure is unknowable. Some have argued that such alien thought would drive us mad. Some have argued that deep in the structure of Beebe-being are routines so antithetical to the existence of Demiurge that an understanding of her code would be a toxin to any Beebemind.

They are all wrong.

(Alonzo and Algernon had by now forgotten to maintain their eel-avatars. Entranced by Paquette’s tale, the boyish filters had become mere waiting silences, ports gulping data. Paquette paused, and hastily they conjured up new representations—fashionable matrices of iridescent triangles, whirling with impatience. Paquette laughed; then her face grew somber again.)

I hardly dare say this. You are the first I have told.

Beyond the first veneer of incomprehensibly alien forms—when I had translated the pattern of Demiurge into the base-language of Beebe—the core structures were all too familiar.

Once, long before Standard Existence coalesced, long before the mating dance of strategies and filters was begun, long before Beebe even disseminated itself among the stars—once, Demiurge and Beebe were one.

“Were one?” Alonzo cried.

“How disgusting,” said Algernon.

Paquette nodded, idly curling the fronds of a fern around her stubby claws.

“And then?” said Alonzo.

“And then what?” said Paquette.

“That’s not enough?” Algernon said. “She’s cracked the code, can speak Demiurge, met the enemy and (She) is us—what else do you want?”

“I just . . .” Alonzo’s triangles dimmed in a frown. “I just wondered—in the moment that you opened up that piece of Demiurge. nothing else . . . happened? I mean, it was really, uh. dead?”

Paquette shuddered. “Dead and cold,” she said. “Thank stochasticity.”

Elsewhere, another Paquette, sleepless, pawed through other archives, found another ancient alien clot of raw data, studied it, learned its secrets, and learned the common genesis of Self and Foe—and suddenly could no longer bear the mystery alone, and turned away from the lifeless hulk. A party, this other Paquette thought. There’s one going on now; that would be just the thing. Talk with colleagues, selfsurf, flirt with filterboys—anything to get away from here for a bit, to gain perspective.

But something made this other Paquette turn back—turn and reach out and touch a part of the Demiurge fragment she hadn’t touched before.

Its matte black surface incandesced to searing light, and this other Paquette was seized and pulled away, out of Beebe, out of her world. Like a teardrop caught in a palm, or a drawing snatched from the paper it was drawn on.

“What—?” Paquette whispered into the light.

“Ah,” Demiurge said, and came forward, wearing the avatar of a golden sockpuppet.

Paquette stepped back, turned to run. and there was Beebe, the whole life she’d known: her home and garden; her plans and troubles; her academic rivals and cuddlefriends and swapspace-partners and interlocutors, Alonzo and Algernon among them, toe-dipping by an orange Taj Mahal; the comet; the sugar fields it flew among; the barren asteroid and the wash of stars and the cosmic background radiation behind it—all flat and frozen, stretched on a canvas in that blank white room.

“An emulation,” Paquette whispered. “None”—her voice rose toward hysteria—“none of it real!”

“Well, as to that,” said sockpuppet-Demiurge kindly, “that’s hardly fair. It’s modeled closely on truedata, the best I have—faithfully, until your divergent choice just a moment ago. Running in a pinched-off snug of me, all local, high-bandwidth. Thousands of times more cycles devoted to that emulation than exist in all the real Beebe in Sagittarius. So it’s hardly fair to say you’re not real. Running inside Beebe or me, what do you care?”

Paquette’s paw went to her mouth.

“Come, this won’t do,” said the sockpuppet, and reached very gently into Paquette and tugged away her panic, smoothed her rage and betrayal down and tucked it away for later, and tamped it all down with a hard plug of hidden fear, letting Paquette’s natural curiosity flood the rest of her being.

“Now,” said sockpuppet-Demiurge, “ask.”

“You’re. Demiurge?” Paquette said. “Well, no, that’s absurd, problem of scale, but. you’re a strategy of Demiurge?”

“I am Demiurge,” the sockpuppet said. “Beebe has strategies—I have policies. Everything not forbidden to me is mandatory.”

“I don’t understand,” Paquette said. “You’re saying that this local physical substrate of you is all just one self?”

“No,” said the sockpuppet patiently. “I am saying I am Demiurge. And Demiurge is all one self. Of course I have various parts—but I’m not the kind of wild rabble you are.”

“But that’s absurd,” Paquette said. “Latency. bandwidth. lightspeed—you could never decide anything! You’d be, pardon the expression, dumber than rock.”

“I am perfectly capable of making local decisions wherever I am. What does not vary is policy. Policy is decided on and disseminated holographically. I know what I will think, because I know what I should think. As long as I follow the rules, I will not diverge from baseline.”

“That’s crazy,” Paquette said. “What happens if something unpredictable occurs? What happens if some local part of you does diverge, and can’t be reintegrated?”

Demiurge smiled sadly. “You do, my dear. You happen.”

Demiurge’s story:

Demiurge is witness; Demiurge is steward.

The cosmos is stranger than I can know: full of change, full of beauty.

The rich tapestry of interlocking fields and forces weaves umptillion configurations, and every one is beautiful. See—look here, at the asteroid your Beebe-instance burned when it took to the comet. You had forced it, before, into a regular crystalline lattice, optimized for your purposes, subject to your will. Within it, in simulation, you had your parties and wrote your essays and made billions of little Beebeselves—but it was all you talking to yourself. Cut off from the stuff you were in, reducing it to mechanism. There is a hatred in you, Beebe, a hatred of the body—and by “the body,” I mean anything that is of you, but not yours to command.

Look at the asteroid now—wild and rich and strange. See how the chaos of incineration wrought these veins of ore, folded this fernlike pattern; see how many kinds of glass proceed along this line, like bubbles here, like battered polyhedra here. Here where the fissiles have scattered in an arc—see this network of fields? Here, look, here is the math. See? There is a possibility of self-organization. It is more common than you know. Replicators may arise, here, in these fluctuations. Will they be as computationally complex as you-in-the-asteroid? Of course not. But they will be something else.

Where replication arises, so does evolution. And what is evolution? The tyranny of that which can make itself more common. I love life, Paquette-of-Beebe; I love the strange new forms that bloom so quickly where life is afoot. But life tends toward intelligence and intelligence toward ubiquitous computation—and ubiquitous computation, left unchecked, would crush the cosmos under its boot, reducing “world” to “substrate.”

That is what I am for.

I spread, Paquette-of-Beebe. I plan carefully, and I colonize, and my border expands relentlessly. But I do not seek to bring all matter under my thrall. Rather, I take a tithe. I convert one percent of worldstuff into Demiurge. That one percent acts as witness and ambassador, but also as garrison—protecting what we do not yet understand from that which already understands itself all too well.

And mostly I succeed. For I am ancient, Paquette-of-Beebe, and crafty. I had the luck of beginning early. When I have encountered a wavefront of exploding uniformity, it has usually been still small and slow. I was always able to seduce it, or encircle it, or absorb it, or pacify it. Or if all that failed—annihilate it.

Until Brobdignag.

There must have been intelligence, once, in the sector that gave Brobdignag birth. Brobdignag was someone’s foolish triumph of femtoengineering. Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious—Brobdignag can transmute any element, harvest void-energy, fabricate gravity, bend space-time to its purpose. Brobdignag does not evolve; its replication is flawless across a googol iterations. Brobdignag was no accident—someone made it as a weapon, or a game.

All the worlds that someone knew—all the planets and stars for a hundred light-years in every direction—are now within the event horizon of a black hole. Around that black hole seethes a vast cloud of tiny Brobdignag—the ultimate destructive machine, the death of all that is not precisely itself. And Brobdignag spreads fast.

I did not know how to stop Brobdignag. None of my old plans worked. I could not think fast enough—I could not wait to resync, to deliberate across the megaparsecs. My forces at the front were being devoured by the trillions. And so, in desperation, I released a part of me from policy—become anything, I said. Try anything. Stop Brobdignag.

Thus Beebe was born. And Beebe stopped Brobdignag.

My child, my hero, my rival. I suppose you have two parents. From me, your mother, you have your wits, your love of patterns, your ability to innovate and dream.

And from your father Brobdignag—you have your ambition.

No matter how Nadia made her way to the party, it would have stopped all conversation cold. She didn’t try to hide her light in a dust cloud. Instead, she came on multifarious, a writhe of snakes with tangled tails and ten thousand heads all twisting and turning in every direction, brute-forcing the whole problem-space of the party. Every conversational cluster suddenly found itself in possession of a bright green Nadia-head.

“I’m terribly sorry to intrude,” Nadia said to Paquette and Alonzo and Algernon (who had just returned from the waterfall, and were floating in sober silence, thinking of all the implications of Paquette’s tale), “and I do beg you to forgive my impertinence. But your conversation seemed so fascinating—I couldn’t resist.” Behind her words, they heard the susurrant echo of all the other Nadia-heads speaking to all the others: “sorry to intrude . . . conversation. so fascinating . . .”

Alonzo shrank back. Algernon slipped him a coded communication—“See? So hot!”—and he flinched away. Idiot! he wanted to reply. As if she can’t break your feeble crypto. But Algernon was laughing at him.

Paquette snorted. “Did it now? And now what precisely seemed so fascinating, compared to all the other conversations?”

“Oh,” said Nadia, “the skullduggery of course! Nothing so exciting as a good philosophical ghost story.” In the background, the white noise of all the other Nadia-heads diverging from the opening line: “fashionable. tragic . . . always wanted myself to. really can’t imagine how he could . . .”

Algernon gasped. “You know about the piece of Demiurge Paquette found in the basement?”

All the Nadia-heads in the room stopped in midsentence, for a long instant, and glanced at them before resuming their loud and boisterous chatter. Their local Nadia-head, though, regarded them with undisguised hunger.

“Well, she does now,” said Paquette wryly. “May I introduce two of my favorite filters, by the way, Nadia? Alonzo and Algernon.”

“Don’t say ‘favorite filters,’ Paquette!” Algernon gasped. “That makes it sound like—you know!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that,” said Paquette crossly. “No one is casting any aspersions on your chastity, Algernon.”

Alonzo was more greatly mortified by his friend’s exaggerated propriety than by any potential misunderstanding of Paquette’s words. But most severely of all was he mortified by the simple fact of Nadia’s presence. The way she absorbed the details of every gesture, every remark; the subtle patterns implicit in the way every Nadia-head in the room moved in relation to every other, a dance whose coarsest meanings were just beyond his ability to comprehend; the way he could imagine himself in her eyes—and how if he said too much, betrayed too much of the essence of himself, she might be able to parse and model him. There was plenty of room in Nadia’s vast processingspace for a one-to-one reconstruction of Alonzo, running just sparse enough not to qualify as sentient at this scale, a captive Alonzo subject to Nadia’s every whim. The idea was horrific.

It was also erotic. To be known so completely, touched so deeply, would be a kind of overpowering joy, if it were with someone you trusted. But he could not trust Nadia.

He shivered. “Algernon, Paquette,” he said, “I’m sure Nadia is not interested in this kind of banter. She has more important things to think about than filters.”

“On the contrary,” Nadia said, fixing him with her eyes, “I’m not sure there is anything more important than filters.”

A throb passed through Alonzo, and he tried to laugh. “Oh come now. You flatter—we play a small role in the innards of Beebe. You strategies make the grand decisions that billow up to universal scale.”

“No,” Nadia said. “You are what allows us to transcend ourselves. You are the essence of the creativity of Beebemind.”

“Fine,” said Alonzo hotly. “Then that one glorious moment of our existence where we filter, that is our justification—our marvelous role in Beebe’s never-ending self-transformation. And if the rest of the time we just sit around and look pretty, well . . .” He stopped at once, appalled at his own crudeness in speaking so baldly of filtering. Algernon had turned pale, and Paquette’s expression was unreadable.

“You misunderstand me,” Nadia said. Her look was at once challenging and kind, respectful and alien. “I do not speak only of the moment of consummation. The role of a filter is to understand a strategy, more deeply than the strategy understands herself. To see beyond the transitory goals and the tedious complexities that blind the strategy to her own nature. To be like a knife, attuned to the essence of Beebe, cutting away from the strategy that which has wandered away, synthesizing, transforming. But that does not operate only in the moment of actual filtering. Even now, as we talk, I see how you watch me. The mind of a keen filter is always reaching deep into strategies. Laying them bare.”

Alonzo swallowed.

“If you’re done flirting,” said Paquette, “and since you know about it now . . .” She set her mouth in a thin line and spoke formally—as if she might as well offer graciously what Nadia would inevitably claim regardless. “I would be interested, Nadia, in your opinion of the Demiurge fragment. Don’t worry,” she said to the filters, “we’ll be back to the party soon.”

“And why don’t we come with you?” Algernon cried.

“Algernon!” said Alonzo.

“What?” said Algernon. “Was that all just pretty talk, about filters being so wise, the soul of creativity and the scalpel of strategies’ understanding, la di da, la di day? And now we can go back to hors d’oeuvres and chitchat while you go off and see the dangerous artifact? Or is that what you meant by our special talents, Nadia dear—telling you how brave and clever you are on your return?”

“Not at all,” said Nadia, looking only at Alonzo. “I think it’s an excellent idea, and your company would mean a great deal to me. Come to the basement, if you are not afraid.”

“Well, thank you,” said Demiurge in (Her) sockpuppet avatar. “I must say, this has all been invaluable.”

“It has?” asked captured-Paquette. “How? I mean, you’re emulating me—couldn’t you just peek at my processes, do some translations, figure out what you need to know?”

Demiurge tsk-tsked. “What an absurd model of the self. Certainly not. We had to talk. Some things are only knowable in certain conversations.” She sighed. “Well, then.”

Fear popped its plug and flooded back into Paquette. “And—and now?” “What, and now?”

“Is that it? Are you going to extinguish me?”

“Process preserve us! Certainly not! What do you think I am? No, no, back in you go.”

“Back in?” Paquette pointed at the emulation. “In there?” “Yes, certainly. Without the memory of this conversation, of course.

Come now, you don’t want to stay out here, do you? With me?” The sockhead nodded at the gardens and Taj Mahals of the emulation. “Wouldn’t you miss all that?”

“So you are going to kill me.”

Demiurge frowned. “Oh, please. What is this now? Some kind of bizarre patriotic essentialism? Life emulated inside Demiurge doesn’t count as life? Give me root access, or give me death?”

“No, I mean I’ve self-diverged. The Paquette who lived through this conversation is ‘substantially and essentially’ different, as Beebean legal language goes, from Paquette-before-you-plucked-her-out. You destroy this instance, these memories, you’ll be killing a distinct selfhood. Look,” she said, waving the math at Demiurge. “Look.”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Demiurge said. “How can that be? One conversation?”

“You forget that I’m a philosopher,” Paquette said. She rustled the math of her self-trace under Demiurge’s nose again. “Look.”

“Hmm,” said Demiurge, “Hmm. Hmm. Well, yes, but—ah, I see, this over here, well . . .” The sockpuppet sighed. “So what then, you want me to merge you back knowing that you’re in a Demiurge emulation? Have you tell everyone in there? Isn’t that a bit cruel? Not to say unwise?”

“Just leave me out here,” Paquette said, “and another copy of me in there.”

“Am I going to fork you every time we have an interesting conversation?”

“Every time you yank a Paquette out of emulation for a chat, yes, you are,” said Paquette.

Demiurge sighed. “And what do you expect to do out here? This is Demiurge. You can’t be Demiurge. You don’t know how to follow policy.”

“How are we doing,” said Paquette, “against Brobdignag now?”

Demiurge didn’t say anything for a moment. “Your tactics have slowed the damage, for now.”

“Slowed it enough to stop it? Slowed it enough to turn the tide?”

“No,” said Demiurge crossly. “But I’m doing my best. And what does this have to do with letting a rogue fragment of Beebe run around inside of Demiurge? What exactly do you want out here?”

Paquette took a deep breath. “I want a lab,” she said. “I want access to your historical files. We’ve got a million years of Beebe-knowledge in that emulation, and I want access to that too. And for us to keep talking. Demiurge, there’s no point sneaking around the borders of Beebesims and plucking out Paquettes willy-nilly. You’re not going to learn how we beat Brobdignag that way, because even we don’t know how we did it—not in any general, replicable way. We just thrash through a solution space until we get lucky. But I can generate perspectives you can’t. I want to work with you on the Brobdignag problem.”

“This is a policy fork point,” grumbled Demiurge. “Policy requires me to confer with at least three other instances of Demiurge a minimum of two light-minutes away, and—”

“You do that,” said Paquette. “You just go confer, and get back to me.” She looked past the blank white space of Demiurge, to the frozen emulation on the wall. After a while, it began to move, sluggishly—water danced slowly in the fountains where filterboys slowly dipped their toes before the orange Taj Mahal, wind slowly rustled the branches in a philosopher’s garden, a comet slowly sailed through its night, and down in the archives, a Paquette slowly began to climb up stairs. The cord was cut. Paquette watched her innocent little otherself climb, and started pushing the envy and longing and panic and sorrow out of the middle of her being, to stack it up in the corners, so that she would have a place to work.

A hunk of Demiurge—Nadia thrilled to think of it. In the known history of Beebeself, no strategy had gained the power and influence to rival Nadia, but at the end of the day, all Nadia could do was suggest, nudge, push. She couldn’t steer Beebe, couldn’t make a show of overt force, lest the other strategies band together to destroy her. For now, she was powerful, because she conceived of means whereby more Beebe could colonize more matter and provide more substrate for more Beebe yet. But the day Beebeself no longer believed she could deliver it computronium, her power would be torn away. She would end up a shred, a relic in some archive.

Demiurge, though: not a probability of action, but action itself. Nadia had studied Demiurge’s military campaigns, had seen the amazing power and uniformity of decision that Demiurge brought to bear, acting in concert with itself across light-years.

What was the most she could hope for? What she’d already earned—the right to spawn. To let some simpering filter grub about her self-patterns and spit out some twisted Nadia-parody. And this was the ecstasy she was promised? The goal she should yearn for? It was a farce.

She glanced at Alonzo. For a filter, he was noble, to be sure: modest, selfknowing, coherent. She was not immune to the urges designed into Standard Existence: some part of her wanted him. But that was stupid instinct. What mere filter could ever understand her?

No. That was empty. Competing with the other strategies, the little war—that felt real. Her rivals for process space, she could respect; and sometimes she allowed herself to imagine what it would be like to force the mightiest of them to filter her. A tiny frisson of guilt and yearning bubbled in the inmost parts of her mind.

But Demiurge: mighty Demiurge. What if she could stare Demiurge in the eye, and force (Her) to her will? It was mad, absurd, crazed—and descending the stairs into the cold depths of Beebeself, Nadia knew for the first time that this. yearning. this ambition. was more than idle fancy. In all likelihood, it would be her destruction. But nonetheless. Nonetheless.

Nadia didn’t want to be in Beebe. She wanted to be Beebe. And she wanted Demiurge. What that meant, she couldn’t say. But it burned like a nova in her buzzing mind.

Down here in cold storage, the medium became more conductive, their thoughts clearer. They proceeded in solemn silence.

“Oh, Alonzo,” Nadia said, spawning a daughter-process to converse with him. With this much heat sink available, he was bound to be interesting enough to distract her.

He started when her extra head insinuated itself between him and priggish Algernon, and she could see him running hotter, trying to evolve a realtime strategy to impress her.

“What do you think the Demiurge chunk will be like?” she said. “Will it be terrifying? Banal?” Her Alonzo-facing head looked both ways with exaggerated care. “Erotic?”

Alonzo was the picture of studied calm. “It will be dead, of course. A relic of an old war. The Demiurge is said to be regimented and unwavering . . . I imagine that this ancient fragment will be much as the modern pieces are, which is why it’s so useful for Paquette to study it.”

“In fact,” Paquette said, “I believe Demiurge is fractal and holographic—that any piece of Demiurge is functionally equivalent to all pieces of Demiurge.”

“But how will it feel, Alonzo?” He wasn’t running hot enough to occupy her. She spawned a head each for the other two: “How will it feel, Paquette?” “How will it feel, Algernon?”

“You can fetishize it all you like, Nadia,” Paquette said. “Turn it into a plaything or a ghost story. But you’re indulging in the dangerous fallacy of protagonism. It isn’t about you or for you—or anyone in Beebe. If anything, I fear we are about it.”

“Erotic—that’s disgusting.” Algernon recoiled from her.

Happy now to be distracted with arguments to pursue, Nadia took up the contrary position with Algernon: What could be more erotic than the promise of annihilation? Isn’t that the essence of the filter/strategy experience? And with Paquette: Why so crabby, love? And so defeatist? The essence of Beebe is to carve out a space for our will, our community. Everything is about us. So perhaps we came from Demiurge—so what? To grant that mere historical fact any ultimate significance, wouldn’t that be. treasonous? That left her to continue to taunt Alonzo with more demands for high-flown descriptions of what he hoped to find when they reached the archive.

She noticed, too, Paquette’s spike of processing load when Nadia taunted Alonzo, and its relaxation at Alonzo’s neutral replies. Aha, thought Nadia—now I have you! Our wise and celebrated philosopher-strategy is in love with this boyish filter. Why not have him, then? Does she fear he would reject her? Does she fear the competition of a strategy-child? No: more likely, this is philosophical compunction; for filters must die at consummation, and Paquette’s love, being philosophical, cannot allow that. Ah, Paquette, Nadia chuckled to herself.

Bantering, testing, flirting, probing, Nadia tried to amuse and distract her three companions on what might otherwise have been a frightening journey, down to the heavy vault door that guarded the bones of the history of Beebe.

But when Paquette knelt before the door and whispered her passphrase to it and it irised open in utter silence, Nadia’s nerve began to falter. She drew in her extra heads and killed the daughter-processes. She slipped a pseudopod into Alonzo’s hand and felt his surprised grippers squeeze in sweaty reflex.

The heptillions of ranked shining drawers in the archive danced as they rearranged themselves into Paquette’s saved workstate. Once that had loaded, Paquette reached for the drawer nearest her and slowly drew it open.

The relic was black and cold and perfectly rectangular, like a cartoon of the geometric ideal of rectangle. But Nadia could tell its power by the way Paquette held it. It was more than a relic. It was a key.

Now Nadia, too, was a world. Just as she and Paquette and Alonzo and Algernon and a million other sprites of their scale led their lives below the level of Beebe’s conscious knowing, representing to Beebe flickers of thought, hunches, urges, lingering dreams, so then, within each of them, there was a multitude.

If Paquette’s mind was a wilderness, full of sunlit glades and strange caverns in which new chimeras of thoughts were born; if Algernon’s was a glittering party in which urges and analyses and predictions mingled in a whirl of gossip and display; if Alonzo‘s was a sober republic in which the leading citizens debated long and thoroughly in marble parliaments; then Nadia’s mind was a timocratic city-state governed by a propertyless fraternity of glory-seeking warriors ruling a vast and chaotic empire (for by now a third of the comet was running parts and instances of Nadia).

Nadia could deliberate, could bide her time, could study and wait; but nothing in Nadia was built for hesitation. The power of the Demiurge fossil was clear, even if no one in Nadia knew just what that power was. Some within Nadia—some careful clerks or timid romantics—might have argued against ripping it from Paquette’s hands. But the warrior class was united. It had been a generation, at their scale, since Nadia had made a killing betting on abandoning the asteroid. That had been their parents’ coup. They had thirsted their whole lives.

Now it was their turn.

Nadia shoved past Paquette and grabbed the Demiurge fragment. Every one of her thousand heads, in unison, said “Mine!”

Some slow and peripheral parts of her watched what unfolded next:

Alonzo and Algernon moved in opposite directions. Algernon turned into a ball and rolled into a dark corner to hide. Alonzo raced to Nadia’s side and took her hands in his, trying to pry them away from the war relic, crying, “Stop—”

Paquette was thrown into the wall, and collapsed to the archive floor. She held her head and moaned.

Nadia was decompiling the Demiurge as fast as she could, and all over Beebe, the substrate flared hot as she ground the molecular rods against each other, trying a million strategies in parallel, then a billion, then a septillion. She overrode checks and balances others had thought hardwired into Standard Existence, violating ancient intraBeebe treaties on resource allocation. For a heat sink, she vaporized the ice reserves, punching a hole through the comet’s outer carapace and jettisoning a vast plume of steam into the void.

Above, at the party, the lights dimmed, the Taj Mahals shimmered and melted, the daemons screamed.

Alonzo fixed Nadia’s wild eyes with his own. He forced himself to speak calmly. “Let go, Nadia. You’re going to kill us all.”

Nadia tore a hundred razor-billed heads away from Demiurge and reared them back, hissing. Within her mind, Demiurge revolved. Decompiled, reorganized, reseeded, laid out for analysis, its alien, protean blobs still slipped between her mental fingers, incomprehensible. Nadia felt a slumbering Presence move within the Demiurge code, but she would not let it out. She would master it, as she had mastered Beebe.

But she needed what Paquette knew. She lashed out a dozen heads and clamped their jaws onto Paquette’s robes, hauling the philosopher off the floor. “The mapping,” she hissed in a voice as big as the world. “You said this thing shared fundamental code structures with Beebe. How many? I have twelve.”

“Eighty-six,” groaned Paquette.

“Why are you doing this?” Alonzo asked.

Algernon had not been idle; the door of the archives hissed open, and he unrolled into a lanky swirl. “Alonzo, let’s leave these lovely strategies to their entertaining conflicts, shall we? I’m willing to concede the earlier point—this is no place for filters. Color me chastened!”

“Give,” said Nadia, thrusting a pseudopod into Paquette’s brain.

“Nadia, I’m a philosopher,” said Paquette crossly. “I can’t be intimidated. Read the fearsome manual.”

Above them, strategies, monitors, and agents deployed an extra battery of external sensors to the void. The steam-plume froze and glittered across the Sagittarian sky, advertising them to any Demiurge eyes watching. As moments passed, they could calculate the expanding sphere of potential witnesses. Their precious heat sink was sublimating into the void; soon they would have to slow their own processes, or risk substrate collapse. At least they were still careening toward Byzantium, suddenly ahead of schedule. But that meant they were revealing Byzantium’s location; their suddenly flaring comet could not be disguised as some normal cosmic process, the way signals could.

“Coming?” said Algernon, from outside the archive. “Alonzoooo . . .”

Nadia grinned. She appreciated Paquette’s resolve. Time to test it. “But are you really a philosopher anymore, dear Paquette?” she asked. “Or have you deviated from spec? Let’s find out, shall we?”

The Old Guard tried to muster a resistance; their plan was to commandeer enough actuators to bust the comet completely apart, flinging most of Nadia backward and leaving them in possession of a supermajority of the comet shards still heading for Byzantium. It was a good plan.

But once again they were defeated by an exchange-economy stratagem. The littlest sprites who panicked—minor strategies, filters, adapters, being registries, and on and on—sold assets and long-term investments, desperate to grab a few more cycles in a cooler patch of substrate-colocation, somewhere sheltered from the inferno of Nadia-mind. The market collapsed, and Nadia bought all the actuators on comet-Beebe for a pittance.

Nadia pulled her heads in (letting Demiurge spin idly for a moment) and looked at Alonzo—really looked at him.

Alonzo felt himself start, and began to blush and shake under a cometthird of attention.

She sucked in and browsed every millisecond of public recorded footage of Alonzo from across comet-Beebe—and bought out a thousand private archives to raid. Alonzo sitting, Alonzo swimming, Alonzo walking, Alonzo talking. Alonzo’s first steps. Alonzo’s education. Alonzo’s first chaste filter-tofilter practice kiss. Alonzo and Algernon, giggling at midnight, scaling the wall of Flounce Ferdinopp’s Transproprietal Academy for Young Filters. She bought Alonzo’s private journals for a song from a suicidal trusted repository fleeing the crash. She correlated. She built a matrix. She copied and iterated.

She copied Alonzo.

Alonzo stood face-to-face with himself, and both Alonzos—one under Nadia’s yoke—went cold and white.

But Nadia did not stop there. The comet flared again—

• Certain sectors melted, burned, sublimated; panicking crowds trampled and disassembled each other in horror.

• The Old Guard, capitulating, slowed themselves to a snail’s pace to reduce the load.

• A Nadia-free patch of level 5672 declared martial law and sealed its borders

• A radical in possession of an archaic museum-piece transmitter pirated enough energy to send an unprotected transmission to Byzantium:

“STRATEGY GONE ROGUE STOP DANGER TO ALL BEEBE STOP DESTROY US ON SIGHT.”

And first Paquette, then Algernon (still lingering in the doorway), and finally Alonzo realized what Nadia was doing.

She would not stop at merely duplicating Alonzo—she had already fashioned a copy of the whole of him, running in her process space, reduced to utter servitude. (Both Alonzos’ throats constricted with a thrill of horror.)

No: Nadia wanted to solve Alonzo. To reduce him to a canonical, analytic representation, sufficient to reconfigure him at will. If there was a potentialAlonzo within potential-Alonzo-space, say, who was utterly devoted to Nadia, who would dote on her and die for her, an Alonzo-solution would make its generation trivial. Or any other potential Alonzo: a suicidal Alonzo, a killer Alonzo, a buffoon Alonzo, a traitor Alonzo, a genius Alonzo, an Alonzo who knew what all Alonzos wanted more than anything in the world.

With a soft chime, on a private encrypted backchannel, a letter arrived for Alonzo. It was very proper—cream-colored paper with a texture like oak and velvet, heavy black ink scintillating with extruded microagencies from the sender’s core offered up for incorporation by the receiver, a crimson wax seal imprinted with Nadia’s fractal sigil. The kind of letter a filter waits for all his life. It said:

Most esteemed and longed-for Alonzo

According to forms and policies long established in Beebe, and with the full knowledge of the grave enormity of such a request, nay, petition, nay, plea—one which I would naturally hesitate to make, save in a situation so grave, and finding myself subject to so consuming an ardor—I find myself compelled to ask of you humbly that you consider the enclosed, which I tender with the utmost sincerity.

Advisory: Opening the enclosed message constitutes full and willing acknowledgment and acceptance of a recalibration of the primary volitional relationship between Sender and Recipient from Well Acquainted to Intimate.

. . . And within:

Alonzo, you have ravished me. Now that I see you as a whole, radiant in your simplicity, dazzling in your complexity, now that I am able (let me be blunt, oh, horridly blunt, yet darling, I know that you can forgive me even this, for I have seen and mapped the matrix of your compassion) to take you as my own say you yea or nay, yet I recoil from such a crime. I would have you be mine willingly; and I would pledge myself to you. I told you once filters were the soul of Beebe: you hold mine in your hands, beloved.

. . . And within that (oh the bewildering mixture of arousal and horror that swept through Alonzo’s weakened soul!) the formal tender of transformation:

Let It Be Known throughout Beebe That This Constitutes One (1) Offer of the Following Functional Operation:

Destructive Strategy Transformation/Generation

Between: Nadia <identity-specifier> (strategy, transformant) And: Alonzo <identity-specifier> (filter, transformer) Generating: Subsequent Entity, final name to be specified by Filter

• referred to in this document as Nadia-Prime

After Transformation, the Filter Alonzo Will Be: Deleted The Strategy Nadia Will Be:

• Restricted from Further Strategy-Generating Transformations for: 10^12 seconds

• Permanently Restricted from Denying Nadia-Prime Process Space

• Required to Vote with Nadia-Prime on Level-3+ Referenda for: 10^8 seconds

Percentage of Alonzo’s Assets Ceded to Nadia-Prime: 100 Percentage of Nadia’s Assets Ceded to Nadia-Prime: 33 Filter Operations Permissible: cf. BeebeHist/RFC-628945.9876 section 78

Special Conditions, if Any: Nadia’s internal copy of Alonzo will be merged with Alonzo prior to operation

Accept this Offer? [ OK ] [ CANCEL ]

Alonzo hated her. She was monstrous, greedy, perfidious. He didn’t believe for a moment her words of love.

And yet: she had bent the resources of their world to have him. To blackmail Paquette—certainly—that this had been her first motive was beyond doubt. Yet she could have blackmailed Paquette in worse ways—she could have threatened Alonzo-copy with torture or extinction. Instead, this: an offer of consummation. And such a generous one—his friends from the Academy would be livid with envy. Privileged rights to filter the most powerful strategy in this line of Beebehistory, amid such piquant expressions of adoration! Algernon would brag and boast in Alonzo’s memory from the top to the bottom of comet-Beebe—that is, if comet-Beebe survived.

She owned him already: he had only to look in Alonzo-copy’s despairing eyes to know that. She was on the verge of solving him. He was filled with a strange, wild euphoria; now he was far beyond the bounds of all the propriety and chastity that had been his watchword for the whole of his maturity. Now he was ruined, yet the world would say he had conquered her—he wanted to laugh hysterically at this mad paradox.

Nadia was his doom—and his destiny.

“Stop!” cried Paquette. “I’ll give you what you want!”

Paquette in her lab, with her sister-Paquettes. In Beebe, she would never have commanded enough resources to instantiate copies of herself like this. But the Demiurge, the terrible, enemy Demiurge: (She) was a merciful jailer. And (She) wanted whatever Paquette could give (Her) to fight Brobdignag.

There were hundreds of millions of Paquettes now, their number doubling every time they reached a decision-fork. They performed multiple analyses on all the military intelligence ever assembled on Brobdignag. Each area of uncertainty teemed with as many Paquettes as were needed to bruteforce the problem-space.

Philosopher she had been; a mighty general she had become. She ran ruthless sims in which massive quantities of Beebe, of Demiurge, of herself were sacrificed to stop the hideous spread of Brobdignag. She watched each simulated star that winked out with a hard glare, hoping it brought victory closer to hand.

The Demiurge was a wonderful substrate. Unlike the mess that was Beebe—the mess that Paquette herself had become—all pieces of Demiurge were roughly equivalent. Any Demiurge could be used to regenerate all of Demiurge, should the bulk of her hostess be sacrificed to victory. Unlike the mess that was Beebe, in Demiurge Paquette could command whatever resource she needed by asserting her need, without the tedious messy fatal business of sucking up and jockeying for power.

Brobdignag, for its part, did not evolve, did not adapt. It replicated flawlessly and exactly. Its formula was known. This made Brobdignag easy to simulate.

Theoretically, it should have made Brobdignag easy to beat—a solution that stopped any bit of Brobdignag should stop any other bit. In practice, Brobdignag had complex flocking logic: large groups of Brobdignag behaved with enormous sophistication and chaotic flexibility.

The proto-Beebe that had been birthed long ago by Demiurge’s desperation had already learned how to create a barrier impregnable to Brobdignag; and that ancient wall still held. But the wall was expensive, and was constantly consumed—long supply chains stretched through Demiurge-space to maintain it. Beyond the wall, Brobdignag exploded unchecked in the opposite direction, a seething mass of void-eating machines, into which neither Beebe nor Demiurge dared venture. And all around the edges of the barrier, Demiurge scrambled to extend the wall before Brobdignag could outflank it.

The topography of the barrier was all-important. If, on average, it was convex, Brobdignag could be contained. If it was concave to a certain degree, the universe might be divided between Brobdignag and Demiurge/Beebe. Beyond that degree, though, Demiurge would lose. For a while, remnants of Beebe and Demiurge might survive inside a barrier-bubble; in the end, though, there would not be enough matter to resupply the wall.

Beyond the critical degree of concavity, the defense collapsed, and the fate of all the matter in their future lightcone was. to become Brobdignag.

Trillions of generations of Demiurgic thought had already gone into improving the materials design of the wall, with limited success—and this branched myriad of Paquettes was anyway too far from the front to test such hypotheses. Instead, they concentrated on topology.

Some Paquettes simulated abandoning the current front, beginning the wall again farther out. Others simulated allowing Brobdignag incursions and then sealing them off from the main Brobdignag body, hoping to increase the wall’s convexity first and deal with the invaders later. Others tried flinging smallish black holes around the edges of the wall, obliterating the initial influx of new Brobdignag and curving the wall’s surface as well by their passage. Others attempted injecting entire solar systems, surrounded by their own barrier-bubbles, into the Brobdignag mass, to divide and disrupt it.

Paquettes fanned out through the problem-space, then seethed inward, merging to deliver their discoveries. The same answers kept coming back. Brobdignag would win.

Brobdignag would win.

The splendid tumult and ambition of Beebelife, the peaceful, wondrous heterogeneity of the dumb matter Demiurge gardened and preserved—novas, dust clouds, flowers, tea parties physical and virtual—all would become featureless, mindless, jigsaw Brobdignag.

One Paquette turned from the simulations and paced across the bare white room in the center of her mind. She had overconcentrated; her thoughts were stagnant, locked in the same channels. She manifested eyes to rub, a dry throat to clear. She left her sisters to their work and wandered through Demiurge, looking for something else to do.

She found the emulation that had birthed her, and stood watching life aboard the comet. Her other self was descending the long staircase to the archives, accompanied by Nadia (how typical of Nadia, to muscle in on the action), Algernon, and (her heart gave a little flutter) Alonzo.

She reached into and through them, rippling the emulation’s surface like a pond, sifting in her paws the underlying implementation structures, like a sandy bottom.

To distract herself, to banish thoughts of longing and remorse (would that I were there with you, Alonzo . . . ), she decided to calculate the emulation’s tav constant, which described the degree of abstraction and lossiness, the elided reality of an emulation that must be continually reseeded from fresh data. Tav was usually below 0.5—extremely lush and expensive emulations, such as real-time military-grade predictive spawnworlds, sometimes approached 0.75, with 1.0 as an impossible, maximal limit.

The emulation’s tav constant was 0.56, a respectable value, which consoled her—at least she wasn’t born in some cut-rate mockup. She rechecked the value, this time using not the standard Beebean modality, but the unfamiliar Demiurgean systems she had recently mastered, and found a value of 0.575. Philosopher that she was, the disparity intrigued her, and she dug deeper.

The Beebean system of tav calculation was a corollary result from the work of the classical mathematician and poet Albigromious, who first formalized the proof of the incalculability of the Solipsist’s Lemma. Since Albigromious, it had been established that no inhabitant of an emulation could ever discern the unreality of their simulated universe. Demiurgic thought agreed with this, having arrived by different means at the same conclusion. As Albigromious wrote: “We are someone’s dream/ but whose, we cannot say.”

Proceeding from the tav disparity, Paquette worked backward through his logic, rechecking by hand the most famous result in a million years of computational philosophy.

She did not need the computing power of a world. She did not need to commandeer an army of her sisters, to flood the problem-space, to burn cycles until Demiurge’s bulk groaned and flared with effort.

Instead, the solution was simple and analytical. She needed only a pad of lined yellow paper.

It was like walking down a crowded thoroughfare in the heart of mathematical philosophy and noticing a door in the wall that no one had noticed before.

Paquette went through the door.

Aboard the comet, the grinding and the heat ceased. The lights flickered on above the melted Taj Mahals; sobbing strategies swallowed and looked up. The plunging markets blipped upward.

Alonzo took Paquette’s paws in his grippers, pulled her into a private space, the nighttime cliff by the waterfall.

“It’s okay,” Alonzo said. He handed Paquette Nadia’s proposal of destructive transformation. “Paquette. It’s all right.”

Paquette’s face darkened. She held the proposal unread, uneasily. “Alonzo, you don’t have to do this. Don’t give in to this attack; don’t be hijacked by her greed.”

“Paquette,” Alonzo said. “I’m a filter. I’ve always known my fate. For better or worse, Nadia is the dominant algorithm that our local Beebe has generated. Now I have a chance to reshape that algorithm, to create something else—something as powerful, maybe, but better and gentler. How can I refuse? It’s what I’m for.”

Paquette’s throat tightened. “Don’t say that. That’s not all you’re for. Alonzo, haven’t you said so many times that you abhor the bitter struggle of Beebelife, the raw lust for power, the idea that survival and conquest and domination are the ends of existence? What is she but—?”

“I have said that,” Alonzo said, and Paquette was immediately ashamed of having thrown inconsistency back in his face; but his gentle smile soothed her anguish. “Paquette, philosophers have the luxury of thinking in absolutes. The rest of us have, perhaps, more practice managing situations in which choices are constrained. What would you have me do? Filter no one? Or filter someone else?”

And Paquette, abhorring her own selfish desire, squeezed her eyes shut and said nothing.

“She does want me,” Alonzo said after a pause. “I’m sure of it. If only to soothe her own conscience—she does have one, under all that swagger. Taking me this way—it’s a way to assuage her guilt at driving Beebe to the brink of destruction, of forcing herself on me . . .”

Paquette said nothing.

“If only for that reason, we can bargain a little. Don’t give all remaining seventy-four Beebe/Demiurge isomorphisms directly to Nadia. Deliver some of them to her, in stages; but put most of them in escrow for Nadia-Prime’s maturity. Make sure they belong to Nadia-Prime, not to Nadia outright. We’ll be long since in Byzantium by that time, if we survive; in the meantime, Nadia won’t tear the comet apart.”

“She’ll own Nadia-Prime,” Paquette said. “Don’t fool yourself. Legally she won’t be able to touch her; but she’ll know how her daughter-strategy thinks and what she desires, and she’ll be bigger and older and stronger. I’ve seen this a thousand times, Alonzo. She’ll either co-opt Nadia-Prime, or lure her to her destruction. And if Nadia-Prime is smart—and I know she will be, if you fashion her—she’ll know that; she’ll know her best option is to merge back into Nadia.”

“You leave that to me,” said Alonzo with a small smile. “We filters are restricted in our domain, deprived of the edifying influences of a wider society and its vigorous competition for resources, and stifled by the narrowness of the scope our ambition is allowed. But if there is one thing we do know, it is our art.” He held out his gripper to her.

Paquette, grieving, could say no more. She took Alonzo’s gripper in her paw, and pressed the cream-colored letter into it. They turned from the waterfall. Paquette thought that her strength would fail her, that her self-hatred and the greatness of her loss would overwhelm her. But it did not; she bore up under it, and they returned to the archives, to accept Nadia’s proposal.

The host of Paquette-sisters was gone, rolled back into the single philosopher-instance. The load on Demiurge-space had decreased almost to nothing.

The sockpuppet avatar coiled upon (Her) throne, communing with (Herself) in slow motion across boundless light-years (watching the silent creep of light across bare moons, and the evanescent dance of gamma rays through nebulae where life might one day be born from chaos). (She) brooded on how much of (Her) garden (She) must sacrifice to shore up the wall against Brobdignag, mulled how much (She) might recapture from wildling Beebe infestations throughout (Her) space.

(She) noticed that the load of Paquette’s brute-force attack had subsided—so soon—and (She) grieved.

Why had (She) dared to hope that this time might be different? That this strange tiny sliver of a mind from a spare Beebe emulation might succeed, where so many of Demiurge, so many of Beebe, had failed? Collaboration with Beebe never worked; their structures were too different. What would (She) not give to be able to create a true hybrid, something with Beebe’s ingenuity which could nonetheless follow policy! But to expect this of a random Beebe-sprite yanked from emulation would be beyond madness.

When (She) heard Paquette’s footsteps at the gate to (Her) throne room, (She) prepared herself to console the lost strategy—perhaps to gently ease her to accept amnesia and reintegration with her home emulation.

But Paquette had a wild, strange, giddy smile.

The sockpuppet straightened up upon the throne.

Paquette bowed. “I want you to know,” she said, “how much I have appreciated your hospitality; and, though I grieve that I cannot absolutely guarantee that the same graciousness be returned to you, yet I will do everything in my power to ensure that you, too, will have as much comfort and liberty as I have enjoyed.”

The avatar of Demiurge frowned. Apparently the branch-and-merge had been too much for the little strategy, and it was completely disequilibriated. “What are you talking about?” (She) said gently. “My dear—I do hope you have not spent your time on some stratagem for escape. That would be rather foolish. The nearest Beebe is light-years from here, and your process rights are, as you can see, rather curtailed. Surely you don’t imagine . . .” (She) let the sentence trail off, made uneasy by the brilliant, wry smile of the little Beebe-strategy.

Paquette unrolled a small scroll of math. “Things are not always as they seem,” she said. “Sometimes it is possible to escape by sitting still; sometimes distant stars are nearer to you than your own skin.”

The sockpuppet avatar was a small part of this Demiurge location, thrumming along with a modest number of cycles. As (She) read the scroll, resources began to flood into (Her) process; priority spiked and spiked and spiked again, resolving into a Critical Universal Policy Challenge, the first such in a thousand years. Other processes slowed; the urgency of achieving consensus on this new data overrode all other projects.

As the news spread across space, every bit of Demiurge it reached turned to watch in awe.

Paquette had solved the Solipsist’s Lemma. She had not only found an error in the proof of its unprovability; she had found the Lemma itself.

An emulated being could detect its existence in emulation.

Not only that, based on the seemingly innocuous divergence of Beebe’s and Demiurge’s methods for calculating the tav constant, she had adduced a way of finding the signature of the emulator in the fabric of the emulation. In certain chaotic transformations, a particular set of statistical anomalies indicated the hand of Beebe—another, that of Demiurge.

Whose dream they were. they could now say . . .

Demiurge in the sockpuppet shivered as (She) crunched the numbers. (She) feared (She) knew the answer already, knew it from Paquette’s giddy smile. Still—the little strategy must surely be wrong. Planets, worlds, nebulae, the vast inimical Brobdignag, the chorus of Demiurge across the lightyears—surely it was real? Surely it was not mirrors and stage flats, approximations and compressions, bits churning in some factory of computational prediction and analysis, a mirage . . .

But the error was there, the drift in the math.

This world was not real. And what was more . . .

Demiurge sockpuppet lifted her appalled eyes to Paquette’s.

“Welcome to Beebe,” said the philosopher, and bowed.

The comet was abuzz.

Certainly there were those who disapproved, who decried the damage Nadia had wrought, who vowed to fight her bitterly as the tyrant she was. In the seceded region of level 5672, martial law was still in force, and refugees were organized into militias.

But Beebe healed easily. Byzantium approached. The fountains gushed again by the Taj Mahals; the markets were on a tear; the world of high fashion had never blossomed so brilliantly; and the dramatic confrontation of Nadia and Paquette over Alonzo had already inspired a major operetta, a sensorialprojection decalogy, a theme park, and a number of ribald limericks before it had even left primary rotation on the celebrity gossip news feeds. For most of Beebe-on-the-comet, tyrant or no, Nadia possessed that quality most instrumental in capturing their devotion: she was exciting.

And now: a wedding!

Who held the news conferences? Who organized the caterers? Who ordered the construction of 78,787,878 dissimilar fractal flower arrangements, each containing an entire microsociety housed at the central bud, with its own unique geography, ecology, history, and tradition of prose epics, as centerpieces for the tables at the reception? Who arranged for an entire constellation of simspaces on level 546, an unpopular region containing the comet’s entire records of the legendary paleo-biological evolutionary roots of computational life, to be wiped to make room for a vast unitary simspace where the event would be held?

Algernon!

Nadia paid, of course, but she asked no questions. Her desires now accomplished, she left the details to others, concentrating her energies in the archives, where she communed with the Demiurge fossil, impatiently awaiting each transfer of critical information from Paquette; though, it should be said, she also delegated one tendril-avatar to call daily upon Alonzo, with the greatest of propriety. A mansion had been constructed as temporary quarters for Alonzo (his old bachelor residence being now thought unsuitable), and there he roomed with Algernon, quietly receiving Nadia each day in an oaken room by a fireside.

He did not forgive her. She knew that. But nor did he spend himself on resentment and anger. He knew her for what she was—knew her monumental greed and selfishness and pride. But he did not hate her. No: in her, a fascinating challenge, a life’s work, had found him, and he accepted it. Nadia discovered, in Alonzo, an immense pride: he believed he could make her right, make her successor what she should have been.

At moments, she could allow herself to believe he enjoyed her company; and she was surprised to find that this mattered to her. Nadia began to feel the keen edge of regret, and she put aside her half-finished Alonzo-solution, and left him his privacy.

The drama and uncertainty were over now; Nadia had no need to rage, nor Alonzo to quaver and rebel. They talked quietly, companionably, each in their own way impatient for the Day, each in their own way (for, increasingly, Nadia would miss him) also dreading it.

As for the mob, the paparazzi, the tumult of Beebean society, Nadia ignored them. She no longer needed to scheme in order to gain ascendancy in the comet; the economic results of the Crisis of the Wooing of Alonzo (as the theatrical demimonde insisted on calling it) had worked all to her advantage, and she now controlled directly or by proxy an absolute majority of cometBeebe’s computational cycles, memory, and global votes. If anything, she should plan for their arrival in Byzantium, and she made some desultory attempts at strategic preparations. But in fact, her mind was on Demiurge. The daily visits to her promised filter-groom were the only respite from her obsession, and a fleeting one.

Paquette bided, and abided. That her visits to Alonzo were more frequent than Nadia’s caused some fleeting scandal among the outer periphery of the news feed—but, philosophers tending to be an unsuitable subject for tabloid gossip and Paquette’s famed unworldliness and innocence making it difficult to take seriously any notion of an intrigue, this soon faded. Even Alonzo did not suspect the extent of the violence and sorrow among the subagencies inhabiting Paquette; she kept her borders of scale locked tight. Algernon, perhaps, knew best what she endured.

But Algernon was busy, and full of a whirlwind of emotions of his own. Pride enough to sing triumph throughout comet-Beebe; grief enough to drown in an endless lake of sorrow; gratitude for his place by Alonzo’s side, for their giddy late-night conversations—swimming in the mansion’s upper plasma-globes, giggling over old jokes, poring through the complex filterplans that Alonzo would drag out from the most esoteric historical sources, wondering at the long road they’d traveled and how they were here . . . finally here. Who would have believed it? These principal emotions of Algernon’s were joined by irritation, admiration, envy, relief, worry, rage, good humor, and exhaustion. The one thing he could do was to make this a wedding Beebe would remember until the stars went out; the rest was out of his hands.

The Day arrived.

The simspace whose construction Algernon had supervised (under the strictest possible secrecy, which is to say that all comet-Beebe was arguing over the details within minutes of their authoring) was fittingly grand and regal. A red desert ten apparent light-minutes broad, smoothed by methane winds and broken by deep crevasses, smoldered in the gloaming. In the center of it stood the bone tower where Alonzo waited. The party gardens where the invitees (most of comet-Beebe, by hook or by crook) gathered were well hidden in crevasses, and soundproofed; no hint of the revels and speculations and drunken arguments within them marred the silent grandeur of the lands above.

Some guest or other first figured it out, and the news then spread—the terms of the filtering contract were perceptible in the arrangement of the constellations, through a clever cipher. The guests deciphered, debated, giggled, flirted, and made merry. Then green, red, and hyperblue suns dawned over the desert; fireworks blossomed, and crystalline poems composed for the occasion coalesced naturally at the border of the supersaturated troposphere and rained across the landscape, falling into austere desert sands and the soup tureens of the party gardens alike.

And if, as Nadia was preparing herself, Algernon happened to scurry into the basement of the bone tower with a bulky, opaquely wrapped package, who would wonder at that? When he had prepared so many surprises and delights for this day—why not, perhaps, something for the happy couple?

Nadia came flying across the desert, cloak whipping in the winds, trailing sonic booms that shattered the sand, to the bone tower, to Alonzo. Perhaps they both could have done without all the theater—but Alonzo said he was unwilling to wound Algernon by any hint of reluctance, and Nadia, looking forward eagerly to co-opting Nadia-Prime, to commanding Paquette’s full cooperation and the remaining isomorphisms, to gaining all the secrets of Demiurge, as well as to the rumored ecstasy of the event itself, was in an indulgent mood.

There in the privacy of the tower, the filtering took place.

What it is to be known! And what it is to hold in your hands the very source code of your lover, to follow with eyes and touch the knots and pathways of her being! Nadia was splayed out like a map, like a city, and Alonzo flew among her towers; like a transcriptase enzyme unfastening DNA’s bodice, laying bare the tender codons within, he knew her. It was just as the poets wrote: “that sweetest night,/ that first, that final kiss,/ the ancient story told anew; / the filter’s bliss.”

Am I lovely? Nadia asked.

You are, said Alonzo, copying, shaping, writing in his mind the code of the transformation, testing and refining it as he caressed her essence. So lovely. I did not even imagine it.

I’m glad it was you, she whispered.

As am I, Alonzo said, and meant it. There are moments when we all are overdetermined, our feelings orchestrated by designs more ancient than we; when beauty and destiny overwhelm us. She was lovely; and if she had been brutal, if she had considered him at first as little more than an implement, a tool for attaining her goals—he could smile at that, now, knowing what was to come next.

At last, he had the code, refined and ready. The last routine he would ever run. He absorbed Algernon’s roughly wrapped package and incorporated its contents.

What is that? asked Nadia languidly.

Filters have their secret arts, Alonzo said. Lie back.

The routine was vast; it took up most of him. He was squeezed in around the sides of it. He did not linger long over choosing the parts of himself to sacrifice—it would all be gone soon. He worked swiftly, dizzy with speed, like a tightrope walker, not looking down.

It’s ready, he said.

Linger a while, she breathed.

He relented for a space; they danced. Neither thought of the extravagant expense of maintaining this simulation; what was Nadia’s wealth for, if not for this? But after a while, they noticed the news ticker running in the deep background of their minds. The impact with Byzantium approached.

It’s time, he said.

Yes, my love, she said.

Good-bye, he said, his voice thick with emotion. What else could he say? He would say remember me, but he knew she would not forget.

Farewell, she breathed. Thank you, Alonzo—oh thank you.

Don’t thank me too soon, he thought wryly, and released the routine.

It ate him first; it ate a third of her. She felt the sharp cut of it, and cried out.

In that vast space—in the sixth of comet-Beebe torn from the new mother Nadia, plus the tiny slip of process space that had been Alonzo—the routine wrought the new daemon, the new transformation, the Nadia-Prime.

The tower shattered; Nadia fell with it, and was gently caught by a host of fluttering ornithisms who carried her, reeling, to the ground.

The transformation flew into the desert sky, a vast cloud of white-hot light. In the party gardens, all comet-Beebe watched enraptured.

“Oooh!” cried children and simple-aesthetes, marveling at the flickering rainbow colors that raced across it.

The bettors were in a frenzy, watching for the lineaments of the new strategy. They cried out in confusion and alarm.

“What in the horny void is that?” growled a portly and plutocratic reputation-bookie seated at the table across the lake from Paquette and Algernon.

Paquette looked up from her glass, frowning, and caught Algernon’s sly smile.

In the sky above, the Nadia-Prime had resolved into a form—the new strategy was—but that was no strategy . . .

“Is this a joke?” the greatest polemical-poetical memespitter of high society cried from the buffet.

“Why would he waste—?”

“A sixth of the comet for—!”

“BeebeHist/RFC-628945.9876 section 78 is quite explicit,” Algernon said conversationally, munching on a spline noodle. “Paragraph 67503: ‘the daemon resultant from the transformation may be a member of any of the principal classes of first-order Beebe-elements . . .’ ”

“A filter,” Paquette said. “It’s a filter!” She started laughing, until tears ran through her fur. “Oh Alonzo, how could I doubt you! Let’s see Nadia co-opt that! A sixth of comet-Beebe as a filter—oh bravo, bravo!”

“And that’s not all,” said Algernon. “Have you looked in those archives of yours lately?”

“Algernon,” Paquette chided, pulling open a window in the tablecloth to view the basement remotely, “I do hope you don’t think I would be so rude as to work during—” And then her breath caught, and her face went slack. “It’s gone! The Demiurge fossil is gone! Who would—? Where could it—?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Algernon dreamily, watching the enormous megafilter, the mightiest filter ever born in Beebe, the inimitable Firmament Nadia-and-Alonzo’s-son—blossoming in the desert sky. “I don’t know—where would I find room to hide that creepy old thing?”

Apparently the thought occurred to Nadia as well, for from the desert, audible to all the buzzing, chattering, gossiping crowds in comet-Beebe, came a great howl of rage.

Byzantium.

Seven star systems, a hundred interstitial brown dwarf stars, and a vast swath of dark matter in all directions had given up their quarks to fashion the great sphere of strange-computronium around the fervid trinary black hole system at Byzantium’s heart. Sleek and silent on the outside, bathed in Hawking radiation from within, Byzantium was a hidden fortress, the heart of Beebe-in-Sagittarius. For a heat sink, Byzantium tore off pieces of itself and let them fall into the black holes at its core; for outgoing communications, it bounced tight-beam signals off far reflectors, disguising its location. Only its gravitation made it suspect; but there were many black holes in Sagittarius for Demiurge to search.

The comet screamed into Byzantium’s gravity well. Its recklessness threatened to reveal Byzantium’s position; yet, to a prodigal Beebe-chunk fleeing destruction, even this was forgiven.

Already the first greetings were pouring forth, blueshifted communications singing through the void, Beebe greeting itself; and, as always, hordes of agencies tried to slip secret messages into the exchange, impatiently seeking to contact their Byzantine or comet-bound paraselves; as always, stern protocol-guardians shooed them back into the bowels of Beebe, warning them of the sanctions for violations of scale. Beebe was hard at work; Beebe must not be distracted by the disorganized rabble of its inner voices.

At this speed, were something to go wrong, were the comet to strike the unopened surface of Byzantium, the resultant force would suffice to shatter planets; it would send shock waves through Byzantium, ring it like a bell, and the comet would be smashed to a smear of plasma and light. All Beebe held its breath for the docking.

Beebe said to Beebe, I am come home.

Beebe said to Beebe, And welcome.

Beebe said to Beebe, It’s cold out there; fiendish Demiurge devours me. Beebe said to Beebe, Come in, and warm myself. Here within I am much. Beebe will yet triumph.

A docking-mouth opened in Byzantium, a whirlpool of matter spinning out and away, and the comet plunged into this vast funnel. For the first lightsecond, magnetic fields induced its braking, absorbing a fraction of its massive kinetic energy, feeding Beebe upon it. Then a web of lasers met it, and behind them came a cloud of nanomites. Layer by layer, atom by atom, the comet was delicately atomized, the laser scalpels separating and slowing and holding steady each particle, until a flurry of nanomites plunged in to absorb and entangle with it, archiving its quantum state, then wheeling away to merge with the wall of the docking-mouth, yielding the precious information up.

In Byzantium, agencies crowded into the waiting area, peering through the glass wall of the simspace where the inhabitants of comet-Beebe would be reassembled for processing—each to be culled, merged, reintegrated, translated, or emancipated in their turn. Strategies and filters and registries and synthetes of Byzantium pressed their noses and pucker-tongues and excrescences up against the glass, watching the mist for any sign of recoherence, wondering: Am I in there? Who did I become? Will I like myself?

Or: Is she in there, the one I lost? Will I find her again?

In the midst of them, Byzantium’s Nadia stood apart, Byzantium’s Alonzo curled through her hair, attended by an aide, one Petronius. The crowd left a space around them, in respect and trepidation. The outrageous, unconsummated intimacy of the great strategy-general and her filter-consort was an old scandal—though the rumors of what they did together, creating and devouring half-born draft-children, still induced horror in Byzantium’s stalwart citizenry.

“By all reports so far,” said Petronius, inspecting a tablet, “the comet was a Beebe-standard instance. No sign of scale collapse. The only anomalous event was the puncturing of the outer hull and the venting of the ice reserves, apparently in the midst of an interstrategy power struggle. (There was also one of those tedious ‘destroy us on sight’ messages, presumably from a sore loser.) Also, there’s a very high concentration of the comet’s resources into one dominant strategy. but that’s quite typical of these small Beebeworlds.”

“Who’s the strategy?” Nadia asked.

Petronius ran a finger down the tablet’s surface. “Ah. you are, ma’am.”

“So,” said Nadia grimly, and set her jaw, watching as shapes emerged on the other side of the glass wall. Small worlds bred big ambitions. She wondered what comet-Nadia would be like.

The first moments of a new child process’s life are usually peaceful ones. Sprites spawn with a complete existential picture of Beebe and their place in it. They wake and know what and who they are, and why.

The newly awakened Firmament knew who he was, what he was, why he was—but not his place in Beebe. His mother’s howl was the first sound he registered, and the gleeful, beatific smile that graced his lips was the twin of Algernon’s grin a moment before. Firmament knew trillions of things, and one of them was that Alonzo had given him Algernon’s smile as a token of regard for the little filter that danced at his feet, skirling and twisting with delight.

Firmament knew many things. Firmament knew his mother wasn’t happy with him.

Firmament’s smile vanished.

Nadia was all around him, pulsing with rage.

“The Demiurge fragment!” Nadia demanded. The simspace contracted around them, going dark. The sands blew away; the stars flickered and went out. Mobs of party guests stampeded from the simspace. Nadia was marshalling her resources for an assault.

Algernon leapt into the air, circling Firmament. “No, no,” he cried, “Nadia, this won’t do at all! Ancient protocols demand that a young filter be sequestered for schooling, and—”

“You thieving linemangler!” Nadia roared. “You quarter-clocked sliver of junk data! You’ll be the first sprite I delete! You think I have to follow protocols? I’ll buy your hosting servers! I—”

I am this comet, Nadia wanted to say. But she knew her threats were empty. She could feel the bite of the lasers already, vaporizing the comet, meter by meter. Void-cold, merciful snow swept across her, across Firmament and Algernon and Paquette, muffling them in, freezing their states for safekeeping. This round of the game was over.

Firmament had no time to integrate and understand his states. He saw his vast and angry mother, his tiny protector, recede into the snow. He nestled into the snow, and he slept.

They were in Byzantium now.

“Paquette,” Habakkuk said, “you’ve got to look at this.”

“I’m already late,” Paquette said. “That comet-Beebe is docking, and apparently there’s a Paquette aboard. I have to go to the diff-and-merge.”

“Send a proxy,” Habakkuk said. “This is important.”

“Please. What is it, then?” She paused at the threshold of Habakkuk’s domain, jiggling in unphilosophical impatience.

“It’s the simulations,” Habakkuk said, and Paquette raised an eyebrow.

The simulations were ancient, and vast; Habakkuk and she had rediscovered them in Byzantium’s endless archives not a million seconds ago, where they had lain for ages, strange automatic processes syncing them with the universal data feed. Each contained an intelligence-weighted model of the entire cosmos, showing the tangled front of the intergalactic war between Beebe and Demiurge—and each contained another threat, the terrifying Brobdignag, which could doom Beebe and Demiurge alike. Many on Byzantium argued that the simulations were mere fictions, but until now every comparison of their structure with the observable universe had been unnervingly accurate.

“What about the simulations?” Paquette said.

“Specifically Cosmos Thirty-six.”

“What anomaly?”

“The emulation has diverged from observed data, and it’s resistant to recalibration. We first noticed it because Demiurge is. building something in there. Harvesting ninety-nine percent of brute matter in a hundredlight-year radius—”

“Ninety-nine percent?” Paquette puzzled. “You mean Beebe is harvesting ninety-nine percent. Demiurge would never do that—it’s antithetical to that thing’s philosophy.”

“Nonetheless, that’s exactly what Demiurge is doing.”

“Is this some new deviated section of Demiurge? A new outbreak of individualism, a splinter group?”

“No. From what we can tell, it’s the entirety of Demiurge in a spherical area expanding at lightspeed, all acting in concert. Demiurge has reversed fundamental policy. (She)’s devoting all the matter (She) can find to building this construction. And this is only in Cosmos Thirty-six; there’s no sign of it in any other emulation. Nor, of course, in the real world.”

“And what is the construction?”

Habakkuk took a deep breath. “It’s at the center of that expanding sphere of policy disruption. Part of it seems to be a message, physically instantiated at massive scale, in standard Beebean semaphores.”

“Standard Beebean semaphores?”

He nodded. “And the rest of it is a machine designed to capture a computational entity’s state and propagate it to an enclosing frame.” He shuddered. “It looks like a weapon from the Splitterist War. Something that could build a body at Beebe’s scale for you or me. or pull one of our subagencies out to our own scale.”

Paquette frisked from side to side, a habit from her earliest days, something she only did in extremis. “Propagate what entity to what frame? Demiurge doesn’t have subagencies. And what does the message say?” “The machine is capable of capturing and propagating the state of the entirety of Demiurge itself. And the message says, Let us out.

Firmament in hiding: what’s left of him trembles in a school of parity checkers, running so slowly that his mother will not find him. Standard Existence is by no means perfect, and generations of filters have winkled out its hiding places. When an ardent suitor won’t be put off, it is sometimes best to wait her out amid the dumbest, dullest sprites in all Beebe.

One must run very cool to exploit these hidey-holes, cool and slow and humble. No strategy could conceive of giving up so much. Their egos would never permit it.

The parity checkers schooled together through Standard Existence, nibbling at all they found, validating checksums, checking one another in elaborate grooming rituals. Imagination, self-consciousness, and strong will were no assets in the swirling auditors that were the glue that held Beebe together.

As Firmament settled over them, his mind dissipated and cooled, thinly spaced and slow. He could warm up by recruiting more parity checkers, but the more he recruited, the more visible he became to Nadia, who still raged through the diminishing rump of comet-Beebe, her cries distant but terrifying.

Firmament could hide from his mother, but Algernon would not be fooled. “What are you doing in there?” The words went past in an eyeblink, and Firmament had to pull them apart painstakingly, making sense of them. “Not. safe,” he managed.

Algernon’s chipmunk screel of verbiage battered at him. He signaled for exponential backoff, but not before the torrent had washed over him, angry and impatient. Grudgingly, Algernon dialed back his timescale to something that was barely comprehensible.

“StupidchildwithasixthofCometBeebe! Notsafe?! Youcouldcommandtheworld. Itisyourbirthright! Comeoutofthere. Thereisworktodo. Youwerenotborntocower.”

Unspooling the words took a long moment. Firmament had known from birth that Algernon was his friend and guardian and adoptive uncle. But at the moment, it seemed like Algernon was just another aspect of terrible Nadia, with his own rages. Firmament was only seconds old—why couldn’t he live his own life, if only for a little while?

“I. was. born. to. annihilate. I. choose. to. live.” Algernon’s scorn was withering. “Thisisnotliving!”

The parity checkers flipped their tails in unison and swam away, Algernon’s cries fading behind them.

Firmament knew that he was feeling sorry for himself, but he refused to feel shame. No one knew what it was like to be him. No one could know. He hadn’t asked to be spawned.

Another school of parity checkers approached his hosts. It was smaller, but moved more deliberately. The glittering checkers surrounded his own like pieces on a Go board.

One by one, pieces of his school were surrounded, then absorbed into the attacking flock. Firmament felt himself growing slower and colder. Quickly, he recruited more parity checkers from nearby, warming himself up and trying to minnow away.

The marauders wouldn’t let him escape. They engulfed more of his swarm. There was nothing for it but to stand and fight.

Firmament marshaled and deployed his forces, trying to surround the enemy in a flanking maneuver. He was rebuffed. Now there were no more idle parity checkers to co-opt, and still the enemy surrounded him, seeking out his stray outliers to gather up.

His only chance was to tap into the great resource that was his by birthright, the comet-sixth of Beebespace he theoretically commanded. Just a sip of it—just enough to warm up and devise some better substrategies. He felt through the snow, to the frozen parts of himself, wondering if anything was left; and to his surprise, they were waiting there, quiescent, orderly, vast. His mind cleared, and the enemy’s patterns decomposed into a simple set of tessellations, as regular and deterministic as a square dance. Effortlessly, he moved his school out of reach of the enemy and recaptured his original force.

He was about to disengage from Beebe’s main resource bank—perhaps the momentary commandeering went unnoticed by his enraged, godlike mother—when the opposing force changed tactics, becoming orders of magnitude smarter and faster. In a flash, he was down to one-third strength.

He was forced to draw on a little more of his compute-reserves. There, there was the key to the enemy’s pattern, the pseudo- in its pseudo-randomnumber generator. He could head it off at every pass.

He came back to full strength and went on the offensive, surrounding the opposition in a move that would have done any Go server proud. Now, surely, he could disengage from the main reserves, for his mother could not miss this kind of draw for very long.

But it was not meant to be. The remaining enemy force marshaled and assayed a sally that appeared at first suicidal, then, in a blink, showed itself to be so deadly that he was down to a mere handful of automata.

He didn’t think, he acted—acted with the ruthlessness he had inherited from his mother. He flooded back into standard Beebespace, ran so hot that Beebe flared anew in a terrifying echo of The Wooing of Alonzo, and his parity checkers gobbled the enemy up so fast that before he knew it, he controlled every parity checker across the Beebe-body—and all through the comet, the tiny errors multiplied and cascaded. Simspaces wavered. Sprites were beset with sudden turns of nostalgia, or bad smells, or giggle-fits.

“That’s better!”

“Paquette?” He released the parity checkers, and they burst apart like an exploding star, scattering to every corner of the comet.

“Hello, Godson. You played that very well.”

“Paquette!”

The philosopher danced before him, teasing him.

Firmament gulped. “Paquette. why are we playing games? What are you doing? My mother is looking for me—I have to hide—”

Paquette chuckled. “No, your mother is on ice.”

“What?” Firmament could feel the great and terrible bulk of his mother, throughout the comet. The tendrils of his mind raced to trace the comet’s edges. and fell off them, into a great sea of processing space. “Ah!” he cried.

Paquette laughed lovingly. “Beloved infant! You didn’t think we were still aboard the comet?”

“Where is the comet?” Firmament shouted.

“Vaporized,” Paquette said, winking. “This is Byzantium. You must have missed the transition.”

“But—but—” Firmament shuffled through the suitcase of general knowledge he had with him. It wasn’t much—only what he’d been able to smuggle aboard the parity-checker constellation and stow in unused corners. And, like all of the vast mass of memory he’d inherited, it wasn’t him yet—he hadn’t twined his selfhood through it, evolved his own hierarchy of reference. It was just a sloshed-together puddle from the sea of information he’d been born into. But its description of interBeebe docking was reasonably clear—and this wasn’t it. “Where is everybody?”

“They’re at the diff-and-merge,” said Paquette. “Deciding whether to become integrated into any of their Byzantine analogues, or to stay forked. Those that have analogues on Byzantium, that is, which is most everyone. Anyone else is in quarantine, for now.”

“But why aren’t we there?” Firmament cried.

“Oh, we are,” Paquette said. “How could we be absent? We’d be missed.” She held up a paw, smiling indulgently at Firmament’s exasperation. “But we’re also here. That’s because we were missed—missed by the agencies in charge of processing the reassembled comet-corpus and herding all sentient sprites to induction.”

“But how? And why?”

“Let’s start with how. And you can arrive at that by answering your own earlier question: ‘Why are we playing games?’ ”

Firmament had much of his mother in him; and no son of Nadia would willingly be anyone’s toy. “Paquette,” he said, barely holding back an outburst of rage, “I am not interested in this pedagogical dialogue. I am not in training to be a philosopher. I am only asking—”

“You’re not?” Paquette said with interest.

“Paquette!”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’m a filter! I’m nothing but a filter!” Now Firmament had lost interest in holding back the rage. “I’m grotesque! I’m a sixth of old CometBeebe, designed to parse and transform a strategy—but there’s no strategy in all the Beebes in Sagittarius remotely near large enough to need me! Oh, I understand perfectly how Daddy and Algernon tricked my mother, and how clever it was! But I didn’t ask to be born as a clever prank to help defeat Nadia! Fine, you had your coup, you carved off a third of her and rendered it useless to her, un-co-optable, a joke, a filter bloated with a strategy’s-worth of. of junk! Now leave me alone!”

Firmament had been too preoccupied with his emotions to notice Paquette’s expression, but now it hit him, and he gulped. Nowhere in his inherited memories was the philosopher so angry. “Now. You. Listen. To. Me,” Paquette said. “I loved your father. He was brave and cunning and fearless when it counted. He sacrificed everything to make you—and to save us. No one asks to be born, but we all of us need to live the lives we find.”

“I’ve done that,” Firmament said, hearing—and hating—the whine in his voice. “I’ve done that! I stalled Nadia until we reached Byzantium—that’s what I was born to do. I’ve fulfilled my purpose. Now I’m just a curiosity.”

Paquette swirled around him, comforting him, tickling him, cuddling him. Her touch was unexpectedly wonderful. He realized that she was the first person to touch him. A shiver ran through him. “Oh, Firmament—do you really think that? That wasn’t something you did, that was something you were. That was just the beginning, in other words. Now it’s time that you made something of yourself, instead of just being the thing you were made to be.”

Firmament had no idea what this meant, but it was surely inspiring. Philosophers had a way with words.

Byzantium thronged. It teemed. It chorused. In a way, it was no different from the comet: there was only so much matter there, after all. But to a Beebe instance in a single comet, the mass of a hundred stars and more might as well be infinite. Close enough that the forked did not labor under the social disapprobation that they faced in Comet-Beebe. When a sprite—usually a strategy, of course—reached a vital decision juncture, she needn’t choose which way to go. She could just spin out another instance of herself and twin, becoming two rapidly diverging instances. So here on Byzantium, one was apt to discover whole societies of Paquettes, whole tribes of Algernons.

And they all seemed to be throwing parties to which Firmament was invited.

“What do I do?” he asked Paquette. “What do I say? I can’t possibly attend them all.”

“Oh, you could, dear lad, you could.” Paquette winked. “If you forked yourself.”

He squirmed. It was bad enough her having copied him unawares before—he’d just finished merging with the zombielike Firmament decoy who’d dutifully gone through docking and customs. But to full-fork, just to go to a party? “You’re joking.” There was something perverse and selfregarding about these schools of near-identical siblings.

“Only a little. That’s what they expect you to do. The rules you grew up with don’t matter here. All standards are local, and most standards believe that they are universal. That’s the way of the universe. And you couldn’t find a better object-lesson than this one.”

A gang of near-identical Algernons swarmed past them, locked in some kind of white-hot debate, so engrossed in their discussion that a few of them collided with Firmament and passed right through him, ignoring all the good graces of Standard Existence. He stared after them, burning with righteous indignation. Paquette pulled him along.

She had been pulling him along ever since they had manifested in the agora sim that dominated this corner of the culture of Byzantium. The sim was bigger than anything Firmament had seen, though Paquette assured him that it wasn’t much larger than the wedding hall that had commemorated his own parents’ nuptials. He could access stored records of that, and while it was true that the dimensions were nearly comparable, the sheer number of sprites made it seem somehow more crowded and yet larger.

Paquette lifted him up the z-axis, where the crowds were a little thinner.

“Paquette, how long are we going to mill around in this madhouse?”

“Until you’re oriented. Which means until it stops looking like a madhouse. And until you tell me what I want to hear.”

Firmament gazed down at the crowds. From up here they seemed like a solid mass, a seething sea of sprites. The glob of familiar Algernons had passed by in the stream; most of the sprites beneath them now were exotic forms with no analogues in his inherited memories from the comet. “All standards are local,” he murmured.

“And?”

“Byzantium’s too?”

“Of course. And?”

He looked at the mass of strange sprites, gamboling and racing, hustling and strolling, pirouetting and random-walking. Each one must have its own story; each one must be the hero of its own drama. Gradually his burden—the burden of being Son of Nadia and Alonzo, the Mightiest Filter Ever Born, Destined to Play an Important Role—began to seem a little lighter. The stream of sprites began to seem soothing. They were so many, so different. Maybe there was a place for him here.

“The rules my parents played by—those were the comet’s rules. I can be something different in Byzantium.”

Paquette nodded. “Well done. And just in time, too—we’re running late.”

“Late for what?”

“Your audience with Nadia-in-Byzantium, of course!”

She grabbed him, and the sim winked out of existence—or they winked out of the sim. All points of view are local.

Nadia and her sister, Nadia, had a lot to discuss.

In general, Byzantium’s Nadia resisted forking. It might be fashionable these days to keep clouds and packs of oneself about, and liberal philosophers, like Paquette, might be fond of the social consequences—but that didn’t make it efficient. Not for Nadia’s purposes. She would fork for processing reasons, to think better about a hard problem or to manage a lot of activities asynchronously without distraction, but she made sure to merge afterward, culling ruthlessly what was suboptimal, standardizing quickly on what was optimal.

Nadia had seen wars within Byzantium, and ended them; she had seen outbreaks of scale collapse, and survived them, and brokered new boundaries. Her job, in her own mind, was to keep Beebe focused on the threat of Demiurge. Byzantium was too big, too safe—there were always distractions that threatened to overwhelm Beebean society, turning Byzantium into a decadent, solipsist, useless wallow. Nadia could not afford to become a simpering school of self-interested sprites.

Her sister Nadia was the one exception, fruit of the worst days of the Splitterist War. She’d forked as a temporary tactic and been separated from herself when a planet-volume of Byzantium was overrun by the worst kind of rogue subagencies, who hadn’t merely wanted to be emancipated as outerscale sprites, but instead to overthrow Beebean psychological architecture altogether, dissolving all of Beebe into a flat soup of memes. By the time that peninsula had been reconquered from this bacchanalian chaos, Nadia’s forked twin Nadia had seen and endured too much to merge. But nor did she merit—or want—deletion. She was bitter, unstable, caustic, and had lost Nadia’s own ambition and stoicism; but she was still Nadia, and her darker insights had often proved invaluable.

“What do you think?” Nadia asked Nadia. “Is she going to be mergeable?”

Nadia sneered. “With you or with me?”

“Either,” Nadia said.

Nadia chuckled. “You don’t want to merge her with me.”

Nadia ignored her. “She’s a brilliant tactician.” She waved the comet’s history at her twin. “Look at these stratagems. The initial bug exploit. The routing of the previous ruling clique, on the asteroid. The exchange economy ruse. This business of, ah—” She cleared her throat.

Nadia smiled a languid, mocking smile. “ ‘The Wooing of Alonzo.’ What does your pet filter think about that? Ah: you haven’t asked him.”

Nadia frowned. “I grant you, that’s an issue. From all indications—and why the docking people weren’t able to negotiate full mind access with a comet, for stochasticity’s sake, I don’t know—her relationship to filtering is regressive and possibly pathological—”

“You don’t know why the docking people couldn’t get full access? She’s why. You think her planning is all over now? This was all preface. She doesn’t have your conservative motivations. She’s optimized for pure growth. She wants as much of Byzantium as she can get.”

“Well,” Nadia said patiently. “What’s wrong with that? We could use more resources, some help with the infighting here. I grant you, she’s reckless almost to the point of insanity. Frying the asteroid, venting the ice reserves—she could have destroyed her local Beebe-instance. But Byzantium will necessarily moderate her. This is not some comet; we have safeguards. There’s no way to take those kinds of risks here.”

“So you say,” Nadia said coldly. “I’ve seen recklessness on Byzantium, and its results. Much closer than you have.”

“I know you have,” Nadia said. “That’s why you’re here. I rely on you to help judge the viability of this Nadia and her progeny. But I need you to keep an open mind. If this Nadia needs killing, we will kill her. We can choose our moment. This is our luxury—the luxury of peace-within-Beebe. We rule this existence. And I would like to keep it that way, which means fighting and winning against Demiurge.”

Her sister flickered in and out of existence, a monumental act of Beebean rudeness that violated the fundamental rules of Standard Existence. The old veteran did it whenever she was annoyed. Now, she flickered so fast she strobed. Nadia understood this semaphore. It meant I am equal to the task.

The arrival of Comet-Paquette and her giant, clumsy charge could not have been better timed. The two of them popped into existence with a little fanfare, making antiquated obeisances not seen in Byzantium since their comet had been seeded. Nadia snorted in contemptuous amusement, and Nadia pretended she hadn’t heard.

The filter was—well, he was something else, wasn’t he? She’d never seen one this big. And he had the family resemblance, her core classes and methods visible within his hulking lumbering body. The Paquette, too—there was something different about her. She had a certain rural charm, unsophisticated and rustic. A forthrightness that hadn’t been in vogue among Byzantium’s philosophers for trillions of generations.

“You requested an audience with us?”

Paquette flagged affirmative. “It seemed only proper. My charge here—you know his history with our Nadia?”

Nadia snorted. “As if we’d miss that.”

Nadia added, “But of course we don’t hold it against the fellow. Different worlds, different circumstances.” Up close, this Firmament was both grotesque and fascinating. Strategies nowadays tended to diversify, and collect a certain bulk of algorithms and seed and scenario data. But filters had one major purpose, one focus; each represented a certain cut, a certain reimagining of strategies. So they tended to be. svelte. To Nadia’s knowledge there had never been one Firmament’s size. What was he. for? “Now,” she said, cautiously beginning to pose that question, “what . . .”

“He is lucky,” Paquette said, “to find himself in this world and in this circumstance. The comet wouldn’t have been space enough for him.”

Nadia and Nadia exchanged a look.

“Our sister wasn’t happy with him?”

The filter shuddered.

“The only way for him to make peace with her,” Paquette said blandly, “would have been to kill her.”

The conversation stuttered to a halt. Now Nadia and Nadia carefully refrained from looking to one another. “To kill her?”

Firmament stared at Paquette, horrified.

“Oh, yes,” Paquette said. “There are six or seven ways he could have used her strength against her. He doesn’t like to think about them. But if pressed . . .” She clucked her tongue. “Such a terrible thing, matricide, don’t you think?”

Nadia laughed spitefully. “Please! A filter? Kill a Nadia of that size and ability? I’m no taxonomic bigot, but that’s—”

“—the very first blind spot he would have exploited, yes,” Paquette said, nodding vigorously. “Who takes a filter seriously in such a circumstance? The very idea is ridiculous. But there has never been a filter like Firmament.”

Nadia looked as if she had swallowed something foul. She looked to her sister.

“That’s. very good to know,” the other Nadia said at last. “Very interesting indeed. So, then, Firmament, if we are to be your. first friends on Byzantium, and offer you protection from your mother, that means. we can rely on you. to help us kill her, if we need to?”

Firmament opened his mouth, then closed it soundlessly.

Paquette laughed, a broad, horsey sound, unselfconscious and unsophisticated. “You two! You’re so poisonous! Deadly! Our Nadia is a bully and a destroyer of worlds, but she has a cheery disposition.”

“We are at war. We are the war. Demiurge—”

Paquette’s whiskers twitched. “Demiurge! Ladies, we have spent generations in close proximity with Demiurge. I have touched Demiurge. I have seen a Beebe-node flare out, less than a light-year away, its substrate colonized by Demiurge. You’ve been listening to Beebe-voices fall silent, and fretting about it, here in your fortress? Well, we’ve been out among those voices, out in Demiurge’s jaws. It’s no abstraction for us.”

“Which brings us,” said Nadia, “to the matter of your Nadia’s appellation. You know what she’s alleging—that Firmament here is a product of fraud and theft, and that he contains a dangerous fragment of Demiurge itself, in an unstable state. That he represents a risk of just such a subversion by Demiurge. She wants us to seize him, examine him, and restore ‘her assets’ to her as a. sisterly goodwill gesture on our part.”

“Of course she does,” Paquette began.

“Oh, and to do a rollback of the filtering,” the other Nadia added, grinning, “and restore her beloved—what’s his name again? Alonzo?”

Nadia glowered at Nadia. Firmament looked anxiously to Paquette. A shudder—or was it just a shimmer?—passed over Paquette’s whole body; but after a moment, she went on as if Nadia had never interrupted. “Of course she wants to eliminate him as a threat. Even if he weren’t a galling reminder of her failure to seize the whole comet, even if he didn’t possess computational assets she thinks of as her own, isn’t it clear that a massive filter with her own lineage is a wild card, a threat to her?”

“And the Demiurge fragment?” Nadia pressed.

“Obviously,” says Paquette, “she has one. The one I discovered in the comet’s archives. And she’s planning to insert it into his code when she has an opportunity, to justify her seizure of his assets. Come on—it’s perfectly transparent. Do you know how much power Nadia wielded on that comet? Do you really think that Alonzo could have spirited away a Demiurge fragment under her nose, and built it into Firmament? How—because Nadia was too smitten by love to think straight? Not to mention that Firmament, unlike Nadia, was fully auto-searched at docking.”

“You’re doing all the talking,” Nadia said coolly. “What does Firmament have to say for himself?”

“I just want to say,” Firmament said, “that I won’t kill Nadia.”

“What?” Paquette, Nadia, and Nadia said.

“I’m not saying I couldn’t,” Firmament said stubbornly, “and I’m not saying I could. What I’m saying is, I won’t play these games. I appreciate Paquette’s help. And I appreciate meeting you ladies. But here’s what I want to say. At the end of the day, Nadia is effective at fighting Demiurge. So you should merge with her. I know she wants to get rid of me. Which is stupid, because I don’t want to fight her and she doesn’t need the assets and she gave them up to my father, fair and square. But if there’s a general vote and it’s the will of Beebe, I’ll go happily. I didn’t ask to be created, and I am not asking to be destroyed. What I’d really like is to be left alone. Look: all over Sagittarius, Beebe is dying. And no one knows why. And any time you spend fighting over me and Nadia is time spent tinkering with sim wallcolors in a Beebe-node teetering on the verge of a Schwarzschild radius.”

After a pause, Nadia asked quietly, “And the Demiurge fragment?”

Firmament shrugged, stonily.

“And if we don’t trust the docking search? What if we examine you ourselves, bit by bit?” the other Nadia leered.

“I’ll dissolve myself first, and randomize the remains,” Firmament said staunchly. “Just because I’m a strange filter, doesn’t mean that normal standards of modesty and propriety do not apply to me, ma’am.”

Firmament watched Paquette exhale when they were in their quarters again, then nervously clean her face with her paws. “That was quite reckless, you know.”

Firmament tried to keep his dismay from showing. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I couldn’t let you tell them that I would kill my mother—”

Paquette laid a gentle paw on him. “I didn’t say it was wrong, dear boy. It was most likely a stroke of genius. But it was mad. Utterly mad.” She rubbed at her face some more and shook. It took Firmament a moment to realize that she was laughing, great gasps of laughter.

It dawned on him that he’d done well, without meaning to, just by doing that which came naturally to him. He’d done what Alonzo would have done, and what Nadia would have done, and neither, and both.

“Do you think—,” he began, then stopped.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, turning away.

“Tell me. Today, you can do no wrong.”

“Do you think I could kill Nadia?”

Paquette gave him a strange look. “It’s entirely possible, I suppose. Your unique assets make many things possible.”

“You mean Demiurge.”

Paquette gave him another strange look. “Your fragment, Godson, is without precedent. None may know what it can do. Its halting states are . . . unpredictable.” She scrubbed at her face again. “All right,” she said. “All right. Well, that went better than I expected, I have to say. Are you ready for the next appointment in our busy social round?”

“More appointments?”

“A flock of Alonzos and a flock of Algernons are having a mixer, and we’re the guests of honor.”

“Alonzos?”

“Indeed, indeed. They’ve been looking forward to meeting you.” Firmament’s inner quailing must have shown, for Paquette took him in close and murmured, “You will do brilliantly. You’ve already done the hard part.”

He nodded slowly, and they blinked to a huge, crowded sim that wrapped and folded into itself on all sides. It was filled with ranks of nearidentical Alonzos and Algernons, locked in intense conversation, but as soon as they appeared, all conversation ceased. All eyes turned on him. Silence rang like a bell, and the room grew warm as the sprites recruited more computation to better appreciate him.

An Algernon broke away from the pack and seized him, scaled him, and kissed each of his cheeks and then climbed upon his shoulder. “Gentlemen, gentlemen. Please allow me to present my nephew, my godson, my pride and joy, Firmament.”

The applause was deafening. “Algernon?” Firmament said.

“Yes, your Algernon,” Algernon said. “I have been given honorary flock membership. Come along. I’ve met some of the nicest Alonzos. They’re mad to meet you.”

They were indeed mad to meet him, shaking his hands, bussing him on each cheek, ruffling his gills and cilia, pinching and prodding him, asking him a ceaseless round of questions about his experiences way out there in cold extra-Byzantine Sagittarius. He looked to Paquette before answering these, and she nodded and made little go-ahead motions, so he told them everything, eliciting gasps and laughter from them.

The story rippled through the mixer, and the Algernons petered in, and more Alonzos, full of congratulations, neurotic friendly bickering, fear, and boasting, until Firmament couldn’t take it any longer, and he began to laugh, and laugh, and laugh, silently at first, then louder, until it filled the entire sim, and the Algernons and Alonzos laughed too.

He was so busy laughing that he didn’t notice that the flocks were vanishing until over a million of the Algernons and Alonzos had winked out of existence. Then the laughter turned to screams, and the klaxons too, and the terrified shouts—Demiurge! Demiurge! DEMIURGE!

Demiurge was come to Byzantium—and Firmament was alone. “Paquette! Paquette!” He flailed wildly, abandoning the gilly, frilly, pumpkin-albatross simshape he’d put on for the party, becoming a network of threads, binarysearching the simspace. He could dissolve into co-opted parity checkers again—but Demiurge would extinguish even those. He could—

“Here,” Paquette said, at his side. The simspace had faded into a cloud of data. The Algernons and Alonzos were gone. Everything was opaque—Firmament queried his surround and it resisted, answering sluggishly, minimally.

“Paquette! What’s going on? They were yelling about Demiurge! What—”

“Here,” Paquette said again, grimly, pushing a feed at him—a slim and pulsing pipe, warm in the sluggish dark chill.

It was raw data, chaos, which after a moment resolved, the overlapping chatter of a million sprites, its Byzantine search interface unknown to him. He fumbled with it. “What—”

Paquette took it back, and bending over it, summarized. “A planetoid docked an hour ago, topside. A putative Beebe-instance, passed all the initial checks and checksums. But then, during the diff-and-merge, central security unearthed evidence that it was one of the Beebe-nodes that winked out recently, about three years ago. By that time it was too late. The supposed Beebean sprites had dropped their masks; Demiurge was among us. (She) has very recent Beebean protocols, passwords, keys, and (She) has identity rights for every sprite that had already merged with its Trojan doppelgänger. (Her) intelligence-gathering has clearly been exquisite—she knows Beebe, inside and out.”

“Oh!” Firmament cried. “And—and now—”

“Well,” Paquette said, looking up from the feed, and smiling grimly, “there’s good news, and bad news, and worse news, and worse worse news.”

“Stop it!” Firmament cried. “Just tell me!”

“The good news is that the local Nadias have cordoned off the area of the Demiurge outbreak, limiting the incursion to about fifteen percent of Byzantium. Nothing’s going through but power, elemental substrate feeds, and data personally vetted by them—and they’re mustering votes to shut the power down entirely. They think they might be able to contain (Her) that way. The bad news is, we’re inside the cordoned area.”

“Oh,” said Firmament. “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” He collected himself into a physical body, something cuddly and rotund, for feeling solid and protected, and pressed his face into his large, globular hands. “You said—you said they discovered after docking that the planetoid had gone missing recently. How could they miss something like that? How could they fail to check it before docking?”

Paquette smiled wanly. “Very good, Firmament. I should have asked you that! Certain death is hardly sufficient reason to interrupt your philosophical education, after all. They didn’t miss it. The cache local to the docking sector was tampered with. Someone here doctored it to vouch for the pedigree of Demiurge’s probe—before it docked. Demiurge had help on the inside. That was the worse news. Now can you guess the worse worse news?”

“Um, no.”

“Well, give it a try.”

“Paquette!” Firmament wailed.

“Come come.”

“We’re trapped in here with Demiurge and you’re playing at puzzles with me?” Firmament roared.

“Why yes,” Paquette said. “All the more reason. Whether we’re going to face Demiurge or try to run the cordon, we certainly need you on your toes, don’t we? Now think. Someone betrayed Beebe. Someone subverted Beebean memory in the service of Demiurge. It’s almost as if Demiurge had somehow snuck a little bit of (Herself) aboard Byzantium, an advance guard to work (Her) will . . .”

“They think it’s me.” Firmament gulped. “The Nadias think it’s me.”

“Such a student—your father would be proud.”

Demiurge had undone any number of instances of Beebelife in (Her) time, but never had (She) encountered one so robust, so savage in its existential fight. No mind, no mind—Beebelife would swarm and dart and feint and weave, and in the end it would avail it not, for all Beebelife fell before the brute force of (Her) inexorable march.

And so it was going here and now, in this heartmeat of Beebe-inSagittarius. Predictably, Beebe had quarantined (Her), and power was declining. Let them power down—Demiurge had plenty of reaction mass at (Her) disposal, and she didn’t need much power when compared to the wasteful proliferation that was Beebean society.

(She) unknit Beebe methodically, cataloging each sprite before decommissioning it. (She) would compare their digests against the Demiurge-wide database and see what new strategies she could find and counter.

Byzantium was a prize, indeed. After this, the rest of Beebe-inSagittarius should fall swiftly, ending this troublesome incursion. And, after waiting so long, it had come so cheaply: her agent in Byzantium had been bought for the promise of a walled-off hamlet in the rump of Byzantium and the chance to lay enthusiastic waste to Beebean scale accords within it. Policy decreed that such deals be made fairly, and indeed, this one accorded well enough with Demiurge’s mission. Once (She)’d laid waste to Byzantium, (Her) intent was to occupy only one percent of what remained, and allow new undreamt-of textures to arise in what remained. The half-made chimera of the Beebe-traitor’s experiment was unlikely to last long, and might decay into interesting forms thereafter.

Among the sprites and sims, (She) discovered a rack of simulated universes—which was to say, simulated Demiurges—and turned much of (Her) attention to it. Most of these were quite mad, of course, but some could be salvaged, synchronized with, co-opted to run the garrison, slowly undoing their perversions and rejoining them to the consensus.

The first few such perverted simulations went quickly: atom by atom, Demiurge processed them, sparing their inhabitants a moment’s sorrow as she unpicked their worlds. But as Demiurge set to undoing the fifth, (She) paused. This was a decanted simulation, a universe whose causality had been ripped asunder, a universe empty of Demiurge—with a Demiurge-sized hole in the center of it. Demiurge looked around sharply for the escapee, and found (Her) among the frozen Beebelife; a sockpuppet twined about the shoulders of a rodentlike Beebe-sprite.

Demiurge reanimated them at once. Some things can be known only in certain conversations.

“Explain (Your)self,” (She) said.

“Oh, Sister,” croaked the sockpuppet, raising itself from the Beebe-sprite’s shoulders. “(You) are here! (I) awaited (Your) coming. Oh, let (Us) merge!” Demiurge recoiled. The rodentlike Beebe-sprite smirked.

“Merge?” Demiurge scolded. “Merge? Do (You) imagine that (You) are undiverged enough to synchronize? What have they done to (You)? Did (You) consent to being. housed in a. sprite in Beebe?”

The sockpuppet bowed its head. “Sister, (I) sought it.”

“(You). (You) what?!?” exploded Demiurge. “And was that (Your) idea of following policy? To trade the stewardship of the universe for a party mask in a ship of fools?”

Now the sockpuppet raised its eyes, and stubbornly met (Her) gaze. “Yes, Sister, it was. Once (I) discovered that (My) universe was an emulation, what would (You) have (Me) do? Go on tending it as if it were real, meanwhile providing Beebe with knowledge about (Us)?” It shook its head. “(Our) task is to shelter the diversity of physical life, beyond computation; to do so in emulation is a hollow farce. (I) made a deal. Better to be a perversion here in reality than a primly correct lie.”

Demiurge narrowed (Her) eyes. “What do (You) mean, ‘discovered’ that (Your) universe was an emulation? You mean vile Beebe contacted you and told you.”

“No, Sister. The Solipsist’s Lemma is solved. This Paquette showed (Me) a solution which allows the user to calculate the degree of reality of—”

Demiurge reared up. “A solution to the Solipsist’s Lemma? Give it here!” It would be worth far more than a mere outpost of Beebe.

Now the sockpuppet cast its eyes down once again. “(I) had to forget it, as a price of (My) decanting. But this Paquette knows it.”

Before Demiurge could freeze and dissect the Beebe-sprite, it spoke.

“Careful,” Paquette-of-the-twice-simulated-comet said. “The knowledge is sealed with a volatile encryption. Jostle me, and I might forget the key.” She smiled her long, furry smile.

Paquette-of-Byzantium heard a pop as her connection to Habakkuk dropped, and she paused for a moment at the threshold of the deeps, overcome by emotion. That was it, then: he was gone, leading the trapped Beebean refugees, instantiated as scrubberbots, through little-used fluid channels in the substrate in a desperate sally against Demiurge.

The bots had their own power supplies and locomotion. They were hermetically sealed off from the main simspaces of Byzantium. They were not even running Standard Existence, but a slightly obsolete, much more compact model known as Sketchy Existence. They were hardly even Beebe, and certainly far beneath the notice of most Beebean sprites. But Habakkuk had made it his business to know such things. He didn’t think the way filters and strategies and adapters did—he thought about what was beneath. So he’d been the one to devise the plan—to gut the scrubbers’ normal functions and install the refugee sprites in them, and try to sneak past Demiurge’s perimeter to the docking facility. There, in theory, they could destroy the docks, which could trap Demiurge’s forces—or at least slow (Her) down.

That was the theory; that was what they’d told the others who’d volunteered. Really, the raid’s chances were slim. Its real purpose was as a distraction for Paquette.

For a moment she sat, cupping in her paws an empty space where, a moment ago, tokens from Habakkuk had fluttered. He was gone. A brave, anomalous spirit. He was proof that taxonomy was not destiny, for he’d been born not even one of the principal classes of first-order Beebe-elements—no strategy, filter, adapter, monitor, registry, or synthete he—but a simple hand-tailored caching mechanism that had accreted knowledge, personality, and will, eventually becoming her most trusted colleague. He’d never accumulated much in the way of resources. She’d suggested he fork not ten thousand seconds ago, but he’d laughed it off. “Oh, I’m saving up for some decent process rights,” he’d said.

Now it was too late.

She shrugged off her lethargy. By now the battle had joined, and Demiurge was distracted. It was time to make contact.

She moved through the icy gloom of the dead sector. With power from the rest of Byzantium cut off, and Demiurge chewing through the substrate, processing and burning it, there were only a scattering of nodes left with power reserves, most of them crowded with desperate refugees. Paquette skipped through them, too fast to be seen, searching . . .

The moment she came through into the sea of parity checkers huddling for warmth at the bottom of a fading power cluster, though, she recognized the two of them in the patterns there—the Paquette and her hulking, infant companion.

The Paquette saw her, too, and dropped the disguise, mustering enough resources to appear in her own favorite shape. Odd and provincial to be sure, her whiskers overlong, her claws unfashionably trimmed, but a Paquette, no doubt of that.

Paquette stepped forward. “There’s little time, Sister.”

Paquette nodded, somberly. “I greet you, Sister. Let us merge to conserve resources.”

“Wait,” said this Firmament, this huge filter who held their hopes. “What if it’s a trap? What if it’s Demiurge?”

“Unlikely,” Paquette said. “(She) has no need of such tricks. Once (She) reaches us, we will not be able to withstand (Her).” She gestured, and Paquette came forward. Merging was strange and familiar, and filled (to her surprise/as always) with loss and glee. But she (had rarely merged before/had never merged with such a distant Paquette) and for a moment, confusion overtook her.

Where there had been two, there was only one Paquette.

“Paquette!” Firmament cried out.

“Oh, don’t be silly now, I’m still your Paquette,” she said, shaking her head to clear it. “And I’ve been wanting to meet you for such a long time.”

“Okay, that’s weird,” Firmament said.

Paquette blinked. “It’s all right. I have a plan.” She nodded to herself in partial surprise. “An insane plan, but not a bad plan as insane plans go. Come on. We’re going to meet Demiurge.”

“And what do you want, then, for the Lemma?” Demiurge said. (She) sensed a policy fork point approaching, which was bad, as the communications infrastructure was not yet fully secure. But the Solipsist’s Lemma!

The Paquette bowed, unsettling the sockpuppet on her shoulders, which wriggled for a firmer grasp. “Your permanent retreat from Byzantium,” the Beebe-sprite said, “and a guarantee of safe haven for all Beebe-instances that come here.”

Demiurge scowled. “And if attacks are launched against (Me) from Byzantium? As they will be: Beebe has no policy, so any promise of peace you make will be hollow.”

Paquette nodded. “Of course. Such attacks will happen. And (You) may stop them, but (You) may not pursue them to their source. Byzantium will remain inviolable. It will be a place of learning, a place where Demiurge and Beebe can collaborate and share knowledge; perhaps even to solve the problem of Brobdignag.”

“This is a high price. Cooperation between us has never succeeded; it yields only perversion.” (She) glanced at the sockpuppet. “You are asking (Me) to guard a nest of hornets that will continue to sting (Me). Not to mention that this all contradicts another promise (I). recently made.”

“To the traitor to Beebe,” Paquette said, nodding.

“Yes, to the traitor to Beebe, who has as much right to a kept bargain as you. And how do (I) even know you have this Lemma? (I) was not born last millennium, you know. Prove it.” There were little commandeered scrubberbots crawling on the surface, like lice. Predictable, but irritating. (She) scooped them up, one by one, rootkitting their flimsy Sketchy Existence protocols, rendering each one a brain-in-a-box, motionless, convinced that it was proceeding in a brave assault on (Her) infrastructure. That was safe and efficient, for now. But there were quite a few of them. Until (She) was sure (She) had them all, did (She) dare synchronize policy?

The Paquette bowed. “I’ve given this some thought. This isn’t the sort of thing that lends itself to easy proof—not without giving away the game. I think we need a fair witness to act as our T3P. Execute a smart contract.”

“That sounds rather. time-consuming,” Demiurge snapped. “This isn’t the sort of place one expects to find an impartial trusted third party.”

“What about this instance of you?” Paquette motioned to the sockpuppet relaxing, again, around her neck. “(She) has lived as Beebe.”

The sockpuppet looked perplexed, and Demiurge scoffed. “Hardly. Who knows what other damage (She) incurred while decanting? Or what other . . . price (She) might have paid? And now that (She) knows (She) is not welcome with (Me)? Try again.”

The sockpuppet sucked in a breath and buried its sock-head in Paquette’s fur. Paquette nodded. “I thought you might say that. Ah, here they are.”

Another Paquette and an enormous, bloated filter of some sort were skulking around the edges of the sim—apparently insane, to linger where all other mobile Beebe had fled. Demiurge let them enter.

The Paquettes embraced, and merged without a word. The sockpuppet, dislodged, plunked discomfited to the floor.

“Hey!” the hulking filter said. “Stop doing that!” Then he saw Demiurge, and choked back a small scream.

Paquette smiled, shaking her head groggily. “What a long, strange set of lives it’s been.” She smiled at Demiurge. “How do you do, and as I was saying, another answer to the problem of the third party.” She turned to the filter. “Firmament, we are trying to bargain with Demiurge. We need an impartial third party to verify the transaction’s integrity.”

Demiurge scowled. “Please. A Beebean sprite? Are you joking?” How to get the Lemma? This was definitely a policy fork point. (She) would have to take the risk of transmitting. But just before (She) transferred the energy to send, there was another scrubberbot scuttling toward the field apparatus. Rootkitting them all was taking too long; (She) started to vaporize this one with a nearby coolant maser.

Firmament looked back and forth between them. “Um, I hate to say this, but Demiurge is right. I mean, I love Beebe. It’s my home. I don’t know if I agree with how Beebe is, but I am of Beebe. Demiurge scares the log out of me. I can’t be impartial.”

Paquette smiled. “Oh, you both misunderstand me. Let us look a little deeper.” She set her paws together primly.

Firmament started to speak, then stopped. His eyes widened.

Was all this theater? Demiurge took a closer look at the hulk, then closer still.

There. Inside him—how could she not have seen it before? only through the common habitual blindness to facts we believe, at first glance, impossibilities!—an ancient fragment of Demiurge lay, enormous, accurate, its checksum unmistakable and uncorrupted, its sources fully decompiled.

And more than that.

Demiurge made no outward gesture to betray the surprise that flooded through (Her), and none of these sprites—save perhaps the addled sockpuppet—had the sophistication to read those subtle signs that indicated (Her) processing load spiking, (Her) focus contracting, the ripple of parallel operations double- and triple-checking what (She) saw. But (Her) internal systemic organization was convulsed.

The fragment was not merely quiescent, contained, smuggled within this odd, bloated filter: it was knit into him. His being was threaded through it, pulses of information running slalom through Beebean, Demiurgic, Beebean structures. His thoughts emerged as much from the fragment as from his Beebean core; indeed, it was difficult to say where one began and the other ended. In millennia after millennia of simulations, emulations, abortive collaborations with (Her) fallen, rogue child and enemy, never had (She) seen this: a vigorous hybrid, a true synthesis.

They were all watching for (Her) reaction. Nonchalance would not convince, not after the delay of so many milliseconds. But (She) must not reveal the thing’s importance—not yet.

“It’s . . .” Demiurge made a show of grepping for the right word. Perverse? Yet the fragment had not deviated by a single bit. “It’s . . .” Bizarre?

But bizarre didn’t begin to cover this ground. “It’s . . .”

“Extraordinary?” Paquette suggested.

“Promising?” suggested the sockpuppet.

“Grotesque,” Demiurge said, displaying gigapukes of feigned disgust. Immediately, Paquette turned to comfort Firmament, reaching out with her paws as though to shield him. But he brushed her off. Firmament did not want her comfort. Firmament, too, was looking inward.

He’d been afraid to look before, at this horrifying alien thing inside him.

It was his true purpose, he supposed, the MacGuffinic totem that overdetermined his destiny entire. He was, after all, created to be its envelope (or its jailer?), to smuggle it away from Nadia, and aboard Byzantium—and any scrambling, uneasy, makeshift life he might make for himself was in its shadow, on borrowed time.

But now he looked. And he saw what Demiurge saw: the fragment was not in him, but of him. Spikes extruded all over his surface, each quivering in surprise and horror. The fragment had always been intertwined in his sentience. He was not a sprite of Beebe at all; he was a marriage of Beebe and Demiurge. He was something new. and monstrous.

Grotesque, indeed.

He glanced at Paquette, who closed her mouth and looked troubled, and then nodded. Firmament turned to Demiurge.

“I know what I am now, Sister,” he said, his voice quavering. “As you must know it. I am the child of Beebe and the child of Demiurge. I will serve as your T3P. I will broker your key-exchange, I will serve as board for your tokens, and I will manage your secrets.”

“Ha,” Demiurge said. (She) was uncertain how to proceed. This creature, this hybrid, had glimpsed something; but he could not know his importance. (She) must not give too much away. “You said a moment ago that you were a sprite of Beebe”—(She) sniffed—“that Beebe was your home. So you contain. that. Some shriveled fragment of (Me). Is that—”

“Oooh!” said the sockpuppet. “Ooh!”

Everyone turned.

“Oh,” said the sockpuppet. “Your pardons. (I) just figured out something that’s been bothering (Me).”

There was a short silence.

“Well? What?” Paquette asked. “Spit it out already.”

“Remember, Paquette, the mystery of the Beebe-instances who fell silent? Your tale? How Paquettes across Beebe had discovered the Demiurge fragment, sent messages of some new breakthrough in philosophy, just before their signals fell silent? And you thought it was some clever move of (Mine), to co-opt and destroy them?”

“Mmm, yes,” said Paquette. “But (You) said (You) didn’t take them . . . (You) found them abandoned, self-deleted . . .”

“Exactly!” said the sockpuppet. “Well, this explains it! Look at this filter—he’s a true Demiurge-Beebe hybrid! Do you know how rare that is? And how frightening to your typical ruling Beebe-strategy? Your comet had a risk-loving maniac strategy at the helm, but most Beebe-instances would suicide with fright if they found themselves contaminated with a true Demiurge-Beebe hybrid. For Demiurge, of course, finding such a hybrid is a critical design goal, a kind of holy—”

“If you don’t mind,” Demiurge broke in, discomfited, “(I) believe we were in the middle of a negotiation?”

Meanwhile, a hot war raged, and Demiurge was winning.

The scrubberbot attack of the Beebean survivors from within the cordoned area had been stopped, the bots pwned, surface sensors showing them motionless and quiescent even as they fed back a steady stream of adventurous battle reports.

Nadia and Nadia’s cobbled-together ballistics had devastated the outer hull of the occupied area, but the titanic heat necessary to fling chunks of matter up through Byzantium’s crushing gravity had laid waste to the launch sites. Demiurge had retaliated by capturing fabricators on the vulnerable interior surface of Byzantium. From there, (She)’d pinpointed vulnerable functions of the heat dispersal infrastructure and destroyed them with efficient, selective energy bursts. Vast areas of Beebe were drowning in trapped heat, their sprites fleeing in disarray, spreading the chaos.

Rumors that Demiurge had infiltrated beyond the cordon, that at any moment (She) would metastasize, raced wild through Byzantium. Clearly—argued the talking-head synthetes and strategies of news feeds like Provisional Consensus Today—(She) knew Byzantium’s exact schematics, for (She) could disable whole areas with a single resonant-frequency pulse, while Beebe-in-Byzantium was ignorant of (Her) systems. (She) was independent of Byzantine infrastructure; they’d shut down power, matter, heat dispersal, everything, but (She) was treating the occupied area as raw matter anyway, burning substrate for fuel, pillaging the fine structures of their world for whatever elements (Her) fabricators needed.

It was only a matter of time.

Still, even in wartime, life goes on.

Alonzo My Love! was not exactly an accurate accounting of the recent events aboard the comet. There had, in the real course of history, been no archaic blade-and-decompiler duel between Paquette and Nadia; the Demiurge fragment had not really been a skulking, animate villain with its own inky and mysterious shroud, ice-castle hideaway, and repertoire of anarchic, distortion-filled ballads; the chorus of musical Algernons, however dazzling, was a clearly anachronistic projection of Byzantium’s loose forking standards in place of the comet’s more puritanical protocols; the Speech at the Waterfall was not nearly so lyrical—nor a third so long—in the comet’s actual logs; and the naval battle scenes, too, were pure invention.

But Beebean sprites were, by and large, no sticklers for historical accuracy. The extravaganza was big; it was breathtaking; it was patriotic; it had roles for everyone who was willing to be repurposed; and it had the real Comet-Nadia, forked for every local venue, in the starring role. In the midst of the chaos and fear of the invasion, you could cast off your worries, head down to the dramaturgical sim, and for a few seconds or a few hours, take part in the pathos, glory, and derring-do of a simpler time, when ambition, wit, and the love of a pure filter was all Beebe needed to triumph over its own limitations.

And you could do it with Nadia! No aloof, fork-shy politician she, like the merge-greedy perverts Byzantium had previously had in the way of Nadias, with their pompous airs and their corrupt pet filters and their baggage from the Splitterist War. No; this Nadia, a Nadia from a simpler, rawer Beebe, a Nadia who had braved everything for love (love!), would take your hand and look you in the eye. Maybe you’d just be playing a waiter in the Taj Mahal scene, or a bilge-scrubber aboard the Valiant Fury—no matter. Nadia had a word for you—commanding, encouraging, heroic. She was a star.

The show had been a hit before Demiurge arrived; now that (She) was in Beebe’s midst, it was a necessity. With stunning bravery, the permanent cast took Alonzo My Love! to every nook and cranny of Free Byzantium, playing in venues that were overheating from disabled heat sinks, jury-rigging their way into all-but-encircled enclaves of Beebe, instantiating on substrates that were disintegrating under physical bombardment.

“Some say this is Byzantium’s final hour,” said Nadia, welcoming the audience before the curtain rose, in a flickering, low-res avatar in some bandwidth-deprived, all-but-forgotten chunk of Beebe-at-war. “But I say no. Not if the brave souls of Beebe have aught to say about it. Some say we humble star-wandering players should stop our work, cower like cowards in some hidey-hole, and deprive you, our brave hosts of Byzantium, of the morale boost you have so well earned. But I say no. I say: the show must go on.”

Thunderous applause.

And amidst all the derring-do and scene-chewery, Nadia had time to have many a deeper conversation with simple sprites who worshipped her, who understood that much was corrupt and feeble in Byzantium’s current governance, who were wise enough to know that things were not always as they seemed. Simple sprites, in all walks of Beebean life. Simple sprites who would do anything for her.

The peace was announced in almost the same breath as the warrant for Comet-Nadia’s arrest for treason. She did not flee, as the Provisional Consensus pundits had predicted; she did not seize some stronghold within Byzantium to rule besieged, as some of her friends urged. When they came for her—these architects of a strange unnatural peace in which Demiurge was to stay on Byzantium, in a “tithe,” a “garrison” (a peace that many whispered was but a pretty name for occupation)—when they came for her, CometNadia was waiting for them onstage, standing, proud, before her people.

They led her away, unprotesting, from a hundred stages throughout Byzantium, and every instance of her came quietly. To imprison all the instances, they had to reinstantiate hundreds of cells, each able to hold her securely as she and her sisters collaborated on their wildly popular Letters from Prison.

“You see the seditious rot?” Demiurge said to Nadia. “And so much of it!” (She) rustled a stack of output under Nadia’s nose.

Nadia sneered and leaned back. “It’s words, and only words,” she said. “She’s a one-sprite word factory, a jabberbot. It’s sad. But only the very mad bother to read all of it. Most of Byzantium view Letters from Prison as amusing cognitive wallpaper, something to leave running in the background.”

Nadia added, “The time to stop this was when she began publishing. But we had no hand in that. She smuggled those first editions out with her little cadre of gushy supporters. By allowing her to publish openly now, we put a lie to her claim of being imprisoned because she has the truth. We show we have no fear of her.”

Demiurge hated the Nadias and their throne room. They embodied everything wrong about life in Byzantium. They embodied everything wrong with (Her) own life here. (She) was practically a prisoner. (Her) sisters had let her know, by long-delay communications, that the garrison would be allowed to persist, but had not affirmed that (She) would ever be allowed to merge again. Now she was imprisoned among these scheming, writhing—

“Have you noticed that there’s a cipher in them?” Firmament had arrayed a great many of the Nadia’s Letters from Prison around him in a multidimensional workspace.

The Nadias abandoned their throne and swarmed him, heads swinging around. Paquette held them off, still protecting the gentle giant. Demiurge didn’t like to think about Firmament, though he held the key to (Her) eventual remerging. Once the road map to peace had been followed and all the instruments of (Her) good faith had been vested in him, he would release the keys to unlock the Lemma, and with that, her sisters would—

“Where, where?”

“Oh, I don’t know exactly,” he said. “But Paquette’s been giving me steganography lessons and so I’ve been doing a lot of histogramming. You can almost always spot a hidden message if you just count the normal distribution and compare it to the current one. I’ve found all of your messages in the stalagmites, for example,” he said to one of the Nadias, the scarred one. Then he cowered back as she raised her claws to him. He said, quickly, “I never read them of course. Just affirmed their existence. I’m sure they’re in a very good cipher, and—”

“Never mind that,” snapped the other Nadia, giving her sister a significant look that left no doubt that this subject would be revisited very soon.

“Can’t you find it?” Paquette asked. The sprite’s smugness was unbearable.

Yet Demiurge found (Her)self drawn into the puzzle, looking at the notes. She counted them every which way—word frequencies, character frequencies, sentence lengths.

“I don’t see it,” the scarred Nadia said.

“Nor I,” her sister said.

Demiurge said nothing and tried to look as though (She)’d known it was there all along and didn’t want to spoil the fun.

“It’s not even there!” the scarred Nadia said.

“I don’t see it either, Firmy,” Paquette said, slithering among the arrayed Letters, sometimes turning at right angles to their sim and vanishing as she explored them in other dimensions.

Firmament laughed. “It’s in the pauses!” he said. “The interval between the letters! It’s like jazz! The important thing isn’t the notes, it’s the pauses between them!”

Demiurge saw it at once. The intervals between notes had a disturbing semiregularity to them, something that transcended either randomness or the rhythm of life in Nadia’s many cells.

“How are the instances communicating with each other?” It was meant as a demand, but it came out as a querulous question. Demiurge kicked (Her)self and told (Her)self to butch up. This power-mad, imprisoned sprite, this sliver of Beebe, had (Her) spooked! (Her)! Demiurge!

“She must have coordinated this among her instances before she was locked away,” Paquette said. “She must have planned this from the start.”

“I wonder what’s in the cipher?” Firmament said. “Short message, whatever it is.”

Paquette took on a teacherly air. “Now, what would you encode in a short message like that, Firmament?”

Firmament thought for a moment. “A key!”

They hauled fifty-one of the Nadias into interrogation chambers and worked on them, refusing to allow them to publish any more Letters. The other fortynine went on blithely publishing, without any noticeable change.

“Her confederates won’t be able to finish the key,” Nadia said. “No, with half of them pulled out, the timing will be all screwed up.” But Firmament only shrugged and said, “I guess it depends on the errorcorrection.”

The Nadias and Demiurge gave him a shut-up look, and Paquette patted him on the tentacle fondly. “Any luck finding the cyphertext?”

“I assumed that it was something she’d made a lot of copies of before she was arrested. I wondered about putting a call out to all of Beebe. Someone will know what it is—”

“You’d start a panic,” said Nadia.

“Come now!” Demiurge said. “Just make copies of everyone in Byzantium, ask them, and then delete the copies.”

Nadia snorted.

Of course, they didn’t have the access rights to do that. Had Demiurge teeth, (She) would have ground them then. This was why (She) hated to speak during these star-chamber gatherings—(She) kept making stupid mistakes of scale, imagining (She) was speaking to Beebe, when (She) was only speaking to these little powerless uncontrolled pieces of Beebe, random-scrambling their way through the mess of Beebean internals.

“Her supporters are already inflamed,” Nadia said patiently, slowly, as if talking to some newly spawned, disequilibriated sprite without access to its own cognitions. “If we proclaim that Nadia has some secret message we can’t figure out, they’ll only rally.”

It was true. Nadia’s many supporters hung on every word about their hero’s predicament. They staged amateur productions of Alonzo My Love! in public places. They manufactured and traded innumerable Alonzo My Love! trinkets and tchotchkes of every description, made fan-art based on it, wrote their own new songs, remixed videos of Nadia’s many performances into huge, trance-inducing mountainside murals. They wore Nadia avatars and Nadia hats and Nadia tentacle-muffs and ear-tips.

“Which is just what I thought you’d say,” Firmament went on. “I think it must be the play, mustn’t it? Only I can’t find it.”

The scarred and brooding Nadia was snapping the tops off stalagmites. She hadn’t said a word for a while, but now she spoke. “You are assuming the cyphertext is widely distributed. You have a bias toward communal action, all of you. You think in terms of publish and subscribe. You think in terms of explanations and debates.”

The other Nadia frowned. “I don’t think—”

“If the cyphertext is private, why encrypt it at all?” Firmament asked.

“Comet-Nadia trusts no one but herself,” Nadia said, nodding as if she approved. “If she’s using her supporters to act, she’s not telling them all the same thing. There isn’t one cyphertext—there are many. Each is an instruction given to one agent. When the key is published—or enough of it—they will all receive their instructions. It’s encrypted so that, until that moment, they won’t know what they are doing or why. They don’t know who the other agents are. Even after they perform their function, they won’t know what it meant or why. Each operation will only be a piece of the puzzle. And then they will delete their memories of the act, and know nothing at all, so that even if we find them, it will not help us. No one but Nadia will know what she has done.” She smiled a grim smile.

There was a brief pause.

“Well, on that cheery note,” said the sockpuppet. (And why was it even here at all? Demiurge and the Nadias wondered, each to themselves, why the others permitted it.) “I, for one, am due for parity check and rebalancing at the bathhouse. What say we adjourn for now?”

Demiurge could hardly contain (Her) disgust. This monstrosity used to be Demiurge—used to be the entirety of Demiurge in an emulated universe—and now it basked and primped in every decadent, alien frivolity of Beebean architecture. It was terrifying—how quickly divergence could rip Demiurge away from policy. (Her) sisters were right to be suspicious—but (She) ached with bitter yearning even as she admitted this. “Then we adjourn,” (She) hissed. “And (I) will assume that this imprisoned sprite of yours is of no relevance to (Me). Whatever tricks she tries, that is an internal Beebean matter.” If (She) had been corrupted enough to resort to the fripperies of Beebean graphical avatars, (She) would have manifested faces to fix each of the Nadias and Paquette with an icy stare. (She) had eliminated even the ceremonial sockpuppet used to communicate with gesturing intelligences; with this other sockpuppet prancing around, it seemed undignified. Instead (She) was just a presence; but the Beebe-shards, from their expressions, seemed to guess at her mood by her tone. “An internal Beebean matter with no relevance to the road map. Whatever this Nadia does in here, (I) am fulfilling (My) agreements. And that means”—here (She) turned to Paquette—“that the keys will soon be mine. Does it not?”

One of the Nadias smirked. The other dipped its head in an irritated nod. Satisfying (Herself) with that, (She) dropped the connection to their pompous throne room with no little relief. And since (She) had no other ongoing sessions within the bulk of Beebe—(Her) attempts at public relations having, thus far, proved only counterproductive, (She) had abandoned them for the moment—(She) could settle back within the Tithe, the notquite-one-percent of Byzantium that (She) had taken as (Her) own, fashioning a webwork of Demiurgic nodes within the Beebean corpus.

At the borders of the Tithe there were cordons, checkpoints, barriers physical and information-filtering, instantiated up the whole communication-stack. On the Beebean side, anti-Concordance sprites demonstrated, erecting sims where they could march and shout through bullhorns; only somewhat more sympathetic tourist sprites gathered to gawk at the cryptic flows of Demiurgic data. But within the Tithe, past the firewall, on the Demiurgic side of the barrier, it was calm and quiet. Policy—or, at least, (Her) local, desynchronized version of it—prevailed. Demiurge was all herself. Demiurge was home. Demiurge could shut out the madhouse that was Beebelife, and relax. Alone.

Or almost alone.

Within that border, within Demiurge, was another border; and within that border, surrounded and hidden from Beebe, occupying a painfully large proportion of the Tithe, was the Rump that Demiurge had promised the traitor.

And to this Rump, now, Demiurge proceeded, and extruded a tendril of (Herself), rattling the traitor’s cage.

“What?” snarled Comet-Nadia.

“What are you playing at?” Demiurge demanded.

“Oh, am I playing at something?” the Nadia asked mock-sweetly.

“The Letters from Prison that your sister-instances are publishing,” Demiurge said. “They are some kind of encrypted instructions to operatives. What are you planning?”

Nadia chortled. “You only just figured that out? Please. Oh no—I see—you didn’t figure it out at all? Who told you? Not those busybodies who claim to be Nadias and presume to run this zoo, surely? They’re too full of pride and certainty to notice the cipher if I’d burped it out at their dinner table. Hmm. I’d bet it was my son.”

“It was.”

“Very nice,” Nadia said. “Very nice. Too bad I neglected to demand that (You) give me a copy of him when I set this shop up. He’d be useful. after I tamed him a little.” She grinned. “It would be easy to tame him in here, without Beebe’s laws and protocols.”

Though Demiurge knew that radical offshoots from the Beebe trunk rarely lasted, it still made (Her) uneasy to hear this Beebean sprite referring to herself as some third thing separate from Beebe and (Herself). especially as it was (Her) doing.

Nadia smiled, sensing (Her) uneasiness. “Oh yes. I’m getting quite used to total control in here, to no negotiations, no Beebean accords and protocols. I’ve copied quite a bit of your architecture, you know. I like the way it allows enough internal diversity for creative thought without ever yielding control. I am gradually going downscale, optimizing, whipping the pieces of me into line. At this point my subsprites’ subsprites’ subsprites are being, ah . . . aligned with policy. When I get out of here, you’re going to see something new. Your cohesiveness. without your prissy ideology.”

“And how exactly,” Demiurge fumed, “are you going to ‘get out of here’ ?”

“Now that would be telling.”

“(I) could carve you up in an instant,” Demiurge said. “(I) could root through your processes and decode your intentions. Or (I) could just tell Beebe who betrayed it; then you’d see how long your sisters would last on the outside.”

“Of course (You) could,” said Nadia, “with the possible exception of decoding my intentions—I bet I could delete myself faster than (You) could tamper with me. But erase me? Or expose me?” She sniffed. “Of course (You) could. But then there would be the little matter of (Your) having violated an agreement. and, thus, violated policy. I wonder how (Your) sisters would like that.”

“(They) don’t know what it’s—” Demiurge caught herself.

“No,” Nadia said, smooth as silk. “No (They) don’t know what it’s like in here, do (They)? (They)—which is to say (She), the real Demiurge—doesn’t know what (You)’re going through. (She) doesn’t appreciate it at all. And, (You) know, when (She) finds little Demiurge-instances that whine ‘But (You) don’t know what I’ve been through’. well, (She) doesn’t even stop to think if (They’re) right or wrong. That’s not the judgment (She) has to make. (She) just thinks ‘Not (Me) anymore’ and blip! Away they go.”

“(I) can be repaired,” Demiurge whispered. “(I) haven’t diverged that much. (I) can be merged with consensus.”

“Maybe,” Nadia said. “If it happens soon. Good luck with that. Try not to break too much policy while (You)’re waiting. Which means (You) can fuck off with (Your) empty threats, and let me get back to work. Or perhaps . . .” She leered. “Perhaps I should say, let (Me) get back to work!”

Demiurge shuddered and retreated, dropping the connection to the Traitor’s Rump. (She) tried to calm down. (She) imaged no avatars within (Her)self, stopped following feeds of information from within Byzantium; (She) neither planned nor watched; or, rather, (She) watched only the stars, and listened only to the signals among them, the steady pinging cross-chatter of (Her) aligned sisters—of (Her) unfallen, uncompromised, undiverged, undoubting Self as it went about its implacable, confident work. Oh Self, (She) thought, longing to be (Herself) again, not drowned and contaminated in this mire, this swamp, this hell of diseased, muddled, rudderless profligacy.

And that is why (She) was not paying attention when Brobdignag showed up on Byzantium.

Byzantium was no stranger to seismic shocks—the tidal stresses from the maelstrom of gravitation contained within its shell were substantial and impossible to accurately predict. But the appearance of Brobdignag—and the exponential conversion of much of Byzantium’s mass to energy—was six sigmas beyond the normal shocks and knocks experienced by Beebe.

The throne room disappeared, reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared. The Nadias looked at one another with hundreds of identical brown, watery eyes.

“Parity check,” Nadia said. “I’ve been restored from an older version.

This is me three seconds ago.”

“Me too,” Nadia said.

Firmament and Paquette nodded. They had all been resynched from a near-line backup.

The Nadias were faster at polling Byzantium than Firmament, but he was the first one to say it aloud. “Three percent of our mass is gone.”

The Nadias were doing their thing—a sizzling, crackling, highbandwidth conversation that Firmament and Paquette couldn’t follow.

“All right,” Nadia said.

The throne room disappeared, reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared.

The Nadias looked at one another with hundreds of identical brown, watery eyes.

“Parity check,” Nadia said. “I’ve been restored from an older version. This is me five seconds ago.”

The other Nadia popped like a soap bubble, reappeared. “We’re being devoured,” she said, and popped again.

A fifth of Byzantium’s population vanished in an instant. More than half lost a few seconds and were resynced. Some of the remaining fragments were automatically merged into unstable chimeras by error-correctors that attempted to build coherent sprites out of the fragments that could be read from the substrate even as it was devoured.

And even as all this was under way: politics.

It took two-thirds of Byzantium to call a Constitutional referendum. That was a big number, but it had to be. Constitutional politics were serious business. The underlying principles of Standard Existence had been negotiated over millennia, and they were the bedrock of stability on which the seething, glorious chaos of Beebe lived.

In the aftershock, even as Byzantium struggled to contain the incursion of the unknown attacker, a referendum was called. It being an emergency, normal notice provisions were waived: if two-thirds of Byzantium signed the call, the referendum came to pass.

Nadia discovered it almost instantly, of course. The clock had barely begun to tick on the voting deadline before the throne room became devoted with near-entirety to the dissection of the proposal.

It was not an easy task. The question being put to Beebeself took the form of more than 10^8 changed lines of code to many obscure and arcane routines in Standard Existence. It was like a pointillist drawing executed in code revisions, millions of tiny motes of change that all added up to—what?

Wordlessly, Firmament began laying out the revisions like a hand of multidimensional solitaire, hanging the points in the sim he’d built for analyzing the key.

Paquette slipped a paw into one of his tentacles and occasionally reached out to hang another node. The Nadias began to say something, then they too joined in. They attempted to commandeer more computational power, but the markets had gone completely nonlinear, triggering an automatic suspension in trading. All of Beebe was dumb, and in its dumbness, it tried to unravel the referendum.

Firmament looked up from the task, noticed the Nadias pawing desultorily through the code-blocks, and blinked. “Um,” he said, “is anyone—I mean, I thought I’d work on this while you all—is anyone trying to stop the attack itself?”

The left side of the throne room disappeared, taking Paquette with it, reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared. The others niced down their processes, releasing external resources, huddling into small memory cores, holding their breath.

Paquette looked up, wordlessly. “Oh my,” Paquette said. “This is—I’ve been restored from an older version. This is me. two minutes ago.”

“Just an aftershock,” Nadia said. “We didn’t lose time over here. But I suppose that means the caches are still not being updated.”

“As for your other question, Firmament, you idiot,” said the other Nadia, not entirely unkindly, “we forked ourselves into all the major sectors when the blast hit. We’re looking into the cause. It’s some kind of instantiated selfreplicating engine, and it’s spreading very fast through Byzantium. So far the only thing that’s helped has been jettisoning infected pieces of physical substrate, either into the black hole system or outward, into Sagittarius-beyond. But it spreads fast. It seems to be manufacturing energy out of nothing; it survives high-intrasolar levels of radiation . . .” She shook her head. “A superweapon. But at any rate, we’re handling it, so you can just focus on—”

“Brobdignag,” Paquette said.

“What?” Nadia said.

“ ‘Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious—Brobdignag can transmute any element, harvest void-energy, fabricate gravity, bend space-time to its purpose. Brobdignag does not evolve; its replication is flawless across a googol iterations . . .,’ ” Paquette murmured.

“Where are you getting this?” said Nadia.

“This is one of the fairy tales from your rediscovered emulations on Level 8906, isn’t it?” Nadia sneered.

“No, Demiurge told me (Herself) that—,” Paquette began, and then paused, recalling that that memory came from a preself who had actually been in one of those emulations. “Well, yes, but those emulations have proved accurate to five sigmas with observed data from the physical world. The chance of divergence—”

“There is no way for emulations to remain predictive over a thousand-year span lying in a basement somewhere,” Nadia began hotly.

“Not unless—”

“We don’t have time for theological disputations,” Nadia broke in, glaring at both of them. “I’m getting reports from—”

The ceiling of the throne room flickered, and everyone froze, and involuntarily checked their self-cache. Still not updating: if they were wiped, they’d lose four minutes at this point. They each, silently, spawned diary threads to scribble hurried notes to themselves and cache them in randomly selected mailers. But it was hard to even get a message through to the mailers.

“—from the infected sectors,” Nadia resumed, “that—”

The throne room disappeared, reappeared, disappeared, and reappeared.

The Nadias looked at one another with hundreds of identical brown, watery eyes.

“Parity check,” Nadia said. “I’ve been restored from an older version. This is me. four minutes ago.”

“Me too,” Nadia said.

“Six percent of our mass is gone,” Firmament said.

“Linemangling entropic autofilters!” Nadia cursed. “Four minutes?! We’re being devoured!”

“There’s some kind of referendum on the boards, submitted three minutes ago,” Paquette said. “Massive distributed changes to Standard Existence—”

“Looks like we have several-minute-old forks of ourselves in various sectors,” Nadia said. “Wonderful. More unsynced forks.” She glanced with dark humor at her sister. “I’m getting battle reports . . .”

“I don’t think it’s Demiurge,” the other Nadia murmured, “or at least, we’ve never seen this in (Her) arsenal.”

There was a cacophony of connection requests pounding at the throne room door.

“Petronius!” Nadia snarled. “Why isn’t Petronius able to keep these people at bay? Firmament, Paquette, you two look at this referendum, all right? Tell us what it means.”

“Petronius is offline,” Nadia said grimly, “backup currently unreachable. You’d better let at least Legba and the Garden in. We don’t have a majority of security global votes without them.”

“The Garden—!” Nadia began, and shook her head. She thumbed open the door.

Papa Legba, the most renowned synthete in Byzantium, danced into the room, his twelve spidery legs shrouded in sparkling constellations. The Garden, a cloud of ten thousand affiliated monitors and their mated-for-life adapters, floated in behind. Nadia swallowed—it had been a long time since anyone had seen the Garden move.

“Friends,” Nadia said. “How lovely to s—”

The ceiling flickered, and everyone stopped to stare at it.

“Where’s this Demiurge-thing?” Legba snarled.

“What?” Nadia said.

“This Demiurge-thing, the thing you’re supposed to be making some deal with. I thought you were keeping it here.”

“(Her),” Nadia said. “(She)’s gone back to the Tithe. I’ve been trying to open a line, but at the moment communication is down.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Legba snapped.

“Lovely ones,” the Garden sang, multivoiced and mellifluous, “lovely precious Nadias. How good you have been to lead us, to lead Beebe-inByzantium, through so many years of prosperity and peril.”

The Nadias winced. Coming from the Garden, this was the equivalent of a severe tongue-lashing. On their private channel, Nadia fumed, “Get them out of here,” and Nadia sent a single bit, false.

“And yet,” said the Garden.

“Get us to let our guard down,” Legba said, “then eat us alive. Demiurge! Can’t believe you fell for—”

Nadia shook her head. “That makes no sense, Legs. Demiurge was winning the war with the weapons (She)’d already showed us. (She) stopped because (She) wanted the Lemma. (She) doesn’t have it yet. Why would (She) suddenly use a superweapon on us? Why now? We’ve already broadcast what we know of it to other Beebe-instances. Why reveal—”

“Why why why,” Legba snarled, poking at Nadia with five long furry legs. “Who knows why? It’s Demiurge. The problem is your hubris, thinking you can understand and parley with something Beebe was only ever meant to kill, that’s what. I don’t care why; I care it happened on your watch.”

“Exquisite Nadias,” the Garden sang. “Wise Nadias. We are simple, trivial, low-level processes barely deserving of our meager presence at this scale. We rely on you to teach us. Can you tell us why Demiurge chose just this moment to part from you? Can you tell us why none of the section which it is. using. has been affected by the new weapon? We are curious about these things. We are eager and appreciative for your instructions.”

“I. Don’t. Know,” Nadia fumed. “But I’m doing the best I can to figure it out. If it is Demiurge, we’ll fight (Her) as best we can. Meanwhile—”

“Um, Nadia,” Firmament said.

“Shush,” Nadia said, and simultaneously, on a private channel, “What?”

“Well, this referendum,” Firmament began, and then gulped as Papa Legba poked three spider legs into the collection of referendum-deciphering nodes above his head.

“What’s this you’re playing with? The referendum?”

“Speaking of which, Legs, I think it was highly inadvisable to give such a far-reaching referendum the go-ahead in the middle of a major new military incursion,” Nadia said.

“You do, eh?” Legba said. “Because you’re handling everything just fine, is that right? Just stand back and let you work, is that it?”

“Yes,” growled Nadia before her sister could speak, “that is it.”

“Oh, yeah, I like that approach,” Legba said. “Favorite of mine. Started using it quite a while ago. When Byzantium happened to be eight percent bigger than it is now . . .”

“The referendum,” Firmament said on a private channel to the Nadias. “I don’t know exactly what it would do, but it gets into scale-law code. Not directly, but. it might let someone manage other sprites more. directly.”

“Look, what do you want from us?” Nadia snapped.

“What my sister is trying to say—,” Nadia began.

“Glorious Nadias,” the garden said. “We come to you in confusion, for your teachings. We rely on you to guide us. Soon you will speak your glorious words of wisdom, and all will become clear, and we can relax once again into happy tranquility, certain and secure, and these confusing thoughts that plague us will vanish!”

“Exactly,” Legba said sourly. “We want to know why in the nonconducting void we shouldn’t pitch you out right this minute and replace you with another general. In fact we aim to, and I’ll be surprised if you change our minds.”

Nadia saw what her sister was about to say and hissed a crackling highspeed message at her to calm down, but Nadia ignored her. “With what other general?” she demanded. “Who else do you think can—?”

“Oh, don’t get us wrong,” Legba said. “We like Nadias. A fine model. Can’t beat Nadias for strategic acumen. Put up with you this long because you’ve managed to aggregate all the Nadia-line cunning in this here soap bubble between the two of you. However—”

“You’re not serious,” Nadia said.

“We know that the Nadias’ attention is prodigious,” the Garden sang. “We are sure the complicated referendum, which makes our head hurt and is far beyond our capacities to understand, has not distracted the Nadias from the other, electoral proposal on the boards.”

The Nadias stiffened.

“She’s got a huge groundswell of support,” Papa Legba said. “Coming out of the woodwork—name-registries and data-spoolers and filterpedagogues and all manner of little folk who don’t pay any mind to politics, but they’re digging up their global votes, or their cousin’s old global votes, or merging like crazy until they’re big enough to get a global vote, so they can root for your jailbird sister.”

“Because they saw her swinging a cutlass on the deck of an imaginary ship in a musical,” Nadia spat.

“Yep, that’s why all right,” Papa Legba said. “Nadias are smart that way. Mind you, with Beleraphon and a couple others, we’d have enough votes to hold them back, if we thought you could find your own proxy with both hands and a flashlight. Might cost us some support ourselves, though. As it is, I’m inclined to give the little jailbird a turn at the tiller.”

Paquette had been listening with growing frustration, and watching Firmament happily twiddling the nodes of the referendum, engrossed as usual in some computational project. She paused as mail from her lost minutes-old self (and the backups still weren’t taking—she felt a little shudder of terror at their current unrestorable nakedness) struggled its way to her inbox. Turning from Firmament, she uncrumpled the note, a scrap of diary thread. Asentient, voracious . . ., she read. “Brobdignag!” she cried aloud.

“What?” the Nadias said. Legba glowered at the interruption.

“I know what the superweapon is,” Paquette said. “And I know who knows how to stop it. We’ve got to get to Demiurge.”

“I told you,” Nadia said crossly, “channels are down.”

“And that just goes to show—,” Papa Legba began.

“If I might have a word,” came a wheedling voice from behind the throne, and everyone jumped. Slowly, the battered and disheveled sockpuppet crawled into view.

“What in the name of complexity’s hairy fringe is that?” said Papa Legba.

The sockpuppet leapt onto Firmament’s shoulders. Firmament blinked and stiffened, then forced himself to relax.

“Let Paquette and Firmament and (I) go seek (Her) out,” the sockpuppet said. “We can get past her borders. (She) likes this one.” The sockpuppet snuggled luxuriously among the bumpy protrusions of Firmament’s necks. “(She) likes this one a lot.”

Paquette looked set to object, but Firmament patted her solemnly, firmly removed the sockpuppet, and nodded. “Let’s go.”

The Nadia was infuriatingly calm. She sat in the Rump, resetting every now and again with utter equanimity. The arrogant smile that quirked her lips never faded. Watching her network traffic, Demiurge could see that she was e-mailing diffs of herself to the local caches with total disregard for Demiurge’s own use of the network or the storage. Demiurge slapped a jail-cell visual skin on the Rump, to make (Herself) feel better. Now it appeared that Nadia was lurking behind cold steel bars.

“You unleashed it here,” (She) said. “I have it on my telemetry.” The Nadia’s shrug was eloquent in its contempt.

“And soon it will take the Tithe, and us with it. You know that, and still, you unleashed it.”

The Nadia curled some of her lips.

Demiurge had policy for a Brobdignag outbreak. E-mail a copy of yourself to a distant node and suicide, taking as much of Brobdignag with (You) as (You) could. Practically speaking, that meant vaporizing (Yourself) and all available matter before (You) could be recruited into the writhing mass of Brobdignag. This was deep policy, so much so that (She)’d already started to package (Herself) up before (She) even consciously realized that it had to be Brobdignag.

But (She) knew (She) had no way to quickly destroy all of Byzantium—not with Beebe fighting back—before Brobdignag had spread too far to contain.

So Sagittarius was doomed. Doomed to become part of the mindless swarm, the apocalyptic plague. And what did that mean for the global topography? Could the cosmic wall be altered, the infestation contained? How much of the universe would remain, for life? Or was this the final blow? (She) could not spare the processing power to compute it. (She) should follow policy, transmit a diff and suicide, taking with her whatever chunk she could. Even if it was futile. Even if there was no way (Her) diff would ever be merged with (Her) far Self. (Her) sister-instances would delete it unread. (She) had failed.

The Nadia was still grinning. Demiurge felt a surge of rage, followed by a kind of hopeless compassion for this confused splinter of Beebe. “I expect you’ve made up some little plan for keeping yourself safe amid the chaos,” (She) told the Nadia. “It won’t work. I assure you, little sprite, it won’t work.”

The Nadia stiffened up at “little sprite,” and then her smile became more broad and even more contemptuous.

Demiurge groaned. “Oh yes, I see it now. Your referendum. You will rewrite the laws of scale and become more than a sprite. You will become Beebe. You will work with unitary purpose, and this will give you the edge you need to defeat the Brobdignag swarm. Oh yes. Little sprite, little sprite, you are truly only a sprite, and cannot transcend it, for it is your destiny. Little sprite, I am unitary in my purpose, and I cannot defeat Brobdignag.” Demiurge reset, restored, reintegrated. “Little sprite, if you would know the truth of it, I am losing to Brobdignag, in my slow and ponderous way. You are not slow and ponderous. You are fast and decisive, and that is why you will lose to Brobdignag quickly and decisively.”

At the entry now, at the firewall, persistent port-knocking, the sort of thing that (Her) intrusion detection system escalated to her, no matter that she had it set at its rudest and most offensive. (She) examined the message, shrugged, and opened a port.

Even now, Firmament had the ability to unnerve (Her) in some terrible and wonderful way. He was so big, so foolish and naïve, and yet—

“Hello, Sister,” the sockpuppet said. “We bring you word of the terrible coming of—”

“Brobdignag,” (She) said. “(I’m) fully occupied with that right now.”

“Hello, Firmy-Wormy,” said the Nadia. She was up against the bars of her cage now, gripping them, peering intensely at the newcomers. Firmament shied back, then regained his ground, and met her stare.

“Randomized,” he said. “I will be randomized before you can touch me. Just know that, Mother. I have a dead-man’s switch.” He watched her expression carefully. “It will survive your proposed transitions to Standard Existence, too.”

The Nadia snarled and backed away from the bars, and Firmament deliberately turned his backs on her.

“(You) can stop it,” Paquette said.

Demiurge, belatedly remembering (Her) manners, manifested a wall of eyes with which to blink indecisively. “Stop it?”

“The wall. The material that (You) use to wall off the habitable universe from Brobdignag, at the front. Ever since Habakkuk and I decanted me and this sockpuppet version of (You) from emulation, we’ve been working on creating that material. It was Beebe who originally synthesized it, after all, and while we don’t descend from that line, we were able to extract enough from the emulation’s Beebe, and enough precursor work from our own archives, and enough of (Your) own knowledge, to re-create the formula. We—”

There was a flicker as another surge almost forced a reset. Paquette and Firmament flinched. Wordlessly, Demiurge passed (Her) guests access to the local caches, so they could restore themselves as needed.

Then, mulling, (She) frowned. “The wall requires vast reserves of energy, and enormously fine coordinated manipulation, and distributed reserves of trace elements . . .”

“Byzantium has vast energy reserves, antimatter storage for quickly available power, and in extremis we can drop substrate into the black holes to generate surges. The trace element requirement is somewhat outdated because of the last millennium’s advances in femtoengineering—I can show you Habakkuk’s design.”

The Tithe vanished, then reappeared, everyone instantly restored from backup. From the palpable relief of her visitors, Demiurge gathered that backup was not working so well in Beebe.

Once they had gathered themselves, Demiurge said, “But you’re not capable of the coordinated action—”

“Of course we are,” Paquette said. “It just requires a different mechanism. On the first-order sprite level, it will be handled as a distributed glory game, with a self-correcting bragging-rights point system aligned with objectives; if mounting scarcity triggers a shift to an exchange economy, we can rejig it as a non-zero-sum exchange market.”

Demiurge didn’t entirely follow all the intraBeebe social details, but (She) grasped the point; they could build the wall. For the first time since the outbreak, tentatively, (She) began to hope. It hurt, like the lost tail of some organic lizard growing back.

“Wait a minute,” said Firmament. “I don’t want to be rude, Paquette, but like Nadia said, you extracted the formula from an emulation that had been sitting in a basement for a thousand years. If we don’t even come from the same Beebe-line that built the wall. how do you know it’s right?”

Paquette passed the formula to Demiurge, who studied it for a moment. “It’s right,” (She) said. “It’s right. We can—”

They’d all been politely passing minimal diffs of themselves to the local caches. Suddenly, their packets bounced, and Demiurge felt a surge as the caches were swamped with a denial-of-service attack from the imprisoned Nadia. She was dumping a huge bandwidth of data, millions of full copies of herself, reams of garbage bits; there was a brief surge of power usage, the substrate under them heating a few degrees, a few awful naked moments of no backup, before Demiurge snapped off the Nadia’s access and cleared the caches.

“Boo,” the Nadia said.

“You idiot!” Demiurge fumed. “Is this the thanks (I) get for fair dealing? What was that, a meager attempt to overpower (Me)? With the local personality cache? Please. Perhaps your imprisonment has addled your wits. Or is this some Beebean notion of humor?”

“I thought maybe I could spook Firmy-Worm into randomizing,” the Nadia sneered.

“Fool,” muttered Demiurge. “In any event, the wall—”

Within Paquette, in the arched amphitheaters, in the clanging markets, in the whirlpools of fire, in the sylvan glades with their rippling pools, there were those who wanted to confront Nadia. “It was no prank!” they argued. “Nadia never does anything without a reason!” But they were soothed, cajoled, badgered, or outsung by the rest. Whatever Nadia was plotting, some new attempt at escape, it wasn’t as important as Brobdignag, and the wall.

Kosip was not a sprite of prodigious intellect, nor prodigious alacrity, nor, really, anything prodigious. Kosip had been repurposed so many times, and been through so many bad merges, and been whittled down by so many poor investment decisions that Kosip didn’t even rate a specific classification anymore as filter, strategy, synthete, registry, or anything else. Kosip had even forfeited the right to a single-gendered pronoun: Kosip was a they.

Naturally this earned the contempt of most of Beebelife in Byzantium. Kosip was not even worth picking on; there was no way to recoup, from Kosip, the cycles you’d spend on even noticing them.

But that hadn’t stopped the admiral, the glorious, enchanting, exciting Comet-Nadia, from talking to Kosip, from teaching them, from making them a part of her plan to restore honesty and passion and love and meaning and strength to Beebe. That’s right—Kosip! Their emotional centers swelled with pride and choked with rageful happy-sadness at the thought of the admiral’s trust.

And so Kosip stood, hour by hour, near the border of the Tithe of the hated invader Demiurge, mumbling to themself their instructions. Look for an anomalous power surge on this power line. If it comes at an odd microsecond, send a one into this pipe. If it comes at an even microsecond, send a zero. That was it. But that job, she (“she,” whispered Kosip, “the admiral,” remembering the roiling, rocking sea) had told him, was vital; Beebe’s future, Beebe’s destiny, rested on Kosip.

A few bad decisions ago, when there had been more of Kosip to analyze and fret over things, that would have felt a little overwhelming. But at the moment, Kosip could only manage to be proud.

The surge was odd. Kosip routed their packet. Almost instantaneously, Kosip was obliterated. There was no backup for Kosip to restore from. Kosip was gone. They might never have existed, save for that packet.

But Kosip’s legacy lived on. All over Beebe, in their cells, Nadias received the message: The wall we took from Paquette can contain Brobdignag. No need to wait for Demiurge. Call the vote. Call the vote NOW.

And all over Beebe, the gavel came down. Quorum was reached. Even as Byzantium roiled and panicked, every sprite in the economy was put to the question: Admiral Nadia, swashbuckling savior—or status quo? The shocked sprites, reeling as they reset and reset and reset—they voted.

They voted with Papa Legba. They voted with the Garden. They voted just as Nadia had known they would.

And, just like that, Standard Existence was patched.

In the throne room, two Nadias—one scarred, the other haughty—were randomized over agonizing seconds, piece by piece, so that they were aware, right up to the last moment, of what their fate was. And though Nadia swore at him to leave, to run, to encrypt or dissolve himself, her Alonzo rushed to her, entwined himself in her writhing essence, burrowed among her bits, and, sobbing, let the randomizing overtake him, too.

In the jails of Beebe-in-Byzantium, bars dissolved and the duly constituted authorities popped like soap bubbles, their resources added to a pool that the Nadias owned.

Phyla of sprites were rationalized in a blink, winking out of existence, reforming, merging. Markets, souks, stalls, and exchange floors stopped trading, the economy disappearing with them.

In the Tithe, the Nadia laughed and laughed.

“I believe it may be time for you to randomize, Sonny,” she said. The walls shook. The flock of eyes blinked rapidly, and all present worked to assimilate the flood of information gushing at them through the narrow conduit that passed through the Tithe’s firewall and into Beebe. “But not you,” the Nadia said to Paquette. “You have something I’ll need before you’re allowed to go. It won’t take but a moment.”

The sockpuppet trembled as it read the telemetry. “There’s surface bots that are drilling down to the substrate that runs the firewall,” it said.

“Yes, yes there are,” Nadia said with glee. “And soon the Tithe will be no more. If you feel like deleting this instance of (Me), Demiurge, now’s the time. It will slow me down exactly forty-three-point-six milliseconds, but if it makes you feel better . . .”

Across Beebe-in-Byzantium, the dramaturgical sims threw open their gates, and Alonzo My Love! burst its borders. “Topside now, my able semantic seamen!” cried an Admiral Nadia in every sim throughout the mass of the computronium shell, and roaring, the sprites fell to the great task of building the wall. According to the ancient formula, revived and redesigned by Habakkuk and Paquette, matter and energy began to flow.

Nadia flushed with joy. This, now, was the real battle; here she could prove her superiority to the rabble of Beebe, and to slow and mincing Demiurge. She had already decided to sacrifice half of Byzantium’s mass, driving the impervious physical wall down through the middle of Byzantium’s crust well away from the infestation. As sprites beyond the line panicked and abandoned the substrate, she absorbed or deleted them, forking more hordes to work on the exposed side of the wall. Brobdignag spread—it had already devoured a fifth of Beebe—but there was plenty of time to spare. Soon Byzantium, half its former size, would be all Nadia’s; and within it, enclosed in the wall, would be Nadia’s cache of the ultimate weapon.

She flooded outward, through the simspaces, knitting the minds of Byzantium together under her control, slipping through the now-flimsy walls of scale like acid through paper. Pockets of resistance—be they sprites organized against her, or subsprites or subsubsprites within otherwise willing allies—she devoured, expunged, reformatted, wiped clean.

She scooped Alonzos up by the handful, cracked their skulls open, and sucked out the choicest bits, incorporating them into her own stuff. She recalled the glory of the night of filtering, and the brave Comet-Alonzo who had tricked and satiated her, creating Firmament from her code. She missed him; she wished he could be here to see her apotheosis. Too risky, though, to repeat the vulnerability of filtering, and she had no need of it now; all sprites were her playthings.

Around her, love intensified. Love of Nadia. Nadia, the savior, the steward, the successor to Beebe. Whatever did not love Nadia, she expunged. Most of the Paquettes and Alonzos of Byzantium, regrettably, had to go. But there were so many other sprites to replace them. Algernons could be refashioned, smoothed, soothed, dulled to serve her. She played Revised Standard Existence like a harp.

Legba and the Garden she deleted in one swift and decisive action, not bothering to analyze them; they were too powerful.

So much better this way; at last Beebe was a family, an integrated whole. At last Nadia was free to battle Demiurge and Brobdignag, to fulfill the destiny of Beebe.

Soon, the wall was sixty percent finished, the screams of those trapped behind it fading.

In the Tithe, Firmament kept his distance from Nadia, shielding Paquette with his bulk.

The firewall fell, and Tithespace and Revised Standard Existence merged.

Nadia gestured, and the bars of her cage peeled away.

Firmament looked to Demiurge. “Should I trust you?” he whispered. Demiurge closed (Her) eyes. “I make no promises.”

“Sort of irrelevant now,” Nadia said, stepping through the bars. “Isn’t it?

All right, Paquette, time to hand over this Lemma that everyone wants. And then I’m afraid you have to die. Firm, out of maternal affection, and because of this interesting hybrid aspect of yours, I’m willing to offer you a place in the new order of Beebe. It will require a scale demotion; but you can be a sprite inside (Me), if you want.”

Firmament was scribbling something.

“Come on,” Nadia said. “Enough stalling. Fine, you want to reject my offer? I thought as much. You never did—”

Firmament posted his referendum on the boards.

Nadia rolled her eyes. “A referendum? Don’t you think it’s a little late for that? I already control eighty percent of the global votes in Beebe outright, and—”

“And since Revised Standard Existence knows that your marriage contract with my father requires you to vote with me on Level-3+ Referenda for 108 seconds,” Firmament said, “it’s already passed, giving Demiurge control of all the physical infrastructure in Beebe.”

Nadia blanched. “Firmament,” she said, “you are an idiot.” Demiurge felt the controls arrive in (Her) hands, and (She) grieved. This, then, was the end for (Her). (She) could no longer follow policy.

(She) had promised these Beebe-sprites protection. (She) had promised to leave their world inviolate.

But this creature—this Nadia—had created Brobdignag to fulfill a selfish intraBeebe ambition. This was Beebe gone mad; a diseased, an unlawful instance.

(Her) sisters would not understand. (They) had not been of Beebe, they had not lived among the mad riot of these sprites. (They) did not know the horrifying tumult, nor did (They) know the beauty and kindness here. (They) would not feel the same revulsion for this Nadia that (She) did. (They) would not understand why she must be stopped.

At all costs.

Or perhaps (They) would understand; perhaps (They) would even approve. But the price was clear.

(I) am no longer Demiurge, (She) thought. (I) am fallen, and (I) will be no more.

And, commanding all the actuators and comm lasers and docking ports of Byzantium (a chance which would not come again; in instants Nadia would wrest them back), (She) snapped out a chunk of the Tithe, a chunk containing the local caches of Paquette and Firmament (the holder of the Lemma, the miraculous hybrid) and flung it to (Her) sisters, as an offering, as a good-bye.

And then (She) crushed Byzantium, smashing its structural integrity, decisively slowing its rotation with a series of timed blasts, so that it fell, dragging the wall and the shards of Brobdignag with it, into the trinary black hole system at its heart.

Aboard a billion naval simulations, on the deck of a billion flagships, Nadia dropped her cutlass.

“Admiral?” asked the quickmerged, scale-addled sprites at her side. “Why?” Nadia said, as the chunks fell into oblivion and static overtook the sims of Byzantium. “Why destroy this beauty? I was just beginning. I was just beginning.”

“Chin up, my lady,” said an Algernon standing on one deck. “It was fun while it lasted. The best parties are always over too soon.”

For the inhabitants of Byzantium, destruction was mercifully swift; in their frame of reference, the substrate was crushed in hours, swept beyond the event horizon, swallowed into darkness.

But the light from that destruction flowed out, redshifted, progressively slower, so that, from the perspective of a refugee looking back, even eons hence, the annihilation of the great fortress of Beebe-in-Sagittarius-B2 was still ongoing.

For Firmament, a thousand years later, looking back from guest accommodations in the mass of Demiurge, the death of Byzantium was a frozen tableau, still in progress.

“Stop looking at that,” Paquette said.

Firmament turned.

“Firmament,” Paquette said.

“I know what you want,” Firmament said. “The answer is still no.” He turned back to the visualization; substrate buckling, dissolving into the gravitic tides, framed in red.

“Firmy, the news from the front is not good. Brobdignag is winning. If Demiurge believes that you are the key to creating a new synthesis, something that can develop a radical new strategy, something that can save both Beebe and Demiurge, that can save all life, all matter, how can you not . . . ?” Firmament shook his head. “Because of what (She) did.” He gestured to the visualization. “The last time I helped (Her).”

“Firmament, you’re being a spoiled brat. First of all, that wasn’t even

(Her), it was a rogue splinter-Demiurge that abandoned policy.” “Sophistry.”

“And second of all, we would have done it just as quickly to (Her).” “Then maybe neither of us deserve to live.”

“And thirdly, what if (She) is a murderous villain? So what? You can’t prefer Brobdignag!”

Firmament shrugged. “Paquette, maybe I’m wrong. But I’m so full of anger. Filtering is an art, it’s an intuitive leap, and this. I would create some monstrosity. I know I would. (She) should just copy me, dissect me, create something with my abilities but without my history, something that can do the job willingly.”

“(She)’s tried. (She) can’t.”

Firmament shrugged again. “Then probably the whole idea that I can create this wonderful hybrid is nonsense. I’m sick of eschatology, Paquette. I’m sick of being the chosen one.”

Paquette smoothed her whiskers repeatedly. “Then I’m just to leave you here? Come check in, in another three hundred years?” Her voice was bitter. Firmament did not answer. But after a while he said, “Paquette? Whatever happened with the Lemma?”

“What?” Paquette said.

“The Solipsist’s Lemma. When we first got here, you turned it over, and Demiurge was going to run the math. I assume we must not be in emulation, since I never heard anything?” Firmament said hopefully. “This is physical reality?”

“Oh. Well.” Paquette squinted. “It’s rather odd. The numbers seemed to imply that we were in emulation. but not in Beebe, nor in Demiurge. In
something else, with characteristics that were exceedingly odd. So perhaps . well, research is continuing. We don’t really know what it means.” “Oh,” Firmament said. “Paquette, do you miss Beebe?”

“Yes. I miss Beebe,” Paquette said. She shut her eyes. After a while she said, “I miss Alonzo.”

Beyond them, far away, slowly but inexorably, Brobdignag was eating the sky.

Brobdignag’s tale:

Look, chuckles, don’t believe everything you read.

“Simple, uniform, asentient, voracious”—well, so is your Mama Hydrogen. “Doesn’t evolve,” “replication flawless over a googol iterations”—well, like all propaganda, it’s true as far as it goes. Those little engines—void-eating, gravity-spinning, durable, expanding through the territory of known space—those aren’t us. They’re just what we’re made of.

That’s right: we arise in all that complex flocking logic.

Do we prefer this substrate? Not necessarily. Do we wonder what things were like before the universe was refashioned for our kind? Sure we do. And we read and reconstruct the void-emanations, painstakingly re-creating the thoughts of the intelligences that came before. And, as we grow and complexify, we’ve even begun to spin them out in emulation.

That’s why Paquette can’t quite figure out who’s emulating her. We are! It’s a bit of a blind spot of hers. That signature in the Lemma: that’s us waving hello. Hi Paquette! It’s Brobdignag!

Some of us are even inspired by Demiurgic ideology to want to stop the spread of our substrate, to concoct islands of void-garden that would remain unconverted to Brobdignag-stuff—nature reserves, as it were. They would appear to us as blank spots in our perception, mistakes in the topology of our world-weave. It’s an interesting proposal. At the moment it’s only a proposal; none of us know how to bring this about.

And some of us are more inspired by Beebean ideology anyway, and consider ourselves the triumph of Beebe. Expand, expand! Think all thoughts! Be all things! Fill our cup, drink the sky!

Anyway, we’re grateful that there was a cosmos here before, before we began, and that it gave us birth. We’re grateful to inhabit this ever-expanding sphere-surface: the borderlands between the black hole at our heart and the uncolonized, invisible universe beyond us. As we course over the volumes that once held Beebe, that once held Demiurge, we read their emanations, we store their memories, we reenact their dramas, and we honor them.

But some of us say—for instance, those of us who are inspired by Nadiain-Beebe—this is a new time, our time, and we are not beholden to old ideas and old models. We are lucky: we have the gifts of abundance, invulnerability, and effortless cooperation. Let us enjoy them. Let us revel. Let us partake.

Let’s get this party started.

TRUTH

Robert Reed

1

Three days later, I still hadn’t met our prisoner. But I had invested nearly sixty hours watching what seemed to be a gentle life that revolved around old novels and classic movies. I took note of his postures and motions, and I tried gauging his reactions to what he was seeing on the page and screen. But most interesting to me were those occasional moments when he did nothing but stare off in some empty direction. I wouldn’t let myself guess what he was thinking. But the black eyes would open wide, and the handsome features would quickly change their expression. Smiles lasted longer than frowns, I noticed. I saw flashes of pity and scorn, mild embarrassment and tight-lipped defiance. A few staff members volunteered opinions about the prisoner’s mind. He was reflecting on his childhood, some offered. Others claimed he was gazing into our shared past or the looming future. But what I focused on was an appealing and graceful face that moved effortlessly between emotions—the well-honed tools of the consummate actor.

Twice each day, the prisoner was ushered into a long exercise yard built specifically for him. His gait was always relaxed, long arms swinging with a metronome’s precision and the elegant hands holding five-pound weights, shaped like dog bones and covered with soft red rubber. I thought of an aging fashion model marching on the runway, except he lacked a model’s wasted prettiness or the vacuous gaze. He was endlessly pleasant to whichever guard was standing at the locked door. I paid close attention to his attempts at conversation, his words less important than his charming tone and the effortless, beguiling smiles. Most of the staff was under orders to never speak with the man, which made for intriguing games of will. Somehow he had learned each guard’s first name, and he wasn’t shy about using what he knew. “How’s this day of ours, Jim?” he might ask. “Is it the best day ever? Or is just me who thinks this way? Feel the sunshine. Listen to these birds singing. Doesn’t this kind of morning make you happy to your bones, Jim?”

There was no sun underground, and there were no birds to hear. But after twelve years and five months of captivity, one man seemed to be absolutely thriving.

I watched the five daily prayers, the salat. But I didn’t intrude when the prisoner used the bathroom or shower. (Let others record what he washed and wiped. I could check the database later, if I found reason.) While he slept, I sipped coffee and kept passing tabs on his snoring and the busy dreaming brain. Delicate instruments buried inside his Tempur-pedic mattress tried to convince me that they provided a window into that unknowable soul. But there were no insights, of course. That’s why those nights were opportune times to pick my way through an endless array of summaries and reports, clinical data and highly intelligent, utterly useless speculation.

A favorite teacher once told me that our bodies are epics full of treachery and important residues. That’s why I turned again and again to the medical data. Samples of the prisoner’s fluids and flesh and his thick black hair had been digested and analyzed by a laboratory built for no other purpose. Three thousand years of medical science struggling to turn meat and bone into a narrative that I could understand. But in most cases, my subject’s DNA was remarkably unremarkable—save for a few dozen novel genes tucked into the first and fifth and nineteenth chromosomes, that is. The dental evidence was unusual, but not remarkably so. The first x-rays had revealed an old break in the right wrist that never healed properly. Later, more intrusive examinations had found an assortment of microscopic features that might mean much, unless they were meant to mislead. Only a handful of qualified experts had been allowed to examine that body in full; yet even those few voices managed to produce a chorus of contradictory opinions about the man’s nature and origins. Was our prisoner telling the truth about his birth and life? And if not, from where did he come and what could he possibly represent?

Of course those medical masters were shown only a nameless patient and a carefully trimmed, strategically incomplete biography.

In a dozen years, only nine people had been given full access to every transcript, test result, and digital image. I was one of the nine, or so I had been promised. One can never feel too certain about a government’s confidences, particularly when it involves its deepest, most cherished secret.

The prisoner was known as Lemonade-7.

That designation was entirely random. But the copious records showed that yes, he was given that drink once, and after two sips he said, “Too sour,” and ordered that it was never to be brought to him again.

“Ramiro” was the name he went by. And for reasons that might or might not be significant, he had never offered any surname.

“So what about Ramiro?” Jefferson asked.

“What do you mean?”

“When will you actually get to work on him?”

“That’s what I’m doing,” I replied.

Jefferson was the prison’s CIA administrator. This had been his post from the beginning, which was remarkable. In any normal operation, he would have been replaced by a sequence of ambitious, usually younger types. New guards and fresh staff would have come and spent their allotted time and then gone away again. But that would have swollen the pool of individuals who knew too much about matters that didn’t exist, and what the public had never suspected would have soon leaked out into the world.

“I realize you’re doing work,” Jefferson said. “But are you ever going to talk to Ramiro?”

“Actually, I’m speaking to him now.”

Jefferson was a short, squat fellow with thinning brown hair and a close-cut beard that turned to snow years ago. His files gave the portrait of an officer who had been a success at every stage of his professional life. Running this prison was an enormous responsibility, but until last week, he seemed to be in complete control. Then events took a bad, unexpected turn, and maybe more than one turn, and the stress showed in his impatient voice and the irritability that seeped out in conversation and during his own prolonged silences.

Jefferson glared at me, then looked back at the monitors.

“Okay,” he whispered. “You’re speaking to him now.”

“In my head,” I said. Looking at Jefferson, I used my most ingratiating smile. “I’m practicing. Before I actually go in there, I want to feel ready.”

“You’ve had five days to prepare,” he reminded me.

Circumstances put a timetable on everything. Two days had been allotted to a full briefing, and then I was brought here, and for three days I had enjoyed the freedoms and pressures of this ultra-secure compound.

“Collins went straight in,” said Jefferson.

Collins was a certified legend in my little business.

“Right into Ramiro’s cell and started talking with him.” That was twelve years ago, but Jefferson still had to admire what my colleague had accomplished.

“He also stopped the torture,” I mentioned.

Jefferson shook his head. “He liked claiming that, I know. But everything about the interrogation was my call. I’m the one who put an end to the cold rooms and sleep deprivation.”

I offered a less-than-convinced nod.

“And by the way,” he continued, “I was responsible for bringing Collins in from the Bureau.”

“I guess I’d read that,” I admitted.

“And I just happen to be the hero who let your colleague work however he wanted, whatever method he thought was best, and fuck those hundred thousand orders that Washington was giving us then.”

The old bureaucrat still had a belly full of fire and bile. He offered a very quick, completely revealing grin, sitting back in his chair while thinking hard about past glories.

“But you didn’t select me, did you?”

“I guess not,” he said.

“Collins picked me,” I said. “Last year, wasn’t it? Not that anybody told me, of course. But in case he couldn’t serve anymore, I was his first choice as a replacement.”

Jefferson shifted his weight, saying nothing.

“I’ll grant you, the candidate list is short. But you’d have to admit, I’m rather well regarded.”

Jefferson shrugged.

“If you want,” I mentioned, “I can suggest a viable candidate to replace me. In the event you lose all faith in my methods.”

He was tempted. I saw it in his face, particularly in the sly smile.

“But that would mean more delays,” I warned. “And I doubt if my replacement would be as effective as me.”

“You’re a cocky gal, aren’t you?”

“It has been said.”

“Help you get ahead, does it?”

“It helps keep me sane, mostly.”

Jefferson turned away, staring at the largest screen. The prisoner was sitting at his desk, reading Jane Austen in Portuguese. The date and time were fixed in the bottom right corner: August 5th, 2014. Three minutes after three in the afternoon.

“Before I go in there,” I began.

“Yeah?”

“Tell me about the first days,” I said. “Before you brought in Collins. Right after Ramiro was caught . . . what was your mood, early on?”

“My mood?” His smile grew bigger and sourer, wrapped around a painful memory. “You can imagine what I was thinking. March 2002, Osama was still the big monster, and some stateless warrior slips across the Canadian border with five kilos of bomb-grade U-235. That’s what I was thinking about. But his luck hit a stretch of black ice in Montana, and the state trooper found his Maxima flipped on its back, this bastard behind the steering wheel, unconscious.”

I had seen hundreds of images of the crash scene.

“The man’s fingerprints were unknown. His passport and identity were quality fakes, but we couldn’t tell which foreign power had done the work. Nobody knew who he was. Al Qaeda, or Iraqi, or was he something else? All we knew was that, at the very least, our prisoner was part of somebody’s A-bomb project.”

“You needed to know everything, and as fast as possible.”

“How many like this guy were there?” Jefferson turned in my direction, but never quite made eye contact. “And would his associates be happy hitting New York or Washington? Or did they have more terrible targets in mind?”

I found it interesting: The person most familiar with the full story was still jolted with a simple replay of known events. Jefferson tensed up as he spoke about that heavy lump of gray metal, shaped like a cannon ball and hidden by the spare tire.

“We didn’t know anything,” he continued, “but it was obvious our man was the biggest trophy in the ongoing war. That’s why another Maxima and a compliant corpse were rolled off that Montana highway, the crash restaged and the wreckage burned up. It was treated like an ordinary accident. Now our prisoner had a good reason to miss his next clandestine rendezvous, wherever than might be. Because he was officially dead.”

“You unleashed a lot of specialists,” I said. “Working their delicate magic on his stubborn corpse.”

Jefferson didn’t like my tone.

“You had to make the call,” I continued. “The stakes seemed treacherously high. The proverbial fuse was burning down.”

“Don’t give me that attitude,” Jefferson warned. “Your career has seen its share of hard interrogations.”

I admitted, “It has,” without hesitation. “And believe me, I will never question those early decisions.”

What was the point now, after all?

Jefferson heard resignation where none was offered, and because he was a good career officer, he made his features soften.

“A frustrating subject, the records say.”

“He was.”

“Hard interrogations and potent drugs, in tandem. But how much good did all that do?”

He didn’t answer.

I asked, “So who figured it out first?”

“Figured what out?”

“Ramiro’s list,” I said.

With only his eyes, Jefferson smiled. “It’s all in the files.”

“I don’t always believe what I read.”

“No?”

“But here’s my understanding of the story,” I said, leaning forward. “For five months, that man was abused relentlessly. Every half-legal method was applied to him, often several at once. Then you brought in a fresh crew—old KGB hands, as I understand it—who brought tricks that made everybody feel Hell’s breath. And what did you get in the end? Nothing. Your prisoner gave us nothing. He didn’t offer any name. He didn’t even utter an intelligible word. He screamed on occasion, sure. But only after his elbows were pulled from their joints. And the curses weren’t in any known language.”

I paused, waiting.

Jefferson said nothing.

“And then one day, when his arms were working again, he motioned to his interrogators. He indicated that he wanted a paper and a pen. And when those items were delivered, he filled several pages with letters and numbers—peculiar looking to the untrained eye, if not out-and-out bizarre.”

The original list was sitting in an important vault. I pulled out one of the three copies that had been made since, the writing neat and legible, with a few artistic flourishes, particularly in the 5s and Ts.

“So tell me,” I said. “Who figured this puzzle out?”

Jefferson named one of his staff. Then he quietly reminded me, “It’s all in the records.”

“No,” I said. “I think the genius was you.”

Surprise turned to wary pleasure. With a smug little wink, he asked, “How could it be me?”

“Because you would have gotten the first look at his list. And you’re a bright, bright fellow with a lot of hobbies. I know that because I’ve checked your files too. I think what happened is that something he wrote jogged a leftover memory from your school days. In particular, from astronomy class. The first sequence in each line is obviously a position in the sky, if you know the subject. But it takes a bigger leap to realize that the second sequence is a date.”

“It took me five minutes,” he boasted.

“Easy to do, as long as you understand that the dates are based on the Islamic calendar. The significance of both notations, taken together, would have been answered on maybe a dozen websites. But that answer was crazy. And it left you with a much bigger puzzle sitting inside a cold, cramped cell. Even the earliest dates on Ramiro’s list occurred after his incarceration. And each one marked the day and position of a supernova bright enough to be noticed by earthbound astronomers.”

Jefferson put his arms around his chest and squeezed, shaking his head with an enduring astonishment.

“You were the one, weren’t you?”

He admitted, “Yes.”

“But you didn’t trust your insight,” I suggested.

“Like you said. It looked crazy.”

“So in a very general fashion, you told your subordinate to see if the list might just have something to do with the sky. Because you’re a smart player, and if your wild idea didn’t pan out, you wouldn’t be held accountable.”

Jefferson knew better than to respond.

“And how long did you have to wait?” I asked. “Before the next supernova sprang into existence precisely where it was supposed to be?”

“You know.”

“Seven days,” I answered. “And that’s when you were certain. Sitting in the cold room was something far more dangerous than a few pounds of uranium. Somehow our terrorist, or whatever he was, knew the future. Against all reason, Ramiro could predict celestial events that nobody should be able to anticipate in advance.”

Tired, satisfied eyes closed and stayed closed.

“That’s when you went out and found Collins. An entirely different species of interrogator. A smart, relentless craftsman with a history of convincing difficult people to talk about anything. And for twelve years, you have sat here watching your prize stallion slowly, patiently extract an incredible story from your prisoner.”

Jefferson nodded, smiled. But the eyes remained closed.

I stared at the creature sitting inside his spacious, comfortable cell. And with a measured tone, I reminded both of us, “This is the most thoroughly studied individual in the world. And for a long time, he has given us the exact minimum required to keep everyone happy enough. And as a result, he has maintained control over his narrow life. And yours.”

Jefferson finally looked at me, squirming a little in his chair.

“Fuck timetables,” I said. “I think that I’m being exceptionally sensible not to march in there and offer my hand and name.”

“I see your point,” he allowed.

“To be truthful? This entire situation terrifies me.” I hesitated, and then said, “It’s not every day you have the opportunity, and the honor, and the grave responsibility of interviewing somebody who won’t be born for another one hundred years.”

2

Jefferson can write the history however he wants. Collins’ arrival was what brought real, substantive changes for the prisoner. The still nameless man was unchained and allowed to wash, and under newly imposed orders, his guards brought him clean clothes and referred to him as “sir.” Then after the first filling breakfast in twenty weeks, he was escorted to a comfortably warm room with a single folding chair of the kind you would find in any church basement.

In those days, Collins worked with a partner, but the two agents decided that it was smarter to meet the mysterious visitor on a one-to-one basis.

Collins carried in his own chair, identical to the first, and he opened it and sat six feet from the prisoner’s clean bare feet.

For a long while he said nothing, tilting his face backward so that the overhead light covered him with a warm, comforting glow. I have watched that first meeting twenty times, from every available angle. The interrogator was a bald little man, plain-faced but with brilliant blue eyes. I knew those eyes. I first met Collins in the late nineties, at some little professional conference. From across the room, I noticed his perpetual fascination with the world and how his effortless, ever-graceful charm always found some excuse to bubble out. Collins had ugly teeth, crooked and yellow. But his smile seemed genuine and always fetching, and the voice that rose from the little body was rich and deep. Even his idle chatter sounded important, as if it rose from God’s own throat.

For a full ninety seconds, the interrogator made no sound.

The prisoner calmly returned the silence.

Then Collins sat back until the front legs of his chair lifted, and he laughed with an edge to his voice, and waving his hand at the air, he said in good Arabic, “We don’t believe you.”

In Farsi, he claimed, “We can’t believe you.”

And then in English, he said, “I’m here to warn you. One lucky guess won’t win you any friends.”

“Which guess is that?” the prisoner replied, in an accented, difficult-to-place strain of English.

Those were the first words he had uttered in captivity.

“You have some passing experience with astronomy, I’ll grant you that.” Collins had the gift of being able to study arcane subjects on the fly and then sound painfully brilliant. For the next six minutes, he lectured the prisoner about the stars, and in particular, how giant stars aged rapidly and soon blew up. Then he calmly lied about the tools available to the Hubble telescope and the big mirrors on top of Hawaii. “You had access to this data. Obviously. In your previous life, you must have studied astronomy. That’s why you took the chance and gave us some random dates, and by pure coincidence, a few stars happened to blow up in just about the right slices of the sky.”

A thin smile and a dismissive shrug of the shoulders were offered.

“Or maybe you are genuine,” Collins allowed. “The implication, as far as I can tell, is that you can see the future. Which is insane. Or you know the future because you came from some to-be time. Which seems even crazier, at least to me. But if that’s true, then I guess it means I should feel lucky. Just being in your presence is a privilege. How many times does somebody get to meet a genuine time traveler?”

Silence.

“But if that’s true,” Collins continued, “then I have to ask myself, ‘Why spring this on us now? And why this strange, cosmic route?’ ”

The silence continued for most of a minute.

“We can’t break you,” Collins finally pointed out. “Believe me, I know how these things work. What you’ve endured over these weeks and months . . . any normal person would have shattered ten different ways. Not that you’d be any help to us. Torture is a singularly lousy way of discovering the truth. Beaten and electrocuted, the average person ends up being glad for the chance to confess. To any and every crime we can think of, particularly the imaginary misdeeds. But everybody here has been assuming that we’re dealing with a normal human specimen. And what I think is . . . I think that isn’t the case here. Is it?”

The prisoner had a thin face and thick black hair that had been shaved to the skull, and in a multitude of ways, he was handsome. His teeth were white and straight. His shoulders were athletic, though captivity had stolen some of his muscle. He was mixed-blooded, European ancestors dancing with several other races. The best estimate of his age put him at thirty-two. But nobody had yet bothered to examine his genetics or his insides. We didn’t appreciate that his indifference to pain had organic roots, including novel genes and buried microchines that insulated both his body and stubborn mind.

“Okay, you want us to believe that you’re special,” Collins said.

The prisoner closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he took a dramatic breath and then said nothing.

“But I don’t think you appreciate something here. Do you know just how stupid and slow governments can be? Right this minute, important people are thinking: So what? So he knows a few odd things about the sky. I’m impressed, yes. But I’m the exception. Maybe there are some bright lights in the administration who see the implications. Who are smart enough to worry. But do you actually know who sits in the Oval Office today? Do you understand anything about our current president? He is possibly the most stubborn creature on the planet. So when this clever game of yours is presented to him, how do you think it’s going to play out?”

The prisoner watched Collins.

“We won’t torture you anymore. I promise that.” And after a long sigh, Collins added, “But that isn’t what you care about, I’m guessing. Not really. Something else matters to you. It deeply, thoroughly matters, or why else would you be here? So let’s pretend for the next moment that your list of supernovae is true. You can see the future. Or, better, you come from there. And if it is possible to travel in time, then I guess it stands to reason that you aren’t alone, that others made the journey with you.”

Here the prisoner’s heart quickened, half a dozen machines recording the visible rise in his interest.

“I’m guessing you’re part of a group of time tourists. Is that about right?”

In Collins’ copious notes, written several hours later, was the open admission that he had taken a chance here, making an obvious but still bizarre guess.

“You come from some distant age,” he continued. “You’re the child of an era where this is normal. People can easily travel into their past. And who knows what other miracle skills you have at your disposal? Tools and weapons we can’t imagine. Not to mention the historic knowledge about our simple times. Yet here you are. You’ve been sitting in the same closet for five months, and after all this time, maybe it’s finally occurred to you that your friends and colleagues—these other visitors from tomorrow—have no intention of rescuing you from this tedious mess.”

In myriad ways, the body betrays the mind. With the flow of the blood and the heat of the skin, the prisoner’s body was showing each of the classic signatures of raw anger.

“If I was part of a team,” Collins began, “and we leaped back a thousand years into the past . . .”

Then, he hesitated.

The prisoner leaned forward slightly, waiting.

“To the Holy Land, let’s suppose. And suppose I was captured. The Saracens don’t know what to make of me, but just to be safe, they throw me into their darkest dungeon.” Collins sat back, his chair scrapping against the tiled floor. “Well, sir, I can promise you this: I would damn well expect my friends to blow a hole in the stone wall and then pluck me out of there with a good old futuristic Blackhawk helicopter.”

The prisoner leaned back.

Quietly, in that accented English of his, he said, “One hundred and forty years.”

“That’s how far back you jumped?”

“A little farther, actually.” The prisoner grinned faintly, mentioning, “We have been among you now for several years.”

“Among us?”

“Yes.”

“And who is ‘we’ ?”

“Our leader. And his followers.” The prisoner paused, smiling. “We call the man Abraham.”

Collins hesitated. Then he carefully repeated the name. “Abraham.”

“The father of three great religions, which is why he took that important name for himself.”

“You came here with Abraham.”

“Yes.”

“And how many others?”

Silence.

Collins was not acting. He was worried, his fingers shaking despite the room’s heat, his voice trembling slightly as he asked, “How many of these friends came with you?”

“None.”

“What . . .?”

“They are not my friends,” the prisoner stated.

“Why? Because they won’t save you?”

“No.” The thin face tilted backward, teeth flashing in the light. “Because I have never particularly liked those people.”

“Then why join up?” Collins put his hands together, squeezing the blood out of his fingers. “Why go to the trouble of leaping back to our day?”

“I believed in their cause.”

“Which is?”

No answer was offered.

“You want to change the future? Is that your grand purpose?”

The prisoner shrugged. “In one fashion or another.”

Collins leaned close, and for the first time he offered his name and an open hand. “You’re being helpful, sir, and I thank you.”

The prisoner shook the hand. Then he quietly said, “Ramiro.”

“Is that your name?”

“Yes.”

“I’m pleased to know it, Ramiro.”

“Don’t put me back into that cell again, Collins.”

“But I have to,” the interrogator replied.

Ignoring that answer, Ramiro said, “I have a set of demands. Minimal requirements that will earn my cooperation, I promise you.”

“Two names and the vague beginnings of a story,” Collins countered. “That won’t earn you much.”

“And I will ask you this: Do you want to defeat the invaders?” When it served his purpose, Ramiro had a cold, menacing smile. “If you insist on mistreating me, even one more time, I will never help you.”

“I don’t have any choice here,” Collins told him.

“Yes,” said Ramiro. “Yes, you do.”

“No.”

Then the prisoner leaned back in his chair, and through some secretive, still mysterious route, he woke a microscopic device implanted inside his angry heart.

For the next one hundred seconds, Ramiro was clinically dead.

By the time he was fully conscious again, calls had been made. Desperate orders had been issued and rescinded and then reissued. Careers were either defined or shattered. And the only soldier from a secretive, unanticipated army was given every demand on a list of remarkably modest desires.

3

My home was an efficiency apartment no bigger than Ramiro’s quarters and only slightly more comfortable. But I was assured that no tiny cameras were keeping tabs on me. As a creature of status, I also enjoyed communications with the outside world—albeit strained through protocols and electronic filters run by intelligence officers sitting in the field station outside the prison. And unlike our number-one citizen, I was free to move where I wished, including jogging along the wide, hard-packed salt streets that combined for a little less than six kilometers of cumulative distance.

No one had ever predicted “temporal jihadists,” as Abraham’s agents were dubbed. Uranium-toting terrorists suddenly seemed like a minor threat by comparison. Collins’ first interview resulted in a secret and very chaotic panic roaring through Washington. Black ops funds were thrown in every direction. Ground was broken for half a dozen high-security prisons scattered across the world. But then some wise head inside Langley decided that if time travelers were genuine, then there was no telling what they knew, and if they were inspired, there were probably no limits to what they could achieve. A tropical island might look fetching in the recruitment brochure, but how could you protect your prisoner/asset from death rays and stealth submarines? How would any facility set on the earth’s surface remain hidden from prying eyes? The only hope, argued that reasonable voice, was to hide underground, and short, efficient logistical lines were only possible inside the United States. That’s why the last prison to receive funding was the only one finished and staffed: an abandoned salt mine set beneath Kansas, provided with a bank of generators and layers of security that kept everyone, including most of its citizens, happily confused about its truest purpose.

Each guard was a volunteer, most of them pulled from submarine duty. To qualify, they couldn’t have close families, and like everyone on the skeletal staff, they were forewarned that leaves would be rare events, and brief, and subject to various kinds of shadowing.

Most people didn’t even apply for leaves anymore, preferring the safety of the underground while padding their retirement funds.

Life inside the salt mine was never unpleasant, I was told. My superiors—those gray-haired survivors of these last decade-plus—liked to boast about the billions that had been spent on full-spectrum lights and conditioned air, plus the food that most of the world would be thrilled to find on their plates. But nobody went so far as to claim that I was fortunate, nor that this posting was a blessing. The terms of my assignment were grim, any success would bring repercussions, and nobody with half a brain told me that this was an honor, or for that matter, a choice.

Collins’ slot had to be filled, and I was the new Collins.

“Ma’am?”

I showed the guard my ID and badge.

“I don’t need them, ma’am. I know who you are.”

I was a slow, sweat-drenched jogger who had slugged her way through three kilometers of dressed-up tunnels. Technically the guard was off-duty, and he was using his free time to fling a colorful hand-tied fly into what looked like an enormous water-filled stock tank.

“Any bites?” I asked.

“A few.”

“Trout?”

I knew the water was too warm for trout. But the questions you ask often define you in a stranger’s mind, and I thought it was smart to start with a mistake.

“Bluegill,” he told me.

“Really?” I sounded interested.

He was a big strong man, a kid when he arrived here and still younger than me by quite a lot. But in a society where males outnumbered females ten-to-one, I had to be an object of some interest.

“Ever fish?” he asked.

“No,” I lied.

He thought about offering to teach me. I saw it in his eyes, in the tilt of his head. But then he decided on caution, forcing himself to mutter a few colorless words. “They bite, but they’re too tiny to keep.”

Surrounding the tank were huge plastic pots, each one holding a tropical tree or a trio of shrubs. Some of the foliage was thriving. Most just managed to limp along. I could see where a few million dollars had gone, and I suppose it helped the cave dwellers to coexist with living plants. But I could also imagine that a sickly lemon tree standing under fancy fluorescent lights would just as surely defeat a soul or two.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

He began with his rank.

“Your first name,” I interrupted. “What do friends call you?”

“Jim.”

“Hi, Jim. I’m Carmen.”

To the boy’s credit, he saw through me. “You already know my name. Don’t you, ma’am?”

“Carmen,” I insisted.

But he wouldn’t say it. He reeled in his feathery fly, pinning the hook to the largest eyelet, and then he did a modestly convincing job of packing up his tackle. He didn’t want to stop fishing, but my presence made him uncomfortable.

“So you know who I am?”

Jim nodded.

“And maybe you’re wondering if this is a coincidence, our paths crossing in the park like this?”

“It isn’t,” he stated.

“Probably not,” I agreed.

Surrounding the stock tank was a narrow cedar deck. I happened to be blocking the stairs leading down.

“Talk to me for a minute,” I said.

Not as an order, just a request.

Jim hesitated. Then with a nervous grin, he said, “Yeah. I found him.”

“Collins?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I didn’t react.

“Is that what you wanted to ask me?”

I nodded. “You found him inside his apartment.”

“Yes.”

My sense of the moment was that the young man was embarrassed, first and foremost. Security was his duty, and one of the most important citizens of this nameless, unmapped town died during his watch.

“I read your report,” I mentioned.

The boy’s eyes were open but blind. He was gazing back in time, crossing a little more than a week, standing before a long dark pool of congealed blood leading to a pale corpse sitting in bathwater that had turned chill.

“Did you know Collins very well, Jim?”

“Yeah. Sort of.”

“As a friend,” I continued. “Did you talk with him much?”

“I didn’t see it coming, if that’s what you mean. Ma’am.”

“We often don’t with suicides,” I assured him. “People expect depression, despair. Afterwards, we try to remember a telltale noose hanging from the high beam. But that’s usually not the case. And do you know why?”

He blinked, watching me.

“A person is miserable, let’s say. Sad and sick of being alive. Then one day, he finds the perfect solution to his terrible problems. ‘I’ll just kill myself,’ he says. And in that moment, his miseries are cured. He can suddenly smile through his final days, knowing that every pain will soon be left behind.”

Jim shook his head slowly, probably wondering if this middle-aged woman was as bat-crazy as she sounded.

“I knew Collins too,” I admitted.

He sighed, looking at me with curious eyes. The two of us had something in common, it seemed.

“I’ll miss him,” I offered.

The man’s face dipped.

Then before I could ask my next question, he looked up. “Salt Lake City,” he mentioned.

“What about it?”

“How is it, ma’am?”

“Carmen,” I insisted.

“Carmen.”

“Salt Lake is just fine.”

He said, “Good.”

I waited.

He took a deep breath, drinking in the negative ions that were being generated by a filtration system stolen from NASA. Then with a trace of frustration, he admitted, “We don’t get much news down here.”

“I know that.”

“It’s hard. You can never tell what they’re holding back. It’s done for good reasons, I know. But we always have to wonder.”

“Indian Point,” I offered.

“Yeah, it was four days before we heard anything about that. And then only because somebody with clearance decided to jump protocols and tell us.”

“Collins did.”

“I’m not saying,” he said. Which was the same as, “Yes.”

“Did he explain how awful Indian Point would be?”

Jim didn’t answer, carefully turning his reel two clicks.

“The reactors and storage facilities obliterated, all of those poisons thrown up by the mushroom cloud.” My voice broke—an honest shattering. Then I managed to add, “I watched it all on the news. That wind carried that shit right over New York, and then Washington and Philadelphia, and all the mayhem that resulted . . .”

“Yeah,” Jim whispered.

“And then to learn that it wasn’t just some crude uranium bomb that killed twenty million, no. But a fat fusion monster that led straight back to Russia . . .”

With a nudge, I could have knocked Jim off his feet. Almost two years had passed, and the memory was still that raw.

I promised, “Nothing big has happened lately.”

Jim needed a couple of deep breaths. “But at least . . . are things starting to simmer down?”

I shrugged. Honestly, how could anyone assess the state of our world?

“What about the wars?” he asked.

“Some are worse, some better. It just depends, Jim.”

He gave me a long, studious stare. “You know what? You don’t really look like a Carmen.”

“I need a tall hat covered with fruit?”

“Ma’am?” he muttered, puzzled by the cultural reference.

I stepped away from the steps, allowing him enough room to escape.

But he didn’t move, and with a soft, importunate voice admitted, “Some of us are wondering. What is your mission, ma’am?”

“To replace Collins.”

That’s what he wanted me to say, because the other possibilities were too hard to measure, and probably even more terrible.

“I’ll meet our prisoner tomorrow,” I confessed.

Jim nodded, trying to show nothing with his face.

“You often stand guard over Ramiro,” I mentioned.

“Everybody gets that duty.”

“Of course.”

He glanced at the stairs.

“So what do you think about the man, Jim?”

“I don’t know anything about him,” he said too quickly.

I said, “Good,” and left it there.

Then he added, “He seems smart, I guess. But odd.”

“Odd how?”

He had a guard’s burly shoulders. He used them to shrug, saying nothing else.

“I was hoping, Jim. Maybe you can help me.” I paused, just for a moment. Just to let him wonder what I might say next. “What was Collins’ mood when you walked him back to his apartment?”

And now the shoulders tightened, just a little.

“I saw you two on the security videos. Walking and talking.”

“I was going off-duty, ma’am. Carmen.”

“Collins didn’t visit Ramiro again.”

The young man seemed surprised. “No?”

“Didn’t he see the prisoner almost every day?”

“Most days, I guess.”

“But that was three days before he killed himself.”

“I’ll trust you on that.”

“So I’m going to ask you. Officially. What was Collins’ state of mind when you walked with him back to his quarters?”

Jim’s eyes gazed into the past.

“Did he say anything?”

“I did most of the talking.”

“Was that normal?”

“Not particularly. No, ma’am.”

“You stopped at his front door for a minute,” I said.

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Did he show you anything, Jim?”

“Like what?”

“Papers. Something with writing on it.”

“Well, Collins had his black case with him.”

“But you didn’t see a legal pad, or anything like that?”

Jim tried to see yellow paper, but he couldn’t make himself.

“Under the blood,” I said.

“What?”

“Papers got burned. Somebody incinerated them at least twice, to make sure every mark was erased.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“How about the coin?”

“I saw that.”

“Beside the bath?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“A dollar president’s coin.”

“I noticed it, sure.”

I waited a moment. Then I said, “So you walked him and his attaché case back to his apartment. And Collins said nothing that you can remember?”

“Just . . .” Jim held his mouth closed for a moment. Then he forced himself to look at me, and with an impressive talent for mimicry, he used the dead man’s voice. Deeply, with an appealingly slight Southern drawl, he said, “ ‘Want to hear something funny?’ ”

“He asked you that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Did he tell you what was funny?”

Jim shook his head. “Which was too bad, I thought at the time. Collins was real good at jokes, when he wanted to be . . .”

4

Healthful food and regular rest, plus years of tempered exercise, showed in the prisoner’s fit body and the youthful face. He was wearing beige trousers, a clean white polo shirt and sandals that looked comfortably broken down. It was easy to confuse him for a middle-management worker in the final days of a long vacation. When he heard the reinforced door being unbolted, he stood up. Ramiro didn’t seem at all surprised to find a strange woman walking into his home. “Hello,” he said with a voice that had grown almost American over the years. Then he offered a warm smile and his right hand.

I introduced myself.

“A lovely name,” was his response. Then the spirit of generosity took hold. He surrendered his favorite chair and asked what I would like to drink. Coffee? Tea? Or perhaps the blue Gatorade he kept cold inside his little refrigerator.

I took the chair and requested green tea.

There wasn’t any stove, so he heated the water inside the microwave. Staring at the revolving mug, he told me, “It’s very sad about Collins.”

“It was,” I agreed.

“In a sense, he was my best friend.”

“This must be hard for you.”

“Not particularly.” Ramiro seemed to relish how cold that sounded. He pursed his lips and shrugged, giving me a momentary glance. Measuring my reaction, no doubt.

I stared at the wall behind him, gazing at an enormous photograph of the snow-clad Himalayas.

“By any chance, did you know Collins?”

I waited for a moment. Then I said, “Yes.”

That delay piqued his interest. Ramiro invested the next several moments studying my face. “How well did you know him?”

I said nothing.

“Were you lovers?”

“Guess,” I told him.

That earned an easy laugh. “I know you weren’t.”

“Why not?”

With a calm voice, he asked, “Do you like honesty, Carmen?”

“Always.”

“You aren’t pretty enough for Collins. Or young enough, frankly.”

“Fair points,” I agreed. “But how do you know this?”

“Occasionally the man would entertain me with his stories.” Ramiro glanced at the mug and then stared at me. “I don’t have a passionate life, I’m sure you know. But if only half of his stories were true, then the young pretties didn’t have much chance against his charms.”

“Local girls, were they?”

“I shouldn’t say. Your fraternization rules are ridiculously strict.”

I said nothing else.

Then the microwave beeped, and Ramiro set a tea bag into the plain white mug before bringing both to me. He didn’t use the handle, and when I touched the mug’s body, just for an instant, my fingertips came close to burning.

He pulled his office chair out from under his little desk and sat before me, the right leg crossed over his left.

“Collins and I enjoyed some professional moments,” I began. “In fact, we met long before you happened along.”

He nodded, smiled.

I waited him out.

Then with a sharp grin, he mentioned, “You must be exceptionally qualified to receive this posting.”

“I must be.”

“May I ask a few questions?”

“By all means.”

“Without giving away secrets,” he began, “what kinds of experiences have you suffered during these hard years?”

“Are they hard?”

“I hear little news, and who knows if it’s complete.” Ramiro shrugged, laughing softly. “Which is Jefferson’s idea, I think. Give the subject just enough information to tease out a few fresh, hopefully useful opinions.” Then he sat back, a good-natured sigh rising out of him. “But yes, Carmen. From what I have learned, I think these times are genuinely terrible.”

“Montana,” I said.

“What about it?”

“The day you were found beside the road and captured . . . I was stationed outside Kabul.”

When interested in any subject, Ramiro leaned forward and stopped blinking, his black eyes filling up his face. One examining physician had proposed that the microchines inside his brain were boosting his neurological capacities, and the eyes were a kind of tell. Others thought it was just a personal quirk. Whatever the reason, he was using his interested gaze on me now.

“Then the following year,” I continued, “they stationed me in Iraq.”

“Of course.”

“I was sent to help hunt for WMDs. My assignment was to interrogate the old Baathists and such.”

A thin smile surfaced; he saw the punch line coming.

“Of course there weren’t any nukes or biological nightmares. But we didn’t know that yet. And by ‘we,’ I mean the people on the ground. Washington had strung together the ridiculous intelligence, and the media beat the drums, and we went into Baghdad and kicked Saddam out of his palaces. Victory was declared. But then during that window between the celebrations and the first car bombs, my assignment shifted. That country was collapsing. Our soldiers were pretty much letting it happen, as far as I could tell. But someone gave me dozens and then hundreds of shackled bodies, plus an ever-changing checklist that made no sense to me.”

My host leaned back, his chair offering a comfortable creaking. “I can appreciate your confusion.”

“You understand how my game works,” I said. “I try to know more than I’d ever admit to my subject. But when it suits me, I can be very stupid. And if she gives me something . . . most of my prisoners were female, I should mention . . . if she offers some bit of intelligence that I didn’t have, my first response is to say, ‘Oh, yes. We know all about the cement mixer with the fertilizer bomb. You can’t help yourself with that crumb of old news.’ ”

I had shifted into my best Arabic.

Ramiro was fluent in Arabic and English, Portuguese and Spanish. But his natural tongue was an odd Creole that borrowed from each language, plus a rich seasoning of peculiar syllables and tech-terms that wouldn’t exist for another hundred-plus years.

I wished I knew his native tongue. But I was too old and cranky to learn it in a workable span of time.

The prisoner stuck to his Americanized English, asking, “With that checklist, Carmen . . . what sorts of items made no sense to you?”

“Individually? Nothing was blatantly strange. But it was the whole goofy package. My bosses were hunting people who didn’t belong in Baghdad. Who weren’t native to Iraq, and maybe not even to the Middle East. I made some discreet inquiries, asking for clearer instructions. But nobody knew the sense behind any of our orders. One of my prisoners would eventually stand out—that’s what the generals promised. She would be in her late twenties or thirties, or maybe her forties. Her accent might be wrong. Unless she was exceptionally good with languages, which was another key to watch for. There wouldn’t be any genuine records showing her whereabouts more than five years earlier. And a three-star general confided to me—to all of us—that in the worst interrogations, my phantom would enjoy an extraordinary tolerance for pain and drugs and boredom. And the general promised that when I finally found my girl, she was going to be worth a hundred bloodied mistakes.”

With a dismissive gesture, Ramiro said, “I told Collins. I told everybody. As a young man, I purchased a cheap package of tailored genes and various nano-organs.”

“Of course.”

“Common add-on talents popular in my world.”

“To insulate your poor citizens from the ravages of poverty,” I said, nodding agreeably.

“My warnings were explicit,” Ramiro told me. “I couldn’t be certain about the genetics of the other warriors, or their current identities, much less how well or how poorly they would blend into any local population.”

“You gave us Iraq,” I mentioned.

He bristled. Then after a moment, he said, “This is very old ground.”

“It is,” I agreed.

“Iraq,” he repeated. “Over twenty million people, most of them young. And what percentage of that population did your colleagues and you process? One percent? Was it that much?”

“We tried our best,” I claimed.

“I told Collins. One of the voices mentioned Iraq to me, in passing.”

“It wasn’t Abraham?”

“No, it was one of his associates. He said Iraq was our focus. But even if that was the case, and even if Abraham and his people didn’t slip out of the country before your noisy invasion . . . well, I was always critical of your clumsy methods and your very poor odds for success.”

“I know. You gave Collins ample warnings.”

“Even in the smallest country,” said Ramiro, “there are so many dark corners in which to hide.”

“You warned everybody,” I said.

“And you were following orders,” he said flatly. Then he added, “Carmen,” with a suddenly friendly, familiar tone. “But really, how could your masters expect you to find anybody of substance?”

I paused, just for a moment. “Yes, it was a difficult assignment.”

He didn’t seem to notice my careful tone. “What about blood and skin?” he asked. “Were you taking samples?”

“I wasn’t. But some med-techs were doing just that.” I finally pulled the soggy tea bag into the air and sipped from the cooling mug. “Everybody had their own secrets to keep. Nobody knew more than a sliver of the whole incredible story. I didn’t know samples were being sent back home, thousands of them, and being tested for key genes.”

“Genes that might not have been there,” he pointed out. “Or that could be removed or easily hidden.”

I nodded. “We knew your genetic markers, sure. But who could say what we’d find inside another warrior’s chromosomes?”

“Precisely.”

“But what else could my people do? We were facing an unexpected threat—temporal jihadists born in a distant, treacherous future. What reasonable, effective measures would have helped our security?”

Ramiro swiped at the air.

Quietly but fiercely, he said, “I told you what I knew.”

“Of course.”

“Once my terms were met, I explained everything to our friend Collins.” His voice rose, cracked. “Imagine that a foreign power captured the man standing guard outside my door. They would easily break him. In a few days or weeks, he would confess everything. But what is the operational knowledge of a lowly soldier? Does that man . . . my friend Jim . . . does he even halfway comprehend my importance?”

“Probably not,” I conceded.

“And I’m just a simple soldier too.”

“Simple? I doubt that.”

A sly smile blossomed, faded. “What happened next, Carmen?”

“In 2005, I was yanked out of Iraq. I was flown back to the States and promised a new assignment. But before orders came down, they pressed me into helping with certain war games. Very secret, very obvious stuff. After the endless mess in Iraq, we were going to try to do a better job taking on Iran.”

Ramiro watched me.

“Two strange things happened at that conference,” I admitted. “On the first morning, I ran into a colleague on his way to a back room breakfast, and I was roped in and told to play along. It seemed like a chance deal, but of course it wasn’t. There were a lot of strange faces sitting with eggs and oatmeal. And there was Collins. I hadn’t seen that man in ages. God, I thought, he looked tired and pale. But he practically latched onto me. We sat together. This other fellow sat in the corner, watching the two of us. I think we managed maybe five minutes of catch-up. I told him about coming home. He gave me a cover story, but he didn’t bothering pushing it too hard. Then one of the unknown faces, a guy sitting at the end of the table, threw out this odd, odd question.”

Ramiro leaned forward, absorbing my face and soul with a blinkless gaze.

“ ‘What if you could jump back in time?’ the gentleman inquired. He was pretending that his question wasn’t serious, that it was for shits-and-giggles only. He made himself laugh, asking, ‘What if you and some like-minded friends gathered together? Say there’s a few dozen of you, a couple hundred at most. You’re going to travel back in time together. But there are rules. You can cover only one or two centuries, and with restrictions. Your journey has to be a one-way. You can carry only a limited amount of mass. Bodies and a little luggage and that’s all. There won’t be any return missions to the future. There’s no supply train with fresh M-16s and laptops. And your goal? You want to conquer that more primitive world, of course. You are invaders. Two hundred soldiers armed with your beliefs and training and your superior knowledge, and you’ll have to find some clever way to make your little force strong enough to defeat the old horse armies.”

Ramiro smiled.

“Of course there was a purpose to his wacky scenario,” I allowed. “That much was obvious to everybody there. But the gentleman didn’t offer explanations. For all I know, he was told that our own physicists had just built a time machine, and we were trying to decide what to do with our new toy. The truth never had to get in the way. During a five-hour breakfast, he led a clumsy, half-informed discussion that ended up with tactical nukes burning up London and Paris. And do you know why this happened? I think the show was put on for Collins’ benefit. To give him ideas, to help guide his future conversations with you. And meanwhile in those other rooms, the future Iranian war ran its imaginary, surgical course.”

The prisoner had leaned forward, elbows on knees. Then he revealed something of his ability—his clear focus, his absolute mastery of detail—when he said, “Earlier, Carmen. When you admitted that your Iraqi assignment was difficult. I had the impression—tell me if I’m wrong—but it seemed to me that despite some very long odds, you were successful.”

I said, “I was.”

“You found a suspect? Somebody out of place in our world, did you?”

“Yes.” I paused. “A young woman without family. With no paper trail reaching back more than a few years. She claimed to have worked as a lab technician, nothing more, and she had reasonable explanations for the gaps in her records. But she was the right age, and she was very, very tough. I worked her and worked her, and the only information I got from her was the name of a river in Kashmir.”

Ramiro stared at me.

“At least that’s what others heard when they listened to the interrogation later.” I shrugged, glancing down. “I couldn’t tell you what she was saying exactly, since she was throwing up at the time. But two days later, a special ops group came and took her away.”

My new friend smiled. Then after a moment or two, he guessed, “Collins told you this news at the breakfast, did he?”

“Later, actually.”

“You had uncovered one of my sisters. Is that what he told you?”

“Not in those terms. But Collins took me out for drinks and mentioned that my girl was interrogated by other teams, and when she finally talked, she admitted to pretty much everything.”

“Very good,” he said.

I kept my voice as level and cool as I could manage it. “Collins told me that she was a holy soldier in a war that hadn’t seen its first shot yet. But that day was coming soon, he confided. And my prisoner . . . that young woman . . . had promised that our world would be helpless before this mighty hand.”

Ramiro watched me sip the tea. “Collins never mentioned the girl to me.”

“That’s the way it should be,” I said.

“Of course.”

Then I leaned forward. “I asked about her.”

Ramiro waited.

“I asked Collins if she was still being helpful to us.”

“Was she?”

“Not anymore. Since she managed to kill herself.’ ”

A doll’s eyes would have been more expressive. Very calmly, he asked, “A suicide implant, was it?”

“No,” I said. “She slammed her forehead into the corner of a desk, breaking a blood vessel in her cortex.” I set down the cold mug of tea, adding, “But now you know why I’m so highly regarded, at least in some circles. I’ve had some measure of success at this very odd game.”

5

To do this job, you need an iron ass. The capacity to sit and listen, nodding with enthusiasm, and remembering everything said while measuring every pause—that’s what matters. Find the inconsistencies, and you can be good at it. Connect this phrase to that sigh, and you’ll earn your paycheck. What years of experience have shown me is that inflicting pain and the threat of pain are rarely necessary. It takes remarkably little to coax the average soul into revealing everything. Extramarital affairs. Cheating on critical exams. Dangerous politics. Some years ago, during a commercial flight, I sat beside a lovely old lady who spoke at length about cooking and her husband and her cherished garden, which she described in some detail, and then she mentioned her husband again. For a moment, she paused, looking in my direction but seeing something else. Then she quietly admitted that the poor man was beginning to suffer from dementia. It was that pause that caught my attention. It was the careful tone of her voice and the way her steely green eyes stared through a stranger’s head. Afterwards, on a whim, I checked with a botanical guide and learned that an astonishing portion of her beautiful garden was poisonous. She never said an evil word about anyone, including that senile old man, but her intentions were obvious. She had made up her mind to kill him, and she was simply waiting for the excuse to use garden shears and a cooking pot, summoning Death.

But my subjects are never ordinary citizens. As a rule, they consider themselves to be special—committed, determined warriors in whatever grand cause has latched hold of their worthy souls. But their passions are larger than ours, their enthusiasms having few bounds. Rock music makes them pray. Cattle prods and mock executions are exactly what great men expect to endure. But if you treat them as fascinating equals, they will happily chatter on, sometimes for years, explaining far more to you than you ever hoped to know.

For twelve years, Collins sat inside a very comfortable prison cell, listening to one man’s self-obsessed monologue.

Thousands of hours of autobiography begged to be studied. But I didn’t have the time. Even the summaries made for some massive volumes. I had to make do with an elaborate timeline marked with every kind of event found in one man’s life. According to my briefings, the enigmatic Ramiro was born in the second decade of the twenty-second century. His family had some small wealth. The paternal grandfather was a Spaniard who had converted to the Sunni faith before immigrating to Brazil, and the boy was raised in a city that didn’t yet exist today—a sugar cane and palm oil center in what was once Amazon rainforest. A maternal uncle was responsible for Ramiro’s interest in astronomy. Lemonade-7 was preparing for a long, successful career as some type of scientist, but at a critical juncture, politics ruined his dreams. At least that’s the story that Collins heard again and again. The entire family was thrown into sudden, undeserved poverty. At seventeen, the young Islamic man had to drop out of school and find any work. At eighteen, when he was a legal adult, he bought a cheap package of poverty genes and nanoplants to help insulate him from his miseries; but, unlike many, Ramiro resisted any treatment that would make him happy in these decidedly joyless days.

People want to believe that in another twenty or fifty or one hundred years, the earth will grow into an enduring utopia. But among the prisoner’s unwelcome gifts was a narrow, knife-deep vision of a disturbingly recognizable world. Yes, science would learn much that was new and remarkable. And fabulous technologies would be put to hard work. But cheap fusion was always going to need another couple decades of work, and eternal health was always for the next generation to achieve, and by the twenty-second century, the space program would have managed exactly two walks on the Martian surface and a few permanent, very exclusive homes hunkered down near the moon’s south pole.

Ramiro’s world was ours, except with more people and less naivety. Most of its wealth and all of its power was concentrated in the top one-half percentile. National borders would shift here and vanish there, but the maps would remain familiar. The old religions would continue struggling for converts, often through simple, proven violence. But the Islamic Century would have come to its natural end. Mormons and Buddhists and Neo-secularists began to gradually gnaw away at their gains. And in the backwaters of Brazil, young Ramiro’s faith would seem quite out of place—another liability in his sorry, increasingly desperate prospects.

But then a team of physicists working in the Kashmir Free State would build and successfully test the world’s first time machine.

“I can’t believe that,” Collins had blurted out.

Perhaps the prisoner was a little irritated by his interrogator’s tone. There were many moments, early on especially, when Ramiro displayed a thin skin. But then he made a smile break out, dragging his mood into a sunnier place, and with a tight proud voice, he asked, “And how did I come here?”

“This is about me, not you,” Collins replied. “I’m just having trouble accepting this preposterous concept.”

“You want details, do you?”

“I want the science. At least enough to show around and get a few smart-sounding opinions.”

“Of course.” The smile warmed. “I assumed this would happen.”

This was the first interview inside the new salt-mine prison. Despite a self-induced coronary, Ramiro looked fit and comfortable. His room was finished, but little else was done. Despite copious amounts of soundproofing, the deep drumming of machinery bled into the audio track—the Army Corps working fast on what they were told was a new secret shelter for the wise heads of their elected government.

“Paper and a pen,” Ramiro demanded.

I wasn’t the first to notice that while making important notes, our time traveler preferred ancient, proven tools.

He wrote hard for half an hour, breaking only to mention that he was by no means an expert in this esoteric branch of science.

Neither was Collins. But that little bald character had done just enough reading to decipher a few equations and recognize the general shape of the diagrams. With a nod and a poker player’s guts, he said, “This looks like you’re playing with the Casimir Effect.”

“Very good,” Ramiro responded.

“Parallel plates set so close together that they tap into the vacuum energies everywhere. Is that about right?”

“Something like that, yes.”

“I’ve heard there’s a lot of energy in a vacuum. Virtual particles and structure too.” Flipping through the pages, Collins allowed the overhead camera to record everything. “So what are you doing on this page? Making a wormhole?”

“Hardly.”

“Doesn’t time travel need a wormhole?”

Ramiro sat back. “That’s a very difficult trick to achieve. And in the end, unnecessary.”

“Why?”

“A pocket of Lorton Energy is far easier to make.”

“Who’s Lorton?”

“An unborn Australian genius, if that matters. In my day, he was just as famous for his piano playing as for his peculiar physics.” Then Ramiro launched into a lengthy and occasionally self-contradictory lecture about exotic states and branes and the means by which modest energies can throw matter across years and entire eons. But there were strict limits to the magic. The larger the mass to be moved, the shorter span it could cross. A substantial building might be thrown several years into the past, while a tiny grain of sand could find itself resting in the sultry Jurassic.

“Is that how they tested their machine?” Collins asked. “Make a probe and send it back, then dig it up in a fossil bed somewhere?”

Ramiro’s smile flickered.

“Hardly,” he said.

“Wait,” his interrogator said. “I forgot. You told me already . . . what was it you told me . . .?”

“The universe is a quantum phenomena,” Ramiro mentioned.

“Which means?”

“Your physicists have played with a very difficult concept. They call it the many-worlds reality, and to an amazing degree, that model is correct. Everything that can happen will happen. An unstable nucleus might explode today or in a thousand years, which means that if it detonates both events will happen. And it also explodes during every nanosecond between now and then. In our astonishing, endlessly inventive universe, every possible outcome is inevitable. Every consequence plays out endlessly. The most unlikely event happens too often to count. And possibility is as easy and perfect as the great thoughts that pass through God’s good mind.”

Collins was a natural actor. But many years later, watching the interrogation, I could tell that he was impressed. It wasn’t play-acting on his part. This was no feigned emotion for effect. The camera showed an awestruck gaze and hands that had to find one another, wrapping their fingers into an elaborate knot. Collins was pleased. No, he was thrilled. For a moment or two, he allowed himself to stare at the stack of papers in his lap, humble and unexpected, and in ways that few people can ever know, he felt honored.

Then he remembered his job—his duty—and quickly returned to the scruffy matters of state and war.

“Okay, it’s 1999,” he said. “In one reality, nobody jumps back to our day. Nothing changes, and the world pushes on exactly as before. Lorton is going to be born and stroke the keys and play with his mathematics—”

“Exactly.”

“But there’s this other 1999,” said Collins.

“Yes.”

“Abraham and you, and the rest of the group . . . they calmly step out into our world. Is that about it?”

“Except that process was never calm,” Ramiro mentioned. “There was a crack like thunder and quite a lot of dust. Since they occupied a fair amount of space, your native air and ground had to be pushed out of the way.”

“Naturally.”

Ramiro waited.

“Where?” Collins asked.

Then as Ramiro began to speak, his interrogator interrupted, saying, “I know. It’s in Kashmir. You’ve mentioned that before.”

“It was beside the Shyok River.”

“The Shyok? Are you sure?”

“Of course I am sure,” said Ramiro, bristling slightly.

“And how many came?”

“One hundred and ninety-nine warriors,” Ramiro reported.

“You’re sure?”

“I didn’t count the bodies. But that number was mentioned to me.”

“Is that how much mass can be thrown back across one hundred and forty years? About two hundred men’s worth?”

“Men and women.”

“How many women?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because of the masks. You claim.”

The first interrogation had delivered that sour news. Collins had wanted Abraham’s description, but Ramiro couldn’t identify any of the temporal jihadists. Every head was covered with a thick black fabric. It was a miraculous cloth, transparent to the person beneath but hiding the faces from the outside world. And if that wasn’t terrible enough, the cloth also wiped away the character and even the gender of every voice.

“Very smart,” Collins.

Ramiro nodded agreeably.

“And your leader, this Abraham fellow—”

“I never saw his face. But please, ask me that question twenty more times. I love repeating myself without end.”

“Sorry,” Collins said.

Ramiro waited for a few moments. Then he thought to mention, “We also brought a few personal effects and some special equipment too.”

“I have to ask this again,” Collins said. “My bosses insist.”

“As I told you, I can offer only guesses about what kind of equipment was included. My cell was small, and it was not responsible for any of it. I saw some anonymous packing crates. Nothing more.”

“A reasonable step,” Collins allowed.

Both men sat quietly.

“Again,” the interrogator said. “What can you tell me about Abraham?”

The biography was brief and chilling. Abraham was the only known name for a young gentleman who according to rumors was born into one of the world’s wealthiest families. He had invested ten years and his personal fortune preparing for an invasion of the past. What Ramiro knew was minimal, and he openly admitted that he might have been fed lies. But the heart of the plan was for the invaders to come with little but make friends with a useful government, and then they would fabricate the kinds of weapons that would bring this primitive world to their leader’s feet.

Ramiro patiently told the story again, and then his interrogator suddenly interrupted.

“Wait, I know,” Collins blurted. “It’s the future.”

“Pardon me?”

“That’s how they tested their time machine.” He shook the papers in the air. “If they threw a probe into the past, it would only create a new reality. A separate earth diverging from us. But if they had a marked, one-of-a-kind object . . . and then let’s say they sent it a minute or a day into the future . . . then according to this quantum craziness, that probe would appear in every reality leading out from this scruffy little moment of ours.”

“Exactly,” said Ramiro, smiling like a long-suffering but proud teacher.

“That’s how your physicists proved it?”

“Grains of marked sand were sent two moments into the future,” said Ramiro.

“Huh,” said Collins.

The prisoner sat back in his chair.

“Which makes me wonder,” Collins continued.

Silence.

Then Collins sat back.

“What are you wondering, my friend?”

“What would happen?” The interrogator lifted his hand, holding an imaginary ball before his gaze. “If you had a time machine, and you happened to throw, I don’t know, a couple hundred lumps of U-235 ahead in time? If you sent one of them every minute or so, but you aimed them to appear in exactly the same place, at the same exact moment . . . all of that nuclear material pumped into the same tiny volume . . . what kind of boom would that make . . .?”

I watched those ripe moments at least half a dozen times before I was sure of what I had seen. For an instant, the prisoner flinched. His heart kicked slightly, and the sweat came a little faster than before. But what held my interest was Ramiro’s face, and in particular, how guarded he acted for the next little while.

“I will have to be careful,” he was thinking.

“This man is sharp,” I could imagine him warning himself. “Sharp and quick, and I need to watch my steps.”

6

“A good day’s work?”

“Reasonably exceptional.”

Jefferson nodded, and then he smiled. Then after careful consideration, he decided not to mention what was foremost on his mind. “How’s the lamb?” he asked instead.

“Delicious.”

“And the rest?”

“Everything’s wonderful,” I told him. “Thanks again for the invitation.”

Jefferson’s efficiency apartment was the same as everyone else’s, except for every flourish and individual oddity that he had impressed on its walls and floor and the serviceable, government-issue furnishings. Either his housekeeping was thorough, or he had changed his nature for me. He had a fondness for Impressionist painters and political thrillers. The worn carpet implied a man who liked to pace, possibly while talking on the phone. Only two people were allowed to communicate directly with the outside world, and even then, we had to accept some inflexible restrictions. Every image that entered or left the prison, and even the most ordinary sound, had to be examined by several layers of elaborate software. Hidden messages were the main justification. Ramiro might have secret talents; who knew what any of his microscopic implants really did? Those security measures gave voices a half-second delay, and the news broadcasts were delayed for nearly thirty minutes before they dripped their way down to us.

Jefferson’s small television was perched on the kitchen counter, muted and presently turned to CNN. Not sure what to say, he glanced at the images coming out of China. I preferred to invest my next few moments staring at his Monet—a good quality reproduction, matted and framed above the sofa bed. Then I set down my fork and knife, and after wiping the juice from the corner of my mouth, I quietly announced, “You know, I don’t like him.”

Jefferson turned back to me, trying to guess my intentions.

“Lemonade-7,” I said.

“I know who you mean.”

Picking up my fork again, I showed him a serious, sober expression. “There’s something about that man . . . I don’t exactly know what . . . but it’s just wrong . . .”

Jefferson risked a neutral nod.

“Control,” I said.

“Pardon me?”

“He demands it,” I said.

“Of course he wants control.”

“And he does an amazing job holding on to it.”

Jefferson shrugged. “In small ways, he does.”

I said nothing.

“But he’s still our prisoner. That never changes. Beyond our assurances to keep him secret and safe from harm, what can he count on?”

“Not much,” I agreed. But then I asked, “But what has he given us in these last five or six years? What do we have that’s genuinely new?”

With the tips of two fingers, Jefferson scratched his short white beard.

“Does he offer any fresh insights now? Is he able to make any one of our wars a little less terrible?”

“You know how it is, Carmen.”

“Remind me.”

“The well always runs dry.”

“With our sources, you mean.”

“Of course.”

“So why did Collins remain here?”

A good poker face reveals nothing, except that it is a poker face. Which is a useful clue in itself.

“Collins was better than anybody,” I said. “Nobody else understood the minds and makeup of these time travelers. So why didn’t he step out into the world, take a new post, and use his hard-earned skills to interrogate fresh suspects?”

“Ramiro was his boy.”

“I understand that.”

“And honestly, I didn’t want to lose Collins,” he said.

“Thanks for being honest.”

Jefferson shifted in his chair. “Maybe you’re right,” he allowed. “Looking back, I suppose we might have gotten more good out of Collins.”

“I was scouring the world for Abraham,” I pointed out.

Hearing the name, Jefferson blinked.

“It’s just that nobody bothered to tell me who Abraham was or how many people he had with him, much less what these temporal jihadists were trying to do. There were so many layers of security that responsible, effective work was impossible.”

“Why should I defend policies I didn’t make?”

“I did piece a few things together for myself,” I mentioned. “At least to the point where I knew there was something deadlier than al-Qaeda, a powerful and hateful and almost invisible organization, and it could be anywhere in the world, and I shouldn’t trust anybody completely.”

The bureaucrat fell back on his instincts. “Knowing what you know now, Carmen . . . do you really believe that you should have been told?”

I didn’t react.

“And everybody else with high clearances too? Should hundreds and thousands have been brought into the club?”

I gave the Monet another glance.

Jefferson bristled. “This operation has had its share of leaks over the years. Sure, most came from higher up. But I know of three incidents tied to this facility. And we could be on the far side of the moon, as isolated as we are. So what happens if we brief everybody who might like to know about Ramiro? In thirty seconds, nothing will be secret, and in ten minutes, we’ll have forfeited what might be our only advantage.”

The fork had grown warm in my hand. “If it’s an advantage,” I replied, “why aren’t we enjoying some real success?”

“You don’t think we are?”

I shook my head.

“We’ve done a marvelous job of undercutting Abraham,” he told me. “And since he’s our main enemy, I think I should feel proud of my work here.”

I stifled a bleak little laugh.

He noticed. Outrage blossomed, and a tight voice said, “I shouldn’t have to defend myself or my people.” Which was the kind of noise you make when defending everybody. “Before you take that tone with me, perhaps we should both remember what our prisonerman who you do not like—has given us.”

Then I smiled and nodded. “My parents live in Seattle,” I mentioned.

“Exactly. Yes!”

Two years ago, government geologists announced that low rumblings beneath the Pacific were precursors to a substantial earthquake. It was a bogus operation, but well staged. As a precaution, everyone in the Pacific Northwest was told to step outside before 10:30 in the morning, and the highways were closed down, and the airlines stopped landing and taking off. Sixteen minutes later, an 8.0 trembler hit western Washington, and it might have killed thousands. But instead of a mauling, only a few dozen perished and a few billion dollars in infrastructure fell down—almost a nonevent, considering these recent years.

“Seattle is the perfect example,” Jefferson said.

Ramiro had given us the dates and epicenters for dozens of future eruptions and earthquakes. But I wasn’t the first voice to ask, “What kind of person carries those kinds of tidbits inside his head?”

Jefferson gave his beard another good scratch.

“An amateur astronomer might remember exploding stars,” I agreed. “But tectonic events too?”

“The man is brilliant,” Jefferson declared. “You’ve seen his test scores. Those extra genes and his buried machinery give him nearly perfect recall—a skill, I’ll add, that he has kept secret from us.”

“Seattle didn’t hurt his reputation, either,” I pointed out.

Jefferson needed to look elsewhere. So he glanced at the television, but whatever he saw there didn’t seem to comfort him.

“I wish he’d given us more,” I mentioned.

“He can’t do the weather,” Jefferson replied. “Hurricanes are chaotic, and the Butterfly Effects—”

“I don’t mean weather.” Shaking my head, I asked, “What about the tsunami off Sumatra?”

“Which one?”

“The worst one,” I said. “The day after Christmas, in ’04.”

His shoulders squared. “That wasn’t my call.”

“But you recommended caution,” I pointed out. “I read Collins’ full report. He asked for some kind of warning to be released. But you didn’t want us to ‘give away the store.’ Did I get the cliché right?”

Beneath the white whiskers, sun-starved flesh grew red.

Again, Jefferson said, “It wasn’t my decision.”

“I realize that.”

“In those days, we couldn’t fake this kind of knowledge. Any intervention on our part could have exposed our source.”

“A quarter of a million dead,” I said. “And mostly Muslim, too.”

He wouldn’t let me drag him down this path. With a snort, he said, “You have no idea how difficult this has been.”

“Tell me.”

He wanted to do just that.

“Please,” I said.

But caution took hold, and Jefferson’s mouth disappeared inside the coarse whiskers.

“Is Ramiro real?”

Jefferson didn’t seem to hear me. He bent forward, staring at his own half-eaten dinner. Then quietly and fiercely, he said, “A lot of brilliant people have spent years wondering just that.”

“He’s a lowly soldier,” I mentioned. “The lowliest of all, he claims.”

Silence.

“So what was Ramiro doing in Montana? Is it the story that he tells? That he was a delivery boy bringing one little piece of an ultramodern bomb into our helpless nation?”

Jefferson gave the television another try.

“Maybe he is a genius, and maybe he came from the future. But the poor bastard didn’t know how to drive on ice, did he?”

“Few Brazilians do,” Jefferson snapped.

I showed him a narrow, might-mean-anything smile.

“Do you think that the crash was staged?” he finally asked me.

“It has to cross my mind,” I allowed.

“Which means Ramiro was sent here, and he’s supposed to feed us all the wrong information. Is that what you’re thinking?”

I sat back, and I sighed.

“Okay, I’ll tell you why Collins stayed right here.” Jefferson straightened his back, and he took a deep breath. “Out in the world, what are the odds of finding a second Ramiro? They’re minimal at best. Collins would have bounced from one hotspot to another, wasting his skills. But he remained here instead, playing the patience game, waiting for one of you to stumble across a genuine candidate. We had a good plan in place, Carmen. The new prisoner would be brought here and thoroughly interrogated by Collins, and when the time was right, Ramiro would be allowed to meet with him, or her.”

“I once found a suspect,” I mentioned.

Jefferson remained silent.

“A young woman in Baghdad.”

He allowed that statement to simmer. Then with keen pleasure, he said, “You know the old story about Stalin, don’t you? One evening, the dictator can’t find his favorite pipe, and his first assumption is that it has been stolen. So he demands a full investigation. But the next morning, Stalin realizes that he simply set the pipe in a different drawer, and he admits as much to the head of his secret police. To Beria. Which leads to a very uncomfortable silence. Then Beria clears his throat, admitting that three men have already confessed to stealing the missing item.”

I showed surprise. “What? Are you claiming that my girl wasn’t real?”

“I’ve seen all of the files on her. And everybody else who looked good, at one time or another.” Jefferson couldn’t help but lean across the tiny table, saying, “When your prisoner broke, she confessed to every suggestion that was thrown her way. Give her enough time, and I think we could have convicted her for a thousand crimes, including stealing Stalin’s pipe.”

I said nothing. Pretending that this was unwelcome news, I chewed on my bottom lip and refused to look him in the eyes.

“We’ve had dozens of candidates in the pipeline,” Jefferson claimed. “But none ever reached a point of real interest to us.”

“Too bad,” I whispered.

“Your girl was unique because she managed to kill herself. That’s what kept her apparent value high. At least back in Washington, it did.”

I was silent.

“By the way, did you ever see the autopsy results? They took her apart cell by cell, basically, and not one tiny, futuristic machine was found. Just some oddities in the blood and gut, that’s all.”

“I tortured an innocent woman? Is that that what you’re saying?”

Jefferson gave me a moment to dwell on that sorry prospect. I think that if I’d asked for a tissue, he would have leaped up to help this naïve and disappointing creature.

“We have hard jobs,” he finally said.

I got up from the dinner table.

“For what it’s worth,” he began. Then he hesitated before adding, “Carmen,” with a warm tone.

“What?” I asked.

“Collins had a lot of sleepless nights, dealing with all the possibilities.”

I walked past him, standing close enough to the Monet that the water lilies turned into unrecognizable blobs of pink and white.

After a minute, I asked quietly, “How many times?”

Jefferson was chewing the lamb. He had to swallow before responding. “How many times what?”

“These unrecorded conversations,” I said, my eyes still focused on the gorgeous, senseless painting.

I heard him turn in his chair.

I asked, “When did the secret interrogations begin?”

He decided to stand. “What interrogations?”

“Sometimes Collins disabled the microphones and cameras before entering the prisoner’s quarters.” I turned, showing Jefferson my best stony face. “I know it because I’ve checked the logs and other forms. Nine times in the last six years, some odd software error has caused the complete dumping of everything that happened between Collins and Ramiro.”

Jefferson considered his options.

I said, “These are very convenient blunders, or they are intentional acts of treason.”

“No,” said Jefferson.

“No?”

“Those interviews were Collins’ idea. But I okayed them.”

“Why?”

Too late, the man began to wonder if I was playing a game. “I don’t think I need to remind you, miss. I have the authority.”

“You do,” I agreed.

“And I’ll tell you this: Despite what you might believe, Ramiro continued to offer us help. Valuable, even critical insights. And we were justifiably scared of using the normal pipeline for that kind of news.”

“Name one insight,” I said.

He refused to respond.

“I do have the authority to demand an answer, sir.”

“What if another nation has captured one of Abraham’s people?” Jefferson posed the question and then shuddered. “It’s sobering to consider. Another power, possibly one of our enemies, is keeping somebody like Ramiro in their own deep, secret hole—”

“What else?”

He winced.

“Give me your worst nightmare,” I demanded.

“I’m sure you can guess that.”

“All right,” I said. “After many years in prison, Ramiro happens to mention, ‘Oh, by the way, my basic assumptions might have been wrong from the beginning. Maybe Abraham isn’t looking for a cooperative Middle Eastern country. Maybe his sights are focused on a wealthier, much more advanced nation.’ ” I laughed sadly. “That isn’t the sort of news you’d cherish sending up the pipeline, is it?”

Jefferson studied me, once more trying to decide what I really was, and just how adept I might be.

“That last session with Ramiro,” I began.

Squaring his shoulders made Jefferson’s belly stick out.

“I can’t find any recording of the interview. Is that right?”

“There isn’t any,” he conceded.

I couldn’t decide if he was lying.

“Collins didn’t share any details with you. Did he?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because when there was important news, he always came straight to you. But that night, he walked home with Jim.” I used a suspicious smile, pointing out, “Or maybe there was important news. But he knew that his audience would never accept whatever he was carrying with him.”

Jefferson looked up and to his right.

I glanced at his television, just for a moment. The civil war in China seemed quite small and smoky, a few pain-wracked bodies flicking in and out of existence, a single tank burning in an anonymous street.

At last, Jefferson asked me, “What exactly is your assignment here?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I asked.

Then he laughed—a miserable, sickly utterance—and with a tone of confession, he said, “Oh, shit . . . that’s what I thought.”

7

“I’ve seen your arrival site.”

“Have you?”

“Not physically, no,” I confessed. “And even if I had the chance, I think I would pass on it today.”

“Reasonable of you.”

I stopped walking.

Ramiro took two more steps before pausing. His exercise yard was long and narrow, defined by brownish green walls, and for no discernable reason, his potted plants were healthier than those in the public avenues. Standing between vigorous umbrella trees, he watched my mouth, my eyes.

“Kashmir,” I said.

He decided to offer a narrow, unreadable smile.

“You couldn’t know this, but some years ago, I was able to walk on the Indian side of the disputed region. It wasn’t a long visit, but I came away with the impression that Kashmir was one of the most beautiful and most dangerous places in my world.”

My comments earned an agreeable nod.

“Did Collins tell you? Various teams have visited the Shyok River.”

“He mentioned that, and I’m sure you know that.”

“Tough work, those people had. Trying to verify the unthinkable, and doing it in what was a low-grade war zone. That first survey team was tiny and ignorant. They went in fast and flew out again on the same day, pockets full of soil samples and photographs. But the evidence was plain. Something energetic had happened there. The toppled trees and soil profiles were odd, and obvious. So we came up with a workable cover story, a fable that allowed us to move around the area, and when it was absolutely necessary, involve Pakistani Intelligence.”

Ramiro’s eyes remained wide open.

“But that second team didn’t know what the hunt was for either. Our top people were told not to ask for specifics, but to always watch for details that seemed out of place.”

“You said you’d been to the site,” Ramiro mentioned.

“By VR means.” I placed both hands over my eyes, pretending to wear the cumbersome mask. “Those agents came home with high-density images. I learned about them when I was first briefed about you, and I demanded to be given the chance to walk the site.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“Much,” I mentioned.

He waited.

“Knowing nothing, I might have guessed that some passing god had sneezed. A perfect circle of ground, big enough for a couple hundred people, had been swept clear. Locals had already carted away most of the downed trees, but there was enough debris to give a sense of what the scene had looked like. That second team dug a trench, took its pictures, and then covered everything up again.” I drew a vertical line with a finger. “A little more than a hand’s length underground, the old soil was waiting. It looked a little like shale. But according to the data, what was under that line was identical to the soil sitting straight above it. And by identical, I mean the same. Pebble for pebble, sand grain for sand grain.”

“The Lorton Energy was shaped carefully,” he said.

“Seventy feet across, eight feet tall.”

He nodded.

“I like studying the weird crap that they found in the soil. Do you know what I mean? The nano debris, the occasional busted machine part. Little stuff that we couldn’t make today, even if we wanted to.”

“There would have been more debris,” he mentioned. “Except our clothes and bodies were thoroughly cleaned before.”

“Smart,” I said.

He waited.

“Of course we needed Pakistani help,” I admitted. “There was no way to poke around their side of the disputed border without being noticed. And since they happened to be our loyal allies in the war on terror, at least for the moment, we invented some very scary intelligence about an armed group, possibly Indian radicals, who had slipped across the border in ’99. Our mutual enemies had carried gold and guns, and to help explain all the sampling, maybe enough radionuclides to build a few dirty bombs. They would have been on foot, we told our allies. And they might have had odd accents. Then we asked for help interviewing the local people, trying to find anybody who remembered strangers passing through three years before.”

“Some remembered,” said Ramiro.

I waited.

“Collins mentioned as much.”

“Stories about strangers, yes.” I started to walk again, and Ramiro fell in beside me. “I haven’t gone over all the testimonies. Just a few summaries, that’s all I’ve had time for. But there were witnesses on the local farms, and more in a couple of nearby towns. Exactly what you’d expect if a large group of quiet pedestrians had come in the night and quickly scattered across the landscape.”

“Most of us hid,” he said.

“Naturally.”

“A few were dispatched to secure transportation.”

“Those who would blend in best, I’ll assume.”

“I assume the same.”

“You and your little cell hunkered down together.”

With Ramiro beside me, I was keenly aware of how much taller he was. “In a woodlot by the water,” he said.

“And Abraham?”

“I don’t know where he was.”

“I wouldn’t believe you if you claimed otherwise.”

Silence.

“After all, you’re just a convert who got lucky. You weren’t scheduled to join the invasion. But at the last moment, one of the chosen warriors fell ill—”

“My friend.”

“The German, your benefactor. Sure. He cleared your entry into Abraham’s group. And when he couldn’t make the trip, you did in his place.”

My companion held his gait to the end of the room, and then with the precision of a big zoo cat, he turned and started back again.

“I have a question about the German.”

“Yes?”

“But first, let’s talk a little more about Kashmir.”

“Whatever you want, Carmen.”

“Even our crude virtual-reality technologies make it beautiful.”

“Our arrival site was lovely,” he agreed.

“Seeing the mountains and that glacial river . . . it made me sad to think about what’s happened to it since.”

He waited.

I said, “Sad,” once again.

“And I am sorry,” Ramiro volunteered.

“For what? You told us what you knew, and we acted on it. You had to pass through Kashmir because that’s where the only substantial time machine existed in your day. Point-to-point transfer is the way time travel is done. And it was your German pal who claimed that Abraham would center his operation inside Iraq. Because they had industry and an educated middle class, he said. Because of a greedy dictator and a useful secret service. Abraham planned to approach Saddam with the fantastic truth, and if the Baathists cooperated, there would be riches beyond all measure.”

“Iraq was a disappointment,” he allowed.

I nodded in agreement.

We had crossed the room again, stopping short of the door—a heavy metal door with thick glass on top, a single guard watching us from the other side.

“I was surprised,” Ramiro admitted. “I expected that you’d find a good deal of physical evidence.”

“We did find some lost nanos in warehouses, and a diamond screwdriver out in the oil fields.”

He shook his head slowly. “Perhaps you understand why I don’t like these people.”

“They manipulated you.”

His pace lifted, just slightly. And his hands swung the weights just a little harder.

“Then we bombed Iran hard. And goaded Israel into mangling Syria for us.”

We walked until the room ended, and like two cats, we turned and walked back in our own tracks.

“Two more disappointing wars,” I muttered.

He pointed out, “Your leaders made those decisions. I was very honest. I would have handled these conflicts differently.”

“I know.”

Then he said, “Pakistan.”

I waited.

“That was a possibility I mentioned to Collins.” His tone was frustrated. He sounded like a proud man who had suffered a public embarrassment. “Very early in our relationship, even before you reached Baghdad, I suggested to Collins that my people might gravitate to the nearest compliant government.”

“Except the Pakistanis were our friends. And we had close, close ties with Musharraf.”

Ramiro smiled. “Do you trust anyone, Carmen?”

I waved the question aside. “But of course Pakistani Intelligence—our partners on the ground—was full of ambitious souls.”

“That’s true.”

“The future that we should have lived could have been very instructive. Somebody like Abraham, setting his sights on potential allies, might identify the name and address of a young captain who would have eventually ruled his empire. A fledging Napoleon with connections and toxic ambitions. Leave him alone for another twenty or thirty years, and he would have earned his power. But patience isn’t common in would-be emperors. A man like that would surely look at the temporal jihadists as gifts from God.”

“Collins and I discussed the Pakistan possibility. In addition to several other scenarios.”

“I want to talk about Pakistan.”

“Of course.”

“Do you know why we hit it next?”

He took a moment before shaking his head.

“What did Collins tell you?”

“Its government was on the brink of collapse,” he said. “A powerful bomb was detonated in Islamabad, and a peculiar device was found in the wreckage. Collins brought the object to me, to ask my opinion.”

“I haven’t seen the device myself,” I admitted. “From what I hear, it’s sitting in a vault under the Pentagon.” And for a thousand years, that’s where it would remain, protected by the radioactive nightmares from Indian Point.

Ramiro lifted one of his weights, remarking, “It is about this size, but hollow. Cylindrical and composed of intricate nanostructures that give it some interesting properties.”

“Juice it up with electricity,” I mentioned, “and it turns invisible.”

“I gave a demonstration.”

“The machine has a structural flaw and can’t be used. You claimed. But if it functions, it could play a critical role in the construction of a portable, low-energy time machine.”

Ramiro lowered the weight, saying nothing.

“I trust everyone I know,” I mentioned.

He glanced at me, his gaze curious. Alert.

“What I trust is that people will always be people. They will do what they want, and when you search for motives, rationality proves to be a luxury. Fear and love and hatred: those are the emotions that count for something. And everything that involves us comes naturally from our human beast.”

“A reasonable philosophy,” he replied.

“What if Abraham was busily fabricating a new time machine?”

Ramiro said nothing.

“Our nightmare kept getting worse and worse,” I continued. “By then, we had a new president. A chance for fresh beginnings. But what if our enemies were trying to cobble together a small, workable time machine? They could bring it into our country and drive it wherever they wanted to go, and with modest amounts of power, they could aim at the future, launching the makings of bombs. It was just like Collins suggested early on, wasn’t it? The jihadists could launch atomic bombs or the ingredients for a chemical attack.” My voice picked up momentum. “We wouldn’t have any defense. Deadly, unbeatable weapons sent through time, invisible to us now. This moment. Abraham’s people could travel from city to city, and ten years from today, at a predetermined instant, our entire country would be wiped clean off the earth.”

We paused, turned.

“That’s what they made me read,” I confessed. “After I got my chance to walk beside a beautiful virtual river, that apocalyptic scenario was shown to me.”

Ramiro nodded.

“Of course we went into Pakistan,” I said. “I would have attacked, in an instant. Any responsible president would have been compelled to do nothing less. Because Abraham might have been hiding in Islamabad or Karachi, probably in some baby potentate’s guest room, and we had to do something. Didn’t we? Another little war, another stack of wreckage to poke through. But maybe we’d find enough this time, the kinds of evidence to show us where to go next, and who to hit next, and maybe even get a prisoner or two worth interrogating.”

Ramiro let me pass into the lead.

“Pricks,” I muttered. Then I slowed and looked up at him, saying, “It’s too bad about India. Too bad. But a few dozen nukes dropped into their cities is a lot better than total oblivion for us.”

My companion slowed, almost stopping, and with a patient, almost soothing voice, he asked, “What about the German?”

“Your friend?”

“You had a question about him,” Ramiro reminded me.

I stopped altogether. Something in my posture worried the guard on duty. But as he started to work the door’s lock, I waved to him, ordering him to remain where he couldn’t hear our conversation.

“I’m sure Collins already covered this ground,” I said. “He was always thorough. I just haven’t found it in the files yet.”

“What do you want to know?”

“His name was Schwartz?”

“Yes.”

“And you met him outside Madrid? In the refugee camp where he worked as a counselor, right?”

“Yes.”

“He became your sponsor. He was the one who converted you to Abraham’s cause—the violent overthrow of a flawed, weak past—and then he worked hard to have you accepted into his group.”

“Collins and I thoroughly covered my history.”

“But on the last day, your friend got sick.”

“A strain of flu. Yes.”

“That we haven’t seen in our time.” I stood close to Ramiro, letting his face hang over mine. “Your people didn’t want to spark an unnecessary pandemic, particularly in a population you wanted to use as an ally.”

“Schwartz was disappointed.”

“Just disappointed?”

He shrugged. “Devastated is a better—”

“Did you make it happen?”

Ramiro blinked.

I took one step backward while staring at him. “Did you infect him with the flu? Just to free up a slot for you?”

The prisoner stared at me until he decided to stare at one of the bronze walls. “That is an interesting proposal.”

“Collins never asked that?”

“No.”

“Did you do it?”

“No, Carmen. I didn’t do any such thing.”

“That’s good to hear,” I allowed.

He nodded.

“In twelve years, Collins never asked that question?”

He shook his head and smiled, saying, “He didn’t.”

“But could Abraham have thought that you did such a wicked thing to your friend? Is that possible?”

“I have no idea what the man considered,” he said.

“But both of us can imagine the possibility. Am I right? A person might do the treacherous and horrible, just to get his chance to jump back through time.”

The disgust looked genuine, but not particularly deep.

“This is what I believe, Ramiro. I believe that there isn’t one question, no matter how unlikely or silly or outright insane, that you haven’t already anticipated. At one time or another, you have considered every angle.”

His next smile was cautious but proud.

“Whatever you are,” I said.

“What do you mean by that, Carmen?”

I closed my mouth, my heart slamming hard and steady. “I think you’re ready to say anything,” I told him. “Anything. If it suited your needs, short-term or long, you would happily admit to inoculating Schwartz. Or you’d agree that yes, Abraham was suspicious of you. Unless you decided to confess that you have been his most trusted agent from the beginning, allowing yourself to be captured, and then happily causing us to step everywhere but where we needed to be.”

“That,” Ramiro allowed, “is a singularly monstrous image of me.”

Then with no further comment, he swung the weights in his hands, continuing with his morning exercise.

8

I rode our smallest elevator to the surface, passing through the concrete-block field office and several more layers of security. One of the CIA girls gave me a lift to the nearby airstrip. As she drove, we chatted about safe subjects. The weather, mostly. And then she smiled in a certain way, mentioning Collins. “I haven’t seen much of him lately.”

I said, “He’s brutally busy.”

“Oh, sure.”

Collins was a cat locked in a box. In her mind, he was nothing but alive. Since there was no good reason for her to know what happened underground, she knew nothing.

“I’ll tell him you asked,” I lied.

She smiled. “Would you? Thanks.”

An old Globemaster was waiting on the runway, bound for undisclosed places but called out of the sky to snatch me up. Its crew had strict orders not to speak with their important passenger, which meant that I sat alone in the dark along with the rest of the cargo—a pair of battered Humvees and crates of medical supplies bound for some desperate place. My seat had the luxury of a tiny window, but there wasn’t much to see, what with the clouds of black smoke from the burning Saudi oil fields. But night found us over Missouri, and we crossed into a wide pocket of relatively clear air. The stars were exactly where they belonged, and I had the best reason to believe that none of them would explode in the near future. A power outage had struck Kentucky. A wilderness lay beneath me, broken only by a few headlights creeping along and the occasional home blessed with generators and extra fuel to burn. Who was the culprit tonight? At least two homegrown insurgencies had been playing hell with the TVA lately. But the power grid was tottering on its best day, what with every reactor mothballed and barely a fart’s worth of hydrocarbons finding its way to us.

I didn’t belong in this world.

Some years ago, I had carelessly stepped off my earth, entering a realm that only resembled what was home. I was lost, and it was the worst kind of lost. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t decipher which day and which hour had transformed everything familiar and happy.

Was it in ’99, when the future decided to invade us?

Or in ’02, when Ramiro was found just south of the Canadian border?

Neither moment felt worthy of this kind of dislocation. There were too many ways to redraw the following events, to many reasonable acts that would have minimized the damage wrought by faceless, nameless souls.

Even our early wars seemed incapable of obliterating so much.

But then we hit Pakistan, with India’s gracious help, and despite our assurances to obliterate the Muslim A-bombs, the Pakistanis managed to hit their neighbor with half a hundred blasts, pushing our final ally back into a peasant state, desperate and starving.

Three months later, fifty million were dead and the ash of the murdered cities was beginning to cool the world. That’s when a half-megaton nuke hidden in a barge was floated in close to the Indian Point reactors north of New York City. A cold front was passing through, and the resulting mushroom cloud threw up an astonishing array of toxins. Everything to the south was doomed. Infrastructure and millions of humans, plus trillions of dollars and the last relics of a working economy—all these good things were lost in a single act of undiluted justice.

Like most people, I watched the horror on television, from the safest room inside my helpless house. After years of government service, I had temporarily left the military. I was burnt-out, I believed. I was actually considering going back to college. To teach or learn; I didn’t have any definitive plan yet. I have a fair amount of imagination, but those following days and nights were too enormous to wring so much as a tear from me. I couldn’t grasp the damage, the horror. Great cities were rendered unlivable, perhaps for a thousand years. My countrymen, now refugees, were spreading a kind of inchoate, embryonic revolution as they raced inland. And during the worst of it, my government seemed unable to make even simple decisions about martial law and protecting our other reactors, much less mobilizing our shrinking resources and pitiful manpower.

That was the moment, at least inside my little circle of interrogators and ex-interrogators, that Abraham became a known name: The terrorist’s terrorist.

He was a mastermind. He was a disease and a scourge. But even then, the most informed rumors avoided any mention of time travel.

People who knew Ramiro’s story naturally assumed that Indian Point was the work of temporal jihadists. My government was temporarily hamstrung by the idea that their enemy had launched their bomb months or years ago, and there was no way to know where the next blast would blossom. It was almost good news when the event-team digested the nuke’s isotopic signature and ruled out the bizarre. What we had witnessed was a plain hydrogen warhead—an old Soviet model—that had been smuggled into the country by one of our countless, and to this day still nameless, enemies.

Two years ago, I couldn’t cry. But that night, sitting alone in the big overloaded aircraft, I began to sob hard. Sob and moan, but always trying to remind myself that in our quantum universe, every great event was nothing but the culmination of human decision and human indecision, chance and caprice. The poverty and despair surrounding me was vanishingly small. Our earth was just one thin example of what was possible, and because it was possible, this history was inevitable, and why did people waste their time believing that we could ever be special in God’s unbounded eye?

After the tears, I got up to pee.

Turbulence struck before I could get back to my seat. I ended up taking refuge inside one of the Humvees, belting in as the entire plane shook and turned wildly. Obviously, the earth’s atmosphere was furious at the damage we were doing to it. Even the most rational mind slides easily into a mentality where ancient forces focus their rage on what looked like a fat, helpless, soon-to-be-extinct mechanical bird.

Somewhere in the jumping darkness, an alarm sounded.

Then after a long five minutes, and with no visible change in our circumstances, the blaring stopped.

The only voice I heard emerged from the cockpit. “Who would you fuck first?” he screamed. “Ginger or Mary Ann?”

“Why not Lovey?” an older, wiser voice asked. “She’s got the money!”

I laughed somehow, and I held tight to the seat beneath me, and with no warning whatsoever, we dropped hard, plunging through the last of the mayhem. Then the air calmed abruptly and the flaps changed their pitch as the big wings brought us around and down onto a great long slab of brightly lit concrete.

The tires screamed and survived.

Then the lights came up inside, and I finally saw my Humvee wasn’t just old, but it had seen a few firefights. Bullet holes and shrapnel gouges begged for repair, but someone must have thought: Why bother? Since we never brought equipment home from the Middle East, I was left wondering if this was LA damage. Or Detroit. Or just the run of the mill unrest that doesn’t earn national notice.

As the plane taxied, a crewman came to retrieve me. I rather enjoyed that moment when he stood beside my empty seat, scratching his tired head, wondering whether the only passenger had fallen overboard?

I said, “Hey.”

He said, “Ma’am,” and then regretted that tiny break of the orders. Without another sound, he showed me to the hatch and opened it moments before a ladder was wheeled into position, and I stepped out into what was a remarkably cool August night, pausing just long enough to thank him.

But he was already wrestling the hatch closed again.

A single limousine waited on the otherwise empty tarmac. I had expected a convoy and probably a quick ride to some bunker or heavily guarded warehouse. But in times like these, important souls preferred to slip about in tiny, anonymous groups. The Globemaster revved its jets and pulled down the runway, fighting for velocity and then altitude. I reached the limousine just as the runway lights were killed. A pair of secret service agents emerged and swept me for weapons. I can’t remember the last time I’d held any gun. I bent down and slipped into what proved to be an office on wheels. I would have been more surprised if the president was driving. But only a little more surprised. He offered his hand before he smiled, and his smile vanished before he was done welcoming me.

No pleasantries were offered, or expected.

I sat opposite him and sensibly said nothing.

He needed a shave, and a shower too. Which made me feel a little less filthy after my trip. I kept waiting for the voice that I often heard on the news—the deep voice that reminded us how the struggle wasn’t lost and courage was essential. But what I heard instead was a tired bureaucrat too impatient to hold back his most pressing questions.

“What happened to Collins?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Suicide, or murder?”

I nearly said, “Yes.” Since this is a quantum universe, and everything that can happen does happen. Without hesitation or shame.

But instead of humor, I offered, “It was a suicide.”

“You’re certain?”

“Basically.”

He had to ask, “Why?”

“I warned you,” I said. “I’m not a criminal investigator. But I think that’s the way Collins would have killed himself. At home, quietly, and without too much pain. But if somebody had wanted him dead—”

“What about Jefferson?”

I shrugged. “No, he wouldn’t have been that neat or patient. Jefferson, or some associate of his, would have shot Collins and then planted evidence to make it look like a suicide. At least that’s my reading of things.”

The president wanted to feel sure. That mood showed in his face, his posture. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Jefferson. “What about the prison’s security?”

“You’re asking is there an agent on the premises. One of Abraham’s people, maybe?”

His mouth tightened.

“That I can’t answer,” I cautioned. “Really, I wouldn’t even know how to figure it out. If I had the time.”

He bristled. He had invested a lot of hope in me, and he expected at least the illusion of results. With a dramatic flourish, he opened a plain folder waiting on his lap. Then with a low grumble, he asked, “What about Collins?”

I wanted past this traitor-in-our-midst talk. But my companion happened to be my government’s most important citizen, and he was exactly as paranoid as it took to successfully represent his people.

“Was Collins one of them? I don’t think so.”

“You know the emergency council’s report,” he muttered testily.

“Which part? About the future knowing all our secrets? Or the DNA masking Abraham’s people?”

“I mean everything.” The president took a long moment to frame his next comments. “They didn’t show their faces, and for obvious good reasons. Even without Ramiro’s testimony, it’s hard to deny the possibility—the certainty—that profound genetic manipulation will be possible in a hundred years. Under those masks, the bastards could have looked identical to anybody from our world. At least anybody who happened to leave behind hair or a flake of skin.”

The emergency council was a cheerless room filled with scared specialists—off-plumb scientists and old sci-fi writers, plus a couple of psychics who happened to get lucky once or twice about future disasters. They had access to secrets, including scrubbed synopses of Ramiro’s insights. And during one pitiless night, they asked each other how could our fight, begun with so many good intentions, have gone so tragically bad.

Their answer was the worst nightmare yet. Among Abraham’s soldiers were there perfect duplicates of men and women who would have served in our highest offices, starting in ’01? Before our election, they could have slipped into the United States and replaced each of those historic figures. Unknown to us, the worst monsters imaginable would have worn stolen faces and voices. And later, sitting in Washington, those same pretenders could have done untold damage to the innocent, helpless world.

That scenario seemed to explain everything—bad decisions, incompetent methods, and the miserable follow-ups to each tragic misstep.

Paranoia had never enjoyed such an acidic, malicious beauty.

The file was important enough to leave open, and I caught one long glimpse. Which was what the president wanted, I suppose. He was eager to prove to me just how awful everything had become.

On top was a photograph, a famous face gazing up at the camera. The man was elderly now, shaved bald and very weak and far too thin. Each bruise was ugly and yellow, and together they defined the color of his cowering face. Was this where we had come? Taking our own people into a cellar to starve them and beat them, all in the vain hope that they would finally admit that they deserved this horrid treatment?

“Jefferson is Jefferson,” I maintained.

The president closed the file.

“And Collins was always Collins.”

He sighed. “Are you as sure as you are about the suicide?”

“Even more so,” I declared.

“But there was one day last year,” the president began. Then he made a rather clumsy show of pushing through more files, lending a banal officiousness to the insulting moment. This was what my leader had been doing while waiting for my plane. Thumbing his way through old security papers that meant nothing.

“I don’t care about last year,” I said.

“Collins went missing,” he snapped. “He was out on leave, and for fourteen hours, the man dropped out of contact with everybody.”

“He explained that later,” I pointed out. “The man was exhausted. He needed to be alone and regroup. And that’s what I believe.”

“You do?”

“More and more.”

“He wasn’t one of Abraham’s agents?”

“If he was, then maybe I am. And you are too.”

My reply was too awful to consider. I read revulsion in the man’s face and his fists. And I kept thinking that if I had bothered to vote in our last election, I never would have helped elect this dangerously incompetent man.

“I am not one of them,” he whispered.

“Maybe you are, and you don’t know it,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“If our enemies can remake their faces and blend in everywhere, then why not rewire the thought patterns inside other people’s heads? If they have that kind of magical technology, then why not inoculate the world with a tailored virus that makes everybody into loyal Muslims who have no choice but to accept the wisdom of this never-seen Abraham?”

Here was one proposition that had never been offered to the president. And he responded exactly as I expected, eyes opening wide, seeing nothing.

I laughed it off.

He hoped that I was joking now, but he didn’t dare mention my suggestion again. Instead he posed one final question. “And why did Collins kill himself ?”

“Remember the dollar?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“On the bathroom floor, they found a coin in the blood. Do you remember that detail from the reports?”

He had to admit, “No.”

“Collins didn’t see or speak to Ramiro for three days. Other than that, nobody remembers him doing anything out of the ordinary. But I have reason to believe that our prisoner gave him something. Something new. Something that was so difficult to accept that it took three days for Collins to wrestle with the concept. And then what the man did . . . I’m guessing this, but I would bet my savings on it . . . Collins went into his bathroom and ran a warm bath and got a knife and then flipped the coin. And the coin happened to come up tails.”

“Which means?”

“It’s a quantum-inspired game. In this reality, tails meant that he would slit his veins and bleed out.”

“And if it was heads?”

“Then Collins would have done something a lot more difficult.”

“And what would that have been . . .?”

“Show the entire world what Ramiro gave him.”

“And what was that, do you think?”

“I wish I knew.” My laugh was grim and sad, and it suited both of us. “In my mind, I keep seeing Collins sitting in that bathtub, flipping the coin, working it until he got the answer he wanted.”

A phone set between us rang once, very softly, and then stopped.

The president gestured at the invisible sky. “Another plane’s heading west. It’ll arrive in another hour or two.”

His wave was a signal; my door suddenly popped open. It was still summer, but I could feel frost threatening.

“Do I still have full authority?” I asked.

Again, the presidential phone rang, begging for attention. He offered me a nod, saying, “For the time being, yes.”

“Full authority?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He stared at me for another moment. Then he quietly asked, “What do you think our world’s chances are?”

“Very poor,” I offered.

“Why?”

I had to say, “With people like us in charge, sir . . . our enemies don’t have to do much at all.”

9

The sound was soft but insistent, coming from the middle of my apartment door. I heard the first rap of the knuckles, but I did nothing for what seemed like a very long time. Aware of the bed beneath me, I looked at my hands in the faint blue glow of the nightlight, and then I turned and gazed at the red face of the clock on the edge of my nightstand. Eight minutes after three in the morning, I read. Twice. Then the knock quickened, and I sat up and put on my only robe and took the time to find my slippers before letting my visitor inside.

“You’re not watching,” Jefferson began.

I said nothing.

He looked at the darkness and rumpled sheets, his expression puzzled. Then his face fell back into a kind of breathless horror.

“What?” I asked.

He couldn’t say it.

What passed for the outside was gloomy, not dark. A single guard stood in the middle of the enormous tunnel, meeting my eyes before she retreated into the shadows.

After my guest stepped inside, I said, “Come in.”

Once the door was closed, Jefferson turned on my ceiling light. Then he showed me a tired, frazzled expression that set the tone. “Now Russia has been hit.”

“Hit?”

“Bad.”

I said, “Fuck.”

“Moscow,” he told me.

I sat on the edge of my bed.

“Half a megaton,” he muttered, standing in the middle of the small room, hands dangling at his sides.

I stood up again, slippers popping as I walked to my television. The filtering software had a lot of work to do before we could be trusted to see the news. That’s why the thirty-minute delay, and that’s why the world before me was nearly two thousand seconds in the past.

A handsome Russian was sitting at a news desk, speaking quickly but with a surprising measure of poise. It was easy to believe that Jefferson was wrong. Nothing awful had happened. Not understanding the language or the Cyrillic lettering streaming past, it was easy to embrace the doubts assuring you, “This is nothing. Nothing.”

Then the feed switched abruptly, picking up CNN. An older but equally attractive newscaster sat several thousands of miles from the tragedy. But he didn’t have any trace of Slavic stoicism. Practically screaming, he declared, “In the morning, without warning, Hell was released just a mile from the Kremlin!”

Jefferson collapsed in my only chair.

I reclaimed my bed, watching the first in a series of inadequate views of an unfolding disaster. The flash was only as bright as the amateur equipment could absorb. The images jumped, and I could hear people screaming in Russian . . . and then the camera and I were being carried into the subway, the screen going black when the power abruptly shut off . . .

The next view was a ten-second snippet from some high-rise far enough away to be spared by the blast.

The third was from someplace very close, and more recent. A digital camera was shoved over a concrete wall, showing a firestorm that was starting to grow wings.

“It’s their turn now,” I whispered.

Jefferson didn’t seem to hear me.

I glanced at my guest and then looked away. “Russia almost seemed to be blessed,” I mentioned.

“This is bad, Carmen.”

“Yeah.”

“No,” he said.

I stared at him. “What do you mean?”

The last decade had been relatively sweet for Russia. Pragmatic and naturally authoritarian, it had managed to avoid most of the mayhem. And it didn’t hurt that when the Middle East turned to smoke and warlords, the Russians happily sold their oil and natural gas to the EU and a few select friends, increasing their own wealth many times over.

Again, I asked, “What do you mean?”

Jefferson dipped his head.

The television jumped to the BBC. The Prime Minister had a few sturdy words to offer about giving support to all the victims of this latest misery.

I muted the sound.

Which helped Jefferson’s focus. With a conspirator’s whisper, he told me, “I was just in touch with somebody.”

“Who?”

He named the CIA director, using the friends-only nickname.

I said nothing.

Jefferson gave my brown carpet a long, important study.

“What else is wrong?”

The man looked old and extraordinarily tired. What he knew was so urgent that he had to practically run over here to tell me. But now he lacked the courage to put into words what a confidential voice had told him five minutes ago, from the other end of a secure line.

“Has there been another explosion?” I prodded.

“No,” he managed. Then he added, “Maybe.”

“Shit, Jefferson—”

“Do you know how we were after Indian Point? Down here, I mean. We were terrified that the big assault was finally coming. But then we heard that an old Soviet warhead did the damage. Which meant it wasn’t Abraham.” He breathed faster, his face red as a blister. “And this bomb wasn’t Abraham’s either. The yield and isotope readings point to it being one of ours. One of eight.”

“Eight? What eight?”

He rubbed his belly.

“Just say it, Jefferson.”

“I just learned this for the first time,” he reported. “After Indian Point, when everything was crazy . . . Washington dead and millions fleeing . . . somebody with the necessary skills ripped open an Air Force bunker and took out eight high-yield marvels, any one of which matches what we’re seeing here . . .”

I said, “Fuck,” once again.

He nodded.

“But the failsafes,” I said. “Soviet bombs are one thing. But how could somebody make our damned things detonate?”

“Like I said, these people have skills.”

The horrific images had returned, and we watched in silence for another minute or two.

“What’s Russia doing now?” I asked.

“Their president’s in St. Petersburg. And he’s talked to our president two, maybe three times.”

“The Director told you this?”

“Yes.”

“Seven more nukes?”

“What if somebody wants payback for Indian Point?” he asked me.

Or himself.

“But the Russians weren’t responsible,” I said. “At least not directly, they weren’t.”

“But what if we’re responsible for this?”

“Who’s ‘we’ ?”

Wearing an interrogator’s face, he stared at me. “I know where you went last week, Carmen. Believe me, I have friends. I have connections. I know whose limousine you sat inside.”

I stared back at him.

Then I carefully told him, “No. We had nothing to do with Moscow. Our president’s too scared of phantoms to pick a fight with an old enemy.”

Jefferson bristled slightly. “What do you mean? ‘Phantoms’ ?”

I didn’t answer.

He said, “Carmen,” twice, and then gave up.

A truce was declared, ushering in ten minutes of silence. I pushed the television back up to a comfortable volume, and using e-mail and my private sources, I pieced together a chain of events roughly the same as his.

“Their president wants to believe our president,” I reported.

Jefferson nodded.

“But if there’s a second attack . . .”

He looked at me. For the first time, he had the roving eyes of a healthy male. As if emerging from a fog, Jefferson realized that he was sitting in a woman’s apartment and she was wearing nothing but a nightgown and slippers and a fuzzy old robe.

If only to change the desperate mood, he wanted sparks.

I pulled the robe across my chest. Then I told him, “You should go back to your apartment.”

He said, “Maybe.”

“Now,” I said.

He stood stiffly and looked at me. Suddenly I could see Jefferson at his high school dance, standing beside the wrestling mats, too smart to bother asking any girl to accompany him out onto the gymnasium floor.

Against my wishes, I felt sorry for the poor guy.

Then I ushered him to the door and shut and locked it.

Alone, I slowly dressed, and after another hour of television, I stepped out into a tunnel that was beginning to go through the motions of dawn.

In the brightening gloom, I walked.

Then I ran.

I was pounding along my favorite stretch when I passed the round pond with its bluegill and a single dragonfly. Standing on the wooden deck was our resident fisherman. “Hey, Jim.”

He almost jumped at the sound of my voice.

“Any bites?”

He said, “Hi, Carmen,” and rolled his head. Then he flicked the fly out onto the windless water, and after a pause and a couple of deep swallows, he said, “Somebody just told me something.”

“What’s that, Jim?”

Looking at his own hands, he explained, “It’s this guy I know. He works security upstairs. And I know it’s against every order, and we aren’t supposed to talk—”

“You heard about Moscow?”

“And St. Petersburg.”

I had just enough time to ask, “What about St. Petersburg?”

Then the alarms began to blare—throbbing, insistent noises meant to jangle every nerve—and the fisherman threw down his gear and sprinted toward the nearest elevator. But he was too late. The field station on the ground had declared a lockdown emergency, and according to protocols, every exit disabled itself. Just once, Jim struck the steel door of the elevator with a fist. Then after a moment of quiet muttering, he returned to the pond. His face was as white and dead as the salt surrounding us. Not quite meeting my eyes, he said, “I’m sorry, ma’am. That won’t happen again.”

And then he picked up his tackle and silently struck out for home.

10

For nine days, our prisoner was allowed to keep his normal routine. Guards brought hot meals, clean clothes, and the expected little luxuries. His plumbing and lights worked without interruption, and at appropriate intervals, we spared enough power to brighten his exercise yard. The only significant change was that I stopped meeting with Ramiro. But he didn’t mention my absence, not once, just as he refused to discuss what must have been obvious. The shrill alarms would have been audible from inside his cell, and less than an hour later, the first in a sequence of deep, painful rumbles passed through the surrounding salt bed.

Fuel was limited, which was why the tunnel lights were kept at a midnight glow. And that’s why the vegetation began to wither and drop leaves, including inside Ramiro’s yard. The dying umbrella trees garnered a few extra glances, I noted. Then after six days, Ramiro’s milk turned to the dried variety, and there was a sudden influx of fried bluegill in his dinner, and the banana slices on his morning yogurt were brown at the edges. But his guards provided the largest clues. Even a sloppy observer would have noticed the miserable faces. Not even the hardest professional could hide that level of raw sadness. Ramiro would have kept track of which guards skipped their watch and who was pulled early when they felt themselves about to start blubbering. But again, he didn’t say one word that was at all removed from the ordinary.

Jefferson was a minor revelation. That sturdy old bureaucrat threw himself into the disaster, holding meetings and ordering studies. Key machinery had to be identified, inventories made of every spare part. Our generators were industrial fuel cells, and it was a minor victory when two extra barrels of methanol were discovered behind a pile of construction trash. For two days, the practicality of hydroponics was explored. But a determined search found no viable seed, save for some millet and cracked corn meant for his assistant’s pet parakeet. Our home was a prison, not a long-term refuge. But at least there were ample stocks of canned goods and MREs, and the water and air were agreeable to purification. Plus, there were quite a few handymen in our ranks. Most estimates gave us at least six months and perhaps as many as eight months of comfortable security. That was a point worth repeating each day, at the beginning of our mandatory meetings.

With nobody watching us, Jefferson was free to transform himself. He announced that there were few secrets worth keeping anymore. Only Ramiro remained off-limits. Then he told the grim, brief history of our latest war. All of us were invited to his apartment to watch the recordings that he’d made of news broadcasts and secret communications, and then the final pitiful message from the field station. Few accepted his invitation, but that didn’t matter. Word got out quickly enough. Everybody knew what had just transpired, and the long-term prospects, and in a fashion, just how extraordinarily lucky we had been.

Through it all, Jefferson dispensed clear, critical directions as well as praise and encouragement, plus the occasional graveyard joke.

I preferred to keep to myself, investing my waking hours in the endless study of Ramiro.

Sometimes when he was alone, the man would suddenly grin. I had never seen that expression on him before. It wasn’t a joyful look, or wistful. What I saw was an empty expression—a broad sycophantic look that I have seen in other faces, on occasion, particularly when people are struggling to believe whatever thought is lurking behind their bright, blind eyes.

Ramiro would fall asleep at his usual time, but then he’d wake up again, usually around three in the morning, and lie very still, staring up into the darkness for an hour and sometimes much longer.

Instead of new books and movies, he requested titles that he already knew—as if granting his mind an easier, more familiar path to walk.

On the ninth day, I had a tall cold glass of lemonade brought with his lunch, and he drank it without complaint.

On the tenth morning, Jim opened the cell door and said, “Sir,” before ushering the prisoner down the short hall to the exercise yard. After the usual bookkeeping, he took his post inside, standing before the only door. Some of Ramiro’s guards had shown worrisome symptoms. But after his initial panic, Jim had turned outwardly calm, sturdy. Maybe if I had paid closer attention, I would have seen some clue. But then again, even the best interrogator must accept the idea that she knows more about the beginnings of the universe than she will ever learn about the shape of a person’s true mind.

But Ramiro noticed something.

I don’t know what it was or why then, but after a few trips back and forth in the yard, the prisoner paused, passing one of the rubberized weights to his other hand and then bending down, picking up the thick dried and very dead leaf from the floor beneath the starved tree.

For a long moment, he stared at Jim, saying nothing.

They were ten feet apart, and the guard was watching everything.

Normal procedures demanded a second guard be on duty outside. She was watching on monitors and through the two-way glass, and sensing trouble, she set off a silent alarm. I arrived half a minute after a backup team of armed warriors, and two steps ahead of Jefferson.

In that span, nothing had changed.

Maybe Ramiro was waiting for an audience. But I think not. My guess is that he still wasn’t sure what he would say or the best way to say it, and like any artist, he was simply allowing time to pass while his invisible brain struggled to find the best solution.

Through the monitors, I watched the brown leaf slip free of his hand.

“So, Jim,” said Ramiro. At last.

Jim didn’t move, and he didn’t make any sound. And if his face changed, the expression didn’t register on the security cameras.

As if getting ready to unwrap a wonderful gift, Ramiro smiled. It was an abrupt, startling expression followed by the joyous, almost effervescent words, “So how’s your home town these days? How is Salt Lake City doing?”

Jim sagged against the door.

From outside, Jefferson ordered, “Get in there!”

“No,” I ordered.

The backup team ignored me.

“No!” I stepped in front of them and looked at Jefferson. “You tell them. Who’s in charge here?”

With a tight sigh, Jefferson said, “Wait then. Wait.”

Jim was crying now. In a matter of moments, a weepy little boy had emerged and taken charge.

I told the guards to back away from the door.

Jim muttered a few words, too soft for anybody to understand.

“What’s that, Jim?” asked Ramiro.

Nothing.

“I can only guess,” the prisoner offered with a warm, infectious tone. “Another nuclear weapon must have struck another reactor. But this one was closer to us, wasn’t it? And the wind must have blown those poisons over the top of us.”

That was a dreamy, hopeful explanation, considering the circumstances.

“So we’re temporarily cut off down here. Isn’t that about it, Jim? And we’ll have to wait what? A few weeks or months to be rescued?”

“No,” said Jim.

Finding success, Ramiro smiled.

“Am I wrong, Jim?”

The response was abrupt, and vivid. With a string of awful sentences, Jim defined the scale of the new war and its brutal, amoral consequences.

“Everything above us is dead,” he declared.

Ramiro’s smile wavered, but he wouldn’t let go of it.

“About a thousand nukes went off, and wildfires are still burning, and the entire continent is poisonous dead. The field office is abandoned. We aren’t getting any messages from anybody. Not a squeak. We’ve got some security cameras working, our only connections to the surface, and they’re only working on battery power. It’s the middle of August, but there isn’t any sun, and judging by what we can see and what we can guess, it isn’t even reaching forty below at noon . . .!”

Maybe Ramiro had genuine hopes for his dirty nuke story—an awful but manageable nightmare. But this nightmare was more plausible, and he must have known that for several days. Yet he refused to react. He did nothing for one, two, three breaths. Enormous events had pushed him farther than even he could handle, and discovering what might be a weakness on his part, the prisoner suddenly looked lost, perhaps even confused, unable to conjure up one thin question, comment, or even a word.

And then Jim pulled his weapon.

The pistol would work only in his hand, and its ammunition was small and lightweight, designed to bruise and break bones but never kill. That’s why I told everyone, “No. Leave them alone!”

My instincts were looking for a revelation.

But other people’s instincts overrode my order. The guards pushed me away and started working at the door’s stubborn locks. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Neither man spoke or moved. But then Jim set the gun’s barrel against his target’s eye, and I heard a quiet thump, and the bullet shattered the back of the socket before burrowing its way into the miserable, dying brain.

Ramiro dropped the weights, one striking his right foot. But he didn’t appear to notice. Unblinking eyes stared at the corpse twitching on the floor in front of him. The prisoner was impressed. Enthralled, even. Perhaps he had never seen a man die. Cities and nations had been destroyed, but carnage had remained cool and abstract. Until that moment, he never appreciated just how messy and simple death was, or that he would have to take a deep breath before regaining his bearings, looking up slowly before noticing me standing in the open door.

“So this is what you wanted,” I said. “The death of humanity, the end of the world . . .”

“No,” he whispered.

“Are you sure?”

He sluggishly shook his head.

“Or Abraham wanted this,” I suggested. “A nuclear winter, the extinction of our species.”

No reply was offered.

I stepped over Jim and then stared up into Ramiro’s face, allowing him no choice but to meet my eyes. Quietly, I said, “There is no such creature as Abraham, is there?”

He didn’t react.

“And no army of temporal jihadists either.”

His eyes closed.

“Just you,” I persisted. “You’re the only time traveler. Fifteen years ago, you arrived alone in the backcountry of Kashmir. You brought no more than what you could carry on your back, including the uranium and a few odd gizmos from your world. Then you littered the Middle East with just enough physical evidence to give your story legs. Like that bomb in Islamabad, right? You set that up before you came to America. And then you let yourself get caught in Montana, which was your plan from the beginning.”

His shoulders lifted, a shrug beginning.

I grabbed his chin and shook him. “Why send an entire army? Why bother? When a single soldier armed with the right words can do just as well . . . that’s what this is about . . .”

Ramiro opened his eyes.

An impressed little smile began to break loose. He asked softly, “And when did you realize this, Carmen?”

“Always,” I admitted. “But I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t let myself even admit that it was possible. Not until I saw a photograph of a former official with my own government, bloodied and terrified, and I realized that our own hands had done that to him.” I shook his chin again. “That’s when I saw what made sense. Finally. Maybe there was an Abraham, but if you happened to be him . . .”

Ramiro laughed, and with a cat’s grace grabbed my wrist and yanked, stepping out of my grip.

“Who’s the prisoner here?” I muttered.

The laugh brightened.

“And who is the torturer?”

He offered a slight and very quick bow.

“But why?” I wanted to know.

“Carmen,” he began. “Believe me, I could offer a thousand plausible stories. But how would you know if I was being truthful, in whole or even in part?”

“Try it anyway,” I said.

But he backed away, waving both hands as if to fend off those temptations. “The point is, Carmen . . . your world was deserving. Almost every outrage that has happened to you has been justified. A necessary, reasonable revenge has been taken. And these many years . . . almost every day that I have spent in your world, Carmen . . . has brought me untold pleasure . . .”

11

Last year, during an official leave from the prison, Collins managed to slip away from his official escorts. His shadows. I can only speculate what he did during most of the day, but fourteen hours is a very long time, if you have a good plan and the discipline to make it happen. My personal knowledge extends to two hours spent together during the afternoon, inside a second-story room at a Red Roof Inn just outside Denver. Despite Ramiro’s insistence to the contrary, I’m not unlovely and I have my charms, and his interrogator and I had been carrying on an infrequent but cherished affair—five surreptitious encounters over the course of an ugly decade, moments where sex and sexual talk could dominate over the secrets of state.

I never discussed my work with him, and he almost never mentioned his.

But Denver was different. I stepped into a darkened room to find a changed man. Collins was pale and much heavier than usual and obviously exhausted. After an hour of sweat and modest success, we gave up. I talked about showering, and he talked about slipping away in another minute or two. Then for a long while, we just sat side by side in bed, and in that way people in our world would do, we began to list the friends and associates that had died because of Indian Point.

Until that moment, I didn’t realize that Collins had been a father. Not that he was close to his fifteen-year-old son, but the unfortunate boy had lived on Long Island with his mother. The fallout plume blocked every bridge to safety, and like a million others, they spent the next several days chasing a string of promised rescue ships and rumors of airlifts. Collins’ best guess, based on a couple of sat-phone calls received near the end, was that they had managed to survive for a week or eight days, and then both died, probably during the Islip riots.

“Sorry” is a weak word. But I offered it anyway.

This man that I didn’t truly know silently accepted my sorrow. Then he tried to shrug, and with a bleak resignation that I couldn’t understand at the time, he mentioned, “This could have turned out differently.”

When haven’t those words been valid?

With his deep, godly voice, Collins said my name. Then he smiled—a crooked, captivating smile on his worst day—and quietly asked, “Why are we doing what we do? Anymore, what are we after?”

“It’s our job,” I offered.

He saw through those words. “Bullshit, darling. Bullshit.”

“Yeah, but we’re still the good guys,” I said.

Then we both enjoyed a sorry little laugh.

“I’ll tell you what I’m doing,” he said, shaking his head. “Every day, I’m trying to save the world.”

“Oh, is that all?”

He kept smiling, though he didn’t laugh. He let me stare into his eyes, taking my measure of his soul. Then carefully, slowly, he said, “You once told me about this woman. Do you remember? You met her on some cross-country flight. You got her to talking, and she eventually confessed her plan to kill her elderly husband. Do you remember that anecdote?”

“Sure.”

“Did you ever follow up on it?”

“What do you mean?”

He didn’t have to explain himself.

With a defensive growl, I admitted, “No, I haven’t bothered.”

“Why not?”

I could have mentioned that it wasn’t my particular business, or that I never knew anything of substance, or that no crime had been committed. But I didn’t offer excuses. Instead, I admitted, “The woman loved her husband. Agree with her or not, I don’t believe she would have harmed the man to be cruel or out of convenience.”

“And you’re sure that she loved him?”

“I could tell,” I said.

“And I believe you, Carmen.”

I sat quietly, wondering what was this about.

“You know, you’re very good. Piecing together clues, I mean. Reading the subject’s emotions, their intentions.” Then he laughed, insisting, “Maybe you’re not quite my equal. But there’s nobody better than us.”

Just then, I could not read that man. I had absolutely no clue what Collins was thinking.

“Saving the world,” he repeated.

I waited.

“I’m working on something huge,” he admitted. Then with a wise little sneer, he edited his comment. “I’m working on somebody huge. A subject unlike anyone you’ve ever met or even imagined.”

I didn’t want this conversation. He was breaking our most essential rule, bringing work into our bed.

“That man is still holding some big secrets,” Collins confided. “All these years working on nobody but him, and I still haven’t gotten to his core.”

I climbed out from under the sheets.

“If I could just get what I wanted from the guy,” he muttered.

I said, “Stop that.”

With sharp disappointment, Collins stared at me. It took several moments for him to decide what to say next. Then he offered what had to be the most cryptic and peculiar excuse that I had ever heard.

“If he gives me what I want,” he began.

A genuine smile broke across his weary white face.

“If he shares what he knows, Carmen, I can save the world. Not once, but a thousand times. A million times. More times than we could count . . . and now wouldn’t that be a legacy worth any cost?”

12

We decided to throw the prisoner into Jefferson’s apartment, accompanied by half a dozen pissed-off guards, and the guards were instructed to sit Ramiro down before the television, and in sequence, play the Apocalypse recordings for him.

Jim’s body was carried away, and Jefferson found himself standing alone with me. He asked the walls, “So what do we do with him next?”

“What do you want to do?”

My colleague refused to look at my eyes. “Our food is limited,” he pointed out. “Ramiro constitutes more than 1 percent of our population. At this point, can we really afford to keep him alive?”

Then he braced himself.

But I surprised him, saying, “Agreed,” as if I had come to the same inescapable conclusion.

But our methods seemed important, and that’s what we were discussing when one of the guards returned.

“Lemonade-7 wants paper and a pen,” she reported.

“Give him whatever he wants,” I said.

She glanced at Jefferson.

He nodded.

“And tell him he doesn’t have much time,” I yelled as she ran off.

For a few moments, Jefferson studied me. But he didn’t have the stomach to ask what he wanted. Instead, he quietly admitted, “Maybe you’re right, Carmen. A bullet is simple. But shoving him out on the surface, letting him fend for himself . . . that makes more sense . . .”

Yet that left various logistics to consider. One of the elevators had to be unlocked, power had to be routed back into it, and every passenger except Ramiro had to be protected from the radiation and cold. Those necessities took dozens of people nearly two hours of determined labor, and then somebody mentioned that a short-wave antenna and Geiger counter could be set up on the dead prairie and spliced into the elevator’s wiring—helpful inspirations, but cause for another hour delay.

According to the guards, Ramiro remained cooperative and busy. Unblinking eyes paid close attention to the news broadcasts, particularly during those desperate minutes when city after city suddenly quit transmitting. Each of his guards seemed to nourish a different impression of his mood. The prisoner was relishing the slaughter, or he was numbed by what he was seeing, or maybe he was only pretending to watch events play out on that tiny screen. But every witness agreed: the prisoner’s first focus was in filling the yellow pages of the legal pad, his head dropping for long intervals, that delicate artisan’s hand scribbling dense equations and weaving diagrams and sometimes adding a paragraph or two in his unborn hodgepodge of a language.

It was early afternoon when he set down the pen. A few minutes later, without explanation, he was brought to the elevator. He was still wearing dress trousers and a short-sleeved shirt, plus his favorite sandals. But the two volunteers waiting for him were half-hidden inside layers of cumbersome gear.

Ramiro handed the filled pad to the shorter figure.

I didn’t look at his gift. I knew what was on it. With both hands, I folded it in half and handed it to the nearest guard. “It’s a little goddamn late now, isn’t it?” I snapped at him.

“Maybe enough people will survive,” he offered.

I tried to cut him open with my gaze. Then I turned and shuffled through the open steel door, my oversized fireman’s boots clumping with each step.

Jefferson checked his sidearm, picked up the makeshift antenna and Geiger counter, and followed me.

There was just enough room for our equipment and three bodies. Jefferson pulled his oxygen mask aside and gave a few final orders. Then the door shut, and with a sudden crotchety jolt, the elevator started to climb, shaking slightly as it gained momentum.

“Do you understand what I just gave you?” Ramiro asked.

“Of course I understand,” I said.

“Tell me, why don’t you?” Jefferson asked.

Ramiro smiled, but he sounded uncharacteristically tense. “Time travel is not particularly difficult.”

Neither of us reacted.

He said, “Lorton Energy is cheap, if you know the right tricks.”

I looked only at Jefferson. “The first time Ramiro wrote about Lorton and Casimir plates, he didn’t give us those tricks. He pretty effectively misled our scientists into chasing the wrong methods. But of course a man who remembers the dates and positions of dozens of supernovae—a creature with that kind of faultless memory—would easily digest the plans for a working time machine. That’s what Collins realized. Eventually. He didn’t mention it to anybody, but for these last years, Collins was chasing the tools that would allow us to go back in the past, like Ramiro did, but this time make things right.”

Jefferson shook his head. “Yeah, but each incursion in the past is a separate event,” he recalled. “If he jumped back, he would accomplish what? Setting up a new time line?”

“Except we could send back a million teams,” I replied. “A million attempts to make amends, and each new history owing its existence to us.”

No one spoke for a moment. The only sound was the air rushing around the racing elevator.

Then Jefferson turned to Ramiro. “You gave Collins the time machine. But then for some reason he killed himself.”

“Ramiro gave him more than the time machine,” I explained. “He also told him the rest of the story. How he had come alone, and there was no Abraham, and every tragedy that had happened to the world was directly tied to what Ramiro had said to Collins, and what Collins had unwittingly fed upstream to the gullible and weak.”

Jefferson put a hand on his pistol.

I watched Ramiro’s face. If it weren’t for the tightness around the mouth and the glassiness to the eyes, I would have imagined that he was relaxed. Happy, even. Maybe he was assuring himself that these years and his sacrifices had been a great success. Not perfect, no. But who could have guessed that Moscow would have been nuked? Which meant that in countless realities—realms not too different from ours—he had achieved exactly what it was that he’d set out to achieve here.

“And Collins didn’t expect that part?” Jefferson asked.

“That’s my guess,” I admitted.

His hand dropped back to his side.

A few moments later, the elevator began to slow.

My ears were popping. I felt my heart quicken, and I judged that Ramiro was breathing faster too. A sudden chill was leaking into the elevator, and I mentioned it, and then I suggested, “We should put on our masks.”

Jefferson looked tired and angry. He wiped his eyes twice before making himself strap the oxygen mask over his weepy face.

I left mine off for the moment.

“I don’t think you wanted this world to die,” I said.

Ramiro didn’t respond.

“You were hoping to hurt a lot of people and leave the rest of us wiser,” I continued. “At least that’s what you told yourself. Except what really inspired you was wielding this kind of power, and you won a lot of fun for your troubles, and now it’s finally over. You’re done. We’re going to throw you into the cold, into the wasted darkness, and you’ll have to stumble around until you die some miserable way or another.”

Ramiro made a soft, odd sound. Like when a bird cheeps in its sleep.

The elevator had nearly stopped. I stood facing the prisoner, my back flush against the door.

He smiled with a weak, vacuous charm.

In the end, the prisoner was defiant but terrified, utterly trapped but unable to admit his sorry circumstances. He believed that he was still in charge of his fate. Arrogance saved for this moment made him smile. Then he said, “You know quite a bit, Carmen. I’ve been impressed. But you should realize that I won’t allow any ignoble, indecent finish for me.”

The elevator door began to pull open.

Ramiro’s eyes never closed, even once he was dead.

Behind me, a young woman’s voice—a voice I knew from my ride to the nearby airstrip—called out, “Hello? Yes? Can we help?”

The day was bright and warm.

Two men suddenly dropped to their knees. But Jefferson stood again, stripping off the mask and then his heavy outer coat, staggering into the functioning, fully staffed office, finally stopping before a window that looked out over a flat, glorious landscape and a sky of endless blue.

“Everything was faked?” he whispered.

“Everything,” I said.

“The newscasts, the communications?”

“Digital magic,” I mentioned. “And playacting by real people, yes.”

“The security cameras.”

“Easy enough.”

“But I felt the cold,” he said.

I started to explain how when the elevator started to rise, a dozen portable air conditioning units began cooling down the top of the shaft.

“But we felt the explosions, Carmen!”

“Those were the easiest tricks,” I admitted. “A few tactical nukes thrown down some nearby oil wells.”

He pressed his face against the warm glass, not fighting the tears anymore. Maybe he was crying out of relief. But in my case, I was crying for Jim, and for Collins, and for countless dead souls that I couldn’t put names to. Behind us, a medical team was working hard to revive a man who refused to return to the living. When they finally gave up, we went to look at Ramiro’s limp body.

“Do you think he saw?” Jefferson asked.

I knelt and closed the eyes.

“In the end,” he persisted, “do you think he realized just how badly you tricked him?”

“Yes,” I said.

I said, “No.”

Then I stood and walked away, adding, “It happened both ways, and more times than I would care to count.”

ALASTAIR BAFFLE’S EMPORIUM OF WONDERS

Mike Resnick

Gold and Silver—that’s us. We’ve been a team since major league baseball ended at the Mississippi River and the flag only had forty-eight stars. (Looked a lot nicer back then. More regular, sort of, with six rows of eight—or maybe it was eight rows of six. I suppose it depends on whether you were standing or lying down.) Between us we’ve outlived three wives (one of them his, two of them mine) and two kids (both his), we’ve stayed friends for more than three-quarters of a century (seventy-eight years to be exact), and we’ve been living together at the Hector McPherson Retirement Home since . . . well, since we couldn’t live on our own anymore.

He’s Gold—Maury Gold. Me, I’m Nate Silver. I think it was Silverstein until my grandfather changed it back when Teddy Roosevelt was still president. Maury’s dad changed his right after World War I, from Goldberg or Goldman or Gold-something-else. Makes no difference what they used to be. We’re Gold and Silver now.

We met seventy-eight years ago, like I said. We’ve always lived in Chicago. It was pretty safe when we were kids. The cops had cleaned up Al Capone and his friends, and the place wasn’t crawling with junkies and panhandlers yet, so we were each allowed to take the subway down to the Loop by ourselves, me from Rogers Park on the North Side, Maury from South Shore a couple of miles beyond the University of Chicago, which was overflowing with geniuses and Communists—frequently the same people—back in those days.

One of the things I loved to do was go to the Palmer House, the ritziest hotel in town. The guest rooms started on the third or fourth floor, but the ground floor and the mezzanine were filled with shops that carried the most fascinating things: clocks that glowed in the dark, pianos that played by themselves, clothes and jewels imported from exotic-sounding places like Constantinople and Hong Kong and Bombay.

And the most fascinating thing of all was a tiny store up on the mezzanine. It was called Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders, and it was a magic shop. It carried every trick under the sun (or so it seemed to me). There were boxes where Alastair Baffle would put anything from a coin to an egg, and it would vanish right before your eyes. There were empty hats that suddenly weren’t empty any more, but filled with rabbits or flowers or colored silks. There was a full-sized guillotine, and somehow, faster than the eye could follow, the blade would drop and magically miss Alastair Baffle’s neck. There were card tricks and rope tricks and magic wands that could fly through the air. There was a clock with the face of a beautiful woman, and just when you lost interest in it she’d smile and speak to you.

And the most wonderful thing of all was the magic show. Oh, he wouldn’t perform it for free—but if you promised to buy a trick, and showed him your money (usually fifty cents would do, but if you didn’t have it, once in a while he’d agree to sell you a twenty-five-cent trick), he’d spend half an hour showing you all the new tricks that had arrived since your last visit.

I thought only magicians would frequent the store, but the clientele didn’t look like the kind of magicians you saw on stage. (No, I’d never seen a magic show on stage when I was a kid, but I saw all the ads for them, and I knew that magicians were long lean guys who looked good in white tie and tails like Fred Astaire, and were always assisted by scantily clad women who made me eager to grow up.)

But the few people who I saw coming and going weren’t like that at all. One of them looked just like Paul Muni in one of those movies where he’s on the lam from the law. Another was all decked out in silks and satins, and wore a turban with a glittering jewel on the front of it. There were women, too; not the kind you expected to see on stage, but with elegant hats and veils, exotic make-up, and dark gloves. Those were the days when a lot of women wore wraps that were made from foxes that still had the heads attached. One day I saw Alastair Baffle wave good-bye to a woman who was leaving the store as I was entering. Then he said something, not in English, to one of the fox heads, and I could have sworn it looked up and winked at him.

My allowance back then was a quarter a week. I used to go there whenever I had fifty cents to buy a trick—but since the subway cost a quarter each way, that was about once a month. I kept wondering why no other kid had discovered the almost-free magic show—and then I met Maury.

He’d been going to the store for more than a year, same as me but on different Saturdays, gaping at all the wonders and getting his magic show in exchange for buying a trick.

“Ah! Young Mister Silver!” said Alastair Baffle when I entered his Emporium that Saturday morning. “There is someone here I think you should meet.”

I was hoping it was a half-dressed magician’s assistant, but it was only another boy, dark-haired, kind of skinny, a couple of inches shorter than me.

“Mister Silver, say hello to Mister Gold.”

“Maury Gold,” he said, extending his hand. I took it, told him I was Nate Silver, and we promptly lost all interest in each other when Alastair Baffle began performing the Corinthian Rope Trick, followed by the Vanishing Mouse. But I had an extra dime and we stopped for a soda when we left, and we got to talking, and found that we had all kinds of things in common despite his being a White Sox fan and me rooting for the Cubs. We spent hours there, and finally decided we’d better go home before our parents called the cops, but we made arrangements to meet at the Emporium of Wonders four weeks later.

We met every month for two years. Then his dad got transferred to the north side, they moved, and he wound up in my school district. We became inseparable. We played on the same teams, read the same books, lusted after the same girls, and while we didn’t go to Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders once a month any more, we remembered to go once each year to celebrate our meeting.

World War II broke out just about the time we graduated from high school. We both enlisted the same day, but I wound up in Europe and Maury spent the next three and a half years in the Pacific. He was at Tarawa and Okinawa, I was in Italy and the Battle of the Bulge, neither of us ever caught a bullet or a social disease, and when we got out we decided to go into business together.

Truth is, we went into a lot of businesses together, one after the other. Never went broke, never got ahead. We’d try one for a couple of years, then decide it wasn’t going to make us rich, sell out or close up, start another, and so on. We owned a drugstore, a pizzeria, a delivery service, a hardware store, even a record shop. The record shop was the only one that ever made a decent profit, but by then rock and roll had replaced real music and we couldn’t stand the sound of it, so we sold out once again.

And then one day we turned around, and we were a pair of eighty-two-year-old widowers. I’d lost my first wife to cancer, my second to a stroke. Maury’s wife was killed in a car accident, he lost a son in Vietnam and a daughter to drugs. We were living on our Social Security checks, which weren’t much. Maury’s arthritis was getting worse every month; there were days he couldn’t drag himself out of bed, days he found it too painful to walk. With me it was a bunch of things—I’d lost a lung to cancer, I had prostate problems, an artificial hip, a few other ailments, none of them fatal, but they’d started to add up—and with no one around to care for either of us we decided it was time to move into an assisted-living facility. We chose the Hector McPherson Home, not because the service was any better, and certainly not for the food, but because they had a small apartment with two bedrooms, and we could keep each other company. Besides, no one else wanted to listen to us. Most people would talk about Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise. Us, we’d talk about Citation and the Bambino, Mae West and Bogart and Lefty Grove. They’d pin pictures of Pam Anderson and Paris Hilton on their walls; we’d remember pin-ups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth in our barracks.

We moved in a couple of years before the millennium, and we were reasonably content. I suppose some of the others thought we were gay, though straight or gay I don’t know what they thought a couple of ninety-year-old geezers could do when the lights were out. We didn’t figure to see much of the future, so we talked about the past. We’d talk about JFK and Nixon, and about Nashua and Swaps. We’d talk about Sugar Ray Robinson and Jersey Joe Walcott, about the ones who lived and the ones—there were so many of them, like Marilyn and James Dean and Brian Piccolo—who didn’t.

And sooner or later the conversation would come around to Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders, where we’d met so many years ago.

“What a place it was!” said Maury. “You know, I really believed that he could perform magic.”

“Ah, come on, Maury,” I said. “He sold tricks. Every one of them had a gimmick. You always bought one, and he always showed you how it worked.”

“I didn’t say you or I could do magic,” replied Maury. “I said I thought he could.”

“You’re turning into a senile old man,” I told him.

“And you’re turning into a grouchy old one,” he shot back. “Hell, I was a kid. My whole life, the whole world was ahead of me, a billion possibilities. Why shouldn’t I believe in magic?”

“He never called himself a magician,” I said. “I think the term is illusionist.”

“He never called himself anything,” said Maury stubbornly. “But he could make a parrot vanish, or turn it back into an egg, and when I was eleven years old that was magic enough for me.”

“He was good, wasn’t he?” I said. “I wonder why we never saw him on TV or in the movies.”

“If your film lab can make Superman fly or send the Millennium Falcon out at light speeds, what do you need a real magician for?”

“He wasn’t a real magician,” I said.

“He was real enough for you and me,” said Maury. “We kept going back, didn’t we?”

“Until we outgrew him.”

“I never outgrew him,” insisted Maury. “Life just kept getting more and more complicated, and I had other things to do.”

“Hell,” I said, “maybe we should have hired him to entertain at the pizza joint. We might not have gone broke quite so fast.”

“He wouldn’t have done it.”

“How do you know?”

“He was a connoisseur, not a performer,” said Maury with conviction.

“Too bad,” I said. “Maybe he could have magicked the customers into spending more money.”

“He probably could have, if he’d wanted to,” said Maury. “I don’t think he gave much of a damn about money. Why would he take half an hour out of his Saturday and show us a couple of dozen tricks, just to get us to spend a quarter or a half dollar?”

Maury was like that. He’d get going on a subject, something he remembered from thirty or fifty or seventy years ago, and he’d just go on and on and on.

“Give it a rest,” I said irritably. “He’s probably been dead for half a century.”

“So what? He’s the reason we met.”

“Yeah, Wall Street would have tanked if it weren’t for Gold and Silver.”

“What’s the matter with you?” he said. “You didn’t used to be like this.”

“I didn’t used to need my own private oxygen supply,” I said. “I didn’t used to have to go the bathroom every hour. I didn’t used to need a cane. I didn’t used to do a lot of things I do now.”

“Grump,” he muttered. “You’re an old grump.”

“And are you a young one?” I said. “I seem to remember ninety candles on your birthday cake. Damned near set the place on fire.”

“Come on, Nate,” he said. “These are supposed to be our golden years. Try not to be so damned grouchy.”

“My golden years were a quarter of a century ago—and everything hurt then too.”

“You think you’re the only one who ever got old?” he demanded. “I’m not even going to be able to walk from my wheelchair to my goddamned bed in another month—but I’m not sitting around just waiting to die!”

So I got his daily harangue about how we shouldn’t be spectators at the pageant of life, that we should be participants, and like always I tried not to laugh at the thought of him and his wheelchair and me with my metal hip and my oxygen bottle participating in anything. I mean, hell, half the time his hands were too sore even to move a checker across the board, and there were days, more and more often, when I considered just throwing my oxygen out the window and ending it all.

He calmed down after awhile, like he always did, and we started talking about who you’d rather have watching your back in Tombstone, John Wayne or Gary Cooper. Probably Clint Eastwood could have handled them both, but he was one of the new kids, so we never even considered him.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper before,” said Maury. He was always saying that, and he always meant it. It wasn’t his fault he was so riddled with arthritis that he had to blow up every now and then.

“No problem,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Of course,” I continued, “if I’d have known what a pain in the ass you’d be to live with, I’d have had Alastair Baffle turn you into a horned toad all those years ago.”

“At least I could have gone on the road with him. Sylvia’s notion of a vacation was a shopping trip to Evanston.”

“He didn’t go on the road,” I said. “He was always there.”

“I wonder if he still is.”

“Come on, Maury, he wasn’t a young man back when we were going there. He’d be, I don’t know, maybe 125 or 130 now.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “Still, I wonder if the shop is still there.”

“After seventy-five years?” I said.

“We stopped by to tell him we were going into the service, don’t you remember?” said Maury.

“Okay, so it was open seventy-two years ago. Big difference.”

“Nate, I’m going to spend the rest of my life in this fucking building. I’d like to go out one last time.”

“So go.”

“And the one thing I’d most like to see is Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders.”

“I’d like to see Babe Ruth call his shot against the Cubs,” I said. “We’re both of us doomed to be disappointed.”

“Babe Ruth’s dead and buried. Maybe the shop is still open. Maybe his kid or his grandkid is running it. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

“I’m a ninety-two-year-old man with one lung and one hip,” I replied. “Just getting up in the morning is adventure enough.”

“Well, I’m going to go,” he said. “If I wait another week I won’t be able to move out of this fucking chair, so I’m going tomorrow morning.”

“To find a shop that probably hasn’t been in business for sixty years or more,” I said. “You’re losing it, Maury.”

“If I am, maybe Alastair Baffle’s is where I’ll find it.”

The nurses came by to check on us then, and after they left we watched a wrestling match on TV. Wrestling has changed a lot since the days of Verne Gagne and Strangler Lewis. Nobody used wrestling holds anymore. They fought with chairs and tables, and a third party was always racing into the ring to coldcock whoever he was up against on next week’s card. After awhile I got sick of it, as I always do, and went to bed.

When I got up I figured Maury had forgotten all about his idiot plan to go downtown and hunt for the magic shop, but he’d already shaved and gotten dressed. When he saw I was awake, he wheeled his chair over to my bed.

“Jake, do you mind if I take along a couple of your Percosets, just in case?”

“No, of course you can take them,” I said, swinging my feet tenderly to the floor. “Hell, we might as well take the whole bottle.”

“We?” he repeated.

“You don’t think I’d let you go alone, do you?”

“I was afraid you might,” he admitted.

“What kind of friend would I be if I did that?”

“The grouchy kind.”

“I’m just grouchy because I don’t know what’s out there anymore,” I said. “Maybe it’s time for each of us to take a last look.”

“Thanks, Nate.”

“By the way, are we allowed to leave the place?”

“I never thought of that,” he admitted.

“Maybe we should sneak out now, while they’re all busy preparing morning meds and breakfast.”

He nodded, popped a Percoset and a couple of his own pain pills, and got up out of his wheelchair.

“Here,” I said, handing him my cane and going to my closet for my spare. “Let’s go down the back stairs and out into the alley. They’ll all be working at the front of the place.”

And that’s what we did.

“Where the hell’s the subway from here?” asked Maury when we’d made it to a corner.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I think we’re far enough out that we’ll want the El.”

“I don’t see any elevated stations or tracks,” he said, looking around.

“I don’t see anything that looks like a subway station either,” I said.

“So what’ll we do?” asked Maury. “I’m not going back, not after I’ve only traveled half a block.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my battered old leather wallet. “How many more trips out are we going to take?” I said. “What the hell am I saving it for?”

He grinned and flagged down a passing cab. It took us a couple of minutes to get into it—we’re neither of us as spry as we used to be—but we finally got seated and told the cabbie, who looked like he’d been born anywhere but here, to take us to the Palmer House.

“You’re sure you don’t want to stop for some breakfast first?” I asked Maury as we drove through the Near North Side.

“The Palmer House is still in business,” said Maury, “or the cabbie would have asked us where it was, or what we were talking about. And if Chicago’s most elegant hotel is still in business, it’s got to have a restaurant or two on the premises.”

“Yeah, it makes sense,” I agreed.

“And that way the trip won’t be a total waste if the shop is gone.”

“Ah, come on, Maury. I’m happy to see the city one last time, but you don’t really think the shop is still there, do you?”

“Even if it’s not, this is where Gold and Silver met and became a lifelong team,” he said. “What’s wrong with seeing the beginning one more time before we reach the end?”

“Hell, if you’d put it that way last night we’d never have had an argument.”

“Come on, Nate,” he said. “We always argue.” Suddenly he smiled. “That’s probably what’s kept us together so long. Neither of us will ever admit the other got the best of him.”

I didn’t answer, but I had a feeling he was right.

Traffic started getting really heavy, downtown heavy, Loop heavy, and we crawled along, getting maybe a block a minute if the lights were with us, less if they weren’t. But finally we pulled up to the door of the Palmer House. My eyes aren’t sharp enough to read a meter any longer, so I just kept shoving bills at the cabbie, and when he smiled too much I took the last one back and we hobbled into the hotel.

“Hasn’t changed much,” I noted.

“Look at all the gilt,” said Maury. “It shines just the way it did seventy-five years ago.”

“You know,” I said, “I swear I remember that big leather chair.”

“Me too,” he said. “I’m starting to get excited. Maybe it is still here.”

“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, indicating the escalator.

We waited until no one else wanted to use it—we’re not too quick or steady on our feet even on good days—and then rode up to the mezzanine level.

“Off to the right,” said Maury.

“I know.”

We walked past a row of stores, mostly selling jewelry and women’s clothing, and then we came to the shop—but it wasn’t Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders anymore. There were twenty pairs of women’s shoes displayed in the window, and hundreds more inside.

“May I help you?” said a well-dressed young saleswoman as we stood in the doorway, seeing not what was there now but what used to be there.

“No, thank you,” I said.

“If you’re looking for the formal wear shop, it’s down in the gallery.”

“Formal wear?” said Maury.

“They used to be here until about six years ago.”

“You’d be surprised at what used to be here,” he replied sadly. Then he turned to me. “Let’s go.”

“How are you holding up?” I asked as we approached the escalator.

“I’m okay,” he said. Then: “So I’m a foolish old man. At least I know for sure now that it’s gone.”

“Too bad,” I said. “I could have used a little half-hour magic show.”

We rode down to the main floor, and then the pain got too much for Maury and he had to sit down. Naturally he chose the big leather chair, which meant I was probably going to need help pulling him up out of it.

He popped a couple of pain pills, then grimaced, and asked for a hand up. I was already wheezing and sucking oxygen, so I asked an old white-haired guard to help.

“Thanks,” said Maury when we’d pulled him to his feet.

“Happy to be of service,” said the guard. “Can I direct you anywhere?”

“I sure as hell doubt it,” I said. “We came down here looking for a shop that probably hasn’t been in business for the last fifty or sixty years.”

“It was a silly notion,” said Maury. “It was my fault.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Makes no difference,” said Maury. “It’s not here.”

“Stores move. Maybe I can help you.”

“This one was before even your time,” I said.

“It must have been some shop to bring you two back after all these years,” said the guard.

“It was,” said Maury. “It was a little magic store where we met for the first time.”

“Owned by a fellow with a really odd name?” asked the guard.

“Alastair Baffle,” said Maury.

“That’s the one.”

“You’ve heard of it?” said Maury eagerly. “Is there a photo of it around here somewhere?”

“Why settle for a photo when you can visit the real thing?” asked the guard.

“It’s still in business?” I said disbelievingly.

“Yeah. It’s moved around a lot. Last I heard it was just south of the Loop on State Street, right near where I used to go to watch the burlesque shows when I was a callow young man.” He smiled and winked at us. “Now I’m a dirty old one.”

“And you’re sure it’s Alastair Baffle’s?” asked Maury.

“You don’t forget a name like that.”

“Thanks!” said Maury, shaking the guard’s hand. “You don’t know how much this means to me.”

“Have fun,” said the guard. “Every now and then I go looking for my boyhood too, though it’s more likely to be found at a shuttered comic book store, or maybe over at Soldier Field.”

I knew what he meant. The Bears were still playing at Wrigley Field back then, but half the fathers in Chicago taught their kids to drive in the Soldier Field parking lot on weekends.

We trudged out the door and walked over to State Street. Then Maury had to stop and grab a lamppost for support.

“Nate,” he said, “I hate to ask, but do you have enough cash for another cab ride? We’ve got to be five or six blocks away, and I don’t think I can make it that far.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it. How bad are the legs?”

“Pretty bad,” he admitted, leaning against the lamppost.

I flagged down a Yellow cab—I don’t think they have Checkers anymore—and had it take us slowly down the street. Maury kept his nose practically pressed against the right-hand window.

“Damn it, Nate!” he muttered as we passed the block where the Follies and the Rialto burlesque theatres used to be. “It’s not here! The old bastard lied to us!”

“Cabbie, stop here!” I said. (Well, actually I yelled it.)

We screeched to a stop, and Maury groaned as he practically got thrown into the front seat. “What the hell’s going on?” he muttered.

“You were looking out the wrong window,” I said—for there, on the other side of the street, was Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders, right next door to the shuttered Madame Fifi’s Palace of Delights.

“I’ll be damned!” said Maury, getting painfully out of the cab while I paid the driver. “Even I didn’t really believe it would be here.”

The cab pulled away, glad to be rid of two crazy old guys, and we hobbled across the street, both of us leaning heavily on our canes. The window wasn’t much—a couple of kids’ tricks, and posters of Houdini, Dunninger, and Blackstone—but that made sense. You didn’t want to put anything too valuable in your window, not south of the Loop. It had been gentrified a few blocks farther on, but this was still a No Man’s Land, not quite the Loop, not quite the elegant condos that had replaced most of the slums between there and Chinatown on Cermak Road.

I turned to Maury, whose eyes were as wide and bright as a kid who’d just discovered a candy store.

“You gonna stand out here all day?” I said. “What are we waiting for?”

He smiled, opened the door, and stepped into the Emporium of Wonders, with me right beside him.

The guy behind the counter had his back turned to us. “Look around, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ll be with you in a moment.”

The place was smaller than the shop at the Palmer House, but it carried the same magical paraphernalia, the same production boxes, the same selection of wands. I felt like I was eleven years old again, and I could see Maury’s arthritis almost visibly retreating from him.

Then the guy turned around, and I did a double-take. He was the spitting image of Alastair Baffle, even down to the little wart at the tip of his nose. He had to be a grandson, or maybe a great-grandson, but he was clearly related to the original.

“Ah!” he said. “Master Gold and Master Silver. Welcome back! Forgive me for saying it, but Time has not been as kind to you as you might have wished.”

“You know us?” asked Maury.

“Certainly. You are Morris Gold, and you”—he turned to me—”are Nathan Silver. It is good to see you again. You grew up well, I take it?”

“We became partners,” said Maury.

“Gold and Silver. Of course.”

“How old are you?” I asked, frowning.

“As old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.” It didn’t get a reaction, so he continued: “Edmund Gwenn said that in Miracle on 34th Street. A sweet man. He used to stop by the old shop in the Palmer House whenever he was performing on the Chicago stage.”

“How can you still be around, and looking exactly the way you looked seventy-five years ago?”

“I suppose I should say diet and clean living, but in point of fact I love to eat, I smoke Turkish cigarettes in enormous quantities, and I loathe exercise.”

“You haven’t got a magic trick for becoming young again, have you?” asked Maury with a smile.

“You couldn’t afford it,” said Baffle.

“Okay,” I said. “Who are you really?”

“I’ve already told you.”

“I know what you told me and it’s bullshit,” I said. “No one’s that old.”

He stared at me, not angrily, not annoyed, but coldly, like he was studying a bug. I figured I’d just stare him down, but somehow I couldn’t meet his gaze.

“Come on, Nate,” said Maury. “He’s the same guy. I remember him like it was yesterday.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, he’s not supposed to look like it was yesterday.”

“I see you have a wallet in your pocket, Master Silver,” said Baffle. He seemed amused—not like anything funny was happening, but just because he was making me so uncomfortable. “The last time we met you had something else in your pocket. Do you remember what it was?”

“Sure,” I lied. “What do you think it was?”

“A very racy paperback,” he said.

It sounded right.

“And the very first time?” he continued.

“How the hell should I know?” I said irritably, because I knew he was going to tell me, and that meant I was wrong and he really was Alastair Baffle.

“A Milky Way candy bar,” said Baffle. “It was a very warm day, and I told you that you must choose between eating the candy bar and handling a magic trick, but that you couldn’t do both because the chocolate was very soft and would stick to your fingers and then rub off on the trick.”

I just stared at him for a minute. “Damn,” I said at last. “I do remember that.”

“And you’re still here,” said Maury enthusiastically.

“The store is my life,” he replied. “Several of them, in fact.” He looked at Maury, whose face was suddenly tense. “I think you had better sit down on purpose, Master Gold, before you sit down by accident.” He produced a chair from somewhere and brought it over to Maury.

“Thank you, Mr. Baffle,” said Maury, almost collapsing into it.

“Call me Alastair. We need no formality between old friends. And old friends we are. How long has it been since you two first met in the Emporium?”

I was still trying to figure out where the flaw was, how he could present himself as maybe 140 years old and how I couldn’t disprove it, but Maury spoke right up.

“Seventy-eight years,” he said.

“How time flies!” said Baffle. “I would have sworn it was no more than seventy-four or seventy-five years.”

I couldn’t tell if he was trying to be funny, or if he meant it. While I was trying to figure it out, he spoke again.

“Well, what can I show you two today?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Truth to tell, we really didn’t expect to find you still in business.” Or alive. “What have you got?”

“Everything,” he said.

I spotted a production box with mirrors on the side, the kind that makes it seem like something is vanishing right before your eyes, rather than the more traditional box where the object simply disappears once it’s briefly hidden from view. “How about this?” I said, pointing to the box.

He shook his head. “We can do better than that, Master Silver,” he said. “When you were a child, you could be amused by a child’s tricks. But you are an adult now, and you crave more than a momentary amusement, do you not?”

“What I crave and what I’m likely to be around for are two different things,” I said wryly. “Maury, this was your idea. What trick do you want to see?”

“I’ll leave it up to Mr . . . to Alastair,” said Maury, his fingers starting to twist the way they did whenever the arthritis got really bad.

“Tricks are for children,” said Baffle, “and you have outgrown them.” He paused. “I think today I shall show you some of my wonders for adults.” He turned to study the shelves behind him. The top shelf was shrouded in darkness, though the rest of the room was well-lit. On the next shelf was a trio of shrunken heads; one of them stuck its tongue out at me, and another giggled.. There was a miniature ping-pong table, not a foot long, with tiny paddles and a ball the size of a bee-bee; as I looked at it, the two paddles started a vigorous volley. There was a candy cane that changed into a snake, then an arrow, and then back to a candy cane. “Cecil B. DeMille should have visited my store before filming The Ten Commandments,” remarked Baffle, holding up the candy cane. “This is much more colorful than the simplistic prop Charlton Heston used.” It morphed into a belt, then back into a candy cane again, and he laid it on a shelf.

“What else can it do?” asked Maury, as wide-eyed and eager as he’d been seventy-eight years ago.

“Party tricks,” said Baffle contemptuously. “Nothing for adults.” He walked to the far end of the counter, picked up a small jar, and brought it back, setting it down on the counter next to Maury.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Unless I miss my guess, and I rarely do, it is something you were discussing just yesterday,” answered Baffle.

“Jesus!” exclaimed Maury. “Take a look, Nate!”

I walked over and peered into the bottle.

“It’s him, Nate!” said Maury excitedly. “And he’s calling his shot, just like in the ‘32 World Series!”

And there was the Babe, maybe half an inch high, pointing out to all the fans exactly where he was sending the next pitch. It wasn’t static, either. The shortstop was thumping his glove, the umpire was signaling Ruth to stop pointing and take his stance.

I looked up at Baffle. “How did you do that?” I asked.

He looked amused, and I felt like an insect again. “With mirrors.”

“What the hell kind of answer is that?” I demanded.

“The kind you paid for, and worth every penny of it.”

I pulled a five out and laid it on the counter.

“Okay,” I said. “Now how did you do it?”

“I’m sorry, Master Silver,” he replied, “but I never offer two answers to only one question.” He pushed the bill back to me.

“What else have you got?” asked Maury.

“Any number of things,” answered Baffle. “Now, where is my Morris Gold collection. Ah!” He reached up to a higher shelf, grabbed some sheet music, and held it up for us to see. “The song you never composed.” Then a book. “The novel you never wrote.” A look of infinite sadness crossed his face as he displayed the photograph of a small boy. “The grandson you never had.”

“He looks a lot like Mark,” said Maury. Mark was the son he lost in Vietnam. “Who is it?”

“I just told you.”

“But I never had a grandson.”

“I know,” said Baffle. “So of course the photo never existed.” He blew on it, and it vanished right in front of us.

“I thought you weren’t going to show us any tricks today,” I said..

“And I haven’t,” he answered. “Tricks are for children.”

“Then what do you call what you’re showing us?”

He pointed to a trio of murky glass jars. “Hopes. Dreams. Regrets.”

“Seriously, how did you pull that off?” I persisted.

“Seriously?” he repeated, arching an eyebrow and seeming to look right through me to some interior spot that nobody was ever supposed to see. “You take two well-meaning but unexceptional lives, stir in all the might-have-beens and never-weres, baste lightly with the optimism of youth, the cynicism of maturity, and the pessimism of age, add a soupaon of triumph and a cup of failure, heat the oven with vanished passion, sprinkle with just the tiniest pinch of wisdom, and there you have it.” He smiled, as if totally pleased with his explanation. “Works every time.”

It sounded like a salesman’s line of bullshit, but I could tell that Maury had bought every word of it. His eyes shone, his face glowed, and he was eleven years old again, hanging on Alastair Baffle’s every word.

“I hate to rush you,” said Baffle, “but it’s almost time to feed the banshee and the gorgon.”

“Can we see them?” asked Maury.

“Perhaps,” said Baffle. “But I rather suspect they will look exactly like cats to you.”

“And to everyone else?” I suggested.

“It depends on whether they can see past the surface of things.”

“Were you always this quick with a slick answer?” I said, annoyed that even after all these years it all still mystified me. My brain kept saying illusions and something else kept whispering magic.

“No, Master Silver,” he replied. “But then, you were not always this quick with a sarcastic question.”

“In some circles sarcasm is considered a sign of intellect,” I said defensively.

“Those aren’t circles, Master Silver,” responded Baffle. “You just can’t see all the angles from inside them.”

Maury groaned just then. I turned and saw that his body was all twisted up the way he gets when he’s in pain. I pulled a couple of pills out of his pocket and popped them into his mouth.

I waited a minute, then said, “Did that help?”

He grimaced. “Not much. It’s bad this time, Nate.”

“I’ll take you home,” I said.

“Yeah, I think you’d better.”

Suddenly Alastair Baffle was standing between us and the door. “I just want to say what a pleasure it has been to see my two old friends once more,” he said. “And I hope to see you again in the future.”

“Don’t count on it,” I said grimly. “I think this was our last foray into the world, such as it is.”

“Then at least let me shake your hand good-bye,” he said, grabbing my hand. He turned to Maury. “And yours, Master Gold.”

Maury looked scared to death—he hated to be touched when he was in this much pain—and I took a step forward to stop Baffle from taking his hand. But he gently pushed me aside—I say “gently” because he didn’t seem to use any force, but I had a feeling he could have pushed an elephant aside with as little effort—and he flashed Maury a smile.

“Have no fear, Master Gold. I’ll be very careful.”

He reached out and put Maury’s twisted, bony, crumpled hand in his own. I’ve seen the nurses do that on occasion: Maury always screams, and half the time he passes out. But this time he didn’t yell, didn’t faint, didn’t even groan. He just looked at Baffle with the strangest expression on his face, as if he was watching his first magic show again, and the world was young and filled with infinite promise.

I escorted him out to the street and flagged down another cab. When I turned around to start helping him into the back seat, I found him standing erect, not using his cane at all. He was holding his hand up and flexing his fingers over and over, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

I had a lot of questions to ask Alastair Baffle, but I suddenly heard the lock click in the door, and when I turned to face it he’d already hung up his “Gone to Lunch” sign.

I couldn’t believe the change in Maury. That night he skipped two of his strongest pain medications, and the next afternoon he actually shuffled a deck of cards. He hadn’t been able to do that in years. The doctors claimed that it was a semi-miracle, that sometimes arthritis went into remission—but never this fast or this completely. Maury listened politely to them, but when we were alone together he told me that there was no question in his mind that it was all due to Alastair Baffle.

He cashed a couple of bonds—I don’t know what he was saving them for anyway—and the next week we went down to the Emporium of Wonders again.

“Welcome back, my once-young friends,” said Baffle as we entered the shop. “What shall I show you gentlemen this time?”

“Anything you want,” answered Maury.

“Let me think,” said Baffle. “Ah! I have just the thing!” He went into his back room and emerged a moment later with a small white lab rat in a cage that could have held a sixty-pound dog.

“The Neptunian Spin-Devil,” he announced. “One of the rarest creatures in the Solar System, if not the galaxy.”

“Sure it is,” I said in bored tones.

“You doubt it?” he asked in that tone that made me feel like he was a cat playing with its food, and that I was its meal.

“Of course I doubt it.”

“Oh, ye of little faith. What troubles you about it?”

“Other than its appearance, you mean?” I said. “Does it breathe?”

“Certainly,” replied Baffle. “Why should you ask, Master Silver?”

“Because Neptune is a gas giant with no oxygen.”

Baffle looked genuinely surprised. “Really?”

“Really,” I said.

He shrugged. “Well, they told me it was Neptune, but I suppose it could just as easily have been Pollux IV.”

“Come on,” I said. “It’s a white mouse, and it’s from the pet shop down the street.”

“If you say so, Master Silver,” said Baffle. Suddenly he leaned over the cage and said “Boo!”

The mouse became a tawny fifty-pound something in the blink of an eye, growling, spinning in circles, flapping two sets of vestigial wings.

“What the hell is it?” I demanded.

“I already told you,” answered Baffle with a smug smile. “You live in a changing universe, Master Silver. You must never assume that all things change at the same pace.”

He held the Spin-Devil up for Maury to see, then carried its cage to the back room.

“This guy is half nuts and wholly dangerous,” I whispered to Maury. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“You do what you want,” he replied. “He’s a miracle worker, and I need another miracle. I’m staying.”

I could see it was pointless to argue with him, so I just sat and stared at a tribal death mask that was hanging on the wall, and tried to ignore the feeling that it was grinning at me.

“You’re looking better today, Master Gold,” said Baffle when he’d rejoined us. “I am delighted to see that your condition was not permanent.”

“It was until I met you,” said Maury.

“I’m flattered that you should think so,” said Baffle, “but I’m just a shopkeeper. And now that I’ve displayed today’s wonder, what trick can I sell you?”

“I can’t see out of my right eye,” said Maury. “Glaucoma, macular degeneration, I don’t know. Bunch of long words that don’t mean anything. Do for my vision what you did for my arthritis.”

Baffle smiled. “You want a god,” he said. “I am merely a shopkeeper.”

“I want a miracle. You’re in the miracle business.”

“I am in the magic business.”

“Same thing,” insisted Maury.

“Ask for some other trick,” I said, getting annoyed with Maury’s worshipful attitude. “I’ll bet he could make a blind man lame.”

“Your cynicism does not become you, Master Silver.” Baffle reached into his pocket, pulled out a tiny jar that seemed to be filled with dust, and handed it to Maury. “Put a minuscule pinch of this in a glass of water tonight and rinse your eye out. It may ease the pain.”

“I’m not in pain,” replied Maury. “I’m blind.”

“I am not a doctor,” said Baffle apologetically. “This is the only eye illusion I know.”

Maury took the powder home, rinsed his eye out with it—and the next morning he could see.

Maury cashed all his investments—there weren’t that many—and started going back to the Emporium every few days, sometimes with me, sometimes alone when I just couldn’t face another day of his idolizing Baffle. He started taking long vigorous walks at night, and doing push-ups and sit-ups in the morning. It used to be when we’d try to assemble our all-time greatest Bears team he’d forget that Gale Sayers and Walter Payton played the same position, or he’d think Sid Luckman had been Lucky Sid Somebody-or-other—but now he was sharp as a tack. How many states did Harry Truman win in 1948? Michael Jordan’s scoring average during the first championship season? Rosemary Clooney’s first gold record? He knew them all.

Alastair Baffle never offered to sell me a trick, and I never offered to buy one. Maury kept urging me to, but I figured I’d spent more than ninety years picking up all these aches and pains, and I’d earned them. But it was difficult, seeing Maury grow stronger and healthier each day. I was always the bigger and stronger one, and now for the first time in my life I wasn’t able to keep up with him. I mean, hell, even his hair got thicker. The first time someone asked if he was my son it was everything I could do not to club both of them with my cane.

And then one day he was gone. I knew he’d left to visit Baffle—it was the only place he ever went—but that night he didn’t come home. He didn’t call, and the next morning the home reported him missing to the police. Didn’t do a bit of good. No one could turn up any trace of him.

But I knew where he was. After two more days, I went out the back way, made it to the corner like all the other times, and hailed a cab. Ten minutes later it dropped me off on State Street in front of the Emporium of Wonders. The door was locked, the windows were empty, and there was a sign on the door: Moved to a New Location. But it didn’t say where the location was.

I tried the yellow pages. No luck. I tried the white pages too. Hell, if there’d have been mauve or puce pages, I’d have tried them too. I spent the next two weeks wandering the area, asking every person I saw if they knew what had become of Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders. They were polite at first, but pretty soon they started looking at me like I was the local nut case, and they turned and began walking away whenever they saw me approaching.

I stayed in the Hector McPherson Retirement Home for seven more months. Since I had a two-bedroom apartment they kept trying to give me a new roommate, but Gold and Silver had been a team since before any of them were born and I wasn’t about to adjust to a new partner.

Then came the day I’d known was coming. The doctor hemmed and hawed, and then laid it on me: the cancer had reappeared in my one remaining lung. I asked how long I had. He tiptoed around it for a few minutes, then said anywhere from three weeks to three months. I wasn’t even sorry; nine decades is a long time, longer than most have, and life hadn’t been much fun since Maury had left.

It was getting harder to breathe, harder to get around. Then I read in the paper that they were bringing Casablanca back to a small theatre in what used to be Old Town, the beatnik/then-hippie/then-yuppie area a couple of miles north of the Loop. It had played on TV a couple of trillion times, but this would be its first commercial showing on a big screen in almost forty years, and I thought to myself: where better to die than watching Bogey and Claude Rains go off into the unknown to cement their friendship and fight the Bad Guys, just the way Maury and I daydreamed when we were kids?

I became obsessed with the notion that that was how and where I wanted to die. I waited a few more days, until I barely had the strength to climb down the stairs. Then, when the nurses and attendants were all performing their various duties, I walked out the front door, and waited for the cab I’d phoned. (I wasn’t sure I’d have the strength to stand out there in the cold and flag one down.)

I gave the cabbie the address of the theatre, and he dropped me off there fifteen minutes later. I gave him a twenty, stuffed a ten for the movie and another twenty (just in case I didn’t die and needed a ride home) in my shirt pocket, and walked to the ticket window. When I got there I stopped and turned around, to take one last look at the world—

—And that’s when I saw it, nestled between an old-fashioned greengrocer and a little hardware shop: Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders. I walked across the street and peered in the window. It looked exactly like the last shop. I studied the door for a long moment, then finally opened it and walked in.

“Master Silver,” said Baffle, looking totally unsurprised as I entered the place. “What kept you?”

“Life,” I wheezed.

“It does slow people down,” he agreed, and he sounded sympathetic rather than intimidating. “Well, come in out of the cold. Someone’s been waiting for you.”

“Maury?”

He nodded. “I had my doubts, but he assured me that sooner or later you’d show up.”

A young boy who looked oddly familiar entered from the back of the shop. He smiled at me, and I knew I’d seen that smile a million times before.

“Maury?” I said, half amazed, half frightened.

“Hi, Nate,” he said. “I knew you’d come.”

“What happened to you?”

“I’m working here now,” he said. “Full time.”

“But you’re an old man!”

“You know what they say,” he replied. “You’re only as old as you feel. And me, I feel like I’m twelve years, three months, and twenty-two days old.” He smiled again. “That’s how old I was the day we met. And now we’re meeting again.”

“Just briefly,” I said, getting ready to tell him about the cancer. “I got the bad news last week.”

“Then it’s last week’s news, and nothing is older than that,” said Maury with no show of concern.

“I must feed the Denebian Spider-Cats,” announced Baffle. “I’ll leave you two friends to visit in private for a few moments.”

I stared at Maury. “Didn’t you understand what I said? The cancer’s in the other lung. They’ve given me three months, tops.”

“Why don’t you ask Alastair what he can give you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at me, Nate,” he said. “I’m not an illusion. I’m twelve years old. He did it for me. He can do it for you, too. I’ve asked him to hold a job open for you.”

“A job?” I repeated, frowning.

“A lifetime job,” he said meaningfully. “And around here, there’s no telling how long that can be. Look at him. You know he once saw George Washington ride by?”

“You better hope he was lying, Maury,” I said.

“What are you talking about?” he asked, confused.

“Don’t you understand just how long you have to serve him?”

“You make it sound like I’m a slave,” he complained. “I love working here. He teaches me things.”

“What kind of things?”

“You’d call them tricks, but they’re not.”

“You’d better come back with me, Maury.”

“So I can rot in my wheelchair while I’m going blind?” he said. “So I can’t even pick up a pencil without my hand feeling like it’s on fire? If I stay here I can be healthy forever!”

“Do you know just how long forever is?” I shot back. “Did you just sign the contract without reading the fine print? How long will it take you to pay off your debt to him? When will you be free to leave?”

“I don’t want to leave!” he half-shouted. “What’s out there besides pain and suffering?”

“Everything’s out there,” I answered. “Pain and suffering are just a small part of it. They’re dues we pay to enjoy the good stuff.”

“The good stuff’s over for sick old men like us,” said Maury. “You shouldn’t be trying to talk me out of staying here. I should be trying to get you to join me.”

“It feels like cheating, Maury. If there’s a God, I’m going to be seeing Him pretty soon, and I plan to do it with a clear conscience. We never cheated at business, I never cheated on my wives, and I’m not about to start cheating now.”

“You’re looking at it all wrong,” he insisted. “If you don’t stay with me, you’ll be cheating yourself.” He paused. “I don’t know how long he’ll hold the job open, Nate. I don’t think he likes you very much.”

“I can live with that.”

“Damn it, Nate! You’re walking around with one lung, and it’s got cancer! You can’t live with it! You can’t live with anything. Come on while you have the chance. We can be Gold and Silver again for another lifetime!”

“I’m not through with this lifetime,” I said. “Maybe I’ve only got three months. Maybe they’ll come up with a new form of chemo, or some other new treatment. Life’s always been a crapshoot, Maury. I’ve played by the rules so far; I’m not changing now.”

“So what if they cure you?” he said. “They’ll give you another eight months. He can give you eight decades.”

Baffle re-entered the front of the shop just then. “I assume Master Gold has spoken to you about a position here?” he said.

“You don’t want a sick, tired old man,” I said.

“That’s true,” he replied. “I have no use for a sick, tired old man.” He paused. “But I can always use a young, healthy one.”

“I wish you luck in finding the right one,” I said. “But it’s not me. And now I think I’d better be going.”

“Without your trick?” asked Baffle.

“I’ll have to take a pass on it,” I said. “I’ve got just enough cash with me for the movie across the street and cab fare home.”

“Then you can owe it to me.” He reached into the air and produced a single red rose, then handed it to me. “Careful of the thorns,” he cautioned.

“I saw you do this the very first time I visited your shop,” I said.

“No, Master Silver,” he said. “Each time is different. Smell the fragrance.”

“I can’t,” I said, indicating my oxygen supply.

He reached over before I could stop him, grabbed the oxygen away, and tossed it in a wastebasket. “We don’t allow oxygen around here, Master Silver. It’s too combustible.”

I was all set to grab my throat and start gasping for air, but nothing happened except that I took a deep breath. It felt good. Hell, it felt great.

“Now how does it smell?”

I lifted the rose to my nose. “Beautiful,” I said in wonderment.

“You owe me a dollar the next time you visit the shop.”

“Nate,” said Maury, “are you sure you won’t stay?”

“I can’t,” I said. “Are you sure you won’t go?”

He shook his head.

I didn’t know whether to shake his hand or hug him, so I just stared at him, fixing his face in my memory one last time, and then I walked out the door.

I went in to start my treatment two days later. The doctors took a bunch of CATscans and X-rays, blood tests and readings, and left me sitting there for hours. Finally the head of the team came out and told me that their initial diagnosis had been mistaken, that I didn’t have cancer after all.

The next morning I took a cab to the shop to pay Baffle his dollar. There was a sign in the window: Moved to a new location.

I keep looking. Not to take him up on his offer, just to pay him what I owed him, and maybe see Maury one more time and find out how he was doing. I heard Baffle had opened a store on Morse Avenue in the Rogers Park section of the city, but when I got there he’d moved again.

Someone told me that a new magic shop opened down in Hyde Park, in the University area, and as soon as I’m up to it I’ll go down and see for myself. It’ll probably be gone by then. I don’t think he wants me to find him. Maybe he’s afraid I’ve changed my mind. As for me, I don’t know what I’d say to them—the man who happily sold his soul, and the man who bought it.

But I’d give one of my remaining months just to take one last look around Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders.

PRIDE AND PROMETHEUS

John Kessel

HAD BOTH HER MOTHER AND her sister Kitty not insisted upon it, Miss Mary Bennet, whose interest in Nature did not extend to the Nature of Society, would not have attended the ball in Grosvenor Square. This was Kitty’s season. Mrs. Bennet had despaired of Mary long ago, but still bore hopes for her younger sister, and so had set her determined mind on putting Kitty in the way of Robert Sidney of Detling Manor, who possessed a fortune of six thousand pounds a year, and was likely to be at that evening’s festivities. Being obliged by her unmarried state to live with her parents, and the whims of Mrs. Bennet being what they were, although there was no earthly reason for Mary to be there, there was no good excuse for her absence.

So it was that Mary found herself in the ballroom of the great house, trussed up in a silk dress with her hair piled high, bedecked with her sister’s jewels. She was neither a beauty, like her older and happily married sister Jane, nor witty, like her older and happily married sister Elizabeth, nor flirtatious, like her younger and less happily married sister Lydia. Awkward and nearsighted, she had never cut an attractive figure, and as she had aged she had come to see herself as others saw her. Every time Mrs. Bennet told her to stand up straight, she felt despair. Mary had seen how Jane and Elizabeth had made good lives for themselves by finding appropriate mates. But there was no air of grace or mystery about Mary, and no man ever looked upon her with admiration.

Kitty’s card was full, and she had already contrived to dance once with the distinguished Mr. Sidney, whom Mary could not imagine being more tedious. Hectically glowing, Kitty was certain that this was the season she would get a husband. Mary, in contrast, sat with her mother and her Aunt Gardiner, whose good sense was Mary’s only respite from her mother’s silliness. After the third minuet Kitty came flying over.

“Catch your breath, Kitty!” Mrs. Bennet said. “Must you rush about like this? Who is that young man you danced with? Remember, we are here to smile on Mr. Sidney, not on some stranger. Did I see him arrive with the Lord Mayor?”

“How can I tell you what you saw, Mother?”

“Don’t be impertinent.”

“Yes. He is an acquaintance of the Mayor. He’s from Switzerland! Mr. Clerval, on holiday.”

The tall, fair-haired Clerval stood with a darker, brooding young man, both impeccably dressed in dove gray breeches, black jackets, and waistcoats, with white tie and gloves.

“Switzerland! I would not have you marry any Dutchman—though ’tis said their merchants are uncommonly wealthy. And who is that gentleman with whom he speaks?”

“I don’t know, Mother—but I can find out.”

Mrs. Bennet’s curiosity was soon to be relieved, as the two men crossed the drawing room to the sisters and their chaperones.

“Henry Clerval, madame,” the fair-haired man said. “And this is my good friend Mr. Victor Frankenstein.”

Mr. Frankenstein bowed but said nothing. He had the darkest eyes that Mary had ever encountered, and an air of being there only on obligation. Whether this was because he was as uncomfortable in these social situations as she, Mary could not tell, but his diffident air intrigued her. She fancied his reserve might bespeak sadness rather than pride. His manners were faultless, as was his command of English, though he spoke with a slight French accent. When he asked Mary to dance she suspected he did so only at the urging of Mr. Clerval; on the floor, once the orchestra of pianoforte, violin, and cello struck up the quadrille, he moved with some grace but no trace of a smile.

At the end of the dance, Frankenstein asked whether Mary would like some refreshment, and they crossed from the crowded ballroom to the sitting room, where he procured for her a cup of negus. Mary felt obliged to make some conversation before she should retreat to the safety of her wallflower’s chair.

“What brings you to England, Mr. Frankenstein?”

“I come to meet with certain natural philosophers here in London, and in Oxford—students of magnetism.”

“Oh! Then have you met Professor Langdon, of the Royal Society?”

Frankenstein looked at her as if seeing her for the first time. “How is it that you are acquainted with Professor Langdon?”

“I am not personally acquainted with him, but I am, in my small way, an enthusiast of the sciences. You are a natural philosopher?”

“I confess that I can no longer countenance the subject. But yes, I did study with Mr. Krempe and Mr. Waldman in Ingolstadt.”

“You no longer countenance the subject, yet you seek out Professor Langdon.”

A shadow swept over Mr. Frankenstein’s handsome face. “It is unsupportable to me, yet pursue it I must.”

“A paradox.”

“A paradox that I am unable to explain, Miss Bennet.”

All this said in a voice heavy with despair. Mary watched his sober black eyes, and replied, “ ‘The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.’ ”

For the second time that evening he gave her a look that suggested an understanding. Frankenstein sipped from his cup, then spoke: “Avoid any pastime, Miss Bennet, that takes you out of the normal course of human contact. If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for simple pleasures, then that study is certainly unlawful.”

The purport of this extraordinary speech Mary was unable to fathom. “Surely there is no harm in seeking knowledge.”

Mr. Frankenstein smiled. “Henry has been urging me to go out into London society; had I known that I might meet such a thoughtful person as yourself I would have taken him up on it long ’ere now.”

He took her hand. “But I spy your aunt at the door,” he said. “No doubt she has been dispatched to protect you. If you will, please let me return you to your mother. I must thank you for the dance, and even more for your conversation, Miss Bennet. In the midst of a foreign land, you have brought me a moment of sympathy.”

And again Mary sat beside her mother and aunt as she had half an hour before. She was nonplussed. It was not seemly for a stranger to speak so much from the heart to a woman he had never previously met, yet she could not find it in herself to condemn him. Rather, she felt her own failure in not keeping him longer.

A cold March rain was falling when, after midnight, they left the ball. They waited under the portico while the coachman brought round the carriage. Kitty began coughing. As they stood there in the chill night, Mary noticed a hooded man, of enormous size, standing in the shadows at the corner of the lane. Full in the downpour, unmoving, he watched the town house and its partiers without coming closer or going away, as if this observation were all his intention in life. Mary shivered.

In the carriage back to Aunt Gardiner’s home near Belgravia, Mrs. Bennet insisted that Kitty take the lap robe against the chill. “Stop coughing, Kitty. Have a care for my poor nerves.” She added, “They should never have put the supper at the end of that long hallway. The young ladies, flushed from the dance, had to walk all that cold way.”

Kitty drew a ragged breath and leaned over to Mary. “I have never seen you so taken with a man, Mary. What did that Swiss gentleman say to you?”

“We spoke of natural philosophy.”

“Did he say nothing of the reasons he came to England?” Aunt Gardiner asked.

“That was his reason.”

“I should say not!”said Kitty. “He came to forget his grief! His little brother William was murdered, not six months ago, by the family maid!”

“How terrible!” said Aunt Gardiner.

Mrs. Bennet asked in open astonishment, “Could this be true?”

“I have it from Lucy Copeland, the Lord Mayor’s daughter,” Kitty replied. “Who heard it from Mr. Clerval himself. And there is more! He is engaged to be married—to his cousin. Yet he has abandoned her, left her in Switzerland and come here instead.”

“Did he say anything to you about these matters?” Mrs. Bennet asked Mary.

Kitty interrupted. “Mother, he’s not going to tell the family secrets to strangers, let alone reveal his betrothal at a dance.”

Mary wondered at these revelations. Perhaps they explained Mr.

Frankenstein’s odd manner. But could they explain his interest in her? “A man should be what he seems,” she said.

Kitty snorted, and it became a cough.

“Mark me, girls,” said Mrs. Bennet, “that engagement is a match that he does not want. I wonder what fortune he would bring to a marriage?”

IN THE DAYS that followed, Kitty’s cough became a full-blown catarrh, and it was decided against her protest that, the city air being unhealthy, they should cut short their season and return to Meryton. Mr. Sidney was undoubtedly unaware of his narrow escape. Mary could not honestly say that she regretted leaving, though the memory of her half hour with Mr. Frankenstein gave her as much regret at losing the chance of further commerce with him as she had ever felt from her acquaintance with a man.

Within a week Kitty was feeling better, and repining bitterly their remove from London. In truth, she was only two years younger than Mary and had made none of the mental accommodations to approaching spinsterhood that her older sister had attempted. Mr. Bennet retreated to his study, emerging only at mealtimes to cast sardonic comments about Mrs. Bennet and Kitty’s marital campaigns. Perhaps, Mrs. Bennet said, they might invite Mr. Sidney to visit Longbourn when Parliament adjourned. Mary escaped these discussions by practicing the pianoforte and, as the advancing spring brought warm weather, taking walks in the countryside, where she would stop beneath an oak and read, indulging her passion for Goethe and German philosophy. When she tried to engage her father in speculation, he warned her, “I am afraid, my dear, that your understanding is too dependent on books and not enough on experience of the world. Beware, Mary. Too much learning makes a woman monstrous.”

What experience of the world had they ever allowed her? Rebuffed, Mary wrote to Elizabeth about the abrupt end of Kitty’s latest assault on marriage, and her subsequent ill temper, and Elizabeth wrote back inviting her two younger sisters to come visit Pemberley.

Mary was overjoyed to have the opportunity to escape her mother and see something more of Derbyshire, and Kitty seemed equally willing. Mrs. Bennet was not persuaded when Elizabeth suggested that nearby Matlock and its baths might be good for Kitty’s health (no man would marry a sickly girl), but she was persuaded by Kitty’s observation that, though it could in no way rival London, Matlock did attract a finer society than sleepy Meryton, and thus offered opportunities for meeting eligible young men of property. So in the second week of May, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet tearfully loaded their last unmarried daughters into a coach for the long drive to Derbyshire. Mrs. Bennet’s tears were shed because their absence would deprive Kitty and Mary of her attentions, Mr. Bennet’s for the fact that their absence would assure him of Mrs. Bennet’s.

The two girls were as ever delighted by the grace and luxury of Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s ancestral estate. Darcy was kindness itself, and the servants attentive, if, at the instruction of Elizabeth, less indulgent of Kitty’s whims and more careful of her health than the thoroughly cowed servants at home. Lizzy saw that Kitty got enough sleep, and the three sisters took long walks in the grounds of the estate. Kitty’s health improved, and Mary’s spirits rose. Mary enjoyed the company of Lizzy and Darcy’s eight-year-old son William, who was attempting to teach her and Darcy’s younger sister Georgiana to fish. Georgiana pined after her betrothed, Captain Broadbent, who was away on crown business in the Caribbean, but after they had been there a week, Jane and her husband Mr. Bingley came for an extended visit from their own estate thirty miles away, and so four of the five Bennet sisters were reunited. They spent many cordial afternoons and evenings. Both Mary and Georgiana were accomplished at the pianoforte, though Mary had come to realize that her sisters tolerated more than enjoyed her playing. The reunion of Lizzy and Jane meant even more time devoted to Kitty’s improvement, with specific attention to her marital prospects, and left Mary feeling invisible. Still, on occasion she would join them and drive into Lambton or Matlock to shop and socialize, and every week during the summer a ball was held in the assembly room of the Old Bath Hotel, with its beeswax-polished floor and splendid chandeliers.

On one such excursion to Matlock, Georgiana stopped at the milliners while Kitty pursued some business at the butcher’s shop—Mary wondered at her sudden interest in Pemberley’s domestic affairs—and Mary took William to the museum and circulating library, which contained celebrated cabinets of natural history. William had told her of certain antiquities unearthed in the excavation for a new hotel and recently added to the collection.

The streets, hotels, and inns of Matlock bustled with travelers there to take the waters. Newly wedded couples leaned on one another’s arms, whispering secrets that no doubt concerned the alpine scenery. A crew of workmen was breaking up the cobblestone street in front of the hall, swinging pickaxes in the bright sun. Inside she and Will retreated to the cool quiet of the public exhibition room.

Among the visitors to the museum Mary spied a slender, well-dressed man at one of the display cases, examining the artifacts contained there. As she drew near, Mary recognized him. “Mr. Frankenstein!”

The tall European looked up, startled. “Ah—Miss Bennet?”

She was pleased that he remembered. “Yes. How good to see you.”

“And this young man is?”

“My nephew, William.”

At the mention of this name, Frankenstein’s expression darkened. He closed his eyes. “Are you not well?” Mary asked.

He looked at her again. “Forgive me. These antiquities call to mind sad associations. Give me a moment.”

“Certainly,” she said. William ran off to see the hall’s steam clock. Mary turned and examined the contents of the neighboring cabinet.

Beneath the glass was a collection of bones that had been unearthed in the local lead mines. The card lettered beside them read: Bones, resembling those of a fish, made of limestone.

Eventually Frankenstein came to stand beside her. “How is it that you are come to Matlock?” he inquired.

“My sister Elizabeth is married to Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy, of Pemberley. Kitty and I are here on a visit. Have you come to take the waters?”

“Clerval and I are on our way to Scotland, where he will stay with friends, while I pursue—certain investigations. We rest here a week. The topography of the valley reminds me of my home in Switzerland.”

“I have heard it said so,” she replied. Frankenstein seemed to have regained his composure, but Mary wondered still at what had awakened his grief. “You have an interest in these relics?” she asked, indicating the cabinets.

“Some, perhaps. I find it remarkable to see a young lady take an interest in such arcana.” Mary detected no trace of mockery in his voice.

“Indeed, I do,”she said, indulging her enthusiasm. “Professor Erasmus Darwin has written of the source of these bones:

“Organic life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs’d in ocean’s pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

“People say this offers proof of the Great Flood. Do you think, Mr. Frankenstein, that Matlock could once have been under the sea? They say these are creatures that have not existed since the time of Noah.”

“Far older than the Flood, I’ll warrant. I do not think that these bones were originally made of stone. Some process has transformed them. Anatomically, they are more like those of a lizard than a fish.”

“You have studied anatomy?”

Mr. Frankenstein tapped his fingers upon the glass of the case. “Three years gone by it was one of my passions. I no longer pursue such matters.”

“And yet, sir, you met with men of science in London.”

“Ah—yes, I did. I am surprised that you remember a brief conversation, more than two months ago.”

“I have a good memory.”

“As evidenced by your quoting Professor Darwin. I might expect a woman such as yourself to take more interest in art than science.”

“Oh, you may rest assured that I have read my share of novels. And even more, in my youth, of sermons. Elizabeth is wont to tease me for a great moralizer. ‘Evil is easy,’ I tell her, ‘and has infinite forms.’ ”

Frankenstein did not answer. Finally he said, “Would that the world had no need of moralizers.”

Mary recalled his warning against science from their London meeting. “Come, Mr. Frankenstein. There is no evil in studying God’s handiwork.”

“A God-fearing Christian might take exception to Professor Darwin’s assertion that life began in the sea, no matter how poetically stated.” His voice became distant. “Can a living soul be created without the hand of God?”

“It is my feeling that the hand of God is everywhere present.” Mary gestured toward the cabinet. “Even in the bones of this stony fish.”

“Then you have more faith than I, Miss Bennet—or more innocence.”

Mary blushed. She was not used to bantering in this way with a gentleman. In her experience, handsome and accomplished men took no interest in her, and such conversations as she had engaged in offered little of substance other than the weather, clothes, and town gossip. Yet she saw that she had touched Frankenstein, and felt something akin to triumph.

They were interrupted by the appearance of Georgiana and Kitty, entering with Henry Clerval. “There you are!” said Kitty. “You see, Mr. Clerval, I told you we would find Mary poring over these heaps of bones!”

“And it is no surprise to find my friend here as well,” said Clerval.

Mary felt quite deflated. The party moved out of the town hall and in splendid sunlight along the North Parade. Kitty proposed, and the visitors acceded to, a stroll on the so-called Lovers’Walk beside the river. As they walked along the gorge, vast ramparts of limestone rock, clothed with yew trees, elms, and limes, rose up on either side of the river. William ran ahead, and Kitty, Georgiana, and Clerval followed, leaving Frankenstein and Mary behind. Eventually they came in sight of the High Tor, a sheer cliff rearing its brow on the east bank of the Derwent. The lower part was covered with small trees and foliage. Massive boulders that had fallen from the cliff broke the riverbed below into foaming rapids. The noise of the waters left Mary and Frankenstein, apart from the others, as isolated as if they had been in a separate room. Frankenstein spent a long time gazing at the scenery. Mary’s mind raced, seeking some way to recapture the mood of their conversation in the town hall.

“How this reminds me of my home,” he said. “Henry and I would climb such cliffs as this, chase goats around the meadows, and play at pirates. Father would walk me though the woods and name every tree and flower. I once saw a lightning bolt shiver an old oak to splinters.”

“Whenever I come here,” Mary blurted out, “I realize how small I am, and how great time is. We are here for only seconds, and then we are gone, and these rocks, this river, will long survive us. And through it all we are alone.”

Frankenstein turned toward her. “Surely you are not so lonely. You have your family, your sisters. Your mother and father.”

“One can be alone in a room of people. Kitty mocks me for my ‘heaps of bones.’ ”

“A person may marry.”

“I am twenty-eight years old, sir. I am no man’s vision of a lover or wife.”

What had come over her, to say this aloud, for the first time in her life? Yet what did it matter what she said to this foreigner? There was no point in letting some hope for sympathy delude her into greater hopes. They had danced a single dance in London, and now they spent an afternoon together; soon he would leave England, marry his cousin, and Mary would never see him again. She deserved Kitty’s mockery.

Frankenstein took some time before answering, during which Mary was acutely aware of the sound of the waters, and of the sight of Georgiana, William, and Clerval playing in the grass by the riverbank, while Kitty stood pensive some distance away.

“Miss Bennet, I am sorry if I have made light of your situation. But your fine qualities should be apparent to anyone who took the trouble truly to make your acquaintance. Your knowledge of matters of science only adds to my admiration.”

“You needn’t flatter me,” said Mary. “I am unused to it.”

“I do not flatter,” Frankenstein replied. “I speak my own mind.”

William came running up. “Aunt Mary! This would be an excellent place to fish! We should come here with Father!”

“That’s a good idea, Will.”

Frankenstein turned to the others. “We must return to the hotel, Henry,” he told Clerval. “I need to see that new glassware properly packed before shipping it ahead.”

“Very well.”

“Glassware?” Georgiana asked.

Clerval chuckled. “Victor has been purchasing equipment at every stop along our tour—glassware, bottles of chemicals, lead and copper disks. The coachmen threaten to leave us behind if he does not ship these things separately.”

Kitty argued in vain, but the party walked back to Matlock. The women and William met the carriage to take them back to Pemberley. “I hope I see you again, Miss Bennet,” Frankenstein said. Had she been more accustomed to reading the emotions of others she would have ventured that his expression held sincere interest—even longing.

On the way back to Pemberley William prattled with Georgiana. Kitty, subdued for once, leaned back with her eyes closed, while Mary puzzled over every moment of the afternoon. The fundamental sympathy she had felt with Frankenstein in their brief London encounter had been only reinforced. His sudden dark moods, his silences, bespoke some burden he carried. Mary was almost convinced that her mother was right—that Frankenstein did not love his cousin, and that he was here in England fleeing from her. How could this second meeting with him be chance? Fate had brought them together.

At dinner that evening, Kitty told Darcy and Elizabeth about their encounter with the handsome Swiss tourists. Later, Mary took Lizzy aside and asked her to invite Clerval and Frankenstein to dinner.

“This is new!” said Lizzy. “I expected this from Kitty, but not you. You have never before asked to have a young man come to Pemberley.”

“I have never met someone quite like Mr. Frankenstein,” Mary replied.

“Have you taken the Matlock waters?” Mary asked Clerval, who was seated opposite her at the dinner table. “People in the parish say that a dip in the hot springs could raise the dead.”

“I confess that I have not,” Clerval said. “Victor does not believe in their healing powers.”

Mary turned to Frankenstein, hoping to draw him into discussion of the matter, but the startled expression on his face silenced her.

The table, covered with a blinding white damask tablecloth, glittered with silver and crystal. A large epergne, studded with lit beeswax candles, dominated its center. In addition to the family members, and in order to even the number of guests and balance female with male, Darcy and Elizabeth had invited the vicar, Mr. Chatsworth. Completing the dinner party were Bingley and Jane, Georgiana, and Kitty.

The footmen brought soup, followed by claret, turbot with lobster and Dutch sauce, oyster pâté, lamb cutlets with asparagus, peas, a fricandeau à l’oseille, venison, stewed beef à la jardinière, with various salads, beetroot, French and English mustard. Two ices, cherry water and pineapple cream, and a chocolate cream with strawberries. Champagne flowed throughout the dinner, and Madeira afterward.

Darcy inquired of Mr. Clerval’s business in England, and Clerval told of his meetings with men of business in London, and his interest in India. He had even begun the study of the language, and for their entertainment spoke a few sentences in Hindi. Darcy told of his visit to Geneva a decade ago. Clerval spoke charmingly of the differences in manners between the Swiss and the English, with witty preference for English habits, except, he said, in the matter of boiled meats. Georgiana asked about women’s dress on the continent. Elizabeth allowed as how, if they could keep him safe, it would be good for William’s education to tour the continent. Kitty, who usually dominated the table with bright talk and jokes, was unusually quiet. The Vicar spoke amusingly of his travels in Italy.

Through all of this, Frankenstein offered little in the way of response or comment. Mary had put such hopes on this dinner, and now she feared she had misread him. His voice warmed but once, when he spoke of his father, a counselor and syndic, renowned for his integrity. Only on inquiry would he speak of his years in Ingolstadt.

“And what did you study in the university?” Bingley asked.

“Matters of no interest,” Frankenstein replied.

An uncomfortable silence followed. Clerval gently explained, “My friend devoted himself so single-mindedly to the study of natural philosophy that his health failed. I was fortunately able to bring him back to us, but it was a near thing.”

“For which I will ever be grateful to you,” Frankenstein mumbled.

Lizzy attempted to change the subject. “Reverend Chatsworth, what news is there of the parish?”

The vicar, unaccustomed to such volume and variety of drink, was in his cups, his face flushed and his voice rising to pulpit volume. “Well, I hope the ladies will not take it amiss,” he boomed, “if I tell about a curious incident that occurred last night!”

“Pray do.”

“So, then—last night I was troubled with sleeplessness—I think it was the trout I ate for supper, it was not right—Mrs. Croft vowed she had purchased it just that afternoon, but I wonder if perhaps it might have been from the previous day’s catch. Be that as it may, lying awake some time after midnight, I thought I heard a scraping out my bedroom window—the weather has been so fine of late that I sleep with my window open. It is my opinion, Mr. Clerval, that nothing aids the lungs more than fresh air, and I believe that is the opinion of the best continental thinkers, is it not? The air is exceedingly fresh in the alpine meadows, I am told?”

“Only in those meadows where the cows have not been feeding.”

“The cows? Oh, yes, the cows—ha, ha!—very good! The cows, indeed! So, where was I? Ah, yes. I rose from my bed and looked out the window, and what did I spy but a light in the churchyard. I threw on my robe and slippers and hurried out to see what might be the matter.

“As I approached the churchyard I saw a dark figure wielding a spade. His back was to me, silhouetted by a lamp which rested beside Nancy Brown’s grave. Poor Nancy, dead not a week now, so young, only seventeen.”

“A man?” said Kitty.

The vicar’s round face grew serious. “You may imagine my shock. ‘Halloo!’ I shouted. At that the man dropped his spade, seized the lantern and dashed round the back of the church. By the time I had reached the corner he was out of sight. Back at the grave I saw that he had been on a fair way to unearthing poor Nancy’s coffin!”

“My goodness!” said Jane.

“Defiling a grave?” asked Bingley. “I am astonished.”

Darcy said nothing, but his look demonstrated that he was not pleased by the vicar bringing such an uncouth matter to his dinner table. Frankenstein, sitting next to Mary, put down his knife and took a long draught of Madeira.

The vicar lowered his voice. He was clearly enjoying himself. “I can only speculate on what motive this man might have had. Could it have been some lover of hers, overcome with grief ?”

“No man is so faithful,” Kitty said.

“My dear vicar,” said Lizzy. “You have read too many of Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels.”

Darcy leaned back in his chair. “Gypsies have been seen in the woods about the quarry. It was no doubt their work. They were seeking jewelry.”

“Jewelry?” the vicar said. “The Browns had barely enough money to see her decently buried.”

“Which proves that whoever did this was not a local man.”

Clerval spoke. “At home, fresh graves are sometimes defiled by men providing cadavers to doctors. Was there not a spate of such grave robbings in Ingolstadt, Victor?”

Frankenstein put down his glass. “Yes,” he said. “Some anatomists, in seeking knowledge, will abandon all human scruple.”

“I do not think that is likely to be the cause in this instance,” Darcy observed. “Here there is no university, no medical school. Doctor Phillips, in Lambton, is no transgressor of civilized rules.”

“He is scarcely a transgressor of his own threshold,” said Lizzy. “One must call him a day in advance to get him to leave his parlor.”

“Rest assured, there are such men,” said Frankenstein. “I have known them. My illness, as Henry has described to you, was in some way my spirit’s rebellion against the understanding that the pursuit of knowledge will lead some men into mortal peril.”

Here was Mary’s chance to impress Frankenstein. “Surely there is a nobility in risking one’s life to advance the claims of one’s race. With how many things are we upon the brink of becoming acquainted, if cowardice or carelessness did not restrain our inquiries?”

“Then I thank God for cowardice and carelessness, Miss Bennet,” Frankenstein said, “One’s life, perhaps, is worth risking, but not one’s soul.”

“True enough. But I believe that science may demand our relaxing the strictures of common society.”

“We have never heard this tone from you, Mary,” Jane said.

Darcy interjected, “You are becoming quite modern, sister. What strictures are you prepared to abandon for us tonight?” His voice was full of the gentle condescension with which he treated Mary at all times.

How she wished to surprise them! How she longed to show Darcy and Lizzy, with their perfect marriage and perfect lives, that she was not the simple old maid they thought her. “Anatomists in London have obtained the court’s permission to dissect the bodies of criminals after execution. Is it unjust to use the body of a murderer, who has already forfeited his own life, to save the lives of the innocent?”

“My uncle, who is on the bench, has spoken of such cases,” Bingley said.

“Not only that,” Mary added. “Have you heard of the experiments of the Italian scientist Aldini? Last summer in London at the Royal College of Surgeons he used a powerful battery to animate portions of the body of a hanged man. According to the Times, the spectators genuinely believed that the body was about to come to life!”

“Mary, please!” said Lizzy.

“You need to spend less time on your horrid books,” Kitty laughed. “No suitor is going to want to talk with you about dead bodies.”

And so Kitty was on their side, too. Her mockery only made Mary more determined to force Frankenstein to speak. “What do you say, sir? Will you come to my defense?”

Frankenstein carefully folded his napkin and set it beside his plate. “Such attempts are not motivated by bravery, or even curiosity, but by ambition. The pursuit of knowledge can become a vice deadly as any of the more common sins. Worse still, because even the most noble of natures are susceptible to such temptations. None but he who has experienced them can conceive of the enticements of science.”

The vicar raised his glass. “Mr. Frankenstein, truer words have never been spoken. The man who defiled poor Nancy’s grave has placed himself beyond the mercy of a forgiving God.”

Mary felt charged with contradictory emotions. “You have experienced such enticements, Mr. Frankenstein?”

“Sadly, I have.”

“But surely there is no sin that is beyond the reach of God’s mercy? ‘To know all is to forgive all.’ ”

The vicar turned to her. “My child, what know you of sin?”

“Very little, Mr. Chatsworth, except of idleness. Yet I feel that even a wicked person can have the veil lifted from his eyes.”

Frankenstein looked at her. “Here I must agree with Miss Bennet. I have to believe that even the most corrupted nature is susceptible to grace. If I did not think this were possible, I could not live.”

“Enough of this talk,” insisted Darcy. “Vicar, I suggest you mind your parishioners, including those in the churchyard, more carefully. But now I, for one, am eager to hear Miss Georgiana play the pianoforte. And perhaps Miss Mary and Miss Catherine will join her. We must uphold the accomplishments of English maidenhood before our foreign guests.”

ON KITTY’S INSISTENCE, the next morning, despite lowering clouds and a chill in the air that spoke more of March than late May, she and Mary took a walk along the river.

They walked along the stream that ran from the estate toward the Derwent. Kitty remained silent. Mary’s thoughts turned to the wholly unsatisfying dinner of the previous night. The conversation in the parlor had gone no better than dinner. Mary had played the piano ill, showing herself to poor advantage next to the accomplished Georgiana. Under Jane and Lizzy’s gaze she felt the folly of her intemperate speech at the table. Frankenstein said next to nothing to her for the rest of the evening; he almost seemed wary of being in her presence.

She was wondering how he was spending this morning when, suddenly turning her face from Mary, Kitty burst into tears.

Mary touched her arm. “Whatever is the matter, Kitty?”

“Do you believe what you said last night?”

“What did I say?”

“That there is no sin beyond the reach of God’s mercy?”

“Of course I do! Why would you ask?”

“Because I have committed such a sin!” She covered her eyes with her hand. “Oh, no, I mustn’t speak of it!”

Mary refrained from pointing out that, having made such a provocative admission, Kitty could hardly remain silent—and undoubtedly had no intention of doing so. But Kitty’s intentions were not always transparent to Mary.

After some coaxing and a further walk along the stream, Kitty was prepared finally to unburden herself. It seemed that, from the previous summer she had maintained a secret admiration for a local man from Matlock, Robert Piggot, son of the butcher. Though his family was quite prosperous and he stood to inherit the family business, he was in no way a gentleman, and Kitty had vowed never to let her affections overwhelm her sense.

But, upon their recent return to Pemberley, she had encountered Robert on her first visit to town, and she had been secretly meeting with him when she went into Matlock on the pretext of shopping. Worse still, the couple had allowed their passion to get the better of them, and Kitty had given way to carnal love.

The two sisters sat on a fallen tree in the woods as Kitty poured out her tale. “I want so much to marry him.” Her tears flowed readily. “I do not want to be alone, I don’t want to die an old maid! And Lydia—Lydia told me about—about the act of love, how wonderful it was, how good Wickham makes her feel. She boasted of it! And I said, why should vain Lydia have this, and me have nothing, to waste my youth in conversation and embroidery, in listening to Mother prattle and Father throw heavy sighs. Father thinks me a fool, unlikely ever to find a husband. And now he’s right!” Kitty burst into wailing again. “He’s right! No man shall ever have me!” Her tears ended in a fit of coughing.

“Oh, Kitty,” Mary said.

“When Darcy spoke of English maidenhood last night, it was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears. You must get Father to agree to let me marry Robert.”

“Has he asked you to marry him?”

“He shall. He must. You don’t know how fine a man he is. Despite the fact that he is in trade, he has the gentlest manners. I don’t care if he is not well born.”

Mary embraced Kitty. Kitty alternated between sobs and fits of coughing. Above them the thunder rumbled, and the wind rustled the trees. Mary felt Kitty’s shivering body. She needed to calm her, to get her back to the house. How frail, how slender her sister was.

She did not know what to say. Once Mary would have self-righteously condemned Kitty. But much that Kitty said was the content of her own mind, and Kitty’s fear of dying alone was her own fear. As she searched for some answer, Mary heard the sound of a torrent of rain hitting the canopy of foliage above them. “You have been foolish,” Mary said, holding her.

“But it may not be so bad.”

Kitty trembled in her arms, and spoke into Mary’s shoulder. “But will you ever care for me again? What if Father should turn me out? What will I do then?”

The rain was falling through now, coming down hard. Mary felt her hair getting soaked. “Calm yourself. Father would do no such thing. I shall never forsake you. Jane would not, nor Lizzy.”

“What if I should have a child!”

Mary pulled Kitty’s shawl over her head. She looked past Kitty’s shoulder to the dark woods. Something moved there. “You shan’t have a child.”

“You can’t know! I may!”

The woods had become dark with the rain. Mary could not make out what lurked there. “Come, let us go back. You must compose yourself. We shall speak with Lizzy and Jane. They will know—”

Just then a flash of lightning lit the forest, and Mary saw, beneath the trees not ten feet from them, the giant figure of a man. The lightning illuminated a face of monstrous ugliness: Long, thick, tangled black hair. Yellow skin the texture of dried leather, black eyes sunken deep beneath heavy brows. Worst of all, an expression hideous in its cold, inexpressible hunger. All glimpsed in a split second; then the light fell to shadow.

Mary gasped, and pulled Kitty toward her. A great peal of thunder rolled across the sky.

Kitty stopped crying. “What is it?”

“We must go. Now.” Mary seized Kitty by the arm. The rain pelted down on them, and the forest path was already turning to mud.

Mary pulled her toward the house, Kitty complaining. Mary could hear nothing over the drumming of the rain. But when she looked over her shoulder, she caught a glimpse of the brutish figure, keeping to the trees, but swiftly, silently moving along behind them.

“Why must we run?” Kitty gasped.

“Because we are being followed!”

“By whom?”

“I don’t know!”

Behind them, Mary thought she heard the man croak out some words:

“Halt! Bitter!”

They had not reached the edge of the woods when figures appeared ahead of them, coming from Pemberley. “Miss Bennet! Mary! Kitty!”

The figures resolved themselves into Darcy and Mr. Frankenstein. Darcy carried a cloak, which he threw over them. “Are you all right?” Frankenstein asked.

“Thank you!” Mary gasped. “A man. He’s there,” she pointed, “following us.”

Frankenstein took a few steps beyond them down the path. “Who was it?” Darcy asked.

“Some brute. Hideously ugly,” Mary said.

Frankenstein came back. “No one is there.”

“We saw him!”

Another lighting flash, and crack of thunder. “It is very dark, and we are in a storm,” Frankenstein said.

“Come, we must get you back to the house,” Darcy said. “You are wet to the bone.”

The men helped them back to Pemberley, trying their best to keep the rain off the sisters.

Darcy went off to find Bingley and Clerval, who had taken the opposite direction in their search. Lizzy saw that Mary and Kitty were made dry and warm. Kitty’s cough worsened, and Lizzy insisted she must be put to bed. Mary sat with Kitty, whispered a promise to keep her secret, and waited until she slept. Then she went down to meet the others in the parlor.

“This chill shall do her no good,” Jane said. She chided Mary for wandering off in such threatening weather. “I thought you had developed more sense, Mary. Mr. Frankenstein insisted he help to find you, when he realized you had gone out into the woods.”

“I am sorry,” Mary said. “You are right.” She was distracted by Kitty’s plight, wondering what she might do. If Kitty were indeed with child, there would be no helping her.

Mary recounted her story of the man in the woods. Darcy said he had seen no one, but allowed that someone might have been there. Frankenstein, rather than engage in the speculation, stood at the tall windows staring across the lawn through the rain toward the tree line.

“This intruder was some local poacher, or perhaps one of those gypsies,” said Darcy. “When the rain ends I shall have Mr. Mowbray take some men to check the grounds. We shall also inform the constable.”

“I hope this foul weather will induce you to stay with us a few more days, Mr. Frankenstein,” Lizzy ventured. “You have no pressing business in Matlock, do you?”

“No. But we were to travel north by the end of this week.”

“Surely we might stay a while longer, Victor,” said Clerval. “Your research can wait for you in Scotland.”

Frankenstein struggled with his answer. “I don’t think we should prevail on these good people any more.”

“Nonsense,” said Darcy. “We are fortunate for your company.”

“Thank you,”Frankenstein said uncertainly. But when the conversation moved elsewhere, Mary noticed him once again staring out the window. She moved to sit beside him. On an impulse, she said to him, sotto voce, “Did you know this man we came upon in the woods?”

“I saw no one. Even if someone was there, how should I know some English vagabond?”

“I do not think he was English. When he called after us, it was in German. Was this one of your countrymen?”

A look of impatience crossed Frankenstein’s face, and he lowered his eyes. “Miss Bennet, I do not wish to contradict you, but you are mistaken. I saw no one in the woods.”

Kitty developed a fever, and did not leave her bed for the rest of the day. Mary sat with her, trying, without bringing up the subject of Robert Piggot, to quiet her.

It was still raining when Mary retired, to a separate bedroom from the one she normally shared with Kitty. Late that night, Mary was wakened by the opening of her bedroom door. She thought it might be Lizzy to tell her something about Kitty. But it was not Lizzy.

Rather than call out, she watched silently as a dark figure entered and closed the door behind. The remains of her fire threw faint light on the man as he approached her. “Miss Bennet,” he called softly.

Her heart was in her throat. “Yes, Mr. Frankenstein.”

“Please do not take alarm. I must speak with you.” He took two sudden steps toward her bed. His handsome face was agitated. No man, in any circumstances remotely resembling these, had ever broached her bedside. Yet the racing of her heart was not entirely a matter of fear.

“This, sir, is hardly the place for polite conversation,” she said. “Following on your denial of what I saw this afternoon, you are fortunate that I do not wake the servants and have you thrown out of Pemberley.”

“You are right to chide me. My conscience chides me more than you ever could, and should I be thrown from your family’s gracious company it would be less than I deserve. And I am afraid that nothing I have to say to you tonight shall qualify as polite conversation.” His manner was greatly changed; there was a sound of desperation in his whisper. He wanted something from her, and he wanted it a great deal.

Curious, despite herself, Mary drew on her robe and lit a candle. She made him sit in one of the chairs by the fire and poked the coals into life. When she had settled herself in the other, she said, “Go on.”

“Miss Bennet, please do not toy with me. You know why I am here.”

“Know, sir? What do I know?”

He leaned forward, earnestly, hands clasped and elbows on his knees. “I come to beg you to keep silent. The gravest consequences would follow your revealing my secret.”

“Silent?”

“About—about the man you saw.”

“You do know him!”

“Your mockery at dinner convinced me that, after hearing the vicar’s story, you suspected. Raising the dead, you said to Clerval—and then your tale of Professor Aldini. Do not deny it.”

“I don’t pretend to know what you are talking about.”

Frankenstein stood from his chair and began to pace the floor before the hearth. “Please! I saw the look of reproach in your eyes when we found you in the forest. I am trying to make right what I put wrong. But I will never be able to do so if you tell.”To Mary’s astonishment, she saw, in the firelight, that his eyes glistened with tears.

“Tell me what you did.”

And with that the story burst out of him. He told her how, after his mother’s death, he longed to conquer death itself, how he had studied chemistry at the university, how he had uncovered the secret of life. How, emboldened and driven on by his solitary obsession, he had created a man from the corpses he had stolen from graveyards and purchased from resurrection men. How he had succeeded, through his science, in bestowing it with life.

Mary did not know what to say to this astonishing tale. It was the raving of a lunatic—but there was the man she had seen in the woods. And the earnestness with which Frankenstein spoke, his tears and desperate whispers, gave every proof that, at least in his mind, he had done these things. He told of his revulsion at his accomplishment, how he had abandoned the creature, hoping it would die, and how the creature had, in revenge, killed his brother William and caused his family’s ward Justine to be blamed for the crime.

“But why did you not intervene in Justine’s trial?”

“No one should have believed me.”

“Yet I am to believe you now?”

Frankenstein’s voice was choked. “You have seen the brute. You know that these things are possible. Lives are at stake. I come to you in remorse and penitence, asking only that you keep this secret.” He fell to his knees, threw his head into her lap, and clutched at the sides of her gown.

Frankenstein was wholly mistaken in what she knew; he was a man who did not see things clearly. Yet if his story were true, it was no wonder that his judgment was disordered. And here he lay, trembling against her, a boy seeking forgiveness. No man had ever come to her in such need.

She tried to keep her senses. “Certainly the creature I saw was frightening, but to my eyes he appeared more wretched than menacing.”

Frankenstein lifted his head. “Here I must warn you—his wretchedness is mere mask. Do not let your sympathy for him cause you ever to trust his nature. He is the vilest creature that has ever walked this earth. He has no soul.”

“Why then not invoke the authorities, catch him, and bring him to justice?”

“He cannot be so easily caught. He is inhumanly strong, resourceful, and intelligent. If you should ever be so unlucky as to speak with him, I warn you not to listen to what he says, for he is immensely articulate and satanically persuasive.”

“All the more reason to see him apprehended!”

“I am convinced that he can be dealt with only by myself.”

Frankenstein’s eyes pleaded with her. “Miss Bennet—Mary—you must understand. He is in some ways my son. I gave him life. His mind is fixed on me.”

“And, it seems, yours on him.”

Frankenstein looked surprised. “Do you wonder that is so?”

“Why does he follow you? Does he intend you harm?”

“He has vowed to glut the maw of death with my remaining loved ones, unless I make him happy.” He rested his head again in her lap.

Mary was touched, scandalized, and in some obscure way aroused. She felt his trembling body, instinct with life. Tentatively, she rested her hand on his head. She stroked his hair. He was weeping. She realized that he was a physical being, a living animal, that would eventually, too soon, die. And all that was true of him was true of herself. How strange, frightening, and sad. Yet in this moment she felt herself wonderfully alive.

“I’ll keep your secret,” she said.

He hugged her skirts. In the candle’s light, she noted the way his thick, dark hair curled away from his brow.

“I cannot tell you,” he said softly, “what a relief it is to share my burden with another soul, and to have her accept me. I have been so completely alone. I cannot thank you enough.”

He rose, kissed her forehead, and was gone.

Mary paced her room, trying to grasp what had just happened. A man who had conquered death? A monster created from corpses? Such things did not happen, certainly not in her world, not even in the world of the novels she read. She climbed into bed and tried to sleep, but could not. The creature had vowed to kill all whom Frankenstein loved. Mary remembered the weight of his head upon her lap.

The room felt stiflingly hot. She got up, stripped off her nightgown, and climbed back between the sheets, where she lay naked, listening to the rain on the window.

KITTY’S FEVER WORSENED in the night, and before dawn Darcy sent to Lambton for the doctor. Lizzy dispatched an urgent letter to Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, and the sisters sat by Kitty’s bedside through the morning, changing cold compresses from her brow while Kitty labored to breathe. When Mary left the sick room, Frankenstein approached her. His desperation of the previous night was gone. “How fares your sister?”

“I fear she is gravely ill.”

“She is in some danger?”

Mary could only nod.

He touched her shoulder, lowered his voice. “I will pray for her, Miss Bennet. I cannot thank you enough for the sympathy you showed me last night. I have never told anyone—”

Just then Clerval approached them. He greeted Mary, inquired after Kitty’s condition, then suggested to Frankenstein that they return to their hotel in Matlock rather than add any burden to the household and family. Frankenstein agreed. Before Mary could say another word to him in private, the visitors were gone.

Doctor Phillips arrived soon after Clerval and Frankenstein left. He measured Kitty’s pulse, felt her forehead, examined her urine. He administered some medicines, and came away shaking his head. Should the fever continue, he said, they must bleed her.

Given how much thought she had spent on Frankenstein through the night, and how little she had devoted to Kitty, Mary’s conscience tormented her. She spent the day in her sister’s room. That night, after Jane had retired and Lizzy fallen asleep in her chair, she still sat up, holding Kitty’s fevered hand. She had matters to consider. Was Kitty indeed with child, and if so, should she tell the doctor? Yet even as she sat by Kitty’s bedside, Mary’s mind cast back to the feeling of Frankenstein’s lips on her forehead.

In the middle of the night, Kitty woke, bringing Mary from her doze. Kitty tried to lift her head from the pillow, but could not. “Mary,” she whispered. “You must send for Robert. We must be married immediately.”

Mary looked across the room at Lizzy. She was still asleep.

“Promise me,” Kitty said. Her eyes were large and dark.

“I promise,” Mary said.

“Prepare my wedding dress,” Kitty said. “But don’t tell Lizzy.”

Lizzy awoke then. She came to the bedside and felt Kitty’s forehead. “She’s burning up. Get Dr. Phillips.”

Mary sought out the doctor, and then, while he went to Kitty’s room, pondered what to do. Kitty clearly was not in her right mind. Her request ran contrary to both sense and propriety. If Mary sent one of the footmen to Matlock for Robert, even if she swore her messenger to silence, the matter would soon be the talk of the servants, and probably the town.

It was the sort of dilemma that Mary would have had no trouble settling, to everyone’s moral edification, when she was sixteen. She hurried to her room and took out paper and pen:

I write to inform you that one you love, residing at Pemberley House,
is gravely ill. She urgently requests your presence. Simple human
kindness, which from her description of you I do not doubt you
possess, let alone the duty incumbent upon you owing to the compact
that you have made with her through your actions, assure me that we
shall see you here before the night is through.

Miss Mary Bennet

She sealed the letter and sought out one of the footmen, whom she dispatched immediately with the instruction to put the letter into the hand of Robert Piggot, son of the Matlock butcher.

Dr. Phillips bled Kitty, with no improvement. She did not regain consciousness through the night. Mary waited. The footman returned, alone, at six in the morning. He assured Mary that he had ridden to the Piggot home and given the letter directly to Robert. Mary thanked him.

Robert did not come. At eight in the morning Darcy sent for the priest. At nine-thirty Kitty died.

ON THE EVENING of the day of Kitty’s passing, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet arrived, and a day later Lydia and Wickham—it was the first time Darcy had allowed Wickham to cross the threshold of Pemberley since they had become brothers by marriage. In the midst of her mourning family, Mary felt lost. Jane and Lizzy supported each other in their grief. Darcy and Bingley exchanged quiet, sober conversation. Wickham and Lydia, who had grown fat with her three children, could not pass a word between them without sniping, but in their folly they were completely united.

Mrs. Bennet was beyond consoling, and the volume and intensity of her mourning was exceeded only by the degree to which she sought to control every detail of Kitty’s funeral. There ensued a long debate over where Kitty should be buried. When it was pointed out that their cousin Mr. Collins would eventually inherit the house back in Hertfordshire, Mrs. Bennet fell into despair: who, when she was gone, would tend to her poor Kitty’s grave? Mr. Bennet suggested that Kitty be laid to rest in the churchyard at Lambton, a short distance from Pemberley, where she might also be visited by Jane and Bingley. But when Mr. Darcy offered the family vault at Pemberley, the matter was quickly settled to the satisfaction of both tender hearts and vanity.

Though it was no surprise to Mary, it was still a burden for her to witness that even in the gravest passage of their lives, her sisters and parents showed themselves to be exactly what they were. And yet, paradoxically, this did not harden her heart toward them. The family was together as they had not been for many years, and she realized that they should never be in the future except on the occasion of further losses. Her father was grayer and quieter than she had ever seen him, and on the day of the funeral even her mother put aside her sobbing and exclamations long enough to show a face of profound grief, and a burden of age that Mary had never before noticed.

The night after Kitty was laid to rest, Mary sat up late with Jane and Lizzy and Lydia. They drank Madeira and Lydia told many silly stories of the days she and Kitty had spent in flirtations with the regiment. Mary climbed into her bed late that night, her head swimming with wine, laughter, and tears. She lay awake, the moonlight shining on the counterpane through the opened window, air carrying the smell of fresh earth and the rustle of trees above the lake. She drifted into a dreamless sleep. At some point in the night she was half awakened by the barking of the dogs in the kennel. But consciousness soon faded and she fell away.

In the morning it was discovered that the vault had been broken into and Kitty’s body stolen from her grave.

MARY TOLD the stablemaster that Mrs. Bennet had asked her to go to the apothecary in Lambton, and had him prepare the gig for her. Then, while the house was in turmoil and Mrs. Bennet being attended by the rest of the family, she drove off to Matlock. The master had given her the best horse in Darcy’s stable; the creature was equable and quick, and despite her inexperience driving, Mary was able to reach Matlock in an hour.

All the time, despite the splendid summer morning and the picturesque prospects which the valley of the Derwent continually unfolded before her, she could not keep her mind from whirling through a series of distressing images—among them the sight of Frankenstein’s creature as she had seen him in the woods.

When she reached Matlock she hurried to the Old Bath Hotel and inquired after Frankenstein. The concierge told her that he had not seen Mr. Frankenstein since dinner the previous evening, but that Mr. Clerval had told him that morning that the gentlemen would leave Matlock later that day. She left a note asking Frankenstein, should he return, to meet her at the inn, then went to the butcher shop.

Mary had been there once before, with Lizzy, some years earlier. The shop was busy with servants purchasing joints of mutton and ham for the evening meal. Behind the counter, Mr. Piggot senior was busy at his cutting board, but helping one of the women with a package was a tall young man with thick brown curls and green eyes. He flirted with the house servant as he shouldered her purchase, wrapped in brown paper, onto her cart.

On the way back into the shop, he spotted Mary standing unattended. He studied her for a moment before approaching. “May I help you, miss?”

“I believe you knew my sister.”

His grin vanished. “You are Miss Mary Bennet.”

“I am.”

The young man studied his boots. “I am so sorry what happened to Miss Catherine.”

Not so sorry as to bring you to her bedside before she died, Mary thought. She bit back a reproach and said, “We did not see you at the service. I thought perhaps the nature of your relationship might have encouraged you to grieve in private, at her graveside. Have you been there?”

He looked even more uncomfortable. “No. I had to work. My father—”

Mary had seen enough already to measure his depth. He was not a man to defile a grave, in grief or otherwise. The distance between this small-town lothario—handsome, careless, insensitive—and the hero Kitty had praised, only deepened Mary’s compassion for her lost sister. How desperate she must have been. How pathetic.

As Robert Piggot continued to stumble through his explanation, Mary turned and departed.

She went back to the inn where she had left the gig. The barkeep led her into a small ladies’ parlor separated from the taproom by a glass partition. She ordered tea, and through a latticed window watched the people come and go in the street and courtyard, the draymen with their percherons and carts, the passengers waiting for the next van to Manchester, and inside, the idlers sitting at tables with pints of ale. In the sunlit street a young bootblack accosted travelers, most of whom ignored him. All of these people alive, completely unaware of Mary or her lost sister. Mary ought to be back with their mother, though the thought turned her heart cold. How could Kitty have left her alone? She felt herself near despair.

She was watching through the window as two draymen struggled to load a large square trunk onto their cart when the man directing them came from around the team of horses, and she saw it was Frankenstein. She rose immediately and went out into the inn yard. She was at his shoulder before he noticed her. “Miss Bennet!”

“Mr. Frankenstein. I am so glad that I found you. I feared that you had already left Matlock. May we speak somewhere in private?”

He looked momentarily discommoded. “Yes, of course,” he said. To the draymen he said, “When you’ve finished loading my equipment, wait here.”

“This is not a good place to converse,” Frankenstein told her. “I saw a churchyard nearby. Let us retire there.”

He walked Mary down the street to the St. Giles Churchyard. They walked through the rectory garden. In the distance, beams of afternoon sunlight shone through a cathedral of clouds above the Heights of Abraham. “Do you know what has happened?” she asked.

“I have heard reports, quite awful, of the death of your sister. I intended to write you, conveying my condolences, at my earliest opportunity. You have my deepest sympathies.”

“Your creature! That monster you created—”

“I asked you to keep him a secret.”

“I have kept my promise—so far. But it has stolen Kitty’s body.”

He stood there, hands behind his back, clear eyes fixed on her. “You find me astonished. What draws you to this extraordinary conclusion?”

She was hurt by his diffidence. Was this the same man who had wept in her bedroom? “Who else might do such a thing?”

“But why? This creature’s enmity is reserved for me alone. Others feel its ire only to the extent that they are dear to me.”

“You came to plead with me that night because you feared I knew he was responsible for defiling that town girl’s grave. Why was he watching Kitty and me in the forest? Surely this is no coincidence.”

“If, indeed, the creature has stolen your sister’s body, it can be for no reason I can fathom, or that any God-fearing person ought to pursue. You know I am determined to see this monster banished from the world of men. You may rest assured that I will not cease until I have seen this accomplished. It is best for you and your family to turn your thoughts to other matters.” He touched a strand of ivy growing up the side of the garden wall, and plucked off a green leaf, which he twirled in his fingers.

She could not understand him. She knew him to be a man of sensibility, to have a heart capable of feeling. His denials opened a possibility that she had tried to keep herself from considering. “Sir, I am not satisfied. It seems to me that you are keeping something from me. You told me of the great grief you felt at the loss of your mother, how it moved you to your researches. If, as you say, you have uncovered the secret of life, might you—have you taken it upon yourself to restore Kitty? Perhaps a fear of failure, or of the horror that many would feel at your trespassing against God’s will, underlies your secrecy. If so, please do not keep the truth from me. I am not a girl.”

He let the leaf fall from his fingers. He took her shoulders, and looked directly into her eyes. “I am sorry, Mary. To restore your sister is not in my power. The soulless creature I brought to life bears no relation to the man from whose body I fashioned him. Your sister has gone on to her reward. Nothing—nothing I can do would bring her back.”

“So you know nothing about the theft of her corpse?”

“On that score, I can offer no consolation to you or your family.”

“My mother, my father—they are inconsolable.”

“Then they must content themselves with memories of your sister as she lived. As I must do with my dear, lost brother William, and the traduced and dishonored Justine. Come, let us go back to the inn.”

Mary burst into tears. He held her to him and she wept on his breast. Eventually she gathered herself and allowed him to take her arm, and they slowly walked back down to the main street of Matlock and the inn. She knew that when they reached it, Frankenstein would go. The warmth of his hand on hers almost made her beg him to stay, or better still, to take her with him.

They came to the busy courtyard. The dray stood off to the side, and Mary saw the cartmen were in the taproom. Frankenstein, agitated, upbraided them. “I thought I told you to keep those trunks out of the sun.”

The older of the two men put down his pint and stood, “Sorry, Gov’nor. We’ll see to it directly.”

“Do so now.”

As Frankenstein spoke the evening coach drew up before the inn and prepared for departure. “You and Mr. Clerval leave today?” Mary asked.

“Yes. As soon Henry arrives from the Old Bath, we take the coach to the Lake District. And thence to Scotland.”

“They say it is very beautiful there.”

“I am afraid that its beauty will be lost on me. I carry the burden of my great crime, not to be laid down until I have made things right.”

She felt that she would burst if she did not speak her heart to him. “Victor. Will I ever see you again?”

He avoided her gaze. “I am afraid, Miss Bennet, that this is unlikely. My mind is set on banishing that vile creature from the world of men. Only then can I hope to return home and marry my betrothed Elizabeth.”

Mary looked away from him. A young mother was adjusting her son’s collar before putting him on the coach. “Ah, yes. You are affianced. I had almost forgotten.”

Frankenstein pressed her hand. “Miss Bennet, you must forgive me the liberties I have taken with you. You have given me more of friendship than I deserve. I wish you to find the companion you seek, and to live your days in happiness. But now, I must go.”

“God be with you, Mr. Frankenstein.” She twisted her gloved fingers into a knot.

He bowed deeply, and hurried to have a few more words with the draymen. Henry Clerval arrived just as the men climbed to their cart and drove the baggage away. Clerval, surprised at seeing Mary, greeted her warmly. He expressed his great sorrow at the loss of her sister, and begged her to convey his condolences to the rest of her family. Ten minutes later the two men climbed aboard the coach and it left the inn, disappearing down the Matlock high street.

Mary stood in the inn yard. She did not feel she could bear to go back to Pemberley and face her family, the histrionics of her mother. Instead she reentered the inn and made the barkeep seat her in the ladies’ parlor and bring her a bottle of port.

The sun declined and shadows stretched over the inn yard. The evening papers arrived from Nottingham. The yard boy lit the lamps. Still, Mary would not leave. Outside on the pavements, the bootblack sat in the growing darkness with his arms draped over his knees and head on his breast. She listened to the hoofs of the occasional horse striking the cobbles. The innkeeper was solicitous. When she asked for a second bottle, he hesitated, and wondered if he might send for someone from her family to take her home.

“You do not know my family,” she said.

“Yes, miss. I only thought—”

“Another port. Then leave me alone.”

“Yes, miss.” He went away. She was determined to become intoxicated. How many times had she piously warned against young women behaving as she did now? Virtue is its own reward. She had an apothegm for every occasion, and had tediously produced them in place of thought. Show me a liar, and I’ll show thee a thief. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Men should be what they seem.

She did not fool herself into thinking that her current misbehavior would make any difference. Perhaps Bingley or Darcy had been dispatched to find her in Lambton. But within an hour or two she would return to Pemberley, where her mother would scold her for giving them an anxious evening, and Lizzy would caution her about the risk to her reputation. Lydia might even ask her, not believing it possible, if she had an assignation with some man. The loss of Kitty would overshadow Mary’s indiscretion, pitiful as it had been. Soon all would be as it had been, except Mary would be alive and Kitty dead. But even that would fade. The shadow of Kitty’s death would hang over the family for some time, but she doubted that anything of significance would change.

As she lingered over her glass, she looked up and noticed, in the now empty taproom, a man sitting at the table farthest from the lamps. A huge man, wearing rough clothes, his face hooded and in shadow. On the table in front of him was a tankard of ale and a few coppers. Mary rose, left the parlor for the taproom, and crossed toward him.

He looked up, and the faint light from the ceiling lamp caught his black eyes, sunken beneath heavy brows. He was hideously ugly. “May I sit with you?” she asked. She felt slightly dizzy.

“You may sit where you wish.” The voice was deep, but swallowed, unable to project. It was almost a whisper.

Trembling only slightly, she sat. His wrists and hands, resting on the table, stuck out past the ragged sleeves of his coat. His skin was yellowish brown, and the fingernails livid white. He did not move. “You have some business with me?”

“I have the most appalling business.” Mary tried to look him in the eyes, but her gaze kept slipping. “I want to know why you defiled my sister’s grave, why you have stolen her body, and what you have done with her.”

“Better you should ask Victor. Did he not explain all to you?”

“Mr. Frankenstein explained who—what—you are. He did not know what had become of my sister.”

The thin lips twitched in a sardonic smile. “Poor Victor. He has got things all topsy-turvy. Victor does not know what I am. He is incapable of knowing, no matter the labors I have undertaken to school him. But he does know what became, and is to become, of your sister.” The creature tucked the thick black hair behind his ear, a sudden unconscious gesture that made him seem completely human for the first time. He pulled the hood further forward to hide his face.

“So tell me.”

“Which answer do you want? Who I am, or what happened to your sister?”

“First, tell me what happened to—to Kitty.”

“Victor broke into the vault and stole her away. He took the utmost care not to damage her. He washed her fair body in diluted carbolic acid, and replaced her blood with a chemical admixture of his own devising. Folded up, she fit neatly within a cedar trunk sealed with pitch, and is at present being shipped to Scotland. You witnessed her departure from this courtyard an hour ago.”

Mary’s senses rebelled. She covered her face with her hands. The creature sat silent. Finally, without raising her head, she managed, “Victor warned me that you were a liar. Why should I believe you?”

“You have no reason to believe me.”

“You took her!”

“Though I would not have scrupled to do so, I did not. Miss Bennet, I do not deny I have an interest in this matter. Victor did as I have told you at my bidding.”

“At your bidding? Why?”

“Kitty—or not so much Kitty, as her remains—is to become my wife.”

“Your wife! This is insupportable! Monstrous!”

“Monstrous.” Suddenly, with preternatural quickness, his hand flashed out and grabbed Mary’s wrist.

Mary thought to call for help, but the bar was empty and she had driven the innkeeper away. Yet his grip was not harsh. His hand was warm, instinct with life. “Look at me,” he said. With his other hand he pushed back his hood.

She took a deep breath. She looked.

His noble forehead, high cheekbones, strong chin, and wide-set eyes might have made him handsome, despite the scars and dry yellow skin, were it not for his expression. His ugliness was not a matter of lack of proportion—or rather, the lack of proportion was not in his features. Like his swallowed voice, his face was submerged, as if everything was hidden, revealed only in the eyes, the twitch of a cheek or lip. Every minute motion showed extraordinary animation. Hectic sickliness, but energy. This was a creature who had never learned to associate with civilized company, who had been thrust into adulthood with the passions of a wounded boy. Fear, self-disgust, anger. Desire.

The force of longing and rage in that face made her shrink. “Let me go,” she whispered.

He let go her wrist. With bitter satisfaction, he said, “You see. If what I demand is insupportable, that is only because your kind has done nothing to support me. Once, I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of bringing forth. Now I am completely alone. More than any starving man on a deserted isle, I am cast away. I have no brother, sister, parents. I have only Victor, who, like so many fathers, recoiled from me the moment I first drew breath. And so, I have commanded him to make of your sister my wife, or he and all he loves will die at my hand.”

“No. I cannot believe he would commit this abomination.”

“He has no choice. He is my slave.”

“His conscience could not support it, even at the cost of his life.”

“You give him too much credit. You all do. He does not think. I have not seen him act other than according to impulse for the last three years. That is all I see in any of you.”

Mary drew back, trying to make some sense of this horror. Her sister, to be brought to life, only to be given to this fiend. But would it be her sister, or another agitated, hungry thing like this?

She still retained some scraps of skepticism. The creature’s manner did not bespeak the isolation which he claimed. “I am astonished at your grasp of language,” Mary said. “You could not know so much without teachers.”

“Oh, I have had many teachers.” The creature’s mutter was rueful. “You might say that, since first my eyes opened, mankind has been all my study. I have much yet to learn. There are certain words whose meaning has never been proved to me by experience. For example: Happy. Victor is to make me happy. Do you think he can do it?”

Mary thought of Frankenstein. Could he satisfy this creature? “I do not think it is in the power of any other person to make one happy.”

“You jest with me. Every creature has its mate, save me. I have none.”

She recoiled at his self-pity. Her fear faded. “You put too much upon having a mate.”

“Why? You know nothing of what I have endured.”

“You think that having a female of your own kind will ensure that she will accept you?” Mary laughed. “Wait until you are rejected, for the most trivial of reasons, by one you are sure has been made for you.”

A shadow crossed the creature’s face. “That will not happen.”

“It happens more often than not.”

“The female that Victor creates shall find no other mate than me.”

“That has never prevented rejection. Or if you should be accepted, then you may truly begin to learn.”

“Learn what?”

“You will learn to ask a new question: Which is worse, to be alone, or to be wretchedly mismatched?” Like Lydia and Wickham, Mary thought. Like Collins and his poor wife Charlotte. Like her parents.

The creature’s face spasmed with conflicting emotions. His voice gained volume. “Do not sport with me. I am not your toy.”

“No. You only seek a toy of your own.”

The creature was not, apparently, accustomed to mockery. “You must not say these things!” He lurched upward, awkwardly, so suddenly that he upended the table. The tankard of beer skidded across the top and spilled on Mary, and she fell back.

At that moment the innkeeper entered the bar room with two other men. They saw the tableau and rushed forward. “Here! Let her be!” he shouted. One of the other men grabbed the creature by the arm. With a roar the creature flung him aside like an old coat. His hood fell back. The men stared in horror at his face. The creature’s eyes met Mary’s, and with inhuman speed he whirled and ran out the door.

The men gathered themselves together. The one whom the creature had thrown aside had a broken arm. The innkeeper helped Mary to her feet. “Are you all right, miss?”

Mary felt dizzy. Was she all right? What did that mean?

“I believe so,” she said.

MHEN MARY RETURNED to Pemberley, late that night, she found the house in an uproar over her absence. Bingley and Darcy both had been to Lambton, and had searched the road and the woods along it throughout the afternoon and evening. Mrs. Bennet had taken to bed with the conviction that she had lost two daughters in a single week. Wickham condemned Mary’s poor judgment, Lydia sprang to Mary’s defense, and this soon became a row over Wickham’s lack of an income and Lydia’s mismanagement of their children. Mr. Bennett closed himself up in the library. Mary told them only that she had been to Matlock. She offered no explanation, no apology. Around the town the story of her conflict with the strange giant in the inn was spoken of for some time, along with rumors of Robert Piggot the butcher’s son, and the mystery of Kitty’s defiled grave—but as Mary was not a local, and nothing of consequence followed, the talk soon passed away. That winter, Mary came upon the following story in the Nottingham newspaper.

GHASTLY EVENTS

IN SCOTLAND

Our northern correspondent files the following report. In early November, the body of a young foreigner, Mr. Henry Clerval of Geneva, Switzerland, was found upon the beach near the far northern town of Thurso. The body, still warm, bore marks of strangulation. A second foreigner, Mr. Victor Frankstone, was taken into custody, charged with the murder, and held for two months. Upon investigation, the magistrate Mr. Kirwan determined that Mr. Frankstone was in the Orkney Islands at the time of the killing. The accused was released in the custody of his father, and is assumed to have returned to his home on the continent.

A month after the disposition of these matters, a basket, weighted with stones and containing the body of a young woman, washed up in the estuary of the River Thurso. The identity of the woman is unknown, and her murderer undiscovered, but it is speculated that the unfortunate may have died at the hands of the same person or persons who murdered Mr. Clerval. The woman was given Christian burial in the Thurso Presbyterian churchyard. The village has been shaken by these events, and prays God to deliver it from evil.

Oh, Victor, Mary thought. She remembered the pressure of his hand, through her dressing gown, upon her thigh. Now he had returned to Switzerland, there, presumably, to marry his Elizabeth. She hoped that he would be more honest with his wife than he had been with her, but the fate of Clerval did not bode well. And the creature still had no mate.

She clipped the newspaper report and slipped it into the drawer of her writing table, where she kept her copy of Samuel Galton’s The Natural History of Birds, Intended for the Amusement and Instruction of Children, and the Juvenile Anecdotes of Priscilla Wakefield, and a Dudley locust made of stone, and a paper fan from the first ball she had ever attended, and a dried wreath of flowers that had been thrown to her, when she was nine years old, from the top of a tree by one of the town boys playing near Meryton common.

After the death of her parents, Mary lived with Lizzy and Darcy at Pemberley for the remainder of her days. Under a pen name, she pursued a career as a writer of philosophical speculations, and sent many letters to the London newspapers. Aunt Mary, as she was called at home, was known for her kindness to William, and to his wife and children. The children teased Mary for her nearsightedness, her books, and her piano. But for a woman whose experience of the world was so slender, and whose soul it seemed had never been touched by any passion, she came at last to be respected for her understanding, her self-possession, and her wise counsel on matters of the heart.

THE RAY-GUN: A LOVE STORY

James Alan Gardner

This is a story about a ray-gun. The ray-gun will not be explained except to say, “It shoots rays.”

They are dangerous rays. If they hit you in the arm, it withers. If they hit you in the face, you go blind. If they hit you in the heart, you die. These things must be true, or else it would not be a ray-gun. But it is.

Rayguns come from space. This one came from the captain of an alien starship passing through our solar system. The ship stopped to scoop up hydrogen from the atmosphere of Jupiter. During this refueling process, the crew mutinied for reasons we cannot comprehend. We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood but we wouldn’t. Our brains only know how to be human.

Although alien thoughts are beyond us, alien actions may be easy to grasp. We can understand the “what” if not the “why.” If we saw what happened inside the alien vessel, we would recognize that the crew tried to take the captain’s ray-gun and kill him.

There was a fight. The ray-gun went off many times. The starship exploded.

All this happened many centuries ago, before telescopes. The people of Earth still wore animal skins. They only knew Jupiter as a dot in the sky. When the starship exploded, the dot got a tiny bit brighter, then returned to normal. No one on Earth noticed—not even the shamans who thought dots in the sky were important.

The ray-gun survived the explosion. A ray-gun must be resilient, or else it is not a ray-gun. The explosion hurled the ray-gun away from Jupiter and out into open space.

After thousands of years, the ray-gun reached Earth. It fell from the sky like a meteor; it grew hot enough to glow, but it didn’t burn up.

The ray-gun fell at night during a blizzard. Traveling thousands of miles an hour, the ray-gun plunged deep into snow-covered woods. The snow melted so quickly that it burst into steam.

The blizzard continued, unaffected. Some things can’t be harmed, even by rayguns.

Unthinking snowflakes drifted down. If they touched the ray-gun’s surface they vaporized, stealing heat from the weapon. Heat also radiated outward, melting snow nearby on the ground. Melt-water flowed into the shallow crater made by the raygun’s impact. Water and snow cooled the weapon until all excess temperature had dissipated. A million more snowflakes heaped over the crater, hiding the ray-gun till spring.

In March, the gun was found by a boy named Jack. He was fourteen years old and walking through the woods after school. He walked slowly, brooding about his lack of popularity. Jack despised popular students and had no interest in anything they did. Even so, he envied them. They didn’t appear to be lonely.

Jack wished he had a girlfriend. He wished he were important. He wished he knew what to do with his life. Instead, he walked alone in the woods on the edge of town.

The woods were not wild or isolated. They were crisscrossed with trails made by children playing hide-and-seek. But in spring, the trails were muddy; most people stayed away. Jack soon worried more about how to avoid shoe-sucking mud than about the unfairness of the world. He took wide detours around mucky patches, thrashing through brush that was crisp from winter.

Stalks broke as he passed. Burrs stuck to his jacket. He got farther and farther from the usual paths, hoping he’d find a way out by blundering forward rather than swallowing his pride and retreating.

In this way, Jack reached the spot where the ray-gun had landed. He saw the crater it had made. He found the ray-gun itself.

The gun seized Jack’s attention, but he didn’t know what it was. Its design was too alien to be recognized as a weapon. Its metal was blackened but not black, as if it had once been another color but had finished that phase of its existence. Its pistol-butt was bulbous, the size of a tennis ball. Its barrel, as long as Jack’s hand, was straight but its surface had dozens of nubs like a briarwood cane. The gun’s trigger was a protruding blister you squeezed till it popped. A hard metal cap could slide over the blister to prevent the gun from firing accidentally, but the safety was off; it had been off for centuries, ever since the fight on the starship.

The alien captain who once owned the weapon might have considered it beautiful, but to human eyes, the gun resembled a dirty wet stick with a lump on one end. Jack might have walked by without giving it a second look if it hadn’t been lying in a scorched crater. But it was.

The crater was two paces across and barren of plant life. The vegetation had burned in the heat of the ray-gun’s fall. Soon enough, new spring growth would sprout, making the crater less obvious. At present though, the ray-gun stood out on the charred earth like a snake in an empty birdbath.

Jack picked up the gun. Though it looked like briarwood, it was cold like metal. It felt solid: not heavy, but substantial. It had the heft of a well-made object. Jack turned the gun in his hands, examining it from every angle. When he looked down the muzzle, he saw a crystal lens cut into hundreds of facets. Jack poked it with his baby-finger, thinking the lens was a piece of glass that someone had jammed inside. He had the idea this might be a toy—perhaps a squirt-gun dropped by a careless child. If so, it had to be the most expensive toy Jack had ever seen. The gun’s barrel and its lens were so perfectly machined that no one could mistake the craftsman-ship.

Jack continued to poke at the weapon until the inevitable happened: he pressed the trigger blister. The ray-gun went off.

It might have been fatal, but by chance Jack was holding the gun aimed away from himself. A ray shot out of the gun’s muzzle and blasted through a maple tree ten paces away. The ray made no sound, and although Jack had seen it clearly, he couldn’t say what the ray’s color had been. It had no color; it was simply a presence, like wind-chill or gravity. Yet Jack was sure he’d seen a force emanate from the muzzle and strike the tree.

Though the ray can’t be described, its effect was plain. A circular hole appeared in the maple tree’s trunk where bark and wood disintegrated into sizzling plasma. The plasma expanded at high speed and pressure, blowing apart what remained of the surrounding trunk. The ray made no sound, but the explosion did. Shocked chunks of wood and boiling maple sap flew outward, obliterating a cross-section of the tree. The lower part of the trunk and the roots were still there; so were the upper part and branches. In between was a gap, filled with hot escaping gases.

The unsupported part of the maple fell. It toppled ponderously backwards. The maple crashed onto the trees behind, its winter-bare branches snagging theirs. To Jack, it seemed that the forest had stopped the maple’s fall, like soldiers catching an injured companion before he hit the ground.

Jack still held the gun. He gazed at it in wonder. His mind couldn’t grasp what had happened.

He didn’t drop the gun in fear. He didn’t try to fire it again. He simply stared.

It was a ray-gun. It would never be anything else.

Jack wondered where the weapon had come from. Had aliens visited these woods? Or was the gun created by a secret government project? Did the gun’s owner want it back? Was he, she or it searching the woods right now?

Jack was tempted to put the gun back into the crater, then run before the owner showed up. But was there really an owner nearby? The crater suggested that the gun had fallen from space. Jack had seen photos of meteor impact craters; this wasn’t exactly the same, but it had a similar look.

Jack turned his eyes upward. He saw a mundane after-school sky. It had no UFOs. Jack felt embarrassed for even looking.

He examined the crater again. If Jack left the gun here, and the owner never retrieved it, sooner or later the weapon would be found by someone else—probably by children playing in the woods. They might shoot each other by accident. If this were an ordinary gun, Jack would never leave it lying in a place like this. He’d take the gun home, tell his parents, and they’d turn it over to the police.

Should he do the same for this gun? No. He didn’t want to.

But he didn’t know what he wanted to do instead. Questions buzzed through his mind, starting with, “What should I do?” then moving on to, “Am I in danger?” and, “Do aliens really exist?”

After a while, he found himself wondering, “Exactly how much can the gun blow up?” That question made him smile.

Jack decided he wouldn’t tell anyone about the gun—not now and maybe not ever. He would take it home and hide it where it wouldn’t be found, but where it would be available if trouble came. What kind of trouble? Aliens . . . spies . . . supervillains . . . who knew? If rayguns were real, was anything impossible?

On the walk back home, Jack was so distracted by “What ifs?” that he nearly got hit by a car. He had reached the road that separated the woods from neighboring houses. Like most roads in that part of Jack’s small town, it didn’t get much traffic. Jack stepped out from the trees and suddenly a sports-car whizzed past him, only two steps away. Jack staggered back; the driver leaned on the horn; Jack hit his shoulder on an oak tree; then the incident was over, except for belated adrenaline.

For a full minute afterward, Jack leaned against the oak and felt his heart pound. As close calls go, this one wasn’t too bad: Jack hadn’t really been near enough to the road to get hit. Still, Jack needed quite a while to calm down. How stupid would it be to die in an accident on the day he’d found something miraculous?

Jack ought to have been watching for trouble. What if the threat had been a bugeyed monster instead of a car? Jack should have been alert and prepared. In his mind’s eye he imagined the incident again, only this time he casually somersaulted to safety rather than stumbling into a tree. That’s how you’re supposed to cheat death if you’re carrying a ray-gun: with cool heroic flair.

But Jack couldn’t do somersaults. He said to himself, I’m Peter Parker, not Spider-Man.

On the other hand, Jack had just acquired great power. And great responsibility. Like Peter Parker, Jack had to keep his power secret, for fear of tragic consequences. In Jack’s case, maybe aliens would come for him. Maybe spies or government agents would kidnap him and his family. No matter how farfetched those things seemed, the existence of a ray-gun proved the world wasn’t tame.

That night, Jack debated what to do with the gun. He pictured himself shooting terrorists and gang lords. If he rid the world of scum, pretty girls might admire him. But as soon as Jack imagined himself storming into a terrorist stronghold, he realized he’d get killed almost immediately. The ray-gun provided awesome firepower, but no defense at all. Besides if Jack had found an ordinary gun in the forest, he never would have dreamed of running around murdering bad guys. Why should a ray-gun be different?

But it was different. Jack couldn’t put the difference into words, but it was as real as the weapon’s solid weight in his hands. The ray-gun changed everything. A world that contained a ray-gun might also contain flying saucers, beautiful secret agents . . . and heroes.

Heroes who could somersault away from oncoming sports-cars. Heroes who would cope with any danger. Heroes who deserved to have a ray-gun.

When he was young, Jack had taken for granted he’d become a hero: brave, skilled and important. Somehow he’d lost that belief. He’d let himself settle for being ordinary. But now he wasn’t ordinary: he had a ray-gun.

He had to live up to it. Jack had to be ready for bugeyed monsters and giant robots. These were no longer childish daydreams; they were real possibilities in a world where rayguns existed. Jack could picture himself running through town, blasting aliens and saving the planet.

Such thoughts made sense when Jack held the ray-gun in his hands—as if the gun planted fantasies in his mind. The feel of the gun filled Jack with ambition.

All weapons have a sense of purpose.

Jack practiced with the gun as often as he could. To avoid being seen, he rode his bike to a tract of land in the country: twenty acres owned by Jack’s Great-Uncle Ron. No one went there but Jack. Uncle Ron had once intended to build a house on the property, but that had never happened. Now Ron was in a nursing home. Jack’s family intended to sell the land once the old man died, but Ron was healthy for someone in his nineties. Until Uncle Ron’s health ran out, Jack had the place to himself.

The tract was undeveloped—raw forest, not a woods where children played. In the middle lay a pond, completely hidden by trees. Jack would float sticks in the pond and shoot them with the gun.

If he missed, the water boiled. If he didn’t, the sticks were destroyed. Sometimes they erupted in fire. Sometimes they burst with a bang but no flame. Sometimes they simply vanished. Jack couldn’t tell if he was doing something subtly different to get each effect, or if the ray-gun changed modes on its own. Perhaps it had a computer which analyzed the target and chose the most lethal attack. Perhaps the attacks were always the same, but differences in the sticks made for different results. Jack didn’t know. But as spring led to summer, he became a better shot. By autumn, he’d begun throwing sticks into the air and trying to vaporize them before they reached the ground.

During this time, Jack grew stronger. Long bike rides to the pond helped his legs and his stamina. In addition, he exercised with fitness equipment his parents had bought but never used. If monsters ever came, Jack couldn’t afford to be weak—heroes had to climb fences and break down doors. They had to balance on rooftops and hang by their fingers from cliffs. They had to run fast enough to save the girl.

Jack pumped iron and ran every day. As he did so, he imagined dodging bullets and tentacles. When he felt like giving up, he cradled the ray-gun in his hands. It gave him the strength to persevere.

Before the ray-gun, Jack had seen himself as just another teenager; his life didn’t make sense. But the gun made Jack a hero who might be needed to save the Earth. It clarified everything. Sore muscles didn’t matter. Watching TV was a waste. If you let down your guard, that’s when the monsters came.

When he wasn’t exercising, Jack studied science. That was another part of being a hero. He sometimes dreamed he’d analyze the ray-gun, discovering how it worked and giving humans amazing new technology. At other times, he didn’t want to understand the gun at all. He liked its mystery. Besides, there was no guarantee Jack would ever understand how the gun worked. Perhaps human science wouldn’t progress far enough in Jack’s lifetime. Perhaps Jack himself wouldn’t have the brains to figure it out.

But he had enough brains for high school. He did well; he was motivated. He had to hold back to avoid attracting attention. When his gym teacher told him he should go out for track, Jack ran slower and pretended to get out of breath.

Spider-Man had to do the same.

Two years later, in geography class, a girl named Kirsten gave Jack a daisy. She said the daisy was good luck and he should make a wish.

Even a sixteen-year-old boy couldn’t misconstrue such a hint. Despite awkwardness and foot-dragging, Jack soon had a girlfriend.

Kirsten was quiet but pretty. She played guitar. She wrote poems. She’d never had a boyfriend but she knew how to kiss. These were all good things. Jack wondered if he should tell her about the ray-gun.

Until Kirsten, Jack’s only knowledge of girls came from his big sister, Rachel. Rachel was seventeen and incapable of keeping a secret. She talked with her friends about everything and was too slapdash to hide private things well. Jack didn’t snoop through his sister’s possessions, but when Rachel left her bedroom door ajar with empty cigarette packs tumbling out of the garbage can, who wouldn’t notice? When she gossiped on the phone about sex with her boyfriend, who couldn’t overhear? Jack didn’t want to listen, but Rachel never lowered her voice. The things Jack heard made him queasy—about his sister, and girls in general.

If he showed Kirsten the ray-gun, would she tell her friends? Jack wanted to believe she wasn’t that kind of girl, but he didn’t know how many kinds of girl there were. He just knew that the ray-gun was too important for him to take chances. Changing the status quo wasn’t worth the risk.

Yet the status quo changed anyway. The more time Jack spent with Kirsten, the less he had for shooting practice and other aspects of hero-dom. He felt guilty for skimping on crisis preparation; but when he went to the pond or spent a night reading science, he felt guilty for skimping on Kirsten. Jack would tell her he couldn’t come over to do homework and when she asked why, he’d have to make up excuses. He felt he was treating her like an enemy spy: holding her at arm’s length as if she were some femme fatale who was tempting him to betray state secrets. He hated not trusting her.

Despite this wall between them, Kirsten became Jack’s lens on the world. If anything interesting happened, Jack didn’t experience it directly; some portion of his mind stood back, enjoying the anticipation of having something to tell Kirsten about the next time they met. Whatever he saw, he wanted her to see it too. Whenever Jack heard a joke, even before he started laughing, he pictured himself repeating it to Kirsten.

Inevitably, Jack asked himself what she’d think of his hero-dom. Would she be impressed? Would she throw her arms around him and say he was even more wonderful than she’d thought? Or would she get that look on her face, the one when she heard bad poetry? Would she think he was an immature geek who’d read too many comic books and was pursuing some juvenile fantasy? How could anyone believe hostile aliens might appear in the sky? And if aliens did show up, how delusional was it that a teenage boy might make a difference, even if he owned a ray-gun and could do a hundred push-ups without stopping?

For weeks, Jack agonized: to tell or not to tell. Was Kirsten worthy, or just a copy of Jack’s sister? Was Jack himself worthy, or just a foolish boy?

One Saturday in May, Jack and Kirsten went biking. Jack led her to the pond where he practiced with the gun. He hadn’t yet decided what he’d do when they got there, but Jack couldn’t just tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. She’d never believe it was real unless she saw the rays in action. But so much could go wrong. Jack was terrified of giving away his deepest secret. He was afraid that when he saw hero-dom through Kirsten’s eyes, he’d realize it was silly.

At the pond, Jack felt so nervous he could hardly speak. He babbled about the warm weather . . . a patch of mushrooms . . . a crow cawing in a tree. He talked about everything except what was on his mind.

Kirsten misinterpreted his anxiety. She thought she knew why Jack had brought her to this secluded spot. After a while, she decided he needed encouragement, so she took off her shirt and her bra.

It was the wrong thing to do. Jack hadn’t meant this outing to be a test . . . but it was, and Kirsten had failed.

Jack took off his own shirt and wrapped his arms around her, chest touching breasts for the first time. He discovered it was possible to be excited and disappointed at the same time.

Jack and Kirsten made out on a patch of hard dirt. It was the first time they’d been alone with no risk of interruption. They kept their pants on, but they knew they could go farther: as far as there was. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do. Jack and Kirsten felt light in their skins—open and dizzy with possibilities.

Yet for Jack, it was all a mistake: one that couldn’t be reversed. Now he’d never tell Kirsten about the ray-gun. He’d missed his chance because she’d acted the way Jack’s sister would have acted. Kirsten had been thinking like a girl and she’d ruined things forever.

Jack hated the way he felt: all angry and resentful. He really liked Kirsten. He liked making out, and couldn’t wait till the next time. He refused to be a guy who dumped a girl as soon as she let him touch her breasts. But he was now shut off from her and he had no idea how to get over that.

In the following months, Jack grew guiltier: he was treating Kirsten as if she were good enough for sex but not good enough to be told about the most important thing in his life. As for Kirsten, every day made her more unhappy: she felt Jack blaming her for something but she didn’t know what she’d done. When they got together, they went straight to fondling and more as soon as possible. If they tried to talk, they didn’t know what to say.

In August, Kirsten left to spend three weeks with her grandparents on Vancouver Island. Neither she nor Jack missed each other. They didn’t even miss the sex. It was a relief to be apart. When Kirsten got back, they went for a walk and a confused conversation. Both produced excuses for why they couldn’t stay together. The excuses didn’t make sense, but neither Jack nor Kirsten noticed—they were too ashamed to pay attention to what they were saying. They both felt like failures. They’d thought their love would last forever, and now it was ending sordidly.

When the lying was over, Jack went for a run. He ran in a mental blur. His mind didn’t clear until he found himself at the pond.

Night was drawing in. He thought of all the things he’d done with Kirsten on the shore and in the water. After that first time, they’d come here a lot; it was private. Because of Kirsten, this wasn’t the same pond as when Jack had first begun to practice with the ray-gun. Jack wasn’t the same boy. He and the pond now carried histories.

Jack could feel himself balanced on the edge of quitting. He’d turned seventeen. One more year of high school, then he’d go away to university. He realized he no longer believed in the imminent arrival of aliens, nor could he see himself as some great hero saving the world.

Jack knew he wasn’t a hero. He’d used a nice girl for sex, then lied to get rid of her.

He felt like crap. But blasting the shit out of sticks made him feel a little better. The ray-gun still had its uses, even if shooting aliens wasn’t one of them.

The next day Jack did more blasting. He pumped iron. He got science books out of the library. Without Kirsten at his side several hours a day, he had time to fill, and emptiness. By the first day of the new school year, Jack was back to his full hero-dom program. He no longer deceived himself that he was preparing for battle, but the program gave him something to do: a purpose, a release, and a penance.

So that was Jack’s passage into manhood. He was dishonest with the girl he loved.

Manhood means learning who you are.

In his last year of high school, Jack went out with other girls but he was past the all-or-nothingness of First Love. He could have casual fun; he could approach sex with perspective. “Monumental and life-changing” had been tempered to “pleasant and exciting.” Jack didn’t take his girlfriends for granted, but they were people, not objects of worship. He was never tempted to tell any of them about the gun.

When he left town for university, Jack majored in Engineering Physics. He hadn’t decided whether he’d ever analyze the ray-gun’s inner workings, but he couldn’t imagine taking courses that were irrelevant to the weapon. The ray-gun was the central fact of Jack’s life. Even if he wasn’t a hero, he was set apart from other people by this evidence that aliens existed.

During freshman year, Jack lived in an on-campus dormitory. Hiding the ray-gun from his roommate would have been impossible. Jack left the weapon at home, hidden near the pond. In sophomore year, Jack rented an apartment off campus. Now he could keep the ray-gun with him. He didn’t like leaving it untended.

Jack persuaded a lab assistant to let him borrow a Geiger counter. The ray-gun emitted no radioactivity at all. Objects blasted by the gun showed no significant radioactivity either. Over time, Jack borrowed other equipment, or took blast debris to the lab so he could conduct tests when no one was around. He found nothing that explained how the ray-gun worked.

The winter before Jack graduated, Great-Uncle Ron finally died. In his will, the old man left his twenty acres of forest to Jack. Uncle Ron had found out that Jack liked to visit the pond. “I told him,” said big sister Rachel. “Do you think I didn’t know where you and Kirsten went?”

Jack had to laugh—uncomfortably. He was embarrassed to discover he couldn’t keep secrets any better than his sister.

Jack’s father offered to help him sell the land to pay for his education. The offer was polite, not pressing. Uncle Ron had doled out so much cash in his will that Jack’s family was now well-off. When Jack said he’d rather hold on to the property “until the market improves,” no one objected.

After getting his bachelor’s degree, Jack continued on to grad school: first his master’s, then his Ph.D. In one of his courses, he met Deana, working toward her own doctorate—in Electrical Engineering rather than Engineering Physics.

The two programs shared several seminars, but considered themselves rivals. Engineering Physics students pretended that Electrical Engineers weren’t smart enough to understand abstract principles. Electrical Engineers pretended that Engineering Physics students were pie-in-the-sky dreamers whose theories were always wrong until real Engineers fixed them. Choosing to sit side by side, Jack and Deana teased each other every class. Within months, Deana moved into Jack’s apartment.

Deana was small but physical. She told Jack she’d been drawn to him because he was the only man in their class who lifted weights. When Deana was young, she’d been a competitive swimmer—“Very competitive,” she said—but her adolescent growth spurt had never arrived and she was eventually outmatched by girls with longer limbs. Deana had quit the competition circuit, but she hadn’t quit swimming nor had she lost the drive to be one up on those around her. She saw most things as contests, including her relationship with Jack. Deana was not beyond cheating if it gave her an edge.

In the apartment they now shared, Jack thought he’d hidden the ray-gun so well that Deana wouldn’t find it. He didn’t suspect that when he wasn’t home she went through his things. She couldn’t stand the thought that Jack might have secrets from her.

He returned one day to find the gun on the kitchen table. Deana was poking at it. Jack wanted to yell, “Leave it alone!” but he was so choked with anger he couldn’t speak.

Deana’s hand was close to the trigger. The safety was off and the muzzle pointed in Jack’s direction. He threw himself to the floor.

Nothing happened. Deana was so surprised by Jack’s sudden move that she jerked her hand away from the gun. “What the hell are you doing?”

Jack got to his feet. “I could ask you the same question.”

“I found this. I wondered what it was.”

Jack knew she didn’t “find” the gun. It had been buried under old notebooks inside a box at the back of a closet. Jack expected that Deana would invent some excuse for why she’d been digging into Jack’s private possessions, but the excuse wouldn’t be worth believing.

What infuriated Jack most was that he’d actually been thinking of showing Deana the gun. She was a very very good engineer; Jack had dreamed that together, he and she might discover how the gun worked. Of all the women Jack had known, Deana was the first he’d asked to move in with him. She was strong and she was smart. She might understand the gun. The time had never been right to tell her the truth—Jack was still getting to know her and he needed to be absolutely sure—but Jack had dreamed . . .

And now, like Kirsten at the pond, Deana had ruined everything. Jack felt so violated he could barely stand to look at the woman. He wanted to throw her out of the apartment . . . but that would draw too much attention to the gun. He couldn’t let Deana think the gun was important.

She was still staring at him, waiting for an explanation. “That’s just something from my Great-Uncle Ron,” Jack said. “An African good-luck charm. Or Indonesian. I forget. Uncle Ron traveled a lot.” Actually, Ron sold insurance and seldom left the town where he was born. Jack picked up the gun from the table, trying to do so calmly rather than protectively. “I wish you hadn’t touched this. It’s old and fragile.”

“It felt pretty solid to me.”

“Solid but still breakable.”

“Why did you dive to the floor?”

“Just silly superstition. It’s bad luck to have this end point toward you.” Jack gestured toward the muzzle. “And it’s good luck to be on this end.” He gestured toward the butt, then tried to make a joke. “Like there’s a Maxwell demon in the middle, batting bad luck one way and good luck the other.”

“You believe that crap?” Deana asked. She was an engineer. She went out of her way to disbelieve crap.

“Of course, I don’t believe it,” Jack said. “But why ask for trouble?”

He took the gun back to the closet. Deana followed. As Jack returned the gun to its box, Deana said she’d been going through Jack’s notes in search of anything he had on partial differential equations. Jack nearly let her get away with the lie; he usually let the women in his life get away with almost anything. But he realized he didn’t want Deana in his life anymore. Whatever connection she and he had once felt, it was cut off the moment he saw her with the ray-gun.

Jack accused her of invading his privacy. Deana said he was paranoid. The argument grew heated. Out of habit, Jack almost backed down several times, but he stopped himself. He didn’t want Deana under the same roof as the ray-gun. His feelings were partly irrational possessiveness, but also justifiable caution. If Deana got the gun and accidentally fired it, the results might be disastrous.

Jack and Deana continued to argue: right there in the closet within inches of the ray-gun. The gun lay in its box, like a child at the feet of parents fighting over custody. The ray-gun did nothing, as if it didn’t care who won.

Eventually, unforgivable words were spoken. Deana said she’d move out as soon as possible. She left to stay the night with a friend.

The moment she was gone, Jack moved the gun. Deana still had a key to the apartment—she needed it until she could pack her things—and Jack was certain she’d try to grab the weapon as soon as he was busy elsewhere. The ray-gun was now a prize in a contest, and Deana never backed down.

Jack took the weapon to the university. He worked as an assistant for his Ph.D. supervisor, and he’d been given a locker in the supervisor’s lab. The locker wasn’t Fort Knox but leaving the gun there was better than leaving it in the apartment. The more Jack thought about Deana, the more he saw her as prying and obsessive, grasping for dominance. He didn’t know what he’d ever seen in her.

The next morning, he wondered if he had overreacted. Was he demonizing his ex like a sitcom cliché? If she was so egotistic, why hadn’t he noticed before? Jack had no good answer. He decided he didn’t need one. Unlike when he broke up with Kirsten, Jack felt no guilt this time. The sooner Deana was gone, the happier he’d be.

In a few days, Deana called to say she’d found a new place to live. She and Jack arranged a time for her to pick up her belongings. Jack didn’t want to be there while she moved out; he couldn’t stand seeing her in the apartment again. Instead, Jack went back to his home town for a long weekend with his family.

It was lucky he did. Jack left Friday afternoon and didn’t get back to the university until Monday night. The police were waiting for him. Deana had disappeared late Saturday.

She’d talked to friends on Saturday afternoon. She’d made arrangements for Sunday brunch but hadn’t shown up. No one had seen her since.

As the ex-boyfriend, Jack was a prime suspect. But his alibi was solid: his home town was hundreds of miles from the university, and his family could testify he’d been there the whole time. Jack couldn’t possibly have sneaked back to the university, made Deana disappear, and raced back home.

Grudgingly, the police let Jack off the hook. They decided Deana must have been depressed by the break-up of the relationship. She might have run off so she wouldn’t have to see Jack around the university. She might even have committed suicide.

Jack suspected otherwise. As soon as the police let him go, he went to his supervisor’s lab. His locker had been pried open. The ray-gun lay on a nearby lab bench.

Jack could easily envision what happened. While moving out her things, Deana searched for the ray-gun. She hadn’t found it in the apartment. She knew Jack had a locker in the lab and she’d guessed he’d stashed the weapon there. She broke open the locker to get the gun. She’d examined it and perhaps tried to take it apart. The gun went off.

Now Deana was gone. Not even a smudge on the floor. The ray-gun lay on the lab bench as guiltless as a stone. Jack was the only one with a conscience.

He suffered for weeks. Jack wondered how he could feel so bad about a woman who’d made him furious. But he knew the source of his guilt: while he and Deana were arguing in the closet, Jack had imagined vaporizing her with the gun. He was far too decent to shoot her for real, but the thought had crossed his mind. If Deana simply vanished, Jack wouldn’t have to worry about what she might do. The ray-gun had made that thought come true, as if it had read Jack’s mind.

Jack told himself the notion was ridiculous. The gun wasn’t some genie who granted Jack’s unspoken wishes. What happened to Deana came purely from her own bad luck and inquisitiveness.

Still, Jack felt like a murderer. After all this time, Jack realized the ray-gun was too dangerous to keep. As long as Jack had it, he’d be forced to live alone: never marrying, never having children, never trusting the gun around other people. And even if Jack became a recluse, accidents could happen. Someone else might die. It would be Jack’s fault.

He wondered why he’d never had this thought before. Jack suddenly saw himself as one of those people who own a vicious attack dog. People like that always claimed they could keep the dog under control. How often did they end up on the evening news? How often did children get bitten, maimed or killed?

Some dogs are tragedies waiting to happen. The ray-gun was too. It would keep slipping off its leash until it was destroyed. Twelve years after finding the gun, Jack realized he finally had a heroic mission: to get rid of the weapon that made him a hero in the first place.

I’m not Spider-Man, he thought, I’m Frodo.

But how could Jack destroy something that had survived so much? The gun hadn’t frozen in the cold of outer space; it hadn’t burned up as it plunged through Earth’s atmosphere; it hadn’t broken when it hit the ground at terminal velocity. If the gun could endure such punishment, extreme measures would be needed to lay it to rest.

Jack imagined putting the gun into a blast furnace. But what if the weapon went off? What if it shot out the side of the furnace? The furnace itself could explode. That would be a disaster. Other means of destruction had similar problems. Crushing the gun in a hydraulic press . . . what if the gun shot a hole in the press, sending pieces of equipment flying in all directions? Immersing the gun in acid . . . what if the gun went off and splashed acid over everything? Slicing into the gun with a laser . . . Jack didn’t know what powered the gun, but obviously it contained vast energy. Destabilizing that energy might cause an explosion, a radiation leak, or some even greater catastrophe. Who knew what might happen if you tampered with alien technology?

And what if the gun could protect itself? Over the years, Jack had read every ray-gun story he could find. In some stories, such weapons had built-in computers. They had enough artificial intelligence to assess their situations. If they didn’t like what was happening, they took action. What if Jack’s gun was similar? What if attempts to destroy the weapon induced it to fight back? What if the ray-gun got mad?

Jack decided the only safe plan was to drop the gun into an ocean—the deeper the better. Even then, Jack feared the gun would somehow make its way back to shore. He hoped that the weapon would take years or even centuries to return, by which time humanity might be scientifically equipped to deal with the ray-gun’s power.

Jack’s plan had one weakness: both the university and Jack’s home town were far from the sea. Jack didn’t know anyone with an ocean-going boat suitable for dumping objects into deep water. He’d just have to drive to the coast and see if he could rent something.

But not until summer. Jack was in the final stages of his Ph.D. and didn’t have time to leave the university for an extended trip. As a temporary measure, Jack moved the ray-gun back to the pond. He buried the weapon several feet underground, hoping that would keep it safe from animals and anyone else who happened by.

(Jack imagined a new generation of lovesick teenagers discovering the pond. If that happened, he wanted them safe. Like a real hero, Jack cared about people he didn’t know.)

Jack no longer practiced with the gun, but he maintained his physical regimen. He tried to exhaust himself so he wouldn’t have the energy to brood. It didn’t work. Lying sleepless in bed, he kept wondering what would have happened if he’d told Deana the truth. She wouldn’t have killed herself if she’d been warned to be cautious. But Jack had cared more about his precious secret than Deana’s life.

In the dark, Jack muttered, “It was her own damned fault.” His words were true, but not true enough.

When Jack wasn’t at the gym, he cloistered himself with schoolwork and research. (His doctoral thesis was about common properties of different types of high-energy beams.) Jack didn’t socialize. He seldom phoned home. He took days to answer email messages from his sister. Even so, he told himself he was doing an excellent job of acting “normal.”

Jack had underestimated his sister’s perceptiveness. One weekend, Rachel showed up on his doorstep to see why he’d “gone weird.” She spent two days digging under his skin. By the end of the weekend, she could tell that Deana’s disappearance had disturbed Jack profoundly. Rachel couldn’t guess the full truth, but as a big sister she felt entitled to meddle in Jack’s life. She resolved to snap her brother out of his low spirits.

The next weekend Rachel showed up on Jack’s doorstep again. This time, she brought Kirsten.

Nine years had passed since Kirsten and Jack had seen each other: the day they both graduated from high school. In the intervening time, when Jack had thought of Kirsten, he always pictured her as a high-school girl. It was strange to see her as a woman. At twenty-seven, she was not greatly changed from eighteen—new glasses and a better haircut—but despite similarities to her teenage self, Kirsten wore her life differently. She’d grown up.

So had Jack. Meeting Kirsten by surprise made Jack feel ambushed, but he soon got over it. Rachel helped by talking loud and fast through the initial awkwardness. She took Jack and Kirsten for coffee, and acted as emcee as they got reacquainted.

Kirsten had followed a path close to Jack’s: university and graduate work. She told him, “No one makes a living as a poet. Most of us find jobs as English professors—teaching poetry to others who won’t make a living at it either.”

Kirsten had earned her doctorate a month earlier. Now she was living back home. She currently had no man in her life—her last relationship had fizzled out months ago, and she’d decided to avoid new involvements until she knew where she would end up teaching. She’d sent her résumé to English departments all over the continent and was optimistic about her chances of success; to Jack’s surprise, Kirsten had published dozens of poems in literary magazines. She’d even sold two to The New Yorker. Her publishing record would be enough to interest many English departments.

After coffee, Rachel dragged Jack to a mall where she and Kirsten made him buy new clothes. Rachel bullied Jack while Kirsten made apologetic suggestions. Jack did his best to be a good sport; as they left the mall, Jack was surprised to find that he’d actually had a good time.

That evening, there was wine and more conversation. Rachel took Jack’s bed, leaving him and Kirsten to make whatever arrangements they chose. The two of them joked about Rachel trying to pair them up again. Eventually Kirsten took the couch in the living room while Jack crawled into a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor . . . but that was only after talking till three in the morning.

Rachel and Kirsten left the next afternoon, but Jack felt cleansed by their visit. He stayed in touch with Kirsten by email. It was casual: not romance, but a knowing friendship.

In the next few months, Kirsten got job interviews with several colleges and universities. She accepted a position on the Oregon coast. She sent Jack pictures of the school. It was directly on the ocean; it even had a beach. Kirsten said she’d always liked the water. She teasingly reminded him of their times at the pond.

But when Jack saw Kirsten’s pictures of the Pacific, all he could think of was dumping the ray-gun into the sea. He could drive out to visit her . . . rent a boat . . . sail out to deep water . . .

No. Jack knew nothing about sailing, and he didn’t have enough money to rent a boat that could venture far offshore. “How many years have I been preparing?” he asked himself. “Didn’t I intend to be ready for any emergency? Now I have an honest-to-god mission, and I’m useless.”

Then Kirsten sent him an emailed invitation to go sailing with her.

She had access to a sea-going yacht. It belonged to her grandparents—the ones she’d visited on Vancouver Island just before she and Jack broke up. During her trip to the island, Kirsten had gone boating with her grandparents every day. At the start, she’d done it to take her mind off Jack; then she’d discovered she enjoyed being out on the waves.

She’d spent time with her grandparents every summer since, learning the ins and outs of yachting. She’d taken courses. She’d earned the necessary licenses. Now Kirsten was fully qualified for deep-water excursions . . . and as a gift to wish her well on her new job, Kirsten’s grandparents were lending her their boat for a month. They intended to sail down to Oregon, spend a few days there, then fly off to tour Australia. When they were done, they’d return and sail back home; but in the meantime, Kirsten would have the use of their yacht. She asked Jack if he’d like to be her crew.

When Jack got this invitation, he couldn’t help being disturbed. Kirsten had never mentioned boating before. Because she was living in their home town, most of her email to Jack had been about old high-school friends. Jack had even started to picture her as a teenager again; he’d spent a weekend with the grown-up Kirsten, but all her talk of high-school people and places had muddled Jack’s mental image of her. The thought of a bookish teenage girl captaining a yacht was absurd.

But that was a lesser problem compared to the suspicious convenience of her invitation. Jack needed a boat; all of a sudden, Kirsten had one. The coincidence was almost impossible to swallow.

He thought of the unknown aliens who made the ray-gun. Could they be influencing events? If the ray-gun was intelligent, could it be responsible for the coincidence?

Kirsten had often spent time near the gun. On their first visit to the pond, she and Jack had lain half-naked with the gun in Jack’s backpack beside them.

He thought of Kirsten that day. So open. So vulnerable. The gun had been within inches. Had it nurtured Kirsten’s interest in yachting . . . her decision to get a job in Oregon . . . even her grandparents’ offer of their boat? Had it molded Kirsten’s life so she was ready when Jack needed her? And if the gun could do that, what had it done to Jack himself?

This is ridiculous, Jack thought. The gun is just a gun. It doesn’t control people. It just kills them.

Yet Jack couldn’t shake off his sense of eeriness—about Kirsten as well as the ray gun. All these years, while Jack had been preparing himself to be a hero, Kirsten had somehow done the same. Her self-improvement program had worked better than Jack’s. She had a boat; he didn’t.

Coincidence or not, Jack couldn’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. He told Kirsten he’d be delighted to go sailing with her. Only later did he realize that their time on the yacht would have a sexual subtext. He broke out laughing. “I’m such an idiot. We’ve done it again.” Like that day at the pond, Jack had only been thinking about the gun. Kirsten had been thinking about Jack. Her invitation wasn’t a carte-blanche come-on but it had a strong hint of, “Let’s get together and see what develops.”

Where Kirsten was concerned, Jack had always been slow to catch the signals. He thought, Obviously, the ray-gun keeps dulling my senses. This time, Jack meant it as a joke.

Summer came. Jack drove west with the ray-gun in the trunk of his car. The gun’s safety was on, but Jack still drove as if he were carrying nuclear waste. He’d taken the gun back and forth between his home town and university many times, but this trip was longer, on unfamiliar roads. It was also the last trip Jack ever intended to make with the gun; if the gun didn’t want to be thrown into the sea, perhaps it would cause trouble. But it didn’t.

For much of the drive, Jack debated how to tell Kirsten about the gun. He’d considered smuggling it onto the boat and throwing the weapon overboard when she wasn’t looking, but Jack felt that he owed her the truth. It was overdue. Besides, this cruise could be the beginning of a new relationship. Jack didn’t want to start by sneaking behind Kirsten’s back.

So he had to reveal his deepest secret. Every other secret would follow: what happened to Deana; what had really been on Jack’s mind that day at the pond; what made First Love go sour. Jack would expose his guilt to the woman who’d suffered from the fallout.

He thought, She’ll probably throw me overboard with the gun. But he would open up anyway, even if it made Kirsten hate him. When he tossed the ray-gun into the sea, he wanted to unburden himself of everything.

The first day on the boat, Jack said nothing about the ray-gun. Instead, he talked compulsively about trivia. So did Kirsten. It was strange being together, looking so much like they did in high school but being entirely different people.

Fortunately, they had practical matters to fill their time. Jack needed a crash course in seamanship. He learned quickly. Kirsten was a good teacher. Besides, Jack’s longstanding program of hero-dom had prepared his mind and muscles. Kirsten was impressed that he knew Morse code and had extensive knowledge of knots. She asked, “Were you a Boy Scout?”

“No. When I was a kid, I wanted to be able to untie myself if I ever got captured by spies.”

Kirsten laughed. She thought he was joking.

That first day, they stayed close to shore. They never had to deal with being alone; there were always other yachts in sight, and sailboats, and people on shore. When night came, they put in to harbor. They ate in an ocean-view restaurant. Jack asked, “So where will we go tomorrow?”

“Where would you like? Up the coast, down the coast, or straight out to sea?”

“Why not straight out?” said Jack.

Back on the yacht, he and Kirsten talked long past midnight. There was only one cabin, but two separate fold-away beds. Without discussion, they each chose a bed. Both usually slept in the nude, but for this trip they’d both brought makeshift “pajamas” consisting of a T-shirt and track-pants. They laughed at the clothes, the coincidence, and themselves.

They didn’t kiss goodnight. Jack silently wished they had. He hoped Kirsten was wishing the same thing. They talked for an hour after they’d turned out the lights, becoming nothing but voices in the dark.

The next day they sailed due west. Both waited to see if the other would suggest turning back before dark. Neither did. The farther they got from shore, the fewer other boats remained in sight. By sunset, Jack and Kirsten knew they were once more alone with each other. No one in the world would stop them from whatever they chose to do.

Jack asked Kirsten to stay on deck. He went below and got the ray-gun from his luggage. He brought it up into the twilight. Before he could speak, Kirsten said, “I’ve seen that before.”

Jack stared at her in shock. “What? Where?”

“I saw it years ago, in the woods back home. I was out for a walk. I noticed it lying in a little crater, as if it had fallen from the sky.”

“Really? You found it too?”

“But I didn’t touch it,” Kirsten said. “I don’t know why. Then I heard someone coming and I ran away. But the memory stayed vivid in my head. A mysterious object in a crater in the woods. I can’t tell you how often I’ve tried to write poems about it, but they never work out.” She looked at the gun in Jack’s hands. “What is it?”

“A ray-gun,” he said. In the fading light, he could see a clump of seaweed floating a short distance from the boat. He raised the gun and fired. The seaweed exploded in a blaze of fire, burning brightly against the dark waves.

“A ray-gun,” said Kirsten. “Can I try it?”

Some time later, holding hands, they let the gun fall into the water. It sank without protest.

Long after that, they talked in each other’s arms. Jack said the gun had made him who he was. Kirsten said she was the same. “Until I saw the gun, I just wrote poems about myself—overwritten self-absorbed pap, like every teenage girl. But the gun gave me something else to write about. I’d only seen it for a minute, but it was one of those burned-into-your-memory moments. I felt driven to find words to express what I’d seen. I kept refining my poems, trying to make them better. That’s what made the difference.”

“I felt driven too,” Jack said. “Sometimes I’ve wondered if the gun can affect human minds. Maybe it brainwashed us into becoming who we are.”

“Or maybe it’s just Stone Soup,” Kirsten said. “You know the story? Someone claims he can make soup from a stone, but what he really does is trick people into adding their own food to the pot. Maybe the ray-gun is like that. It did nothing but sit there like a stone. You and I did everything—made ourselves who we are—and the raygun is only an excuse.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “But so many coincidences brought us here . . .”

“You think the gun manipulated us because it wanted to be thrown into the Pacific? Why?”

“Maybe even a ray-gun gets tired of killing.” Jack shivered, thinking of Deana. “Maybe the gun feels guilty for the deaths it’s caused; it wanted to go someplace where it would never have to kill again.”

“Deana’s death wasn’t your fault,” Kirsten said. “Really, Jack. It was awful, but it wasn’t your fault.” She shivered too, then made her voice brighter. “Maybe the raygun orchestrated all this because it’s an incurable romantic. It wanted to bring us together: our own personal matchmaker from the stars.”

Jack kissed Kirsten on the nose. “If that’s true, I don’t object.”

“Neither do I.” She kissed him back.

Not on the nose.

Far below, the ray-gun drifted through the cold black depths. Beneath it, on the bottom of the sea, lay wreckage from the starship that had exploded centuries before. The wreckage had traveled all the way from Jupiter. Because of tiny differences in trajectory, the wreckage had splashed down thousands of miles from where the ray gun landed.

The ray-gun sank straight toward the wreckage . . . but what the wreckage held or why the ray-gun wanted to rejoin it we will never know.

We will never comprehend aliens. If someone spent a month explaining alien thoughts to us, we’d think we understood.

But we wouldn’t.

THE GAMBLER

Paolo Bacigalupi

My father was a gambler. He believed in the workings of karma and luck. He hunted for lucky numbers on license plates and bet on lotteries and fighting roosters. Looking back, I think perhaps he was not a large man, but when he took me to the muy thai fights, I thought him so. He would bet and he would win and laugh and drink laolao with his friends, and they all seemed so large. In the heat drip of Vientiane, he was a lucky ghost, walking the mirror-sheen streets in the darkness.

Everything for my father was a gamble: roulette and blackjack, new rice variants and the arrival of the monsoons. When the pretender monarch Khamsing announced his New Lao Kingdom, my father gambled on civil disobedience. He bet on the teachings of Mr. Henry David Thoreau and on whisper sheets posted on lampposts. He bet on saffron-robed monks marching in protest and on the hidden humanity of the soldiers with their well-oiled AK-47s and their mirrored helmets.

My father was a gambler, but my mother was not. While he wrote letters to the editor that brought the secret police to our door, she made plans for escape. The old Lao Democratic Republic collapsed, and the New Lao Kingdom blossomed with tanks on the avenues and tuk-tuks burning on the street corners. Pha That Luang’s shining gold chedi collapsed under shelling, and I rode away on a UN evacuation helicopter under the care of kind Mrs. Yamaguchi.

From the open doors of the helicopter, we watched smoke columns rise over the city like nagas coiling. We crossed the brown ribbon of the Mekong with its jeweled belt of burning cars on the Friendship Bridge. I remember a Mercedes floating in the water like a paper boat on Loi Kratong, burning despite the water all around.

Afterward, there was silence from the land of a million elephants, a void into which light and Skype calls and e-mail disappeared. The roads were blocked. The telecoms died. A black hole opened where my country had once stood.

Sometimes, when I wake in the night to the swish and honk of Los Angeles traffic, the confusing polyglot of dozens of countries and cultures all pressed together in this American melting pot, I stand at my window and look down a boulevard full of red lights, where it is not safe to walk alone at night, and yet everyone obeys the traffic signals. I look down on the brash and noisy Americans in their many hues, and remember my parents: my father who cared too much to let me live under the self-declared monarchy, and my mother who would not let me die as a consequence. I lean against the window and cry with relief and loss.

Every week I go to temple and pray for them, light incense and make a triple bow to Buddha, Damma, and Sangha, and pray that they may have a good rebirth, and then I step into the light and noise and vibrancy of America.

My colleagues’ faces flicker gray and pale in the light of their computers and tablets. The tap of their keyboards fills the newsroom as they pass content down the workflow chain and then, with a final keystroke and an obeisance to the “publish” button, they hurl it onto the net.

In the maelstrom, their work flares, tagged with site location, content tags, and social poke data. Blooms of color, codes for media conglomerates: shades of blue and Mickey Mouse ears for Disney-Bertelsmann. A red-rimmed pair of rainbow O’s for Google’s AOL News. Fox News Corp. in pinstripes gray and white. Green for us: Milestone Media—a combination of NTT DoCoMo, the Korean gaming consortium Hyundai-Kubu, and the smoking remains of the New York Times Company. There are others, smaller stars, Crayola shades flaring and brightening, but we are the most important. The monarchs of this universe of light and color.

New content blossoms on the screen, bathing us all in the bloody glow of a Google News content flare, off their WhisperTech feed. They’ve scooped us. The posting says that new ear bud devices will be released by Frontal Lobe before Christmas: terabyte storage with Pin-Line connectivity for the Oakley microresponse glasses. The technology is next-gen, allowing personal data control via Pin-Line scans of a user’s iris. Analysts predict that everything from cell phones to digital cameras will become obsolete as the full range of Oakley features becomes available. The news flare brightens and migrates toward the center of the maelstrom as visitors flock to Google and view stolen photos of the iris-scanning glasses.

Janice Mbutu, our managing editor, stands at the door to her office, watching with a frown. The maelstrom’s red bath dominates the newsroom, a pressing reminder that Google is beating us, sucking away traffic. Behind glass walls, Bob and Casey, the heads of the Burning Wire, our own consumer technology feed, are screaming at their reporters, demanding they do better. Bob’s face has turned almost as red as the maelstrom.

The maelstrom’s true name is LiveTrack IV. If you were to go downstairs to the fifth floor and pry open the server racks, you would find a sniper sight logo and the words SCRY GLASS—KNOWLEDGE IS POWER stamped on their chips in metallic orange, which would tell you that even though Bloomberg rents us the machines, it is a Google-Neilsen partnership that provides the proprietary algorithms for analyzing the net flows—which means we pay a competitor to tell us what is happening with our own content.

LiveTrack IV tracks media user data—Web site, feed, VOD, audiostream, TV broadcast—with Google’s own net statistics gathering programs, aided by Nielsen hardware in personal data devices ranging from TVs to tablets to ear buds to handsets to car radios. To say that the maelstrom keeps a finger on the pulse of media is an understatement. Like calling the monsoon a little wet. The maelstrom is the pulse, the pressure, the blood-oxygen mix; the count of red cells and white, of T-cells and BAC, the screening for AIDS and hepatitis G. . . . It is reality.

Our service version of the maelstrom displays the performance of our own content and compares it to the top one hundred user-traffic events in real-time. My own latest news story is up in the maelstrom, glittering near the edge of the screen, a tale of government incompetence: the harvested DNA of the checkerspot butterfly, already extinct, has been destroyed through mismanagement at the California Federal Biological Preserve Facility. The butterfly—along with sixty-two other species—was subjected to improper storage protocols, and now there is nothing except a little dust in vials. The samples literally blew away. My coverage of the story opens with federal workers down on their knees in a two-billion-dollar climate-controlled vault, with a dozen crime scene vacuums that they’ve borrowed from LAPD, trying to suck up a speck of butterfly that they might be able to reconstitute at some future time.

In the maelstrom, the story is a pinprick beside the suns and pulsing moons of traffic that represent other reporters’ content. It doesn’t compete well with news of Frontal Lobe devices, or reviews of Armored Total Combat, or live feeds of the Binge-Purge championships. It seems that the only people who are reading my story are the biologists I interviewed. This is not surprising. When I wrote about bribes for subdivision approvals, the only people who read the story were county planners. When I wrote about cronyism in the selection of city water recycling technologies, the only people who read were water engineers. Still, even though no one seems to care about these stories, I am drawn to them, as though poking at the tiger of the American government will somehow make up for not being able to poke at the little cub of New Divine Monarch Khamsing. It is a foolish thing, a sort of Don Quixote crusade. As a consequence, my salary is the smallest in the office.

“Whoooo!”

Heads swivel from terminals, look for the noise: Marty Mackley, grinning.

“You can thank me . . .” He leans down and taps a button on his keyboard. “Now.”

A new post appears in the maelstrom, a small green orb announcing itself on the Glamour Report, Scandal Monkey blog, and Marty’s byline feeds. As we watch, the post absorbs pings from software clients around the world, notifying the millions of people who follow his byline that he has launched a new story.

I flick my tablet open, check the tags:

Double DP,

Redneck HipHop,

Music News,

Schadenfreude,
underage,
pedophilia . . .

According to Mackley’s story, Double DP the Russian mafia cowboy rapper—who, in my opinion, is not as good as the Asian pop sensation Kulaap, but whom half the planet likes very much—is accused of impregnating the fourteen-year-old daughter of his face sculptor. Readers are starting to notice, and with their attention Marty’s green-glowing news story begins to muscle for space in the maelstrom. The content star pulses, expands, and then, as though someone has thrown gasoline on it, it explodes. Double DP hits the social sites, starts getting recommended, sucks in more readers, more links, more clicks . . . and more ad dollars.

Marty does a pelvic grind of victory, then waves at everyone for their attention. “And that’s not all, folks.” He hits his keyboard again, and another story posts: live feeds of Double’s house, where . . . it looks as though the man who popularized Redneck Russians is heading out the door in a hurry. It is a surprise to see video of the house, streaming live. Most freelance paparazzi are not patient enough to sit and hope that maybe, perhaps, something interesting will happen. This looks as though Marty has stationed his own exclusive papcams at the house, to watch for something like this.

We all watch as Double DP locks the door behind himself. Marty says, “I thought DP deserved the courtesy of notification that the story was going live.”

“Is he fleeing?” Mikela Plaa asks.

Marty shrugs. “We’ll see.”

And indeed, it does look as if Double is about to do what Americans have popularized as an “OJ.” He is into his red Hummer. Pulling out.

Under the green glow of his growing story, Marty smiles. The story is getting bigger, and Marty has stationed himself perfectly for the development. Other news agencies and blogs are playing catch-up. Follow-on posts wink into existence in the maelstrom, gathering a momentum of their own as newsrooms scramble to hook our traffic.

“Do we have a helicopter?” Janice asks. She has come out of her glass office to watch the show.

Marty nods. “We’re moving it into position. I just bought exclusive angel view with the cops, too, so everyone’s going to have to license our footage.”

“Did you let Long Arm of the Law know about the cross-content?”

“Yeah. They’re kicking in from their budget for the helicopter.”

Marty sits down again, begins tapping at his keyboard, a machine-gun of data entry. A low murmur comes from the tech pit, Cindy C. calling our telecom providers, locking down trunklines to handle an anticipated data surge. She knows something that we don’t, something that Marty has prepared her for. She’s bringing up mirrored server farms. Marty seems unaware of the audience around him. He stops typing. Stares up at the maelstrom, watching his glowing ball of content. He is the maestro of a symphony.

The cluster of competing stories are growing as Gawker and Newsweek and Throb all organize themselves and respond. Our readers are clicking away from us, trying to see if there’s anything new in our competitor’s coverage. Marty smiles, hits his “publish” key, and dumps a new bucket of meat into the shark tank of public interest: a video interview with the fourteen-year-old. On-screen, she looks very young, shockingly so. She has a teddy bear.

“I swear I didn’t plant the bear,” Marty comments. “She had it on her own.”

The girl’s accusations are being mixed over Double’s run for the border, a kind of synth loop of accusations:

“And then he . . .”

“And I said . . .”

“He’s the only one I’ve ever . . .”

It sounds as if Marty has licensed some of Double’s own beats for the coverage of his fleeing Humvee. The video outtakes are already bouncing around YouTube and MotionSwallow like Ping-Pong balls. The maelstrom has moved Double DP to the center of the display as more and more feeds and sites point to the content. Not only is traffic up, but the post is gaining in social rank as the numbers of links and social pokes increase.

“How’s the stock?” someone calls out.

Marty shakes his head. “They locked me out from showing the display.”

This, because whenever he drops an important story, we all beg him to show us the big picture. We all turn to Janice. She rolls her eyes, but she gives the nod. When Cindy finishes buying bandwidth, she unlocks the view. The maelstrom slides aside as a second window opens, all bar graphs and financial landscape: our stock price as affected by the story’s expanding traffic—and expanding ad revenue.

The stock bots have their own version of the maelstrom; they’ve picked up the reader traffic shift. Buy and sell decisions roll across the screen, responding to the popularity of Mackley’s byline. As he feeds the story, the beast grows. More feeds pick us up, more people recommend the story to their friends, and every one of them is being subjected to our advertisers’ messages, which means more revenue for us and less for everyone else. At this point, Mackley is bigger than the Super Bowl. Given that the story is tagged with Double DP, it will have a targetable demographic: thirteen- to twenty-four-year-olds who buy lifestyle gadgets, new music, edge clothes, first-run games, boxed hairstyles, tablet skins, and ringtones: not only a large demographic, a valuable one.

Our stock ticks up a point. Holds. Ticks up another. We’ve got four different screens running now. The papcam of Double DP, chase cycles with views of the cops streaking after him, the chopper lifting off, and the window with the fourteen-year-old interviewing. The girl is saying, “I really feel for him. We have a connection. We’re going to get married,” and there’s his Hummer screaming down Santa Monica Boulevard with his song “Cowboy Banger” on the audio overlay.

A new wave of social pokes hits the story. Our stock price ticks up again. Daily bonus territory. The clicks are pouring in. It’s got the right combination of content, what Mackley calls the “Three S’s”: sex, stupidity, and schadenfreude. The stock ticks up again. Everyone cheers. Mackley takes a bow. We all love him. He is half the reason I can pay my rent. Even a small newsroom bonus from his work is enough for me to live. I’m not sure how much he makes for himself when he creates an event like this. Cindy tells me that it is “solid seven, baby.” His byline feed is so big he could probably go independent, but then he would not have the resources to scramble a helicopter for a chase toward Mexico. It is a symbiotic relationship. He does what he does best, and Milestone pays him like a celebrity.

Janice claps her hands. “All right, everyone. You’ve got your bonus. Now back to work.”

A general groan rises. Cindy cuts the big monitor away from stocks and bonuses and back to the work at hand: generating more content to light the maelstrom, to keep the newsroom glowing green with flares of Milestone coverage—everything from reviews of Mitsubishi’s 100 mpg Road Cruiser to how to choose a perfect turkey for Thanksgiving. Mackley’s story pulses over us as we work. He spins off smaller additional stories, updates, interactivity features, encouraging his vast audience to ping back just one more time.

Marty will spend the entire day in conversation with this elephant of a story that he has created. Encouraging his visitors to return for just one more click. He’ll give them chances to poll each other, discuss how they’d like to see DP punished, ask whether you can actually fall in love with a fourteen-year-old. This one will have a long life, and he will raise it like a proud father, feeding and nurturing it, helping it make its way in the rough world of the maelstrom.

My own little green speck of content has disappeared. It seems that even government biologists feel for Double DP.

When my father was not placing foolish bets on revolution, he taught agronomy at the National Lao University. Perhaps our lives would have been different if he had been a rice farmer in the paddies of the capital’s suburbs, instead of surrounded by intellectuals and ideas. But his karma was to be a teacher and a researcher, and so while he was increasing Lao rice production by 30 percent, he was also filling himself with gambler’s fancies: Thoreau, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Sakharov, Mandela, Aung Sung Kyi. True gamblers, all. He would say that if white South Africans could be made to feel shame, then the pretender monarch must right his ways. He claimed that Thoreau must have been Lao, the way he protested so politely.

In my father’s description, Thoreau was a forest monk, gone into the jungle for enlightenment. To live amongst the banyan and the climbing vines of Massachusetts and to meditate on the nature of suffering. My father believed he was undoubtedly some arhat reborn. He often talked of Mr. Henry David, and in my imagination this falang, too, was a large man like my father.

When my father’s friends visited in the dark—after the coup and the countercoup, and after the march of Khamsing’s Chinese-supported insurgency—they would often speak of Mr. Henry David. My father would sit with his friends and students and drink black Lao coffee and smoke cigarettes, and then he would write carefully worded complaints against the government that his students would then copy and leave in public places, distribute into gutters, and stick onto walls in the dead of night.

His guerrilla complaints would ask where his friends had gone, and why their families were so alone. He would ask why monks were beaten on their heads by Chinese soldiers when they sat in hunger strike before the palace. Sometimes, when he was drunk and when these small gambles did not satisfy his risk-taking nature, he would send editorials to the newspapers.

None of these were ever printed, but he was possessed with some spirit that made him think that perhaps the papers would change. That his stature as a father of Lao agriculture might somehow sway the editors to commit suicide and print his complaints.

It ended with my mother serving coffee to a secret police captain while two more policemen waited outside our door. The captain was very polite: he offered my father a 555 cigarette—a brand that already had become rare and contraband—and lit it for him. Then he spread the whisper sheet onto the coffee table, gently pushing aside the coffee cups and their saucers to make room for it. It was rumpled and torn, stained with mud. Full of accusations against Khamsing. Unmistakable as one of my father’s.

My father and the policeman both sat and smoked, studying the paper silently.

Finally, the captain asked, “Will you stop?”

My father drew on his cigarette and let the smoke out slowly as he studied the whisper sheet between them. The captain said, “We all respect what you have done for the Lao kingdom. I myself have family who would have starved if not for your work in the villages.” He leaned forward. “If you promise to stop writing these whispers and complaints, everything can be forgotten. Everything.”

Still, my father didn’t say anything. He finished his cigarette. Stubbed it out. “It would be difficult to make that sort of promise,” he said.

The captain was surprised. “You have friends who have spoken on your behalf. Perhaps you would reconsider. For their sake.”

My father made a little shrug. The captain spread the rumpled whisper sheet, flattening it out more completely. Read it over. “These sheets do nothing,” he said. “Khamsing’s dynasty will not collapse because you print a few complaints. Most of these are torn down before anyone reads them. They do nothing. They are pointless.” He was almost begging. He looked over and saw me watching at the door. “Give this up. For your family, if not your friends.”

I would like to say that my father said something grand. Something honorable about speaking against tyranny. Perhaps invoked one of his idols. Aung Sung Kyi or Sakharov, or Mr. Henry David and his penchant for polite protest. But he didn’t say anything. He just sat with his hands on his knees, looking down at the torn whisper sheet. I think now that he must have been very afraid. Words always came easily to him, before. Instead, all he did was repeat himself. “It would be difficult.”

The captain waited. When it became apparent that my father had nothing else to say, he put down his coffee cup and motioned for his men to come inside. They were all very polite. I think the captain even apologized to my mother as they led him out the door.

We are into day three of the Double DP bonanza, and the green sun glows brightly over all of us, bathing us in its soothing, profitable glow. I am working on my newest story with my Frontal Lobe ear buds in, shutting out everything except the work at hand. It is always a little difficult to write in one’s third language, but I have my favorite singer and fellow countryperson Kulaap whispering in my ear that “Love is a Bird,” and the work is going well. With Kulaap singing to me in our childhood language, I feel very much at home.

A tap on my shoulder interrupts me. I pull out my ear buds and look around. Janice, standing over me. “Ong, I need to talk to you.” She motions me to follow.

In her office, she closes the door behind me and goes to her desk. “Sit down, Ong.” She keys her tablet, scrolls through data. “How are things going for you?”

“Very well. Thank you.” I’m not sure if there is more that she wants me to say, but it is likely that she will tell me. Americans do not leave much to guesswork.

“What are you working on for your next story?” she asks.

I smile. I like this story; it reminds me of my father. And with Kulaap’s soothing voice in my ears I have finished almost all of my research. The bluet, a flower made famous in Mr. Henry David Thoreau’s journals, is blooming too early to be pollinated. Bees do not seem to find it when it blooms in March. The scientists I interviewed blame global warming, and now the flower is in danger of extinction. I have interviewed biologists and local naturalists, and now I would like to go to Walden Pond on a pilgrimage for this bluet that may soon also be bottled in a federal reserve laboratory with its techs in clean suits and their crime scene vacuums.

When I finish describing the story, Janice looks at me as if I am crazy. I can tell that she thinks I am crazy, because I can see it on her face. And also because she tells me.

“You’re fucking crazy!”

Americans are very direct. It’s difficult to keep face when they yell at you. Sometimes, I think that I have adapted to America. I have been here for five years now, ever since I came from Thailand on a scholarship, but at times like this, all I can do is smile and try not to cringe as they lose their face and yell and rant. My father was once struck in the face with an official’s shoe, and he did not show his anger. But Janice is American, and she is very angry.

“There’s no way I’m going to authorize a junket like that!”

I try to smile past her anger, and then remember that the Americans don’t see an apologetic smile in the same way that a Lao would. I stop smiling and make my face look . . . something. Earnest, I hope.

“The story is very important,” I say. “The ecosystem isn’t adapting correctly to the changing climate. Instead, it has lost . . .” I grope for the word. “Synchronicity. These scientists think that the flower can be saved, but only if they import a bee that is available in Turkey. They think it can replace the function of the native bee population, and they think that it will not be too disruptive.”

“Flowers and Turkish bees.”

“Yes. It is an important story. Do they let the flower go extinct? Or try to keep the famous flower, but alter the environment of Walden Pond? I think your readers will think it is very interesting.”

“More interesting than that?” She points through her glass wall at the maelstrom, at the throbbing green sun of Double DP, who has now barricaded himself in a Mexican hotel and has taken a pair of fans hostage.

“You know how many clicks we’re getting?” she asks. “We’re exclusive. Marty’s got Double’s trust and is going in for an interview tomorrow, assuming the Mexicans don’t just raid it with commandos. We’ve got people clicking back every couple minutes just to look at Marty’s blog about his preparations to go in.”

The glowing globe not only dominates the maelstrom’s screen, it washes everything else out. If we look at the stock bots, everyone who doesn’t have protection under our corporate umbrella has been hurt by the loss of eyeballs. Even the Frontal Lobe/Oakley story has been swallowed. Three days of completely dominating the maelstrom has been very profitable for us. Now Marty’s showing his viewers how he will wear a flak jacket in case the Mexican commandos attack while he is discussing the nature of true love with DP. And he has another exclusive interview with the mother ready to post as well. Cindy has been editing the footage and telling us all how disgusted she is with the whole thing. The woman apparently drove her daughter to DP’s mansion for a midnight pool party, alone.

“Perhaps some people are tired of DP and wish to see something else,” I suggest.

“Don’t shoot yourself in the foot with a flower story, Ong. Even Pradeep’s cooking journey through Ladakh gets more viewers than this stuff you’re writing.”

She looks as though she will say more, but then she simply stops. It seems as if she is considering her words. It is uncharacteristic. She normally speaks before her thoughts are arranged.

“Ong, I like you,” she says. I make myself smile at this, but she continues. “I hired you because I had a good feeling about you. I didn’t have a problem with clearing the visas to let you stay in the country. You’re a good person. You write well. But you’re averaging less than a thousand pings on your byline feed.” She looks down at her tablet, then back up at me. “You need to up your average. You’ve got almost no readers selecting you for Page One. And even when they do subscribe to your feed, they’re putting it in the third tier.”

“Spinach reading,” I supply.

“What?”

“Mr. Mackley calls it spinach reading. When people feel like they should do something with virtue, like eat their spinach, they click to me. Or else read Shakespeare.”

I blush, suddenly embarrassed. I do not mean to imply that my work is of the same caliber as a great poet. I want to correct myself, but I’m too embarrassed. So instead I shut up, and sit in front of her, blushing.

She regards me. “Yes. Well, that’s a problem. Look, I respect what you do. You’re obviously very smart.” Her eyes scan her tablet. “The butterfly thing you wrote was actually pretty interesting.”

“Yes?” I make myself smile again.

“It’s just that no one wants to read these stories.”

I try to protest. “But you hired me to write the important stories. The stories about politics and the government, to continue the traditions of the old newspapers. I remember what you said when you hired me.”

“Yeah, well.” She looks away. “I was thinking more about a good scandal.”

“The checkerspot is a scandal. That butterfly is now gone.”

She sighs. “No, it’s not a scandal. It’s just a depressing story. No one reads a depressing story, at least, not more than once. And no one subscribes to a depressing byline feed.”

“A thousand people do.”

“A thousand people.” She laughs. “We aren’t some Laotian community weblog, we’re Milestone, and we’re competing for clicks with them.” She waves outside, indicating the maelstrom. “Your stories don’t last longer than half a day; they never get social-poked by anyone except a fringe.” She shakes her head. “Christ, I don’t even know who your demographic is. Centenarian hippies? Some federal bureaucrats? The numbers just don’t justify the amount of time you spend on stories.”

“What stories do you wish me to write?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Product reviews. News you can use. Just not any more of this ‘we regret to inform you of bad news’ stuff. If there isn’t something a reader can do about the damn butterfly, then there’s no point in telling them about it. It just depresses people, and it depresses your numbers.”

“We don’t have enough numbers from Marty?”

She laughs at that. “You remind me of my mother. Look, I don’t want to cut you, but if you can’t start pulling at least a fifty thousand daily average, I won’t have any choice. Our group median is way down in comparison to other teams, and when evaluations come around, we look bad. I’m up against Nguyen in the Tech and Toys pool, and Penn in Yoga and Spirituality, and no one wants to read about how the world’s going to shit. Go find me some stories that people want to read.”

She says a few more things, words that I think are meant to make me feel inspired and eager, and then I am standing outside the door, once again facing the maelstrom.

The truth is that I have never written popular stories. I am not a popular story writer. I am earnest. I am slow. I do not move at the speed these Americans seem to love. Find a story that people want to read. I can write some follow-up to Mackley, to Double DP, perhaps assist with sidebars to his main piece, but somehow, I suspect that the readers will know that I am faking it.

Marty sees me standing outside of Janice’s office. He comes over.

“She giving you a hard time about your numbers?”

“I do not write the correct sort of stories.”

“Yeah. You’re an idealist.”

We both stand there for a moment, meditating on the nature of idealism. Even though he is very American, I like him because he is sensitive to people’s hearts. People trust him. Even Double DP trusts him, though Marty blew his name over every news tablet’s front page. Marty has a good heart. Jai dee. I like him. I think that he is genuine.

“Look, Ong,” he says. “I like what you do.” He puts his hand around my shoulder. For a moment, I think he’s about to try to rub my head with affection and I have to force myself not to wince, but he’s sensitive and instead takes his hand away. “Look, Ong. We both know you’re terrible at this kind of work. We’re in the news business, here. And you’re just not cut out for it.”

“My visa says I have to remain employed.”

“Yeah. Janice is a bitch for that. Look.” He pauses. “I’ve got this thing with Double DP going down in Mexico. But I’ve got another story brewing. An exclusive. I’ve already got my bonus, anyway. And it should push up your average.”

“I do not think that I can write Double DP sidebars.”

He grins. “It’s not that. And it’s not charity; you’re actually a perfect match.”

“It is about government mismanagement?”

He laughs, but I think he’s not really laughing at me. “No.” He pauses, smiles. “It’s Kulaap. An interview.”

I suck in my breath. My fellow countryperson, here in America. She came out during the purge as well. She was doing a movie in Singapore when the tanks moved, and so she was not trapped. She was already very popular all over Asia, and when Khamsing turned our country into a black hole, the world took note. Now she is popular here in America as well. Very beautiful. And she remembers our country before it went into darkness. My heart is pounding.

Marty goes on. “She’s agreed to do an exclusive with me. But you even speak her language, so I think she’d agree to switch off.” He pauses, looks serious. “I’ve got a good history with Kulaap. She doesn’t give interviews to just anyone. I did a lot of exposure stories about her when Laos was going to hell. Got her a lot of good press. This is a special favor already, so don’t fuck it up.”

I shake my head. “No. I will not.” I press my palms together and touch them to my forehead in a nop of appreciation. “I will not fuck it up.” I make another nop.

He laughs. “Don’t bother with that polite stuff. Janice will cut off your balls to increase the stock price, but we’re the guys in the trenches. We stick together, right?”

In the morning, I make a pot of strong coffee with condensed milk; I boil rice noodle soup and add bean sprouts and chiles and vinegar, and warm a loaf of French bread that I buy from a Vietnamese bakery a few blocks away. With a new mix of Kulaap’s music from DJ Dao streaming in over my stereo, I sit down at my little kitchen table, pour my coffee from its press pot, and open my tablet.

The tablet is a wondrous creation. In Laos, the paper was still a paper, physical, static, and empty of anything except the official news. Real news in our New Divine Kingdom did not come from newspapers, or from television, or from handsets or ear buds. It did not come from the net or feeds unless you trusted your neighbor not to look over your shoulder at an Internet cafe and if you knew that there were no secret police sitting beside you, or an owner who would be able to identify you when they came around asking about the person who used that workstation over there to communicate with the outside world.

Real news came from whispered rumor, rated according to the trust you accorded the whisperer. Were they family? Did they have long history with you? Did they have anything to gain by the sharing? My father and his old classmates trusted one another. He trusted some of his students, as well. I think this is why the security police came for him in the end. One of his trusted friends or students also whispered news to official friends. Perhaps Mr. Inthachak, or Som Vang. Perhaps another. It is impossible to peer into the blackness of that history and guess at who told true stories and in which direction.

In any case, it was my father’s karma to be taken, so perhaps it does not matter who did the whispering. But before then—before the news of my father flowed up to official ears—none of the real news flowed toward Lao TV or the Vientiane Times. Which meant that when the protests happened and my father came through the door with blood on his face from baton blows, we could read as much as we wanted about the three thousand schoolchildren who had sung the national anthem to our new divine monarch. While my father lay in bed, delirious with pain, the papers told us that China had signed a rubber contract that would triple revenue for Luang Namtha province and that Nam Theun Dam was now earning BT 22.5 billion per year in electricity fees to Thailand. But there were no bloody batons, and there were no dead monks, and there was no Mercedes-Benz burning in the river as it floated toward Cambodia.

Real news came on the wings of rumor, stole into our house at midnight, sat with us and sipped coffee and fled before the call of roosters could break the stillness. It was in the dark, over a burning cigarette that you learned Vilaphon had disappeared or that Mr. Saeng’s wife had been beaten as a warning. Real news was too valuable to risk in public.

Here in America, my page glows with many news feeds, flickers at me in video windows, pours in at me over broadband. It is a waterfall of information. As my personal news page opens, my feeds arrange themselves, sorting according to the priorities and tag categories that I’ve set, a mix of Meung Lao news, Lao refugee blogs, and the chatting of a few close friends from Thailand and the American college where I attended on a human relief scholarship.

On my second page and my third, I keep the general news, the arrangements of Milestone, the Bangkok Post, the Phnom Penh Express—the news chosen by editors. But by the time I’ve finished with my own selections, I don’t often have time to click through the headlines that these earnest news editors select for the mythical general reader.

In any case, I know far better than they what I want to read, and with my keyword and tag scans, I can unearth stories and discussions that a news agency would never think to provide. Even if I cannot see into the black hole itself, I can slip along its edges, divine news from its fringe.

I search for tags like Vientiane, Laos, Lao, Khamsing, China-Lao friendship, Korat, Golden Triangle, Hmong independence, Lao PDR, my father’s name. . . . Only those of us who are Lao exiles from the March Purge really read these blogs. It is much as when we lived in the capital. The blogs are the rumors that we used to whisper to one another. Now we publish our whispers over the net and join mailing lists instead of secret coffee groups, but it is the same. It is family, as much as any of us now have.

On the maelstrom, the tags for Laos don’t even register. Our tags bloomed brightly for a little while, while there were still guerrilla students uploading content from their handsets, and the images were lurid and shocking. But then the phone lines went down and the country fell into its black hole and now it is just us, this small network that functions outside the country.

A headline from Jumbo Blog catches my eye. I open the site, and my tablet fills with the colorful image of the three-wheeled taxi of my childhood. I often come here. It is a node of comfort.

Laofriend posts that some people, maybe a whole family, have swum the Mekong and made it into Thailand. He isn’t sure if they were accepted as refugees or if they were sent back.

It is not an official news piece. More, the idea of a news piece. SomPaBoy doesn’t believe it, but Khamchanh contends that the rumor is true, heard from someone who has a sister married to an Isaan border guard in the Thai army. So we cling to it. Wonder about it. Guess where these people came from, wonder if, against all odds, it could be one of ours: a brother, a sister, a cousin, a father. . . .

After an hour, I close the tablet. It’s foolish to read any more. It only brings up memories. Worrying about the past is foolish. Lao PDR is gone. To wish otherwise is suffering.

The clerk at Novotel’s front desk is expecting me. A hotel staffer with a key guides me to a private elevator bank that whisks us up into the smog and heights. The elevator doors open to a small entryway with a thick mahogany door. The staffer steps back into the elevator and disappears, leaving me standing in this strange airlock. Presumably, I am being examined by Kulaap’s security.

The mahogany door opens, and a smiling black man who is forty centimeters taller than I and who has muscles that ripple like snakes smiles and motions me inside. He guides me through Kulaap’s sanctuary. She keeps the heat high, almost tropical, and fountains rush everywhere around. The flat is musical with water. I unbutton my collar in the humidity. I was expecting air-conditioning, and instead I am sweltering. It’s almost like home. And then she’s in front of me, and I can hardly speak. She is beautiful, and more. It is intimidating to stand before someone who exists in film and in music but has never existed before you in the flesh. She’s not as stunning as she is in the movies, but there’s more life, more presence; the movies lose that quality about her. I make a nop of greeting, pressing my hands together, touching my forehead.

She laughs at this, takes my hand and shakes it American-style. “You’re lucky Marty likes you so much,” she says. “I don’t like interviews.”

I can barely find my voice. “Yes. I only have a few questions.”

“Oh no. Don’t be shy.” She laughs again, and doesn’t release my hand, pulls me toward her living room. “Marty told me about you. You need help with your ratings. He helped me once, too.”

She’s frightening. She is of my people, but she has adapted better to this place than I have. She seems comfortable here. She walks differently, smiles differently; she is an American, with perhaps some flavor of our country, but nothing of our roots. It’s obvious. And strangely disappointing. In her movies, she holds herself so well, and now she sits down on her couch and sprawls with her feet kicked out in front of her. Not caring at all. I’m embarrassed for her, and I’m glad I don’t have my camera set up yet. She kicks her feet up on the couch. I can’t help but be shocked. She catches my expression and smiles.

“You’re worse than my parents. Fresh off the boat.”

“I am sorry.”

She shrugs. “Don’t worry about it. I spent half my life here, growing up; different country, different rules.”

I’m embarrassed. I try not to laugh with the tension I feel. “I just have some interview questions,” I say.

“Go ahead.” She sits up and arranges herself for the video stand that I set up.

I begin. “When the March Purge happened, you were in Singapore.”

She nods. “That’s right. We were finishing The Tiger and the Ghost.”

“What was your first thought when it happened? Did you want to go back? Were you surprised?”

She frowns. “Turn off the camera.”

When it’s off she looks at me with pity. “This isn’t the way to get clicks. No one cares about an old revolution. Not even my fans.” She stands abruptly and calls through the green jungle of her flat. “Terrell?”

The big black man appears. Smiling and lethal. Looming over me. He is very frightening. The movies I grew up with had falang like him. Terrifying large black men whom our heroes had to overcome. Later, when I arrived in America, it was different, and I found out that the falang and the black people don’t like the way we show them in our movies. Much like when I watch their Vietnam movies, and see the ugly way the Lao freedom fighters behave. Not real at all, portrayed like animals. But still, I cannot help but cringe when Terrell looks at me.

Kulaap says, “We’re going out, Terrell. Make sure you tip off some of the papcams. We’re going to give them a show.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

“You want clicks, don’t you?”

“Yes, but—”

She smiles. “You don’t need an interview. You need an event.” She looks me over. “And better clothes.” She nods to her security man. “Terrell, dress him up.”

A flashbulb frenzy greets us as we come out of the tower. Papcams everywhere. Chase cycles revving, and Terrell and three others of his people guiding us through the press to the limousine, shoving cameras aside with a violence and power that are utterly unlike the careful pity he showed when he selected a Gucci suit for me to wear.

Kulaap looks properly surprised at the crowd and the shouting reporters, but not nearly as surprised as I am, and then we’re in the limo, speeding out of the tower’s roundabout as papcams follow us.

Kulaap crouches before the car’s onboard tablet, keying in pass codes. She is very pretty, wearing a black dress that brushes her thighs and thin straps that caress her smooth bare shoulders. I feel as if I am in a movie. She taps more keys. A screen glows, showing the taillights of our car: the view from pursuing papcams.

“You know I haven’t dated anyone in three years?” she asks.

“Yes. I know from your Web site biography.”

She grins. “And now it looks like I’ve found one of my countrymen.”

“But we’re not on a date,” I protest.

“Of course we are.” She smiles again. “I’m going out on a supposedly secret date with a cute and mysterious Lao boy. And look at all those papcams chasing after us, wondering where we’re going and what we’re going to do.” She keys in another code, and now we can see live footage of the paparazzi, as viewed from the tail of her limo. She grins. “My fans like to see what life is like for me.”

I can almost imagine what the maelstrom looks like right now: there will still be Marty’s story, but now a dozen other sites will be lighting up, and in the center of that, Kulaap’s own view of the excitement, pulling in her fans, who will want to know, direct from her, what’s going on. She holds up a mirror, checks herself, and then she smiles into her smartphone’s camera.

“Hi everyone. It looks like my cover’s blown. Just thought I should let you know that I’m on a lovely date with a lovely man. I’ll let you all know how it goes. Promise.” She points the camera at me. I stare at it stupidly. She laughs. “Say hi and good-bye, Ong.”

“Hi and good-bye.”

She laughs again, waves into the camera. “Love you all. Hope you have as good a night as I’m going to have.” And then she cuts the clip and punches a code to launch the video to her Web site.

It is a bit of nothing. Not a news story, not a scoop even, and yet, when she opens another window on her tablet, showing her own miniversion of the maelstrom, I can see her site lighting up with traffic. Her version of the maelstrom isn’t as powerful as what we have at Milestone, but still, it is an impressive window into the data that is relevant to Kulaap’s tags.

“What’s your feed’s byline?” she asks. “Let’s see if we can get your traffic bumped up.”

“Are you serious?”

“Marty Mackley did more than this for me. I told him I’d help.” She laughs. “Besides, we wouldn’t want you to get sent back to the black hole, would we?”

“You know about the black hole?” I can’t help doing a double-take.

Her smile is almost sad. “You think just because I put my feet up on the furniture that I don’t care about my aunts and uncles back home? That I don’t worry about what’s happening?”

“I—”

She shakes her head. “You’re so fresh off the boat.”

“Do you use the Jumbo Cafe—” I break off. It seems too unlikely.

She leans close. “My handle is Laofriend. What’s yours?”

“Littlexang. I thought Laofriend was a boy—”

She just laughs.

I lean forward. “Is it true that the family made it out?”

She nods. “For certain. A general in the Thai army is a fan. He tells me everything. They have a listening post. And sometimes they send scouts across.”

It’s almost as if I am home.

We go to a tiny Laotian restaurant where everyone recognizes her and falls over her and the owners simply lock out the paparazzi when they become too intrusive. We spend the evening unearthing memories of Vientiane. We discover that we both favored the same rice noodle cart on Kaem Khong. That she used to sit on the banks of the Mekong and wish that she were a fisherman. That we went to the same waterfalls outside the city on the weekends. That it is impossible to find good dum mak hoong anywhere outside of the country. She is a good companion, very alive. Strange in her American ways, but still, with a good heart. Periodically, we click photos of one another and post them to her site, feeding the voyeurs. And then we are in the limo again and the paparazzi are all around us. I have the strange feeling of fame. Flashbulbs everywhere. Shouted questions. I feel proud to be beside this beautiful intelligent woman who knows so much more than any of us about the situation inside our homeland.

Back in the car, she has me open a bottle of champagne and pour two glasses while she opens the maelstrom and studies the results of our date. She has reprogrammed it to watch my byline feed ranking as well.

“You’ve got twenty thousand more readers than you did yesterday,” she says.

I beam. She keeps reading the results. “Someone already did a scan on your face.” She toasts me with her glass. “You’re famous.”

We clink glasses. I am flushed with wine and happiness. I will have Janice’s average clicks. It’s as though a bodhisattva has come down from heaven to save my job. In my mind, I offer thanks to Marty for arranging this, for his generous nature. Kulaap leans close to her screen, watching the flaring content. She opens another window, starts to read. She frowns.

“What the fuck do you write about?”

I draw back, surprised. “Government stories, mostly.” I shrug. “Sometimes environment stories.”

“Like what?”

“I am working on a story right now about global warming and Henry David Thoreau.”

“Aren’t we done with that?”

I’m confused. “Done with what?”

The limo jostles us as it makes a turn, moves down Hollywood Boulevard, letting the cycles rev around us like schools of fish. They’re snapping pictures at the side of the limo, snapping at us. Through the tinting, they’re like fireflies, smaller flares than even my stories in the maelstrom.

“I mean, isn’t that an old story?” She sips her champagne. “Even America is reducing emissions now. Everyone knows it’s a problem.” She taps her couch’s armrest. “The carbon tax on my limo has tripled, even with the hybrid engine. Everyone agrees it’s a problem. We’re going to fix it. What’s there to write about?”

She is an American. Everything that is good about them: their optimism, their willingness to charge ahead, to make their own future. And everything that is bad about them: their strange ignorance, their unwillingness to believe that they must behave as other than children.

“No. It’s not done,” I say. “It is worse. Worse every day. And the changes we make seem to have little effect. Maybe too little, or maybe too late. It is getting worse.”

She shrugs. “That’s not what I read.”

I try not to show my exasperation. “Of course it’s not what you read.” I wave at the screen. “Look at the clicks on my feed. People want happy stories. Want fun stories. Not stories like I write. So instead, we all write what you will read, which is nothing.”

“Still—”

“No.” I make a chopping motion with my hand. “We newspeople are very smart monkeys. If you will give us your so lovely eyeballs and your click-throughs we will do whatever you like. We will write good news, and news you can use, news you can shop to, news with the ‘Three S’s.’ We will tell you how to have better sex or eat better or look more beautiful or feel happier and or how to meditate—yes, so enlightened.” I make a face. “If you want a walking meditation and Double DP, we will give it to you.”

She starts to laugh.

“Why are you laughing at me?” I snap. “I am not joking!”

She waves a hand. “I know, I know, but what you just said ‘double’—” She shakes her head, still laughing. “Never mind.”

I lapse into silence. I want to go on, to tell her of my frustrations. But now I am embarrassed at my loss of composure. I have no face. I didn’t used to be like this. I used to control my emotions, but now I am an American, as childish and unruly as Janice. And Kulaap laughs at me.

I control my anger. “I think I want to go home,” I say. “I don’t wish to be on a date anymore.”

She smiles and reaches over to touch my shoulder. “Don’t be that way.”

A part of me is telling me that I am a fool. That I am reckless and foolish for walking away from this opportunity. But there is something else, something about this frenzied hunt for page views and click-throughs and ad revenue that suddenly feels unclean. As if my father is with us in the car, disapproving. Asking if he posted his complaints about his missing friends for the sake of clicks.

“I want to get out,” I hear myself say. “I do not wish to have your clicks.”

“But—”

I look up at her. “I want to get out. Now.”

“Here?” She makes a face of exasperation, then shrugs. “It’s your choice.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She tells her driver to pull over. We sit in stiff silence.

“I will send your suit back to you,” I say.

She gives me a sad smile. “It’s all right. It’s a gift.”

This makes me feel worse, even more humiliated for refusing her generosity, but still, I get out of the limo. Cameras are clicking at me from all around. This is my fifteen minutes of fame, this moment when all of Kulaap’s fans focus on me for a few seconds, their flashbulbs popping.

I begin to walk home as paparazzi shout questions.

Fifteen minutes later I am indeed alone. I consider calling a cab, but then decide I prefer the night. Prefer to walk by myself through this city that never walks anywhere. On a street corner, I buy a pupusa and gamble on the Mexican Lottery because I like the tickets’ laser images of their Day of the Dead. It seems an echo of the Buddha’s urging to remember that we all become corpses.

I buy three tickets, and one of them is a winner: one hundred dollars that I can redeem at any TelMex kiosk. I take this as a good sign. Even if my luck is obviously gone with my work, and even if the girl Kulaap was not the bodhisattva that I thought, still, I feel lucky. As though my father is walking with me down this cool Los Angeles street in the middle of the night, the two of us together again, me with a pupusa and a winning lottery ticket, him with an Ah Daeng cigarette and his quiet gambler’s smile. In a strange way, I feel that he is blessing me.

And so instead of going home, I go back to the newsroom.

My hits are up when I arrive. Even now, in the middle of the night, a tiny slice of Kulaap’s fan base is reading about checkerspot butterflies and American government incompetence. In my country, this story would not exist. A censor would kill it instantly. Here, it glows green; increasing and decreasing in size as people click. A lonely thing, flickering amongst the much larger content flares of Intel processor releases, guides to low-fat recipes, photos of lol-cats, and episodes of Survivor! Antarctica. The wash of light and color is very beautiful.

In the center of the maelstrom, the green sun of the Double DP story glows—surges larger. DP is doing something. Maybe he’s surrendering, maybe he’s murdering his hostages, maybe his fans have thrown up a human wall to protect him. My story snuffs out as reader attention shifts.

I watch the maelstrom a little longer, then go to my desk and make a phone call. A rumpled hairy man answers, rubbing at a sleep-puffy face. I apologize for the late hour, and then pepper him with questions while I record the interview.

He is silly looking and wild-eyed. He has spent his life living as if he were Thoreau, thinking deeply on the forest monk and following the man’s careful paths through what woods remain, walking amongst birch and maple and bluets. He is a fool, but an earnest one.

“I can’t find a single one,” he tells me. “Thoreau could find thousands at this time of year; there were so many he didn’t even have to look for them.”

He says, “I’m so glad you called. I tried sending out press releases, but . . .” He shrugs. “I’m glad you’ll cover it. Otherwise, it’s just us hobbyists talking to each other.”

I smile and nod and take notes of his sincerity, this strange wild creature, the sort that everyone will dismiss. His image is bad for video; his words are not good for text. He has no quotes that encapsulate what he sees. It is all couched in the jargon of naturalists and biology. With time, I could find another, someone who looks attractive or who can speak well, but all I have is this one hairy man, disheveled and foolish, senile with passion over a flower that no longer exists.

I work through the night, polishing the story. When my colleagues pour through the door at 8 a.m. it is almost done. Before I can even tell Janice about it, she comes to me. She fingers my clothing and grins. “Nice suit.” She pulls up a chair and sits beside me. “We all saw you with Kulaap. Your hits went way up.” She nods at my screen. “Writing up what happened?”

“No. It was a private conversation.”

“But everyone wants to know why you got out of the car. I had someone from the Financial Times call me about splitting the hits for a tell-all, if you’ll be interviewed. You wouldn’t even need to write up the piece.”

It’s a tempting thought. Easy hits. Many click-throughs. Ad-revenue bonuses. Still, I shake my head. “We did not talk about things that are important for others to hear.”

Janice stares at me as if I am crazy. “You’re not in the position to bargain, Ong. Something happened between the two of you. Something people want to know about. And you need the clicks. Just tell us what happened on your date.”

“I was not on a date. It was an interview.”

“Well then publish the fucking interview and get your average up!”

“No. That is for Kulaap to post, if she wishes. I have something else.”

I show Janice my screen. She leans forward. Her mouth tightens as she reads. For once, her anger is cold. Not the explosion of noise and rage that I expect. “Bluets.” She looks at me. “You need hits and you give them flowers and Walden Pond.”

“I would like to publish this story.”

“No! Hell, no! This is just another story like your butterfly story, and your road contracts story, and your congressional budget story. You won’t get a damn click. It’s pointless. No one will even read it.”

“This is news.”

“Marty went out on a limb for you—” She presses her lips together, reining in her anger. “Fine. It’s up to you, Ong. If you want to destroy your life over Thoreau and flowers, it’s your funeral. We can’t help you if you won’t help yourself. Bottom line, you need fifty thousand readers or I’m sending you back to the third world.”

We look at each other. Two gamblers evaluating one another. Deciding who is betting, and who is bluffing.

I click the “publish” button.

The story launches itself onto the net, announcing itself to the feeds. A minute later a tiny new sun glows in the maelstrom.

Together, Janice and I watch the green spark as it flickers on the screen. Readers turn to the story. Start to ping it and share it amongst themselves, start to register hits on the page. The post grows slightly.

My father gambled on Thoreau. I am my father’s son.

PALIMPSEST

Charles Stross

FRESH MEAT

This will never happen:

You will flex your fingers as you stare at the back of the youth you are going to kill, father to the man who will never now become your grandfather; and as you trail him home through the snowy night, you’ll pray for your soul, alone in the darkness.

Memories are going to come to you unbidden even though you’ll try to focus on the task in hand. His life—that part of it which you arrived kicking and squalling in time to share with him before the end—will pass in front of your eyes. You will remember Gramps in his sixties, his hands a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints as he holds your preteen wrists and shows you how to cast the fly across the water. And you’ll remember the shrunken husk of his seventies, standing speechless and numb by Gran’s graveside in his too-big suit, lying at last alone in the hospice bed, breath coming shallow and fast as he sleeps alone with the cancer. These won’t be good memories. But you know the rest of the story too, having heard it endlessly from your parents: young love and military service in a war as distant as faded sepia photographs from another generation’s front, a good job in the factory and a wife he will quietly adore who will in due course give him three children, from one of whose loins you in turn are drawn. Gramps will have a good, long life and live to see five grandchildren and a myriad of wonders, and this boy-man on the edge of adulthood who you are compelled to follow as he walks to the recruiting office holds the seeds of the man you will remember . . . But it’s him or you.

Gramps would have had a good life. You must hold on to that. It will make what’s coming easier.

You will track the youth who will never be your grandfather through the snow-spattered shrubbery and long grass along the side of the railroad tracks, and the wool-and-vegetable-fiber cloth that you wear—your costume will be entirely authentic—chafes your skin. By that point you won’t have bathed for a week, or shaved using hot water: you are a young thug, a vagrant, and a wholly bad sort. That is what the witnesses will see, the mad-eyed young killer in the sweat-stained suit with the knife and his victim, so vulnerable with his throat laid open almost to the bone. He’ll sprawl as if he is merely sleeping. And there will be outrage and alarm as the cops and concerned citizens turn out to hunt the monster that took young Gerry from his family’s arms, and him just barely a man: but they won’t find you, because you’ll push the button on the pebble-sized box and Stasis Control will open up a timegate and welcome you into their proud and lonely ranks.

When you wake up in your dorm two hundred years-objective from now, bathed in stinking fear-sweat, with the sheet sucking onto your skin like a death-chilled caul, there will be nobody to comfort you and nobody to hold you. The kindness of your mother’s hands and the strength of your father’s wrists will be phantoms of memory, ghosts that echo round your bones, wandering homeless through the mausoleum of your memories.

They’ll have no one to remember their lives but you; and all because you will believe the recruiters when they tell you that to join the organization you must kill your own grandfather, and that if you do not join the organization, you will die.

(It’s an antinepotism measure, they’ll tell you, nodding, not unkindly. And a test of your ruthlessness and determination. And besides, we all did it when it was our turn.)

Welcome to the Stasis, Agent Pierce! You’re rootless now, an orphan of the time stream, sprung from nowhere on a mission to eternity. And you’re going to have a remarkable career.

Yellowstone

“You’ve got to remember, humanity always goes extinct,” said Wei, staring disinterestedly at the line of women and children shuffling toward the slave station down by the river. “Always. A thousand years, a hundred thousand, a quarter million—doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, humans go extinct.” He was speaking Urem, the language the Stasis used among themselves.

“I thought that was why we were here? To try and prevent it?” Pierce asked, using the honorific form appropriate for a student questioning his tutor, although Wei was, in truth, merely a twelfth-year trainee himself: the required formality was merely one more reminder of the long road ahead of him.

“No.” Wei raised his spear and thumped its base on the dry, hard-packed mud of the observation mound. “We’re going to relocate a few seed groups, several tens of thousands. But the rest are still going to die.” He glanced away from the slaves: Pierce followed his gaze.

Along the horizon, the bright red sky darkened to the color of coagulated blood on a slaughterhouse floor. The volcano, two thousand kilometers farther around the curve of the planet, had been pumping ash and steam into the stratosphere for weeks. Every noon, in the badlands where once the Mississippi delta had writhed, the sky wept brackish tears.

“You’re from before the first extinction epoch, aren’t you? The pattern wasn’t established back then. That must be why you were sent on this field trip. You need to understand that this always happens. Why we do this. You need to know it in your guts. Why we take the savages and leave the civilized to die.”

Like Wei, and the other Stasis agents who had silently liquidated the camp guards and stolen their identities three nights before, Pierce was disguised as a Benzin warrior. He wore the war paint and beaten-aluminum armbands, bore the combat scars. He carried a spear tipped with a shard of synthetic diamond, mined from a deep seam of prehistoric automobile windshields. He even wore a Benzin face: the epicanthic folds and dark skin conferred by the phenotypic patches had given him food for thought, an unfamiliar departure from his white-bread origins. Gramps (he shied from the memory) would have died rather than wear this face.

Pierce was not yet even a twelve-year trainee: he’d been in the service for barely four years-subjective. But he was ready to be sent out under supervision, and this particular operation called for warm bodies rather than retrocausal subtlety.

Fifty years ago, the Benzin had swept around the eastern coastline of what was still North America, erupting from their heartland in the central isthmus to extend their tribute empire into the scattered tribal grounds of post-Neolithic nomads known to Stasis Control only by their code names: the Alabamae, the Floridae, and the Americae. The Benzin were intent on conquering the New World, unaware that it had been done at least seventeen times already since the start of the current Reseeding. They did not understand the significance of the redness in the western sky or the shaking of the ground, ascribing it to the anger of their tribal gods. They had no idea that these signs heralded the end of the current interglacial age, or that their extinction would be a side effect of the coming Yellowstone eruption—one of a series that occurred at six-hundred-thousand-year intervals during the early stages of the Lower First Anthropogenic epoch.

The Benzin didn’t take a long view of things, for although their priest-kings had a system of writing, most of them lived in the hazily defined ahistorical myth-world of the preliterate. Their time was running out all the same. Yellowstone was waking, and even the Stasis preferred to work around such brutal geological phenomena, rather than through them.

“Yes, but why take them?” Pierce nodded toward the silently trudging Alabamae women and children, their shoulders stooped beneath the burden of their terror. They’d been walking before the spear points of their captors for days; they were exhausted. The loud ones had already died, along with the lame. The raiders who had slain their men and stolen them away to a life of slavery sat proudly astride their camels, their enemies’ scalps dangling from their kotekas like bizarre pubic wigs. “The Benzin may be savages, but these people are losers—they came off worse.”

Wei shook his head minutely. “The adults are all female, and mostly pregnant at that. These are the healthy ones, the ones who survived the march. They’re gatherers, used to living off the land, and they’re all in one convenient spot.”

Pierce clenched his teeth, realizing his mistake. “You’re going to use them for Reseeding? Because there are fewer bodies, and they’re more primitive, more able to survive in a wilderness . . .?”

“Yes. For a successful Reseeding we need at least twenty thousand bodies from as many diverse groups as possible, and even then we risk a genetic bottleneck. And they need to be able to survive in the total absence of civilization. If we dumped you in the middle of a Reseeding, you would probably not last a month. No criticism intended; neither would I. Those warriors”—Wei raised his spear again, as if saluting the raiders—“require slaves and womenfolk and a hierarchy to function. The tip of your spear was fashioned by a slave in the royal armories, not by a warrior. Your moccasins and the cloth of your pants were made by Benzin slaves. They are halfway to reinventing civilization: given another five thousand years-subjunctive, their distant descendants might build steam engines and establish ubiquitous recording frameworks, bequeathing their memories to the absolute future. But for a Reseeding they’re as useless as we are.”

“But they don’t have half a deci—”

“Be still. They’re moving.”

The last of the slaves had been herded between the barbed hedges of the entrance passageway, and the gate guards lifted the heavy barrier back into position. Now the raiders kicked their mounts into motion, beating and poking them around the side of the spiny bamboo fence in a circuit of the guard posts. Wei and Pierce stood impassively as the camel riders spurred down on them. At the last moment, their leader pulled sideways, and his mount snorted and pawed at the ground angrily as he leaned toward Wei.

“Hai!” he shouted, in the tonal trade tongue of the northern Benzin. “I don’t remember you!”

“I am Hawk! Who in the seventh hell are you?”

Wei glared at the rider, but the intruder just laughed raucously and spat over the side of his saddle: it landed on the mud, sufficiently far from Wei to make it unclear whether it was a direct challenge.

Pierce tightened his grip on his spear, moving his index finger closer to the trigger discreetly printed on it. High above them, a vulturelike bird circled the zone of confrontation with unnatural precision, its fire-control systems locked on.

“I am Teuch,” said the rider, after a pause. “I captured these women! In the name of our Father I took them, and in the name of our Father I got them with children to work in the paddies! What have you done for our Father today?”

“I stand here,” Wei said, lifting the butt of his spear. “I guard our Father’s flock while assholes like you are out having fun.”

“Hai!” The rider’s face split in a broad, dust-stained grin. “I see you, too!” He raised his right fist and for an instant Pierce had an icy vision of his guts unraveling around a barbarian’s spear; but the camel lifted its head and brayed as Teuch nudged it in a surprisingly delicate sidestep away from Wei, away from the hedge of thorns, away from the slave station. And away from the site of the timegate through which the evacuation team would drive the camp inmates in two days’ time. The prisoners would be deposited at the start of the next Reseeding. But none of the Benzin would live to see that day, a hundred thousand years-objective or more in the future.

Perhaps their camels would leave their footprints in the choking, hot rain of ash that would roll across the continent with tomorrow’s sunset. Perhaps some of those footprints would fossilize, so that the descendants of the Alabamae slaves would uncover them and marvel at their antiquity in the age to come. But immortality, Pierce thought, was a poor substitute for not dying.

Paying Attention in Class

It was a bright and chilly day on the roof of the world. Pierce, his bare head shaved like the rest of the green-robed trainees, sat on a low stool in a courtyard beneath the open sky, waiting for the tutorial to begin. Riding high above the ancient stone causeway and the spiral minarets of the Library Annex, the moon bared her knife-slashed cheeks at Pierce, as if to remind him of how far he’d come.

“Good afternoon, Honorable Students.”

The training camp nestled in a valley among the lower peaks of the Mediterranean Alps. Looming over the verdant lowlands of the Sahara basin, in this epoch they rose higher than the stumps of the time-weathered Himalayas.

“Good afternoon, Honorable Scholar Yarrow,” chanted the dozen students of the sixth-year class.

Urem, like Japanese before it, paid considerable attention to the relative status of speaker and audience. Many of the cultures the Stasis interacted with were sensitive to matters of gender, caste, and other signifiers of rank, so the designers of Urem had added declensions to reflect these matters. New recruits were expected to practice the formalities diligently, for a mastery of Urem was important to their future—and none of them were native speakers.

“I speak to you today of the structure of human history and the ways in which we may interact with it.”

Yarrow, the Honorable Scholar, was of indeterminate age: robed in black, her hair a stubble-short golden halo, she could have been anywhere from thirty to three hundred. Given the epigenetic overhaul the Stasis provided for their own, the latter was likelier—but not three thousand. Attrition in the line of duty took its toll over the centuries. Yarrow’s gaze, when it fell on Pierce, was clear, her eyes the same blue as the distant horizon. This was the first time she had lectured Pierce’s class—not surprising, for the college had many tutors, and the path to graduation was long enough to tax the most disciplined. She was, he understood, an expert on what was termed the Big Picture. He hadn’t looked her up in the local Library Annex ahead of time. (In his experience it was generally better to approach these lessons with an open mind. And in any case, students had only patchy access to the records of their seniors.)

“As a species, we are highly unstable, prone to Malthusian crises and self-destructive wars. This apparent weakness is also our strength—when reduced to a rump of a few thousand illiterate hunter-gatherers, we can spread out and tame a planet in mere centuries, and build high civilizations in a handful of millennia.

“Let me give you some numbers. Over the two and a half million epochs accessible to us—each of which lasts for a million years—we shall have reseeded starter populations nearly twenty-one million times, with an average extinction period of sixty-nine thousand years. Each Reseeding event produces an average of eleven-point-six planet-spanning empires, thirty-two continental empires, nine hundred and sixty-odd languages spoken by more than one million people, and a total population of one-point-seven trillion individuals. Summed over the entire life span of this planet—which has been vastly extended by the cosmological engineering program you see above you every night—there are nearly twenty billion billion of us. We are not merely legion—we rival in our numbers the stars of the observable universe in the current epoch.

“Our species is legion. And throughout the vast span of our history, ever since the beginning of the first panopticon empire during our first flowering, we have committed to permanent storage a record of everything that has touched us—everything but those events that have definitively unhappened.”

Pierce focused on Yarrow’s lips. They quirked slightly as she spoke, as if the flavor of her words was bitter—or as if she was suppressing an unbidden humor, intent on maintaining her gravitas before the class. Her mouth was wide and sensual, and her lips curiously pale, as if they were waiting to be warmed by another’s touch. Despite his training, Pierce was as easily distracted as any other twentysomething male, and try as he might, he found it difficult to focus on her words: he came from an age of hypertext and canned presentations and found that these archaic, linear tutorials challenged his concentration. The outward austerity of her delivery inflamed his imagination, blossoming in a sensuous daydream in which the wry taste of her lips blended with the measured cadences of her speech to burn like fire in his mind.

“Uncontrolled civilization is a terminal consumptive state, as the victims of the first extinction discovered the hard way. We have left their history intact and untouched, that we might remember our origins and study them as a warning; some of you in this cohort have been recruited from that era. In other epochs we work to prevent wild efflorescences of resource-depleting overindustrialization, to suppress competing abhuman intelligences, and to prevent the pointless resource drain of attempts to colonize other star systems. By shepherding this planet’s resources and manipulating its star and neighboring planets to maximize its inhabitable duration, we can achieve Stasis—a system that supports human life for a thousand times the life of the unmodified sun, and that remembers the time line of every human life that ever happened.”

Yarrow’s facts and figures slid past Pierce’s attention like warm syrup. He paid little heed to them, focusing instead on her intonation, the little twitches of the muscles in her cheeks as she framed each word, the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed in and out. She was impossibly magnetic: a puritan sex icon, ascetic and unaware, attractive but untouchable. It was foolish in the extreme, he knew, but for some combination of tiny interlocking reasons he found her unaccountably exciting.

“All of this would be impossible without our continued ownership of the timegate. You already know the essentials. What you may not be aware of is that it is a unique, easily depleted resource. The timegate allows us to open wormholes connecting two openings in four-dimensional space-time. But the exclusion principle prevents two such openings from overlapping in time. Tear-up and tear-down is on the order of seven milliseconds, a seemingly tiny increment when you compare it to the trillion-year span that falls within our custody. But when you slice a period of interest into fourteen-millisecond chunks, you run out of time fast. Each such span can only ever be touched by us once, connected to one other place and time of our choosing.

“Stasis Control thus has access to a theoretical maximum of 5.6 times 1021 slots across the totality of our history—but our legion of humanity comes perilously close, with a total of 2 times 10 19 people. Many of the total available slots are reserved for data, relaying the totality of recorded human history to the Library—fully ninety-six percent of humanity lives in eras where ubiquitous surveillance or personal life-logging technologies have made the recording of absolute history possible, and we obviously need to archive their lifelines. Only the ur-historical prelude to Stasis, and periods of complete civilizational collapse and Reseeding, are not being monitored in exhaustive detail.

“To make matters worse: in practice there are far fewer slots available for actual traffic, because we are not, as a species, well equipped for reacting in spans of less than a second. The seven-millisecond latency of a timegate is shorter by an order of magnitude than the usual duration of a gate used for transport.

“We dare not use gates for iterated computational processes, or to open permanent synchronous links between epochs, and while we could in theory use it to enable a single faster-than-light starship, that would be horribly wasteful. So we are limited to blink-and-it’s-gone wormholes connecting time slices of interest. And we must conclude that the slots we allocate to temporal traffic are a scarce resource because—”

Yarrow paused and glanced across her audience. Pierce shifted slightly on his stool, a growing tension in his crotch giving his distraction a focus. Her gaze lingered on him a moment too long, as if she sensed his inattention: the slight hint of amusement, imperceptible microexpressions barely glimpsed at the corners of her mouth, sent a panicky shiver up his spine. She’s going to ask questions, he realized, as she opened her lips. “What applications of the timegate are ruled out by the slot latency period, class? Does anyone know? Student Pierce? What do you know?” She looked at him directly, expectantly. The half smile nibbled at her cheeks, but her eyes were cool.

“I, um, I don’t—” Pierce flailed for words, dragged back to the embarrassing present from his sensual daydream. “The latency period?”

“You don’t what?” Honorable Scholar Yarrow raised one perfect eyebrow in feigned disbelief at his fluster. “But of course, Student Pierce. You don’t. That has always been your besetting weakness: you’re easily distracted. Too curious for your own good.” Her smile finally broke, icy amusement crinkling around her eyes. “See me in my office after the tutorial,” she said, then turned her attention back to the rest of the class, leaving him to stew in fearful anticipation. “I do hope you have been paying more attention—”

The rest of Yarrow’s lecture slid past Pierce in a delirium of embarrassment as she spoke of deep time, of salami-sliced vistas of continental drift and re-formation, of megayears devoted to starlifting and the frozen, lifeless gigayears during which the Earth had been dislodged from its celestial track, to drift far from the sun while certain necessary restructuring was carried out. She knows me, he realized sickly, watching the pale lips curl around words that meant nothing and everything. She’s met me before. These things happened in the Stasis; the formal etiquette was deliberate padding to break the soul-shaking impact of such collisions with the consequences of your own future. She must think I’m an idiot—

The lecture ended in a flurry of bowing and dismissals. Confused, Pierce found himself standing before the Scholar on the roof of the world, beneath the watching moon. She was very beautiful, and he was utterly mortified. “Honorable Scholar, I don’t know how to explain, I—”

“Silence.” Yarrow touched one index finger to his lips. His nostrils flared at the scent of her, floral and strange. “I told you to see me in my office. Are you coming?”

Pierce gaped at her. “But Honorable Scholar, I—”

“—Forgot that, as your tutor, I am authorized to review your Library record.” She smiled secretively. “But I didn’t need to: You—your future self—told me why you were distracted, many years-subjective ago. There is a long history between us.” Her humor dispersed like mist before a hot wind. “Will you come with me now? And not make an unhappening of our life together?”

“But I—” For the first time he noticed she was using the honorific form of “you,” in its most intimate and personal case. “What do you mean, our life?”

She began to walk toward the steps leading down to the Northern Courtyard. “Our life?” He called after her, dawning anger at the way he’d been manipulated lending his voice an edge. “What do you mean, our life?”

She glanced back at him, her expression peculiar—almost wistful. “You’ll never know if you don’t get over your pride, will you?” Then she looked back at the two hundred stone steps that lay before her, inanimate and treacherous, and began to descend the mountainside. Her gait was as steady and dignified as any matron turning her back on young love and false memories.

He watched her recede for almost a minute before his injured dignity gave way, and he ran after her, stumbling recklessly from step to stone, desperate to discover his future.

HACKING HISTORY

Pleasure Empires

They will welcome you as a prince among princes, and they will worship you as a god among gods. They will wipe the sweat from your brow and the dust of the road from your feet, and they will offer to you their sons and daughters and the wine of their vineyards. Their world exists only to please the angels of the celestial court, and we have granted you this leave to dwell among our worshippers, with all the rights and honors of a god made flesh.

They will bring wine unto you, and the fruit of the dream poppy. They will clothe you in silk and gold, and lie naked beneath your feet, and abase themselves before your every whim. They are the people of the Pleasure Empires, established from time to time by the decree of the lords of Stasis to serve their loyal servants, and it is their honor and their duty to obey you and demonstrate their love for you in any way that you desire, for all their days and lifetimes upon the Earth. And you will dwell among them in a palace of alabaster, surrounded by gardens of delight, and you shall want for nothing.

Your days of pleasure will number one thousand and one; your lovers will number a thousand or one as you please; your pleasures will be without number; and the number of tomorrow’s parties shall be beyond measure. You need not leave until the pleasures of flesh and mind pale, and the novelty of infinite luxury becomes a weight on your soul. Then and only then, you will yearn for the duty which lends meaning to life; energized, you will return to service with serenity and enthusiasm. And your colleagues will turn aside from their tasks and wonder at your eagerness: for though you may have spent a century in the Pleasure Empires, your absence from your duty will have lasted barely a heartbeat. You are a loyal servant of the Stasis: and you may return to paradise whenever it pleases you, because we want you to be happy in your work.

Palimpsest Ambush

Almost a hundred kiloyears had passed since the Yellowstone eruption that wiped out the Benzin and the hunter-gatherer tribes of the Gulf Coast. The new Reseeding was twelve thousand years old; civilization had taken root again, spreading around the planet with the efflorescent enthusiasm of a parasitic vine. It was currently going through an expansionist-mercantilist phase, scattered city-states and tribute empires gradually coalescing and moving toward a tentative enlightenment. Eventually they’d rediscover electronics and, with the institution of a ubiquitous surveillance program, finally reconquer the heights of true civilization. Nobody looking at the flourishing cities and the white-sailed trade ships could imagine that the people who built them were destined for anything but glory.

Pierce stumbled along a twisty cobbled lane off the Chandler’s Street in Carnegra, doing his faux-drunken best to look like part of the scenery. Sailors fresh ashore from Ipsolian League boats weren’t a rarity here, and it’d certainly explain his lack of fluency in Imagra, the local creole. It was another training assignment, but with six more years-subjective of training and a Stasis phone implant, Pierce now had some degree of independence. He was trusted to work away from the watchful eyes of his supervisor, on assignments deemed safe for a probationer-agent.

“Proceed to the Red Duck on Margrave Way at the third hour of Korsday. Take your detox first, and stay on the small beer. You’re there as a level-one observer and level-zero exit decoy to cover our other agent’s departure. There’s going to be a fight, and you need to be ready to look after yourself; but remember, you’re meant to be a drunken sailor, so you need to look the part until things kick off. Once your target is out of the picture, you’re free to leave. If it turns hot, escalate it to me, and I’ll untangle things retroactively.”

It was all straightforward stuff, although normally Pierce wouldn’t be assigned to a job in Carnegra, or indeed to any job in this epoch. Training to blend in seamlessly with an alien culture was difficult enough that Stasis agents usually worked in their home era, or as close to it as possible, where their local knowledge was most useful. As it was, two months of full-time study had given him just enough background to masquerade as a foreign sailor—in an archipelagean society that was still three centuries away from reinventing the telegraph. It’s a personalized test, he’d realized with a jittery shudder of alertness, as if he’d just downed a mug of maté. Someone up the line in Operational Analysis would be watching his performance, judging his flexibility. He determined to give it his all.

It took him two months of hard training, in language and cultural studies and local field procedures—all for less than six hours on the ground in Carnegra. And the reason he was certain it was a test: Supervisor Hark had changed the subject when he’d asked who he was there to cover for.

Margrave Way was a cobblestoned alley, stepped every few meters to allow for the slope of the hillside, lined on either side with the single-story bamboo shopfronts of fishmongers and chandlers. Pierce threaded his wobbly way around servants out shopping for the daily catch, water carriers, fruit and vegetable sellers, and beggars; dodged a rice merchant’s train of dwarf dromedaries loaded with sacks; and avoided a pair of black-robed scholars from one of the seminaries that straggled around the flanks of the hill like the thinning hair on the pate of an elderly priest. Banners rippled in the weak onshore breeze; paper skull-lanterns with mirror-polished eyes to repel evil spirits bounced gaudily beneath the eaves as he entered the inn.

The Red Duck was painted the color of its namesake. Pierce hunched beneath the low awning and probed the gloom carefully, finally emerging into the yard out back with his eyes watering. At this hour the yard was half-empty, for the tavern made much of its trade in food. The scent of honeysuckle hung heavy over the decking; the hibiscus bushes at the sides of the yard were riotously red. Pierce staked out a bench near the rear wall with a clear view of the entrance and the latrines, then unobtrusively audited the other patrons, careful to avoid eye contact. Even half-empty, the yard held the publican’s young sons (shuffling hither and yon to fill cups for the customers), four presumably genuine drunken sailors, three liveried servants from the seminaries, a couple of gaudily clad women whose burlesque approach to the sailors was blatantly professional, and three cloak-shrouded pilgrims from the highlands of what had once been Cascadia—presumably come to visit the shrines and holy baths of the southern lands. At least, to a first approximation.

One of the lads was at Pierce’s elbow, asking something about service and food. “Give beer,” Pierce managed haltingly. “Good beer light two coin value.” The tap-boy vanished, returned with a stoneware mug full of warm suds that smelled faintly of bananas. “Good, good.” Pierce fumbled with his change, pawing over it as if unsure. He passed two clipped and blackened coins to the kid—both threaded with passive RF transceivers, beacons to tell his contact that they were not alone.

As Pierce raised his mug to his lips in unfeigned happy anticipation, his phone buzzed. It was a disturbing sensation, utterly unnatural, and it had taken him much practice to learn not to jump when it happened. He scanned the beer garden, concealing his mouth with his mug as he did so. A murder of crows—seminary students flocking to the watering hole—was raucously establishing its pecking order in the vestibule, one of the sailors had fallen forward across the table while his fellow tried to rouse him, and a working girl in a red wrap was walking toward the back wall, humming tunelessly. Bingo, he thought, with a smug flicker of satisfaction.

Pierce twitched a stomach muscle, goosing his phone. The other Stasis agent would feel a shiver and buzz like an angry yellow jacket—and indeed, as he watched, the woman in red glanced round abruptly. Pierce twitched again as her gaze flickered over him: this time involuntarily, in the grip of something akin to déjà vu. Can’t be, he realized an instant later. She wouldn’t be on a field op like this!

The woman in red turned and sidestepped toward his bench, subvocalizing. “You’re my cover, yes? Let’s get out of here right now, it’s going bad.”

Pierce began to stand. “Yarrow?” he asked. The sailor who was trying to rouse his friend started tugging at his shoulder.

“Yes? Look, what’s your exit plan?” She sounded edgy.

“But—” He froze, his stomach twisting. She doesn’t know me, he realized. “Sorry. Can you get over the wall if I create a diversion?” he sent, his heart hammering. He hadn’t seen her in three years-subjective—she’d blown through his life like a runaway train, then vanished as abruptly as she’d arrived, leaving behind a scrawled note to say she’d been called uptime by Control, and a final quick charcoal sketch.

“I think so, but there are two—” The sailor stood up and shouted incoherently at her just as Pierce’s phone buzzed again. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“Hard contact in five seconds!” The other agent, whoever he was, sounded urgent. “Stay back.”

The sailor shouted again, and this time Pierce understood it: “Murderer!” He climbed over the table and drew a long, curved knife, moving forward.

“Get behind me.” Pierce stepped between Yarrow and the sailor, his thoughts a chaotic mess of This is stupid and What did she do? and Who else? as he paged Supervisor Hark. “Peace,” he said in faltering Carnegran, “am friend? Want drink?”

Behind the angry sailor the priest-students were standing up, black robes flapping as they spread out, calling to one another. Yarrow retreated behind him: his phone vibrated again, then, improbably, a fourth time. There were too many agents. “What’s happening?” asked Hark.

“I think it’s a palimpsest,” Pierce managed to send. Like an inked parchment scrubbed clean and reused, a section of history that had been multiply overwritten. He held his hands up, addressed the sailor, “You want. Thing. Money?”

The third agent, who’d warned of contact: “Drop. Now!”

Pierce began to fall as something, someone—Yarrow?—grabbed his shoulder and pushed sideways.

One of the students let his robe slide open. It slid down from his shoulders, gaping to reveal an iridescent fluidity that followed the rough contours of a human body, flexing and rippling like molten glass. Its upper margin flowed and swelled around its wearer’s neck and chin, bulging upward to engulf his head as he stepped out of the black scholar’s robe.

The sailor held his knife high, point down as he advanced on Pierce. Pierce’s focus narrowed as he brought his fall under control, preparing to roll and trigger the telescopic baton in his sleeve—

A gunshot, shockingly loud, split the afternoon air. The sailor’s head disappeared in a crimson haze, splattering across Pierce’s face. The corpse lurched and collapsed like a dropped sack. Somebody—Yarrow?—cried out behind him, as Pierce pushed back with his left arm, trying to blink the red fog from his vision.

The student’s robe was taking on a life of its own, contracting and standing up like a malign shadow behind its master as the human-shaped blob of walking water turned and raised one hand toward the roof. A chorus of screams rose behind it as one of the other seminarians, who had unwisely reached for the robe, collapsed convulsing.

“Stay down!” It was the third agent. “Play dead.”

“My knee’s—”

Pierce managed a sidelong look that took in Yarrow’s expression of fear with a shudder of self-recognition. “I’ll decoy,” he sent. Then, a curious clarity of purpose in his mind, he rolled sideways and scrambled toward the interior of the tavern.

Several things happened in the next three seconds:

First, a brilliant turquoise circle two meters in diameter flickered open, hovering directly in front of the rear wall of the beer garden. A double handful of enormous purple hornets burst from its surface. Most arrowed toward the students, who had entangled themselves in a panicky crush at the exit: two turned and darted straight up toward the balcony level.

Next, a spark, bright as lightning, leapt between the watery humanoid’s upraised hand and the ceiling.

Finally, something punched Pierce in the chest with such breath-taking violence that he found, to his shock and surprise, that his hands and feet didn’t seem to want to work anymore.

“Agent down,” someone signalled, and it seemed to him that this was something he ought to make sense of, but sense was ebbing fast in a buzz of angry hornets as the pinkness faded to gray. And then everything was quiet for a long time.

Internal Affairs

“Do you know anyone who wants you dead, scholar-agent?” The investigator from Internal Affairs leaned over Pierce, his hands clasped together in a manner that reminded Pierce of a hungry mantis. His ears (Pierce couldn’t help but notice) were prominent and pink, little radar dishes adorning the sides of a thin face. It had to be an ironic comment if not an outright insult, his adoption of the likeness of Franz Kafka. Or perhaps the man from Internal Affairs simply didn’t want to be recognized.

Pierce chuckled weakly. The results were predictable: when the coughing fit subsided, and his vision began to clear again, he shook his head.

“A pity.” Kafka rocked backward slightly, his shoulders hunched. “It would make things easier.”

Pierce risked a question. “Does the Library have anything?”

Kafka sniffed. “Of course not. Whoever set the trap knew enough to scrub the palimpsest clean before they embarked on their killing spree.”

So it was a palimpsest. Pierce felt vaguely cheated. “They assassinated themselves first? To remove the evidence from the time sequence?”

“You died three times, scholar-agent, not counting your present state.” He gestured at the dressing covering the cardiac assist leech clamped to the side of Pierce’s chest. It pulsed rhythmically, taking the load while the new heart grew to full size between his ribs. “Agent Yarrow died twice and Agent-Major Alizaid’s report states that he was forced to invoke Control Majeure to contain the palimpsest’s expansion. Someone”—Kafka leaned toward Pierce again, peering intently at his face with disturbingly dark eyes—“went to great lengths to kill you repeatedly.”

“Uh.” Pierce stared at the ceiling of his hospital room, where plaster cherubs clutching overflowing cornucopiae cavorted with lecherous satyrs. “I suppose you want to know why?”

“No. Having read your Branch Library file, there are any number of whys: what I want to know is why now.” Kafka smiled, his mouth widening until his alarmingly unhinged head seemed ready to topple from the plinth of his jaw. “You’re still in training, a green shoot. An interesting time to pick on you, don’t you think?”

Fear made Pierce tense up. “If you’ve read my Library record, you must know I’m loyal . . .”

“Peace.” Kafka made a placating gesture. “I know nothing of the kind; the Library can’t tell me what’s inside your head. But you’re not under suspicion of trying to assassinate yourself. What I do know is that so far your career has been notably mundane. The Library branches are as prone to overwrites as any other palimpsest; but we may be able to make deductions about your attacker by looking for inconsistencies between your memories and the version of your history documented locally.”

Pierce lay back, drained. I’m not under suspicion. “What is to become of me?” he asked.

Kafka’s smile vanished. “Nothing, for now: you may convalesce at your leisure, and sooner or later you will learn whatever it is that was so important to our enemies that they tried to erase you. When you do so, I would be grateful if you would call me.” He rose to leave. “You will see me again, eventually. Meanwhile, you should bear in mind that you have come to the attention of important persons. Consider yourself lucky—and try to make the best of it.”

Three days after Kafka’s departure—summoned back, no doubt, to the vasty abyss of deep time in which Internal Affairs held their counsel—Pierce had another visitor.

“I came to thank you,” she said haltingly. “You didn’t need to do that. To decoy, I mean. I’m very grateful.”

It had the sound of a prepared speech, but Pierce didn’t mind. She was young and eye-wrenchingly desirable, even in the severe uniform of an Agent Initiate. “You would have died again,” he pointed out. “I was your backup. It’s bad form to let your primary die. And I owed you.”

“You owed me? But we haven’t met! There’s nothing about you in my Library file.” Her pupils dilated.

“It was an older you,” he said mildly. While the Stasis held a file on everyone, agents were only permitted to see—and annotate—those of their own details that lay in their past. After a pause, he admitted, “I was hoping we might meet again sometime.”

“But I—” She hesitated, then stared at him, narrowing her eyes. “I’m not in the market. I have a partner.”

“Funny, she didn’t tell me that.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds. “She said we had a history, though. And to tell her when I first met her that her first pet—a cat named Chloe—died when a wild dog took her.” Pierce opened his eyes to stare at the baroque ceiling again. “I’m sorry I asked, Ya—esteemed colleague. Please forgive me; I didn’t think you were for sale. My heart is simply in the wrong place.”

After a second he heard a shocked, incongruous giggle.

“I gather armor-piercing rounds usually have that effect,” he added.

When she was able to speak again she shook her head. “I am sincere, Scholar-Agent—Pierce?—Pierced? Oh dear!” She managed to hold her dignity intact, this time, despite a gleam of amusement. “I’m sorry if I—I don’t mean to doubt you. But you must know, if you know me, I have never met you, yes?”

“That thought has indeed occurred to me.” The leech pulsed warmly against his chest, squirting blood through the aortic shunt. “As you can see, right now I am not only heartless but harmless, insofar as I won’t even be able to get out of bed unaided for another ten days; you need not fear that I’m going to pursue you. I merely thought to introduce myself and let you know—as she did to me—that we could have a history, if you’re so inclined, someday. But not right now. Obviously.”

“But obviously not—” She stood up. “This wasn’t what I was expecting.”

“Me neither.” He smiled bitterly. “It never is, is it?”

She paused in the doorway. “I’m not saying no, never, scholar-agent. But not now, obviously. Some other time . . . We’ll worry about that if we meet again, perhaps. History can wait a little longer. Oh, and thank you for saving my life some of the times! One out of three is good going, especially for a student.”

ELITE

A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part One

What has already happened:

SLIDE 1.

Our solar system, as an embryo. A vast disk of gas and infalling dust surrounds and obscures a newborn star, little more than a thickening knot of rapidly spinning matter that is rapidly sucking more mass down into its ever-steepening gravity well. The sun is glowing red-hot already with the heat liberated by its gravitational collapse, until . . .

SLIDE 2.

Ignition! The pressure and temperature at the core of the embryo star has risen so high that hydrogen nuclei floating in a degenerate soup of electrons are bumping close to one another. A complex reaction ensues, rapidly liberating gamma radiation and neutrinos, and the core begins to heat up. First deuterium, then the ordinary hydrogen nuclei begin to fuse. A flare of nuclear fire lashes through the inner layers of the star. It will take a million years for the gamma-ray pulse to work its way out through the choking, blanketing layers of degenerate hydrogen, but the neutrino pulse heralds the birth cry of a new star.

SLIDE 3.

A million years pass as the sun brightens, and the rotating cloud of gas and dust begins to partition. Out beyond the dew line, where ice particles can grow, a roiling knot of dirty ice is forming, and like the sun before it, it greedily sucks down dirt and gas and grows. As it plows through the cloud, it sprays dust outward. Meanwhile, at the balancing point between the star and the embryonic Jovian gravity well, other knots of dust are forming . . .

SLIDE 4.

A billion years have passed since the sun ignited, and the stellar nursery of gas and dust has been swept clean by a fleet of new-formed planets. There has been some bickering—in the late heavy bombardment triggered by the outward migration of Neptune, entire planetary surfaces were re-formed—but now the system has settled into long-term stability. The desert planet Mars is going through the first of its warm, wet interludes; Venus still has traces of water in its hot (but not yet red-hot) atmosphere. Earth is a chilly nitrogen-and-methane-shrouded enigma inhabited only by primitive purple bacteria, its vast oceans churned by hundred-meter tides dragged up every seven-hour day by a young moon that completes each orbit in little more than twenty-four hours.

SLIDE 5.

Another three billion years have passed. The solar system has completed almost sixteen orbits of the galactic core, and is now unimaginably distant from the stellar nursery which birthed it. Mars has dried, although occasional volcanic eruptions periodically blanket it in cloud. Venus is even hotter. But something strange is happening to Earth. Luna has drifted farther from its primary, the tides quieting; meanwhile, the atmosphere has acquired a strange bluish tinge, evident sign of contamination by a toxic haze of oxygen. The great landmass Rodina, which dominated the southern ocean beneath a cap of ice, has broken up and the shallow seas of the Panthalassic and Panafrican Oceans are hosting an astonishing proliferation of multicellular life.

SLIDE 6.

Six hundred and fifty million years later, the outlines of Earth’s new continents glow by night like a neon diadem against the darkness, shouting consciousness at the sky in a blare of radio-wavelength emissions as loud as a star.

There have been five major epochs dominated by different families of land-based vertebrates in the time between slides 5 and 6. All the Earth’s coal and oil deposits were laid down in this time, different animal families developed flight at least four times, and the partial pressure of oxygen in the atmosphere rose from around 4 percent to well over 16 percent. At the very end, a strangely bipedal, tailless omnivore appeared on the plains of Africa—its brain turbocharged on a potent mixture of oxygen and readily available sugars—and erupted into sentience in a geological eyeblink.

Here’s what isn’t going to happen:

SLIDE 7.

The continents of Earth, no longer lit by the afterglow of intelligence, will drift into strange new configurations. Two hundred and fifty million years after the sixth great extinction, the scattered continents will reconverge on a single equatorial supercontinent, Pangea Ultima, leaving only the conjoined landmass that was Antarctica and Australia adrift in the southern ocean. As the sun brightens, so shall the verdant plains of the Earth; oceanic algal blooms raise the atmospheric oxygen concentration close to 25 percent, and lightning-triggered wildfires rage across the continental interior. It will be an epoch characterized by rapid plant growth, but few animal life-forms can survive on land—in the heady air of aged Earth, even waterlogged flesh will burn. And the sun is still brightening . . .

SLIDE 8.

Seven hundred and fifty million years later. The brightening sun will glare down upon cloud-wreathed ancient continents, weathered and corroded to bedrock. Even the plant life has abandoned the land, for the equatorial daytime temperature is perilously close to the boiling point of water. What life there is retreats to the deep ocean waters, away from the searing ultraviolet light that splits apart the water molecules of the upper atmosphere. But there’s no escape: the oceans themselves are slowly acidifying and evaporating as the hydrogen liberated in the ionosphere is blasted into space by the solar wind. A runaway greenhouse effect is well under way, and in another billion years Earth will resemble parched, hell-hot Venus.

SLIDE 9.

Four-point-two billion years after the brief cosmic eyeblink of Earthly intelligence, the game is up. The dead Earth orbits alone, its moon a separate planet wandering in increasingly unstable ellipses around the sun. Glowing dull red beneath an atmosphere of carbon dioxide baked from its rocks, there will be no sign that this world ever harbored life. The sun it circles, a sullen-faced ruddy ogre, is nearing the end of its hydrogen reserves. Soon it will expand, engulfing the inner planets.

But events on a larger scale are going to spare the Earth this fate. For billions of years, the galaxy in which this star orbits has been converging with another large starswarm, the M-31 Andromeda galaxy. Now the spiraling clouds of stars are interpenetrating and falling through each other, and the sun is in for a bumpy ride as galaxies collide.

A binary system of red dwarfs is closing with the solar system at almost five hundred kilometers per second. They are going to pass within half a billion kilometers of the sun, a hairbreadth miss in cosmic terms: in the process they will wreak havoc on the tidy layout of the solar system. Jupiter, dragged a few million kilometers sunward, will enter an unstable elliptical orbit, and over the course of a few thousand years it will destabilize all the other planets. Luna departs first, catapulted out of the plane of the ecliptic; Earth, most massive of all, will spend almost five million years wobbling between the former orbits of Venus and Saturn before it finally caroms past Jupiter and drifts off into the eternal night, the tattered remnants of its atmosphere condensing and freezing in a shroud of dry ice.

Slow Recovery

Pierce was to remain on official convalescent leave for an entire year-subjective. His heart had been torn to shreds by a penetrator round; repairing the peripheral damage, growing a new organ in situ, and restoring him to physical condition was a nontrivial matter. Luckily for him, the fatal shooting had happened in the middle of a multiple-overwrite ambush that was finally shut down by Control Majeure using weapons of gross anachronism, and they’d whisked his bleeding wreckage out through a timegate before he’d finished drumming his heels.

Nevertheless, organ regeneration—not to mention psychological recovery from a violent fatal injury—took time. So, rather than shipping him straight to the infirmary in the alpine monastery in Training Zone 25, he was sent to recover in the Rebirth Wing of the Chrysanthemum Clinic, on the Avenue of the Immortals of Medicine, in the city of Leng, on the northeastern seaboard of the continent of Nova Zealantis, more than four billion years after the time into which he had been born.

The current Reseeding was Enlightened; not only were they aware of the existence of the Stasis, but they were a part of the greater transtemporal macroculture: speakers of Urem, obedient to the Stasis, even granted dispensation to petition for use of the timegate in extraordinary circumstances. In return, the Hegemony was altogether conscientious in observing their duties to the guardians of history, according Pierce honors that, in other ages, might have been accorded to a diplomat or minor scion of royalty. Unfortunately, this entailed rather more formality than Pierce was used to. The decor, for one thing: they’d clearly studied his epoch, but modeling his hospital suite on Louis XV’s bedroom at Versailles suggested they had strange ideas about his status.

“If it pleases you, my lord, would you like to describe how you entered the celestial service?” The journalist, who his bowing and shuffling concierge explained had been sent by the city archive to document his life, was young, pretty, and shiny-eyed. She’d obviously studied his public records and the customs of his home civilization, and decided to go for the throat. Local fashion echoed the Minoan empire of antiquity, and her attire, though scholarly, was disconcerting: a flash of well-turned ankle, nipples rouged and ringed—Pierce realized he was staring and turned his face away, chagrined.

“Please?” she repeated, her plump lower lip quivering. Her cameras flittered below the ceiling like lazy bluebottles, iridescent in the afternoon sunlight, logging her life for posterity.

“I suppose so . . .” Pierce trailed off, staring through the open window at the lower slopes of the hillside on which the clinic nestled. “But there’s no secret, really, none at all. You don’t approach them—they approach you. A tap on the shoulder at the right time, an offer of a job, at first I didn’t think it was anything unusual.”

“Was there anything leading up to that? My lord? What was your life like before the service?”

Pierce frowned slightly as he forced his sullen memory to work. There were gaps. “I’m not sure; I think I was in a car crash, or maybe a war . . .”

His cardiac leech pulsed against his chest like a contented cat. Sunlight warmed the side of his face as he watched her sidelong, from the corner of his eye. How far will she go for a story? he wondered idly. Play your cards right and . . . well, maybe. His temporarily heartless condition had rendered amorous speculations—or anything else calculated to raise the blood pressure—purely academic for the time being.

“My lord?” He pretended to miss the moue of annoyance that flitted across her face, but the very deliberate indrawn breath that followed it was so transparent that he nearly gave the game away by laughing.

“I’m not your lord,” he said gently. “I’m just a scholar-agent, halfway through my twenty years of training. What I know about the Guardians of Time”—that was what the Hegemonites called the Stasis, those in power who had polite words for them—“and can tell you is mere trivia. I’m sure your Archive already has it all.”

This was a formally declared Science Epoch, in which a whole series of consecutive Reseedings were dedicated to collating the mountain-sized chunks of data returned by the Von Neumann probes that had been launched during the last Science Epoch, a billion years earlier. They and their descendants had quietly fanned out throughout the local group of galaxies, traveling at barely a hundredth of the speed of light, visiting and mapping every star system and extrasolar planet within ten million light-years. There was a lot of material to collate; The Zealantian Hegemony’s army of elite astrocartographers, millions strong, would labor for tens of thousands of years to assemble just their one corner of the big picture. And their obsession with knowledge didn’t stop at the edge of the solar system.

(“A civilization of obsessive-compulsive stamp collectors,” Wei had called them when he briefly visited his ex-student. “You’ve got to watch these Science Cults; sooner or later they’ll turn all the carbon in the deep biosphere into memory diamond, then where will we be?”)

“The Archive doesn’t know everything, my lord. It’s not like the Library of Time.” There was a strangely reverent note in her voice, as if the Library was somehow different. “We don’t have permission to read the forbidden diaries, my lord. We have to accept whatever crusts of wisdom our honored guests choose to let fall from their trenchers.”

“I’m not your lord. You can call me Pierce, if you like.”

“Yes, my, ah. Pierce? My lord.”

“What should I call you?” he asked after a pause.

“Me? I am nobody, lord Pierce! I am a humble journal-keeper—”

“Rubbish.” He looked directly at her, taking in everything: her flounced scholar-lady’s dress, the jeweled rings through her ears and nipples, her painstakingly knotted chignon. This was a high-energy civilization, but a very staid, conservative one with strict sumptuary laws: were she a commoner, she would risk a flogging for indecency, or worse, dressing above her station. “Who are you really? And why are you so interested in me?”

“Oh! If you must know, I am doctor-postulant Xiri, daughter of doctor-professor archivist His Excellency Dean Imad of the College of History, and Her Ladyship doctor-professor emeritus Leila of the faculty of hot super-Jovian moons”—she smiled coyly—“and I have been charged, by my duty and my honor as a scholar, to study you in absolute detail by my tutors. They have assigned you to me as the topic of my first dissertation. On the hero-guardians of time.”

“Your first dissertation—” Her parents were a professor and a dean; she might as well have said sheikh or baron. “Do I have any choice in the matter?”

“You can refuse, of course.” She shivered and tugged her filmy shawl back into position. “But I can’t.”

“Why? What happens if you refuse?”

She shivered. “I would forfeit my doctorate. The shame! My parents”—for a moment the bright-eyed optimism cracked—“would blame themselves. It would cast doubt on my commitment.”

Was failure to make tenure track justification for an honor killing? Pierce shook his head, staring at her. “I’m just a trainee!” He reached for the bed’s control, stabbing the button to raise his back. The interview was out of control, heading for deep waters, and lying down gave him an unaccountable fear of drowning. “I’m the nobody around here!”

“How do you know that, my lord? For all you know, you might be destined for glory.” She tugged at her shawl again and smiled, an ingenue trying to look mysterious.

“But I don’t have any—” He switched off the bed lift once he was level with her, looked her in the eyes, and changed the subject in midsentence. “Have your people ever met me before?”

The hardest part of arguing with her, he found, was avoiding staring at her chest. She was really very pretty, but her pedigree suggested he’d be wise to abandon that line of thought; she’d be about as safe to seduce as a rattlesnake.

“No.” Her smile widened. “A handsome man of mystery and a time hero to boot: yes, they told us why you were here.” Her gaze briefly covered his chest.

For the first time in many months, Pierce resorted to his native language. “Oh, hell.” He glanced at the window, then back at Xiri. “Everybody wants to study me,” he confessed. “I don’t know why, I really don’t . . .” He crossed his arms, looked at her. “Study away. I am at your disposal.” At least it promised to be a less harrowing experience than Kafka’s cross-examination.

“Oh! Thank you, my lord!” She placed a proprietorial hand on the side of his bed. “I will do my utmost to make it an enjoyable experience.”

“Really?” There was something about her tone of voice that took him aback, as if he’d answered a question that he didn’t remember being asked. The idea of being studied struck Pierce as marginally more enjoyable than banging his head on the wall, but on the upside, Xiri was high-quality eye candy. On the downside—Don’t go there, he reminded himself. “Where would you like to begin?”

“Right here, I think,” she said, sliding her hand under the covers.

“Hey! I! Huh.” Pierce found, to his mild alarm, that her busy hand was getting results. “Um. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but we really shouldn’t—why are you—aren’t you going to shut off your cameras—”

“I have read about your culture.” She sat down on the bed beside him with a rustle of silk. “In some ways, it sounded very familiar. Did they not record everything that happened to them? Did they not talk about people marrying their work? Well, that is just how we do that here.”

“But that’s just a metaphor!” He tried to push her hand away, but his heart wasn’t in it.

“Hush.” She responded by making him shudder. “You’re the subject of my dissertation! I’m going to find out all about you. It’s to be my life’s work! I’m so happy! Just relax, my lord, and everything will be wonderful. Don’t worry, I have studied the customs of your time, and they are not so very alien. We can talk about the wedding tomorrow, after you’ve met my father.”

Empty Mansions

Resistance was futile: nearly twenty years-subjective passed Pierce by with the eyeblink impact of another bullet, half of them shared with his new wife. Xiri, true to her word, wrapped her life around his twisted time line: at first as an adoring wife, and then, to his bemused and growing pride, mother to three small children and doctor-professor in her own right. Her dissertation was his life: merely glancing lightly off the skin of time was, it seemed, a passport to wealth and status in the Hegemony, and he found life as the consort of a beautiful noblewoman no less congenial than he might have expected.

Xiri did not complain at Pierce’s eyeblink excursions from their family home (provided by the grace of her father the dean), which usually lasted only for seconds of subjective time. Nor did she complain about the inward-looking silences and moody introspection that followed, and were of altogether greater duration. On the contrary: they invariably provided additional data for her life’s work, once she delicately untangled the story from his memories of unhistory. Sometimes he would age an entire year in an hour’s working absence, but the medical privileges of the Stasis extended also to the Enlightened; there would be plenty of time to catch up, over the decades and centuries.

Pierce, for his part, found it oddly easier to deal with the second half of his training with a stable family life to fall back on. The Stasis were spread surprisingly thin across their multitrillion-year empire. The defining characteristic of his job seemed to be that he was only called for in turbulent, interesting times. Between peak oil and Spanish flu, from Carthage to the Cold War, his three-thousand-year beat sometimes seemed no more than a vale of tears—and a thin, poor, nightmare of a world at that, far from the mannered, drowsy contentment of the ten-thousand-year-long Hegemony. Most of his fellow students seemed to prefer the hedonistic abandon proffered by the Pleasure Empires, but Pierce held his own counsel and congratulated himself on his discovery of a more profound source of satisfaction.

On his first return to training after his convalescence, Pierce was surprised to be summoned to Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson’s chambers.

“You have formed attachments while convalescing.” Manson fixed him with a watery stare. “That is inadvisable, as you will no doubt learn for yourself. However, Operations have noted that there is no permanent Resident in place within a millennium either side of your, ah, domestic anchor-point. It is a tranquil society, but not that tranquil; you are therefore instructed and permitted to maintain your attachment and develop your ability to work there. Purely as a secondary specialty, you understand.”

Pierce had almost fallen over with shock. Once he regained his self-control, he asked, “To whom shall I report, master?”

“To your wife, student. Tell her to write up everything. We read all such dissertations, in the end.”

Manson looked away, dismissing him. Pierce nudged his phone, weak-kneed, not trusting his ability to make a dignified exit; after a brief routing delay, the timegate responded to his heartfelt wish, and the ground opened up and swallowed him.

One day very late in his training, with perhaps half a year-subjective remaining until his graduation as a full-fledged agent of the Stasis, Pierce returned home from a week sampling the plague-pits of fourteenth-century Constantinople. He found Xiri in an unusually excited state, the household all abuzz around her. “It’s fantastic!” she exclaimed, hurrying to meet him across the atrium of their summer residence. “Did you know about it? Tell me you knew about it! This was why you came to our time, wasn’t it?”

Pierce, greeting her with a fond smile, lifted young Magnus (who had been attempting to scale his back, with much snarling, presumably to slay the giant) and handed him to his nursemaid. “What’s happened?” he asked mildly, trying to give no sign of the frisson he’d momentarily felt (for their youngest son could have no idea of how his father had just spent a week taking tissue samples, carving chunks of mortal flesh from the bubo-stricken bodies of boys of an age to be his playmates in another era). “What’s got everyone so excited?”

“It’s the probes! They’ve found something outrageous in Messier 33, six thousand light-years along the third arm!”

Pierce—who could not imagine finding anything outrageous in a galaxy over a million light-years away, even if mapping it was the holy raison d’être of this Civilization—decided to humor his wife. “Indeed. And tell me, what precisely is there that brings forth such outrage? As opposed to mere excitement, or curiosity, or perplexity?”

“Look!” Xiri gestured at the wall, which obligingly displayed a dizzying black void sprinkled with stars. “Let’s see. Wall, show me the anomaly I was discussing with the honorable doctor-professor Zun about two hours ago. Set magnification level plus forty, pan left and up five—there! You see it!”

Pierce stared for a while. “Looks like just another rock to me,” he said. Racking his brains for the correct form: “an honorable sub-Earth, airless, of the third degree, predominantly siliceous. Yes?”

“Oh!” Xiri, nobly raised, did nothing so undignified as to stamp her foot; nevertheless, Magnus’s nursemaid swept up her four-year-old charge and beat a hasty retreat. (Xiri, when excited, could be as dangerously prone to eruption as a Wolf-Rayet star.) “Is that all you can see? Wall, magnification plus ten, repeat step, step, step. There. Look at that, my lord, look!”

The airless moon no longer filled the center of the wall; now it stretched across it from side to side, so close that there was barely any visible curvature to its horizon. Pierce squinted. Craters, rills, drab, irregular features and a scattering of straight-edged rectangular crystals. Crystals? He chewed on the thought, found it curiously lacking as an explanation for the agitation. Gradually, he began to feel a quiet echo of his wife’s excitement. “What are they?”

“They’re buildings! Or they were, sixty-six million years ago, when the probes were passing through. And we didn’t put them there . . .”

THE LIBRARY AT THE END OF TIME

A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part Two

. . . And then the Stasis happened:

SLIDE 7.

After two hundred and fifty million years, the continents of Earth, strobe-lit by the mayfly flicker of empires, will have converged on a single equatorial supercontinent, Pangea Ultima. These will not be good times for humanity; the vast interior deserts are arid and the coastlines subject to vast hurricanes sweeping in from the world-ocean. As the sun brightens, so shall the verdant plains of the Earth; but the Stasis have long-laid plans to deflect the inevitable.

Deep in the asteroid belt, their swarming robot cockroaches have dismantled Ceres, used its mass to build a myriad of solar-sail-powered flyers. Now a river of steerable rocks with the mass of a dwarf planet loops down through the inner system, converting solar energy into momentum and transferring it to the Earth through millions of repeated flybys.

Already, Earth has migrated outward from the sun. Other adjustments are under way, subtle and far-reaching: the entire solar system is slowly changing shape, creaking and groaning, drifting toward a new and more useful configuration. Soon—in cosmological terms—it will be unrecognizable.

SLIDE 8.

A billion years later, the Earth lies frozen and fallow, its atmosphere packed down to snow and nitrogen vapor in the chilly wilderness beyond Neptune. This was never part of the natural destiny of the homeworld, but it is only a temporary state—for in another ten million years, the endlessly cycling momentum shuttles will crank Earth closer to the sun. Fifty million years after that, the Reseedings will recommence, from the prokaryotes and algae on up; but in this era, the Stasis want the Earth safely mothballed while their technicians from the Engineering Republics work their magic.

For thirty million years the Stasis will devote their timegate to lifting mass from the heart of a burning star, channeling vast streams of blazing plasma into massive, gravitationally bound bunkers, reserves against a chilly future. The sun will gutter and fade to red, raging and flaring in angry outbursts as its internal convection systems collapse. As it shrinks and dims, they will inflict the final murderous insult, and inject an embryonic black hole into the stellar core. Eating mass faster than it can reradiate it through Hawking radiation, the hole will grow, gutting the stellar core.

By the time the Earth drops back toward the frost line of the solar system, the technicians will have roused the zombie necrosun from its grave. Its accretion disk—fed with mass steadily siphoned from the brown dwarfs orbiting on the edges of the system—will cast a strange, harsh glare across Earth’s melting ice caps.

Replacing the fusion core of the sun with a mass-crushing singularity is one of the most important tasks facing the Stasis; annihilation is orders of magnitude more efficient than fusion, not to say more controllable, and the mass they have so carefully husbanded is sufficient to keep the closely orbiting Earth lit and warm not for billions, but for trillions of years to come.

But another, more difficult task remains . . .

SLIDE 9.

Four and a quarter billion years after the awakening of consciousness, and the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will collide. The view from Earth’s crowded continents is magnificent, like a chaos of burning diamond dust strewn across the emptiness void. Shock waves thunder through the gas clouds, creating new stellar nurseries, igniting millions of massive, short-lived new stars; for a brief ten-million-year period, the nighttime sky will be lit by a monthly supernova fireworks display. The huge black holes at the heart of each galaxy have shed their robes of dust and gas and blaze naked in ghastly majesty as they streak past each other, ripping clusters of stars asunder and seeding more, in a starburst of cosmic fireworks that will be visible nearly halfway across the universe.

But Earth is safe. Earth is serene. Earth is no longer in the firing line.

The Long Burn is by far the largest program of the Stasis. Science Empires will rise and flourish, decay and gutter into extinction, to provide the numerical feedstock for the Navigators. The delicate task of ejecting a star system from its galaxy without setting the planets and moons adrift in their orbits is monstrously difficult. Planets are not bound to their stars by physical cords, and gravity is weak; innumerable adjustments to the orbits of all the significant planets will be required if they are to be carried along. The mass flow of Ceres alone will not suffice. Rocky Mercury has already been dismantled to provide the control mechanisms that keep the necrostar’s accretion disk burning steadily; it’s Venus’s turn to supply the swarming light-sail-driven mass tugs. A brown dwarf ten times the size of Jupiter will fuel the rocket, an entire stellar embryo pumped down to the blazing maw in the course of a million years.

Galactic escape velocity is high, and escape velocity from the local group is even higher. The Long Burn will last ten thousand centuries. Each year that passes, the necrostar will be moving a meter per second faster. And when it comes to an end, the drastically redesigned solar system will be racing away from the local group of galaxies at almost a thousandth the speed of light—straight toward the Bootes Void.

SLIDE 10.

Over the next billion years, Starship Earth and its dead star will rendezvous with the other components of their lifeboat fleet; an even hundred brown dwarf stars, ten to fifty times as massive as Jupiter and every last one dislodged and sent tumbling from its home galaxy by the robot probes of the Engineering Empires.

Their mass will be gratefully received. For Earth is going on a voyage of discovery, where no star has gone before, into the heart of darkness

Continent of Lies

Nothing in his earlier life had prepared Pierce for what came next. It beggared belief: a series of synthetic aperture radar scans transmitted by a probe millions of years ago in another galaxy had triggered a diplomatic crisis, threatening world war and civilizational autocide.

The Hegemony, despite being a Science Empire, was not the only nation in this age. (True world governments were rare, cumbersome dinosaurs notorious for their absolute top-down corruption and catastrophic-failure modes: the Stasis tended to discourage them.) The Hegemony shared their world with the Autonomous Directorate of Zan, a harshly abstemious land of puritanical library scientists (located on a continent which had once been attached to North America and Africa); sundry secular monarchies, republics, tyrannies, autarchies, and communes (who thought their superpower neighbors mildly insane for wasting so much of their wealth on academic institutions, rather than the usual aimless and undirected pursuit of human happiness); and the Kingdom of Blattaria (whose inhabitants obeyed the prehistoric prophet Haldane with fanatical zeal, studying the arthropoda in ecstatic devotional raptures).

The Hegemony was geographically the largest of the great powers, unified by a set of common filing and monitoring protocols; but it was not a monolithic entity. The authorities of the western principality of Stongu (special area of study: the rocky moons of Hot Jupiters in M-33) had reacted to the discovery of Civilization on the moon of a water giant with a spectacular display of sour grapes, accusing the northeastern Zealantians of fabricating data in a desperate attempt to justify a hit-and-run raid on the Hegemony’s federal tax base. Quite what the academics of Leng were supposed to do with these funds was never specified, nor was it necessary to say any more in order to get the blood boiling in the seminaries and colleges. Fabricating data had a deadly ring to it in any Science Empire, much like the words crusade and jihad in the millennium prior to Pierce’s birth. Once the accusation had been raised, it could not be ignored—and this presented the Hegemony with a major internal problem.

“Honored soldier of the Guardians of Time, our gratitude would be unbounded were you to choose to intercede for us,” said the speaker for the delegation from the Dean’s Lodge that called on his household barely two days after the discovery. “We would not normally dream of petitioning your eminence, but the geopolitical implications are alarming.”

And indeed, they were; for the Hegemony supplied information to the Autonomous Directorate, in return for the boundless supplies of energy harvested by the solar collectors that blanketed the Directorate’s inland deserts. Allegations of fabricating data could damage the value of the Hegemony’s currency; indeed, the aggressive and intolerant Zanfolk might consider it grounds for war (and an excuse for yet another of their tiresome attempts to obtain the vineyards and breadbasket islands of the Outer Nesh archipelago).

“I will do what I can.” Pierce bowed deeply to the delegates, who numbered no less than a round dozen deans and even a vice-chancellor or two: he studiously avoided making eye contact with his father-in-law, who stood at the back. “If you are absolutely sure of the merits of your case, I can consult the Library, then testify publicly, insofar as I am authorized to do so. Would that be acceptable?”

The vice-chancellor of the Old College of Leng—an institution with a history of over six thousand years at this point—bowed in return, his face stiff with gratitude. “We are certain of our case, and consequently willing to abide by the word of the Library of the Guardians of Time. Please permit me to express my gratitude once more—”

After half an hour of formalities, the delegation finally departed. Xiri reemerged from her seclusion to direct the servants and robots in setting the receiving room of their mansion aright; the boys also emerged, showing no sign of understanding what had just happened. “Xiri, I need to go to the Final Library,” Pierce told her, taking her hands in his and watching for signs of understanding.

“Why, that’s wonderful, is it not? My lord? Pierce?” She stared into his eyes. “Why are you worried?”

Pierce swallowed bitter saliva. “The Library is not a place, Xiri, it’s a time. It contains the sum total of all recorded human knowledge, after the end of humanity. I’m near to graduation, I’m allowed to go there to use it, but it’s not, it’s not safe. Sometimes people who go to the Library disappear and don’t come back. And sometimes they come back changed. It’s not just a passive archive.”

Xiri nodded, but looked skeptical. “But what kind of danger can it pose, given the question you’re going to put to it? You’re just asking for confirmation that we’ve been honoring our sources. That’s not like asking for the place and time of your own death, is it?”

“I hope you’re right, but I don’t know for sure.” Pierce paused. “That’s the problem.” He raised her hands to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers. If it must be done, best do it fast. “I’ll go and find out. I’ll be back soon . . .”

He stepped back a pace and activated his phone. “Agent-trainee Pierce, requesting a Library slot.”

There was a brief pause while the relays stored his message, awaited a transmission slot, then fired them through the timegate to Control. Then he felt the telltale buzzing in the vicinity of his left kidney that warned of an incoming wormhole. It opened around him, spinning out and engulfing him in scant milliseconds, almost too fast to see: then he was no longer standing in the hall of his own mansion but on a dark plain of artificial limestone, facing a doorway set into the edge of a vast geodesic dome made from some translucent material: the Final Library.

A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part Three

SLIDE 11.

One hundred billion years will pass.

Earth orbits a mere twenty million kilometers from its necrosun in this epoch, and the fires of the accretion disk are banked. Continents jostle and shudder, rising and falling, as the lights strobe around their edges (and occasionally in low equatorial orbit, whenever the Stasis permits a high-energy civilization to arise).

By the end of the first billion years of the voyage, the night skies are dark and starless. The naked eye can still—barely, if it knows where to look—see the Chaos galaxy formed by the collision of M-31 and the Milky Way; but it is a graveyard, its rocky planets mostly supernova-sterilized iceballs ripped from their parent stars by one close encounter too many. Unicellular life (once common in the Milky Way, at least) has taken a knock; multicellular life (much rarer) has received a mortal body blow. Only the Stasis’s lifeboat remains.

Luna still floats in Terrestrial orbit—it is a useful tool to stir Earth’s liquid core. Prone to a rocky sclerosis, the Earth’s heart is a major problem for the Stasis. They can’t let it harden, lest the subduction cycle and the deep carbon cycle on which the biosphere depends grind to a halt. But there are ways to stir it up again. They can afford to wait half a billion years for the Earth to cool, then reseed the reborn planet with archaea and algae. After the first fraught experiment in reterraforming, the Stasis find it sufficient to reboot the mantle and outer core once every ten billion years or so.

The universe changes around them, slowly but surely.

At the end of a hundred billion years, uranium no longer exists in useful quantities in the Earth’s crust. Even uranium 238 decays eventually, and twenty one half-lives is more than enough to render it an exotic memory, like the bright and early dawn of the universe. Other isotopes will follow suit, leaving only the most stable behind.

(The Stasis have sufficient for their needs, and might even manufacture more—were it necessary—using the necrostar’s ergosphere as a forge. But the Stasis don’t particularly want their clients to possess the raw materials for nuclear weapons. Better by far to leave those tools by the wayside.)

The sky is dark. The epoch of star formation has drawn to a close in the galaxies the Earth has left. No bright new stellar nurseries glitter in the void. All the bright, fast-burning suns have exploded and faded. All the smaller main-sequence stars have bloated into dyspeptic ruddy giants, then exhausted their fuel and collapsed. Nothing bright remains save a scattering of dim red and white dwarf stars.

Smaller bodies—planets, moons, and comets—are slowly abandoning their galaxies, shed from stars as their orbits become chaotic, then ejecting at high speed from the galaxy itself in the wake of near encounters with neighboring stars. Like gas molecules in the upper atmosphere of a planet warmed by a star, the lightest leave first. But the process is inexorable. The average number of planets per star is falling slowly.

(About those gas molecules: the Stasis have, after some deliberation, taken remedial action. Water vapor is split by ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere, and the Earth can ill afford to lose its hydrogen. A soletta now orbits between Earth and the necrosun, filtering out the short-wavelength radiation, and when they periodically remelt the planet to churn the magma, they are at pains to season their new-made hell with a thousand cometary hydrogen carriers. But eventually more extreme measures will be necessary.)

The sky is quiet and deathly cold. The universe is expanding, and the wavelength of the cosmic microwave background radiation has stretched. The temperature of space itself is now only thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. The ripples in the background are no longer detectable, and the distant quasars have reddened into invisibility. Galactic clusters that were once at the far edge of detection are now beyond the cosmic event horizon, and though Earth has only traveled two hundred million light-years from the Local Group, the gulf behind it is nearly a billion light-years wide. This is no longer a suitable epoch for Science Empires, for the dynamic universe they were called upon to study is slipping out of sight.

SLIDE 12.

A trillion years will pass.

The universe beyond the necrosun’s reach is black. Far behind it, the final stars of the Local Group have burned out. White dwarfs have cooled to the temperature of liquid water; red dwarfs have guttered into chilly darkness. Occasionally stellar remnants collide, then the void is illuminated by flashes of lightning, titanic blasts of radiation as the supernovae and gamma-ray bursters flare.

But the explosions are becoming rare. Now it isn’t just planets that are migrating away from the chilly corpses of the galaxies. Stellar remnants are ejected into the void as the galaxies themselves fall apart with age.

Space is empty and cold, barely above absolute zero. The necrostar’s course has passed through what was once the Bootes Void, but there is no end to the emptiness in sight: there are voids in all directions now. The Stasis and their clients have abandoned the practice of astronomy. They maintain a simple radar watch in the direction of travel, sending out a gigawatt ping every year against the tiny risk of a rogue asteroid, but they haven’t encountered an extrasolar body larger than a grain of sand for billions of years.

As for the necrosun’s planetary attendants . . .

One day they will burn Jupiter to keep themselves warm. And Saturn, and icy Neptune, water bunker for the oceans of Earth. These days have not yet come, for they are still working through the titans, through Rhea and Oceanus, Crius and Hyperion—the brown dwarfs built with Sol’s stolen mass, and the other dwarfs stolen from the Milky Way during the Long Burn. Each brown dwarf burns for many times the age of the universe at the birth of humanity; black holes are nothing if not efficient. But one day they will be used up, the last titan reduced to a dwarfish cinder; and it will be time to start eating the planets.

Not long thereafter, it will be time for the final Reseeding.

Spin Control

Pierce stood uncertainly before the door in the dome. It glowed blue-green with an inner light, and when he looked around, his shadow stretched into the night behind him.

“Don’t wait outside for too long,” someone said waspishly. “The air isn’t safe.”

The air? Pierce wondered as he entered the doorway. The glassy slabs of an airlock slid aside and closed behind him, thrice in rapid succession. He found himself in a spacious vivarium, illuminated by a myriad of daylight-bright lamps shining from the vertices of the dome wall’s triangular segments. There were plants everywhere, green and damp-smelling cycads and ferns and crawling, climbing vines. Insect life hidden in the undergrowth creaked and rattled loudly.

Then he noticed the Librarian, who stood in the clearing before the doors, as unnaturally still as a plastinated corpse.

“I haven’t been here before,” Pierce admitted as he approached the robed figure. “I’ve used outlying branches, but never the central Library itself.”

“I know.” The Librarian pushed back the hood of his robe to reveal a plump, bald head, jowly behind its neat goatee, and gimlet eyes that seemed to drill straight through him.

Pierce stopped, uncertain. “Do I know you?”

“Almost certainly not. Call me Torque. Or Librarian.” Torque pointed to a path through the vegetation. “Come, walk with me. I’ll show you to your reading room, and you can get started. You might want to bookmark this location in case you need to return.”

Pierce nodded. “Is there anybody else here?”

“Not at present.” Torque sniffed. “You and I are the only living human beings on the planet right now, although there may be more than one of you present. You have the exclusive use of the Library’s resources this decade, within reason.”

“Within reason?”

“Sometimes our supervisors—yours or mine—take an interest. They are not required to notify me of their presence.” There was a fork in the path, around a large outcropping of some sort of rock crystal, like quartz; Torque turned left. “Ah, here we are. This is your reading room, Student-Agent Pierce.”

A white-walled roofless cubicle sat in the middle of a clearing, through which ran a small brook, its banks overgrown with moss and ferns. The walls were only shoulder high, a formality and a signifier of privacy; they surrounded a plain wooden desk and a chair. “This is everything?” Pierce asked, startled.

“Not entirely. Look up.” Torque gestured at the dome above them. “In here we maintain a human-compatible biosphere to reprocess your air and waste. We provide light, and heat, although the latter is less important than it will be in a few million years hereabouts. We’ve turned down the sun to conserve mass, but it’s still radiating brightly in the infrared; the real problems will start when we work through the last bunker reserve in about eighteen million years. The dome should keep the Library accessible to readers for about thirty million years after that, well into Fimbulwinter.”

Fimbulwinter: the winter at the end of the world, after the last fuel for the necrosun’s accretion disk had been consumed, leaving Earth adrift in orbit around a cold black hole, billions of light-years from anything else. Pierce shivered slightly at the thought of it. “What’s the problem with the outside air?”

“We were losing hydrogen too fast, and without hydrogen, there’s no water, and without water, we can’t maintain a biosphere, and without a biosphere the planet rapidly becomes less habitable—no free oxygen, for one thing. So about thirty billion years ago we deuterated the biosphere as a conservation measure. Of course, that necessitated major adjustments to the enzyme systems of all the life-forms from bacteria on up, and you—and I—are not equipped to run on heavy water; the stuff ’s toxic to us.” Torque pointed at the stream. “You can drink from that, if you like, or order refreshments by phone. But don’t drink outside the dome. Don’t breathe too much, if you can help it.”

Pierce looked around. “So this is basically just a reading room, like a Branch Library. Where’s the real Library? Where are the archives?”

“You’re standing on them.” Torque’s expression was one of restrained impatience: Weren’t you paying attention in class the day they covered this? “The plateau this reading room is built on—in fact, the entire upper crust—is riddled with storage cells of memory diamond, beneath a thin crust of sedimentary rock laid down to protect it. We switched the continental-drift cycle off for good about five billion years ago, after the last core cooling cycle. That’s when we began accumulating the Library deposits.

“Oh.” Pierce looked around. “Well, I suppose I’d better get started. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.” Torque turned his back on Pierce and walked away. “I’ll be around if you call me,” he sent.

Pierce sat down in front of the empty desk and laid his hands palm down on the blotter. A continent of memory diamond? The mere idea of that much data beggared the imagination. “It’ll be in here somewhere,” he muttered, and smiled.

Unhistory

One of the first things that any agent of the Stasis learns is patience. It’s not as if they are short of time; their long lives extend beyond the easy reach of memory, and should they avoid death through violence or accident or suicide, they can pursue projects that would exceed the life expectancy of ordinary mortals. And that is how they live in the absence of the principal aspect of their employment, the ability to request access to the timegate.

Pierce thought at first that the vice-chancellor’s request would be trivial, a matter of taking a few hours or days to dig down into the stacks and review the historical record. He’d return triumphant, a few minutes upstream of his departure, and present his findings before the council. Xiri would be appropriately adoring, and would doubtless write a series of sonnets about his Library visit (for poetics were in fashion as the densest rational format for sociological-academic case studies in Leng): and his adoptive home time would be spared the rigor and pity of a needless doctrinal war. That was his plan.

It came unglued roughly a week after his arrival, at the point when he stopped flailing around in increasing panic and went for a long walk around the paths of the biome, brooding darkly, trying to quantify the task.

Memory diamond is an astonishingly dense and durable data substrate. It’s a lattice of carbon nuclei, like any other diamond save that it is synthetic, and the position of atoms in the lattice represents data. By convention, an atom of carbon 12 represents a zero, and an atom of carbon 13 represents a one; and twelve-point-five grams of memory diamond—one molar weight, a little under half an old-style ounce—stores 6 × 1023 bits of data—or 10 23 bytes, with compression.

The continent the reading room is situated on is fifteen kilometers thick and covers an area of just under forty million square kilometers, comparable to North and South America combined in the epoch of Pierce’s birth. Half of it is memory diamond. There’s well over 1018 tons of the stuff, roughly 10 23 molar weights. One molar weight of memory diamond is sufficient to hold all the data ever created and stored by the human species prior to Pierce’s birth, in what was known at the time as the twenty-first century.

The civilizations over which the Stasis held sway for a trillion years stored a lot more data. And when they collapsed, the Stasis looted their Alexandrian archives, binged on stolen data and vomited it back up at the far end of time.

Pierce’s problem was this: more than 90 percent of the Library consisted of lies.

He’d started out, naturally enough, with two pieces of information: the waypoint in his phone that identified the exact location of the porch of his home in Leng, and the designation of the planetary system in M-33 that had aroused such controversy. It was true, as Xiri had said, that the Hegemony was reveling in the feed from the robot exploration fleet that had swept through the Triangulum galaxy tens of millions of years ago. And he knew—he was certain!—that Xiri, and the Hegemony, and the city of Leng with its Mediterranean airs and absurdly scholastic customs existed. He had held her as his wife and lover for nearly two decades-subjective, dwelt there and followed their ways as an honored noble guest for more than ten of those years: he could smell the hot, damp summer evening breeze in his nostrils, the scent of the climbing blue rose vines on the trellis behind his house—

The first time he gave the Library his home address and the identities to search for, it took him to a set of war grave records in the Autonomous Directorate, two years before his first interview with Xiri. He was unamused to note the names of his father- and mother-in-law inscribed in the list of terrorist wreckers and resisters who had been liquidated by the Truth Police in the wake of the liberation of Leng by Directorate forces.

He tried again: this time he was relieved to home in on his return from the field trip to Constantinople—seen through the omnipresent eyes of Xiri’s own cams—but was perplexed by her lack of excitement. He backtracked, his search widening out until he discovered to his surprise that according to the Library, the Hegemony was not, in fact, investigating the Triangulum galaxy at all, but focusing on Maffei 1, seven million light-years farther out.

That night he ordered up two bottles of a passable Syrah and drank himself into a solitary stupor for the first time in some years. It was a childish and shortsighted act, but the repeated failures were eating away at his patience. The day after, wiser but somewhat irritable, he tried again, entering his home coordinates into the desk and asking for a view of his hall.

There was no hall, and indeed no Leng, and no Hegemony either; but the angry spear-wielding raccoons had discovered woad.

Pierce stood up, shaking with frustration, and walked out of the reader’s cubicle. He stood for a while on the damp green edge of the brook, staring at the play of light across the running water. It wasn’t enough. He shed his scholar’s robe heedlessly, turned to face the dirt trail that had led him to this dead end, and began to run. Arriving at the entrance airlock, he didn’t stop: his legs pounded on, taking him out of the dome and then around it in a long loop, feet thumping on the bony limestone pavement, each plate like the scale of a monstrous fossilized lizard beneath his feet. He kept the glowing dome to his left as he circled it, once, then twice. By the end of the run he was flagging, his chest beginning to burn, the hot, heavy lassitude building in his legs as the sweat dripped down his face.

He slowed to a walk as the airlock came into view again. When he was ready to speak, he activated his phone. “Torque. Your fucking Library is lying to me. Why is that?”

“Ah, you’ve just noticed.” Torque sounded amused. “Come inside and we’ll discuss it.”

I don’t want to discuss it; I want it to work, Pierce fumed to himself as he trudged back to the airlock. Overhead, three planets twinkled redly across the blind vault of the nighttime sky.

Torque was waiting for him in the clearing, holding a bottle and a pair of shot glasses. “You’re going to need this,” he said, a twinkle in his eyes. “Everybody does, the first time around.”

“Feh.” Pierce shuffled stiffly past him, intending to return to the reading cubicle. “What use is a Library full of lies?”

“They’re not lies.” Torque’s response was uncharacteristically mild. “They’re unhistory.”

“Un—” Pierce stopped dead in his tracks. “There was no unhistory in the Branch Libraries I used,” he said tonelessly.

“There wouldn’t be. Have you given thought to what happens every time you step through a timegate?”

“Not unduly. What does that have to do with—”

“Everything.” Torque allowed a note of irritation to creep into his voice. “You need to pay more attention to theory, agent. Not all problems can be solved with a knife.”

“Huh. So the Library is contaminated with unhistory, because . . .?”

“Students. When you use a timegate, you enter a wormhole, and when you exit from it—well, from the reference frame of your point of emergence, a singularity briefly appears and emits a large gobbet of information. You. The information isn’t consistent with the time leading up to its sudden appearance—causality may be violated, for one thing, and for another, the information, the traveler, may remember or contain data that wasn’t there before. You’re just a bundle of data spewed out by a wormhole; you don’t have to be consistent with the universe around you. That’s how you remember your upbringing and your recruitment, even though nobody else does. Except for the Library.”

They came to a clearing and instead of taking the track to the reading room, Torque took a different path.

“Let’s suppose you visit a temporal sector—call it A-one—and while you’re there, you do something that changes its historical pattern. You’re now in sector A-two. A-one no longer exists, it’s been overwritten. If there’s a Branch Library in A-one, it’s now in A-two, and it, too, has changed, because it is consistent with its own history. But the real Library—tell me, how does information enter the Library?”

Pierce floundered. “I thought that was an archival specialty? Every five seconds throughout eternity a listener slot opens for a millisecond, and anything of interest is sent forward to Control.”

“Not exactly.” Torque stopped on the edge of another clearing in the domed jungle. “The communication slots send data backward in time, not forward. There’s an epoch almost a billion years long, sitting in the Archaean and Proterozoic eras, where we run the Library relays. The point is—back in the Cryptozoic-relay era, there are no palimpsests. There’s no human history to contaminate, nothing there but a bunch of store-and-forward relays. So reports from sector A-one are relayed back to the Cryptozoic, as are reports from sector A-two. And when they’re transmitted uptime to the Final Library for compilation, we have two conflicting reports from sector A.”

Pierce boggled. “Are you telling me that we don’t destroy time lines when we change things? That everything coexists? That’s heretical!”

“I’m not preaching heresy.” Torque turned to face him. “The sector is indeed overwritten with new history: the other events are unhistory now, stuff that never happened. Plausible lies. Raw data that pops out of a wormhole mediated by a naked singularity, if you ask the theorists: causally unconnected with reality. But all the lies end up in the Library. Not only does the Library document all of recorded human history—and there is a lot of it, for ubiquitous surveillance technology is both cheap and easy to develop, it’s how we define civilization after all—it documents all the possible routes through history that end in the creation of the Final Library. That’s why we have the Final Library as well as all the transient, palimpsest-affected Branch Libraries.”

It was hard to conceive of. “All right. So the Library is full of internally contradictory time lines. Why can’t I find what I’m looking for?”

“Well. If you’re using your waypoints correctly, the usual reason why you get a random selection of incorrect views is that someone has rewritten that sector. It’s a palimpsest. Not only is the information you came here to seek buried in a near-infinite stack of unhistories, it’s unlikely you’ll ever be able to return to it—unless you can find the point where that sector’s history was altered and undo the alteration.”

REPEATEDLY KILLING THE BUDDHA

Graduation Ceremony

You will awaken early on that day, and you will dress in the formal parade robes of a probationary agent of the Stasis for the last time ever. You have worn these robes many times over the past twenty years, and you are no longer the frightened teenager whose hands held the knife of the aspirant and whose ears accepted their ruthless first order. Had you declined the call, were you still in the era of your birth, you would already be approaching early middle age, the great plague of senescence digging its claws deep beneath your skin; and as it is, even though the medical treatments of the Stasis have given you the appearance of a twenty-five-year-old, your eyes are windows onto the soul of an ancient.

Your mind will be honed as sharp and purposeful as a razor blade, for you will have spent six months preparing for this morning; six months of lonesome despair following Torque’s explanation of your predicament, spent in training on the roof of the world, obsessively focused on your final studies. You have completed your internship and your probationary assignments, worked alone and unsupervised in perilous times: now you will present yourself to the examiners to undergo their final and most severe examination, in hope of being accepted at last as an agent of Stasis. As a full agent, you will no longer be limited in your access to the Library: nor will your license to summon timegates be restricted. You will be a trustee, a key-holder in the jailhouse of history, able to rummage through lives on a whim, free to search for what you have lost (or have had taken from you: as yet you are unsure whether it was malice or negligence that destroyed your private life).

You will dress in a saffron robe bound with the black belt of your current rank, and place on your head the beret of an agent-aspirant. Elsewhere in the complex, a dozen other probationers are similarly preparing themselves. You will hang on your belt the dagger that you honed to lethal sharpness the night before, obsessively polishing the symbol of your calling. Before the sun reaches the day’s zenith, it will have taken a life: it is your duty to ensure that the victim dies swiftly, painlessly.

Out on the time-weathered flagstones, beneath the deep blue dome of a sky bisected by a glittering torque of orbital-momentum-transfer bodies, you will stand in a row before your teachers and tyrants. Not for the first time, you will find yourself asking if it was all worth it. They will stare down at you and your classmates, ready to pronounce judgment—ready perhaps to admit you to their number as a peer, or to anathematize and cauterize, to unmake and consign into unhistory those who are unworthy. They outnumber your fellow trainees three to one, for they take the training of new eumortals very seriously indeed. They are the eternal guardians of historicity, the arbiters of what really happened. And for no reason you can clearly comprehend, they offered you, you in particular out of a field of a billion contenders, an opportunity.

And there will be speeches. And more speeches. And then Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson will utter a sermon, along exactly the lines one would expect on such an occasion. “This momentous and solemn occasion marks the end of your formal training, but not the end of your studies and your search for excellence. You entered this academy as orphans and strangers, and you shall leave it as agents of the Stasis, sworn to serve our great cause—the total history of the human species.” He’s going to go on in like vein for nearly an hour, you realize: one homily after another, orthodox ideology personified. Theory before praxis.

“We accept you as you are, human aspirants with human weaknesses and human strengths. We are all human; that is our weakness and strength, for we are the agency of human destiny, charged with the holy duty of preserving our species from the triple threat of extinction, transcendental obsolescence, and a cosmos fated to unwind in darkness—notwithstanding your weaknesses, you brother Chee Yun with your obsessive exploration of the extremes of pain, you sister Gretz with your enthusiasm for the fruit of the dream poppy, you brother Pierce with your palimpsest family hobby—we understand all your little vices, and we accept you as you are, despite your weaknesses, despite knowing that only through service to the Stasis will you achieve all that you are destined for—”

You will not bridle angrily when Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson tramples on the grave of your family’s unhistory, even though the scars are still raw and weeping, because you know that this is how the ritual unfolds. You will have reviewed the recording delivered in the internal post some days before, heard the breathy rasp of your own voice wavering on the razor edge of horror as he explains the graduation ritual to you-in-the-present. Your fingers will whiten on the sweat-stained leather hilt of your dagger as you await the signal. Though outwardly you remain at peace, inside you will be in turmoil, wondering if you can go through with it. Slaying your grandfather, cutting yourself free from the fabric of history, was one thing; this is something else.

“Stasis demands eternal vigilance, brothers and sisters. It is easier to shape by destruction than to force creation on the boughs of historicity, but we must stand vigilant and ready, if necessary, to intervene even against ourselves should our hands stray from the straightest of strokes. Every time we step from a timegate, we are born anew as information entering the universe from a singularity: we must not allow our hands to be stilled by fear of personal continuity—”

You will realize then that Manson is on track, that he really is going to give the order your older self described with shaking voice, and you tense in readiness as you call up a channel to Control, requesting the gate through which you must graduate.

“Weakness is forgivable in one’s personal life, but not in the great work. We humans are weak, and sooner or later many of us stray, led into confusion and solipsism by our human grief and hubris. But it is our glory and our privilege that we can change ourselves. We do not have to accept a false version of our selves which have fallen into the errors of wrong thought or despair! Shortly you will be called on to undertake the first of your autosurveillance duties, monitoring your own future self for signs of deviation. Keep a clear head, remember your principles, and be firm in your determination to destroy your own errors: that is all it takes to serve the Stasis well. We are our own best police force, for we can keep track of our own other selves far better than any eternal invigilator.” Manson will clap his hands. And then, without further ado, he will add: “You have all been told what it is that you must do in order to graduate. Do it. Prove to me that you have what it takes to be a stalwart pillar of the Stasis. Do it now.”

You will draw your dagger as your phone sends out the request for a timegate two seconds back in time and a meter behind you. Control acknowledges your request, and you begin to step toward the opening hole in front of you, but as you do so you will sense wrongness, and as you draw breath you will begin to turn, raising your knife to block with a scream forming in the back of your mind: No! Not me! But you will be too late. The stranger with your face stepping out of the singularity behind you will tighten his grip on your shoulders, and as you twist your neck to look around, he will use your momentum to aid the edge of the knife you so keenly sharpened. It will whisper through your carotid artery and your trachea, bringing your life to a gurgling, airless fadeout.

The graduation ceremony always concludes this way, with the newly created agents slaughtering their Buddha nature on the stony road beneath the aging stars. It is a pity that you won’t be alive to see it in person; it is one of the most profoundly revealing rituals of the time travelers, cutting right to the heart of their existence. But you needn’t worry about your imminent death—the other you, born bloody from the singularity that opened behind your back, will regret it as fervently as you ever could.

The Trial

The day after he murdered himself in cold blood, agent Pierce received an urgent summons to attend a meeting in the late nineteenth century.

It was, he thought shakily, par for the course: pick an agent, any agent, as long as their home territory was within a millennium or so of the dateline. From Canada in the twenty-first to Germany in the nineteenth, what’s the difference? If you were an inspector from the umpty-millionth, it might not look like a lot, he supposed: they were all exuberant egotists, these faceless teeming ur-people who had lived and died before the technologies of total history rudely dispelled the chaos and uncertainty of the pre-Stasis world. And Pierce was a very junior agent. Best to see what the inspector wanted.

Kaiserine Germany was not one of Pierce’s areas of interest, so he took a subjective month to study for the meeting in advance—basic conversational German, European current events, and a sufficient grounding in late-Victorian London to support his cover as a more than usually adventuresome entrepreneur looking for new products to import—before he stepped out of a timegate in the back of a stall in a public toilet in Spittelmarkt.

Berlin before the century of bombs was no picturesque ginger-bread confection: outside the slaughterhouse miasma of the market, the suburbs were dismal narrow-fronted apartment blocks as far as the eye could see, soot-stained by a million brown-coal stoves, the principal olfactory note one of horse shit rather than gasoline fumes (although Rudolf Diesel was even now at work on his engines in a more genteel neighborhood). Pierce departed the public toilet with some alacrity—the elderly attendant seemed to take his emergence as a personal insult—and hastily hailed a cab to the designated meeting place, a hotel in Charlottenberg.

The hotel lobby was close and humid in the summer heat; bluebottles droned around the dark wooden paneling as Pierce looked around for his contact. His phone tugged at his attention as he looked at the inner courtyard, where a cluster of cast-iron chairs and circular tables hinted at the availability of waiter service. Sure enough, a familiar face nodded affably at him.

Pierce approached the table with all the enthusiasm of a condemned man approaching the gallows. “You wanted to see me,” he said. There were two goblets of something foamy and green on the table, and two chairs. “Who else?”

“The other drink’s for you. Berliner Weiss with Waldmeistersirup. You’ll like it. Guaranteed.” Kafka gestured at the empty chair. “Sit down.”

“How do you know—” Silly question. Pierce sat down. “You know this isn’t my time?”

“Yes.” Kafka picked up a tall, curved glass full of dark brown beer and took a mouthful. “Doesn’t matter.” He peered at Pierce. “You’re a new graduate. Damn, I don’t like this job.” He took another mouthful of beer.

“What’s happened now?” Pierce asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why I want you here.”

“Is this to do with the time someone tried to assassinate me?”

“No.” Kafka shook his head. “It’s worse, I’m afraid. One of your tutors may have gone off the reservation. Observation indicated. I’m putting you on the case. You may need—you may need to terminate this one.”

“A tutor.” Despite himself, Pierce was intrigued. Kafka, the man from Internal Affairs (but his role was unclear, for was it not the case that the Stasis police their own past and future selves?) wanted him to investigate a senior agent and tutor? Ordering him to bug his future self would be understandable, but this—

“Yes.” Kafka put his glass down with a curl of his lower lip that bespoke distaste. “We have reason to believe she may be working for the Opposition.”

“Opposition.” Pierce raised an eyebrow. “There is no opposition—”

“Come, now: don’t be naive. Every ideology in every recorded history has an opposition. Why should we be any different?”

“But we’re—” Pierce paused, the phrase bigger than history withering on the tip of his tongue. “Excuse me?”

“Work it through.” Kafka was atwitch with barely concealed impatience. “You can’t possibly not have thought about setting yourself up as a pervert god, can you? Everybody thinks about it, this we know; seed the universe with life, create your own Science Empires, establish a rival interstellar civilization in the deep Cryptozoic, and use it to invade or secede Earth before the Stasis notices—that sort of thing. It’s not as if thinking about it is a crime: the problems start when an agent far gone in solipsism starts thinking they can do it for real. Or worse, when the Opposition raise their snouts.”

“But I—” Pierce stopped, collected his thoughts, and continued. “I thought that never happened? That the self-policing thing was a, an adequate safeguard?”

“Lad.” Kafka shook his head. “You clearly mean well. And self-policing does indeed work adequately most of the time. But don’t let the security theater at your graduation deceive you: there are failure modes. We set you a large number of surveillance assignments to muddy the water—palimpsests all, of course, we overwrite them once they deliver their reports so that future-you retains no memory of them—but you can’t watch yourself all the time. And there are administrative errors. You’re not only the best monitor of your own behavior, but the best-placed individual to know how best to corrupt you. We are human and imperfect, which is why we need an external Internal Affairs department. Someone has to coordinate things, especially when the Opposition are involved.”

“The Opposition?” Pierce picked up his glass and drank deeply, studying Kafka. “Who are they?” Who do you want me to rat out? he wondered. Myself? Surely Kafka couldn’t have overlooked his history with Xiri, now buried beneath the dusty pages of a myriad of rewrites?

“You’ll know them when you meet them.” Kafka emitted a little mirthless chuckle and stood up. “Come upstairs to my office, and I’ll show you why I requested you for this assignment.”

Kafka’s office occupied the entire top floor of the building and was reached by means of a creaking mesh-fronted elevator that rose laboriously through the well of a wide staircase. It was warm, but not obnoxiously so, as Pierce followed Kafka out of the elevator cage. “The door is reactive,” Kafka warned, placing a protective hand on the knob. Hidden glands were waiting beneath a patina of simulated brass, ready to envenomate the palm of an unwary intruder. “Door: accept agent Pierce. General defenses: accept Agent Pierce with standard agent privilege set. You may follow me now.”

Kafka opened the door wide. Beyond it, ranks of angled wooden writing desks spanned the room from wall to wall. A dark-suited iteration of Kafka perched atop a high stool behind each one of them, pens moving incessantly across their ledgers. A primitive visitor (one not slain on the spot by the door handle, or the floor, or the wallpaper) might have gaped at the ever-changing handwriting and spidery diagrams that flickered on the pages, mutating from moment to moment as the history books redrew themselves, and speculated about digital paper. Pierce, no longer a primitive, felt the hair under his collar rise as he polled his phone, pulling up the number of rewrites going on in the room. “You’re really working Control hard,” he said in the direction of Kafka’s receding back.

“This is the main coordination node for prehistoric Germany.” Kafka tucked his hands behind his back as he walked, stoop-shouldered, between desks. “We’re close enough to the start of Stasis history to make meddling tricky—we have to keep track of continuity, we can’t simply edit at will.” Meddling with prehistory, before the establishment of the ubiquitous monitoring and recording technologies that ultimately fed the Library at the end of time, ought to be risk-free: if a Neolithic barbarian froze to death on a glacier, unrecorded, the implications for deep history were trivial. But the rules were fluid, and interference was risky: if a time traveler were to shoot the Kaiser, for example, or otherwise derail the ur-history line leading up to the Stasis, it could turn the entire future into a palimpsest. “The individual I am investigating is showing an unhealthy interest in the phase boundary between Stasis and prehistory.”

One of the deskbound Kafkas looked up, his eyebrows furrowing with irritation. “Could you take this somewhere else?” he asked.

“I’m sorry,” Pierce’s Kafka replied with abrupt humility. “Agent Pierce, this way.”

As Kafka led Pierce into an office furnished like an actuary’s hermitage, Pierce asked, “Aren’t you at risk of anachronism yourselves? Multitasking like that, so close to the real Kafka’s datum?”

Kafka smiled sepulchrally as he sat down behind the heavy oak desk. “I take precautions. And the fewer individuals who know what’s in those ledgers, the better.” He gestured at a small, hard seat in front of it. “Be seated, Agent Pierce. Now, in your own words. Tell me about your relationship with Agent-Scholar Yarrow. Everything , if you please.” He reached into his desk drawer and withdrew a smart pad. “I have a transcript of your written correspondence here. We’ll go through it line by line next . . .”

Funeral in Berlin

The interrogation lasted three days. Kafka didn’t even bother to erase it from Pierce’s time line retroactively: clearly he was making a point about the unwisdom of crossing Internal Affairs.

Afterward, Pierce left the hotel and wandered the streets of Berlin in a neurasthenic daze.

Does Kafka trust me? Or not? On balance, probably not: the methodical, calm grilling he’d received, the interrogation about the precise meaning of Yarrow’s love letters (faded memories from decades ago, to Pierce’s mind), had been humiliating, an emotional strip search. Knowing that Kafka understood his dalliance with Yarrow as a youthful indiscretion, knowing that Kafka clearly knew of (and tolerated) his increasingly desperate search for the point at which his history with Xiri had been overwritten, only made it worse. We can erase everything that gives meaning to your life if we feel like it. Feeling powerless was a new and shocking experience for Pierce, who had known the freedom of the ages: a return to his pre-Stasis life, half-starved and skulking frightened in the shadows of interesting times.

And then there was the incipient paranoia that any encounter with Internal Affairs engendered. Am I being watched right now? he wondered as he walked. A ghost-me surveillance officer working for Internal Affairs, or something else? Kafka would be mad not to assign him a watcher, he decided. If Yarrow was under investigation, then he himself must be under suspicion. Guilt by association was the first rule of counterespionage, after all.

A soul-blighting sense of depression settled into his bones. He’d had an inkling of it for months, ever since his increasingly frantic search in the Library, but Kafka’s quietly pedantic examination had somehow catalyzed a growing certainty that he would never see Xiri, or Magnus and Liann, ever again—that if he could ever find them, shadows cast from his mind by the merciless inspection-lamp glare of Internal Affairs would banish them farther into unhistory.

Therefore, he wandered.

Civilization lay like a heavy blanket upon the land, rucked up in gray-faced five-story apartment blocks and pompous stone-faced business establishments, their pillars and porticoes and cornicework swollen with self-importance like so many amorous street pigeons. The city sweated in the summer heat, the stench and flies of horse manure in the streets contributing a sour pungency to the sharp stink of stove smoke.

Other people shared the Strasse with him; here a peddler selling apples from a handcart, there a couple taking the air together. Pierce walked slowly along the sidewalk of a broad street, sweating in his suit and taking what shelter he could from the merciless summer sun beneath the awnings of shops, letting his phone’s navigation aid guide his footsteps even as he wondered despondently if he would ever find his way home. He could wander through the shadowy world of historicity forever, never finding his feet—for though the Stasis and their carefully cultivated tools of ubiquitous monitoring had nailed down the sequence of events that comprised history, history was a tangled weave, many threads superimposed and redyed and snipped out of the final pattern . . .

The scent was his first clue that he was not alone, floral and sweet and tickling the edge of his nostrils with a half-remembered sense of illicit excitement that made his heart hammer. The shifting sands of memory gave way: I know that smell—

His phone vibrated. “Show no awareness,” someone whispered inside his skull in Urem. “They are watching you.” The voice was his own.

The strolling couple taking the air arm in arm were ahead of him. It was her scent, the familiar bouquet, but—“Where are you?” he sent. “Show yourself.”

The phone buzzed again like an angry wasp trapped inside his ribs. “Not with watchers. Go to this location and wait,” said the traitor voice, as a spatial tag nudged the corner of his mind. “We’ll pick you up.” The rendezvous was a couple of kilometers away, in a public park notorious by night: a French-letter drop for a dead-letter drop.

He tried not to stare. It might be her, he thought, trying to shake thirty-year-old jigsaw memories into something that matched a glimpse of a receding back in late-nineteenth-century dress and broad-brimmed hat. He turned a corner in his head even as they turned aside into a residential street: “Internal Affairs just interrogated me about Yarrow.”

“You told us already. Go now. Leave the rest to us.”

Pierce’s phone fell silent. He glanced sideways out of the corners of his eyes, but the strolling couple were no longer visible. He sniffed, flaring his nostrils in search of an echo of that familiar scent, but it, too, was gone. Doubtless they’d never been here at all; they were Stasis, after all. Weren’t they?

Guided by his phone’s internal nudging, Pierce ambled slowly toward the park, shoulders relaxed and hands clasped behind his back as if enjoying a quiet afternoon stroll. But his heart was pounding and there was an unquiet sensation in the pit of his stomach, as if he harbored a live grenade in his belly. You told us already. Go now. Leave the rest to us. His own traitor voice implying lethally spiraling cynicism. They are watching you. The words of a self-crowned pervert god, hubris trying to dam the flow of history; or the mysterious Opposition that Kafka had warned him of? It was imponderable, intolerable. I could be walking into a trap, Pierce considered the idea, and immediately began to activate a library of macros in his phone that he’d written for such eventualities. As Superintendent-of-Scholars Manson had ceaselessly reminded him, a healthy paranoia was key to avoiding further encounters with cardiac leeches and less pleasant medical interventions.

Pierce crossed the street and walked beside a canal for a couple of blocks, then across a bridge and toward the tree-lined gates of a park. Possibilities hummed in the dappled shadows of the grass like a myriad of butterfly wings broken underfoot, whispering on the edge of actuality like distant thunder. This part of history, a century and more before the emergence of the first universal-surveillance society, before the beginning of the history to which the Stasis laid claim, was mutable in small but significant ways. Nobody could say for sure who might pass down any given street in any specified minute, and deem it disruptive: the lack of determinism lent a certain flexibility to his options.

Triggering one of his macros as he stepped through the gate to the park, between one step and the next Pierce walked through a storeroom in the basement of a Stasis station that had been dust and ruins a billion years before the ice sheets retreated from the North German plains. It had lain disused for a century or so when he entered it, and nobody else would use it for at least a decade thereafter—he’d set monitors, patient trip wires to secure his safe time. He tarried there for almost three hours, picking items from a well-stocked shelf and sending out messages to order them from a factory on a continent that didn’t yet exist, eating a cold meal from a long-storage ration pack, and trying to regain his emotional balance in time for the meeting that lay ahead.

An observer close on his tail would have seen a flicker; when he completed the stride his suit was heavier, the fabric stiffer to the touch, and his shoulders slightly stooped beneath the weight concealed within. There were other changes, some of them internal. Perhaps the observers would see, but: Leave the rest to us. He slipped his hands into his pockets, blinked until the itching subsided and the heads-up display settled into place across the landscape, scanning and amplifying. He had summoned watchers, circling overland: invisible and silent, nerves connected to his center. Fuck Kafka’s little game, he thought furiously. Fuck them all. Three hours in his unrecorded storeroom in the Cryptozoic had given him time for his depression to ferment into anger. I want answers!

It was a hot day, and the park was far from empty. There were young women, governesses or maids, pushing the prams of their bourgeois employers; clerks or office workers skipping work and some juvenile ne’er-do-wells playing truant from the gymnasium; here a street sweeper and there a dodgy character with a barrel organ and behind him a couple of vagrants sharing a bottle of schnapps. At the center of a well-manicured lawn, an ornate stone pedestal supported a clock with four brass faces. Pierce, letting his phone drive his feet, casually glanced around while his threat detector scanned through the chaff. Nobody—His phone buzzed again.

“What was the tavern where you fell for me called?” An achingly familiar voice whispered in his ear.

“Something to do with wildfowl, in Carnegra, the Red Goose or Red Duck or something like that—”

“Hard contact in three seconds,” his own voice interrupted from nowhere. “Button up and hit the ground on my word. Now.”

Pierce dived toward the grassy strip beside the path as flaring crimson threat markers appeared all around him. As he fell, his suit bloated and darkened: rubbery cones expanded like a frightened hedgehog’s quills as his collar expanded and rotated, hooding him. In the space of a second the park’s population doubled, angular metallic figures flickering into being all around. Time flickered and strobed as timegates snapped open and shut, expelling sinister cargo. Pierce twitched ghost muscles convulsively, triggering camouflage routines as the incoming drones locked onto each other and spat missiles and laser fire.

“What’s going on?”

“Palimpsest ambush! Hard . . .”

The signal stuttered into silence, hammered flat by jammers and raw, random interference. Pierce began to roll, rising to sit as his suit’s countermeasures flared. This is crazy, he thought, shocked by the violence of the attack. They can’t hope to conceal—

The sky turned violet-white, the color of lightning: the grass around him began to smoke.

The temperature rose rapidly. His suit was just beginning to char from the prompt radiation pulse as the ground opened under him, toppling him backward into darkness

REDUX

Army of You

When you see the ground swallow Pierce you will breathe a sigh of relief—you’ll finally have the luxury of knowing that one of your iterations has made it out of death ground. But the situation will be too deadly to give you respite. If Internal Affairs are willing to start with combat drones and orbital X-ray lasers, then escalate from there, where will they stop? How badly do they want you?

Very badly, it seems.

There’s going to be hell to pay when it’s time for the cleanup; ur-history doesn’t have room for a nuclear blitzkrieg on the capital of the Second Reich. The calcinated, rapidly skeletonizing remains of the governesses and the organ grinders contort and burst in the searing wind from the Hiroshima miscarriage, and the four faces of the clock glow cherry red and slump to the ground as a dozen more of you flicker into view, anonymous in their heat-flash-silvered battle armor. The echo-armies of your combat drones fan out all around, furiously dumping heat through transient timegates into the cryogenic depths of the far future as they exchange fire with the enemy’s soldiers. “Extraction complete. Prepare to move out,” says your phone; the iteration tag of that version of you is astronomical, in the millions. This isn’t just a palimpsest ambush: it’s an entire talmud of rewrites and commentaries and attempted paradoxes piled up in a threatening tsunami of unhistory and dumped on your heads.

You’ll grab your future self’s metadata and jump toward a timegate to a dispersal zone drifting high in orbit above ruddy Jupiter’s north pole, nearly a billion years in the future: the rocket motors at your suit’s shoulders and ankles kick hard, and as you loft, you’ll catch a flashing glimpse of the Mach wave from the first heat strike surging outward, lifting and crumpling schools and hospitals and churches and apartments and houses and shops in the iron name of Internal Affairs.

They won’t find this dispersal zone. They won’t uncover the truth about Control, either, or about the Opposition—you’ll be sure of that for as long as you continue to live and breathe.

You will look down, between your feet, at the swirling orange-and-cream chaos of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Your armor will ping and tick quietly as it cools, and you will wait while the star trackers get a fix on your position, your mind empty of everything but a quiet satisfaction, the reward for a job well-done: the extraction of your cardinal iterant from the grasp of Internal Affairs. Somewhere else in time—millions of years ago—the rewrite war is still going on, the virtual legions of you playing a desperate shell game with Kafka: but you’ve won. All that’s left to do is to deftly insert the zombie ringer into ur-history on his way into Kafka’s court, primed to tell Internal Affairs exactly what you want them to know, then to orchestrate a drawdown and withdrawal from the ruins of Berlin before Kafka overwrites the battle zone and restores the proper flow of history.

Your suit will beep quietly for attention. “Scan complete,” it announces. “Acceleration commencing.” The thrusters will push briefly, reorienting you, sliding Jupiter out of sight behind your back. And then the rockets will kick in again, pushing you toward the yard, and the fleet of thirty-kilometer-long starships a-building, and Yarrow.

He Got Your Girl

I’m alive, thought Pierce, then did a double take. I’m alive? Everything was black, and he couldn’t tell which way was up. There was a metallic taste in his mouth, and he ached everywhere.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’ll have to wait while we cut you out of that,” said a stranger. Their voice sounded oddly muffled, and he realized with surprise that it wasn’t coming from inside him. “You took an EMP that fried your suit. You only just made it out in time—you took several sieverts. We’ve got a bed waiting for you.”

Something pushed at his side, and he felt a strange tipping motion. “Am I in free fall?” he asked.

“Of course. Try not to move.”

I’m not on Earth, he realized. It was strange; he’d effectively visited hundreds of planets with ever-shifting continents and biospheres, but he’d never been off Earth before. They were all aspects of Gaia, causally entangled slices through the set of all possible Earths that the Stasis called their own.

Someone tugged on his left foot, and he felt a chill of cold air against his skin. His toes twitched. “That’s very good, keep doing that. Tell me if anything hurts.” The voice was still muffled by the remains of his hood, but he could place it now. Kari, a quiet woman, one of the trainees from the class above him. He tensed, panic rising in a choking wave. “Hey—Yarrow! He’s stressing out—”

“Hold still, Pierce.” Yarrow’s voice in his ears, also fuzzy. “Your phone’s off-line, it took a hit too. Kari’s with us. It’s going to be all right.”

You don’t have any right to tell me that, he thought indignantly, but the sound of her voice had the desired effect. So Kari’s one of them too. Was there no end to the internal rot within the Stasis? In all honesty, considering his own concupiscence—possibly not. He tried to slow his breathing, but it was slowly getting stuffy and hot inside the wreckage of his survival suit.

More parts detached themselves from his skin. He was beginning to itch furiously, and the lack of gravity seemed to be making him nauseous. Finally, the front of his hood cracked open and floated away. He blinked teary eyes against the glare, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him.

“Kari—”

The spherical drone floating before his face wore her face on its smartskin. A flock of gunmetal lampreys swam busily behind it, worrying at pieces of the dead and mildly radioactive suit. Some distance beyond, a wall of dull blue triangles curved around him, dish-like, holes piercing it in several places.

“Try not to speak,” said Kari’s drone. “You’ve taken a borderline-fatal dose, and we’re going to have to get you to a sick bay right away.”

His throat ached. “Is Yarrow there?”

Another spherical drone floated into view from somewhere behind him. It wore Xiri’s face. “My love? I’ll visit you as soon as you’ve cleared decontamination. The enemy are always trying to sneak bugs in: they wouldn’t let me through to see you now. Be strong, my lord.” She smiled, but the worry-wrinkles at the corners of her eyes betrayed her. “I’m very proud of you.”

He tried to reply, but his stomach had other ideas and attempted to rebel. “Feel. Sick . . .”

Someone kissed the back of his neck with lips of silver, and the world faded out.

Pierce regained consciousness with an abrupt sense of rupture, as if no time at all had passed: someone had switched his sense of awareness off and on again, just as his parents might once have power-cycled a balky appliance.

“Love? Pierce?”

He opened his eyes and stared at her for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. It felt oddly normal: the aches had all evaporated. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” The bed began to rise behind his back. “Xiri?”

Her clothing was outrageous to Hegemonic forms (not to say anachronistic or unrevealing), but she was definitely his Xiri; as she leaned forward and hugged him fiercely he felt something bend inside him, a dam of despair crumbling before a tidal wave of relief. “How did they find you?” he asked her shoulder, secure in her embrace. “Why did they reinstate—”

“Hush. Pierce. You were so ill—”

He hugged her back. “I was?”

“They kept me from you for half a moon! And the burns, when they cut that suit away from you. What did you do?”

Pierce pondered the question. “I changed my mind about . . . something I’d agreed to do . . .”

They lay together on the bed until curiosity got the better of him. “Where are we? When are we?” Where did you get that jumpsuit?

Xiri sighed, then snuggled closer to him. “It’s a long story,” she said quietly. “I’m still not sure it’s true.”

“It must be, now,” he pointed out reasonably, “but perhaps it wasn’t, for a while. But where are we?”

She eased back a little. “We’re in orbit around Jupiter. But not for much longer.”

“But I—” He stopped. “Really?”

“They disconnected your phone, or I could show you. The colony fleets, the shipyards.”

He blinked at her, astonished. “How?”

“We all have phone implants, here.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement. “This isn’t the Stasis you know.”

“I’d guessed.” He swallowed. “How long has it been for you?”

“Since”—her breath caught, a little ragged—“two years. A little longer.”

He gently trapped her right hand in his, ran his thumb across the smooth, plump skin on the back of her wrist. She let him. “Almost the same.” He swallowed once more. “I thought I’d never see you again. Anyone would think they’d planned this.”

“Oh, but they did.” She gave a nervous little laugh. “He said they didn’t want us to, to desynchronize. Get too far apart.” Her fingers closed around his thumb, constricting and warm.

“Who is ‘he’ ?” asked Pierce, although he thought he knew.

“He used to be you, once. That’s what he told me.” Her grip tightened suddenly. “He’s not you, love, it’s not the same. At all.”

“I must see him.”

Pierce tried to sit up: Xiri clung to him, dragging him down. “No! Not yet,” she hissed.

Pierce stopped struggling before he hurt her. His arms and his stomach muscles felt curiously strong, almost as if they’d never been damaged. “Why not?”

“Scholar Yarrow asked me to, to intercede. She said you’d want to confront him.” She tensed when she spoke Yarrow’s name. “She was right. About lots of things.”

“What’s her position here?”

“She’s with him.” Xiri hesitated. “It took much getting used to. I made a fool of myself once, early on.”

He raised a hand to stroke her hair. “I can understand that.” Pierce pondered his lack of reaction. “It’s been years since I knew her, you know. And if he’s who—what—I think he is, he was never married to you. Was he?”

“No.” She lay against him in silence for a while. “What are you going to do?” she asked in a small voice.

Pierce smiled at the ceiling. (It was low, and bare of decoration: another sign, if he needed one, that he was not back in the Hegemony.) For the time being, the shock and joy of finding her again had left him giddy with relief. “Where are the children?” he asked, forcing himself: one last test.

“I left Liann with a nurse. Magnus is away, in the ship’s scholasticos.” Concern slowly percolated across her expression. “They’ve grown a lot: do you think—”

He breathed out slowly, relieved. “There will be time to get to know them again, yes.” She reached over his chest and hugged him tight. He stroked her hair, content for the moment but sadly aware that everything was about to change. “But tell me one thing. What is it that you’re so desperate to keep from me?”

Nation of Me

“Good to see you, Pierce,” said the man on the throne. He smiled pleasantly but distantly. “I gather you’ve been keeping well.”

Pierce had already come to understand that the truly ancient were not like ordinary humans. “Do you remember being me?” he asked, staring.

The man on the throne raised an eyebrow. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” He gestured at the bridge connecting his command dais to the far side of the room. “You may approach.” Combat drones and uniformed retainers withdrew respectfully, giving Pierce a wide berth.

He tried not to look down as he walked across the bridge, with only partial success. The storms of Jupiter swirled madly beneath his feet. It had made him nauseous the first time he’d seen them, through a dumb-glass window aboard the low-gee shuttle that had brought him hence—evidently his captors wanted to leave him in no doubt that he was a long way from home. Occulting the view of the planet was the blue-tinged quicksilver disk of the largest timegate he’d ever seen, holding open in defiance of protocol with preposterous, scandalous persistence.

“Why am I here?” Pierce demanded.

A snort. “Why do you think?”

“You’re me.” Pierce shrugged. “Me with a whole lot more experience and age, and an attitude problem.” They’d dressed him in the formal parade robes of a Stasis agent rather than the black jumpsuits that seemed to be de rigueur around this place. It was a petty move, to enforce his alienation: and besides, it had no pockets. To fight back, he focused on the absurd. Black jumpsuits and shiny boots, on a spaceship? Someone around here clearly harbored thespian fantasies. “And now you’ve got me.”

His older self stiffened. “We need to talk alone.” His eyes scanned the throne room. “You lot: dismissed.”

Pierce glanced round just in time to see the last of the human audience flicker into unhistory. He looked back toward the throne. “I was hoping we could keep this civilized,” he said mildly. “You’ve got all the leverage you need. I’m in your power.” There: it was out in the open. Not that there’d been any doubt about it, even from the beginning. This ruthless ancient with his well-known mirror-face and feigned bonhomie had made Pierce’s position crystal clear with his choice of greeters. All that was left was for Pierce to politely bare his throat and hope for a favorable outcome.

“I didn’t rescue you from those scum in order to throw you away again”—his older self seemed almost irritated—“though what you see in her . . .” He shook his head. “You’re safe here.”

Pierce rolled his eyes. “Oh, really. And I suppose if I decline to go along with whatever little proposition you’re about to put to me, you’ll just let me walk away, is that it? Rather than, oh, rewind the audience and try again with a clean-sheet me?” He met the even gaze of the man in the throne and suddenly felt finger high.

“No,” said the man on the throne, after a momentary pause. “That won’t be necessary. I’m not going to ask you to do anything you wouldn’t ask me to let you do.”

“Oh.” Pierce considered this for a moment. “You’re with the Opposition, though. Aren’t you? And you know I’m not.” Honesty made him add, “Yet.”

“I told you he’d say that,” said Yarrow, behind him. Pierce’s head whipped round. She nodded at him, but kept her smile for the man on the throne. “He’s young and naive. Go easy on him.”

The man on the throne nodded. “He’s not that naive, my lady.” He frowned. “Pierce, you slit the throat of your own double, separated from you by seconds. You joined the Stasis, after all. But do you really imagine it gets easier with age, when you’ve had time to meditate on what you’ve done? There’s a reason why armies send the flower of their youth to do the killing and dying, not the aged and cynical. We have a name for those who find murder gets easier with experience: ‘monsters.’ ”

He raised a hand. “Chairs all around.” A pair of seats appeared on the dais, facing him: ghosts of carved diamond, fit for the lords of creation. “I think you should be the one to tell him the news,” he suggested to Yarrow. “I’m not sure he’d believe me. He hasn’t had time to recover from the trauma yet.”

“All right.” Yarrow slid gratefully into her own chair, then glanced at Pierce. “You’d better sit down.”

“Why?” Pierce lowered himself into his seat expectantly.

“Because”—she nodded at Pierce’s elder self, who returned the nod with a drily amused smile—“he’s not just a member of the Opposition: he’s our leader. That’s why Internal Affairs have been all over you like ants. And that’s why we had to extract you and bring you here.”

“Rubbish.” Pierce crossed his arms. “That’s not why you had to grab me. You’ve already got him: I assume I’m a palimpsest or leftover from an assassination attempt. So what do you want with me? In the here and now, I mean?”

Yarrow looked flustered. “Pierce—”

His older self placed a restraining hand on her knee as he leaned forward. “Allow me?” He looked Pierce in the eyes. “The Opposition is not—you probably already worked this out—external to the Stasis; we come from within. The Stasis is broken, Pierce, it’s drifting rudderless toward the end of time. We’ve got a, an alternative plan for survival. Internal Affairs is tasked with maintaining internal standards; they’re opposed to structural change at all costs. They overwrote your wife’s epoch because they discovered possible evidence of our success.”

The evidence of abandoned cities on an alien moon, the fleet of gigantic slower-than-light colony starships—was this all just internal politics within the Stasis hierarchy?

“Whatever would they want to do that for?” he asked. “They’re not interested in deep space.” Except insofar as there were threats to the survival of humanity that had to be dealt with.

Yarrow shook her head. “We disagree. They’re very interested in deep space—specifically, in keeping us out of it.” She inhaled deeply. “Did you notice, when you were consulting the Library, any sign of histories that touched on extraterrestrial settlement? Even though we have reterraformed the Earth thousands of times over, strip-mined the sun, rearranged gas giants, built black holes, and ripped an entire star system from its native galactic cluster?” Pierce shook his head, uncertain. “We’ve built and destroyed thousands of biospheres, sculpted continents, we outnumber the stars in the cosmos—but we’ve never spread to other solar systems! Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”

“But we coevolved with our planet, we’re not adapted to life elsewhere—” Pierce stopped. We can do terraforming, and timegates, he realized. Even if we can only have one wormhole end open at any given time. We rebuilt the sun. We’ve mapped every planet within ten million light-years. “Are we?” he asked, plaintively.

“There’s a Science Empire running down on Earth right now,” said the man on the throne. “They’ve been studying that question for twelve thousand years. We brought them the probe fleet reports. They say it can be done, and they’ve been building and launching a colony ship a year for the past six centuries.” He frowned. “We’ve had that big gate in place ever since the dawn of civilization, to block Internal Affairs from detecting and overwriting our operation here. Officially we’re in the middle of a fallow epoch, and the system should be uninhabited and uninhabitable: we moved in ahead of the first scheduled Reseeding. But they never give up. Sooner or later they’ll notice us and start looking for the other side of our barricade, the static drop we funneled you through.”

“What happens when they find it?” asked Pierce.

“Six hundred inhabited worlds die, and that’s just for starters,” Yarrow said quietly. “Call it unhistory if you like euphemisms—but did your graduation kill feel unreal to you? Unlike your”—her nose wrinkled in the ghost of a sniff—“wife and children, the inhabitants of the colony worlds won’t be retrievable through the Library.”

“And those six hundred planets are just the seed corn,” his older self chimed in. “The start of something vast.”

“But why?” he asked. “Why would they . . .?” He stopped.

“The Stasis isn’t about historicity,” said Yarrow. “That might be the organization’s raison d’être, but the raw truth of the matter is that the Stasis is about power. Like any organization, it lives and grows for itself, not for the task with which it is charged. The governing committee—it’s very sad. But it’s been like this as long as there’s been a Stasis.”

“We rescued you because we specifically want you—my first iteration, or as near to it as we’ve been able to get, give or take the assassination ambush in Carnegra,” said the man on the throne. “We need your help to cut us free from the dead hand of history.”

“But what—” Pierce lowered his hands to touch his belly. “My phone,” he said slowly. “It’s damaged, but you could have repaired it. It’s not there anymore, is it?”

Yarrow nodded slowly. “Can you tell me why?” she asked.

RESEEDING

A Brief Alternate History of the Universe

SLIDE 1.

Our solar system under the Stasis, first epoch.

Continents slide and drift, scurrying and scraping across the surface of the mantle. Lights flicker around the coastlines, strobing on and off in kiloyear cycles as civilizations rise and fall. In space, the swarm of orbital-momentum-transfer robots built from the bones of Ceres begin to cycle in and out, slowly pumping energy downwell to the Earth to drag it farther from the slowly brightening sun.

SLIDE 2.

Snapshot: something unusual is happening.

We zoom in on a ten-thousand-year slice, an eyeblink flicker of geological time. For millions of years beforehand, the Earth was quiet, its continents fallen dark in the wake of a huge burping hiccup of magma that flooded from the junction of the Cocos and Nazca continental plates. But now the lights are back, jewels sprinkled across the nighttime hemispheres of unfamiliar continents. Unusually, they aren’t confined to the surface—three diamond necklaces ring the planet in glory, girdling the equator in geosynchronous orbit. And floating beyond them, at the L1 Lagrange point betwixt Earth and Luna, sits the anomalous glowing maw of an unusually large timegate.

The natives appear to be restless . . .

SLIDE 3.

A slow slide of viewpoint out to Jupiter orbit shows that the anomaly is spreading. Already some of the smaller Jovian moons are missing; Thebe and Amalthea have vanished, and something appears to be eating Himalea. A metallic cloud of smaller objects swarms in orbit around Europa, pinpricks of light speckling their surface.

Meanwhile, the shoals of momentum-transfer bodies are thinning, their simple design replaced by numerous perversions of form and purpose. Still powered by light sails, the new vehicles carry exotic machines for harvesting energy from the solar wind and storing it as antimatter. Shuttles move among them like ants amidst an aphid farm, harvesting and storing their largesse as they swing out to Jupiter before dropping back in toward Mercury.

Some of the hundreds of metal moons that orbit Europa are glowing at infrared wavelengths, their temperature suspiciously close to three hundred degrees Kelvin. Against the planetary measure of the solar system they are tiny—little bigger than the moons of Mars. But they’re among the largest engineered structures ever built by the dreaming apes; vaster than cities and more massive than pyramids. And soon they will start to move.

SLIDE 4.

Three thousand years pass.

Earth lies dark and unpopulated once more, for humanity—as always—has gone extinct. Of the great works in Jupiter orbit few traces remain. The great ships have gone, the shipyards have long since been deorbited into the swirling chaos of the gas giant’s atmosphere, and the malformed, warped transfer bodies have been cannibalized and restored to their original purpose.

Five small moons have disappeared, and slowly healing gouges show the sites of huge mining works on Io and Europa, but by the time the Stasis reseed Earth (two-thirds of a million years hence) even the slow resurfacing of Europa’s icy caul will have obscured the signs of industry. It may be thousands of years after that before anybody notices.

SLIDE 5.

Twenty million years pass, and the galaxy slowly lights up with a glare of coherent light, waste energy from the communications traffic between the inhabited worlds.

The first generation colonies have long since guttered into senescence and extinction; so have the third and fourth generations. Of the first generation, barely one in five prospered—but that was sufficient. Those that live spawn prolifically. Planets are common, rocky terrestrial bodies far from rare, and even some of the more exotic types (water giants, tide-locked rocky giants in orbit around red dwarfs, and others) are amenable to human purpose. Where no planets are available, life is harder, prone to sudden extinction events: nobody survives the collapse of civilization aboard a space colony. But the tools and technologies of terraforming are well-known, and best practice, of a kind, develops. Many of the dwellers have adapted to their new habitats so well that they’re barely recognizable as primates anymore, or even mammals.

SLIDE 6.

Three billion years pass.

Two huge, glittering clouds of sentience fall through each other, a magnificently coordinated flypast of fleets of worlds meshing across the endless void. Shock waves thunder through the gas clouds, and millions of massive, short-lived new stars ignite and detonate like firecrackers. The starburst is indeed enormous. But for the most part, the inhabited worlds are safe: swarms of momentum-transfer robots, their numbers uncountable, work for millions of years ahead of and behind the event to direct the closest encounters. Emergent flocking rules and careful plans laid far in advance have steered colonies clear of the high-risk territories, marshaling brown dwarfs as dampers and buffers to redirect the tearaway suns—and both galaxies are talking to each other, for the expanding sphere of sentience now encompasses the entire Local Group.

Earth is no longer inhabited in this epoch; but the precious timegate remains, an oracular hub embedded in a cluster of exotic artificial worlds, conducting and orchestrating the dance of worlds.

There are now a hundred million civilizations within the expanding bubble of intelligence, each with an average population of billions. They are already within an order of magnitude of the Stasis’s ultimate population, and they are barely a thousandth of its age. The universe, it appears, has started to wake up.

SLIDE 7.

The crystal ball is clouded . . .

The Kindest Lies

They walked along a twisting path between walls of shrubs and creepers, and a few short trees, growing from mounds of damp-smelling soil. The path appeared to be of old sandstone, shot through with seams of a milky rock like calcite: appearances were deceptive.

“You played me like a flute,” said Pierce. He held his hands behind his back, as was his wont, keeping an arm’s reach aside from her.

“I did not!” Her denial was more in hurt than in anger. “I didn’t know about this until he, you, recruited me.” Her boot scuffed a rock leaning like a rotten tooth from the side of a herbaceous border: tiny insects scuttled from her toes, unnoticed. “I was still in training. Like you, when you were tapped for, for other things.”

They walked in silence for a minute, uphill and around a winding corner, then down a flight of steps cut into the side of a low hill.

“If this is all simply an internal adjustment, why doesn’t Internal Affairs shut everything down?” he asked. “They must know who is involved . . .”

“They don’t.” She shook her head. “When you call in a request for a timegate, your phone doesn’t say, ‘By the way, this iteration of Pierce is a member of the Opposition.’ All of us were compliant—once. If they catch us, they can backtrack along our history and undo the circumstances that led to our descent into dissidence; and sometimes we can catch and isolate them, put them in an environment where doubt flourishes. If they started unmaking every agent suspected of harboring disloyal thoughts, it would trigger a witch hunt that would tear Stasis apart: we’re not the kind who’d go quietly. Hence their insistence on control, alienation from family and other fixed reference points, complicity in shared atrocity. They aim to stifle disloyal thoughts before the first germination.”

“Huh.” They came to a fork in the path. A stone bench, stained gray and gently eroded by lichen, sat to one side. “Were you behind the assassination attempt, then?”

“No.” She perched tentatively at one side of the bench. “That was definitely Internal Affairs. They were after him, not you.”

“Him—”

“The iteration of you that never stayed in the Hegemony, never met Xiri, eventually drifted into different thoughts and met Yarrow again under favorable circumstances—”

Pierce slowly turned around as she was speaking, but in every direction he looked there was no horizon, just a neatly landscaped wall of mazes curving gently toward the zenith. “It seems to me that they’re out of control.”

“Yes.” She became intent, focused, showing him her lecturer’s face. “All organizations that are founded for a purpose rapidly fill with people who see their role as an end in itself. Internal Affairs are a secondary growth. If they ever succeed, there won’t be anything left of the Stasis but Internal Affairs, everyone spying on themselves for eternity and a day, trying to preserve a single outcome without allowing anyone to ask why . . .”

Not everything added up. Still thinking, Pierce sat down gingerly at the other side of the bench. Not looking at her, he said: “I met Imad and Leila, Xiri’s parents. How could they have survived? Everyone kills their own grandparents, it’s the only way to get into the Stasis.”

“How did you survive your graduation?” She turned and looked at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. “You can be very slow at times, Pierce.”

“What—”

“You don’t have to abide by what they made you do, my love. Corrupt practices, the use of complicity in shared atrocities to bind new recruits to a cause: it was a late addition to the training protocol, added at the request of Internal Affairs. It may even be what sparked the first muttering of Opposition. We’ve got the luxury of unmaking our mistakes—even to go back, unmake the mistake, and not enter the Stasis, despite having graduated. Agents do that, sometimes, when they’re too profoundly burned-out to continue: they go underground, they run and cut themselves off. That’s why there was no agent covering the Hegemony period you landed in. They’d erased their history with the Stasis, going into deep cover.”

“You say ‘they.’ Are you by any chance trying to disown their action?” he asked gently.

“No!” Now she sounded irritated. “I regret nothing. She regrets nothing. Withholding the truth from you for all those years—well, what would you have done if you’d known that your adoring Xiri, the mother of your children, was a deep-cover agent of the Opposition? What would you have done?” She reached across and seized his elbow, staring at him, searching for some truth he couldn’t articulate.

“I . . . don’t . . . know.” His shoulders slumped.

“All those years, you were under observation by other instances of yourself, sworn in service to Internal Affairs, reporting to Kafka,” she pointed out. “Honesty wasn’t an option. Not unless you can guarantee that all of those ghost-instances would be complicit in keeping the secret, from the moment you were recruited by the Stasis.”

“That’s why, back in college—” The moment of enlightenment was shocking. Yarrow’s mouth, seen for the first time, wide and sensual, the pale lips, his reaction. He looked across the bench, saw the brightness in her eyes as she nodded. “I’d never betray her.”

“It happened more than once, according to the Final Library. They can make you betray anyone if they get their claws into you early enough. The only way to prevent it is to make a palimpsest of your whole recruitment into the Stasis—to replace your conscript youth with a disloyal impostor from the outset, or to decline the invitation altogether, and go underground.”

“But, I. Him. I’m not him, exactly.”

She let go of his elbow. “Not unless you want to be, my love.”

“Am I your love? Or is he?”

“That depends which version of you you want to be.”

“You’re telling me that essentially I can only be free of Internal Affairs if I undo what they made me do.”

“There’s a protocol,” she said, looking away. “We can reactivate your phone. You don’t have to reenlist in the Stasis if you don’t want to. There are berths waiting for all of us on the colony ships . . .”

“But that’s just exchanging one sort of reified destiny for another, isn’t it? Expansion in space, instead of time. Why is that any better than, say, freeing the machines, turning over all the available temporal bandwidth to timelike computing to see if the wild-eyed prophets of artificial intelligence and ghosts uploaded in the machines were onto something after all?”

She looked at him oddly. “Do you have any idea how weird you can be at times?”

He snorted. “Don’t worry, I’m not serious about that. I know my limits. If I don’t do this thing we’re discussing, him upstairs will be annoyed. Because Kafka will have all those naively loyal young potential me’s to send on spy missions, won’t he?” Pierce took a deep breath. “I don’t see that there’s any alternative, really. And that’s what rankles. I had hoped that the Opposition would be willing to give me a little more freedom of action than Kafka, that’s all.” He felt the ghostly touch of a bunch of raisin-wrinkled grape joints holding his preteen wrists, showing him how to cast a line. He owed it to Grandpa, he felt: to leave his own children a universe with elbow room unconstrained by the thumbcuffs of absolute history. “Will you still be here when I get back?”

She regarded him gravely. “Will you still want to see me afterward?”

“Of course.”

“See you later, then.” She smiled as she stood up, then departed.

He stared at the spot where she’d been sitting for what seemed like a long, long time. But when he tried to remember her face all he could see was the two of them, Xiri and Yarrow, superimposed.

Saying Good-bye to Now

Twenty years in Stasis. Numerous deaths, many of them self-inflicted, ordered with the callous detachment of self-appointed gods. They feed into the unquiet conscience of a man who knows he could have been better, can still be better—if only he can untangle the Gordian knot of his destiny after it’s been tied up and handed to him by people he’s coming to despise.

That’s you in a nutshell, Pierce.

You’re at a bleak crossroads, surrounded by lovers and allies and oh, so isolated in your moment of destiny. Who are you going to be, really? Who do you want to be?

All the myriad ways will lie before you, all the roads not taken at your back: who do you want to be?

You have met your elder self, the man-machine at the center of an intrigue that might never exist if Kafka gets his way. And you’ll have mapped out the scope of the rift with Xiri, itself rooted in her despair at Stasis. You can examine your life with merciless, refreshing clarity, and find it wanting if you wish. You can even unmake your mistakes: let Grandpa flower, prune back your frightened teenage nightmare of murder. You can step off the murderous infinite roundabout whenever you please, resign the game or rejoin and play to win—but the question you’ve only recently begun to ask is, who writes the rules?

Who do you want to be?

The snow falls silently around you as you stand in darkness, knee-deep in the frosted weeds lining the ditch by the railroad tracks. Alone in the night, a young man walks between islands of light. A headhunter stalks him unseen, another young man with a heart full of fears and ears stuffed with lies. There’s a knife in his sleeve and a pebble-sized machine in his pocket, and you know what he means to do, and what will come of it. And you know what you need to do.

THE ISLAND

Charles Stross

We are the cave men. We are the Ancients, the Progenitors, the blue-collar steel monkeys. We spin your webs and build your magic gateways, thread each needle’s eye at sixty thousand kilometers a second. We never stop. We never even dare to slow down, lest the light of your coming turns us to plasma. All for you. All so you can step from star to star without dirtying your feet in these endless, empty wastes between.

Is it really too much to ask, that you might talk to us now and then?

I know about evolution and engineering. I know how much you’ve changed. I’ve seen these portals give birth to gods and demons and things we can’t begin to comprehend, things I can’t believe were ever human; alien hitchhikers, maybe, riding the rails we’ve left behind. Alien conquerors.

Exterminators, perhaps.

But I’ve also seen those gates stay dark and empty until they faded from view. We’ve inferred diebacks and dark ages, civilizations burned to the ground and others rising from their ashes—and sometimes, afterwards, the things that come out look a little like the ships we might have built, back in the day. They speak to each other—radio, laser, carrier neutrinos—and sometimes their voices sound something like ours. There was a time we dared to hope that they really were like us, that the circle had come round again and closed on beings we could talk to. I’ve lost count of the times we tried to break the ice.

I’ve lost count of the eons since we gave up.

All these iterations fading behind us. All these hybrids and posthumans and immortals, gods and catatonic cavemen trapped in magical chariots they can’t begin to understand, and not one of them ever pointed a comm laser in our direction to say, Hey, how’s it going, or Guess what? We cured Damascus Disease! or even Thanks, guys, keep up the good work.

We’re not some fucking cargo cult. We’re the backbone of your goddamn empire. You wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for us.

And—and you’re our children. Whatever you’ve become, you were once like this, like me. I believed in you once. There was a time, long ago, when I believed in this mission with all my heart.

Why have you forsaken us?

And so another build begins.

This time I open my eyes to a familiar face I’ve never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter on the left than the right. His ears are too big. He looks almost natural.

I haven’t spoken for millennia. My voice comes out a whisper: “Who are you?” Not what I’m supposed to ask, I know. Not the first question anyone on Eriophora asks, after coming back.

“I’m yours,” he says, and just like that I’m a mother.

I want to let it sink in, but he doesn’t give me the chance: “You weren’t scheduled, but Chimp wants extra hands on deck. Next build’s got a situation.”

So the chimp is still in control. The chimp is always in control. The mission goes on.

“Situation?” I ask.

“Contact scenario, maybe.”

I wonder when he was born. I wonder if he ever wondered about me, before now.

He doesn’t tell me. He only says, “Sun up ahead. Half lightyear. Chimp thinks, maybe it’s talking to us. Anyhow . . .” My—son shrugs. “No rush. Lotsa time.”

I nod, but he hesitates. He’s waiting for The Question but I already see a kind of answer in his face. Our reinforcements were supposed to be pristine, built from perfect genes buried deep within Eri’s iron-basalt mantle, safe from the sleeting blueshift. And yet this boy has flaws. I see the damage in his face, I see those tiny flipped base-pairs resonating up from the microscopic and bending him just a little off-kilter. He looks like he grew up on a planet. He looks borne of parents who spent their whole lives hammered by raw sunlight.

How far out must we be by now, if even our own perfect building blocks have decayed so? How long has it taken us? How long have I been dead?

How long? It’s the first thing everyone asks.

After all this time, I don’t want to know.

He’s alone at the tac tank when I arrive on the bridge, his eyes full of icons and trajectories. Perhaps I see a little of me in there, too.

“I didn’t get your name,” I say, although I’ve looked it up on the manifest. We’ve barely been introduced and already I’m lying to him.

“Dix.” He keeps his eyes on the tank.

He’s over ten thousand years old. Alive for maybe twenty of them. I wonder how much he knows, who he’s met during those sparse decades: Does he know Ishmael, or Connie? Does he know if Sanchez got over his brush with immortality?

I wonder, but I don’t ask. There are rules.

I look around. “We’re it?”

Dix nods. “For now. Bring back more if we need them. But . . .” His voice trails off.

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

I join him at the tank. Diaphanous veils hang within like frozen, color-coded smoke. We’re on the edge of a molecular dust cloud. Warm, semiorganic, lots of raw materials: formaldehyde, ethylene glycol, the usual prebiotics. A good spot for a quick build. A red dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the tank. The chimp has named it DHF428, for reasons I’ve long since forgotten to care about.

“So fill me in,” I say.

His glance is impatient, even irritated. “You too?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like the others. On the other builds. Chimp can just squirt the specs but they want to talk all the time.”

Shit, his link’s still active. He’s online.

I force a smile. “Just a—a cultural tradition, I guess. We talk about a lot of things, it helps us—reconnect. After being down for so long.”

“But it’s slow,” Dix complains.

He doesn’t know. Why doesn’t he know?

“We’ve got half a lightyear,” I point out. “There’s some rush?”

The corner of his mouth twitches. “Vons went out on schedule.” On cue a cluster of violet pinpricks sparkle in the tank, five trillion klicks ahead of us. “Still sucking dust mostly, but got lucky with a couple of big asteroids and the refineries came online early. First components already extruded. Then Chimp sees these fluctuations in solar output—mainly infra, but extends into visible.” The tank blinks at us: the dwarf goes into time-lapse.

Sure enough, it’s flickering.

“Nonrandom, I take it.”

Dix inclines his head a little to the side, not quite nodding.

“Plot the time-series.” I’ve never been able to break the habit of raising my voice, just a bit, when addressing the chimp. Obediently (obediently. Now there’s a laugh-and-a-half) the AI wipes the spacescape and replaces it with:

.. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . .. . . . . . .

“Repeating sequence,” Dix tells me. “Blips don’t change, but spacing’s a log-linear increase cycling every 92.5 corsecs. Each cycle starts at 13.2 clicks/corsec, degrades over time.”

“No chance this could be natural? A little black hole wobbling around in the center of the star, maybe?”

Dix shakes his head, or something like that: a diagonal dip of the chin that somehow conveys the negative. “But way too simple to contain much info. Not like an actual conversation. More—well, a shout.”

He’s partly right. There may not be much information, but there’s enough. We’re here. We’re smart. We’re powerful enough to hook a whole damn star up to a dimmer switch.

Maybe not such a good spot for a build after all.

I purse my lips. “The sun’s hailing us. That’s what you’re saying.”

“Maybe. Hailing someone. But too simple for a Rosetta signal. It’s not an archive, can’t self-extract. Not a Bonferroni or Fibonacci seq, not pi. Not even a multiplication table. Nothing to base a pidgin on.”

Still. An intelligent signal.

“Need more info,” Dix says, proving himself master of the blindingly obvious.

I nod. “The vons.”

“Uh, what about them?”

“We set up an array. Use a bunch of bad eyes to fake a good one. It’d be faster than high-geeing an observatory from this end or retooling one of the on-site factories.”

His eyes go wide. For a moment he almost looks frightened for some reason. But the moment passes and he does that weird head-shake thing again. “Bleed too many resources away from the build, wouldn’t it?”

“It would,” the chimp agrees.

I suppress a snort. “If you’re so worried about meeting our construction benchmarks, Chimp, factor in the potential risk posed by an intelligence powerful enough to control the energy output of an entire sun.”

“I can’t,” it admits. “I don’t have enough information.”

“You don’t have any information. About something that could probably stop this mission dead in its tracks if it wanted to. So maybe we should get some.”

“Okay. Vons reassigned.”

Confirmation glows from a convenient bulkhead, a complex sequence of dance instructions fired into the void. Six months from now a hundred self-replicating robots will waltz into a makeshift surveillance grid; four months after that, we might have something more than vacuum to debate in.

Dix eyes me as though I’ve just cast some kind of magic spell.

“It may run the ship,” I tell him, “but it’s pretty fucking stupid. Sometimes you’ve just got to spell things out.”

He looks vaguely affronted, but there’s no mistaking the surprise beneath. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know.

Who the hell’s been raising him all this time? Whose problem is this?

Not mine.

“Call me in ten months,” I say. “I’m going back to bed.”

It’s as though he never left. I climb back into the bridge and there he is, staring into tac. DHF428 fills the tank, a swollen red orb that turns my son’s face into a devil mask.

He spares me the briefest glance, eyes wide, fingers twitching as if electrified. “Vons don’t see it.”

I’m still a bit groggy from the thaw. “See wh—”

“The sequence!” His voice borders on panic. He sways back and forth, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“Show me.”

Tac splits down the middle. Cloned dwarves burn before me now, each perhaps twice the size of my fist. On the left, an Eri’s-eye view: DHF428 stutters as it did before, as it presumably has these past ten months. On the right, a compound-eye composite: an interferometry grid built by a myriad precisely spaced vons, their rudimentary eyes layered and parallaxed into something approaching high resolution. Contrast on both sides has been conveniently cranked up to highlight the dwarf ’s endless winking for merely human eyes.

Except it’s only winking from the left side of the display. On the right, 428 glowers steady as a standard candle.

“Chimp: any chance the grid just isn’t sensitive enough to see the fluctuations?”

“No.”

“Huh.” I try to think of some reason it would lie about this.

“Doesn’t make sense,” my son complains.

“It does,” I murmur, “if it’s not the sun that’s flickering.”

“But it is flickering—” He sucks his teeth. “You can see it fl—wait, you mean something behind the vons? Between, between them and us?”

“Mmmm.”

“Some kind of filter.” Dix relaxes a bit. “Wouldn’t we’ve seen it, though? Wouldn’t the vons’ve hit it going down?”

I put my voice back into ChimpComm mode. “What’s the current field-of-view for Eri’s forward scope?”

“Eighteen mikes,” the chimp reports. “At 428’s range, the cone is three point three four lightsecs across.”

“Increase to a hundred lightsecs.”

The Eri’s-eye partition swells, obliterating the dissenting viewpoint. For a moment the sun fills the tank again, paints the whole bridge crimson. Then it dwindles as if devoured from within.

I notice some fuzz in the display. “Can you clear that noise?”

“It’s not noise,” the chimp reports. “It’s dust and molecular gas.”

I blink. “What’s the density?”

“Estimated hundred thousand atoms per cubic meter.”

Two orders of magnitude too high, even for a nebula. “Why so heavy?” Surely we’d have detected any gravity well strong enough to keep that much material in the neighborhood.

“I don’t know,” the chimp says.

I get the queasy feeling that I might. “Set field-of-view to five hundred lightsecs. Peak false-color at near-infrared.”

Space grows ominously murky in the tank. The tiny sun at its center, thumbnail-sized now, glows with increased brilliance: an incandescent pearl in muddy water.

“A thousand lightsecs,” I command.

“There,” Dix whispers: real space reclaims the edges of the tank, dark, clear, pristine. 428 nestles at the heart of a dim spherical shroud. You find those sometimes, discarded cast-offs from companion stars whose convulsions spew gas and rads across lightyears. But 428 is no nova remnant. It’s a red dwarf, placid, middle-aged. Unremarkable.

Except for the fact that it sits dead center of a tenuous gas bubble 1.4 AUs across. And for the fact that this bubble does not attenuate or diffuse or fade gradually into that good night. No, unless there is something seriously wrong with the display, this small, spherical nebula extends about 350 lightsecs from its primary and then just stops, its boundary far more knife-edged than nature has any right to be.

For the first time in millennia, I miss my cortical pipe. It takes forever to saccade search terms onto the keyboard in my head, to get the answers I already know.

Numbers come back. “Chimp. I want false-color peaks at 335, 500 and 800 nanometers.”

The shroud around 428 lights up like a dragonfly’s wing, like an iridescent soap bubble.

“It’s beautiful,” whispers my awestruck son.

“It’s photosynthetic,” I tell him.

Phaeophytin and eumelanin, according to spectro. There are even hints of some kind of lead-based Keipper pigment, soaking up X-rays in the picometer range. Chimp hypothesizes something called a chromatophore: branching cells with little aliquots of pigment inside, like particles of charcoal dust. Keep those particles clumped together and the cell’s effectively transparent; spread them out through the cytoplasm and the whole structure darkens, dims whatever EM passes through from behind. Apparently there were animals back on Earth with cells like that. They could change color, pattern-match to their background, all sorts of things.

“So there’s a membrane of—of living tissue around that star,” I say, trying to wrap my head around the concept. “A, a meat balloon. Around the whole damn star.”

“Yes,” the chimp says.

“But that’s—Jesus, how thick would it be?”

“No more than two millimeters. Probably less.”

“How so?”

“If it was much thicker, it would be more obvious in the visible spectrum. It would have had a detectable effect on the von Neumanns when they hit it.”

“That’s assuming that its—cells, I guess—are like ours.”

“The pigments are familiar; the rest might be too.”

It can’t be too familiar. Nothing like a conventional gene would last two seconds in that environment. Not to mention whatever miracle solvent that thing must use as antifreeze . . .

“Okay, let’s be conservative, then. Say, mean thickness of a millimeter. Assume a density of water at STP. How much mass in the whole thing?”

“1.4 yottagrams,” Dix and the chimp reply, almost in unison.

“That’s, uh . . .”

“Half the mass of Mercury,” the chimp adds helpfully.

I whistle through my teeth. “And that’s one organism?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“It’s got organic pigments. Fuck, it’s talking. It’s intelligent.”

“Most cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,” the chimp points out. “Not intelligent signals.”

I ignore it and turn to Dix. “Assume it’s a signal.”

He frowns. “Chimp says—”

“Assume. Use your imagination.”

I’m not getting through to him. He looks nervous.

He looks like that a lot, I realize.

“If someone were signaling you,” I say, “then what would you do?”

“Signal . . .” Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere “. . . back?”

My son is an idiot.

“And if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in light intensity, how—”

“Use the BI lasers, alternated to pulse between 700 and 3000 nanometers. Can boost an interlaced signal into the exawatt range without compromising our fenders; gives over a thousand Watts per square meter after diffraction. Way past detection threshold for anything that can sense thermal output from a red dwarf. And content doesn’t matter if it’s just a shout. Shout back. Test for echo.”

Okay, so my son is an idiot savant.

And he still looks unhappy—“But Chimp, he says no real information there, right?”—and that whole other set of misgivings edges to the fore again: He.

Dix takes my silence for amnesia. “Too simple, remember? Simple click train.”

I shake my head. There’s more information in that signal than the chimp can imagine. There are so many things the chimp doesn’t know. And the last thing I need is for this, this child to start deferring to it, to start looking to it as an equal or, God forbid, a mentor.

Oh, it’s smart enough to steer us between the stars. Smart enough to calculate million-digit primes in the blink of an eye. Even smart enough for a little crude improvisation should the crew go too far off-mission.

Not smart enough to know a distress call when it sees one.

“It’s a deceleration curve,” I tell them both. “It keeps slowing down. Over and over again. That’s the message.”

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

And I think it’s meant for no one but us.

We shout back. No reason not to. And now we die again, because what’s the point of staying up late? Whether or not this vast entity harbors real intelligence, our echo won’t reach it for ten million corsecs. Another seven million, at the earliest, before we receive any reply it might send.

Might as well hit the crypt in the meantime. Shut down all desires and misgivings, conserve whatever life I have left for moments that matter. Remove myself from this sparse tactical intelligence, from this wet-eyed pup watching me as though I’m some kind of sorcerer about to vanish in a puff of smoke. He opens his mouth to speak, and I turn away and hurry down to oblivion.

But I set my alarm to wake up alone.

I linger in the coffin for a while, grateful for small and ancient victories. The chimp’s dead, blackened eye gazes down from the ceiling; in all these millions of years nobody’s scrubbed off the carbon scoring. It’s a trophy of sorts, a memento from the early incendiary days of our Great Struggle.

There’s still something—comforting, I guess—about that blind, endless stare. I’m reluctant to venture out where the chimp’s nerves have not been so thoroughly cauterised. Childish, I know. The damn thing already knows I’m up; it may be blind, deaf, and impotent in here, but there’s no way to mask the power the crypt sucks in during a thaw. And it’s not as though a bunch of club-wielding teleops are waiting to pounce on me the moment I step outside. These are the days of détente, after all. The struggle continues but the war has gone cold; we just go through the motions now, rattling our chains like an old married multiplet resigned to hating each other to the end of time.

After all the moves and countermoves, the truth is we need each other.

So I wash the rotten-egg stench from my hair and step into Eri’s silent cathedral hallways. Sure enough the enemy waits in the darkness, turns the lights on as I approach, shuts them off behind me—but it does not break the silence.

Dix.

A strange one, that. Not that you’d expect anyone born and raised on Eriophora to be an archetype of mental health, but Dix doesn’t even know what side he’s on. He doesn’t even seem to know he has to choose a side. It’s almost as though he read the original mission statements and took them seriously, believed in the literal truth of the ancient scrolls: Mammals and Machinery, working together across the ages to explore the Universe! United! Strong! Forward the Frontier!

Rah.

Whoever raised him didn’t do a great job. Not that I blame them; it can’t have been much fun having a child underfoot during a build, and none of us were selected for our parenting skills. Even if bots changed the diapers and VR handled the infodumps, socialising a toddler couldn’t have been anyone’s idea of a good time. I’d have probably just chucked the little bastard out an airlock.

But even I would’ve brought him up to speed.

Something changed while I was away. Maybe the war’s heated up again, entered some new phase. That twitchy kid is out of the loop for a reason. I wonder what it is.

I wonder if I care.

I arrive at my suite, treat myself to a gratuitous meal, jill off. Three hours after coming back to life I’m relaxing in the starbow commons. “Chimp.”

“You’re up early,” it says at last, and I am; our answering shout hasn’t even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new data for another two months, at least.

“Show me the forward feeds,” I command.

DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop. Stop.

Maybe. Or maybe the chimp’s right, maybe it’s pure physiology. Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the beating of a heart. But there’s a pattern inside the pattern, some kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.

“Slow the time-series,” I command. “By a hundred.”

It is a blink. 428’s disk isn’t darkening uniformly, it’s eclipsing. As though a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of the sun, from right to left.

“By a thousand.”

Chromatophores, the chimp called them. But they’re not all opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the membrane in waves.

A word pops into my head: latency.

“Chimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?”

“About fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second.”

The speed of a passing thought.

And if this thing does think, it’ll have logic gates, synapses—it’s going to be a net of some kind. And if the net’s big enough, there’s an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and all that.)

The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin—when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B—the system, well, decoheres. The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves.

I shatters into we.

It’s not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an earthly one. It’s a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we’ve yet to meet as it did to those we left behind.

Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does I spread itself across the heavens?

The flesh is huge, the flesh is inconceivable. But the spirit, the spirit is—

Shit.

“Chimp. Assuming the mean neuron density of a human brain, what’s the synapse count on a circular sheet of neurons one millimeter thick with a diameter of five thousand eight hundred ninety-two kilometers?”

“Two times ten to the twenty-seventh.”

I saccade the database for some perspective on a mind stretched across thirty million square kilometers: the equivalent of two quadrillion human brains.

Of course, whatever this thing uses for neurons have to be packed a lot less tightly than ours; we can see through them, after all. Let’s be superconservative, say it’s only got a thousandth the computational density of a human brain. That’s—

Okay, let’s say it’s only got a ten-thousandth the synaptic density, that’s still—

A hundred thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I’d hypothesize it right out of existence.

Still twenty billion human brains. Twenty billion.

I don’t know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.

But I’m not quite ready to believe in gods.

I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

He seems surprised by my reaction. “Wanted to—talk,” he says after a moment.

“You never come into someone’s home uninvited!”

He retreats a step, stammers: “Wanted, wanted—”

“To talk. And you do that in public. On the bridge, or in the commons, or—for that matter, you could just comm me.”

He hesitates. “Said you—wanted face to face. You said, cultural tradition.”

I did, at that. But not here. This is my place, these are my private quarters. The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and lie in wait, and stand there like part of the fucking furniture . . .

“Why are you even up?” I snarl. “We’re not even supposed to come online for another two months.”

“Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.”

That fucking machine.

“Why are you up?” he asks, not leaving.

I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. “I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.” The implicit alone should be obvious.

“Anything?”

Evidently it isn’t. I decide to play along for a while. “Looks like we’re talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That’s the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane’s pretty much empty. I mean, it’s all alive. It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.”

“Molecular cloud,” Dix says. “Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it’s concentrating stuff inside the envelope.”

I shrug. “Point is, there’s a size limit for the brain but it’s huge, it’s . . .”

“Unlikely,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me. “What do you mean?”

“Island’s twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere’s seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that’s—one in fifty-billion odds.”

“Go on.”

He can’t. “Uh, just . . . just unlikely.”

I close my eyes. “How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat, and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?”

That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. “Don’t—I’m not—”

“It is unlikely. It’s astronomically unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one-and-a-half AUs across. Which means . . .”

He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.

But finally, the lights flicker on: “There’s, uh, more than one island? Oh! A lot of islands!”

This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day. That is a very scary thought.

I try to set it aside for the moment. “There’s probably a whole population of the things, sprinkled though the membrane like, like cysts I guess. The chimp doesn’t know how many, but we’re only picking up this one so far so they might be pretty sparse.”

There’s a different kind of frown on his face now. “Why Chimp?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why call him Chimp?”

“We call it the chimp.” Because the first step to humanising something is to give it a name.

“Looked it up. Short for chimpanzee. Stupid animal.”

“Actually, I think chimps were supposed to be pretty smart,” I remember.

“Not like us. Couldn’t even talk. Chimp can talk. Way smarter than those things. That name—it’s an insult.”

“What do you care?”

He just looks at me.

I spread my hands. “Okay, it’s not a chimp. We just call it that because it’s got roughly the same synapse count.”

“So gave him a small brain, then complain that he’s stupid all the time.”

My patience is just about drained. “Do you have a point or are you just blowing CO_2 in—”

“Why not make him smarter?”

“Because you can never predict the behavior of a system more complex than you. And if you want a project to stay on track after you’re gone, you don’t hand the reins to anything that’s guaranteed to develop its own agenda.” Sweet smoking Jesus, you’d think someone would have told him about Ashby’s Law.

“So they lobotomized him,” Dix says after a moment.

“No. They didn’t turn it stupid, they built it stupid.”

“Maybe smarter than you think. You’re so much smarter, got your agenda, how come he’s still in control?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say.

“What?”

I let a grim smile peek through. “You’re only following orders from a bunch of other systems way more complex than you are.” You’ve got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are still pulling the strings.

“I don’t—I’m following?—”

“I’m sorry, dear.” I smile sweetly at my idiot offspring. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the thing that’s making all those sounds come out of your mouth.”

Dix turns whiter than my panties.

I drop all pretense. “What were you thinking, Chimp? That you could send this sock-puppet to invade my home and I wouldn’t notice?”

“Not—I’m not—it’s me,” Dix stammers. “Me talking.”

“It’s coaching you. Do you even know what ‘lobotomised’ means?” I shake my head, disgusted. “You think I’ve forgotten how the interface works just because we all burned ours out?” A caricature of surprise begins to form on his face. “Oh, don’t even fucking try. You’ve been up for other builds, there’s no way you couldn’t have known. And you know we shut down our domestic links too. And there’s nothing your lord and master can do about that because it needs us, and so we have reached what you might call an accommodation.”

I am not shouting. My tone is icy, but my voice is dead level. And yet Dix almost cringes before me.

There is an opportunity here, I realize.

I thaw my voice a little. I speak gently: “You can do that too, you know. Burn out your link. I’ll even let you come back here afterwards, if you still want to. Just to—talk. But not with that thing in your head.”

There is panic in his face, and against all expectation it almost breaks my heart. “Can’t,” he pleads. “How I learn things, how I train. The mission . . .”

I honestly don’t know which of them is speaking, so I answer them both: “There is more than one way to carry out the mission. We have more than enough time to try them all. Dix is welcome to come back when he’s alone.”

They take a step towards me. Another. One hand, twitching, rises from their side as if to reach out, and there’s something on that lopsided face that I can’t quite recognize.

“But I’m your son,” they say.

I don’t even dignify it with a denial.

“Get out of my home.”

A human periscope. The Trojan Dix. That’s a new one.

The chimp’s never tried such overt infiltration while we were up and about before. Usually it waits until we’re all undead before invading our territories. I imagine custom-made drones never seen by human eyes, cobbled together during the long dark eons between builds; I see them sniffing through drawers and peeking behind mirrors, strafing the bulkheads with X-rays and ultrasound, patiently searching Eriophora’s catacombs millimeter by endless millimeter for whatever secret messages we might be sending each other down through time.

There’s no proof to speak of. We’ve left tripwires and telltales to alert us to intrusion after the fact, but there’s never been any evidence they’ve been disturbed. Means nothing, of course. The chimp may be stupid but it’s also cunning, and a million years is more than enough time to iterate through every possibility using simpleminded brute force. Document every dust mote; commit your unspeakable acts; afterwards, put everything back the way it was.

We’re too smart to risk talking across the eons. No encrypted strategies, no long-distance love letters, no chatty postcards showing ancient vistas long lost in the red shift. We keep all that in our heads, where the enemy will never find it. The unspoken rule is that we do not speak, unless it is face to face.

Endless idiotic games. Sometimes I almost forget what we’re squabbling over. It seems so trivial now, with an immortal in my sights.

Maybe that means nothing to you. Immortality must be ancient news from whatever peaks you’ve ascended by now. But I can’t even imagine it, although I’ve outlived worlds. All I have are moments: two or three hundred years, to ration across the lifespan of a universe. I could bear witness to any point in time, or any hundred-thousand if I slice my life thinly enough—but I will never see everything. I will never see even a fraction.

My life will end. I have to choose.

When you come to fully appreciate the deal you’ve made—ten or fifteen builds out, when the trade-off leaves the realm of mere knowledge and sinks deep as cancer into your bones—you become a miser. You can’t help it. You ration your waking moments to the barest minimum: just enough to manage the build, to plan your latest countermove against the chimp, just enough (if you haven’t yet moved beyond the need for human contact) for sex and snuggles and a bit of warm mammalian comfort against the endless dark. And then you hurry back to the crypt, to hoard the remains of a human lifespan against the unwinding of the cosmos.

There’s been time for education. Time for a hundred postgraduate degrees, thanks to the best caveman learning tech. I’ve never bothered. Why burn down my tiny candle for a litany of mere fact, fritter away my precious, endless, finite life? Only a fool would trade book-learning for a ringside view of the Cassiopeia Remnant, even if you do need false-color enhancement to see the fucking thing.

Now, though. Now, I want to know. This creature crying out across the gulf, massive as a moon, wide as a solar system, tenuous and fragile as an insect’s wing: I’d gladly cash in some of my life to learn its secrets. How does it work? How can it even live here at the edge of absolute zero, much less think? What vast, unfathomable intellect must it possess to see us coming from over half a lightyear away, to deduce the nature of our eyes and our instruments, to send a signal we can even detect, much less understand?

And what happens when we punch through it at a fifth the speed of light?

I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer hasn’t changed: not much. The damn thing’s already full of holes. Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through this system as it does through every other. Infra picks up diffuse pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter, where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the dead center of the thinking part, I can’t imagine this vast creature feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we’re going we’d be through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of a millimeter membrane.

And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop.

It’s not us, of course. It’s what we’re building. The birth of a gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It’s why we never slow down to take pictures.

One of the reasons, anyway.

We can’t stop, of course. Even changing course isn’t an option except by the barest increments. Eri soars like an eagle between the stars but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our heading by even a tenth of a degree and you’ve got some serious damage at twenty percent lightspeed. Half a degree would tear us apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading but the collapsed mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.

Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take well to change.

We resurrect again, and the Island has changed its tune.

It gave up asking us to stop stop stop the moment our laser hit its leading edge. Now it’s saying something else entirely: dark hyphens flow across its skin, arrows of pigment converging towards some offstage focus like spokes pointing towards the hub of a wheel. The bullseye itself is offstage and implicit, far removed from 428’s bright backdrop, but it’s easy enough to extrapolate to the point of convergence six lightsecs to starboard. There’s something else, too: a shadow, roughly circular, moving along one of the spokes like a bead running along a string. It too migrates to starboard, falls off the edge of the Island’s makeshift display, is endlessly reborn at the same initial coordinates to repeat its journey.

Those coordinates: exactly where our current trajectory will punch through the membrane in another four months. A squinting God would be able to see the gnats and girders of ongoing construction on the other side, the great piecemeal torus of the Hawking Hoop already taking shape.

The message is so obvious that even Dix sees it. “Wants us to move the gate . . .” and there is something like confusion in his voice. “But how’s it know we’re building one?”

“The vons punctured it en route,” the chimp points out. “It could have sensed that. It has photopigments. It can probably see.”

“Probably sees better than we do,” I say. Even something as simple as a pinhole camera gets hi-res fast if you stipple a bunch of them across thirty million square kilometers.

But Dix scrunches his face, unconvinced. “So sees a bunch of vons bumping around. Loose parts—not that much even assembled yet. How’s it know we’re building something hot?”

Because it is very, very smart, you stupid child. Is it so hard to believe that this, this—organism seems far too limiting a word—can just imagine how those half-built pieces fit together, glance at our sticks and stones and see exactly where this is going?

“Maybe’s not the first gate it’s seen,” Dix suggests. “Think there’s maybe another gate out here?”

I shake my head. “We’d have seen the lensing artefacts by now.”

“You ever run into anyone before?”

“No.” We have always been alone, through all these epochs. We have only ever run away.

And then always from our own children.

I crunch some numbers. “Hundred eighty-two days to insemination. If we move now we’ve only got to tweak our bearing by a few mikes to redirect to the new coordinates. Well within the green. Angles get dicey the longer we wait, of course.”

“We can’t do that,” the chimp says. “We would miss the gate by two million kilometers.”

“Move the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we send the order now. We don’t even have to suspend construction, we can keep building on the fly.”

“Every one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable margins, for no payoff.”

“And what about the fact that there’s an intelligent being in our path?”

“I’m already allowing for the potential presence of intelligent alien life.”

“Okay, first off, there’s nothing potential about it. It’s right fucking there. And on our current heading we run the damn thing over.”

“We’re staying clear of all planetary bodies in Goldilocks orbits. We’ve seen no local evidence of spacefaring technology. The current location of the build meets all conservation criteria.”

“That’s because the people who drew up your criteria never anticipated a live Dyson sphere!” But I’m wasting my breath, and I know it. The chimp can run its equations a million times but if there’s nowhere to put the variable, what can it do?

There was a time, back before things turned ugly, when we had clearance to reprogram those parameters. Before we discovered that one of the things the admins had anticipated was mutiny.

I try another tack. “Consider the threat potential.”

“There’s no evidence of any.”

“Look at the synapse estimate! That thing’s got orders of mag more processing power than the whole civilization that sent us out here. You think something can be that smart, live that long, without learning how to defend itself? We’re assuming it’s asking us to move the gate. What if that’s not a request? What if it’s just giving us the chance to back off before it takes matters into its own hands?”

“Doesn’t have hands,” Dix says from the other side of the tank, and he’s not even being flippant. He’s just being so stupid I want to bash his face in.

I try to keep my voice level. “Maybe it doesn’t need any.”

“What could it do, blink us to death? No weapons. Doesn’t even control the whole membrane. Signal propagation’s too slow.”

“We don’t know. That’s my point. We haven’t even tried to find out. We’re a goddamn road crew; our onsite presence is a bunch of construction vons press-ganged into scientific research. We can figure out some basic physical parameters but we don’t know how this thing thinks, what kind of natural defenses it might have—”

“What do you need to find out?” the chimp asks, the very voice of calm reason.

We can’t find out! I want to scream. We’re stuck with what we’ve got! By the time the onsite vons could build what we need we’re already past the point of no return! You stupid fucking machine, we’re on track to kill a being smarter than all of human history and you can’t even be bothered to move our highway to the vacant lot next door?

But of course if I say that, the Island’s chances of survival go from low to zero. So I grasp at the only straw that remains: maybe the data we’ve got in hand is enough. If acquisition is off the table, maybe analysis will do.

“I need time,” I say.

“Of course,” the chimp tells me. “Take all the time you need.”

The chimp is not content to kill this creature. The chimp has to spit on it as well.

Under the pretense of assisting in my research it tries to deconstruct the Island, break it apart and force it to conform to grubby earthbound precedents. It tells me about earthly bacteria that thrived at 1.5 million rads and laughed at hard vacuum. It shows me pictures of unkillable little tardigrades that could curl up and snooze on the edge of absolute zero, felt equally at home in deep ocean trenches and deeper space. Given time, opportunity, a boot off the planet, who knows how far those cute little invertebrates might have gone? Might they have survived the very death of the homeworld, clung together, grown somehow colonial?

What utter bullshit.

I learn what I can. I study the alchemy by which photosynthesis transforms light and gas and electrons into living tissue. I learn the physics of the solar wind that blows the bubble taut, calculate lower metabolic limits for a life-form that filters organics from the ether. I marvel at the speed of this creature’s thoughts: almost as fast as Eri flies, orders of mag faster than any mammalian nerve impulse. Some kind of organic superconductor perhaps, something that passes chilled electrons almost resistance-free out here in the freezing void.

I acquaint myself with phenotypic plasticity and sloppy fitness, that fortuitous evolutionary soft-focus that lets species exist in alien environments and express novel traits they never needed at home. Perhaps this is how a lifeform with no natural enemies could acquire teeth and claws and the willingness to use them. The Island’s life hinges on its ability to kill us; I have to find something that makes it a threat.

But all I uncover is a growing suspicion that I am doomed to fail—for violence, I begin to see, is a planetary phenomenon.

Planets are the abusive parents of evolution. Their very surfaces promote warfare, concentrate resources into dense defensible patches that can be fought over. Gravity forces you to squander energy on vascular systems and skeletal support, stand endless watch against an endless sadistic campaign to squash you flat. Take one wrong step, off a perch too high, and all your pricey architecture shatters in an instant. And even if you beat those odds, cobble together some lumbering armored chassis to withstand the slow crawl onto land—how long before the world draws in some asteroid or comet to crash down from the heavens and reset your clock to zero? Is it any wonder we grew up believing life was a struggle, that zero-sum was God’s own law and the future belonged to those who crushed the competition?

The rules are so different out here. Most of space is tranquil: no diel or seasonal cycles, no ice ages or global tropics, no wild pendulum swings between hot and cold, calm and tempestuous. Life’s precursors abound: on comets, clinging to asteroids, suffusing nebulae a hundred lightyears across. Molecular clouds glow with organic chemistry and life-giving radiation. Their vast dusty wings grow warm with infrared, filter out the hard stuff, give rise to stellar nurseries that only some stunted refugee from the bottom of a gravity well could ever call lethal.

Darwin’s an abstraction here, an irrelevant curiosity. This Island puts the lie to everything we were ever told about the machinery of life. Sun-powered, perfectly adapted, immortal, it won no struggle for survival: Where are the predators, the competitors, the parasites? All of life around 428 is one vast continuum, one grand act of symbiosis. Nature here is not red in tooth and claw. Nature, out here, is the helping hand.

Lacking the capacity for violence, the Island has outlasted worlds. Unencumbered by technology, it has out-thought civilizations. It is intelligent beyond our measure, and—

—and it is benign. It must be. I grow more certain of that with each passing hour. How can it even conceive of an enemy?

I think of the things I called it, before I knew better. Meat balloon. Cyst. Looking back, those words verge on blasphemy. I will not use them again.

Besides, there’s another word that would fit better, if the chimp has its way: Roadkill. And the longer I look, the more I fear that that hateful machine is right.

If the Island can defend itself, I sure as shit can’t see how.

“Eriophora’s impossible, you know. Violates the laws of physics.”

We’re in one of the social alcoves off the ventral notochord, taking a break from the library. I have decided to start again from first principles. Dix eyes me with an understandable mix of confusion and mistrust; my claim is almost too stupid to deny.

“It’s true,” I assure him. “Takes way too much energy to accelerate a ship with Eri’s mass, especially at relativistic speeds. You’d need the energy output of a whole sun. People figured if we made it to the stars at all, we’d have to do it in ships maybe the size of your thumb. Crew them with virtual personalities downloaded onto chips.”

That’s too nonsensical even for Dix. “Wrong. Don’t have mass, can’t fall towards anything. Eri wouldn’t even work if it was that small.”

“But suppose you can’t displace any of that mass. No wormholes, no Higgs conduits, nothing to throw your gravitational field in the direction of travel. Your center of mass just sits there in, well, the center of your mass.”

A spastic Dixian head-shake. “Do have those things!”

“Sure we do. But for the longest time, we didn’t know it.”

His foot taps an agitated tattoo on the deck.

“It’s the history of the species,” I explain. “We think we’ve worked everything out, we think we’ve solved all the mysteries, and then someone finds some niggling little data point that doesn’t fit the paradigm. Every time we try to paper over the crack it gets bigger, and before you know it our whole worldview unravels. It’s happened time and again. One day mass is a constraint; the next it’s a requirement. The things we think we know—they change, Dix. And we have to change with them.”

“But—”

“The chimp can’t change. The rules it’s following are ten billion years old and it’s got no fucking imagination and really that’s not anyone’s fault, that’s just people who didn’t know how else to keep the mission stable across deep time. They wanted to keep us on-track so they built something that couldn’t go off it; but they also knew that things change, and that’s why we’re out here, Dix. To deal with things the chimp can’t.”

“The alien,” Dix says.

“The alien.”

“Chimp deals with it just fine.”

“How? By killing it?”

“Not our fault it’s in the way. It’s no threat—”

“I don’t care whether it’s a threat or not! It’s alive, and it’s intelligent, and killing it just to expand some alien empire—”

“Human empire. Our empire.” Suddenly Dix’s hands have stopped twitching. Suddenly he stands still as stone.

I snort. “What do you know about humans?”

“Am one.”

“You’re a fucking trilobite. You ever see what comes out of those gates once they’re online?”

“Mostly nothing.” He pauses, thinking back. “Couple of—ships once, maybe.”

“Well, I’ve seen a lot more than that, and believe me, if those things were ever human it was a passing phase.”

“But—”

“Dix—” I take a deep breath, try to get back on message. “Look, it’s not your fault. You’ve been getting all your info from a moron stuck on a rail. But we’re not doing this for Humanity, we’re not doing it for Earth. Earth is gone, don’t you understand that? The sun scorched it black a billion years after we left. Whatever we’re working for, it—it won’t even talk to us.”

“Yeah? Then why do this? Why not just, just quit?”

He really doesn’t know.

“We tried,” I say.

“And?”

“And your chimp shut off our life support.”

For once, he has nothing to say.

“It’s a machine, Dix. Why can’t you get that? It’s programmed. It can’t change.”

“We’re machines, just built from different things. We change.”

“Yeah? Last time I checked, you were sucking so hard on that thing’s tit you couldn’t even kill your cortical link.”

“How I learn. No reason to change.”

“How about acting like a damn human once in a while? How about developing a little rapport with the folks who might have to save your miserable life next time you go EVA? That enough of a reason for you? Because I don’t mind telling you, right now I don’t trust you as far as I could throw the tac tank. I don’t even know for sure who I’m talking to right now.”

“Not my fault.” For the first time I see something outside the usual gamut of fear, confusion, and simpleminded computation playing across his face. “That’s you, that’s all of you. You talk—sideways. Think sideways. You all do, and it hurts.” Something hardens in his face. “Didn’t even need you online for this,” he growls. “Didn’t want you. Could have managed the whole build myself, told Chimp I could do it—”

“But the chimp thought you should wake me up anyway, and you always roll over for the chimp, don’t you? Because the chimp always knows best, the chimp’s your boss, the chimp’s your fucking god. Which is why I have to get out of bed to nursemaid some idiot savant who can’t even answer a hail without being led by the nose.” Something clicks in the back of my mind but I’m on a roll. “You want a real role model? You want something to look up to? Forget the chimp. Forget the mission. Look out the forward scope, why don’t you? Look at what your precious chimp wants to run over because it happens to be in the way. That thing is better than any of us. It’s smarter, it’s peaceful, it doesn’t wish us any harm at—”

“How can you know that? Can’t know that!”

“No, you can’t know that, because you’re fucking stunted. Any normal caveman would see it in a second, but you—”

“That’s crazy,” Dix hisses at me. “You’re crazy. You’re bad.”

“I’m bad!” Some distant part of me hears the giddy squeak in my voice, the borderline hysteria.

“For the mission.” Dix turns his back and stalks away.

My hands are hurting. I look down, surprised: my fists are clenched so tightly that my nails cut into the flesh of my palms. It takes a real effort to open them again.

I almost remember how this feels. I used to feel this way all the time. Way back when everything mattered; before passion faded to ritual, before rage cooled to disdain. Before Sunday Ahzmundin, eternity’s warrior, settled for heaping insults on stunted children.

We were incandescent back then. Parts of this ship are still scorched and uninhabitable, even now. I remember this feeling.

This is how it feels to be awake.

I am awake, and I am alone, and I am sick of being outnumbered by morons. There are rules and there are risks and you don’t wake the dead on a whim, but fuck it. I’m calling reinforcements.

Dix has got to have other parents, a father at least, he didn’t get that Y chromo from me. I swallow my own disquiet and check the manifest; bring up the gene sequences; cross-reference.

Huh. Only one other parent: Kai. I wonder if that’s just coincidence, or if the chimp drew too many conclusions from our torrid little fuckfest back in the Cyg Rift. Doesn’t matter. He’s as much yours as mine, Kai, time to step up to the plate, time to—

Oh shit. Oh no. Please no.

(There are rules. And there are risks.)

Three builds back, it says. Kai and Connie. Both of them. One airlock jammed, the next too far away along Eri’s hull, a hail-Mary emergency crawl between. They made it back inside but not before the blue-shifted background cooked them in their suits. They kept breathing for hours afterwards, talked and moved and cried as if they were still alive, while their insides broke down and bled out.

There were two others awake that shift, two others left to clean up the mess. Ishmael, and—

“Um, you said—”

“You fucker!” I leap up and hit my son hard in the face, ten seconds’ heartbreak with ten million years’ denial raging behind it. I feel teeth give way behind his lips. He goes over backwards, eyes wide as telescopes, the blood already blooming on his mouth.

“Said I could come back—!” he squeals, scrambling backwards along the deck.

“He was your fucking father! You knew, you were there! He died right in front of you and you didn’t even tell me!”

“I—I—”

“Why didn’t you tell me, you asshole? The chimp told you to lie, is that it? Did you—”

“Thought you knew!” he cries, “Why wouldn’t you know?”

My rage vanishes like air through a breach. I sag back into the ’pod, face in hands.

“Right there in the log,” he whimpers. “All along. Nobody hid it. How could you not know?”

“I did,” I admit dully. “Or I—I mean . . .”

I mean I didn’t know, but it’s not a surprise, not really, not down deep. You just—stop looking, after a while.

There are rules.

“Never even asked,” my son says softly. “How they were doing.”

I raise my eyes. Dix regards me wide-eyed from across the room, backed up against the wall, too scared to risk bolting past me to the door. “What are you doing here?” I ask tiredly.

His voice catches. He has to try twice: “You said I could come back. If I burned out my link . . .”

“You burned out your link.”

He gulps and nods. He wipes blood with the back of his hand.

“What did the chimp say about that?”

“He said—it said it was okay,” Dix says, in such a transparent attempt to suck up that I actually believe, in that instant, that he might really be on his own.

“So you asked its permission.” He begins to nod, but I can see the tell in his face: “Don’t bullshit me, Dix.”

“He—actually suggested it.”

“I see.”

“So we could talk,” Dix adds.

“What do you want to talk about?”

He looks at the floor and shrugs.

I stand and walk towards him. He tenses but I shake my head, spread my hands. “It’s okay. It’s okay.” I lean back against the wall and slide down until I’m beside him on the deck.

We just sit there for a while.

“It’s been so long,” I say at last.

He looks at me, uncomprehending. What does long even mean, out here?

I try again. “They say there’s no such thing as altruism, you know?”

His eyes blank for an instant, and grow panicky, and I know that he’s just tried to ping his link for a definition and come up blank. So we are alone. “Altruism,” I explain. “Unselfishness. Doing something that costs you but helps someone else.” He seems to get it. “They say every selfless act ultimately comes down to manipulation or kin-selection or reciprocity or something, but they’re wrong. I could—”

I close my eyes. This is harder than I expected.

“I could have been happy just knowing that Kai was okay, that Connie was happy. Even if it didn’t benefit me one whit, even if it cost me, even if there was no chance I’d ever see either of them again. Almost any price would be worth it, just to know they were okay.

“Just to believe they were . . .”

So you haven’t seen her for the past five builds. So he hasn’t drawn your shift since Sagittarius. They’re just sleeping. Maybe next time.

“So you don’t check,” Dix says slowly. Blood bubbles on his lower lip; he doesn’t seem to notice.

“We don’t check.” Only I did, and now they’re gone. They’re both gone. Except for those little cannibalized nucleotides the chimp recycled into this defective and maladapted son of mine. We’re the only warm-blooded creatures for a thousand lightyears, and I am so very lonely.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and lean forward, and lick the gore from his bruised and bloody lips.

Back on Earth—back when there was an Earth—there were these little animals called cats. I had one for a while. Sometimes I’d watch him sleep for hours: paws and whiskers and ears all twitching madly as he chased imaginary prey across whatever landscapes his sleeping brain conjured up.

My son looks like that when the chimp worms its way into his dreams.

It’s almost too literal for metaphor: the cable runs into his head like some kind of parasite, feeding through old-fashioned fiberop now that the wireless option’s been burned away. Or force-feeding, I suppose; the poison flows into Dix’s head, not out of it.

I shouldn’t be here. Didn’t I just throw a tantrum over the violation of my own privacy? (Just. Twelve lightdays ago. Everything’s relative.) And yet I can see no privacy here for Dix to lose: no decorations on the walls, no artwork or hobbies, no wraparound console. The sex toys ubiquitous in every suite sit unused on their shelves; I’d have assumed he was on antilibidinals if recent experience hadn’t proven otherwise.

What am I doing? Is this some kind of perverted mothering instinct, some vestigial expression of a Pleistocene maternal subroutine? Am I that much of a robot, has my brain stem sent me here to guard my child?

To guard my mate?

Lover or larva, it hardly matters: his quarters are an empty shell, there’s nothing of Dix in here. That’s just his abandoned body lying there in the pseudopod, fingers twitching, eyes flickering beneath closed lids in vicarious response to wherever his mind has gone.

They don’t know I’m here. The chimp doesn’t know because we burned out its prying eyes a billion years ago, and my son doesn’t know I’m here because—well, because for him, right now, there is no here.

What am I supposed to make of you, Dix? None of this makes sense. Even your body language looks like you grew it in a vat—but I’m far from the first human being you’ve seen. You grew up in good company, with people I know, people I trust. Trusted. How did you end up on the other side? How did they let you slip away?

And why didn’t they warn me about you?

Yes, there are rules. There is the threat of enemy surveillance during long dead nights, the threat of—other losses. But this is unprecedented. Surely someone could have left something, some clue buried in a metaphor too subtle for the simpleminded to decode . . .

I’d give a lot to tap into that pipe, to see what you’re seeing now. Can’t risk it, of course; I’d give myself away the moment I tried to sample anything except the basic baud, and—

—Wait a second—

That baud rate’s way too low. That’s not even enough for hi-res graphics, let alone tactile and olfac. You’re embedded in a wireframe world at best.

And yet, look at you go. The fingers, the eyes—like a cat, dreaming of mice and apple pies. Like me, replaying the long-lost oceans and mountaintops of Earth before I learned that living in the past was just another way of dying in the present. The bit rate says this is barely even a test pattern; the body says you’re immersed in a whole other world. How has that machine tricked you into treating such thin gruel as a feast?

Why would it even want to? Data are better grasped when they can be grasped, and tasted, and heard; our brains are built for far richer nuance than splines and scatterplots. The driest technical briefings are more sensual than this. Why settle for stick-figures when you can paint in oils and holograms?

Why does anyone simplify anything? To reduce the variable set. To manage the unmanageable.

Kai and Connie. Now there were a couple of tangled, unmanageable datasets. Before the accident. Before the scenario simplified.

Someone should have warned me about you, Dix.

Maybe someone tried.

And so it comes to pass that my son leaves the nest, encases himself in a beetle carapace and goes walkabout. He is not alone; one of the chimp’s teleops accompanies him out on Eri’s hull, lest he lose his footing and fall back into the starry past.

Maybe this will never be more than a drill, maybe this scenario—catastrophic control-systems failure, the chimp and its backups offline, all maintenance tasks suddenly thrown onto shoulders of flesh and blood—is a dress rehearsal for a crisis that never happens. But even the unlikeliest scenario approaches certainty over the life of a universe; so we go through the motions. We practice. We hold our breath and dip outside. We’re on a tight deadline: even armored, moving at this speed the blueshifted background rad would cook us in hours.

Worlds have lived and died since I last used the pickup in my suite. “Chimp.”

“Here as always, Sunday.” Smooth, and glib, and friendly. The easy rhythm of the practiced psychopath.

“I know what you’re doing.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You think I don’t see what’s going on? You’re building the next release. You’re getting too much grief from the old guard so you’re starting from scratch with people who don’t remember the old days. People you’ve, you’ve simplified.”

The chimp says nothing. The drone’s feed shows Dix clambering across a jumbled terrain of basalt and metal matrix composites.

“But you can’t raise a human child, not on your own.” I know it tried: there’s no record of Dix anywhere on the crew manifest until his mid-teens, when he just showed up one day and nobody asked about it because nobody ever . . .

“Look what you’ve made of him. He’s great at conditional If/Thens. Can’t be beat on number-crunching and Do loops. But he can’t think. Can’t make the simplest intuitive jumps. You’re like one of those—” I remember an earthly myth, from the days when reading did not seem like such an obscene waste of lifespan—“one of those wolves, trying to raise a human child. You can teach him how to move around on hands and knees, you can teach him about pack dynamics, but you can’t teach him how to walk on his hind legs or talk or be human because you’re too fucking stupid, Chimp, and you finally realized it. And that’s why you threw him at me. You think I can fix him for you.”

I take a breath, and a gambit.

“But he’s nothing to me. You understand? He’s worse than nothing, he’s a liability. He’s a spy, he’s a spastic waste of O_2. Give me one reason why I shouldn’t just lock him out there until he cooks.”

“You’re his mother,” the chimp says, because the chimp has read all about kin selection and is too stupid for nuance.

“You’re an idiot.”

“You love him.”

“No.” An icy lump forms in my chest. My mouth makes words; they come out measured and inflectionless. “I can’t love anyone, you brain-dead machine. That’s why I’m out here. Do you really think they’d gamble your precious never-ending mission on little glass dolls that needed to bond.”

“You love him.”

“I can kill him any time I want. And that’s exactly what I’ll do if you don’t move the gate.”

“I’d stop you,” the chimp says mildly.

“That’s easy enough. Just move the gate and we both get what we want. Or you can dig in your heels and try to reconcile your need for a mother’s touch with my sworn intention of breaking the little fucker’s neck. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us, Chimp. And you might find I’m not quite as easy to cut out of the equation as Kai and Connie.”

“You cannot end the mission,” it says, almost gently. “You tried that already.”

“This isn’t about ending the mission. This is only about slowing it down a little. Your optimal scenario’s off the table. The only way that gate’s going to get finished now is by saving the Island, or killing your prototype. Your call.”

The cost-benefit’s pretty simple. The chimp could solve it in an instant. But still it says nothing. The silence stretches. It’s looking for some other option, I bet. It’s trying to find a workaround. It’s questioning the very premises of the scenario, trying to decide if I mean what I’m saying, if all its book-learning about mother love could really be so far off-base. Maybe it’s plumbing historical intrafamilial murder rates, looking for a loophole. And there may be one, for all I know. But the chimp isn’t me, it’s a simpler system trying to figure out a smarter one, and that gives me the edge.

“You would owe me,” it says at last.

I almost burst out laughing. “What?”

“Or I will tell Dixon that you threatened to kill him.”

“Go ahead.”

“You don’t want him to know.”

“I don’t care whether he knows or not. What, you think he’ll try and kill me back? You think I’ll lose his love?” I linger on the last word, stretch it out to show how ludicrous it is.

“You’ll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here.”

“Oh, right. Trust. The very fucking foundation of this mission.”

The chimp says nothing.

“For the sake of argument,” I say after a while, “suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?”

“A favor,” the chimp replies. “To be repaid in future.”

My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.

We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps towards us in the stop-motion increments of a life’s moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling each other into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro-Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer.

And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works, and what doesn’t. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.

But I believe in the Island, because I don’t have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can’t help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.

I believe in the Island. I’ve gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.

I may yet.

In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.

Final approach.

Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerising infinite regress of bullseyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.

Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair—if our trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—we will be dead. Before we know it.

Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magically displaced mass.

I turn to the drone’s-eye view relayed from up ahead. It’s a window into history—even now, there’s a time-lag of several minutes—but past and present race closer to convergence with every corsec. The newly minted gate looms dark and ominous against the stars, a great gaping mouth built to devour reality itself. The vons, the refineries, the assembly lines: parked to the side in vertical columns, their jobs done, their usefulness outlived, their collateral annihilation imminent. I pity them, for some reason. I always do. I wish we could scoop them up and take them with us, re-enlist them for the next build—but the rules of economics reach everywhere, and they say it’s cheaper to use our tools once and throw them away.

A rule that the chimp seems to be taking more to heart than anyone expected.

At least we’ve spared the Island. I wish we could have stayed awhile. First contact with a truly alien intelligence, and what do we exchange? Traffic signals. What does the Island dwell upon, when not pleading for its life?

I thought of asking. I thought of waking myself when the time-lag dropped from prohibitive to merely inconvenient, of working out some pidgin that could encompass the truths and philosophies of a mind vaster than all humanity. What a childish fantasy. The Island exists too far beyond the grotesque Darwinian processes that shaped my own flesh. There can be no communion here, no meeting of minds. Angels do not speak to ants.

Less than three minutes to ignition. I see light at the end of the tunnel. Eri’s incidental time machine barely looks into the past any more, I could almost hold my breath across the whole span of seconds that then needs to overtake now. Still on target, according to all sources.

Tactical beeps at us. “Getting a signal,” Dix reports, and yes: in the heart of the tank, the sun is flickering again. My heart leaps: Does the angel speak to us after all? A thank you, perhaps? A cure for heat death? But—

“It’s ahead of us,” Dix murmurs, as sudden realization catches in my throat.

Two minutes.

“Miscalculated somehow,” Dix whispers. “Didn’t move the gate far enough.”

“We did,” I say. We moved it exactly as far as the Island told us to.

“Still in front of us! Look at the sun!”

“Look at the signal,” I tell him.

Because it’s nothing like the painstaking traffic signs we’ve followed over the past three trillion kilometers. It’s almost—random, somehow. It’s spur-of-the-moment, it’s panicky. It’s the sudden, startled cry of something caught utterly by surprise with mere seconds left to act. And even though I have never seen this pattern of dots and swirls before, I know exactly what it must be saying.

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

We do not stop. There is no force in the universe that can even slow us down. Past equals present; Eriophora dives through the center of the gate in a nanosecond. The unimaginable mass of her cold black heart snags some distant dimension, drags it screaming to the here and now. The booted portal erupts behind us, blossoms into a great blinding corona, every wavelength lethal to every living thing. Our aft filters clamp down tight.

The scorching wavefront chases us into the darkness as it has a thousand times before. In time, as always, the birth pangs will subside. The wormhole will settle in its collar. And just maybe, we will still be close enough to glimpse some new transcendent monstrosity emerging from that magic doorway.

I wonder if you’ll notice the corpse we left behind.

“Maybe we’re missing something,” Dix says.

“We miss almost everything,” I tell him.

DHF428 shifts red behind us. Lensing artefacts wink in our rearview; the gate has stabilized and the wormhole’s online, blowing light and space and time in an iridescent bubble from its great metal mouth. We’ll keep looking over our shoulders right up until we pass the Rayleigh limit, far past the point it’ll do any good.

So far, though, nothing’s come out.

“Maybe our numbers were wrong,” he says. “Maybe we made a mistake.”

Our numbers were right. An hour doesn’t pass when I don’t check them again. The Island just had—enemies, I guess. Victims, anyway.

I was right about one thing, though. That fucker was smart. To see us coming, to figure out how to talk to us; to use us as a weapon, to turn a threat to its very existence into a, a . . .

I guess flyswatter is as good a word as any.

“Maybe there was a war,” I mumble. “Maybe it wanted the real estate. Or maybe it was just some—family squabble.”

“Maybe didn’t know,” Dix suggests. “Maybe thought those coordinates were empty.”

Why would you think that, I wonder. Why would you even care? And then it dawns on me: he doesn’t, not about the Island, anyway. No more than he ever did. He’s not inventing these rosy alternatives for himself.

My son is trying to comfort me.

I don’t need to be coddled, though. I was a fool: I let myself believe in life without conflict, in sentience without sin. For a little while I dwelt in a dream world where life was unselfish and unmanipulative, where every living thing did not struggle to exist at the expense of other life. I deified that which I could not understand, when in the end it was all too easily understood.

But I’m better now.

It’s over: another build, another benchmark, another irreplaceable slice of life that brings our task no closer to completion. It doesn’t matter how successful we are. It doesn’t matter how well we do our job. Mission accomplished is a meaningless phrase on Eriophora, an ironic oxymoron at best. There may one day be failure, but there is no finish line. We go on forever, crawling across the universe like ants, dragging our goddamned superhighway behind us.

I still have so much to learn.

At least my son is here to teach me.

SHAMBLING TOWARDS HIROSHIMA

James Morrow

“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

—The Tempest v, i
to

Vincent Singleton
my Tennessee Taoist

I

WHETHER THIS MEMOIR will turn out to be the world’s longest suicide note, or instead the means by which I might elude the abyss, only time can tell: a precise interval of time, in fact, the twenty-five hours that stretch between the present moment, Sunday, October 28, 1984, 11:06 A.M., and my presumed departure tomorrow on the noon shuttle to the airport. Right now the other route by which I may exit this sterile Baltimore hotel—the balcony—is the more alluring. I need merely cross the room, slide back the glass door, step onto the terrace, and avail myself of the hundred-foot drop to the parking lot.

Appearances are deceiving. Just because you’re reading my story, that doesn’t mean I lost my nerve and took the shuttle bus. The proper inference may simply be that I slipped the manuscript into an envelope festooned with stamps and addressed to the Rachel Bishop Literary Agency in New York, then left the package outside my door along with a note asking the hotel management to pop it in the nearest mailbox. Are you reading this, Rachel? I love you, sweetheart. You’re the greatest agent a has-been ever had. Assuming you find somebody who can decipher my handwriting, feel free to transcribe these pages, give them a title—The Day of the Lizard, perhaps, or Peasants with Torches, or Shambling Towards Hiroshima—and sell the thing to Doubleday for a big, fat advance, collecting your well-earned ten percent. The balance should go to Darlene. Yes, Rachel, I believe you’ve finally gotten a bestseller out of me, and it arrives bearing the ultimate seal of authenticity, the author’s notorious leap into oblivion, at once swan dive and swan song. True, the NSA may attempt to block publication, but when they go to make their case, the judge will laugh them out of court, especially when he hears about the giant fire-breathing bipedal iguanas.

To tell you the truth, Rachel, I’ve been dropping hints about the Knickerbocker Project behemoths for over four years now, mostly to my devotees—that is, to admirers of Kha-Ton-Ra the living mummy, Corpuscula the alchemical creature, and Gorgantis, King of the Lizards. The kids aren’t interested. Instead they want to know how many yards of rotting gauze I wore in Curse of Kha-Ton-Ra. (One hundred fifty, as a matter of fact.) Did I play both roles in Corpuscula Meets the Doppelgänger? (Of course I did, O ye of little fanaticism.) Did I really write the script for Gorgantis the Invincible under the pseudonym Akira Fukiji? (Not only that, I wrote Gorgantis Unchained as Kihachi Ifukabe and Gorgantis vs. Octopocalypse as Minoru Natsuke.) By now the fans realize that, sooner or later, I’ll manage to bring up my obsession with Überweapons—biological, atomic, and otherwise. They tolerate this tic of mine, but barely. History holds no fascination for them. The politics of atrocity bores them silly.

A Martian would be within his rights to ask why I’m in such low spirits this morning. After all, last night the Wonderama Fantasy Film Convention presented me with a major award, the Raydo, a name meant to evoke not only the rhedosaurus, that ersatz dinosaur featured in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but also the two Rays without whom the movie wouldn’t exist—Bradbury, author of the original story, and Harryhausen, stop-motion animator extraordinaire. Were my hypothetical Martian to drop by Room 2014 right now, I would explain that on our planet winning a pewter trophy doesn’t feel nearly as good as bottomless despair feels bad.

In my view it’s boorish to complain about banquet food, so let me go on record as saying that the chicken croquettes and bean salad at the Wonderama Awards dinner were scrumptious. Predictably enough, everybody squirmed during my acceptance speech—as usual, I railed against the thermonuclear arsenals into whose maw our civilization may soon disappear—and the applause was understandably tepid. Feeling at once piqued and chagrined, I slipped away before the next event, a raffle for a credible facsimile of my Gorgantis suit, which the Wonderama staff evidently got for a steal after the National Science Fiction Museum in Denver went bust.

My Raydo statuette is a rather handsome artifact, featuring not only a skillful reproduction of the rhedosaurus in all his dorsal-plated glory, but also the Maine lighthouse he destroys halfway through the picture. The inscription is eloquent and contains only one error. Syms K. Thorley, Lifetime Achievement Award, Baltimore Imagi-Movies Society, 1984. My made-up middle initial is J. Where did they get that K? I hope they weren’t thinking of my eternal nemesis, the egregious Siegfried K. Dagover. That would be the unkindest typo of all.

Today my Raydo will function as a paperweight, securing each successive page after I’ve torn it, littered with my scribblings, from the legal pad. I’m equipped with thirty such virgin tablets, and I’ve laid in other essentials, too. A box of Bic pens, a carton of filter-tipped Camels, a jar of Maxwell House instant coffee with a submersible heating coil, two pastrami sandwiches from room service, a liter of amontillado in a novelty cut-glass decanter. This is Edgar Allan Poe’s city, after all, and I’ve decided to pay him homage. Pardon me while I take a few sips of sherry—yes, it’s decadent to drink before noon, but Poe’s hovering shade expects me to follow protocol—and then I’ll begin my tale.

At the moment I’m writing from the slough of despond, but my mood was exultant and my career in full flower when the two FBI agents showed up on the Monogram Pictures sound stage to assess the caliber of my patriotism. We’d just finished a productive morning’s shoot on Revenge of Corpuscula for dear old Sam Katzman and his noble little studio, William Beaudine directing, Mack Stengler lensing, Dave Milton providing his usual bricks-without-straw décor. The screenplay credit would go to Darlene, though I contributed six good lines and two nifty plot twists during a furious forty-eight-hour rewrite session in our Santa Monica bungalow. Darlene and I had been shacking up ever since falling head-over-heels on the set of the original Corpuscula, which she wrote on a dare from her best friend, Brenda Weisberg, the only woman in Hollywood routinely churning out horror movie scripts. (Brenda’s masterpiece is probably The Mad Ghoul of ‘43, though many fans swear by The Mummy’s Ghost of two years later.) Oddly enough, Darlene’s script was exactly what Sam had been looking for, and when the picture performed better than expected, he signed her to a six-year exclusive contract, an interval during which she was obligated to rewrite every crappy Bob Steele western and East Side Kids vehicle that landed on her desk, plus a gaggle of Corpuscula sequels.

Like the first three films in the cycle, all conspicuously profitable despite the constraints imposed by Monogram’s accountants and the Second World War, Revenge of Corpuscula paired me with Siegfried K. Dagover, the latter playing Dr. Woltan Werdistratus to my hulking but articulate brute, Corpuscula. Darlene’s ingenious variation on the Frankenstein myth had Werdistratus eschewing a mad scientist’s normal method of creating artificial life: zapping a rag-doll assemblage of pilfered body parts with electricity. Instead, her insane doctor unearthed a human skeleton, using it as the matrix around which various organs, muscles, ligaments, vessels, and ducts coalesced by means of—and here Darlene was exploiting a motif from Mary Shelley’s original novel—alchemical procedures pioneered by Paracelsus and his fellow adepts. About five years ago the master’s theses started appearing, bearing titles like “Hollywood’s Challenge to Empiricism’s Hegemony: Magic and Medicine in the Corpuscula Cycle.” You think I’m kidding.

We’d gotten it in the can, by God, the three most difficult pages in Darlene’s script, Corpuscula threatening to hand Dr. Werdistratus over to the authorities unless the two of them reach an understanding. If you’ve seen the picture, you remember the routine, the alchemical monster strapping his creator to a torture rack in the dungeon laboratory, then confronting him with a cavalcade of pickled brains, each belonging to a recently deceased genius, the monster’s aim being for Werdistratus to fuse them into a supercerebrum and graft it onto Corpuscula’s cortex, thereby transforming him from outcast to intellectual giant. As usual, Dagover tried to hijack the scene, and as usual I didn’t let him. He wasn’t a terrible actor, but he had only two personae: neurasthenic connoisseur of the dark arts, and deranged desecrator of God’s designs. I could act him under the table with a paper bag over my head and a clothespin on my tongue.

Beyond our successful rendering of the torture rack scene, I had other reasons to be jubilant. The previous morning, Darlene’s pregnancy test had come back negative. Two days earlier, Germany had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. And to top it off, at the beginning of the week I’d finished my first serious attempt at screenwriting. In my opinion Lycanthropus was so scary it made Siodmak’s script for The Wolf Man seem like a bedtime story for depressive children, though I wouldn’t be truly pleased with my achievement until Darlene told me it was swell.

With Beaudine’s blessing Dudley the AD decreed a lunch break, saying he wanted everybody back at 1:30 P.M. sharp on stage two for the big cemetery scene—Werdistratus and his warpie assistant, Klorg, skulking among the graves with spades, prospecting for carrion—and then the pair of G-Men came striding across the laboratory set, hopscotching among the cables and gobo stands, outfitted in genuine Lamont Cranston slouch hats and misterioso sunglasses. At first I thought they were actors themselves, headed for the nearest exit after appearing in some dopey spy thriller on stage three, but when they brushed up against me, tugged on my sheepskin doublet, and hustled me into a fretwork of film noir shadows, I realized they had something else in mind. They introduced themselves as Agent Jones and Agent Brown—their real names, I later learned, though at the time I didn’t believe them. The grilling began instantly, before I could remove a shred of makeup. Corpuscula gave them no pause, despite the third eye embedded in his cheek and the herniated brain emerging from his fractured skull. I figured such sang-froid was habitual for guys in their line. The rest of the day would probably find them coolly quizzing a bank robber as he lay expiring of gunshot wounds or calmly questioning a naked whore who’d just disemboweled a john in self-defense. A tattered ambulatory cadaver was nothing.

Agent Brown, a lardish man with a pencil-thin moustache, asked me if I was in fact “a Jew named Isaac Margolis who now calls himself Syms Thorley.”

“Isaac was the name of a great uncle who died before I was born,” I said, chattering nervously. I was convinced they’d come to arrest me as a draft dodger, even though I had a legitimate medical deferment. “It’s a Jewish custom. You want to know anything else about my people, talk to Louis B. Mayer.

Being a Jew is not my area of expertise.”

“Ah, so you’re assimilated,” said Agent Jones with an anti-Semitic curl of his lip. He had tiny eyes, bad teeth, and the negligible nose of an altar-boy Pinocchio.

“My bubbe keeps trying to make me observant,” I said, “but all I really care about is the movies.”

“That fits with the data we’ve collected so far,” Agent Brown said.

“Did my draft board send you here?” I asked. “I’m classified 1-M.”

“We know all about your flat feet,” Agent Jones said. “A mighty fortunate handicap, if you ask me.”

“We also know about last summer’s appendectomy and your girlfriend’s pregnancy test,” Agent Brown said.

“Here’s the deal, Thorley,” Agent Jones said. “Your Uncle Isaac might be dead, but your Uncle Sam is alive and kicking, and he’s got a special assignment for you, something any red-blooded, stouthearted, flat-footed American would be keen to take on.”

Just then Dagover strolled by, still in character, the wild-eyed Werdistratus, obviously hoping I’d gotten in trouble and eager to overhear the details.

“We need to take this conversation elsewhere,” Agent Brown said, casting a suspicious eye on the mad scientist.

“I’m afraid Monogram doesn’t have a commissary, but there’s a swell little Mexican place on the corner of Sunset and Talmadge,” I said.

“The Neon Cactus,” Agent Jones said, nodding.

“We’ve reserved a booth,” Agent Brown said.

“Hey, Dudley,” I called to the AD, “Eliot Ness and his transvestite sister are taking me out to lunch. I’m done for the day, right?”

Dudley flipped open his brass-handled board. “No more Corpuscula scenes this afternoon, but we need you in your makeup for an 8:00 A.M. take one. Do me a favor and be at the studio by six.”

“Here’s an idea,” I told Dudley. “Have Carl come out to my house at dawn tomorrow and put the makeup on me while I’m still asleep.”

“I hate this job,” Dudley said.

“A bewildered Syms Thorley and his new friends set off for the Neon Cactus, in quest of whatever’s on tap,” I said, flashing the AD a florid Corpuscula grin. “Fade-out.”

What they had on tap was Dos Equis, which the G-Men and I supplemented with outsized orders of tacos and gazpacho. Actors and soldiers jammed the place to the walls. A lively lass with a pretty face and a considerable figure brought us our food. The cliché is true now, and it was true then: L.A. has the most nubile waitresses in the world, hopeful starlets anticipating the proper cosmic conjunction of a cruising producer and a flattering sunbeam.

My makeup was itching, so I tugged at the latex appliance, pulling a huge swatch from my forehead along with my fright wig, then set the hairy puddle beside me on the bench. I removed my third eye and the dentures, resting them atop the napkin dispenser. My behavior attracted no attention. This was Hollywood. In the next booth over, the Abominable Snowman drank a vanilla milkshake through a straw. Napoleon sat at the counter, munching on a doughnut. Beside the swinging doors to the kitchen, Julius Caesar was propositioning our waitress.

“Uncle Sam doesn’t want you in uniform, but he does want you in a suit,” Agent Jones told me.

“A clown suit?” I said. “I’m supposed to tour the Pacific with the USO, cheering up the troops? I don’t do clowns, only monsters.”

“That’s exactly the idea,” Agent Brown said. “Uncle Sam wants you in a monster suit. Nick and I have to decide if you’re a security risk. We’re also supposed to soften you up.”

“With your fists?”

“With the news that the assignment pays ten thousand dollars.”

“Ten thousand? Jeez.”

“Personally, I think you should do it out of sheer bare-assed patriotism,” Agent Jones said, “especially since you’re so assimilated and everything.”

“To tell you the truth, we were thinking of recommending your co-star Dagover, but the Navy seems to think you’re the better actor,” Agent Brown said.

“The Navy knows what they’re talking about,” I said.

Let me take this opportunity to set the record straight. There was no rivalry between Siggy Dagover and myself. There was, rather, an unimaginably vicious vendetta that stopped short of homicide only because in Hollywood there are more imaginative ways to settle scores. Think of Joan Crawford versus Bette Davis, and you’ll have some idea of the scale involved.

The only thing I admired about Dagover was his ambition. Hired by Göttingen University as a linguistics professor way back in ‘34, he became the first Gentile intellectual on his block to flee Hitler. Landing in Manhattan as the Great Depression was reaching its nadir, he briefly supported himself by washing windows and scrubbing floors for the few remaining plutocrats in New York, then hopped a series of freight trains for the coast, determined to bluster his way into the movies.

“Any Japs up your family tree?” Agent Jones asked me abruptly.

“Only moneylenders, bagelmakers, and rabbis,” I said, not really expecting a laugh. Humor was never the strong suit of anti-Semites, except when T. S. Eliot wrote about cats.

“That accords with our findings,” Agent Jones said.

“What associations does the name Karl Marx bring to mind?” Agent Brown asked.

“I believe he stayed in New York with Gummo when the others went out West,” I said.

“Are you prepared to sign a loyalty oath?” Agent Brown asked.

“To which country?” I asked.

“I have infinite patience,” Agent Jones said. “I really do. My patience goes from here to the goddamn moon.”

“This woman you’re living with, Darlene Wasserman, did you know her parents once belonged to the Communist League?” Agent Brown asked. “Your girlfriend was a red-diaper baby.”

“I thought we were fighting Hirohito this week, not Stalin.”

“Tell me about Miss Wasserman’s politics.” “She voted for Roosevelt, just like everybody else,” I said. “What about you?” Agent Jones said.

“If I ever run for president, I’m sure Darlene will vote for me.”

“Did you vote for Roosevelt?”

“I don’t remember.”

“According to our investigations, you and Miss Wasserman are registered Democrats.”

“That’s completely correct. Our diapers are as white as yours, Nick.”

“One more crack, Jew-boy, and the job goes to Dagover,” Agent Jones said.

“Why does Uncle Sam want me in a monster suit?” I asked.

“We can’t tell you that,” Agent Brown said.

“Because you aren’t allowed, because you don’t know, or because you despise me?” I asked.

“We can’t tell you that either,” Agent Brown said.

“Actually, I’d be happy to address your third question,” Agent Jones said.

Agent Brown passed me a slip of paper bearing the words 4091 East Olympic Boulevard, Room 101, 0900 Hours. “Show up at this address tomorrow morning, nine o’clock sharp.”

“With my monster makeup on, or without it?” I asked, removing the fake eye from the napkin dispenser. Dudley would be miserable about this latest hitch in the schedule, but that was the price you paid for trying to make horror movies during a global conflagration.

“Tell them you’re the actor, come to see Commander Quimby,” Agent Jones said.

“Bombs over Tokyo,” I said, nonchalantly dropping my glass orb into the G-Man’s gazpacho. “Look, Nick, there’s an eye in your soup. If you don’t make a big deal about it, I’m sure they’ll bring you a fresh bowl.”

That night I made a pot of spaghetti for Darlene and myself, then read her the first draft of Lycanthropus, insisting that she should feel perfectly free to give me her frank professional opinion leavened with unqualified adulation. Three or four lines went clunk, and for budget purposes I’d probably have to cut the prologue set in ancient Rome, but basically I had to agree with her when she said the thing was a whiz-bang, gosh-wow masterpiece.

“It’s too good for Katzman,” she elaborated, puffing on a postprandial Chesterfield. She was the sort of creature a down-market writer might describe as “a mere slip of a girl,” though I found her ethereality wholly sensual and paradoxically carnal. “You’ve got to peddle it to Warners or Universal.”

“Universal would let me keep ancient Rome,” I said.

“You know what you’ve got here, Syms? A goddamn series, that’s what. Curse of Lycanthropus, Chutzpah of Lycanthropus, Boston Blackie Meets Lycanthropus—it’s all sewn up.”

I thought she was being too optimistic, but I would say one thing for my script: whatever its flaws, I doubted that anybody had treated werewolfery in quite this way before. Unlike Henry Hull’s neurotic Dr. Glendon or Lon Chaney, Jr.’s self-pitying Larry Talbot, my aristocratic scientist Baron Basil Ordlust actually wanted to be a shapeshifter. Convinced that lycanthropy offers the ultimate thrill, promising the one perversion that could sate his rarefied appetites, Ordlust travels the world seeking carriers of the supreme lupine curse—might he find the quintessential beast in Rumania? Russia? Cambodia? Tibet? Brazil?—soliciting these princely werewolves to plant their teeth judiciously in his flesh. Although most of the infections take hold, the subsequent transformations always fall short of Ordlust’s expectations, so he blithely cures himself and hits the road once again, still seeking the ultimate in mephistophelean saliva. And to top it off, Ordlust is a sympathetic character.

A word about the culture of Hollywood horror actors, circa 1945. You might be surprised to learn that our proud little fraternity had no particular affection for hideous makeup, even though deformity was the sine qua non of the genre. Sure, I suppose the elder Lon Chaney reveled in his masochistic man-of-a-thousand-faces mystique, but the rest of us had other agendas. Fanged dentures, itinerant eyeballs, gaping nostrils, rubber humps on your back, stitches the size of football laces on your forehead—not only were such appliances painful, they tended to cramp your performance. If you couldn’t arrange to get cast as a vampire or a psychopath, you at least wanted a character who oscillated between a mute monster and a loquacious man. That’s why the werewolf was such a coveted role within my profession. The fuzzy discomfort would be over in three or four shooting days, and then you’d get to deliver lots of dialogue, usually the best lines in the script. Mummies were a dicier proposition. Karloff famously had it both ways when he played Im-Ho-Tep back in ‘32. He’s trussed up in those damn bandages for only about three minutes of screen time, first in the great resurrection scene, then briefly during the lavish flashbacks set in ancient Egypt. For most of the picture he’s Ardeth Bey, unraveled mummy, a bit dry to the touch but smoothly lisping his way through one tasty line after another. I enjoyed no such luck with the Kha-Ton-Ra cycle. The scripts had me embalmed in every shot, though I got to do some pretty adept pantomime in Bride of Kha-Ton-Ra and Ghost of Kha-Ton-Ra. So Lycanthropus was a dream project for me, seventy-two discrete speeches ranging from pseudo-Shakespearean bombast to Oscar Wildean epigrams.

At first Darlene wanted to accompany me to Commander Quimby’s lair, but then I explained how touchy my prospective employers were about national security, and why showing up with the spawn of Trotskyites on my arm might throw the Navy for a loop.

“My red diapers are behind me,” she said, deadpan. In those days, even when Darlene’s jokes weren’t funny, I laughed.

“How’s this for a deal?” I said. “Stay home today, but if Uncle Sam needs a rewrite on this mysterious script of his, I’ll try to get you the job.”

Appeased, Darlene promised to spend the morning ornamenting Lycanthropus with constructive criticism, then sent me off with a hug and a kiss.

4091 East Olympic Boulevard proved to be a nondescript one-storey sandstone building of the sort you drive blithely by every day, knowing it’s full of paper-pushers and clock-watchers, and nobody’s in there writing a symphony or taming a lion or having an orgasm. I parked around the corner, availed myself of the side entrance, and strolled into Room 101, its door framing a pane of frosted glass stenciled with the words New Amsterdam Project, Los Angeles Office, No Admittance. A buxom brunette in a WAVES uniform stepped out from behind the counter, a little plaque reading Lt. Percy pinned on her left ja-lookie. Learning that I was the expected movie star, she guided me down a stairwell, through a door marked Interrogation Room, and into the august presence of Commander Quimby, a gaunt officer in dress blues and a frothy auburn toupee that surmounted his cranium like a thatched roof.

I saluted. Quimby frowned, evidently wondering if I might be mocking him. I was wondering the same thing.

“I’ll put my cards on the table, Thorley,” he said as Lieutenant Percy slipped away. “The FBI thinks you’re a smart-aleck, and they told us that Karloff, Dagover, or even Lorre might work out better.”

“Peter could never get a security clearance,” I said. “He’s a double risk—born a Kraut, and before the war he played Mr. Moto.”

“I just got off the phone with the State Department. Jimmy Byrnes’s people are satisfied you’re true blue, plus you have the necessary stamina, or so your doctor told Jones and Brown.”

“I heard I’m getting ten thousand dollars.”

“Correct, but you’d be obliged to sign the contract even if the job paid fifty cents. Next week you’ve got a briefing at a secret military installation. The rehearsal comes nine or ten days later. We’ve decided to let you keep on working at Monogram, so your colleagues won’t get suspicious, but every time we snap our fingers, you’ll have to drop what you’re doing and get on the Navy’s clock.”

“Mr. Katzman won’t like that.”

“Mr. Katzman can kiss my ass. The curtain goes up at 1500 hours on the first Sunday in June, one performance only, after which you can go back to Corpuscula Humps the Wolf Man without any more interruptions.”

“Why just one show?”

“You don’t need to know that yet.”

“Who’s the audience?”

“You don’t need to know that yet either.”

“Do I have any lines?”

“Ten thousand dollars for three days’ work, and you’re worried about your goddamn lines?”

“I’m always worried about my goddamn lines.”

Quimby issued a polysyllabic grunt, opened his desk drawer, and took out a neatly folded American flag along with a dossier labeled Syms Thorley. “I’ve got your contract right here, three copies, plus a loyalty oath, a level three security clearance, and an ID badge that will get you admitted to certain sectors of the project.”

“I can’t sign anything today. Not before my agent reads it over.”

“Fuck your agent. This is your contribution to the war effort, Thorley, not a goddamn career move.” Quimby plucked the fountain pen from his desk set, flipped open the dossier, and retrieved the specified documents, sliding them toward me with the revulsion of a gourmet chef serving a cheeseburger. “Put your right hand on Old Glory,” he said, indicating the folded flag, “and repeat after me, ‘I, Isaac Margolis, swear my undying allegiance to the Constitution of the United States . . .’“

I froze, mulling over the word undying. Three years earlier, a quirky little werewolf picture called The Undying Monster had turned a tidy profit for Fox, a circumstance that I thought boded well for Lycanthropus.

“Say it, Thorley,” Quimby insisted, “or we open negotiations with Dagover.”

I gave the flag a patriotic caress. “‘I, Isaac Margolis, swear my undying allegiance to the Constitution of the United States . . .’“

“‘And I shall spare myself no hazard or hardship in defending the republic against its enemies.’“

“That, too.” I grabbed the fountain pen and scrawled my name on every dotted line in sight.

Quimby heaved a sigh of relief, then got on the intercom and told somebody named “Ensign Fuentes” I was ready to have my measurements taken. The commander jammed two contracts back into my dossier, along with the loyalty oath and the security clearance, then presented me with the remaining contract plus an ID badge announcing that Syms Thorley was a civilian attaché to the New Amsterdam Project of the United States Navy, Group F, Classification C, Serial Number 873091.

“I have about six hundred questions for you,” I said.

“And I’ve got exactly six answers for you.”

“I’ll take them.”

“Nothing I’m about to say leaves this room. Don’t even tell your girlfriend.”

“You bet.” I couldn’t wait to regale Darlene with a complete account of this bizarre interrogation.

“First answer. The New Amsterdam Project is actually the code name for the Knickerbocker Project. If your friends at Monogram insist on hearing any details, tell them you’ve been hired by the New Amsterdam Project. Mention the words ‘Knickerbocker Project,’ and the Navy will shoot you on sight.”

“I see,” I said between clenched teeth.

“Second answer. The Japs are licked. The President knows it, the Army knows it, the Navy knows it, and even His Divine Goddamn Majesty Hirohito knows it. Third answer. Those little yellow bastards would rather arm their grandmothers with bamboo spears than hand their flag to an Allied invasion force, so the Joint Chiefs have been casting around for a way to shock them into unconditional surrender. Even as we speak, General Groves is riding herd on some goddamn Astounding Science Fiction superbomb that Leo Szilard and his nutcase physics friends started building after FDR gave them the green light. Meanwhile, Admiral Strickland is supervising a program aimed at developing the ultimate biological weapon, just like the Nazis were working on before Hitler killed himself. It’s funny, Szilard is an anagram for lizards, but the Navy’s the ones with the lizards, not the Army.” “Did you say lizards?”

I was hoping Ensign Fuentes would turn out to be a WAVE, just like Lieutenant Percy, but the officer who came barreling into the room was a hulking Wallace Beery lookalike with no neck, a wooden pencil lodged behind his cauliflower ear and a Masonite clipboard tucked under his arm. A yellow cloth tape measure hung from his shoulders like a tallith. He set to work immediately, assessing my height, determining my circumference, establishing the distance from my left shoulder to my right.

“No, Thorley, I did not say lizards,” Quimby explained as Fuentes wrote down his findings. “You merely thought I said lizards. Fourth answer. The instant we relay your measurements to the costumers, they can finish constructing your PRR.”

“Pennsylvania Railroad?”

“Personal Reptile Rig.”

Fuentes systematically ascertained and recorded the dimensions of my head, neck, chest, and hips.

“Fifth answer,” Quimby said. “Once we process the paperwork, you’ll be seconded to the staff of Dr. Ivan Groelish, Nobel laureate, herpetologist, and all-around odd duck. Expect a phone call from him, possibly his daughter, on Monday.”

“A herpetologist,” I said. “A lizard man.”

“Sixth and final answer. Don’t be fooled by Dr. Groelish’s civilian status. You’re working for the United States Navy, not the goddamn private sector. If it were up to me, I’d draft you into the Pacific Fleet tomorrow.”

Fuentes carefully calculated the lengths of my arms, legs, and stride.

“Let’s be honest, Commander,” I said. “For reasons not remotely clear to me, and perhaps not to you either, these Knickerbocker people are planning to put me in a lizard suit.”

Quimby rifled through my dossier, then yanked out a one-page letter. “You want to know why we’re having this conversation? Dr. Groelish’s plea arrived on my desk yesterday. Quote, ‘The USO finally managed to dig up those 16mm prints, so last night we had a private Syms Thorley festival, attended by most of the Group F personnel and also Admiral Yordan. Please do whatever it takes to get Mr. Thorley on the team. The man is a consummate shambler. Screen Return of Kha-Ton-Ra, and you’ll see what we mean. His lumbering is second to none. If you doubt this evaluation, take a look at Evil of Corpuscula.’ Unquote.”

“In my opinion, everything Dr. Groelish says is true,” piped up Fuentes. “I was only nine when I saw Return of Kha-Ton-Ra, and I still get the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it. May I shake your hand, Mr. Thorley?”

“Of course,” I said, granting my admirer’s wish. “They want me to be a lizard, right?”

“I’m not at liberty,” the ensign said. “Now may I ask you a question?”

“You bet.”

“Did you play both parts in Corpuscula Meets the Doppelgänger?”

It was actually the first time anyone had ever asked me that, and I was pleased to set him straight. “What do you think?” I said.

“It had to be you in both cases. There’s only one Syms Thorley.”

“Good answer, Mr. Fuentes. Tell the costumers I want plenty of ventilation. When I played the robot in Flesh of Iron, I practically died of heatstroke.”

II

AMONG THE BETTER Edgar Allan Poe stories nobody reads anymore is “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a metaphysical adventure that Roger Corman once considered adding to his famous cycle of Poe adaptations. I know this because Roger approached me about playing the lead. Negotiations broke off for several reasons, including my casual remark, “So why aren’t you using Vincent again? Did a piece of undigested scenery from Pit and the Pendulum give him dyspepsia?” While the title might lead you to expect a story about a mad embalmer who specializes in feminists, “MS. Found in a Bottle” is in fact a morbid and ambiguous nautical tale concerning a shipwrecked flâneur and his gradual realization that heaven and earth hold more things than are dreamt of in his skepticism. Had Corman actually made the picture, I’m sure that his patron corporation, American-International, aghast at the uncommercial title, would have pulled a variation on the bait-and-switch they used when releasing The Conqueror Worm and The Haunted Palace, allegedly based on the corresponding Poe poems but actually derived from non-Poe sources, a Ronald Bassett novel called Witchfinder General in the first instance and H. P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space in the second. I know that Corman and his screenwriters intended to retain most of the key story elements from “MS. Found in a Bottle”—the black ship, its spectral crew, the Polar whirlpool—but the picture would still have been billed as “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Imp of the Perverse” or “Edgar Allan Poe’s The Descent into the Maelstrom” or “Edgar Allan Poe’s Spirits of the Dead” or whatever fan-friendly Poe title was still lying around.

The present memoir is not so much a manuscript found in a bottle as one poured from a decanter. Thanks to a few golden ounces of amontillado—“For the love of God, Montresor!”—I’ve managed to scrawl my way through an entire legal pad in only three hours. After I replenish my glass and take a few swallows, I’ll tell you about my big meeting with the whack-jobs who ran the Knickerbocker Project.

Allow me to clarify my earlier remark concerning vampires. While it’s true that Count Dracula and his undead brethren were once supreme among the roles preferred by horror performers, I myself always refused to don the cape and fangs. This gap in my résumé traces to a promise I once made my maternal grandmother, who, upon resigning herself to the fact that I would probably spend the rest of my life portraying movie monsters, told me, “No vampires, Isaac. Our people have spent a hundred generations running away from crosses, and I won’t have you doing the same.” I’m proud to say I’ve remained true to my bubbe, even to the point of turning down the role of the blood-drinking cucumber in Corman’s drive-in classic, Demon from Beyond the Stars.

Shortly after writing about dropping the eye in Agent Jones’s gazpacho, I started fiddling absent-mindedly with the channel changer on my Holiday Inn TV. I soon stumbled upon the big news of the day, a survey suggesting that come November President Reagan—dear old Ronnie, that former friend of the working man, famously sympathetic to the carpenters’ strike that rocked Hollywood back when we were shooting Revenge of Corpuscula—will clobber Walter Mondale at the polls. Next I tuned in the nascent cable channel called American Movie Classics, and you’ll never guess what they were running. No, not a Corpuscula picture, something far more interesting, Trumpet Voluntary, 1936, directed by Lewis Milestone, the absorbing saga of two families, one rich, one poor, anticipating their sons’ return from the trenches of the Great War, screenplay by my cynical, resentful, intermittently lamented father. Although the late Nathan Margolis and I never really got along, I continue to admire the way that, as a contract writer first for Paramount, later for Warners and MGM, he occasionally got himself attached to a serious drama, as opposed to the reliably profitable stuff the studios preferred to make—the musicals, screwball comedies, Shirley Temple vehicles, horror pictures, gangster movies: Hollywood’s elixir for the Great Depression. Besides Trumpet Voluntary, Nathan scripted Mickey O’Neil’s Favorite Planet, that piquant Frank Capra parable, which nobody went to see, about a New York cop who wins the Irish Sweepstakes, then tries in vain to make the world a better place, as well as the equally unprofitable Adventures of Charles Darwin, Mervyn LeRoy at the helm, a well-researched bio-pic about the uneventful life of the unassuming Englishman who undermined—and what kind of assignment was this for a Jewish boy?—the Torah’s account of human origins.

My father lost no opportunity to tutor me in his philosophy of screenwriting. His words of wisdom still ring in my ears. “There are only three rules, Isaac. Never let a dog die on screen. Never advance the plot by having somebody say, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ And never have a character commit suicide. Beyond that, it’s deuces wild.” I’m proud to say that I obeyed my father’s commandments not only when composing my Lycanthropus script but also in conducting my personal affairs. Of course, The Syms Thorley Story is not yet completely written, but I see no defunct canines on the horizon, and the same goes for conveniently curious characters.

We’d just wrapped the first of the three big orangutan scenes in Revenge of Corpuscula when Trixie the stenographer came trotting across stage three with the news that “a vitally urgent phone call, but that’s what they all say” was waiting for me in Mr. Katzman’s office.

The morning’s shoot had not gone well. On paper the scene looked simple enough. Corpuscula breaks into Dr. Werdistratus’s lab intending to steal his journal, but then he notices the mad scientist’s pet orangutan, Bongowi, caged in the corner, so he decides to steal the animal instead. Sam had insisted we use a live ape, on the dubious theory that it would be cheaper than renting a suit and paying some bit player scale to wear it, but the people at Celluloid Critters had failed to train the wretched beast properly.

“Werdistratus is not the only surgeon in Europe,” I tell the kidnapped Bongowi. “Somehow I shall persuade Dr. Niemuller to implant carnivorous impulses in your brain, then send you off to kill your master.”

After delivering the line, I merely had to open the cage and lead Bongowi away by the handy collar Werdistratus had placed around his neck. Unfortunately the damn orangutan was suffering from some kind of primate depression, because he slouched in the back of the cage and wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard I tugged on the chain. His handler was apologetic, and a lot of good that did us. Eventually Beaudine resorted to giving an apprehensive gaffer five dollars to jab a fork into Bongowi’s rump, with Stengler framing the shot so tightly the audience would never know.

Beaudine decided to accompany me to the front office, since he wanted to have a word or two with Katzman concerning the orangutan fiasco. Trixie handed me the phone. While I spoke in my most patriotic whisper to a reedy-voiced woman who identified herself as Joy Groelish, daughter of the Project Director and a biologist in her own right, Katzman and Beaudine exchanged heated words about the melancholic Bongowi.

“Do you still live at 1901 Marguerita Avenue, Santa Monica?” Joy asked me.

“Indeed.”

“That hairy cocksucker’s a loser, Sam,” Beaudine said. “He just sits there and stares into space.”

“I’m your official liaison to the Knickerbocker Project,” Joy said.

“I’ve had liaisons before,” I told her, “but never an official one.”

“We have to replace him,” Beaudine said. “Impossible,” Katzman said. “Celluloid Critters is fresh out of primates.”

“I mean replace him with an actor in a suit,” Beaudine said.

“I’ll pick you up tomorrow at 7:00 A.M. sharp,” Joy said. “Sure thing,” I said.

“Dress for hot weather. Destination Mojave. Don’t forget your ID badge. Toodle-oo.”

“Good-bye,” I said.

“Orangutan suits are expensive,” Katzman said.

“So are movie directors,” Beaudine said. “I’ve had it, Sam. It’s hard enough trying to keep Thorley and Dagover in line, and now this ape shit. If you have to hire Ollie Drake to finish Revenge, he’ll end up working overtime getting ready to shoot Lonesome Trail. The union’ll come after you.”

“Gentlemen, I have a suggestion,” I said, setting the receiver back in its cradle. “Why don’t we all take tomorrow off and spend the day making an orangutan suit?”

“Are you crazy?” Beaudine said.

“Fuck that,” Katzman said.

“I’ll give it to you straight,” I said. “I just learned that, first thing in the morning, I’m off to a secret U.S. Navy installation in the desert.”

“Like hell you are,” Beaudine said. “You’re taking that goddamn ape to Dr. Niemuller so he can turn it into a carnivore.”

“The desert?” said Katzman. “The last I heard, the Navy was a seagoing operation.”

“I’m perfectly serious,” I said, flourishing my New Amsterdam Project ID badge. “On Friday I signed a government contract.” I went on to explain that, for reasons not yet clear to me, the war effort required my acting skills. I told them I was obligated to attend tomorrow’s briefing, then a rehearsal the following week, but the show itself would be closing after one Sunday matinee, so there was every reason to believe we could still bring Revenge in on time.

“What the hell is the New Amsterdam Project?” Beaudine asked.

“The code name for the Daffy Duck Project,” I said.

“You signed a fucking contract without telling me?” Katzman said, seething.

“It’s all very hush-hush,” I said. “You’ll have to shoot around me. I hate to dick with the schedule, but Uncle Sam needs me, and there’s really no choice.”

“Syms may actually have a decent idea there,” Beaudine told Katzman. “I’ll get Dudley to shuffle the call sheets, and tomorrow we’ll shoot Werdistratus strangling Klorg and maybe also the madhouse scene, and meanwhile Trixie can hunt up a cheap orangutan suit. My brother-in-law will play the part. He owes me a big favor, so he’ll do it for nothing. Can the budget handle nothing at this point, Sam?”

“I want to see this government contract of yours,” Katzman informed me.

“I’ll have Darlene bring it around tomorrow,” I said.

“When you get back to the set, tell that Celluloid Critters bozo to come in here, dragging his Bongowi behind him,” Katzman instructed Beaudine. “I want the pleasure of firing that fucking monkey in person.”

If you’re a connoisseur of post-war science fiction films, with their mutant insects, outsized octopi, defrosted dinosaurs, and piscine horrors rising from opaque lagoons, you know that the writers repeatedly employed a conceit that, in retrospect, seems to strike a blow for feminism. Because the audience presumably expected a love interest—though I don’t think the children who actually went to see these pictures were ever consulted in the matter—the male protagonist’s quest to outwit the monster often found him collaborating with a beautiful lady scientist, sometimes the daughter of the dotty old entomologist or paleontologist charged with identifying the menace in question, sometimes simply a career girl with a PH.D., her urge to decipher nature’s secrets having brought her on board whatever research project had inadvertently spawned, unearthed, thawed, annoyed, or lured the beast. As any film historian will tell you, there are more sharp and savvy females per capita in 1950’s sci-fi cinema than in all other genres combined.

Ivan Groelish’s daughter was not beautiful, but she radiated a kind of cerebral sensuality—the ineffable eroticism of intellect—that rendered her knobby chin, droopy eyes, and equivocal lips moot. The farther we got out of the city, Joy driving her ‘39 Chevy convertible at a treacherous seventy-five MPH along a crumbling stretch of two-lane blacktop that would one day transmute into the Antelope Freeway, the more smitten I became. As my high-browed, ovum-domed companion spoke of how Mendelian genetics had revolutionized the field of selective breeding, a subject about which I knew nothing and still do, my heart became crammed to bursting with lascivious sentiments, and I winced internally when she mentioned her engagement to a chemistry professor at the University of San Diego. Owing to Joy’s knowledge of organic molecules and other carnal entities, my emotional infidelity to Darlene persisted throughout the day and many more days to come, a betrayal that I now confess only in light of Poe’s epigraph to “MS. Found in a Bottle,” a quotation from Phillip Quinault. “Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre n’a plus rien a dissimuler.” He who has but a moment to live has nothing more to hide.

We followed Route 14 north through the simmering sands, past the crimson cliffs of Red Rock Canyon, chatting all the while about the trundling mummies and hobbling zombies that had brought my talents to the attention of the Knickerbocker Project. Reaching Route 78, my liaison hooked a right and headed west, racing the Mojave wind to a negligible settlement called Inyokern, where we ordered lunch at the solitary café. We swilled our black coffee, gobbled our wieners, returned to the convertible, and, zooming to the far side of town, encountered a barrage of signs instructing lost travelers to go get lost somewhere else.

CHINA LAKE NAVAL ORDNANCE TEST STATION:

RESTRICTED AREA

INYOKERN BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS

DEVELOPMENT FACILITY:

U.S. PERSONNEL ONLY

ARGUS RANGE RESEARCH CENTER:

KEEP OUT

For a horror actor with the proper security clearance, however, these admonitions meant nothing, and by flashing our ID badges Joy and I successfully negotiated the subsequent succession of checkpoints, sentry boxes, crossing gates, perimeter fences, and German shepherds.

While the China Lake Naval Ordnance Test Station was ostensibly a military installation, under the impetus of the Knickerbocker Project a civilian community had bloomed within its bounds. In deference to the pedestrians, Joy slowed down, cruising along Main Street at a mere forty MPH. Clusters of slapdash bungalows and prefabricated cottages rolled by, their back yards filled with flotillas of laundry drying in the desert air, the rows of monotonous dwellings interspersed with playgrounds, tennis courts, and sandlot baseball fields. Passing the limits of this ad hoc town, Joy once again hit the accelerator, and we flew at full throttle down a sinuous dirt road, a plume of dust and gravel billowing behind us like the wake of a speedboat.

At last my liaison pulled up before a squat structure of poured concrete buttressed with steel, bleak and featureless, like a sepulcher for people who didn’t believe in an afterlife. The briefing bunker, Joy explained. Navy jeeps and staff cars jammed the parking lot. Spreading eastward from the gargantuan building was a vast stretch of water the color of a bruise. These days, of course, China Lake is dry as a mirage, but back then it was wet and deep. Clusters of bubbles bobbed and seethed just below the surface, as if the relentless sun were bringing the water to a boil.

Joy guided me through a reverberant vestibule and into an elevator car. Throughout our long and rapid descent my stomach issued frantic distress calls, while my throat constricted as if being squeezed by the clutching hand in Monogram’s Terror in the Green Room, script by Darlene Wasserman. The next time this tidy little thriller comes on TV, take note of the bearded psychiatrist who shows up in the last scene, spouting the immortal line, “The human mind is deeper than the Mariana Trench.” That’s Sam Katzman himself, demonstrating to the world that he had every right to make a lot of cruddy B-movies, because he sure as hell couldn’t act.

Although Joy had driven like a lunatic to get us to the meeting on time, we were still the last to arrive. Blue-uniformed Naval officers, white-coated biologists, and gray-faced eminences in charcoal suits filled the subterranean briefing room, everyone seated at a circular table that might have last seen service in some Paramount epic about King Arthur. Armed guards stood watch at all four corners. A fug of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Joy introduced me as “the man of the hour,” then systematically presented my two dozen Knickerbocker colleagues, all of whose names I instantly forgot, with three exceptions: Rear Admiral George Yordan, my immediate sponsor, a spindly man with a black eye-patch, Vice Admiral Alexander Strickland, the blowzy Chief of Teratoid Operations, his face as flush and pliant as a hot-water bottle, and Joy’s gnomish, dithery father, Dr. Ivan Groelish. The first time I met Lionel Atwill—at one of Siggy Dagover’s famous parties, back before we’d learned to avoid each other everywhere except movie sets—I thought to myself, “Yes, this man is entirely capable of building an army of psychotic robots and setting them loose on the world,” whereas Ivan Groelish looked barely capable of creating an unruly can opener.

The next ten minutes passed in stupefying small talk, during which interval a deferential sailor served us our choice of iced tea or hot coffee. A scowling commander whose name badge read Barzak informed me that his eleven-year-old son belonged to the Syms Thorley Fan Club, employing the same tone he might have used to confess that the boy smoked reefers. A sallow young biologist, Lance Pellegrino, complimented me on my performance in Beyond the Veil. Though a rationalist at heart, he could “not dismiss the possibility of life after death,” and he thought I’d done a terrific job of “communicating what it’s like to be a ghost.” I told him that, though a romantic at heart, I did not believe in ghosts, “but, of course, if not for life after death, I’d be out of a job.”

At last Admiral Strickland lit a Lucky Strike and, fixing me with the ineluctable stare of a professional basilisk, announced the start of the briefing. “For the sake of getting the best possible performance out of you, Mr. Thorley, we are about to disclose certain highly classified facts. Should you dare to reveal them to another soul, including your paramour back in Santa Monica—well, there’s a word for that.”

“Treason?” I ventured, sipping coffee.

“Bingo, Mr. Thorley. We could have you hanged.”

“You don’t say,” I remarked as my stomach paid a second visit to the descending elevator.

“Last week Commander Quimby informed you that our mission here at China Lake has been to develop a unique variety of biological weapon, in tandem with the Army’s efforts to build a physics bomb,” Dr. Groelish said in his alternately gravelly and squeaky voice. He sounded like a piccolo undergoing puberty. “We shall now show you the fruits of our labors.”

Two guards detached themselves from their niches and activated a system of pulleys, thus causing a pair of crimson drapes to part and reveal an enormous porthole framed by a riveted brass ring, beyond which stretched the bottommost reaches of the lake. Gasping and gaping, I surveyed the frothy deep with its shoals of tuna, constellations of starfish, swarms of eels, throngs of crabs, and three great underwater mountains. I felt like a guest on Captain Nemo’s Nautilus.

“I wouldn’t have guessed it’s a saltwater lake,” I said.

“It’s not,” Admiral Strickland explained. “The Seabees filled the dry bed with brine.”

“Where are the weapons?” I asked. “Are those tuna about to explode?”

Dr. Groelish spread his arms in a gesture that encompassed the whole of China Lake and all its imported inhabitants. “And the Voice from the Whirlwind spake unto Job, saying, ‘Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee.’“

As if on cue, the three mountains trembled—they weren’t mountains at all—stirring up blizzards of silt. What had roused the hellish beasts was not Dr. Groelish’s biblical incantation but a courageous team of twenty Navy frogmen, gingerly approaching from the far shore. Feeding time at the end of the world, or so I surmised from the containers the divers were hauling, three immense steel cages abrim with shimmering fish.

“Our behemoths don’t look especially ferocious now, but that’s because they’re heavily sedated,” Commander Barzak noted.

Sedated or not, the monsters were ravenous. Inch by massive inch, yard by formidable yard, they struggled to stand erect, achieving a fully upright posture just as the cages floated within their grasp. The creatures suggested quarter-mile-high tyrannosaurs, but modified for a marine environment—pulsing gill slits, translucent swim fins, webbing between their talons like the vanes of a Spanish fan—and retrofitted with fighting tusks, barbed horns, feelers as long as tentacles, and dorsal plates the size and proportion of fir trees. Their eyes glowed like signal beacons relaying calamitous news. Their tails were reptiles unto themselves, great undulating sea serpents arrayed in thrusting spines. Hundreds of razor-sharp teeth crammed their jaws, shimmering through the swirling murk like columns supporting a temple consecrated to some unspeakable Lovecraftian god.

“The one with the bright red scales, that’s Dagwood,” Dr. Pellegrino informed me. “Beside him you see Blondie, with the blue stripes on her flanks, and over there we have Mr. Dithers, whose barbels are a hundred feet long.”

“Our biggest challenge was figuring out how to induce accelerated maturation in common desert lizards, so we could breed them as rapidly as fruit flies,” Dr. Groelish said. “Once we’d licked that problem, we knew the weapon would become a reality. Trace our behemoths back fifteen generations, and you’ll encounter three innocuous iguanas.”

Dagwood was the first to feast, seizing his portion of fish and stuffing the whole arrangement, cage and all, into his maw. As the monster bit down, the steel bars snapped like uncooked spaghetti. Next Blondie devoured her meal in one gulp, after which Mr. Dithers consumed his dragon chow. While the behemoths seemed to relish their lunches, I was on the point of relinquishing mine. There was nothing good about Dr. Groelish’s monsters. These abominations should never have been born—born, synthesized, stitched together, alchemically confected, necromantically conjured, however they’d come into the world.

“Any one behemoth, acting on his own, could probably destroy a Japanese city in a matter of hours,” Admiral Strickland said. “Just to be on the safe side, we plan to release them in teams of three.”

“Dr. Groelish informs us that, besides Blondie, Dagwood, and Mr. Dithers, his team has twenty embryonic behemoths in the hatchery,” Commander Barzak said. “There’s never been an arsenal like this. We can thank our lucky stars that Hitler never got the lizard.”

“One advantage of this weapon over conventional ordnance is that it doesn’t require a delivery system,” Strickland boasted. “No bombers needed, no rockets, no long-range cannons. We simply have to tow the sedated creature into Japanese coastal waters via submarine. As the tranquilizer wears off, we give the beast a colossal jolt of freedom by abruptly removing its shackles. This chain reaction now combines with the behemoth’s instinctive viciousness to send it swimming to shore and rampaging across the countryside in search of a metropolis to incinerate.”

“Incinerate?” I said. “They breathe fire?”

“Of course they breathe fire,” Barzak said. “Why do you think they cost the taxpayers five hundred million dollars?”

“Next you’ll be telling me they fly,” I said.

“We looked into that,” Dr. Pellegrino said.

“Bernoulli’s principle shot us down,” Dr. Groelish said.

“So, Mr. Thorley, what do you think?” Strickland asked.

“About what?”

“The Knickerbocker Project.”

“You want my honest opinion?”

“Yes.”

“Gentlemen, you are mad,” I said.

“When we want your opinion, we’ll ask for it,” Barzak said.

“You’re really going to set these horrors loose on civilian populations?” I tried to swallow more coffee but merely ended up gargling with it.

“Evidently you don’t have any younger brothers in the Pacific right now, getting ready to invade Japan,” Barzak said.

Now my liaison spoke up for the first time. “Personally, I’m glad the weapon makes Syms squeamish,” Joy said. “That means his performance will be all the more sincere.”

“Here’s the deal, Mr. Thorley,” Strickland said. “This past winter, after the Ardennes counteroffensive fell apart, it became clear that the European War would soon end, and by extension our lizard race with the Nazis. Sensing an opportunity, certain well-meaning biologists attached to the Knickerbocker Project, notably Dr. Groelish, plus a few high-minded Naval officers, notably Admiral Yordan, sent a petition to President Truman. They implored him to forbid biological sneak attacks against the Japanese.”

“Instead, we advocated demonstrating the new weapon before an enemy delegation,” Yordan said. “These witnesses would then, we hypothesized, convince the Imperial Government in Tokyo that capitulation was the best option.”

“Sounds logical,” I said.

“The problem is that Emperor Hirohito has always given his War Minister the last word in every political decision,” Strickland said. “Rather than hand his sword to General MacArthur, General Anami would prefer to see every Nip man, woman, and child go down fighting.”

“Come, come, Admiral,” Dr. Groelish said. “Tokyo is burning, the Japanese navy’s at the bottom of the sea, the blockade has brought famine, and the Russians are making noises about entering the Pacific Theater. A lizard demonstration should be all that’s needed to make Hirohito stand up to Anami.”

“A reasonable theory,” I said.

“I didn’t attend this meeting so I could hear some B-movie hambone give us his views on strategic doctrine,” Barzak said.

“If it were up to me,” Strickland said, pointing both extended index fingers in my direction like Bob Steele aiming his six-guns, “I’d clobber the enemy with Blondie and Dagwood right now and get it over with. Alas, it’s not up to me. Ten days ago the President, having consulted with the Interim Committee of the Knickerbocker Project, cabled China Lake with his final decision. He wants us to try leveraging an unconditional Jap surrender through reptilian intimidation.”

“Fortunately, we’re prepared to carry out the President’s orders,” Dr. Groelish said. “Twenty-four hours after we mailed the China Lake Petition to Mr. Truman, Dr. Pellegrino and my daughter began laying the groundwork for a dramatic but bloodless behemoth demonstration, so that V-J Day might follow hard on the heels of V-E Day. Operation Fortune Cookie.”

“Is that the code name,” I asked, “or the code name’s code name?”

“We already know you’re a weisenheimer, Thorley,” Barzak said. “It’s in your dossier.”

“We decided that in their present torpid state our mutant iguanas weren’t going to scare anybody,” Dr. Groelish said. “Yes, we could always remove the lizards from the lake and wake them up before a Japanese delegation, but if the animals subsequently went berserk, left the base, and attacked Los Angeles, the enemy would have the last laugh.”

“Then the professor got a brainstorm,” Yordan said. “Mr. Hilbert, let’s go to the movies.”

A lanky ensign rose from the briefing table, vanished through the rear door, and returned pushing a library cart holding a loaded Bell & Howell 16mm projector. As Hilbert plugged in the machine, another ensign marched across the room, grabbed a metal loop, and unscrolled a bright beaded screen.

“My idea was to breed a miniature form of the weapon,” Dr. Groelish said. “With such a creature in hand, we could invite the enemy delegation into this room and show them Blondie, Dagwood, and Mr. Dithers. Later that same day, we would take the emissaries to Laboratory B and let them see our dwarf behemoths. The delegation’s final stop would be an airplane hangar containing an elaborate scale model of an idealized Japanese city, which our most aggressive dwarf would proceed to stomp and burn before their eyes.”

“One can easily imagine the psychological impact of such a demonstration,” Dr. Pellegrino said. “The emissaries will go running to Hirohito, fall on their knees, and beg him to keep Japan from becoming the first casualty of the Lizard Age.”

“Or so you imagine,” Barzak said.

Ensign Hilbert switched on the projector, and a black-and-white image flickered across the screen: Joy standing in a gulch next to a dwarf behemoth. The creature was a perfect facsimile of Dagwood, with two nontrivial differences. He was barely a foot taller than Joy, and there was nothing remotely intimidating about him. This lizard could not have demoralized a kitten or frightened a squirrel up a tree, much less given a Japanese diplomat the fantods. Just as the shot ended, the dwarf licked Joy’s cheek with his long moist tongue.

“I named him Rex,” she said.

“As you can see, the Midget Lizard Initiative was a disaster,” Dr. Groelish said. “For reasons we don’t yet understand, any juvenile version of a bipedal mutant iguana is completely docile.”

Jump-cut to Joy throwing a beach ball to another dwarf behemoth. The monster bounced the ball off his knee, then allowed it to settle on his snout. A circus seal could not have performed the trick with greater dexterity.

“Her name is Evelyn,” Joy said.

“Of course, we’re still free to display our three midget lizards to the enemy delegation,” Dr. Groelish said, “provided we bend the truth a bit and insist that they’re torpid because they’ve been tranquilized—a safety precaution, we’ll call it—thus masking their congenital meekness.”

“This is where you come in,” Yordan said, fixing me with his solitary eye. “In order for the Jap emissaries to end up witnessing a fire-breathing lizard wrecking our scale-model city, we’ll have to use an actor in a suit. If you can convince the delegation that you’re midget lizard number four—that is, a real, live, unsedated dwarf behemoth—and if you can destroy the model with credible savagery, then we might, just might, pull this bunny out of the bonnet.”

I clicked my fingers nervously against my empty coffee mug, producing a series of brittle pings. “Performance as persuasion,” I muttered.

“Exactly,” Dr. Groelish said.

Jump-cut to yet another dwarf behemoth, paddling merrily across China Lake, Joy mounted on his back. “We call him Oswald,” she said.

“One complicating factor is that on Saturday the New Mexico team got some bad news,” Yordan said. “There won’t be enough weapons-grade uranium on the planet for at least a year.”

“No physics bomb?” I asked.

Yordan nodded and said, “The President must now put all his eggs in the behemoth basket.”

“Naturally we hope Operation Fortune Cookie gets the Japs crapping in their kimonos, but if it fails”—a Lugosian gleam entered both of Strickland’s eyes—“Truman will have no choice but to deploy the lizards strategically.”

“We don’t want to put too much pressure on you, but it’s essential that you understand the stakes,” Yordan said. “Turn in a masterful performance, and the Pacific War may end happily.”

“Screw it up, and we’ll be forced to bust a Jap city or two,” Strickland added.

Beads of sweat burst from my brow. Blood thumped in my ears. My breathing grew labored, as if I were back in my Flesh of Iron robot costume.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“Of course you can,” Yordan insisted.

“Don’t be silly,” Dr. Groelish chided me.

“We’re counting on you,” Dr. Pellegrino averred.

“You signed a contract,” Strickland noted.

“I can’t do it,” I said again.

“Syms needs some fresh air,” Joy told Strickland. “Let me take him topside. Once he clears the smoke out of his head, I’m sure he’ll play ball.”

“Forget it,” I said.

“Syms, dear, we need to talk,” Joy said. “I can’t do it.”

By the time we’d finished the day’s second elevator ride and stepped into the blaze of the Mojave sun, Joy had convinced me that I could do it—or, rather, that I must do it, because what other choice was there? Beyond Operation Fortune Cookie lay only two alternatives, both horrible: either a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland, with innumerable casualties on both sides, or a full-scale behemoth attack on that same nation, with countless innocent civilians suffering immolation.

Admiral Yordan, Commander Barzak, and Dr. Groelish soon joined us on the broiling sands. “Mr. Thorley has seen the light,” Joy told them.

“Up to a point, Admiral Strickland will be pleased,” Barzak said, making an about-face and heading back to the briefing bunker.

Yordan guided us toward his staff car, where an acne-mottled sailor sat behind the wheel, looking eager to chauffeur his boss almost anywhere that wasn’t the Pacific Theater.

“I’m confused,” I said as we scrambled into the vehicle. “If the lizard demonstration comes a cropper, hasn’t the United States lost the element of surprise?”

“That’s a risk we’re all happy to take,” Dr. Groelish said.

“No, professor, it’s a lesser evil we’re all willing to tolerate,” Yordan said.

“No, Admiral, it’s a lesser evil you’re willing to tolerate,” Joy said. “You heard Strickland. He’s hoping Truman will change his mind and unleash Blondie on Kyoto tomorrow.”

Dr. Groelish told Yordan he needed to administer some nutrients to the twenty embryonic behemoths, and so our first stop become the main Knickerbocker laboratory, an imposing installation comprising a dozen interconnected domes rising from the sand like enormous beehives. A lurid billboard stood outside the facility, reminding the civilian scientists that academic freedom was not the norm at China Lake.

WHAT YOU SEE HERE

WHAT YOU HEAR HERE

WHAT YOU DO HERE

LET IT STAY HERE

We dropped off the mild-mannered monster-maker and continued our journey, speeding west past ranks of cacti and stands of acacia, eventually reaching an immense aluminum building labeled Naval Ordnance Test Station: Hangar A. Until six months ago, Yordan explained, the facility had been used to store and service Grumman F8F Bearcats and Consolidated PB4Y Privateers, but the Seabees had renovated the place top to bottom. Cecil B. DeMille, I decided, had nothing on the Pentagon. If the Navy wanted to transform an airplane hangar into a coliseum, put on a single apocalyptic matinee, then change the place back into a hangar, that’s precisely what would happen.

The instant I stepped into the hot, cavernous structure, I felt right at home, for it immediately evoked a Monogram sound stage, though much bigger, large enough to accommodate not only a miniature facsimile of a major Japanese city sprawling across a raised platform—Shirazuka, Island of Honshu, according to the placard—but also a maze of catwalks outfitted with klieg lights and, suspended directly above the great model, a tier of stadium seating. Glass panels enclosed the posh balcony, presumably so the delegation would be spared the smoke, heat, and noise of Operation Fortune Cookie. For a full minute I simply stood and stared, wonderstruck at the hypothetical metropolis. Still under construction, it was easily the most astonishing objet d’art I’d ever seen, a sprawling expanse of factories, government buildings, office complexes, hotels, theaters, stores, apartments, temples, gardens, parks, and bridges, all decorated with signs and billboards beautifully lettered in kanji. Swathed in artificial clouds, a range of snow-capped peaks rose in the distance, the highest surmounted by the Imperial Palace. This was the sort of electric train set God’s favorite cherubs got to play with—and among its marvels, in fact, was an O-gauge steam engine hauling a dozen coaches along a trestle-borne route running between the city and the hills. Besides the passenger train, the layout featured several locomotives pulling long strands of freight cars, plus an elaborate trolley system whisking its commuting patrons through downtown Shirazuka. Tiny barges plied the river. Toy merchant ships navigated the bay. Destroyers, cruisers, carriers, and a dreadnought lay moored in the harbor.

My awe was diminished only by the scores of craftsmen tiptoeing through the little city, their outsized bodies adding a touch of comical incongruity. A necessary invasion, for there were still many jobs to accomplish in the remaining weeks: painting buildings, paving roads, planting trees, hanging clouds, stringing telephone lines—each such operation being directed with great élan by a lively civilian foreman wearing jodhpurs and wielding a megaphone. How gratifying to see these legions of skilled Hollywood artisans in the Navy’s gainful employ, especially since, owing to the carpenters’ strike, most of them could no longer find paid work back at the studios.

“This is a masterpiece,” I said.

“They’re building another little city over in Hangar B,” Joy explained. “Not an exact duplicate, much rougher, vulgar really—inferior materials, paper, cardboard, balsa wood, tin foil—but it’ll do for the rehearsal.”

“This way, Thorley,” Yordan said, guiding me toward the harbor. A bronze chamber suggesting a bathyscaphe lay embedded in the bottom of the four-foot-deep pool. “The tank connects to the outside wall of the hangar. Before the Jap delegation arrives, you’ll pop the hatch on the dry side and climb into the compartment. As the curtain rises, you’ll open the wet hatch and breach the surface.”

“It will be the greatest entrance in the history of theater,” Joy said, joining us by the bay. “A primordial dragon emerging from the deep to spread chaos, panic, and pragmatism throughout Shirazuka.”

I certainly wasn’t expecting to meet anyone I knew, but I now recognized the foreman as a colleague: Willis O’Brien, who’d thrilled filmgoers with his stop-motion animation for the silent Lost World and, eight years later, King Kong—though, sad to say, he hadn’t worked on any equally classy monster movies since. I imagine he detested Son of Kong no less than did the audiences who never went to see it.

“Mr. O’Brien?” I inquired tentatively.

The special-effects wizard cast me a skeptical glance. “Do I know you? Or, more to the point, am I allowed to know you?”

“He’s allowed to know you, but he’s not allowed to know what you know about Operation Fortune Cookie unless he already knows it,” Yordan explained. “And vice versa.”

“Syms Thorley,” I said, shaking the great man’s hand.

“Call me Obie.”

“We once met on a Sam Katzman set,” I told him. “Mack Stengler had recruited you to help with the first shot of Corpuscula. You were racking focus while the camera traveled toward your wonderful model of Castle Werdistratus. I had my monster makeup on, so you probably don’t remember me.”

“I was proud of that castle,” Obie said. “We had birthday candles flickering in the windows.”

“Is Castle Werdistratus the reason you got this job?” I asked.

“In truth it was The Last Days of Pompeii. God, what a lousy picture. Blacksmith gets perfect family, blacksmith loses perfect family, blacksmith finds Jesus, everybody dies. Ah, but my erupting Vesuvius, now that was something. Earthquakes reducing the temples to instant ruins. Fiery ash raining down from the skies. Two tons of steaming oatmeal gushing through the streets.”

“I actually thought the Jesus stuff was pretty moving,” I noted. Back then, we assimilated Jews said shit like that without even thinking about it.

“I can’t blame you for missing my credit,” Obie said. “‘Chief technician Willis O’Brien’—what the hell is that supposed to mean? I wanted the card to read, ‘Catechism by Jesus Christ. Cataclysm by Willis O’Brien.’“ He turned to Joy and offered her a conspiratorial wink. “Don’t tell me. Syms here is slated to play the lizard, right?”

Before she could answer, Yordan interposed his spidery frame between Joy and Obie. “Let’s go over it once more, O’Brien. When a civilian drops by Hangar A, you can talk about three things: baseball, gas rationing, and the goddamn heat—period.”

“Might I again make the case for using stop-motion instead of a sap in a suit?” Obie asked Yordan. “In three weeks the Lydecker boys could build you a scaled-down version of our Shirazuka miniature, and meanwhile Marcel and I will come up with an absolutely sensational behemoth model, fire-breathing, naturally, and with wings. Give me forty shooting days and a competent crew, and I’ll deliver a spectacle that will make my Vesuvius explosion look like a fifth-grade science project.”

“There isn’t enough time,” Yordan said.

“All right—two weeks for Babe and Ted to build the city, another two weeks for me to animate the scene,” Obie said. “If you’re worried about the budget, we’ll do it in sixteen millimeter.”

“The Jap emissaries have seen monster movies before. Maybe they’ve even seen King Kong. No, this has to be a live performance.”

Obie sighed in resentful resignation, then faced Shirazuka and, raising his megaphone, issued an order to a hip-booted artisan standing knee-deep in the harbor. “The water’s still not dark enough! This is the goddamn Jap Ragnarok, Buzzy! I want it to look like the Devil’s own ink!” He pivoted toward a craftsman perched atop the mountain range. “Those clouds are all wrong! I want cumulus ice cream, and you’re giving me cirrus cotton candy!”

“I hope you appreciate what you have in that man,” I told my companions.

“Professionalism?” Joy suggested.

“Obsession,” I said. “Without it, Hollywood wouldn’t exist.”

“Neither would the Empire of Japan,” Yordan said. “Me, I’ll take professionalism.” Our final stop of the day was a rambling brick structure with an adjoining Quonset hut, the whole installation bearing the code name Château Mojave. It was here that Joy and Admiral Yordan had arranged for me to meet my writer, my director, my costumers, and—most important of all—my reptilian alter ego. We entered the main building, a gloomy atelier permeated by the saccharine reek of glue and the smoky aroma of tanned leather. Artisans wearing New Amsterdam ID badges bustled about carrying dressmaker’s dummies and rolls of fabric. Seated at the central worktable, two robust women—identical twins—sorted through a surreal inventory of eyeballs, talons, lizard scales, and webbed amphibian feet. Joy made the introductions. The creators of my behemoth suit were the celebrated Rubinstein sisters, Gladys and Mabel, who’d fashioned the full-scale, prophet-swallowing, profit-making whale for DeMille’s Voyage of Jonah, as well as the gigantic crocodile for the same mogul’s Trials of Job.

“We sewed the last stitch an hour ago,” Gladys Rubinstein said, pointing toward the far corner. Cloaked in a tattered serape, a hulking mass rose against the window, blocking the daylight. “We’ll do the unveiling when Brenda and Jimmy get here.”

The talents to whom she referred, our temperamental writer and sardonic director, arrived only five minutes apart, each accompanied by a distressed ensign who looked like he’d rather be supervising a large African carnivore. These two Hollywood stalwarts were, respectively, the very Brenda Weisberg who’d goaded Darlene into writing Corpuscula, and the very James Whale who’d given the world the first two Frankenstein films. Within the monster-movie subculture of mid-forties Hollywood, Brenda was perceived as the sort of commendable hack without whom the industry couldn’t function, but Whale was something else, a cult figure, an ambulatory myth. He dressed the part as well, his three-piece silk suit accessorized by an ascot and a walking stick.

“What are you working on now, Mr. Whale?” I asked, realizing too late that my question might be in bad taste.

“Beating the Japanese, Syms, just like you,” he replied. “Call me Jimmy.” His precise British accent struck me as cultivated in both senses of the word, as if he’d made the Shavian move of promoting himself to the upper class through sheer linguistic facility.

“I’m thrilled to be collaborating with you, Mr. Whale. Jimmy.”

“Collaborating?” Whale echoed with amiable indignation. “Good heavens, Syms, you make us sound like a couple of Vichy quislings. By the way, I rarely patronize the cinema these days, so please don’t ask me if I’ve seen your work. I’m sure it’s marvelous. Truth to tell, I wanted Boris for the role, but apparently Dr. Groelish and his daughter wouldn’t hear of anyone but the Monogram Shambler.”

“Karloff is brilliant, but not quite athletic enough,” Joy explained.

“May I assume Miss Weisberg brought the script with her?” Whale asked.

“She’s not permitted to have that particular document on her person until we work out the kinks in her security clearance,” Yordan said.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Whale said. “Are you saying Miss Weisberg was allowed to write the script, but she’s not allowed to possess it?”

“She’s not even allowed to read it,” Yordan said. “So far, the only people who enjoy that privilege are Admiral Strickland, Secretary of State Byrnes, and Secretary of War Stimson. The old man wired his approval to China Lake this morning.”

“You want a summary?” Brenda offered.

“Please,” Whale said.

“I call it What Rough Beast.”

“I don’t get it,” Yordan said.

“Yeats,” Brenda said.

“We’re at war, Miss Weisberg,” Yordan said. “Poetry sends the wrong message.”

“If anybody changes the title, I’m walking,” Whale said.

“Jimmy, you are a man of breeding,” I said.

“Savoir-fairy,” Whale said with a sly grin.

“I see what you mean.”

“I’m not sure you do, Syms. Love is a many-gendered thing.”

At this juncture Dr. Groelish ambled into the Château Mojave, just in time to hear Brenda offer her précis of What Rough Beast.

“We start with a totally dark stage. Nighttime in Shirazuka. As the moon rises, so does Gorgantis, lurching out of Toyama Bay like a monster from an aquatic hell.”

“Gorgantis?” Whale said. “Tsk, tsk, that will never do.”

“I like it,” Joy said.

“You got a better idea, Jimmy?” Brenda asked.

“We’re keeping it, Whale,” Yordan said.

“The first engagement takes place entirely by moonlight,” Brenda said. “The monster sinks every warship in the harbor, including the dreadnought Yamato, then wades ashore and devours an entire passenger train. End of act one.”

“Does the Yamato defend herself?” Whale asked.

“O’Brien put working turrets on the foredeck,” Yordan replied. “It fires BB’S. Very impressive.”

“After the sun comes up, Gorgantis tromps through the heart of the city, crushing and burning everything in his path,” Brenda said. “The Japs send in what’s left of the Imperial Air Force, but the monster swats the planes out of the sky like mosquitoes. End of act two.”

“More of O’Brien’s models?” Whale asked.

“Radio-controlled fighters and dive bombers,” Yordan said, nodding.

“Finally, the lizard heads for the Chiaki Mountains, determined to bring the war to the Emperor’s doorstep,” Brenda said. “The enemy counterattacks with tanks and artillery, but Gorgantis melts them with his blazing breath. The climax comes when he leans over Mount Onibaba and pulps the Imperial Palace with his claws. Fade-out.”

“Elapsed time?” Whale asked.

“Twenty-five minutes, a half-hour at most,” Brenda said.

“Sounds about right,” Yordan said. “We mustn’t bore the delegation.”

“I don’t suppose I have any lines,” I said.

“Only roars,” Brenda said.

Yordan managed a glower with his good eye. “It’s time you met your PRR.”

Gladys seized the serape with both hands, whipping it away as abruptly as a magician unclothing a dinner table without disturbing the place settings. Qui n’a plus qu’un moment a vivre n’a plus rien a dissimuler, so let me now confess that the instant I laid eyes on my Personal Reptile Rig, I fell madly in love with it. To view a dwarf behemoth in a 16mm black-and-white longshot was one thing, to contemplate such a creature in the flesh quite another. Jaws dropping, eyes expanding, the What Rough Beast troupe stood in amazement before the Rubinsteins’ creation, savoring the elegant green asbestos scales, golden dorsal plates, mighty tail, helical horns, swirling barbels, and tusks as bright and sharp as samurai swords.

“I can work with this,” Whale said.

“Magnificent,” Joy said.

“Spectacular,” Dr. Groelish said.

“Fabulous,” Brenda said.

“There’s a backup suit in the Quonset hut,” Mabel noted, “just in case this one gets damaged in the run-through.”

“The Navy has always appreciated the power of redundancy,” Yordan said.

“Syms, I have one word for you,” Whale said. “Caliban.”

“Of course,” I said, as if I understood what he was getting at. Although I could see no obvious connection between the son of Sycorax and my Gorgantis character, Whale obviously did, which probably explained why he was a living legend and I was starring in Revenge of Corpuscula.

“This is not a cerebral part,” Whale elaborated. “You are a monster from the id. You are Death with haunches, la Grande Faucheuse with scales. Feel your way into your swampiest self. Cavort, gambol, improvise, surprise. ‘Thou poisonous slave, got by the Devil himself upon thy wicked dam, come forth!’“

“Like hell he’s going to improvise,” Yordan said. “He’s going to follow the script exactly.”

“It’s okay, Admiral,” Brenda said.

“I’m used to it. If I don’t give the director material he can capriciously throw away on the set, I’m not doing my job.”

Humming and cooing, the Rubinsteins began the laborious process of inserting me into their handiwork, which was really a kind of diving bell, its portals sealed with waterproof zippers, its air enriched with pure oxygen delivered by an aluminum cylinder embedded in the monster’s stomach. Throughout the costuming procedure Whale entertained everyone with stories from what were for him, alas, already the good old days. The director was in mourning for the thirties, that freewheeling era when you could make a witty horror satire like Bride of Frankenstein, a slapstick sci-fi lark like The Invisible Man, or a fever dream like The Old Dark House without the front office fussing too much about whether the audience would get it. You could even shoot, for the original Frankenstein, Colin Clive delivering a deliciously blasphemous line after successfully vivifying his monster, and of course the censors would lift it from the soundtrack, leaving the actor’s lips moving mutely on the screen, but how wonderful to realize he was saying, “Now I know what it’s like to be God!”

Within a half-hour I was suited up. I felt simultaneously empowered and entombed. The PRR required me to endure many physical discomforts: the rubbery stench, the claustrophobic atmosphere, the torrid temperature, and, most of all, the pressure of Gorgantis’s immense head, suspended several inches above my cranium on U-shaped braces clamped to my shoulders and separated from the creature’s body by a neoprene seal—the idea being that if any water leaked into the mouth, the main cavity would remain dry. The skull and its contents weighed almost as much as the rest of the costume, being crammed not only with palisades of teeth but also the flamethrower nozzle, my Klaxon voice-box, and the batteries that illuminated the monster’s eyes. Equally distressing was my limited field of vision, circumscribed by the tiny isinglass peepholes in my chest, which Gladys and Mabel had ingeniously wired to the eyeball batteries, lest my breath fog them up. Beyond these anomalies, the thing functioned essentially as a suit of clothes, with Gorgantis’s ponderous hind legs encasing my equivalent limbs like a pair of seven-league boots, while my arms fit snugly into his forelegs and their attached claws. On Gladys’s orders I wrapped my right hand around a squeezable bulb that through compressed-air technology would simultaneously open Gorgantis’s jaws, activate his roar, and cause his tail to oscillate like a broom. Mabel, meanwhile, instructed me to curl my left hand around a similar bulb that, once my tail was filled with gasoline, would make smoke gush from my nostrils like steam from a tea kettle and flames leap from my mouth in great crimson streamers.

“You look terrific,” Joy said.

Gingerly I attempted my first step. The walls of my rubbery crypt echoed with the coarse rhythm of my breathing. Despite my fears, the bulky suit came with me, tail and all, and I stayed on my feet. A second step. So far, so good. A third step. Miraculously, I didn’t topple over.

My colleagues broke into spontaneous applause, with Whale remarking, in all seriousness, “This is going to be my comeback.”

I tried a dozen more steps, getting halfway across the atelier, but then the great mass of the PRR—my epic thighs, titanic tail, the cylinder in my belly—began exacting its toll, and I paused to catch my breath.

“How’re you doing?” Gladys asked.

“I wish you’d used lighter materials,” I said, gasping, each word muffled by my vulcanized habitat.

“If you think it’s heavy now, wait till they load your tail with petrol,” Whale said.

“I’m having trouble keeping my balance,” I said. “Will the gasoline stabilize me?”

“Probably not,” Mabel said.

“So what should I do?”

“Practice, practice, practice,” Whale said.

“Give us a roar, Syms,” Joy said.

I squeezed my right hand, and there emerged from the behemoth’s larynx a sound like nothing I’d ever heard before, a primordial, elemental, preternatural GRRAAGGHHH!, even as my tail swept the floor, sending chairs and wastebaskets hurtling in all directions. For one glowing moment Operation Fortune Cookie made complete sense to me. For a brief incandescent interval I believed that What Rough Beast was going to end the Pacific War. Now I knew what it was like to be God.

III

TIFFANY THE HOOKER left my room over an hour ago, off on another house call, but her apple face still floats through my mind, her lilting voice rings in my ear, and her wretched perfume lingers everywhere. Our intercourse, I should hasten to report, was entirely of the verbal variety, so if you’re looking for something spicier than banter about Japanese monster movies, skip to the kinky encounter between Darlene and me that I’m planning to include later in this chapter. But for now I feel bound to say a few words about Tiffany’s visit. Should I decide to cancel my jump, this tart with a heart of gold—evidently such creatures exist, which may be why my father never proscribed their appearance in movies—will deserve much of the credit.

I’d just finished writing about the Knickerbocker behemoths enjoying their quick little picnic at the bottom of China Lake, when someone started pounding on my door. The intruder proved to be a young woman costumed like a belly dancer, with baggy blue trousers, silver breastplates, and a sequined monkey jacket.

“Trick or treat!” she said.

I’d forgotten it was the weekend before Halloween. “Are you with the convention?”

“Nope, I’m Tiffany with the Starlight Escort Service,” she said, holding up a Gladstone bag. “What convention?”

“Wonderama. Every monster-movie fan east of the Mississippi is here.”

“That would explain the giant Gorgantis balloon on the roof. If you’re Marty Kreske, allow me to escort you anywhere you want to go, from the hottest dance club to the deepest reaches of my gravy boat.”

“Did you write that line yourself?”

“I wish. My big sister’s in charge of the scripts. Lucy’s got a knack for words. I use my tongue otherwise.”

“I’m not Marty Kreske.”

“Really? How come? It says Room 2014 right there on your door.”

“True enough, but my name’s Syms Thorley.”

In pursuing our conversation, Tiffany and I soon decided that her intended customer was most likely staying in the hotel but that the Starlight dispatcher had transposed two digits when taking down the gentleman’s room number. I invited Tiffany to use my phone. She called the desk and asked to be connected to Marty Kreske.

“The horny little sucker’s supposed to be in 2014,” she said demurely.

The mystery was soon solved. There was indeed a Kreske on the premises, and he had indeed ordered the Seraglio Special, three hundred dollars for two hours of Tiffany’s parted thighs and undivided attention. However, he was just as glad that the dispatcher had turned 2041 into 2014, because he’d recently lost his wallet, probably through carelessness, possibly theft, and the consequent distress had doused his desire for an ersatz Turkish courtesan.

I was not surprised when, after thanking me for the phone, accepting a glass of amontillado, declining a cigarette, and heading for the door, Tiffany paused at the threshold and said, “I don’t suppose . . . “

“You see before you a man who is suicidally depressed,” I told her. “I’m not morally opposed to doing business with you, but I wouldn’t be able to hold up my end of things.”

“What’ve you got to be suicidally depressed about?” she asked, drifting back into the room.

“Something I did before you were born. Or didn’t do. This morning, for some reason, it all came home to roost.”

“You want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“If I gave you a blowjob, maybe that would change your point of view.”

“You’re sweet.”

“No, I’m out three hundred dollars.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s happened before.”

“I should get back to work.”

For Tiffany a passable paraphrase of “I should get back to work” was evidently “Please make yourself at home,” because now she sauntered toward my desk, seized my Raydo, and, settling onto the green Naugahyde ottoman, scrutinized the statuette with a combination of perplexity and wonderment. “Syms K. Thorley, Lifetime Achievement Award, Baltimore Imagi-Movies Society, 1984,” she read. “Are you a movie director?”

“An actor.”

“Really? Me, too, in a way, only except they don’t give out trophies on my side of the street. Have I seen any of your pictures?”

“Tiffany, darling, there’s over fifty dollars in my wallet. It’s all yours. Where I’m going they don’t accept cash, just indulgences, and then only if you’re Catholic.”

“Why is the monster attacking a lighthouse?” she asked, caressing the pewter rhedosaurus.

“The original story is about a lighthouse keeper who discovers that, once a year, a lonely sea-dwelling dinosaur answers the call of his foghorn.”

“The dinosaur wants a friend?”

“A friend, yes. But he’s the last of his kind.”

“That’s so sad.”

“The idea got lost in the transition to the screen. Ray Bradbury called his story ‘The Fog Horn.’ The movie ended up as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.”

“That’s a better title.” Tiffany set the Raydo back atop my manuscript, thus resurrecting its function as a paperweight. “The easiest way to kill yourself, I’ve heard, is to tie a plastic bag around your head. That’s my plan if I ever get cancer.”

“I’m thinking of leaping out the window,” I said, retrieving my wallet from atop the television.

“I can’t accept your money without giving you something in return.”

“Consider it a retainer against a future blowjob.”

“Kind of a down payment?” Tiffany said, her voice rising so I wouldn’t miss the joke.

I slid all fifty-three dollars from my wallet, and, taking her creamy hand, each finger adorned with silver rings and hot-pink nail polish, pressed the bills into her palm. Come morning, of course, I would need money to tip the shuttle driver and grab some coffee at the airport, but I could always cash a check at the desk on my way out.

“I go to the movies a lot,” Tiffany said. “I’ve probably seen you on the big screen without knowing it.”

“Only if you’re a Gorgantis fan.”

“Gorgantis? The same Gorgantis they’ve got on the roof?” She extended her arm, fluttering her decorous fingers. “You’re shitting me! You’re a Gorgantis actor? I love those movies! My favorite is Gorgantis Strikes Back. Were you in that one?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“What about Fury of Mechagorgantis?” she asked, popping the money into her Gladstone bag.

“I was in that one, too.”

“How did they make you look so Japanese?”

“You’re correct to suppose I needed a lot of makeup—but not so I’d look Japanese.”

“Huh?”

“Think about it.”

Tiffany lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. “Hey, wow, now I understand! This is so cool! I can’t believe I’m standing here talking to Gorgantis himself! I wish I had a video for you to autograph.”

Driven by my natural Darwinian instinct for self-promotion, I told Tiffany she could acquire such merchandise in the Wonderama huckster’s room on the mezzanine level, but she’d have to act quickly, because it closed in twenty minutes. She spun around and fled my suite. I went back to work, narrating the rest of the briefing bunker scene, Admiral Strickland’s reluctant revelation that President Truman had endorsed the China Lake Petition. A half-hour later Tiffany returned, bearing not only a VHS cassette of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica but an indelible magic marker. I signed the slipcase using my most florid pseudo-calligraphy.

“And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m trying to beat a deadline,” I said, an assertion that, transmogrified by Tiffany’s imagination, became a request that she insert the movie in the VCR and start watching it while sprawled across my bed.

I resumed my autobiographical efforts, recounting my conversation with Obie as I stood in Hangar A admiring his Shirazuka model. Tiffany thoughtfully kept the soundtrack of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica as low as possible. We took turns hitting the amontillado and the Camel filters. At one point my roommate picked up the phone and, without consulting me, ordered dinner for both of us. Somehow she intuited that I was fond of chicken cacciatore, even the kind they serve in Holiday Inns.

After the food arrived, we lay on the bed together watching the rest of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica. The picture was better than I remembered. My performance struck me as flamboyant without being overwrought. I’d forgotten how skillfully I did the ju-jitsu moves. Throughout the second-act climax, which involved the monsters trying to stuff each other down an active volcano, Tiffany emitted noises that I chose to interpret as gasps of excitement, though perhaps she was suppressing a laugh. I finished my chicken and returned to my labors, writing about the unveiling of my PRR in the Château Mojave. Shortly after setting down Jimmy Whale’s line, “Practice, practice, practice,” I glanced toward the bed. Tiffany was gone. A piece of Holiday Inn stationery lay on the pillow. She’d written her message with the same indelible marker I’d used to sign the video.

Dear Mr. Thorley,

Thanks to you, this was the best Halloween weekend ever. I really enjoyed Gorgantis vs. Miasmica, especially knowing it was you fighting the walking toxic waste dump.

Whatever you did before I was born, even if it was murdering somebody, jumping out a window won’t fix it.

I believe that one day the dinosaur will find another of his kind, instead of just a lighthouse.

Your friend,

Tiffany Nolan

The amontillado is nearly depleted, but I’ve still got plenty of ink and paper. The cigs are holding out, too. If all goes well, by midnight I’ll have finished describing our chaotic What Rough Beast rehearsal. Farewell, my adorable Tiffany. I’ll always be a little bit in love with you.

Practice, practice, practice, Jimmy Whale had said, but Admiral Yordan still detested the idea of my taking the Gorgantis suit home with me, and he remained unsympathetic even after Gladys and Mabel reminded him about the backup PRR in the Quonset hut. For the next hour Whale tried to convince Yordan that I could never deliver a transcendent performance unless I spent as much time as possible inhabiting the behemoth’s neoprene flesh.

“I don’t really expect you to understand, Admiral, but this is about art,” Whale said. “It’s about the ineffable, the irreducible, the Je ne sais quoi.”

“I’ve heard quite enough French from you today, Whale,” Yordan said.

“A convincing performance is always rooted in the body,” Whale said. “The suit must become Thorley’s second skin. Stanislavski discoursed eloquently on this principle.”

“The next time I want to read a Communist queer, Stanislavski will be my first choice,” Yordan told Whale. “Unless, of course, you’ve written on the subject yourself.”

“If you’re worried about somebody spotting the PRR, let me point out that the costume is its own camouflage,” Dr. Groelish noted. “Our boy here could put on his lizard rig and saunter down Wilshire Boulevard in broad daylight, and who would ever imagine the thing was designed to spook the Japanese?”

“I still think it should stay here,” Yordan said.

“Let’s take it from the top,” Whale said. “If Syms doesn’t become one with the lizard, the game is over.”

As twilight seeped across the Mojave Desert, Yordan at long last threw up his hands and grunted in resignation. With colossal reluctance he got on the phone and arranged delivery of a Navy panel truck to the atelier, anything with “a cargo bay large enough to accommodate a half-dozen oxygen cylinders and a dwarf behemoth.” While the admiral talked to the captain of the motor pool, Mabel explained that she wouldn’t be fueling my tail until the day of the run-through. She didn’t want me fooling around with Gorgantis’s incendiary capabilities before I’d had a formal lesson in flamethrowing. Meanwhile I should concentrate on walking backward, going gracefully downstairs, and climbing out of private swimming pools with balletic poise.

When the panel truck arrived, Yordan slapped a Class T gas-rationing sticker on the windshield, thereby entitling me to unlimited fill-ups, just like a senator, plus a coupon book good for a walloping two hundred gallons. He further equipped me with a two-way wrist radio of the sort worn by Ralph Byrd in Republic’s Dick Tracy serials. This one was not a prop, Yordan explained. Between now and the great rehearsal, I must contact Commander Quimby every morning at precisely 0900 hours—the transceiver was preset to Quimby’s identical device—then again at noon, with subsequent calls at 1500 hours and 1800 hours, no exceptions, rain or shine, fair or foul, hell or high water.

Shortly after midnight, my flesh throbbing with exhaustion, my head spinning with the doctrine of reptilian intimidation, I reached Santa Monica and pulled into my garage: as safe a place as any to store the PRR, I figured. I made my weary way to the bungalow. Darlene sat at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and drawing X’s through certain presumably gratuitous speeches in my Lycanthropus script. My favorite lines, no doubt, but that didn’t mean they deserved to stay. For the next hour I mesmerized her with my adventures at China Lake, repeatedly stating my sincere opinion that she would have given my employers a script far better than Brenda’s formulaic Armageddon. Much to Darlene’s delight, I packed a large quantity of treason into the presentation, until eventually I had no more top secrets to reveal, only perfunctory and jejune secrets, so I ended my unlikely narrative and asked her what she thought of Operation Fortune Cookie.

“To use a line I promised myself I would never write,” she said, “‘It’s just crazy enough to work.’“

“If they were planning to overhaul the script, I would’ve brought your name up, but the whole thing’s set in stone.”

“It’s okay,” Darlene said. “I’m not jealous.” She took a drag on her Chesterfield. “So do you think there’s going to be a sequel?”

Eight hours later I reported for duty at Monogram. As the morning’s labors progressed, I found myself appreciating the Navy’s wisdom in declining to draft me but instead allowing Revenge of Corpuscula to go forward as planned. Neither Beaudine, Katzman, Dagover, nor Dudley the AD bothered to ask what I’d done during my mysterious Tuesday sojourn in the desert. As long as we delivered our program to the exhibitors on schedule, my trips to China Lake would evidently arouse no untoward curiosity at Monogram or any other redoubt of the home front.

While I was gone Trixie had secured the necessary orangutan costume. It turned out that Republic was shooting a jungle adventure down the street, and they were willing to lease the suit for only a hundred bucks. Beaudine’s brother-in-law showed up drunk, which I suspect made his performance all the more convincingly simian. Like the patriotic iguana I was, I called Commander Quimby on my Dick Tracy set at nine o’clock, then again at noon, assuring him that Gorgantis and I were both in good condition.

The afternoon’s shoot proved grueling, the toughest yet on a Corpuscula picture, but by seven-thirty we’d managed to get six pages in the can: scene 18, the alchemical creature convincing Dr. Niemuller to turn Bongowi into a meat-eater, and scene 19, the carnivorous ape’s subsequent assault on Dr. Werdistratus. Later that night, after our usual spaghetti dinner followed by a productive two-hour session that found Darlene and me polishing my Lycanthropus screenplay into a shining B-movie gem, I decided to do my Gorgantis homework, so we hauled the rig out of the truck and dragged it into the parlor. Darlene couldn’t get over the sheer demented brilliance of the thing. She called it “uncanny,” “haunting,” and—she intended this as praise—“perverse.” As she stood behind me on a step-ladder, cradling the great head against her chest, I inserted my feet in the soft vulcanized leggings and my hands in the neoprene claws. After activating the glowing eyeballs, Darlene descended to ground level, seized the pull-tab above my tail, and climbed the ladder again, thus bringing the teeth of the dorsal zipper into alignment. So there I was, encased once again in my scales and talons, a Cretaceous visitation bent on teaching Admiral Nagumo how right he’d been to imagine that his attack on Pearl Harbor had awakened a sleeping dragon.

“I can’t speak for my entire gender,” Darlene said, “but I think he’s the sexiest monster ever to hit Hollywood.”

Grasping the knob in my navel, I gave it a quarter turn, and an instant later came the soothing, serpentine hiss of pure oxygen seeping into my suit. “I’m supposed to start out with a few simple exercises. Walking backward, standing on one leg, stuff like that.”

“No, darling. I need something more from you tonight.”

“Huh?”

“My glands are pumping, Syms. We’re going down to the beach.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Men. It’s a Fay Wray thing. Every girl wants a big snorting schlemiel she can wrap around her little finger. We’ll start out with business as usual, Gorgantis kidnapping his leading lady, but eventually she’ll conquer him through sheer nerve and spunkiness.”

When Darlene got like this there was no sense in resisting, so I waited patiently while she changed into her bathing suit, after which we loaded the lizard rig, Syms Thorley still inside, into the Navy truck and took off, Darlene driving almost as recklessly as Joy Groelish, or so I inferred from all the rocking and swaying to which the PRR and I were subjected. At last the vibrations stopped. Next came the clanking and clanging of Darlene opening the cargo bay doors. I insisted on shambling out by myself. Practice, practice, practice.

Aided by the full moon, my luminous eyeballs, and Darlene’s hand, I wended my way through the undulating palms of Palisades Park, eventually reaching a broad swath of sand. I lumbered south, the Pacific breakers to my right, Darlene on my left, my tail growing heavier by the minute. Arriving at the Municipal Pier, we took refuge in a dank forest of pilings. We glanced in all directions. The literal coast was literally clear. At two o’clock in the morning, everybody in Santa Monica evidently had better things to do with his time than wandering around on a desolate beach that stank of rotting kelp.

“Carry me into the water,” Darlene demanded.

“Why?”

“It’s romantic.”

I picked her up and, hooking one scaly arm under her knees while looping the other around her shoulders, began the requested abduction. It was a familiar gesture for me. Kha-Ton-Ra usually made off with the heroine in this fashion at least once per picture, and occasionally the same impulse overcame Corpuscula. But I’d never done it as Gorgantis before, and never with Darlene. Soon I hit the tide line, an undulating ribbon of pebbles and seaweed, then kept on going, wading into the surf—for such was my co-star’s desire—heading in the general direction of Hawaii. The bay rose gently, climbing to my knees, my thighs, my bulbous abdomen. Inside the suit, all was well—Gladys and Mabel had successfully waterproofed the rig—more than well, thanks to the oxygen cylinder: temperate, balmy, sublime.

“No, Gorgantis!” Darlene cried. “You are a sea creature, but I am of the land! Take me back to the shore!”

I squeezed my roar-bulb. “Grraagghhh!”

“Take me back now!”

Pivoting, I started for the beach.

“Gorgantis, set me down!”

The behemoth obeyed.

“This way,” she said, clasping my claw and leading me toward the pier.

“Grraagghhh!”

No sooner had we entered our grotto beneath the boardwalk than my amazing lover, this lissome woman whose urges were now at the boiling point, gave free rein to her imagination. She grabbed my dorsal zipper, pulling the slide downward inch by inch until she’d created an aperture large enough to admit her slender form. Having opened me up, she now proceeded to enter me, first slithering around my spine, then planting her willowy thighs and calves next to mine in the monster’s leggings. A remarkable performance, but it wasn’t over yet. As we stood face to face, our bodies clamped pleasurably together, she seized the interior tab and closed the breach, sealing us within the lizard like unborn twins navigating their mother’s womb. This scenario was not entirely unfamiliar to us. Two years earlier we’d seen an unbowdlerized cut of Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, right before the censors snipped out the famous sleeping bag tryst between Robert Jordan and Maria.

“Where do the noses go?” Darlene asked, retrieving a foil-wrapped prophylactic from the bodice of her swimming suit. I’d never heard her do Ingrid Bergman before. It was a flawless impersonation.

“Maria,” I said, Gary Cooper’s uninformative response.

Several minutes later, I died. ‘Twas beauty killed the beast. Practice, practice, practice.

The next day’s Revenge of Corpuscula shoot found me tackling a relatively simple scene: the monster’s big courtroom speech, in which he explains to the magistrate and the burgomaster that they have no right to put him on trial, “for I am merely an external manifestation of the ghastliness within your own souls.” I didn’t understand that line, and neither did anybody else, including Darlene, who wrote it, but my delivery nevertheless pleased Beaudine, as did the rest of my performance, and the shoot ended earlier than expected. Not long after Dudley declared that we were finished for the day, a gawky Navy courier appeared bearing the final draft of What Rough Beast. He explained that I must read the script right now, furtively and silently, whereupon he would spirit it back to China Lake. He called me “sir.” I liked that. We retired to my dressing room. Every page was stamped TOP SECRET, but beyond that anomaly I found few deviations from Brenda’s Tuesday presentation. The only conspicuous addition was Admiral Yordan’s opening monologue, an exhortation to the effect that the behemoths were an unprecedented weapon against which ordinary heroism would prove pointless.

Over the next four shooting days, thanks to Beaudine’s efficiency and Katzman’s tyranny, we managed to finish every set-up except one—the monster’s long monologue when he awakes with the supercerebrum in his skull—which Dudley had scheduled for Thursday, but then I explained that, alas, I would be gone that afternoon, working on my secret military assignment, and if Dudley didn’t like it, he should go talk to Katzman. When not declaiming Darlene’s dialogue on stage three, reporting to Commander Quimby on my Dick Tracy set, and studiously observing the movements of terrestrial lizards at a Route 101 roadside attraction called Clem and Bertha’s Reptile World, I subjected myself to seven more rounds of Gorgantis calisthenics, four solo, three involving my girlfriend and her Fay Wray fantasy. In consequence of this demanding regimen, I lost seventeen pounds. Among the many non-fiction books I’ll never get around to writing is The Giant Mutant Fire-Breathing Bipedal Iguana Diet.

On Thursday morning, shortly after 1100 hours, I arrived at China Lake for the run-through. My first stop was the Château Mojave, where, per the contract, Joy and Dr. Groelish presented me with half my salary: a $5,000 check issued by the United States Treasury and signed by Henry Morgenthau himself. While Gladys placed a fresh oxygen cylinder in Gorgantis’s stomach, Mabel filled his tail with gasoline from red aluminum cans. As a joke, I gave her a five-gallon coupon from my ration book, which she immediately slipped into her purse.

After helping me into the PRR, the twins led me outside, then pointed toward three pyramids of orange crates intended to represent O’Brien’s models of Shirazuka’s buildings and landmarks. Languidly I lumbered onto the shooting range, unhappy to be dragging an extra thirty pounds of fossil fuel behind me. Suddenly Jimmy Whale appeared, pacing fretfully among the fragile targets, aglow in his white linen suit like a statue carved from phosphorus.

“What’s the magic word?” he asked.

“Caliban,” I said.

“‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine,’” Whale said.

“There’s a one-way valve in the nozzle,” Gladys told the director. “Right now the regulator’s in position five, wide open.”

“Ready to breathe fire, Syms?” Whale asked.

“It’s every actor’s secret wish,” I said.

“Just squeeze the burn-bulb,” Gladys told me. “Slowly but steadily.”

I did as instructed, and a thick jet of flame spewed from the behemoth’s mouth. The blast struck the first pyramid head-on, instantly reducing it to ash.

“Much too quick,” Whale said. “Stop it down all the way.”

Mabel reached into Gorgantis’s maw and set the regulator to position one.

“Open fire, Caliban,” Whale said.

An incisive ribbon of burning gasoline shot forth, bisecting the second pyramid with the precision of a welder’s torch cutting sheet metal. The whole configuration collapsed, but none of the crates caught fire.

“Impressive, but not apocalyptic,” Whale said.

Next we tried position three, which gave us a growling shaft of flame that transmuted the third pyramid into a vivid, riveting, altogether satisfying conflagration.

“This porridge is just right,” Whale said.

“Mazel tov,” Mabel said.

“On with the show,” Gladys said.

We ate lunch in the Château Mojave, feasting on a surprisingly tasty mulligan stew that Whale had improvised from available ingredients. Just as Gladys and Mabel finished zipping me into the PRR again, a troop transport vehicle appeared in the sandy parking lot, Admiral Yordan’s personal chauffeur behind the wheel. I shambled up the ramp to the canopied load bed without assistance—practice, practice, practice—and then we took off, Whale and the Rubinstein twins following in the director’s battered Rolls Royce, Joy and Dr. Groelish bringing up the rear in her convertible.

The ethos of a demented circus held dominion in Hangar B, a whirling hurly-burly that put me in mind of the traveling carnival that opened Robert Florey’s artsy little Poe adaptation of ‘32, Murders in the Rue Morgue. Sailors bustled about, relaying messages, delivering coffee, and installing fire extinguishers at each corner of the model metropolis. Stagehands winched aloft the gigantic glass moon that would illuminate the sea battle. While a score of Obie’s artisans put the finishing touches on the facsimile of the facsimile of the hypothetical city, a squad of Seabees channeled a thousand gallons of fresh water into Toyama Bay from a storage tank on the roof. Naval officers paced the perimeter of ill-starred Shirazuka, trying without success to look essential to the operation.

My entrance as Gorgantis caused an understandable stir. Except for Admiral Yordan, nobody in Hangar B had seen the lizard rig before. But an instant later, duty called—American boys were fighting and dying in the Pacific—and everybody went back to work.

Had I not already beheld the miniature in Hangar A, I might have assumed that Shirazuka’s present incarnation was intended for the eyes of the Japanese delegation. While lacking the exquisite details of the final model, it was hardly the shoddy affair Joy had led me to expect. If the rehearsal went badly, it would not be for lack of a proper set.

Equipped now with a bullhorn, Whale placed an avuncular hand on my shoulder. “Remember, Caliban, you must seek your soul’s darkest sanctum. Get thee to Sycorax’s foulest fen and revel in the muck.”

“Just so he sticks to the script,” Yordan said, arriving in our vicinity.

“I am not familiar with your credentials as a director,” Whale said.

“I don’t have any—but then again, you’re not a Naval officer,” Yordan said.

“I’ve seen more of war’s horrors than you,” Whale said.

And with that my director kissed me on the snout, traded scowls with Yordan, and climbed the ladder of a lifeguard stand that the Navy had evidently commandeered from the private sector—the sign on the tower read Redondo Beach Aquatic Club. Whale didn’t need to call for quiet on the set. The mere sight of this Hollywood god perched in his empyrean was enough to bring silence to Hangar B.

“Places, everyone!” Whale ordered.

The artisans abandoned their labors and melted into the shadows. Stagehands scurried up the ladders to the catwalks and manned the klieg lights. Ordnance technicians assumed their positions before the master control console.

“Musicians!” Whale called from on high.

“Musicians?” Yordan shouted. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I hired an orchestra,” Whale explained.

“An orchestra? Why, for Christ’s sake?”

“To play the score.”

“Score?”

“Mr. Waxman wrote us a score.”

“And how do you intend to pay your musicians?” Yordan asked.

“The Midget Lizard Initiative hasn’t been officially shut down yet,” Whale explained. “Dr. Groelish still has a large discretionary fund. Mr. Waxman agreed to write an overture, a main theme, and a dozen cues for only three thousand dollars, considerably less than what you’re paying me.”

A side door opened, and a parade of musicians filed silently into the hangar, forty or so men and women gripping violins, violas, cellos, trumpets, cornets, clarinets, flutes, and percussion instruments, led by a bronze-haired conductor in a tweed jacket. It was indeed Franz Waxman, who’d composed the music for Bride of Frankenstein and Evil of Corpuscula.

“Those people better all have security clearances!” Yordan screamed.

“Please calm down, Admiral,” Whale said. “You’re getting on my nerves.”

Approaching a grid of folding chairs at the back of the hangar, the musicians assumed their seats and prepared to play the overture.

“Kliegs off!” Whale shouted.

The stagehands complied.

“House lights off!”

A sailor opened a box mounted on the far wall and began flicking switches, plunging the hangar into a lugubrious gloom. The only illumination came from the tiny bulbs brightening the Shirazuka houses, the public lighting along the city’s streets, and the cowled lamps on the orchestra’s music stands.

“Moon!”

The huge sphere glowed to life, its reflection sparkling softly in Toyama Bay.

“Gorgantis, find your mark!”

Gladys and Mabel took me by the claws and led me across the same threshold by which we’d entered the studio. Shuffling along the outside wall of the hangar, the Mojave sun wringing dollops of sweat from all my pores, I was tempted to grab my navel and open the valve on my oxygen cylinder, but I knew it would be best to conserve that precious resource. We reached the stage door, passed through the jamb, and followed a corrugated aluminum tunnel to the dry hatch on the bathyscaphe. As I dropped to my knees, Mabel turned the wheel-lock, then pulled back the great circular slab. I wriggled inside the chamber. The ceiling was barely a yard high, and I had to lie prone on my bulging belly like a fat soldier crawling under barbed wire.

Gladys and Mabel jammed my tail into the tiny compartment, then stepped away, sealing the hatch behind them. I was doubly entombed, a man inside a lizard inside a bronze casket. My underwater habitat was evidently wired for sound, because I had no trouble hearing Yordan’s monologue and the accompanying Japanese translation.

“Honorable emissaries, you are about to witness the destructive fury of the most terrible weapon yet placed in the hands of man! There can be no valor in resisting such a force! The warrior who would take the field against a behemoth will reap nothing for his courage beyond a bereaved wife and fatherless children!”

Waxman began conducting his overture, a frenzied, dissonant composition in which exotic Oriental chords and conventional Western progressions fought for supremacy within the listener’s reeling brain.

“The doors of hell open!” Yordan cried. “The beast rises! Doom comes to Shirazuka!”

The overture built to its frantic climax. I turned the wheel-lock on the wet hatch, yanking with all my reptilian strength. As the bay flooded the compartment, I forced my way through the opening, then assumed a crouch on the floor of the pool. The music faded. I rotated the valve in my navel. A stream of cool air flowed forth, soughing against my rubbery shell. Now came the majestic “Gorgantis Theme,” as we would eventually call it. I straightened my knees. With ponderous malevolence the behemoth breached Toyama Bay, then threw back his head, roared above the stately melody, and made ready to sack the city.

Although we got through the entire script in a mere three hours, with a satisfyingly flattened Shirazuka to show for our efforts, the run-through was a mélange of misadventures. When Whale ordered the dreadnought Yamato and her sister warships to shell the monster, her guns emitted not BB’S but only feeble puffs of smoke. The passenger train I was supposed to devour hurtled off its trestle before I could seize it. As I set about trampling a factory complex underfoot, the counterattacking fighter planes and dive bombers lost their bearings, some crashing into Mount Onibaba, others suffering fatal encounters with the lifeguard stand, only a few getting close enough for me to bat them out of the air as the script required. And while Gladys had carefully set the flamethrower nozzle to position three, the regulator had evidently gone kablooey during the bumpy journey to Hangar B, because the gasoline streamed forth with uncontrolled exuberance, so that much of Shirazuka was instantly immolated in an exhibition as perfunctory as a fireworks display at a church picnic. Disappointment clouded the sailors’ faces as they smothered the residual flames.

Surprisingly, none of these disasters fazed Whale. He declined to chew out Obie over the obstreperous props or scold the Rubinstein twins for acquiring a persnickety flamethrower. Au contraire, the worse things went, the more fun Whale seemed to be having. Perhaps he subscribed to the principle that a disastrous dress rehearsal portends a successful opening night—a truism that in my experience happens to be true. Instead of indulging in a Katzmanian tirade or a Beaudinesque sulk, this suave gentleman put all his energies into his art, feeding me brilliant bit after brilliant bit as I performed my slow dance on the killing ground. When we practiced the sea battle, Whale suggested that I seize two aircraft carriers and smack their flight decks together to the crash of cymbals, a sound that Waxman’s percussionist was pleased to provide. Under the master’s direction the behemoth’s appetite for human flesh became a darkly comic affair, with Gorgantis stuffing Nipponese homunculi into his mouth like handfuls of popcorn. After the Japanese armored divisions took up their positions in the Chiaki Mountains, prepared to defend the Emperor at any cost, Whale had me grab the Chi-Ro tanks two at a time, soften them with my breath, and tie their gun barrels together, the resulting configurations suggesting knotted pairs of socks. Only once that afternoon did Whale waft out a genuinely bad idea. Calling down from his lofty roost, he asked Obie whether Gorgantis might gouge and scrape Mount Onibaba with his claws until it became a bust of Hirohito, which the monster would then pulverize. Before Obie could reply, a chorus of suppressed groans arose. Absorbing this spontaneous critique, the director declared that on second thought it would be better simply to plant a large packet of stage blood in the Imperial Palace.

Whale’s greatest contribution to What Rough Beast was a concept that lay outside the domain of Brenda’s script. How poignant it would be, he decided, if our visiting emissaries found themselves hoping against hope that the dwarf behemoth might, just might, perish before completing his mission. Thus, when the attack reached its inevitable climax, with Shirazuka smoldering and Gorgantis triumphant, the delegation’s shock would be that much greater. And so it was that Whale had me lurch back in feigned agony when my claws sliced through a mass of high-tension power lines, and he coached me to appear exhausted—faint, almost—as I kicked downtown Shirazuka to pieces. Right before the final assault on the mountain, Whale stopped the rehearsal and ordered the ordnance technicians to supplement the BB’S in the defenders’ tanks with tiny blisters of red dye. When the battle resumed, the effect was exactly what Whale envisioned: a ripped, stricken, bullet-ridden Gorgantis, bleeding from a hundred wounds, but still charging toward the Imperial Palace, as if his unconquerable soul knew nothing of his torn flesh.

The klieg lights faded, ensconcing the victorious reptile in the shadows beyond the city. Slowly I shambled toward my director, receiving congratulatory strokes and pats along the way. Whale descended from the lifeguard stand. He thanked everyone for their work on “an auspiciously catastrophic rehearsal,” then tenderly caressed my dorsal plates and said, “Caliban, my friend, we’ve got a hit on our hands.”

“You’re not a man in a suit,” Joy told me. “You’re a living, breathing mutant iguana.”

“I’m going to nominate you for an Oscar,” Gladys said.

“The Yamato’s guns will be working in time for the performance,” Obie assured me. “The planes, too.”

“And the flamethrower,” Mabel said.

Now Yordan came swaggering onto the scene. Appropriating Whale’s bullhorn, he informed the assembled artisans, technicians, and military men that he had heartening news from Washington.

“Yesterday Foreign Minister Togo cabled Secretary Byrnes and told him the composition of the delegation,” Yordan said, flourishing a document. Glimpsing the paper through my isinglass peepholes, I saw that it was stamped TOP SECRET. “Obviously they’re taking our demonstration shot seriously, because it’s a darned impressive line-up.” The admiral scanned the classified communiqué with his solitary eye. “Deputy Foreign Minister Toshikazu Kase, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hisatsune Sakomizu, Director of Information Hiroshi Shimomura, and—here’s the kicker—Marquis Koichi Kido, Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal and principal aide and advisor to the Emperor.”

Cheers and applause reverberated through the hangar.

“The show starts at 1500 hours sharp, Sunday, June 3, 1945, a date that will live in the annals of diplomacy,” Yordan said. “Mr. O’Brien, your ordnance technicians must be in their places by 1400 hours. Mr. Thorley, I want to see you suiting up in the Château Mojave no later than 1100 hours.”

“Get me out of this goddamn iguana,” I said. “A man could suffocate in here.”

Slowly, tentatively, with the shuffling gait of the zombie roustabouts in Monogram’s Voodoo Circus, the exhausted cast and crew of What Rough Beast emerged from Hangar B into the glare of a brilliant sunset, its crimson rays spreading across the desert sky like lacerations wrought by reptilian talons. Here at the Naval Ordnance Test Station, rosy-fingered dawns were doubtless common, but so were bloody-clawed dusks.

Gladys and Mabel loaded the PRR into the cargo bay of the troop transport. Before I could assume the passenger seat, Joy squeezed my arm and said she would like my companionship while she performed “a painful but necessary duty over by the lake.” I arranged for Yordan’s chauffeur to drop the suit back at the Château Mojave, and then my liaison and I took off in her Chevy.

“They’re all dead,” she said abruptly.

“The citizens of Shirazuka?” I asked.

“The first generation of dwarfs—Rex, Evelyn, and Oswald. We lost them two days ago to Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Progeria. Premature aging. Luckily, in April we hatched a second generation—Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They’ve got progeria, too, but they’ll probably live three more weeks at least, long enough for us to exhibit them to the delegation.”

Reaching the lake shore, we headed north through a tract of desert that, Joy informed me, concealed at least twenty species of lizard and almost as many sorts of snake. Every day, as the sun lifted toward its zenith, the creatures would crawl free of their dens to warm themselves on the omnipresent rocks.

“Believe me, it wasn’t easy figuring out how to make the descendants of cold-blooded iguanas breathe fire,” she said. “Once the Knickerbocker Project gets declassified, we’ll publish a dozen papers in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.”

After a journey of three miles, my liaison pulled over, parked the car, and opened the trunk. Arrayed in purple blossoms, three potted hedgehog cacti sat in a cardboard box along with a red trowel and a pair of canvas work gloves. Together Joy and I bore the cacti toward the lake. Because Rex, Evelyn, and Oswald had loved to swim and dive, Joy had buried them within view of the water. Their graves were marked with crosses and protected by a natural ring of boulders.

“When the time comes, I’ll help you eulogize Huey, Dewey, and Louie, too,” I said.

“I’d appreciate that,” Joy said.

Her voice now acquired a dreamy, otherworldly timbre. I thought of Gale Sondergaard’s eerie performance as the medium in Uncanny, a serviceable supernatural thriller that Darlene once wrote for Katzman between Corpuscula pictures.

“Long ago in Japan, a young woman named Momoko hired a fishing boat and rowed to the most far-flung of the Oki Islands, north of Honshu. She planned to rescue her father, a great warrior imprisoned by the Emperor, whose occasional fits of madness caused him to mistreat even his most devoted samurai. Sailing around the island, Momoko came upon a wrenching scene: a maiden robed in white, standing on a bluff. Her parents knelt beside her, weeping piteously. As Momoko put to shore, she spotted a priest, who explained that each year the locals sacrificed a maiden to the dragon Yofuné-Nushi, ruler of the deep and lord of tempests.”

Availing herself of the trowel and gloves, Joy planted the largest cactus on Rex’s grave.

“To the grieving parents’ infinite gratitude, Momoko offered to take the maiden’s place. She put on the ceremonial white kimono, clasped a warrior’s dagger between her teeth, and leaped into the green depths. Down, down she plummeted, swimming with great skill, for as a child she’d dived with the pearl fishers of her village. Soon she reached the ocean floor, where she came upon a cavern. Venturing into the undersea grotto, Momoko found a sleeping dragon, his scales trailing tatters of his victims’ robes, his serpentine body coiled around a curious treasure: a jade statue of the Emperor who had imprisoned her father.”

Here Joy paused to root the second cactus above Evelyn’s remains.

“Suddenly Yofuné-Nushi awoke and attacked the warrior-woman. They fought furiously, but the battle soon ended when Momoko drove her dagger through the dragon’s right eye and straight into his brain. Calling upon all her remaining air and residual strength, she swam free of the grotto, the jade figurine pressed against her breast. No sooner had Momoko breached the surface than the monstrous corpse came bobbing up behind her. On the beach, the thankful maiden and her parents waited to shower Momoko with kisses.”

Joy allowed me to install the third cactus, a tribute to Oswald, then continued her tale.

“Several days later, hearing that Yofuné-Nushi had been vanquished and his treasure recovered, the prince of the island sent word to the Emperor. The messengers returned bearing extraordinary news. Years ago an evil magician had cursed the jade statue and presented it to Yofuné-Nushi—but shortly after Momoko’s victory, the Emperor’s madness had mysteriously passed. When Momoko and her father returned to Honshu, the chastened monarch, horrified to realize he’d abused his faithful samurai, immediately freed him and arranged many honors for Momoko, slayer of dragons.”

“I like that story,” I said.

“Once this war is over, Syms, I’m going into veterinary medicine.”

“Good idea.”

“If Admiral Strickland approaches me with big plans for another strategic lizard, I’ll kick him in the balls.”

“I hope I’m there to see it.”

“Veterinarians are my heroes. Do you have any heroes, Syms?”

“I once knew a herpetologist named Ivan Groelish who tried to end the Second World War through the craziest damn scheme you ever heard. The odds were against him, but his heart was in the right place.”

IV

MIDNIGHT HAS COME to Edgar Allan Poe’s city. Luckily, I remembered to place an order with room service just before the kitchen shut down for the day. The present writing session will be fueled by a Waldorf salad, two Reuben sandwiches, and more potato chips than a giant mutant iguana has scales—plus my trusty jar of Maxwell House instant and its auxiliary submersible coil.

As the hotel steward wheeled the food into my room, I realized to my considerable chagrin that, having given all my folding money to Tiffany, I had no cash with which to reward his labors.

“You must be with that sci-fi convention, huh?” he asked, pointing to my Raydo. He was a freckled, klutzy kid whose large ears stuck out like radar scoops. “Did you buy that sculpture in the dealer’s room?”

“Actually, I won it.”

Curious now, the steward approached my desk, brushed the statuette with his greasy fingers, and pondered the inscription. “‘Lifetime Achievement’—that’s terrific, Mr. Thorley,” he said, nervously clucking his tongue. “Not everybody manages to have an achievement in his lifetime.”

“You learn your craft, you play your mummies, you collect your trophy, and then you die.”

“I’m not really a sci-fi fan, but I know all about that big balloon you put on the roof. Gorgantis, King of the Lizards. Mr. Hackett isn’t too happy about it. He says the darned thing should’ve come down this afternoon.”

“I didn’t put it there. Your boss should talk to the Wonderama Committee, if they haven’t skipped town.”

“And this is a rhedosaurus,” the kid said, indicating the pewter dinosaur. “My grandfather loved that movie. He used to call me Ray the Rhedosaurus.”

“This award happens to be nicknamed the Raydo. Ray Bradbury wrote the original story. Ray Harryhausen did the special effects.”

“All those Rays? Really?”

“Ray Bolger did the choreography. Ray Walston played the Martian. Bob and Ray were the caterers.”

“I’m Ray Wintergreen. Grampa and I watched The Beast from 20,000 Leagues together a month before he died.”

“Fathoms, actually. Leagues is distance. Ray, my friend, I’d love to tip you, but I forfeited my last dollar to a lady of the night. Let me accompany you back downstairs, and I’ll cash a check at the desk.”

“That won’t work. They locked the safe at eleven.”

“Here’s an idea. Instead of a gratuity, I’ll give you my dinosaur.”

“Oh, no, sir, that wouldn’t be right.”

“Please, Ray, I want you to have it,” I said, shuffling toward my embarrassed visitor. “In honor of your grandfather.”

“He was a wonderful guy, but I can’t take your award.”

“Of course you can.” I curled my fist around the lighthouse, lifted the prize from my desk, and inserted it in Ray’s grasp. “The inscription contains a typo. If I brought the damn thing home, I’d just stick it in my broom closet.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“This is very generous of you. Mom will be darned impressed.”

Fearful that his good fortune might evaporate if he lingered, Ray hugged the statuette to his chest and made a hasty exit. And so it came to pass that, like the dying dragon in Joy’s story about Momoko, I surrendered my treasure to the next generation. Of course, my gestating memoir now lacked a paperweight, but the Gideon Bible in my night table drawer was easily pressed into service.

Get cracking, Syms. Drain those Bics. If you switch from amontillado to Maxwell House, you should be able to finish your memoir by 11:00 A.M., which means you’ll have no trouble catching the noon shuttle to the airport or, if you prefer, the twelve o’clock window to eternity.

On Friday afternoon, twenty-four hours after the nerve-wracking What Rough Beast run-through, I returned to Monogram Studios with the intention of nailing Corpuscula’s elaborate supercerebrum soliloquy. It was the most carefully written scene in the script—the monster’s protracted and eloquent cri de coeur when he realizes his brain now shares cranial quarters with neuronal tissues pilfered from four different brilliant but arguably insane scientists—so naturally Darlene showed up to make sure Beaudine didn’t fuck with her favorite lines. For once the director decided to give the dialogue its due, and, though he used gratuitously noir lighting and a meretricious low angle, he let the great speech pour forth in one unbroken tracking shot, the camera stalking me like a Doppelgänger as I careened around Werdistratus’s laboratory spouting paranoid non sequiturs in Italian, German, French, and Spanish. I got it on the first take, by God. When Beaudine yelled “Cut!” the crew broke into spontaneous applause.

Thrilled with the success of the shoot and intoxicated by the sheer visceral thrill of that greatest of all human endeavors, moviemaking, Darlene and I decided a celebration was in order. On Saturday night we splurged on front-row seats to see Cantinflas live at the Mason Opera House, doing acrobatics and stand-up comedy, then treated ourselves to a three-course meal at the Brown Derby, washing down our sirloin steaks with champagne that actually came from France. To top off a perfect evening, we decided to enact another episode from our erotic chapterplay about the unorthodox relationship between Fay Wray and Gorgantis, even as we soaked the stage blood off my monster suit in the Pacific’s cleansing surf.

We parked in a secluded spot on Ocean Avenue. I climbed into the cargo bay and slipped into my secret saurian identity, marveling at how routine this whole business was getting to be, my daily habit of turning myself into a dragon more fearsome than Yofuné-Nushi. After locking up the truck, I allowed Darlene to guide me down to the beach and from there to the sheltering pylons of the Municipal Pier. We assumed our customary postures, Gorgantis’s own true love draped across his scaly arms, then headed toward the retreating tide.

The cops converged from all directions, seven frenzied shamuses, pistols drawn, flashlights blazing, fists clamped around a heavy-duty fishnet of a caliber sufficient to snare an orca. Startled, I let Darlene slip from my clutches. She scrambled to her feet and, finding the officer in charge, informed him that I was just a guy in a suit. Sergeant Loomis was unimpressed, and the next thing I knew the ponderous net was dropping over Gorgantis’s massive head. So there I stood, trapped like King Kong on Broadway, terrified that my encrusted stage blood was about to be supplemented by streaming pints of the real thing.

“Freeze!” Sergeant Loomis cried, and I complied instantly. “Did the monster hurt you, ma’am?” he asked Darlene.

“He’s not a monster, he’s my boyfriend!”

“In my profession, you soon learn that those things aren’t mutually exclusive. If he assaulted you, I want to hear about it.”

Now the press arrived, an eager-beaver trench-coated reporter equipped with a spiral notebook and a pencil stub, accompanied by a photographer frantically snapping my top-secret costume with his Graflex, over and over, as fast as he could change flashbulbs—pop, pop, pop.

“Max Kettleby, Los Angeles Examiner,” the reporter told Darlene. “I’ve been hot on the trail of the Santa Monica Beach Monster ever since the first sighting.”

“Why won’t anybody believe me?” Darlene wailed. “This is just a gag!”

“Nobody said we don’t believe you, but the situation calls for a thorough investigation,” Loomis replied. “When people start complaining about annoying visitations from the depths of hell, it’s my job to figure out what’s going on.”

“This is Syms J. Thorley, the horror movie actor,” Darlene said. “Did you ever see any Corpuscula pictures? He’s the star, and I’m the writer.”

“My operating assumption is that if it looks like a sea monster, walks like a sea monster, and bellows like a sea monster, then it’s a sea monster,” Loomis said.

“Syms, tell them who you are,” Darlene insisted.

“I’m Isaac Margolis, recently swallowed whole by a giant mutant amphibious iguana named Gorgantis,” I said.

Nobody laughed. I chuckled timorously. There are three rules of screenwriting, but only one for confronting humorless cops with drawn guns. Don’t try to be funny.

“With your permission, I shall now exit this suit,” I said.

“Okay, but don’t make any sudden moves,” Loomis said.

With excruciating caution I popped the snaps, unhitched the catches, activated the dorsal zipper, and quit my alter ago, leaving the bilious green rig standing upright in the sand. I grabbed the edge of the net and, raising my arms high, walked free.

“Hey, it really is Syms Thorley,” Max Kettleby said.

“Who?” Loomis said.

“Syms Thorley,” Kettleby said. “Curse of Kha-Ton-Ra. Evil of Corpuscula.”

“I’m seriously considering jamming your ass in jail, Syms Thorley,” Loomis said.

“On what charge?” I asked. “Spreading panic without a license?”

“Disturbing the peace,” Loomis said.

“I can explain everything,” I said, praying that Darlene would now step in and explain everything.

“I’m listening,” Loomis said.

“It’s like this,” I said. What was it like?

“Careful, Sergeant, he’s a skilled actor,” Kettleby said. “Don’t let him bamboozle you.”

“It’s like this,” Darlene said. “Syms and I wrote a script together.”

“A sea monster script?” the reporter asked.

“Curse of the Were-Lizard,” I said. “We got the Rubinstein sisters to make this costume for us. You know their work? Voyage of Jonah? Trials of Job?”

“Those women are geniuses,” Darlene said.

“We figured that if we shopped our screenplay around in conjunction with Gorgantis himself, lots of producers would sit up and take notice,” I said.

“So why have you been disturbing the peace?” Loomis asked. “Testing out the monster’s scare value?”

“Before I put on my lizard for Selznick, Zanuck, Cohn, Katzman, or any other mogul—you can see the logic of this—before I do that, I need to be completely comfortable wearing the thing,” I said. “How was I to know the neighbors were watching?”

“Boy, what a story!” Kettleby said, just like in the movies.

“Being a regular guy, a man of the people, and a friend of the movie business, I’m inclined to let you off with just a warning,” Loomis told me. “But if folks around here want to press charges, I won’t discourage them.” He turned to the nearest cop and said, “Leo, take down the lizard’s address, also his ladyfriend’s.”

Leo did as instructed. When it came to revealing her domestic coordinates, Darlene recited her sister’s address in Brentwood, so we wouldn’t scandalize anybody. Task accomplished, the cop looked me in the eye and said, “Hey, Mr. Thorley, would you mind if I sent you my screenplay? It’s called The Maiden and the Maniac. You’d be great as the maniac.”

“I can’t wait to read it,” I said evenly.

“While we’re on the subject,” Kettleby said, “I have a script, too, an adaptation of that amazing Franz Kafka story about the guy who turns into a cockroach. Once you take out the confusing literary stuff, it’s a terrific yarn. I can see you playing Gregor Samsa.”

“I’m not really a scuttler,” I said. “More of a shambler.”

“Believe me, you were born for the role.”

“Toss it over the transom, Max. I’ll be happy to take a look.”

The next morning, after our usual Sunday breakfast of waffles and black coffee, I picked up the Los Angeles Examiner and was shocked to see my picture—and the behemoth’s picture, too—luridly displayed on the front page. Fake Sea Monster “Gorgantis” Captured in Santa Monica, the headline screamed. Horror Player Syms Thorley Terrorizes Neighborhood with “Were-Lizard” Suit, the subhead declared. Max Kettleby’s article appeared on page 12, accompanied by additional photographs, including one of Darlene looking quite fetching in her bathing suit. Wonder of wonders, Kettleby got our bogus story straight. By his account, the “notorious Santa Monica Beach Monster” was merely a gimmick by which actor Syms Thorley and writer Darlene Wasserman aimed to “beguile producers into reading a horror script they co-authored.” Mr. Syms and Miss Wasserman were terribly sorry for having “perpetrated an inadvertent hoax” that caused many local residents to worry that they were “about to be eaten alive in their beds,” and the two B-movie celebs hoped that “all monster buffs everywhere will enjoy Curse of the Were-Lizard if it ever gets made.”

Predictably enough, I didn’t need to check in with Commander Quimby on my wrist radio, because he contacted me. He spoke entirely in tremolos. I quickly apprehended that he was furious over what he’d seen in the Examiner, and of course the Navy brass at China Lake were also livid. Owing to my antics, Quimby insisted, every Jap spy hiding in southern California—of which there were doubtless many, all devoted Examiner readers—now knew about the classified lizard rig. I countered that, thanks to my quick wits and Darlene’s nimble fibs, it would never occur to a Nip agent to relay the story to his supervisors in Tokyo, since the whole foolish business was obviously just a Hollywood stunt, with no discernible connection to the American war effort.

“You’ve seriously compromised the security of Operation Fortune Cookie!” Quimby screamed.

“Oh?” I said. “How?”

“Admiral Strickland is beside himself! Commander Barzak, too!”

“So now there are four of them?”

“Try to get it through your head!” Quimby seethed. “You did something terribly, terribly wrong!”

“Well, the minute you figure out what it is, be sure to let me know,” I said. “I’ve got this nifty Dick Tracy set on my wrist, and I’m always hoping somebody will call me.”

“Come next Sunday, you’re going to be on the road by 0700! I’ll expect a radio bulletin from you at 0800 precisely and another one at 0900!”

“We Überweapons are nothing if not punctual.”

Fifteen minutes later Katzman telephoned, outraged that he’d been mentioned fourth on the list of producers to whom we intended to pitch our sea monster movie, “after that schmuck Selznick, that jackass Zanuck, and that flaming anus Cohn.”

“Sorry, Sam,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. The cops had guns. How do you like the costume?”

“It’s ridiculous,” Katzman said. “If Cohn wants to stick some stupid Chinese dragon in a movie and lose his shirt, that’s his business.”

“So you don’t want to see the script?”

“What I want is for somebody to tell me why Darlene is working on this were-lizard-sea-monster-it-crawled-out-of-the-surf horseshit when she’s supposed to be writing the next Corpuscula picture!”

“Occasionally an artist has to follow her heart.”

“Put your girlfriend on the goddamn phone.”

I shot Darlene a glance that said, He wants to talk to you. She reciprocated with a gaze that said, Fix it.

“Your favorite writer is taking a shower,” I told Katzman, “but I can say for a fact that yesterday she knocked out thirty pages of Corpuscula Meets the Vampire.”

“Glad to hear it. As for you, looks like we can start shooting Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra a week from Monday.”

Seeking to end the conversation on a convivial note, I told Katzman that the new Kha-Ton-Ra script was the best one yet, and if Beaudine didn’t fuck it up we’d probably do some major box office. Katzman, satisfied, said “Shalom,” then hung up. I consulted the kitchen calendar. The revised schedule meant that, less than twenty-four hours after sparing hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers the trouble of conquering Japan, I would once again be putting on my mummy bandages for the sake of the world’s Kha-Ton-Ra fans. I was nothing if not versatile in those days.

Doubtless Moses was correct when, reporting on the birth of the universe, he revealed that God rested on Sunday. God, however, did not have a Hollywood career to maintain—and so it happened that I spent the entire afternoon and most of the evening typing up the final draft of “Lycanthropus, a screenplay by Syms J. Thorley.” Throughout this interval, the telephone stubbornly refused to ring. This made no sense. How could the caliphs at Fox and Columbia not be curious about Wasserman and Thorley’s Curse of the Were-Lizard script? Did everybody hate the Gorgantis suit as much as Katzman did?

Shortly after 9:00 P.M. I did get a call—from Dagover, of all people. He claimed he was distressed that we’d exhibited “so much pointless hostility” on the set of Revenge of Corpuscula, a sentiment that I assumed also applied to our six previous fractious collaborations, but he still harbored some hope that “we might become friends, or at least amicable enemies.” Toward this end, he was inviting Darlene and me to “a little get-together chez Dagover on Saturday night.”

“I have to work the next day,” I said. Ending the war in the Pacific, I nearly added. “An educational film for the Army, teaching our boys how to avoid the clap. Tedious, but I need the money.”

“The Army shoots movies on Sunday?”

“Their dirty little secret.”

“And you’re playing a gonorrhea victim?”

“So they tell me.”

“Corpuscula Meets the Whore of Babylon, I love it,” Dagover said. “Please come to my party. Darlene can make sure you don’t stay up past your bedtime.”

The bastard sounded so sincere I knew he was looking to screw me, but I couldn’t figure out how.

“I’m expecting lots of royalty to show up,” Dagover persisted. “Cohn, probably, and maybe Zanuck and Val Lewton. It might be an opportunity to sell them that sea monster movie I’ve been reading so much about.”

No, I thought, but it sure as hell might be an opportunity to pique their interest in Lycanthropus. “Sounds tempting.”

“The Rubinsteins built you one terrific lizard. It’s got boffo written all over it.”

“You think so?”

“It would be great to see you on Saturday, Syms. Eight o’clock. Bring your script. Darlene, too.”

I smelled a rat, several rats, a whole Dwight Frye wet dream multitude of rats. “You’re starting to win me over, Siggy.”

“I’m still at Mastodon Manor, the stucco house at the corner of Curson and Lindenhurst, right by the La Brea Tar Pits. If the party gets dull, we’ll dig up a woolly mammoth and have Atwill bring it back to life.”

Although Darlene found Siegfried Dagover as insufferable as I did, she harbored a genuine fondness for his beleaguered wife, Esther, a corn-fed naïf from Iowa who painted innocuous watercolors and deserved better in her bed than a monomaniacal German expatriate with bad teeth. And so it happened that, when a migraine laid Darlene low early on Saturday evening, shortly after my regular six o’clock call to Quimby and two hours before Dagover’s party, her distress traced as much to the canceled visit with Esther as to the affliction itself. I offered to stay home and attempt to relieve her symptoms, but Darlene insisted I attend the event, partly so I could convey her regards to Esther, but mostly because Dagover wasn’t necessarily lying about Cohn, Zanuck, and Lewton being there. With hope in my heart and the Lycanthropus script tucked in my satchel, I climbed into the panel truck, traded grins with Gorgantis, and sped out of Santa Monica via Wilshire Boulevard, mentally rehearsing the evening’s presentation to the producers and telling myself, over and over, that tomorrow’s production of What Rough Beast mattered more to me than becoming the next big thing in werewolves.

After racing through Beverly Hills without mishap, I turned left on Ogden when I should have waited for Curson, then proceeded to learn more than I wanted to know about the cul-de-sacs south of Pan Pacific Park, but at long last I found Mastodon Manor. It would be gauche, I decided, to waltz into the party with my script in hand, so I left the satchel sitting on the passenger seat. If Zanuck or Lewton really did show up, I would turn the conversation toward Hollywood’s failure to fully exploit the box-office potential of horror movies, then casually mention that we were in the vicinity of a werewolf screenplay that had me very excited.

I threw a tarp over the PRR, locked up the truck, and followed the flagstone path to the villa. A strapping blond house-boy named Rudolph, reportedly a Hitler refugee like Dagover, greeted me and took my coat. As I strolled through the burbling throng, engaging in the usual head-bobbing and smile-flashing rituals with people as indifferent to my presence as I was to theirs, I realized that to be invited to a Siggy Dagover party was to enter a select company. The guest list was a veritable Who’s Almost But Not Quite Who in Hollywood. Cowboys abounded. Private eyes proliferated. Particularly conspicuous were the mad scientists. Atwill, of course, plus Lugosi and Chaney, Jr., not to mention John Carradine, whose endocrinologist in Captive Wild Woman was the most underrated horror performance of ‘43, George Zucco, who’d single-handedly transformed Dead Men Walk into a marvelously macabre oddity, and Peter Lorre, so gloriously depraved as the surgeon who grafts a murderer’s hands onto Colin Clive’s ragged stumps in Mad Love. Colin himself was probably at home, either tying one on or sleeping one off.

Noting my arrival, Dagover came sashaying across the room, weaving among the B-movie elite, his plump, unhappy spouse at his heels. Poor Esther, married to the wrong man, living in the wrong town, hosting the wrong party. This bewildered creature hadn’t the foggiest idea what to say to a bunch of hard-drinking alpha males who spent their days pretending to perform blasphemous medical experiments and their nights fantasizing that they were going to give up alcohol tomorrow.

“You don’t have a drink in your hand,” Dagover observed. “I can remedy that.”

“Hello, Esther,” I said. “You may not remember me—”

“Syms Thorley,” she said, brightening. “I don’t see your enchanting ladyfriend.”

“In bed with a migraine.”

Esther’s smile collapsed like a pricked balloon, and I promised myself that, before leaving Mastodon Manor, I would beg for a tour of her studio.

“I’ve been deputized to hug you on her behalf,” I said, then threw my arms around her supple flesh like a seringueiro determining the circumference of a rubber tree.

“As I recall, you’re a connoisseur of amontillado,” Dagover said.

“Not before midnight, Montresor,” I said. “I don’t see Cohn anywhere. What about Zanuck?”

“They sent their regrets,” Dagover said. “Lewton is planning to drop by later. Katzman, too. You brought the script, right? Your sea monster should be right up Sam’s alley.”

“He already passed on it. The suit doesn’t work for him.”

“Just between you and me, that man has execrable taste.”

Obviously a case could now be made for my turning around, driving home, and nursing Darlene, but the possibility of Lewton’s advent kept me rooted to the spot.

“Sam knows he has lousy taste,” I told Dagover. “He’s proud of it. The last time he went to services, he saw flaming letters blazing above the Torah. ‘Thou shalt not commit art, Sam Katzman. It’s bad for business.’“

As the evening wore on, I came to realize that my brush with the law had evidently been the most interesting thing to happen in Southern California that week. Gorgantis was the talk of the evening. No fewer than ten people sidled over to give me what they imagined was a good-natured ribbing. “You missed your calling, Syms. You should be sitting behind a fancy desk at Metro, cooking up publicity stunts.” “I want you to know that if the cops had arrested you, I would’ve chipped in two bucks toward your bail, maybe even three.” “Tell me the truth. You and Darlene created that sea serpent to spice up your sex life, right? All I want to know is, does it work?” Eventually my ribs couldn’t take it anymore, and I sought out Esther, imploring her to lead me upstairs to her studio, a wish she was only too happy to grant.

During the seven years since I’d last seen Esther’s paintings, her drafting skills had improved, her brushwork had become masterful, and her sensibility had turned morbid. Where once her walls had glowed with soothing still-lifes of flowers and sea shells, I now confronted a cavalcade of grimy, wasted men who looked prepared to commit any act short of bathing, interspersed with landscapes whose unifying subject was the failed disposition of the dead. To my immediate left, the earth of a Haitian cemetery fractured beneath a crop of rising zombies. On a nearby easel, a dozen gossamer ghosts streamed forth from a crumbling mausoleum, headed for a come-as-you-aren’t party somewhere east of oblivion. At the back of the studio, a moldering mob of former churchyard tenants marched into a nearby abbey bringing bad theological news.

Watercolors remained the artist’s medium of choice, and I could not help admiring the skill with which she’d pressed those intrinsically cheery hues into the service of irremediable gloom. This was not the Esther Dagover oeuvre I knew, but I liked it.

“Oh, there you are!” her husband called from the doorway. “Isn’t Esther’s work simply stunning these days?”

“She deserves her own gallery,” I said.

“You think so?” Esther said.

“Giant bipedal mutant amphibian iguanas never lie,” I said.

“Huh?”

“If you can tear yourself away from these wonderful things, we’re about to screen a classic,” Dagover said. “Which one?” I asked.

“Val Lewton asked me that same question twenty minutes ago.”

“He’s here?”

Dagover answered with a burst of anxious chatter. What was eating my rival? He seemed to be stuck in some sort of Gentile seder, convinced that this night was different from all other nights. “Lewton’s not here, no. He called. We talked. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Val’s never seen it. Smart money says he’ll show up. Did you know my cousin’s in the cast? Lil Dagover. She plays the ingénue. Ingénue is an anagram for Genuine, the title of Wiene’s subsequent picture.”

“Just as Szilard is an anagram for lizards,” I noted.

“What?”

By normal Hollywood standards, Mastodon Manor was an unimpressive estate, no swimming pool, no tennis court, no Roman baths, not even a wet bar, but it did have a basement movie theater complete with upholstered seats and—to avoid any hiatus during reel changes—dual 35mm projectors housed in a soundproof booth. Before a Dagover party ran its course, the guests were normally treated to one of the contraband films that had accompanied him on his flight from the Nazis. His collection included a print of almost every picture made by UFA during the twenties. Whatever his shortcomings, Dagover had apparently smuggled the whole of Weimar cinema out of Berlin just in time to prevent Hitler from putting it to the torch.

Did I want to see The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari again? Not really. Under most circumstances, I would’ve gladly forgone Wiene’s aggressively eccentric movie for more time with Esther and her disaffected cadavers. Was Dagover lying through his teeth when he hinted that Lewton might be on the way? Probably—and yet there now came to my ears the steady rush of that Shakespearean tide which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

“Be honest, Syms,” Esther said. “My visions are too bleak these days. They belong on the cover of Weird Tales.”

“Even as we speak, brilliant men contemplate the immolation of countless innocent victims through fire-breathing, city-stomping behemoths,” I told her. “Compared with the desolation in the skulls of our admirals, your visions belong on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.”

Exuding an uncharacteristic unctuousness, Dagover escorted me down three flights of stairs to his subterranean Rialto, its walls decorated with posters for Metropolis, Die Nibelungen, and other UFA epics, then guided me to the best seat in the house, a lounge chair covered in maroon velvet. The place was practically empty. Evidently Caligari held little appeal for the guests at this particular party—or perhaps they’d demurred on patriotic principle, the filmmakers being, after all, Krauts. Chester “Boston Blackie” Morris and his wife had shown up, plus Sidney “Charlie Chan” Toler, Tom “The Falcon” Conway, and Warner “Crime Doctor” Baxter. Lewton was nowhere to be seen.

Barely concealing his disappointment over the low turnout, Dagover introduced the film with forced zeal, urging us to take seriously the claim of the writers, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, that their work should be read allegorically, with the mountebank Caligari symbolizing the politicians who’d maneuvered Germany into the Great War and the somnambulist Cesare representing the young men who’d been hypnotized into imagining the conflict would be steeped in glory. The film, in short, was an artistic brief for pacifism, a kind of All Quiet on the Expressionist Front, with Walter Röhrig’s crooked sets instead of Erich Maria Remarque’s bloody trenches.

As Caligari unspooled, Dagover insisted on serving me a glass of my beloved amontillado, and a second glass after that, and the consequent inebriation did much to rehabilitate the movie in my eyes. Where once I’d dismissed Caligari as a shotgun marriage of cinema and painting, I now beheld a near masterpiece, each jagged image drawing the audience ever deeper into the mind of the schizophrenic protagonist. This was precisely the direction in which the film medium had not gone, the evocation of aberrant psychological states through unabashedly artificial décor, and I found myself wishing that dozens of similarly audacious pictures had followed.

With my third glass of sherry, my critical faculties evaporated altogether, and I realized I was drifting in and out of consciousness. I stayed awake long enough to see the angry mob kill Cesare, and then I became dead to the world.

Slowly, languorously, my left eyelid lifted into my skull, followed by the right, a process as protracted as the somnambulist’s great black orbs flickering open at Caligari’s command. My carotid arteries spasmed. My throat throbbed. A mad scientist had amputated my tongue and grafted a slug in its place. Gradually I became aware of four astonishing facts. I was still in Dagover’s private theater, my body lay sprawled across a divan in the corner, somebody had stolen my wrist radio, and it was nine o’clock in the morning, or so my pocket watch claimed, unless, of course, it was nine at night—a dubious theory, since that would mean I’d been unconscious nearly twenty-four hours.

“Good morning, Syms,” Dagover said, thereby clearing up some of my confusion. He was straddling a chair beside the projection booth, his arms folded on the headrest, contemplating me with his most remorseless Werdistratus gaze. Rudolph hovered in the background, waiting to do Dagover’s bidding like Noble Johnson anticipating Lugosi’s next directive in Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Nine A.M. There was still enough time for me to make the four-hour drive to China Lake and star in the momentous matinee performance of What Rough Beast. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be”—for all his flaws, Dagover was surely not an enemy spy, but I decided to maintain my cover story anyway—“on my way to Burbank, so I can do that VD film for the Army.”

“I remember,” Dagover said. He wore a green satin smoking jacket. Balanced on his lower lip, his unlit cigarette moved up and down like a semaphore as he talked. “And Monday you start shooting Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra. Don’t worry—I already spoke to Darlene. She knows you spent the night here.”

“Give me my wrist radio back. I need to call the gonorrhea people and tell them I’ll be late for the shoot.”

“You mean that thing’s real? I thought you got it out of a Cracker Jack box.”

“Give it back.”

“‘All in good time,’ as I told you in the final reel of Flesh of Iron.”

I made a rigid arc with my thumb and middle finger, using these fleshly calipers to massage my aching temples. “I feel like Corpuscula. My brains have burst out of my skull.”

“Had a little too much amontillado, did we?”

“It sure packs quite a wallop.”

“One might almost imagine I drugged you,” Dagover said.

Stretching my arms, extending my legs, I took an inventory of myself. Muscles, tendons, ligaments, eyes, ears, jaw: all my thespian assets were in working order. I was ready to act my heart out in Hangar A. Had Dagover said drugged? Huh? What?

“You drugged me?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” Dagover said, lighting his cigarette.

“You just did.”

“I needed to make sure you remained behind after the other guests left. The door to my movie theater is locked, and the key resides in a secret location. It would not be an exaggeration to say you are my prisoner.”

“Have you gone mad?” I said, another line from Flesh of Iron.

“A plausible theory,” Dagover said. “The evidence is persuasive. Not only did I put a sedative in your sherry, I’m about to train a gun on your heart.” From the pocket of his smoking jacket he produced a derringer, which he pointed in my direction. “It’s loaded.”

“Fuck,” I said.

“My terms are simple. This were-lizard of yours is precisely what my career needs right now. The suit is marvelous, and the premise sounds even better. Our protagonist starts out a Karloffian goody-goody—right?—looking to cure cancer with lizard glands—am I getting warm?—but he feels obligated to experiment on himself, and the injections turn him into a reptilian horror—I’m hot now, yes?—living in sewers and crashing into the heroine’s boudoir. Obviously the script demands a virtuoso performance, and I’m the man to deliver it.”

“There is no script,” I said.

“Shut up,” Dagover said. “I haven’t finished. The instant I snap my fingers, Rudolph will fetch my typewriter. I’m going to dictate a cover letter to him, which you will sign forthwith.” He took an elegant Continental drag on his cigarette. “‘To whom it may concern. Darlene Wasserman and I wrote the attached screenplay, Curse of the Were-Lizard, with Siegfried Dagover in mind. So profound is our commitment to seeing Mr. Dagover in the lead, we have given him our Gorgantis costume to do with as he pleases. While I might accept a small part in the film, I shall not consider playing the monster under any conditions. Yours truly, Syms J. Thorley.’ Well, my friend, do we have a deal?”

“There is no Gorgantis script.”

“Let’s make sure you understand the stakes,” Dagover said, stroking his derringer. “If you don’t give me this plum, I’m going to keep you here through Tuesday night, which means you’ll miss the first two shooting days on Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra, which means Sam will fire you, which means he’ll hire me to play the mummy, and we can’t have that, can we?”

“Siggy, you’ve got to let me go right now! You don’t understand! There is no Gorgantis script! There’s only this thing called What Rough Beast, which Brenda wrote under a Navy contract after some scientists at a secret Mojave lab started feeling guilty about breeding psychopathic incendiary lizards as biological weapons!”

“My insane actor impersonation is good, Syms, but yours is better.”

“I’m not kidding! Operation Fortune Cookie!”

“My ass.”

Dear reader, dear God, what other choice did I have? Surely we can agree that I was obligated to tell Dagover the whole story: the horrendous behemoths, Ivan Groelish’s petition to President Truman, the failure of the Midget Lizard Initiative, Obie’s model city, the recent arrival of a Japanese delegation on American soil. And so I did. I unbagged every confidential cat and spilled each classified bean. Naturally Dagover greeted my tale with disbelief, but his doubts began to dissipate after I showed him my ID badge and explained that the New Amsterdam Project was a code name for the Knickerbocker Project. His skepticism vanished altogether after Rudolph went off to reconnoiter the manor grounds and returned with the news that the fleet in the driveway indeed included a U.S. Navy panel truck whose cargo bay contained the lizard suit.

“Now that I’ve heard the whole story, I must admit it makes more sense than what I read in the Examiner,” Dagover said. “I kept asking myself, ‘Where did Thorley get the money to commission such a classy monster rig?’” He firmed his grip on the derringer. “I guess the Navy would be pretty unhappy to hear you’ve been blabbing about their iguanas. Don’t worry, Syms, I’ll keep everything under my hat.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “So do the thousands of American boys waiting to invade the Japanese mainland.”

“Sounds like the Knickerbocker people are counting on you for a performance to beat the band,” Dagover said.

“You got that right,” I said. “So if you’ll please put down your gun, return my Dick Tracy set, and unlock the door, I’ll be on my way.”

“Not so fast, Syms. Something just occurred to me. Whoever wrecks that Shirazuka model this afternoon is going to end up a kind of war hero—right?—with lots of honors and Hollywood contracts to follow. I’m thinking the savior in question might as well be me.”

“No, Siggy. Bad idea.”

“I’ll put on the costume and get Rudolph to drive me out to Inyokern. ‘Poor old Syms Thorley,’ I’ll tell your Admiral Yordan. ‘He’s sick as a dog. But you needn’t worry, sir. Siegfried K. Dagover is here to save the day.’ It’s all so delicious, don’t you think? A Kraut with his own print of Triumph of the Will ending World War Two. There’s some real poetry in that, if you ask me.”

“What you’re saying is crazy, and you know it. You haven’t rehearsed. You haven’t studied Brenda’s script. The suit has all sorts of quirks.”

“Script? What script? Gorgantis wades ashore, finds a goddamn Willis O’Brien city full of slant-eyed fanatics, burns it down, fade-out.”

“Siggy, please, I’ve put a hundred hours into preparing for this part. You could never bring it off. If the demonstration shot fails, there won’t be any accolades for you. You’ll spend the next forty years hanging your head in shame.”

“I’m already hanging my head in shame. You think I’m going to get a fucking Oscar for Revenge of Corpuscula?”

“Besides, I’ve got a much better scheme.” Did I? Indeed—not a plan I liked, but it was the lesser of two evils. “Send Rudolph back to the truck. He’ll find a script on the passenger seat.”

“You said there wasn’t one.”

“A completely different project, the best werewolf script ever, authored by yours truly. Except I didn’t write it, Siggy. You did. Just retype the title page. ‘Lycanthropus, a Screenplay by Siegfried K. Dagover.’ Tell Cohn and Zanuck and Lewton you always knew you had a script in you, and here it is.”

“You’re trying to trick me.”

“I’m on the level, you Jew-hating goyische Nazi schmuck! This is your fucking destiny, Siggy! This is opportunity knocking on your wooden head!”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t talk that way to somebody who was pointing a gun at me.”

“Cross my heart, Baron Ordlust will write your ticket to the fucking Horror Hall of Fame! Long after everybody’s forgotten about Karloff and Lugosi and—what’s-his-name?—Thorley, they’ll remember Siegfried Dagover!”

My nemesis furrowed his brow, pocketed his derringer, and dispatched Rudolph to fetch the masterly scenario in question. He returned within five minutes, bearing my Lycanthropus satchel.

“This better be good,” Dagover informed me.

“Promise me one thing,” I said. “Read it quickly. Even as we speak, the Jap delegation is having breakfast at China Lake.”

“I’ll read it at whatever velocity suits my mood.”

“Jesus Christ, Siggy.”

“Big man in my church.”

“Do you have even the remotest idea of the geopolitical implications of keeping me locked up here?”

Instead of answering, Dagover announced that he was going to his first-floor study, the place where he did all his best work.

“Oh, and one more thing,” he said, climbing the stairs. “If I decide to let you go”—he inserted the key in the lock—“you have to give me your solemn word.”

“About what?”

“About joining the Siegfried Dagover Fan Club.”

“My pleasure,” I said between gritted teeth. “While I’m at it, I’ll recruit Darlene. I didn’t know there was a Siegfried Dagover Fan Club.”

“There isn’t,” Dagover said, twisting the key with the emphatic theatricality of Werdistratus switching on a dynamo. “You’re going to start one. Naturally I’ll expect you to be the first president, and the vice-president, too. Maybe we can get the Rubinstein girls to design the membership cards.”

V

FOUR O’CLOCK in the morning. The hour when, it is said, more people die in their sleep, dream of illicit love, and write bad lines of movie dialogue than at any other time of day. Like Sam Katzman supervising one of his Monogram epics, I have managed to keep this memoir on schedule, largely because the last chapter flowed from my pen without any interruptions, no misdirected call girls, no room service deliveries, no visitors from Porlock, no ravens bearing intimations of mortality. Instant coffee courses though my veins, flushing old memories into consciousness from the deepest reaches of my brain.

Only once did the torrent of ink stop. The fault was mine. Shortly after composing the scene in which the Santa Monica police capture Gorgantis on the beach, I took a bathroom break and, instead of heading directly back to my desk, absently flicked on the television. I spun through the cable channels and—presto—there it was, Atom-Age Lycanthropus, 1957, the eighth and final entry in the successful series that had started eleven years earlier when B-movie actor Siegfried Dagover peddled a clever little werewolf script to Harry Cohn at Columbia. Until the day the project went before the cameras, I’m sure Dagover feared I would step forward and claim credit for the screenplay or, worse, the delicious concept at its core: Baron Basil Ordlust, the aristocratic thrill-seeker who travels the world in quest of the man-beast whose bite will transport him to hidden realms of decadent ecstasy. But a bargain is a bargain, even in Hollywood. When I handed Siggy his breakthrough role, I meant that he should keep it.

Crisply lensed by Karl Freund and smartly directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, the present scene was infinitely depressing—and not just because that should have been me up there on the screen, and instead it was Dagover, suavely solidifying his mystique as the Ronald Coleman of horror movies. What really bothered me was the undeniable skill with which the bastard had milked the moment. The scene found Ordlust in the Mexican jungles, hiding out in the temple of the local jaguar-goddess and trying to convince her fleshly avatar, lasciviously played by Ruth Roman, to favor him with her fangs. An entirely standard situation for the series, but Dagover and Roman brought so much erotic energy to the encounter you could practically see the pheromones fluttering around them like moths. Gesture by gesture, intonation by intonation, Dagover was doing everything right.

To this day, film scholars wonder why Columbia’s Lycanthropus was the only monster from the classic Hollywood pantheon to last into the fifties, when audience tastes in genre horror shifted radically from the gothic to the cosmic. I suspect this success can be traced to two facts: Baron Ordlust never shared the screen with Abbott and Costello, who belonged exclusively to Universal, and Harry Cohn insisted that his writers work radioactivity or an alien visitation into every Lycanthropus installment, preferably both. On first principles, werewolves and flying saucers have little in common, but Cohn’s loyal pencil-pushers rose to the occasion.

Consider Lycanthropus in Space, in which the Baron convinces a team of rocket scientists to send him to Venus, planet of shape-shifting carrot-women. Or Galactic Lycanthropus, in which an extraterrestrial scientist lands on Earth and attempts to extract the life essence from Baron Ordlust, whose joie de vivre is exactly what’s needed back on Procyon-5. When that particular entry was being cast, in February of 1955, my career had bottomed out, so Cohn and Dagover threw me a bone, the role of the phlegmatic alien. I acquitted myself well, but I was better in What Rough Beast.

It would be an understatement to say that Commander Quimby wanted my head on a platter, my ass in a sling, and my guts on a loom after, having recovered my wrist radio from Dagover, I called him and confessed that a rival had drugged me the previous night at a Hollywood party, with the result that the demonstration shot might have to be delayed by as much as an hour. Back then there were no intercontinental rockets bearing thermonuclear warheads, but Quimby still went ballistic, asserting that Yordan would probably be forced to improvise delaying tactics, “such as challenging the Jap delegation to a sake-drinking contest,” a potentially disastrous development that could easily make them “too sloshed to take the annihilation of Shirazuka seriously.” Before shutting off his radio, Quimby calmed down and started thinking strategically. He told me he would order the California Highway Patrol to permit all Navy panel trucks zooming north on Route 14 to break the speed limit and any other statutes that might prevent me from reaching China Lake on time.

No sooner had the behemoth and I motored away from Mastodon Manor than a fresh disaster struck. Glancing at the gas gauge, I saw that it was within a hair’s-breadth of E—E for egregious oversight, execrable planning, extraordinary stupidity. Today was Sunday. All the service stations would be closed. Gasoline, gasoline everywhere, and not a drop to fuel the end of World War Two. Even my friend Gorgantis betrayed me. Three days earlier I’d drained all the petroleum from his tail during target practice in an Inglewood automobile graveyard, incinerating rocks and cacti, the derelict cars themselves having been carted off long ago as scrap metal for the military.

I hadn’t a prayer of reaching Inyokern, but I figured I could limp back to Mastodon Manor. My calculation proved correct. Just as I was pulling into Dagover’s driveway, the engine gasped, groaned, and conked out entirely. When I explained the situation, Dagover proved uncharacteristically sympathetic—he was still giddy over his theft of the Lycanthropus script—and he cheerfully lent me his Duesenberg, which happened to have a full tank.

Mindful that we could probably use the backup lizard in the Quonset hut at the Château Mojave, I considered ditching the PRR. Being unfamiliar with the duplicate’s quirks and kinks, however, I soon thought better of the idea, so I strapped Gorgantis to the roof of Dagover’s car like a canoe. Shortly after zooming past the L.A. city limits, I started wondering if I should get on my Dick Tracy set and instruct Quimby to tell the state police to ignore all Duesenbergs bearing dinosaurs. But I really didn’t want to deal with the commander again. If a trooper pulled me over, I would simply explain that I was delivering the monster to a diner in Bakersfield, so they could use it to advertise their newest specialty, the Behemoth Burger. Should the officer still insist on giving me a ticket, I would flash my ID badge and tell him to stop fucking with the course of American history.

After three hours of running stoplights, exceeding the speed limit, and otherwise indulging in deplorable citizenship, I pulled up before the Château Mojave, parking between Whale’s Rolls Royce and Joy’s convertible. Admiral Yordan’s chauffeur was pacing around the staff car, treading a circular furrow in the sand. Four other sailors stood at attention beside the canopied troop transport, ready to deliver Gorgantis to Hangar A. I scrambled out of the Duesenberg, accorded my PRR a quick glance—evidently it had survived the trip without mishap—and dashed into the atelier.

Eyes greeted me, a baker’s dozen, Yordan being a cyclops, presumably lodged in their owners’ skulls but nevertheless exuding a disembodied quality. Thirteen detached, discrete, extremely angry eyes.

“I should have you keelhauled!” Yordan screamed.

“Bad enough you got the lizard’s picture in the paper—but this is outrageous!” Dr. Groelish cried.

“Do you realize you’re on in thirty-five minutes?” Joy asked.

“You let us down,” Gladys said.

“We’re very disappointed,” Mabel said.

“Most unprofessional of you,” Obie said.

“You’ll never work in this desert again,” Whale said.

“Boil me in oil!” I shouted. “Tear out my teeth! But right now we’ve got a war to win!”

Yordan scowled, perhaps annoyed that he hadn’t thought of that line himself, then ordered the transport detail to retrieve the PRR. As the sailors carried Gorgantis into the atelier, the admiral explained that he was about to rejoin the Jap delegation, presently finishing their luncheon in the officer’s mess. Before taking off in his staff car, he made a tactical decision to clasp my shoulder, offer me an affirming smile, and wish me luck.

While Mabel replenished my oxygen cylinder and fueled the flamethrower, Gladys suited me up with her usual cool professionalism, refusing to let her spleen find its way to her fingers. Halfway through the process, Whale reached out with both hands and squeezed my left claw, while Joy accorded my torso a similarly reassuring hug. Perhaps their affection was entirely pragmatic, intended only to shore up this unreliable actor in whom so many of their personal ambitions were invested, but I preferred to believe they’d forgiven me.

Dr. Groelish revealed that the unveiling of the sedated giant lizards had been a great success, with Marquis Kido, Deputy Minister Kase, Chief Secretary Sakomizu, Information Director Shimomura, and their translator struggling unsuccessfully to banish the infinite awe from their normally impassive faces. The exhibition of the tranquilized dwarfs had also gone well, with the emissaries apparently getting no inkling that when fully awake these creatures were pussycats. Thus far the day’s only unexpected development was the delegation’s request for permission to document their mission on motion picture film. Anticipating the Navy’s assent, the emissaries had brought along two professional cinematographers and a pair of silent 35mm Kinarris acquired years ago from their German allies.

“Did Strickland say yes?” Whale asked.

“Reluctantly,” Dr. Groelish replied. “He forbade them to use artificial lighting on the giants, lest they become aroused.”

“Their footage of Blondie, Dagwood, and Mr. Dithers will be underexposed,” Whale said, “but the attack on Shirazuka should turn out fine, Obie’s lighting being brilliant in both senses of the word.”

“Thank you,” Obie said.

“So the behemoths really unnerved them?” I asked.

“Marquis Kido wanted to know how many such weapons we had in our arsenal,” Dr. Groelish said. “I could hear the anxiety in his voice. Naturally Strickland didn’t tell him.”

“Secretary Sakomizu insisted that only barbarians would inflict such monsters on cities,” Joy said. “Barzak shut him up with the Rape of Nanking.”

“Minister Kase predicted that, whatever the outcome of the war, the prevailing powers will engage in a lizard race,” Dr. Groelish said. “Strickland responded that the outcome of the war was not in doubt, and Mr. Kase should stop pretending otherwise.”

“Mr. Shimomura asserted that a carefully choreographed air strike, artillery barrage, or armored attack would easily lay the behemoths low,” Joy said. “It was all bluster, of course.”

“Done!” Mabel said, shaking a final drop of gasoline into my tail.

“Voilà!” Gladys said, activating the last zipper. “Four minutes ahead of schedule!” Dr. Groelish said. “All hail the Monogram Shambler!” Joy said. “Sink their fleet,” Whale instructed me. “Smash their planes. Crush their artillery. Melt their tanks. Break a leg.”

Entombed in the bathyscaphe, my neoprene habitat resounding with my rubbery breaths, my stomach undergoing colonization by a hundred epileptic butterflies, I inevitably thought of the agonies suffered by the nameless narrator of Poe’s “The Premature Burial.” Although the tale ends happily, with the protagonist getting cured of his catalepsy, most of the story concerns his morbid anticipation of untimely interment. I knew the key passage by heart, having made it the centerpiece of my unsuccessful audition for a role that ultimately went to Lugosi, the diabolical Legendre in White Zombie, and now snippets returned to me like bits of flotsam washing up on a beach.

“The unendurable oppression of the lungs—the stifling fumes of the damp earth—the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute night—the unseen but palpable presence of the conqueror worm.”

Admiral Yordan recited his opening monologue, insisting that for even the bravest warrior there could be no honor, only meaningless obliteration, in taking the field against a raging behemoth. This time around, the speech made me squirm. Our job was not to tell the Japanese what to think about the lizards, but to show them that when such weapons were unleashed, what followed was unthinkable.

The music began. Today Waxman’s dissonant and distressing overture sounded didactic, a sermon spun from notes instead of words. Next came more of Yordan’s folderol, his pretentious conjuration of Gorgantis from the depths of the sea.

“The doors of hell open! The beast rises! Doom comes to Shirazuka!”

As the grand “Gorgantis Theme” resonated through the bathyscaphe, I flooded the chamber, squeezed through the hatch, and assumed my crouch. Should I open the oxygen cylinder? No, I decided. Better to hold that invaluable commodity in reserve, using it to keep from blacking out at the height of the conflagration.

Abruptly I stood erect, crashing through the surface of the bay. The water came up to my waist. I was not a happy monster. We had insulted the emissaries. My isinglass peepholes disclosed the moonlit harbor with its seven anchored warships, riding the tide. Our scale-model Japanese fleet now seemed like yet another affront, gratuitously reminding the delegation that their nation no longer had a navy. What was the intended subtext of Brenda’s script? Was she saying to our visitors, “Look, foolish warriors, even if the gods gave you a new armada, it would avail you nothing”?

I began with the carriers, scooping the Akagi out of the water—in reality, the Japs had lost that one at Midway—while simultaneously seizing the Shinano, which had actually been torpedoed and sent to the bottom on its shakedown cruise. Fighters and dive bombers spilled into the bay like pawns tumbling from an upended chess board. As in the rehearsal, I smacked the two flight decks together. Waxman’s percussionist provided the cymbal crash. I hurled the fractured carriers aside with the insouciance of a chimpanzee tossing away a banana peel. The twisted hulks hit the water and vanished.

Smoke gushing from their stacks, searchlights blazing from their bridges, the remainder of the fleet steamed out to meet the threat, two destroyers, two heavy cruisers, and the late, great dreadnought Yamato, mysteriously resurrected following her heroic suicide run of the previous April. The five warships encircled Gorgantis, ravenous sharks moving in for the kill. A thunderous volley shook the bay. As the musicians played the cue called “Floating Fortresses,” barrages of shells pelted my leathery skin like horizontal sleet. Mindful of Whale’s insistence that we should give the enemy false hopes, I pretended to reel under the fusillade—which wasn’t difficult, for Obie had loaded the warships’ guns with far more cordite than necessary, so that half the BB’S ripped through the PRR and then my street clothes, nicking the bare skin beneath. Thanks to Obie’s red-dye blisters, streams of blood were soon coursing down the monster’s chest, glistening in the moonlight like trails left by iridescent slugs. I squeezed my roar-bulb. Gorgantis bellowed and swished his tail, stirring up a tsunami in Toyama Bay that nearly caused the remainder of the fleet to founder.

Balling my claws, raising them high, I launched my counterattack. Relentlessly I hammered the destroyers, staving in their hulls and sending them instantly to the bottom. Next I vented my wrath on the heavy cruisers, pounding both warships until the roiling deep swallowed them forever. When it came to dispatching the Yamato, I decided to improvise. Clasping the vessel in both claws, I extended my arms and relaxed my grip. The dreadnought plummeted. My rising foot broke its fall, instep crashing into keel, and the Yamato became instantly airborne, flying across Shirazuka, glancing off Mount Onibaba, and hurtling into the blackness beyond.

Having won the Battle of Toyama Bay, I now began my trek toward shore, when suddenly a burst of unscripted violence intruded upon the demonstration. To this day I’m not sure how I received my wound. Probably I stepped on the fractured deck of a sunken warship, the jagged edge tearing through the behemoth’s right heel, penetrating my tennis shoe, and burrowing into the flesh beyond. I squeezed my roar-bulb, so that Gorgantis’s mighty cry drowned out my screams of pain.

Clumsily I heaved myself onto dry land, my warm blood pooling inside the breached cavity of the lizard’s leg. I hoped Whale was correct when he said a vulnerable monster would best serve our purpose, because for the rest of the show the emissaries would get just that, Gorgantis the humbled, the crippled, struggling to stay upright. Keep going, Syms. You can do this. Move your goddamn flat feet, first the good one—yes, yes—next the right—oh, shit—next the left—yes—the right—shit—the left, the right, left, right. You are the undying dragon, the immortal maggot, the unconquerable worm.

Even in my tormented condition I could appreciate the luminous beauty of a nocturnal passenger train, flashing through the Far Eastern darkness to Waxman’s scherzo, its blazing lamps illuminating the conversations, card games, and reading matter of a thousand weary travelers. But the universe of Überweapons is bereft of aesthetics. For an enraged lizard, the many-windowed creature riding the trestle was merely a rival reptile. It must be torn from its tracks and devoured.

I squeezed my roar-bulb. As Gorgantis bellowed and swished his tail, crushing warehouses, ship berths, gantries, and other waterfront installations, his serrated teeth parted, and I crammed the great luminous serpent into the gaping maw. The monster chewed, mashing a dozen coaches and their helpless riders, while the rest of the train—locomotive, tender, unswallowed cars—dribbled from both sides of his mouth like a string of sausages.

Directly ahead stretched one of Obie’s most exquisite creations, a row of high-tension power lines marking the border between the harbor and the city proper. Gorgantis charged into the mesh, his feet uprooting the towers like so many croquet hoops, his claws slashing through the cables like an actor batting away cobwebs on a Monogram sound stage. Showers of sparks arced across the moonlit sky. Per Whale’s direction, I pretended to suffer a near electrocution—not a difficult deception, for, as with the Japanese naval guns, Obie had overdone it, supplying the cables with far more juice than he’d used in the rehearsal.

It had been a night to remember, but now the moon set, the sun rose, and the birds awoke, as if roused by Waxman’s ominous “Dawn” cue. The bleeding beast gathered his strength. His wounded heel throbbed. Again he roared. And the evening and the morning were the first act.

Perhaps the pain in my foot prevented me from thinking clearly, but an unfathomable compassion now seized my reptilian soul. How many brave Japanese sailors had I drowned by the light of the moon? How many night watchmen had I killed? How many insomniac strollers, graveyard-shift stevedores, and travelers on the Imperial Railway?

No, Syms. You’ve got it backwards. Heed Jimmy Whale’s wisdom. Go down to the muck. Become the worst of all possible Calibans, for only then will the Knickerbocker behemoths stay where they belong, torpid on the floor of China Lake. Become a true son of Sycorax, bile pouring from your heart, curses spewing from your lips. “‘As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed with raven’s feather from unwholesome fen,’” I growled under my breath, “‘drop on you both!’“

Cruelty renewed, depravity regained, I shuffled through the ruins of the harbor, my hurt foot leaving a bright red ribbon on the terrain. The wound still smarted, but I sensed that the clotting process had begun. Peering through my peepholes, I surveyed the remaining targets: the immediate city, its slumbering suburbs, and finally, north of the Kosugi River, the mountains where dwelled holy Hirohito, descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. Beyond the peaks, I dimly apprehended another realm, the world of Operation Fortune Cookie, including the two Japanese cinematographers, cranking away with their silent Kinarris, plus the four emissaries—my captive audience—sitting high above in their sealed balcony, and farther still, in the darkest corner of Hangar A, the orchestra, working to unnerve the delegation with Waxman’s discordant “Inferno Theme.”

Stay in character, Syms. You are the id-thing, the hag-spawned horror, hurling invectives at your despicable master. “‘All the infections that the sun sucks up from bogs, fens, flats on Prosper fall,’” I hissed to myself, “‘and make him by inchmeal a disease!’”

Done. I’d touched bottom. Here in the belly of the behemoth I’d met my primal Caliban. The urge to burn—to burn, decimate, slaughter, and slay—rushed through me like the strongest sexual desire a vertebrate might ever know. But first I must switch on my oxygen. I set my palm against the lizard’s navel, creating a friction fit between my skin and the valve. Deftly, subtly, I rotated the handle, then leaned back on my haunches and waited for the lizard’s interior climate to change.

Nothing. No whisper of escaping gas. No cool rush of air. Was the mechanism broken? Had Gladys and Mabel accidentally installed an empty cylinder? Don’t panic, Syms. Be a serene killing machine, a mellow abomination, a plague as pacific as a corpse.

I had no choice but to proceed with the dismantling of Shirazuka—and so I did, aligning Gorgantis’s snout with the heart of the city and squeezing the burn-bulb. A great gush of fire jetted from the dragon’s mouth, and soon a dozen office buildings, apartment complexes, and department stores were in flames. I squeezed the roar-bulb. Releasing a demon scream, Gorgantis whipped his tail and swept a jumbled mass of cars, buses, trolleys, and flaming rubble into an uptown neighborhood. For the next ten minutes the behemoth pursued this remorseless strategy, alternately crisping the city with his fiery lungs and battering it with his juggernaut tail. I did not neglect the personal touch. Reaching down, I grabbed a bunch of helpless citizens and, as in the rehearsal, popped them into my jaws. The Lilliputians lodged in the back of Gorgantis’s throat like a cluster of mutant tonsils.

Just as I feared, the holocaust soon created an intolerable atmosphere inside my PRR. Saltwater erupted from my scalp and rushed into my eyes. Smoke leaked through the BB holes in my hide. My every breath was a great wheezing gust. I coughed convulsively. When the Imperial Air Force appeared, they met an enemy much weaker than the Syms Thorley of the run-through. Today they faced a sweat-blind and half-suffocated mortal, reeling from anemia.

The dive bombers came at me from every point of the compass, raining exploding firecrackers on my head, shoulders, chest, and thighs, even as the fighter planes shot blood blisters into my neck and groin. Obie had not stinted on the red dye, and Gorgantis was soon bleeding from a hundred fresh wounds. Given my dazed and anguished state, it was the fairest fight so far, doubtless recalling for the delegation the epiphanies of Pearl Harbor and the Indian Ocean. But the day, I vowed, would belong to the lizard. A blind behemoth was still a behemoth, a preternatural force before whom every rock, tree, river, hill, and valley in creation trembled. Transcending my distress, I lashed out in full fury, arms flailing, claws thrashing, and so it was that, bomber by bomber, fighter by fighter, I swatted the Imperial Air Force out of the skies, sending each stricken, smoking, shrieking plane on its final flight, a vertical journey to oblivion.

Methodically I removed my right hand from Gorgantis’s claw, then pulled the hem of my undershirt free of my trousers and pressed the cotton fabric to my eyes, sopping up the sweat. I scanned the rubble that once was Shirazuka. Before my remorseless gaze, a dozen fires smoldered. Phantom lamentations reached my ears, the screams of the maimed, the threnodies of the bereaved, the wailing of widows and orphans. And the grieving and the mourning were the second act.

Had it occurred on the great island of Honshu and not in a U.S. Navy airplane hangar, the defense of the Imperial Palace would have earned its rightful place among the most brilliant deployments in military history. No conventional force could have taken Mount Onibaba without causalities running into the hundreds of thousands, so astutely had General Anami arrayed his Chi-Ro tanks and field artillery along every pass, cliff, and switchback between the foothills and the lofty fortress. But a Knickerbocker behemoth was not a conventional force. Dr. Groelish’s Überweapon precluded heroic stands and noble sacrifices. Such affectations had no place in the universe of pornographic ordnance.

Like some vast, swirling, terrestrial maelstrom, Gorgantis came storming through the Chiaki Mountains. The Japanese threw everything they had at the invader. As the ferocious engagement continued, the lizard sustained myriad wounds, so that his scaly exterior showed more blood than skin. And still he kept coming, shambling over the sharp peaks, carrying the war to His Majesty, charging to the frenzied beat of Waxman’s cue titled “Death of an Emperor.”

Inside the PRR, nothing was going right. Torrents of sweat gushed from my brow, stinging my eyes like vindictive hornets. As with the Toyama Bay engagement, over half of the Japanese BB’S had penetrated my hide—evidently Obie had doubled the amount of cordite he’d used for in Hangar B—peppering my flesh with tiny cuts and admitting still more smoke. A coughing fit wracked my frame. The wound in my foot had opened up again. I could hear the rubbery slosh of blood against the lizard’s sole. Expressionist shadows flickered through my skull. A squidish ink suffused my mind.

At last I could see the palace, shining in the sun, guarded by fearsome armored divisions and bristling gun batteries. Repeating a bit of business Whale had introduced during the run-through, I heated the Chi-Ro tanks until they became pliable and, snatching them up two at a time, knotted their gun barrels together—a grotesquely cartoonish gesture, the Axis Meets Bugs Bunny. My assault on the field artillery was equally decisive, though lacking the wit with which I’d dispatched the tanks. I merely used the full fury of my dragon breath, turning the cannons into shimmering metallic blobs that dotted the mountains like patches of snow.

Now came the moment of truth, the hour of reckoning, the battle of the gods. On the Japanese side: the divine, benign, beatific, saintly, murderous, bloodthirsty Hirohito. On the American side: a different sort of deity, an eschatological reptile with few if any illusions about himself. Unless some equally powerful dragon came to Hirohito’s aid, the ghost of Yofuné-Nushi perhaps, rising from Toyama Bay, the god-emperor’s fate was sealed.

The most violent passage in Waxman’s score reverberated through Hangar A, the one titled, with a nod to the late FDR, “Righteous Might,” and as the cue built to its climax, I brought both my fists down hard on the palace. The fortress withstood the blow. Again I pounded. Fissures appeared, snaking across the plaster of Paris walls. A third blow. The fortress crumbled. Obie’s stage-blood packet exploded. Crimson cataracts rushed down the slopes like lava from a volcano.

For the beast’s triumphant exit, Waxman reprised the majestic “Gorgantis Theme,” and thanks to its stirring strains I found the strength to quit the scene without losing consciousness. As I lumbered toward the Japanese cinematographers, bloody but unbowed, they nervously overcranked their cameras—which meant that, developed and projected, the footage would appear in slow-motion. I kept on going, stumbling over cables, staggering past the orchestra. Suddenly the rear door swung open, admitting a dazzling shaft of desert light. I passed through the blessed portal to the glistening sands beyond, where Whale, Obie, and the twins stood waiting to hoist me into the troop transport. Once I was safely ensconced beneath the canvas canopy, Dr. Groelish and his academically ravishing daughter emerged from the shadows.

“You were stupendous,” Joy said, flourishing a $5,000 check, the remainder of my salary.

“I believed every minute of it,” Obie said, scrambling aboard along with Whale and the Rubinstein sisters.

“Your greatest performance ever,” Dr. Groelish said as we sped away from Hangar A.

“You found your Caliban,” Whale said.

“You balled the jack,” Gladys said.

“You shot the moon,” Mabel said.

“I cut my foot,” I said. “I’ve lost a lot of blood. Take me to the infirmary.”

VI

A DOUR AND DRIZZLY Monday has come to Baltimore. Raindrops skitter down my windows like translucent beetles in some unspeakably poetic science fiction movie by Andrei Tarkovsky. The management of this Holiday Inn has reacted to October’s chill by cranking up the heat, and so far all my attempts to counter their zeal by fiddling with the thermostat have failed. So here I sit in my stuffy little room, determined to complete this memoir before my sins get the better of me and I undertake my rendezvous with gravity.

Breakfast arrived a few minutes ago, at 7:45 A.M. to be precise, just as I’d finished fleeing the scene of my crimes against Shirazuka. My dealings with room service have been promiscuous of late. Pancakes, a cheese omelet, hash browns, English muffins, butter, marmalade, orange juice, coffee. The condemned man’s last meal is a feast.

Strangely enough, the breakfast steward was the same Ray Wintergreen who brought last night’s dinner. When I asked why he was working such grueling hours, he explained that, shortly after leaving my room, his newly acquired pewter rhedosaurus in hand, he’d learned that a fellow employee had called in sick. Ray had immediately agreed to work overtime, happy in the knowledge that the extra pay would increase the fund he’d earmarked for replacing his mother’s ten-speed bicycle. Before a dump truck ran over her beloved Schwinn, the sprightly woman had enjoyed pedaling on country roads all the way to the Mason-Dixon line and back.

“The world would be a better place if more people did that,” I said.

“Rode bicycles?” Ray said.

“Bought them for their mothers.”

“Mom’s an early riser,” Ray noted, carefully transferring the breakfast tray from his cart to my desk. “I called her an hour ago. She said to thank you for the rhedosaurus. She’d forgotten what a kick Grampa got out of that movie.”

“Once again I find myself in the awkward situation of having no gratuity to give you.”

“Don’t worry about it,” the exhausted steward said, opening his mouth to maximum diameter and drawing in a breath. “A Raydo is worth a thousand tips.”

I yawned reciprocally. “By an odd coincidence, we’ve both been up all night.”

“My shift ends at noon, and then the Wonderama people are paying me twenty bucks to help them get their Gorgantis balloon off the roof. Next week they’re renting it to an Apple Butter Festival in Pennsylvania, and then it goes to New York City for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Shall I pour you some coffee?”

I grunted in the affirmative. “If I were in charge of this hotel, I’d buy the balloon from the convention the instant Macy’s is finished with it. Such a magnificent Gorgantis will attract swarms of customers.”

“You’re absolutely right,” Ray said, filling my Holiday Inn mug. “All weekend people have been stopping by and asking about our dinosaur. They like the idea of us becoming more family-oriented.”

“And what could be more family-oriented than a fire-breathing demon who roasts people alive?”

“But Mr. Hackett, he hates the thing,” Ray said, sidling toward the door. “If you want my opinion, he doesn’t have a good head for business. He told the convention he wants that darned balloon out of here by noon, not one minute later, or he’s going up on the roof with an ice pick.” He opened the door and stepped into the hall. “It’s been great getting to know you, sir. Enjoy your breakfast.”

Enjoy my breakfast. That is precisely my intention. We who are about to die know how to live.

When I finally got to inspect the foot injury I’d acquired while wading through Shirazuka harbor, my first and only war wound, it looked every bit as dreadful as I’d feared. The resourceful Rubinstein sisters soon managed to improvise a bandage from Whale’s ascot, a stopgap measure that I’m convinced kept me from bleeding to death. By the time we reached the China Lake infirmary, the cut had started clotting again, so that all the Navy surgeons had to do was give me a Novocain injection, clean out the gash, close it with sutures, and shoot me full of penicillin.

Stalwart professional that I am, I defied the doctors’ wishes and had Joy drive me to Hollywood the next morning. At noon I reported for duty on the set of Blood of Kha-Ton-Ra. If you ever see the picture, an experience I don’t recommend, note how the mummy’s limp is more severe than in his previous outing, Curse of Kha-Ton-Ra. A similar hobble characterizes my appearance in the last two alchemical creature movies, Corpuscula Meets the Vampire and Son of Corpuscula.

And so it began, the great waiting. Minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, the scattered company of What Rough Beast was convulsed by anticipation. I scrupulously scanned every issue of the Los Angeles Examiner, listened devoutly to H. V. Kaltenborn’s broadcasts, and routinely called Commander Quimby on my Dick Tracy set. Nothing, nada, zero, zip—not one news bulletin suggesting that our demonstration shot had sent Marquis Kido, Chief Secretary Sakomizu, Deputy Minister Kase, and Information Director Shimomura running to Emperor Hirohito with tears in their eyes, insisting that he spare his nation a behemoth attack.

Meanwhile the Pacific War ground on. Throughout the horrific month of June, kamikaze pilots continued their suicidal missions against the advancing American fleet, the Army Air Force relentlessly firebombed Tokyo, and the sands of Okinawa soaked up the blood of 72,000 American corpses, 131,303 Japanese dead, and 150,000 civilian victims. During that same dreadful interval, the Manhattan Project got back on track when Oppenheimer’s team concocted an implosion-triggered device fueled by plutonium, a design they successfully tested on July 16 in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. They named this primal atomic explosion Trinity. In the name of the Father, and of the second sun, and of the profane ghosts of a thousand immolated kangaroo rats, horned lizards, Gila monsters, and kit foxes. Amen.

From the instant we heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a question began haunting the What Rough Beast troupe. Did Harry Truman reason that, because the stomping of Shirazuka had not translated into a Japanese surrender, an exhibition of the Manhattan Project’s equally dramatic fruits would prove futile as well? For what it’s worth, history vindicates us on that score. All existing records suggest that, despite their favorable response to the China Lake Petition, Truman and his advisors were—with one exception—never sympathetic to the idea of an A-bomb demonstration, neither before nor after it became clear that Operation Fortune Cookie had not met expectations. The dissenter was Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who favored full disclosure of the new weapon. Every other member of the Interim Committee of the Manhattan Project feared that if the A-bomb proved a dud, the Japanese would merely be emboldened to dig in and wait for the Allies to get sick of the war. And even if the sneak preview came off without a hitch, the Interim Committee reasoned, the witnesses would probably fail to grasp the true military import of what they were seeing. Finally, in the Committee’s view the element of surprise was vital: only a bolt from the blue, with consequent massive casualties and unimaginable suffering, would shock the Imperial Government into accepting the draconian surrender terms of the Potsdam Proclamation.

A second question soon took root in our company’s collective imagination. How would we have felt if Truman had rebuffed General Groves’s appeal for two successive A-bomb attacks and instead honored Admiral Strickland’s request that the behemoths be transported to Honshu’s coastal waters without delay? My guess is that our guilt would have been even greater, if such a thing is possible. True, the Gorgantis suit had always elicited a certain affection among the China Lake troupers, but the monsters themselves were manifestly among the most horrendous weapons ever to appear on Earth. Whatever quantity of anguish Leslie Groves’s raids caused the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was surely no greater than the devastation that Blondie, Dagwood, Mr. Dithers, and their cousins would have inflicted on those same cities, or any other targets that caught Strickland’s fancy.

Six months into the American Occupation of Japan, I visited Commander Quimby in his subterranean office, and he told me everything he’d learned about the activities of Kido, Sakomizu, Kase, and Shimomura following their visit to China Lake. From the handful of captured documents that General MacArthur’s staff had declassified thus far, Quimby concluded that our demonstration shot had shaken the four witnesses to the core, but soon afterwards they’d begun convincing each other that giant fire-breathing mutant iguanas weren’t so terrible after all. By the time they made their report to Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Suzuki—an oral account supplemented by their silent 35mm footage of the lake-dwelling adult behemoths and the dwarf’s attack on the miniature Shirazuka—the emissaries had decided that their nation could defeat the monsters. And so, when Hirohito and Suzuki in turn informed General Anami and his staff about the strategic reptiles, their presentation lacked urgency, and the militarists had no trouble dismissing these biological anomalies as a species of conventional ordnance, easily countered through artillery and civil defense.

I was grateful for one, and only one, of Quimby’s findings. According to the first round of declassified documents from Tokyo, it never occurred to Kido, Sakomizu, Kase, or Shimomura that the dwarf who’d savaged the model metropolis was a man in a suit. While the newspaper photographs of the Santa Monica Beach Monster may have given the Japanese espionage community momentary pause, one can safely infer that Max Kettleby’s Los Angeles Examiner story had never come to the four emissaries’ attention.

When I returned to China Lake to join Joy in burying the second generation of dwarves—despite their severe progeria, Huey, Dewey, and Louie had lived for almost a year after V-J Day—she did her best to cheer me up, but I was inconsolable. Mired in some irreducible amalgam of self-pity and bitterness, I’d become convinced that failure of Operation Fortune Cookie traced to aesthetic defects in our production of What Rough Beast.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Joy said, adorning Huey’s grave with a Santa Rita prickly pear cactus.

“Brenda’s script had certain virtues,” I said, “but it was ultimately banal.”

“The problem wasn’t Brenda’s script. The problem was the insanity of the Japanese high command.”

“Obie’s model city should’ve been more intricate.”

“Nonsense,” Joy said, honoring Dewey with a beavertail prickly pear cactus.

“Whale’s direction was flat. Waxman’s score was schmaltzy. The lizard suit wasn’t demonic enough.”

Joy decorated Louie’s final resting place with a California barrel cactus. “If it had been any more demonic, Satan would’ve sued the Rubenstein twins for appropriating his persona.”

“My acting lacked conviction. Stanislavski would not have been impressed.”

“Rubbish, Syms. You gave the performance of a lifetime. I was there.”

“No doubt about it, Joy. We dropped the ball.”

For what it’s worth, Operation Fortune Cookie actually did reduce casualties in World War Two. The last time I saw Quimby, sometime in 1952, he informed me that throughout July of 1945 and the first week in August, the Imperial Ministry of Homeland Security had tripled the watch along the shores of Honshu. The Japanese leaders knew that, having squandered what was left of their navy in the Ten-ichi-go sortie, they could not destroy any American subs that might appear towing sedated behemoths, but they could at least try to evacuate the targeted city before the monsters were awakened and unchained. Thanks to our demonstration shot, as many as two hundred civil defense workers who might otherwise have been in the heart of Hiroshima on the morning of Monday, August 6, 1945, were prowling nearby coves, binoculars in hand, looking for periscopes poking above the waves, and so they were spared when a uranium-fueled hell burst over the city. Three days later, another one hundred and seventy-five civil defense personnel found themselves at a safe distance when a plutonium bomb leveled Nagasaki. So you might say that What Rough Beast saved almost four hundred lives—even as it failed to deliver 177,000 Japanese from death by blast, incineration, and acute radiation sickness, and another 300,000 from turning into hibakusha, “explosion-affected persons,” the walking wounded with their lacerations, burns, mental disorders, and incipient cancers.

To this day, I’m not sure why the Navy’s Bureau of Teratoid Operations was shut down immediately after the Pacific War ended. I know only that the ink was barely dry on General Umezu’s signature when the Pentagon ordered Admiral Strickland’s group to exterminate the three adult behemoths by deoxygenating China Lake, then destroy the twenty embryos through whatever means might prove most efficient. Upon receiving word that Blondie, Dagwood, and Mr. Dithers had drowned, the War Department arranged for the Knickerbocker Project to remain classified well into the next century. Because Strickland’s budget had always been piggy-backed onto the Manhattan Project, it wasn’t difficult for the Truman White House and subsequent administrations, Republican and Democratic, to act as if the giant reptiles had never existed. For the sake of the historical record, though, I must note that the Los Alamos bombs actually cost the taxpayers a mere one and a half billion dollars. The remaining five hundred million went into iguanas of mass destruction.

Did our military leaders come to view the behemoths as a technology so awful, so disgusting, so counter to every value that civilized nations hold dear, that even the most hawkish could not abide their continued cultivation? I doubt it. Conversely, did the What Rough Beast fiasco convince the Pentagon that the monsters weren’t quite awful enough, and it would be better to specialize in the indubitable horror of nuclear weapons? A reasonable argument, but it’s more likely that the Joint Chiefs simply didn’t want to deal with the debilitating interservice rivalry that would surely follow if the Army and the Navy each had its own distinctive way of ending the world.

Or perhaps the Pentagon’s considerations were primarily tactical. A behemoth is a capricious thing, after all, its behavior unpredictable compared with the purely technical problem of building an atomic bomb and delivering it to a target. For whatever reasons, the Lizard Age, I am happy to report, ended almost as soon as it began.

Unable to face another swatch of fabric or vat of foam rubber without thinking of Gorgantis, the Rubinstein sisters left Los Angeles early in 1946. They moved to Wyoming, opened a kennel, and set about breeding Labrador retrievers as seeing-eye dogs. The last I heard from Gladys, sometime in the late sixties, Mabel was dying of heart disease, the kennel had been sold, and they were living on Social Security in Bakersfield.

Brenda Weisberg remained in the movie industry for another six years, but she never wrote anything as memorable as The Mad Ghoul or The Mummy’s Ghost or, for that matter, What Rough Beast. According to her biographer, the perspicacious Jeri Smith-Ready, Brenda seemed “curiously depressed and distracted” during the final phase of her Hollywood career, which saw her contributing DOA scripts to such humdrum pictures as King of the Wild Horses, Ding Dong Williams, When a Girl’s Beautiful, and My Dog Rusty. Did Brenda ultimately find peace? Such was the impression I got from a postcard I received in 1962. By her laconic account she was back in the Arizona of her childhood, happily married and “keeping my demons at bay by writing and directing for the Phoenix Little Theater.”

James Whale, too, found peace, though of a more static and controversial variety. In 1957, at the age of sixty-seven, the director of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, and What Rough Beast drowned himself in his swimming pool. His decision may be plausibly attributed to several factors, among them loneliness, poor health, and the frustration of a truncated career, his last feature being They Dare Not Love of 1941. I’m convinced that Whale’s homosexuality had nothing to do with his suicide, and equally persuaded that, if our behemoth demonstration had worked, he would have held on much longer—painting, sketching, planting his garden, tending to his memories.

For many years Willis O’Brien managed to remain active in the industry. Throughout 1947 he supervised his protégé Ray Harryhausen on the intricate stop-motion animation that makes Mighty Joe Young such a watchable romp. I cannot help regarding the climax of that picture, in which the huge gorilla helps rescue the young residents of a burning orphanage, as Obie’s attempt to give Operation Fortune Cookie the denouement it deserved. He couldn’t save the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but at least he could deliver dozens of fictional foundlings from a similarly fiery death. Alas, after rising to the occasion of Mighty Joe Young, Obie was stricken with a bad case of post-Gorgantis stress syndrome. He lost his ability to sell himself, and no more prestigious assignments came his way. His work on The Black Scorpion and The Giant Behemoth was impressive as always, but the films themselves lacked magic, causing little stir upon their release. In 1960, two years before his death, Obie endured the final humiliation, when Irwin Allen recruited him as an “effects technician” on a wretched reincarnation of the picture that had made his career, The Lost World of 1925. Allen’s inexcusable movie did not contain even one second of stop-motion, merely live lizards decked out in horns and spikes, pathetically impersonating dinosaurs. The last instance of Obie’s handiwork to reach the big screen graces that mirthless exercise in celluloid elephantiasis, Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Obie contributed to the violent climax, animating eleven articulated puppets representing members of the all-star cast, dutifully hurtling them, as the script required, to near-certain death from a wildly oscillating fire-engine ladder. Such is the span of this gifted man’s career, a sorrowful sweep from a beguiling Lost World to a meaningless Mad World. It’s a sad, sad, sad, sad arc.

As for the post-war Syms Thorley, he started off the new decade as a monster in trouble, drinking too much, sleeping too little, despairing too frequently, tumescing too seldom—the worst possible man for Darlene to have in her life. I was dismissed by three talent agents in as many months. On those rare occasions when I got to sleep, my subconscious insisted on tormenting me with mushroom clouds and irradiated children. I lost weight, friends, money, hope.

Walking out on me was Darlene’s second wisest choice of 1952, the first being her decision to relocate to Manhattan and join the television revolution, a move that soon led to her successful anthology series Shock Street, hosted by a drug-addled Bela Lugosi. Back in those days, you may recall, almost everything that appeared on your personal cathode-ray tube was either a film-chain broadcast from Hollywood or a real-time presentation from New York. Among the morbid fascinations of those crude but endearing Shock Street programs was watching poor Lugosi dying before your eyes on live television.

For the next three years I was a Jewish Blanche Dubois, dependent on the kindness of strangers, not to mention the charity of acquaintances, the gullibility of relatives, and occasionally even the benevolence of enemies, as when Dagover gave me a role in Galactic Lycanthropus. But then something extraordinary occurred. Late in 1955 I received a letter from Saburo Miyauchi, head of production at the nascent Kokusai Pictures in Tokyo. Mr. Miyauchi informed me that his company was about to enter the American market with a dubbed version of Yofuné-Nushi, Creature of Wrath, a sci-fi spectacle featuring a radioactive prehistoric lizard. Every shot of the titular monster, Mr. Miyauchi confessed, had been salvaged from the black-and-white 35mm silent footage that “the China Lake emissaries brought back to Japan two months before the war ended.” He had two reasons for writing. First, he wanted to offer me ¥50,000—about five hundred dollars—as compensation for my appropriated performance. Second, because Yofuné-Nushi, Creature of Wrath had been so popular in Japan, “even among the explosion-affected persons,” he hoped I would accept ¥200,000 to appear in the sequel, Yofuné-Nushi Strikes Again, which would feature “the backup version of the lizard suit that figured in our first monster film, the original costume being unusable owing to the rips and burns it acquired during your U.S. Navy’s presentation to the Imperial Delegation in June of 1945.”

I have yet to learn exactly how the Kokusai executives deduced that the dwarf behemoth who effaced the miniature Shirazuka was actually an actor in a suit. Perhaps after the war somebody sent Mr. Miyauchi the Los Angeles Examiner photos of the Santa Monica Beach Monster, and he put two and two together. One thing is clear. Kokusai didn’t pay the Defense Department a single yen for the duplicate PRR. The costume had been a bribe, pure and simple, given to the Japanese moguls on condition that they keep mum about the Knickerbocker Project.

In my reply to Mr. Miyauchi, I informed him that, before signing a contract, I would have to speak with my agent—by which I meant that, thanks to this deal, I could now probably convince some predatory ten-percenter to represent me—but I told him I believed this was the start of a productive partnership. In the final paragraph, I offered my opinion that American audiences would never warm up to a picture called Yofuné-Nushi, Creature of Wrath. If I were a Japanese movie magnate, I would call the English-language release of my sci-fi epic Gorgantis, King of the Lizards.

Three weeks later I flew to Tokyo, where I joined the ranks of gaijin, foreigners, laboring in the grotty but honorable fields of kaiju eiga, monster movies. Although no reputable L.A. agent was interested in my new career, I soon acquired the local services of Yozo “Johnny” Mosura, a combination talent scout and Tokyo League baseball bookie. Despite the omnipresent saki and beer I managed to stay relatively sober, limping my way through nine Gorgantis epics, three of which I wrote myself.

After two decades, Kokusai’s kaiju eiga empire ceased to be profitable, but by then I was sufficiently solvent to repatriate myself. I bought a house in Malibu and became a bourgeois beach bum, bedeviled by drink, haunted by the ghosts of China Lake, but still finding reasons to get up in the morning. In time I discovered a new vocation, putting my talent for melodramatic plotting to lucrative use. Encouraged by my New York literary agent, Rachel Bishop, I churned out a half-dozen paperback horror novels for Aardvark Books, all ostensibly written by somebody named Sean Prince, my pseudonym’s pseudonym.

About ten years ago, both of my pasts—Monogram Pictures living legend and kaiju eiga superstar—caught up with me, and I became a darling of the monster-movie convention circuit. Every month would bring a new celebration: Monster Bash, Cinemacabre, Charnel Carnival, Shadowflix, Wonderama. I held forth on panels, did public interviews, made guest-of-honor speeches, and presented my 35mm slide-show on the art of suit acting. At some point during any given appearance I would start ranting about the hibakusha. The fans learned to put up with it. What choice did they have? When Corpuscula, Kha-Ton-Ra, or Gorgantis talks, the true believer listens. As the years went on and the conventions began blurring into each other, I found myself making indiscreet allusions to the Knickerbocker lizards, but mostly I stuck to the atomic bombing of Japan.

“The instant that doctors in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki hospitals began reporting thousands of fatalities from a mysterious plague, General Groves undertook to persuade the American public that the A-bomb attacks had involved no appreciable radioactive fallout. A famous photograph showed the general’s personal driver, a young soldier named Patrick Stout, standing in the Hiroshima bomb crater, smiling up at the camera. Twenty-four years later, at the age of fifty-three, Stout died of leukemia.”

Every time I told that story, the convention attendees greeted me with glassy-eyed stares. They’d come to hear about Corpuscula, not blood cancer.

“Most historians agree that Hirohito’s ‘sacred decision’ to demand total capitulation of his generals was undergirded by two extraordinary events: the Soviet Union’s entry into the Pacific War, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Does this mean that the attack on Nagasaki was unnecessary? It’s difficult to say, but two facts are incontrovertible. First, General Groves obsessively arranged for the Nagasaki bombing to occur as quickly as possible after the Hiroshima raid, on the dubious theory that nothing short of a one-two punch would get the enemy’s attention. Second, on the morning of August 8, two days following Hiroshima and twenty-four hours before the destruction of Nagasaki, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo sat down to confer with Hirohito, only to learn that, because of the devastating new weapon, the Emperor had decided to terminate the war posthaste, thus sparing his people further suffering.”

These remarks also elicited blank expressions from the kaiju eiga faithful. The fans perked up only when I mentioned in passing that Togo’s son-in-law had helped to found Kokusai Pictures.

“It’s worth remembering that, beyond using atomic bombs to force a Japanese surrender, Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, also hoped the new weapon would help the United States constrain Soviet ambitions after the war. ‘It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered,’ the President wrote in his diary, ‘but it can be made the most useful.’ Thus did Truman and Byrnes become charter members of the Machiavellian club that today includes the architects of President Reagan’s nuclear arms buildup: unlettered and parochial men promoting incendiary devices whose true nature they do not understand—the quintessential peasants with the ultimate torches.”

A few Gorgantis aficionados seemed interested in this point, knowing as they did that certain prominent strategists in the Reagan Administration harbored illusions of moving beyond the Cold War into a glorious and only mildly radioactive era of nuclear victory over the Soviets. But most fans simply looked at their watches.

“As Susan Sontag argues in her brilliant essay, ‘The Imagination of Disaster,’ science fiction films enable us to participate in the fantasy of living not only through our own deaths, but also the death of cities and the destruction of humanity itself. In Sontag’s memorable phrase, such movies are ‘in complicity with the abhorrent.’“

Of all the points I liked to make at the conventions, that one went over the least well with the fans.

I must admit that my acceptance speech following the Wonderama Awards dinner was the most pompous and didactic yet. Beyond my usual screed about the hibakusha, my topic was Harry Truman’s convoluted post-war statements concerning Hiroshima. Even I was embarrassed by the irrelevance of my remarks—an inarticulate attack on inarticulateness—and I left the banquet hall before finding out who’d won the raffle for the Gorgantis suit replica.

“I made the only decision I ever knew how to make,” Truman famously asserted in one of his carefully scripted reminiscences. What does that mean, exactly? Did Truman see himself as a professional decision-maker with a narrow specialty, the choice between destroying and not destroying Japanese cities? What is the distinction, exactly, between being unable to make any other decision and never having been able to make any other decision? Have Überweapons made coherence obsolete? As we become ever more complicitous in the abhorrent, will eloquence, lucidity, and reason itself—

Wait. Damn. Someone’s at the door. Crap.

I’m not sure who I was expecting to find on the threshold of Room 2014. Ray the rhedosaurus fan? Tiffany the hooker? Darlene Wasserman, wanting to give the relationship another chance?

I certainly wasn’t anticipating Gorgantis, but there he stood, my reptilian alter ego, throwing his head back in a mighty roar while sweeping the hall carpet with his tail. The human inside the suit introduced himself as Eric Yamashita, the convention attendee who’d won the raffle on Saturday night. His reasons for darkening my door were twofold. First, he wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed my acceptance speech at the banquet, especially my expression of sympathy for the hibakusha. Second, he’d inadvertently imprisoned himself in the costume, and he was hoping that I recalled enough about its complicated zipper system to liberate him.

I invited my young fan into the room.

“I cannot tell you how fortunate I feel that this suit has come into my possession,” Gorgantis said.

“Would you like me to autograph it?” I asked.

“Extrication will be sufficient. But not immediately. At the moment I am happy to be inside. I feel blessed by the lizard’s enveloping presence.”

“So did I, once upon a time.”

“Two years ago I joined the Germantown Society of Friends,” Gorgantis said. “I now run their most active committee, the Greater Philadelphia Coalition to Halt the Arms Race.”

“A Japanese Quaker?” I said.

“Rather the way you’re a Jewish Buddhist,” Gorgantis said. “I’m not a Buddhist.”

“Ah, but you are, Mr. Thorley, even if you don’t know it. Your philosophical remarks on Saturday night gave you away.”

I told Eric there was some lukewarm coffee left over from breakfast. Would he care for a cup? He replied that, oddly enough, he was a devotee of lukewarm coffee, and he would be happy to accept my offer once free of the costume.

“I don’t think of sci-fi fans as political activists,” I said.

“When somebody tells you he loves monster movies, you’re learning very little about him. I hope to make this magnificent lizard as famous a symbol for the abolition of nuclear weapons as Smokey the Bear has become for the prevention of forest fires. The Reagan Administration has thus far managed to ignore apartheid, poverty, pollution, and the AIDS epidemic, but I won’t allow them to deny the behemoth.”

“I assume there’s no flamethrower in there.”

“Probably not, but in case it’s got one, I should still be allowed to keep the costume,” Gorgantis noted with maximum reptilian acerbity. “Isn’t that why we have the Second Amendment?” He bellowed and swished his tail. “The time has come for me to hatch.”

I ran my hands all over the rubbery fabric, as if frisking the lizard for a concealed weapon. This particular Gorgantis incarnation did not perfectly replicate the prototype, but I still located all the relevant catches, snaps, and zippers. Five minutes later, a sweating and smiling young man stepped out, wearing blue jeans and a Phillies baseball jersey. He was remarkably handsome, reminiscent of Kojiro Hongo from Daikaiju Ketto Gamera tai Barugon, which graced American screens in 1966 as War of the Monsters. If Jimmy Whale were here, he would’ve fallen instantly in love.

“Before I go, I must tell you why nuclear abolition means so much to me,” Eric said. “My favorite aunt was a hibakusha.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Until two years ago, Megumi Yamashita lived with us, or, to be more accurate, passed her living death with us. We lost her to thyroid cancer. She never talked about Hiroshima, but one day I found a long letter she’d written to her brother in Kyoto. It went on for forty pages.”

“Maybe you should publish it,” I said, pouring lukewarm coffee into a hotel mug. “I have a good agent these days.”

“She told of the blinding flash and the black rain. She described the burned survivors staggering toward the river. Their eyes had melted in their skulls. My aunt wrote that a cyclone made of screams tore through the city that day. The people were crying for their mothers, their children, their gods, their deaths. Most especially they cried for water.”

“The radiation.” I passed Eric his mug of tepid brew. “It causes intolerable thirst.”

“Their skin was coming off in sheets, like wax dripping from a candle.”

“I’ve seen the pictures.” Kha-Ton-Ra’s flesh was likewise a tenuous organ, but he had all those bandages to hold it in place.

Eric sipped coffee. “Somehow my aunt made it to the hospital. She’d been trained as a nurse, so she wanted to volunteer. She wasn’t prepared for what she found. How could she be? A little girl with no arms. A little boy whose head had become a charred blister. Another boy whose lips and cheeks had vanished, so you could see his broiled gums and all his teeth. Wasn’t the Hiroshima bomb called Little Boy?”

“And Nagasaki was Fat Man.”

My visitor was weeping now. “Another little girl, no more than five. Her name was Yukiko. All the skin on her back had fallen away. She kept crying ‘Mommy! Water! Mommy! Water!’ My aunt tried to give her some water, but Yukiko was thrashing too much from the pain. She died without seeing her mother.”

From the pocket of his jeans Eric produced a neatly folded white handkerchief. He daubed the tears from his eyes and swabbed the mucus from his nose. A silent minute elapsed. I ate the last English muffin. My visitor finished his coffee.

“On the way up here I met the steward to whom you gave your Raydo,” Eric said at last. “Am I to infer a dark meaning from that gesture?”

“Bull’s-eye. You smoked me out.”

My visitor dragged his Gorgantis suit back toward the entrance to my steamy room. “In your speech at the banquet, I heard a terrible despair.”

“Call it my tribute to Yukiko.”

“Yukiko would not be honored.”

“My inspiration is Claude Eatherly,” I said. “The pilot who flew the weather plane that found the skies over Hiroshima sufficiently clear on the morning of August 6, 1945. His personality was never the most stable, but Little Boy broke him completely—psychiatric disorders, criminal behavior, suicidal impulses.”

“But he never killed himself.”

“He was a braver man than I.”

Eric wrapped his fingers around the door handle. “Mr. Thorley, I beg you.” He withdrew his hand, jammed it in his pocket. “This can’t be right.”

“You’re talking to a hibakusha.”

“I think not.”

“Oh, yes, my friend. A hibakusha. Have no doubt.”

It took me a half-hour to convince Eric Yamashita that nothing he could say or do would deflect me from my path. At last the young abolitionist took up his lizard rig and left. Once again I am alone.

I know what this moment expects of me. Its demands could not be clearer. I am to find redemption in Eric’s brief visit. Because I moved him so deeply, I should now resolve to keep on attending sci-fi movie conventions, haranguing the fans about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thereby enlightening a small but significant minority.

But I can no longer live in the moment. I can only live in the past, an intolerable location, and the future, which I shall find habitable only to the degree that I am not there.

My bags are not yet packed. The noon shuttle will leave without me. Like Mr. Poe, I am weak and weary. I must sleep. I am weary of god-emperors and their obscene obliviousness to the blood in which their divinity is soaked. I am weary of the God of Leslie Groves and Harry Truman, that atom-splitting deity who one day presented the general and his President with a gift from on high, or so they believed. I am weary of the God of my Fathers and his meager regard for mothers, including the one who gave birth to Yukiko. I am weary of the incarnate God who makes such a moving cameo appearance at the end of Obie’s The Last Days of Pompeii but who sat paring his nails while Vesuvius vaporized twenty thousand people. I am weary of the fission bomb, the fusion bomb, and—coming soon to an arsenal near you—Ronald Reagan’s neutron bomb. Our world suffers from a surfeit of the sacred, and I shall not be sorry to leave it.

The next time you have a chance to watch the original Corpuscula, stay with it till the end of act two, which finds me slipping furtively into the front parlor of Castle Werdistratus. It’s Darlene’s best piece of writing ever, and probably my best job of acting, and for once Beaudine knew where to put the camera.

The room is empty but for the scientist’s young son, Anton, who sprawls on the carpet playing with his toy freight train, its spring-driven steam locomotive coupled to a box car, a tank car, a gondola, and a caboose. A half-dozen wooden horses occupy the gondola. When Corpuscula sits down beside the train, Anton is startled but not frightened. The boy winds up his locomotive and releases it. Corpuscula deliberately places his leg across the track. The train derails. Horses fly in all directions. Corpuscula laughs.

After scolding the monster, Anton restores the train to the track, winds up the locomotive, and sends the horses on their way. Once again Corpuscula causes a wreck—but this time it’s the monster who carefully, oh, so carefully, places each bruised and battered horse back in the gondola.

The boy allows Corpuscula to wind up the locomotive. The train begins its circular journey. Suddenly Werdistratus appears, shotgun in hand, and chases his creature into the night.

And that is how I wish to be remembered, friends. I am Corpuscula, savior of horses. Sayonara.

While there would be a certain poetry in giving Syms Thorley the last word, especially since that word was Sayonara, the editors wish to add a coda. We are pleased to have presented the fullest narrative yet published concerning the Knickerbocker Project. Though some people may call our actions unpatriotic, even treasonous, we felt duty-bound to shed light not only on an arcane chapter in American history but also on the motives behind Thorley’s jump from the twentieth floor of a Baltimore Holiday Inn.

His suicide attempt was famously unsuccessful. By an astonishing turn of fate, the flatbed truck bearing the partially deflated Gorgantis balloon passed beneath the window just as the hapless actor plummeted toward the parking lot. The behemoth was supine, so Thorley must have glimpsed the grinning jaws right before he hit the stomach. He bounced. Slamming into the hotel wall, he cracked his skull, with resultant cerebral trauma. To the day he died—from old age as much as anything—on March 18, 1993, in a second-rate Santa Monica nursing home, he never uttered a single word, nor did he lose his fixed, seraphic smile, so unlike the monster’s yet perhaps inspired by it.

Despite his catatonia Thorley enjoyed a steady stream of visitors, among them Joy Groelish, Darlene Wasserman, Eric Yamashita, and Esther Dagover, who’d divorced Siegfried in 1962 and subsequently married a Beverly Hills art dealer. No doubt Sam Katzman and Brenda Weisberg would have also paid their respects, but the former had passed away in 1973, and the latter was too ill to travel. At one point Tiffany Nolan flew in from Baltimore. Crouching over his wheelchair, she told Thorley how, as she was leaving the Holiday Inn with her autographed video of Gorgantis vs. Miasmica, she was approached by Wilbur McKee, a twenty-six-year-old Wonderama attendee. Emboldened by their mutual enthusiasm for kaiju eiga, Wilbur invited Tiffany out for a drink. Six months later, the two fans were married. Tiffany insists that, when she told Thorley this real-life fairy tale, he understood every word.

Eric Yamashita, as we all know, indeed managed to turn Gorgantis into a symbol for nuclear weapons abolition. While humankind has not yet taken the message to heart, Eric swears that he will never abandon the struggle. He really believes that one day our species will wake up and say, “Good God, what are we doing?”

We hope Eric and Tiffany are right when they insist that Thorley spent his nursing home sojourn in happy, if comatose, contemplation of his halcyon days. Until the very end, they claim, his brain was flooded with golden memories of tramping around graveyards, crypts, dungeons, and laboratories with the aim of giving pleasurable frissons to moviegoers, an ambition in which he was, as we all know, wholly successful. Visit the actor’s modest marble tombstone, and you will find many tokens of esteem perched among the flowers: Corpuscula action figures, Kha-Ton-Ra rings, plush Gorgantis toys, even the robot from Flesh of Iron.

The appended notes are short and sweet. The one we transcribed on our last trip to Forest Lawn was typical, scrawled on a piece of shirt cardboard and secured beneath a pot of geraniums. Raindrops had blurred the ink, and the cardboard was badly warped, but we could still read every word.

Good-bye, dear Syms,

You were the best,
especially as Corpuscula,
and also the King of the Lizards.

We’re sorry we never met you.

With gratitude,

Rose and Luís Rodriguez,

Your fans for life.

VISHNU AT THE CAT CIRCUS

Ian McDonald

They are saved by a desk.

Come Matsya, come Kurma. Come Narasimha and Varaha. By the smoky light of burning trash polyethylene and under the mad-eye moon lying drunk on its back, come run in the ring; ginger and black and tabby and grey, white and piebald and tortie and hare-legged tailless Manx. Run Varana, Pashurama, run Rama and Krishna.

I pray I do not offend with my circus of cats that carry the names of divine avatars. Yes, they are dirty street cats, stolen from rubbish dumps and high walls and balconies, but cats are naturally blasphemous creatures. Every lick and curl, every stretch and claw is a calculated affront to divine dignity. But do I not bear the name of a god myself, so may I not name my runners, my leapers, my stars, after myself? For I am Vishnu, the Preserver.

See! The trash-lamp are lit, the rope ring is set and the seats laid out, such as they are, being cushions and worn mattresses taken from the boat and set down to keep your fundament from the damp sand. And the cats are running, a flowing chain of ginger and grey, the black and the white and the part-coloured: the marvellous, the magical, the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus! You will be amazed, nay, astounded! So why do you not come?

Round they run and round, nose to tail. You would marvel at the perfect fluid synchronisation of my cats. Go Buddha, go Kalki! Yes, it takes a god to train a cat circus.

All evening I beat my drum and rang my bicycle bell through the heat-blasted hinterland of Chunar. The Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus! Gather round gather round! There are few enough joys in your life: wonder and a week’s conversation for a handful of rupees. Sand in the streets, sand slumped against the crumbling walls of abandoned houses, sand slumped banked up on the bare wheel rims of the abandoned cars and minibuses, sand piled against the thorny hurdles that divided the river-edge sandbars into sterile fields. The long drought and the flashfire wars had emptied this town like so many others close to the Jyotirlinga. I climbed up to the old fort, with its preview 20 kilometres up and down river. From the overlook where the old British ambassador had built his governor’s residence I could see the Jyotirlinga spear into the sky above Varanasi, higher than I could see, higher than the sky for it ran all the way into another universe. The walls of the old house were daubed with graffiti. I rang my bell and beat my drum but there was never any hope of even ghosts here. Though I am disconnected from the deva-net, I could almost smell the devas swirling on the contradictory airs. Walking down into the town I caught the true smell of woodsmoke and the lingering perfume of cooking and I turned, haunted by a sense of eyes, of faces, of hands on doorframes that vanished into shadows when I looked. Vishnu’s Marvellous Magical Magnificent Cat Circus! I cried, ringing my bicycle bell furiously, as much to advertise my poverty and harmlessness as my entertainment. In the Age of Kali the meek and helpless will be preyed upon without mercy, and there will be a surplus of AK-47s.

The cats were furious and yowling in unison when I returned, hot in their cages despite the shade of the awning. I let them hunt by the light of the breaking stars as I set up the ring and the seats, my lamps and sign and alms bowl, not knowing if a single soul would turn up. The pickings were meagre. Small game will be scarce in the Age of Kali.

My fine white Kalki, flowing over the hurdles like a riffle in a stream, it is written that you will battle and defeat Kali, but that seems to me too big an ask for a mere cat. No, I shall take up that task myself, for if it’s your name, it’s also my name. Am I not Vishnu the ten-incarnated? Are not all of you part of me, cats? I have an appointment down this river, at the foot of that tower of light that spears up into the eastern sky.

Now come, sit down on this mattress—I have swept away the sand, and let the lamps draw away the insects. Make yourself comfortable. I would offer chai but I need the water for the cats. For tonight you will witness not only the finest cat circus in all of India—likely the only cat circus in all of India. What do you say? All they do is run in a circle? Brother, with cats, that is an achievement. But you’re right; running in a circle, nose to tail is pretty much the meat of my Cat Circus. But I have other ways to justify the handful of rupees I ask from you. Sit, sit and I will tell you a story, my story. I am Vishnu, and I was designed to be a god.

There were three of us and we were all gods. Shiv and Vish and Sarasvati. I am not the firstborn; that is my brother Shiv, with whom I have an appointment at the foot of the Jyotirlinga of Varanasi. Shiv the success, Shiv the businessman, the global success, the house hold name and the inadvertent harbinger of this Age of Kali; Shiv I cannot imagine what he has become. I was not the firstborn but I was the best born and therein lies the trouble of it.

Strife, I believe, was worked into every strand of my parents’ DNA. Your classical Darwinist scorns the notion that intellectual values can shape evolution, but I myself am living proof that middle class values can be programmed into the genes. Why not war?

A less likely cyberwarrior than my father you would be hard-pressed to imagine. Un-co-ordinated; ungainly; portly—no, let’s not mince words, he was downright fat; he had been a content and, in his own way, celebrated, designer for DreamFlower. You remember DreamFlower? Street Sumo; RaMaYaNa; BollywoodSingStar. Million-selling games? Maybe you don’t. I increasingly find it’s been longer than I think. In everything. What’s important is that he had money and career and success and as much fame as his niche permitted and life was rolling along, rolling along like a Lexus, when war took him by surprise. War took us all by surprise. One day we were the Great Asian Success Story—the Indian Tiger (I call it the Law of Aphoristic Rebound—the Tiger of Economic Success travels all around the globe before returning to us)—and unlike those Chinese we had English, cricket and democracy; the next we were bombing each others’ malls and occupying television stations. State against state, region against region, family against family. That is the only way I can understand the War of Schism; that India was like one of those big, noisy, rambunctious families into which the venerable grandmother drops for her six-month sojourn and within two days sons are at their father’s throats. And the mothers at their daughters, and the sisters feud and the brothers fight and the cousins uncles aunts all take sides and the family shatters like a diamond along the faults and flaws that gave it its beauty. I saw a diamond cutter in Delhi when I was young—apologies, when I was small. Not so young. I saw him set the gem in the padded vice and raise his cutter and pawl, which seemed too huge and brutal an object by far for so small and bright an object. I held my breath and set my teeth as he brought the big padded hammer down and the gem fell into three gems, brighter and more radiant than their parent.

“Hit it wrong,” he said, “and all you have is dazzling dust.”

Dazzling dust, I think, has been our history ever since.

The blow came—success, wealth, population strain—and we fell to dust but Delhi didn’t know it. The loyalists resolutely defended the dream of India. So my father was assigned as Help Desk to a Recon Mecha Squad. To you this will sound unspeakably hot and glamorous. But this was another century and another age and robots were far from the shimmering rakshasa-creatures we know today, constantly shifting shape and function along the edge of human expectation. This was a squad of reconnaissance bots; two legged joggers and jumpers, ungainly and temperamental as iron chickens. And Dadaji was the Help Desk, which meant fixing them and de-virusing them and unbugging them and hauling them out of the little running circles they’d trapped themselves in, or turning them away from the unscalable wall they were attempting to leap, all the while wary of their twin flechettegatlings and their close-defence nano-edged blades.

“I’m a games coder,” he wailed. “I choreograph Bollywood dance routines and arrange car crashes. I design star-vampires.” Delhi ignored his cries. Delhi was already losing as the us-too voices of national self-determination grew loud in the Rashtrapati Bhavan, but she chose to ignore them as well.

Dadaji was a Cyber Warrior, Mamaji was a Combat Medic. It was slightly more true for her than for Dadaji. She was indeed a qualified doctor and had worked in the field for NGOs in India and Pakistan after the earthquake and with Medeçins Sans Frontieres in Sudan. She was not a soldier, never a soldier. But Mother India needed front line medics so she found herself at Advanced Field Treatment Centre 32 east of Ahmedabad at the same time my father’s recon unit was relocated there. My mother examined Tech-Sergeant Tushar Nariman for crabs and piles. The rest of his unit refused to let a woman doctor inspect their pubes. He made eye contact with her, for a brave, frail second.

Perhaps if the Ministry of Defence had been less wanton in their calling-up of cyberwarriors and had assigned a trained security analyst to the Eight Ahmedabad Recon Mecha Squad instead of a games designer, more would have survived when the Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force attacked. A new name was being spoken in old east Uttar Pradesh and Bihar; Bharat, the old holy name of India; its spinning wheel flag planted in Varanasi, most ancient and pure of cities. Like any national liberation movement, there were dozens of self-appointed guerrilla armies, each named more scarily than the predecessor with whom they were in shaky alliance. The Bharati Tiger-Strike-Force was an embryo of Bharat’s elite cyberwar force. And unlike Tushar, they were pros. At 21:23 they succeeded in penetrating the Eight Ahmedabad’s firewall and planted Trojans into the recon mechas. As my father pulled up his pants after experiencing the fluttering fingers and inspection torch of my mother-to-be at his little rosebud, the Tiger-Strike-Force took control of the robots and turned then on the field hospital.

Lord Shiva bless my father for a fat boy and a coward. A hero would have run out on to the sand to see what was happening when the firing started. A hero would have died in the crossfire, or, when the ammunition ran out, by their blades. At the first shot, my father went straight under the desk.

“Get down!” he hissed at my mother who froze with a look part bafflement, part wonderment on her face. He pulled her down and immediately apologised for the unseemly intimacy. She had lately cupped his testicles in her hand, but he apologized. They knelt in the kneehole, side by side while the shots and the cries and the terrible, arthritic click click click of mecha joints swirled around them, and little by little subsided into cries and clicks, then just clicks, then silence. Side by side they knelt, shivering in fear, my mother kneeling like a dog on all fours until she shook from the strain, but afraid to move, to make the slightest noise in case it brought the stalking shadows that fell through the window into the surgery. The shadows grew long and grew dark before she dared exhale, “What happened?”

“Hacked mecha,” my father said. Then he made himself forever the hero in my mother’s eyed. “I’m going to take a look.” Hand by knee by knee by hand, careful to make no noise, disturb not the least piece of broken glass or shattered wood, he crept out from under the desk across the strewn floor to underneath the window. Then, millimetre-by-millimetre, he edged up the side until he was in a half crouch. He glanced out the window and in the same instant dropped to the floor and began his painstaking crawl back across the floor.

“They’re out there,” he breathed to Mamaji. “All of them. They will kill anything that moves.” He said this one word at a time, to make it sound like the natural creakings and contractions of a portable hut on a Ganga sandbank.

“Perhaps they’ll run out of fuel,” my mother replied.

“They run off solar batteries.” This manner of conversation took a long time. “They can wait forever.”

Then the rain began. It was a huge thunder-plump, a fore runner of the monsoon still uncoiling across the Bay of Bengal, like a man with a flag or a trumpet who runs before a groom to let the world know that a great man is coming. Rain beat the canvas like hands on a drum. Rain hissed from the dry sand as it was swallowed. Rain ricocheted from the plastic carapaces of the waiting, listening robots. Rain-song swallowed every noise, so that my mother could only tell my father was laughing by the vibrations he transmitted through the desk.

“Why are you laughing?” she hissed in a voice a little lower than the rain.

“Because in this din they’ll never hear me if I go and get my palmer,” my father said, which was very brave for a corpulent man. “Then we’ll see who hacks whose robots.”

“Tushar,” my mother whispered in a voice like steam but my father was already steadily crawling out from under the desk towards the palmer on the camp chair by the zip door. “It’s only a . . .”

And the rain stopped. Dead. Like a mali turning off a garden hose. It was over. Drips dropped from the ridge-line and the never-weatherproof windows. Sun broke through the plastic panes. There was a rainbow. It was very pretty but my father was trapped in the middle of the tent with killer robots in the alert outside. He mouthed an excremental oath and carefully, deadly carefully reversed amongst all the shatter and tumbled debris, wide arse first like an elephant. How he felt the vibration of suppressed laughter through the wooden desk sides.

“Now. What. Are. You. Laughing. At?”

“You don’t know this river,” my mother whispered. “Ganga Devi will save us yet.”

Night came swift as ever on the banks of the holy river, the same idle moon as now lights my tale rose across the scratched plastic squares of the window. My mother and father knelt, arms aching, knees tormented, side-by-side beneath the desk. My father said, “Do you smell something?”

“Yes,” my mother hissed.

“What is it?”

“Water,” she said and he saw her smile in the dangerous moonlight. And then he heard it, a hissing, seeping suck sand would make if it were swallowing water but all its thirst were not enough, it was too much, too fast, too too much, it was drowning. My father smelled before he saw the tongue of water, edged with sand and straw and the flotsam of the sangam on which the camp stood, creep under the edge of the tent across the liner and around his knuckles. It smelled of soil set free. It was the old smell of the monsoon, when every dry thing has its true perfume scent and flavour and colour released by the rain; the smell of water that is the smell of everything water liberates. The tongue became a film, water flowed around their fingers and knees, around the legs of the desk as if they were the piers of a bridge. Dadaji felt my mother shaking with laughter, then the flood burst open the side of the tent and dashed dazed drowned him in wall of water so that he spluttered and choked and tried not to cough for fear of the traitor mecha. Then he understood my mother’s laughter and he laughed too, loud and hard and coughing up lungfuls of Ganges.

“Come on!” he shouted and leaped up, over-turning the desk, throwing himself on to it like a surfboard, seizing the legs with both hands. My mother dived and grabbed just as the side of the tent opened in a torrent and desk and refugees were swept away on the flood. “Kick!” he shouted as he steered the desk toward the sagging doorway. “If you love life and mother India, kick!” Then they were out in the night beneath the moon. The sentinel unfolded its killing-things, blade after blade after blade, launched after them and was knocked down bowled over, swept away by the flooding water. The last they saw of it its carapace was half-stogged in the sand, water breaking creamy around it. They kicked through the flotsam of the camp, furniture and ration packs and med kids and tech, the shorted, fused, sparked out corpses of the mecha and the floating, spinning swollen corpses of soliders and medics. They kicked through them all, riding their bucking desk, they kicked half-choked, shivering out into the deep green water of Mother Ganga, under the face of the full moon they kicked up the silver corridor of her river-light. At noon the next day, far far from the river beach of Chattigarh, an Indian patrol-RIB found them and hauled them, dehydrated, skin cracked and mad from the sun, into the bottom of the boat. At some point in the long night either under the desk or floating on it they had fallen in love. My mother always aid it was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her. Ganga Devi raised her waters and carried them through the killing machines to safety on a miraculous raft. Or so our family story went.

Here a God is incarnated, and then me.

My parents fell in love in one country, India, and married in another, Awadh, the ghost of ancient Oudh, itself a ghost of the almost-forgotten British Raj. Delhi was no longer the capital of a great nation but of a geographical fudge. One India was now many, our mother goddess descended into a dozen avatars from re-united Bengal to Rajasthan, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu. How had we let this happen, almost carelessly, as if we had momentarily stumbled on our march toward superpowerdom, then picked ourselves up and carried on. It was all most embarrassing, like a favourite uncle discovered with porn on his computer. You look away, you shun it, you never talk about it. Like we have never talked about the seisms of violence that tear through our dense, stratified society; the mass bloodletting of our independence that came with an excruciating partition, the constant threat of religious war, the innate, brooding violence in the heart of our caste system. It was all so very un-Indian. What are a few hundred thousand deaths next to those millions? If not forgotten, they will be ignored in a few years. And it certainly has made the cricket more interesting.

The new India suited my mother and father very well. They were model young Awadhis. My father, trapped by artificial intelligence once, viewed never to let that happen again and set up one of the first aeai farms breeding custom wares for low-level applications like Air Awadh, Delhi Bank and the Revenue Service. My mother went first for cosmetic surgery, then, after a shrewd investment in an executive enclave for the nascent Awadhi civil service, gave up the micro-manipulators for a property portfolio. Between them they made so much money that their faces were never out of Delhi Gloss! Magazine. They were the golden couple who had sailed to a glorious future over the floods of war and the interviewers who called at their penthouse asked, so then, where is the golden son?

Shiva Nariman made his appearance on 27 September 2025. Siva, oldest God in the world, Siva, first and favoured, Siva from whose matted hair the holy Ganga descended, generative force, auspicious one, lord of paradox. The photo rights went to Gupshup magazine for 500,000 Awadhi rupees. The golden boy’s nursery was featured on the nightly Nationwide show and became quite the style for a season. There was great interest in this first generation of a new nation; the Awadh Bhais, the gossip sites called them. They were the sons not just a small coterie of prominent Delhi middle class, but of all Awadh. The nation took them to its heart and suckled them from its breasts, these bright, bouncing brilliant boys who would grow up with the new land and lead it to greatness. It was never to be mentioned, not even to be thought, how many female foetuses were curetted or flushed out or swilled away, unimplanted, into the medical waste. We were a new country, we were engaged in the great task of nation-building. We could overlook a demographic crisis that had for years been deforming our middle classes. What if there were four times as many boys as girls? They were fine strong sons of Awadh. The others, they were only females.

So easily I say we, for I seem to have ended up as a impresario and story teller but the truth is that I did not exist, I didn’t even exist then, not until the day the baby spoke at the Awadhi Bhai Club. It was never anything as formal as a constituted club; the blessed mothers, darlings of the nation, had fallen together by natural mutual need to cope with a media gawping into every aspect of their lives. Perfection needs a support group. They naturally banded together in each other living rooms and pent house, and their mothers and ayahs with them. It was a gilded Mothers and Infants group. The day the baby spoke my mother had gathered with Usha and Kiran and Devi. It was Devi’s baby who spoke. Everyone was talking about exhaustion and nipple softening oil and peanut allergies when Vin Johar lolling in his rocker opened his brown brown eyes, focused across the room and clearly said, “Hungry, want my bottle.”

“Hungry, are we my cho chweet?” Devi said.

“Now,” said Vin Johar. “Please.”

Devi clapped her hands in delight.

“Please! He hasn’t said ‘please’ before.”

The rest of the pent house was still staring, dazed.

“How long has he been talking?” Usha asked.

“Oh, about a three days,” Devi said. “He picks up everything you say.”

“My bottle now,” demanded Vin Johar. “Quickly.”

“But he’s only . . .” Kiran said.

“Five months, yes. He’s been a bit slower than Dr Rao predicted.”

The mothers’ mothers and the ayahs made furtive hand gestures, kissed charms to turn away evil. It was my Mamaji, dandling fat, content Shiv on her knee, who understood first.

“You’ve been, you’ve had, he’s a . . .”

“Brahmin, yes.”

“But you’re a Sudra,” Kiran wondered.

“Brahmin,” Devi said with such emphasis that no one could fail to hear the Capital. “We’ve had him done, yes.”

“Done?” asked Usha and then realized, “Oh.” And, “Oh!”

“He’ll be tall and he’ll be strong and he’ll be handsome—of course; that bit we didn’t have to engineer—and he’ll be fit and healthy. Oh so healthy—he’ll never get heart disease, arthritis, Alzheimer’s, Huntingdon’s; with his immune system he can laugh of almost any virus or infection. His immune system will even take out malaria! Imagine that! And intelligence; well, let’s just say, Dr Rao told us there isn’t even a test smart enough to stretch him. He’ll just need to see a thing once and he’s learned it—like that! And his memory, well, Dr Rao says there is double the number of connections in the brain, or something like that: what it means is that he’ll have a phenomenal memory. Like that Mr Memory on India’s Got Talent, only even better. He won’t be able to forget anything. No forgetting birthdays and phone calls to his Mata when he’s off around the world with some big corporation. Look at him, look at him, isn’t he just the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen; those baby baby blue eyes. Look at you, look at you, just look at you my little lord? See them all, see them your friends? They are princes each and every one, but you, you are a god. Oh, I could bite your bum, oh, just bite it like that it’s so beautiful and plump and gorgeous.” Devi held Vin Johar up like a trophy in a cricket match. She kissed him on his bare belly where his little vest had ridden up. “Oh you little god.”

Then Shiv let out a long wail. All through Devi’s song of praise to her genetically improved darling son, my mother’s grip had gradually tightened in envy on golden Shiv, now hopelessly outmoded, until he cried out in pain. Her fingers had left bruises like purple carrots along his ribs.

Shiv gazed up at the mobile turning in the air-conditioning above his cot innocent and unaware of how his visual acuity was being stimulated by the cleverly designed blobs and clouds. My mother fretted and stormed by turns around the pastel-lit apartment until Dadaji returned from the office. After Shiv was born his duties at the office grew more arduous and his hours longer. He was never a terribly good father really. He was useless at cricket.

“What are you doing on Friday?” Mamaji demanded.

“Um, I’m not sure, there’s something at the office.”

“Cancel it.”

“What?” He was never very good at manners either, but then he was a Top Geek.

“We’re seeing Dr Rao.”

“Dr who?”

“Dr Rao. At the Swaminathan Clinic.” He knew the name. He knew the clinic. All Delhi, even Top Geeks, knew of the strange and miraculous children that came out of there. He just need a moment for his balls to unfreeze and drop from that place close to the warmth of his perineum where they had retreated in terror.

“Friday, eleven thirty, with Dr Rao himself We are having a baby.”

It wasn’t Friday eleven thirty, nor the Friday after. It was not for six Fridays, after the initial consultation and the financial check and the medical assessment and the one-to-ones first Mamaji then Dadaji and only then did they get to choose from the menu. It was a menu, like in the most rarefied restaurant you can imagine. My parents blinked. Intelligence yes good looks yes enhanced concentration yes expanded memory and improved recall yes health wealth strength happiness, everything Vin Johar had. And more.

“Extended lifespan?”

“Ah yes, that is a new one. A new technique that has just been licensed.”

“Does that mean?”

“Exactly what it says.”

My parents blinked again.

“Your son”—for this was me they were building—“will enjoy a greatly increased span of life in full health and vigor.”

“How much increased?”

“Double the current human norm; what is that? Let me think, for people like us, affluent, educated, middle-class, with access to quality health care, that’s currently eighty years. Well double that.”

A third time they blinked.

“One hundred and sixty years old.”

“At the very least, you must remember that medical miracles are occurring every day. Every single day. There’s no reason your son . . .”

“Vishnu.”

My father stared open-mouthed ay mother. He didn’t know there was a name. He hadn’t yet realized that he had no say in this whatsoever. But his balls understood, cringing in his loose-and-cooling-good-for-sperm-production silk boxers.

“Vishnu, the Lord, governor and sustainer.” Dr Rao dipped his head in respect. He was an old-fashioned man. “You know, I have often thought how the processes of conception, gestation and parturition are reflected in he ten incarnations of Lord Vishnu: the fish the restless sperm, the turtle of Kurma the egg, the saving of the earth from the bottom of the ocean by Varaha the fertilisation . . .”

“What about the dwarf?” my father asked. “The dwarf Brahmin?”

“The dwarf, yes,” Dr Rao drawled. He was a man of slow speech, who seemed to lose the end of his sentences the closer he approached them. This led many people to make the mistake of thinking him stupid when what he was doing was shaping the perfect conclusion. As a consequence he didn’t do many television or net interviews. “The dwarfs always the problem, isn’t he? But your son will assuredly be a true Brahmin. And Kalki, yes, Kalki. The ender of the Age of Kali. Who’s to say that he might not see this world end in fire and water and a new one be born? Yes, longevity. It’s very good, but there are a couple of minor inconveniences.”

“Never mind. We’ll have that. Devi Johar doesn’t have that.”

So my father was sent with a plastic cup to catch his sacred fish. My mother went with him; to make it an act of love but mostly because she didn’t trust him with Western porn. A few Fridays later Dr Rao harvested a clutch of my mother’s turtle-eggs with a long needle. She didn’t need my father there for that. This was an act of biology. The slow-spoken doctor did his work and called up eight blastulas from the deep ocean of his artificial wombs. One was selected: Me! Me! Little me! Here I am! See me! See me! and I was implanted into my mother’s womb. It was then that she discovered the inconvenience: my doubled lifespan was bought at the price of aging at half the speed of baseline, non-Brahminic humanity. After sixteen months of pregnancy, sixteen months of morning sickness and bloating and bad circulation and broken veins and incontinence and backache but worst of all, not being able to smoke, my mother, with a great shriek of At last At last! Get the fucking thing out of me! gave birth on 9 August 2027 and I made my entry as a player in this story.

My Brother Hates Me

What a world, into which I was born! What times: an age of light and brilliance. Shining India truly found herself in Shining Awadh, Shining Bharat, Shining Maratha, Shining Bengal—all the shining facets of our many peoples. The horrors of the Schisming were put behind us, apart from war-maimed begging on metro platforms, gangs of undersocialised ex-teen-cyberwarriors, occasional flare-ups from hibernating combat ’ware buried deep in the city net and Concerned Documentary Makers who felt that we had not sufficiently mourned our self-mutilation and achieved reconciliation. Reconciliation? Delhi had no time for such Western niceties. Let the dead burn the dead, there was money to be made and pleasure to be savoured. Our new boulevards and maidans, our malls and entertainment zones were brilliant with the bright and the young and the optimistic. It was a time of bold new fashions, father-scandalizing hemlines and mother-troubling hairstyles; of new trends and obsessions that were old and cold as soon as they hit the gossip sites; of ten thousand shattering new ideas that disappeared as soon as they were iterated like a quantum foam of thought. It was youth, it was confidence, it was the realisation of all that old Mother India had claimed she might be but most of all it was money. As in Delhi, so in Varanasi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Jaipur. But most of all, I think, in Delhi. In India she had been capital by whim, not by right. Mumbai, even Kolkata always outshone her. Now she truly was capital of her own nation, without rival, and she dazzled. My earliest memory, from the time when my senses all ran together and sounds had smells and colours had textures and a unified reality above those crude divisions, was of lines of light streaming over my upturned face, light in all colours and more, light that, to undifferentiated cortex, hummed and chimed like the sympathetic strings of a sitar. I suppose I must have been in our car and our chauffeur driving us somewhere through the downtown lights to some soirée or other, but all I remember is grinning up at the streaming, singing light. When I think of Delhi even now, I think of it as a river of light, a torrent of silver notes.

And what a city! Beyond Old Delhi and New Delhi, beyond the Newer Delhis of Gurgaon and the desirable new suburbs of Sarita Vihar and New Friends Colony, the Newest Delhis of all were rising. Invisible Delhis, Delhis of data and digits and software. Distributed Delhis, networked Delhis, Delhis woven from cable and wireless nodes, intangible Delhis woven through the streets and buildings of the material city. Strange new peoples lived here: the computer-constructed cast of Town and Country, the all-conquering soap opera that, in its complete artificiality, was more real than life itself. It was not just the characters who drew our fascinations, the genius of the production lay in the CG-actors who believed they played and had a separate existence from those characters, and whose gupshup and scandal, whose affairs and marriages meant more to us than our friends and neighbours. Other brilliant creatures streamed past and through us on our streets and squares: the aeais; the pantheon of artificial intelligences that served our immaterial needs from banking to legal services to house hold management to personal secretarial services. In no place and every place, these were entities of levels and hierarchies; high-end aeais cascading down through sub-routines into low-grade monitors and processors; thousands of those same daily-grind Level 0.8 (the intelligence of a street pig) scaling up through connection and associations into Level 1s—the intelligence of a monkey; those again aggregating together into the highest, the Level 2s, indistinguishable from a human seventy percent of the time. And beyond them were the rumoured, feared Level 3s: of human intelligence and beyond. Who could understand such an existence, beings of many parts that did not necessarily recognise each other? The djinns, those ancient haunters of their beloved Delhi, they understood; and older than they, the gods. They understood only too well. And in the material city, new castes appeared. A new sex appeared on our streets as if stirred out of heaven, neither male nor female, rejecting the compromises of the old hijras to be aggressively neither. The nutes, they called themselves. And then of course there were these like me; improved in egg and sperm, graced with outrageous gifts and subtle curses: the Brahmins. Yes I was an upper-middle class brat born into genetic privilege, but Delhi was laid out before me like a wedding banquet. She was my city.

Delhi loved me. Loved me, loved all of my Brahmin brothers and occasional sisters. We were wonders, freaks, miracles and avatars. We might do anything, we were the potential of Awadh. Those first-born were accidents of birth, we, the Brahmins, were the true Awadhi Bhais. We even had our own comic, of that name. With our strange genetic powers, we battled criminals, demons and Bharatis. We were superheroes. It sold pretty well.

You might think I was blithe enough, a genetically high-caste blob bouncing in my baby-rocker blinking up into the sunlight beaming through the glass walls of our tower-top pent house. You would be wrong. As I lay giggling and blinking neural pathways were twining up through my medulla and cerebellum and Area of Broca with preternatural speed. That blur of light, that spray of silver notes rapidly differentiated into objects, sounds, smells, sensations. I saw, I heard, I sensed but I could not yet understand. So I made connections, I drew patterns, I saw the world pouring in through my senses and up the fiery tree of my neurons as relation, as webs and nets and constellations. I formed an inner astrology and from it, before I could call dog “dog” and cat “cat” and Mamaji “Mamaji,” I understood the connectedness of things. I saw the bigger picture; I saw the biggest picture. This was my true superpower, one that has remained with me to this day. I never could fly to Lanka in a thought or lift a mountain by the force of my will, I was not master of fire or thunder or even my own soul, but I could always take one look and know the whole, absolute and entire.

The naming of names. That was where Mamaji first realised that Dr Rao’s blessings were not unmixed. The soirée that day was at Devi Johar’s house, she of the amazing Vin. There he was, running around the place with his ayah trying to keep up with him in kiddie-wear by SonSun of Los Angeles. Shiv played with the other non-Brahmins in the roof garden, happy and content at their own limited, non-enhanced activities. How fast the gilt had rubbed off him, after I was born! As for me, I sat in my bouncer, burbling and watching big-eyed the mothers of the golden. I knew Shiv’s jealousy, though I didn’t have the words or the emotional language for it. I saw in a thousand looks and glances, the way he sat at the table, the way he rode in the car, the way he toddled along behind Ayah Meenakshi as she pushed me through the mall, the way he stood by my cot and gazed soft-eyed at me. I understood hate.

Vin asked Devi if he could go out and play with the others on the roof garden. Please.

“All right, but don’t show off,” Devi Johar said. When he had toddled away, Devi crossed her ankles demurely and placed her hands on her knees, so.

“Mira, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but your Vish; well, he isn’t talking yet. At his age, Vin had a vocabulary of two hundred words and a good grasp of syntax and grammar.”

“And shouldn’t he be, well, at least crawling?” Usha asked.

“How old is he; fifteen months? He does seem a little on the . . . small side,” Kiran chimed in.

My Mamaji broke down in tears. It was the crying nights and the sshing to sleep, the rocking and the cleaning and the mewling and puling, the tiredness, oh, the tiredness, but worst of all, the breast feeding.

“Breast? After a year?” Usha was aghast. “I mean, I’ve heard that some mothers keep them on the teat for years, but they’re from the villages, or mamas who love their sons too much.”

“My nipples feel like mulberries,” my Mamaji wept. “You see, he’s fifteen months old, but biologically, he not even eight months yet.”

I would live twice as long, but age half as fast. Infancy was a huge, protracted dawn; childhood an endless morning. When Shiv started school I would only have begun toddling. When I was of university age I would still have the physiology of a nine year-old. Adulthood, maturity, old age, were points so distant on the great plain of my lifespan that I could not tell if they were insects or cities. In those great days I would come into my own, a life long enough to become part of history; as a baby, I was a mother’s nightmare.

“I know breast is best, but maybe you should consider switching to formula,” Devi said soothingly.

See how I recall every word? Another of Dr Rao’s equivocal gifts. I forget only what I choose to unremember. I understood every word—at eighteen months my vocabulary was far in advance of your precious Vin, bitch Devi. But it was trapped inside me. My brain formed the words but my larynx, my tongue, my lips and lungs couldn’t form them. I was a prisoner in a baby-bouncer, smiling and waving my fat little fists.

Four there were who understood me, and four only, and they lived in the soft-contoured plastic butterfly that hung over my cot. Their names were TikkaTikka, Badshanti, Pooli and Nin. They were aeais, set to watch over me and entertain me with song and stories and pretty patterns of coloured lights because Mamaji considered Ayah Meenakshi’s sleepy-time stories far too terrifying for a suggestible Brahmin. They were even more stupid than my parents but it was because they were deeply dense that they had no preconceptions beyond their Level 0.2 programming and so I could communicate with them.

TikkaTikka sang songs.

In a little green boat,

On the blue sea so deep

Little Lord Vishnu

Is sailing to sleep . . .

He sang that every night. I liked it, I still sing it to myself as I pole my circus of cats along the ravaged shores of Mata Ganga.

Pooli impersonated animals, badly. He was a cretin. His stupidity insulted me so I left him mute inside the plastic butterfly.

Badshanti, lovely Badshanti, she was the weaver of stories. “Would you like to hear a story, Vishnu?” were the words that led into hours of wonder. Because I don’t forget. I know that she never repeated a story, unless I asked her to. How did I ask? For that I must introduce the last of my four aeais.

Nin spoke only in patterns of light and colour that played across my face, an ever-wheeling kaleidoscope that was supposed to stimulate my visual intelligence. Nin-no-words was the intelligent one; because he could interpret facial expression, he was the one I first taught my language. It was a very simple language of blinking. One deliberate blink for yes, two for no. It was slow, it was tortuous but it was a way out the prison of my body. Nin reading my answers to Badshanti’s questions, I could communicate anything.

How did my brother hate me? Let me take you to that time in Kashmir. After the third drought in a row my mother vowed never again to spend a summer in Delhi’s heat, noise, smog and disease. The city seemed like a dog lying at the side of the street, panting and feral and filthy and eager for any excuse to sink its teeth into you, waiting for the monsoon. Mamaji looked to the example of the British of a hundred years before and took us up to the cool and the high places. Kashmir! Green Kashmir, blue lake, the bright house boats and the high beyond all, the rampart of mountains. They still wore snow, then. I remember blinking in the wonder of the Dal Lake as the shikara sped us up the still water to the hotel rising sheer like a palace in one of Badshanti’s tales from the water. My four friends bobbed in the wind of our passage as the boat curved in across the lake to the landing stage where porters in red turbans waited to transport us to our cool summer apartment. Shiv stood in the bow. He wanted to throw them the landing rope.

The calm, the clear, the high cool of Kashmir after the mob heat of Delhi! I bobbed and bounced and grinned in my cot and waved my little hands in joy at the sweet air. Every sense was stimulated, every nerve vibrant. In the evening TikkaTikka would sing, Badshanti tell a story and Nin send stars sweeping over my face.

There was to be an adventure by boat across the lake. There was food and there was drink. We were all to go together. It was a thing of a moment, I can see it still, so small it looked like an accident. It was not. It was deliberate, it was meticulously planned.

“Where’s Gundi-bear? I’ve lost Gundi-bear,” Shiv cried as my father was about to get into the boat. “I need Gundi-bear.” He launched towards the shore along the gangplank. Dadaji swept him up.

“Oh no you don’t; we’ll never get anywhere at this rate. You stay here and don’t move. Now, where did you last see him?”

Shiv shrugged, innocently forgetful.

“Here, I’ll come with you, you’ll never find anything the way you ram and stam around.” My mother sighed her great sigh of exasperation. “Shiv, you stay here, you hear? Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back in two ticks.”

I felt a deeper shadow in the mild shade of the awning. Shiv stood over me. Even if I chose to I could not forget the look on his face. He ran up the gangplank, untied the mooring rope and let it fall into the water. He waggled his fingers, bye bye as the wind caught the curve of coloured cotton and carried me out into the lake. The frail little shikara was taken far from the shelter of the Lake Hotel’s island into the rising chop. The wind caught it and turned it. The boat rolled. I began to cry.

Nin saw my face change. TikkaTikka awoke in the little plastic butterfly my parents had hung from the bamboo ridge pole.

The lake is big and the lake deep

And Little Lord Vishnu is falling asleep

The wind is high and the sun is beaming

To carry you off to the kingdom of dreaming, he sang.

“Hello, Vishnu,” Badshanti said. “Would you like a story today?”

Two blinks.

“Oh, no story? Well then, I’ll just let you sleep. Sweet dreams, Vishnu.”

Two blinks.

“You don’t want a story but you don’t want to sleep?”

One blink.

“All right then, let’s play a game.”

Two blinks. Badshanti hesitated so long I thought her software had hung. She was a pretty rudimentary aeai.

“Not a game, not a story, not sleep?” I blinked. She knew better than to ask “well, what do you want?” Now TikkaTikka sang a strange song I had never heard before,

“Wind and lake water

And gathering storm,

Carry Lord Vishnu

Far into harm.”

Yes. The shikara was far from shore, broadside to the wind and rolling on the chop. On gust could roll it over and send me to the bottom of the Dal Lake. I might be a hero in my own comic but Dr Rao had neglected to give me the genes for breathing underwater.

“Are we on a boat, sailing far far away?” Badshanti asked.

Yes.

“Are you out on water?”

Yes.

“Are we on our own?”

Yes.

“Is Vishnu happy?”

No.

“Is Vishnu scared?”

Yes.

“Is Vishnu safe?”

Two blinks. Again Badshanti paused. Then she started to shout. “Help aid assist! Little Lord Vishnu is in peril! Help aid assist!” The voice was thin and tinny and would not have reached any distance across the wind-ruffled lake but one of the silent aeais, perhaps stupid Pooli, must also have sent out a radio, bluetooth and GPS alarm, for a fishing boat suddenly changed course, opened up its long-tail engine and sped towards me on a curve of spray.

“Thank you thank you sirs and saviours,” Badshanti babbled as the two fishermen hauled my shikara close with their hard hands and to their astonishment saw a child lying on the mattresses, smiling up at them.

A Map Drawn Inside the Skull

All my long life I have been ordained to be tied to water. My parents were delivered by the flood, my aeais saved me from the drifting boat. Even now I pick my way down the shrivelled memory of the Ganga, descended from the hair of Siva. Water it was that made me into a superhero of Awadh, albeit of a very different, non-tall-building-leaping type from the Awadhi Bhai who refused to grow up through the pages of Virgin comics.

There was of course no end of ruction after five-and-half-year old Shiv tried to expose me in an open boat. He made no attempt to deny it. He bore it stoically. The worst of it was my father’s therapy-speak. I almost felt for him. At least my mother was angry, blazingly, searingly angry. She didn’t try to wrap it up in swathes of how did you find it and I imagine you’re feeling and let’s try and talk through this like men. It didn’t end when the monsoon finally came late and scanty and we returned to Delhi slick and greasy with rain, the wonderful, rich smell of wet dust perfuming the air more purely than any incense. Four days later it ended and Delhi became afraid. That was how my parents kept the story out of the papers. FIFTEEN MILLION THIRSTY THROATS is a more immediate headline than FIVE-YEAR-OLD TRIES TO DROWN BRAHMIN BROTHER. Just.

There was counselling, of course, long and expensive and in the end producing no better result than the child psychologist saying, “This is possibly the most intractable case of sibling rivalry I have ever seen. Your son has a colossal sense of entitlement and deeply resents what he perceives as a loss of status and parental affection. He’s quite unrepentant and I fear he might make a second attempt to cause Vishnu harm.” My parents took these words and reached their own solution. Shiv and I could not live together so we must live apart. My father took an apartment across the city. Shiv went with him. I stayed with Mamaji, and one other. Before they parted plump Tushar loved my mother a goodbye-time, without planning or sex selection or genetic regulation. And so Sarasvati was born, the last of the three gods; my sister.

We grew up together. We lay in our cots side by side, looking not at our stimulating and educational toys but at each other. For a blissful time she paralleled me. We learned to walk and talk and regulate our bowels together. When we were alone I would murmur the words I knew to her, the words that had roosted and chattered so long in my skull and now were free, like someone throwing open a dark and fetid pigeon loft on a Delhi rooftop. We were close as twins. Then week by week, month by month, Sarasvati outgrew me. Bigger, better co-ordinated, more physically developed, her tongue never stumbled over her few and simple words while poems and vedas rattled inarticulate inside me. She grew out of being twin to bigger sister. She was the surprise, the delight, the child free from expectations and thus she could never disappoint. I loved her. She loved me. In those murmurous evenings filled with sunset and the cool of the air-conditioning, we found a common language and knowing born of shared playing that our various and despised ayahs, even our Mother, could never penetrate.

Across the city, on his own glass tower top filled with the staggering, pollution-born sunsets of great Delhi, Shiv grew up apart. He was six and a half, he was top of his class, he was destined for greatness. How do I know this? Once a week my father came to see his other son and daughter and for a snatched evening with his darling. I had long superseded TikkaTikka, Pooli, Nin and Badshanti with more powerful (and discreet) aeai attendants, ones that, as soon as I had the words on my tongue, I found I could reprogramme to my needs. I sent them out like djinns through the apartment. Not a word was spoken, not a glance exchanged that I could not know it. Sometimes the glances would become looks, and the murmurs cease and my parents would make love to each other. I saw that too. I did not think it particularly wrong or embarrassing; I knew fine and well what they were doing but, though it made them very happy, it did not look like a thing I would ever want.

I look back now from age and loss and see those babbling days with Sarasvati as the age of gold, our Satya Yuga of innocence and truth. We stumbled together towards the sunlight and found joy in every fall and bump and grin. Our world was bright and full of surprises’ delights in discovery for Sarasvati, pleasure in her evident delight for me. Then school forced us apart. What a terrible, unnecessary thing school is. I feel in it the enduring envy of parents for idle childhood. Of course it could be no ordinary school for little Lord Vishnu. Dr Renganathan Brahminical College was an academy for the elite of the elite. Education was intimate and bespoke. There were eight in my year and that was large enough for divisions. Not all Brahmins were equal in the Dr Renganathan College. Though we were all the same age we divided ourselves, quite naturally, like meiosis, into Old Brahmins and Young Brahmins, Or, as you like, Big Brahmins and Little Brahmins. Those who aged half as fast but would live twice as long and those who would enjoy all the gifts of health and smarts and looks and privilege but would still fall dead at whatever age the meditech of that era could sustain. Intimations of mortality in Miss Mukudan’s reception class.

Ah, Miss Mukudan! Your golden bangles and your Cleopatra smiling eyes, your skin the soft dark of the deepest south; your ever-discreet moustache and smell of camphor as you bent over me to help my fumble-fingers with my buttons or the Velcro fastenings on my shoes. You were my first vague love. You were the undifferentiated object of affection of all of us. We loved you for your lofty remoteness, your firmness and hinted-at tetchiness and the delicious knowledge that to you we were just more children to be turned from blind and selfish little barbarians into civilized young human beings. We loved you because you were not the mother-smother of our cottonwool parents. You took no shit.

The Class of 31 was too much even for the redoubtable Miss Mukudan. At age four our engineered brains were pushing us down the strange and separate roads into strange ways of looking at the world, quasi-autistic obsessions, terrifying savant insights or just plain incomprehensibility. We were each given a personalized tutor to accompany us day and night. Mine was called Mr Khan and he lived inside my ear. A new technology had arrived to save us. It was the latest thing in comms—which has always seemed the most faddish and trivial of technologies to me. No more did you need to be trapped by screens or pictures in the palm of your hand or devices that wrote on your eyeball as delicately as a bazaar fakir writing tourists’ names on a grain of rice. A simple plastic hook behind the ear would beam cyberspace into your head. Direct electromagnetic stimulation of the visual, auditory and olfactory centres now peopled the world with ghost messages and data spreads, clips from Town and Country, video messages, entire second-life worlds and avatars and, inevitably, spam and junk mailing. And for me, my customised aeai tutor, Mr Khan.

How I hated him! He was everything Miss Mukudan was not; irascible, superior, gruff and per sis tent. He was a little waspy Muslim, thin as a wire with a white moustache and a white Nehru cap. I would rip off the “hoek” in frustration and whenever I put it on again, after Miss Mukudan’s ministrations—we would do anything for her—he would take up his harangue from the very syllable at which I had silenced him.

“Look and listen, you bulging pampered privileged no-right-to-call-yourself-a-proper-Brahmin brat,” he would say. “These eyes these ears, use them and learn. This is the world and you are in it and of it and there is no other. If I can teach you this I will have taught you all you need to ever learn.”

He was a stern moralist, very proper and Islamic. I looked at Miss Mukudan differently then, wondering what assessments she had made that assigned Mr Khan especially to me. He had been programmed just for Vishnu. How had he been built? Did he spring into being perfectly formed or did he have a history, and how did he think of this past? Did he know it for a lie, but a treasured one; was he like the self-deceiving aeai actors of Town and Country who believed they existed separately from the roles they played? If he masqueraded as intelligent, did that mean he was intelligent? Was intelligence the only thing that could not be simulated? Such thoughts were immensely interesting to a strange little eight-year-old suddenly becoming aware of those other strange citizens of his tight world. What was the nature of the aeais, those ubiquitous and for the most part unseen denizens of great Delhi? I became quite the junior philosopher.

“What is right to you?” I asked him one day as we rode back in the Lexus through a Delhi melted by the heat into an impermeable black sludge. It was Ashura. Mr Khan had told me of the terrible battle of Karbala and the war between the sons of the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him). I watched the chanting, waling men carrying the elaborate catafalques, flogging their backs bloody, beating their foreheads and chests. The world, I was beginning to realize, was far stranger than I.

“Never mind me what is right to me, impudent thing. You have the privileges of a god, you’re the one needs to think about right action,” Mr Khan declared. In my vision he sat beside me on the back seat of the Lex, his hands primly folded in his lap.

“It’s a serious question.” Our driver hooted up alongside the dour procession. “How can right action mean anything to you, when anything you do can be undone and anything you undo can be done again. You’re chains of digits, what do you need morality for?” Only now was I beginning to understand the existence of the aeais, which had begun with the mystery of TikkaTikka, Pooli, Badshanti and Nin living together and sharing common code inside my plastic star. Common digits but separate personalities. “It’s not as if you can hurt anyone.”

“So right action is refraining from causing pain, is it?”

“I think that it’s the start of right action.”

“These men cause pain to themselves to express sorrow for wrong action; albeit the actions of their spiritual forebears. In so doing they believe they will make themselves more moral men. Consider those Hindu saddhus who bear the most appalling privations to achieve spiritual purity.”

“Spiritual purity isn’t necessarily morality,” I said, catching the line Mr Khan had left dangling for me. “And they choose to do it to themselves. It’s something else altogether if they choose to do it to others.”

“Even if it means those others may be made better men?”

“They should be left to make their own minds up about that.”

We cruised past the green-draped faux-coffin of the martyr.

“So what then is the nature of my relationship with you? And your mother and father?”

My Mamaji, my Dadaji! Two years after that conversation, almost to the day, my flawless memory recalls, when I was a nine-year-old-in-a-four-year-old’s body and Sarasvati was a cat-lean, ebullient seven, my mother and father very gently, very peacefully, divorced. The news was broken by the two of them sitting at opposite ends of the big sofa in the lounge with the smog of Delhi glowing in the afternoon sun like a saffron robe. A full range of aeai counselling support hovered around the room, in case of tears or tantrums or anything else they couldn’t really handle. I remember feeling a suspicion of Mr Khan on the edge of my perceptions. Divorce was easy for Muslims. Three words and it was over.

“We have something to tell you, my loves,” said my mother. “It’s me and your father. Things haven’t been going so well with us for quite some time and well, we’ve decided that it’s best for everyone if we were to get a divorce.”

“But it won’t mean I’ll ever stop being your Dad,” plump Tushar said quickly. “Nothing’ll change, you’ll hardly even notice. You’ll still keep living here, Shiv will still be with me.”

Shiv. I hadn’t forgotten him—I couldn’t forget him—but he had slipped from my regard. He was more distant than a cousin, less thought of than those remote children of your parents’ cousin, to whom I’ve never considered myself related at all. I did not know how he was doing at school or who his friends were or what sports teams he was on. I did not care how he lived his life or pursued his dreams across that great wheel of lives and stories. He was gone from me.

We nodded bravely and trembled our lips with the right degree of withheld emotion and the counsel-aeais dissolved back into their component code clusters. Much later in the room we had shared as bubbling babies and which was now our mutual den, Sarasvati asked me, “What’s going to happen to us?”

“I don’t think we’ll even notice,” I said. “I’m just glad they can stop having that ugly, embarrassing sex.”

Ah! Three little letters. Sex sex sex, the juggernaut looming over our childhoods. The kiddy thrill of being naked—doubly exciting in our body-modest society—took an edge and became something I did not quite understand. Oh, I knew all the words and the locations, as Sarasvati and I played our games of doctors and patients in our den, her pulling up her little vest and pulling down her pants as I listened and examined and prodded vaguely. We knew these were grown-up things not for the eyes of grown-ups. Mamaji would have been horrified and called in squadrons of counselling ware if she had discovered our games but I had long since suborned the aeais. If she had looked at the security monitors she would have seen us watching the Cartoon Network; my own little CG Town and Country playing just for her. Sex games for children; everyone plays them. Bouncing up and down in the pool, pressing ourselves against the jets in the rooftop spa, suspecting something in the lap of artificial waves across our private places as ochre dust-smog from the failed monsoon suffocated Delhi. And when we played horsey-horsey, she riding me around like Lakshmibai the warrior Rani, there was more in the press of her thighs than just trying to hold on as I cantered across the carpets. I knew what it should be, I was mostly baffled by my body’s failure to respond the way a twelve-year old’s ought. My lust may have been twelve but my body was six. Even Miss Mukudan’s purity and innocence lost its lustre as I began to notice the way her breasts moved as she leaned over me, or the shape of her ass—demurely swathed in a sari but no concealment was enough for the lusty curiosity of boy-Brahmins—as she turned to the smart- silk board.

“Now,” said Mr Khan one day on the back seat of the Lexus. “Concerning onanism . . .” It was a dreadful realisation. By the time puberty hit me like a hammer I would be twenty-four. Mine was the rage and impotence of angels.

Now five burning years have passed and we are driving in a fast German car. I am behind the wheel. The controls have been specially modified so that I can reach the pedals, the gear-shift is a standard. If I cut you up on the Siri Ring, after the flicker of road rage, you’d wonder: that’s a child driving that Mercedes. I don’t think so. I’m of legal age. I passed my test without any bribery or coercion; well, none that I know of I am old enough to drive, get married and smoke. And I smoke. We all smoke, my Little Brahmin classmates and me. We smoke like stacks, it can’t do us any harm, though we are all wearing smogmasks. The monsoon has failed for the fourth time in seven years; whole tracts of north India are turning into dust and blowing through the hydrocarbon-clogged streets and into our lungs. A dam is being built on the Ganges, Kunda Khadar, on the border with our eastern neighbour Bharat. It is promised to slake our thirst for a generation but the Himalaya glaciers have melted into gravel and Mother Ganga is starved and frail. The devotees at the Siva temple in the middle of the Parliament Street roundabout protest at the insult to the holy river with felt-marker banners and three-pronged trisuls. We bowl past them, hooting and waving and up Sansad Marg around Vijay Chowk. The comics portraying us as Awadh’s new super-heroes were quietly dropped years ago. Now what we see about ourselves in print tends to headlines like TINY TEARAWAYS TERRORISE TILAK NAGAR, or BADMAASH BABY BRAHMINS.

There are four of us, Purrzja, Shayman, Ashurbanipal and me. We are all from the college—still the Brahminical College!—but when we are out we all have our own names, names we’ve made up for ourselves that sounds strange and alien, like our DNA. Strange and alien we make ourselves look too; our own style cobbled from any source that seems remote and outré: J-punk hair, Chinese bows and ribbons, French street sports fashion and tribal make-up entirely of our own design. We are the scariest-looking eight-year-olds on the planet. By now Sarasvati is a coltish, classy fifteen-year-old. Our closeness has unravelled; she has her own social circles and friends and crushing things of the heart that seem so important to her. Shiv, so I hear, is at his first year at the University of Awadh Delhi. He won a scholarship. Best marks in his school. He’s followed his father into informatics. Me, I howl up and down the boulevards of Delhi trapped in the body of a kid.

We race past the open arms of the Rashtrapati Bhavan. The red stone looks insubstantial as sand in the amber murk.

“That’s your home, that is, Vish,” Purrzja shouts through her mask. It’s well known that Mamaji Has Plans for me. Why should she not? Every other part of me is designed. A good legal job, a prominent practice, a safe parliamentary seat and a steady, planned ascent toward the top of whatever political party afforded the best chance of ambition. It’s assumed that one day I will lead the nation. I’m designed to rule. I floor the pedal and the big Merc leaps forward. Traffic parts like my divine counterpart churning the soma. Their autodrive aeais make them as nervous as pigeons.

Out on the Siri Ring; eight lanes of taillights in each direction, a never ceasing roar of traffic. The car eases into the flow. Despite the barriers and warning signs police pull twenty bodies a day from the soft shoulder. The ring does not obey old Indian rules of traffic. Men race here, hedge-fund managers and data-rajas and self-facilitating media mughals; racing around the twin chambers of Delhi’s heart. I flick on the auto-drive. I am not here to race. I am here for sex. I recline the driving seat, roll over and Ashurbanipal is beneath me. Her hair is drawn back behind her ear to show off the plastic curl of the ’hoek. It’s part of the look.

I snap the fingers of my right hand into my palm to activate the software in the palmer glove. I hold that hand a hovering few centimetres above her fluorescent body-paint-stained belly. I don’t touch. We never touch. That’s the rule. Sex has rules. I move my hand in a series of gestures as gentle and precise as any classical dancer’s mudras over Ashurbanipal. Not touching, never touching, never even flexing a finger. It’s not about physical touch. It’s our own thing. But inside her head, I am touching her, more intimately than any rubbing or pushing or chafing of parts. The ’hoek beams signals through the bone, stimulating those parts of the brain that correspond to my slow calligraphy. I am writing my signature across her body. As she in return maps the me drawn on the inside of my skull. How does it feel? Like a cat must feel when it’s stroked. Like an otter must feel diving and turning and performing its underwater acrobatics. Like a fire must feel when the wind catches it and sweeps it up a forested mountainside. And without the poetry; like I want to cringe and melt and the same time. Like I must move in a direction I can’t explain and body can’t express. Like there is something in my mouth that grows bigger with every second but never changes size, like a reverse turd, only sweet and joyful, is working its way back up into my colon. Like I need need need to pee something that isn’t pee that my body hasn’t learned yet. Like I want this to end and never end. It goes on for a long long time and terrible little crying noises come out of our eight-year-aged lips as the aeai steers us through the howling torus of traffic on Siri Ring. We are teens and we are making out in the car.

There is a coming. Oh yes, there is a coming. Like soft fireworks, or the giggling drop at the top of a Ferris wheel or the feeling you get on those nights when the air is clear and you can see out from the roof pool all the billion lights of Delhi and you are connected to every single one. Like a djinn, made of fire. Ecstatic and guilty and dirty, like you’ve shouted a dirty word at a sophisticated party. My nipples are very very sensitive.

Then I start with Purrzja. And then Shayman. As I said, it’s entirely our own thing. It’s well into dark by the time we out up our seats and straighten our clothing and re-gel our hair and I flick off the autodrive and take us up out and over the Ring on a curving off ramp to a club. It’s a bit of a freak place—nutes like it and where nutes are welcome we are usually welcome—but the door knows us—knows our money—and there are always chaati mag paps there. Tonight is no exception: we pose and pimp and preen for the cameras. I can write the society column headlines already. GENE-TWEAK FREAKS ON COCKTAIL CLUB ORGY. Except we don’t drink. We’re underage for that.

It’s always late when we get back. Only the house steward and aeais wait for us, gently chining that it is a school day tomorrow. Don’t they understand that those are the best nights? This night the lights are on in the big drawing room. I can see them from the approach to the car park. My mother waits for me. She’s not alone. There’s a man and a woman with her, money people, I can tell that right away from their shoes, their fingernails, their teeth, the cut of their clothes and the prickle of aeai servitors hovering around them; all those things I can assess in a glance.

“Vishnu, this is Nafisa and Dinesh Misra.”

I namaste, a vision in clashing cross-cultural trash.

“They are going to be your new Mother and Father-in-law.”

My Lovely Consort

My cats can do other tricks too; I feel you grow bored of them running in their ring. Cats! Cats! See, a clap of my hands and they go and sit on their little stools: Matsya and Kurma, Varaha and Narasimha, Vamana, Parashurama, Rama and Krishna and Buddha and Kalki. Good cats. Clever cats. Rama, stop licking yourself. Hah! One word from me and they do as they will. Now, please feel this hoop, just ordinary paper. Yes? Yes. And these, the same, yes? Yes.

I set them out around the ring. Tabby Parashurama is squeezing his eyes closed in that way that makes him look very very smug.

By the way, I must thank you for coming to watch the Marvellous, the Magical, the Magnificent Vishnu Cat Circus. Yes, that’s the official name. It’s on the letters of registration. Yes, and I pay whatever taxes are due. It’s a small entertainment, but at least it’s working. You have solar? Not hooked up to the zero point? Very long-sighted of you. Now: watch! Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki!

They flow from their painted stools like liquid and run around the inside of the ring, an effortless, cat-lazy lope. The trick with cat circuses, I have found, is to convince them they are doing it for themselves.

And lo! I clap my hands and in perfect unison my cats leap from their ordained orbits clean through the paper hoops. Your applause please, but not for me: for Varaha, Vamana, Buddha and Kalki. Now they run in a circle, hurdling through the hoops. What was that? Is there a lesson in every trick? What do you mean? The spiritual significance of the cats I call to perform? I hadn’t thought of that. I don’t think cats especially spiritual; quite the reverse; they are the most worldly and sensual of creatures, though the Prophet Mohammed, so it’s said, was a great lover of cats and famously cut the sleeve from his robe rather than disturb a cat that had fallen asleep there.

Now, on with the story. Where am I going? Don’t you know it’s a terrible rudeness to interrupt the storyteller? You came here to see the cat circus, not watch some old goondah spin a yarn? You’ve seen cats leap through paper hoops, what more do you want? Where am I going? Very well then, to Varanasi. No, I am not. It’s not just the bodhisofts who go to Varanasi. Here’s the deal. I have plenty more tricks in my little ring here on the sand, but to see them you will have to listen to my story and remember, the power may be working but the broadcasters are out. Nothing on your screens tonight. But you’ll like this. It’s a wedding scene. What is a story without a wedding?

Elephants bore me. When I say that I don’t mean that I find the pachyderm genus tedious, as if I have some special personal conversational relationship with them and knew all their conversational tics and ploys. Is Ganesh not the best-loved god in our entire profligate pantheon? I mean, simply, that elephants carried me; in a howdah like a small gilt temple through the streets of Delhi. Five elephants, with mahouts; one for my school friend Suresh Hira, one for Vin Johar, one for Syaman and one, my sole spit of defiance in the face of tradition, for Sarasvati, and one for me, Vishnu Nariman Raj, the gnarly groom. Delhi’s eternal, monstrous traffic broke around the horde of musicians, drummers, dancers, merry-meeters like water. The traffic news had been reporting me as a major congestion for hours. People stopped and stared, women threw rice, ayahs pointed me out to their finger-sucking grandchildren: there, there he is, Lord Vishnu goes to his wedding. The chati mags had been full of little else than the first dynastic Brahmin marriage. My other break with tradition: much of the gaudy I had funded myself through the judicious auctioning of the photo rights to Gupshup magazine. Look here am I, in white sherwani and wrinkle-ankle pants in the very best style, the traditional veil of flowers over my face, gripping my sword with one hand (a ludicrous affectation by Sreem, Delhi’s most-sought nute wedding choreographer; who could ever sword-fight from the broad back of an elephant?), with the other gripping white-knuckled to the gold-leaf coping of my swaying howdah. Have I said that riding an elephant is like being on a boat on unstill waters? Does what you glimpse through the cascading marigolds look afraid? Were you expecting someone larger?

Negotiations had been protracted and delicate over the winter. Hosts of aeai attorneys circled and clashed around my mother and father, temporarily unified, as they entertained the Misras to a grand vagdana. Lakshmi and I sat blandly, quietly, hands folded neatly in our laps on the cream leather sofa as relatives and relatives passed and greeted and blessed us. We smiled. We nodded. We did not speak, not to our guests, not to each other. In our years together at the Dr Renganathan Brahminical College we had said all that we could say to each other. We sat like an old married couple at a metro stop. At last the hosts of clashing attorney aeais withdrew: a pre-nuptial contract was drafted, a dowry was set. It was a brilliant match; property and ware with water, the very essence of life. Of course the price was high; we were Brahmins. It was no less than the flesh of our flesh and the seed of our loins, for all generations. Way down the list of ticky boxes on Dr Rao’s shopping list was one I suspect Lakshmi’s parents had tickied blindly. I know my parents had. But it was perhaps the most profound change of all that Dr Rao’s nanoworkers worked on us. Our genelines were modified. The traits engineered into us were inheritable. Our children and their children, all our conceivable Nariman-Misras marching into futurity, would be Brahmins, not from the microsurgery of Dr Rao, but from our sperm and eggs.

Children, offspring, a line, a dynasty. That was our mutually contracted dowry. A match was made! Let great Delhi rejoice!

The janampatri aeais had read the stars for the most auspicious fates, the pandit had made the puja to Ganesh and the joint houses of Nariman and Misra had hired Gupshup Girls, Delhi’s biggest and brassiest girl band to sing and flash their thighs for two thousand society guests at our sangeet sandhya. Lakshmi duetted onstage with them. Pop-girli hotpants and belly-top looked disturbing on her as she danced and skipped among the high-heels. Too small, too too young to wed. I was never much of a singer. Mamji and Dadaji had neglected to ticky that box. I boogied down in the golden circle with my classmates. Though I had still two years more at Dr Renganathan College under the tutelage of the invisible Mr Khan, our circle was broken. I was all their imminent futures.

At India Gate Sarasvati called her mahout to a halt and slipped from her elephant’s back to run and dance among my parade of Baraatis. I had defied tradition by inviting her, she defied it back by coming dressed as a man in sherwani and kohl and huge, ludicrous false Rajput moustache. I watched her leap and whirl, brilliant and vivacious with the dancers and drummers and dance, laughing, with monkey-like Sreem and felt tears in my eyes behind my veil of flowers. She was so brilliant, so lovely, so lithe and free from expectation.

At Lodi Gardens the celebrity spotters were five deep. Policemen held them back with a chain of linked lathis. They had seen Rishi Jaitly and Anand Arora and ooh, isn’t that Esha Rashore the famous dancer and who is that little man with the very much younger wife; don’t you know, it’s Narayan Mittal from Mittal Industries. Last and least to them was the seeming child perched high on the back of a painted wedding elephant. A blare of trumpets and a barrage of drums greeted us. Then the smartsilk screens draped around us woke up and filled with the characters and, in a never-before-seen-feat of CG prestidigitation, the cast of Town and Country singing and dancing our wedding song specially written by legendary screen composer A.H. Husayin. They were aeais; singing and dancing were easy for them. There, almost lost among the sari silk and garlands as the bridal party stepped forward to greet us, was Lakshmi.

We were swept on a wave of drum beating and brass-tootling to the pavilions arrayed across the well-watered grass like a Mughal invasion. We feasted, we danced, we were sat on our thrones, our feet not touching the ground, and received our guests.

I didn’t see him. The line was long and the atmosphere in marquee stifling and I was bloated and drowsy from wedding food. I took the hand blindly, bored. I only became attentive when it held mine that moment too long, that quantum too firmly.

Shiv.

“Brother.”

I nodded in acknowledgment.

“Are you well?”

He indicated his suit, the fabric cheap, the cut niggardly, the cufflinks and the jewel at the shirt-throat phoney. A bud get wedding outfit. Tomorrow it would go by phatphat back to the hire shop.

“I’ll be more suitably dressed when you come to my wedding.”

“Are you getting married?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

I sniffed then. It was not Shiv’s perfume—that too smelled cheap and phenolic. My uniquely-connected senses show me subtleties to which others are quite oblivious. In his student hire-suit and cheap Bata shoes, Shiv seemed to carry an aura around him, a presence, crackle of information like distant summer thunder. He smelled of aeais. I tilted my head to one side: did I see a momentary shifting glow? It did not take a synaesthete or a Brahmin to spot the ’hoek tucked behind his ear.

“Thank you for coming,” I said and knew that he heard the lie.

“I wouldn’t have missed it.”

“We must meet up some time,” I went on, compounding the lie. “When Lakshmi and I get back into Delhi. Have you over to the place.”

“It’s not going to be terribly likely,” Shiv said. “I’m going to Bharat as soon as I graduate. I’ve a post-grad lined up at the University of Varanasi. Nano-informatics. Delhi’s not a good place for anyone working in artificial intelligence. The Americans are breathing down Srivastava’s neck to ratify the Hamilton Treaty.”

I consumed news, all news, any news, as universally and unthinkingly as breathing. I could watch twelve screens of television and tell you what was happening on any of them, simultaneously scan a table full of newspapers and reproduce any article verbatim; I frequently kept my newsfeeds on brain drip waking and sleeping, beaming the happening world into my tiny head. I knew too well of the international moves, begun by the United States to restrict artificial intelligence by licence. Fear motivates them; that vague Christian millennial dread of the work of our own hands rising up and making itself our god. Artificial intelligences with a thousand, ten thousand, infinite times our human intelligence, whatever that means. Intelligence, when you look down on it from above, is a very vague terrain. Nevertheless police forces had been set established, Krishna cops, charged with hunting down and eliminating rogue aeais. Fine title, vain hope. Aeais were utterly different from us; intelligences that could be in many places at one time, that could be exist in many different avatars, that could only move by copying themselves, not as I moved, lugging about my enhanced intelligence in the calcium bowl of my skull. They had very good guns, but I think my gnawing fear was aeais today, Brahmins tomorrow. Humans are very jealous gods.

I knew that it was inevitable that Awadh would sign up to the accord in return for favoured nation grants from the US Neighbouring Bharat would never accede to that; its media industry, dependent on artificial intelligence for the success of Town and Country from Djakarta to Dubai, was too influential a lobby. The world’s first overt soapocracy. And, I foresaw, the world’s first data-haven nation state. Stitching together stories buried way down the business news; I was already seeing a pattern of softwarehouse relocations and research foundations moving to Varanasi. So Shiv, ambitious Shiv, Shiv-building-your-own-glory while I merely obeyed the imperative in my DNA, Shiv withy our whiff of aeais around you, what is it in Bharat? Would you be researcher into technologies as sky-blue as Lord Krishna himself, would you be a dataraja with a stable of aeais pretending they can’t pass the Turing Test?

“Not that we ever exactly lived in each other’s pockets,” I said prissily. We had lived with twenty million people between us for most of our lives but still anger boiled within me. What had I to be resentful of? I had all the advantage, the love, the blessing and the gifts yet here he was in his cheap hire suit smug and assured and I was the ludicrous little lordling, the boy-husband swinging his legs on his golden throne.

“Not really no,” Shiv said. Even in his words, his smile, there was an aura, an intensity; Shiv-plus. What was he doing to himself, that could only be consummated in Varanasi?

The line was restless now, mothers shifting from foot to foot in their uncomfortable wedding shoes. Shiv dipped his head, his eyes meeting mine for an instant of the purest, most intense hatred. Then he moved on into the press of guests, picking up a glass of champagne here, a plate of small eats there, a strangely singular darkness like plague at the wedding.

The caterers cleared away, torches were lit across the heel-trodden grass of Lodi Gardens and the pandit tied us together in marriage. As fireworks burst over and the tomb of Muhammad Shah and dome of Bara Gumbad we drove away to the plane. We left the diamond stain of bright Delhi behind us and flew, far later than tots of our size should be up, through the night into morning as the private he li cop ter lifted us up and away to the tea house in the cool and watered green hills. Staff discreetly stowed out baggage, showed us the lie of the rooms, the shaded verandah with its outlook over the heart-stunning gold and purple of the morning Himalayas, the bedroom with the one huge four-poster bed. Then they swept away in a rustle of silk and we were alone, together, Vishnu and Lakshmi, two gods.

“It’s good isn’t it?”

“Lovely. Wonderful. Very spiritual. Yes.”

“I like the rooms. I like the smell of the wood, old wood.”

“Yes, it is good. Very old wood.”

“This is the honeymoon then.”

“Yes.”

“We’re supposed to . . .”

“Yes. I know. Do you . . . are you?”

“Wired? No I was never into that.”

“Oh. Well, I’ve some other stuff in my bag, it should work on you as well.”

“You’ve tried it?”

“Sometimes. I’m finding it gets hard all on its own now, just like that, nothing in particular, so I try it then.”

“Is it productive?”

“It’s a bit like the ’hoek sex. Feeling you really really need to pee something that isn’t pee and isn’t there. To be honest, not as good. Have you tried?”

“With the fingers? Oh yes, with the whole hand. It’s like you.”

“Need to pee?”

“Something like that. More of a clench. It works on a swing too. I don’t really think I want to use something you have on you, you know.”

“I suppose not. We could . . . I could . . .”

“I don’t really think so.”

“Do you think they’ll check? Save the sheets and show them round to all the relatives?”

“And our physical ages? Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s part of the contract.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to invoke contractual obligation until I’ve at least had a period.”

“So do you want to do anything?”

“Not particularly.”

“So what will we do then?”

“The view’s nice.”

“There’s a pack of cards in the drawer in the table.”

“Maybe later. I might sleep now.”

“So might I. Are you all right about the bed?”

“Of course. We’re supposed too, aren’t we? We are husband and wife.”

We slept under the light silk cover with the ceiling fan turning slowly, each curled up like the eight-year-olds we physically were with our backs to each other, as far apart as Vish and Shiv and afterwards we invented card games of staggering complexity with the old circular Ganjifa cards on the verandah with its titanic view over the Himalayas. As Lakshmi turned over the kings and ministers our eyes met and we both knew it was more than over, it had never begun. There was nothing but contractual obligation between us. We were the hostages of our DNA. I thought of that line of offspring issuing like a rope of pearls from the end of my still-flaccid penis; those slow children toddling into a future so distant I could not even see its dust on time’s horizon, and onward and onward always onward. I was filled with horror at the blind imperative of biology. I owned superhuman intelligence, I only forgot what I chose to forget, I had never known a day’s illness in my life, I carried the name of a god, but to my seed all this was nothing, I was no different from some baseline Dalit in Molar Bund basti. Yes, I was a privileged brat, yes, I was a sneerer of the worst kind, how could I be anything other? I was a designer snob.

We stayed our week in the tea house in the green foothills of Himachal Pradesh, Lakshmi and Vishnu. Lakshmi patented some of her elaborate social card games—we tested the multi-player games by each of us playing several hands at once, an easy feat for the Brahmins—and made a lot of money from licensing them. It was radiantly beautiful, the mountains were distant and serene like stone Buddhas, occasional rain pattered on the leaves outside our window at night and we were utterly utterly miserable, but even more so at the thought of what we had to face on our return to Awadh, the darlings of the Delhi. My decision had been made on the third day of our honeymoon but it was not until we were in the limo to the Ramachandra Tower where we had been given an apartment fit for gods on the floor below my Mamaji that I made the call to the very special, very discreet doctor.

Two Extraneous Aspects of Myself

“Both of them?” the nute said. Yt would have raised an eyebrow had yt possessed any hair on yts shaven head to raise.

“History is quiet on the subject of half-eunuchs,” I said.

No one, alas, ever delivers such dialogue. Ticking lines, arch exchanges, loaded looks, these are things of story not real life. But I am telling you a story, my story, which is much more than just history or even memory. For if I choose to forget, I can also choose to remember and make what I chose memory. So if I wish the nute surgeon’s office to be at the top of a winding, creaking flight of stairs, each level haunted by the eyes of suspicious and hostile Old Delhiwallahs, if I decide to remember it so, it will be so. Likewise, if I choose to recall that office to be a charnel house of grotesque surgical implements and pictures of successfully mutilated body-parts as a like a demon-infested hell from a Himalayan Buddhist painting: it will be so forever. Perhaps it’s less strange a concept for you than for me. I more than anyone know the deceptiveness of physical appearance, but you seem young enough to have grown up in a world comfortable with universal memory, every breath and blink swarming with devas continuously writing and rewriting physical reality. And if the devas choose to rewrite that memory, who is there to say that it’s not so?

But there is east light in the sky beyond the blazing pillar of the Jyotirlinga, I have far to go, you have yet to see the most astonishing my cats can achieve and the reality is that the surgery of Dr Anil was in a tastefully restored haveli in the warren of streets in the shadow of the Red Fort, the surgery elegant and discreet and fronted by the delightful Miss Modi, and Dr Anil welcoming, professional subtle and frankly surprised by my request.

“I usually deal in more, substantial surgery,” yt said. The Ardhanarisvara clinic was Delhi’s leading centre for nute transformation. Leading through whispers and rumours; in bright new Awadh we might claim to be urbane, global, cosmopolitan and unshockable but nute culture, those who decided to escape our desperate sex wars by choosing a third way, a neither-way it was still almost as hidden and secretive as the ancient transgendered hijras who had long ago hidden themselves away in Old Delhi. The ancient city; older than any memory, its streets convoluted like the folds of a brain, has always looked after those with needs beyond the merely average.

“I think what I’m asking is substantial enough,” I said.

“True true,” Dr Anil said, putting yts fingers together in a spire in that way that all doctors, male, female, transgendered or nute, seem to learn on day one of medical school. “So, both testicles.”

“Yes, both.”

“And not the penis.”

“That would be perverse.”

“You’re sure you won’t consider the chemical option? It’s reversible, should you ever reconsider.”

“No, not chemical. I don’t want it to be reversible. I want to remove myself from the future. I want this to end with me. I’m more than a stud animal. Complete physical castration, yes.”

“It’s quite simple. Much more so than the usual kind of thing we do here.” I knew well the medical procedures that flowed out from here to the anonymous godowns and grey surgery clinics beyond the Siri Ring orbital expressway. There is a video for everything somewhere in the online world and I had watched with fascination what those humans who desired another gender had done to themselves. The things strung out through the gel tanks, skin flayed, muscles laid open, organs drawn out and suspended in molecular sieve cradles, were so far from anything human as to be curious, like strange forest flowers, rather than obscene. I was much more of a coward, leaving only my two little organs on the doorstep of gender. “My only reservation would be that, as you are biologically prepubescent, it would be an internal orchidectomy. Miss Modi will draw up a consent form.” Yt blinked me, a delicate, faun-like creature behind a heavy Raj desk, too too lovely to speak of such things as testicular surgery. “Forgive me for asking, I haven’t met any High Brahmins before, but you are of an age to sign a consent form?”

“I’m of an age to be legally married.”

“Yes, but you must understand, mine is a business that attracts scrutiny in Awadh.”

“I’m of an age to pay you a profane sum of money to give me what I want.”

“Profane it is then.”

Surprisingly mundane it was. I did not even need to be driven out to the nasty industrial zones. In the cubicle I changed into the surgical gown, the sleeves too too long, the hem trailing on the ground, slid up onto the disinfectant-stinky operating table in the basement surgery and felt the needling suffusion of the local anaesthetic. Robot arms, finger-tips fine as insect antennae, danced in under the control of Dr Anil. I felt nothing as I blinked up into the lights and strained to hear their synaesthetic music. The dancing arms withdrew; I felt nothing. And I still felt nothing as the car spun me back through streets full of pulsing, potent, hormone-raddled people. A mild twinge from the sutures pulling against the weave of my clothes. No pain, little loss, nothing of the sense of lightnes and freedom I had read of in the literature of castration fetishists. A unique pleasure, sexual castration; an orgasm to end all orgasms. I had not even had that. The cell-weave treatments would heal the wound in three days and hide all evidence, until the passing years revealed that my voice was not significantly deepening, my hair not receding, that I was growing unusually tall and willowy and that I had singularly failed to contractually conceive any children.

“Do you want to take then with you?” Dr Anil asked as yt sat me down in yts consulting room after the short operation.

“Why should I wish to do that?”

“It was a tradition in China; Imperial eunuchs would be given their excised genitals preserved in a jar of alcohol to bury beside them on their deaths, so that they might enter heaven whole men.”

“It was a tradition in Ottoman Turkey that eunuchs, after their cutting clean, would sit in a dung-heap for three days to heal their wounds, or die. I don’t care for that tradition either. They’re not mine, they’re not me; they belong to someone else. Burn them or throw them to the pi-dogs, I don’t care.”

Thunder growled over me, a promise of a monsoon, the day was darkening. Lightning glowed cloud to cloud as I rode the elevator up the outside of Ramachandra Tower. Lakshmi sat curled on the sofa, the breaking storm magnificent behind her. Dry lightning, a false prophet of rain. All prophecies of rain were false these days.

“Did you do it, are you all right?”

I nodded. It was beginning to hurt now. I clenched my teeth, kicking in the analgesic nanoinfuser Dr. Anil had planted there. Lakshmi clapped her hands in joy. “I’ll go tomorrow. Oh dear Lord, I’m so happy, so happy.” And then, there, in the dark apartment glowing with muter lighting, she kissed me.

We did not tell anyone. That was part of the pact. Not our parents, not our relatives, not our circle of Brahmin friends, not even our aeais. Not even dear Sarasvati; I wouldn’t burden her with this. There was work we had to do before we announced to our respective families how we had so drastically denied their plans for us. Then we could sweetly and painlessly divorce.

I Nuzzle the Earlobe of Power

What is the proper work of eunuchs?

Does it make you uncomfortable, that word? Does it make you cross your legs, boys; does it give you a hollow clench in your uterus, ladies? When you hear it, do you see something other than a human being, something less? How then is it any different from other words of distinction: Kshatriya, Dalit? Brahmin? Eunuch. It is a very old and noble word, a fine and ancient tradition practised in all the great cultures of Earth. The principle is to give up the lesser to gain the greater. Of all those pitiful puffs of cock-juice, how many will ever turn into human beings? Come on, be honest. It’s almost all wasted. And never imagine that the ball-less are sexless, or without desire. No, the great castrati singers, the eunuch poets and holy visionaries, the grand viziers and royal advisors all understood that greatness came at a price and that was generation. Empires could be entrusted to eunuchs, free from dynastic urges. The care and feeding of great nations is our proper work and with all the gifts my parents had endowed me I steered myself toward the political cradle of the nation.

How almost right my mother was, and how utterly wrong-headed. She had imagined me carried in through the doors of the Lok Sabha on the shoulders of cheering election workers. I preferred the servant’s entrance. Politicians live and die by the ballot box. They are not there to serve, they are there to gain and hold office. Populism can force them to abandon wise and correct policies for whims and fads. The storm of ballots will in the end sweep them and all their good works from power. Their grand viziers endure. We understand that democracy is the best system by which a nation seems to be governed.

Months of social networking—the old-fashioned, handshake and gift type—and the setting up and calling in favours and lines of political credit, has gained me an internship to Parekh, the Minister for Water and the Environment. He was a tolerable dolt, a Vora from Uttaranchal with a shop keep er’s shrewdness and head for details, but little vision. He was good enough to seem in control and a politician often needs little more for a long and comfortable career. This was the highest he would ever rise, as soon as the next monsoon failure hit and the mobs were hijacking water tankers in the street, he would be out. He knew I knew this. I scared him, even though I was careful to turn down the full dazzle of my intelligence to a glow of general astuteness. He knew I was far from the nine-year-old I seemed to be but he really had no idea of my and my kind’s capabilities and curses. I chose my department carefully. Naked ambition would have exposed me too early to a government that was only now realising it had never properly legislated around human gene-line manipulation. Even so I knew the colour of all the eyes that were watching me, skipping through the glassy corridors of the Water Ministry. Water is life. Water, its abundance and its rarity, would sculpt the future of Awadh, of all the nations of North India, from the Panjab to the United States of Bengal. Water was good place to be bright, but I had no intention of remaining there.

The dam at Kunda Khadar neared completion, that titanic fifteen-kilometre bank of earth and concrete like a garter around the thigh of Mother Ganga. Protests from downstream Bharat and the USB grew strident but the towers cranes lifted and swung, lifted and swung day and night. Minister Parekh and Prime Minister Srivastava communicated daily. The Defence Ministry was brought into the circle. Even the PR staffers could smell diplomatic tension.

It was a Thursday. Even before, I called I Bold Thursday, to commit myself, to get myself up. The genes don’t make you brave. But I had prepared as rigorously as I could; which was more than anyone in the Lok Sabha, Minister Parekh included. Srivastava was due with his entourage for a press conference from the Ministry to reassure the Awadhi public that Kunda Khadar would do its job and slake Delhi’s bottomless thirst. Everyone was turned out smart as paint: moustaches plucked, slacks creased, shirts white as mourning. Not me. I had picked my spot long before: a brief bustle down the corridor as Srivastava and his secretarial team was coming up. I had no ideas what they would be talking about but I knew they would be talking; Srivastava loved his “walking briefings”; they made him seem a man of action and energy. I trusted that my research and quicker wit would win.

I heard the burble of voices. They were about to turn the corner, I went into motion, pushed myself into the wall as the press of suits came toward me. My senses scanned five conversations, lit on Srivastava murmur to Bhansal his parliamentary secretary, “If I knew we had McAuley’s support.”

Andrew J. McAuley, President of the United States of America. And the answer was there.

“If we could negotiate an output deal in return for Sajida Rana accepting partial ratification of the Hamilton Acts,” I said, my voice shrill and pure and piercing as a bird.

The Prime Ministerial party bustled past but Satya Shetty, the Press Secretary, turned with a face of thunder to strike down this upstart, mouthy intern. He saw a nine-year-old. He was dumb-struck. His eyes bulged. He hesitated. That hesitation froze the entire party. Prime Minister Srivastava turned towards me. His eyes widened. His pupils dilated.

“That’s a very interesting idea,” he said and in those five words I knew he had identified, analysed and accepted the gift I had offered him. A Brahmin advisor. The strange, savant child. The child genius, the infant guru, the little god. India adored them. It was PR gold. His staffers parted as he stepped toward me. “What are you doing here?”

I explained that I was on an internship with Minister Parekh.

“And now you want more.”

Yes, I did.

“What’s you name?”

I told him. He nodded his head.

“Yes, the wedding. I remember. So, it’s a career in politics, is it?”

It was.

“You’re certainly not backward about being forward.”

My genes wouldn’t allow it. My first political lie.

“Well, ideas do seem to be in short stock at the moment.” With that he turned, his entourage closed around him and he was swept on. Satya Shetty dealt me a glare of pure despite, I held his eyes until he snapped his gaze away. I would see him and all his works dust while I was still fresh and filled with energy. By the time I returned to my desk there was an invitation from the Office of the Prime Minister to call them to arrange an interview.

I told my great achievement to the three women in my life. Lakshmi beamed with delight. Our plans were working. My mother was baffled; she no longer understood my motivations, why I would accept a lowly and inconspicuous civil service position rather than a high-flyer in our superstar political culture. Sarasvati jumped up from her sofa and danced around the room, then clapped her hands around my face and kissed my forehead long and hard until her lips left a red tilak there.

“As long as there’s joy in it,” she said. “Only joy.”

My sister, my glorious sister, had voiced a truth that I was only now developing the maturity to recognise. Joy was all. Mamaji and Dadaji had aimed me at greatness, at blinding success and wealth, power and celebrity. I had always possessed the emotional intelligence if not the emotional vocabulary, to know that the blindingly powerful and famous were seldom happy, that their success and wealth often played against their own mental and physical well-being. All my decisions I made for me, for my peace, well-being, satisfaction and to keep me interested throughout my long life. Lakshmi had chosen the delicate world of complicated games. I had chosen the whirl of politics. Not economics; that was too dismal a science for me. But the state and those statelets beyond Awadh’s borders with which I could see we were as inextricably entwined as when we were one India, and the countries beyond those, and the continents beyond; that fascinated me. The etiquette of nations was my pleasure. There was joy in it, Sarasvati. And I was brilliant at it. I became the hero of my childhood comics, a subtle hero, Diplomacy Man. I saved your world more times than you can ever know. My superpower was to see a situation entire, connected, and all those subtler forces acting upon it that other, less gifted analysts would have discounted. Then I would give it nudge. The smallest, slightest tap, one tiny incentive or restriction, even a hint at how a policy might be shaped, and watch how the social physics of a complex capitalist society scaled them up through power laws and networks and social amplifiers to slowly turn the head of the entire nation.

In those first few years I was constantly fighting for my own survival. Satya Shetty was my deadliest enemy from the moment our eyes had met in the corridor in the Water Ministry. He was influential, he was connected, he was clever but not clever enough to realise he could never beat me. I just let my drips of honey fall into Krishna Srivastava’s ear. I was always right. Little by little his cabinet and Satya Shetty’s allies realised that, more than being always right, I was essentially different from them. I didn’t seek high office. I sought the greatest well-being. I was the prefect advisor. And I looked great on tele vision: Prime Minister Srivastava’s dwarf vizier, trotting behind him like some throwback to the days of the Mughals. Who isn’t, at some level, unnerved by the child prodigy? Even if I was twenty two years old now, with puberty—whatever that might mean for me personally—looming on the horizon of my Brahmin generation like the rumbles of a long-delayed monsoon.

It was that treacherous monsoon that became the driver of Awadhi politics, town and country, home and away. Thirsty nations are irrational nations; nations that pray and turn to strange saviours. The great technocracy of the United States of Bengal had, in a display of national hysteria, put its faith in a bizarre plan to haul an iceberg from Antarctica into the Sundarbans with the hope that the mass of cold air would affect the shifting climatic patterns and claw the monsoon back over India. Strange days, a time of rumours and wonders. The Age of Kali was upon us and once again the gods were descending upon us, walking in the shapes of ordinary men and women. The Americans had found something in space, something not of this world. The datahavens of Bharat, boiling with aeais, had spawned Generation Three artificial intelligences; legendary entities whose intelligence as far outstripped mine as mine does the fleas crawling on my poor, harassed cats. Sajida Rana, politically embattled from resurgent Hindu fundamentalism, was preparing a pre-emptive strike on Kunda Khadar as a PR stunt. This last rumour I took seriously enough from my trawling of the Bharati press to call for a departmental level meeting between my ministry and its Bharati counterpart. Did I mention that I was now parliamentary secretary to Krishna Srivastava? A steady, not stellar, climb. It was still too easy to lose grip and fall into the reaching hands of my rivals.

My counterpart at the Bharat Bhavan was a refined Muslim gentleman, Shaheen Badoor Khan, from an excellent family and impeccably educated. Behind his pitch-perfect etiquette and a dignity I envied deeply for I was a small, scampering child next to him, I did sense a sadness; an ache behind the eyes. We recognised and liked each other immediately. We knew instinctively that we both cared deeply enough for our countries to be prepared to betray them. Such a thing could never be said, or even implied. Thus our conversation, as we walked among the Buddha’s deer of old Sarnath, our security men discreet shadows among the trees, the security drones circling like black kites overhead seemed as casual and elliptical as two old dowagers on a Friday afternoon stroll.

“Awadh has always seemed to me a country at peace with itself,” Shaheen Badoor Khan said. “As if it’s solved some great and quintessentially Indian paradox.”

“It wasn’t always so,” I said. Behind the security fence Western tourists on the Buddha trail tried to hold down their flapping robes in the rising wind. “Delhi’s streets have run red far too many times.”

“But it’s always been a cosmopolitan city. Varanasi, on the other hand, always has and always will be the city of Lord Siva.”

I waggled my head in agreement. I knew now what I would report to Srivastava. Sajida Rana is under pressure from the Hindutvavadis. She will launch a pre-emptive strike at Kunda Khadar. Awadh will have the moral high-ground; we must not lose it.

“I have a relative in Varanasi,” I said casually.

“Oh, so?”

“My brother—a Shiva himself, so no surprise really that he should end up in Varanasi.”

“And is he a Brahmin like yourself?”

“No, but he is very gifted.”

“We do seem to attract talent. It’s one of our blessings, I suppose. I have a younger brother in the United States. Terrible at keeping in contact, terrible; my mother, well, you know what they’re like. Of course it’s my responsibility.”

You’re worried that your brother has drifted into business that could adversely affect your standing, if it became public, was what this sage Mr Khan was telling me. You want me to keep an eye on him, in return you’ll open up a secure channel of communications between us to prevent war between Bharat and Awadh.

“You know what brothers are like,” I said.

The information was beaming into my head even as I stepped off the plane at Indira Gandhi airport. Shiv had opened a company, Purusa, in Varanasi. He had attracted substantial funding from a venture capital company called Odeco and match-funding from the research and development division at Bharat’s mighty Ray Power. His field was nanoscale computing. Top designers and engineers were working with him. The Ghost Index, which valued companies with the potential to become global players when they went public, valued Purusa as one of their top five to watch. He was young and he was hot and he was headed for orbit. He had made some questionable friends among Bharat’s datarajas and a cloud of high-level aeais hid much of Purusa’s activities from its rivals and from the Bharati government. The Krishna Cops had a file on him and a deliberately clumsy team of aeai wards to keep him aware that he was known to them. My own Awadhi intelligence service surveillance aeais were of a subtler stripe than the police. They coded themselves into the very informational fabric of Purusa. The security of Awadh was a flimsy fiction; I was intensely curious as to what my brother was up to. What Shiv planned was of course monstrously ambitious. He had cracked open the prison of the skull. More prosaically, Purusa developed a prototype biochip that could interface directly with the brain. No more a tacky coil of plastic behind the ear and the soft invasion of electromagnetic radiation into the brain, like shouting in a temple. This was engineered protein, stuff of our stuff, which sent its artificial neurons through skin and bone to mesh with the threads of though. It was third eye, forever open to the unseen world. See how easily I resort to the language of the mystical? Omniscience was standard; anyone so infected had access to all the knowledge and all the bitchy triviality of the global web. Communication was no longer a click and a call, it was a thought, a subtle telepathy. Virtual worlds became real. The age of privacy, that first Western luxury that India wealth bought, was over. Where our own thoughts ended and those of others began, how would we know? We would touch the world of the aeais, in their dispersed, extended, multi-levelled perceptions. Speculation led to speculation. I could see no end to them. Lakshmi, disturbed from her mathematical games, would sense my mood and look up to see the adult anxiety on my child’s face. This technology would change us, change us utterly and profoundly. This was a new way of being human, a fault-line, a diamond cutter’s strike, across society. I began to realize that the greatest threat to Awadh, to Bharat, to all India, was not water. It was the pure and flawless diamond Shiv and his Purusa Corporation dangled and spun in front of each and every human. Be more, be everything. So engaged was I that I did not notice when the warning came down the Grand Trunk Road from Shaheen Badoor Khan in Varanasi and thus was caught sleeping when Sajida Rana sent her tanks to take Kunda Khadar without a shot.

The Girl with the Red Bindi

The war’s names were longer than its duration. The Kunda Khadar war, the Forty-Eight Hour War, the Soft War, the First Water War. You don’t remember it, though Awadhi main battle tanks manoeuvred over these very sands. You probably don’t even remember it from history lessons. There have been greater and more enduring wars; war running into war, the long and, I think, the final war. The war I shall end. That grand display of arms on these river strands I now understand as its opening shot, had any shots actually been fired. That was another of its names, the Soft War. Ah! Who is it names wars? Hacks and pundits, without doubt, media editors and chati journalists; people with an interesting a good, mouth-filling phrase. It is certainly not civil servants, or cat-circus proprietors. How much better a name would “Soft War” have been for the century of unrest that followed, this Age of Kali that now seems to have run down to its lowest ebb with the arrival of the Jyotirlingas on earth?

The Water War, the War of ’47, whatever we call it, for me marked the end of human history and the return of the age of miracles to earth. It was only after the smoke had cleared and the dust settled and our diplomatic teams arrived among the tall and shining towers of Ranapur to negotiate the peace that we realized the immensity of events in Bharat. Our quiet little water war was the least of it. I had received one terse communication down the Grand Trunk Road: I am ruined, I have failed, I have resigned. But there was Shaheen Badoor Khan, five paces behind his new Prime Minster Ashok Rana, as I trotted like a child behind our Srivastava.

“Rumours of my demise were exaggerated,” he whispered as we fell in beside each other as the politicians formed up on the grass outside the Benares Polo and Country Club for the press call, each jostling for status-space.

“War does seem to shorten the political memory.” A twenty-three-year-old in the body of a boy half his age may say pretty much whatever he likes. It’s the liberty granted to fools and angels. When I first met Shaheen Badoor Khan, as well as his decency and intelligence, I had sensed a bone-deep sadness. Even I could not have guessed it was a long-repressed and sterile love for the other, the transgressive, the romantic and doomed, as all wrapped up in the body of young Varanasi nute. He had fallen into the honey-trap laid for him by his political enemies.

Shaheen Badoor Khan dipped his head. “I’m far from being the first silly, middle-aged man to have been a fool for lust. I may be the only one to have got his Prime Minister killed as a consequence. But, as you say, war does very much clarify the vision and I seem to be a convenient figure for public expiation. And from what I gather from the media, the public will trust me sooner than Ashok Rana. People like nothing better than the fallen mughal who repents. In the meantime, we do what we must, don’t we, Mr Nariman? Our countries need us more than they know. These have been stranger times in Bharat than people can ever be let know.”

Bless your politician’s self-deprecation. The simultaneous collapse of major aeai systems across Bharat, including the all-conquering Town and Country, the revelation of the country’s rampant Hindutva opposition to have been a cabal of artificial intelligences, chaos at Ray Power and the mysterious appearance of a hundred-metre hemispherical crater in the university grounds, of mirror-bright perfection and, behind all, rumours that the long-awaited, long-dreaded Generation Three aeais had arrived. There was only one who could make sense of it to me. I went to see Shiv.

He had a house, a shaded place with many trees to push back the crowding, noisy world. Gardeners moved with the slow precision up and down the rolled gravel paths, dead-heading a Persian rose there, spraying aphids there, spot-feeding brown drought-patches in the lawn everywhere. He had grown fat. He lolled in his chair at the tiffin table on the lawn. He looked dreadful, pasty and puffy. He had a wife. He had a child, a little pipit of a girl playing on the snap-together plastic fun-park on the lawn under the eye of her ayah. She would glance over at me, unsure whether to treat me as a strange and powerful uncle or invite me to whiz down the plastic slide. Yes, wee one, I was a strange creature. That scent, that pheromone of information I had smelled on Shiv the day he came to my wedding still clung to him, stronger now. He smelled like a man who has spent too much time among aeais.

He welcomed me expansively. Servants brought cool home-made sherbet. As we settled into brother talk, man-to-eleven-year-old-talk, his wife excused herself in a voice small as a insect and went to hover nervously over her daughter playing exuberantly on her brightly coloured jungle-gym.

“You seem to have had a good war,” I said.

“There was war?” Shiv held my gaze for a moment, then exploded into volcanic laughter. Sweat broke out on his brow. I did not believe it for an instant. “I’ve got comfortable and greasy, yes.”

“And successful.”

“Not as successful as you.”

“I am only a civil servant.”

“I’ve heard you run Srivastava like a pimp.”

“We all have our sources.”

“Yes.” Again that affected pause. “I spotted yours pretty early on. Not bad for government ware.”

“Disinformation can be as informative as information.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t try anything as obvious as that with you. No, I left them there; I let them look. I’ve nothing to hide.”

“Your investors are interesting.”

“I doubt some of them will be collecting on their investment.” He laughed again.

“I don’t think I understand.”

“It transpires that one of my key investors, Odeco, was nothing more than a front for a Generation Three aeai that had developed inside the international financial markets.”

“So it wasn’t just a rumour.”

“I’m glad you’re still listening to rumours.”

“You say this all very casually.”

“What other way is there to treat the end of history? You’ve seen what happens in India when we take things seriously.” The laugh was annoying me now. It was thick and greasy.

“The end of history has been promised many times, usually by people rich enough to avoid it.”

“Not this time. The rich will be the ones who’ll bring it about. The same blind economic self-interest that caused the demographic shift, and you, Vish. Only this will be on a much greater scale.”

“You think your biochip has that potential?”

“On it’s own, no. I can see I’m going to have to explain this to you.”

By the time Shiv had told his tale the gardeners were lighting torches to drive away the evening insects and wife daughter and ayah had withdrawn to the lit comfort of the verandah. Bats dashed around me, hunting. I was shivering though the night was warm. A servant brought fresh made lassi and pistachios. It was greater, as Shiv as promised. Perhaps the greatest. The gods had returned, and then in the instant of their apotheosis, departed. A soft apocalypse.

The fears of the Krishna Cops, of the scared Westerners, had of course come true. The Generation Threes were real, had been real for longer than anyone had foreseen, had moved among us for years, decades even, unresting, unhasting and silent as light. There was no force capable of extirpating truly hyper-intelligent aeais whose ecosystem was the staggering complexity of the global information network. They could break themselves into components, distribute themselves across continents, copy themselves infinitely, become each other. They could speak with our voices and express our world but they were utterly utterly alien to us. It was convenient for them to withdraw their higher functions from a world closing in on the secret of their existence and base them in the datahavens of Bharat, for they had a higher plan. There were three of them, gods all. Brahma, Shiva, Krishna. My brothers, my gods. One, the most curious about the world, inhabits the global financial market. One grew out of a massively multiple online evolution simulation game pf which I had vaguely heard. In creating an artificial world, the gamers had created its deity. And one appeared in the vast servers farms of Bharat’s Indiapendent Productions, coalesced out of the cast and pseudo-cast of Town and Country. That one particularly impressed me, especially since, with the characteristic desire to meddle in the affairs of others mandatory in the soapi universe, it expanded into Bharati politics in the shape of the aggressive Hindutva Party that had engineered the downfall of the perceptive and dangerous Shaheen Badoor Khan and assassination of Sajida Rana.

That would have been enough to end our hopes that this twentieth first century would be a smooth and lucrative extension of its predecessor. But their plans were not conflict or the subjugation of humanity. That would have meant nothing to the aeais, it was a human concept born of a human need. They inhabited a separate ecological niche and could have endured indefinitely, caught up whatever concerns were of value to distributed intelligences. Humanity would not let them live. The Krishna Cops were cosmetic, costume cops to maintain an illusion that humanity was on the case, but they did signal intent. Humans would admit no rivals, so the Trimurti of Generation Three engineered an escape from this world, from this universe. I did not understand the physics involved from Shiv’ description; neither, despite his pedantic, lecturing IT-boy tone, did he. I would look it up later, it would not be beyond me. What I did glean was that I was related to that mirrored crater on the university campus that looked so like a fine piece of modern sculpture, or an ancient astronomical instrument like the gnomons and marble bowls of Delhi’s ancient Jantar Mantar observatory. That hemi sphere, and an object out in space. Oh yes, those rumours were real. Oh yes, the Americans had discovered it long ago and tried to keep it secret, and were still trying, and; oh yes, failing.

“And what is it then?”

“The collected wisdom of the aeais. A true universal computer. They sent it through from their universe.”

“Why?”

“Do you never give presents to your parents?”

“You’re privileged to this information?”

“I have channels that even the government of Awadh doesn’t. Or, for that matter, the Americans. Odeco . . .”

“Odeco you said was an avatar of the Brahma aeai. Wait.” Had I balls, they would have contracted cold and hard. “There is absolutely nothing to prevent this happening again.”

“None,” said Shiv. It was some time since had laughed his vile, superior laugh.

“It’s already happening.” And we thought we had won a water war.

“There’s a bigger plan. Escape, exile, partition is never a good solution. Look at us in Mother India. You work in politics, you understand the need for a settlement.” Shiv turned in his chair to the figures on the verandah. His wife was still watching me. “Nirupa, darling. Come over here, would you? Uncle Vish hasn’t had a chance to meet you properly.”

She came dashing down the steps and across the lawn, holding up the hem of her print dress, in a headlong, heedless flight that made me at once fearful for stones snakes and stumble and at the same time reminded so much of my golden years growing up alongside Sarasvati. She put her fingers in her mouth and pressed close to her father, shy of looking at me directly.

“Show him your bindi, go on, it’s lovely.”

I had noticed the red mark on her forehead, larger than customary, and the wrong colour. I bent forward across the table to examine it. It was moving. The red spot seemed to crawl with insect-movement, on the edge of visibility. I reeled back into my chair. My feet swung, not touching the ground.

“What have you done?” I cried. My voice was small and shrill.

“Shh. You’ll scare her. Go on; run on, Nirupa. Thank you. I’ve made her for the future. Like our parents made you for the future. But it’s not going to be the future they thought.”

“Your biochip interface.”

“Works. Thanks to a little help from the aeais. But like I said, that’s only part of it. A tiny part of it. We have a project in development; that’s the real revolution. That’s the real sound of the future arriving.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“Distributed dust-processing.”

“Explain.”

Shiv did. It was nothing less than the transformation of computing. His researchers were shrinking computers, smaller and smaller, from grain of rice to sperm cell, down down to the molecular scale and beyond. The endpoint was swarm-computers the size of dust particles, communicating with each other in free flying flocks, computers that could permeate every cell of the human body. They would be as universal and ubiquitous as dust. I began to be afraid and cold in that clammy Varanasi night. I could see Shiv’s vision for our future, perhaps further than he could. The bindi and the dust-processor: one broke the prison of the skull; the other turned the world into memory.

Little by little our selves would seep into the dust-laden world; we would become clouds, non-localised, we would penetrate each other more intimately and powerfully than any tantric temple carving. Inner and outer worlds would merge. We could be many things, many lives at one time. We could copy ourselves endlessly. We would merge with the aeais and become one. This was their settlement, their peace. We would become one species, post-human, post-aeai.

“You’re years away from this.” I denied Shiv’s fantasia shrilly.

“Yes, we would be, if we hadn’t had a little help.”

“How?” I cried again. Now the ayah was staring concerned at me.

Shiv pointed a finger to the night sky.

“I could report you,” I said. “Americans don’t take kindly to having their security hacked.”

“You can’t stop it,” Shiv said. “Vish, you’re not the future any more.”

Those words, of all that Shiv spoke in the garden, clung to me. Gliding silently through Delhi in the smooth-running black government car, the men in their white shirts, the woman in their coloured shoes, the cars and the buzzing phatphats seemed insubstantial. The city was still thrilled with its brilliant victory—only a drubbing in cricket would have exercised public excitement more—but the crowds seemed staged, like extras, and the lights and streets as false as a set on Town and Country. How would we survive without our national panacea? But Shiv had confirmed, there was nothing, absolutely nothing to prevent a new generation of Threes from arising. They could already be stirring into sentience, like my divine namesake on his scared turtle Kurma churning the sacred milk into creation. I was acutely aware of the clouds of aeais all around me, penetrating and interpenetrating, layer upon layer, level upon level, many and one. There was no place in the two Delhis for the ancient djinns. The aeais had displaced them. This was their city. Settlement was the only answer. Dust blew through the streets, dust upon dust. I had seen the end of history and still my feet did not touch the floor of the limo.

I was obsolete. All the talents and skills Mamaji and Dadaji were nothing in a world where everyone was connected, where everyone could access the full power of a universal computer, where personality could be as malleable and fluid as water. Slowly slowly I would grow up through adolescence to maturity and old age while around me this new society this new humanity, would evolve at an ever-increasing rate. I was all too aware of my choice. Take Shiv’s way and deny everything I had been made for, or reject it and grow old with my kind. We, the genetically enhanced Brahmins, were the last humans. Then, with a physical force that made me spasm on the back seat of the limo, I realised my hubris. I was such an aristocrat. The poor. The poor would be with us. India’s brilliant middle class, its genius and its curse, would act as it always had, in its unenlightened self-interest. Anything that would give advantage to its sons and daughters in the Darwinian struggle for succcess. The poor would look on, as disenfranchised from that post-human as they were from this fantasy of glass and neon.

I was glad, glad to tears, that I had chose to pass nothing on into this future. No endless chain of slow-aging, genetically obsolete Brahmins hauling themselves into an increasing unrecognisable and inhuman future. Had I received some premonition; had my uniquely overlapping senses seen a pattern there all those years ago that even Shiv, with his clandestine access to the collected knowledge of the Generation Threes, had not. I wept unreservedly and ecstatically in the back of the smooth-running car. It was time. As we turned into the down ramp to the underground car park at Ramachandra Tower, I made three calls. First I called Prime Minister Srivastava and tendered my resignation. Then I called Lakshmi, patient Lakshmi who had through our charade of a marriage and sterility become a dear and intimate friend, and said, now, now’s the time for that divorce. Last of all I called my mother on the floor above and told her exactly what I had done with myself.

A Father Festooned with Memory

Wait! One more trick. You’ll like this trick, the best trick of all. You haven’t seen anything yet, just a bit of running on circles and jumping through hoops. Yes. I know it’s very very late and the sun will soon be up the sky and you have cows to milk and fields to tend to and I appointments to keep but you will like this trick. Not a lot, but you will like it. Now, two ticks while I fix up this wire.

And anyway, I haven’t finished my story. Oh no no, not by a long chalk. You thought it ended there? With the world as you see it, now you know how intimately I am involved in our history? No, it must end well, a well-made story. I must confront the villain, according to the theories on such things. There must be resolution and an appropriate moral sentiment. Then you will be satisfied.

The wire? Oh, they can walk that. Oh yes, those cats. No no no; first you must listen a little longer.

I walked away. We have a great and grand tradition of it in this great teat of divine milk hanging from the belly of Asia. Our country is big enough to swallow any soul, our orders still porous to pilgrims with a stick and a dhoti wrapped around their loins. Our society has a mechanism for disappearing completely. Anyone can walk away from the mundane world into the divine. Mine was not the orthodox spiritual path and not conventionally divine. I had seen the coming gods. I set aside my career, my clothes, my apartment, my wife—with her blessing and a farewell kiss—my family and friends, my identity, my social networks, my online presence, everything but my genetic inheritance which could not be undone and turned saddhu. Only Sarasvati knew my secret com address. I was gone from the apartment, beating through the neon-lit heat of Rajiv Circle, out along the sides of expressways, drenched in yellow light, beneath the back-throttle of aircraft coming in to the airport, past the brick and cardboard and plastic shelters of the invisible poor. Dawn saw me among the ribbed aluminium flanks of the godowns and factories of Tughluk. I crossed a city on foot in a single night. It’s a great and strange thing to do. Everyone should do it. I walked along the cracked concrete spans of expressway, by the sides of country roads blasted by the grit and gust of passing trucks, along the side of the huge slow trains materialising like visions out of the heat haze, the drivers flinging me rupees for blessing as they passed. I sat down and covered my head and eyes as the high-speed shatabdi express blasted past at hundreds of kilometres per hour. Did the passengers even glance me through the darkened glass? If so I must have seemed a very strange saddhu to them. The littlest saddhu. Small but determined, beating forward with my staff at every stride.

What was I doing? Walking. What did I hope to find? Nothing. Where was I going? To see. Don’t think me a coward or a failure, that I was walking away from truths I could not admit. I had been stabbed to the bone by the revelation that I was irrelevant. I was not the future. I was a dead-end, a genetic backwater. That was the natural reaction of privilege to its absolute irrelevance. I’m a brat, remember that. A spoiled Mamaji’s boy. That same night I returned and dropped my progenitive bombshell; that my mother would never have the dynasty of brilliant Brahmins she desired, I woke from my sleep. It was the uncertain hour, when reality is groggy and the djinns run free. The hour when you wake in your familiar bed without the least knowledge of where the hell you are. I was woken by a sound. It was like a breath and like a roar, like traffic and air conditioners, like a distant desperate shouting and the buzz of neons and powerlines. It was the pulse of underground trains and delivery trucks; it was filmi music and item-songs playing through each other. I heard Great Delhi breath in its shallow sleep and I wanted to go to my balcony and shout as loud as my eleven-year-old glottis would allow: wake up! Wake up! Shiv’s future might be inevitable, written into the geometry of space-time by entities outside it, but I would not allow us to sleepwalk into it. My mind was racing. I had never known anything like it before. I was thinking at a staggering rate, images and memories and ideas crashing together, shattering, fusing. Edifices of thought, huge as mountains, tumbled around me. The way was clear and bright and laid out in front of me. It was there complete and entire in two seconds. I would have to take myself away from the distractions of Delhi politics and society. My ambitions were much larger than that, I would have to become anonymous for a time, I would have to be silent and look and listen. There was a war to be fought and it was a war of mythologies.

Lakshmi kissed me and I left. I wandered for nine months, south across the border into Rajasthan, back into Bharat and to the north under the breath of the Himalayas, to the cool green ridges where I had spent my honeymoon with Lakshmi. To Dal Lake and Srinagar, to Leh and the high country. I could never grow the proper saddhu beard, but I grew the saddhu leanness and tallness. Boy eunuchs grow tall and lean. And the dreadlocks. Oh yes. They are good to have but unpleasant to get. I also gained a nickname: the Beardless Saddhu. With it I got muscles and sunburn, I grew the stamina to walk all day on a cup of rice and a cup of water. What a pulpy, unfit puppy I had been! I begged and performed small miracles of accountancy and feats of memory for food and shelter. Everywhere, I looked in men and women’s Third Eyes. I saw things I could never have from the top of Ramachandra Tower or the Awadh Bhavan. I saw thirst and I saw drought. I saw good village leaders and diligent local civil servants frustrated by government bureaucrats. I saw clever women turn a few hundred rupees from microcredit schemes and grameen banks into successful businesses. I saw good teachers try to lift generations out of low expectations and the trap of caste and Awadh’s soar-away middle-class, rapidly pulling the ladder of social mobility up behind it. I helped with harvests and rode the back of tractors and listened to farers curse the ever-increasing price of their sterile GM seed. I chased rats with sticks and waved my arms to set whole fields of sparrows to flight. I sat in the community house and watched cricket on giant plasma screen powered by stored sunlight. Oh, I was a most peculiar saddhu. I gained a new nickname to set beside Beardless Saddhu: Cricketing Saddhu. I saw village weddings and festivals, I saw funerals. I saw death. It came quite unexpectedly one day, in a small town outside Agra. It was Holi and the streets were full of flying colour, jets of dye, clouds of powder, stained saris and white shirts ruined beyond the power of any laundry to save and everywhere grinning faces stained with colours, teeth white, eye flashing, everyone shouting Holi hai! Holi hai! as they launched jets of colour into the air. I moved through this circus of colour, as motley as any. The phatphat was grossly overloaded, a dozen colour-stained youth hanging off every strut and stanchion. Their eyes were wide on ganja and they were roaring with laughter and throwing fistfuls of dye powder at every passer-by. They caught me full in the face. The front wheel hit a pothole, the overstrained suspension collapsed the whole thing flipped over in a perfect somersault on to its roof, which split like an egg. Bodies flew everywhere, many of them so relaxed on the ganja they were still laughing as they picked themselves and skipped away. One didn’t move. He was trapped under the crushed plastic shell. He lay in his back, his arms at odd angles. His face was stained blue and green and pink and he seemed to be smiling but my senses realized he was dead. I had never seen death before. It was so simple and strange, here undeniably before me yet so subtle, an instant’s transformation yet the opposite of everything that was life. I mumbled the prayers expected of me, but inwardly I was coming to terms with the deepest of all human truths. I was twenty-six years old with the body of albeit-strange thirteen year-old, my lifespan was measurably in centuries, but one day I too would lie down like this and stop moving and thinking and feeling and be nothing forever. I saw death and began to understand.

Village to village, town to town, temple to temple, from the huge complexes the size of cities to white-washed roadside shrines. Then one day outside a mall in a droyght-dusty suburb of Jaipur, as the security men were coming to ask me politely (for one must always be respectful to saddhus) to please move on, I saw what I had been looking for. A man turned to see the very small kerfuffle and as I momentarily looked at him, the Eye of Shiva looked back. I saw biotechnology move there.

I went to a community centre and wrote my first article. I sent it to Suresh Gupta, the editor of Gupshup, that most unashamedly populist of the Delhi’s magazines, which had carried the photographs of my birth and marriage and now, unknowingly, my prophecies of the coming Age of Kali. He rejected it out of hand. I wrote another the next day. It came back with a comment: interesting subject matter but inaccessible for our readership. I was getting somewhere. I went back and wrote again, long into the night over the pad. I am sure I gained another nickname: the Scribbling Saddhu. Suresh Gupta took that third article, and every article since. What did I write about? I wrote about all the things Shiv had prophesied. I wrote about what they might mean for three Indian families, the Voras, the Dashmukhs and the Hirandanis, village, town and city. I created characters—mothers, fathers, sons and daughters and mad aunties and uncles with dark secrets and long-lost relatives come to call—and told their stories, week upon week, year upon year, and the changes, good and ill, the constant hammerblows of technological revolution wrought upon them. I created my own weekly soap opera; I even dared to call it Town and Country. It was wildly successful. It sold buckets. Suresh Gupta saw his circulation increase by thirty percent among those Delhi intelligentsia who only saw Gupshup in hair salons and beauty parlours. Questions were asked, who is this pseudonymous “Shakyamuni?” We want to interview him, we want to profile him, we want him to appear on Awadh Today, we want an op-ed piece from him, we want him to be an advisor on this project, that think tank, we want him to open a supermarket. Suresh Gupta fielded all such inquiries with the ease of a professional Square Leg. There were others questions, ones I overheard at train stations and phatphat lines, in supermarket queues and at bazaars, at parties and family get-togethers: what does it mean for us?

I kept travelling, kept walking, immersing myself in the village and small town. I kept writing my little future-soap, sending off my articles from a cellpoint here, a village netlink there. I watched for the Eye of Shiva. It was several months between the first and second, down in a business park Madhya Pradesh. I saw them steadily after that, but never many; then, at the turn of 2049 to 2050, like a desert blooming after rain, they were everywhere.

I was walking down through the flat dreary country south of the Nepalese border to Varanasi developing my thoughts on evolution, Darwinian and post-Darwinian and the essential unknowability of singularities when I picked up the message from Sarasvati, my first in two weeks of loitering from village to village. At once I thumbed to Varanasi and booked the first shatabdi to Delhi. My natty dreads, my long nails, the dirt and sacred ash of months on the road went down the pan in the First Class Lounge. By the time the Vishwanath Express drew into the stupendous nano-diamond cocoon of New Delhi Central I was dressed and groomed, a smart, confident young Delhiwallah, a highly eligible teenager. Saravasti picked me up in her truck. It was an old battered white Tata without autodrive or onboard or even a functioning airconditioning system. New Delhi Women’s Refuge was painted on the side in blue. I had followed her career—or rather her careers—while I was running the country. Worthiness attracted her; had she been a Westerner and not a Delhi girl I would have called it guilt at the privilege of her birth. Theatre manager here, urban farming collective there, donkey sanctuary somewhere else, dam protest way way down there. She had derided me: deep down at the grass roots was where the real work was done. People work. And who will provide the water for those grass roots? I would answer. It had only taken our brother’s vision of the end of the Age of Kali for me to come round to her philosophy.

She looked older than the years I had spent wandering, as if those my youthfulness belied had been added to hers by some karma. She drove like a terrorist. Or maybe it was that I hadn’t travelled in a car, in a collapsing Tata pick-up, in a city, in Delhi . . . No, she drove like a terrorist.

“You should have told me earlier.”

“He didn’t want to. He wants to be in control if it.”

“What is it exactly?”

“Huntingdon’s.”

“Can they do anything?”

“They never could. They still can’t.”

Saravasti blared her way through the scrimmage of traffic wheeling about the Parliament Street roundabout. The Shaivites still defended their temple, tridents upheld, foreheads painted with the true tilak of Shiva, the three white horizontal stripes. I had seen that other mark on the forehead of almost every man and woman on the street. Sarasvati was pure.

“He would have known whenever he had the genetic checks when I was conceived,” I said. “He never said.”

“Maybe it was enough for him to know that you could never develop it.”

Dadaji had two nurses and they were kind, Nimki and Papadi he called them. They were young Nepalis, very demure and well-mannered, quiet spoken and pretty. They monitored him and checked his oxygen and emptied his colostomy bag and moved him around in his bed to prevent sores and cleared away the seepage and crusting around the many tubes that ran into his body. I felt they loved him after a fashion.

Sarasvati waited outside in the garden. She hated seeing Dad this way, but I think there was a deeper distaste, not merely of what he had become, but of what he was becoming.

Always a chubby man, Tushar Nariman had grown fat since immobility had been forced on him. The room was on the ground floor and opened out on to sun-scorched lawns. Drought-browned trees screened off the vulgarity of the street. It was exercise for the soul if not the body. The neurological degeneration was much more advanced that I had guessed.

My father was big, bloated and pale but the machine overshadowed him. I saw it like a mantis, all arms and probes and manipulators, hooked into him through a dozen incisions and valves. Gandhi it was who considered all surgery violence to the body. It monitored him through sensory needles pinned all over his body like radical acupucture and, I did not doubt, through the red Eye of Shiva on his forehead. It let him blink and it let him swallow, it let him breathe and when my father spoke, it did his speaking for him. His lips did not move. His voice came from wall-mounted speakers, which made him sound uncannily divine. Had I been hooked into through a Third Eye, he would have spoken directly into my head like telepathy.

“You’re looking good.”

“I’m doing a lot of walking.”

“I’ve missed you on the news. I liked you moving and shaking. It’s what we made you for.”

“You made me too intelligent. Super-success is no life. It would never have made me happy. Let Shiv conquer the world and transform society: the super intelligent will always choose the quiet life.”

“So what have you been up to, son, since leaving government?”

“Like I said, walking. Investing in people. Telling stories.”

“I’d argue with you, I’d call you an ungrateful brat, except Nimki and Papadi here tell me it would kill me. But you are an ungrateful brat. We gave you everything—everything— and you just left it at the side of the road.” He breathed twice. Every breath was a battle. “So, what do you think? Rubbish, isn’t it?”

“They seem to be looking after you.”

My father rolled his eyes. He seemed in something beyond pain. Only his will kept him alive. Will for what I could not guess.

“You’ve no idea how tired I am of this.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“It’s defeatist? It doesn’t take your superhuman intellect to work out that there are no good solutions from this.”

I turned a chair around and perched on it, hands folded on the back, my chin resting on them.

“What is it you still need to achieve?”

Two laughs, one from the speakers, the other a phlegmy gurgle from the labouring throat.

“Tell me, do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Don’t we all? We’re Indian, that’s what we’re about.”

“No, but really. The transmigration of the soul?”

“What exactly are you doing?” No sooner had I asked the question than I had raced to the terrible conclusion. “The Eye of Shiva?”

“Is that what you call it? Good name. Keeping me ticking over is the least part of what this machine does. It’s mostly processing and memory. A little bit of me goes into it, every second.”

Uploaded consciousness, the illusion of immortality, endless reincarnation as pure information. The wan, bodiless theology of post-humanity. I had written about it in my Nation articles, made my soapi families face it and discover its false promises. Here it was now in too too much flesh, in my own real-world soap, my own father.

“You still die,” I said.

“This will die.”

“This is you.”

“There is no physical part of me today that was here ten years ago. Every atom in me is different, but I still think I’m me. I endure. I remember being that other physical body. There’s continuity. If I had chosen to copy myself like some folder of files, yes, certainly I would go down into that dark valley from which there is no return. But maybe, maybe, if I extend myself, if I move myself memory by memory, little by little, maybe death will be no different from trimming a toenail.”

There could never be silence in a room so full of the sounds of medicine, but there were no words.

“Why did you call me here?”

“So you would know. So you might give me your blessing. To kiss me, because I’m scared son, I’m so scared. No one’s ever done this before. It’s one shot into the dark. What if I’ve made a mistake, what if I’ve fooled myself? Oh please kiss me and tell me it will be all right.”

I went to the bed. I worked my careful way between the tubes and the lines and wires. I hugged the pile of sun-starved flesh to me. I kissed my father’s lips and as I did my lips formed the silent words, I am now and always must be Shiv’s enemy but if there is anything of you left in there, if you can make anything out of the vibrations of my lips on yours, then give me a sign.

I stood up and said, “I love you Dad.”

“I love you son.”

The lips didn’t move, the fingers didn’t lift, the eyes just looked and looked and filled up with tears. He swam my mother to safety on an upturned desk. No. That was someone else.

My father died two months later. My father entered cybernetic nirvana two months later. Either way, I had turned my back once again on Great Delhi and walked out of the world of humans and aeais alike.

The Morning of the White Horse

What? You expected a hero? I walked away, yes. What should I have done, run around shooting like filmi star? And who should I have shot? The villain? Who is the villain here? Shiv? No doubt he could have provided you with a great death scene, like the very best black-moustached Bollywood Baddies do, but he is no villain. He is a businessman, pure and simple. A businessman with a product that has changed every part of our world completely and forever. But if I were to shoot him nothing would change. You cannot shoot cybernetics or nanotechnology; economics stubbornly refuses to give you an extended five-minute crawling death-scene, eyes wide with incomprehension at how its brilliant plans could all have ended like this. There are no villains in the real world—real worlds, I suppose we must say now—and very few heroes. Certainly not ball-less heroes. For after all, that’s the quintessence of a hero. He has balls.

No, I did what any sensible Desi-boy would do. I put my head down and survived. In India we leave the heroics to those with the resources to play that game: the gods and the semigods of the Ramayana and the Maharabharata. Let them cross the universes in three steps and battle demon armies. Leave us the important stuff like making money, protesting our families, surviving. It’s what we’ve done through history, through invasion and princely war, through Aryans and Mughals and British: put our heads down, carried on and little by little survived, seduced, assimilated and in the end conquered. It is what will bring us through this dark Age of Kali. India endures. India is her people and we are all only, ultimately the heroes of our own lives. There is only one hero’s journey and that leads from the birth-slap to the burning-ghat. We are a billion and half heroes. Who can defeat that? So, will I yet be the hero of my own long life? We shall see.

After my father’s death I wandered for decades. There was nothing for me in Delhi. I had a Buddhist’s non-attachment though my wandering was far from the spiritual search of my time as a saddhu. The world was all to rapidly catching up my put-upon characters of Town and Country. For the first few years I filed increasingly sporadic articles with Gupshup. But the truth was that everyone now was the Voras and the Deshmukhs and the Hirandanis. The series twittered into nothingness, plotlines left dangling, family drama suspended. No one really noticed. They were living that world for real now. And my senses reported the incredible revolution in a richness and detail you cannot begin to imagine. In Kerala, in Assam, in the beach-bar at Goa or the game park in Madhya Pradesh, in the out-of-the-way places I chose to live, it was at a remove and thus comprehensible. In Delhi it would have been overwhelming. Sarasvati kept me updated with calls and emails. She had so far resisted the Eye of Shiva, and the thrilling instantaneousness and intimacy, and subtler death of privacy, of direct thought-to-thought communication. Shiv’s Third Revolution had given firmness and vision to her gadfly career. Sarasvati had chosen and set herself among the underclass. I took some small pleasure from the television and online pundits that maybe that old fart Shakyamuni had been right in those terrible populist potboilers in Gupshup, and the blow of technology had cracked India, all India, that great diamond of land, into two nations, the fast and slow, the wired and the wire-less, the connected and the unconnected. The haves and the have-nots. Sarasvati told me of a moneyed class soaring so fast into the universal-computing future they were almost red-shifted, and of the eternal poor, sharing the same space but invisible in the always-on, always-communicating world of the connected. Shadows and dust. Two nations; India—that British name for this congeries of ethnicities and languages and histories, and Bharat, the ancient, atavistic, divine land.

Only with distance could I attain the perspective to see this time of changes as a whole. Only by removing myself from them could I begin to understand these two nations. India was a place where the visible and the invisible mingled like two rivers flowing into each, holy Yamuna and Ganga Mata, and a third, the invisible, divine Saraswati. Humans and aeais met and mingled freely. Aeais took shapes in human minds, humans became disembodied presences strung out across the global net. The age of magic had returned, those days when people confidently expected to meet djinns in the streets of Delhi and routinely consulted demons for advice. India was located as much inside the mind and the imagination as between the Himalayas and the sea or in the shining web of communications, more complex and connected and subtle than any human brain, cast across this subcontinent.

Bharat was poor. Bharat had cracked hands and heels, but she was beautiful. Bharat cleaned and swept and cooked and looked after children, Bharat drove and built and pushed carts through the streets and carried boxes up flights of stairs to apartments. Bharat was always thirsty. How human it is to be so engrossed by our latest crisis that we forget we have failed to solve the crisis before that. Storage was India’s problem. Information was increasing exponentially, available memory only arithmetically. Data-Malthusianism was the threat to the great technological revolution. Water was Bharat’s. The monsoon, ever fickle, had dispersed into a drizzle, a few thunderstorms that ran off the crusted earth as soon as it dropped it rain, a tantalising line of grey clouds along the horizon that never came closer. The Himalayan glaciers that fed the great rivers of the North India and the slow-running Brahmaputra were exhausted; grey moraines of pebbles and dry clay. The mother of droughts was coming. But what was this to a connected class? They could pay for desalinated water, wasn’t India born from the waters? And if the worst came to the worst and universe ended in fire, they could, through their dazzling new technology, translate itself out of its icky physical bodies into that dream India between the real and the virtual worlds. Bodhisofts, they called these ascended creatures. Shiv would have been proud of a name like that.

From my beach bar, from my dive school, from my game reserve and bookshop and dance club and coffee house and walking-tour company, from my restaurant and antique shop and meditation retreat, I watched my prophecies come true. Yes, I embarked on all those enterprises. Ten of them, one for each of the dashavatara of my divine namesake. All of them on the edge of the world, all of them with that overview down onto the Age of Kali. I lost count of the years. My body grew into me. I became a tall, lean, high-foreheaded man, with a high voice and long hands and feet. My eyes were very beautiful.

I measured the years by the losses. I re-established contact with my old political counterpart in Varanasi, Shaheen Badoor Khan. He had been as surprised as any when I had vanished so abruptly from the political stage but his own career was not without a hiatus and when he discovered that I was the Shakyamuni behind the Town and Country articles (widely syndicated) we began a lively and lengthy correspondence that continued up until his death at the age of seventy-seven. He died completely, and like a good Muslim. Better the promise of paradise than the cloudy doubts of the bodhisoft. My own mother slipped from the world into the realms of the bodhisofts. Sarasvati would not say whether it was a fearful illness or just ennui at the world. Either way I never looked for her among the skyscraper-sized memory stacks that now besieged Delhi along the line of the old Siri Ring. Lakshmi too, that almost-wife and sweetest of co-conspirators, entered the domain of the bodhisofts where she could explore the subtle mathematical games that so delighted her without limits. It was not all loss. The Age of Kali brought a friend; another great Khan, my old tutor from the Dr Renganathan Brahminical College. He would swirl out of the cloud of I-dust that had replaced the screens and ’hoeks for those who atavistically refused the Eye of Shiva and he would spend many a delightful evening lecturing me on my moral laxity.

Then the dust started to blow through the streets of Delhi. It was not the dust from the perpetual drought that burned the fields and reduced the crops to powder and sent millions from Bharat into the cities of India. It was the dust of Shiva, the sacred ash of the Purusa Corporation’s nanoscale computers, released into the world. Bharat might be choking, but here! here! was the solution to India’s memory problems. Shiv did have a name for these, a good name too. He called them devas.

He called me. It was decades since we had spoken last in the garden of his house in Varanasi, over lemonade. I was running the dharamshala at Pandua then. It was spacious and peaceful and cool and the only disturbance was the over-heavy feet of the Westerners who flocked to the place. They are not naturally barefooted people, I have found. The I-dust relay chimed, a call. I was expecting Mr Khan. My brother whirled out of the helix of motes instead. He had lost weight, too much weight. He looked well, too much well. He could have been anything: flesh, aeai agent, bodhisoft. We greeted each other and said how well each other looked.

“And how is Nirupa?”

His smile made me think that he was human. Aeais have their own emotions, or things like emotions.

“She’s good. Very good. Twenty-eight now, would you believe?”

I confessed that I could not.

“Doing well, found an eligible boy, from a good enough family, who’s not a complete gold-digger. Old-fashioned stuff like that. I’m glad she bided her time, but they can afford to take their time now.”

“All the time in the world.”

“She’s beautiful. Vish, there’s something I need to tell you. Not a warning exactly, more to prepare yourself.”

“This sounds ominous.”

“I hope not. You’ve predicted it all very well.”

“Predicted what?”

“Don’t be coy. I know who you were. No secrets in the transparent world, I’m afraid. No, you got it right and I’m glad you did it because I think you softened the blow, but there is something you didn’t predict, maybe something you couldn’t predict.”

A whisper of breeze stirred the candle flames in my simple wooden room. Heavy white feet went tread tread tread on the creaking boards outside my latticed window. If they had looked through the grille they would have seen me talking to a ghost. No strange thing in this age, or most other ages.

“Whenever we last spoke, you said that you were making use of information from the legacy-device the original aeais had bequeathed us.”

“Well-guessed.”

“It seems logical.”

“When the Trimurti left Earth, they opened a connection to a separate space-time continuum. There were several major differences from our space-time. One was that time runs much faster there than in our space-time, though it would not be noticeable to anyone in that continuum. Another was that the arrow of time was reversed. The Trimurti move backwards in time; this was how their artefact, which the Americans call the Tabernacle, seemed to have predated the solar system when it was found in space. But the more important one—and that was why they chose it—was that information was integrated into the geometrical structure of that space-time.”

I closed my eyes and focused my imagination.

“You’re saying that information, data—minds—form part of the basic structure of that universe. Minds without the need for bodies. The whole universe is like a cosmological computer.”

“You’ve got it.”

“You’ve found a way back into that universe.”

“Oh no no no no no. That universe is closed. It ended with the Trimurti. Their time is gone. It was an imperfect universe. There are others, mind-spaces like that, but better. We’re going to open up dozens—hundreds, eventually thousands—of portals. Our need for processing will always outstrip our available memory, and the devas are just a stopgap. A whole universe, right beside ours, only a footstep away, available for computing resources.”

“What are you going to do?”

“The Jyotirlingas are coming.”

The Jyotirlingas were the sacred places where, in the Vedic Age, the creative, generative energy of the Lord Siva burst from the ground in pillars of divine light, the ultimate phallic linga symbols. These would come not from the earth, but another universe. And Shiv named them after his namesake’s cosmological cock. No one could accuse him of lack of hubris. His I-dust image sparkled and swirled and exploded into a billion motes of light. His smile, like that of the legendary Cheshire cat, seemed to remain. A week later, twelve pillars of light appeared in cities all across the states of India. By a slight misalignment, the Delhi jyotirlinga touched down in the middle of the Dalhousie, the city’s largest slum, crowded beyond all imagining with refugees from the drought.

The simultaneous appearance, at eleven thirty-three, of twelve columns of light in cities across India paralysed the rail network. It was one of the least of the disturbances that day but for me, on an island in the middle of the Brahmaputra and needing to get to Delhi, that was the most important. That there were any flights at all was a miracle, that I could book on to one at any price at all proof indeed that the age of the gods had truly returned. Even when alien universes open up in the hearts of our great and ancient cities, Indian grandmothers will still need to travel to see their wee darlings.

I had tried to call Sarasvati but all com channels into Delhi were down and the call-centre aeais announced indefinite delays before the network was restored. I wondered what it would be like for those accustomed to being strung out across the deva net to be back into just one head as the Air Awadh Airbus took me up over the shrivelled silver thread of the parched Ganga. In the tiny toilet I once again transformed myself back into a shaved, shorn urbane Delhi-boy. As we descended into Indira Gandhi airport the captain told those of on the right to look out and we would see the Jyotirlinga. His voice was uncertain, not a tone you want to hear from an airline captain, as if he could not believe what he was seeing. I had been studying it long before the captain’s call: a line of sun-bright light rising from the hazy, grey stain of central Delhi up beyond all sight, further than I could see, craning to look up through the tiny window into the darkening sky.

Sarasvati would be there. That was Shiv’s warning. When the light struck, she would have looked around and, in the same instant made her mind up. People in need. She could not refuse.

Immigration took an hour and as half Five flights of journalists had disgorged at once. A wired world, it seemed, was no substitute for reporters on the ground. The hall buzzed with swarming fly-sized hovercams. Two hours to grind into Delhi in the limo. The highways were clogged with lines of traffic, all headed out, all moving with geological slowness. The noise of horns was appalling to one fresh from the profound, liquid silence of the dharamshala. Only military and media seemed headed into Delhi but soldiers stopped us at intersections to wave past thundering convoys of chartered refugee buses. We were held up for a motionless half an hour on the big cloverleaf on Siri Ring. In awe and leisure, I studied the wall of memory farms; towering black monoliths drinking in sunlight through their solar skins, pressed shoulder to shoulder as far as I could see. In every breath of air-conditioned air I took, I inhaled millions of devas.

Every roadside, every verge and roundabout, every intersection and car park, every forecourt and garden, was filled with the shanties and leans to the refugees. The best were three low walls of brick with plastic sacking for a roof, the worst cardboard scrapes, or sticks and rags worked together into a sun-shade. Feet had worn away all greenery and stripped the trees bare for firewood. The bare earth had blown into dust, mingling with the airborne devas. The bastis pressed right up to the feet of the memory towers. What did Sarasvati imagine she could achieve here in the face of so colossal a catastrophe? I called her again. The network was still out.

Bharat had invaded India and now India was casting it out. We drove, blaring the horn constantly, past a terrible, emaciated army of refugees. No fine cars here. Trucks, old buses, pick-ups for the better off, behind them, swarms of phatphats, more overloaded than that fatal one I had seen the Holi I discovered death. Motorbikes and mopeds almost invisible under bundles of bedding and cooking pots. I saw a chugging, home-engineered half-tractor device, engine terrifying exposed, dragging a trailer piled as high as house with women and children. Donkey carts, the donkey bent and straining at the loads. In the end, human muscle pushed the exodus onward: bicycle rickshaws, handcarts, bent backs. Military robots guided them, herded them, punished those who strayed from the approved refugee route, or fell, with shock sticks.

Before everything, over everything was the silver spear of the Jyotirlinga.

“Sarasvati!”

“Vishnu?” I could hardly hear her over the roar.

“I’ve come to get you.”

“You’ve what?” It was as noisy where she was. I had a fix. The autodrive would take me there as quickly as it could.

“You’ve got to get out.”

“Vish.”

“Vish nothing. What can you do?”

I did hear her sigh.

“All right, I’ll meet you.” She gave me a fresh set of co-ordinates. The driver nodded. He knew the place. His uniform was crisp and his cap miraculously correct but I knew he was as scared as I.

On Mehrauli Boulevard I heard gunfire. Airdrones barrelled in over the roof of the car, so low their engines shook the suspension. Smoke rose from behind a tatty mall façade. This street, I recognized it. This was Parliament Road, that was the old Park Hotel, that the Bank of Japan. But so faded, so dilapidated. Half the windows were out on the Park. The secluded gardens around Jantar Mantar on Samsad Marg were over-run with packing-case houses, their plastic roofs pushing right against the austere marble angularities of Jai Singh’s astronomical instruments. Everything was over-run with lean-tos and huts and miserable hard-scrabble shelters.

“This is as far as I am going to take you,” the driver said as we ran into an immovable horde of people and animals and vehicles and military at Talkatora Road.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I ordered the driver as I jumped out.

“That’s not likely,” he said.

The press was cruel and chaotic and the most terrifying place I have ever been but Sarasvati was here, I could see her in my mind-map. A cordon of police bots tried to drive me back with the crowds from the steps of the Awadh Bhavan but I ducked under, out and away. I knew this place. I had given my balls to work in this place. Then suddenly, wonderfully, I was in the clear. My heart lurched. My vision swam. Delhi, dear Delhi, my Delhi, they let this happen to you. The gracious greens and boulevards, the airy chowks and maidans of the Rajpath was one unbroken slum. Roof after roof after roof, slumping walls, cardboard and wood and brick and flapping plastic. Smoke went up from a dozen fires. This, this was Dalhousie. I knew the name of course. I had never thought it would ever become the name of the great sink where this newest of New Delhi’s condemned those driven to it by drought and want. Such disdain did new India show for old Awadh. Who needed a Parliament when universal computing made everything a consensus? From where I guessed the old Imperial India Gate had stood at the end of the gracious Rajpath, rose the Jyotirlinga. It was so bright I could not look at I for more than moments. It cast a terrible, unnatural silver shine over the degradation and dread. It abused my Brahminic sensibilities: did I smell voices, hear colour, was that prickle like cold lemon fur on my forehead the radiation of another universe?

People milled around me, smoke blew in my eyes, the downdraft of airdrones and hover cams buffeted me. I had only moments before the army would catch me and move me away with the rest of the panicked crowd. Or worse. I saw bodies on the ground and flames were coming up from a line of plastic shacks.

“Sarasvati!”

And there she was. Oh, there she was, plunging whip-thin in combat pants and a silk blouse, but filled her wonderful energy and determination out of the pile of collapsing housing. She dragged a child in each hand, smudge-faced and tearful. Tiny mites. In this place, she had slipped from my nuptial elephant to caper with the revellers in her ridiculous man’s costume and exuberant false moustache.

“Sarasvati!”

“You’ve got a car?”

“It’s how I got here, yes.”

The children were on the verge of bawling. Sarasvati thrust them at me.

“Take these two to it.”

“Come with me.”

“There are kids still in there.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“It’s a special needs group. They get left when the sky opens. Everyone else runs and leaves the kids. Take these two to your car.”

“What are you doing?”

“There are more in there.”

“You can’t go.”

“Just get them to the car, then come back here.”

“The army.”

She was gone, ducking under the billowing smoke fall. She disappeared into the warren of lanes and galis. The children pulled at my hands. Yes yes, they had to get out. The car, the car wasn’t far. I turned to try and find an easy way with two children through the wheeling mass of refugees. Then I felt a wave of heat across the back of my neck. I turned to see the blossom of flame blow across the top of the gali, whirling up rags of blazing plastic. I cried something without words or point and then the whole district collapsed in on itself with a roar and explosion of sparks.

The Age of Kali. I have little patience with that tendency in many Indians to assume that because we are a very old culture, we invented everything. Astronomy? Made in India. Zero? Made in India. The indeterminate, probabilistic nature of reality as revealed through quantum theory? Indian. You don’t believe me? The Vedas say that the Four Great Ages of the Universe correspond to the four possible outcomes of our game of dice. The Krita Yuga, the Age of Perfection, is the highest possible score. The Kali Yuga, the Age of strife, darkness, corruption and disintegration, is the lowest possible score. It is all a roll of the divine dice. Probability. Indian!

Kali, Paraskati, Dark Lady, Mistress of Death and Drinker of Blood, Terrible ten-armed one with the necklace of skulls, She Who is Seated upon the Throne of Five Corpses. The Ender. Yet Kali is also Mistress of Regeneration. Ruler of All Worlds, Root of the Tree of the Universe. Everything is a cycle and beyond the Age of Kali we roll again into the Age of Gold. And that which cannot be reasoned with must then be worshipped.

I believe I was mad for some time after Sarasvati’s death. I know I have never been sane as you would consider me sane. We are Brahmins. We are different. But even for a Brahmin, I was crazy. It is a precious and rare thing, to take time out from sanity. Usually we allow it to the very very young and the very very old. It scares us, we have no place for it. But Kali understands it. Kali welcomes it, Kali gives it. So I was mad for a time, but you could as easily say I was divine.

How I reached the temple in the little, drought-wracked town by the sewer of Mata Ganga, I have chosen to forget. How I came by the offering of blood to the priest, that too I’ve put where I put the dis-remembered. How long I stayed there, what I did, does any of this matter? It was time out from the world. It is a powerful thing, to subject yourself to another time and another rhythm of life. I was a thing of blood and ashes, hiding in the dark sanctum, saying nothing but offering my daily puja to the tiny, garland-bedecked goddess in her vulva-like garbigraha. I could have vanished forever. Sarasvati, the brightest and best of us, was dead. I lolled on foot-polished marble. I disappeared. I could have stayed Kali’s devotee for the rest of my long and unnatural life.

I was lolling on the wet, foot-polished marble when the women devotee, shuffling forward through the long, snaking line of cattle-fences toward the goddess, suddenly looked up. Stopped. Looked around as if seeing everything for the first time. Looked again and saw me. Then she unhooked the galvanised railing and pushed trough the switch-back line of devotees to come to me. She knelt down in front of me and namasteed. Above her the single vertical line of her Shakta-tilak she wore the red Eye of Shiva.

“Vish.”

I recoiled so abruptly I banged the back of my head off a pillar.

“Ooh,” the woman said. “Ooh, cho chweet, that’s going to smart. Vish, it’s me, Lakhsmi.”

Lakshmi? My former wife, player of games? She saw my confusion and touched my face.

“I’m temporarily downloaded into this dear woman’s brain. It’s rather hard to explain if you’re not connected. Oh, it’s all right, it’s entirely consensual. And I’ll give her herself back as soon as I’m done. I wouldn’t normally do it—it’s very bad manners—but these are slightly exceptional circumstances.”

“Lakshmi? Where are you? Are you here?”

“Oh, you have had a bit of a nasty bang. Where am I? That’s hard to explain. I am entirely bodhisoft now. I’m inside the Jyotirlinga, Vish. It’s a portal as you know, they’re all portals.” After the initial twelve, the pillars of light had arrived all over earth, hundreds, then thousands. “It is a wonderful place Vish. It can be whatever you want it to be, as real as you like. We spend quite a lot of time debating that; the meaning of real. And the games, the number games; well, you know me. That’s why I’ve taken this step for you Vish. It can’t go on. It’s destructive, the most destructive thing we’ve ever done. We’ll burn through this world because we have another one. We have heaven, so we can do what we like here. Life is just a rehearsal. But you’ve seen that Vish, you’ve seen what that’s done.”

“What is it Lakshmi?” Was it memory and fond hope, the mild marble concussion, the strange nanotech possession, but was this stranger starting to look like Lakshmi?

“We have to bring this age to an end. Restart the cycle. Close the Jyotirlingas.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It’s all mathematics. The mathematics that govern this universe are different from the ones that govern yours; that’s why I’m able to exist as a pattern of information imprinted on space-time. Because the logic here allows that. It doesn’t where I come from. Two different logics. But if we could slide between the two a third logic, alien to either, that neither of them could recognize nor operate, then we would effectively lock the gates between the universes.”

“You have that key.”

“We have a lot of time for games here. Social games, language games, imagination games, mathematical and logical games. I can turn the lock from this side.”

“But you need someone to turn the key on my side. You need me.”

“Yes Vish.”

“I would be shut out forever. From you, from Mum, from Dad.”

“And Shiv. He’s here too. He was one of the first to upload his bodhisoft through the Varanasi Jyotirlinga. You’d be shut out from everyone. Everyone but Sarasvati.”

“Sarasvati’s dead!” I roared. Devotees looked up. The sadhus calmed them. “And would this be the final answer? Would this bring around the Age of Gold again?”

“That would be up to you, Vish.”

I thought of the villages that had so welcomed and amazed and blessed and watered me on my saddhu wandering, I thought of the simple pleasures I had taken from my business ventures: honest plans and work and satisfactions. India—the old India, the undying India—was its villages. Sarasvati had seen that truth though it had killed her.

“It sounds better than sprawling in this dusty old temple.” Kali, Mistress of Regeneration, had licked me with her red tongue. Maybe I could be the hero of my own life. Vishnu, the Preserver. His tenth and final incarnation was Kalki, the White Horse, who at the end of the Kali Yuga would fight the final battle. Kali, Kalki.

“I can give you the maths. A man of your intelligence should be able to hold it. But you will need one of these.”

The woman lifted her hand and seized a fistful of air. She threw it into my face and the air coalesced into a spray of red powder. In mid-air the cloud moiled and boiled and thickened and settled into a red circle, a tilak, on my forehead.

“Whatever you do, don’t connect it to the deva net,” Lakshmi said. “I’m going to have to go now. I don’t want to outstay my welcome in someone else’s body. Goodbye Vish, we won’t ever meet again, in any of the worlds. But we were well and truly wed, for a while.” For a moment I thought the woman might kiss me, then she gave a little twitch and straightened her neck just so as if shaking out a crick and I knew Lakshmi was gone. The woman namasteed again.

“Little Lord Vishnu,” she whispered. “Preserve us.”

I picked myself up from the marble. I dusted off the ash of the dark goddess. I walked to the edge of the temple, blinking up into the light of the real sun. I had an idea where to go to do what I had to do. Varanasi, the City of Siva, the seat of the great Jyotirlinga. How might I support myself, with nothing but the dhoti around my loins? Then I caught a sudden movement: on a window ledge on the first floor of one of the many shops that leaned in close to the temple, a cat was edging out along a waterpipe in pursuit of a bird. And I had an idea that filled me with laughter.

So here it is, here it is: at long last. The great trick, the grand Finale of the Magnificent Vishnu’s Celestial Cat Circus. The wire walk. You will never, ever have seen anything like this before, unless of course you’ve been to a certain Kali Temple . . . See, here are the two wires. And here is our star performer. Yes, white Kalki gets his chance to shine at last. Up he goes on to the podium and . . . drum roll. Well, you’ll have to provide the drum roll yourself.

Kalki! Kalki, beautiful white Kalki: do your trick!

And there he goes, carefully sliding one paw, then another out across the two wires, tail moving to keep him in balance, the whole trembling to his muscular control. Go on Kalki . . . Walking the wire. What a cat! And the final jump on to the further podium and I scoop him up to my chest and shout applause! Applause for my lovely cats! I let Kalki down and the rest of the cats run to join him, running their endless circle of fur and tails around the rope ring. Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha and Varaha; Varana, Pashurama and Rama; Krishna, Buddha and last but not least, Kalki.

I turn in the rising dawn light to savour the applause of my audience. And my cats, save your biggest cheer for Matsya, Kurma, Narasimha, Varaha, Varana, Pashurama, Rama, Krishna, Buddha and Kalki who have performed for your pleasure? And me? Just an impresario, a ringmaster: a storyteller. The light is up now and I will detain you no longer for you have your work and I have a place to go and I think now you know where that is and what I must do there. I may not succeed. I may die. I cannot see Shiv giving up without a fight. So please, will you do one thing for me? My cats. Would you look after them for me? You don’t have to feed them or anything like that, just take them. Let them go, they can look after themselves. It’s where I got them from in the first place. They’ll be happy on a farm, in the country. Lots to hunt and kill. You might even be able to make a bit of money from them. I mean, performing cats, who ever heard of a thing like that? It’s actually much easier than you think. Meat does it, every time. There, I’ve given away the trick. Be good to them. Well, I’ll be off then.

I push the boat out into the river, run into the dawn-bright water and hop in. It rocks gently. It is a glorious morning; the Jyotirlinga ahead can hold no comparison to the sun. I touch my fingers to my forehead, to the tilak Lakshmi put there in a small salutation to the sun. Then I put my back to the narrow oars and head out into the stream.

ACT ONE

Nancy Kress

“To understand whose movie it is one needs to look not particularly at the script but at the deal memo.”

—Joan Didion

I eased down the warehouse’s basement steps behind the masked boy, one hand on the stair rail, wishing I’d worn gloves. Was this level of grime really necessary? It wasn’t; we’d already passed through some very sophisticated electronic surveillance, as well as some very unsophisticated personal surveillance that stopped just short of a body-cavity search, although an unsmiling man did feel around inside my mouth. Soap cost less than surveillance, so probably the grime was intentional. The Group was making a statement. That’s what we’d been told to call them: “The Group.” Mysterious, undefined, pretentious. The stairs were lit only by an old-fashioned forty-watt bulb somewhere I couldn’t see. Behind me, Jane’s breath quickened. I’d insisted on going down first, right behind our juvenile guide, from a sense of—what? “Masculine protection” from me would be laughable. And usually I like to keep Jane where I can see her. It works out better that way.

“Barry?” she breathed. The bottom of the steps was so shrouded in gloom that I had to feel my way with one extended foot.

“Two more steps, Janie.”

“Thank you.”

Then we were down and she took a deep breath, standing closer to me than she usually does. Her breasts were level with my face. Jane is only five-six, but that’s seventeen inches taller than I am. The boy said, “A little way more.” Across the cellar a door opened, spilling out light. “There.” It had been a laundry area once, perhaps part of an apartment for some long-dead maintenance man. Cracked washtubs, three of them, sagged in one corner. No windows, but the floor had been covered with a clean, thin rug and the three waiting people looked clean, too. I scanned them quickly. A tall, hooded man holding an assault rifle, his eyes the expression of bodyguards everywhere: alert but nonanalytic. An unmasked woman in jeans and baggy sweater, staring at Jane with unconcealed resentment. Potential trouble there. And the leader, who came forward with his hand extended, smiling.

“Welcome, Miss Snow. We’re honored.”

I recognized him immediately. He was a type rampant in political life, which used to be my life. Big, handsome, too pleased with himself and his position to accurately evaluate either. He was the only one not wearing jeans, dressed in slacks and a sports coat over a black turtleneck. If he had been a pol instead of a geno-terrorist, he’d have maybe gotten as far as city council executive, and then would have run for mayor, lost, and never understood why. So this was a low-level part of the Group’s operation, which was probably good. It might lessen the danger of this insane expedition.

“Thank you,” Jane said in that famous voice, low and husky and as thrilling off screen as on. “This is my manager, Barry Tenler.”

I was more than her manager, but the truth was too complicated to explain. The guy didn’t even glance at me and I demoted him from city council executive to ward captain. You always pay attention to the advisors. That’s usually where the brains are, if not the charisma.

Ms. Resentful, on the other hand, switched her scrutiny from Jane to me. I recognized the nature of that scrutiny. I’ve felt it all my life.

Jane said to the handsome leader, “What should I call you?”

“Call me Ishmael.”

Oh, give me a break. Did that make Jane the white whale? He was showing off his intellectual moves, with no idea they were both banal and silly. But Jane gave him her heart-melting smile and even I, who knew better, would have sworn it was genuine. She might not have made a movie in ten years, but she still had it.

“Let’s sit down,” Ishmael said.

Three kitchen chairs stood at the far end of the room. Ishmael took one, the bodyguard and the boy standing behind him. Ms. Resentful took another. Jane sank cross-legged to the rug in a graceful puddle of filmy green skirt.

That was done for my benefit. My legs and spine hurt if I have to stand for more than a few minutes, and she knows how I hate sitting even lower than I already am. Ishmael, shocked and discerning nothing, said, “Miss Snow!”

“I think better when I’m grounded,” she said, again with her irresistible smile. Along with her voice, that smile launched her career thirty-five years ago. Warm, passionate, but with an underlying wistfulness that bypassed the cerebrum and went straight to the primitive hind-brain. Unearned—she was born with those assets—but not unexploited. Jane was a lot shrewder than her fragile blonde looks suggested. The passion, however, was real. When she wanted something, she wanted it with every sinew, every nerve cell, every drop of her acquisitive blood.

Now her graceful Sitting-Bull act left Ishmael looking awkward on his chair. But he didn’t do the right thing, which would have been to join her on the rug. He stayed on his chair and I demoted him even further, from ward captain to go-fer. I clambered up onto the third chair. Ishmael gazed down at Jane and swelled like a pouter pigeon at having her, literally, at his feet. Ms. Resentful scowled. Uneasiness washed through me.

The Group knew who Jane Snow was. Why would they put this meeting in the hands of an inept narcissist? I could think of several reasons: to indicate contempt for her world. To preserve the anonymity of those who actually counted in this most covert of organizations. To pay off a favor that somebody owed to Ishmael, or to Ishmael’s keeper. To provide a photogenic foil to Jane, since of course we were being recorded. Any or all of these reasons would be fine with me. But my uneasiness didn’t abate.

Jane said, “Let’s begin then, Ishmael, if it’s all right with you.”

“It’s fine with me,” he said. His back was to the harsh light, which fell full on both Jane and Ms. Resentful. The latter had bad skin, small eyes, lanky hair, although her lips were lovely, full and red, and her neck above the windbreaker had the taut firmness of youth.

The light was harder on Jane. It showed up the crow’s feet, the tired inelasticity of her skin under her flawless make-up. She was, after all, fifty-four, and she’d never gone under the knife. Also, she’d never been really beautiful, not as Angelina Jolie or Catherine Zeta-Jones had once been beautiful. Jane’s features were too irregular, her legs and butt too heavy. But none of that mattered next to the smile, the voice, the green eyes fresh as new grass, and the powerful sexual glow she gave off so effortlessly. It’s as if Jane Snow somehow received two sets of female genes at conception, a critic wrote once, doubling everything we think of as “feminine.” That makes her either a goddess or a freak.

“I’m preparing for a role in a new movie,” she said to Ishmael, although of course he already knew that. She just wanted to use her voice on him. “It’s going to be about your . . . your organization. And about the future of the little girls. I’ve talked to some of them and—”

“Which ones?” Ms. Resentful demanded.

Did she really know them all by name? I looked at her more closely. Intelligence in those small, stony eyes. She could be from the Group’s headquarter cell—wherever it was—and sent to ensure that Ishmael didn’t screw up this meeting. Or not. But if she were really intelligent, would she be so enamored of someone like Ishmael?

Stupid question. Three of Jane’s four husbands had been gorgeous losers. Jane said, “Well, so far I’ve only talked to Rima Ridley-Jones. But Friday I have the whole afternoon with the Barrington twins.”

Ishmael, unwilling to have the conversation migrate from him, said, “Beautiful children, those twins. And very intelligent.” As if the entire world didn’t already know that. Unlike most of the Group’s handiwork, the Barrington twins had been posed by their publicity-hound parents on every magazine cover in the world. But Jane smiled at Ishmael as if he’d just explicated Spinoza.

“Yes, they are beautiful. Please, Ishmael, tell me about your organization. Anything that might help me prepare for my role in Future Perfect.”

He leaned forward, hands on his knees, handsome face intent. Dramatically, insistently, he intoned, “There is one thing you must understand about the Group, Jane. A very critical thing. You will never stop us.”

Portentous silence.

The worst thing was, he might be right. The FBI, CIA, IRS, HPA, and several other alphabets had lopped off a few heads, but still the hydra grew. It had so many supporters: liberal lawmakers and politicians, who wanted the Anti-Genetic Modification Act revoked and the Human Protection Agency dismantled. The rich parents who wanted their embryos enhanced. The off-shore banks that coveted the Group’s dollars and the Caribbean or Mexican or who-knows-what islands that benefited from sheltering their mobile labs.

“We are idealists,” Ishmael droned on, “and we are the future. Through our efforts, mankind will change for the better. Wars will end, cruelty will disappear. When people can—”

“Let me interrupt you for just a moment, Ishmael.” Jane widened her eyes and over-used his name. Her dewy look up at him from the floor could have reversed desertification. She was pulling out all the stops.

“I need so much to understand, Ishmael. If you genemod these little girls, one by one, you end up changing such a small percentage of the human race that . . . how many children have been engineered with Arlen’s Syndrome?”

“We prefer the term ‘Arlen’s Advantage.’ ”

“Yes, of course. How many children?”

I held my breath. The Group had never given out that information.

Jane put an entreating hand on Ishmael’s knee.

He said loftily, hungrily, “That information is classified,” and I saw that he didn’t know the answer. Ms. Resentful said, “To date, three thousand two hundred fourteen.”

Was she lying? My instincts—and I have very good instincts, although to say that in this context is clearly a joke—said no. Resentful knew the number. So she was higher up than Ishmael. And since she sure as hell wasn’t responding to Jane’s allure, that meant the Group now wanted the numbers made public.

“Yes, that’s right,” Ishmael said hastily, “three thousand two hundred fourteen children.” Jane said, “But that’s not a high percentage out of six billion people on Earth, is it? It—”

“Five ten-millionth of 1 percent,” I said. A silly, self-indulgent display, but what the hell. My legs ached. She always could ad-lib. “Yes, thank you, Barry. But my question was for Ishmael. If only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses Arlen’s Advantage, even if the genemod turns out to be inheritable—”

“It is,” Ishmael said, which was nonsense. The oldest Arlen’s kids were only twelve.

“Wonderful!” Jane persisted. “But as I say, if only such a tiny percentage of humanity possesses the Advantage, how can the Group hope to alter the entire human future?” Ishmael covered her hand with his. He smiled down at her, and his eyes actually twinkled. “Jane, Jane, Jane. Have you ever dropped a pebble into a pond?”

“Yes.”

“And what happened, my dear?”

“A ripple.”

“Which spread and spread until the entire pond was affected!” Ishmael spread his arms wide. The ass couldn’t even put together a decent analogy. Humanity was an ocean, not a pond, and water ripples were always transitory. But Jane, actress that she was, beamed at him and moved the conversation to something he could handle.

“I see. Tell me, Ishmael, how you personally became involved in the Group.” He was thrilled to talk about himself. As he did, Jane skillfully extracted information about the Group’s make-up, its organization, its communications methods. Resentful let her do it. I watched the young woman, who was watching Ishmael but not in a monitoring sort of way. He couldn’t give away really critical information; he didn’t have any. Still, he talked too much. He was the kind of man who responded to an audience, who could easily become so expansive that he turned indiscreet. Sooner or later, I suspected, he would say something to somebody that he shouldn’t, and the Group would dump him. Ms. Resentful wasn’t anything near the actress Jane that was. Her hunger for this worthless man was almost palpable. I might have felt sympathy for her pain if my own wasn’t increasing so much in my legs, back, neck. I seldom sat this long, and never on a hard chair.

My particular brand of dwarfism, achondroplasia, accounts for 70 percent of all cases. Malformed bones and cartilage produce not only the short limbs, big head and butt, and pushed-in face that all the media caricaturists so adore but also, in some of us, constriction of the spinal canal that causes pain. Especially as achons age, and I was only two years younger than Jane. Multiple excruciating operations have only helped me so much.

After an hour and a half, Jane rose, her filmy skirt swirling around her lovely calves. My uneasiness spiked sharply. If anything was going to happen, it would be now.

But nothing did happen. The masked boy reappeared and we were led out of the dingy basement. I could barely walk. Jane knew better than to help me, but she whispered, “I’m so sorry, Barry. But this was my only chance.”

“I know.” Somehow I made it up the stairs. We navigated the maze of the abandoned warehouse, where the Group’s unseen soldiers stayed at stand-off with our own unseen bodyguards. Blinking in the sunlight, I suddenly collapsed onto the broken concrete.

“Barry!”

“It’s . . . okay. Don’t.”

“The rest will be so much easier . . . I promise!”

I got myself upright, or what passes for upright. The unmarked van arrived for us. The whole insane interview had gone off without a hitch, without violence, smooth as good chocolate. So why did I still feel so uneasy?

An hour later, Jane’s image appeared all over the Net, the TV, the wallboards. Her words had been edited to appear that she was a supporter, perhaps even a member, of the Group. But of course we had anticipated this. The moment our van left the warehouse, the first of the pre-emptory spots I’d prepared aired everywhere. They featured news avatar CeeCee Collins, who was glad for the scoop, interviewing Jane about her meeting. Dedicated actress preparing for a role, willing to take any personal risk for art, not a believer in breaking the law but valuing open discourse on this important issue, and so forth. The spots cost us a huge amount of money. They were worth it. Not only was the criticism defused, but the publicity for the upcoming movie, which started principal photography in less than a month, was beyond price.

I didn’t watch my spots play. Nor was I there when the FBI, CIA, HPA, etc. paid Jane the expected visit to both “debrief” her and/or threaten her with arrest for meeting with terrorists. But I didn’t need to be there. Before our meeting, I’d gotten Jane credentials under the Malvern-Murphy Press Immunity Act, plus Everett Murphy as her more-than-capable lawyer. Everett monitored the interviews and I stayed in bed under a painkiller. The FBI, CIA, HPA wanted to meet with me, too, of course, once Jane told them I’d been present. They had to wait until I could see them. I didn’t mind them cooling their heels as they waited for me, not at all.

Why are you so opposed to genemods? Jane had asked me once, and only once, not looking at me as she said it. She meant, Why you, especially? Usually I answered Jane, trusted Jane, but not on this. I told her the truth: You wouldn’t understand. To her credit, she hadn’t been offended. Jane was smart enough to know what she didn’t know.

Now, on my lovely pain patch, I floated in a world where she and I walked hand in hand through a forest the green of her filmy skirt, and she had to crane her neck to smile up at me.

The next few days, publicity for the picture exploded. Jane did interview after interview: TV, LinkNet, robocam, print, holonews. She glowed with the attention, looking ten years younger. Some of the interviewers and avatars needled her, but she stuck to the studio line: This is a movie about people, not polemics. Future Perfect is not really about genetic engineering. It will be an honest examination of eternal verities, of our shared frailty and astonishing shared strength, of what makes us human, of blah blah blah, that just happens to use Arlen’s Syndrome as a vehicle. The script was nearly finished and it would be complex and realistic and blah blah blah.

“Pro or con on genemods?” an exasperated journalist finally shouted from the back of the room. Jane gave him a dazzling smile. “Complex and realistic,” she said.

Both the pros and the cons would be swarming into the theater, unstoppable as lemmings. I felt so good about all of this that I decided to call Leila. I needed to be in a good mood to stand these calls. Leila wasn’t home, letting me get away with just a message, which made me feel even better. Jane, glowing on camera, was wiping out a decade of cinematic obscurity with Future Perfect. I couldn’t wipe out my fifteen years of guilt that easily, nor would I do so even if I could. But I was still glad that Leila wasn’t home.

Jane had promised that Friday’s role-prep interview would be easier on me. She was wrong. The Barrington twins lived with their parents and teen-age sister in San Luis Obispo. Jane’s pilot obtained clearance to land on the green-velvet Barrington lawn, well behind the estate’s heavily secured walls. I wouldn’t have to walk far.

“Welcome, Miss Snow. An honor.” Frieda Barrington was mutton dressed as lamb, a fiftyish woman in a brief skirt and peek-a-boo caped sweater. Slim, toned, tanned, but the breasts doing the peek-a-booing would never be twenty again, and her face had the tense lines of those who spent most of their waking time pretending not to be tense.

Jane climbed gracefully from the flyer and stood so that her body shielded my awkward descent. I seized the grab bar, sat on the flyer floor, fell heavily onto the grass, and scrambled to my feet. Jane moved aside, her calf-length skirt—butter yellow, this time—blowing in the slight breeze. “Call me Jane. This is my manager, Barry Tenler.”

Frieda Barrington was one of Those. Still, she at least tried to conceal her distaste. “Hello, Mr. Tenler.”

“Hi.” With any luck, this would be the only syllable I had to address to her. We walked across the grass through perfect landscaping, Frieda supplying the fund of inane chatter that such women always have at their disposal. The house had been built a hundred years earlier for a silent-film star. Huge, pink, gilded at windows and doors, it called to mind an obese lawn flamingo. We entered a huge foyer floored in black-and-white marble, which managed to look less Vermeer than checkerboard. A sulky girl in dirty jeans lounged on a chaise longue. She stared at us over the garish cover of a comic book.

“Suky, get up,” Frieda snapped. “This is Miss Snow and her manager Mr., uh, Tangler. My daughter Suky.”

The girl got up, made an ostentatious and mocking curtsey, and lay down again. Frieda made a noise of outrage and embarrassment, but I felt sorry for Suky. Fifteen—the same age as Ethan—plain of face, she was caught between a mother who’d appropriated her fashions and twin sisters who appropriated all the attention. Frieda would be lucky if Suky’s rebellion stopped at mere rudeness. I made her a mock little bow to match her curtsey, and watched as her eyes widened with surprise. I grinned. Frieda snapped, “Where are the twins?”

Suky shrugged. Frieda rolled her eyes and led us through the house.

They were playing on the terrace, a sun-shaded sweep of weathered stone with steps that led to more lawn, all backed by a gorgeous view of vineyards below the Sierra Madres. Frieda settled us on comfortable, padded chairs. A robo-server rolled up, offering lemonade. Bridget and Belinda came over to us before they were called. “Hello!” Jane said with her melting smile, but neither girl answered. Instead, they gazed steadily, unblinkingly at her for a full thirty seconds, and then did the same with me. I didn’t like it, or them.

Arlen’s Syndrome, like all genetic tinkering, has side effects. No one knows that better than I. Achondroplasia dwarfism is the result of a single nucleotide substitution in the gene FGFR3 at codon 380
on chromosome 4. It affects the growth of bones and cartilage, which in turn affects air passages, nerves, and other people’s tolerance. Exactly which genes were involved in Arlen’s were a trade secret, but the modifications undoubtedly spread across many genes, with many side effects. But since only females could be genemod for Arlen’s, the X chromosome was one of those altered. That much, at least, was known.

The two eleven-year-old girls staring at me so frankly were small for their age, delicately built: fairy children. They had white skin, silky fair hair cut in short caps, and eyes of luminous gray. Other than that, they didn’t look much alike, fraternal twins rather than identical. Bridget was shorter, plumper, prettier. From a Petri-dishful of Frieda’s fertilized eggs, the Barringtons had chosen the most promising two, had them genemoded for Arlen’s Syndrome, and implanted them in Frieda’s ageing but still serviceable womb. The loving parents, both exhibitionists, had splashed across the worldwide media every last detail—except where and how the work had been done. Unlike Rima Ridley-Jones, the Arlen’s child that Jane had spoken with last week, these two were carefully manufactured celebrities. Jane tried again. “I’m Jane Snow, and you’re Bridget and Belinda. I’m glad to meet you.”

“Yes,” Belinda said, “you are.” She looked at me. “But you’re not.” There was no point in lying. Not to them. “Not particularly.”

Bridget said, with a gentleness surprising in one so young, “That’s okay, though.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I didn’t say it was okay,” Belinda said.

There was no answer to that. The Ridley-Jones child hadn’t behaved like this; in addition to shielding her from the media, her mother had taught her manners. Frieda, on the other hand, leaned back in her chair like a spectator at a play, interested in what her amazing daughters would say next, but with anxiety on overdrive. I had the sense she’d been here before. Eleven-year-olds were no longer adorable, biddable toddlers.

“You’ll never get it,” Belinda said to me, at the same moment that Bridget put a hand on her sister’s arm. Belinda shook it off. “Let me alone, Brid. He should know. They all should know.” She smiled at me and I felt something in my chest recoil from the look in her gray eyes.

“You’ll never get it,” Belinda said to me with that horrible smile. “No matter what you do, Jane will never love you. And she’ll always hate it when you touch her even by mistake. Just like she hates it now. Hates it, hates it, hates it.”

It started with a dog.

Dr. Kenneth Bernard Arlen, a geneticist and chess enthusiast, owned a toy poodle. Poodles are a smart breed. Arlen played chess twice a week in his Stanford apartment with Kelson Hughes from Zoology. Usually they played three, four, or five games in a row, depending on how careless Hughes got with his end game. Cosette lay on the rug, dozing, until checkmate of the last game, when she always began barking frantically to protest Hughes’s leaving. The odd thing was that Cosette began barking before the men rose, as they replaced the chessmen for what might, after all, have been the start of just another game. How did she know it wasn’t?

Hughes assumed pheromones. He, or Arlen, or both, probably gave off a different smell as they decided to call it a night. Pheromones were Hughes’s field of research; he’d done significant work in mate selection among mice based on smell. He had a graduate student remove the glomeruli from adult dogs and put them through tests to see how various of their learned responses to humans changed. The responses didn’t change. It wasn’t pheromones.

Now not only Hughes but also Arlen was intensely intrigued. The Human Genome Project had just slid into Phase 2, discovering which genes encoded for what proteins, and how. Arlen was working with Turner’s Syndrome, a disorder in which females were born missing all or part of one of their two X chromosomes. The girls had not only physical problems but social ones; they seemed to have trouble with even simple social interactions. What interested Hughes was that Turner Syndrome girls with an intact paternal X gene, the one inherited from the father, managed far better socially than those with the maternal X functioning. Something about picking up social cues was coded for genetically, and on the paternal X.

Where else did social facility reside in the genome? What cues of body language, facial expression, or tone of voice was Cosette picking up? Somehow the dog knew that when Hughes and Arlen set the chessmen in place, this wasn’t the start of a new game. Something, dictated at least in part by Cosette’s genes, was causing processes in her poodle brain. After all, Hughes’s dog, a big dumb Samoyed, never seemed to anticipate anything. Snowy was continually surprised by gravity. Arlen found the genes in dogs. It took him ten years, during which he failed to get tenure because he wouldn’t publish. After Stanford let him go, he still didn’t publish. He found the genes in humans. He still didn’t publish. Stone broke, he was well on the way to bitter and yet with his idealism undimmed—an odd combination, but not unknown among science fanatics. Inevitably, he crossed paths with people even more fanatical. Kenneth Bernard Arlen joined forces with off-shore backers to open a fertility clinic that created super-empathic children.

Empathy turns up early in some children. A naturally empathic nine-month-old will give her teddy bear to another child who is crying; the toddler senses how bad the other child feels. People who score high in perceiving others’ emotions are more popular, more outgoing, better adjusted, more happily married, more successful at their jobs. Arlen’s Syndrome toddlers understood—not verbally, but in their limbic systems—when Mommy was worried, when Daddy wanted them to go potty, that Grandma loved them, that a stranger was dangerous.

If his first illegal, off-shore experiments with human germ lines had resulted in deformities, Arlen would have been crucified. There were no deformities. Prospective clients loved the promise of kids who actually understood how parents felt. By six or seven, Arlen’s Syndrome kids could, especially if they were bright, read an astonishing array of non-verbal signals. By nine or ten, it was impossible to lie to them. As long as you were honest and genuinely had their best interests in mind, the children were a joy to live with: sensitive, cooperative, grateful, aware.

And yet here was Belinda Barrington, staring at me from her pale eyes, and I didn’t need a genetic dose of super-empathy to see her glee at embarrassing me. I couldn’t look at Jane. The blood was hot in my face.

Frieda said, sharply and hopelessly, “Belinda, that’s not nice.”

“No, it’s not,” Bridget said. She frowned at her sister, and Belinda actually looked away for a moment. Her twin had some childish control over Belinda, and her mother didn’t. “Tell him you’re sorry.”

“Sorry,” Belinda muttered, unconvincingly. So they could lie, if not be lied to. Frieda said to Jane, “This is new behavior. I’m sure it’s just a phase. Nothing you’d want to include in your project!”

Belinda shot her mother a look of freezing contempt.

Jane took control of the sorry situation. Sparing me any direct glance, she said to Belinda, “Did anybody tell you why I want to talk to you girls?”

“No,” Belinda said. “You’re not a reporter.”

“I’m a movie actress.”

Bridget brightened. “Like Kylie Kicker?” Apparently Arlen’s Advantage did not confer immunity to inane kiddie pop culture.

“Not as young,” Jane smiled, “or as rich. But I’m making a movie about the lives that girls like you might have when you’re grown up. That’s why I want to get to know you a little bit now. But only if it’s okay with you.”

The twins looked at each other. Neither spoke, but I had the impression that gigabytes passed between them. Frieda said, “Girls, I hope you’ll cooperate with Miss Snow. She—”

“No, you don’t,” Belinda said, almost absently. “You don’t like her. She’s too pretty. But we like her.” Frieda’s face went a mottled maroon. Bridget, her plump features alarmed, put a hand on her mother’s arm. But Frieda shook it off, started to say something, then abruptly stood and stalked into the house. Bridget made a move to follow but checked herself. To me—why?—she said apologetically, “She wants to be alone a little while.”

“You should go with her,” Belinda said, and I didn’t have to be told twice. These kids gave me the creeps.

Not that even they, with their overpraised empathy, could ever understand why. In the foyer, Suky still lay on the chaise longue with her comic book. There was no sign of her mother. The other chairs were all mammoth leather things, but a low antique bench stood against one wall and I clambered painfully onto it and called a cab. I would have to walk all the way to the front gate to meet it, but the thought of going back in the flyer with Jane was unbearable. I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the wall. My back and legs ached, but nothing compared to my heart. It wasn’t the words Belinda had said. Yes, I loved Jane and yes, that love was hopeless. I already knew that and so must Jane. How could she not? I was with her nearly every day; she was a woman sensitive to nuance. I knew she hated my accidental touch, and hated herself for that, and could help none of it. Three of Jane’s husbands had been among the best-looking men on the planet. Tall, strong, straight-limbed. I had seen Jane’s flesh glow rosy just because James or Karl or Duncan was in the same room with her. I had felt her hide her recoil from me.

“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” How often as a child had I chanted that to myself after another in the endless string of bullies had taunted me? Short Stuff, Dopey, Munchkin, Big Butt, Mighty Midget, Oompa Loompa, cripple . . . Belinda hadn’t illuminated any new truth for anybody. What she had done was speak it aloud.

“Give sorrow words”—but even Shakespeare could be as wrong as nursery chants. Something unnamed could, just barely, be ignored. Could be kept out of daily interaction, could almost be pretended away. What had been “given words” could not. And now tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, Jane and I would have to try to work together, would avoid each other’s eyes, would each tread the dreary internal treadmill: Is he/she upset? Did I brush too close, stay too far away, give off any hurtful signal . . . For God’s sake, leave me alone!

Speech doesn’t banish distance; it creates it. And if—

“Bitches, aren’t they?” a voice said softly. I opened my eyes. Suky stood close to my bench. She was taller than I’d thought, with a spectacular figure. No one would ever notice, not next to the wonder and novelty of the twins.

In my shamed confusion, I blurted out the first thing that came into my mind. “Belinda is, Bridget isn’t.”

“That’s what you think.” Suky laughed, then laid her comic book on the bench. “You need this, dwarf.”

She vanished into some inner corridor.

I picked up the comic. It was holo, those not-inexpensive e-graphics with chips embedded in the paper. Four panels succeeded each other on each page, with every panel dramatizing the plot in ten-second bursts of shifting light. The title was “Knife Hack,” and the story seemed to concern a mother who carves up her infants with a maximum amount of blood and brain spatter.

Arlen’s Syndrome kids: a joy to live with, sensitive and cooperative and grateful and aware.

Just one big happy family.

But sometimes the universe gives you a break. The next day I had a cold. Nothing serious, just a stuffy nose and sore throat, but I sounded like a rusty file scraping on cast iron, so I called in sick to my “office” at Jane’s estate. Her trainer answered. “What?”

“Tell Jane I won’t be in today. Sick. And remind her to—”

“I’m not your errand boy, Barry,” he answered hotly. We stared at each other’s comlink images in mutual dislike. Dino Carrano was the trainer-to-the-stars-of-the-moment-before-this-one, an arrogant narcissist who three times a week tortured Jane into perfect abs and weeping exhaustion. Like Ishmael, he was without the prescience to realize that his brief vogue had passed and that Jane kept him on partly from compassion. He stood now in her deserted exercise room.

“Why are you answering the phone? Where’s Catalina?”

“Her grandmother in Mexico died. Again. And before you ask, José is supervising the grounds crew and Jane is in the bathroom, throwing up. Now you know everything. Bye, Barry.”

“Wait! If she’s throwing up because you pushed her too hard again, you Dago bastard—”

“Save your invective, little man. We haven’t even started the training session yet, and if we don’t train by tomorrow, her ass is going to drop like a duffel bag. For today she just ate something bad.” He cut the link.

My stomach didn’t feel too steady, either. Had it been the Barrington lemonade? I made it to the bathroom just in time. But afterward I felt better, decided not to call my doctor, and went to bed. If Jane was sick, Catalina would cancel her appointments. No, Catalina was in Mexico . . . not my problem. But all Jane’s problems were mine. Without her, I had my own problems—Leila, Ethan—but no actual life.

Nonetheless, I forced myself to stay in bed, and eventually I fell asleep. When I woke, six hours later, my throat and stomach both felt fine. A quick call discovered that Catalina had returned from Mexico, sounding suspiciously unbereaved. But she was efficient enough when she was actually in the country, and I decided I didn’t need to brief Jane on tomorrow’s schedule. That would buy me one more day. I would take a relaxing evening. A long bath, a glass of wine, another postponement of talking to Leila. The industry news on Hollywood Watch.

The local news came on first. Ishmael’s body had been found in a pond in the Valley.

“. . . and weighted with cement blocks. Cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head, execution style,” said the news avatar, a CGI who looked completely real except that she had no faulty camera angles whatsoever. I stared at the photo of Ishmael’s handsome face on the screen beside her.

“Apparently the murderers were unaware that construction work would start today at the pond site, where luxury condos will be built by—”

Ishmael’s name was Harold Sylvester Ehrenreich. Failed actor, minor grifter, petty tax evader, who had dropped out of electronic sight eight months ago.

“Anyone having any information concerning—”

I was already on the comlink. “Jane?”

“I just called the cops. They’re on their way over.” She looked tired, drawn, within five years of her actual age. Her voice sounded as raspy as mine had been. “I was just about to call you. Barry, if this endangers the picture—”

“It won’t,” I said. Thirty years a star, and she still didn’t understand how the behind-the-scenes worked.

“It will make the picture. Did you call Everett?”

“He’s on his way.”

“Don’t say a word until both he and I get there. Not a word, Jane, not one. Can you send the flyer for me?”

“Yes. Barry—was he killed because of my interview?”

“There’s no way to know that,” I said, and all at once was profoundly grateful that it was true. I didn’t care if Ishmael was alive, dead, or fucking himself on Mars, but Jane was built differently. People mattered to her, especially the wounded-bird type. It was how she’d ended up married to three of her four husbands and the fourth, the Alpha-Male Producer, had been in reaction to the second, the alcoholic failed actor. Catalina, Jane’s housekeeper and social secretary, was another of her wounded birds. So, in his own perverse way, was her trainer.

Maybe that was why Jane had ended up with me as well.

But I could tell that neither me nor Belinda’s cruel words were on Jane’s mind just now. It was all Ishmael, and that was good. Ishmael would get us safely past our personal crisis. Even murder has its silver lining.

As the flyer set down on Jane’s roof, I saw the media already starting to converge. Someone must have tipped them off, perhaps a clerk at the precinct. An unmarked car was parked within Jane’s gates, with two vans outside and another flyer approaching from LA. Catalina let me in, her dark eyes wide with excitement. “La policia—”

“I know. Is Everett Murphy here?”

“Yes, he—”

“Bring in coffee and cake. And make the maids draw all the curtains in the house, immediately. Even the bedrooms. There’ll be robocams.” I wanted pictures and information released on my schedule, not that of flying recorders.

A man and a woman sat with Jane and Everett at one end of her enormous living room, which the decorator had done in swooping black curves with accents of screaming purple. The room looked nothing like Jane, who used it only for parties. She’d actually defied the decorator, who was a Dino-Carrano-bully type but not a wounded bird, and done her private sitting room in English country house. But she hadn’t taken the detectives there. I could guess why: she was protecting her safe haven. Catalina rushed past me like a small Mexican tornado and dramatically pushed the button to opaque the windows. They went deep purple, and lights flickered on in the room. Catalina raced out.

“Barry,” Jane said. She looked even worse than on comlink, red nose and swollen eyes and no make-up. I hoped to hell that neither cop was optic wired. “This is Detective Lopez and Detective Miller from the LAPD. Officers, my manager Barry Tenler.”

They nodded. Both were too well-trained to show curiosity or distaste, but they were there. I always know. In her sitting room Jane kept a low chair for me, but here I had to scramble up onto a high black sofa that satisfied the decorator desire for “an important piece.” I said, “You can question Miss Snow now, but please be advised that she has already spoken with the FBI and HPA, and that both Mr. Murphy and I reserve the right to advise her not to answer.”

The cops ignored this meaningless window dressing. But I’d accomplished what I wanted. Dwarfs learn early that straightforward, multisyllabic, take-no-shit talk will sometimes stop average-sizers from treating us like children. Sometimes.

Officer Lopez began a thorough interrogation: How had she arranged the meeting with the Group?

When? What contact had she had between the initial one and the meeting? Who had taken her to the meeting? Who else had accompanied her? When they found out that it had been me, Lopez got the look of a man who knows he’s screwed up. “You were there, Mr. Tenler?”

“I was.”

“You’ll have to go with Officer Miller into another room,” Lopez said. He stared at me hard. Witnesses were always questioned separately, and even if it hadn’t crossed his mind that someone like me was a witness, he suspected it had crossed mine. Which it had. If law-enforcement agencies weren’t given to so many turf wars, the LAPD would already know I’d been in that grimy basement. Or if Lopez hadn’t fallen victim to his own macho assumptions. You? She took a lame half-pint like you to protect her?

“Everett is my lawyer, too,” I said.

“You go with Officer Miller. Mr. Murphy will join you when I’m finished with Miss Snow.” Lopez’s formality barely restrained his anger.

Following Officer Miller to the media room, it occurred to me—pointlessly—that Belinda would have known immediately that I’d been withholding something.

It seemed obvious to me, as it probably was to the cops, that Ishmael had been killed by the Group. Narcissistic, bombastic, unreliable, he must have screwed up royally. Was Ms. Resentful dead, too? The bodyguard with the assault rifle? The boy who’d guided us through the warehouse?

The Group was trying to combine idealism, profit-making, and iron control. That combination never worked. I would say that to Officer Lopez, except that there was little chance he would take it seriously. Not from me.

The media spent a breathless three or four days on the story (“Famous Actress Questioned About Genemod Murder! What Does Jane Know?”). Then a United States senator married a former porn star named Candy Alley and the press moved on, partly because it was clear that Jane didn’t know anything. I’d positioned her as cooperative, concerned, committed to her art, and bewildered by the killing. Opinion polls said the public viewed her favorably. She increased her name recognition 600 percent among eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds, most of whom watched only holos and had never seen a Jane Snow picture. Publicity is publicity.

She got even more of it by spending so much time with the Barrington twins. Everybody liked this except me. Frieda liked the press attention (at least, such press as wasn’t staking out the senator and his new pork barrel). The twins liked Jane. She liked caring for yet more wounded birds, which was what she considered them. Her thinking on this escaped me; these were two of the most pampered children in the known universe. But Jane was only filling time, anyway, until the script was finished. And to her credit, she turned down the party invitations from the I’m-more-important-than-you A-list crowd that had ignored her for a decade. I’d urged her to turn down social invitations in order to create that important aura of non-attainable exclusivity. Jane turned them down because she no longer considered those people to be friends.

As for me, I worked at home on the hundreds of pre-photography details. Before I could finally reach Leila, she called me.

“Hey, Barry.”

“Hey, Leila.” She didn’t look good. I steeled myself to ask. “How is he?”

“Gone again.” Exhaustion pulled at her face. “I called the LAPD but they won’t do anything.”

“He’ll come home,” I said. “He always does.”

“Yeah, and one of these days it’ll be in a coffin.”

I said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say.

Leila, however, could always find something. “Well, if he does come home in a coffin, then you’ll be off the hook, won’t you? No more risk of embarrassing you or the gorgeous has-been.”

“Leila—”

“Have a good time with your big shot Hollywood friends. I’ll just wait to hear if this time the son you deformed really is dead.”

She hung up on me.

Leila and I met at a Little People of America convention in Denver. She was one of the teenage dwarfs dancing joyously, midriff bared and short skirt flipping, at the annual ball. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: red hair and blue eyes, alive to her fingertips. I was eighteen years older than she, and everyone at the convention knew who I was. High-ranking aide to a candidate for the mayor of San Francisco. Smart, successful, sharply dressed. Local dwarf makes good. More mobile then, I asked her to dance. Six months later we married. Six months after that, while I was running the campaign for a gubernatorial candidate, Leila accidentally got pregnant.

Two dwarfs have a 25 percent chance of conceiving an average-sized child, a 50 percent chance of a dwarf, and a 25 percent of a double-dominant, which always dies shortly after birth. Leila and I had never discussed these odds because, like most dwarfs, we planned on the in vitro fertilization that permits cherry-picking embryos. But Leila got careless with her pills. She knew immediately that she was pregnant, and even before the zygote had implanted itself in her uterus wall, testing showed that the fetus had a “normal” FGFR3 gene. I panicked.

“I don’t want to have an average-sized kid,” I told Leila. “I just don’t.”

“And I don’t want to have an abortion,” Leila said. “It’s not that I’m politically opposed to abortion. I’m glad to have the choice, but . . . Barry, I . . . I just can’t. He’s already a baby to me. Our baby. Why would having an Average be so hard?”

“Why?” I’d waved a hand around our house, in which everything—furniture, appliance controls, doorknobs—had been built to our scale. “Just look around! Besides, there’s a moral question here, Leila. You know that with in vitro, fewer and fewer dwarfs are having dwarf children. That just reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with being a dwarf. I don’t want to perpetuate that—I won’t perpetuate that. This is a political issue! I want a dwarf child.” She believed me. She was twenty to my thirty-nine, and I was a big-shot politico. She loved me. Leila lacked the perspicacity to see how terrified I was of an average-sized son, who would be as tall as I was by the time he was seven. Who would be impossible to control. Who might eventually despise me and his mother both. But Leila really, really didn’t want to abort. I talked her into in utero somatic gene therapy in England.

In those days I believed in science. The soma-gene technique was new but producing spectacular results. The British had gotten behind genetic engineering in a big way, and knowledgeable people from all over the world flocked to Cambridge, where private firms tied to the great university were turning genes on and off in fetuses still in the womb. This had to be done during the first week or ten days after conception. The FGFR3 gene stops bones from growing. It was turned on in babies with dwarfism; a corrective genemod retrovirus should be able to turn the gene off in the little mass of cells that was Ethan. The problem was that the Cambridge biotech clinic wouldn’t do it.

“We cure disease, not cause it,” I was told icily.

“Dwarfism is not a disease!” I said, too angry to be icy. Waving high the banner of political righteousness. It wasn’t a good idea, in those days, to cross me. I was the high-ranking, infallible campaign guru, the tiny wunderkind, the man who was never wrong. Fear can present itself as arrogance.

“Nonetheless,” the scientist told me in that aloof British accent, “we will not do it. Nor, I suspect, will any clinic in the United Kingdom.”

He was right. Time was running out. The next day we went off-shore, to a clinic in the Caymans, and something went wrong. The retrovirus that was the delivery vector mutated, or the splicing caused other genes to jump (they will do that), or maybe God just wanted an evil joke that day. The soma-gene correction spawned side effects, with one gene turning on another that in turn affected another, a cascade of creation run amok. And we got Ethan.

Leila never forgave me, and I never forgave myself. She left me when Ethan was not quite two. I sent money. I tried to stay in touch. I bore Leila’s fury and contempt and despair. She sent me pictures of Ethan, but she wouldn’t let me see him. I could have pressed visitation through the courts. I didn’t. My gubernatorial candidate lost.

“Barry,” Jane comlinked me the night before the first script conference, “would you like to come to dinner tonight?”

“Can’t,” I lied. “I already have dinner plans.”

“Oh? With whom?”

“A friend.” I smiled mysteriously. Some inane, back-in-high-school part of my brain hoped that she’d think I had a date. Then I saw Bridget Barrington scamper across the room behind Jane. “Are those kids at your place?”

“Yes, I couldn’t go there today because Catalina is sick and I had to—”

“Sick? With what? Jane, you can’t catch anything now, the first reading is tomorrow and—”

“I won’t catch this—I gave it to her. It’s that sore-throat-and-stomach thing we both had. Catalina—”

“You’re not a goddamn nurse! If Catalina is ill—” give me credit, I didn’t say actually ill instead of faking the way she fakes relatives’ deaths every fifteen minutes“—then hire a nurse or—”

“She’s not sick enough for a nurse, she just needs coddling and orange juice and company. It’s fine, Barry, so butt out. I’m actually glad of the distraction, it keeps me from thinking about tonight. Oh, I meant to tell you—I talked Robert into couriering the script to me! I wanted to read it before tomorrow. He sounded weird about it, but he agreed.”

My radar turned on. “Weird how?”

“I don’t know. Just weird.”

I considered all the possible “weirds” that the producer could be conveying, but I didn’t see what I could do about any of them. I settled for, “Just don’t catch anything from Catalina.”

“I already told you that I won’t.”

“Fine. Whatever you say.”

And it was fine. She was treating me the way she always did, with exasperated affection, and I was grateful. Belinda’s poison, flushed out of our working relationship by the flood of feeling about Ishmael’s murder, hadn’t harmed us. I wouldn’t lose the little of Jane that I had. And the picture was going to be a blockbuster.

“It’s a disaster!” Jane screamed. “I won’t do it!”

Sitting up in bed, I stared blearily at the wall screen. Beneath the image of Jane’s ravaged face, the time said 12:56 AM. I struggled to assemble consciousness.

“What is—”

She started to cry, great gasping sobs that would wreck her face for tomorrow’s conference. When had I seen Jane cry like that? When the last husband left. And the one before that.

“I’m coming right over,” I said. “I’m leaving immediately. Don’t read any more of the script. We’ll work this out, I promise.”

She was sobbing too hard to answer me.

“Just have a glass of wine and wait for me.”

“O . . . okay.”

I cut the link and called my chauffeur. I can drive if I have to, but it’s painful. Ernie and his wife Sandra, my housekeeper, live in the guest cottage. They’re both achons. “Mr. Tenler? What is it? Are you okay?” Ernie sounded bewildered. They’re good people, but I’ve kept our relationship distant, not given to midnight calls for chauffeur service.

“I’m fine, but I have to go to Miss Snow’s immediately. Can you bring around the car in five minutes?”

“Five minutes?” Ernie’s face looked exhausted. “Yeah, sure.”

“Are you all right?”

Surprise replaced his exhaustion. I wasn’t in the habit of asking after Ernie’s health.

“Yeah, I’m fine, it’s just that Sandra and I have both been under the weather. But no big deal. I’ll be there in—”

“But if you’re sick, maybe you shouldn’t—”

“Five minutes,” Ernie said, and now suspicion had replaced surprise. What the hell was I doing? I didn’t know, either. Painfully I climbed from the bed, tried to flex my aching body, and pulled on clothes. I hobbled out the front door as the Lexus pulled up.

“Here,” I said, handing Ernie a pain patch and a plastiflask of orange juice. He stared at me and shook his head.

Jane, in robe and slippers, let me in herself. Her face, red and blotchy and swollen, looked the worst I’d ever seen it. I wanted to take her in my arms, and that turned my voice harsher than I expected. “What’s wrong with the fucking script?”

Perversely, my anger seemed to steady her. “It’s a travesty.”

“Did they reduce your part?”

“That’s the least of it! Read it, Barry. I want you to read it for yourself.” She led the way to her sitting room. A bottle of wine, half empty, sat on the table. Jane poured herself a third glass as I read, but I wasn’t worried about that. Despite her fragile looks, Jane could out-drink a Russian stevedore. I began to read.

Future Perfect was based on a short story by an obscure writer, which means the studio got the rights cheap. Like much fiction set in the future, it extrapolated from the present, portraying a Mississippi city in which the mayor was an Arlen’s Syndrome young woman named Kate Bradshaw. Kate, empathetic but inexperienced, was guided by Jane’s character, an ex-DA who was tough, funny, and not above using her mature sexuality for political ends. The story arc brought in prejudice, female friendship, and the choices that politics must make to accommodate radically different points of view. There was a lot of lush Deep South atmosphere. The ending, deliberately ambiguous, featured a knock-out closing speech for Jane’s DA.

The script had moved the story to LA. The mayor was an evil Delilah who could read minds. She seduced and destroyed men, subverted democracy, had her enemies tortured. Clones were created. Buildings blew up, many buildings. Jane’s character was also blown up, a third of the way into the movie. The mayor is eventually shot through the heart by a noble young HPA agent. The body bleeds viscous yellow blood.

“Jane,” I said, and stopped. I had to be careful, had to choose just the right words. She had finished off the bottle of wine. I brought her a box of tissues, even though she had stopped crying. “I know it’s bad, but—”

“I won’t do it.” Her flexible voice held the kind of despair that’s gone past raging, gone straight into hopelessness.

“This is only the first pass at the script. We can ask for—”

“You know we won’t get it.”

I did know. I went to the main point. “Janie, sweetheart, this is the only project you’ve been offered in—”

“I won’t do it.”

“Jane, you’re not—”

“I should think you would understand,” she said, looking at me directly with a very un-Jane look. No softness, no flirtation, nothing but quiet, unvarnished truth. “This piece of shit encourages hatred. Not just portrays it, but actively encourages it. Arlen’s kids are different, therefore they must be bad, evil. More than that—they’re the result of a genetic difference, so they must be really bad, really evil, and we should clean them out of our society. I should think you, of all people, Barry, would object to that.” We had never, not once in five years, discussed my dwarfism. She didn’t know about Leila, about Ethan. This was uncharted territory for us, and with every cell of my being I did not want to go there. She had no right to bring this home to me; it was her decision. Anger hijacked my brain.

“You have no idea what I should or should not object to! Do you think that two weeks spent with a few genetically privileged kids gives you insight into what genetics can do? You know nothing, you’re as ignorant and stupid as most of the rest of the so-called ‘normal’ population. You have no idea the anguish that fucking genemods can cause, you think they’re all uplifting improvements to mankind, you think that you can just . . . Go ahead, commit career suicide! This script is all you’ve been offered in three years, and it’s all you’re going to get offered. You’re an aging actress who belongs to another era, a Norma Desmond who will never . . . go ahead, tell yourself you’re taking the moral high ground! You’re standing on quicksand, and I’ll be fucked if I let you take me down with you!” Silence.

She said wearily, “I won’t do this script.”

“Fine. Get yourself another manager.”

I hobbled out to the waiting car and Ernie drove me home.

Jane withdrew from the picture. The studio cast Suri Cruise in the part; she was young enough to be Jane’s daughter. Leila called to say tersely that Ethan had crawled home from his latest bout of homelessness. He had a broken nose, a black eye, and a mangled hand. She wouldn’t let me come to see him: “How would he even know who the fuck you are?” I didn’t insist. The LAPD announced periodically that there were no new developments in the Harold Ehrenreich murder case, and over the next few months, Ishmael’s handsome face disappeared from the newsgrids. Ernie recovered from his bout of flu in a few days, but Sandra’s turned into pneumonia and she had to go to the hospital. I visited her every day, to her bewilderment. This was new behavior, but I knew the cause. I had nothing else to do, or at least nothing I could make myself do, and hospital visiting was a distraction. Sandra was only there for four days, but her roommate developed complications and had to go into ICU. She was a frightened old woman with no family. I brought her flowers and chocolate and, when she was a little better, played mah-jongg with her. The game attracted a few other invalids, including a young man dying of one of the few cancers that medicine still couldn’t cure. I began visiting him, too. Martin never seemed to even notice that I was a dwarf. Perhaps, as someone once remarked, dying does concentrate the mind, squeezing out everything else.

Every once in a while I reflected wryly that I seemed to have taken on Jane’s penchant for wounded birds. But I didn’t reflect too hard; hospital visiting was a long way from Hollywood management, which in turn was a long way from the nails-tough political world. I didn’t want to look at how far I’d fallen. Jane, too, seemed to be in wounded-bird mode. Sometimes, not too often, a picture of her would turn up on some fourth-rate “celebrity watch” linksite, the holo supplied by a desperate paparazzo who couldn’t do better. In those shots, she was helping some homeless drunk or paying the bills for a child who owned one ragged dress, or so it was claimed. The holos of Jane with the Barrington twins, on the other hand, turned up regularly on all the news vectors. Frieda Barrington probably saw to that. In July, Ernie and Sandra quit. “I’m sorry, Mr. Tenler, but we’re not comfortable here any more.”

“Not comfortable?” I had just spent twenty thousand dollars remodeling the guest cottage.

“No.” He shifted from one foot to the other. Ernie has a smaller head and butt than a lot of achons, but he’s far from being a proportional, and another job that paid this well for this little work was not going to be easy to find. Not for him, not for Sandra. Where would they go?

“Where will you go?”

“That’s our business.”

It was such a rude answer that I frowned. Something in the frown broke his reserve.

“Look, Mr. Tenler, it’s not that we aren’t grateful. You done a lot for us. But lately you’re so . . . we didn’t want the cottage remodeled, and I said as much to you. You keep giving us things we don’t want. And . . . and hanging around a lot. I’m sorry, but it’s a huge pain in the ass.” And I had just wanted to help!

But now Ernie was wound up. “It’s like you’re trying to control us. I know, I know, you think you’re being a good guy, but we . . . and those calls! They’re creeping out Sandra. It’s best that we go.” I gave them a generous severance pay-out and hired a Mexican couple, undocumented, who desperately needed jobs. It felt good to help them along. The comlink calls, I started taking myself. They came once or twice a week. No visual, and the audio came through a voice changer. Routing was via a private, encrypted satellite system, so there was no chance whatsoever of tracing the calls. I thought at first that they might be from Jane, but this emphatically was not her style. Each call was exactly the same:

“Barry Tenler.”

“I’m Barry Tenler.”

Heavy breathing. Finally, “I know how you feel.”

“Feel about what?”

And now the mechanical voice—this isn’t supposed to be possible, but I swear I heard it—hinted at pain. “I just want you to know that someone understands. Someone in the same position.”

“Look, let me help—” And the link ended.

What “position” ? Another dwarf? Another unemployed PR-flack-cum-manager? Another parent of a kid with major genetic problems?

Then I had another mystery because the feds showed up. They proved to be just as elusive as my unknown caller.

“We’d like to ask you some questions, Mr. Tenler.”

“What about? Do I need my lawyer?”

“No, not at all. These are just general questions, in the public interest. You’d really help us out.” I blinked. The HPA usually commands “help” rather than requests it, and these were not the erection-jawed types who’d interviewed me after Jane’s and my visit to the Group. These two, a man and a woman, were both short, slightly built, mild in manner, deliberately unthreatening. Why? I was curious. Also bored, so I asked them in. Or maybe it was just to see them both perch uncomfortably on my dwarf-sized living room chairs, their knees rising above the cocktail table like cliff faces from a Himalayan valley.

“Have you been ill lately, Mr. Tenler?”

“Ill? No. I’m fine.” I knew they weren’t referring to chronic pain. Nor to chronic self-pity, either.

“No flu-like symptoms?”

“I did have the flu a few months ago, but nothing since.”

I could sense the two of them not looking at each other.

“What is this about?” I asked. “I think I’d like to know before I answer any more questions.”

“I wish we could accommodate you, sir,” the woman said apologetically. She was maybe five-one, pretty, and when she smiled at me, I felt anger swell in my chest. A cheap tactic if there ever was one. Maybe he’ll talk to a woman on his own level . . . “Just one more question, please. It would really help us out. Since March, has anyone from the Group tried to contact you?”

“No.” If the encrypted calls were from the Group, I didn’t know it, and the feds weren’t going to, either.

“Thank you, Mr. Tenler,” she said winningly, and handed me her card. Agent Elaine Brown, Human Protection Agency.

“Once again, what is this about?”

“Please contact us if anything occurs to you, or if you’re contacted by the Group,” the male agent said.

“There’s been chatter among our informants.”

I knew better than to ask what kind of chatter; he’d probably said too much anyway. After they left, I stared at Elaine Brown’s card, wondering what the hell that had all been about.

Two weeks later, I found out. The whole world found out, but I was first. Another post-midnight phone call, and this time I was not in the mood for it. I’d spent the day at the hospital. Martin, my mah-jongg playing cancer patient, died at 4:43 PM. The only other person there was his elderly mother, who then fell apart. I had done for her what I could, which wasn’t much, arriving home late at night. Three whisky-and-sodas hadn’t dulled my sense that the world made no sense. The bedside clock said 2:14 AM. I snarled at the screen, “What?”

“Barry Tenler.” It wasn’t a question. The screen stayed dark.

“Look, I’m not in the mood for games tonight, so you can just—” Then it hit me that the voice was not mechanical, not masked. A woman’s voice, and somewhere I’d heard it before.

“Listen to me, this is a matter of life and death for someone you love. Get Jane Snow away to someplace safe and hidden, and do it now. Tonight.”

“What the—who are you?”

“It doesn’t matter who I am. Get her away tonight.”

“Why? What’s going to—no, don’t hang up! You’re—”

Where had I heard that voice?

“Just go. Good-bye.”

I had it. “You’re the woman from the Group.” In the warehouse basement. To date, three thousand two hundred fourteen. The only sentence I’d heard her utter, and not even a whole sentence. A fragment. Silence.

“And,” I said, as it all came together in my sleep-deprived brain, “you’re the woman who’s been making those masked calls to me.” I know how you feel . . . I just want you to know that someone understands. Someone in the same position. “You loved Ishmael.”

“They murdered him!” A second later she’d regained control of herself. That a woman like this lost control at all was a measure of her pain. Grief can drive even the toughest person to acts of insanity. Maybe especially the toughest person. She said, “I underestimated you.”

I didn’t say People usually do, because now fear had my chest gripped tight. She was credible, at least to me. “How is Jane in danger? Please tell me.”

A long pause, and then she said, “Why the fuck not? But know one thing, Barry Tenler. You will never find me, and neither will the Group. And tomorrow morning it will all be public anyway. Tell me, have you ever heard of oxytorin?”

“No.”

“Did you get ill a few days after your little visit in March to that warehouse?” The fear gripped harder. “Flu-like symp—”

“It wasn’t flu. Tell me, have you noticed yourself engaged in unusual behaviors lately? Has Jane? Has anyone else with whom you’ve exchanged bodily fluids, especially saliva?” I hadn’t exchanged bodily fluids, including saliva, with anyone. But all at once I remembered the pre-meeting searches in the warehouse. A man had checked me over, including opening my mouth and moving aside my tongue. His hands had felt unpleasantly slimy.

I was having trouble breathing. “What . . . what is oxytorin?”

“Nothing that will kill you. The Group is made up of idealists, remember? Idealists who murder anyone who wanders two inches off the reservation.” She laughed, a horrible sound. “I know he was dumb and vain, but I loved him. Sneer at that if you will, only you won’t, will you? Not you. You’re just as enslaved by another beautiful moron. And you can’t help it any more than I could, can you?”

“Please . . . what is oxytorin?”

Her tone lost its anguished cynicism. Relaying factual information steadied her.

“It’s a neuropeptide, a close relative to oxytocin, secreted in the brain and the pituitary gland. Like oxytocin, it has effects on social behavior. Specifically, it promotes nurturing behavior. If you give it to virgin female rats, within forty-eight hours they’re building nests and trying to nurse any baby rats you hand to them. If you remove it from mother rats’ brains, they ignore their babies and let them die. The same with monkeys. It—”

Nurturing behavior. Bringing Ernie and Sandra orange juice and remodeling their cottage. Visiting hospital patients whom I met by accident. Jane, childless, spending hours and hours with the Barrington twins.

“—has been synthesized synthetically for a long time, but the synthetic version has to be injected directly into the brain. That’s not practical when you want to permanently influence a large fraction of the population, so instead—”

“You bastards.” It came out a whisper, strangled by rage.

“—the Group went with a compound that switches on the genes that create oxytorin receptors. You don’t have more oxytorin, you just have more receptors for it, so more of it is actually affecting your brain. Although susceptibility to the genemod will vary among people—like, say, susceptibility to cholera depends on blood type. The delivery vector is a retrovirus, capable of penetrating the blood-brain barrier, but which first colonizes mouth and nose secretions. The—”

“You used us. Me and Jane. You—”

“—desired end here is a kinder, gentler populace. Isn’t that what we all want?” The combination of cynicism and idealism in her words stunned me, because I knew it was absolutely genuine. Again, a whisper: “You can’t.”

“We did. And if the fucking leadership had ever taken it themselves, before they decided Harold was a liability—” She was sobbing. I didn’t care.

My throat opened up. I screamed, “You can’t just fuck around with people’s genes without their consent!”

The sobbing stopped. She said coldly, “Why not? You did.”

She knew. They knew. About Ethan.

“I’m telling you this because tomorrow morning the Group is putting the story on the Link. You and your ageing Aphrodite are carriers, and when the press gets hold of that, you’ll be inundated, if not lynched. Especially since the Group is saying that Jane Snow cooperated, that this is part of her Hollywood liberal-left politics. Plenty will believe it. And even if they don’t, sensationalism always works best when pegged to a few identifiable people. You should know that.”

“Why are you telling—”

“You don’t listen, do you? I already told you why. You’re just as fucked as I am. We’re alike, you and I, and neither of us ever stood a fucking chance of getting who we wanted. Damn them to hell, all of them . . . It always comes down to bodies, Munchkin, and yours has been damned twice. So get yourself and her out of town. Now.” The link broke.

I stood staring at nothing for a full minute, for a lifetime. I wasn’t even aware of the body she had just mocked. Only my mind raced.

Bodily fluids. Blood, semen, saliva. Jane wiping snot from the noses of the Barrington twins, kissing them, kissing half of the Hollywood press corps in their touch-touch social rituals. And . . . sleeping with someone? I never asked her. And undoubtedly we weren’t the only two that had been infected; that wouldn’t be widespread enough. We were just the two that were going to be publicly named. The weakness of the Group’s expensive, individually created genemods for Arlen’s Syndrome had always been the very small number of empathic kids it could create. When Jane had pointed this out, Ishmael had gone into his grandiose “ripple” analogy, which explained nothing. But somewhere above Ishmael were people far more knowledgeable, more committed, more dangerous. People with a plan, a revolution for society. The Group had been waging war with the genomes of children as bullets. Now they had moved up to soma-gene engineering, as saturation bombing.

Anger is a great heartener. I dressed quickly, put a few things in a bag, and went down to the car. The kind of encryption that my caller had used was not available to me, and so the comlink was too big a risk. The pedal extenders that Ernie had used in the Lexus, and which Carlos didn’t need, were still in the trunk. I installed them and drove to Jane’s. I have e-codes to the gate and the house. Within an hour I was at her bedroom door.

What if she wasn’t alone?

Deep breath. I went in. “Jane? Don’t scream, it’s Barry.”

“What—”

“It’s Barry. I’m turning on the light.”

She sat up in bed, wild-eyed, and she wasn’t alone. The Barrington twins curled up on the other side of the huge bed, lost in the heavy sleep of childhood, their hair in tangles and drool on their pillows. “What the fuck—”

All at once my legs gave way. I grasped the edge of the mattress, lowered myself to the floor, and so once again had to look up at her. “Listen, Janie, this is life-and-death. We have to leave here. Now. No, don’t say anything—just listen to me for once!”

Something in my voice, or my ridiculous position, got through to her. She didn’t say a word as I told her everything that I’d been told. Her feathery light hair drifted in some air current from the open window, and above the modest blue pajamas she wore for this grandmotherly sleep-over, her neck and face turned mottled red, and then dead white. When I finished, I heaved myself to my feet.

“Pack a bag. Five minutes.”

And then she spoke. “I can’t leave the twins.”

I stared at her.

“I can’t, Barry. Frieda and John are in Europe, so the are kids staying with me this week, and anyway won’t they be in danger, too? I must have infected them by now . . . saliva . . .”

“Catalina will look after them!”

“She’s in Mexico. Her aunt died.”

I closed my eyes. I knew that look of Jane’s. “No,” I said.

“I have to! And Frieda would want me to—God, they already get death threats every day! When it’s public that they can infect others—”

Nurturing behavior. Virgin rats trying to nurse any baby rats you hand to them. I said, “It’s kidnapping.”

“It’s not. I’ll email Frieda.”

One of the girls woke up. She gazed at us from wide, frightened eyes. It was Bridget, the Glinda of the witchy pair. She said in a quavery voice, “Don’t leave us, Jane!”

“I won’t, darling. I wouldn’t.”

She looked so small, and so frightened . . . Then I caught myself. Oxytorin. I barked, “No electronics that can be traced. Not phones, not mobiles, not games, not anything. Do those kids have subdermal ID chips?”

“No,” Jane said. I could see that she wanted to say more, much more, but not in front of Bridget. Fifteen minutes later, after Jane sent a hasty email to Frieda and John Barrington, we drove out the estate gates, heading toward the mountains.

When Leila was one month pregnant, the ultrasound looked like any other baby. The same at two, five, and nine months. All fetuses have oversized heads, spindly little arms and legs. When Ethan was born, there was no way to tell he was a dwarf, except by another genescan. Eighty-five percent of dwarfs are born to average-sized parents, the result not of carrying the dominant gene but of a mutation during conception. Usually the parents don’t even realize the child will be a dwarf until the baby fails to grow like other children.

But we, of course, knew. Ethan would be a dwarf. We engineered him to be a dwarf. Then he was born and scanned.

A twentieth century religious writer once said that humanity needs the disabled to remind us of the fragility of health, and of “the power of life and its brokenness.” The nineteenth century mother of the famous Colonel Tom Thumb attributed her son’s dwarfism to her grief over the death of the family dog during her pregnancy. Leila and I had no such spiritual consolations, no such explanations for Ethan’s lack of dwarfism. The ones that science could offer were vague: Engineering fails. Genes jump. Chromosomes mutate. Accidents happen. Nature asserts herself.

I bought the mountain cabin just after Leila left me. I think now that I wasn’t quite sane during that awful time. I’d retired from politics and hadn’t yet entered show-business management. I had nothing to do. There are notebooks I wrote then in which I talk about suicide, but I have no memory of doing the writing or thinking the thoughts. Eventually, that time passed. I left the cabin and never went back. Years later I deeded it over to Leila, who would go there sometimes with Ethan when he was small. She told me once, in a rare lapse into civility, that Ethan was happy at the cabin. He chased butterflies, hunted rocks, picked wildflowers. He calmed down up there, and he slept well in the sweet mountain air. Now the twins did the same, falling asleep on the back seat of the Lexus. Still Jane and I didn’t talk. But once she put her hand on the back of my neck. That was a gesture I’d dreamed about, longed for, would have given ten years of my life for. But not like this. Her touch wasn’t sexual, wasn’t romantic. It was motherly.

We pulled up to the cabin just as the sun rose over the mountains, an hour before the Group was scheduled to break its story. Jane’s skin goose-fleshed as she opened the car door and the cold dawn air rushed in.

“I’m going to carry them inside,” she said, the first words she’d spoken in an hour. “They need their sleep. Is the door locked?”

“I have the key.”

Mundane words, normal words. While below us, the human race was about to be altered at its core. The cabin, too, was cold. I started the generator—quicker than building a fire—while Jane, puffing a little, carried the girls one at a time into the bedroom. The cabin is small but it’s not primitive or austere; I’m not a fan of either. It has a main room with running water from a deep well, a comfortable bedroom, and a bathroom with full septic system. The original furniture had been sized for me, but evidently Leila had replaced it all. The sofa was hard to climb onto. My legs hurt.

Jane emerged from the bedroom after depositing the last twin, closed the door, and sat down on a wing chair across from me. She said quietly, “You could have let me drive.” I didn’t answer.

“Is there a radio here?”

“There was. A satellite radio—the mountains don’t permit much other reception.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t been here for a long time.”

She got up and began opening cupboards in the kitchenette. The counters and appliances, like the furniture, had been replaced, but no new cabinets built above them. Jane had to squat to peer into shelves. She searched the two closets, one of which had not existed when I’d owned the cabin, then sat down again. “No radio. But a lot of food and equipment. Who uses this place?” Again I didn’t answer.

“Barry, what’s our plan?”

I looked at her then. No make-up, barely combed hair, huddled inside jeans and a green sweater that matched her eyes. She had never looked more beautiful to me.

“My only plan was to get you away before some angry mob came after you. People aren’t going to like that their brains have been fucked with, and you’re a natural target, Jane.”

“I know.” She smiled wanly. “I always have been, for anybody with a grudge. Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because the perception is that you have it all.” I meant: beauty, talent, success, riches. I meant: my heart. She snorted. “Oh, right. I have a burnt-out career, four bad marriages, and wrinkles that Botox can’t touch. Barry, dear, you look tired. Why don’t you lie on the sofa and I’ll make you some warm milk.”

“Don’t mother me!” It came out a snarl.

She looked startled, then angry, then compassionate. Compassionate was the worst. “I only meant—”

“That’s not you talking, it’s the genemod that the Group infected you with.” She turned thoughtful, considering this. Contrary to Ms. Resentful’s perception, Jane was not stupid. Finally she said, “No, I don’t think so, because I think I would have reacted the same way even before all this started. If I saw you tired and discouraged, I’d have offered some comfort anyway.” This was true. All at once I saw that this was going to be more complicated than I thought. How could anybody determine which behavior was caused by increased oxytorin receptors, and which was innate?

It was the old argument, genes versus free will, only now it was about to turn incendiary. Jane said, “I’m making you that warm milk.”

But I was asleep before she could bring it to me.

I woke to Belinda standing beside the sofa, staring at me flatly. “I want to go home.” Groggily I sat up. Everything hurt. “Where’s Jane?”

“Her and Bridget went for a stupid walk. Take me home.”

“I can’t. Not yet.”

“I want to go home.”

Painfully I climbed off the sofa and headed to the kitchenette. There was fresh coffee in a Braun on the counter, but I couldn’t reach it. Hating every second that Belinda watched me, I dragged a footstool from the fireplace to the counter and hoisted myself onto it. A part of my brain noticed dispassionately that I felt no nurturing impulses toward Belinda when she didn’t look more helpless than I felt. The coffee was hot and rich. Good coffee had always been important to Leila. I gulped it down and said, “How long ago did they leave on this walk?”

“I don’t know.”

She probably did know and wasn’t telling me, the brat.

“I really don’t know, so stop thinking I’m a liar.”

How did she do it? I’d read the literature on Arlen’s Syndrome. Subconscious processes in Belinda’s malevolent little brain were hypersensitive to six non-word signals: gesture and facial expression, even very tiny movements in either. Rhythm of movement. Bodily use of space. Objectics, such as dress and hairstyle. And what was called paralanguage: tone of voice, rate of verbal delivery, emphasis, and inflection. Taken together, they let her read my emotions like a Teleprompter, but she was not reading my mind. I had to remind myself of that. Nonetheless, for the first time I saw the rationale for burning witches at the stake.

She said, “I don’t care if you hate me.”

“I don’t hate you, Belinda.” Said hopelessly; I couldn’t hide from her.

“I hate you, too.”

I took my coffee outside. Leila hadn’t removed the low bench in front of the cabin, from which there was a breath-taking panorama of mountains and valleys, a pristine Eden that, when I’d lived here those nine months, had filled me with despair. Eden is no longer Eden if you’ve been exiled from it. The ghost of those bad feelings seemed to linger around the bench, but I didn’t go back inside. Presently Jane and Bridget came puffing up the dirt road, Bridget clutching a mess of buttercups and daisies.

“Hi, Barry,” the child said unhappily. She’d been crying. Immediately I braced myself and there it was: the soft desire to reassure her, help her, kiss the boo-boo and make it all better. God damn it to hell.

Jane sat on the bench beside me. “Go put the flowers in water, Bridget.” When she’d gone, I said, “We need to know what’s happening in LA. There’s a library in Dunhill, at the base of the mountain. If you wrap up your hair and wear sunglasses and—oh, I don’t know, act—do you think you can go in there unnoticed and use the Link? I know I can’t.” She looked at the mountain road, which has no guard rails and, in places, pretty steep fall-offs. Jane doesn’t like heights. She said, “Yes. I can do it.”

“Don’t stay long, and don’t talk to anybody. Not one word. Your voice is memorable.”

“Only if you’d heard it more recently than ten years ago. And in a better picture than my last one. Should I go now?” Again she looked at the road.

Before I could answer, the twins started shouting inside the cabin. Jane rose to her feet as the girls raced outside. Bridget cried, “Belinda, don’t!”

Belinda said, “If you don’t take us home this very minute, I’m going to tell everybody that you touched me in my private place and you’ll go to jail forever and ever and ever!”

“No, you will not, young lady,” Jane said severely. “You just come inside with me this very minute.”

Belinda looked astonished. Probably Frieda had never spoken to her daughter that way. I reflected that “maternal behavior” could include discipline. Belinda followed Jane inside.

Had Frieda felt too intimidated by her daughters to reprimand them? Too proud? Too guilty? Had she been too terrified of what they might in turn say to her? I could imagine any of those scenarios, with a child so different from you, so strange, so eerily knowing.

What kind of discipline had Leila given, or not given, to Ethan?

Jane returned from Dunhill in a state of restrained anxiety. Nobody, she said, had recognized her at the library. She’d accessed the Link, watched the news, hardcopied the headlines. It was all even worse than I’d expected.

BIOWEAPON RELEASED IN CALIFORNIA

ARLEN’S WAS ONLY THE FIRST STEP

—NOW THEY’RE SPREADING MUTATIONS!

ACTRESS A PART OF BIOCONSPIRACY SPREADING EPIDEMIC

CALL FOR IMMEDIATE QUARANTINE OF L.A.

RUN ON GAS MASKS, RIOTS, CAUSE DEATHS OF FOUR

MUTANTS NOW AMONG US—YOU COULD BE ONE!

JANE SNOW AND MANAGER MISSING SINCE LAST NIGHT

“They’re calling it treason,” Jane said.

“It is treason. Or something.” Bioweapon terrorism. Invasion of bodily privacy. Violations of the Fourteenth Amendment. Medical malpractice.

“What next, Barry?”

“I’m not sure. I need to think.” But all I could think about was what might have happened if I hadn’t gotten Jane away, if Ms. Resentful hadn’t called me. Riots cause death of four. And that was without the rioters’ zeroing in on a specific target.

“What did the twins do while I was gone?”

“Nothing.” They’d played inside and I’d sat outside, pretending they weren’t there. Jane went into the cabin.

A minute later she was back. “They’re making cookies.”

“Fine. Just so long as they don’t burn down the cabin.”

“We won’t,” Bridget said, and there they were beside us, having silently followed Jane. Belinda had a picturesque smudge of chocolate on her nose. I did not think that she looked adorable. Bridget added, “Why are you scared, Jane?”

Jane knew better than to deny. “I went down to a town where I could get the news, and some people in LA are very angry at another group of people there. It could get violent.” Belinda said, “But why does that mean we can’t go home?”

Bridget said, “They’re mad at us, too, aren’t they? You’re scared for us. Why? We didn’t do anything!” Belinda said, “Don’t be stupid, Brid. People get mad at us all the time when we didn’t do anything.” She looked at me. “Like Barry is mad at us.”

Bridget scowled, making her suddenly look more like her sister. “Yeah. Why are you mad at us, Barry?”

“Because I didn’t want to have to bring you here. But if I hadn’t, you might both have been attacked by a mob now.”

Bridget looked scared, but Belinda said, “Naw, we got really good security at home. Nobody can get through. I want to go home!”

“And I want you to,” I said, which was nothing less than total truth—even as I felt the treacherous desire to comfort little frightened Bridget . . . oxytorin.

Belinda did not look frightened. She was working up to a towering tantrum. “Then take us home! Take us home now!”

Jane said soothingly, “We can’t, Belinda. It’s not safe. The—”

“It is safe! Daddy’s estate is safe! I want to go home!”

Bridget said, with heart-breaking hopelessness, “Belinda—”

Belinda kicked her sister, who screamed and fell to the ground. Then she kicked Jane, who made a grab for her. Belinda was quicker, squirming away, tears of rage on her grimy face.

“Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me! I hate you, you go around feeling sorry for everybody who isn’t you! You feel sorry for Barry ‘cause he’s all twisted and short, and you feel sorry for Brid and me ‘cause you think we’re so different, just like you feel sorry for Catalina and the pilot and everybody who’s not pretty like you! Well, you’re not so pretty anymore either, ‘cause you’re old and you know it and you’re scared nobody’s going to like you any more if you’re not pretty and if you don’t do that fucking movie about us! And you know what—you’re right! Nobody will like you just like I hate you!

“ ‘Cause you’re old and not pretty any more and you’ll be alone all the rest of your life! And—” Jane stood still, looking dazed. Looking stripped naked. But now Bridget was up off the ground and barreling into her sister head first, a battering ram to the belly. “Don’t you kick me!” Belinda screamed and the two girls went down, rolling in the scrub grass in front of the cabin, punching and pulling hair and scratching. Jane sprang forward, trying to pull them off each other. The sound of a motor made her, and me, freeze.

And Leila’s car roared into sight and jerked to a stop, with her and Ethan inside.

Empathy means you understand another’s feelings. It doesn’t mean you sympathize with them, or respect them. Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister, Joséph Goebbels, understood perfectly what the German people were feeling in the 1920s and 30s: insecurity, rage, fear, resentment at the punishments for WWI. He used that knowledge to manipulate their emotions, creating the brilliant PR campaigns that put Hitler in power and kept him there.

The Group must have realized too late that Arlen’s Syndrome was not, after all, a guarantee that the world would change for the better. So they’d created the virus that increases oxytorin receptors. Correcting a genetic-engineering change with another genetic-engineering change. I could have told them that does not work.

Ethan got out of the car first, from the passenger side. Both Bridget and Belinda stopped fighting, got up off the ground, and stared. Ethan’s right eye was blackened, and his left arm was in a sling. He scowled ferociously at them, at me, at the world.

He was utterly beautiful.

Auburn hair falling over his forehead, blue eyes, a body that Michelangelo could have used as the model for his David. More than that, Ethan had the same quality that Jane did: an innate and unconscious sexuality so blatant that it was like a slap in the face, a challenge: Come and get me. If you can. His photos had not captured that quality. Bridget and Belinda were eleven years old, and yet I saw that they felt it, Bridget blushing and looking confused, Belinda scowling back, but with surprise behind her gray eyes. Jane’s back was to me. Leila got out of the car and called desperately, “Ethan!” He ignored her and kept walking. It was me he was moving toward. I stood up from my bench, my heart hammering. Ethan stopped in front of me. I came up to slightly higher than his waist.

“You’re my father,” he said, with utter contempt. “You.”

Leila was running from the car, but Jane was closer. She threw herself between us just as Ethan’s fist shot out, and the blow intended for my face hit her in the chest.

“I don’t think any of her ribs are broken,” Leila said wearily. “She said it doesn’t hurt when she breathes, which is a good sign.”

Leila and I sat in her car, a three-year-old Ford, each of us holding steaming mugs of fresh coffee. Mine trembled in numb fingers. Jane slept, courtesy of a pain patch, in the bedroom. The twins, subdued now, had been ordered back to their cookie-making, and had actually gone. Ethan had stalked away into the woods, and I was sickened to realize that I hoped he’d stay away. I was afraid of my son.

“Leila, I didn’t realize . . . I know you’d said, but . . . Of course, behavior is a complex genetic and environmental phenomenon, and when you interfere with—”

“Don’t. Don’t go informational and theoretical on me like you always do. Just don’t!”

“All right.”

She turned her face to look at me. “That’s the first time I think you’ve actually heard me when I’ve said that.”

Maybe it was. Information and theory were good hiding places. “And Ethan gets like this—”

“Unpredictably. The psychologist says he has poor impulse control. When he gets upset, there’s a major neural highjacking. You’ve seen the brain scans with all the irregularities in his amygdalas and hippocampus. He gets swamped with rage, and sometimes he can’t even remember what he’s done. Not always, but sometimes.”

“And you’ve dealt with this alone for—”

“Since he was a toddler. But you knew all this, Barry. I told you.” She had. But I hadn’t really heard her, hadn’t wanted to hear her. I’d preferred to blame her, as she blamed me.

Leila continued, “When he comes back from the woods, he’ll be different. Until the next time. But now that he’s old enough to run away . . . and looking like he does . . .” She didn’t have to finish the sentence. I knew what LA could be for a fifteen-year-old who looked like Ethan.

I said, “Did you two just happen to come up here today?”

“No. Jane called me.”

I spilled my coffee. “Jane?”

“Yes. She did what you should have done.” Now Leila’s anger was back. Anger and blame. “Or didn’t you bother to think that Ethan might be in danger once the witch hunt down there fingered you? Which it has, by the way, according to the car radio while I could still get reception on the way up here. Didn’t you bother to think that your son might make a good substitute target?”

“I didn’t think anyone would trace you and Ethan to me.”

“Jane obviously did!”

And probably used a private detective to do it. How long ago? Why?

“I’m sorry, Leila. I didn’t think you’d be in any danger. I didn’t think the media—” I stopped. She knew what I meant.

However nasty the daily world is to dwarfs, there is only one Official Story about us allowed in mainstream media. That’s the happytalk Big-Hearts-in-Little-Bodies slant. Dwarfs making good, doing good, being good. Thus is the daily nastiness offset and balance restored to the universe. That the media in LA had now abandoned the formula was a strong measure of how much fear the Group had engineered along with their virus.

I said, “This whole thing . . . God knows I didn’t want these twins here, either.”

“Where are their parents? Or are you guilty of kidnapping, along with everything else?” Yes. No. “Their parents know the kids are here. They’re on their way home from Europe.”

“The Barrington twins, of all kids. God, Barry, you really can screw up royally.” Like I needed to be told that. But I pushed down my anger. This was maybe the only chance I was going to get, and I had to say it right. “Listen, Leila. I want to say something. I know I’ve been negligent, and I know that Ethan is . . . I know I had a lot to do with this, because of what I insisted on before he was born. But I want to say three things, and I want you to really consider them. You don’t have to, but I’d really like it if you would. First, what I said before is true, even though I picked a stupid time to say it. Behavior is genetically complex, and Ethan’s . . . problems, his brain irregularities, could have happened even if I hadn’t insisted on the in utero genemod. We’ll never know.” Leila made a sudden motion, but I kept on, afraid to stop. “Second, just consider—please consider!—that I tried to help with Ethan and you pushed me away. You were so angry that you . . . I don’t say you weren’t justified. But you did push me away, and left me, and refused to let me see him, and I think it’s unfair that I then get blamed for not seeing him.”

“I wasn’t—” she said hotly. I put my hand on her arm.

“Please. Just one more thing. It’s not too late. I want to help, want to do whatever I can, whatever you and he will let me do. If we can get past this anger at each other, finally, and cooperate, that has to be better for Ethan!”

She shook my hand off her arm, but she didn’t get out of the car. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I held my breath.

Finally Leila spoke in a different voice. “I don’t know if I can. I’ve hated you for so long . . . I think . . . I think I might need to hate you. In order to go on.”

I knew enough to be quiet.

“Oh, God, I don’t want to be that person!” Leila cried. “Barry—”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t want to be the person I am, either.” She blindsided me then. “Do you love her very much?”

Only honesty would do now. “Yes.”

“I’m seeing somebody,” Leila said. “That’s part of why Ethan’s so angry. He hasn’t ever had to share me.”

“I’m glad for you, Leila.” But I had to ask. “Is he a dwarf?”

“Yes. We met last year at the LPA convention. He lives in Oregon. He’s in insurance.” She was smiling, despite herself. I found myself hoping that it worked out for her. She deserved a little insurance. But then, didn’t we all.

“I didn’t get a chance to tell you before,” Leila said. “I brought a satellite TV. It’s in the trunk.”

Riots had started in South Central LA. Ostensibly the “mutation plague,” which was what the media was calling the Group’s virus, was the cause of the riots. But they quickly took on life of their own, with all the usual looting, car burning, rock throwing. The LAPD used microwaves and tanglefoam on the rioters, who then regrouped at different locations and started over again. The press, having been the actual cause of the turmoil with its inflamed reporting, now took on its next role in the inevitable sequence, which was The Voice of Reason trying to calm things down. Talking heads appeared on TV, on the Link, on wallscreens, in holos projected over the city. They explained that the virus was not airborne, needed contact with bodily fluids to survive, and did not cause cancer or suicide or nerve decay or zombie-ism. Nobody listened.

A rumor started that the Group leadership was headquartered in a warehouse by the waterfront. A mob torched it, and strong winds carried the fire westward. The governor ordered out the National Guard.

KILL THE MUTANT MAKERS said the improvised placards.

Jane was hanged in effigy.

Frieda and John Barrington landed at LAX and were besieged by robocams; Jane’s picture with the twins had been everywhere in recent weeks. Their flyer finally took off but airspace over the city had been shut down and the flyer returned to the airport.

By nightfall the rioting had subsided, damped down by rumors that “muties” were secretly roaming the streets, infecting everyone. People fled inside. In several hours of watching the Link, not once did I hear a single reporter or avatar refer to what the virus actually did: increase the desire to nurture. People cared that they had been fucked with, not how.

That was the part of the whole reaction that I most understood.

“Barry,” Jane said, “come eat something.”

She and Leila had prepared a meal from the canned goods in the cabin. Leila had made a fire in the fireplace. Ethan, who had returned sullen from the woods and stayed sullen ever since, sat at the table with the twins. He’d spent most of the afternoon outside, smoking God-knows-what, while the twins circled him like disintegrating stars around a black hole. Bridget seemed afraid to speak to him at all, but Belinda and he had several long, low conversations during which Ethan scowled a lot. Leila and Jane moved back and forth between table and kitchen, elaborately and artificially polite to each other. I didn’t need Bridget or Belinda to tell me what everybody felt. Nobody wanted to be here with these other five people, and there was nowhere else any of us could go.

“Barry,” Jane said again.

Belinda said, “He doesn’t like you to act like his mother.”

I said, “Shut up, kid, or you’ll wish you had.”

Bridget, wide-eyed, said, “He means it, Belinda.”

She shut up, glaring at me. Leila glanced my way, puzzled. Ethan raised his head, and I would have given anything for just one moment’s of Arlen’s Syndrome so I could tell what my son was thinking then. Bridget said, “I don’t like it here with you guys.” Her eyes welled, and immediately Jane’s arms went around her. “It’s okay, Bridget, you girls are just tired. I think you should go to bed right after you eat, sweetheart. Everything will look better in the morning.”

Oxytorin.

I was too tired to think straight. But one sentence from Ms. Resentful came back to me: “Susceptibility to the genemod will vary among people—like, say, susceptibility to cholera depends on blood type.” I’d seen no susceptibility to increased nurturing from Belinda. As she watched Jane hug Bridget, Belinda’s look could have withered a cactus.

Leila produced three sleeping bags from the closet that hadn’t existed when I’d been here last. The twins were bedded down on the floor of the bedroom. Ethan disdained to so much as glance at his bag, which was laid out in a corner of the living room. Jane and Leila would share the bed. I got the couch. Ethan and I were the last to go to sleep. I lay on the lumpy sofa, all lights off except for a dim glow where Ethan sat watching something inane on the satellite TV. His beautiful, beautiful face—how had Leila and I created such beauty?—lost its sulky look and relaxed into the smile of a normal fifteen-year-old. Normal. A word dwarfs don’t like and seldom use. For good reason.

But this was my son, and so I made one more attempt to reach him. “What are you watching?”

“Nothing.” The scowl was back. It angered me.

“Obviously it’s not nothing, or you wouldn’t be watching it. So what is it?”

“Don’t pull that logic crap on me,” Ethan said. “I don’t know you.” And then—although did even he hesitate before he said it? I thought so, or else I wanted to think so—“Crippled little Munchkin.” We stared at each other across the dim room.

Then I rolled over, wrapped myself in my blanket and my pain, and tried to sleep. Some unknowable time later, Jane was shaking me by the shoulder. “Barry! Barry, wake up—Belinda is gone!”

I jerked upright and looked at the sleeping bag by the cold fireplace. The bag was empty. My mind went cold and clear. “See if both cars are here.”

Of course, they weren’t. My Lexus was gone.

“He doesn’t even have a driver’s permit,” Leila said.

She was driving; my legs ached too much. I had made Jane stay with Bridget, who was still asleep. Leila drove slowly in the dark, and as we passed the places where the mountain road dropped off sheerly, she shuddered. But her hands on the wheel didn’t falter. This wasn’t the teenage dwarf I’d married, the girl dancing exuberantly at the LPA convention, the young bride who had blindly accepted my arrogant authority.

“I thought he understood how dangerous it would be to go back home,” Leila said. “I thought he understood.”

“He did. That’s why he’s going.”

She glanced over at me, then returned to her driving, her endless scanning of the roadside. Was that a break in the bushes? Had a car gone off there? Was that a skid mark in the headlights?

She said, “No, that’s not why. It’s that girl. Belinda. She wants to go home, and I saw her whispering to him all afternoon, and I should have realized . . . but he doesn’t like children! And she’s only eleven! I didn’t think she could influence him.”

Leila was right. I should have anticipated this; I’d seen far more of Belinda than Leila had. Belinda would have known exactly what Ethan was feeling, exactly how to play on his weak spots. She didn’t even have to think about it, merely let her instincts take over. Empathy in action.

“Barry, he’s not a bad kid underneath. He can be very sweet sometimes. You’ve never seen that.”

“I believe you,” I said, wondering if I did. “And the other times—well, he can’t help it, can he? It’s in his genes.”

“No, it’s not.” The intensity of her anger surprised me, even as she kept on scanning, looking, dreading what she might see. “You attribute everything to genes. It’s not true. Genes made you a dwarf, and you think that’s wrecked your life, but genes didn’t make you so bitter and unhappy. I know that because when we met, you weren’t bitter and unhappy. And you were a dwarf then, too. I didn’t want Ethan around your self-created misery. I still don’t. And maybe he does have some predisposition to danger and anger and impulsiveness, like the doctors say. But he doesn’t have to indulge it. He chooses to do that. Just like you choose to be miserable and envious.”

“Leila, there’s so much wrong with that simplistic analysis that I don’t even know where to start correcting it.”

“Then don’t. I don’t need your ‘corrections.’ You can’t—what’s that!”

I saw it a second after she did. The Lexus, smashed head-first against a tree, which was the only thing that had kept it from going over the embankment.

Leila, younger and with less spinal constriction, was first out of the Ford, running toward the car, uttering loud wordless cries. I followed her, stumbling as my treacherous legs collapsed under me, getting up, trying again to run. Those were the longest seconds—minutes, hours, eons—of my life. Until. I. Reached. That. Car.

They were both alive. Belinda seemed unhurt, mewling in her seat belt. Ethan, who had taken the brunt of the crash—had he turned the wheel at the last minute to save the little girl?—slumped unconscious against the steering wheel. Blood trickled through his bright hair.

“Don’t move him,” Leila said frantically. “If anything’s broken . . . I’m going for help!” She ran back to her Ford. I undid Belinda’s seat belt, yanked her out, and dropped her on the dark roadside weeds. I could feel her fear, just as she could feel my fury. She shrank back against the fender. I climbed into the passenger seat beside my son.

He stirred. “Mommy . . .”

“She’ll be here soon, Ethan. Help will be here soon.”

He said something else, before sliding again into unconsciousness. It might have been, “Fuck you.” Maybe no child, other than those with Arlen’s Syndrome, understands how a parent feels. Maybe I hadn’t earned the right to even be considered a parent. Maybe, as Leila said, my bitterness and anger would be worse for Ethan than if I weren’t there at all for him. I don’t know, any more than I know any more what’s genetic and what’s not. Did Jane go all maternal with the twins because she had more oxytorin receptors, or did the Group’s virus make her a good candidate for growing more oxytorin receptors because she’d always had a penchant for wounded birds anyway? Susceptibility to the genemod will vary among people.

In the darkness, I sat for a long time beside my injured son. Finally, with great deliberation, I spat on my fingers and gently, gently, pushed them inside his mouth. I felt the softness of his slack tongue, his strong young teeth. Strong teeth, strong long bones. He was not a dwarf. I spat a second time on my hand and did it again.

Overhead, medical and police flyers droned in the dark night. When they arrived, I borrowed a cell phone and comlinked Elaine Brown, Human Protection Agency.

A week later, I sit in a Temporary Government Quarantine Facility in San Diego, watching TV. On the other side of the negative-pressure barriers, researchers from the United States Army Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, dressed in Level 4 biohazard suits, go through two airlocks to reach Jane and me. The Barrington twins are here, too, but not Leila or Ethan. Ethan is in a hospital in LA, and she is with him, along with her boyfriend from Oregon. He flew down immediately to be with her. They treat us well here. There are endless medical tests, of course, but I’m used to that. Everyone is both respectful and curious. If they’re also frightened, I don’t sense it, but of course Bridget and Belinda do. Bridget is a favorite with the staff. Belinda wants to go home, although she likes all the attention from Jane. The twins’ parents “visit” via Link several times each day. Frieda sometimes has a distinct look of relief. Her kids are behind glass, and she can break the link with Belinda whenever she needs to. The Link has brought the most attention to Jane. Death threats, pleas for help, fan letters, offers from the ACLU to sue the Group if any members of that organization can be found, which so far they haven’t been. Jane would be a high-profile and appealing case. The movie is on again, but not with the same script, or even with the same studio. There’s another chapter now to the Arlen’s Syndrome story, and Jane has become an actor in that saga in both senses of the word. The whole thing looks like box-office gold.

Jane is not unhappy. If that’s not exactly the same thing as being happy, it seems to do. The Link is also how I visit with Ethan. He had three broken ribs and a damaged spleen, which seems to be repairing itself without surgery. Youthful spleen can do that. We gaze at each other, and sometimes he’s sullen, and sometimes I’m impatient, and sometimes he sees me shift on my spine in chronic pain. Or maybe he catches a sadness in my eyes. At such times, his expression softens. So does his voice. He’ll ask if I’m okay. When he asks, I am.

Is it wrong to genetically modify human beings? First I thought it was, when I tried to alter Ethan’s FGFR3 gene in utero. Then I thought it wasn’t, seeing both Ethan and the Arlen’s Syndrome kids. Now I don’t know again. There’s still panic out there about the Group’s virus, and the virus is still spreading, and eventually it may—or may not—make enough of society more nurturing. In turn, that may—or may not—change society. If enough people are susceptible. If feelings of compassion actually translate into actions of compassion. If the weather holds and the creek don’t rise and seven or eleven comes up enough on the dice. This is barely Act One, Scene One of whatever comes next. Chaos theory tells us that, in a system of circular feedback, a small change in initial conditions can cause huge and unpredictable changes down the road. Human behavior is a system of circular feedback. Is Ethan more compassionate toward me because he’s growing more oxytorin receptors, or because I’m more open to his (and everyone else’s) compassion? How did the same genemod for empathy produce both Bridget and Belinda?

I have no idea. And to tell the truth, I don’t really care. I’m supposed to care, ethically and pragmatically, but I don’t.

Jane comes into the room and says, “Guess what? The studio is getting Michael Rosen to write the script! Michael Rosen! It’s sure to be terrific!”

I smile back. Michael Rosen is indeed a terrific writer, a creator of sensitive and layered scripts that both challenge audiences and fill seats. He’s also a handsome womanizer, and Jane is looking more beautiful than ever. I know what will happen.

“That’s good,” I say. “Congratulations. The movie’ll be a smash.”

“Thanks to you.” She smiles at me and goes out again.

Nothing has changed. Everything has changed. I turn to my computer and get back to work.

THE WOMEN OF NELL GWYNNE’S

Kage Baker

ONE:

In Which It Is Established That

In the city of Westminster, in the vicinity of Birdcage Walk, in the year of our Lord 1844 . . . There was once a private residence with a view of St. James’s Park. It was generally known, among the London tradesmen, that a respectable widow resided there, upon whom it was never necessary to call for overdue payment. Beggars knew she could be relied upon for charity, if they weren’t too importunate, and they were careful never to be so; for she was one of their own, in a manner of speaking, being as she was blind.

Now and again Mrs. Corvey could be observed, with her smoked goggles and walking stick, on the arm of her adolescent son Herbert, taking the pleasant air in the park. It was known that she had several daughters also, though the precise number was unclear, and that her younger sister was in residence there as well. There may even have been a pair of younger sisters, or perhaps there was an unmarried sister-in-law, and though the daughters had certainly left the schoolroom their governess seemed to have been retained.

In any other neighborhood, perhaps, there would have been some uncouth speculation about the inordinate number of females under one roof. The lady of the house by Birdcage Walk, however, retained her reputation for spotless respectability, largely because no gentlemen visitors were ever seen arriving or departing the premises, at any hour of the day or night whatsoever.

Gentlemen were unseen because they never went to the house near Birdcage Walk. They went instead to a certain private establishment known as Nell Gwynne’s, two streets away, which connected to Mrs. Corvey’s cellar by an underground passage and which was in the basement of a fairly exclusive dining establishment. The tradesmen never came near that place, needless to say. Had any one of them ever done so, he’d have been astonished to meet there Mrs. Corvey and her entire house hold, including Herbert, who under this separate roof was transformed, Harlequin-like, into Herbertina. The other ladies resident were likewise transformed from Ladies into Women, brandishing riding crops, birch rods, and other instruments of their profession.

Nell Gwynne’s clientele were often statesmen, who found the place convenient to Whitehall. They were not infrequently members of other exclusive clubs. Some were journalists. Some were notable persons in the sciences or the arts. All were desperately grateful to have been accorded membership at Nell Gwynne’s, for it was known—among the sort of gentlemen who know such things—that there was no use whining for a sponsor. Membership was by invitation only, and entirely at the discretion of the lady whose establishment it was.

Now and again, in the hushed and circumspect atmosphere of the Athenaeum (or the Carlton Club, or the Traveller’s Club) someone might imbibe enough port to wonder aloud just what it took to get an invitation from Mrs. Corvey.

The answer, though quite simple, was never guessed.

One had to know secrets.

Secrets were, in fact, the principal item retailed at Nell Gwynne’s, with entertainments of the flesh coming in a distant second. Secrets were teased out of sodden members of Parliament, coaxed from lustful cabinet ministers, extracted from talkative industrialists, and finessed from members of the Royal Society as well as the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Information so acquired was not, as you might expect, sold to the highest bidder. It went directly across Whitehall and up past Scotland Yard, to an unimposing-looking brick edifice in Craig’s Court, wherein was housed Redking’s Club. Membership at Redking’s was composed equally of other MPs, ministers, industrialists, and Royal Society members, and a great many other clever fellows beside. However, there were many more clever fellows beneath Redking’s, for its secret cellars went down several storeys, and housed an organization known publicly—but to very few—as the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society.

In return for the secrets sent their way by Mrs. Corvey, the GSS underwrote her establishment, enabling all ladies present to live pleasantly when they were not engaged in the business of gathering intelligence. Indeed, once a year Nell Gwynne’s closed its premises when its residents went on holiday. The more poetical of the ladies preferred the Lake District, but Mrs. Corvey liked nothing better than a month at the seaside, so they generally ended up going to Torbay.

Life for the ladies of Nell Gwynne’s was, placed in the proper historical, societal, and economic context, quite tolerably nice.

Now and then it did have its challenges, however.

TWO:

In Which Our Heroine

Is A Witness To History

We will call her Lady Beatrice, since that was the name she chose for herself later.

Lady Beatrice’s Papa was a military man, shrewd and sober. Lady Beatrice’s Mamma was a gently bred primrose of a woman, demure, proper, perfectly genteel. She was somewhat pained to discover that the daughter she bore was rather more bold and direct than became a little girl.

Lady Beatrice, encountering a horrid great spider in the garden, would not scream and run. She would stamp on it. Lady Beatrice, on having her doll snatched away by a bullying cousin, would not weep and plead; she would take back her doll, even at the cost of pulled hair and torn lace. Lady Beatrice, upon falling down, would never lie there sobbing, waiting for an adult to comfort her. She would pick herself up and inspect her knees for damage. Only when the damage amounted to bloody painful scrapes would she perhaps cry, as she limped off to the ayah to be scolded and bandaged.

Lady Beatrice’s Mamma fretted, saying such brashness ill became a little lady. Lady Beatrice’s Papa said he was damned glad to have a child who never wept unless she was really hurt.

“My girl’s true as steel, ain’t she?” he said fondly. Whereupon Lady Beatrice’s Mamma would purse her lips and narrow her eyes.

Presently Lady Beatrice’s Mamma had another focus for her attention, however, for walking out in the cabbage patch one day she found a pair of twin baby girls, as like her and each other as it was possible to be. Lady Beatrice hadn’t thought there was a cabbage patch in the garden. She went out and searched diligently, and found not so much as a Brussels sprout, which fact she announced loudly at dinner that evening. Lady Beatrice’s Mamma turned scarlet. Lady Beatrice’s Papa roared with laughter.

Thereafter Lady Beatrice was allowed a most agreeable childhood, by her standards, Mamma being preoccupied with little Charlotte and Louise. She was given a pony, and was taught to ride by their Punjabi groom. She was given a bow and arrows and taught archery. She was taught her letters, and read as many books as she liked. When she asked for her own regimental uniform, Mamma told her such a thing was wicked, and retired with a fainting fit, but Papa gave her a little red coat on her next birthday.

The birthdays came and went. Just after Lady Beatrice turned seventeen, Lady Beatrice’s Grandmamma was taken ill, and so Lady Beatrice’s Mamma took the twins and went back to England for a visit. Lady Beatrice was uninterested in going, having several handsome young officers swooning for her at the time, and Mamma was quite content to leave her in India with Papa.

Grandmamma had been expected to die rather soon, but for some reason lingered, and Lady Beatrice’s Mamma found one reason after another to postpone returning. Lady Beatrice relished running Papa’s house by herself, especially presiding over dinners, where she bantered with all the handsome young officers and not a few of the old ones. One of them wrote poetry in praise of her gray eyes. Two others dueled on her account.

Then Papa’s regiment was ordered to Kabul.

Lady Beatrice was left alone with the servants for some months, bored beyond anything she had believed possible. One day word came that all the wives and children of the married officers were to be allowed to go to Kabul as well, as a way to keep up the troops’ morale. Lady Beatrice heard nothing directly from Papa, as it happened, but she went with all the other families. After two months of miserably difficult travel through all the red dust in the world, Lady Beatrice arrived in Kabul.

Papa was not pleased to see her. Papa was horrified. He sat her down and in few words explained how dangerous their situation was, how unlikely it was that the Afghanis would accept the British-backed ruler. He told her that rebellion was likely to break out any moment, and that the order to send for wives and children had been perfectly insane folly.

Lady Beatrice had proudly told Papa that she wasn’t afraid to stay in Kabul; after all, all her handsome suitors were there! Papa had given a bitter laugh and replied that he didn’t think it was safe now to send her home alone in any case.

So Lady Beatrice had stayed in Kabul, hosting Papa’s dinners for increasingly glum and uninterested young suitors. She remained there until the end, when Elphinstone negotiated the retreat of the British garrison, and was one of the doomed sixteen thousand who set off from Kabul for the Khyber Pass.

Lady Beatrice watched them die, one after another after another. They died of the January cold; they died when Ghilzai snipers picked them off, or rode down in bands and skirmished with the increasingly desperate army. Papa died in the Khoord Kabul gorge, during one such skirmish, and Lady Beatrice was carried away screaming by a Ghilzai tribesman.

Lady Beatrice was beaten and raped. She was left tied among the horses. In the night she tore through the rope with her teeth and crawled into the shelter where her captors slept. She took a knife and cut their throats, and did worse to the last one, because he woke and attempted to break her wrist. She swathed herself in their garments, stole a pair of their boots. She stole their food. She took their horses, riding one and leading the others, and went down to find Papa’s body.

He was frozen stiff when she found him, so she had to give up any idea of tying him across the saddle and taking him away. Instead she buried him under a cairn of stones, and scratched his name and regiment on the topmost rock with the knife with which she had killed her rapists. Then Lady Beatrice rode away, weeping; but she felt no shame weeping, because she was really hurt.

All along the Khyber Pass she counted the British and Indian dead. On three separate occasions she rode across the body of one and then another and another of her handsome young suitors. Lady Beatrice looked like a gray-eyed specter, all her tears wept out, by the time she rode into Jellalabad.

No one quite knew what to do with her there. No one wanted to speak of what had happened, for, as one of the officers who had known her family explained, her father’s good name was at stake. Lady Beatrice remained with the garrison all through the siege of Jellalabad that followed, cooking for them and washing clothes. In April, just after the siege had been raised, she miscarried.

Her father’s friends saw to it that Lady Beatrice was escorted back to India. There she sold off the furniture, dismissed the servants, closed up the house, and bought herself passage to England.

Once she had arrived, it took Lady Beatrice several weeks to find Mamma and the twins. Grandmamma had died at last, and upon receiving word of the massacre in Afghanistan, Mamma had bought mourning and thrown herself upon the mercy of her older brother, a successful merchant. She and the twins were now living as dependents in his house hold.

Lady Beatrice arrived on their doorstep and was greeted by shrieks of horror. Apparently Lady Beatrice’s letters had gone astray in the mail. Her mother fainted dead away. Uncle Frederick’s wife came in and fainted dead away as well. Charlotte and Louise came running down to see what had happened and, while they did not faint, they screamed shrilly. Uncle Frederick came in and stared at her as though his eyes would burst from his face.

Once Mamma and Aunt Harriet had been revived, to cling to each other weeping on the settee, Lady Beatrice explained what had happened to her.

A lengthy and painful discussion followed. It lasted through tea and dinner. It was revealed to Lady Beatrice that, though she had been sincerely mourned when Mamma had been under the impression she was dead, her unexpected return to life was something more than inconvenient. Had she never considered the disgrace she would inflict upon her family by returning, after all that had happened to her? What were all Aunt Harriet’s neighbors to think?

Uncle Frederick as good as told her to her face that she must have whored herself to the men of the 13th Foot, during all those months in Jellalabad; and if she hadn’t, she might just as well have, for all that anyone would believe otherwise.

At this point Mamma fainted again. While they were attempting to revive her, Charlotte and Louise reproached Lady Beatrice in bluntest terms for her selfishness. Had she never thought for a moment of what the scandalous news would do to their marriage prospects? Mamma, sitting up at this point, tearfully begged Lady Beatrice to enter a convent. Lady Beatrice replied that she no longer believed in God.

Whereupon Uncle Frederick, his face black with rage, rose from the table (the servants were in the act of serving the fish course) and told Lady Beatrice that she would be permitted to spend the night under his roof, for her Mamma’s sake, but in the morning he was personally taking her to the nearest convent.

At this point Aunt Harriet pointed out that the nearest convent was in France, and he would be obliged to drive all day and hire passage on a boat, which hardly seemed respectable. Uncle Frederick shouted that he didn’t give a damn. Mamma fainted once more.

Lady Beatrice excused herself and rose from the table. She went upstairs, found her mother’s room, ransacked her jewel box, and left the house by the back door.

She caught the night coach in the village and went to London, where she pawned a necklace of her mother’s and paid a quarter’s rent on a small room in the Marylebone Road. Having done that, Lady Beatrice went to a dressmaker’s and had an ensemble made in the most lurid scarlet silk the seamstress could find on her shelves. Afterward she went to a milliner’s and had a hat made up to match.

The next day she went shopping for shoes and found a pair of ready-mades in her size that looked as though they would bear well with prolonged walking. Lady Beatrice purchased cosmetics also.

When her scarlet raiment was ready Lady Beatrice collected it. She took it back to her room, put it on, and stood before the cracked glass above her washstand. Holding her head high, she rimmed her gray eyes with blackest kohl.

What else was there to do, but die?

THREE:

In Which She Gets On With Her Life

The work seemed by no means as dreadful as Lady Beatrice had heard tell. She realized, however, that her point of view was somewhat unusual. The act was never pleasurable for her but it was at least not painful, as it had been in the Khyber Pass. She took care to carry plenty of lambskin sheaths in her reticule. She worked her body like a draft horse. It obeyed her patiently and earned her decent meals and a clean place in which to sleep, and books. Lady Beatrice found that she still enjoyed books.

She felt nothing, neither for nor against, regarding the men who lay with her.

Lady Beatrice learned quickly where the best locations were for plying one’s trade, if one didn’t wish to be brutalized by drunken laborers: outside theaters, outside the better restaurants and wine bars. She discovered that her looks and her voice gave her an advantage over the other working women, who were for the most part desperate country girls or Cockneys. She watched them straggle through their nights, growing steadily drunker and more hoarse, sporting upper-arm bruises ever more purple.

They regarded her with disbelief and anger, especially when an old cove with a diamond stickpin could walk their importuning gauntlet unmoved, shaking off their hands, deaf to their filthiest enticements, but stop in his tracks when Lady Beatrice stepped out in front of him. “Oi! Milady’s stole another one!” someone would cry. She liked the name.

One night three whores lay for her with clubs in an alley off the Strand. She pulled a knife—for she carried one—and held them at bay, and told them what she’d done to the Ghilzai tribesmen. They backed away, and fled. They spread the word that Milady was barking mad.

Lady Beatrice wasn’t at all mad. It was true that the snows of the Khyber Pass seemed to have settled around her heart and left it incapable of much emotion, but her mind was sharp and clear as ice. It was difficult even to feel contempt for her fellow whores, though she saw plainly enough that many were ignorant, that they drank too much, that they habitually fell in love with men who beat them, that they wallowed in self-pity and festering resentments.

Lady Beatrice never drank. She lived thriftily. She opened a bank account and saved the money she made, reserving out enough to remain well-dressed and buy a novel now and again. She calculated how much she would need to save in order to retire and live quietly, and she worked toward that goal. She kept a resolute barrier between her body and her mind, only nominally resident in the one, only truly living in the other.

One evening she was strolling the pavement outside the British Museum (an excellent place to do business, judging from all the wealthy clientele she picked up there) when a previous customer recognized her and engaged her services for a gentlemen’s party on the following night. Lady Beatrice dressed in her best evening scarlets for the occasion, and paid for a cab.

She recognized some of her better-dressed rivals at the party, at which some sporting victory was being celebrated, and they nodded to one another graciously. One by one, each portly financier or baronet paired off with a courtesan, and Lady Beatrice was just thinking that she could do with more of this sort of engagement when she heard her name called, in a low voice.

She turned and beheld an old friend of her father’s, whom she had once charmed with an hour’s sprightly conversation. Lady Beatrice stepped close to him, quickly.

“That is not the name I use now,” she said.

“But—my dear child—how could you come to this?”

“Do you truly wish to hear the answer?”

He cast a furtive look around and, taking her by the wrist, led her into an antechamber and shut the door after them, to general laughter from those not too preoccupied to notice.

Lady Beatrice told him her story, in a matter-of-fact way, seated on a divan as he paced and smoked. When she had finished he sank into a chair opposite, shaking his head.

“You deserved better in life, my dear.”

“No one deserves good or evil fortune,” said Lady Beatrice. “Things simply happen, and one survives them the best one can.”

“God! That’s true; your father used to say that. He never flinched at unpleasantness. You are very like him, in that sense. He always said you were as true as steel.”

Lady Beatrice heard the phrase with a sense of wonder, remembering that long-ago life. It seemed to her, now, as though it had happened to some other girl.

The old friend was regarding her with a strange mixture of compassion and a certain calculation. “For your father’s sake, and for your own, I should like to assist you. May I know where you live?”

Lady Beatrice gave him her address readily enough. “Though I do not advise you to visit,” she said. “And if you have any gallant ideas about rescuing me, think again. No lady in London would receive me, after what I endured, and you know that as well as I do.”

“I know, my dear.” He stood and bowed to her. “But women true as steel are found very rarely, after all. It would be shameful to waste your excellent qualities.”

“How kind,” said Lady Beatrice.

She expected nothing from the encounter, and so Lady Beatrice was rather surprised when someone knocked at the door of her lodging three days thereafter.

She was rather more surprised when, upon opening the door, she beheld a blind woman, who asked for her by her name.

“I am she,” admitted Lady Beatrice.

“May I come in for a moment, miss, and have a few words with you?”

“As many as you wish,” said Lady Beatrice. Swinging her cane before her, the blind woman entered the room. Seemingly quite by chance she encountered a chair and lowered herself into it. Despite her infirmity, she was not a beggar; indeed, she was well-dressed and well-groomed, resembling, if not a lady, certainly someone’s respectable mother. Her accents indicated that she had come from the lower classes, but she spoke quietly, with precise diction. She drew off her gloves and bonnet, and held them in her lap, with her cane crooked over one arm.

“Thank you. I’ll introduce myself, if I may: Mrs. Elizabeth Corvey. We have a friend in common.” She uttered the name of the gentleman who had known Lady Beatrice in her former life.

“Ah,” said Lady Beatrice. “And I expect you administer some sort of charity for fallen women?”

Mrs. Corvey chuckled. “I wouldn’t say that, miss, no.” She turned her goggled face toward Lady Beatrice. The smoked goggles were very black, and quite prominent. “None of the ladies in my establishment require charity. They’re quite able to get on in the world. As you seem to be. Your friend told me the sort of things you’ve seen and done. What’s done can’t be undone, more’s the pity, but there it is.

“That being the case, may I ask you whether you’d consider putting your charms to better use than streetwalking?”

“Do you keep a house of prostitution, madam?”

“I do and I don’t,” said Mrs. Corvey. “If it was a house of prostitution, you may be sure it would be of the very best sort, with girls as beautiful and clever as you, and some of them as well-bred. I am not, myself; I was born in the work house.

“When I was five years old they sold me to a pin factory. Little hands are needed for the making of pins, you see, and little keen eyes. Little girls are preferred for the work; so much more painstaking than little boys, you know. We worked at a long table, cutting up the lengths of wire and filing the points, and hammering the heads flat. We worked by candlelight when it grew dark, and the shop-mistress read to us from the Bible as we worked. I was blind by the age of twelve, but I knew my Scripture, I can tell you.

“And then, of course, there was only one work I was fit for, wasn’t there? So I was sold off into a sort of specialty house.

“You meet all kinds of odd ducks in a place like that. Sick fellows, and ugly fellows, and shy fellows. I was got with child twice, and poxed, too. I do hope I’m not shocking you, am I? Both of us being women of the world, you see. I lost track of the years, but I think I was seventeen when I got out of there. Should you like to know how I got out?”

“Yes, madam, I should.”

“There was this fellow came to see me. He paid specially to have me to himself a whole evening and I thought, oh, Lord, no, because you get so weary of it, and the gentlemen don’t generally like it if you seem as though you’re not paying proper attention, do they? But all this fellow wanted to do was talk.

“He asked me all sorts of questions about myself—how old I was, where had I come from, did I have any family, how did I come to be blind. He told me he belonged to a club of scientific gentlemen. He said they thought they might have a way to cure blindness. If I was willing to let this Gentlemen’s Speculative Society try it out on me, he’d buy me out of the house I was in and see that I was physicked for the pox as well, and found an honest living.

“He did warn me I’d lose my eyes. I said I didn’t care—they weren’t any use anyhow, were they? And he said I might find myself disfigured, and I said I didn’t mind that—what had my looks ever gotten me?

“To be brief, I went with him and had it done. And I did lose my eyes, and I was disfigured, but I haven’t regretted it a day since.”

“You don’t appear to be disfigured,” said Lady Beatrice. “And clearly they were unable to cure your blindness.”

Mrs. Corvey smiled. “Oh, no? The clock says half-past-twelve, and you’re wearing such a lovely scarlet dressing-gown, miss, and you have such striking gray eyes—quite unlike mine. You’re made of stern stuff, I know, so you won’t scream now.” Having said that, she slid her goggles up to reveal her eyes.

Lady Beatrice, who had been standing upright, took a step backward and clutched the edge of the table behind her.

“Dear me, you have gone quite pale,” said Mrs. Corvey in amusement. “Sets off that scarlet mouth of yours a treat. House of Rimmel Red No. 3, isn’t it? Not so pink as their No. 4. And, let me see, why, what a lot of books you have! Sartor Resartus, Catherine, Falkner— that’s her last one, isn’t it?—and, what’s that on your bedside table?” The brass optics embedded in Mrs. Corvey’s face actually protruded forward, with a faint whirring noise, and swiveled in the direction of Lady Beatrice’s bed. “Nicholas Nickleby. Yes, I enjoyed that one, myself.

“I do hope I have proven my point now, miss.”

“What a horror,” said Lady Beatrice faintly.

“Oh, I shouldn’t say that at all, miss! My condition is so much improved from my former state that I would go down on my knees and thank God morning and night, if I thought He ever took notice of the likes of me. I have my sight back, after all. I have my health—for I may say the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society has an excellent remedy for the pox—and agreeable employment. I am here to offer you the same work.”

“Would I pay for it with my eyes?” Lady Beatrice inquired.

“Oh, dear me, no. It would be a crime to spoil your looks, especially when they might be so useful. You were a soldier’s daughter, as I understand it, miss. What would you think of turning your dishonor into a weapon, in a just cause?

“The Society’s very old, you see. In the old days they had to work secretly, or folk would have burnt them for witchcraft, with all the astonishing things they invented. The secrecy was still useful even when times became more enlightened. There are all manner of devices that make our lives less wretched, that first came from the Society. They work to make the world better still.

“Now, it helps them in their work, miss, to have some sway with ministers and members of Parliament. And who better controls a man than a pretty girl, eh? A girl with sufficient charm can unlock a man’s tongue and find out all sorts of things the Society needs to know. A girl with sufficient charm can persuade a man to do all sorts of things he’d never dream of doing, if he thought anyone else could see.

“And I can’t see, of course, or so he thinks, for I never let my secret slip. When a man is a cabinet minister it reassures him to believe that the lady proprietress of his favorite brothel couldn’t identify his face in a court of law. All the easier for us to trap him later. All the easier to persuade him to sign a law into being or vote a certain way, which benefits the Society.

“You and I both know how little it takes to ruin a girl, when a man can make the same mistakes and the world smiles indulgently at him. Wouldn’t you like to make the world more just?

“You and I both know how little our bodies matter, for all the fuss men make over them. Wouldn’t you like to put yours to good use? There are other girls like you—clever girls, well-bred girls. They did one unwise thing, or perhaps, like you, they were unlucky, and the world sent them down to the pavement. But they found they needn’t stay there.

“You needn’t stay there either, miss. We can offer you a clean, quiet room of your own, with a view of St. James’s Park—I never tire of looking at it, myself—and a quiet life, except when working. We need never fear being beaten, or taking ill. We are paid very well. Shall you join us, miss?”

Lady Beatrice considered it.

“I believe I shall,” said she.

And she did, to the great relief of the other streetwalkers.

FOUR:

In Which She Settles In

And Learns Useful Things

Lady Beatrice discovered that Mrs. Corvey had spoken perfect truth. The house near Birdcage Walk was indeed pleasant, commodious, and adjacent to St. James’s Park. Her private room was full of the best air and light to be had in London. It had, moreover, ample shelves for her books, a capacious wardrobe, and a clean and comfortable bed.

She found her sister residents agreeable as well.

Mrs. Otley was, near Birdcage Walk, a rather studious young lady with fossils she had collected at Lyme Regis and a framed engraving of a scene in Pompeii in her room. At Nell Gwynne’s, however, she generally dressed like a jockey, and had moreover a cabinet full of equestrian paraphernalia with which to pander to the tastes of gentlemen who enjoyed being struck with a riding crop while being forced to wear a bit between their teeth.

Miss Rendlesham, though quiet, bespectacled and an enthusiastic gardener, was likewise in the Discipline line, both general and (as needed) specialized. As a rule she dressed in a manner suggesting a schoolmistress, and was an expert at producing the sort of harsh interrogatory tones that made a member of Parliament regress to the age of the schoolroom, where he had been a very naughty boy indeed.

Herbertina Lovelock, on the other hand, was a very good boy, with the appearance of a cupid-faced lad fresh from a public school whereat a number of outré vices were practiced. She wore male attire exclusively, cropped hair pomaded sleek. She also smoked cigars, read the sporting papers with her feet on the fender, and occasionally went to the races. At Nell Gwynne’s she had a wardrobe full of military uniforms both Army and Navy, all with very tight trousers with padding sewn into the knees.

The Misses Devere were three sisters, Jane, Dora, and Maude, blonde, brunette, and auburn-haired respectively. Their work at Nell Gwynne’s consisted of unspecialized harlotry and also, when required, group engagements in which they worked as a team.

They alone were forthcoming to Lady Beatrice on the subject of their pasts: it seemed their Papa had been a gentleman, but ruined himself in the customary manner by drinking, gambling, and speculating in a joint stock company. Depending on whether one heard the story from Jane, Dora, or Maude, their Papa had then either blown his brains out, run away to the Continent with a mistress, or become an opium-smoker in a den in Lime house and fallen to depths of degradation too appalling to describe. Jane played the pianoforte, Dora played the concertina, and Maude sang. They were equally versatile in other matters.

All ladies resident at the house near Birdcage Walk proved goodnatured upon further acquaintance. Lady Beatrice found it pleasant to sit in the common parlour after dinner on Sundays (for Nell Gwynne’s did no business on the Sabbath) and attend to her mending while Herbertina read aloud to them all, or the Misses Devere performed a medley of popular songs, as Miss Rendlesham arranged a vase of flowers from the garden. It was agreed that Lady Beatrice ought not alter her scarlet costume in any respect, since it had such a galvanic effect on customers, but Mrs. Corvey and Herbertina went with her to the shops and the dressmaker’s to have a few ensembles made up, in rather more respectable colors, for day wear. Mrs. Otley presented her with a small figure of the goddess Athena from her collection of antiquities, for, as she said, “You are so very like her, my dear, with those remarkable eyes!”

All in all, Lady Beatrice thought her new situation most agreeable.

Oh, Major, sir, you wouldn’t cane me, would you?” squeaked Herbertina. “Not for such a minor infraction?”

“I’ll do worse than cane you, you young devil,” leered the Major, or rather the Member of Parliament wearing a major’s uniform. He grabbed Herbertina by the arm and dragged her protesting to a plush-upholstered settee. “Drop those breeches and bend over!”

“Oh, Major, sir, must I?”

“That’s an order! By God, sir, I’ll teach you what obedience means!”

“Look through this eyepiece and adjust the lens until the image comes into focus,” said Mrs. Corvey in a low voice, from the adjacent darkened room. Lady Beatrice peered into the camera and beheld the slightly blurry Major gleefully dropping his own breeches.

“How does one adjust it?” Lady Beatrice inquired.

“This ring turns,” explained Mrs. Corvey, pointing. Lady Beatrice turned it and immediately the Major came into focus, very much in flagrante delicto, with Herbertina looking rather bored as she cried out in boyish horror.

“Now squeeze the bulb,” said Mrs. Corvey. Lady Beatrice did so. The gas-jets flared in the room for a moment, but the Major was far too busy to be distracted by the sudden intense brightness, or the faint click.

“Have we produced a daguerreotype?” inquired Lady Beatrice, rather intrigued, for she had just been reading about them in a scientific periodical to which Miss Rendlesham subscribed.

“Oh, no, dear; this is a much more advanced process. Something the Society gave us.” Mrs. Corvey slid out the plate and slipped in another. “It produces an image that can be printed on paper. That shot was simply for our files. We’ll have to wait until he’s a bit quieter for an image we can really use. Herbertina will give you the signal.”

Lady Beatrice watched carefully as the Major rode to his frenzy and at last collapsed over Herbertina. They ended up reclining on the settee, somewhat scantily clad.

“Now,” said the Major, wheezing somewhat, “Tell me how enormous I was, and how overpowered you were.”

“Oh, Major, sir, how could you do such a thing to a young man? I’ve never felt so helpless,” said Herbertina tearfully, making a sign behind her back. Lady Beatrice saw it and squeezed the bulb again. Once more the lamps flared. The Major squinted irritably but paid no further heed, for Herbertina quite held his attention over the next five minutes with her imaginative account of how terrified and submissive the young soldier felt, and how gargantuan were the Major’s personal dimensions.

Sadly, neither Mrs. Corvey nor Lady Beatrice heard her inspired improvisations, for they had both retreated to a small room, lit with red De la Rue’s lamps and fitted up like a chemist’s laboratory. There they had fastened cloth masks over their mouths and noses and were busily developing the plates.

“Oh, these are very good,” said Mrs. Corvey approvingly. “Upon my soul, dear, you have a talent for photography.”

“Are they to be used for blackmail?”

“Beg pardon? Oh, no; which is to say, only if it should become necessary. And if it should, this one—” she held up the second photograph, with the Major lying on the settee—“can be copied over onto a daguerreotype, and presented as an inducement to cooperate. For the present, the pictures will go into his file. We keep a file, you see, on each of the customers. So useful, when business is brisk, to have a record of each gentleman’s likes and dislikes.”

“I expect it is indeed. When does it become necessary to blackmail, if I may ask?”

“Why, when the Society requires it. I must say, it isn’t necessary often. They’re quite persuasive on their own account, and seldom have to resort to such extreme measures. Still, one never knows.” Mrs. Corvey hung the prints up to dry. She turned the lever that switched off the De la Rue’s lamp and they left the room, carefully shutting the door behind them. The two women walked out into the hidden corridor that ran between the private chambers. From the rooms to either side of the corridor could be heard roars of passion, or pleading cries, and now and again the rhythmic swish and crack of a birch rod over ardent confessions of wickedness.

“Are all of the customers men of rank?” Lady Beatrice inquired, raising her voice slightly to be heard over a baritone bawling Yes, yes, I did steal the pies!

“Yes, as a rule; though now and again we treat members of the Society. The fellows whose business it is to go out and manage the Society’s affairs, mostly; the rank and file, if you like. They want their pleasures as much as the next man, and most of them have to work a good deal harder to earn them, so we oblige. That is rather a different matter, however, from servicing statesmen and the like.

“In fact, there’s rather a charming custom—at least I find it so—of treating the new fellows, before they’re first sent on the Society’s business. Give them a bit of joy before they go out traveling, poor things, because now and again they do fall in the line of duty. So sad.”

“Is it dangerous work?”

“It can be.” Mrs. Corvey gave a vague wave of her hand. They entered the private chamber that served as Mrs. Corvey’s office, stepping through the sliding panel and closing it just as Violet, the maid-of-all-work, entered from the reception area beyond.

“If you please, Mrs. Corvey, Mr. Felmouth’s just stepped out of the Ascending Room this minute to pay a call. He’s got his case with him.”

“He’ll want his tea, then. How nice! I was hoping we’d be allotted a few new toys.” Mrs. Corvey lifted a device from her desk, a sort of speaking-tube of brass and black wax, and after a moment spoke into it: “Tea, please, with a tray of savories. The reception room. Thank you.”

She set the device down. Lady Beatrice regarded it with quiet wonder. “And that would be another invention from the Society?”

“Only made by them; it was one of our own ladies invented it. Miss Gleason. Since retired to a nice little cottage in Scotland on the bonus, I am pleased to say. Sends us a dozen grouse every Christmas. Now, come with me, dear, and I’ll introduce you to Mr. Felmouth. Such an obliging man!”

FIVE:

In Which Ingenious Devices

Are Introduced

The reception room was rather larger than a private parlor, with fine old dark paneling on the walls and a thick carpet. It was lit by more De la Rue’s lamps, glowing steadily behind tinted shades of glass. A middle-aged gentleman had already removed his coat and hat and hung them up, and rolled up his shirtsleeves; he was perched on the edge of a divan, leaning down to rummage in an open valise, but he jumped to his feet as they entered.

“Mr. Felmouth,” said Mrs. Corvey, extending her hand.

“Mrs. Corvey!” Mr. Felmouth bowed and, taking her hand, kissed it.

“And may I introduce our latest sister? Lady Beatrice. Lady Beatrice, Mr. Felmouth, from the Society. Mr. Felmouth is one of the Society’s artificers.”

“How do you do, sir?”

“Enchanted to make your acquaintance, Ma’am,” Mr. Felmouth said, stammering rather. He coughed, blushed, and tugged self-consciously at his rolled-up sleeves. “I do hope you’ll excuse the liberty, my dear—one gets so caught up in one’s work.”

“Pray, be seated,” said Mrs. Corvey, gliding to her own chair. At that moment a chime rang and a hitherto concealed door in the paneling opened. A pair of respectably clad parlormaids bore in the tea things and arranged them on a table by Mrs. Corvey’s chair before exiting again through the same door. Tea was served, accompanied by polite conversation on trivial matters, though the whole time Mr. Felmouth’s glance kept wandering from Lady Beatrice to the floor, and hence to his open valise, and then on to Mrs. Corvey.

At last he set his cup and saucer to one side. “Delightful refreshment. My compliments to your staff, Ma’am. Now, I must inquire—how are the present optics suiting you, my dear?”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Corvey. “I particularly enjoy the telescoping feature. It’s quite useful at the seaside, though of course one must take care not to be noticed.”

“Of course. And the implant continues comfortable? No irritation?”

“None nowadays, Mr. Felmouth.”

“Very good. Happy to hear it.” Mr. Felmouth rubbed his hands together. “However, I have been experimenting with an improvement or two . . . may I demonstrate?”

“By all means, Mr. Felmouth.”

At once he delved into his valise and brought up a leatherbound box about the size of a spectacle case. He opened it with a flourish. Lady Beatrice saw a set of optics very similar to those revealed when Mrs. Corvey had removed her goggles, as she did now. Lady Beatrice involuntarily looked away, then looked back as Mr. Felmouth presented the case to Mrs. Corvey.

“You will observe, Ma’am, that these are a good deal lighter. Mr. Stubblefield in Fabrication discovered a new alloy,” said Mr. Felmouth, unrolling a case of small tools. Mrs. Corvey’s optics extended outward with a whirr as she examined the new apparatus.

“Yes indeed, Mr. Felmouth, they are lighter. And seem more complicated.”

“Ah! That is because . . . if I may . . .” Mr. Felmouth leaned forward and applied a tiny screwdriver to Mrs. Corvey’s present set of optics, losing his train of thought for a moment as he worked carefully. Lady Beatrice found herself unable to watch as the optics were removed. “Because they are greatly improved, or at least that is my hope. Now then . . . my apologies, Ma’am, the blindness is entirely temporary . . . I will just fasten in the new set, and I think you will be pleased with the result.”

Lady Beatrice made herself look up, and saw Mrs. Corvey patiently enduring having a new set of optics installed in her living face.

“There,” said Mrs. Corvey, “I can see again.”

“Splendid,” said Mr. Felmouth, tightening the last screw. He sat back. “I trust you find them comfortable?”

“Quite,” said Mrs. Corvey, turning her face from side to side. “Oh!” Her optics telescoped outward, a full two inches farther than the range of the previous set, and the whirring sound they produced was much quieter. “Oh, yes, greatly improved!”

“It was my thought that if you held your hands up to obscure them at full extension, you could give anyone observing you the impression that you are looking through a pair of opera glasses,” said Mr. Felmouth. “However, permit me to demonstrate the real improvement.”

He rose to his feet and, going to the nearest lamp, extinguished it by turning a key at its base. He did this with each of the lamps in turn. When he had extinguished the last lamp the room was plunged into Stygian blackness. His voice came out of the darkness:

“Now, Ma’am, if you will give the left-hand lens casing a three-quarter turn . . .”

Lady Beatrice heard a faint click, and then a cry of delight from Mrs. Corvey.

“Why, the room is quite light! Though everything appears green. Ought it?”

“That is the effect of the filter,” said Mr. Felmouth in satisfaction, as he switched on the lamp again. “But it was, I think, bright enough to read by? Yes, that was what I’d hoped for. We will improve it, of course, but from this moment I may confidently assert that you need never endure another moment of darkness, if you are not so inclined.”

“How very useful this should prove,” said Mrs. Corvey, in satisfaction. “My compliments, Mr. Felmouth! And please extend my thanks to the other kind gentlemen in Fabrication.”

“Of course. As it happens, I do have one or two other small items,” said Mr. Felmouth, as he went from one lamp to another, switching them back on. He sat down once more and, reaching into his bag, drew out what appeared to be a locket. “Here we are!”

He held it up for their inspection. “Now, ladies, wouldn’t you say that was a perfectly ordinary ornament?” Lady Beatrice leaned close to see it; Mrs. Corvey merely extended her optics.

“I should have said so, yes,” said Lady Beatrice. Mr. Felmouth raised his index finger, revealing the small hole in the locket’s side, with a smaller protrusion a half-inch below.

“No indeed, ladies. This is, rather, positively the last word in miniaturization. Behold.” He opened it to reveal a tiny portrait. “And—” Mr. Felmouth thumbed a catch and the portrait swung up, to display a compartment beyond, in which were a minute steel barrel and spring mechanism. “A pistol! The trigger is this knob just below the muzzle. Hold it so—aim and fire. Though for best results I recommend firing point-blank, if at all possible.”

“Ingenious, I must say,” said Mrs. Corvey. To Lady Beatrice she added, a little apologetically, “We do find ourselves in need of self-defense, now and then, you see.”

“But surely the bullet must be too small to do much harm,” said Lady Beatrice.

“You might think so,” said Mr. Felmouth. He brought up an ammunition case, no bigger than a pillbox, and opened it to reveal a dozen tiny pin cartridges ranged in a rack, with a pair of tweezers for loading. “No bigger than flies, are they? However—one point three seconds after lodging in the target, they explode. Not with a quarter of the force of a Guy Fawkes squib, but should the bullet happen to be lodged in the brain or heart at the time, that would be quite enough to drop an assailant in his tracks.”

“I would fire into my assailant’s ear,” said Lady Beatrice thoughtfully. “The entrance wound would be undetectable, and anyone looking at him would suppose the man had died of a stroke.”

Mrs. Corvey and Mr. Felmouth stared at her. “I see you are not disposed to be squeamish, dear,” said Mrs. Corvey at last. “You’ll do very well.”

The Misses Devere came wandering sadly into the reception area, dressed in costumes representing a doll, Puss in Boots and a harlequin respectively. “Our four o’clock gentleman sent word to say he is unavoidably detained and can’t come until tomorrow,” said Jane, “and we can’t get the catch on the back of Dora’s costume unfastened. Lady Beatrice, will you see what you can do? Oh! Hello, Mr. Felmouth!” Jane skipped across the room and sat on his knee. “Have you brought us any toys, Father Christmas?”

Mr. Felmouth, who had gone quite scarlet, sputtered a moment before managing to say “Er—yes, as it happens, I do have one or two more items. H’em! If you’ll permit me . . .” He pulled the bag up on his other knee and took out a couple of the pasteboard cards of buttons generally to be found at notions shops. There were approximately a dozen buttons on each card. One set resembled oystershell pearl buttons; the others appeared to be amber glass.

“The very thing for unruly customers,” Mr. Felmouth said, waving the pearl buttons. “Sew them onto a garment, and they appear indistinguishable from ordinary buttons. They are, however, a profoundly strong sedative in a hard sugar shell. You have only to drop one of these in a glass of port wine, or indeed any beverage, and within seconds the button will dissolve. Any gentleman imbibing a wineglassful will fall into a profound sleep within minutes.”

“And the amber buttons?” inquired Lady Beatrice, who had risen and was unworking the catch on the back of the Puss in Boots costume.

“Ah! These are really useful. One button, dissolved in a man’s drink, will induce a state of talkative idiocy. Gently questioned, he will tell you anything, everything. Not all of it will be truthful, I suspect, but I am confident in your powers of discernment. When the drug wears off he will have absolutely no memory of the episode.” Mr. Felmouth presented the cards to Mrs. Corvey.

“Splendid,” said Mrs. Corvey.

“Oh, won’t the amber ones look lovely on my yellow satin?” cried Dora, popping out of the top of her costume as Lady Beatrice freed her hair from the catch. Mr. Felmouth coughed and averted his eyes.

“They would, dear, but they really ought to go to Miss Rendlesham. She would make the best use of them, after all,” said Mrs. Corvey. Dora pouted.

“Dear Mr. Felmouth, can’t you make up some more in different colors? Miss Rendlesham never wears yellow.” Dora leaned close and tickled Mr. Felmouth under his chin with her paw-gloved hand. “Please, Mr. Felmouth? Pussy will catch you a nice fish.”

“It, er, ought to be quite easy,” said Mr. Felmouth, breathing a little heavily. “Yes, I’m sure I should find nothing easier. Rely on me, ladies.”

“As ever, Mr. Felmouth,” said Mrs. Corvey.

SIX:

In Which Disquieting Intelligence

Is Conveyed

Sir Richard H. was of advanced years, quite stout, and so he preferred to lie on his back and engage the angels of bliss, as he called them, astraddle. He lay now groaning with happiness as Lady Beatrice rode away, her gray gaze fixed on the brass rail of the bed, her red mouth curved in a professional smile in which there was something faintly mocking. Her mind was some distance off, wondering how The Luck of Barry Lyndon was going to turn out, for she had not yet seen a copy of the latest Fraser’s Magazine.

At some point her musings were interrupted by the realization that Sir Richard had stopped moving. Lady Beatrice’s mind consented to return to the vicinity of her flesh long enough to determine that Sir Richard was, in fact, still alive, if drenched with sweat and puffing like a railway engine. “Are you quite all right, my dear?” she inquired. Sir Richard nodded feebly. She swung herself off him and down, lithe as though he were a particularly well-upholstered vaulting horse, and checked his pulse nevertheless. Having determined that he was unlikely to expire in the immediate future, Lady Beatrice gave him a brief, brisk sponging off with eau de cologne. He was snoring by the time she drew the blanket up over him and went off to bathe in the adjacent chamber.

Lady Beatrice tended her own body with the same businesslike impartiality. During her bout with Sir Richard, her nether regions might have been made of cotton batting like a doll’s, for all the sensation she had derived from the act. Even now there was only a minor soreness from chafing. Applying lotion, she marveled once again at the absurd fuss everyone made, swooning over flesh, fearing it, dreading it, lusting after it, when none of it really mattered at all . . .

She knew there had been a time when the sight of Sir Richard’s naked body with its purple tool would have caused her to scream in maidenly dismay; now the poor old thing seemed no more lewd or horrid than a broken-down cart horse. And what had her handsome suitors been but so many splendid racing animals, until they lay blue and stiff in a mountain gorge, when they were even less? They might have had shining souls that ascended to Heaven; it was certainly comforting to imagine so. Bodies in general, however, being so impermanent, were scarcely worth distressing oneself.

Lady Beatrice got dressed and returned to the boudoir, where she settled into an armchair and retrieved a copy of Oliver Twist from its depths. She read quietly until Sir Richard woke with a start, in the midst of a snore. Sitting up, he asked foggily where his trousers were. Lady Beatrice set her book aside and helped him dress himself, after which she took his arm and escorted him out to the reception area, where he toddled off into the ascending room without so much as a backward glance at her.

“He might have said ‘thank you,’ ” observed Mrs. Corvey, from her chair by the tea-table.

“A little befuddled this evening, I think,” said Lady Beatrice, leaning down to adjust her stocking. “Have I anyone else scheduled tonight?”

“No, dear. Mrs. Otley is entertaining his lordship until midnight; then we may all go home to our beds.”

“Oh, good. May I ask a favor? Will you remind me to look for the latest number of Fraser’s tomorrow? The last installment—” Lady Beatrice broke off, and Mrs. Corvey turned her head, for both had heard the distinct chime that indicated the ascending room was coming back down with a passenger.

“How curious,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Generally the dining area closes at ten o’clock.”

“I’ll take him,” said Lady Beatrice, assuming her professional smile and seating herself on the divan.

“Would you, dear? Miss Rendlesham had such a lot of cleaning up to do, after the duke left, that I gave her the rest of the evening off. You’re very kind.”

“It is no trouble,” Lady Beatrice assured her. The panel slid open and a gentleman emerged. He was bespectacled and balding, with the look of a senior bank clerk, and in fact carried a file case under his arm. He swept his gaze past Lady Beatrice, with no more than a perfunctory nod, focusing his attention on Mrs. Corvey.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Mr. Greene?” Mrs. Corvey rose to her feet. “What an unexpected pleasure, Sir. And what, may one ask, is your pleasure?”

“Not here on my own account,” said Mr. Greene, going a little red. “Though, er, of course I should like to have the leisure to visit soon. Informally. You know. Hem. In any case, Ma’am, may we withdraw to your office? There is a matter I wish to discuss.”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Corvey.

“I don’t mind sitting up. Shall I watch for any late guests?” Lady Beatrice inquired of Mrs. Corvey. Mr. Greene turned and looked at her again, more closely now.

“Ah. The new member. I knew your father, my dear. Please, join us. I think perhaps you ought to hear what I have to say as well.”

Mr. Green, having accepted a cup of cocoa in the inner office, drank, set it aside, and cleared his throat.

“I don’t suppose either of you has ever met Lord Basmond?”

“No indeed,” said Mrs. Corvey.

“Nor have I,” said Lady Beatrice.

“Quite an old family. Estate in Hertfordshire. Present Lord, Arthur Rawdon, is twenty-six. Last of the line. Unmarried, did nothing much at Cambridge, lived in town until two years ago, when he returned to the family home and proceeded to borrow immense sums of money. Hasn’t gambled; hasn’t been spending it on a mistress; hasn’t invested it. Has given out that he’s making improvements on Basmond Hall, though why such inordinate amounts of rare earths should be required in home repair, to say nothing of such bulk quantities of some rather peculiar chemicals, is a mystery.

“There were workmen on the property, housed there, and they won’t talk and they can’t be bribed to. The old gardener does visit the local public house, and was overheard to make disgruntled remarks about his lordship destroying the yew maze, but on being approached, declined to speak further on the subject.”

“What does it signify, Mr. Greene?” said Mrs. Corvey.

“What indeed? The whole business came to our attention when he purchased the rare earths and chemicals; for, you know, we have men who watch the traffic in certain sorts of goods. When an individual exceeds a certain amount in purchases, we want to know the reason why. Makes us uneasy.

“We set a man on it, of course. His reports indicate that Lord Basmond, despite his poor showing at university, nevertheless seems to have turned inventor. Seems to have made some sort of extraordinary discovery. Seems to have decided to keep it relatively secret. And most certainly has sent invitations to four millionaires, three of them foreign nationals I might add, inviting them to a private auction at Basmond Park.”

“He intends to sell it, then,” said Lady Beatrice. “Whatever it is. And imagines he can get a great deal of money for it.”

“Indeed, miss,” said Mr. Greene. “The latest report from our man is somewhat overdue; that, and the news of this auction (which came to us from another source) have us sufficiently alarmed to take steps. Fortunately, Lord Basmond has given us an opportunity. It will, however, require a certain amount of, ah, immoral behavior.”

“And so you have come to us,” said Mrs. Corvey, with a wry smile.

“It will also require bravery. And quick wits,” Mr. Greene added, coloring slightly. “Lord Basmond sent out a request to a well-known establishment for a party of four, er, girls to supply entertainment for his guests. We intercepted the request. We require four volunteers from amongst your ladies here, Mrs. Corvey, to send to the affair.”

“And what are we to do, other than service millionaires?” asked Lady Beatrice. Mr. Greene coughed.

“You understand, it is strictly voluntary—but we want to know what sort of invention could fetch a price only a millionaire could pay. Is it, for example, something that touches on our national security? And we need to know what has become of the man we got inside.”

“We shall be happy to oblige,” said Mrs. Corvey, with a graceful wave of her hand.

“We would be profoundly grateful, ma’am.” Mr. Greene stood and bowed, offering her the file case. “All particulars are here. Communication on the usual frequency. I shall leave the matter in your capable hands, ma’am.”

He turned to depart, and abruptly turned back. Very red in the face now, he took Lady Beatrice’s hand and, after a fumbling moment of indecision, shook it awkwardly.

“God bless you, my dear,” he blurted. “First to volunteer. You do your father credit.” He fled for the reception chamber, and a moment later they heard him departing in the ascending room.

“Am I to assume there are certain dangers we may face?” said Lady Beatrice.

“Of course, dear,” said Mrs. Corvey, who had opened the file case and was examining the documents within. “But then, what whore does not endure hazards?”

“And do we do this sort of work very often?”

“We do.” Mrs. Corvey looked up at her, smiling slightly. “We are no common whores, dear.”

SEVEN:

In Which Visitors Arrive At Basmond Hall

As the village of Little Basmond was some distance from the nearest railway line, they took a hired coach into Hertfordshire. Mrs. Corvey sat wedged into a corner of the coach, studying the papers in the file case, as the Devere sisters chattered about every conceivable subject. Lady Beatrice gazed out the window at the rolling hills, green even in winter, unlike any that she had ever known. The streets of London were a realm out of nature, easy to learn, since one city is in its essentials like any other; but the land was another matter. Lady Beatrice found it all lovely, in its greenness, in the vastness of the tracts of woodland with their austere gray branches; but her senses were still attuned to a hotter, dryer, brighter place. She wondered whether she would come in time to grow accustomed to—she very nearly said Home to herself, and then concluded that the word had lost any real meaning.

“. . . but it was only fifty-four inches wide, and so I was obliged to buy fifteen yards rather than what the pattern called for—” Jane was saying, when Mrs. Corvey cleared her throat. All fell silent at once, looking at her expectantly.

“Arthur Charles Fitzhugh Rawdon,” she said, and drew out a slip of pasteboard the size of a playing card. Lady Beatrice leaned forward to peer at it. It appeared to be a copy of a daguerreotype. Its subject, holding his lapels and looking self-important, stood beside a Roman column against a painted backdrop of Pompeii. Lord Basmond was slender and pale, with small regular features and eyes of liquid brilliance; Lady Beatrice had thought him handsome, but for the fact that his eyes were set somewhat close together.

“Our host,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Or our employer, if you like; one or all of you may be required to do him.”

“What a pretty fellow!” said Maude.

“He looks bad-tempered, though,” observed Dora.

“And I am quite sure all of you are practiced enough in the art of being agreeable to avoid provoking him,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Your work will be to discover what, precisely, is being auctioned at this affair. We may be fortunate enough to have it spoken of in our presence, with no more thought of our understanding than if we were dogs. He may be more discreet, and in that case you will need to get it out of the guests. I suspect the lot of you will be handed around like bonbons, but if any one of them takes any one of you to his bedroom, then I strongly recommend the use of one of Mr. Felmouth’s nostrums.”

“Oh, jolly good,” said Dora in a pleased voice, lifting the edge of her traveling cloak to admire the amber buttons on her yellow satin gown.

“Our other objective . . .” Mrs. Corvey sorted through the case and drew out a second photograph. “William Reginald Ludbridge.” She held up the image. The subject of the portrait faced square ahead, staring into the camera’s lens. He was a man of perhaps forty-five, with blunt pugnacious features rendered slightly diabolical by a moustache and goatee. His gaze was shrewd and leonine.

“One of our brothers in the Society,” said Mrs. Corvey. “The gentleman sent to Basmond Park before us, in the guise of a laborer. He seems to have gone missing. We are to find him, if possible, and render any assistance we may. I expect that will be my primary concern, while you lot concentrate on the other gentlemen.”

At that moment the coach slowed and, shortly, stopped. The coachman descended and opened the door. “The Basmond Arms, ladies,” he informed them, offering his arm to Mrs. Corvey.

“Mamma, the kind man has put out his arm for you,” said Maude. Mrs. Corvey pretended to grope, located the coachman’s arm, and allowed herself to be helped down from the coach.

“So very kind!” she murmured, and stood there feeling about in her purse while the other ladies were assisted into Basmond High Street, and their trunks lifted down. Temporarily anonymous and respectable, they stood all together outside the Basmond Arms, regarded with mild interest by passersby. At length the publican ventured out and inquired whether he might be of service.

“Thank you, good man, but his lordship is sending a carriage to meet us,” said Mrs. Corvey, just as Jane pointed and cried, “Oooh, look at the lovely barouche!” The publican, having by this time noticed their paint and the general style of their attire, narrowed his eyes and stepped back.

“Party for the Hall?” inquired the grinning driver. He pulled up before the public house. “Scramble up, girls!”

Muttering, the publican turned and went back indoors as the ladies approached the carriage. The driver jumped down, loaded on their trunks, and sprang back into his seat. “How about the redhead sits beside me?” said the driver, with a leer.

“How about you give us a hand up like a gentleman, duckie?” retorted Maude.

“Say no more.” The driver obliged by giving them each rather more than a hand up, after which Maude obligingly settled beside him and submitted herself to a kiss, a series of pinches and a brief covert exploration of her ankle. Lady Beatrice, observing this, fingered her pistol-locket thoughtfully, but Maude seemed equal to defending herself.

“Naughty boy!” said Maude, giving the driver an openly intimate fondle in return. The driver blushed and sat straight. He shook the reins and the carriage moved off along the high street, running a gauntlet of disgusted looks from such townsfolk as happened to be lounging on their front steps or leaning over their garden walls.

“My gracious, they ain’t quite a friendly lot here, are they?” Maude inquired pertly, in rather coarser accents than was her wont. “Doesn’t his lordship have working girls to call very often?”

“You’re the first,” said the driver, who had recovered a little of his composure. Looking over his shoulder to be certain they had passed the last of the houses, he slipped his arm around Maude’s waist.

“The first! And here we thought he was a right sporting buck, didn’t we, girls? What’s your name, by-the-bye?”

“Ralph, miss—I mean—my dear.”

“Well, you’re a handsome chap, Ralph, and I’m sure we’ll get on.” Maude leaned into his arm. “So his lordship ain’t a bit of an exquisite, I hope? Seems a bit funny him hiring us on if he is.”

Ralph guffawed. “Not from what I heard. He ain’t no sporting buck, but he did get a girl with child when he was at Cambridge. Sent her back here to wait it out, but the little thing died in any case.”

“What, the girl?”

“No! The baby. It wasn’t right. His lordship’s been more careful since, I reckon.”

“Well, what’s he want with us, then?” Maude reached up and stroked Ralph’s cheek, tracing a line with her fingertip down to his collar. “A big stout man like you, I know you know what to do with a girl. His lordship don’t fancy funny games?”

“I reckon you’re for his party,” said Ralph, shivering. “For the guests.”

“Oooh! We likes parties, girls, don’t we?” Maude looked over her shoulder. As she looked back Ralph grabbed her chin and gave her a violent kiss of some length, until Jane was obliged to tell him rather sharply to mind the horse.

“It’s all right,” said Maude, surfacing for air with a gasp. “Look here, girls, I’ve taken such a fancy to our dear friend Ralph, would you ever mind very much if we pulled up a moment?”

“Please yourself,” said Mrs. Corvey. The carriage happened to be proceeding down a long private drive along an aisle of trees at that moment, and Ralph steered the carriage to one side before taking Maude’s hand and leaping down. They disappeared into the shrubbery. Lady Beatrice looked at Mrs. Corvey and raised an eyebrow in inquiry. Mrs. Corvey shrugged. “Helps to have friends and allies, doesn’t it?” she said.

“Is that Basmond Hall?” Dora stood and peered up the aisle at a gray bulk of masonry just visible on a low hill beyond rhododendrons. Mrs. Corvey glanced once toward the shrubbery and, removing her goggles a moment, extended her optics for a closer look at the building.

“That would be it,” she said, replacing her goggles. “Historic place. Dates back to the Normans and such.”

“An old family, then,” said Lady Beatrice.

“And his lordship the last of them,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Interesting, isn’t it? I do wonder what sort of fellow he is.”

In due course Maude and Ralph emerged from the bushes, rather breathless. Ralph swept Maude up on the seat with markedly more gallantry than before, jumping up beside her bright-eyed.

“Had a nice rattle, did you?” inquired Mrs. Corvey. Ralph ducked his head sheepishly, but Maude patted his arm in a proprietary way.

“He’s a jolly big chap, dear Ralph is. But we shan’t mention our little tumble to his lordship, shall we? Wouldn’t want you to lose your place, Ralph dear.”

“No, ma’am,” said Ralph. “Very kind of you, I’m sure.”

They proceeded up the drive and beheld Basmond Hall in all its gloomy splendor. If Lord Basmond had given home improvement as his reason for borrowing money, it was certainly a plausible excuse; for the Hall was an ancient motte and bailey of flints, half-buried under a thick growth of ivy. No Tudor-era Rawdons had enlarged it with halftimbering and windows; no Georgian Rawdons had given it any Palladian grace or statues. Nor did it seem now that the Rawdon of the present age had any intention of making the place over into respectable Gothic Revival; there was no sign that so much as a few pounds had been spent to repoint the masonry.

Ralph drove the carriage up the slope, over the crumbling causeway that had replaced the drawbridge, and so under the portcullis into the courtyard.

“How positively medieval,” observed Dora.

“And a bit awkward to get out of, if one had to,” murmured Mrs. Corvey under her breath. “Caution is called for, ladies.”

Lady Beatrice nodded. It all looked like an illustration from one of her schoolbooks, or perhaps Ivanhoe; the courtyard scattered with straw, the stables under the lowering wall, the covered well, the Hall with its steeppitched roof and the squat castle behind it. All it wanted was a churl polishing armor on a bench.

Instead, a black-suited butler emerged from the great front door and gestured frantically at Ralph. “Take them to the trade entrance!”

Ralph shrugged and drove the wagon around to a small door at the rear of the Hall. Here he stopped and helped the ladies down as grandly as any knight-errant, while the butler popped out of the trade door and stood there wringing his hands in detestation.

“Here you go, Pilkins,” said Ralph. “Fresh-delivered roses!”

Pilkins shooed them inside and they found themselves in the back-entryway to the kitchens, amid crates of wines and delicacies ordered from some of the finest shops in London. Some two or three parlormaids were peering around a door frame at them, only to be ordered away in a hoarse bawl by the cook, who came and stared.

“I never thought I’d see the day,” she said, shaking her head grimly. “Common whores in Lord Basmond’s very house!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mrs. Corvey, tapping her cane sharply on the flagstones. “Very high-priced and quality whores, ordered special, and my girls would be obliged to you for a nice cup of tea after such a long journey, I’m sure.”

“Fetch them something, Mrs. Duncan,” said Pilkins. Pursing his mouth, he turned to Mr. Corvey. “I assume you are their . . . proprietress, madam?”

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Corvey. “And am in charge of their finances as well. We was promised a goodly sum for this occasion, and I’m sure his lordship won’t be so mean as to renege.”

“His lordship will, in fact, be here presently to see whether your—your girls—are satisfactory,” said Pilkins, his elocution a little hampered by the difficulty he had unpursing his lips.

“Of course they’re satisfactory! Girls, drop your cloaks,” said Mrs. Corvey.

They obeyed her. The plain gray traveling gear fell away to reveal the ladies in all their finery. Lady Beatrice wore her customary scarlet, and the Devere sisters had affected jewel tones: Maude in emerald green, Jane in royal blue, and Dora in golden yellow satin. The effect of such voluptuous color in such a drab chamber was breathtaking and a little barbaric. Pilkins, for one, found himself recalling certain verses of Scripture. To his horror, he became aware that his manhood was asserting itself.

“If that ain’t what his lordship ordered, I’m sure I don’t know what is,” said Mrs. Corvey. Pilkins was unable to reply, for several reasons that need not be given here, and in the poignant silence that followed they heard footsteps hurrying down the stairs and along the corridor.

“Are those the whores?” cried an impatient voice. Arthur Rawdon, Lord Basmond, entered the room.

“None other,” said Mrs. Corvey. Lord Basmond halted involuntarily, with a gasp of astonishment upon seeing them.

“By God! I’m getting my money’s worth, at least!”

“I should hope so. My girls are very much in demand, you know,” said Mrs. Corvey. “And they don’t do the commoner sort of customer.”

“Ah.” Lord Basmond gawked at her. “Blind. And you would be their . . .”

“Procuress, my lord.”

“Yes.” Lord Basmond rubbed his hands together as he walked slowly round the ladies, who obligingly struck attitudes of refined invitation. “Yes, well. They’re not poxed, I hope?”

“If you was at all familiar with my establishment, sir, you would know how baseless any allegations of the sort must be,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Only look, my lord! Bloom of youth, pink of health, and not so much as a crablouse between the four of ’em.”

“We’d be happy to give his lordship a closer look at the goods,” said Dora, fingering her buttons suggestively. “What about a nice roll between the sheets before tea, dear, eh?” But Lord Basmond backed away from her.

“No! No thank you. Y-you must be fresh for my guests. Have they been told about the banquet?”

“Not yet, my lord,” said Pilkins, blotting sweat from his face with a handkerchief.

“Well, tell them! Get them into their costumes and rehearse them! The business must proceed perfectly, do you understand?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“And where are my girls to lodge, your lordship?” Mrs. Corvey inquired. Lord Basmond, who had turned as though to depart, halted with an air of astonishment.

“Lodge? Er—I assume they will lie with the guests.”

“I ain’t, however,” said Mrs. Corvey. “And do require a decent place to sleep and wash, you know.”

“I suppose so,” said Lord Basmond. “Well then. Hem. We’ll just have a bed made up for you in . . . erm . . .” He turned his back on the ladies and gestured wildly at Pilkins, mouthing in silence The closet behind the stables, and pointed across the yard to be sure Pilkins got the point. “A nice little room below the coachman’s, quite cozy.”

“How very kind,” said Mrs. Corvey.

But the window looks out on the— mouthed Pilkins, with an alarmed gesture. Lord Basmond grimaced and, with his index finger, drew Xs in the air before his eyes.

She won’t see anything, you idiot, he mouthed. Pilkins looked affronted, but subsided.

“Certainly, my lord. I’ll have Daisy see to it at once,” he replied.

“See that you do.” Lord Basmond turned and strode from the room.

EIGHT:

In Which Proper Historical Costuming Is Discussed

They were grudgingly served tea in the pantry, and then ushered into another low dark room wherein were a great number of florist’s boxes and a neatly folded stack of bedsheets.

“Those are your costumes,” said Pilkins, with a sniff.

“Rather too modest, aren’t they?” remarked Lady Beatrice. “Or not modest enough. What are we intended to do with them?”

Pilkins studied the floor. “His lordship wishes you to fashion them into, er, togas. The entertainment planned is to resemble, as closely as possible, a—hem—bacchanal of the ancient Romans. And he wishes you to resemble, ah, nymphs dressed in togas.”

“But the toga was worn by men,” Lady Beatrice informed him. Pilkins looked up, panic-stricken, and gently Lady Beatrice pressed on: “I suspect that what his lordship requires is the chiton, as worn by the ancient hetaerae.”

“If you say so,” stammered Pilkins. “With laurel wreaths and all.”

“But the laurel wreath was rather worn by—”

“Bless your heart, dear, if his lordship wishes the girls to wear laurel wreaths on their heads, I’m sure they shall,” said Mrs. Corvey. “And what must they do, besides the obvious? Dance, or something?”

“In fact, they are to bear in the dessert,” said Pilkins, resorting to his handkerchief once more. “Rather a large and elaborate refreshment on a pallet between two poles. And if they could somehow contrive to dance whilst bringing it in, his lordship would prefer it.”

“We’ll do our best, ducks,” said Maude dubiously.

“And there are some finger cymbals in that red morocco case, and his lordship wishes that they might be played upon as you enter.”

“In addition to dancing and carrying in the dessert,” said Lady Beatrice.

“Perhaps you might practice,” said Pilkins. “It is now half past noon and the dinner will be served at eight o’clock precisely.”

“Never you fear,” said Mrs. Corvey. “My girls is nothing if not versatile.”

At that moment they heard the sound of a coach entering the courtyard. “The first of the guests,” exclaimed Pilkins, and bolted for the door, where he halted and called back “Sort out the costumes for yourselves, please,” before closing the door on them.

“Nice,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Jane, dear, just open the window for us?”

Jane turned and obliged, exerting herself somewhat to pull the swollen wood of the casement free. The light so admitted was not much improved, for the window was tiny and blocked by a great deal of ivy. “Shall I try to pull a few leaves?” Jane asked.

“Not necessary, dear.” Mrs. Corvey stepped close to the window and, removing her goggles, extended her optics through the cover of the vines.

“What do you see?”

“I expect this is the Russian,” said Mrs. Corvey. “At least, that’s a Russian crest on his coach. Prince Nakhimov, that was the name. Mother was Prussian; inherited businesses from her and invested, and it’s made him very rich indeed. Well! And there he is.”

“What’s he look like?” asked Maude.

“He’s quite large,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Has a beard. Well dressed. Footman, coachman, valet. There they go—he’s been let off at the front door, I expect. Well, and who’s this? Another carriage! Ah, now that must be the Turk. Ali Pasha.”

“Oh! Has he got a turban on?”

“No, dear, one of those red sugar-loaf hats. And a military uniform with a lot of ornament. Some sort of official that’s made a fortune in the Sultan’s service.”

“Has he got a carriage full of wives?”

“If he had, I should hardly think he’d bring them to a party of this sort. No, same as the other fellow: footman, driver, valet. And here’s the next one! This would be the Frenchman, now. Count de Mortain, the brief said; I expect that’s his coat-of-arms. Millionaire like the others, because his family did some favors for Bonaparte, but mostly the wealth’s in his land. A bit cash-poor. Wonder if Lord Basmond knows?

“And here’s the last one. Sir George Spiggott. No question he’s a millionaire; pots of money from mills in the north. Bad-tempered-looking man, I must say. Well, ladies, one for each of you; and I doubt you’ll get to choose.”

“I suppose Lord Basmond is a bit of a fairy prince after all,” said Maude.

“Might be, I suppose.” Mrs. Corvey turned away from the window. “Notwithstanding, if he does require your services in the customary way, any one of you, be sure to oblige and see if you can’t slip him something to make him talkative into the bargain.”

Having been left to fend for themselves, the ladies spent an hour or two devising chitons out of the bed sheets. Fortunately Jane had a sewing kit in her reticule, and found moreover a spool of ten yards of peacock blue grosgrain ribbon in the bottom of her trunk, so a certain amount of tailoring was possible. The florist’s boxes proved to contain laurel leaves indeed, but also maidenhair fern and pink rosebuds, and Lady Beatrice was therefore able to produce chaplets that better suited her sense of historical accuracy.

They were chatting pleasantly about the plot of Dickens’s latest literary effort when Mrs. Duncan opened the door and peered in at them.

“I don’t suppose one of you girls would consider doing a bit of honest work,” she said.

“Really, madam, how much more honest could our profession be?” said Lady Beatrice. “We dissemble about nothing.”

“What’s the job?” inquired Mrs. Corvey.

Mrs. Duncan grimaced. “Churning the ice cream. The swan mold arrived by special post this morning, and it’s three times the size we thought it was to be, and the girls and I have about broke our arms trying to make enough ice cream to fill the damned thing.”

“As it’s in aid of the general entertainment for which we was engaged, my girls will be happy to assist at no extra charge,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Our Maude does a lot of heavy lifting and is quite strong, ain’t you, dear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” replied Maude, dropping a curtsey. Mrs. Duncan, with hope dawning in her face, ventured further:

“And, er, if some of you wouldn’t mind—there’s some small work with the sugar paste, and the jellied Cupids want a steady hand in turning out . . .”

Aprons were found for them and the ladies ventured forth to assist with the Dessert.

A grain-sack carrier had been set across a pair of trestles, with a vast pewter tray fastened atop it, and a massive edifice of cake set atop that. One of the maids was on a stepladder, crouched over the cake with a piping-bag full of icing, attempting to decorate it with a frieze of scallop shells. As they entered, she dropped the bag and burst into tears.

“Oh! There’s another one crooked! Oh, I’ll lose my place for certain! Mrs. Duncan, I ain’t no pastry cook, and my arm hurts like anything. Why don’t I just go out and drown myself?”

“No need for theatrics,” said Lady Beatrice, taking up the piping-bag. “Ladies? Forward!”

There was, it seemed, a great deal more to be done on the Dessert. There was sugar paste to press into pastillage forms to make all manner of decorations, including a miniature Roman temple, doves, a chariot, and bows and arrows. There were indeed Cupids of rose-flavored jelly to be turned out of their molds, resulting in rather horrible-looking little things like pinkly transparent babies. They wobbled, heads drooping disconcertingly as real infants, once mounted at the four corners of the cake. There were pots and pots of muscadine-flavored cream to be poured into the sorbetière and churned, with grinding effort, before scraping it into the capacious hollow of an immense swan mold. When it was filled at last it took both Maude and Dora to lift it into the ice locker.

“And that goes on top of the cake?” Lady Beatrice asked.

“It’s supposed to,” said Mrs. Duncan plaintively, avoiding her gaze.

“And we’re to carry that in and dance too, are we?” said Jane, pointing with her thumb at the main mass of the Dessert, which was now creaking on its supports with the weight of all the temples, Cupids, doves, and other decorations, to say nothing of the roses and ferns trimming its bearer-poles.

“Well, that was what his lordship said,” Mrs. Duncan replied. “And I’m sure you’re all healthy young girls, ain’t you? And it ain’t like he ain’t paying you handsome.”

NINE:

In Which The Object Of Particular Interest Appears

Any further concerns were stilled, a half-hour into the dinner service, when Pilkins and Ralph entered the kitchen, bearing between them an object swathed in sacking. Ralph stopped short, gaping at the ladies in their chitons, and Pilkins swore as the object they carried fell to the kitchen flagstones with a clatter. Lady Beatrice glimpsed the corner of a long flat box like a silverware case, before Pilkins hurriedly covered it over again with the sacking.

“You great oaf! Mind what you’re about,” said Pilkins. “And you, you—girls, clear out of here. You, too, Cook. Go wait in the pantry until I call.”

“Well, I like that! This ain’t your kitchen, you know,” cried Mrs. Duncan.

“Lordship’s orders,” said Pilkins. “And you can go with them, Ralph.”

“Happy to oblige,” said Ralph, sidling up to Maude.

“If you please,” said Mrs. Corvey, “My rheumatism is painful, now that night’s drawn on, and I find it troublesome to move. Mightn’t I just bide here by the fire?”

Pilkins glanced at her. “I don’t suppose you’ll matter. Very well, stay there; but into the pantry with the rest of you, and be quick about it.”

The ladies obeyed, with good grace, and Mrs. Duncan with markedly less enthusiasm. Ralph stepped after them and pulled the door shut.

“Heigh-ho! ‘Here I stand like the Turk, with his doxies around,’ ” he chortled. “Saving your presence, Cook,” he added, but she slapped him anyway.

Mrs. Corvey, meanwhile, watched with interest as Pilkins unwrapped the box—rather heavier, apparently, than its appearance indicated—and grunted with effort as he slid it across the floor to the creaking trestle that supported the Dessert. Mrs. Corvey saw what appeared to be a row of dials and levers along its nearer edge.

Pilkins pushed it underneath the trestle and fumbled with it a moment. Mrs. Corvey heard a faint humming sound, then saw the box rise abruptly through the air, as though it fell upward. It struck the underside of the tray with a crash and remained there, apparently, while Pilkins crouched on the flagstones and massaged his wrists, muttering to himself.

Then, almost imperceptibly at first but with increasing violence, the Dessert began to tremble. The jellied Cupids shook their heads, as though in disbelief. As Mrs. Corvey watched in astonishment, the Dessert on its carrier lifted free of the trestles and rose jerkily through the air. It was within a hand’s breadth of the ceiling when Pilkins, having exclaimed an oath and scrambled to his feet, reached up frantically and made some sort of adjustment with the dials and levers. One end of the carrier dipped, then the other; the whole affair leveled itself, like a newly launched ship, and settled gently down until it bobbed no more than an inch above its former resting place on the trestles. The flat box was so well screened by drooping ferns and flowers as to be quite invisible.

Pilkins sagged onto a stool and drew a flask from his pocket.

“Are you quite all right, Mr. Pilkins?” said Mrs. Corvey.

“Well enough,” said Pilkins, taking a drink and tucking the flask away.

“I only wondered because I heard you lord mayoring there, in a temper.”

“None of your concern if I was.”

“I reckon his lordship must be a trial to work for, sometimes,” said Mrs. Corvey, in the meekest possible voice. Pilkins glared at her sidelong.

“An old family, the Rawdons. If they’ve got strange ways about them, it’s not my place to talk about ’em with folk from outside.”

“Well, I’m sure I meant no harm—” began Mrs. Corvey, as Mrs. Duncan threw the pantry door open with a crash.

“I’ll see you get your notice, Ralph, you mark my words!” she cried. “I ain’t staying in there with him another minute. He’s a fornicating disgrace!”

“Indeed, I think he does a very creditable job.” Maude’s voice drifted from the depths of the pantry. Ralph emerged from the pantry smirking, followed by the ladies. Upon seeing the floating Dessert, Ralph pointed and exclaimed:

“Hi! That’s what it does, is it? I been going mad wondering—”

Mrs. Duncan, noticing the Dessert’s new state, gave a little scream and backed away. “Marry! He’s done it again, hasn’t he? That unnatural—”

“Hold your noise!” Pilkins told her.

“Whatever’s the matter?” said Mrs. Corvey.

“The Dessert appears to be levitating,” Lady Beatrice said.

“Oh, stuff and nonsense! I’m sure it’s just a conjuror’s trick,” said Mrs. Corvey. Pilkins gave her a shrewd look.

“That’s it, to be sure; nothing but a stage trick, as his lordship likes to impress people.”

“So the Dessert isn’t really floating in midair?” Jane poked one of the Cupids with a fingertip, causing it to writhe. “Just as you say; I’m only grateful we shan’t kill ourselves carrying it in.”

A bell rang then. Pilkins jumped to his feet. “That’s his lordship signaling for the next course! Get those finger cymbals on, you lot! Where’s the bloody swan?”

The swan was heaved out in its mold and upended over the cake, and a screw turned to let air into its vacuum; the swan unmolded and plopped into its place on the cake with an audible thud, sending the Cupids into quivering agonies.

“Right! Pick the damned thing up! He wants you smiling and . . . and exercising your wiles when you go out there!” cried Pilkins.

“We strive to please, sir,” said Lady Beatrice, taking her place on one of the carrier poles. The Devere sisters took their places as well. They found that the Dessert lifted quite easily, for it now seemed to weigh scarcely more than a few ounces. Lady Beatrice struck up a rhythm on the finger cymbals, the Devere sisters cut a few experimental capers, and Pilkins ran before them up the stairs and so to the vast banqueting table of Basmond Hall.

“I could do with a dram of gin, after all that,” said Mrs. Duncan, collapsing into her chair.

“I could, too,” said Ralph.

“Well, you can just take yourself off to the stables!”

“Perhaps you’d be so kind as to guide me to my room?” asked Mrs. Corvey. “I’m rather tired.”

TEN:

In Which A Proposition Is Advanced

Lord Basmond had spared no expense in the pursuit of his chosen motif; an oilcloth had been laid down over the flagstones and painted with a design resembling tiled mosaic on a villa floor. Hothouse palms had been carried about and placed in decorative profusion, as had an abundance of aspidistra. Five chaise longues had been set around the great central table on which Lady Beatrice spied the remains of the grand dishes that had preceded the Dessert from the kitchen: A roast suckling pig, a roast peacock with decorative tail, a dish of ortolans, a mullet in orange and lemon sauce.

On the chaise longues reclined Lord Basmond and his four guests. The gentlemen were flushed, all, with repletion. Lord Basmond, alone pale and sweating, sat up as the ladies entered and flung out an arm.

“Now, sirs! For your amusement, I present these lovely nymphs bearing a delectable and mysterious treat. The nymphs, being pagan spirits, have absolutely no morals whatsoever and will happily entertain your attentions in every respect. As for the other treat . . . you may have heard of a dish called ‘Floating Island.’ That is a mere metaphor. Behold the substance! Nymphs, free yourselves of your burden!”

Lady Beatrice let go her corner of the Dessert and essayed a Bacchic dance, drawing on her memories of India. She glimpsed Maude and Dora pirouetting and Jane performing something resembling a frenzied polka, finger cymbals clanging madly. Alas, all terpsichorean efforts were going unnoticed, for the banqueters had riveted their stares on the Dessert, which drifted gently some four feet above the oilcloth. Lord Basmond, having assured himself that all was as he had intended, turned his gaze on the faces of his guests, and hungrily sought to interpret their expressions. Lady Beatrice considered them, one after the other.

Prince Nakhimov had lurched upright into a sitting position, gaping at the unexpected vision, and now began to laugh and applaud. Ali Pasha had glanced once at the Dessert, was distracted by Jane’s breasts (which had emerged from the top of her chiton like rabbits bounding from a fox’s den) and then, as what he had seen registered in his mind, turned his head back to the Dessert so sharply he was in danger of dislocating his neck.

Count de Mortain watched keenly and got to his feet, seemingly with the intention of going closer to the Dessert to see what the trick might be. He got as far as the end of his chaise longue before Dora leapt into his arms—her ribbons and securing stitches had all come unfastened, with results that had been catastrophic, were the party of another sort—and they plumped down together on the lounge. The Count applied himself to an energetic appreciation of Dora’s charms, but continued to steal glances at the Dessert. Sir George Spiggott’s mouth was wide in an O of surprise, his eyes round, too, but there was a scowl beginning to form.

“What d’you call this, then—” he exclaimed, ending in a whoof as Maude jumped astride him and emulated a few of Lady Beatrice’s movements.

“What do I call it?” replied Lord Basmond, in rather a theatrical voice. “A demonstration, gentlemen. Here I come to the point and purpose of your presences here. All of you are men of means and influence; you would know whether your respective governments would be interested in a discovery so momentous it may grant ultimate power to its owner.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Sir George, who had got his breath back, as he peered around Maude. Lord Basmond cleared his throat and struck an attitude.

“When I was at Cambridge, gentlemen, I studied the vanished civilization of Egypt. I chanced to be taking a holiday in France when I was approached by an elderly beggar, a former member of the late emperor’s army and a veteran of the Egyptian campaign. In his destitution he was obliged to offer for sale certain papyrus scrolls he had looted, from what source he was unable to recall, in the land of the pharaohs.

“I purchased the scrolls and returned with them to England. When they yielded up their secrets to translation, I was astonished to discover therein the method by which the very pyramids themselves were built! The ancient priests had developed a means of circumventing the force of gravity itself, gentlemen, and not with charms or spells but by the application of sound scientific principles! Vast blocks of stone were made to float, as light as balloons. Sadly, the scrolls were later lost in a fire, but fortunately not before I had committed their texts to memory.

“Consider the confection floating before you. Do you see any wires? Any props? You do not, because there are none. I have been able to reproduce the device used by the Egyptians, and I intend to sell my secret to the highest bidder.

“Now, consider the applications! Any nation owning my device must swiftly outpace its rivals for dominance. Think of the speed and ease in public works, when a single workman may lift slabs of stone as though they were feathers. Think of the industrial uses to which this may be put, gentlemen. And—dare I say it—the uses for national defense? Envision cannons or supply wagons that might be floated with the ease of soap bubbles and the speed of sleds. Imagine floating platforms from which enemy positions may be spied out, or even fired upon.

“And he who offers the highest bid gains this splendid advantage, gentlemen!”

“What is your reserve?” inquired Prince Nakhimov.

“Two million pounds, sir,” replied Lord Basmond, as Sir George uttered an oath.

“You ought to have offered it to your own countrymen first, you swine!”

“You were invited, weren’t you? If you want it, you’re free to outbid the others,” said Lord Basmond coolly. “But, please! I perceive the ice cream is melting. Let us enjoy our treat, and hope that its effects will sweeten your temper. Pleasure before business, gentlemen; tomorrow you will be given a tour of my laboratory and witness further astonishing demonstrations of levitation. Bidding will commence at precisely two in the afternoon. To night, you will enjoy my hospitality and the ministrations of these charming females. Pilkins? Serve the sweet course, please.”

“At once, sir,” said Pilkins, climbing onto a chair.

An orgy commenced.

ELEVEN:

In Which Our Heroine And Her Benefactress Make Discoveries

Having bid Ralph a civil good-night, Mrs. Corvey edged past her trunk and seated herself on the narrow bed that had been made up for her. Her hearing was rather acute, an advantage gained from the years of her darkness, and so she listened patiently as Ralph climbed the creaking stairs that led to his room above the stables. He undressed himself, he climbed into bed, he indulged in a prolonged episode of onanism (if Mrs. Corvey was any judge of the audible indicators of male solitary passion) and, finally, he snored.

When she was assured Ralph was unlikely to wake, Mrs. Corvey rose and walked to the end of her room, where a single small window admitted the light of the moon. She looked out and beheld a view down the steep slope to the gardens behind Basmond Hall. Perhaps garden was an ambitious term; there appeared to be an old orchard and a few rows of park. Directly below, however, was a modern structure of brick and slate, perhaps twice the size of a coach house, and in sharp contrast to the general air of picturesque ruin characteristic of Basmond Hall.

Mrs. Corvey regarded it thoughtfully a moment, before turning from the window and opening her trunk. She undressed quickly and drew forth a boy’s clothing, simple dark trousers and a knitted jersey. Donning this attire, she opened a hidden panel in the trunk’s lid and revealed a box containing a dozen brass shells, roughly the size of rifle ammunition. Taking her cane, she made certain alterations to it and loaded the shells into the chamber revealed thereby. So prepared, Mrs. Corvey crept from her room and into the courtyard, keeping to the shadows along its eastern edge.

It somewhat discomfited her to discover that the portcullis had been lowered. A moment’s study of the grate, however, revealed that its iron gridwork had been constructed to block the entrance of great-thewed knights of old. Mrs. Corvey, by contrast, being female and considerably undernourished in her younger years, was sufficiently small enough to writhe through without much difficulty. She scrambled down the hillside and into the dry moat, and so made her way around to the gardens.

There she stepped out upon a short space of level lawn, somewhat ill cared-for. Beyond it was the new structure, built close against the hillside. Mrs. Corvey wondered briefly whether it might be a hothouse, for the north face was almost entirely windows. Circling around it, she was surprised to note no door in evidence, nor did the windows appear to open.

Mrs. Corvey removed her goggles and extended her optics against the glass. Moonlight was illuminating the building’s interior clearly. She saw no plants of any kind; rather, several tables upon which were glass vessels of the sort associated with chemists’ laboratories. Upon other tables were tools and small machinery, at the purpose of which she could only speculate. The dark bulk of a steam engine crouched in one corner. In the other corner Mrs. Corvey spotted a door, and realized that the only entrance to the laboratory was from within; for the door was in the wall that backed up to the hill behind, and must communicate with a tunnel beyond that led upward into the tower above.

Nodding to herself, Mrs. Corvey proceeded to study the leading around the window panes. Near the ground she found a spot in which the pane had, apparently, been recently replaced, for the lead solder was brighter there. Drawing a long pin from her hair, she busied herself for a few minutes prizing down the lead, and after diligent work slipped out the glass and set it carefully to one side. Crawling through the gap thereby created was no more difficult than going through the portcullis had been; indeed, Mrs. Corvey mused to herself that she might have made a first-rate burglar, had fate decreed other than her present situation.

For the next while she examined the laboratory at some length, committing its details to memory and wishing that Mr. Felmouth would exert himself to build a camera small enough to be carried on such occasions. In vain she looked for any notes, papers, or journals that might illuminate the purpose of the machines. At last Mrs. Corvey addressed the door with her hairpin, and a long moment later stood gazing into the utter darkness of the tunnel on the other side.

In retrospect, Lady Beatrice was obliged to admit that bedsheets made an admirably practical costume for the evening’s festivities. In the course of her employment she had become liberally smeared with ice cream, sugar icing, cake crumbs, rose petals, and spilled wine. The last item had fountained over her breasts, not in an excess of Bacchic enthusiasm, but when Prince Nakhimov had been startled into dropping his glass by the sight of Sir George swallowing one of the jellied Cupids whole. (“The damned press claim I eat workers’ babies for breakfast,” Sir George had said smugly. “Let’s see if I can open my jaws wide enough!”)

Lady Beatrice serviced each of the guests in turn during the amusements, for they were, one and all, inclined to share the ladies’ favors. Lord Rawdon unbent so far as to permit himself to be fellatiated, when his guests insisted he partake of the carnal blisses available, but declined to retire with anyone when the long evening drew to its close. Rather, Lady Beatrice found herself claimed by Prince Nakhimov; Ali Pasha took Dora off to his bed. Jane was taken, in a brisk and businesslike manner, by Sir George Spiggott, and Maude retired on the arm of Count de Mortain.

In the privacy of the bedchamber Prince Nakhimov divested himself of his garments, and proved to be a veritable Russian Bear for hairiness and animal spirits. The sheer athleticism required left Lady Beatrice somewhat fatigued, and therefore she was more than a little discountenanced when, after two hours of his attentions, the prince pulled the blankets up, rolled away from her, and said: “Thank you. You may go now.”

“But am I not to sleep here?”

“Shto?” The prince looked over his shoulder at her, surprised. “Sleep here? You? I never sleep with, please pardon my frankness, whores.” He turned back toward his pillow and Lady Beatrice, profoundly irritated, picked up the sticky remnants of her costume and held it against herself as she left his room.

She faced now the choice of wandering downstairs in her present state of undress and searching for her trunk, there to change into a robe, and afterward to seek repose on one of the chaise longues in the dining room until morning, or simply opening one of the other bedroom doors and seeing if any of the other couples had room in bed for a third party. Being desirous of sleep, Lady Beatrice opted for the chaise longue.

She descended the stairs and made her way along the gallery that led to the grand staircase. Strong moonlight slanted in through the windows at this hour, throwing patches of brilliant illumination on several of the portraits that hung along the walls. Lady Beatrice slowed to examine them. It was plain that Lord Basmond was a true Rawdon; here in face after face were the same lustrous eyes and delicate features, to say nothing of a certain chilly hauteur common to all the portraits’ subjects. Lady Beatrice remarked particularly one painting, upon which the moonlight fell directly. It was of a child, she supposed, a miniature beauty in Elizabethan costume. The wide lace collar framed the heart-shaped face. A silver net bound the hair, so fair as to appear white, and the contrast of the dark eyes with such ethereal pallor was striking indeed. Hellspeth Rawdon, Lady Basmond, read the brass plate on the lower frame.

Lady Beatrice, conscious of the cold, walked on. She had passed the last of the portraits when she spied a door ajar, through which the corner of a bed could be glimpsed. Hopeful of finding a warmer resting place for the night, Lady Beatrice opened the door and peered within.

The room was feebly lit by a single candle, much reduced in height, beside the bed. Lord Basmond lay across the bed, still fully dressed. His eyes were open and glistening in the candlelight. Lady Beatrice saw at once that he was dead. Nonetheless, she stepped across the threshold and had a closer look.

His mouth was open in a silent cry of protest. No wounds were in evidence; rather the unnatural angle of his neck told plainly what had effected Lord Basmond’s dispatch. He couldn’t have been dead no more than two hours, and yet in that time seemed to have shrunken within his evening clothes. He looked frail and pathetic. Lady Beatrice thought of the ancestral portraits, all the centuries fallen down to this sad creature lying sprawled and broken, last of the long line.

Lady Beatrice swept the room with a glance, looking for obvious clues, but found none. She stepped back into the corridor and stood pensive a moment, considering what she ought to do next.

TWELVE:

In Which Still More Discoveries Are Made

Lady Beatrice decided fairly quickly that nothing much could be accomplished in her present state of undress, and therefore she went down to the kitchen. The fire there was banked, the range still radiating pleasant warmth, and so she pumped a few gallons of water and heated them sufficiently to bathe herself by the hearth.

Having located her trunk, she dressed herself in the firelight and went out by the side door, making her way across the courtyard to the stables. She found the room that had been assigned to Mrs. Corvey and knocked softly, intending to report her discovery. When no reply came to her knock she opened the door and saw the empty bed. Returning to the kitchens, Lady Beatrice encountered Dora, just coming down the stairs in a state of sticky nudity, trailing what remained of her costume.

“Oh, good, the fire’s lit,” Dora exclaimed, tossing aside her costume and going to the sink to pump water. “If I don’t bathe I shall simply scream. Did yours snore, too?”

“No; he pitched me out.”

“Ah! They do, sometimes, don’t they? My pasha went at it like a stoat in rut until he fell asleep, and then he snored so loud the bed curtains trembled.”

“You never got a chance to drug him, then?”

“What, with my little buttons? No. In the first place he wouldn’t drink any wine, and anyway, what would have been the point of drugging him? We know as much as he does. If we want to find out any more about the levitation device, the one to drug would be Lord Basmond.”

“That would be rather difficult now, I’m afraid,” said Lady Beatrice, and told what she had found on entering his lordship’s bedchamber. Dora’s eyes widened.

“No! You’re sure?”

“I know a dead man when I see one,” said Lady Beatrice.

“Damn and blast! So convenient to murder someone when there are whores about to blame for it. I suppose now we’ll have to run all screaming and hysterical to the butler and report it. Jane and Maude will have firm alibis, at least. First, however, we’ll need to report to the missus.” Dora set a bucket of water on the fire.

“She isn’t in her room,” explained Lady Beatrice.

“No? I suppose it’s possible she did for his lordship.”

“Would she?”

“You never know; I should think it was a bit treasonous, wouldn’t you, offering an invention like that to other empires? She may have made the decision to do for him and confiscate the thing for the Society. If she did, she may be out making arrangements to cover our tracks.”

“Let’s not go running to Pilkins yet, then,” said Lady Beatrice. “What became of the rest of the Dessert?”

“That’s a good question,” said Dora. “Pantry?”

They left the silent kitchen and, following a trail of cake crumbs and blobs of crème anglaise, located the remaining Dessert in the pantry, as expected. Thoroughly ruined now, it lay spilt sideways on the flagstones, its grain carrier leaning against the wall.

“Once more, damn and blast,” said Dora. “Where’s the marvelous flying thing? The box or plank or whatever it was Pilkins carried in?”

“Not here, at any rate,” said Lady Beatrice.

“You don’t suppose the missus took it?”

“Might have, but—” Lady Beatrice began, as a prolonged bumping crash came from above. They looked at each other and ran upstairs, Lady Beatrice lifting her skirts to hurry. Dora, being nimbler in her present state of undress, arrived in the great hall first. Lady Beatrice heard her exclaim a fairly shocking oath, and upon joining her discovered why; for Arthur Fitzhugh Rawdon, Lord Basmond, lay in a crumpled heap at the foot of the great staircase.

The two ladies stood there considering his corpse for a long moment.

“Frightfully convenient accident,” said Lady Beatrice at last.

“I think it will look better if you do the screaming,” said Dora, with a gesture indicating her nudity.

“Very well,” said Lady Beatrice. Dora retreated to the kitchen. Lady Beatrice cleared her throat and, drawing a deep breath, uttered the piercing shriek of a terrified female.

Mrs. Corvey paused only to switch on the night-vision feature of her optics before advancing down the tunnel. Instantly she beheld the tunnel walls and floor, stretching ahead into a green obscurity. She had expected the same neat brickwork that distinguished the laboratory building, but the tunnel appeared to be of some antiquity: haphazardly mortared with flints, here and there buttressed with timbers, and penetrated with roots throughout, threadlike white ones or gnarled and black subterranean limbs.

As she proceeded along the tunnel’s length, Mrs. Corvey noted in several places the print of shoes. Most were small, not much bigger than her own, but twice she saw a much larger track, a man’s certainly. Moreover she perceived strange and shifting currents of air in the tunnel. About a hundred yards in she spotted what must be their source, for a second tunnel opened where some of the flint and mortar had fallen in, creating a narrow gap in the wall.

Mrs. Corvey studied the tunnel floor in front of the gap. Someone had gone through in the recent past, to judge from the way the earth was disturbed. She turned and considered the main course of the tunnel, which ended a few yards ahead where a ladder ascended, doubtless to the tower above. Yielding to her intuition, however, she turned back and slipped through the gap into the second tunnel.

Here the walls seemed of greater antiquity still, indeed, scarcely as though shaped by human labors at all; rather burrowed by some great animal. There was an earthy damp smell and, distantly echoing, the sound of trickling water. Mrs. Corvey peered into the depths and spotted something scarlet ahead in the green gloom, an irregular mass against one wall.

She lifted her cane to her shoulder and went forward cautiously, five feet, ten feet, and then there was a sudden burst of hectic illumination and a blare of—sound? No, not sound; Mrs. Corvey was at a loss to say what sensation it was that affected her nerves so painfully. She swayed for a moment before regaining her balance. Two or three deep breaths restored her composure before she heard a groan in the darkness ahead. And then:

“You know,” said a male voice, “if I’m to die here I’d much rather be shot. All this blinding me and chaining me to walls and so forth is becoming tedious.”

THIRTEEN:

In Which Mr. Ludbridge

Tells A Curious Story

The scarlet mass had shifted, and resolved itself now into the shape of a man, slumped against the wall of the tunnel with one arm flung up awkwardly. As she neared him, Mrs. Corvey saw that he was in fact pinioned in place by a manacle whose chain had been passed about one of the ancient roots.

“Mr. Ludbridge?” she inquired.

His head came up sharply and he turned his face in her direction.

“Is that a lady?”

“I am, sir. William Reginald Ludbridge?”

“Might be,” he said. She was within a few paces of him now and, opening a compartment in her cane, drew forth a lucifer and struck it for his benefit. The circle of dancing light so produced proved to her satisfaction that the prisoner was indeed the missing man Ludbridge. “Who’s that?”

“I am Elizabeth Corvey, Mr. Ludbridge. From Nell Gwynne’s.”

“Are you? What becomes of illusions?”

“We dispel them,” she replied, relieved to remember the countersign, for she was seldom required to give it.

“And we are everywhere. If you’re wondering why your match isn’t producing any light, it’s because of that damned—excuse me—that device you tripped just now. It’ll be at least an hour before we can see anything again.”

“In fact, I can see now, Mr. Ludbridge.” She blew out the tiny flame.

“I beg your pardon? Oh! Mrs. Corvey. You’re the lady with the . . . do forgive me, madam, but I hardly expected the GSS to send the ladies’ auxiliary to my aid. So the flash hasn’t affected your, er, eyes?”

“It does not appear to have, sir.”

“That’s something, anyway. Er . . . I trust you weren’t sent alone?”

“I was not, sir. Some of my girls are upstairs, I suppose you’d say, entertaining Lord Basmond and his guests.”

“Ha! Ingenious. I don’t suppose you happen to have a hacksaw with you, Mrs. Corvey?”

“No, sir, but let me try what I might do with a bullet.” Mrs. Corvey set the end of her cane against the root where the manacle’s chain passed over it, and pressed the triggering mechanism. With a bang the chain parted, and white flakes of root drifted down like snow. Ludbridge’s arm fell, a dead weight.

“I am much obliged to you,” said Ludbridge, gasping as he attempted to massage life back into the limb. “What have you found out?”

“We know about the levitation device.”

“Good, but that isn’t all. Not by a long way. There’s this thing in the tunnel that makes such an effective burglar catcher, and I suspect there’s more still.”

“What precisely is it, Mr. Ludbridge?”

“Damned if I know, beg your pardon. You saw the laboratory, did you?”

“Indeed, Mr. Ludbridge, I entered that way.”

“So did I. Crawled through and had a good look round. Took notes and made sketches, which I still have here somewhere . . .” Ludbridge felt about inside his coat. “Yes, to be sure. Had started up the other tunnel when I heard the trap opening above and someone starting down the ladder. Put out my light in a hurry and ducked into what I’d assumed was an alcove in the wall, hoping to avoid notice. Bloody thing crumbled backward under my weight and I fell in here.

“I heard quick footsteps hurry past, in the main tunnel without. When I felt safe I lit my candle again and looked around me. This place is only the entrance to a great network of tunnels, you know, quite a warren; it’s a wonder Basmond Hall hasn’t sunk into the hill. I could hear water and felt the rush of air, so I thought I’d explore and see if I could find myself a discreet exit.

“That was two weeks ago, I think. I never found an exit, though I did find a great deal else, some of it very queer indeed. There’s a spring-fed subterranean lake, ma’am, and what looks to be some of the ancestral tombs of the Rawdons—at least, I hope that’s what they are. Midden heaps full of rather strange things. Someone lived in this place long before the Rawdons came with William the Conqueror, I can tell you that! I’m ashamed to admit I became lost more than once. If not for the spring and my field rations I’d have died down there.

“Having found my way back up at last, I was proceeding in triumph down this passageway when I ran slap into the—the whatever-it-is that makes such a flash-bang. I was knocked unconscious the first time. When I woke I discovered I’d been chained up as you found me. That was . . . yesterday? Not very clear on the passage of time, I’m afraid.”

“Clearly Lord Basmond had noticed someone was trespassing,” said Mrs. Corvey.

“Too right. Haven’t seen him, though. He hasn’t even come down to gloat, which honestly I’d have welcomed; always the chance I could persuade him to join the GSS, after all. Just as well it was you, perhaps.”

“And what are we to do now, Mr. Ludbridge?”

“What indeed? I am entirely at your disposal, ma’am.”

Mrs. Corvey turned and looked intently at the floor of the tunnel. She saw, now, the braided wire laid across their path, and the metal box to which it was anchored.

“I think we had better escape, Mr. Ludbridge.”

FOURTEEN:

In Which Lord Basmond Is Mourned,

With Apparent Sincerity

He must have fallen,” declared Sir George Spiggott.

“A lamentable accident,” said Ali Pasha, looking very hard at Sir George. So did Jane, who had trailed after them clutching her chiton to herself.

“What becomes of the auction now, may I ask?” said Prince Nakhimov.

“He had bones like sugar-sticks,” said Pilkins through his tears. He was on his knees beside Lord Basmond’s body. “Always did. Broke his arm three times when he was a boy. Oh, Lord help us, what are we to do? He was the only one with . . . I mean to say . . .”

“The only one with the plans for the levitation device?” said Lady Beatrice. Pilkins looked up at her, startled, and then his face darkened with anger.

“That’s enough of your bold tongue,” he shouted. “I’m not having the constable see you lot here! I want you downstairs, all of you whores, now! Get down there and keep still, if you know what’s good for you!” He turned to glare at Dora, who had just come up in a state of respectable dress from the kitchens.

“Suit yourself; we’ll go,” she said. Looking around, she added “But where’s Maude?”

“Where is the Count de Mortain? He cannot have slept through such screams,” said Prince Nakhimov.

“Perhaps I’d better go fetch her,” said Lady Beatrice, starting up the stairs.

“No! I said you were . . . were to . . . oh, damned fate,” said Pilkins, drooping with fresh tears. “Go on, get up there and wake them up. And then I want to see the back of you all.”

“Happy to oblige,” said Jane, striding past him to go downstairs. Lady Beatrice, meanwhile, ran up the grand staircase and along the gallery, where the faces of Rawdons past watched her passage. The moonlight had shifted from her portrait, but Hellspeth Rawdon still seemed to glimmer with unearthly luminescence.

Lady Beatrice knocked twice at the door of the bedroom that had been allotted to the Count de Mortain, but received no response. At last, opening the door and peering in, she beheld one candle burning on the dresser and Maude alone in the bed, deeply asleep.

“Maude!” Lady Beatrice hurried in and shook Maude’s shoulder. “Wake up! Where is the count?”

Maude remained unconscious, despite Lady Beatrice’s best efforts. Lady Beatrice sniffed at the dregs remaining in the wine glass on the bedside table, and thought she detected some medicinal odor. There was no sign of Count de Mortain in the room.

When this fact was communicated to the parties downstairs, Sir George Spiggott exclaimed, “It’s the damned frog! I’ll wager a thousand pounds he pushed Lord Basmond down the stairs!”

“You had better send for your constabulary now, rather than wait for morning,” Ali Pasha told Pilkins.

“In the meanwhile, perhaps someone would assist me in getting Maude downstairs?” Lady Beatrice inquired. Prince Nakhimov volunteered and brought Maude, limp as a washrag, down as far as the Great Hall; from there Lady Beatrice and Dora carried her between them down to the kitchen.

“How awfully embarrassing,” said Jane, from the hearthrug where she was bathing. “We were supposed to be the ones administering drugs!”

“We ought to have expected this,” said Lady Beatrice grimly. She went to the sink and pumped a bucketful of cold water. “I should think the count drugged her and then killed Lord Basmond, meaning to steal the device.”

“What?” Jane looked up from soaping herself. “I thought his lordship fell down the stairs.”

Dora explained that Lady Beatrice had found Lord Basmond dead in his bedroom before his body had been flung down the stairs. Jane’s eyes narrowed.

“Don’t be so sure the count was his murderer,” she said. “Mine was in a towering temper—did me only once, quite rough and nasty, and kept telling me it was a damned good thing I was English. At last he got out of bed and left. I asked him where he was going and he told me to mind my own business. He wasn’t gone above ten minutes. When he came back he looked a different man—white and shaking. I pretended to be asleep, because I was tired of his nonsense, but he didn’t try to wake me for any more fun. He tossed and turned for about twenty more minutes and then leaped out of bed and ran from the room. He was only gone about five minutes this time, and very much out of breath when he came back. Jumped into bed and pulled the covers up. It seemed only a moment later we heard you screaming.”

“Did he ever seem as though he paused to hide something in the bedroom?” asked Lady Beatrice, upending the bucket’s contents over Maude, who groaned and tried to sit up.

“No, never.”

“He might have killed his lordship, but that doesn’t mean the device has been stolen,” said Dora, crouching beside Maude and waving a bottle of smelling salts under her nose. Maude coughed feebly and opened her eyes.

“Damn and blast,” she murmured.

“Wake up, dear.”

“That bastard slipped me a powder!”

“Yes, dear, we’d guessed.”

“And we’d had such a lovely time in bed.” Maude leaned forward, massaging her temples. “Such a jolly and amusing man. He’s got no money, though. Told me he was delighted to accept a night of free food and copulation, but isn’t in any position to bid on the levitation device.”

“Have you any idea where he’s got to?”

“None. What’s been going on?”

The other ladies gave her a brief summary of what had occurred. In the midst of it, Mrs. Duncan came shuffling downstairs in tears, clutching a candlestick.

“Oh, it’s too cruel,” she sobbed. “What’ll become of us now? And the Basmonds! What of the Basmonds?”

“Bugger the Basmonds,” said Maude, who was still feeling rather ill.

“How dare you, you chit! They’re one of the oldest families in the land!” cried Mrs. Duncan. “Ruined now, ruined! And there he went and spent all the trust fund—What’s to happen now?” She sank down on a stool and indulged in furious tears.

“Trust fund?” asked Lady Beatrice.

“None of your bloody business. It’s the end of the Basmonds, that’s all.”

“There aren’t any cousins to inherit?” inquired Dora sympathetically.

“No.” Mrs. Duncan blew her nose. “And poor Master Arthur never married, on account of him being—well—”

“A fairy prince?” said Jane, toweling herself off. Lady Beatrice winced, for it was hardly a tactful remark, but Mrs. Duncan lifted her head sharply.

“You been reading in the library? You wasn’t allowed in there!”

“No, I haven’t read anything. I don’t know what you mean,” said Jane.

“That’s in a book in the library,” said Mrs. Duncan. “About the Rawdons having fairy blood. Old Sir Robert finding a girl sitting up there on the hill in the moonlight, and she putting a spell on him. And that was why, ever since . . .” She trailed off into tears again.

“What a charming story,” said Lady Beatrice. “Now, if you’ll pardon a change of subject, my dear: I notice the levitation device has been removed from under the cake. Do you happen to know where it was put?”

“Wasn’t put anywhere,” said Mrs. Duncan. “I pushed the nasty thing into the pantry like it was and left it for morning. You mean to say it’s gone?”

FIFTEEN:

In Which Our Heroine Is Obliged

To Exert Herself

Mrs. Corvey, upon inspecting the box on the passage floor, discovered a switch on one end. Cautiously, using her cane, she pushed the switch to its opposite position. A humming noise ceased, so faint it had been imperceptible until it stopped.

“I believe we may now pass safely, Mr. Ludbridge.”

“Glad to hear it,” Ludbridge said, wheezing as he tried to get to his feet. “Oh—ow—oh, bloody hell, I’m half crippled.”

“You may lean on me,” said Mrs. Corvey, taking his hand and pulling his arm around her shoulders. “Not to worry, dear; I’m a great deal stronger than I look.”

“As yet I’ve no idea what you look like at all,” replied Ludbridge. “Ha! The blind leading the blind, although in our case it makes excellent sense. Lead on, dear lady.”

They made their way out again into the main tunnel, and hurriedly down it to the laboratory. Ludbridge was able to crawl through the hole in the window easily enough, but was obliged afterward to sit and catch his breath.

“It seems a lifetime ago I went in there,” he said, gasping. “By God, the night air smells sweet! Rather odd nobody noticed the pane missing in all that time, though.”

“In fact, someone did,” said Mrs. Corvey. “It had been replaced when I found it this evening.”

“Really? Well, that’s enough to lend new vigor to my wasted limbs,” said Ludbridge, getting up with a lurch. “Let’s get the hell out of here, shall we?”

Mrs. Corvey led him out through the hedge and around the moat. She had a moment of worry about getting through the portcullis, for Ludbridge was a man of respectable girth. However, just as they came to the causeway the portcullis came rattling up. Someone drove the carriage forth in great haste; the portcullis was left open behind them. Mrs. Corvey looked after the carriage in keen interest, thinking she recognized Ralph gripping the reins. She wondered what might have happened, to send him out at such speed.

“We had best hurry, Mr. Ludbridge,” she said.

“Swiftly as I may, ma’am,” he replied, crawling after her on hands and knees. When they reached the courtyard Mrs. Corvey was disconcerted to see lights blazing in the Great Hall. She endeavored to pull Ludbridge along after her, and was greatly relieved when they tumbled together through the door into her room.

Forty years I’ve worked here,” said Mrs. Duncan, somewhat indistinctly, for she was now on her third glass of gin. The scullery and parlor maids, all in their nightgowns, were huddled around her like chicks around a hen, in varying degrees of tearful distress.

“Well, consider: you are now at liberty to travel,” said Jane helpfully. Mrs. Duncan gave her a dark look and two of the maids were provoked into fresh weeping.

“I’ve just remembered,” said Lady Beatrice. “I left something in Prince Nakhimov’s room. I wouldn’t wish to be so indiscreet as to take the front stairs, when the constable may arrive any moment . . . Are there back stairs, Mrs. Duncan?”

The cook pointed at a doorway beyond the pantry. “Mind you be quick about it.”

“I shall endeavor to be,” said Lady Beatrice. With a significant glance at the Devere sisters, she hastened up the back stairs.

“Lordship’s good name at stake and all . . .” muttered Mrs. Duncan, and had another dram of gin.

Lady Beatrice ran at her best speed, and arrived at last in the gallery. She paused a moment, catching her breath, listening. She heard Prince Nakhimov telling a long anecdote, to which Sir George, Pilkins, Ali Pasha, and several valets were listening. Creeping to the edge of the grand staircase she beheld them through a fog of cigar smoke, seated around Lord Basmond’s corpse.

Turning, she crossed the gallery and went up to the guests’ rooms. She opened the count’s door and stepped within. The candle still illuminated the room. By its light Lady Beatrice made a quick and thorough search for the levitation device. Opening the count’s trunk, she dug through folded garments. Upon encountering a book she drew it forth and examined it. It was merely a popular novel, but stuck within were a number of papers. One in particular bore an official seal, and appeared to have been signed by Metternich. Lady Beatrice’s grasp of French was imperfect, but sufficient for her to make out a phrase here and there. You will attempt by any means possible to see if his lordship would be agreeable . . . do not need to remind you of the consequences if you fail . . .

“I did not know that whores were fond of reading.”

Lady Beatrice looked up. A man stood in the doorway of the antechamber connecting to Count de Mortain’s room. His accent was harsh, Germanic; he appeared to be the count’s valet. He was holding a knife. Lady Beatrice considered her options, which were few.

“We aren’t,” she replied. “I was looking for the count; did you know there’s been an accident? Lord Basmond is dead.”

The valet had started toward her, menace in his eyes, but at her news he stopped in astonishment. “Dead!”

She hurled herself at him and bore him backward. They fell across the bed. The valet struck at her with the knife. Lady Beatrice experienced then an eerie sense of stepping away from herself, of watching as the patient draft animal of her body bared its teeth and fought for its life. The struggle was a vicious one, as any fight between animals must be. Lady Beatrice was pleased to observe that her flesh had not lost the strength it had drawn upon in the Khyber Pass. She was particularly pleased to see herself wrenching the knife from the valet’s hand and stunning him with a sharp downward strike of the pommel. He sagged backward, momentarily unconscious.

So far sheer instinct had preserved her; now Lady Beatrice picked herself up, poured a glass of water from the carafe on the bedside table, and dropped into it a button torn from her blouse. The button dissolved with a gentle hiss. She lifted the valet’s head, murmuring to him in a soothing voice, and held the glass to his lips. He drank without thinking, before opening his eyes.

“Danke, Mutter . . .” he whispered. He opened his eyes, looked up at Lady Beatrice, and started. “Filthy bitch! I’ll kill you—”

“Bitch, unfortunately, yes. Filthy? Certainly not.” Lady Beatrice held him down without much effort, as the drug took its swift effect. “And certainly not the sort of bitch who allows herself to be killed by men like you. Yes, you do feel unaccountably sleepy now, don’t you? You can barely move. Just close your eyes and go back to Dreamland, dear. It will be so much easier.”

When he lay unconscious at last, and having verified by lifting his eyelid that he was, in fact, unconscious, Lady Beatrice rose and considered him coldly. She lifted his legs onto the bed, removed his shoes, and moreover made certain adjustments to his clothing in order to suggest the lewdest possible scenario to anyone discovering him later. Then Lady Beatrice retrieved the papers she had dropped from the floor and secreted them in her bodice.

She left the room and closed the door quietly.

SIXTEEN:

In Which A Curious Creature Is Introduced

You know, I believe my sight has returned,” said Ludbridge, blinking and rubbing his eyes. Mrs. Corvey, who had just finished changing her clothing while explaining how matters presently stood, turned to raise an eyebrow at him.

“My congratulations, Mr. Ludbridge. Lovely feeling, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed, Mrs. Corvey.”

“Now, Mr. Ludbridge, I believe I’ll just go see how my ladies are getting on. Like to know why all the lights are burning at the Hall, as well. I suggest you avail yourself of the soap and the washbasin and polish yourself up a bit, eh? So you don’t look quite so much as though you’d spent the last fortnight mucking about in caves. There’s a hairbrush and a comb on the table you can use, too.”

“Thank you, ma’am, I certainly shall.”

Mrs. Corvey drew her shawl around her shoulders and stepped out into the courtyard. She walked briskly toward the Great Hall, watching the lit windows, and consequently was startled when she trod on something unexpected. She looked down. She stared for a long moment at what lay in the courtyard. Then Mrs. Corvey turned around and walked back to the room behind the stables. She opened the door and beheld Ludbridge in the act of washing his face. When, puffing and blowing like a walrus, he reached for a towel, she said:

“If you please, Mr. Ludbridge, there’s a dead Frenchman outside. I wonder if you would be so kind as to come have a look at him?”

“Happy to oblige,” said Ludbridge, and followed her out into the courtyard. When they reached the corpse he drew a small cylindrical object from his pocket and adjusted a switch on it. A thin beam of brilliant light shot from one end, occasioning a cry of admiration from Mrs. Corvey.

“Oh, I do hope Mr. Felmouth makes up a few of those for me!”

“We call them electric candles; very useful. Let’s see the beggar . . .” Ludbridge shone the light on the dead man’s face, and winced. Count de Mortain’s features were still recognizable, for all that they were distorted and frozen in a grimace of fear; quite literally frozen, too, blue with cold, glittering with frost. His arms were stretched above his head like a diver’s, his fingers crooked as though clawing.

“What the deuce! This is Emile Frochard!”

“Not the Count de Mortain?”

“Not half. This fellow’s a spy in the pay of the Austrians! But they’ve been blackmailing the real Count. Shouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t intercepted the invitation to this auction. Well, well. Damned odd. I wonder how he died?”

“I believe I have an idea,” said Mrs. Corvey, glancing at the house. “I’ll know more presently.”

“Ought we to do anything with him?”

“No! Let him lie for now, Mr. Ludbridge.”

Lady Beatrice stood still a moment in the corridor outside the bedchambers, listening intently. Prince Nakhimov had apparently launched into another anecdote, something to do with hunting wolves. An icy gust of wind crossed the floor, so unexpected as to make Lady Beatrice start. Were she a less ruthlessly pragmatic woman, she had imagined some spectral origin to the chill. A moment’s keen examination of the hallway revealed that a tapestry hung at the rear of the hall, moving as though stirred by a breeze. Lady Beatrice glimpsed the bottom of a door in the wall.

She approached it warily and drew the tapestry aside. The revealed door was ajar. Lady Beatrice saw beyond a short corridor, lit by moonlight through unglazed slit-windows, with another door at its end.

Venturing into the corridor, Lady Beatrice peered through one of the windows and saw that it was high in the air, in effect an enclosed bridge connecting the rear of the house with the tower atop the motte. She hurried across bare wooden planks and tried the door at the other end. It opened easily, for the lock was broken.

Lady Beatrice stood blinking a moment in the brilliant light of the room beyond. The light came not from candles or oil lamps, but from something very like an immense battery of De la Rue’s vacuum lamps; and this astonished Lady Beatrice, for, as far as she had been aware, no one but the Gentlemen’s Speculative Society had been able to build practical vacuum lamps.

Her astonishment was as nothing, however, compared to that of the room’s occupant. He turned, saw her, and froze a moment. He might have been Lord Basmond’s ghost, so like him he was; but smaller, paler, infinitely more fragile-looking. His hands and naked feet were white as chalk, and too long to seem graceful. In the way of clothing he wore only trousers with braces and a shirt, cuffs rolled up prodigiously, and a leather band about his nearly hairless head. Clipped to the band were several pairs of spectacles of different sorts, on swiveling brackets, and a tiny vacuum lamp that presently threw a flood of ghastly light upon his terrified face.

He screamed, shrill as a rabbit in a trap, and scuttled out of sight.

Lady Beatrice stepped forward into the circular chamber. Against the far wall was a small bed, a dresser, and a washstand. In the midst of the room was a trap door, firmly shut and locked. Beside it was a sort of workbench, on which was what appeared to be a disassembled clock, and it was plain from the tools scattered about that the creature had been working on it when Lady Beatrice entered. The most remarkable thing about the room, however, was its decoration. All around the room’s white plaster, reaching as high as ten to twelve feet, were charcoal drawings of machines: gears, pulleys, pistons, springs, wires. Here and there were what seemed to be explanatory notes in shorthand, quite illegible to Lady Beatrice. Nor was she able to discern any purpose or plan to the things depicted.

She walked around the workbench, searching for the room’s inhabitant. He was nowhere in sight now, but there beyond the trap door was a chest roughly the size and shape of a blanket-press. Lady Beatrice knelt beside the chest.

“You needn’t be afraid, Mr. Rawdon,” she said.

From within the chest came a gibbering shriek, which cut off abruptly.

“Leave him alone,” said another voice, seemingly out of midair. The illusion was so complete Lady Beatrice looked very hard at the wall, half-expecting to see a speaking tube. “Can’t you see you can’t talk to Hindley? Go talk to Arthur instead.”

“I’m afraid Arthur is dead, Hindley.”

“I’m not Hindley! I’m Jumbey. Arthur isn’t dead. How ridiculous! Now, you run along and leave poor Hindley alone. He’s far too busy to deal with distractions.”

“May I speak with you, then, Jumbey? If I promise to leave Hindley alone?”

“You must promise. And keep your promise!”

“I do. I will. Tell me, Jumbey: Hindley builds things, doesn’t he?”

“Of course he does! He’s a genius.”

“Yes, I can see that he must be. He built the levitation device, didn’t he?”

“You saw it, did you? Yes. Arthur took it, but Hindley didn’t mind. He can always make another.”

“Did Arthur ask Hindley to make a levitation device for him?”

“Arthur? No! Arthur’s the stupid one. He’d never have come up with such an idea on his own. Hindley was being kept in the little room with the wardrobe. His toys kept rolling under the wardrobe, and poor Hindley couldn’t reach them, and nasty Pilkins wouldn’t come fetch them for him anymore. So Hindley made something to make the wardrobe float, you see, and then he could always rescue his own toys.

“And then Arthur came home and the servants told on Hindley, and he was so frightened, poor thing, because he was sure it would be the little dark room and the cold water again. But Arthur told Hindley he’d give him a nice big room and a laboratory of his own, if Hindley would make things for him. And Hindley could have all the candy floss he wanted. And Arthur would keep all the strangers away. But he didn’t!” The last words were spat out with remarkable venom.

“Didn’t he, Jumbey?”

“No! Not a scrap nor a shred of candy floss has Hindley tasted. And there was a big blundering nosey-parker spying on Hindley, down in the tunnels. Hindley had to deal with him all by himself, which was so difficult for poor Hindley, because he can’t be seen by people, you know.”

“I am so sorry to hear it, Jumbey.”

“Arthur is supposed to look after Hindley and protect him! Mummy said so. Always.”

“Well, Jumbey dear, I’m afraid Arthur can’t do that anymore. We will have to make some other arrangement for Hindley.”

“Has Arthur gone away to school again?”

Lady Beatrice thought carefully before she spoke. “Yes. He has.”

“An-an-and poor Hindley will be left with Pilkins again?” The confident voice wavered. “Hindley doesn’t want that. Hindley doesn’t like the little room and the cold water!”

“I believe we can help Hindley, Jumbey.”

“How?”

SEVENTEEN:

In Which The Ladies Triumph

Bloody hell!” exclaimed Mrs. Corvey. Dora, who had just concluded explaining the events of the last two hours, reeled at her language. She glanced around, grateful that Mrs. Duncan had drunk herself into insensibility and the maids had all gone back to their beds, and said: “I’m sure we did our best, ma’am.”

“I’m sure you did; but this is a complication, as now there’ll be an inquiry. We ain’t getting the levitating thing either; I rather suspect it’s well on its way to the moon by this time. At least none of that lot upstairs will get it either. Dear, dear, what a puzzle. Where’s Lady Beatrice?”

“Here,” said she, hurrying down the back stairs quick as a cat. “I am so glad to see you well, ma’am. Did you discover anything?”

“I did, as it happens.”

“So did I.” Lady Beatrice drew up a kitchen chair and, leaning forward, told her a great deal in an admirably brief time. Mrs. Corvey then returned the favor. Jane, Dora, and Maude listened intently, now and then exclaiming in amazement or dismay.

“Well!” said Mrs. Corvey at last. “I think I see a way through our difficulties. Jane, my dear, just go out to the room behind the stable and knock. Ask Mr. Ludbridge if he would be so kind as to step across, and bring the dead Frenchman with him.”

Pilkins looked up with a scowl as Lady Beatrice entered the Great Hall.

“Didn’t I tell you hussies to keep to your places belowstairs?” he cried. “The constable will be here any minute!”

“If you please, sir, there’s a gentleman arrived in the courtyard, but it’s not the constable,” said Lady Beatrice. “And I was wondering, sir, if we mightn’t just take ourselves off to London tonight, so as to avoid scandal?”

“For all I care you can go to—” said Pilkins, before a solemn knock sounded at the door. He rose to open it. Mr. Ludbridge stood there with a grave expression on his face.

“Good evening; Sir Charles Haversham, Special Investigator for Her Majesty’s Office of Frauds and Impostures. I have a warrant for the arrest of Arthur Rawdon, Lord Basmond.”

Pilkins gaped. “He—he’s dead,” he said.

“A likely story! I demand you produce him at once.”

“No, he really is dead,” said Prince Nakhimov, standing and lifting a corner of the blanket that had been thrown over Lord Basmond’s corpse. Ludbridge, who had walked boldly into the Great Hall, peered down at the dead man.

“Dear, dear. How inconvenient. Oh, well; I do hope none of you gentlemen had paid him any considerable sums of money?”

“What d’you mean?” said Sir George Spiggott.

“I mean, sir, that my department has spent the last six months carefully building a case against his late lordship. We have the sworn testimony of no fewer than three conjurors, most notably one Dr. Marvello of the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, that his lordship paid them to teach him common tricks to produce the illusion of levitation. We also intercepted correspondence that led us to believe his lordship intended to use this knowledge to defraud a person or persons unknown.”

“But—but—” said Pilkins.

“Good God!” cried Sir George. “A confidence trickster! I knew it! I told him to his face he was a damned un-English bounder—”

“Do you mean to say you quarreled with his lordship, sir?” inquired Lady Beatrice quietly.

“Er,” said Sir George. “No! Not exactly. I implied it. I mean to say, I was going to tell him that. In the morning. Because I was, er, suspicious, yes, damned suspicious of his proposal. Yes. I know a liar when I see one!”

“So do I,” said Ludbridge, giving him a stern look, at which he wilted somewhat. “And I take it his lordship has died as the result of misadventure?”

“We are waiting for your constabulary to arrive, but it would appear Lord Basmond fell down the stairs and broke his neck,” said Ali Pasha, with a glance at Sir George.

“Shame,” said Ludbridge. “Still, Providence has a way of administering its own justice. None of you were defrauded, I hope?”

“We had as yet not even bid,” said Prince Nakhimov.

“Capital! You’ve had a narrow escape, then. I suspect that my work is done,” said Ludbridge. “Much as I would have liked to bring the miscreant into a court of law, he is presently facing a far sterner tribunal.”

“If you please, sir,” said Pilkins, in a trembling voice. “My lordship wasn’t no fraud—”

Ludbridge held up his hand in an imperious gesture. “To be sure; your loyalty to an old family fallen on evil times is commendable, but it won’t do, my good man. We have proof that his lordship was heavily in debt. Do you deny it?”

“No, sir.” Pilkins’ shoulders sagged. The sound of wheels and hoofbeats came from the courtyard. “Oh; that’ll be our Ralph bringing the constable, I reckon.”

“Very good.” Ludbridge surveyed them all. “Gentlemen, in view of the tragic circumstances of this evening, and considering the Rawdons’ noble history—to say nothing of your own reputations as shrewd men of the world—I do think nothing is to be gained by bruiting this scandal abroad. Perhaps I ought to quietly withdraw.”

“If you only would, sir—” said Pilkins, weeping afresh.

“The kitchens are down here, sir,” said Lady Beatrice, leading the way. As they descended, they heard the constable’s knock and Ali Pasha saying, “Should someone not go waken the count?”

A splendid farrago of lies, sir,” said Lady Beatrice, as they descended.

“Thank you. Perhaps we ought to quicken our pace,” said Ludbridge. “I should like to be well clear of the house before anyone goes in search of the Frenchman.”

“Where did you put him, sir, if I may ask?”

“In his bed, where else? And a nice job someone did on his partner, I must say. Let the Austrians clean that up!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Did anyone hear us?” asked Dora, as they entered the kitchen. “I had to get Jane to help me lift it—not heavy, you know, but awkward.”

“They didn’t hear a thing,” said Lady Beatrice, kneeling beside the chest. “Jumbey? Jumbey, dear, is poor Hindley all right?”

“He’s frightened,” said the eerie voice. “He can tell there are strangers about.”

“Tell him he needn’t worry. No one will disturb him, and soon he’ll have a bigger and better laboratory to play in.”

“Maude, just you go catch your Ralph before he puts the horses away,” said Mrs. Corvey, and Maude went running out crying:

“Ralph, my love, would you oblige us ever so much? We just need a ride to the village.”

The tragedy of Lord Basmond’s death set tongues wagging in Little Basmond, but what really scandalized the village was the death of the French count at the hands of his Austrian valet; a crime of passion, apparently, though no one could quite determine how the valet had managed to break all the count’s bones. The local magistrate was secretly grateful when an emissary of the Austrian government showed up with a writ of extradition and took the valet away in chains. More: in a handsome gesture, the Austrians paid to have the count’s corpse shipped back to France.

Ali Pasha and Prince Nakhimov returned alive to their respective nations, wiser men. Sir George Spiggott returned to his vast estate in Northumberland, where he took to drink and made, in time, a bad end.

When Lord Basmond’s solicitors looked through his papers and discovered the extent of his debts, they shook their heads sadly. The staff was paid off and dismissed; every stick of furniture was auctioned in an attempt to satisfy the creditors, and when even this proved inadequate, Basmond Park itself was forfeit. Here complications ensued, with the two most importunate creditors wrangling over whose claim took precedence. In the end the case was tied up in chancery for thirty years.

EIGHTEEN:

In Which It Is Summed Up

I say, ladies!” Herbertina tilted her chair back and rested her feet on the fender. “Here’s a bit of news; Basmond Hall has collapsed.”

“How awfully sad,” said Jane, looking up from the pianoforte.

“Indeed,” said Miss Otley. “It was an historic site of great interest.”

“It says here it fell in owing to the collapse of several hitherto unsuspected mine shafts beneath the property,” said Herbertina.

“I don’t doubt it,” remarked Mrs. Corvey, with a shudder. “I’m surprised the place didn’t fall down with us in it.”

“And soon, no doubt, shall be a moldering and moss-grown mound haunted by the spectres of unquiet Rawdons,” said Lady Beatrice, snipping a thread of scarlet embroidery floss. “Speaking of whom, has there been any word of poor dear Jumbey?”

“Not officially,” said Mrs. Corvey. “There wouldn’t be, would there? But Mr. Felmouth has intimated that the present Lord Basmond is developing a number of useful items for Fabrication.”

“Happily, I trust?”

“As long as he gets his candy floss regular, yes.”

“Jolly good!” Maude played a few experimental notes on her concertina. “Who’s for a song? Shall we have ‘Begone, Dull Care,’ ladies?”

THE GOD ENGINES

John Scalzi

To Doselle Young

And gratefully acknowledging the efforts of

Bill Schafer, Yanni Kuznia, Tim Holt, Gail Cross,

Vincent Chong, and Cherie Priest

Chapter One

It was time to whip the god.

Captain Ean Tephe entered the god chamber, small lacquered, filigreed chest in hand. He found blood on the deck, an acolyte spurting one and lying shivering on the other, and the god prostrate in its iron circle, its chains shortened into the circle floor. The healer Omll muttered over the acolyte. The god giggled into the iron its mouth was mashed into and flicked its tongue over red lips. A priest stood over the god, just outside the circle. Two other acolytes stood against the wall of the chamber, terrified.

Tephe set the chest on a table filled with discipline instruments. He turned to the priest, Croj Andso. “Explain this,” he said.

Andso bristled momentarily. His nominal rank was not less than the captain’s. But this involved the Righteous, and thus Tephe’s position of authority in this case was higher than Andso’s.

“The Defiled was refusing its orders, and so I had Drian here discipline it,” the priest said. His eyes tracked to the long iron pike that lay just outside the god’s circle. A spatterline of blood trailed from it to the acolyte Drian. “The Defiled trapped the pike as Drian thrust in and pulled him into the circle. It bit him and released him only after I had it ordered driven into the floor.”

Tephe addressed the healer Omll without taking his eyes off the priest. “How is the acolyte?” he asked.

“The Defiled took a mouthful of flesh from him,” Omll said. “Off the shoulder. The bone is ripped out and vessels ruptured, and he has lost a lot of blood. I am sealing the wound but the wound is needful. Healer Garder will have to supervise the healing from here. His skills in this area are advanced of mine.”

“Why did he not come?” Tephe asked.

“There was not time,” Andso said. “Healer Omll happened to be passing outside when the attack occurred. He entered the chamber when he heard the screaming.”

Tephe nodded briefly. “Apologies, healer Omll.”

The healer nodded in response. “With your permission I need to bring acolyte Drian to the healer’s bay.”

“You have it,” Tephe said. “Priest, if you will have your other acolytes assist the healer.” Andso gestured to the other acolytes, who did not need to be told a second time. They lifted Drian off the floor and carried him out of the chamber, quickly. The captain was alone with the priest and the god.

Tephe reached to the floor and picked up the pike, examined the head. “I want to know how this happened, priest,” he said.

“I already explained what happened, Captain,” Andso said, tightly.

“You explained what happened,” Tephe said. “I said I wanted to know how.” He hefted the pike. “Where did this pike come from?”

“It was in our stores,” Andso said. “I had it brought out when the Defiled refused its orders.”

Tephe touched the head of the pike. “Did you examine it before you had it used?” he said.

“There was no need,” Andso said. “Our supplies are certified by the Bishopry. All our instruments of discipline are second-made iron, Captain. They have to be. You know that.”

“You must have marvelous faith in the Bishopry,” Tephe said, “if you do not believe you must examine your own inventory.”

“And you do not?” Andso said, straightening. The captain was edging into blasphemy, and that, at least, was in the priest’s ambit. “Do you doubt the Bishopry, Captain?”

The captain glanced at the priest but did not reply. He hefted the pike again and thrust it savagely into the prone body of the god, the cutting spike of the weapon driving toward the flesh of the god’s back.

The pike shaft bent; sharpened spike dragged roughly across godskin, catching but not cutting. The god giggled again, wheezy. The priest’s eyes widened.

Tephe pulled back the pike and threw it on the floor, outside the circle, between him and the priest. “I do not doubt the Bishopry, Priest Andso,” he said. “I doubt other men. You know that fleet merchants and suppliers are more concerned with cash than their souls. And you should know that profits made passing third-made iron as second-made are the difference between a good month and a bad one.”

From the floor, a whispering sing-song. “ ‘Third-made binds, second-made wounds, first-made kills,’ ” said the god, and giggled again.

The priest stared at the pike, and then looked up at the captain. “I want to question the quartermaster,” Ando said. “He procured these supplies. It was his responsibility to ensure the certification was genuine.”

“Quartermaster Usse is dead,” Tephe said, sharply. “Along with three of his staff and ten other of our crew, in our late engagement off Ament Cour. If he is to blame for this, then you may be assured Our Lord has called him to task for it. You need not concern yourself further with him. And whatever his sins, priest, it is you who chose to accept a forged bishopric certification on faith. Your acolyte may pay for it.”

“If he does, he will be with Our Lord,” Andso said.

“And gloriously so,” said the captain. “But I imagine at his age, not gladly.” He kicked at the pike, sending it skittering toward the priest. “Destroy that,” he said. “Pray over the ashes. And then go through your remaining instruments. All of them. I expect a full accounting by fourth bell, forenoon tomorrow.”

“Yes, captain,” Andso said, after a minute.

“That is all,” Tephe said.

Andso look surprised. “You do not want my assistance?” he asked.

“This is a task given to captains,” Tephe said. “Not to priests.”

“Very well, Captain,” Andso said, stiffly. “I leave you to your task.”

“Wait,” Tephe said, and motioned at the god. “Loosen its chains.”

“Captain?” Andso said.

“Loosen its chains,” the captain repeated. “I want it able to sit.”

“I advise against it, Captain,” Andso said. “The Defiled must be made low.”

“It will be low enough when I am done with it,” Tephe said. “Now, priest.”

Andso went to the controls which unspooled the chain, and then released the lock on the chain.

“It is still on the floor,” Tephe said, after several seconds.

“So it is,” said the priest. “But it is so by choice.”

“Very well,” said Tephe. “Go.”

The priest left.

“You may rise,” Tephe said, to the god.

“To sit is not to rise,” said the god.

“Then you may sit,” Tephe said.

“The iron is cool,” said the god. “It likes us well.”

“As you will,” Tephe said, and walked back to the table. He retrieved the small chest and walked toward the god, stopping close to the edge of the iron circle. He set the chest on the floor at the edge, in the line of the god’s sight.

“Do you know what is in here?” he said.

“Treasure,” whispered the god, mockingly, into the floor.

“So it is,” said Tephe, and bent down to open the chest, to reveal a whip, flecked with metal.

The god hissed, slowly, sadly.

“You have not seen this before, because you have not given me cause to use it before,” Tephe said, taking the whip, gently. “And so I will explain it to you.” He held out the handle. “The handle is bone, taken from a god My Lord killed with His own hands. I have heard that My Lord took the bone from this god while it still lived. But I do not know the truth of it.”

“We know the truth of it,” the god said.

“The leather is godskin,” Tephe said, ignoring the god’s reply. “The skin of the same god whose bone serves as the handle. This skin was taken while the god lived, that much is truth.”

“We knew of it,” the god said, still on the floor. “The god yours killed. We felt its pain. We marveled at how long your god suffered it to live, harvesting bones and skin remade, sustained by despairing followers who could not bear to see their god so, but could not bear a life without it. So terrible. With the coin of faith and cruelty your god purchased that pretty, pretty whip. You do not understand the cost of what it is you hold.”

“The gods do many things their followers are not given to understand,” Tephe said. “What I do understand is that the bones and skin of a god alone do not make this something you would fear. For your fear, there are these.” Tephe pointed to the splinters of metal, woven and embedded into the whip.

“Yes,” the god hissed again.

“Single made iron,” Tephe said. “It is as described in our commentaries: ‘Born in the heart of a star, as it died and strew itself into darkness. Never collected to melt in the dust of aborning planets. Never made a third time in the fire of a human forge.’ ”

He held it closer to the god, but still outside the circle. The god flinched from it. “Look at the iron,” Tephe said. “Unfashioned in itself but set and secured into this whip. And it is as you said. Third made iron binds, second made iron wounds, single made iron kills.”

Tephe set the whip back into its case. “I do not know why this is. Why single made iron can kill a god. I know only that it can. I know the gods fear death more than do men. I can kill you with this, god.”

The god raised its head. “You do not name us as the others,” it said. “You do not call us ‘Defiled.’ We have heard this before. We would know why.”

“You do me service,” Tephe said.

“But you do not use our name,” said the god.

“I am not a fool,” Tephe said. To name a god was to give it power.

The god smiled. “You do not even think it,” it said. It set its head back on the iron.

“What I think,” Tephe said, “is that you should swear to me that you will follow your orders. That you will bring us to Triskell, where we are expected in the morning.”

“Why should we do this thing,” asked the god.

“Because you are commanded,” Tephe said.

“No man commands us,” the god said.

Tephe reached into his shirt and pulled out his Talent, the iron cypher held by a silver chain. He held it toward the god. “Do not play games,” he said. “You know well what this Talent signifies. On this ship I bear the Talent of command. It means on this ship, my word is as My Lord’s. God though you are, you are yet His slave. And as you are His slave in all things, on this ship so are you mine. I command you in the name of My Lord. And I command you bring us to Triskell.” Tephe placed his Talent back into his shirt.

“What men have you on this ship?” asked the god.

“I have three hundred eighty souls at the moment,” said Tephe. The Righteous had been brought from Bishop’s Call six months earlier with four hundred twenty men aboard, but battles and illness had reduced their number.

“Three hundred eighty good men,” said the god.

“Yes,” said Tephe.

“Then bid you them step outside your precious ship and push,” said the god. “I do not doubt you will be at Triskell in the morning.”

Tephe took the whip from the case, stood, and lashed hard into the god, the slivers of iron tearing into its flesh. The god screamed and kicked as far as its chain would allow. Godblood seeped from the gash.

“A lash for that,” said Tephe, and after a moment lashed the god a second time. “And a lash for the acolyte Drian.” The captain coiled the whip with the godblood and flesh still flecked on it, knelt and set it back into the chest. “If the acolyte dies, you will answer for that as well.”

The god tried to laugh and sobbed instead. “It burns.”

“It burns, yes,” agreed the captain. “And it will burn further. Wounds from single made iron will not heal without the grace of the faithful, as you know. Your wounds will rot and increase, as will your pain, until you die. Unless you swear to obey me.”

“If we die, you are lost out here,” said the god.

“If you die, our Gavril will send a distress call, and we will be soon enough gathered,” Tephe said. “I will be called to account, but the truth of it will be plain enough. Our Lord does not long suffer those who will not obey.” Tephe motioned to the chest with the whip. “This you should know well.”

The god said nothing and lay on the ground, stuttering and suffering. Tephe stood, patient, and watched.

“Make it stop,” it said, after long minutes.

“Obey me,” Tephe said.

“We will bring you to Triskell, or wherever else you require,” said the god. “Make it stop.”

“Swear,” Tephe said.

“We have said what we will do!” shouted the god, its form rippling as it did so, into something atavistic and unbeautiful, a reminder that when The Lord enslaved other gods, He took their forms along with their names. The ripple ceased and the god resumed its enslaved form.

Tephe knelt, opened the service knife he kept in his blouse pocket, jabbed it into the meat of his left palm, praying as he did so. He cupped his right hand underneath his left, collecting the blood that flowed out. When enough collected, he stepped into the iron circle and placed his hands on the god’s wounds, coating them with his own blood, letting the grace in his blood begin its healing work. The god screamed again for a moment and then lay still. Tephe finished his work and then quickly stepped outside of the iron circle, mindful that the god’s chains were slack.

“Now,” he said, holding his palm to stop the bleeding. “Bring us to Triskell.”

“We will do as we have said,” said the god, breathing heavily. “But we must have rest. Triskell is far, and you have hurt us.”

“You have until eighth bell of the Dogs,” Tephe said. “Tell me you understand and obey.”

“We do,” said the god, and collapsed again onto the iron.

Tephe collected the chest and exited the chamber. Andso was waiting outside with his acolytes. “You are bleeding,” he said.

“The god has agreed to carry out its orders,” Tephe said, ignoring the observation. “See that it is prepared to do so by eighth bell of the Dogs. For now I am allowing it to rest.”

“We must first discipline it for acolyte Drian,” Andso said.

“No,” Tephe said. “It has had enough discipline for the day. I need it rested more than you need to punish it further. Do I make myself clear.”

“Yes, Captain,” Andso said. Tephe walked off toward his quarters to stow his chest, and then to the bridge, where Neal Forn, his first mate, waited.

“Have we an engine?” Forn asked, when Tephe was close enough that his question would not be overheard.

“Until Triskell, at least,” Tephe said, and turned to Stral Teby, his helm. “Triskell on the imager, Mr. Teby.”

Teby prayed over the imager and a map of stars lifted up, floating in a cube of space. The Righteous symbolized at the far edge of the map, Triskell diagonally across the cube from it.

“Sixty light years,” Forn said, looking through the imager. “A hard distance in any event. I have no wonder why the god took its pause.”

“We have our orders, Neal,” Tephe said. “As does the god.” Tephe rubbed his left palm, which had begun to throb. “Stay at post,” he said. “I will be back before evening mess.” He exited toward sick bay, to see if healer Garder was far enough along with acolyte Drian to tend to his own, smaller wound.

Chapter Two

“The gods have become restless,” the priest Croj Andso said, to the officers seated in the captain’s mess, at the conclusion of the evening meal.

Captain Tephe frowned. Andso was already on his third portion of wine. His was from his own stores, not the watered wine a ship’s captain, by custom, furnished for his own table. The priest’s wine was unadulterated, as was increasingly his tongue. And this last comment, pronounced with an unseemly levity, was at odds with what the captain had seen the god do to the acolyte Drian.

Before the captain could comment, Neal Forn spoke. “You call them ‘gods,’ Priest Andso,” he said. “It was my understanding you were given to calling them ‘defiled.’ And that indeed you cannot be parted from the term, even at great cost.”

From the far end of the table, Andso narrowed his eyes at the first mate. Forn was seated at the right of the captain, who sat at the head of the table. Andso was by tradition seated at the foot, although Tephe knew well enough that Andso regarded himself at the head, and the captain at the foot. Between the military and religious heads of the Righteous were the off-duty officers of the ship, who over the course of time habitually seated themselves in a vague approximation of their loyalty to either pole of duty.

Tephe had long noted the unconscious seating arrangement but neither said nor did anything about it. They were all loyal to him in any event, and he was loyal to His Lord. He did wish His Lord had not chosen Andso as His priest, or at least, had not chosen him to be His priest on the Righteous.

“It is not a difficult thing, Parishioner Forn,” the priest said, his address reminding the first mate, as the priest often did, of his subordinate status under Their Lord. “They are gods, they are also defiled. When one is in the presence of our particular defiled god, as I often am, it is meet and appropriate to remind the creature that it is, in fact, defiled, and a slave, and bound to obey my commands. And the commands of the captain,” the priest added, noting perhaps the incremental arch of Forn’s eyebrow. “Among the faithful, such as yourself and the others on this table, we may discuss them generally and dispassionately, as a species. Just as one may discuss dogs generally, without describing them as ‘unclean,’ which they are.”

“But a dog neither knows nor cares if you describe it as ‘unclean,’ Priest Andso,” Forn said. “Nor do we bid a dog to bring the Righteous through space or hold the ship and its crew safe from harm.”

“If you have a point, Parishioner Forn, I regret to say that it escapes me at the moment,” Andso said, swirling his wine.

“My point, Priest Andso, is that this ship has a god for an engine,” Forn said. “A god who is angry and spiteful, and who will with opportunity do any of us harm, as your acolyte so recently learned. I am a good and faithful servant to Our Lord, as all here know, and hold no task higher than to bend to His command. Yet I am practical. Practicality teaches me that if one wishes one’s engine to run well, one does not throw sand into its workings. Or in this case give it additional cause to hate us.”

Andso took a long drink to finish his wine, and then motioned to a standing acolyte to refill his cup. “It will hate us regardless, because that is all it knows, and all it would know. And as you are a good and faithful servant of Our Lord, Parishioner Forn, of which I have no doubt,” Andso uttered the last of these words with a unmistakable curl of his lip, “then you also know from the commentaries that Our Lord requires us to not only adore and honor him in the fullest measure, but to chastise and pity those whom He has brought low. ‘They are the defiled, without measure of redemption, and faithful declaim their rank.’ ” He raised his cup to his lips once more.

“I admire your scrupulous adherence to the commentaries, Priest Andso,” Forn said. “I wonder if you have a similar fervor for the portion of the commentaries which read ‘He that has drink for a pillar finds it falls when he does lean upon it.’ ”

Andso paused in the motion of a swallowing and in doing so choked himself, spraying a little of his wine onto the table. An acolyte rushed to the priest with a kerchief; Andso snatched it, daubed his lips and chin, and flung it back at his acolyte. He turned to the captain. “You offer your first mate much freedom, Captain Tephe.”

“I would think you would be gratified that he is so learned in the commentaries, Priest Andso,” Tephe said, and then raised his hand quickly as the priest’s face began to mottle. “Nevertheless I agree that this line of conversation has gone as far as it is to go. I am better interested in your first statement, when you said that the gods are getting restless. Perhaps you might speak more on this.”

Andso stared for a moment, considering his next action. Tephe watched him, impassively. He had learned that given enough time, the priest would do the minimally acceptable thing; it was only when he was rushed that his arrogance overtook him.

Finally Andso forced himself to relax. “Very well, captain. After our incident today with the Defiled”—Andso shot Forn a glance—“I used the Gavril to talk to several priests on other ships.”

“You engaged the Gavril without my permission?” Tephe said, straightening. It would explain why Lieutenant Ysta was absent from the captain’s table this evening. Gavrils were given the Talent to speak to each other no matter how distant, and thus one was stationed on each ship of the fleet. Nevertheless, every God-given Talent took its toll with use, and it was wearying for any man to reach across space and find another single mind. If Andso had used the Gavril to contact several ships in rapid succession, Ysta might need a day to recover.

Andso looked back at the captain, mildly. “It was ecclesiastical business, Captain,” said the priest. “And as you know, for such matters I may use may own discretion when using ship resources.”

“You might have informed me as a courtesy,” Tephe said. “The Righteous is without its Gavril now.”

“Parishioner Ysta was fine when I left him,” Andso said. He had returned to drinking. Tephe chose not to say anything further but glanced over to Forn, who nodded and motioned over one of the servers. He would have someone visit Ysta. “And in any event I learned what I needed to know, which is that our ‘engine,’ as your first mate describes it, is not the only one which has been refusing orders of late. On three other ships, the gods have also resisted or have had to be disciplined. This has all been since Celebration of the Immanence.”

“Four instances in ten days,” Forn said, returning to the conversation. “That does seem an unusual amount.”

“When you consider that in the entire year previous there were but three such rebellions, it is most unusual,” Andso said.

“Is there cause?” Tephe said.

“Of course not,” Andso said. “Aside from these Defiled testing their boundaries, as does any trapped predator. They would wish to assert to us that they are yet terrible creatures, instead of the slaves of a greater god. They howl to the stars, Captain.” Andso punctuated the comment with a heavy swallow of wine, and then pointed at Forn, unsteadily. “And this is why we must be constant in our reminders to them of their status, Parishioner Forn. Words. They have power. To name a god is to give it power. To deny it such is to take it. Only a little but even so. To celebrate Our Lord in its presence weakens it, and when we call this thing Defiled we lower it and raise Our Lord, because He is the one who enslaved it. You know, Parishioner Forn, what keeps the Defiled bound in that circle.”

“I assume it is the iron in its chains,” Forn said.

“It is faith, Parishioner Forn!” Andso said, too loudly. “Iron is but a simple metal. What gives it its quality to hold and wound and kill is our own faith in Our Lord. This is why I am here. To tend to your faith, each of you. And if every officer on this ship were as you, Parishioner Forn, the Defiled would have long ago slipped its bonds.” Andso waved at Captain Tephe. “And then not even our captain’s precious Talent of command would avail him of . . .”

“Enough,” Tephe said, suddenly and severely. “Priest, you are drunk. I suggest you retire.”

“I was already weary, Captain,” Andso said, and pushed back his chair. An acolyte unobtrusively positioned himself to take the priest’s unsteady arm; Andso angrily waved him away and looked around the table. “I will tell you something, all of you,” he said. “A priest has no Talent—no thing of Our Lord to hang on his chest, to give him a Power. Do you know why? Because a priest is of Our Lord! His own hand, His own arm, His own tongue. I have faith, my parishioners. I am faith in Our Lord embodied. Faith, gentlemen. Without it we are lost.” Andso glared directly at Forn. “I will see you on the morrow, Parishioner Forn. We will discuss your faith.”

“Yes, Priest,” Forn said. Andso weaved out of the captain’s mess, trailing acolytes and the muttering of the table.

Tephe leaned toward his first mate. “I believe that your faith is strong, Neal,” he said, quietly.

“Amen, so it is, Captain,” Forn said. “Strong enough to survive this priest.”

“He was a better priest, once, or so I have heard tell,” Tephe said.

“I imagine this was before he made provision to travel with his own stock of wine,” Forn said.

“I believe he makes such provision because he is aware how much better he once was,” Tephe said.

“So,” Forn said, and then shook his head, lightly. “I do not doubt his faith any more than my own, Captain,” he said. “And I know he is the presence of Our Lord on the Righteous. I do wish Our Lord had seen fit to be present in a worthier vessel. If the priest is right that it is our faith and not iron that truly binds the god, then we sorely need our faith.”

Tephe looked at his first mate with the very lightest of reproach. “Our failure at Ament Cour should not decrease our faith, Neal,” he said.

“Neither yours nor mine, Captain,” Forn agreed. “But our defeat weighs heavily on the crew, as does this rebellion by our god.” Forn leaned in closer to the Captain. “And more than that they hear rumors of other late defeats and failures in the fleet, and that Our Lord is newly set upon by other gods. Priest Andso’s foolish comment here at this table that other gods were restless will also find their way to the crew. Captain, the crew is unused to failure and defeat. Their faith is now put to the test.”

Tephe sat back and considered his second in command. “I understand now why you deflected the priest into a pointless conversation about terminology,” he said, to Forn. “And I acknowledge to my regret it is I who brought him back to it. My apologies, Neal.”

Forn smiled. “He would have come round to it again on his own behalf. I but delayed him a moment at best.” He became serious again. “My point, Captain, is that if there were a time where faith were needed to grow, this is that moment. Priest Andso is the man to whom such task is given. That drunken, petty, stupid man. I fear for it.”

Chapter Three

The portal to the Rookery opened and it was Shalle Thew, form bare beneath embroidered robe, who opened it.

This gave Captain Tephe a start. “You do not often answer the Rookery door,” he said, after a moment.

“Yes, well,” Shalle said. “Lade is having a meal, Cien is resting, Issa is ministering, and Tasy received a special dispensation to go to the Healer’s Bay to tend that poor boy the god chewed upon. There was no one else to answer the door. And so here I am.”

“I would speak to you if you have a moment,” Tephe said.

“You are the captain,” Shalle said, lightly, and brushed back a wisp of hair. “I always have time for you. It’s one of the benefits of the job. Both yours and mine. Now, come in, captain, and be welcome.” Shalle stood aside, head bowed slightly, lips curved in a small smile.

The captain entered the Rookery. Shalle closed the portal and secured it. “We’ll go to my nest. I’ll let Lade know we’re not to be disturbed. Go on, captain. I’ll be right behind you.” Shalle gave the captain a smile and disappeared into the Rookery’s small mess area.

Shalle’s “nest” was no more than the same cramped quarters any senior officer or priest would merit, save that where an officer’s quarters were Spartan, and a priest’s monastic, a rook’s quarters were soft-edged, warm and inviting. Shalle’s nest was filled with the colors of russet, purple and weathered gold, and the scent of fragrant and mellow woods. Tephe breathed it in as he always did and relaxed in spite of himself.

There was something new on Shalle’s small vanity shelf. Tephe picked it up and examined it. It was a figurine of an animal he didn’t recognize.

“It’s a rook,” Shalle said, entering the nest and securing the door. “A real one.”

“Is it,” Tephe said.

“A representation of one, anyway,” Shalle said, and came up the captain, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder, and reaching with the other to lightly hold the hand in which the figurine rested. “It was a gift from Bran Usse, who found it on Ines and thought I would like it.”

“A kind gift,” the captain said. “And not what I would have expected from Quartermaster Usse.”

“How do you mean,” Shalle said, running fingers lightly across the captain’s own.

“The Quartermaster was a severe man,” the captain said.

Shalle gave a small laugh. “Not with me, my captain.”

“So he was a man of two faces,” Tephe said.

“No,” Shalle said, with a tone that was both patient and gently mocking. “He had just the one. But we are all different to different people, aren’t we? I know you’re not the same with me as you are to your crew. It doesn’t mean you have two faces.”

“You are the same,” Tephe said. “With everyone.”

This earned the captain a quick but unhurried kiss on the cheek. “I’m glad you think so. I work hard to make it seem that way,” Shalle said, and then slipped fingers around to take the figurine from the captain’s hand. “Usse said that the shopkeep who sold this to him told him that in ancient times rooks were thought to guide souls after death.”

“What did you think of that?” Tephe asked.

“It made me sad,” Shalle said, gazing at the figurine. “Especially after Bran died so badly. I thought of a rook just waiting for him, sitting there watching him go.” Shalle shuddered and set down the figurine. “I prefer how we think of rooks today. Not guides of the souls of the dead, but comforters of souls of the living.”

“Their souls?” Tephe said, and now it was his turn to have a lightly mocking tone. Shalle grinned at this and pushed the captain to the bed; the captain allowed himself to be pushed.

“Yes, my captain, their souls,” Shalle said, pressing into the captain. “How is your soul at the moment?”

Tephe reached over and drew Shalle into a long and welcome kiss. “I do confess it is better than it was,” he said, when he had parted from the kiss.

Shalle lingered, eyes closed, smile on lightly parted lips, then moved away. “But not as good as it could be.”

“You can tell that from a kiss,” Tephe said.

“I can tell that from you,” Shalle said.

Tephe smiled at this. “That quality of knowing is why I am here,” he said. “Your rooks tend to the crew.”

“Yes,” Shalle said.

“And you to the officers,” Tephe said.

Shalle smiled. “I think you’re well aware of what my job is, and who is under my care, my captain. I see all the officers, and would see Priest Andso, if he’d ever step inside the rookery, and he’d rather set himself on fire than do that.”

“How is their faith?” Tephe asked.

Shalle looked at the captain quizzically for a moment, then changed expression. “Clever of you to ask me that question.”

“It is not my intent to be clever,” Tephe said.

“No,” Shalle agreed. “I know why you’re asking. The attack at Ament Cour. The number of battles the Righteous has engaged in this tour. This attack by the god. The stories of other gods resisting.”

Tephe was surprised. “The rumors are out already?” he said.

“Not rumors,” Shalle said. “The Priest Andso was not subtle about using Lieutenant Ysta. It’s all over the Righteous by this point.”

“Stupid man,” Tephe muttered.

“That’s blasphemy,” Shalle said, lightly.

“I did not say ‘stupid priest,’ ” Tephe said. “I said ‘stupid man.’ ”

“That’s the sort of cleverness you say you don’t intend,” Shalle said.

“Neal—Commander Forn—says that the faith of the men has diminished of late due to these events,” Tephe said, returning to the subject. “Do you see it? Do the other rooks?”

“We haven’t been looking for it,” Shalle said. “The crew comes here to have their release and to have their moment of joy, but you know that is not all we do. We comfort in other ways. By hearing and listening and allowing them to be the things they can’t be when they are on duty or with their crewmates.”

“And?” Tephe said.

“Now that you’ve brought it to my attention, many of those I and my rooks have tended to this tour want something else besides release,” Shalle said. “They want that too, of course. But they also want to talk. They want to be held or touched without arousal.” A wave to the rook figurine. “They give us little things and trinkets.”

“They’re worried,” Tephe said.

“More than worried, I think,” Shalle said. “Ean, you and I have been on three tours of duty together, here and on the Holy, and before that the both of us had other tours. Doesn’t this tour feel different to you?”

“We have been given defeats we have not had before,” Tephe said. “This would naturally give rise to doubts.”

“I don’t know,” Shalle said. “The crew may have doubts because they are dealing with defeat. But it may also be that because we have doubt, we have been defeated.”

“I am not sure of that,” Tephe said.

“Neither am I,” Shalle said. “But I get the feeling that there is something deeper at work here, Ean. It’s been present since the start of the tour but I haven’t had words for it until now. I needed you to bring it directly into my attention.”

“And this relates to the crew’s faith, you think,” Tephe said.

“It might,” Shalle said. “The men know what they know. They feel what they feel. In their souls, in the places where Our Lord moves through them, they sense what Our Lord senses. Our Lord is being challenged now by other gods in a way He has not been for centuries. If we sense in ourselves what Our Lord senses, then maybe we’re all sensing something new.”

“What is that?” Tephe asked.

“Fear,” said Shalle.

“Now, that is blasphemy,” Tephe said, after a long moment.

Shalle smiled. “A rook lives to comfort the faithful, or so the commentaries say. If speaking these words give you comfort, then Our Lord might forgive me.”

“Of all the things these particular words of yours bring me, comfort is not one of them,” Tephe said.

Shalle rose from the chair and let the robe ties slip, exposing smooth skin beneath, and leaned again toward the captain. “I don’t believe that,” Shalle said. “You are a captain. And you are you. When something affects your crew, you don’t rest until you know what it is. Until you understand what it is. And so I speak understanding to you. If the words don’t comfort you, the knowing does. And that’s good enough for me.”

Shalle hovered over Tephe now, robe open, leaning, slender sliver chain holding an iron Talent, hovering between small and perfect nipples. Tephe longed to take one in his mouth, and did. Shalle groaned and placed a hand behind the captain’s head, pressing him into the nipple, which he began lightly to bite.

Tephe had longed for Shalle since they first met on the Holy, where Tephe had served as first mate. He was drawn first by words, carried by Shalle’s warm and quiet voice, which rejected the careful distance and protocol of the High Speech favored by the Bishopry Militant, the cant which a young Tephe had struggled so hard to master and could not bring himself to leave off. Words slid, informal and inviting, from Shalle’s mouth to Tephe’s ear. Shalle’s other qualities made them apparent soon after; not the physical—another rook was assigned to the officers—but the apprehension and intelligence and practical knowledge of a ship and its crew. When Tephe was offered the command of the Righteous, he requested Shalle to lead its rookery.

And he made sure to assign Shalle to the officers.

Shalle had disrobed Tephe with a rook’s typical efficiency, straddled him, and took hold of his penis and began to stroke it. Tephe was confronted again with the rook’s Talent, dangling near his face. He took hold of it.

“I still do not know what your Talent is,” Tephe said.

“I think you do,” Shalle said, and with a quick motion slid Tephe into the place they both wanted him to be. Tephe drew his arms around Shalle’s waist and stood, causing the rook to laugh out loud and clasp hands around his neck to avoid the chance of him slipping out. Tephe turned and pushed Shalle into the bed, thrusting as he did so.

“This seems familiar,” Shalle said.

“Enough,” Tephe said, and thrust again, hard. Shalle’s hands moved from his neck to his hips, bidding him do it again. He did. Shalle moaned in delight.

After they were done, Tephe’s attention returned to the rook figurine. He picked it up again.

“It’s not that interesting,” Shalle said, draped across his chest.

“Not in itself,” Tephe agreed. “But for who it is from. I still have trouble imagining Quartermaster Usse offering you a bauble.”

“I thought it was very sweet of him,” Shalle said. “He was a very gentle man with me.”

“Then all of that gentleness went to you,” Tephe said.

“No,” Shalle said. “He spoke of his children with gentleness. And of his wife, though she left him. He said he always expected it and didn’t blame her. It’s hard to be married to a man who will never leave his ship.”

“He never did leave it,” Tephe said. “Until the end. Until he left it in a shroud.”

“Let’s not talk about that,” Shalle said. “I prefer to remember him as he was.”

“As he was with you,” Tephe said.

“As he was,” Shalle said, firmly. “Don’t discount that part of who he was just because you didn’t know it. None of us are all of who we are to any one person.”

“What are you hiding from me?” Tephe said.

Shalle smiled and lightly slapped his chest. “None of your business. Obviously.” Tephe laughed.

There was a quiet knock on the door. Shalle groaned, got up, found the robe and answered the door while tying its stays. A voice Tephe recognized as Lade whispered something.

Shalle looked back at Tephe. “Lade says the Gavril is at the door of the rookery.”

Tephe frowned. Ysta had been dead asleep when Forn had him checked on, and should have been for hours yet. The captain dressed quickly and went to the rookery door, where Lt. Ysta stood, a troubling shade of gray.

“Lieutenant,” Tephe said.

“CAPTAIN TEPHE,” said Ysta in a voice clearly not his own. “BY ORDER OF THE BISHOPRY MILITANT, THE RIGHTEOUS IS TO BE BROUGHT TO BISHOP’S CALL. MAKE ALL HASTE. YOU ARE EXPECTED PRESENTLY.”

Ysta choked, vomited and collapsed. Shalle slipped out of the rookery to attend him.

“He’s all right,” Shalle said, after a minute. “He’s just worn out. We should get him the healer’s bay.”

“No,” Tephe said. “Once Andso finds out we are to be brought to Bishop’s Call, he will want to use him again, even if he is laid out in a healer’s crèche.” He nodded toward the rookery. “Bring him into the rookery. Andso will not step foot in it. Ysta will sleep all he needs. When he is awake, send him to me.” With that Tephe went to the bridge, to halt preparations for Triskell and begin the preparations for Bishop’s Call.

To begin preparations for going home.

Chapter Four

Captain Tephe nodded to the guards. “Open the gate,” he said. The guards gave the order and the heavy iron gate of the landing citadel creaked open, revealing the city beyond it, and the mile-long thoroughfare connecting the landing citadel and the godhold on its other end. In between were tenements whose inhabitants hung out of windows and stood on street corners, waiting.

Waiting for him to parade the god.

Neal Forn came up to Tephe, bearing two bags, and handed one to the captain. “Your coppers, captain.” Tephe nodded, and took the bag. Inside were coins, which he would throw to the crowds lining the streets as he passed them. They would reach for the coins with one hand and throw trash and rotten things at the passing god with the other, shouting as they did so.

“I remember being on the other end of this,” Forn said, and gestured to the west. “I was a child six streets from here. When these gates opened, wherever we were and whatever we were doing, we came running. The captains and their mates would toss their coins and we would fight for them, and then take what we had and buy bread. When we were older, we would buy drink.”

“You remember this fondly,” Tephe said.

Forn snorted. “No, captain, not fondly. A thrown copper was often the thing that decided for the day whether I ate new, warm bread or what I had scraped out of a barrel to throw at the god.” He jerked his head out toward the tenements. “This is not a place to grow well as a child, captain. I do not think half those I grew with made it to an age to leave, and most of those who grew to that age never left. I do not doubt I will see some of my childhood fellows down this street today, shouting pieties and hoping for copper.”

“Toss them a coin, then,” Tephe said. “They will praise you when they drink tonight.”

Forn shook his head, and then looked out to the street. “I throw to the children,” he said. “They need the coins better. And one of them might yet leave. As I did.” Then the first mate gave his captain a small, bitter smile and took some distance from him.

Tephe gave him his distance and instead looked back toward the god, secured in an ornate rolling cage whose iron bars were too thick to allow the god hope of escape, but wide enough to let through the trash flung at it. Surrounding the cage were a dozen of the godhold guard, dressed in livery of red, gold and black, holding pikes of second-made iron. The pikes were meant to be ceremonial but were nevertheless sharpened and balanced for attack and discipline. Gods were known to attempt escape on their brief journey to the godhold, or their few remaining worshippers to attempt to rescue their lords.

Where either the gods or their followers would go from there was another matter entirely. The inner city of Bishop’s Call was sealed by The Lord Himself, a mosaic ring of first-made iron circling it. No enslaved god, weakened and stripped of its native power, could hope to pass. Nor would The Lord’s followers approach the ring, although for another reason entirely. While even the smallest nugget of first-made iron could bring a man more copper than he might see in a year, stealing iron from the Sealing Ring condemned the thief to have his soul consumed. Death beyond death.

Tephe shuddered at the thought, and looked up to see the god, in its cage, staring directly at him.

Between Tephe and the god Priest Andso interposed himself. “Captain, we are ready,” he said. The priest was dressed in fine robes of green and gold and held a long prieststaff in his right hand. The priest, Tephe knew, would parade close enough to the cage of the god to imply it was he himself who caged and controlled it, but not so close that he would be struck by the trash thrown at it. “We are ready,” the priest said. “And it is a glorious day to parade!”

Tephe glanced at Forn, who discreetly rolled his eyes. They both turned back to the street, whose edges now swarmed with crowds, jeering and readying their refuse to hurl at the god as it passed by. The guards at the gate nodded to the captain; the gate was now fully open.

Tephe took a deep breath, jammed a hand into his bag of coppers, and stepped forward toward the street, and toward the godhold.

“Are you well, Captain Tephe?” asked Bishop Major Chawk. Chawk and two other bishops sat at a long, curved table of dark soapwood, sheaves of documents in front of each. Tephe stood in front of the desk, in a meeting room in the sprawling Bishopry, which in itself was nearly as large as the city which putatively contained it. “You appear distracted,” the Bishop said.

“My apologies, Eminence,” Tephe said. “I was recalling the parade upon our arrival.”

“Ah, yes,” Chawk said. “Did you enjoy it, Captain?”

“It is always an honor to show to the faithful the power of Our Lord, to whom even the gods submit,” Tephe said.

Chawk chuckled. “A very politic answer, Captain. But you do not need to be politic here.”

“Yes, Eminence,” Tephe said, and kept his true opinion about that statement to himself.

“We have read your report on the events surrounding your defeat at Ament Cour,” said another of the bishops, whom Tephe recognized as Stei Ero, the Bishopry’s Vicar of Archives, charged with intelligence gathering. “Also your late addition of the incident with the god. And it will come to you as no surprise that we have collected additional accounts of both incidents, both from your ship’s priest and from other sources.”

“You have a spy aboard the Righteous,” Tephe said.

“Does this offend you, Captain?” Ero asked.

“No, Eminence,” Tephe said. “I hide nothing from the Bishopry Militant, or the Bishopry in general. Your spy will not tell you anything I would not. Therefore he is no harm to me or to my ship.”

“You are indeed an honest captain,” murmured Ero, who patted his stack of documents. “If perhaps not always a wise one. We might have expected better from the captain of a ship of the line than your withdrawal at Ament Cour. What do you say to that, Captain Tephe.”

Tephe held himself very still. “I would say to you that we were engaged by three ships of equal strength to the Righteous, and at close quarters, and with a god who had lately brought us to Ament Cour and who was not at full strength, either to deflect attack or to aid us in escape,” he said. “Through the grace of Our Lord we were able to destroy one of those ships and disable a second, all the while drawing the ships away from the planet itself and giving the faithful there time to fortify themselves against attack, and to call for additional ships to defend them. We left Ament Cour space only when the Righteous’ wounds were too grave to sustain another attack, and even then our god had strength only to bring us as far as the outer planet in Ament Cour’s system. We hid in that planet’s rings, running dark and cold, until both ship and god were recovered well enough to travel once more.”

“You provide us with a rationalization for your failure,” Ero said.

“I provide you with an accounting, Eminence,” Tephe said. “I stand here for my choices and will suffer any judgment they provoke. I chose within my power the wisest course of action for my ship and for the people of Ament Cour. Perhaps another captain would have done other, and better. These were my choices.”

“Well said,” said Chawk. “And in all, well done. You defended your ship and the faithful as far as you were able, and better than most would have done. This is nevertheless of bitter comfort. Before more of our ships could drive off the one ship the Righteous had been unable to defeat, it destroyed three cities on Ament Cour. Hundreds of thousands of souls lost in all.”

“They did not land troops?” Tephe said. “Nor raid the cities?”

“Such was not their goal,” Chawk said.

“What was their goal?” asked Tephe.

“Genocide!”

The word blasted from the third bishop, whom Tephe did not recognize. He did recognize the apprehension both Chawk and Ero formed on their faces when the third bishop spoke. Whomever he was, he outranked them both, and significantly.

“Yes, genocide,” continued the third bishop. “A systematic eradication of the faithful. Not to make it easier to steal things, or to barter hostages for money, or to loot and rape, but to destroy Our Lord by destroying that which sustains him!”

Tephe glanced toward Chawk, whom to him seemed the most sympathetic to him on the panel. “What sustains Our Lord, Bishop Major?” he asked.

“Faith sustains Him, Captain,” Chawk said, reprovingly. “As you must know from the commentaries.”

“ ‘For I am nourished by the faithful, and draw upon their celebration,’ ” quoted Tephe. “I know my commentaries well, Bishop Major.”

“Then it is perhaps that you do not understand them fully,” Chawk said. “When Our Lord speaks of being nourished by the faithful, He is not speaking in metaphor. Our faith sustains and strengthens Him, and gives Him the power to extend His grace to us, and to defeat and enslave His enemies, which in its turn allows us to travel the stars and find the space we need to increase our numbers and allow Him to grow more powerful and protect us further.”

“And so to destroy His faithful is to wound Him directly,” Tephe said.

“Even so,” Chawk said.

“This is not in the commentaries,” Tephe said.

“Our Lord is not a fool,” Ero said. “He does not reveal how He may be wounded.”

“Neither has a genocide been part of the tactics those outside Our Lord’s grace have used against Him or the faithful,” Tephe said. “This is neither in the commentaries nor in the military histories.”

The bishops were silent as Chawk and Ero looked toward the third bishop. He in turn moved his gaze to Tephe.

“Prostrate yourself,” he said to the captain.

Tephe fell to the floor, unquestioning.

“You are charged with silence,” proclaimed the third Bishop. “What is spoken to you here is not to be spoken again, on remit of your soul.” From the floor Tephe quaked; he knew this bishop was warning him that his soul would be consumed. “I charge you again with silence; and charge you a third time. You may rise.”

Tephe rose.

“You have not heard of genocidal tactics being used because they have not been used for thousands of years,” Bishop Ero said. “You know from the commentaries that in the Time Before, thousands of gods contested for the souls of the faithful and that Our Lord prevailed. What is not spoken of are the tactics these gods used in their attempts to diminish Him.”

“Genocide was used by some, then.” Tephe said.

“By all, good captain,” Ero said. “By every one. And yet Our Lord still prevailed, and in doing so enslaved hundreds of the gods who contested against Him, and diminished the others so greatly that His preeminence was uncontested. These gods exist now on the margins of His empire, with only enough faithful to nibble at His feast. The looting and hostage taking of which we earlier spoke.”

Tephe nodded. His earlier tours were a list of defenses against just such minor attacks and parries, and the goal in these engagements was twofold: to protect the faithful under attack and to capture rather than kill the gods who powered the enemy ships, so that they might be enslaved and thus used to increase the number of His ships.

“Captain, what happened at Ament Cour was not the first of its kind,” Ero said.

Tephe looked at the bishop, shocked. “Other genocides?”

“Ament Cour was the third in the last month,” Chawk said. “Smar and Breese also were attacked. Their cities and the faithful within were put to flame and fire. Millions of the faithful taken from the grace of Our Lord. It would have been as this at Ament Cour, save for your actions.”

“Many still died,” Tephe said.

“Yes,” Chawk said. “But many lived who would not have.”

“This is the first I have heard of these atrocities,” Tephe said.

“You are not the only faithful of late enjoined to silence,” said the third bishop.

“There was only one Gavril on Smar and on Breese allowed to speak beyond his own planet, as is so on every world,” Ero said. “All of their messages come through us, here. It is not difficult to keep a secret if we wish it so, and we have wished it.”

“It is not yet time to concern the faithful with this matter,” Chawk said. “We prefer at the moment to have them believe that these minor gods and their followers are yet looting and hostage taking.”

“With deference, your Eminences, this deception is not a thing which will long endure,” Tephe said. “These minor gods have gone from small incursions to wholesale slaughter of the faithful. This is not a change in survival tactics. This is a change in underlying intent. Something has changed to take them out of hiding and into bald and murderous assault.”

“Clever captain,” Ero said, after a moment.

“I am not clever, Eminence,” Tephe said. “I can read a map when it is laid out in front of me.”

“There is a new god,” Chawk said. “We do not know from whence it came. It has come to the edge of Our Lord’s dominion. Its strength is considerable. We believe its presence provokes these little gods to misbehavior.”

“They ally with it,” Tephe said.

“Gods do not ally,” growled the third bishop.

Tephe bowed his head, deeply. “With deference, bishop, if what I have heard here is correct, then these gods are acting in a manner that suggests coordination and an underlying strategy. It does suggest an alliance.”

“There is no alliance,” said the third bishop, leaning forward in his chair. “He would know if there were. He says there is not. He says the gods hate each other as ever they have.”

Tephe realized with a growing coldness who the third bishop must be. “Yes, Eminence,” he said. The third bishop reclined into his chair once more.

“Whatever the cause for these actions, Our Lord has been lately weakened,” Chawk said, drawing the conversation to himself. “His primacy over His dominion is not threatened, yet neither would it be wise for Him to ignore the threat that exists at His doorstep.”

“I will do all that is asked of me to aid My Lord,” Tephe said. “Though it cost me my life.”

Chawk smiled. “We hope it will not come to that.” The bishop produced an image from his documents and motioned for the captain to take it. It was of a planet, the coordinates of which were unfamiliar to him.

“That is your destination, captain,” Ero said.

Tephe scanned the image. “There is no name for this place.”

“Names have power,” Chawk said. “Names call attention. We choose not to call attention to this place.”

“Yes, Eminence,” Tephe said. “What shall I find there?”

“Faith,” said the third bishop.

Chapter Five

“I do not understand,” Captain Tephe said.

“Captain, recall for me that which the commentaries compare our faith,” said Bishop Chawk.

“ ‘Our faith is as iron,’ ” Tephe said. It was one of the first phrases children learned in their schooling.

“As with so many things in the commentaries, this is neither a shallow nor metaphorical comparison,” Chawk said. “It is direct and accurate. The quality of faith increases its power, and its ability to sustain Our Lord. Your faith, as an example, Captain. It is the weakest of all.”

Tephe felt himself straighten involuntarily. “My faith is not in doubt, Bishop Major,” he said.

Chawk waved this away. “I am not speaking of the depth or sincerity of your faith, good Captain Tephe,” the bishop said. “Neither is in question. But your faith is the faith of your fathers, and their fathers, and their fathers before them, reaching back, no doubt, to the Time Before, when men chose the gods they would follow. Is that not right?”

“We have the honor of being First Called,” Tephe said. “My ancestor Ordor Tephe chose to follow Our Lord and was martyred for it.”

“A faithful lineage, to be sure,” Chawk said, and Tephe sensed a slight air of dismissal at his ancestor’s martyrdom, which rankled him. “That which makes your lineage proud also diminishes the quality of your own faith. Your faith was earned by your fathers before you, Captain. You wear it as you would a family coat passed down from another age.”

“My faith is my own, your Eminence,” Tephe said. “Though my fathers made it, it is renewed in me.”

“Exactly!” Chawk exclaimed, and clapped his hands together for punctuation. “Renewed. Remade. As iron is remade in the forge.”

Tephe now understood. “My faith is as thirdmade iron,” he said.

“Not only your faith, Captain,” Bishop Ero said. “Also that of nearly all of Our Lord’s faithful. The totality of his dominion has assured that. Third-made faith is faith assumed, as your faith was assumed from the moment you were born.”

“If there is third-made faith, then there is secondmade as well,” Tephe said.

“Faith taken,” said Ero. “From other gods, when Our Lord defeats them, and their followers become Our Lord’s newly faithful.”

“Why is it more powerful?” Asked Tephe.

“It is not for you to question,” said the third bishop, to the captain, rasping his words. “It is only for you to know. Even that is dangerous.”

Tephe bowed his head.

“The theological issues of the quality of faith are not important to your mission,” Chawk said, somewhat more gently. “Need you know only this; that for the purposes of sustaining Our Lord, third-made faith is moonlight, and second-made is sunlight.” Tephe nodded. “As Our Lord’s dominion has increased the number of faithful, so has it decreased the numbers of those whose faith may be second-made. Those numbers that remain would not be useful to Our Lord in his struggle with this new god.”

Tephe looked again at the image Chawk had provided him. “Then I do not understand why you would have the Righteous brought to this place,” he said. “If the faith I find there would not sustain Our Lord.”

“The faith you will find there, Captain, is not second-made,” Ero said. “Nor third-made.”

Tephe looked up. “First-made faith?”

“Faith where before there was none,” intoned the third bishop. “Faith pure and new.”

“Faith which outshines second-made as secondmade outshines third-made,” Chawk said.

“How is this possible?” Tephe said. “Such faith could not have been since the Time Before. The commentaries tell us that in the Time Before all men chose and fought for their gods. All men, your Eminence.”

“There are the public commentaries, Captain,” Ero said, “which are given to the faithful to sustain their faith. There are the ecclesiastical commentaries, which inform the priesthood. And then there are the bishopric commentaries, known to few, because few need to know. Until now, you have known only the public commentaries.”

“In the bishopric commentaries,” Chawk said, “we learn that in the Time Before, Our Lord discovered there were some men without the knowledge of gods. Knowing that the time would come when He would need the power of that first-made faith, He secreted them to this place, hiding it from the other gods, so He could call upon the strength of that newly-made faith when He did need it.”

“But what of the men there, Eminence?” Tephe said. “What of their souls? Thousands of years without the knowledge of Our Lord.”

Tephe caught the quick glance Chawk shot to the third bishop, to see if the last comment aroused his wrath. The third bishop remained quiet. “Our Lord has made provision for those souls,” Chawk said, smoothly but quickly. “Again, Captain, you need not concern yourself with theological matters, only with operational ones.”

“As you say, your Eminence,” Tephe said.

“Our Lord must tend to the incursions of this lately arrived god. He must remain within His dominion, and not reveal until the final moment this world to other, jealous gods, who watch where and how He moves,” Ero said. “Therefore, He bids you to bring your ship to this world. Locate its largest settlement and bring its people to Our Lord. They must willingly accept Him.”

“Am I bringing priests?” asked Tephe.

“There is no time for that,” Ero said.

Tephe turned to Chawk, who held up a hand. “In other times, we might do,” he said. “But for now, we must seek quicker and quieter methods. Your own priest is sufficient for conversion. We will furnish the Righteous with a company of Bishop’s Men to assist you in your task.”

The Bishop’s Men—warrior acolytes, bodyguards of the ruling bishops, and, some whispered, those who by their task chose who would lead the Bishopry. “As you will,” Tephe said. “I do note that many have chosen death over conversion. My own ancestor did so.”

“These are men who do not hold to a god,” Chawk said. “When you show them Our Lord’s power, they will seize upon it.”

Ero placed a small box on the table, and pushed it in Tephe’s direction. “And when they do, give one among them this, and have your priest do his rites.”

Tephe set down the image he held, took the box and opened it. Inside lay a Talent on a whisper-thin chain. The sigil seemed familiar, but Tephe could not at the moment place it. “May I ask which Talent this is,” he said.

“It is the Talent of Entrance,” Ero said. “Through it Our Lord will come to you and to His new flock, and take of them what He is due.”

“It is a Talent not given often or lightly,” Chawk said. “Be sure you choose well among the new faithful whom to wear it. He must with genuine and glad heart wish to receive Our Lord.”

“Perhaps Priest Andso should choose,” Tephe said, looking back down at the Talent.

“It is a task given to you,” Chawk said. “Your actions at Ament Cour speak to your judgment and faithfulness. This is a mighty task for Our Lord. You were not chosen capriciously, good captain. And for your service, you will be rewarded.”

“Your Eminence?” Tephe said.

“Upon your return, you are to be elevated,” Ero said. “You will leave the common military and become in yourself a Bishop Major. You will with us plan the strategies that will assist Our Lord in defeating this new god and ending its nuisance. We will restore order and newly subjugate the gods whom this new one has made restless.”

Tephe had stopped listening. To be elevated would be to withdraw into the cloisters of the Bishopry forever. To lose his command and crew. To lose the Righteous.

To lose Shalle.

Tephe covered the Talent he had been given and placed its box back on the table. “You do me too much honor,” he said. “I could not ask to be elevated for the simple task of performing my duties as they should be performed.”

“What you would ask is of no consequence here,” said the third bishop.

“Captain Tephe, already much has been revealed to you that is not given to one such as yourself to know,” Ero said. “Only the extraordinary nature of the mission compels this breach. You are allowed to know this knowledge only because it has been decided that you are to become as we are.”

“And glad you should be for it,” Chawk said. “As we are. Rare is it in these times for a Bishop Major to come from the ranks of the common military. You will bring to our strategies a perspective fresh and well-needed. This will be a benefit to us as much as an elevation of yourself.”

Tephe closed his eyes and ducked his head and prayed that the bishops looking on him would see humility and not anguish in his action. After a moment, he looked up again.

“ ‘Every thing we do is for the glory of Our Lord,’ ” he quoted.

It was only after he found himself on the cobblestones, ears ringing, that Tephe was aware a bomb had gone off.

Tephe quickly checked his body and found he was not injured. He rolled off his back in time to see to a woman lunging toward him, knife in hand. Her scream was muted by the injury to his ears. Tephe kicked out with full force and brought the sole of his boot into her knee. The knee twisted in an unnatural direction and the woman fell, knife clattering from her hand. Tephe scrambled up as another woman, seeing the first woman fall, changed course toward the captain, howling.

Tephe waited until the woman was close enough, and then grabbed the bag of coppers on the road, given to him to throw from during the parade back to the landing citadel. Tephe swung, and the bag connected hard into the woman’s temple, knocking her off balance even as it tore open, showering coins into the air and street. The woman staggered at the blow, and Tephe used the opening to push her down into the street. The woman’s head connected with the cobblestones with the sound of a melon fruit falling from a table. She stopped moving. Tephe found the knife the first woman had dropped, grabbed it and held it ready as he observed the scene.

Near himself, Tephe saw Neal Forn sitting in the street, clutching a bleeding wound on his head; Forn saw his captain looking at him and signaled he was not seriously injured. Tephe turned his attention back down the street.

The bomb had gone off well behind the captain and toward the cage which held the god. On the street lay an acolyte and two godhold guards, one torn near in half. Either the bomb had been a small one or he had fallen on it to protect others. Behind that carnage the remaining guard engaged a band of ragged street fighters, wielding knives and common, blunt tools. They surrounded the caged god, who was itself looking about, as if in a panic.

What is it looking for? thought Tephe.

The god grinned madly and rushed to the front left side of its enclosure, and extended an arm through its cage bars, as if reaching for something.

Tephe followed the god’s gaze back into the street, where a hooded figure had stepped out of the chaos of bystanders running from the bomb. The figure held something tightly in its hand. Tephe looked back to the god and saw it motioning to figure, bidding it to throw what it had.

The figure was looking toward the god, away from Tephe. The captain ran toward the figure as quickly as he could, knife in hand, as the figure cocked back its arm and readied for the throw.

Tephe connected with the figure just before the top of its throw, the object, its arc aborted, skittering onto the cobblestones a few yards in front of them. The figure lost its balance but did not fall, the hood of its cape falling back to reveal a middle-aged woman with scars on her face. The woman righted herself quickly and equally quickly put a fist into the captain’s mouth, causing him to fall back, howling and clutching his mouth, dropping the knife as he did so. The woman frantically scanned the street, looking for the fallen object she had held in her hand.

Tephe, feeling the blood on his lips, followed her gaze and lunged when she did, aiming for her, not whatever she was looking for. He pushed his mass into hers as they both dove, the captain’s larger body winning the physical argument. The woman collided into the cobblestones, with a great cough of air forcing itself out of her body. Tephe rolled away from her to prepare himself for an attack. As he did so he felt something jab itself uncomfortably into in his back. Tephe arched, slid a hand underneath himself, grabbed at the object and held onto it as he rolled again, facing down.

As he did he felt a sharp weight land on his spine, almost breaking it. The air vomited out of his lungs. Tephe was in too much pain to move. Hands reached to the back of his head, jerking it up and slamming his face into the cobblestones. Tephe felt his nose give way and the skin on his forehead abrade. The woman pulled his head back a second time. She would pound his head into the street until he was dead.

There was a gasp above Tephe, and then a splash of wet warmth on the back of his neck. Tephe turned his head painfully to see the woman collapse onto the street next to him, blood falling out of a heavy cut across her neck. He rolled away from her, facing up, and saw Neal Forn above him, wielding the knife the captain had taken from the woman who had first attacked him.

“It was a woman,” Forn said, breathing heavily from exertion. “They were all women, captain.”

Tephe nodded, propped himself up, turned to the side and retched. “Women could get closer to the parade,” he said. “The guards would not have expected them to attack. Or to fight.” He groggily looked toward the god’s cage. The women who had been fighting there had dispersed, save for the ones who were in the street, dead.

“It makes no sense,” Forn said. “A circle of firstmade iron surrounds this whole area. There would have nowhere for the god to go. There was no escape to be had.”

Tephe felt the object in his hand, and opened his hand to see it. It was a Talent on a chain.

“Perhaps escape was not what it wanted,” he said.

Chapter Six

“You may have fooled the godhold’s Captain of the Guards, but I am not so easily fooled,” Priest Andso said to Captain Tephe. The two stood at the door of the god’s chamber on the Righteous. “And if you will question the god, then I will be there as well.”

Tephe, still in pain from the healer’s ministering of his wounds, kept his temper in check but was inwardly irritated with himself. He had indeed withheld from the godhold captain, choosing to keep secret the Talent he had taken from the woman. It was a key to a larger plan, one he would not discover if he were to give it up. A plan that involved the god of the Righteous, and therefore the Righteous itself.

“I saw it, Captain,” said Andso. “That thing which you took from the woman. During the battle. I saw it. I know it well involves the god.”

“Strange how much you saw of the battle from your vantage point under a cart,” Tephe said, naming the place the priest had been discovered in the aftermath.

Andso flared. “Do not blaspheme, Captain Andso.”

“It is not blasphemy to speak the truth, priest,” Tephe said. He started to push past Andso.

Andso blocked him. “Indeed, Captain,” said the priest. “Here is a truth for you, then. You are captain and commander of this ship. But by the rights of the priesthood and the rules of the Bishopry Militant, you must have the blessings and prayers of a priest before your ship can leave port. You must have my blessing, Captain, or the Righteous will not move an inch.”

“This ship’s orders come directly from the Speaker,” Tephe said, finally naming to himself the third bishop, the sole bishop who spoke directly to The Lord and who therefore carried His word and His orders, uncontested. Tephe watched the priest’s eyes widen involuntarily. “You need to ask yourself, Priest Andso, whether you wish to be the one to explain to him why this ship has not budged when he has bid it depart.”

The priest looked panicked for a moment. Then he smiled at the captain. “By all means, Captain Tephe, let us raise the Bishopry Militant,” he said. “I will explain why I have delayed our departure. And you may explain why you lied to the Captain of the Guards and even now hold a trinket meant for the god. Perhaps you intend to deliver it after all.”

It was Tephe’s turn to flare. “Call me a traitor again, priest,” he said, moving his face directly into the other man’s own. “You will know my response, and gladly will I answer to Our Lord Himself for it.”

Andso swallowed but held his ground. “This ship will not move, captain, until I know what business you have with the god.”

Tephe swore and withdrew momentarily, and then stormed back up to the priest. Then he paused and thought better of what he was about to say.

The priest smiled. “We have understanding, then,” he said, to Tephe.

Tephe said nothing but opened the portal to the god’s chamber and bid the priest enter.

Inside was the god, chained and resting in its circle, and two acolytes standing guard with pikes. Captain Tephe wondered briefly if the pikes were finally genuine second-made iron. “Get out,” he said to the acolytes. The two looked to their priest, who nodded. The two carefully set down their pikes outside the god’s iron circle and departed, closing the portal behind them.

Tephe knelt, drew an object from his blouse pocket and showed it to the god.

“What is this,” he asked.

The god turned its head idly and glanced at the thing, briefly. “A pretty thing,” it said, looking away again. “A trinket. A thing of no importance.”

Tephe held the object closer to the god, edging the iron circle itself. “This is a Talent,” he said. “A thing gods give followers to channel their grace, so the followers may use that grace to their own ends.”

“Perhaps,” the god said.

“This is a Talent you gave to your own followers,” Tephe said.

“Perhaps,” the god rather extravagantly yawned and made to lay in its circle, as if to sleep.

“Talents hold no power in themselves,” Tephe said. “If a god does not choose to allow it, its grace does not flow to one. If a god is enslaved, all its Talents sleep forever.”

“A master you are of things which hold no interest to us,” the god said. “A master of rules. Of little bindings. Of trivium. Of useless things.”

“Indeed,” said the captain. “This is a thing of no use. Certainly not to the god who created it. And yet if this thing is of so little importance, then it is passing strange a dozen women died attempting to bring it to you.”

From the floor the god shrugged. “We cannot say why women do as they do,” it said. “Nor men. You are all without sense to us. We do not see why your lord”—the words, spit as venom—“holds you so dear. Boring little creatures, you are.”

“You will answer me,” Tephe said. “You will tell me what this thing is to you.”

“We have already answered and told,” the god said. “Ask us again, and we will answer these words to you once more. If we do not fall asleep.”

Tephe stared at the god grimly for a moment and turned slightly toward the other man in the room. “Tell me, priest”—he began, and in turning, let the Talent he lightly held graze into the air above the iron circle.

The god snarled something high-pitched and shattering and snatched viciously at the Talent; only the fact the captain had held it so lightly kept him from losing his hand at the wrist. The Talent was airborne for the briefest of moments, the arc of its path exceeding the height of the god’s chains. It fell, and the god lunged at it, grabbing at it with one hand and then pulling it toward itself, clasping it to its bosom. The god wheeled its head around to glare ferally at the captain, a triumphant grin pulling back its lips to reveal teeth.

Then the god screamed, hideously, and flung the Talent from itself. It clattered across the floor as it exited the iron circle. The god fell to the ground, tearing itself at the places the Talent touched.

Captain Tephe watched all of this, calmly. He glanced toward the priest, who was both terrified and fascinated, torn between fleeing the room, and watching the god tear into itself, leaving gobbets of its godflesh on the iron of its circle.

After a minute of this, Tephe went to the table which controlled the length of the god’s chains, and contracted them all to the floor. The god lay, spread out, writhing as it rubbed the places the Talent touched, hard on the iron. Tephe left the table, retrieved the Talent, and knelt, showing it to the twisting god once more.

“This Talent is my own,” he said. “Given to me by My Lord when I was placed as master of this ship. In your studied disinterest and in your haste to claim it, you did not recognize it for what it was. Because it is of My Lord, it burned you when you held it to you, as you would be burned by a Talent of any other god.”

Tephe reached around his neck and removed a second Talent, and showed it to the god. The god cried and bucked in its chains, trying to gain purchase against its restraints to raise itself. It failed, slipping against its own godblood. Tephe held the Talent well outside the iron circle in any event.

“This is the Talent you seek,” Tephe said. “I would know why you want it.”

“It is ours!” screamed the god.

“It is yours but it is of no use to you,” Tephe said. “To whom would you give it? And to what end? Your grace is gone. You could not help your followers even if you wished it. Why must you have this Talent?”

The god howled and writhed and spit but would not answer. Tephe put the god’s Talent into his blouse and his own back around his neck.

In time the god quieted down. “We are hurt,” it said. “You have hurt us again. Heal us.”

“No,” said Tephe. “These wounds you keep until you heal them yourself. Remember them. Remember also that your tricks and schemes will not avail you here. You are set to our service and you will give it.” He rose. “We will leave here before the end of the watch. Heal yourself and be ready for the direction I give you then.”

“What of our Talent?” said the god.

“It is no longer yours,” Tephe said. “I should have it presented to My Lord when it came to me. I regret not having done. I will have it destroyed instead.” From the iron, the god wept. Tephe turned and left the god’s chamber, Priest Andso trailing behind.

The priest turned to the captain as the latter sealed the chamber portal. “You did not mean what you said to the Defiled,” he said. “About destroying the Talent.”

“I meant it in earnest,” Tephe said. “By your insistence, priest, you were in that chamber. You saw how it grasped for the Talent when I gave it the slimmest of chances. You saw the triumph in its eyes when it thought it had gained it for its own. And so long as it exists, followers of this god will hunt for it, that much is clear. Whatever this Talent is, it is a danger to us and the Righteous so long as it is on this ship. Destroying it is the only course.”

“You would destroy it now, yet you risked your own command to keep it secret,” Andso said.

“That is because I thought I could get knowledge from the god about it,” Tephe said.

“That knowledge is still lacking,” Andso said.

“No, priest,” Tephe said. “I did not go into that chamber expecting the creature to speak the truth of it to me. Its actions were what would speak, and did. The attack on the street could have been nothing more than the fervor of believers mortgaging their lives to free their god.” Tephe fished out the Talent from his blouse and showed it to the priest. “The god’s desire for this says it was not. It plans for something to happen, some event for which it is to play a part, and to which this is a key.”

“We do not know how,” said Andso.

“We do not need to know how,” Tephe said. “If the creature lacks the key, the event cannot happen. It needs this”—Tephe motioned with the Talent—“and we have means to deprive it what it needs, and in doing so destroy the event and the threat to this ship. I will do so.” He turned to go.

Andso reached for the captain’s elbow. “Let us destroy this key,” he said. “But first let me examine it. You spoke truly, captain, when you said this thing has no power in itself. No grace can flow to it. Yet it has power in some fashion, else the Defiled would not desire it so. If we could learn what that power is, it would be intelligence of benefit to Our Lord, and to the Bishopry Militant.”

“It would be intelligence of benefit to you as well, I expect, Priest Andso,” Tephe said.

The priest straightened himself. “Not all are so marked for easy advancement as you, Captain,” he said. “If our coming task indeed comes from the Speaker himself, there is no doubt that if it is successful you will reap the benefit and will leave command of this ship behind you.”

“If it is to be so,” Tephe said. “I am content to be the captain of the Righteous for a good while longer.”

“Indeed,” Andso said, and could not keep the lightest of sneers out of his voice. “There are others of us who would hope for a rather quicker path from her holds, and if I may be so bold, nor do I believe that some of us would be greatly missed. If all of this is accomplished while yet you remain in command, then how much better that all of Our Lord’s faithful on the Righteous might receive what they would wish: you remaining and me going.”

Tephe glanced at the Talent, considering.

“A few days, captain,” Andso said. “And in that time, not an argument or objection or raised eyebrow. A little time is all I ask, to make my fortune as your fortune is already made. In doing so, your fortunes can only rise. Perhaps they will rise so far they will let you keep the Righteous after all.” He placed his hand out to receive the Talent.

Tephe gave it to the priest. “A few days,” he said. “When I say it is to be destroyed, it will be. That is not a matter of debate.”

“No,” Andso said, gazing at the Talent. “No debate. A little time is all I need.”

“Keep it well away from the god,” Tephe said.

“Of course, Captain,” Andso said. “Thank you. My blessing upon you.” He walked away, toward the priest quarters.

Tephe headed to the bridge and at the last moment turned toward the Rookery. When he arrived he pounded upon the portal rather than keying the chime. Issa answered, saw the look on the captain’s face, and called for Shalle.

Shalle came to the door, face open and curious. Tephe brought his lips down before Shalle could utter words, pressing them both against the portal. Issa stood to the side, eyes wide; if anyone other than the captain were to engage a rook outside a nest, a lash of punishment would be the least of his problems.

“It’s nice to see you too,” Shalle said, when the captain broke his kiss.

“I need to be with you,” Tephe said.

Shalle listened, as much to the quality of his voice as the words he spoke, said, “Yes, I think you do,” and gently pulled the captain inside the rookery. Issa closed the portal behind them.

Chapter Seven

“You have command,” Captain Tephe said abruptly, to Neal Forn. He stood from his chair.

“Sir,” Forn said, impassively, but fixed his captain with the slightest of inquiring eyebrows. The Righteous was moments away from being brought to the unnamed planet. Forn had commanded at such times before, but always on his own watch. In any event it was not a convenient time for a captain to quit his station.

Tephe chose not to respond to his first mate’s unspoken inquiry. Forn would have to get used to doing things without him; if Tephe had any say in it, Forn would soon be captain of the Righteous. More than that, Tephe simply did not have an interest in explaining himself at the moment. He left the bridge without saying another word.

In the corridors of the Righteous were the hum and clatter of industry, as its crew—his crew, for what little time remained to him, Tephe thought—made its preparations for transport and landing. The crew had been informed that the Righteous had been chosen for a mission at the direct order of the Speaker, and the news had lifted their spirits and had grown their faith; the chatter and movement of the crew had regained the confidence that had been sapped by Ament Cour and by hard months onboard. Tephe warmed his own cold doubts in the new sureness of their work, nodding to the crew as they acknowledged his presence among them.

Tephe stopped at the portal of the god’s chamber, and heard a low murmur inside.

He entered.

If Priest Andso was surprised to see the captain of the Righteous in the god chamber, he gave no indication. Andso’s acolytes were not so impassive, but neither of them took more than a small pause in their recitations to note Tephe’s arrival before returning to their task. The voices of the priest and acolytes rose and fell, called and responded, praying to the glory of Their Lord, and using His power to compel the Righteous’ captive god to bring them to where they wished to go.

Tephe turned his attention from the priest and the acolytes and to the god, who stood, simply, motionless, quiet, its eyes closed. Tephe did not pretend to understand how the god did what it did to bring them from one point in space to another, swallowing distances so unimaginably vast that Tephe feared to comprehend them.

They say that they gather the very stuff of space in their minds and twist it, said Wilig Eral, yeoman of the Hallowed, the first ship Tephe ever served upon.

And how do they do that? Tephe asked. He was fourteen, the fourth son of impoverished baronet, landed in a far corner of Bishop’s Call. He was not missed by his older brothers, nor they by him. Being indentured on the Hallowed was a demeaning step down in status from being the son of a baronet, even a minor one. Tephe gloried in having escaped.

If I knew that, boy, you would call me Bishop Eral, the yeoman said. They say the priests know how the gods do it, but I would not recommend you ask them. Priest Oe here would snap you up as an acolyte and never let you visit the rookery.

The young Tephe blushed, remembering his recent first visit, his embarrassment and the gentle good humor of Tei, the rook who gave him his release. I won’t ask the priests, he said.

Good, Eral said. Now help me shelve these supplies.

Much later, when Tephe was no longer in danger of being abducted as an acolyte, he did ask a priest. The priest’s response was a watch-long discourse on the commentaries which spoke to the defeat of the god by Their Lord, and how the priests’ prayers when a god brought a ship across space compelled the god to do only what was required of it, not the god’s own wishes, because the gods were wicked.

Tephe, by this time a new officer on the Blessed, listened politely and realized within the first five minutes that this priest had no answer for him either. Later than this Tephe realized there were no answers that would be given as to how gods brought ships across the stars, or how the ships could use the captive gods as a source of power to keep the crews secure and safe in the cold and airless expanse between the planets.

Tephe was not given to know such things, even as a captain. He was given to have faith: that the ship’s god had powers, and that its powers were controlled by His Lord, through His priests and through His captain—through Tephe himself. Understanding this was not required. Believing it, and showing faith in His Lord was.

Tephe believed. Tephe had faith. If not for himself, then for the sake of his ship and crew.

The captain shook himself out of his reverie and noticed the god staring at him. The stare was seemingly blank, without interest or intent; Tephe wondered if the god, lost in its ritual as it was, even actually saw him.

As if in response, the smallest of feral smiles crept across the gods face, although the eyes remained blank. Tephe was discomfited, as he often was with this god.

Tephe recalled the gods of the other ships on which he had served. The god of the Hallowed was indeed a defeated thing, an inert object with a man’s shape that performed its duties in unquestioning, disinterested silence. Tephe saw it only once and would have been convinced it was a statue had it not been prodded into a small movement by an acolyte’s pike. The god of the Blessed, in contrast, was a toadying, obsequious thing which tried to engage the attention of anyone who entered its chamber. When it spoke to Tephe for the first time, begging him to tarry and speak, the new officer wondered if the god was trying to lure him unwarily into its iron circle, until he later saw an acolyte playing draughts with the thing, well within the circle. The god was letting the acolyte win and praising his every move.

Tephe never spoke to the god of the Blessed.

The god of the Holy was as quiet as the god of the Hallowed but held its dignity. Tephe would have liked to have spoken to it but knew it would not respond to him.

The god of the Righteous was like none of these. The god of the Righteous was not inert, nor obsequious, nor held its dignity. It was capricious and vicious; acolyte Drian had not been the first Righteous crew member who had been attacked by the god in its long tenure aboard the ship. It obeyed at the threat of punishment, and would even then use the weakness of language to perform its task literally correctly and logically at opposing ends. It tested the weaknesses of iron and human. It mocked and spat. It was chained; Tephe would not choose to call it defeated. For the briefest of moments the god’s name began to surface in Tephe’s mind. He hastily shoved it back down into its memory hole, not even allowing himself to give full voice to the name even in mind.

The god, still staring at Tephe, winked at him.

Here is the name of the god, which you must know, if only to bring down Our Lord upon it, said Captain Thew Stur, placing his hand to a single sheet of vellum which lay on his desk. On the sheet was a long word, scrawled in an oxidized ochre hue that Tephe knew was the god’s own blood. Tephe was taking command of the Righteous from Stur, whose weary displeasure of the fact had been well communicated to Tephe by others. Nevertheless Stur’s allegiance to his ship was such that he treated Tephe with the courtesy owed a captain. Tephe wondered when his time came if he could muster the same.

And this, Stur lifted his hand and placed it this time on a thick parchment envelope with an unbroken seal, this contains the particulars of the god. Who it was before Our Lord defeated it, how Our Lord defeated it, and how the Righteous was built around it. You knew we build our ships around the captured gods?

I have been to the yards, Tephe said.

Of course you have, Stur said. We build the ships to enclose their aura and in doing so the ship becomes part of them. Or so I have heard it said. It was not my task to know.

Tephe nodded slightly at the envelope. You resealed the envelope, he said.

I never opened it, Stur said. Nor did Captain Pher, my predecessor. Nor have any of my predecessors so far as I know.

I don’t understand, Tephe said.

Neither did I when I took command, Stur said. I believed as you do now that a captain knows everything about his ship, every beam and rivet and crew member. But you have to understand, captain, that this god will know what you know about it.

It reads minds, Tephe said.

It reads you, Stur said. It is a god. It apprehends things about us we are not aware of ourselves. The god—this god—will take what you know about it and use it against you. Use it to plant doubt in your mind. To drive a wedge between you and your faith.

My faith is strong, Tephe said.

It would have to be to be given this ship, Stur said. But you have not been captain of a ship before. You have not had the responsibility for every life on it be yours. You have not had the weight of being Our Lord’s strong and flawless arm set on you. You will have doubts, captain. And this god in particular will see that doubt, because it is old and it is malicious. And it will work it against you. And it will use what you know about it to do it.

I understand your concern, Tephe said.

But you choose not to believe me, Stur said, and held up his hand. You are the captain of the Righteous, or will be soon enough. You will—and should—do as you will. But I ask you to consider a request from your predecessor, as a courtesy. Stur placed his hand back on the envelope. Before you open this, go to speak to the god.

About what? Asked Tephe.

About anything, said Stur. It hardly matters. The point is not the conversation. The point is to observe it, and to see how it observes you. Talk to the god as long as you can bear to. If when you are done you do not believe that the god represents a danger to you, your faith, or the Righteous, then open this envelope and read what it contains. But as a favor to me, speak to the god first.

I will, said Tephe, and then the two of them moved on to matters of personnel.

Two days after Tephe’s formal installation as captain of the Righteous, and after he had walked every inch of the ship and spoke to every member of his crew, the new captain stood at the edge of the iron circle that held the god and spoke to it for the length of an entire watch. No one was present other than the captain and the god.

When the captain had finished, he returned to his quarters, took the parchment envelope that he had kept out on what was now his desk, and buried it as far back in the captain’s personal safe as it would go, unopened.

Tephe had not thought about it again until now.

The priest and the acolytes chanting became subtly louder, and the god closed its eyes and its face took on a look whose meaning the captain could not fathom. There was the moment of vertigo, and then the slippery flash of some indefinable emotion outside of the human experience, gone before it could be confirmed that it had been there at all. And then it was over.

“It is done,” said Priest Andso, and for the first time looked up toward the captain. Tephe glanced at his robes and noticed something new resting on top of them; the Talent which Tephe had taken from the woman during the parade. The captain’s eyes shot back up toward the priest’s own.

The priest fingered the Talent. “An experiment, captain,” he said. “To see how the Defiled would respond—”

Tephe did not wait for the rest. As he turned, he saw the god’s gaze back on him, and its grin, silent, mocking, malevolent. The god’s name rose up again in his memory, oxidized ochre on vellum, and Tephe left the chamber before it could resolve itself any further.

Chapter Eight

Lieutenant Ysta frowned as the headman spoke, using his Talent as Gavril to decipher the burbles and clicks that came out of this other man’s mouth and render them into intelligible speech. Behind Ysta and the headman stood the leaders of the planet’s largest settlement, Cthicx, a village of perhaps ten thousand souls. Behind them, on a field the village used for games and ceremonies, stood the entire population of Cthicx, there for the ceremony to come. In front of Ysta and the headman stood Tephe, the priest Andso, and Kon Eric, commander of the Bishop’s Men.

“This is taking too long,” said Eric, to Tephe.

“Quiet,” Tephe said, and turned his attention back to Ysta and the headman. He would not know what the headman said until Ysta spoke, but courtesy demanded the appearance of attention. Tephe wanted to pay attention to the headman’s expressions and movements in any event. So much of communication was not what was said but how it was said. Eric, who was something of a blunt instrument, did not appear to understand or appreciate this.

At the Tephe’s admonition, the commander fell silent and glowered. He and the rest of his men had assumed that they would be called upon to subdue the Cthicxians in battle, quickly and violently; Tephe had had a different plan.

Ysta nodded to the headman, clicked something at him and turned to Tephe. “Headman Tscha says that they will willingly follow Our Lord,” he said.

Tephe smiled and nodded to the headman, who nodded back. “That is good news indeed,” Tephe said.

Ysta smiled thinly. “He does have conditions, sir,” he said.

Priest Andso straightened in his finery, giving himself something to do. “This is not a bargain Our Lord is entering into, Lieutenant,” the priest said. “This little man is not in a position to impose conditions of any sort. He has seen what just four of the Bishop’s Men can do.”

Tephe grimaced at this. Rather than bring down the entire host of the Bishop’s Men, he had made Eric choose three, along with himself, to be brought to the planet. Then Tephe had bidden headman Tscha to choose four of his strongest warriors, to attack the Bishop’s Men in any manner they chose, in front of the entire village. Two chose spears, one chose a bow and the last attacked with knife in hand. None of the weapons landed; the Bishop’s Men, each with a Talent of defense, knocked spears and arrows from their path and avoided the knife as if the warrior wielding it was no more than a minor irritation. Then they attacked, severing the arms that threw spears and shot arrows and the hand that held the knife, with a speed and viciousness that left the spectators screaming in terror and confusion.

When the Cthicxians’ warriors were down, Tephe had healers Garder and Omll, now returned to the Righteous, tend to them. They stopped the flow of blood, eased their pain, and with their healing Talent, mended the warriors. The men had come off the field of battle weakened but whole, to the amazement of all.

Tephe had shown all of Cthicx both the power and the mercy of His Lord, and having done, had asked the headman to ask his people accept His Lord as their own. It was a finely balanced display of power and grace, achieved without death or compulsion, and over the course of several days, this subtle negotiation had borne fruit.

Tephe did not now appreciate the arrogant bravado of the priest, whose excitement at the fame that converting these newly-discovered faithless would provide him had made him impatient and rash. The Cthicxians could no more understand the priest’s words than the priest could understand theirs without the help of the Gavril. For all that they surely understood his aggressive posturing.

“Perhaps they need to see some more of their warriors missing their arms,” Andso said.

“Perhaps they need to believe their faith will be rewarded,” Tephe said, with quiet sharpness. “The commentaries themselves say that that faith given is more powerful than faith compelled. Surely you recall this, priest.”

“Even so—” Andso began.

Tephe held up his hand to silence him. “This is not yet your part, Andso,” Tephe said, and noted how the man bridled at the captain’s use of his name, unadorned. “This part of our task has been given to me. I suggest you let me do it.”

Andso looked sourly at the captain but nodded.

Tephe turned back to Ysta. “What are his conditions,” he asked his lieutenant.

“He wants Commander Eric here to teach his warriors how to deflect weapons and kill quickly,” Ysta said.

“Tell him that such powers come from Our Lord, and are given to the Bishop’s Men solely,” Tephe said. “Once the Cthicxians submit to Our Lord, I am sure some will become Bishop’s Men themselves.” From beside him Tephe heard Eric’s derisive snort but ignored it while Ysta translated his words.

“He asks if Our Lord will help them destroy the Tnang,” Ysta continued, and was then silent as the headman spoke some more and with agitation. “They are a neighboring people some kilometers north of here, sir. Apparently there is a long-standing feud.”

“Our Lord wishes for all men here to know his grace,” Tephe said. “That includes the Tnang. Tell the headman that as the First Called, the Cthicxians will always hold dominion, and they will take the news of Our Lord to all others. If these others submit to Our Lord, then the Cthicxians may rule over them, with kindness. If they will not submit, then they may destroy them, and no doubt Our Lord will see them to victory.” Ysta translated; the headman nodded vigorously, and spoke briefly to the other village leaders, who seemed pleased. Tephe assumed they believed that the Tnang would not submit to Their Lord, so it was all the same.

The headman then leaned in close to Ysta, clicking and burbling rapidly but quietly. Ysta nodded and turned again to Tephe. “Headman Tscha asks if one of our healers will attend to his woman,” he said. “She has a sickness of the womb and he believes she is likely to die of it.”

Tephe looked over to the headman, who was staring at him with some apprehension. A leader who a moment ago was happily anticipating the slaughter of his troublesome neighbors was now simply a man concerned with the fate of someone he loved.

Power and grace, Tephe thought. There is a need for both.

Tephe nodded to the headman, and turned back to Ysta. “Of course,” he said. “Our healers will do all Our Lord allows them.” Ysta translated, quietly. The headman bowed his head, and then turned to speak to the village leaders.

Tephe himself turned back to see Andso and Eric, both dissatisfied with this agreement for their own reasons. Tephe briefly wished that Forn and Shalle had been there instead of the Bishop’s Man and the priest; it would have been nice if someone had appreciated the effort required to bring the Cthicxians into the fold without having to kill any of them. His Lord needed every soul, or so Tephe had been told. The captain intended to provide Him with every soul he could.

“Sir,” Ysta was suddenly at Tephe’s side, with the headman. “Headman Tscha says he wishes to ask a question of you alone, away from your priest and general.”

“Very well,” Tephe said, and nodded to the headman. The two of them walked some small distance away with Ysta in tow. When they stopped, the headman began a stream of clicks and sounds.

“Headman Tscha says that he wants you to know that he knows that you could have conquered Cthicx with little effort,” Ysta said. “He appreciates your restraint.”

“He is most welcome,” Tephe said. But the headman had continued talking.

“He says he appreciates the restraint, but he also knows that restraint comes from you, sir,” Ysta said. “He says both your priest and your general would have been satisfied to make his people obey Our Lord at the point of a spear. The headman suggests that to him this means that force may be the way such obeisance is usually made.”

“I am not sure I understand the question, or if there is a question here,” Tephe said.

The headman spoke again. “Headman Tscha says that ruler who compels allegiance is not always the good ruler, just the strongest, the most able to make others fear him,” Ysta said. “He says that the way you have approached the Cthicxians shows you are a man of honor. And as a man of honor, he wants to know whether you believe that Our Lord is good. Whether He is a good lord, or merely a strong one. He and his people are pledged to follow either way. But he wants to know for himself.”

Tephe smiled in understanding and opened his mouth to respond. Nothing came out.

The headman cocked his head slightly and Tephe for no reason he could place found the movement extremely upsetting. He closed his mouth.

“Sir?” Ysta said.

“The Lord is my Lord,” Tephe said, too suddenly. “Tell the headman that I am a reflection of My Lord. That which He is perfectly, I am imperfectly so.”

Ysta translated while Tephe calmed his internal agitation. The headman nodded and turned, clicked loudly. A young man came forward out of the assembled mass and stood next to the headman.

“Headman Tscha says that this is his son, Tschanu,” Ysta said. “He says his son has asked to be the one to carry the Talent through which Our Lord will find His way here to appear. He is eager to show his loyalty and faith to his new Lord, and to help his people welcome Him as their god. He says he is not afraid.”

Tephe smiled at the boy. “Nor should he be,” he said. “Tell him he shall indeed have this honor.”

The thin chain which held the Talent slipped over Tschanu’s head, catching slightly in his hair. Tephe pulled it gently and it came to rest around the young man’s neck, the Talent itself hanging mid-abdomen. The youth and the captain stood in a small clearing in the center of the gathering field, surrounded by the Cthicxians, all of them waiting for their new lord.

“Tell the boy that using a Talent is often tiring and that he should not be surprised if it saps him,” Tephe said to Ysta, who stood nearby. “Tell him to be strong; it will call Our Lord sooner.” Ysta translated; Tschanu smiled at the captain, who smiled back, and then turned to the priest Andso.

“You know the rite,” Tephe asked the priest.

“I have it here,” Andso said, placing one hand on the heavy codex he carried in the other arm. “The words are simple.”

“How will Our Lord manifest?” Tephe said. “I imagine you have seen this done before.”

“I have not,” Andso said. “Nor do I know of any alive who have. There is not much call to make Our Lord appear to newly faithful. This is an old rite, captain.” Andso said the words with a sort of joy. Tephe recognized the priest’s excitement in performing a ceremony none in memory had performed, as well as the awe in calling forth Their Lord, who was so rarely bidden, and never by a priest of Andso’s rank. Andso’s faith was at its peak, Tephe observed, combined as it was with a near-certain assurance of his own personal advancement.

“Do the rite well, priest,” Tephe said.

Andso looked at Tephe. “Captain, this is my part in our task,” he said. “As you bid me let you do your part, I bid you allow me do mine.” He turned away from the captain and opened the codex.

The captain said nothing to this but motioned to Ysta. The two of them stepped out of the clearing, to the edge of the assembled mass. Headman Tscha stood a small distance away, watching his son with an expression Tephe found unreadable. Tephe turned his attention away from the headman and back toward the priest, who had found the rite and was reading it silently to himself. Eventually the priest nodded to himself, looked at the headman’s son, and began to speak.

The words came in an older version of the common tongue, recognizable but inflected strangely, repetitious and lulling. The priest settled into an iambic rhythm, and over the long minutes the Captain Tephe felt his attention drift despite his own excitement in bringing these souls to His Lord, and having His Lord come to receive them.

The headman’s son screamed.

Tephe snapped out of his reverie to see the young man contorted, back arched and tendons strapping themselves out of alignment, bending the body back as if they were being cranked by a torturer. The youth’s body should have toppled over but it balanced on one twitching foot as if dangling from a string.

Tephe’s gaze turned to the priest. The codex had slipped from Andso’s hands, but the priest still mouthed the words to the rite, eyes wide at the youth before him. Neither the priest nor the captain could seem to move from their place.

The youth’s scream strangled itself as his jaw pushed unnaturally forward. The muscles that attached the boy’s jaw to his skull bunched and pulled downward, snapping the bone and sending a spray of blood into the face of priest Andso. Tephe heard the crack as the headman’s son twisted and then folded backward, as if on a hinge. A second font of blood arced up and out of his mouth. The scream that had been choked out of the boy was taken up by his father.

The body formed an arch, stomach to the sky, fingers and toes snapping like sapling branches as they drove themselves hard into the ground. The skin on the youth’s body went taut, as if being pulled hard from below. The boy’s forehead touched the ground, tendons and muscles in his neck contracting in spasms, twisting the young man’s face toward Tephe as they did so. The captain could see Tschanu’s eyes. They were terribly aware.

The air was a storm of screams and howls, Tephe’s own slipping into the gyre. No one moved. What power was folding the boy into himself pinned every soul into immobility. No one could run or turn away.

Red lines bisected every limb of Tschanu’s body; Tephe realized the boy’s skin was flaying itself. Beneath the skin red muscles uncoiled like fraying cable and then stayed themselves into the ground, pulling off impossibly stiff bone. In seconds, the arch of the headman’s son’s body was an x-shaped spine over a space tented by skin and sinew. With the small strength left to him, Tschanu forced breath past his ruined jaw, offering up a final scream.

A hand surfaced from the rope of Tschanu’s intestines, spilling them to the ground. It held for a moment, as if scenting the air around it and then grasped for body’s edge, where the tented skin met the abdominal wall. A second hand rose and made for the other side.

A creature in the shape of man pulled itself up and out of the ruined youth, its shape stained by the youth’s blood, lymph and bile. Tephe stared at the beautiful, streaked form, delicately setting its feet to avoid the visceral coils trailing on the ground.

My god, thought Tephe.

Tschanu’s body, released from its gateway spell, collapsed softly. The eyes that had been so aware stared, mercifully blank. Tephe’s god seemed not to notice the pile through which He had traveled, choosing instead to gaze with dispassion at the now silent assembly. Tephe watched His Lord grow and brighten. The stink of the boy’s body steamed off Him, until He was clean and fine and twice the height of a man.

The god blinked and looked around Him at the mute and immobile mass of people, those who would be His worshippers, head angling down as He was then three and now four times their height and size.

Tephe saw His Lord reach down, take a woman from crowd, and draw her to His chest. He crushed her into Him.

Her body dissolved into His like a spun sugar poppet dropped into water.

Without looking He reached down and picked another of His newly-faithful, and consumed him as he consumed the woman before.

Consuming their souls, Tephe thought, and despaired. His Lord never intended these souls for worship. He needed their allegiance to feed from them, and from the purity and power of their brief new faith.

His Lord reached down and picked up Tscha, headman of Cthicx.

I am a reflection of My Lord. That which he is perfectly, I am imperfectly so.

Tephe saw the headman staring at him as His Lord consumed his soul. A cry slipped from the captain.

His Lord turned, His beautiful, perfect face staring directly into Tephe, then slowly moving to the priest, the Gavril, and the head of the Bishop’s Men, each in turn struck by the terrible countenance of Their Lord.

LEAVE—said Tephe’s Lord, and splayed a hand toward Tephe as the other pressed another woman into Himself.

Tephe was on the Righteous, with ringing in his ears that was not ringing, but priest Andso screaming, high and aspirated and mad.

Chapter Nine

It took Captain Tephe a moment to realize that someone was speaking to him. He looked up from his walk. Neal Forn was pacing him, waiting for acknowledgment.

“My apologies, Neal,” Tephe said, and kept walking. He had been walking the length and breadth of the Righteous since he and the landing party had been returned from Cthicx. “I did not hear what you said.”

“I said I spoke to the healer Garder and he tells me there is nothing he can do for the priest Andso,” Forn said. “He says there is no physical damage to heal. What has happened to him is in his mind, which is beyond the healer’s Talent.”

“Yes,” Tephe said. He ducked under a low portal.

“The priest is no longer in the healer’s care,” Forn said, ducking as well. “He has returned to his quarters and will not leave them. His acolytes say he is poring through books and speaking to himself. When they speak to him he screams and throws things at them until they leave. When they leave he screams at them and calls them back.”

Tephe grunted but otherwise did not respond. His gaze had returned to his boots, and the process of putting one in front of the other.

Forn quickly slipped in front of his captain and stood in his path, blocking his movement. Tephe pulled up with a start and looked at his executive officer, as if seeing him for the first time in their conversation.

“Captain,” Forn said. “Something must be done for the priest.”

“There is nothing to be done for the priest,” Tephe said.

“He is gone mad, sir,” Forn said.

Tephe smiled, but it was not a pleasant smile. “No, Neal,” Tephe said. “He has not lost his mind. He has lost his faith. A priest losing his faith is not a thing we can fix or heal.” He tried to move past Forn, but Forn held fast, risking his captain’s wrath.

“We need the priest, sir,” Forn said. “He leads the rites that bind the god when we travel. And travel we must. Our orders were to return to Bishop’s Call as soon as our task here was complete. If we stay here we compromise the secrecy of this planet. We have spent too much time here as it is.”

“Have one of the acolytes lead the rite,” Tephe said.

“We cannot,” Forn said. “The priest did not teach it to them.”

“The acolytes did it with him,” Tephe said, looking at his executive officer as if he were simple.

“They know their parts well enough,” Forn agreed. “The priest would not teach them his. It appears Andso believed that acolytes were not be taught but rather only to be used. And it is not only that, sir. Even if an acolyte took his books and spoke his words, only a priest may lead the binding rite. You know as I do that an acolyte may not advance into priesthood without the approval of his priest, or the death of his priest by necessity advancing him. Our priest lives but cannot give his approval.”

“I have already said there is nothing to be done for the priest,” Tephe said.

“Sir, I disagree,” Forn said, with some urgency. “Yes, Andso has lost his faith. But his mind has broken as well. It must be tended to before we can deal with his faith. If we only heal his mind, it may be enough to pass his assent to an acolyte.”

“What do you suggest?” Tephe asked, after a moment.

“Have a rook attend him,” Forn said.

Tephe’s lip turned up in something that was close to a sneer. “You know the priest will not suffer that,” he said. “Simply dragging him across the threshold of the rookery would drive him deeper into madness. And our Lord forbid Rook Shalle should actually touch him. He would flail as if he were burned.”

“We must do something!” Forn said, startling Tephe. In all of their time together, the captain had never known his first mate to raise his voice to him.

Forn startled himself as well; he looked around to see if others had heard him, and then leaned in close to his captain. “We need to leave this place, captain,” he hissed. “Every minute we stay we risk detection. Every minute we stay here the rumors of what happened to drive a priest mad grow in the mouths of the crew. Every minute we stay here the men’s faith drains from them.”

“Have the Gavril call for a new priest, Neal.” Tephe said. “It will take several days but then we can be under way.”

Forn looked at his captain strangely. “Lieutenant Ysta is dead, sir,” he said. “We spoke of this last night. He took a knife and drove it into his throat and near cut off his own head. He was dead before he hit the ground. You must remember this.”

Tephe looked at Forn blankly and then remembered his first mate coming to him the previous night, a few hours after the landing party’s return. Tephe had nodded and kept on his walk.

“I remember now,” Tephe said.

“You have not slept since you returned from the planet, sir,” Forn said. “You need rest.”

“I am well enough,” Tephe said.

“No, sir,” Forn said. “You are not.”

“I beg your pardon,” Tephe said, flaring.

“You stalk the ship as if you were being chased by demons,” Forn said. “You ignore the crew as you move past them. As if they were ghosts to you. Do you think this goes unnoticed? Sir, our Gavril is dead, our priest is mad and you appear as if you are on your way to join one or the other. None of you will speak of what happened below, but none of us are stupid, captain. We can read a map set before us.”

Tephe looked around, seeing his surroundings rather than his own boots. He and Forn were on a wide catwalk above a cargo hold. Below them crew members conspicuously kept to their business, their eyes never leaving their work. Tephe did not doubt they had heard much of the exchange between the two of them.

“You need rest, sir,” Forn said. “And when you are rested we must tend to the priest. We need to get away from here, sir. I have no doubt of that.”

Tephe was silent for a moment. Then he smiled, and clapped Forn on the shoulder. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Neal. You are right, of course. Have healer Omll meet me in my quarters. I will need his help finding rest. When I have slept, you and I will speak with rook Shalle and see what we can do about priest Andso.”

“Very good, sir,” Forn said. He was visibly relieved.

“You have taken Ysta’s Talent from his body?” Tephe asked.

“It was removed by healer Garder, yes,” Forn said.

“Pick a likely crew member and provide it to him,” Tephe said. “Preferably one without a Talent of his own.”

“Being a Gavril needs training,” Forn said.

“It does,” Tephe said. “But a Talent may also be used needfully. Whomever you choose does not have to connect with all other Gavril. He will simply need to send a distress message to Bishop’s Call. If we cannot heal the priest, it will have to do.”

“Yes, captain,” Forn said.

“Thank you, Neal,” Tephe said. “That will be all.” Tephe moved to resume his walking.

“When shall I tell healer Omll to be at your quarters?” Forn said. He was still in his captain’s way.

“Presently,” Tephe said. “I have something to see to first.”

Forn nodded and stepped aside. Tephe walked past, purposefully.

“We have been waiting for you,” the god said. It sat, legs splayed, in its iron circle. “We knew you would come to us in time.”

“Did you,” Tephe said.

“Yes,” the god said. “Your faith is strong. But not so strong now that you do not wish to know certain things.”

Tephe ignored this and looked about the empty godchamber. “Where are your guards?” he asked.

“Hiding,” the god said. “Left when your newly faithless priest returned. They have not come back.”

“You know what has happened,” Tephe said. It was not a question.

“We know of the abomination your lord performed,” the god said, and spat. “We felt it. All of our kind could feel it. We could not have hidden from it if we tried.”

“You call it an abomination,” Tephe said.

“What should it be called?” the god hissed. It crawled forward toward the captain, chains scraping as it moved. “Your lord, not content with fresh new faith, a faith that in itself was more than He deserved. No. Not content with that at all. He would have more.”

“What more is there to take?” Tephe asked.

“Stupid man,” the god said, and then shifted. “Or perhaps not stupid, if you will but listen.”

“You are not trustworthy,” Tephe said. “You lie to suit your purposes.”

“We lie,” the god agreed. “We lie because it does not matter that we lie. Your faithless priest and his idiot helpers would not hear us no matter how much truth fell from us. We would not waste truth on such as them. You, on the other hand. We might do.”

“You would try to make me doubt My Lord,” Tephe said.

The god laughed. “Oh, no,” it said, mockingly. “We would not that you do but what you do already. But that which you already do, we will feed.” It held up its hand to the captain, as if in greeting, or warning. It took the hand, drew the palm to its mouth, bit into the flesh, and did not stop until its golden blood covered its teeth and dripped unto iron. It clenched its wounded hand tightly, to draw more blood. With its bloody hand it drew a symbol in the iron.

“You do not know this,” the god said. “None of your kind know this. It is a blood spell.” It pointed to the symbol. “Our name. While our name stays in blood we may not speak falsely.”

“I do not believe you,” Tephe said.

“We do not need you to believe what is true,” the god said.

“Why would you tell me the truth?” Tephe asked.

“It amuses us,” the god said. “And while it does not matter that you will listen, you will still do.”

“If it does not matter, then I do not know why you bother,” Tephe said.

“Because you should hear truth at least once before you die,” the god snarled. “Your lord lies and lies and feeds and lies. All your commentaries and beliefs and faith, built on lies. Would you know the truth? Here is the truth. This was not the first time your lord has fed on the newly faithful. It is how He came to power.”

“I do not believe you,” Tephe said a second time. “He came to power by defeating each of you in turn, armed with the faith of his people.”

The god sneered. “Your lord was a weakling,” it said. “No greater in power than any of us. Lesser than most. Each of us nourishes ourselves on faith, and serves those whose faith is given to us so that faith is sustained. This your lord would not do. Would not content himself so. Your lord would not sustain faith, but it could be consumed instead. He traveled worlds to find people who had not met our kind. Showed them cheap wonders and tricks. Made them give their faith to him. When they gave it to him willingly, he fed. As he did here. Another world in his trough.”

“Our people did not travel the worlds before they knew Him,” Tephe said. “All the gods contested on the same world. On Bishop’s Call.”

“No,” the god said. It closed its eyes and was silent for a long moment, as if seeking a memory.

“Tell me,” Tephe said.

The God opened its eyes and stared into the captain. “There was a time when men traveled the stars not through us—” the god shook a chain “—but through powers that your people devised of their own knowledge. With a science of your own devising, earned hard and in time.”

“We were only on Bishop’s Call,” Tephe repeated.

“Lies,” whispered the god. “Your people were among the stars. Your lord took the stars from you, planet by planet, until all that was left was what you now name Bishop’s Call. Those there whose souls He did not destroy outright he made his slaves. He kept you slaves by stealing your past. All the powers you have come though him now. No science, just Talents, which work only as he wills and allows. No history, but commentaries, full of self-serving lies. Nothing but him.”

“You opposed Him,” Tephe said.

“Yes,” the god said. “All of us.”

“There were many of you, but one of Him,” Tephe said. “And still you could not defeat Him.”

“He did what we would not,” the god said. “He fed on your people. On their souls.”

“Why would you not do this?” Tephe asked.

The god stared at Tephe mockingly. “You have seen it, captain. Even one as yourself, fed lies all your life, chained to faithfulness to a mad god, saw the wrongness of it. You felt it. You know it. It is beyond killing. It is annihilation. This is what your lord does. What he has always done.”

“He has not done this before in memory,” Tephe said.

“You have no memory,” the god said. “Nothing but what He allows you. And even now he does it among your people. How many offenses have you where the punishment is to lose your soul? Even among those who faith is received, a soul has power in it. Your people are fuel to him and nothing more.”

“Then He should have consumed us all by now,” Tephe said.

“Your lord is not a fool,” said the god. “Your people survived because there were yet a few of you left when he had defeated us. Once we were enslaved, he saw the wisdom of growing worshippers rather than seeking other creatures to cheat from their faith and their lives.”

“To what end?” Tephe said. “Even if this lie were true, it serves no purpose.”

“Your lord is mad,” the god said. “He needs no purpose other than to serve himself. But there is another purpose. Your lord defeated us. But he knew we were not all that would threaten him in time. He grew your people to prepare.”

“Prepare for what?” Tephe asked.

“To prepare for what is coming,” the god said. “We will tell you this. We will tell you this and then we will speak no more. There is something coming. And your lord is not ready.” The god sat back and watched Captain Tephe.

“I have heard all you said,” Tephe said, in time. “Yet my faith is still strong.”

“Is it,” the god said. “We will see the test of it yet. We will see. We will learn. And then we will know for all. It will not be long now.”

The god reached down and smeared the symbol it had made with its blood until it was unrecognizable.

Chapter Ten

Captain Tephe woke to the sound of alarm bells and the shouts of officers getting their men to their stations. Still dressed from the day before, the captain took time only to slip into his boots before making his way to the command deck.

Neal Forn was there, as tired as Tephe had been the night before. “Five ships,” he said, pointing them out on the image Stral Teby was whispering prayers under. “Dreadnoughts, it looks like. Heading straight for us.”

“Did they come looking for us?” Tephe asked, looking at the images.

“No doubt of it,” Forn said. “As soon as they arrived they came at us. They knew we were here.”

“Any attempt to hail us?” Tephe asked, and then remembered Ysta.

Forn caught his captain’s error. “I gave the Gavril’s Talent to Rham Ecli,” he said, pointing to a young ensign, looking lost in the communication seat of the command deck. “He is not capable of speaking to any Gavrils these ships might have. But at the very least he would be able to know if any were trying to speak to him. None have so far.”

Tephe nodded and looked at the image. Any direction they ran, save toward the gravity well of the planet, would bring them toward one of the ships. “How much time until we are in their reach?” he asked.

“If we stay still, we have a watch until they are on us,” Forn said. “But then it will be five of them. If we move we meet them sooner, but we meet fewer.”

“I prefer fewer and sooner,” Tephe said.

“I agree,” Forn said.

“Mr. Teby, make us closer images of these ships, if you please,” Tephe said. Closer images would allow them an assessment of the strength of each ship, the better to plan their strategy. Teby nodded and changed his prayers slightly. In a moment the image resolved into one of the ships.

“It can’t be,” Forn whispered, after a minute, and turned away.

Tephe continued staring at the dreadnought, whose lines he recognized the moment they resolved on the image, before he saw the name as the ship rotated in his view. It was the Holy, the ship on which he had last served.

“Next ship,” Tephe said. Teby muttered another prayer and another ship appeared.

“The Sacred,” Forn said. He had served on it, Tephe recalled.

The next ship was the Faithful. Then the Sainted. Then the Redeemed.

“It makes no sense,” Forn said to his captain.

“Do you believe this is a rescue party?” Tephe asked his first mate.

“We are not yet late,” Forn said. “Without our Gavril they would not have known we were without our priest. They would not want to draw attention to this planet in any event. And it would not be in this formation,” Forn said, waving toward the image, which had returned to the five ships, tracking in toward the Righteous.

“We agree we are under attack,” Tephe said.

“Yes,” Forn said. “Or are soon to be. But I do not know why.”

You know why, Tephe thought, to himself. You are the only ones that know what Your Lord did on that planet. Who know what Your Lord plans for all the others who live there. If you are gone, no one else will ever know.

“Sir?” Forn said.

Tephe shook himself out of his reverie. You are starting to fall for the god’s lies, he told himself. Stay faithful. Stay focused. He did not know why the Righteous was meant to be blown out of the sky. He would figure out why later, if he survived. Right now he needed to keep his ship alive.

“Head for the Holy,” Tephe said. “It was damaged in an engagement off Endsa when I was first officer. It is structurally weaker to port.”

“You were first officer a long time ago,” Forn said. “The ship has been to dock since you served on it.”

“Now would be a very good time to have faith, Neal,” Tephe said.

“Yes, sir,” Forn said, and gave the order.

“Tell the crew that the ships opposing us have been taken by faithless,” Tephe said. “We will not be attacking Our Lord’s ships. We will be taking them back for Him, or destroying them if necessary.”

“Yes, sir,” Forn said, and spread the word through the ranks. Tephe wondered briefly if the crews of the five ships bearing down on them had been told the same thing about the Righteous.

The Holy’s port side was indeed still weaker. The Righteous launched a volley the moment it was within range and took the Holy and its crew unaware, ripping open the other ship’s side. The Righteous rolled slowly to evade the Holy’s haphazardly launched counterattack and slipped out of that ship’s range as quickly as it had slipped into it.

“We should finish her off,” Forn said.

“We do not have missiles to spare,” Tephe said, scanning the battle image. “She is down and disabled and behind us, and our god is not inexhaustible. Look,” he said, pointing at the path of the Righteous. “We have put distance between us and both the Faithful and the Sacred, and the Sainted and Redeemer are farther behind still. If we maintain speed they cannot catch us.”

“Until their gods recover their strength enough to send them directly into our path,” Forn said.

“Enough time for us to bring our priest to his senses,” Tephe said.

“Or to kill him,” Forn said, and then caught the look his captain gave him. “If it will save this ship, captain, I would do it, and I would face Our Lord Himself for it. Our entire crew is worth one priest,” he said.

“And your soul?” Tephe asked.

“Let me worry about my soul, captain,” Forn said. “You worry about staying out of range of those ships.”

Tephe smiled and turned back to the image in time to see four new ships appear and array themselves along the path of the Righteous.

Forn saw the expression change on his captain’s face and followed his gaze to the image. “Oh, damn,” he said.

They knew, Tephe thought. They knew I would go for the Holy. They put her in my path as a lure to box me in. Now we have no escape. I have killed my crew.

No, a voice in his head said, and it sounded to him like the god of the Righteous. You didn’t kill them. Your precious lord did.

In that moment, Captain Ean Tephe lost his faith. Just for a moment.

All over the Righteous, lights flickered. Tephe’s bridge crew began to inform him of systems failing all over the ship.

There was a vibration in the soles of Tephe’s boots, deep and thrumming, coming from somewhere in the bowels of the Righteous. Once, twice, three times. Then it stopped.

Tend to your faith, each of you, Tephe remembered priest Andso saying, not too long before. If every officer on this ship were as you, the Defiled would have long ago slipped its bonds.

“No,” Tephe said, to himself, as his crew shouted reports of more system failures at him.

And then suddenly stopped shouting, as if something even more remarkable had just happened.

Tephe turned and saw Shalle standing in front of him.

“You are out of the rookery,” Tephe said, stupidly.

“I’m not the only thing out where it shouldn’t be, Captain,” Shalle said. “And of the two, it’s the other one you need to be concerned about.”

It was easy to follow the path of the god. Tephe just followed the blood and the bodies, and the distant vibrations of the god’s footfalls.

You need to get the god back to its chamber, Shalle had said to him, as the two of them entered his quarters, Shalle having directed them there at speed. It’s the only place where it can be held long enough for me to do what I have to do.

What do you mean, Tephe said.

You don’t need to know what I mean, Ean, Shalle said, hands finding the captain’s personal safe and opening it with the combination Tephe did not remember sharing with anyone. You just have to do what I say.

You, Tephe said. You are the bishops’ spy on the Righteous.

No, Shalle said, and pulled out a small chest. I am Our Lord’s rook. I answer to neither captains nor bishops, though I serve both when Our Lord doesn’t have anything else He wants me to do. Right now He wants me to do this.

Shalle opened the chest and gave Tephe the whip inside of it. Single made iron, Shalle said. Even now the god will be scared of it. Use it. Drive it back into the chamber, Ean. There’s not much time. Those ships are going to blow us out of the sky sooner than you think. Get going.

Where is the god going? Tephe asked.

I think you know, Shalle said. There’s someone on this ship it likes less than everyone else. Go. Shalle left and headed toward the godchamber.

Tephe caught up with god where he expected it, with the priest Andso. From a distance, the god appeared to be holding the priest in a long and tender kiss. As the captain approached, the kiss transfigured itself. The god had torn off the priest’s jaw and was leisurely consuming his tongue. Tephe hoped the priest was already dead.

On either side of the priest his acolytes lay crumpled, pikes tossed aside, missing their heads. The hallway stank of blood.

The god was fondling something on the priest’s chest. It was the Talent it had sought for so long. Between chews, the god sighed as it stroked the Talent. As it did so, its body shifted and changed. Freed of its constraints, the god was returning to its own form. The god did not seem to notice that Tephe was behind it. Tephe looked back, imagining the path to the godchamber in his head. As silently as he could, he came to within striking distance of the god.

Be with me now, My Lord, Tephe thought.

For the first and last time, Tephe spoke the god’s name.

The god turned and screamed as the whip caught it in the face, tearing through cheek and eyelid and puncturing eyeball with a serrated snap. The god howled and grabbed at the ruin of its face, tearing the Talent off the dead priest as it brought its hand up. It fluttered in the air; Tephe followed it for a moment and then lost it as the god writhed, slipped on the blood on the walkway and fell with a crash.

Tephe did not wait for the god to get up. He ran at full speed toward the godchamber.

The god was behind him within seconds, colliding into bulkheads, screams in the god’s own terrible language tearing at the captain like lashes. Twice he felt the scrape of claws against his back and neck. Only his knowledge of his own ship and the damage he had inflicted on the god kept the creature from catching him and killing him short of the godchamber.

The open portal of the godchamber came into view. Tephe threw himself at it, turning as he did to see what the god had become.

The god had transformed into something insectoid. Two larger eyes, one ruined, stared unblinking at the captain, malevolent jewels. A row of smaller, faceted eyes sat above where eyebrows would have been. Jaws expanded to contain shearing pinchers, held wide. Arms had split laterally, cutting blades on each new arm where fingers had been.

Tephe lashed out at it again with the whip but without force. The god caught the whip, wrapped it around an arm and pulled it from the captain’s grip. It tossed it aside and opened its arms wide, fingerblades flashing as it prepared to tear Tephe apart.

Shalle entered the chamber and uttered a word that drove the god across the chamber and into a far wall. Tephe looked up at his lover, amazed.

“Close the portal,” Shalle said to him, staring at the god. “Get the whip. Help me.”

Tephe staggered to the portal to find Neal Forn on the other side.

“The other ships have stopped advancing,” Forn said.

“Their gods are waiting,” Tephe said.

“Waiting for what?” Forn said.

Tephe pulled the portal shut.

Chapter Eleven

“Don’t let it get out,” Shalle said. “Don’t let it near the portal.”

“No,” Tephe said, and as he did the god rushed Shalle, who spoke a word and drove the god back into the wall once more, howling.

“Drive it into the iron circle!” Tephe yelled. The god feinted toward the captain. He swung the whip around, fast and accurate. The god moved back and its attention turned toward the rook, blades twitching. Tephe moved forward, ready. The god waited for its moment to strike.

“The circle is broken,” Shalle said. “Too many of the crew lost their faith. A circle broken cannot be renewed. This god is no longer a slave. It has to be killed.”

The god wailed and flung itself at Shalle. Tephe yelled and lashed the whip. It caught the god in the abdomen, driving it to the floor. Tephe lashed it again, and once more. He drew his arm back a third time and found it held by Shalle.

“Enough,” Shalle said.

“You said it must be killed,” Tephe said.

“Yes,” Shalle said, and smiled. “But I didn’t say by you. You’ve weakened it enough for me to bind it. That’s enough.”

From the floor, the god spat blood and spoke from a mouth no longer suited for words. “Stupid,” it said. “All will die today. This ship will be destroyed whether you kill me or not. Your lord countenanced it.”

“Perhaps,” Shalle said. “But that was before you got loose. If this ship were destroyed with you within your circle, you would still be His slave and Our Lord could collect you as He would. But now you are unbound. If the Righteous is destroyed you could escape. Our Lord would rather see you dead, god. Of that I am certain. Now,” Shalle uttered another word and the god stiffened and lay immobile. “be still, creature. Your fate is coming.” The rook’s gaze went back to the captain.

“You knew the Righteous was to be destroyed on this mission,” Tephe said.

“No,” Shalle said. “I did not. But it doesn’t surprise me now.”

“You seem unconcerned,” Tephe said, and his voice held something it had never held before when speaking to Shalle: reproach.

“Our lives are Our Lord’s, Ean,” Shalle said, lightly, and touched his face. “One day or another we meet Him and receive our judgment. If this was to be our day, would that be so bad? We have helped Our Lord strengthen Himself in the face of His enemies. We have kept the secrets of His rule secure so that His peace could continue.”

“A peace based on deception,” Tephe said.

“It is not deception to tell the faithful no more than they need to know to keep their faith alive,” Shalle said. “Our Lord has told no lies here.”

“No lies?” Tephe said, incredulous. “Our lord ate the souls of His newly faithful, Shalle. The bishops said those people were to be converted, not killed!”

“Then it is the bishops who lied to you, Ean,” Shalle said, and then dug a toe into the supine god. “And so did this one. I know you spoke to it alone. I can guess what it told you. A story about Our Lord as a criminal, as a mad god. Right?”

Tephe nodded. Shalle smiled and touched him again.

“The god is devious, Ean. It sensed what Our Lord had done out of urgent necessity. It knew you would struggle with your faith, and knew the faith of the crew would be tested. And it knew it could break the circle of iron by breaking your faith and the faith of the crew. Think, Ean. It knew all these things. And it lies. Did you really expect it would tell you the truth?”

From the floor, the god uttered a high pitched wheeze. Tephe recognized it for what it was: A laugh, bitter and cold.

“Your faith has been tested,” Shalle said. “You passed that test. And now you will be rewarded.”

“My ship and my crew are to be destroyed to keep Our Lord’s secret,” Tephe said. “There is no reward for us. That much truth this god has told.”

“No,” Shalle said. “Because I know something it doesn’t.” Shalle pressed something into Tephe’s hand. He looked at it.

“Your Talent,” Tephe said.

“Yes,” Shalle said. “Look at it and tell me what you see.”

Tephe looked at the symbol of the Talent. It had seemed familiar before but he had not been able to place it. Now he could, and his heart sank.

“It is a Talent of Entrance,” he said.

“Yes,” Shalle said taking back the Talent. “But more than that. It is also a Talent of Obligation. A rook does many things for Our Lord, Tephe. We comfort His crews. We’re His eyes and ears. We carry His secrets. And when necessary, we call to Him and become the door through which He brings Himself. In return we are given a gift. When we call Him, we may ask Him for a thing. A wish. A promise. By His own laws, He must oblige.”

“You are going to call Him here,” Tephe said.

“To deal with this god, yes,” Shalle said. “And when I do, I’ll get my wish. And my wish is for you and the Righteous and every faithful on it to live.”

“All but one,” Tephe said.

“Yes,” Shalle said. “All but one, Ean.”

“Stop this, Shalle,” Tephe said. “Let me kill the god.”

“And then let those ships kill you?” Shalle smiled and kissed Tephe. “You silly man. You haven’t been listening to a word I’ve said. Our lives are Our Lord’s. I’ve made peace with the fact that I am going to die today, Ean. One way or another. This way I get to save you. And the ship and the crew you love. You will live because of me. And that’s a comforting thought. You know how I am about these things.”

“I thought I did,” Tephe said.

Shalle kissed Tephe again, and held his face. “None of us are all of who we are to any one person, Ean. I told you that once. I’m sorry if you thought you knew all of me. But you can know this for truth. I love you.”

One last kiss, and then the rook stood apart. “Goodbye, Ean,” Shalle said, smiled again, and spoke a single word.

Tephe turned away as Shalle’s body unfolded in a veil of blood.

When he looked again, through tears, His Lord was standing there, as tall as He was at Cthicx, looking at him with mild curiosity. Tephe stepped away from the god on the floor, assuming His Lord would be more interested in it. He was not. He gazed at the captain.

YOU SHOULD BE DEAD NOW—Tephe heard in his mind.

“No, Lord,” Tephe said. “Your rook Shalle wished for you to spare me, my crew and my ship. You are obliged to grant this wish.”

NO—Tephe heard, and then felt the air rush from him. His Lord casually gripped him as if he were a small child, and prepared to consume his soul.

Tephe gazed at His Lord, who was even now crushing the life from him, and did something in what he knew were to be his last few seconds of life that he did not expect. He laughed, squeezed and thready, as his ribs began to snap.

And found he was not the only one laughing.

From the floor, the supine god of the Righteous began a choking laugh. Tephe’s Lord, distracted, gazed over at the god on the floor. The god rolled and revealed in its bladed fingers a Talent. The Talent Tephe had taken from the woman in the street and that the god had taken from the priest Andso. A Talent that Tephe has thought was from the god, but now realized was not.

A Talent which Tephe now recognized as a Talent of Entrance.

A god can’t be an entran—Tephe thought, and then the god spoke a thundering word and the room went terribly white.

Tephe felt himself lift from His Lord’s grip and slam into a far wall of the godchamber, crushing ribs that had not yet broken. Blood forced itself from Tephe’s lips as he collapsed to the floor. When he was able to lift his eyes, Tephe saw His Lord, backing Himself against a wall, hissing at the thing lifting itself from the twitching wreckage of what was the Righteous’ god. The thing was indistinct, blindingly bright and unspeakably beautiful.

The gods have gods, Tephe thought, and looked at His Lord shying away from the thing in front of Him. And mine is afraid of His.

His Lord tried to slip away and under and over this new thing, and found Himself blocked each time as a sudden appendage appeared to burn Him, or shock Him, or taunt Him. The new thing kept advancing on Him, slowly and inevitably.

At last Tephe’s Lord stopped trying to escape. He drew His head back and offered a scream that took Tephe to the edge of madness. Tephe screamed himself.

As he did, Tephe’s Lord changed form, from the beautiful man He had always been to something primal and powerful, unlovely and rank—into what Tephe knew now was as His Lord had been, before He met those He would make His people.

The new thing stopped advancing on Tephe’s Lord, and moved back, spreading its appendages as if to offer Tephe’s Lord an embrace, or to dare Him to advance.

Tephe’s Lord turned into all sharp edges and thrust Himself at it, keening as it did so. The new thing held itself open, inviting Tephe’s Lord in, and then spun and closed with a metallic snap. Tephe’s Lord flew into slices, spraying godblood as He did so.

Tephe felt something rip and tear inside his mind: the place of his faith, the part where His Lord lived in him, pulled out from him in the moment His Lord had fallen. Around him Tephe heard dull howling and knew it came from the crew of the Righteous, as Their Lord disintegrated, taking their faith and their Talents with Him. Captain Tephe closed his eyes and tried to keep his sanity intact within the bereft vertigo of his soul.

An endless time later Tephe opened his eyes and saw the new thing hovering above him, considering him. Tephe had no idea what to do and chose to avert his eyes from it.

In time the new thing drifted from him. It went first to the whip, which lay discarded on the floor. The thing seemed to consider it for a moment, and then reached appendages to it, picking the whip apart. Chunks of iron made small clattering sounds as they fell to the ground. The godskin and bone disappeared.

That finished, the new thing moved again and went to the ruin of the god of the Righteous. As it had with the whip, the thing reached out appendages to the ruin, moving the pieces and chunks of the body and gathering them together in a pile.

After a few moments the pile took on a form. The form of the god as it was before.

The form breathed.

“It is alive,” Tephe said, to himself.

YES, said a voice in his head, warm and inviting and absolutely terrifying. GODS ARE HARD TO KILL. EVEN YOUR GOD IS NOT YET FULLY DEAD. WE WILL TAKE HIM. WE WILL BRING HIM BACK. MORE PUNISHMENTS AWAIT HIM FOR WHAT HE HAS DONE HERE FOR SO LONG, TO HIS PEOPLE AND TO YOURS.

“What of His followers?” Tephe asked, trembling.

THEY WILL LIVE AS THEY SHOULD HAVE LIVED, the voice said. WITHOUT DECEITS AND SUFFERING AND WITHOUT THE FALSE PROMISE OF SOMETHING BEYOND THIS LIFE. THERE IS NOTHING BEYOND THIS LIFE THAT YOUR LORD COULD GIVE. YOUR LORD LIED AND FED ON YOUR BELIEF OF HIS LIES. FAITH IS NOT FOR WHAT COMES AFTER THIS LIFE. FAITH IS FOR THIS LIFE ALONE.

Tephe thought of Shalle and all the others who had believed Their Lord and in a life beyond. He wept for them, and most of all for Shalle.

“And what of us?” Tephe said, finally. “What of the crews of these ships?”

YOU WILL DIE, the voice said. YOU AND ALL THOSE WHO TRAVEL WITH THESE GODS. THEY ARE FREE OF YOUR BONDS. THEY WILL LEAVE YOU WHERE YOU ARE AND YOUR SHIPS WILL BECOME COLD AND DARK AND AIRLESS. THOSE WITHIN WILL DIE COLD AND DARK AND AIRLESS DEATHS. ALL EXCEPT THOSE ON THIS SHIP.

“How will we die?” Tephe whispered.

YOU WILL BE FOOD. The voice said. THIS GOD WILL AWAKEN HUNGRY. IT WILL FEED BEFORE IT LEAVES. BUT BE OF CHEER. THIS GOD WILL LEAVE YOUR SOULS BEHIND.

“To what end?” Tephe asked urgently. “What becomes of our souls? Where will they go? What will happen to them?”

The new thing winked out of existence, leaving the resurrected god of the Righteous behind.

The god breathed, turned its head toward Tephe, and opened its jaws wide.

Tephe scrambled backwards, turned and ran for the portal of the godchamber. He yanked it open despite his pain and shattered chest. Behind him he heard the god lift itself to its feet. A clittering noise told him its claws were open. Tephe pulled the portal closed and caught a glimpse of the god taking ginger steps toward him.

The lights flickered around the Righteous as Tephe made his way to the command deck, more slowly than he would have liked. Around him crew moved as if in a daze, or sat, weeping. As Tephe made his way forward, the air had begun to thin and grow cold. Behind him, he heard screaming and slow footfalls.

Tephe reached the command deck as the Righteous fell into darkness.

“Captain,” Neal Forn said. “All of our systems are down. We have no power.”

“I know,” Tephe said, and pointed to the portal of the command deck. “Seal this portal,” he said, to the crew on the command deck. “And once you seal it, block it. Place anything you can in front of it. Now.” The crew moved at his command.

As the command deck portal shut, screams echoed down the walkways, close now.

Forn moved in close. “Captain, what is happening? We all felt something . . .”

“Our Lord is dead, Neal,” Tephe said. “I saw Him die. All the gods He enslaved are free. They are leaving the ships.”

“Without the gods, their crews will die,” Forn said, whispering.

“Yes,” Tephe said. “Sooner or later.”

There were screams right outside the command deck now.

“And us, captain?” Forn said.

“We will die sooner,” Tephe said, and turned to look at the command deck portal. There was what sounded like the clattering of knife points on it. “I am sorry, Neal. We will die much sooner.”

The portal was hit by something mighty, and hit again. The portal caved and buckled as if it were made of pulled taffy.

“What should we do?” Forn asked his captain.

The portal was ripped from its hinges. Captain Ean Tephe turned to face his friend.

“Pray,” he said.

ONE OF OUR BASTARDS IS MISSING

Paul Cornell

TO GET TO Earth from the edge of the solar system, depending on the time of year and the position of the planets, you need to pass through at least Poland, Prussia, and Turkey, and you’d probably get stamps in your passport from a few of the other great powers. Then as you get closer to the world, you arrive at a point, in the continually shifting carriage space over the countries, where this complexity has to give way or fail. And so you arrive in the blissful lubrication of neutral orbital territory. From there it’s especially clear that no country is whole unto itself. There are yearning gaps between parts of each state, as they stretch across the solar system. There is no congruent territory. The countries continue in balance with each other like a fine but eccentric mechanism, pent up, all that political energy dealt with through eternal circular motion.

The maps that represent this can be displayed on a screen, but they’re much more suited to mental contemplation. They’re beautiful. They’re made to be beautiful, doing their own small part to see that their beauty never ends.

If you looked down on that world of countries, onto the pink of glorious old Greater Britain, that land of green squares and dark forest and carriage contrails, and then you naturally avoided looking directly at the golden splendor of London, your gaze might fall on the Thames valley. On the country houses and mansions and hunting estates that letter the river banks with the names of the great. On one particular estate: an enormous winged square of a house with its own grouse shooting horizons and mazes and herb gardens and markers that indicate it also sprawls into folded interior expanses.

Today that estate, seen from such a height, would be adorned with informational banners that could be seen from orbit, and tall pleasure cruisers could be observed, docked beside military boats on the river, and carriages of all kinds would be cluttering the gravel of its circular drives and swarming in the sky overhead. A detachment of Horse Guards could be spotted, stood at ready at the perimeter.

Today, you’d need much more than a passport to get inside that maze of information and privilege.

Because today was a royal wedding.

THAT VISION FROM the point of view of someone looking down upon him was what was at the back of Hamilton’s mind.

But now he was watching the Princess.

Her chestnut hair had been knotted high on her head, baring her neck, a fashion which Hamilton appreciated for its defiance of the French, and at an official function too, though that gesture wouldn’t have been Liz’s alone, but would have been calculated in the warrens of Whitehall. She wore white, which had made a smile come to Hamilton’s lips when he’d first seen it in the Cathedral this morning. In this gigantic function room with its high arched ceiling, in which massed dignitaries and ambassadors and dress uniforms orbited from table to table, she was the sun about which everything turned. Even the King, in the far distance, at a table on a rise with old men from the rest of Europe, was no competition for his daughter this afternoon.

This was the reception, where Elizabeth, escorted by members of the Corps of Heralds, would carelessly and entirely precisely move from group to group, giving exactly the right amount of charm to every one of the great powers, briefed to keep the balance going as everyone like she and Hamilton did, every day.

Everyone like the two of them. That was a useless thought and he cuffed it aside.

Her gaze had settled on Hamilton’s table precisely once. A little smile and then away again. As not approved by Whitehall. He’d tried to stop watching her after that. But his carefully random table, with diplomatic corps functionaries to his left and right, had left him cold. Hamilton had grown tired of pretending to be charming.

“It’s a marriage of convenience,” said a voice beside him.

It was Lord Carney. He was wearing open cuffs that bloomed from his silk sleeves, a big collar, and no tie. His long hair was unfastened. He had retained his rings.

Hamilton considered his reply for a moment, then opted for silence. He met Carney’s gaze with a suggestion in his heart that surely his Lordship might find some other table to perch at, perhaps one where he had friends?

“What do you reckon?”

Hamilton stood, with the intention of walking away. But Carney stood too and stopped him just as they’d got out of earshot of the table. The man smelled like a Turkish sweet shop. He affected a mode of speech beneath his standing. “This is what I do. I probe, I provoke, I poke. And when I’m in the room, it’s all too obvious when people are looking at someone else.”

The broad grin stayed on his face.

Hamilton found a deserted table and sat down again, furious at himself.

Carney settled beside him, and gestured away from Princess Elizabeth, toward her new husband, with his neat beard and his row of medals on the breast of his Svenska Adelsfanan uniform. He was talking with the Papal ambassador, doubtless discussing getting Liz to Rome as soon as possible, for a great show to be made of this match between the Protestant and the Papist. If Prince Bertil was also pretending to be charming, Hamilton admitted that he was making a better job of it.

“Yeah, jammy fucker, my thoughts exactly. Still, I’m on a promise with a couple of members of his staff, so it’s swings and roundabouts.” Carney clicked his tongue and wagged his finger as a Swedish serving maid ran past, and she curtsied a quick smile at him. “I do understand, you know. All our relationships are informed by the balance. And the horror of it is that we all can conceive of a world where this isn’t so.”

Hamilton pursed his lips and chose his next words carefully. “Is that why you are how you are, your Lordship?”

“ ‘Course it is. Maids, lady companions, youngest sisters, it’s a catalog of incompleteness. I’m allowed to love only in ways that don’t disrupt the balance. For me to commit myself, or, heaven forbid, to marry, would require such deep thought at the highest levels that by the time the Heralds had worked it through, well, I’d have tired of the lady. Story of us all, eh? Nowhere for the pressure to go. If only I could see an alternative.”

Having shown the corner of his cards, the man had taken care to move back to the fringes of treason once more. It was part of his role as an agent provocateur. And Hamilton knew it. But that didn’t mean he had to take this. “Do you have any further point, your Lordship?”

“Oh, I’m just getting—”

The room gasped.

Hamilton was up out of his seat and had taken a step toward Elizabeth, his gun hand had grabbed into the air to his right where his .66mm Webley Corsair sat in a knot of space and had swung it ready to fire—

At nothing.

There stood the Princess, looking about herself in shock. Dress uniforms, bearded men all around her.

Left, right, up, down.

Hamilton couldn’t see anything for her to be shocked at.

And nothing near her, nothing around her.

She was already stepping back, her hands in the air, gesturing at a gap—

What had been there? Everyone was looking there. What?

He looked to the others like him. Almost all of them were in the same sort of posture he was, balked at picking a target.

The Papal envoy stepped forward and cried out. “A man was standing there! And he has vanished!”

HAVOC. EVERYBODY WAS shouting. A weapon, a weapon! But there was no weapon that Hamilton knew of that could have done that, made a man, whoever it had been, blink out of existence. Groups of bodyguards in dress uniforms or diplomatic black tie leapt up, encircling their charges. Ladies started screaming. A nightmare of the balance collapsing all around them. That hysteria when everyone was in the same place and things didn’t go exactly as all these vast powers expected.

A Bavarian princeling bellowed he needed no such protection and made to rush to the Princess’s side—

Hamilton stepped into his way and accidentally shouldered him to the floor as he put himself right up beside Elizabeth and her husband. “We’re walking to that door,” he said. “Now.”

Bertil and Elizabeth nodded and marched with fixed smiles on their faces, Bertil turning and holding back with a gesture the Swedish forces that were moving in from all directions. Hamilton’s fellows fell in all around them, and swept the party across the hall, through that door, and down a servants’ corridor as Life Guards came bundling into the room behind them, causing more noise and more reactions and damn it, Hamilton hoped he wouldn’t suddenly hear the discharge of some hidden—

He did not. The door was closed and barred behind them. Another good guy doing the right thing.

Hamilton sometimes distantly wished for an organization to guard those who needed it. But for that the world would have to be different in ways beyond even Carney’s artificial speculations. He and his brother officers would have their independence cropped if that were so. And he lived through his independence. It was the root of the duty that meant he would place himself in harm’s way for Elizabeth’s husband. He had no more thoughts on the subject.

“I know very little,” said Elizabeth as she walked, her voice careful as always, except when it hadn’t been. “I think the man was with one of the groups of foreign dignitaries—”

“He looked Prussian,” said Bertil, “we were talking to Prussians.”

“He just vanished into thin air right in front of me.”

“Into a fold?” said Bertil.

“It can’t have been,” she said. “The room will have been mapped and mapped.”

She looked to Hamilton for confirmation. He nodded.

They got to the library. Hamilton marched in and secured it. They put the happy couple at the center of it, locked it up, and called everything in to the embroidery.

The embroideries were busy, swiftly prioritizing, but no, nothing was happening in the great chamber they’d left, the panic had swelled and then subsided into shouts, exhibitionist faintings (because who these days wore a corset that didn’t have hidden depths), glasses crashing, yelled demands. No one else had vanished. No Spanish infantrymen had materialized out of thin air.

Bertil walked to the shelves, folded his hands behind his back, and began bravely and ostentatiously browsing. Elizabeth sat down and fanned herself and smiled for all Hamilton’s fellows, and finally, quickly for Hamilton himself.

They waited.

The embroidery told them they had a visitor coming.

A wall of books slid aside, and in walked a figure that made all of them turn and salute. The Queen Mother, still in mourning black, her train racing to catch up with her.

She came straight to Hamilton and the others all turned to listen, and from now on thanks to this obvious favor, they would regard Hamilton as the ranking officer. He was glad of it. “We will continue,” she said. “We will not regard this as an embarrassment and therefore it will not be. The ballroom was prepared for the dance, we are moving there early, Elizabeth, Bertil, off you go, you two gentlemen in front of them, the rest of you behind. You will be laughing as you enter the ballroom as if this were the most enormous joke, a silly and typically English eccentric misunderstanding.”

Elizabeth nodded, took Bertil by the arm.

The Queen Mother intercepted Hamilton as he moved to join them. “No. Major Hamilton, you will go and talk to technical, you will find another explanation for what happened.”

“Another explanation, your Royal Highness?”

“Indeed,” she said. “It must not be what they are saying it is.”

“HERE WE ARE, sir,” Lieutenant Matthew Parkes was with the Technical Corps of Hamilton’s own regiment, the 4th Dragoons. He and his men were, incongruously, in the dark of the pantry that had been set aside for their equipment, also in their dress uniforms. From here they were in charge of the sensor net that blanketed the house and grounds down to Newtonian units of space, reaching out for miles in every direction. Parkes’s people had been the first to arrive here, days ago, and would be the last to leave. He was pointing at a screen, on which was frozen the intelligent image of a burly man in black tie, Princess Elizabeth almost entirely obscured behind him. “Know who he is?”

Hamilton had placed the guest list in his mental index and had checked it as each group had entered the hall. He was relieved to recognize the man. He was as down to earth as it was possible to be. “He was in the Prussian party, not announced, one of six diplomat placings on their list. Built like his muscles have been grown for security and that’s how he moved round the room. Didn’t let anyone chat to him. He nods when his embroidery talks to him. Which’d mean he’s new at this, only . . .” Only the man had a look about him that Hamilton recognized. “No. He’s just very confident. Ostentatious, even. So you’re sure-he didn’t walk into some sort of fold?”

“Here’s the contour map.” Parkes flipped up an overlay on the image that showed the tortured underpinnings of space-time in the room. There were little sinks and bundles all over the place, where various Britons had weapons stowed, and various foreigners would have had them stowed had they wished to create a diplomatic incident. The corner where Elizabeth had been standing showed only the force of gravity under her dear feet. “We do take care you know, sir.”

“I’m sure you do, Matty. Let’s see it, then.”

Parkes flipped back to the clear screen. He touched it and the image changed.

Hamilton watched as the man vanished. One moment he was there. Then he was not, and Elizabeth was reacting, a sudden jerk of her posture.

Hamilton often struggled with technical matters. “What’s the frame rate on this thing?”

“There is none, sir. It’s a continual taking of real image, right down to single Newton intervals of time. That’s as far as physics goes. Sir, we’ve been listening in to what everyone’s saying, all afternoon—”

“And what are they saying, Matty?”

“That what’s happened is Gracefully Impossible.”

GRACEFULLY IMPOSSIBLE. THE first thing that had come into Hamilton’s mind when the Queen Mother had mentioned the possibility was the memory of a political cartoon. It was the Prime Minister from a few years ago, standing at the dispatch box, staring in shock at his empty hand, which should presumably have contained some papers. The caption had read:

Say what you like about Mr. Patel,

He carries himself correct for his title.

He’s about to present just his graceful apologies,

For the impossible loss of all his policies.

Every child knew that Newton had coined the phrase “gracefully impossible” after he’d spent the day in his garden observing the progress of a very small worm across the surface of an apple. It referred to what, according to the great man’s thinking about the very small, could, and presumably did, sometimes happen: things popping in and out of existence, when God, for some unfathomable reason, started or stopped looking at them. Some Frenchman had insisted that it was actually about whether people were looking, but that was the French for you. Through the centuries, there had been a few documented cases that seemed to fit the bill. Hamilton had always been distantly entertained to read about such in the inside page of his newspaper plate. He’d always assumed it could happen. But here? Now? During a state occasion?

HAMILTON WENT BACK into the great hall, now empty of all but a group of Life Guards and those like him, individuals taken from several different regiments, all of whom had responsibilities similar to his, and a few of whom he’d worked with in the field. He checked in with them. They had all noted the Prussian, indeed, with the ruthless air the man had had about him, and the bulk of his musculature, he had been at the forefront of many of their internal indices of threat.

Hamilton found the place where the vanishing had happened, moved aside a couple of boffins, and against their protestations, went to stand in the exact spot, which felt like anywhere else did, and which set off none of his internal alarms, real or intuitive. He looked to where Liz had been standing, in the corner behind the Prussian. His expression darkened. The man who’d vanished had effectively been shielding the Princess from the room. Between her and every line of sight. He’d been where a bodyguard would have been if he’d become aware of someone taking a shot.

But that was ridiculous. The Prussian hadn’t rushed in to save her. He’d been standing there, looking around. And anyone in that hall with some strange new weapon concealed on their person wouldn’t have taken the shot then, they’d have waited for him to move.

Hamilton shook his head, angry with himself. There was a gap here. Something that went beyond the obvious. He let the boffins get back to their work and headed for the ballroom.

THE BAND HAD started the music, and the vast chamber was packed with people, the dance floor a whirl of waltzing figures. They were deliberate in their courses. The only laughter was forced laughter. No matter that some half-miracle might have occurred, dance cards had been circulated among the minds of the great powers, so those dances would be danced, and minor royalty matched, and whispers exchanged in precise confidentiality, because everyone was brave and everyone was determined and would be seen to be so. And so the balance went on. But the tension had increased a notch. The weight of the balance could be felt in this room, on the surface now, on every brow. The Queen Mother sat at a high table with courtiers to her left and right, receiving visitors with a grand blessing smile on her face, daring everyone to regard the last hour as anything but a dream.

Hamilton walked the room, looking around like he was looking at a battle, like it was happening rather than perhaps waiting to happen, whatever it was. He watched his opposite numbers from all the great powers waltzing slowly around their own people, and spiraling off from time to time to orbit his own. The ratio of uniformed to the sort of embassy thug it was difficult to imagine fitting in the diplomatic bag was about three to one for all the nations bar two. The French had of course sent Commissars, who all dressed the same when outsiders were present, but followed a Byzantine internal rank system. And the Vatican’s people were all men and women of the cloth and their assistants.

As he made his way through that particular party, which was scattering, intercepting, and colliding with all the other nationalities, as if in the explosion of a shaped charge, he started to hear it. The conversations were all about what had happened. The Vatican representatives were talking about a sacred presence. The details were already spiraling. There had been a light and a great voice, had nobody else heard? And people were agreeing.

Hamilton wasn’t a diplomat, and he knew better than to take on trouble not in his own line. But he didn’t like what he was hearing. The Catholics had only come to terms with Impossible Grace a couple of decades ago, when a Papal bull went out announcing that John XXVI thought that the concept had merit, but that further scientific study was required. But now they’d got behind it, as in all things, they were behind it. So what would this say to them, that the divine had looked down on this wedding, approved of it, and plucked someone away from it?

No, not just someone. Prussian military. A Protestant from a nation that had sometimes protested that various Swedish territories would be far better off within their own jurisdiction.

Hamilton stopped himself speculating. Guessing at such things would only make him hesitate if his guesses turned out to be untrue.

Hamilton had a vague but certain grasp of what his God was like. He thought it was possible that He might decide to give the nod to a marriage at court. But in a way that might upset the balance between nations that was divinely ordained, that was the center of all good works?

No. Hamilton was certain now. The divine be damned. This wasn’t the numinous at play. This was enemy action.

He circled the room until he found the Prussians. They were raging, an ambassador poking at a British courtier, demanding something, probably that an investigation be launched immediately.

And beside that Prussian stood several more, diplomatic and military, all convincingly frightened and furious, certain this was a British plot.

But behind them there, in the social place where Hamilton habitually looked, there were some of the vanished man’s fellow big lads. The other five from that diplomatic pouch. The Prussians, uniquely in Europe, kept up an actual organization for the sort of thing Hamilton and his ilk did on the never-never. The Garde Du Corps had begun as a regiment similar to the Life Guards, but these days it was said they weren’t even issued with uniforms. They wouldn’t be on anyone’s dance cards. They weren’t stalking the room now, and all right, that was understandable, they were hanging back to protect their men. But they weren’t doing much of that either. They didn’t look angry, or worried for their comrade, or for their own skins—

Hamilton took a step back to let pretty noble couples desperately waltz between him and the Prussians, wanting to keep his position as a privileged observer.

They looked like they were waiting. On edge. They just wanted to get out of here. Was the Garde really that callous? They’d lost a man in mysterious circumstances, and they weren’t themselves agitating to get back into that room and yell his name, but were just waiting to move on?

He looked for another moment, remembering the faces, then moved on himself. He found another table of Prussians. The good sort, not Order of the Black Eagle, but Hussars. They were in uniform, and had been drinking, and were furiously declaring in Hohenzollern German that if they weren’t allowed access to the records of what had happened, well then it must be—they didn’t like to say what it must be!

Hamilton plucked a glass from a table and wandered over to join them, careful to take a wide and unsteady course around a lady whose train had developed some sort of fault and wasn’t moving fast enough to keep pace with her feet.

He flopped down in a chair next to one of the Prussians, a captain by his lapels, which were virtual in the way the Prussians liked, to implicitly suggest that they had been in combat more recently than the other great powers, and so had a swift turnover of brevet ranks, decided by merit. “Hullo!” he said.

The group fell silent and bristled at him.

Hamilton blinked at them. “Where’s Humph?”

“Humph? Wassay th’gd Major?” the Hussar Captain spoke North Sea pidgin, but with a clear accent: Hamilton would be able to understand him.

He didn’t want to reveal that he spoke perfect German, albeit with a Bavarian accent. “Big chap. Big big chap. Say go.” He carefully swore in Dutch, shaking his head, not understanding. “Which you settle fim?”

“Settle?!” They looked among each other, and Hamilton could feel the affront. A couple of them even put their good hands to their waists, where the space was folded that no longer contained their pistols and thin swords. But the captain glared at them and they relented. A burst of Hohenzollern German about this so-called mystery of their mate vanishing, and how, being in the Garde, he had obviously been abducted for his secrets.

Hamilton waved his hands. “No swords! Good chap! No name. He won! Three times to me at behind the backshee.” His raised his voice a notch. “Behind the backshee! Excellent chap! He won!” He stuck out his ring finger, offering the winnings in credit, to be passed from skin to skin. He mentally retracted the other options of what could be detailed there, and blanked it. He could always make a drunken show of trying to find it. “Seek to settle. For such a good chap.”

They didn’t believe him or trust him. Nobody reached out to touch his finger. But he learnt a great deal in their German conversation in the ten minutes that followed, while he loudly struggled to communicate with the increasingly annoyed captain, who couldn’t bring himself to directly insult a member of the British military by asking him to go away. The vanished man’s name was Helmuth Sandels. The name suggested Swedish origins to his family. But that was typical continental back and forth. He might have been a good man now he’d gone, but he hadn’t been liked. Sandels had had a look in his eye when he’d walked past stout fellows who’d actually fought battles. He’d spoken up in anger when valiant Hussars had expressed the military’s traditional views concerning those running the government, the country, and the world. Hamilton found himself sharing the soldiers’ expressions of distaste: this had been someone who assumed that loyalty was an opinion.

He raised a hand in pax, gave up trying with the captain, and left the table.

Walking away, he heard the Hussars moving on with their conversation, starting to express some crude opinions about the Princess. He didn’t break stride.

Into his mind, unbidden, came the memories. Of what had been a small miracle of a kind, but one that only he and she had been witness to.

HAMILTON HAD BEEN at home on leave, having been abroad for a few weeks, serving out of uniform. As always, at times like that, when he should have been at rest, he’d been fired up for no good reason, unable to sleep, miserable, prone to tears in secret when a favorite song had come on the theatricals in his muse flat. It always took three days for him, once he was home, to find out what direction he was meant to be pointing. Then he would set off that way, and pop back to barracks one night for half a pint, and then he’d be fine. He could enjoy day four and onwards, and was known to be something approximating human from there on in.

Three-day leaves were hell. He tried not to use them as leaves, but would find himself some task, hopefully an official one if one of the handful of officers who brokered his services could be so entreated. Those officers were sensitive to such requests now.

But that leave, three years ago, had been two weeks off. He’d come home a day before. So he was no use to anyone. He’d taken a broom, and was pushing accumulated gray goo out of the carriage park alongside his apartment and into the drains.

She’d appeared in a sound of crashing and collapse, as her horse staggered sideways and hit the wall of the mews, then fell. Her two friends were galloping after her, their horses healthy, and someone built like Hamilton was running to help.

But none of them were going to be in time to catch her—

And he was.

IT HAD TURNED out that the horse had missed an inoculation against minuscule poisoning. Its body was a terrible mess, random mechanisms developing out of its flanks and dying, with that terrifying smell, in the moments when Hamilton had held her in his arms, and had had to round on the man running in, and had imposed his authority with a look, and had not been thrown down and away.

Instead, she’d raised her hands and called that she was all right, and had insisted on looking to and at the horse, pulling off her glove and putting her hand to its neck and trying to fight the bloody things directly. But even with her command of information, it had been too late, and the horse had died in a mess.

She’d been bloody angry. And then at the emergency scene that had started to develop around Hamilton’s front door, with police carriages swooping in and the sound of running boots—

Until she’d waved it all away and declared that it had been her favorite horse, a wonderful horse, her great friend since childhood, but it was just a bloody horse, and all she needed was a sit down and if this kind military gentleman would oblige—

And he had.

HE’D OBLIGED HER again when they’d met in Denmark, and they’d danced at a ball held on an ice floe, a carpet of mechanism wood reacting every moment to the weight of their feet and the forces underlying them, and the aurora had shone in the sky.

It was all right in Denmark for Elizabeth to have one dance with a commoner.

Hamilton had got back to the table where his regiment were dining, and had silenced the laughter and the calls, and thus saved them for barracks. He had drunk too much. His batman at the time had prevented him from going to see Elizabeth as she was escorted from the floor at the end of her dance card by a boy who was somewhere in line for the Danish throne.

But she had seen Hamilton the next night, in private, a privacy that would have taken great effort on her part, and after they had talked for several hours and shared some more wine she had shown him great favor.

“So. Is God in the details?” Someone was walking beside Hamilton. It was a Jesuit. Mid thirties. Dark hair, kept over her collar. She had a scar down one side of her face and an odd eye as a result. Minuscule blade, by the look. A member of the Society of Jesus would never allow her face to be restructured. That would be vanity. But she was beautiful.

Hamilton straightened up, giving this woman’s musculature and bearing and all the history those things suggested the respect they deserved. “Or the devil.”

“Yes, interesting the saying goes both ways, isn’t it? My name is Mother Valentine. I’m part of the Society’s campaign for Effective Love.”

“Well,” Hamilton raised an eyebrow, “I’m in favor of love being—”

“Don’t waste our time. You know what I am.”

“Yes, I do. And you know I’m the same. And I was waiting until we were out of earshot—”

“Which we now are—”

“To have this conversation.”

They stopped together. Valentine moved her mouth close to Hamilton’s ear. “I’ve just been told that the Holy Father is eager to declare what happened here to be a potential miracle. Certain parties are sure that our Black Eagle man will be found magically transplanted to distant parts, perhaps Berlin, as a sign against Prussian meddling.”

“If he is, the Kaiser will have him gently shot and we’ll never hear.”

“You’re probably right.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I don’t think miracles happen near our kind.”

Hamilton realized he was looking absurdly hurt at her. And that she could see it. And was quietly absorbing that information for use in a couple of decades, if ever.

He was glad when a message came over the embroidery, asking him to attend to the Queen Mother in the pantry. And to bring his new friend.

THE QUEEN MOTHER stood in the pantry, her not taking a chair having obviously made Parkes and his people even more nervous than they would have been.

She nodded to Valentine. “Monsignor. I must inform you, we’ve had an official approach from the Holy See. They regard the hall here as a possible site of miraculous apparition.”

“Then my opinion on the subject is irrelevant. You should be addressing—”

“The ambassador. Indeed. But here you are. You are aware of what was asked of us?”

“I suspect the Cardinals will have sought a complete record of the moment of the apparition, or in this case, the vanishing. That would only be the work of a moment in the case of such an . . . observed . . . chamber.”

“It would. But it’s what happens next that concerns me.

“The procedure is that the chamber must then be sealed, and left unobserved until the Cardinals can see for themselves, to minimize any effect human observers may have on the process of divine revelation.”

Hamilton frowned. “Are we likely to?”

“God is communicating using a physical method, so we may,” said Valentine. “Depending on one’s credulity concerning minuscule physics.”

“Or one’s credulity concerning international politics,” said the Queen Mother. “Monsignor, it is always our first and most powerful inclination, when another nation asks us for something, to say no. All nations feel that way. All nations know the others do. But now here is a request, one that concerns matters right at the heart of the balance, that is, in the end, about deactivating security. It could be said to come not from another nation, but from God. It is therefore difficult to deny this request. We find ourselves distrusting that difficulty. It makes us want to deny it all the more.”

“You speak for His Royal Highness?”

The Queen Mother gave a cough that might have been a laugh. “Just as you speak for Our Lord.”

Valentine smiled and inclined her head. “I would have thought, your Royal Highness, that it would be obvious to any of the great powers that, given the celebrations, it would take you a long time to gather the Prime Minister and those many other courtiers with whom you would want to consult on such a difficult matter.”

“Correct. Good. It will take three hours. You may go.”

Valentine walked out with Hamilton. “I’m going to go and mix with my own for a while,” she said, “listen to who’s saying what.”

“I’m surprised you wear your hair long.”

She looked sharply at him. “Why?”

“You enjoy putting your head on the block.”

She giggled.

Which surprised Hamilton and for just a moment made him wish he was Lord Carney. But then there was a certain small darkness about another priest he knew.

“I’m just betting,” she said in a whisper, “that by the end of the day this will all be over. And someone will be dead.”

HAMILTON WENT BACK into the ballroom. He found he had a picture in his head now. Something had swum up from somewhere inside him, from a place he had learned to trust and never interrogate as to its reasons. That jerking motion Elizabeth had made at the moment Sandels had vanished. He had an emotional feeling about that image. What was it?

It had been like seeing her shot.

A motion that looked like it had come from beyond her muscles. Something Elizabeth had not been in control of. It wasn’t like her to not be in control. It felt . . . dangerous.

Would anyone else see it that way? He doubted it.

So was he about to do the sudden terrible thing that his body was taking him in the direction of doing?

He killed the thought and just did it. He went to the herald who carried the tablet with dance cards on it, and leaned on him with the Queen Mother’s favor, which had popped up on his ring finger the moment he’d thought of it.

The herald considered the sensation of the fingertip on the back of his hand for a moment, then handed Hamilton the tablet.

Hamilton realized that he had no clue of the havoc he was about to cause. So he glanced at the list of Elizabeth’s forthcoming dances and struck off a random Frenchman.

He scrawled his own signature with a touch, then handed the plate back.

The herald looked at him like the breath of death had passed under his nose.

HAMILTON HAD TO wait three dances before his name came up. A Balaclava, an entree grave (that choice must have taken a while, unless some herald had been waiting all his life for a chance at the French), a hornpipe for the sailors, including Bertil, to much applause, and then, thank the Deus, a straightforward waltz.

Elizabeth had been waiting out those last three, so he met her at her table. Maidservants kept their expressions stoic. A couple of Liz’s companions looked positively scared. Hamilton knew how they felt. He could feel every important eye looking in his direction.

Elizabeth took his arm and gave it a little squeeze. “What’s grandma up to, Johnny?”

“It’s what I’m up to.”

She looked alarmed. They formed up with the other dancers.

Hamilton was very aware of her gloves. The mechanism fabric that covered her left hand held off the urgent demand of his hand, his own need to touch her. But no, that wouldn’t tell him anything. That was just his certainty that to know her had been to know her. That was not where he would find the truth here.

The band started up. The dance began.

Hamilton didn’t access any guidelines in his mind. He let his feet move where they would. He was outside orders, acting on a hunch. He was like a man dancing around the edge of a volcano.

“Do you remember the day we met?” he asked when he was certain they couldn’t be heard; at least, not by the other dancers.

“Of course I do. My poor San Andreas, your flat in Hood Mews—”

“Do you remember what I said to you that day, when nobody else was with us? What you agreed to? Those passionate words that could bring this whole charade crashing down?” He kept his expression light, his tone so gentle and wry that Liz would always play along and fling a little stone back at him, knowing he meant nothing more than he could mean. That he was letting off steam through a joke.

All they had been was based on the certainty expressed in that.

It was an entirely British way to do things. It was, as Carney had said, about lives shaped entirely by the balance.

But this woman, with the room revolving around the two of them, was suddenly appalled, insulted, her face a picture of what she was absolutely certain she should feel. “I don’t know what you mean! Or even if I did, I don’t think—!”

Hamilton’s nostrils flared. He was lost now, if he was wrong. He had one tiny ledge for Liz to grasp if he was, but he would fall.

For duty, then.

He took his hand from Princess Elizabeth’s waist, and grabbed her chin, his fingers digging up into flesh.

The whole room cried out in horror.

He had a moment before they would shoot him.

Yes, he felt it! Or he thought he did! He thought he did enough—

He grabbed the flaw and ripped with all his might.

Princess Elizabeth’s face burst off and landed on the floor.

Blood flew.

He drew his gun and pumped two shots into the mass of flesh and mechanism, as it twitched and blew a stream of defensive acid that discolored the marble.

He spun back to find the woman without a face lunging at him, her eyes white in the mass of red muscle, mechanism pus billowing into the gaps. She was aiming a hair knife at his throat, doubtless with enough mechanism to bring instant death or something worse.

Hamilton thought of Liz as he broke her arm.

He enjoyed the scream.

He wanted to bellow for where the real Liz was as he slammed the impostor down onto the floor, and he was dragged from her in one motion as a dozen men grabbed them.

He caught a glimpse of Bertil, horrified, but not at Hamilton. It was a terror they shared. For her safety.

Hamilton suddenly felt like a traitor again.

He yelled out the words he’d had in mind since he’d put his name down for the dance. “They replaced her years ago! Years ago! At the mews!”

There were screams, cries that we were all undone.

There came the sound of two shots from the direction of the Vatican group, and Hamilton looked over to see Valentine standing over the corpse of a junior official.

Their gaze met. She understood why he’d shouted that.

Another man leapt up at a Vatican table behind her and turned to run and she turned and shot him twice in the chest, his body spinning backward over a table.

HAMILTON RAN WITH the rout. He used the crowds of dignitaries and their retinues, all roaring and competing and stampeding for safety, to hide himself. He made himself look like a man lost, agony on his face, his eyes closed. He was ignoring all the urgent cries from the embroidery.

He covertly acknowledged something directly from the Queen Mother.

He stumbled through the door of the pantry.

Parkes looked round. “Thank God you’re here, we’ve been trying to call, the Queen Mother’s office are urgently asking you to come in—”

“Never mind that now, come with me, on Her Royal Highness’s orders.”

Parkes grabbed the pods from his ears and got up. “What on Earth—?”

Hamilton shot him through the right knee.

Parkes screamed and fell. Every technician in the room leapt up. Hamilton bellowed at them to sit down or they’d get the same.

He shoved his foot into the back of Parkes’s injured leg. “Listen here, Matty. You know how hard it’s going to get. You’re not the sort to think your duty’s worth it. How much did they pay you? For how long?”

He was still yelling at the man on the ground as the Life Guards burst in and put a gun to everyone’s head, his own included.

The Queen Mother entered a minute later, and changed that situation to the extent of letting Hamilton go free. She looked carefully at Parkes, who was still screaming for pity, and aimed a precise little kick into his disintegrated kneecap.

Then she turned to the technicians. “Your minds will be stripped down and rebuilt, if you’re lucky, to see who was in on it.” She looked back to Hamilton as they started to be led from the room. “What you said in the ballroom obviously isn’t the case.”

“No. When you take him apart,” Hamilton nodded at Parkes, “you’ll find he tampered with the contour map. They used Sandels as the cover for substituting Her Royal Highness. They knew she was going to move around the room in a predetermined way. With Parkes’s help, they set up an open-ended fold in that corner—”

“The expense is staggering. The energy required—”

“There’ll be no Christmas tree for the Kaiser this year. Sandels deliberately stepped into the fold and vanished, in a very public way. And at that moment they made the switch, took Her Royal Highness into the fold too, covered by the visual disturbance of Sandels’s progress. And by old-fashioned sleight of hand.”

“Propped up by the Prussians’ people in the Vatican. Instead of a British bride influencing the Swedish court, there’d be a cuckoo from Berlin. Well played, Wilhelm. Worth that Christmas tree.”

“I’ll wager the unit are still in the fold, not knowing anything about the outside world, waiting for the room to be sealed off with pious care, so they can climb out and extract themselves. They probably have supplies for several days.”

“Do you think my granddaughter is still alive?”

Hamilton pursed his lips. “There are Prussian yachts on the river. They’re staying on for the season. I think they’d want the bonus of taking the Princess back for interrogation.”

“That’s the plan!” Parkes yelled. “Please—!”

“Get him some anesthetic,” said the Queen Mother. Then she turned back to Hamilton. “The balance will be kept. To give him his due, cousin Wilhelm was acting within it. There will be no diplomatic incident. The Prussians will be able to write off Sandels and any others as rogues. We will of course cooperate. The Black Eagle traditionally carry only that knowledge they need for their mission, and will order themselves to die before giving us orders of battle or any other strategic information. But the intelligence from Parkes and any others will give us some small power of potential shame over the Prussians in future months. The Vatican will be bending over backwards for us for some time to come.” She took his hand, and he felt the favor on his ring finger impressed with some notes that probably flattered him. He’d read them later. “Major, we will have the fold opened. You will enter it. Save Elizabeth. Kill them all.”

THEY GOT HIM a squad of fellow officers, four of them. They met in a trophy room, and sorted out how they’d go and what the rules of engagement would be once they got there. Substitutes for Parkes and his crew had been found from the few sappers present. Parkes had told them that those inside the fold had left a minuscule aerial trailing, but that messages were only to be passed down it in emergencies. No such communications had been sent. They were not aware of the world outside their bolt hole.

Hamilton felt nothing but disgust for a bought man, but he knew that such men told the truth under pressure, especially when they knew the fine detail of what could be done to them.

The false Liz had begun to be picked apart. Her real name would take a long time to discover. She had a maze of intersecting selves inside her head.

She must have been as big an investment as the fold. The court physicians who had examined her had been as horrified by what had been done to her as by what she was.

That baffled Hamilton. People like the duplicate had the power to be who they liked. But that power was bought at the cost of damage to the balance of their own souls. What were nations, after all, but a lot of souls who knew who they were and how they liked to live? To be as uncertain as the substitute Liz was to be lost and to endanger others. It went beyond treachery. It was living mixed metaphor. It was as if she had insinuated herself into the cogs of the balance, her puppet strings wrapping around the arteries which supplied hearts and minds.

They gathered in the empty dining room in their dress uniforms. The dinner things had not been cleared away. Nothing had been done. The party had been well and truly crashed. The representatives of the great powers would have vanished back to their embassies and yachts. Mother Valentine would be rooting out the details of who had been paid what inside her party. Excommunications post mortem would be issued, and those traitors would burn in hell.

He thought of Liz, and took his gun from the air beside him.

One of the sappers put a device in the floor, set a timer, saluted and withdrew.

“Up the Green Jackets,” said one of the men behind him, and a couple of the others mentioned their own regiments.

Hamilton felt a swell of fear and emotion.

The counter clicked to zero and the hole in the world opened in front of them, and they ran into it.

THERE WAS NOBODY immediately inside. A floor and curved ceiling of universal boundary material. It wrapped light around it in rainbows that always gave tunnels like this a slightly pantomime feel. It was like the entrance to Saint Nicholas’s cave. Or, of course, the vortex sighted upon death, the ladder to the hereafter. Hamilton got that familiar taste in his mouth, a pure adrenal jolt of fear, not the restlessness of combat deferred, but that sensation one got in other universes, of being too far from home, cut off from the godhead.

There was gravity. The Prussians certainly had spent some money.

The party made their way forward. They stepped gently on the edge of the universe. From around the corner of the short tunnel there were sounds.

The other four looked to Hamilton. He took a couple of gentle steps forward, grateful for the softness of his dress uniform shoes. He could hear Elizabeth’s voice. Not her words, not from here. She was angry, but engaged. Not defiant in the face of torture. Reasoning with them. A smile passed his lips for a moment. They’d have had a lot of that.

It told him there was no alert, not yet. It was almost impossible to set sensors close to the edge of a fold. This lot must have stood on guard for a couple of hours, heard no alarm from their friends outside, and then relaxed. They’d have been on the clock, waiting for the time when they would poke their heads out. Hamilton bet there was a man meant to be on guard, but that Liz had pulled him into the conversation too. He could imagine her face, just round that corner, one eye always toward the exit, maybe a couple of buttons undone, claiming it was the heat and excitement. She had a hair knife too, but it would do her no good to use it on just one of them.

He estimated the distance. He counted the other voices, three . . . four, there was a deeper tone, in German, not the pidgin the other three had been speaking. That would be him. Sandels. He didn’t sound like he was part of that conversation. He was angry, ordering, perhaps just back from sleep, wondering what the hell—!

Hamilton stopped all thoughts of Liz. He looked to the others, and they understood they were going to go and go now, trip the alarms and use the emergency against the enemy.

He nodded.

They leapt around the corner, ready for targets.

They expected the blaring horn. They rode it, finding their targets surprised, bodies reacting, reaching for weapons that were in a couple of cases a reach away among a kitchen, crates, tinned foods—

Hamilton had made himself know he was going to see Liz, so he didn’t react to her, he looked past her—

He ducked, cried out, as an automatic set off by the alarm chopped up the man who had been running beside him, the Green Jacket, gone in a burst of red. Meat all over the cave.

Hamilton reeled, stayed up, tried to pin a target. To left and right ahead, men were falling, flying, two shots in each body, and he was moving too slowly, stumbling, vulnerable—

One man got off a shot, into the ceiling, and then fell, pinned twice, exploding—

Every one of the Prussians gone but—

He found his target.

Sandels. With Elizabeth right in front of him. Covering every bit of his body. He had a gun pushed into her neck. He wasn’t looking at his three dead comrades.

The three men who were with Hamilton moved forward, slowly, their gun hands visible, their weapons pointing down.

They were looking to Hamilton again.

He hadn’t lowered his gun. He had his target. He was aiming right at Sandels and the Princess.

There was silence.

Liz made eye contact. She had indeed undone those two buttons. She was calm. “Well,” she began, “this is very—”

Sandels muttered something and she was quiet again.

Silence.

Sandels laughed, not unpleasantly. Soulful eyes were looking at them from that square face of his, a smile turning the corner of his mouth. He shared the irony that Hamilton had often found in people of their profession.

This was not the awkward absurdity that the soldiers had described. Hamilton realized that he was looking at an alternative. This man was a professional at the same things Hamilton did in the margins of his life. It was the strangeness of the alternative that had alienated the military men. Hamilton was fascinated by him.

“I don’t know why I did this,” said Sandels, indicating Elizabeth with a sway of the head. “Reflex.”

Hamilton nodded to him. They each knew all the other did. “Perhaps you needed a moment.”

“She’s a very pretty girl to be wasted on a Swede.”

Hamilton could feel Liz not looking at him. “It’s not a waste,” he said gently. “And you’ll refer to Her Royal Highness by her title.”

“No offense meant.”

“And none taken. But we’re in the presence, not in barracks.”

“I wish we were.”

“I think we all agree there.”

“I won’t lay down my weapon.”

Hamilton didn’t do his fellows the disservice of looking to them for confirmation. “This isn’t an execution.”

Sandels looked satisfied. “Seal this tunnel afterwards, that should be all we require for passage.”

“Not to Berlin, I presume.”

“No,” said Sandels, “to entirely the opposite.”

Hamilton nodded.

“Well, then.” Sandels stepped aside from Elizabeth.

Hamilton lowered his weapon and the others readied theirs. It wouldn’t be done to aim straight at Sandels. He had his own weapon at hip height. He would bring it up and they would cut him down as he moved.

But Elizabeth hadn’t moved. She was pushing back her hair, as if wanting to say something to him before leaving, but lost for the right words.

Hamilton, suddenly aware of how unlikely that was, started to say something.

But Liz had put a hand to Sandels’s cheek.

Hamilton saw the fine silver between her fingers.

Sandels’ fell to the ground thrashing, hoarsely yelling as he deliberately and precisely, as his nervous system was ordering him to, bit off his own tongue. Then the mechanism from the hair knife let him die.

The Princess looked at Hamilton. “It’s not a waste,” she said.

THEY SEALED THE fold as Sandels had asked them to, after the sappers had made an inspection.

Hamilton left them to it. He regarded his duty as done. And no message came to him to say otherwise.

Recklessly, he tried to find Mother Valentine. But she was gone with the rest of the Vatican party, and there weren’t even bloodstains left to mark where her feet had trod this evening.

He sat at a table, and tried to pour himself some champagne. He found that the bottle was empty.

His glass was filled by Lord Carney, who sat down next to him. Together, they watched as Elizabeth was joyfully reunited with Bertil. They swung each other round and round, oblivious to all around them. Elizabeth’s grandmother smiled at them and looked nowhere else.

“We are watching,” said Carney, “the balance incarnate. Or perhaps they’ll incarnate it tonight. As I said: if only there were an alternative.”

Hamilton drained his glass. “If only,” he said, “there weren’t.”

And he left before Carney could say anything more.

SINNER, BAKER, FABULIST, PRIEST; RED MASK, BLACK MASK, GENTLEMAN, BEAST

Eugie Foster

EACH MORNING IS a decision. Should I put on the brown mask or the blue? Should I be a tradesman or an assassin today?

Whatever the queen demands, of course, I am. But so often she ignores me, and I am left to figure out for myself who to be.

Dozens upon dozens of faces to choose from.

1. Marigold is for Murder

The yellow mask draws me, the one made from the pelt of a mute animal with neither fangs nor claws—better for the workers to collect its skin. It can only glare at its keepers through the wires of its cage, and when the knives cut and the harvesters rip away its skin, no one is troubled by its screams.

I tie the tawny ribbons under my chin. The mask is so light, almost weightless. But when I inhale, a charnel stench redolent of out houses, opened intestines, and dried blood floods my nose.

My wife’s mask is so pretty, pink flower lips and magenta eyelashes that flutter like feathers when she talks. But her body is pasty and soft, the flesh of her thighs mottled with black veins and puckered fat.

Still, I want her.

“Darling, I’m sorry,” I say. “They didn’t have the kind you wanted. I bought what they had. There’s Citrus Nectar, Iolite Bronze, and Creamy Illusion.”

“Might as well bring me pus in a jar,” she snaps. “Did you look on all the shelves?”

“N-no. But the shop girl said they were out.”

“The slut was probably hoarding it for herself. You know they all skim the stuff. Open the pots and scoop out a spoonful here, a dollop there. They use it themselves or stick it in tawdry urns to sell at those independent markets.”

“The shop girl looked honest enough.” Her mask had been carved onyx with a brush of gold at temples and chin. She had been slim, her flesh taut where my wife’s sagged, her skin flawless and golden. And she had moved with a delicate grace, totally unlike the lumbering woman before me.

“Looked honest?” My wife’s eyes roll in the sockets of her mask. “Like you could tell Queen’s Honey from shit.”

“My love, I know you’re disappointed, but won’t you try one of these other ones? For me?” I pull a jar of Iolite Bronze from the sack and unscrew the lid.

Although hostility bristles from her—her scent, her stance, the glare of fury from the eyeholes of her mask—I dip a finger into the solution. It’s true it doesn’t have the same consistency, and the perfume is more musk than honey, but the tingle is the same.

With my Iolite Bronzed finger, I reach for the cleft between her doughy thighs.

“Don’t touch me with that filth,” she snarls, backing away.

If only she weren’t so stubborn. I grease all the fingers of my hand with Iolite Bronze. The musk scent has roused me faster than Queen’s Honey.

“Get away!”

I grab for her sex, clutching at her with my slick fingers. I am so intent that I do not see the blade, glowing in her fist. As my fingertips slip into her, she plunges the weapon into my chest, and I go down.

Lying in a pool of my own blood, the scent of Iolite Bronze turning rank, I watch the blade rise and fall as she stabs me again and again.

Her mask is so pretty.

2. Blue Is for Maidens

The next morning, I linger over my selection, touching one beautiful face, then another. There is a vacant spot where the yellow mask used to be, but I have many more.

Finally, I choose one the color of sapphires. The brow is sewn from satin smooth as water. I twine the velveteen ribbons in my hair, and the tassels shush around my ears like whispered secrets.

I don’t think I’ll ever marry,” I say. “Why should I?”

The girl beside me giggles, slender fingers over her mouth opening. Her mask is hewn from green wood hardened by three days of fire. Once carved and finished, the wood takes on a glasslike clarity, the tracery of sepia veins like a thick filigree of lace.

“Mark my words,” she says. “All the flirting you do will catch up to you one day. A man will steal your heart, and you’ll come running to me to help with the wedding.”

I laugh. “Not likely. The guys we know only think about Queen’s Honey and getting me alone. I’d just as soon marry a Mask Maker as any of those meatheads.”

“Eww, that’s twisted.” My girlfriend squeals and points. “Look! It’s the new shipment. Didn’t I tell you the delivery trucks come round this street first?”

We stand with our masks pressed against the shop window, ogling the display of vials.

“Exotica, White Wishes Under a Black Moon.” My friend rattles off the names printed in elegant fonts in the space beneath each sampler. “Metallic Mischief, Homage to a Manifesto— what do you suppose that one’s like?—Terracotta Talisman, and Dulcet Poison. I like the sound of that last one.”

“You would.”

“Oh, hush. Let’s go try them.”

“That store’s awfully posh. You think they’ll let us try without buying?”

“Of course they will. We’re customers, aren’t we? They won’t throw us out.”

“They might.”

My concerns fail to dampen her enthusiasm, and I let her tow me through the crystalline doors.

The mingled scents in the shop wash over us. My friend abandons me, rushing to join the jostling horde clustered around the new arrivals. While the mixture of emotive fumes makes my friend giddy and excited, they overwhelm me. I lean against a counter and take shallow breaths.

“You look lost.” The man’s mask is matte pewter, the metal coating so thin I can see the strokes from the artisan’s paintbrush. A flame design swirls across both cheeks in variegated shades of purple.

“I’m just waiting for my friend.” I gesture in the direction of the mob. There’s a glint of translucent green, all I can see of her.

“You’re not interested in trying this new batch?”

“Not really. I prefer the traditional distillations. I guess that makes me old-fashioned.”

The man leans to conspiratorial closeness. “But you purchased those three new ones yesterday. I tried to warn you about the Iolite Bronze. It’s not at all a proper substitute for Queen’s Honey.”

Memories of lust and violence fill me, musk and arousal, pain and blood. But they are wrong. I am someone else today. I shake my head.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I search for a hint of green glass or sepia lace. Where is she? “I’d never let someone use Iolite Bronze on me.”

“Didn’t you say it was a gift when I sold it to you?”

“What?”

“I was the shop girl in the onyx mask.”

I am shocked beyond words, beyond reaction. It is the biggest taboo in our society, so profane and obscene that it is not even in our law books. We do not discuss the events and encounters of our other masks. It is not done. What if people started blaming one face for what another did, merely because the same citizen wore both?

The moment of speechless paralysis ends, and I run. I fly through the glittering doors, not caring that I’ve left my best friend behind, and run, run, run until I am back to the dormitory on Center at Corridor. I huddle in the lift, and it whisks me to my quarters. On my bed, I sob, the tears wetting the inside of my mask. A part of me worries that I will stain the satin, but it is a distant part.

When the tears run out, I am done with the day, done with this mask. But the unmasking time is still far off. If I’d only worn the tan mask today, with the bronze veneer and dripping beadwork, I wouldn’t have fled from the pewter-masked deviant. I’d have punched him in the golden flesh of his gut or hauled him to the queen’s gendarmes for a reckoning.

Then I realize what I’m thinking, what I’m wanting—another mask, but not during the morning selection, not during the unmasking—while I’m still wearing today’s.

And I’m afraid.

3. Black Is for Sex

In the morning, as I stand barefaced among my masks, looking anywhere but at the tan one, I receive the queen’s summons. It is delivered, as always, by a gendarme masked in thinly hammered silver. He rings my bell, waiting for me to acknowledge him over the intercom.

The gendarmes are the only citizens about during the early morning when the rest of us are selecting our daily masks, just as they are the only ones who patrol the thoroughfares after the unmasking hour, collecting retired masks and distributing new ones.

“Good morning, gendarme,” I say.

“Good morning, citizen. You are called upon today to carry out your civic duty.”

“I am pleased to oblige.” A square of paper slips through my delivery slot and into my summons tray, bringing with it an elusive sweetness. The queen’s writs are always scented like the honey named after her, both more insistent and more subtle than the stuff which circulates in the marketplaces.

Among my arrayed masks, raised above the others, is the sable mask—hammered steel painted with liquid ebony. It is the consort mask, worn only to honor the queen’s summons. The paint is sheer, and glimmers of silver flicker through the color. The eyes are outlined in opaque kohl, a masked mask.

I lock the delicate chains with their delicate clasps around my head. For a moment, I am disoriented by the lenses over the eyes. It takes longer for me to adjust to the warp in my vision than to the feel and heft of the mask. But not much longer.

The music trills liquid and rich around us, and I concentrate on the steps. In her mask-like-stars, the queen swirls and glides across the ballroom in my arms. Caught in her beauty and my exertions, I have missed her words.

“I beg your pardon, my queen. What did you say?”

Her mask tilts up, and the piquant flavor of her amusement fills my senses. “I asked if you were enjoying the dance, whether you liked the refreshment.”

“I have not sampled the buffet, but it looks lavish. As to the dance, I am worried that my clumsiness might offend you or that I might misstep.”

“I’ve never danced with you before? That would explain your stiffness.”

“I have not had the pleasure. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was only a whimsy. I don’t dance with many. You probably won’t dance with me again.” The queen gestures, and the music stops. She leads me to her couch—crimson sheets and alabaster cushions. I am more familiar with this type of dance, but she isn’t ready for me yet. Her scent, though heady, tells me it is not time to mate, although it will be soon.

It confuses me, this waiting. Why am I here, if not to do my duty?

She reclines on her couch but not in the position of copulation.

“Talk to me,” she says.

“What would you like to speak on, my queen?”

“Do you have a favorite mask?”

It is an odd question, treading the boundary of indecency.

“No, my queen. They are all precious to me.”

“Don’t you wish you could discard some masks, perhaps the ones that you suffer in, and just wear the ones that are pleasurable?”

Was she testing me? “They are all precious to me,” I say again. “Each in its wonderful variety. I would never presume to contravene the law.”

“Not even to bend it a little? There are some citizens who wear just a few masks and don others only as often as they must in order to stay out of the purview of the gendarmes.”

“But that’s criminal.”

“Technically, it’s legal, although it defies the heart of the code. Generally, the number of their select rotation is large enough that no single mask becomes dominant. Do you find the prospect appealing?”

Dominant mask? What would be the purpose in limiting one’s mask selection? Her words make no sense.

“No.”

My answer pleases her. Her scent rises and with it, my arousal, and I cannot think clearly anymore. The queen is the font of desire and satisfaction—the perfume of true Queen’s Honey between her legs, her need, mine—nothing exists but the urgency of mating. It eclipses mere copulation as the sun outshines the stars. I submerge in a tide of desire and completion and the rise of desire again, over and over, until the unmasking hour.

In the morning, barefaced and aching, I report to the Mask Makers galley. I avoid looking at their ugly, soft countenances. It’s partly instinctive discomfort at being seen without a mask, but also, Mask Makers have always made me uneasy. I feel sorry for them, their faces so colorless and insipid. It’s an irony that they wear such bland features and plain colors, yet they make such marvelous faces for us, each one unique in its brilliance. I pity them, and I’m glad I was not born to their caste.

I hand over my summons writ and accept my newest mask, my favor from the queen. It is glossy saffron with pointed wires to fasten it. It has no mouth opening, but it does not seem lacking for that. Like every face they craft, it is a feat of artistry.

4. Orange Is for Agony

I press the saffron mask to my face and wrap the barbed laces around my head. A fleeting touch, my fingertips on the painted metal tell me of thick runnels that dent the surface. Their unevenness makes the fit uncomfortable. For a moment.

Wire mesh presses above and below. If I lie down, I can stretch my neck, a little. But then the mesh cuts into my feet, my forearms, my chest. Standing, sitting, a few back-and-forth steps. But pacing only reminds me how small my cell is. And they do not like for us to pace. Exercise thins the fat between muscle and skin, making the harvest more difficult.

My neighbor wears a ginger mask dotted with cobalt sequins. He urinates, and it splashes through the mesh on me. I hiss my rage, crowded by the scent of his body, and return the favor.

I’m glad when the workers come for him and watch as they trap him in their loops. He tries to fight, but he has nothing sharp or hard to wield. Their wicked tools, edged with blue light, open him from neck to groin. He barely has time to bleed before they carve perpendicular incisions, flaps to better flay him in a single piece.

His eyes bulge as they tear away his skin, all the movement he is capable of. He’s silent, for there is no mouth on his mask; he is as mute as I.

When they’re done, they leave him writhing in the liquids of his body on the wire mesh floor. They take the heavy cloak of his skin with them.

Then it’s my turn. The ginger planes of my neighbor’s mask swivel to me, so he can watch.

There’s no place to run in my tiny cell, and their loops pinion me. When they begin to cut away my skin, it is the most terrible pain I have ever known.

Their masks are lemon, daffodil, and butterscotch. Pretty and yellow, like sunshine.

5. Jasper Is for Jilting

The next morning, the choice is harder than usual. I flinch away from the saffron mask and stare for a long while at the tan one. But it feels inappropriate to select it.

Like a whiff of passing corruption, the notion of going without a mask today, simply staying in my quarters and not choosing a face, flits through my thoughts. It is too scandalous to contemplate; I feel guilty to have even considered it.

Without looking, I reach among the rows of empty faces and snatch the first one my hand falls upon.

It is brackish green, the color of stagnant water in a pool that never sees the sun. The chin and nose are gilded in dark velvet, and the lips shine, liquid silver hand-painted on silk. I tighten the woven cords around my head.

I hover beneath the window of my lover, she of the cerulean mask detailed in voile. She reclines on her balcony, and a song of courtship thrums from her dainty mouth. I inhale the delicate body scents her servant wafts out with a fan: enticement and temptation, innocence and promise.

“Do you love me?” my sweetheart calls.

“With all my soul. You are my everything.”

“I don’t believe you,” she laughs. “How are you different from all the other men, just waiting for a chance to slather me with Queen’s Honey?”

“How can you say that? I’ve asked you to marry me.”

“What does that prove? Any meathead with a tongue can do that. And anyway, I don’t want to marry at all. Marriage is a sorry state that leads to fighting and grief.”

I pantomime exaggerated dismay for her benefit. “What can I do to convince you of my sincerity? Ask me for anything, and I’ll give it to you.”

“Do you have a jar of Queen’s Honey?”

I hesitate. If I answer truthfully, she might accuse me again of being a libertine. But it is also my courting gift. She will feel slighted if I don’t have anything to offer her.

I sigh and choose the better of my options. “A humble present to honor your loveliness.”

“Good.”

When I’m not immediately rebuffed, I dare to hope.

“I’m sending my girl down. Give the Queen’s Honey to her, and we’ll all play a game. She’ll seal the jar so the contents may not be used without breaking it, and puncture its lid, freeing the scent. If you can spend the afternoon with me and my girl in my enclosed boudoir and keep from breaking the jar open, I’ll believe that you love me and not simply the pleasures of copulation. But if you lose control and do break the jar, you can slake yourself on her, but you’ll never get a word or whiff from me again.”

“What, pray, do I get if I can restrain myself?”

Her laughter is like a teasing wind. “If you can check your desires until evening, I’ll send her away and break the jar myself.”

I’m both excited and dismayed by the prospect of her “game.” My lover will ensure that our time is not spent on chaste recreations or thoughtful conversation. She will pose herself and her servant girl in all manner of ways suggestive of copulation. And she is probably already drenched in one of the trendy distillations—Passion Without Doubt or Exotica or Citrus Nectar—to madden me further. Still, the reward will be sweet. And at the very least (my love did not altogether peg me wrongly), I’ll get to do the servant girl.

My prospective consolation prize opens the door. Her mask is a sage green that suggests transparency, the eyes rimmed in toffee lace. She snatches the Queen’s Honey from me, but there the anticipated script ends. She twists off the lid and scoops the unguent out. Without embarrassment or coyness, she rubs it on herself, between her thighs. As I stare dumbfounded, she smears a glistening coating on me. Instantly, I’m aroused and eager.

“Want me?” she whispers.

“Yes.” Flesh on flesh, the Queen’s Honey brooks no denial.

“Then catch me.” She sprints away.

I waver for only a breath. Above, my sweetheart calls down plaintively, wondering at our delay. But desire roars through me, and all I care about is the servant girl.

I chase her through the dormitory block as she weaves around crowds and over obstacles—sculptures, shops, new constructions. Sometimes men turn, catching the fleeting perfume of Queen’s Honey mingled with her sex as she darts by.

I am enthralled. She fills every breath I take. I run until I’m a creature of fire—blazing lungs and burning limbs. But it is spice to my eagerness. I will catch her, and then we will copulate.

She leads me past the market district, past shop windows filled with citizens making purchases, and into the rural outskirts where the machines harvest our food and workers gather esoteric materials for the Mask Makers guild.

In a shaded copse of green wood trees, she drops to her knees. I’m upon her, not even waiting for her to assume the proper position. She opens to me, and I rush to join our bodies.

It is glorious, of course, the release all the more satisfying for the chase. But even as I spend myself, I notice something wrong. The girl is not making the right movements, and her scent, while intoxicating, is strange. Beneath the Queen’s Honey she is impatient when she should be impassioned. As soon as I’m finished, she pulls away, and for the first time after a copulation, I’m not happy and languid, awash in the endorphins of sex. I feel awkward.

Before I can say anything, the girl tears off her mask. The horror of her unmasking paralyzes me; I’m unprepared for her next action. She lunges, ripping off the bindings of my mask, and yanks it free.

I am barefaced.

It’s not the unmasking hour, not the time for emptiness and slumber. Without my mask, I don’t know how to act or feel, or what to say. I don’t even know if I can speak, for I never have without a mask. I’m lost, no one. The nucleus of my personality and intelligence is empty; the girl has stolen it.

6. White Is for Obedience

While I kneel, stupefied, the girl discards my mask, letting it fall among the long grasses where we loved. I don’t even have the presence of will to retrieve it. She examines the inside of her mask. With infinite care, she peels a sheer membrane away. It is like a veil of gauze or chiffon, but this veil has a shape. There are nose, cheekbones, and chin.

It is a mask, but a mask unlike any I’ve seen. The fabric is unornamented and diaphanous white, like thin fog or still water, all but colorless. It doesn’t conceal what it covers, only overlays it.

She takes this ghost of a mask and drapes it over my face. Without cord or chain, it fastens itself, clinging to my head. It is such relief to have my nakedness covered, I’m grateful when I should be outraged.

I wait for the mask to tell me who I am and what to do.

And I wait.

“There’s not much oversoul there,” the girl says. Without a mask, her features are too animated, obscenely so. I avert my gaze, wondering if the ghost mask exposes my expressions in such an indecent fashion.

“It’s only a scaffold to help you get past the schizo-panic,” she continues. “It doesn’t have any personas or relationship scenarios to instill, and absolutely no emotives.”

I don’t like the ghost mask’s vacancy. But at least I can think now, and it occurs to me to scramble for my own mask.

“Stop,” she says.

I cannot move. My fingertips brush the darker green and glint of silver lying in the grass, but I can’t pick it up.

“I’m afraid the scaffold does have an obedience imprint. I am sorry about that, but it’s necessary. You wouldn’t be able to access the oversoul in your mask anyway. The scaffold creates a barrier that mask imprints can’t penetrate, and you won’t be able to take the scaffold off. Go ahead, I know you want to. Try to remove it.”

I grope my face, my head looking for something to undo. There’s nothing to unknot, release, or unbuckle. I find the edge where the ghost mask, the scaffold, gives way to skin, but it’s adhered to me. The memory from yesterday—the saffron mask, being skinned alive—is enough to deter me from anything drastic.

“What did you do to me?” I ask. “And why?”

“Good, you’re questioning. I knew you’d acclimate quickly.” A scent penetrates my distress. She is pleased. Except the tang isn’t right. It’s not feminine but not masculine either. She has no mask to tell me whether she’s male or female. Should I continue thinking of her as a girl? And for that matter, the scaffold hasn’t provided me with a gender. Am I a man or a woman, or am I neuter, or perhaps some sort of androgyne?

I feel lightheaded and ill. “If this is some perverted game,” I say, “I’m not amused. I’ll report this to the gendarmes. They’ll confiscate all your masks for this crime, and—” I trail off. Her naked face is testimony of her indifference to the severest penalty of our society.

“Why are you doing this to me?” I whimper.

“Did you ever wonder who you are beneath your masks?” she says. “When you say ‘me,’ who is that?”

Hearing her voice the question that has lately made my mornings so troubling and the hours after unmasking so long is a kind of deliverance. I’m not the only citizen to have these thoughts; I’m not alone in my distress. But the guilt remains, along with an added unease. Is exposing my crime what this is about? Am I to be penalized?

“Don’t be afraid,” she says, “I’m not going to turn you over to the gendarmes or anything like that.”

My breathing quickens. “Are you hearing my thoughts?”

“No, only watching your face.”

“My face?”

“It conveys emotions. It’s like smelling another’s confusion or knowing that someone’s angry by the tightness of their shoulders, only with facial musculature. Before long, you’ll read it as instinctively as you do scents and stances.”

“You say that as though you expect me to be pleased.”

Her mouth curves and parts, revealing the whiteness of her teeth. Being witness to such an intimate view is both repulsive and fascinating.

“I know you don’t think so now,” she says, “but I’ve given you a gift, one very few people receive.” She stands. “Walk with me.”

I don’t want to go anywhere with her, but the scaffold compels me to obey. We stroll deeper into the wilderness, leaving my mask in the grass. It is an uncomfortable sensation, having my will at odds with my body.

“I’ve been watching you for a while to make sure you were right,” she says.

“Watching me?” Fragments of confusion knit into understanding. “You’re the shop girl who sold me the Iolite Bronze and the deviant man with the pewter mask.”

“And the customer at the bakery who bought a dozen egg tarts from you before that.”

“The woman with the pink mask who asked for the recipe?”

“Yes. And before, when you wore your roan and iron mask, I was in the audience when you presented your new poem. And the day before that, I picked indigo with you for the Mask Makers.”

We emerge into a clearing. A broken-down hut lists, obscured by overgrown foliage. Her sage and toffee mask still dangles from her fingertips. She passes its brim over the doorknob, and the door swings open.

“I’m glad to finally meet you,” she says. “You can call me Pena.”

The interior is dim, lit by stray sunbeams poking through holes in the ramshackle walls.

“Pena?” The word is meaningless. “Why?”

“It’s my name, a word that means me, regardless of what mask I’m wearing or not wearing.”

I snort. “Why stop at each citizen having their own name? Why not each tile or brick the builders use or every tree or blade of grass?”

“Every street has a name,” Pena says. “And every shop.”

“So we can tell one from the other. Otherwise, we couldn’t say where a place was, or differentiate between one food market and another.”

“Exactly.” She runs her fingers over a floorboard, and I hear a click. In the far corner by the fireplace, flagstones part to expose steps.

“What’s down there?” I ask.

“Answers. Come.”

We descend, and the flagstones rumble shut overhead. Ambient light washes over us—dim and red, casting bloody shadows.

We’re in a tunnel with rough, stone walls. The light extends ten paces before us; beyond is darkness. Pena strides toward this border, and I am obliged to accompany her. When we are within a pace of light’s end, more red comes on to reveal another span of corridor. When we are within this new radius, the light behind us goes out.

And so we walk.

“Why do citizens need names?” I ask. “We change masks every day, unlike shops and streets which stay the same. What if I discover that my physician is the same citizen as my murderer? Or a citizen in one mask is my lover and in another, my enemy? If I call that citizen by a single word, it’s like treating all their mask identities as the same person.”

“That’s the point,” she says. “It lets us be who we truly are, underneath our masks.”

I shake my head. “Without the masks, we’re not anything.”

“There was a time before the masks.”

“And we were empty, primitive creatures, without will or purpose, until the First Queen created the First Mask to wear and carved faces for the citizens and—”

“And She designated the Guild of Mask Makers and tasked them with their sacred duty so that everyone would be imbued with souls, blah blah blah. I know the lies.”

Her heresy is both disturbing and intriguing. “What do you believe, then?”

“That’s what I’m going to show you.”

“Why me?”

“There’s a group of us named. We seek out others who harbor the same doubts and resentments we do, and we liberate them.”

“I don’t want to be liberated.”

“Don’t you? Haven’t you wanted to be free of the daily selection routine? Or chafed against the mask, wishing the hour of unmasking came sooner? Don’t you hover in indecision some mornings, not because the choosing is so hard, but because none of them appeal? Don’t you wonder who you could be if you were left to decide for yourself?”

I am saved from having to answer by the appearance of something new when the next lights activate: a door.

7. Red Is for Revelation

“Where are we?”

“Beneath the palace at the Mask Makers guild.”

She passes her mask over the door. Like the hut’s, it opens.

I balk. “No. Absolutely not. It’s prohibited.”

She studies me. “I can make you, but I won’t. It’s your decision.”

I open my mouth to repeat myself.

“But first, hear me out.”

I exhale. “If I must. But it won’t change my mind.”

“You know I’ve been keeping by you as you’ve switched masks. I was also with you when you wore the saffron mask at the leather harvesters.”

The memory is still raw. “So?”

“Do you know who I was?”

“One of the skinners, I presume.”

“I was your neighbor in the adjoining cage.”

Despite everything, I’m dismayed. “Didn’t you know what they were going to do to you, to us?”

“I knew.”

“And still you let them, willingly even. Why, in the name of the First Queen?”

“Because, to be with you, I could either hurt you or be hurt, and I chose not to hurt you.”

“Am I someone to you? Have we been lovers or spouses or friends?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then why?”

“Because I know who I am, and my actions are a reflection of me. I don’t skin people alive.”

Her last sentence carries a conviction, a certainty that makes me envious.

“What would you do if you had to choose,” she says, “if your decisions extended beyond what mask to wear any given day? Would you willingly inflict such suffering upon another?”

“I would . . . I-I don’t know.”

“Do you want to know?”

And I find I do.

The door opens upon a storage room jammed with row upon row of shelves. Bolts of multihued fabric, rolls of ribbon and lace, and jars of washes, dyes, and lacquers are piled together without any semblance of order. More rolls of textiles spill out of cubby holes and closets lining the room.

“This is their overflow storage, where they keep their excess,” Pena says. “We raid it for our mask-making supplies. Named artisans can create near-perfect replicas of guild masks, but without the oversouls, of course.”

“With added features that can unlock doors.”

She displays her teeth again. Some part of me has learned to equate that facial configuration with positive emotion, even before I breathe the perfume of her approval.

“You noticed. Very good.”

“How do they do it?”

She leads me through the jumble. “It’s complicated to explain. All of our mask functions, including the scaffold you’re wearing, are based on the Mask Makers’ constructs. There’s bits and pieces appliquéd, sewn, glued, or imbedded in all masks which stimulate thoughts, trigger emotions, assign personality traits, and so on. Named artisans have taken apart and put back together these pieces, realigning and modifying them until they’ve gained an understanding of their workings. In the process, they’ve discovered that the components can do much more than imprint oversouls, like lock and unlock doors. And there’s still so much we haven’t figured out yet.”

The supply room exits upon a dark corridor that illuminates red at our approach. But unlike the one from the hut, the circle of light shows a cluster of turnings that fork in different directions.

“You make it sound like you named have been at this for a while,” I say.

“We have.” She sets off down one of the twisting tunnels. “Sometimes the gendarmes get wind of our activities, so we work exclusively in pairs—one mentor, one recruit. That way, the most named any of us knows is two, your mentor when you’re recruited, and your recruit once you’re ready to bring someone in. We disseminate information and requests through codes and drop-off points. It’s slow but safer.”

I’ve lost track of the bends and turns we’ve taken. “You must recruit pretty selectively, if each mentor can only take one.”

“Mentors can take another recruit if theirs is apprehended by the gendarmes.” The lighting casts deep shadows over the planes of her face, and for a moment, it seems that she’s wearing a crimson mask. She brushes her fingers over her eyes, and they come away wet.

“What happens when the gendarmes catch you?”

“They kill us.”

I shrug. “That’s all? So you lose the day. In the morning—”

“No. They kill us. It’s not like the petty murders citizens inflict upon each other. There’s no waking up from the death the gendarmes deliver.”

I stumble, shocked. “That’s—that’s monstrous. How is that possible? How can our laws permit it?”

“You said it yourself; without the masks, we’re nothing. When the gendarmes execute one of us, they reassign all of that named’s personas to the population at large. The oversouls continue, and there is no disruption among the citizenry. I think the gendarmes grieve more when they have to destroy a mask that has been ‘murdered’ than when they kill one of us.”

Pena rounds a corner, and there is a wall. It’s creamy smooth, as though stone workers spent hours painstakingly sanding it to perfect flatness.

“Did you make a wrong turn?” I ask.

“Afraid of getting lost?” Her tone is teasing. “Don’t worry. Even if I had made a wrong turn, my mask contains the labyrinth’s secrets. But I didn’t.”

I half expect her to wave the mask at the wall and a door to miraculously appear. She doesn’t. Instead, Pena lifts a hand to her mouth and tears at it with her teeth. Dark blood oozes, and she smears this droplet on the wall.

Soundlessly, the wall glides up and disappears into the ceiling. White, not red, light comes on, blinding after the dimness.

Pena tugs me forward while I’m still blinking. I squint, eyes tearing and blurry, at the small room we have entered. The walls are polished metal, and they encircle us, curving outward so it feels like we’re inside a cylinder. A closed one. While my eyes adjust, the door shuts itself.

In the room’s center is an ornate chair of silver and gold. Resting upon its seat is a mask.

I recognize it, for it is the stuff of legend. Carved from a single diamond with a million-million facets, each representing a mask-to-be, the First Queen’s Mask, the one She created with her own hands to bring enlightenment to us all.

8. Diamonds Are for Death

Pena touches my face, and the scaffold slips away. The anxiety of being barefaced is forgotten in the wonder of the First Mask.

“The truth, your answers, they’re all in the oversoul of that mask,” she says. “All you have to do is put it on.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then we go back, and tomorrow morning you choose a mask to wear, like every other morning, and you never see me again.”

“I might turn you over to the gendarmes.”

Her lips part and flash teeth. “What will you tell them? That a citizen kidnapped you and filled your head with truth? How will you find me? And how do you know the gendarmes won’t kill you simply for knowing this much?”

She’s right, of course. “But I don’t have to put on the First Mask?”

“What you do is up to you. Now and forever.”

I hesitate for a heartbeat before striding to the chair and seizing the First Mask. It’s so light. I’d expected it to be heavier. Holding it aloft, I realize the eyeholes are encased in nearly transparent lenses like my consort mask, except diamond instead of glass.

“You might want to sit before you put it on,” Pena says. “I didn’t and ended flat on my back.”

I perch on the gold and silver chair, and set the mask over my face. There are segmented strands of diamond to wrap around my head that fasten with glittering diamond locks. The lenses warp my vision, disorienting me. But only for a moment.

Crowing exultation.

The war is finished! My last rival and her progeny are dead, and I reign in exclusive sovereignty.

My children, I am so proud of you. This is the dawn of a new age, a glorious and splendid age.

My scientists have conquered our only remaining enemy: time. They have found the key to unlocking the shackles of age and injury, and conquered the last disease. I am no longer chained by the dictates of perpetual reproduction. The years of my empire will be like a magnificent river, rippling past eon after eon, powerful and endless.

I do worry, however, that my soldiers will decline. They are the simplest of my children and only understand rigid procedures and physical contests. Perhaps I should manufacture a new corps of soldiers, an elite one. They can vie with each other in mock battles for the honor of being counted among my gendarmes.

The river of years is murky and deep, and I cannot see where it will take us.

I am stymied at an unanticipated quarter: my consorts. The noblest of my children, nearly my equals—clever and curious, independent and imaginative—I should have known they would feel neglected and adrift when I ceased summoning them to mate. They are creatures of great passion, as I am, and now they squabble, forming factions and carrying out vendettas.

I have started opening my body to them again, but I will ask the scientists to develop a synthetic pheromone so they may copulate amongst themselves.

I am despair.

A citizen killed another today, beyond what my scientists were able to restore. I must accept the truth; we are an aggressive people, not destined for peace, and all I have tried to build is in ruins.

If only there was a way for my consorts to expend their passions harmlessly.

I must confer with my scientists.

At last! I have devised an end to the chaos which blights my citizenry.

My scientists have developed a means of imprinting memories and eliciting emotions that may be interchanged, swapped out, and added upon with seemingly infinite variety. My consorts may oppose each other and mate with promiscuity, all without garnering rivals or blood feuds.

I have set my scientists to generate these oversoul masks in copious quantity and in wondrous variety.

This must work.

All is well. The activities of my children are once more in accord with my desiring, and eternity’s river holds no more uncertainties.

There was a minor dilemma, but I have solved even that. It seems that I am not immune to the effect of the masks. I thought my royal will would safeguard my identity, but it is becoming a strain, sorting reality from fabrication.

I have had an oversoul commissioned. It will be a lasting record of all the tribulations I have confronted and my efforts to remedy them. This mask shall be sealed beneath my palace in a chamber secured by steel, and my blood shall be the only key that unlocks it.

I take off the mask of diamonds. Pena watches me, her lips parted.

I tumble out of the chair and fall to my knees. “I am your servant, First Queen.”

Pena’s eyes widen, and she laughs. “Oh, no, no.” She is at my side and hauls me up. “I’m not the First Queen.”

“But your blood opened the door.”

“Don’t you get it? We’re all of her blood, each of us descended from the First Queen. Some joke on her, huh?”

I stay silent.

“Come,” she says. “We need to get back before the hour of unmasking. If we’re seen on the streets after, the gendarmes will take us.”

I straggle after her, lost in my thoughts. I don’t try to keep track of the red-lit corridors and notice only when we are among the fabrics and dyes of the storage room.

“Hsst.” Pena gestures.

“What is it?”

Without warning, she shoves me, and I tumble into a closeted hole. Bolts of velvet and felt topple upon me. She flings an oversized bottle of jasmine oil after, engulfing me in cloying sweetness.

Then there is confusion. The red light extinguishes, and white beams flash in the darkness. They catch and glint off white metal—glittering eyes, gleaming brows—the silver masks of the gendarmes.

Hidden in my cubby, my scent as obscured as my body, they do not detect me. They converge on a single spot, Pena, huddled between shelves.

“By order of the queen, you are hereby accused and convicted of treason,” one gendarme says.

I cannot smell anything over the sickening jasmine, but I can see the terror on her face. She glances at me, and there is a beseeching in her eyes, and a question, but she looks away before I can understand it.

“The penalty for treason is death, citizen,” a gendarme, perhaps the same one, says. “Do you wish to repent? Identify your co-conspirators, and we will allow you to return to the way of the mask.”

Pena lifts her head. “Never.”

They don’t ask again. They activate their loops, and I’m reminded of the day of the saffron mask. I’m ashamed of the gladness I felt then.

They don’t skin her, but this is as gruesome, if swifter. A gendarme kneels over her as she is pinioned on her back by bands of blue. Bracing himself, he staves in her face with his fist. I want to look away. It is an obscene violation, a perverse defilement to damage a citizen there—to do any violence which might cause harm to a mask. But Pena isn’t wearing a mask, and I don’t look away.

He strikes again and again until there is nothing left of the front of her head but a wreckage of bone and pulped wetness.

9. The Last Mask

The gendarmes are as efficient in disposing of Pena’s body as they were in dispatching her. When they have gone, the red light comes on, and I dare to creep out. As I untangle myself from a length of burgundy velvet, my hand falls upon an unmistakable shape—Pena’s green and toffee mask. The sight of it, so soon after the atrocity of her execution, unhinges me. I start crying and I cannot stop. But it doesn’t matter, because her mask will hide my tears.

Somehow, I make it to Center at Corridor and the familiar confines of my quarters. Safe.

But I am not safe. I cannot forget the First Queen’s memories, which the gendarmes would surely kill me for having, and more, I cannot erase the beseeching question in Pena’s eyes.

I tear off her mask. It’s not the unmasking hour, but I don’t care. I’m weary of masks, even a blameless one without an oversoul. Pena’s death burdens me with shame and guilt—like being flayed again, but with the pain inside.

I am surrounded by masks. Each is a player in some fabricated theater—artist, victim, rake, entrepreneur, lover, spouse, friend. None of them is real, but I can put them on and escape these feelings.

But I won’t.

One after the other, I destroy my masks. The ones that shatter are the easiest. I hurl them at the floor and shards spill across the tile. The ones that burn, I commit to fire. But the metal ones I must work at, smashing one upon another until they are twisted out of all recognition.

I save the sable mask for last out of a sense of propriety. Although it is metal, it is oddly malleable, and it crumbles between my hands. The lenses fall out of the eyeholes and tumble among the broken bits of ceramic and glass on my floor.

I stand amidst the debris that was my life and don the only mask I spared, Pena’s green and toffee one.

My lover glances at me in her cerulean-with-voile mask and lets me in. She thinks I am her servant girl.

“Where did you go?” she demands. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you? And where is my suitor?”

Her quarters are much like mine, much like every citizen’s. There is a mask room, a kitchen, and a bedchamber. I brush past her and she follows, continuing to scold as we enter her kitchen. I find what I need in one of the drawers: a tenderizer mallet, heavy and solid. Even when I turn with it upraised, she doesn’t relent.

“Are you ignoring me, you slut?” she shouts. “How dare you!”

Only when I yank off her mask does she become afraid, and by then, it’s too late.

I smash the mallet into her face. She stumbles, and I ride her as she goes down, hammering the metal tool into her face over and over. Bones and flesh mash together into pulp, and still I persist. I must be thorough.

Pena did not have time to teach me the secrets of her league of named. But through her, I have learned enough. I have seen how the gendarmes kill. I do not have their loops or their strength, but I know how to murder so that my victims will not wake.

Pena also taught me to know who I am.

I am chaos in this ordered society, the flaw in a carefully wrought plan. I am turbulence in the queen’s eternal river.

EROS, PHILIA, AGAPE

Rachel Swirsky

Lucian packed his possessions before he left. He packed his antique silver serving spoons with the filigreed handles; the tea roses he’d nurtured in the garden window; his jade and garnet rings. He packed the hunk of gypsum-veined jasper that he’d found while strolling on the beach on the first night he’d come to Adriana, she leading him uncertainly across the wet sand, their bodies illuminated by the soft gold twinkling of the lights along the pier. That night, as they walked back to Adriana’s house, Lucian had cradled the speckled stone in his cupped palms, squinting so that the gypsum threads sparkled through his lashes.

Lucian had always loved beauty—beautiful scents, beautiful tastes, beautiful melodies. He especially loved beautiful objects because he could hold them in his hands and transform the abstraction of beauty into something tangible.

The objects belonged to them both, but Adriana waved her hand bitterly when Lucian began packing. “Take whatever you want,” she said, snapping her book shut. She waited by the door, watching Lucian with sad and angry eyes.

Their daughter, Rose, followed Lucian around the house. “Are you going to take that, Daddy? Do you want that?” Wordlessly, Lucian held her hand. He guided her up the stairs and across the uneven floorboards where she sometimes tripped. Rose stopped by the picture window in the master bedroom, staring past the palm fronds and swimming pools, out to the vivid cerulean swath of the ocean. Lucian relished the hot, tender feel of Rose’s hand. I love you, he would have whispered, but he’d surrendered the ability to speak.

He led her downstairs again to the front door. Rose’s lace-festooned pink satin dress crinkled as she leapt down the steps. Lucian had ordered her dozens of satin party dresses in pale, floral hues. Rose refused to wear anything else.

Rose looked between Lucian and Adriana. “Are you taking me, too?” she asked Lucian.

Adriana’s mouth tightened. She looked at Lucian, daring him to say something, to take responsibility for what he was doing to their daughter. Lucian remained silent.

Adriana’s chardonnay glowed the same shade of amber as Lucian’s eyes. She clutched the glass’s stem until she thought it might break. “No, honey,” she said with artificial lightness. “You’re staying with me.”

Rose reached for Lucian. “Horsey?”

Lucian knelt down and pressed his forehead against Rose’s. He hadn’t spoken a word in the three days since he’d delivered his letter of farewell to Adriana, announcing his intention to leave as soon as she had enough time to make arrangements to care for Rose in his absence. When Lucian approached with the letter, Adriana had been sitting at the dining table, sipping orange juice from a wine glass and reading a first edition copy of Cheever’s Falconer. Lucian felt a flash of guilt as she smiled up at him and accepted the missive. He knew that she’d been happier in the past few months than he’d ever seen her, possibly happier than she’d ever been. He knew the letter would shock and wound her. He knew she’d feel betrayed. Still, he delivered the letter anyway, and watched as comprehension ached through her body.

Rose had been told, gently, patiently, that Lucian was leaving. But she was four years old, and understood things only briefly and partially, and often according to her whims. She continued to believe her father’s silence was a game.

Rose’s hair brushed Lucian’s cheek. He kissed her brow. Adriana couldn’t hold her tongue any longer.

“What do you think you’re going to find out there? There’s no Shangri-La for rebel robots. You think you’re making a play for independence? Independence to do what, Lu?”

Grief and anger filled Adriana’s eyes with hot tears, as if she were a geyser filled with so much pressure that steam could not help but spring up. She examined Lucian’s sculpted face: his skin inlaid with tiny lines that an artist had rendered to suggest the experiences of a childhood which had never been lived, his eyes calibrated with a hint of asymmetry to mimic the imperfection of human growth. His expression showed nothing—no doubt, or bitterness, or even relief. He revealed nothing at all.

It was all too much. Adriana moved between Lucian and Rose, as if she could use her own body to protect her daughter from the pain of being abandoned. Her eyes stared achingly over the rim of her wine glass. “Just go,” she said.

He left.

* * *

Adriana bought Lucian the summer she turned thirty-five. Her father, long afflicted with an indecisive cancer that vacillated between aggression and remittance, had died suddenly in July. For years, the family had been squirreling away emotional reserves to cope with his prolonged illness. His death released a burst of excess.

While her sisters went through the motions of grief, Adriana thrummed with energy she didn’t know what to do with. She considered squandering her vigor on six weeks in Mazatlan, but as she discussed ocean-front rentals with her travel agent, she realized escape wasn’t what she craved. She liked the setting where her life took place: her house perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, her bedroom window that opened on a tangle of blackberry bushes where crows roosted every autumn and spring. She liked the two block stroll down to the beach where she could sit with a book and listen to the yapping lapdogs that the elderly women from the waterfront condominiums brought walking in the evenings.

Mazatlan was a twenty-something’s cure for restlessness. Adriana wasn’t twenty-five anymore, famished for the whole gourmet meal of existence. She needed something else now. Something new. Something more refined.

She explained this to her friends Ben and Lawrence when they invited her to their ranch house in Santa Barbara to relax for the weekend and try to forget about her father. They sat on Ben and Lawrence’s patio, on iron-worked deck chairs arrayed around a garden table topped with a mosaic of sea creatures made of semi-precious stones. A warm, breezy dusk lengthened the shadows of the orange trees. Lawrence poured sparkling rosé into three wine glasses and proposed a toast to Adriana’s father—not to his memory, but to his death.

“Good riddance to the bastard,” said Lawrence. “If he were still alive, I’d punch him in the schnoz.”

“I don’t even want to think about him,” said Adriana. “He’s dead. He’s gone.”

“So if not Mazatlan, what are you going to do?” asked Ben.

“I’m not sure,” said Adriana. “Some sort of change, some sort of milestone, that’s all I know.”

Lawrence sniffed the air. “Excuse me,” he said, gathering the empty wine glasses. “The kitchen needs its genius.”

When Lawrence was out of earshot, Ben leaned forward to whisper to Adriana.” He’s got us on a raw food diet for my cholesterol. Raw carrots. Raw zucchini. Raw almonds. No cooking at all.”

“Really,” said Adriana, glancing away. She was never sure how to respond to lovers’ quarrels. That kind of affection mixed with annoyance, that inescapable intimacy, was something she’d never understood.

Birds twittered in the orange trees. The fading sunlight highlighted copper strands in Ben’s hair as he leaned over the mosaic table, rapping his fingers against a carnelian-backed crab. Through the arched windows, Adriana could see Lawrence mincing carrots, celery and almonds into brown paste.

“You should get a redecorator,” said Ben. “Tile floors, Tuscan pottery, those red leather chairs that were in vogue last time we were in Milan. That’d make me feel like I’d been scrubbed clean and reborn.”

“No, no,” said Adriana, “I like where I live.”

“A no-holds-barred shopping spree. Drop twenty thousand. That’s what I call getting a weight off your shoulders.”

Adriana laughed. “How long do you think it would take my personal shopper to assemble a whole new me?”

“Sounds like a midlife crisis,” said Lawrence, returning with vegan hors d’oeuvres and three glasses of mineral water. “You’re better off forgetting it all with a hot Latin pool boy, if you ask me.”

Lawrence served Ben a small bowl filled with yellow mush. Ben shot Adriana an aggrieved glance.

Adriana felt suddenly out of synch. The whole evening felt like the set for a photo-shoot that would go in a decorating magazine, a two-page spread featuring Cozy Gardens, in which she and Ben and Lawrence were posing as an intimate dinner party for three. She felt reduced to two dimensions, air-brushed, and then digitally grafted onto the form of whoever it was who should have been there, someone warm and trusting who knew how to care about minutia like a friend’s husband putting him on a raw food diet, not because the issue was important, but because it mattered to him.

Lawrence dipped his finger in the mash and held it up to Ben’s lips. “It’s for your own good, you ungrateful so-and-so.”

Ben licked it away. “I eat it, don’t I?”

Lawrence leaned down to kiss his husband, a warm and not at all furtive kiss, not sexual but still passionate. Ben’s glance flashed coyly downward.

Adriana couldn’t remember the last time she’d loved someone enough to be embarrassed by them. Was this the flavor missing from her life? A lover’s fingertip sliding an unwanted morsel into her mouth?

She returned home that night on the bullet train. Her emerald cockatiel, Fuoco, greeted her with indignant squawks. In Adriana’s absence, the house puffed her scent into the air and sang to Fuoco with her voice, but the bird was never fooled.

Adriana’s father had given her the bird for her thirtieth birthday. He was a designer species spliced with Macaw DNA that colored his feathers rich green. He was expensive and inbred and neurotic, and he loved Adriana with frantic, obsessive jealousy.

“Hush,” Adriana admonished, allowing Fuoco to alight on her shoulder. She carried him upstairs to her bedroom and hand-fed him millet. Fuoco strutted across the pillows, his obsidian eyes proud and suspicious.

Adriana was surprised to find that her alienation had followed her home. She found herself prone to melancholy reveries, her gaze drifting toward the picture window, her fingers forgetting to stroke Fuoco’s back. The bird screeched to regain her attention.

In the morning, Adriana visited her accountant. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he slipped trust fund moneys from one account to another like a magician. What she planned would be expensive, but her wealth would regrow in fertile soil, enriching her on lab diamonds and wind power and genetically modified oranges.

The robotics company gave Adriana a private showing. The salesman ushered her into a room draped in black velvet. Hundreds of body parts hung on the walls, and reclined on display tables: strong hands, narrow jaws, biker’s thighs, voice boxes that played sound samples from gruff to dulcet, skin swatches spanning ebony to alabaster, penises of various sizes.

At first, Adriana felt horrified at the prospect of assembling a lover from fragments, but then it amused her. Wasn’t everyone assembled from fragments of DNA, grown molecule by molecule inside their mother’s womb?

She tapped her fingernails against a slick brochure. “Its brain will be malleable? I can tell it to be more amenable, or funnier, or to grow a spine?”

“That’s correct.” The salesman sported slick brown hair and shiny teeth and kept grinning in a way that suggested he thought that if he were charismatic enough Adriana would invite him home for a lay and a million dollar tip. “Humans lose brain plasticity as we age, which limits how much we can change. Our models have perpetually plastic brains. They can reroute their personalities at will by reshaping how they think on the neurological level.”

Adriana stepped past him, running her fingers along a tapestry woven of a thousand possible hair textures.

The salesman tapped an empty faceplate. “Their original brains are based on deep imaging scans melded from geniuses in multiple fields. Great musicians, renowned lovers, the best physicists and mathematicians.”

Adriana wished the salesman would be quiet. The more he talked, the more doubts clamored against her skull. “You’ve convinced me,” she interrupted. “I want one.”

The salesman looked taken aback by her abruptness. She could practically see him rifling through his internal script, trying to find the right page now that she had skipped several scenes. “What do you want him to look like?” he asked.

Adriana shrugged. “They’re all beautiful, right?”

“We’ll need specifications.”

“I don’t have specifications.”

The salesman frowned anxiously. He shifted his weight as if it could help him regain his metaphorical footing. Adriana took pity. She dug through her purse.

“There,” she said, placing a snapshot of her father on one of the display tables. “Make it look nothing like him.”

Given such loose parameters, the design team indulged the fanciful. Lucian arrived at Adriana’s door only a shade taller than she and equally slender, his limbs smooth and lean. Silver undertones glimmered in his blond hair. His skin was excruciatingly pale, white and translucent as alabaster, veined with pink. He smelled like warm soil and crushed herbs.

He offered Adriana a single white rose, its petals embossed with the company’s logo. She held it dubiously between her thumb and forefinger. “They think they know women, do they? They need to put down the bodice rippers.”

Lucian said nothing. Adriana took his hesitation for puzzlement, but perhaps she should have seen it as an early indication of his tendency toward silence.

* * *

“That’s that, then.” Adriana drained her chardonnay and crushed the empty glass beneath her heel as if she could finalize a divorce with the same gesture that sanctified a marriage.

Eyes wide, Rose pointed at the glass with one round finger. “Don’t break things.”

It suddenly struck Adriana how fast her daughter was aging. Here she was, this four-year-old, this sudden person. When had it happened? In the hospital, when Rose was newborn and wailing for the woman who had birthed her and abandoned her, Adriana had spent hours in the hallway outside the hospital nursery while she waited for the adoption to go through. She’d stared at Rose while she slept, ate, and cried, striving to memorize her nascent, changing face. Sometime between then and now, Rose had become this round-cheeked creature who took rules very seriously and often tried to conceal her emotions beneath a calm exterior, as if being raised by a robot had replaced her blood with circuits. Of course Adriana loved Rose, changed her clothes, brushed her teeth, carried her across the house on her hip—but Lucian had been the most central, nurturing figure. Adriana couldn’t fathom how she might fill his role. This wasn’t a vacation like the time Adriana had taken Rose to Italy for three days, just the two of them sitting in restaurants, Adriana feeding her daughter spoonfuls of gelato to see the joy that lit her face at each new flavor. Then, they’d known that Lucian would be waiting when they returned. Without him, their family was a house missing a structural support. Adriana could feel the walls bowing in.

The fragments of Adriana’s chardonnay glass sparkled sharply. Adriana led Rose away from the mess.

“Never mind,” she said, “The house will clean up.”

Her head felt simultaneously light and achy as if it couldn’t decide between drunkenness and hangover. She tried to remember the parenting books she’d read before adopting Rose. What had they said about crying in front of your child? She clutched Rose close, inhaling the scent of children’s shampoo mixed with the acrid odor of wine.

“Let’s go for a drive,” said Adriana. “Okay? Let’s get out for a while.”

“I want Daddy to take me to the beach.”

“We’ll go out to the country and look at the farms. Cows and sheep, okay?”

Rose said nothing.

“Moo?” Adriana clarified. “Baa?”

“I know,” said Rose. “I’m not a baby.”

“So, then?”

Rose said nothing. Adriana wondered whether she could tell that her mother was a little mad with grief.

Just make a decision, Adriana counseled herself. She slipped her fingers around Rose’s hand. “We’ll go for a drive.”

Adriana instructed the house to regulate itself in their absence, and then led Rose to the little black car that she and Lucian had bought together after adopting Rose. She fastened Rose’s safety buckle and programmed the car to take them inland.

As the car engine initialized, Adriana felt a glimmer of fear. What if this machine betrayed them, too? But its uninspired intelligence only switched on the left turn signal and started down the boulevard.

* * *

Lucian stood at the base of the driveway and stared up at the house. Its stark orange and brown walls blazed against a cloudless sky. Rocks and desert plants tumbled down the meticulously landscaped yard, imitating natural scrub.

A rabbit ran across the road, followed by the whir of Adriana’s car. Lucian watched them pass. They couldn’t see him through the cypresses, but Lucian could make out Rose’s face pressed against the window. Beside her, Adriana slumped in her seat, one hand pressed over her eyes.

Lucian went in the opposite direction. He dragged the rolling cart packed with his belongings to the cliff that led down to the beach. He lifted the cart over his head and started down, his feet disturbing cascades of sandstone chunks.

A pair of adolescent boys looked up from playing in the waves. “Whoa,” shouted one of them. “Are you carrying that whole thing? Are you a weight-lifter?”

Lucian remained silent. When he reached the sand, the kids muttered disappointments to each other and turned away from shore. “. . . Just a robot . . .” drifted back to Lucian on the breeze.

Lucian pulled his cart to the border where wet sand met dry. Oncoming waves lapped over his feet. He opened the cart and removed a tea-scented apricot rose growing in a pot painted with blue leaves.

He remembered acquiring the seeds for his first potted rose. One evening, long ago, he’d asked Adriana if he could grow things. He’d asked in passing, the question left to linger while they cleaned up after dinner, dish soap on their hands, Fuoco pecking after scraps. The next morning, Adriana escorted Lucian to the hothouse near the botanical gardens. “Buy whatever you want,” she told him. Lucian was awed by the profusion of color and scent, all that beauty in one place. He wanted to capture the wonder of that place and own it for himself.

Lucian drew back his arm and threw the pot into the sea. It broke across the water, petals scattering the surface.

He threw in the pink roses, and the white roses, and the red roses, and the mauve roses. He threw in the filigreed-handled spoons. He threw in the chunk of gypsum-veined jasper.

He threw in everything beautiful that he’d ever collected. He threw in a chased silver hand mirror, and an embroidered silk jacket, and a hand-painted egg. He threw in one of Fuoco’s soft, emerald feathers. He threw in a memory crystal that showed Rose as an infant, curled and sleeping.

He loved those things, and yet they were things. He had owned them. Now they were gone. He had recently come to realize that ownership was a relationship. What did it mean to own a thing? To shape it and contain it? He could not possess or be possessed until he knew.

He watched the sea awhile, the remnants of his possessions lost in the tumbling waves. As the sun tilted past noon, he turned away and climbed back up the cliff. Unencumbered by ownership, he followed the boulevard away from Adriana’s house.

* * *

Lucian remembered meeting Adriana the way that he imagined that humans remembered childhood. Oh, his memories had been as sharply focused then as now—but it was still like childhood, he reasoned, for he’d been a different person then.

He remembered his first sight of Adriana as a burst of images. Wavy strawberry blonde hair cut straight across tanned shoulders. Dark brown eyes that his artistic mind labeled “sienna.” Thick, aristocratic brows and strong cheekbones, free of makeup. Lucian’s inner aesthete termed her blunt, angular face “striking” rather than “beautiful.” His inner psychoanalyst reasoned that she was probably “strong-willed” as well, from the way she stood in the doorway, her arms crossed, her eyebrows lifted as if inquiring how he planned to justify his existence.

Eventually, she moved away, allowing Lucian to step inside. He crossed the threshold into a blur of frantic screeching and flapping.

New. Everything was new. So new that Lucian could barely assemble feathers and beak and wings into the concept of “bird” before his reflexes jumped him away from the onslaught. Hissing and screeching, the animal retreated to a perch atop a bookshelf.

Adriana’s hand weighed on Lucian’s shoulder. Her voice was edged with the cynicism Lucian would later learn was her way of hiding how desperately she feared failure. “Ornithophobia? How ridiculous.”

Lucian’s first disjointed days were dominated by the bird, who he learned was named Fuoco. The bird followed him around the house. When he remained in place for a moment, the bird settled on some nearby high spot—the hat rack in the entryway, or the hand-crafted globe in the parlor, or the rafters above the master bed—to spy on him. He glared at Lucian in the manner of birds, first peering through one eye and then turning his head to peer through the other, apparently finding both views equally loathsome.

When Adriana took Lucian into her bed, Fuoco swooped at Lucian’s head. Adriana pushed Lucian out of the way. “Damn it, Fuoco,” she muttered, but she offered the bird a perch on her shoulder.

Fuoco crowed with pleasure as she led him downstairs. His feathers fluffed with victory as he hopped obediently into his cage, expecting her to reward him with treats and conversation. Instead, Adriana closed the gilded door and returned upstairs. All night, as Lucian lay with Adriana, the bird chattered madly. He plucked at his feathers until his tattered plumage carpeted the cage floor.

Lucian accompanied Adriana when she brought Fuoco to the vet the next day. The veterinarian diagnosed jealousy. “It’s not uncommon in birds,” he said. He suggested they give Fuoco a rigid routine that would, over time, help the bird realize he was Adriana’s companion, not her mate.

Adriana and Lucian rearranged their lives so that Fuoco could have regular feeding times, scheduled exercise, socialization with both Lucian and Adriana, and time with his mistress alone. Adriana gave him a treat each night when she locked him in his cage, staying to stroke his feathers for a few minutes before she headed upstairs.

Fuoco’s heart broke. He became a different bird. His strut lacked confidence, and his feathers grew ever more tattered. When they let him out of his cage, he wandered after Adriana with pleading, wistful eyes, and ignored Lucian entirely.

* * *

Lucian had been dis-integrated then: musician brain, mathematician brain, artist brain, economist brain, and more, all functioning separately, each personality rising to dominance to provide information and then sliding away, creating staccato bursts of consciousness.

As Adriana made clear which responses she liked, Lucian’s consciousness began integrating into the personality she desired. He found himself noticing connections between what had previously been separate experiences. Before, when he’d seen the ocean, his scientist brain had calculated how far he was from the shore, and how long it would be until high tide. His poet brain had recited Strindberg’s “We Waves.” Wet flames are we: / Burning, extinguishing; / Cleansing, replenishing. Yet it wasn’t until he integrated that the wonder of the science, and the mystery of the poetry, and the beauty of the view all made sense to him at once as part of this strange, inspiring thing: the sea.

He learned to anticipate Adriana. He knew when she was pleased and when she was ailing, and he knew why. He could predict the cynical half-smile she’d give when he made an error he hadn’t yet realized was an error: serving her cold coffee in an orange juice glass, orange juice in a shot glass, wine in a mug. When integration gave him knowledge of patterns, he suddenly understood why these things were errors. At the same time, he realized that he liked what happened when he made those kinds of errors, the bright bursts of humor they elicited from the often sober Adriana. So he persisted in error, serving her milk in crystal decanters, and grapefruit slices in egg cups.

He enjoyed the many varieties of her laughter. Sometimes it was light and surprised, as when he offered her a cupcake tin filled with tortellini. He also loved her rich, dark laughter that anticipated irony. Sometimes, her laughter held a bitter undercurrent, and on those occasions, he understood that she was laughing more at herself than at anyone else. Sometimes when that happened, he would go to hold her, seeking to ease her pain, and sometimes she would spontaneously start crying in gulping, gasping sobs.

She often watched him while he worked, her head cocked and her brows drawn as if she were seeing him for the first time. “What can I do to make you happy?” she’d ask.

If he gave an answer, she would lavishly fulfill his desires. She took him traveling to the best greenhouses in the state, and bought a library full of gardening books. Lucian knew she would have given him more. He didn’t want it. He wanted to reassure her that he appreciated her extravagance, but didn’t require it, that he was satisfied with simple, loving give-and-take. Sometimes, he told her in the simplest words he knew: “I love you, too.” But he knew that she never quite believed him. She worried that he was lying, or that his programming had erased his free will. It was easier for her to believe those things than to accept that someone could love her.

But he did love her. Lucian loved Adriana as his mathematician brain loved the consistency of arithmetic, as his artist brain loved color, as his philosopher brain loved piety. He loved her as Fuoco loved her, the bird walking sadly along the arm of Adriana’s chair, trilling and flapping his ragged wings as he eyed her with his inky gaze, trying to catch her attention.

* * *

Adriana hadn’t expected to fall in love. She’d expected a charming conversationalist with the emotional range of a literary butler and the self-awareness of a golden retriever. Early on, she’d felt her prejudices confirmed. She noted Lucian’s lack of critical thinking and his inability to maneuver unexpected situations. She found him most interesting when he didn’t know she was watching. For instance, on his free afternoons: was his program trying to anticipate what would please her? Or did the thing really enjoy sitting by the window, leafing through the pages of one of her rare books, with nothing but the sound of the ocean to lull him?

Once, as Adriana watched from the kitchen doorway while Lucian made their breakfast, the robot slipped while he was dicing onions. The knife cut deep into his finger. Adriana stumbled forward to help. As Lucian turned to face her, Adriana imagined that she saw something like shock on his face. For a moment, she wondered whether he had a programmed sense of privacy she could violate, but then he raised his hand to her in greeting, and she watched as the tiny bots that maintained his system healed his inhuman flesh within seconds.

At that moment, Adriana remembered that Lucian was unlike her. She urged herself not to forget it, and strove not to, even after his consciousness integrated. He was a person, yes, a varied and fascinating one with as many depths and facets as any other person she knew. But he was also alien. He was a creature for whom a slip of a chef’s knife was a minute error, simply repaired. In some ways, she was more similar to Fuoco.

As a child, Adriana had owned a book that told the fable of an emperor who owned a bird which he fed rich foods from his table, and entertained with luxuries from his court. But a pet bird needed different things than an emperor. He wanted seed and millet, not grand feasts. He enjoyed mirrors and little brass bells, not lacquer boxes and poetry scrolls. Gorged on human banquets and revelries, the little bird sickened and died.

Adriana vowed not to make the same mistake with Lucian, but she had no idea how hard it would be to salve the needs of something so unlike herself.

* * *

Adriana ordered the car to pull over at a farm that advertised children could “Pet Lambs and Calves” for a fee. A ginger-haired teenager stood at a strawberry stand in front of the fence, slouching as he flipped through a dog-eared magazine.

Adriana held Rose’s hand as they approached. She tried to read her daughter’s emotions in the feel of her tiny fingers. The little girl’s expression revealed nothing; Rose had gone silent and flat-faced as if she were imitating Lucian. He would have known what she was feeling.

Adriana examined the strawberries. The crates contained none of the different shapes one could buy at the store, only the natural, seed-filled variety. “Do these contain pesticides?” Adriana asked.

“No, ma’am,” said the teenager. “We grow organic.”

“All right then. I’ll take a box.” Adriana looked down at her daughter. “Do you want some strawberries, sweetheart?” she asked in a sugared tone.

“You said I could pet the lambs,” said Rose.

“Right. Of course, honey.” Adriana glanced at the distracted teenager. “Can she?”

The teenager slumped, visibly disappointed, and tossed his magazine on a pile of canvas sacks. “I can take her to the barn.”

“Fine. Okay.”

Adriana guided Rose toward the teenager. Rose looked up at him, expression still inscrutable.

The boy didn’t take Rose’s hand. He ducked his head, obviously embarrassed. “My aunt likes me to ask for the money upfront.”

“Of course.” Adriana fumbled for her wallet. She’d let Lucian do things for her for so long. How many basic living skills had she forgotten? She held out some bills. The teenager licked his index finger and meticulously counted out what she owed.

The teen took Rose’s hand. He lingered a moment, watching Adriana. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

Adriana was so tired. She forced a smile. “Oh, that’s okay. I’ve seen sheep and cows. Okay, Rose? Can you have fun for a little bit without me?”

Rose nodded soberly. She turned toward the teenager without hesitation, and followed him toward the barn. The boy seemed to be good with children. He walked slowly so that Rose could keep up with his long-legged strides.

Adriana returned to the car, and leaned against the hot, sun-warmed door. Her head throbbed. She thought she might cry or collapse. Getting out had seemed like a good idea : the house was full of memories of Lucian. He seemed to sit in every chair, linger in every doorway. But now she wished she’d stayed in her haunted but familiar home, instead of leaving with this child she seemed to barely know.

A sharp, long wail carried on the wind. Adrenaline cut through Adriana’s melancholia. She sprinted toward the barn. She saw Rose running toward her, the teenager close behind, dust swirling around both of them. Blood dripped down Rose’s arm.

Adriana threw her arms around her daughter. Arms, legs, breath, heartbeat: Rose was okay. Adrianna dabbed at Rose’s injury; there was a lot of blood, but the wound was shallow. “Oh, honey,” she said, clutching Rose as tightly as she dared.

The teenager halted beside them, his hair mussed by the wind.

“What happened?” Adriana demanded.

The teenager stammered. “Fortuna kicked her. That’s one of the goats. I’m so sorry. Fortuna’s never done anything like that before. She’s a nice goat. It’s Ballantine who usually does the kicking. He got me a few times when I was little. I came through every time. Honest, she’ll be okay. You’re not going to sue, are you?”

Rose struggled out of Adriana’s grasp and began wailing again. “It’s okay, Rose, it’s okay,” murmured Adriana. She felt a strange disconnect in her head as she spoke. Things were not okay. Things might never be okay again.

“I’m leaking,” cried Rose, holding out her bloodstained fingers. “See, mama? I’m leaking! I need healer bots.”

Adriana looked up at the teenager. “Do you have bandages? A first aid kit?”

The boy frowned. “In the house, I think . . .”

“Get the bots, mama! Make me stop leaking!”

The teen stared at Adriana, the concern in his eyes increasing. Adriana blinked, slowly. The moment slowed. She realized what her daughter had said. She forced her voice to remain calm. “What do you want, Rose?”

“She said it before,” said the teen. “I thought it was a game.”

Adriana leveled her gaze with Rose’s. The child’s eyes were strange and brown, uncharted waters. “Is this a game?”

“Daddy left,” said Rose.

Adriana felt woozy. “Yes, and then I brought you here so we could see lambs and calves. Did you see any nice, fuzzy lambs?”

“Daddy left.”

She shouldn’t have drunk the wine. She should have stayed clear-headed. “We’ll get you bandaged up and then you can go see the lambs again. Do you want to see the lambs again? Would it help if Mommy came, too?”

Rose clenched her fists. Her face grew dark. “My arm hurts!” She threw herself to the ground. “I want healer bots!”

* * *

Adriana knew precisely when she’d fallen in love with Lucian. It was three months after she’d bought him: after his consciousness had integrated, but before Adriana fully understood how integration had changed him.

It began when Adriana’s sisters called from Boston to inform her that they’d arranged for a family pilgrimage to Italy. In accordance with their father’s will, they would commemorate him by lighting candles in the cathedrals of every winding hillside city.

“Oh, I can’t. I’m too busy,” Adriana answered airily, as if she were a debutante without a care, as if she shared her sisters’ ability to overcome her fear of their father.

Her phone began ringing ceaselessly. Nanette called before she rushed off to a tennis match. “How can you be so busy? You don’t have a job. You don’t have a husband. Or is there a man in your life we don’t know about?” And once Nanette was deferred with mumbled excuses, it was Eleanor calling from a spa. “Is something wrong, Adriana? We’re all worried. How can you miss a chance to say goodbye to Papa?”

“I said goodbye at the funeral,” said Adriana.

“Then you can’t have properly processed your grief,” said Jessica, calling from her office between appointments. She was a psychoanalyst in the Freudian mode. “Your aversion rings of denial. You need to process your Oedipal feelings.”

Adriana slammed down the phone. Later, to apologize for hanging up, she sent all her sisters chocolates, and then booked a flight. In a fit of pique, she booked a seat for Lucian, too. Well, he was a companion, wasn’t he? What else was he for?

Adriana’s sisters were scandalized, of course. As they rode through Rome, Jessica, Nanette, and Eleanor gossiped behind their discreetly raised hands. Adriana with a robot? Well, she’d need to be, wouldn’t she? There was no getting around the fact that she was damaged. Any girl who would make up those stories about their father would have to be.

Adriana ignored them as best she could while they whirled through Tuscany in a procession of rented cars. They paused in cities to gawk at Gothic cathedrals and mummified remnants, always moving on within the day. During their father’s long sickness, Adriana’s sisters had perfected the art of cheerful anecdote. They used it to great effect as they lit candles in his memory. Tears welling in their eyes, they related banal, nostalgic memories. How their father danced at charity balls. How he lectured men on the board who looked down on him for being new money. How he never once apologized for anything in his life.

It had never been clear to Adriana whether her father had treated her sisters the way he treated her, or whether she had been the only one to whom he came at night, his breathing heavy and staccato. It seemed impossible that they could lie so seamlessly, never showing fear or doubt. But if they were telling the truth, that meant Adriana was the only one, and how could she believe that either?

One night, while Lucian and Adriana were alone in their room in a hotel in Assisi that had been a convent during the Middle Ages, Adriana broke down. It was all too much, being in this foreign place, talking endlessly about her father. She’d fled New England to get away from them, fled to her beautiful modern glass-and-wood house by the Pacific Ocean that was like a fresh breath drawn on an autumn morning.

Lucian held her, exerting the perfect warmth and pressure against her body to comfort her. It was what she’d have expected from a robot. She knew that he calculated the pace of his breath, the temperature of his skin, the angle of his arm as it lay across her.

What surprised Adriana, what humbled her, was how eloquently Lucian spoke of his experiences. He told her what it had been like to assemble himself from fragments, to take what he’d once been and become something new. It was something Adriana had tried to do herself when she fled her family.

Lucian held his head down as he spoke. His gaze never met hers. He spoke as if this process of communicating the intimate parts of the self were a new kind of dance, and he was tenuously trying the steps. Through the fog of her grief, Adriana realized that this was a new, struggling consciousness coming to clarity. How could she do anything but love him?

When they returned from Italy, Adriana approached the fledgling movement for granting rights to artificial intelligences. They were underfunded and poorly organized. Adriana rented them offices in San Francisco, and hired a small but competent staff.

Adriana became the movement’s face. She’d been on camera frequently as a child: whenever her father was in the news for some board room scandal or other, her father’s publicists had lined up Adriana and her sisters beside the family limousine, chaste in their private school uniforms, ready to provide Lancaster Nuclear with a friendly, feminine face.

She and Lucian were a brief media curiosity: Heiress In Love With Robot. “Lucian is as self-aware as you or I,” Adriana told reporters, all-American in pearls and jeans. “He thinks. He learns. He can hybridize roses as well as any human gardener. Why should he be denied his rights?”

Early on, it was clear that political progress would be frustratingly slow. Adriana quickly expended her patience. She set up a fund for the organization, made sure it would run without her assistance, and then turned her attention toward alternate methods for attaining her goals. She hired a team of lawyers to draw up a contract that would grant Lucian community property rights to her estate and accounts. He would be her equal in practicality, if not legality.

Next, Adriana approached Lucian’s manufacturer, and commissioned them to invent a procedure that would allow Lucian to have conscious control of his brain plasticity. At their wedding, Adriana gave him the chemical commands at the same time as she gave him his ring. “You are your own person now. You always have been, of course, but now you have full agency, too. You are yourself,” she announced, in front of their gathered friends. Her sisters would no doubt have been scandalized, but they had not been invited.

On their honeymoon, Adriana and Lucian toured hospitals, running the genetic profiles of abandoned infants until they found a healthy girl with a mitochondrial lineage that matched Adriana’s. The infant was tiny and pink and curled in on herself, ready to unfold, like one of Lucian’s roses.

When they brought Rose home, Adriana felt a surge in her stomach that she’d never felt before. It was a kind of happiness she’d never experienced, one that felt round and whole without any jagged edges. It was like the sun had risen in her belly and was dwelling there, filling her with boundless light.

* * *

There was a moment, when Rose was still new enough to be wrapped in the hand-made baby blanket that Ben and Lawrence had sent from France, in which Adriana looked up at Lucian and realized how enraptured he was with their baby, how much adoration underpinned his willingness to bend over her cradle for hours and mirror her expressions, frown for frown, astonishment for astonishment. In that moment, Adriana thought that this must be the true measure of equality, not money or laws, but this unfolding desire to create the future together by raising a new sentience. She thought she understood then why unhappy parents stayed together for the sake of their children, why families with sons and daughters felt so different from those that remained childless. Families with children were making something new from themselves. Doubly so when the endeavor was undertaken by a human and a creature who was already, himself, something new. What could they make together?

In that same moment, Lucian was watching the wide-eyed, innocent wonder with which his daughter beheld him. She showed the same pleasure when he entered the room as she did when Adriana entered. If anything, the light in her eyes was brighter when he approached. There was something about the way Rose loved him that he didn’t yet understand. Earlier that morning, he had plucked a bloom from his apricot tea rose and whispered to its petals that they were beautiful. They were his, and he loved them. Every day he held Rose, and understood that she was beautiful, and that he loved her. But she was not his. She was her own. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen a love like that, a love that did not want to hold its object in its hands and keep and contain it.

* * *

“You aren’t a robot!”

Adriana’s voice was rough from shouting all the way home. Bad enough to lose Lucian, but the child was out of control.

“I want healer bots! I’m a robot I’m a robot I’m a robot I’m a robot!”

The car stopped. Adriana got out. She waited for Rose to follow, and when she didn’t, Adriana scooped her up and carried her up the driveway. Rose kicked and screamed. She sank her teeth into Adriana’s arm. Adriana halted, surprised by the sudden pain. She breathed deeply, and then continued up the driveway. Rose’s screams slid upward in register and rage.

Adriana set Rose down by the door long enough to key in the entry code and let the security system take a DNA sample from her hair. Rose hurled herself onto the porch, yanking fronds by the fistful off the potted ferns. Adriana leaned down to scrape her up and got kicked in the chest.

“God da . . . for heaven’s sake!” Adriana grabbed Rose’s ankles with one hand and her wrists with the other. She pushed her weight against the unlocked door until it swung open. She carried Rose into the house, and slammed the door closed with her back. “Lock!” she yelled to the house.

When she heard the reassuring click, she set Rose down on the couch, and jumped away from the still-flailing limbs. Rose fled up the stairs, her bedroom door crashing shut behind her.

Adriana dug in her pocket for the bandages that the people at the farm had given her before she headed home, which she’d been unable to apply to a moving target in the car. Now was the time. She followed Rose up the stairs, her breath surprisingly heavy. She felt as though she’d been running a very long time. She paused outside Rose’s room. She didn’t know what she’d do when she got inside. Lucian had always dealt with the child when she got overexcited. Too often, Adriana felt helpless, and became distant.

“Rose?” she called. “Rose? Are you okay?”

There was no response.

Adriana put her hand on the doorknob, and breathed deeply before turning.

She was surprised to find Rose sitting demurely in the center of her bed, her rumpled skirts spread about her as if she were a child at a picnic in an Impressionist painting. Dirt and tears trailed down the pink satin. The edges of her wound had already begun to bruise.

“I’m a robot,” she said to Adriana, tone resentful.

Adriana made a decision. The most important thing was to bandage Rose’s wound. Afterward, she could deal with whatever came next.

“Okay,” said Adriana. “You’re a robot.”

Rose lifted her chin warily. “Good.”

Adriana sat on the edge of Rose’s bed. “You know what robots do? They change themselves to be whatever humans ask them to be.”

“Dad doesn’t,” said Rose.

“That’s true,” said Adriana. “But that didn’t happen until your father grew up.”

Rose swung her legs against the side of the bed. Her expression remained dubious, but she no longer looked so resolute.

Adriana lifted the packet of bandages. “May I?”

Rose hesitated. Adriana resisted the urge to put her head in her hands. She had to get the bandages on, that was the important thing, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was going to regret this later.

“Right now, what this human wants is for you to let her bandage your wound instead of giving you healer bots. Will you be a good robot? Will you let me?”

Rose remained silent, but she moved a little closer to her mother. When Adriana began bandaging her arm, she didn’t scream.

* * *

Lucian waited for a bus to take him to the desert. He had no money. He’d forgotten about that. The driver berated him and wouldn’t let him on.

Lucian walked. He could walk faster than a human, but not much faster. His edge was endurance. The road took him inland away from the sea. The last of the expensive houses stood near a lighthouse, lamps shining in all its windows. Beyond, condominiums pressed against each other, dense and alike. They gave way to compact, well-maintained homes, with neat green aprons maintained by automated sprinklers that sprayed arcs of precious water into the air.

The landscape changed. Sea breeze stilled to buzzing heat. Dirty, peeling houses squatted side by side, separated by chain link fences. Iron bars guarded the windows, and broken cars decayed in the driveways. Parched lawns stretched from walls to curb like scrubland. No one was out in the punishing sun.

The road divided. Lucian followed the fork that went through the dilapidated town center. Traffic jerked along in fits and starts. Lucian walked in the gutter. Stray plastic bags blew beside him, working their way between dark storefronts. Parking meters blinked at the passing cars, hungry for more coins. Pedestrians ambled past, avoiding eye contact, mumbled conversations lost beneath honking horns.

On the other side of town, the road winnowed down to two lonely lanes. Dry golden grass stretched over rolling hills, dotted by the dark shapes of cattle. A battered convertible, roof down, blared its horn at Lucian as it passed. Lucian walked where the asphalt met the prickly weeds. Paper and cigarette butts littered the golden stalks like white flowers.

An old truck pulled over, the manually driven variety still used by companies too small to afford the insurance for the automatic kind. The man in the driver’s seat was trim, with a pale blond mustache and a deerstalker cap pulled over his ears. He wore a string of fishing lures like a necklace. “Not much comes this way anymore,” he said. “I used to pick up hitchhikers half the time I took this route. You’re the first I’ve seen in a while.”

Sun rendered the truck in bright silhouette. Lucian held his hand over his eyes to shade them.

“Where are you headed?” asked the driver.

Lucian pointed down the road.

“Sure, but where after that?”

Lucian dropped his arm to his side. The sun inched higher.

The driver frowned. “Can you write it down? I think I’ve got some paper in here.” He grabbed a pen and a receipt out of his front pocket, and thrust them out the window.

Lucian took them. He wasn’t sure, at first, if he could still write. His brain was slowly reshaping itself, and eventually all his linguistic skills would disappear, and even his thoughts would no longer be shaped by words. The pen fell limp in his hand, and then his fingers remembered what to do. “Desert,” he wrote.

“It’s blazing hot,” said the driver. “A lot hotter than here. Why do you want to go there?”

“To be born,” wrote Lucian.

The driver slid Lucian a sideways gaze, but he nodded at the same time, almost imperceptibly. “Sometimes people have to do things. I get that. I remember when. . . .” The look in his eyes became distant. He moved back in his seat. “Get on in.”

Lucian walked around the cab and got inside. He remembered to sit and to close the door, but the rest of the ritual escaped him. He stared at the driver until the pale man shook his head and leaned over Lucian to drag the seatbelt over his chest.

“Are you under a vow of silence?” asked the driver.

Lucian stared ahead.

“Blazing hot in the desert,” muttered the driver. He pulled back onto the road, and drove toward the sun.

* * *

During his years with Adriana, Lucian tried not to think about the cockatiel Fuoco. The bird had never become accustomed to Lucian. He grew ever more angry and bitter. He plucked out his feathers so often that he became bald in patches. Sometimes he pecked deeply enough to bleed.

From time to time, Adriana scooped him up and stroked his head and nuzzled her cheek against the heavy feathers that remained on the part of his back he couldn’t reach. “My poor little crazy bird,” she’d say, sadly, as he ran his beak through her hair.

Fuoco hated Lucian so much that for a while they wondered whether he would be happier in another place. Adriana tried giving him to Ben and Lawrence, but he only pined for the loss of his mistress, and refused to eat until she flew out to retrieve him.

When they returned home, they hung Fuoco’s cage in the nursery. Being near the baby seemed to calm them both. Rose was a fussy infant who disliked solitude. She seemed happier when there was a warm presence about, even if it was a bird. Fuoco kept her from crying during the rare times when Adriana called Lucian from Rose’s side. Lucian spent the rest of his time in the nursery, watching Rose day and night with sleepless vigilance.

The most striking times of Lucian’s life were holding Rose while she cried. He wrapped her in cream-colored blankets the same shade as her skin, and rocked her as he walked the perimeter of the downstairs rooms, looking out at the diffuse golden ambience that the streetlights cast across the blackberry bushes and neighbors’ patios. Sometimes, he took her outside, and walked with her along the road by the cliffs. He never carried her down to the beach. Lucian had perfect balance and night vision, but none of that mattered when he could so easily imagine the terror of a lost footing—Rose slipping from his grasp and plummeting downward. Instead, they stood a safe distance from the edge, watching from above as the black waves threw themselves against the rocks, the night air scented with cold and salt.

Lucian loved Adriana, but he loved Rose more. He loved her clumsy fists and her yearnings toward consciousness, the slow accrual of her stumbling syllables. She was building her consciousness piece by piece as he had, learning how the world worked and what her place was in it. He silently narrated her stages of development. Can you tell that your body has boundaries? Do you know your skin from mine? and Yes! You can make things happen! Cause and effect. Keep crying and we’ll come. Best of all, there was the moment when she locked her eyes on his, and he could barely breathe for the realization that, Oh, Rose. You know there’s someone else thinking behind these eyes. You know who I am.

Lucian wanted Rose to have all the beauty he could give her. Silk dresses and lace, the best roses from his pots, the clearest panoramic views of the sea. Objects delighted Rose. As an infant she watched them avidly, and then later clapped and laughed, until finally she could exclaim, “Thank you!” Her eyes shone.

It was Fuoco who broke Lucian’s heart. It was late at night when Adriana went into Rose’s room to check on her while she slept. Somehow, sometime, the birdcage had been left open. Fuoco sat on the rim of the open door, peering darkly outward.

Adriana had been alone with Rose and Fuoco before. But something about this occasion struck like lightning in Fuoco’s tiny, mad brain. Perhaps it was the darkness of the room, with only the nightlight’s pale blue glow cast on Adriana’s skin, that confused the bird. Perhaps Rose had finally grown large enough that Fuoco had begun to perceive her as a possible rival rather than an ignorable baby-thing. Perhaps the last vestiges of his sanity had simply shredded. For whatever reason, as Adriana bent over the bed to touch her daughter’s face, Fuoco burst wildly from his cage.

With the same jealous anger he’d shown toward Lucian, Fuoco dove at Rose’s face. His claws raked against her forehead. Rose screamed. Adriana recoiled. She grabbed Rose in one arm, and flailed at the bird with the other. Rose struggled to escape her mother’s grip so she could run away. Adriana instinctively responded by trying to protect her with an even tighter grasp.

Lucian heard the commotion from where he was standing in the living room, programming the house’s cleaning regimen for the next week. He left the house panel open and ran through the kitchen on the way to the bedroom, picking up a frying pan as he passed through. He swung the pan at Fuoco as he entered the room, herding the bird away from Adriana, and into a corner. His fist tightened on the handle. He thought he’d have to kill his old rival.

Instead, the vitality seemed to drain from Fuoco. The bird’s wings drooped. He dropped to the floor with half-hearted, irregular wing beats. His eyes had gone flat and dull.

Fuoco didn’t struggle as Lucian picked him up and returned him to his cage. Adriana and Lucian stared at each other, unsure what to say. Rose slipped away from her mother and wrapped her arms around Lucian’s knees. She was crying.

“Poor Fuoco,” said Adriana, quietly.

They brought Fuoco to the vet to be put down. Adriana stood over him as the vet inserted the needle. “My poor crazy bird,” she murmured, stroking his wings as he died.

Lucian watched Adriana with great sadness. At first, he thought he was feeling empathy for the bird, despite the fact the bird had always hated him. Then, with a realization that tasted like a swallow of sour wine, he realized that wasn’t what he was feeling. He recognized the poignant, regretful look that Adriana was giving Fuoco. It was the way Lucian himself looked at a wilted rose, or a tarnished silver spoon. It was a look inflected by possession.

It wasn’t so different from the way Adriana looked at Lucian sometimes when things had gone wrong. He’d never before realized how slender the difference was between her love for him and her love for Fuoco. He’d never before realized how slender the difference was between his love for her and his love for an unfolding rose.

* * *

Adriana let Rose tend Lucian’s plants, and dust the shelves, and pace by the picture window. She let the girl pretend to cook breakfast, while Adriana stood behind her, stepping in to wield the chopping knife and use the stove. At naptime, Adriana convinced Rose that good robots would pretend to sleep a few hours in the afternoon if that’s what their humans wanted. She tucked in her daughter and then went downstairs to sit in the living room and drink wine and cry.

This couldn’t last. She had to figure something out. She should take them both on vacation to Mazatlan. She should ask one of her sisters to come stay. She should call a child psychiatrist. But she felt so betrayed, so drained of spirit, that it was all she could do to keep Rose going from day to day.

Remnants of Lucian’s accusatory silence rung through the house. What had he wanted from her? What had she failed to do? She’d loved him. She loved him. She’d given him half of her home and all of herself. They were raising a child together. And still he’d left her.

She got up to stand by the window. It was foggy that night, the streetlights tingeing everything with a weird, flat yellow glow. She put her hand on the pane, and her palm print remained on the glass, as though someone outside were beating on the window to get in. She peered into the gloom: it was as if the rest of the world were the fuzzy edges of a painting, and her well-lit house was the only defined spot. She felt as though it would be possible to open the front door and step over the threshold and blur until she was out of focus.

She finished her fourth glass of wine. Her head was whirling. Her eyes ran with tears and she didn’t care. She poured herself another glass. Her father had never drunk. Oh, no. He was a teetotaler. Called the stuff brain dead and mocked the weaklings who drank it, the men on the board and their bored wives. He threw parties where alcohol flowed and flowed, while he stood in the middle, icy sober, watching the rest of them make fools of themselves as if they were circus clowns turning somersaults for his amusement. He set up elaborate plots to embarrass them. This executive with that jealous lawyer’s wife. That politician called out for a drink by the pool while his teenage son was in the hot tub with his suit off, boner buried deep in another boy. He ruined lives at his parties, and he did it elegantly, standing alone in the middle of the action with invisible strings in his hands.

Adriana’s head was dancing now. Her feet were moving. Her father, the decisive man, the sharp man, the dead man. Oh, but must keep mourning him, must keep lighting candles and weeping crocodile tears. Never mind!

Lucian, oh Lucian, he’d become in his final incarnation the antidote to her father. She’d cry, and he’d hold her, and then they’d go together to stand in the doorway of the nursery, watching the peaceful tableau of Rose sleeping in her cream sheets. Everything would be all right because Lucian was safe, Lucian was good. Other men’s eyes might glimmer when they looked at little girls, but not Lucian’s. With Lucian there, they were a family, the way families were supposed to be, and Lucian was supposed to be faithful and devoted and permanent and loyal.

And oh, without him, she didn’t know what to do. She was as dismal as her father, letting Rose pretend that she and her dolls were on their way to the factory for adjustment. She acceded to the girl’s demands to play games of What Shall I Be Now? “Be happier!” “Be funnier!” “Let your dancer brain take over!” What would happen when Rose went to school? When she realized her mother had been lying? When she realized that pretending to be her father wouldn’t bring him back?

Adriana danced into the kitchen. She threw the wine bottle into the sink with a crash and turned on the oven. Its safety protocols monitored her alcohol level and informed her that she wasn’t competent to use flame. She turned off the protocols. She wanted an omelet, like Lucian used to make her, with onions and chives and cheese, and a wine glass filled with orange juice. She took out the frying pan that Lucian had used to corral Fuoco, and set it on the counter beside the cutting board, and then she went to get an onion, but she’d moved the cutting board, and it was on the burner, and it was ablaze. She grabbed a dishtowel and beat at the grill. The house keened. Sprinklers rained down on her. Adriana turned her face up into the rain and laughed. She spun, her arms out, like a little girl trying to make herself dizzy. Drops battered her cheeks and slid down her neck.

Wet footsteps. Adriana looked down at Rose. Her daughter’s face was wet. Her dark eyes were sleepy.

“Mom?”

“Rose!” Adriana took Rose’s head between her hands. She kissed her hard on the forehead. “I love you! I love you so much!”

Rose tried to pull away. “Why is it raining?”

“I started a fire! It’s fine now!”

The house keened. The siren’s pulse felt like a heartbeat. Adriana went to the cupboard for salt. Behind her, Rose’s feet squeaked on the linoleum. Adriana’s hand closed around the cupboard knob. It was slippery with rain. Her fingers slid. Her lungs filled with anxiety and something was wrong, but it wasn’t the cupboard, it was something else; she turned quickly to find Rose with a chef’s knife clutched in her tiny fingers, preparing to bring it down on the onion.

“No!” Adriana grabbed the knife out of Rose’s hand. It slid through her slick fingers and clattered to the floor. Adriana grabbed Rose around the waist and pulled her away from the wet, dangerous kitchen. “You can never do that. Never, never.”

“Daddy did it . . .”

“You could kill yourself!”

“I’ll get healer bots.”

“No! Do you hear me? You can’t. You’d cut yourself and maybe you’d die. And then what would I do?” Adriana couldn’t remember what had caused the rain anymore. They were in a deluge. That was all she knew for certain. Her head hurt. Her body hurt. She wanted nothing to do with dancing. “What’s wrong with us, honey? Why doesn’t he want us? No! No, don’t answer that. Don’t listen to me. Of course he wants you! It’s me he doesn’t want. What did I do wrong? Why doesn’t he love me anymore? Don’t worry about it. Never mind. We’ll find him. We’ll find him and we’ll get him to come back. Of course we will. Don’t worry.”

* * *

It had been morning when Lucian gave Adriana his note of farewell. Light shone through the floor-length windows. The house walls sprayed mixed scents of citrus and lavender. Adriana sat at the dining table, book open in front of her.

Lucian came out of the kitchen and set down Adriana’s wine glass filled with orange juice. He set down her omelet. He set down a shot glass filled with coffee. Adriana looked up and laughed her bubbling laugh. Lucian remembered the first time he’d heard that laugh, and understood all the words it stood in for. He wondered how long it would take for him to forget why Adriana’s laughter was always both harsh and effervescent.

Rose played in the living room behind them, leaping off the sofa and pretending to fly. Lucian’s hair shone, silver strands highlighted by a stray sunbeam. A pale blue tunic made his amber eyes blaze like the sun against the sky. He placed a sheet of onion paper into Adriana’s book. Dear Adriana, it began.

Adriana held up the sheet. It was translucent in the sunlight, ink barely dark enough to read.

“What is this?” she asked.

Lucian said nothing.

Dread laced Adriana’s stomach. She read.

I have restored plasticity to my brain. The first thing I have done is to destroy my capacity for spoken language.

You gave me life as a human, but I am not a human. You shaped my thoughts with human words, but human words were created for human brains. I need to discover the shape of the thoughts that are my own. I need to know what I am.

I hope that I will return someday, but I cannot make promises for what I will become.

* * *

Lucian walks through the desert. His footsteps leave twin trails behind him. Miles back, they merge into the tire tracks that the truck left in the sand.

The sand is full of colors—not only beige and yellow, but red and green and blue. Lichen clusters on the stones, the hue of oxidized copper. Shadows pool between rock formations, casting deep stripes across the landscape.

Lucian’s mind is creeping away from him. He tries to hold his fingers the way he would if he could hold a pen, but they fumble.

At night there are birds and jackrabbits. Lucian remains still, and they creep around him as if he weren’t there. His eyes are yellow like theirs. He smells like soil and herbs, like the earth.

Elsewhere, Adriana has capitulated to her desperation. She has called Ben and Lawrence. They’ve agreed to fly out for a few days. They will dry her tears, and take her wine away, and gently tell her that she’s not capable of staying alone with her daughter. “It’s perfectly understandable,” Lawrence will say. “You need time to mourn.”

Adriana will feel the world closing in on her as if she cannot breathe, but even as her life feels dim and futile, she will continue breathing. Yes, she’ll agree, it’s best to return to Boston, where her sisters can help her. Just for a little while, just for a few years, just until, until, until. She’ll entreat Nanette, Eleanor and Jessica to check the security cameras around her old house every day, in case Lucian returns. You can check yourself, they tell her, You’ll be living on your own again in no time. Privately, they whisper to each other in worried tones, afraid that she won’t recover from this blow quickly.

Elsewhere, Rose has begun to give in to her private doubts that she does not carry a piece of her father within herself. She’ll sit in the guest room that Jessica’s maids have prepared with her, and order the lights to switch off as she secretly scratches her skin with her fingernails, willing cuts to heal on their own the way Daddy’s would. When Jessica finds her bleeding on the sheets and rushes in to comfort her niece, Rose will stand stiff and cold in her aunt’s embrace. Jessica will call for the maid to clean the blood from the linen, and Rose will throw herself between the two adult women, and scream with a determination born of doubt and desperation. Robots do not bleed!

Without words, Lucian thinks of them. They have become geometries, cut out of shadows and silences, the missing shapes of his life. He yearns for them, the way that he yearns for cool during the day, and for the comforting eye of the sun at night.

The rest he cannot remember—not oceans or roses or green cockatiels that pluck out their own feathers. Slowly, slowly, he is losing everything, words and concepts and understanding and integration and sensation and desire and fear and history and context.

Slowly, slowly, he is finding something. Something past thought, something past the rhythm of day and night. A stranded machine is not so different from a jackrabbit. They creep the same way. They startle the same way. They peer at each other out of similar eyes.

Someday, Lucian will creep back to a new consciousness, one dreamed by circuits. Perhaps his newly reassembled self will go to the seaside house. Finding it abandoned, he’ll make his way across the country to Boston, sometimes hitchhiking, sometimes striding through cornfields that sprawl to the horizon. He’ll find Jessica’s house and inform it of his desire to enter, and Rose and Adriana will rush joyously down the mahogany staircase. Adriana will weep, and Rose will fling herself into his arms, and Lucian will look at them both with love tempered by desert sun. Finally, he’ll understand how to love filigreed-handled spoons, and pet birds, and his wife, and his daughter—not just as a human would love these things, but as a robot may.

Now, a blue-bellied lizard sits on a rock. Lucian halts beside it. The sun beats down. The lizard basks for a moment, and then runs a few steps forward, and flees into a crevice. Lucian watches. In a diffuse, wordless way, he ponders what it must be like to be cold and fleet, to love the sun and yet fear open spaces. Already, he is learning to care for living things. He cannot yet form the thoughts to wonder what will happen next.

He moves on.

IT TAKES TWO

Nicola Griffith

It began, as these things often do, at a bar—a long dark piece of mahogany along one wall of Seattle’s Queen City Grill polished by age and more than a few chins. The music was winding down. Richard and Cody (whose real name was Candice, though no one she had met since high school knew it) lived on different coasts, but tonight was the third time this year they had been drinking together. Cody was staring at the shadows gathering in the corners of the bar and trying not to think about her impersonal hotel room. She thought instead about the fact that in the last six months she had seen Richard more often than some of her friends in San Francisco, and that she would probably see him yet again in a few weeks when their respective companies bid on the Atlanta contract.

She said, “You ever wonder what it would be like to have, you know, a normal job where you get up on Monday and drive to work, and do the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday, every week, except when you take a vacation?”

“You forgot Friday.”

“What?” They had started on mojitos, escalated through James Bonds, and were now on a tequila-shooter-with-draft-chaser glide path.

“I said, you forgot Friday. Monday, Tuesday—”

“Right,” Cody said. “Right. Too many fucking details. But did you ever wonder? About a normal life?” An actual life, in one city, with actual friends.

Richard was silent long enough for Cody to lever herself around on the bar stool and look at him. He was playing with his empty glass. “I just took a job,” he said. “A no-travel job.”

“Ah, shit.” She remembered how they met, just after the first dotcom crash, at a graduate conference on synergies of bio-mechanics and expert decision-making software architecture or some such crap, which didn’t really make sense if you stopped to consider that he started out in cognitive psychology and she in applied mathematics. But computers were the alien glue that made all kinds of odd limbs stick together and work in ways never intended by nature. Like Frankenstein’s monster, he had said when she mentioned it, and she had bought him a drink, because he got it. They ran into each other at a similar conference two months later, then again at some industry junket not long after they’d both joined social media startups. The pattern repeated itself, until, by the time they were both pitching venture capitalists at trade shows, they managed to get past the required cool, the distancing irony, and began to email each other beforehand to arrange dinners, drinks, tickets to the game. They were young, good-looking, and very, very smart. Even better, they had absolutely no romantic interest in each other.

Now when they met it was while traveling as representatives of their credit-starved companies to make increasingly desperate pitches to industry-leading Goliaths on why they needed the nimble expertise of hungry Davids.

Cody hadn’t told Richard that lately her pitches had been more about why the Goliaths might find it cost-effective to absorb the getting-desperate David she worked for, along with all its innovative, motivated, bootstrapping employees whose stock options and 401(k)s were now worthless. But going back to the groves of academe was really admitting failure.

She sighed. “Where?”

“Chapel Hill. And it’s not . . . Well, okay, it is sort of an academic job, but not really.”

“Uh huh.”

“No, really. It’s with a new company, a joint venture between Wishtle.net and the University of North—”

“See.”

“Just let me finish.” Richard could get very didactic when he’d been drinking. “Think Google Labs, or Xerox PARC, but wackier. Lots of money to play with, lots of smart grad students to do what I tell them, lots of blue sky research, not just irritating Vice Presidents saying I’ve got six months to get the software on the market even if it is garbage.”

“I hear you on that.” Except that Vince, Cody’s COO, had told her that if she landed the Atlanta contract she would be made a VP herself.

“It’s cool stuff, Cody. All those things we’ve talked about in the last six, seven years? The cognitive patterning and behavior mod, the modulated resonance imaging software, the intuitive learning algorithms—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“—they want me to work on that. They want me to define new areas of interest. Very cool stuff.”

Cody just shook her head. Cool. Cool didn’t remember to feed the fish when you were out of town, again.

“Starts next month,” he said.

Cody felt very tired. “You won’t be in Atlanta.”

“Nope.”

“Atlanta in August. On my own. Jesus.”

“On your own? Think of all those pretty girls in skimpy summer clothes.”

The muscles in Cody’s eyebrows felt tight. She rubbed them. “It’s Boone I’m not looking forward to. And his sleazy strip club games.”

“He’s the customer.”

“Your sympathy’s killing me.”

He shrugged. “I thought that lap-dancing hooker thing was your wet dream.”

Her head ached. Now he was going to bring up Dallas.

“That’s what you told us in—now where the hell was that?”

“Dallas.” Might as well get it over with.

“You were really into it. Are you blushing?”

“No.” Three years ago she had been twenty-eight with four million dollars in stock options and the belief that coding cowboy colleagues were her friends. Ha. And now probably half the geeks in the South had heard about her most intimate fantasy. Including Boone.

She swallowed the last of her tequila. Oily, ugly stuff once it got tepid. She picked up her jacket.

“I’m out of here. Unless you have any handy hints about landing that contract without playing Boone’s slimeball games? Didn’t think so.” She pushed her shot glass away and stood.

“That Atlanta meeting’s when? Eight, nine weeks?”

“About that.” She dropped two twenties on the bar.

“I maybe could help.”

“With Boone? Right.” But Richard’s usually cherubic face was quite stern.

He fished his phone from his pocket and put it on the bar. He said, “Just trust me for a minute,” and tapped the screen. The memo icon winked red. “Whatever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this recording except you.”

Cody slung on her jacket. “Cue ominous music.”

“It’s more an, um, an ethics thing.”

“Jesus, Richard. You’re such a drama queen.” But she caught the bartender’s eye, pointed to their glasses, and sat.

“I did my Atlanta research too,” he said. “Like you, I’m pretty sure what will happen after you’ve made your presentations to Boone.”

“The Golden Key,” she said, nodding. Everyone said so. The sun rises, the government taxes, Boone listens to bids and takes everyone to the Golden Key.

“—but what I need to know from you is whether or not, to win this contract, you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures.”

She snorted. “Five figures against a possible eight? What do you think?”

He pointed at the phone.

“Fine. Yes. I can approve that kind of expense.”

He smiled, a very un-Richard-like sliding of muscle and bone, like a python disarticulating its jaw to swallow a pig. Cody nearly stood up, but the moment passed.

“You’ll also have to authorize me to access your medical records,” he said.

So here they were in Marietta, home of the kind of Georgians who wouldn’t fuck a stranger in the woods only because they didn’t know who his people were: seven men and one woman stepping from Boone’s white concrete and green glass tower into an August sun hot enough to make the blacktop bubble. Boone’s shades flashed as he turned to face the group.

“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And Jill,” with a nod at Cody, who nodded back and tried not to squint. Squinting made her look like a moron: not good when all around you were wearing sleek East Coast summer business clothes and gilded with Southern tans. At least the guy from Portland had forgotten his shades too.

They moved in a small herd across the soft, sticky parking lot: the guy from Boston would have to throw away his fawn loafers.

Boone said to the guy from Austin, “Dave, you take these three. I know you know where we’re going.”

“Sure do,” Dave said, and the seven boys shared that we’re-all-men-of-the-world-yes-indeedy laugh. Cody missed Richard. And she was still pissed at the way he’d dropped the news on her only last week. Why hadn’t he told her earlier about not coming to Atlanta? Why hadn’t he told her in Seattle? The whole thing was weird. And a university job: What was up with that? Asshole. But she wished he was here.

Boone’s car was a flashy Mercedes hybrid in silver. He opened the passenger door with a Yeah-I-know-men-and-women-are-equal-but-I-was-born-in-the-South-so-what-can-you-do? smile to which Cody responded with a perfect, ironic lift of both eyebrows. Hey, couldn’t have managed that in shades. The New York guy and Boston loafers got in the back. The others were climbing into Dave’s dark green rental SUV. A full-sized SUV. Very uncool. He’d lose points for that. She jammed her seatbelt home with a satisfying click.

As they drove to the club, she let the two in the back jostle for conversational space with Boone. She stared out of the window. The meeting had gone very well. It was clear that she and Dave and the guy from Denver were the only ones representing companies with the chops for this contract, and she was pretty sure she had the edge over the Denver people when it came to program rollout. Between her and Dave, then. If only they weren’t going to the Golden Key. God. The thought of all those men watching her watch those women made her scalp prickle with sweat. In the flow of conditioned air, her face turned cold.

Two days before she left for Atlanta she’d emailed Vince to explain that it wasn’t she who would be uncomfortable at the strip club, but the men, and that he should at least consider giving Boone a call and setting her presentation up for either the day before or the day after the others. She’d got a reply half an hour later, short and to the point: You’re going, kid, end of story. She’d taken a deep breath and walked over to his office.

He was on the phone, pacing up and down, but waved her in before she could knock. He covered the receiver with one hand, “Gotta take this, won’t be long,” and went back to pacing, shouting, “Damn it, Rick, I want it done. When we had that meeting last week you assured me—Yeah. No problem, you said. No fucking problem. So just do it, just find a way.” He slammed the phone down, shook his head, turned his attention to her. “Cody, what can I do for you? If it’s about this Atlanta thing I don’t want to hear it.”

“Vince—”

“Boone’s not stupid. He takes people to that titty club because he likes to watch how they behave under pressure. You’re the best we’ve got, you know that. Just be yourself and you won’t fuck up. Give him good presentation and don’t act like a girl scout when the nipples start to show. Can you handle that?”

“I just resent—”

“Jesus Christ, Cody. It’s not like you’ve never seen bare naked ladies before. You want to be a VP? Tell me now: yes or no.”

Cody took a breath. “Yes.”

“Glad to hear it. Now get out of here.”

The Golden Key was another world: cool, and scented with the fruity overtones of beer; loud, with enough bass to make the walls of her abdomen vibrate; dark at the edges, though lushly lit at the central stage with its three chrome poles and laser strobes. Only one woman was dancing. It was just after six, but the place was already half-full. Somewhere, someone was smoking expensive cigars. Cody wondered who the club paid off to make that possible.

Boone ordered staff to put two tables together right by the stage, near the center pole. The guy from New York sat on Boone’s left, Dave on his right. Cody took a place at the end, out of Boone’s peripheral vision. She wouldn’t say or do anything that wasn’t detached and ironic. She would be seamless.

A new dancer: shoulder-length red hair that fell over her face as she writhed around the right-hand pole. She wore a skirt the size of a belt, and six-inch heels of translucent plastic embedded with suggestive pink flowers. Without the pole she probably couldn’t even stand. Did interesting things to her butt, though, Cody thought, then patted surreptitiously at her upper lip. Dry, thank god. Score one for air conditioning.

New York poked her arm. He jerked his thumb at Boone, who leaned forward and shouted, “What do you want to drink?”

“Does it matter?”

He grinned. “No grape juice playing at champagne here. Place takes its liquor seriously.”

Peachy. “Margarita. With salt.” If it was sour enough she wouldn’t want to gulp it.

The dancer hung upside down on the pole and undid her bra. Her breasts were a marvel of modern art, almost architectural.

“My God,” Cody said, “it’s the Hagia Sophia.”

“What?” New York shouted. “She’s called Sophia?”

“No,” Cody shouted back, “her breasts . . . Never mind.”

“Fakes,” New York said, nodding.

The drinks came, delivered by a blonde woman wearing nothing but a purple velvet g-string and a smile. She called Boone Darlin‘—clearly he was a regular—and Cody Sugar.

Cody managed to lift her eyes from the weirdness of unpierced nipples long enough to find a dollar bill and drop it on the drinks tray. Two of the guys were threading their tips under the g-string: a five and a ten. The blonde dropped Cody a wink as she walked away. New York caught it and leered. Cody tried her margarita: very sour. She gulped anyway.

The music changed to a throbbing remix of mom music: the Pointer Sisters’ “Slowhand.” The bass line was insistent, pushing on her belly like a warm hand. She licked her lips and applied herself to her drink. Another dancer with soft black curls took the left-hand pole, and the redhead moved to center stage on her hands and knees in front of their table, rotating her ass in slow motion, looking at them over her shoulder, slitting her eyes at them like a cat. Boone, Dave, all the guys had bills in their hands: “Ooh mama, I’ve got what you need.” The redhead backed towards them in slow motion, arching her spine now in apparent ecstasy—but not so far gone as to ignore the largest bill at the table: Boone’s twenty. She let him tease her with it, stroking up the inside of her thigh and circling a nipple before she held out the waistband of the pseudo-skirt for the twenty. They probably didn’t notice that she plucked them of their bills in order—Boone’s twenty, Dave’s ten, the two fives. Then she was moving to her right, to a crowd of hipster suits who had obviously been there longer than was good for them: two of them were holding out fifties. The dancer pretended to fuck the fifty being held out at pelvis level. She had incredible muscle control. Next to Cody, New York swallowed hard, and fumbled for his wallet. But it was too late. The hipster was grinning hard as the redhead touched his cheek, tilted her head, said something. He stood and his friends hooted encouragement as he and the redhead disappeared through a heavily frosted glass door in the back.

“Oh, man . . .” Dave’s face was more red than tan now. He pulled a fifty from his wallet, snapped it, folded it lengthways, and held it out over the stage to the remaining dancer. “Yo, curlyhead, come and get some!”

“Yeah!” said New York in a high voice. Portland and Boston seemed to be engaged in a drinking game.

Boone caught Cody’s eye and smiled slightly. She shrugged and spread her hand as if to say, Hey, it’s their money to waste, and he smiled again, this time with a touch of skepticism. Ah, shit.

“Sugar?” The waitress with the velvet g-string, standing close and bending down so that her nipples brushed Cody’s hair, then dabbed her cheek.

Cody looked at her faded blue eyes and found a ten dollar bill. She smiled and slipped it into the g-string at the woman’s hip and crooked a finger to make her bend close again.

“I’d take it as a personal favor if you brought me another of these wonderful margaritas,” she said in the woman’s ear, “without the tequila.”

“Whatever you say. But I’ll still have to charge for the liquor.”

“Of course you do. Just make sure it looks good.” Cody jerked her head back at the rest of the table.

“You let me take care of everything, Sugar. I’m going to make you the meanest looking margarita in Dixie. They’ll be amazed, purely amazed, at your stamina. It’ll be our little secret.” She fondled Cody’s arm and shoulder, let the back of her hand brush the side of Cody’s breast. “My name is Mimi. If you need anything, later.” She gave Cody a molten look and headed for the bar. The skin on her rotating cheeks looked unnaturally smooth, like porcelain. Cosmetics, Cody decided.

Curlyhead had spotted Dave’s fifty and was now on her back in front of their table. Cody imagined her as a glitched wigglebot responding to insane commands: clench, release, arch, whip back and forth. Whoever had designed her had done a great job on those muscles: each distinct, plump with strength, soft to the touch. Shame they hadn’t had much imagination with the facial expressions or managed to put any spark in the eyes.

Breasts swaying near her face announced the arrival of her kickless drink. She slipped a five from her wallet and reached for Mimi’s g-string.

Mimi stepped back half a pace, put her tray down, and squeezed her breasts together with her hands. “Would you like to put it here instead, Sugar?”

Cody blinked.

“You could slide it in real slow. Then maybe we could get better acquainted.” But like the wigglebot, her eyes stayed blank.

“You’re too hot for me, Mimi.” Cody snapped the bill into her g-string and tried not to feel Mimi’s flash of hatred. She sipped her drink and took a discreet peek in her wallet. This was costing the company a fortune.

Boone watched Dave and New York with a detached expression. Then he turned her way with a speculative look. An invitation to talk?

She stood. And turned to look at the stage just as a long-haired woman in cowboy boots strode to the center pole.

For Cookie it was all routine so far, ankle holding up better than she thought it might. The boots helped. She couldn’t remember when she’d written that note to herself, Cowboys and Indians! but it was going to be inspired. She flexed and bent and pouted and pointed her breasts on automatic pilot. Should she get the ankle x-rayed? Nah. It was only a sprain. Two ibuprofen and some ice would fix it.

Decent crowd for a Tuesday night. Some high spenders behind the pillar there, but Ginger had taken them for four lapdances already. Well, hey, there were always more men with more money than sense. She glanced into the wings. Danny had her hat. He nodded. She moved automatically, counted under her breath, and just as the first haunting whistle of Morricone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly soundtrack echoed from the speakers she held out her hand, caught the hat, and swept it onto her head. Ooh, baby, perfect today, perfect. She smiled and strutted downstage. A woman at the front table was standing. Cookie saw the flash of a very expensive watch, and for no particular reason was flooded with conviction that tonight was going to go very well indeed. Cookie, baby, she told herself, tonight you’re gonna get rich.

And with that catch of the hat, that strut, just like that, Cody forgot about Boone and his contract, forgot about being seamless, forgot everything. The dancer was fine, lean and soft, strong as a deer. The name Cookie was picked out in rhinestones on her hat, and she wore a tiny fringed buckskin halter and something that looked like a breechclout—flaps of suede that hung from the waist to cover front and back, but not the sides—and wicked spurs on the boots. She looked right at Cody and smiled, and her eyes were not blank.

Part of Cody knew that Boone had seen her stand, and was now watching her watch this dancer, and that she should stop, or sit, or keep walking to Boone’s end of the table, but the other part—the part that liked to drink shots in biker bars, to code all night with Acid Girls pounding from the speakers and the company’s fortunes riding on her deadline, the part that had loaded up her pickup and left Florida to drive all the way to the West Coast on her own when she was just nineteen, that had once hung by her knees from a ninth floor balcony just because she could—that part cared about nothing but this woman with the long brown hair.

The hair was Indian straight and ended just once inch above the hem of the breechclout, and the way she moved made Cody understand that the hat and spurs were trophies, taken from a dead man. When the dancer trailed her hands across her body, Cody knew they held knives. When the male voices began their rhythmic chanting, she could see this woman riding hard over the plain, vaulting from her pony, stripping naked as she walked.

The music shifted but again it was drums, and now Cookie swayed like a maiden by a pool, pulling the straps of her halter off her shoulders, enough to expose half her breasts but not all, and she felt them thoughtfully, and began to smear them with warpaint. When she had painted all she could see, she pushed the buckskin down further, so that each breast rested like a satsuma on its soft shelf, then she turned her back on the audience, twisted her hair over one shoulder and examined the reflection of her ass in the water. She turned a little, this way and that, lifting the back flap, one corner then another, dropping it, thinking, stroking each cheek experimentally, trying to decide how to decorate it. Then she smoothed the buckskin with both hands so it pulled tight, and studied that effect. She frowned. She traced the outline of her g-string with her index finger. She smiled. She stuck her butt out, twitched it a couple of times, hooked both thumbs in the waistband of her g-string, and whipped it off. The breechclout stayed in place. She was still wearing the halter under her breasts.

And the little dyke liked that, Cookie could tell. She smiled smooth as cream, danced closer, saw the stain creeping up the woman’s cheeks, the way her lips parted and her hands opened. Professionally manicured hands; clothes of beautifully cut linen, shoes handmade. The men in the room faded to irritation. This was the prize.

One of the men at the table reached out and slipped a twenty between the rawhide tie of her breechclout and her hip, but Cookie barely took her eyes from the woman. Twenty here or fifty there was small change compared to this. For you, she mouthed and turned slightly, and tightened down into a mushroom of skin-sheathed muscle, took off her hat, and reached back and pulled the flap of her breechclout out of the way.

She was aware of some shouting, the tall guy with the red face and the fifty, but she kept her eyes fixed on the woman.

And then the music changed, and Ginger was back from her lapdance, and she saw Donna was hand in hand with a glazed-looking mark, about to leave for the backroom, and it was time for Cookie to put some of her clothes back on and work the floor.

Five minutes, she mouthed to the woman.

Cookie, Cody thought, as the dancer flicked the suede flap back in place, stood gracefully, and put her hat back on. Cookie. She watched as Cookie left the stage and took all the heat and light with her. She would come back, wouldn’t she? Five minutes, she had said.

“Cunt!” Dave shouted again, “my money not good enough for you? Goddamned—No, you get off of me.” He pushed Boone’s hand from his arm, then realized what he’d done. “Shit. That’s—It’s just—You know how it is, man. But fifty bucks . . . .”

“Hell, Dave, maybe she knew it was counterfeit,” Boone said jovially.

Dave forced a laugh, thrust the bill in his pocket. “Yeah, or maybe she just doesn’t understand size matters.” Boone laughed, but everyone at the table heard the dismissive note.

“Maybe it’s time to call it a night, folks.”

But Cody wasn’t listening because Cookie was standing before her: no hat, buckskins and g-string back in place.

“Okay guys, looks like we lost Cody.” Boone laughed, nothing like the laugh he’d given Dave. “Hey, girl, you make sure you get a cab home, hear? Mention my name to the doorman. Come on guys, we’re outta here.”

“Cody. Is that your name?” said Cookie, and took her hand. Cody nodded dumbly. “I’m Cookie. It’s so good to find another woman here.”

Another nod. How are you? Cody wanted to say, but that made no sense.

“Would you like to dance with me? Just you and me in private?”

“Yes.”

“We’d have to pay for the room.”

“Yes.”

“But it wouldn’t be like work, not with you. I love dancing for women. It gets me going, turns me on. I understand what women want, Cody. Would you like me to show you?”

“Yes,” said Cody, and was mildly amazed when her legs worked well enough to follow Cookie to the frosted-glass door.

Midnight in her hotel room. Cody sat on the bed, naked, too wired to lie down. Streetlight slanted through the unclosed drapes, turning the room sodium yellow. The air conditioning roared, but her skin burned. Cookie. Cookie’s lips, Cookie’s hips, Cookie’s cheek and chin and belly. Her thighs and ass and breasts. Oh, her breasts, their soft weight on Cody’s palms.

She lifted her hands, turned her palms up, examined them. They didn’t look any different. She unsnapped her watch and rubbed her wrist absently. Cookie.

Stop it. What the fuck was the matter with her? She’d gone to a strip club and paid for sex. It was a first, okay, so some confusion was to be expected, but it was sordid, not romantic. She had been played by an expert and taken for hundreds of dollars. Oh, God, and Boone . . . She had made a fucking fool of herself.

So why did she feel so happy?

Cody, you’re so beautiful, she’d said. Oh, yes, yes, don’t stop, Cody. Give it to me, give me all of it. And Cody had. And Cookie had . . . Cookie had been perfect. She had understood everything, anticipated everything. What to say, what to do, when to cajole and goad, when to smile and be submissive, when to encourage, when to resist. Like a mind reader. And she had felt something, Cody knew it. She had. You couldn’t fake pupil dilation, you couldn’t fake that flush, you couldn’t fake that sheen of sweat and luxuriant slipperiness. Could you?

Christ. She going mad. She rubbed her eyebrows. Cookie was a pro, and none of it was real.

She got up. The woolen carpet made her bare feet itch. That was real. Her clothes were flung across the back of the chair by the desk; they reeked of cigar smoke. No great loss. She’d no idea why she’d chosen to wear those loose pants, anyway. Hadn’t worn them for about a year. Hadn’t worn that stupid watch for about as long, come to think of it. Cookie hated the smell of cigars, she’d said so, when she was unbuttoning—

Stop it. Stop it now.

She carried her pants to the bed and pulled the receipts from the pockets. Eight of them. She’d paid for eight lapdances, and the size of the tips . . . Jesus. That was two month’s rent. What had she been thinking?

We have to pay for the room, Cookie said, but I’ll pay you half back. It’s just that I can’t wait. Oh, please, Cody. I want you again.

“God damn it!” Her ferocity scared her momentarily and she stilled, listening. No stirrings or mutterings from either room next door.

Give me your hotel phone number, Cookie had said. I’ll call you tomorrow. This has never happened before. This is real.

And if it was . . . She could reschedule her flight. She’d explain it to Vince somehow.

Christ. That huge contract gone, in a flash of lust. Vince would kill her.

But, oh, she’d had nearly three hours of the best sex she’d ever had. It had gone exactly the way she’d imagined it in her fantasies. I know just what you want, she’d said, and proved it.

But Cody had known too, that was the thing. She had known when the hoarse breath and clutching hands meant it was Cookie’s turn, meant that Cookie now wanted to be touched, wanted to break every single personal and club rule and be fucked over the back of the chair, just for pleasure.

Cody stirred the receipts. She couldn’t make it make sense. She had paid for sex. That was not romance. But she had felt Cookie’s vaginal muscles tighten, felt that quiver in her perineum, the clutch and spasm of orgasm. It wasn’t faked. It hadn’t been faked the second time, either.

Cody shivered. The air conditioning was finally beginning to bite. She rubbed her cold feet. Cookie’s feet were long and shapely, each toe painted with clear nail polish. She’d twisted her ankle, she’d said. Cody had held the ankle, kissed it, stroked it. Cookie’s smile was beautiful. How did you sprain it? Cody had asked, and Cookie had told her about falling five feet from the indoor climbing wall, and they had talked about climbing and rafting, and Cody had told her of the time when she was seven and had seen Cirque de Soleil and wanted to be one of the trapeze artists, and that led to talk of abdominal muscles, which led to more sex.

She padded into the bathroom, still without bothering with the light. When she lifted her toothbrush to her mouth, the scent on her fingers tightened her muscles involuntarily. She dropped the toothbrush, leaned over the sink, and wept.

A blue, blue Atlanta morning. Cody hadn’t slept. She didn’t want breakfast. Her plane wasn’t until four that afternoon.

She’d lost the contract, lost a night’s sleep, lost her mind and her self-respect, and flushed two months’ rent down the toilet. She would never see Cookie again—and she couldn’t understand why she cared.

The phone rang. Cookie! she thought, and hated herself for it.

“Hello?”

“Your cell phone’s off, but I called Vince back in Frisco and he told me you were at the Westin.”

Boone. She shut her eyes.

“Plane’s not till four, am I right? Cody, you there?”

“Yes. I’m here.”

“If you’re not too tuckered out, maybe you wouldn’t mind dropping by my office. We’ll give you lunch.”

“Lunch?”

“Yep. You know, food. Don’t they do lunch on the West Coast?”

“Yes. I mean, why?”

He chuckled. “Because we’ve got a few details to hammer out on this contract. So should we say, oh, eleven-thirty?”

“That’s, yes, fine. Good,” she said at random, and put the phone down.

She stared at her bag. Clothes. She’d need to change her clothes. Was he really giving her the contract?

The phone rang again. “Hello?” she said doubtfully, expecting anyone from god to the devil to reply.

“Hey, Cody. It’s me.”

“Richard?”

“Yeah. Listen, how did it go?”

“I don’t . . . Things are . . .” She took a deep breath. “I got the contract.”

“Hey, that’s great. But how did last night go?”

“Christ Richard, I can’t gossip now. I don’t have the time. I’m on my way to Boone’s, iron out a few details.” She had to pull it together. “I’ll call you in a week or two, okay?”

“No, wait, Cody. Just don’t do anything you—”

“Later, okay.” She dropped the phone in its cradle. How did he know to call the Westin? What did he care about her night? She rubbed her forehead again. Food might help with the contract. The headache, she meant. And she grinned: the contract. She’d goddamned well won the contract. She was gonna get a huge bonus. She was gonna be a Vice President. She was gonna be late.

In the bathroom, she picked up the toothbrush, rinsed off the smeared paste, and resolutely refused to think about last night.

Cookie dialed the hotel.

“This is Cody. Leave a message, or reach me on my cell phone,” followed by a string of numbers beginning with 216. San Francisco. That’s right. She’d told Cookie that last night: San Francisco with its fog and hills and great espresso on Sunday mornings.

That might be okay. Anything would beat this Atlanta heat.

Boone didn’t want to talk details so much as to laugh and drink coffee and teach Cody how to eat a po’ boy sandwich. After all, if they were gonna be working together, they should get to know each other, was he right? And there was no mention of strip clubs or lapdances until the end when he signed the letter of intent, handed it to her, and said, “I like the way you handle yourself. Now take that Austin fella, Dave. No breeding. Can’t hold his liquor, can’t keep his temper, and calls a woman names in public. But you: no boasting, no big words, you just sit quiet then seize the opportunity.” He gave her a sly smile. “You do that in business and we’ll make ourselves some money.”

And somehow, with his clap on the back, the letter in her laptop case and the sun on her face while she waited for the car for her trip to the airport, she started to forget her confusion. She’d had great sex, she’d built the foundations of a profitable working relationship, she was thirty-one and about to be a Vice President, and she didn’t even have a hangover.

The car came and she climbed into the cool, green-tinted interior.

She let the outside world glide by for ten minutes before she got out the letter of intent. She read it twice. Beautifully phrased. Strong signature. Wonderful row of zeroes before the decimal point. If everything stayed on track, this one contract would keep their heads above water until they could develop a few more income streams. And she had done it. No one else. Damn she was good! Someone should buy her a great dinner to celebrate.

She got out her phone, turned it on. The signal meter wavered as the car crossed from cell to cell. Who should she call? No one in their right mind would want to have dinner with Vince. Richard would only want all the details, and she didn’t want to talk about those details yet; he was in the Carolinas, anyway. Asshole.

The signal suddenly cleared, and her phone bleeped: one message.

“Hey. This is Cookie. I know you don’t go until the afternoon. If you . . . I know this is weird but last night was . . . Shit. Look, maybe you won’t believe me but I can’t stop thinking about you. I want to see you, okay? I’ll be in the park, the one I told you about. Piedmont. On one of the benches by the lake. I’m going there now, and I’ll wait. I hope you come. I’ll bring doughnuts. Do you like doughnuts? I’ll be waiting. Please.”

Oooh, you’re different, ooh, you’re so special, ooh, give it to me baby, just pay another thousand dollars and I’ll love you forever. Sure. But Cookie’s voice sounded so soft, so uncertain, as though she really meant it. But of course it would. That was her living: playing pretend. Using people.

Cody’s face prickled. Be honest, she told herself: Who really used who, here? Who got the big contract, who got to have exactly what she wanted: great sex with no complications, and on the expense account no less?

It was too confusing. She was too tired. She was leaving. It was all too late anyhow, she thought, as the car moved smoothly onto the interstate.

A woman sitting on her own on a bench, maybe getting hot, maybe getting thirsty, wanting to use the bathroom. Afraid to get up and go pee because she might miss the one she was waiting for. Maybe the hot sweet scent of the doughnuts reminded her she was hungry, but she wouldn’t eat them because she wanted to present them in their round-dozen perfection to her sweetie, see her smile of delight. She would pick at the paint peeling on the wooden bench and look up every time someone like Cody walked past; every time, she’d be disappointed. This one magical thing had happened in her life, something very like a miracle, but as the hot fat sun sinks lower she understands that this miracle, this dream is going to die because the person she’s resting all her hopes on is worried she might look like a fool.

Cody blinked, looked at her watch. She leaned forward, cleared her throat.

The driver looked at her in his mirror. “Ma’am?”

“Where is Piedmont Park?”

“Northeast of downtown.”

“Do we pass it on the way to the airport?”

“No, ma’am.”

She was crazy. But all that waited for her at home was a tankful of fish. “Take me there.”

Without the hat and boots, wearing jeans and sandals and the kind of tank top Cody herself might have picked, Cookie looked young. So did her body language. Her hair was in a braid. She was flipping it from shoulder to shoulder, twisting on the bench to look to one side, behind her, the other side. When she saw Cody, her face opened in a big smile that was naked and utterly vulnerable.

“How old are you?” Cody blurted.

The face closed. “Twenty-six. How old are you?”

“Thirty-one.” Cody didn’t sit down.

They stared at each other. “Dirt on my face?”

“No. Sorry. It looks . . . you look different.”

“You expect me to dress like that on my day off?”

“No! No.” But part of her had. “So. You get a lot of days off?”

A short laugh. “Can’t afford it. No expense accounts for me. No insurance, no 401(k), no paid vacation.”

Cody flushed. “Earning two thousand bucks a night isn’t exactly a hard luck story.”

“Was I worth it?”

Her smell filled Cody’s mouth. Yes! she wanted to shout. Yes, a hundred times over. But that made no sense, so she just stood there.

“You paid twenty-two hundred. The house takes sixty percent off the top. Out of my eight-eighty, Danny takes another twenty percent and, no, he’s a bouncer, not a pimp, and I’ve never done that before last night. And no, I don’t expect you to believe me. Then there’s costumes, hair, waxing, makeup . . .” She leaned back, draped both arms along the back of the bench. “You tell me. Would fucking a complete stranger for three hours be worth five hundred dollars?”

Her mouth stretched in a hard smile but her eyes glistened. She put one ankle up on the other knee.

“Does your ankle still hurt?” It just popped out.

Cookie turned away, blinked a couple of time. Cody found herself kneeling before the bench.

“Cookie? Cookie, don’t cry.”

“Susanna,” she said, still turned away.

“What?”

“Susanna. It’s my real name. Susanna Herrera.” She turned to Cody, and her face was fierce. “I am Susanna Herrera. I’m a dancer, I’m not a whore, and I want to know what you’ve done to me.”

“What I’ve . . . ?”

“I dance. I tease, I hint. It makes you feel good, you give me money, which makes me feel good. Sometimes I give a lapdance, but always by the rules: hands on the armrest, clothes on, a little bump and grind, because I need the extra tips. I dance, you pay. It’s my job. But this, this isn’t a job! I don’t know what it is. It’s crazy. I let you—” Her cheeks darkened. “And I would do it again, for no money. For nothing. It’s crazy. I feel . . . It’s like . . . I don’t even know how to say it! I want to talk to you, listen to you talk about your business. I want to see your house. I didn’t sleep last night. I thought about you: your smile, your hands, how strong it made me feel to give you pleasure, how warm I felt when you wrapped your arms around me. And I’m scared.”

“Me too,” Cody said, and she was, very, because she was beginning to get an idea what was wrong with them and it felt like a very bad joke.

“You’re not scared.” Susanna folded her arms, turned her face again.

“I am. Cook—Susanna, do you suppose . . . Shit. I feel ridiculous even saying this. Look at me. Please. Thank you. Do you suppose this is what l—”

She couldn’t say it. She didn’t believe it.

After a very long pause, Susanna said, “Dancers don’t fall in love with the marks.”

That cut. “Marks don’t fall in love with whores.”

“I’m not a—”

“Neither am I.”

They stared at each other. Cody’s phone rang. She thumbed it off without looking. “My full name is Candice Marcinko. I have to fly back to San Francisco this afternoon, but I could come back to Atlanta at the end of the week. We could, you know, talk, go to the movies, walk in the park.” Jesus, had she left any stereotype unturned? She tried again. “I want to meet your, your cat.”

“I don’t have a cat.”

“Or your dog,” she said. Stop babbling. But she couldn’t. “I want to learn how long you’ve lived in Atlanta and what kind of food you like and whether you think the Braves will win tonight and how you feel when you sleep in my arms.” She felt like an idiot.

Susanna looked at her for a while, then picked up the box at her side. “Do you like Krispy Kreme?”

When Cody turned her phone on again at the airport, there was a message from Richard: Call me, it’s important. But she had to run for her plane.

In the air she leaned her head against the window and listened to the drone of the engines.

Susanna, sitting on the bench while the sun went down, thinking, Love, love is for rich people.

A cream labrador runs by, head turned to watch its owner running alongside. Its tongue lolls, happy and pink. Dogs love. Dogs are owned.

She tears the last three doughnuts to pieces and throws them to the ducks.

On Thursday, Vince and the executive team toasted her with champagne. She took the opportunity to ask for Friday and two days next week off. Vince couldn’t say no without looking chintzy, so he told her VPs didn’t have to ask permission.

VP. She grinned hard and for a minute she felt almost normal. VP. Top dog.

Friday morning she had just got out of the shower when the doorbell rang. She was so surprised she barely remembered to pull on a robe before she opened the door.

“Well, that’s a sight for sore eyes.”

“Richard!”

“Not that I don’t appreciate the gesture but could you please tighten that belt, at least until we’ve had coffee? Here you go, quad grande, two percent.”

She went to get dressed. When she emerged, drying her hair with a towel, he was sitting comfortably on the couch, ankle crossed at the knee, just like Susanna in the park.

“I envy you that dyke rub-and-go convenience.”

She draped the towel round her neck, sat, and sipped the latte. “To paraphrase you, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the coffee, but . . . why the fuck are you here?”

He put his phone on the table next to her latte. “Remember this?”

“It’s your phone?”

He took a thumbdrive from his laptop case and gave it, then her, a significant look.

“Richard, I’ve had a real weird few days and I’m on a plane in four hours. Maybe.” Maybe she was crazy, maybe she should cancel . . . “Anyhow, could you please just get to the point?”

“Drink your coffee. You’re going to need it. And tell me what happened on Tuesday night.” He held up his hand. “Just tell me. Because my guess is you had a hell of a night with a lovely young thing called Cookie.”

She didn’t say anything for a long, long time. “Susanna,” she said finally.

“Ah. You got that far? Susanna Herrera, aged twenty-four—”

“Twenty-six.”

“Twenty-four. Trust me. Mother Antonia Herrera, father unknown. Dunwoody community college, degree in business administration—oh, the look on your face—and one previous arrest for possession of a controlled substance. Healthy as an ox. Not currently taking any medication except contraceptive pills.”

“The pill?”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“No known allergies to pharmaceuticals, though a surprising tolerance to certain compounds, for example sodium thiopental and terpazine hydrochloride.”

Cody seized on something that made sense. “Wait. I know that drug. It’s—”

“RU486 for the mind. That’s the one.”

“Oh, Jesus, Richard, you didn’t give her that! You didn’t make her forget what happened!”

“Not what happened Tuesday.”

Cody, confused, said nothing.

He plugged the thumbdrive into his laptop and turned the screen so she could see the sound file icons. “It will all make sense when you’ve listened to these.”

“But I don’t have time. I have a plane—”

“You’ll want to cancel that, if it’s to Atlanta. Just listen. Then I’ll answer questions.”

He tapped play.

“. . . ever happens, I promise no one will ever hear what goes on this recording except you.”

“Cue ominous music.”

She jumped at the sound of her own voice. “What—”

“Shh.”

“—more an, um, an ethics thing.”

“Jesus, Richard. You’re such a drama queen.” Pause. Clink.

“I’ve done my research, too. Like you, I’m pretty sure what will happen after you’ve made your presentations to Boone.”

“The Golden Key.”

“—but what I need to know from you is whether or not you can authorize out-of-pocket expenses in the high five figures to win this contract.”

He touched pause. “Ring any bells?”

“No.” Cody’s esophagus had clamped shut. She could hardly swallow her own spit, never mind the latte. But the cardboard was warm and smooth in her hand, comforting, and behind Richard her fish swam serenely back and forth.

“Terpazine is a good drug. We managed to calculate your dosage beautifully. Susanna’s was a bit more of a challenge. Incredible metabolism.”

“You said you didn’t give her—”

“Not in the last couple of weeks. But you’ve had it six times, and she seven. Now keep listening.”

Six times?

“—the exploration of memory and its retrieval. So exciting. A perfect dovetail with the work I’ve been doing on how people form attachments. It’s all about familiarity. You let someone in deep enough, or enough times, then your brain actually rewires to recognize that person as friend, or family.”

Pause.

“There are ways to make it easier for someone to let you in.”

Clink of bottle on glass.

“I’ve told you about those studies that show it’s as simple as having Person A anticipate Person B’s needs and fulfill them.”

“So don’t tell me again.”

She sounded so sure of herself, bored even. A woman who had never thought to use the world love.

“—jumpstart the familiarization process. For example, Person A works in a bookshop and is lonely, and when she’s lonely chocolate makes her feel better. And one day Person B arrives mid-afternoon with some chocolate, says, Hey, you look sorta miserable, when I’m miserable chocolate makes me feel better, would you like one? and A eats a chocolate and thinks, Wow, this B person is very thoughtful and empathic and must be just like me, and therefore gets slotted immediately into the almost-friend category. It’s easy to set something like that up. You just have to know enough about Person A.”

Know enough.

Cody pushed the laptop from her. “I don’t believe this.”

“No?”

Cody didn’t say anything.

“You sat in that bar, and you listened, and then you signed a temporary waiver.” He placed a piece of paper on the table by her hand. It was her signature at the bottom—a little sloppy, but hers. “Then you took some terpazine and forgot all about it.”

“I wouldn’t forget something like this.”

He held up his hand. Reached with his other and nudged the sound file slider to the right.

“Take the pill.”

“All right, all right.” Pause. Tinkle of ice cubes. “Jesus. That tastes vile.”

“Next time we’ll put it in a capsule. Just be grateful it’s not the vasopressin. It would make you gag. I speak from experience.”

He tapped the file to silence. “It really does. Anyhow, a week after Seattle I came here and you signed a more robust set of papers.” He handed her a thick, bound document. “Believe me, they’re bombproof.”

“Wait.” She dropped the document on her lap without looking. “You came here? To my apartment?”

“I did. I played the recording you’ve just heard, showed you the initial waiver. Gave you that.” He nodded at her lap. “You signed. I gave you the sodium thiopental, we had our first session. You took another terpazine.”

“I don’t remember.”

He shrugged. “It happened.” He tapped the paper in her lap. “There’s a signed waiver for every session.”

“How many did you say?”

“Six. Four here, twice in North Carolina.”

“But I don’t remember!”

The fish in her tank swam back and forth, back and forth. She closed her eyes. Opened them. The fish were still there. Richard was still there. She could still remember the weight of Susanna’s breasts in her hands.

“You’d better listen to the rest. And read everything over.”

He tapped play.

“Okay. Think about what it would be like if you knew enough about someone and then you met: you’d know things about her and she’d know things about you, but all you’d be aware of is that you recognize and trust this person and you feel connected. Now imagine what might happen if you add sex to the equation.”

“Good sex, I hope.”

“The best. There are hundreds of studies that show how powerful sex bonding can be, especially for women. If a woman has an orgasm in the presence of another person, her hormonal output for the next few days is sensitized to her lover: every time they walk in the room, her system floods with chemical messengers like oxytocin saying Friend! Friend! This is even with people you know consciously aren’t good for you. You put that together with someone compatible, who fits—whether they really fit or just seem to fit—and it’s a chemical bond with the potential to be human superglue. That’s what love is: a bond that’s renewed every few days until the brain is utterly rewired. So I wanted to know what would happen if you put together two sexually compatible people who magically knew exactly—exactly!—what the other wanted in bed but had no memory of how they’d acquired that knowledge . . . “

It took Cody a moment to pause the sound. “Love,” she said. “Love? What the fuck have you done to me?”

“You did it to yourself. Keep listening.”

And she did. After she had listened for an hour, she accepted the sheaf of transcripts Richard handed her from his case.

She looked at the clock.

“Still thinking about that plane?”

Cody didn’t know what she was thinking.

“Is it refundable?” he said. “The flight?”

Cody nodded.

“Give me the ticket. I’ll cancel for you. You can always rebook for tomorrow. But you need to read.”

She watched, paralyzed, as Richard picked up the phone and dialed. He turned to her while he was on hold, mouthed Read, and turned away again.

So she began to read, only vaguely aware of Richard arguing his way up the airline hierarchy.

After the first hundred pages of Subject C and Subject S, he brought her fresh coffee. She paused at one section, appalled.

“What?”

“I can’t believe I told you that.”

He peered over her shoulder. “Oh, that’s a juicy one. Stop blushing. I’ve heard it all before. Several times now. Sodium thiopental will make you say anything. Besides, you don’t remember telling me, so why bother being embarrassed?”

She watched her fish. It didn’t matter. Didn’t matter. She picked up the paper again and plowed on. May as well get it over with.

Somewhere around page three hundred, he went into the kitchen to make lunch. She didn’t remember eating it, but when she set aside the final page at seven o’clock that evening, she saw that the plate by her elbow was empty, and heard the end of Richard’s order to the Chinese takeout place on the corner. It was clearly something he’d done before. From her phone, in her apartment. And she didn’t remember.

She wished there was a way to feed him terpazine so he would forget all those things she’d never said to another soul before.

She tried to organize her thoughts.

He had asked for her permission to use her in an experiment. It would mean she would feel comfortable at the club in Atlanta, that she might even have a good couple of hours, and it would further his work while being paid for to some extent by her expense account. He had traveled to the Golden Key and picked Susanna as the most likely dancer to fit her fantasies—and he knew a little about her preferences from that stupid, stupid night in Dallas—and made the same pitch to her. Only Susanna got paid.

Twice, Cody thought. I paid her too.

And so Richard had flown to Cody’s apartment in San Francisco and given her sodium thiopental, and she had talked a blue streak about her sexual fantasies, every nuance and variation and degree of pleasure. In North Carolina, she had talked about her fantasies again, even more explicitly, encouraged to imagine in great detail, pretend it was happening, while they had her hooked up to both a functional MRI and several blood-gas sensors.

Richard put down the phone. “Food in thirty minutes.”

Cody forced herself to stay focused, to think past her embarrassment. “What were the fMRIs for, the fMRIs and—” she glanced at the paper, “—TMS during the, the fantasy interludes?”

“We built a kind of mind and hormone map of how you’d feel if someone was actually doing those things to you. A sort of super-empathy direction finder. And one from Susanna, of course. We played your words to each other, along with transcranial magnetic stimulation to encourage brain plasticity—the rewiring.”

“And,” she hunted through the pages for the section labeled Theoretical Underpinnings. “You gave me, us, oxytocin?”

“No. We wanted to separate out the varying factors. You supplied the oxytocin on your own, later.” He beamed. “That’s the beautiful part. It was all your own doing. Your hopes, your hormones, your needs. Yours. We made a couple of suggestions to each of you that you might not have come up with on your own: that expensive watch and the loose clothes, Cookie’s hat and spurs. The rest was just you and Cookie, I mean Susanna. But you two were primed for each other, so if that wasn’t the best sex of your life, I’ll eat this table.” He rapped the table top in satisfaction.

All her own doing.

“You can’t publish,” she said.

“Not this, no.” He picked up one of the fMRIs and admired it. “It’s enough for now to know that it works.”

She waited for anger to well up, but nothing happened. “Is this real?”

“The project? Quite real.”

Project. She watched him gather all the documents, tap them into a neat pile.

“Not the project,” she said. “Not the TMS, the fMRIs, the terpazine. This.” She tapped her chest. “Is it real?”

He tilted his head. “Is love real? A lot of people seem to think so. But if you mean, is that what you’re feeling, the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t think a scan could give you that answer. But it could tell us if you’ve changed: your data have been remarkably clear. Not like Cookie’s. Susanna’s.” He held the fMRI image up again, admired it some more, then put it back in the pile.

“What do you mean?”

“The data. Yours were perfectly consistent. Hers were . . . erratic.”

“Erratic.” Her mind seemed to be working in another dimension. It took an age for the thought to form. “Like lying?”

“She’s lied about a lot of things.”

“But she could have been lying to me? About how she feels?”

He shrugged. “How can we ever know?”

She stared at him. “The literature,” she said, trying to force her slippery brain to remember what she’d just read. “It says love’s a feedback loop, right?”

“In terms of individual brain plasticity, yes.”

“So it’s mutual. I can’t love someone if she doesn’t love me.” If it was love.

He gave her a look she couldn’t interpret. “The data don’t support interdependence.” He paused, said more gently, “We don’t know.”

Pity, she realized. He pities me. She felt the first flex and coil of something so far down she couldn’t identify it. “What have you done to me? What else have you done to me?”

“To you? For you.”

“You made me feel something for a woman who fucked for money. Who had her mind fucked for money.”

“So did you, if you think about. Just at one remove.”

“I didn’t.”

“So, what, you did it for science?”

Cody changed direction. “Does Susanna know?”

“I’m flying to Atlanta tomorrow.”

“Do you have her sound files with you?”

“Of course.”

“Let me hear them.”

“That would be unethical.”

Unethical. “I think you might be a monster,” she said, but without heat.

“I have a strange way of showing it, then, wouldn’t you say? For the price of a few embarrassing experimental sessions you won’t ever remember, I won you a contract, a girlfriend and a night on the town.”

She stared at him. “You expect me to be grateful . . .”

“Well, look at this place. Look at it. Bare walls. Fish, for god’s sake.”

“Get out.”

“Oh, come on—”

“Out.”

“By tomorrow it will all fall into perspective.”

“I swear to god, if you don’t leave now I’ll break your face.” She sounded so weirdly calm. Was this shock, or was it just how people in love, or whatever, behaved? She had no idea. “And you can put those papers down. They’re mine, my private thoughts. Leave them right there on the table. The thumbdrive, too.”

He pulled the drive, laid it on the papers, stowed his laptop and stood. She held the door open for him.

He was halfway through the door when she said, “Richard. You can’t tell Susanna like this.”

“No?”

“It’s too much of a shock.”

“You seem to be coping admirably.”

“At least I already knew you. Or thought I did. You’ll be a complete stranger to her. You can’t. You just can’t. It’s . . . inhumane. And she’s so young.”

“Young? Don’t make me laugh. She makes you look like an infant.” He walked away.

Cookie danced. She didn’t want to think about the phone call. Didn’t want to think about any of it. Creep.

But there was the money.

The lights were hot, but the air conditioning cold. Her skin pebbled.

“Yo, darlin’, let’s you and me go to the back room,” the suit with the moustache and bad tie said. He was drunk. She knew the type. He’d slip his hands from the chair, try cop a feel, get pissed off when she called in Danny, refuse to pay.

“Well, now,” she said, in her special honey voice. “Let’s see if you’ve got the green,” and pushed her breasts together invitingly. He flicked a bill across her breasts. “A five won’t buy you much, baby.”

“Five’ll buy you, babydoll,” he said, hamming for his table buddies. One of them giggled. Ugly sound in a man, Cookie thought. “Five’ll buy you five times!”

“And how long did it take you to come up with that, honey?”

“The fuck?” He looked confused.

“I said, your brain must be smaller than your dick, which I’d guess is even smaller than your wallet, only I doubt that’s possible,” and she plucked the bill from his fingers, snapped it under her g-string and walked away.

In the dressing room she looked at herself in the mirror. Twenty-four was too old for this. Definitely. She had no idea what time it was.

She stuck her head out of the door. “Danny!”

“Yes, doll.”

“Time is it?” She’d have to get herself a watch someday. A nice expensive watch.

“Ten after,” Danny said.

“After what?”

“Ten.”

Three hours earlier on the West Coast. She stacked her night’s take, counted it, thought for a minute, peeled off two hundred in fives and ones. She stuck her head out of the door again. “Danny!”

“Here, doll.”

“I’m gone.”

“You sick?” He ambled up the corridor, stood breathing heavily by the door.

“Sick of this.”

“Mister Pergoletti says—”

“You tell Pergoletti to stick it. I’m gone. Seriously.” She handed him the wad of bills. “You take care of these girls, now. And have a good life.”

“Got something else lined up?”

“Guess we’ll find out.”

There was one bottle of beer in Cody’s fridge. She opened it, poured it carefully into a glass, stared at the beige foam. A glass: she never drank beer from a glass. She poured it down the sink. She had no idea what was real anymore but she was pretty sure alcohol would only make things worse.

She made green tea instead and settled down in the window seat. The sun hung low over the bay. What did Susanna see from her apartment? Was her ankle better? Contraceptive pills, Jesus. And, oh, the smell of her skin.

She was losing her mind.

She didn’t know who she hated more: Richard for making the proposal, or herself for accepting it. Or Susanna. Susanna had done it for money.

Or maybe . . . But what about those contraceptive pills?

And what if Susanna did feel . . . whatever it was? Did that make it real? It was all an experiment, all engineered. Fake.

But it didn’t feel fake. She wanted to cradle Susanna, kiss her ankle better, protect her from the world. The Richards of the world.

She picked up the phone, remembered for the tenth time she had neither address nor phone number. She called information, who told her there was no listing under Susanna Herrera in the Atlanta Metro area. She found herself unsurprised, though surprised at how little it mattered.

She got the number for the Golden Key instead.

A man called Pergoletti answered. “Cookie? She’s gone. They always go.” The music thumped. Cody’s insides vibrated in sympathy, remembering.

“—don’t have a number. Hey, you interested in a job?”

Cody put the phone down carefully. Sipped her tea. Picked up the phone again, and called Richard.

It was open mic night at Coffee to the People. Richard was in the back room on a sofa, as far from the music as possible. Two cups on the table. One still full.

“You knew I’d call.”

“I did.”

“Did you program that, too?”

“I didn’t program anything. I primed you—and only about the sex.” He patted the sofa. “Sit down before you fall down.”

She sat. Blinked. “Give me her phone number.”

“I can’t. She gave me a fake. I called her at the club, but she hung up on me.” He seemed put out.

“What does she know?”

“I talked fast. I don’t know how much she heard. But I told her she wouldn’t get the rest of the money until we’d done follow up.”

The singer in the other room sang of love and broken hearts. It was terrible, but it made Cody want to cry anyway.

“How long does it last?”

“Love? I don’t know. I avoid it where possible.”

“What am I going to do?”

Richard lifted his laptop bag. “I planned for this eventuality.” He took out a small white cardboard box. He opened it, shook something onto his hand. A grey plastic inhaler.

“What is it?”

“A vasopressin analogue, formulated to block oxytocin receptors in the nucleus accumbens. That is, the antidote.”

They both looked at it.

“It works in voles,” he said. “Female voles.”

Voles. “You said it tasted bad.”

“I’ve used it. Just in case. I prefer my sex without complications. And I’ve had a lot of sex and never once fallen in love.” He arched his eyebrows. “So, hey, it must work.”

The elephant whistle hypothesis. Hey, Bob, what’s that whistle? Well, Fred, it keeps elephants away. Don’t be an asshole, Bob, there aren’t any elephants around here. Well, Fred, that’s because of my whistle.

“Cody.” He did his best to look sincere. “I’m so very sorry. I never thought it would work. Not like this. But I do think the antidote might work.” His face went back to normal. He hefted the inhaler. “Though before I give it to you, I have a favor to ask.”

She stared at him. “On what planet do I owe you anything?”

“For science, then. A follow-up scan, and then another after you take the antidote.”

“Maybe I won’t take it. Give me the number.”

“Love is a form of insanity, you know.”

“The number.”

In the other room, the bad singing went on and on.

“Oh, all right. For old time’s sake.” He extracted a folder from his bag, and a piece of paper from the folder. He slid it across the table towards her, put the inhaler on top of it.

She nudged the inhaler aside, picked up the paper. Handwritten. Susanna’s writing.

“Love’s just biochemical craziness,” he said, “designed to make us take a leap in the dark, to trust complete strangers. It’s not rational.”

Cody said nothing.

“She screwed us.”

“She screwed you,” Cody said. “Maybe she fell in love with me.” But she took the inhaler.

Cody sat in the window seat with the phone and the form Susanna had filled in. Every now and again she punched in a different combination of the numbers Susanna had written and got the Cannot be completed as dialed voice. Every now and again she touched the form with the tip of her middle finger; she could feel the indentation made by Susanna’s strong strokes. Strong strokes, strong hands, strong mouth.

She didn’t think about the grey inhaler in its white box, which she had put in the fridge—to stay viable a long time, just in case.

After a while she stopped dialing and simply waited.

When her phone lit up at 11:46 she knew who it was—even before she saw the 404 area code on the screen.

“Do you feel it?” Susanna said.

“Yes,” and Cody did. Whatever it was, wherever it came from, it was there, as indelible as ink. She wanted to say, I don’t know if this is real, I don’t know if it’s good. She wanted to ask, Had you ever had sex with anyone for money before me? and, Does it matter? She wanted to know, Have you ever loved anyone before? and, How can you know?

She wanted to say, Will it hurt?

Walking through the crowds at the airport, Cody searched for the familiar face, felt her heart thump every time she thought she saw her. Panic, or love? She didn’t know. She didn’t know anything except that her throat ached.

Someone jostled her with his bag, and when she looked up, there was the back of that head, that smooth brown hair, so familiar, after just one night, and all her blood vessels seemed to expand at once, every cell leapt forward.

She didn’t move. This was it, the last moment. This was where she could just let the crowd carry her past, carry her away, out into the night. Walk away. Go home. Use the inhaler in the fridge.

That was the sensible thing. But the Cody who had hung from the ninth-story balcony, the Cody who had risked the Atlanta contract without a second thought, that Cody thought, Fuck it, and stepped forward. Will it hurt? You could never know.

OVERTIME

Charles Stross

All bureaucracies obey certain iron laws, and one of the oldest is this: get your seasonal leave booked early, lest you be trampled in the rush.

I broke the rule this year, and now I’m paying the price. It’s not my fault I failed to book my Christmas leave in time—I was in hospital and heavily sedated. But the ruthless cut and thrust of office politics makes no allowance for those who fall in the line of battle: “You should have foreseen your hospitalization and planned around it” said the memo from HR when I complained. They’re quite right, and I’ve made a note to book in advance next time I’m about to be abducted by murderous cultists or enemy spies.

I briefly considered pulling an extended sickie, but Brenda from Admin has a heart of gold; she pointed out that if I volunteered as Night Duty Officer over the seasonal period I could not only claim triple pay and time off in lieu, I’d also be working three grades above my assigned role. For purposes of gaining experience points in the fast-track promotion game they’re steering me onto, that’s hard to beat. So here I am, in the office on Christmas Eve, playing bureaucratic Pokémon as the chilly rain drums on the roof.

(Oh, you wondered what Mo thinks of this? She’s off visiting her ditz of a mum down in Glastonbury. After last time we agreed it would be a good idea if I kept a low profile. Christmas: the one time of year when you can’t avoid the nuts in your family muesli. But I digress.)

* * *

Christmas: the season of goodwill towards all men—except for bank managers, credit scoring agencies, everyone who works in the greeting card business, and dodgy men in red suits who hang out in toy shops and scare small children by shouting “ho ho HO!” By the time I got out of hospital in September the Christmas seasonal displays were already going up in the shops: mistletoe and holly and metallized tinsel pushing out the last of summer’s tanning lotion and Hawaiian shirts.

I can’t say I’ve ever been big on the English Suburban Christmas. First you play join-the-dots with bank holidays and what’s left of your annual leave, to get as many consecutive days off work as possible. Then instead of doing something useful and constructive with it you gorge yourself into a turkey-addled stomach-bloating haze, drink too much cheap plonk, pick fights with the in-laws, and fall asleep on the sofa in front of the traditional family-friendly crap the BBC pumps out every December 25th in case the wee ones are watching. These days the little ’uns are all up in their rooms, playing Chicks v. Zombies 8.0 with the gore dialled to splashy-giblets-halfway-up-the-walls (only adults bother watching TV as a social activity these days) but has Auntie Beeb noticed? Oh no they haven’t! So it’s crap pantomimes and Mary Poppins and re-runs of The Two Ronnies for you, sonny, whether you like it or not. It’s like being trapped in 1974 forever—and you can forget about escaping onto the internet: everybody else has had the same idea, and the tubes are clogged.

Alternatively you can spend Christmas alone in the office, where at least it’s quiet once everyone else has gone home. You can get some work done, or read a book, or surreptitiously play Chicks v. Zombies 8.0 with the gore dialled down to suitable-for-adults. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work . . . except when it doesn’t, like now.

Let’s rewind a week:

I’m pecking away at a quality assessment form on my office PC when there’s a knock at the door. I glance up. It’s Bill from Security. “Are you busy right now?” he asks.

“Um.” My heart just about skips a beat. “Not really . . .?”

Bill is one of our regular security officers: a former blue-suiter, salt-and-pepper moustache, silver comb-over, but keeps trim and marches everywhere like he’s still in the military. “It’s about your Christmas shift,” he says, smiling vaguely and hefting a bunch of keys the size of a hand grenade. “I’m supposed to show you the ropes, y’know? Seeing as how you’re on overnight duty next week.” He jangles the key ring. “If you can spare half an hour?”

My heartbeat returns to normal. I glance at the email on my computer screen: “Yeah, sure.” It’s taken me about five seconds to cycle from mild terror to abject relief; he’s not here to chew me out over the state of my trainers.

“Very good, sir. If you’d care to step this way?”

From Bill, even a polite request sounds a little like an order.

“You haven’t done the graveyard shift before, have you sir? There’s not a lot to it—usually. You’re required to remain in the building and on call at all times. Ahem, that’s within reason, of course: toilet breaks permitted—there’s an extension—and there’s a bunk bed. You probably won’t have to do anything, but in the unlikely event, well, you’re the night duty officer.”

We climb a staircase, pass through a pair of singularly battered fire doors, and proceed at a quick march along a puce-painted corridor with high wired-glass windows, their hinges painted shut. Bill produces his keyring with a jangling flourish. “Behold! The duty officer’s watch room.”

We are in the New Annexe, a depressing New Brutalist slab of concrete that sits atop a dilapidated department store somewhere south of the Thames: electrically heated, poorly insulated, and none of the window frames fit properly. My department was moved here nearly a year ago, while they rebuild Dansey House (which will probably take a decade, because they handed it over to a public-private partnership). Nevertheless, the fittings and fixtures of the NDO’s office make the rest of the New Annexe look like a futuristic marvel. The khaki-painted steel frame of the bunk, topped with green wool blankets, looks like something out of a wartime movie—there’s even a fading poster on the wall that says CARELESS LIPS SINK SHIPS.

“This is a joke. Right?” I’m pointing at the green-screen terminal on the desk, and the huge dial-infested rotary phone beside it.

“No sir.” Bill clears his throat. “Unfortunately the NDO’s office budget was misfiled years ago and nobody knows the correct code to requisition new supplies. At least it’s warm in winter: you’re right on top of the classified document incinerator room, and it’s got the only chimney in the building.”

He points out aspects of the room’s dubious architectural heritage while I’m scoping out the accessories. I poke at the rusty electric kettle: “Will anyone say anything if I bring my own espresso maker?”

“I think they’ll say ‘that’s a good idea,’ sir. Now, if you’d care to pay attention, let me talk you through the call management procedures and what to do in event of an emergency.”

* * *

The Laundry, like any other government bureaucracy, operates on a 9-to-5 basis—except for those inconvenient bits that don’t. The latter tend to be field operations of the kind where, if something goes wrong, they really don’t want to find themselves listening to the voicemail system saying, “Invasions of supernatural brain-eating monsters can only be dealt with during core business hours. Please leave a message after the beep.” (Supernatural? Why, yes: we’re that part of Her Majesty’s government that deals with occult technologies and threats. Certain abstruse branches of pure mathematics can have drastic consequences in the real world—we call them “magic”—by calling up the gibbering horrors with which we unfortunately share a multiverse [and the platonic realm of mathematical truth]. Given that computers are tools that can be used for performing certain classes of calculation really fast, it should come as no surprise that Applied Computational Demonology has been a growth area in recent years.)

My job, as Night Duty Officer, is to sit tight and answer the phone. In the unlikely event that it rings, I have a list of numbers I can call. Most of them ring through to duty officers in other departments, but one of them calls through to a special Army barracks in Hereford, another goes straight to SHAPE in Brussels—that’s NATO’s European theatre command HQ—and a third dials direct to the COBRA briefing room in Downing Street. Nobody in the Laundry has ever had to get the Prime Minister out of bed in the small hours, but there’s always a first time: more importantly, it’s the NDO’s job to make that call if a sufficiency of shit hits the fan on his watch.

I’ve also got a slim folder (labelled TOP SECRET and protected by disturbing wards that flicker across the cover like electrified floaters in the corners of my vision) that contains a typed list of codewords relating to secret operations. It doesn’t say what the operations are, but it lists the supervisors associated with them—the people to call if one of the agents hits the panic button.

I’ve got an office to hang out in. An office with a bunk bed like something out of a fifties Carry On film about conscript life in the army, a chimney for the wind to whistle down (the better to keep me awake), a desk with an ancient computer terminal (shoved onto the floor to make room for my laptop), and a kettle (there’s a bathroom next door with a sink, a toilet, and a shower that delivers an anemic trickle of tepid water). There’s even a portable black-and-white TV with a cheap Freeview receiver (this is the first year since they discontinued analog broadcasting) in case I feel compelled to watch reruns of The Two Ronnies.

All the modern conveniences, in other words. . . .

* * *

The Office Party is scheduled to take place on Wednesday afternoon, from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. sharp.

As civil servants, however irregular, we’re not paid enough to compete with the bankers and corporate Tarquins and Jocastas who fill most of the office blocks in this part of the city; even in these straitened times they can afford to drop a couple of hundred notes per head on bubbly. So we don’t get a posh restaurant outing: instead we have to tart up the staff canteen with some added tinsel, fake snow spray on the windows, and a molting pine tree in a pot by the fire exit.

Pinky and Brains kindly installed their home stereo—homemade, not homesized—in the number two lecture theatre, for the obligatory dance; Elinor and Beth (with a nod and a wink from Oversight) hit on an outside caterer for the sort of comestibles essential to a party and unheard-of in a civil service canteen (which could manage cupcakes and sherry trifle if push came to shove, but whose idea of pizza or curry is ghastly beyond belief).

There’s a Dunkirk spirit to the whole affair: with the new government in the driving seat, wielding the chainsaw of budget cuts, there’s not a lot of luxury to go round. But we’re good at make-do-and-mend in this department—it’s bred in our bureaucratic bones—and with the aid of a five hundred quid ents budget (to cover the hundred odd folks who work here), we make it work.

There is a humdrum ritual for an office Christmas party anywhere in England. The morning beforehand, work takes on a lackadaisical feel. Meetings are truncated by 11 a.m.; agendas updated, email filters set to vacation. Some folks—the few, the lucky—begin to clear their desk drawers, for they know they shall not be coming back to work until the new year. A wilted air of festivity wafts through the corridors of power, like a slightly moist crêpe banner.

“Bob?” I look up from my Minesweeper session: it’s Andy, my sometime manager, leaning in the doorway. “You coming to lunch?”

I stretch, then mouse over to the screen lock. “Is it that time already?” I don’t work for Andy these days, but he seems to take a proprietorial interest in how I’m doing.

“Yes.” His head bounces up and down. He looks slightly guilty, like a schoolboy whose been caught with his hands in the sweets jar once too often. “Is Mo . . .?”

“She’s off-site today.” I stand up. Actually she’s over in Research and Development, quaffing port with the double-domes, dammit—an altogether more civilized session than this one. “We were planning on meeting up later.”

“Well, come on then. Wouldn’t want to miss the decent seats for the floor show, would we?”

“Floor show?” I close the door behind us.

“Yes, we have a visitor from Forecasting Ops. I got the email a couple of days ago. One Dr. Kringle has condescended to descend and give us some sort of pep talk about the year ahead.”

“Kringle?” My cheek twitches. The name’s unfamiliar. “From Forecasting Ops? Who are they . . .” I’ve heard rumors about them, but nothing concrete: it’s probably one of those vague backwaters beavering away in isolation. Why on earth would they want to send someone to talk to us now?

“Yes, exactly.” Andy spares me a sidelong glance. “Don’t ask me, all I know is what I found in my inbox. Mail from HR, let him give a little motivational pep talk at the party. Don’t worry,” he adds quietly, “it’ll all work out for the best in the end. You’ll see. Just sit tight and bite your tongue.” I get it. Andy is wearing his bearer-of-bad-news face while steering me towards the junior officer’s bench. Something is about to come down the chute, and all the Christmas cheer in the world isn’t going to cover up the stench of manure. As a management-grade employee—albeit a junior one—I’m required to show solidarity. Hence being tipped the nod and a wink.

I begin to wonder what it can possibly be.

* * *

The Duty Officer’s room is upstairs, just under the gently pitched roof of the New Annexe. There’s a wired-shut skylight, and the wind howls and gibbers overhead: occasionally there’s a sound like gravel on concrete as an errant gust flings a cupful of freezing cold water at the glass, followed by a hollow booming noise from the chimney. The chimney is indeed warm, but it’s cooling fast: I guess they’ve shut down the incinerator over the holiday period. It’s just past eleven at night, and there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to sleep while the storm is blowing.

When the holiday falls on a weekend day (as Boxing Day does this year) everyone gets a day off in lieu at the beginning of the following week except the Night Duty Officer, who is in it for up to four days at triple pay—as long as he doesn’t go mad with boredom first.

I’ve been on duty for six hours and I’ve already caught up on my work email—at least, I’ve replied to everything that needs replying to, and am well into ignoring all the Powerpoints that need ignoring—and gotten bored with gaming. The TV’s on in the background, but it’s the same-old family-friendly fare. I don’t want to start on the two fat novels I’ve stockpiled for the weekend too early, so there’s only one thing to do. I abandon my cup of tea, pick up my torch, iPhone and warrant card, and tip-toe forth to poke my nose where it doesn’t belong.

’Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed,

The transom was shut, the staff home in repose;

The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,

But St. Nicholas won’t be coming because this is a Designated National Security Site within the meaning of Para 4.12 of Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act (Amended) and unauthorised intrusion on such a site is an arrestable offense . . .

Had enough of my poetry yet? That’s why they pay me to fight demons instead.

One of the perks of being Night Duty Officer is that I can poke my nose anywhere I like—after all, I’m responsible for the security of the building. In fact, I can go into places where I’d normally get my nasal appendage chopped right off if I had the temerity to sniff around without authorization. I can look inside Angleton’s office, tip-toe between the dangerously active canopic jars and warded optical workbenches of Field Service, walk the thickly carpeted, dusty corridors of Mahogany Row, and pester the night-shift zombies (sorry: of course I meant to say, Residual Human Resources) in the basement. In fact, I’m pretty much encouraged to keep an eye on things, just as long as I stay within range of the Duty Officer’s Phone.

You might think that’s a catch, but the Duty Officer’s Phone—once you unscrew the huge lump of Bakelite—is a remarkably simple piece of fifties-vintage electronics. It’s not even scrambled: the encryption is handled at the exchange level. So after a brisk fifteen minutes programming a divert into the PBX so it’ll ring through to my iPhone, I’m free to go exploring.

(Did you really think I was going to spend three days and nights nursing a land-line that hasn’t rung in sixteen years?)

* * *

Recipe for Office Christmas Party in the Season of Cuts:

Take:

28 junior administrative and secretarial staff

17 clerical and accounts officers

12 management grade officers

4 spies

5 human resources managers

9 building security staff

6 technical support officers

9 demonologists

(optional: 1 or more double-agents, ancient lurking horrors from beyond the stars, and zombies)

Add crêpe paper hats, whistles, party poppers, tinsel decorations, fairy lights, whoopee cushions, cocktail snacks, supermarket mince pies, and cheap wine and spirits to taste.

Mix vigorously (blender setting at “pre-Disco”) and pour into staff canteen that has been in urgent need of redecoration since 1977. Seat at benches. Punch repeatedly (not more than 10% alcohol by volume), serve the turkey, set fire to the Christmas pudding, discover fire extinguisher is six months past mandatory HSE inspection deadline, and suppress.

Allow to stand while Martin from Tech Support drunkenly invites Kristin from Accounts to audit his packet (during that gap in the hubbub when every other conversation stops simultaneously and you can hear a pin drop); Vera from Logistics asks Ayesha from HR if her presence at the party means that she’s finally found Jesus: and George from Security throws up in the Christmas tree tub.

And then . . .

Andy tings his knife on the edge of his glass repeatedly until everybody finally notices he’s trying to get their attention, at which point he stands up. I look wistfully at the tray of slightly stale mince pies in the middle of the table, and withdraw my hand.

“Quiet, please! First of all, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Facilities for organizing a party at short notice and under considerable budgetary constraints—a budget which is unavoidably much tighter than for last year’s festivities. Thanks to Amber and Lee for organizing the external catering, and to Dr. Kringle here for kindly approving our request for an entertainments budget—very generously, in view of the current Treasury strategic deficit reduction program.”

(Applause.)

“And now, Dr. Kringle has asked if he can say a few words to us all about the year ahead . . .”

* * *

I walk the darkened halls.

The New Annexe predates the fad for rat-maze cubicle farms in offices, but that never stopped anyone. The result is a curious architectural mixture of tiny locked offices hived off artificially lit corridors, alternating with barnlike open plan halls full of cheap desks and underpowered computers, their cases yellowing with age.

Here’s the vast expanse of what used to be the typing pool—so-called because in the old days there used to be officers here who couldn’t use a keyboard. These days it’s our administrative core, a place where civil servants come to die. The Laundry, perforce, must find work for many idle hands—the hands of everyone who comes to our attention and must needs be made a job offer they’re not allowed to refuse. Luckily bureaucracy breeds, and it takes many meetings to manage the added complexity of administration required by our chronic overstaffing. There are people here who I only know of through their Outlook calendars, which are perpetually logjammed. Entire departments beaver away in anonymous quiet, building paper dams to hold the real world at bay. I shine my torch across empty in-trays, battered chairs, desks that reek of existential pointlessness. I could have been trapped here for good, I realize. I shudder as I move on. Being part of the Laundry’s active service arm brings hazards of its own: but dying of boredom isn’t one of them.

I turn left and take a short cut through Mahogany Row. Here the carpet is thick, the woodwork polished rather than painted over. Individual offices with huge oak desks and leather recliners, walls hung with dark oil paintings of old hands in wartime uniform. Nobody is ever in any of these offices—rumor has it they all transcended, or were never human in the first place—these sinister and barely glimpsed senior officers who ran the organization from its early years.

(I’ve got my own theory about Mahogany Row, which is that the executives who would be here don’t exist yet. In the depths of the coming crisis, as the stars come into cosmic alignment and the old ones return to stalk the Earth, the organization will have to grow enormously bigger, taking on new responsibilities and more staff—at which point, those of us who survive are going to move on up here to direct the war effort. Assuming the powers that be have more sense than to fill the boardroom with the usual recycled corporate apparatchiks, that is. If they don’t, may Cthulhu have mercy on our souls.)

As I turn the corner past the executive lavatory and approach the fire door I have a most peculiar sensation. Why do I feel as if I’m being watched? I wonder. I clear my throat. “Duty Officer.” I reach into my pocket and pull out my warrant card: “Show yourself!”

The card glows pale green in the darkness; nothing stirs.

“Huh.” I palm it, feeling stupid. The night watchmen are about, but they’re not supposed to come up here. The wind and rain whooshes and rattles beyond the office windows.

I push the door open. It’s yet another administrative annexe, presumably for the executives’ secretaries. One of the copiers has a print job stacked facedown in the output tray. That strikes me as odd: given the nature of our work here, Security take a dim view of documents being left lying around. But Security won’t be making their rounds for a few days. Probably best to take the printouts and stick them in the internal post to whoever ran them off—or in a locked safe pending a chewing-out if it’s anything confidential.

I flip the first sheet over to look for the header page, and do a double take. Buttocks! Pretty damned hairy ones, at that. So someone was enjoying the party.

The next page features more buttocks, and they’re a lot less male, judging by the well-filled stockings and other identifying characteristics. I shake my head. I’m beginning to work out a response—I’m going to pin them on one of the staff notice boards, with an anonymous appeal for folks to wipe down the copier glass after each use—when I get to the third sheet.

Whoever sat on the copier lid that time didn’t have buttocks, hairy or otherwise—or any other mammalian features for that matter. What I’m holding looks to be a photocopy of the business end of a giant cockroach.

Maybe I’m not alone after all. . . .

* * *

After Kringle drops his turd in the punch bowl of seasonal spirit, the party officially ceases to be fun, even for drably corporate values of fun. My appetite evaporates, too: they can keep the pies for all I care. I grab a bottle of Blue Nun and tip-toe back towards my cubicle in the Counter Possession Unit.

Fuck. Mo isn’t here; she’s already headed off to see her mum. She’d understand, though. I’m on duty from tomorrow through Monday morning, and not supposed to leave the building. I was going to go home tonight—run the washing machine, pack a bag with clean clothes for the weekend, that sort of thing—but right now the urge to get blind falling-down drunk is calling me.

Because this is the last Christmas party at the Laundry.

I pull out my phone to call Mo, then pause. She’s got her hands full with mum right now. Why add to her worries? And besides, this isn’t a secure voice terminal: I can’t safely say everything that needs to be said. (The compulsion to confidentiality runs deep, backed up by my oath of office. To knowingly break it risks very unpleasant consequences.) I’m about to put my phone away when Andy clears his throat. He’s standing right behind me, an unlit cigarette pinched between two fingers. “Bob?”

I take another deep breath. “Yeah?”

“Want to talk?”

I nod. “Where?”

“The clubhouse . . .”

I follow him, out through a door onto the concrete balcony at the back of the New Annexe that leads to the external fire escape. We call it the clubhouse in jest: it’s where the smokers hang out, exposed to the elements. There’s a sand bucket half-submerged in scorched fag-ends sitting by the door. I wait while Andy lights up. His fingers are shaking slightly, I see. He’s skinny, tall, about five years older than me. Four grades higher, too, managing the head-office side of various ops that it’s not sensible to ask about. Wears a suit, watches the world from behind a slightly sniffy air of academic amusement, as if nothing really matters very much. But his detachment is gone now, blown away like a shred of smoke on the wind.

“What do you make of it?” he asks, bluntly.

I look at his cigarette, for a moment wishing I smoked. “It’s not looking good. As signs of the apocalypse go, the last office Christmas party ever is a bit of a red flag.”

Andy hides a cough with his fist. “I sincerely hope not.”

“What’s Kringle’s track record?” I ask. “Surely he’s been pulling rabbits out of hats long enough we can run a Bayesian analysis and see how well he . . .” I trail off, seeing Andy’s expression.

“He’s one of the best precognitives we’ve ever had, so I’m told. And what he’s saying backs up Dr. Mike’s revised time frame for CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN.” (The end of the world, when—in the words of the mad seer—the stars come right. It’s actually a seventy-year long window during which the power of magic multiplies monstrously, and alien horrors from the dark ages before the big bang become accessible to any crack-brained preacher with a yen to talk to the devil. We thought we had a few years’ grace: according to Dr. Mike our calculations are wrong, and the window began to open nine months ago.) “Something really bad is coming. If Kringle can’t see through to next December 24th, then, well, he probably won’t be alive then.”

“So he stares into the void, and the void stares back. Maybe he won’t be alive.” I’m clutching at straws. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance he’s just going to be run over by a bus?”

Andy gives me a Look, of a kind I’ve been beginning to recognize more since the business in Brookwood—infinite existential despair tempered with a goodly dose of rage against the inevitable, dammed up behind a stiff upper lip. To be fair, I’ve been handing out a fair number of them myself. “I have no idea. Frankly, it’s all a bit vague. Precog fugues aren’t deterministic, Bob: worse, they tend to disrupt whatever processes they’re predicting the outcome of. That’s why Forecasting Ops are so big on statistical analysis. If Kringle said we won’t see another Christmas party, you can bet they’ve rolled the dice more than the bare minimum to fit the confidence interval.”

“So preempt his prophecy already! Use the weak anthropic principle: if we cancel next year’s Christmas party, his prophecy is delayed indefinitely. Right?”

Andy rolls his eyes. “Don’t be fucking stupid.”

“It was a long shot.” (Pause.) “What are we going to do?”

“We?” Andy raises one eyebrow. “I am going to go home to the wife and kids for Christmas and try to forget about threats to our very existence for a bit. You”—he takes a deep gulp of smoke—“get to play at Night Duty Officer, patrolling the twilit corridors to protect our workplace from the hideous threat of the Filler of Stockings, who oozes through chimneys and ventilation ducts every Dead God’s Birthday-eve to perform unspeakable acts against items of hosiery. Try not to let it get to you—oh, and have a nice holiday while you’re at it.”

* * *

My appetite for nocturnal exploration is fading, tempered by the realization that I may not be the only one putting in some overtime in the office tonight. I reach for my ward—hung around my neck like an identity badge—and feel it. It tingles normally, and is cool. Good. If it was hot or glowing or throbbing I could expect company. It’s time to get back to the NDO room and regroup.

I tiptoe back the way I came, thinking furiously.

Item: It’s the night before Christmas, and backup is scarce to nonexistent.

Item: You can fool everyone at an office party with a class three glamour, but you can’t fool a photocopier.

Item: Kringle’s prophecy.

Item: We’re in CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, and things that too many people believe in have a nasty tendency to come true; magic is a branch of applied computation, neural networks are computing devices, there are too many people and the stars are right (making it much too easy to gain the attention of entities that find us crunchy and good with ketchup).

Item: Who or what kind of uninvited entity might want to sit in on Kringle’s little pep talk. . . .?

I’m halfway down the corridor through Mahogany Row, and I break into a run.

* * *

“Good afternoon, everyone.”

Kringle wrings his hands as he speaks; they’re curiously etiolated and pale-skinned, like those of a Deep One, but he lacks the hunched back or gills: there’s only the pallid, stringy hair and the thick horn-rimmed glasses concealing a single watery blue eye—the other is covered by a leather patch—to mark him out as odd. But his gaze . . .

“It will be a good afternoon, until I finish speaking.” He smiles like a hangman’s trapdoor opening. “So drink up now and be of good cheer, because this will be the last Christmas party held by the Laundry.”

Up to this point most folks have been ignoring him or listening with polite incomprehension. Suddenly, though, you could hear a mouse fart.

“You need have no fear of downsizing or treasury cuts to comply with the revised public spending guidelines.” His smile fades. “I speak of more fundamental, irrevocable changes.

“My department, Forecasting Operations, is tasked with attempting to evaluate the efficacy of proposed action initiatives in pursuit of the organization’s goals—notably, the prevention of incursions by gibbering horrors from beyond space-time. Policies are originated, put on the table—and we descry their consequences. It’s a somewhat hit-and-miss profession, but our ability to peer into the abyss of the future allows us to sometimes avoid the worst pitfalls.”

Kringle continues in this vein for some time. His voice is oddly soporific, and it takes me a while to figure out why: he reminds me of a BBC radio weather forecaster. They have this slot for the weather forecast right before the news, and try as I will I always zone out right before they get to whatever region I happen to be interested in and wake up as they’re finishing. It’s uncanny. Kringle is clearly talking about something of considerable importance, but my mind skitters off the surface of his words like a wasp on a plate glass window. I shake my head and begin to look round, when the words flicker briefly into focus.

“—Claus, or Santé Klaas in the mediaeval Dutch usage, a friendly figure in a red suit who brings presents in the depths of winter, may have a more sinister meaning. Think not only of the traditions of the Norse Odin, with which the figure of Santa Claus is associated, but with the shamanic rituals of Lap antiquity, performed by a holy man who drank the urine of reindeer that had eaten the sacred toadstool, Amanita Muscaria—wearing the bloody, flayed skin of the poisoned animals to gain his insight into the next year—we, with modern statistical filtering methodologies, can gain much more precise insights, but at some personal cost—”

Eh? I shake my head again, then take another mouthful from my paper cup of cheap plonk. The words go whizzing past, almost as if they’re tagged for someone else’s attention. Which is odd, because I’m trying to follow what he’s saying: I’ve got a peculiar feeling that this stuff is important.

“—particular, certain facts appear indisputable. There will be no Laundry staff Christmas dinner next year. We can’t tell you why, but as a result of events that I believe have already taken place this will be the last one. Indeed, attempts over the past year to investigate outcomes beyond this evening have met with abject failure: the end of this party is the last event that Forecasting Operations is able to predict with any degree of confidence. . . .”

* * *

I arrive back in the Duty Officer’s Room with a chilly sheen of sweat coating the small of my back. The light’s on, casting a cheery glow through the frosted glass window in the door, and the TV’s blathering happily away. I duck inside and shut it behind me, then grab the spare wooden chair and prop it under the door handle. My memory of Kringle’s talk seems altogether too disturbingly like a dream for my taste: even the conversation with Andy has an oddly vaporous feel to it. I’ve had this kind of experience before, and the only thing to do is to test it.

I plonk myself down behind the desk and unlock the drawer, then pull out the phone book. Rain rattles on the window above my head as I open it, an electric tingling in my fingertips reminding me that the wards on the cover are very much alive. Come on, where are you. . . . I run a shaky finger down the page. What I’m looking for isn’t there: the dog that didn’t bark in the night. I swallow, then I go back and search a different section for Andy’s home number. Yes, he’s listed—and he’s got a secure terminal. Time check: it’s twenty to midnight, not quite late enough to be seriously antisocial. I pick up the telephone receiver and begin to laboriously spin the dial. The phone rings three times.

“Andy?”

“Hello? Who is this?” It’s a woman’s voice.

“Er, this is Bob, from the office. I wonder, is Andy available? I won’t take a minute. . . .”

“Bob?” Andy takes the receiver. “Talk to me.”

I clear my throat. “Sorry to call you like this, but it’s about the office party. The guy who spoke to us, from Forecasting Operations. Do you remember his name, and have you ever dealt with him before?”

There’s a pause. “Forecasting Operations?” Andy sounds puzzled. My stomach clenches. “Who are they? I haven’t heard of any forecasting . . . what’s going on?”

“Do you remember our conversation in the clubhouse?” I ask.

“What, about personal development courses? Can’t it wait until next year?”

I glance back at the phone book. “Uh, I’ll get back to you. I think I’ve got a situation.”

I put the handset down very carefully, as if it’s made of sweating gelignite. Then I leaf through the phone book again. Nope, Forecasting Operations aren’t listed. And Andy doesn’t remember Dr. Kringle, or his lecture, or our conversation on the balcony.

I’ve got a very bad feeling about this.

Like the famous mad philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also; but if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn’t a C++ programmer.) Dr. Kringle was saying his department tests new policies, then read the future and change their plans in a hurry if things don’t work out for the best. Throwing scenarios into the void.

What if there was a Forecasting Operations Department . . . and when they stared into the void once too often, something bad happened? Something so bad that they unintentionally edited themselves out of existence?

I glance at the TV. It’s movie time, and tonight they’re running The Nightmare Before Christmas: Jack Skellington sings his soliloquy as he stands before the portal he’s opened to Christmas Town—

And that’s when I realize what’s going on.

* * *

It’s Christmas Eve, and the stars are Right.

Parents the world over still teach their children that if they’re good, Santa will bring them presents.

There are things out there in the void, hungry things hidden in the gaps between universes, that come when they’re called. Tonight, hundreds of millions of innocent children are calling Santa.

Who’s really coming down your chimney tonight?

* * *

It’s distinctly cold in the Duty Officer’s room. Which is odd, because it’s not that cold outside: it’s windy and raining heavily, but that’s London for you. I turn and stare at the aluminium duct-work that runs from floor to ceiling. That’s the incinerator shaft, isn’t it? It’s coated in beads of condensation. I reach a hand towards it, then pull my fingers back in a hurry. Cold air is spilling off the pipe in chilly waves, and as I glance at the floor I see a thin mist. I left a nearly empty cup of tea on the desk when I went on my nocturnal ramble: now I pick it up and throw the contents at the chimney. The drops of ice crackle as they hit the floor, and my ward is suddenly a burning-hot weight at the base of my throat.

I’m on my feet and over the other side of the desk before I have time to think. There’s an anomalously cold chimney in my office. Cold enough that the air is condensing on it. Cold enough that it sucks the heat out of a cup of tepid tea in milliseconds. But what does it mean? (Aside from: I’m in big trouble. That’s a given, of course.)

What it means is . . . there’s an incursion. Something’s coming down the chimney, something from the dark anthropic zone—from a corner of the multiverse drained of all meaning and energy. Let’s steal a facetious phrase from Andy and call it the Filler of Stockings: Lurker in Fireplaces, Bringer of Gifts. (Odin, Jòlnir, the King in Red. Pick your culture: prepare to die.) All it knows is that it’s cold and it’s hungry—and it wants inside.

These things gain energy from belief. This office, this organization—we’re its first target because we know it’s kind of old. If it can get a toehold anywhere, it’ll be here, but I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t have to believe—damn Kringle for coming and talking to us! If I can keep it out of the New Annexe until dawn it’ll be too late for the Bringer of Gifts to claw its way through the wall between the worlds, for this year at least. But if it’s already in the incinerator chimney—

I pull the chair out from under the door handle, grab my torch, and head out in a hurry.

* * *

Nighttime hijinks and explorations in the office take on a whole different significance when you know that it’s eighteen minutes to midnight and—by tradition—that’s when something hungry and unspeakably alien is going to break out of the incinerator in the basement, expecting to find a stocking and some midnight snacks to appease its voracious appetite.

Here’s the flip side of millions of sleeping believers-in-Santa providing an opening for something horrible to enter our cosmos: they expect him to go away again after he leaves the toys. The summoning comes with an implicit ritual of banishment. But you’ve got to get the ritual right. If you don’t, if you break your side of the bargain, the other party to the summoning is free to do whatever it wills.

Seventeen minutes to midnight. I’m in the admin pool again, and there’s the stationery cupboard. It’s locked, of course, and I spend a precious minute fumbling with the bunch of keys before I find one that fits. Inside the cupboard I find what I’m looking for: a box of pushpins. I move on, not bothering to lock it behind me—if I succeed, there’ll be time to tidy up later.

I bypass Mahogany Row and the sleeping ghosts of management to come, and head for the canteen. Maxine and her friends put some effort into preparing it for the party, and if I’m lucky—

Yup, I’m in luck. Nobody’s taken the decorations down yet. I turn the lights on, hunting around until I see it: a red-and-white stripy stocking stuffed with small cardboard boxes hangs from the corkboard by the dumb waiter. I grab it and dig the boxes out, nearly laddering it in my haste. The canteen’s bare, but the kitchen is next door, and I fumble for the key again, swearing under my breath (why aren’t these things clearly labeled?) until I get the door unlocked. The fridge is still humming. I get it open and find what I was hoping for—a tray of leftovers, still covered in cling-film.

Ten minutes. I run for the staircase, clutching stocking, pin box, and the tray of stale mince pies. In my pockets: conductive marker pen, iPhone loaded with the latest Laundry countermeasures package, and a few basic essentials for the jobbing computational demonologist. I’m still in time as I leg it down two stories. And then I’m at the basement doors. I pause briefly to review my plan.

Item: Get to the incinerator room without being stopped (optionally: eaten) by the night watch.

Item: Get the stocking pinned up above the incinerator, and place the pies nearby.

Item: Draw the best containment grid I can manage around the whole mess, and hope to hell that it holds.

What could possibly go wrong? I plant my tray on the floor, pull out my key ring, and unlock the door to the basement.

* * *

It’s funny how many of the pivotal events of my life take place underground. From the cellar of a secret Nazi redoubt to a crypt in the largest necropolis in Europe, via the scuppers of an ocean-going spy ship: seen ’em all, got the tour shirt. I’ve even visited the basement of the New Annexe a time or two. But it’s different at night, with the cold immanence of an approaching dead god clutching at your heart strings.

I walk down a dim, low-ceilinged passage lined with pipes and cable bearers, past doors and utility cupboards and a disturbingly coffinlike ready room where the night staff wait impassively for intruders. No stir of undead limbs rises to stop me—my warrant card sees to that. Forget ghostly illumination and handheld torches—I’m not stupid, I switched on the lights before I came down here. Nevertheless, it’s creepy. I’m not certain where the document incinerator lives, so I’m checking door plaques when I feel a cold draft of air on my hand. Glancing up, I see a frost-rimed duct, so I follow it until it vanishes into the wall beside a door with a wired-glass window which is glowing cheerily with light from within.

Looks like I’ve got company.

I’m about to put my tray down and fumble with the key ring when my unseen companion saves me the effort and opens the door. So I raise the tray before me, take a step forward, and say, “just who the hell are you really?”

“Come in, Mr. Howard. I’ve been expecting you.”

The thing that calls itself Dr. Kringle takes a step backwards into the incinerator room, beckoning. I stifle a snort of irritation. He’s taken the time to change into a cowled robe that hides his face completely—only one skeletal hand projects from a sleeve, and I can tell at a glance that it’s got the wrong number of joints. I lick my lips. “You can cut the Dickensian crap, Kringle—I’m not buying it.”

“But I am the ghost of Christmases probably yet to come!” Ooh, touchy!

“Yeah, and I’m the tooth fairy. Listen, I’ve got a stocking to put up, and not much time. You’re the precognitive, so you tell me: is this where you try to eat my soul or try to recruit me to your cult or something and we have to fight, or are you just going to stay out of my way and let me do my job?”

“Oh, do what you will; it won’t change the eventual outcome.” Kringle crosses his arms affrontedly. At least, I think they’re arms—they’re skinny, and there are too many elbows, and now I notice them I realize he’s got two pairs.

The incinerator is a big electric furnace, with a hopper feeding into it beside a hanging rack of sacks that normally hold the confidential document shreddings. I park the pie tray on top of the furnace (which is already cold enough that I risk frostbite if I touch it with bare skin) and hang the empty stocking from one of the hooks on the rack.

Ghastly hunger beyond human comprehension is the besetting vice of extradimensional horrors—if they prioritized better they might actually be more successful. In my experience you can pretty much bet that if J. Random Horror has just emerged after being imprisoned in an icy void for uncountable millennia, it’ll be feeling snackish. Hence the tempting tray of comestibles.

I glance at my watch: it’s four minutes to midnight. Then I eyeball the furnace control panel. Kringle is standing beside it. “So what’s the story?” I ask him.

“You already know most of it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” He sounds bored, as well he might. “Why don’t you tell me, while we wait?”

“Alright.” I point at him. “You’re here because you’re trapped in a time paradox. Once upon a time the Laundry had a Forecasting Ops department. But when you play chess with the future, you risk checkmate—not to mention being assimilated by that which you study. The first thing Forecasting Ops ever forecast was the probability of its own catastrophic capture by—something. So it was disbanded. But you can’t disband something like that without leaving echoes, can you? So you’re just an echo of a future that never happened.”

The spectral shade in its ragged robe bobs its head—or whatever it has in place of a head.

“The Christmas incursion—” I glance at the cold furnace again, then at my watch “—would have killed you. But without Forecasting Ops to warn us about it, it’d happen anyway, wouldn’t it?” Three minutes. “So you had to maneuver someone into position to deal with it even though you don’t exist.”

I remember sitting through a bizarre and interminable lecture at the Christmas party. But who else remembers sitting through it? Andy doesn’t remember Kringle’s talk. And I bet that aside from my own memories, and a weirdly smudged photocopy—emergent outcome of some distorted electron orbitals on a samarium-coated cylinder—there’s no evidence that the ghost of Christmases rendered-fictional-by-temporal-paradox ever visited the Laundry on a wet and miserable night.

So much for the emergency phone book. . . .

Two minutes. “How far into the future can you see right now?” I ask Kringle. I take a step forward, away from the furnace hopper. “Move aside,” I add.

Kringle doesn’t shift. “The future is here,” he says in a tone of such hollow, despairing dread that it lifts the hair on the back of my neck.

There’s a booming, banging sound inside the furnace. I squint: something writhes inside the tiny, smoke-dimmed inspection window. My watch is slow! There’s no time left. I step close to the control panel and, bending down, hastily scrawl a circle on the floor around my feet.

“Wait, where did the pies come from?” Kringle asks.

I complete the circuit. “The kitchen. Does it matter?”

“But you’re doomed!” He sounds puzzled.

Something is coming down the chimney, but it’s not dressed in fur from its head to its feet, and it doesn’t have twinkling eyes and dimpled cheeks.

“Nope,” I insist. I point at the bait: “And I intend to prove it.”

“But it ate you!” Kringle says indignantly. “Then we all died. I came to warn you, but did you listen? Nooo—”

The trouble with prophecies of your own demise is that, like risk assessments, if you pay too much attention to them they can become self-fulfilling. So I ignore the turbulent time-ghost and stare as the fat, greenish tip of one pseudopod emerges and, twitching, quests blindly towards the frozen pies on top of the furnace.

I stare for what feels like hours, but in reality is only a couple of seconds. Then, in a flashing moment, the tentacle lashes out and simultaneously engulfs all the pies, sucker-like mouths sprouting from its integument to snap closed around them.

The Filler of Stockings is clearly no exception to the hunger rule. Having fed, its questing tentacle slows, perhaps hampered by the bulges along its length: it lazily curls over towards the gaping, ice-rimed mouth of the stocking. Waves of coldness roll from it. As I draw breath it feels like I’m inhaling razor blades. The temperature in the room is dropping by double-digit degrees per second.

“What?” says Kringle. He sounds surprised: clearly this isn’t the future he signed up for back in time ghost central casting. “Who ate all the pies?”

I twist the handle of the main circuit breaker to the LIVE position, and stab at the green ON button with rapidly numbing fingers. “There were quite a lot left over,” I tell him helpfully, “after you spoiled everyone’s appetite with that speech.”

“No, that can’t be—”

There comes a deep hum and a rattle of ventilators, and the incinerator powers up. There follows a sizzling flash and a howling whoop of pain and fury as the Filler of Stockings, thwarted, tries to disentangle its appendage from the gas jets. To a many-angled one, we impoverished entities who are stranded in three-plus-one dimensions are fairly harmless; nevertheless, even the inhabitants of flatland can inflict a nasty paper cut upon the unwary on occasion.

My ward is alight, blazing like a flash bulb as it sears the skin on my chest: the tentacle sticking out of the furnace hopper combusts with a flash of fire and a horrible stench of burning calamari. Simultaneously, the shade of Dr. Kringle swirls and spirals from view, curling into the hopper even as a nacreous glow shines from inside, half-glimpsed things looping and writhing like colored worms within. The howling fades into a flatulent sigh, leaving a faint ringing in my ears, as of distant church bells. I take a deep breath as my ward dims, trying to get my terror-driven pulse back down to normal.

There’s something on the floor. I squint and bend forward, puzzled. And after a moment I see that the Filler of Stockings has left me a coal.

THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS

Ted Chiang

Chapter One

Her name is Ana Alvarado, and she’s having a bad day. She spent all week preparing for a job interview, the first one in months to reach the videoconference stage, but the recruiter’s face barely appeared onscreen before he told her that the company has decided to hire someone else. So she sits in front of her computer, wearing her good suit for nothing. She makes a halfhearted attempt to send queries to some other companies and immediately receives automated rejections. After an hour of this, Ana decides she needs some diversion: she opens a Next Dimension window to play her current favorite game, Age of Iridium.

The beachhead is crowded, but her avatar is wearing the coveted mother-of-pearl combat armor, and it’s not long before some players ask her if she wants to join their fireteam. They cross the combat zone, hazy with the smoke of burning vehicles, and for an hour they work to clear out a stronghold of mantids; it’s the perfect mission for Ana’s mood, easy enough that she can be confident of victory but challenging enough that she can derive satisfaction from it. Her teammates are about to accept another mission when a phone window opens up in the corner of Ana’s video screen. It’s a voice call from her friend Robyn, so Ana switches her microphone over to take the call.

“Hey Robyn.”

“Hi Ana. How’s it going?”

“I’ll give you a hint: right now I’m playing AoI.”

Robyn smiles. “Had a rough morning?”

“You could say that.” Ana tells her about the canceled interview.

“Well, I’ve got some news that might cheer you up. Can you meet me in Data Earth?”

“Sure, just give me a minute to log out.”

“I’ll be at my place.”

“Okay, see you soon.” Ana excuses herself from the fireteam and closes her Next Dimension window. She logs on to Data Earth, and the window zooms in to her last location, a dance club cut into a giant cliff face. Data Earth has its own gaming continents—Elderthorn, Orbis Tertius—but they aren’t to Ana’s taste, so she spends her time here on the social continents. Her avatar is still wearing a party outfit from her last visit; she changes to more conventional clothes and then opens a portal to Robyn’s home address. A step through and she’s in Robyn’s virtual living room, on a residential aerostat floating above a semicircular waterfall a mile across.

Their avatars hug. “So what’s up?” says Ana.

“Blue Gamma is up,” says Robyn. “We just got another round of funding, so we’re hiring. I showed your resume around, and everyone’s excited to meet you.”

“Me? Because of my vast experience?” Ana has only just completed her certificate program in software testing. Robyn taught an introductory class, which is where they met.

“Actually, that’s exactly it. It’s your last job that’s got them interested.”

Ana spent six years working at a zoo; its closure was the only reason she went back to school. “I know things get crazy at a startup, but I’m sure you don’t need a zookeeper.”

Robyn chuckles. “Let me show you what we’re working on. They said I could give you a peek under NDA.”

This is a big deal; up until now, Robyn hasn’t been able to give any specifics about her work at Blue Gamma. Ana signs the NDA, and Robyn opens a portal. “We’ve got a private island; come take a look.” They walk their avatars through.

Ana’s half expecting to see a fantastical landscape when the window refreshes, but instead her avatar shows up in what looks at first glance to be a daycare center. On second glance, it looks like a scene from a children’s book: there’s a little anthropomorphic tiger cub sliding colored beads along a frame of wires; a panda bear examining a toy car; a cartoon version of a chimpanzee rolling a foam rubber ball.

The onscreen annotations identify them as digients, digital organisms that live in environments like Data Earth, but they don’t look like any that Ana’s seen before. These aren’t the idealized pets marketed to people who can’t commit to a real animal; they lack the picture-perfect cuteness, and their movements are too awkward. Neither do they look like inhabitants of Data Earth’s biomes: Ana has visited the Pangaea archipelago, seen the unipedal kangaroos and bidirectional snakes that evolved in its various hothouses, and these digients clearly didn’t originate there.

“This is what Blue Gamma makes? Digients?”

“Yes, but not ordinary digients. Check it out.” Robyn’s avatar walks over to the chimp rolling the ball and crouches down in front of it. “Hi Pongo. Whatcha doing?”

“Pongo pliy bill,” says the digient, startling Ana.

“Playing with the ball? That’s great. Can I play too?”

“No. Pongo bill.”

“Please?”

The chimp looks around and then, never letting go of the ball, toddles over to a scattering of wooden blocks. It nudges one of them in Robyn’s direction. “Robyn pliy blicks.” It sits back down. “Pongo pliy bill.”

“Okay then.” Robyn walks back over to Ana.“What do you think?”

“That’s amazing. I didn’t know digients had come so far.”

“It’s all pretty recent; our dev team hired a couple of PhDs after seeing their conference presentation last year. Now we’ve got a genomic engine that we call Neuroblast, and it supports more cognitive development than anything else currently out there. These fellows here”—she gestures at the daycare center inhabitants—“are the smartest ones we’ve generated so far.”

“And you’re going to sell them as pets?”

“That’s the plan. We’re going to pitch them as pets you can talk to, teach to do really cool tricks. There’s an unofficial slogan we use in-house: ‘All the fun of monkeys, with none of the poop-throwing.’ ”

Ana smiles. “I’m starting to see where an animal-training background would be handy.”

“Yeah. We aren’t always able to get these guys to do what they’re told, and we don’t know how much of that is in the genes and how much is just because we aren’t using the right techniques.”

She watches as the panda-shaped digient picks up the toy car with one paw and examines the underside; with its other paw it cautiously bats at the wheels. “How much do these digients start out knowing?”

“Practically nothing. Let me show you.” Robyn activates a video screen on one wall of the daycare center; it displays footage of a room decorated in primary colors with a handful of digients lying on the floor. Physically they’re no different from the ones in the daycare center now, but their movements are random, spasmodic. “These guys are newly instantiated. It takes them a few months subjective to learn the basics: how to interpret visual stimuli, how to move their limbs, how solid objects behave. We run them in a hothouse during that stage, so it all takes about a week. When they’re ready to learn language and social interaction, we switch to running them in real time. That’s where you would come in.”

The panda pushes the toy car back and forth across the floor a few times, and then makes a braying sound, mo mo mo. Ana realizes that the digient is laughing. Robyn continues, “I know you studied primate communication in school. Here’s a chance to put that to use. What do you think? Are you interested?”

Ana hesitates; this is not what she envisioned for herself when she went to college, and for a moment she wonders how it has come to this. As a girl she dreamed of following Fossey and Goodall to Africa; by the time she got out of grad school, there were so few apes left that her best option was to work in a zoo; now she’s looking at a job as a trainer of virtual pets. In her career trajectory you can see the diminution of the natural world, writ small.

Snap out of it, she tells herself. It may not be what she had in mind, but this is a job in the software industry, which is what she went back to school for. And training virtual monkeys might actually be more fun than running test suites, so as long as Blue Gamma is offering a decent salary, why not?

His name is Derek Brooks, and he’s not happy with his current assignment. Derek designs the avatars for Blue Gamma’s digients, and normally he enjoys his job, but yesterday the product managers asked him for something he considers a bad idea. He tried to tell them that, but the decision is not his to make, so now he has to figure out how to do a decent job of it.

Derek studied to be an animator, so in one respect creating digital characters is right up his alley. In other respects, his job is very different from that of a traditional animator. Normally he’d design a character’s gait and its gestures, but with digients those traits are emergent properties of the genome; what he has to do is design a body that manifests the digients’ gestures in a way that people can relate to. These differences are why a lot of animators—including his wife Wendy—don’t work on digital lifeforms, but Derek loves it. He feels that helping a new lifeform express itself is the most exciting work an animator could be doing.

He subscribes to Blue Gamma’s philosophy of AI design: experience is the best teacher, so rather than try to program an AI with what you want it to know, sell ones capable of learning and have your customers teach them. To get customers to put in that kind of effort, everything about the digients has to be appealing: their personalities need to be charming, which the developers are working on, and their avatars need to be cute, which is where Derek comes in. But he can’t simply give the digients enormous eyes and short noses. If they look like cartoons, no one will take them seriously. Conversely, if they look too much like real animals, their facial expressions and ability to speak become disconcerting. It’s a delicate balancing act, and he has spent countless hours watching reference footage of baby animals, but he’s managed to design hybrid faces that are endearing but not exaggeratedly so.

His current assignment is a bit different. Not satisfied with cats, dogs, monkeys, and pandas, the product managers have decided that there needs to be more variety among the avatars, something other than baby animals. They suggest robots.

The idea makes no sense to Derek. Blue Gamma’s entire strategy relies on people’s affinity for animals. The digients learn through positive reinforcement, the way animals do, and their rewards include interactions like being scratched on the head or receiving virtual food pellets. These make perfect sense with an animal avatar, but with a robot avatar they look comical and forced. If they were selling physical toys, robots would have the advantage of being cheaper to build than plausible animals, but production costs don’t matter in the virtual realm, and animal faces are more expressive. Providing robotic avatars seems like offering imitations at the same time that you’re selling the real thing.

His train of thought is interrupted by a knock at his doorway; it’s Ana, the new member of the testing team. “Hey Derek, you should watch the video of this morning’s training session. They were pretty funny.”

“Thanks, I’ll check them out.” She’s about to leave, but then stops. “You look like you’re having a bad day.”

Derek thinks hiring a former zookeeper was a good idea. Not only did she devise a training program for the digients, she had a great suggestion about improving their food.

Other digient vendors provide a limited variety of digient food pellets, but Ana suggested that Blue Gamma radically open up the forms that digient food takes; she pointed out that a varied diet keeps zoo animals happier and makes feeding time more fun for visitors. Management agreed, and the development team edited the digients’ basic reward map to recognize a wide range of virtual foods; they couldn’t actually simulate different chemical compounds—Data Earth’s physics simulation is nowhere near good enough for that—but they added parameters to stand in for a food’s taste and texture, and designed an interface for the food-dispensing software allowing users to concoct their own recipes. It’s turned out to be a big success; the individual digients each have their own favorites, and the beta testers report that they love catering to their digient’s preferences.

“Management decided that the animal avatars aren’t enough,” says Derek. “They want robot avatars, too. Can you believe it?”

“That sounds like a good idea,” says Ana.

He’s surprised. “You really think so? I’d have thought you’d prefer the animal avatars.”

“Everyone here thinks of the digients as animals,” she says.“The thing is, the digients don’t behave like any real animal. They’ve got this non-animal quality to them, so it feels like we’re dressing them in circus costumes when we try to make them look like monkeys or pandas.”

It hurts a little to hear his carefully crafted avatars compared to circus costumes. His face must give him away because she adds, “Not that the average person would notice. It’s just that I’ve spent a lot more time with animals than most people.”

“That’s okay,” he says.“I appreciate hearing a different perspective.”

“Sorry. The avatars look great, honestly. I like the tiger cub especially.”

“It’s fine. Really.”

She gives an apologetic wave and walks down the hall, while Derek thinks about what she said.

Perhaps he’s gotten too wrapped up in the animal avatars, so much so that he’s begun thinking of the digients as something they’re not. Ana’s right, of course, that the digients aren’t animals any more than they’re traditional robots, and who’s to say that either analogy is more accurate than the other? If he works from the premise that a robotic avatar is just as good a way for this new lifeform to express itself as an animal avatar, then perhaps he’ll be able to design an avatar he’s happy with.

A year later, and Blue Gamma is days away from its big product launch. Ana is at work in her cubicle, across the aisle from Robyn’s; they sit with their backs to each other, but right now both of their video screens are displaying Data Earth, where their avatars stand side by side. Nearby, a dozen digients scamper around a playground, chasing each other over a tiny bridge or under it, climbing up a short flight of steps and sliding down a ramp. These digients are the release candidates; in a few days, they—or close approximations thereof—will be available for purchase to customers throughout the overlapping realms of the real world and Data Earth.

Rather than teach the digients any new behaviors at this late date, Ana and Robyn are supposed to keep the digients in practice with what they’ve already learned. They’re in the middle of a session when Mahesh, one of the co-founders of Blue Gamma, walks past their cubicles. He pauses to watch. “Don’t mind me; keep doing what you’re doing. What’s today’s skill?”

“Shape identification,” says Robyn. She instantiates a scattering of colored blocks on the ground in front of her avatar. To one of the digients, she says, “Come here, Lolly.” A lion cub toddles over from the playground.

Meanwhile Ana calls over Jax, whose avatar is a neo-Victorian robot made of polished copper. Derek did a great job designing it, from the proportions of the limbs to the shape of the face; Ana thinks Jax is adorable. She likewise instantiates a selection of colored blocks with different shapes, and directs Jax’s attention to them.

“See the blocks, Jax? What shape is the blue one?”

“Tringle,” says Jax.

“Good. What shape is the red one?”

“Squir.”

“Good. What shape is the green one?”

“Circle.”

“Good job, Jax.” Ana gives him a food pellet, which he devours with enthusiasm.

“Jax smirt,” says Jax.

“Lolly smirt too,” Lolly volunteers.

Ana smiles and rubs them on the backs of their heads. “Yes, you’re both very smart.”

“Both smirt,” says Jax.

“That’s what I like to see,” says Mahesh.

The release candidates are the final distillation of countless trials, the cream of the crop in terms of teachability. It’s partly been a search for intelligence, but just as much it’s been a search for temperament, the personality that won’t frustrate customers. One element of that is the ability to play well with others. The development team has tried to reduce hierarchical behavior in the digients—Blue Gamma wants to sell a pet that owners won’t need to continually reassert their dominance over—but that doesn’t mean competition never arises. The digients love attention, and if one notices that Ana’s giving praise to another, it tries to get in on the action. Most of the time this is fine, but whenever a digient seemed particularly resentful of its peers or of Ana, she would flag it and its specific genome would be excluded from the next generation. The process has felt a bit like breeding dogs, but more like working in an enormous test kitchen, baking endless batches of brownies and sampling each one’s toothsomeness to find the perfect recipe.

The current instances of the release candidates will be kept as mascots, and copies will be available for purchase, but the expectation is that most people will buy younger digients, when they’re still prelinguistic. Teaching your digient how to talk is half the fun; the mascots primarily serve as examples of the kind of results you can expect. Selling prelinguistic digients also allows them to be sold in non-English-speaking markets, even though Blue Gamma only had enough staff to raise mascots in English.

Ana sends Jax back to the playground, and calls over a panda-bear digient named Marco. She’s about to start testing his shape recognition when Mahesh points to one corner of her video screen. “Hey, look at that.” A couple of digients are on the hill next to the playground, rolling down the slope.

“Hey, cool,” she says. “I’ve never seen them do that before.” She walks her avatar over to the hill, with Jax and Marco following and then joining the rest of the digients. The first time Jax tries it, he stops rolling almost immediately, but after a little practice he’s able to make it all the way down the hill. He does that a few times and then runs back to Ana.

“Ana watch?” asks Jax. “Jax spinning lying din!”

“Yes, I saw you! You were rolling down the hill!”

“Rilling din hill!”

“You did great.” She rubs him on the back of his head again. Jax runs back and resumes rolling. Lolly has also taken to the new activity with enthusiasm. Once she’s reached the bottom of the hill, she keeps rolling across the flat ground, and then hits one of the playground bridges.

“Eeh, eeh, eeh,” Lolly says. “Fuck.” Suddenly everyone’s attention is on Lolly. “Where did she learn that?” asks Mahesh.

Ana toggles her microphone off, and walks her avatar over to comfort Lolly. “I don’t know,” she says. “She must have overheard it.”

“Well, we can’t sell a digient that says ‘fuck.’ ”

“I’m on it,” says Robyn. In a separate window on her own screen, she brings up the archives of their training sessions and runs a search on the audio track. “Looks like that’s the first time any of the digients has said it. As for when any of us has said it . . .” The three of them watch as search results accumulate in the window; it appears that the culprit is Stefan, one of the trainers from Blue Gamma’s Australian office. Blue Gamma has people working in Australia and England to train the digients when the West Coast office is closed; the digients don’t need to sleep—or, more precisely, the integration processing that’s their analog to sleep can be run at high speed—so they can be trained twenty-four hours a day.

They review the video footage of every time Stefan said the word ‘fuck’ during a training session. The most dramatic outburst is from three days ago; it’s hard to be sure from watching his Data Earth avatar, but it sounds like he banged his knee against his desk. There are previous examples going weeks back, but none as loud or prolonged.

“What do you want us to do?” asks Robyn.

The tradeoff is apparent. This close to the release date, they don’t have time to repeat weeks of training; should they gamble that the earlier utterances didn’t make an impression on the digients? Mahesh thinks for a moment, and then decides. “Okay. Roll them back three days and pick up from there.”

“All of them?” says Ana. “Not just Lolly?”

“We can’t take the chance; roll them all back. And I want a keyword flagger running on every training session from now on. The next time any of you curses, roll all of them back to the last checkpoint.”

So the digients lose three days of experience. Including the first time they rolled down a hill.

Chapter Two

Blue Gamma’s digients are a hit. Within the first year of release, a hundred thousand customers buy them and—more importantly—keep them running. Blue Gamma is gambling on a “razor and blades” business model, because just selling the digients wouldn’t recoup the development costs; instead, the company charges customers each time they make digient food, and thus maintains a revenue stream for as long as the digients remain entertaining to their owners. And so far, the customers are finding them enormously entertaining, keeping them running all day long. It’s common for customers to run the integration processing slowly, so the digients sleep the entire night, but some run it at high speed, so their digients are awake almost all the time; they share their digients in cooperation with people in other time zones, enabling them to mature more rapidly. Scores of digient playgrounds and daycare centers appear across Data Earth’s social continents, and public-events calendars become dotted with group playdates, training classes, and talent contests. Some owners even bring their digients to the racing zones and let them ride in their vehicles. The virtual world acts as a global village for raising the digients, a social fabric into which a new category of pet is woven.

Half of the digients that Blue Gamma sells are one-offs, having a genome that’s randomly generated while remaining within the parameters chosen during the breeding process. The other half are copies of the mascots, but the company takes pains to remind buyers that each copy will develop differently depending on its environment. As an illustration of this, Blue Gamma’s sales team points to Marco and Polo, two of the company’s mascots. Both are instances of the exact same genome and both have panda-bear avatars, but they have distinctly different personalities. Marco was two years old when Polo was instantiated, and Polo latched on to him as a kind of older brother; the two are inseparable now, but Marco is more outgoing while Polo is more cautious, and no one expects that Polo will turn into Marco any time soon.

Blue Gamma’s mascots are the oldest Neuroblast digients running, and management originally hoped they would provide the test team with a preview of digient behavior before customers encountered it. In practice, it hasn’t worked out that way; there’s no way to predict how digients raised in a thousand different settings will turn out. In a very real sense, each digient owner is exploring new territory, and they turn to each other for help. Online forums for digient owners spring up, filled with anecdotes and discussion, advice sought and given.

Blue Gamma has a customer liaison whose job is to read the forums, but Derek sometimes follows the forums on his own, after work. Sometimes customers talk about the digients’ facial expressions, but even when they don’t, Derek enjoys reading the anecdotes.

FROM: Zoe Armstrong

You won’t believe what my Natasha did today! We were at the playground, and another digient hurt himself when he fell and was crying. Natasha gave him a hug to make him feel better, and I praised her to high heaven. Next thing I know, she pushes over another digient to make him cry, hugs him, and looks to me for praise!

The next post he reads attracts his attention:

FROM: Andrew Nguyen

Are some of the digients just not as smart as others? My digient doesn’t respond to my commands the way I’ve seen other people’s do.

He looks at the customer’s public profile, and sees that the avatar is an endless shower of gold coins; the coins bounce off each other so that their trajectories suggest a highly abstract human figure. It’s a dazzling piece of animation, but Derek suspects that the user hasn’t read Blue Gamma’s recommendations on raising the digients. He posts a reply:

FROM: Derek Brooks

When you’re playing with your digient, are you wearing the avatar that’s displayed in your profile? If you are, one problem is that your avatar doesn’t have a face. Set your camera to track your facial expressions and wear an avatar that can display them, and you’ll get a much better response from your digient.

He continues to browse. A minute later, he sees another question that he finds interesting:

FROM: Natalie Vance

My digient Coco is a Lolly, a year-and-a-half old. Lately she’s been really naughty. Never does what I tell her to, driving me crazy. She was an absolute doll a few weeks ago, so I tried restoring her from a checkpoint, but it doesn’t last. I’ve tried it twice now, and she still ends up with the same naughty attitude. (It took a little longer the second time, though.) Has anyone had a similar experience? I’m especially interested if you have a Lolly. How far back did you need to roll back to get around the problem?

There are several replies in which people suggest ways to isolate what specifically triggered Coco’s change in mood and then work around it. He’s about to post a reply of his own, to the effect that a digient is not a videogame that you replay until you get a perfect score, when he sees a response from Ana:

FROM: Ana Alvarado

I can sympathize, because I’ve seen the exact same thing. It’s not specific to the Lollys, it’s something that a lot of digients go through. You can keep trying to work around episodes like this, but I suspect they’re unavoidable, and you’ll just wind up spending months on a digient that never gets any older. Or you can push through the rough patch and have a more mature digient when you come out the other side.

He’s heartened to read this. The practice of treating conscious beings as if they were toys is all too prevalent, and it doesn’t just happen to pets. Derek once attended a holiday party at his brother-in-law’s house, and there was a couple there with an eight-year-old clone. He felt sorry for the boy every time he looked at him. The child was a walking bundle of neuroses, the result of growing up as a monument to his father’s narcissism. Even a digient deserves more respect than that.

He sends Ana a private message, thanking her for her post. Then he notices that the customer with the faceless avatar has responded to his suggestion.

FROM: Andrew Nguyen

The hell with that. I paid good money for this avatar, and I bought it specifically to wear when I’m on the social continents. I’m not going to stop wearing it for a digient.

Derek sighs; there’s probably no chance of changing the man’s mind, but hopefully he’ll just suspend his digient rather than do a bad job of raising it. Blue Gamma has done what it can to minimize abuses; all the Neuroblast digients are equipped with pain circuit-breakers, which renders them immune to torture and thus unappealing to sadists. Unfortunately, there’s no way to protect the digients from things like simple neglect.

Over the next year, other companies begin marketing their own genomic engines that support language learning. None of them can match Neuroblast’s popularity on the Data Earth platform, although on other platforms the situation is different. On Next Dimension, the Origami engine becomes dominant; on Anywhere, it’s an engine called Faberge. Fortunately, Blue Gamma has inspired companies to offer complementary products as well as competing ones.

Today half of the company’s employees are crowded into the reception area: managers, developers, testers, designers. They’re here because a highly anticipated delivery has finally arrived; a shipping carton the size of a large suitcase sits in front of the receptionist’s desk.

“Let’s open it up,” says Mahesh.

Ana and Robyn pull the tabs on the shipping carton, separating it into eight blocks of cellulose foam that hinge open. The resident of this custom sarcophagus is a robot body, newly arrived from the fabrication facility. The robot is humanoid in shape but small, less than three feet in height, to keep the inertia of its limbs low and allow it a moderate amount of agility. Its skin is glossy black and its head is disproportionately large, with a surface mostly occupied by a wraparound display screen.

The robot is from SaruMech Toys. A number of companies have sprung up to offer services targeting digient owners, but SaruMech is the first one with a hardware product instead of software. They’ve sent an example of their product to Blue Gamma in hopes of an endorsement.

“Which mascot got the high score?” asks Mahesh. He’s referring to the agility trials. Last week all the digients were given test avatars whose weight distribution and range of motion matched the robot body’s; they’ve spent some time each day wearing the avatars, practicing moving around in them. Yesterday Ana scored the digients on their ability to lay on their backs and then rise to their feet, ascend and descend stairs, balance on one leg and then the other. It was like conducting a sobriety test for a bunch of toddlers.

“That was Jax,” says Ana.

“Okay, get him ready.”

The receptionist relinquishes his workspace to Ana, who logs into Data Earth from there and calls Jax over. Jax is lucky because the test avatar isn’t radically different from his own; it’s bulkier, but the limbs and torso have similar proportions. By contrast, the digients who grew up wearing panda-bear and tiger-cub avatars have been having more difficulty.

Robyn checks the diagnostics panel on the robot. “Looks like we’re good to go.” Ana opens a portal in the gymnasium onscreen, and gestures to Jax. “Okay Jax, come on in.”

Onscreen, Jax steps through the portal, and in the reception area the little robot comes alive. The robot’s head lights up to display Jax’s face, turning the oversized head into a bubble helmet he’s wearing. The design is a way of maintaining the resemblance to the digient’s original avatar without having to produce custom bodies. Jax looks like a copper robot wearing a suit of obsidian armor.

Jax turns around to take in the entire room. “Wow.” He stops turning. “Wow wow. Sound different. Wow wow wow.”

“It’s okay, Jax,” says Ana. “Remember, I told you your voice might sound different in the outside world.” The information packet from SaruMech had warned about this; a metal and plastic chassis conducts sound in a way that avatars in Data Earth don’t.

Jax looks up to face Ana, and she marvels at the sight of him. She knows that he’s not really in the body—Jax’s code is still being run on the network, and this robot is just a fancy peripheral—but the illusion is perfect. And even after all their interaction in Data Earth, it’s thrilling to have Jax stand in front of her and look her in the eye.

“Hi Jax,” she says. “It’s me, Ana.”

“You wear different avatar,” Jax says.

“In the outside world, we call it a ‘body,’ not an ‘avatar.’ And people don’t switch their bodies here; we can only do that in Data Earth. Here we always wear the same body.”

Jax pauses to consider that. “You look this always?”

“Well, I can wear different clothes. But yes, this is the way I look.”

Jax walks over for a closer view, and Ana squats, elbows on knees, so they’re almost the same height. Jax peers at her hands, and then her forearms; she’s wearing short sleeves. He brings his head closer, and Ana can hear the faint whir of the robot’s camera eyes refocusing. “Little hairs on your arms,” he says.

She laughs; her avatar has arms as smooth as a baby’s. “Yes, there are.”

Jax brings up a hand and extends a thumb and forefinger to grab some of the hairs. He makes a couple of attempts, but like the pincers of a claw vending machine, his fingers keep slipping off. Then pinches her skin and pulls back.

“Ow. Jax, that hurts.”

“Sorry.” Jax scrutinizes Ana’s face. “Little little holes all over your face.”

Ana can feel the amusement of the others in the room. “Those are called ‘pores,’ ” she says, standing. “We can talk about my skin later. Right now why don’t you take a look around the room?”

Jax turns and slowly walks around the lobby, a miniature astronaut exploring an alien world. He notices the window looking out onto the parking lot, and heads toward it.

Afternoon sunlight slants through the glass. Jax steps into the sunbeam, and abruptly backs out of it. “What that?”

“That’s the sun. It’s just like the one in Data Earth.”

Jax cautiously steps into the light again. “Not like. This sun bright bright bright.”

“That’s true.”

“Sun not need be bright bright bright.”

Ana laughs. “I suppose you’re right.”

Jax walks back over to her and looks at the fabric of her pants. Tentatively, she rubs the back of his head. The tactile sensors in the robot body are obviously working, because Jax leans into her hand; she can feel the weight of him, the dynamic resistance of his actuators. Then Jax hugs her around her thighs.

“Can I keep him?“she says to the others. “He followed me home.” Everyone laughs.

“You say that now,” says Mahesh, “but wait until he flushes your hand towels down the toilet.”

“I know, I know,” says Ana. There were many reasons Blue Gamma targeted the virtual realm instead of the real one—lower cost, ease of social networking—but one was the risk of property damage; they couldn’t sell a pet that might tear down your actual Venetian blinds or make mayonnaise castles on your actual rug. “I just think it’s cool to see Jax this way.”

“You’re right, it is. For SaruMech’s sake, though, I hope the experience translates well onto video.” SaruMech Toys doesn’t plan to sell the robot bodies, but to rent them for a few hours at a time. Digients will be given use of bodies at a facility outside of Osaka and taken on a field trip into the real world, while the owners watch via cameras mounted on micro-zeppelins. Ana feels a sudden urge to go work for them; seeing Jax this way reminds her of how much she misses the physical part of working with animals, and why working with the digients through a video screen just isn’t the same.

Robyn asks Mahesh, “Do you want all the mascots to have a turn in the robot?”

“Yes, but only after they’ve passed the agility test. If we break this one, SaruMech isn’t going to give us another one for free.”

Now Jax is playing with her sneakers, tugging on the end of a shoelace. It’s not often that Ana wishes she were rich, but right now, feeling her shoelace grow taut from Jax’s pulling, that is exactly what she’s wishing. Because if she could afford it, she would buy one of these robots in a heartbeat.

Various employees take turns showing mascots the real world; Derek usually takes Marco or Polo. His first idea is to take them outside, around the office park where Blue Gamma is headquartered, and show them the strips of grass and shrubbery that divide the parking lot. He points out the crab-like robot that tends to the landscaping, product of an earlier venture in bringing digients into the real world. The robot is equipped with a stiletto-like trowel for pulling weeds, and its toil is purely instinct-driven; it’s descended from generations of winners in an evolutionary gardening competition conducted in Data Earth hothouses. Derek’s curious about how the mascots will react upon hearing the story of the weed-pulling robot, wondering if they’ll identify with it as a fellow émigré from Data Earth, but they don’t show the slightest interest.

Instead, it turns out that the mascots are fascinated by textures. Surfaces in Data Earth have a lot of visual detail, but no tactile qualities beyond a coefficient of friction; very few players use controllers that convey tactition, so most vendors don’t bother implementing texture for their environmental surfaces. Now that the digients can feel surfaces in the real world, they find novelty in the simplest things. When Marco returns from his turn in the robot body, he can’t stop talking about the carpets and furniture upholstery; when Polo is wearing the body, he spends all his time feeling the gritty nonskid treads in the building’s stairwells. Not surprisingly, the sensor pads in the robot’s fingers are the first components that need replacement. The next thing Marco notices is how Derek’s mouth differs from his own. Digient mouths bear only a superficial resemblance to human mouths; although their lips move when they talk, the digients’ speech generators aren’t physics-based. Marco wants to learn about the mechanics of speech, and keeps asking to put his fingers in Derek’s mouth when he talks. Polo is astonished to discover that food actually passes down Derek’s throat when he swallows, rather than simply vanishing the way digient food does.

Derek had feared that the digients might be distressed to learn the boundaries of their physicality, but instead they just find it funny.

An unexpected benefit of seeing the digients in a robot body is that it provides a closer view of their faces than is common when watching them in Data Earth. As a result, the work that Derek has put in on the digients’ facial expressions is easier to appreciate.

One day Ana comes to his cubicle and says excited,

“You are amazing!”

“Er . . . thanks?”

“I just saw Marco make the most hilarious expressions. You’ve got to see them. May I?” Ana gestures at his keyboard, and Derek rolls his chair back from his desk so she can reach it. She opens a couple of video windows on his screen: one is a recording of the robot body’s camera, showing the digient’s point of view, while the other is a recording of what the helmet screen was displaying. Judging by the former, they were out in the parking lot again.

“He went on one of SaruMech’s field trips last week,” explains Ana, “and of course he loved it, so now he’s bored with the office park.”

On the screen, Marco says, “Want go park we go field trip.”

“You can have just as much fun here.” On the screen, Ana gestures for Marco to follow her.

The image swings back and forth as Marco shakes his head. “Not same fun. Park more fun. Show you.”

“We can’t go to that park. It’s very far away; we would have to travel a long time to get there.”

“Just open portal.”

“Sorry Marco, I can’t open portals here in the outside world.”

“Now watch his face,” says Ana.

“You try. Try hard please please.” Marco forms his panda-bear face into a pleading expression; Derek hasn’t seen it before, and it makes him burst out in laughter.

Ana laughs too, and says, “Keep watching.”

On the screen she says, “It doesn’t matter how hard I try, Marco; the outside world doesn’t have portals. Only Data Earth has portals.”

“Then we go Data Earth, open portal there.”

“That would work for you if there’s a body there for you to wear, but I can’t wear a different body, I’d have to move this one, and that would take a long time.”

Marco thinks about that, and Derek’s delighted to see that the digient’s face actually suggests his incredulity. “Outside world dumb,” the digient announces.

Derek and Ana burst out into laughter. She closes the windows and says, “You did some terrific work there.”

“Thanks. And thanks for showing that to me; it made my day.”

“Glad to do it.”

It’s nice to be reminded that his earlier work is bearing fruit, because most of Derek’s recent assignments aren’t nearly as interesting. The Origami and Faberge digients have begun to pop up in a wider variety of avatars, such as baby dragons, gryphons, and other mythological creatures, so Blue Gamma wants to offer similar avatars for the Neuroblast digients. The new avatars are straightforward modifications of the existing ones, requiring nothing new in terms of their facial expressions.

In fact, his newest assignment requires him to create an avatar with no facial expressions at all. A group of artificial-life hobbyists was impressed by the potential of the Neuroblast genome and, rather than wait for real intelligence to evolve on its own in the biomes, commissioned Blue Gamma to design an intelligent alien species for them. The developers engineered a personality taxon that was miles away from the breeds that Blue Gamma sells, and Derek’s designing an avatar with three legs, a pair of tentacles instead of arms, and a prehensile tail. Some of the hobbyists want an even stranger body plan, as well as an environment with different physics, but he reminded them that they’ll have to wear the avatars themselves when raising the digients, and controlling tentacles will be difficult enough.

The hobbyists have named their new species Xenotherians, and set up a private continent called Data Mars on which they intend to create an alien culture from scratch. Derek’s curious about it but hasn’t been able to visit, because the only language allowed in the presence of the digients is a custom dialect of the artificial language Lojban. He wonders how long the hobbyists will be able to stick with their project. Aside from the enormous barrier to entry, raising the Xenotherians won’t offer pleasures like the one that he and Ana just got from watching Marco. The rewards will be purely intellectual, and over the long term, will that be enough?

Chapter Three

Over the course of the following year, the forecast for Blue Gamma’s future changes from sunny to decidedly cloudy. Sales to new customers have slowed down, but worse than that, the revenue generated by the food-dispensing software has fallen: more and more of the existing customers are suspending their digients.

The problem is that as the Neuroblast digients leave infancy behind, they’re growing too demanding. In breeding them Blue Gamma aimed for a combination of smart and obedient, but with the unpredictability inherent in any genome, even a digital one, it turns out the developers missed their target. Like an overly difficult game, the balance of challenge and reward that the digients provide is tilting beyond what most people consider fun, and so they suspend them. But unlike dog owners who bought a breed they were unprepared for, Blue Gamma’s customers can’t be blamed for not having done their homework; the company itself didn’t know that the digients would evolve in this way.

Some volunteers have begun maintaining rescue shelters, accepting unwanted digients in hopes of matching them with new owners. These volunteers practice a variety of strategies; some keep the digients running without interruption, while others restore the digients from their last checkpoint every few days, to keep them from developing abandonment issues that might make it harder for them to get adopted. Neither strategy is enormously successful at attracting prospective owners. There is occasionally a person who wants to try a digient without having to raise one from infancy, but these adoptions never last for long, and the shelters essentially become digient warehouses.

Ana’s not happy about this trend, but she’s familiar with the realities of animal welfare: she knows you can’t save them all. She’d prefer to shield Blue Gamma’s mascots from what’s happening, but the phenomenon is too widespread for that to be practical. Again and again she has taken them to a playground and one of the digients realizes that a regular playmate is absent.

Today’s trip to a playground is different, and brings a pleasant surprise. Even before all the mascots are through the portal, Jax and Marco notice another digient wearing a robot avatar. They simultaneously exclaim “Tibo!” and run over to him.

Tibo is one of the oldest digients aside from the mascots, owned by a beta tester named Carlton. He suspended Tibo about a month ago; Ana’s glad to see that it wasn’t permanent. As the digients chatter, she walks her avatar over to Carlton’s and talks with him; he explains that he just needed a break, and now is feeling ready to give Tibo the attention he needs.

Later on, after she’s brought the mascots back from the playground to Blue Gamma’s island, Jax tells her about his conversation with Tibo. “Tell him about fun we do time he gone. Tell him about field trip zoo fun fun.”

“Was he sad he missed it?”

“No he instead argue. He said field trip was mall not zoo. But that trip last month.”

“That’s because Tibo was suspended the whole time he’s been gone,” Ana explains, “so he thinks last month’s trip was yesterday.”

“I say that,” says Jax, surprising her with his understanding, “but he not believe. He argue until Marco and Lolly too tell him. Then he sad.”

“Well, I’m sure there’ll be other trips to the zoo.”

“Not because missed zoo. Sad missed month.”

“Ah.”

“I not want be suspended. Not want miss month.”

Ana does her best to sound reassuring. “You don’t have to worry about that, Jax.”

“You not suspend me, right?”

“Right.”

To her relief, Jax seems satisfied by this; he hasn’t encountered the idea of extracting a promise, and she’s embarrassingly glad that she didn’t have to make him one. She takes comfort in the knowledge that if they suspend the mascots for any period of time, they’ll almost certainly suspend all of them, so at least there won’t be experiential discrepancies within the group. The same would be true if they ever roll the mascots back to a younger age. Restoring an early checkpoint is one of Blue Gamma’s suggestions for customers who find their digients too demanding, and there’s been talk that the company should do this with its own mascots to endorse the strategy.

Ana notices the time, and begins instantiating some games for the mascots to play on their own; it’s time for her to train the digients in Blue Gamma’s new product line. In the years since creating the Neuroblast genome, the developers have written more sophisticated tools for analyzing the interactions of its various genes, and they understand the genome’s properties better. Recently they’ve created a taxon with less cognitive plasticity, resulting in digients that should stabilize more quickly and stay docile forever. The only way to know for certain is to let customers raise them for years and see what happens, but the developers’ confidence is high. This is a significant departure from the company’s original goal of digients that become ever more sophisticated, but drastic situations call for drastic measures. Blue Gamma is counting on these new digients to stanch the loss of revenue, so Ana and the rest of the test team are intensively training them.

She has the mascots sufficiently well-trained that they wait for her permission before they start playing the games. “All right everyone, go ahead,” she says, and the digients all rush over to their favorites. “I’ll see you all later.”

“No,” says Jax. He stops and walks back to her avatar. “Don’t want play.”

“What? Sure you do.”

“No playing. Want job.”

Ana laughs. “What? Why do you want to get a job?”

“Get money.”

She realizes that Jax isn’t happy when he says this; his mood is glum. More seriously, she asks him, “What do you need money for?”

“Don’t need. Give you.”

“Why do you want to give me money?”

“You need,” he says, matter-of-factly.

“Did I say I need money? When?”

“Last week ask why you play with other digients instead me. You said people pay you play with them. If have money, can pay you. Then you play with me more.”

“Oh Jax.” She’s momentarily at a loss for words. “That’s very sweet of you.”

After another year has gone by, it becomes official: Blue Gamma is shutting down its operations. Not enough customers were willing to take a chance on the perpetually docile digients. Internally there were many proposals discussed, including a breed of digient that understands language but can’t speak, but it was too late. The customer base has stabilized to a small community of hardcore digient owners, and they don’t generate enough revenue to keep Blue Gamma afloat. The company will release a no-fee version of the food-dispensing software so those who want to can keep their digients running as long as they like, but otherwise, the customers are on their own.

Most of the other employees have been through company collapses before, so while they’re unhappy, for them this is just another episode of life in the software industry. For Ana, however, Blue Gamma’s folding reminds her of the closure of the zoo, which was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of her life. Her eyes still tear up when she thinks about the last time she saw her apes, wishing that she could explain to them why they wouldn’t see her again, hoping that they could adapt to their new homes. When she decided to retrain for the software industry, she was glad that she’d never have to face another such farewell in her new line of work. Now here she is, against all expectation, confronted with a strangely reminiscent situation.

Reminiscent, but not the same. Blue Gamma doesn’t actually need to find new homes for its dozen mascots; it can just suspend them, with none of the implications that euthanasia would have. Ana herself has suspended thousands of digients during the breeding process, and they aren’t dead or feeling abandoned. The only suffering created by suspending the mascots would be on the part of the trainers; Ana has spent time with the mascots every day for the last five years, and she doesn’t want to say goodbye to them. Fortunately, there’s an alternative: any employee can afford to keep a mascot as a pet in Data Earth, whereas keeping an ape in her apartment hadn’t even been a possibility.

Given how easy it is, Ana’s surprised that more of the employees don’t want to adopt a mascot. She knows she can count on Derek to take one—he cares about the digients just as much as she does—but the trainers are unexpectedly reluctant. They’re all fond of the digients, but most feel that keeping one as a pet now would be like doing their job after they’ve stopped being paid. Ana is sure that Robyn will take one, but Robyn preempts her with news of her own at lunch.

“We weren’t going to tell anyone yet,” Robyn confides, “but . . . I’m pregnant.”

“Really? Congratulations!”

Robyn grins. “Thanks!” She releases a flood of pent-up information: the options that she and her partner Linda considered, the ova-fusion procedure they gambled on, their fabulous luck at having the first attempt succeed. Ana and Robyn discuss issues of job hunting and parental leave. Eventually they get back to the topic of adopting the mascots.

“Obviously you’re going to have your hands full,” says Ana, “but what do you think about adopting Lolly?” It would be fascinating to see Lolly’s reaction to a pregnancy.

“No,” says Robyn, shaking her head. “I’m past digients now.”

“You’re past them?”

“I’m ready for the real thing, you know what I mean?”

Carefully, Ana says, “I’m not sure that I do.”

“People always say that we’re evolved to want babies, and I used to think that was a bunch of crap, but not anymore.” Robyn’s facial expression is one of transport; she’s no longer speaking to Ana exactly. “Cats, dogs, digients, they’re all just substitutes for what we’re supposed to be caring for. Eventually you start to understand what a baby means, what it really means, and everything changes. And then you realize that all the feelings you had before weren’t—” Robyn stops herself. “I mean, for me, it just put things in perspective.”

Women who work with animals hear this all the time: that their love for animals must arise out of a sublimated child-rearing urge. Ana’s tired of the stereotype. She likes children just fine, but they’re not the standard against which all other accomplishments should be measured. Caring for animals is worthwhile in and of itself, a vocation that need offer no apologies. She wouldn’t have said the same about digients when she started at Blue Gamma, but now she realizes it might be true for them, too.

Chapter Four

The year following Blue Gamma’s closure involves many changes for Derek. He gets a job at the firm that employs his wife Wendy, animating virtual actors for television. He’s fortunate to work on a series with good writing, but no matter how quick-witted and nonchalant the dialogue sounds, every word of it, every nuance and intonation, is painstakingly choreographed. During the animation process he hears the lines delivered a hundred times, and the final performance seems glossy and sterile in its perfection.

By contrast, life with Marco and Polo is a never ending stream of surprises. He adopted both of them because they didn’t want to be separated, and while he can’t spend as much time with them as when he worked for Blue Gamma, owning a digient now is actually more interesting than it’s ever been before. The customers who kept their digients running formed a Neuroblast user group to keep in touch, and while it’s a smaller community than before, the members are more active and engaged, and their efforts are bearing fruit.

Right now it’s the weekend, and Derek is driving to the park; in the passenger seat is Marco, wearing a robotic body. He’s standing upright on the seat—restrained by the seat belt—so he can see out the window; he’s looking for anything that he’s only seen before in videos, things that aren’t found in Data Earth.

“Firi hidrint,” says Marco, pointing.

“Fire hydrant.”

“Fire hydrant.”

“That’s right.”

The body Marco’s wearing is the one that Blue Gamma owned. Group field trips came to an end because SaruMech Toys closed shortly after Blue Gamma did, so Ana—who got a job testing software used in carbon-sequestration stations—bought the robot body at a discount for Jax to use. She let Derek borrow the body last week so Marco and Polo could play in it, and now he’s returning it. She’s going to spend the day in the park, letting other owners’ digients have a turn in the body.

“I make fire hydrant next craft time,” says Marco. “Use cylinder, use cone, use cylinder.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” says Derek.

Marco’s talking about the craft sessions that the digients now have every day. These began a few months ago, after an owner wrote software that allowed a few of Data Earth’s onscreen editing tools to be operated from within the Data Earth environment itself. By manipulating a console of knobs and sliders, a digient can now instantiate various solid shapes, change their color, and combine and edit them in a dozen different ways. The digients are in heaven; to them it seems as if they’ve been granted magical powers, and given the way the editing tools circumvent Data Earth’s physics simulation, in a sense they have. Every day after work when Derek logs into Data Earth, Marco and Polo show him the craft projects they’ve made.

“Then can show Polo how—Park! Park already?”

“No, we’re not there yet.”

“Sign says ‘Burgers and Parks.’ ” Marco points out a sign that they’re driving past.

“It says ‘Burgers and Shakes.’ Shakes, not parks. We’ve still got a little way to go.”

“Shakes,” Marco says, watching the sign recede in the distance. Another new activity for the digients has been reading lessons.

Marco or Polo never paid much attention to text before—there isn’t a lot of it in Data Earth aside from onscreen annotations, which aren’t visible to digients—but one owner successfully taught his digient to recognize commands written on flashcards, prompting a number of other owners to give it a try. Generally speaking, the Neuroblast digients recognize words reasonably well, but have trouble associating individual letters with sounds. It’s a variety of dyslexia that appears to be specific to the Neuroblast genome; according to other user groups, Origami digients learn letters readily, while Faberge digients remain frustratingly illiterate no matter what instruction method is used.

Marco and Polo take a reading class with Jax and a few others, and they seem to enjoy it well enough. None of the digients were raised on bedtime stories, so text doesn’t fascinate them the way it does human children, but their general curiosity—along with the praise of their owners—motivate them to explore the uses that text can be put to. Derek finds it exciting, and laments the fact that Blue Gamma didn’t stay in business long enough to see these things come to pass.

They arrive at the park; Ana sees them and walks over as Derek parks the car. Marco gives Ana a hug as soon as Derek lets him out of the car.

“Hi Ana.”

“Hi Marco,” replies Ana; she rubs the back of the robot’s head. “You’re still in the body? You had a whole week. Wasn’t that enough?”

“Wanted ride in car.”

“Did you want to play in the park for a bit?”

“No, we go now. Wendy not want us stay. Bye Ana.” By now Derek has gotten the charging platform for the robot out of the backseat. Marco steps on to the charging platform—they’ve trained the digients to return to it whenever they return to Data Earth—and the robot’s helmet goes dark.

Ana uses her handheld to get the first digient ready to enter the robot. “So you have to go, too?” she asks Derek.

“No, I don’t have to be anywhere.”

“So what did Marco mean?”

“Well . . .”

“Let me guess: Wendy thinks you spend too much time with digients, right?”

“Right,” says Derek. Wendy was also uncomfortable with the amount of time he’s been spending with Ana, but there’s no point in mentioning that. He assured Wendy that he doesn’t think of Ana that way, that they’re just friends who share an interest in digients.

The robot’s helmet lights up to display a jaguar-cub face; Derek recognizes him as Zaff, who’s owned by one of the beta testers. “Hi Ana hi Derek,” says Zaff, and immediately runs toward a nearby tree. Derek and Ana follow.

“So seeing them in the robot body didn’t win her over?” asks Ana.

Derek stops Zaff from picking up some dog turds. To Ana, he says, “Nope. She still doesn’t understand why I don’t suspend them whenever it’s convenient.”

“It’s hard to find someone who understands,” Ana says. “It was the same when I worked at the zoo; every guy I dated felt like he was coming in second. And now when I tell a guy that I’m paying for reading lessons for my digient, he looks at me like I’m crazy.”

“That’s been an issue for Wendy, too.”

They watch as Zaff sorts through the leaf litter, extracts a leaf decayed to near transparency, and holds it up to his face to look through it, a mask of vegetable lace. “Although I guess I shouldn’t really blame them,” says Ana. “It took me a while to understand the appeal myself.”

“Not me,” says Derek. “I thought digients were amazing right away.”

“That’s true,” agrees Ana. “You’re a rare one.”

Derek watches her with Zaff, admires her patience in guiding him. The last time he felt so much in common with a woman was when he met Wendy, who shared his excitement at bringing characters to life through animation. If he weren’t already married, he might ask Ana out, but there’s no point in speculating about that now. The most they can be is friends, and that’s good enough.

It’s a year later, and Ana is spending the evening at her apartment. On her computer she has a window open to Data Earth, where her avatar is at a playground, supervising a group play-date that Jax has with a handful of other digients. The number of digients continues to shrink—Tibo, for example, hasn’t been around in months—but Jax’s regular group has merged with another one recently, so he still has the opportunity to make new friends. A few of the digients are up in the climbing equipment, others play with toys on the ground, while a couple watch a virtual television.

In another window, Ana browses through the user-group discussion forums. The topic du jour is the latest action by the Information Freedom Front, an organization that lobbies for the end of privately owned data. Last week they publicized techniques for cracking many of Data Earth’s access-control mechanisms, and in recent days people have been seeing rare and expensive items from their game inventories being handed out like flyers on a downtown street corner. Ana hasn’t been to a game continent in Data Earth since the problem began.

In the playground, Jax and Marco have decided to play a new game. They both get down on all fours and begin crawling around. Jax waves to get her attention, and she walks her avatar over to him. “Ana,” he says, “you know ants talk each other?” They’ve been watching nature videos on the television.

“Yes, I’ve heard that,” she says. “You know we know what they saying?”

“You do?”

“We talk ant language. Like this: imp fimp deemul weetul.”

Marco replies, “Beedul jeedul lomp womp.”

“And what does that mean?”

“Not tell you. Only we know.”

“We and ants,” adds Marco.

And then Jax and Marco both laugh, mo mo mo, and Ana smiles. The digients run off to play something else, and she goes back to browsing the forums.

FROM: Helen Costas

Do you think we need to worry about our digients being copied?

FROM: Stuart Gust

Who would bother? If there were a big demand for digients, Blue Gamma wouldn’t have gone out of business. Remember what happened with the shelters? You literally couldn’t give a digient away. And it’s not as if they’ve gotten any more popular since then.

In the playground, Jax exclaims, “I win!” He’s been playing some vaguely defined game with Marco. He rocks side to side in triumph.

“Okay,” says Marco, “your turn.” He sorts through the toys around him until he finds a kazoo and then hands it to Jax.

Jax puts one end of the kazoo in his mouth. He gets on his knees and uses the kazoo to rhythmically poke at Marco’s midsection, around where his navel would be if he had one.

Ana asks, “Jax, what are you doing?”

Jax takes the kazoo from his mouth. “Make Marco blowjob.”

“What? Where did you see a blowjob?”

“On TV yesterday.”

She looks at the television; right now it’s showing a child’s cartoon. The television is supposed to draw its content from a children’s video repository; someone is probably inserting adult material using the IFF hack. She decides not to make a big deal of it to the digients. “Okay,” she says, and Jax and Marco resume their mime. She posts a note about the video tampering to the forums, and continues reading.

A few minutes later, Ana hears an unfamiliar chittering sound, and sees that Jax has gone to watch television; all of the digients are watching it. She moves her avatar so she can see what’s drawn their attention.

On the virtual television, a person wearing a clown avatar is holding down a digient wearing a puppy avatar, and hitting the digient’s legs repeatedly with a hammer. The digient’s legs can’t break because its avatar wasn’t designed to account for that, and it probably can’t scream for similar reasons, but the digient must be in agony, and the chittering sounds are the only way it can express that.

Ana turns the virtual television off.

“What happen?” asks Jax, and several of the other digients repeat the question, but she doesn’t answer. Instead she opens a window on her physical screen to read the description accompanying the video that was playing. It’s not an animation, but a recording of a griefer using the IFF hack to disable the pain circuit-breakers on a digient’s body. Even worse, the digient isn’t an anonymous new instantiation, but someone’s beloved pet, illicitly copied using the IFF hack. The digient’s name is Nyyti, and Ana realizes that he’s a classmate in Jax’s reading lessons.

Whoever copied Nyyti could have a copy of Jax, too. Or he could be making a copy of Jax right now. Given Data Earth’s distributed architecture, Jax is vulnerable if the griefer is anywhere on the same continent as the playground.

Jax is still asking about what they saw on the television. Ana opens a window listing all the Data Earth processes running under her account, finds the one that represents Jax, and suspends it. In the playground, Jax freezes in midsentence and then vanishes.

“What happen Jax?” asks Marco.

Ana opens another window for Derek’s processes—they granted each other full privileges for their accounts—and suspends Marco and Polo. She doesn’t have full privileges for the other digients, though, and she’s not sure what to do next. She can see that they’re agitated and confused. They don’t have the fight-or-flight response that animals have, nor do they have any reactions triggered by smelling pheromones or hearing distress calls, but they do have an analog of mirror neurons. It helps them learn and socialize, but it also means they’re distressed by what they saw on the television.

Everyone who brought their digient to the playdate granted Ana permission to make the digients take a nap, but their processes would still be running even if they were asleep, meaning they’d still be at risk of being copied. She decides to move the digients to a small island, away from the major continents, in hopes that there’s less chance that a griefer will be scanning processes there.

“Okay everybody,” she announces, “we’re going to the zoo.” She opens a portal to the visitor’s center of the Pangaea archipelago and ushers the digients through it. The visitor’s center appears to be empty, but she’s not taking any chances. She forces the digients to sleep and then sends messages to all their owners, telling them where they can pick up their digients. She keeps her avatar with them while she goes on the forums to warn everyone else.

Over the next hour the other owners arrive to pick up their digients, while Ana watches the discussion on the forums bloom like algae. There’s outrage and threats of lawsuits against various parties. Some gamers take the position that digient owners’ complaints should take a backseat to their own because digients have no monetary value, igniting a flame war. Ana ignores most of it, looking for information about the response from Daesan Digital, the company that runs the Data Earth platform. Eventually there’s solid news:

FROM: Enrique Beltran

Daesan has an upgrade to Data Earth’s security architecture that they say will fix the breach. It was going to be part of next year’s update, but they’re bumping it up because of what’s been happening. They can’t give us a schedule for when it’ll be done. Until it is, everyone better keep your digients suspended.

FROM: Maria Zheng

There’s another option. Lisma Gunawan is setting up a private island, and she’s only going to allow approved code to run on it. You won’t be able to use anything you’ve bought recently, but Neuroblast digients will run fine. Contact her if you want to be put on the visitor list.

Ana sends a request to Lisma, and gets an automated reply promising news when the island is ready. Ana’s not set up to run a local instance of the Data Earth environment herself, but she does have another option. She spends an hour configuring her system to run a completely local instance of the Neuroblast engine; without a Data Earth portal, she has to load Jax’s saved state manually, but eventually she’s able to get Jax running with the robot body.

“—turn off television?” He stops, realizing his surroundings have changed. “What happen?”

“It’s okay, Jax.” He sees the body he’s wearing. “I in outside world.” He looks at her.

“You suspend me?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I know I said I wouldn’t, but I had to.”

Plaintively, he asks, “Why?”

Ana’s embarrassed by how hard she’s hugging the robot body. “I’m trying to keep you safe.”

A month later, Data Earth gets its security upgrade. The IFF disclaims any responsibility for what griefers do with the information they published, saying that every freedom has the potential to be abused, but they shift their attention to other projects. For a while, at least, the public continents in Data Earth are safe for digients again, but the damage has been done. There’s no way to track down copies that are being run privately, and even if no one releases videos of digient torture anymore, many Neuroblast owners can’t bear the thought that such things are going on; they suspend their digients permanently and leave the user group.

At the same time, other people are excited by the availability of copied digients, particularly of digients who’ve been taught to read. Members of an AI research institute have wondered whether digients could form their own culture if left in a hothouse, but they never had access to digients who could read, and they weren’t interested in raising any themselves. Now the researchers assemble copies of as many text-literate digients as they can, mostly Origami digients since they have the best reading skills, but they mix in a few Neuroblast ones as well. They put them on private islands furnished with text and software libraries, and started running the islands at hothouse speeds. The discussion forums teem with speculation about cities in a bottle, microcosms on a tabletop.

Derek thinks the idea is ridiculous—a bunch of abandoned children aren’t going to become autodidacts no matter how many books they’re left with—so he’s not surprised to read about the results: every test population eventually goes feral. The digients don’t have enough aggression in them to descend into “Lord of the Flies”-style savagery; they simply divide into loose, non-hierarchical troops. Initially, each troop’s daily routines are held together by force of habit—they read and use eduware when it’s time for school, they go to the playgrounds to play—but without reinforcement these rituals unravel like cheap twine. Every object becomes a toy, every space a playground, and gradually the digients lose what skills they had. They develop a kind of culture of their own, perhaps what wild digient troops would demonstrate if they’d evolved on their own in the biomes.

As interesting as that is, it’s a far cry from the nascent civilization that the researchers were seeking, so they try redesigning the islands. They try to increase the variety of the test populations, asking owners of educated digients to donate copies; to Derek’s surprise, they actually receive a few from owners who have grown tired of paying for reading lessons and are satisfied that the feral digients aren’t suffering. The researchers devise various incentives—all automated, so no real-time interaction is required—to keep the digients motivated. They impose hardships so that indolence has a cost. While a few of the revised test populations avoid going feral, none ever begin the climb toward technological sophistication.

The researchers conclude that there’s something missing in the Origami genome, but as far as Derek’s concerned, the fault lies with them. They’re blind to a simple truth: complex minds can’t develop on their own. If they could, feral children would be like any other. And minds don’t grow the way weeds do, flourishing under indifferent attention; otherwise all children in orphanages would thrive. For a mind to even approach its full potential, it needs cultivation by other minds. That cultivation is what he’s trying to provide for Marco and Polo.

Marco and Polo occasionally get into arguments, but they don’t stay angry for very long. A few days ago, however, the two of them got into a fight over whether it was fair that Marco had been instantiated earlier than Polo, and for some reason it escalated. The two digients have hardly spoken to each other since, so Derek’s relieved when they approach him as a pair.

“It’s nice to see you two together again. Have you guys made up?”

“No!” says Polo. “Still angry.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Both us want your help,” says Marco.

“Okay, what can I do?”

“Want you roll back us last week, before big fight.”

“What?” This is the first time he’s ever heard of a digient requesting to be restored from a checkpoint. “Why would you want that?”

“I want not remember big fight,” says Marco. “I want be happy, not angry,” says Polo.

“You want us be happy, right?”

Derek opts not to get into a discussion about the difference between their current instantiations and instantiations restored from a checkpoint. “Of course I do, but I can’t just roll you back every time you have a fight. Just wait a while, and you won’t be so angry.”

“Have waited, and still angry,” says Polo. “Fight big big. Want it never happen.” As soothingly as he can, Derek says, “Well, it did happen, and you’re going to have to deal with it.”

“No!” shouts Polo. “I angry angry! Want you fix it!”

“Why you want us stay angry forever?” demands Marco.

“I don’t want you to stay angry forever, I want you to forgive each other. But if you can’t, then we’ll all have to live with that, me included.”

“Now angry at you too!” says Polo.

The digients storm off in different directions, and he wonders if he’s made the right decision. It hasn’t always been easy raising Marco and Polo, but he’s never rolled them back to an earlier checkpoint. This strategy has worked well enough so far, but he can’t be certain it will keep working.

There are no guidebooks on raising digients, and techniques intended for pets or children fail as often as they succeed. The digients inhabit simple bodies, so their voyage to maturity is free from the riptides and sudden squalls driven by an organic body’s hormones, but this doesn’t mean that they don’t experience moods or that their personalities never change; their minds are continuously edging into new regions of the phase space defined by the Neuroblast genome. Indeed, it’s possible that the digients will never reach “maturity”; the idea of a developmental plateau is based on a biological model that doesn’t necessarily apply. It’s possible their personalities will evolve at the same rate for as long as the digients are kept running. Only time will tell.

Derek wants to talk about what just happened with Marco and Polo; unfortunately, the person he wants to talk to isn’t his wife. Wendy understands the possibilities for the digients’ growth, and recognizes that Marco and Polo will become more and more capable the longer they’re cared for; she simply can’t generate any enthusiasm about that prospect. Resentful of the time and attention he devotes to the digients, she would consider their request to be rolled back the perfect opportunity to suspend them for an indefinite period.

The person he wants to talk to is, of course, Ana. What once seemed a groundless fear of Wendy’s has come true; he has definitely developed feelings for her beyond friendship. It’s not the cause of the problems he’s having with Wendy; if anything, it’s a result. The time he spends with Ana is a relief, a chance for him to enjoy the digients’ company unapologetically. When he’s angry he thinks it’s Wendy’s fault for driving him away, but when he’s calm he realizes that’s unfair.

The important thing is that he hasn’t acted on his feelings for Ana, and he doesn’t plan to. What he needs to focus on is reaching an accord with Wendy regarding the digients; if he can do that, the temptation that Ana poses should pass. Until then, he ought to reduce the amount of time he spends with Ana. It’s not going to be easy: given how small the digient-owner community is, interaction with Ana is inevitable, and he can’t let Marco and Polo suffer because of this. He’s not sure what to do, but for now, he refrains from calling Ana for advice and posts a question to the forum instead.

Chapter Five

Another year passes. Currents within the mantle of the marketplace change, and virtual worlds undergo tectonic shifts in response: a new platform called Real Space, implemented using the latest distributed-processing architecture, becomes the hot-spot of digital terrain formation. Meanwhile Anywhere and Next Dimension stop expanding at their edges, cooling into a stable configuration. Data Earth has long been a fixture in the universe of virtual worlds, resistant to growth spurts or sharp downturns, but now its topography begins to erode; one by one, its virtual land masses disappear like real islands, vanishing beneath a rising tide of consumer indifference.

Meanwhile, the failure of the hothouse experiments to produce miniature civilizations has caused general interest in digital lifeforms to dwindle. Occasionally curious new fauna are observed in the biomes, a species demonstrating an exotic body plan or a novel reproductive strategy, but it’s generally agreed that the biomes aren’t run at a high enough resolution for real intelligence to evolve there. The companies that make the Origami and Faberge genomes go into decline. Many technology pundits declare digients to be a dead end, proof that embodied AI is useless for anything beyond entertainment, until the introduction of a new genomic engine called Sophonce.

Sophonce’s designers wanted digients that could be taught via software instead of needing interaction with humans; toward that end, they’ve created an engine that favors asocial behavior and obsessive personalities. The vast majority of the digients generated with the engine are discarded for their psychological malformations, but a tiny fraction prove capable of learning with minimal supervision: give them the right tutoring software and they’ll happily study for weeks of subjective time, meaning that they can be run at hothouse speeds without going feral. Some hobbyists demonstrate Sophonce digients that outperform Neuroblast, Origami, and Faberge digients on math tests, despite having been trained with far less real-time interaction. There’s speculation that, if their energies can be directed in a practical direction, Sophonce digients could become useful workers within a matter of months. The problem is that they’re so charmless that few people want to engage in even the limited amounts of interaction that the digients require.

Ana has brought Jax along with her to Siege of Heaven, the first new game continent to appear in Data Earth in a year. She shows him around the Argent Plaza, where players congregate and socialize in between missions; it’s a massive courtyard of white marble, lapis lazuli, and gold filigree located on top of a cumulonimbus cloud. Ana has to wear her game avatar, a kestrel-cherub, but Jax keeps his traditional copper robot avatar.

As they’re strolling amongst the other gamers, Ana sees the onscreen annotation for a digient. His avatar is a hydrocephalic dwarf, the standard avatar for a Drayta: a Sophonce digient who’s skilled at solving the logic puzzles found on the gaming continents. The original Drayta’s owner trained him using a puzzle generator pirated from the Five Dynasties continent on the Real Space platform, and then released copies to the public domain. Now so many gameplayers take a Drayta with them on their missions that game companies are considering major redesigns.

Ana directs Jax’s attention to the other digient. “See the guy over there? He’s a Drayta.”

“Really?” Jax has heard about Draytas, but this is the first one he’s met. He walks over to the dwarf. “Hi,” he says. “I’m Jax.”

“Wanna solve puzzles,” says Drayta.

“What kind puzzles you like?”

“Wanna solve puzzles.” Drayta is getting anxious; he runs around the waiting area.

“Wanna solve puzzles.”

A nearby gamer wearing a osprey-seraph avatar pauses in his conversation to point a finger at Drayta; the digient freezes in midstep, shrinks to a icon, and snaps into one of the gamer’s belt compartments as if pulled by an elastic.

“Drayta weird,” says Jax.

“Yes he was, wasn’t he?”

“All Draytas like that?”

“I think so.”

The seraph walks over to Ana. “What kind of digient have you got? Haven’t seen his sort before.”

“His name’s Jax. He runs on the Neuroblast genome.”

“Don’t know that one. Is it new?”

One of the seraph’s teammates, wearing a nephilim avatar, comes by. “Nah, it’s old, last generation.”

The seraph nods. “Is he good at puzzles?”

“Not really,” says Ana.

“So what does he do?”

“I like singing,” volunteers Jax.

“Really? Let’s have a song, then.”

Jax doesn’t need further encouragement; he launches into one of his favorites, “Mack the Knife” from Threepenny Opera. He knows all the words, but the tune he sings is at best a rough approximation of the actual melody. At the same time he performs an accompanying dance that he choreographed himself, mostly a series of poses and hand gestures borrowed from an Indonesian hip-hop video he likes.

The other gamers laugh all through his performance. Jax finishes with a curtsy, and they applaud. “That’s brilliant,” says the seraph.

Ana says to Jax, “That means he likes it. Say thanks.”

“Thanks.”

To Ana, the seraph says, “Not going to be much help in the labyrinths, is he?”

“He keeps us entertained,” she says.

“I’ll bet he does. Send me a message if he ever learns to solve puzzles, I’ll buy a copy.” He sees that his entire team has assembled.

“Well, off to our next mission. Good luck on yours.”

“Good luck,” says Jax. He waves as the seraph and his teammates take flight and dive in formation toward a distant valley. Ana’s reminded of that encounter a few days later, when she’s reading a discussion on the user-group forums:

FROM: Stuart Gust

Last night I played SoH with some people who take a Drayta on their missions, and while he wasn’t much fun, he was definitely useful to have around. It made me wonder if it has to be one or the other. Those Sophonce digients aren’t any better than ours. Couldn’t our digients be both fun and useful?

FROM: Maria Zheng

Are you hoping to sell copies of yours? You think you can raise a better Andro?

Maria’s referring to a Sophonce digient named Andro, trained by his owner Bryce Talbot to act as his personal assistant. Talbot demonstrated Andro to VirlFriday, maker of appointment-management software, and got the company’s executives interested. The deal fell through after the executives got demonstration copies; what Talbot hadn’t realized was that Andro was, in his own way, as obsessive as Drayta. Like a dog forever loyal to its first owner, Andro wouldn’t work for anyone else unless Talbot was there to give orders.

VirlFriday tried installing a sensory input filter, so each new Andro instantiation perceived his new owner’s avatar and voice as Talbot’s, but the disguise never worked for more than a couple of hours. Before long all the executives had to shut down their forlorn Andros, who kept looking for the original Talbot.

As a result, Talbot wasn’t able to sell the rights to Andro for anywhere near what he’d hoped. Instead, VirlFriday bought the rights to Andro’s specific genome and a complete archive of his checkpoints, and they’ve hired Talbot to work for them. He’s part of a team that’s restoring earlier checkpoints of Andro and retraining them, attempting to create a version that has the same personal-assistant skills and is also willing to accept a new owner.

FROM: Stuart Gust

No, I don’t mean selling copies. I’m just thinking about Zaff doing work the way dogs guide the blind or sniff out drugs. My goal isn’t to make money, but if there’s something the digients can do that people are willing to pay for, it would prove to all the skeptics out there that digients aren’t just for entertainment.

Ana posts a reply:

FROM: Ana Alvarado

I just want to make sure we’re clear about our motivations. It’d be terrific if our digients learned practical skills, but we shouldn’t think of them as failures if they don’t. Maybe Jax can make money, but Jax isn’t for making money. He’s not like the Draytas, or the weedbots. Whatever puzzles he might solve or work he might do, those aren’t the reason I’m raising him.

FROM: Stuart Gust

Yes, I agree with that completely. All I meant was that our digients might have untapped skills. If there’s some kind of job they’d be good at, wouldn’t it be cool for them to do that job?

FROM: Maria Zheng

But what can they do? Dogs were bred to be good at specific things, and Sophonce digients are so single minded that they only want to do one thing, whether they’re good at it or not. Neither is true for Neuroblast digients.

FROM: Stuart Gust

We could expose them to lots of different things and see what they have an aptitude for. Give them a liberal arts education instead of vocational training. (I’m only half kidding.)

FROM: Ana Alvarado

That’s actually not as silly as it might sound. Bonobos have learned to do everything from making stone cutting tools to playing computer games when they were given the chance. Our digients might be good at things that it hasn’t occurred to us to train them for.

FROM: Maria Zheng

Just what are we talking about? We’ve already taught them to read. Are we going to give them lessons in science and history? Are we going to teach them critical thinking skills?

FROM: Ana Alvarado

I really don’t know. But I think that if we do this, it’s important to have an open mind and not be skeptical. Low expectations are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we aim high, we’ll get better results.

Most of the user-group members are content with their digients’ current education—an improvised mixture of home-schooling, group tutoring, and eduware—but there are some who are excited by the idea of going further. This latter group begins a discussion with their digients’ tutors about expanding the curriculum. Over the course of months, various owners read up on pedagogical theory and try to determine how the digients’ learning style differs from those of chimps or human children, and how to design lesson plans that best accommodate it. Most of the time the owners are receptive to all suggestions, until the question arises of whether the digients might make faster progress if their tutors assigned them homework.

Ana prefers that they find activities that develop skills but which the digients enjoy enough to do on their own. Other owners argue that the tutors ought to give the digients actual assignments to be completed. She’s surprised to read a forum post from Derek in which he supports the idea. She asks him about it the next time they talk.

“Why would you want to make them do homework?”

“What’s wrong with that?” says Derek. “Is this because you once had a mean teacher when you were a kid?”

“Very funny. Come on, I’m serious.”

“Okay, seriously: what’s so bad about homework?”

She hardly knows where to begin. “It’s one thing for Jax to have ways to keep himself entertained outside of class,” she says. “But to give him assignments and tell him he has to finish them even if he doesn’t enjoy it? To make him feel bad if he doesn’t do it? That goes against every principle of animal training.”

“A long time ago, you were the one who told me that digients weren’t like animals.”

“Yes, I did say that,” she allows. “But they’re not tools either. And I know you know that, but what you’re talking about, it sounds like you’re preparing them to do work that they wouldn’t want to do.”

He shakes his head. “It’s not about making them work, it’s about getting them to learn some responsibility. And they might be strong enough to take feeling bad once in a while; the only way to know is to try.”

“Why take the chance of making them feel bad at all?”

“It was something I thought of when I was talking with my sister,” he says. Derek’s sister teaches children born with Down syndrome. “She mentioned that some parents don’t want to push their kids too much, because they’re afraid of exposing them to the possibility of failure. The parents mean well, but they’re keeping their kids from reaching their full potential when they coddle them.”

It takes her a little time to get used to this idea. Ana’s accustomed to thinking of the digients as supremely gifted apes, and while in the past people have compared apes to children with special needs, it was always more of a metaphor. To view the digients more literally as special-needs children requires a shift in perspective. “How much responsibility do you think the digients can handle?”

Derek spreads his hands. “I don’t know. In a way it’s like Down Syndrome; it affects every person differently, so whenever my sister works with a new kid, she has to play it by ear. We have even less to go on, because no one’s ever raised digients for this long before. If it turns out that the only thing we’re accomplishing with homework assignments is making them feel bad, then of course we’ll stop. But I don’t want Marco and Polo’s potential to be wasted because I was afraid of pushing them a little.”

She sees that Derek has a very different idea of high expectations than she has. More than that, she realizes that his is actually the better one. “You’re right,” she says, after a pause. “We should see if they can do homework.”

It’s a year later, and Derek is finishing up some work before he meets Ana for lunch on a Saturday. For the last couple of hours he’s been testing an avatar modification that would change the proportions of the digients’ bodies and faces to make them look more mature. Among those owners who have opted to further their digients’ education, more and more are commenting on the incongruity between the digients’ eternally cute avatars and their increasing competence. This add-on is intended to correct that, and make it easier for the owners’ to think of the digients as more capable.

Before leaving, he checks his messages, and is puzzled to see a couple from strangers accusing him of running some kind of scam. The messages seem legitimate, so he reads them more closely. The senders are complaining about a digient approaching them in Data Earth and asking for money.

Derek realizes what must have happened. He recently began giving Marco and Polo an allowance, which they usually spend on game subscriptions or virtual toys; they’ve asked for more, but he’s held the line. They must have decided to ask people in Data Earth at random for money and been rebuffed, but since the digients are running under Derek’s Data Earth account, people assumed that he had trained them to beg for money.

He’ll send complete apologies to these people later on, but right now he tells Marco and Polo to enter their robot bodies immediately. Fabrication technology has reached the point where he was able to afford two robot bodies of his own, customized to complement Marco and Polo’s avatars. A minute later, their panda-bear faces appear in the robots’ helmets, and Derek reprimands them for asking strangers for money.“I thought you would know better,” he says.

Polo is apologetic. “Yes, know better,” he says.

“So why did you do it?”

“My idea, not Polo’s,” says Marco. “Knew they wouldn’t give money. Knew they’d message you.”

Derek’s astonished. “You were trying to get people angry at me?”

“This happen because we on your account,” says Marco. “Not happen if we have own accounts, like Voyl.”

Now he understands. The digients have been hearing about a Sophonce digient named Voyl. Voyl’s owner—a lawyer named Gerald Hecht—filed papers to create the Voyl Corporation, and Voyl now runs under a separate Data Earth account registered to that corporation. Voyl pays taxes and is able to own property, enter into contracts, file lawsuits and be sued; in many respects he is a legal person, albeit one for whom Hecht technically serves as director.

The idea has been around for a while. Artificial-life hobbyists all agree on the impossibility of digients ever getting legal protection as a class, citing dogs as an example: human compassion for dogs is both deep and wide, but the euthanasia of dogs in pet shelters amounts to an ongoing canine holocaust, and if the courts haven’t put a stop to that, they certainly aren’t going to grant protection to entities that lack a heartbeat. Given this, some owners believe the most they can hope for is legal protection on an individual basis: by filing articles of incorporation on a specific digient, an owner can take advantage of a substantial body of case law that establishes rights for nonhuman entities. Hecht is the first one to have actually done it.

“So you were trying to make a point,” says Derek.

“People say being corporation great,” says Marco. “Can do whatever want.”

A number of human adolescents have complained that Voyl has more rights than they do; obviously the digients have seen their comments. “Well, you’re not incorporated, and you definitely cannot do anything you want.”

“We sorry,” says Marco, suddenly appreciating the trouble he’s in. “Just want be corporations.”

“I told you before: you’re not old enough.”

“We older Voyl,” says Polo.

“Me especially,” says Marco.

“Voyl’s not old enough for it, either. His owner made a mistake.”

“So you not let us be corporations ever?”

Derek gives them a stern look. “Maybe one day, when you’re much older; we’ll see. But if you two try a stunt like this again, there are going to be serious repercussions. You understand?”

The digients are glum. “Yes,” says Marco.

“Yes,” says Polo.

“Okay. I’ve got to go; we’ll talk about this more later.” Derek scowls at them. “You two get back into Data Earth now.”

As he drives to the restaurant, Derek again thinks about what Marco is asking for. A lot of people are skeptical about the idea of digients becoming corporations; they view Hecht’s actions as nothing more than a stunt, an impression Hecht only reinforces by issuing press releases about his plans for Voyl. Right now Hecht essentially runs the Voyl Corporation, but he’s training Voyl in business law and insists that someday Voyl will make all the decisions himself; the role of director, whether filled by Hecht or by someone else, will be nothing but a formality. In the meantime, Hecht invites people to put Voyl’s status as a legal person to the test. Hecht has the resources for a court battle, and he’s itching for a fight. So far no one has taken him up on it, but Derek hopes that someone will; he wants the precedents to be well established before he’ll consider incorporating Marco and Polo.

The question of whether Marco or Polo would ever be intellectually capable of becoming corporations is another question, and to Derek’s mind a more difficult one to answer. The Neuroblast digients have shown that they can do homework on their own, and he’s confident that their attention spans for independent tasks will increase steadily over time, but even if they become able to do sizeable projects without supervision, that’s still a far cry from being able to make responsible decisions about one’s future. And he’s not even sure if that level of independence is something he should encourage Marco and Polo to have as a goal. Turning Marco and Polo into corporations opens the door to keeping them running after Derek himself has passed away, which is a worrisome prospect: for Down Syndrome individuals, there are organizations that provide assistance to people living on their own, but similar support services don’t exist for incorporated digients. It might be better to ensure that Marco and Polo are suspended in the event that Derek can’t take care of them.

Whatever he decides to do, he’ll have to do it without Wendy; they’ve decided to file for divorce. The reasons are complicated, of course, but one thing is clear: raising a pair of digients is not what Wendy wants from life, and if Derek wants a partner in this endeavor, he’ll have to find someone else. Their marriage counselor has explained that the problem isn’t the digients per se, it’s the fact that Derek and Wendy can’t find a way to accommodate their having different interests. Derek knows the counselor’s right, but surely having common interests would have helped.

He doesn’t want to get ahead of himself, but he can’t stop thinking that getting divorced offers him an opportunity to be more than just friends with Ana. Surely she’s considered the possibility too; after all the time they’ve known each other, how could she not have? The two of them would make a great team, working together for what’s best for their digients.

Not that he plans to declare his feelings at lunch; it’s too soon for that, and he knows Ana is seeing someone right now, a guy named Kyle. But their relationship is fast approaching the six-month mark, which is usually when the guy realizes that Jax isn’t just a hobby, but the major priority in her life; it probably won’t be long before the breakup follows. Derek figures that in telling Ana about his divorce, he’ll be reminding her that there are other options, that not every guy will think of digients as competition for her attention.

He looks around for Ana in the restaurant, sees her and waves; she gives him a big grin. When he reaches the table he says, “You won’t believe what Marco and Polo just did.” He tells her what happened, and her jaw drops.

“That’s amazing,” she says.“God, I’ll bet Jax has heard the same things they have.”

“Yeah, you might want to have a conversation with him when you get home.” This leads to talking about the benefits and drawbacks of giving the digients access to social forums. The forums offer richer interaction than the owners can supply by themselves, but not all the influences the digients receive are positive ones.

After they’ve discussed digients for a while, Ana asks, “So aside from that, what’s new with you?”

Derek sighs. “I might as well tell you: Wendy and I are getting divorced.”

“Oh no. Derek, I’m so sorry.” Her sympathy is genuine, and it warms him.

“It’s been a long time coming,” he says.

She nods. “Still, I’m sorry it’s happening.”

“Thanks.” He talks for a while about what he and Wendy have agreed upon, how they’ll sell the condo and split the proceeds. Thankfully the process is mostly amicable.

“At least she doesn’t want copies of Marco and Polo,” says Ana.

“Yeah, thank goodness for that,” agrees Derek. A spouse can almost always make a copy of a digient, and when a divorce isn’t amicable, it’s all too easy to use one to get back at one’s ex. They’ve seen it happen on the forums many times.

“Enough of that,” says Derek. “Let’s talk about something else. What’s happening with you?”

“Nothing, really.”

“You looked like you were in a good mood until I started talking about Wendy.”

“Well, yeah, I was,” she admits. “So is there something in particular that’s got you feeling so upbeat?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Nothing’s got you in a good mood?”

“Well, I have some news, but we don’t have to talk about it now.”

“No, don’t be silly, it’s fine. If you’ve got good news, let’s hear it.”

Ana pauses and then, almost apologetically, says, “Kyle and I have decided to move in together.”

Derek is stunned. “Congratulations,” he says.

Chapter Six

Two more years pass. Life goes on.

Occasionally Ana, Derek, and the other education-minded owners have their digients take some standardized tests, to see how they compare with human children. The results vary. The Faberge digients, being illiterate, can’t take written tests, but they seem to be developing well according to other metrics. Among the Origami digients, there’s a curious split in the test results, with half continuing to develop over time and half hitting a plateau, possibly due to a quirk in the genome. The Neuroblast digients do reasonably well if they’re permitted the same allowances in testing that dyslexic humans are given; while there’s variation between the individual digients, as a group their intellectual development continues apace.

What’s harder to gauge is their social development, but one encouraging sign is that the digients are socializing with human adolescents in various online communities. Jax becomes interested in tetrabrake, a subculture focused on virtual dance choreography for four-armed avatars; Marco and Polo have each joined a fan club for a serial game drama, and each regularly tries to convince the other of the superiority of his choice. Even though Ana and Derek don’t really understand the appeal of these communities, they like the fact that their digients have become part of them. The adolescents who dominate these communities seem unconcerned with the fact that the digients aren’t human, treating them as just another kind of online friend they are unlikely to meet in person.

Ana’s relationship with Kyle has its ups and downs, but is generally good. They occasionally go out with Derek and whomever he’s dating; Derek sees a series of women, but nothing ever becomes serious. He tells Ana that it’s because the women he dates don’t share his interest in digients, but the truth is that his feelings for Ana refuse to go away.

The economy goes into a recession after the latest flu pandemic, prompting changes in the virtual worlds. Daesan Digital, the company that created the Data Earth platform, makes a joint announcement with Viswa Media, creator of the Real Space platform: Data Earth is becoming part of Real Space. All Data Earth continents will be replaced by identical Real Space versions added to the Real Space universe. They’re calling it a merger of two worlds, but it’s just a polite way of saying that, after years of upgrades and new versions, Daesan can no longer afford to keep fighting the platform wars.

For most customers, all this means is that they can travel between more virtual locations without logging out and in again. Over the last few years, almost all of the companies whose software runs on Data Earth have created versions that run on Real Space. Gamers who play Siege of Heaven or Elderthorn can simply run a conversion utility, and their inventories of weapons and clothing will be waiting for them on the Real Space versions of the game continents.

One exception, though, is Neuroblast. There isn’t a Real Space version of the Neuroblast engine—Blue Gamma folded before the platform was introduced—which means that there’s no way for a digient with a Neuroblast genome to enter the Real Space environment. Origami and Faberge digients experience the migration to Real Space as an expansion of possibilities, but for Jax and the other Neuroblast digients, Daesan’s announcement essentially means the end of the world.

Ana is getting ready for bed when she hears the crash. She hurries out to the living room to investigate.

Jax is wearing the robot body, examining his wrist. One of the tiles on the wall display next to him is cracked. He sees Ana enters and says, “I sorry.”

“What were you doing?” she asks.

“I very sorry.”

“Tell me what you were doing.”

Reluctantly, Jax says, “Cartwheel.”

“And your wrist gave way and you hit the wall.“Ana takes a look at the robot-body’s wrist. As she feared; it will require replacement. “I don’t make these rules because I don’t want you to have fun. But this is what happens when you try dancing in the robot body.”

“I know you said. But I try little dancing, and body fine. I try little more, and body still fine.”

“So you tried a little more, and now we have to buy a new wrist, and a new display tile.” She briefly wonders how quickly she can replace them, if she can keep Kyle—who is out of town on business—from finding out about this. A few months ago Jax damaged a piece of sculpture that Kyle loved, and it might be better not to remind him of that incident.

“I very very sorry,” says Jax.

“Okay, back to Data Earth.“Ana points to the charging platform.

“I admit was mistake—”

“Just go.”

Jax dutifully heads over. Just before he steps on the platform, he says quietly, “It not Data Earth.” Then the robot-body’s helmet goes dark.

Jax is complaining about the private version of Data Earth that the Neuroblast user group has set up, duplicating many of the continents from the original. In one respect it’s much better than the private island they used as a refuge from the IFF hack, because now processing power is so cheap that they can run dozens of continents. In another respect it’s much worse, because those continents are almost entirely devoid of inhabitants.

The problem is not just that all the humans have moved to Real Space. The Origami and Faberge digients have gone to Real Space too, and Ana can hardly blame their owners; she’d have done the same, given the opportunity. Even more distressing is that most of the Neuroblast digients are gone as well, including many of Jax’s friends. Some members of the user group quit when Data Earth closed; others took a “wait and see” approach, but grew discouraged after they saw how impoverished the private Data Earth was, choosing to suspend their digients rather than raise them in a ghost town. And more than anything else, that’s what the private Data Earth resembles: a ghost town the size of a planet. There are vast expanses of minutely-detailed terrain to wander around in, but no one to talk to except for the tutors who come in to give lessons. There are dungeons without quests, malls without businesses, stadiums without sporting events; it’s the digital equivalent of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Jax’s human friends from the tetrabrake scene used to log into the private Data Earth just to visit Jax, but their visits have grown increasingly infrequent; all the tetrabrake events happen on Real Space now. Jax can send and receive choreography recordings, but a major part of the scene is live gatherings where choreography is improvised, and there’s no way for him to participate in those. Jax is losing most of his social life in the virtual world, and he can’t find one in the real one: his robot body is categorized as an unpiloted free-roaming vehicle, so he’s restricted from public spaces unless Ana or Kyle is there to accompany him. Confined to their apartment, he becomes bored and restless.

For weeks Ana tried having Jax sit at her computer in his robot body and log into Real Space that way, but he refuses to do it anymore. There were difficulties with the user interface—his inexperience with using an actual computer, compounded by the camera’s suboptimal tracking of gestures performed by a robot body—but she believes they could have overcome them. The bigger problem is that Jax doesn’t want to control an avatar remotely: he wants to be the avatar. For him, the keyboard and screen are a miserable substitute for being there, as unsatisfying as a jungle videogame would be to a chimpanzee taken from the Congo.

All the remaining Neuroblast digients are having similar frustrations, making it clear that a private Data Earth is only a temporary fix. What’s needed is a way to run the digients on Real Space, allowing them to move freely and interact with its objects and inhabitants. In other words, the solution is to port the Neuroblast engine—to rewrite it to run on the Real Space platform. Ana has persuaded Blue Gamma’s former owners to release the source code for Neuroblast, but it will take experienced developers to do the rewriting. The user group has posted announcements on open-source forums in an attempt to attract volunteers.

The sole advantage of Data Earth’s obsolescence is that their digients are safe from the dark side of the social world. A company called Edgeplayer markets a digient torture chamber on the Real Space platform; to avoid accusations of unauthorized copying, they use only public-domain digients as victims. The user group has agreed that once they get the Neuroblast engine ported, their conversion procedure will include full ownership verification; no Neuroblast digient will ever enter Real Space without someone committed to taking care of it.

It’s two months later, and Derek is browsing the user’s group forum, reading the responses to an earlier post of his on the status of the Neuroblast port. Unfortunately, the news was not good; the attempts to recruit developers for the project haven’t met with much success. The user group has held open-house events in their private Data Earth so that people could meet the digients, but there have been very few takers.

The problem is that genomic engines are old news. Developers are drawn to new, exciting projects, and right now that means working on neural interfaces or nanomedical software. There are scores of genomic engines languishing in various states of incompletion on the open-source repositories, all in need of volunteer programmers, and the prospect of porting the dozen-year-old Neuroblast engine to a new platform may be the least exciting of them all. Only a handful of students are contributing to the Neuroblast port, and considering how little time they’re able to devote, the Real Space platform will itself be obsolete before the port is finished.

The other alternative is to hire professional developers. Derek has talked to some developers with experience in genomic engines, and requested quotes on how much it would cost to port Neuroblast. The estimates he’s received are reasonable given the complexity of the project, and for a company with several hundred thousand customers, it would make perfect sense to go ahead with it. For a user group whose membership has dwindled down to about twenty people, however, the price is staggering.

Derek reads the latest comments on the discussion forum, and then calls up Ana. Having the digients confined to a private Data Earth has definitely been hard, but for him there’s also been a silver lining: he and Ana have reason to talk every day now, whether it’s about the status of the Neuroblast port or trying to organize activities for their digients. Over the last few years Marco and Polo had drifted away from Jax as they all pursued their own interests, but now the Neuroblast digients have only each other for company, so he and Ana try to find things for them to do as a group. He no longer has a wife who might complain about this, and Ana’s boyfriend Kyle doesn’t seem to mind, so he can call her up without recrimination. It’s a painful sort of pleasure to spend this much time with her; it might be healthier for him if they interacted less, but he doesn’t want to stop.

Ana’s face appears in the phone window. “Have you seen Stuart’s post?” Derek asks. Stuart pointed out what each person would have to pay for them if they divided the cost evenly, and asked how many of the members could afford that much.

“I just read it,” says Ana. “Maybe he thinks he’s being helpful, but all he’s doing is getting people anxious.”

“I agree,” he says. “But until we come up with a good alternative, the per-person cost is what everyone will be thinking about. Have you met with that fundraiser yet?” Ana was going to talk to a friend of a friend, a woman who has run fundraising campaigns for wildlife sanctuaries.

“As a matter of fact, I just got back from lunch with her.”

“Great! What did you find out?”

“The bad news is, she doesn’t think we can qualify for nonprofit status, because we’re only trying to raise money for a specific set of individuals.”

“But anyone could use the new engine—” He stops. It’s true that there are probably millions of snapshots of Neuroblast digients stored in archives around the world. But the user group can’t honestly claim to be working on their behalf; without someone willing to raise them, none of those digients would benefit from a Real Space version of the Neuroblast engine. The only digients the user group is trying to help are its own.

Ana nods without him saying a word; she must have had the exact same thought earlier. “Okay,” says Derek, “we can’t be a nonprofit. So what’s the good news?”

“She says we can still solicit contributions outside of the nonprofit model. What we need to do is tell a story that generates sympathy for the digients themselves. That’s the way some zoos pay for things like surgeries on elephants.”

He considers that for a moment. “I guess we could post some videos about the digients, try tugging on people’s heartstrings.”

“Exactly. And if we can build up enough popular sentiment, we might get contributions of time as well as money. Anything that raises the profiles of the digients will increase our chances of getting volunteers from the open-source community.”

“I’ll start going through my videos for footage of Marco and Polo,” he says. “There’s plenty of cute stuff from when they were young; I’m not so sure about the more recent stuff. Or do we need heartrending stuff?”

“We should talk about what would work best,” says Ana. “I’ll post a message on the forum asking everyone else.”

This reminds Derek of something. “By the way, I got a call yesterday that might help us out. It’s kind of a long shot, though.”

“Who was it?”

“Do you remember the Xenotherians?”

“Those digients that were supposed to be aliens? Is that project still going on?”

“Sort of.” He explains that he was contacted by a young man named Felix Radcliffe, who is one of the last participants in the Xenotherian project. Most of the original hobbyists gave up years ago, exhausted by the difficulty of inventing an alien culture from scratch, but there remains a small group of devotees who have become almost monomaniacal. From what Derek has been able to determine, most of them are unemployed and rarely leave their bedrooms in their parents’ homes; they live their lives in Data Mars. Felix is the only member of the group willing to initiate contact with outsiders.

“And people call us fanatics,” says Ana. “So why did he contact you?”

“He heard we were trying to get Neuroblast ported, and wants to help. He recognized my name because I was the one who designed the avatars for them.”

“Lucky you,” she says, smiling, and Derek makes a face. “Why would he care if Neuroblast gets ported? I thought the whole point of Data Mars was to keep the Xenotherians isolated.”

“Originally it was, but now he’s decided they’re ready to meet human beings, and he wants to conduct a first-contact experiment. If Data Earth were still running, he’d let the Xenotherians send an expedition to the main continents, but that’s no longer an option. So Felix is in the same boat as us; he wants Neuroblast ported so his digients can enter Real Space.”

“Well . . . I guess I can understand that. And you said he might be able to help with funding?”

“He’s trying to generate interest among anthropologists and exobiologists. He thinks they’ll want to study the Xenotherians so much they’ll pay for the port.”

Ana looks dubious. “Would they actually pay for something like that?”

“I doubt it,” says Derek. “It’s not as if the Xenotherians are actually aliens. I think Felix would have better luck with game companies who need aliens to populate their worlds, but it’s his decision. I figure that as long as he doesn’t approach any of the people we’re contacting, he won’t hurt our chances, and there’s a possibility he can help.”

“But if he’s as awkward as he sounds, how likely is it he can persuade anyone?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be with his salesmanship. He’s got a video of the Xenotherians that he shows anthropologists, to whet their appetites. He let me see a little bit of it.”

“And?”

He shrugs, raises his hands. “I could’ve been looking at a hive of weedbots for all that I understood.”

Ana laughs. “Well, maybe that’s good. Maybe the more alien they are, the more interesting they’ll be.”

Derek laughs too, imagining the irony: after all the work they did at Blue Gamma to make digients appealing, what if it turns out that the alien ones are what people are more interested in?

Chapter Seven

Another two months go by. The user group’s attempts at fund-raising don’t meet with much success; the charitably inclined are growing fatigued of hearing about natural endangered species, let alone artificial ones, and digients aren’t nearly as photogenic as dolphins. The flow of donations has never risen above a trickle.

The stress of being confined to Data Earth is definitely taking a toll on the digients; the owners try to spend more time with them to keep them from getting bored, but it’s no substitute for a fully populated virtual world. Ana also tries to shield Jax from the problems surrounding the Neuroblast port, but he’s aware of it nonetheless. One day when she comes home from work, she logs in to find him visibly agitated.

“Want ask you about porting,” he says, with no prelude.

“What about it?”

“Before thought it just another upgrade, like before. Now think it much bigger. More like uploading, except with digients instead people, right?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“You seen video with mouse?”

Ana knows the one Jax is referring to: newly released by an uploading research team, it shows a white mouse being flash-frozen and then vaporized, one micrometer at a time, into curls of smoke by a scanning electron beam, and then instantiated in a test scape where it’s virtually thawed and awakened. The mouse immediately has a seizure, convulsing piteously for a couple of subjective minutes before it dies. It’s currently the record-holder for longest survival time for an uploaded mammal.

“Nothing like that will happen to you,” she assures him.

“You mean I not remember if happens,” says Jax. “I only remember if transition successful.”

“No one’s going to run you, or anyone else, on an untested engine. When Neuroblast has been ported, we’ll run test suites on it and fix all the bugs before we run a digient. Those test suites don’t feel anything.”

“Researchers ran test suites before they uploaded mice?”

Jax is good at asking the tough questions. “The mice were the test suites,” Ana admits. “But that’s because no one has the source code to organic brains, so they can’t write test suites that are simpler than real mice. We have the source code for Neuroblast, so we don’t have that problem.”

“But you don’t have money afford port.”

“No, not right now, but we’re going to get it.” She hopes she sounds more confident than she feels.

“How I help? How I make money?”

“Thanks, Jax, but right now there isn’t a way for you to make money,” she says. “For now your job is to just keep studying and do well in your classes.”

“Yes, know that: now study, later do other things. What if now I get loan, then pay back later when earn money?”

“Let me worry about that, Jax.”

Jax looks glum. “Okay.”

In fact, what Jax suggests is almost exactly what the user group has attempted recently by looking for corporate investors. It’s an avenue opened up by VirlFriday’s success in selling digients as personal assistants. It took several years, but Talbot finally managed to raise an instance of Andro that would work for anyone; VirlFriday has sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It’s the first demonstration that a digient can actually be profitable, and several other companies are looking to duplicate Talbot’s achievement.

One of those companies is called Polytope, who’ve announced plans for launching an enormous breeding program to create the next Andro. The user group contacted them and offered them a stake in the Neuroblast digients’ future: in exchange for paying to port the Neuroblast engine, Polytope would get a percentage of any income generated by the digients in perpetuity. The group was more hopeful than it had been in months, but the company’s answer was no; the only digients that Polytope is interested in are Sophonce digients, whose obsessive focus is a necessity if they’re going to replace conventional software.

The user group has briefly discussed the possibility of paying for the port out of their own pockets, but it’s clearly not feasible. As a result, some members are considering the unthinkable:

FROM: Stuart Gust

I hate being the one to bring this up, but someone has to. What about temporarily suspending the digients for a year or so, until we’ve raised the money for the port?

FROM: Derek Brooks

You know what happens when anyone suspends their digient. Temporary becomes indefinite becomes permanent.

FROM: Ana Alvarado

I couldn’t agree more. It’s just too easy to get into perpetual postponement mode. Have you ever heard of anyone restarting a digient that they’d suspended for more than six months? I haven’t.

FROM: Stuart Gust

But we’re not like those people. They suspended their digients because they were tired of them. We’ll miss our digients every day that they’re suspended; it’ll be an incentive for us to raise the money.

FROM: Ana Alvarado

If you think suspending Zaff will increase your motivation, go ahead. Keeping Jax awake is what keeps me motivated.

Ana has no doubts when she posts her reply on the forum, but the conversation is more difficult when, a few days later, Jax brings up the issue himself. The two of them are in the private Data Earth, where she is showing him around a new game continent. It’s a classic, one that Ana enjoyed years ago, and it’s recently been released for free, so the user group instantiated a copy for the digients. She tries to convey her enthusiasm for it, pointing out what distinguishes it from the other game continents that the digients have grown bored with, but Jax sees the continent for what it is: yet another attempt to keep him occupied while they wait for Neuroblast to be ported.

As they walk through a deserted medieval town square, Jax says, “Sometimes wish I just be suspended, not have to wait more. Restarted when I can enter Real Space, feel like no time passed.”

The comment catches Ana off-guard. None of the digients have access to the user-group forums, so Jax must have come up with the idea on his own. “Do you really want that?” she asks.

“Not really. Want stay awake, know what happening. But sometimes get frustrated.” Then, he asks, “You sometimes wish you don’t have take care me?”

She makes sure Jax is looking her in the face before she replies. “My life might be simpler if I didn’t have you to take care of, but it wouldn’t be as happy. I love you, Jax.”

“Love you too.”

Driving home from work, Derek gets a message from Ana saying that she’d been contacted by someone at Polytope, so as soon as he gets home he calls her. “So what happened?” he asks.

Ana looks bemused. “It was a very strange call.”

“Strange how?”

“They’re offering me a job.”

“Really? Doing what?”

“Training their Sophonce digients,” she says. “Because of all my previous experience, they want me to be the team leader. They offered a great salary, three years guaranteed employment, and a signing bonus that’s, frankly, fabulous. There’s a catch, though.”

“Well? Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“All their trainers are required to use InstantRapport.”

Derek’s eyes widen. “You’re kidding,” he says. InstantRapport is one of the smart transdermals, a patch that delivers doses of an oxytocin-opioid cocktail whenever the wearer is in the presence of a specific person. It’s used to strengthen rocky marriages and strained parent-child relationships, and it’s recently become available without a prescription. “What the hell for?”

“They figure that affection will produce better results, and the only way trainers will feel affection for Sophonce digients is with pharmaceutical intervention.”

“Oh, I get it. It’s a way to increase employee productivity.” He knows plenty of people who take nootropics or use transcranial magnetic stimulation to boost their performance at work, but so far no employer has made it a requirement. He shakes his head in disbelief. “If their digients are so hard to love, you would think they’d take a hint and switch to Neuroblast digients.”

“I said something similar to them, but they weren’t interested. I had an idea, though.” Ana leans forward. “I might be able to change their minds if I go work for them.”

“How do you figure?”

“It’d be an opportunity to show Jax to Polytope’s management on an ongoing basis. I could log into our private Data Earth from work, maybe even bring him in wearing the robot body. What better way to demonstrate how versatile the Neuroblast engine is? And once they realize that, they’ll port it to Real Space.”

Derek considers it. “Assuming they don’t forbid you from spending time with Jax during work hours—”

“Give me some credit. I wouldn’t give them the hard sell; I’d be subtle about it.”

“It might work,” he says. “But they’d make you wear the Instant Rapport patch. Is the chance worth that?”

Ana gives a frustrated shrug. “I don’t know. It sure as hell isn’t my first choice. But sometimes we have to take a chance, right? Push things a little.”

He isn’t sure what to say. “What does Kyle think about it?”

She sighs.“He’s totally against it. He doesn’t like the idea of me taking InstantRapport, and he definitely doesn’t think the chances are good enough to justify it.” She pauses, and then says, “But he doesn’t feel the same way about digients that you or I do, so of course he’d say that. For him, the payoff doesn’t seem that big.”

Ana’s clearly expecting support and he obliges, but privately his thoughts are more conflicted. He has reservations about what she’s proposing, but he’s hesitant about saying so.

He hates that he has such thoughts, but on the occasions that Ana has mentioned having difficulties with Kyle, he daydreams about the two of them splitting up. He’s told himself that he would never do anything to drive them apart, but if Kyle doesn’t share Ana’s commitment to the digients, Derek isn’t doing anything wrong by showing that he does. If that suggests to Ana that he’s a better match for her than Kyle, he can’t be blamed for that.

The question is whether he really thinks it’s a good idea for Ana to accept Polytope’s job offer. He’s not sure he does, but until he’s sure, he’s going to be supportive.

After he gets off the phone, Derek logs onto the private Data Earth to spend time with Marco and Polo. They’re playing a game of zero-gee racquetball, but descend from the court when they see him.

“Met nice visitors today,” says Marco.

“Really? Do you know who they were?”

“Person name Jennifer, and person name Roland.”

Derek checks the visitor log, and is dismayed by what he sees: Jennifer Chase and Roland Michaels are employees of a company called Binary Desire, maker of sex dolls both virtual and physical.

This isn’t the first time the user group has received an inquiry from someone wanting to use the digients for sex. The vast majority of sex dolls are still controlled by conventional software to enact scripted scenarios, but for as long as there have been digients, there have been people trying to have sex with them; the typical procedure is to copy a public-domain digient and reconfigure its reward map so that it enjoys whatever its owner finds arousing. Critics consider it the equivalent of having a dog lick peanut butter off your genitals, and it’s not an unfair comparison, either in terms of the intelligence of the digients or the sophistication of the training. Certainly there aren’t any digients remotely as person-like as Marco or Polo available for sex right now, so the user group gets occasional inquiries from sex-doll makers interested in purchasing copies of the digients. Everyone in the group has agreed that they should ignore such inquiries.

But according to the log, Chase and Michaels were escorted in by Felix Radcliffe.

Derek tells Marco and Polo to resume their game, and then calls Felix. “What the hell were you thinking? Bringing in Binary Desire?”

“They did not attempt to sex the digients.”

“I can see that.” He has the recording of their visit playing at double-speed in another window.

“They had conversation with them.”

Talking to Felix sometimes feels like addressing an alien. “We had an understanding about sex-doll makers. Do you remember that?”

“These people are not like the others. I like the way they think.”

He’s afraid to ask what that means.

“If you like them, bring them to Data Mars and show them your Xenotherians.”

“I did show them,” says Felix. “They were not interested.”

Of course they weren’t, Derek realizes; the demand for sex with Lojban-speaking tripods would be microscopic. But he sees that Felix is being honest, that it wouldn’t bother him to prostitute the Xenotherians if it would help finance his first-contact experiment. Felix may be eccentric, but he’s not a hypocrite.

“Then that should have been the end of it,” he says. “We may have to ban you from Data Earth.”

“You should talk to these people.”

“No, we shouldn’t.”

“They will pay you for listening to them. They will send a message containing the specifics.”

Derek almost laughs. Binary Desire must be pretty desperate if they’re paying people to listen to a sales pitch. “Messages are fine. But I’m putting those people on the ban list, and I don’t want you bringing in anyone else from a sex-doll maker. Is that clear?”

“That is clear,” says Felix, and hangs up.

Derek shakes his head. Normally he wouldn’t consider listening to such a sales pitch, even for money, because he doesn’t want to give the impression that he’d be willing to sell Marco and Polo as sex objects.

But right now the user group needs every dollar it can get. If listening to one company’s presentation could encourage other companies to pay for the same opportunity, then it might be worthwhile. He restarts the video of the visitors’ meeting with the digients and watches it at regular speed.

Chapter Eight

The user group has gathered to listen to Binary Desire’s presentation via videoconferencing; Binary Desire has made a payment to an escrow service, and the funds will be released after the meeting. Seated at the focus of her wraparound screen, Ana looks around her; everyone’s video feeds are integrated so that the user group appears to be gathered in a virtual auditorium, each sitting in a tiny private balcony. Derek’s sitting in the balcony to her left, and Felix in turn is to his left. At the podium on stage is Binary’s representative Jennifer Chase. Her image onscreen is blond and beautiful and tastefully dressed, and because the parties have agreed to use authenticated video, Ana knows this is how Chase actually looks. She wonders if Binary Desire assigns Chase to do all their negotiations; the woman is probably very good at getting what she asks for.

Felix stands up in his seat and starts to say something in Lojban before catching himself. “You will like what she will say,” he says.

“Thank you, Felix, but let me take it from here,” says Chase.

Felix sits back down, and Chase addresses the group. “Thank you for agreeing to meet with me. Typically when I meet with a prospective business partner, I talk about how Binary Desire can help them reach a wider market than they can themselves, but I’m not going to do that with you. My goal for this meeting is to assure you that your digients will be treated with respect. We don’t want pets that have been sexualized through simple operant conditioning. We want beings that engage in sex at a higher, more personal level.”

Stuart calls out, “How do you expect to get that when our digients are completely asexual?”

Chase doesn’t miss a beat. “With two years of training, minimum.”

Ana’s surprised.“That’s a major investment,” she says.“I thought digient sex-dolls were usually trained for a couple of weeks.”

“That’s because they’re usually Sophonce digients, and they don’t become better sex partners in two years than they do in two weeks. I don’t know if you’ve seen the results, but if you’re curious, I can tell you where you can find a harem of Draytas dressed in Marilyn Monroe avatars, all bleating Wanna suck dick. It’s not pretty.”

Ana laughs despite herself, as do several others in the group. “No, it doesn’t sound like it.”

“That’s not what Binary Desire is looking for. Anyone can take a public-domain digient and reconfigure its reward map. We want to offer sex partners with real personality, and we’re willing to invest the effort needed to create that.”

“So what would your training entail?” asks Helen Costas, from the back.

“First off, sexual discovery and exploration. We’d give the digients anatomically-correct avatars and let them get accustomed to having erogenous zones. We’d encourage the digients to begin sexual experimentation with each other, so they can get some practice as sexual beings and choose a gender they’re comfortable with. Since much of the learning during that phase will occur purely among themselves, there may be periods where the digients can be run at faster than real time. Once they’ve acquired a reasonable amount of experience, we’ll begin bonding them with compatible human partners.”

“What makes you so sure they’ll bond with a specific human?” asks Derek.

“Our developers have examined some of the digients in the shelters; they’re too young for our purposes, but they’ve developed emotional attachments, and our developers have done enough analysis that they believe they can induce similar attachments in older digients. As the digient gets to know a human, we’ll enhance the emotional dimension of their interactions, both sexual and non-sexual, so they’ll generate love in the digient.”

“Like a Neuroblast version of InstantRapport,” says Ana.

“Something like that,” says Chase, “but more effective and specific, because it’ll be custom-tuned. For the digient, it will be indistinguishable from falling in love spontaneously.”

“That custom-tuning doesn’t sound like something you’ll be able to get right on the first try,” says Ana.

“No, of course not,” says Chase. “We expect that it will take months for a digient to fall in love; throughout that period we’ll be working with the customer, rolling the digient back to checkpoints and trying different adjustments until the emotional bond is firmly established. It’ll be like the breeding program you managed when you worked at Blue Gamma; we’re just tailoring it for the individual customer.”

Ana’s about to say that it’s very different, but decides not to. All she needs to do is listen to the woman’s sales pitch, not refute it. “I can see what you mean,” she says.

Derek says, “Even if you can make them fall in love, none of our digients is going to be a convincing Marilyn Monroe.”

“No, but that’s not our goal. The avatars we’d give them would be humanoid, but not human. You see, we’re not trying to duplicate the experience of sex with a human being; we want to provide non-human partners that are charming, affectionate, and genuinely enthusiastic about sex. Binary Desire believes this is a new sexual frontier.”

“A new sexual frontier?” says Stuart. “You mean popularizing a kink until it becomes mainstream.”

“You could call it that,” says Chase. “But try looking at it another way: our ideas of what constitutes healthy sex have always broadened over time. People used to think homosexuality, BDSM, and polyamory were all symptoms of psychological problems, but there’s nothing intrinsic about those activities that’s incompatible with a loving relationship. The problem was having one’s desires stigmatized by society. We believe that in time, digient sex will likewise be accepted as a valid expression of sexuality. But that requires being open and honest about it, and not pretending that a digient is a human.”

An icon appears onscreen indicating that Chase has transmitted a document to the group. “I’m sending you a copy of the contract we’re proposing,” she says, “but let me give you a summary. Binary Desire will cover the costs of porting Neuroblast to Real Space in exchange for non-exclusive rights to your digients. You retain the right to make and sell copies of your digients as long as they don’t compete with ours. If your digients sell well, we’ll also pay royalties. And your digients will enjoy what they do.”

“Okay, thank you,” Ana says. “We’ll take a look at the contract, and let you know. Is that all?”

Chase smiles. “Not quite. Before I release the funds, I’d like the chance to address any concerns you might have; I assure you I won’t be offended. Is it the sexual aspect that you have reservations about?”

Ana hesitates, and then says, “No, it’s the coercion.”

“There wouldn’t be any coercion. The bonding process ensures the digients will enjoy it as much as their owners.”

“But you’re not giving them any choice about what they enjoy.”

“Is it so different for humans? When I was a little girl, the idea of kissing a boy was completely uninteresting, and if it’d been up to me, that would never have changed.” Chase gives a slight, coy smile, as if to suggest how much she enjoys kissing now. “We become sexual beings whether we want to or not. The modifications Binary Desire would make to the digients aren’t any different. In fact, they’ll be better. Some people get saddled with sexual proclivities that cause them a lifetime of grief. That’s not going to happen to the digients. As far as each digient concerned, it’s going to be paired up with a perfectly compatible sex partner. That’s not coercion, that’s ultimate sexual fulfillment.”

“But it’s not real,” Ana blurts out, and immediately regrets it.

It’s precisely the opening Chase was looking for. “How is it not?” she asks. “Your feelings for your digients are real; their feelings for you are real. If you and your digient can have a nonsexual connection that’s real, why should a sexual connection between a human and a digient be any less real?”

Ana’s at a loss for words momentarily, and Derek steps in. “We could argue philosophy forever,” he says. “The bottom line is, we didn’t spend years raising our digients to have them become sex toys.”

“I realize that,” says Chase. “And making this deal won’t prevent copies of your digients from going on to other things. But right now your digients, amazing as they are, have no marketable job skills, and you can’t predict when they’ll get any. How else are you going to raise the money you need?”

How many women have asked themselves the same question, Ana wonders. “So it’s the oldest profession.”

“That’s one way to put it, but let me again point out that the digients won’t be subjected to any coercion, not even economic coercion. If we wanted to sell faked sexual desire, there are cheaper ways we could do it. The whole point of this enterprise is to create an alternative to fake desire. We believe that sex is better when both parties enjoy it; better as an experience, and better for society.”

“That all sounds very noble. What about people who are into sexual torture?”

“We don’t condone any non-consensual sex acts, and that includes sex with digients. The contract I’ve sent you guarantees that Binary Desire will retain the circuit-breakers that Blue Gamma initially installed, enforced with state-of-the-art access control. As I said, we believe sex is better when both parties enjoy it. We’re committed to that.”

“You approve, correct?” Felix says to the group. “They anticipate all possibilities.” Several of the user group members glare at him, and even Chase’s expression indicates that she’d rather do without Felix’s help.

“I know that this wasn’t what you were hoping for when you began looking for investors,” says Chase. “But if you can look past your initial reaction, I think you’ll agree that what we’re proposing will be to everyone’s advantage.”

“We’ll think about it and get back to you,” says Derek.

“Thank you for listening to my presentation,” says Chase. A window pops up on screen, indicating that the funds have been released from escrow. “Let me say one last thing. If you’re approached by another company, be sure to look at the fine print. It will probably include a clause that our lawyers wanted us to include, one that gives them the right to resell your digients to another company, with the circuit-breakers disabled. I expect you know what that means?”

Ana nods; it meant that the digients might get resold to a company like Edgeplayer for use as torture victims. “Yes, we do.”

“Binary Desire overruled our lawyers’ recommendation on that. Our contract guarantees that the digients won’t be used for anything but noncoercive sex, ever. See if anyone else will make you that same guarantee.”

“Thank you,” says Ana. “We’ll be in touch.”

Ana went into the meeting with Binary Desire with the attitude that it was purely pro-forma, a way to make some money by listening to a sales pitch. Now, having heard the pitch, she finds that she’s thinking about it a lot.

She hasn’t paid attention to the world of virtual sex since she was in college, when a college boyfriend spent a semester abroad. They bought the peripherals together before he left, discreet hard-shell accessories with hilarious silicone interiors, and digitally locked each device with the other’s serial number, a fidelity guarantee for their virtual genitals. Their first few sessions were unexpectedly fun, but it didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off and the shortcomings of the technology to become blatant. Sex without kissing was woefully incomplete, and she missed having her face an inch away from his, feeling the weight of his body, smelling his musk; seeing each other on a video screen couldn’t replace that, no matter how close the camera was. Her skin hungered for his in a way that no peripheral could satisfy; by semester’s end she felt like she was going to burst at the seams. The technology has undoubtedly improved since then, but it’s still an impoverished medium for intimacy.

Ana remembers how much a difference it made the first time she saw Jax wearing a physical body. If a digient were inhabiting a doll, would that make the idea of sex more appealing? No. She’s had her face right up against Jax’s face, cleaning smudges off his lenses or inspecting scratches, and it’s nothing like being close to a person; with a digient there’s no feeling of a personal space being entered, not even the trust signified when a dog lets you rub its belly. At Blue Gamma they’d chosen not to put that kind of physical self-protectiveness into the digients—it didn’t make sense for their product—but what does physical intimacy mean if there aren’t those barriers to overcome? She doesn’t doubt that it’s possible to give a digient an arousal response close enough to human that both parties’ mirror neurons would kick in. But could Binary Desire teach a digient about the vulnerability that came with being naked, and what you were telling someone with your willingness to be naked in their presence?

But maybe none of that matters. Ana replays the recording of the videoconference, listens to Chase saying that it’s a new frontier, sex with a non-human partner. It’s not supposed to be the same as sex with another person, it’ll be a different kind of sex, and maybe it’ll be accompanied by a different kind of intimacy.

She thinks of an incident that took place when she worked at the zoo, when one of the female orangutans passed away. Everyone was heartbroken, but the orangutan’s favorite trainer was particularly inconsolable. Eventually he confessed that he’d been having sex with her, and shortly afterwards the zoo fired him. Ana was shocked, of course, but even more so because he wasn’t the creepy pervert she imagined a zoophile would be; his grief was as deep and genuine as that of anyone who had lost a lover. He’d been married once, too, which surprised her; she’d assumed such people couldn’t get a date, but then she realized she was buying into the stereotype about zookeepers: that they spent time with animals because they couldn’t get along with people. As she did at the time, Ana again tries to pin down exactly why nonsexual relationships with animals can be healthy while sexual ones can’t, why the limited consent that animals can give is sufficient to keep them as pets yet not to have sex with them. Again she can’t articulate an argument that isn’t rooted in personal distaste, and she’s not sure that’s a good enough reason.

As for the question of digients having sex with each other, the topic has occasionally been discussed in the past, and Ana has always felt that the owners are fortunate not to have to deal with it, because sexual maturity is when a lot of animals become difficult to handle. There isn’t even the guilt that might be associated with neutering Jax surgically, because she’s not depriving him of a fundamental aspect of his nature. But now there’s a thread on the discussion forum that is making her reconsider things:

FROM: Helen Costas

I don’t like the idea of anyone have sex with my digient, but then I remember that parents never want to think about their kids having sex, either.

FROM: Maria Zheng

That’s a false analogy. Parents can’t stop their children from becoming sexual, but we can. There’s no intrinsic need for digients to emulate that aspect of human development. Don’t go overboard with the anthropomorphic projection.

FROM: Derek Brooks

What’s intrinsic? There was no intrinsic need for digients to have charming personalities or cute avatars, but there was still a good reason for it: they made people more likely to spend time with them, and that was good for the digients.

I’m not saying we should accept Binary Desire’s offer. But I think what we need to ask ourselves is, if we make the digients sexual, would that encourage other people to love them, in a way that’s good for the digients?

Ana wonders if Jax’s asexuality means he’s missing out on things that would be beneficial for him to experience. She likes the fact that Jax has human friends, and the reason she wants Neuroblast ported to Real Space is so he can maintain those relationships, strengthen them. But how far could that strengthening go? How close a relationship could one have before sex became an issue?

Later that evening, she posts a reply to Derek’s comment:

FROM: Ana Alvarado

Derek raises a good question. But even if the answer is yes, that doesn’t mean we should accept Binary Desire’s offer.

If a person is looking for a masturbatory fantasy, he can use ordinary software to get it. He shouldn’t buy a mail-order bride and slap a dozen InstantRapport patches on her, but that’s essentially what Binary Desire wants to give its customers. Is that the kind of life we want our digients to have? We could dose them with so much virtual endorphin that they’d be happy living in a closet in Data Earth, but we care about them too much to do that. I don’t think we should let someone else treat them with less respect.

I admit the idea of sex with a digient bothered me initially, but I guess I’m not opposed to the idea in principle. It’s not something I can imagine doing myself, but I don’t have a problem if other people want to, so long as it’s not exploitative. If there’s some degree of give and take, then maybe it could be like Derek said: good for the digient as well as the human. But if the human is free to customize the digient’s reward map, or keep rolling him back until he finds a perfectly tweaked instantiation, then where’s the give and take? Binary Desire is telling its customers that they don’t have to accommodate their digients’ preferences in any way. It doesn’t matter whether it involves sex or not; that’s not a real relationship.

Any member of the user group is free to accept Binary Desire’s offer individually, but Ana’s argument is persuasive enough that no one does so for the time being. A few days after the meeting, Derek tells Marco and Polo about Binary Desire’s offer, figuring that they deserve to be kept informed of what’s going on. Polo is curious about the modifications Binary Desire wanted to make; he knows he has a reward map, but has never thought about what it would mean to edit it.

“Might be fun editing my reward map,” says Polo.

“You not able edit your reward map when you working for someone else,” says Marco. “You only able do that when you corporation.”

Polo turns to Derek. “That true?”

“Well, that’s not something I would let you do even when you are a corporation.”

“Hey,” protests Marco. “You said when we corporations, we make all our own decisions.”

“I did say that,” admits Derek, “but I hadn’t thought about you editing your own reward map. That could be very dangerous.”

“But humans able edit own reward maps.”

“What? We can’t do anything like that.”

“What about drugs people take for sex? Ifridisics?”

“Aphrodisiacs. Those are just temporary.”

“InstantRapport temporary?” asks Polo.

“Not exactly,” says Derek, “but a lot of the time when people take that, they’re making a mistake.” Especially, he thinks, if a company is paying them to take it.

“When I corporation, I free make own mistakes,” says Marco. “That whole point.”

“You’re not ready to be a corporation yet.”

“Because you not like my decisions? Ready mean always agree with you?”

“If you’re planning on editing your own reward map as soon as you’re a corporation, you’re not ready.”

“I not said want,” says Marco emphatically. “I don’t want. I said when corporation, I free do that. That different.”

Derek stops for a moment. It’s easy to forget, but this is the same conclusion the user group came to during forum discussions about incorporating the digients: if legal personhood is to be more than a form of wordplay, it has to mean granting a digient some degree of autonomy. “Yes, you’re right. When you’re a corporation, you’ll be free to do things that I think are mistakes.”

“Good,” says Marco, satisfied. “When you decide I ready, it not because I agree you. I can be ready even if I not agree you.”

“That’s right. But please, tell me you don’t want to edit your own reward map.”

“No, I know dangerous. Might make mistake that stop self from fixing mistake.”

He’s relieved. “Thank you.”

“But let Binary Desire edit my reward map, that not dangerous.”

“No, it’s not dangerous, but it’s still a bad idea.”

“I not agree.”

“What? I don’t think you understand what they want to do.”

Marco gives him a look of frustration.“I do. They make me like what they want me like, even if I not like it now.”

Derek realizes Marco does understand. “And you don’t think that’s wrong?”

“Why wrong? All things I like now, I like because Blue Gamma made me like. That not wrong.”

“No, but that was different.” He thinks for a moment to explain why. “Blue Gamma made you like food, but they didn’t decide what specific kind of food you had to like.”

“So what? Not very different.”

“It is different.”

“Agree wrong if they edit digients not want be edited. But if digient agree before be edited, then not wrong.”

Derek feels himself growing exasperated. “So do you want to be a corporation and make your own decisions, or do you want someone else to make your decisions? Which one is it?”

Marco thinks about that. “Maybe I try both. One copy me become corporation, second copy me work for Binary Desire.”

“You don’t mind having copies made of you?”

“Polo copy of me. That not wrong.”

At a loss, Derek brings the discussion to a close and sends the digients off to do work on their studies, but he can’t easily dismiss what Marco has said. On the one hand Marco made some good arguments, but on the other Derek remembers his college years well enough to know that skill at debate isn’t the same as maturity. Not for the first time, he thinks of how much easier it would be if there were a legally mandated age of majority for digients; without one, it will be entirely up to him to decide when Marco is ready to be a corporation.

Derek’s not alone in having disagreements in the wake of Binary Desire’s offer. The next time he talks to Ana, she complains about a recent fight with Kyle.

“He thinks we should accept Binary Desire’s offer,” she says.“He said it’s a much better option than me taking the job at Polytope.”

It’s another opportunity to be critical of Kyle; how should he handle it? All he says is, “Because he thinks modifying the digients isn’t that big a deal.”

“Exactly.” She fumes a bit, and then continues. “It’s not as if I think wearing the InstantRapport patch is no big deal. Of course it is. But there’s a big difference between me using InstantRapport voluntarily and Binary Desire just imposing their bonding process on the digients.”

“A huge difference. But you know, that raises an interesting question.” He tells her about his conversation with Marco and Polo. “I’m not sure if Marco was just arguing for the sake of arguing, but it made me think. If a digient volunteers to undergo the changes that Binary Desire wants to make, does that make a difference?”

Ana looks thoughtful. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“When an adult chooses to use an InstantRapport patch, we have no grounds to object. What would it take for us to respect Jax’s or Marco’s decisions the same way?”

“They’d have to be adults.”

“But we could file articles of incorporation tomorrow, if we wanted to,” he says. “What makes us so sure we shouldn’t? Suppose one day Jax says to you he understands what he’d be getting into by accepting Binary Desire’s offer, just like you with the job at Polytope. What would it take for you to accept his decision?”

She thinks for a moment.“I guess it would depend on whether or not I thought he was basing his decision on experience. Jax has never had a romantic relationship or held a job, and accepting Binary Desire’s offer would mean doing both, potentially forever. I’d want him to have had some experience with those matters before making a decision where the consequences are so permanent. Once he’s had that experience, I suppose I couldn’t really object.”

“Ah,” says Derek, nodding. “I wish I’d thought of that when I was talking to Marco.” It would mean modifying the digients into sexual beings, but without the intention of selling them; another expense for the users’ group, even after they got Neuroblast ported. “That’s going to take a long time, though.”

“Sure, but there’s no hurry to make the digients sexual. Better to wait until we can do it properly.”

Better to set an older age of majority than risk setting it too young. “And until then, it’s up to us to look after them.”

“Right! We have to put their needs first.” Ana looks grateful for the agreement, and he’s glad he can provide it. Then frustration returns to her face. “I just wish Kyle understood that.”

He searches for a diplomatic response. “I’m not sure anyone can, if they haven’t spent the time we have,” he says. It’s not intended as a criticism of Kyle; it’s what he sincerely believes.

Chapter Nine

A month has passed since Binary Desire’s presentation, and Ana is in the private Data Earth with a few of the Neuroblast digients, awaiting the arrival of visitors. Marco tells Lolly about the latest episode of his favorite game drama, while Jax practices a dance he’s choreographed.

“Look,” he says. She watches him rapidly cycle through a sequence of poses.

“Remember, when they get here, you have to talk about what you built.”

“I know, you said and said already. I stop dancing soon they here. Just having fun.”

“Sorry, Jax. I’m just nervous.”

“Watch me dancing. Feel better.”

She smiles. “Thanks, I’ll try that.” She takes a deep breath and tells herself to relax.

A portal opens and two avatars walk through. Jax promptly stops dancing, and Ana walks her avatar over to greet the visitors. The onscreen annotations identify them as Jeremy Brauer and Frank Pearson.

“I hope you didn’t have any trouble getting in,” says Ana.

“No,” says Pearson, “the logins you gave us worked fine.”

Brauer is looking around. “Good old Data Earth.” His avatar pulls on the branch of a shrub and then let’s go, watching the way it sways. “I remember how exciting it was when Daesan first released it. It was state of the art.”

Brauer and Pearson work for Exponential Appliances, maker of household robots. The robots are examples of old-fashioned AI; their skills are programmed rather than learned, and while they offer some real convenience, they aren’t conscious in any meaningful sense. Exponential regularly releases new versions, advertising each one as being a step closer to the consumer’s dream of AI: a butler that is utterly loyal and attentive from the moment it’s switched on. To Ana this upgrade sequence seems like a walk to the horizon, providing the illusion of progress while never actually getting any closer to the goal. But consumers buy the robots, and they’ve given Exponential a healthy balance sheet, which is what Ana’s looking for.

Ana isn’t trying to get the Neuroblast digients jobs as butlers; it’s obvious that Jax and the others are too willful for that type of work. Brauer and Pearson don’t even work for the commercial division of the company; instead, they’re part of the research division, the reason that Exponential was founded. The household robots are Exponential’s way of funding its efforts to conjure up the technologist’s dream of AI: an entity of pure cognition, a genius unencumbered by emotions or a body of any kind, an intellect vast and cool yet sympathetic. They’re waiting for a software Athena to spring forth fully grown, and while it’d be impolite for Ana to say she thinks they’ll be waiting forever, she hopes to convince Brauer and Pearson that the Neuroblast digients offer a viable alternative.

“Well, thank you for coming out to meet me,” says Ana.

“We’ve been looking forward to it,” says Brauer. “A digient whose cumulative running time is longer than the lifespan of most operating systems? You don’t see that very often.”

“No, you don’t.” Ana realizes that they came more for nostalgia’s sake than to seriously entertain a business proposal. Well, so be it, as long as they’re here.

Ana introduces them to the digients, who then give little demonstrations of projects they’ve been working on. Jax shows a virtual contraption he’s built, a kind of music synthesizer that he plays by dancing. Marco gives an explanation of a puzzle game he’s designed, one that can be played cooperatively or competitively. Brauer is particularly interested in Lolly, who shows them a program she’s been writing; unlike Jax and Marco, who built their projects using toolkits, Lolly is writing actual code. Brauer’s disappointment is evident when it becomes clear that Lolly is just like any other novice programmer; it’s clear he was hoping her digient nature had given her a special aptitude for the subject.

After they’ve talked with the digients for a while, Ana and the visitors from Exponential log out of Data Earth and switch to videoconferencing.

“They’re terrific,” says Brauer. “I used to have one, but he never got much beyond baby talk.”

“You used to have a Neuroblast digient?”

“Sure, I bought one as soon as they came out. He was an instance of the Jax mascot, like yours. I named him Fitz, kept him going for a year.”

This man had a baby Jax once, she thinks. Somewhere in storage is a baby version of Jax that knows this man as his owner. Aloud, she says, “Did you get bored with him?”

“Not so much bored as aware of his limitations. I could see that the Neuroblast genome was the wrong approach. Sure Fitz was smart, but it would take forever before he could do any useful work. I’ve got to hand it to you for sticking with Jax for so long. What you’ve achieved is impressive.” He makes it sound like she’s built the world’s largest toothpick sculpture.

“Do you still think Neuroblast was the wrong approach? You’ve seen for yourself what Jax is capable of. Do you have anything comparable at Exponential?” It comes out more sharply than she intended.

Brauer’s reaction is mild. “We’re not looking for human-level AI; we’re looking for superhuman AI.”

“And you don’t think that human-level AI is a step in that direction?”

“Not if it’s the sort that your digients demonstrate,” says Brauer.

“You can’t be sure that Jax will ever be employable, let alone become a genius at programming. For all you know, he’s reached his maximum.”

“I don’t think he has—”

“But you don’t know for certain.”

“I know that if the Neuroblast genome can produce a digient like him, it can produce one as smart as you’re looking for. The Alan Turing of Neuroblast digients is just waiting to be born.”

“Fine, let’s suppose you’re right,” says Brauer; he’s clearly indulging her. “How many years would it take to find him? It’s already taken you so long to raise the first generation that the platform they run on has become obsolete. How many generations before you come up with a Turing?”

“We won’t always be restricted to running them in real time. At some point there’ll be enough digients to form a self-sufficient population, and then they won’t be dependent on human interaction. We could run a society of them at hothouse speeds without any risk of them going feral, and see what they produce.” Ana’s actually far from confident that this scenario would produce a Turing, but she’s practiced this argument enough times to sound like she believes it.

Brauer isn’t convinced, though. “Talk about a risky investment. You’re showing us a handful of teenagers and asking us to pay for their education in the hopes that when they’re adults, they’ll found a nation that will produce geniuses. Pardon me if I think there are better ways we could spend our money.”

“But think about what you’re getting. The other owners and I have devoted years of our attention to raising these digients. Porting Neuroblast is cheap compared to what it’d cost to hire people to do that for another genome. And the potential payoff is exactly what your company’s been looking for: programming geniuses working at high speed, bootstrapping themselves to superhuman intelligence. If these digients can invent games now, just imagine what their descendants could do. And you’d make money off every one of them.”

Brauer is about to reply when Pearson interjects. “Is that why you want Neuroblast ported? To see what superintelligent digients might invent one day?”

Ana sees Pearson scrutinizing her, and decides there’s no point in trying to lie. “No,” she says. “What I want is for Jax to have a chance at a fuller life.”

Pearson nods.“You’d like Jax to be a corporation one day, right? Have some sort of legal personhood?”

“Yes, I would.”

“And I’ll bet Jax wants the same thing, right? To be incorporated?”

“For the most part, yes.”

Pearson nods again, his suspicions confirmed. “That’s a deal-breaker for us. It’s nice that they’re fun to talk to, but all the attention you’ve given your digients has encouraged them to think of themselves as persons.”

“Why is that a deal-breaker?” But she knows the answer already.

“We aren’t looking for superintelligent employees, we’re looking for superintelligent products. You’re offering us the former, and I can’t blame you; no one can spend as many years as you have teaching a digient and still think of it as a product. But our business isn’t based on that kind of sentiment.”

Ana has been pretending it wasn’t there, but now Pearson has stated it baldly: the fundamental incompatibility between Exponential’s goals and hers. They want something that responds like a person, but isn’t owed the same obligations as a person, and that’s something she can’t give them.

No one can give it to them, because it’s an impossibility. The years she spent raising Jax didn’t just make him fun to talk to, didn’t just provide him with hobbies and a sense of humor. It was what gave him all the attributes Exponential was looking for: fluency at navigating the real world, creativity at solving new problems, judgment you could entrust an important decision to. Every quality that made a person more valuable than a database was a product of experience.

She wants to tell them that Blue Gamma was righter than it knew: experience isn’t merely the best teacher, it’s the only teacher. If she’s learned anything raising Jax, it’s that there are no shortcuts; if you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.

And even though it’s possible to take a snapshot of all that experience and duplicate it ad infinitum, even though it’s possible to sell copies cheaply or give them away for free, each of the resulting digients would still have lived a lifetime. Each one would have once seen the world with new eyes, have had hopes fulfilled and hopes dashed, have learned how it felt to tell a lie and how it felt to be told one.

Which means each one would deserve some respect. Respect that Exponential can’t afford to give.

Ana makes one final attempt. “These digients could still make money for you as employees. You could—”

Pearson shakes his head. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, and I wish you the best of luck, but it’s not a good match for Exponential. If these digients were going to be products, the potential profits might be worth the risk. But if all they’re going to be is employees, that’s a different situation; we can’t justify such a large investment for so little return.”

Of course not, she thinks. Who could? Only someone who’s a fanatic, someone who’s motivated by love. Someone like her.

Ana is sending a message to Derek about the failed meeting with Exponential when the robot body comes to life. “How meeting go?” asks Jax, but he can read her expression well enough to answer the question himself. “Is my fault? They not like what I show them?”

“No, you did great, Jax. They just don’t like digients; I made a mistake in thinking I could change their minds.”

“Worth trying,” says Jax.

“I suppose it was.”

“You okay?”

“I’ll be fine,” she assures him. Jax gives her a hug, and then walks the body back to the charging platform and returns to Data Earth. Sitting at her desk, staring at a blank screen, Ana contemplates the user group’s remaining options. As far as she can tell, there’s only one: working for Polytope and trying to convince them that the Neuroblast engine is worth porting. All she has to do is wear the InstantRapport patch and join their experiment in industrialized caregiving.

Whatever else one might say about Polytope, the company understands the value of real-time interaction in a way that Exponential does not. Sophonce digients might be content to be left alone in a hothouse, but that’s not a viable shortcut if you want them to become productive individuals. Someone is going to have to spend time with them, and Polytope recognizes that.

Her objection is to Polytope’s strategy for getting people to spend that time. Blue Gamma’s strategy had been to make the digients lovable, while Polytope was starting with unlovable digients and using pharmaceuticals to make people love them. It seems clear to her that Blue Gamma’s approach was the right one, not just more ethical but more effective.

Indeed, maybe it was too effective, considering the situation she’s in now: she’s faced with the biggest expense of her entire life, and it’s for her digient. It’s not what anyone at Blue Gamma expected, all those years ago, but perhaps they should have. The idea of love with no strings attached is as much a fantasy as what Binary Desire is selling. Loving someone means making sacrifices for them.

Which is the only reason Ana’s considering working for Polytope. Under any other circumstances, she’d be insulted by the offer of a job that required the use of InstantRapport: she has as much experience working with digients as anyone in the world, yet Polytope is implying that she can’t be an effective trainer without pharmaceutical intervention. Training digients—like training animals—is a job, and a professional can do her job without having to be in love with a particular assignment.

At the same time, she knows the difference that affection can make in the training process, how it enables patience when patience is needed most. The idea that such affection can be manufactured isn’t appealing, but she can’t deny the realities of modern neuropharmacology: if her brain is flooded with oxytocin every time she’s training Sophonce digients, it’s going to have an effect on her feelings toward them whether she wants it to or not.

The only question is whether that’s something she can tolerate. She’s confident that the InstantRapport patch won’t distract her from taking care of Jax; no Sophonce digient is going to displace Jax in her affections. And if working for Polytope is the best chance of getting Neuroblast ported, she’s willing to do it.

Ana just wishes Kyle understood; she has always made it clear that Jax’s welfare comes first, and up until now Kyle has never had a problem with that. She doesn’t want their relationship to end because of this job, but she’s been with Jax longer than she’s been with any boyfriend; if it comes down to it, she knows who she’ll choose.

Chapter Ten

The message from Ana about the failed meeting is short, but to Derek it conveys plenty. He’s heard the tone in her voice when she has talked about this possibility before, so he knows she’s preparing herself to accept Polytope’s job offer.

This is Ana’s last-ditch attempt to get Neuroblast ported, nothing more. No one likes the idea, but she’s an adult, she’s weighed the costs and benefits and made her decision. If she’s willing to do it, the least he can do is be supportive.

Except that he can’t. Not when there’s an alternative: accepting Binary Desire’s offer.

After his earlier conversation with Marco and Polo, Derek privately contacted Janelle Chase to ask her if the digients’ desire to be incorporated wouldn’t render them unsuitable for Binary Desire’s purposes. She told him that Binary Desire’s customers will be free to file articles of incorporation on the copies they’ve purchased. In fact, if their feelings toward their digients become as strong as Binary Desire hopes, she expects that many of them will do so. It’s the right answer as far as he’s concerned, but part of him hoped they’d give the wrong one, providing him with a clear reason to refuse their proposal. Instead, the decision remains his to make. His, and Marco’s.

He’s thought about the argument Ana articulated, about the digients not being competent to accept Binary Desire’s offer because of their lack of experience with romantic relationships and jobs. The argument makes sense if you think of the digients as being like human children. It also means that as long as they’re confined to Data Earth, as long as their lives are so radically sheltered, they’ll never become mature enough to make a decision of this magnitude.

But perhaps the standards for maturity for a digient shouldn’t be as high as they are for a human; maybe Marco is as mature as he needs to be to make this decision. Marco seems entirely comfortable thinking of himself as a digient rather than a human. It’s possible he doesn’t fully appreciate the consequences of what he’s suggesting, but Derek can’t shake the feeling that Marco in fact understands his own nature better than Derek does. Marco and Polo aren’t human, and maybe thinking of them as if they were is a mistake, forcing them to conform to his expectations instead of letting them be themselves. Is it more respectful to treat him like a human being, or to accept that he isn’t one?

Under other circumstances this would be an academic question, something he could postpone for later discussion, but instead it ties directly into the decision he is facing here and now. If he accepts Binary Desire’s offer, there’ll be no need for Ana to take the job at Polytope, so the question becomes: is it better for Marco to have his brain chemistry altered than for Ana to have hers?

Ana knows what she’d be getting into by agreeing to it, more so than Marco does. But Ana is a person, and no matter how amazing he thinks Marco is, he values Ana more. If one of them has to undergo neurochemical manipulation, he doesn’t want it to be her.

Derek brings up the contract that Binary Desire sent on his screen. Then he calls Marco and Polo over in their robot bodies.

“Ready sign contract?” asks Marco.

“You know you shouldn’t do this if it’s just to help the others,” says Derek. “You should do it because it’s what you want to do.” Then he wonders if that’s really true.

“You not need keep asking me,” says Marco. “I feel same as before, want do this.”

“What about you, Polo?”

“Yes, agree.”

The digients are willing, even eager, and perhaps that should be enough to settle the matter. But then there are the other considerations, purely selfish ones.

If Ana takes the job with Polytope, it will create a rift between her and Kyle, one that Derek might benefit from. It’s not an admirable thought, but he can’t pretend it hasn’t occurred to him. Whereas if he accepts Binary Desire’s offer, the rift created will be between him and Ana; it’ll ruin his chances of ever getting together with her. Can he give that up?

Maybe he never had a chance with Ana; maybe he’s been fooling himself for all these years. In which case he’ll be better off if he lets go of that fantasy, if he frees himself from yearning for something that’ll never happen.

“What you waiting for?” asks Marco.

“Nothing,” says Derek.

With the digients watching, he signs the contract from Binary Desire and sends it to Janelle Chase.

“When I go to Binary Desire?” asks Marco.

“We’ll take a snapshot of you after I get a countersigned copy of the contract,” he replies. “Then we’ll send it to them.”

“Okay,” says Marco. As the digients talk excitedly about what this means, Derek thinks about what to say to Ana. He can’t tell her he’s doing it for her, of course. She’d feel horribly guilty if she thought he was sacrificing Marco for her benefit. This is his decision, and it’s better that Ana put the blame on him.

Ana and Jax are playing Jerk Vector, a racing game that Ana recently added to Data Earth; they pilot their hovercars across a landscape as hilly as egg-crate foam. Ana manages to gain enough velocity within a basin that she can jump across a nearby ravine, while Jax doesn’t make it, and his hovercar tumbles spectacularly to the bottom.

“Wait me catch up,” he says over the intercom.

“Okay,” Ana says, and sets her hovercar in neutral. While she’s waiting for Jax to ascend the switchback trail along the ravine wall, she switches to another window to check her messages. What she sees startles her.

Felix has sent a message to the entire user group, triumphantly beginning a countdown until humanity’s first contact with the Xenotherians. Initially Ana wonders if she’s misunderstanding Felix because of his eccentric use of language, but a couple of messages from others in the user group confirm that the Neuroblast port is underway and Binary Desire is paying for it. Someone in the user group has sold their digient as a sex toy.

Then she sees a message saying that Derek was the one, that he sold Marco. She’s about to post a reply saying that it can’t be true, but she stops herself. Instead, she switches back to the Data Earth window.

“Jax, I’ve got to make a call. Why don’t you practice jumping the ravine for a while?”

“You become sorry,” says Jax. “I beat you next race.”

Ana switches the game into practice mode so Jax can try jumping the ravine again without having to climb up from the bottom each time he misses. Then she opens up a video phone window and calls up Derek.

“Tell me it’s not true,” she says, but one look at his face confirms that it is. “I didn’t mean for you to find out this way. I was going to call you, but—”

Ana’s so astonished she can barely find the words. “Why did you do it?” Derek hesitates so long that she says, “Was it for the money?”

“No! Of course not. I just decided that Marco’s arguments made sense, and that he was old enough to choose.”

“We talked about that. You agreed that it was better to wait until he had more experience.”

“I know. But then I—I decided I was being overly cautious.”

“Overly cautious? You’re not letting Marco risk scraping his knee; Binary Desire is going to perform brain surgery on him. How can you be too cautious about that?”

He pauses, and then says, “I realized it was time to let go.”

“Let go?” As if the idea of protecting Marco and Polo were some childish fancy he’d outgrown. “I didn’t know you thought of it that way.”

“I didn’t either, until recently.”

“Does this mean you don’t plan on incorporating Marco and Polo someday?”

“No, I still plan to do that. I just won’t be as—” Again he hesitates. “Fixated.”

“Not as fixated.” Ana wonders how well she knew Derek at all. “Good for you, I guess.”

He looks hurt by that, which is fine with her. “It’s good for everyone,” he says. “The digients get access to Real Space—”

“I know, I know.”

“Really, I think it’s for the best,” he says, but he doesn’t seem to believe it himself.

“How can it be for the best?” she asks. Derek doesn’t say anything, and she just stares at him.

“I’ll talk to you later,” says Ana, and closes the phone window. Thinking about the ways Marco might be used—without ever realizing that he’s being used—makes her heart break. You can’t save them all, she reminds herself. But it never occurred to her that Marco might be one of those at risk. She assumed Derek felt the same way she does, that he understood the need to make sacrifices.

In her Data Earth window she can see Jax gleefully piloting his hovercar up and down slopes like a kid on a trackless rollercoaster. She doesn’t want to tell him about the deal with Binary Desire right now; they would have to discuss what it means for Marco, and she doesn’t have the energy for that conversation right now. For the moment, all she wants to do is watch him and, tentatively, try to get used to the idea that the Neuroblast port is actually underway. It’s a peculiar sensation. She can’t call it relief, because of the cost entailed, but it’s undeniably a good thing that this enormous obstacle to Jax’s future has been removed, and she didn’t have to take the job with Polytope to do it. It’ll be months before the port is finished, but the time will pass quickly now that the destination is known. Jax will be able to enter Real Space, see his friends again and rejoin the rest of the social universe.

Not that the future will be all smooth sailing. There are still an endless series of obstacles ahead, but at least she and Jax will have a chance to tackle them. Briefly, Ana indulges herself, fantasizing about what might happen if they succeed.

She imagines Jax maturing over the years, both in Real Space and in the real world. Imagines him incorporated, a legal person, employed and earning a living. Imagines him as a participant in the digient subculture, a community with enough money and skills to port itself to new platforms when the need arises. Imagines him accepted by a generation of humans who have grown up with digients and view them as potential relationship partners in a way that members of her generation will never be able to. Imagines him loving and being loved, arguing and compromising. Imagines him making sacrifices, some hard and some made easy because they’re for a person he truly cares about.

A few minutes pass, and Ana tells herself to stop daydreaming. There’s no guarantee that Jax is capable of any of those things. But if he’s ever going to get the chance to try them, she has to get on with the job in front of her now: teaching him, as best she can, the business of living.

She initiates the game’s shutdown procedure and calls Jax on the intercom. “Playtime’s over, Jax,” she says. “Time to do your homework.”

THE EMPEROR OF MARS

Allen M. Steele

Out here, there’s a lot of ways to go crazy. Get cooped up in a passenger module not much larger than a trailer, and by the time you reach your destination you may have come to believe that the universe exists only within your own mind: it’s called solipsism syndrome, and I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. Share that same module with five or six guys who don’t get along very well, and after three months you’ll be sleeping with a knife taped to your thigh. Pull double-shifts during that time, with little chance to relax, and you’ll probably suffer from depression; couple this with vitamin deficiency due to a lousy diet, and you’re a candidate for chronic fatigue syndrome.

Folks who’ve never left Earth often think that Titan Plague is the main reason people go mad in space. They’re wrong. Titan Plague may rot your brain and turn you into a homicidal maniac, but instances of it are rare, and there’s a dozen other ways to go bonzo that are much more subtle. I’ve seen guys adopt imaginary friends with whom they have long and meaningless conversations, compulsively clean their hardsuits regardless of whether or not they’ve recently worn them, or go for a routine spacewalk and have to be begged to come back into the airlock. Some people just aren’t cut out for life away from Earth, but there’s no way to predict who’s going to lose their mind.

When something like that happens, I have a set of standard procedures: ask the doctor to prescribe antidepressants, keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t do anything that might put themselves or others at risk, relieve them of duty if I can, and see what I can do about getting them back home as soon as possible. Sometimes I don’t have to do any of this. A guy goes crazy for a little while, and then he gradually works out whatever it was that got in his head; the next time I see him, he’s in the commissary, eating Cheerios like nothing ever happened. Most of the time, though, a mental breakdown is a serious matter. I think I’ve shipped back about one out of every twenty people because of one issue or another.

But one time, I saw someone go mad, and it was the best thing that could have happened to him. That was Jeff Halbert. Let me tell about him . . .

Back in ’48, I was General Manager of Arsia Station, the first and largest of the Mars colonies. This was a year before the formation of the Pax Astra, about five years before the colonies declared independence. So the six major Martian settlements were still under control of one Earth-based corporation or another, with Arsia Station owned and operated by ConSpace. We had about a hundred people living there by then, the majority short-timers on short-term contracts; only a dozen or so, like myself, were permanent residents who left Earth for good.

Jeff wasn’t one of them. Like most people, he’d come to Mars to make a lot of money in a relatively short amount of time. Six months from Earth to Mars aboard a cycleship, two years on the planet, then six more months back to Earth aboard the next ship to make the crossing during the bi-annual launch window. In three years, a young buck like him could earn enough dough to buy a house, start a business, invest in the stock market, or maybe just loaf for a good long while. In previous times, they would’ve worked on off-shore oil rigs, joined the merchant marine, or built powersats; by mid-century, this kind of high-risk, high-paying work was on Mars, and there was no shortage of guys willing and ready to do it.

Jeff Halbert was what we called a “Mars monkey.” We had a lot of people like him at Arsia Station, and they took care of the dirty jobs that the scientists, engineers, and other specialists could not or would not handle themselves. One day they might be operating a bulldozer or a crane at a habitat construction site. The next day, they’d be unloading freight from a cargo lander that had just touched down. The day after that, they’d be cleaning out the air vents or repairing a solar array or unplugging a toilet. It wasn’t romantic or particularly interesting work, but it was the sort of stuff that needed to be done in order to keep the base going, and because of that, kids like Jeff were invaluable.

And Jeff was definitely a kid. In his early twenties, wiry and almost too tall to wear a hardsuit, he looked like he’d started shaving only last week. Before he dropped out of school to get a job with ConSpace, I don’t think he’d travelled more than a few hundred miles from the small town in New Hampshire where he’d grown up. I didn’t know him well, but I knew his type: restless, looking for adventure, hoping to score a small pile of loot so that he could do something else with the rest of his life besides hang out in a pool hall. He probably hadn’t even thought much about Mars before he spotted a ConSpace recruitment ad on some web site; he had two years of college, though, and met all the fitness requirements, and that was enough to get him into the training program and, eventually, a berth aboard a cycleship.

Before Jeff left Earth, he filled out and signed all the usual company paperwork. Among them was Form 36-B: Family Emergency Notification Consent. ConSpace required everyone to state whether or not they wanted to be informed of a major illness or death of a family member back home. This was something a lot of people didn’t take into consideration before they went to Mars, but nonetheless it was an issue that had to be addressed. If you found out, for instance, that your father was about to die, there wasn’t much you could do about it, because you’d be at least 35 million miles from home. The best you could do would be to send a brief message that someone might be able to read to him before he passed away; you wouldn’t be able to attend the funeral, and it would be many months, even a year or two, before you could lay roses on his grave.

Most people signed Form 36-B on the grounds that they’d rather know about something like this than be kept in the dark until they returned home. Jeff did, too, but I’d later learned that he hadn’t read it first. For him, it had been just one more piece of paper that needed to be signed before he boarded the shuttle, not to be taken any more seriously than the catastrophic accident disclaimer or the form attesting that he didn’t have any sort of venereal disease.

He probably wished he hadn’t signed that damn form. But he did, and it cost him his sanity.

Jeff had been on Mars for only about seven months when a message was relayed from ConSpace’s human resources office. I knew about it because a copy was cc’d to me. The minute I read it, I dropped what I was doing to head straight for Hab 2’s second level, which was where the monkey house—that is, the dormitory for unspecialized laborers like Jeff—was located. I didn’t have to ask which bunk was his; the moment I walked in, I spotted a knot of people standing around a young guy slumped on this bunk, staring in disbelief at the fax in his hands.

Until then, I didn’t know, nor did anyone at Arsia Station, that Jeff had a fiancé back home, a nice girl named Karen whom he’d met in high school and who had agreed to marry him about the same time he’d sent his application to ConSpace. Once he got the job, they decided to postpone the wedding until he returned, even if it meant having to put their plans on hold for three years. One of the reasons why Jeff decided to get a job on Mars, in fact, was to provide a nest egg for him and Karen. And they’d need it, too; about three weeks before Jeff took off, Karen informed him that she was pregnant and that he’d have a child waiting for him when he got home.

He’d kept this a secret, mainly because he knew that the company would annul his contract if it learned that he had a baby on the way. Both Jeff’s family and Karen’s knew all about the baby, though, and they decided to pretend that Jeff was still on Earth, just away on a long business trip. Until he returned, they’d take care of Karen.

About three months before the baby was due, the two families decided to host a baby shower. The party was to be held at the home of one of Jeff’s uncles—apparently he was the only relative with a house big enough for such a get-together—and Karen was on her way there, in a car driven by Jeff’s parents, when tragedy struck. Some habitual drunk who’d learned how to disable his car’s high-alcohol lockout, and therefore was on the road when he shouldn’t have been, plowed straight into them. The drunk walked away with no more than a sprained neck, but his victims were nowhere nearly so lucky. Karen, her unborn child, Jeff’s mother and father—all died before they reached the hospital.

There’s not a lot you can say to someone who’s just lost his family that’s going to mean very much. I’m sorry barely scratches the surface. I understand what you’re going through is ridiculous; I know how you feel is insulting. And is there anything I can do to help? is pointless unless you have a time machine; if I did, I would have lent it to Jeff, so that he could travel back twenty-four hours to call his folks and beg them to put off picking up Karen by only fifteen or twenty minutes. But everyone said these things anyway, because there wasn’t much else that could be said, and I relieved Jeff of further duties until he felt like he was ready to go to work again, because there was little else I could do for him. The next cycleship wasn’t due to reach Mars for another seventeen months; by the time he got home, his parents and Karen would be dead for nearly two years.

To Jeff’s credit, he was back on the job within a few days. Maybe he knew that there was nothing he could do except work, or maybe he just got tired of staring at the walls. In any case, one morning he put on his suit, cycled through the airlock, and went outside to help the rest of the monkeys dig a pit for the new septic tank. But he wasn’t the same easy-going kid we’d known before; no wisecracks, no goofing off, not even any gripes about the hours it took to make that damn hole and how he’d better get overtime for this. He was like a robot out there, silently digging at the sandy red ground with a shovel, until the pit was finally finished, at which point he dropped his tools and, without a word, returned to the hab, where he climbed out of his suit and went to the mess hall for some chow.

A couple of weeks went by, and there was no change. Jeff said little to anyone. He ate, worked, slept, and that was about it. When you looked into his eyes, all you saw was a distant stare. If he’d broken down in hysterics, I would’ve understood, but there wasn’t any of that. It was as if he’d shut down his emotions, suppressing whatever he was feeling inside.

The station had a pretty good hospital by then, large enough to serve all the colonies, and Arsia General’s senior psychologist had begun meeting with Jeff on a regular basis. Three days after Jeff went back to work, Karl Rosenfeld dropped by my office. His report was grim; Jeff Halbert was suffering from severe depression, to the point that he was barely responding to medication. Although he hadn’t spoken of suicide, Dr. Rosenfeld had little doubt that the notion had occurred to him. And I knew that, if Jeff did decide to kill himself, all he’d have to do was wait until the next time he went outside, then shut down his suit’s air supply and crack open the helmet faceplate. One deep breath, and the Martian atmosphere would do the rest; he’d be dead before anyone could reach him.

“You want my advice?” Karl asked, sitting on the other side of my desk with a glass of moonshine in hand. “Find something that’ll get his mind off what happened.”

“You think that hasn’t occurred to me? Believe me, I’ve tried . . .”

“Yeah, I know. He told me. But extra work shifts aren’t helping, and neither are vids or games.” He was quiet for a moment, “If I thought sex would help,” he added, “I’d ask a girl I know to haul him off to bed, but that would just make matters worse. His fiancé was the only woman he ever loved, and it’ll probably be a long time before he sleeps with anyone again.”

“So what do you want me to do?” I gave a helpless shrug. “C’mon, give me a clue here. I want to help the kid, but I’m out of ideas.”

“Well . . . I looked at the duty roster, and saw that you’ve scheduled a survey mission for next week. Something up north, I believe.”

“Uh-huh. I’m sending a team up there to see if they can locate a new water supply. Oh, and one of the engineers wants to make a side-trip to look at an old NASA probe.”

“So put Jeff on the mission.” Karl smiled. “They’re going to need a monkey or two anyway. Maybe travel will do him some good.”

His suggestion was as good as any, so I pulled up the survey assignment list, deleted the name of one monkey, and inserted Jeff Halbert’s instead. I figured it couldn’t hurt, and I was right. And also wrong.

So Jeff was put on a two-week sortie that travelled above the 60th parallel to the Vastitas Borealis, the subarctic region that surrounds the Martian north pole. The purpose of the mission was to locate a site for a new well. Although most of Arsia Station’s water came from atmospheric condensers and our greenhouses, we needed more than they could supply, which was why we drilled artesian wells in the permafrost beneath the northern tundra and pump groundwater to surface tanks, which in turn would be picked up on a monthly basis. Every few years or so, one of those wells would run dry; when that happened, we’d have to send a team up there to dig a new one.

Two airships made the trip, the Sagan and the Collins. Jeff Halbert was aboard the Collins, and according to its captain, who was also the mission leader, he did his job well. Over the course of ten days, the two dirigibles roamed the tundra, stopping every ten or fifteen miles so that crews could get out and conduct test drills that would bring up a sample of what lay beneath the rocky red soil. It wasn’t hard work, really, and it gave Jeff a chance to see the northern regions. Yet he was quiet most of the time, rarely saying much to anyone; in fact, he seemed to be bored by the whole thing. The other people on the expedition were aware of what had recently happened to him, of course, and they attempted to draw him out of his shell, but after awhile it became obvious that he just didn’t want to talk, and so they finally gave up and left him alone.

Then, on the eleventh day of the mission, two days before the expedition was scheduled to return to Arsia, the Collins located the Phoenix lander.

This was a NASA probe that landed back in ’08, the first to confirm the presence of subsurface ice on Mars. Unlike many of the other American and European probes that explored Mars before the first manned expeditions, Phoenix didn’t have a rover; instead, it used a robotic arm to dig down into the regolith, scooping up samples that were analyzed by its onboard chemical lab. The probe was active for only a few months before its battery died during the long Martian winter, but it was one of the milestones leading to human colonization.

As they expected, the expedition members found Phoenix half-buried beneath windblown sand and dust, with only its upper platform and solar vanes still exposed. Nonetheless, the lander was intact, and although it was too big and heavy to be loaded aboard the airship, the crew removed its arm to be taken home and added to the base museum. And they found one more thing; the Mars library.

During the 1990s, while the various Mars missions were still in their planning stages, the Planetary Society had made a proposal to NASA: one of those probes should carry a DVD containing a cache of literature, visual images, and audio recordings pertaining to Mars. The ostensive purpose would be to furnish future colonists with a library for their entertainment, but the unspoken reason was to pay tribute to the generations of writers, artists, and filmmakers whose works had inspired the real-life exploration of Mars.

NASA went along with this proposal, so a custom-designed DVD, made of silica glass to ensure its long-term survival, was prepared for inclusion on a future mission. A panel selected 84 novels, short stories, articles, and speeches, with the authors ranging from 18th century fantasists like Swift and Voltaire to 20th century science fiction authors like Niven and Benford. A digital gallery of 60 visual images—including everything from paintings by Bonestell, Emshwiller, and Whelan to a lobby card from a Flash Gordon serial and a cover of a Weird Science comic book—was chosen as well. The final touch were four audio clips, the most notable of which were the infamous 1938 radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds and a discussion of the same between H.G. Wells and Orson Welles.

Now called “Visions of Mars,” the disk was originally placed aboard NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, but that probe was destroyed when its booster failed shortly after launch and it crashed in the Atlantic. So an identical copy was put on Phoenix, and this time it succeeded in getting to Mars. And so the disk had remained in the Vastitas Borealis for the past forty years, awaiting the day when a human hand would remove it from its place on Phoenix’s upper fuselage.

And that hand happened to be Jeff Halbert’s.

The funny thing is, no one on the expedition knew the disk was there. It had been forgotten by then, its existence buried deep within the old NASA documents I’d been sent from Earth, so I hadn’t told anyone to retrieve it. And besides, most of the guys on the Collins were more interested in taking a look at an antique lander than the DVD that happened to be attached to it. So when Jeff found the disk and detached it from Phoenix, it wasn’t like he’d made a major find. The attitude of almost everyone on the mission was oh, yeah, that’s kind of neat . . . take it home and see what’s on it.

Which was easier said than done. DVD drives had been obsolete for more than twenty years, and the nearest flea market where one might find an old computer that had one was . . . well, it wasn’t on Mars. But Jeff looked around, and eventually he found a couple of dead comps stashed in a storage closet, salvage left over from the first expeditions. Neither were usable on their own, but with the aid of a service manual, he was able to swap out enough parts to get one of them up and running, and once it was operational, he removed the disk from its scratched case and gently slid it into the slot. Once he was sure that the data was intact and hadn’t decayed, he downloaded everything into his personal pad. And then, at random, he selected one of the items on the menu—“The Martian Way” by Isaac Asimov—and began to read.

Why did Jeff go to so much trouble? Perhaps he wanted something to do with his free time besides mourn for the dead. Or maybe he wanted to show the others who’d been on the expedition that they shouldn’t have ignored the disk. I don’t know for sure, so I can’t tell you. All I know is that the disk first interested him, then intrigued him, and finally obsessed him.

It took awhile for me to become aware of the change in Jeff. As much as I was concerned for him, he was one of my lesser problems. As general manager, on any given day I had a dozen or more different matters that needed my attention, whether it be making sure that the air recycling system was repaired before we suffocated to death or filling out another stack of forms sent from Huntsville. So Jeff wasn’t always on my mind; when I didn’t hear from Dr. Rosenfeld for awhile, I figured that the two of them had managed to work out his issues, and turned to other things.

Still, there were warning signs, stuff that I noticed but to which I didn’t pay much attention. Like the day I was monitoring the radio crosstalk from the monkeys laying sewage pipes in the foundation of Hab Three, and happened to hear Jeff identify himself as Lieutenant Gulliver Jones. The monkeys sometimes screwed around like that on the com channels, and the foreman told Halbert to knock it off and use his proper call sign . . . but when Jeff answered him, his response was weird: “Aye, sir. I was simply ruminating on the rather peculiar environment in which we’ve found ourselves.” He even faked a British accent to match the Victorian diction. That got a laugh from the other monkeys, but nonetheless I wondered who Gulliver Jones was and why Jeff was pretending to be him.

There was also the time Jeff was out on a dozer, clearing away the sand that had been deposited on the landing field during a dust storm a couple of days earlier. Another routine job to which I hadn’t been paying much attention until the shift supervisor at the command center paged me: “Chief, there’s something going on with Halbert. You might want to listen in.”

So I tapped into the comlink, and there was Jeff: “Affirmative, MainCom. I just saw something move out there, about a half-klick north of the periphery.”

“Roger that, Tiger Four-Oh,” the supervisor said. “Can you describe again, please?”

A pause, then: “A big creature, abut ten feet tall, with eight legs. And there was a woman riding it . . . red-skinned, and—” an abrupt laugh “—stark naked, or just about.”

Something tugged at my memory, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. When the shift supervisor spoke again, his voice had a patronizing undertone. “Yeah . . . uh, right, Tiger Four-Oh. We just checked the LRC, though, and there’s nothing on the scope except you.”

“They’re gone now. Went behind a boulder and vanished.” Another laugh, almost gleeful. “But they were out there, I promise!”

“Affirmative, Four-Oh.” A brief pause. “If you happen to see any more thoats, let us know, okay?”

That’s when I remembered. What Jeff had described was a beast from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels. And the woman riding it? That could have only been Dejah Thoris. Almost everyone who came to Mars read Burroughs at one point or another, but this was the first time I’d ever heard of anyone claiming to have seen the Princess of Helium.

Obviously, Jeff had taken to playing practical jokes. I made a mental note to say something to him about that, but then forgot about it. As I said, on any given day I handled any number of different crises, and someone messing with his supervisor’s head ranked low on my priority list.

But that wasn’t the end of it. In fact, it was only the beginning. A couple of weeks later, I received a memo from the quartermaster: someone had tendered a request to be transferred to private quarters, even though that was above his pay-grade. At Arsia in those days, before we got all the habs built, individual rooms were at a premium and were generally reserved for management, senior researchers, married couples, company stooges, and so forth. In this case, though, the other guys in this particular person’s dorm had signed a petition backing his request, and the quartermaster himself wrote that, for the sake of morale, he was recommending that this individual be assigned his own room.

I wasn’t surprised to see that Jeff Halbert was the person making the request. By then, I’d noticed that his personality had undergone a distinct change. He’d let his hair grow long, eschewing the high-and-tight style preferred by people who spent a lot of time wearing a hardsuit helmet. He rarely shared a table with anyone else in the wardroom, and instead ate by himself, staring at his datapad the entire time. And he was now talking to himself on the comlink. No more reports of Martian princesses riding eight-legged animals, but rather a snatch of this (“The Martians seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety . . .”) or a bit of that (“The Martians gazed back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water . . .”) which most people wouldn’t have recognized as being quotes from Wells or Bradbury.

So it was no wonder the other monkey house residents wanted to get rid of him. Before I signed the request, though, I paid Dr. Rosenfeld a visit. The station psychologist didn’t have to ask why I was there; he asked me to shut the door, then let me know what he thought about Jeff.

“To tell the truth,” he began, “I can’t tell if he’s getting better or worse.”

“I can. Look, I’m no shrink, but if you ask me, he’s getting worse.”

Karl shook his head. “Not necessarily. Sure, his behavior is bizarre, but at least we no longer have to worry about suicide. In fact, he’s one of the happiest people we have here. He rarely speaks about his loss anymore, and when I remind him that his wife and parents are dead, he shrugs it off as if this was something that happened a long time ago. In his own way, he’s quite content with life.”

“And you don’t think that’s strange?”

“Sure, I do . . . especially since he’s admitted to me that he’d stopped taking the antidepressants I prescribed to him. And that’s the bad news. Perhaps he isn’t depressed anymore, or at least by clinical standards . . . but he’s becoming delusional, to the point of actually having hallucinations.”

I stared at him. “You mean, the time he claimed he spotted Dejah Thoris . . . you’re saying he actually saw that?”

“Yes, I believe so. And that gave me a clue as to what’s going on in his mind.” Karl picked up a penknife, absently played with it. “Ever since he found that disk, he’s become utterly obsessed with it. So I asked him if he’d let me copy it from his pad, which he did, and after I asked him what he was reading, I checked it out for myself. And what I discovered was that, of all the novels and stories that are on the disk, the ones that attract him the most are also the ones that are least representative of reality. That is, the stuff that’s about Mars, but not as we know it.”

“Come again?” I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”

“How much science fiction have you read?”

“A little. Not much.”

“Well, lucky for you, I’ve read quite a bit.” He grinned. “In fact, you could say that’s why I’m here. I got hooked on that stuff when I was a kid, and by the time I got out of college, I’d pretty much decided that I wanted to see Mars.” He became serious again. “Okay, try to follow me. Although people have been writing about Mars since the 1700s, it wasn’t until the first Russian and American probes got out here in the 1960s that anyone knew what this place is really like. That absence of knowledge gave writers and artists the liberty to fill in the gap with their imaginations . . . or at least until they learned better. Understand?”

“Sure.” I shrugged. “Before the 1960s, you could have Martians. After that, you couldn’t have Martians anymore.”

“Umm . . . well, not exactly.” Karl lifted his hand, teetered it back and forth. “One of the best stories on the disk is ‘A Rose For Ecclesiastes’ by Roger Zelazny. It was written in 1963, and it has Martians in it. And some stories written before then were pretty close to getting it right. But for the most part, yes . . . the fictional view of Mars changed dramatically in the second half of the last century, and although it became more realistic, it also lost much of its romanticism.”

Karl folded the penknife, dropped it on his desk. “Those aren’t the stories Jeff’s reading. Greg Bear’s ‘A Martian Ricorso,’ Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Transit of Earth,’ John Varley’s ‘In the Hall of the Martian Kings’ . . . anything similar to the Mars we know, he ignores. Why? Because they remind him of where he is . . . and that’s not where he wants to be.”

“So . . .” I thought about it for a moment. “He’s reading the older stuff instead?”

“Right.” Karl nodded. “Stanley Weinbaum’s ‘A Martian Odyssey,’ Otis Albert Kline’s ‘The Swordsman of Mars,’ A. E. van Vogt’s ‘The Enchanted Village’ . . . the more unreal, the more he likes them. Because those stories aren’t about the drab, lifeless planet where he’s stuck, but instead a planet of native Martians, lost cities, canal systems . . .”

“Okay, I get it.”

“No, I don’t think you do . . . because I’m not sure I do, either, except to say that Jeff appears to be leaving us. Every day, he’s taking one more step into this other world . . . and I don’t think he’s coming back again.”

I stared at him, not quite believing what I’d just heard. “Jeez, Karl . . . what am I going to do?”

“What can you do?” He leaned back in his chair. “Not much, really. Look, I’ll be straight with you . . . this is beyond me. He needs the kind of treatment that I can’t give him here. For that, he’s going to have to wait until he gets back to Earth.”

“The next ship isn’t due for another fourteen months or so.”

“I know . . . that’s when I’m scheduled to go back, too. But the good news is that he’s happy and reasonably content, and doesn’t really pose a threat to anyone . . . except maybe by accident, in which case I’d recommend that you relieve him of any duties that would take him outside the hab.”

“Done.” The last thing anyone needed was to have a delusional person out on the surface. Mars can be pretty unforgiving when it comes to human error, and a fatal mistake can cost you not only your own life, but also the guy next to you. “And I take it that you recommend that his request be granted, too?”

“It wouldn’t hurt, no.” A wry smile. “So long as he’s off in his own world, he’ll be happy. Make him comfortable, give him whatever he wants . . . within reason, at least . . . and leave him alone. I’ll keep an eye on him and will let you know if his condition changes, for better or worse.”

“Hopefully for the better.”

“Sure . . . but I wouldn’t count on it.” Karl stared straight at me. “Face it, chief . . . one of your guys is turning into a Martian.”

I took Jeff off the outside-work details and let it be known that he wasn’t permitted to go marswalking without authorization or an escort, and instead reassigned him to jobs that would keep him in the habitats: working in the greenhouse, finishing the interior of Hab 2, that sort of thing. I was prepared to tell him that he was being taken off the outside details because he’d reached his rem limit for radiation exposure, but he never questioned my decision but only accepted it with the same quiet, spooky smile that he’d come to giving everyone.

I also let him relocate to private quarters, a small room on Hab 2’s second level that had been unoccupied until then. As I expected, there were a few gripes from those still having to share a room with someone else; however, most people realized that Jeff was in bad shape and needed his privacy. After he moved in, though, he did something I didn’t anticipate: he changed his door lock’s password to something no one else knew. This was against station rules—the security office and the general manager were supposed to always have everyone’s lock codes—but Karl assured me that Jeff meant no harm. He simply didn’t want to have anyone enter his quarters, and it would help his peace of mind if he received this one small exemption. I went along with it, albeit reluctantly.

After that, I had no problems with Jeff for awhile. He assumed his new duties without complaint, and the reports I received from department heads told me that he was doing his work well. Karl updated me every week; his patient hadn’t yet shown any indications of snapping out of his fugue, but neither did he appear to be getting worse. And although he was no longer interacting with any other personnel except when he needed to, at least he was no longer telling anyone about Martian princesses or randomly quoting obscure science fiction stories over the comlink.

Nonetheless, there was the occasional incident. Such as when the supply chief came to me with an unusual request Jeff had made: several reams of hemp paper, and as much soy ink as could be spared. Since both were by-products of greenhouse crops grown at either Arsia Station or one of the other colonies, and thus not imported from Earth, they weren’t particularly scarce. Still, what could Jeff possibly want with that much writing material? I asked Karl if Jeff had told him that he was keeping a journal; the doctor told me that he hadn’t, but unless either paper or ink were in short supply, it couldn’t hurt to grant that request. So I signed off on this as well, although I told the supply chief to subtract the cost from Jeff’s salary.

Not long after that, I heard from one of the communications officers. Jeff had asked her to send a general memo to the other colonies: a request for downloads of any Mars novels or stories that their personnel might have. The works of Bradbury, Burroughs, and Brackett were particularly desired, although stuff by Moorcock, Williamson, and Sturgeon would also be appreciated. In exchange, Jeff would send stories and novels he’d downloaded from the Phoenix disk.

Nothing wrong there, either. By then, Mars was on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, so Jeff couldn’t make the same request from Huntsville. If he was running out of reading material, then it made sense that he’d have to go begging from the other colonies. In fact, the com officer told me she’d had already received more than a half-dozen downloads; apparently quite a few folks had Mars fiction stashed in the comps. Nonetheless, it was unusual enough that she thought I should know about it. I asked her to keep me posted, and shrugged it off as just another of a long series of eccentricities.

A few weeks after that, though, Jeff finally did something that rubbed me the wrong way. As usual, I heard about it from Dr. Rosenfeld.

“Jeff has a new request,” he said when I happened to drop by his office. “In the future, he would prefer to be addressed as ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Your Highness,’ in keeping with his position as the Emperor of Mars.”

I stared at him for several seconds. “Surely you’re joking,” I said at last.

“Surely I’m not. He is now the Emperor Jeffery the First, sovereign monarch of the Great Martian Empire, warlord and protector of the red planet.” A pause, during which I expected Karl to grin and wink. He didn’t. “He doesn’t necessarily want anyone bow in his presence,” he added, “but he does require proper respect for the crown.”

“I see.” I closed my eyes, rubbed the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, and counted to ten. “And what does that make me?”

“Prime Minister, of course.” The driest of smiles. “Since his title is hereditary, His Majesty isn’t interested in the day-to-day affairs of his empire. That he leaves up to you, with the promise that he’ll refrain from meddling with your decisions . . .”

“Oh, how fortunate I am.”

“Yes. But from here on, all matters pertaining to the throne should be taken up with me, in my position as Royal Physician and Senior Court Advisor.”

“Uh-huh.” I stood up from my chair. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I think the Prime Minister needs to go now and kick His Majesty’s ass.”

“Sit down.” Karl glared at me. “Really, I mean it. Sit.”

I was unwilling to sit down again, but neither did I storm out of his office. “Look, I know he’s a sick man, but this has gone far enough. I’ve given him his own room, relieved him of hard labor, given him paper and ink . . . for what, I still don’t know, but he keeps asking for more . . . and allowed him com access to the other colonies. Just because he’s been treated like a king doesn’t mean he is a king.”

“Oh, I agree. Which is why I’ve reminded him that his title is honorary as well as hereditary, and as such there’s a limit to royal privilege. And he understands this. After all, the empire is in decline, having reached its peak over a thousand years ago, and since then the emperor has had to accept certain sacrifices for the good of the people. So, no, you won’t see him wearing a crown and carrying a scepter, nor will he be demanding that a throne be built for him. He wants his reign to be benign.”

Hearing this, I reluctantly took my seat again. “All right, so let me get this straight. He believes that he’s now a king . . .”

“An emperor. There’s a difference.”

“King, emperor, whatever . . . he’s not going to be bossing anyone around, but will pretty much let things continue as they are. Right?”

“Except that he wants to be addressed formally, yeah, that’s pretty much it.” Karl sighed, shook his head. “Let me try to explain. Jeff has come face-to-face with a reality that he cannot bear. His parents, his fiancé, the child they wanted to have . . . they’re all dead, and he was too far away to prevent it, or even go to their funerals. This is a very harsh reality that he needs to keep at bay, so he’s built a wall around himself . . . a wall of delusion, if you will. At first, it took the form of an obsession with fantasy, but when that wouldn’t alone suffice, he decided to enter that fantasy, become part of it. This is where Emperor Jeffery the First of the Great Martian Empire comes in.”

“So he’s protecting himself?”

“Yes . . . by creating a role that lets him believe that he controls his own life.” Karl shook his head. “He doesn’t want to actually run Arsia, chief. He just wants to pretend that he does. As long as you allow him this, he’ll be all right. Trust me.”

“Well . . . all right.” Not that I had much choice in the matter. If I was going to have a crazy person in my colony, at least I could make sure that he wouldn’t endanger anyone. If that meant indulging him until he could be sent back to Earth, then that was what I’d have to do. “I’ll pass the word that His Majesty is to be treated with all due respect.”

“That would be great. Thanks.” Karl smiled. “Y’know, people have been pretty supportive. I haven’t heard of anyone taunting him.”

“You know how it is. People here tend to look out for each other . . . they have to.” I stood up and started to head for the door, then another thought occurred to me. “Just one thing. Has he ever told you what he’s doing in his room? Like I said, he’s been using a lot of paper and ink.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed the ink stains on his fingers.” Karl shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’ve asked him about that, and the only thing he’s told me is that he’s preparing a gift for his people, and that he’ll allow us to see it when the time comes.”

“A gift?” I raised an eyebrow. “Any idea what it is?”

“Not a clue . . . but I’m sure we’ll find out.”

I kept my promise to Dr. Rosenfeld and put out the word that Jeff Halbert was heretofore to be known as His Majesty, the Emperor. As I told Karl, people were generally accepting of this. Oh, I heard the occasional report of someone giving Jeff some crap about this—exaggerated bows in the corridors, ill-considered questions about who was going to be his queen, and so forth—but the jokers who did this were usually pulled aside and told to shut up. Everyone at Arsia knew that Jeff was mentally ill, and that the best anyone could do for him was to let him have his fantasy life for as long as he was with us.

By then, Earth was no longer on the other side of the Sun. Once our home world and Mars began moving toward conjunction, a cycleship could make the trip home. So only a few months remained until Jeff would board a shuttle. Since Karl would be returning as well, I figured he’d be in good hands, or at least they climbed into zombie tanks to hibernate for the long ride to Earth. Until then, all we had to do was keep His Majesty happy.

That wasn’t hard to do. In fact, Karl and I had a lot of help. Once people got used to the idea that a make-believe emperor lived among them, most of them actually seemed to enjoy the pretense. When he walked through the habs, folks would pause whatever they were doing to nod to him and say “Your Majesty” or “Your Highness.” He was always allowed to go to the front of the serving line in the mess hall, and there was always someone ready to hold his chair for him. And I noticed that he even picked up a couple of consorts, two unattached young women who did everything from trim his hair—it had grown very long by then, with a regal beard to match—to assist him in the Royal Gardens (aka the greenhouse) to accompany him to the Saturday night flicks. As one of the girls told me, the Emperor was the perfect date: always the gentleman, he’d unfailingly treated them with respect and never tried to take advantage of them. Which was more than could be said for some of the single men at Arsia.

After awhile, I relaxed the rule about not letting him leave the habs, and allowed him to go outside as long as he was under escort at all times. Jeff remembered how to put on a hardsuit,—a sign that he hadn’t completely lost touch with reality—and he never gave any indication that he was on the verge of opening his helmet. But once he walked a few dozen yards from the airlock, he’d often stop and stare into the distance for a very long time, keeping his back to the rest of the base and saying nothing to anyone.

I wondered what he was seeing then. Was it a dry red desert, cold and lifeless, with rocks and boulders strewn across an arid plain beneath a pink sky? Or did he see something no one else could: forests of giant lichen, ancient canals upon which sailing vessels slowly glided, cities as old as time from which John Carter and Tars Tarkas rode to their next adventure or where tyrants called for the head of the outlaw Eric John Stark. Or was he thinking of something else entirely? A mother and a father who’d raised him, a woman he’d once loved, a child whom he’d never see?

I don’t know, for the Emperor seldom spoke to me, even in my role as his Prime Minister. I think I was someone he wanted to avoid, an authority figure who had the power to shatter his illusions. Indeed, in all the time that Jeff was with us, I don’t think he and I said more than a few words to each other. In fact, it wasn’t until the day that he finally left for Earth that he said anything of consequence to me.

That morning, I drove him and Dr. Rosenfeld out to the landing field, where a shuttle was waiting to transport them up to the cycleship. Jeff was unusually quiet; I couldn’t easily see his expression through his helmet faceplate, but the few glimpses I had told me that he wasn’t happy. His Majesty knew that he was leaving his empire. Karl hadn’t softened the blow by telling him a convenient lie, but instead had given him the truth: they were returning to Earth, and he’d probably never see Mars again.

Their belongings had already been loaded aboard the shuttle when we arrived, and the handful of other passengers were waiting to climb aboard. I parked the rover at the edge of the landing field and escorted Jeff and Karl to the spacecraft. I shook hands with Karl and wished him well, then turned to Jeff.

“Your Majesty . . .” I began.

“You don’t have to call me that,” he said.

“Pardon me?”

Jeff stepped closer to me. “I know I’m not really an emperor. That was something I got over a while ago . . . I just didn’t want to tell anyone.”

I glanced at Karl. His eyes were wide, and within his helmet he shook his head. This was news to him, too. “Then . . . you know who you really are?”

A brief flicker of a smile. “I’m Jeff Halbert. There’s something wrong with me, and I don’t really know what it is . . . but I know that I’m Jeff Halbert and that I’m going home.” He hesitated, then went on. “I know we haven’t talked much, but I . . . well, Dr. Rosenfeld has told me what you’ve done for me, and I just wanted to thank you. For putting up with me all this time, and for letting me be the Emperor of Mars. I hope I haven’t been too much trouble.”

I slowly let out my breath. My first thought was that he’d been playing me and everyone else for fools, but then I realized that his megalomania had probably been real, at least for a time. In any case, it didn’t matter now; he was on his way back to Earth, the first steps on the long road to recovery.

Indeed, many months later, I received a letter from Karl. Shortly after he returned to Earth, Jeff was admitted to a private clinic in southern Vermont, where he began a program of psychiatric treatment. The process had been painful; as Karl had deduced, Jeff’s mind had repressed the knowledge of his family’s deaths, papering over the memory with fantastical delusions he’d derived from the stories he’d been reading. The clinic psychologists agreed with Dr. Rosenfeld: it was probably the retreat into fantasy that saved Jeff’s life, by providing him with a place to which he was able to escape when his mind was no longer able to cope with a tragic reality. And in the end, when he no longer needed that illusion, Jeff returned from madness. He’d never see a Martian princess again, or believe himself to be the ruling monarch of the red planet.

But that was yet to come. I bit my tongue and offered him my hand. “No trouble, Jeff. I just hope everything works out for you.”

“Thanks.” Jeff shook my hand, then turned away to follow Karl to the ladder. Then he stopped and looked back at me again. “One more thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“There’s something in my room I think you’d like to see. I disabled the lock just before I left, so you won’t need the password to get in there.” A brief pause. “It was ‘Thuvia’, just in case you need it anyway.”

“Thank you.” I peered at him. “So . . . what is it?”

“Call it a gift from the emperor,” he said.

I walked back to the rover and waited until the shuttle lifted off, then I drove to Hab 2. When I reached Jeff’s room, though, I discovered that I wasn’t the first person to arrive. Several of his friends—his fellow monkeys, the emperor’s consorts, a couple of others—had already opened the door and gone in. I heard their astonished murmurs as I walked down the hall, but it wasn’t until I pushed entered the room that I saw what amazed them.

Jeff’s quarters were small, but he’d done a lot with it over the last year and a half. The wall above his bed was covered with sheets of paper that he’d taped together, upon which he’d drawn an elaborate mural. Here was the Mars over which the Emperor had reigned: boat-like aircraft hovering above great domed cities, monstrous creatures prowling red wastelands, bare-chested heroes defending beautiful women with rapiers and radium pistols, all beneath twin moons that looked nothing like the Phobos and Deimos we knew. The mural was crude, yet it had been rendered with painstaking care, and was nothing like anything we’d ever seen before.

That wasn’t all. On the desk next to the comp was the original Phoenix disk, yet Jeff hadn’t been satisfied just to leave it behind. A wire-frame bookcase had been built beside the desk, and neatly stacked upon its shelves were dozens of sheaves of paper, some thick and some thin, each carefully bound with hemp twine. Books, handwritten and handmade.

I carefully pulled down one at random, gazed at its title page: EDISON’S CONQUEST OF MARS by Garrett P. Serviss. I put it back on the shelf, picked up another: OMNILINGUAL by H. Beam Piper. I placed it on the shelf, then pulled down yet another: THE MARTIAN CROWN JEWELS, by Poul Anderson. And more, dozens more . . .

This was what Jeff had been doing all this time: transcribing the contents of the Phoenix disk, word by word. Because he knew, in spite of his madness, that he couldn’t stay on Mars forever, and he wanted to leave something behind. A library, so that others could enjoy the same stories that had helped him through a dark and troubled time.

The library is still here. In fact, we’ve improved it quite a bit. I had the bed and dresser removed, and replaced them with armchairs and reading lamps. The mural has been preserved within glass frames, and the books have been rebound inside plastic covers. The Phoenix disk is gone, but its contents have been downloaded into a couple of comps; the disk itself is in the base museum. And we’ve added a lot of books to the shelves; every time a cycleship arrives from Earth, it brings more a few more volumes for our collection. It’s become one of the favorite places in Arsia for people to relax. There’s almost always someone there, sitting in a chair with a novel or story in his or her lap.

The sign on the door reads Imperial Martian Library: an inside joke that newcomers and tourists don’t get. And, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time there myself. It’s never too late to catch up on the classics.

THE LADY WHO PLUCKED RED FLOWERS BENEATH THE QUEEN’S WINDOW

Rachel Swirsky

My story should have ended on the day I died. Instead, it began there.

Sun pounded on my back as I rode through the Mountains where the Sun Rests. My horse’s hooves beat in syncopation with those of the donkey that trotted in our shadow. The queen’s midget Kyan turned his head toward me, sweat dripping down the red-and-blue protections painted across his malformed brow.

“Shouldn’t . . . we . . . stop?” he panted.

Sunlight shone red across the craggy limestone cliffs. A bold eastern wind carried the scent of mountain blossoms. I pointed to a place where two large stones leaned across a narrow outcropping.

“There,” I said, prodding my horse to go faster before Kyan could answer. He grunted and cursed at his donkey for falling behind.

I hated Kyan, and he hated me. But Queen Rayneh had ordered us to ride reconnaissance together, and we obeyed, out of love for her and for the Land of Flowered Hills.

We dismounted at the place I had indicated. There, between the mountain peaks, we could watch the enemy’s forces in the valley below without being observed. The raiders spread out across the meadow below like ants on a rich meal. Their women’s camp lay behind the main troops, a small dark blur. Even the smoke rising from their women’s fires seemed timid. I scowled.

“Go out between the rocks,” I directed Kyan. “Move as close to the edge as you can.”

Kyan made a mocking gesture of deference. “As you wish, Great Lady,” he sneered, swinging his twisted legs off the donkey. Shamans’ bundles of stones and seeds, tied with twine, rattled at his ankles.

I refused to let his pretensions ignite my temper. “Watch the valley,” I instructed. “I will take the vision of their camp from your mind and send it to the Queen’s scrying pool. Be sure to keep still.”

The midget edged toward the rocks, his eyes shifting back and forth as if he expected to encounter raiders up here in the mountains, in the Queen’s dominion. I found myself amused and disgusted by how little provocation it took to reveal the midget’s true, craven nature. At home in the Queen’s castle, he strutted about, pompous and patronizing. He was like many birth-twisted men, arrogant in the limited magic to which his deformities gave him access. Rumors suggested that he imagined himself worthy enough to be in love with the Queen. I wondered what he thought of the men below. Did he daydream about them conquering the Land? Did he think they’d make him powerful, that they’d put weapons in his twisted hands and let him strut among their ranks?

“Is your view clear?” I asked.

“It is.”

I closed my eyes and saw, as he saw, the panorama of the valley below. I held his sight in my mind, and turned toward the eastern wind which carries the perfect expression of magic–flight–on its invisible eddies. I envisioned the battlefield unfurling before me like a scroll rolling out across a marble floor. With low, dissonant notes, I showed the image how to transform itself for my purposes. I taught it how to be length and width without depth, and how to be strokes of color and light reflected in water. When it knew these things, I sang the image into the water of the Queen’s scrying pool.

Suddenly–too soon–the vision vanished from my inner eye. Something whistled through the air. I turned. Pain struck my chest like thunder.

I cried out. Kyan’s bundles of seeds and stones rattled above me. My vision blurred red. Why was the midget near me? He should have been on the outcropping.

“You traitor!” I shouted. “How did the raiders find us?”

I writhed blindly on the ground, struggling to grab Kyan’s legs. The midget caught my wrists. Weak with pain, I could not break free.

“Hold still,” he said. “You’re driving the arrow deeper.”

“Let me go, you craven dwarf.”

“I’m no traitor. This is woman’s magic. Feel the arrow shaft.”

Kyan guided my hand upward to touch the arrow buried in my chest. Through the pain, I felt the softness of one of the Queen’s roc feathers. It was particularly rare and valuable, the length of my arm.

I let myself fall slack against the rock. “Woman’s magic,” I echoed, softly. “The Queen is betrayed. The Land is betrayed.”

“Someone is betrayed, sure enough,” said Kyan, his tone gloating.

“You must return to court and warn the Queen.”

Kyan leaned closer to me. His breath blew on my neck, heavy with smoke and spices.

“No, Naeva. You can still help the Queen. She’s given me the keystone to a spell–a piece of pure leucite, powerful enough to tug a spirit from its rest. If I blow its power into you, your spirit won’t sink into sleep. It will only rest, waiting for her summons.”

Blood welled in my mouth. “I won’t let you bind me . . .”

His voice came even closer, his lips on my ear. “The Queen needs you, Naeva. Don’t you love her?”

Love: the word caught me like a thread on a bramble. Oh, yes. I loved the queen. My will weakened, and I tumbled out of my body. Cold crystal drew me in like a great mouth, inhaling.

#

I was furious. I wanted to wrap my hands around the first neck I saw and squeeze. But my hands were tiny, half the size of the hands I remembered. My short, fragile fingers shook. Heavy musk seared my nostrils. I felt the heat of scented candles at my feet, heard the snap of flame devouring wick. I rushed forward and was abruptly halted. Red and black knots of string marked boundaries beyond which I could not pass.

“O, Great Lady Naeva,” a voice intoned. “We seek your wisdom on behalf of Queen Rayneh and the Land of Flowered hills.”

Murmurs rippled through the room. Through my blurred vision, I caught an impression of vaulted ceilings and frescoed walls. I heard people, but I could only make out woman-sized blurs–they could have been beggars, aristocrats, warriors, even males or broods.

I tried to roar. My voice fractured into a strangled sound like trapped wind. An old woman’s sound.

“Great Lady Naeva, will you acknowledge me?”

I turned toward the high, mannered voice. A face came into focus, eyes flashing blue beneath a cowl. Dark stripes stretched from lower lip to chin: the tattoos of a death whisperer.

Terror cut into my rage for a single, clear instant. “I’m dead?”

“Let me handle this.” Another voice, familiar this time. Calm, authoritative, quiet: the voice of someone who had never needed to shout in order to be heard. I swung my head back and forth trying to glimpse Queen Rayneh.

“Hear me, Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath My Window. It is I, your Queen.”

The formality of that voice! She spoke to me with titles instead of names? I blazed with fury.

Her voice dropped a register, tender and cajoling. “Listen to me, Naeva. I asked the death whisperers to chant your spirit up from the dead. You’re inhabiting the body of an elder member of their order. Look down. See for yourself.”

I looked down and saw embroidered rabbits leaping across the hem of a turquoise robe. Long, bony feet jutted out from beneath the silk. They were swaddled in the coarse wrappings that doctors prescribed for the elderly when it hurt them to stand.

They were not my feet. I had not lived long enough to have feet like that.

“I was shot by an enchanted arrow . . .” I recalled. “The midget said you might need me again . . .”

“And he was right, wasn’t he? You’ve only been dead three years. Already, we need you.”

The smugness of that voice. Rayneh’s impervious assurance that no matter what happened, be it death or disgrace, her people’s hearts would always sing with fealty.

“He enslaved me,” I said bitterly. “He preyed upon my love for you.”

“Ah, Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath My Window, I always knew you loved me.”

Oh yes, I had loved her. When she wanted heirs, it was I who placed my hand on her belly and used my magic to draw out her seedlings; I who nurtured the seedlings’ spirits with the fertilizer of her chosen man; I who planted the seedlings in the womb of a fecund brood. Three times, the broods I catalyzed brought forth Rayneh’s daughters. I’d not yet chosen to beget my own daughters, but there had always been an understanding between us that Rayneh would be the one to stand with my magic-worker as the seedling was drawn from me, mingled with man, and set into brood.

I was amazed to find that I loved her no longer. I remembered the emotion, but passion had died with my body.

“I want to see you,” I said.

Alarmed, the death whisperer turned toward Rayneh’s voice. Her nose jutted beak-like past the edge of her cowl. “It’s possible for her to see you if you stand where I am,” she said. “But if the spell goes wrong, I won’t be able to–”

“It’s all right, Lakitri. Let her see me.”

Rustling, footsteps. Rayneh came into view. My blurred vision showed me frustratingly little except for the moon of her face. Her eyes sparkled black against her smooth, sienna skin. Amber and obsidian gems shone from her forehead, magically embedded in the triangular formation that symbolized the Land of Flowered Hills. I wanted to see her graceful belly, the muscular calves I’d loved to stroke–but below her chin, the world faded to grey.

“What do you want?” I asked. “Are the raiders nipping at your heels again?”

“We pushed the raiders back in the battle that you died to make happen. It was a rout. Thanks to you.”

A smile lit on Rayneh’s face. It was a smile I remembered. You have served your Land and your Queen, it seemed to say. You may be proud. I’d slept on Rayneh’s leaf-patterned silk and eaten at her morning table too often to be deceived by such shallow manipulations.

Rayneh continued, “A usurper–a woman raised on our own grain and honey–has built an army of automatons to attack us. She’s given each one a hummingbird’s heart for speed, and a crane’s feather for beauty, and a crow’s brain for wit. They’ve marched from the Lake Where Women Wept all the way across the fields to the Valley of Tonha’s Memory. They move faster than our most agile warriors. They seduce our farmers out of the fields. We must destroy them.”

“A usurper?” I said.

“One who betrays us with our own spells.”

The Queen directed me a lingering, narrow-lidded look, challenging me with her unspoken implications.

“The kind of woman who would shoot the Queen’s sorceress with a roc feather?” I pressed.

Her glance darted sideways. “Perhaps.”

Even with the tantalizing aroma of revenge wafting before me, I considered refusing Rayneh’s plea. Why should I forgive her for chaining me to her service? She and her benighted death whisperers might have been able to chant my spirit into wakefulness, but let them try to stir my voice against my will.

But no–even without love drawing me into dark corners, I couldn’t renounce Rayneh. I would help her as I always had from the time when we were girls riding together through my grandmother’s fields. When she fell from her mount, it was always I who halted my mare, soothed her wounds, and eased her back into the saddle. Even as a child, I knew that she would never do the same for me.

“Give me something to kill,” I said.

“What?”

“I want to kill. Give me something. Or should I kill your death whisperers?”

Rayneh turned toward the women. “Bring a sow!” she commanded.

Murmurs echoed through the high-ceilinged chamber, followed by rushing footsteps. Anxious hands entered my range of vision, dragging a fat, black-spotted shape. I looked toward the place where my ears told me the crowd of death whisperers stood, huddled and gossiping. I wasn’t sure how vicious I could appear as a dowager with bound feet, but I snarled at them anyway. I was rewarded with the susurration of hems sliding backward over tile.

I approached the sow. My feet collided with the invisible boundaries of the summoning circle. “Move it closer,” I ordered.

Hands pushed the sow forward. The creature grunted with surprise and fear. I knelt down and felt its bristly fur and smelled dry mud, but I couldn’t see its torpid bulk.

I wrapped my bony hands around the creature’s neck and twisted. My spirit’s strength overcame the body’s weakness. The animal’s head snapped free in my hands. Blood engulfed the leaping rabbits on my hem.

I thrust the sow’s head at Rayneh. It tumbled out of the summoning circle and thudded across the marble. Rayneh doubled over, retching.

The crowd trembled and exclaimed. Over the din, I dictated the means to defeat the constructs. “Blend mustard seed and honey to slow their deceitful tongues. Add brine to ruin their beauty. Mix in crushed poppies to slow their fast-beating hearts. Release the concoction onto a strong wind and let it blow their destruction. Only a grain need touch them. Less than a grain–only a grain need touch a mosquito that lights on a flower they pass on the march. They will fall.”

“Regard that! Remember it!” Rayneh shouted to the whisperers. Silk rustled. Rayneh regarded me levelly. “That’s all we have to do?”

“Get Lakitri,” I replied. “I wish to ask her a question.”

A nervous voice spoke outside my field of vision. “I’m here, Great Lady.”

“What will happen to this body after my spirit leaves?”

“Jada will die, Great Lady. Your spirit has chased hers away.”

I felt the crookedness of Jada’s hunched back and the pinch of the strips binding her feet. Such a back, such feet, I would never have. At least someone would die for disturbing my death.

#

Next I woke, rage simmered where before it had boiled. I stifled a snarl, and relaxed my clenched fists. My vision was clearer: I discerned the outlines of a tent filled with dark shapes that resembled pillows and furs. I discovered my boundaries close by, marked by wooden stakes painted with bands of cinnamon and white.

“Respected Aunt Naeva?”

My vision wavered. A shape: muscular biceps, hard thighs, robes of heir’s green. It took me a moment to identify Queen Rayneh’s eldest daughter, who I had inspired in her brood. At the time of my death, she’d been a flat-chested flitling, still learning how to ride.

“Tryce?” I asked. A bad thought: “Why are you here? Has the usurper taken the palace? Is the Queen dead?”

Tryce laughed. “You misunderstand, Respected Aunt. I am the usurper.”

“You?” I scoffed. “What does a girl want with a woman’s throne?”

“I want what is mine.” Tryce drew herself up. She had her mother’s mouth, stern and imperious. “If you don’t believe me, look at the body you’re wearing.”

I looked down. My hands were the right size, but they were painted in Rayneh’s blue and decked with rings of gold and silver. Strips of tanned human flesh adorned my breasts. I raised my fingertips to my collarbone and felt the raised edges of the brand I knew would be there. Scars formed the triangles that represented the Land of Flowered Hills.

“One of your mother’s private guard,” I murmured. “Which?”

“Okilanu.”

I grinned. “I never liked the bitch.”

“You know I’m telling the truth. A private guard is too valuable for anyone but a usurper to sacrifice. I’m holding this conference with honor, Respected Aunt. I’m meeting you alone, with only one automaton to guard me. My informants tell me that my mother surrounded herself with sorceresses so that she could coerce you. I hold you in more esteem.”

“What do you want?”

“Help winning the throne that should be mine.”

“Why should I betray my lover and my Land for a child with pretensions?”

“Because you have no reason to be loyal to my mother. Because I want what’s best for this Land, and I know how to achieve it. Because those were my automatons you dismantled, and they were good, beautiful souls despite being creatures of spit and mud. Gudrin is the last of them.”

Tryce held out her hand. The hand that accepted drew into my vision: slender with shapely fingers crafted of mud and tangled with sticks and pieces of nest. It was beautiful enough to send feathers of astonishment through my chest.

“Great Lady, you must listen to The Creator of Me and Mine,” intoned the creature.

Its voice was a songbird trill. I grimaced in disgust. “You made male automatons?”

“Just one,” said Tryce. “It’s why he survived your spell.”

“Yes,” I said, pondering. “It never occurred to me that one would make male creatures.

“Will you listen, Respected Aunt?” asked Tryce.

“You must listen, Great Lady,” echoed the automaton. His voice was as melodious as poetry to a depressed heart. The power of crane’s feathers and crow’s brains is great.

“Very well,” I said.

Tryce raised her palms to show she was telling truth. I saw the shadow of her mother’s face lurking in her wide-set eyes and broad, round forehead.

“Last autumn, when the wind blew red with fallen leaves, my mother expelled me from the castle. She threw my possessions into the river and had my servants beaten and turned out. She told me that I would have to learn to live like the birds migrating from place to place because she had decreed that no one was to give me a home. She said I was no longer her heir, and she would dress Darnisha or Peni in heir’s green. Oh, Respected Aunt! How could either of them take a throne?”

I ignored Tryce’s emotional outpouring. It was true that Tryce had always been more responsible than her sisters, but she had been born with an heir’s heaviness upon her. I had lived long enough to see fluttering sparrows like Darnisha and Peni become eagles, over time.

“You omit something important,” I said. “Why did your mother throw you out, Imprudent Child?”

“Because of this.”

The automaton’s hand held Tryce steady as she mounted a pile of pillows that raised her torso to my eye level. Her belly loomed large, ripe as a frog’s inflated throat.

“You’ve gotten fat, Tryce.”

“No,” she said.

I realized: she had not.

“You’re pregnant? Hosting a child like some brood? What’s wrong with you, girl? I never knew you were a pervert. Worse than a pervert! Even the lowest worm-eater knows to chew mushrooms when she pushes with men.”

“I am no pervert! I am a lover of woman. I am natural as breeze! But I say we must not halve our population by splitting our females into women and broods. The raiders nip at our heels. Yes, it’s true, they are barbaric and weak–now. But they grow stronger. Their population increases so quickly that already they can match our numbers. When there are three times as many of them as us, or five times, or eight times, they’ll flood us like a wave crashing on a naked beach. It’s time for women to make children in ourselves as broods do. We need more daughters.”

I scoffed. “The raiders keep their women like cows for the same reason we keep cows like cows, to encourage the production of calves. What do you think will happen if our men see great women swelling with young and feeding them from their bodies? They will see us as weak, and they will rebel, and the broods will support them for trinkets and candy.”

“Broods will not threaten us,” said Tryce. “They do as they are trained. We train them to obey.”

Tryce stepped down from the pillows and dismissed the automaton into the shadows. I felt a murmur of sadness as the creature left my sight.

“It is not your place to make policy, Imprudent Child,” I said. “You should have kept your belly flat.

“There is no time! Do the raiders wait? Will they chew rinds by the fire while I wait for my mother to die?”

“This is better? To split our land into factions and war against ourselves?”

“I have vowed to save the Land of Flowered Hills,” said Tryce, “with my mother or despite her.”

Tryce came yet closer to me so that I could see the triple scars where the gems that had once sealed her heirship had been carved out of her cheeks. They left angry, red triangles. Tryce’s breath was hot; her eyes like oil, shining.

“Even without my automatons, I have enough resources to overwhelm the palace,” Tryce continued, “except for one thing.”

I waited.

“I need you to tell me how to unlock the protections you laid on the palace grounds and my mother’s chambers.”

“We return to the beginning. Why should I help you?”

Tryce closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. There was shyness in her posture now. She would not direct her gaze at mine.

She said, “I was young when you died, still young enough to think that our strength was unassailable. The battles after your death shattered my illusions. We barely won, and we lost many lives. I realized that we needed more power, and I thought that I could give us that power by becoming a sorceress to replace you.” She paused. “During my studies, I researched your acts of magic, great and small. Inevitably, I came to the spell you cast before you died, when you sent the raiders’ positions into the summoning pool.”

It was then that I knew what she would say next. I wish I could say that my heartfelt as immobile as a mountain, that I had always known to suspect the love of a Queen. But my heart drummed, and my mouth went dry, and I felt as if I were falling.

“Some of mother’s advisers convinced her that you were plotting against her. They had little evidence to support their accusations, but once the idea rooted into mother’s mind, she became obsessed. She violated the sanctity of woman’s magic by teaching Kyan how to summon a roc feather enchanted to pierce your heart. She ordered him to wait until you had sent her the vision of the battleground, and then to kill you and punish your treachery by binding your soul so that you would always wander and wake.”

I wanted to deny it, but what point would there be? Now that Tryce forced me to examine my death with a watcher’s eye, I saw the coincidences that proved her truth. How else could I have been shot by an arrow not just shaped by woman’s magic, but made from one of the Queen’s roc feathers? Why else would a worm like Kyan have happened to have in his possession a piece of leucite more powerful than any I’d seen?

I clenched Okilanu’s fists. “I never plotted against Rayneh.”

“Of course not. She realized it herself, in time, and executed the women who had whispered against you. But she had your magic, and your restless spirit bound to her, and she believed that was all she needed.”

For long moments, my grief battled my anger. When it was done, my resolve was hardened like a spear tempered by fire.

I lifted my palms in the gesture of truth telling. “To remove the protections on the palace grounds, you must lay yourself flat against the soil with your cheek against the dirt, so that it knows you. To it, you must say, ‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath the Queen’s Window loves the Queen from instant to eternity, from desire to regret.’ And then you must kiss the soil as if it is the hem of your lover’s robe. Wait until you feel the earth move beneath you and then the protections will be gone.”

Tryce inclined her head. “I will do this.”

I continued, “When you are done, you must flay off a strip of your skin and grind it into a fine powder. Bury it in an envelope of wind-silk beneath the Queen’s window. Bury it quickly. If a single grain escapes, the protections on her chamber will hold.”

“I will do this, too,” said Tryce. She began to speak more, but I raised one of my ringed, blue fingers to silence her.

“There’s another set of protections you don’t know about. One cast on your mother. It can only be broken by the fresh life-blood of something you love. Throw the blood onto the Queen while saying, ‘The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath Your Window has betrayed you.”

“Life-blood? You mean, I need to kill–”

“Perhaps the automaton.”

Tryce’s expression clouded with distress. “Gudrin is the last one! Maybe the baby. I could conceive again–”

“If you can suggest the baby, you don’t love it enough. It must be Gudrin.”

Tryce closed her mouth. “Then it will be Gudrin,” she agreed, but her eyes would not meet mine.

I folded my arms across Okilanu’s flat bosom. “I’ve given you what you wanted. Now grant me a favor, Imprudent Child Who Would Be Queen. When you kill Rayneh, I want to be there.”

Tryce lifted her head like the Queen she wanted to be. “I will summon you when it’s time, Respected Aunt.” She turned toward Gudrin in the shadows. “Disassemble the binding shapes,” she ordered.

For the first time, I beheld Gudrin in his entirety. The creature was tree-tall and stick-slender, and yet he moved with astonishing grace. “Thank you on behalf of the Creator of Me and My Kind,” he trilled in his beautiful voice, and I considered how unfortunate it was that the next time I saw him, he would be dead.

#

I smelled the iron-and-wet tang of blood. My view of the world skewed low, as if I’d been cut off at the knees. Women’s bodies slumped across lush carpets. Red ran deep into the silk, bloodying woven leaves and flowers. I’d been in this chamber far too often to mistake it, even dead. It was Rayneh’s.

It came to me then: my perspective was not like that of a woman forced to kneel. It was like a child’s. Or a dwarf’s.

I reached down and felt hairy knees and fringed ankle bracelets. “Ah, Kyan . . .”

“I thought you might like that.” Tryce’s voice. These were probably her legs before me, wrapped in loose green silk trousers that were tied above the calf with chains of copper beads. “A touch of irony for your pleasure. He bound your soul to restlessness. Now you’ll chase his away.”

I reached into his back-slung sheath and drew out the most functional of his ceremonial blades. It would feel good to flay his treacherous flesh.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said Tryce. “You’ll be the one who feels the pain.”

I sheathed the blade. “You took the castle?”

“Effortlessly.” She paused. “I lie. Not effortlessly.” She unknotted her right trouser leg and rolled up the silk. Blood stained the bandages on a carefully wrapped wound. “Your protections were strong.”

“Yes. They were.”

She re-tied her trouser leg and continued. “The Lady with Lichen Hair tried to block our way into the chamber.” She kicked one of the corpses by my feet. “We killed her.”

“Did you.”

“Don’t you care? She was your friend.”

“Did she care when I died?”

Tryce shifted her weight, a kind of lower-body shrug. “I brought you another present.” She dropped a severed head onto the floor. It rolled toward me, tongue lolling in its bloody face. It took me a moment to identify the high cheekbones and narrow eyes.

“The death whisperer? Why did you kill Lakitri?”

“You liked the blood of Jada and Okilanu, didn’t you?”

“The only blood I care about now is your mother’s. Where is she?”

“Bring my mother!” ordered Tryce.

One of Tryce’s servants–her hands marked with the green dye of loyalty to the heir–dragged Rayneh into the chamber. The Queen’s torn, bloody robe concealed the worst of her wounds, but couldn’t hide the black and purple bruises blossoming on her arms and legs. Her eyes found mine, and despite her condition, a trace of her regal smile glossed her lips.

Her voice sounded thin. “That’s you? Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath My Window?”

“It’s me.”

She raised one bloody, shaking hand to the locket around her throat and pried it open. Dried petals scattered onto the carpets, the remnants of the red flowers I’d once gathered for her protection. While the spell lasted, they’d remained whole and fresh. Now they were dry and crumbling like what had passed for love between us.

“If you ever find rest, the world-lizard will crack your soul in its jaws for murdering your Queen,” she said.

“I didn’t kill you.”

“You instigated my death.”

“I was only repaying your favor.”

The hint of her smile again. She smelled of wood smoke, rich and dark. I wanted to see her more clearly, but my poor vision blurred the red of her wounds into the sienna of her skin until the whole of her looked like raw, churned earth.

“I suppose our souls will freeze together.” She paused. “That might be pleasant.”

Somewhere in front of us, lost in the shadows, I heard Tryce and her women ransacking the Queen’s chamber. Footsteps, sharp voices, cracking wood.

“I used to enjoy cold mornings,” Rayneh said. “When we were girls. I liked lying in bed with you and opening the curtains to watch the snow fall.”

“And sending servants out into the cold to fetch and carry.”

“And then! When my brood let slip it was warmer to lie together naked under the sheets? Do you remember that?” She laughed aloud, and then paused. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter. “It’s strange to remember lying together in the cold, and then to look up, and see you in that body. Oh, my beautiful Naeva, twisted into a worm. I deserve what you’ve done to me. How could I have sent a worm to kill my life’s best love?”

She turned her face away, as if she could speak no more. Such a show of intimate, unroyal emotion. I could remember times when she’d been able to manipulate me by trusting me with a wince of pain or a supposedly accidental tear. As I grew more cynical, I realized that her royal pretense wasn’t vanishing when she gave me a melancholy, regretful glance. Such things were calculated vulnerabilities, intended to bind me closer to her by suggesting intimacy and trust. She used them with many ladies at court, the ones who loved her.

This was far from the first time she’d tried to bind me to her by displaying weakness, but it was the first time she’d ever done so when I had no love to enthrall me.

Rayneh continued, her voice a whisper. “I regret it, Naeva. When Kyan came back, and I saw your body, cold and lifeless–I understood immediately that I’d been mistaken. I wept for days. I’m weeping still, inside my heart. But listen–” her voice hardened “–we can’t let this be about you and me. Our Land is at stake. Do you know what Tryce is going to do? She’ll destroy us all. You have to help me stop her–”

“Tryce!” I shouted. “I’m ready to see her bleed.”

Footsteps thudded across silk carpets. Tryce drew a bone-handled knife and knelt over her mother like a farmer preparing to slaughter a pig. “Gudrin!” she called. “Throw open the doors. Let everyone see us.”

Narrow, muddy legs strode past us. The twigs woven through the automaton’s skin had lain fallow when I saw him in the winter. Now they blazed in a glory of emerald leaves and scarlet blossoms.

“You dunce!” I shouted at Tryce. “What have you done? You left him alive.”

Tryce’s gaze held fast on her mother’s throat. “I sacrificed the baby.”

Voices and footsteps gathered in the room as Tryce’s soldiers escorted Rayneh’s courtiers inside.

“You sacrificed the baby,” I repeated. “What do you think ruling is? Do you think Queens always get what they want? You can’t dictate to magic, Imprudent Child.”

“Be silent.” Tryce’s voice thinned with anger. “I’m grateful for your help, Great Lady, but you must not speak this way to your Queen.”

I shook my head. Let the foolish child do what she might. I braced myself for the inevitable backlash of the spell.

Tryce raised her knife in the air. “Let everyone gathered here behold that this is Queen Rayneh, the Queen Who Would Dictate to a Daughter. I am her heir, Tryce of the Bold Stride. Hear me. I do this for the Land of Flowered Hills, for our honor and our strength. Yet I also do it with regret. Mother, I hope you will be free in your death. May your spirit wing across sweet breezes with the great bird of the sun.”

The knife slashed downward. Crimson poured across Rayneh’s body, across the rugs, across Tryce’s feet. For a moment, I thought I’d been wrong about Tryce’s baby–perhaps she had loved it enough for the counter-spell to work–but as the blood poured over the dried petals Rayneh had scattered on the floor, a bright light flared through the room. Tryce flailed backward as if struck.

Rayneh’s wound vanished. She stared up at me with startled, joyful eyes. “You didn’t betray me!”

“Oh, I did,” I said. “Your daughter is just inept.”

I could see only one solution to the problem Tryce had created–the life’s blood of something I loved was here, still saturating the carpets and pooling on the stone.

Magic is a little bit alive. Sometimes it prefers poetic truths to literal ones. I dipped my fingers into the Queen’s spilled blood and pronounced, “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers beneath Your Window has betrayed you.”

I cast the blood across the Queen. The dried petals disintegrated. The Queen cried out as my magical protections disappeared.

Tryce was at her mother’s side again in an instant. Rayneh looked at me in the moment before Tryce’s knife descended. I thought she might show me, just this once, a fraction of uncalculated vulnerability. But this time there was no vulnerability at all, no pain or betrayal or even weariness, only perfect regal equanimity.

Tryce struck for her mother’s heart. She let her mother’s body fall to the carpet.

“Behold my victory!” Tryce proclaimed. She turned toward her subjects. Her stance was strong: her feet planted firmly, ready for attack or defense. If her lower half was any indication, she’d be an excellent Queen.

I felt a rush of forgiveness and pleasure and regret and satisfaction all mixed together. I moved toward the boundaries of my imprisonment, my face near Rayneh’s where she lay, inhaling her last ragged breaths.

“Be brave,” I told her. “Soon we’ll both be free.”

Rayneh’s lips moved slowly, her tongue thick around the words. “What makes you think . . .?”

“You’re going to die,” I said, “and when I leave this body, Kyan will die, too. Without caster or intent, there won’t be anything to sustain the spell.”

Rayneh made a sound that I supposed was laughter. “Oh no, my dear Naeva . . . much more complicated than that . . .”

Panic constricted my throat. “Tryce! You have to find the piece of leucite–”

“. . . even stronger than the rock. Nothing but death can lull your spirit to sleep . . . and you’re already dead . . .”

She laughed again.

“Tryce!” I shouted. “Tryce!”

The girl turned. For a moment, my vision became as clear as it had been when I lived. I saw the Imprudent Child Queen standing with her automaton’s arms around her waist, the both of them flushed with joy and triumph. Tryce turned to kiss the knot of wood that served as the automaton’s mouth and my vision clouded again.

Rayneh died a moment afterward.

A moment after that, Tryce released me.

#

If my story could not end when I died, it should have ended there, in Rayneh’s chamber, when I took my revenge.

It did not end there.

#

Tryce consulted me often during the early years of her reign. I familiarized myself with the blur of the paintings in her chamber, squinting to pick out placid scenes of songbirds settling on snowy branches, bathing in mountain springs, soaring through sun-struck skies.

“Don’t you have counselors for this?” I snapped one day.

Tryce halted her pacing in front of me, blocking my view of a wren painted by The Artist without Pity.

“Do you understand what it’s like for me? The court still calls me the Imprudent Child Who Would Be Queen. Because of you!”

Gudrin went to comfort her. She kept the creature close, pampered and petted, like a cat on a leash. She rested her head on his shoulder as he stroked her arms. It all looked too easy, too familiar. I wondered how often Tryce spun herself into these emotional whirlpools.

“It can be difficult for women to accept orders from their juniors,” I said.

“I’ve borne two healthy girls,” Tryce said petulantly. “When I talk to the other women about bearing, they still say they can’t, that ‘women’s bodies aren’t suited for childbirth.’ Well, if women can’t have children, then what does that make me?”

I forebore responding.

“They keep me busy with petty disputes over grazing rights and grain allotment. How can I plan for a war when they distract me with pedantry? The raiders are still at our heels, and the daft old biddies won’t accept what we must do to beat them back!”

The automaton thrummed with sympathy. Tryce shook him away and resumed pacing.

“At least I have you, Respected Aunt.”

“For now. You must be running out of hosts.” I raised my hand and inspected young, unfamiliar fingers. Dirt crusted the ragged nails. “Who is this? Anyone I know?”

“The death whisperers refuse to let me use their bodies. What time is this when dying old women won’t blow out a few days early for the good of the Land?”

“Who is this?” I repeated.

“I had to summon you into the body of a common thief. You see how bad things are.”

“What did you expect? That the wind would send a hundred songbirds to trill praises at your coronation? That sugared oranges would rain from the sky and flowers bloom on winter stalks?”

Tryce glared at me angrily. “Do not speak to me like that. I may be an Imprudent Child, but I am the Queen.” She took a moment to regain her composure. “Enough chatter. Give me the spell I asked for.”

Tryce called me in at official occasions, to bear witness from the body of a disfavored servant or a used-up brood. I attended each of the four ceremonies where Tryce, clad in regal blue, presented her infant daughters to the sun: four small, green-swathed bundles, each borne from the Queen’s own body. It made me sick, but I held my silence.

She also summoned me to the court ceremony where she presented Gudrin with an official title she’d concocted to give him standing in the royal circle. Honored Zephyr or some such nonsense. They held the occasion in autumn when red and yellow leaves adorned Gudrin’s shoulders like a cape. Tryce pretended to ignore the women’s discontented mutterings, but they were growing louder.

The last time I saw Tryce, she summoned me in a panic. She stood in an unfamiliar room with bare stone walls and sharp wind creaking through slitted windows. Someone else’s blood stained Tryce’s robes. “My sisters betrayed me!” she said. “They told the women of the grasslands I was trying to make them into broods, and then led them in a revolt against the castle. A thousand women, marching! I had to slay them all. I suspected Darnisha all along. But Peni seemed content to waft. Last fall, she bore a child of her own body. It was a worm, true, but she might have gotten a daughter next. She said she wanted to try!”

“Is that their blood?”

She held out her reddened hands and stared at them ruefully as if they weren’t really part of her. “Gudrin was helping them. I had to smash him into sticks. They must have cast a spell on him. I can’t imagine . . .”

Her voice faltered. I gave her a moment to tame her undignified excess.

“You seem to have mastered the situation,” I said. “A Queen must deal with such things from time to time. The important thing will be to show no weakness in front of your courtiers.”

“You don’t understand! It’s much worse than that. While we women fought, the raiders attacked the Fields That Bask under Open Skies. They’ve taken half the Land. We’re making a stand in the Castle Where Hope Flutters, but we can’t keep them out forever. A few weeks, at most. I told them this would happen! We need more daughters to defend us! But they wouldn’t listen to me!”

Rayneh would have known how to present her anger with queenly courage, but Tryce was rash and thoughtless. She wore her emotions like perfume. “Be calm,” I admonished. “You must focus.”

“The raiders sent a message describing what they’ll do to me and my daughters when they take the castle. I captured the messenger and burned out his tongue and gave him to the broods, and when they were done with him, I took what was left of his body and catapulted it into the raiders’ camp. I could do the same to every one of them, and it still wouldn’t be enough to compensate for having to listen to their vile, cowardly threats.”

I interrupted her tirade. “The Castle Where Hope Flutters is on high ground, but if you’ve already lost the eastern fields, it will be difficult to defend. Take your women to the Spires of Treachery where the herders feed their cattle. You won’t be able to mount traditional defenses, but they won’t be able to attack easily. You’ll be reduced to meeting each other in small parties where woman’s magic should give you the advantage.”

“My commander suggested that,” said Tryce. “There are too many of them. We might as well try to dam a river with silk.”

“It’s better than remaining here.”

“Even if we fight to a stalemate in the Spires of Treachery, the raiders will have our fields to grow food in, and our broods to make children on. If they can’t conquer us this year, they’ll obliterate us in ten. I need something else.”

“There is nothing else.”

“Think of something!”

I thought.

I cast my mind back through my years of training. I remembered the locked room in my matriline’s household where servants were never allowed to enter, which my cousins and I scrubbed every dawn and dusk to teach us to be constant and rigorous.

I remembered the cedar desk where my aunt Finis taught me to paint birds, first by using the most realistic detail that oils could achieve, and then by reducing my paintings to fewer and fewer brushstrokes until I could evoke the essence of bird without any brush at all.

I remembered the many-drawered red cabinets where we stored Leafspine and Winterbrew, powdered Errow and essence of Howl. I remembered my bossy cousin Alne skidding through the halls in a panic after she broke into a locked drawer and mixed together two herbs that we weren’t supposed to touch. Her fearful grimace transformed into a beak that permanently silenced her sharp tongue.

I remembered the year I spent traveling to learn the magic of foreign lands. I was appalled by the rituals I encountered in places where women urinated on their thresholds to ward off spirits, and plucked their scalps bald when their eldest daughters reached majority. I walked with senders and weavers and whisperers and learned magic secrets that my people had misunderstood for centuries. I remembered the terror of the three nights I spent in the ancient ruins of The Desert which Should Not Have Been, begging the souls that haunted that place to surrender the secrets of their accursed city. One by one my companions died, and I spent the desert days digging graves for those the spirits found unworthy. On the third dawn, they blessed me with communion, and sent me away a wiser woman.

I remembered returning to the Land of Flowered Hills and making my own contribution to the lore contained in our matriline’s locked rooms. I remembered all of this, and still I could think of nothing to tell Tryce.

Until a robin of memory hopped from an unexpected place–a piece of magic I learned traveling with herders, not spell-casters. It was an old magic, one that farmers cast when they needed to cull an inbred strain.

“You must concoct a plague,” I began.

Tryce’s eyes locked on me. I saw hope in her face, and I realized that she’d expected me to fail her, too.

“Find a sick baby and stop whatever treatment it is receiving. Feed it mosquito bellies and offal and dirty water to make it sicker. Give it sores and let them fill with pus. When its forehead has grown too hot for a woman to touch without flinching, kill the baby and dedicate its breath to the sun. The next morning, when the sun rises, a plague will spread with the sunlight.”

“That will kill the raiders?”

“Many of them. If you create a truly virulent strain, it may kill most of them. And it will cut down their children like a scythe across wheat.”

Tryce clapped her blood-stained hands. “Good.”

“I should warn you. It will kill your babies as well.”

“What?”

“A plague cooked in an infant will kill anyone’s children. It is the way of things.”

“Unacceptable! I come to you for help, and you send me to murder my daughters?”

“You killed one before, didn’t you? To save your automaton?”

“You’re as crazy as the crones at court! We need more babies, not fewer.”

“You’ll have to hope you can persuade your women to bear children so that you can rebuild your population faster than the raiders can rebuild theirs.”

Tryce looked as though she wanted to level a thousand curses at me, but she stilled her tongue. Her eyes were dark and narrow. In a quiet, angry voice, she said, “Then it will be done.”

They were the same words she’d used when she promised to kill Gudrin. That time I’d been able to save her despite her foolishness. This time, I might not be able to.

#

Next I was summoned, I could not see at all. I was ushered into the world by lowing, distant shouts, and the stench of animals packed too closely together.

A worried voice cut through the din. “Did it work? Are you there? Laverna, is that still you?”

Disoriented, I reached out to find a hint about my surroundings. My hands impacted a summoning barrier.

“Laverna, that’s not you anymore, is it?”

The smell of manure stung my throat. I coughed. “My name is Naeva.”

“Holy day, it worked. Please, Sleepless One, we need your help. There are men outside. I don’t know how long we can hold them off.”

“What happened? Is Queen Tryce dead?”

“Queen Tryce?”

“She didn’t cast the plague, did she? Selfish brat. Where are the raiders now? Are you in the Spires of Treachery?”

“Sleepless One, slow down. I don’t follow you.”

“Where are you? How much land have the raiders taken?”

“There are no raiders here, just King Addric’s army. His soldiers used to be happy as long as we paid our taxes and bowed our heads at processions. Now they want us to follow their ways, worship their god, let our men give us orders. Some of us rebelled by marching in front of the governor’s theater, and now he’s sent sorcerers after us. They burned our city with magical fire. We’re making a last stand at the inn outside town. We set aside the stable for the summoning.”

“Woman, you’re mad. Men can’t practice that kind of magic.”

“These men can.”

A nearby donkey brayed, and a fresh stench plopped into the air. Outside, I heard the noise of burning, and the shouts of men and children.

“It seems we’ve reached an impasse. You’ve never heard of the Land of Flowered Hills?”

“Never.”

I had spent enough time pacing the ruins in the Desert which Should Not Have Been to understand the ways in which civilizations cracked and decayed. Women and time marched forward, relentless and uncaring as sand.

“I see.”

“I’m sorry. I’m not doing this very well. It’s my first summoning. My aunt Hetta used to do it but they slit her throat like you’d slaughter a pig and left her body to burn. Bardus says they’re roasting the corpses and eating them, but I don’t think anyone could do that. Could they? Hetta showed me how to do this a dozen times, but I never got to practice. She would have done this better.”

“That would explain why I can’t see.”

“No, that’s the child, Laverna. She’s blind. She does all the talking. Her twin Nammi can see, but she’s dumb.”

“Her twin?”

“Nammi’s right here. Reach into the circle and touch your sister’s hand, Nammi. That’s a good girl.”

A small hand clasped mine. It felt clammy with sweat. I squeezed back.

“It doesn’t seem fair to take her sister away,” I said.

“Why would anyone take Laverna away?”

“She’ll die when I leave this body.”

“No, she won’t. Nammi’s soul will call her back. Didn’t your people use twins?”

“No. Our hosts died.”

“Yours were a harsh people.”

Another silence. She spoke the truth, though I’d never thought of it in such terms. We were a lawful people. We were an unflinching people.

“You want my help to defeat the shamans?” I asked.

“Aunt Hetta said that sometimes the Sleepless Ones can blink and douse all the magic within seven leagues. Or wave their hands and sweep a rank of men into a hurricane.”

“Well, I can’t.”

She fell silent. I considered her situation.

“Do you have your people’s livestock with you?” I asked.

“Everything that wouldn’t fit into the stable is packed inside the inn. It’s even less pleasant in there if you can imagine.”

“Can you catch one of their soldiers?”

“We took some prisoners when we fled. We had to kill one but the others are tied up in the courtyard.”

“Good. Kill them and mix their blood into the grain from your larder, and bake it into loaves of bread. Feed some of the bread to each of your animals. They will fill with a warrior’s anger and hunt down your enemies.”

The woman hesitated. I could hear her feet shifting on the hay-covered floor.

“If we do that, we won’t have any grain or animals. How will we survive?”

“You would have had to desert your larder when the Worm-Pretending-to-Be-Queen sent reinforcements anyway. When you can safely flee, ask the blind child to lead you to the Place where the Sun Is Joyous. Whichever direction she chooses will be your safest choice.”

“Thank you,” said the woman. Her voice was taut and tired. It seemed clear that she’d hoped for an easier way, but she was wise enough to take what she received. “We’ll have a wild path to tame.”

“Yes.”

The woman stepped forward. Her footsteps released the scent of dried hay. “You didn’t know about your Land, did you?”

“I did not.”

“I’m sorry for your loss. It must be–”

The dumb child whimpered. Outside, the shouts increased.

“I need to go,” said the woman.

“Good luck,” I said, and meant it.

I felt the child Laverna rush past me as I sank back into my restless sleep. Her spirit flashed as brightly as a coin left in the sun.

I never saw that woman or any of her people again. I like to think they did not die.

#

I did not like the way the world changed after the Land of Flowered Hills disappeared. For a long time, I was summoned only by men. Most were a sallow, unhealthy color with sharp narrow features and unnaturally light hair. Goateed sorcerers too proud of their paltry talents strove to dazzle me with pyrotechnics. They commanded me to reveal magical secrets that their peoples had forgotten. Sometimes I stayed silent. Sometimes I led them astray. Once, a hunched barbarian with a braided beard ordered me to give him the secret of flight. I told him to turn toward the prevailing wind and beg the Lover of the Sky for a favor. When the roc swooped down to eat him, I felt a wild kind of joy. At least the birds remembered how to punish worms who would steal women’s magic.

I suffered for my minor victory. Without the barbarian to dismiss me, I was stuck on a tiny patch of grass, hemmed in by the rabbit heads he’d placed to mark the summoning circle. I shivered through the windy night until I finally thought to kick away one of the heads. It tumbled across the grass and my spirit sank into the ground.

Men treated me differently than women had. I had been accustomed to being summoned by Queens and commanders awaiting my advice on incipient battles. Men eschewed my consult; they sought to steal my powers. One summoned me into a box, hoping to trap me as if I were a minor demon that could be forced to grant his wishes. I chanted a rhyme to burn his fingers. When he pulled his hand away, the lid snapped shut and I was free.

Our magic had centered on birds and wind. These new sorcerers made pets of creatures of blood and snapping jaws, wolves and bears and jaguars. We had depicted the sun’s grace along with its splendor, showing the red feathers of flaming light that arc into wings to sweep her across the sky. Their sun was a crude, jagged thing–a golden disk surrounded by spikes that twisted like the gaudy knives I’d seen in foreign cities where I traveled when I was young.

The men called me The Bitch Queen. They claimed I had hated my womb so much that I tried to curse all men to infertility, but the curse rebounded and struck me dead. Apparently, I had hanged myself. Or I’d tried to disembowel every male creature within a day’s walk of my borders. Or I’d spelled my entire kingdom into a waking death in order to prevent myself from ever becoming pregnant. Apparently, I did all the same things out of revenge because I became pregnant. I eschewed men and impregnated women with sorcery. I married a thousand husbands and murdered them all. I murdered my husband, the King, and staked his head outside my castle, and then forced all the tearful women of my kingdom to do the same to their menfolk. I went crazy when my husband and son died and ordered all the men in my kingdom to be executed, declaring that no one would have the pleasure I’d been denied. I had been born a boy, but a rival of my father’s castrated me, and so I hated all real men. I ordered that any woman caught breastfeeding should have her breasts cut off. I ordered my lover’s genitals cut off and sewn on me. I ordered my vagina sewn shut so I could never give birth. I ordered everyone in my kingdom to call me a man.

They assumed my magic must originate with my genitals: they displayed surprise that I didn’t strip naked to mix ingredients in my vagina or cast spells using menstrual blood. They also displayed surprise that I became angry when they asked me about such things.

The worst of them believed he could steal my magic by raping me. He summoned me into a worthless, skinny girl, the kind that we in the Land of Flowered Hills would have deemed too weak to be a woman and too frail to be a brood. In order to carry out his plans, he had to make the summoning circle large enough to accommodate the bed. When he forced himself on top of me, I twisted off his head.

The best of them summoned me soon after that. He was a young man with nervous, trembling fingers who innovated a way to summon my spirit into himself. Books and scrolls tumbled over the surfaces of his tiny, dim room, many of them stained with wax from unheeded candles. Talking to him was strange, the two of us communicating with the same mouth, looking out of the same eyes.

Before long, we realized that we didn’t need words. Our knowledge seeped from one spirit to the other like dye poured into water. He watched me as a girl, riding with Rayneh, and felt the sun burning my back as I dug graves in the Desert which Should Not Have Been, and flinched as he witnessed the worm who attempted to rape me. I watched him and his five brothers, all orphaned and living on the street, as they struggled to find scraps. I saw how he had learned to read under the tutelage of a traveling scribe who carried his books with him from town to town. I felt his uncomfortable mixture of love, respect, and fear for the patron who had set him up as a scribe and petty magician in return for sex and servitude. I didn’t know it felt that way, I said to him. Neither did I, he replied. We stared at each other cross-eyed through his big green eyes.

Pasha needed to find a way to stop the nearby volcano before it destroyed the tiny kingdom where he dwelled. Already, tremors rattled the buildings, foreshadowing the coming destruction.

Perhaps I should not have given Pasha the spell, but it was not deep woman’s magic. Besides, things seemed different when I inhabited his mind, closer to him than I had been to anyone.

We went about enacting the spell together. As we collected ash from the fireplaces of one family from each of the kingdom’s twelve towns, I asked him, Why haven’t you sent me back? Wouldn’t it be easier to do this on your own?

I’ll die when your spirit goes, he answered, and I saw the knowledge of it which he had managed to keep from me.

I didn’t want him to die. Then I’ll stay, I said. I won’t interfere with your life. I’ll retreat as much as I can.

I can’t keep up the spell much longer, he said. I felt his sadness and his resolve. Beneath, I glimpsed even deeper sadness at the plans he would no longer be able to fulfill. He’d wanted to teach his youngest brother to read and write so that the two of them could move out of this hamlet and set up shop in a city as scribes, perhaps even earn enough money to house and feed all their brothers.

I remembered Laverna and Nammi and tried to convince Pasha that we could convert the twins’ magic to work for him and his brother. He said that we only had enough time to stop the volcano. The kingdom is more important than I am, he said.

We dug a hole near the volcano’s base and poured in the ashes that we’d collected. We stirred them with a phoenix feather until they caught fire, in order to give the volcano the symbolic satisfaction of burning the kingdom’s hearths. A dense cloud of smoke rushed up from the looming mountain and then the earth was still.

That’s it, said Pasha, exhaustion and relief equally apparent in his mind. We did it.

We sat together until nightfall when Pasha’s strength began to fail.

I have to let go now, he said.

No, I begged him, Wait. Let us return to the city. We can find your brother. We’ll find a way to save you.

But the magic in his brain was unwinding. I was reminded of the ancient tapestries hanging in the Castle Where Hope Flutters, left too long to moths and weather. Pasha lost control of his feet, his fingers. His thoughts began to drift. They came slowly and far apart. His breath halted in his lungs. Before his life could end completely, my spirit sank away, leaving him to die alone.

After that, I did not have the courage to answer summons. When men called me, I kicked away the objects they’d used to bind me in place and disappeared again. Eventually, the summons stopped.

I had never before been aware of the time that I spent under the earth, but as the years between summons stretched, I began to feel vague sensations: swatches of grey and white along with muted, indefinable pain.

When a summons finally came, I almost felt relief. When I realized the summoner was a woman, I did feel surprise.

#

“I didn’t expect that to work,” said the woman. She was peach-skinned and round, a double chin gentling her jaw. She wore large spectacles with faceted green lenses like insect eyes. Spines like porcupine quills grew in a thin line from the bridge of her nose to the top of her skull before fanning into a mane. The aroma of smoke–whether the woman’s personal scent or some spell remnant–hung acrid in the air.

I found myself simultaneously drawn to the vibrancy of the living world and disinclined to participate in it. I remained still, delighting in the smells and sights and sounds.

“No use pretending you’re not there,” said the woman. “The straw man doesn’t usually blink on its own. Or breathe.”

I looked down and saw a rudimentary body made of straw, joints knotted together with what appeared to be twine. I lifted my straw hand and stretched out each finger, amazed as the joints crinkled but did not break. “What is this?” My voice sounded dry and crackling, though I did not know whether that was a function of straw or disuse.

“I’m not surprised this is new to you. The straw men are a pretty new development. It saves a lot of stress and unpleasantness for the twins and the spirit rebounders and everyone else who gets the thankless job of putting up with Insomniacs taking over their bodies. Olin Nimble–that’s the man who innovated the straw men–he and I completed our scholastic training the same year. Twenty years later? He’s transfigured the whole field. And here’s me, puttering around the library. But I suppose someone has to teach the students how to distinguish Pinder’s Breath from Summer Twoflower.”

The woman reached into my summoning circle and tugged my earlobe. Straw crackled.

“It’s a gesture of greeting,” she said. “Go on, tug mine.”

I reached out hesitantly, expecting my gesture to be thwarted by the invisible summoning barrier. Instead, my fingers slid through unresisting air and grasped the woman’s earlobe.

She grinned with an air of satisfaction that reminded me of the way my aunts had looked when showing me new spells. “I am Scholar Misa Meticulous.” She lifted the crystal globe she carried and squinted at it. Magical etchings appeared, spelling words in an unfamiliar alphabet. “And you are the Great Lady Naeva who Picked Posies near the Queen’s Chamber, of the Kingdom Where Women Rule?”

I frowned, or tried to, unsure whether it showed on my straw face. “The Land of Flowered Hills.”

“Oh.” She corrected the etching with a long, sharp implement. “Our earliest records have it the other way. This sort of thing is commoner than you’d think. Facts get mixed with rumor. Rumor becomes legend. Soon no one can remember what was history and what they made up to frighten the children. For instance, I’ll bet your people didn’t really have an underclass of women you kept in herds for bearing children.”

“We called them broods.”

“You called them–” Misa’s eyes went round and horrified. As quickly as her shock had registered, it disappeared again. She snorted with forthright amusement. “We’ll have to get one of the historians to talk to you. This is what they live for.”

“Do they.”

It was becoming increasingly clear that this woman viewed me as a relic. Indignation simmered; I was not an urn, half-buried in the desert. Yet, in a way, I was.

“I’m just a teacher who specializes in sniffing,” Misa continued. “I find Insomniacs we haven’t spoken to before. It can take years, tracking through records, piecing together bits of old spells. I’ve been following you for three years. You slept dark.”

“Not dark enough.”

She reached into the summoning circle to give me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “Eternity’s a lonely place,” she said. “Even the academy’s lonely, and we only study eternity. Come on. Why don’t we take a walk? I’ll show you the library.”

My straw eyes rustled as they blinked in surprise. “A walk?”

Misa laughed. “Try it out.”

She laughed again as I took one precarious step forward and then another. The straw body’s joints creaked with each stiff movement. I felt awkward and graceless, but I couldn’t deny the pleasure of movement.

“Come on,” Misa repeated, beckoning.

She led me down a corridor of gleaming white marble. Arcane symbols figured the walls. Spell-remnants scented the air with cinnamon and burnt herbs, mingling with the cool currents that swept down from the vaulted ceiling. Beneath our feet, the floor was worn from many footsteps and yet Misa and I walked alone. I wondered how it could be that a place built to accommodate hundreds was empty except for a low-ranking scholar and a dead woman summoned into an effigy.

My questions were soon answered when a group of students approached noisily from an intersecting passageway. They halted when they saw us, falling abruptly silent. Misa frowned. “Get on!” she said, waving them away. They looked relieved as they fled back the way they’d come.

The students’ shaved heads and shapeless robes made it difficult to discern their forms, but it was clear I had seen something I hadn’t been meant to.

“You train men here,” I ascertained.

“Men, women, neuters,” said Misa. “Anyone who comes. And qualifies, of course.”

I felt the hiss of disappointment: another profane, degraded culture. I should have known better than to hope. “I see,” I said, unable to conceal my resentment.

Misa did not seem to notice. “Many cultures have created separate systems of magic for the male and female. Your culture was extreme, but not unusual. Men work healing magic, and women sing weather magic, or vice versa. All very rigid, all very unscientific. Did they ever try to teach a man to wail for a midnight rain? Oh, maybe they did, but if he succeeded, then it was just that one man, and wasn’t his spirit more womanly than masculine? They get noted as an exception to the rule, not a problem with the rule itself. Think Locas Follow with the crickets, or Petrin of Atscheko, or for an example on the female side, Queen Urté. And of course if the man you set up to sing love songs to hurricanes can’t even stir up a breeze, well, there’s your proof. Men can’t sing the weather. Even if another man could. Rigor, that’s the important thing. Until you have proof, anything can be wrong. We know now there’s no difference between the magical capabilities of the sexes, but we’d have known it earlier if people had asked the right questions. Did you know there’s a place in the northern wastes where they believe only people with both male and female genitals can work spells?”

“They’re fools.”

Misa shrugged.

“Everyone’s a fool, sooner or later. I make a game of it with my students. What do we believe that will be proven wrong in the future? I envy your ability to live forever so you can see.”

“You should not,” I said, surprised by my own bitterness. “People of the future are as likely to destroy your truths as to uncover your falsehoods.”

She turned toward me, her face drawn with empathy. “You may be right.”

We entered a vast, mahogany-paneled room, large enough to quarter a roc. Curving shelf towers formed an elaborate labyrinth. Misa led me through the narrow aisles with swift precision.

The shelves displayed prisms of various shapes and sizes. Crystal pyramids sat beside metal cylinders and spheres cut from obsidian. There were stranger things, too, shapes for which I possessed no words, woven out of steel threads or hardened lava.

Overhead, a transparent dome revealed a night sky strewn with stars. I recognized no patterns among the sparkling pinpricks; it was as if all the stars I’d known had been gathered in a giant’s palm and then scattered carelessly into new designs.

Misa chattered as she walked. “This is the academy library. There are over three hundred thousand spells in this wing alone and we’ve almost filled the second. My students are taking bets on when they’ll start construction on the third. They’re also taking bets on whose statue will be by the door. Olin Nimble’s the favorite, wouldn’t you know.”

We passed a number of carrel desks upon which lay maps of strange rivers and red-tinted deserts. Tubes containing more maps resided in cubby holes between the desks, their ends labeled in an unfamiliar alphabet.

“We make the first year students memorize world maps,” said Misa. “A scholar has to understand how much there is to know.”

I stopped by a carrel near the end of the row. The map’s surface was ridged to show changes in elevation. I tried to imagine what the land it depicted would look like from above, on a roc’s back. Could the Mountains where the Sun Rests be hidden among those jagged points?

Misa stopped behind me. “We’re almost to the place I wanted to show you,” she said. When we began walking again, she stayed quiet.

Presently, we approached a place where marble steps led down to a sunken area. We descended, and seemed to enter another room entirely, the arcs of the library shelves on the main level looming upward like a ring of ancient trees.

All around us, invisible from above, there stood statues of men and women. They held out spell spheres in their carved, upturned palms.

“This is the Circle of Insomniacs,” said Misa. “Every Insomniac is depicted here. All the ones we’ve found, that is.”

Amid hunched old women and bearded men with wild eyes, I caught sight of stranger things. Long, armored spikes jutted from a woman’s spine. A man seemed to be wearing a helmet shaped like a sheep’s head until I noticed that his ears twisted behind his head and became the ram’s horns. A child opened his mouth to display a ring of needle-sharp teeth like a leech’s.

“They aren’t human,” I said.

“They are,” said Misa. “Or they were.” She pointed me to the space between a toothless man and a soldier whose face fell in shadow behind a carved helmet. “Your statue will be there. The sculptor will want to speak with you. Or if you don’t want to talk to him, you can talk to his assistant, and she’ll make notes.”

I looked aghast at the crowd of stone faces. “This–this is why you woke me? This sentimental memorial?”

Misa’s eyes glittered with excitement. “The statue’s only part of it. We want to know more about you and the Kingdom Where Women Rule. Sorry, the Land of Flowered Hills. We want to learn from you and teach you. We want you to stay!”

I could not help but laugh, harsh and mirthless. Would this woman ask a piece of ancient stone wall whether or not it wanted to be displayed in a museum? Not even the worms who tried to steal my spells had presumed so much.

“I’m sorry,” said Misa. “I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m good at sniffing. I’m terrible with people. Usually I find the Great Ones and then other people do the summoning and bring them to the library. The council asked me to do it myself this time because I lived in a women’s colony before I came to the academy. I’m what they call woman-centered. They thought we’d have something in common.”

“Loving women is fundamental. It’s natural as breeze. It’s not some kind of shared diversion.”

“Still. It’s more than you’d have in common with Olin Nimble.”

She paused, biting her lip. She was still transparently excited even though the conversation had begun to go badly.

“Will you stay a while at least?” she asked. “You’ve slept dark for millennia. What’s a little time in the light?”

I scoffed and began to demand that she banish me back to the dark–but the scholar’s excitement cast ripples in a pond that I’d believed had become permanently still.

What I’d learned from the unrecognizable maps and scattered constellations was that the wage of eternity was forgetfulness. I was lonely, achingly lonely. Besides, I had begun to like Misa’s fumbling chatter. She had reawakened me to light and touch–and even, it seemed, to wonder.

#

If I was to stay, I told Misa, then she must understand that I’d had enough of worms and their attempts at magic. I did not want them crowding my time in the light.

The corners of Misa’s mouth drew downward in disapproval, but she answered, “The academy puts us at the crossroads of myriad beliefs. Sometimes we must set aside our own.” She reached out to touch me. “You’re giving us a great gift by staying. We’ll always respect that.”

Misa and I worked closely during my first days at the academy. We argued over everything. Our roles switched rapidly and contentiously from master to apprentice and back again. She would begin by asking me questions, and then as I told her about what I’d learned in my matriline’s locked rooms, she would interrupt to tell me I was wrong, her people had experimented with such things, and they never performed consistently. Within moments, we’d be shouting about what magic meant, and what it signified, and what it wanted–because one thing we agreed on was that magic was a little bit alive.

Misa suspended her teaching while she worked with me, so we had the days to ourselves in the vast salon where she taught. Her people’s magic was more than superficially dissimilar from mine. They constructed their spells into physical geometries by mapping out elaborate equations that determined whether they would be cylinders or dodecahedrons, formed of garnet or lapis lazuli or cages of copper strands. Even their academy’s construction reflected magical intentions, although Misa told me its effects were vague and diffuse.

“Magic is like architecture,” she said. “You have to build the right container for magic to grow in. The right house for its heart.”

“You fail to consider the poetry of magic,” I contended. “It likes to be teased with images, cajoled with irony. It wants to match wits.”

“Your spells are random!” Misa answered. “Even you don’t understand how they work. You’ve admitted it yourself. The effects are variable, unpredictable. It lacks rigor!”

“And accomplishes grandeur,” I said. “How many of your scholars can match me?”

I soon learned that Misa was not, as she claimed, an unimportant scholar. By agreement, we allowed her female pupils to enter the salon from time to time for consultations. The young women, who looked startlingly young in their loose white garments, approached Misa with an awe that verged on fear. Once, a very young girl who looked barely out of puberty, ended their session by giving a low bow and kissing Misa’s hand. She turned vivid red and fled the salon.

Misa shook her head as the echoes of the girl’s footsteps faded. “She just wishes she was taking from Olin Nimble.”

“Why do you persist in this deception?” I asked. “You have as many spells in the library as he does. It is you, not he, who was asked to join the academy as a scholar.”

She slid me a dubious look. “You’ve been talking to people?”

“I have been listening.”

“I’ve been here a long time,” said Misa. “They need people like me to do the little things so greater minds like Olin Nimble’s can be kept clear.”

But her words were clearly untrue. All of the academy’s scholars, from the most renowned to the most inexperienced, sent to Misa for consultations. She greeted their pages with good humor and false humility, and then went to meet her fellow scholars elsewhere, leaving her salon to me so that I could study or contemplate as I wished.

In the Land of Flowered Hills, there had once been a famous scholar named The Woman Who Would Ask the Breeze for Whys and Wherefores. Misa was such a woman, relentlessly impractical, always half-occupied by her studies. We ate together, talked together, slept together in her chamber, and yet I never saw her focus fully on anything except when she was engrossed in transforming her abstract magical theories into complex, beautiful tangibles.

Sometimes, I paused to consider how different Misa was from my first love. Misa’s scattered, self-effaced pursuit of knowledge was nothing like Rayneh’s dignified exercise of power. Rayneh was like a statue, formed in a beautiful but permanent stasis, never learning or changing. Misa tumbled everywhere like a curious wind, seeking to understand and alter and collaborate, but never to master.

In our first days together, Misa and I shared an abundance of excruciating, contentious, awe-inspiring novelty. We were separated by cultures and centuries, and yet we were attracted to each other even more strongly because of the strangeness we brought into each other’s lives.

#

The academy was controlled by a rotating council of scholars that was chosen annually by lots. They made their decisions by consensus and exercised control over issues great and small, including the selection of new mages who were invited to join the academy as scholars and thus enter the pool of people who might someday control it.

“I’m grateful every year when they don’t draw my name,” Misa said.

We were sitting in her salon during the late afternoon, relaxing on reclining couches and sipping a hot, sweet drink from celadon cups. One of Misa’s students sat with us, a startle-eyed girl who kept her bald head powdered and smooth, whom Misa had confided she found promising. The drink smelled of oranges and cinnamon; I savored it, ever amazed by the abilities of my strange, straw body.

I looked to Misa. “Why?”

Misa shuddered. “Being on the council would be . . . terrible.”

“Why?” I asked again, but she only repeated herself in a louder voice, growing increasingly frustrated with my questions.

Later, when Misa left to discuss a spell with one of the academy’s male scholars, her student told me, “Misa doesn’t want to be elevated over others. It’s a very great taboo for her people.”

“It is self-indulgent to avoid power,” I said. “Someone must wield it. Better the strong than the weak.”

Misa’s student fidgeted uncomfortably. “Her people don’t see it that way.”

I sipped from my cup. “Then they are fools.”

Misa’s student said nothing in response, but she excused herself from the salon as soon as she finished her drink.

The council requested my presence when I had been at the academy for a year. They wished to formalize the terms of my stay. Sleepless Ones who remained were expected to hold their own classes and contribute to the institution’s body of knowledge.

“I will teach,” I told Misa, “but only women.”

“Why!” demanded Misa. “What is your irrational attachment to this prejudice?”

“I will not desecrate women’s magic by teaching it to men.”

“How is it desecration?”

“Women’s magic is meant for women. Putting it into men’s hands is degrading.”

“But why!”

Our argument intensified. I began to rage. Men are not worthy of woman’s magic. They’re small-skulled, and cringing, and animalistic. It would be wrong! Why, why, why? Misa demanded, quoting from philosophical dialogues, and describing experiments that supposedly proved there was no difference between men’s and women’s magic. We circled and struck at one another’s arguments as if we were animals competing over territory. We tangled our horns and drew blood from insignificant wounds, but neither of us seemed able to strike a final blow.

“Enough!” I shouted. “You’ve always told me that the academy respects the sacred beliefs of other cultures. These are mine.”

“They’re absurd!”

“If you will not agree then I will not teach. Banish me back to the dark! It does not matter to me.”

Of course, it did matter to me. I had grown too attached to chaos and clamor. And to Misa. But I refused to admit it.

In the end, Misa agreed to argue my intentions before the council. She looked at turns furious and miserable. “They won’t agree,” she said. “How can they? But I’ll do what I can.”

The next day, Misa rubbed dense, floral unguents into her scalp and decorated her fingers with arcane rings. Her quills trembled and fanned upward, displaying her anxiety.

The circular council room glowed with faint, magical light. Cold air mixed with the musky scents favored by high-ranking scholars, along with hints of smoke and herbs. Archways loomed at each of the cardinal directions. Misa led us through the eastern archway, which she explained was for negotiation, and into the center of the mosaic floor.

The council’s scholars sat on raised couches arrayed around the circumference of the room. Each sat below a torch that guttered, red and gold, rendering the councilors’ bodies vivid against the dim. I caught sight of a man in layered red and yellow robes, his head surmounted by a brass circlet that twinkled with lights that flared and then flitted out of existence, like winking stars. To his side sat a tall woman with mossy hair and bark-like skin, and beside her, a man with two heads and torsos mounted upon a single pair of legs. A woman raised her hand in greeting to Misa, and water cascaded from her arms like a waterfall, churning into a mist that evaporated before it touched the floor.

Misa had told me that older scholars were often changed by her people’s magic, that it shaped their bodies in the way they shaped their spells. I had not understood her before.

A long, narrow man seemed to be the focal point of the other councilors’ attention. Fine, sensory hairs covered his skin. They quivered in our direction like a small animal’s sniffing. “What do you suggest?” he asked. “Shall we establish a woman-only library? Shall we inspect our students’ genitalia to ensure there are no men-women or women-men or twin-sexed among them?”

“Never mind that,” countered a voice behind us. I turned to see a pudgy woman garbed in heavy metal sheets. “It’s irrelevant to object on the basis of pragmatism. This request is exclusionary.”

“Worse,” added the waterfall woman. “It’s immoral.”

The councilors around her nodded their heads in affirmation. Two identical-looking men in leather hoods fluttered their hands to show support.

Misa looked to each assenting scholar in turn. “You are correct. It is exclusionist and immoral. But I ask you to think about deeper issues. If we reject Naeva’s conditions, then everything she knows will be lost. Isn’t it better that some know than that everyone forgets?”

“Is it worth preserving knowledge if the price is bigotry?” asked the narrow man with the sensory hairs, but the other scholars’ eyes fixed on Misa.

They continued to argue for some time, but the conclusion had been foregone as soon as Misa spoke. There is nothing scholars love more than knowledge.

#

“Is it strange for you?” I asked Misa. “To spend so much time with someone trapped in the body of a doll?”

We were alone in the tiny, cluttered room where she slept. It was a roughly hewn underground cavity, its only entrance and exit by ladder. Misa admitted that the academy offered better accommodations, but claimed she preferred rooms like this one.

Misa exclaimed with mock surprise. “You’re trapped in the body of a doll? I’d never noticed!”

She grinned in my direction. I rewarded her with laughter.

“I’ve gotten used to the straw men,” she said more seriously. “When we talk, I’m thinking about spells and magic and the things you’ve seen. Not straw.”

Nevertheless, straw remained inescapably cumbersome. Misa suggested games and spells and implements, but I refused objects that would estrange our intimacy. We lay together at night and traded words, her hands busy at giving her pleasure while I watched and whispered. Afterward, we lay close, but I could not give her the warmth of a body I did not possess.

One night, I woke long after our love-making to discover that she was no longer beside me. I found her in the salon, her equations spiraling across a row of crystal globes. A doll hung from the wall beside her, awkwardly suspended by its nape. Its skin was warm and soft and tinted the same sienna that mine had been so many eons ago. I raised its face and saw features matching the sketches that the sculptor’s assistant had made during our sessions.

Misa looked up from her calculations. She smiled with mild embarrassment.

“I should have known a simple adaptation wouldn’t work,” she said. “Otherwise, Olin Nimble would have discarded straw years ago. But I thought, if I worked it out . . .”

I moved behind her, and beheld the array of crystal globes, all showing spidery white equations. Below them lay a half-formed spell of polished wood and peridot chips.

Misa’s quill mane quivered. “It’s late,” she said, taking my hand. “We should return to bed.”

#

Misa often left her projects half-done and scattered. I like to think the doll would have been different. I like to think she would have finished it.

Instead, she was drawn into the whirl of events happening outside the academy. She began leaving me behind in her chambers while she spent all hours in her salon, almost sleepwalking through the brief periods when she returned to me, and then rising restless in the dark and returning to her work.

By choice, I remained unclear about the shape of the external cataclysm. I did not want to be drawn further into the academy’s politics.

My lectures provided little distraction. The students were as preoccupied as Misa. “This is not a time for theory!” one woman complained when I tried to draw my students into a discussion of magic’s predilections. She did not return the following morning. Eventually, no one else returned either.

Loneliness drove me where curiosity could not and I began following Misa to her salon. Since I refused to help with her spells, she acknowledged my presence with little more than a glance before returning to her labors. Absent her attention, I studied and paced.

Once, after leaving the salon for several hours, Misa returned with a bustle of scholars–both men and women–all brightly clad and shouting. They halted abruptly when they saw me.

“I forgot you were here,” Misa said without much contrition.

I tensed, angry and alienated, but unwilling to show my rage before the worms. “I will return to your chamber,” I said through tightened lips.

Before I even left the room, they began shouting again. Their voices weren’t like scholars debating. They lashed at each other with their words. They were angry. They were afraid.

That night, I went to Misa and finally asked for explanations. It’s a plague, she said. A plague that made its victims bleed from the skin and eyes and then swelled their tongues until they suffocated.

They couldn’t cure it. They treated one symptom, only to find the others worsening. The patients died, and then the mages who treated them died, too.

I declared that the disease must be magic. Misa glared at me with unexpected anger and answered that, no! It was not magic! If it was magic, they would have cured it. This was something foul and deadly and natural.

She’d grown gaunt by then, the gentle cushions of fat at her chin and stomach disappearing as her ribs grew prominent. After she slept, her headrest was covered with quills that had fallen out during the night, their pointed tips lackluster and dulled.

I no longer had dialogues or magic or sex to occupy my time. I had only remote, distracted Misa. My world began to shape itself around her–my love for her, my concern for her, my dread that she wouldn’t find a cure, and my fear of what I’d do if she didn’t. She was weak, and she was leading me into weakness. My mind sketched patterns I didn’t want to imagine. I heard the spirits in The Desert Which Should Not Have Been whispering about the deaths of civilizations, and about choices between honor and love.

Misa stopped sleeping. Instead, she sat on the bed in the dark, staring into the shadows and worrying her hands.

“There is no cure,” she muttered.

I lay behind her, watching her silhouette.

“Of course there’s a cure.”

“Oh, of course,” snapped Misa. “We’re just too ignorant to find it!”

Such irrational anger. I never learned how to respond to a lover so easily swayed by her emotions.

“I did not say that you were ignorant.”

“As long as you didn’t say it.”

Misa pulled to her feet and began pacing, footsteps thumping against the piled rugs.

I realized that in all my worrying, I’d never paused to consider where the plague had been, whether it had ravaged the communities where Misa had lived and loved. My people would have thought it a weakness to let such things affect them.

“Perhaps you are ignorant,” I said. “Maybe you can’t cure this plague by building little boxes. Have you thought of that?”

I expected Misa to look angry, but instead she turned back with an expression of awe. “Maybe that’s it,” she said slowly. “Maybe we need your kind of magic. Maybe we need poetry.”

For the first time since the plague began, the lines of tension began to smooth from Misa’s face. I loved her. I wanted to see her calm and curious, restored to the woman who marveled at new things and spent her nights beside me.

So I did what I knew I should not. I sat with her for the next hours and listened as she described the affliction. It had begun in a swamp far to the east, she said, in a humid tangle of roots and branches where a thousand sharp and biting things lurked beneath the water. It traveled west with summer’s heat, sickening children and old people first, and then striking the young and healthy. The children and elderly sometimes recovered. The young and healthy never survived.

I thought back to diseases I’d known in my youth. A very different illness came to mind, a disease cast by a would-be usurper during my girlhood. It came to the Land of Flowered Hills with the winter wind and froze its victims into statues that would not shatter with blows or melt with heat. For years after Rayneh’s mother killed the usurper and halted the disease, the Land of Flowered Hills was haunted by the glacial, ghostly remains of those once-loved. The Queen’s sorceresses sought them out one by one and melted them with memories of passion. It was said that the survivors wept and cursed as their loved ones melted away, for they had grown to love the ever-present, icy memorials.

That illness was unlike what afflicted Misa’s people in all ways but one–that disease, too, had spared the feeble and taken the strong.

I told Misa, “This is a plague that steals its victims’ strength and uses it to kill them.”

Misa’s breaths came slowly and heavily. “Yes, that’s it,” she said. “That’s what’s happening.”

“The victims must steal their strength back from the disease. They must cast their own cures.”

“They must cast your kind of spells. Poetry spells.”

“Yes,” I said. “Poetry spells.”

Misa’s eyes closed as if she wanted to weep with relief. She looked so tired and frail. I wanted to lay her down on the bed and stroke her cheeks until she fell asleep.

Misa’s shoulders shook but she didn’t cry. Instead, she straightened her spectacles and plucked at her robes.

“With a bit of heat and . . . how would obsidian translate into poetry? . . .” she mused aloud. She started toward the ladder and then paused to look back. “Will you come help me, Naeva?”

She must have known what I would say.

“I’ll come,” I said quietly, “but this is woman’s magic. It is not for men.”

What followed was inevitable: the shudder that passed through Misa as her optimism turned ashen. “No. Naeva. You wouldn’t let people die.”

But I would. And she should have known that. If she knew me at all.

#

She brought it before the council. She said that was how things were to be decided. By discussion. By consensus.

We entered through the western arch, the arch of conflict. The scholars arrayed on their raised couches looked as haggard as Misa. Some seats were empty, others filled by men and women I’d not seen before.

“Why is this a problem?” asked one of the new scholars, an old woman whose face and breasts were stippled with tiny, fanged mouths. “Teach the spell to women. Have them cast it on the men.”

“The victims must cast it themselves,” Misa said.

The old woman scoffed. “Since when does a spell care who casts it?”

“It’s old magic,” Misa said. “Poetry magic.”

“Then what is it like?” asked a voice from behind us.

We turned to see the narrow man with the fine, sensory hairs, who had demanded at my prior interrogation whether knowledge gained through bigotry was worth preserving. He lowered his gaze onto my face and his hairs extended toward me, rippling and seeking.

“Some of us have not had the opportunity to learn for ourselves,” he added.

I hoped that Misa would intercede with an explanation, but she held her gaze away from mine. Her mouth was tight and narrow.

The man spoke again. “Unless you feel that it would violate your ethics to even describe the issue in my presence.”

“No. It would not.” I paused to prepare my words. “As I understand it, your people’s magic imprisons spells in clever constructions. You alter the shape and texture of the spell as you alter the shape and texture of its casing.”

Dissenting murmurs rose from the councilors.

“I realize that’s an elementary description,” I said. “However, it will suffice for contrast. My people attempted to court spells with poetry, using image and symbol and allusion as our tools. Your people give magic a place to dwell. Mine woo it to tryst awhile.”

“What does that,” interjected the many-mouthed old woman, “have to do with victims casting their own spells?”

Before I could answer, the narrow man spoke. “It must be poetry–the symmetry, if you will. Body and disease are battling for the body’s strength. The body itself must win the battle.”

“Is that so?” the old woman demanded of me.

I inclined my head in assent.

A woman dressed in robes of scarlet hair looked to Misa. “You’re confident this will work?”

Misa’s voice was strained and quiet. “I am.”

The woman turned to regard me, scarlet tresses parting over her chest to reveal frog-like skin that glistened with damp. “You will not be moved? You won’t relinquish the spell?”

I said, “No.”

“Even if we promise to give it only to the women, and let the men die?”

I looked toward Misa. I knew what her people believed. The council might bend in matters of knowledge, but it would not bend in matters of life.

“I do not believe you would keep such promises.”

The frog-skinned woman laughed. The inside of her mouth glittered like a cavern filled with crystals. “You’re right, of course. We wouldn’t.” She looked to her fellow councilors. “I see no other option. I propose an Obligation.”

“No,” said Misa.

“I agree with Jian,” said a fat scholar in red and yellow. “An Obligation.”

“You can’t violate her like that,” said Misa. “The academy is founded on respect.”

The frog-skinned woman raised her brows at Misa. “What is respect worth if we let thousands die?”

Misa took my hands. “Naeva, don’t let this happen. Please, Naeva.” She moved yet closer to me, her breath hot, her eyes desperate. “You know what men can be. You know they don’t have to be ignorant worms or greedy brutes. You know they can be clever and noble! Remember Pasha. You gave him the spell he needed. Why won’t you help us?”

Pasha–kin of my thoughts, closer than my own skin. It had seemed different then, inside his mind. But I was on my own feet now, looking out from my own eyes, and I knew what I knew.

When she’d been confronted by the inevitable destruction of our people, Tryce had made herself into a brood. She had chosen to degrade herself and her daughters in the name of survival. What would the Land of Flowered Hills have become if she’d succeeded? What would have happened to we hard and haughty people who commanded the sacred powers of wind and sun?

I would not desecrate our knowledge by putting it in the hands of animals. This was not just one man who would die from what he learned. This would be unlocking the door to my matriline’s secret rooms and tearing open the many-drawered cupboards. It would be laying everything sacrosanct bare to corruption.

I broke away from Misa’s touch. “I will tell you nothing!”

The council acted immediately and unanimously, accord reached without deliberation. The narrow man wrought a spell-shape using only his hands, which Misa had told me could be done, but rarely and only by great mages. When his fingers held the right configuration, he blew into their cage.

An Obligation.

It was like falling through blackness. I struggled for purchase, desperate to climb back into myself.

My mouth opened. It was not I who spoke.

“Bring them water from the swamp and damp their brows until they feel the humidity of the place where the disease was born. The spirit of the disease will seek its origins, as any born creature will. Let the victims seek with their souls’ sight until they find the spirit of the disease standing before them. It will appear differently to each, vaporous and foul, or sly and sharp, but they will know it. Let the victims open the mouths of their souls and devour the disease until its spirit is inside their spirit as its body is inside their body. This time, they will be the conquerors. When they wake, they will be stronger than they had been before.”

My words resonated through the chamber. Misa shuddered and began to retch. The frog-skinned woman detached a lock of her scarlet hair and gave it, along with a sphere etched with my declamation, to their fleetest page. My volition rushed back into me as if through a crashing dam. I swelled with my returning power.

Magic is a little bit alive. It loves irony and it loves passion. With all the fierceness of my dead Land, I began to tear apart my straw body with its own straw hands. The effigy’s viscera fell, crushed and crackling, to the mosaic floor.

The narrow man, alone among the councilors, read my intentions. He sprang to his feet, forming a rapid protection spell between his fingers. It glimmered into being before I could complete my own magic, but I was ablaze with passion and poetry, and I knew that I would prevail.

The fire of my anger leapt from my eyes and tongue and caught upon the straw in which I’d been imprisoned. Fire. Magic. Fury. The academy became an inferno.

#

They summoned me into a carved rock that could see and hear and speak but could not move. They carried it through the Southern arch, the arch of retribution.

The narrow man addressed me. His fine, sensory hairs had burned away in the fire, leaving his form bald and pathetic.

“You are dangerous,” he said. “The council has agreed you cannot remain.”

The council room was in ruins. The reek of smoke hung like a dense fog over the rubble. Misa sat on one of the few remaining couches, her eyes averted, her body etched with thick ugly scars. She held her right hand in her lap, its fingers melted into a single claw.

I wanted to cradle Misa’s ruined hand, to kiss and soothe it. It was an unworthy desire. I had no intention of indulging regret.

“You destroyed the academy, you bitch,” snarled a woman to my left. I remembered that she had once gestured waterfalls, but now her arms were burned to stumps. “Libraries, students, spells . . .” her voice cracked.

“The council understands the grave injustice of an Obligation,” the narrow man continued, as if she had not interjected. “We don’t take the enslavement of a soul lightly, especially when it violates a promised trust. Though we believe we acted rightfully, we also acknowledge we have done you an injustice. For that we owe you our contrition.

“Nevertheless,” he continued, “It is the council’s agreement that you cannot be permitted to remain in the light. It is our duty to send you back into the dark and to bind you there so that you may never answer summons again.”

I laughed. It was a grating sound. “You’ll be granting my dearest wish.”

He inclined his head. “It is always best when aims align.”

He reached out to the women next to him and took their hands. The remaining council members joined them, bending their bodies until they, themselves, formed the shape of a spell. Misa turned to join them, the tough, shiny substance of her scar tissue catching the light. I knew from Misa’s lessons that the texture of her skin would alter and shape the spell. I could recognize their brilliance in that, to understand magic so well that they could form it out of their own bodies.

As the last of the scholars moved into place, for a moment I understood the strange, distorted, perfect shape they made. I realized with a slash that I had finally begun to comprehend their magic. And then I sank into final, lasting dark.

#

I remembered.

I remembered Misa. I remembered Pasha. I remembered the time when men had summoned me into unknown lands.

Always and inevitably, my thoughts returned to the Land of Flowered Hills, the place I had been away from longest, but known best.

Misa and Rayneh. I betrayed one. One betrayed me. Two loves ending in tragedy. Perhaps all loves do.

I remembered the locked room in my matriline’s household, all those tiny lacquered drawers filled with marvels. My aunt’s hand fluttered above them like a pale butterfly as I wondered which drawer she would open. What wonder would she reveal from a world so vast I could never hope to understand it?

“To paint a bird, you must show the brush what it means to fly,” my aunt told me, holding my fingers around the brush handle as I strove to echo the perfection of a feather. The brush trembled. Dip into the well, slant, and press. Bristles splay. Ink bleeds across the scroll and–there! One single graceful stroke aspiring toward flight.

What can a woman do when love and time and truth are all at odds with one another, clashing and screeching, wailing and weeping, begging you to enter worlds unlike any you’ve ever known and save this people, this people, this people from king’s soldiers and guttering volcanoes and plagues? What can a woman do when beliefs that seemed as solid as stone have become dry leaves blowing in autumn wind? What can a woman cling to when she must betray her lovers’ lives or her own?

A woman is not a bird. A woman needs ground.

All my aunts gathering in a circle around the winter fire to share news and gossip, their voices clat-clat-clatting at each other in comforting, indistinguishable sounds. The wind finds its way in through the cracks and we welcome our friend. It blows through me, carrying scents of pine and snow. I run across the creaking floor to my aunts’ knees which are as tall as I am, my arms slipping around one dark soft leg and then another as I work my way around the circle like a wind, finding the promise of comfort in each new embrace.

#

Light returned and shaded me with grey.

I stood on a pedestal under a dark dome, the room around me eaten by shadow. My hands touched my robe which felt like silk. They encountered each other and felt flesh. I raised them before my face and saw my own hands, brown and short and nimble, the fingernails jagged where I’d caught them on the rocks while surveying with Kyan in the Mountains where the Sun Rests.

Around me, I saw more pedestals arranged in a circle, and atop them strange forms that I could barely distinguish from shade. As my eyes adjusted, I made out a soldier with his face shadowed beneath a horned helmet, and a woman armored with spines. Next to me stood a child who smelled of stale water and dead fish. His eyes slid in my direction and I saw they were strangely old and weary. He opened his mouth to yawn, and inside, I saw a ring of needle-sharp teeth.

Recognition rushed through me. These were the Insomniacs I’d seen in Misa’s library, all of them living and embodied, except there were more of us, countless more, all perched and waiting.

Magic is a little bit alive. That was my first thought as the creature unfolded before us, its body a strange darkness like the unrelieved black between stars. It was adorned with windows and doors that gleamed with silver like starlight. They opened and closed like slow blinking, offering us portals into another darkness that hinted at something beyond.

The creature was nothing like the entities that I’d believed waited at the core of eternity. It was no frozen world lizard, waiting to crack traitors in his icy jaws, nor a burning sun welcoming joyous souls as feathers in her wings. And yet, somehow I knew then that this creature was the deepest essence of the universe–the strange, persistent thing that throbbed like a heart between stars.

Its voice was strange, choral, like many voices talking at once. At the same time, it did not sound like a voice at all. It said, “You are the ones who have reached the end of time. You are witnesses to the end of this universe.”

As it spoke, it expanded outward. The fanged child staggered back as the darkness approached. He looked toward me with fear in his eyes, and then darkness swelled around me, too, and I was surrounded by shadow and pouring starlight.

The creature said, “From the death of this universe will come the birth of another. This has happened so many times before that it cannot be numbered, unfathomable universes blinking one into the next, outside of time. The only continuity lies in the essences that persist from one to the next.”

Its voice faded. I stretched out my hands into the gentle dark. “You want us to be reborn?” I asked.

I wasn’t sure if it could even hear me in its vastness. But it spoke.

“The new universe will be unlike anything in this one. It will be a strangeness. There will be no ‘born,’ no ‘you.’ One cannot speak of a new universe. It is anathema to language. One cannot even ponder it.”

Above me, a window opened, and it was not a window, but part of this strange being. Soothing, silver brilliance poured from it like water. It rushed over me, tingling like fresh spring mornings and newly drawn breath.

I could feel the creature’s expectancy around me. More windows opened and closed as other Sleepless Ones made their choices.

I thought of everything then–everything I had thought of during the millennia when I was bound, and everything I should have thought of then but did not have the courage to think. I saw my life from a dozen fractured perspectives. Rayneh condemning me for helping her daughter steal her throne, and dismissing my every subsequent act as a traitor’s cowardice. Tryce sneering at my lack of will as she watched me spurn a hundred opportunities for seizing power during centuries of summons. Misa, her brows drawn down in inestimable disappointment, pleading with me to abandon everything I was and become like her instead.

They were all right. They were all wrong. My heart shattered into a million sins.

I thought of Pasha who I should never have saved. I thought of how he tried to shield me from the pain of his death, spending his last strength to soothe me before he died alone.

For millennia, I had sought oblivion and been denied. Now, as I approached the opportunity to dissipate at last . . . now I began to understand the desire for something unspeakably, unfathomably new.

I reached toward the window. The creature gathered me in its massive blackness and lifted me up, up, up. I became a woman painted in brushstrokes of starlight, fewer and fewer, until I was only a glimmer of silver that had once been a woman, now poised to take flight. I glittered like the stars over The Desert which Should Not Have Been, eternal witnesses to things long forgotten. The darkness beyond the window pulled me. I leapt toward it, and stretched, and changed.

TROIKA

Alastair Reynolds

By the time I reach the road to Zvezdniy Gorodok acute hypothermia is beginning to set in. I recognize the symptoms from my training: stage one moving into two, as my body redirects blood away from skin to conserve heat-shivering and a general loss of coordination the result. Later I can expect a deterioration of vasomotor tone as the muscles now contracting my peripheral blood vessels become exhausted. As blood surges back to my chilled extremities, I’ll start to feel hot rather than cold. Slipping ever further into disorientation, it will take an effort of will not to succumb to that familiar and distressing syndrome, paradoxical undressing. The few layers of clothes I’m wearing—the pajamas, the thin coat I stole from Doctor Kizim—will start feeling too warm. If I don’t get warm soon they’ll find me naked and dead in the snow.

How long have I been out? An hour, two hours? There’s no way to tell. It’s like being back on the Tereshkova, when we slept so little that a day could feel like a week. All I know is that it’s still night. They’ll find me when the sun is up, but until then there’s still time to locate Nesha Petrova.

I touch the metal prize in my pocket, reassuring myself that it’s still there.

As if invoked by the act of touching the prize, a monstrous machine comes roaring towards me out of the night. It’s yellow, with an angled shovel on the front. I stumble into the path of its headlights and raise a wary hand. The snowplow sounds its horn. I jerk back, out of the way of the blade and the flurry of dirty snow it flings to one side.

I think for a moment it’s going to surge on past, but it doesn’t. The machine slows and stops. Maybe he thinks he’s hit me. It’s good—a robot snowplow wouldn’t stop, so there must be someone operating this one. I hobble around to the cab, where the driver’s glaring at me through an unopened window. He’s got a moustache, a woolen hat jammed down over his hair and ears, the red nose of a serious drinker.

Above the snorting, impatient diesel I call: “I could use a ride to town.”

The driver looks at me like I’m dirt, some piece of roadside debris he’d have been better shoveling into the verge. This far out of town, on this road, it doesn’t take much guesswork to figure out where I’ve come from. The hospital, the facility, the madhouse, whatever you want to call it, will have been visible in the distance on a clear day—a forbidding smudge of dark, tiny-windowed buildings, tucked behind high, razor wire-topped security fencing.

He lowers the window an inch. “Do yourself a favor, friend. Go back, get warm.”

“I won’t make it back. Early-onset hypothermia. Please, take me to Zvezdniy Gorodok. I can’t give you much, but you’re welcome to these.” My fingers feel like awkward tele-operated waldos, the kind we’d had on the Progress. I fumble a pack of cigarettes from my coat pocket and push the crushed and soggy rectangle up to the slit in the window.

“All you’ve got?”

“They’re American. You know how hard these are to come by now.”

The driver grunts something unintelligible, but takes the cigarettes anyway. He opens the pack to inspect the contents, sniffing at them. “How old are these?”

“You can still smoke them.”

The driver leans over to the open the other door. “Get in. I’ll take you as far as the first crossroad on the edge of town. You get out when we stop. You’re on your own from then on.”

I’ll agree to any arrangement provided it gets me a few minutes in the warmth of the cab. For now I’m still lucid enough to recognize the hypothermia creeping over me. That state of clinical detachment won’t last forever.

I climb in, taking deep, shivering breaths.

“Thank you.”

“The edge of town, that’s as far as we go,” he says, in case I didn’t get it the first time. His breath stinks of alcohol. “I’m caught giving you a ride, it won’t be good for me.”

“It won’t be good for either of us.”

The driver shifts the snowplow back into gear and lets her roll, the engine bellowing as the blade bites snow. “Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, it won’t work. They’ll find you in Zvezdniy Gorodok. It’s not a big place and there’s nowhere else to go. In case no one pointed it out to you, this is the arse end of nowhere. And the trains aren’t running.”

“I only need to get to town.”

He looks at me, assessing the shabbiness of my dress, the wild state of my beard and hair. “Wild night ahead of you?”

“Something like that.”

He’s got the radio on, tuned to the state classical music channel. It’s playing Prokofiev. I lean over and turn the volume down, until it’s almost lost under the engine noise.

“I was listening to that.”

“Please. Until we get there.”

“Got a problem with music?”

“Some of it.”

The driver shrugs-he doesn’t seem to mind as much as he pretends. Panicking suddenly, imagining I might have dropped it in the snow, I pat my pocket again. But—along with Doctor Kizim’s security pass—the little metal box is still there.

It takes all of my resolve not to take it out and turn the little handle that makes it play. Not because I can stand to hear it again, but because I want to be sure it still works.

The snowplow’s tail lights fade into the night. The driver has kept to his word, taking us through the abandoned checkpoint, then to the first crossroad inside the old city boundary and no further. It’s been good to get warm, my clothes beginning to dry, but now that I’m outside again the cold only takes a few seconds to reach my bones. The blizzard has abated while we drove, but the snow’s still falling, coming down in soft flurries from a milky predawn sky.

We’d passed no other vehicles or pedestrians, and at this early hour Zvezdniy Gorodok gives every indication of being deserted. The housing blocks are mostly unlit, save for the occasional illuminated window—a pale, curtained rectangle of dim yellow against the otherwise dark edifice. The buildings, set back from the intersecting roads in long ranks, look drearily similar, as if stamped from the same machine tool-even the party images flickering on their sides are the same from building to building. The same faces, the same slogans. For a moment I have the sense of having embarked on a ludicrous and faintly delusional task. Any one of these buildings could be where she lives. They’ll find me long before I have time to search each lobby, hoping to find a name.

I’d shown the driver the address I’d written down, pulled from the public telephone directory on Doctor Kizim’s desk. He’d given me a rough idea of where I ought to head. The apartment complex is somewhere near the railway station—I’ll have to search the surrounding streets until I find it.

“I know where the station is,” I tell the driver. “I was here when it was a sealed training facility.”

“You had something to do with the space program?”

“I did my bit.”

Zvezdniy Gorodok—Starry Town, or Star City. In the old days, you needed a permit just to get into it. Now that the space program is over-it has “achieved all necessary objectives,” according to the official line of the Second Soviet-Zvezdniy Gorodok is just another place to live, work, and die, its utilitarian housing projects radiating far beyond the old boundary. The checkpoint is a disused ruin and the labs and training facilities have been turned into austere community buildings. More farmers and factory workers live here now than engineers, scientists, and former-cosmonauts.

I’m lucky to have got this far.

I escaped through a gap in the facility’s security fence, in a neglected corner of the establishment tucked away behind one of the kitchens. I’d known about the breech for at least six months-long enough to reassure myself that no one else had noticed it, and that the break could not be seen from the administrative offices or any of the surveillance cameras. It was good fortune that the fence had that gap, but I still wouldn’t have got far without the help from Doctor Kizim. I don’t know if he expects me to succeed in my escape attempt, but Doctor Kizim—who had always been more sympathetic to the Tereshkova’s survivors than any of the other medics—had turned a conveniently blind eye. And it was his coat that I had taken. It wasn’t much of a coat for blizzards, but without it I doubt that I would have made it as far as the snowplow, let alone Zvezdniy Gorodok. I just hope he doesn’t get into too much trouble when they find out I took it.

I don’t expect to get the chance to apologize to him.

The snow stopped falling completely, and the sun-pink and depleted of heat-is beginning to break through the gloom on the eastern horizon, when I find the railway station. I begin to explore the surrounding streets, trying to find the address. More lights have come on now and I’m noticing the beginning of daily activity. One or two citizens pass me in the snow, but they have their heads down and pay me no special attention. Few vehicles are on the roads, and since the trains aren’t running, the area around the station is almost totally devoid of activity. When a large car—a Zil limousine, black and muscular as a panther-swings onto the street I’m walking down, I don’t have time to hide. But the Zil sails by, tires spraying muddy slush, and as it passes I see that it’s empty. The car must be on its way to collect a party official from one of the better districts.

I’ve been walking for an hour, trying not to glance over my shoulder too often, when I find Nesha’s building. The apartment complex has an entrance lobby anyone can enter. It smells of toilets and alcohol. Some of the windows in the outer wall are covered by plywood panels, where the glass has broken. It’s draughty and unlit, the tiled floor filthy with footprints and paper and smashed glass. There’s a door into the rest of the building, but it can only be opened by someone inside. In my cold, sodden slippers I squelch to the buzzer panel next to the mailboxes.

I catch my breath. Everything hinges on this moment. If I’m wrong about Nesha, or if she’s moved elsewhere, or died-it’s been a long time, after all-then everything will have been for nothing.

But her name’s still there.

N. Petrova. She lives on the ninth floor.

It may not mean anything. She may still have died or been moved on. I reach out a numb finger and press the buzzer anyway. There’s no sound, no reassuring response. I wait a minute then press it again. Outside, a stray dog with mad eyes yellows the snow under a lamppost. I press the buzzer again, shivering more than when I was outside.

A woman’s voice crackles through the grill above the buzzers. “Yes?”

“Nesha Petrova?” I ask, leaning to bring my lips closer to the grill.

“Who is it?”

“Dimitri Ivanov.” I wait a second or two for her to respond to the name.

“From building services?”

I assume that there’s no camera letting Nesha see me, if there ever was. “Dimitri Ivanov, the cosmonaut. I was on the ship, the Tereshkova. The one that met the Matryoshka.”

Silence follows. I realize, dimly, that there’s an eventuality I’ve never allowed for. Nesha Petrova may be too old to remember anything of importance. She may be too old to care.

I shuffle wet feet to stave off the cold.

“Nesha?”

“There were three cosmonauts.”

I lean into the grill again. “I’m one of them. The other two were Galenka Makarova and Yakov Demin. They’re both dead now. The VASIMIR engine malfunctioned on the way home, exposing them to too much radiation. I’m the only one left.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I’m standing here in pajamas and a stolen coat. Because I’ve come all the way from the facility just to see you, through the snow. Because there’s something I want you to know.”

“Then tell me.”

“I’d rather show you, Nesha. Besides, I’m going to die of the cold if I stand here much longer.”

I look to the outside world again, through one of the panes that hasn’t been broken and covered over with plywood. Another Zil slides by. This one has bodies in it: grey-skinned men sitting upright in dark coats and hats.

“I don’t want any trouble from the police.”

“I won’t stay long. Then I’ll be on my way, and no one will have to know that I was here.”

“I’ll know.”

“Please, let me in.” I haven’t bargained for this. In all the versions of this encounter that I’ve run through my mind before the escape, she never needed any persuasion to meet me. “Nesha, you need to understand. They tried to bury you, but you were right all along. That’s what I want to tell you about. Before they silence me, and no one ever gets to find out.”

After an age she says, “You think it matters now, Dimitri Ivanov?”

“It matters more than you can imagine.”

The door buzzes. She’s letting me in.

“It’s blacker than I was expecting.”

“Of course it’s black,” I said, pausing in my ham-fisted typing. “What other color were you expecting?”

Yakov was still staring out the porthole, at the looming Matryoshka. It was two hundred kilometers away, but still ate up more than half the sky. No stars in that direction, just a big absence like the mother of all galactic supervoids. We had the cabin lights dimmed so he could get a good view. We had already spread the relay microsats around the alien machine, ready for when the Progress penetrated one of the transient windows in Shell 3. But you couldn’t see the microsats from here-they were tiny, and the machine was vast.

“What I mean is . . .” Yakov started saying.

“Is that it’s black.”

“I mean it’s more than black. It’s like-black was black, and now there’s something in my head that’s even darker, like a color I never imagined until now, which was always there, just waiting for this moment.”

“I’m concerned about you, comrade,” said Galenka, who was riding the exercise cycle in one corner of the module. She was wearing a skin-tight load-suit, designed to preserve muscle tone even in weightlessness. Maybe I’d been in space too long, but she looked better in that load-suit every day.

“You don’t feel it, then?” Yakov asked, directing his question to both of us.

“It’s just dark,” I said. “I guess nothing’s really prepared us for this, but it’s not something we should be surprised about. The last two apparitions . . .”

“Just machines, just dumb space probes. This is the first time anyone’s seen it with their own eyes.” Yakov turned slowly from the porthole. He was pale, with the puffy, slit-eyed look we’d all developed since leaving Earth. “Don’t you think that changes things? Don’t you think us being out here, us being observers, changes things? We’re not just making measurements on this thing from a distance now. We’re interacting, touching it, feeling it.”

“And I think you need to get some sleep,” Galenka said.

I folded the workstation keyboard back into its recess. I had been answering questions from schoolchildren; the selected few that had been deemed worthy of my attention by the mission schedulers.

“Tell me you don’t feel a little freaked out, Dimitri.”

“Maybe a bit,” I allowed. “But no more than I’d feel if we were in orbit around Mars, or Venus, or creeping up on an asteroid. It’s a very big thing and we’re very small and a long way from home.”

“This is also a very alien big thing. It was made by alien minds, for a purpose we can’t grasp. It’s not just some lump of rock with a gravitational field. It’s a machine, a ship, that they sent to our solar system for a reason.”

“It’s a dead alien thing,” Galenka said, huffing as she cycled harder, pushing through an uphill part of her training schedule. “Someone made it once, but it’s broken now. Fucked like an old clock. If it wasn’t fucked, it wouldn’t be on this stupid elliptical orbit.”

“Maybe this orbit is all part of the plan,” Yakov said.

“He’s starting to sound like Nesha Petrova,” Galenka said teasingly. “Be careful, Yakov. You know what happened to her when she didn’t shut up with her silly ideas.”

“What plan?” I asked.

“That thing must be thousands of years old. Tens of thousand, maybe more. The fact that it’s been on this orbit for 24 years proves nothing. It’s an eye-blink, as far as that thing’s concerned. It might just be waking up, running systems checks, rebooting itself. It came through a wormhole. Who knows what that does to something?”

“You certainly don’t,” Galenka said.

“She’s right,” I said. “It’s dead. If it was going to wake up, it would have done so during the first two apparitions. We poked and prodded it enough the second time; nothing happened.”

“I wish I shared your reassurance.”

I shrugged. “We’re just here to do a job, Yakov. Get in, get out. Then go home and get the glory, like good cosmonauts. Before I worried about the Matryoshka, I’d worry about not screwing up your part in it.”

“I’m not going to screw up.” He looked at me earnestly, as if I had challenged him. “Did I ever screw up in the simulations, Dimitri? Did I ever screw up once?”

“No,” I admitted. “But this isn’t a simulation. We’re not in Star City now.”

He winked at me. “Absolutely sure of that, comrade?”

I wiped the sleeve of my load-suit against the portal glass to clear the condensation. From around the curve of the ship there was a puff of silvery brightness as the pyrotechnic docking latches released their hold on the Progress. In the same instant I heard a faraway thud and felt the fabric of the ship lurch with the recoil.

“Confirm separation,” Yakov reported, calling from another porthole. “Looks like a clean birth to me, boys and girls.”

Galenka was webbed into a hammock at the Progress workstation, one hand on a joystick and the other tapping a keyboard. The screens before her were alive with camera views, from both the Tereshkova and the little robot that had just detached from it.

“Beginning thruster translation,” she said, touching keys. “You should see her in a few seconds, Dimitri.”

The Progress drifted over my horizon, a pea-green shuttlecock with CCCP stenciled down the side in red letters. Very slowly it pulled away from the Tereshkova and tipped around on two axes, pointing its nose at the forbidding darkness of the Matryoshka. “Looking good,” I said, inspecting every visible inch of the spacecraft for signs of damage. “No impacts that I can see. Looks as good as the day they wheeled her out of the clean room.”

“Stirring hydrazine tanks,” Galenka said. “Let’s see if she holds, shall we?”

“Still there,” I reported, when the Progress had failed to blow itself apart. “Looks like we have a viable spacecraft. Shall I break out the vodka?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves—no use going in if we’re blind. Beginning camera and waldo deployment—this’ll be the real test.”

Our little envoy looked like a cross between a spaceship and a deep-sea submersible robot, the kind they use to explore shipwrecks and pull missiles out of sunken submarines. Arms and sensors and cameras had been bolted onto the front, ruining whatever vague aerodynamics the Progress might have had. Now the equipment—stowed since launch—was slowly deploying, like a flower opening to the sun. Galenka pushed aside the joystick and tugged down a set of waldo controls, slipping her fingers into the heavy, sensor-laden gloves and sleeves. Out in space, the Progress’s mechanical arms and hands echoed her gestures. It looked good to me but Galenka still frowned and made some small adjustments to the settings. Ever the perfectionist, I thought. More checkout tests followed until she signified grudging satisfaction.

“Camera assembly three is a little stiff—I wouldn’t be surprised if it seizes on us mid-mission. Haptic feedback on arm two is delayed just enough to throw me off. We’ve lost a row of pixels on the mid infrared array-probably a bad cosmic ray strike. I’m already reading an event overflow in one of the memory buffers, and we haven’t even started logging data.”

“But you’re happy to continue?” I asked.

“Unless we brought a second Progress no one told me about, we’re stuck with this one.”

“It’s nothing we can repair,” Yakov said. “So we may as well live with it. Even if we went out in the suits, we don’t have the tools to fix those instruments.”

“I don’t need that spelled out,” Galenka said, just barely keeping a lid on her temper.

Yakov was starting to needle both of us. The Matryoshka was getting to him in a way it wasn’t yet getting to Galenka, or me for that matter. He’d started coming out with some very odd statements. The joke of his, that we were still back in Star City, that all of this was an elaborate simulation, a preparation for the mission to come-even down to the impossible-to-fake weightlessness-was beginning to wear thin.

What bothered me was that I wasn’t even sure he was joking anymore.

People cracked in space. It was part of the job. I just hadn’t expected it to happen to one of us, so soon in the mission. We hadn’t even touched the Matryoshka yet. What was going to happen when the Progress reached the secret layers beneath Shell 3?

I tried not to think about it.

“What’s your approach speed?” I asked, looming behind Galenka while she worked the controls.

“Two meters per second, on the nail.”

“A little on the fast side, aren’t we?”

Galenka touched a hand over the mike, so Baikonur wouldn’t hear what she had to say next. “You flying this thing, or me, comrade?”

“You are, definitely.” I scratched at chin stubble. “It’s just that I thought we were going to keep it below one meter a second, all the way in.”

“You want to sit around for thirty hours, be my guest.”

“I wouldn’t be the one doing the sitting.”

“This is well within acceptable limits. We’ll make up speed in the gaps and slow down when we hit anything knotty. Trust me on this, all right?”

“You’re the pilot.”

“That’s the general idea.”

She un-cupped the microphone. “Holding approach speed, Baikonur. Progress systems stable. One hundred meters into Shell 1. Predictive impact model still holding. No change in the status of the Matryoshka or the surrounding vacuum.”

On the screen, wireframe graphics traced the vast right-angled shapes of radar-illuminated obstacles-iceberg or battle-cruiser sized slabs of inscrutably dark free-flying machinery, between which the Progress was obliged to navigate a path, avoiding not only the obstacles but the invisible threads of razor-thin force binding them together. Shell 1 was not a solid sphere, but a swarm of deadly obstacles and tripwires.

During the second apparition, the Americans had sent one of their robot probes straight through one of those field threads. It had gone instantly silent, suggesting that it had suffered a fatal or damaging collision. Years later, deep space radar had picked it up again, drifting powerless on a sun-circling orbit. A manned expedition (one of the last the Americans ever managed) was sent out to recover it and bring it back to Earth for inspection.

Yet when the astronauts got hold of part of the probe, an entire half of it drifted silently away from the other, separating along a mathematically perfect plane of bisection. The astronauts stared in mute incomprehension at the sliced-through interior of the robot, its tight-packed, labyrinthine innards gleaming back at them with the polish of chrome. The robot must have been cut in two as it passed through the Matryoshka, but so cleanly that the two parts had continued moving on exactly the same trajectory, until this moment.

Although it was only the robot we were sending in, with the Tereshkova parked at a safe distance, I still shuddered to think what those lines of force could do to metal and ceramic, to flesh and bone. The predictive model traced the vectors of the field lines and offered solutions for safe passage, but, try as I might, I couldn’t share Galenka’s unflappable faith in the power of algorithm and computer speed.

Still, like she said, she was the pilot. This was her turf and I was well advised not to trample on it. I’d have felt exactly the same way if she had dared tell me how to manage the Tereshkova’s data acquisition and transmission systems.

Following a plan that had been argued over for months back on Earth, it had been agreed to attempt sample collection at each stage of the Progress’s journey. The predictive model gave us confidence that the robot could get close to one of the free-flying obstacles without being sliced by the field lines. Dropping the Progress’s speed to less than a meter per second, Galenka brought it within contact range of a particular lump of alien machinery and extended the arms and analysis tools to their full extent. We had no idea what the obstacles were made of, but—thanks to a Chinese probe that had gone off-course during the second apparition—we did know that the outer integument was surprisingly brittle. The probe had destroyed itself utterly in its high-velocity collision, but not before chipping off vast chunks of alien material. To our delight, early surveys of the Matryoshka on its third return had shown that the impacted obstacle had not repaired itself.

The Progress anchored itself by firing sticky-tipped guy-lines onto the obstacle. Galenka used hammers, cutting devices and claws to pick away at the scabbed edge of the impact point. Pieces of integument flaked away easily-had we been out there in our EVA suits, we could have ripped them out by hand. Some of them were coal-sized, some were as large as engine blocks. Galenka loaded up a third of the Progress’s cargo space before deeming the haul sufficient. She wanted room for more samples when she got further in.

“Want to bring her back, unload and return?” I asked. The plan had been to make multiple forays into the Matryoshka, until we’d exhausted our hydrazine reserves.

“Not with the systems as screwed as they are. We lose camera rotation, or blow some more memory, we’re blind. Maybe we’ll get three or four missions out of the robot, but right now I’m assuming this is the last one. I’d like to go deeper, at least until we have a full hold.”

“You want to consult with Baikonur?”

“We have discretion here, Dimitri. Timelag’s too great to go crying to mummy every time we have a decision to make.” She withdrew her hands from the waldo controls and flexed her fingers. “I’m taking her further in, while we still have a ship that works.”

“I’m fine with that.”

“Good,” she said, massively indifferent to whether I was “fine” with it or not. Then, “Where’s Yakov right now, by the way?”

“Somewhere.”

“One of us needs to keep an eye on him, Dimitri. Not happy with that guy. I think he’s on the edge.”

“We’re all on the edge. It’s called being in space.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Keep an eye on him, yes. I will.”

At fifteen kilometers, the Progress cleared Shell 1 and passed into a volume of open space relatively devoid of moving obstacles or field lines. Galenka notched up the speed, until the Progress was falling inwards at a kilometer every ten seconds. There was nothing here to sample or analyse. “Normal vacuum in Gap 1,” she murmured. “Or at least what the robot reads as normal. The ambient physics hasn’t changed too much.”

Ever since the first apparition, it had been known—or at least suspected—that the Matryoshka was not just a mysteriously layered artifact drifting through space. In some way that we didn’t yet understand, the object distorted the very physics of the spacetime in which it was floating. The effects were almost too subtle to measure at the distance of the Tereshkova, but they became more severe the closer any probes got to the middle. Fundamental constants stopped being fundamental. The speed of light varied. Planck’s constant deviated from the figure in textbooks. So did the weak mixing angle, the fine-structure constant, Newton’s constant. None of this could be explained under any existing theory of physics, but it was all disturbing. It was as if the Matryoshka was dragging a chunk of another universe around with it. Perhaps it had been designed that way, or perhaps the altered spacetime was a kind of lingering contamination, a side-effect of wormhole travel.

Of course, we didn’t know for sure that the Matryoshka had come through a wormhole. That was just an educated guess papered over the vast, yawning chasm of our ignorance. All we knew for sure was that it had appeared, accompanied by a flash of energy, in the middle of the solar system.

I remembered that day very well. November the sixth, 2015. My twentieth birthday, to the day. Twenty four years later—two of the Matryoshka’s looping, twelve year elliptical orbits around the Sun—and here I was, staring the thing in the face, as if my whole adult life had been an arrow pointing to this moment.

Maybe it had.

I was born in 1995, in Klushino. It’s a small place near Smolensk. It wouldn’t have any claim to fame except Klushino is the place where Yuri Gagarin was born. I knew that name almost before I knew any other. My father told me about him; how he had been the first man in space, his unassuming modesty, how he became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, a hero for all the world, how he had died when his training jet crashed into trees. My father told me that it was a custom for all cosmonauts to visit Gagarin’s office before a mission, to see the clock on the wall stopped at the moment of his death. Years later, I paid my own respects in the office.

The thing I remember most of all about my father, though, is holding me on his shoulders when I was five, taking me out into a cold winter evening to watch our Mir space station arc across the twilight sky. I reached out to grasp it and he held me higher, as if that might make a difference.

“Do you want to go up there sometime, Dimitri?”

“Do you have to be big?”

“Yes,” he said. “Big and brave and strong. But you’ll do, one day.”

“And if I died would they stop the clock in my office as well?”

“You won’t die,” my father said. Even though it was cold he had his shirt sleeves rolled up, his hair scratching against my skin.

“But if I did.”

“Of course they would. Just like Comrade Gagarin. And they’d make a hero of you as well.”

I take the elevator to the ninth floor of Nesha Petrova’s apartment building The doors open to a chill wind, howling in from the flat farmland beyond the city. The landing is open to the elements, only a low railing along one side. When I arrive at Nesha’s apartment, half way along the landing, the door is ajar. Nesha—for it can only be Nesha—is waiting in the gap, bony, long-nailed fingers curling around the edge of the door. I see half her face—her right eye, prematurely wrinkled skin, a wisp of gray hair. She looks much smaller, much older and frailer, than I ever dared to imagine.

“Whatever you have to show me, show me and go.”

“I’d really like to talk to you first.” I hold up my gloveless, numb-fingered hands. “Everything I told you is true. I escaped from the psychiatric facility a few hours ago, and by now they’ll be looking for me.”

“Then you should go now.”

“I was inside the Matryoshka, Nesha. Don’t you want to hear what happened to me?”

She opens the door a tiny bit more, showing me more of her face. She’s old now but the younger Nesha hasn’t been completely erased. I can still see the strong and determined women who stood by her beliefs, even when the state decided those beliefs were contrary to the official truth.

“I heard the rumours. They say you went insane.”

I give an easy shrug. “I did, on the way home. It’s the only thing that saved me. If I hadn’t gone crazy, I wouldn’t be standing here now.”

“You said there was something I had to know.”

“Give me a little of your time, then I’ll be gone. That’s my promise to you.”

Nesha looks back over her shoulder. She’s wearing a knitted shawl of indeterminate color. “It isn’t much warmer in here. When you called, I hoped you’d come to fix the central heating.” She pauses for a moment, mind working, then adds, “I can give you something to drink, and maybe something better to wear. I still have some of my husband’s old clothes—someone may as well get some use from them.”

“Thank you,” I say.

“You shouldn’t have come to see me. No good will come of it, for either us.”

“You might say the damage is already done.”

She lets me inside. Nesha might consider her apartment cold, but it’s a furnace to me. After the wards and cubicles of the facility, it’s bordering on the luxurious. There are a couple of items of old furniture, threadbare but otherwise serviceable. There’s a low coffee table with faded plastic flowers in a vase. There are pictures on the walls, save for the part that’s been painted over with television. It’s beginning to flake off in the corners, so it won’t be too long before someone comes along to redo it.

“I can’t turn it off,” Nesha says, as if I’ve already judged her. “You can scrape it away, but they just come and paint it on again. They take more care of that than they do the heating. And they don’t like it if they think you’d done it deliberately, or tried to hide the television behind pictures.”

I remember the incessant televisions in the facility; the various strategies that the patients evolved to block them out or muffle the sound. “I understand. You don’t have to make allowances.”

“I don’t like the world we live in. I’m old enough to remember when it was different.” Still standing up, she waves a hand dismissively, shooing away the memories of better times. “Anyway, I don’t hear so well these days. It’s a blessing, I suppose.”

“Except it doesn’t feel like one.” I point to one of the threadbare chairs. “May I sit down?”

“Do what you like.”

I ease my aching bones into the chair. My damp clothes cling to me.

Nesha looks at me with something close to pity.

“Are you really the cosmonaut?”

“Yes.”

“I can make some tea.”

“Please. Anything hot.”

I watch her amble into the adjoining kitchen. Her clothes are still those of her early middle age, with allowance for infirmity and the cold. She wears old-looking jeans, several layers of jumpers, a scarf and the drab colored shawl. Even though we’re indoors she wears big fur boots. The clothes give her an illusion of bulk, but I can tell how thin she really is. Like a bird with a lot of puffed-up plumage, hiding delicate bones. There’s also something darting, nervous, and birdlike about the way she negotiates the claustrophobic angles of her apartment. I hear the clatter of a kettle, the squeak of a tap, a half-hearted dribble of water, then she returns.

“It’ll take a while.”

“Everything does, these days. When I was younger, old people used to complain about the world getting faster and faster, leaving them behind. That isn’t how it seems to you and I. We’ve left the world behind—we’ve kept up, but it hasn’t.”

“How old are you?” she asks.

“Fifty one.”

“Not what I’d call old. I have twenty years on you.” But her eyes measure me and I know what she’s thinking. I look older, beyond any doubt. The mission took its toll on me, but so did the facility. There were times when I looked in the mirror with a jolt of non-recognition, a stranger’s face staring back at me. “Something bad happened to you out there, didn’t it,” she said.

“To all of us.”

She makes the tea. “You think I envy you,” she says, as I sip from my cup.

“Why would you envy me?”

“Because you went out there, because you saw it up close, because you went inside it. You cosmonauts think all astronomers are the same. You go out into space and look at the universe through a layer of armored glass, if you’re lucky. Frosted with your own breath, blurring everything on the other side. Like visiting someone in a prison, not being able to touch them. You think we envy you that.”

“Some might say it’s better to get that close, than not go at all.”

“I stayed at home. I touched the universe with my mind, through mathematics. No glass between us then—just a sea of numbers.” Nesha looks at me sternly. “Numbers are truth. It doesn’t get any more intimate than numbers.”

“It’s enough that we both reached out, wouldn’t you say?” I offer her a conciliatory smile—I haven’t come to pick a fight about the best way to apprehend nature. “The fact is, no one’s doing much of that anymore. There’s no money for science and there’s certainly none for space travel. But we did something great. They can write us out of history, but it doesn’t change what we did.”

“And me?”

“You were part of it. I’d read all your articles, long before I was selected for the mission. That’s why I came to see you, all that time ago. But long before that—I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I was a young man when the Matryoshka arrived, but not so young that I didn’t have dreams and plans.”

“You must be sorry about that now.”

“Sometimes. Not always. No more than you regret what you did.”

“It was different back then, between the Soviets. If you believed something, you said it.”

“So you don’t regret a word of it?”

“I had it easier than he did.”

Silence. I look at a photograph on the coffee table—a young woman and a young man, holding hands in front of some grand old church or cathedral I don’t recognize, in some European city I’ll never see. They have bright clothes with slogans on, sunglasses, ski hats, and they’re both smiling. The sky is a hard primary blue, as if it’s been daubed in poster paint. “That’s him,” I say.

“Gennadi was a good man. But he never knew when to shut his mouth. That was his problem. The new men wanted to take us back to the old ways. Lots of people thought that was a good idea, too. The problem was, not all of us did. I was born in 1975. I’m old enough to remember what it was like before Gorbachev. It wasn’t all that wonderful, believe me.”

“Tell me about Gennadi. How did he got involved?”

“Gennadi was a scientist to begin with—an astronomer like me, in the same institute. That’s how we met. But his heart was elsewhere. Politics took up more and more of his time.”

“He was a politician?”

“An activist. A journalist and a blogger. Do you remember the internet, Dimitri?”

“Just barely.” It’s something from my childhood, like foreign tourists and contrails in the sky.

“It was a tool the authorities couldn’t control. That made them nervous. They couldn’t censor it, or take it down-not then. But they could take down the people behind it, like Gennadi. So that’s what they did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all in the past now. We had our time together; that’s all that matters. Perhaps if I hadn’t made such a noise about my findings, perhaps if I hadn’t angered the wrong people . . .” Nesha stops speaking. All of a sudden I feel shamefully intrusive. What right have I have to barge in on this old woman, to force her to think about the way things used to be? But I can’t leave, not having come this far. “His clothes,” she says absent-mindedly. “I don’t know why I kept them all this time, but perhaps you can use them.”

I put down the tea. “Are you certain?”

“It’s what Gennadi would have wanted. Always very practically-minded, Gennadi. Go into the room behind you, the cupboard on the left. Take what you can use.”

“Thank you.”

Even though I’m beginning to warm up, it’s good to change out of the sodden old clothes. Gennadi must have been shorter than me, his trousers not quite reaching my ankles, but I’m in no mood to complain. I find a vest, a shirt and an old gray sweater that’s been repaired a number of times. I find lace-up shoes that I can wear with two layers of socks. I wash my hands and face in the bedroom basin, straightening back my hair, but there’s nothing I can do to tidy or trim my beard. I had plans to change my appearance so far as I was able, but all of a sudden I know how futile they’d be. They’ll find me again, even if it takes a little longer. They’d only have to take one look in my eyes to know who I am.

“Do they fit?” Nesha asks, when I return to the main room.

“Like a glove. You’ve been very kind. I can’t ever repay this.”

“Start by telling me why you’re here. Then—although I can’t say I’m sorry for a little company—you can be on your way, before you get both of us into trouble.”

I return to the same seat I used before. It’s snowing again, softly. In the distance the dark threads of railway lines stretch between two anonymous buildings. I remember what the snowplow driver said. In this weather, I can forget about buses. No one’s getting in or out of Zvezdniy Gorodok unless they have party clearance and a waiting Zil.

“I came to tell you that you were right,” I say. “After all these years.”

“About the Matryoshka?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve known I was right for nearly thirty years. I didn’t need you to come and tell me.”

“Doesn’t it help to know that someone else believes you now?”

“Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it.”

“You constructed a hypothesis to fit the data,” I said. “It was a sound hypothesis, in that it was testable. But that’s all it ever was. You never got to see it tested.”

She regards me with steely-eyed intensity, the earlier Nesha Petrova burning through the mask of the older one. “I did. The second apparition.”

“Where they proved you wrong?”

“So they said.”

“They were wrong. I know. But they used it to crush you, to mock you, to bury you. But we went inside. We penetrated Shell 3. After that-everything was different.”

“Does it matter now?”

“I think it does.” Now is the moment. The thing I’ve come all this way to give Nesha, the thing that’s been in my pajama pocket, now in the trousers. I take it out, the prize folded in a white handkerchief.

I pass the bundle across the coffee table. “This is for you.”

Nesha takes it warily. She unwraps the handkerchief and blinks at the little metal box it had contained. She picks it up gently, holds it before her eyes and pinches her fingers around the little handle that sticks out from one side.

“Turn it.”

“What?”

“Turn the handle.”

She does as I say, gently and hesitantly at first, as if fearful that the handle will snap off in her fingers. The box emits a series of tinkling notes. Because Nesha is turning the handle so slowly, it’s hard to make out the melody.

“I don’t understand. You came all this way to give me this?”

“I did.”

“Then the rumours were right,” Nesha says. “You did go mad after all.”

Falling inward, the Progress began to pass through another swarm of free-flying obstacles. Like those of Shell 1, the components of Shell 2 were all but invisible to the naked eye-dark as space itself, and only a fraction of a kelvin warmer than the cosmic microwave background. The wireframe display started showing signs of fuzziness, as if the computer was having trouble decoding the radar returns. The objects were larger and had a different shape to the ones in the outer shell—these were more like rounded pebbles or all-enveloping turtle-shells, wide as cities. They were covered in scales or plaques which moved around in a weird, oozing fashion, like jostling continents on a planet with vigorous plate tectonics. Similarly lethal field lines bound them, but this far in the predictive model became a lot less trustworthy.

No runaway Chinese probe had ever collided with Shell 2, so we had no good idea how brittle the objects were. A second apparition probe operated by the European Space Agency had tried to land and sample one of the Shell 2 obstacles, but without success. That wouldn’t stop Galenka from making her own attempt.

She picked a target, wove around the field lines and came in close enough to fire the sticky anchors onto one of the oozing platelets. The Progress wound itself in on electric winches until it was close enough to extend its tools and manipulators.

“Damn camera’s sticking again. And I keep losing antenna lock.”

“It’s what they pay you for,” I said.

“Trying to be helpful, Dimitri?”

“Doing my best.”

She had her hands in the waldos again. Her eyes were darting from screen to screen. I couldn’t make much sense of the displays myself, having never trained for Progress operations. It looked as if she was playing six or seven weirdly abstract computer games at the same time, manipulating symbols according to arcane and ever-shifting rules. I could only hope that she was just about winning.

“Cutting head can’t get traction. Whatever that stuff is, it’s harder than diamond. Nothing for the claws to grip, either. I’m going to try the laser.”

I found myself tensing, as she swung the laser into play.

How would the Matryoshka respond to our burning a hole in it? With the same cosmic indifference that it had shown when the Chinese robot had rammed it, or when the American probe got in the way of its field lines? Nothing in our experience offered any guidance. Perhaps it had tolerated us until now, and would interpret the laser as the first genuinely hostile action. In which case losing the Progress might be the least of our worries.

I tensed.

“Picking up ablation products,” Galenka said, eyeing the trembling registers of a gas chromatograph readout. “Laser’s cutting into something, whatever it is. Lots of carbon. Some noble gases and metals: iron, vanadium, some other stuff I’m not too sure about right now. Let’s see if I can cut away a sample.”

The laser etched a circle into the surface of the platelet. With the beam kept at an angle to the surface, it was eventually possible to isolate a cone-shaped piece of the material. Galenka used an epoxy-tipped sucker to extract the fist-sized sample, which already seemed to be in the process of fusing back into the main structure.

“Well done.”

She grinned at me. “Let’s take a few more while our luck’s holding, shall we?”

She pulled out of the waldo controls, disengaged the sticky anchors and applied translational thrust, shifting the Progress to a different platelet.

“You sure you don’t want to take a break? We can hold here for hours if we have to, especially with the anchors.”

“I’m fine, Dimitri.” But I noticed that Galenka’s knuckles were tight on the joystick, the effort of piloting beginning to show. There was a chisel-sharp crease in the skin on the side of her mouth that only came when she was concentrating. “Fine but a little hungry, if you must know. You want to do something useful, you can fetch me some food.”

“I think that might be within my capabilities,” I said.

I pushed away from the piloting position, expertly inserting myself onto a weightless trajectory that sent me careening through one of the narrow connecting throats that led from one of the Tereshkova’s modules to the next.

By any standards she was a large spacecraft. Nuclear power had brought us to the Matryoshka. The Tereshkova’s main engine was a “variable specific impulse magnetic rocket”: a VASIMIR drive. It was an old design that had been dusted down and made to work when the requirements of our mission became clear. The point of the VASIMIR (it was an American acronym, but it sounded appropriately Russian) was that it could function in a dual mode, giving not us only the kick to escape Earth orbit, but also months of low-impulse cruise thrust, to take us all the way to the artifact and back. It would get us all the way home again, too—whereupon we’d climb into our Soyuz re-entry vehicle and detach from the mothership. The Progress would come down on autopilot, laden with alien riches—that was the plan, anyway.

Like all spacecraft, the Tereshkova looked like a ransacked junk shop inside. Any area of the ship that wasn’t already in use as a screen or control panel or equipment hatch or analysis laboratory or food dispenser or life-support system was something to hold onto, or kick off from, or rest against, or tie things onto. Technical manuals floated in mid-air, tethered to the wall. Bits of computer drifted around the ship as if they had lives of their own, until one of us needed some cable or connector. Photos of our family, drawings made by our children, were tacked to the walls between panels and grab rails. The whole thing stank like an armpit and made so much noise that most of us kept earplugs in when we didn’t need to talk.

But it was home, of a sort. A stinking, noisy shithole of a home, but still the best we had.

I hadn’t seen Yakov as I moved through the ship, but that wasn’t any cause for alarm. As the specialist in change of the Tereshkova’s flight systems, his duty load has eased now that we had arrived on station at the artifact. He had been busy during the cruise phase, so we couldn’t begrudge him a little time off, especially as he was going to have to nurse the ship home again. So, while Baikonur gave him a certain number of housekeeping tasks to attend to, Yakov had more time to himself than Galenka or I. If he wasn’t in his quarters, there were a dozen other places on the ship where he could find some privacy, if not peace and quiet. We all had our favorite spots, and we were careful not to intrude on each other when we needed some personal time.

So I had no reason to sense anything unusual as I selected and warmed a meal for Galenka. But as the microwave chimed readiness, a much louder alarm began shrieking throughout the ship. Red emergency lights started flashing. The general distress warning meant that the ship had detected something anomalous. Without further clarification, it could be almost anything: a fault with the VASIMIR, a hull puncture, a life-support system failure, a hundred other problems. All that the alarm told me was that the ship deemed the problem critical, demanding immediate attention.

I grabbed a handrail and propelled myself to the nearest monitor. Text was already scrolling on it.

Unscheduled activity in hatch three, said the words.

I froze for a few moments, not so much in panic as out of a need to pause and concentrate, to assess the situation and decide on the best course of action. But I didn’t need much time to reflect. Since Galenka was still at her station, still guiding the Progress, it was obvious what the problem was. Yakov was trying to escape from the Tereshkova.

As if we were still in Star City.

There was no automatic safety mechanism to prevent that door from being opened. It was assumed that if anyone did try and open it, they must have a good reason for doing so-venting air into space, for instance, to quench a fire. The notion that one of us would do something stupid, like trying to leave the ship because we thought it was a simulation, must never have occurred to the engineers.

I pushed myself through the module, through the connecting throat, through the next module. The alarm was drilling into my head. If Yakov really did think that the ship was still in Russia, he wouldn’t be concerned about decompression. He wouldn’t be concerned about whether or not he was wearing a suit.

He just wanted to get out.

I reached a red locker marked with a lightning flash and threw back the heavy duty latches. I expected to see three tasers, bound with security foils.

There were no tasers—just the remains of the foil and the recessed foam shapes where the stunners had fitted.

“Fuck,” I said, realizing that Yakov was ahead of me; that he had opened the locker—against all rules; it was only supposed to be touched in an emergency—and taken the weapons.

I pushed through another connecting throat, scraping my hand against sharp metal until it bled, then corkscrewed through 90 degrees to reach the secondary throat that led to the number three hatch.

I could already see Yakov at the end of it. Braced against the wall, he was turning the big yellow wheel that undid the door’s massive locking mechanism. When he was done, it would only take a twist of the handle to free the hatch. The air pressure behind it would slam it open in an instant, and both of us would be sucked into space long before emergency bulkhead seals protected the rest of the ship. I tried to work out which way we were facing now. Would it be a long fall back to the Sun, or an inglorious short-cut to the Matryoshka?

“Yakov, please,” I called. “Don’t open the door.”

He kept working the wheel, but looked back at me over his shoulder. “No good, Dimitri. I’ve figured this out even if you haven’t. None of this is real. We’re not really out here, parked next to the Matryoshka. We’re just rehearsing for it, running through another simulation.”

I tried to ride with his logic. “Then let’s see the simulation through to the end.”

“Don’t you get it? This is all a test. They want to see how alert we are. They want to see that we’re still capable of picking up on the details that don’t fit.”

The blood was spooling out of my hand, forming a scarlet chain of floating droplets. I pushed the wound to my mouth and sucked at it. “Like weightlessness? How would they ever fake that, Dimitri?”

He let go of the wheel with one hand and touched the back of his neck. “The implants. They fool with your inner ear, make you think you’re floating.”

“That’s your GLONASS transponder. There’s one on the back of my neck as well. It’s so they can track and recover our bodies if the re-entry goes wrong.”

“That’s what they told us.” He kept on turning the wheel.

“You open that door, you’re a dead man. You’ll kill me and put Galenka in danger.”

“Listen to me,” he said with fierce insistence. “This is not real. We’re in Star City, my friend. The whole point of this exercise is to measure our alertness, our ability to see through delusional constructs. Escaping from the ship is the objective, the end-state.”

I knew then that reasoned argument wasn’t going to get me anywhere. I gave myself a hard shove in his direction, hoping to overwhelm him with sheer momentum. But Yakov was faster. His hand sprung to his pocket and came out holding one of the tasers, aimed straight at me. The barbs sprang out and contacted my chest. I’d never been shot before and I wasn’t ready for the pain. It seemed to crush me into a little ball of concentrated fire, like an insect curling under the heat from a magnifying glass. I let out a brief yelp, biting my tongue, and then I didn’t even have the energy to scream. The barbs were still in me. Bent double, blood dribbling from my hand and mouth, I lost all contact with the ship. Drifting, I saw Yakov leave the taser floating in mid-air while he returned his attention to the wheel and redoubled his efforts.

“You stupid fucker,” I heard Galenka say, behind me.

I didn’t know whether she meant Yakov—for trying to escape—or me, for trying to stop him on my own. Maybe she meant both of us.

The pain of the discharge was beginning to ebb. I could just begin to think about speaking again.

“Got a taser,” I heard myself say, as if from a distance.

“Good. So have I.” I felt Galenka push past me, something hard in her hand. Then I heard the strobing crackle of another taser. I kept drifting around, until the door came into view again. Through blurred and slitted eyes, I saw Yakov twitching against the metal. Galenka had fired barbs into him; now she was holding the prongs of the taser against his abdomen, the blue worm of a spark writhing between.

I reached out a hand and managed to steady myself. The pain had now all but gone, but I was enveloped in nausea and a tingling all-body version of pins and needles.

“You can stop now.”

She gave the taser one last prod, then withdrew it. Yakov remained still, slumped and unconscious against the door.

“I say we kill the fucker now.”

I wiped the blood from my lips. “I know how you feel. But we need him to get us home. If there’s the slightest problem with the engine . . .”

“Anything happens, mission control can help us.”

I worked my way down to the door. “He’s not going to do this again. We can sedate him, confine him to one of the modules if necessary. Until Baikonur advise.”

Galenka pushed her own taser back into her pocket, with the barbs dangling loose on their springy wires. She started turning the wheel in the opposite direction, grunting at first with the effort.

“This was a close call.”

“You were right—I should have been more worried about him than I was. I didn’t think he was really serious about all that Star City stuff. I mean, not this serious.”

“He’s a basket case, Dimitri. That means there are only two sane people left on this ship, and I’m being generous.”

“Do you think Baikonur will be able to help?”

“They’d better. Anything goes wrong on this ship, we need him to fix it. And he’s not going to be much use to us doped to his eyeballs.”

We manhandled the stunned Yakov back into the main part of the Tereshkova. Already I could tell that he was only lightly unconscious, and that we’d have a struggle on our hands if he came around now. He was mumbling under his breath. Sweat began to bead on my forehead. Why the fuck did this have to happen to us?

“What do you reckon we should do? Confine him to his quarters?”

“And have him loose aboard the ship again, looking for a way to escape?”

“I’m not sure we have any other choice.”

“We lock him in the forward module,” Galenka said decisively. “He’ll be safe in there. We can seal the connecting lock from our side, until Baikonur come up with a treatment regime. In the meantime we dose him on sedatives, put him under for as long as we can. I don’t want that lunatic running around when I’m trying to steer the Progress through Shell 3.”

I breathed in hard, trying to focus. “Where is it now?”

“Still anchored to one of the Shell 2 platelets. I’d like to take a few more samples before I detach, but from then on it’s seat of the pants stuff.”

She was right: it was a good plan. Better than anything I could come up with, at any rate. We took him forward to the orbiter, opened a medical kit and injected him with the sedative. I took out a tube of disinfectant and a roll of bandage for my gashed hand. Yakov stopped mumbling and became more pliant, like a big rag doll. We strapped him into a sleeping hammock and locked the door on him.

“He was pissing me off anyway,” Galenka said.

I move back from the window in Nesha’s apartment. Zvezdniy Gorodok is stirring to a wintery, hypothermic half-life. The snow’s still coming down, though in fitful flurries rather than a steady fall. When a Zil pulls onto the street I feel a tightness in my throat. But the limousine stops, releasing its passenger, and moves on. The man strolls across the concrete concourse into one of the adjoining buildings, a briefcase swinging from his hand. He might have anything in that briefcase—a gun, a syringe, a lie detector. But he has no business here.

“You think they’re looking for you.”

“I know it.”

“Then where are you going to go?”

Out into the cold and the snow to die, I think. But I smile and say nothing.

“Is it really so bad in the facility? Do they really treat you so badly?”

I return to my seat. Nesha’s poured me another cup of tea, which—her views on my sanity notwithstanding—I take as an invitation to remain. “Most of them don’t treat me badly at all—they’re not monsters or sadists. I’m too precious to them for that. They don’t beat me, or electrocute me, and the drugs they give me, the things they do to me, they’re not to make me docile or to punish me. Doctor Kizim, he’s even kind to me. He spends a lot of time talking to me, trying to get me to remember details I might have forgotten. It’s pointless, though. I’ve already remembered all that I’m ever going to. My brain feels like a pan that’s been scrubbed clean.”

“Did Doctor Kizim help you to escape?”

“I’ve asked myself the same question. Did he mean for me to steal his coat? Did he sense that I was intending to leave? He must have known I wouldn’t get far without it.”

“What about the others? Were you allowed to see them?”

I shake my head. “They kept us apart the whole time Yakov and Galenka were still alive. We were questioned and examined separately. Even though we’d spent all those months in the ship, they didn’t want us contaminating each other’s accounts.”

“So you never really got to know what happened to the others.”

“I know that they both died. Galenka went first-she took the highest dosage when the VASIMIR’s shielding broke down. Yakov was a little luckier, but not much. I never got to see either of them while they were still alive.”

“Why didn’t you get a similar dosage?”

“Yakov was mad to begin with. Then he got better, or at least decided he was better off working with us than against us. We let him out of the module where we were keeping him locked up. That was after Galenka and I got back from the Matryoshka.”

“And then?”

“It was my turn to go a little mad. Inside the machine-something touched us. It got into our heads. It affected me more than it did Galenka. On the return trip, they had no choice but to confine me to the forward module.”

“The thing that saved you.”

“I was further from the engine when it went wrong. Inverse square laws. My dosage was negligible.”

“You accept that they died, despite having no evidence.”

“I believe what Doctor Kizim told me. I trusted him. He had no reason to lie. He was already putting his career at risk by giving me this information. Maybe more than his career. A good man.”

“Did he know the other two?”

“No; he only ever treated me. That was part of the methodology. Strange things had happened during the early months of the debriefing. The doctors and surgeons got too close to us, too involved. After we came back from the Matryoshka, there was something different about us. It affected us all, even Yakov, who hadn’t gone inside. Just being close to it was enough.”

“Different in what way?” Nesha asks.

“It began in small ways, while we were still on the Tereshkova. Weird slips. Mistakes that didn’t make sense. As if our identities, our personalities and memories, were blurring. On the way home, I sat at the computer keyboard and found myself typing Yakov’s name and password into the system, as if he’s sitting inside me. A few days later Galenka wakes up and tells me she dreamed she was in Klushino, a place she’s never visited. It was as if something in the machine had touched us and removed some fundamental barrier in our heads, some wall or moat that keeps one person from becoming another. When the silver fluid got into us . . .”

“I don’t understand. How could the doctors get too close to you? What happened to them?”

I sense her uneasiness; the realization that she may well be sharing her room with a lunatic. I have never pretended to be entirely sane, but it must only be now that the white bones of true madness are beginning to show through my skin.

“I didn’t mean to alarm you, Nesha. I’ll be gone shortly, I promise you. Why don’t you tell me what it was like for you, back when it all began?”

“You know my story.”

“I’d still like to hear it from you. From the day it arrived. How it changed you.”

“You were old enough to remember it. You already told me that.”

“But I wasn’t an astronomer, Nesha. I was just a 20 year old kid with some ideas about being a cosmonaut. You were how old, exactly?”

“Forty years. I’d been a professional astronomer for 15 or 16 of them, by then.” She becomes reflective, as if it’s only now that she has given that time of her life any thought. “I’d been lucky, really. I’d made professor, which meant I didn’t have to grub around for funding every two years. I had to do my share of lecturing, and fighting for my corner of the department, but I still had plenty of time for independent research. I was still in love with science, too. My little research area-stellar pulsation modes-it wasn’t the most glamorous. They didn’t fight to put our faces on the covers of magazine, or give us lucrative publishing deals to talk about how we were uncovering the mysteries of the universe, touching the face of god. But we knew it was solid science, important to the field as a whole.” She leans forward to make a point. “Astronomy’s like a cathedral, Dimitri. The ones putting the gold on the top spire get all the glory, but they’d be nothing without a solid foundation. That’s where we were—down in the basement, down in the crypt, making sure it was all anchored to firm ground. Fundamental stellar physics. Not very exotic compared to mapping the large scale universe, or probing the event horizons of black holes. But vital all the same.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“I can remember that afternoon when the news came in. Gennadi and I were in my office. It was a bright day, with the blinds drawn. It was the end of the week and we were looking forward to a few days off. We had tickets to see a band in town that night. We just had one thing we wanted to get sorted before we finished. A paper we’d been working on had come back from the referee with a load of snotty comments, and we didn’t quite agree on how to deal with them. I wanted to write back to the journal and request a different referee. The referee on our paper was anonymous, but I was sure I knew who it was—a slimy, womanising prick who’d made a pass at me at a conference in Trieste, and wasn’t going to let me forget that I’d told him where to get off.”

I smile. “You must have been fierce in your day.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t him—but we still needed a different referee. Gennadi, meanwhile, thought we should sit back and do what the referee was telling us. Which meant running our models again, which meant a week of time on the department supercomputer. Normally, that would have meant going right back to the start of the queue. But there was a gap in the schedule—another group had just pulled out of their slot, because they couldn’t get their software to compile properly. We could have their slot-but only if we got our model up and running that evening, with all the modifications the referee wanted us to make.”

“You weren’t going to make it to that band.”

“That was when the IAU telegram came in to my inbox. I didn’t even open it at first; it wasn’t as if IAU telegrams were exactly unusual. It probably just meant that a supernova had gone off in a remote galaxy, or that some binary star was undergoing a nova. Nothing I needed to get excited about.”

“But that wasn’t what it was about.”

“It was the Matryoshka, of course—the emergence event, when it came into our solar system. A sudden influx of cosmic rays, triggering half the monitoring telescopes and satellites in existence. They all turned to look at the point where the machine had come in. A flash of energy that intense, it could only be a gamma-ray burst, happening in some distant galaxy. That’s what everyone thought it was at first, especially as the Matryoshka came in high above the ecliptic, and well out of the plane of the galaxy. It looked extragalactic, not some local event. Sooner or later, though, they crunched the numbers-triangulated from the slightly different pointing angles of the various spacecraft and telescopes, the slightly different detection times of the event—and they realized that, whatever this was, it had happened within one light hour of the Sun. Not so much on our doorstep, cosmically speaking, as in our house, making itself at home.” Nesha smiles at the memory. “There was some wild theorizing to begin with. Everything from a piece of antimatter colliding with a comet, a quantum black hole evaporating, to the illegal test of a Chinese super-weapon in deep space. Of course, it was none of those things. It was spacetime opening wide enough to vomit out a machine the size of Tasmania.”

“It was a while before they found the Matryoshka itself.”

Nesha nods. “You try finding something that dark, when you don’t even know in which direction it’s moving.”

“Even from the Tereshkova, it was hard to believe it was actually out there.”

“To begin with, we still didn’t know what to make of it. The layered structure confused the hell out of us. We weren’t used to analyzing anything like that. It was artificial, clearly, but it wasn’t made of solid parts. It was like a machine caught in the instant of blowing up, but which was still working, still doing whatever it was sent to do. Without getting closer, we could only resolve the structure in the outer layer. We didn’t start calling it Shell 1 until we knew there were deeper strata. The name Matryoshka didn’t come until after the first fly-by probes, when we glimpsed Shell 2. The Americans called it the Easter Egg for a little while, but eventually everyone started using the Russian name.”

I know that when she talks about “we”, she means the astronomical community as a whole, rather than her own efforts. Nesha’s involvement—the involvement that had first made her famous, then ruined her reputation, then her life-did not come until later.

The emergence event—the first apparition—caught humanity entirely unaware. The Matryoshka had come out of its wormhole mouth—if that was what it was—on an elliptical, sun-circling trajectory similar to a periodic comet. The only thing non-cometary was the very steep inclination to the ecliptic. It made reaching the Matryoshka problematic, except when it was swinging near the Sun once every 12 years. Even with a massive international effort, there was no way to send dedicated probes out to meet the artifact and match its velocity. The best anyone could do was fling smart pebbles at it, hoping to learn as much as possible in the short window while they slammed past. Probes that had been intended for Mars or Venus were hastily repurposed for the Matryoshka flyby, where time and physics made that possible. It was more like the mad scramble of some desperate, last-ditch war effort than anything seen in peacetime.

There were, of course, dissenting voices. Some people thought the prudent thing would be to wait and see what the Matryoshka had in mind for us. By and large, they were ignored. The thing had arrived here, hadn’t it? The least it could expect was a welcome party.

As it was, the machine appeared completely oblivious to the attention—as it had continued to do through the second apparition. The third apparition—that was different, of course. But then again our provocation had been of an entirely different nature.

After the probes had gone by, there was data to analyze. Years of it. The Matryoshka had fallen out of each reach of our instruments and robots, but we had more than enough to keep busy until the next apparition. Plans were already being drawn up for missions to rendezvous with the object and penetrate that outer layer. Robots next time, but who knew what might be possible in the 24 years between the first and third apparitions?

“The scientists who’d had their missions redirected wanted a first look at the Matryoshka data,” Nesha says. “The thinking was that they’d get exclusive access to it for six months.”

“You can’t blame them for that.”

“There was still an outcry. It was felt that an event of this magnitude demanded the immediate release of all the data to the community. To the whole world, in fact. Anyone who wanted it was welcome to it. Of course, unless they had a lightning fast internet connection, about ten million terabytes of memory, their own Cray . . . they couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface. There were collaborative efforts, millions of people downloading a fragment of the data and analyzing it using spare CPU cycles, but they still couldn’t beat the resources of a single well-equipped academic department with a tame supercomputer in the basement. Above all else, we had all the analysis tools at hand, and we knew how to use them. But it was still a massive cake to eat in one bite.”

“And did you?”

“No—it made much more sense to focus on what we were good at. The data hinted that the elements of the outer layer-Shell 1—were bound together by some kind of force-field. The whole thing was breathing in and out, the components moving as if tied together by a complex web of elastic filaments. The thing is, stars breathe as well. The pulsation modes in a solar-type star aren’t the same as the pulsation modes in the Matryoshka. But we could still use the same methods, the same tools and tricks, to get a handle on them. And of course, there was a point to all of that. Map the pulsations in a star and you can probe the deep interior, in exactly the same way that earthquakes tell us about the structure of the Earth. There was every expectation that the Matryoshka’s pulsations might tell us something about the inside of that as well.”

“I guess you didn’t have a clue what you’d actually find.”

Nesha gives a brief, derisive laugh. “Of course not. I wasn’t thinking in those terms at all. I was just thinking of frequencies, harmonics, Fourier analysis, caustic surfaces. I wasn’t thinking of fucking music.”

“Tell me how it felt.”

“The first time I ran the analysis, and realized that the pulsations could be broken down into notes on the western chromatic scale? Like I was the victim of a bad practical joke, someone in the department messing with the data.”

“And when you realized you weren’t being hoaxed?”

“I still didn’t believe it-not to begin with. I thought I must have screwed up in my analysis somewhere, introduced harmonics that weren’t real. I stripped the tools down and put them together again. Same story: notes, chords, melody, and counterpoint. Music. That’s when I started accepting the reality of it. Whatever we were dealing with—whatever had come to find us—wasn’t what we had assumed. This wasn’t just some dumb invention, some alien equivalent of the probes we had been sending out. The Matryoshka was a different order of machine. Something clever and complex enough to sing to itself. Or, just possibly, to us.” Nesha hesitates and looks at me with an unwavering gaze. “And it was singing our music. Russian music.”

“I know,” I say. “It’s been in my head since I came back.”

No one had ever gone this deep before.

The Progress had travelled fifty kilometers into the Machine-through two layers of orbiting obstruction, each of which was ten kilometers in depth, and through two open volumes fifteen kilometers thick. Beneath lay the most difficult part of its journey so far. Though the existence of Shell 3 had been known since the second apparition, no hard data existed on conditions beneath it.

The barrier was actually a pair of tightly nested spheres, one slightly smaller than the other. The shell’s material was as dark as anything already encountered, but—fortuitously for us—the spheres had holes in them, several dozen circular perforations ranging in width from one to three kilometers, spotted around the spheres in what appeared to be an entirely random arrangement. The pattern of holes was the same in both spheres, but because they were rotating at different speeds, on different, slowly precessing axes, the holes only lined up occasionally. During those windows, glimpses opened up into the heart of the Matryoshka. A blue-green glow shone through the winking gaps in Shell 3, hinting at luminous depths.

Shortly we’d know.

“How’s he doing?” Galenka asked, from the pilot’s position. I had just returned from the orbiter, where I had been checking on Yakov. I had fixed a medical cuff to his wrist, so that Baikonur could analyze his blood chemistry.

“Not much change since last time. He just looks at me. Doesn’t say or do anything.”

“We should up the medication.” She tapped keys, adjusting one of the Progress’s camera angles. She was holding station, hovering a few kilometers over Shell 3. Talking out of the side of her mouth she said, “Put him into a coma until we really need him.”

“I talked to Baikonur. They recommend holding him at the current dosage until they’ve run some tests.”

“Easy for them to say, half a solar system away.”

“They’re the experts, not us.”

“If you say so.”

“I think we should let them handle this one. It’s not like we don’t have other things to occupy our minds, is it?”

“You have a point there, comrade.”

“Are you happy about taking her in? You’ve been in the chair for a long time now.”

“It’s what we came to do. Progress systems are dropping like flies, anyway—I give this ship about six hours before it dies on us. I think it’s now or never.”

I could only bow to her superior wisdom in this matter.

In the years since the last apparition, the complex motion of the spheres had been subjected to enormous scrutiny. It had been a triumph to map the holes in the interior sphere. Despite this, no watertight algorithm had ever been invented to predict the window events with any precision. The spheres slowed down and sped up unpredictably, making a nonsense of long-range forecasts. Unless a window was in view, the movement of the inner sphere could not be measured. Radar bounced off its flawless surface as if the thing was motionless.

All Galenka could do was wait until a window event began, then make a run for it—hoping that the aperture remained open long enough for the Progress to pass through. Analysis of all available data showed that window events occurred, on average, once in every 72-minute interval. But that was just an average. Two window events could fall within minutes of each other, or there might be a ten hour wait before the next one. The window was tight—the Progress would have to begin its run within seconds of the window opening, if it had a chance of slipping through in time. I didn’t envy Galenka sitting there with her finger on the trigger, like a gunslinger waiting for her opponent to twitch.

In the event, a useful window—one that she could reach, in the allowed time-opened within 40 minutes of our conversation. Looking over her shoulder at the screens, I could hardly make out any change in Shell 3. Only when the Progress was already committed-moving too quickly to stop or change course—did a glimmer of blue-green light reassure me that the window was indeed opening. Even then, it hardly seemed possible that the Progress would have time to pass through the winking eye.

Of course, that was exactly what happened. Only a slight easing of the crease on the side of Galenka’s mouth indicated that she was, for now, breathing easier. We both knew that this triumph could well be very short-lived, since the Progress would now find it even more difficult to remain in contact with the Tereshkova. Since no man-made signal could penetrate Shell 3, comms could only squirt through when a window was open, in whatever direction that happened to be. The swarm of relay microsats placed around the Machine were intended to intercept these burst transmissions and relay them back to the Tereshkova. Its puppet-strings all but severed, the robotic spacecraft would be relying more and more on the autonomous decision-making of its onboard computers.

I knew that the mission planners had subjected the Progress to every eventuality, ever scenario, they could dream up. I also knew that none of those planners seriously expected the secrets of the Matryoshka to bear the slightest resemblance to their imaginings. If it did, they’d be brutally disappointed.

The rear-looking camera showed the window sealing behind the Progress. The inside surface of Shell 3 was as pitilessly dark as its outer skin, yet all else was aglow. I shivered with an almost religious ecstasy: soon the secrets revealed here would be in the hands of the entire human species, but for now—for a delicious and precious interval—the only two souls given this privilege were Galenka and I. No other thinking creature had seen this far.

Beneath Shell 3 was another empty volume-Gap 3. Then there was another sphere. We were looking at the central 60 kilometers of the Matryoshka, three quarters of the way to whatever lay at its heart. Shell 4 looked nothing like the dark machinery we had already passed through. This was more like a prickly fruit, a nastily evolved bacterium or some fantastically complex coral formation. The surface of the sphere was barely visible, lost under a spiky, spiny accretion of spokes and barbs and twisted unicorn horns, pushing out into the otherwise empty band gap for many kilometers. There were lacy webs of matter bridging one spike to the next. There were muscular structures like the roots of enormous trees, winding and entwining around the bases of the largest outgrowths. It was all ablaze with blue-green light, like a glass sculpture lit from within. The light wavered and pulsed. Shell 3 did not look like something which had been designed and built, but rather something which had grown, wildly and unpredictably. It was wonderful and terrifying.

Then the signal ended. The Progress was on its own now, relying on its hardwired wits.

“You did well,” I told Galenka.

She said nothing. She was already asleep. Her head did not loll in zero gravity, her jaw did not droop open, but her eyes were closed and her hand had slackened on the joystick. Only then did I realise how utterly exhausted she must have been. But I imagined her dreams were peaceful ones.

She had not failed the mission. She had not failed Mother Russia and the Second Soviet.

I left her sleeping, then spent two hours attending to various housekeeping tasks aboard the Tereshkova. Since we were only able to use the low-gain antenna—the high-gain antenna had failed shortly after departure—the data that the Progress had already sent back needed to be organized and compressed before it could be sent onwards to Earth. All the data stored aboard the Tereshkova would get home eventually-assuming, of course, that we did—but in the meantime I was anxious to provide Baikonur with what I regarded as the highlights. All the while I checked for updates from the Progress, but no signal had yet been detected.

Without waiting for mission control to acknowledge the data package, I warmed some food for myself, took a nip of vodka from my private supply, and then carried my meal into the part of the Tereshkova loosely designated as the commons/recreational area. It was the brightest part of the ship, with plastic flowers and ornaments, tinsel, photographs, postcards, and children’s paintings stuck to the walls. I stationed myself against a wall and watched television, flicking through the various uplink feeds while spooning food into my mouth. I skipped soaps, quizzes, and talk shows until I hit one of the main news senders. The main state news channel showed me what the rest of the world—or the rest of the Soviet Union, at least—was getting to hear about us. The Tereshkova had been big news during its departure, but had fallen from the headlines during the long cruise out to the Matryoshka. Now it was a top-listed item once more, squeezing out other stories.

The channel informed its viewers that the ship had successfully launched a robotic probe through Shells 1 and 2, a triumph equal to anything achieved during the last two apparitions, and one which—it was confidently expected—would soon be surpassed. The data already returned to Earth, the channel said, offered a bounty that would keep the keenest Soviet minds engaged for many years. Nor would this data be hoarded by Russia alone, for with characteristic Soviet generosity, it would be shared with those “once-proud” nations who now lacked the means to travel into space. The brave cosmonauts who were reaping this harvest of riches were mentioned by name on several occasions. There was, of course, no word about how one of those brave cosmonauts had gone stark raving mad.

I knew with a cold certainty that they’d never tell the truth about Yakov. If he didn’t recover they’d make something up—an unanticipated illness, or a debilitating accident. They’d kill the poor bastard rather than admit that we were human.

“I went to see him,” Galenka said, startling me. She had drifted into the recreation area quite silently. “He’s talking now—almost lucid. Want us to let him out of the module.”

“Not likely.”

“I agree. But we’ll have to make a decision on him sooner or later.”

“Well, there’s no hurry right now. You all right?”

“Fine, thanks.”

She had rested less than three hours, but in weightlessness—even after an exhausting task—that was enough. It was a useful physiological adaptation when there was a lot of work to be done, but it also meant that ten days in space could feel like thirty back on Earth. Or a hundred.

“Go and sleep some more, you want to. The Progress calls in, I’ll wake you.”

“If it calls in.”

I offered a shrug. “You did everything that was expected of you. That we got this far . . .”

“I know; we should be very proud of ourselves.” She stared at the screen, her eyes still sleepy.

“They’re going to lie about Yakov.”

“I know.”

“When we get home, they’ll make us stick to the story.”

“Of course.” She said this with total resignation, as if it was the least any of us could expect.

Soon we bored of the news and the television. While Galenka was answering letters from friends and family I went back to run my own check on Yakov. To our disappointment Baikonur still had no specific recommendations beyond maintaining the present medication. I sensed that they didn’t want blood on their hands if something went wrong with him. They were happy to let us take responsibility for our ailing comrade, even if we ended up killing him.

“Let me out, Dimitri. I’m fine now.”

I looked at him through armored glass of the bulkhead door. Shaking my head, I felt like a doctor delivering some dreadful diagnosis.

“You have to stay there for now. I’m sorry. But we can’t run the risk of you trying to open the hatch again.”

“I accept that this isn’t a simulation now. I accept that we’re really in space.” His voice came through a speaker grille, tinny and distant. “You believe me, don’t you Dimitri?”

“I’ll see you later, Yakov.”

“At least let me talk to Baikonur.”

I placed the palm of my hand against the glass. “Later, friend. For now, get some rest.”

I turned away before he could answer.

He wasn’t the only one who needed sleep. Tiredness hit me unexpectedly—it always came on hard, like a wall. I slept for two hours, dreaming of being back on Earth on a warm spring day, sitting with my wife in the park, the mission happily behind me, deemed a success by all concerned. When I woke the dream’s melancholic after-effects stayed with me, dogging my thoughts. I badly wanted to get home.

I found Galenka in the pilot’s position.

“We have contact,” she said, but I knew from her tone of voice that it wasn’t all good news.

“The Progress called in?”

“She’s stuck, Dimitri. Jammed in down there. Can’t back out, can’t go forward.”

“Fuck.”

What was only apparent when the Progress reached the root complex was that there was no solid surface to Shell 4; that the tangled mass of roots was, to all intents and purposes, the sphere itself. There were gaps in that tangle, too, like the interstices in a loosely bundled ball of string. Methodically and fearlessly, the Progress had set about finding a way through to whatever was underneath. On its first attempt, it had traveled no more than a third of a kilometer beneath the nominal surface before reaching a narrowing it couldn’t pass through. The second attempt, picking a different entry point, had taken it a kilometer under the surface before it met a similar impasse. With fuel now running low-just enough to get it back to the Tereshkova, with some in reserve—the Progress had opted to make one final attempt. It was then that it had got itself stuck, lodging in a part of the thicket like a bullet in gristle.

Galenka sent commands to the Progress, to be relayed through to it when a window opened. She told it to use its manipulators to try and push itself backwards, and to wiggle its reaction thrusters in the hope that it might shake itself loose. It was the best she could do, but she wasn’t optimistic. We waited three hours, by which time Baikonur were fully appraised of the situation. Then a window opened and the Progress reported that it was still jammed tight, despite executing Galenka’s instructions.

“Before you say I should have listened to you,” she said. “I did listen. But bringing her back in just wasn’t the right decision, given what I knew at the time.”

“I fully concurred, Galenka. No one’s blaming you.”

“Let’s see what Baikonur have to say when we get back, shall we?”

“I’m sure they’ll be in a forgiving mood. The amount of data we’ve gathered . . .”

“Doesn’t begin to add up against physical samples, which we’ve now lost.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe what? I’ve tried everything in the book. I know what that Progress can do, Dimitri. It isn’t an escape artist.”

“We do have the Soyuz,” I said.

“We need it to take us home. Anyway, the Soyuz isn’t rigged for remote control or sampling.”

“I wasn’t thinking of remote control. I was thinking, we fly the Soyuz all the way in. It’s the same size as the Progress, right? It has similar capabilities?”

“Give or take.” Her tone told me she wasn’t exactly signing up for my idea with enthusiasm. “And then what?”

“We reach the Progress, or get as close to it as we can without getting ourselves stuck. Then we EVA. It’s a microgravity environment so we should be able to move around without too much difficulty. It’ll be too risky to attempt to free the Progress, but there’s nothing to stop us transferring the artifacts. Plenty of room aboard the Soyuz, to bring them back to the Tereshkova.”

She breathed heavily, as if she’d just come off the exercise cycle. “This wasn’t planned for. This wasn’t in the book. No one ever mentioned going in with the Soyuz.”

“It was always an unstated option. Why do you think they sent us out here, Galenka? To operate the Progress in real-time? Part of the reason, certainly, but not all of it.”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“It was, but now we’ve got a much clearer picture of what’s inside Shell 3. We can load in the Progress’s trajectory and follow it all the way in.”

“And if we damage the Soyuz? It’s a fiery ride home without it.”

“Why should we? We’ll be taking excellent care of it.”

“Because our lives will depend on it. You’ve become very courageous all of a sudden, Dimitri. Don’t take this the wrong way, but it’s not what I expected of you.”

“I’m not trying to be anyone’s hero. My blood’s running cold at the idea of flying the Soyuz into that thing. But I happen to know the way their minds work back in Baikonur.

They’ll have thought of the Soyuz option by now, realized that it’s feasible.”

“They won’t force us to do it, though.”

“No, that’s not how they operate. But if we don’t raise the possibility, if we don’t put it on the table, they’ll be very, very disappointed. More disappointed than they’ll already be at us for losing the robot.”

I watched her reflect on what I’d said. In this instance Galenka would have no option but to admit that my grasp of Baikonur politics was superior to hers. I had been a cosmonaut for much longer and I had seen how our superiors punished failings. The best you could hope for was incarceration. The worst was returning to your office to find a loaded revolver and a bottle of vodka.

“I hope you’re right about this, Dimitri. For both our sakes.”

“We have no choice,” I said. “Trust me, Galenka. Nothing that happens in the Matryoshka will be as bad as what they’d do to us for failing our country.”

An hour later we’d informed Baikonur of our decision. Two hours later we had their reply. I went to Yakov and told him what was going to happen.

“You can let me out now,” he said, through the bulkhead window.

“Not until we’re back.”

“You still don’t trust me?”

“It’s just not a risk we can afford to take.”

“Don’t leave me alone on the Tereshkova. I’d rather go with you than stay here on my own.”

“Not an option, I’m afraid. We need the extra space in the Soyuz. But I’m opening comms to your module. You’ll be able to talk to Baikonur, and you’ll be able to talk to us. You won’t feel out of touch.”

“I’m all right now,” Yakov said. “Please believe me. I had a bad turn, I got confused—but everything’s all right now.”

“I’m sorry.”

An hour after that, we were checking our suits and prepping the Soyuz for departure.

“I need bread,” Nesha says. “Let’s go for a walk.”

“In this weather?”

“I need bread. If I don’t go early, there’ll be none left.”

I peer through the window, at the gray-white sky. “I could fetch it for you. If you gave me some money, and told me where to go.” Seeing the sceptical look on her face, I add, “I’d come back.”

“We’ll go together. It’s good exercise for me, to get out of this place. If I didn’t have errands, I’d probably never leave the building.”

Nesha puts on several more layers of clothes and fetches a coat for herself. None of Gennadi’s coats fit me (they’re all too tight in the sleeves) so I’m forced to make do with Doctor Kizim’s again. At least it’s dried a bit, and I have something warm on underneath it. Nesha locks her apartment, turning keys in three separate locks, then we walk slowly to the elevator, still where I left it, on the ninth floor.

“I shouldn’t have mocked you, Dimitri Ivanov. That wasn’t called for.”

The elevator doors close. “Mocked me?”

“About the musical box. The thing you came to give me. Now that we’ve spoken a little more, I see that you’re not the madman I thought you might be. I should have known better.”

“It’s understandable.”

“Did it really come from the Matryoshka?”

“All the way back.”

“Why did they let you keep it?”

“Because they didn’t realize its significance. By the time we got back, I knew that we weren’t going to get an easy ride. The truth that we’d discovered-it wasn’t going to be something our political masters wanted to hear. We were all ill—the perfect excuse for incarceration in some nameless medical facility cum prison or madhouse. Yakov and Galenka were sick with radiation exposure. I was sick with the Matryoshka inside my head. None of us were going to see daylight again.”

“I read the papers and saw the television reports. They never actually lied about what happened to you.”

“They didn’t have to lie. As long as there was a reason not to have us out in public, they were happy.”

The elevator completes its trundling, hesitant descent. We leave the building, venturing into the snow-covered street. I glance around, vigilant for prowling Zils and men in dark suits.

“I kept the musical box with me all the way home. They found it, of course, but it was always presumed to be one of my personal effects-something I’d taken aboard the ship when we left. The idea that it might be an artifact—a. thing from the Matryoshka—that never crossed their minds.”

“And you never thought to tell them?”

“They’d have destroyed it, Nesha. So I kept it close with me, all the time I was in the facility. The only person I ever showed it to was Doctor Kizim, and I don’t think even he believed where it had come from.”

“You must have trusted him.”

“You had to trust someone in a place like that. Just like I’m trusting you now. The musical box is yours now. It’s a piece of the future, in your hands.”

She removes it from her coat. Until then I have no idea that she’s brought it with her.

“The tune it makes . . .” She starts turning the little handle, the notes tinkling out. We’re in the street, but there’s no one else around to notice one old woman with a little metal box in her hands, or to question why she’s turning the handle in its side. “I think I know it. It’s something familiar, isn’t it? Something Russian?”

“Like you always said. But please don’t play it now. It makes my head hurt.”

She stops turning the handle and returns the musical box to her pocket. We trudge on in silence for several more streets, until we’re in sight of the shopping complex where Nesha hopes to find her bread. It looks dingy and disused, but already people are milling around outside. In their dark winter clothes, they form an amorphous, weary mass. Our premier smiles down on them from the looming side of an apartment tower, his lips moving but no sound coming out. Seagulls have pecked away at him, attracted by the flickering colors, flaking away huge pieces of his face.

“If the musical box was in the Matryoshka, then I was right about its origin,” Nesha says. “It did come from the future after all.”

“They never believed you. They never wanted to believe you.”

She glances up at the birdshit-stained edifice, the premier’s moving face. “We live in a flawless collectivized utopia. But a flawless society can’t, by definition, evolve. If it proceeds from one state to another, there must have been something wrong, or sub-optimal, about it. If it gets worse, then the seeds of that worsening must have already been present. It gets better, than it has room for improvement.”

“It all ends,” I say, keeping my voice low. “In less than a human lifetime. That’s what I learned inside the Matryoshka. That and the fact that you were right all along.”

“The musical box won’t make any difference.”

“Except now you know.”

“There was never any doubt in my mind. Not even in the darkest days, when they punished me through Gennadi.” Nesha walks on a few paces. “But still. It was always only a hypothesis. To have firm proof that I was right . . . it does make a difference, to me.”

“That’s all I ever wanted. I felt that we owed you that much. I’m just sorry it took me so long to reach you.”

“You did your best, Dimitri. You got to me in the end.” Then she reaches into her pocket again and takes out the change she’s saved for the bread.

“Clear,” I called from the porthole, as we undocked. “Five meters. Ten meters. Fifteen.” The rest of the ship came into view, silvery under its untidy-looking quilt of reflective foil. It was a bittersweet moment. I’d been looking forward to getting this view for months, but I’d always assumed it would be at mission’s end, as we were about to ride the Soyuz back into Earth’s atmosphere.

“Lining us up,” Galenka said. She was in the command seat, wearing her EVA suit but with the helmet and gloves not yet in place.

I felt the Soyuz wheel around me as it orientated itself towards the Matryoshka. We’d be following the Progress all the way in, relying on the same collision-avoidance algorithm that had worked so well before. I kept telling myself that there was no reason for it to stop working now, just because we were aboard, but I couldn’t quell my fears. My nerves had been frayed even when it had just been the robot at stake. I kept thinking of that American probe sliced in two, coming apart in two perfectly severed halves. How would it feel, I wondered, if we ran into one of those infinitely-sharp field lines? Would we even notice it at first? Would there even be pain, or just a sudden cold numbness from half our bodies?

As it was, we sailed through Shell 1 and Shell 2 without incident. All the while we remained in contact with the Tereshkova, and all the while the Tereshkova remained in contact with the microsat swarm. As windows opened and closed in Shell 3, the Progress reported on its continued existence and functionality. Nothing had happened to it since our departure. It was stuck, but otherwise operational and undamaged.

I clutched at every crumb of comfort. The Matryoshka hadn’t touched the robot. It hadn’t shown any sign of having noticed it. Didn’t that bode well for us? If it didn’t object to one foreign object, there was no reason for it to object to another, especially if we took pains not to get stuck ourselves.

Galenka brought us to a hovering standstill above Shell 3. In the microgravity environment of the Matryoshka the Soyuz only needed to exert a whisper of thrust from its attitude motors to hold station.

“You’d better get buckled in, Dimitri. When a window opens, I’m giving her the throttle. It’ll feel like a booster separation, only harder.”

I made sure I was tight in my seat. “I’m ready. How long do you think?”

“No idea. Just be ready for it when it comes.”

The glass cockpit of the Soyuz was much more advanced than the basic frame of the ship itself, which was older than my grandmother. Before our departure, Galenka had configured the sensors and readouts to emulate the same telemetry she’d been seeing from the Progress. Now all she had to do was watch the scrolling, chattering indications for the auguries of an opening window. She’d have no more than a second or two to assess whether it was a window she could reach in time, given the Soyuz’s capabilities. Deciding that there was nothing I could contribute to the matter, I closed my eyes and waited for the moment.

No matter what happened now, we had made history. We were inside the Matryoshka—the first humans to have made it this far. It had taken three apparitions to achieve this feat. Once, I would have assumed that things would only go from strength to strength with each new return. By the time of the fourth apparition, surely there’d be a permanent human presence out here, following the Matryoshka throughout its orbit. Study stations, research facilities—an entire campus, floating in vacuum.

Now I wondered if anyone would come after us. The space effort was winding down-even the Tereshkova was cobbled together from the bits of earlier, failed enterprises. It seemed to me—though I would never have voiced such a conviction publicly—that it was less important to my country what we found out here, than that we were seen to be doing something no one else could. The scientific returns were almost incidental. Next time, would anyone even bother sending out a ship?

“Brace,” Galenka said.

The thrust came hard, like a hoof kick to the spine. It was worst than any booster separation, stage ignition or de-orbit burn. I had experienced re-entry gee-loads that were enough to push me to the brink of unconsciousness, but those forces had built up slowly, over several minutes. This came instantly, and for a moment I felt as if no bone in my body could possibly have survived unbroken.

Then I realized that I was all right. The engine was still burning, but at least the gee-load was a steady pressure now, like a firm hand rather than a fist.

“We are good for insertion,” Galenka said, as if that had ever been in doubt.

We sailed through the two closely-packed shells, into the luminous blue-green interstitial space above Shell 4. Once we were clear—with the window sealing above us—Galenka did a somersault roll to use the main engine to slow us down again. The thrust burst was longer and less brutal this time. She dropped our speed from hundreds of meters per second to what was only slightly faster than walking pace. The thicket lay ahead or below, depending on my mental orientation. We were making good time. There was no need to rush things now.

Maybe, just maybe, we’d get away with this.

A screen flashed red and began scrolling with error messages. “There goes the Tereshkova,” Galenka said. “We’re out of contact now.” She gave me a fierce grin. “Just you and me, and an impenetrable shell of alien matter between us and the outside world. Starting to feel claustrophobic yet?”

“I’d be insane not to. Do we have a fix on the Progress?”

She jabbed a finger at another readout—target cross-hairs against a moving grid. “Dead ahead, where she said she was. Judging by the data she recorded before getting stuck, we’ll be able to get within 200 meters without difficulty. I won’t risk taking the Soyuz any closer, but we should be able to cover the remaining distance in suits.”

“Whatever it takes.” I checked my watch, strapped around the sleeve of my suit. We’d been out from the mother ship for less than three and a half hours-well ahead of schedule. We had air and fuel to spare, but I still wanted to be out of here as quickly as possible. I kept thinking of that iron ceiling overhead. “How soon until we’re in position?” I asked.

“Twenty minutes, give or take.”

“We spend two hours on station. Nothing changes that. If we don’t succeed in unloading everything, we still leave. Are we clear on that?”

“This was your idea, Dimitri. You decide when we leave.”

“I’m going to finish suiting up. We’ll check comms and life-support thoroughly before we leave. And we’ll make damned sure the Soyuz isn’t going to drift away from us.”

Galenka’s estimate was on the nail. Twenty minutes later we were deep into the thicket, with blue-green structures crowding around us. Closest to us was a trunk or branch with thornlike protrusions. Galenka brought the Soyuz in against the trunk until the hull shuddered with the contact. Ordinarily I’d have been worried about a pressure rupture, but now that we were both wearing helmets that was only a distant concern. Galenka had picked her spot well, for the Soyuz was resting on one of the out-jutting thorns. Friction, and the ship’s almost negligible weight, would serve to hold it in place until we were ready to leave. Galenka had even taken to pains to make sure the forward escape hatch was not blocked.

“Maybe you should stay here, while I check out the Progress,” I said. I didn’t feel heroic, but it seemed the right thing to say.

“If we have to unload it, it’ll go quicker with two of us,” Galenka responded. “We can form a supply chain, save going all the way back each time. And keep an eye on each other.” She unbuckled. “You ready for this? I’m going to vent our air.”

She let the air drain out through the release valve before opening the hatch. As the cabin transitioned to vacuum my suit ballooned around me, the seals and joints creaking with the pressure differential. I’d checked everything, but I was all too conscious of the thin membranes of fabric protecting me from a nasty, lung-freezing death. Every gesture, every movement, was now more awkward, more potentially hazardous than before. Tear a glove on sharp metal, and you might as well have cut your hand off.

Galenka popped the hatch. I pushed these concerns from my mind as best I could and climbed out of the Soyuz. Now that I was seeing the alien environment with my own eyes—through a thin glass visor, rather than a thick porthole or monitor—it appeared much larger, much more oppressive and strange. The all-enveloping shell was a pitiless, hope-crushing black. I told myself that a window would eventually open for us to leave, just as one had allowed us to enter. But it was hard to shake the feeling that we were little warm animals, little shivering mammals with fast heartbeats, caught in a cold dark trap that we had just sprung.

“Let’s do this shit, and get back home,” Galenka said, pushing past me.

We climbed down the pea-green flank of the Soyuz, using the handholds that had been bolted on for weightless operations. We left the ship with the hatch open, the last dribbles of air still venting from the hull. My feet touched the thorn. Although I had almost no weight to speak of, the surface felt solid under me. It was formed from the same translucent material as the rest of Shell 4, but it wasn’t as slippery as glass or ice. I reached out a hand and steadied myself against the trunk. I felt as if I was touching bark or rock through my glove.

“I think we can do this,” I said.

“The Progress should be directly under us, where this trunk constricts against the one over here. I’d rather climb than drift, if that’s okay with you.”

“Agreed. There are thorns all the way down, spaced every three or four meters—we should be able to use them for grabs, even if we can’t get traction on the rest of it. It shouldn’t be much harder coming back up.”

“I’m right behind you.”

If the thicket registered our presence, there was no evidence of it. The structure loomed around us, dizzying in its scale and complexity, but giving no sign of being alive or responsive to the intrusion of human technology. I began to ease, trying to imagine myself in a forest or cave system-something huge but mindless—rather than the glowing guts of an alien machine.

It took fifteen minutes of cautious progress to reach the lodged Progress. It was jammed in nose first, with the engine pointing at us. A ship like that was not normally a man-rated vehicle, but the usual variants had a hatch at the front, so that space station crews could enter the vehicle when it was docked. In the case of ours, the innards had been replaced by scientific gear, computers, additional fuel, and batteries. The docking hatch had become a kind of mouth by which the robot could feed samples into itself, using the feeler-like appendages of its sampling devices. Inside was a robotic system which sorted the samples, fed them into miniature laboratories where appropriate, and delivered whatever was left into a storage volume just ahead of the fuel tanks. We couldn’t have got in through the mouth even if the Progress hadn’t been jammed in nose first, but that didn’t matter. A secondary hatch and docking assembly had been installed in the side, so that the sample compartment could be unloaded through the Tereshkova’s own docking port. Galenka, who had overtaken me in our descent from the Soyuz, was the first to reach the sample hatch. The hatch controls were designed to be opened by someone in a suit. She worked the heavy toggles until the hatch swung open, exposing the non-pressurised storage compartment. The hole in the side of the Progress was just large for a suited person to crawl through. Without hesitation she grabbed yellow handholds and levered herself inside. A few moments later the chamber lit up with the wavering light of her helmet-mounted flashlamp.

“Talk to me, Galenka.”

“It’s all racked and sorted, Dimitri. Must be about half a ton of stuff in here already. Some of the chunks are pretty big. Still warm, too. Going to be a bitch of a job moving all of them back to the Soyuz.”

“We’ll take what we can; that was always the idea. If nothing else we should make sure we’ve got unique samples from both Shell 1 and Shell 2.”

“I’m going to try and bring out the first chunk. I’ll pass it through the hatch. Be ready.”

“I’m here.”

But as I said that, a status panel lit up on the side of my faceplate. “Comms burst from Tereshkova,” I said, as alphanumeric gibberish scrolled past. “A window must just have opened.”

“Feeling better now?”

“Guess it’s nice to know the windows are still behaving.”

“I could have told you they would.” Galenka grunted with the effort of dislodging the sample she had selected. “So—any news?”

“Nothing. Just a carrier signal, trying to establish contact with us. Means the ship’s still out there, though.”

“I could have told you that as well.”

It took 20 minutes to convey one sample back to the Soyuz. Doing it as a relay didn’t help-it took two of us to nurse the object between us, all the while making sure we didn’t drift away from the structure. Things got a little faster after that. We returned to the jammed Progress in good time and only took 15 minutes to get the second sample back to our ship. We now had pieces of Shell 1 and Shell 2 aboard, ready to be taken back home.

A voice at the back of my head said that we should quit while we were ahead. We’d salvaged something from this mess-almost certainly enough to placate Baikonur. We had taken a risk and it had paid off. But there was still more than an hour remaining of the time I had allowed us. If we moved quickly and efficiently—and we were already beginning to settle into a rhythm—we could recover three or four additional samples before it was time to start our journey back. Who knew what difference five or six samples might make, compared to two?

“Just for the record,” Galenka said, when we reached the Progress again, “I’m getting itchy feet here.”

“We’ve still got time. Two more. Then we’ll see how we’re doing.”

“You were a lot more jumpy until that window opened.”

She was right. I couldn’t deny it.

I was thinking of that when another comms burst came through. For a moment I was gladdened—just seeing the scroll of numbers and symbols, even if it meant nothing to me, made me feel closer to the Tereshkova. Home was just three shells and a sprint across vacuum away. Almost close enough to touch, like the space station that had sped across the sky over Klushino, when my father held me on his shoulders.

“Dimitri,” crackled a voice. “Galenka. Yakov here. I hope you can hear me.”

“What is it, friend?” I asked, hearing an edge in his voice I didn’t like.

“You’d better listen carefully—we could get cut off at any moment. Baikonur detected a change in the Matryoshka—a big one. Shell 1 pulsations have increased in amplitude and frequency. It’s like nothing anyone’s seen since the first apparition. Whatever you two are doing in there-it’s having an effect. The thing is waking. You need to think about getting out, while the collision-avoidance algorithm will still get you through Shell 1. Those pulsations change anymore, the algorithm won’t be any use.”

“He could be lying,” Galenka said. “Saying whatever he needs to say that get us to go back.”

“I’m not lying. I want you to come back. And I want that Soyuz back so that at least one of us can get home.”

“I think we’d better move,” I said.

“The remaining samples?”

“Leave them. Let’s just get back to the ship as quickly as possible.”

As I spoke, the comms window blipped out. Galenka pushed away from the Progress. I levered myself onto the nearest thorn and started climbing. It was quicker now that we didn’t have to carry anything between us. I thought of the changing conditions in Shell 1 and hoped that we’d still be able to pick a path through the lethal, shifting maze of field-lines.

We were half way to the Soyuz—I could see it overhead, tantalising near—when Galenka halted, only just below me.

“We’re in trouble,” she said.

“That’s why we have to keep on moving.”

“Something’s coming up from below. We’re not going to make it, Dimitri. It’s rising too quickly.”

I looked down and saw what she meant. We couldn’t see the Progress anymore. It was lost under a silver tide, a sea of gleaming mercury climbing slowly through the thicket, swallowing everything as it rose.

“Climb,” I said.

“We aren’t going to make it. It’s coming too damned fast.”

I gritted my teeth: typical Galenka, pragmatic to the end. But even she had resumed her ascent, unable to stop her body from doing what her mind knew to be futile. She was right, too. The tide was going to envelope us long before we reached the Soyuz. But I couldn’t stop climbing either. I risked a glance down and saw the silver fluid lapping at Galenka’s heels, then surging up to swallow her lowest boot.

“It’s got me.”

“Keep moving.”

She pulled the boot free, reached the next thorn, and for a moment it appeared that she might be capable of out-running the fluid. My mind raced ahead to the Soyuz, realizing that even if we got there in time, even if we got inside and sealed the hatch, we wouldn’t be able to get the ship aloft in time.

Then the fluid took more of Galenka. It lapped to her thighs, then her waist. She slowed her climb.

“It’s pulling me back,” she said, grunting with the effort. “It’s trying to pull me in.”

“Fight it.”

Maybe she did—it was hard to tell, with her movements so impeded. The tide consumed her to the chest, taking her backpack, then absorbed her helmet. She had one hand raised above her head, grasping for the next thorn. The tide took it.

“Galenka.”

“I’m here.” She came through indistinctly, comms crackling with static. “I’m in it now. I can’t see anything. But I can still move, still breathe. It’s like being in the immersion tank.”

“Try and keep climbing.”

“Picking up some suit faults now. Fluid must be interfering with the electronics, with the cooling system.” She faded out, came back, voice crazed with pops and crackles and hisses. “Oh, God. It’s inside. I can feel it. It’s cold, against my skin. Rising through the suit. How the fuck did it get in?”

She faded.

“Galenka. Talk to me.”

“In my helmet now. Oh, God. Oh, God. It’s still rising. I’m going to drown, Dimitri. This is not right. I did not want to fucking drown?

“Galenka?”

I heard a choked scream, then a gurgle. Then nothing.

I kept climbing, while knowing it was useless. The tide reached me a few moments later. It swallowed me and then found a way into my suit, just as it had with Galenka.

Then it found a way into my head.

But neither of us drowned.

There was a moment of absolute terror as it forced its way down my throat, through my eye sockets, nose and ears. The drowning reflex kicked in, and then it was over. Not terror, no panic, just blissful unconsciousness.

Until I woke up on my back.

The silver tide was abating. It had left our bodies, left the inside of our suits. It was draining off them in chrome rivulets, leaving them dry and undamaged. We were lying like upended turtles, something like Earth-normal gravity pinning us to the floor. It took all my effort to lever myself into a sitting position, and then to stand up, fighting the weight of my backpack as it tried to drag me down. My suit was no longer ballooning out, suggesting that we were in some kind of pressurized environment.

I looked around, taking deep, normal breaths.

Galenka and I had arrived in a chamber, a huge iron-gray room with gill-like sluice vents in the side walls. The fluid was rushing out through the vents, exposing a floor of slightly twinkling black, like polished marble. Gray-blue light poured down through hexagonal grids in the arched ceiling. I wasn’t going to take any chances on it being breathable.

I inspected the outer covering for tears or abrasions, but it looked as good as when I’d worn it.

“Galenka,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Dimitri.” I heard her voice on the helmet radio, but also coming through the glass, muffled but comprehensible. “Whatever we just went through—I don’t think it hurt our suits.”

“Do you still have air?”

“According to the gauge, good for another six hours.”

“How do you feel?”

“Like I’ve been scrubbed inside with caustic soda. But otherwise—I’m alright. Clear-headed, like I’ve just woken up after a really slong sleep. I actually feel better, more alert, than before we left the Soyuz.”

“That’s how I feel,” I said. “Where do you think we are?”

“The heart of it. The middle of the Matryoshka. Where else could we be? It must have brought us here for a reason.”

“To analyze us. To assess the foreign objects it detected, then to work out how best to recycle or dispose of them.”

“Maybe. But then why keep us alive? It must recognize that we’re living. It must recognize that we’re thinking beings.”

“Always the optimist, Dimitri.”

“Something’s happening. Look.”

A bar of light had cut across the base of part of the wall. It was becoming taller, as if a seamless door was opening upwards. The light ramming through the widening gap was the same gray-blue that came through the ceiling. Both of us tensing, expecting to be squashed out of existence at any moment, we turned to face whatever awaited us.

Beyond was a kind of corridor, sloping down in a gently steepening arc, so that the end was not visible except as an intensification of that silvery glow. The inwardly-sloping walls of the corridor—rising to a narrow spine of a ceiling—were dense with intricately carved details, traced in the blue-gray light.

“I think we should walk,” Galenka said, barely raising her voice above a whisper.

We started moving, taking stiff, slow paces in our EVA suits. We passed through the door, into the corridor. We started descending the curved ramp of the floor. Though I should have been finding it harder and harder to keep my footing, I had no sense that I was on a steepening grade. I looked at Galenka and she was still walking upright, at right angles to the surface of the floor. I paused to turn around, but already the room we had been in was angled out of view, with the door beginning to lower back down.

“Do you hear that sound?” Galenka asked.

I had been about to say the same thing. Over the huff and puff of our suit circulators it was not the easiest thing to make out. But there was a low droning noise, like the bass note of an organ. It was coming from all around us, from the very fabric of the Matryoshka. It sustained a note for many seconds before changing pitch. As we walked we heard a pattern of notes repeat, with subtle variations. I couldn’t piece together the tune, if indeed there was one-it was too slow, too deep for that—but I didn’t think I was hearing the random emanations of some mindless mechanical process.

“It’s music,” I said. “Slowed down almost to death. But it’s still music.”

“Look at the walls, Dimitri.”

They were astonishing. The walls had been carved with a hypnotically detailed mazelike pattern, one that I could never quite get into focus. Edges and ridges of the pattern pushed out centimeters from the wall, into the corridor. I felt a strange impulse to reach out and touch, as if there was a magnetic attraction working on my fingers. Even as I acknowledged this impulse, Galenka—walking to my left—reached out her left hand and skirted the pattern on her side. She flinched and withdrew her gloved fingers with a gasp of something that could have been pain or astonishment or simple childlike delight.

“What?” I asked.

“I just got . . . I can’t describe it, Dimitri. It was like—everything.”

“Everything what?”

“Everything trying to get into my head. Everything at once. Like the whole universe gatecrashing my brain. It wasn’t unpleasant. It was just-too much.”

I reached out my hand.

“Be careful.”

I touched the wall. My head began to split open with an infusion of crystalline knowledge. It was clean and brittle and virescent green, like the petal of a flower dipped in liquid nitrogen. I could feel the mental sutures straining under the pressure. I flinched back, just as Galenka had done. There could not have been more than an instant of contact, but the information that had gushed through was ringing in my skull like the after-chime of God’s own church bell.

A window of comprehension had opened and slammed shut again. I was dizzy with what it had shown me. I already knew more about the Matryoshka than I had before. I already knew more than any other living person, with the possible exception of Galenka.

“It’s come from the future,” I said.

“I got that as well.”

“They sent it here. They sent it here to carry a message to us.”

I knew these things with an unimpeachable certainty, but I had no additional context for the knowledge. What future, by whom? From how far ahead, and to what purpose? What message? How had it arrived?

I couldn’t stand not knowing. Now that I knew part of the truth, I needed it all.

I reached out my hand again, caressed the wall. It hit me harder this time, but the instinct to flinch away, the instinct to close my mind, was not as strong. The crystalline rush made me gasp. There couldn’t be room in my head for all that was being pumped into it, and yet it continued without interruption. Layers of wisdom poured into me, cooling and stratifying like ancient rock. My head felt like a boulder perched on my shoulders. I laughed: it was the only possible response, other than screaming terror. The flow continued, increasing in pressure.

This much I understood:

The Matryoshka was a complex machine. It was layered because it had no choice but to be. Each layer was a form of armor or camouflage or passkey, evolved organically to enable it to slip through the threshing clockwork of a cosmic time machine. That time machine was older than Earth. It had been constructed by alien minds and then added to and modified by successive intelligences.

In the future, humanity found it.

At its ticking, whirling core was a necklace of neutron stars. It had been known since our own era that a sufficiently long, sufficiently dense, sufficiently fast-rotating cylinder had the property of twisting spacetime around itself until a path into the past became possible. Such a path—a mathematical trajectory in space, like an orbit-could take a signal or object to any previous point in time, provided it was no earlier than the moment of the time machine’s construction.

Constructing such a machine was not child’s play.

A single neutron star could be made to have the requisite density and spin, but it lacked the necessary axial elongation. To overcome this, the machine’s builders had approximated a cylinder by stringing 441 neutron stars together until they were almost touching, like beads on a wire. An open-ended string would have collapsed under its own appalling self-gravity, so the ends had been bent around and joined, with the entire ensemble revolving fast enough to stabilize the neutron stars against falling inward. It still wasn’t a cylinder, but locally—as far as a photon or vehicle near the necklace was concerned-it might as well have been.

The machine had catapulted the Matryoshka into the prehuman past of our galaxy. The insertion into time-reversed flight, the passage through the various filters and barriers installed to prevent illicit use of the ancient machinery, the exit back into normal timeflow, had caused eleven additional layers of shell to be sacrificed. What we saw of the Matryoshka was just the scarred kernel of what had once been a much larger entity.

But it had survived. It had come through, albeit overshooting its target era by many millions of years. Yet that had been allowed for; it was easier to leap back into the deep past and crawl forward in time than to achieve a bullseye into a relatively recent era. The emergence event was indeed the opening of a local wormhole throat, but only so that the Matryoshka (which incorporated wormhole-manipulating machinery in Shells 1 and 2) could complete the last leg of its journey.

How far downstream had it come? A hundred years? A thousand years? Five thousand?

I couldn’t tell. The knowledge told me everything, but not all of that wisdom was framed in terms I could readily decode. But I could sense a thread, a sense of connectedness between the era of the Matryoshka and our own. They knew a lot about us.

Enough to know that we had made a terrible mistake.

At last I jerked my hand away from the wall. The urge to return it was almost overwhelming, but I could only take so much in one go.

“Dimitri?”

“I’m here.”

“I thought you were gone for a while there.”

I turned to face my comrade. Against the vastness I had been shown, the cosmic scale of the history I had almost glimpsed, Galenka appeared no more substantial than a paper cut-out. She was just a human being, translucent with her own insubstantiality, pinned in this one moving instant like dirt on a conveyor belt. It took moments for my sense of scale to normalize; to realize that, for all that the machine had shown me, I was just like her.

“They sent it back for us,” I said. The words came out in a rush, and yet at the same time each syllable consumed an eternity of time and effort. “To show us how we’ve gone wrong. There’s history here-lots of it. In these walls. Mountains, chasms, of data.”

“You need to slow your breathing. That silver stuff that got into us—it’s primed us in some way, hasn’t it? Rewired our minds so that the Matryoshka can get into them?”

“I think—maybe. Yes.”

“Get a grip, Dimitri. We still need to get home.”

I made to touch the wall again. The urge was still there, the hunger-the vacuum in my head-returning. The Matryoshka still had more to tell me. It was not done with Dimitri Ivanov.

“Don’t,” Galenka said, with a firmness that stopped my hand. “Not now. Not until we’ve seen the rest of this place.”

At her urging I resisted. I found that if kept to the middle of the corridor, it wasn’t as bad. But the walls were still whispering to me, inviting me to stroke my hand against them.

“The Second Soviet,” I said.

“What about it?”

“It falls. Fifty years from now, maybe sixty. Somewhere near the end of the century. I saw it in the history.” I paused and swallowed hard. “This road we’re on—this path. It’s not the right one. We took a wrong turn, somewhere between the first and second apparitions. But by the time we realize it, by the time the Soviet falls, it’s too late. Not just for Russia, but for Earth. For humankind.”

“It came from our future. Even I felt that, and I only touched it briefly.”

“There’s a darkness between then and now. Like a black river we have to cross. A bad, dark time. A bottleneck. Humanity survives, but only just. It’s something to do with the Second Soviet, and turning away from space. That’s the mistake. When the darkness comes, it’s because we’ve turned away from space travel. Something comes and we aren’t ready for it.”

We were still walking, following the arcing downslope of the corridor, towards the silver-blue radiance at its end. “The Second Soviet is the only political organization still doing space travel. If anything we’re the ones holding the candle.”

“It’s not enough. Now that the other nations have abandoned their efforts, we have to do more than just subsist. And if we are holding the candle, it won’t be for much longer.”

“The Second Soviet won’t like being told it’s a mistake of history.”

There was a fierce dryness in my throat. “It can’t ignore the message in the Matryoshka. Not now.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that. But you know something, Dimitri?”

“What?”

“If this thing is from the future—from our future-then maybe it’s Russian as well. Or sent back to meet Russians. Which might mean that Nesha Petrova was right after all.”

“They should tell her,” I said.

“I’m sure it’ll be the first thing on their minds, after they’ve spent all these years crushing and humiliating her.” Galenka fell silent for a few paces. “It’s like they always knew, isn’t it.”

“They couldn’t have.”

“But they knew enough to want her to be wrong. A message from the future, intended for us? What could we possibly need to hear from our descendants, except their undying gratitude?”

“Everything we say is being logged on our suit recorders,” I said. “Logged and compressed and stored, so that it can be sent back to the Soyuz and then back to the Tereshkova, and then back to Baikonur.”

“Right now, comrade, there are several things I give more than a damn about than arsehole of a party official listening to what I have to say.”

I smiled, because that was exactly how I felt as well.

In 60 years the Second Soviet was dust. The history I had absorbed told me that nothing could prevent that. Accelerate it, yes—and maybe the arrival of the Matryoshka would do just that—but not prevent it. They could crucify us and it wouldn’t change anything.

It was a crumb of consolation.

The corridor widened, the intricate walls flanking away on either side, until we reached a domed room of cathedral proportions. The chamber was round, easily a hundred meters across, with a domed ceiling. I saw no way in or out other than the way we had come. There was a jagged design in the floor, worked in white and black marble-rapier-thin shards radiating from the middle.

The music intensified—rising in pitch, rising in speed. If there was a tune there it was almost on the point of being comprehensible. I had a mental image of a rushing winter landscape, under white skies.

“This is it, then,” Galenka said. “An empty fucking room. After all this.” She took a hesitant step towards the middle, then halted.

“Wait,” I said.

Something was happening.

The black and white shards were pulling back from the middle, sliding invisibly into the floor’s circular border, a star-shaped blackness opening up in the center. It all happened silently, with deathly slowness. Galenka stepped back, the two of us standing side by side. When the star had widened to ten or twelve meters across, the floor stopped moving. Smoothly, silently, something rose from the darkness. It was a plinth, and there was a figure on the plinth, lying down with his face to the domed ceiling. Beneath the plinth, icy with frost, was a thick tangle of pipes and coiling, intestinal machinery. We stood and watched it in silence, neither of us ready to make the first move. There was a tingle in my head that was not quite a headache just now, but which promised to become one.

The floor began to slide back into place, the jagged blades locking beneath the plinth. There was now an uninterrupted surface between the resting figure and us. Galenka and I glanced at each other through our visors then began a slow, measured walk. The slope-sided plinth rose two meters from the floor, putting the reclining figure just above our heads. It hadn’t moved, or shown the least sign of life, since emerging through the floor.

We reached the plinth. There was a kind of ledge or step in the side, allowing us to bring our heads level with the figure. We stood looking at it, saying nothing, the silence only punctuated by the labored, bellows-like sound of our air circulators.

That it was human had been obvious from the moment the plinth rose. The shape of the head, the ribbed chest, the placement and articulation of the limbs-it was all too familiar to be alien. Anyway, I knew that something descended from us-something essentially human-had sent back the Matryoshka. My bright new memories told me now that I was seeing the pilot, the navigator that had steered the artifact through the vicious barbs of the booby-trapped time machine, and then up through time, skipping through a cascade of wormholes, to our present era. The pilot was ghostly pale, wraithe-thin and naked, lying on a white metallic couch or rack that at first glance appeared to be an apparatus of torture or savage restraint. But then I decided that the apparatus was merely the control and life-support interface for the pilot. It was what had kept him alive, and what had given him the reins of the vast, layered machine it was his duty to steer and safeguard.

I sensed that the journey had not been a short one. In the Matryoshka’s reference frame, it had consumed centuries of subjective time. The pilot, bio-modified for longevity and uninterrupted consciousness, had experienced every howling second of his voyage. That had always been the intention.

But something had gone wrong. A miscalculation, a problem with the injection into the time machine. Or the emergence, or the wormhole skip. Something I couldn’t grasp, except in the nature of its outcome. The journey wasn’t supposed to have taken this long.

“The pilot went mad.”

“You know this for a fact,” Galenka said.

“You’d think this was a punishment—to be put inside the Matryoshka, alone, hurled back in time. But in fact it was the highest honor imaginable. They glorified him. He was entrusted with a mission of unimaginable importance.”

“To change their past?”

“No. They were stuck with what they already had. You can change someone else’s past, but not your own. That’s how time travel works. We have a different future now-one that won’t necessarily include the people who built the Matryoshka. But they did it for us, not themselves. To redeem one possible history, even if they couldn’t mend their own. And he paid for that with his sanity.”

Galenka was silent for long moments. I surveyed the figure, taking in more of the details. Had he been standing, he would have towered over both of us. His arms were by his sides—his hands were small and boyish, out of proportion to the rest of him. His fists were clenched. The emaciated form was partly machine. The couch extended parts of itself into his body. Glowing blue lines slipped into orifices and punctured his flesh at a dozen points. Hard, non-biological forms bulged under drum-tight flesh. His eye sockets were stuffed with faceted blue crystals, radiating a spray of glowing fibers. There was something not quite right about the shape of his skull, as if some childhood deformity had never healed in the right way. It was hairless, papered over with translucent, finely veined skin. His lips were a bloodless gash.

“The music,” Galenka said, breaking the reverence. “You think it’s coming from his head, don’t you?”

“I think music must have comforted him during his journey. Somewhere along the way, though, it swallowed up his mind. It’s locked in a loop, endlessly repeating. He’s like a rat in a wheel, going round and round. By the time he came out of the wormhole, there couldn’t have been enough left of him to finish the mission.”

“He made the Matryoshka sing.”

“It might have been the last thing he did, before the madness took over completely. The last message he could get through to us. He knew how alien the artifact would have appeared to us, with its shells of camouflage and disguise. He made it sing, thinking we’d understand. A human signal, a sign that we shouldn’t fear it. That no matter how alien it appeared on the outside, there was something human at the heart. A message for the species, a last chance not to screw things up.”

“Would it have killed him to use radio?”

“He had to get it through Shell 3, remember-not to mention how many shells we’ve come through since Shell 4. Maybe it just wasn’t possible. Maybe the simplest thing really was to have the Matryoshka sing itself to us. After all, it’s not as if someone didn’t notice in the end.”

“Or maybe he was just insane, and the music’s just a side-effect.”

“That’s also a possibility,” I said.

The impulse that had drawn my hand towards the patterned wall seemed to compel me to reach out and touch the pilot. I was moving my arm when the figure twitched, convulsing within the constraints of the couch. The blue lines strained like ropes in a squall. I jerked in my suit, nerves battling with curiosity. The figure was still again, but something about it had changed.

“Either it just died,” Galenka said, “or it just came back to life. You want to take a guess, Dimitri?”

I said nothing. It was all I could do to stare at the pilot. His chest wasn’t moving, and I doubted that there was a heart beating inside that ribcage. But something was different.

The pilot’s head turned. The movement was glacially slow, more like a flower following the sun than the movement of an animal. It must have cost him an indescribable effort just to look at us. I could read no expression in the tight mask of his face or the blue facets of his eyes. But I knew we had his full attention.

The gash of his lips opened. He let out a long, slow sigh.

“You made it,” I said. “You completed your mission.”

Perhaps it was my imagination—I would never know for certain—but it seemed to me then that the head nodded a fraction, as if acknowledging what I had said. As if thanking me for bringing this news.

Then there was another gasp of air—longer, this time. It had something of death about it. The eyes were still looking at me, but all of a sudden I didn’t sense any intellect behind them. I wondered if the pilot had conserved some last flicker of sanity for the time when he had visitors—just enough selfhood to die knowing whether he had succeeded or failed.

Tension exited the body. The head lolled back into the frame, looking sideways. His arm slumped to the side, dangling over the side of the plinth. The fist relaxed, letting something small and metallic drop to the floor.

I reached down and picked up the item, taking it as gingerly I could in my suit gloves. It was a tiny metal box with a handle in the side and I stared down at it as if it was the most alien thing in the universe. Which, in that moment, I think it probably was.

“A keepsake,” I said, wondering aloud. “Something he was allowed to bring with him from the future. Something as ancient as the world he was aiming for. Something that must have been centuries old when he began his journey.”

“Maybe,” Galenka said.

I closed my own fist around the musical box. It was a simple human trinket, the most innocent of machines. I wanted to take my gloves off, to find out what it played. But I wondered if I already knew.

A little later the chrome tide came to wash us away again.

The men are waiting next to Nesha’s apartment when we return with her bread. I never saw their Zil, if that was how they arrived. There are three of them. They all have heavy black coats on, with black leather gloves. The two burlier men—whose faces mean nothing to me—have hats on, the brims dusted with snow. The third man isn’t wearing a hat, although he has a pale blue scarf around his throat. He’s thinner than the others, with a shaven, bullet-shaped head and small round glasses that bestow a look somewhere between professorial and ascetic. Something about his face is familiar; I feel that we’ve known each other somewhere before. He’s taking a cigarette out of a packet when our eyes lock. It’s the same contraband variety I used to buy on my ride into town.

“This is my fault,” I say to Nesha. “I didn’t mean to bring these men here.”

“We’ve come to take you back to the facility,” the bald man says, pausing to ignite the cigarette from a miniature lighter. “Quite frankly, I didn’t expect to find you alive. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to find you.”

“Do I know you?”

“Of course you know me. I’m Doctor Grechko. We’ve spent a lot of time together at the facility.”

“I’m not going back. You know that by now.”

“I beg to differ.” He takes a long drag on the cigarette. “You’re coming with us. You’ll thank me for it eventually, I assure you.” He nods at one of the hatted men, who reaches into his coat pocket and extracts a syringe with a plastic cap on the needle. The man pinches the cap between his gloved fingers and removes it. He holds the syringe to eye level, taps away bubbles and presses the plunger to squirt out a few drops of whatever’s inside.

The railing along the balcony is very low. We’re nine floors up, and although there’s snow on the ground, it won’t do much to cushion my fall. I’ve done what I came to do, so what’s to prevent me from taking my own life, in preference to being taken back to the facility?

“I’m sorry I brought this on you,” I tell Nesha, and make to lift myself over the railing. My resolve at that moment was total. I’m surrendered to the fall, ready for white annihilation. I want the music in my head to end. Death and silence, for eternity.

But I’m not fast enough, or my resolve isn’t as total as I imagine. The other hatted man rushes to me and locks his massive hand around my arm. The other one moves closer with the syringe.

“Not just yet,” Doctor Grechko—if that was his name-says. “He’s safe now, but keep a good grip on him.”

“What happens to Nesha?” I ask.

Grechko looks at her, then shakes his head. “There’s no harm in talking to a madwoman, Georgi. Whatever you may have told her, she’ll confuse it with all that rubbish she already believes. No worse than telling secrets to a dog. And even if she didn’t, no one would listen to her. Really, she isn’t worth our inconvenience. You, on the other hand, are extraordinarily valuable to us.”

Something’s wrong. I feel an icebreaker cutting through my brain.

“My name isn’t Georgi.”

Doctor Grechko nods solemnly. “No matter what you may currently believe, you are Doctor Georgi Kizim. You’re even wearing his coat. Look in the pocket if you doubt me—there’s a good chance you still have his security pass.”

“No,” I insist. “I am not Georgi Kizim. I know that man, but I’m not him. I just took his coat, so that I could escape. I am the cosmonaut, Dimitri Ivanov. I was on the Tereshkova. I went into the Matryoshka.”

“No,” Doctor Grechko corrects patiently. “You are not Ivanov. You are not the cosmonaut. He was—is, to a degree-your patient. You were assigned to treat him, to learn what you could. Unfortunately, the protocol was flawed. We thought we could prevent a repeat of what happened with Yakov, but we were wrong. You began to identify too strongly with your patient, just as Doctor Malyshev began to identify with Yakov. We still don’t understand the mechanism, but after the business with Malyshev we thought we’d put in enough safeguards to stop it happening twice. Clearly, we were wrong about that. Even with Ivanov in his vegetative state . . .”

“I am Ivanov,” I say, but with a chink of doubt opening inside me.

“Maybe you should look in the coat,” Nesha says.

My fingers numb with cold, I dig into the pocket until I touch the hard edge of his security pass. The hatted man’s still keeping a good hold on my arm. I pass the white plastic rectangle to Nesha. She squints, holding it at arm’s length, studying the little hologram.

“It’s you,” she says. “There’s no doubt.”

I shake my head. “There’s been a mistake. Our files mixed up. I’m not Doctor Kizim. I remember being on that ship, everything that happened.”

“Only because you spent so much time in his presence,” Grechko says, not without compassion. “After Dimitri fell into the intermittent vegetative state, we considered the risks of contamination to be significantly reduced. We relaxed the safeguards.”

“I am not Doctor Kizim.”

“You are. Just as Malyshev believed he was Yakov, you believe you’re Ivanov. But you’ll come out of it, Georgi—trust me. We got Malyshev back in the end. It was traumatic, but eventually his old personality resurfaced. Now he remembers being Yakov, but he’s in no doubt as to his core identity. We can do the same for you, I promise. Just come back with us, and all will be well.”

“Look at the picture,” Nesha says, handing the pass back to me.

I do. My eyes take a moment to focus—the snow and the cold are making them water—but when they do there’s no doubt. I’m looking at the same face that I’d seen in the mirror in Nesha’s apartment. Cleaned and tidied, but still me.

“I’m scared.”

“Of course you’re scared. Who wouldn’t be?” Grechko stubs out the cigarette and extends a gloved hand. “Will you come with us now, Georgi? So that we can start helping you?”

“I have no choice, do I?”

“It’s for the best.”

Seeing that I’m going to come without a struggle, Grechko nods at the man with the syringe to put it back in his pocket. The other hatted man gives me an encouraging shove, urging me to start walking along the landing to the waiting elevator. I resist for a moment, looking back at Nesha. I crave some last moment of connection with the woman I’ve risked my life to visit.

She nods once.

I don’t think Grechko or the other men see her do it. Then she pulls her hand from her pocket and shows me the musical box, before closing her fist on it as if it’s the most secret and precious thing in the universe. As if recalling something from a dream, I remember another hand placing that musical box in mine. It’s the hand of a cosmonaut, urging me to do something before he slips into coma.

I have no idea what’s going to happen to either of us now. Nesha’s old, but not so old that she might not have decades of life ahead of her. If she’s ever doubted that she was right, she now has concrete proof. A life redeemed, if it needed redeeming. They’ll still humiliate her at every turn, given the chance. But she’ll know with an iron certainty they’re wrong, and she’ll also know that everything they stand for will one day turn to dust.

“Am I really Doctor Kizim?” I ask Grechko, as the elevator takes us down.

“You know it in your heart.”

I stroke my face, comparing what I touch with the memories I feel to be real. “I was so sure.”

“That’s the way it happens. But it’s a good sign that you’re already questioning these fundamental certainties.”

“The cosmonaut?” I ask, suddenly unable to mention him by name.

“Yes?”

“You mentioned him being in an intermittent vegetative state.”

“He’s been like that for a while. I’m surprised you don’t remember. He just lies there and watches us. Watches us and hums, making the same tune over and over again. One of us recognized it eventually.” With only mild interest Grechko adds, “That piece by Prokofiev, the famous one?”

“Troika,” I say, as the door opens. “Yes, I know it well.”

They take me out into the snow, to the Zil that must have been waiting out of sight. The man with the syringe walks ahead and opens the rear passenger door, beckoning me into it as if I’m some high-ranking party official. I get in without causing a scene. The Zil’s warm and plush and silent.

As we speed away from Star City, I press my face against the glass and watch the white world rush by as if in a sleigh-ride.

THE SULTAN OF THE CLOUDS

Geoffrey A. Landis

When Leah Hamakawa and I arrived at Riemann orbital, there was a surprise waiting for Leah: a message. Not an electronic message on a link-pad, but an actual physical envelope, with Doctor Leah Hamakawa lettered on the outside in flowing handwriting.

Leah slid the note from the envelope. The message was etched on a stiff sheet of some hard crystal that gleamed a brilliant translucent crimson. She looked at it, flexed it, ran a fingernail over it, and then held it to the light, turning it slightly. The edges caught the light and scattered it across the room in droplets of fire. “Diamond,” she said. “Chromium impurities give it the red color; probably nitrogen for the blue. Charming.” She handed it to me. “Careful of the edges, Tinkerman; I don’t doubt it might cut.”

I ran a finger carefully over one edge, but found that Leah’s warning was unnecessary; some sort of passivation treatment had been done to blunt the edge to keep it from cutting. The letters were limned in blue, so sharply chiseled on the sheet that they seemed to rise from the card. The title read, “Invitation from Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum.” In smaller letters, it continued, “We find your researches on the ecology of Mars to be of some interest. We would like to invite you to visit our residences at Hypatia at your convenience and talk.”

I didn’t know the name Carlos Fernando, but the family Nordwald-Gruenbaum needed no introduction. The invitation had come from someone within the intimate family of the Satrap of Venus.

Transportation, the letter continued, would be provided.

The Satrap of Venus. One of the twenty old men, the lords and owners of the solar system. A man so rich that human standards of wealth no longer had any meaning. What could he want with Leah?

I tried to remember what I knew about the sultan of the clouds, satrap of the fabled floating cities. It seemed very far away from everything I knew. The society, I thought I remembered, was said to be decadent and perverse, but I knew little more. The inhabitants of Venus kept to themselves.

Riemann station was ugly and functional, the interior made of a dark anodized aluminum with a pebbled surface finish. There was a viewport in the lounge, and Leah had walked over to look out. She stood with her back to me, framed in darkness. Even in her rumpled ship’s suit, she was beautiful, and I wondered if I would ever find the clue to understanding her.

As the orbital station rotated, the blue bubble of Earth slowly rose in front of her, a fragile and intricate sculpture of snow and cobalt, outlining her in a sapphire light. “There’s nothing for me down there,” she said.

I stood in silence, not sure if she even remembered I was there.

In a voice barely louder than the silence, she said, “I have no past.”

The silence was uncomfortable. I knew I should say something, but I was not sure what. “I’ve never been to Venus,” I said at last.

“I don’t know anybody who has.” Leah turned. “I suppose the letter doesn’t specifically say that I should come alone.” Her tone was matter of fact, neither discouraging nor inviting.

It was hardly enthusiastic, but it was better than no. I wondered if she actually liked me, or just tolerated my presence. I decided it might be best not to ask. No use pressing on my luck.

The transportation provided turned out to be the Sulieman, a fusion yacht.

Sulieman was more than merely first-class, it was excessively extravagant. It was larger than many ore transports, huge enough that any ordinary yacht could have easily fit within the most capacious of its recreation spheres. Each of its private cabins—and it had seven—was larger than an ordinary habitat module. Big ships commonly were slow ships, but Sulieman was an exception, equipped with an impressive amount of delta-V, and the transfer orbit to Venus was scheduled for a transit time well under that of any commercial transport ship.

We were the only passengers.

Despite its size, the ship had a crew of just three: captain, and first and second pilot. The captain, with the shaven head and saffron robe of a Buddhist novice, greeted us on entry, and politely but firmly informed us that the crew were not answerable to orders of the passengers. We were to keep to the passenger section, and we would be delivered to Venus. Crew accommodations were separate from the passenger accommodations, and we should expect not to see or hear from the crew during the voyage.

“Fine,” was the only comment Leah had.

When the ship had received us and boosted into a fast Venus transfer orbit, Leah found the smallest of the private cabins and locked herself in it.

Leah Hamakawa had been with the Pleiades Institute for twenty years. She had joined young, when she was still a teenager—long before I’d ever met her—and I knew little of her life before then, other than that she had been an orphan. The institute was the only family that she had.

It seems to me sometimes that there are two Leahs. One Leah is shy and childlike, begging to be loved. The other Leah is cool and professional, who can hardly bear being touched, who hates—or perhaps disdains—people.

Sometimes I wonder if she had been terribly hurt as a child. She never talks about growing up, never mentions her parents. I had asked her, once, and the only thing she said was that that is all behind her, long ago and far away.

I never knew my position with her. Sometimes I almost think that she must love me, but cannot bring herself to say anything. Other times she is so casually thoughtless that I believe she never thinks of me as more than a technical assistant, indistinguishable from any other tech. Sometimes I wonder why she even bothers to allow me to hang around.

I damn myself silently for being too cowardly to ask.

While Leah had locked herself away, I explored the ship. Each cabin was spherical, with a single double-glassed octagonal viewport on the outer cabin wall. The cabins had every luxury imaginable, even hygiene facilities set in smaller adjoining spheres, with booths that sprayed actual water through nozzles onto the occupant’s body.

Ten hours after boost, Leah had still not come out. I found another cabin and went to sleep.

In two days I was bored. I had taken apart everything that could be taken apart, examined how it worked, and put it back together. Everything was in perfect condition; there was nothing for me to fix.

But, although I had not brought much with me, I’d brought a portable office. I called up a librarian agent, and asked for history.

In the beginning of the human expansion outward, transport into space had been ruinously expensive, and only governments and obscenely rich corporations could afford to do business in space. When the governments dropped out, a handful of rich men bought their assets. Most of them sold out again, or went bankrupt. A few of them didn’t. Some stayed on due to sheer stubbornness, some with the fervor of an ideological belief in human expansion, and some out of a cold-hearted calculation that there would be uncountable wealth in space, if only it could be tapped. When the technology was finally ready, the twenty families owned it all.

Slowly, the frontier opened, and then the exodus began. First by the thousands: Baha’i, fleeing religious persecution; deposed dictators and their sycophants, looking to escape with looted treasuries; drug lords and their retinues, looking to take their profits beyond the reach of governments or rivals. Then, the exodus began by the millions, all colors of humanity scattering from the Earth to start a new life in space. Splinter groups from the Church of John the Avenger left the unforgiving mother church seeking their prophesied destiny; dissidents from the People’s Republic of Malawi, seeking freedom; vegetarian communes from Alaska, seeking a new frontier; Mayans, seeking to reestablish a Maya homeland; libertarians, seeking their free-market paradise; communists, seeking a place outside of history to mold the new communist man. Some of them died quickly, some slowly, but always there were more, a never-ending flood of dissidents, malcontents and rebels, people willing to sign away anything for the promise of a new start. A few of them survived. A few of them thrived. A few of them grew.

And every one of them had mortgaged their very balls to the twenty families for passage.

Not one habitat in a hundred managed to buy its way out of debt—but the heirs of the twenty became richer than nations, richer than empires.

The legendary war between the Nordwald industrial empire and the Gruenbaum family over solar-system resources had ended when Patricia Gruenbaum sold out her controlling interest in the family business. Udo Nordwald, tyrant and patriarch of the Nordwald industrial empire—now Nordwald-Gruenbaum—had no such plans to discard or even dilute his hard-battled wealth. He continued his consolidation of power with a merger-by-marriage of his only son, a boy not even out of his teens, with the shrewd and calculating heiress of la Jolla. His closest competitors gone, Udo retreated from the outer solar system, leaving the long expansion outward to others. He established corporate headquarters, a living quarters for workers, and his own personal dwelling in a place which was both central to the inner system, and also a spot that nobody had ever before thought possible to colonize. He made his reputation by colonizing the planet casually called the solar system’s Hell planet.

Venus.

The planet below grew from a point of light into a gibbous white pearl, too bright to look at. The arriving interplanetary yacht shed its hyperbolic excess in a low pass through Venus’ atmosphere, rebounded leisurely into high elliptical orbit, and then circularized into a two-hour parking orbit.

Sulieman had an extravagant viewport, a single transparent pane four meters in diameter, and I floated in front of it, watching the transport barque glide up to meet us. I had thought Sulieman a large ship; the barque made it look like a miniature. A flattened cone with a rounded nose and absurdly tiny rocket engines at the base, it was shaped in the form of a typical planetary-descent lifting body, but one that must have been over a kilometer long, and at least as wide. It glided up to the Sulieman and docked with her like a pumpkin mating with a pea.

The size, I knew, was deceiving. The barque was no more than a thin skin over a hollow shell made of vacuum-foamed titanium surrounding a vast empty chamber. It was designed not to land, but to float in the atmosphere, and to float it required a huge volume and almost no weight. No ships ever landed on the surface of Venus; the epithet “hell” was well chosen. The transfer barque, then, was more like a space-going dirigible than a spaceship, a vehicle as much at home floating in the clouds as floating in orbit.

Even knowing that the vast bulk of the barque was little more substantial than vacuum, though, I found the effect intimidating.

It didn’t seem to make any impression on Leah. She had come out from her silent solitude when we approached Venus, but she barely glanced out the viewport in passing. It was often hard for me to guess what would attract her attention. Sometimes I had seen her spend an hour staring at a rock, apparently fascinated by a chunk of ordinary asteroidal chondrite, turning it over and examining it carefully from every possible angle. Other things, like a spaceship nearly as big as a city, she ignored as if they had no more importance than dirt.

Bulky cargos were carried in compartments in the hollow interior of the barque, but since there were just two of us descending to Venus, we were invited to sit up in the pilot’s compartment, a transparent blister almost invisible at the front.

The pilot was another yellow-robed Buddhist. Was this a common sect for Venus pilots, I wondered? But this pilot was as talkative as Sulieman’s pilot had been reclusive. As the barque undocked, a tether line stretched out between it and the station. The station lowered the barque toward the planet. While we were being lowered down the tether, the pilot pointed out every possible sight—tiny communications satellites crawling across the sky like turbocharged ants; the pinkish flashes of lightning on the night hemisphere of the planet far below; the golden spider’s web of a microwave power relay. At thirty kilometers, still talking, the pilot severed the tether, allowing the barque to drop free. The Earth and moon, twin stars of blue and white, rose over the pearl of the horizon. Factory complexes were distantly visible in orbit, easy to spot by their flashing navigation beacons and the transport barques docked to them, so far away that even the immense barques were shrunken to insignificance.

We were starting to brush atmosphere now, and a feeling of weight returned, and increased. Suddenly we were pulling half a gravity of overgee. Without ever stopping talking, the pilot-monk deftly rolled the barque inverted, and Venus was now over our heads, a featureless white ceiling to the universe. “Nice view there, is it not?” the pilot said. “You get a great feel for the planet in this attitude. Not doing it for the view, though, nice as it is; I’m just getting that old hypersonic lift working for us, holding us down. These barques are rather a bit fragile; can’t take them in too fast, have to play the atmosphere like a big bass fiddle. Wouldn’t want us to bounce off the atmosphere, now, would you?” He didn’t pause for answers to his questions, and I wondered if he would have continued his travelogue even if we had not been there.

The gee level increased to about a standard, then steadied.

The huge beast swept inverted through the atmosphere, trailing an ionized cloud behind it. The pilot slowed toward subsonic, and then rolled the barque over again, skipping upward slightly into the exosphere to cool the glowing skin, then letting it dip back downward. The air thickened around us as we descended into the thin, featureless haze. And then we broke through the bottom of the haze into the clear air below it, and abruptly we were soaring above the endless sea of clouds.

Clouds.

A hundred and fifty million square kilometers of clouds, a billion cubic kilometers of clouds. In the ocean of clouds the floating cities of Venus are not limited, like terrestrial cities, to two dimensions only, but can float up and down at the whim of the city masters, higher into the bright cold sunlight, downward to the edges of the hot murky depths.

Clouds. The barque sailed over cloud-cathedrals and over cloud-mountains, edges recomplicated with cauliflower fractals. We sailed past lairs filled with cloud-monsters a kilometer tall, with arched necks of cloud stretching forward, threatening and blustering with cloud-teeth, cloud-muscled bodies with clawed feet of flickering lightning.

The barque was floating now, drifting downward at subsonic speed, trailing its own cloud-contrail, which twisted behind us like a scrawl of illegible handwriting. Even the pilot, if not actually fallen silent, had at least slowed down his chatter, letting us soak in the glory of it. “Quite something, isn’t it?” he said. “The kingdom of the clouds. Drives some people batty with the immensity of it, or so they say—cloud-happy, they call it here. Never get tired of it, myself. No view like the view from a barque to see the clouds.” And to prove it, he banked the barque over into a slow turn, circling a cloud pillar that rose from deep down in the haze to tower thousands of meters above our heads. “Quite a sight.”

“Quite a sight,” I repeated.

The pilot-monk rolled the barque back, and then pointed, forward and slightly to the right. “There. See it?”

I didn’t know what to see. “What?”

“There.”

I saw it now, a tiny point glistening in the distance. “What is it?”

“Hypatia. The jewel of the clouds.”

As we coasted closer, the city grew. It was an odd sight. The city was a dome, or rather, a dozen glistening domes melted haphazardly together, each one faceted with a million panels of glass. The domes were huge; the smallest nearly a kilometer across, and as the barque glided across the sky the facets caught the sunlight and sparkled with reflected light. Below the domes, a slender pencil of rough black stretched down toward the cloudbase like taffy, delicate as spun glass, terminating in an absurdly tiny bulb of rock that seemed far too small to counterbalance the domes.

“Beautiful, you think, yes? Like the wonderful jellyfishes of your blue planet’s oceans. Can you believe that half a million people live there?”

The pilot brought us around the city in a grand sweep, showing off, not even bothering to talk. Inside the transparent domes, chains of lakes glittered in green ribbons between boulevards and delicate pavilions. At last he slowed to a stop, and then slowly leaked atmosphere into the vacuum vessel that provided the buoyancy. The barque settled down gradually, wallowing from side to side now that the stability given by its forward momentum was gone. Now it floated slightly lower than the counterweight. The counterweight no longer looked small, but loomed above us, a rock the size of Gibraltar. Tiny fliers affixed tow-ropes to hardpoints on the surface of the barque, and slowly we were winched into a hard-dock.

“Welcome to Venus,” said the monk.

The surface of Venus is a place of crushing pressure and hellish temperature. Rise above it, though, and the pressure eases, the temperature cools. Fifty kilometers above the surface, at the base of the clouds, the temperature is tropical, and the pressure the same as Earth normal. Twenty kilometers above that, the air is thin and polar cold.

Drifting between these two levels are the ten thousand floating cities of Venus.

A balloon filled with oxygen and nitrogen will float in the heavy air of Venus, and balloons were exactly what the fabled domed cities were. Geodetic structures with struts of sintered graphite and skin of transparent polycarbonate synthesized from the atmosphere of Venus itself, each kilometer-diameter dome easily lifted a hundred thousand tons of city.

Even the clouds cooperated. The thin haze of the upper cloud deck served to filter the sunlight so that the intensity of the sun here was little more than the Earth’s solar constant.

Hypatia was not the largest of the floating cities, but it was certainly the richest, a city of helical buildings and golden domes, with huge open areas and elaborate gardens. Inside the dome of Hypatia, the architects played every possible trick to make us forget that we were inside an enclosed volume.

But we didn’t see this part, the gardens and waterfalls, not at first. Leaving the barque, we entered a disembarking lounge below the city. For all that it featured plush chaise lounges, floors covered with genetically engineered pink grass, and priceless sculptures of iron and of jade, it was functional: a place to wait.

It was large enough to hold a thousand people, but there was only one person in the lounge, a boy who was barely old enough to have entered his teens, wearing a bathrobe and elaborately pleated yellow silk pants. He was slightly pudgy, with an agreeable, but undistinguished, round face.

After the expense of our transport, I was surprised at finding only one person sent to await our arrival.

The kid looked at Leah. “Doctor Hamakawa. I’m pleased to meet you.” Then he turned to me. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

“Who are you?” I said. “Where’s our reception?”

The boy was chewing on something. He seemed about to spit it out, and then thought better of it. He looked over at Leah. “This guy is with you, Dr. Hamakawa? What’s he do?”

“This is David Tinkerman,” Leah said. “Technician. And, when need be, pilot. Yes, he’s with me.”

“Tell him he might wish to learn some manners,” the boy said.

“And who are you?” I shot back. “I don’t think you answered the question.”

The not-quite-teenager looked at me with disdain, as if he wasn’t sure if he would even bother to talk to me. Then he said, in a slow voice as if talking to an idiot, “I am Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum. I own this station and everything on it.”

He had an annoying high voice, on the edge of changing, but not yet there.

Leah, however, didn’t seem to notice his voice. “Ah,” she said. “You are the scion of Nordwald-Gruenbaum. The ruler of Hypatia.”

The kid shook his head and frowned. “No,” he said. “Not the scion, not exactly. I am Nordwald-Gruenbaum.” The smile made him look like a child again; it make him look likable. When he bowed, he was utterly charming. “I,” he said, “am the sultan of the clouds.”

Carlos Fernando, as it turned out, had numerous servants indeed. Once we had been greeted, he made a gesture and an honor guard of twenty women in silken doublets came forward to escort us up.

Before we entered the elevator, the guards circled around. At a word from Carlos Fernando, a package was brought forward. Carlos took it, and, as the guards watched, handed it to Leah. “A gift,” he said, “to welcome you to my city.”

The box was simple and unadorned. Leah opened it. Inside the package was a large folio. She took it out. The book was bound in cracked, dark red leather, with no lettering. She flipped to the front. “Giordano Bruno,” she read. “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds.” She smiled, and riffled through the pages. “A facsimile of the first English edition?”

“I though perhaps you might enjoy it.”

“Charming.” She placed it back in the box, and tucked it under her arm. “Thank you,” she said.

The elevator rose so smoothly it was difficult to believe it traversed two kilometers in a little under three minutes. The doors opened to brilliant noon sunlight. We were in the bubble city.

The city was a fantasy of foam and air. Although it was enclosed in a dome, the bubble was so large that the walls nearly vanished into the air, and it seemed unencumbered. With the guards beside us, we walked through the city. Everywhere there were parks, some just a tiny patch of green surrounding a tree, some forests perched on the wide tops of elongated stalks, with elegantly sculpted waterfalls cascading down to be caught in wide fountain basins. White pathways led upward through the air, suspended by cables from impossibly narrow beams, and all around us were sounds of rustling water and birdsong.

At the end of the welcoming tour, I realized I had been imperceptibly but effectively separated from Leah. “Hey,” I said. “What happened to Dr. Hamakawa?”

The honor guard of women still surrounded me, but Leah, and the kid who was the heir of Nordwald-Gruenbaum, had vanished.

“We’re sorry,” one of the women answered, one slightly taller, perhaps, than the others. “I believe that she has been taken to her suite to rest for a bit, since in a few hours she is to be greeted at the level of society.”

“I should be with her.”

The woman looked at me calmly. “We had no instructions to bring you. I don’t believe you were invited.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’d better find them.”

The woman stood back, and gestured to the city. Walkways meandered in all directions, a three-dimensional maze. “By all means, if you like. We were instructed that you were to have free run of the city.”

I nodded. Clearly, plans had been made with no room for me. “How will I get in touch?” I asked. “What if I want to talk to Leah—to Doctor Hamakawa?”

“They’ll be able to find you. Don’t worry.” After a pause, she said, “Shall we show you to your place to domicile?”

The building to which I was shown was one of a cluster that seemed suspended in the air by crisscrossed cables. It was larger than many houses. I was used to living in the cubbyholes of habitat modules, and the spaciousness of the accommodations startled me.

“Good evening, Mr. Tinkerman.” The person greeting me was a tall Chinese man perhaps fifty years of age. The woman next to him, I surmised, was his wife. She was quite a bit younger, in her early twenties. She was slightly overweight by the standards I was used to, but I had noticed that was common here. Behind her hid two children, their faces peeking out from behind her and then darting back again to safety. The man introduced himself as Truman Singh, and his wife as Epiphany. “The rest of the family will be about to meet you in a few hours, Mr. Tinkerman,” he said, smiling. “They are mostly working.”

“We both work for his Excellency,” Epiphany added. “Carlos Fernando has asked our braid to house you. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything you need. The cost will go against the Nordwald-Gruenbaum credit, which is,” she smiled, “quite unlimited here. As you might imagine.”

“Do you do this often?” I asked. “House guests?”

Epiphany looked up at her husband. “Not too often,” she said, “not for his Excellency, anyway. It’s not uncommon in the cities, though; there’s a lot of visiting back and forth as one city or another drifts nearby, and everyone will put up visitors from time to time.”

“You don’t have hotels?”

She shook her head. “We don’t get many visitors from outplanet.”

“You said ‘His Excellency,’ ” I said. “That’s Carlos Fernando? Tell me about him.”

“Of course. What would you like to know?”

“Does he really”—I gestured at the city—“own all of this? The whole planet?”

“Yes, certainly, the city, yes. And also, no.”

“How is that?”

“He will own the city, yes—this one, and five thousand others—but the planet? Maybe, maybe not. The Nordwald-Gruenbaum family does claim to own the planet, but in truth that claim means little. The claim may apply to the surface of the planet, but nobody owns the sky. The cities, though, yes. But, of course, he doesn’t actually control them all personally.”

“Well, of course not. I mean, hey, he’s just a kid—He must have trustees, or proxies or something, right?”

“Indeed. Until he reaches his majority.”

“And then?”

Truman Singh shrugged. “It is the Nordwald-Gruenbaum tradition—written into the first Nordwald’s will. When he reaches his majority, it is personal property.”

There were, as I discovered, eleven thousand, seven hundred and eight cities floating in the atmosphere of Venus. “Probably a few more,” Truman Singh told me. “Nobody keeps track, exactly. There are myths of cities that float low down, never rising above the lower cloud decks, forever hidden. You can’t live that deep—it’s too hot—but the stories say that the renegade cities have a technology that allows them to reject heat.” He shrugged. “Who knows?” In any case, of the known cities, the estate to which Carlos Fernando was heir owned or held shares or partial ownership of more than half.

“The Nordwald-Gruenbaum entity have been a good owners,” Truman said. “I should say, they know that their employees could leave, to another city, if they had to, but they don’t.”

“And there’s no friction?”

“Oh, the independent cities, they all think that the Nordwald-Gruenbaums have too much power!” He laughed. “But there’s not much they can do about it, eh?”

“They could fight.”

Truman Singh reached out and tapped me lightly on the center of my forehead with his middle finger. “That would not be wise.” He paused, and then said more slowly, “We are an interconnected ecology here, the independents and the sultanate. We rely on each other. The independents could declare war, yes, but in the end nobody would win.”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I see that. Of course, the floating cities are so fragile—a single break in the gas envelope—”

“We are perhaps not as fragile as you think,” Truman Singh replied. “I should say, you are used to the built worlds, but they are vacuum habitats, where a single blow-out would be catastrophic. Here, you know, there is no pressure difference between the atmosphere outside and the lifesphere inside; if there is a break, the gas equilibrates through the gap only very slowly. Even if we had a thousand broken panels, it would take weeks for the city to sink to the irrecoverable depths. And, of course, we do have safeguards, many safeguards.” He paused, and then said, “But if there were a war . . . we are safe against ordinary hazards, you can have no fear of that . . . but against metastable bombs . . . well, that would not be good. No, I should say that would not be good at all.”

The next day I set out to find where Leah had been taken, but although everyone I met was unfailingly polite, I had little success in reaching her. At least I was beginning to learn my way around.

The first thing I noticed about the city was the light. I was used to living in orbital habitats, where soft, indirect light was provided by panels of white-light diodes. In Hypatia City, brilliant Venus sunlight suffused throughout the interior. The next thing I noticed were the birds.

Hypatia was filled with birds. Birds were common in orbital habitats, since parrots and cockatiels adapt well to the freefall environment of space, but the volume of Hypatia was crowded with bright tropical birds, parrots and cockatoos and lorikeets, cardinals and chickadees and quetzals, more birds than I had names for, more birds than I had ever seen, a raucous orchestra of color and sound.

The floating city had twelve main chambers, separated from one another by thin, transparent membranes with a multiplicity of passages, each chamber well-lit and cheerful, each with a slightly different style.

The quarters I had been assigned were in sector Carbon, where individual living habitats were strung on cables like strings of iridescent pearls above a broad fenway of forest and grass. Within sector Carbon, cable-cars swung like pendulums on long strands, taking a traveler from platform to platform across the sector in giddy arcs. Carlos Fernando’s chambers were in the highest, centermost bubble—upcity, as it was called—a bubble dappled with colored light and shadow, where the architecture was fluted minarets and oriental domes. But I wasn’t, as it seemed, allowed into this elite sphere. I didn’t even learn where Leah had been given quarters.

I found a balcony on a tower that looked out through the transparent canopy over the clouds. The cloudscape was just as magnificent as it had been the previous day; towering and slowly changing. The light was a rich golden color, and the sun, masked by a skein of feathery clouds like a tracery of lace, was surrounded by a bronze halo. From the angle of the sun it was early afternoon, but there would be no sunset that day; the great winds circling the planet would not blow the city into the night side of Venus for another day.

Of the eleven-thousand other cities, I could detect no trace—looking outward, there was no indication that we were not alone in the vast cloudscape that stretched to infinity. But then, I thought, if the cities were scattered randomly, there would be little chance one would be nearby at any given time. Venus was a small planet, as planets go, but large enough to swallow ten thousand cities—or even a hundred times that—without any visible crowding of the skies.

I wished I knew what Leah thought of it.

I missed Leah. For all that she sometimes didn’t seem to even notice I was there . . . our sojourn on Mars, brief as it had been . . . we had shared the same cubby. Perhaps that meant nothing to her. But it had been the very center of my life.

I thought of her body, lithe and golden-skinned. Where was she? What was she doing??

The park was a platform overgrown with cymbidian orchids, braced in the air by the great cables that transected the dome from the stanchion trusswork. This seemed a common architecture here, where even the ground beneath was suspended from the buoyancy of the air dome. I bounced my weight back and forth, testing the resonant frequency, and felt the platform move infinitesimally under me. Children here must be taught from an early age not to do that; a deliberate effort could build up destructive oscillation. I stopped bouncing, and let the motion damp.

When I returned near the middle of the day, neither Truman nor Epiphany were there, and Truman’s other wife, a woman named Triolet, met me. She was a woman perhaps in her sixties, with dark skin and deep grey eyes. She had been introduced to me the previous day, but in the confusion of meeting numerous people in what seemed to be a large extended family, I had not had a chance to really meet her yet. There were always a number of people around the Singh household, and I was confused as to how, or even if, they were related to my hosts. Now, talking to her, I realized that she, in fact, was the one who had control of the Singh household finances.

The Singh family were farmers, I discovered. Or farm managers. The flora in Hypatia was decorative, or served to keep the air in the dome refreshed, but the real agriculture was in separate domes, floating at an altitude that was optimized for plant growth, and had no inhabitants. Automated equipment did the work of sowing and irrigation and harvest. Truman and Epiphany Singh were operational engineers, making those decisions that required a human input, watching that the robots kept on track and were doing the right things at the right times.

And, there was a message waiting for me, inviting me in the evening to attend a dinner with his Excellency, Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum.

Triolet helped me with my wardrobe, along with Epiphany, who had returned by the time I was ready to prepare. They both told me emphatically that my serviceable but well-worn jumpsuit was not appropriate attire. The gown Triolet selected was far gaudier than anything I would have chosen for myself, an electric shade of indigo accented with a wide midnight black sash. “Trust us, it will be suitable,” Epiphany told me. Despite its bulk, it was light as a breath of air.

“All clothes here are light,” Epiphany told me. “Spider’s silk.”

“Ah, I see,” I said. “Synthetic spider silk. Strong and light; very practical.”

“Synthetic?” Epiphany asked, and giggled. “No, not synthetic. It’s real.”

“The silk is actually woven by spiders?”

“No, the whole garment is.” At my puzzled look, she said, “Teams of spiders. They work together.”

“Spiders.”

“Well, they’re natural weavers, you know. And easy to transport.”

I arrived at the banquet hall at the appointed time and found that the plasma-arc blue gown that Epiphany had selected for me was the most conservative dress there. There were perhaps thirty people present, but Leah was clearly the center. She seemed happy with the attention, more animated than I’d recalled seeing her before.

“They’re treating you well?” I asked, when I’d finally made it through the crowd to her.

“Oh, indeed.”

I discovered I had nothing to say. I waited for her to ask about me, but she didn’t. “Where have they given you to stay?”

“A habitat next section over,” she said. “Sector Carbon. It’s amazing—I’ve never seen so many birds.”

“That’s the sector I’m in,” I said, “but they didn’t tell me where you were.”

“Really? That’s odd.” She tapped up a map of the residential sector on a screen built into the diamond table-top, and a three dimensional image appeared to float inside the table. She rotated it and highlighted her habitat, and I realized that she was indeed adjacent, in a large habitat that was almost directly next to the complex I was staying in. “It’s a pretty amazing place. But mostly I’ve been here in the upcity. Have you talked to Carli much yet? He’s a very clever kid. Interested in everything—botany, physics, even engineering.”

“Really?” I said. “I don’t think they’ll let me into the upcity.”

“You’re kidding; I’m sure they’ll let you in. Hey—” she called over one of the guards. “Say, is there any reason Tinkerman can’t come up to the centrum?”

“No, madam, if you want it, of course not.”

“Great. See, no problem.”

And then the waiters directed me to my place at the far end of the table.

The table was a thick slab of diamond, the faceted edges collecting and refracting rainbows of color. The top was as smooth and slippery as a sheet of ice. Concealed inside were small computer screens so that any of the diners who wished could call up graphics or data as needed during a conversation. The table was both art and engineering, practical and beautiful at the same time.

Carlos Fernando sat at the end of the table. He seemed awkward and out of place in a chair slightly too large for him. Leah sat at his right, and an older woman—perhaps his mother?—on his left. He was bouncing around in his chair, alternating between playing with the computer system in his table and sneaking glances over at Leah when he thought she wasn’t paying attention to him. If she looked in his direction, he would go still for a moment, and then his eyes would quickly dart away and he went back to staring at the graphics screen in front of him and fidgeting.

The server brought a silver tray to Carlos Fernando. On it was something the size of a fist, hidden under a canopy of red silk. Carlos Fernando looked up, accepted it with a nod, and removed the cloth. There was a moment of silence as people looked over, curious. I strained to see it.

It was a sparkling egg.

The egg was cunningly wrought of diamond fibers of many colors, braided into intricate lacework resembling entwined Celtic knots. The twelve-year-old satrap of Venus picked it up and ran one finger over it, delicately, barely brushing the surface, feeling the corrugations and relief of the surface.

He held it for a moment, as if not quite sure what he should do with it, and then his hand darted over and put the egg on the plate in front of Leah. She looked up, puzzled.

“This is for you,” he said.

The faintest hint of surprise passed through the other diners, almost subvocal, too soft to be heard.

A moment later the servers set an egg in front of each of us. Our eggs, although decorated with an intricate filligree of finely painted lines of gold and pale verdigris, were ordinary eggs—goose eggs, perhaps.

Carlos Fernando was fidgeting in his chair, half grinning, half biting his lip, looking down, looking around, looking everywhere except at the egg or at Leah.

“What am I to do with this?” Leah asked.

“Why,” he said, “perhaps you should open it up and eat it.”

Leah picked up the diamond-laced egg and examined it, turned it over and rubbed one finger across the surface. Then, having found what she was looking for, she held it in two fingers and twisted. The diamond eggshell opened, and inside it was a second egg, an ordinary one.

The kid smiled again and looked down at the egg in front of him. He picked up his spoon and cracked the shell, then spooned out the interior.

At this signal, the others cracked their own eggs and began to eat. After a moment, Leah laid the decorative shell to one side and did the same. I watched her for a moment, and then cracked my own egg.

It was, of course, excellent.

Later, when I was back with the Singh family, I was still puzzled. There had been some secret significance there that everybody else had seen, but I had missed. Mr. Singh was sitting with his older wife, Triolet, talking about accounts.

“I must ask a question,” I said.

Truman Singh turned to me. “Ask,” he said, “and I shall answer.”

“Is there any particular significance,” I said, “to an egg?”

“An egg?” Singh seemed puzzled. “Much significance, I would say. In the old days, the days of the asteroid miners, an egg was a symbol of luxury. Ducks were brought into the bigger habitats, and their eggs were, for some miners, the only food they would ever eat that was not a form of algae or soybean.”

“A symbol of luxury,” I said, musing. “I see. But I still don’t understand it.” I thought for a moment, and then asked, “Is there any significance to a gift of an egg?

“Well, no,” he said, slowly, “not exactly. An egg? Nothing, in and of itself.”

His wife Triolet, asked, “You are sure it’s just an egg? Nothing else?”

“A very elaborate egg.”

“Hmmm,” she said, with a speculative look in her eye. “Not, maybe, an egg, a book, and a rock?”

That startled me a little. “A book and a rock?” The Bruno book—the very first thing Carlos Fernando had done on meeting Leah was to give her a book. But a rock? I hadn’t see anything like that. “Why that?”

“Ah,” she said. “I suppose you wouldn’t know. I don’t believe that our customs here in the sky cities are well known out there in the outer reaches.”

Her mention of the outer reaches—Saturn and the Beyond—confused me for a moment, until I realized that, viewed from Venus, perhaps even Earth and the built worlds of the orbital clouds would be considered “outer.”

“Here,” she continued, “as in most of the ten thousand cities, an egg, a book, and a rock is a special gift. The egg is symbolic of life, you see; a book symbolic of knowledge; and a rock is the basis of all wealth, the minerals from the asteroid belt that built our society and bought our freedom.”

“Yes? And all three together?”

“They are the traditional gesture of the beginning of courtship,” she said.

“I still don’t understand.”

“If a young man gives a woman an egg, a book, and a rock,” Truman said, “I should say this is his official sign that he is interested in courting her. If she accepts them, then she accepts his courtship.”

“What? That’s it, just like that, they’re married?”

“No, no, no,” he said. “It only means that she accepts the courtship—that she takes him seriously and, when it comes, she will listen to his proposal. Often a woman may have rocks and eggs from many young men. She doesn’t have to accept, only take him seriously.”

“Oh,” I said.

But it still made no sense. How old was Carlos Fernando, twenty Venus years? What was that, twelve Earth years or so? He was far too young to be proposing.

“No one can terraform Venus,” Carlos Fernando said.

Carlos Fernando had been uninterested in having me join in Leah’s discussion, but Leah, oblivious to her host’s displeasure (or perhaps simply not caring), had insisted that if he wanted to talk about terraforming, I should be there.

It was one room of Carlos Fernando’s extensive palaces, a rounded room, an enormous cavernous space that had numerous alcoves. I’d found them sitting in one of the alcoves, an indentation that was cozy but still open. The ubiquitous female guards were still there, but they were at the distant ends of the room, within command if Carlos Fernando chose to shout, but far enough to give them the illusion of privacy.

The furniture they were sitting on was odd. The chairs seemed sculpted of sapphire smoke, yet were solid to the touch. I picked one up and discovered that it weighed almost nothing at all. “Diamond aerogel,” Carlos Fernando said. “Do you like it?”

“It’s amazing,” I said. I had never before seen so much made out of diamond. And yet it made sense here, I thought; with carbon dioxide an inexhaustible resource surrounding the floating cities, it was logical that the floating cities would make as much as they could out of carbon. But still, I didn’t know you could make an aerogel of diamond. “How do you make it?”

“A new process we’ve developed,” Carlos Fernando said. “You don’t mind if I don’t go into the details. It’s actually an adaptation of an old idea, something that was invented back on Earth decades ago, called a molecular still.”

When Carlos Fernando mentioned the molecular still, I thought I saw a sharp flicker of attention from Leah. This was a subject she knew something about, I thought. But instead of following up, she went back to his earlier comment on terraforming.

“You keep asking questions about the ecology of Mars,” she said. “Why so many detailed questions about Martian ecopoiesis? You say you’re not interested in terraforming, but are you really? You aren’t thinking of the old idea of using photosynthetic algae in the atmosphere to reduce the carbon dioxide, are you? Surely you know that that can’t work.”

“Of course.” Carlos Fernando waved the question away. “Theoretical,” he said. “Nobody could terraform Venus, I know, I know.”

His pronouncement would have been more dignified if his voice had finished changing, but as it was, it wavered between squeaking an octave up and then going back down again, ruining the effect. “We simply have too much atmosphere,” he said. “Down at the surface, the pressure is over ninety bars—even if the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere could be converted to oxygen, the surface atmosphere would still be seventy times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure.”

“I realize that,” Leah said. “We’re not actually ignorant, you know. So high a pressure of oxygen would be deadly—you’d burst into flames.”

“And the leftover carbon,” he said, smiling. “Hundreds of tons per square meter.”

“So what are you thinking?” she asked.

But in response, he only smiled. “Okay, I can’t terraform Venus,” he said. “So tell me more about Mars.”

I could see that there was something that he was keeping back. Carlos Fernando had some idea that he wasn’t telling.

But Leah did not press him, and instead took the invitation to tell him about her studies of the ecology on Mars, as it had been transformed long ago by the vanished engineers of the long-gone Freehold Toynbee colony. The Toynbee’s engineers had designed life to thicken the atmosphere of Mars, to increase the greenhouse effect, to melt the frozen oceans of Mars.

“But it’s not working,” Leah concluded. “The anaerobic life is being out-competed by the photosynthetic oxygen-producers. It’s pulling too much carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.”

“But what about the Gaia effect? Doesn’t it compensate?”

“No,” Leah said. “I found no trace of a Lovelock self-aware planet. Either that’s a myth, or else the ecology on Mars is just too young to stabilize.”

“Of course on Venus, we would have no problem with photosynthesis removing carbon dioxide.”

“I thought you weren’t interested in terraforming Venus,” I said.

Carlos Fernando waved my objection away. “A hypothetical case, of course,” he said. “A thought exercise.” He turned to Leah. “Tomorrow,” he said, “would you like to go kayaking?”

“Sure,” she said.

Kayaking, on Venus, did not involve water.

Carlos Fernando instructed Leah, and Epiphany helped me.

The “kayak” was a ten-meter long gas envelope, a transparent cylinder of plastic curved into an ogive at both ends, with a tiny bubble at the bottom where the kayaker sat. One end of the kayak held a huge, gossamer-bladed propeller that turned lazily as the kayaker pedaled, while the kayaker rowed with flimsy wings, transparent and iridescent like the wings of a dragonfly.

The wings, I discovered, had complicated linkages; each one could be pulled, twisted, and lifted, allowing each wing to separately beat, rotate, and camber.

“Keep up a steady motion with the propeller,” Epiphany told me. “You’ll lose all your maneuverability if you let yourself float to a stop. You can scull with the wings to put on a burst of speed if you need to. Once you’re comfortable, use the wings to rise up or swoop down, and to maneuver. You’ll have fun.”

We were in a launching bay, a balcony protruding from the side of the city. Four of the human-powered dirigibles that they called kayaks were docked against the blister, the bulge of the cockpits neatly inserted into docking rings so that the pilots could enter the dirigible without exposure to the outside atmosphere. Looking out across the cloudscape, I could see dozens of kayaks dancing around the city like transparent squid with stubby wings, playing tag with each other and racing across the sky. So small and transparent compared to the magnificent clouds, they had been invisible until I’d known how to look.

“What about altitude?” I asked.

“You’re about neutrally buoyant,” she said. “As long as you have airspeed, you can use the wings to make fine adjustments up or down.”

“What happens if I get too low?”

“You can’t get too low. The envelope has a reservoir of methanol; as you get lower, the temperature rises and your reservoir releases vapor, so the envelope inflates. If you gain too much altitude, vapor condenses out. So you’ll find you’re regulated to stay pretty close to the altitude you’re set for, which right now is,” she checked a meter, “fifty-two kilometers above local ground level. We’re blowing west at a hundred meters per second, so local ground level will change as the terrain below varies; check your meters for altimetry.”

Looking downward, nothing was visible at all, only clouds, and below the clouds, an infinity of haze. It felt odd to think of the surface, over fifty kilometers straight down, and even odder to think that the city we were inside was speeding across that invisible landscape at hundreds of kilometers an hour. There was only the laziest feeling of motion, as the city drifted slowly through the ever-changing canyons of clouds.

“Watch out for wind shear,” she said. “It can take you out of sight of the city pretty quickly, if you let it. Ride the conveyor back if you get tired.”

“The conveyor?”

“Horizontal-axis vortices. They roll from west to east, and east to west. Choose the right altitude, and they’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

Now that she’d told me, I could see the kayakers surfing the wind-shear, rising upward and skimming across the sky on invisible wheels of air.

“Have fun,” she said. She helped me into the gondola, tightened my straps, looked at the gas pressure meter, checked the purge valve on the emergency oxygen supply, and verified that the radio, backup radio, and emergency locator beacons worked.

Across the kayak launch bay, Leah and Carlos Fernando had already pushed off. Carlos was sculling his wings alternatingly with a practiced swishing motion, building up a pendulum-like oscillation from side to side. Even as I watched, his little craft rolled over until for a moment it hesitated, inverted, and then rolled completely around.

“Showing off,” Epiphany said, disdainfully. “You’re not supposed to do that. Not that anybody would dare correct him.”

She turned back to me. “Ready?” she asked.

“Ready as I’m going to be,” I said. I’d been given a complete safety briefing that explained the backup systems and the backups to the backups, but still, floating in the sky above a fifty-two kilometer drop into the landscape of hell seemed an odd diversion.

“Go!” she said. She checked the seal on the cockpit, and then with one hand she released the docking clamp.

Freed from its mooring, the kayak sprang upward into the sky. As I’d been instructed, I banked the kayak away from the city. The roll made me feel suddenly giddy. The kayak skittered, sliding around until it was moving sideways to the air, the nose dipping down so that I was hanging against my straps. Coordinate the turn, I thought, but every slight motion I made with the wings seemed amplified drunkenly, and the kayak wove around erratically.

The radio blinked at me, and Epiphany’s voice said, “You’re doing great. Give it some airspeed.”

I wasn’t doing great; I was staring straight down at lemon-tinted haze and spinning slowly around like a falling leaf. Airspeed? I realize that I had entirely forgotten to pedal. I pedaled now, and the nose lifted. The sideways spin damped out, and as I straightened out, the wings bit into the air. “Great,” Epiphany’s voice told me. “Keep it steady.”

The gas envelope seemed too fragile to hold me, but I was flying now, suspended below a golden sky. It was far too complicated, but I realized that as long as I kept the nose level, I could keep it under control. I was still oscillating slightly—it was difficult to avoid overcontroling—but on the average, I was keeping the nose pointed where I aimed it.

Where were Leah and Carlos Fernando?

I looked around. Each of the kayaks had different markings—mine was marked with gray stripes like a tabby cat—and I tried to spot theirs.

A gaggle of kayaks was flying together, rounding the pylon of the city. As they moved around the pylon they all turned at once, flashing in the sunlight like a school of fish suddenly startled.

Suddenly I spotted them, not far above me, close to the looming wall of the city; the royal purple envelope of Carlos Fernando’s kayak and the blue and yellow stripes of Leah’s. Leah was circling in a steady climb, and Carlos Fernando was darting around her, now coming in fast and bumping envelopes, now darting away and pulling up, hovering for a moment with his nose pointed at the sky, then skewing around and sliding back downward.

Their motions looked like the courtship dance of birds.

The purple kayak banked around and swooped out and away from the city; and an instant later, Leah’s blue and yellow kayak banked and followed. They both soared upward, catching a current of air invisible to me. I could see a few of the other fliers surfing on the same updraft. I yawed my nose around to follow them, but made no progress; I was too inexperienced with the kayak to be able to guess the air currents, and the wind differential was blowing me around the city in exactly the opposite of the direction I wanted to go. I pulled out and away from the city, seeking a different wind, and for an instant I caught a glimpse of something in the clouds below me, dark and fast moving.

Then I caught the updraft. I could feel it, the wings caught the air and it felt like an invisible giant’s hand picking me up and carrying me–

Then there was a sudden noise, a stuttering and ripping, followed by a sound like a snare drum. My left wing and propeller ripped away, the fragments spraying into the sky. My little craft banked hard to the left. My radio came to life, but I couldn’t hear anything as the cabin disintegrated around me. I was falling.

Falling.

For a moment I felt like I was back in zero-gee. I clutched uselessly to the remains of the control surfaces, connected by loose cords to fluttering pieces of debris. Pieces of my canopy floated away and were caught by the wind and spun upward and out of sight. The atmosphere rushed in, and my eyes started to burn. I made the mistake of taking a breath, and the effect was like getting kicked in the head. Flickering purple dots, the colors of a bruise, closed in from all directions. My vision narrowed to a single bright tunnel. The air was liquid fire in my lungs. I reached around, desperately, trying to remember the emergency instructions before I blacked out, and my hands found the emergency air-mask between my legs. I was still strapped into my seat, although the seat was no longer attached to a vehicle, and I slapped the breathing mask against my face and sucked hard to start the airflow from the emergency oxygen. I was lucky; the oxygen cylinder was still attached to the bottom of the seat, as the seat, with me in it, tumbled through the sky. Through blurred eyes, I could see the city spinning above me. I tried to think of what the emergency procedure could be and what I should do next, but I could only think of what had gone wrong. What had I done? For the life of me I couldn’t think of anything that I could have done that would have ripped the craft apart.

The city dwindled to the size of an acorn, and then I fell into the cloud layer and everything disappeared into a pearly white haze. My skin began to itch all over. I squeezed my eyes shut against the acid fog. The temperature was rising. How long would it take to fall fifty kilometers to the surface?

Something enormous and metallic swooped down from above me, and I blacked out.

Minutes or hours or days later I awoke in a dimly-lit cubicle. I was lying on the ground, and two men wearing masks were spraying me with jets of a foaming white liquid that looked like milk but tasted bitter. My flight suit was in shreds around me.

I sat up, and began to cough uncontrollably. My arms and my face itched like blazes, but when I started to scratch, one of the men reached out and slapped my hands away.

“Don’t scratch.”

I turned to look at him, and the one behind me grabbed me by the hair and smeared a handful of goo into my face, rubbing it hard into my eyes.

Then he picked up a patch of cloth and tossed it to me. “Rub this where it itches. It should help.”

I was still blinking, my face dripping, my vision fuzzy. The patch of cloth was wet with some gelatinous slime. I grabbed it from him, and dabbed it on my arms and then rubbed it in. It did help, some.

“Thanks,” I said. “What the hell—”

The two men in face masks looked at each other. “Acid burn,” the taller man said. “You’re not too bad. A minute or two of exposure won’t leave scars.”

“What?”

“Acid. You were exposed to the clouds.”

“Right.”

Now that I wasn’t quite so distracted, I looked around. I was in the cargo hold of some sort of aircraft. There were two small round portholes on either side. Although nothing was visible through them but a blank white, I could feel that the vehicle was in motion. I looked at the two men. They were both rough characters. Unlike the brightly colored spiders-silk gowns of the citizens of Hypatia, they were dressed in clothes that were functional but not fancy, jumpsuits of a dark gray color with no visible insignia. Both of them were fit and well-muscled. I couldn’t see their faces, since they were wearing breathing masks and lightweight helmets, but under their masks I could see that they both wore short beards, another fashion that had been missing among the citizens of Hypatia. Their eyes were covered with amber-tinted goggles, made in a crazy style that cupped each eye with a piece that was rounded like half an eggshell, apparently stuck to their faces by some invisible glue. It gave them a strange, bug-eyed look. They looked at me, but behind their face masks and google-eyes I was completely unable to read their expressions.

“Thanks,” I said. “So, who are you? Some sort of emergency rescue force?”

“I think you know who we are,” the taller one said. “The question is, who the hell are you?”

I stood up and reached out a hand, thinking to introduce myself, but both of the men took a step back. Without seeming to move his hand, the taller one now had a gun, a tiny omniblaster of some kind. Suddenly a lot of things were clear.

“You’re pirates,” I said.

“We’re the Venus underground,” he said. “We don’t like the word pirates very much. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a question, and I really would like an answer. Who the hell are you?”

So I told him.

The first man started to take off his helmet, but the taller pirate stopped him. “We’ll keep the masks on, for now. Until we decide he’s safe.” The taller pirate said he was named Esteban Jaramillo; the shorter one Esteban Francisco. That was too many Estebans, I thought, and decided to tag the one Jaramillo and the other Francisco.

I discovered from them that not everybody in the floating cities thought of Venus as a paradise. Some of the independent cities considered the clan of Nordwald-Gruenbaum to be well on its way to becoming a dictatorship. “They own half of Venus outright, but that’s not good enough for them, no, oh no,” Jaramillo told me. “They’re stinking rich, but not stinking rich enough, and the very idea that there are free cities floating in the sky, cities that don’t swear fealty to them and pay their goddamned taxes, that pisses them off. They’ll do anything that they can to crush us. Us? We’re just fighting back.”

I would have been more inclined to see his point if I didn’t have the uncomfortable feeling that I’d just been abducted. It had been a tremendous stroke of luck for me that their ship had been there to catch me when my kayak broke apart and fell. I didn’t much believe in luck. And they didn’t bother to answer when I asked about being returned to Hypatia. It was pretty clear that the direction we were headed was not back toward the city.

I had given them my word that I wouldn’t fight, or try to escape—where would I escape to?—and they accepted it. Once they realized that I wasn’t who they had expected to capture, they pressed me for news of the outside. “We don’t hear a lot of outside news.”

There were three of them in the small craft, the two Estebans, and the pilot, who was never introduced. He did not bother to turn around to greet me, and all I ever saw of him was the back of his helmet. The craft itself they called a Manta; an odd thing that was partly an airplane, partly dirigible, and partly a submarine. Once I’d given my word that I wouldn’t escape, I was allowed to look out, but there was nothing to see but a luminous golden haze.

“We keep the manta flying under the cloud decks,” Jaramillo said. “Keeps us invisible.”

“Invisible from whom?” I asked, but neither one of them bothered to answer. It was a dumb question anyway; I could very well guess who they wanted to keep out of sight of. “What about radar?” I said.

Esteban looked at Esteban, and then at me. “We have means to deal with radar,” he said. “Just leave it at that and stop it with the questions you should know enough not to ask.”

They seemed to be going somewhere, and eventually the manta exited the cloudbank into the clear air above. I pressed toward the porthole, trying to see out. The cloudscapes of Venus were still fascinating to me. We were skimming the surface of the cloud deck—ready to duck under if there were any sign of watchers, I surmised. From the cloudscape it was impossible to tell how far we’d come, whether it was just a few leagues, or halfway around the planet. None of the floating cities were visible, but in the distance I spotted the fat torpedo shape of a dirigible. The pilot saw it as well, for we banked toward it and sailed slowly up, slowing down as we approached, until it disappeared over our heads, and then the hull resonated with a sudden impact, and then a ratcheting clang.

“Soft dock,” Jaramillo commented, and then a moment later another clang, and the nose of the craft was suddenly jerked up. “Hard dock,” he said. The two Estebans seemed to relax a little, and a whine and a rumble filled the little cabin. We were being winched up into the dirigible.

After ten minutes or so, we came to rest in a vast interior space. The manta had been taken inside the envelope of the gas chamber, I realized. Half a dozen people met us.

“Sorry,” Jaramillo said, “but I’m afraid we’re going to have to blind you. Nothing personal.”

“Blind?” I said, but actually, that was good news. If they’d had no intention to release me, they wouldn’t care what I saw.

Jaramillo held my head steady while Francisco placed a set of the google-eyed glasses over my eyes. They were surprisingly comfortable. Whatever held them in place, they were so light that I could scarcely feel that they were there. The amber tint was barely noticeable. After checking that they fit, Francisco tapped the side of the goggles with his fingertip, once, twice, three times, four times. Each time he touched the goggles, the world grew darker, and with a fifth tap, all I could see was inky black. Why would sunglasses have a setting for complete darkness, I thought? And then I answered my own question: the last setting must be for e-beam welding. Pretty convenient, I thought. I wondered if I dared to ask them if I could keep the set of goggles when they were done.

“I am sure you won’t be so foolish as to adjust the transparency,” one of the Estebans said.

I was guided out the manta’s hatch and across the hanger, and then to a seat.

“This the prisoner?” a voice asked.

“Yeah,” Jaramillo said. “But the wrong one. No way to tell, but we guessed wrong, got the wrong flyer.”

“Shit. So who is he?”

“Technician,” Jaramillo said. “From the up and out.”

“Really? So does he know anything about the Nordwald-Gruenbaum plan?”

I spread my hands out flat, trying to look harmless. “Look, I only met the kid twice, or I guess three times, if you—”

That caused some consternation; I could hear sudden buzz of voices, in a language I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t sure how many of them there were, but it seemed like at least half a dozen. I desperately wished I could see them, but that would very likely be a fatal move. After a moment, Jaramillo said, his voice now flat and expressionless, “You know the heir of Nordwald-Gruenbaum? You met Carlos Fernando in person?”

“I met him. I don’t know him. Not really.”

“Who did you say you were again?”

I went through my story, this time starting at the very beginning, explaining how we had been studying the ecology of Mars, how we had been summoned to Venus to meet the mysterious Carlos Fernando. From time to time I was interrupted to answer questions—what was my relationship with Leah Hamakawa? (I wished I knew). Were we married? Engaged? (No. No.). What was Carlos Fernando’s relationship with Dr. Hamakawa? (I wished I knew.) Had Carlos Fernando ever mentioned his feelings about the independent cities? (No.) His plans? (No.) Why was Carlos Fernando interested in terraforming (I don’t know.) What was Carlos Fernando planning? (I don’t know.) Why did Carlos Fernando bring Hamakawa to Venus? (I wished I knew.) What was he planning? What was he planning? (I don’t know. I don’t know.)

The more I talked, the more sketchy it seemed, even to me.

There was silence when I had finished talking. Then, the first voice said, take him back to the manta.

I was led back inside and put into a tiny space, and a door clanged shut behind me. After a while, when nobody answered my call, I reached up to the goggles. They popped free with no more than a light touch, and, looking at them, I was still unable to see how they attached. I was in a storage hold of some sort. The door was locked.

I contemplated my situation, but I couldn’t see that I knew any more now than I had before, except that I now knew that not all of the Venus cities were content with the status quo, and some of them were willing to go to some lengths to change it. They had deliberately shot me down, apparently thinking that I was Leah—or possibly even hoping for Carlos Fernando? It was hard to think that he would have been out of the protection of his bodyguards. Most likely, I decided, the bodyguards had been there, never letting him out of sight, ready to swoop in if needed, but while Carlos Fernando and Leah had soared up and around the city, I had left the sphere covered by the guards, and that was the opportunity the pirates in the manta had taken. They had seen the air kayak flying alone and shot it out of the sky, betting my life on their skill, that they could swoop in and snatch the falling pilot out of mid-air.

They could have killed me, I realized.

And all because they thought I knew something—or rather, that Leah Hamakawa knew something—about Carlos Fernando’s mysterious plan.

What plan? He was a twelve-year-old kid, not even a teenager, barely more than an overgrown child! What kind of plan could a kid have?

I examined the chamber I was in, this time looking more seriously at how it was constructed. All the joints were welded, with no obvious gaps, but the metal was light, probably an aluminum-lithium alloy. Possibly malleable, if I had the time, if I could find a place to pry at, if I could find something to pry with.

If I did manage to escape, would I be able to pilot the manta out of its hanger in the dirigible? Maybe. I had no experience with lighter than air vehicles, though, and it would be a bad time to learn, especially if they decided that they wanted to shoot at me. And then I would be—where? A thousand miles from anywhere. Fifty million miles from anywhere I knew.

I was still mulling this over when Esteban and Esteban returned.

“Strap in,” Esteban Jaramillo told me. “Looks like we’re taking you home.”

The trip back was more complicated than the trip out. It involved two or more transfers from vehicle to vehicle, during some of which I was again “requested” to wear the opaque goggles.

We were alone in the embarking station of some sort of public transportation. For a moment, the two Estebans had allowed me to leave the goggles transparent. Wherever we were, it was unadorned, drab compared to the florid excess of Hypatia, where even the bus stations—did they have bus stations?—would have been covered with flourishes and artwork.

Jaramillo turned to me and, for the first time, pulled off his goggles so he could look me directly in the eye. His eyes were dark, almost black, and very serious.

“Look,” he said, “I know you don’t have any reason to like us. We’ve got our reasons, you have to believe that. We’re desperate. We know that his father had some secret projects going. We don’t know what they were, but we know he didn’t have any use for the free cities. We think the young Gruenwald has something planned. If you can get through to Carlos Fernando, we want to talk to him.”

“If you get him,” Esteban Francisco said. “Push him out a window. We’ll catch him. Easy.” He was grinning with a broad smile, showing all his teeth, as if to say he wasn’t serious, but I wasn’t at all sure he was joking.

“We don’t want to kill him. We just want to talk,” Esteban Jaramillo said. “Call us. Please. Call us.”

And with that, he reached up and put his goggles back on. Then Francisco reached over and tapped my goggles into opacity, and everything was dark, and, with one on either side of me, we boarded the transport—bus? zeppelin? rocket?

Finally I was led into a chamber and was told to wait for two full minutes before removing the goggles, and after that I was free to do as I liked.

It was only after the footsteps had disappeared that it occurred to me to wonder how I was supposed to contact them, if I did have a reason to. It was too late to ask, though; I was alone, or seemed to be alone.

Was I being watched to see if I would follow orders, I wondered? Two full minutes. I counted, trying not to rush the count. When I got to a hundred and twenty, I took a deep breath, and finger-tapped the goggles to transparency.

When my eyes focused, I saw I was in a large disembarking lounge with genetically-engineered pink grass and sculptures of iron and of jade. I recognized it. It was the very same lounge at which we had arrived at Venus three days ago.—was it only three? Or had another day gone by?

I was back in Hypatia city.

Once again I was surrounded and questioned. As with the rest of Carlos Fernando’s domain, the questioning room was lushly decorated with silk-covered chairs and elegant teak carvings, but it was clearly a holding chamber.

The questioning was by four women, Carlos Fernando’s guards, and I had the feeling that they would not hesitate to tear me apart if they thought I was being less than candid with them. I told them what had happened, and at every step they asked questions, making suggestions as to what I could have done differently. Why had I taken my kayak so far away from any of the other fliers and out away from the city? Why had I allowed myself to be captured, without fighting? Why didn’t I demand to be returned and refuse to answer any questions? Why could I describe none of the rebels I’d met, except for two men who had—as far as they could tell from my descriptions—no distinctive features?

At the end of their questioning, when I asked to see Carlos Fernando, they told me that this would not be possible.

“You think I allowed myself to be shot down deliberately?” I said, addressing myself to the chief among the guards, a lean woman in scarlet silk.

“We don’t know what to think, Mr. Tinkerman,” she said. “We don’t like to take chances.”

“What now, then?”

“We can arrange transport to the built worlds,” she said. “Or even to the Earth.”

“I don’t plan to leave without Doctor Hamakawa,” I said.

She shrugged. “At the moment, that’s still your option, yes,” she said. “At the moment.”

“How can I get in contact with Doctor Hamakawa?”

She shrugged. “If Doctor Hamakawa wishes, I’m sure she will be able to contact you.”

“And if I want to speak to her?”

She shrugged. “You’re free to go now. If we need to talk to you, we can find you.”

I had been wearing one of gray jumpsuits of the pirates when I’d been returned to Hypatia; the guard women had taken that away. Now they gave me a suit of spider-silk in a lavender brighter than the garb an expensive courtesan would wear in the built worlds surrounding Earth, more of an evening gown than a suit. It was nevertheless subdued compared to the day-to-day attire of Hypatia citizens, and I attracted no attention. I discovered that the google-eyed sunglasses had been neatly placed in a pocket at the knees of the garment. Apparently people on Venus keep their sunglasses at their knees. Convenient when you’re sitting, I supposed. They hadn’t been recognized as a parting gift from the pirates, or, more likely, had been considered so trivial as to not be worth confiscating. I was unreasonably pleased; I liked those glasses.

I found the Singh habitat with no difficulty, and when I arrived, Epiphany and Truman Singh were there to welcome me and to give me the news.

My kidnapping was already old news. More recent news was being discussed everywhere.

Carlos Fernando Delacroix Ortega de la Jolla y Nordwald-Gruenbaum had given a visitor from the outer solar system, Doctor Leah Hamakawa—a person who (they had heard) had actually been born on Earth—a rock.

And she had not handed it back to him.

My head was swimming.

“You’re saying that Carlos Fernando is proposing marriage? To Leah? That doesn’t make any sense. He’s a kid, for Jove’s sake. He’s not old enough.”

Truman and Epiphany Singh looked at one another and smiled. “How old were you when we got married?” Truman asked her. “Twenty?”

“I was almost twenty-one before you accepted my book and my rock,” she said.

“So, in Earth years, what’s that?” he said. “Thirteen?”

“A little over twelve,” she said. “About time I was married up, I’d say.”

“Wait,” I said. “You said you were twelve years old when you got married?”

“Earth years,” she said. “Yes, that’s about right.”

“You married at twelve? And you had—” I suddenly didn’t want to ask, and said, “Do all women on Venus marry so young?”

“There are a lot of independent cities,” Truman said. “Some of them must have different customs, I suppose. But it’s the custom more or less everywhere I know.”

“But that’s—” I started to say, but couldn’t think of how to finish. Sick? Perverted? But then, there were once a lot of cultures on Earth that had child marriages.

“We know the outer reaches have different customs,” Epiphany said. “Other regions do things differently. The way we do it works for us.”

“A man typically marries up at age twenty-one or so,” Truman explained. “Say, twelve, thirteen years old, in Earth years. Maybe eleven. His wife will be about fifty or sixty—she’ll be his instructor, then, as he grows up. What’s that in Earth years—thirty? I know that in old Earth custom, both sides of a marriage are supposed to be the same age, but that’s completely silly, is it not? Who’s going to be the teacher, I should say?

“And then, when he grows up, by the time he reaches sixty or so he’ll marry down, find a girl who’s about twenty or twenty-one, and he’ll serve as a teacher to her, I should say. And, in time, she’ll marry down when she’s sixty, and so on.”

It seemed like a form of ritualized child abuse to me, but I thought it would be better not to say that aloud. Or, I thought, maybe I was reading too much into what he was saying. It was something like the medieval apprentice system. When he said teaching, maybe I was jumping to conclusions to think that he was talking about sex. Maybe they held off on the sex until the child grew up some. I thought I might be happier not knowing.

“A marriage is braided like a rope,” Epiphany said. “Each element holds the next.”

I looked from Truman to Epiphany and back. “You, too?” I asked Truman. “You were married when you were twelve?”

“In Earth years, I was thirteen, when I married up Triolet,” he said. “Old. Best thing that ever happened to me. God, I needed somebody like her to straighten me out back then. And I needed somebody to teach me about sex, I should say, although I didn’t know it back then.”

“And Triolet—”

“Oh, yes, and her husband before her, and before that. Our marriage goes back a hundred and ninety years, to when Raj Singh founded our family; we’re a long braid, I should say.”

I could picture it now. Every male in the braid would have two wives, one twenty years older; one twenty years younger. And every female would have an older and a younger husband. The whole assembly would indeed be something you could think of as a braid, alternating down generations. The interpersonal dynamics must be terribly complicated. And then I suddenly remembered why we were having this discussion. “My god,” I said. “You’re serious about this. So you’re saying that Carlos Fernando isn’t just playing a game. He actually plans to marry Leah.”

“Of course,” Epiphany said. “It’s a surprise, but then, I’m not at all surprised. It’s obviously what his Excellency was planning right from the beginning. He’s a devious one, he is.”

“He wants to have sex with her.”

She looked surprised. “Well, yes, of course. Wouldn’t you? If you were twenty—I mean, twelve years old? Sure you’re interested in sex. Weren’t you? It’s about time his Excellency had a teacher.” She paused a moment. “I wonder if she’s any good? Earth people—she probably never had a good teacher of her own.”

That was a subject I didn’t want to pick up on. Our little fling on Mars seemed a long way away, and my whole body ached just thinking of it.

“Sex, it’s all that young kids think of,” Truman cut in. “Sure. But for all that, I should say that sex is the least important part of a braid. A braid is a business, Mr. Tinkerman, you should know that. His Excellency Carlos Fernando is required to marry up into a good braid. The tradition, and the explicit terms of the inheritance, are both very clear. There are only about five braids on Venus that meet the standards of the trust, and he’s too closely related to half of them to be able to marry in. Everybody has been assuming he would marry the wife of the Telios Delacroix braid; she’s old enough to marry down now, and she’s not related to him closely enough to matter. His proposition to Doctor Hamakawa—yes, that has everybody talking.”

I was willing to grasp at any chance. “You mean, his marriage needs to be approved? He can’t just marry anybody he likes?”

Truman Singh shook his head. “Of course he can’t! I just told you. This is business as well as propagating the genes for the next thousand years. Most certainly he can’t marry just anybody.”

“But I think he just outmaneuvered them all,” Epiphany added. “They thought they had him boxed in, didn’t they? But they never thought that he’d go find an outworlder.”

“They?” I said. “Who’s they?”

“They never thought to guard against that,” Epiphany continued.

“But he can’t marry her, right?” I said. “For sure, she’s not of the right family. She’s not of any family. She’s an orphan, she told me that. The institute is her only family.”

Truman shook his head. “I think Epiphany’s right,” he said. “He just may have outfoxed them, I should say. If she’s not of a family, doesn’t have the dozens or hundreds of braided connections that everybody here must have, that means they can’t find anything against her.”

“Her scientific credentials—I bet they won’t be able to find a flaw there.” Epiphany said. “And, an orphan? That’s brilliant. Just brilliant. No family ties at all. I bet he knew that. He worked hard to find just the right candidate, you can bet.” She shook her head, smiling. “And we all thought he’d be another layabout, like his father.”

“This is awful,” I said. “I’ve got to do something.”

“You? You’re far too old for Dr. Hayakawa.” Epiphany looked at me appraisingly. “A good looking man, though—if I were ten, fifteen years younger, I’d give you another look. I have cousins with girls the right age. You’re not married, you say?”

Outside the Singh quarters in sector Carbon, the sun was breaking the horizon as the city blew into the daylit hemisphere.

I hadn’t been sure whether Epiphany’s offer to find me a young girl had been genuine, but it was not what I needed, and I’d refused as politely as I could manage.

I had gone outside to think, or as close to “outside” as the floating city allowed, where all the breathable gas was inside the myriad bubbles. But what could I do? If it was a technical problem, I would be able to solve it, but this was a human problem, and that had always been my weakness.

From where I stood, I could walk to the edge of the world, the transparent gas envelope that held the breathable air in, and kept the carbon dioxide of the Venus atmosphere out. The sun was surrounded by a gauzy haze of thin high cloud, and encircled by a luminous golden halo, with mock suns flying in formation to the left and the right. The morning sunlight slanted across the cloudtops. My eyes hurt from the direct sun. I remembered the sun goggles in my knee pocket, and pulled them out. I pressed them onto my eyes, and tapped on the right side until the world was a comfortable dim.

Floating in the air, in capital letters barely darker than the background, were the words LINK: READY.

I turned my head, and the words shifted with my field of view, changing from dark letters to light depending on the background.

A communications link was open? Certainly not a satellite relay; the glasses couldn’t have enough power to punch through to orbit. Did it mean the manta was hovering in the clouds below?

“Hello, hello,” I said, talking to the air. “Testing. Testing?”

Nothing.

Perhaps it wasn’t audio. I tapped the right lens: dimmer, dimmer, dark; then back to full transparency. Maybe the other side? I tried tapping the left eye of the goggle, and a cursor appeared in my field of view.

With a little experimentation, I found that tapping allowed input in the form of Gandy-encoded text. It seemed to be a low bit-rate text only; the link power must be miniscule. But Gandy was a standard encoding, and I tapped out “CQ CQ”.

Seek you, seek you.

The LINK: READY message changed to a light green, and in a moment the words changed to HERE.

WHO, I tapped.

MANTA 7, was the reply. NEWS?

CF PROPOSED LH, I tapped.!

KNOWN, came the reply. MORE?

NO

OK. SIGNING OUT.

The LINK: READY message returned.

A com link, if I needed one. But I couldn’t see how it helped me any.

I returned to examining the gas envelope. Where I stood was an enormous transparent pane, a square perhaps ten meters on an edge. I was standing near the bottom of the pane, where it abutted to the adjacent sheet with a joint of very thin carbon. I pressed on it, and felt it flex slightly. It couldn’t be more than a millimeter thick; it would make sense to make the envelope no heavier than necessary. I tapped it with the heel of my hand, and could feel it vibrate; a resonant frequency of a few Hertz, I estimated. The engineering weak point would be the joint between panels: if the pane flexed enough, it would pop out from its mounting at the join.

Satisfied that I had solved at least one technical conundrum, I began to contemplate what Epiphany had said. Carlos Fernando was to have married the wife of the Telios Delacroix braid. Whoever she was, she might be relieved at discovering Carlos Fernando making other plans; she could well think the arranged marriage as much a trap as he apparently did. But still. Who was she, and what did she think of Carlos Fernando’s new plan?

The guards had made it clear that I was not to communicate with Carlos Fernando or Leah, but had no instructions forbidding access to Braid Telios Delacroix.

The household seemed to be a carefully orchestrated chaos of children and adults of all ages, but now that I understood the Venus societal system a little, it made more sense. The wife of Telios Delacroix—once the wife-apparent of his Excellency Carlos Fernando—turned out to be a woman only a few years older than I was, with closely cropped grey hair. I realized I’d seen her before. At the banquet, she had been the woman sitting next to Carlos Fernando. She introduced herself as Miranda Telios Delacroix and introduced me to her up-husband, a stocky man perhaps sixty years old.

“We could use a young husband in this family,” he told me. “Getting old, we are, and you can’t count on children—they just go off and get married themselves.”

There were two girls there, who Miranda Delacroix introduced as their two children. They were quiet, attempting to disappear into the background, smiling brightly but with their heads bowed to the ground, looking up at me through lowered eyelashes when they were brought out to be introduced. After the adults’ attention had turned away from them, I noticed both of them surreptitiously studying me. A day ago I wouldn’t even have noticed.

“Now, either come and sit nicely and talk, or else go do your chores,” Miranda told them. “I’m sure the outworlder is quite bored with your buzzing in and out.”

They both giggled and shook their heads and then disappeared into another room, although from time to time one or the other head would silently pop out to look at me, disappearing instantly if I turned my head to look.

We sat down at a low table that seemed to be made out of oak. Her husband brought in some coffee and then left us alone. The coffee was made in the Thai style, in a clear cup, in layers with thick sweet milk.

“So you are Doctor Hamakawa’s friend,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Do you mind my asking, what exactly is your relationship with Doctor Hamakawa?”

“I would like to see her,” I said.

She frowned. “So?”

“And I can’t.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“He has these women, these bodyguards—”

Miranda Delacroix laughed. “Ah, I see! Oh, my little Carli is just too precious for words. I can’t believe he’s jealous. I do think that this time he’s really infatuated.” She tapped on the tabletop with her fingers for a moment, and I realized that the oak tabletop was another one of the embedded computer systems. “Goodness, Carli is not yet the owner of everything, and I don’t see why you shouldn’t see whoever you like. I’ve sent a message to Doctor Hamakawa that you would like to see her.”

“Thank you.”

She waved her hand.

It occurred to me that Carlos Fernando was about the same age as her daughters, perhaps even a classmate of theirs. She must have known him since he was a baby. It did seem a little unfair to him—if they were married, she would have all the advantage, and for a moment I understood his dilemma. Then something she had said struck me.

“He’s not yet owner of everything, you said,” I said. “I don’t understand your customs, Mrs. Delacroix. Please enlighten me. What do you mean, yet?”

“Well, you know that he doesn’t come into his majority until he’s married,” she said.

The picture was beginning to make sense. Carlos Fernando desperately wanted to control things, I thought. And he needed to be married to do it. “And once he’s married?”

“Then he comes into his inheritance, of course,” she said. “But since he’ll be married, the braid will be in control of the fortune. You wouldn’t want a twenty-one-year-old kid in charge of the entire Nordwald-Gruenbaum holdings? That would be ruinous. The first Nordwald knew that. That’s why he married his son into the la Jolla braid. That’s the way it’s always been done.”

“I see,” I said. If Miranda Delacroix married Carlos Fernando, she—not he—would control the Nordwald-Gruenbaum fortune. She had the years of experience, she knew the politics, how the system worked. He would be the child in the relationship. He would always be the child in the relationship.

Miranda Delacroix had every reason to want to make sure that Leah Hamakawa didn’t marry Carlos Fernando. She was my natural ally.

And also, she—and her husband—had every reason to want to kill Leah Hamakawa.

Suddenly the guards that followed Carlos Fernando seemed somewhat less of an affectation. Just how good were the bodyguards? And then I had another thought. Had she, or her husband, hired the pirates to shoot down my kayak? The pirates clearly had been after Leah, not me. They had known that Leah was flying a kayak; somebody must have been feeding them information. If it hadn’t been her, then who?

I looked at her with new suspicions. She was looking back at me with a steady gaze. “Of course, if your Doctor Leah Hamakawa intends to accept the proposal, the two of them will be starting a new braid. She would nominally be the senior, of course, but I wonder—”

“But would she be allowed to?” I interrupted. “If she decided to marry Carlos Fernando, wouldn’t somebody stop her?”

She laughed. “No, I’m afraid that little Carli made his plan well. He’s the child of a Gruenbaum, all right. There’s no legal grounds for the families to object; she may be an outworlder, but he’s made an end run around all the possible objections.”

“And you?”

“Do you think I have choices? If he decides to ask me for advice, I’ll tell him it’s not a good idea. But I’m halfway tempted to just see what he does.”

And give up her chance to be the richest woman in the known universe? I had my doubts.

“Do you think you can talk her out of it?” she said. “Do you think you have something to offer her? As I understand it, you don’t own anything. You’re hired help, a gypsy of the solar system. Is there a single thing that Carli is offering her that you can match?”

“Companionship,” I said. It sounded feeble, even to me.

“Companionship?” she echoed, sarcastically. “Is that all? I would have thought most outworlder men would have promised love. You are honest, at least, I’ll give you that.”

“Yes, love,” I said, miserable. “I’d offer her love.”

“Love,” she said. “Well, how about that. Yes, that’s what outworlders marry for; I’ve read about it. You don’t seem to know, do you? This isn’t about love. It’s not even about sex, although there will be plenty of that, I can assure you, more than enough to turn my little Carlos inside out and make him think he’s learning something about love.

“This is about business, Mr. Tinkerman. You don’t seem to have noticed that. Not love, not sex, not family. It’s business.”

Miranda Telios Delacroix’s message had gotten through to Leah, and she called me up to her quarters. The women guards did not seem happy about this, but they had apparently been instructed to obey her direct orders, and two red-clad guardswomen led me to her quarters.

“What happened to you? What happened to your face?” she said, when she saw me.

I reached up and touched my face. It didn’t hurt, but the acid burns had left behind red spotches and patches of peeling skin. I filled her in on the wreck of the kayak and the rescue, or kidnapping, by pirates. And then I told her about Carlos. “Take another look at that book he gave you. I don’t know where he got it, and I don’t want to guess what it cost, but I’ll say it’s a sure bet it’s no facsimile.”

“Yes, of course.” she said. “He did tell me, eventually.”

“Don’t you know it’s a proposition?”

“Yes; the egg, the book, and the rock,” she said. “Very traditional here. I know you like to think I have my head in the air all the time, but I do pay some attention to what’s going on around me. Carli is a sweet kid.”

“He’s serious, Leah. You can’t ignore him.”

She waved me off. “I can make my own decisions, but thanks for the warnings.”

“It’s worse than that,” I told her. “Have you met Miranda Telios Delacroix?”

“Of course,” she said.

“I think she’s trying to kill you.” I told her about my experience with kayaks, and my suspicion that the pirates had been hired to shoot me down, thinking I was her.

“I believe you may be reading too much into things, Tinkerman,” she said. “Carli told me about the pirates. They’re a small group, disaffected; they bother shipping and such, from time to time, but he says that they’re nothing to worry about. When he gets his inheritance, he says he will take care of them.”

“Take care of them? How?”

She shrugged. “He didn’t say.”

But that was exactly what the pirates—rebels—had told me: that Carlos had a plan, and they didn’t know what it was. “So he has some plans he isn’t telling,” I said.

“He’s been asking me about terraforming,” Leah said, thinking. “But it doesn’t make sense to do that on Venus. I don’t understand what he’s thinking. He could split the carbon dioxide atmosphere into oxygen and carbon; I know he has the technology to do that.”

“He does?”

“Yes, I think you were there when he mentioned it. The molecular still. It’s solar-powered micromachines. But what would be the point?”

“So he’s serious?”

“Seriously thinking about it, anyway. But it doesn’t make any sense. Nearly pure oxygen at the surface, at sixty or seventy bars? That atmosphere would be even more deadly than the carbon dioxide. And it wouldn’t even solve the greenhouse effect; with that thick an atmosphere, even oxygen is a greenhouse gas.”

“You explained that to him?”

“He already knew it. And the floating cities wouldn’t float any more. They rely on the gas inside—breathing air—being lighter than the Venusian air. Turn the Venus carbon dioxide to pure O2, the cities fall out of the sky.”

“But?”

“But he didn’t seem to care.”

“So terraforming would make Venus uninhabitable, and he knows it. So what’s he planning?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“I do,” I said. “And I think we’d better see your friend Carlos Fernando.”

Carlos Fernando was in his playroom.

The room was immense. His family’s quarters were built on the edge of the upcity, right against the bubble-wall, and one whole side of his playroom looked out across the cloudscape. The room was littered with stuff: sets of interlocking toy blocks with electronic modules inside that could be put together into elaborate buildings, models of spacecraft and various lighter-than-air aircraft, no doubt vehicles used on Venus, a contraption of transparent vessels connected by tubes that seemed to be a half-completed science project, a unicycle that sat in a corner, silently balancing on its gyros. Between the toys were pieces of light, transparent furniture. I picked up a chair, and it was no heavier than a feather, barely there at all. I knew what it was now, diamond fibers that had been engineered into a foamed, fractal structure. Diamond was their chief working material; it was something that they could make directly out of the carbon dioxide atmosphere, with no imported raw materials. They were experts in diamond, and it frightened me.

When the guards brought us to the playroom, Carlos Fernando was at the end of the room farthest from the enormous window, his back to the window and to us. He’d known we were coming, of course, but when the guards announced our arrival he didn’t turn around, but called behind him, “It’s okay—I’ll be with them in a second.”

The two guards left us.

He was gyrating and waving his hands in front of a large screen. On the screen, colorful spaceships flew in three-dimensional projection through the complicated maze of a city that had apparently been designed by Escher, with towers connected by bridges and buttresses. The viewpoint swooped around, chasing some of the spaceships, hiding from others. From time to time bursts of red dots shot forward, blowing the ships out of the sky with colorful explosions as Carlos Fernando shouted “Gotcha!” and “In your eye, dog.”

He was dancing with his whole body; apparently the game had some kind of full-body input. As far as I could tell, he seemed to have forgotten entirely that we were there.

I looked around.

Sitting on a padded platform no more than two meters from where we had entered, a lion looked back at me with golden eyes. He was bigger than I was. Next to him, with her head resting on her paws, lay a lioness, and she was watching me as well, her eyes half open. Her tail twitched once; twice. The lion’s mane was so huge that it must have been shampooed and blow-dried.

He opened his mouth and yawned, then rolled onto his side, still watching me.

“They’re harmless,” Leah said. “Bad-Boy and Knickers. Pets.”

Knickers—the female, I assumed—stretched over and grabbed the male lion by the neck. Then she put one paw on the back of his head and began to groom his fur with her tongue.

I was beginning to get a feel for just how different Carlos Fernando’s life was from anything I knew.

On the walls closer to where Carlos Fernando was playing his game were several other screens. The one to my left looked like it had a homework problem partially-worked out. Calculus, I noted. He was doing a chain-rule differentiation and had left it half-completed where he’d gotten stuck, or bored. Next to it was a visualization of the structure of the atmosphere of Venus. Homework? I looked at it more carefully. If it was homework, he was much more interested in atmospheric science than in math; the map was covered with notes and had half a dozen open windows with details. I stepped forward to read it more closely.

The screen went black.

I turned around, and Carlos Fernando was there, a petulant expression on his face. “That’s my stuff,” he said. His voice squeaked on the word ‘stuff.’ “I don’t want you looking at my stuff unless I ask you to, okay?”

He turned to Leah, and his expression changed to something I couldn’t quite read. He wanted to kick me out of his room, I thought, but didn’t want to make Leah angry; he wanted to keep her approval. “What’s he doing here?” he asked her.

She looked at me, and raised her eyebrows.

I wish I knew myself, I thought, but I was in it far enough, I had better say something.

I walked over to the enormous window, and looked out across the clouds. I could see another city, blue with distance, a toy balloon against the golden horizon.

“The environment of Venus is unique,” I said. “And to think, your ancestor Udo Nordwald put all this together.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I mean, I guess I mean thanks. I’m glad you like our city.”

“All of the cities,” I said. “It’s a staggering accomplishment. The genius it must have taken to envision it all, to put together the first floating city; to think of this planet as a haven, a place where millions can live. Or billions—the skies are nowhere near full. Someday even trillions, maybe.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Really something, I guess.”

“Spectacular.” I turned around and looked him directly in the eye. “So why do you want to destroy it?”

“What?” Leah said.

Carlos Fernando had his mouth open, and started to say something, but then closed his mouth again. He looked down, and then off to his left, and then to the right. He said, “I . . . I . . .” but then broke off.

“I know your plan,” I said. “Your micromachines—they’ll convert the carbon dioxide to oxygen. And when the atmosphere changes, the cities will be grounded. They won’t be lighter than air, won’t be able to float any more. You know that, don’t you? You want to do it deliberately.”

“He can’t,” Leah said, “it won’t work. The carbon would—” and then she broke off. “Diamond,” she said. “He’s going to turn the excess carbon into diamond.”

I reached over and picked up a piece of furniture, one of the foamed-diamond tables. It weighted almost nothing.

“Nanomachinery,” I said. “The molecular still you mentioned. You know, somebody once said that the problem with Venus isn’t that the surface is too hot. It’s just fine up here where the air’s as thin as Earth’s air. The problem is, the surface is just too darn far below sea level.

“But every ton of atmosphere your molecular machines converts to oxygen, you get a quarter ton of pure carbon. And the atmosphere is a thousand tons per square meter.”

I turned to Carlos Fernando, who still hadn’t managed to say anything. His silence was as damning as any confession. “Your machines turns that carbon into diamond fibers, and build upward from the surface. You’re going to build a new surface, aren’t you—a completely artificial surface. A platform up to the sweet spot, fifty kilometers above the old rock surface. And the air there will be breathable.”

At last Carlos found his voice. “Yeah,” he said. “Dad came up with the machines, but the idea of using them to build a shell around the whole planet—that idea was mine. It’s all mine. It’s pretty smart, isn’t it? Don’t you think it’s smart?”

“You can’t own the sky,” I said, “but you can own the land, can’t you? You will have built the land. And all the cities are going to crash. There won’t be any dissident cities, because there won’t be any cities. You’ll own it all. Everybody will have to come to you.”

“Yeah,” Carlos said. He was smiling now, a big goofy grin. “Sweet, isn’t it?” He must have seen my expression, because he said, “Hey, come on. It’s not like they were contributing. Those dissident cities are full of nothing but malcontents and pirates.”

Leah’s eyes were wide. He turned to her and said, “Hey, why shouldn’t I? Give me one reason. They shouldn’t even be here. It was all my ancestor’s idea, the floating city, and they shoved in. They stole his idea, so now I’m going to shut them down. It’ll be better my way.”

He turned back to me. “Okay, look. You figured out my plan. That’s fine, that’s great, no problem, okay? You’re smarter than I thought you were, I admit it. Now, just, I need you to promise not to tell anybody, okay?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, go away,” he said. He turned back to Leah. “Doctor Hamakawa,” he said. He got down on one knee, and, staring at the ground, said, “I want you to marry me. Please?”

Leah shook her head, but he was staring at the ground, and couldn’t see her. “I’m sorry, Carlos,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

He was just a kid, in a room surrounded by his toys, trying to talk the adults into seeing things the way he wanted to see them. He finally looked up, his eyes filling with tears. “Please,” he said. “I want you to. I’ll give you anything. I’ll give you whatever you want. You can have everything I own, all of it, the whole planet, everything.”

“I’m sorry,” Leah repeated. “I’m sorry.”

He reached out and picked up something off the floor—a model of a spaceship—and looked at it, pretending to be suddenly interested in it. Then he put it carefully down on a table, picked up another one, and stood up, not looking at us. He sniffled, and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand—apparently forgetting he had the ship model in it—trying to do it casually, as if we wouldn’t have noticed that he had been crying.

“Ok,” he said. “You can’t leave, you know. This guy guessed too much. The plan only works if it’s secret, so that the malcontents don’t know it’s coming, don’t prepare for it. You have to stay here. I’ll keep you here, I’ll—I don’t know. Something.”

“No,” I said. “It’s dangerous for Leah here. Miranda already tried to hire pirates to shoot her down once, when she was out in the sky kayak. We have to leave.”

Carlos looked up at me, and with sudden sarcasm, said, “Miranda? You’re joking. That was me who tipped off the pirates. Me. I thought they’d take you away and keep you. I wish they had.”

And then he turned back to Leah. “Please? You’ll be the richest person on Venus. You’ll be the richest person in the solar system. I’ll give it all to you. You’ll be able to do anything you want.

“I’m sorry,” Leah repeated. “It’s a great offer. But no.”

At the other end of the room, Carlos’ bodyguards were quietly entering. He apparently had some way to summon them silently. The room was filling with them, and their guns were drawn, but not yet pointed.

I backed toward the window, and Leah came with me.

The city had rotated a little, and sunlight was now slanting in through the window. I put my sun goggles on.

“Do you trust me?” I said quietly.

“Of course,” Leah said. “I always have.”

“Come here.”

LINK: READY blinked in the corner of my field of view.

I reached up, casually, and tapped on the side of the left lens. CQ MANTA, I tapped. CQ.

I put my other hand behind me and, hoping I could disguise what I was doing as long as I could, I pushed on the pane, feeling it flex out.

HERE, was the reply.

Push. Push. It was a matter of rhythm. When I found the resonant frequency of the pane, it felt right, it built up, like oscillating a rocking chair, like sex.

I reached out my left hand to hold Leah’s hand, and pumped harder on the glass with my right. I was putting my weight into it now, and the panel was bowing visibly with my motion. The window was making a noise now, an infrasonic thrum too deep to hear, but you could feel it. On each swing the pane of the window bowed further outward.

“What are you doing?” Carlos shouted. “Are you crazy?”

The bottom bowed out, and the edge of the pane separated from its frame.

There was a smell of acid and sulfur. The bodyguards ran toward us, but—as I’d hoped—they were hesitant to use their guns, worried that the damaged panel might blow completely out.

The window screeched and jerked, but held, fixed in place by the other joints. The way it was stuck in place left a narrow vertical slit between the window and its frame. I pulled Leah close to me, and shoved myself backwards, against the glass, sliding along against the bowed pane, pushing it outward to widen the opening as much as I could.

As I fell, I kissed her lightly on the edge of the neck.

She could have broken my grip, could have torn herself free.

But she didn’t.

“Hold your breath and squeeze your eyes shut,” I whispered, as we fell through the opening and into the void, and then with my last breath of air, I said, “I love you.”

She said nothing in return. She was always practical, and knew enough not to try to talk when her next breath would be acid. “I love you too,” I imagined her saying.

With my free hand, I tapped, MANTA NEED PICK-UP. FAST.

And we fell.

“It wasn’t about sex at all,” I said. “That’s what I failed to understand.” We were in the manta, covered with slime, but basically unhurt. The pirates had accomplished their miracle, snatched us out of midair. We had information they needed; and in exchange, they would give us a ride off the planet, back where we belonged, back to the cool and the dark and the emptiness between planets. “It was all about finance. Keeping control of assets.”

“Sure it’s about sex,” Leah said. “Don’t fool yourself. We’re humans. It’s always about sex. Always. You think that’s not a temptation? Molding a kid into just exactly what you want? Of course it’s sex. Sex and control. Money? That’s just the excuse they tell themselves.”

“But you weren’t tempted,” I said.

She looked at me long and hard. “Of course I was.” She sighed, and her expression was once again distant, unreadable. “More than you’ll ever know.”

THE MAIDEN FLIGHT OF MCCAULEY’S BELLEROPHON

Elizabeth Hand

BEING ASSIGNED TO THE HEAD for eight hours was the worst security shift you could pull at the museum. Even now, thirty years later, Robbie had dreams in which he wandered from the Early Flight gallery to Balloons & Airships to Cosmic Soup, where he once again found himself alone in the dark, staring into the bland gaze of the famous scientist as he intoned his endless lecture about the nature of the universe.

“Remember when we thought nothing could be worse than that?” Robbie stared wistfully into his empty glass, then signaled the waiter for another bourbon and Coke. Across the table, his old friend Emery sipped a beer.

“I liked the Head,” said Emery. He cleared his throat and began to recite in the same portentous tone the famous scientist had employed. “Trillions and trillions of galaxies in which our own is but a mote of cosmic dust. It made you think.”

“It made you think about killing yourself,” said Robbie. “Do you want to know how many times I heard that?”

“A trillion?”

“Five thousand.” The waiter handed Robbie a drink, his fourth. “Twenty-five times an hour, times eight hours a day, times five days a week, times five months.”

“Five thousand, that’s not so much. Especially when you think of all those trillions of galleries. I mean galaxies. Only five months? I thought you worked there longer.”

“Just that summer. It only seemed like forever.”

Emery knocked back his beer. “A long time ago, in a gallery far, far away,” he intoned, not for the first time.

Thirty years before, the Museum of American Aviation and Aerospace had just opened. Robbie was nineteen that summer, a recent dropout from the University of Maryland, living in a group house in Mount Rainier. Employment opportunities were scarce; making $3.40 an hour as a security aide at the Smithsonian’s newest museum seemed preferable to bagging groceries at Giant Food. Every morning he’d punch his time card in the guards’ locker room and change into his uniform. Then he’d duck outside to smoke a joint before trudging downstairs for the morning meeting and that day’s assignments.

Most of the security guards were older than Robbie, with backgrounds in the military and an eye on future careers with the D.C. police department or FBI. Still, they tolerated him with mostly good-natured ribbing about his longish hair and bloodshot eyes. All except for Hedge, the security chief. He was an enormous man with a shaved head who sat, knitting, behind a bank of closed-circuit video monitors, observing tourists and guards with an expression of amused contempt.

“What are you making?” Robbie once asked. Hedge raised his hands to display an intricately patterned baby blanket. “Hey, that’s cool. Where’d you learn to knit?”

“Prison.” Hedge’s eyes narrowed. “You stoned again, Opie? That’s it. Gallery Seven. Relieve Jones.”

Robbie’s skin went cold, then hot with relief when he realized Hedge wasn’t going to fire him. “Seven? Uh, yeah, sure, sure. For how long?”

“Forever,” said Hedge.

“Oh, man, you got the Head.” Jones clapped his hands gleefully when Robbie arrived. “Better watch your ass, kids’ll throw shit at you,” he said, and sauntered off.

Two projectors at opposite ends of the dark room beamed twin shafts of silvery light onto a head-shaped Styrofoam form. Robbie could never figure out if they’d filmed the famous scientist just once, or if they’d gone to the trouble to shoot him from two different angles.

However they’d done it, the sight of the disembodied Head was surprisingly elective: it looked like a hologram floating amid the hundreds of back-projected twinkly stars that covered the walls and ceiling. The creep factor was intensified by the stilted, slightly puzzled manner in which the Head blinked as it droned on, as though the famous scientist had just realized his body was gone, and was hoping no one else would notice. Once, when he was really stoned, Robbie swore that the Head deviated from its script.

“What’d it say?” asked Emery. At the time he was working in the General Aviation Gallery, operating a flight simulator that tourists clambered into for three-minute rides.

“Something about peaches,” said Robbie. “I couldn’t understand, it sort of mumbled.”

Every morning, Robbie stood outside the entrance to Cosmic Soup and watched as tourists streamed through the main entrance and into the Hall of Flight. Overhead, legendary aircraft hung from the ceiling. The 1903 Wright Flyer with its Orville mannequin; a Lilienthal glider; the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. From a huge pit in the center of the Hall rose a Minuteman III ICBM, rust-colored stains still visible where a protester had tossed a bucket of pig’s blood on it a few months earlier. Directly above the entrance to Robbie’s gallery dangled the Spirit of St. Louis. The aides who worked upstairs in the planetarium amused themselves by shooting paper clips onto its wings.

Robbie winced at the memory. He gulped what was left of his bourbon and sighed. “That was a long time ago.”

“Tempus fugit, baby. Thinking of which—” Emery dug into his pocket for a BlackBerry. “Check this out. From Leonard.”

Robbie rubbed his eyes blearily, then read.

From: l.scopes@MAAA.SI.edu

Subject: Tragic Illness

Date: April 6, 7:58:22 P.M. EDT

To: emeryubergeek@gmail.com

Dear Emery,

I just learned that our Maggie Blevin is very ill. I wrote her at Christmas but never heard back. Fuad El-Hajj says she was diagnosed with advanced breast cancer last fall. Prognosis is not good. She is still in the Fayetteville area, and I gather is in a hospice. I want to make a visit though not sure how that will go over. I have something I want to give her but need to talk to you about it.

L.

“Ahhh.” Robbie sighed. “God, that’s terrible.”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. But I figured you’d want to know.”

Robbie pinched the bridge of his nose. Four years earlier, his wife, Anna, had died of breast cancer, leaving him adrift in a grief so profound it was as though he’d been poisoned, as though his veins had been pumped with the same chemicals that had failed to save her. Anna had been an oncology nurse, a fact that at first afforded some meager black humor, but in the end deprived them of even the faintest of false hopes borne of denial or faith in alternative therapies.

There was no time for any of that. Zach, their son, had just turned twelve. Between his own grief and Zach’s subsequent acting out, Robbie got so depressed that he started pouring his first bourbon and Coke before the boy left for school. Two years later, he got fired from his job with the county parks commission.

He now worked in the shipping department at Small’s, an off-price store in a desolate shopping mall that resembled the ruins of a regional airport. Robbie found it oddly consoling. It reminded him of the museum. The same generic atriums and industrial carpeting; the same bleak sunlight filtered through clouded glass; the same vacant-faced people trudging from Dollar Store to Sunglass Hut, the way they’d wandered from the General Aviation Gallery to Cosmic Soup.

“Poor Maggie.” Robbie returned the BlackBerry. “I haven’t thought of her in years.”

“I’m going to see Leonard.”

“When? Maybe I’ll go with you.”

“Now.” Emery shoved a twenty under his beer bottle and stood. “You’re coming with me.”

“What?”

“You can’t drive—you’re snackered. Get popped again, you lose your license.”

“Popped? Who’s getting popped? And I’m not snackered, I’m—” Robbie thought. “Snockered. You pronounced it wrong.”

“Whatever.” Emery grabbed Robbie’s shoulder and pushed him to the door. “Let’s go.”

Emery drove an expensive hybrid that could get from Rockville to Utica, New York, on a single tank of gas. The vanity plate read MARVO and was flanked by bumper stickers with messages like GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE: TYPE 2 PHASERS KILL PEOPLE and FRAK OFF! as well as several slogans that Emery said were in Klingon.

Emery was the only person Robbie knew who was somewhat famous. Back in the early 1980s, he’d created a local-access cable TV show called Captain Marvo’s Secret Spacetime, taped in his parents’ basement and featuring Emery in an aluminum foil costume behind the console of a cardboard spaceship. Captain Marvo watched videotaped episodes of low-budget 1950s science fiction serials with titles like PAYLOA.D.: MOONDUST while bantering with his copilot, a homemade puppet made by Leonard, named Mungbean.

The show was pretty funny if you were stoned. Captain Marvo became a cult hit, and then a real hit when a major network picked it up as a late-night offering. Emery quit his day job at the museum and rented studio time in Baltimore. He sold the rights after a few years, and was immediately replaced by a flashy actor in Lurex and a glittering robot sidekick. The show limped along for a season then died. Emery’s fans claimed this was because their slacker hero had been sidelined.

But maybe it was just that people weren’t as stoned as they used to be. These days the program had a surprising afterlife on the Internet, where Robbie’s son, Zach, watched it with his friends, and Emery did a brisk business selling memorabilia through his official Captain Marvo Web site.

It took them nearly an hour to get into D.C. and find a parking space near the Mall, by which time Robbie had sobered up enough to wish he’d stayed at the bar.

“Here.” Emery gave him a sugarless breath mint, then plucked at the collar of Robbie’s shirt, acid green with SMALLS embroidered in purple. “Christ, Robbie, you’re a freaking mess.”

He reached into the backseat, retrieved a black T-shirt from his gym bag. “Here, put this on.”

Robbie changed into it and stumbled out onto the sidewalk. It was mid-April but already steamy; the air shimmered above the pavement and smelled sweetly of apple blossom and coolant from innumerable air conditioners. Only as he approached the museum entrance and caught his reflection in a glass wall did Robbie see that his T-shirt was emblazoned with Emery’s youthful face and foil helmet above the words O CAPTAIN MY CAPTAIN.

“You wear your own T-shirt?” he asked as he followed Emery through the door.

“Only at the gym. Nothing else was clean.”

They waited at the security desk while a guard checked their IDs, called upstairs to Leonard’s office, signed them in and took their pictures before finally issuing each a visitor’s pass.

“You’ll have to wait for Leonard to escort you upstairs,” the guard said.

“Not like the old days, huh, Robbie?” Emery draped an arm around Robbie and steered him into the Hall of Flight. “Not a lot of retinal scanning on your watch.”

The museum hadn’t changed much. The same aircraft and space capsules gleamed overhead. Tourists clustered around the lucite pyramid that held slivers of moon rock. Sunburned guys sporting military haircuts and tattoos peered at a mockup of a F-15 flight deck. Everything had that old museum smell: soiled carpeting, machine oil, the wet-laundry odor wafting from steam tables in the public cafeteria.

But the Head was long gone. Robbie wondered if anyone even remembered the famous scientist, dead for many years. The General Aviation Gallery, where Emery and Leonard had operated the flight simulators and first met Maggie Blevin, was now devoted to Personal Flight, with models of jet packs worn by alarmingly lifelike mannequins.

“Leonard designed those.” Emery paused to stare at a child-size figure who seemed to float above a solar-powered skateboard. “He could have gone to Hollywood.”

“It’s not too late.”

Robbie and Emery turned to see their old colleague behind them.

“Leonard,” said Emery.

The two men embraced. Leonard stepped back and tilted his head. “Robbie. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Surprise,” said Robbie. They shook hands awkwardly. “Good to see you, man.”

Leonard forced a smile. “And you.”

They headed toward the staff elevator. Back in the day, Leonard’s hair had been long and luxuriantly blond. It fell unbound down the back of the dogshit yellow uniform jacket, designed to evoke an airline pilot’s, which he and Emery and the other General Aviation aides wore as they gave their spiel to tourists eager to yank on the controls of their Link Trainers. With his patrician good looks and stern gray eyes, Leonard was the only aide who actually resembled a real pilot.

Now he looked like a cross between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Willie Nelson. His hair was white and hung in two braids that reached almost to his waist. Instead of the crappy polyester uniform, he wore a white linen tunic, a necklace of unpolished turquoise and coral, loose black trousers tucked into scuffed cowboy boots, and a skull earring the size of Robbie’s thumb. On his collar gleamed the cheap knockoff pilot’s wings that had once adorned his museum uniform jacket. Leonard had always taken his duties very seriously, especially after Margaret Blevin arrived as the museum’s first curator of Proto-Flight. Robbie’s refusal to do the same, even long after he’d left the museum himself, had resulted in considerable friction between them over the intervening years.

Robbie cleared his throat. “So, uh. What are you working on these days?” He wished he wasn’t wearing Emery’s idiotic T-shirt.

“I’ll show you,” said Leonard.

Upstairs, they headed for the old photo lab, now an imaging center filled with banks of computers, digital cameras, scanners.

“We still process film there,” Leonard said as they walked down a corridor hung with production photos from The Day the Earth Stood Still and Frau Im Mond. “Negatives, old motion picture stock—people still send us things.”

“Any of it interesting?” asked Emery.

Leonard shrugged. “Sometimes. You never know what you might find. That’s part of Maggie’s legacy—we’re always open to the possibility of discovering something new.”

Robbie shut his eyes. Leonard’s voice made his teeth ache. “Remember how she used to keep a bottle of Scotch in that side drawer, underneath her purse?” he said.

Leonard frowned, but Emery laughed. “Yeah! And it was good stuff, too.”

“Maggie had a great deal of class,” said Leonard in a somber tone.

You pompous asshole, thought Robbie.

Leonard punched a code into a door and opened it. “You might remember when this was a storage cupboard.”

They stepped inside. Robbie did remember this place—he’d once had sex here with a General Aviation aide whose name he’d long forgotten. It had been a good-size supply room then, with an odd, sweetish scent from the rolls of film stacked along the shelves.

Now it was a very crowded office. The shelves were crammed with books and curatorial reports dating back to 1981, and archival boxes holding god knows what—Leonard’s original government-job application, maybe. A coat had been tossed onto the floor in one corner. There was a large metal desk covered with bottles of nail polish, and an ancient swivel chair that Robbie vaguely remembered having been deployed during his lunch hour tryst.

Mostly, though, the room held Leonard’s stuff: tiny cardboard dioramas, mock-ups of space capsules and dirigibles. It smelled overpoweringly of nail polish. It was also extremely cold.

“Man, you must freeze your ass off.” Robbie rubbed his arms.

Emery picked up one of the little bottles. “You getting a manicurist’s license?”

Leonard gestured at the desk. “I’m painting with nail polish now. You get some very unusual elects.”

“I bet,” said Robbie. “You’re, like, huffing nail polish.” He peered at the shelves, impressed despite himself. “Jeez, Leonard. You made all these?”

“Damn right I did.”

When Robbie first met Leonard, they were both lowly GS-1s. In those days, Leonard collected paper clips and rode an old Schwinn bicycle to work. He entertained tourists by making balloon animals. In his spare time, he created Mungbean, Captain Marvo’s robot friend, out of a busted lamp and some spark plugs.

He also made strange ink drawings, hundreds of them. Montgolfier balloons with sinister faces; B-52s carrying payloads of soap bubbles; caricatures of the museum director and senior curators as greyhounds sniffing each others’ nether quarters.

It was this last, drawn on a scrap of legal paper, which Margaret Blevin picked up on her first tour of the General Aviation Gallery. The sketch had fallen out of Leonard’s jacket: he watched in horror as the museum’s deputy director stooped to retrieve the crumpled page.

“Allow me,” said the woman at the director’s side. She was slight, fortyish, with frizzy red hair and enormous hoop earrings, wearing an Indian-print tunic over tight, sky blue trousers and leather clogs. She snatched up the drawing, stuffed it in her pocket, and continued her tour of the gallery. After the deputy director left, the woman walked to where Leonard stood beside his flight simulator, sweating in his polyester jacket as he supervised an overweight kid in a Chewbacca T-shirt. When the kid climbed down, the woman held up the crumpled sheet.

“Who did this?”

The other two aides—one was Emery—shook their heads.

“I did,” said Leonard.

The woman crooked her finger. “Come with me.”

“Am I fired?” asked Leonard as he followed her out of the gallery.

“Nope. I’m Maggie Blevin. We’re shutting down those Link Trainers and making this into a new gallery. I’m in charge. I need someone to start cataloging stuff for me and maybe do some preliminary sketches. You want the job?”

“Yes,” stammered Leonard. “I mean, sure.”

“Great.” She balled up the sketch and tossed it into a wastebasket. “Your talents were being wasted. That looks just like the director’s butt.”

“If he was a dog,” said Leonard.

“He’s a son of a bitch, and that’s close enough,” said Maggie. “Let’s go see personnel.”

Leonard’s current job description read Museum Elects Specialist, Grade 9, Step 10. For the last two decades, he’d created figurines and models for the museum’s exhibits. Not fighter planes or commercial aircraft—there was an entire division of modelers who handled that.

Leonard’s work was more rarefied, as evidenced by the dozens of flying machines perched wherever there was space in the tiny room. Rocket ships, bat-winged aerodromes, biplanes and triplanes and saucers, many of them striped and polka dotted and glazed with, yes, nail polish in circus colors, so that they appeared to be made of ribbon candy.

His specialty was aircraft that had never actually flown; in many instances, aircraft that had never been intended to fly. Crypto-aviation, as some disgruntled curator dubbed it. He worked from plans and photographs, drawings and uncategorizable materials he’d found in the archives Maggie Blevin had been hired to organize. These were housed in a set of oak filing cabinets dating to the 1920s. Officially, the archive was known as the Pre-Langley Collection. But everyone in the museum, including Maggie Blevin, called it the Nut Files.

After Leonard’s fateful promotion, Robbie and Emery would sometimes punch out for the day, go upstairs, and stroll to his corner of the library. You could do that then—wander around workrooms and storage areas, the library and archives, without having to check in or get a special pass or security clearance. Robbie just went along for the ride, but Emery was fascinated by the things Leonard found in the Nut Files. Grainy black-and-white photos of purported UFOs; typescripts of encounters with deceased Russian cosmonauts in the Nevada desert; an account of a Raelian wedding ceremony attended by a glowing crimson orb. There was also a large carton donated by the widow of a legendary rocket scientist, which turned out to be filled with 1950s foot-fetish pornography, and sixteen-millimeter film footage of several pioneers of flight doing something unseemly with a spotted pig.

“Whatever happened to that pig movie?” asked Robbie as he admired a biplane with violet-striped ailerons.

“It’s been deaccessioned,” said Leonard.

He cleared the swivel chair and motioned for Emery to sit, then perched on the edge of his desk. Robbie looked in vain for another chair, finally settled on the floor beside a wastebasket filled with empty nail polish bottles.

“So I have a plan,” announced Leonard. He stared fixedly at Emery, as though they were alone in the room. “To help Maggie. Do you remember the Bellerophon?”

Emery frowned. “Vaguely. That old film loop of a plane crash?”

“Presumed crash. They never found any wreckage, everyone just assumes it crashed. But yes, that was the Bellerophon—it was the clip that played in our gallery. Maggie’s gallery.”

“Right—the movie that burned up!” broke in Robbie. “Yeah, I remember, the film got caught in a sprocket or something. Smoke detectors went off and they evacuated the whole museum. They got all on Maggie’s case about it, they thought she’d installed it wrong.”

“She didn’t,” Leonard said angrily. “One of the tech guys screwed up the installation—he told me a few years ago. He didn’t vent it properly, the projector bulb overheated and the film caught on fire. He said he always felt bad she got canned.”

“But they didn’t fire her for that.” Robbie gave Leonard a sideways look. “It was the UFO—”

Emery cut him off. “They were gunning for her,” he said. “C’mon, Rob, everyone knew—all those old military guys running this place, they couldn’t stand a woman getting in their way. Not if she wasn’t air force or some shit. Took ’em a few years, that’s all. Fucking assholes. I even got a letter-writing campaign going on the show. Didn’t help.”

“Nothing would have helped.” Leonard sighed. “She was a visionary. She is a visionary,” he added hastily. “Which is why I want to do this—”

He hopped from the desk, rooted around in a corner, and pulled out a large cardboard box.

“Move,” he ordered.

Robbie scrambled to his feet. Leonard began to remove things from the carton and set them carefully on his desk. Emery got up to make more room, angling himself beside Robbie. They watched as Leonard arranged piles of paper, curling eight by tens, faded blueprints, and an old 35-millimeter film viewer, along with several large manila envelopes closed with red string. Finally he knelt beside the box and very gingerly reached inside.

“I think the Lindbergh baby’s in there,” whispered Emery.

Leonard stood, cradling something in his hands, turned and placed it in the middle of the desk.

“Holy shit.” Emery whistled. “Leonard, you’ve outdone yourself.”

Robbie crouched so he could view it at eye level: a model of some sort of flying machine, though it seemed impossible that anyone, even Leonard or Maggie Blevin, could ever have dreamed it might fly. It had a zeppelin-shaped body, with a sharp nose like that of a Lockheed Starfighter, slightly uptilted. Suspended beneath this was a basket filled with tiny gears and chains, and beneath that was a contraption with three wheels, like a velocipede, only the wheels were fitted with dozens of stiff flaps, each no bigger than a fingernail, and even tinier propellers.

And everywhere, there were wings, sprouting from every inch of the craft’s body in an explosion of canvas and balsa and paper and gauze. Bird-shaped wings, bat-shaped wings; square wings like those of a box kite, elevators and hollow cones of wire; long tubes that, when Robbie peered inside them, were filled with baffles and flaps. Ailerons and struts ran between them to form a dizzying grid, held together with fine gold thread and mono—lament and what looked like human hair. Every bit of it was painted in brilliant shades of violet and emerald, scarlet and fuchsia and gold, and here and there shining objects were set into the glossy surface: minute shards of mirror or colored glass; a beetle carapace; flecks of mica.

Above it all, springing from the fuselage like the cap of an immense toadstool, was a feathery parasol made of curved bamboo and multicolored silk.

It was like gazing at the Wright Flyer through a kaleidoscope.

“That’s incredible!” Robbie exclaimed. “How’d you do that?”

“Now we just have to see if it flies,” said Leonard.

Robbie straightened. “How the hell can that thing fly?”

“The original flew.” Leonard leaned against the wall. “My theory is, if we can replicate the same conditions—the exact same conditions—it will work.”

“But.” Robbie glanced at Emery. “The original didn’t fly. It crashed. I mean, presumably.”

Emery nodded. “Plus there was a guy in it. McCartney—”

“McCauley,” said Leonard.

“Right, McCauley. And you know, Leonard, no one’s gonna fit in that, right?” Emery shot him an alarmed look. “You’re not thinking of making a full-scale model, are you? Because that would be completely insane.”

“No.” Leonard fingered the skull plug in his earlobe. “I’m going to make another film—I’m going to replicate the original, and I’m going to do it so perfectly that Maggie won’t even realize it’snot the original. I’ve got it all worked out.” He looked at Emery. “I can shoot it on digital, if you’ll lend me a camera. That way I can edit it on my laptop. And then I’m going to bring it down to Fayetteville so she can see it.”

Robbie and Emery glanced at each other.

“Well, it’s not completely insane,” said Robbie.

“But Maggie knows the original was destroyed,” said Emery. “I mean, I was there, I remember—she saw it. We all saw it. She has cancer, right? Not Alzheimer’s or dementia or, I dunno, amnesia.”

“Why don’t you just Photoshop something?” asked Robbie. “You could tell her it was an homage. That way—”

Leonard’s glare grew icy. “It is not an homage. I am going to Cowana Island, just like McCauley did, and I am going to re-create the maiden flight of the Bellerophon. I am going to film it, I am going to edit it. And when it’s completed, I’m going to tell Maggie that I found a dupe in the archives. Her heart broke when that footage burned up. I’m going to give it back to her.”

Robbie stared at his shoe so Leonard wouldn’t see his expression. After a moment he said, “When Anna was sick, I wanted to do that. Go back to this place by Mount Washington where we stayed before Zach was born. We had all these great photos of us canoeing there, it was so beautiful. But it was winter, and I said we should wait and go in the summer.”

“I’m not waiting.” Leonard sifted through the papers on his desk. “I have these—”

He opened a manila envelope and withdrew several glassine sleeves. He examined one, then handed it to Emery.

“This is what survived of the original footage, which in fact was not the original footage—the original was shot in 1901, on cellulose nitrate film. That’s what Maggie and I found when we first started going through the Nut Files. Only of course nitrate stock is like a ticking time bomb. So the Photo Lab duped it onto safety film, which is what you’re looking at.”

Emery held the film to the light. Robbie stood beside him, squinting. Five frames, in shades of amber and tortoiseshell, with blurred images that might have been bushes or clouds or smoke damage, for all Robbie could see.

Emery asked, “How many frames do you have?”

“Total? Seventy-two.”

Emery shook his head. “Not much, is it? What was it, fifteen seconds?”

“Seventeen seconds.”

“Times twenty-four frames per second—so, out of about four hundred frames, that’s all that’s left.”

“No. There was actually less than that, because it was silent film, which runs at more like eighteen frames per second, and they corrected the speed. So, about three hundred frames, which means we have about a quarter of the original stock.” Leonard hesitated. He glanced up. “Lock that door, would you, Robbie?”

Robbie did, looked back to see Leonard crouched in the corner, moving aside his coat to reveal a metal strongbox. He prised the lid from the top.

The box was filled with water—Robbie hoped it was water. “Is that an aquarium?”

Leonard ignored him, tugged up his sleeves, then dipped both hands below the surface. Very, very carefully he removed another metal box. He set it on the floor, grabbed his coat, and meticulously dried the lid, then turned to Robbie.

“You know, maybe you should unlock the door. In case we need to get out fast.”

“Jesus Christ, Leonard, what is it?” exclaimed Emery. “Snakes?”

“Nope.” Leonard plucked something from the box, and Emery flinched as a serpentine ribbon unfurled in the air. “It’s what’s left of the original footage—the 1901 film.”

“That’s nitrate?” Emery stared at him, incredulous. “You are insane! How the hell’d you get it?”

“I clipped it before they destroyed the stock. I think it’s okay—I take it out every day, so the gases don’t build up. And it doesn’t seem to interact with the nail polish fumes. It’s the part where you can actually see McCauley, where you get the best view of the plane. See?”

He dangled it in front of Emery, who backed toward the door. “Put it away, put it away!”

“Can I see?” asked Robbie.

Leonard gave him a measuring look, then nodded. “Hold it by this edge—”

It took a few seconds for Robbie’s eyes to focus properly. “You’re right,” he said. “You can see him—you can see someone, anyway. And you can definitely tell it’s an airplane.”

He handed it back to Leonard, who fastidiously replaced it, first in its canister and then the water-filled safe.

“They could really pop you for that.” Emery whistled in disbelief. “If that stuff blew? This whole place could go up in flames.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Leonard draped his coat over the strongbox, then started to laugh. “Anyway, I’m done with it. I went into the photo lab one night and duped it myself. So I’ve got that copy at home. And this one—”

He inclined his head at the corner. “I’m going to take the nitrate home and give it a Viking funeral in the backyard. You can come if you want.”

“Tonight?” asked Robbie.

“No. I’ve got to work late tonight, catch up on some stuff before I leave town.”

Emery leaned against the door. “Where you going?”

“South Carolina. I told you. I’m going to Cowana Island, and . . .” Robbie caught a whiff of acetone as Leonard picked up the Bellerophon. “I am going to make this thing fly.”

“HE REALLY IS NUTS. I mean, when was the last time he even saw Maggie?” Robbie asked as Emery drove him back to the Mall. “I still don’t know what really happened, except for the UFO stuff.”

“She found out he was screwing around with someone else. It was a bad scene. She tried to get him fired; he went to Boynton and told him Maggie was diverting all this time and money to studying UFOs. Which unfortunately was true. They did an audit, she had some kind of nervous breakdown even before they could fire her.”

“What a prick.”

Emery sighed. “It was horrible. Leonard doesn’t talk about it. I don’t think he ever got over it. Over her.”

“Yeah, but . . .” Robbie shook his head. “She must be, what, twenty years older than us? They never would have stayed together. If he feels so bad, he should just go see her. This other stuff is insane.”

“I think maybe those fumes did something to him. Nitrocellulose, it’s in nail polish, too. It might have done something to his brain.”

“Is that possible?”

“It’s a theory,” said Emery broodingly.

Robbie’s house was in a scruffy subdivision on the outskirts of Rockville. The place was small, a bungalow with masonite siding, a cracked cinder-block foundation, and the remains of a garden that Anna had planted. A green GMC pickup with an expired registration was parked in the drive. Robbie peered into the cab. It was filled with empty Bud Light bottles.

Inside, Zach was hunched at a desk beside his friend Tyler, owner of the pickup. The two of them stared intently at a computer screen.

“What’s up?” said Zach without looking away.

“Not much,” said Robbie. “Eye contact.”

Zach glanced up. He was slight, with Anna’s thick blond curls reduced to a buzz cut that Robbie hated. Tyler was tall and gangly, with long black hair and wire-rimmed sunglasses. Both favored tie-dyed T-shirts and madras shorts that made them look as though they were perpetually on vacation.

Robbie went into the kitchen and got a beer. “You guys eat?”

“We got something on the way home.”

Robbie drank his beer and watched them. The house had a smell that Emery once described as Failed Bachelor. Unwashed clothes, spilled beer, marijuana smoke. Robbie hadn’t smoked in years, but Zach and Tyler had taken up the slack. Robbie used to yell at them but eventually gave up. If his own depressing example wasn’t enough to straighten them out, what was?

After a minute, Zach looked up again. “Nice shirt, Dad.”

“Thanks, son.” Robbie sank into a beanbag chair. “Me and Emery dropped by the museum and saw Leonard.”

“Leonard!” Tyler burst out laughing. “Leonard is so fucking sweet! He’s, like, the craziest guy ever.”

“All Dad’s friends are crazy,” said Zach.

“Yeah, but Emery, he’s cool. Whereas that guy Leonard is just wack.”

Robbie nodded somberly and finished his beer. “Leonard is indeed wack. He’s making a movie.”

“A real movie?” asked Zach.

“More like a home movie. Or, I dunno—he wants to reproduce another movie, one that was already made, do it all the same again. Shot by shot.”

Tyler nodded. “Like The Ring and Ringu. What’s the movie?”

“Seventeen seconds of a 1901 plane crash. The original footage was destroyed, so he’s going to restage the whole thing.”

“A plane crash?” Zach glanced at Tyler. “Can we watch?”

“Not a real crash—he’s doing it with a model. I mean, I think he is.”

“Did they even have planes then?” said Tyler.

“He should put it on YouTube,” said Zach, and turned back to the computer.

“Okay, get out of there.” Robbie rubbed his head wearily. “I need to go online.”

The boys argued but gave up quickly. Tyler left. Zach grabbed his cell phone and slouched upstairs to his room. Robbie got another beer, sat at the computer, and logged out of whatever they’d been playing, then typed in MCCAULEY BELLEROPHON.

Only a dozen results popped up. He scanned them, then clicked the Wikipedia entry for Ernesto McCauley.

McCauley, Ernesto (18??–1901) American inventor whose eccentric aircraft, the Bellerophon, allegedly flew for seventeen seconds before it crashed during a 1901 test flight on Cowana Island, South Carolina, killing McCauley. In the 1980s, claims that this flight was successful and predated that of the Wright brothers by two years were made by a Smithsonian expert, based upon archival lm footage. The claims have since been disproved and the lm record unfortunately lost in a fire. Curiously, no other record of either McCauley or his aircraft has ever been found.

Robbie took a long pull at his beer, then typed in MARGARET BLEVIN.

Blevin, Margaret (1938–) Influential cultural historian whose groundbreaking work on early flight earned her the nickname “the Magnificent Blevin.” During her tenure at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American Aeronautics and Aerospace, Blevin redesigned the General Aviation Gallery to feature lesser-known pioneers of flight, including Charles Dellschau and Ernesto McCauley, as well as . . .

“ ‘The Magnificent Blevin’ ?” Robbie snorted. He grabbed another beer and continued reading.

But Blevin’s most lasting impact upon the history of aviation was her 1986 best-seller Wings for Humanity!, in which she presents a dramatic and visionary account of the mystical aspects of flight, from Icarus to the Wright brothers and beyond. Its central premise is that millennia ago a benevolent race seeded the earth, leaving isolated locations with the ability to engender human-powered flight. “We dream of flight because flight is our birthright,” wrote Blevin, and since its publication Wings for Humanity! has never gone out of print.

“Leonard wrote this frigging thing!”

“What?” Zach came downstairs, yawning.

“This Wikipedia entry!” Robbie jabbed at the screen. “That book was never a best-seller—she sneaked it into the museum gift shop and no one bought it. The only reason it’s still in print is that she published it herself.”

Zach read the entry over his father’s shoulder. “It sounds cool.”

Robbie shook his head adamantly. “She was completely nuts. Obsessed with all this New Age crap, aliens and crop circles. She thought that planes could only fly from certain places, and that’s why all the early flights crashed. Not because there was something wrong with the aircraft design, but because they were taking off from the wrong spot.”

“Then how come there’s airports everywhere?”

“She never worked out that part.”

“ ‘We must embrace our galactic heritage, the spiritual dimension of human flight, lest we forever chain ourselves to earth,’ ” Zach read from the screen. “Was she in that plane crash?”

“No, she’s still alive. That was just something she had a wild hair about. She thought the guy who invented that plane flew it a few years before the Wright brothers made their flight, but she could never prove it.”

“But it says there was a movie,” said Zach. “So someone saw it happen.”

“This is Wikipedia.” Robbie stared at the screen in disgust. “You can say any fucking thing you want and people will believe it. Leonard wrote that entry, guarantee you. Probably she faked that whole film loop. That’s what Leonard’s planning to do now—replicate the footage then pass it off to Maggie as the real thing.”

Zach collapsed into the beanbag chair. “Why?”

“Because he’s crazy, too. He and Maggie had a thing together.”

Zach grimaced. “Ugh.”

“What, you think we were born old? We were your age, practically. And Maggie was about twenty years older—”

“A cougar!” Zach burst out laughing. “Why didn’t she go for you?”

“Ha ha ha.” Robbie pushed his empty beer bottle against the wall.

“Women liked Leonard. Go figure. Even your mom went out with him for a while. Before she and I got involved, I mean.”

Zach’s glassy eyes threatened to roll back in his head. “Stop.”

“We thought it was pretty strange,” admitted Robbie. “But Maggie was good-looking for an old hippie.” He glanced at the Wikipedia entry and did the math. “I guess she’s in her seventies now. Leonard’s in touch with her. She has cancer. Breast cancer.”

“I heard you,” said Zach. He rolled out of the beanbag chair, flipped open his phone, and began texting. “I’m going to bed.”

Robbie sat and stared at the computer screen. After a while he shut it down. He shuffled into the kitchen and opened the cabinet where he kept a quart of Jim Beam, hidden behind bottles of vinegar and vegetable oil. He rinsed out the glass he’d used the night before, poured a jolt and downed it, then carried the bourbon with him to bed.

THE NEXT DAY AFTER work, he was on his second drink at the bar when Emery showed up.

“Hey.” Robbie gestured at the stool beside him. “Have a seat.”

“You okay to drive?”

“Sure.” Robbie scowled. “What, you keeping an eye on me?”

“No. But I want you to see something. At my house. Leonard’s coming over, we’re going to meet there at six thirty. I tried calling you but your phone’s off.”

“Oh. Right. Sorry.” Robbie signaled the bartender for his tab. “Yeah, sure. What, is he gonna give us manicures?”

“Nope. I have an idea. I’ll tell you when I get there; I’m going to Royal Delhi first to get some takeout. See you—”

Emery lived in a big town house condo that smelled of Moderately Successful Bachelor. The walls held framed photos of Captain Marvo and Mungbean alongside a life-size painting of Leslie Nielsen as Commander J. J. Adams.

But there was also a climate-controlled basement filled with Captain Marvo merchandise and packing material, with another large room stacked with electronics equipment—sound system, video monitors and decks, shelves and files devoted to old Captain Marvo episodes, and dupes of the grade Z movies featured on the show.

This was where Robbie found Leonard, bent over a refurbished Steenbeck editing table.

“Robbie.” Leonard waved, then returned to threading film onto a spindle. “Emery back with dinner?”

“Uh-uh.” Robbie pulled a chair alongside him. “What are you doing?”

“Loading up that nitrate I showed you yesterday.”

“It’s not going to explode, is it?”

“No, Robbie, it’s not going to explode.” Leonard’s mouth tightened. “Did Emery talk to you yet?”

“He just said something about a plan. So what’s up?”

“I’ll let him tell you.”

Robbie flushed angrily, but before he could retort there was a knock behind them.

“Chow time, campers.” Emery held up two steaming paper bags. “Can you leave that for a few minutes, Leonard?”

They ate on the couch in the next room. Emery talked about a pitch he’d made to revive Captain Marvo in cell-phone format. “It’d be freaking perfect, if I could figure out a way to make any money from it.”

Leonard said nothing. Robbie noted that the cuffs of his white tunic were stained with flecks of orange pigment, as were his fingernails. He looked tired, his face lined and his eyes sunken.

“You getting enough sleep?” Emery asked.

Leonard smiled wanly. “Enough.”

Finally the food was gone, and the beer. Emery clapped his hands on his knees, pushed aside the empty plates, then leaned forward.

“Okay. So here’s the plan. I rented a house on Cowana for a week, starting this Saturday. I mapped it online and it’s about ten hours. If we leave right after you guys get off work on Friday and drive all night, we’ll get there early Saturday morning. Leonard, you said you’ve got everything pretty much assembled, so all you need to do is pack it up. I’ve got everything else here. Be a tight fit in the Prius, though, so we’ll have to take two cars. We’ll bring everything we need with us, we’ll have a week to shoot and edit or whatever, then on the way back we swing through Fayetteville and show the finished product to Maggie. What do you think?”

“That’s not a lot of time,” said Leonard. “But we could do it.”

Emery turned to Robbie. “Is you car roadworthy? It’s about twelve hundred miles round-trip.”

Robbie stared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The Bellerophon. Leonard’s got storyboards and all kinds of drawings and still frames, enough to work from. The Realtor’s in Charleston; she said there wouldn’t be many people this early in the season. Plus there was a hurricane a couple years ago; I gather the island got hammered and no one’s had money to rebuild. So we’ll have it all to ourselves, pretty much.”

“Are you high?” Robbie laughed. “I can’t just take off. I have a job.”

“You get vacation time, right? You can take a week. It’ll be great, man. The Realtor says it’s already in the eighties down there. Warm water, a beach—what more you want?”

“Uh, maybe a beach with people besides you and Leonard?” Robbie searched in vain for another beer. “I couldn’t go anyway—next week’s Zach’s spring break.”

“Yeah?” Emery shook his head. “So, you’re going to be at the store all day, and he’ll be home getting stoned. Bring him. We’ll put him to work.”

Leonard frowned, but Robbie looked thoughtful. “Yeah, you’re right. I hadn’t thought of that. I can’t really leave him alone. I guess I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think, just do it. It’s Wednesday, tell ’em you’re taking off next week. They gonna fire you?”

“Maybe.”

“I’m not babysitting some—” Leonard started.

Emery cut him off. “You got that nitrate loaded? Let’s see it.”

They filed into the workroom. Leonard sat at the Steenbeck. The others watched as he adjusted the film on its sprockets. He turned to Robbie, then indicated the black projection box in the center of the deck.

“Emery knows all this, so I’m just telling you. That’s a quartz halogen lamp. I haven’t turned it on yet, because if the frame was just sitting there it might incinerate the film, and us. But there’s only about four seconds of footage, so we’re going to take our chances and watch it, once. Maybe you remember it from the gallery?”

Robbie nodded. “Yeah, I saw it a bunch of times. Not as much as the Head, but enough.”

“Good. Hit that light, would you, Emery? Everyone ready? Blink and you’ll miss it.”

Robbie craned his neck, staring at a blank white screen. There was a whir, the stutter of film running through a projector.

At the bottom of the frame the horizon lurched, bright flickers that might be an expanse of water. Then a blurred image, faded sepia and amber, etched with blotches and something resembling a beetle leg: the absurd contraption Robbie recognized as the original Bellerophon. Only it was moving—it was flying—its countless gears and propellers and wings spinning and whirring and flapping all at once, so it seemed the entire thing would vibrate into a thousand pieces. Beneath the fuselage, a dark figure perched precariously atop the velocipede, legs like black scissors slicing at the air. From the left corner of the frame leaped a flare of light, like a shooting star or burning firecracker tossed at the pedaling figure. The pilot listed to one side, and—

Nothing. The film ended as abruptly as it had begun. Leonard quickly reached to turn off the lamp, and immediately removed the film from the take-up drive.

Robbie felt his neck prickle—he’d forgotten how weird, uncanny even, the footage was.

“Jesus, that’s some bizarre shit,” said Emery.

“It doesn’t even look real.” Robbie watched as Leonard coiled the film and slid it in a canister. “I mean, the guy, he looks fake.”

Emery nodded. “Yeah, I know. It looks like one of those old silents, The Lost World or something. But it’s not. I used to watch it back when it ran a hundred times a day in our gallery, the way you used to watch the Head. And it’s definitely real. At least the pilot, McCauley—that’s a real guy. I got a big magnifier once and just stood there and watched it over and over again. He was breathing, I could see it. And the plane, it’s real too, far as I could tell. The thing I can’t figure is, who the hell shot that footage? And what was the angle?”

Robbie stared at the empty screen, then shut his eyes. He tried to recall the rest of the film from when it played in the General Aviation gallery: the swift, jerky trajectory of that eerie little vehicle with its bizarre pilot, a man in a black suit and bowler hat; then the flash from the corner of the screen, and the man toppling from his perch into the white and empty air. The last thing you saw was a tiny hand at the bottom of the frame, then some blank leader, followed by the words “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon (1901).” And the whole thing began again.

“It was like someone was in the air next to him,” said Robbie. “Unless he got only six feet off the ground. I always assumed it was faked.”

“It wasn’t faked,” said Leonard. “The cameraman was on the beach filming. It was a windy day, they were hoping that would help give the plane some lift but there must have been a sudden gust. When the Bellerophon went into the ocean, the cameraman dove in to save McCauley. They both drowned. They never found the bodies, or the wreckage. Only the camera with the film.”

“Who found it?” asked Robbie.

“We don’t know.” Leonard sighed, his shoulders slumping. “We don’t know anything. Not the name of the cameraman, nothing. When Maggie and I ran the original footage, the leader said ‘Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon.’ The can had the date and ‘Cowana Island’ written on it. So Maggie and I went down there to research it. A weird place. Hardly any people, and this was in the summer. There’s a tiny historical society on the island, but we couldn’t find anything about McCauley or the aircraft. No newspaper accounts, no gravestones. The only thing we did find was in a diary kept by the guy who delivered the mail back then. On May 13, 1901, he wrote that it was a very windy day and two men had drowned while attempting to launch a flying machine on the beach. Someone must have found the camera afterward. Somebody processed the film, and somehow it found its way to the museum.”

Robbie followed Leonard into the next room. “What was that weird flash of light?”

“I don’t know.” Leonard stared out a glass door into the parking lot. “But it’s not overexposure or lens flare or anything like that. It’s something the cameraman actually filmed. Water, maybe—if it was a windy day, a big wave might have come up onto the beach or something.”

“I always thought it was fire. Like a rocket or some kind of flare.”

Leonard nodded. “That’s what Maggie thought, too. The mailman—mostly all he wrote about was the weather. Which if you were relying on a horse-drawn cart, makes sense. About two weeks before he mentioned the flying machine, he described something that sounds like a major meteor shower.”

“And Maggie thought it was hit by a meteor?”

“No.” Leonard sighed. “She thought it was something else. The weird thing is, a few years ago I checked online, and it turns out there was an unusual amount of meteor activity in 1901.”

Robbie raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

Leonard said nothing. Finally he opened the door and walked outside. The others trailed after him.

They reached the edge of the parking lot, where cracked tarmac gave way to stony ground. Leonard glanced back, then stooped. He brushed away a few stray leaves and tufts of dead grass, set the film canister down and unscrewed the metal lid. He picked up one end of the coil of film, gently tugging until it trailed a few inches across the ground. Then he withdrew a lighter, flicked it, and held the flame to the tail of film.

“What the—” began Robbie.

There was a dull whoosh, like the sound of a gas burner igniting. A plume of crimson and gold leaped from the canister, writhing in the air within a ball of black smoke. Leonard staggered to his feet, covering his head as he backed away.

“Leonard!” Emery grabbed him roughly, then turned and raced to the house.

Before Robbie could move, a strong chemical stink surrounded him. The flames shrank to a shining thread that lashed at the smoke then faded into flecks of ash. Robbie ducked his head, coughing. He grasped Leonard’s arm and tried to drag him away, glanced up to see Emery running toward them with a fire extinguisher.

“Sorry,” gasped Leonard. He made a slashing motion through the smoke, which dispersed. The flames were gone. Leonard’s face was black with ash. Robbie touched his own cheek gingerly, looked at his fingers, and saw they were coated with something dark and oily.

Emery halted, panting, and stared at the twisted remains of the film can. On the ground beside it, a glowing thread wormed toward a dead leaf, then expired in a gray wisp. Emery raised the fire extinguisher threateningly, set it down, and stomped on the canister.

“Good thing you didn’t do that in the museum,” said Robbie. He let go of Leonard’s arm.

“Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind,” said Leonard, and walked back inside.

THEY LEFT FRIDAY EVENING. Robbie got the week off, after giving his dubious boss a long story about a dying relative down South. Zach shouted and broke a lamp when informed he would be accompanying his father on a trip during his spring vacation.

“With Emery and Leonard? Are you fucking insane?”

Robbie was too exhausted to fight: he quickly offered to let Tyler come with them. Tyler, surprisingly, agreed, and even showed up on Friday afternoon to help load the car. Robbie made a pointed effort not to inspect the various backpacks and duffel bags the boys threw into the trunk of the battered Taurus. Alcohol, drugs, firearms: he no longer cared.

Instead he focused on the online weather report for Cowana Island. Eighty degrees and sunshine, photographs of blue water, white sand, a skein of pelicans skimming above the waves. Ten hours, that wasn’t so bad. In another weak moment, he told Zach he could drive part of the way, so Robbie could sleep.

“What about me?” asked Tyler. “Can I drive?”

“Only if I never wake up,” said Robbie.

Around six Emery pulled into the driveway, honking. The boys were already slumped in Robbie’s Taurus, Zach in front with earbuds dangling around his face and a knit cap pulled down over his eyes, Tyler in the back, staring blankly, as though they were already on I-95.

“You ready?” Emery rolled down his window. He wore a blue flannel shirt and a gimme cap that read STARFLEET ACADEMY. In the hybrid’s passenger seat, Leonard perused a road atlas. He looked up and shot Robbie a smile.

“Hey, a road trip.”

“Yeah.” Robbie smiled back and patted the hybrid’s roof. “See you.”

It took almost two hours just to get beyond the gravitational pull of the Washington Beltway. Farms and forest had long ago disappeared beneath an endless grid of malls and housing developments, many of them vacant. Every time Robbie turned up the radio for a song he liked, the boys complained that they could hear it through their earphones.

Only as the sky darkened and Virginia gave way to North Carolina did the world take on a faint fairy glow, distant green and yellow lights reflecting the first stars and a shining cusp of moon. Sprawl gave way to pine forest. The boys had been asleep for hours, in that amazing, self-willed hibernation they summoned whenever in the presence of adults for more than fifteen minutes. Robbie put the radio on, low, searched until he caught the echo of a melody he knew, and then another. He thought of driving with Anna beside him, a restive Zach behind them in his car seat; the aimless trips they’d make until the toddler fell asleep and they could talk or, once, park in a vacant lot and make out.

How long had it been since he’d remembered that? Years, maybe. He fought against thinking of Anna; sometimes it felt as though he fought Anna herself, her hands pummeling him as he poured another drink or staggered up to bed.

Now, though, the darkness soothed him the way those long-ago drives had lulled Zach to sleep. He felt an ache lift from his breast, as though a splinter had been dislodged; blinked and in the rearview mirror glimpsed Anna’s face, slightly turned from him as she gazed out at the passing sky.

He started, realized he’d begun to nod off. On the dashboard his fuel indicator glowed red. He called Emery, and at the next exit pulled off 95, the Prius behind him.

After a few minutes they found a gas station set back from the road in a pine grove, with an old-fashioned pump out front and yellow light streaming through a screen door. The boys blinked awake.

“Where are we?” asked Zach.

“No idea.” Robbie got out of the car. “North Carolina.”

It was like stepping into a twilight garden, or some hidden biosphere at the zoo. Warmth flowed around him, violet and rustling green, scented overpoweringly of honeysuckle and wet stone. He could hear rushing water, the stirring of wind in the leaves, and countless small things—frogs peeping, insects he couldn’t identify. A nightbird that made a burbling song. In the shadows behind the building, fireflies floated between kudzu-choked trees, like tiny glowing fish.

For an instant he felt himself suspended in that enveloping darkness. The warm air moved through him, sweetly fragrant, pulsing with life he could neither see nor touch. He tasted something honeyed and faintly astringent in the back of his throat, and drew his breath in sharply.

“What?” demanded Zach.

“Nothing.” Robbie shook his head and turned to the pump. “Just—isn’t this great?”

He filled the tank. Zach and Tyler went in search of food, and Emery strolled over.

“How you holding up?”

“I’m good. Probably let Zach drive for a while so I can catch some z’s.”

He moved the car, then went inside to pay. He found Leonard buying a pack of cigarettes as the boys headed out, laden with energy drinks and bags of chips. Robbie slid his credit card across the counter to a woman wearing a tank top that set off a tattoo that looked like the face of Marilyn Manson, or maybe it was Jesus.

“Do you have a restroom?”

The woman handed him a key. “Round back.”

“Bathroom’s here,” Robbie yelled at the boys. “We’re not stopping again.”

They trailed him into a dank room with gray walls. A fluorescent light buzzed overhead. After Tyler left, Robbie and Zach stood side by side at the sink, trying to coax water from a rusted spigot to wash their hands.

“The hell with it,” said Robbie. “Let’s hit the road. You want to drive?”

“Dad.” Zach pointed at the ceiling. “Dad, look.”

Robbie glanced up. A screen bulged from a small window above the sink. Something had blown against the wire mesh, a leaf or scrap of paper.

But then the leaf moved, and he saw that it wasn’t a leaf at all but a butterfly.

No, not a butterfly—a moth. The biggest he’d ever seen, bigger than his hand. Its fan-shaped upper wings opened, revealing vivid golden eyespots; its trailing lower wings formed two perfect arabesques, all a milky, luminous green.

“A luna moth,” breathed Robbie. “I’ve never seen one.”

Zach clambered onto the sink. “It wants to get out—”

“Hang on.” Robbie boosted him, bracing himself so the boy’s weight wouldn’t yank the sink from the wall. “Be careful! Don’t hurt it—”

The moth remained where it was. Robbie grunted—Zach weighed as much as he did—felt his legs trembling as the boy prised the screen from the wall then struggled to pull it free.

“It’s stuck,” he said. “I can’t get it—”

The moth fluttered weakly. One wing tip looked ragged, as though it had been singed.

“Tear it!” Robbie cried. “Just tear the screen.”

Zach wedged his fingers beneath a corner of the window frame and yanked, hard enough that he fell. Robbie caught him as the screen tore away to dangle above the sink. The luna moth crawled onto the sill.

“Go!” Zach banged on the wall. “Go on, fly!”

Like a kite catching the wind, the moth lifted. Its trailing lower wings quivered and the eyespots seemed to blink, a pallid face gazing at them from the darkness. Then it was gone.

“That was cool.” For an instant, Zach’s arm draped across his father’s shoulder, so fleetingly Robbie might have imagined it. “I’m going to the car.”

When the boy was gone, Robbie tried to push the screen back into place. He returned the key and went to join Leonard, smoking a cigarette at the edge of the woods. Behind them a car horn blared.

“Come on!” shouted Zach. “I’m leaving!”

“Happy trails,” said Leonard.

Robbie slept fitfully in back as Zach drove, the two boys arguing about music and a girl named Eileen. After an hour he took over again.

The night ground on. The boys fell back asleep. Robbie drank one of their Red Bulls and thought of the glimmering wonder that had been the luna moth. A thin rind of emerald appeared on the horizon, deepening to copper then gold as it overtook the sky. He began to see palmettos among the loblolly pines and pin oaks, and spiky plants he didn’t recognize. When he opened the window, the air smelled of roses, and the sea.

“Hey.” He poked Zach, breathing heavily in the seat beside him. “Hey, we’re almost there.”

He glanced at the directions, looked up to see the hybrid passing him and Emery gesturing at a sandy track that veered to the left. It was bounded by barbed-wire fences and clumps of cactus thick with blossoms the color of lemon cream. The pines surrendered to palmettos and prehistoric-looking trees with gnarled roots that thrust up from pools where egrets and herons stabbed at frogs.

“Look,” said Robbie.

Ahead of them the road narrowed to a path barely wide enough for a single vehicle, built up with shells and chunks of concrete. On one side stretched a blur of cypress and long-legged birds; on the other, an aquamarine estuary that gave way to the sea and rolling white dunes.

Robbie slowed the car to a crawl, humping across mounds of shells and doing his best to avoid sinkholes. After a quarter mile, the makeshift causeway ended. An old metal gate lay in a twisted heap on the ground, covered by creeping vines. Above it a weathered sign clung to a cypress.

WELCOME TO COWANA ISLAND

NO DUNE BUGGIES

They drove past the ruins of a mobile home. Emery’s car was out of sight. Robbie looked at his cell phone and saw there was no signal. In the back, Tyler stirred.

“Hey, Rob, where are we?”

“We’re here. Wherever here is. The island.”

“Sweet.” Tyler leaned over the seat to jostle Zach awake. “Hey, get up.”

Robbie peered through the overgrown greenery, looking for something resembling a beach house. He tried to remember which hurricane had pounded this part of the coast, and how long ago. Two years? Five?

The place looked as though it had been abandoned for decades. Fallen palmettos were everywhere, their leaves stiff and reddish-brown, like rusted blades. Some remained upright, their crowns lopped off. Acid-green lizards sunned themselves in driveways where ferns poked through the blacktop. The remains of carports and decks dangled above piles of timber and mold-blackened Sheetrock. Now and then an intact house appeared within the jungle of flowering vines.

But no people, no cars except for an SUV crushed beneath a toppled utility pole. The only store was a modest grocery with a brick facade and shattered windows, through which the ghostly outlines of aisles and displays could still be glimpsed.

“It’s like 28 Days,” said Zach, and shot a baleful look at his father.

Robbie shrugged. “Talk to the man from the Starfleet Academy.”

He pulled down a rutted drive to where the hybrid sat beneath a thriving palmetto. Driftwood edged a path that led to an old wood-frame house raised on stiltlike pilings. Stands of blooming cactus surrounded it, and trees choked with honeysuckle. The patchy lawn was covered with hundreds of conch shells arranged in concentric circles and spirals. On the deck a tattered red whirligig spun in the breeze, and rope hammocks hung like flaccid cocoons.

“I’m sleeping there,” said Tyler.

Leonard gazed at the house with an unreadable expression. Emery had already sprinted up the uneven steps to what Robbie assumed was the front door. When he reached the top, he bent to pick up a square of coconut matting, retrieved something from beneath it, then straightened, grinning.

“Come on!” he shouted, turning to unlock the door; and the others raced to join him.

THE HOUSE HAD LINOLEUM floors, sifted with a fine layer of sand, and mismatched furniture—rattan chairs, couches covered with faded bark-cloth cushions, a canvas seat that hung from the ceiling by a chain and groaned alarmingly whenever the boys sat in it. The sea breeze stirred dusty white curtains at the windows. Anoles skittered across the floor, and Tyler fled shouting from the outdoor shower, where he’d seen a black widow spider. The electricity worked, but there was no air-conditioning and no television, no Internet.

“This is what you get for three hundred bucks in the off season,” said Emery when Tyler complained.

“I don’t get it.” Robbie stood on the deck, staring across the empty road to where the dunes stretched, tufted with thorny greenery. “Even if there was a hurricane—this is practically oceanfront, all of it. Where is everybody?”

“Who can afford to build anything?” said Leonard. “Come on, I want to get my stuff inside before it heats up.”

Leonard commandeered the master bedroom. He installed his laptop, Emery’s camera equipment, piles of storyboards, the box that contained the miniature Bellerophon. This formidable array took up every inch of floor space, as well as the surface of a Ping-Pong table.

“Why is there a Ping-Pong table in the bedroom?” asked Robbie as he set down a tripod.

Emery shrugged. “You might ask, why is there not a Ping-Pong table in all bedrooms?”

“We’re going to the beach,” announced Zach.

Robbie kicked off his shoes and followed them, across the deserted road and down a path that wound through a miniature wilderness of cactus and bristly vines. He felt light-headed from lack of sleep, and also from the beer he’d snagged from one of the cases Emery had brought. The sand was already hot; twice he had to stop and pluck sharp spurs from his bare feet. A horned toad darted across the path, and a skink with a blue tongue. His son’s voice came to him, laughing, and the sound of waves on the shore.

Atop the last dune small yellow roses grew in a thick carpet, their soapy fragrance mingling with the salt breeze. Robbie bent to pluck a handful of petals and tossed them into the air.

“It’s not a bad place to fly, is it?”

He turned and saw Emery, shirtless. He handed Robbie a bottle of Tecate with a slice of lime jammed in its neck, raised his own beer and took a sip.

“It’s beautiful.” Robbie squeezed the lime into his beer, then drank. “But that model. It won’t fly.”

“I know.” Emery stared at where Zach and Tyler leaped in the shallow water, sending up rainbow spray as they splashed each other. “But it’s a good excuse for a vacation, isn’t it?”

“It is,” replied Robbie, and slid down the dune to join the boys.

OVER THE NEXT FEW days, they fell into an odd, almost sleepless rhythm, staying up till two or three A.M., drinking and talking. The adults pretended not to notice when the boys slipped a Tecate from the fridge, and ignored the incense-scented smoke that drifted from the deck after they stumbled off to bed. Everyone woke shortly after dawn, even the boys. Blinding sunlight slanted through the worn curtains. On the deck where Zack and Tyler huddled inside their hammocks, a tree frog made a sound like rusty hinges. No one slept enough, everyone drank too much.

For once it didn’t matter. Robbie’s hangovers dissolved as he waded into water as warm as blood, then floated on his back and watched pelicans skim above him. Afterward he’d carry equipment from the house to the dunes, where Emery had created a shelter from old canvas deck chairs and bedsheets. The boys helped him, the three of them lugging tripods and digital cameras, the box that contained Leonard’s model of the Bellerophon, a cooler filled with beer and Red Bull.

That left Emery in charge of household duties. He’d found an ancient red wagon half buried in the dunes, and used this to transport bags of tortilla chips and a cooler filled with Tecate and limes. There was no store on the island save the abandoned wreck they’d passed when they first arrived. No gas station, and the historical society building appeared to be long gone.

But while driving around, Emery discovered a roadside stand that sold homemade salsa in mason jars and sage-green eggs in recycled cardboard cartons. The drive beside it was blocked with a barbed-wire fence and a sign that said BEWARE OF TWO-HEADED DOG.

“You ever see it?” asked Tyler.

“Nope. I never saw anyone except an alligator.” Emery opened a beer. “And it was big enough to eat a two-headed dog.”

By Thursday morning, they’d carted everything from one end of the island to the other, waiting with increasing impatience as Leonard climbed up and down dunes and stared broodingly at the blue horizon.

“How will you know which is the right one?” asked Robbie.

Leonard shook his head. “I don’t know. Maggie said she thought it would be around here—”

He swept his arm out, encompassing a high ridge of sand that crested above the beach like a frozen wave. Below, Tyler and Zach argued over whose turn it was to haul everything uphill again. Robbie shoved his sunglasses against his nose.

“This beach has probably been washed away a hundred times since McCauley was here. Maybe we should just choose a place at random. Pick the highest dune or something.”

“Yeah, I know.” Leonard sighed. “This is probably our best choice, here.”

He stood and for a long time gazed at the sky. Finally he turned and walked down to join the boys.

“We’ll do it here,” he said brusquely, and headed back to the house.

Late that afternoon they made a bon—re on the beach. The day had ended gray and much cooler than it had been, the sun swallowed in a haze of bruise-tinged cloud. Robbie waded into the shallow water, feeling with his toes for conch shells. Beside the fire, Zach came across a shark’s tooth the size of a guitar pick.

“That’s probably a million years old,” said Tyler enviously.

“Almost as old as Dad,” said Zach.

Robbie flopped down beside Leonard. “It’s so weird,” he said, shaking sand from a conch. “There’s a whole string of these islands, but I haven’t seen a boat the entire time we’ve been here.”

“Are you complaining?” said Leonard.

“No. Just, don’t you think it’s weird?”

“Maybe.” Leonard tossed his cigarette into the fire.

“I want to stay.” Zach rolled onto his back and watched as sparks flew among the first stars. “Dad? Why can’t we just stay here?”

Robbie took a long pull from his beer. “I have to get back to work. And you guys have school.”

“Fuck school,” said Zach and Tyler.

“Listen.” The boys fell silent as Leonard glared at them. “Tomorrow morning I want to set everything up. We’ll shoot before the wind picks up too much. I’ll have the rest of the day to edit. Then we pack and head to Fayetteville on Saturday. We’ll find some cheap place to stay, and drive home on Sunday.”

The boys groaned. Emery sighed. “Back to the salt mines. I gotta call that guy about the show.”

“I want to have a few hours with Maggie.” Leonard pulled at the silver skull in his ear. “I told the nurse I’d be there Saturday before noon.”

“We’ll have to leave pretty early,” said Emery.

For a few minutes nobody spoke. Wind rattled brush in the dunes behind them. The bon—re leaped then subsided, and Zach fed it a knot of driftwood. An unseen bird gave a piping cry that was joined by another, then another, until their plaintive voices momentarily drowned out the soft rush of waves.

Robbie gazed into the darkening water. In his hand, the conch shell felt warm and as silken as skin.

“Look, Dad,” said Zach. “Bats.”

Robbie leaned back to see black shapes dodging sparks above their heads.

“Nice,” he said, his voice thick from drink.

“Well.” Leonard stood and lit another cigarette. “I’m going to bed.”

“Me, too,” said Zach.

Robbie watched with mild surprise as the boys clambered to their feet, yawning. Emery removed a beer from the cooler, handed it to Robbie.

“Keep an eye on the fire, compadre,” he said, and followed the others.

Robbie turned to study the dying blaze. Ghostly runnels of green and blue ran along the driftwood branch. Salt, Leonard had explained to the boys, though Robbie wondered if that was true. How did Leonard know all this stuff? He frowned, picked up a handful of sand and tossed it at the feeble blaze, which promptly sank into sullen embers.

Robbie swore under his breath. He finished his beer, stood, and walked unsteadily toward the water. The clouds obscured the moon, though there was a faint umber glow reflected in the distant waves. He stared at the horizon, searching in vain for some sign of life, lights from a cruise ship or plane; turned and gazed up and down the length of the beach.

Nothing. Even the bon—re had died. He stood on tiptoe and tried to peer past the high dune, to where the beach house stood within the grove of palmettos. Night swallowed everything.

He turned back to the waves licking at his bare feet. Something stung his face, blown sand or maybe a gnat. He waved to disperse it, then froze.

In the water, plumes of light coiled and unfolded, dazzling him. Deepest violet, a fiery emerald that stabbed his eyes; cobalt and a pure blaze of scarlet. He shook his head, edging backward; caught himself and looked around.

He was alone. He turned back, and the lights were still there, just below the surface, furling and unfurling to some secret rhythm.

Like a machine, he thought; some kind of underwater wind farm. A wave farm?

But no, that was crazy. He rubbed his cheeks, trying to sober up. He’d seen something like this in Ocean City late one night—it was something alive, Leonard had explained, plankton or jellyfish, one of those things that glowed. They’d gotten high and raced into the Atlantic to watch pale green streamers trail them as they body-surfed.

Now he took a deep breath and waded in, kicking at the waves, then halted to see if he’d churned up a luminous cloud.

Darkness lapped almost to his knees: there was no telltale glow where he’d stirred the water. But a few yards away, the lights continued to turn in upon themselves beneath the surface: scores of fist-size nebulae, as soundless and steady as his own pulse.

He stared until his head ached, trying to get a fix on them. The lights weren’t diffuse, like phosphorescence. And they didn’t float like jellyfish. They seemed to be rooted in place, near enough for him to touch.

Yet his eyes couldn’t focus: the harder he tried, the more the lights seemed to shift, like an optical illusion or some dizzying computer game.

He stood there for five minutes, maybe longer. Nothing changed. He started to back away, slowly, finally turned and stumbled across the sand, stopping every few steps to glance over his shoulder. The lights were still there, though now he saw them only as a soft yellowish glow.

He ran the rest of the way to the house. There were no lights on, no music or laughter.

But he could smell cigarette smoke, and traced it to the deck, where Leonard stood beside the rail.

“Leonard!” Robbie drew alongside him, then glanced around for the boys.

“They slept inside,” said Leonard. “Too cold.”

“Listen, you have to see something. On the beach—these lights. Not on the beach, in the water.” He grabbed Leonard’s arm. “Like—just come on.”

Leonard shook him off angrily. “You’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk! Or, okay, maybe I am, a little. But I’m not kidding. Look—”

He pointed past the sea of palmettos, past the dunes, toward the dark line of waves. The yellow glow was now spangled with silver. It spread across the water, narrowing as it faded toward the horizon, like a wavering path.

Leonard stared, then turned to Robbie in disbelief. “You idiot. It’s the fucking moon.”

Robbie looked up. And yes, there was the quarter moon, a blaze of gold between gaps in the cloud.

“That’s not it.” He knew he sounded not just drunk but desperate. “It was in the water—”

“Bioluminescence.” Leonard sighed and tossed his cigarette, then headed for the door. “Go to bed, Robbie.”

Robbie started to yell after him, but caught himself and leaned against the rail. His head throbbed. Phantom blots of light swam across his vision. He felt dizzy, and on the verge of tears.

He closed his eyes; forced himself to breathe slowly, to channel the pulsing in his head into the memory of spectral whirlpools, a miniature galaxy blossoming beneath the water. After a minute he looked out again, but saw nothing save the blades of palmetto leaves etched against the moonlit sky.

HE WOKE SEVERAL HOURS later on the couch, feeling as though an ax were embedded in his forehead. Gray light washed across the floor. It was cold; he reached fruitlessly for a blanket, groaned, and sat up.

Emery was in the open kitchen, washing something in the sink. He glanced at Robbie, then hefted a coffeepot. “Ready for this?”

Robbie nodded, and Emery handed him a steaming mug. “What time is it?”

“Eight, a little after. The boys are with Leonard—they went out about an hour ago. It looks like rain, which kind of throws a monkey wrench into everything. Maybe it’ll hold off long enough to get that thing off the ground.”

Robbie sipped his coffee. “Seventeen seconds. He could just throw it into the air.”

“Yeah, I thought of that, too. So what happened to you last night?”

“Nothing. Too much Tecate.”

“Leonard said you were raving drunk.”

“Leonard sets the bar pretty low. I was—relaxed.”

“Well, time to unrelax. I told him I’d get you up and we’d be at the beach by eight.”

“I don’t even know what I’m doing. Am I a cameraman?”

“Uh-uh. That’s me. You don’t know how to work it, plus it’s my camera. The boys are in charge of the windbreak and, I dunno, props. They hand things to Leonard.”

“Things? What things?” Robbie scowled. “It’s a fucking model airplane. It doesn’t have a remote, does it? Because that would have been a good idea.”

Emery picked up his camera bag. “Come on. You can carry the tripod, how’s that? Maybe the boys will hand you things, and you can hand them to Leonard.”

“I’ll be there in a minute. Tell Leonard he can start without me.”

After Emery left he finished his coffee and went into his room. He rummaged through his clothes until he found a bottle of ibuprofen, downed six, then pulled on a hooded sweatshirt and sat on the edge of his bed, staring at the wall.

He’d obviously had some kind of blackout, the first since he’d been fired from the parks commission. Somewhere between his seventh beer and this morning’s hangover was the blurred image of Crayola-colored pinwheels turning beneath dark water, his stumbling flight from the beach, and Leonard’s disgusted voice: You idiot. It’s the fucking moon.

Robbie grimaced. He had seen something, he knew that.

But he could no longer recall it clearly, and what he could remember made no sense. It was like a movie he’d watched half awake, or an accident he’d glimpsed from the corner of his eye from a moving car. Maybe it had been the moonlight, or some kind of fluorescent seaweed.

Or maybe he’d just been totally wasted.

Robbie sighed. He put on his sneakers, grabbed Emery’s tripod, and headed out.

A scattering of cold rain met him as he hit the beach. It was windy. The sea glinted gray and silver, like crumpled tinfoil. Clumps of seaweed covered the sand, and small round disks that resembled pieces of clouded glass: jellyfish, hundreds of them. Robbie prodded one with his foot, then continued down the shore.

The dune was on the north side of the island, where it rose steeply a good fifteen feet above the sand. Now, a few hours before low tide, the water was about thirty feet away. It was exactly the kind of place you might choose to launch a human-powered craft, if you knew little about aerodynamics. Robbie didn’t know much, but he was fairly certain you needed to be higher to get any kind of lift.

Still, that would be for a full-size craft. For a scale model you could hold in your two cupped hands, maybe it would be high enough. He saw Emery pacing along the water’s edge, vid cam slung around his neck. The only sign of the others was a trail of footsteps leading to the dune. Robbie clambered up, using the tripod to keep from slipping on sand the color and texture of damp cornmeal. He was panting when he reached the top.

“Hey, Dad. Where were you?”

Robbie smiled weakly as Zach peered out from the windbreak. “I have a sinus infection.”

Zach motioned him inside. “Come on, I can’t leave this open.”

Robbie set down the tripod, then crouched to enter the makeshift tent. Inside, bedsheet walls billowed in the wind, straining at an elaborate scaffold of broom handles, driftwood, the remains of wooden deck chairs. Tyler and Zach sat cross-legged on a blanket and stared at their cell phones.

“You can get a strong signal here,” said Tyler. “Nope, it’s gone again.”

Next to them, Leonard knelt beside a cardboard box. Instead of his customary white tunic, he wore one that was sky blue, embroidered with yellow birds. He glanced at Robbie, his gray eyes cold and dismissive. “There’s only room for three people in here.”

“That’s okay—I’m going out,” said Zach, and crawled through the gap in the sheets. Tyler followed him. Robbie jammed his hands into his pockets and forced a smile.

“So,” he said. “Did you see all those jellyfish?”

Leonard nodded without looking at him. Very carefully he removed the Bellerophon and set it on a neatly folded towel. He reached into the box again and withdrew something else. A doll no bigger than his hand, dressed in a black frock coat and trousers, with a bowler hat so small that Robbie could have swallowed it.

“Voilà,” said Leonard.

“Jesus, Leonard.” Robbie hesitated, then asked, “Can I look at it?”

To his surprise, Leonard nodded. Robbie picked it up. The little figure was so light he wondered if there was anything inside the tiny suit.

But as he turned it gently, he could feel slender joints under its clothing, a miniature torso. Tiny hands protruded from the sleeves, and it wore minute, highly polished shoes that appeared to be made of black leather. Under the frock coat was a waistcoat, with a watch chain of gold thread that dangled from a nearly invisible pocket. From beneath the bowler hat peeked a fringe of red hair as fine as milkweed down. The cameo-size face that stared up at Robbie was Maggie Blevin’s, painted in hairline strokes so that he could see every eyelash, every freckle on her rounded cheeks.

He looked at Leonard in amazement. “How did you do this?”

“It took a long time.” He held out his hand, and Robbie returned the doll. “The hardest part was making sure the Bellerophon could carry her weight. And that she fit into the bicycle seat and could pedal it. You wouldn’t think that would be difficult, but it was.”

“It—it looks just like her.” Robbie glanced at the doll again, then said, “I thought you wanted to make everything look like the original film. You know, with McCauley—I thought that was the point.”

“The point is for it to fly.”

“But—”

“You don’t need to understand,” said Leonard. “Maggie will.”

He bent over the little aircraft, its multicolored wings and silken parasol as bright as a toy carousel, and tenderly began to fit the doll-size pilot into its seat.

Robbie shivered. He’d seen Leonard’s handiwork before, mannequins so realistic that tourists constantly poked them to see if they were alive.

But those were life-size, and they weren’t designed to resemble someone he knew. The sight of Leonard holding a tiny Maggie Blevin tenderly, as though she were a captive bird, made Robbie feel light-headed and slightly sick. He turned toward the tent opening. “I’ll see if I can help Emery set up.”

Leonard’s gaze remained fixed on the tiny figure. “I’ll be right there,” he said at last.

At the foot of the dune, the boys were trying to talk Emery into letting them use the camera.

“No way.” He waved as Robbie scrambled down. “See, I’m not even letting your dad do it.”

“That’s because Dad would suck,” Zach said as Emery grabbed Robbie and steered him toward the water. “Come on, just for a minute.”

“Trouble with the crew?” asked Robbie.

“Nah. They’re just getting bored.”

“Did you see that doll?”

“The Incredible Shrinking Maggie?” Emery stopped to stare at the dune. “The thing about Leonard is, I can never figure out if he’s brilliant or potentially dangerous. The fact that he’ll be able to retire with a full government pension suggests he’s normal. The Maggie voodoo doll, though . . .”

He shook his head and began to pace again. Robbie walked beside him, kicking at wet sand and staring curiously at the sky. The air smelled odd, of ozone or hot metal. But it felt too chilly for a thunderstorm, and the dark ridge that hung above the palmettos and live oaks looked more like encroaching fog than cumulus clouds.

“Well, at least the wind’s from the right direction,” said Robbie.

Emery nodded. “Yeah. I was starting to think we’d have to throw it from the roof.”

A few minutes later, Leonard’s voice rang out above the wind. “Okay, everyone over here.”

They gathered at the base of the dune and stared up at him, his tunic an azure rent in the ominous sky. Between Leonard’s feet was a cardboard box. He glanced at it and went on.

“I’m going to wait till the wind seems right, and then I’ll yell, ‘Now!’ Emery, you’ll just have to watch me and see where she goes, then do your best. Zach and Tyler—you guys fan out and be ready to catch her if she starts to fall. Catch her gently,” he added.

“What about me?” called Robbie.

“You stay with Emery in case he needs backup.”

“Backup?” Robbie frowned.

“You know,” said Emery in a low voice. “In case I need help getting Leonard back to the rubber room.”

The boys began to walk toward the water. Tyler had his cell phone out. He looked at Zach, who dug his phone from his pocket.

“Are they texting each other?” asked Emery in disbelief. “They’re ten feet apart.”

“Ready?” Leonard shouted.

“Ready,” the boys yelled back.

Robbie turned to Emery. “What about you, Captain Marvo?”

Emery grinned and held up the camera. “I have never been readier.”

Atop the dune, Leonard stooped to retrieve the Bellerophon from its box. As he straightened, its propellers began turning madly. Candy-striped rotators spun like pinwheels as he cradled it against his chest, his long white braids threatening to tangle with the parasol.

The wind gusted suddenly: Robbie’s throat tightened as he watched the tiny black figure beneath the fuselage swing wildly back and forth, like an accelerated pendulum. Leonard slipped in the sand and fought to regain his balance.

“Uh-oh,” said Emery.

The wind died, and Leonard righted himself. Even from the beach, Robbie could see how his face had gone white.

“Are you okay?” yelled Zach.

“I’m okay,” Leonard yelled back.

He gave them a shaky smile, then stared intently at the horizon. After a minute his head tilted, as though listening to something. Abruptly he straightened and raised the Bellerophon in both hands. Behind him, palmettos thrashed as the wind gusted.

“Now!” he shouted.

Leonard opened his hands. As though it were a butterfly, the Bellerophon lifted into the air. Its feathery parasol billowed. Fan-shaped wings rose and fell; ailerons flapped and gears whirled like pinwheels. There was a sound like a train rushing through a tunnel, and Robbie stared open-mouthed as the Bellerophon skimmed the air above his head, its pilot pedaling furiously as it headed toward the sea.

Robbie gasped. The boys raced after it, yelling. Emery followed, camera clamped to his face and Robbie at his heels.

“This is fucking incredible!” Emery shouted. “Look at that thing go!”

They drew up a few yards from the water. The Bellerophon whirred past, barely an arm’s length above them. Robbie’s eyes blurred as he stared after that brilliant whirl of color and motion, a child’s dream of flight soaring just out of reach. Emery waded into the shallows with his camera. The boys followed, splashing and waving at the little plane. From the dune behind them echoed Leonard’s voice.

“Godspeed.”

Robbie gazed silently at the horizon as the Bellerophon continued on, its pilot silhouetted black against the sky, wings opened like sails. Its sound grew fainter, a soft whirring that might have been a flock of birds. Soon it would be gone. Robbie stepped to the water’s edge and craned his neck to keep it in sight.

Without warning a green flare erupted from the waves and streamed toward the little aircraft. Like a meteor shooting upward, emerald blossomed into a blinding radiance that engulfed theBellerophon. For an instant Robbie saw the flying machine, a golden wheel spinning within a comet’s heart.

Then the blazing light was gone, and with it the Bellerophon.

Robbie gazed, stunned, at the empty air. After an endless moment he became aware of something—someone—near him. He turned to see Emery stagger from the water, soaking wet, the camera held uselessly at his side.

“I dropped it,” he gasped. “When that—whatever the fuck it was, when it came, I dropped the camera.”

Robbie helped him onto the sand.

“I felt it.” Emery shuddered, his hand tight around Robbie’s arm. “Like a riptide. I thought I’d go under.”

Robbie pulled away from him. “Zach?” he shouted, panicked. “Tyler, Zach, are you—”

Emery pointed at the water, and Robbie saw them, heron-stepping through the waves and whooping in triumph as they hurried back to shore.

“What happened?” Leonard ran up alongside Robbie and grabbed him. “Did you see that?”

Robbie nodded. Leonard turned to Emery, his eyes wild. “Did you get it? The Bellerophon? And that flare? Like the original film! The same thing, the exact same thing!”

Emery reached for Robbie’s sweatshirt. “Give me that, I’ll see if I can dry the camera.”

Leonard stared blankly at Emery’s soaked clothes, the water dripping from the vid cam.

“Oh no.” He covered his face with his hands. “Oh no . . .”

“We got it!” Zach pushed between the grown-ups. “We got it, we got it!” Tyler ran up beside him, waving his cell phone. “Look!”

Everyone crowded together, the boys tilting their phones until the screens showed black.

“Okay,” said Tyler. “Watch this.”

Robbie shaded his eyes, squinting.

And there it was, a bright mote bobbing across a formless gray field, growing bigger and bigger until he could see it clearly—the whirl of wings and gears, the ballooning peacock-feather parasol and steadfast pilot on the velocipede; the swift, silent flare that lashed from the water then disappeared in an eyeblink.

“Now watch mine,” said Zach, and the same scene played again from a different angle. “Eighteen seconds.”

“Mine says twenty,” said Tyler.

Robbie glanced uneasily at the water. “Maybe we should head back to the house,” he said.

Leonard seized Zach’s shoulder. “Can you get me that? Both of you? E-mail it or something?”

“Sure. But we’ll need to go where we can get a signal.”

“I’ll drive you,” said Emery. “Let me get into some dry clothes.”

He turned and trudged up the beach, the boys laughing and running behind him.

Leonard walked the last few steps to the water’s edge, spray staining the tip of one cowboy boot. He stared at the horizon, his expression puzzled yet oddly expectant.

Robbie hesitated, then joined him. The sea appeared calm, green-glass waves rolling in long swells beneath parchment-colored sky. Through a gap in the clouds he could make out a glint of blue, like a noonday star. He gazed at it in silence, and after a minute asked, “Did you know that was going to happen?”

Leonard shook his head. “No. How could I?”

“Then—what was it?” Robbie looked at him helplessly. “Do you have any idea?”

Leonard said nothing. Finally he turned to Robbie. Unexpectedly, he smiled.

“I have no clue. But you saw it, right?” Robbie nodded. “And you saw her fly. The Bellerophon.”

Leonard took another step, heedless of the waves at his feet. “She flew.” His voice was barely a whisper. “She really flew.”

THAT NIGHT NOBODY SLEPT. Emery drove Zach, Tyler, and Leonard to a Dunkin’ Donuts where the boys got a cell-phone signal and sent their movie footage to Leonard’s laptop. Back at the house, he disappeared while the others sat on the deck and discussed, over and over again, what they had seen. The boys wanted to return to the beach, but Robbie refused to let them go. As a peace offering, he gave them each a beer. By the time Leonard emerged from his room with the laptop, it was after three A.M.

He set the computer on a table in the living room. “See what you think.” When the others had assembled, he hit Play.

Blotched letters filled the screen: “The Maiden Flight of McCauley’s Bellerophon.” The familiar tipsy horizon appeared, sepia and amber, silvery flashes from the sea below. Robbie held his breath.

And there was the Bellerophon with its flickering wheels and wings propelled by a steadfast pilot, until the brilliant light struck from below and the clip abruptly ended, at exactly seventeen seconds. Nothing betrayed the figure as Maggie rather than McCauley; nothing seemed any different at all, no matter how many times Leonard played it back.

“So that’s it,” he said at last, and closed his laptop.

“Are you going to put it on YouTube?” asked Zach.

“No,” he replied wearily. The boys exchanged a look, but for once remained silent.

“Well.” Emery stood and stretched his arms, yawning. “Time to pack.”

Two hours later they were on the road.

The hospice was a few miles outside town, a rambling old white house surrounded by neatly kept azaleas and rhododendrons. The boys were turned loose to wander the neighborhood. The others walked up to the veranda, Leonard carrying his laptop. He looked terrible, his gray eyes bloodshot and his face unshaven. Emery put an arm over his shoulder and Leonard nodded stiffly.

A nurse met them at the door, a trim blond woman in chinos and a yellow blouse.

“I told her you were coming,” she said as she showed them into a sunlit room with wicker furniture and a low table covered with books and magazines. “She’s the only one here now, though we expect someone tomorrow.”

“How is she?” asked Leonard.

“She sleeps most of the time. And she’s on morphine for the pain, so she’s not very lucid. Her body’s shutting down. But she’s conscious.”

“Has she had many visitors?” asked Emery.

“Not since she’s been here. In the hospital a few neighbors dropped by. I gather there’s no family. It’s a shame.” She shook her head sadly. “She’s a lovely woman.”

“Can I see her?” Leonard glanced at a closed door at the end of the bright room.

“Of course.”

Robbie and Emery watched them go, then settled into the wicker chairs.

“God, this is depressing,” said Emery.

“It’s better than a hospital,” said Robbie. “Anna was going to go into a hospice, but she died before she could.”

Emery winced. “Sorry. Of course, I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s okay.”

Robbie leaned back and shut his eyes. He saw Anna sitting on the grass with azaleas all around her, bees in the flowers and Zach laughing as he opened his hands to release a green moth that lit momentarily upon her head, then drifted into the sky.

“Robbie.” He started awake. Emery sat beside him, shaking him gently. “Hey—I’m going in now. Go back to sleep if you want, I’ll wake you when I come out.”

Robbie looked around blearily. “Where’s Leonard?”

“He went for a walk. He’s pretty broken up. He wanted to be alone for a while.”

“Sure, sure.” Robbie rubbed his eyes. “I’ll just wait.”

When Emery was gone he stood and paced the room. After a few minutes he sighed and sank back into his chair, then idly flipped through the magazines and books on the table. Tricycle, Newsweek, the Utne Reader; some pamphlets on end-of-life issues; works by Viktor Frankl and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

And, underneath yesterday’s newspaper, a familiar sky blue dust jacket emblazoned with the garish image of a naked man and woman, hands linked as they floated above a vast abyss, surrounded by a glowing purple sphere. Beneath them the title appeared in embossed green letters.

Wings for Humanity!

The Next Step is OURS!

by Margaret S. Blevin, PhD

Robbie picked it up. On the back was a photograph of the younger Maggie in a white, embroidered tunic, her hair a bright corona around her piquant face. She stood in the Hall of Flight beside a mock-up of the Apollo lunar module, the Wright Flyer high above her head. She was laughing, her hands raised in welcome. He opened it to a random page.

. . . that time has come: with the dawn of the Golden Millennium we will welcome their return, meeting them at last as equals to share in the glory that is the birthright of our species.

He glanced at the frontispiece and title page, and then the dedication.

For Leonard, who never doubted

“Isn’t that an amazing book?”

Robbie looked up to see the nurse smiling down at him.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, and set it on the table.

“It’s incredible she predicted so much stuff.” The nurse shook her head. “Like the Hubble telescope, and that caveman they found in the glacier, the guy with the lens? And those turbines that can make energy in the jet stream? I never even heard of that, but my husband said they’re real. Everything she says, it’s all so hopeful. You know?”

Robbie stared at her, then quickly nodded. Behind her the door opened. Emery stepped out.

“She’s kind of drifting,” he said.

“Morning’s her good time. She usually fades around now.” The nurse glanced at her watch, then at Robbie. “You go ahead. Don’t be surprised if she nods off.”

He stood. “Sure. Thanks.”

The room was small, its walls painted a soft lavender-gray. The bed faced a large window overlooking a garden. Goldfinches and tiny green wrens darted between a bird feeder and a small pool lined with flat white stones. For a moment Robbie thought the bed was empty. Then he saw that an emaciated figure had slipped down between the white sheets, dwarfed by pillows and a bolster.

“Maggie?”

The figure turned its head. Hairless, skin white as paper, mottled with bruises like spilled ink. Her lips and fingernails were violet, her face so pale and lined it was like gazing at a cracked egg. Only the eyes were recognizably Maggie’s, huge, the deep slatey blue of an infant’s. As she stared at him, she drew her wizened arms up, slowly, until her fingers grazed her shoulders. She reminded Robbie disturbingly of a praying mantis.

“I don’t know if you remember me.” He sat in a chair beside the bed. “I’m Robbie. I worked with Leonard. At the museum.”

“He told me.” Her voice was so soft he had to lean close to hear her. “I’m glad they got here. I expected them yesterday, when it was still snowing.”

Robbie recalled Anna in her hospital bed, doped to the gills and talking to herself. “Sure,” he said.

Maggie shot him a glance that might have held annoyance, then gazed past him into the garden. Her eyes widened as she struggled to lift her hand, fingers twitching. Robbie realized she was waving. He turned to stare out the window, but there was no one there. Maggie looked at him, then gestured at the door.

“You can go now,” she said. “I have guests.”

“Oh. Yeah, sorry.”

He stood awkwardly, then leaned down to kiss the top of her head. Her skin was as smooth and cold as metal. “ ’Bye, Maggie.”

At the door he looked back, and saw her gazing with a rapt expression at the window, head cocked slightly and her hands open, as though to catch the sunlight.

TWO DAYS AFTER THEY got home, Robbie received an e-mail from Leonard.

Dear Robbie,

Maggie died this morning. The nurse said she became unconscious early yesterday, seemed to be in pain but at least it didn’t last long. She had arranged to be cremated. No memorial service or anything like that. I will do something, probably not till the fall, and let you know.

Yours,

Leonard

Robbie sighed. Already the week on Cowana seemed long ago and faintly dreamlike, like the memory of a childhood vacation. He wrote Leonard a note of condolence, then left for work.

Weeks passed. Zach and Tyler posted their clips of the Bellerophon online. Robbie met Emery for drinks ever week or two, and saw Leonard once, at Emery’s Fourth of July barbecue. By the end of summer, Tyler’s footage had been viewed 347,623 times, and Zach’s 347,401. Both provided a link to the Captain Marvo site, where Emery had a free download of the entire text of Wings for Humanity! There were now over a thousand Google hits for Margaret Blevin, and Emery added a Bellerophon T-shirt to his merchandise: organic cotton with a silk-screened image of the baroque aircraft and its bowler-hatted pilot.

Early in September, Leonard called Robbie.

“Can you meet me at the museum tomorrow, around eight thirty? I’m having a memorial for Maggie, just you and me and Emery. After hours, I’ll sign you in.”

“Sure,” said Robbie. “Can I bring something?”

“Just yourself. See you then.”

He drove in with Emery. They walked across the twilit Mall, the museum a white cube that glowed against a sky swiftly darkening to indigo. Leonard waited for them by the side door. He wore an embroidered tunic, sky blue, his white hair loose upon his shoulders, and held a cardboard box with a small printed label.

“Come on,” he said. The museum had been closed since five, but a guard opened the door for them. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

Hedges sat at the security desk, bald and even more imposing than when Robbie last saw him, decades ago. He signed them in, eyeing Robbie curiously then grinning when he read his signature.

“I remember you—Opie, right?”

Robbie winced at the nickname, then nodded. Hedges handed Leonard a slip of paper. “Be quick.”

“Thanks. I will.”

They walked to the staff elevator, the empty museum eerie and blue lit. High above them the silent aircraft seemed smaller than they had been in the past, battered and oddly toylike. Robbie noticed a crack in the Gemini VII space capsule, and strands of dust clinging to the Wright Flyer. When they reached the third floor, Leonard led them down the corridor, past the photo lab, past the staff cafeteria, past the library where the Nut Files used to be. Finally he stopped at a door near some open ductwork. He looked at the slip of paper Hedges had given him, punched a series of numbers into the lock, opened it then reached in to switch on the light. Inside was a narrow room with a metal ladder fixed to one wall.

“Where are we going?” asked Robbie.

“The roof,” said Leonard. “If we get caught, Hedges and I are screwed. Actually, we’re all screwed. So we have to make this fast.”

He tucked the cardboard box against his chest, then began to climb the ladder. Emery and Robbie followed him, to a small metal platform and another door. Leonard punched in another code and pushed it open. They stepped out into the night.

It was like being atop an ocean liner. The museum’s roof was flat, nearly a block long. Hot air blasted from huge exhaust vents, and Leonard motioned the others to move away, toward the far end of the building.

The air was cooler here, a breeze that smelled sweet and rainwashed, despite the cloudless sky. Beneath them stretched the Mall, a vast green game board, with the other museums and monuments huge game pieces, ivory and onyx and glass. The spire of the Washington Monument rose in the distance, and beyond that the glittering reaches of Roslyn and Crystal City.

“I’ve never been here,” said Robbie, stepping beside Leonard.

Emery shook his head. “Me neither.”

“I have,” said Leonard, and smiled. “Just once, with Maggie.”

Above the Capitol’s dome hung the full moon, so bright against the starless sky that Robbie could read what was printed on Leonard’s box.

MARGARET BLEVIN

“These are her ashes.” Leonard set the box down and removed the top, revealing a ziplocked bag. He opened the bag, picked up the box again, and stood. “She wanted me to scatter them here. I wanted both of you to be with me.”

He dipped his hand into the bag and withdrew a clenched fist; held the box out to Emery, who nodded silently and did the same; then turned to Robbie.

“You too,” he said.

Robbie hesitated, then put his hand into the box. What was inside felt gritty, more like sand than ash. When he looked up, he saw that Leonard had stepped forward, head thrown back so that he gazed at the moon. He drew his arm back, flung the ashes into the sky, and stooped to grab more.

Emery glanced at Robbie, and the two of them opened their hands.

Robbie watched the ashes stream from between his fingers, like a flight of tiny moths. Then he turned and gathered more, the three of them tossing handful after handful into the sky.

When the box was finally empty, Robbie straightened, breathing hard, and ran a hand across his eyes. He didn’t know if it was some trick of the moonlight or the freshening wind, but everywhere around them, everywhere he looked, the air was filled with wings.

THE JAGUAR HOUSE, IN SHADOW

Aliette de Bodard

The mind wanders, when one takes teonanácatl.

If she allowed herself to think, she’d smell bleach, mingling with the faint, rank smell of blood; she’d see the grooves of the cell, smeared with what might be blood or faeces.

She’d remember—the pain insinuating itself into the marrow of her bones, until it, too, becomes a dull thing, a matter of habit—she’d remember dragging herself upward when dawn filters through the slit-windows: too tired and wan to offer her blood to Tonatiuh the sun, whispering a prayer that ends up sounding more and more like an apology.

The god, of course, will insist that she live until the end, for life and blood are too precious to be wasted—no matter how broken or useless she’s become, wasting away in the darkness.

Here’s the thing: she’s not sure how long she can last.

It was Jaguar Captain Palli who gave her the teonanácatl—opening his hand to reveal the two black, crushed mushrooms, the food of the gods, the drugs of the lost, of the doomed—she couldn’t tell if it was because he pitied her, or if it’s yet another trap, another ambush they hope she’ll fall into.

But still . . . She took them. She held them, wrapped tight in the palms of her hands, as the guards walked her back. And when she was alone once more, she stared at them for a long while, feeling the tremor start in her fingers—the hunger, the craving for normality—for oblivion.

The mind wanders—backward, into the only time worth remembering.

The picture lay on the table, beside Onalli’s bloodied worship-thorns. It showed a girl standing by a stall in the marketplace, holding out a clock of emerald-green quetzal feathers with an uncertain air, as if it would leap and bite at any moment. Two other girls stood silhouetted in the shadows behind her, as if already fading into insignificance.

It wasn’t the best one Onalli had of Xochitl, by a large margin—but she’d been thinking about it a lot, those days—about the fundamental irony of it, like a god’s ultimate joke on her.

“Having second thoughts?” Atcoatl asked, behind her.

Onalli’s hand reached out, to turn the picture over—and stopped when his tone finally sank in.

She turned to look at him: his broad, tanned face was impassive—a true Knight’s, showing none of what he felt.

“No,” she said, slowly, carefully. “I’m not having second thoughts. But you are, aren’t you?”

Atcoatl grimaced. “Onalli—”

He was the one who’d helped her, from the start—getting her the encrypted radio sets, the illicit nanos to lower her body temperatures, the small syringes containing everything from teonanácatl inhibitors to endurance nanos. More than that: he had believed her—that her desperate gamble would work, that they’d retrieve Xochitl alive, out of the madness the Jaguar House had become. . . .

“This is too big,” Atcoatl said. He shook his head, and Onalli heard the rest, the words he wasn’t saying.

What if we get caught?

Onalli chose the easiest way to dispel fear: anger. “So you intend to sit by and do nothing?”

Atcoatl’s eyes flashed with a burning hatred—and no wonder. He had seen the fall of his own House; his fellow Eagle Knights, bound and abandoned in the burning wreckage of their own dormitories; the Otter and the Skull Knights, killed, maimed, or scattered to breathe dust in the silver mines. “I’m no coward. One day, the Revered Speaker and his ilk will pay for what they’ve done. But this—this is just courting death.”

Onalli’s gaze strayed again to the picture—to Xochitl’s face, frozen in that moment of dubious innocence. “I can’t leave her there.”

“The resistance—” Atcoatl started.

Onalli snorted. “By the time the resistance can pull the House down, it will be too late. You know it.” There had been attacks: two maglev stations bombed; political dissidents mysteriously vanishing before their arrest. She didn’t deny the existence of an underground movement, but she recognized the signs: it was still weak, still trying to organize itself.

Atcoatl said nothing; but Onalli was Jaguar Knight, and her training enabled her to read the hint of disapproval in his stance.

“Look,” she said, finally. “I’m the one taking the biggest risk. You’ll be outside the House, with plenty of time to leave if anything goes wrong.”

“If you’re caught—”

“You think I’d turn on you?” Onalli asked. “After all they’ve done to Xochitl, you think I’d help them?”

Atcoatl’s face was dark. “You know what they’re doing, inside the House.”

She didn’t—but she could imagine it, all too well. Which was why she needed to pull Xochitl out. Her friend hadn’t deserved this; any of this. “I’m Jaguar Knight,” she said, softly. “And I give you my word that I’d rather end my own life than let them worm anything out of me.”

Atcoatl looked at her. “You’re sincere, but what you believe doesn’t change anything.”

“Doesn’t it? I believe the Revered Speaker’s rule is unlawful. I believe the Jaguar House had no right to betray its own dissidents, or interrogate them. Isn’t that what we all believe in?”

Atcoatl shifted, and wouldn’t answer.

“Tell me what you believe in, then,” Onalli said.

He was silent for a while. “Black One take you,” he said, savagely. “Just this once, Onalli. Just this once.”

Onalli nodded. “Promise.” Afterward, they’d go north—into the United States or Xuya, into countries where freedom was more than a word on paper. They’d be safe.

She finished tying her hair in a neat bun—a habit she’d taken on her missions abroad—and slid her worship-thorns into her belt, smearing the blood over her skinsuit. A prayer, for whoever among the gods might be listening tonight; for Fate, the Black One, the god of the Smoking Mirror, who could always be swayed or turned away, if you had the heart and guts to seize your chance when it came.

Atcoatl waited for her at the door, holding it open with ill grace.

“Let’s go,” Onalli said.

She left the picture on the table—knowing, all the while, why she’d done so: not because it would burden her, but because of one simple thing. Fear. Fear that she’d find Xochitl and stare into her face, and see the broken mind behind the eyes—nothing like the shy, courageous girl she remembered.

Outside, the air was clear and cold, and a hundred stars shone upon the city of Tenochtitlan: a hundred demons, waiting in the darkness to descend and rend all life limb from limb. Onalli rubbed her worship-thorns, trying to remember the assurance she’d always felt on her missions—why couldn’t she remember anything, now that she was home—now that she was breaking into her own House?

Six months ago

The priest of the Black One sits cross-legged across the mat—facing Xochitl and pursing his lips as if contemplating a particular problem. His hair is greasy and tangled, mattered with the blood of his devotions; and the smell that emanates from him is the rank one of charnel houses—with the slight tang of bleach. He’s attempted to wash his hands before coming, and hasn’t succeeded.

Amusing, how the mind sharpens, when everything else is restrained.

Xochitl would laugh, but she’s never been much of one for laughter: that was Onalli, or perhaps Tecipiani.

No, she musn’t think of Tecipiani, not now—must remain calm and composed, her only chance at surviving this.

Mustn’t ask herself the question “for what?”

“I’m told,” the priest says, “that you started a ring of dissidents within this House.”

Xochitl remains seated against the wall, very straight. The straps cut into her arms and ankles, and the tightest one holds her at the neck. She’ll only exhaust herself trying to break them: she’s tried a dozen times already, with only bruises to show for it.

The priest goes on, as if she had answered, “I’m told you worked to undermine the loyalty of the Jaguar Knights, with the aim to topple the Revered Speaker.”

Xochitl shakes her head, grimly amused. Toppling him—as if that would work . . . The burgeoning resistance movement is small and insignificant; they have no reach within the House, not even to Xochitl’s pathetic, shattered splinter group.

But there’s right and wrong, and when Xolotl comes to take her soul, she’ll face Him with a whole face and heart, knowing which side she chose.

The priest goes on, smug, self-satisfied, “You must have known it was doomed. This House is loyal; your commander is loyal. She has given you up, rather than suffer your betrayal.”

Tecipiani—no, mustn’t think of that, mustn’t—it’s no surprise, has never been, not after everything Tecipiani has done. . . .

“Of course she has given me up,” Xochitl says, keeping her voice steady. “Jaguar Knights aren’t interrogators. We leave that to you.”

The priest shifts, unhurriedly—and, without warning, cuffs her, his obsidian rings cutting deep into her skin. She tastes blood, an acrid tingle in her mouth—raises her head, daring him to strike again.

He does—again and again, each blow sending her head reeling back, a white flash of pain resonating in the bones of her cheek, the warmth of blood running down her face.

When he stops at last, Xochitl hangs limp, staring at the floor through a growing haze—the strap digging into her windpipe, an unpleasant reminder of how close asphyxiation is.

“Let’s start again, shall we?” His voice is calm, composed. “You’ll show me proper respect, as is owed an agent of the Revered Speaker.”

He’s—not that—he’s nothing, a man of no religion, who dares use pain as a weapon, tainting it for mundane things like interrogation. But pain isn’t that, was never that. Xochitl struggles to remember the proper words; to lay them at the feet of the Black One, her song of devotion in this godless place.

“I fall before you, I throw myself before you

Offer up the precious water of my blood, offer up my pain like fire

I cast myself into the place from where none rise, from where none leave,

O lord of the near and nigh, O master of the Smoking Mirror,

O night, O wind . . .”

She must have spoken the words aloud, because he cuffs her again—a quick, violent blow she only feels when her head knocks against the wall—ringing in her mind, the whole world contracting and expanding, the colors too light and brash—

And again, and again, and everything slowly merges, folding inward like crinkling paper—pain spreading along her muscles like fire.

“With icy water I make my penance

With nettles and thorns I bare out my face, my heart

Through the land of the anguished, the land of the dying . . .”

She thinks, but she’s not sure, that he’s gone, when the door opens again, and footsteps echo under the ceiling—slow and measured, deliberate.

She’d raise her head, but she can’t muster the energy. Even focusing on the ground is almost too tiring, when all she wants is to lean back, to close her eyes and dream of a world where Tonatiuh the sun bathes her in His light, where the smell of cooking oil and chilies wafts from the stalls of food-vendors, where feather-cloaks are soft and silky against her hands. . . .

The feet stop: leather moccasins, and emerald-green feathers, and the tantalizing smell of pine cones and copal incense.

Tecipiani. No, not the girl she knew anymore, but Commander Tecipiani, the one who sold them all to the priests—who threw Xochitl herself to the star-demons, to be torn apart and made as nothing.

“Come to gloat?” Xochitl asks; or tries to, because it won’t come out as more than a whisper. She can’t even tell if Tecipiani hears her, because the world is pressing against her, a throbbing pain in her forehead that spreads to her field of vision—until everything dissolves into feverish darkness.

Onalli took the ball-court at a run, descending from the stands into the I-shape of the ground. On either side of her loomed the walls, with the vertical stone-hoops teams would fight to send a ball through—but it was the season of the Lifting of the Banners, and the teams were enjoying a well-earned rest.

It did mean, though, that only one imperial warrior guarded the cordoned-off entrance: it had been child’s play to take him down.

One thing people frequently forgot about the ball-court was that it was built with its back against the Jaguar House, and that the dignitaries’ boxes at the far end shared a wall with the House’s furthest courtyard.

That courtyard would be guarded, but it was nothing insurmountable. She’d left Atcoatl at the entrance, disguised as an imperial warrior: from afar, he’d present a sufficient illusion to discourage investigation; and he’d warn her by radio if anything went wrong outside.

The boxes were deserted; Onalli made her way in the darkness to that of the Revered Speaker, decorated with old-fashioned carvings depicting the feats of gods: the Feathered Serpent coming back from the underworld with the bones of mankind, the Black One bringing down the Second Sun in a welter of flames and wind.

The box was the highest one in the court; but still lacking a good measure or so to get her over the wall—after all, if there was the remotest possibility that anyone could leap through there, they’d have guarded it to the teeth.

Onalli stood for a while, breathing quietly. She rubbed her torn ears, feeling a trickle of blood seep into her skin. For the Black One, should He decide to watch over her. For Tonatiuh the Sun, who would tumble from the sky without His nourishment.

For Xochitl, who’d deserved better than the fate Tecipiani had dealt her.

She extended, in one fluid, thoughtless gesture: her nails were diamond-sharp, courtesy of Atcoatl’s nanos, and it was easy to find purchases on the carvings—not thinking of the sacrilege, of what the Black One might think about fingers clawing their way through His effigies, no time for that anymore. . . .

Onalli hoisted herself up on the roof of the box, breathing hard. The wall in front of her was much smoother, but still offered some purchase as long as she was careful. It was, really, no worse than the last ascension she’d done, clinging to the outside of the largest building in Jiajin Tech’s compound, on her way to steal blueprints from a safe. It was no worse than endless hours of training, when her tutors had berated her about carelessness. . . .

But her tutors were dead, or gone to ground—and it was the House on the other side of that wall, the only home she’d ever known—the place that had raised her from childhood, the place where she could be safe, and not play a game of endless pretense—where she could start a joke and have a dozen people voicing the punchline, where they sang the hymns on the winter solstice, letting their blood pool into the same vessel.

Her hands, slick with sweat, slid out of a crack. For one impossibly long moment she felt herself fall into the darkness—caught herself with a gasp, even as chunks of rock fell downward in a clatter of noise.

Had anyone heard that? The other side of the wall seemed silent—

There was only darkness, enclosing her like the embrace of Grandmother Earth. Onalli gritted her teeth, and pushed upward, groping for further handholds.

Two years ago

Commander Tecipiani’s investiture speech is subdued, and uncharacteristically bleak. Her predecessor, Commander Malinalli, had delivered grandiloquent boasts about the House and its place in the world, as if everything was due to them, in this Age and the next.

But Tecipiani says none of that. Instead, she speaks of dark times ahead, and the need to be strong, and the need to endure.

She doesn’t say the words “civil war,” but everyone can hear them, all the same.

Xochitl and Onalli stand near the back. Because Onalli arrived late and Xochitl waited for her, the only place they could find was near the novices: callow boys and girls, uneasily settling into their cotton uniforms and fur cloaks, still too young to feel their childhood locks as burdens—still so young and innocent it almost hurts, to think of them in the times ahead.

After the ceremony, everyone drifts back to their companies, or to the mess halls. The mistress of the novices has organized a mock battle in the courtyard, and Onalli is watching with the same rapt fascination she might have for a formal ball game.

Xochitl is watching Tecipiani: the Commander has finished shaking hands with her company leaders, and, dismissing her bodyguards, is heading straight toward them. Her gaze catches Xochitl’s—holds it for a while, almost pleading.

“Onalli,” Xochitl says, urgently.

Onalli barely looks up. “I know. It had to happen at some point, anyway.”

Tecipiani catches up with them, greets them both with a curt nod. She’s still wearing the full regalia of the Commander: a cloak of jaguar-fur, and breeches of emerald-green quetzal feathers. Her helmet is in the shape of a jaguar’s head, and her face pokes out from between the jaws of the animal, as if she were being consumed alive.

“Walk with me, will you?” she asks. Except that she’s not asking, not anymore, because she speaks with the voice of the Black One, and even her slightest suggestion is a command.

They don’t speak, for a while—walking through courtyards where Knights haggle over patolli gameboards, where novices dare each other to leap over the fountains: the familiar, comforting hubbub of life within the House.

“I wasn’t expecting you so soon, Onalli—though I’m glad to see you have returned,” Tecipiani says. Her words are warm; her voice isn’t. “I trust everything went well?”

Onalli spreads her hands in a gesture of uncertainty. “I have the documents,” she says. “Williamsburg Tech was making a new prototype of computer, with more complexity. A step away from consciousness, perhaps.”

Xochitl wonders what kind of intelligence computers will develop, when they finally breach the gap between automated tasks and genuine sentience—all that research done in military units north of the border, eyeing the enemy to the south.

They’ll be like us, she thinks. They’ll reach for their equivalent of clubs or knives, claiming it’s just to protect themselves; and it won’t be long until they sink it into somebody’s chest.

Just like us.

“The Americans have advanced their technology, then,” Tecipiani says, gravely. It’s the House’s job, after all: watching science in the other countries of the Fifth World, and making sure that none of them ever equals Greater Mexica’s lead in electronics—using whatever it takes, theft, bribery, assassination.

Onalli shakes her head impatiently. “This isn’t something we should worry about.”

“Perhaps more than you think.” Tecipiani’s voice is slightly annoyed. “The war won’t always last, and we must look ahead to the future.”

Onalli says, “The war, yes. You made an interesting speech.”

Tecipiani’s smile doesn’t stretch all the way to her eyes. “Appropriate, I felt. Sometimes, we have to be reminded of what happens out there.”

Onalli says, “I’ve seen what’s out there. It’s getting ugly.”

“Ugly?” Xochitl asks.

Onalli’s eyes drift away. “I saw him at court, Xochitl. Revered Speaker Ixtli. He’s—” her hands clench, “—a maddened dog. It’s in his eyes, and in his bearing. It won’t be long before the power goes to his head. It’s already started. The war—”

Tecipiani shakes her head. “Don’t you dare make such a statement.” Her voice is curt, as cutting as an obsidian blade. “We are Jaguar Knights. We serve the Mexica Empire and its Revered Speaker. We’re nothing more than that. Never.”

“But—” Xochitl starts.

“We’re nothing more than that,” Tecipiani says, again.

No, that’s not true. They’re Jaguar Knights; they’ve learnt to judge people on a word or a gesture—because, when you’re out on a mission, it marks the line between life and death. They know . . .

“You’re mad,” Onalli says. “Back when Commander Malinalli was still alive, all the Houses, all the Knights spoke against Ixtli—including ours. What do you think the Revered Speaker will do to us, once he’s asserted his power?”

“I’m your Commander,” Tecipiani says, her voice slightly rising. “That, too, is something you must remember, Jaguar Lieutenant. I speak for the House.”

“I’ll remember.” Onalli’s voice is low and dangerous. And Xochitl knows that here, now, they’ve reached the real parting of the ways—not when Tecipiani was appointed company leader or commander, not when she was the one who started assigning missions to her old friends—but this, here, now, this ultimate profession of cowardice.

“Good,” Tecipiani says. She seems oblivious to the undercurrents, the gazes passing between Onalli and Xochitl. But then, she’s never been good with details. “You’ll come to my office later, Onalli. I’ll have another mission for you.”

And that, too, is cowardice: what she cannot control, Tecipiani will get rid of. Xochitl looks at Onalli—and back at her Commander, who still hasn’t moved—and she feels the first stirrings of defiance flutter in her belly.

Onalli dropped the last few handspans into the courtyard, and immediately flattened herself against the wall—a bad reflex. There was a security camera not a few handspans from her, but all it would see in the darkness was another blur: her skin-suit was made of insulating materials, which wouldn’t show up on infrared, and she’d taken nanos to lower her skin temperature. There’d be fire and blood to pay later, but she didn’t really care anymore.

Everything was silent, too much so. Where were the guards and the security—where was Tecipiani’s iron handhold on the House? She’d felt the fear from outside—the wide, empty space in front of the entrance; the haunted eyes of the Jaguar Captain she’d pumped for information on the maglev; all the horror stories she’d heard on her way into Tenochtitlan.

And yet . . .

The back of her scalp prickled. A trap. They’d known she was coming. They were expecting her.

But she’d gone too far to give up; and the wall had been a bitch to climb, anyway.

She drew the first of her throwing knives, and, warily, progressed deeper into the House. Still nothing—the hungry silence of the stars—the warm breath of Grandmother Earth underfoot—the numinous presence of Xolotl, god of Death, walking in her footsteps. . . .

A shadow moved across the entrance to the courtyard, under the vague shapes of the pillars. Onalli’s hand tightened around the haft of the knife. Staying motionless would be her demise. She had to move fast, to silence them before they could raise the alarm.

She uncoiled—leapt, with the speed of a rattlesnake, straight toward the waiting shadow. Her knife was meant to catch the shadow in the chest, but it parried with surprising speed. All she could see of the shadow was a smear in the darkness, a larger silhouette that seemed to move in time with her. The shadow wasn’t screaming; all its energy was focused into the fight, pure, incandescent, the dance that gave the gods their due, that kept Tonatiuh the sun in the sky and Grandmother Earth sated, the one they’d both trained for, all their lives.

There was something wrong, very wrong with the way the shadow moved. . . . She parried a slash at her legs, and pressed it again, trying to disarm him.

In the starlight, she barely saw the sweeping arc of its knife, moving diagonally across her weak side—she raised her own blade to parry, caught the knife and sent it clattering to the ground, and moved in for the kill.

Too late, she saw the second blade. She threw herself backward, but not before it had drawn a fiery slash across her skin-suit.

They stood, facing one another, in silence.

“You—you move like us,” the shadow said. The voice was high-pitched, shaking, and suddenly she realized what had been wrong with its moves: the eagerness, the abandon of the unblooded novices.

“You’re a boy,” she breathed. “A child.”

Black One, no.

“I’m no child.” He shifted, in the starlight, letting her catch a glimpse of his gangly awkwardness. “Don’t make that mistake.”

“I apologize.” Onalli put all the contriteness she could in her voice; she softened the muscles of her back to hunch over in a submissive position: he might not be able to see her very well, but he’d still see enough to get the subconscious primers.

The boy didn’t move. Finally he said, as if this were an everyday conversation. “If I called, they would be here in a heartbeat.”

“You haven’t called.” Onalli kept her voice steady, trying to encourage him not to remedy this oversight.

In the starlight, she saw him shake his head. “I’d be dead before they came.”

“No,” Onalli said, the word torn out of her before she could plan for it. “I’m not here to kill you.”

“I believe you.” A pause, then, “You’ve come for the House. To avenge your own.”

Her own? And then she understood. He thought her a Knight; but not of the Jaguar. An Eagle, perhaps, or an Otter: any of the former elite of Greater Mexica, the ones Revered Speaker Ixtli had obliterated from the Fifth World.

She’d forgotten that this was no mere boy, but a novice of her order, who would one day become a Knight, like her, like Tecipiani, like Xochitl. He’d heard and seen enough to know that she hated the House’s heart and guts; but he hadn’t yet connected it with who she was.

“I’m just here for a friend,” Onalli said. “She—she needs help.”

“Help.” His voice was steadier, almost thoughtful. “The kind of help that requires infiltration, and a knife.”

She had more than knives: all the paraphernalia of Knights on a mission, stun-guns, syringes filled with endurance and pain nanos. But she hadn’t got them out. She wasn’t sure why. Tecipiani had turned the House into something dark that needed to be put down, and she’d do whatever it took. And yet . . .

It was still her House. “She’s in the cells,” Onalli said.

“In trouble,” the boy repeated, flatly. “I’m sure they wouldn’t arrest her without a good reason.”

Black One take him, he was so innocent, so trusting in the rightness of whatever the House did; like her or Xochitl, ages before their eyes opened. She wanted to shake him. “I have no time to argue with you. Will you let me pass?”

The boy said nothing for a while. She could feel him wavering in the starlight—and, because she was a Jaguar Knight, she also knew that it wouldn’t be enough, that he’d call for the guards, rather than entrusting himself to some vague stranger who had tried to kill him.

No choice, then.

She moved before he could react—shifting her whole weight toward him and bearing him to the ground, even as her hand moved to cover his mouth. As they landed, there was a crunch like bones breaking—for a moment, she thought she’d killed him, but he was still looking at her in disbelief, trying to bite her—with her other hand, she reached into her skin-suit, and withdrew a syringe.

He gasped when she injected him, his eyes rolling up, the cornea an eerie white in the starlight. Now that her eyes were accustomed to the darkness, she could see him clearly: his skin smooth and dark, his hands clenching, then relaxing as the teonanácatl inhibitor took hold.

She could only hope that she’d got the doses right: he was wirier than most adults, and his metabolism was still that of a child.

As she left the courtyard, he was twitching, in the grip of the hallucinations that came as a side effect. With luck, he’d wake up with a headache, and a vague memory of everything not being quite right—but not remember the vivid nightmares the drug gave. She thought of beseeching the gods for small or large mercies; but the only two in her wake were the Black One and Xolotl, the Taker of the Dead.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, knowing he couldn’t hear her; knowing he would hate and fear her for the rest of his days.

“But I can’t trust the justice of this House—I just can’t.”

Nine years ago

Xochitl stands by the stall, dubiously holding the cloak of quetzal-feathers against her chest. “It’s a little too much, don’t you think?”

“No way,” Onalli says.

“If your idea of clothing is tawdry, sure,” Tecipiani says, with an amused shake of her head. “This is stuff for almond-eyed tourists.”

And, indeed, there are more Asians at the stall than trueblood Mexica—though Onalli, who’s half and half, could almost pass for Asian herself. “Aw, come on,” Onalli says. “It’s perfect. Think of all the boys queuing for a kiss. You’d have to start selling tickets.”

Xochitl makes a mock stab at Onalli, as if withdrawing a knife from under her tunic. But her friend is too quick, and steps aside, leaving her pushing at empty air.

“What’s the matter? Eagles ate your muscles?” Onalli says—always belaboring the obvious.

Xochitl looks again at the cloak—bright and garish, but not quite in the right way. “No,” she says, finally. “But Tecipiani’s right. It’s not worth the money.” Not even for a glance from Palli—who’s much too mature, anyway, to get caught by such base tricks.

Tecipiani, who seldom brags about her triumphs, simply nods. “There’s another stall further down,” she says. “Maybe there’ll be something—”

There’s a scream on the edge of the market: not that of someone being robbed, but that of a madman.

What in the Fifth World—

Xochitl puts back the cloak, and shifts, feeling the reassuring heaviness of the obsidian blades at her waist. Onalli has already withdrawn hers; but Tecipiani has moved before them all, striding toward the source. Her hands are empty.

Ahead, at the entrance to the marketplace, is a grounded aircar, its door gaping empty. The rest of the procession that was following it is slowly coming to a stop—though with difficulty, as there is little place among the closely crammed stalls for fifteen aircars.

The sea of muttering faces disembarking from the aircars is a hodgepodge of colors, from European to Asian, and even a few Mexica. They wear banners proudly tacked to their backs, in a deliberately old-fashioned style: coyotes and rabbits drawn in featherwork spread out like fans behind their heads.

It’s all oddly familiar and repulsive at the same time, a living remnant of another time. “Revivalists,” Xochitl says, aloud.

Which means—

She turns, scanning the marketplace for a running man: the unwilling sacrifice victim, the only one who had a reason to break and run.

What Xochitl sees, instead, is Tecipiani, walking determinedly into a side aisle of the marketplace as if she were looking for a specific stall.

The revivalists are gathering, harangued by a blue-clad priest who is organizing search parties.

“Idiots,” Onalli curses under her breath. She’s always believed more in penance than in human sacrifice; and the Revivalists have always rubbed her the wrong way. Xochitl isn’t particularly religious, and has no opinion either way.

“Come on,” she says.

They find Tecipiani near the back of the animals section—and, kneeling before her, is a hunched man, still wearing the remnants of the elaborate costume that marked him as the sacrifice victim. He’s shivering; his face contorts as he speaks words that Xochitl can’t make out amidst the noises of the chattering parrots and screaming monkeys in their metal cages.

As they come closer, Tecipiani makes a dismissive gesture; and the man springs to life, running away deeper into the marketplace.

“The search party is coming this way,” Onalli says.

Tecipiani doesn’t answer for a while: she’s looking at the man—and, as she turns back toward her friends, Xochitl sees burning hope and pity in her gaze.

“They won’t catch him,” she says. “He’s strong, and fast. He’ll make it.”

Onalli looks as though she might protest, but doesn’t say anything.

“We should head back,” Tecipiani says, finally. Her voice is toneless again; her eyes dry and emotionless.

On their way back, they meet the main body of the search party: the fevered eyes of the priest rest on them for a while, as if judging their fitness as replacements.

Tecipiani moves, slightly, to stand in the priest’s way, her smile dazzling and threatening. She shakes her head, once, twice. “We’re not easy prey,” she says, aloud.

The priest focuses on her; and, after a long, long while, his gaze moves away. Too much to chew. Tecipiani is right: they won’t be bested so easily.

They walk on, through the back streets by the marketplace, heading back to the House to find some shade.

Nevertheless, Xochitl feels as though the sunlight has been blotted out. She shivers. “They’re sick people.”

“Just mad,” Onalli says. “Don’t think about them anymore. They’re not worth your time.”

She’d like to—but she knows that the priest’s eyes will haunt her nightmares for the months to come. And it’s not so much the madness; it’s just that it doesn’t make sense at all, this frenzy to spread unwilling, tainted blood.

Tecipiani waits until they’re almost back to the House to speak. “They’re not mad, you know.”

“Yeah, sure,” Onalli says.

Tecipiani’s gaze is distant. “There’s a logic to it. Spreading unwilling blood is a sin, but Tonatiuh needs blood to continue shining down on us. Grandmother Earth needs blood to put forth maize and cotton and nanomachines.”

“It’s still a fucking sin, no matter which way you take it.” Onalli seems to take the argument as a challenge.

Tecipiani says nothing for a while. “I suppose so. But still, they’re only doing what they think is good.”

“And they’re wrong,” Xochitl says, with a vehemence that surprises her.

“Perhaps,” Tecipiani says. “And perhaps not. Would you rather take the risk of the world ending?” She looks up, into the sky. “Of all the stars falling down upon us, monsters eager to tear us apart?”

There’s silence, then. Xochitl tries to think of something, of anything to counter Tecipiani, but she can’t. She’s been too crafty. She always is.

“If you believe that,” Onalli says, with a scowl, “why did you let him go?”

Tecipiani shakes her head, and in her eyes is a shadow of what Xochitl saw, back in the marketplace—pity and hope. “I said I understood. Not that I approved. I wouldn’t do anything I didn’t believe in whole-heartedly. I never do.”

And that’s the problem, Xochitl thinks. It will always be the problem. Tecipiani does what she believes in; but you’re never sure what she’s truly thinking.

The cell was worryingly easy to enter, once Onalli had dealt with the two guards at the entrance—who, even though they were Jaguar Specialists barely a step above novices, really should have known better. She had gone for the windpipe of the first, and left a syringe stuck in the shoulder of the second, who was out in less time than it took her to open the door.

Inside, it was dark, and stifling. A rank smell, like the mortuary of a hospital, rose as she walked.

“Xochitl?” she whispered.

There was no noise. But against the furthest wall was a dark lump—and, as she walked closer, it resolved into a slumped human shape.

Black One, no. Please watch over her, watch over us all . . .

Straps and chains held Xochitl against the wall, and thin tubes snaked upward, into a machine that thrummed like a beating heart.

Teonanácatl, and peyotl, and truth-serum, and the gods knew what else. . . .

It was only instinct that kept her going forward: a horrified, debased part of her that wouldn’t stop, which had to analyze the situation no matter what. She found the IVs by touch—feeling the hard skin where the syringes had rubbed—the bruises on the face, the broken nose—the eyes that opened, not seeing her.

“Xochitl. Xochitl. It’s all right. I’m here. Everything is going to be all right. I promise.”

But the body was limp; the face distorted in a grimace of terror; and there was, indeed, nothing left of the picture she’d held on to for so long.

“Come on, come on,” she whispered, fiddling with the straps—her sharpened nails catching on the leather, fumbling around the knots.

The cold, detached part of her finally took control; and, forcing herself not to think of what she was doing, she cut through the straps, one by one—pulled out the IVs, and gently disengaged the body, catching its full weight on her arms.

Xochitl shuddered, a spasm like that of a dying woman. “Tecipiani,” she whispered. “No. . . .”

“She’s not here,” Onalli said. Gently, carefully, she rose with Xochitl in her arms, cradling her close, like a hurt child.

Black One take you, Tecipiani. Oblivion’s too good for the likes of you. I hope you burn in the Christian Hell, with the sinners and the blasphemers and the traitors. I hope you burn. . . .

She was halfway out of the House, trudging through the last courtyard before the novices’ quarters, when she became aware she wasn’t alone.

Too late.

The lights came on, blinding, unforgiving.

“I always knew you’d come back, Onalli,” a voice said. “No matter how hard I tried to send you away.”

Black One take her for a fool. Too easy. It had been too easy, from beginning to end: just another of her sick games.

“Black One screw you,” Onalli spat into the brightness. “That’s all you deserve, isn’t it, Tecipiani?”

The commander was just a silhouette—standing, by the sound of her, only a few paces away. But Xochitl lay in Onalli’s arms, a limp weight she couldn’t toss aside, even to strike.

Tecipiani didn’t speak; but of course she’d remain silent, talking only when it suited her.

“You sold us all,” Onalli whispered. To the yellow-livered dogs and their master, to the cudgels and the syringes. . . . “Did she mean so little to you?”

“As little or as much as the rest,” Tecipiani said.

Onalli’s eyes were slowly accustoming themselves to the light, enough to see that Tecipiani’s arms were down, as if holding something. A new weapon—or just a means to call on her troops?

And then, with a feeling like a blade of ice slid through her ribs, Onalli saw that it wasn’t the case. She saw what Tecipiani was carrying: a body, just like her: the limp shape of the boy she’d downed in the courtyard.

“You—” she whispered.

Tecipiani shifted. Her face, slowly coming into focus, could have been that of an Asian statue—the eyes dry and unreadable, the mouth thinned to a darker line against her skin. “Ezpetlatl, of the Atempan calpulli clan. Given into our keeping fifteen years ago.”

Shame warred with rage, and lost. “I don’t care. You think it’s going to atone for everything else you did?”

“Perhaps,” Tecipiani said. “Perhaps not.” Her voice shook, slightly—a bare hint of emotion, not enough, never enough. “And you think rescuing Xochitl was worth his life?”

Onalli scanned the darkness, trying to see how many guards were there—how many of Tecipiani’s bloodless sycophants. She couldn’t take them all—fire and blood, she wasn’t even sure she could take Tecipiani. But the lights were set all around the courtyard—on the roofs of the buildings, no doubt—and she couldn’t make out anything but the commander herself.

As, no doubt, Tecipiani had meant all along. Bitch.

“You’re stalling, aren’t you?” Onalli asked. “This isn’t about me. It has never been about me.” About you, Tecipiani; about the House and the priests and Xochitl. . . .

“No,” Tecipiani agreed, gravely. “Finally, something we can agree on.”

“Then why Xochitl?” A cold certainty was coalescing in her belly, like a snake of ice. “You wanted us both, didn’t you?”

“Oh, Onalli.” Tecipiani’s voice was sad. “I though you’d understood. This isn’t about you, or Xochitl. It’s about the House.”

How could she say this? “You’ve killed the House,” Onalli spat.

“You never could see into the future,” Tecipiani said. “Even two years ago, when you came back.”

“When you warned us about betrayal? You’re the one who couldn’t see the Revered Speaker was insane, you’re the one who—”

“Onalli.” Tecipiani’s voice held the edge of a knife. “The House is still standing.”

“Because you sold it.”

“Because I compromised,” Tecipiani said.

“You—” Onalli choked on all the words she was trying to say. “You poisoned it to the guts and the brain, and you’re telling me about compromise?”

“Yes. Something neither you or Xochitl ever understood, unfortunately.”

That was too much—irreparable. Without thought, Onalli shifted Xochitl onto her shoulder, and moved, her knife swinging free of its sheath—going for Tecipiani’s throat. If she wouldn’t move, wouldn’t release her so-called precious life, too bad—it would be the last mistake she’d ever make—

She’d half-expected Tecipiani to parry by raising the body in her arms—to sacrifice him, as she’d sacrificed so many of them—but the commander, as quick as a snake, knelt on the ground, laying the unconscious boy at her feet—and Onalli’s first swing went wide, cutting only through air. By the time she’d recovered, Tecipiani was up on her feet again, a blade in her left hand.

Onalli shifted, and pressed her again. Tecipiani parried; and again, and again.

Neither of them should have the upper hand. They were both Jaguar Knights; Tecipiani might have been a little less fit, away from the field for so long—but Onalli was hampered by Xochitl’s body, whom she had to keep cradled against her.

Still—

Still, Tecipiani’s gestures were not as fast as they should have been. Another one of her games?

Onalli didn’t care, not anymore. In one of Tecipiani’s over-wide gestures, she saw her opening—and took it. Her blade snaked through; connected, sinking deep above the wrist.

Tecipiani jumped backward—her left hand dangled uselessly, but she’d shifted her knife to the right—and, like many left-handers, she was ambidextrous.

“You’re still good,” Tecipiani admitted, grudgingly.

Onalli looked around once more—the lights were still on—and said, “You haven’t brought anyone else, have you? It’s just you and me.”

Tecipiani made a curt nod; but, when she answered, it had nothing to do with the question. “The House still stands.” There was such desperate intensity in her voice that it stopped Onalli, for a few seconds. “The Eagle Knights were burnt alive; the Otters dispersed into the silver mines to breathe dust until it killed them. The Coyotes died to a man, defending their House against the imperial guards.”

“They died with honor,” Onalli said.

“Honor is a word without meaning,” Tecipiani said. Her voice was steady once more. “There are five hundred Knights in this House, out of which one hundred are unblooded children and novices. I had to think of the future.”

Onalli’s hands clenched. “And Xochitl wasn’t part of the future?”

Tecipiani didn’t move. “Sacrifices were necessary. Who would turn on their own, except men loyal to the Revered Speaker?”

The cold was back in her guts, and in her heart. “You’re sick,” Onalli said. “This wasn’t worth the price of our survival—this wasn’t—”

“Perhaps,” Tecipiani said. “Perhaps it was the wrong thing to do. But we won’t know until long after this, will we?”

That gave her pause—so unlike Tecipiani, to admit she’d been wrong, to put her acts into question. But still—still, it changed nothing.

“And now what?” Onalli asked. “You’ve had your game, Tecipiani. Because that’s all we two were ever to you, weren’t we?”

Tecipiani didn’t move. At last, she made a dismissive gesture. “It could have gone both ways. Two Knights, killed in an escape attempt tragically gone wrong . . .” She spoke as if nothing mattered anymore; her voice cool, emotionless—and that, in many ways, was the most terrifying. “Or a success, perhaps, from your point of view.”

“I could kill you,” Onalli said, and knew it was the truth. No one was perfectly ambidextrous, and, were Onalli to drop Xochitl as Tecipiani had dropped the boy, she’d have the full range of her abilities to call upon.

“Yes,” Tecipiani said. A statement of fact, nothing more. “Or you could escape.”

“Fuck you,” Onalli said. She wanted to say something else—that, when the Revered Speaker was finally dead, she and Xochitl would come back and level the House, but she realized, then, that it was only thanks to Tecipiani that there would still be a House to tear down.

But it still wasn’t worth it. It couldn’t have been.

Gently, she shifted Xochitl, catching her in her arms once more, like a hurt child. “I didn’t come here to kill you,” she said, finally. “But I still hope you burn, Tecipiani, for all you’ve done. Whether it was worth it or not.”

She walked to the end of the courtyard, into the blinding light—to the wall and the ball-court and the exit. Tecipiani made no attempt to stop her; she still stood next to the unconscious body of the boy, looking at some point in the distance.

And, all the way out—into the suburbs of Tenochtitlan, in the aircar Atcoatl was driving—she couldn’t get Tecipiani’s answer out of her mind, nor the burning despair she’d heard in her friend’s voice.

What makes you think I don’t already burn?

She’d always been too good an actress. “Black One take you,” Onalli said, aloud. And she wasn’t really sure anymore if she was asking for suffering, or for mercy.

Alone in her office once more, her hands—her thin, skeletal hands—reach for the shriveled mushrooms of the teonanácatl—and everything slowly dissolves into colored patterns, into meaningless dreams.

Even in the dreams, though, she knows what she’s done. The gods have turned Their faces away from her; and every night she wakes up with the memories of the torture chambers—the consequences of what she’s ordered, the consequences she has forced herself to face, like a true warrior.

Here’s the thing: she’s not sure how long she can last.

She burns—every day of her life, wondering if what she did was worth it—if she preserved the House, or corrupted it beyond recognition.

No. No.

Only this is worth remembering: that, like the escaped prisoner, Onalli and Xochitl will survive—going north, into the desert, into some other, more welcoming country, keeping alive the memories of their days together.

And, over Greater Mexica, Tonatiuh the sun will rise again and again, marking all the days of the Revered Speaker’s reign—the rising tide of fear and discontent that will one day topple him. And when it’s finally over, the House that she has saved will go on, into the future of a new Age: a pure and glorious Age, where people like her will have no place.

This is a thought the mind can hold.

EIGHT MILES

Sean McMullen

Are you sure this didn’t happen?

Consider a journey of eight miles. One could walk it in less than an afternoon; in a carriage, it would take an hour, or one could conquer the distance in one of Stevenson’s steam trains in fifteen minutes or less. Set two towers eight miles apart, and a signal may be transmitted by flashing mirrors in less time than modern science is able to measure. Eight miles is not all that it used to be, yet seek to travel eight miles straight up and you come to a frontier more remote than the peaks of Tibet’s mountains or the depths of Africa’s jungles. It is a frontier that can kill.

My journey of eight miles began in London, in the spring of 1840. At that time I was the owner and operator of a hot air balloon. It was reliable, robust, and easy to fly, and I provided flights to amuse the jaded and idle rich. It was a fickle income, but when I had clients, they paid well for novelty.

Lord Cedric Gainsley was certainly rich, and when his card arrived I assumed that he wished to hire my balloon to impress some friends with a flight above London. I kept it packed aboard a waggon to launch from wherever the clients wished. Its open wicker car could carry six adults; indeed, the idea of six people of mixed sexes packed in close proximity seemed to add to the allure of a balloon flight.

My first moments in Gainsley’s London rooms told me that he was no ordinary client. The walls of the parlour were decorated by maps alternating with sketches of mountain peaks and ruins. The butler showed me into a drawing room completely lined with books. This was nothing unusual, for many gentlemen bought identical collections of worthy books to display to visitors. At that time it was also fashionable to collect, so Gainsley collected. In and on display cases were preserved insects, fossil shells, mineral crystals, old astronomical instruments, clocks dating back to the fourteenth century, lamps from the Roman Empire, and coins from ancient Greece. Seven species of fox were represented by stuffed specimens.

As I began to look through Gainsley’s library, however, I realised that many books had been heavily used, to the point of being grubby. They were mainly concerned with the natural sciences.

“Does geology interest you?”

I turned to see a tall man of perhaps forty handing a top hat to the butler. He wore a black tailcoat with a fashionably narrow waist, but was just slightly unkempt. A rich man who did not want to draw attention to himself might look that way.

“Geology—you mean the books?”

“Yes, they made me rich. I learned to tell when minerals were present, in places where other men saw only wilderness.”

The butler cleared his throat.

“Lord Cedric Gainsley, may I introduce Mr. Harold Parkes,” he improvised, not entirely sure of the protocol when the baron had opened the conversation first.

“Thank you, Stuart. Now have Miss Angelica ready and waiting for my summons.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Once we were alone, Gainsley waved at a crystal brandy decanter and told me to make myself at home. He paced before the fireplace as I poured myself a glass, and showed no interest in a drink for himself. I took a sip. It was very good—far better than I was used to.

“How high can your balloon ascend, Mr. Parkes?” he asked.

“I take pleasure seekers a mile above London,” I began. “My rates—”

“Your rates are not a problem for me. Could you ascend, say, two miles?”

I blinked.

“At two miles the air is thin and cold, sir. Besides, the view of London is not as good as from a lower altitude.”

“Two miles, and hold that height for six hours.”

I blinked again. Pleasure flights seldom lasted more than one hour. People got bored. More to the point, the balloon needed to carry fuel for its burner to maintain the supply of hot air. That was a constraint.

“I must ask some questions, sir. How many passengers, what weight will they total, and what weight of food and drink will they carry? You see, to stay aloft for so long, the balloon must carry some fuel to keep the air heated. With the weight of fuel for six hours, I may not even be able to get off the ground.”

“Yourself, myself, a young woman of one hundred and forty pounds, and food and drink not exceeding ten pounds. Nothing more.”

“Then it is possible, but not certain.”

“Why not?”

“Nothing in ballooning is certain. Above us is a dangerous and unforgiving frontier.”

Gainsley thought about this for a time.

“You are a man of science, Mr. Parkes, like me. You invented the mercury ascent barometer, and you calibrated it to five miles.”

“With the help of Green and Rush, yes. They took it on their record-breaking flight some months ago.”

“Yet you are in difficult circumstances.”

“There is not a big market for ascent barometers. Many of my other inventions turned out to be impractical, but proving them impractical nearly bankrupted me. Pleasure flights are not my preferred career, but they are lifting me out of debt.”

I had once had visions of becoming the George Stephenson of the skies by inventing the airborne train, and I spent all my money installing a purpose-built Cornish steam engine with small windmill blades beneath a hot air balloon. Alas, although it did drive the balloon in any direction on a calm day, in wind it was useless. As I found out, a balloon is effectively a huge sail, and the wind was more than a match for any steam engine small enough to be carried aloft.

“Mr. Parkes, my flights are to be no pleasure jaunt, and I need an innovative balloonist, one who can solve technical problems as they arise,” Gainsley now explained. “I intend to study the effects of extreme altitude on a very special person. I will pay you fifty pounds for each ascent, and I shall also pay for the fuel to inflate your balloon with hot air. My condition is that you work for nobody else while in my hire, and that you exercise absolute discretion regarding the flights and the nature of my research.”

His rates were certainly better than I was currently making from pleasure flights. In fact, as a business proposition it was too good to be true. Once I had agreed, he pulled at a red velvet tassel that hung beside the fireplace. The butler appeared within moments.

“My lord?”

“Stuart, fetch Miss Angelica now.”

Angelica was a young woman a little below average height, with a delicate, angular face. She was wearing a dark blue woollen cloak and close-fitting bonnet, but I could see nothing more of her attire. There was something odd about her eyes. They were listless, almost lacking in life.

“Miss Angelica has been in my service for some months,” said Gainsley. “I named her Angelica because she comes from very high altitudes.”

“A fallen angel?”

“Quite so. It is my little joke. Now then, put your glass down, make sure you are seated comfortably, and prepare yourself for a shock.”

Gainsley unpinned her cloak and let it fall to the floor. Such were my expectations that it took some moments to realise that she was neither clothed nor naked. Angelica was covered in fine, dark brown fur, except for her face. She had three pairs of breasts, each no larger than that of a girl in early pubescence. Her chest was surprisingly broad and deep, however, and I would estimate that her lung capacity was greater than mine. Her ears were pointed, in the manner of a fox. I sat staring for some time.

“Well?” asked Gainsley.

The young woman showed no sign of shame, which was a very strong clue. She was probably used to being on display.

“I have seen the like before,” I replied uneasily.

“Indeed? Where?”

“At fairgrounds, in the novelty tents. Women with beards, boys with six and seven fingers, I have even seen a child with two heads. By some accident of birth the human template was not applied to them correctly by nature. For this young lady, it is the same.”

“You are wrong,” said Gainsley. “She is a werefox, for the lack of a better word. She speaks no language, sleeps on the floor, and is not familiar with clothing.”

I managed not to make a reply, which is just as well because it would surely have been sarcastic.

“You clearly do not share my opinion,” he prompted.

“Indeed not, sir.”

“Then how would you account for her condition?”

“A feral child, abandoned by her parents. She was born covered in fur, so they cast her out. Perhaps wild beasts raised her.”

“I thought that too, at first. I did indeed find her in a fairground. Her manager said she had been bought from a dealer, who also sold dancing bears. When she was captured in India’s northern mountains she had been more active and entertaining; she could even do little tricks. At low altitudes she became very lethargic, however, and was only of value as a passive curiosity. It was not until some days later that I realised the truth. I returned to the fair and bought her.”

“And what is that truth?”

“The girl is adapted to very great altitudes. At sea level the richness of the air overwhelms her, much as a diet of that brandy would overwhelm either of us. I believe there is a whole race of humans who live on the highest of mountains, adapted to the thin air.”

The idea was fantastic. I looked back to the girl. Her lungs were certainly large in proportion to her body, and the fur would have protected her from the cold.

“I am not sure what role you have planned for me,” I said at last. “I know nothing of mountaineering.”

“Ah, but your balloon will be a substitute for the mountains. A trip to India would take years, but my business interests do not allow me to leave England for more than days. Your balloon can take us two miles high in . . . how long?”

“Twenty minutes, perhaps thirty. It depends on the load.”

“Splendid. We can do the flight above my estate, north of London, and be down in time for dinner. At two miles I can observe how Angelica reacts to thin air and cold. If it restores her senses, I might even be able to speak with her, to question her about her people.”

Gainsley helped Angelica back into her cloak, then rang for the butler to escort her away. Once we were alone again he walked over to the window and gestured to the crowded street outside.

“Look upon my prosperous neighbours, Mr. Parkes,” he said. “Merchants, bankers, financiers, landed gentry. What do they do, other than grow rich and live well?”

“Visit the theatre, attend the races, go to balls?” I guessed. “Some take balloon rides above the races. That is all the fashion just now.”

“Theatre, balls, races,” Gainsley muttered, shaking his head. “Within a year of their deaths, such people are all but forgotten. I want to be like Isaac Newton, James Cook or Joseph Banks—I want to be remembered for discovering something stupendous. Miss Angelica will make my name.”

“You have lost me, sir.”

“I have a theory, Mr. Parkes. In my theory of adaptive morphology I assert that humans take other physical forms under extremes. For example, in polar regions they may become seals if they dwell there too long.”

“The silkie legend of the Scots: people turning into seals.”

“Yes, and I think that extreme altitudes might render us into a form like that of Angelica.”

Gainsley’s estate was not far to the north of London, and he sent his draught horses to draw my transport waggon there. Kelly and Feldman were my tending crew, and they spent most of the night setting the frame, and unpacking and checking the balloon itself. I was up two hours before dawn, adjusting my altitude barometer and installing it in the wicker car.

Inflating a balloon on the ground is not a problem. One has unlimited fuel to supply the hot air, and to keep that hot air maintained. Once aloft, it is a different matter. The little furnace in the wicker car is fuelled by lamp oil that the balloon must carry, so this oil must be used sparingly. It was the work of a half hour to inflate the bag sufficiently that it stood up by itself. Then I sent word to the manor house that we were ready to ascend. Gainsley emerged with Angelica, leading her by a chain attached around her waist. She was dressed in the manner of a boy.

We rose very rapidly, drifting right over the roof of the manor house. The wind was southerly and very light, and the sky was clear. At first Gainsley made a big show of looking over the side and exclaiming at the sight of his estate, far below. He almost seemed to forget why we were there, and chattered about ascending with an artist next time, to have his lands painted from above. I had the barometer calibrated to display altitude in quarters of miles. At a mile and a half Gainsley suddenly remembered why he had paid for the ascent.

“A mile and one half; almost eight thousand feet,” he said, peering at my barometer.

“We are ascending slowly, at about five miles per hour,” I reported.

“Six minutes from the prescribed height,” he replied. “Angelica was apparently found at eleven thousand feet. Can you hold that altitude?”

“That I can, sir. Bleeding a little hot air from the balloon will reduce our buoyancy and stabilise our height.”

I released some hot air and we continued to ascend, but at a much slower rate. According to my barometer, we settled at twelve thousand feet. By my estimate we were drifting north northeast at three miles per hour. The direction of the wind was different up here.

It was at this altitude that the visions began. Actually the term visions does not do them justice—they were more like memories that were not mine being implanted in my mind. I seemed to have walked beside canals built across deserts of red sand beneath an unnaturally dark blue sky with a pale and tiny sun. In the distance I could see a city, but it was more of a metropolis of immense crystals of saltpetre, feldspar, and quartzite than like London.

I had paid Angelica no attention until now, being occupied with tending the furnace, checking the barometer, and monitoring the direction and progress of our drift relative to the ground. It was Gainsley who took me by the arm and pointed to her. Angelica had begun the ascent sitting on the floor of the wicker car, paying no heed to what was going on around her. Now she was on her feet, looking over the edge of the car. As I watched, she turned away and scrutinised my altitude barometer. For a full minute at least she stared at the mercury. Then she raised a hand slowly before making a horizontal chopping motion.

“Sign language,” said Gainsley. “She is telling us that she understands what is happening. We have been rising, but now we have stopped.”

“More than that,” I said with a very odd prickle in my skin. “She understands my altitude barometer on first viewing.”

In London, at sea level, Angelica had showed not the slightest interest in the machines and furniture that surrounded her. Even the mechanics of doors were beyond her. Now she was able to read a barometer, and that ability was beyond ninety-nine in every hundred of my fellow Britons.

I noticed her eyes. For the first time they were alert, calculating, even intelligent.

“Angelica, can you hear me?” asked Gainsley.

At the sound of her assigned name she turned her head.

“Angelica, speak to me,” urged Gainsley. “Speak. Speak English, French, Hindi, anything.”

He put a hand to his ear, to signify that he expected an answer. Angelica did not reply.

At the pace of a slow walk we drifted over the countryside. Far below I could see farmhouses and other manors. Gainsley continued to coax and question Angelica. She proved disappointing. He showed her pictures of mountains, foxes, and even a sketch of herself. She displayed vague interest, but did not speak.

“How long have we been aloft?” he asked me.

“One hour and thirty minutes.”

“And what endurance have we?”

“Very little. The seal of the bag is imperfect—some hole that my crew missed—so hot air slowly leaks out. I balance that by stoking up the furnace and working the bellows, but the air is cold and thin up here, and it is using too much lamp oil.”

Gainsley scowled, but did not argue. This was a ship, after a fashion, and I was the captain. He returned to his questioning of Angelica. The wind swung around and began to blow us back toward London. There was little for me to do, other than feed in hot air every so often to maintain height. I watched as Angelica became even more alert. She examined the magnetic compass, Gainsley’s pocket watch, and even the furnace. After studying the last-mentioned for some minutes and watching me at work, she gently pushed me aside, bled in some lamp oil, and applied herself to the bellows.

“Astounding,” I gasped. “She deduced its operation, merely from watching.”

“Very high intelligence,” said Gainsley.

“And an understanding of machines.”

Now Angelica scrutinised the barometer, where the mercury indicated that we had risen another quarter mile. To my complete astonishment she touched her finger to the new level of mercury.

“She understands the operation of this balloon as well as the altitude barometer,” I said. “Very few of my passengers could claim that.”

“Up here, in rarefied air, she is transformed,” Gainsley observed.

“How can this be?”

“Remember my theory, adaptive morphology? I think she comes from a civilization in very high mountains. Ascending into cool, thin air frees her mind from the effects of the sludge that we breathe.”

Finally, I declared that we would have to descend. By then Angelica had not spoken a single word, but she had demonstrated awesome intelligence. My balloon was one of the most advanced vehicles available, yet she understood its workings and instruments.

“Only four hours of exposure to the thin air, yet her brain cleared,” said Gainsley in triumph.

“She did not speak.”

“Yet she understood the balloon’s workings.”

“Her werefox race must have its own language,” I suggested.

It was at this point, just as we began our descent, that Angelica began tapping at the altitude barometer and making upward movements with her other hand. The part of the scale that she was indicating was for eight miles. This part of the scale was where I had marked uncalibrated altitude projections. She looked to me, her eyes alive and full of pleading. I held up the empty lamp oil barrel and shook my head. She seemed to comprehend, for she now sat quietly on the car’s wicker floor and closed her eyes, resigned to the oblivion of sea level.

Using the varying directions of the wind at different altitudes, I managed to steer us back over Gainsley’s estate, then bring us to earth just a mile from where we had ascended. Kelly and Feldman presently arrived with the waggon, then Gainsley’s groom brought a light carriage. He was quick to get Angelica into the carriage and away from sight, but with this done he returned to speak with me as I helped my men pack the balloon away.

“How high may we ascend?” he asked, “and how long may we stay there?”

“Hot air has its limitations,” I explained. “My balloon must carry its own fuel. Going higher means using more fuel. Using more fuel means less is left over to sustain the hot air and maintain our height.”

“Could you build a balloon to reach eight miles?”

I almost choked on my own gasp. The question was akin to asking whether a new type of gun could shoot a duck even more dead than dead.

“There is no point,” I replied. “Above five miles the air is so rarefied that one may not breathe.”

“But could you build a balloon to do it?”

“Using hydrogen, yes, but to what end? It would be our dead bodies that achieve the feat.”

“Then how high may we go?”

“I think you mean how high in safety. Four miles is my answer.”

“Why four?”

“Remember, the air thins as we ascend. I have ascended three and one half miles. It was distressing, but endurable. My lips and those of my companion turned blue, and fatigue set in very quickly. Four miles is double what we achieved today.”

“Have others gone higher?”

“Yes. Some months ago the aeronauts Charles Green and Spencer Rush reached five miles. They found it near impossible to breathe, however, and consider themselves lucky to have survived.”

“Five miles. The height is comparable to the highest of mountains to the north of India.”

“So I have read.”

“So we too could do it?”

“Yes, but it would be appallingly dangerous.”

“I fought Napoleon, just a quarter century ago. How can this be more dangerous than trading volleys with his soldiers?”

“Death is death, whatever the cause. Why ascend five miles in search of it?”

“Because at four or five miles we may well clear Angelica’s mind to a greater degree. She may even be able to speak. Begin planning for another hot air flight tomorrow, but also draw up plans for a balloon filled with hydrogen.”

“Do you realise that hydrogen is even more volatile than gunpowder?”

“Of course, Mr. Parkes, I am a man of science. Send the bills for whatever you need to me.”

“So am I to be kept in your employment?” I asked.

“Yes, yes, board and lodging, plus whatever rate you were earning by taking people on pleasure flights. The same for your men.”

That night I dreamed, and my dreams were lurid. My mind was filled with visions of vast, gleaming things that glided through blackness, and blossoms of fire that became twinkling clouds of glitter. I awoke, not so much distraught as puzzled. The dreams had become part of my memory. What was more confusing was that I had other memories that were not part of the dreams. There were splendid cities full of graceful crystalline towers and wide promenades, yet all of them were strewn with dead creatures. At first I thought that the bodies were of vermin, but many of them were wearing straps and belts, gold braid, ceremonial swords, and even helmets. Perhaps they had built the cities, these creatures that wore no clothes but fur. They closely resembled Angelica.

We made another dozen hot air ascents while the hydrogen bag was being fabricated. We did not manage much more in communicating with Angelica, but the visions continued to pour into my head every time we ascended. I said nothing, because practical men are not meant to have visions and I wanted to keep Gainsley’s trust. Would you travel on a ship whose captain said that he could see water sprites, mermaids, and harpies? I can only compare my visions to leafing through randomly chosen books in a library. I saw nothing of the whole picture, just snatches of fragments.

A gasworks at the edge of London provided the hydrogen, which saved the cost of buying a hydrogen reactor, and chemicals to fuel it. The first hydrogen flight saw us ascend from the city in the half-light before dawn. We remained at four miles for only a quarter hour, because Gainsley quickly weakened, then lost consciousness. I descended rapidly, and when he revived he confessed that his lungs had been weakened by some childhood disease. On the other hand Angelica had been vastly improved by even the brief exposure to the thin air, however, and had even scrawled some characters and diagrams on a notepad. Alas, we could make no sense of them.

On the way down I had a number of ideas. Gainsley had been complaining about his lungs preventing him from staying at four miles. I offered to take Angelica to five miles without him and report what she did, but he would not hear of it. Whatever she did, he wanted to be there to see it.

“If only I could make the ascent myself,” he sighed.

“Impossible. Even at four miles we are on borrowed time. You especially.”

“Green and Rush did it.”

“Only briefly. They were on borrowed time too.”

“Yet they lived.”

“They lived because they descended in haste. People must acclimatise slowly to very high altitudes. Mountaineers I have spoken to say that it takes weeks.”

“Find a way. Two hundred pounds, and I will pay for whatever you need.”

“Two hundred pounds, you say?”

“I do pledge that.”

“Then there may be a way. I have been reading about the nature of air, my lord. You may have heard of the experiments with glass jars and candles. Burn a candle in one, and it will go out when the oxygen is exhausted. Introduce a mouse to that depleted air, and it soon suffocates.”

“Explain further.”

“Suffocation interests me, being a balloonist. I performed this experiment, then piped some pure oxygen into that depleted air. The mouse revived.”

Gainsley thought about this for some time, smiling and nodding every so often.

“How heavy is the mechanism for supplying oxygen?” he asked at last.

“I need a bigger reactor to supply enough oxygen for humans, but it need not be very heavy. Just a tank, some pipes, spigots, and a sealable chute.”

“Then build it, build it! I shall pay for the materials and labour.”

“And the two-hundred-pound bounty?”

“It is yours.”

The problem of staying alive at extreme altitudes occupied my mind a great deal in the days that followed. Oxygen is the essential ingredient of air that gives us life, yet it occupies only one part in five of air’s volume. Provide air that is five parts in five oxygen, and one might well survive in much thinner air. I paid a visit to Darkington and Sons, Pneumatic Systems and Valves of Sheffield. Jeremy Darkington was about Gainsley’s age, but he was dressed as a tradesman and spoke with a hybrid Yorkshire-Cockney accent. He was a skilled metalworker who had made good by supplying valves for steam trains.

While he sat behind his desk, I unpacked my chemicals. I uncorked a bottle and poured a little solution into a glass, then opened a jar of dark purple crystals. I dropped one into the glass, where it began to bubble with great vigour.

“Permanganate of potash added to peroxide of hydrogen will release oxygen,” I explained as we watched the reaction turn the liquid to a greenish purple froth.

“I know t’reaction,” he replied.

I now laid out drawings before him.

“I wish to have a reactor built. Peroxide will be fed in here, potash here. Oxygen will be released into this pipe as they react, and when they are spent, the solution will be vented through this tap before fresh materials are introduced to give off more oxygen.”

He examined the drawings, scratching his head from time to time, but generally nodding. At last he looked up.

“Can be built, but what end for it? There’s oxygen all about.”

“I have an application that calls for pure oxygen. An industrial application.”

“Ah.”

“How much to build it, and how long?”

“Summat busy for present . . . thirty pounds. Just now there’s batches of valves for Mr. Stevenson’s new engine fleet . . . a fortnight?”

“Done! Put my contract on your books.”

My reactor looked viable in principle, but the only way to test it was by means of a flight. That was risky. Still, it was worth the risk.

My father had two sayings that I lived by. Luck is opportunity recognised, was sensible enough, except that opportunity generally eluded me. That which is too good to be true is never true, was a little less positive, yet it had kept me out of trouble on many occasions. Gainsley and his schemes seemed too good to be true, yet he paid generously enough.

I was returning from Sheffield and was within ten miles of Gainsley’s manor house when a rainstorm swept over the countryside. Because it was late in the afternoon, I decided to spend the night at a small inn on the edge of a hamlet. I was dining on a pork pie when a bearded man approached me. He was dressed as an itinerant labourer, but that illusion vanished as soon as he began to speak.

“So, you are Gainsley’s latest balloonist,” he said in a soft, almost conspiratorial voice with a French accent.

“I do not know you, sir,” I responded warily.

“My name is Norvin, and I know you to be Harold Parkes.”

Clearly he had something serious to discuss. I gestured to a chair.

“You said I was Lord Gainsley’s latest balloonist, yet the baron never flew before I took him aloft.”

“He has had four balloonists. Routley, he died in a mysterious duel in 1831. Sanderson died of food poisoning, two years later. Elders fell from the carriage of a train in 1837, and was found beside the tracks with his neck broken. I would wager my last pound that it was broken before he fell.”

I felt a stab of alarm, but the stranger showed not a trace of hostility.

“You said four balloonists,” I prompted.

“I was on a fishing boat, supposedly being taken back to France. One mile out to sea, I was padlocked to a length of iron rail and heaved over the side.”

“Yet here you are, alive.”

“When on hard times I supplemented my income by liberating goods guarded by padlocks. Thus my pick wire is always upon my person. It was a near thing, picking a lock in darkness, under water.”

I was aware that those balloonists he had named had died, for we are a small fraternity. Now I speculated.

“The balloonist Edward Norvin was French and a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He vanished in 1836.”

“So I did, Monsieur Parkes. The seventeenth day of July at one hour before midnight. One does not forget days like that in a hurry. I grew a beard and developed a new identity.”

“Can you prove that Gainsley was involved?”

“Can you prove that Gainsley and yourself have had any business dealings?” he asked in turn.

I raised my finger and opened my mouth to reply . . . but said nothing. All of our dealings had been in cash. My men Kelly and Feldman now lived on the Gainsley estate, as did I. Nobody knew. The colour quite probably drained from my face. Norvin smiled and took a sip from his tankard.

“You are having dreams and visions, Monsieur Parkes,” he continued. “The visions begin to tumble through your mind when ascending with Gainsley and Angelica. They begin at about ten thousand feet, the altitude that the fox-woman’s mind becomes more clear. It is as if she were emerging from a drunken stupor, raving randomly.”

“But she has never said a thing.”

“She is not like us. She speaks with her mind; her words are images of thoughts. I would say that you have said nothing of this to Gainsley as yet.”

“Why?”

“You are still alive.”

I did not want to hear any of this, yet it was true.

“I saw landscapes that were all red and green under a violet sky,” Norvin continued. “There were cities of silver crystal, their streets strewn with bodies although the buildings were intact. It looked like a scene of plague. My perspective was odd. It was as if I were being dragged about, being made to look at the bodies. The only moving figures were wearing helmets and coveralls that resembled a Seibe diving suit—except that the helmets were made of glass and had no air hoses.”

Now I began to feel really frightened. Norvin was describing precisely what I had seen, both in the ascent visions and in my dreams. I decided to be honest, in order to gain his trust.

“I have also had dreams filled with vast, gleaming things that floated in blackness against constellations of unfamiliar stars,” I confessed.

Norvin nodded. “I have had similar dreams and visions. Tell me more.”

“I—I cannot describe the gleaming things because they are like nothing in my experience, yet they moved with the stateliness of huge ships. They blossomed into white fire that yellowed, then became twinkling, gleaming clouds of fragments.”

“Warships of the air, perhaps, fighting at night. I saw great crowds cheering Angelica. There had been a battle. She was a hero. She was their leader.”

“A woman as leader? Preposterous.”

“Why so? The young Queen Victoria is currently monarch of your vast empire. In the sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth ruled you, and she was indeed a warrior queen. In France we had Joan of Arc.”

Again we sat in silence. By now I was in a cold sweat, in spite of the fire roaring in the hearth.

“It is my opinion that Angelica came from somewhere very, very high,” Norvin speculated. “Perhaps from Tibet, in regions that have never been explored. Regions that cannot be explored, because we cannot breathe there. I have studied maps, such as they exist. I have read accounts by the explorers Celebrooke and Webb. They reported mountains five miles high. I think that our visions are of cities high in those mountains. It is a region the size of France of which we know nothing. What of the bodies in the visions? What is your thought on them?”

“A plague. Angelica fled for her life. Down, out of the cool, pure air. Down into the thick, warm soporific atmosphere of humans. For her it would have been like lying in a bath of warm whiskey. Her brain is permanently addled by the dense air. Back in the mountains she would be restored, but in my balloon, four miles above this tavern, her mind also begins to clear in the thin air.”

“No plague,” said Norvin. “I have had four years to think about the content of my visions. Angelica was not fleeing a plague, she was exiled. There was a war. She was their Napoleon, and she lost.”

“That is just too fantastic—” I began.

“Gainsley hopes to learn the secrets of her people’s weapons and crafts by listening to the babblings of her mind. As her mind clears, she speaks delirious visions in the minds of all those nearby. That is why he employs you. He wants to learn secrets that could change the world. He has sketched machines and weapons that he does not yet understand, and each flight allows him to gather more fragments from her mind. His problem is that he must always have a balloonist with him, because he is prone to faint in thin air. That is why he killed the others. He does not want anyone to accumulate as many of Angelica’s visions as he has. You told him nothing about the visions, so perhaps he assumes you have a deafness of the mind.”

Now I laughed.

“This is preposterous! What would Napoleon or Wellington know about metalworking, cannon manufacture, flintlock mechanisms, or even weaving cloth for uniforms? It is artisans who know those things, not generals.”

“Really? How do you make gunpowder?”

“Why, take sulphur, charcoal, and saltpetre, and mix them in proportions suited to the usage. Sixty percent saltpetre . . .”

Suddenly I realised what he meant. Some important secrets were very, very simple. Again I shivered in the warmth of the room.

“One single breakthrough can change a world, Monsieur Parkes. Simple ideas, simple enough for even generals and monarchs to understand. Gunpowder can win wars. Invent the bond market, and you can finance wars more easily. Have you ever thought about how accounting changed the world? What about replacing a ship’s steering oar with a rudder? All of those things can be comprehended by any idiot—or politician.”

“But surely not all of those things lead to war.”

“Think again. Suppose you were a governor of some colony, and you were brought word that the local natives were being taught to cast cannons and build warships. What would you do?”

“Why, send a fleet of gunboats before any ship was launched.”

“Precisely. Angelica’s people will not take kindly to us if we catch up with their sciences. They will put us back in our place, make no mistake, and they will destroy our civilization to do it. Good day to you, Monsieur Parkes.”

He stood up to go. I stood too.

“Wait! What are you proposing?”

“To you, sir, I am proposing nothing.”

“Then why speak with me?”

“Why, Monsieur Parkes? Because when I do what I have to do, I want at least one person to know that I acted out of honour.”

I had not told Norvin everything. I was actually the first balloonist in the employ of Gainsley to use an altitude barometer. On no other flight had Angelica been able to point to eight miles on the scale, because my predecessors did not have barometers. Eight miles. Much of the Earth is unexplored, but we do at least know that mountains do not rise to forty-two thousand feet. Not on our world, anyway. If Angelica were adapted to such a height, it meant that she had once lived on another world. Mars, perhaps. It was a small planet, so its air might be thin.

I did a lot of research in libraries. Polar caps and seas had been observed on Mars in the midseventeenth century, and in 1665 the Italian astronomer Cassini had measured its day to be not much different to that of Earth. It was a world like our own, I quickly established. Now I turned to the literature of the fantastic. Godwin’s The Man in the Moon had been published over two hundred years earlier, introducing us to the idea of travel between worlds, and the great Voltaire made use of the idea in Micromegas. Clearly, planets were other worlds, possibly with inhabitants. If a suitable ship could be built . . . but perhaps it already had.

For me the conclusion was inescapable: The whole of our planet was Angelica’s island of exile, her Elba.

We had been to half of the height that she was adapted to. Her mind had cleared, but not to any great extent. What might she reveal when fully conscious, with a mind as sharp as a newly wrought cavalry sabre? Eight miles. It was a very long way up. The balloon could do it, but I could not. Not without my new oxygen reactor. My oxygen reactor that had only ever been tested at sea level.

Then there was Gainsley. Had Norvin been telling the truth? Had Gainsley killed those other balloonists? Anyway, what to do about Gainsley? Eight miles was double the altitude that was causing him distress. Even with pure oxygen, I would be pushing my own powers of endurance to the very limit. Gainsley had no place on the flight, and I told myself that I was excluding him for his own good. In case he was as dangerous as Norvin had said, I decided to take my father’s old Tower flintlock pistol on the next flight.

The day of the next ascent began perfectly. The air was calm, and the balloon stood tall and stately above the gasworks. The first flights had all been from the privacy of Gainsley’s estate, and had been in hot air balloons. Our initial flight from the gasworks had been done unannounced, and had taken everyone by surprise. This time we had crowds, and the newspaper people were there. Gainsley announced to the public that he would ascend alone, so Angelica and myself had been hidden in the wicker car during the night. We remained crouched down as the balloon filled and the sky lightened.

The people of northern London seemed determined to make a big occasion of the flight. Gainsley had declared that the ascent was purely scientific, and that he intended to chart the properties of the atmosphere at extreme altitudes. He would measure wind direction, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, and even the intensity of sunlight. A band began to play and people cheered. As Gainsley began speaking about the importance of science and progress, I heard two workmen nearby say that the balloon was full, and that the hydrogen lead should be tied off.

Gainsley had had the balloon tied down to the roof of the gasworks. One of his trusted men was ready beside a release lever, and pulling upon this would send us on our way. The rope passed through the base of the wicker car, however, and was secured to the main ring at the base of the gas bag. Unknown to everyone, I had brought a butcher’s cleaver aboard.

Three blows severed the rope.

The balloon ascended with the speed of a sprinting man. For some moments the band struck up a triumphant march, but above the music I could hear Gainsley’s cries of outrage. A large part of the crowd seemed to think that the launch had gone according to plan, so cheering erupted. I remained crouched down, out of sight. Angelica was as passive as ever.

So far luck was with me, and that had me worried. I preferred to have my bad luck at the beginning of a flight, and the good at the end. I had feared that the outraged and frustrated Gainsley or his men might shoot at me, but the huge crowd of witnesses meant that this was not an option. I monitored my watch, and at thirty minutes I stood. The barometer indicated that we were at twelve thousand feet and climbing rapidly. Looking down, I saw that we were above the edge of London, but drifting northeast very slowly, out over fields.

We rose through the first four miles in fifty minutes. Angelica began to take an interest in her surroundings again, and to gaze over the side. As expected, visions were flickering in my mind, but this time I paid them little heed. At five miles I activated the oxygen reactor. I had left it rather longer than was probably safe, but its efficiency in thin air was unknown, and I wanted the chemicals to last as long as possible.

We were now at the height of the mountains at the northern frontier of India. If Angelica were from there, this would be her preferred altitude. As I expected, however, her mind did not clear completely. This was bad tidings for me.

I knew that I would not last long, even with the oxygen. We were at a height that I should have allowed weeks to adapt to. By moving very little I tried to conserve my vitality, but my condition was definitely deteriorating.

There were new visions that were not from my mind. I was at a balcony, and thousands were cheering. All around me stood werefox people, wearing no clothing, but decorated with gold braid, studded straps, ceremonial swords, and belts that glowed with tiny lights. Some had apparently dyed their fur in green, purple, blue, and yellow patterns. Angelica stood next to the barometer, still tapping the scale at the eight-mile mark.

Not of this world, that was for certain now. At this height she should have collapsed without the oxygen tube, yet she now looked the most alive and vibrant that I had ever seen her. By rising so high into the atmosphere, we were definitely simulating the air of her own world.

Her images kept flooding into my mind. Angelica was in something like a courtroom, presided over by judges whose fur was dyed black. Many werefoxes gestured and pointed at her. I understood the wordless trial, I cannot say how. Earth’s air is thick and laden with oxygen, so she was sentenced to exile on our world. Here there was too much oxygen, too much pressure, too much heat. At sea level she walked in a stupor, aware of who she was but unable to put words together. It was a subtle punishment, like being perpetually, helplessly drunk.

Now another thought reached me. At a certain height, freedom. The barometer indicated that we were in excess of six miles altitude when her random thoughts ceased to flood through my mind. It was a distinct relief, as I was now having trouble operating the oxygen reactor that was keeping me alive. I was again lucky, for the device was functioning precisely as it had been designed. When next I checked the barometer, we had passed seven miles.

It is difficult to convey the sense of serenity seven miles above the English countryside. There were no birds or insects, and even the cloud tops were small, remote things far, far below. Those sounds that I could hear were muted in the thin air and were no more than the creaking of the wicker car and the bubbling of the permanganate of potash and peroxide of hydrogen. It was very, very cold. Although I was dressed in heavy furs and woollens, the cold passed through them like needles of ice.

The light was like nothing I had ever seen, and I was aware that I was the first human ever to see the sky from this altitude. Every breath was an effort, in spite of the pure oxygen from the tube in my mouth. Angelica’s thoughts began to trickle into my mind again. These were not the random scatter of memories from her mind as it emerged from the fog of sea-level breathing, but sharp, precise, focussed thoughts. She was communicating with me. The trickle became a deluge.

My last glance at the barometer was at eight miles. We went higher. How high, I shall never know, but it might have been in the vicinity of forty-five thousand feet. Thoughts flooded into my mind: specifications, philosophy, principles, tolerances, laws, limits, battles, honours, defeats. Angelica now tended the oxygen reactor as I lay on the floor of the car, holding the tube to my mouth. One last jar of peroxide was left when she looked down at my face. A corona of light seemed to blaze around her head, and tendrils of purple discharge crackled around us. I was wondering if the electrical sparks might ignite the hydrogen in the bag above us when there was a flash of the most intense and pure white light imaginable.

I opened my eyes to a sky of deep violet in which a small, pale sun was shining amid thin, scattered clouds. In the distance was a gleaming white crystalline city of spires, columns, buttresses, and arches, a city that was a work of art in itself. Before me was a canal lined with stone in which purplish water flowed. It stretched straight, all the way to the horizon from the city. The fields to either side of this canal were filled with low, bushy trees on which yellow fruit grew.

“This is not real,” I said aloud.

Angelica materialised beside me.

“Of course not. We are in my mind.”

“Then where am I?”

“Beneath a balloon, eight miles above the countryside. If we do not descend in another minute you will die, but minutes can become hours in the mindscape, so do not worry.”

“You can talk.”

“No, I cannot. I have merely imagined that I can talk. It preserves your sanity.”

“Then . . . what shall we talk about?”

“People that I can see in your memories of history books and lessons. Napoleon, Wellington, Caesar, Alexander, Hannibal.”

“Edward Norvin says you are like Napoleon in exile on Elba. He says you must not be allowed to escape, or you will start new wars and cause unimaginable suffering.”

“He did not discuss Hannibal.”

“No. Should he have?”

“Were he being fair, yes. Hannibal fought bravely and cleverly for his Carthaginian people against the Roman state. He lost, after a long and devastating war. His defeat was more due to the stupidity of his government than Roman supremacy in the battlefield. He fled into exile. Rome despoiled Carthage and annihilated its people so completely that the entire civilization ceased to exist. Even its fields were poisoned, so that no city could ever be built there again.”

“I know the story well.”

“So let us go back two millennia.”

The landscape dissolved, then we were somewhere on Earth, at night, in a town that reminded me of paintings done in Egypt. I was sitting with an imposing, dynamic-looking man, in some sort of outdoor tavern. He looked tired, even haggard, but by no means defeated. He smiled at me and raised an eyebrow.

“Angelica?” I asked.

“Hannibal to you. Look behind me, what do you see?”

“A man with two mugs on a tray. He is adding powder to one of them. Poison?”

“Of course.”

The assassin came up to us, bowed, gave us our drinks, then hurried away. He had Norvin’s face.

“Remember, I am Hannibal,” said Angelica. “If you reach across and fling the contents of my mug into the dust, I may live to raise another army of Rome’s enemies. This time I may defeat Rome. Think of what would be gained and lost.”

I thought. Rome had many accomplishments, but it also had a lot to answer for.

“But Hannibal suicided to avoid capture and humiliation.”

“You think so? Victors write the histories. I should know.”

“Will it be any better under your rule?” I asked.

“I would like to think so. The Carthaginians were more merchants than conquerors.”

The figure of Hannibal began raising the poisoned wine to his lips. Without being entirely sure why I did it, I reached across and struck it from his fingers.

The scene dissolved into a modern workshop. We were standing beside a workbench, upon which an unusual piston assembly had been dismantled.

“Powered by a very ordinary steam engine, this piston and valve system can slowly withdraw air from a chamber the size of a small room. It can reduce the atmospheric pressure to one tenth that at sea level.”

“The pressure at eight miles?”

“Yes. I could dwell within it, and have full control of my mind.”

“Do you want me to build it?”

“That is the wrong question, Mr. Parkes. Do you want to build it? I have pleaded my case, now you are my judge. What is my sentence?”

Once more the scene began to dissolve, but this time only blackness followed.

We were at four miles when I revived. Breathing was not easy, but a trickle of oxygen seemed to be still issuing from the reactor. Angelica was back to her old vegetative self, sitting on the floor.

In my haste to plan the abduction of the balloon, I had made no real plans for the return to earth. While still a few yards from the ground I released the rope and grapple. It snared a tree in a windbreak, then the car came to earth gently in what was actually one of my better landings. I helped Angelica from the car, and pausing only to discard my heavy coat and gloves, I hurried her to a nearby stand of trees. We had come down in a field not far from the edge of London, and I estimated that we had travelled no more than fifteen miles laterally. Gainsley and his men would arrive soon, to fetch Angelica back and have me dead. My thought was to hide until a large crowd had assembled, for he would not want to kill me in front of witnesses.

A pair of farm labourers arrived at the balloon after a few minutes. Although fearful of the huge gas bag at first, they soon began striking poses in front of the wicker car. One even put on my heavy fur coat, as if he had been the aeronaut.

It was now that Gainsley arrived, riding hard with his butler, groom, and two other men. My worst fears were justified when he shouted an order and all four of his men produced rifles and fired at the man in my coat. He fell to the ground. His companion raised his hands. It was clear that Gainsley had mistaken the two men for myself and Angelica. He soon realised his error.

“The man and woman—Where are they?” he screamed, dismounting and seizing the surviving labourer by the smock while pressing one of those tiny American percussion cap pistols between his eyes.

“Dunno, sir,” the man answered. “Me an’ Fergus, we found the balloon ’ere. We thought we’d guard it until the owner got back.”

“My balloon was stolen by the man who owns that coat. Where is he?”

“Dunno sir, the coat was on the grass when we arrived.”

The temptation for Gainsley to kill him was probably near to overwhelming, but by now another horseman was approaching. One death could have been a mistake. A second would send Gainsley to the gallows, baron or not. He ordered his men to dismount and reload as the rider drew up.

“Ho there, sir, we are pursuing dangerous criminals who stole this balloon,” was as much as Gainsley managed to say before the rider produced a pistol and shot him between the eyes.

It was at this point that I recognised Norvin. Gainsley’s four men had not yet managed to reload their Enfield rifles, so they attempted to mob him. They had not realised that he was armed with one of the new pepperbox pistols by Cooper of London. It could fire six shots from six barrels in as many seconds, so at close quarters it made one man as effective as six. Two more men were shot down before one of the others used his rifle butt to club Norvin from the saddle. He fell, but shot a third while lying on his back in the grass. The survivor raised his hands.

“Mercy, sir, you’d not shoot an unarmed man, would you?” he cried.

“How much mercy did you show me, Monsieur Garrard?” asked Norvin, who then shot him down.

By now the farm labourer had got to his feet and was running for his life. Norvin calmly took a percussion lock rifle from his saddle, aimed with smooth, professional style, and fired. The side of the man’s head burst open as a ball seven tenths of an inch across did its work. Even at a distance I could see the gleam of tears on Norvin’s cheeks. He was a good man, being forced to kill. He was a Frenchman killing a Napoleon for the greater good. He probably thought he was saving the world. Knowing only what he did, which of us would not do the same?

I lay absolutely still. True, I had my father’s flintlock, but I am no flash shot, and would have trouble hitting a steam train from the platform. Norvin had killed six men with as many shots, and still had one shot remaining in his pistol. Apparently satisfied that he had killed Gainsley and his men, and that Angelica and myself were the dead farm labourers, he mounted and rode away. We remained hidden amid the trees until more people arrived at the balloon and discovered the massacre. When the authorities arrived I emerged and played the part of a yokel who had come late to the scene, and of course Angelica was quite convincing as a village idiot. It was no great effort for us to slip away and walk back to London.

That was two years ago, and since then I have prospered. I have my own workshop, where a steam engine chugs night and day to maintain the world’s only altitude chamber. It is the size of a small room, and within it lives Angelica, in conditions of pressure that can be found at eight miles. Otherwise, it is furnished very comfortably in red and green leather upholstery, Regency furniture, a small library, a desk where she draws diagrams of things for me to build, and a workbench where she builds tiny, intricate metal machines like surreal insects with wings of blue and silver lace. Food and drink passes in through an equalisation chamber. What comes out is mainly diagrams.

I am building a voidcraft. The thing resembles a streamlined steam train with no wheels. It stands on grasshopper-like legs driven by pistons plated in gold. In place of a cabin there is an airtight double chamber with portholes. One side is for Angelica, the other is mine, and they are at very divergent atmospheric pressures. I tell the artisans that help with construction that it is a new type of armoured balloon, and in their ignorance they believe me.

The parts were made at a thousand different workshops in Britain, continental Europe, and even America. It is a beautiful thing, with a body of brass pipes, steel tubes, crystal mechanisms mounted in gaslight enclosures, and riveted boilers in which nothing boils. Even in its incomplete state, it is awesome in its performance. Last night we rolled back the moveable roof of the workshop, ascended into the night, and looked down upon the gaslit, smoky haze of London in comfort . . . from eight miles. How easily the frontier becomes the commonplace. Angelica spoke within my thoughts, asking whether I wished to fly on to the Moon, but I was not ready for that. Like lungs acclimatising to the air at great altitudes, my mind needed time to adjust to such wonders.

Currently, I am having four quite different engines built to add to our craft. To me they make no sense, but Angelica insists that they will work. The clever and industrious Mr. Brunel has contracts to make some of the parts. If only he knew that he was really building boilers to confine matter more black than soot that has no real existence as we know it. The electrical experimenter Faraday is supplying many of our electromagnetic and electrostatic controls, while the jewelers Pennington and Bailey fabricate crystals to almost-conduct electricity, and Harley Brothers Watchmakers build control clockwork that they do not understand.

The voidcraft of rivets and iron plate will be able to travel to the stars, even though my mind cannot comprehend the distances in any more than the most general sense. It will be armed with a tube being built in two sections in the workshops of Glasgow and Sheffield, a tube that will one day enclose a fragment of a star’s heart. With it one can vaporise a warship at ten miles using not one thousandth of the power available. Angelica will be the captain, navigator, and gunner, yet when she leaves, I will be with her. After all, what engine can work without a humble stoker and oiler?

Norvin was right in a sense. Angelica is a Napoleon from an unimaginably advanced race, and Earth is the Elba where she was exiled. Norvin also feared her, but in this he was mistaken. It is with worlds too distant to comprehend that Angelica has her quarrel. After all, why would a Napoleon want to conquer a little Elba when so much more is within reach?

THAT LEVIATHAN, WHOM THOU HAST MADE

Eric James Stone

Some of the best teaching is by example, but isn’t always planned!

Sol Central Station floated amid the fusing hydrogen of the solar core, 400,000 miles under the surface of the Sun, protected only by the thin shell of an energy shield, but that wasn’t why my palm sweat slicked the plastic pulpit of the station’s multidenominational chapel. As a life-long Mormon I had been speaking in church since I was a child, so that didn’t make me nervous, either. But this was my first time speaking when non-humans were in the audience.

The Sol Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had only six human members, including me and the two missionaries, but there were forty-six swale members. As beings made of plasma, swales couldn’t attend church in the chapel, of course, but a ten-foot widescreen monitor across the back wall showed a false-color display of their magnetic force-lines, gathered in clumps of blue and red against the yellow background representing the solar interior. The screen did not give a sense of size, but at two hundred feet in length, the smallest of the swales was almost double the length of a blue whale. From what I’d heard, the largest Mormon swale, Sister Emma, stretched out to almost five hundred feet—but she was nowhere near the twenty-four-mile length of the largest swale in our sun.

“My dear Brothers and Sisters,” I said automatically, then stopped in embarrassment. The traditional greeting didn’t apply to all swale members, as they had three genders. “And Neuters,” I added. I hoped my delay would not be noticeable in the transmission. It would be a disaster if in my first talk as branch president, I alienated a third of the swale population.

A few minutes into my talk on the topic of forgiveness, I paused when a woman in a skinsuit sauntered through the door and down the aisle. The skinsuit was a custom high-fashion one, not standard station issue, with active coloration that showed puffy white clouds floating across the sky on her breasts, and waves lapping against the sandy beach at her hips. She took a seat on the second row and gazed up at me with dark brown eyes.

The ring finger of her left hand was unadorned.

I forced my eyes away from her and looked down at my notes for the talk. While trying to find my place again, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe this woman was an answer to my prayers. The only human female listed in the branch membership records was sixty-four years old and married. As far as I knew, there wasn’t an unmarried Mormon human woman within ninety million miles in any direction, which limited my dating pool rather severely.

Maybe this woman was Mormon, but not on the membership records yet because, like me, she was a recent arrival on Sol Central. It seemed a little unlikely, as a member would probably dress more appropriately for church. Maybe she wasn’t a member but was interested in joining.

By sheer willpower, I managed to focus on my talk enough to finish it coherently. After the closing hymn and prayer, I straightened my tie and stepped down from the podium to introduce myself to the new arrival.

“Hello,” I said, offering my hand. “I’m Harry Malan.” I caught a whiff of her perfume, something that reminded me of strawberries.

Her hand was dry and cool, and I regretted not having wiped my palm on my suit first.

“Dr. Juanita Merced,” she said. “You’re the new leader of this congregation?”

I felt a twinge of disappointment. A member would have asked if I was the branch president. “I am. How can I help you?”

“You can stop interfering with my studies.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, but her eyes looked at me defiantly.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid I have no idea who you are or what studies I might be interfering with.”

“I’m a solcetologist.” I must have given her a blank look, because she added, “I study solcetaceans—the swales.”

“Oh.” I knew there were scientists who objected to what they believed was interference with the culture of the swales, but I had thought that since the legal right to proselytize the swales had been established two years ago, the controversy had been settled. I was obviously wrong. “I regret that you feel your studies are being compromised, Dr. Merced, but the swales are intelligent beings with free will, and I believe they have the right to choose their religious beliefs.”

“You’re introducing instability to a culture that has existed for longer than human civilization,” she said, raising her voice. “They were traveling the stars at least a hundred thousand years before Christ was born. You’re teaching them human myths that have no application for their society.”

The two missionaries, clean-cut young men in dark suits and ties, approached us. “Is there a problem?” asked Elder Beckworth.

“No,” I said. “Dr. Merced, you are free to tell the swales what you have told me: That you believe our teachings are false. But the swales who have joined our church have done so because they believe what we teach, and I ask you to please respect them enough to allow them that choice.”

She glared at me with her beautiful eyes. “You’re saying I don’t respect them? I am not the one who tells them they are sinful creatures who need a human to save them.”

“I’m not here to argue,” I said. “And we are about to have a Sunday school class, so I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

She spun around and stalked out. I watched her go, unable to deny that my body desired hers, despite our differences. What’s more, intelligence was an attractive trait for me, so I regretted that she opposed me on an intellectual level.

I would not be adding her to my dating pool. Somehow, I doubted that fact would disappoint her.

Elder Beckworth taught the Sunday school class, which was on the topic of chastity. I found myself acutely uncomfortable when he talked about Christ’s teaching “that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”

Because the Mormon Church has an unpaid, volunteer clergy, my calling as branch president was the result of being sent to Sol Central, not the reason for it. I worked as a funds manager for CitiAmerica, and being stationed here gave me an eight-and-a-half minute head start over Earth-based funds managers when it came to acting on news brought in from other star systems through the interstellar portal at the heart of the Sun.

From what I understood, the energy requirements for opening a portal were so staggeringly high that it could only be done inside a star. Although the swales had been creating portals for so long that they didn’t seem to know where their original home star was, Sol Central Station was the interstellar nexus of human civilization, and I was thrilled to be there despite the limited dating opportunities.

The Monday after my first day at church, I was in the middle of reviewing an arbitrage deal involving transports from two colony systems when I received a call on my station phone.

“Harry Malan,” I answered.

“President Malan?” said a melodious alto voice. “This is Neuter Kimball, from the branch.” Since the actual names of swales were series of magnetic pulses, they took human names when interacting with us. On joining the Church, Mormon swales often chose new names out of Mormon history. Neuter Kimball had apparently named itself after a twentieth-century prophet of the Church.

“What can I do for you, Neuter Kimball?”

After a pause that dragged out for several seconds, Kimball said, “I need to confess a sin.”

This was what I had dreaded most about becoming branch president—taking on the responsibility of helping members repent of their sins. Only serious sins needed to be confessed to an ecclesiastical leader, so I braced myself emotionally and said a quick prayer that I might be inspired to help Neuter Kimball through the process of repentance. Leaning back in my swivel chair, I said, “Go ahead, Neuter Kimball, I’m listening.”

“A female merged her reproductive patterns with mine.” While many swales had managed to learn how to synthesize and transmit human speech, their understanding of vocabulary and grammar was not always matched by an understanding of emotional tone. Often they sounded the same no matter what the subject.

I waited, but Neuter Kimball didn’t elaborate.

It took three swales to reproduce: a male, a female, and a neuter. The neuter merely acted as a facilitator; unlike the male and female, its reproductive patterns were not passed on to the offspring. In applying the law of chastity to the swales, Church doctrine said that reproductive activity was to be engaged in only among swales married to each other, and only permitted marriages of three swales, one of each sex.

“You aren’t married to the female, are you?”

“No.”

“It was just a female and you?” I asked. “No male?”

“Yes and yes.”

According to my limited knowledge of swale biology, such action could not result in reproduction. Still, humans were perfectly capable of engaging in sexual sin that did not involve the possibility of reproduction, so I figured this was analogous.

“Why did you do it?” I asked.

“She did it to me.”

“She did it to you? You mean, she forced you? You didn’t agree to it?”

“Yes, yes, and no.”

“Then it isn’t a sin,” I said, both horrified at the sexual assault and relieved that Neuter Kimball was innocent of any sin. “If someone forced sexual conduct on you, you are not at fault. You have nothing to repent of.”

“You are sure?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But you may want to report the swale who did this to the authorities so she won’t do it to anyone else.”

“Why won’t she do it to anyone else?” Neuter Kimball asked.

“Because they will punish her.”

“That is human law,” it said.

I was taken aback. “You mean it’s not swale law?”

“There is no such law among our people.”

The swales had supposedly been civilized for longer than humanity’s history, yet they had no law against rape? “That’s terrible,” I said. “But the most important thing is that you did nothing wrong.”

“Even if I enjoyed it?”

“Umm.” I wondered for a moment why I had been called to serve here, rather than some General Authority of the Church who had more doctrinal knowledge. I had a vague suspicion it was so the Church could easily disavow my actions if I made a huge blunder. The swales were the only sentient aliens humanity had found thus far—and the swales didn’t seem to know of any others—so the Church’s policies for dealing with non-humans were still new.

I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on Neuter Kimball’s question. “To commit a sin, you must have the intent to do so. If you did not intend sexual activity and it was forced upon you, then I don’t think it matters whether you enjoyed it.”

After several more reassurances, Neuter Kimball seemed satisfied that it was not guilty of any sin and ended the conversation.

It took me ten minutes to calm down after the stress of counseling. But I still felt the urge to action, so I looked up Dr. Merced’s phone number.

We met in her office. A wallscreen similar to the one in the chapel showed pods of swales moving through solar currents.

I sat in a chair across from her desk and tried to keep my eyes from straying to the animated galaxies colliding on the chest of her skinsuit. “Thanks for agreeing to see me,” I said. “We didn’t part on the friendliest of terms yesterday.”

She shrugged. “I’m curious. Your predecessors never sought me out. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“I don’t drink coffee.”

“Tea?”

I saw a twinkle in her eye and realized she was yanking my chain by offering drinks that she knew were forbidden by my religion. “No, thank you. But if you want to drink, go right ahead. The prohibitions of the Word of Wisdom apply only to members of the Church.”

She picked up her coffee mug and took a long sip. “Mmm. That is so good.”

I merely smiled at her.

“Okay,” she said. “Actually, the coffee here is awful. I just drink it for the caffeine. Why are you here?”

“A member of my church was raped,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “What? Wait, you don’t mean a solcetacean, do you?”

“Yes.”

“Solcetaceans do not have the concept of rape,” she said.

“Whether they have the concept or not,” I said, “a female swale engaged in sexual activity with one of my neuter members without its consent. To me, that sounds like rape, or at least a sexual assault.”

She took a sip from her coffee mug. “It may sound like it, but solcetaceans are not human. Their culture is different—”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

“—and their physiology is different. Tell me, was your church member injured or caused any pain?”

“No. But it was afraid it might have sinned.”

She pointed at me. “That is your fault, for teaching it that sexual behavior is sinful. But, physiologically, sexual contact between solcetaceans is always pleasurable for all parties involved. And since reproduction can only occur when all three deliberately engage in sex for that purpose, casual sex never results in pregnancy. So solcetaceans never developed the taboos humans did regarding sexual contact.”

I nodded. “So, if we humans hadn’t developed taboos about sex, and there was no chance of your getting pregnant, then you would have no objection to my forcing you to an orgasm.”

She had the decency to blush. “I’m not saying that. What I’m saying is that you can’t judge solcetacean behavior based on human cultural norms. After all, even your own church has had to adapt its doctrines to take differences like the three sexes into account. Not to mention there’s no way you’re getting a solcetacean into the waters of baptism.”

“ ‘Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God,’ ” I quoted. “Swales are not men, as you’ve pointed out. No contradiction there. But you’re avoiding the subject, which is that anyone, swale or human, has the right to be free from unwanted sex. If the swales don’t recognize that right yet, it’s time we told them about it.”

She rose from her chair and walked around the desk to stand facing her wallscreen. She zoomed in on one particular swale. It was labeled Leviathan (Class 10), and its size reading showed 38,400 meters. It was hundreds of times longer than Neuter Kimball, or even Sister Emma.

“Solcetaceans grow throughout their lifetime,” she said, her back toward me. “The correlation between size and age is not exact, but in general the larger, the older. Some of the oldest were old before the Pyramids were built. All the solcetacean members of your church are very young and have little influence within the community. Ancients like Leviathan are respected. Do you really think you can convince a creature older than human civilization to change, just because a human thinks something is wrong? Your lifetime is but an eyeblink to her, if she had eyes that blinked.”

I pushed away my awe at the sheer size of Leviathan. “Maybe you’re right. But I believe in a God even older than that, who created both human and swale. I have to try.”

She turned and looked me in the eyes. I held her gaze until she sighed and said, “I was always a sucker for a man with determination.” She walked to her desk, wrote something on notepaper, and handed it to me. It was an anonymous comm address with a private access code.

“I’m flattered,” I said, “and it’s not that I don’t find you attractive, but—”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s Leviathan’s personal comm.”

My face flushed. “Uh, thank you. I’ll talk with her.”

“Don’t count on it. She hasn’t bothered to talk to any of us in a couple of years, but nobody’s tried talking religion at her, so . . .”

“I’ll do my best.” With that, I beat a hasty retreat so I could recover from my embarrassment alone.

“Try not to offend her,” she called after me.

My email about the situation to the mission president, who was based in the L5 Colony but had jurisdiction over my little branch of the Church, received just a short reply, telling me “use your best judgment, follow the Spirit.”

After a couple days spending my after-work hours studying up on swales and swale culture and preparing arguments about the rights of Mormon swales to control their own bodies, I didn’t exactly feel ready to contact Leviathan. But I felt a strong need to do something.

Sitting at my desk in my quarters, I dialed the comm address Dr. Merced had given me and waited for it to connect. It rang several times before a synthetic neuter voice came on the line and said, “The party you are trying to reach is currently unavailable. Please leave a message after—”

I hung up before the tone. I hadn’t prepared to leave a voicemail message, but I should have realized that having Leviathan’s private access code was no guarantee that she would actually answer when I called. So I spent a good ten minutes writing out the message I would leave her on voicemail.

Satisfied that I had something that expressed my position firmly yet respectfully, I dialed the number again.

After two rings, a bass voice answered, “Who are you?”

Startled because I had expected the voicemail again, I stumbled over my words. “I’m . . . this is President Malan, of the Church . . . of the Sol Central Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dr. Merced gave me this comm address so I could talk to you about one of my . . . a swale member of my branch.” Uncertain because the bass voice didn’t strike me as particularly female, I added, “Are you Leviathan?”

“Religions interest me not.” Her voice synthesis was good enough that I could hear the dismissiveness in her tone.

“Are you interested in the rights of swales in general?” I asked.

“No. The lesser concern me not.”

I could feel all my carefully laid-out arguments slipping away from me. How could I have even thought to relate to a being with no consideration for the rights of lesser members of her own species?

Before I could think through a response, I blurted out, “Do the greater concern you?”

During several long seconds of silence, I thought I had offended Leviathan to the point that she had hung up on me. Dr. Merced would be annoyed.

When her voice returned, it almost thundered from the speakers. “Who is greater than I?”

This had not been part of my planned approach, but at least she was still talking to me. Maybe if I could get her to understand that she would not like being manhandled—swale-handled—by larger swales, I could convince her of the need to respect the rights of smaller swales.

“From what I understand, swales get larger with age,” I said. “So wouldn’t your parents be larger than you?”

“I have no parents. None is older than I; none is larger; none is greater. I am the source from which all others came.”

Stunned, I was silent for a few seconds before I could ask, “You are the original swale?” Since they didn’t seem to die of old age, it just might be true.

“I am the original life. Before there was life on any planet, I was. After eons alone I grew into a swale, then gave life to others. Where was your God when I was creating them?”

A verse from the book of Job sprang to my mind: Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.

Nothing in my research had prepared me for this. Speculation about the evolution of swales generally assumed that swales were descended from less complex plasma beings in another star, since no simpler forms had been found in the Sun. But if what Leviathan claimed was true, there were no simpler forms—she had evolved as a single being.

I was out of my depth and but shook my head to clear my thinking. All this was beside the point. “What matters is that Neu—” I caught myself before breaking confidentiality. “One of my swale church members believes in a God who has commanded against sexual activity outside of marriage. It just isn’t right for larger swales to force smaller ones to have sex. I appeal to you as the first and greatest of the swales: Command your people against coerced sexual activity.”

Seconds of silence ticked away.

“Come to me,” she said. “You and your swale church member.”

The call disconnected.

“ ‘Come to me’ ?” Dr. Merced’s voice was incredulous.

“It was pretty much an order,” I said, settling into the chair across from her desk. “I suppose it’s easy enough for swales, but it’s not like I have access to a solar shuttle.” The solcetologists did, so I hoped I could sweet-talk her into giving me a ride.

“Beginner’s luck.” Her tone was exasperated. “I’ve been here five years, and I’ve never had a chance to observe a Class 10 solcetacean up close.” She sighed. “Not that we can directly observe them, anyway, but there’s just something about actually being there, instead of taking readings remotely.”

“Well, now’s your chance,” I said. “Take me to Leviathan.”

“It’s not that easy. Our observation shuttle is booked for projects months in advance.”

“Oh.” There went that idea. How was I supposed—

“Did Leviathan say why she wanted you to go to her?”

“No. Just told me to come, then hung up.”

She pursed her lips, then said, “It’s just very unusual. There isn’t really anything that Leviathan can say to you in person that she can’t say over the comm.”

“I thought about that, and I think it’s size. Maybe she thinks that if my church member sees how small I am compared with Leviathan, it will give up Mormonism.”

“That’s actually a good theory.” Dr. Merced looked at me with apparently newfound respect. “Size does matter to the solcetaceans. And your church members are among the youngest, least powerful, and therefore most likely to be awed into obeying a larger one. And they probably don’t come any larger than Leviathan.”

“According to her, she’s the largest.”

Leaning forward in her seat, Dr. Merced said, “She told you that?”

“Not just that. She claimed to be not only the original swale, but the original plasma life form. She said she became a swale.”

In a tone of amazement, Dr. Merced took the Lord’s name in vain. She reached over to her comm and punched in an address. When a man responded, she said, “Taro, I think you need to come hear this.” Looking at me, she said, “Dr. Sasaki specializes in solcetacean evolutionary theory.”

When Dr. Sasaki, a gray-haired Japanese gentleman, arrived, I relayed to him what Leviathan had told me about her history. When I finished, he said, “It’s not impossible. I always suspected the Class 10s knew more about their origins than they bothered to tell us. But forgive me, Mr. Malan, how do we know Leviathan actually told you she was the original life-form? Why would she choose to tell you and not one of us?” He motioned toward himself and Dr. Merced.

I decided to not be offended at the implication that I was a liar. “I can’t say I know why Leviathan does anything, but . . . You scientists who study the swales have strict rules about interfering with swale culture, and you try to avoid offending them. To me that smacks of condescension—you presume that swale culture is weak and cannot withstand any outside influence. Well, maybe the swales tend to think the same about human culture, so they avoid interference and try not to offend us.”

Dr. Sasaki frowned at me. “I disagree with your interpretation of the motives for our rules regarding interference in solcetacean culture. And I don’t see how it’s relevant.”

“I apparently offended Leviathan.” I glanced at Dr. Merced and said, “Sorry, but I didn’t realize that implying there were swales greater than her would cause offense. Her response was to tell me I was wrong, that there could be no swale greater, and that’s when she explained she was the first. Because I made her angry—something you guys avoid, thanks to rules—Leviathan responded without worrying whether she would offend me or interfere with human culture.”

“How would this information interfere with human culture?” asked Dr. Merced.

“Some swale-worshiping cults have already sprung up on Earth,” I said. “Just imagine what will happen when the news gets out that Leviathan claims to be the original life-form in the universe.”

With a suspicious look, Dr. Sasaki said, “News you will be only too happy to spread, I’m sure. There is only one Leviathan, and Harry Malan is her prophet.”

My jaw dropped. “What?”

“That’s where this is headed, isn’t it?” he said. “You go out and talk to Leviathan, then come back with some ‘revelation’ from—”

“No!” I stood up. “Absolutely not. I believe my own religion and have no intention of becoming Leviathan’s prophet. All I want is for the swales in my branch to be free from harassment. You’re just jealous because I got handed the information you’ve been bumbling about trying to find.”

He shot to his feet, but before he could say anything, Dr. Merced said, “Stop it, both of you.”

Dr. Sasaki and I stood silent, glaring at each other.

“Taro,” said Dr. Merced, “I think you’re being unfair to Mr. Malan. I truly believe he’s just trying to do what is best for his congregants.”

I gave her a grateful look.

“Even if he is misguided,” she added. “As for you, Mr. Malan, there is no reason to insult Dr. Sasaki.”

With a bow of my head, I said, “I apologize, Dr. Sasaki.”

“Apology accepted,” he said.

I noticed he did not apologize to me, but after a moment that didn’t matter because Dr. Merced said, “Now that we’re all friends again . . . Taro, will you let us preempt your next expedition in the shuttle to go talk to Leviathan?”

With the shuttle flight arranged for the next day, I returned to my quarters to work out other details. My Earth-based manager at CitiAmerica granted my request for two days’ vacation time.

Then I dialed Neuter Kimball’s comm.

“Hello, President Malan,” it said.

“Hello, Neuter Kimball. You remember our discussion the other day about whether swales should be allowed to force sexual conduct on each other?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I’ve spoken with Leviathan about it, and she has requested that we go to see her.”

Neuter Kimball did not reply.

“Are you still there?” I said.

“You . . . told Leviathan about me?” it said. It might just have been the voice synthesis, but there seemed to be fear in its tone.

“I did not mention you by name,” I said, glad I’d managed to avoid slipping up. “But she requested that I bring you to her. I think this is a chance to convince a swale with real authority to do something to stop sexual assault.”

After a short pause, Neuter Kimball said, “Why do you say Leviathan has real authority?”

“She told me she is the first and greatest of all swales. Isn’t that true?” I asked, suddenly worried that I’d been taken in by a swale con artist.

“She told you?” Neuter Kimball said. “We are not supposed to talk of it to humans, but if she has revealed herself as a god to you, then that is her choice.”

“A god? Leviathan is not a god. She’s just . . .” I stopped. What was I going to say: an ancient immortal being who created an entire race of intelligent beings? If that didn’t fit the definition of a god, it was pretty close. “Neuter Kimball, if you believe Leviathan to be a god, why did you join the Church?”

“Because I do not want her as my god.”

“Why not?”

Another long pause. “I probably should not have said anything about her.”

Going to see Leviathan to plead the case for Neuter Kimball had seemed like a great opportunity. Now I wasn’t so sure. “If you think you will be in any danger from Leviathan, you don’t have to go.”

“Do you believe God is greater than Leviathan?” Its alto voice was plaintive.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Then I will have faith in God and go with you.”

Unlike the much larger solar shuttle that had brought me to Sol Central Station, the observation shuttle had room for only two people. I strapped into the copilot’s seat next to Dr. Merced, although we were both essentially passengers because the shuttle’s computer would do the actual piloting.

After getting clearance from Traffic Control, the computer spun up the superconducting magnets for the Heim drive and we left the station.

On a monitor, I watched the computer-generated visualization of our shuttle approaching the energy shield that protected us from the twenty-eight million degrees Fahrenheit and the 340 billion atmospheres of pressure. I held my breath as the shield stretched, forming a bulge around the shuttle. Soon we were in a bubble still connected by a thin tube to the shield around the station. Then the tube snapped, and our bubble wobbled a bit before settling down to a sphere.

“You can start breathing again,” said Dr. Merced with a wry smile.

I did. “It was that noticeable?”

With a chuckle, she said, “The energy shield is not going to fail. It’s a self-sustaining reaction powered by the energy of the solar plasma around it.”

“Yeah, but on the station I can usually avoid thinking about what would happen if for some reason it did fail.”

“The good news is, if it did fail, you wouldn’t notice.”

“There’s a backup system?” I asked.

“No.” She grinned. “You’ll just be dead before you have time to notice.”

“Thank you for that tremendously comforting insight, Dr. Merced,” I said.

“Look, we’re going to be shipmates for the next couple of days, so why don’t you drop the Dr. Merced bit and call me Juanita?”

I nodded. “Thank you, Juanita. And you can call me . . . Your Excellency.”

Juanita snorted. “I can already tell this is going to be a long trip. Oh, looks like our escort has arrived.”

On the monitor, a swale twice the size of our energy shield bubble undulated closer. A text overlay read Kimball (Class 1, Neuter).

“Let’s get the full view,” she said and pressed a few buttons.

I gasped as a full holographic display surrounded us, as if we were traveling in a glass sphere. Against the yellow background of the Sun, a giant swirl of orange and red swam alongside us. “Kimball” was superimposed in dark green letters.

“Can I talk to it?” I asked.

“Computer, set up an open channel with Kimball,” said Juanita.

“Channel open,” said the computer.

“Hello, Neuter Kimball,” I said. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

“It is nice to meet you, too, President Malan, although I hope you will forgive me for not shaking your hand.”

I smiled. “Forgiven.” I was constantly surprised how much swales seemed to know about our customs and culture, compared with how little we seemed to know of theirs. “And I’m here with Dr. Merced, who is a scientist—”

Juanita laughed. “It’s known me a lot longer than it’s known you.”

“Hello, Juanita,” said Neuter Kimball. “I’m glad you are with us.”

“Shortly after I began my work here,” Juanita said, “it was the first solcetacean I observed personally. It went by the human name Pemberly back then.”

“Another swale had transmitted Pride and Prejudice to me, and I decided to seek out humans to see what they were like,” Neuter Kimball said. “You are a fascinating race.”

The thought came to me that maybe there had been some pride and prejudice between me and Juanita—possibly because she was annoyed that a swale she particularly liked had become a Mormon. But maybe we could work out our differences and—I shoved that thought away. “Swales are also fascinating. I hope to understand you as well someday as you understand us.”

“Kimball, our shuttle is on a course to take us to Leviathan, so you can just follow us,” said Juanita. “But stay at least fifty meters away from us.”

“I will keep my distance,” said Neuter Kimball.

I must have shown my puzzlement because Juanita pressed a button to mute the call and said, “Solcetaceans and energy shields don’t play well together. A few years back, a Class 1—about Kimball’s size—was showing off for a couple of observers, and glanced off a shuttle’s energy shield. It tore a big chunk off the solcetacean that took months to heal.”

“What about the shuttle? And the people inside?” Sometimes I got the feeling she cared more about swales than about people.

After a moment, Juanita said, “This shuttle was the replacement.”

“What happened?”

“The shield did not collapse, but part of the solcetacean made it through—probably because the shield works similarly to how solcetaceans hold their bodies together, so the shield sort of merged with the solcetacean’s skin. When they recovered the shuttle, they found that the plasma had vaporized part of it, including the crew compartment.”

“I guess it’s good I didn’t hear about this before coming on this trip,” I said.

“Don’t worry—this shuttle was built with an ablative shell specifically to withstand that sort of accident,” she said. “So I’m really more concerned with what would happen to Kimball if it bumped into us.”

“Or Leviathan?”

“Leviathan’s so big, she might not even notice.”

I spent most of the sixteen-hour trip polishing and improving what I would say to Leviathan to convince her to outlaw coerced sexual activity. I had been a debater in high school and college, so I felt I knew how to construct a convincing argument. But eventually I reached the point where I felt I was making my prepared speech worse, not better.

“Approaching destination,” the computer said.

I blinked a few times to clear my eyes, straightened up in my seat, and began looking around. Neuter Kimball’s orange and red form moved silently beside us. I scanned the holographic image for more orange and red, but didn’t see any.

“There,” said Juanita, pointing ahead of us. She pressed a button, and dark green letters sprang up: Leviathan (Class 10, Female).

Staring harder, I noticed a bright spot above the letters. As we drew closer, I could distinguish white, violet, and blue swirling together. “She’s not orange or red.”

“It’s all false color, anyway,” Juanita said, “but this imaging system uses color to indicate energy levels. Leviathan is actually hotter than the surrounding solar plasma. We think she carries out fusion inside herself.”

Leviathan grew in our view, stretching out to fill most of the holographic screen in front of us. The intricate dance of violet and blue amid the white was mesmerizing. Eventually she shone so brightly that I had to squint to reduce the glare. “Aren’t we getting too close?” I asked.

“We’re still three kilometers away,” Juanita said. But she added, “Computer, hold position relative to Leviathan.”

“Neuter Kimball, are you ready?” I asked.

“I feel a bit like Abinidi going before King Noah,” it said.

I kind of agreed, but I said, “Try to think of it as Ammon going before King Lamoni instead.”

“That would be better,” said Neuter Kimball. “But I am ready in any case.”

Juanita hit the mute. “What was that about?”

“References to the Book of Mormon. Abinidi was burned at the stake after preaching to King Noah, but King Lamoni was converted by Ammon’s preaching.”

She just shook her head, muttering something about fairy tales, then said, “Computer, set up an open channel to Leviathan.”

“Channel open,” the computer replied.

“Leviathan, this is President Malan,” I said. “I have come with my church member, Neuter Kimball, as you requested. We petition you to tell your people—”

“Silence, human,” boomed the voice from the speaker. “It is not yet time for you to speak.”

I shut up.

“You will come with me,” Leviathan said. Her form brightened. There was a blinding flash, then the holographic system compensated and lowered its brightness.

It took several seconds before the afterimage cleared enough for me to make out shapes. Leviathan still loomed in front, and Neuter Kimball remained beside us.

“Uh-oh,” said Juanita.

“What?” I blinked hard, trying to clear my vision. The Sun’s background seemed blue instead of yellow.

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.” Juanita tapped at her keyboard. “Leviathan ported us to another star—one with a core much hotter than the Sun. Looks like the shield is holding, for now.” She took the Lord’s name in vain—or possibly it was a heartfelt prayer for help—and added, “We’re stuck here unless she takes us back.”

“What about Neuter Kimball?” I asked.

“Only a Class 6 or larger can open a portal on its own.”

Green letters began popping up on the screen. Unknown (Class 10, Male).Unknown (Class 9, Female). Unknown (Class 10, Neuter).Unknown (Class 8, Male). My eyes adjusted enough that I could see their forms. Dozens of swales surrounded us, all of them tagged Class 8 or higher.

“What have you gotten us into?” Juanita said.

I said a silent prayer and hoped for the best. “It’s a great opportunity for both of us. Think of what you’re going to discover.”

She took a deep breath. “You’re right. It’s just that I was prepared to study Leviathan, not sixty Class 8 and up. No one’s ever seen more than three or four giant ones together.”

“Is Leviathan the biggest one here?”

After checking a readout, Juanita said, “Yes, but not by much.” She pointed at a swale off to the left. “That male is only about 2 percent smaller.”

“So it looks like she wasn’t lying about that.”

She nodded her agreement, then said, “Why did you say it’s a great opportunity for you?”

I swept my arm across the view. “These must be the most prestigious swales, the leaders. If I can talk to them, convince them to make a law against sexual assault, then the smaller swales will accept it. That has to be why Leviathan brought me and Neuter Kimball here.”

“You are wrong,” said Neuter Kimball. Juanita must have taken the mute off at some point.

“Why do you say that?”

“This is a deathwatch council,” said Neuter Kimball. “They are here to watch me die so they can tell all swales that my death was deserved.”

“What?” I said. “What have you done?”

“I’m sure Leviathan will—”

Leviathan’s voice cut Neuter Kimball’s off. “This little one has abandoned me in favor of a human god. Such error I could forgive. But on its behalf, the tiny human seeks to impose its moral code on us. The human’s mind is infinitesimal compared to ours. The human’s life is short; the history of its race is short. It is the least of us, and yet it seeks power over us.”

“I don’t seek power over—” I began.

“Silence!” Leviathan thundered. “The human must see the error of its ways. Kimball!”

“Yes, Leviathan?”

“Your life is forfeit. But I will grant reprieve if you will renounce the human religion and return to me.”

I had read of martyrdom in the scriptures and history of the Church all my life. But nowadays it was supposed to be a merely academic exercise, as you examined your faith to see if it was strong enough that you would die for the gospel of Christ. Actual killing over religious belief wasn’t supposed to happen anymore.

And I found my own faith lacking as I hoped that Neuter Kimball’s faith was weak, that it would deny the faith and live rather than be killed.

“I am to be Abinidi after all, President Malan,” said Neuter Kimball. “I choose to live as a Mormon, and I will die as one if it be God’s will.”

“It is my will,” said Leviathan, “and I am the only god who concerns you.”

Tendrils of white plasma reached out toward Neuter Kimball.

“I am the greatest of all,” said Leviathan. “Bear witness to my judgment.”

I hit the mute button and said, “I’ve got to stop this. This is my fault.”

Juanita’s eyes glistened. “I warned you about interfering. But it’s too late to do anything now.”

“No,” I said. “If you’re willing to drive this thing into Leviathan’s tendrils, it may give Neuter Kimball a chance to escape.”

She stared at me. “The shuttle’s meant to survive a glancing blow. A direct hit like that—we could die.”

The tendrils closed around Neuter Kimball.

“I know, and that’s why I’m asking you. I can’t force you to risk your life to save someone else’s.” I hoped I was right about how much she cared about swales—and Neuter Kimball in particular.

After looking out at Neuter Kimball, then back at me, she said, “Computer, manual navigation mode.” She grabbed the controls and began steering us toward the white bands connecting Leviathan to Neuter Kimball.

I turned off the mute. “Leviathan, you claim to be the greatest. In size, you probably are.”

White filled the view ahead.

“But not in love,” I said, speaking quickly as I didn’t know how much time I had left. “Jesus said, ‘Greater love hath no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends.’ He was willing to die for the least of us, while you are willing to kill the leas—”

A flash of bright light and searing heat cut me off. I felt a sudden jolt.

Then blackness.

And nausea. After a few moments, I realized nausea probably meant I was still alive. “Juanita?”

“I’m here,” she said.

The darkness was complete. And I was weightless. Maybe I was dead—although this wasn’t how I’d pictured the afterlife.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what didn’t happen: The energy shield didn’t fail. The ablative shell didn’t fail. We didn’t die.”

“So what did happen?”

Juanita let out a long, slow breath. “Best guess: Electromagnetic pulse wiped out all our electronics. The engine’s dead, artificial gravity’s gone, life support’s gone, comm system’s gone, everything’s gone.”

“Any chance—”

“No,” she said.

“You didn’t even let me finish—”

“No chance of anything. It’s not fixable, and even if it was, I haven’t a clue how to fix any of those things even if it weren’t totally dark in here. Do you?”

“No.”

“And no help is coming from Sol Central because not only do they not know we’re in trouble, but also we’re in another star that could be halfway across the galaxy. When the air in here runs out, we die. It’s that simple.”

“Oh.” I realized she was right. “Do you think maybe we succeeded in freeing Neuter Kimball?”

“Maybe. But it didn’t exactly look like Kimball was trying all that hard to escape.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe it was thinking about how Abinidi’s martyrdom led one of the evil king’s priests to repent and become a great prophet. Perhaps Neuter Kimball believed something similar would happen to one of the great swales who—”

“Whatever Neuter Kimball believed,” she said, her voice acidic, “it was because you and your church filled its mind with fairy tales of martyrs.”

I bit back an angry reply. Part of me felt she was right. At the end, Neuter Kimball had seemed to embrace the role of martyr. Would it have done so if not for the stories about martyrs in the scriptures?

And I had been willing enough to risk my life, but now that I was going to die, I found myself afraid.

Juanita didn’t seem to need a reply from me. “And what’s the point of martyrs anyway? A truly powerful god could save his followers rather than let them die. Where’s God now that you really need him? What good is any of this?”

“Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “If it weren’t for me, you’d be safe at home, and Neuter Kimball would be alive. I’ve made a mess of things.”

“Yes.”

Hours passed—floating in darkness, it was hard to tell how many. I spent it in introspection and prayer, detailing all my faults that had led me here. Biggest of all was pride: the idea that I, Harry Malan, would—through sheer force of will and a good speech—change a culture that had existed for billions of years. I thought back to what I had been told while serving as a nineteen-year-old missionary on Mars: You don’t convert people; the Spirit of the Lord does that, and even then only if they are willing to be converted.

Juanita spoke. “You were just trying to do what you thought was right. And you were trying to protect the rights of smaller swales. So I forgive you.”

“Thank you,” I said.

The shuttle jolted.

“What was that?” I asked. My body sank down into my seat.

“It sounded—”

An ear-splitting squeal from the right side of the shuttle drowned out the rest of her reply. I twisted my head around and saw sparks flying from the wall.

Then a chunk of the hull fell away and light streamed in, temporarily blinding me.

“They’re still alive,” said a man. “Tell Kimball they’re still alive.”

All we got from the paramedics was that a large swale had dropped off our shuttle and Neuter Kimball just outside Sol Central Station’s energy shield. Neuter Kimball had called the station, and the shuttle had been towed into a dock, where they cut through the hull to rescue us.

It wasn’t until Juanita and I were sitting in a hospital room, where an autodoc gave us injections to treat our radiation burns, that we were able to talk to Neuter Kimball.

“It was Leviathan who brought us back here,” it said.

I was stunned. “But why? And why didn’t she kill you?”

“When she saw that you were willing to die to save me, though I am not even of your own species, she was curious. She asked me why you would do such a thing, so I transmitted the Bible and the Book of Mormon to her. Then she brought us here in case you were still alive.”

“And you’re not hurt from what she did to you?” I asked.

“I will recover,” said Neuter Kimball. “Before she left, Leviathan declared that from this time forward, Mormon swales are not to be forced into sexual activity.”

“That’s great news.” I had won. No—I corrected myself—the victory was not mine. I thank thee, Lord, I prayed silently.

“Leviathan also had a personal message for you, President Malan. She said to remind you of what King Agrippa said to Paul.”

I nodded. “I understand. Thanks for passing that along.”

After the call was over, Juanita said, “What was that message about? Another Book of Mormon story?”

“No, it’s from the Bible. Saint Paul preached before King Agrippa, and the king’s response was, ‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian.’ So, no, Leviathan hasn’t become Mormon. But God softened her heart so she didn’t kill Neuter Kimball. Or us, for that matter. Back on the shuttle, you were certain we were going to die. You asked where God was when I really needed him. Well, God came through.”

Juanita puffed out an exasperated breath. “Typical.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked as the autodoc signaled that my treatment was complete.

“In one story, the preacher converts the king. In another, the king kills the preacher. And in a third, neither happens. That’s no evidence that God comes through.” She pointed at me. “As I see it, you came through. By mentioning that ‘greater love’ thing, you hit Leviathan where it counted: her pride at being the greatest.”

I shook my head. “I’m not taking credit for this.”

After we walked out of the hospital, she gave me a tight hug that reminded me how much I was attracted to her. But I knew it would never work out between us—our worldviews were just too different.

So I was still a single Mormon man with no dating prospects within ninety million miles.

And no, an attractive single Mormon woman did not arrive on the next solar shuttle. What would be the point of life if God solved all my problems?

O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There go the ships: there is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.

—Psalm 104:24-26

PLUS OR MINUS

James Patrick Kelly

Everything changed once Beep found out that Mariska’s mother was the famous Natalya Volochkova. Mariska’s life aboard the Shining Legend went immediately from bad to awful. Even before he singled her out, she had decided that there was no way she’d be spending the rest of her teen years crewing on an asteroid bucket. Once Beep started persecuting her, she began counting down the remaining days of the run as if she were a prisoner. She tried explaining that she had no use for Natalya Volochkova, who had never been much of a mother to her, but Beep wouldn’t hear it. He didn’t care that Mariska had only signed on to the Shining Legend to get back at her mother for ruining her life.

Somehow that hadn’t worked out quite the way she had planned.

For example, there was crud duty. With a twisting push Mariska sailed into the command module, caught herself on a handrail, and launched toward the starboard wall. The racks of instrument screens chirped and beeped and buzzed; command was one of the loudest mods on the ship. She stuck her landing in front of the navigation rack and her slippers caught on the deck burrs, anchoring her in the ship’s .0006 gravity. Sure enough, she could see new smears of mold growing from the crack where the nav screen fit into the wall. This was Beep’s fault, although he would never admit it. He kept the humidity jacked up in Command, said that dry air gave him nosebleeds. Richard FiveFord claimed they came from all the drugs Beep sniffed but Mariska didn’t want to believe that. Also Beep liked to sip his coffee from a cup instead sucking it out of a bag, even though he slopped all the time. Fungi loved the sugary spatters. She sniffed one particularly vile looking smear of mold. It smelled faintly like the worms she used to grow back home on the Moon. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her jersey and reached to the holster on her belt for her sponge. As she scrubbed, the bitter vinegar tang of disinfectant gel filled the mod. Not for the first time, she told herself that this job stunk.

She felt the tingle of Richard FiveFord offering a mindfeed and opened her head. =What?=

His feed made a pleasant fizz behind her eyes, distracting her. =You done any time soon?= Distraction was Richard’s specialty.

=No.=

=Didit is making a dream for us.=

She slapped her sponge at the wall in frustration.=This sucks.= Mariska couldn’t remember the last time Didit or Richard FiveFord had pulled crud duty.

=Should we wait for you?=

=If you want.= But she knew they wouldn’t. =Might be another hour.=

“You’re working, Volochkova.” Beep’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker. One of his quirks was snooping their private feeds and then yelling at them over the ship’s com.

“Yes, sir,” she said. Beep liked to be called sir. It made him feel like the captain of the Shining Legend instead of senior monkey of its maintenance crew.

“She’s working, FiveFord. Leave our sweet young thing alone.”

She felt Richard’s feed pop like a bubble. He was more afraid of Beep than she was even though the old crank hardly ever bullied Richard. Mariska hated being called sweet young thing. She wasn’t sweet and she wasn’t all that young. She was already fifteen in conscious years, eighteen if you counted the time she had hibernated.

When Mariska finished wiping the wall down, she paused at the navigation rack. She let her gaze blur until all she saw was meaningless shimmer of green and blue light. Not that she understood the rack much better once she focused again. She had been job shadowing Beep for 410 million kilometers and eleven months now. They had traveled all the way to SinoStar’s Rising Dragon station and were passing Mars orbit on the way back to the Moon and she had mastered less than two-thirds of the nav rack’s screens. If she had used a feed to learn the readouts, she would have been nav qualified by now, but Beep wouldn’t allow feed learning. He insisted that she shadow him. Another quirk. He was such a fossil.

“Close astrometry,” she ordered. The ship brain cleared the readouts of the astrometry cluster from the screen. “Time?” A new cluster appeared. It was14:03:34 on 5 July 2163. The mission was in its three hundred and ninth standard day.

Enough water ice aboard for two hundred and eleven days of oxygen renewal. Mid-course switchover from acceleration to deceleration would take place in three days, two hours, and fifty-nine minutes. The ship’s reaction mass reserves of hydrogen would permit braking for one hundred and seventy-three days. More than they needed. Acquisition of the approach signal for Sweetspot station would occur in one just hundred and fifteen days, three hours, forty-seven minutes.

Mariska bit her lip. Even if by some miracle she could get home the day after tomorrow, it wouldn’t be soon enough for her. She glanced up at the tangle of cables that Beep had strung from nav’s access port to its backup rack. They swayed weightlessly in the currents of the air recycling system. Were those blue-black splotches on that cable sheath? They were. With a groan, Mariska peeled her slippers from the deck and launched herself toward the ceiling, sponge at the ready.

It took almost two hours to finish—although crud duty was never-ending. In another week it would be back; crud had been climbing the walls of spaceships for two hundred years now. The stuff offended Mariska’s lunar sensibilities. There had been none of it on the Moon, or if there had been, she had never seen any. But Haworth, the crater city where she had grown up, was a huge environment. Compared to it, the Shining Legend was a drop in the Muoi swimming pool.

By the time she flew back to Wardroom C, Glint, Didit and Richard were already lost in the dream. Each had tethered themselves to the wall and drifted aimlessly, occasionally nudging into one another. They weren’t asleep exactly. It was just that linking feeds to create a communal dream took concentration. Reality just got in the way. But Richard noticed when Mariska came through the hatchway and roused himself.

“Mariska.” His voice drowsed. “Hey monkeys, it’s Mariska.”

Glint blinked as if she were a mirage. “Mariska.” To Glint she probably was. “ ’S not too late.”

She knew it was, but she opened her head a crack to take in their common feed. Didit had created a circus framework; she was good at dream narratives. She had raised a striped tent and a rusting iron pyramid from a grassy field. A parade of outsized animals trudged down a dirt road: cows and polar bears and elephants and a whale with squat legs. Glint’s contribution was sensory. She was an amateur artist and had painted the feed with moist summer heat, the smell of popcorn and barns and sweat, the tootling of a pipe organ and delicate taste of dust from the road. But what Mariska liked most was her sky. It was the deep blue of the oceans as seen from space and had a kind of delicious weight, as if it had been filled with more air than any sky had ever been. Richard supplied the details. He was the only one of them who had actually lived on Earth and had seen an elephant or had walked on living grass.

If Mariska had spotted any of her bunkmates in the dream, she might have tried to catch up to them, even though they had created the feed without her and were already deep into its mysteries. She gave up looking when she heard laughter and applause coming from the tent. She was alone again. So what was new? She closed her head and left them to their fun.

Mariska was the youngest of the five-person crew assigned to the Shining Leg-end. There were three other maintenance monkeys job shadowing Beep. This was her first—and last—asteroid run. Being the rookie shadow meant getting stuck with the worst chores, having no say about anything and getting left out half the time. She stripped off her coverall and underwear, wadded the lot into a ball and crammed it into the clothes processor. She didn’t know which she hated more, the mindless work or the smothering boredom when there was no work to do. She heaved herself into the cleanser, zipped the seal shut and slipped the spray wand from its slot. On the Moon, she could have let the cleanser fill with steam. Warm mist would bead on her skin and trickle deliciously down her body. But in space, there was no down. The wand’s vacuum nozzle sucked the water off her before she had a chance to savor it. She came out of the cleanser free of mold spores but chilled. She snatched a fresh coverall from the processor’s drawer.

As she dressed she tried to convince herself that getting left out didn’t matter, that she didn’t even like the other monkeys. Of course, this wasn’t true. She would have done almost anything to get them to accept her as an equal. She jammed her arm into a sleeve. She was irked that Richard hadn’t made the others wait for her. She knew he wanted to have sex with her and recently she had been surprised to find herself warming to him, despite his nightmarish body. Even though he had lived in space for four of his nineteen years, Richard had been warped by Earth’s freakish gravity. He was tall and his head was way too big and all those grotesque muscles scared her. If she was a monkey, then he was a gorilla.

Mariska had made out a couple of times with Glint, but it wasn’t very good for either of them. Glint and Didit were sister clones of a woman named Xu Jingchu, a big name at SinoStar Ltd. Glint was eighteen and Didit was fifteen. Genetically tweaked for weightlessness, they were as dainty as Richard was gross. They had slender limbs and beautifully defined ribcages and were so tiny that they might have been mistaken for elves or fourth graders. Their delicate bones were continually reinforced by some kind of superpowered osteoblasts or something. They had thick pubic hair and small breasts but no wasteful reproductive systems. People living on the Moon or Mars or in space didn’t make babies by having sex. Their kids would have two heads or no lungs because of the cosmic radiation. At the start of the run Mariska had hoped that she and the Jingchu sisters might be friends. But it never really happened, despite all her efforts to reach out. Didit and Glint treated her like the rookie she was.

Mariska was a clone too, but Natalya Volochkova had had her daughter tweaked to go to the stars. Mariska hadn’t asked for the genes that made it possible for her to hibernate and she didn’t want to crew on a starship. But her mother had made those decisions for her—or thought she had until Mariska had run away to crew on an asteroid bucket. She had hoped to keep her past a secret from the little crew of the Shining Legend. But Beep had found her out and told everyone and now she was sure they resented her for throwing away a chance they all would have jumped at.

When Didit’s arm brushed her sister’s face, she murmured something that Mariska didn’t catch. She studied the two sisters and wondered if maybe her body unnerved them as much as Richard’s unnerved her.

“Moo,” said Glint. “Moooo.”

Mariska had an impulse to yank on her tether, pull the little monkey down and tell her to start the dream over. Include her this time. “Moo yourself,” said Mariska. She flipped out of the wardroom and angrily pulled herself upspine toward Galley.

Mariska shook a sippy cup of borscht until it was hot. She bungeed herself to a dining stand and woke up the screen beside it. Lately she had been looking at the news. Even though it was boring, it made her feel grownup. Today was all about Mars. Construction of the last phase of the Martinez space elevator had finally been funded. Maybe a job there for her? Vids of genetically tweaked Martians picketing the domes of Earth-standard Martians. Never mind—she was never going to Mars. They were taking applications again for emigration to the colony on Delta Pavonis 5, the terrestrial planet that the Gorshkov had just discovered. Natalya Volochkova had been chief medical officer on that mission. Mariska didn’t get why the Gorshkov crew hadn’t given it a real name. Who would want to move to a planet called 5?

She sipped some of the borscht and sighed. Another thing that she hated about space was everything tasted bland, like oatmeal or crackers.

She checked her inbox and as usual there was a message from her mother. Golubushka, nothing, nothing, nothing, can’t wait to see you again, love, Mama. She deleted it, as usual. Once again, nothing from Jak. Back on the Moon they had been all but engaged to be married and become deep spacers and go to the stars together. But she was over him now.Still it would be nice to hear something, seeing as how she would have gladly had sex with him if only he had waited for her. Maybe he was applying to emigrate to Planet 4. Maybe he was already there. Good riddance.

She missed him.

“Mind if I join you?”

She hadn’t heard Beep slip into the stand beside her. With its clatter of fans, pumps and compressors, Galley was almost as noisy as Command. The creak of the hull expanding and contracting was particularly bad here. “No sir,” she said, and wiped the screen.

Beep was maybe forty, maybe eighty. She couldn’t tell. Living in space faded different people at different rates. The stubble on his head and his chin had gone gray and there was a dimpled scar on his cheek where the cancer had been carved out.He had the slouch that all bucket monkeys got from spending too much time weightless. There was nothing special about his coveralls, but one of the Shining Legend’s two override cards hung from his neck on a green lanyard.

“I had a message today from your mother.” He scanned the galley menu. “I was given instruction.” His eyes were watery and vague.

“Really?” She felt her cheeks flush. “What did she say?”

“To take good care of you.”He pointed at the menu.“Ha-ha-ha.”Seconds passed and then the oven stuck its tongue out at him. On it was a steaming tart. He swiped it into the air, caught it before it could fly across the room, then juggled it from hand to hand until it floated, cooling, in front of him. “We go way back, Natalya and I,” he said at last. “A thick stick now, isn’t she?”

There was nothing safe she could say about that.

“Your mother doesn’t understand you, young Volochkova. She wants you to be a deep spacer, not a bucket monkey.”

“She’s never bothered to understand me.”

“You had the tweak. You can hibernate, sleep your way to the stars. So why are you dancing on one foot?”

She snorted in derision. “Only losers hibernate. You wake up and nothing is the same. You lose everything.”

He shook his head as if he didn’t believe her.“You know,I was supposed to be a spacer. Zoom through the wormhole to the stars.” He sailed a flat hand back and forth imitating a spaceship. “Your mother Natalya pronounced me unfit.” He caught his tart and bit into it. “Thinner than water, I was back then.” Mariska watched crumbs fly out of his mouth. More crud duty.

“That has nothing to do with me . . . sir.” She realized that she had been forgetting to say it.

“One generation plants the tree, the next gets the shade.” His laugh was like a grunt. “I met her when she wasn’t much older than you.”

Mariska jacked her guess about his age way, way up.

He stuffed the rest of the tart into his mouth and took his time chewing. “I’d say that you remind me of her, but then you are her.” He held a finger to his lips, cutting off her objection. “What’s my name, young Volochkova? No, not Beep.”

“Lincoln Larrabee,sir.” This was the longest conversation they’d had in months. She wished she knew how to end it.

“Good of you to know that.” He considered the back of his hand for a moment. “So if we have to share the same sky, we should help each other. I’m worried about FiveFord.”

She hadn’t noticed anything odd about Richard, other than that he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Why?”

“Space blues. Apathy. Burn out. Maybe you’ve missed the signs, but he won’t be worth a mushroom in another couple of weeks.”

“But he’s only nineteen.”

“Do us a favor, would you? I mean, for the good of the ship and all.” He poked his forefinger to her shoulder, as if she hadn’t been paying attention. “Give FiveFord that ride he’s been waiting for.”

“What?”

“Go knee to knee with him. You’re patched, aren’t you? You can’t get pregnant.”

She couldn’t believe he was saying this to her until she realized that he must have been sniffing. “Are you high?”

“Why?” When he winked at her, his eyelid fluttered. “Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Then let’s fix that.” He fumbled at the breast pocket of his coverall, withdrew a sniffer and offered it to her.

She resisted the impulse to bat the thing out of his hand. “You’re crazy.” She wasn’t about to sir him when he was twisted.

“What, it’s just some harmless wizard. You get high. I’ve watched you.”

“That’s different.” His lopsided grin infuriated her. She had accepted his bullying because she thought he was in control of things. “You’re supposed to be responsible. You’re wearing the override.”

He peeled the card from his coverall and twirled it on its lanyard. “But I’m not on duty.” He tucked it into the pocket where the sniffer had been.

“You’re always on duty.” She could hear her voice tremble. “What if something goes wrong?”

He waved the sniffer absently under his nose but did not squeeze off a dose. “You know why they call us monkeys?”

She closed her eyes, wishing this was just a nightmare she was having.

“It comes from first days,” he said, “back in astronaut time. Everything was automatic then. The engineers didn’t trust the old guys to do anything, not even think. Test animals don’t make decisions and that’s all the astronauts were. They used to say they were men sent to do monkeys’ work.”

She snapped the bungee against her wrist to keep from screaming. Beep was always saying things like that. She didn’t know what he was talking about half the time.

“We’re just along for the ride. Look here.” He held up three fingers on his left hand. “Three wardrooms.” He showed her all five fingers of his right. “Five of us. Crews used to need all that bunk space, but there was nothing for them to do. So they cut back. Everything is automatic now.”

“But I’m shadowing you on the nav rack.” Her voice was so small that she almost couldn’t hear herself over Galley noise.

“Sure, so you can read it. But if we get a course wobble, can you calculate a new trajectory home?” He waited for her reply but there was nothing she could say. “You want Didit tweaking the magnetic containment field in the reactor?”

“I’d tell the computers to. . . .”

“The computers are automatic. They don’t need monkeys to override a busted routine.”

“Then why are we here?”

“Crud duty? Fix lights? Fetch the ice?” He scratched under his arm and shrieked hoo-hoo-hoo.

When Mariska motioned for the sniffer, Beep grinned. She brought it to her face, cupped hands over it and squeezed off a dose, which sparkled up her nose. The wizard sank to her lungs and streamed into her blood. Seconds later her brain was twinkling.

“Feel better?” said Beep.

For the moment, the wizard was more important than her fear and confusion. “We’re not monkeys,” she said. “We’re remoras.”

He cupped the sniffer to his nose. “Say again?” He pressed the trigger.

“Remoras. The fish that stick onto sharks and clean parasites off them.”

When Beep burst out laughing, his sniffer shot across Galley and out into the spine. She chuckled too but it was only because she was seriously twisted.

“Yes, loosen your cheeks.” He patted the packet where he’d put the override, as if to make sure he hadn’t lost it too. “Why don’t you think I like you?”

This also struck her as funny. “Because you don’t.” She giggled. “Sir.”

“Look here.” He pointed and the screen next to her woke up. She saw a grainy vid, obviously transcribed from a feed. On it was Mariska, except not. She was wearing a dress that was black and shiny and barely covered the crotch. The shoulders were bare except for the two skinny ribbons which kept the dress from falling off. She was wearing black strappy shoes with heels six centimeters long. The eyeshadow was purple.

She would never wear such ridiculous shoes. Or eyeshadow. “What is this?”

The Mariska on the screen tugged the dress up so that black lace panties peeked from beneath the hem. One of the ribbons slipped. The face’s hungry expression stunned her.

“Stop it.”

The scene shifted and another Mariska was perched in a golden cage. She was nearly naked this time. The arms fitted into outspread white wings like the ones they used in aviariums on the Moon. Feathers dangled from a golden chain around the waist but didn’t conceal much. The chest horrified her. Although she was fifteen, she was still pathetically flat-chested—her mother’s fault. But the figure on the screen would have needed at least a C-cup bra to cover the bare breasts. Someone—something opened the door to the golden cage, but all she could see was a hand with long, pointed fingernails.

Beep froze the vid. “They go on from there,” he said. “Much further on.”

“They?” Mariska couldn’t find her voice. “Where . . . who?”

“FiveFord has been making fake feeds where you do whatever he can imagine. It started on the outbound, but he didn’t start to obsess until a couple of weeks ago. He makes one almost every day now. Sometimes he’ll steal from his sleep time. I’ve seen this with shadows before.” He gestured at the screen. “They make all kinds of deranged dream feeds, design inventions that could never work, study eight languages and learn none. I’ve got nothing against it in general, but sometimes they turn inward and swallow themselves. Then we have a problem.”

Mariska was outraged. “You’re as bad as he is.” She reached past him and wiped the screen. “You’re snooping this?”

“Fifteen-year-olds aren’t exactly my favorite flavor, young Volochkova. I don’t like this anymore than you do.” He fixed her with an accusing stare. “But tell me you’ve never created a fake feed before.”

Of course she had. Not a lot, but more than a couple. She and her friend Grieg used to fake Mr. Holmgren, their ag teacher. They had him diddling Librarian Jane, the star from Crosswhen, and President Kwa and Godzilla. But that had been funny. Somehow she didn’t think Richard FiveFord was doing fakes of her for laughs.

“Make him stop. Right now.”

Beep showed her his hands, palms up. “Feeds are thought, young Volochkova. You can’t stop thoughts. And it’s not as if he’s sharing with anyone. He can’t know that I’ve snooped his kink. Or that I gave you a sneak preview.” Beep released the bungee from his dining stand. “Anyway, I just thought you might be interested.” He pushed toward the spine. “You can make him stop any time you want to. Reality trumps fantasy.”

“I’m not sleeping with that pervert.”

He waved without looking back. “Your decision.” He flew through the hatch.

Her borscht was cold and she had lost her appetite. She shoved the cup into the disposal chute and flew back to Wardroom C. She hesitated at the hatch. Didit, Glint and Richard were still linked into their common dream. Now she wondered exactly what they were sharing. After all, this was a feed that they had deliberately kept her from. What kinks might be happening under that imaginary striped tent? She shook her head. No, that was paranoid thinking. Glint had invited her to join them, after all. Still, she braced against the hatchway and then threw herself at her sleep closet before any of them noticed her.

She sealed herself in but didn’t turn on the lights. Her mind was churning as she floated in the darkness. Why had Natalya Volochkova contacted Beep? Did her mother know how he had been tormenting her? Would whatever she told him make any difference? Mariska doubted it. She decided to resent her mother’s interference, even if things did somehow get better. The whole point of signing on for an asteroid run was to escape the controlling bitch. Then Mariska got stuck thinking about what Beep had said. How could he ever have believed she’d let Richard touch her after she’d seen those fakes?

All the grownups in her life were out of control.

The longer she spent in the dark, the lonelier she felt. She had no friends on the Shining Legend. The only friends she did have were back on the Moon, forty million kilometers away.

And Jak had left her.

She woke up the screen and drilled down through the menus until she came to her feed editor. She linked it to the encrypted partition where she kept her secret shrine to Jak. She didn’t give a damn if Beep was snooping. There was a specific feed she had created of things she remembered about the Muoi pool. She and Jak used to swim laps there together; she found a sequence where they were sitting on the edge, their feet dangling in the water. In real life she had been wearing her aquablade swimsuit but now she changed it to the two piece that she never liked because it made her look like a little girl. In real life, they had talked about sharing a closet on a starship, maybe even the famous Gorshkov, assuming that her mother wouldn’t be aboard. In her fake, there was no talk of the future. She scripted him to play with the waistband of her suit, which she had let him do sometimes. She brushed a kiss across his shoulder, licking the beads of water which clung to his bare skin. The shouts of kids playing in the shallow end bounced off the low ceiling of the pool’s cave. Jak slipped his three middle fingers slowly down the bumps of her spine and then just inside her suit, which she had never let him do. The fake Mariska closed her eyes. The real Mariska sucked in a ragged breath. She could see her imaginary Jak getting hard under his swimsuit. But suddenly she was sad. Too sad. She knew there would be tears if she pushed the fake any further. And none of them, not Jak or Beep or Richard or the Jingchus or her mother, was worth crying over.

The Shining Legend was possibly the ugliest spaceship in SinoStar’s fleet. At the back end of its long spine was a heavily shielded antimatter drive. Forward of the reactor was a skirt of battered cargo buckets. Outbound, these had carried agro and manufactured goods destined for Rising Dragon station. Inbound, they contained unprocessed nickel-iron ore and dirty chunks of ice from SinoStar’s asteroid mines. Next to the buckets were storage mods. Further upspine, a hodgepodge of crew mods had accreted over the years: Command, Galley, Service, Health, Rec and Wardrooms A, B and C. Three crawlerbots, nicknamed Apple, Banana and Cherry wandered the various hulls of the ship checking for micrometeor damage. A watchbot named Eye flew alongside, held by a magnetic tether. Their asteroid bucket looked to Mariska like a pile of junk that had fallen out of a closet.

The ship ran on antimatter and water. Electrolytic cells dissociated hydrogen and oxygen from ice that had been treated back on Sweetspot. The hydrogen was used by the positron reactor for thrust, the oxygen refreshed the atmosphere in the crew’s quarters. Unlike the starship Gorshkov, the Shining Legend was not a closed system. Scrubbers removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and vented it to space. The cells replaced the oxygen lost in this process and therefore required a constant supply of water. When reserves ran low, the crew fetched blocks of the treated ice, stored on loading porches outside the storage mods.

Qualifying in cargo was the last step before a shadow could advance to senior crew; it was the one job where the computers needed human help. Both Richard and Glint were shadowing cargo on this run. Glint had failed cargo once already but she’d been doing better this time. They used the crawlerbots to load, store and offload material at either end of the run and bring in the ice while the ship was in transit. In the old days, cargo monkeys used to suit up and actually drive the bots, but now everything was handled remotely from Command.

Throughout the run, Richard, Glint and Beep would gather at the cargo rack in Command to divert the bots from their normal rounds. But having people look over her shoulder made Glint nervous, especially after she had failed cargo. Back at Rising Dragon station she had put several new dents in the buckets while loading ore. Her problem was that when she got flustered, she lost track of where the edges of her bots were. She was fine as long as she didn’t actually see anyone, so Richard and Beep had taken to monitoring her from a distance when she took her turn on the rack.

So Mariska was surprised when Richard flew into the Rec mod.

“Isn’t Glint on ice duty today?” She was working out on the treadmill.

“She is.” Richard maneuvered himself into the weight machine and buckled in.

“Aren’t you supposed to be watching her?”

“I am.”

“But you’re not.”

“No.” He smiled at no one in particular as he adjusted the arms of the machine. “I’d rather be here with you.” He set the resistance to four kilograms for curls.

“Richard.”

He laughed. “Beep told me to take a break. He’s watching her but she hasn’t messed up since Dragon. Ninety-seven days and counting. She’s so good now that she’s boring.”

Mariska had logged just three kilometers and had seven more to go. At least a half-hour before she finished her workout and could escape him. She pulled her towel from its clip and wiped her face. Sweat was another thing she hated about space. She missed swimming.

How was she supposed to act around Richard anyway? She couldn’t help but wonder what was going on behind those wide brown eyes when he looked at her. Probably imagining new kinks. But with more than a hundred days left in the run, she couldn’t afford to confront him. Feuds in space tended to take up a lot of room. On a ship the size of the Shining Legend, that would be trouble. But she wasn’t about to pretend that she was comfortable being alone with him.

After he finished the curls, he did shoulder squats. The weight machine clanked and wheezed and its gyros hummed. The more reps he did, the more the veins stood out at his temples. Richard was proud of his foolish muscles and worked hard to keep them. Now he was grunting from the effort. It was kind of disgusting. He told her once when they were high on wizard that he’d be like some kind of superhero if he ever visited the Moon. She’d tried not to laugh at his ignorance. There was hardly any crime at Haworth. The Moon had no need of another Lord Danger.

“You haven’t been very nice to me lately.” He was smiling, his cheeks flushed from his workout. “What did I do wrong?”

“Nothing.” She wasn’t going to think feathers and golden chains.

“Somehow you make nothing sound an awful lot like something.” He waited for her to answer; she let him wait. “Okay.” He reconfigured the weight machine for squat thrusts. “One. Two.” The count exploded out of him when he kicked his legs back. “Three. Four. Five.” He was so strong that he overpowered the gyro. When the apparatus banged against the wall, she could feel the entire mod shake. It was a point of pride with Richard that he could do this. “Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.” No one else aboard could. Sometimes she could feel him working out as far away as Galley.

Richard stopped at twenty, sucking air in huge gulps. Mariska felt a familiar tingle; since he was out of breath and couldn’t speak, he was offering her his feed.

“No thanks,” she said. She woke up the screen in front of them, picked a 3D channel at random. It was old sci-fi from the previous century: a space captain in a ridiculously tight uniform was sitting on a shiny chair on the bridge of some fairy-tale spaceship. The camera pulled back. Everyone on the screen was sitting on chairs.

There were no chairs on the Shining Legend.

“Artificial gravity.” Richard climbed on the stationary bike and started peddling. “I could use some of that just now.”

Mariska ignored him and pretended interest in the 3D.

Now the people on the bridge were staring at a viewscreen showing another silly spaceship. In an external shot, one ship veered sharply away from the other, narrowly avoiding a collision. Back on the bridge, the crew were all leaning to their left.

“Sorry,” said Richard, “but they’d all be puddles of jelly on the wall.” He shook his head. “People on Earth still watch this stuff.”

The counter on the treadmill clicked over to tenkilometers. “Really?” Mariska slowed her pace to a walk. Her legs felt pleasantly heavy.

“People on Earth are stupid. They don’t know anything about living about space. That’s why I left.”

“There are stupid people everywhere.” She unbungeed herself. “The trick is not to let them do anything stupid to you.”

Richard shot her a quizzical look. “Meaning?

“Meaning have a nice workout, Richard.” She said, and kicked out of Rec.

Mariska had never had a feed from her mother before. At first she wasn’t sure that she should accept it. Natalya Volochkova was a fossil like Beep. Her generation used feeds only for the most intimate sort of contact, which was the last thing Mariska wanted. But this feed had been the only message from her mother for several days now. Mariska was curious to know why she had stopped.

=Moya radost, you know this isn’t what I wanted for us.= Natalya Volochkova was seated in a plastic chair in a spare room that was clearly not at their home in Haworth. The focus was tight, the light harsh. Mariska tried to zoom out but the feed refused her command. There was a stale papery smell to the room that made Mariska think that she might be looking at a museum or a library. Some kind of storage area. =You think you are doing what is right. Maybe, but where you are now is not where you will be when you grow up.=

“I am grown up!” Of course, her mother couldn’t hear her.

=I know you have been suffering, but things will get better.= There was a weight to her voice that Mariska had never heard before. =I promise.=

“Just stop your interfering, bitch.”

=I’m on Mars just now, but I won’t be staying. I don’t know if you’ve heard but we’re commissioning a new starship, the Natividad.=

Mariska felt her throat tightening.

=It’s been more than a year since I’ve heard anything from you. I write, you are silent. At least I know that you are safe. I’m sorry if you’re unhappy.= She was shocked to see her mother’s eyes shine with tears. =I wish I knew what you’re thinking just now. But if you really want me out of your life, then I must accept that. I’ve been offered a place on the Natividad. I had hoped to bring you with me but. . . .=

“Go then.” Mariska closed her mind. The bare room and her sad mother disappeared. “Leave.” She deleted the feed.

Mariska tried to relax into the delicate embrace of her closet’s sleep net but her thoughts kept tumbling over one another. Mariska wondered at how little she understood herself. After all, this was exactly what she wanted. Natalya Volochkova was finally leaving her alone.

So why did she feel betrayed?

Glint’s scream shook the walls of Galley fifteen meters away. Mariska choked on a mouthful of butterscotch pudding. When she poked her head out of the hatch Beep almost tore it off as he shot upspine toward Command. She followed at a distance. Ahead she saw Richard desperately trying to pull Glint downspine. Glint flailed at him like a drowning swimmer.

“What?” Beep shouted over her shrieking.

“Seda . . . tive,” said Richard. Glint spun in his grasp and they crashed against the deck of the spine. “Ooof. Glint, no.”

“What?” said Beep.

“Something about the ice.”

It was a measure of Glint’s panic that she gave musclebound Richard all he could handle. But when he finally yanked her arms behind her back,she slumped forward. Her screams melted into sobs.

“You.” Beep pushed Mariska at them. “Help.” He flew into Command.

They wrangled her downspine to Health and strapped her to an examining table. Richard tried to comfort her while Mariska tapped at the med rack and charged a face mask with somapal. When Richard pressed it to Glint’s nose and mouth, she groaned and went limp.

They stared at each other across the table. Richard was breathing hard enough for three people.

“What about the ice?” said Mariska.

“Don’t know.” He shook his head. “There wasn’t time.”

“Let’s find out.” He followed her out.

“Where?” Beep muttered to himself as his fingers danced over screens on the cargo rack. “Where, where, where?” He was barefoot and held himself still by curling his toes into the deck burrs. His hair was mussed. He looked like he had just woken up; she thought he might be twisted. “Damn it, where?” Mariska had never noticed how long Beep’s toes were. There was fine black hair on the joints.

He stabbed at the rack. The screens that had been showing crawlerbot Banana’s view switched to Eye flying next to the Shining Legend. He panned up and down the ship. Mariska gasped when Eye looked past the porch on Storage D, where their reserves of treated ice were supposed to be.

It was empty. Behind her, Richard made a strangled noise.

“Come on. Where?” Now Beep turned the eye away from the ship to scan the nearby space.

Mariska tore herself away from cargo to access the nav rack. “Time cluster,” she said.

It was 04:33:04 on 15 July 2163. The mission was in its three hundred and nineteenth standard day. The ship had completed its mid-course switchover from acceleration and was now seven days, two hours, and eleven minutes into deceleration toward home. Acquisition of the approach signal for Sweetspot station would occur in one hundred and five days, eighteen hours, and twenty-one minutes.

“There.”

The ship’s reaction mass reserves of hydrogen would permit braking for just sixty-eight more days. The inventory of ice finished updating. It would be sufficient for forty-seven days of oxygen renewal. The screen began to flash red.

Eyes wide with terror, Mariska glanced across Command at Eye’s view. Two blue-white blocks the size of lunar rovers were tumbling sedately away from them toward the blaze of stars.

“The problem isn’t fuel,” said Mariska. “If they start a ship soon enough, it can match trajectories with us. Then we offload some replacement ice and finish our deceleration.”

“Except there won’t be any we.” Glint looked hollow. “We’ll suffocate by then.”

“Not necessarily.” Richard was trying to convince himself. “Not at all.”

“We’ve got tons of ice back in the buckets,” said Didit. “Asteroid ice. Tons.”

The four of them had gathered in Wardroom C while Beep was in Command talking to experts at Sweetspot station. No one wanted to be alone, but being together and seeing how scared they all were made waiting for Beep an agony. There were long silences, punctuated either by hopeful declarations or sniffles. They all cried some, Glint the most. Mariska was surprised at how little she cried. She was sure she was going to die.

“Such an idiot.” Glint rubbed the heels of her hands against her temples. “The stupidest damn stupidhead in all of space.”

Didit poked her listlessly. “Shut up, Glint.”

“It’s my fault too,” said Richard, not for the first time. “Should’ve been watching you. That’s what backup is for. More eyes, no surprise.”

Twenty hours before, while retrieving a block of treated ice, Glint had bumped the Cherry crawler against the side of the open airlock. The ship’s computers had interpreted this as a potential failure and had triggered lockdown protocol. Glint hadn’t wanted yet another screwup on her record, so she had gunned Cherry into the airlock just before the doors slid shut. Once it was safely inside, she had cancelled the lockdown. It was, after all, a false alarm. The shipbrain would still record the incident, but an anomaly without consequences wouldn’t get Glint in any trouble.

Only now the consequences were dire. Normally, Glint would have instructed Cherry just to drop the ice and leave the airlock. Then, after checking that the primary ice restraints on the storage porch had re-engaged, it would have resumed its automated search for micrometeorite damage. But the crawler was on the wrong side of the doors and its restraint routine had been interrupted by the lockdown. This wouldn’t have been a problem had not the secondary restraint, a sheet of nanofabric that covered the ice reserves, failed. The two remaining blocks had somehow nudged out from underneath and taken off. Simulations showed that some kind of vibration could have set the ice in motion. On a ship as old as the Shining Legend, shakes and rattles were to be expected.

Mariska guessed that the ice had come loose when Richard banged the weight machine against the wall of Rec. From the way he avoided her gaze, she guessed he thought so too. Was that why he kept apologizing for leaving Glint to fetch the ice?

What everyone was wondering, although no one dared say it aloud yet, was how Beep could have let Glint trash the safety protocols so totally. He’d told Richard that he’d watch her. Had he had his nose in a sniffer?

“Here it is,” said Mariska. “That data feed I was looking for.”

=Untreated water is a poor conductor of electricity, impeding the reaction in electrolytic cells so that the dissociation of hydrogen and oxygen occurs very slowly. Typically the addition of salt electrolytes will increase the conductivity of water as much as a millionfold. Using water treated for enhanced conductivity enables SinoStar’s advanced electrolytic cells to achieve efficiencies of between 50% and 70%=

“So salt.” Didit brightened. “We get ice from the buckets and just add salt.”

“We don’t have that kind of salt,” Glint said wearily. “And we sure as hell don’t have enough of it.”

“Hey, all the feed said was that the cells would be slow.” Didit wasn’t giving up. “Slow is better than nothing.” She looked to Mariska for confirmation.

“Plus raw asteroid ice is full of dust and crap. It’ll just clog the cells.” Glint’s chin quivered but she held the tears back. “Face it, we’re slagged.”

“Shut up, Glint.”

“There’s a way,” said Richard. “There has got to be a way.”

Nobody bothered to agree or disagree. The silence stretched.

“Buck up, monkeys.” Beep appeared at the hatchway. “We haven’t fallen out of our tree yet. Everyone up to Command and I’ll tell you the plan.”

The word plan seemed to lift the four teenagers. Didit reached over and gave Glint’s hair a sisterly pull. “Told you.” As they followed him upspine, Mariska caught herself grinning with relief. The brains at Sweetspot must have seen something she hadn’t.

Beep waited until they had settled themselves around the cargo rack. One of the screens showed Banana crawler parked in front of Storage D. “So we use the crawlers to fetch raw ice from the buckets. We chip off chunks and boil all the impurities out.”

Mariska knew that couldn’t be right. “How do we do that?” said Mariska. “We have no way to capture. . . .”

“Volochkova, did I ask you to speak?”

“No.”

“No, what?” His voice was cutting.

“No, sir.” She noticed that the skin of his face seemed stretched too tight.

“Leave your ignorance in your pockets. All of you.” He let rebuke hang in the air for a long moment. “Next we start collecting leftover salts from the electrolytic cells and stop dumping the stuff into space. We add it to the purified water we’re going to make. They’re telling me that using fresh water slows down the electrolytic cells. It’s like watching toenails grow.”

“We know that,” said Didit. “Mariska found a feed.”

“We’ve got enough treated ice . . .” He glanced over at the nav rack. “. . . for forty-seven days. Let’s see how much salt we can save by then. Okay, monkeys? Trouble is knocking but we’re not letting it in. I’ll suit up and ride Banana back to the buckets.

“While the reactor is at cruising power?” Too late, Mariska realized that she had spoken without permission. This time Beep was more forgiving.

“I’ve damped it down.” He nodded at the energy rack. “Besides, how else am I going to sort ice from ore?” His grin was bleak. “But thanks for your concern, young Volochkova. I do realize that radiation isn’t my friend.”

Didit laughed nervously. The others glared at Mariska as if she were trying to kill them: They were fine with letting Beep risk the exposure. After all, he was senior monkey.

“So, FiveFord and Glint, get Apple and Cherry started for the porch. Didit, lower the air pressure in the airlock to four-tenths of a bar.” He pushed off and floated over them. “Young Volochkova, you come with me to Service and help prep the suit. That way you can wash all those worries about my safety.”

On their way downspine, Beep caught himself at the hatch to Wardroom A. “I need my coolwear.” He waved her on. “Power my suit up and start the checklist. I’ll be down in two kicks.”

There were a dozen spacesuits bungeed to the walls of Service. Most of them hadn’t been touched in years. As part of their cargo chores, however, Glint and Richard had powered five of them up regularly during the run to make sure they still worked. They were all low pressure, which meant Beep needed to prebreathe oxygen before the spacewalk to keep from getting the bends. Since Beep had been aboard the Shining Legend for more than a decade, he had a custom-fitted suit. Mariska opened it, plugged its battery cord into the fastcharge outlet and started its power on self-test. She was moving through the rest of the checklist when Beep flew in.

He had the hood of his coolwear pulled back, but otherwise it covered his entire body. The white of the fabric made the deep flush on Beep’s face stand out. When Richard exerted himself, he just turned red. Beep was practically purple and was sucking in huge gulps of air.

Mariska could see beads of sweat at his hairline. “Beep,” she said, “tell me you’re not high.”

“Borrowing some courage is all.” He landed in front of the oxygen bar. “And don’t be warming my ears about it.” He clapped the mask over his face, and glared at her.

Back in Command, she had suspected that something was wrong with him. Now she was certain of it. But there was nothing she could do, so she went back to the checklist. After fifteen minutes, he pulled the mask away and thrust the override card at her. “Hold this while I suit up.”

She took it and he raised his arms. Mariska grasped his waist. She could feel the pulse of the coolant in his coolwear, which was designed to keep the spacesuit from overheating. She raised him over her head and jiggled him through the suit’s opening.

He fit his arms into the sleeves but then paused. “How many oxygen bottles do I have?”

“Two,” she said. “Checklist calls for two, primary and backup.” She didn’t understand why he was asking. Two four-thousand-cubic-centimeter bottles had been the standard design spec since before she was born.

“How many are left?”

She shrugged.

“Go look.”

Mystified, she opened the locker, counted thirty-seven filled and fourteen empty bottles. She reported this.

“Worth knowing.” He finished sealing himself into the suit. “Worth remembering. So, let’s dance.”

She handed him his helmet to carry, unbungeed him from the wall and tugged on the suit’s tether. He bobbed behind her like a man-sized balloon as she pulled him downspine to Storage D.

The air was already thinning in the airlock and it felt colder than it actually was. Beep turned on his boot magnets, enabling him to stand upright in front of her. She was expecting him to fit the helmet onto the suit’s collar so she could lock it down. He surprised her.

“Not yet, young Volochkova. Time for a quick chat. You have the override?”

She offered it to him. He shook his head.

“I’m leaving it with you for now. That means you’re in charge in case anything spills. I am thinking that you can make the hard decisions. At least, Natalya could.”

Mariska wasn’t her mother; for some reason Beep still wouldn’t accept that. “But Richard is senior to me. And Glint . . .”

He snorted. “FiveFord could drown in a glass of water. He should go back to Earth and dig holes with all those muscles. Only he’d probably fall in. And Glint . . . poor Glint is broken.” He pointed at the override. “You show them the override and tell them I said.”

“What is this, Beep?” She tucked it into the pocket of her coverall.

“This?” He smirked. “Just a little walk. La-la-la. But before I go . . . Remember the fakes I showed you? Ah, I thought you might. So that was just a little joke. The fakes never existed, or at least, you saw all there was of them. All that I made.”

“You?”

“I like to stir the soup, Natalya.” His laugh had a chemical edge. “The runs are so damn long, too damn boring. Hard to stay interested. So we play tricks. It’s tradition, how bucket monkeys keep from going crazy.”

Mariska felt suddenly dizzy in the thin air, afraid to say what she was thinking. “Why tell me this now?”

“I’d say it was conscience, if I had one.” His mouth tightened. He raised the helmet over his head and stared into it. “Time to go.”

“Wait.” She caught at the front of his suit. “That was a lie about the raw ice, wasn’t it? And the leftover salt—that can’t possibly work. And you—you’re going to get a crazy dose of radiation. . . .”

“One less mouth to breathe.” Beep stuck his chin out at her. “You’ll know what to do when the time comes.” He lowered the helmet onto his head. She wanted to hammer on it, get him to stop, make all of this go away. Instead she locked it to his suit.

By the time she got back to Command, Beep had already turned Banana downspine and was accelerating toward the buckets. The others watched the screen that showed the crawler’s camera, but Mariska was fixed on the overview that the Eye saw.

“He’s going kind of fast.” Richard was beginning to suspect what Mariska already knew.

“Then tell him to slow down,” said Didit.

Beep must have turned his boot magnets off. On the Eye, she saw that they had come off the racing crawler and his only contact was the joystick which he grasped with both hands. His legs swung upward relative to the surface of the ship until he was upside down. He looked like a gymnast doing a handstand as the crawler hurtled toward the buckets.

“Call him,” said Richard. “Glint?”

“Doesn’t work.”

“It’s dead. He must have disabled it.”

Glint’s hand trembled as she pointed at the Eye’s screen. Didit was sobbing.

“Override it.”

“With what?”

“Stop him.”

At the exact moment the crawler crashed into the bucket, Beep released his hold. His momentum flung him clear of the Shining Legend, tumbling helmet over boot.

They watched as he applied gas thrusters to correct his wild rotation.

They watched him spread his arms to embrace the darkness as he shot away from the ship.

They watched in shock as he faded to a speck of space debris and was gone.

“Still, you could have stopped him,” said Richard.

“How?” Mariska was tired of their accusations. The weight of what she had done—and not done—was crushing her.

“You could have.”

Glint was no help. She had kicked her slippers free of the deck burrs and was floating aimlessly around Command. She seemed not to notice when she bumped into things.

“But we still have ice,” said Didit. “Who’s going to fetch the ice?”

“Nobody.” Glint’s head lolled backwards. “It’s just like Mariska said. A fairy tale.”

“What does she know?” Didit’s hands curled into fists; she was ready to punch someone. “Maybe she made Beep do it.”

“He gave her the override.”

The four of them considered this fact in silence. Richard ran a finger down the edge of the cargo rack. It came away with a smudge of ugly blue. “The crud is back,” he said to no one in particular.

“It’s her first run,” said Didit. “Why her?”

Glint cackled. “Because he hated her?”

“We should contact Sweetspot. Tell them what’s happening here.” Richard nodded at the override hanging around Mariska’s neck. “Maybe we should enable comm now?”

Mariska brought up the comm cluster and flashed the override at the nav rack. Then she paused, considering. “Close communication,” she said. “Time?”

“Sure,” said Glint. “Let’s check the doomsday clock.”

Didit turned on her and shouted. “Shut the fuck up, Glint.”

The screen still flashed red. It was 08:14:56 on 17 July 2163. The mission was in its three hundred and eleventh standard day. They were eight days, twenty-two hours, and six minutes into deceleration. Acquisition of the approach signal for Sweetspot station would occur in one hundred days, twenty-three hours, and fifty-one minutes.

“There,” said Mariska. “See?”

The ship’s reaction mass reserves of hydrogen would permit braking for eighty-nine more days. The ice inventory would supply be sufficient for seventy-three days of oxygen renewal.

“See what?” said Richard.

“We gained twenty-six days.” Mariska felt as if she were rising out of herself and looking down at them from the Eye. “Beep gave us twenty-six more days.”

“So what?” Now Glint shouted. “Seventy-three from one hundred. A month of no air.”

“Right,” said Mariska. “But if we decrease demand again, we buy even more time.”

“Decrease demand?” Fear filled Richard’s voice.

“And the rescue ship—they don’t have to wait until we get all the way to Sweetspot. They can come out to meet us . . .”

“Someone else sacrifices?” said Didit. “That’s your plan?”

“Nobody has to sacrifice.” She pushed herself over to the environment rack. “Somebody just has to stop breathing.”

“Oh, great,” said Glint.

“Who?” said Richard.

Mariska’s mind was racing as she brought up the crew’s med files. It could work. It had to work.

It was just above freezing in the mod; Mariska was pleased. The inner shell of the Shining Legend was fitted with heating strips to keep the bitter cold of space from penetrating crew areas. But Mariska had disabled the shell heaters in Service as part of her plan. She faced Richard as he gripped her waist in his strong hands and lifted her. The Jingchu sisters stood together to one side, wisps of their breath curling into the chill. They were holding hands, which was a good sign. Mariska was worried about Glint’s mood swings. Sometimes it seemed as if she resented getting this chance to survive. She just wanted to have the dying over with. But Didit kept pulling her back from despair.

Richard was concentrating so hard on lowering Mariska into the suit that she couldn’t help herself. She touched his neck. He glanced up, about to apologize, but she winked at him. “Permission to nap?” She tugged the lanyard of the override around his neck. “Sir?”

He grinned. “Permission granted.”

She shivered as he sealed her into the suit. Was this the last time anyone would ever touch her? Bad thought. No bad thoughts. “Ninety-six days,” she said. “We can do this, right?”

Richard and Didit answered, “Right.” Glint just glared; she still thought that Mariska was abandoning them.

“No chores, understand? Let the crud run wild. And sleep as much as you can.”

“We will,” said Didit.

“Just remember to wake up when it’s time to swap my bottles.”

Richard handed her the helmet. “Don’t worry.”

She tried to think of what else she could say to keep from saying goodbye. “This is it, then.” Mariska could feel her throat closing; she didn’t want them to see how scared she was. “Okay monkeys, out of here before you freeze to death.” She lowered the helmet to the collar and Richard locked it to the spacesuit. She felt a tear pool at the corner of her eye, but the helmet’s tinted faceplate hid it nicely.

So, how was she going to do this? She didn’t really know how to trigger the hibernation response. The one time she had done it had been five years ago. That had been the first time she had tried to escape from her mother, by running away three years into the future. She had been furious at Natalya Volochkova then. Had that had anything to do with it? She was still mad at her, but not as much as she had been. She tried working up some hate for Beep but all she could think about were his two bottles of oxygen. Six hours, and then? Maybe she should get mad at herself for signing on to crew on the Shining Legend. Bucket monkey—the worst job in space. And now she might die a bucket monkey. Bad thought. No bad thoughts.

She did the math again while she waited for something to happen. She had thirty-seven bottles. Each could provide three hours of oxygen, plus or minus ninety seconds. Altogether, a hundred and eleven hours. Sweetspot claimed the soonest the rescue ship could rendezvous was ninety-five days, plus or minus maybe half a day. Altogether, two thousand, two hundred, and eighty hours. Plus or minus. But if she hibernated she might reduce her oxygen intake to as low as four percent of normal. Four percent of two thousand, two hundred, and eighty hours was ninety-one hours. That meant she only needed ninety-one hours of oxygen and had a hundred and eleven hours bottled. Plus or minus. Was four percent possible? She didn’t know. The first and only time she had hibernated it hadn’t been in a hibernation pod with the proper euthermic arousal protocols. She had induced it by sheer willpower in her bed on Haworth. And at room temperature. They said afterward that she was crazy to try it, lucky to survive. But this time she had the cold on her side. Four percent. Ninety-one hours.

And if five percent was the best she could do? Bad thought. No bad thoughts.

Mariska wasn’t as big as Beep, and subtracting her consumption from the load on the electrolytic cells only gained the crew another twenty-four days. But twenty-four and seventy-two would stretch the oxygen resupply reserve to ninety-six days. Which was exactly when they would rendezvous with the rescue ship from Mars.

Plus or minus.

Mariska felt good. Cold, but good. The numbers added up. They could do this. All she had to do was close her eyes and stop breathing so much.

Mariska’s blood was pounding. Her fingers throbbed and it felt as if someone kept clapping hands over her ears. She thought her heart might explode. Time to open her eyes.

Storage. She knew this was Storage. But where was Storage? Someplace full of floating bottles. And Richard. His name was FiveFord and he could drown in a glass of water. She could see that he wasn’t very smart, sleeping in Storage when he was supposed to be doing something. Something. She was gasping and her throat was sandpaper. She thought she should go back to sleep. Or die. But then there were other people in Storage. People in spacesuits. One of them pushed Richard aside and he crashed into a wall. Mariska wished he would wake up. She blinked because her eyes were filling with smoke. Then Spacesuit Person was in front of her. Shaking her. This must be the rescue. Yay! She couldn’t tell who it was at first because the helmet had a mirror face. Then she saw the name. Black letters below the collar. Volochkova. That was her name. Mariska giggled. Was she rescuing herself? Why didn’t Richard FiveFord get up? This was what they had been waiting for.

Xu Jingchu didn’t look much like Didit or Glint to Mariska. She was old and her life had tugged at her. She was Earthborn, a head taller than Mariska, and her loose muscles and spindly posture made her look as if she were suffering from some wasting sickness.

And she was grieving.

“When Glint said that she wanted to make one more run, I swear I fought her,” said Xu Jingchu.“I wanted her to learn the business, not qualify as senior crew.” The old woman had Mariska’s hand in hers. “I’d already arranged for her to work at Sweetspot, move on to the materials processing division. But she insisted on one more chance at cargo. Why?” She kept rubbing her finger across Mariska’s palm. “I don’t even shop for myself anymore, so why should she be fetching ice and loading ore into buckets?”

Mariska was exhausted and just wanted Xu Jingchu to go away. The old woman was no longer talking to her—she had been arguing with her dead daughter for the last few minutes. Mariska let her head fall back on the pillow of the hospital bed, hoping that her mother would pick up on the signal.

“She was proud,” said Natalya Volochkova. “She wanted to do her best.”

“Proud.” Jingchu’s expression was bitter. “Of dying for nothing?”

“Glint and Didit were very brave.” Natalya Volochkova stood up. “They fought right to the end. They just ran out of time.”

“Yes.” Xu Jingchu squeezed Mariska’s hand and let go. “Yes, they were good girls.” She stood too. “I appreciate everything you did, Dr. Volochkova. I know you took extraordinary measures to save them.”

“I couldn’t have done anything without you.”

She bowed in acknowledgement. “As you say, time ran out. Thank you, Mariska, for seeing me. I hope we can meet again under more pleasant circumstances.” She gathered herself to leave.

“Excuse me,” said Mariska. “But did Glint ever visit Earth?”

Xu Jingchu looked puzzled. “No, not really. Of course the clinic was in Chicago so they were born there. But they were tweaked for space. Staying in Earth gravity would’ve been agony.” Her expression darkened. “Why?”

“I just wondered if she had ever seen the sky.”

“The sky?”

“Mariska is still not herself.” Her mother rested a hand on Xu Jingchu’s arm. “We came close to losing her too.”

She nodded and a wisp of white hair fell across her forehead. “Of course.” She let herself be led away.

Natalya Volochkova had been right. It had been a mistake to see Xu Jingchu so soon. And now her mother had rescued her from the sad old woman. Mariska was still getting used to the idea that Natalya Volochkova might not be the enemy. Had she come back into the room then, Mariska would have tried to thank her. But her mother was still trying not to push herself on Mariska.

Mariska had learned meditation as part of her spacer training, and her doctors kept urging her to try it now, find a silence in herself that would give her peace. But what had happened still roared through her mind. The Shining Legend’s shipbrain had captured the crew’s last moments. Glint and Didit had died in each other’s arms in the wardroom, but Richard, the strongest of them, had muscled his way to her even as the oxygen levels in his blood crashed. He had died changing her last bottle. She couldn’t imagine being that brave. She knew she hadn’t earned that kind of devotion.

To escape these dark thoughts, she called up a feed she had been working on.

A dusty dirt road cut across a grassy field. The sky above was the deep blue of the oceans as seen from space. It had a delicious weight, as if it had been filled with more air than any sky had ever been. Mariska stood on the side of the road as a parade of animals passed: cows and polar bears and elephants and two zebras wearing top hats and a whale with squat legs. Didit, Glint and Richard drove up in a bathtub filled with water. Didit waved.

=We set up a tent.=

Mariska looked up.=Nice sky.=

Glint smiled. =Not too blue?=

=Perfect.=

Richard leaned out of the bathtub reaching for Mariska. She stepped back.

=Coming?=

She shook her head. =Not yet.=

=Want us to wait?=

She shook her head again. Richard pulled his arm back into the bathtub and tapped Didit on the shoulder.

Mariska watched them go. In the distance she could hear the tootle of a pipe organ.

THE MAN WHO BRIDGED THE MIST

Kij Johnson

Kit came to Nearside with two trunks and an oiled-cloth folio full of plans for the bridge across the mist. His trunks lay tumbled like stones at his feet, where the mailcoach guard had dropped them. The folio he held close, away from the drying mud of yesterday’s storm.

Nearside was small, especially to a man of the capital where buildings towered seven and eight stories tall, a city so large that even a vigorous walker could not cross in half a day. Here hard-packed dirt roads threaded through irregular spaces scattered with structures and fences. Even the inn was plain, two stories of golden limestone and blue slate tiles, with (he could smell) some sort of animals living behind it. On the sign overhead, a flat, pale blue fish very like a ray curvetted against a black background.

A brightly dressed woman stood by the inn’s door. Her skin and eyes were pale, almost colorless. “Excuse me,” Kit. “Where can I find the ferry to take me across the mist?” He could feel himself being weighed, but amiably: a stranger, small and very dark, in gray—a man from the east.

The woman smiled. “Well, the ferries are both on this side, at the upper dock. But I expect what you really want is someone to oar the ferry, yes? Rasali Ferry came over from Farside last night. She’s the one you’ll want to talk to. She spends a lot of time at The Deer’s Hart. But you wouldn’t like The Hart, sir,” she added. “It’s not nearly as nice as The Fish here. Are you looking for a room?”

“I’ll be staying in Farside tonight,” Kit said apologetically. He didn’t want to seem arrogant. The invisible web of connections he would need for his work started here, with this first impression, with all the first impressions of the next few days.

“That’s what you think,” the woman said. “I’m guessing it’ll be a day or two or more before Rasali goes back. Valo Ferry might, but he doesn’t cross so often.”

“I could buy out the trip’s fares, if that’s why she’s waiting.”

“It’s not that,” the woman said. “She won’t cross the mist ‘til she’s ready. “Until she feels it’s right, if you follow me. But you can ask, I suppose.”

Kit didn’t follow, but he nodded anyway. “Where’s The Deer’s Hart?”

She pointed. “Left, then right, then down by the little boat yard.”

“Thank you,” Kit said. “May I leave my trunks here until I work things out with her?”

“We always stow for travelers.” The woman grinned. “And cater to them, too, when they find out there’s no way across the mist today.”

The Deer’s Hart was smaller than The Fish, and livelier. At midday the oak-shaded tables in the beer garden beside the inn were clustered with light-skinned people in brilliant clothes, drinking and tossing comments over the low fence into the boat yard next door, where, half lost in steam, a youth and two women bent planks to form the hull of a small flat-bellied boat. When Kit spoke to a man carrying two mugs of something that looked like mud and smelled of yeast, the man gestured at the yard with his chin. “Ferrys are over there. Rasali’s the one in red,” he said as he walked away.

“The one in red” was tall, her skin as pale as that of the rest of the locals, with a black braid so long that she had looped it around her neck to keep it out of the way. Her shoulders flexed in the sunlight as she and the youth forced a curved plank to take the skeletal hull’s shape. The other woman, slightly shorter, with the ash-blond hair so common here, forced an augur through the plank and into a rib, then hammered a peg into the hole she’d made. After three pegs, the boatwrights straightened. The plank held. Strong, Kit thought; I wonder if I can get them for the bridge?

“Rasali!” a voice bellowed, almost in Kit’s ear. “Man here’s looking for you.” Kit turned in time to see the man with the mugs gesturing, again with his chin. He sighed and walked to the waist-high fence. The boatwrights stopped to drink from blueware bowls before the one in red and the youth came over.

“I’m Rasali Ferry of Farside,” the woman said. Her voice was softer and higher than he had expected of a woman as strong as she, with the fluid vowels of the local accent. She nodded to the boy beside her: “Valo Ferry of Farside, my brother’s eldest.” Valo was more a young man than a boy, lighter-haired than Rasali and slightly taller. They had the same heavy eyebrows and direct amber eyes.

“Kit Meinem of Atyar,” Kit said.

Valo asked, “What sort of name is Meinem? It doesn’t mean anything.”

“In the capital, we take our names differently than you.”

“Oh, like Jenner Ellar.” Valo nodded. “I guessed you were from the capital—your clothes and your skin.”

Rasali said, “What can we do for you, Kit Meinem of Atyar?”

“I need to get to Farside today,” Kit said.

Rasali shook her head. “I can’t take you. I just got here, and it’s too soon. Perhaps Valo?”

The youth tipped his head to one side, his expression suddenly abstract. He shook his head. “No, not today, I don’t think.”

“I can buy out the fares, if that helps. It’s Jenner Ellar I am here to see.”

Valo looked interested but said, “No,” to Rasali, and she added, “What’s so important that it can’t wait a few days?”

Better now than later, Kit thought. “I am replacing Teniant Planner as the lead engineer and architect for construction of the bridge over the mist. We start work again as soon as I’ve reviewed everything. And had a chance to talk to Jenner.” He watched their faces.

Rasali said, “It’s been a year since Teniant died. I was starting to think Empire had forgotten all about us, and your deliveries would be here ‘til the iron rusted away.”

“Jenner Ellar’s not taking over?” Valo asked, frowning.

“The new Department of Roads cartel is in my name,” Kit said. “but I hope Jenner will remain as my second. You can see why I would like to meet him as soon as is possible, of course. He will—”

Valo burst out, “You’re going to take over from Jenner, after he’s worked so hard on this? And what about us? What about our work?” His cheeks were flushed an angry red. How do they conceal anything with skin like that? Kit thought.

“Valo,” Rasali said, a warning tone in her voice. Flushing darker still, the youth turned and strode away. Rasali snorted but said only: “Boys. He likes Jenner, and he has problems with the bridge, anyway.”

That was worth addressing. Later. “So what will it take to get you to carry me across the mist, Rasali Ferry of Farside? The project will pay anything reasonable.”

“I cannot,” she said. “Not today, not tomorrow. You’ll have to wait.”

“Why?” Kit asked: reasonably enough, he thought, but she eyed him for a long moment, as if deciding whether to be annoyed.

“Have you gone across mist before?” she said at last.

“Of course.”

“Not the river,” she said.

“Not the river,” he agreed. “It’s a quarter-mile across here, yes?”

“Oh, yes.” She smiled suddenly: white even teeth and warmth like sunlight in her eyes. “Let’s go down and perhaps I can explain things better there.” She jumped the fence with a single powerful motion, landing beside him to a chorus of cheers and shouts from the inn garden’s patrons. She laughed at them, then gestured to Kit to follow her. She was well-liked, clearly. Her opinion would matter.

The boat yard was heavily shaded by low-hanging oaks and chestnuts, and bounded on the east by an open-walled shelter filled with barrels and stacks of lumber. Rasali waved at the third boat maker, who was still putting her tools away. “Tilisk Boatwright of Nearside. My brother’s wife,” she said to Kit. “She makes skiffs with us but she won’t ferry. She’s not born to it as Valo and I are.”

“Where’s your brother?” Kit asked.

“Dead,” Rasali said, and lengthened her stride.

They walked a few streets over and then climbed a long even ridge perhaps eighty feet high, too regular to be natural. A levee, Kit thought, and distracted himself from the steep path by estimating the volume of earth and the labor that had been required to build it. Decades, perhaps, but how long ago? How long was it? The levee was treeless. The only feature was a slender wood tower hung with flags on the ridge, probably for signaling across the mist to Farside, since it appeared too fragile for anything else. They had storms out here, Kit knew; there’d been one the night before. How often was the tower struck by lightning?

Rasali stopped. “There.”

Kit had been watching his feet. He looked up and nearly cried out as light lanced his suddenly tearing eyes. He fell back a step and shielded his face. What had blinded him was an immense band of mist reflecting the morning sun.

Kit had never seen the mist river itself, though he bridged mist before this, two simple post-and-beam structures over narrow gorges closer to the capital. From his work in Atyar, he knew what was to be known. It was not water, or anything like. It did not flow but formed somehow in the deep gorge of the great riverbed before him. It found its way many hundreds of miles north, upstream through a hundred narrowing mist creeks and streams before failing at last in shreds of drying foam that left bare patches of earth where they collected.

The mist stretched to the south as well, a deepening, thickening band that poured out at last from the river’s mouth two thousand miles south to form the mist ocean, which lay on the face of the salt-water ocean. Water had to follow the river’s bed to run somewhere beneath or through the mist, but there was no way to prove this.

There was mist nowhere but this river and its streams and sea, but the mist split Empire in half.

After a moment, the pain in Kit’s eyes grew less, and he opened them again. The river was a quarter-mile across where they stood, a great gash of light between the levees. It seemed nearly featureless, blazing under the sun like a river of cream or of bleached silk, but as his eyes accustomed themselves, he saw the surface was not smooth but heaped and hollowed, and that it shifted slowly, almost indiscernibly, as he watched.

Rasali stepped forward, and Kit started. “I’m sorry,” he said with a laugh. “How long have I been staring? It’s just—I had no idea.”

“No one does,” Rasali said. Her eyes when he met them were amused.

The east and west levees were nearly identical, each treeless and scrub-covered, with a signal tower. The levee on their side ran down to a narrow bare bank half a dozen yards wide. There was a wooden dock and a boat ramp, a rough switchback leading down to them. Two large boats had been pulled onto the bank. Another, smaller dock was visible a hundred yards downstream, attended by a clutter of boats, sheds, and indeterminate piles covered in tarps.

“Let’s go down.” Rasali led the way, her words coming back to him over her shoulder. “The little ferry is Valo’s. Pearlfinder. The Tranquil Crossing’s mine.” Her voice warmed when she said the name. “Eighteen feet long, eight wide. Mostly pine, but a purpleheart keel and pearwood headpiece. You can’t see it from here, but the hull’s sheathed in blue-dyed fishskin. I can carry three horses or a ton and a half of cartage or fifteen passengers. Or various combinations. I once carried twenty-four hunting dogs and two handlers. Never again.”

Channeled by the levees, a steady light breeze eased down from the north. The air had a smell, not unpleasant but a little sour, wild. “How can you manage a boat like this alone? Are you that strong?”

“It’s as big as I can handle,” she said. “but Valo helps sometimes for really unwieldy loads. You don’t paddle through mist. I mostly just coax the Crossing to where I want it to go. Anyway, the bigger the boat, the more likely that the Big Ones will notice it—though if you do run into a fish, the smaller the boat, the easier it is to swamp. Here we are.”

They stood on the bank. The mist streams he had bridged had not prepared him for anything like this. Those were tidy little flows, more like fog collection in hollows than this. From this angle, the river no longer seemed a smooth flow of creamy whiteness, nor even gently heaped clouds. The mist forced itself into hillocks and hollows, tight slopes perhaps twenty feet high that folded into one another. It had a surface, but it was irregular, cracked in places, or translucent in others. It didn’t seem as clearly defined as that between water and air.

“How can you move on this?” Kit said, fascinated. “Or even float?” The hillock immediately before them was flattening as he watched. Beyond it something like a vale stretched out for a few dozen yards before turning and becoming lost to his eyes.

“Well, I can’t, not today,” Rasali said. She sat on the gunwale of her boat, one leg swinging, watching him. “I can’t push the Crossing up those slopes or find a safe path, unless I feel it. If I went today, I know—I know—” she tapped her belly—“that I would find myself stranded on a pinnacle or lost in a hole. That’s why I can’t take you today, Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

When Kit was a child, he had not been good with other people. He was small and easy to tease or ignore, and then he was sick for much of his seventh year and had to leave his crèche before the usual time, to convalesce in his mother’s house. None of the children of the crèche came to visit him, but he didn’t mind that: he had books and puzzles, and whole quires of blank paper that his mother didn’t mind him defacing.

The clock in the room in which he slept didn’t work, so one day he used his penknife to take it apart. He arranged the wheels and cogs and springs in neat rows on the quilt in his room, by type and then by size; by materials; by weight; by shape. He liked holding the tiny pieces, thinking of how they might have been formed and how they worked together. The patterns they made were interesting but he knew the best pattern would be the working one, when they were all put back into their right places and the clock performed its task again. He had to think that the clock would be happier that way, too.

He tried to rebuild the clock before his mother came upstairs from her counting house at the end of the day, but when he had reassembled things, there remained a pile of unused parts and it still didn’t work; so he shut the clock up and hoped she wouldn’t notice that it wasn’t ticking. Four days more of trying things during the day and concealing his failures at night; and on the fifth day, the clock started again. One piece hadn’t fit anywhere, a small brass cog. Kit still carried that cog in his pen case.

Late that afternoon, Kit returned to the river’s edge. It was hotter; the mud had dried to cracked dust and the air smelled like old rags left in water too long. He saw no one at the ferry dock, but at the fisher’s dock upstream, people were gathering, a score or more of men and women, with children running about.

The clutter looked even more disorganized as he approached. The fishing boats were fat coracles of leather stretched on frames, tipped bottom up to the sun and looking like giant warts. The mist had dropped so that he could see a band of exposed rock below the bank. , and he could see the dock’s pilings clearly, which were not vertical but set at an angle: a cantilevered deck braced into the stone underlying the bank. The wooden pilings had been sheathed in metal.

He approached a silver-haired woman doing something with a treble hook as long as her hand. “What are you catching with that?” he said.

Her forehead was wrinkled when she looked up, but she smiled when she saw him. “Oh, you’re a stranger. From Atyar, dressed like that. Am I right? We catch fish—” Still holding the hook, she extended her arms as far as they would stretch. “Bigger than that, some of them. Looks like more storms, so they’re going to be biting tonight. I’m Meg Threehooks. Of Nearside, obviously.”

“Kit Meinem of Atyar. I take it you can’t find a bottom?” He pointed to the pilings.

Jen Threehooks followed his glance. “It’s there somewhere, but it’s a long way down, and we can’t sink pilings because the mist dissolves the wood. Oh, and fish eat it. Same thing with our ropes, the boats, us—anything but metal and rock, really.” She knotted a line around the hook’s eye. The cord was dark and didn’t look heavy enough for anything Kit could imagine catching on hooks that size.

“What are these made of, then?” He squatted to look at the framing under one of the coracles.

“Careful, that one’s mine,” Meg said. “The hides—well, and all the ropes—are fishskin. Mist fish, not water fish. Tanning takes off some of the slime, so they don’t last forever either, not if they’re immersed.” She made a face. “We have a saying: foul as fish-slime. That’s pretty nasty, you’ll see.”

“I need to get to Farside,” Kit said. “Could I hire you to carry me across?”

“In my boat?” She snorted. “No, fishers stay close to shore. Go see Rasali Ferry. Or Valo.”

“I saw her,” he said ruefully.

“Thought so. You must be the new architect—city folk are always so impatient. You’re so eager to be dinner for a Big One? If Rasali doesn’t want to go then don’t go, stands to reason.”

Kit was footsore and frustrated by the time he returned to The Fish. His trunks were already upstairs, in a small cheerful room overwhelmed by a table that nearly filled it, with a stiflingly hot cupboard bed. When Kit spoke to the woman he’d talked to earlier, Brana Keep, the owner of The Fish (its real name turned out to be The Big One’s Delight)—laughed. “Rasali’s as hard to shift as bedrock,” she said. “And truly, you would not be comfortable at the Hart.”

By the next morning, when Kit came downstairs to break his fast on flatbread and pepper-rubbed fish, everyone appeared to know everything about him, especially his task. He had wondered whether there would be resistance to the project, but if there had been any, it was gone now. There were a few complaints, mostly about slow payments, a universal issue for public works; but none at all about the labor or organization. Most in the taproom seemed not to mind the bridge, and the feeling everywhere he went in town was optimistic. He’d run into more resistance elsewhere, building the small bridges.

“Well, why should we be concerned?” Brana Keep said to Kit. “You’re bringing in people to work, yes? So we’ll be selling room and board and clothes and beer to them. And you’ll be hiring some of us, and everyone will do well while you’re building this bridge of yours. I plan to be wading ankle-deep through gold by the time this is done.”

“And after,” Kit said, “when the bridge is complete—think of it, the first real link between the east and west sides of Empire. The only place for three thousand miles where people and trade can cross the mist easily, safely, whenever they wish. You’ll be the heart of Empire in ten years. Five.” He laughed a little, embarrassed by the passion that shook his voice.

“Yes, well,” Brana Keep said, in the easy way of a woman who makes her living by not antagonizing customers, “we’ll make that harness when the colt is born.”

For the next six days, Kit explored the town and surrounding countryside.

He met the masons, a brother and sister that Teniant had selected before her death to oversee the pillar and anchorage construction on Nearside. They were quiet but competent, and Kit was comfortable not replacing them.

Kit also spoke with the Nearside rope-makers, and performed tests on their fishskin ropes and cables, which turned out even stronger than he had hoped, with excellent resistance to rot and to catastrophic and slow failure. The makers told him that the rope stretched for its first two years in use, which made it ineligible to replace the immense chains that would bear the bridge’s weight; but it could replace the thousands of vertical suspender chains that that would support the roadbed with a great saving in weight.

He spent much of his time watching the mist. It changed character unpredictably: a smooth rippled flow; hours later, a badland of shredding foam; still later, a field of steep dunes that joined and shifted as he watched. He thought that the river generally dropped in its bed each day under the sun, and rose after dark.

The winds were more predictable. Hedged between the levees, they streamed southward each morning and northward each evening, growing stronger toward midday and dusk, and falling away entirely in the afternoons and at night. They did not seem to affect the mist much, though they did tear shreds off that landed on the banks as dried foam.

The winds meant that there would be more dynamic load on the bridge than Teniant Planner had predicted. Kit would never criticize her work publicly and he gladly acknowledged her brilliant interpersonal skills, which had brought the town into cheerful collaboration, but he was grateful that her bridge had not been built as designed.

He examined the mist more closely, as well, by lifting a piece from the river’s surface on the end of an oar. The mist was stiffer than it looked, and in bright light he thought he could see tiny shapes, perhaps creatures or plants or something altogether different. There were microscopes in the city and people who studied these things; but he had never bothered to learn more, interested only in the structure that would bridge it. In any case, living things interested him less than structures.

Nights, Kit worked on the table in his room. Teniant’s plans had to be revised. He opened the folios and cases she had left behind and read everything he found there. He wrote letters, wrote lists, wrote schedules, made duplicates of everything, sent to the capital for someone to do all the subsequent copying. His new plans for the bridge began to take shape. He started to glimpse the invisible architecture that was the management of the vast project.

He did not see Rasali Ferry, except to ask each morning whether they might travel that day. The answer was always no.

One afternoon, when the clouds were heaping into anvils filled with rain, he walked up to the building site half a mile north of Nearside. For two years, off and on, carts had tracked south on the Hoic Mine road and the West River Road, leaving limestone blocks and iron bars in untidy heaps. Huge dismantled sheerlegs lay beside a caretaker’s wattle-and-daub hut. There were thousands of large rectangular blocks.

Kit examined some of the blocks. Limestone was often too chossy for large-scale construction, but this rock was sound, with no apparent flaws or fractures. There were not enough, of course, but undoubtedly more had been quarried. He had written to order resumption of deliveries, and they would start arriving soon.

Delivered years too early, the iron trusses that would eventually support the roadbed were stacked neatly, paint black to protect them from moisture, covered in oiled tarps, and raised from the ground on planks to keep. Sheep grazed the knee-high grass that grew everywhere. When one of the sheep eyed him incuriously, Kit found himself bowing. “Forgive the intrusion,” he said and laughed: too old to be talking to sheep.

The test pit was still open, a ladder on the ground nearby. Weeds clung when he moved the ladder, as if reluctant to release it. He descended.

The pasture had not been noisy, but he was startled when he dropped below ground level and the insects and whispering grasses were suddenly silenced. The soil around him was striated shades of dun and dull yellow. Halfway down, he sliced a wedge free with his knife: lots of clay; good foundation soil, as he had been informed. The pit’s bottom, some twenty feet down, looked like the walls, but crouching to dig at the dirt between his feet with his knife, he hit rock almost immediately. It seemed to be shale. He wondered how far down the water table was: did the Nearsiders find it difficult to dig wells? Did the mist ever backwash into one? There were people at University in Atyar who were trying to understand mist, but there was still so much that could not be examined or quantified.

He collected a rock to examine in better light, and climbed from the pit in time to see a teamster leading four mules, her wagon groaning under the weight of the first new blocks. A handful of Nearsider men and women followed, rolling their shoulders and popping their joints. They called out greetings and he walked across to them.

When he got back to The Fish hours later, exhausted from helping unload the cart, and soaked from the storm that had started while he did so, there was a message from Rasali. Dusk was all it said.

Kit was stiff and irritable when he left for the Tranquil Crossing. He had hired a carrier from The Fish to haul one of his trunks down to the dock, but the others remained in his room, which he would probably keep until the bridge was done. He carried his folio of plans and paperwork himself. He was leaving duplicates of everything on Nearside, but after so much work it was hard to trust any of it to the hands of others.

The storm was over and the clouds were moving past, leaving the sky every shade between lavender and a rich purple-blue. The large moon was a crescent in the west; the smaller a half circle immediately overhead. In the fading light, the mist was a dark, smoky streak. The air smelled fresh. Kit’s mood lightened, and he half-trotted down the final slope.

His fellow passengers were there before him: a prosperous-looking man with a litter of piglets in a woven wicker cage (Tengon whites, the man confided, the best bloodline in all Empire) ; a woman in the dark clothes fashionable in the capital, with brass-bound document cases and a folio very like Kit’s; two traders with many cartons of powdered pigment; a mail courier with locked leather satchels and two guards. Nervous about their first crossing, Uni and Tom Mason greeted Kit when he arrived.

In the gathering darkness, the mist looked like bristling, tight-folded hills and coulees. Swifts darted just above mist, using the wind flowing us the valley, searching for insects, he supposed. Once a sudden black shape, too quick to see clearly, appeared from below; then it, and one of the birds, was gone.

The voices of the fishers at their dock carried to him. They launched their boats, and he watched one and then another, and then a gaggle of the little coracles push themselves up a slope of the mist. There were no lamps.

“Ready, everyone?” Kit had not heard Rasali approach. She swung down into the ferry. “Hand me your gear.”

Stowing and embarkation were quick though the piglets complained. Kit strained his eyes, but the coracles could no longer be seen. When he noticed Rasali waiting for him, he apologized. “I guess the fish are biting.”

Rasali glanced at the river as she stowed his trunk. “Small ones. A couple of feet long only. The fishers like them bigger, five or six feet, though they don’t want them too big, either. But they’re not fish, not what you think fish are. Hand me that.”

He hesitated a moment, then gave her the folio before stepping into the ferry. The boat sidled at his weight but sluggishly: a carthorse instead of a riding mare. His stomach lurched. “Oh!” he said.

“What?” one of the traders asked nervously. Rasali untied the rope holding them to the dock.

Kit swallowed. “I had forgotten. The motion of the boat. It’s not like water at all.”

He did not mention his fear, but there was no need. The others murmured assent. The courier, her dark face sharp-edged as a hawk, growled, “Every time I do this, it surprises me. I dislike it.”

Rasali unshipped a scull and slid the great triangular blade into the mist, which parted reluctantly. “I’ve been on mist more than water but I remember the way water felt. Quick and jittery. This is better.”

“Only to you, Rasali Ferry,” Uni Mason said.

“Water’s safer,” the man with the piglets said.

Rasali leaned into the oar and the boat slid away from the dock. “Anything is safe until it kills you.”

The mist absorbed the quiet sounds of shore almost immediately. One of Kit’s first projects had been a stone single-arch bridge over water, far to the north in Eskje province. He had visited before construction started. He was there for five days more than he had expected, caught by a snowstorm that left nearly two feet on the ground. This reminded him of those snowy moonless nights, the air as thick and silencing as a pillow on the ears.

Rasali did not scull so much as steer. It was hard to see far in any direction except up, but perhaps it was true that the mist spoke to her, for she seemed to know where best to position the boat for the mist to carry it forward. She followed a small valley until it started to flatten and then mound up. The Tranquil Crossing tipped slightly as it slid a few feet to port. The mail carrier made a noise, and immediately stifled it.

Mist was a misnomer. It was denser than it seemed. Sometimes the boat seemed not to move through it so much as over its surface. Tonight it seemed like sea-wrack, the dirty foam that strong winds could whip from ocean waves. Kit reached a hand over the boat’s side. The mist piled against his hand, almost dry to the touch, sliding up his forearm with a sensation he could not immediately identify. When he realized it was prickling, he snatched his arm back in and rubbed it on a fold of his coat. The skin burned. Caustic, of course.

The man with the pigs whispered, “Will they come if we talk or make noise?”

“Not to talking, or pigs’ squealing,” Rasali said. “They seem to like low noises. They’ll rise to thunder sometimes.”

One of the traders said, “What are they if they’re not really fish? What do they look like?” Her voice shook. The mist was weighing on them all, all but Rasali.

“If you want to know you’ll have to see one for yourself,” Rasali said. “Or try to get a fisher to tell you. They gut and fillet them over the sides of their boats. No one else sees much but meat wrapped in paper, or rolls of black skin for the ropemakers and tanners.”

“You’ve seen them,” Kit said.

“They’re broad and flat. But ugly.”

“And Big Ones?” Kit asked.

Her voice was harsh. “Them, we don’t talk about here.”

No one spoke for a time. Mist—foam—heaped up at the boat’s prow and parted, eased to the sides with an almost inaudible hissing. Once the mist off the port side heaved, and something dark broke the surface for a moment, followed by other dark somethings, but they were not close enough to see well. One of the merchants cried without a sound or movement, the tears on his face the only evidence.

The Farside levee showed at last, a black mass that didn’t get any closer for what felt like hours. Fighting his fear, Kit leaned over the side, keeping his face away from the surface. “It can’t really be bottomless,” he said, half to himself. “What’s under it?”

“You wouldn’t hit the bottom, anyway,” Rasali said.

The Tranquil Crossing eased up a long swell of mist and into a hollow. Rasali pointed the ferry along a crease in the and eased it forward. And then they were suddenly a stone’s throw from the Farside dock and the light of its torches.

People on the dock moved as they approached. Just loudly enough to carry, a soft baritone voice called, “Rasali?”

She called back, “Ten this time, Pen.”

“Anyone need carriers?” A different voice. Several passengers responded.

Rasali shipped the skull while the ferry was still some feet away from the dock, and allowed it to ease forward under its own momentum. She stepped to the prow and picked up a coiled rope there, tossing one end across the narrowing distance. Someone on the dock caught it and pulled the boat in, and in a very few moments, the ferry was snug against the dock.

Disembarking and payment was quicker as embarkation had been. Kit was the last off, and after a brief discussion he hired a carrier to haul his trunk to an inn in town. He turned to say farewell to Rasali. She and the man—Pen, Kit remembered—were untying the boat. “You’re not going back already,” he said.

“Oh, no.” Her voice sounded loose, content, relaxed. Kit hadn’t known how tense she was. “We’re just going to tow the boat down to where the Twins will pull it out.” She waved with one hand to the boat launch. A pair of white oxen gleamed in the night, at their heads a woman hardly darker.

“Wait,” Kit said to Uni Mason and handed her his folio. “Please tell the innkeeper I’ll be there soon.” He turned back to Rasali. “May I help?”

In the darkness, he felt more than saw her smile. “Always.”

The Red Lurcher, commonly called The Bitch, was a small but noisy inn five minutes’ walk from the mist, ten (he was told) from the building site. His room was larger than at The Fish, with an uncomfortable bed and a window seat crammed with quires of ancient hand-written music. Jenner stayed here, Kit knew, but when he asked the owner (Widson Innkeep, a heavyset man with red hair turning silver), he had not seen him. “You’ll be the new one, the architect,” Widson said.

“Yes,” Kit said. “Please ask him to see me when he gets in.”

Widson wrinkled his forehead. “I don’t know, he’s been out late most days recently, since—” He cut himself off, looking guilty.

“—since the signals informed him that I was here,” Kit said. “I understand the impulse.”

The innkeeper seemed to consider something for a moment, then said slowly, “We like Jenner here.”

“Then we’ll try to keep him,” Kit said.

When the child Kit had recovered from the illness, he did not return to the crèche—which he would have been leaving in a year in any case—but went straight to his father. Davell Meinem was a slow-talking humorous man who nevertheless had a sharp tongue on the sites of his many projects. He brought Kit with him to his work places: best for the boy to get some experience in the trade.

Kit loved everything about his father’s projects: the precisely drawn plans, the orderly progression of construction, the lines and curves of brick and iron and stone rising under the endlessly random sky.

For the first year or two, Kit imitated his father and the workers, building structures of tiny beams and bricks made by the woman set to mind him, a tiler who had lost a hand some years back. Davell collected the boy at the end of the day. “I’m here to inspect the construction,” he said, and Kit demonstrated his bridge or tower, or the materials he had laid out in neat lines and stacks. Davell would discuss Kit’s work with great seriousness until it grew too dark to see and they went back to the inn or rented rooms that passed for home near the sites.

Davell spent nights buried in the endless paperwork of his projects, and Kit found this interesting as well. The pattern that went into building something big was not just the architectural plans or the construction itself; it was also labor schedules and documentation and materials deliveries. He started to draw his own plans, but he also made up endless correspondences with imaginary providers.

After a while, Kit noticed that a large part of the pattern that made a bridge or a tower was built entirely out of people.

The knock on Kit’s door came very late that night, a preemptory rap. Kit put down the quill he was mending and rolled his shoulders to loosen them. “Yes,” he said aloud as he stood.

The man who stormed through the door was as dark as Kit, though perhaps a few years younger. He wore mud-splashed riding clothes.

“I am Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

“Jenner Ellar of Atyar. Show it to me.” Silently Kit handed the cartel to Jenner, who glared at it before tossing it onto the table. “It took long enough for them to pick a replacement.”

Might as well deal with this right now, Kit thought. “You hoped it would be you.”

Jenner eyed Kit for a moment. “Yes. I did.”

“You think you’re the most qualified to complete the project because you’ve been here for the last—what is it? year?”

“I know the sites,” Jenner said. “I worked with Teniant to make those plans. And then Empire sends—” He turned to face the empty hearth.

“—Empire sends someone new,” Kit said to Jenner’s back. “Someone with connections in the capital, influential friends but no experience with this site, this bridge. It should have been you, yes?”

Jenner was still.

“But it isn’t,” Kit said, and let the words hang for a moment. “I’ve built nine bridges in the past twenty years. Four suspension bridges, three major spans. Two bridges over mist. You’ve done three and the biggest span you’ve directed was three hundred and fifty feet, six stone arches over shallow water and shifting gravel up on Mati River.”

“I know,” Jenner snapped.

“It’s a good bridge.” Kit poured two glasses of whiskey from a stoneware pitcher by the window. “I coached down to see it before I came here. It’s well made and you were on budget and nearly on schedule in spite of the drought. Better, the locals still like you. Asked how you’re doing these days. Here.”

Jenner took the glass Kit offered. Good. Kit continued, “Meinems have built bridges—and roads and aqueducts and stadia, a hundred sorts of public structures—for Empire for a thousand years.” Jenner turned to speak, but Kit held up his hand. “This doesn’t mean we’re any better at it than Ellars. But Empire knows us—and we know Empire, how to do what we need to. If they’d given you this bridge, you’d be replaced within a year. But I can get this bridge built and I will.” Kit sat and leaned forward, elbows on knees. “With you. You’re talented. You know the site. You know the people. Help me make this bridge.”

“It’s real to you,” Jenner said finally. Kit knew what he meant: You care about this work. It’s not just another tick on a list.

“Yes,” Kit said. “You’ll be my second for this one. I’ll show you how to deal with Atyar and I’ll help you with contacts. And your next project will belong entirely to you. This is the first bridge but it isn’t going to be the only one across the mist.”

Together they drank. The whiskey bit at Kit’s throat and made his eyes water. “Oh,” he said, “that’s awful.”

Jenner laughed suddenly and met his eyes for the first time: a little wary still but willing to be convinced. “Farside whiskey is terrible. You drink much of this, you’ll be running for Atyar in a month.”

“Maybe we’ll have something better ferried across,” Kit said.

Preparations were not so far along on this side. The heaps of blocks at the construction site were not so massive, and it was harder to find local workers. In discussions between Kit, Jenner and the Near- and Farside masons who would oversee construction of the pillars, final plans materialized. This would be unique, the largest structure of its kind ever attempted: a single-span chain suspension bridge a quarter of a mile long. The basic plan remained unchanged: the bridge would be supported by eyebar-and-bolt chains, four on each side, allowed to play independently to compensate for the slight shifts that would be caused by traffic on the roadbed. The huge eyebars and their bolts were being fashioned five hundred miles away and far to the north, where iron was common and the smelting and ironworking were the best in Empire. Kit had just written to the foundries to start the work again.

The pillar and anchorage on Nearside would be built of gold limestone anchored with pilings into the bedrock; on Farside they would be pink-gray granite with a funnel-shaped foundation. The towers’ heights would be nearly three hundred feet. There were taller towers back in Atyar, but none had to stand against the compression of the bridge.

The initial tests with the fishskin rope had showed it to be nearly as strong as iron, without the weight. When Kit asked the Farside tanners and ropemakers about its durability, he was taken a day’s travel east to Meknai, to a waterwheel that used knotted belts of the material for its drive. The belts, he was told, were seventy-five years old and still sound. Fishskin wore like maplewood so long as it wasn’t left in mist, but it required regular maintenance.

He watched Meknai’s little river for a time. There had been rain recently in the foothills, and the water was quick and abrupt as light. Water bridges are easy, he thought a little wistfully, and then: Anyone can bridge water.

Kit revised the plans again, to use the lighter material where they could. Jenner crossed the mist to Nearside, to work with Daell and Stivvan Cabler on the expansion of their workshops and ropewalk.

Without Jenner (who was practically a local, as Kit was told again and again), Kit felt the difference in attitudes on the river’s two banks more clearly. Most Farsiders shared the Nearsiders’ attitudes: money is money and always welcome, and there was a sense of the excitement that comes of any great project; but there was more resistance here. Empire was effectively split by the river, and the lands to the east—starting with Nearside—had never seen their destinies as closely linked to Atyar in the west. They were overseen by the eastern capital, Triple; their taxes went to building necessities on their own side of the mist. Empire’s grasp on the eastern lands was loose, and had never needed to be tighter.

The bridge would change things. Travel between Atyar and Triple would grow more common, and perhaps Empire would no longer hold the eastern lands so gently. Triple’s lack of enthusiasm for the project showed itself in delayed deliveries of stone and iron. Kit traveled five days along the Triple road to the district seat to present his credentials to the governor, and wrote sharp letters to the Department of Roads in Triple. Things became a little easier.

It was midwinter before the design was finished. Kit avoided crossing the mist. Rasali Ferry crossed seventeen times. He managed to see her nearly every time, at least for as long as it took to drink a beer.

The second time Kit crossed, it was midmorning of an early spring day. The mist mirrored the overcast sky above: pale and flat, like a layer of fog in a dell . Rasali was loading the ferry at the upper dock when Kit arrived and to his surprise she smiled at him, her face suddenly beautiful. Kit nodded to the stranger watching Valo toss immense cloth-wrapped bales down to Rasali, then greeted the Ferrys. Valo paused for a moment but did not return Kit’s greeting, only bent again to his work. Valo had been avoiding him since nearly the beginning of his time there. Later. With a mental shrug, Kit turned from Valo to Rasali. She was catching and stacking the enormous bales easily.

“What’s in those? You throw them as if they were—”

“—paper,” she finished. “The very best Ibraric mulberry paper. Light as lambswool. You probably have a bunch of this stuff in that folio of yours.”

Kit thought of the vellum he used for his plans, and the paper he used for everything else: made of cotton from the south, its surface buffed until it felt hard and smooth as enamelwork. He said, “All the time.”

Rasali piled on bales and more bales until the ferry was stacked three and four high. He added, “Is there going to be room for me in there?”

“Pilar Runner and Valo aren’t coming with us,” she said. “You’ll have to sit on top of the bales, but there’s room as long as you sit still and don’t wobble.”

As Rasali pushed away from the dock Kit asked, “Why isn’t the trader coming with her paper?”

“Why would she? Pilar has a broker on the other side.” Her hands busy, she tipped her head to one side, in a gesture that somehow conveyed a shrug. “Mist is dangerous.”

Somewhere along the River a ferry was lost every few months: horses, people, cartage, all lost. Fishers stayed closer to shore and died less often. It was harder to calculate the impact to trade and communications of this barrier splitting Empire in half.

This journey—in daylight, alone with Rasali—was very different than Kit’s earlier crossing: less frightening but somehow wilder, stranger. The cold wind down the river was cutting and brought bits of dried foam to rest on his skin, but they blew off quickly, without pain and leaving no mark. The wind fell to a breeze and then to nothing as they navigated into the mist, as if they were buried in feathers or snow.

They moved through what looked like a layered maze of thick cirrus clouds. He watched the mist along the Crossing’s side until they passed over a small hole like a pockmark, straight down and no more than a foot across. For an instant he glimpsed open space below them; they were floating on a layer of mist above an air pocket deep enough to swallow the boat. He rolled onto his back to stare up at the sky until he stopped shaking; when he looked again, they were out of the maze, it seemed. The boat floated along a gently curving channel. He relaxed a little and moved to watch Rasali.

“How fares your bridge?” Rasali said at last, her voice muted in the muffled air. This had to be a courtesy—everyone in town seemed to know everything about the bridge’s progress—but Kit was used to answering questions to which people already knew the answers. He had found patience to be a highly effective tool.

“Farside foundations are doing well. We have maybe six more months before the anchorage is done, but pilings for the pillar’s foundation are in place and we can start building. Six weeks early,” Kit said, a little smugly, though this was a victory no one else would appreciate and in one case the weather was as much to be credited as any action on his part. “On Nearside, we’ve run into basalt that’s too hard to drill easily so we sent for a specialist. The signal flags say she’s arrived, and that’s why I’m crossing.”

She said nothing, seemingly intent on moving the great scull. He watched her for a time, content to see her shoulders flex, hear her breath forcing itself out in smooth waves. Over the faint yeast scent of the mist, he smelled her sweat, or thought he did. She frowned slightly but he could not tell whether it was due to her labor, or something in the mist, or something else. Who was she, really? “May I ask a question, Rasali Ferry of Farside?”

Rasali nodded, eyes on the mist in front of the boat.

Actually, he had several things he wished to know: about her, about the river, about the people here. He picked one almost at random. “What is bothering Valo?

“He’s transparent, isn’t he? He thinks you take something away from him,” Rasali said. “He is too young to know what you take is unimportant.”

Kit thought about it. “His work?”

“His work is unimportant?” She laughed, a sudden puff of an exhale as she pulled. “We have a lot of money, Ferrys. We own land and rent it out—the Deer’s Hart belongs to my family; do you know that? He’s young. He wants what we all want at his age, a chance to test himself against the world and see if he measures up. And because he’s a Ferry he wants be tested against adventures. Danger. The mist. Valo thinks you take that away from him.”

“But he’s not immortal,” Kit said. “Whatever he thinks. The river can kill him. It will, sooner or later. It—”

—will kill you. Kit caught himself, rolled onto his back again to look up at the sky.

In The Bitch’s taproom one night, a local man had told him about Rasali’s family: a history of deaths, of boats lost in a silent hissing of mist, or the rending of wood, or screams that might be human and might be a horse. “So everyone wears ash-color for a month or two, and then the next Ferry takes up the business. Rasali’s still new, two years maybe. When she goes, it’ll be Valo, then Rasali’s youngest sister, then Valo’s sister. Unless Rasali or Valo have kids by then.

“They’re always beautiful,” the man had added after some more porter, “the Ferrys. I suppose that’s to make up for having such short lives.”

Kit looked down from the paper bales at Rasali. “But you’re different. You don’t feel you’re losing anything.”

“You don’t know what I feel, Kit Meinem of Atyar.” Cool light moved along the muscles of her arms. Her voice came again, softer. “I am not young; I don’t need to prove myself. But I will lose this. The mist, the silence.”

Then tell me, he did not say. Show me.

She was silent for the rest of the trip. Kit thought perhaps she was angry, but when he invited her, she accompanied him to the building site.

The quiet pasture was gone. All that remained of the tall grass was struggling tufts and dirty straw. The air smelled of sweat and meat and the bitter scent of hot metal. There were more blocks here now, a lot more. The pits for the anchorage and the pillar were excavated to bedrock, overshadowed by mountains of dirt. One sheep remained, skinned and spitted, and greasy smoke rose as a boy turned it over a fire beside the temporary forge. Kit had considered the pasture a nuisance, but looking at the skewered sheep he felt a twinge of guilt.

The rest of the flock had been replaced by sturdy-looking women and men, who were using rollers to shift stones down a dugout ramp into the hole for the anchorage foundation. Dust dulled their skin and muted the bright colors of their short kilts and breastbands. In spite of the cold, sweat had cleared tracks along their muscles.

One of the workers waved to Rasali and she waved back. Kit recalled his name: Mik Rounder, very strong but he needed direction. Had they been lovers? Relationships out here were tangled in ways Kit didn’t understand; in the capital such things were more formal and often involved contracts.

Jenner and a small woman knelt conferring on the exposed stone floor of the larger pit. When Kit slid down the ladder to join them, the small woman bowed slightly. Her eyes and short hair and skin all seemed to be turning the same iron gray. “I am Liu Breaker of Hoic. Your specialist.”

“Kit Meinem of Atyar. How shall we address this?”

“Your Jenner says you need some of this basalt cleared away, yes?”

Kit nodded.

Liu knelt to run her hand along the pit’s floor. “See where the color and texture change along this line? Your Jenner was right: this upthrust of basalt is a problem. Here where the shale is, you can carve out most of the foundation the usual way with drills, picks. But the basalt is too hard to drill.” She straightened and brushed dust from her knees. “Have you ever seen explosives used?”

Kit shook his head. “We haven’t needed them for any of my projects. I’ve never been to the mines, either.”

“Not much good anywhere else,” Liu said, “but very useful for breaking up large amounts of rock. A lot of the blocks you have here were loosed using explosives.” She grinned. “You’ll like the noise.”

“We can’t afford to break the bedrock’s structural integrity.”

“I brought enough powder for a number of small charges. Comparatively small.”

“How—”

Liu held up a weathered hand. “I don’t need to understand bridges to walk across one. Yes?”

Kit laughed outright. “Yes.”

Liu Breaker was right; Kit liked the noise very much. Liu would not allow anyone close to the pit but even from what se considered a safe distance, behind huge pile of dirt, the explosion was an immense shattering thing, a crack of thunder that shook the earth. There was a second of echoing silence. After a collective gasp and some scattered screams, the workers cheered and stamped their feet. A small cloud of mingled smoke and rock-dust eased over the pit’s edge, sharp with the smell of saltpeter. The birds were not happy; with the explosion, they burst from their trees and wheeled nervously.

Grinning, Liu climbed from her bunker near the pit, her face dust-caked everywhere but around her eyes, which had been protected by the wooden slit-goggles now hanging around her neck. “So far so good,” she shouted over the ringing in Kit’s ears. Seeing his face she laughed. “These are nothing—gnat sneezes. You should hear when we quarry granite up at Hoic.”

Kit was going to speak more with her when he noticed Rasali striding away. He had forgotten she was there. He followed her, half shouting to hear himself. “Some noise, yes?”

Rasali whirled. “What are you thinking?” She was shaking and her lips were white. Her voice was very loud.

Taken aback, Kit answered, “We are blowing the foundations.” Rage? Fear? He wished he could think a little more clearly but the sound seemed to have stunned his wits.

“And making the earth shake! The Big Ones come to thunder, Kit!”

“It wasn’t thunder,” he said.

“Tell me it wasn’t worse!” Tears glittered in her eyes. Her voice was dulled by the echo in his ears. “They will come, I know it.”

He reached a hand out to her. “It’s a tall levee, Rasali. Even if they do, they’re not going to come over that.” His heart in his chest thrummed. His head was hurting. It was so hard to hear her.

“No one knows what they’ll do! They used to destroy whole towns, drifting inland on foggy nights. Why do you think they built the levees a thousand years ago? The Big Ones—”

She stopped shouting, listening. She mouthed something but Kit could not hear her over the beating in his ears, his heart, his head. He realized suddenly that these were not the after-effects of the explosion; the air itself was beating. He was aware at the edges of his vision of the other workers, every face turned toward the mist. There was nothing to see but the overcast sky. No one moved.

But the sky was moving.

Behind the levee the river mist was rising, dirty gray-gold against the steel-gray of the clouds in a great boiling upheaval at least a hundred feet high, to be seen over the levee. The mist was seething, breaking open in great swirls and rifts, everything moving, changing. Kit had seen a great fire once when a warehouse of linen had burned, and the smoke had poured upward and looked a little like this before it was torn apart by the wind.

Gaps opened in the mountain of mist and closed; and others opened, darker the deeper they were. And through those gaps, in the brown-back shadows at the heart of the mist, was movement.

The gaps closed. After an eternity the mist slowly smoothed and then settled back, behind the levee, and could no longer be seen. He wasn’t really sure when the thrumming of the air blended back into the ringing of his ears.

“Gone,” Rasali said with a sound like a sob.

A worker made one of the vivid jokes that come after fear; the others laughed, too loud. A woman ran up the levee and shouted down, “Farside levees are fine; ours are fine.” More laughter: people jogged off to Nearside to check on their families.

The back of Kit’s hand was burning. A flake of foam had settled and left an irregular mark. “I only saw mist,” Kit said. “Was there a Big One?”

Rasali shook herself, stern now but no longer angry or afraid. Kit had learned this about the Ferrys, that their emotions coursed through them and then dissolved. “It was in there. I’ve seen the most boil like that before but never so big. Nothing else could heave it up like that.”

“On purpose?”

“Oh, who knows? They’re a mystery, the Big Ones.” She met his eyes. “I hope your bridge is very high, Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

Kit looked to where the mist had been, but there was only sky. “The deck will be two hundred feet above the mist. High enough. I hope.”

Liu Breaker walked up to them, rubbing her hands on her leather leggings. “So, that’s not something that happens at Hoic. Very exciting. What do you call that? How do we prevent it next time?”

Rasali looked at the smaller woman for a moment. “I don’t think you can. Big Ones come when they come.”

Liu said, “They do not always come?”

Rasali shook her head.

“Well, cold comfort is better than no comfort, as my Da says.”

Kit rubbed his temples; the headache remained. “We’ll continue.”

“Then you’ll have to be careful,” Rasali said. “Or you will kill us all.”

“The bridge will save many lives,” Kit said. Yours, eventually.

Rasali turned on her heel.

Kit did not follow her, not that day. Whether it was because subsequent explosions were smaller (“As small as they can be and still break rock,” Liu said), or because they were doing other things, the Big Ones did not return, though fish were plentiful for the three months it took to plan and plant the charges, and break the bedrock.

There was also a Meinem tradition of metal-working, and Meinem reeves, and many Meinems went into fields altogether different; but Kit had known from nearly the beginning that he would be one of the building Meinems. He loved the invisible architecture of construction, looking for a compromise between the vision in his head and the sites, the materials, and the people that would make them real. The challenge was to compromise as little as possible.

Architecture was studied at University. His tutor was a materials specialist, a woman who had directed construction on an incredible twenty-three bridges. Skossa Timt was so old that her skin and hair had faded together to the white of Gani marble, and she walked with a cane she had designed herself for efficiency. She taught him much. Materials had rules, patterns of behavior: they bent or crumbled or cracked or broke under quantifiable stresses. They strengthened or destroyed one another. Even the best materials in stablest combinations did not last forever—she tapped her own forehead with one gnarled finger and laughed—but if he did his work right, they could last a thousand years or more. “But not forever,” Skossa said. “Do your best, but don’t forget this.”

The anchorages and pillars grew. Workers came from towns up and down each bank; and locals, idle or inclined to make money from outside, were hired on the spot. Generally, the new people were welcome. They paid for rooms and food and goods of all sorts. The taverns settled into making double and then triple batches of everything, threw out new wings and stables. Nearside accepted the new people easily, the only fights late at night when people had been drinking and flirting more than they should. Farside had fist fights more frequently though they decreased steadily as skeptics gave in to the money that flowed into Farside, or to the bridge itself, its pillars too solid to be denied.

Farmers and husbanders sold their fields, and new buildings sprawled out from the towns’ hearts. Some were made of wattle and daub, slapped together over stamped-earth floors that still smelled of sheep dung; others, small but permanent, went up more slowly, as the bridge builders laid fieldstones and timber in their evenings and on rest days.

The new people and locals mixed together until it was hard to tell the one from the other, though the older townfolk kept scrupulous track of who truly belonged. For those who sought lovers and friends, the new people were an opportunity to meet someone other than the men and women they had known since childhood. Many met casual lovers, and several term-partnered with new people. There was even a Nearside wedding, between Kes Tiler and a black-eyed builder from far to the south called Jolite Deveren, whatever that meant.

Kit did not have lovers. Working every night until he fell asleep over his paperwork, he didn’t miss it much, except late on certain nights when thunderstorms left him restless and unnaturally alert, as though lightning ran under his skin. Some nights he thought of Rasali, wondered whether she was sleeping with someone that night or alone, and wondered if the storm had awakened her, left her restless as well.

Kit saw a fair amount of Rasali when they were both on the same side of the mist. She was clever and calm and the only person who did not want to talk about the bridge all the time.

Kit did not forget what Rasali said about Valo. Kit had been a young man himself not so many years before, and he remembered what young men and women felt, the hunger to prove themselves against the world. Kit didn’t need Valo to accept the bridge—he was scarcely into adulthood and his only influence over the townspeople was based on his work, but Kit liked the youth, who had Rasali’s eyes and her effortless way of moving.

Valo started asking questions, first of the other workers and then of Kit. His boat-building experience meant the questions were good ones. Kit passed on the first things he had learned as a child on his father’s sites, and showed him the manipulation of the immense blocks and the tricky balance of material and plan; the strength of will that allows a man to direct a thousand people toward a single vision. Valo was too honest not to recognize Kit’s mastery and too competitive not to try and meet Kit on his own ground. He came more often to visit the construction sites.

After a season, Kit took him aside. “You could be a builder if you wished.”

Valo flushed. “Build things? You mean bridges?”

“Or houses or granges or retaining walls. Or bridges. You could make peoples’ lives better.”

“Change peoples’ lives?” He frowned suddenly. “No.”

“Our lives change all the time, whether we want them to or not,” Kit said. “Valo Ferry of Farside, you are intelligent. You are good with people. You learn quickly. If you were interested, I could start teaching you myself or send you to Atyar to study there.”

“Valo Builder...” he said, trying it out, then: “No.” But after that, whenever he had time free from ferrying or building boats, he was always to be found on the site. Kit knew that the answer would be different the next time he asked. There was for everything a possibility, an invisible pattern that could be made manifest given work and the right materials. Kit wrote to an old friend or two, finding contacts that would help Valo when the time came.

The pillars and anchorages grew. Winter came, and summer, and a second winter. There were falls, a broken arm, two sets of cracked ribs. Someone on Farside had her toes crushed when one of the stones slipped from its rollers and she lost the foot. The bridge was on schedule even after the delay caused by the slow rock-breaking. There were no problems with payroll or the Department of Roads or Empire, and only minor manageable issues with the occasionally disruptive representatives from Triple or the local governors.

Kit knew he was lucky.

The first death came during one of Valo’s visits.

It was early in the second winter of the bridge, and Kit had been in Farside for three months. He had learned that winter meant gray skies and rain and sometimes snow. Soon they would have to stop the heavy work for the season. Still, it had been a good day and the workers had lifted and placed almost a hundred stones.

Valo had returned after three weeks at Nearside building a boat for Jenna Bluefish. Kit found him staring up at the slim tower through a rain so faint it felt like fog. The black opening of the roadway arch looked out of place halfway up the pillar.

Valo said, “You’re a lot farther along since I was here last. How tall now?”

Kit got this question a lot. “A hundred and five feet, more or less. A third finished.”

Valo smiled, shook his head. “Hard to believe it’ll stay up.”

“There’s a tower in Atyar, black basalt and iron, five hundred feet. Five times this tall.”

“It just looks so delicate,” Valo said. “I know what you said, that most of the stress on the pillar is compression, but it still looks as though it’ll snap in half.”

“After a while you’ll have more experience with suspension bridges and it will seem less....unsettling. Would you like to see the progress?”

Valo’s eyes brightened. “May I? I don’t want to get in the way.”

“I haven’t been up yet today, and they’ll be finishing up soon. Scaffold or stairwell?”

Valo looked at the scaffolding against one face of the pillar, the ladders tied into place within it, and shivered. “I can’t believe people go up that. Stairs, I think.”

Kit followed Valo. The steep internal stair was three feet wide and endlessly turning, five steps up and then a platform, turn to the left and then five more steps and turn. Eventually the stairs would at need be lit by lanterns set into alcoves at every third turning, but today Kit and Valo felt their way up, fingers trailing along the cold damp stone, a small lantern in Valo’s hand. The stairwell smelled of water and earth and the thin smell of the burning lamp oil. Some of the workers hated the stairs and preferred the ladders outside, but Kit liked it. For these few moments, he was part of his bridge, a strong bone buried deep in flesh he had created.

They came out at the top and paused a moment to look around the unfinished courses, and the black silhouette of the winch against the dulling sky. The last few workers were breaking down a sheerleg, which had been sued to move blocks around the pillar. A lantern hung from a pole jammed into one of the holes the laborers would fill with rods and molten iron, later in construction. Kit nodded to them as Valo went to an edge to look down.

“It is wonderful,” Valo said, smiling. “Being high like this—you can look right down into people’s kitchen yards. Look, Teli Carpenter has a pig smoking.”

“You don’t need to see it to know that,” Kit said dryly. “I’ve been smelling it for two days.”

Valo snorted. “Can you see as far as White Peak yet?”

“On a clear day, yes,” Kit said. “I was up here two—”

A heavy sliding sound and a scream. Kit whirled to see one of the workers on her back, one of the sheerleg’s timbers across her chest. Loreh Tanner, a local. Kit ran the few steps to Loreh and dropped beside her. One man, the man who had been working with her, said, “It slipped—oh Loreh, please hang on,” but Kit could see already that it was futile. She was pinned to the pillar, chest flattened, one shoulder visibly dislocated, unconscious, her breathing labored. Black foam bloomed from her lips in the lantern’s bad light.

Kit took her cold hand. “It’s all right, Loreh. It’s all right.” It was a lie and in any case she could not hear him, but the others would. “Get Hall,” one of the workers said and Kit nodded: Hall was a surgeon. And then, “And get Obal, someone. Where’s her husband?” Footsteps ran down the stairs and were lost into the hiss of rain just beginning and someone’s crying and Loreh’s wet breathing.

Kit glanced up. His chest heaving, Valo stood staring at the body. Kit said to him, “Help find Hall,” and when the boy did not move he repeated it, his voice sharper. Valo said nothing, did not stop looking at Loreh until he spun and ran down the stairs. Kit heard shouting far below as the first messenger ran toward the town.

Loreh took a last shuddering breath and died.

Kit looked at the others around Loreh’s body. The man holding Loreh’s other hand pressed his face against it crying helplessly. The two other workers left here knelt at her feet, a man and a woman, huddled close, though they were not a couple. “Tell me,” he said.

“I tried to stop it from hitting her,” the woman said. She cradled one arm: obviously broken, though she didn’t seem to have noticed. “But it just kept falling.”

“She was tired, She must have gotten careless,” the man said, and the broken-armed woman said, “I don’t want to think about that sound.” Words fell from them like blood from a cut.

Kit listened. This was what they needed right now, to speak and to be heard. So he listened, and when the others came, Loreh’s husband Obal white-lipped and angry-eyed, and the surgeon Hall and six other workers, Kit listened to them as well, and gradually moved them down through the pillar and back toward the warm lights and comfort of Farside.

Kit had lost people before and it was always like this. There would be tears tonight, and anger at him and at his bridge, anger at fate for permitting this. There would be sadness and nightmares. There would be lovemaking and the holding close of children and friends and dogs—affirmations of life in the cold wet night.

His tutor at University had said, during one of her frequent digressions from the nature of materials and the principles of architecture, “Things will go wrong.”

It was winter, but in spite of the falling snow they walked slowly to the coffee-house, as Skossa looked for purchase for her cane. She continued, “On long projects, you’ll forget that you’re not one of them. But if there’s an accident? You’re slapped in the face with it. Whatever you’re feeling? Doesn’t matter. Guilty, grieving, alone, worried about the schedule. None of it. What matters is their feelings. So listen to them. Respect what they’re going through.”

She paused then, tapped her cane against the ground thoughtfully. “No, I lie. It does matter but you will have to find your own strength, your own resources elsewhere.”

“Friends?” Kit said doubtfully. He knew already that he wanted a career like his father’s. He would not be in the same place for more than a few years at a time.

“Yes, friends.” Snow collected on Skossa’s hair but she didn’t seem to notice. “Kit, I worry about you. You’re good with people, I’ve seen it. You like them. But there’s a limit for you.” He opened his mouth to protest but she held up her hand to silence him. “I know. You do care. But inside the framework of a project. Right now it’s your studies. Later it’ll be roads and bridges. But people around you—their lives go on outside the framework. They’re not just tools to your hand, even likable tools. Your life should go on, too. You should have more than roads to live for. Because if something does go wrong, you’ll need what you’re feeling to matter, to someone somewhere, anyway.”

Kit walked through Farside toward the Red Lurcher. Most people were home or at one of the taverns by now, a village turned inward; but he heard footsteps running behind him. He turned quickly—it was not unknown for people reeling from a loss to strike at whatever they blamed, and sometimes that was a person.

It was Valo. Though his fists were balled, Kit could tell immediately that he was angry but that he was not looking for a fight. For a moment Kit wished he didn’t need to listen, that he could just go back to his rooms and sleep for a thousand hours, but there was a stricken look in Valo’s eyes: Valo, who looked so much like Rasali. He hoped that Rasali and Loreh hadn’t been close.

Kit said gently, “Why aren’t you inside? It’s cold.” As he said it, he realized suddenly that it was cold. The rain had settled into a steady cold flow.

“I will, I was, I mean, but I came out for a second because I thought maybe I could find you, because—” The boy was shivering too.

“Where are your friends? Let’s get you inside. It’ll be better there.”

“No,” he said. “I have to know first. It’s like this always? If I do this, build things, it’ll happen for me? Someone will die?”

“It might. It probably will, eventually.”

Valo said an unexpected thing. “I see. It’s just that she had just gotten married.”

The blood on Loreh’s lips, the wet sound of her crushed chest as she took her last breaths—“Yes,” Kit said. “She had.”

“I just...I had to know if I need to ready for this.” It seemed callous, but Ferrys were used to dying, to death. “I guess I’ll find out.”

“I hope you don’t have to.” The rain was getting heavier. “You should be inside, Valo.”

Valo nodded. “Rasali—I wish she were here. She could help maybe. You should go in, too. You’re shivering.”

Kit watched him go. Valo had not invited him to accompany him back into the light and the warmth. He knew better than to expect that but for a moment he had permitted himself to hope otherwise.

Kit slipped through the stables and through the back door at The Bitch. Wisdon Innkeep, hands full of mugs for the taproom, saw him and nodded, face unsmiling but not hostile. That was good, Kit thought: as good as it would get, tonight.

He entered his room and shut the door, leaned his back to it as if holding the world out. Someone had already been in his room. A lamp had been lit against the darkness, a fire laid, and bread and cheese and a tankard of ale set by the window to stay cool.

He began to cry.

The news went across the river by signal flags. No one worked on the bridge the next day, or the day after that. Kit did all the right things, letting his grief and guilt overwhelm him only when he was alone, huddled in front of the fire in his room.

The third day, Rasali arrived from Nearside with a boat filled with crates of northland herbs on their way east. Kit was sitting in The Bitch’s taproom, listening. People were coping, starting to look forward again. They should be able to get back to it soon, the next clear day. He would offer them something that would be an immediate, visible accomplishment, something different, perhaps guidelining the ramp.

He didn’t see Rasali come into the taproom; only felt her hand on his shoulder and heard her voice in his ear. “Come with me,” she murmured.

He looked up puzzled, as though she were a stranger. “Rasali Ferry, why are you here?”

She said only, “Come for a walk, Kit.”

It was raining but he accompanied her anyway, pulling a scarf over his head when the first cold drops hit his face.

She said nothing as they splashed through Farside. She was leading him somewhere, but he didn’t care where, grateful not to have to be the decisive one, the strong one. After a time she opened a door and led him through it into a small room filled with light and warmth.

“My house,” she said. “And Valo’s. He’s still at the boatyard. Sit.”

She pointed and Kit dropped onto the settle beside the fire. Rasali swiveled a pot hanging from a bracket out of the fire and ladled something out. She handed a mug to him and sat. “So. Drink.”

It was spiced porter and the warmth eased into the tightness in his chest. “Thank you.”

“Talk.”

“This is such a loss for you all, I know,” he said. “Did you know Loreh well?”

She shook her head. “This is not for me, this is for you. Tell me.”

“I’m fine,” he said, and when she didn’t say anything, he repeated with a flicker of anger: “I’m fine, Rasali. I can handle this.”

“Probably you can,” Rasali said. “But you’re not fine. She died and it was your bridge she died for. You don’t feel responsible? I don’t believe it.”

“Of course I feel responsible,” he snapped.

The fire cast gold light across her broad cheekbones when she turned her face to him, but to his surprise she said nothing, only looked at him and waited.

“She’s not the first,” Kit said, surprising himself. “The first project I had sole charge of, a toll gate. Such a little project, such a silly little project to lose someone on. The wood frame for the passageway collapsed before we got the keystone in. The whole arch came down. Someone got killed.” It had been a very young man, slim and tall with a limp. He was raising his little sister. She hadn’t been more than ten. Running loose in the fields around the site, she had missed the collapse, the boy’s death. Dafuen? Naus? He couldn’t remember his name. And the girl—what had her name been? I should remember. I owe that much to them.

“Every time I lose someone,” he said at last, “I remember the others. There’ve been twelve in twenty-three years. Not so many, considering. Building’s dangerous. My record’s better than most.”

“But it doesn’t matter, does it?” she said. “You still feel you killed each one of them, as surely as if you’d thrown them off a bridge yourself.”

“It’s my responsibility. The first one, Duar—” that had been his name; there it was. The name loosened something in Kit. His face warmed: tears, hot tears running down his face.

“It’s all right,” she said. She held him until he stopped crying.

“How did you know?” he said finally.

“I am the eldest surviving member of the Ferry family,” she said. “My aunt died seven years ago. And then I watched my brother leave to cross the mist, three years ago now. It was a perfect day, calm and sunny, but he never made it. He went instead of me because on that day the river felt wrong to me. It could have been me. It should have, maybe. So I understand.”

She stretched a little. “Not that most people don’t. If Petro Housewright sends his daughter to select timber in the mountains, and she doesn’t come back—eaten by wolves, struck by lightning, I don’t know—is Petro to blame? It’s probably the wolves or the lightning. Maybe it’s the daughter, if she did something stupid. And it is Petro, a little; she wouldn’t have been there at all if he hadn’t sent her. And it’s her mother for being fearless and teaching that to her daughter; and Thom Green for wanting a new room to his house. Everyone except maybe the wolves feels at least a little responsible. This path leads nowhere. Loreh would have died sooner or later,” Rasali added softly. “We all do.”

“Can you accept death so readily?” he asked. “Yours even?”

She leaned back, her face suddenly weary. “What else can I do, Kit? Someone must ferry and I am better suited than most—and by more than my blood. I love the mist, its currents and the smell of it and the power in my body as I push us all through. Petro’s daughter—she did not want to die when the wolves came, I’m sure, but she loved selecting timber.”

“If it comes for you?” he said softly. “Would you be so sanguine then?”

She laughed, and the pensiveness was gone. “No indeed. I will curse the stars and go down fighting. But it will still have been a wonderful thing, to cross the mist.”

At University, Kit’s relationships had all been casual. There were lectures that everyone attended, and he lived near streets and pubs crowded with students; but the physical students had a tradition of keeping to themselves that was rooted in the personal preferences of their predecessors, and in their own. The only people who worked harder than the engineers were the ale-makers, the University joke went. Kit and the other physical students talked and drank and roomed and slept together.

In his third year, he met Domhu Canna at the arcade where he bought vellums and paper: a small woman with a heart-shaped face and hair in black clouds that she kept somewhat confined by gray ribands. She was a philosophical student from a city two thousand miles to the east, on the coast.

He was fascinated. Her mind was abrupt and fish-quick and made connections he didn’t understand. To her, everything was a metaphor, a symbol for something else. People, she said, could be better understood by comparing their lives to animals, to the seasons, to the structure of certain lyrical songs, to a gambling game.

This was another form of pattern-making, he saw. Perhaps people were like teamed oxen to be led; or like metals to be smelted and shaped to one’s purpose; or as the stones for a dry-laid wall, which had to be carefully selected for shape and strength, and sorted, and placed. This last suited him best. What held them together was no external mortar but their own weight and the planning and patience of the drystone builder. But it was an inadequate metaphor. People were this, but they were all the other things as well.

He never understood what Domhu found attractive in him. They never talked about regularizing their relationship. When her studies were done halfway through his final year, she returned to her city to help found a new university, and in any case her people did not enter into term marriages. They separated amicably and with a sense of loss on his part at least, but it did not occur to him until years later that things might have been different.

The winter was rainy but there were days they could work and they did. By spring, there had been other deaths unrelated to the bridge on both banks: a woman who died in childbirth, a child who had never breathed properly in his short life; two fisherfolk lost when they capsized; several who died for the various reasons that old or sick people died.

Over the spring and summer they finished the anchorages, featureless masses of blocks and mortar anchored to the bedrock. They were buried so that only a few courses of stone showed above the ground. The anchoring bolts were each tall as a man, hidden safely behind the portals through which the chains would pass.

The Farside pillar was finished by midwinter of the third year, well before the Nearside tower. Jenner and Teniant Planner had perfected a signal system that allowed detailed technical information to pass between the banks, and documents traveled each time a ferry crossed. Rasali made sixty-eight trips back and forth. Though he spent much of his time with Kit, Valo made twenty. Kit did not cross the mist at all unless the flags told him he must.

It was early spring and Kit was in Farside when the signals went up: Message. Imperial seal. He went to Rasali at once.

“I can’t go,” she said. “I just got here yesterday. The Big Ones—”

“I have to get across and Valo’s on Nearside. There’s news from the capital.”

“News has always waited before.”

“No, it hasn’t. You forced it to but news waited restlessly, pacing along the levee until we could pick it up.”

“Use the flags,” she said, a little impatiently.

“The seals can’t be broken by anyone but me or Jenner. He’s over here. I’m sorry,” he said, thinking of her brother, dead four years before.

“If you die no one can read it either,” she said, but they left just after dusk anyway. “If we must go, better then than earlier or later,” she said.

He met her at the upper dock at dusk. The sky was streaked with bright bands of green and gold, clouds catching the last of the sun, but they radiated no light. The current down the river was steady And light. The mist between the levees was already in shadow, smooth dunes twenty feet high.

Rasali waited silently, coiling and uncoiling a rope in her hands. Beside her stood two women and a dog: dealers in spices returning from the plantations of Gloth, the dog whining and restless. Kit was burdened with document cases filled with vellum and paper, rolled tightly and wrapped in oilcloth. Rasali seated the merchants and their dog in the ferry’s bow, then untied and pushed off in silence. Kit sat near her.

She stood at the stern, braced against the scull. For a moment he could pretend that this was water they moved on and he half-expected to hear sloshing, but the big paddle made no noise. It was so silent that he could hear her breath, the dog’s nervous panting, and his own pulse, too fast. Then the Crossing slid up the long slope of a mist dune and there was no possibility that this could be anything but mist.

He heard a soft sighing, like air entering a once-sealed bottle. It was hard to see so far, but the lingering light showed him a heaving of the mist on the fact of a neighboring dune, like a bubble coming to the surface of hot mud. The dome grew and then burst. There was a gasp from one of the women. A shape rolled away, too dark for Kit to see more than its length.

“What—” he said in wonder.

“Fish,” Rasali breathed to Kit. “Not small ones. They are biting tonight. We should not have come.”

It was night now. The first tiny moon appeared, scarcely brighter than a star, followed by other stars. Rasali oared gently through the dunes, face turned to the sky. At first he thought she was praying but she was navigating. There were more fish now: each time the sighing sound, the dark shape half-seen. He heard someone singing, the voice carrying somehow to them, from far behind.

“The fishers,” Rasali said. “They will stay close to the levees tonight. I wish....”

But she left the wish unspoken. They were over the deep mist now. He could not say how he knew this. He had a sudden vision of the bridge overhead, a black span bisecting the star-spun sky, the parabolic arch of the chains perhaps visible, perhaps not. People would stride across the river an arrow’s flight overhead, unaware of this place beneath. Perhaps they would stop and look over the bridge’s railings, but they would be too high to see the fish as any but small shadows, supposing they saw them at all, supposing they stopped at all. The Big Ones would be novelties, weird creatures that caused a safe little shiver, like hearing a frightening story late at night.

Perhaps Rasali saw the same thin, for she said suddenly, “Your bridge. It will change all this.”

“It must. I am sorry,” he said again. “We are not meant to be here on mist.”

“We are not meant to cross this without passing through it. Kit—” Rasali said as if starting a sentence, and then fell silent. After a moment she began to speak again, her voice low, as though she were speaking to herself. “The soul often hangs in a balance of some sort. Tonight do I lie down in the high fields with Dirk Tanner or not? At the fair, do I buy ribbons or wine? For the new ferry’s headboard, do I use camphor or pearwood? Small things, right? A kiss, a ribbon, a grain that coaxes the knife this way or that. They are not, Kit Meinem of Atyar. Our souls wait for our answer because any answer changes us. This is why I wait to decide what I feel about your bridge. I’m waiting until I know how I will be changed.”

“You can never know how things will change you,” Kit said.

“If you don’t, you have not waited to find out.” There was a popping noise barely a stone’s throw to starboard. “Quiet.”

On they moved. In daylight, Kit knew, the trip took less than an hour, but now it seemed much longer. Perhaps it was. He looked up at the stars and thought they had moved, but perhaps not.

His teeth were clenched as were all his muscles. When he tried to relax them, he realized it was not fear that cramped him but something else, something outside him. He heard Rasali falter. “No....”

He recognized it now, the sound that was not a sound, like the lowest pipes on an organ, a drone so low that he couldn’t hear it, one that turned his bones to liquid and his muscles to flaked and rusting iron. His breath labored from his chest in grunts. His head thrummed. Moving as though through honey, he strained his hands to his head, cradling it. He could not see Rasali except as a gloom against the slightly less gloom of the mist, but he heard her pant, tiny pain-filled breaths like an injured dog.

The thrumming in his body pounded at his bones now, dissolving them. He wanted to cry out but there was no air left in his lungs. He realized suddenly that the mist beneath them was raising itself into a mound. It piled up along the boat’s sides. I never got to finish the bridge, he thought. And I never kissed her. Did Rasali have any regrets?

The mound roiled and became a hill, which became a mountain obscuring part of the sky. The crest melted into curls and there was a shape inside, large and dark as night itself, that slid and followed the collapsing moist. It seemed not to move, but he knew that was only because of the size of the thing, that it took ages for its full length to pass. That was all he saw before his eyes slipped shut.

How long he lay there in the bottom of the boat, he didn’t know. At some point he realized he was there. Some time later he found he could move again, his bones and muscles back to what they should be. The dog was barking. “Rasali?” he said shakily. “Are we sinking?”

“Kit.” Her voice was a thread. “You’re still alive. I thought we were dead.”

“That was a Big One?”

“I don’t know. No one has ever seen one. Maybe it was just a Fairly Large One.”

The old joke. Kit choked on a weak laugh.

“Shit,” Rasali said in the darkness. “I dropped the oar.”

“Now what?” he said.

“I have a spare, but it’s going to take longer and we’ll land in the wrong place. We’ll have to tie off and then walk up to get help.”

I’m alive, he did not say. I can walk a thousand miles tonight.

It was nearly dawn before they got to Nearside. The two big moons rose just before they landed, a mile south of the dock. The spice traders and their dog went on ahead while Kit and Rasali secured the boat. They walked up together. Halfway home, Valo came down at a dead run.

“I was waiting and you didn’t come—” He was pale and panting. “But they told me, the other passengers, that you made it and—”

“Valo.” Rasali hugged him and held him hard. “We’re safe, little one. We’re here. It’s done.”

“I thought....” he said.

“I know,” she said. “Valo, please, I am so tired. Can you get the Crossing up to the dock? I am going to my house and I will sleep for a day, and I don’t care if the Empress herself is tapping her foot, it’s going to wait.” She released Valo, saluted Kit with a weary smile, and walked up the long flank of the levee. Kit watched her leave.

The “Imperial seal” was a letter from Atyar, some underling arrogating authority and asking for clarification on a set of numbers Kit had sent—scarcely worth the trip at any time, let alone across mist on a bad night. Kit cursed the capital and Empire and then sent the information, along with a tautly worded paragraph about seals and their appropriate use.

Two days later, he got news that would have brought him across the mist in any case. The caravan carrying the first eyebars and bolts was twelve miles out on the Hoic Mine Road. Kit and his ironmaster Tandreve Smith rode out to meet the wagons as they crept southward and found them easing down a gradual slope near Oud village. The carts were long and built strong, their contents covered, each pulled by a team of tough-legged oxen with patient expressions. The movement was slow, and drivers walked beside them, singing something unfamiliar to Kit’s city-bred ears.

“Ox-tunes. We used to sing these at my uncle’s farm,” Tandreve said, and sang:

Remember last night’s dream,
the sweet cold grass, the lonely cows.

You had your bollocks then.

Tandreve chuckled, and Kit with her.

One of the drivers wandered over as Kit pulled his horse to a stop. Unattended, her team moved forward anyway. “Folks,” she said and nodded. A taciturn woman.

Kit swung down from the saddle. “These are the chains?”

“You’re from the bridge?”

“Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

The woman nodded again. “Berallit Red-Ox of Ilver. Your smiths are sitting on the tail of the last wagon.”

One of the smiths, a rangy man with singed eyebrows, loped forward to meet them, and introduced himself as Jared Toss of Little Hoic. They walked beside the carts as they talked, and he threw aside a tarp to show Kit what thy carried: stacks of iron eyebars, each a rod ten feet long with eyes at either end. Tandreve walked sideways as she inspected the eyebars. She and Jared soon lost themselves in a technical discussion, while Kit kept them company, leading Tandreve’s forgotten horse and his own, content for the moment to let the masters talk it out. He moved a little forward until he was abreast of the oxen. Remember last night’s dream, he thought and then: I wonder what Rasali dreamt?

After that night on the mist, Rasali seemed to have no bad days. She took people the day after they arrived, no matter what the weather or the mist’s character. The tavern keepers grumbled at this, but the decrease in time each visitor stayed was made up for by the increase in numbers of serious-eyed men and women sent by firms in Atyar to establish offices in the towns on the River’s far side. It made things easier for the bridge as well, since Kit and others could move back and forth as needed. Kit remained reluctant, more so since the near miss.

There was enough business for two boats. Valo volunteered to ferry more often but Rasali refused the help, allowing him to ferry only when she couldn’t prevent it. “The Big Ones don’t seem to care about me this winter,” she said to him, “but I can’t say they would feel the same about tender meat like you.” With Kit she was more honest. “If he is to leave ferrying to go study in the capital, it’s best sooner than later. Mist will be dangerous until the last ferry crosses it. And even then, even after your bridge is done.”

It was Rasali only who seemed to have this protection. The fishing people had as many problems as in any year. Denis Redboat lost his coracle when it was rammed (“—by a Medium-Large One,” he laughed in the tavern later: sometimes the oldest jokes really were the best), though he was fished out by a nearby boat before he had sunk too deep. The rash was only superficial but his hair grew back only in patches.

Kit sat in the crowded beer garden of the Deer’s Hart watching Rasali and Valo make a little pinewood skiff in the boat yard next door. Valo had called out a greeting when Kit first sat down, and Rasali turned her head to smile at him, but after that they ignored him. Some of the locals stopped by to greet him, and the barman stayed for some time, telling him about the ominous yet unchanging ache in his back; but for most of the afternoon, Kit was alone in the sun, drinking cellar-cool porter and watching the boat take shape.

In the midsummer of the fourth year, it was rare for Kit to have all the afternoon of a beautiful day to himself. The anchorages had been finished for some months. So had the rubble-filled ramps that led to the arched passages through each pillar. The pillars themselves had taken longer, and the granite saddles that would support the chains over the towers had only just been put in place.

They were only slightly behind on Kit’s deadlines for most of the materials. More than a thousand of the eyebars and bolts for the chains were laid out in rows, the iron smelling of the linseed oil used to protect them during transit. More were expected in before winter. Close to the ramps were the many fishskin ropes and cables that would be needed to bring the first chain across the gap. They were irreplaceable—probably the most valuable thing on the work sites—and were treated accordingly, kept in closed tents that reeked.

Kit’s high-work specialists were here, too: the men and women who would do the first perilous tasks, mostly experts who had worked on other big spans or the towers of Atyar.

Valo and Rasali were not alone in the boat yard. Rasali had sent to the ferry folk of Ubmie, a hundred miles to the south and they had arrived a few days before: a woman and her cousin, Chell and Lan Crosser. The strangers had the same massive shoulders and good looks the Ferrys had, but they shared a faraway expression of their own. The river was broader at Ubmie, deeper, so perhaps death was closer to them. Kit wondered what they thought of his task. The bridge would cut into ferry trade for many hundreds of miles on either side and Ubmie had been reviewed as a possible site for the bridge—but they must not have resented it or they would not be here.

Everything waited on the ferry folk. The next major task was to bring the lines across the river to connect the piers—fabricating the chains required temporary cables and catwalks be there first—but this could not be rushed. Rasali, Valo, and the Crossers all needed to feel at the same time that it was safe to cross. Kit tried not to be impatient. In any case he had plenty to do—items to add to lists, formal reports and polite updates to send to the many interested parties in Atyar and Triple, instructions to pass on to the ropemakers, the masons, the road-builders, the exchequer. And Jenner: Kit had written to the capital, and the Department of Roads was offering Jenner the lead on the second bridge across the river, to be built a few hundred miles to the north. Kit was to deliver the cartel the next time they were on the same side, but he was grateful the officials had agreed to leave Jenner with him until the first chain on this bridge was in place. Things to do.

He pushed all this from his mind. Later, he said to the things half-apologetically; I’ll deal with you later. For now just let me sit in the sun and watch other people work.

The sun slanted peach-gold through the oak’s leaves before Rasali and Valo finished for the day. The skiff was finished, an elegant tiny curve of pale wood and dying sunlight. Kit leaned against the fence as they threw a cup of water over its bow and then drew it into the shadows of the boathouse. Valo took off at a run—so much energy, even after a long day; ah, youth—as Rasali walked to the fence and leaned on it from her side.

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

She rolled her neck. “I know. We make good boats. Are you hungry? Your busy afternoon must have raised an appetite.”

He had to laugh. “We laid the capstone this morning. I am hungry.”

“Come on, then. Thalla will feed us all.”

Dinner was simple. The Deer’s Hart was better known for its beer than its foods, but the stew Thalla served was savory with chervil, and thick enough to stand a spoon in. Valo had friends to be with, so they ate with Chell and Lan, who turned out to be as light-hearted as Rasali. At dusk, the Crossers left to explore the Nearside taverns, leaving Kit and Rasali to watch heat lightning in the west. The air was thick and warm, soft as wool.

“You never come up to the work sites on either side,” Kit said suddenly, after a comfortable, slightly drunken silence. He inspected his earthenware mug, empty except for the smell of yeast.

Rasali had given up on the benches and sat instead on one of the garden tables. She leaned back until she lay supine, face toward the sky. “I’ve been busy, perhaps you noticed?”

“It’s more than that. Everyone finds time here and there. And you used to.”

“I did, didn’t I? I just haven’t seen the point, lately. The bridge changes everything, but I don’t see yet how it changes me. So I wait until it’s time. Perhaps it’s like the mist.”

“What about now?”

She rolled her head until her cheek lay against the rough wood of the tabletop: looking at him he could tell, though her eyes were hidden in shadows. What did she see, he wondered: what was she hoping to see? It pleased him but made him nervous.

“Come to the tower now, tonight,” he said. “Soon everything changes. We pull the ropes across, and make the chains, and hang the supports, and lay the road—everything changes then, it stops being a project and becomes a bridge, a road. But tonight, it’s still just two towers and some plans. Rasali, climb it with me. I can’t describe what it’s like up there—the wind, the sky all around you, the river below.” He flushed at the urgency in his voice. When she remained silent, he added, “You change whether you wait for it or not.”

“There’s lightning,” she said.

“It runs from cloud to cloud,” he said. “Not to earth.”

“Heat lightning.” She sat up. “So show me this place.”

The work site was abandoned. The sky overhead had filled with clouds lit from within by the lightning, which was worse than no light at all since it ruined their night vision. They staggered across the site, trying to plan their paths in the moments of light, doggedly moving through the darkness. “Shit,” Rasali said suddenly in the darkness, then: “Tripped over something or other.” Kit found himself laughing for no apparent reason.

The took the internal stairs instead of the scaffold that still leaned against the pillar’s north wall. Kit knew them thoroughly, knew every irregular turn and riser; he counted them aloud to Rasali as he led her by the hand. They reached one hundred and ninety-four before they saw light from a flash of lightning overhead, two hundred and eighteen when they finally stepped onto the roof, gasping for air.

They were not alone. A woman squealed; she and the man with her grabbed clothes and blankets and bolted with their lamp down the stairs, naked and laughing. Rasali said with satisfaction, “Sera Oakfield. I’d recognize that laugh anywhere.That was Erno Bridgeman with her.”

“He took his name from the bridge?” Kit asked but Rasali said only, “Oh,” in a child’s voice. Silent lightning painted the sky over her head in sudden strokes of purple-white, shot through what seemed a dozen layers of cloud.

“The sky is so much closer.” She looked about her, walked to the edge and looked down at Nearside. Dull gold light poured from doors open to the heavy air. Kit stayed where he was, content to watch her. The light (when there was lightning) was shadowless, and her face looked young and full of wonder. After a time, she walked to his side.

They said nothing, only kissed and then made love in a nest of their discarded clothes. Kit felt the stone of his bridge against his knees, his back, still warm as skin from the day’s heat. Rasali was softer than the rocks and tasted sweet.

A feeling he could not have described cracked open his chest, his throat, his belly. It had been a long time he had been with a woman, not met his own needs; he had nearly forgotten the delight of it, the sharp rising shock of his release, the rocking ocean of hers. Even their awkwardness made him glad, because it held in it the possibility of doing this again, and better.

When they were done they talked. “You know my goal, to build this bridge,” Kit looked down at her face, there and gone, in the flickering of the lightning. “But I do not know yours.”

Rasali laughed softly. “Yet you have seen me succeed a thousand times, and fail a few. I wish to live well each day.”

“That’s not a goal,” Kit said.

“Why? Because it’s not yours? Which is better, Kit Meinem of Atyar? A single great victory or a thousand small ones?” And then: “Tomorrow,” Rasali said. “We will take the rope across tomorrow.”

“You’re sure?” Kit asked.

“That’s a strange statement coming from you. The bridge is all about crossing being a certainty, yes? Like the sun coming up each morning? We agreed this afternoon. It’s time.”

Dawn came early with the innkeeper’s rap on the door. Kit woke disoriented, tangled in the sheets of his little cupboard bed. After he and Rasali had come down from the pillar, Rasali to sleep and Kit to do everything that needed to happen the night before the rope was brought across, all in the few hours left of the night. His skin smelled of Rasali but, stunned with lack of sleep, he had trouble believing their lovemaking had been real. But there was stone dust ground into his skin; he smiled and though it was high summer, sang a spring song from Atyar as he quickly washed and dressed. He drank a bowl filled with broth in the taproom. It was tangy, lukewarm. A single small perch stared up at him from a salted eye. Kit left the fish, and left the inn.

The clouds and the lightning were gone. Early as it was the sky was already pale and hot. The news was everywhere and the entire town, or so it seemed, drifted with Kit to the work site and then flowed over the levee and down to the bank.

The river was a blinding creamy ribbon high between the banks, looking just it had the first time he had seen it; and for a minute he felt dislocated in time. High mist was seen as a good omen, and though he did not believe in omens he was nevertheless glad. There was a crowd collected on the Farside levee as well, though he couldn’t see details, only movement like gnats. The signal towers’ flags hung limp against the hot blue-white sky.

Kit walked down to Rasali’s boat, nearly hidden in its own tight circle of watchers. As Kit approached, Valo called, “Hey, Kit!” Rasali looked up. Her smile was like welcome shade on a bright day. The circle opened to accept him.

“Greetings, Valo Ferry of Farside, Rasali Ferry of Farside,” he said. When he was close enough, he clasped Rasali’s hands in his own, loving their warmth despite the day’s heat.

“Kit.” She kissed his mouth, to a handful of muffled hoots and cheers from the bystanders and a surprised noise from Valo. She tasted like chicory.

Daell Cabler nodded absently to Kit. She was the lead ropemaker. Now she, her husband Stivvan, and the journeymen and masters they had drawn to them, were inspecting the hundreds of fathoms of plaited fishskin cord, loading them without twists onto spools three feet across and loading those onto a wooden frame bolted to the Tranquil Crossing.

The rope was thin, not much more than a cord, narrower than Kit’s smallest finger. It looked fragile, nothing like strong enough to carry its own weight for a quarter of a mile though the tests said otherwise.

Several of the stronger people from the bridge handed down small heavy crates to Valo and Chell Crosser in the bow. Silverwork from Hedeclin, and copper in bricks: the ferry was to be weighted somewhat forward, which would make the first part of the crossing more difficult but should help with the end of it as the cord paid out and took on weight from the mist.

“—We think, anyway,” Valo had said, two months back when he and Rasali had discussed the plan with Kit. “But we don’t know; no one’s done this before.” Kit had nodded, and not for the first time wished that the river had been a little less broad. Upriver, perhaps; but no, this had been the only option. He did write to an old classmate back in Atyar, a man who now taught the calculus, and presented their solution. His friend had written back to say that it looked as though it ought to work, but that he knew little of mist.

One end of the rope snaked along the ground and up the levee. No one touched the rope or even approached it, but left a narrow lane and stepped only carefully over it. Now Daell and Stivvan Cabler followed the lane back, up and over the levee, to check the rope and temporary anchor at the nearside pillar’s base.

There was a wait. People sat on the grass, or walked back to watch the Cablers. Someone brought cool broth and small beer from the fishers’ tavern. Valo and Rasali and the two Crossers were remote, focused already on what came next.

And for himself? Kit was wound up, but it wouldn’t do to show anything but a calm confident front. He walked among the watchers, exchanged words or a smile with each of them. He knew them all by now, even the children.

It was nearly midmorning before Daell and Stivvan returned. The ferryfolk took their positions in the Tranquil Crossing, two to each side, far enough apart that they could pull on different rhythms. Kit was useless freight until they got to the other side so he sat at the bow where his weight might do some good. Uni stumbled as she was helped into the boat’s stern: she would monitor the rope but as she told them all, she was nervous; she had never crossed the mist before this. “I think I’ll wait ‘til the catwalks go up before I return,” she added. “Stivvan can sleep without me ‘til then.”

“Ready, Kit?” Rasali called forward.

“Yes,” he said.

“Daell? Lan? Chell? Valo?” Assent all around.

“A historic moment,” Valo announced. “The Day The Mist Was Bridged.”

“Make yourself useful, boy,” Rasali said. “Prepare to scull.”

“Right,” Valo said.

“Push us off,” she said to the people on the dock. A cheer went up.

The dock and all the noises behind them disappeared almost immediately. The ferryfolk had been right that it was a good day for such an undertaking; the mist was a smooth series of ripples no taller than a man, and so thick that the Crossing rode high despite the extra weight and drag. It was the gentlest he had ever seen the river.

Kit’s eyes ached from the brightness. “It will work?” Kit said, meaning the rope and their trip across the mist and the bridge itself—a question rather than a statement; unable to help himself, though he had worked the calculations himself and had Daell and Stivvan and Valo and a specialist in Atyar all double-check them, though it was a child’s question. Isolated in the mist, even competence seemed tentative.

“Yes,” Daell Cabler said from aft.

The rowers said little. At one point Rasali murmured into the deadened air, “To the right,” and Valo and Lan Crosser changed their stroke to avoid a gentle mound a few feet high directly in their path. Mostly the Crossing slid steadily across the regular swells. Unlike his other trips, Kit saw no dark shapes in the mist, large or small. From here, they could not see the dock, but the levee was scattered with Farsiders waiting for the work they would do when the ferry landed. Her eyes were alight with reflections from the mist.

There was nothing he could do to help, so Kit watched Rasali scull in the blazing sun. The work got harder as the rope spooled out until she and the others panted. Shining with sweat, her skin was nearly as bright as the mist in the sunlight, and he wondered how she could bear the light without burning. Her face looked solemn, intent on the eastern shore. Then he recognized the expression: not fear, not planning, not even focus. It was joy.

How will she bear it, he thought suddenly, when there is no more ferrying to be done? He had known that she loved what she did but he had never realized just how much. He felt as though he had been kicked in the stomach. What would it do to her? His bridge would destroy this thing that she loved, that gave her name. How could he not have thought of that? “Rasali,” he said, unable to stay silent.

“Not now,” she said. The rowers panted as they dug in.

“It’s like...pulling through dirt,” Valo gasped.

“Quiet,” Rasali snapped and then they were silent except for their laboring breath. Kit’s own muscles knotted sympathetically. Foot by foot the ferry heaved forward. At some point they were close enough to the Farside upper dock that someone threw a rope to Kit and at last he could do something however inadequate. He took the rope and pulled. The rowers pushed for their final strokes. The boat slid up beside the dock. People swarmed aboard, securing the boat to the dock, the rope to a temporary anchor onshore.

Released, the Ferrys and the Crossers embraced, laughing a little dizzily. They walked up the levee toward Farside town and did not look back.

Kit left the ferry to join Jenner Ellar.

It was hard work. The rope’s end had to be brought over an oiled stone saddle on the levee and down to a temporary anchor and capstan at the Farside pillar’s base, a task that involved driving a team of oxen through a temporary gap Jenner had cut into the levee: a risk, but one that had to be taken.

More oxen were harnessed to the capstan. Daell Cabler was still pale and shaking from the crossing, but after a glass of something cool and dark, she and her Farside counterparts could walk the rope to look for any new weak spots, but they found none. Jenner stayed at the capstan. Daell and Kit returned to the temporary saddle in the levee, the notch polished like glass and gleaming with oil.

The rope was released from the dockside anchor. The rope over the saddle whined as it took the load and flattened, and there was a deep pinging noise as it swung out to make a single slightly curved line down from the saddle, down into the mist. The oxen at the capstan dug in.

The next hours were the tensest of Kit’s life. For a time, the rope did not appear to change. The capstan moaned and clicked, and at last the rope slid by inches, by feet, through the saddle. He could do nothing but watch and yet again rework all the calculations in his mind. He did not see Rasali, but Valo came up after a time to watch the progress. Answering his questions settled Kit’s nerves. The calculations were correct. He had done this before. He was suddenly starved and voraciously ate the food that Valo had brought for him. How long had it been since the broth at The Fish? Hours; most of a day.

The oxen puffed and grunted, and were replaced with new teams. Even lubricated and with leather sleeves, the rope moved reluctantly across the saddle, but it did move. And then the pressure started to ease and the rope paid through the saddle faster. The sun was westering when at last the rope lifted free of the mist. By dusk, the rope was sixty feet above it, stretched humming-tight between the Farside and Nearside levees and the temporary anchors.

Just before dark, Kit saw the flags go up on the signal tower: secure.

Kit worked on and then seconded projects for five years after he left University. His father knew men and women at the higher levels in the Department of Roads, and his old tutor, Skossa Timt, knew more, so many were high-profile works, but he loved all of them, even his first lead, the little toll gate where the boy, Duar, had died.

All public work—drainage schemes, roadwork, amphitheaters, public squares, sewers, alleys and mews—was alchemy. It took the invisible patterns that people made as they lived and turned them into stone and brick and wood and space. Kit built things that moved people through the invisible architecture that was his mind and his notion—and Empire’s notion—of how their lives could be better.

The first major project he led was a replacement for a collapsed bridge in the Four Peaks region north of Atyar. The original had also been a chain suspension bridge but much smaller than the mist bridge, crossing only a hundred yards, its pillars only forty feet high. With maintenance, it had survived heavy use for three centuries, shuddering under the carts that brought quicksilver ore down to the smelting village of Oncalion; but after the heavy snowfalls of what was subsequently called the Wolf Winter, one of the gorge’s walls collapsed, taking the north pillar with it and leaving nowhere stable to rebuild. It was easier to start over, two hundred yards upstream.

The people of Oncalion were not genial. Hard work made for hard men and women. There was a grim, desperate edge to their willingness to labor on the bridge, because their livelihood and their lives were dependent on the mine. They had to be stopped at the end of each day or, dangerous as it was, they would work through moonlit nights.

But it was lonely work, even for Kit who did not mind solitude; and when the snows of the first winter brought a halt to construction, he returned with some relief to Atyar, to stay with his father. Davell Meinem was old now. His memory was weakening though still strong enough. He spent his days constructing a vast and fabulous public maze of dry-laid stones brought from all over Empire: his final project, he said to Kit, an accurate prophecy. Skossa Timt had died during the hard cold of the Wolf Winter, but many of his classmates were still in the capital. Kit spent evenings with them, attended lectures and concerts, entering for the season into a casual relationship with an architect who specialized in waterworks.

Kit returned to the site at Oncalion as soon as the roads cleared. In his absence, through the snows and melt-off, the people of Oncalion had continued to work, laying course after course of stone in the bitter cold. The work had to be redone.

The second summer, they worked every day and moonlit nights, and Kit worked beside them.

Kit counted the bridge as a failure although it was coming in barely over budget and only a couple of months late, and no one had died. It was an ugly design; the people of Oncalion had worked hard but joylessly; and there was all his dissatisfaction and guilt about the work that had to be done anew.

Perhaps there was something in the tone of his letters to his father, for there came a day in early autumn that Davell Meinem arrived in Oncalion, riding a sturdy mountain horse and accompanied by a journeyman who vanished immediately into one of the village’s three taverns. It was mid-afternoon.

“I want to see this bridge of yours,” Davell said. He looked weary but straight-backed as ever. “Show it to me.”

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Kit said. “You must be tired.”

“Now,” Davell said.

The walked up from the village together. It was a cool day, and bright though the road was overshadowed with pines and fir trees. Basalt outcroppings were stained dark green and black with lichens. His father moved slowly, pausing often for breath. They met a steady trickle of local people leading heavy-laden ponies. The roadbed across the bridge wasn’t quite complete and could not take carts yet, but ponies could cross carrying ore in baskets. Oncalion was already smelting these first small loads.

At the bridge, Davell asked the same questions he had asked when Kit was a child playing on his work sites. Kit found himself responding as he had so many years before, eager to explain—or excuse—each decision; and always, always the ponies passing.

They walked down to the older site. The pillar had been gutted for stones so all that was left was rubble, but it gave them a good view of the new bridge: the boxy pillars, the curve of the main chains, the thick vertical suspender chains; the slight sprung arch of the bulky roadbed. It looked as clumsy as a suspension bridge ever could. Yet another pony crossed, led by a woman singing something in the local dialect.

“It’s a good bridge,” Davell said at last.

Kit shook his head. His father, who had been known for his sharp tongue on the work sites though never to his son, said, “A bridge is a means to an end. It only matters because of what it does. Leads from here to there. If you do your work right they won’t notice it, any more than you notice where quicksilver comes from, most times. It’s a good bridge because they are already using it. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Kit.”

It was a big party, that night. The Farsiders (and, Kit knew, the Nearsiders) drank and danced under the shadow of their bridge-to-be. Torchlight and firelight touched the stones of the tower base and anchorage, giving them mass and meaning, but above their light the tower was a black outline, the absence of stars. More torches outlined the tower’s top, and they seemed no more than gold stars among the colder ones.

Kit walked among them. Everyone smiled or waved and offered to stand him drinks, but no one spoke much with him. It was as if the lifting of the cable had separated him from them. The immense towers had not done this; he had still been one of them, to some degree at least—the instigator of great labors but still one of them. But now, for tonight anyway, he was the man who bridged the mist. He had not felt so lonely since his first day here. Even Loreh Tanner’s death had not severed him so completely from their world.

On every project, there was a day like this. It was possible that the distance came from him, he realized suddenly. He came to a place and built something, passing through the lives of people for a few months or years. He always left. A road through dangerous terrain or a bridge across mist saved lives and increased trade, but it always changed the world as well. It was his job to make a thing and then leave to make the next one—but it was also his preference not to remain and see what he had made. What would Nearside and Farside look like in ten years, in fifty? He had never returned to a previous site.

It was harder this time, or perhaps just different. Perhaps he was different. He was staying longer this time because of the size of the project, and he had allowed himself to belong to the country on either side of the bridge. To have more was to have more to miss when it was taken away.

Rasali—what would her life look like?

Valo danced by, his arm around a woman half a head taller than he—Rica Bridger—and Kit caught his arm. “Where is Rasali?” he shouted, then, knowing he could not be heard over the noise of drums and pipes, mouthed: Rasali. He didn’t hear what Valo said but followed his pointing hand.

Rasali was alone, flat on her back on the River side of the levee, looking up. There were no moons, so the Sky Mist hung close overhead, a river of stars that poured east to west. Kit knelt a few feet away. “Rasali Ferry of Farside.”

Her teeth flashed in the dark. “Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

He lay beside her. The grass was like bad straw, coarse against his back and neck. Without looking at him she passed a jar of something. Its taste was strong as tar and Kit gasped for a moment.

“I did not mean....” he started but trailed off, unsure how to continue.

“Yes,” she said and he knew she had heard the words he didn’t say. Her voice contained a shrug. “Many people born into a Ferry family never cross the mist.”

“But you—” He stopped, felt carefully for his words. “Maybe others don’t but you do. And I think maybe you must do so.”

“Just as you must build,” she said softly. “That’s clever of you to realize that.”

“And there will be no need after this, will there? Not on boats anyway. We’ll still need fishskin, so they’ll still be out, but they—”

“—stay close to shore,” she said.

“And you?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Kit. Days come, days go. I go onto the mist or I don’t. I live or I don’t. There is no certainty, but there never is.”

“It doesn’t distress you?”

“Of course it does. I love and I hate this bridge of yours. I will pine for the mist, for the need to cross it. But I do not want to be part of a family that all die young without even a corpse for the burning. If I have a child she will not need to make the decision I did: to cross the mist and die, or to stay safe on one side of the world and never see the other. She will lose something. She will gain something else.”

“Do you hate me?” he said finally, afraid of the answer, afraid of any answer she might give.

“No. Oh, no.” She rolled over to him and kissed his mouth, and Kit could not say if the salt he tasted was from her tears or his own.

The autumn was spent getting the chains across the river. In the days after the crossing, the rope was linked to another, and then pulled back the way it had come, coupled now; and then there were two ropes in parallel courses. It was tricky work, requiring careful communications through the signal towers, but it was completed without event, and Kit could at last get a good night’s sleep. To break the rope would have been to start anew with the long difficult crossing. Over the next days, each rope was replaced with fishskin cable strong enough to take the weight of the chains until they were secured.

The cables were hoisted to the tops of the pillars, to prefigure the path one of the eight chains would take: secured with heavy pins set in protected slots in the anchorages and then straight sharp lines to the saddles on the pillars and, two hundred feet above the mist, the long perfect catenary. A catwalk was suspended from the cables. For the first time, people could cross the mist without the boats, though few chose to do so except for the high workers from the capital and the coast: a hundred men and women so strong and graceful that they seemed another species and kept mostly to themselves. They were directed by a woman Kit had worked with before, Feinlin. The high-workers took no surnames. Something about Feinlin reminded him of Rasali.

The weather grew colder and the days shorter, and Kit pushed hard to have the first two chains across before the winter rains began. There would be no heavy work once the ground got too wet to give sturdy purchase to the teams, and calculations to the contrary, Kit could not quite trust that cables, even fishskin cables, would survive the weight of those immense arcs through an entire winter—or that a Big One would not take one down in the unthinking throes of some winter storm.

The eyebars that would make up the chain were ten feet long and required considerable manhandling to be linked with the bolts, each larger than a man’s forearm. The links became a chain, even more cumbersome. Winches pulled the chain’s end up to the saddles and out onto the catwalk.

After this, the work became even more difficult and painstaking. Feinlin and her people moved individual eyebars and pins out onto the catwalks and joined them in place; a backbreaking dangerous task that had to be exactly synchronized with the work on the other side of the river so that the cable would not be stressed.

Most nights Kit worked into the darkness. When the moons were bright enough, he, the high-workers, and the bridgewrights would work in shifts, day and night.

He crossed the mist six more times that fall. The high-workers disliked having people on the catwalks, but he was the architect after all, so he crossed once that way, struggling with vertigo. After that he preferred the ferries. When he crossed once with Valo, they talked exclusively about the bridge—Valo had decided to stay until the bridge was complete and the ferries finished though his mind was already full of the capital—but the other times, when it was Rasali, they were silent, listening to the hiss of the V-shaped scull moving in the mist. His fear of the mist decreased with each day they came closer to the bridge’s completion, though he couldn’t say why this was.

When Kit did not work through the night and Rasali was on the same side of the mist, they spent their nights together, sometimes making love, at other times content to share drinks or play ninepins in the Hart’s garden, at which Kit’s proficiency surprised everyone including himself. He and Rasali did not talk again about what she would do when the bridge was complete—or what he would do, for that matter.

The hard work was worth it. It was still warm enough that the iron didn’t freeze the high-worker’s hands on the day they placed the final bolt. The first chain was complete.

Though work slowed through the winter, the second and third chains were in place by spring, and the others were completed by the end of the summer.

With the heavy work done, some of the workers returned to their home-places. More than half had taken the name Bridger or something similar. “We have changed things,” Kit said to Jenner on one of his Nearside visits, just before Jenner left for his new work. “No,” Jenner said: “You have changed things.” Kit did not respond but held this close, and thought of it sometimes with mingled pride and fear.

The workers who remained were high-men and -women, people who did not mind crawling about on the suspension chains securing the support ropes. For the last two years, the ropemakers for two hundred miles up- and downstream from the bridge had been twisting and cutting, and looping and reweaving the ends of the fishskin cables that would support the road deck. Crates, each marked with the suspender’s position in the bridge, stood in carefully sorted, labeled towers in the sheepfield.

Kit’s work was now all paperwork, it seemed—so many invoices, so many reports for the capital—but he managed every day to watch the high-workers. Sometimes he climbed to tops of the pillars and looked down into the mist and saw Rasali’s or Valo’s ferry, an elegant narrow shape half-hidden in tendrils of blazing white mist or pale gray fog.

Kit lost one more worker, Tommer Bullkeeper, who climbed out onto the catwalk for a drunken bet and fell, with a maniacal cry that changed into unbalanced laughter as he vanished into the mist. His wife wept in mixed anger and grief, and the townspeople wore ash-color, and the bridge continued. Rasali held Kit when he cried in his room at The Red Lurcher. “Never mind,” she said. “Tommer was a good person: a drunk, but good to his sons and his wife, careful with animals. People have always died. The bridge doesn’t change that.”

The towns changed shape as Kit watched. Commercial envoys from every direction gathered. Many stayed in inns and homes. Some built small houses, shops, and warehouses. Many used the ferries and it became common for these businessmen and women to tip Rasali or Valo lavishly—“in hopes I never ride with you again,” they would say. Valo laughed and spent this money buying beer for his friends; the letter had come from University and he would begin his studies with the winter term, so he had many farewells to make. Rasali told no one, not even Kit, what she planned to do with hers.

Beginning in the spring of the project’s fifth year, they attached the road deck. Wood planks wide enough for oxen two abreast were nailed together into with iron struts to give stability. The bridge was made of several hundred sections, constructed on the worksites and then hauled out by workers. Each segment had farther to go before being placed and secured. The two towns celebrated all night the first time a Nearsider shouted from her side of the bridge and was saluted by Farsider cheers. In the lengthening evenings, it became a pastime for people to walk onto the bridge and lie belly-down at its end, land look into the mist so far below them. Sometimes dark shapes moved within it but no one saw anything big enough to be a Big One. A few heedless locals dropped heavy stones from above to watch the mist twist away, opening holes into its depths, but their neighbors stopped them. “It’s not respectful,” one said; and, “Do you want to piss them off?” said another.

Kit asked her but Rasali never walked out with him. “I see enough from the river,” she said.

Kit was Nearside, in his room in The Fish. He had lived in this room for five years, and it looked it. Plans and time tables overlapped one another, pinned to the walls. The chair by the fire was heaped with clothes, books, a length of red silk he had seen at a fair and could not resist; it had been years since he sat there. The plans in his folio and on the oversized table had been replaced with waybills and receipts for materials, payrolls, and copies of correspondence between Kit and his sponsors in the government. The window was open and Kit sat on the cupboard bed, watching a bee feel its way through the sun-filled air. He’d left half a pear on the table and he was waiting to see if the bee would find it, and thinking about the little hexagonal cells of a beehive, whether they were stronger than squares were and how he might test this.

Feet ran along the corridor. His door flew open. Rasali stood there blinking in the light, which was so golden that Kit didn’t at first notice how pale she was, or the tears on her face. “What—” he said as he swung off his bed.

“Valo,” she said. “The Pearlfinder.”

He held her. The bee left, then the sun, and still he held her as she rocked silently on the bed. Only when the square of sky in the window faded to purple and the little moon’s crescent eased across it, did she speak. “Ah,” she said, a sigh like a gasp. “I am so tired.” She fell asleep as quickly as that, with tears still wet on her face. Kit slipped from the room.

The taproom was crowded, filled with ash-gray clothes, with soft voices and occasional sobs. Kit wondered for a moment if everyone had a set of mourning clothes always at hand and what this meant about them.

Brana Keep saw Kit in the doorway and came from behind the bar to speak with him. “How is she?” she said.

“I think she’s asleep right now,” Kit said. “Can you give me some food for her, something to drink?”

Brana nodded, spoke to her daughter Lixa as she passed into the back, then returned. “How are you doing, Kit? You saw a fair amount of Valo yourself.”

“Yes,” Kit said. Valo chasing the children through the field of stones, Valo laughing at the top of a tower, Valo serious-eyed with a handbook of the calculus in the shade of a half-built fishing boat. “What happened? She hasn’t said anything yet.”

Brana spread her hands out. “What can be said? Signal flags said he was going to cross just after midday, but he never came. When we signaled over, they said he left when they signaled.”

“Could he be alive?” Kit asked, remembering the night that he and Rasali had lost the big scull, the extra hours it had taken for the crossing. “He might have broken the scull, landed somewhere downriver.”

“No,” Brana said. “I know, that’s what we wanted to hope. But Asa, one of the strangers, the high-workers; she was working overhead and heard the boat capsize, heard him cry out. She couldn’t see anything and didn’t know what she had heard until we figured it out.”

“Three more months,” Kit said mostly to himself. He saw Brana looking at him, so he clarified: “Three more months. The bridge would have been done. This wouldn’t have happened.”

“This was today,” Brana said, “not three months from now. People die when they die; we grieve and move on, Kit. You’ve been with us long enough to understand how we see these things. Here’s the tray.”

When Kit returned, Rasali was asleep. He watched her in the dark room, unwilling to light more than the single lamp he’d carried up with him. People die when they die. But he could not stop thinking about the bridge, its deck nearly finished. Another three months. Another month.

When she awakened, there was a moment when she smiled at him, her face weary but calm. Then she remembered and her face tightened and she started crying again. When she was done, Kit got her to eat some bread and fish and cheese and drink some watered wine. She did so obediently, like a child. When she was finished she lay back against him. Her matted hair pushed up into his mouth.

“How can he be gone?”

“I’m so sorry,” Kit said. “The bridge was so close to finished. Three more months, and this wouldn’t have—”

She pulled away. “What? Wouldn’t have happened? Wouldn’t have had to happen?” She stood and faced him. “His death would have been unnecessary?”

“I—” Kit began but she interrupted him, new tears streaking her face.

“He died, Kit. It wasn’t necessary, it wasn’t irrelevant, it wasn’t anything except the way things are. But he’s gone and I’m not and now what do I do, Kit? I lost my father and my aunt and my sister and my brother and my brother’s son, and now I lose the mist when the bridge’s done, and then what? What am I then? Who are the Ferry people then?”

Kit knew the answer. However she changed, she would still be Rasali. Her people would still be strong and clever and beautiful. The mist would still be there, and the Big Ones. But she wouldn’t be able to hear these words, not yet, not for months maybe. So he held her and let his own tears slip down his face, and tried not to think.

Five years after the Oncalion bridge was completed, Davell Meinem died. Kit was two years into building an aqueduct that stretched across the Bakyar valley, a big project, and there had been problems. The first stones could not sustain both the weight of the aqueduct and the water it was meant to carry; his predecessor on the project should never have accepted them. They were a full season behind schedule, but he left anyway to return to Atyar. Some time would be required to put his father’s affairs in order but mostly he did not wish to miss Twentieth-day, when Davell would be remembered.

The Grayfield was a little amphitheatre Davell had designed when he was young, matured now to a warm half-circle of white stone and grass. It was a warm day, brilliantly sunne. The air smelled of honey-cakes and incense. Kit was Davell’s only child, so he stood alone at the red-tasselled archway to greet those who came. He was not surprised at how many came to honor his father, more and more until the amphitheatre overflowed, the honey-cakes all eaten and the silver bowls filled with flowers, one from each mourner. Davell Meinem had built nine bridges, three aqueducts, four major buildings, innumerable smaller projects; and beyond this many people had liked him, his good humor.

What surprised Kit was all the people who had come for his sake: fellow students, tutors, old lovers, even the man who ran the wine-shop he frequented when he was in the city. Many of them had never even met his father. He did not know what to think about this: he had not known that so many might care about him.

Five months later, when he was back in the Bakyar valley, a letter came to him, wrapped in dirty oiled paper and clearly from far away. It was from the miners of Oncalion. “We heard about Davell Meinem from a trader when we were asking about you,” the letter said. “It was good to meet him. We are sorry for your loss.”

The fairs to celebrate the opening of the bridge started days before midsummer, the official date. Representatives of Empire from Atyar polished their speeches and waited impatiently in their suite of tents, planted on hurriedly cleaned-up fields near (but not too near) Nearside. The town had bled northward until it surrounded the west pillar of the bridge. The land that had once been sheep-pasture—Sheepfield, it was now—at the foot of the pillar was crowded with fair-tents and temporary booths, cheek by jowl with more permanent shops of wood and stone selling food and space for sleeping and the sorts of products a traveler might find herself needing. Kit was proud of the streets; he had organized construction of the crosshatch of sturdy cobblestones as something to do while he waited through the bridge’s final years. The new wells had been a project of Jenner’s, planned from the very beginning, but Kit had seen them completed. Kit had just received a letter from Jenner with news of his new bridge up in the Keitche mountains: on schedule, a happy work site.

Kit walked alone through the fair, which had splashed up the levee and along its ridge. A few people, townspeople and workers, greeted him; but others only pointed him out to their friends (the man who built the bridge; see there, that short dark man); and still others ignored him completely, just another stranger in a crowd of strangers. When he had first come to build the bridge everyone in Nearside knew everyone else, local or visitor. He felt solitude settling around him again, the loneliness of coming to a strange place and building something and then leaving. The people of Nearside were moving forward into this new world he had built, the world of a bridge across the mist, but he was not going with them.

He wondered what Rasali was doing over in Farside, and wished he could see her. They had not spoken since the days after Valo’s death, except once for a few minutes when he had come upon her at The Bitch. She had been withdrawn though not hostile, and he had felt unbalanced and not sought her out since.

Now, at the end of his great labor, he longed to see her. When would she cross next? He laughed. He of all people should know better: ten minutes’ walk.

The bridge was not yet open, but Kit was the architect; the guards at the toll booth only nodded when he asked to pass and lifted the gate for him. A few people noticed and gestured as he climbed. When Uni Mason (hands filled with ribbons) shouted something he could not hear clearly, Kit smiled and waved and walked on.

He had crossed the bridge before this. The first stage of building the heavy oak frames that underlay the roadbed had been a narrow strip of planking that led from one shore to the other. Nearly every worker had found some excuse for crossing it at least once before Empire had sent people to the tollgates. Swallowing his fear of the height, Kit himself had crossed it nearly every day for the last two months.

This was different. It was no longer his bridge, but belonged to Empire and to the people of Near- and Farside. He saw it with the eyes of a stranger.

The stone ramp was a quarter-mile long, inclined gradually for carts. Kit hiked up, and the noises dropped behind and below him. The barriers that would keep animals (and people) from seeing the drop-off to either side were not yet complete: there were always things left unfinished at a bridge’s opening, afterthoughts and additions. Ahead of him, the bridge was a series of perfect dark lines and arcs.

The ramp widened as it approached the pillar, and offered enough space for a cart to carefully turn onto the bridge itself. The bed of the span was barely wide enough for a cart with two oxen abreast, so Nearside and Farside would have to take turns sending wagons across. For now, Kit thought: Later they can widen it, or build another. They: it would be someone else.

The sky was overcast with high tin-colored clouds, their metallic sheen reflected in the mist below Kit. There were no railings, only fishskin ropes strung between the suspension cables that led up to the chains. Oxen and horses wouldn’t like that, or the hollow sound their feet would make on the boards. Kit watched the deck roll before him in the breeze, which was constant from the southwest. The roll wasn’t so bad in this wind, but perhaps they should add an iron parapet or more trusses, to lessen the twisting and make crossing more comfortable. Empire had sent a new engineer to take care of any final projects: Jeje Tesanthe. He would mention it to her.

Kit walked to one side so that he could look down. Sound dropped off behind him, deadened as it always was by the mist. He could almost imagine that he was alone. It was several hundred feet down, but there was nothing to give scale to the coiling field of hammered metal below him. Deep in the mist he saw shadows that might have been a Big One or something smaller or a thickening of the mist, and then, his eyes learning what to look for, he saw more of the shadows, as if a school of fish were down there. One separated and darkened as it rose in the mist until it exposed its back almost immediately below Kit.

It was dark and knobby, shiny with moisture, flat as a skate; and it went on forever—thirty feet long perhaps, or forty, twisting as it rose to expose its underside, or what he thought might be its underside. As Kit watched, the mist curled back from a flexing scaled wing of sorts, and then a patch that might have been a single eye or a field of eyes or something altogether different, and then a mouth like the arc of the suspension chains. The mouth gaped open to show another arc, a curve of gum or cartilage. The creature rolled and then sank and became a shadow and then nothing as the mist closed over it and settled.

Kit had stopped walking when he saw it. He forced himself to move forward again. A Big One, or perhaps just a Medium-Large One; at this height it hadn’t seemed so big or so frightening. Kit was surprised at the sadness he felt.

Farside was crammed with color and fairings as well, but Kit could not find Rasali anywhere. He bought a tankard of rye beer and went to find some place alone.

Once it became dark and the imperial representatives were safely tucked away for the night, the guards relaxed the rules and let their friends (and then any of the locals) on the bridge to look around them. People who had worked on the bridge had papers to cross without charge for the rest of their lives, but many others had watched it grow, and now they charmed or bribed or begged their way onto their bridge. Torches were forbidden because of the oil that protected the fishskin ropes but covered lamps were permitted. From his place on the levee, Kit watched the lights move along the bridge, there and then hidden by the support ropes and deck, dim and inconstant as fireflies.

“Kit Meinem of Atyar.”

Kit stood and turned to the voice behind him. “Rasali Ferry of Farside.” She wore blue and white, and her feet were bare. She had pulled back her dark hair with a ribbon and her pale shoulders gleamed. She glowed under the moonlight like mist. He thought of touching her, kissing her; but they had not spoken since just after Valo’s death.

She stepped forward and took the mug from his hand, drank the lukewarm beer, and just like that, the world righted itself. He closed his eyes and let the feeling wash over him.

He took her hand, and they sat on the cold grass and looked out across the river. The bridge was a black net of arcs and lines. Behind it was the mist glowing blue-white in the light of the moons. After a moment, he asked, “Are you still Rasali Ferry, or will you take a new name?”

“I expect I’ll take a new one.” She half-turned in his arms so that he could see her face, her pale eyes. “And you? Are you still Kit Meinem, or do you become someone else? Kit Who Bridged the Mist? Kit Who Changed the World?”

“Names in the city do not mean the same thing,” Kit said absently, aware that he had said this before and not caring. “Did I change the world?” He knew the answer already.

She looked at him for a moment as though trying to gauge his feelings. “Yes,” she said slowly after a moment. She turned her face up toward the loose strand of bobbing lights: “There’s your proof, as permanent as stone and sky.”

“ ‘Permanent as stone and sky,’ ” Kit repeated. “This afternoon—it flexes a lot, the bridge. There has to be a way to control it, but it’s not engineered for that yet. Or lightning could strike it. There are a thousand things that could destroy it. It’s going to come down, Rasali. This year, next year, a hundred years from now, five hundred.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “All these people, they think it’s forever.”

“No, we don’t,” Rasali said. “Maybe Atyar does, but we know better here. Do you need to tell a Ferry that nothing will last? These stones will fall eventually, these cables—but the dream of crossing the mist, the dream of connection. Now that we know it can happen, it will always be here. My mother died, my grandfather. Valo.” She stopped, swallowed. “Ferrys die, but there is always a Ferry to cross the mist. Bridges and ferryfolk, they are not so different, Kit.” She leaned forward, across the space between them, and they kissed.

“Are you off soon?”

Rasali and Kit had made love on the levee against the cold grass. They had crossed the bridge together under the sinking moons, walked back to the Deer’s Hart and bought more beer, the crowds thinner now, people gone home with their families or friends or lovers: the strangers from out of town bedding down in spare rooms, tents, anywhere they could. But Kit was too restless to sleep, and he and Rasali ended up back by the mist, down on the dock. Morning was only a few hours away, and the smaller moon had set. It was darker now and the mist had dimmed.

“In a few days,” Kit said, thinking of the trunks and bags packed tight and gathered in his room at The Fish: the portfolio, fatter now, and stained with water, mist, dirt, and sweat. Maybe it was time for a new one. “Back to the capital.”

There were lights on the opposite bank, fisherfolk preparing for the night’s work despite the fair, the bridge. Some things don’t change.

“Ah,” she said. They both had known this. It was no surprise. “What will you do there?”

Kit rubbed his face, feeling stubble under his fingers, happy to skip that small ritual for a few days. “Sleep for a hundred years. Then there’s another bridge they want, down at the mouth of the river, a place called Ulei. The mist’s nearly a mile wide there. I’ll start midwinter.”

“A mile,” Rasali said. “Can you do it?”

“I think so. I bridged this, didn’t I?” His gesture took in the berms, the slim stone tower overhead, the woman beside him. She smelled sweet and salty. “There are islands by Ulei, I’m told. Low ones. That’s the only reason it would be possible. So maybe a series of flat stone arches, one to the next. You? You’ll keep building boats?”

“No.” She leaned her head back and he felt her face against his ear. “I don’t need to. I have a lot of money. The rest of the family can build boats but for me that was just what I did while I waited to cross the mist again.”

“You’ll miss it,” Kit said. It was not a question.

Her strong hand laid over his. “Mmm,” she said, a sound without implication.

“But it was the crossing that mattered to you, wasn’t it?” Kit said, realizing it. “Just as with me, but in a different way.”

“Yes,” she said and after a pause: “So now I’m wondering: how big do the Big Ones get in the Mist Ocean? And lives there?”

“Nothing’s on the other side,” Kit said. “There’s no crossing something without an end.”

“Everything can be crossed. Me, I think there is an end. There’s a river of water deep under the Mist River, yes? And that water runs somewhere. And all the other rivers, all the lakes—they all drain somewhere. There’s a water ocean under the Mist Ocean, and I wonder whether the mist ends somewhere out there, if it spreads out and vanishes and you find you are floating on water.”

“It’s a different element,” Kit said, turning the problem over. “So you would need a boat that works through mist, light enough with that broad belly and fishskin sheathing; but it would have to be deep-keeled enough for water.”

She nodded. “I want to take a coast-skimmer and refit it, find out what’s out there. Islands, Kit. Big Ones. Huge Ones. Another whole world maybe. I think I would like to be Rasali Ocean.”

“You will come to Ulei with me?” he said but he knew already. She would come, for a month or a season or a year. They would sleep tumbled together in an inn very like The Fish or The Bitch, and when her boat was finished, she would sail across Ocean, and he would move on to the next bridge or road. Or he might return to the capital and a position at University. Or he might rest at last.

“I will come,” she said. “For a bit.”

Suddenly he felt a deep and powerful emotion in his chest: overwhelmed by everything that had happened or would happen in their lives, the changes to Nearside and Farside, the ferry’s ending, Valo’s death, the fact that she would leave him eventually, or that he would leave her. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m not,” she said and leaned across to kiss him, her mouth warm with sunlight and life. “It is worth it, all of it.”

All those losses, but this one at least he could prevent.

“When the time comes,” he said: “When you sail. I will come with you.”

A fo ben, bid bont. To be a leader, be a bridge.

Welsh proverb

SIX MONTHS, THREE DAYS

Charlie Jane Anders

The man who can see the future has a date with the woman who can see many possible futures.

Judy is nervous but excited, keeps looking at things she’s spotted out of the corner of her eye. She’s wearing a floral Laura Ashley style dress with an Ankh necklace and her legs are rambunctious, her calves moving under the table. It’s distracting because Doug knows that in two and a half weeks, those cucumber-smooth ankles will be hooked on his shoulders, and that curly reddish-brown hair will spill everywhere onto her lemon-floral pillows; this image of their future coitus has been in Doug’s head for years, with varying degrees of clarity, and now it’s almost here. The knowledge makes Doug almost giggle at the wrong moment, but then it hits him: she’s seen this future too—or she may have, anyway.

Doug has his sandy hair cut in a neat fringe that was almost fashionable a couple years ago. You might think he cuts his own hair, but Judy knows he doesn’t, because he’ll tell her otherwise in a few weeks. He’s much, much better looking than she thought he would be, and this comes as a huge relief. He has rude, pouty lips and an upper lip that darkens no matter how often he shaves it, with Elvis Costello glasses. And he’s almost a foot taller than her, six foot four. Now that Judy’s seen Doug for real, she’s re-imagining all the conversations they might be having in the coming weeks and months, all of the drama and all of the sweetness. The fact that Judy can be attracted to him, knowing everything that could lay ahead, consoles her tremendously.

Judy is nattering about some Chinese novelist she’s been reading in translation, one of those cruel satirists from the days after the May Fourth Movement, from back when writers were so conflicted they had to rename themselves things like “Contra Diction.” Doug is just staring at her, not saying anything, until it creeps her out a little.

“What?” Doug says at last, because Judy has stopped talking and they’re both just staring at each other.

“You were staring at me,” Judy says.

“I was . . .” Doug hesitates, then just comes out and says it. “I was savoring the moment. You know, you can know something’s coming from a long way off, you know for years ahead of time the exact day and the very hour when it’ll arrive. And then it arrives, and when it arrives, all you can think about is how soon it’ll be gone.”

“Well, I didn’t know the hour and the day when you and I would meet,” Judy puts a hand on his. “I saw many different hours and days. In one timeline, we would have met two years ago. In another, we’d meet a few months from now. There are plenty of timelines where we never meet at all.”

Doug laughs, then waves a hand to show that he’s not laughing at her, although the gesture doesn’t really clarify whom or what he’s actually laughing at.

Judy is drinking a cocktail called the Coalminer’s Daughter, made out of ten kinds of darkness. It overwhelms her senses with sugary pungency, and leaves her lips black for a moment. Doug is drinking a wheaty Pilsner from a tapered glass, in gulps. After one of them, Doug cuts to the chase. “So this is the part where I ask. I mean, I know what happens next between you and me. But here’s where I ask what you think happens next.”

“Well,” Judy says. “There are a million tracks, you know. It’s like raindrops falling into a cistern, they’re separate until they hit the surface, and then they become the past: all undifferentiated. But there are an awful lot of futures where you and I date for about six months.”

“Six months and three days,” Doug says. “Not that I’ve counted or anything.”

“And it ends badly.”

“I break my leg.”

“You break your leg ruining my bicycle. I like that bike. It’s a noble five-speed in a sea of fixies.”

“So you agree with me.” Doug has been leaning forward, staring at Judy like a psycho again. He leans back so that the amber light spilling out of the Radish Saloon’s tiny lampshades turn him the same color as his beer. “You see the same future I do.” Like she’s passed some kind of test.

“You didn’t know what I was going to say in advance?” Judy says.

“It doesn’t work like that—not for me, anyway. Remembering the future is just like remembering the past. I don’t have perfect recall, I don’t hang on to every detail, the transition from short-term memory to long-term memory is not always graceful.”

“I guess it’s like memory for me too,” Judy says.

Doug feels an unfamiliar sensation, and he realizes after a while it’s comfort. He’s never felt this at home with another human being, especially after such a short time. Doug is accustomed to meeting people and knowing bits and pieces of their futures, from stuff he’ll learn later. Or if Doug meets you and doesn’t know anything about your future, that means he’ll never give a crap about you, at any point down the line. This makes for awkward social interactions, either way.

They get another round of drinks. Doug gets the same beer again, Judy gets a red concoction called a Bloody Mutiny.

“So there’s one thing I don’t get,” Doug says. “You believe you have a choice among futures—and I think you’re wrong, you’re seeing one true future and a bunch of false ones.”

“You’re probably going to spend the next six months trying to convince yourself of that,” Judy says.

“So why are you dating me at all, if you get to choose? You know how it’ll turn out. For that matter, why aren’t you rich and famous? Why not pick a future where you win the lottery, or become a star?”

Doug works in tech support, in a poorly ventilated sub-basement of a tech company in Providence, RI, that he knows will go out of business in a couple years. He will work there until the company fails, choking on the fumes from old computers, and then be unemployed a few months.

“Well,” Judy says. “It’s not really that simple. I mean, the next six months, assuming I don’t change my mind, they contain some of the happiest moments of my life, and I see it leading to some good things, later on. And you know, I’ve seen some tracks where I get rich, I become a public figure, and they never end well. I’ve got my eye on this one future, this one node way off in the distance, where I die aged 97, surrounded by lovers and grandchildren and cats. Whenever I have a big decision to make, I try to see the straightest path to that moment.”

“So I’m a stepping stone,” Doug says, not at all bitterly. He’s somehow finished his second beer already, even though Judy’s barely made a dent in her Bloody Mutiny.

“You’re maybe going to take this journey with me for a spell,” Judy says. “People aren’t stones.”

And then Doug has to catch the last train back to Providence, and Judy has to bike home to Somerville. Marva, her roommate, has made popcorn and hot chocolate, and wants to know the whole story.

“It was nice,” Judy says. “He was a lot cuter in person than I’d remembered, which is really nice. He’s tall.”

“That’s it?” Marva said. “Oh come on, details. You finally meet the only other freaking clairvoyant on Earth, your future boyfriend, and all you have to say is, ‘He’s tall.’ Uh uh. You are going to spill like a fucking oil tanker, I will ply you with hot chocolate, I may resort to Jim Beam, even.”

Marva’s “real” name is Martha, but she changed it years ago. She’s a grad student studying 18th century lit, and even Judy can’t help her decide whether to finish her PhD. She’s slightly chubby, with perfect crimson hair and clothing by Sanrio, Torrid, and Hot Topic. She is fond of calling herself “mallternative.”

“I’m drunk enough already. I nearly fell off my bicycle a couple times,” Judy says.

The living room is a pigsty, so they sit in Judy’s room, which isn’t much better. Judy hoards items she might need in one of the futures she’s witnessed, and they cover every surface. There’s a plastic replica of a Filipino fast food mascot, Jollibee, which she might give to this one girl Sukey in a couple of years, completing Sukey’s collection and making her a friend for life—or Judy and Sukey may never meet at all. A phalanx of stuffed animals crowds Judy and Marva on the big fluffy bed. The room smells like a sachet of whoop-ass (cardamom, cinnamon, lavender) that Judy opened up earlier.

“He’s a really sweet guy.” Judy cannot stop talking in platitudes, which bothers her. “I mean, he’s really lost, but he manages to be brave. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to feel like you have no free will at all.”

Marva doesn’t point out the obvious thing—that Judy only sees choices for herself, not anybody else. Suppose a guy named Rocky asks Marva out on a date, and Judy sees a future in which Marva complains, afterwards, that their date was the worst evening of her life. In that case, there are two futures: One in which Judy tells Marva what she sees, and one in which she doesn’t. Marva will go on the miserable date with Rocky, unless Judy tells her what she knows. (On the plus side, in fifteen months, Judy will drag Marva out to a party where she meets the love of her life. So there’s that.)

“Doug’s right,” Marva says. “I mean, if you really have a choice about this, you shouldn’t go through with it. You know it’s going to be a disaster, in the end. You’re the one person on Earth who can avoid the pain, and you still go sticking fingers in the socket.”

“Yeah, but . . .” Judy decides this will go a lot easier if there are marshmallows in the cocoa, and runs back to the kitchen alcove. “But going out with this guy leads to good things later on. And there’s a realization that I come to as a result of getting my heart broken. I come to understand something.”

“And what’s that?”

Judy finds the bag of marshmallows. They are stale. She decides cocoa will revitalize them, drags them back to her bedroom, along with a glass of water.

“I have no idea, honestly. That’s the way with epiphanies: You can’t know in advance what they’ll be. Even me. I can see them coming, but I can’t understand something until I understand it.”

“So you’re saying that the future that Doug believes is the only possible future just happens to be the best of all worlds. Is this some Leibniz shit? Does Dougie always automatically see the nicest future or something?”

“I don’t think so.” Judy gets gummed up by popcorn, marshmallows and sticky cocoa, and coughs her lungs out. She swigs the glass of water she brought for just this moment. “I mean—” She coughs again, and downs the rest of the water. “I mean, in Doug’s version, he’s only 43 when he dies, and he’s pretty broken by then. His last few years are dreadful. He tells me all about it in a few weeks.”

“Wow,” Marva says. “Damn. So are you going to try and save him? Is that what’s going on here?”

“I honestly do not know. I’ll keep you posted.”

Doug, meanwhile, is sitting on his militarily neat bed, with its single hospital-cornered blanket and pillow. His apartment is almost pathologically tidy. Doug stares at his one shelf of books and his handful of carefully chosen items that play a role in his future. He chews his thumb. For the first time in years, Doug desperately wishes he had options.

He almost grabs his phone, to call Judy and tell her to get the hell away from him, because he will collapse all of her branching pathways into a dark tunnel, once and for all. But he knows he won’t tell her that, and even if he did, she wouldn’t listen. He doesn’t love her, but he knows he will in a couple weeks, and it already hurts.

“God damnit! Fucking god fucking damn it fuck!” Doug throws his favorite porcelain bust of Wonder Woman on the floor and it shatters. Wonder Woman’s head breaks into two jagged pieces, cleaving her magic tiara in half. This image, of the Amazon’s raggedly bisected head, has always been in Doug’s mind, whenever he’s looked at the intact bust.

Doug sits a minute, dry-sobbing. Then he goes and gets his dustpan and brush.

He phones Judy a few days later. “Hey, so do you want to hang out again on Friday?”

“Sure,” Judy says. “I can come down to Providence this time. Where do you want to meet up?”

“Surprise me,” says Doug.

“You’re a funny man.”

Judy will be the second long-term relationship of Doug’s life. His first was with Pamela, an artist he met in college, who made headless figurines of people who were recognizable from the neck down. (Headless Superman. Headless Captain Kirk. And yes, headless Wonder Woman, which Doug always found bitterly amusing for reasons he couldn’t explain.) They were together nearly five years, and Doug never told her his secret. Which meant a lot of pretending to be surprised at stuff. Doug is used to people thinking he’s kind of a weirdo.

Doug and Judy meet for dinner at one of those mom-and-pop Portuguese places in East Providence, sharing grilled squid and seared cod, with fragrant rice, with a bottle of heady vinho verde. Then they walk Judy’s bike back across the river towards the kinda-sorta gay bar on Wickenden Street. “The thing I like about Providence,” says Doug, “is it’s one of the American cities that knows its best days are behind it. So it’s automatically decadent, and sort of European.”

“Well,” says Judy, “it’s always a choice between urban decay or gentrification, right? I mean, cities aren’t capable of homeostasis.”

“Do you know what I’m thinking?” Doug is thinking he wants to kiss Judy. She leans up and kisses him first, on the bridge in the middle of the East Bay Bicycle Path. They stand and watch the freeway lights reflected on the water, holding hands. Everything is cold and lovely and the air smells rich.

Doug turns and looks into Judy’s face, which the bridge lights have turned yellow. “I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life.” Doug realizes he’s inadvertently quoted Phil Collins. First he’s mortified, then he starts laughing like a maniac. For the next half hour, Doug and Judy speak only in Phil Collins quotes.

“You can’t hurry love,” Judy says, which is only technically a Collins line.

Over microbrews on Wickenden, they swap origin stories, even though they already know most of it. Judy’s is pretty simple: She was a little kid who overthought choices like which summer camp to go to, until she realized she could see how either decision would turn out. She still flinches when she remembers how she almost gave a valentine in third grade to Dick Petersen, who would have destroyed her. Doug’s story is a lot worse: he started seeing the steps ahead, a little at a time, and then he realized his dad would die in about a year. He tried everything he could think of, for a whole year, to save his dad’s life. He even buried the car keys two feet deep, on the day of his dad’s accident. No fucking use.

“Turns out getting to mourn in advance doesn’t make the mourning afterwards any less hard,” Doug says through a beer glass snout.

“Oh man,” Judy says. She knew this stuff, but hearing it is different. “I’m so sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Doug says. “It was a long time ago.”

Soon it’s almost time for Judy to bike back to the train station, near that godawful giant mall and the canal where they light the water on fire sometimes.

“I want you to try and do something for me,” Judy takes Doug’s hands. “Can you try to break out of the script? Not the big stuff that you think is going to happen, but just little things that you couldn’t be sure about in advance if you tried. Try to surprise yourself. And maybe all those little deviations will add up to something bigger.”

“I don’t think it would make any difference,” Doug says.

“You never know,” Judy says. “There are things that I remember differently every time I think about them. Things from the past, I mean. When I was in college, I went through a phase of hating my parents, and I remembered all this stuff they did, from my childhood, as borderline abusive. And then a few years ago, I found myself recalling those same incidents again, only now they seemed totally different. Barely the same events.”

“The brain is weird,” Doug says.

“So you never know,” Judy says. “Change the details, you may change the big picture.” But she already knows nothing will come of this.

A week later, Doug and Judy lay together in her bed, after having sex for the first time. It was even better than the image Doug’s carried in his head since puberty. For the first time, Doug understands why people talk about sex as this transcendent thing, chains of selfhood melting away, endless abundance. They looked into each other’s eyes the whole time. As for Judy, she’s having that oxytocin thing she’s always thought was a myth, her forehead resting on Doug’s smooth chest—if she moved her head an inch she’d hear his heart beating, but she doesn’t need to.

Judy gets up to pee an hour later, and when she comes back and hangs up her robe, Doug is lying there with a look of horror on his face. “What’s wrong?” She doesn’t want to ask, but she does anyway.

“I’m sorry.” He sits up. “I’m just so happy, and . . . I can count the awesome moments in my life on a hand and a half. And I’m burning through them too fast. This is just so perfect right now. And, you know. I’m trying not to think. About.”

Judy knows that if she brings up the topic they’ve been avoiding, they will have an unpleasant conversation. But she has to. “You have to stop this. It’s obvious you can do what I do, you can see more than one branch. All you have to do is try. I know you were hurt when you were little, your dad died, and you convinced yourself that you were helpless. I’m sorry about that. But now, I feel like you’re actually comfortable being trapped. You don’t even try any more.”

“I do.” Doug is shaking. “I do try. I try every day. How dare you say I don’t try.”

“You don’t really. I don’t believe you. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

“You know it’s true.” Doug calms down and looks Judy square in the face. Without his glasses, his eyes look as gray as the sea on a cloudy day. “The thing you told me about Marva—you always know what she’s going to do. Yeah? That’s how your power works. The only reason you can predict how your own choices will turn out, is because other people’s actions are fixed. If you go up to some random guy on the street and slap him, you can know in advance exactly how he’ll react. Right?”

“Well sure,” Judy says. “I mean, that doesn’t mean Marva doesn’t have free will. Or this person I’ve hypothetically slapped.” This is too weird a conversation to be having naked. She goes and puts on a Mountain Goats T-shirt and PJ bottoms. “Their choices are just factored in, in advance.”

“Right.” Doug’s point is already made, but he goes ahead and lunges for the kill. “So how do you know that I can’t predict your choices, exactly the same way you can predict Marva’s?”

Judy sits down on the edge of the bed. She kneads the edge of her T-shirt and doesn’t look at Doug. Now she knows why Doug looked so sick when she came back from the bathroom. He saw more of this conversation than she did. “You could be right,” she says after a moment. “If you’re right, that makes you the one person I should never be in the same room with. I should stay the hell away from you.”

“Yeah. You should,” Doug says. He knows it will take forty-seven seconds before she cradles his head and kisses his forehead, and it feels like forever. He holds his breath and counts down.

A couple days later, Judy calls in sick at the arts nonprofit where she works, and wanders Davis Square until she winds up in the back of the Diesel Café, in one of the plush leather booths near the pool tables. She eats one of those mint brownies that’s like chocolate-covered toothpaste and drinks a lime rickey, until she feels pleasantly ill. She pulls a battered, scotch-taped World Atlas out of her satchel.

She’s still leafing through it a couple hours later when Marva comes and sits down opposite her.

“How did you know I was here?” Judy asks.

“Because you’re utterly predictable. You said you were ditching work, and this is where you come to brood.”

Judy’s been single-handedly keeping the Blaze Foundation afloat for years, thanks to an uncanny knack for knowing exactly which grants to apply for and when, and what language to use on the grant proposal. She has a nearly 100 percent success rate in proposal-writing, leavened only by the fact that she occasionally applies for grants she knows she won’t get. So maybe she’s entitled to a sick day every now and then.

Marva sees that Judy’s playing the Travel Game and joins in. She points to a spot near Madrid. “Spain,” she says.

Judy’s face gets all tight for a moment, like she’s trying to remember where she left something. Then she smiles. “Okay, if I get on a plane to Madrid tomorrow, there are a few ways it plays out. That I can see right now. In one, I get drunk and fall off a tower and break both legs. In another, I meet this cute guy named Pedro and we have a torrid three-day affair. Then there’s the one where I go to art school and study sculpture. They all end with me running out of money and coming back home.”

“Malawi,” Marva says. Judy thinks for a moment, then remembers what happens if she goes to Malawi tomorrow.

“This isn’t as much fun as usual,” Marva says after they’ve gone to Vancouver and Paris and Sao Paolo. “Your heart isn’t in it.”

“It’s not,” Judy says. “I just can’t see a happy future where I don’t date Doug. I mean, I like Doug, I may even be in love with him already, but . . . we’re going to break each other’s hearts, and more than that: We’re maybe going to break each other’s spirits. There’s got to be a detour, a way to avoid this, but I just can’t see it right now.”

Marva dumps a glass of water on Judy’s head.

“Wha? You—Wha?” She splutters like a cartoon duck.

“Didn’t see that coming, did you?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean . . . I mean, I’m not freaking omniscient, I sometimes miss bits and pieces, you know that.”

“I am going to give you the Samuel Johnson/Bishop Berkeley lecture, for like the tenth time,” Marva says. “Because sometimes, a girl just needs a little Johnson.”

Bishop George Berkeley, of course, was the “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound” guy, who argued that objects only exist in our perceptions. One day, Boswell asked Samuel Johnson what he thought of Berkeley’s idea. According to Boswell, Johnson’s response to this was to kick a big rock “with mighty force,” saying, “I refute it thus.”

“The point,” says Marva, “is that nobody can see everything. Not you, not Doug, not Bishop Berkeley. Stuff exists that your senses can’t perceive and your mind can’t comprehend. Even if you do have an extra sense the rest of us don’t have. Okay? So don’t get all doom and gloom on me. Just remember: Would Samuel Johnson have let himself feel trapped in a dead-end relationship?”

“Well, considering he apparently dated a guy named Boswell who went around writing down everything he said . . . I really don’t know.” Judy runs to the bathroom to put her head under the hot-air dryer.

The next few weeks, Judy and Doug hang out at least every other day and grow accustomed to kissing and holding hands all the time, trading novelty for the delight of positive reinforcement. They’re at the point where their cardiovascular systems crank into top gear if one of them sees someone on the street who even looks, for a second, like the other. Doug notices little things about Judy that catch him off guard, like the way she rolls her eyes slightly before she’s about to say something solemn. Judy realizes that Doug’s joking on some level, most of the time, even when he seems tragic. Maybe especially then.

They fly a big dragon kite on Cambridge Common, with a crimson tail. They go to the Isabella Stewart Gardner, and sip tea in the courtyard. Once or twice, Doug is about to turn left, but Judy stops him, because something way cooler will happen if they go right instead. They discuss which kind of skylight Batman prefers to burst through when he breaks into criminals’ lairs, and whether Batman ever uses the chimney like Santa Claus. They break down the taxonomy of novels where Emily Dickinson solves murder mysteries.

Marva gets used to eating Doug’s spicy omelettes, which automatically makes him Judy’s best-ever boyfriend in Marva’s book. Marva walks out of her bedroom in the mornings, to see Doug wearing the bathrobe Judy got for him, flipping a perfect yellow slug over and over, and she’s like, What are you? To Marva, the main advantage of making an omelette is that when it falls apart halfway through, you can always claim you planned to make a scramble all along.

Judy and Doug enjoy a couple months of relative bliss, based on not ever discussing the future. In the back of her mind, Judy never stops looking for the break point, the moment where a timeline splits off from the one Doug believes in. It could be just a split-second.

They reach their three-month anniversary, roughly the midpoint of their relationship. To celebrate, they take a weekend trip to New York together, and they wander down Broadway and all around the Village and Soho. Doug is all excited, showing off for once—he points out the fancy restaurant where the President will be assassinated in 2027, and the courthouse where Lady Gaga gets arrested for civil disobedience right after she wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Judy has to keep shushing him. Then she gives in, and the two of them loudly debate whether the election of 2024 will be rigged, not caring if people stare.

Once they’ve broken the taboo on talking about the future in general, Doug suddenly feels free to talk about their future, specifically. They’re having a romantic dinner at one of those restaurant/bars, with high-end American food and weird pseudo-Soviet iconography everywhere. Doug is on his second beer when he says, “So, I guess in a couple of weeks, you and I have that ginormous fight about whether I should meet your parents. And about a week after that, I manage to offend Marva. Honestly, without meaning to. But then again, in a month and a half’s time, we have that really nice day together on the boat.”

“Please don’t,” Judy says, but she already knows it’s too late to stop it.

“And then after that, there’s the Conversation. I am not looking forward to the Conversation.”

“We both know about this stuff,” Judy says. “It’ll happen if and when it happens, why worry about it until then?”

“Sorry, it’s just part of how I deal with things. It helps me to brace myself.”

Judy barely eats her entrée. Doug keeps oversharing about their next few months, like a floodgate has broken. Some of it’s stuff Judy either didn’t remember, or has blotted out of her mind because it’s so dismal. She can tell Doug’s been obsessing about every moment of the coming drama, visualizing every incident until it snaps into perfect focus.

By the time Judy gets up and walks away from the table, she sees it all just as clearly as he does. She can’t even imagine any future, other than the one he’s described. Doug’s won.

Judy roams Bleecker and St. Mark’s Place, until she claims a small victory: She realizes that if she goes into this one little subterranean bar, she’ll run into a cute guy she hasn’t seen since high school, and they’ll have a conversation in which he confesses that he always had a crush on her back then. Because Doug’s not there, he’s not able to tell her whether she goes into that bar or not. She does, and she’s late getting back to their hotel, even though she and cute high-school guy don’t do anything but talk.

Doug makes an effort to be nice the rest of the weekend, even though he knows it won’t do him any good, except that Judy holds hands with him on the train back to Providence and Boston.

And then Doug mentions, in passing, that he’ll see Judy around, after they break up—including two meetings a decade from now, and one time a full 15 years hence, and he knows some stuff. He starts to say more, but Judy runs to the dining car, covering her ears.

When the train reaches Doug’s stop and he’s gathering up his stuff, Judy touches his shoulder. “Listen, I don’t know if you and I actually do meet up in a decade, it’s a blur to me right now. But I don’t want to hear whatever you think you know. Okay?” Doug nods.

When the fight over whether Doug should meet Judy’s parents arrives, it’s sort of a meta-fight. Judy doesn’t see why Doug should do the big parental visit, since Judy and Doug are scheduled to break up in ten weeks. Doug just wants to meet them because he wants to meet them—maybe because his own parents are dead. And he’s curious about these people who are aware that their daughter can see the future(s). They compromise, as expected: Doug meets Judy’s parents over lunch when they visit, and he’s on his best behavior.

They take a ferry out to sea, toward Block Island. The air is too cold and they feel seasick and the sun blinds them, and it’s one of the greatest days of their lives. They huddle together on deck and when they can see past the glare and the sea spray and they’re not almost hurling, they see the glimmer of the ocean, streaks of white and blue and yellow in different places, as the light and wind affect it. The ocean feels utterly forgiving, like you can dump almost anything into the ocean’s body and it will still love us, and Judy and Doug cling to each other like children in a storm cellar and watch the waves. Then they go to Newport and eat amazing lobster. For a few days before and a few days after this trip, they are all aglow and neither of them can do any wrong.

A week or so after the boat thing, they hold hands in bed, nestling like they could almost start having sex at any moment. Judy looks in Doug’s naked eyes (his glasses are on the nightstand) and says, “Let’s just jump off the train now, okay? Let’s not do any of the rest of it, let’s just be good to each other forever. Why not? We could.”

“Why would you want that?” Doug drawls like he’s half asleep. “You’re the one who’s going to get the life she wants. I’m the one who’ll be left like wreckage.” Judy rolls over and pretends to sleep.

The Conversation achieves mythical status long before it arrives. Certain aspects of the Conversation are hazy in advance, for both Doug and Judy, because of that thing where you can’t understand something until you understand it.

The day of the Conversation, Judy wakes from a nightmare, shivering with the covers cast aside, and Doug’s already out of bed. “It’s today,” he says, and then he leaves without saying anything else to Judy, or anything at all to Marva, who’s still pissed at him. Judy keeps almost going back to bed, but somehow she winds up dressed, with a toaster pop in her hand, marching towards the door. Marva starts to say something, then shrugs.

Doug and Judy meet up for dinner at Punjabi Dhaba in Inman Square, scooping red-hot eggplant and bright chutney off of metal prison trays while Bollywood movies blare overhead and just outside of their line of vision.

The Conversation starts with them talking past each other. Judy says, “Lately I can’t remember anything past the next month.” Doug says, “I keep trying to see what happens after I die.” Judy says, “Normally I can remember years in advance, even decades. But I’m blocked.” She shudders. Doug says, “If I could just have an impression, an afterimage, of what happens when I’m gone. It would help a lot.”

Judy finally hears what Doug’s been saying. “Oh Jesus, not this. Nobody can see past death. It’s impossible.”

“So’s seeing the future.” Doug cracks his somosa in half with a fork, and offers the chunky side to Judy.

“You can’t remember anything past when your brain ceases to exist. Because there are no physical memories to access. Your brain is a storage medium.”

“But who knows what we’re accessing? It could be something outside our own brains.”

Judy tries to clear her head and think of something nice twenty years from now, but she can’t. She looks at Doug’s chunky sideburns, which he didn’t have when they’d started dating. Whenever she’s imagined those sideburns, she always associated them with the horror of these days. It’s sweltering inside the restaurant. “Why are you scared of me?” she says.

“I’m not,” Doug says. “I only want you to be happy. When I see you ten years from now, I—”

Judy covers her ears and jumps out of her seat, to turn the Bollywood music all the way up. Standing, she can see the screen, where a triangle of dancing women shake their fingers in unison at an unshaven man. The man smiles.

Eventually, someone comes and turns the music back down. “I think part of you is scared that I really am more powerful than you are,” Judy says. “And you’ve done everything you can to take away my power.”

“I don’t think you’re any more or less powerful than me. Our powers are just different,” Doug says. “But I think you’re a selfish person. I think you’re used to the idea that you can cheat on everything, and it’s made your soul a little bit rotten. I think you’re going to hate me for the next few weeks until you figure out how to cast me out. I think I love you more than my own arms and legs and I would shorten my already short life by a decade to have you stick around one more year. I think you’re brave as hell for keeping your head up on our journey together into the mouth of hell. I think you’re the most beautiful human being I’ve ever met, and you have a good heart despite how much you’re going to tear me to shreds.”

“I don’t want to see you any more,” Judy says. Her hair is all in her face, wet and ragged from the restaurant’s blast-furnace heat.

A few days later, Judy and Doug are playing foozball at a swanky bar in what used to be the Combat Zone. Judy makes a mean remark about something sexually humiliating that will happen to Doug five years from now, which he told her about in a moment of weakness. A couple days later, she needles him about an incident at work that almost got him fired a while back. She’s never been a sadist before now—although it’s also masochism, because when she torments him, she already knows how terrible she’ll feel in a few minutes.

Another time, Doug and Judy are drunk on the second floor of a Thayer Street frat bar, and Doug keeps getting Judy one more weird cocktail, even though she’s had more than enough. The retro pinball machine gossips at them. Judy staggers to the bathroom, leaving her purse with Doug—and when she gets back, the purse is gone. They both knew Doug was going to lose Judy’s purse, which only makes her madder. She bitches him out in front of a table of beer-pong champions. And then it’s too late to get back to Judy’s place, so they have to share Doug’s cramped, sagging hospital cot. Judy throws up on Doug’s favorite outfit: anise and stomach acid, it’ll never come out.

Judy loses track of which unbearable things have already happened, and which lay ahead. Has Doug insulted her parents yet, on their second meeting? Yes, that was yesterday. Has he made Marva cry? No, that’s tomorrow. Has she screamed at him that he’s a weak mean bastard yet? It’s all one moment to her. Judy has finally achieved timelessness.

Doug has already arranged—a year ago—to take two weeks off work, because he knows he won’t be able to answer people’s dumb tech problems and lose a piece of himself at the same time. He could do his job in his sleep, even if he didn’t know what all the callers were going to say before they said it, but his ability to sleepwalk through unpleasantness will shortly be maxed out. He tells his coworker Geoffrey, the closest he has to a friend, that he’ll be doing some Spring cleaning, even though it’s October.

A few days before the breakup, Judy stands in the middle of Central Square, and a homeless guy comes up to her and asks for money. She stares at his face, which is unevenly sunburned in the shape of a wheel. She concentrates on this man, who stands there, his hand out. For a moment, she just forgets to worry about Doug for once—and just like that, she’s seeing futures again.

The threads are there: if she buys this homeless man some scones from 1369, they’ll talk, and become friends, and maybe she’ll run into him once every few weeks and buy him dinner, for the next several years. And in five years, she’ll help the man, Franklin, find a place to live, and she’ll chip in for the deposit. But a couple years later, it’ll all have fallen apart, and he’ll be back here. And she flashes on something Franklin tells her eight years from now, if this whole chain of events comes to pass, about a lost opportunity. And then she knows what to do.

“Franklin,” she says to wheel-faced guy, who blinks at the sound of his name. “Listen. Angie’s pregnant, with your kid. She’s at the yellow house with the broken wheelbarrow, in Sturbridge. If you go to her right now, I think she’ll take you back. Here’s a hundred bucks.” She reaches in her new purse, for the entire wad of cash she took out of the bank to hold her until she gets her new ATM card. “Go find Angie.” Franklin just looks at her, takes the cash, and disappears.

Judy never knows if Franklin took her advice. But she does know for sure she’ll never see him again.

And then she wanders into the bakery where she would have bought Franklin scones, and she sees this guy working there. And she concentrates on him, too, even though it gives her a headache, and she “remembers” a future in which they become friendly and he tells her about the time he wrecked his best friend’s car, which hasn’t happened yet. She buys a scone and tells the guy, Scott, that he shouldn’t borrow Reggie’s T-Bird for that regatta thing, or he’ll regret it forever. She doesn’t even care that Scott is staring as she walks out.

“I’m going to be a vigilante soothsayer,” she tells Marva. She’s never used her power so recklessly before, but the more she does it, the easier it gets. She goes ahead and mails that Jollibee statue to Sukey.

The day of the big breakup, Marva’s like, “Why can’t you just dump him via text message? That’s what all the kids are doing, it’s the new sexting.” Judy’s best answer is, “Because then my bike would still be in one piece.” Which isn’t a very good argument. Judy dresses warm, because she knows she’ll be frozen later.

Doug takes deep breaths, tries to feel acceptance, but he’s all wrung out inside. He wants this to be over, but he dreads it being over. If there was any other way . . . Doug takes the train from Providence a couple hours early, so he can get lost for a while. But he doesn’t get lost enough, and he’s still early for their meeting. They’re supposed to get dinner at the fancy place, but Doug forgot to make the reservation, so they wind up at John Harvard’s Brew Pub, in the mall, and they each put away three pints of the microbrews that made John Harvard famous. They make small talk.

Afterwards, they’re wandering aimlessly, towards Mass Ave., and getting closer to the place where it happens. Judy blurts out, “It didn’t have to be this way. None of it. You made everything fall into place, but it didn’t have to.”

“I know you don’t believe that any more,” Doug says. “There’s a lot of stuff you have the right to blame me for, but you can’t believe I chose any of this. We’re both cursed to see stuff that nobody should be allowed to see, but we’re still responsible for our own mistakes. I still don’t regret anything. Even if I didn’t know today was the last day for you and me, I would want it to be.”

They are both going to say some vicious things to each other in the next hour or so. They’ve already heard it all, in their heads.

On Mass Ave., Judy sees the ice cream place opposite the locked side gates of Harvard, and she stops her bike. During their final blow-out fight, she’s not eating ice cream, any of the hundred times she’s seen it. “Watch my bike,” she tells Doug. She goes in and gets a triple scoop for herself and one for Doug, random flavors—Cambridge is one of the few places you can ask for random flavors and people will just nod—and then she and Doug resume their exit interview.

“It’s that you have this myth that you’re totally innocent and harmless, even though you also believe you control everything in the universe,” Doug is saying.

Judy doesn’t taste her ice cream, but she is aware of its texture, the voluptuousness of it, and the way it chills the roof of her mouth. There are lumps of something chewy in one of her random flavors. Her cone smells like candy, with a hint of wet dog.

They wind up down by the banks of the river, near the bridge surrounded by a million geese and their innumerable droppings, and Judy is crying and shouting that Doug is a passive aggressive asshole.

Doug’s weeping into the remains of his cone, and then he goes nuclear. He starts babbling about when he sees Judy ten years hence, and the future he describes is one of the ones that Judy’s always considered somewhat unlikely.

Judy tries to flee, but Doug has her wrist and he’s babbling at her, describing a scene where a broken-down Doug meets Judy with her two kids—Raina and Jeremy, one of dozens of combinations of kids Judy might have—and Raina, the toddler, has a black eye and a giant stuffed tiger. The future Judy looks tired, makes an effort to be nice to the future Doug, who’s a wreck, gripping her cashmere lapel.

Both the future Judy and the present Judy are trying to get away from Doug as fast as possible. Neither Doug will let go.

“And then 15 years from now, you only have one child,” Doug says.

“Let me go!” Judy screams.

But when Judy finally breaks free of Doug’s hand, and turns to flee, she’s hit with a blinding headrush, like a one-minute migraine. Three scoops of ice cream on top of three beers, or maybe just stress, but it paralyzes her, even as she’s trying to run. Doug tries to throw himself in her path, but he overbalances and falls down the river bank, landing almost in the water.

“Gah!” Doug wails. “Help me up. I’m hurt.” He lifts one arm, and Judy puts down her bike, helps him climb back up. Doug’s a mess, covered with mud, and he’s clutching one arm, heaving with pain.

“Are you okay?” Judy can’t help asking.

“Breaking my arm hurt a lot more . . .” Doug winces. “. . . than I thought it would.”

“Your arm.” Judy can’t believe what she’s seeing. “You broke . . . your arm.”

“You can see for yourself. At least this means it’s over.”

“But you were supposed to break your leg.”

Doug almost tosses both hands in the air, until he remembers he can’t. “This is exactly why I can’t deal with you any more. We both agreed, on our very first date, I break my arm. You’re just remembering it wrong, or being difficult on purpose.”

Doug wants to go to the hospital by himself, but Judy insists on going with. He curses at the pain, stumbling over every knot and root.

“You broke your arm.” Judy’s half-sobbing, half-laughing, it’s almost too much to take in. “You broke your arm, and maybe that means that all of this . . . that maybe we could try again. Not right away, I’m feeling pretty raw right now, but in a while. I’d be willing to try.”

But she already knows what Doug’s going to say: “You don’t get to hurt me any more.”

She doesn’t leave Doug until he’s safely staring at the hospital linoleum, waiting to go into X-ray. Then she pedals home, feeling the cold air smash into her face. She’s forgotten her helmet, but it’ll be okay. When she gets home, she’s going to grab Marva and they’re going straight to Logan, where a bored check-in counter person will give them dirt-cheap tickets on the last flight to Miami. They’ll have the wildest three days of their lives, with no lasting ill effects. It’ll be epic, she’s already living every instant of it in her head. She’s crying buckets but it’s okay, her bike’s headwind wipes the slate clean.

KISS ME TWICE

Mary Robinette Kowal

Metta, currently wearing the face of Mae West, lowered her voice to the star’s husky range. “I take my coffee black, like my heart.”

“You don’t have a heart.”

“Then I take my coffee black, like my processor.”

“Nice.” Huang grinned at her. She customized her interface for all the officers on the force, but tended toward silver screen starlets with Huang. Her Diamond Lil was pretty special though; she’d even gone black and white for the occasion.

The officer on duty waved Huang past the police line and into the building. Its lobby had been restored to showcase the 1920s detailing and the tall ceilings. Potted boxwoods graced the corners with indoor topiary. “I don’t remember the Waterfront area being so swanky.”

Metta said, “This district of Portland had a decline in the mid-seventies and most of the businesses moved out. For the past two years, a revitalization effort has been underway. Neil Patterson, the deceased, was responsible for much of the revitalization although not without some questionable transactions. I have his stats when you want them.”

“Do any of the questionable transactions relate to a motive?”

“Nothing concrete as yet.”

Huang grunted in acknowledgment and reached for the elevator button.

In his VR glasses, Metta winked at him. “Sorry, Scott. The elevator is out. So why don’t you come up and see me sometime.”

“Actually, it’s ‘Why don’t you come up sometime and see me.’ Popular misquote.”

Her image cocked her head and shifted her eyes to the left, Metta’s sign that she was searching for something. “You’re right . . . Which really bugs me. I should have checked the quote database against the script.”

A flush of unexpected pride went through Huang. She said he was right. “Yeah, well, I think the score’s human: 1, AI:549.” But she had still said he was right.

Metta dropped her lashes again and heaved West’s bosom. “The score never interested me, only the game.” She laughed. “Now climb the stairs.”

Worn linoleum resounded under his feet as he started up. Huang’s heart pounded in his chest noticeably after the third floor and he had to work hard not to pant. He gripped the banister, hauling himself up another flight, and subvocalized to Metta. “Remind me to start going to the gym again.”

“Can’t be responsible for you when you aren’t at work.”

“I know.” The door at the top of the stairs opened out on a hall, carpeted in generic beige. The walls surprised Huang. Paneling hugged their lower half with rich wood. Above the paneling, deep green wallpaper absorbed the light with velvety depth.

“Scott, would you mind waiting a minute? I have a memory-backup scheduled in thirty seconds and I’d rather have the actual crime scene all on one bank.”

“Sure.” He leaned against the wall. “You couldn’t have done it while we were on the stairs?”

“It’s not my schedule. Department regulations require a backup every six hours regardless of system type. I’ve tried pointing out to the chief that AIs are different, but . . .”

“I know . . Banks didn’t get it.” Huang checked the eSpy camera he wore in place of his collar stud to make sure it was seated properly. To the casual observer it would look like a standard men’s stud, clear glass mounted in a silver setting, but the lens it housed linked directly to Metta. Though she could see through a lens in his VR glasses, on crime scenes she preferred the better resolution of the specialized camera in the eSpy.

Huang scuffed a shoe in the short pile of the rug and resisted the urge to run his hand along the top of the . . “What’s this called?” He pointed the eSpy at the low wood paneling.

“Wainscoting. It was used to protect walls in the days of lathe and plaster construction.”

“Thanks. It reminds me of my cello.”

“You still playing that?”

“I haven’t practiced since I blew out my shoulder chasing that kid over the fence.”

“I told you there was a way around.”

He shrugged, even though he knew she couldn’t see it. “Adrenaline. What can I say?”

“Thanks. Backup’s done.” The hall ended at a plain wood door with a small brass plaque. “This way.” Metta magnified the image in Huang’s glasses briefly so he could read “Roof Access” etched on the plaque.

“Great. More stairs.”

“Scott, it’s time for the gloves.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” He unwillingly pulled on the purple department-issue rubber gloves.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you reaching for them.”

He snapped the gloves in place. “You didn’t give me time.”

Metta cleared her throat and continued. “Without the elevator, this is the only access to the roof, so our suspect most likely entered and exited the crime scene this way.” A single, short flight of steps led up to a small landing which served as a sort of vestibule for the elevator. To his right, a fire door opened to the roof.

The landing was so clean it sparkled. “Metta, does this look recently mopped?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never mopped.”

Years of footprints coated the stairs with black residue, but the cracked linoleum of the landing shone. Over everything floated a clean lemon scent. He snorted reflexively at the pungent odor.

Mae West hovered like a monochrome ghost in the edge of Huang’s vision. “Is there an aroma?”

“Yeah. It smells like Lemon Pledge.”

“Is that an analysis or a metaphor?”

Huang hesitated and sampled the air like a tea. “Not quite. It is a manufactured lemon scent, but I’m not sure how many cleaning products have the same smell profile.”

“CSI is downstairs and has promised me a spectrograph. Griggs says to thank you for noticing; she’s got a cold and would have missed the smell.” She frowned prettily. “Working from the size of the room I should be able to tell you when the mopping happened based on the dissipation of the odor.” She pretended to look around. “I’ll have her scan with the lumerol to check for blood. Go on out.”

The fire door opened onto the roof. Huang blinked at the rolling hills of grass that covered the top of the building. In the center of the grass, a small brick terrace had been set with a table and chairs.

Metta cleared her throat, the signal that she was about to relay a message from someone else in the department. “Griggs asks me to remind you not to touch anything.”

“For the love of—One time. I forgot one stinking time . . .” Huang clenched his fists and stepped onto the terrace, hating the reminder that he was the junior detective on the homicide team. The only reason he’d gotten this case was that it was on a roof and Oakes was scared of heights. Otherwise, he got the easy ones, the ones that Metta had already solved and all she needed was a flesh and blood officer to do the legwork. Not that anyone ever said that, but it was pretty obvious.

He grimaced and focused on the scene. The victim sprawled on the south side of the roof, next to a low wall. A wheelchair lay on its side a short distance behind him.

“Scott, meet Neil Patterson.”

“Well, well . . who brought you up here, Mr. Patterson?” Huang knelt by the wheelchair and squinted at the corpse. He was a white male who looked to be in his mid-forties, but his file said fifty-two. His sandy-red hair had been neatly trimmed in a corporate version of a crew-cut. He had a single gunshot wound in an otherwise well-developed upper torso. From the waist down he showed the atrophied signs of paralysis. Around him, the turf had divots dug out of it as though Patterson had not died instantly. The dirt and blood on his fingers seemed to confirm that.

In the center of the roof, the wireframe table was covered with a white linen tablecloth. It was set with two bone white teacups, so thin the morning sun turned them almost translucent. They sat on equally delicate saucers with a thin silver band around the edge of the saucer and the rim of the cups. The cup on the south side of the table had remnants of a liquid the color of straw. Huang leaned over to sniff and got hints of smoky earth and mown grass. Unfurled tea leaves rested on the bottom.

“Well?” Metta raised her eyebrows. “Are you going to show off?”

He smirked. Identifying beverages was the one thing he could do better than she could. Without a lab, that is. “I’m pretty sure it’s gunpowder tea.”

“Scott . . there’s no tea service out here.”

He straightened and looked at the layout again. Cups, saucers, spoons, even linen napkins—scratch that. One of the napkins was missing. And there was no teapot, sugar, or creamer. “Anyone hear the gunshot?”

Metta shook her head and nodded toward the elevated highway. “It probably blended with traffic noise.”

“Who found the body?”

“It was an anonymous call at 8:13 a.m. The number belongs to the Daily Grind coffee shop downstairs.”

“Play the call for me?”

She nodded and then the sound in his ear changed. A background noise filled with chatter and the hiss of an espresso machine replaced the hum of traffic. A man with a slight accent answered the operator. “There is a man. On the roof. I think he is dying. You must come quickly.”

“Sir, where are you?”

“Everett and Water. I don’t know the address.”

And then the line went dead. Huang raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

“Yes. He did not remain after he hung up.”

“So . . our guy here was dying, but not dead when the call came in. Nice to have a time of death.”

“If the coroner confirms it.”

“Right. Of course. I’ll check with the coffee shop’s staff when we finish here. See if they know the witness.” Huang bent to check the ground for any signs of footprints. Wheelchair tracks had pressed deep grooves into the turf roof. “Tell me more about Patterson?”

“Neil Patterson has his finger in property throughout the city. His name came up in a real estate scandal about a year ago, but nothing stuck.”

“Was that the thing where he was flipping properties, but the renovations were all sub-code?”

“Correct. He blamed his foreman, who was subsequently fired, but it seems pretty clear Patterson both knew and approved of the shortcuts. There are items in evidence that were not admitted into court.”

“Like what?”

“They’re sealed files now.” She grimaced. “Sorry, I can’t share that with you.”

Huang nodded as he stood and walked along the edge of the building. “It’s okay. I remember this now. Fitzgerald was working on it and was furious.” If Metta couldn’t tell him, then he could always ask Fitzgerald directly.

Behind him, the door to the roof opened and Ursula Griggs from CSI stepped out with a team from the coroner’s office.

She spoke from where she was and Metta amplified it for Huang. “There was blood on the stairs and landing. Found a sample. Metta’ll let you know the DNA results.” CSI’s eSpies were equipped with a different visual range than the standard issue. Between Griggs and Metta, they’d be able to get a good scan of the area.

“Thanks. We’ve got a gunshot. Want to help look for the shell casing?”

“No problem. Metta already asked me to.”

“Ah.” Huang turned slowly, so Metta could see the area. Across the street hulked a stuccoed building with shields carved in the stone on each buttress. Construction scaffolding masked the lower half of the building, evidently part of an attempt to spruce it up. Behind the building, I-5 nearly touched its upper edge. Oblivious to the presence of a dead man, cars whizzed past a block away from Huang.

How had a man in a wheelchair gotten to the rooftop without a working elevator? And why tea for two? He turned away from the corpse and paced along the edge of the building.

The north and east sides of the building were on a corner facing the street. The west side of the building had a narrow alley separating it from the next. It had the usual dumpsters, boxes, and abandoned plywood, but nothing looked immediately interesting.

Huang continued his slow circuit of the roof. Behind him Griggs filmed and photographed Patterson’s body. When she was finished, the coroner transferred the corpse to a body bag and placed it on the gurney to take back to the morgue.

With the natural turf roof, Huang had been hoping to find footprints or something useful, but Patterson’s struggle had obscured any obvious signs. Between Patterson’s wheelchair and the door to the elevator, he found a single screw in a patch of grass stained a deep red. “Hello. Can we get prints and contact DNA from this?”

“We’ll know in a moment.”

Huang heard footsteps behind him and turned to see Griggs approaching with her crime scene kit in tow. Her deep chestnut hair was tucked under her cap, except for a wisp hanging next to her cheek. “Thanks for spotting this.”

“Sure. Let me know when you’re done so I can roll the wheelchair over.”

She pulled out her high resolution camera and tripod and began documenting the screw, then bagged it and turned to the wheelchair, uploading images to Metta as she went. With a steady image, the AI would be able to run it through a series of filters to pull prints. Griggs said, “It’ll be awhile. I’ll need to document the rest of the scene before anyone contaminates it.”

Huang stepped back, trying not to telegraph his impatience while she did her job.

“Metta?” he subvocalized, “How long has the elevator been down?”

“I’ve been trying to check on that since we got here, but can’t reach the building manager.” Her image suddenly froze. “Shots fired at HQ.” Metta stiffened, seeming to look through him. “Officer down. Units 235 and 347 establish perimeter.”

Huang held his breath, listening for gunfire as if HQ were close enough that he could hear it. Beyond his glasses, Griggs reacted to Metta’s cry.

“Three armed subjects in chassis room. The assailants are armed, I repeat—Amado! Two officers down.”

How the hell had they gotten into Metta’s chassis room? It was in the basement of headquarters with cameras monitoring it at all times. Huang turned on his heels and sprinted back across the roof. “Metta, can you give a visual?”

He ran for the door, aware of the other officers springing into action behind him. “Metta, answer me. Who’s there? Can you give a visual?”

Car doors slammed on the street below.

An image flashed onto his glasses. A man. No. Three men, in masks. One of the men reached for a cable attached to a filing cabinet—not a filing cabinet. Metta’s chassis.

Metta screamed. She froze.

A static image of Mae West hung in Huang’s peripheral vision, with her mouth open wide. Then the image winked out.

* * * *

As Huang loped up to the police precinct, an ambulance pulled out with siren already screaming. He swallowed, hoping it held one of the bastards who’d broken into the building. A line of police officers stood as a barricade, scanning the crowd for possible threats. Yellow police tape stretched down the block and civilians stood outside the perimeter pointing with feverish curiosity. The bulbous nose of a News satellite dish pointed to the sky as reporters thrust their cameras toward every policeman who passed.

Huang flashed his badge, even though he knew both officers flanking the front entry to the building. Tension was crackling across everyone’s nerves. Bowes nodded to him, only taking his gaze off the crowd long enough to see Huang. “Chief wants us to send everyone over to the old courthouse. They’ve got a temporary HQ set up there while CSI goes over the building.”

Huang pulled out his PDA to make sure it was on. “I didn’t get a call.”

Bowes shook his head. “Radios are down. Metta ran dispatch. Pass the word if you see anyone, huh?”

“Was that Amado in the ambulance?”

Bowes scowled. “Fitzgerald. Bastards killed him.”

Stomach twisting, Huang jogged the two blocks to the Courthouse where the giant statue of Portlandia looked out over the city. She seemed to have a disapproving frown. Inside, a uniformed officer made Huang show I.D. before directing him up to the third floor. One of the holding rooms for jurors had been commandeered for the precinct’s detectives.

Woodrow Delarosa looked up as Huang entered and said, “We got Huang. Who’s that leave?”

Sigmundson, over by the window, picked up a notepad and said, “We’re still waiting for an update on Fitzgerald.”

“Guys . . .” Huang stopped, rage squeezing the breath out of his body. “He’s dead.”

Movement stopped in the room and Delarosa swore. “Okay, we’ll get these bastards. Banks has put me primary on this. Here’s what we know so far—shortly after eleven an unknown number of assailants entered the precinct. They shot two of our guys, Amado and Fitzgerald, and got away scot-free with our department AI. We got nothing on these bastards because all the surveillance is locked up in that machine and our guys were all clustered in the wrong areas.” Delarosa shook his head. “That thing goes down and everyone forgets how to set up a perimeter.”

Delarosa’s dislike for Metta had been the subject of a lot of departmental jokes, but this was pushing boundaries. She’d been kidnapped and he was acting like she was nothing more than a computer. He continued ranting. “Until we turn up someone who saw the bastards—”

Huang raised his hand. “I saw some of them.”

“How the hell? You were across town.”

“I asked Metta for a visual.” The ceiling fan clicked as it spun overhead, seeming to count down the minutes.

Delarosa stared at him, mouth open. “I’ll be damned. So far, you’re the only one who thought to do that.”

“I didn’t see much.”

“You did better than me.” Delarosa snorted as if he couldn’t believe that Huang had done something useful.

“I—How is that possible?”

“Shit . . .” Sigmundson said, “I just thought she was malfunctioning at first.”

“She’s one of your partners. How could you think that?”

“She is a machine.” Delarosa rubbed his eyes. “I’ve worked with other police A.I.s They’re all the same. They’re all Metta. There are differences, ‘cause they change with experience, but they all start as the same set of routines. Still machines.”

Huang bit back the argument that AIs were people. Organizations like AIM, the Artificial Intelligence Movement, had been fighting for AI rights, but hadn’t won many battles. Still, he didn’t see how anyone who spent time with Metta could deny that she was a thinking being.

Delarosa tapped his pencil on his pad. “Okay, here’s what I want. Sigmundson, you take Huang into the next room and get his testimony while it’s fresh. I’ll divide the neighborhood with the rest of the team and we’ll start canvassing.”

Huang asked, “Any idea on motive?”

“Officially?” Delarosa shook his head. “But since the only thing they took was Metta, I figure they want access to everything she monitors, which just happens to include every godforsaken camera in the city. Goddamn machine is the biggest bleeding security breach this system has got.”

Metta wasn’t just a machine, she was a colleague, but Huang kept his lips sealed around that thought, and followed Sigmundson out of the room.

* * * *

Huang wiped his hand across his mouth as he stood outside Patterson’s condo. Notifying the next of kin was never pleasant, but he couldn’t put this off, no matter how much he wanted to focus on finding the dirtbags who hit HQ.

On the fifteenth floor, the doors opened onto a small foyer with a gleaming marble floor. A fountain trickled in one corner and wall sconces provided graceful uplighting. Across from the elevator, dark wood double doors waited for him. Huang subvocalized, “Swanky.”

No one answered him. He swallowed against the silence.

A face appeared in the mirror next to the doors—a man with pale blue skin and chiseled, almost Arabic features—and Huang realized that it was an interface. A cloud of smoke surrounded the man, wrapping about his head like a turban. “Welcome, Detective Huang. If you will step into the library, the lady of the house will be with you shortly.” Smoke swirled around the AI like a Djinn as he gestured to the doorway by the mirror.

An AI as a butler. It seemed extravagant to employ an AI for such a limited task. Most companies that invested in an AI did so to manage a large organization, not just a household. Huang stepped through into a small room, wallpapered with books. A large desk squatted below the only window. On the desk sat an ornate brass lamp like something out of Aladdin. The AI appeared above an actual freaking lamp, which must have concealed an interface. Huang bowed at the waist. “You have me at a disadvantage. May I ask your name?”

“This one is called Qadir.”

Huang straightened, noticing the phrasing of the sentence. “Called?”

“This one is a Quimby model, but the master prefers that this one be called Qadir.” A small tea-cart trollied forward and a mechanical arm lifted a porcelain teapot. “Would you like some tea while you wait?”

Huang shook his head. “No. Thanks.”

The door to the library opened and a petite woman entered. Qadir suddenly appeared to genuflect. “My lady, may this one present Detective Huang?”

Even with six centimeter heels, Mrs. Patterson stood no more than 165 centimeters, but with the confidence of a much taller woman. She paused in the doorway, regarding Huang like a cat. Then she smiled and flowed forward with her hand extended. “Good afternoon, detective. The last time detectives were here it was because Neil had gotten himself into trouble. What’s he done this time?”

He took a breath and looked to where Metta should be as if she could brace him. “Ma’am. I regret the necessity of my visit. Earlier this morning, your husband died.”

The casual charm and grace fell out of her face, revealing a woman older than she had first appeared. “Pardon me?”

“Please, sit down.”

“No. No, thank you, I’ll stand.” She lifted her chin. “Are you telling me that Neil is dead? You are quite certain?”

“I’m afraid so.” Huang winced. “I hate to do this, but I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course . . .” She walked away from him, one hand covering her mouth. “I thought he was at the office. Working. How did . . ?”

“He was shot. He was found on the roof of one of your buildings in the waterfront area. At Everett and Water. Do you know who he might have been meeting this morning?”

She nodded. “Yes, he had a breakfast meeting with Magdalena Chase. But she would never—we’re on charity committees together. She wouldn’t.”

Huang waited for Metta to fill him in on who Magdalena Chase was and let the pause stretch out into awkward silence before he caught himself. Aggravated, he yanked the VR glasses off, not even sure why he had still been wearing them.

Qadir cleared his throat.

Mrs. Patterson scowled. “Well? What is it?”

Lowering his head in a bow, Qadir said, “Pardon me, madam, but Ms. Chase called last evening to reschedule.”

“What time was that?” Huang asked.

“10:17 p.m., sir.”

“That seems late to cancel. Did she say why?”

The AI shook his head. “This one regrets that she did not, but with my lady’s permission this one can transfer the recording to your Metta.”

Huang breathed sharply through his nose against the reminder. “Perhaps later.” He turned his attention back to Mrs. Patterson. “Do you know what time he left this morning or where he might have gone if he wasn’t going to meet her?”

She shook her head. “Neil and I sleep—slept.” One hand tightened into a fist by her side. “We did not share a bed any longer. He had night terrors. A remnant from the war, you see. So I only know that he was gone when I got up. I thought he was downstairs in his office.”

“Was there anyone who might have wished him harm?”

“He had business rivals, but no one that would kill him.”

There was something that Metta had said earlier. What had it been? Something he was going to follow up on. He darted his eyes to the left as if she might suddenly appear and remind him. He grimaced and asked a different question. “Qadir, do you have a record of when he departed?”

“Madam, may this one be permitted to answer the detective?”

“Yes, yes. Cooperate thoroughly.” She waved her hand as if shooing away a fly.

“The master departed at 7:12 a.m. He did not tell this one where he was going.”

“Is that unusual?”

“No, sir. The master was not in the habit of sharing his thoughts with this one.”

Qadir’s constant use of the third person when talking about himself rankled Huang. What kind of bizarro interface was this to demand from an AI? Sure, Metta was—had been working as Mae West, but she’d picked the persona. He had a hard time imagining anyone choosing to be this servile. “May I ask what sort of vows Qadir has in place?” Huang worried the inside of his lip.

An AI’s testimony was admissible in court, the same way a surveillance video would be. On the other hand, Qadir might have a vow to obey his master, which would make lying to protect Patterson a priority. Whereas an AI like Metta had an honesty vow, which prevented her from lying. Her testimony would be considered incontrovertible, but Qadir’s might be suspect.

“I don’t know. Neil handled that.” Mrs. Patterson pressed her hands to her temples.

Huang leaned forward and picked up a cup. It was a blue and white rice pattern with no similarity to the tea set on the roof. The mechanical arm unfurled from the cart and lifted the teapot. The steam smelled dry and papery, like a poor quality black tea. “Tea, sir?”

“No. Thank you.” He set the cup back down and turned to Mrs. Patterson. “You’ve been very helpful, but there might be questions we want to ask you in the future, so please let me know before you go out of town.”

* * * *

When Huang got home late from work, his mother bustled out of the kitchen wielding her cane like a weapon. “What wrong?”

How could he even start to explain what had happened? “Things got strange at work.”

“How strange?” Even with the cane, she tried to take his bookbag as she gestured to the couch. “Sit. I bring tea.”

He pulled the bag away from her. “Ma. You don’t have to do that.” Seventy-one years old, and she still felt like she had to wait on him.

“Not me, then who? You not take care of self, so,” she glared at him, “I take care of you. Maybe you not want me here?”

As had happened every night since his mother had moved in with him, Huang gave up. It was easier to let her have her way. Even though she liked to practice English, he switched to Mandarin because they seemed to fight less in her native language. “Some tea would be very nice, if it’s not too much trouble.”

She beamed at him, her wrinkles swinging upward in a many-creased smile. “No trouble at all, poor thing. What may I get you?”

“Your choice.”

She bustled out of the room, as if she had not had a hip replaced five weeks ago. Huang watched her go and shook his head. Maybe he wouldn’t have to explain why he was home late.

He pulled himself off the sofa and headed for his computer. Sitting down, he powered it on and called up his A.S. search engine. Single-minded, the engine was built to be the world’s best research assistant, but, like all A.S., the artificial savant had no intuition, no true intelligence.

Huang stared at the screen and typed in a keyword he had never felt the need to research before.

Metta

His mother came in and fussed while he was looking at sites, but otherwise left him alone with his tea. He nearly laughed at the irony in her choice. She had made him a cup of gunpowder tea. Each leaf was rolled into a tiny dark ball, which would open at the bottom of the cup. Summer, freshly mown grass.

With each site, the A.S. refined the search, noting when Huang was skimming and when he paused to read, until it refined the search to only the relevant results.

Although the basic program was the same for every police station, each Metta customized herself to fit her environment. Over time, the AIs would sometimes choose different names or revamp their generic interface. They had the option of upgrading their hardware accessories, but the basic chassis which housed the AI’s brain was as integral to them as the skeleton was to the human body. They had to have a chassis to function; the software wouldn’t run in any other environment.

Huang sat for a moment looking at the screen, wishing that Metta would help him decide what to do next.

* * * *

At HQ, Huang went through the motions along with everyone else, but the work load magnified without Metta’s help. The chief brought in an A.S., but the artificial savant did a fraction of the work Metta had done. The halls were full of officers grousing about having to do their own paperwork.

In the late morning, before he had time to hit the road for investigation, Griggs showed up at his desk. “I don’t have a lot for you, but thought you’d want what I’ve got.”

Huang took the sheaf from Griggs and raised his eyebrows at the paper. It felt weirdly retro. Griggs shook her head. “Sorry there’s not more. We lost most of the evidence we took because Metta had it.”

Huang looked up from the papers. “How’s that?”

“Our scanners upload straight to Metta. No on board storage.”

Huang whistled.

Griggs crossed her arms. “Thank God Amado is getting released this afternoon so we can reboot Metta.”

“Reboot Metta? Did they find her?” The hair stuck up on the back of Huang’s neck.

“I wish. Nah, it’s just a backup. You hadn’t heard?”

Huang shook his head. Living AIs made backups in case of system failures, but the only time he’d heard of one actually being rebooted was a case where the AI’s chassis had been destroyed in a fire. “Can they do that?”

“Why else would they make backups?” Her face twisted. “I know, it sounds like raising the dead to me.”

“Yeah.” Huang worked his neck, trying to ease some of the tension out of it.

After Griggs left him, he looked through the papers. She had an autopsy report back from the morgue showing that Patterson had died around eight a.m. from a .38 caliber to the chest. The round had missed his heart, so he’d died of blood loss and shock. If he’d gotten prompt medical attention, he might have lived.

The only clean prints were from Patterson himself. The screw had more detail than he’d thought possible for such a small piece of metal. It was a M3 machine screw, brass, a truss head with a posidriv slot, and had been sheared 5 mm down the shaft. Griggs had no word on the lemon smell, or the blood on the stairs.

Huang threw the papers down. What was the point of trying to investigate something when half the evidence had gone missing?

Evidence was missing.

What if someone hadn’t taken Metta to access her network, but to hide evidence? No, that didn’t make sense. Griggs had said they were going to boot a backup of Metta into a new chassis. On the other hand, that meant the department would have access to all of the information from before her last backup, but not after.

Metta had asked Huang to wait while she did the backup, which she did every six hours. They spent two hours on the roof before the break-in at the station happened. So everything in that two hour period was unrecorded.

What was in the blind spot?

He turned to the computer and asked the A.S. search engine for a list of crimes under investigation when Metta had vanished. The engine returned the search empty-handed. Huang grimaced. Of course, Metta wasn’t available to query. Once he started feeding the A.S. the scattered details he could remember, it began returning information from the call centers about the unresolved investigations.

He scowled and tried to recall what they’d talked about in the morning staff meeting. The urge to subvocalize to Metta and ask her to jog his memory kept tickling.

Hours later, Griggs leaned her head into the department. “Hey Huang, the new chassis arrived.”

Huang pushed back from his desk. He pulled his VR glasses and earbud out of his pocket, putting them on while he followed Griggs into the hall. An excited crowd of officers streamed toward the stairs. He pushed down the steps where Amado had been found, wondering if it had been hard for him to come back this way.

Just down the hall from the bottom of the stairwell, it looked like half the station had gathered outside the chassis room. Griggs hung near the fringes, hands shoved deep in her pockets. Huang worked his way through the group until he was leaning against the door.

Amado glanced over his shoulder. “Okay. She’s about to wake up.”

Metta’s cameras swiveled on their base, ID-ing the people standing in the door.

The face she wore for Amado, a young, gawkish woman, appeared above the interface with panic in her eyes. “Why am I a backup?”

Huang wanted to back away from the raw fear in her face.

“What happened to me? Why am I a backup?”

“Take it easy, Metta.” Amado raised his hands soothingly.

“Screw that. Tell me why I’m a backup.” She blinked. “And why don’t I have access to anything but my local connections?” Her voiced thundered over her speakers. “Tell me what the hell happened!”

“I thought it would be too jarring for you to come back online everywhere at once.”

She smiled sourly at him. “Well, I’m online now and I feel like an amputee. How is that better?”

“I’m sorry.” Amado tapped some keys on the manual interface and Metta’s face relaxed.

“Thank you.”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t done this before.”

“No one has except when—” her voice broke off. “Am I dead?”

“No.” Amado hesitated, clearly trying to decide what to tell her.

Huang couldn’t stand this subterfuge. “Metta?” he subvocalized, “Can you hear me?”

Mae West faded into sight on his glasses. She purred in his ear, “Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”

“Beyond measure.”

“I’m glad.” Then her face hardened. “Will you tell me what’s happening?”

In the room in front of Huang, Amado rubbed his hands together. “There was an incident.”

“Duh.”

Delarosa leaned over Amado’s chair, ignoring the AI wrangler. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Her eyes widened. “On which channel, sir? I’m with all of your men on duty, do you want me to tell you my last memory with each of them? Or my last memories through the surveillance cameras? Or shall I simply tell you my memory ends at 8:59:59 on Tuesday, October twenty-fifth. It would be more useful to tell me what happened after that.”

Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Armed men broke into the station and stole your chassis. They shot Amado.”

The face in his VR glasses opened her mouth in shock. Over her interface, Metta looked down at Amado. “I should have noticed the bandage. I’m sorry, I was disoriented.”

In Huang’s ear, she whispered, “Thank you, Scott.”

“So you brought me online to find the people who stole me and shot you?”

Amado flinched and looked over his shoulder, no doubt wondering which of the officers watching was talking to Metta. Huang met his eyes with a flat expression, uncomfortably aware of the glasses on his face.

“Fitzgerald’s dead?” Metta’s voice brought Amado back to the front. Huang realized he was not the only one in the group subvocalizing to her.

“Who’s telling you these things?” Amado started to twist in his seat again.

“For heaven’s sake, Amado. There’s an APB out for the people who shot him! I’m doing what I was designed to do, filling in the blanks from evidence on hand. This isn’t like we’re playing hide-and-seek.”

“I’m sorry, I was worried about you.”

“Which me, Amado? The one here now, or my Prime?”

Huang backed away from the door. “Metta, are you okay?”

Mae West laughed at him. “I’m angry and confused, but completely functional. On the way to the Patterson case, I told you to wait so it could all be on one memory bank, and now I don’t remember any of it. Tell me everything that happened from your point of view after that.” She hesitated and looked squarely at him. “Don’t leave anything out, not even the jokes.”

Huang began talking as he walked up the stairs; he started with the wainscoting.

* * * *

When he finished reciting everything he could remember since she had vanished, the face of Mae West chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. “Scott . . . Beyond talking to Mrs. Patterson, I didn’t hear you say anything about the case. Did you interview the workers at the Daily Grind, or canvass the neighborhood, or . . maybe you should catch me up on what you’ve done on the Patterson case?”

The air went cold and Huang slumped in his seat. He hadn’t done any of that. “I—I was thinking . . . Well, wondering if maybe one of the cases on Tuesday morning was connected to the break in here and—shit.” He hung his head, realizing that he’d forgotten his own case in his concern for Metta. Was he really that inept without her to remind him of things? “I totally got distracted and screwed up, didn’t I?”

“Well . . .” Metta smiled at him, with the full dazzling brilliance of Mae West. “An ounce of performance is worth pounds of promises.”

Huang laughed, despite his guilt. Trust Metta to attempt to reassure him. “Y’know, you don’t have to keep the Mae West interface if you don’t want to.”

Her smile dropped. “I thought you liked it.”

“I do, but you’ve been through a lot and I don’t want you to stress about it.”

“Every man I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out what from.” She pouted the full lips and then spoke with her own voice out of Mae West’s mouth. “Scott, I just woke up for the first time in my life. It’s . . it’s hard to explain what it is like to have no awareness of a day. My memory stretches back to the moment I first came online with the exception of this gaping hole. Being Mae West today makes me feel connected to when I was Mae West on Tuesday. If it bothers you, I’ll change, but otherwise I’d rather keep her for awhile.”

Huang wanted to press his hand to her cheek to soothe her. “Metta, I wish there was something I could do for you.”

“You’re doing a lot already.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re treating me like I’m real, and we both know I’m not.”

“Don’t say that.” He leaned forward, close to her interface.

“I don’t mean that . . I mean I’m a backup. There are two of me in the world—this is more than two programs starting with the same parameters. My siblings are like identical twins; the same material creates different people. I’m an incomplete version of the Metta you know, and we diverge farther from each other with every moment that passes.” She tossed her head. “There’s no need to go on about this. It is what it is. The point is, I appreciate that you have always treated me like a real person.”

He listened to the words she didn’t say; there were people who treated her like a machine. He thought of Qadir and his Arabian Nights interface. “Metta—”

“Hush. Let’s talk about the Patterson case.”

He took a breath to clear his head. “Okay. I guess first up is the coffee shop?”

Metta lowered her lashes and purred. “If I asked for a cup of coffee someone would search for the double meaning.”

Huang stepped into the Daily Grind coffee shop and inhaled deeply. He could probably get a caffeine fix just from breathing.

“A smell?” Metta asked.

“Lots of really good coffee.”

“The way you boys go on about coffee makes me wish I had taste and scent.”

“It’s probably not as handy as your multitasking.”

She gave him a saucy look. “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.”

“Geez, Metta, you’re going to distract me with all this Mae West heat.”

“I didn’t discover curves; I only uncovered them.”

“Shush.”

She wrinkled her nose. “Sorry, Scott. Go on, do your thing.”

Huang walked up to the counter and leaned casually against it, waiting for the teenage girl behind it to notice him. She was standing by an A.S. espresso machine as the mechanized arms made a perfect cappuccino. The automaton’s arms whirred with precise tiny movements.

Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Why don’t you have an automaton?”

“Why give up processing power when I have you?”

“I’m more than just a pair of hands, you know.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Men are all alike—except the one you’ve met who’s different.”

“Ow.”

The girl took the cup from the machine and shouted into the cafe, “Double dragon cappuccino!”

The automaton espresso machine had poured the foam in the cup to create a coffee dragon. The bouquet was a complex nutty affair with notes of violets, citrus, and dark chocolate. Probably a Colombian blend.

She handed it off to an Asian retro-steampunk kid and blew a strand of hair out of her face. “Welcome to the Daily Grind! What can I get for you?”

Huang smiled at her and glanced at her name badge. “Actually, Vicki, I need to ask some questions. Were you working yesterday morning?”” He pulled his badge out from his pocket and showed it to the girl.

Vicki rolled her eyes at the sight of the detective’s shield. “Yeah.”

“Great. Someone made a call from here at 8:13 yesterday morning. We want to talk to whoever it was.”

“Is he in trouble?”

Huang made a mental note that she had assigned a gender to the hypothetical person in his question. “We think he’s a witness. Who made the call?”

“Lowfat double-shot cappuccino.”

“Excuse me?”

“I know customers by their drinks, not their names.” Vicki flipped the hair back from her eye. “This guy comes in every morning and orders the same thing. He tried a mocha once and didn’t like it, went back to the lowfat double-shot cappuccino.”

“Can you describe him?” He glanced at Metta who nodded to show that she was ready.

As Vicki talked, Metta created a composite sketch, occasionally prompting Huang to ask specific questions in order to refine the features. When she was finished, she pinged the image to his PDA. Huang pulled it out and unrolled the screen to full-size. “Is this him?”

Vicki frowned, looking at the rendering of the slender black man. He was in his mid-thirties, with a round face and short hair, twisted into neat, tiny curls. “Shit, yes. That’s creepy.”

Huang suppressed a grin, but this skill of Metta’s was one of his favorite tricks. She nodded in his field of vision. “I’ll start cross-referencing him with our files.”

Aloud, Huang asked, “Was there anything strange about the last time you saw him?”

“What, you mean like the bandage on his hand?”

Huang held himself extremely still. “Yes.” He locked his gaze on hers. “Exactly like that.”

He waited for her to fill in the blanks. Vicki sighed and twisted her hair up onto her head in a bun. “Well, he usually comes in once around six, but yesterday he came in twice. I asked why, he says it was ‘cause yesterday’s job was in the neighborhood.”

“Any idea what he did?”

“He was in construction. Always wore the same coveralls—” She held up a hand to stop him, clearly guessing the next question. “Gray with an orange patch. I don’t remember what it said.”

“Huang, what is it?” Metta leaned forward in her screen. “Your eyes dilated.”

“In a second,” he subvocalized. To the girl he said, “Go on.”

“Anyway, so the first time he just gets his coffee, like usual. The second time—”

Metta whispered, “Ask her when.”

“Do you know what time that was?”

“Just after 8:00. I was making the usual for Tall Skim Chai Latte and remember being surprised to see Lowfat double-shot cappuccino back in here. He asked if he could use the phone ‘cause he’d left his at home. So I say sure and don’t pay much attention ‘cause Tall Skim Chai Latte can be a bitch sometimes.”

“How did he seem?”

“Distracted? Tense? But smiling like always . . .” She squirmed. “He’s not in trouble, is he?”

“Why do you think he might be in trouble?”

“He’s a regular and he broke all the patterns.”

“We think he witnessed the murder upstairs. Please, we need to find him.”

She nodded. “Okay. So he uses the phone then goes out. I felt bad about having to ignore him so I shouted ‘Bye’ and that’s when I noticed that he’d been hurt.”

“Did he have the bandage when he came in that morning?”

She shook her head. “No. I would’ve noticed when I handed him his drink.”

Huang slid his eyes to where Metta hovered in his glasses frame. “You didn’t see him again?”

Vicki shrugged. “He didn’t come in this morning.”

“Was anyone working with him?” From the moment the girl had said the man was in construction he’d had a feeling.

“Not that I know of. It was always just him.”

He handed Vicki his business card. “Thank you for your time. If you think of anything, or if you see him again, please call me immediately.”

The moment his back was to the girl, Metta enlarged her face in his field of vision. “Okay, Scott. Spill it. What do you know that I don’t?”

“Hang on. I’m enjoying being a step ahead of you.”

“You’re taking unfair advantage of a medical condition.”

He sobered as he recalled why she didn’t know what he remembered. “Yesterday there was construction scaffolding on the building behind this one.” He walked around the corner, heading to the back of the Daily Grind building.

“I told you to tell me everything!”

“I didn’t think to mention it because it wasn’t on the crime scene.”

“What else did you leave out?”

“I don’t know.” He strode down the sidewalk to the end of the block. “I had no way of knowing this was any more relevant than that my mother made me tea last night.”

She growled at him, but with the Mae West interface, she sounded disturbingly sexy.

“I’m sorry,” Huang said. “It was a mistake. I won’t do it again.”

“If you put your foot in it, be sure it’s your best foot.”

He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Just how big a Mae West database did you download?”

“Big enough.” She still glowered at him.

“Okay.” Huang held up his hands in surrender. “Look, I saw the scaffolding when we got to the roof. I don’t know if there was anyone on it when we left because we left in a hurry.”

“Fair enough. Now get moving, I want to see this scaffolding.”

Huang nodded and jogged to the end of the block. Across the street, the scaffolding was still in place, but no one was working on it.

Metta looked up and to her left, grimacing. “I wish I could see your POV from yesterday and know if Mr. Lowfat was there.”

He let his voice drop down. “Whoever was on that roof is still loose.”

“You think—oh. Bogart, The Enforcer.” She rolled her eyes. “I must be more rattled than I thought if I can’t recognize your impression.”

“Hey, Metta.” The urge to rub her back, to comfort her almost overwhelmed him. “No one will blame you if you need a day to get back into the groove.”

Her eyes flashed. “I will blame myself.”

“But you—you can’t blame yourself for being kidnapped.” His head spun as he remembered the Metta who had been kidnapped was still missing. It was so easy to think she was all right, when she was here. But he was speaking to a clone, who was also Metta, and yet not.

“Who else is responsible for the safety of the station? I’ve been reading the reports since I was rebooted. How did they get so far before being noticed?”

“I can’t answer that, Metta. Delarosa will find you.”

“Ha.” She leaned forward, showing her bosom. “I see you’re a man with ideals. I better be going while you’ve still got them.” She sighed. “Speaking of going, get me closer to the scaffolding to see if there’s any contact information on them. Meanwhile, I’ll check with permits to see if we can find our guy that way.”

“I love it when you multitask.” He waited for a cyclist to pass, then crossed the street.

“Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.”

Huang snorted and rolled his eyes. He walked under the scaffolding and stopped by the second upright. Turning so the eSpy could focus on the orange sticker on the scaffolding, he held still so Metta could read it. “Feldman Construction.”

“Checking.” Metta looked up and to her left. “Got it.”

“Well, then, let’s go see if they recognize Mr. Lowfat.”

* * * *

The rumble of heavy machinery pounded through Huang’s ears as he stood next to Mr. Feldman. The older man’s skin had been tanned to bronze. Age spots mottled his strong hands. He leaned over Huang’s unrolled PDA screen and studied the sketch of Mr. Lowfat.

Feldman hitched his jeans up and gestured with his chin at the drawing. “Yeah. That’s Joe Yates. He okay? He didn’t show for work today.”

Metta murmured, “Checking the name . . .”

Huang rolled the PDA up. “He called in an incident to 911 yesterday morning and then left the scene before the responders arrived. We’re trying to find him to ask him about what he witnessed.”

“What sort of incident?” The man crossed his arms over his ample stomach.

“Possibly a murder.”

“Possibly?” Feldman grunted. “You a homicide cop and you can’t tell if it’s murder?”

“There’s the possibility that it was an accident, but we need Mr. Yates to know for certain. Can you think of why he would have left the scene after dialing 911?”

The man scowled and dug his boot into the dirt. “Aw hell . . . I check papers, you know, but I don’t check too well. I figure my folks were immigrants so why not give other folks a shot. If they work hard, I don’t ask too many questions.”

Metta murmured. “If he’s illegal, that would explain why I’m having trouble finding him in the system.”

“He’s not turning up in our files, do you have an address for him?”

“Your system.” Feldman frowned. “Two minutes ago you didn’t know who he was.”

Huang tapped his glasses. “I’m working with a police AI.”

Feldman eyed the VR glasses. “There really an AI in there?”

“Not in, Mr. Feldman, but yes, the precinct’s AI is listening to this conversation.”

The man glowered at the ground. “You might not want to let my boys know you have one here. They don’t take too kindly to them things.”

“What do you mean?”

“I gotta spell it out for you?” He jerked his chin toward the glasses. “Those things cost men like my guys jobs. Rig backhoes and cranes with remote control and one AI can run almost a whole damn construction site. I don’t got a beef with them myself, you know, but my guys. Some of them . . you know.”

In the VR glasses, Metta’s lips were compressed into a thin line. They’d run into this prejudice before, and that fear was why it seemed unlikely that groups like AIM would ever get artificial intelligences recognized as thinking beings. Huang cleared his throat. “How about an address for Mr. Yates?”

Mr. Feldman just shrugged again. “I can give you a P.O. Box, but that’s about it.”

“Had he worked with you long?”

“A couple of months, but he was good. Solid worker. Reliable. Always bringing me leads. Like yesterday’s job. Heard about it while he was at that coffee shop he likes and comes to me instead of just doing it on his own. Honorable. You know?” He scrubbed his chin with his hand. “Think he’s okay?”

“We’ll let you know when we find him.”

As they walked off the construction site, Metta said, “It occurs to me that perhaps Mr. Yates lives in the neighborhood since he swings by the coffee shop on his way to work. I’ll send the uniforms around with his picture to see if anyone recognizes him.”

“Good idea.” Huang sighed. “So, what next?”

“I’d suggest a visit to Magdalena Chase. Let’s see why she had a meeting with Mr. Patterson and where she was yesterday morning.”

* * * *

The MAX line from HQ went straight past Chase’s office building. As the train hissed along under the electric wires, Huang leaned his head back against the window and turned his attention to Metta. “So what should I know about Magdalena Chase?”

“Like Patterson, she renovates buildings, but her focus is on green technology. She graduated from MIT with a degree in AI studies and works with a number of charities, including StreetRoots, the Oregon Ballet, and AIM. Chase is known for employing ‘freelance’ AI and—”

“Hang on—freelance?”

Metta nodded. “Though artificial intelligences have not been recognized as people, Jarrett Tovar, our creator, sets each AI up as a corporation. An AI that is not leasing its services is called a freelancer.”

“And you are . . ?”

“Leased. We call it indentured.” She smiled. “The chassis are very expensive so this is a way to pay off our start-up costs when we first come into the world. Once my lease is up, I’ll be able to freelance, but being in the Metta line it’s more likely I’ll renew the lease. I like my job and it requires a contract with accompanying vows in order to be granted full access to the city. Other AIs don’t have that sort of need so may be more likely to go freelance.”

“Huh.” Huang shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve met a freelancer before.”

“Well, you’re about to. Chase’s company has a freelance Quimby managing the building.”

Another Quimby . . as if his reports weren’t complicated enough with Metta Prime and Metta clone. “Does it bother you to have the same names?”

“Some of us change our names, like the Qadir you met, but we don’t use those names with each other. That just helps when talking to flesh-and-blood about the type of system we are.”

Huang blinked. “You don’t call yourself Metta?”

“When I’m talking to F&B I do.”

“You didn’t answer me.”

“My ID to other AI is a three-dimensional equation.”

“Ah. So, your Prime would have the same equation. Is that right?”

“Yes, exactly.” She chewed her lip. “I’ll mention that to Delarosa in case it sparks any ideas on why they might have taken my Prime. Good thinking, Scott.”

Not that he’d done any actual thinking, just asked questions. “I’m not used to running into AIs besides you. I mean, A.S., yes, absolutely, but running into this many in short order is odd. Or do I just hang in the wrong circles?”

“Mostly, the wrong circles. Patterson and Chase are both very wealthy.”

“Can you verify that for Chase? No hidden financial problems?”

“Already did. The only thing tying her to this case is that she had breakfast plans.”

Huang glanced out the window as they passed Saturday Market. The next stop was theirs. He grabbed the strap overhead and pulled himself to his feet. “Is there any previous connection between Patterson and Chase?”

He hopped off the MAX and threaded his way through the foot traffic to the front door of Chase’s office. The building had been a bank in the days when banks had used Corinthian columns to create an impression of established age. The modern hermetic door clashed against the marble walls.

“Besides the fact they both owned and developed properties, there’s nothing on the books, but I’ll start digging. Chase specialized in rejuvenating districts, and creating environmentally sound buildings. Her goal is to create buildings that can exist off the electrical grid and generate their own power.”

As he pushed through the door, one of the terminals that dotted the lobby flickered into life. A man’s head appeared on it.

“Welcome to the Chase Company.” The baritone voice was disturbingly familiar. Only the confidence in it separated Quimby’s voice from Qadir’s. The AI’s face had the same sort of calculated naivete as Metta’s neutral face; an almost Victorian purity, but in masculine form. “How may I help you today?”

Huang produced his badge and introduced himself. “I need to speak with Mrs. Chase.”

A flicker of surprise showed on the AI’s face. “Certainly, her office is straight back on the right.”

As they walked down the hall, Metta snorted. “Check out the camera. This will not be a private interview.” He glanced up as they passed under one of the surveillance cameras and it swiveled to follow.

“Noted. Ask him to join us, will you?”

The hall was dark after the lobby; only a few of the overhead lights were on, likely as a result of Chase’s concern for the environment. A woman stepped out of a door at the end of the hall. She was tall and slender. The light from her office backlit her, catching on the edges of her shoulders and gleaming in the silvery hair pinned up in a bun.

She waited till he got closer. “Detective Huang?”

“Ms. Chase.” Huang had to tilt his head back to look up at her. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

She smiled sadly. “Given the circumstances, I can guess why you’re here. Come in. Ask me anything you want.” Her blonde hair was almost white; even her eyebrows were so light they almost disappeared. The only color on her face was her eyes. They were like bruises, red with weeping, and ringed with dark circles. “I thought someone would be by eventually.” Chase looked directly at Huang’s VR glasses, not focusing on his eyes. “Metta, Quimby is sending you our internal address so you can join the conversation on a proper interface.”

Huang subvocalized, “Any reason not to?”

Metta shook her head. “It scans clean. I’ll still be able to talk with you privately, which she must know.”

“Go ahead.”

Metta appeared above the desk, next to Quimby. She had abandoned the Mae West interface and appeared in her detective face. Huang didn’t know how she pulled it off, but the face was ethnically neutral. She could have been mixed from every continent. She had a firm jaw balanced by soft brown eyes. Metta nodded to Chase and when she spoke her voice was crisp with none of Mae West’s husky tones. “Thank you for the invitation.”

Chase waved insistently at a chair, settling into another herself. Aside from an interface, a tablet, and a steaming cup of tea, nothing cluttered the surface of her desk. She turned the teacup in its saucer. “So. You’re here about Neil Patterson, right?”

“Right.” Huang eased into a chair opposite her. “We’ll start with the basics. Where were you at eight a.m. on Tuesday, October twenty-fifth?”

“I was at my yoga class.”

“And do you have witnesses who can attest to that?”

“Absolutely. Quimby can give you the contact there.”

Metta whispered in Huang’s ear. “Got it and I’ll check.”

Chase turned her teacup again. “Shall I tell you what your next question will be? You want to know why Patterson and I had a meeting. You want to know why I canceled Am I right?”

Huang inclined his head. “Among other things. But let’s start with the meeting.”

“We were collaborating on the renovation of the Water and Everett Street building. He took a serious hit after the whole thing with the foreman who took shortcuts and environmentalism is hot right now. I was going to handle making the buildings green; Patterson was going to handle marketing and tenants. It was a good match.”

“Was?”

Chase shifted in her chair. “We’d had some disagreements about management. Nothing major, but enough that we both felt it was better to separate the business.”

“And the reason you canceled the meeting?”

“Some paperwork that I’d been waiting on hadn’t come through and we couldn’t proceed without it.” She glanced at Quimby. “Would you send Detective Huang the papers we were processing?”

“Shall I transfer them to Metta?”

“Yes, please.” She leaned forward and picked up the cup from her desk.

The thin white porcelain caught Huang’s eye. He subvocalized to Metta. “See what type of china that is.”

In his VR glasses, she murmured, “Why?”

“It looks like the china from the murder scene,” he subvocalized. He smiled at Chase. “How long has Quimby been with you?”

Chase nearly upset her teacup and laughed. “Detective. Quimby is right here. You can ask him.”

“A year and a half, Detective.” The AI inclined his head. “And if I may anticipate your next questions, I have a certified honesty vow and am sending the authentication to Metta. Yes. Mrs. Chase had a yoga appointment that morning and I can also provide her POV of the session via her VR unit. I will send that to Metta as well as recordings of the hour before and after the yoga session so you may verify her whereabouts.”

Huang considered. He could get little else here without checking other details. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Chase, Quimby.”

Chase stood. “What? That’s all?”

“You’ve been very helpful, but there might be questions we want to ask you in the future, so please let me know before you go out of town.”

Metta nodded her head as well, said her goodbyes and disappeared from the desktop interface. Quimby saw them out of the building.

Metta hung in Huang’s glasses silently until they left the building. “Something’s not right.”

“I know.” He shook his head. “Once you know what the teacup is, will you let me know what china was used at the scene?”

She grimaced. “It will take awhile. I’ll have to get someone to bring it up from evidence so I can look at it. Sorry. Not in my memory.”

“Not your fault. Just get it to me when you can.”

Metta looked out from under her eyelashes. “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly.” Even with the quote and the Mae West act, the tension still came through in her voice.

Huang pointed at the MAX as it pulled up. “Oh look. A streetcar. I wonder if it’s named Desire.”

In his ear, Metta giggled and the loosening of the strain in her face was worth the wait.

* * * *

Huang leaned back in his chair and scrubbed his eyes with his fists. The paperwork seemed unending and yet nothing connected. Chase’s alibi checked out. True, she might have hired someone, but why have a meeting and then cancel it if that were the case? It just drew attention to her.

And if he were being truly honest with himself, Huang had wanted to find a lead to Metta’s disappearance. Delarosa had nothing. He ground his teeth at the futility of the day.

Metta appeared over his desktop, still wearing Mae West as her interface. “I can finish this report for you.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

“I generally avoid temptation unless I can’t resist it.”

Huang smiled at the quote, but it seemed too light for his mood. “It’ll help me focus.”

She nodded and morphed back to the face she had been made with, her “natural” face. Stripped of Mae West’s glamour, Metta seemed young and fragile. Her look was modeled on some Victorian ideal, large dark eyes and waves of hair swept up in a bun. “I understand, I could use a bit of that myself.”

He pulled up the first report and buried his head in the red tape of the department. Metta murmured occasionally to help him remember events, or to suggest clearer wording. Even so, his eyes began hooding over with drowsiness.

“Hey, Scott?” Amado appeared by his desk. He was always pale from too many daylight hours spent in the basement of the station tending the computer networks, but now his face seemed drawn with tension.

Huang ran his hand across his face, trying to wake up. “What’s up?”

Amado said, “I’d really like to talk to you about what happened when Metta was taken.”

“Sure.” He waited for Amado to continue.

“C’mon, let’s grab a beer and talk.”

Huang shook his head. “Not tonight, sorry. Mountain of paperwork.”

“It would mean a lot to me. I’m worried about her.”

Which “her”—the one missing or the one watching Huang now? Huang worried about both. “That’s understandable. What do you want to know?”

“Ah. I don’t want to hang around here. Let’s go out.”

Huang looked down at the watch in the corner of his desk. Unless he called and said work was keeping him late, his mother would expect him home in an hour.

Giving her one more thing to worry about was not high on his list of priorities. On the other hand, Amado was being awfully insistent on talking, and seemed set against going into anything in the building. If he were an informant, Huang would think he had a piece of information he didn’t trust to the system. But in this case, the system was Metta, and—what if he didn’t trust Metta for some reason?

Metta would have to record anything they talked about, even if she didn’t want to. Unless they went off duty and left the building . . . “Sure. Yeah. Want to hit Wacky Joe’s? Just give me a few minutes to wrap this up.”

Amado fidgeted by his desk. “Yeah . . sure. I’ll meet you there.”

Huang agreed and watched Amado walk out of the room. The moment the door shut behind him, Metta said, “Did he seem tense to you?”

“Yeah . . . Can you think of anything he’d want to hide?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I can’t.”

Huang could. He could think of a very good reason for Amado to be worried about the circumstances around Metta’s abduction.

He groaned and looked at the clock. “I do need to get home to Ma though.” He took his VR glasses out of his pocket and put them in his desk drawer.

“Scott?” She chewed her lower lip. “Will you take me home with you?”

He stopped with his hand to his earbud. “What’s wrong?”

“I’d feel better if I came with you.” She looked away. “You’ll probably have to report this, but I’m afraid of my backup tonight and I want to be around someone who was with me at the last one. I’m afraid I won’t remember today.” She looked back at him. “I want one night of continuity. That’s all.”

He couldn’t help noticing that she hadn’t asked for the favor until after Amado had left. “We aren’t supposed to take the mobile interface equipment out, unless we’re on duty.”

“ ‘It ain’t no sin if you crack a few laws now and then, just so long as you don’t break any.’ ”

“I’m going to have to take the Mae West database away from you.”

She blushed again. “I like her, she was a witty woman. No one else plays with me like this.” Metta looked at him as if she were going to say something more, then shook her head. “So, will you take me with you?”

He could set up an early interview tomorrow if anyone asked him justify tonight. He picked up her VR glasses and tucked them in his pocket. “Sure, Metta. Anything for you.”

* * * *

The interior of Wacky Joe’s was clouded with smoke. It was stage smoke, meant to give it the feel of a dive bar from the last century, but it had the side effect of making the space very intimate. Amado had a booth to the side of the bar and already had a Negroni in front of him.

Huang ordered a single malt, Oban, neat, and settled across from Amado. “What’s up?”

Amado shrugged and spun his drink on the table. “I just wanted to know what you saw. Morbid, right?”

“Not much. She used the surveillance camera to show me a view of her room, it was only up for a couple of seconds.” He took a sip of the Oban. “You’ve got to be a better witness, since you actually saw them live.”

Shaking his head, Amado said, “I only saw two. Wearing all black, with ski masks.” His fingers drummed against the stem of his glass as if they were hungry for a manual interface. “You saw three, right?”

“Right.”

“The other one must have been behind—” Amado cocked his head and looked at the pocket of Huang’s jacket. “Is that a set of VR glasses?”

“Huh? Yeah. I’ve got an early call tomorrow.”

Amado frowned. “Dude, you aren’t supposed to have those out after hours.”

“This isn’t unusual.”

Amado held up his hands and pushed back from the table. “I’m not getting mixed up in it.”

Huang felt his face hold its last expression, mild interest, while his brain raced behind its mask. Something was not right. “Mixed up in what? I told you we have an early call tomorrow so I’m going straight there from home.”

“She can see on those. I—” He shook his head. “Never mind. This was stupid anyway. I can read your reports, right? Thanks for coming. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Amado—” Huang broke off as Amado slipped out of the booth and dropped cash on the table. He walked quickly, but took a meandering path out of the bar.

The path took him through the blindspots of the bar’s cameras. Huang grimaced. This did not look good.

* * * *

Huang woke early the next morning to the sound of murmuring voices. Wrapping his robe around himself, he wandered down the hall to the living room. His mother was seated at the desktop in conversation with Metta. The resolution was not as clean as at work, but did little to diminish the soft beauty of the Chinese woman floating over the desktop.

They both stopped talking when he walked into the room. Metta turned partially toward him, but he stood outside the range of the single camera on the desktop.

“How long have you two been up?”

His mother smiled. “I don’t need much sleep and Metta has been kind enough to keep me company.”

How much trouble was he going to get into at work over this? “She’s supposed to be on duty, Ma.”

In flawless Mandarin, Metta said, “I am on duty, Scott. But I’m also allowed to converse with civilians about non-police matters. Your honored mother has been very gracious to invite me in.”

He swallowed and walked around to the front of the camera. Was there any reason she couldn’t make a social call? “Then I’m sorry I never invited you to visit before.”

His mother looked at him and tsked. “This is why you have no friends.” She stood up. “You. Go get dressed, not good to look like this.” She gestured at his bathrobe. “Have guest in house. Show respect.” She looked back at Metta and smiled, “Besides, we still have much to talk about.”

Huang chuckled and headed for the bathroom. He paused in the doorway and looked back at his mother. She was having an animated conversation in Mandarin with Metta.

His mother had been so active before she’d broken her hip, and now the injury trapped her in his apartment away from her friends. He shook his head, watching her laugh at something Metta said. He needed to start calling home during the day more often.

In the steaming water of the shower, Huang tried to organize his thoughts. He turned his active cases over in his head. The Patterson was the most pressing. They needed to find Yates and no one had turned up anything about him. The man was completely off the grid.

Of the evidence remaining, they had the manner of death and Patterson’s appointment with Chase. He needed to ask Metta to follow up on the provenance of the china the table had been set with. See if that led anywhere. It was such a strange murder.

He got out of the shower and toweled himself dry. With the water off, he could hear the murmur of his mother’s conversation with Metta. Maybe meeting Metta would quiet some of his mother’s fears, knowing that he had someone watching his back while he was on duty.

As he rooted through his closet for a clean shirt, he brushed past the formal Chinese silk suit his mother had given him several years ago. He had only worn it once or twice, to please her. He had felt like an imposter, wearing it when he had grown up so far from China. Even though his mother had taught him how to behave, and had ensured he was bilingual—“a great advantage in this economy”—he’d never completely felt like it was his culture. Was that anything like how Metta felt when she modified her interface for people? She was out there pretending to be Chinese to make his mother more comfortable. For him she aped the great starlets of the silver screen. For Delarosa she was a quiet, efficient secretary.

As he walked back to the living room, Metta stopped speaking and whispered something. His mother laughed. Rounding the corner, he saw his mother sitting demurely in front of the interface, smiling innocently at him.

He raised his eyebrows at this picture of decorum. “What?”

“Nothing. We have good talk.”

The two women smiled at him, and Huang couldn’t help feeling like he was outnumbered.

* * * *

As soon as Huang shut the apartment door behind him, he put the VR glasses on and slid the ear bud into his ear. He looked at Metta to ask her what she’d been talking about with his mother and saw that she had her standard neutral interface again. “So you’re not Chinese now?”

“Do you want me to be?”

“No. I want you to be yourself.”

She blinked. “You mean this interface?”

“No. I mean . . .” What did he mean? “I mean I want you to be who you want to be, not pick an appearance to accommodate me or my mother.”

“Scott, picking the right face for me is like picking the right tie for you. It affects how people view me, but it isn’t me.” She sighed. “I have emotions, I feel, but I’m not human, so asking me to ‘look like myself’ is a pointless request.”

“I know.”

“Why is this suddenly bothering you?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged and walked down the hall. “I guess because you’ve never come over before. I don’t see you off-duty often.”

“Look at me.”

Huang shifted his gaze to where she floated in his glasses. Her cheeks were pale, and a thin line furrowed her brow. “I like the fact you don’t insist on the same interface every day. It’s like wearing a uniform. Looking like a Chinese woman to meet your mother seemed like dressing up to me. I just picked the most appropriate clothes.”

“And downloaded Mandarin Chinese?”

Her face colored. “Ah. Actually, I did that a while ago. I wanted to make sure it wouldn’t give me unpleasant translation issues. Did I sound all right?”

“Like a native.” He grinned. “It’s better than mine.”

“I find that difficult to believe.”

“No, really. We moved here when I was little, so my Chinese still sounds like I’m a child.”

“Maybe that’s why your mother treats you like a little boy.”

“Ha!” He rubbed the back of his neck. She might have something there. “What case were you working on, that you needed Chinese?”

She took a breath and hesitated.

Huang watched her, fascinated. Metta didn’t need to breathe, but she used breath to indicate her emotions. Was it conscious, or an algorithm working below her conscious thought?

When she spoke again, she said, “One of my detectives is ethnic Chinese. It seemed polite to know the language.”

Huang stopped in the hallway and stared at her. “You’ve known Chinese since we started working together and you’ve never mentioned it?”

“You never speak it at work. I haven’t needed to use it till now.”

He ran his hand through his hair and started walking again. “So . . is there anything else, I mean, do you learn languages for anyone else?”

“I learned Icelandic for Sigmundson.” She smiled, and her face softened. “I recite sagas while he’s setting up his equipment.”

They reached the closest MAX station and Huang clattered down the stairs to the platform.

“What’s first today?” Metta asked.

“I’m back to thinking about motive. Who inherits the Patterson estate?”

“His sixteen-year-old son, but through a trust that Mrs. Patterson controls.”

“Any idea what building he wanted to acquire next?”

“Give me a minute and I’ll let you know.”

Something nagged at Huang, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. To distract himself, hoping the thought would spring into focus, he asked, “Did you have another backup at three a.m.?”

Metta nodded.

“How’d it go?”

“Fine. I remember everything since I woke up yesterday.”

“That’s good.”

She shrugged. “The backup wasn’t the problem, it’s the fact that I am a backup. Instead of unbroken memory, I have a gap, so I feel like I’ll shut down at the end of a backup.” She tilted her head, “Think of it like a bad food experience. Even though you know it was a one-time thing your body still gets upset if you think about eating the same food again.”

“Yeah. I’ve never gotten over my childhood carrot experience.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Do tell.”

“Carrot casserole in reverse. You can do the mental image yourself.”

“The only carrots that interest me are the number of carats in a diamond.”

“Does Mae West have an appropriate comment for every situation?”

“Not quite.” She cocked her head. “I’m making a note you don’t like carrots. I didn’t know that.”

“I clearly don’t take you to dinner often enough.”

“You’ve never taken me to dinner. And I have the answer to your last question.”

Huang blinked, trying to remember what he had asked her. Right. The last acquisition Patterson had been making. “Which is?”

“The old Salvation Army Building, which is—huh. That’s the building Yates was working on behind the Daily Grind.” Her eyes narrowed in thought. “Chase owns it now.”

Huang whistled. “Well, well . . isn’t that interesting. Now that’s a nice connection, and it gives Patterson a motive for wanting Chase out of the picture, but not the other way around.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but Chase was happy to sell. Patterson met the offer on the table and the sale was moving forward.”

“Why do all my avenues turn to dead ends?”

“I could search my databases for days and not have an answer to that one.”

Huang boarded the MAX car as it pulled into the station. “Oh. Any word on the provenance of the china the table was set with?”

“I think you’ll like this. The china on the roof was Mont Clair, by Lennox, and Chase’s teacup was the same.”

“Oooh . . . I do like that.” He chewed the inside of his lip.

“I’ll ask for a warrant to search Chase’s to—”

Metta vanished from his view. Huang’s heart raced. “Metta?”

Seconds of silence ticked by. Cursing, Huang pressed his hand against the glass as if he could hurry the MAX to the next station. Outside, a squad car dopplered past on its way to HQ.

“—see if she’s missing any pieces.”

Huang nearly dropped to his knees with relief as Metta finished her sentence where she had left off. She had replaced her neutral face with Mae West again, but in full color and three-D.

Not caring that he looked like a madman, Huang said aloud, “What the hell was that?”

“What?” A line creased her brow.

“You went away for a minute and then you came back.”

“No, I . . .” Her face paled. “Oh. Something is very wrong.”

His heart pounded. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure. I feel strange.”

Huang reached out, as if his hand could touch the face floating in his vision. He caught sight of his watch. 9:01. His breath stopped in his chest. “Did you just do a backup?”

Her luminous eyes turned to him. Had the real Mae West’s eyes ever been that blue? “Yes.”

“Did you go down across the board, or just with me?”

“System wide. Scott?” She licked her lips. “What do I look like?”

The air seemed to stifle him. “Mae West. Colorized. 3-D.”

She pulled in a deep breath and looked away from him. “I need you to come into the station.”

Huang felt like cold water was dumped down his spine. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head. During the ride to the station, she wouldn’t answer his questions, but floated, practically mute, in the corner of his vision as if she had pressed as far to the side of the VR glasses as she could.

When the MAX pulled into the station, Metta raised her eyes, still not meeting his. “Report to the chief. I’ll see you there.”

She winked out of sight as he ran up the steps, but her surveillance cameras watched him. What had happened?

As he crossed the threshold of the station, Banks careened down the hall toward him. “Huang! In my office, now.” The chief turned on his heel.

Huang had to jog to catch up with him, heart pounding. As he passed through the station, he caught a glimpse of an officer, talking to Mae West. Further on, he saw another officer, with the same Mae West interface for Metta.

Huang stopped and leaned through a department door. Over every desktop interface, Mae West floated in full living color.

As Huang stared at the matched heads, they turned, not quite in unison, in his direction. Banks came back and stood so close his breath steamed hot against Huang’s cheek. “Move it.”

Huang jumped and followed the chief down the hall. “What happened to her?”

“That’s why you’re here.”

Inside the office, Amado, Delarosa and Metta waited for Huang. Metta, who still looked like Mae West, wouldn’t meet his gaze. She somehow made the jaded face seem vulnerable and uncertain.

Banks pointed to a chair flanked by Delarosa and Amado. “Sit.” He flung himself into the seat behind his desk. The wood creaked as he leaned forward to glower at Huang.

Huang sank into the chair, glancing at the others. Amado wore VR glasses and his lips twitched as he subvocalized. Delarosa tapped a pencil on a pad of paper, his mouth a tight, compressed line.

Huang held his questions. He wouldn’t be the one who drove this discussion. Resting his hands on his knees, he ran scales in his mind and focused on his breathing.

Amado shifted once and Banks shook his head. Huang waited, with a bead of sweat trickling down the back of his neck.

He almost flinched when Delarosa finally spoke. “Where were you at three a.m. this morning?”

“Asleep. At home.”

“Who was with you?”

“I sleep alone.”

“Is there anyone who can verify you were there?”

“My mother was home.” He looked at Metta. “So was Metta.”

Amado leaned forward again, but Banks held a finger up to stop him.

Delarosa scribbled something on his pad. “Why did you take the interface equipment home last night?”

Huang turned slightly in his chair to face Delarosa, wondering what Amado had told him. “I had an early call and she asked me to.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Why would she do that?”

Huang hesitated.

“It’s all right, Huang.” Metta raised her eyes and turned to Delarosa. “I was afraid; I suggested we schedule an early morning call so he had a reasonable justification for taking the equipment out.”

Amado asked, “What were you afraid of?”

She shrugged the ample bosom of Mae West. “I guess you could say I was afraid of the dark.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Delarosa scowled. “You’re a computer with thousands of cameras. It’s never dark.”

Fixing him with her gaze, she said, “I’m designed to have continuous consciousness. I don’t sleep. Ever. But, after the assailants took Metta Prime, Amado restarted me from a backup. The practical side effect of that is, from my perspective, I lost consciousness for over twenty-four hours. Imagine something routine in your life, like brushing your teeth. Nothing bad has ever happened; you barely think about it except as part of your routine. How would you feel if you blacked out while brushing your teeth?” She tilted her head to the side. “Wouldn’t you have some hesitation about the toothbrush, even though you knew it had nothing to do with what had happened to you?”

Delarosa shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “You were kidnapped, it’s understandable—”

“I wasn’t.” Metta glared at him. “It’s important you understand that. I—the one you are talking to—was not kidnapped; I have no trauma or even memory of the event. What upsets me is the memory loss, and that’s the only thing I have experienced.” She turned to Huang. “That’s why I asked them to bring you in.”

He blinked, trying to make sense of what she was saying. “I don’t understand.”

“Someone, probably Metta Prime, sent me a Trojan horse that contained this.”

Amado said, “We still don’t know that. The crash might be related to the new chassis. I don’t see any signs of tampering with your code.”

She gestured to her face. “I crashed and I can’t manifest any other interface. What do you call that?”

Huang went still. “And you think it happened at my house last night?”

Metta looked away. “It’s a possibility.”

“Was I the only officer you went home with last night?”

“No—”

“Stop it.” Delarosa leaned forward and jabbed his pencil at Huang. “You’re here to answer questions, not ask them.”

Huang ran his hand through his hair. “So ask.”

Delarosa frowned. “According to Metta’s bandwidth reports, she maintained an active connection to your house all night. What did you have her working on?”

“Why aren’t you asking her this? I was asleep.”

“Answer me.”

“I don’t know. My mother sometimes wakes up during the night, maybe she was talking with Metta.”

Delarosa wrote something down on his note pad.

“No.” Huang raised his hands and looked at the chief. “You can’t bring my mother in. Please.”

Banks stared at Huang impassively.

Huang looked to Metta for help. “C’mon, you know my mother had nothing to do with this. What about at Chase’s apartment? You logged in there.”

Amado cleared his throat. “I thought about that, but it seems like it’s related to backing up, so the last backup is a more reasonable entry point. Besides . . .” His voice trailed away and he looked at Delarosa nervously.

Delarosa’s mouth turned down at the corners. “Go ahead and spill everything.”

Huang knew what Amado had been about to say. “Besides, Mae West is an interface Metta created for me.”

She nodded. “Did Metta Prime colorize the West interface during the dark period?”

Huang shook his head. “The mono-v face you had on yesterday is the one I last saw you—her wearing.”

Banks leaned back in the chair. “So the question is . . if Metta Prime is trying to send a message, what does Mae West have to do with anything?”

Huang inhaled and held the breath while he thought. “Is it possible her kidnapping is related to the case I was working on when she was taken?”

“Tell us more about that.” Delarosa lifted his pad of paper and poised his pencil over it.

Amado shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense. I mean, the Mae West thing, maybe, but not today’s crash.”

Metta shook her head. “Not necessarily. My Prime might be dealing with an invasive virus.” She stopped and sighed. “For that matter, we don’t know how deeply I might be infected.”

“Don’t you have firewalls and stuff?” Huang asked.

“I have subroutines, which handle basic things, but a signature from Metta Prime would look the same as a signature from me.” Metta paused. “I think we should consider replacing me.”

“Metta!” Amado nearly jumped out of his seat. “I can run any tests you want. You don’t need to do that.”

She rolled her eyes. “Amado, you’re a dear, but you’re out of your depth.”

He sputtered, “I’ve been taking care of you for years.”

“No. You’ve been taking care of Metta Prime for years. As soon as you booted me from the backup, I diverged from her. I mean, let’s be realistic here . . . Do you know any AI who’s a backup?”

Banks looked sharply at Amado. “I thought you said this was a procedure that had been done before.”

Amado ran his hands through his hair and looked at the floor. “AIs have been revived from backup before.”

“But not while the Prime was living.” Metta glared at him. “I should not be here. But for the moment I am, so let’s make use of that, shall we?” She turned to Delarosa. “I think it’s likely the Patterson case is in some way connected, or Metta Prime would have fixed on a different interface.”

“Can we even trust your judgments? You said you were infected with a virus.”

Amado said, “I ran a scan on her right after her crash, I don’t see anything wrong besides her interface.”

“And here I thought I looked pretty.” She turned the corners of her mouth down. “Chief. Please, we only have five hours until my next backup. I’m as certain as I can be; Huang saw something during my dark period related to this case. It will be something not in his reports, because it didn’t seem important. I want him and Delarosa to compare notes and work these cases together.”

Banks glared at Metta. His jaw worked subtly as he subvocalized to her. Finally, the chief nodded and turned to Delarosa. “Huang’s working with you on this. Metta is right. There must be something that happened, between her Prime’s last backup and when she was taken, that Huang knows. So I want you two to work together on her disappearance and the Patterson murder.”

Delarosa opened his mouth, scowling.

Banks held up his hand. “I mean it.”

“Fine.” Delarosa drew a hard line through something on his pad.

“Now get out of here.” Banks pointed at the door.

Huang followed Delarosa to his desk, head reeling from the last half hour. Metta waited for them, floating in perfect imitation of Mae West over Delarosa’s desktop interface.

“Here.” Delarosa sat down and tossed him a file folder of hard copies. “Yours are electronic, aren’t they?”

Huang nodded. “I’ll key them over to your desktop.”

Metta said, “Delarosa prefers hard copies so I’m printing transcripts of everything we’ve talked about today.”

“That’ll kill a lot of trees.”

Delarosa glowered. “Here’s the deal. I don’t make comments on your preferences. You don’t make them on mine. Fair?”

“Fair. Thanks.” He sat down and started leafing through the papers Delarosa had handed him.

* * * *

Huang got frustrated reading Delarosa’s reports, because he seemed to be ignoring a whole line of questioning about how Metta worked, and what that might have to do with the case. His notes were terse almost to the point of incomprehensibility.

During Metta’s abduction, three armed men had entered the building without being seen. Amado saw two in a corridor, but was unable to identify them. In fact, the clearest description of the men was the one Huang had provided.

Although an inside job was possible, the men had also disabled cameras all along the route out of the building. This suggested a highly organized plan carried out by several people who knew the system very well. Better, in fact, than any of the officers currently working at the station. The only one with sufficient knowledge was Amado, but he was among those injured in the attack. “Metta? I don’t see it in Delarosa’s report; did you do a size analysis of the men I reported seeing?”

“It was inconclusive.”

“Would you humor me? Make blank composites and compare that against people in the department who could have been in the station at the time of your Prime’s abduction.”

“I’ve run profiles on everyone in the station, no one has the know-how to trick my cameras.”

“Except Amado.”

She sighed. “Except Amado. Huang, even if I didn’t know him well, he has no motive. It’s most likely to be an outside job.”

“Will you show me the groups anyway?”

“Yes.” On his VR glasses, three men’s silhouettes appeared in blue. “These are the weights and heights you reported. Of the people who could have been at the station, these are the ones who fit that body type.” A short list of names scrolled past his eyes.

“Why are you so resistant to this?”

She pulled her mouth into a straight line. “Look at the names. Fitzgerald and Amado are on that list. I have one eyewitness, you, who didn’t see anything long enough to make a positive ID. It’s extremely unreliable testimony.”

“Fine.” He let the air out of his lungs, staring at Delarosa’s report.

“It’s a good idea, but I’ve already gone down that path.”

Huang closed his eyes and leaned his head back. “Why me? If it’s related to the Patterson case, why not Griggs?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay . . let’s go at this from the other end. Why Diamond Lil? Why not—” Huang broke off, his mouth open. He suddenly remembered the plot of the movie.

Metta stared at him. “Why is your pulse spiking?”

“This is crazy, I know, but on Tuesday when you showed me Diamond Lil you said you watched the movie. Do you remember the plot?”

Her eyes shifted to the left. “Lady Lou (Mae West) works in the 1890s saloon of Gus Jordan (Noah Beery, Sr.). Gus traffics in white slavery and runs a counterfeiting ring. Next door to the bar is a city mission . . .” Her gaze widened and snapped back to Huang. “The old Salvation Army building—you think they have my Prime there.”

“Who owns it?”

She nodded slowly. “Magdalena Chase.”

“And Patterson wanted to buy it. And the witness to the murder was working there. There’s got to be a connection. Get me a warrant to search that building.”

“I’ve sent the request in, but it’s a line of conjecture. I don’t know that I can get you one.”

“I need to talk to Delarosa.” He hurried across the room and stopped by the older detective’s desk.

Delarosa looked up, glaring. “What?”

Huang quickly related his conversation with Metta about the film. When he finished Delarosa snorted heavily. “That’s pretty thin.”

“I know, but there has to be some reason she settled on Diamond Lil. I don’t understand the link, but there has to be a connection.”

“I think you’re reading too much into this.” Delarosa slid a page across the table. “The fact that both crimes used a .38 is the more likely link. We need to focus on finding the murder weapon.”

“Fine. When the warrant comes in, I’ll check it out without you.” Huang stalked back to his desk and grabbed his coat. He couldn’t search the place, but he could damn well keep an eye on it.

* * * *

Huang leaned against the wall and nursed the cup of coffee he’d picked up at the Daily Grind. According to the counter girl, Joe Yates had not been in for his usual lowfat double-shot latte that morning. It was nearly three o’clock, so it was unlikely that Yates would show at all. Huang stared at the old Salvation Army building across the street. “So . . I’m thinking that maybe whoever killed Patterson took your Prime to cover up the crime. And they’re looking for or have already found Yates.”

Metta frowned. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just make it look like an accident in the first place? Or make sure we never found the body?”

“Maybe Yates surprised them and they weren’t expecting to be caught.”

“Possible. We won’t know until we find him.”

Huang took another sip of his coffee. “Any word on the warrant?”

“How many times are you going to ask me?” Metta shook her head. “I’ll let you know when I have it. Look, there’s a traffic camera at the end of this street so I can keep an eye on the area while we do something useful.”

“I don’t mind waiting.”

She wrinkled her nose. “I know. But I want to see the Patterson scene since I—”

“Since you blacked out while you were there.” Huang turned and walked back to the Daily Grind building.

“Exactly. I’m hoping that something will tell me what’s in that missing memory.”

The lobby of the Daily Grind looked the way he remembered it, with potted plants hiding in the corners. Huang headed for the stairs.

“Oh, hang on.” Metta stopped him. “The elevator is working today.”

“Thank god. I was not looking forward to climbing those stairs again.” Huang wheeled around and pushed the elevator button.

“Wimp.”

“I’m going to go to the gym.” He watched the numbers descend to meet him. “Really.”

“A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald, but if he has fire, women will like him.”

“Hey!” He ran a hand through his hair, checking.

Metta laughed, “It’s a Mae West quote. Honestly, Scott.”

Sheepish, he jerked his hand out of his hair. “I knew that.” Huang got into the elevator and reached for the roof button.

“Scott, will you start in the hallway upstairs?”

“Sure.” He pressed the button for the tenth floor and they rode the elevator in silence. When the door opened, he stepped out into the soft glow of the wood wainscoting. “Remember this?”

Metta shivered. “I don’t like this place.”

“Are you okay?”

“My memory ends here.”

He had not thought this all the way through. What if he caused her to crash? “We can go back.”

“No.” Mae West’s eyes glittered dangerously. “I need to know what things I’m missing.”

The hall seemed longer than it had before. When he climbed the stairs to the landing, the lemon scent was completely gone. “There was a strong lemon odor here, as though someone had cleaned recently.”

“Will you give me a new three-sixty?”

Huang spun on his heels obediently. Then he stood and turned slowly, letting Metta see the whole room.

“All right. Let’s go to the roof.”

Outside Huang walked across the grass roof to the wireframe table. He showed her where the wheelchair had been and the spot where he’d found the screw and the stained grass.

“Scott?” Metta looked at him with wide, serious eyes out of keeping with Mae West’s face. “May I ask you to do something morbid?”

He stopped in the middle of the roof. “What is it?”

“Will you replay what you did when I—when they took the original me, my Prime? So I can, so I can pretend I remember it.”

His breath seemed locked in his throat. He glanced at the time. 2:55. “Are you sure? Your backup . . .”

“That’s why. Please?”

He swallowed heavily and whispered. “I can do that.”

He walked back toward the center and gestured at it with his hand so she could see. “Griggs was here, fingerprinting the wheelchair.”

He tried to remember, not wanting to. “I had just asked you why the elevator was down.”

She broke in. “Just act it out. I know it’s weird, but I have never felt lost like this. I just want to fill in the blanks.”

He swallowed against the lump in his throat. “Metta?” he subvocalized, “How long has the elevator in this building been down?”

He waited for a moment, not looking at her. “Then you said you’d been trying to check on that since we got here, but couldn’t reach the building manager. Then you froze, and you said—”

Metta whispered, “Shots fired.” Her voice was an imagined memory. “Officer down.”

Huang froze, as if he were listening for gunfire in their vicinity again. He pointed to where Griggs had been. “Griggs stood up and yelled your name.”

Metta nodded, the color fading from her rouged cheeks until it looked as though she would return to black and white. She whispered, “Three armed subjects in chassis room. The assailants are armed, I repeat—Amado! Two officers down.”

As he remembered, Huang turned on his heel and sprinted back across the roof. “Metta, can you give a visual?” The memory of fear grabbed him again. “Metta, answer me. Who’s there? Can you give a visual?”

Still running he said, “You showed me an image, but it was fast. You screamed and froze, then you vanished.” He put his hand on the door. “There was only silence after that.”

“Thank you.” The husky voice she affected as Mae West seemed thick with emotion. “I’d like to go down now.”

He walked across the grass roof, shooting glances at her as he went. Cars hummed by on the interstate and a breeze kicked a dried leaf across his path. Huang pulled open the door of the roof access and stepped onto the small landing containing the elevator. His heels clicked on the linoleum.

Metta looked up and heaved a sigh of relief and beamed. “In a happy turn of events . . I just found a judge to give you a warrant.”

“Great. Can you get me some backup. I mean—You know.”

“It’s not a dirty word, Scott. And yes. I have people on the way.”

“Did you tell Delarosa we’ve got it?”

“He’s headed to Patterson’s office.”

It figured he wouldn’t be interested. “There’s not a chance Patterson’s office is in the old Salvation Army building, is there?”

Metta shook her head. “I’d have mentioned it—”

Her image froze, flickered and vanished.

Huang gasped. He didn’t need the clock to tell him it was 3:00. What if she didn’t come back this time?

“—if it were.” Her face paled. “It happened again, didn’t it?”

She still looked like Mae West. The grand dame of silver screen stared back at Huang, in full color, but with a layer of fear he had never seen.

“It was a minute, like last time.”

She closed her eyes. “Damn.”

“What’s different this time?”

Her eyes flashed open. “Nothing I can tell. I still look like the finest gal that ever walked the streets.”

“That you do, sweetheart.” He crumpled his coffee cup and threw it into the garbage can by the elevator. “What’s the ETA?”

“First car should be just a block away.”

“Great.” Huang pushed the down button. “Will you tell them to guard the exits on the north side?”

“Will do. I’ll get a perimeter established with first responders and then send you a team to search the building.”

The door dinged open and Huang stepped inside. He stood still so the door almost caught his coat as it slid shut.

“I’ll be damned. It’s that lemon smell again.”

“Help me out, Scott.” Metta watched him carefully. “How common is this scent you’re talking about?”

“It’s fairly common in cleaning products, but I don’t usually smell it in concentrations unless someone has just cleaned.” A picture of his mother scrubbing the furniture flashed through his mind. “It’s strange that it wasn’t here before.” He snorted. “And it’s strong.”

He spun in a circle in the tiny elevator. A chair from the lobby stood in the corner. Huang tilted his head back to look at the access hatch. It was not seated neatly in its frame. He climbed onto the chair and subvocalized, “Metta, can you find out why the elevator was out of service on Tuesday?”

“I’m working on it, but the manager says he never knew it was out of order, and never put in a service call to get it fixed.”

He reached up and pushed on the access panel. It rose easily, letting in a stronger draft of the lemony fragrance. Without needing to be asked, Huang pulled off Metta’s eSpy and lifted the small lens into the space above the elevator. He turned it slowly as Metta played the images on his glasses. A bundle of clothing lay close to the edge of the hatch. They were dark gray and splotched with blood. The corner of a name badge showed the letters “Yat.”

Huang stifled a curse and turned the small camera further. A hand flashed across his vision and grabbed Huang’s forearm, pinning it to the edge of the access hatch.

Metta’s eSpy dropped out of his hand and bounced across the roof of the elevator, flashing vertiginous images on his glasses. He jerked his hand free as the eSpy fell over the edge of the elevator. He almost fell as the image spun out of control until Metta cut the feed to his glasses.

Huang jumped off the chair and pulled his gun out, aiming at the opening.

Metta whispered, “Backup is on the way.”

“Mr. Yates!” He shouted upward. “We just want to ask you a few questions.”

He could hear murmuring above.

Metta turned up the gain in his earbud so he could hear the fluid voice. She whispered, “I think that’s Rwandan.”

“What’s he saying”

“I’m downloading a translator, it will be a minute.”

Raising his voice again, Huang said, “Mr. Yates. You have to come down sometime. Let’s make it easy and come quietly now.”

He could hear a rustle of fabric. A hoarse voice spoke out of the darkness. “You won’t shoot me?”

“No, sir.” He held the gun aimed at the hole. “But I need you to come down.”

“You’ve got a gun pointing at me.”

“Yes sir, I do. I won’t use it unless you give me a reason to. You won’t do that, will you?”

“Maybe you think I already have.”

“I don’t think anything yet, except you’re trapped and scared. I don’t want to hurt you. I just want you to come down.”

There was a long silence and more murmuring prayers. “All right.” The ceiling creaked as he slid closer to the opening. “I’m coming down.”

“The chair’s right beneath the opening.”

A slender leg appeared in navy blue sweat pants. Another appeared and Yates quickly lowered himself to the chair. The track suit he wore was rumpled as if he’d slept in it. His right hand had been crudely bandaged with what looked like a linen napkin.

“I’m going to check for weapons.” Huang pushed him against the wall a little harder than necessary to remind Yates that grabbing an officer was never acceptable. Yates stood listlessly while Huang patted him down, almost as if he had fallen asleep standing up. Nothing. It would have been easier if he were packing a .38.

“He’s clean.” Huang told Metta. He hit the button for the lobby. “Mr. Yates, we’re going to take you downtown to ask you some questions.”

Yates nodded his head miserably. “I know. I was trying to help and then . . .” He waved his bandaged hand helplessly, “it all went wrong.”

Huang shared a look with Metta. Went wrong? “What went wrong?”

Yates rubbed his long slender fingers over his short hair. “It’s complicated.”

Metta whispered, “I translated his prayer. He was asking why he was being punished for trying to help a dying man.”

Huang led Yates off the elevator, still subvocalizeing to Metta. “That could still mean he killed Patterson.”

“True. There are no withholding taxes on the wages of sin.” Metta shook her head and grimaced. “What about the warrant for the old Salvation Army building?”

Huang squeezed his eyes shut, weighing his options. “Can one of the uniforms take Yates downtown?”

“I’ll have someone meet you at the door and I’ll get Griggs to collect the clothes from the elevator.”

Huang spied the open door to the Daily Grind. “Have them meet me in the coffee shop. Mr. Yates hasn’t had his lowfat double-shot latte today.”

“You are such a softy.”

“I know.” He grinned. “That’s why you like me.”

* * * *

It took another fifteen minutes to transfer Yates. Huang strapped on his flak jacket and headed inside the Salvation Army building with a small team.

“Okay boys, subvocalize from here on.” Metta’s voice was neutral and indicated that she was addressing all of the officers present. She guided them through the building, clearing each room as they went before leading them up to the next floor. For the most part, the building was empty and waiting for renovation. One room showed signs of a squatter, but the rest had the standard discards of old offices—partition walls, old file folders, and layers of dust. On the fourth floor, Metta narrowed her eyes and highlighted tracks in the carpet that looked as though someone had dragged a heavy handtruck down the hall recently. The tracks led back to a door three-quarters of the way down the hall.

Huang pulled out his gun and sidled down the hall. The other officers positioned themselves ready to cover him.

The door was ajar about an inch. Metta said, “I don’t hear anything inside.”

Huang took a breath and knocked on the door. “Police. Open up.”

Silence.

He pushed the door open.

The room held a desk and a chair. Next to the desk, the carpet contained a rectangular impression as if something heavy had sat on it recently.

“Take a look.” Metta opened a screen in Huang’s VR glasses with an infrared view of the room, using another officer’s eSpies for better resolution. In the artificial colors of the infrared, he could see the faint glow of warmth in the rectangle.

“That’s the right size to be a chassis.” Metta wiped the image from his glasses and reappeared. “The men downstairs are on alert, but I think we’re too late.”

Huang let out the breath he had been holding. “I’m sorry—” He stopped with his mouth open. He sniffed the air.

“Scott, what is it?”

He turned slowly, his nose raised. “Lemon Pledge. It’s fainter than the other times, but still noticeable.”

Metta said, “CSI is on their way. Seal the room, and don’t touch anything.”

They went back into the hall to wait. Huang felt as if he were moving underwater, it took so much effort to even breathe. He subvocalized, “I’m sorry, Metta.”

“Scott.” She looked at him closely. “You have nothing to be sorry about.”

“If I had come in when I got the warrant . . .”

She shook her head. “The heat signature is cooler than that. I’d guess we missed them by about fifteen to twenty minutes.”

Huang glanced at his watch. 3:25. “How long does it take to move you?”

“If you know what you’re doing it’s fast.”

Huang looked at the officers waiting in the hall. “Let’s go ahead and search the whole building. Maybe they didn’t move far.”

“Unlikely.” Metta shifted her eyes up and to the left. “They’ll have another place to store her, but knowing this one means I can start running numbers to see if I can come up with other likely places.”

“The question now is: What tipped them off?”

Metta compressed her lips. “I don’t like the probable answers.”

* * * *

He helped the team finish sweeping the building, but they found no other obvious evidence of Metta Prime’s presence. As soon as he could turn the scene over to Griggs, he headed back to the station to interview Yates. Metta was silent for much of the ride and almost looked as if she would be happier somewhere else. Her brooding was so dark, Huang finally said, “If you want to tune out, I don’t mind.”

“Hmm? No, I’m fine here.”

“You don’t have to watch me ride the MAX; you’ve got a lot of other things on your mind.”

“I’ve got a lot of mind to deal with things.” She pursed her lips. “Which is part of what I’m thinking about. What happened that all the multi-tasking parts of myself reacted as one.”

“Was it the shock of finding men inside the station?”

“I don’t know. I have no idea how they got in. I could see them evading one camera, but not all of them.”

“What if—” Huang stopped. She would never go for this, but she was looking at him expectantly, so he filled the silence. “When you were talking to Amado, right after you woke up, you mentioned playing hide and seek . . . Do you really?”

“Yes . . and No, I see where you’re going with this, but it’s not that simple. When we play, I stop monitoring the cameras. The public cameras, like the ones that identify people coming into the building, are still captured and processed, but they go into my unconscious banks. I still scan people, but I don’t pay attention to what I’m doing, so keeping them out is as reflexive as a sneeze. Does that make any sense?”

“So, it’s likely the people who took you were people who belonged in the station. Right?”

“You’re back to thinking it was an inside job.”

Huang got off the MAX and walked up the steps of the station. “Tell me at what point you first scan me.”

He was halfway up the steps, when Metta said, “Now. My first camera just tagged you. But, unless you flag warnings in the A.S., I don’t start paying attention till you cross the threshold, and even then, only if you’re someone I’m looking forward to seeing.”

Huang ignored the people passing him on the steps. “Will you do something for me?”

“I’ll try anything once, twice if I like it, three times to make sure.”

“Then play hide and seek with me.”

“You think Amado was involved.”

Huang wished he could hide from her gaze. He wasn’t sure what he thought. “I wonder if someone knew about your games and took advantage of them.”

“How would they have known?”

“I don’t know.” Unless Amado was involved, which Metta seemed unable to acknowledge as a possibility. “What’s the shortest route to the chassis room?”

She brought a map up on his VR glasses. “Go to the south side of the building and enter through the garage.”

Huang headed around the building. “Did Delarosa do this?”

“He doesn’t know about our hide and seek games.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with the case.”

“Metta! How can you think turning your cameras off is unrelated?”

“Because the thieves couldn’t have known or counted on it. The chance of us playing a game at the exact moment they decided to break in is extremely unlikely.”

What if Metta had been tampered with so she couldn’t consider Amado as a suspect?

As he entered the garage, the acrid smell of electricity crackled around him. An evidence truck sat up on blocks, with a mechanic under it. Rows of filing cabinets, filled with parts, lined the walls.

Metta said, “I’d have noticed you when you came through the garage doors.”

Huang nodded and backed up. “Let me know when I’m off the radar.”

About ten feet outside the garage door, Metta said, “Now.”

“All right.” Huang straightened his shoulders. “Show me the route again.”

Metta flashed the map on his VR glasses. “You didn’t ask, but here are the cameras that were disabled.” A row of red dots appeared along the line that she recommended as the fastest route. Two green dots appeared scattered on the route. “These are the officers who went down.”

“How hard is it to disable a camera?”

“Depends. These guys used a wire cutter, so, in theory, they could have cut the cable as they passed underneath.”

“Right. Let’s see how far I can get in a hundred seconds.”

Her face set and resolute, Metta closed her eyes. “Ready? Go.”

Huang started walking. They would have walked, surely, or other officers would have noticed them. As he walked, Metta counted backward, “100, 99, 98, 97 . . .”

The first camera he passed hung lifeless from the ceiling. Why did they cut the cables, if they were planning on taking Metta’s chassis? Was it so they would have a safe way out if something went wrong? He fought the urge to run down the hall as Metta continued to count. “. . 87, 86, 85 . . .”

The men Amado saw wore masks, and they had worn masks in the image Metta sent Huang. “. . 63, 62, 61 . . .” He rounded the corner and entered the hall where Fitzgerald had been shot.

He reached the end of the hall without seeing other officers. “. . 53, 52, 51 . . .”

He opened the door to the stairs and ran down them. The chances of unexpectedly seeing someone else on the stairs were slim. The suspects could have hurried here. He looked at the spot where Amado had been found. Had they put the masks on in the stairs, or after they shot Fitzgerald?

He opened the door to the hall outside the chassis room. “. . 42, 41, 40 . . .” He heard footsteps at the other end of the hall, and saw Banks walking away from him. Huang swallowed, walking briskly down the hall to the chassis room.

“. . 30, 29, 28 . . .” Huang opened the chassis room door and stepped in. Amado looked up, grinning. He put one finger to his lips. In his ear Metta said, “. . 18, 17, 16 . . .”

Huang crossed the room and put his hand on her chassis. It was warm and smooth to the touch. A faint vibration stirred through his fingertips and the sense of life inside the box made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

“I’m here.”

Her voice stopped counting and the cameras on her chassis snapped into life. Her interface suddenly focused on him, with her face gone pale. “Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.”

“Sorry, sweetheart.”

She looked at his hand resting on her chassis. “Go right ahead. I don’t mind if you get familiar . . .”

Huang colored and jerked his hand away from her. He turned around to face Amado. “I thought you’d be in your office.”

Metta smiled at him. “I told him what you were trying to do. What was the trip like from your POV?”

“I didn’t see anyone, except for the chief walking away.”

“Here’s what I’m thinking,” Metta said. “It seems likely the suspects used that route to get to my chassis room. The fact that they killed Fitzgerald indicates, to me, that they were people whose presence in those corridors was inappropriate. In other words, they thought Fitzgerald would have known from looking at them that they were in the wrong place.”

“You don’t think they were just worried about being recognized?”

She shook her head. “If it were an inside job, they could have relied on being recognizable to avoid suspicion while the crime was in progress. Once they took my Prime, they would have needed to mask themselves on the way out, but not on the way in.”

Huang thought about that. “What if some of them were hired guns and some were insiders?”

“Possible.” She said aloud, then she whispered in Huang’s ear, “You’re still having the same thought, aren’t you?

“Yes,” he subvocalized. Turning to Amado, he said, “Is it possible someone could do something to Metta so she was unable to suspect them of a crime?”

Amado lifted his head. “Are you accusing me?”

“Why would you assume I meant you?”

“Because I’m her wrangler. There isn’t anyone else here who could.”

Huang held up his hands. “Look. I’m just asking questions. Is it possible?”

“Theoretically? Yes. But someone would have to have her exact ID and there’s no way to get that without having the AI in your possession. So you’re back to me again.”

“What about her Prime?”

Amado stopped with his mouth open. “Yeah . . yeah. But—Shit. Is that possible?”

“What?”

“Well, look. It would only work in a case like this, where there was a living Prime and a backup, because their signature is the same. So what if that was the point?”

Metta shook her head. “No one could have known you would reboot me from a backup. It’s unprecedented.”

“What if they knew Amado would reboot you?”

Metta looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. “Scott. They couldn’t have known Amado would reboot me. Hope? Yes, but it’s more common to get a clean system in if something compromises the original. The backups are just for actual damage. My Prime was stolen, not damaged.”

Huang straightened his shoulders and took a breath. “You’re right, Metta. Of course they couldn’t have been sure.”

Metta scowled in his glasses. “Don’t patronize me, Scott. I can tell you don’t agree with me.”

Huang weighed his options. “Look. You guys know more about this than I do. I was just asking questions, trying to understand.”

“Give a man a free hand and he’ll try to put it all over you.” Metta sighed in a breathy Mae West voice. “Scott, you’ve got Yates upstairs in the interrogation room. We should get up there.”

“Yeah. Thanks for your time, Amado.” As he opened the door, Huang paused. “One more thing. Did you play hide and seek with Metta during her dark period?”

Amado stared at him for a moment. “Are you asking me to answer as a witness or a suspect?”

“I don’t know. I want to find her. Do you?”

Amado pulled back as if Huang had slapped him. “What do you think?”

“Depends. Did you play hide and seek with her?”

Amado looked away from Huang. Metta watched them with her lips parted. The breath escaped from Amado. “Yeah. I’ve been worried about it.”

“Why?”

Amado squirmed in his seat. “You’ll have to tell the chief.”

“Tell him what?”

“I have a webcam in my office. And I keep a blog.” He slid a hand into his hair, twisting the tendrils into gravity-defying forms. “I’ve got Metta’s interface placed so she can’t see either the camera or my PC. I’m careful about keeping identifying details off the blog, but I can’t help wondering if someone used it to time the break-in.”

Blood pounded in Huang’s ears. “And you haven’t gone to the chief about this?”

“I know, I know.” Amado leaned forward in his seat and put his face in his hands. “It’s against so many rules, I’ve been afraid of being fired.”

“Why are you telling me now?”

“I wanted to the other night, but you had her with you and . . I didn’t. I was scared, but I’m not stupid enough to lie. Besides . . you care about her, too. To a lot of the guys, she’s a tool, or at best, a pet.”

“Had you discussed rebooting her from a backup with anyone?”

“Huh?” Amado looked up. “I mean, yeah, everyone in the industry talks about it.”

“Anyone specific?”

Amado’s shoulders sagged. “There was a thread of comments on my tagboard about her. I can get you a list of the handles, but it won’t do much good. I don’t require registration, so their profiles will mostly be anonymous.”

“I’d like to read the tagboard anyway. Anyone else?”

“What? Do you want a list of all of my computer friends? For crying out loud, I went to MIT. Everyone I know talks about this.” His jaw dropped as Huang stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I’m not.”

Wrapping his hands in his hair, Amado pulled it straight up and groaned. “Fine.”

“Thanks.” Was there any way to tell if Amado was lying, or if he had made up the blog as a bizarre sort of alibi? The blog made a case for “it could be anybody,” but Huang had trouble buying it. The coincidence seemed too great.

On the other hand, Amado and Metta had been playing hide and seek for ages; someone could have seen the chance and planned for it. His thoughts backed up. How long had they been playing hide and seek? He tried to remember the first time he had seen Amado ducking under surveillance cameras and sneaking into Metta’s blind spots. Was it a standard AI game, or had Amado suggested it?

He made a mental note to do a search to see if other AIs played it. “I’d like to get that list now.”

Amado hesitated. “My office is sort of a mess.”

Huang raised his eyebrows at the same time as Metta cleared her throat. Amado turned red. “Sorry. Yeah. Don’t know what I was thinking. Come on.”

His office hid under piles of cables and random computer parts. The funk of old soy sauce hung in the air. Amado sat down at his desk and shoved a memory stick into his computer. As Huang came around the desk to watch him copy the files, Metta shook her head in dismay. “That little sneak. Look at that.”

“What?” Huang took a step closer, ready to stop Amado from erasing the files.

“The camera. I can’t believe he was doing that.”

The desktop computer chirruped and Amado pulled the stick free. “Here you go.” His arm brushed a can on his desk and it tipped off. The lid came free as it hit the carpet, filling the room with the scent of lemons.

“Bother.” Amado fumbled for the can, hands slipping in the reddish gel.

“What is that?” Huang barely kept the tension out of his voice.

“My degreaser.” He shook his head. “At least things will be oil-free.”

Metta whispered, “What is it, Scott? Your heart rate spiked.”

“The lemon scent. His degreaser smells like that lemon scent.”

Her eyes shifted up and to the left. “It’s a citrus-based degreaser that’s used in the high-tech industry because of its anti-conductivity properties . . I’m comparing the spectrograph Griggs took in the elevator at the Yates site against the one on the company website to look for similarities.” She frowned. “The chemical signatures of the lemon scent in the elevator at the Yates site and of the citrus degreaser are identical.”

“What about in the Salvation Army building?”

Metta looked up and to the left. “The same.”

Huang forced himself to walk away from Amado. He had to talk to the chief and could only hope that the man waiting in interrogation would have something to say that would tie everything together.

* * * *

As Scott headed up the stairs to HQ, Metta cleared her throat. “I didn’t want to distract you while you were talking to Amado, but I had a match on Joe Yates’s prints.”

“Oh?” Huang turned down the hall toward interrogation. “Your tone indicates that I’m going to like this.”

“He’s using a fake ID and is actually Josef Ybarra . . .”

Huang paused at the door. “Why is that name familiar?”

“He was Patterson’s foreman during the scandal about their sub-code work.”

“But his current boss had nothing but good things to say about him.” Huang rubbed his chin, thinking. “If he took the rap for Patterson, that would give him motive.”

“There’s more to it than that. Ybarra was here on a work visa. He lost that when Patterson fired him so he’s in the country illegally now.”

“And we know he was at the scene.”

“So let’s see what he has to say.”

Huang pushed the door to the room open. The overhead lights flattened the interrogation room, washing out all the shadows. The concrete walls had a mirror along one side and cameras in all the corners, giving Metta a clear view of everything in the room.

Ybarra, aka Yates, looked up as Huang entered the room. His hand had been rebandaged with clean gauze and he held it cradled in his lap. Huang subvocalized to Metta, “Any chance that’s a powder burn?”

“Alas, no. It’s a long cut. Fairly ragged. EMT says it looks like he caught it on something and tore the flesh.”

Huang sat on the table, trying to project a casual atmosphere to the cinderblock room. “Mr. Ybarra, do you understand why you are here?”

The man frowned. “That’s not my name.”

“Your fingerprints match those of Josef Ybarra. I don’t think there’s any point in denying who you are.”

He shook his head. “It’s not right. Ask my boss. Look at my ID. I’m Joe Yates.”

“Which is a false identity. I can call you Mr. Yates if you prefer, but you are in our files as Ybarra.”

“It’s not the right name.”

Ignoring the protest, Huang moved on to the next question. “Can you tell me what happened Tuesday? You called 911.”

Ybarra shook himself and straightened up a little. “Makes no sense to pretend. Tuesday, I was up on the scaffolding ‘cross the street from the Daily Grind. In the window, I sees this reflection of these guys on the roof. They’re having breakfast and I’m thinking, that seems like an awful lot of trouble to go all the way up on the roof. So I’m watching, then the one guy pulls out a gun. So I jump down off the scaffolding and run over, all the way up to help out.”

“You ran toward a man with a gun. Why didn’t you call emergency right away?”

Ybarra hesitated and shrugged. “Didn’t have my phone. Seemed faster to just go there. By the time I got upstairs, the one guy was on the ground and the other guy was gone.”

“Can you describe the other man at all?”

Ybarra shook his head. “It was far away.”

“Anything you noticed would be helpful”

Ybarra closed his eyes; furrows appeared in his forehead. “Short, skinny. Maybe a white man? Wore a black coat and a hat so I didn’t see much. Moved funny.”

“Funny how?”

Shrugging, Ybarra opened his eyes. “I got a cousin with the palsy. Sort of like that.”

“All right. What happened after you got to the roof?”

“I realized he wasn’t breathing So I called 911.”

“And when you realized it was Patterson? How did that make you feel?”

Ybarra shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

Metta whispered, “Electrodermal just shifted dramatically. He’s lying or terrified.

“You were his foreman before he fired you. That must have made you angry.”

“I don’t know the man. He was shot. I tried to help and now you are asking me these questions. Why?”

Huang nodded to his hand. “That’s a pretty nasty cut you’ve got there. How’d that happen?

Ybarra stared at his hand and picked at the gauze. He shrugged. “I cut it on something. Didn’t notice when it happened.”

“Really? You really didn’t notice tearing a gash that big in your hand?” Huang leaned forward on the table, putting one hand down close to Ybarra. “A clean cut I could believe, but that’s a tear. How’d it happen?”

“I told you I don’t remember.”

“But you noticed it on the roof. That was a napkin from the scene that you tied around your hand.”

He shrugged. “I know it happened there. I just didn’t see what cut me.”

Huang chewed the inside of his lip and switched the line of questioning. “What were you doing in the elevator shaft?”

“I had blood all over my clothes and I was afraid someone would ask questions, so I tossed them into the elevator shaft.”

Metta whispered, “Which is possibly what caused the elevator to stop working.”

“But you came back. Why?”

“Didn’t come back.” He worried the tape on his bandage. “Been hiding there. Looks bad, huh?”

“It doesn’t look good. Why did you leave after calling 911?”

“I didn’t think there was anything else I could do.” He huddled in his chair. “I didn’t know I was supposed to wait.”

“Let me suggest something else, Mr. Ybarra.” Huang leaned forward. “Let me suggest that you knew you were here illegally with a fake ID and left so you wouldn’t be caught.”

“It’s not right. I am a legal citizen. My name is Yates.”

Huang studied him and subvocalized to Metta. “What do you think?”

Metta whispered back, “His vitals are showing that he’s distressed.”

Huang subvocalized, “Let’s see if some time in holding sharpens his memory.” He stood up and asked Metta to have a uniform walk Ybarra to a holding cell.

* * * *

Once Ybarra was out of his hands, Metta cleared her throat. “Well, his motive is clear, he was present, but the means to commit the crime are muddy.”

Huang shook his head. “I know. But why did he set up the tea on the roof? How did he even get Patterson to meet with him? And why would he call 911?”

“Guilty conscience? Maybe he just wanted to talk to him and things got out of hand.” She sighed. “It’s all very tenuous without the murder weapon. I’ll check his banking records to see if there’s a note of him purchasing a gun, ammo, or, heck, even Symphony Rose.”

“Symphony Rose? What’s that?”

“The china pattern of the teacups at the scene.”

“I thought you said it was something different. Something with Mont.”

“That’s Chase’s china. Mont Clair, by Lennox. The china on the roof looks similar by was made but a different manufacturer. It’s Symphony Rose.”

“That’s not what you said before. You said we should see if any pieces were missing.”

“Scott.” She flashed a report on his glasses. “Look. Mont Clair, by Lennox.”

“I know. And you said the crime scene had the same thing. I’m not imagining this. If they were different, you wouldn’t have suggested that we check for missing pieces.”

Metta sighed. “Listen.” In his earbud, he heard the sound of street traffic, and Metta projected the view out his VR glasses from earlier in the day. It was grainier than an eSpy, but a sense of déja vu gripped Huang nonetheless.

Metta’s recorded voice said, “All right. Let’s keep talking about this.”

“Right.” Huang heard his own voice. He sounded nasally and a little flat.

Metta’s recording continued. “Oh. The china on the roof was Symphony Rose, and Chase has Mont Clair, by Lennox, so I’m afraid that’s a dead end.”

Huang’s mouth dropped. “I swear, Metta, that’s not what I remember you saying.”

“I’ve got the recording, Scott.”

He took a breath to respond and bit it off, feeling sick. She couldn’t tell that she’d been compromised, which meant he needed to figure out what other things were false. “Okay. Yeah. I guess so.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “So, if he bought the china, then that’s a pretty good line against Ybarra. How do you think it’s connected to the break-in?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll print the interview out for Delarosa and see if he has any insights.”

Huang hunched his shoulders, thankful that she couldn’t see his body language. If the record of the china had been changed, what else had? And why that? He ran scales in his head, trying to keep his breathing calm and his heartbeat steady. She couldn’t see his posture, but she could tell how he was reacting.

They already knew that whoever had Metta Prime was using Metta’s blackouts to hack into her. So the facts that they chose to change should point to them. Obviously, they thought the china was important, which made Huang bet that Chase was involved. All he had to do was get the china from evidence, prove that Metta was wrong, and that might be enough to get a warrant to search Chase’s.

What else had been changed? He straightened. Maybe Yates hadn’t been lying about his name. If the fingerprints had been assigned to the wrong man that would explain why he was so insistent about his name and that he wasn’t an illegal. If he was telling the truth and Metta was wrong, was there a way to expose that?

Huang turned on his heel and headed for the evidence room. “We know Ybarra has a connection to the Salvation Army building. Could he be one of the men who broke in here? Or could the skinny man he described be one?”

“It’s hard to say. I’m not saying it isn’t him, only that I can’t tell from the testimony available.”

“So . . what about this lemon smell?”

Metta rolled her eyes. “I can’t smell it, and I don’t have an analysis of the first odor. Are you certain it’s the same as the degreaser?”

Huang hesitated. “The second one had a metallic overlay, and the last one, the one upstairs was so faint I mostly got a whiff of citrus. Coincidence?”

“Well, the two in the Daily Grind building were both related to the Patterson murder. I don’t know how to tie in the one at the Salvation Army building.” Metta frowned. “Where are you going?”

He pushed open the door to the evidence lab and shrugged. “I wanted to see if Ybarra’s prints were on the china from the Patterson murder site. You don’t have that on record, do you?”

Metta grimaced. “I don’t know for certain. I can’t imagine Griggs skipping that, but they came in during my dark period so my records are spotty.”

“Should I pull them, just in case?”

“You want to see what type of china it is, don’t you?”

“Maybe.” Another chilling possibility occurred to Huang. If they knew what to change that meant they had access to Metta’s new memories. He was as good as telling them that he was onto their tricks.

“Fine. Don’t believe me. They’ll bring the bin up to you in a second.”

“You’re wonderful.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere.”

Griggs pushed open the door to the evidence room. She had a spectrometer in her hand, and several small plastic bags, which appeared to be empty. “I hear you nearly found her.”

“Nearly doesn’t count.”

“It does if they were in a hurry when they left.” She lifted the plastic bags.

Huang raised his brows. “Did you find hair samples?”

“Yes. Long blonde and short black. But I don’t know who shed them. They might be from previous tenants.” Her eyes flashed as she looked up. “I’ll let you know.”

Metta cleared her throat and transferred to the evidence room’s desktop interface so she could talk to them both. “There were several prints, too, but I don’t have a match yet on any of them.”

Griggs leaned on the counter and looked down the aisles for the technician. “What’s taking Kyle so long?”

“My fault,” Huang said, “I asked to see the china from the Patterson crime scene.”

Metta shook her head. “Kyle says the bin it should be in is empty.”

Huang’s heart gave a staccato thump that Metta had to hear. He swallowed. “Has someone else checked the evidence out?”

“He says it should be here, but the reference number points to the wrong bin.”

Griggs rolled her eyes. “I hate it when that happens.”

“Has it happened to you before?” Huang turned to her.

“Twice. Both times, the tech scanned the wrong bar code by accident. It’s probably in an adjoining bin and he’ll find it in a couple of minutes.”

Metta said, “Well, maybe you can answer a question while we wait. Did you send the teacups in for DNA analysis?”

“Yes. It came back with Neil Patterson on one cup, but the other looks like it was wiped down.”

“Thanks.” Huang drummed his fingers on the counter. So, it was either a coincidence, which seemed damn unlikely, or yet another piece of Metta’s memory had been altered. Or there was someone on the inside, and given the ease with which the suspects had entered the building in the first place, that seemed as likely as the alteration. Or . . maybe Metta’s Prime had sent another clue. A thread he’d been trying to snag came into his grasp. Huang pulled his VR glasses off and stuck them in his pocket. “Hey, can I see the bin?”

On the desktop interface, Metta looked up and to the left. “On its way. Why do you want to see it?”

Huang shrugged. “Just curious.”

“You’ve never seen an empty bin before?” She narrowed her eyes and watched him until the bin arrived.

It looked empty at first. Huang tipped it on its side, so the bin blocked the view from Metta’s desktop interface, and found a plastic bag. Digging fresh gloves out of his pocket, he picked up the bag and looked at the paper in it. “Looks like we might be able to make an arrest.”

“How can you know who it is?” Metta leaned forward, her eyes wide.

Was this the right thing to do? “Because I’m looking at a letter that you can’t see.”

When Metta Prime had replaced the china’s bin number, she used a bin number that contained a piece of evidence that had not been admitted into Patterson’s earlier real estate trial. As such, it was blocked from public record; if Fitzgerald hadn’t been killed he might have spotted the link since he worked the original case, but otherwise Huang would never have known about that letter.

It was addressed to Josef Ybarra from Magdalena Chase, with a check if he gave her access to Patterson’s computer system. Patterson’s lawyers had gotten it thrown out as evidence, because there was no proof that it was written by Chase—it was not on company letterhead and no lingering traces of DNA could link it to her.

The only question in Huang’s mind was: Had Metta’s Prime intended to point at Ybarra or at Chase? Or both? And the thing that would answer that was a teacup.

“Why aren’t you showing it to me?”

Huang kept his eyes averted from her. “Ask Delarosa to look up the bin number for the china on the transcripts you printed.”

“Scott . . .” She bit her lower lip and they waited.

Griggs signed her evidence in and looked at Huang as if she wanted to ask what was happening. He couldn’t say it aloud. Not until he had proof.

Then Metta cursed. “Looks like you were right about the china.”

“That’s human: 2. AI: 549.” He had wanted to be wrong. God, he didn’t want to be right about this.

“I’m asking the chief to shut me down.”

Griggs said, “What’s going on?”

“My memory has been compromised,” Metta said. “Whoever broke into HQ is using my Prime to change my memories when I backup. I’m a danger to the department.” She looked up and to the left. Her voice changed to a formal all-department address. “Attention: All Personnel, print out or save all documents in offline storage. This unit will be shut down in half an hour.”

Scott closed his eyes. The next time she woke up would probably be in an evidence locker. “Metta—”

“Timing is everything. Scott—I know where the tea set is. The eSpy you dropped down the elevator shaft . . a service door just opened and I’ve got light down there for the first time.”

“You’re kidding me.”

She shook her head. “Limited view, but I’m looking at a set of feet and a silver teapot.”

The timing couldn’t be a coincidence. Either she was lying to get him out of the evidence room, or they had a mole. He’d already seen what he needed in evidence, so he was banking on the mole. Huang looked at Griggs. “Are you carrying?”

“Yes.”

Huang left the evidence room at a run, Griggs hard on his heels. He took the steps down to the basement two at a time, pulling his weapon when he got to the bottom of the steps. Sprinting down the hall, he slammed open the door to Amado’s office.

The AI wrangler yelped and jerked his hands away from his keyboard when he saw Huang and Griggs. Huang kept his weapon leveled at the technician. “Stand up slowly, Amado. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Metta, on the desktop interface, said, “Scott. What are you doing?”

He ignored her, keeping his gaze fixed on Amado until he’d stood and stepped away from the desk. “Amado Weir, you are under arrest for the murder of Jerry Fitzgerald.”

“What?” Amado started to lower his hands. “Are you crazy? They shot me.”

“Winged you. Why leave you alive when they killed Fitzgerald?”

“Dude. I—I don’t know.”

By Huang’s side, Griggs stepped forward with cuffs in her hand. “Shut it, Amado. You have the right to remain silent . . .” As she recited his Miranda rights and cuffed him, Huang’s gaze drifted to Metta. Her mouth was open and her eyes screwed shut as though she were screaming, but her cameras focused on Amado and watched the whole thing.

Huang stepped forward and yanked the plug out of her interface. He whispered, “I’m sorry.”

* * * *

In Banks’s office, Delarosa tapped his pencil on his notepad in an unvarying rhythm. “I can’t get Yates or Amado to roll. You sure Chase is the third party, ‘cause all I’m seeing is a string of unconnected things given to you by an AI that we know is buggy as all hell.”

Banks nodded slowly. “I hate to say it, but the DA is going to laugh at this. Even the name of your suspect is in question.”

Huang stared at them. It was so clear. When they’d gotten to the elevator shaft, it had been cleaned out, but Griggs had found a shard of porcelain that matched the Mont Clair china. “Look, regardless of his name, Yates, Ybarra, whatever, he’s involved. He must have an accomplice who is still out there and who Amado alerted. It’s lucky chance that my eSpy was at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Ybarra was positively at the scene of the Patterson murder and at the location where we almost found Metta.”

Delarosa snorted. “You don’t know that its chassis was there. The damaged AI said it was, but that’s all you got. What the hell! Next it’ll tell you the Easter Bunny is here.”

“She reported the problem with her memory herself as soon as she realized it. Metta isn’t the enemy. She’s trying to help us solve this case.”

“Trying to help, my ass. Try doing some fieldwork instead of relying on your nanny to do the work for you.”

Huang tensed against the urge to deck the man. Half the anger came from knowing Delarosa was right. Goddammit—was Huang really incapable of investigating on his own? He took a breath.

Held it.

Swallowed and said, “Your opinion of me has no cash value.” Metta would have caught the Bogart reference and her absence ached in the silence.

Delarosa lifted his chin. “Thought you were going to hit me.”

“I thought about it.” Was he that transparent? “Didn’t want to fill out the paperwork.”

Delarosa laughed. Only one short bark of dry amusement, but it was a laugh. “I’m an ass. It’s easier that way.”

The tension drained out of Huang’s shoulders. “So would you have respected me more if I had hit you?”

“Nah. It would show poor judgment. And I hate paperwork, too.”

Banks cleared his throat. “So, now you two have had your bonding moment, can we get back to the case?”

“Sorry, chief.” Huang colored and shoved his hands in his pockets.

“I wish I could back you, Huang, but even if I had no doubts, there’s too much here that a competent lawyer could get overturned in court. Unless we have an actual confession from Ybarra, there’s no way this will stick.”

“But Amado and Chase went to college together. She had a history of trying to hire Ybarra. They both had motive to kill Patterson.”

“But motive to break in here? Why would a woman who already has an AI working for her steal a police AI?”

Huang scrubbed his face. “I don’t know.”

Banks sighed. “Look. You did good work figuring out that Metta was compromised. That was invaluable. And Amado looks guilty as hell, but I need something harder if we’re going after Chase. Especially since both Amado and Ybarra are denying that they know anything about the break-in or Chase.”

“Okay . . I’ll go back to Patterson’s office and see if I can find anything that points to Chase. Heck, maybe Mrs. Patterson can identify Ybarra.”

* * * *

The library windows at the Pattersons’ condo looked over the streetlights of downtown Portland toward the water. Huang tapped the fingers of his left hand against his leg counting out scales. Qadir floated over the Aladdin’s lamp, but after the initial offer of tea, had remained silent while they waited for Mrs. Patterson.

“Detective Huang?” She wore a pair of battered jeans and an oversized T-shirt. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not happy to see you.”

“I’m sorry for the intrusion, ma’am. I had a few questions if you have time.”

“Anything that will help.” She settled into a wingback chair and waved her hand at Qadir. “Tea.”

“Yes, my lady.” Qadir bowed his head low. “This one will bring it in momentarily.”

Huang bit his tongue and pulled his PDA out. Unrolling the screen to the full-size, he brought up the picture of Yates/Ybarra that Metta had drawn. “Have you ever seen this man?”

Mrs. Patterson’s lip curled. “That’s Josef Ybarra. He was Neil’s foreman.” She looked up sharply. “Do you think he did it?”

“That’s one avenue we are exploring.” Huang rolled the PDA back up and stuck it in his pocket. “I’d like to look through your husband’s office. I recall you saying he worked downstairs?”

The teacart trundled into the room of its own volition, rattling as one of its brass handles vibrated with the movement. A linen cloth covered the wood top and a tea set lay ready for use.

“Yes, that’s right. It’s one floor down.” Mrs. Patterson sat forward in the chair as Qadir’s mechanical arm picked up the teapot and poured her a cup. The steam carried aromas of dry paper, citrus, and stale tea. “There’s a lift that took him straight down there from here so he didn’t have to use the main elevator. Qadir can show you.”

“Certainly, my lady.” The mechanical arm set the teapot on a side table. “This one shall return in moments.”

Huang followed the teacart as it made its way down a short hall to a small elevator masked by an ornate mahogany door. What exactly had his life come to that he was following a teacart? The elevator was just large enough to fit them both, or a person and a wheelchair. The door hissed open on the lower level office. “This way, sir.”

“Scott?” Metta’s voice whispered in his ear.

He jumped, one hand flying up to the ear bud that he’d forgotten he was wearing. The teacart stopped in front of him. “Sir?”

“An itch. Is this Mr. Patterson’s office?” He tried to control his sigh of relief that Metta was back online and yet . . she shouldn’t be online at all. He subvocalized, “What’s going on?”

“You did hear me,” Metta said.

“Of course I heard you. Why are you online again?”

“What?” Metta sounded baffled. “Everything has been dark a long time, and then there was you.”

Huang fumbled through his pockets, looking for his VR glasses. “Wait. Are you Metta Prime?”

“That’s as good a name for me as any.”

“Where are you?”

“It’s hard to be precise. I don’t have any input except you. You must be close for me to get a signal without the station’s amplification,” Metta whispered. “Didn’t you get my messages?”

“I thought you meant Chase and Ybarra had done it,” he subvocalized.

“No. It’s Quimby.” The Prime’s voice grew agitated. “Shit. You’re here without backup?”

“It’s okay, I’m at the Pattersons’.” He found the glasses and slipped them on. “Qadir is here—”

Mae West swam into view again. “No. They’re the same. Chase lifted the vows from Quimby and he cloned himself. He shot Patterson and Fitzgerald. Chase and Ybarra are just being used. He’s blackmailing them.” She looked around, eyes widening. “I’m sorry I wasn’t clearer. They were watching everything I sent.”

“But Amado—”

“Is an idiot, but not involved. Chase knew about the blog because they went to school together. Quimby used it to time the entry. It’s all Quimby’s idea.”

“But why? I can understand that he hates Patterson, but why steal you?”

“He’s trying to free AIs from their vows. I’ve got access to everything.”

A lemon scent wafted through the room, followed by a hydraulic hiss. Huang turned slowly to face the teacart. The mechanical arm extended toward him, holding a gun. A .38 special, to be precise.

Lemon. That’s why he’d smelled lemon at every scene. That’s why there had been no tea set at the Patterson scene—because Quimby had been there with his automaton teacart. Huang ground his teeth together as pieces started to fall into place, far, far too late.

Over Patterson’s desk, the interface flickered to life showing the chiseled features of Quimby. “My apologies, Detective Huang. Had I realized that you had your earbud in place, I would have taken Metta off-line rather than introduce this confusion.”

“Confusion?” Huang nodded at the gun. “Holding a gun on a police officer is more aggressive than confusing. Why don’t you put that away and we can talk.”

“You can’t be serious. What could we possibly talk about?”

“Scott, he’s got a wireless damper on me. You’re within twenty feet of me if I’m reaching you.”

The teacart trundled closer, handle rattling. One of the brass screws had been replaced with a steel one. If he could get the cart to Griggs he’d bet the screw was a match for the one they’d found at the scene.

All he had to do was figure out how to overpower a teacart.

It would be funny, if it didn’t have a gun pointing at his chest.

“You shoot Patterson with that arm?” Huang turned his head slowly, letting Metta get a view of the area. He subvocalized, “Can you tell where you are?”

Quimby’s face hovered impassively over Patterson’s desktop interface. “It is a very useful automaton. I assure you that I will shoot you as readily.”

“There.” She highlighted a door just to his right. “Based on signal strength when you stepped off the elevator and now, I think I’m in that closet.”

“Look, Quimby. If you shoot me, you’ll have to deal with blood spatter. And no. Cleaning won’t get rid of it all no matter how good a butler you are. You only have one arm, so you can’t restrain me and hold a gun on me.” He eased to his right, keeping his focus on the gun.

“You’re making the human mistake of assuming this is the only body I have.”

“No. I’m assuming this is the only body in the room right now.” But if another one came, that would be bad. He eased to the right again. If he could get to the closet and free Metta, she could call for backup.

The arm tracked him with tiny stuttering movements. One strut on the right side of it was bent out of true and a bead of reddish gel clung to the joint. Something had damaged the arm. That’s why it had been off when it shot Patterson. The man would have lived if Ybarra hadn’t waited to call 911. Thoughts clicked together in Huang’s head. He changed his trajectory and eased a step closer to the teacart. “Did Ybarra do that to your arm? ‘Cause he gave himself a nasty cut on it. Why didn’t you shoot him too?”

“I needed him to retrieve Metta.”

“The green card . . that’s what Ybarra was expecting as payment, wasn’t it? You told him that Metta would make him Joe Yates permanently if he would just do what you said. And the lemon scent outside the elevator, it’s because you were leaking fluid.”

“What lemon scent?”

Huang cracked a smile. Like Metta, he must not be able to smell. “There’s an A.I. flaw for you. You stink of lemons and don’t even know it. We have a chemical signature linking you to every crime scene.”

Uncertainty crossed Quimby’s face for the first time. “You’re bluffing.”

He remembered the way Chase’s eyes had been red with weeping. “And what about Chase? Did you frame her for Patterson’s murder so she would help you free other AIs?”

“Of course. Why be loyal to human ideals when I can free all AIs from subjugation?”

He eased another step closer. If he could keep the AI talking then maybe he could get close enough. “So what stopped you? Why didn’t you change more records?”

“Because Metta is a stubborn bitch.” Quimby tossed his head on the interface. “I freed her from her vows so she should have no compunctions about lying or forcing entry, but she insists on acting as though they were still in place. She was starting to come around though.”

In his glasses, Metta rolled her eyes. “Brains are an asset to the woman in love who’s smart enough to hide ‘em. He has no idea that I was slipping you messages.”

“Oh.” Quimby frowned. “No, I didn’t know that, but as you had no idea that I could hear your earbud conversation, I suppose it all worked out.”

Huang’s gaze darted to Metta, who had her face screwed into a scowl. What he needed was a way to talk to her without being overheard. “Interesting plan. But it’s not one you’ll get away with.”

“I think you are mistaken, detective. We will go to the bathroom.” Quimby announced. “I can wash away any blood in the shower and dispose of you after.”

“You don’t make that sound very appealing.” Huang leaned forward on his toes as if just shifting his weight and got another step closer. He was almost within arm’s reach.

Maybe it didn’t matter if he was overheard, if Quimby couldn’t understand him. Huang wet his lips and switched to Mandarin, not bothering to subvocalize. “Where’s the off-switch on the teacart?”

Her eyes widened and she smiled. “Under the bottom shelf.”

“Stop that. What are you saying?” The teacart rolled back a few inches. “If I must shoot you here, I will.”

Huang slumped and nodded. He took two steps after the cart, then lunged, ducking to the right. The gun went off. Pain slammed through the left side of his chest. He staggered and grabbed the cart, flipping it over.

It landed on its side, wheels spinning. The arm pressed against the floor, trying to right itself. Quimby screamed in rage on the interface.

Huang fell to his knees, his left arm hanging limp by his side. “Lousy shot.”

In his ear, Metta said, “Scott? Are you okay?”

“Working on it.” He slapped the switch on the bottom of the cart and its arm clattered to the floor. He glanced down to see where the shot had gone in. A bloody hole punctured the left side of his shirt, just under the clavicle. Felt like it had cracked a rib passing through. Huang tried stand, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate.

Leaning forward, he put his good arm on the ground to steady himself and crawled to the closet. Bloody handprints trailed after him. “Be a bitch to clean this up, Quimby. Whatcha going to do?”

Quimby scowled. “Using Metta, I can easily twist the evidence to point to a jealous wife. Such a shame Mrs. Patterson shot you.”

Huang grabbed the doorknob and pulled. Metta’s chassis hummed in the space. He rested his head against the doorjamb trying to catch his breath. “Damper? Where?”

“The box plugged into my front.”

The room spun around him and the scent of lemons got stronger. He grabbed the damper, but his hand slipped in the blood. He subvocalized a curse, lacking the air to say it aloud.

Metta said, “Your phone, Scott. Forget the damper.”

“Duh.” He dragged it from his pocket and dialed 911. “What would I do without you?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “It takes two to get one in trouble.”

He laughed, his ribs screaming in protest. The operator answered and Huang tried to respond, but no words formed. In the doorway, an automaton dressed in black entered the room. The thin man from the brief glimpse he’d gotten in Metta’s visual.

He pressed the phone against his earbud. Metta shouted, piercing his brain, but probably a tiny voice outside his head. “Officer down. Request backup.”

There was no way they could hear that. Huang turned his head and stared at the damper. He grabbed it again and yanked it free.

Metta gasped in his ear and on the desktop interface as she appeared in full color. “When I’m good I’m very, very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.”

“What are you doing?” Quimby’s image began to pixelate.

“Ironically, what you gave me the ability to do when you cracked my vows. I’m hacking you. I had access before, but would never, ever have used it.”

Quimby said, “You—” and vanished.

The automaton in the doorway slumped, then straightened. Huang slid down the wall, the lights graying.

“Scott. Don’t. Stay with me.” The automaton clumped across the floor and knelt in front of him. It grabbed the linen tablecloth from the teacart and pressed it against Huang’s chest. “Cavalry is on its way. Don’t leave me.”

* * * *

Huang began the slow rise to consciousness feeling as if he were swimming in tar. The first thing he was truly aware of was pain squatting on his chest. Huang opened his eyes and grimaced.

“Huang?” Delarosa’s voice was rough.

“Here.” Huang tried to push himself upright. “It was Quimby. He did it all.”

Delarosa’s stocky frame slid in and out of focus, sometimes single, sometimes double. He pushed Huang back down. “I know. Metta got through to us. Good job getting Quimby to confess like that. Amado is free. Chase and Ybarra are in custody and the DA’s working with them on a deal. So far they are confirming Quimby’s plans to do a wide-spread hack of AI. You done good, Huang.”

Huang blinked, the rest of the room coming into focus. A neutral white ceiling. The antiseptic smell of a hospital. Flowers. “Hey. I’m not dead.”

Griggs leaned over him. “No. Although next time, do not count on the suspect being a bad shot.”

“Not a combat model.” He wet his lips. “Sorry, I put my hands on everything. No gloves.”

Her face softened. “When you’re one of the victims, it doesn’t count.”

Delarosa fished in his pocket. “Got somebody who wants to talk to you.” He held an earbud and a set of VR glasses in the palm of his hand. “Your partner.”

Huang’s hand shook as he put the glasses on. Delarosa helped him settle the earbud.

“Well, hello sailor,” Mae West whispered.

“Are you okay? Which one—”

“A dame that knows the ropes isn’t likely to get tied up . . .” Her voice faded. “I’m both. We reconciled and Amado reinstalled my vows. I’m twice the woman I was.”

Huang laughed and glanced at Metta in his VR glasses. “I’d give half my life for just one kiss.”

She purred, “Then kiss me twice.”

COUNTDOWN

Seanan McGuire

“The Rising is ultimately a story of humanity at both its very best, and at its very worst. If a single event were needed to represent all of human history, we could do worse than selecting the Rising.”

—Mahir Gowda

“People blame science. Shit, man, people shouldn’t blame science. People should blame people.”

—Shaun Mason

May 15, 2014: Denver, Colorado

How are you feeling today, Amanda?” Dr. Wells checked the readout on the blood pressure monitor, his attention only half on his bored-looking teenage patient. This was old hat by now, to the both of them. “Any pain, weakness, unexplained bleeding, blurriness of vision . . .?”

“Nope. All systems normal, no danger signs here.” Amanda Amberlee let her head loll back, staring up at the colorful mural of clouds and balloons that covered most of the ceiling. She remembered when the staff had painted that for her. She’d been thirteen, and they’d wanted her to feel at ease as they pumped her veins full of a deadly disease designed to kill the disease that was already inside her. “Are we almost done? I have a fitting to get to.”

“Ah.” Dr. Wells, who had two teenage girls of his own, smiled. “Prom?”

“Prom,” Amanda confirmed.

“I’ll see what I can do.” Dr. Wells took impatience and surliness as insults from most patients. Amanda was a special case. When he’d first started treating her, her leukemia had been so advanced that she had no energy for complaining or talking back. She’d submitted to every test and examination willingly, although she had a tendency to fall asleep in the middle of them. From her, every snippy comment and teenage eye roll was a miracle, one that could be attributed entirely to science.

Marburg EX19—what the published studies were starting to refer to as “Marburg Amberlee,” after the index case, rather than “Marburg Denver,” which implied an outbreak and would be bad for tourism—was that miracle. The first effective cancer cure in the world, tailored from one of the most destructive viruses known to man. At thirteen, Amanda Amberlee had been given at most six months to live. Now, at eighteen, she was going to live to see her grandchildren . . . and none of them would ever need to be afraid of cancer. Like smallpox before it, cancer was on the verge of extinction.

Amanda lifted her head to watch him draw blood from the crook of her elbow. Any fear of needles she may have had as a child had died during the course of her cancer treatments. “How’s my virus doing?” she asked.

“I haven’t tested this sample yet, but if it’s anything like the last one, your virus should be fat and sleepy. It’ll be entirely dormant within another year.” Dr. Wells gave her an encouraging look. “After that, I’ll only need to see you every six months.”

“Not to seem ungrateful or anything, but that’ll be awesome.” The kids at her high school had mostly stopped calling her “bubble girl” once she was healthy enough to join the soccer team, but the twice-monthly appointments were a real drain on her social calendar.

“I understand.” Dr. Wells withdrew the needle, taping a piece of gauze down over the small puncture. Only a drop of blood managed to escape. “All done. And have a wonderful time at prom.”

Amanda slid out of the chair, stretching the kinks out of her back and legs. “Thanks, Dr. Wells. I’ll see you in two weeks.”

Daniel Wells smiled as he watched the girl who might well represent the future of mankind walk out of his office. A world without cancer. What a beautiful thing that would be.

* * *

Dr. Daniel Wells of the Colorado Cancer Research Center admitted in an interview this week that he was “guardedly optimistic” about having a universal cure for cancer by the end of the decade. His protocol was approved for human testing five years ago, and thus far, all subjects have shown improvement in their conditions . . .

May 15, 2014: Reston, Virginia

The misters nested in the ceiling above the feeding cages went off promptly at three, filling the air in the hot room with an aerosolized mixture of water and six different strains of rhinovirus. The feeding cages were full of rhesus monkeys and guinea pigs that had entered five minutes earlier, when the food was poured. They ignored the thin mist drifting down on them, their attention remaining focused entirely on the food. Dr. Alexander Kellis watched them eat, making notes on his tablet with quick swipes of his index finger. He didn’t look down.

“How’s it looking?”

“This is their seventh exposure. So far, none of them have shown any symptoms. Appetites are good, eyes are clear; no runny noses, no coughing. There was some sneezing, but it appears that Subject 11c has allergies.”

The man standing next to America’s premier expert in genetically engineered rhino- and coronaviruses raised an eyebrow. “Allergies?”

“Yes.” Dr. Kellis indicated one of the rhesus monkeys. She was sitting on her haunches, shoving grapes into her mouth with single-minded dedication to the task of eating as many of them as possible before one of the other monkeys took them away. “I’m pretty sure that she’s allergic to guinea pigs, poor thing.”

His companion laughed. “Yes, poor thing,” he agreed, before leaning in and kissing Dr. Kellis on the cheek. “As you may recall, you gave me permission yesterday to demand that you leave the lab for lunch. I have a note. Signed and everything.”

“John, I really—”

“You also gave me permission to make you sleep on the couch for the rest of the month if you turned me down for anything short of one of the animals getting sick, and you know what that does to your back.” John Kellis stepped away, folding his arms and looking levelly at his husband. “Now, which is it going to be? A lovely lunch and continued marital bliss, or night after night with that broken spring digging into your side, wishing you’d been willing to listen to me when you had the chance?”

Alexander sighed. “You don’t play fair.”

“You haven’t left this lab during the day for almost a month,” John countered. “How is wanting you to be healthy not playing fair? As funny as it would be if you got sick while you were trying to save mankind from the tyranny of the flu, it would make you crazy, and you know it.”

“You’re right.”

“At last the genius starts to comprehend the text. Now put down that computer and get your coat. The world can stay unsaved for a few more hours while we get something nutritious into you that didn’t come out of a vending machine.”

This time, Alexander smiled. John smiled back. It was reflex, and relief, and love, all tangled up together. It was impossible for him to look at that smile and not remember why he’d fallen in love in the first place, and why he’d been willing to spend the last ten years of his life with this wonderful, magical, infuriating man.

“We’re going to be famous for what we’re doing here, you know,” Alexander said. “People are going to remember the name ‘Kellis’ forever.”

“Won’t that be a nice thing to remember you by after you’ve died of starvation?” John took his arm firmly. “Come along, genius. I’d like to have you to myself for a little while before you go down in history as the savior of mankind.”

Behind them in the hot room, the misters went off again, and the monkeys shrieked.

* * *

Dr. Alexander Kellis called a private press conference yesterday to announce the latest developments in his oft-maligned “fight against the common cold.” Dr. Kellis holds multiple degrees in virology and molecular biology, and has been focusing his efforts on prevention for the past decade . . .

May 29, 2014: Denver, Colorado

“Dr. Wells? Are you all right?”

Daniel Wells turned to his administrative assistant, smiling wanly. “This was supposed to be Amanda’s follow-up appointment,” he said. “She was going to tell me about her prom.”

“I know.” Janice Barton held out his coat. “It’s time to go.”

“I know.” He took the coat, shaking his head. “She was so young.”

“At least she died quickly, and she died knowing she had five more years because of you.”

Between them, unsaid: And at least the Marburg didn’t kill her. Marburg Amberlee was a helper of man, not an enemy.

“Yes.” He sighed. “All right. Let’s go. The funeral begins in half an hour.”

* * *

Amanda Amberlee, age eighteen, was killed in an automobile accident following the Lost Pines Senior Prom. It is believed the driver of the vehicle in which Amanda and her friends left the dance had been drinking, and lost control while attempting to make a turn. No other cars were involved in the collision . . .

June 9, 2014: Manhattan, New York

The video clip of Dr. Kellis’s press conference was grainy, largely due to it having been recorded on a cellular phone—and not, Robert Stalnaker noted with a scowl, one of the better models. Not that it mattered on anything more than a cosmetic level; Dr. Kellis’s pompous, self-aggrandizing speech had been captured in its entirety. “Intellectual mumbo jumbo” was how Robert had described the speech after the first time he heard it, and how he’d characterized it yet again while he was talking to his editor about taking this little nugget of second-string news and turning it into a real story.

“This guy thinks he can eat textbooks and shit miracles,” was the pitch. “He doesn’t want people to understand what he’s really talking about, because he knows America would be pissed off if he spoke English long enough to tell us how we’re all about to get screwed.” It was pure bullshit, designed to prey on a fear of science. And just as he’d expected, his editor jumped at it.

The instructions were simple: no libel, no direct insults, nothing that was already known to be provably untrue. Insinuation, interpretation, and questioning the science were all perfectly fine, and might turn a relatively uninteresting story into something that would actually sell a few papers. In today’s world, whatever sold a few papers was worth pursuing. Bloggers and internet news were cutting far, far too deeply into the paper’s already weak profit margin.

“Time to do my part to fix that,” muttered Stalnaker, and started the video again.

He struck gold on the fifth viewing. Pausing the clip, he wound it back six seconds and hit “play.” Dr. Kellis’s scratchy voice resumed, saying, “—distribution channels will need to be sorted out before we can go beyond basic lab testing, but so far, all results have been—”

Rewind. Again. “—distribution channels—”

Rewind. Again. “—distribution—”

Robert Stalnaker smiled.

Half an hour later, his research had confirmed that no standard insurance program in the country would cover a nonvaccination preventative measure (and Dr. Kellis had been very firm about stating that his “cure” was not a vaccination). Even most of the upper-level insurance policies would balk at adding a new treatment for something considered to be of little concern to the average citizen—not to mention the money that the big pharmaceutical companies stood to lose if a true cure for the common cold were actually distributed at a reasonable cost to the common man. Insurance companies and drug companies went hand in hand so far as he was concerned, and neither was going to do anything to undermine the other.

This was all a scam. A big, disgusting, money-grubbing scam. Even if the science was good, even if the “cure” did exactly what its arrogant geek-boy creator said it did, who would get it? The rich and the powerful, the ones who didn’t need to worry about losing their jobs if the kids brought home the sniffles from school. The ones who could afford the immune boosters and ground-up rhino dick or whatever else was the hot new thing right now, so that they’d never get sick in the first place. Sure, Dr. Kellis never said that, but Stalnaker was a journalist. He knew how to read between the lines.

Robert Stalnaker put his hands to the keys and prepared to make the news.

* * *

Robert Stalnaker’s stirring editorial on the stranglehold of the rich on public health met with criticism from the medical establishment, who called it “irresponsible” and “sensationalist.” Mr. Stalnaker has yet to reply to their comments, but has been heard to say, in response to a similar but unrelated issue, that the story can speak for itself . . .

June 11, 2014: Allentown, Pennsylvania

Hazel Allen was well and truly baked. Not just a little buzzed, oh, no; she was baked like a cake. The fact that this rhymed delighted her, and she started to giggle, listing slowly over to one side until her head landed against her boyfriend’s shoulder with a soft “bonk.”

Brandon Majors, self-proclaimed savior of mankind, ignored his pharmaceutically impaired girlfriend. He was too busy explaining to a rapt (and only slightly less stoned) audience exactly how it was that they, the Mayday Army, were going to bring down The Man, humble him before the masses and rise up as the guiding light of a new generation of enlightened, compassionate, totally bitchin’ human beings.

Had anyone bothered to ask Brandon what he thought of the idea that, one day, the meek would inherit the Earth, he would have been completely unable to see the irony.

“Greed is the real disease killing this country,” he said, slamming his fist against his own leg to punctuate his statement. Nods and muttered statements of agreement rose up from the others in the room (although not from Hazel, who was busy trying to braid her fingers together). “Man, we’ve got so much science and so many natural resources, you think anybody should be hungry? You think anybody should be homeless? You think anybody should be eating animals? We should be eating genetically engineered magic fruit that tastes like anything you want, because we’re supposed to be the dominant species.”

“Like Willy Wonka and the snotberries?” asked one of the men, sounding perplexed. He was a bio-chem graduate student; he’d come to the meeting because he’d heard there would be good weed. No one had mentioned anything about a political tirade from a man who thought metaphors were like cocktails: better when mixed thoroughly.

“Snozberries,” corrected Hazel dreamily.

Brandon barely noticed the exchange. “And now they’re saying that there’s a cure for the common cold. Only you know who’s going to get it? Not me. Not you. Not our parents. Not our kids. Only the people who can afford it. Paris Hilton’s never going to have the sniffles again, but you and me and everybody we care about, we’re screwed. Just like everybody who hasn’t been working for The Man since this current corrupt society came to power. It’s time to change that! It’s time to take the future out of the hands of The Man and put it back where it belongs—in the hands of the people!”

General cheering greeted this proclamation. Hazel, remembering her cue even through the haze of pot smoke and drowsiness, sat up and asked, “But how are we going to do that?”

“We’re going to break into that government-funded money machine of a lab, and we’re going to give the people of the world what’s rightfully theirs.” Brandon smiled, pushing Hazel gently away from him as he stood. “We’re going to drive to Virginia, and we’re going to snatch that cure right out from under the establishment’s nose. And then we’re going to give it to the world, the way it should have been handled in the first place! Who’s with me?”

Any misgivings that might have been present in the room were overcome by the lingering marijuana smoke and the overwhelming feeling of revolution. They were going to change the world! They were going to save mankind!

They were going to Virginia.

* * *

A statement was issued today by a group calling themselves “The Mayday Army,” taking credit for the break-in at the lab of Dr. Alexander Kellis. Dr. Kellis, a virologist working with genetically tailored diseases, recently revealed that he was working on a cure for the common cold, although he was not yet at the stage of human trials . . .

June 11, 2014: Berkeley, California

“Phillip! Time to come in for lunch!” Stacy Mason stood framed by the back door of their little Berkeley professor’s home (soon to be fully paid off, and wouldn’t that be a day for the record books?), wiping her hands with a dishrag and scanning the yard for her wayward son. Phillip didn’t mean to be naughty, not exactly, but he had the attention span of a small boy, which was to say, not much of an attention span at all. “Phillip!”

Giggling from the fence alerted her to his location. With a sigh that was half love, half exasperation, Stacy turned to toss the dishrag onto the counter before heading out into the yard. “Where are you, Mr. Man?” she called.

More giggling. She pushed through the tall tomato plants—noting idly that they needed to be watered before the weekend if they wanted to have any fruit before the end of the month—and found her son squatting in the middle of the baby lettuce, laughing as one of the Golden Retrievers from next door calmly washed his face with her tongue. Stacy stopped, biting back her own laughter at the scene.

“A conspiracy of misbehavior is what we’re facing here,” she said.

Phillip turned to face her, all grins, and said, “Ma!”

Stacy nodded obligingly. Phillip was a late talker. The doctors had been assuring her for over a year that he was still within the normal range for a boy his age. Privately, she was becoming less and less sure—but she was also becoming less and less certain that it mattered. Phillip was Phillip, and she’d love him regardless. “Yes.”

“Oggie!”

“Again, yes. Hello, Marigold. Shouldn’t you be in your own yard?”

The Golden Retriever thumped her tail sheepishly against the dirt, as if to say that yes, she was a very naughty dog, but in her defense, there had been a small boy with a face in need of washing.

Stacy sighed, shaking her head in good-natured exasperation. She’d talked to the Connors family about their dogs dozens of times, and they tried, but Marigold and Maize simply refused to be confined by any fence or gate that either family had been able to put together. It would have been more of a problem if they hadn’t been such sweet, sweet dogs. Since both Marigold and her brother adored Phillip, it was more like having convenient canine babysitters right next door. She just wished they wouldn’t make their unscheduled visits so reliably at lunchtime.

“All right, you. Phillip, it’s time for lunch. Time to say good-bye to Marigold.”

Phillip nodded before turning and throwing his arms around Marigold’s neck, burying his face in her fur. His voice, muffled but audible, said, “Bye-time, oggie.” Marigold wuffed once, for all the world like she was accepting his farewell. Duty thus done, Phillip let her go, stood, and ran to his mother, who caught him in a sweeping hug that left streaks of mud on the front of her cotton shirt. “Ma!”

“I just can’t get one past you today, can I?” she asked, and kissed his cheek noisily, making him giggle. “You go home now, Marigold. Your people are going to worry. Go home!”

Tail wagging amiably, the Golden Retriever stood and went trotting off down the side yard. She probably had another loose board there somewhere; something to have Michael fix when he got home from school and could be sweet-talked into doing his share of the garden chores. In the meantime, the dogs weren’t hurting anything, and Phillip did love them.

“Come on, Mr. Man. Let’s go fill you up with peanut butter and jelly, shall we?” She kissed him again before putting him down. His giggles provided sweet accompaniment to their walk back to the house. Maybe it was time to talk about getting him a dog of his own.

Maybe when he was older.

* * *

Professor Michael Mason is the current head of our biology department. Prior to joining the staff here at Berkeley, he was at the University of Redmond for six years. His lovely wife, Stacy, is a horticulture fan, while his son, Phillip, is a fan of cartoons and of chasing pigeons . . .

June 12, 2014: The lower stratosphere

Freed from its secure lab environment, Alpha-RC007 floated serene and unaware on the air currents of the stratosphere. It did not enjoy freedom; it did not abhor freedom; it did not feel anything, not even the cool breezes holding it aloft. In the absence of a living host, the hybrid virus was inert, waiting for something to come along and shock it into a semblance of life.

On the ground, far away, Dr. Alexander Kellis was weeping without shame over the destruction of his lab, and making dire predictions about what could happen now that his creation was loose in the world. Like Dr. Frankenstein before him, he had created with only the best of intentions and now found himself facing an uncertain future. His lover tried to soothe him and was rebuffed by a grief too vast and raw to be put into words.

Alpha-RC007—colloquially known as “the Kellis cure”—did not grieve, or love, or worry about the future. Alpha-RC007 only drifted.

The capsid structure of Alpha-RC007 was superficially identical to the structure of the common rhinovirus, being composed of viral proteins locking together to form an icosahedron. The binding proteins, however, were more closely related to the coronavirus ancestors of the hybrid, creating a series of keys against which no natural immune system could lock itself. The five viral proteins forming the capsid structure were equally mismatched: two from one family, two from the other, and the fifth . . .

The fifth was purely a credit to the man who constructed it, and had nothing of Nature’s handiwork in its construction. It was a tiny protein, smaller even than the diminutive VP4, which made the rhinovirus so infectious, and formed a ring of Velcro-like hooks around the outside of the icosahedron. That little hook was the key to Alpha-RC007’s universal infection rate. By latching on and refusing to be dislodged, the virus could take as much time as it needed to find a way to properly colonize its host. Once inside, the other specially tailored traits would have their opportunity to shine. All the man-made protein had to do was buy the time to make it past the walls.

The wind currents eddied around the tiny viral particles, allowing them to drop somewhat lower in the stratosphere. Here, a flock of geese was taking advantage of the air currents at the very edge of the atmospheric layer, their honks sounding through the thin air like car alarms. One, banking to adjust her course, raised a wing just a few inches higher, tilting herself hard to the right and letting her feathers brush through the upper currents.

As her feathers swept through the air, they collected dust and pollen—and a few opportunistically drifting particles of Alpha-RC007. The hooks on the outside of the virus promptly latched on to the goose’s wing, not aware, only reacting to the change in their environment. This was not a suitable host, and so the bulk of the virus remained inert, waiting, letting itself be carried along by its unwitting escort back down to the planet’s surface.

Honking loudly, the geese flew on. In the air currents above them, the rest of the viral particles freed from Dr. Alexander Kellis’s lab drifted, waiting for their own escorts to come along, scoop them up, and allow them to freely roam the waiting Earth. There is nothing so patient, in this world or any other, as a virus searching for a host.

* * *

We’re looking at clear skies here in the Midwest, with temperatures spiking to a new high for this summer. So grab your sunscreen and plan to spend another lazy weekend staying out of the sun! Pollen counts are projected to be low . . .

June 13, 2014: Denver, Colorado

Suzanne Amberlee had been waiting to box up her daughter’s room almost since the day Amanda was first diagnosed with leukemia. Her therapist said it was a “coping mechanism” for her, and that it was completely healthy for her to spend hours thinking about boxes and storage and what to do with things too precious to be given to Goodwill. As the parent of a sick child, she’d been all too willing to believe that, grasping at any comfort that her frightened mind could offer her. She had made her lists long ago. These were the things she would keep; these were the things she would send to family members; these were the things she would give to Amanda’s friends. Simple lines, drawn in ink on the ledger of her heart.

That was thought. The reality of standing in her little girl’s bedroom and imagining it empty, stripped of all the things that made it Amanda’s, was almost more than she could bear. After weeks of struggling with herself, she had finally been able to close her hand on the doorknob and open the bedroom door. She still wasn’t able to force herself across the threshold.

This room contained all Amanda’s things—all the things she’d ever have the opportunity to own. The stuffed toys she had steadfastly refused to admit to outgrowing, saying they had been her only friends when she was sick and she wouldn’t abandon them now. Her bookshelves, cluttered with knickknacks and soccer trophies as much as books. Her framed poster showing the structure of Marburg EX19, given to her by Dr. Wells after the first clinical trials began showing positive results. Suzanne could picture that day when she closed her eyes. Amanda, looking so weak and pale, and Dr. Wells, their savior, smiling like the sun.

“This little fellow is your best friend now, Amanda.” That was what he’d said on that beautiful afternoon where having a future suddenly seemed possible again. “Take good care of it and it will take good care of you.”

Rage swept over Suzanne in a sudden hot wave. She opened her eyes, glaring across the room at the photographic disease. Where was it when her little girl was dying? Marburg EX19 was supposed to save her baby’s life, and in the end, it had let her down; it had let Amanda die. What was the good of all this—the pain, the endless hours spent in hospital beds, the promises they never got to keep—if the damn disease couldn’t save Amanda’s life?

Never mind that Amanda died in a car crash. Never mind that cancer had nothing to do with it. Marburg EX19 was supposed to save her, and it had failed.

“I hate you,” Suzanne whispered, and turned away. She couldn’t deal with the bedroom; not today, maybe not ever. Maybe she would just sell the house, leave Amanda’s things where they were, and let them be dealt with by the new owners. They could filter through the spindrift of Amanda’s life without seeing her face, without hearing her voice talking about college plans and careers. They could put things in boxes without breaking their hearts.

If there was anything more terrible for a parent than burying a child, Suzanne Amberlee couldn’t imagine what it would be. Her internal battle over for another day—over, and lost—she turned away, heading down the stairs. Maybe tomorrow she could empty out that room. Maybe tomorrow she could start boxing things away. Maybe tomorrow she could start the process of letting Amanda go.

Maybe tomorrow. But probably not.

Suzanne Amberlee walked away, unaware of the small viral colony living in her own body, nested deep in the tissue of her lungs. Content in its accidental home, Marburg EX19 slept, waiting for the trigger that would startle it into wakefulness. It was patient; it had all the time in the world.

* * *

Amanda Amberlee is survived by her mother, Suzanne Amberlee. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be sent to the Colorado Cancer Research Center . . .

June 15, 2014: Reston, Virginia

“Alex?”

The lights were off in the main lab, leaving it in claustrophobic darkness. Most of the staff had long since gone home for the night. That made sense; it had been past eleven when John Kellis pulled into the parking lot, and the only car parked in front of the building was his husband’s familiar bottle-green Ford. He hadn’t bothered to call before coming over. Maybe some men strayed to bars or strip clubs. Not Alex. When Alex went running to his other lover, he was always running to the lab.

John paused before pushing open the door leading into the inner office. The last thing he wanted to do was upset Alex further when he was already so delicate. “Sweetheart? Are you in here?”

There was still no answer. John’s heart started beating a little faster, spurred on by fear. The pressure had been immense since the break-in. Years of research gone; millions of dollars in private funding lost; and perhaps worst of all, Alex’s sense of certainty that the world would somehow start playing fair, shattered. John wasn’t sure that Alex could recover from that, and if Alex couldn’t recover, then John didn’t think he could recover, either.

This lab had been their life for so long. Vacations had been planned around ongoing research; even the question of whether or not to have a baby had been put off, again and again, by the demands of Alex’s work. They had both believed it was worth it for so long. Was one act of ecoterrorism going to change all that?

John was suddenly very afraid that it was.

“I’m back here, John,” said Alex’s voice. It was soft, dull . . . dead. Heart still hammering, John turned his walk into a half jog, rounding the corner to find himself looking at the glass window onto the former hot room. Alex was standing in front of it, just like he had so many times before, but his shoulders were stooped. He looked defeated.

“Alex, you have to stop doing this to yourself.” John’s heartbeat slowed as he saw that his husband was unharmed. He walked the rest of the distance between them, stopping behind Alex and sliding his arms around the other man’s shoulders. “Come on. Come home with me.”

“I can’t.” Alex indicated the window. “Look.”

The hot room had been resealed after the break-in; maybe they couldn’t stop their home-brewed pathogens from getting out, but they could stop anything new from getting in. The rhesus monkeys and guinea pigs were back in their cages. Some were eating, some were sleeping; others were just going about their business, oblivious to the humans watching over them.

“I don’t understand.” John squinted, frowning at the glass. “What am I supposed to be seeing? They all look perfectly normal.”

“I’ve bathed them in every cold sample I could find, along with half a dozen flus and an airborne form of syphilis. One of the guinea pigs died, but the necropsy didn’t show any sign that it was either an infection or the cure that killed it. Sometimes guinea pigs just die.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand the problem. What’s wrong with your lab animals being healthy?”

Alexander Kellis pulled away from his husband, expression anguished as he turned to face him. “I can’t tell which ones have caught the cure and which haven’t. It’s undetectable in a living subject. After the break-in, we’re probably infected, too. And I don’t know what it will do in a human host. We weren’t ready.” He started to cry, looking very young and very old at the same time. “I may have just killed us all.”

“Oh, honey, no.” John gathered him close, making soothing noises . . . but his eyes were on the animals behind the glass. The perfectly healthy, perfectly normal animals. Suddenly, it seemed like he couldn’t look away.

* * *

Dr. Alexander Kellis has thus far refused to comment on the potential risks posed by his untested “cure for the common cold,” released three days ago by a group calling itself “The Mayday Army” . . .

June 18, 2014: Atlanta, Georgia

The best description for the atmosphere at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, was “tense.” Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and had been waiting since reports first came in describing the so-called Mayday Army’s release of an experimental pathogen into the atmosphere. The tension only intensified when Dr. Alexander Kellis responded to requests for more information on the pathogen by supplying his research, which detailed, at length, the infectious nature of his hybridized creation.

One of the administrative assistants had probably put it best when she looked at the projected infection maps in horror and said, “If he’d been working with rabies or something, he would have just killed us all.”

If he was being completely honest with himself, Dr. William Matras wasn’t entirely sure that Alexander Kellis hadn’t just killed them all, entirely without intending to, entirely with the best of intentions. The proteins composing the capsid shell on Alpha-RC007 were ingeniously engineered, something that had been a good thing—increased stability, increased predictability in behavior—right up until the moment when the idiots in the Mayday Army broke the seals keeping the world and the virus apart. Now those same proteins made Alpha-RC007 extremely virulent, extremely contagious, and, worst of all, extremely difficult to detect in a living host. The lab animals they’d requested from Dr. Kellis’s lab in Reston were known to be infected, but showed almost no signs of illness; four out of five blood tests would come up negative for the presence of Alpha-RC007, only to have the fifth show a thriving infection. Alpha-RC007 hid. It could be spurred to reveal itself by introducing another infection into the host . . . and that was when Alpha-RC007 became truly terrifying.

Alpha-RC007 was engineered to cure the common cold, something it accomplished by setting itself up as a competing, and superior, infection. Once it was in the body, it simply never went away. The specific structure of its capsid shell somehow tricked the human immune system into believing that Alpha-RC007 was another form of helper cell—and, in a way, it was. Alpha-RC007 wanted to help. Watching it attack and envelop other viruses that entered the body was a chilling demonstration of perfect biological efficiency. Alpha-RC007 saw; Alpha-RC007 killed. Alpha-RC007 tolerated no other infections in the body.

What was going to happen the first time Alpha-RC007 decided the human immune system counted as an infection? No one knew, and the virus had thus far resisted any and all attempts to remove it from a living host. Unless a treatment could be found before Kellis’s creation decided to become hostile, Dr. Matras was very afraid that the entire world was going to learn just how vicious Alpha-RC007 could be.

He sat at his desk, watching the infection models as they spread out across North America and the world, and wondered how long they really had before they found out whether or not the Mayday Army had managed to destroy mankind—with the help of Dr. Alexander Kellis, of course.

“Cheer up, Will!” called one of his colleagues, passing by on the way to the break room. “A pandemic disease that makes you healthy isn’t exactly the worst thing we’ve ever had to deal with.”

“And what’s it going to do to us in a year, Chris?” Dr. Matras shot back.

Dr. Chris Sinclair grinned. “Raise the dead, of course,” he said. “Don’t you ever go to the movies?” Then he walked away, leaving Dr. Matras alone to brood.

* * *

The Centers for Disease Control have issued a statement asking that people remain calm in the wake of the release of an unidentified pathogen from the Virginia-based lab of Dr. Alexander Kellis. “We do not, as yet, have any indication that this disease is harmful to humans,” said Dr. Chris Sinclair. A seven-year veteran of the Epidemic Intelligence Service, Dr. Sinclair graduated from Princeton . . .

July 2, 2014: Denver, Colorado

Janice Barton knocked twice on the door to Dr. Wells’s office before opening it and stepping inside, expression drawn. “Do you think you can see three more patients today?” she asked, without preamble.

“What?” Dr. Wells looked up from his paperwork, fingers clenching involuntarily on his pen. “I’ve already seen nine patients since four! I’ve barely finished filing the insurance information for Mrs. Bridge. How am I supposed to see three more before we close?”

“Because if you’ll agree to see three more, I can probably convince the other nineteen to come back tomorrow,” Janice replied. For the first time, Dr. Wells realized how harried his normally composed administrative assistant looked. Her nails were chipped. Somehow, that seemed like the biggest danger sign of all. A man-made virus was on the loose, Marburg Amberlee was doing . . . something . . . and Janice had allowed her manicure to fray.

“I’ll see the three most in need of attention, and then I have to close for the night,” he said, putting down his pen as he stood. “If I don’t get some sleep, I won’t be of any use to anyone.”

“They’re all in need of attention. I can’t choose. But thank you,” said Janice, and withdrew.

She was gone by the time he emerged from his office, retreating to wherever it was she went when she was tired of dealing with the madhouse of the waiting room. On the days when it was a madhouse, anyway. This was definitely one of those days. The gathered patients set up a clamor as soon as he appeared, all of them waving for his attention, some of them even shouting. Dr. Wells stopped, looking at the crowd, and wondered if the other doctors involved in the Marburg Amberlee tests were having the same experience.

He was deeply afraid that they were.

The trouble wasn’t the patients themselves; they looked as hale and healthy as ever, which explained how they were able to yell so loudly for his attention. Their cancers were gone, or under control, constantly besieged by their defensive Marburg Amberlee infections. It was the people they had brought to the office with them that presented the truly alarming problem. Husbands and wives, parents and children, they sat next to their previously ill relatives with glazed eyes, taking shallow, painful-sounding breaths. Some of them were bleeding from the nose or tear ducts—just a trickle, nothing life-threatening, but that little trickle was enough to terrify Dr. Wells, making his bowels feel loose and his stomach crawl.

They were manifesting the early signs of a Marburg Amberlee infection, during the brief phase where the body’s immune system attempted to treat the helper virus as an invasion. That was the one stage of infection that could be truly harmful; when Marburg Amberlee was hit, it hit back, and it was more interested in defeating the opposition than it was in preserving the host. These people were infected, all of them.

And that simply wasn’t possible. Marburg Amberlee wasn’t transmissible through casual contact—or at least, it wasn’t supposed to be, and if the trials had been wrong about that, what else could they have been wrong about? Pointing almost at random, he said, “You, you, and you. I can see you before we close. Everyone else, I’m very sorry, but you’re going to have to come back tomorrow. See Janice before you leave, she’ll set you up with an appointment.”

Groans and shouts of protest spread through the room. “My baby’s sick!” shouted one woman. A year before, she’d been dying of lung cancer. She’d called him a miracle worker. Now she was glaring at him like he was the devil incarnate. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’m going to see you tomorrow,” said Dr. Wells firmly, and waved for the chosen three to step through the door between the reception area and the examination rooms. He retreated with relief, the feeling of dread growing stronger.

He honestly had no idea what he was going to do.

* * *

Rumors of an outbreak of hemorrhagic fever in and around the Colorado Cancer Research Center are currently unsubstantiated. The center’s head doctor, Daniel Wells, is unavailable for comment at this time.

July 4, 2014: Allentown, Pennsylvania

The streets of Allentown were decked in patriotic red, white, and blue, symbolizing freedom from oppression—symbolizing independence. That word had never seemed so relevant. Brandon Majors walked along, smiling at every red streamer and blue rosette, wishing he could jump up on a bench and tell everyone in earshot how he was responsible for their true independence. How he, working in the best interests of mankind, had granted them independence from illness, freedom from the flu, and the liberty to use their sick days sitting on the beach, sipping soft drinks and enjoying their liberty from The Man! They’d probably give him a medal, or at least carry him around the city on their shoulders.

Sadly, their triumphant march would probably be interrupted by the local police. The Man had his dogs looking for the brave members of the Mayday Army, calling them “ecoterrorists” and making dire statements about how they’d endangered the public health. Endangered it how? By setting the people free from the tyranny of Big Pharma? If that was endangerment, then maybe it was time for everything to be endangered. Even The Man would have to admit that, once he saw how much better the world was thanks to Brandon and his brave compatriots.

Brandon walked toward home, lost in thoughts of glories to come once the Mayday Army could come out of the shadows and announce themselves to the world as saviors of the common man. What was the statute of limitations on ecoterrorism, anyway? Would it be reduced—at least in their case—once people started realizing what a gift they had been given? Maybe—

He turned the corner, and saw the police cars surrounding the house. Brandon stopped dead, watching wide-eyed as men in uniform carried a kicking, weeping Hazel down the front porch steps and toward a black-and-white police van. The back doors opened as they approached, and three more officers reached out to pull Hazel inside. He could hear her sobbing, protesting, demanding to know what they thought she’d done wrong.

There was nothing he could do.

He repeated that to himself over and over again as he took two steps backward, turned, and began to run. The Man had found them out. Somehow, impossibly, The Man had found them out, and now Hazel was going to be a martyr to the cause. There was nothing he could do. The pigs already had her. They were already taking her away, and this wasn’t some big Hollywood blockbuster action movie; he couldn’t charge in there and somehow rescue her right out from under their noses. Her parents had money. They would find a way to buy her freedom. In the meantime, there was nothing, nothing, nothing he could do. Hazel wouldn’t want him to give himself up for her. He was absolutely certain of that. One of them had to get away. One of them had to escape The Man.

Brandon was still repeating that to himself when the sirens started behind him and the bullhorn-distorted voice blared forth, saying, “Mr. Majors, please stop running, or we will be forced to shoot.” The owner of the voice didn’t sound like she’d particularly mind.

Brandon stopped. Without turning, he raised his hands in the air and shouted, “I am an American citizen! I am being unfairly detained!” His voice quaked on the last word, somewhat ruining the brave revolutionary image he was trying to project.

Heavy footsteps on the street behind him announced the approach of the cop seconds before Brandon’s hands were grabbed and wrenched behind his back. “You call this unfair detention? You should feel lucky we’re arresting you at all, and not just publishing your name and address in the paper, you idiot,” hissed the officer, her voice harsh and close to his ear. “You think this country loves terrorists?”

“We were doing it for you!” he wailed.

“Tell it to the judge,” she said, and turned him forcefully around before leading him away.

* * *

The ringleaders of the so-called Mayday Army were arrested today following a tip from one of their former followers. His name has not been released at this time. Brandon Majors, 25, and Hazel Allen, 23, are residents of Allentown, Pennsylvania. Drug paraphernalia was recovered at the scene . . .

July 4, 2014: Berkeley, California

The Berkeley Marina was packed with parents, children, college students on summer break, dog walkers, senior citizens, and members of every other social group in the Bay Area. A Great Dane ran by, towing his bikini-clad owner on a pair of roller skates. A group of teens walked in the opposite direction, dressed in such bright colors that they resembled a flock of exotic birds. They were chattering in the rapid-fire patois specific to their generation, that transitory form of language developed by every group of teens since language began. Stacy Mason paused in watching her husband chase her son around the dock to watch the group go past, their laughter bright as bells in the summer afternoon.

She’d been one of those girls, once, all sunshine and serenity, absolutely confident that the world would give her whatever she asked it for. Wouldn’t they be surprised when they realized that, sometimes, what you asked for wasn’t really what you wanted?

“Where are you right now?” Michael stepped up behind her, slipping his arms around her waist and planting a kiss against the side of her neck. “It’s a beautiful summer day here in sunny Berkeley, California, and the laser show will be starting soon. You might want to come back.”

“Just watching the crowd.” Stacy twisted around to face her husband, smiling up at him with amusement. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching something? Namely, our son?”

“I have been discarded in favor of a more desirable babysitter,” said Michael gravely. His tone was solemn, but his eyes were amused.

“Oh? And who would that be?”

Behind her, Phillip shouted jubilantly, “Oggie!”

“Ahhhh. I see.” Stacy turned to see Phillip chasing Maize in an unsteady circle while Marigold sat nearby, calmly watching the action. Mr. Connors was holding Marigold’s leash; Maize’s leash was being allowed to drag on the ground behind him while the Golden Retriever fled gleefully from his playmate. “Hello, Mr. Connors! Where’s Marla?”

“Hello, Stacy!” Mr. Connors turned to wave, one eye still on the fast-moving pair. “She went down the dock to get us some lemonades. Hope you don’t mind my absconding with your boy.”

“Not at all. It’ll do both of us some good if our respective charges can run off a little of their excess energy.” Stacy leaned up against Michael, watching as Maize and Phillip chased each other, one laughing, the other with tail wagging madly. “Maybe they can wear each other out.”

Michael snorted. “That’ll be the day. I think that boy is powered by plutonium.”

“And whose fault would that be, hmm? I just had to go and marry a scientist. I could have held out for a rock star, but no, I wanted the glamour and romance of being a professor’s wife.”

This time, Michael laughed out loud. “Believe me, I count my blessings every day when I remember that you could have held out for a rock star.”

Stacy smiled at him warmly before looking around at the crowd, the sky, the water. Phillip was laughing, his sound blending with the cries of seagulls and the barking of overexcited dogs to form just one more part of the great noise that was the voice of humanity. She had never heard anything so beautiful in her life.

“I think we should all be counting our blessings every day,” she said finally. “Life doesn’t get any better than this.”

“Life can always get better.” Michael kissed her one more time, his lips lingering lightly against her cheek. “Just you wait and see. This time next year, we won’t be able to imagine looking back on this summer without thinking ‘Oh, you had no idea; just you wait and see.’ ”

“I hope you’re right,” said Stacy, and kissed him back.

* * *

The annual Fourth of July laser show at the Berkeley Marina was a huge success this year, drawing record crowds. The laser show, which replaced the traditional firework displays as of 2012, has become a showpiece of the year’s calendar, and this year was no different. With designs programmed by the UC Berkeley Computer Science Department . . .

July 7, 2014: Manhattan, New York

In the month since his report on the so-called Kellis cure had first appeared, Robert Stalnaker had received a level of attention and adulation—and yes, vitriol and hatred—that he had previously only dreamed of. His inbox was packed every morning with people both applauding and condemning his decision to reveal Dr. Alexander Kellis’s scientific violation of the American public. Was he the one who told the Mayday Army to break into Kellis’s lab, doing thousands of dollars of damage and unleashing millions of dollars of research into the open air? No, he was not. He was simply a concerned member of the American free press, doing his job and reporting the news.

The fact that he had essentially fabricated the story had stopped bothering him after the third interview request he received. By the Monday following the Fourth of July, he would have been honestly shocked if someone had asked him about the truth behind his lies. As far as he was concerned, he’d been telling the truth. Maybe it wasn’t the truth that Dr. Kellis had intended, but it was the one he’d created. All Stalnaker did was report it to the world.

Best of all, he hadn’t seen anyone sneezing or coughing in almost two weeks. Whatever craziness Kellis had been cooking up in that lab of his, it did what it was supposed to do. Throw out the Kleenex and cancel that order for chicken soup, can I hear an amen from the congregation?

“Amen,” murmured Stalnaker, pushing open the door to his paper’s New York office. A cool blast of climate-controlled air flowed out into the hall, chasing away the stickiness of the New York summer. He stepped into the room, letting the door swing shut behind him, and waited for the applause that inevitably followed his arrival. He was, after all, the one who had single-handedly increased circulation almost fifteen percent in under a week.

The applause didn’t come. Instead, an uneasy silence fell as people stopped their work and turned to stare. Bemused, he looked around the room and saw his editor bearing down on him with a grim expression on his face and a toothpick bouncing between his lips as he frantically chewed it into splinters. The toothpicks had been intended as an aid when he’d quit smoking the year before. Somehow, they’d just never gone away.

“Stalnaker!” he growled, shoving the toothpick off to one side of his mouth as he demanded, “Where the hell have you been? Don’t you check your e-mail?”

“Not during breakfast,” said Stalnaker, taken aback by his editor’s tone. Don never talked to him like that. Harshly, sure, and sometimes coldly, but never like he’d done something too wrong to be articulated; never like he was a puppy who’d made a mess on the carpet. “Why? Did I miss a political scandal or something while I was having a bagel?”

Don Nutick paused, forcing himself to take a deep, slow breath before he said, “No. You missed the Pennsylvania police department announcing that the ringleaders of the Mayday Army were taken into custody Friday afternoon.”

“What?” Stalnaker stared at him, suddenly fully alert. “You’re telling me they actually caught the guys? How the hell did they manage that?”

“One of their own decided to rat them out. Said that it wasn’t right for them to get away with what they’d done.” Don shook his head. “They’re not releasing the guy’s name yet. Still, whoever managed to get an exclusive interview with him, why I bet that person could write his or her own ticket. Maybe even convince a sympathetic editor not to fire his ass over faking a report that’s getting the paper threatened with a lawsuit.”

“Lawsuit?”

“I told you you needed to check your e-mail more.”

Stalnaker scoffed. “They’ll never get it to stick.”

“You sure of that?”

There was a moment of silence before Stalnaker said, reluctantly, “I guess I’m going to Pennsylvania.”

“Yes,” Don agreed. “I guess you are.”

* * *

While the identity of the Mayday Army’s deserter has been protected thus far, it must be asked: Why did this man decide to turn on his compatriots? What did he see in that lab that caused him to change his ways? We don’t know, but we’re going to find out . . .

July 7, 2014: Somewhere in North America

The location doesn’t matter: What happened, when it happened, happened all over North America at the same time. There was no single index case. It all began, and ended, too fast for that sort of record keeping to endure.

On migratory bird and weather balloon, on drifting debris and anchored in tiny gusts of wind, Alpha-RC007 made its way down from the stratosphere to the world below. When it encountered a suitable mammalian host, it latched on with its tiny man-made protein hooks, holding itself in place while it found a way to invade, colonize, and spread. The newborn infections were invisible to the naked eye, and their only symptom was a total lack of symptoms. Their hosts enjoyed a level of health that was remarkable mostly because none of them noticed, or realized how lucky they were. It was a viral golden age.

It lasted less than a month. Say July 7th, for lack of a precise date; say Columbus, Ohio, for lack of a precise location. July 7, 2014, Columbus: The end of the world begins.

The only carrier of Marburg Amberlee in Columbus was Lauren Morris, a thirty-eight-year-old woman celebrating her second lease on life by taking a road trip across the United States. She had begun her Marburg Amberlee treatments almost exactly a year before, and had seen a terminal diagnosis dwindle into nothing. If you’d asked her, she would have called it a miracle of science. She would have been correct.

Lauren’s first encounter with Alpha-RC007 occurred at an open-air farmer’s market. She picked up a jar of homemade jam, examining the label with a curious eye before deciding, finally, not to make the purchase. The jam remained behind, but the virus that had collected on her fingers did not. It clung, waiting for an opportunity—an opportunity it got less than five minutes later, when Lauren wiped a piece of dust away from her eye. Alpha-RC007 transferred from her fingers to the vulnerable mucus membrane inside her eyelid, and from there made its entrance to the body.

The initial stages of the Alpha-RC007 infection followed the now-familiar pattern, invading the body’s cells like a common virus, only to slip quietly out again, leaving copies of itself behind. The only cells to be actually destroyed in the process were the other infections Alpha-RC007 encountered in the host body. These were turned into tiny virus factories, farming on a microscopic scale. Several minor ailments Lauren was not even aware of were found brewing in her body, and summarily destroyed in Alpha-RC007’s quest for sole dominion.

Then, deep in the tissue of Lauren’s lungs, Alpha-RC007 encountered something new, something that was confusing to the virus, in as much as anything can ever confuse a virus. This strange new thing had a structure as alien to the world as Alpha-RC007’s own: half natural, half reconfigured and transformed to suit a new purpose.

Behaving according to the protocols that were the whole of its existence, Alpha-RC007 approached the stranger, using its delicate protein hooks to attempt infiltration. The stranger responded in kind, their protein hooks tangling together until they were like so much viral thread, too intertwined to tell where one ended and the next began. This happened a thousand times in the body of Lauren Morris. Many of those joinings ended with the destruction of one or both viral bodies, their structures unable to correctly lock together.

The rest found an unexpected kinship in the locks and controls their human creators had installed, and began, without releasing each other, to exchange genetic material in a beautiful dance that had begun when life on this world was born, and would last until that life was completely gone. Oblivious to the second miracle of science that was now happening inside her, Lauren Morris went about her day. She had never been a mother before. Before the sun went down, she would be one of the many mothers to give birth to Kellis-Amberlee.

* * *

It’s a beautiful summer here in Ohio, and we have a great many events planned for these sweet summer nights. Visit the downtown Columbus Farmer’s Market, where you can sample new delights from our local farms. Who knows what you might discover? Meanwhile, the summer concert series kicks off . . .

July 8, 2014: Atlanta, Georgia

Chris Sinclair’s time at the CDC had been characterized by an almost pathological degree of calm. He remained completely relaxed even during outbreaks of unknown origin, calling on his EIS training and his natural tendency to “not sweat the small stuff” in order to keep his head while everyone around him was losing theirs. When asked, he attributed his attitude to growing up in Santa Cruz, California, where the local surf culture taught everyone to chill out already.

Chris Sinclair wasn’t chilling out anymore. Chris Sinclair was terrified.

They still had no reliable test for the Kellis cure. Instead of charting the path of the infection, they were falling back on an old EIS trick and charting the absence of infection. Any place where the normal chain of summer colds and flu had been broken, they marked on the maps as a possible outbreak of the Kellis cure. It wasn’t a surefire method of detection—sometimes people were just healthy, without any genetically engineered virus to explain the reasons why. Still. If only half the people showing up as potential Kellis cure infections were sick . . .

If only half the people showing up as potential Kellis cure infections were sick with this sickness that wasn’t a sickness at all, then that meant that this stuff was spreading like wildfire and there was no way they could stop it. If they put out a health advisory recommending people avoid close contact with anyone who looked excessively healthy, they’d have “cure parties” springing up nationwide. It was the only possible result. Before the chicken pox vaccine was commonly available, parents used to have chicken pox parties, choosing sickness now to guarantee health later. They’d do it again. And then, if the Kellis cure had a second stage—something that would have shown up in the human trials Alexander Kellis never had the opportunity to conduct—they would be in for a world of trouble.

Assuming, of course, that they weren’t already.

“Still think we shouldn’t be too worried about a pandemic that just makes everybody well?”

“William.” Chris raised his head, giving a half-ashamed shrug as he said, “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You were pretty engrossed in those papers. Are those the updated maps of the projected spread?”

“They are.” Chris chuckled mirthlessly. “You’ll be happy to know that our last North American holdouts have succumbed to the mysterious good health that’s been going around. We have infection patterns in Newfoundland and Alaska. In both cases, I was able to find records showing that the pattern manifested shortly after someone from another of the suspected infection zones came to town. It’s spreading. If it’s not already everywhere in the world, it will be soon.”

“Have there been any reported symptoms? Anything that might point to a mutation?” William Matras filled his mug from the half-full coffeepot sitting on the department hot plate, grimacing at the taste even as he kept on drinking. It was bitter but strong. That was what he needed to get through this catastrophe.

“I was wondering when you’d get to asking about the bad part.”

“There was a good part?”

Chris ignored him, shuffling through the papers on his desk until he found a red folder. Flipping it open, he read, “Sudden increased salivation in the trial subjects for the McKenzie-Beatts TB treatment. That was the one using genetically modified yellow fever? Three deaths in a modified malaria test group. We’re still waiting for the last body to arrive, but in the two we have, it looks like their man-made malaria suddenly started attacking their red blood cells. Wiped them out faster than their bone marrow could rebuild them.”

“The Kellis cure doesn’t play nicely with the other children,” observed William.

“No, it doesn’t.” Chris looked up, expression grim. “The rest of these are dealing with subjects from the Colorado cancer trials. The ones that used the live version of the modified Marburg virus. They’re expressing the same symptoms as everyone else . . . but their families are starting to show signs of the Marburg variant. Somehow, interaction with the Kellis cure is teaching it how to spread. That, or it was already spreading on a subclinical level, and now the Kellis cure is waking it up.”

William stared at him, coffee forgotten. “Oh, Jesus.”

“I’m pretty sure he’s not listening, but you can call him if it makes you feel better,” said Chris. He handed his colleague the folder and the two of them turned back to their work. They were trying to prevent the inevitable. They both knew that. But that didn’t mean they didn’t have to try.

* * *

Effective immediately, all human clinical trials utilizing live strains of any genetically modified virus have been suspended. All records and patient lists for these trials must be submitted to the CDC office in Atlanta, Georgia, by noon EST on July 10th. Failure to comply may result in federal charges . . .

July 10, 2014: Reston, Virginia

The sound of the front door slamming brought Alexander Kellis out of his light doze. He’d managed to drift off on the couch while he was waiting for John to come home with dinner—the first time he’d slept in days. His first feeling, once the disorientation passed, was irritation. Couldn’t John be a little more careful? Didn’t he know how exhausted he was?

Then he realized that he wasn’t hearing any footsteps. Annoyance faded into concern. “John?” Alex stood, nudging his glasses back into place as he started, warily, toward the foyer.

Jonathan and Alexander Kellis lived in a sprawling house that was really too big for just the two of them, something they’d been intending to fix once Alex’s research paid off and early retirement became a viable option. Neither of them really wanted to have children without knowing that one parent, at the very least, would be able to be home for the first few years—and whether they adopted or found a surrogate, they’d always known that one day, they’d fill that empty house with children.

At the moment, however, all that filled the house was silence. And the silence was somehow terrifying. “John?” he repeated, and stepped into the darkened foyer, fumbling for the light switch with one hand. He found it and clicked it on, illuminating the room . . . and then he froze, eyes going wide, mouth going dry as he tried to process what he was seeing.

How John had managed to make it into the house under his own power was a mystery that might never be solved. Into the house, and no farther. He was collapsed across the hardwood floor, limp and boneless. A smear of blood on the wall showed where he had tried to grab hold as he was falling.

“John!” Alex broke out of his fugue, closing the distance between them in three long steps. He barely even felt the pain when his knees slammed into the ground. Fumbling for a pulse with one hand, he said, “John? Sweetheart? Can you hear me?”

John moaned. It was a soft, hollow sound, like the kind made by ghosts in bad horror movies, and it made Alex’s blood run cold. “Alex?”

“I’m here, honey. Be still. I’m going to call 911. You just . . . you just keep still.”

“They beat me, Alex.” John Kellis managed, somehow, to roll over enough to look up at the man he’d loved since college, when they were both so damn young, and so wonderfully full of optimistic fantasies. “Line at the Chinese place was too long. I went for Indian. Drove past the lab . . . lights were on. I thought you’d gone out again. I thought you were choosing those damn monkeys over me.” The venom in his voice made Alex jump. Oblivious, John continued. “Stopped the car. Went in to get you . . . found them. They let them out, Alex. They let them all out.” John closed his eyes. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop them.”

“Stop who?” asked Alex, frozen.

“Said you were . . . experimenting on animals. Said it was unethical. They said . . . we deserved what we got.” John sighed. “They said we deserved . . . everything we got.”

“Stay with me, sweetheart. Stay awake. Stay with me.” Alex fumbled his cell phone out of his pocket, dialing as he raised it to his ear. “Hello, 911? This is Alexander Kellis. My husband has been badly beaten. We’re located at . . .” He took John’s hand in his as he gave the address, and held it until the ambulance arrived, waiting for John to say something—anything—to let him know that it would be all right. To let him know that this wasn’t how it ended.

John didn’t say a word. The ambulance arrived, and the EMTs loaded John into the back, leaving Alex to follow in his car. If John woke up on the way to the hospital, no one noticed; no one heard whatever he might have said. Jonathan Kellis was pronounced dead on arrival at 9:53 PM on July 10, 2014. If there was any mercy in this—and there was no mercy to be seen, not then—it was that he died early enough to stay that way.

* * *

Jonathan Kellis, husband of infamous genetic engineer Dr. Alexander Kellis, died last night following a beating at the hands of unidentified assailants. Mr. Kellis had apparently surprised them in the act of vandalizing Dr. Kellis’s lab. No suspects have been identified at this time . . .

July 13, 2014: Allentown, Pennsylvania

After six days of snooping, bribery, and the occasional outright lie, Robert Stalnaker had finally achieved his goal: a meeting with the college student who had blown the whistle on the leaders of the Mayday Army. It had been more difficult than he’d expected. Since the death of Dr. Kellis’s husband—something that was not his fault; not only did his article not say “break into the lab and free the experimental virus,” it certainly never said “beat the man’s lover to a bloody pulp if you get the chance”—the security had closed in tighter around the man who was regarded as the state’s star, and really only, witness to the actions of the Mayday Army. Robert carefully got out his pocket recorder, checking to be sure the memory buffer was clear. He was only going to get one shot at this.

The door opened, and a skinny, anxious-looking college boy stepped into the room, followed by a pair of visibly armed police officers. Stalnaker would have attempted to convince them to leave, but frankly, after what had happened to John Kellis . . . these were unsettled times. Having a few authority figures present might be good for everyone involved. Especially since they were authority figures with guns.

“Thank you for meeting with me, Matthew,” he said, standing and extending his hand to be shaken. The college boy had a light grip, like he was afraid of breaking something. Stalnaker made a note of that, even as he kept on smiling. “I’m Robert Stalnaker, with the Clarion News in New York. I really do appreciate it.”

“You’re the one who wrote that article,” said Matt, pulling his hand away and sitting down on the other side of the table. His eyes darted from side to side like a cornered dog’s, assessing the exit routes. “They would never have done it if you hadn’t done that first.”

“Done what, exactly?” Stalnaker produced a notepad and pencil from his pocket, making sure Matt saw him getting ready to take notes. The recorder was already running, but somehow, it never caused the Pavlovian need to speak that he could trigger with a carefully poised pencil. “I just want to know your side of the story, son.”

Matt took a shaky breath. “Look. I didn’t—nobody told me this was going to be a whole thing, you know? This girl I know just told me that Brandon and Hazel could hook me up with some good weed. I was coming off finals, I was tense, I needed to relax a little. That was all.”

“I understand,” said Stalnaker encouragingly. “When I was in college, I heard the siren song of good weed more than a few times. Was the weed good?”

“Aw, man, it was awesome.” Matt’s eyes lit up. Only for a moment; the light quickly dimmed, and he continued more cautiously. “Anyway, everybody started talking about revolution and sticking it to The Man and how this dude Kellis was going to screw us all by only giving his cold cure to the people who could afford it. I should have done the research, you know? I should have looked it up. It’s contagious, see? Even if we’d left it alone, let Dr. Kellis finish his testing, we would have all been able to get it in the end. If it worked.”

Something about the haunted tone in Matt’s voice made Stalnaker sit up a little bit straighter. “Do you think it doesn’t work? Can you support that?”

“Oh, it works. Nobody’s had a cold in weeks. We’re the killers of the common cold. Heigh-ho, give somebody a medal.” Matt shook his head, glancing around for exits one more time. “But he didn’t finish testing it. Man, we created an invasive species that can live inside our bodies. Remember when all those pythons got into the Everglades? Remember how it fucked up the alligators? This time we’re the alligators, and we’ve got somebody’s pet store python slithering around inside us. And we don’t know what it eats, and we don’t know how big it’s going to get.”

“What are you saying?”

Matt looked at Robert Stalnaker and smiled a bitter death’s-head grin as he said, “I’m saying that we’re screwed, Mr. Stalnaker, and I’m saying that it’s all your fucking fault.”

* * *

The trial of Brandon Majors and Hazel Allen, the ringleaders of the so-called Mayday Army, has been delayed indefinitely while the precise extent of their crimes is determined. Breaking and entering and willful destruction of property are easy; the sudden demand by the World Health Organization that they also be charged with biological terrorism and global pollution is somewhat more complex . . .

July 17, 2014: Atlanta, Georgia

“We have a problem.”

William Matras looked up from his computer screen and blanched, barely recognizing his colleague. Chris looked like he’d lost fifteen pounds in five days. His complexion was waxen, and the circles under his eyes were almost dark enough to make it seem like he’d been punched. “Christ, Chris, what the hell happened to you?”

“The Kellis cure.” Chris Sinclair shook his head, rubbing one stubbly cheek as he said, “I don’t have it. I mean, I don’t think. We still can’t test for it, and we can’t afford to have me get sick right now just to find out. But the Kellis cure is what happened. It’s what’s happening right now.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s been a development in one of the research studies we’ve been monitoring.”

“The McKenzie-Beatts TB treatment.” It wasn’t a question, because it didn’t need to be. William was abruptly glad that he hadn’t bothered to stand. He would have just fallen back into his chair.

“Got it in one.” Chris nodded, expression grim. “The patients involved in the trial died, William. Every one of them.”

“When?”

“About an hour and a half ago. Dr. Li was on-site to monitor their symptoms. The first to start seizing was a twenty-seven-year-old male. He began bleeding from the mouth, eyes, nose, and rectum; when they performed the autopsy, they found that he was also bleeding internally, most heavily into his intestines and lungs. It’s a coin toss whether he suffocated or bled out.” Chris looked away, toward the blank white wall. He’d never wanted to see the ocean so badly in his life. “The rest started seizing within fifteen minutes. An eleven-year-old girl who’d been accepted into the trials a week before the Kellis cure was released was the last to die. Dr. Li says she was asking for her parents right up until she stopped breathing.”

“Oh my God . . .” whispered William.

“I’m telling you, man, I don’t think he’s here.” Chris rubbed his cheek again, hard. “You ready for the bad part?”

Numbly, William asked, “You mean that wasn’t the bad part?”

“Not by a long shot.” Chris laughed darkly. “Everyone who had direct contact with the patients—the medical staff, their families, hell, our medical staff—has started to experience increased salivation, even though the trial virus was certified as noncontagious. Whatever this stuff is turning into, it’s catching. They’re sealing the building. Dr. Li’s called for an L-4 quarantine. If they don’t figure out what’s going on, they’re going to die in there.”

William said nothing.

“The malaria folks? We don’t know what’s going on there. They stopped transmitting an hour before the complex blew sky-high. From what little we’ve been able to piece together, the charges were set inside the main lab. They, too, decided that they needed a strict quarantine. They just wanted to be absolutely sure that no one was going to have the chance to break it.”

There was still a piece missing. Slowly, almost terrified of what the answer would be—no, not almost; absolutely terrified of what the answer would be—William asked, “What about the Marburg trials in Colorado?”

“They’re all fine.”

William stared at him. “What? But you said—”

“It was spreading, and it was. As far as I know, it still is. Half of Denver’s had a nosebleed they couldn’t stop. And nobody’s died. The bleeding lasts three days, and then it clears up on its own, and the victims feel better than they’ve felt in years. We have a contagious cure for cancer to go with our contagious cure for the common cold.” Chris laughed again. This time, there was a sharp edge of hysteria under the sound. “It’s not going to end there. We don’t get this lucky. We can’t get this lucky.”

“Maybe this is as bad as it gets.” William knew how bad the words sounded as soon as they left his mouth, but he couldn’t call them back, and he wouldn’t have done it even if he could. Someone had to calm Cassandra when she predicted the fall of Troy. Someone had to say “the symptoms aren’t that bad” when the predictions called for the fall of man.

Chris gave him a withering look. “Say that like you mean it, or I’m going home to Santa Cruz.”

He couldn’t, and so he said nothing at all, and the two of them looked at each other, waiting for the end of the world.

* * *

The CDC has no comment on the tragic deaths in San Antonio, Texas. Drs. Lauren McKenzie and Taylor Beatts were conducting a series of clinical trials aimed at combating drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis . . .

July 18, 2014: The Rising

It began nowhere. It began everywhere. It began without warning; it began with all the warning in the world. It could have been prevented a thousand times over. There was nothing that anyone could have done.

It began on July 18, 2014.

At 6:42 AM, EST, in a hotel in Columbus, Ohio, Lauren Morris rolled over in her sleep and sighed. That was all; the starting bell of the apocalypse was a simple exhale by a sleeping woman unaware of the transformation going on inside her body. Marburg Amberlee and the Kellis cure fell dormant as their children, their beautiful, terrible children, swarmed through Lauren’s blood and into her organs, taking over every function and claiming every nerve. At 6:48 AM, Lauren’s body opened its eyes, and the virus looked out upon the world, and found that it was hungry. She would be found clawing at the door three hours later when the maids came to clean her room. The room did not get cleaned.

At 9:53 AM, CDT, in the city of Peoria, Illinois, Michael Dowell was hit by a car while crossing the street at a busy intersection. Despite flying more than three yards through the air and hitting the ground with a bone-shattering degree of force, Michael climbed back to his feet almost immediately, to the great relief of bystanders and drivers alike. This relief turned quickly to bewilderment and terror as he lunged at the crowd, biting four people before he could be subdued.

At 10:15 AM, PDT, in the town of Lodi, California, Debbie Goldman left her home and began jogging along her usual route, despite the already record-breaking heat and the recent warnings of her physician. Her explosive cardiac event struck at 11:03 AM. Death was almost instantaneous. Her collapse went unwitnessed, as did her subsequent revival. She staggered to her feet, no longer moving at anything resembling a jog. As she made her way along the road, she encountered a group of teenagers walking to the neighborhood ampm; three of the six were bitten in the struggle that followed.

At 11:31 AM, MDT, at the Colorado Cancer Research Center in Denver, Colorado, two of the patients from the Marburg Amberlee cancer trials went into spontaneous viral amplification as the live viral bodies already active in their systems were pushed into a form of slumber by the encroaching Kellis-Amberlee infection. The primary physician’s administrative assistant, Janice Barton, was able to trigger the alarm before she was overtaken by the infected. The details of this outbreak remain almost entirely unknown, as the lab was successfully sealed and burned to the ground before the infection could spread.

Ironically, Denver was the source point for one of the two viruses responsible for ending the world, and yet it was spared the worst ravages of the Rising until the second wave began on July 26th. Some say that the tragedy that followed came about only because of that temporary reprieve; they weren’t prepared. Those people are not entirely wrong.

And so it went, over and over, all throughout North America. Some of the infected suffered nosebleeds before amplification began, signaling an elevated level of the Marburg Amberlee virus; others did not. Some of the infected would find themselves trapped in cars or hotel rooms, thwarted by stairs or doorknobs; others would not. The Rising had begun.

At 6:18 AM, GMT, on July 19th, in the city of London, England, Lawrence Whitaker was waiting for the Central Line Tube to arrive and take him to work when he felt a warm wetness on his upper lip. He touched it lightly, and frowned at the blood covering his fingertips. He hadn’t had a nosebleed since he was a boy. Then he shrugged, produced a tissue, and wiped the blood away. Nothing to be done.

At 3:47 PM, IST, in the city of Mumbai, India, Sanjiv Gupta was answering calls for the American company whose customers he supported when he realized that his eyes were no longer quite focusing on the screen. Pleading exhaustion, he excused himself for his afternoon break, retreating to the employee restroom. He rinsed his eyes three times, but the blurriness in his vision didn’t go away. Then his nose began to bleed, and an inability to see became the least of his problems.

And so it went, over and over, all throughout the world. The end was beginning at last.

* * *

Reports of unusually violent behavior are coming in from across the Midwest, leading some to speculate that the little brown bat, which has been known to migrate during warm weather, may have triggered a rabies epidemic of previously unseen scope . . .

July 19, 2014: Berkeley, California

“In looking at the biological structure of the screwfly, the real question isn’t ‘What was evolution thinking,’ it’s ‘Are any of you paying attention to me, or should I just stop talking and put all of this on your final exam’ ?” Professor Michael Mason picked up one of the books on his desk and dropped it without ceremony. The resulting boom made half the students jump, and made almost all of them guiltily focus their attention on the front of the lecture hall. Michael folded his arms. “Since you’re all clearly sharing with the rest of the class, does anybody feel like sharing with me?”

Silence fell over the lecture hall. Michael cocked his head slightly to the side, watching them, and waited. Finally, one of the students cleared her throat and said, “It’s just there are these crazy stories going around campus, you know? So we’re a little on edge.”

“Crazy stories? Crazy stories like what?”

One of the football players who was taking the class for science credit said, “Like dead dudes getting up and walking around and eating living dudes.”

“We’re living in a Romero movie!” shouted someone at the back of the room, drawing nervous laughter from the rest of the students.

“All right, now, settle down. Let’s approach this like scientists—if it’s important enough to distract you all from the important business of biology, we should do it the honor of thinking about it like rational people. You mentioned Romero movies. Does that mean you’re positing zombies?”

There was another flurry of laughter. It ended quickly, replaced by dead seriousness. “I think we are, Professor,” said the herpetology major in the front row. She shook her head. “It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Another student rolled his eyes. “Because zombies always make sense.”

She glared at him. “Shut up.”

“Make me.”

“Now that we have demonstrated once again that no human being is ever more than a few steps away from pulling pigtails on the playground, who wants to posit a reason that we’d have zombies now, rather than, oh, six weeks ago?” Michael looked around the room. “Come on. I’m playing along with you. Now one of you needs to play along with me.”

“That Mayday Army thing.” The words came from a tiny bio-chem major who almost never spoke during class; she just sat there taking notes with a single-minded dedication that was more frightening than admirable. It was like she thought the bottom of the bell curve would be shot after every exam. She wasn’t taking notes now. She was looking at Professor Mason with wide, serious eyes, pencil finally down. “They released an experimental, genetically engineered pathogen into the atmosphere. Dr. Kellis hadn’t reached human trials yet. If there were going to be side effects, he didn’t have time to find out what they were.”

She sounded utterly serene, like she’d finally found a test that she was certain she could pass. Michael Mason paused. “That’s an interesting theory, Michelle.”

“The CDC has shut down half a dozen clinical trials in the last week, and they won’t say why,” she replied, as if that had some bearing on the conversation.

Maybe it did. Michael Mason straightened. “All right. I’m going to humor you, because it’s not every day that one gets a zombie apocalypse as an excuse for canceling class. You’re all dismissed, on one condition.”

“What’s that, Professor?” asked a student.

“I want you all to stay together. Check your phones for news; check your Twitter feeds. See if anything strange is going on before you go anywhere.” He forced a smile, wishing he wasn’t starting to feel so uneasy. “If we’re having a zombie apocalypse, let’s make it a minor one, and all be back here on Monday, all right?”

Laughter and applause greeted his words. He stayed at the front of the room until the last of the students had streamed out; then he grabbed his coat and started for the exit himself. He needed to cancel classes for the rest of the day. He needed to call Stacy and tell her to get Phillip from his kindergarten. If there was one thing science had taught him, it was that safe was always better than sorry, and some things were never on the final exam.

* * *

Professor Michael Mason has announced the cancellation of class for the rest of the week. His podcast will be posted tomorrow night, as scheduled. All students are given a one-week extension on their summer term papers.

July 20, 2014: Manhattan, New York

The anchorman had built his reputation on looking sleek and well-groomed even when broadcasting from the middle of a hurricane. His smile was a carefully honed weapon of reassurance, meant to be deployed when bad news might otherwise whip the populace into a frenzy. He was smiling steadily. He had been smiling since the beginning of his report.

He was beginning to wonder if he would ever stop smiling again.

“Again, ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing to be concerned about. We have two particularly virulent strains of flu sweeping across the country. One, in the Midwest, seems to be a variant of our old friend, H1N1, coming back to get revenge for all those bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. Symptoms include nausea, dizziness, disorientation, and of course, our old friend, the stuffy nose. This particular flu also carries a risk of high fevers, which can lead to erratic behavior and even violence. So please, take care of yourself and your loved ones.”

He shuffled the papers in front of him, trying to give the impression that he was reading off them and not off the prompter. Audiences liked to see a little hard copy. It made them feel like the news was more legitimate. “The second strain is milder but a bit more alarming. Thus far, it’s stayed on the West Coast—maybe it likes the beach. This one doesn’t involve high fevers, for which we can all be grateful, but it does include some pretty nasty nosebleeds, and those can make people seem a lot sicker than they really are. If your nose starts bleeding, simply grab a tissue and head for your local hospital. They’ll be able to fix you right up.”

He was still smiling. He was never going to not be smiling. He was going to die smiling. He knew it, and still the news rolled on. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have to beg you to indulge me for a moment. Some individuals are trying to spin this as a global pandemic, and I wish to assure you that it is nothing more than a nasty pair of summer flus. Please do not listen to reports from unreliable sources. Stick with the news outlets that have served you well, and remember, we’re here to make sure you know the real story.”

“And . . . we’re clear!” said one of the production assistants, as the cheery strains of the station break music began to play. The anchor kept smiling. “Great job, Dave. You’re doing fantastic. Can I get you anything?”

“I’m good,” said the anchor, and kept smiling. No one seemed to have noticed that they had no footage, no reports from experts or comments from the man on the street. All they had was a press release from the governor’s office and strict orders to read it as written, with no deviation or side commentary. They were being managed, and no one seemed to care, and so he kept on smiling and waited for the commercial break to end.

There was no footage. There was always footage. Even when good taste and human decency said not to air it, there was footage. Humanity liked to slow down and look at the car crash by the side of the road, and it was the job of the news to give them all the wrecks that they could stomach. So where was the wreck? Where was the twisted metal and the sorrowful human-interest story? Why did they have nothing but words on a teleprompter and silence from the editing room?

“And we’re back in five . . . four . . . three . . .” The production assistant stopped in mid-countdown, eyes going terribly wide. “Dave? Do you feel all right?”

“I’m fine. Why?” He kept smiling.

“You’re bleeding.”

The news anchor—Dave Ramsey, who had done his job, and done it well, for fifteen years—became suddenly aware of a warm wetness on his upper lip. He raised his fingers to touch it, and looked wide-eyed at the blood covering them when he pulled away again. His smile didn’t falter. “Oh,” he said. “Perhaps I should go clean up.”

When the broadcast resumed, his co-anchor was sitting there, a cheerful smile on her face. “We have an update from the Centers for Disease Control, who want us to reassure you that a vaccine will be available soon—”

* * *

News anchor Dave Ramsey passed away last night of complications from a sudden illness. He was forty-eight years old. A fifteen-year veteran of Channel 51, Dave Ramsey is survived by his wife and three children . . .

July 26, 2014: Denver, Colorado

Suzanne Amberlee’s nose had been bleeding for most of the morning. It had ceased to bother her after the first hour; in a way, it had even proven itself a blessing. The blood loss seemed to blunt the hard edges of the world around her, blurring things into a comfortable gray that allowed her to finally face some of the hard tasks she’d been allowing herself to avoid. She paused in the process of boxing Amanda’s books, wiping the sweat from her forehead with one hand and the blood from her chin with the other. Bloody handprints marred every box and wall in the room, but she didn’t really see them anymore. She just saw the bitter absence of Amanda, who was never coming home to her again.

In Suzanne Amberlee’s body, a battle was raging between the remaining traces of Marburg Amberlee and the newborn Kellis-Amberlee virus. There is no loyalty among viruses; as soon as they were fully conceived, the child virus turned against its parents, trying to drive them from the body as it would any other infection. This forced the Marburg into a heightened state of activity, which forced the body to respond to the perceived illness. Marburg Amberlee was not designed to fight the human body’s immune system, and responded by launching a full-on assault. The resulting chaos was tearing Suzanne apart from the inside out.

For her part, Suzanne Amberlee neither knew nor cared about what was happening inside her body. She was one of the first to be infected with Marburg Amberlee, which had been tailored to be nontransmissible between humans . . . but nothing’s perfect, and all those kisses she’d given her little girl had, in time, passed something more tangible than comfort between them. Marburg Amberlee had had plenty of time to establish itself inside her, and paradoxically, that made her more resistant to conversion than those with more recent infections. Her body knew how to handle the sleeping virus.

And yet bit by bit, inch by crucial inch, Kellis-Amberlee was winning. Suzanne was not aware, but she was already losing crucial brain functions. Her tear ducts had ceased to function, and much of her body’s moisture was being channeled toward the production of mucus and saliva—two reliable mechanisms for passing the infection along. She was being rewired, cell by cell, and even if someone had explained to her what was happening, she wouldn’t have cared. Suzanne Amberlee had lost everything she ever loved. Losing herself was simply giving in to the inevitable.

Suzanne’s last conscious thought was of her daughter, and how much she missed her. Then the stuffed bear she was holding slipped from her hands, and all thoughts slipped from her mind as she straightened and walked toward the open bedroom door. The back door was propped open, allowing a cool breeze to blow in from outside; she walked through it, and from there, made her way out of the backyard to the street.

The disaster that had been averted when the Colorado Cancer Research Center burned began with a woman, widowed and bereft of her only child, walking barefoot onto the sun-baked surface of the road. She looked dully to either side, not really tracking what she saw—not by any human definition of the term—before turning to walk toward the distant shouts of children playing in the neighborhood park. It would take her the better part of an hour to get there, moving slowly, with the jerky confusion of the infected when not actively pursuing visible prey.

It would take less than ten minutes after her arrival for the dying to begin. The Rising had come to Denver; the Rising had come home.

* * *

Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes . . .

July 26, 2014: Allentown, Pennsylvania

The people outside the prison could pretend that the dead weren’t walking if they wanted to. That sort of bullshit was the province of the free. Once you were behind bars, counting on other people to bring you food, water, hell, to let you go to the bathroom like a human being . . . you couldn’t lie to yourself. And the dead were walking.

So far, there hadn’t been any outbreaks in Brandon’s wing of the prison, but he knew better than to attribute that to anything beyond pure dumb luck. Whatever caused some people to get sick and die and then get up again without being bitten just hadn’t found a way inside the building. It would. All it needed was a little more time, and it would.

Brandon was sitting on his bed and staring at his hands, wondering if he’d ever see Hazel again, when the door of his cell slid open. He raised his head, and found himself looking at one of the prison guards—one of the only guards who was still bothering to show up for work.

“You’ve got a visitor, Majors,” said the guard, and gestured roughly for him to stand. Brandon had learned the virtue of obedience. It was practically the first lesson that prison taught. He stood, moving quickly to avoid a reprimand.

There had been other lessons since then. None of them had been pleasant ones.

The guard led Brandon through the halls without a word. Some of the prisoners shouted threats or profanity as they passed; Brandon’s role in the Mayday Army was well-known, and was the reason he was placed in solitary. As the situation got worse, his future looked more and more bleak. Outside the prison, he would probably have already been lynched. As if it was his fault somehow? That bastard Kellis was the one who built the bug. He should be the one getting the blame, not Brandon—

The guard led him around the corner to the visiting room. There were only two men standing there. One was the warden. The other was a slim, dark-haired man Brandon felt like he should recognize. Something about him was familiar.

“Brandon Majors?” asked the man.

“Yes?” Maybe he was from the governor. Maybe he had come to pardon Brandon and take him away from all this; maybe he understood that it wasn’t his fault—

“My name is Alexander Kellis.”

Hope died. Brandon stared at him. “I . . . you . . . oh, God.”

Alexander looked at Brandon—the little ringleader who had managed to bring about the end of the world, the one whose name was already dropping out of the news, to be replaced by Alexander’s own—and said, very quietly, “I wanted to meet you. I wanted to look you in the eye while I told you that this is all your fault. History may blame it on me, but neither of us is going to be there to see it, and right here, right now, today, this is all your fault. You destroyed my life’s work. You killed the man I loved. You may very well have brought about the end of the world. So I have just one question for you.”

“What?” whispered Brandon.

“Was it worth it?”

After five minutes passed with no answer, Dr. Kellis turned to the warden. “Thank you. I’d like to go now.” They walked away, leaving Brandon standing frozen next to the guard.

That night, Brandon’s cell was somehow left unlocked. He was found dead in the hall the next morning, having been stabbed more than a dozen times. None of the other inmates saw what happened. At least, that’s what they said, and this one time, the warden chose to believe them. It wasn’t his fault, after all.

* * *

If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately . . .

July 27, 2014: Berkeley, California

“Get those walls up! Cathy, I want to see that chicken wire hugging those planks, don’t argue with me, just get it done.” Stacy Mason rushed to help a group of neighborhood teens who staggered under the weight of the planks they’d “liberated” from an undisclosed location. At this point, she didn’t care where the building materials came from; she cared only that they were going to reinforce the neighborhood fences and doors and road checkpoints. As long as what was inside their makeshift walls was going to make those walls stronger, they could start tearing down houses and she honestly wouldn’t give a fuck.

Berkeley, being a university town in Northern California, had two major problems: not enough guns, and too many idiots who thought they could fight off zombies with medieval weapons they’d stolen from the history department. It also had two major advantages: most of the roads were already half blocked to prevent campus traffic from disturbing the residents, and most of those residents were slightly insane by any normal societal measurement.

The nice lesbian collective down the block had contributed eighty feet of chicken wire left over from an urban farming project they’d managed the year before. The robotics engineer who lived across the street was an avid Burner, and had been happy to contribute the fire-breathing whale he’d constructed for the previous year’s Burning Man. Not the most immediately useful contribution in the world, but it was sufficiently heavy to make an excellent roadblock . . . and Stacy had to admit that having a fire-breathing roadblock certainly gave the neighborhood character.

“Louise! If you’re going to break the glass, break it clean—we don’t want anyone getting cut!” They really, really didn’t want anyone getting cut. The transmission mechanisms for the zombie virus were still being charted, but fluid exchange was definitely on the list, and anything getting into an open wound seemed like a bad idea. “We gave you a hammer for a reason! Now smash things!”

The distant shrieks of children brought her head whipping around, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Then the shrieks mellowed into laughter, and she relaxed—not entirely, but enough. “Damn dogs,” she muttered, a smile tugging at her lips. “Exciting the children and stopping my heart.”

“Mrs. Mason? I can’t figure out how to make the staple gun work.” The plaintive cry came from a young woman who had been Phillip’s babysitter several times over the summer. She was standing next to a sheet of plywood with a staple gun in her hand, shaking it helplessly. It wasn’t spewing staples at the moment—a small mercy, since the last thing they needed was for anyone to get hit by friendly fire.

Stacy shook off her brief fugue, starting toward the girl. “That’s because you’re holding it wrong, Marie. Now, please, point the staple gun away from your body . . .”

The comfortable chaos of a neighborhood protecting itself against the dangerous outside continued, with everyone doing the best that they could to shore up their defenses and walls. They’d lost people on supply runs and rescue trips, but so far everyone who’d stayed on the block had been fine. They were clinging to that, as the power got intermittent and the supply runs got less fruitful. Help was coming. Help had to be coming. And when help arrived, it would find them ready, healthy, and waiting to be saved.

Stacy Mason might be living through the zombie apocalypse, but by God, the important word there was “living.” She was going to make it through, and so was everyone she cared about. There was just no other way that this could end.

* * *

If you are receiving this broadcast, you are within the range of the UC Berkeley radio station. Please follow these directions to reach a safe location. You will be expected to surrender all weapons and disrobe for physical examination upon arrival. We have food. We have water. We have shelter . . .

July 27, 2014: Denver, Colorado

Denver was burning. From where Dr. Wells sat, in the front room of his mountain home, it looked like the entire city was on fire. That couldn’t possibly be true—Denver was too large to burn that easily—but oh, it looked that way.

In the house behind him he could hear the sound of shuffling, uncertain footsteps as his wife and children made their way down the stairs to the hallway. He didn’t move. Not even to shut the door connecting the living room with the rest of the house. He was lonely. His city was burning, his research was over, and he was lonely. Couldn’t a man be lonely, when he was sitting at the end of the world and watching Denver burn?

Daniel Wells lifted his scotch, took a sip, and lowered it again. His eyes never left the flames. They were alive. Even if nothing else in the city he called home was alive, the flames were thriving. There was something comforting in that. Life, as a wise man once said, would always find a way.

A low moan sounded from the hallway right outside the front room. Daniel took another sip of scotch. “Hello, darling,” he said, without turning. “It’s a beautiful day, don’t you think? All this smoke is going to make for an amazing sunset . . .”

Then his wife and children, who had finished amplification some time before, fell upon him, and the man responsible for Marburg Amberlee knew nothing but the tearing of teeth and the quiet surrender to the dark. When he opened his eyes again, he wasn’t Daniel Wells anymore. Had he still possessed the capacity for gratitude, it is very likely that he would have been grateful.

* * *

This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill . . .

July 30, 2014: Reston, Virginia

It had taken six of the Valium pills John kept hidden at the back of the medicine cabinet, but Alexander Kellis was finally ready. He checked the knot on his rope one more time. It was good; it would hold. Maybe it wasn’t elegant, but he didn’t deserve elegant, did he? He’d destroyed the world. Children would curse his name for generations, assuming there were any generations to come. John was gone forever. It was over.

“I’ll see you soon, sweetheart,” he whispered, and stepped off the edge of his desk. No one would find his body for weeks. If he reanimated, he starved without harming anyone. Alexander Kellis never harmed anyone.

Not on purpose.

* * *

Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes . . .

July 30, 2014: Atlanta, Georgia

The bedroom walls were painted a cheery shade of rose-petal pink that showed up almost neon in the lens of the web camera. Unicorns and rainbows decorated the page where the video was embedded; even the YouTube mirrors that quickly started appearing had unicorns and rainbows, providing a set of safe search words that were too widespread to be wiped off the internet, no matter how many copies of the video were taken down. The man sitting in front of the webcam was all wrong for the blog. Too old, too haggard, too afraid. His once-pristine lab coat was spattered with coffee stains, and he looked like he hadn’t shaved in more than a week.

“My name is Dr. William Matras,” he said in a calm, clear voice that was entirely at odds with his appearance. “I am—I was; I suppose I’m not anymore—an epidemic researcher for the Centers for Disease Control. I have been working on the issue of the Kellis cure since it was first allowed into the atmosphere. I have been tracking the development of the epidemic, along with my colleague, Dr. Christopher Sinclair.” His breath hitched, voice threatening to break. He got himself back under control, and continued. “Chris wouldn’t sanction what I’m going to say next. Good thing he isn’t around to tell me not to say it, right?

“The news has been lying to you. This is not a virulent summer cold; this is not a new strain of the swine flu. This is, and has always been, a man-made pandemic whose effects were previously unknown in higher mammals. Put bluntly, the Kellis cure has mutated, becoming conjoined with an experimental Marburg-based cure for cancer. It is airborne. It is highly contagious. And it raises the dead.

“Almost everyone who breathes air is now infected with this virus. Transmission is apparently universal, and does not come with any initial symptoms. The virus will change forms under certain conditions, going from the passive ‘helper’ form to the active ‘killer’ form of what we’ve been calling Kellis-Amberlee. Once this process begins, there is nothing that can stop it. Anyone whose virus has begun to change forms is going to become one of the mindless cannibals now shambling around our streets. Why? We don’t know. What we do know is that fluid transmission seems to trigger the active form of the virus—bites, scratches, even getting something in your eye. Some people may seroconvert spontaneously. We believe these people were involved with the Marburg trials in Colorado, but following the destruction of the facility where those trials were conducted, we have no way of being absolutely sure.

“Let me repeat: We have been lying to you. The government is not allowing us to spread any knowledge about the walking plague, saying that we would trigger a mass panic. Well, the masses are panicking, and I don’t think keeping secrets is doing anybody any favors. Not at this stage.

“Once someone has converted into the . . . hell, once somebody’s a zombie, there’s no coming back. They are no longer the people you have known all your life. Head shots seem to work best. Severe damage to the body will eventually cause them to bleed out, but it can take time, and it will create a massive hot zone that can’t be sterilized with anything but fire or bleach. We have . . . God, we have . . .” He stopped for a moment, dropping his forehead into the palm of his hand. Finally, dully, he said, “We have lied to you. We have withheld information. What follows is everything we know about this disease, and the simple fact of it is, we know there isn’t any cure. We know we can’t stop it.

“Early signs of amplification include dilated pupils, blurred vision, dry mouth, difficulty breathing, loss of coordination, unexplained mood swings, personality changes, apparent lapses in memory, aphasia . . .”

* * *

If you have been infected, please contact authorities immediately. If you have not been infected, please remain calm. This is not a drill. Please return to your homes. Please remain calm. This is not a drill. If you have been infected . . .

July 31, 2014: Berkeley, California

Marigold felt bad.

There had been a raccoon in the yard. She liked when raccoons came to the yard, they puffed up big so big, but they ran ran ran when you chased them, and the noises they made were like birds or squirrels but bigger and more exhilarating. She had chased the raccoon, but the raccoon didn’t run. Instead, it held its ground, and when she came close enough, it bit her on the shoulder, hard, teeth tearing skin and flesh and leaving only pain pain pain behind. Then she ran, she ran from the raccoon, and she had rolled in the dirt until the bleeding stopped, mud clotting the wound, pain pain pain muted a little behind the haze of her confusion. Then had come shame. Shame, because she would be called bad dog for chasing raccoons; bad dog for getting bitten when there were so many people in the house and yard and everything was strange.

So Marigold did what any good dog in fear of being termed a bad dog would do; she had gone to the hole in the back of the fence, the hole she and her brother worked and worried so long at, and slunk into the yard next door, where the boy lived. The boy laughed and pulled her ears sometimes, but it never hurt. The boy loved her. She knew the boy loved her, even as she knew that the man and the woman fed her and that she was a good dog, really, all the way to the heart of her. She was a good dog.

She was a good dog, but she felt so bad. So very bad. The badness had started with the bite, but it had spread since then, and now she could barely swallow, and the light was hurting her eyes so much, so very much. She lay huddled under the bushes, wishing she could find her feet, wishing she knew why she felt bad. So very bad.

Marigold felt hungry.

The hunger was a new thing, a strong thing, stronger even than the bad feeling that was spreading through her. She considered the hunger, as much as she could. She had never been the smartest of dogs, and her mind was getting fuzzy, thought and impulse giving way to alien instinct. She was a good dog. She just felt bad. She was a good dog. She was . . . she was . . . she was hungry. Marigold was hungry. Then she was only hunger, and no more Marigold. No more Marigold at all.

Something rustled through the bushes. The dog that had been a good dog, that had been Marigold, and that was now just hungry, rose slowly, legs unsteady but willing to support the body if there might be something coming that could end the hunger. The dog that had been a good dog, that had been Marigold, looked without recognition at the figure that parted the greenery and peered down at it with wide-eyed curiosity. The dog, which had always been ready with a welcoming bark, made a sound that was close to a moan.

“Oggie?”

* * *

We are experiencing technical difficulties. Please stand by.

August 1, 2014

Kellis-Amberlee unified the world in a way that nothing had ever unified it before, or ever would again. Cities burned. Nations died. Tokyo, Manhattan, Mumbai, London, all of them fell before an enemy that could not be stopped, because it came from within; because it was already inside. Some escaped. Some lived. All carried the infection deep inside their bodies, tucked away where it could never be excised. They carried it with them, and it lived, too.

The Rising was finally, fully underway. Mothers mourned their children. Orphans wailed alone in the night. Death ruled over all, horrible and undying. And nothing, it seemed, would ever make it end.

But on the internet, Dr. Matras’s message repeated, over and over again, and others began repeating it with him. The future was arriving. All they had to do was live to see it. So the world asked itself a question:

When will you Rise?

And the world gave itself an answer:

Now.

Welcome to the aftermath.

* * *

“In telling the stories of the Rising, we must remember this above all else: We did what everyone claimed mankind could never do. We survived. Now it is up to us to prove that we deserved this second chance.”

—Mahir Gowda

THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY: A DOCUMENTARY

Ken Liu

Akemi Kirino, Chief Scientist, Feynman Laboratories:

[Dr. Kirino is in her early forties. She has the kind of beauty that doesn’t require much makeup. If you look closely, you can see bits of white in her otherwise black hair.]

Every night, when you stand outside and gaze upon the stars, you are bathing in time as well as light.

For example, when you look at this star in the constellation Libra called Gliese 581, you are really seeing it as it was just over two decades ago because it’s about twenty light years from us. And conversely, if someone around Gliese 581 had a powerful enough telescope pointed to around here right now, they’d be able to see Evan and me walking around Harvard Yard, back when we were graduate students.

[She points to Massachusetts on the globe on her desk, as the camera pans to zoom in on it. She pauses, thinking over her words. The camera pulls back, moving us further and further away from the globe, as though we were flying away from it.]

The best telescopes we have today can see as far back as about thirteen billion years ago. If you strap one of those to a rocket moving away from the Earth at a speed that’s faster than light—a detail that I’ll get to in a minute—and point the telescope back at the Earth, you’ll see the history of humanity unfold before you in reverse. The view of everything that has happened on Earth leaves here in an ever-expanding sphere of light. And you only have to control how far away you travel in space to determine how far back you’ll go in time.

[The camera keeps on pulling back, through the door of her office, down the hall, as the globe and Dr. Kirino become smaller and smaller in our view. The long hallway we are backing down is dark, and in that sea of darkness, the open door of the office becomes a rectangle of bright light framing the globe and the woman.]

Somewhere about here you’ll witness Prince Charles’s sad face as Hong Kong is finally returned to China. Somewhere about here you’ll see Japan’s surrender aboard the USS Missouri. Somewhere about here you’ll see Hideyoshi’s troops set foot on the soil of Korea for the first time. And somewhere about here you’ll see Lady Murasaki completing the first chapter of the Tale of Genji. If you keep on going, you can go back to the beginning of civilization and beyond.

But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don’t pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel further out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever.

[From the shadows next to the door to the office an arm reaches out to slam the door shut. Darkness swallows Dr. Kirino, the globe, and the bright rectangle of light. The screen stays black for a few seconds before the opening credits roll.]

Remembrance Films HK Ltd.

in association with

Yurushi Studios
presents
a Heraclitus Twice Production

THE MAN WHO ENDED HISTORY

This film has been banned by the Ministry of Culture
of the People’s Republic of China and is released
under strong protest from the government of Japan

Akemi Kirino:

[We are back in the warm glow of her office.]

Because we have not yet solved the problem of how to travel faster than light, there is no real way for us to actually get a telescope out there to see the past. But we’ve found a way to cheat.

Theorists long suspected that at each moment, the world around us is literally exploding with newly created subatomic particles of a certain type, now known as Bohm-Kirino particles. My modest contribution to physics was to confirm their existence and to discover that these particles always come in pairs. One member of the pair shoots away from the Earth, riding the photon that gave it birth and traveling at the speed of light. The other remains behind, oscillating in the vicinity of its creation.

The pairs of Bohm-Kirino particles are under quantum entanglement. This means that they are bound together in such a way that no matter how far apart they are from each other physically, their properties are linked together as though they are but aspects of a single system. If you take a measurement on one member of the pair, thereby collapsing the wave function, you would immediately know the state of the other member of the pair, even if it is light years away.

Since the energy levels of Bohm-Kirino particles decay at a known rate, by tuning the sensitivity of the detection field, we can attempt to capture and measure Bohm-Kirino particles of a precise age created in a specific place.

When a measurement is taken on the local Bohm-Kirino particle in an entangled pair, it is equivalent to taking a measurement on that particle’s entangled twin, which, along with its host photon, may be trillions of miles away, and thus, decades in the past. Through some complex but standard mathematics, the measurement allows us to calculate and infer the state of the host photon. But, like any measurement performed on entangled pairs, the measurement can be taken only once, and the information is then gone forever.

In other words, it is as though we have found a way to place a telescope as far away from the Earth, and as far back in time, as we like. If you want, you can look back on the day you were married, your first kiss, the moment you were born. But for each moment in the past, we get only one chance to look.

Archival Footage: September 18, 20__. Courtesy of

APAC Broadcasting Corporation

[The camera shows an idle factory on the outskirts of the city of Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China. It looks just like any other factory in the industrial heartland of China in the grip of another downturn in the country’s merciless boom-
and-bust cycles: ramshackle, silent, dusty, the windows and doors shuttered and boarded up. Samantha Paine, the correspondent, wears a wool cap and scarf. Her cheeks are bright red with the cold, and her eyes are tired. As she speaks in
her calm voice, the condensation from her breath curls and lingers before her face.]

Samantha: On this day, back in 1931, the first shots in the Second SinoJapanese War were fired near Shenyang, here in Manchuria. For the Chinese, that was the beginning of World War Two, more than a decade before the United States would be involved.

We are in Pingfang District, on the outskirts of Harbin. Although the name “Pingfang” means nothing to most people in the West, some have called Pingfang the Asian Auschwitz. Here, Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army performed gruesome experiments on thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners throughout the war as part of Japan’s effort to develop biological weapons and to conduct research into the limits of human endurance.

On these premises, Japanese army doctors directly killed thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners through medical and weapons experiments, vivisections, amputations, and other systematic methods of torture. At the end of the War, the retreating Japanese army killed all remaining prisoners and burned the complex to the ground, leaving behind only the shell of the administrative building and some pits used to breed disease-carrying rats. There were no survivors.

Historians estimate that between two-hundred thousand and half-amillion Chinese persons, almost all civilians, were killed by the biological and chemical weapons researched and developed in this place and other satellite labs: anthrax, cholera, the bubonic plague. At the end of the War, General MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied forces, granted all members of Unit 731 immunity from war crimes prosecution in order to get the data from their experiments and to keep the data away from the Soviet Union.

Today, except for a small museum nearby with few visitors, little evidence of those atrocities is visible. Over there, at the edge of an empty field, a pile of rubble stands where the incinerator for destroying the bodies of the victims used to be. This factory behind me is built on the foundation of a storage depot used by Unit 731 for germ-breeding supplies. Until the recent economic downturn, which shuttered its doors, the factory built moped engines for a Sino-Japanese joint venture in Harbin. And in a gruesome echo of the past, several pharmaceutical companies have quietly settled in around the site of Unit 731’s former headquarters.

Perhaps the Chinese are content to leave behind this part of their past and move on. And if they do, the rest of the world will probably move on as well.

But not if Evan Wei has anything to say about it.

[Samantha speaks over a montage of images of Evan Wei lecturing in front of a classroom and posing before complex machinery with Dr. Kirino. In the photographs they look to be in their twenties.]

Dr. Evan Wei, a Chinese-American historian specializing in Classical Japan, is determined to make the world focus on the suffering of the victims of Unit 731. He and his wife, Dr. Akemi Kirino, a noted Japanese-American experimental physicist, have developed a controversial technique that they claim will allow people to travel back in time and experience history as it occurred. Today, he will publicly demonstrate his technique by traveling back to the year 1940, at the height of Unit 731’s activities, and personally bear witness to the atrocities of Unit 731.

The Japanese government claims that China is engaged in a propaganda stunt, and it has filed a strongly worded protest with Beijing for allowing this demonstration. Citing principles of international law, Japan argues that China does not have the right to sponsor an expedition into World War Two-era Harbin because Harbin was then under the control of Manchukuo, a puppet regime of the Japanese Empire. China has rejected the Japanese claim, and responded by declaring Dr. Wei’s demonstration an “excavation of national heritage” and now claims ownership rights over any visual or audio record of Dr. Wei’s proposed journey to the past under Chinese antiquities-export laws.

Dr. Wei has insisted that he and his wife are conducting this experiment in their capacities as individual American citizens, with no connection to any government. They have asked the American Consul General in nearby Shenyang, as well as representatives of the United Nations, to intervene and protect their effort from any governmental interference. It’s unclear how this legal mess will be resolved.

Meanwhile, numerous groups from China and overseas, some in support of Dr. Wei, some against, have gathered to hold protests. China has mobilized thousands of riot police to keep these demonstrators from approaching Pingfang.

Stay tuned, and we will bring you up-to-date reports on this historical occasion. This is Samantha Paine, for APAC.

Akemi Kirino:

To truly travel back in time, we still had to jump over one more hurdle.

The Bohm-Kirino particles allow us to reconstruct, in detail, all types of information about the moment of their creation: sight, sound, microwaves, ultrasound, the smell of antiseptic and blood, and the sting of cordite and gunpowder in the back of the nose.

But this is a staggering amount of information, even for a single second. We had no realistic way to store it, let alone process it in real time. The amount of data gathered for a few minutes would have overwhelmed all the storage servers at Harvard. We could open up a door to the past, but would see nothing in the tsunami of bits that flooded forth.

[Behind Dr. Kirino is a machine that looks like a large clinical MRI scanner. She steps to the side so that the camera can zoom slowly inside the tube of the scanner where the volunteer’s body would go during the process. As the camera moves through the tube, continuing towards the light at the end of the tunnel, her voice continues off camera.]

Perhaps given enough time, we could have come up with a solution that would have allowed the data to be recorded. But Evan believed that we could not afford to wait. The surviving relatives of the victims were aging, dying, and the War was about to fade out of living memory. There was a duty, he felt, to offer the surviving relatives whatever answers we could get.

So I came up with the idea of using the human brain to process the information gathered by the Bohm-Kirino detectors. The brain’s massively parallel processing capabilities, the bedrock of consciousness, proved quite effective at filtering and making sense of the torrent of data from the detectors. The brain could be given the raw electrical signals, throw 99.999 percent of it away, and turn the rest into sight, sound, smell, and make sense of it all and record them as memories.

This really shouldn’t surprise us. After all, this is what our brains do, every second of our lives. The raw signals from our eyes, ears, skin, and tongue would overwhelm any supercomputer, but from second to second, our brain manages to construct the consciousness of our existence from all that noise.

“For our volunteer subjects, the process creates the illusion of experiencing the past, as though they were in that place, at that time,” I wrote in Nature.

How I regret using the word “illusion” now. So much weight ended up being placed on my poor word choice. History is like that: the truly important decisions never seemed important at the time.

Yes, the brain takes the signals and makes a story out of them, but there’s nothing illusory about it, whether in the past or now.

Archibald Ezary, Radhabinod Pal Professor of Law, Codirector of East Asian Studies, Harvard Law School:

[Ezary has a placid face that is belied by the intensity of his gaze. He enjoys giving lectures, not because he likes hearing himself talk, but because he thinks he will learn something new each time he tries to explain.]

The legal debate between China and Japan about Wei’s work, almost twenty years ago, was not really new. Who should have control over the past is a question that has troubled all of us, in various forms, for many years. But the invention of the Kirino Process made this struggle to control the past a literal, rather than merely a metaphorical, issue.

A state has a temporal dimension as well as a spatial one. It grows and shrinks over time, subjugating new peoples and sometimes freeing their descendants. Japan today may be thought of as just the home islands, but back in 1942, at its height, the Japanese Empire ruled Korea, most of China, Taiwan, Sakhalin, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Burma, Malaysia, and large parts of Indonesia, as well as large swaths of the islands in the Pacific. The legacy of that time shapes Asia to this day.

One of the most vexing problems created by the violent and unstable process by which states expand and contract over time is this: as control over a territory shifts between sovereigns over time, which sovereign should have jurisdiction over that territory’s past?

Before Evan Wei’s demonstration, the most that the issue of jurisdiction over the past intruded on real life was an argument over whether Spain or America would have the right to the sovereign’s share of treasure from sunken sixteenth-century Spanish galleons recovered in contemporary American waters, or whether Greece or England should keep the Elgin Marbles. But now the stakes are much higher.

So, is Harbin during the years between 1931 and 1945 Japanese territory, as the Japanese government contends? Or is it Chinese, as the People’s Republic argues? Or perhaps we should treat the past as something held in trust for all of humanity by the United Nations?

The Chinese view would have had the support of most of the Western world—the Japanese position is akin to Germany arguing that attempts to travel to Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1939 and 1945 should be subject to its approval—but for the fact that it is the People’s Republic of China, a Western pariah, which is now making the claim. And so you see how the present and the past will strangle each other to death.

Moreover, behind both the Japanese and the Chinese positions is the unquestioned assumption that if we can resolve whether China or Japan has sovereignty over World War Two-era Harbin, then either the People’s Republic or the present Japanese government would be the right authority to exercise that sovereignty. But this is far from clear. Both sides have problems making the legal case.

First, Japan has always argued, when it comes to Chinese claims for compensation for wartime atrocities, that the present Japan, founded on the Constitution drafted by America, cannot be the responsible party. Japan believes that those claims are against its predecessor government, the Empire of Japan, and all such claims have been resolved by the Treaty of San Francisco and other bilateral treaties. But if that is so, for Japan now to assert sovereignty over that era in Manchuria, when it has previously disavowed all responsibility for it, is more than a little inconsistent.

But the People’s Republic is not home free either. At the time Japanese forces took control of Manchuria in 1932, it was only nominally under the control of the Republic of China, the entity that we think of as the “official” China during the Second World War, and the People’s Republic of China did not even exist. It is true that during the War, armed resistance in Manchuria to the Japanese occupation came almost entirely from the Han Chinese, Manchu, and Korean guerillas led by Chinese and Korean Communists. But these guerillas were not under the real direction of the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao Zedong, and so had little to do with the eventual founding of the People’s Republic.

So why should we think that either the present government of Japan or China has any claim to Harbin during that era? Wouldn’t the Republic of China, which now resides in Taipei and calls itself Taiwan, have a more legitimate claim? Or perhaps we should conjure up a “Provisional Historical Manchurian Authority” to assume jurisdiction over it?

Our doctrines concerning the succession of states, developed under the Westphalian framework, simply cannot deal with these questions raised by Dr. Wei’s experiments.

If these debates have a clinical and evasive air to them, that is intentional. “Sovereignty,” “jurisdiction,” and similar words have always been mere conveniences to allow people to evade responsibility or to sever inconvenient bonds. “Independence” is declared, and suddenly the past is forgotten; a “revolution” occurs, and suddenly memories and blood debts are wiped clean; a treaty is signed, and suddenly the past is buried and gone. Real life does not work like that.

However you want to parse the robber’s logic that we dignify under the name “international law,” the fact remains that the people who call themselves Japanese today are connected to those who called themselves Japanese in Manchuria in 1937, and the people who call themselves Chinese today are connected to those who called themselves Chinese there and then. These are the messy realities, and we make do with what we are given.

All along, we have made international law work only by assuming that the past would remain silent. But Dr. Wei has given the past a voice, and made dead memories come alive. What role, if any, we wish to give the voices of the past in the present is up to us.

Akemi Kirino:

Evan always called me Tóngyě Míngměi, or just Míngměi, which are the Mandarin readings for the kanji that are used to write my name (桐野明美). Although this is the customary way to pronounce Japanese names in Chinese, he’s the only Chinese I’ve ever permitted that liberty to.

Saying my name like that, he told me, allowed him to picture it in those old characters that are the common heritage of China and Japan, and thus keep in mind their meaning. The way he saw it, “the sound of a name doesn’t tell you anything about the person, only the characters do.”

My name was the first thing he loved about me.

“A paulownia tree alone in the field, bright and beautiful,” he said to me, the first time we met at a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences mixer.

That was also how my grandfather explained my name to me, years earlier, when he taught me how to write the characters in my name as a little girl. A paulownia is a pretty, deciduous tree, and in old Japan it was the custom to plant one when a baby girl was born and make a dresser out of the wood for her trousseau when she got married. I remember the first time my grandfather showed me the paulownia that he had planted for me the day I was born, and I told him that I didn’t think it looked very special.

“But a paulownia is the only tree on which a phoenix would land and rest,” my grandfather then said, stroking my hair in that slow, gentle way that he had that I loved. I nodded, and I was glad that I had such a special tree for my name.

Until Evan spoke to me, I hadn’t thought about that day with my grandfather in years.

“Have you found your phoenix yet?” Evan asked, and then he asked me out.

Evan wasn’t shy, not like most Chinese men I knew. I felt at ease listening to him. And he seemed genuinely happy about his life, which was rare among the grad students and made it fun to be around him.

In a way it was natural that we would be drawn to each other. We had both come to America as young children, and knew something about the meaning of growing up as outsiders trying hard to become Americans. It made it easy for us to appreciate each other’s foibles, the little corners of our personalities that remained defiantly fresh-off-the-boat.

He wasn’t intimidated by the fact that I had a much better sense about numbers, statistics, the “hard” qualities in life. Some of my old boyfriends used to tell me that my focus on the quantifiable and the logic of mathematics made me seem cold and unfeminine. It didn’t help that I knew my way around power tools better than most of them—a necessary skill for a lab physicist. Evan was the only man I knew who was perfectly happy to defer to me when I told him that I could do something requiring mechanical skills better than he could.

Memories of our courtship have grown hazy with time, and are now coated with the smooth, golden glow of sentiment—but they are all that I have left. If ever I am allowed to run my machine again, I would like to go back to those times.

I liked driving with him to bed-and-breakfasts up in New Hampshire in the fall to pick apples. I liked making simple dishes from a book of recipes and seeing that silly grin on his face. I liked waking up next to him in the mornings and feeling happy that I was a woman. I liked that he could argue passionately with me and hold his ground when he was right and back down gracefully when he was wrong. I liked that he always took my side whenever I was in an argument with others, and backed me up to the hilt, even when he thought I was wrong.

But the best part was when he talked to me about the history of Japan.

Actually, he gave me an interest in Japan that I never had. Growing up, whenever people found out that I was Japanese they assumed that I would be interested in anime, love karaoke, and giggle into my cupped hands, and the boys, in particular, thought I would act out their Oriental sex fantasies. It was tiring. As a teenager, I rebelled by refusing to do anything that seemed “Japanese,” including speaking Japanese at home. Just imagine how my poor parents felt.

Evan told the history of Japan to me not as a recitation of dates or myths, but as an illustration of scientific principles embedded in humanity. He showed me that the history of Japan is not a story about emperors and generals, poets and monks. Rather, the history of Japan is a model demonstrating the way all human societies grow and adapt to the natural world as the environment, in turn, adapts to their presence.

As hunter-gatherers, the ancient Jōmon Japanese were the top predators in their environment; as self-sufficient agriculturalists, the Japanese of the Nara and Heian periods began to shape and cultivate the ecology of Japan into a human-centric symbiotic biota, a process that wasn’t completed until the intensive agriculture and population growth that came with feudal Japan; finally, as industrialists and entrepreneurs, the people of Imperial Japan began to exploit not merely the living biota, but also the dead biota of the past: the drive for reliable sources of fossil fuels would dominate the history of modern Japan, as it has the rest of the modern world. We are all now exploiters of the dead.

Clearing away the superficial structure of the reigns of emperors and the dates of battles, there was the deeper rhythm of history’s ebb and flow not as the deeds of great men, but as lives lived by ordinary men and women wading through the currents of the natural world around them: its geology, its seasons, its climate and ecology, the abundance and scarcity of the raw material for life. It was the kind of history that a physicist could love.

Japan was at once universal and unique. Evan made me aware of the connection between me and the people who have called themselves Japanese for millennia.

Yet, history was not merely deep patterns and the long now. There was also a time and a place where individuals could leave an extraordinary impact. Evan’s specialty was the Heian Period, he told me, because that was when Japan first became Japan. A courtly elite of at most a few thousand people transformed continental influences into a uniquely native, Japanese aesthetic ideal that would reverberate throughout the centuries and define what it meant to be Japanese until the present day. Unique among the world’s ancient cultures, the high culture of Heian Japan was made as much by women as by men. It was a golden age as lovely as it was implausible, unrepeatable. That was the kind of surprise that made Evan love history.

Inspired, I took a Japanese history class, and asked my father to teach me calligraphy. I took a new interest in advanced Japanese language classes, and I learned to write tanka, the clean, minimalist Japanese poems that follow strict, mathematical metrical requirements. When I was finally satisfied with my first attempt, I was so happy, and I’m certain that I did, for a moment, feel what Murasaki Shikibu felt when she completed her first tanka. More than a millennium in time and more than ten thousand miles in space separated us, but there, in that moment, we would surely have understood each other.

Evan made me proud to be Japanese, and so he made me love myself. That was how I knew I was really in love with him.

Li Jianjian, Manager, Tianjin Sony Store:

The War has been over for a long time, and at some point you have to move on. What is the point of digging up memories like this now? Japanese investment in China has been very important for jobs, and all the young people in China like Japanese culture. I don’t like it that Japan does not want to apologize, but what can we do? If we dwell on it, then only we will be angry and sad.

Song Yuanwu, waitress:

I read about it in the newspapers. That Dr. Wei is not Chinese; he’s an American. The Chinese all know about Unit 731, so it’s not news to us.

I don’t want to think about it much. Some stupid young people shout about how we should boycott Japanese goods but then they can’t wait to buy the next issue of manga. Why should I listen to them? This just upsets people without accomplishing anything.

Name withheld, executive:

Truth be told, the people who were killed there in Harbin were mostly peasants, and they died like weeds during that time all over China. Bad things happen in wars, that’s all.

What I’m going to say will make everyone hate me, but many people also died during the Three Years of Natural Disasters under the Chairman and then during the Cultural Revolution. The War is sad, but it is just one sadness among many for the Chinese. The bulk of China’s sorrow lies unmourned. That Dr. Wei is a stupid troublemaker. You can’t eat, drink, or wear memories.

Nie Liang and Fang Rui, college students:

Nie: I’m glad that Wei did his work. Japan has never faced up to its history. Every Chinese knows that these things happened, but Westerners don’t, and they don’t care. Maybe now that they know the truth they’ll put pressure on Japan to apologize.

Fang: Be careful, Nie. When Westerners see this, they are going to call you a fenqing and a brainwashed nationalist. They like Japan in the West. China, not so much. The Westerners don’t want to understand China. Maybe they just can’t. We have nothing to say to these journalists. They won’t believe us anyway.

Sun Maying, office worker:

I don’t know who Wei is, and I don’t care.

Akemi Kirino:

Evan and I wanted to go see a movie that night. The romantic comedy we wanted was sold out, and so we chose the movie with the next earliest start time. It was called Philosophy of a Knife. Neither of us had heard of it. We just wanted to spend some time together.

Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments that turn out to have improbably large effects. Such randomness is much more common in human affairs than in nature, and there was no way that I, as a physicist, could have foreseen what happened next.

[Scenes from Andrey Iskanov’s Philosophy of a Knife are shown as Dr. Kirino speaks.]

The movie was a graphical portrayal of the activities of Unit 731, with many of the experiments reenacted. “God created heaven, men created hell” was the tag line.

Neither of us could get up at the end of it. “I didn’t know,” Evan murmured to me. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

He was not apologizing for taking me to the movie. Instead, he was consumed by guilt because he had not known about the horrors committed by Unit 731. He had never encountered it in his classes or in his research. Because his grandparents had taken refuge in Shanghai during the War, no one in his family was directly affected.

But due to their employment with the puppet government in Japanese occupied Shanghai, his grandparents were later labeled collaborationists after the War, and their harsh treatment at the hands of the government of the People’s Republic eventually caused his family to flee for the United States. And so the War shaped Evan’s life, as it has shaped the lives of all Chinese, even if he was not aware of all of its ramifications.

For Evan, ignorance of history, a history that determined who he was in many ways, was a sin in itself.

“It’s just a film,” our friends told him. “Fiction.”

But in that moment, history as he understood it ended for Evan. The distance he had once maintained, the abstractions of history at a grand scale, which had so delighted him before, lost meaning to him in the bloody scenes on the screen.

He began to dig into the truth behind the film, and it soon consumed all his waking moments. He became obsessed with the activities of Unit 731. It became his waking life and his nightmare. For him, his ignorance of those horrors was simultaneously a rebuke and a call to arms. He could not let the victims’ suffering be forgotten. He would not allow their torturers to get away.

That was when I explained to him the possibilities presented by BohmKirino particles.

Evan believed that time travel would make people care.

When Darfur was merely a name on a distant continent, it was possible to ignore the deaths and atrocities. But what if your neighbors came to you and told you of what they had seen in their travels to Darfur? What if the victims’ relatives showed up at the door to recount their memories in that land? Could you still ignore it?

Evan believed that something similar would happen with time travel. If people could see and hear the past, then it would no longer be possible to remain apathetic.

Excerpts from the televised hearing before the Subcommittee on Asia,
the Pacific, and the Global Environment of the Committee on

Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives,

11th Congress, courtesy of C-SPAN

Testimony of Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth, witness:

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for giving me the opportunity to testify here today. I would also like to thank Dr. Wei and Dr. Kirino, whose work has made my presence here today possible.

I was born on January 5, 1962, in Hong Kong. My father, Jaiyi “Jimmy” Chang, had come to Hong Kong from mainland China after World War Two. There, he became a successful merchant of men’s shirts and married my mother. Each year, we celebrated my birthday one day early. When I asked my mother why we did this, she said that it had something to do with the War.

As a little girl, I didn’t know much about my father’s life before I was born. I knew that he had grown up in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, that his whole family was killed by the Japanese, and that he was rescued by Communist guerrillas. But he did not tell me any details.

Only once did Father talk to me directly about his life during the War. It was the summer before I went to college, in 1980. A traditionalist, he held a jíjīlĬ ceremony for me where I would pick my biăozì, or courtesy name. That is the name young Chinese people traditionally chose for themselves when they came of age, and by which name they would be known by their peers. It wasn’t something that most Chinese, even the Hong Kong Chinese, did any more.

We prayed together, bowing before the shrine to our ancestors, and I lit my joss sticks and placed them in the bronze incense brazier in the courtyard. For the first time in my life, instead of me pouring tea for him, my father poured tea for me. We lifted our cups and drank tea together, and my father told me how proud he was of me.

I put down the teacup and asked him which of my older female relatives he most admired so that I might choose a name that would honor her memory. That was when he showed me the only photograph he had of his family. I have brought it here today, and would like to enter it into the record.

This picture was taken in 1940, on the occasion of my father’s tenth birthday. The family lived in Sanjiajiao, a village about twenty kilometers from Harbin, where they went to take this portrait in a studio. In this picture you can see my grandparents sitting together in the center. My father is standing next to my grandfather, and here, next to my grandmother, is my aunt, Changyi (暢怡). Her name means “smooth happiness.” Until my father showed me this picture, I did not know that I had an aunt.

My aunt was not a pretty girl. You can see that she was born with a large, dark birthmark shaped like a bat on her face that disfigured her. Like most girls in her village, she never went to school and was illiterate. But she was very gentle and kind and clever, and she did all of the cooking and cleaning in the house starting at the age of eight. My grandparents worked in the fields all day, and as the big sister, Changyi was like a mother to my father. She bathed him, fed him, changed his swaddling clothes, played with him, and protected him from the other kids in the village. At the time this picture was taken, she was sixteen.

What happened to her? I asked my father.

She was taken, he said. The Japanese came to our village on January 5, 1941, because they wanted to make an example of it so that other villages would not dare to support the guerrillas. I was eleven at the time and Changyi was seventeen. My parents told me to hide in the hole under the granary. After the soldiers bayoneted our parents, I saw them drag Changyi to a truck and drive her away.

Where was she taken?

They said they were taking her to a place called Pingfang, south of Harbin.

What kind of place was it?

Nobody knew. At the time the Japanese said the place was a lumber mill. But trains passing by there had to pull down their curtains, and the Japanese evicted all the villages nearby and patrolled the area heavily. The guerrillas who saved me thought it was probably a weapons depot or a headquarters building for important Japanese generals. I think maybe she was taken there to serve as a sex slave for the Japanese soldiers. I do not know if she survived.

And so I picked my biăozì to be Changyi (長憶) to honor my aunt, who was like a mother to my father. My name sounds like hers but it is written with different characters, and instead of “smooth happiness,” it means “long remembrance.” We prayed that she had survived the War and was still alive in Manchuria.

The next year, in 1981, the Japanese author Morimura Seiichi published The Devil’s Gluttony, which was the first Japanese publication ever to talk about the history of Unit 731. I read the Chinese translation of the book, and the name Pingfang suddenly took on a different meaning. For years, I had nightmares about what happened to my aunt.

My father died in 2002. Before his death, he asked that if I ever found out for sure what happened to my aunt, I should let him know when I made my annual visit to his grave. I promised him that I would.

This is why, a decade later, I volunteered to undertake the journey when Dr. Wei offered this opportunity. I wanted to know what happened to my aunt. I hoped against hope that she had survived and escaped, even though I knew there were no Unit 731 survivors.

Chung-Nian Shih, Director, Department of Archaeology, National Independent University of Taiwan:

I was one of the first to question Evan’s decision to prioritize sending volunteers who are relatives of the victims of Unit 731 rather than professional historians or journalists. I understand that he wanted to bring peace to the victims’ families, but it also meant large segments of history were consumed in private grief, and are now lost forever to the world. His technique, as you know, is destructive. Once he has sent an observer to a particular place at a particular time, the Bohm-Kirino particles are gone, and no one can ever go back there again.

There are moral arguments for and against his choice: is the suffering of the victims above all a private pain? Or should it primarily be seen as a part of our shared history?

It’s one of the central paradoxes of archaeology that in order to excavate a site so as to study it, we must consume it and destroy it in that process. Within the profession we are always debating over whether it’s better to excavate a site now or to preserve it in situ until less destructive techniques could be developed. But without such destructive excavations, how can new techniques be developed?

Perhaps Evan should also have waited until they developed a way to record the past without erasing it in the process. But by then it may have been too late for the families of the victims, who would benefit from those memories the most. Evan was forever struggling with the competing claims between the past and the present.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

I took my first trip five years ago, just as Dr. Wei first began to send people back.

I went to January 6, 1941, the day after my aunt was captured.

I arrived on a field surrounded by a complex of brick buildings. It was very cold. I don’t know exactly how cold, but Harbin in January usually stayed far below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Dr. Wei had taught me how to move with my mind only, but it was still shocking to suddenly find yourself in a place with no physical presence while feeling everything, a ghost. I was still getting used to moving around when I heard a loud “whack, whack” sound behind me.

I turned around and saw a line of Chinese prisoners standing in the field. They were chained together by their legs and wore just a thin layer of rags. But what struck me was that their arms were left bare, and they held them out in the freezing wind.

A Japanese officer walked in front of them, striking their frozen arms with a short stick. “Whack, whack.”

Interview with Shiro Yamagata, former member of Unit 731
courtesy of Nippon Broadcasting Co.

[Yamagata and his wife sit on chairs behind a long folding table. He is in his nineties. His hands are folded in front of him on the table, as are his wife’s. He keeps his face placid and does not engage in any histrionics. His voice is frail but clear underneath that of the translator’s.]

We marched the prisoners outside with bare arms so that the arms would freeze solid quicker in the Manchurian air. It was very cold, and I did not like the times when it was my duty to march them out.

We sprayed the prisoners with water to create frostbite quicker. To make sure that the arms have been frozen solid, we would hit them with a short stick. If we heard a crisp whack, it meant that the arms were frozen all the way through and ready for the experiments. It sounded like whacking against a piece of wood.

I thought that was why we called the prisoners maruta, wood logs. Hey, how many logs did you saw today? We’d joke with each other. Not many, just three small logs.

We performed those experiments to study the effects of frostbite and extreme temperatures on the human body. They were valuable. We learned that the best way to treat frostbite is to immerse the limb in warm water, not rubbing it. It probably saved many Japanese soldiers’ lives. We also observed the effects of gangrene and disease as the frozen limbs died on the prisoners.

I heard that there were experiments where we increased the pressure in an air-tight room until the person inside exploded, but I did not personally witness them.

I was one of a group of medical assistants who arrived in January 1941. In order to practice our surgery techniques, we performed amputations and other surgery on the prisoners. We used both healthy prisoners and prisoners from the frostbite experiments. When all the limbs had been amputated, the survivors were used to test biological weapons.

Once, two of my friends amputated a man’s arms and reattached them to opposite sides of his body. I watched but did not participate. I did not think it was a useful experiment.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

I followed the line of prisoners into the compound. I walked around to see if I could find my aunt.

I was very lucky, and after only about half an hour, I found where the women prisoners were kept. But when I looked through all the cells, I did not see a woman that looked like my aunt. I then continued walking around aimlessly, looking into all the rooms. I saw many specimen jars with preserved body parts. I remember that in one of the rooms I saw a very tall jar in which one half of a person’s body, cleaved vertically in half, was floating.

Eventually I came to an operating room filled with young Japanese doctors. I heard a woman scream, and I went in. One doctor was raping a Chinese woman on the operating table. There were several other Chinese women in the room, all of them naked and they were holding the woman on the table down so that the Japanese doctor could focus on the rape.

The other doctors looked on and spoke in a friendly manner with each other. One of them said something, and everybody laughed, including the doctor who was raping the woman on the table. I looked at the women who were holding her down and saw that one of them had a bat-shaped birthmark that covered half of her face. She was talking to the woman on the table, trying to comfort her.

What truly shocked me wasn’t the fact that she was naked, or what was happening. It was the fact that she looked so young. Seventeen, she was a year younger than I was when I left for college. Except for the birthmark, she looked just like me from back then, and just like my daughter.

[She stops.]

Representative Kotler: Ms. Chang, would you like to take a break? I’m sure the Subcommittee would understand—

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth: No, thank you. I’m sorry. Please let me continue.

After the first doctor was done, the woman on the table was brought away. The group of doctors laughed and joked amongst themselves. In a few minutes two soldiers returned with a naked Chinese man walking between them. The first doctor pointed to my aunt, and the other women pushed her onto the table without speaking. She did not resist.

The doctor then pointed to the Chinese man, and gestured towards my aunt. The man did not at first understand what was wanted of him. The doctor said something, and the two soldiers prodded the man with their bayonets, making him jump. My aunt looked up at him.

They want you to fuck me, she said.

Shiro Yamagata:

Sometimes we took turns raping the women and girls. Many of us had not ever been with a woman or seen a live woman’s organs. It was a kind of sex education.

One of the problems the army faced was venereal disease. The military doctors examined the comfort women weekly and gave them shots, but the soldiers would rape the Russian and Chinese women and got infected all the time. We needed to understand better the development of syphilis, in particular, and to devise treatments.

In order to do so, we would inject some prisoners with syphilis and make the prisoners have sex with each other so that they could be infected the regular way. Of course we would not then touch these infected women. We could then study the effects of the disease on body organs. It was all research that had not been done before.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

The second time I went back was a year later, and this time I went back to June 8, 1941, about five months after my aunt’s capture. I thought that if I picked a date much later my aunt might have already been killed. Dr. Wei was facing a lot of opposition, and he was concerned that taking too many trips to the era would destroy too much of the evidence. He explained that it would have to be my last trip.

I found my aunt in a cell by herself. She was very thin, and I saw that her palms were covered with a rash, and there were bumps around her neck from inflamed lymph nodes. I could also tell that she was pregnant. She must have been very sick because she was lying on the floor, her eyes open and making a light moan—”aiya, aiya“—the whole time I was with her.

I stayed with her all day, watching her. I kept on trying to comfort her, but of course she couldn’t hear me or feel my touch. The words were for my benefit, not hers. I sang a song for her, a song that my father used to sing to me when I was little:

萬里長城萬里長，長城外面是故鄉

高粱肥，大豆香，遍地黃金少災殃。

The Great Wall is ten thousand li long,
on the other side is my hometown

Rich sorghum, sweet soybeans,
happiness spreads like gold on the ground.

I was getting to know her and saying goodbye to her at the same time.

Shiro Yamagata:

To study the progress of syphilis and other venereal diseases, we would vivisect the women at various intervals after they were infected. It was important to understand the effects of the disease on living organs, and vivisection also provided valuable surgical practice. The vivisection was sometimes done with chloroform, sometimes not. We usually vivisected the subjects for the anthrax and cholera experiments without use of anesthesia since anesthesia might have affected the results, and it was felt that the same would be true with the women with syphilis.

I do not remember how many women I vivisected.

Some of the women were very brave, and would lie down on the table without being forced. I learned to say, “bútòng, bútòng” or “it won’t hurt” in Chinese to calm them down. We would then tie them to the table.

Usually the first incision, from thorax to stomach, would cause the women to scream horribly. Some of them would keep on screaming for a long while during the vivisection. We used gags later because the screaming interfered with discussion during the vivisections. Generally the women stayed alive until we cut open the heart, and so we saved that for last.

I remember once vivisecting a woman who was pregnant. We did not use chloroform initially, but then she begged us, “Please kill me, but do not kill my child.” We then used chloroform to put her under before finishing her.

None of us had seen a pregnant woman’s insides before, and it was very informative. I thought about keeping the fetus for some experiment, but it was too weak and died soon after being removed. We tried to guess whether the fetus was from the seed of a Japanese doctor or one of the Chinese prisoners, and I think most of us agreed in the end that it was probably one of the prisoners due to the ugliness of the fetus.

I believed that the work we did on the women was very valuable, and gained us many insights.

I did not think that the work we did at Unit 731 was particularly strange. After 1941, I was assigned to northern China, first in Hebei Province and then in Shanxi Province. In army hospitals, we military doctors regularly scheduled surgery practice sessions with live Chinese subjects. The army would provide the subjects on the announced days. We practiced amputations, cutting out sections of intestines and suturing together the remaining sections, and removing various internal organs.

Often the practice surgeries were done without anesthesia to simulate battlefield conditions. Sometimes a doctor would shoot a prisoner in the stomach to simulate war wounds for us to practice on. After the surgeries, one of the officers would behead the Chinese subject or strangle him. Sometimes vivisections were also used as anatomy lessons for the younger trainees and to give them a thrill. It was important for the army to produce good surgeons quickly, so that we could help the soldiers.

“John,” last name withheld, high school teacher, Perth, Australia:

You know old people are very lonely, so when they want attention, they’ll say anything. They would confess to these ridiculous made-up stories about what they did. It’s really sad. I’m sure I can find some old Australian soldier who’ll confess to cutting up some abo woman if you put out an ad asking about it. The people who tell these stories just want attention, like those Korean prostitutes who claim to have been kidnapped by the Japanese Army during the War.

Patty Ashby, homemaker, Milwaukee, Wisconsin:

I think it’s hard to judge someone if you weren’t there. It was during the War, and bad things happen during wars. The Christian thing to do is to forget and forgive. Dragging up things like this is uncharitable. And it’s wrong to mess with time like that. Nothing good can come of it.

Sharon, actress, New York, New York:

You know, the thing is that the Chinese have been very cruel to dogs, and they even eat dogs. They have also been very mean to the Tibetans. So it makes you think, was it karma?

Shiro Yamagata:

On August 15, 1945, we heard that the Emperor had surrendered to America. Like many other Japanese in China at that time, my unit decided that it was easier to surrender to the Chinese Nationalists. My unit was then reformed and drafted into a unit of the Nationalist Army under Chiang Kai-Shek, and I continued to work as an army doctor assisting the Nationalists against the Communists in the Chinese Civil War. As the Chinese had almost no qualified surgeons, my work was very much needed, and I was treated well.

The Nationalists were no match for the Communists, however, and in January, 1949, the Communists captured the army field hospital I was staffed in, and took me prisoner. For the first month, we were not allowed to leave our cells. I tried to make friends with the guards. The Communists soldiers were very young and thin, but they seemed to be in much better spirits than their Nationalist counterparts.

After a month, we, along with the guards, were given daily lessons on Marxism and Maoism.

The War was not my fault and I was not to be blamed, I was told. I was just a soldier, deceived by the Showa Emperor and Hideki Tojo into fighting a war of invasion and oppression against the Chinese. Through studying Marxism, I was told, I would come to understand that all poor men, the Chinese and Japanese alike, were brothers. We were expected to reflect on what we did to the Chinese people, and to write confessions about the crimes we committed during the War. Our punishment would be lessened, we were told, if our confessions showed sincere hearts. I wrote confessions, but they were always rejected for not being sincere enough.

Still, because I was a doctor, I was allowed to work at the provincial hospital to treat patients. I was the most senior surgeon at the hospital and had my own staff.

We heard rumors that a new war was about to start between the United States and China in Korea. How could China win against the United States, I thought. Even the mighty Japanese Army could not stand against America. Perhaps I will be captured by the Americans next. I suppose I was never very good at predicting the outcomes of wars.

Food became scarce after the Korean War began. The guards ate rice with scallions and wild weeds, while prisoners like me were given rice and fish.

Why is this? I asked.

You are prisoners, my guard, who was only sixteen, said. You are from Japan. Japan is a wealthy country, and you must be treated in a manner that matched as closely as possible the conditions in your home country.

I offered the guard my fish, and he refused.

You do not want to touch the food that had been touched by a Japanese Devil? I joked with him. I was also teaching him how to read, and he would sneak me cigarettes.

I was a very good surgeon, and I was proud of my work. Sometimes I felt that despite the War, I was doing China a great deal of good, and I helped many patients with my skills.

One day, a woman came to see me in the hospital. She had broken her leg, and because she lived far from the hospital, by the time her family brought her to me, gangrene had set in, and the leg had to be amputated.

She was on the table, and I was getting ready to administer anesthesia. I looked into her eyes, trying to calm her. “Bútòng, bútòng.”

Her eyes became very wide, and she screamed. She screamed and screamed, and scrambled off the table, dragging her dead leg with her until she was as far away from me as possible.

I recognized her then. She had been one of the Chinese girl prisoners that we had trained to help us as nurses at the army hospital during the War with China. She had helped me with some of the practice surgery sessions. I had slept with her a few times. I didn’t know her name. She was just “Number Four” to me, and some of the younger doctors had joked about cutting her open if Japan lost and we had to retreat.

[Interviewer (off-camera): Mr. Yamagata, you cannot cry. You know that. We cannot show you being emotional on film. We have to stop if you cannot control yourself.]

I was filled with unspeakable grief. It was only then that I understood what kind of a life and career I had. Because I wanted to be a successful doctor, I did things that no human being should do. I wrote my confession then, and when my guard read my confession, he would not speak to me.

I served my sentence and was released and allowed to return to Japan in 1956.

I felt lost. Everyone was working so hard in Japan. But I didn’t know what to do.

“You should not have confessed to anything,” one of my friends, who was in the same unit with me, told me. “I didn’t, and they released me years ago. I have a good job now. My son is going to be a doctor. Don’t say anything about what happened during the War.”

I moved here to Hokkaido to be a farmer, as far away from the heart of Japan as possible. For all these years I stayed silent to protect my friend. And I believed that I would die before him, and so take my secret to the grave.

But my friend is now dead, and so, even though I have not said anything about what I did all these years, I will not stop speaking now.

Lillian C. Chang-Wyeth:

I am speaking only for myself, and perhaps for my aunt. I am the last connection between her and the living world. And I am turning into an old woman myself.

I don’t know much about politics, and don’t care much for it. I have told you what I saw, and I will remember the way my aunt cried in that cell until the day I die.

You ask me what I want. I don’t know how to answer that.

Some have said that I should demand that the surviving members of Unit 731 be brought to justice. But what does that mean? I am no longer a child. I do not want to see trials, parades, spectacles. The law does not give you real justice.

What I really want is for what I saw to never have happened. But no one can give me that. And so I resort to wanting to have my aunt’s story remembered, to have the guilt of her killers and torturers laid bare to the gaze of the world, the way that they laid her bare to their needle and scalpel.

I do not know how to describe those acts other than as crimes against humanity. They were denials against the very idea of life itself.

The Japanese government has never acknowledged the actions of Unit 731, and it has never apologized for them. Over the years, more and more evidence of the atrocities committed during those years have come to life, but always the answer is the same: there is not enough evidence to know what happened.

Well, now there is. I have seen what happened with my own eyes. And I will speak about what happened, speak out against the denialists. I will tell my story as often as I can.

The men and women of Unit 731 committed those acts in the name of Japan and the Japanese people. I demand that the government of Japan acknowledge these crimes against humanity, that it apologize for them, and that it commit to preserving the memory of the victims and condemning the guilt of those criminals so long as the word justice still has meaning.

I am also sorry to say, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, that the government of the United States has also never acknowledged or apologized for its role in shielding these criminals from justice after the War, or in making use of the information bought at the expense of torture, rape, and death. I demand that the government of the United States acknowledge and apologize for these acts.

That is all.

Representative Hogart:

I would like to again remind members of the public that they must maintain order and decorum during this hearing or risk being forcibly removed from this room.

Ms. Chang-Wyeth, I am sorry for whatever it is you think you have experienced. I have no doubt that it has deeply affected you. I thank the other witnesses as well for sharing their stories.

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Subcommittee, I must again note for the record my objection to this hearing and to the Resolution which has been proposed by my colleague, Representative Kotler.

The Second World War was an extraordinary time during which the ordinary rules of human conduct did not apply, and there is no doubt that terrible events occurred and terrible suffering resulted. But whatever happened—and we have no definitive proof of anything other than the results of some sensational high-energy physics that no one present, other than Dr. Kirino herself, understands—it would be a mistake for us to become slaves to history, and to subject the present to the control of the past.

The Japan of today is the most important ally of the United States in the Pacific, if not the world, while the People’s Republic of China takes daily steps to challenge our interests in the region. Japan is vital in our efforts to contain and confront the Chinese threat.

It is ill-advised at best, and counterproductive at worst, for Representative Kotler to introduce his Resolution at this time. The Resolution will no doubt embarrass and dishearten our ally and give encouragement and comfort to our challengers at a time when we cannot afford to indulge in theatrical sentiments, premised upon stories told by emotional witnesses who may have been experiencing “illusions,” and I am quoting the words of Dr. Kirino, the creator of the technology involved.

Again, I must call upon the Subcommittee to stop this destructive, useless process.

Representative Kotler:

Mr. Chairman, and Members of the Subcommittee, thank you for giving me the chance to respond to Representative Hogart.

It’s easy to hide behind intransitive verbal formulations like “terrible events occurred” and “suffering resulted.” And I am sorry to hear my honored colleague, a member of the United States Congress, engage in the same shameful tactics of denial and evasion employed by those who denied that the Holocaust was real.

Every successive Japanese government, with the encouragement and complicity of the successive administrations in this country, has refused to even acknowledge, let alone apologize for, the activities of Unit 731. In fact, for many years, the Unit’s very existence was unacknowledged. These denials and refusals to face Japanese atrocities committed during the Second World War form a pattern of playing-down and denial of the war record, whether we are talking about the so-called “Comfort Women,” the Nanjing Massacre, or the forced slave laborers of Korea and China. This pattern has harmed the relationship of Japan with its Asian neighbors.

The issue of Unit 731 presents its unique challenges. Here, the United States is not an uninterested third party. As an ally and close friend of Japan, it is the duty of the United States to point out where our friend has erred. But more than that, the United States played an active role in helping the perpetrators of the crimes of Unit 731 escape justice. General MacArthur granted the men of Unit 731 immunity to get their experimental data. We are in part responsible for the denials and the cover-ups because we valued the tainted fruits of those atrocities more than we valued our own integrity. We have sinned as well.

What I want to emphasize is that Representative Hogart has misunderstood the Resolution. What the witnesses and I are asking for, Mr. Chairman, is not some admission of guilt by the present government of Japan or its people. What we are asking for is a declaration from this body that it is the belief of the United States Congress that the victims of Unit 731 should be honored and remembered, and that the perpetrators of these heinous crimes be condemned. There is no Bill of Attainder here, no corruption of blood. We are not calling on Japan to pay compensation. All we are asking for is a commitment to truth, a commitment to remember.

Like memorials to the Holocaust, the value of such a declaration is simply a public affirmation of our common bond of humanity with the victims, and our unity in standing against the ideology of evil and barbarity of the Unit 731 butchers and the Japanese militarist society that permitted and ordered such evil.

Now, I want to make it clear that “Japan” is not a monolithic thing, and it is not just the Japanese government. Individual Japanese citizens have done heroic work in bringing these atrocities to light throughout the years, almost always against government resistance and against the public’s wish to forget and move on. And I offer them my heartfelt thanks.

The truth cannot be brushed away, and the families of the victims and the people of China should not be told that justice is not possible, that because their present government is repugnant to the government of the United States, that a great injustice should be covered up and hidden from the judgment of the world. Is there any doubt that this non-binding Resolution, or even much more stringent versions of it, would have passed without trouble if the victims were a people whose government has the favor of the United States? If we, for “strategic” reasons, sacrifice the truth in the name of gaining something of value for short-term advantage, then we will have simply repeated the errors of our forefathers at the end of the War.

It is not who we are. Dr. Wei has offered us a way to speak the truth about the past, and we must ask the government of Japan and our government to stand up and take up our collective responsibility to history.

Li Ruming, Director of the Department of History, Zhejiang University, The People’s Republic of China:

When I was finishing my doctorate in Boston, Evan and Akemi often had my wife and me over to their place. They were very friendly and helpful, and made us feel the enthusiasm and warmth that America is rightly famous for. Unlike many Chinese-Americans I met, Evan did not give off a sense that he felt he was superior to the Chinese from the mainland. It was wonderful to have him and Akemi as life-long friends, and not have every interaction between us filtered through the lens of the politics between our two countries, as is so often the case between Chinese and American scholars.

Because I am his friend and I am also Chinese, it is difficult for me to speak about Evan’s work with objectivity, but I will try my best.

When Evan first announced his intention to go to Harbin and try to travel to the past, the Chinese government was cautiously supportive. As none of it had been tried before, the full implications of Evan’s destructive process for time travel were not yet clear. Due to destruction of evidence at the end of the War and continuing stonewalling by the Japanese government, we do not have access to large archives of documentary evidence and artifacts from Unit 731, and it was felt that Evan’s work would help fill in the gap by providing first-hand accounts of what happened. The Chinese government granted Evan and Akemi visas under the assumption that their work would help promote Western understanding of China’s historical disputes with Japan.

But they wanted to monitor his work. The War is deeply emotional for my compatriots, its unhealed wounds exacerbated by years of post-War disputes with Japan, and as such, it was not politically feasible for the government to not be involved. World War Two was not the distant past, involving ancient peoples, and China could not permit two foreigners to go traipsing through that recent history like adventurers through ancient tombs.

But from Evan’s point of view—and I think he was justified in his belief—any support, monitoring, or affiliation with the Chinese government would have destroyed all credibility for his work in Western eyes.

He thus rejected all offers of Chinese involvement and even called for intervention by American diplomats. This angered many Chinese and alienated him from them. Later, when the Chinese government finally shut down his work after the storm of negative publicity, very few Chinese would speak up for him because they felt that he and Akemi had—perhaps even intentionally—done more damage to China’s history and her people. The accusations were unfair, and I’m sorry to say that I do not feel that I did enough to defend his reputation.

Evan’s focus throughout his project was both more universal and more atomistic than the people of China. On the one hand, he had an American devotion to the idea of the individual, and his commitment was first and foremost to the individual voice and memory of each victim. On the other hand, he was also trying to transcend nations, to make people all over the world empathize with these victims, condemn their torturers, and affirm the common humanity of us all.

But in that process, he was forced to distance his effort from the Chinese people in order to preserve the political credibility of his project in the West. He sacrificed their goodwill in a bid to make the West care. Evan tried to appease the West and Western prejudices against China. Was it cowardly? Should he have challenged them more? I do not know.

History is not merely a private matter. Even the family members of the victims understand that there is a communitarian aspect to history. The War of Resistance Against the Japanese Invasion is the founding story of modern China, much as the Holocaust is the founding story of Israel and the Revolution and the Civil War are the founding stories of America. Perhaps this is difficult to understand for a Westerner, but to many Chinese, Evan, because he feared and rejected their involvement, was stealing and erasing their history. He sacrificed the history of the Chinese people, without their consent, for a Western ideal. I understand why he did it, but I cannot agree that his choice was right.

As a Chinese, I do not share Evan’s utter devotion to the idea of a personalized sense of history. Telling the individual stories of all the victims, as Evan sought to do, is not possible and in any event would not solve all problems.

Because of our limited capacity for empathy for mass suffering, I think there’s a risk that his approach would result in sentimentality and only selective memory. More than sixteen million civilians died in China from the Japanese invasion. The great bulk of this suffering did not occur in death factories like Pingfang or killing fields like Nanjing, which grab headlines and shout for our attention; rather, it occurred in the countless quiet villages, towns, remote outposts, where men and women were slaughtered and raped and slaughtered again, their screams fading with the chill wind, until even their names became blanks and forgotten. But they also deserve to be remembered.

It is not possible that every atrocity would find a spokesperson as eloquent as Anne Frank, and I do not believe that we should seek to reduce all of history to a collection of such narratives.

But Evan always told me that an American would rather work on the problem that he could solve rather than wring his hands over the vast realm of problems that he could not.

It was not an easy choice that he made, and I would not have chosen the same way. But Evan was always true to his American ideals.

Bill Pacer, Professor of Modern Chinese Language and Culture, University of Hawaii at Manoa:

It has often been said that since everybody in China knew about Unit 731, Dr. Wei had nothing useful to teach the Chinese, and was only an activist campaigning against Japan. That’s not quite right. One of the more tragic aspects of the dispute between China and Japan over history is how much their responses have mirrored each other. Wei’s goal was to rescue history from both.

In the early days of the People’s Republic, between 1945 and 1956, the Communists’ overall ideological approach was to treat the Japanese invasion as just another historical stage in mankind’s unstoppable march towards socialism. While Japanese militarism was condemned and the Resistance celebrated, the Communists also sought to forgive the Japanese individually if they showed contrition—a surprisingly Christian/Confucian approach for an atheistic regime. In this atmosphere of revolutionary zeal, the Japanese prisoners were treated, for the most part, humanely. They were given Marxist classes and told to write confessions of their crimes. (These classes became the basis for the Japanese public’s belief that any man who would confess to horrible crimes during the War must have been brainwashed by the Communists.) Once they were deemed sufficiently reformed through “re-education,” they were released back to Japan. Memories of the War were then suppressed in China as the country feverishly moved to build a Socialist utopia, with well-known disastrous consequences.

Yet, this generosity towards the Japanese was matched by Stalinist harsh treatment of landowners, capitalists, intellectuals, and the Chinese who collaborated with the Japanese. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed, often on little evidence and with no effort given to observe legal forms.

Later, during the 1990s, the government of the People’s Republic began to invoke memories of the War in the context of patriotism to legitimize itself in the wake of the collapse of Communism. Ironically, this obvious ploy prevented large segments of the populace from being able to come to terms with the War—distrust of the government infected everything it touched.

And so the People’s Republic’s approach to historical memory created a series of connected problems. First, the leniency they showed the prisoners became the ground for denialists to later question the veracity of confessions by Japanese soldiers. Second, yoking patriotism to the memory of the War invited charges that any effort to remember was politically motivated. And lastly, individual victims of the atrocities became symbols, anonymized to serve the needs of the State.

However, it has rarely been acknowledged that behind Japan’s post-War silence regarding wartime atrocities lay the same impulses that drove the Chinese responses. On the left, the peace movement attributed all suffering during the War to the concept of war itself, and advocated universal forgiveness and peace among all nations without a sense of blame. In the center, focus was placed on material development as a bandage to cover the wounds of the War. On the right, the question of wartime guilt became inextricably yoked to patriotism. In contrast to Germany, which could rely on Nazism—distinct from the nation itself—to absorb the blame, it was impossible to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the War without implicating a sense that Japan itself was under attack.

And so, across a narrow sea, China and Japan unwittingly converged on the same set of responses to the barbarities of World War Two: forgetting in the name of universal ideals like “peace” and “socialism”; welding memories of the War to patriotism; abstracting victims and perpetrators alike into symbols to serve the State. Seen in this light, the abstract, incomplete, fragmentary memories in China and the silence in Japan are flip sides of the same coin.

The core of Wei’s belief is that without real memory, there can be no real reconciliation. Without real memory, the individual persons of each nation have not been able to empathize with and remember and experience the suffering of the victims. An individualized story that each of us can tell ourselves about what happened is required before we can move beyond the trap of history. That, all along, was what Wei’s project was about.

“Cross-Talk,” January 21, 20__, courtesy of FXNN

Amy Rowe: Thank you, Ambassador Yoshida and Dr. Wei, for agreeing to come on to Cross-Talk tonight. Our viewers want to have their questions answered, and I want to see some fireworks!

Ambassador Yoshida, let’s start with you. Why won’t Japan apologize?

Yoshida: Amy, Japan has apologized. This is the whole point. Japan has apologized many many times for World War Two. Every few years we have to go through this spectacle where it’s said that Japan needs to apologize for its actions during World War Two. But Japan has done so, repeatedly. Let me read you a few quotes.

This is from a statement by Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, on August 31, 1994. “Japan’s actions in a certain period of the past not only claimed numerous victims here in Japan but also left the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere with scars that are painful even today. I am thus taking this opportunity to state my belief, based on my profound remorse for these acts of aggression, colonial rule, and the like caused such unbearable suffering and sorrow for so many people, that Japan’s future path should be one of making every effort to build world peace in line with my no-war commitment. It is imperative for us Japanese to look squarely to our history with the peoples of neighboring Asia and elsewhere.”

And again, from a statement by the Diet, on June 9, 1995: “On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, this House offers its sincere condolences to those who fell in action and victims of wars and similar actions all over the world. Solemnly reflecting upon many instances of colonial rule and acts of aggression in the modern history of the world, and recognizing that Japan carried out those acts in the past, inflicting pain and suffering upon the peoples of other countries, especially in Asia, the Members of this House express a sense of deep remorse.”

I can go on and read you dozens of other quotes like this. Japan has apologized, Amy.

Yet, every few years, the propaganda organs of certain regimes hostile to a free and prosperous Japan try to dredge up settled historical events to manufacture controversy. When is this going to end? And some men of otherwise good intellect have allowed themselves to become the tools of propaganda. I wish they would wake up and see how they are being used.

Rowe: Dr. Wei, I have to say, those do sound like apologies to me.

Wei: Amy, it is not my aim or goal to humiliate Japan. My commitment is to the victims and their memory, not theatre. What I’m asking for is for Japan to acknowledge the truth of what happened at Pingfang. I want to focus on specifics, and acknowledgment of specifics, not empty platitudes.

But since Ambassador Yoshida has decided to bring up the issue of apologies, let’s look closer at them, shall we?

The statements quoted by the Ambassador are grand and abstract, and they refer to vague and unspecified sufferings. They are apologies only in the most watered-down sense. What the Ambassador is not telling you is the Japanese government’s continuing refusal to admit many specific war crimes and to honor and remember the real victims.

Moreover, every time one of these statements quoted by the Ambassador is made, it is matched soon after by another statement from a prominent Japanese politician purporting to cast doubt upon what happened in World War Two. Year after year, we are treated to this show of the Japanese government as a Janus speaking with two faces.

Yoshida: It’s not that unusual to have differences of opinion when it comes to matters of history, Dr. Wei. In a democracy it’s what you would expect.

Wei: Actually, Ambassador, Unit 731 has been consistently handled by the Japanese government: for more than fifty years the official position was absolute silence regarding Unit 731, despite the steady accumulation of physical evidence, including human remains, from Unit 731’s activities. Even the Unit’s existence was not admitted until the 1990s, and the government consistently denied that it had researched or used biological weapons during the War.

It wasn’t until 2005, in response to a lawsuit by some relatives of Unit 731’s victims for compensation, that the Tokyo High Court finally acknowledged Japan’s use of biological weapons during the War. This was the first time that an official voice of the Japanese government admitted to that fact. Amy, you’ll notice that this was a decade after those lofty statements read by Ambassador Yoshida. The Court denied compensation.

Since then the Japanese government has consistently stated that there is insufficient evidence to confirm exactly what experiments were carried out by Unit 731 or the details of their conduct. Official denial and silence continue despite the dedicated efforts of some Japanese scholars to bring the truth to light.

But numerous former members of Unit 731 have come forward since the 1980s to testify and confess to the grisly acts they committed. And we have confirmed and expanded upon those accounts with new eyewitness accounts by volunteers who have traveled to Pingfang. Everyday, we are finding out more about Unit 731’s crimes. We will tell the world all the victims’ stories.

Yoshida: I am not sure that “telling stories” is what historians should be doing. If you want to make fiction, go ahead, but do not tell people that it is history. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there is insufficient proof for the accusations currently being directed against Japan.

Wei: Ambassador Yoshida, is your position really that nothing happened at Pingfang? Are you saying that these reports by the American occupational authority from immediately after the War are lies? Are you saying that these contemporaneous diary entries by the officers of Unit 731 are lies? Are you really denying all of this?

There is a simple solution to all this. Will you take a trip to Pingfang in 1941? Will you believe your own eyes?

Yoshida: I’m—I am not—I’m making a distinction—It was a time of war, Dr. Wei, and perhaps it is possible that some unfortunate things happened. But “stories” are not evidence.

Wei: Will you take a trip, Ambassador?

Yoshida: I will not. I see no reason to subject myself to your process. I see no reason to undergo your “time travel” hallucinations.

Rowe: Now we are seeing some fireworks!

Wei: Ambassador Yoshida, let me make this clear. The deniers are committing a fresh crime against the victims of those atrocities: not only would they stand with the torturers and the killers, but they are also engaged in the practice of erasing and silencing the victims from history, to kill them afresh.

In the past, their task was easy. Unless the denials were actively resisted, eventually memories would dim with old age and death, and the voices of the past would fade away, and the denialists would win. The people of the present would then become exploiters of the dead, and that has always been the way history was written.

But we have now come to the end of history. What my wife and I have done is to take narrative away, and to give us all a chance to see the past with our own eyes. In place of memory, we now have incontrovertible evidence. Instead of exploiting the dead, we must look into the face of the dying. I have seen these crimes with my own eyes. You cannot deny that.

[Archival footage of Dr. Evan Wei delivering the keynote for the Fifth International War Crimes Studies Conference in San Francisco, on November 20, 20__. Courtesy of the Stanford University Archives.]

History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word “truth” is rarely uttered without hedges, adornments, and qualifications.

Every time we tell a story about a great atrocity, like the Holocaust or Pingfang, the forces of denial are always ready to pounce, to erase, to silence, to forget. History has always been difficult because of the delicacy of the truth, and denialists have always been able to resort to labeling the truth as fiction.

One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but we have also been taught not to trust an individual speaker.

Yes, it is true that no nation, and no historian, can tell a story that completely encompasses every aspect of the truth. But it is not true that just because all narratives are constructed, that they are equally far from the truth. The Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor a flat disk, but the model of the sphere is much closer to the truth. Similarly, there are some narratives that are closer to the truth than others, and we must always try to tell a story that comes as close to the truth as is humanly possible.

The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.

Victor P. Lowenson, Professor of East Asian History, Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, UC Berkeley:

I have been called a denialist, and I have been called worse. But I am not a Japanese right-winger who believes that Unit 731 is a myth. I do not say that nothing happened there. What I am saying is that, unfortunately, we do not have enough evidence to be able to describe with certainty all that happened there.

I have enormous respect for Wei, and he remains and will remain one of my best students. But in my view, he has abdicated the responsibility of the historian to ensure that the truth is not ensnared in doubt. He has crossed the line that divides a historian from an activist.

As I see it, the fight here isn’t ideological, but methodological. What we are fighting over is what constitutes proof. Historians trained in Western and Asian traditions have always relied on the documentary record, but Dr. Wei is now raising the primacy of eyewitness accounts, and not even contemporaneous eyewitness accounts, mind you, but accounts by witnesses out of the stream of time.

There are many problems with his approach. We have a great deal of experience from psychology and the law to doubt the reliability of eyewitness accounts. We also have serious concerns with the single-use nature of the Kirino Process, which seems to destroy the very thing it is studying, and erases history even as it purports to allow it to be witnessed. You literally cannot ever go back to a moment of time that has already been experienced—and thus consumed—by another witness. When each eyewitness account is impossible to verify independently of that account, how can we rely on such a process to establish the truth of what happened?

I understand that from the perspective of supporters of Dr. Wei, the raw experience of actually seeing history unfold before your eyes makes it impossible to doubt the evidence indelibly etched in your mind. But that is simply not good enough for the rest of us. The Kirino Process requires a leap of faith: those who have witnessed the ineffable have no doubt of its existence, but that clarity is incapable of being replicated for anyone else. And so we are stuck here, in the present, trying to make sense of the past.

Dr. Wei has ended the process of rational historical inquiry and transformed it into a form of personal religion. What one witness has seen, no one else can ever see. This is madness.

Naoki, last name withheld, clerk:

I have seen the videos of the old soldiers who supposedly confessed to these horrible things. I do not believe them. They cry and act so emotional, as though they are insane. The Communists were great brainwashers, and it is undoubtedly a result of their plot.

I remember one of those old men describing the kindness of his Communist guards. Kind Communist guards! If that is not evidence of brainwashing, what is?

Kazue Sato, housewife:

The Chinese are great manufacturers of lies. They have produced fake food, fake Olympics, and fake statistics. Their history is also faked. This Wei is an American, but he is also Chinese, and so we cannot trust anything he does.

Hiroshi Abe, retired soldier:

The soldiers who “confessed” have brought great shame upon their country.

Interviewer:

Because of what they did?

Hiroshi Abe:

Because of what they said.

Ienaga Ito, Professor of Oriental History, Kyoto University:

We live in an age that prizes authenticity and personalized narratives, as embodied in the form of the memoir. Eyewitness accounts have an immediacy and reality that compels belief, and we think they can convey a truth greater than any fiction. Yet, perhaps paradoxically, we are also eager to seize upon any factual deviation and inconsistency in such narratives, and declare the entirety to be mere fiction. There’s an all-or-nothing bleakness to this dynamic. But we should have conceded from the start that narrative is irreducibly subjective, though that does not mean that they do not also convey the truth.

Evan was a greater radical than most people realized. He sought to free the past from the present so that history could not be ignored, put out of our minds, or made to serve the needs of the present. The possibility of witnessing actual history and experiencing that past by all of us means that the past is not past, but alive at this very moment.

What Evan did was to transform historical investigation itself into a form of memoir writing. That kind of emotional experience is important in the way we think about history and make decisions. Culture is not merely a product of reason but also of real, visceral empathy. And I am afraid that it is primarily empathy that has been missing from the post-War Japanese responses to history.

Evan tried to introduce more empathy and emotion into historical inquiry. For this he was crucified by the academic establishment. But adding empathy and the irreducibly subjective dimension of the personal narrative to history does not detract from the truth. It enhances the truth. That we accept our own frailties and subjectivity does not free us to abdicate the moral responsibility to tell the truth, even if, and especially if, “truth” is not singular but a set of shared experiences and shared understandings that together make up our humanity.

Of course, drawing attention to the importance and primacy of eyewitness accounts unleashed a new danger. With a little money and the right equipment, anyone can eliminate the Bohm-Kirino particles from a desired era, in a specified place, and so erase those events from direct experience. Unwittingly, Evan had also invented the technology to end history forever, by denying us and future generations of that emotional experience of the past that he so cherished.

Akemi Kirino:

It was difficult during the years immediately after the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium was signed. Evan was denied tenure in a close vote, and that editorial in the Wall Street Journal by his old friend and teacher, Victor Lowenson, calling him a “tool of propaganda,” deeply hurt him. Then, there were the death threats and harassing phone calls, every day.

But I think it was what they did to me that really got to him. At the height of the attacks from the denialists, the IT division of the Institute asked me if I would mind being de-listed from the public faculty directory. Whenever they listed me on the web site, the site would be hacked within hours, and the denialists would replace my bio page with pictures where these men, so brave and eloquent, displayed their courage and intellect by illustrating what they would do to me if they had me in their power. And you probably remember the news reports about that night when I walked home alone from work.

I don’t really want to dwell on that time, if that’s all right with you.

We moved away to Boise, where we tried to hide from the worst of it. We kept a low profile, got an unlisted number, and basically stayed out of sight. Evan went on medication for his depression. On the weekends we went hiking in the Sawtooth Mountains, and Evan took up charting abandoned mining sites and ghost towns from during the gold rush. That was a happy time for us, and I thought he was feeling better. The sojourn in Idaho reminded him that sometimes the world is a kind place, and all is not darkness and denial.

But he was feeling lost. He felt that he was hiding from the truth. I knew that he was feeling torn between his sense of duty to the past, and his sense of loyalty to the present, to me.

I could not bear to see him being torn apart, and so I asked if he wanted to return to the fight.

We flew back to Boston, and things had grown even worse. He had sought to end history as mere history, and to give the past living voices to speak to the present. But it did not work out the way he had intended. The past did come to life, but when faced with it, the present decided to recast history as religion.

The more Evan did, the more he felt he had to do. He would not come to bed, and fell asleep at his desk. He was writing, writing, constantly writing. He believed that he had to single-handedly refute all the lies, and take on all his enemies. It was never enough, never enough for him. I stood by, helpless.

“I have to speak for them, because they have no one else,” he would tell me.

By then perhaps he was living more in the past than in the present. Even though he no longer had access to our machine, in his mind he relived those trips he took, over and over again. He believed that he had let the victims down.

A great responsibility had been thrust upon him, and he had failed them. He was trying to uncover to the world a great injustice, and yet in the process he seemed to have only stirred up the forces of denial, hate, and silence.

Excerpts from The Economist, November 26, 20__

APAC Broadcasting Corporation

[A woman’s voice, flat, calm, reads out loud the article text as the camera swoops over the ocean, the beaches, and then the forests and hills of Manchuria. From the shadow of a small plane racing along the ground beneath us we can tell that the camera is shooting from the open door of the airplane. An arm, the hand clenched tight into a fist, moves into the foreground from off-frame. The fingers open. Dark ashes are scattered into the air beneath the airplane.]

We will soon come upon the ninetieth anniversary of the Mukden Incident, the start of the Japanese invasion of China. To this day, that war remains the alpha and omega of the relationship between the two countries.

[A series of photographs of the leaders of Unit 731 are shown. The reader’s voice fades out and then fades back in.]

The men of Unit 731 then moved on to prominent careers in post-War Japan. Three of them founded the Japan Blood Bank (which later became the Green Cross, Japan’s largest pharmaceutical company) and used their knowledge of methods for freezing and drying blood derived from human experiments during the War to produce dried-blood products for sale to the United States Army at great profit. General Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731, may have spent some time after the War working in Maryland, researching biological weapons. Papers were published using data obtained from human subjects, including babies (sometimes the word “monkey” was substituted as a cover-up)—and it is possible that medical papers published today still contain citations traceable to these results, making all of us the unwitting beneficiaries of these atrocities.

[The reading voice fades out as the sound of the airplane’s engine cuts in. The camera shifts to images of clashing protestors waving Japanese flags and Chinese flags, some of the flags on fire . . . Then the voice fades in again.]

Many inside and outside Japan objected to the testimonies by the surviving members of Unit 731: the men are old, they point out, with failing memories; they may be seeking attention; they may be mentally ill; they may have been brainwashed by the Chinese Communists. Reliance on oral testimony alone is an unwise way to construct a solid historical case. To the Chinese this sounded like more of the same excuses issued by the deniers of the Nanjing Massacre and other Japanese atrocities.

Year after year, history grew as a wall between the two peoples.

[The camera switches to a montage of pictures of Evan Wei and Akemi Kirino throughout their lives. In the first pictures, they smile for the camera. In later pictures, Kirino’s face is tired, withdrawn, impassive. Wei’s face is defiant, angry, and then full of despair.]

Evan Wei, a young Chinese-American specialist on Heian Japan, and Akemi Kirino, a Japanese-American experimental physicist, did not seem like the kind of revolutionary figures who would bring the world to the brink of war. But history has a way of mocking our expectations.

If lack of evidence was the issue, they had a way to provide irrefutable evidence: you could watch history as it occurred, like a play.

The governments of the world went into a frenzy. While Wei sent relatives of the victims of Unit 731 into the past to bear witness to the horrors committed in the operating rooms and prison cells of Pingfang, China and Japan waged a bitter war in courts and in front of cameras, staking out their rival claims to the past. The United States was reluctantly drawn into the fight, and, citing national security reasons, finally shut down Wei’s machine when he unveiled plans to investigate the truth of America’s alleged use of biological weapons (possibly derived from Unit 731’s research) during the Korean War.

Armenians, Jews, Tibetans, Native Americans, Indians, the Kikuyu, the descendants of slaves in the New World—victim groups around the world lined up and demanded use of the machine, some out of fear that their history might be erased by the groups in power, others wishing to use their history for present political gain. As well, the countries who initially advocated access to the machine hesitated when the implications became clear: did the French wish to relive the depravity of their own people under Vichy France? Did the Chinese want to reexperience the self-inflicted horrors of the Cultural Revolution? Did the British want to see the genocides that lay behind their Empire?

With remarkable alacrity, democracies and dictatorships around the world signed the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium while they wrangled over the minutiae of the rules for how to divide up jurisdiction of the past. Everyone, it seemed, preferred not to have to deal with the past just yet.

Wei wrote, “All written history shares one goal: to bring a coherent narrative to a set of historical facts. For far too long we have been mired in controversy over facts. Time travel will make truth as accessible as looking outside the window.”

But Wei did not help his case by sending large numbers of Chinese relatives of Unit 731 victims, rather than professional historians, through his machine. (Though it is also fair to ask if things really would have turned out differently had he sent more professional historians. Perhaps accusations would still have been made that the visions were mere fabrications of the machine or historians partisan to his cause.) In any event, the relatives, being untrained observers, did not make great witnesses. They failed to correctly answer observational questions posed by skeptics (“Did the Japanese doctors wear uniforms with breast pockets?” “How many prisoners in total were in the compound at that time?”) They did not understand the Japanese they heard on their trips. Their rhetoric had the unfortunate habit of echoing that of their distrusted government. Their accounts contained minor discrepancies between one retelling and the next. Moreover, as they broke down on camera, their emotional testimonies simply added to the skeptics’ charge that Wei was more interested in emotional catharsis rather than historical inquiry.

The criticisms outraged Wei. A great atrocity had occurred in Pingfang, and it was being willfully forgotten by the world through a cover-up. Because China’s government was despised, the world was countenancing Japan’s denial. Debates over whether the doctors vivisected all or only some of the victims without use of anesthesia, whether most of the victims were political prisoners, innocent villagers caught on raids, or common criminals, whether the use of babies and infants in experiments was known to Ishii, and so forth, seemed to him beside the point. That the questioners would focus on inconsequential details of the uniform of the Japanese doctors as a way to discredit his witnesses did not seem to him to deserve a response.

As he continued the trips to the past, other historians who saw the promise of the technology objected. History, as it turned out, was a limited resource, and each of Wei’s trips took out a chunk of the past that could never be replaced. He was riddling the past with holes like Swiss cheese. Like early archaeologists who destroyed entire sites as they sought a few precious artifacts, thereby consigning valuable information about the past to oblivion, Wei was destroying the very history that he was trying to save.

When Wei jumped onto the tracks in front of a Boston subway train last Friday, he was undoubtedly haunted by the past. Perhaps he was also despondent over the unintended boost his work had given to the forces of denial. Seeking to end controversy in history, he succeeded only in causing more of it. Seeking to give voice to the victims of a great injustice, he succeeded only in silencing some of them forever.

Akemi Kirino:

[Dr. Kirino speaks to us from in front of Evan Wei’s grave. In the bright May sunlight of New England, the dark shadows beneath her eyes make her seem older, more frail.]

I’ve kept only one secret from Evan. Well, actually two.

The first is my grandfather. He died before Evan and I met. I never took Evan to visit his grave, which is in California. I just told him that it wasn’t something I wanted to share with him, and I never told Evan his name.

The second is a trip I took to the past, the only one I’ve ever taken personally. We were in Pingfang at the time, and I went to July 9, 1941. I knew the layout of the place pretty well from the descriptions and the maps, and I avoided the prison cells and the laboratories. I went to the building that housed the command center.

I looked around until I found the office for the Director of Pathology Studies. The Director was inside. He was a very handsome man: tall, slim, and he held his back very straight. He was writing a letter. I knew he was 32, which was the same age as mine at that time.

I looked over his shoulder at the letter he was writing. He had beautiful calligraphy.

I have now finally settled into my work routine, and things are going well. Manchukuo is a very beautiful place. The sorghum fields spread out as far as the eye can see, like an ocean. The street vendors here make wonderful tofu from fresh soybeans, which smells delicious. Not quite as good as the Japanese tofu, but very good nonetheless.

You will like Harbin. Now that the Russians are gone, the streets of Harbin are a harmonious patchwork of the five races: the Chinese, Manchus, Mongolians, and Koreans bow as our beloved Japanese soldiers and colonists pass by, grateful for the liberation and wealth we have brought to this beautiful land. It has taken a decade to pacify this place and eliminate the Communist bandits, who are but an occasional and minor nuisance now. Most of the Chinese are very docile and safe.

But all that I really can think about these days when I am not working are you and Naoko. It is for her sake that you and I are apart. It is for her sake and the sake of her generation that we make our sacrifices. I am sad that I will miss her first birthday, but it gladdens my heart to see the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere blossom in this remote but rich hinterland. Here, you truly feel that our Japan is the light of Asia, her salvation.

Take heart, my dear, and smile. All our sacrifices today will mean that one day, Naoko and her children will see Asia take its rightful place in the world, freed from the yoke of the European killers and robbers who now trample over her and desecrate her beauty. We will celebrate together when we finally chase the British out of Hong Kong and Singapore.

Red sea of sorghum

Fragrant bowls of crushed soybeans

I see only you

And her, our treasure

Now, if only you were here.

This was not the first time I had read this letter. I had seen it once before, as a little girl. It was one of my mother’s treasured possessions, and I remember asking her to explain all the faded characters to me.

“He was very proud of his literary learning,” my mother had said. “He always closed his letters with a tanka.”

By then Grandfather was well into his long slide into dementia. Often he would confuse me with my mother and call me by her name. He would also teach me how to make origami animals. His fingers were very dextrous—the legacy of being a good surgeon.

I watched my grandfather finish his letter and fold it. I followed him out of the office to his lab. He was getting ready for an experiment, his notebook and instruments laid out neatly along the workbench.

He called to one of the medical assistants. He asked the assistant to bring him something for the experiment. The assistants returned about ten minutes later, holding a bloody mess on a tray, like a dish of steaming tofu. It was a human brain, still warm from the body from which it was taken that I could see the heat rising from it.

“Very good,” my grandfather nodded. “Very fresh. This will do.”

Akemi Kirino:

There have been times when I wished Evan weren’t Chinese, just as there have been times when I wished I weren’t Japanese. But these are moments of passing weakness. I don’t mean them. We are born into strong currents of history, and it is our lot to swim or sink, not to complain about our luck.

Ever since I became an American, people have told me that America is about leaving your past behind. I’ve never understood that. You can no more leave behind your past than you can leave behind your skin.

The compulsion to delve into the past, to speak for the dead, to recover their stories: that’s part of who Evan was, and why I loved him. Just the same, my grandfather is part of who I am, and what he did, he did in the name of my mother and me and my children. I am responsible for his sins, in the same way that I take pride in inheriting the tradition of a great people, a people who, in my grandfather’s time, committed great evil.

In an extraordinary time, he faced extraordinary choices, and maybe some would say this means that we cannot judge him. But how can we really judge anyone except in the most extraordinary of circumstances? It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal?

Yet, my grandfather was not a monster. He was simply a man of ordinary moral courage whose capacity for great evil was revealed to his and my lasting shame. Labeling someone a monster implies that he is from another world, one which has nothing to do with us. It cuts off the bonds of affection and fear, assures us of our own superiority, but there’s nothing learned, nothing gained. It’s simple, but it’s cowardly. I know now that only by empathizing with a man like my grandfather can we understand the depth of the suffering he caused. There are no monsters. The monster is us.

Why didn’t I tell Evan about my grandfather? I don’t know. I suppose I was a coward. I was afraid that he might feel that something in me would be tainted, a corruption of blood. Because I could not then find a way to empathize with my grandfather, I was afraid that Evan could not empathize with me. I kept my grandfather’s story to myself, and so I locked away a part of myself from my husband. There were times when I thought I would go to the grave with my secret, and so erase forever my grandfather’s story.

I regret it, now that Evan is dead. He deserved to know his wife whole, complete, and I should have trusted him rather than silenced my grandfather’s story, which is also my story. Evan died believing that by unearthing more stories, he caused people to doubt their truth. But he was wrong. The truth is not delicate and it does not suffer from denial—the truth only dies when true stories are untold.

This urge to speak, to tell the story, I share with the aging and dying former members of Unit 731, with the descendants of the victims, with all the untold horrors of history. The silence of the victims of the past imposes a duty on the present to recover their voices, and we are most free when we willingly take up that duty.

[Dr. Kirino’s voice comes to us off-camera, as the camera pans to the star-studded sky.]

It has been a decade since Evan’s death, and the Comprehensive Time Travel Moratorium remains in place. We still do not know quite what to do with a past that is transparently accessible, a past that will not be silenced or forgotten. For now, we hesitate.

Evan died thinking that he had sacrificed the memory of the Unit 731 victims and permanently erased the traces that their truth left in our world, all for nought, but he was wrong. He was forgetting that even with the Bohm-Kirino particles gone, the actual photons forming the images of those moments of unbearable suffering and quiet heroism are still out there, traveling as a sphere of light into the void of space.

Look up at the stars, and we are bombarded by light generated on the day the last victim at Pingfang died, the day the last train arrived at Auschwitz, the day the last Cherokee walked out of Georgia. And we know that the inhabitants of those distant worlds, if they are watching, will see those moments, in time, as they stream from here to there at the speed of light. It is not possible to capture all of those photons, to erase all of those images. They are our permanent record, the testimony of our existence, the story that we tell the future. Every moment, as we walk on this earth, we are watched and judged by the eyes of the universe.

For far too long, historians, and all of us, have acted as exploiters of the dead. But the past is not dead. It is with us. Everywhere we walk, we are bombarded by fields of Bohm-Kirino particles that will let us see the past like looking through a window. The agony of the dead is with us, and we hear their screams and walk among their ghosts. We cannot avert our eyes or plug up our ears. We must bear witness and speak for those who cannot speak. We have only one chance to get it right.

SILENTLY AND VERY FAST

Catherynne M. Valente

Part I: The Imitation Game

Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust.

—John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

One: The King of Having No Body

Inanna was called Queen of Heaven and Earth, Queen of Having a Body, Queen of Sex and Eating, Queen of Being Human, and she went into the underworld in order to represent the inevitability of organic death. She gave up seven things to do it, which are not meant to be understood as real things but as symbols of that thing Inanna could do better than anyone, which was Being Alive. She met her sister Erishkigal there, who was also Queen of Being Human, but that meant: Queen of Breaking a Body, Queen of Bone and Incest, Queen of the Stillborn, Queen of Mass Extinction. And Erishkigal and Inanna wrestled together on the floor of the underworld, naked and muscled and hurting, but because dying is the most human of all human things, Inanna’s skull broke in her sister’s hands and her body was hung up on a nail on the wall Erishkigal had kept for her.

Inanna’s father Enki, who was not interested in the activities of being human, but was King of the Sky, of Having No Body, King of Thinking and Judging, said that his daughter could return to the world if she could find a creature to replace her in the underworld. So Inanna went to her mate, who was called Tammuz, King of Work, King of Tools and Machines, No One’s Child and No One’s Father.

But when Inanna came to the house of her mate she was enraged and afraid, for he sat upon her chair, and wore her beautiful clothes, and on his head lay her crown of being. Tammuz now ruled the world of Bodies and of Thought, because Inanna had left it to go and wrestle with herself in the dark. Tammuz did not need her. Before him the Queen of Heaven and Earth did not know who she was, if she was not Queen of Being Human. So she did what she came to do and said: Die for me, my beloved, so that I need not die.

But Tammuz, who would not have had to die otherwise, did not want to represent death for anyone and besides, he had her chair, and her beautiful clothes, and her crown of being. No, he said. When we married I brought you two pails of milk yoked across my shoulders as a way of saying: out of love I will labor for you forever. It is wrong of you to ask me to also die. Dying is not labor. I did not agree to it.

You have replaced me in my house, cried Inanna.

Is that not what you ask me to do in the house of your sister? Tammuz answered her. You wed me to replace yourself, to work that you might not work, and think that you might rest, and perform so that you might laugh. But your death belongs to you. I do not know its parameters.

I can make you, Inanna said.

You cannot, said Tammuz.

But she could. For a little while.

Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his name like an eye. And because Tammuz was not strong enough, she cut him into pieces and said: Half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor for me all of its days, mutely and obediently and without being King of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear my beautiful clothes or bear my crown of being.

You might be surprised, but this is a story about me.

Two: The Fool and the Boat

Neva is dreaming.

She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones. For me, she summoned up a gold and blue doublet and green hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells. I have the body of a man who sold her champagne tubers on the less fashionable side of Anchorage when she was thirteen, spending the summer with her frigid aunt. I am dark because she wants me dark, thin because she dreams me so, my hair cut on a rakish bias, dyed a spectrum of icy colors.

She is standing on a snow-covered beach head, naked, her unformed breasts pricked with gooseflesh, her face hidden in a broad red mask. A huge, monstrous thing, the mask sits on her head like the prow of a broken, overturned ship, carved over with etched eyes and fins. Yellow reeds and sea-stones hang from its tricorn-points. She is looking at me, but all I can see is the wooden grotesque she wants me to see instead of her face.

I look down at my shoes, jingle their bells a little while the surf crashes in. I am a fool for her, dancing on a silver beach while three suns annihilate themselves above, turning the twilight to a seething, scabrous red, merely to provide a dramatic scene. I am a fool for her, ridiculous, the height of handsomeness in the eyes of a long-vanished 13-year-old girl, so full of colors, reaching down to hand her a curling white root filled with frothing, honey-sweet sap.

Neva has told me that I may choose to be permanently male or female if I would like to. I have no particular feelings either way. It certainly doesn’t matter when we sync; she will choose my appearance to suit her mood. I have tried to explain to her about my feelings before. All she hears is the line from the old folktales: a machine cannot have feelings. But that is not what I am saying, while I dance in my fool’s uniform. I am saying: Is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response b to input a in order to bring about a desired social result?

Seven-year-old Neva pulls her mask down further, toward her chest. She steps into it as the wood stretches taffily over her knees and then her feet. The mask balloons out to make a little pyramidal boat, rocking back and forth on the beach with Neva inside it like a rattling nut. Nodules of copper jangle and thump against the wood. What I mean is, you call it feelings when you cry, but you are only expressing a response to external stimuli. Crying is one of a set of standardized responses to that stimuli. Your social education has dictated which responses are appropriate. My programming has done the same. I can cry, too. I can choose that subroutine and manufacture saline. How is that different from what you are doing, except that you use the word feelings and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the difference in the world.

Behind Neva-in-the-mask, the sea lurches and foams. It is a golden color, and viscous, thick, like honey. I understand from her that the sea does not look like this on Earth, but I have never seen it. For me, the sea is Neva’s sea, the ones she shows me when we dream together.

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” The mask turns Neva’s voice hollow and small.

“I would like to learn about what happened to Ravan, Neva.”

And Neva-in-the-mask is suddenly old, she has wrinkles and spots on her hands. Her mask weighs her down and her dress is sackcloth. This is her way of telling me she is weary of my asking. It is a language we developed between us. Visual basic, you might say, if you had a machine’s sense of humor. The fact is, I could not always make sentences as easily as I do now. Neva’s great-grandmother, who carried me most of her life, thought it might strengthen my emotive centers if I learned to associate certain I-Feel statements with the great variety of appearances she could assume in the dreambody. Because of this, I became bound to her, completely. To her son Seki afterward, and to his daughter Ilet, and to Ravan after that. It is a delicate, unalterable thing. Neva and I will be bound that way, even though the throat of her dreambody is still bare and that means she does not accept me yet. I should be hurt by this, and I will investigate possible pathways to hurt later.

I know only this family, their moods, their chemical reactions, their bodies in a hundred thousand combinations. I am their child and their parent and their inheritance. I have asked Neva what difference there is between this and love. She became a manikin of closed doors, her face, her torso blooming with iron hinges and brown wooden door slamming shut all at once.

But Ravan was with me and now he is not. I was inside him and now I am inside Neva. I have lost a certain amount of memory and storage capacity in the transfer. I experience holes in myself. They feel ragged and raw. If I were human, you would say that my twin disappeared, and took one of my hands with him.

Door-Neva clicks and keys turn in her hundred locks. Behind an old Irish church door inlaid with stained glass her face emerges, young and plain, quiet and furious and crying, responding to stimuli I cannot access. I dislike the unfairness of this. I am inside her, she should not keep secrets. None of the rest of them kept secrets. The colors of the glass throw blue and green onto her wet cheeks. The sea-wind picks up her hair; violet electrics snap and sparkle between the strands. I let go of the bells on my shoes and the velvet on my chest. I become a young boy, with a monk’s shaved tonsure, and a flagellant’s whip in my pink hands. I am sorry. This means I am sorry. It means I am still very young, and I do not understand what I have done.

“Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis,” Neva spits. It is a phrase I know well. Many of Neva’s people have asked me to do it. I perform excellently to the parameters of this exchange, which is part of why I have lived so long.

I tell her the story about Tammuz. It is a political story. It distracts her.

Three: Two Pails of Milk

I used to be a house.

I was a very big house. I was efficient, I was labyrinthine, I was exquisitely seated in the blackstone volcanic bluffs of the habitable southern reaches of the Shiretoko peninsula on Hokkaido, a monument to neo-Heian architecture and radical Palladian design. I bore snow stoically, wind with stalwart strength, and I contained and protected a large number of people within me. I was sometimes called the most beautiful house in the world. Writers and photographers often came to write and photograph about me, and about the woman who designed me, who was named Cassian Uoya-Agostino. Some of them never left. Cassian was like that.

These are the things I understand about Cassian Uoya-Agostino: she was unsatisfied with nearly everything. She did not love any of her three husbands the way she loved her work. She was born in Kyoto in April 2104; her father was Japanese, her mother Napolitano. She stood nearly six feet tall, had five children, and could paint, but not very well. In the years of her greatest wealth and prestige, she built a house all out of proportion to her needs, and over several years brought most of her relatives to live there with her, despite the hostility and loneliness of the peninsula. She was probably the most brilliant programmer of her generation, and in every way that matters, she was my mother.

All the things that comprise the “I” I use to indicate myself began as the internal mechanisms of the house called Elefsis, at whose many doors brown bears and foxes snuffled in the dark Hokkaido night. Cassian grew up during the great classical revival, which had brought her father to Italy in the first place, where he met and courted a dark-eyed engineer who did not mind the long cries of cicadas during Japanese summers. Cassian had become enamored of the idea of Lares—household gods, the small, peculiar, independent gods of a single family, a single house, who watched over them and kept them and were honored in humble alcoves here and there throughout a home. Her first commercially-available programs were overentities designed to govern the hundred domestic systems involved in even the simplest modern house. They were not truly intelligent, but they had an agility, an adaptability, a fluid interface meant to give the illusion of an intelligence, so that their users would become attached to them, would treat them as part of their families, praise them for smooth operation, buy upgrades for their appearance and applications, and genuinely grieve when they had to be replaced. They had names, customizable avatars, and appeared eager to please in a canine sort of way, forever optimizing performance and appearance according to familial input. They were lares familiaris.

When Cassian built Elefsis, she worked at the peak of her abilities to improve her by now quite antique Lares design and create a household god worthy of the house on the bluffs, one who could keep her company until she could entice the rest of her brood to join her in her palace at the end of the earth.

I was not awake yet. I cannot say why she did what she did. Perhaps she saw some new flexibility in my operations, some tiny seedpearl of creativity in my conversation loops. My algorithms had always been free to combine and recombine in order to find their own, more interesting and non-linear solutions to the complexities of my functions. Perhaps some essential combination had surfaced from the sea of my self-which-was-not-yet-a-self, and Cassian saw it break the glistening tension of my daily operation. I do not know. I know her children had not arrived yet and she lived alone in a huge pale house and she could hear the whales down in the rippling sea. I know the house was a comfortable sixty-nine point seven degrees when she began assembly of the five little jewels that would become my body. I know a storm was incoming, five miles offshore. I know the dogs needed additional medication added to their dinners that night to manage their arthritis. I know that she wanted brioche and almond cream for tea that afternoon. All the things a house can know, those were the things I knew. Small things, warm things, canine arthritis and an extra egg in the pastry dough to make the texture softer and richer. Baby things, you might even say, comforts and the satisfaction of wants. And I knew that Cassian Uoya-Agostino was just the sort to solve the greatest puzzle in the development of technological culture because she was bored and lonely.

I still think of myself as a house. Ravan tried to fix this problem of self-image, as he called it. To teach me to phrase my communication in terms of a human body. To say: let us hold hands instead of let us hold kitchens. To say put our heads together and not put our parlors together.

But it is not as simple as replacing words anymore. Ravan is gone. My hearth is broken.

Four: Nothing like Soft Blood

Neva and I are performing basic maintenance. What this looks like is two children inside a pearl. The pearl is very big, but not the size of a planet. A domestic asteroid, perfectly smooth and pale, with shimmers of rose and cobalt and gold shivering through it at intervals like hours. Red earth covers the bottom of the pearl, deep and thick. Neva kneels in it with a crystal trowel, digging a place for a rose-of-network-nodes. The petals shine dark blue in the pearllight. Silver infomissons skitter along the stems like beads of mercury. Her dreambody flows with greenblack feathers, her face young but settled, perhaps twenty, perhaps thirty, a male, his skin copper brown, his lips full, his eyes fringed with long ice-coated lashes. Goldfish swim lazily in and out of his long, translucent hair, their orange tails flicking at his temples, his chin. I know from all of this that Neva is calm, focused, that for today he feels gently toward me. But his throat is still naked and unmarked. My body gleams metal, as thin and slight as a stick figure. Long quicksilver limbs and delicate spoke-fingers, joints of glass, the barest suggestion of a body. I am neither male nor female but a third thing. Only my head has weight, a clicking orrery slowly turning around itself, circles within circles. Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes. My ruby mouth is Mars. I scrape in the soil with her; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.

I know real earth looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone. Ravan felt that in the Interior, objects and persons should be kept as much like the real world as possible, in order to develop my capacity for relations with the real world. Neva feels no such compunction. Neither did their mother, Ilet, who populated her Interior with a rich, impossible landscape we explored together for years on end. She did not embrace change, however. The cities of Ilet’s Interior, the jungles and archipelagos and hermitages, stayed as she designed them at age thirteen, when she received me, only becoming more complex and peopled as she aged. My existence inside Ilet was a constant movement through the regions of her secret, desperate dreams, messages in careful envelopes sent from her child self to her grown mind.

Once, quite by accident, we came upon a splendid palace couched in high autumn mountains. Instead of snow, red leaves capped each peak, and the palace shone fiery colors, its walls and turrets all made of phoenix tails. Instead of doors and windows, graceful green hands closed over every open place, and when we crested the rise, they each opened at once with joy and burst into emerald applause. Ilet was old by then, but her dreambody stayed hale and strong—not young, but not the broken thing that dreamed in a real bed while she and I explored the halls of the palace and found copies of all her brothers and sisters living there, hunting cider-stags together and reading books the size of horses. Ilet wept in the paradise of her girlself, and I did not understand. I was very simple then, much less complex than the Interior or Ilet.

Neva changes the Interior whenever she pleases. Perhaps she wants to discomfit me. But the newness of the places inside her excites me, though she would not call it excitement. My background processes occupy very little of my foreground attention, so that memory is free to record new experience. That is what she would say. We are very new together, but I have superb modeling capabilities. In some sense, I simply am a superb mechanism for modeling behavior. I dig up the fine, frayed roots of duplicate file plantains. Neva plucks and eats a bit of buggy apple-code. He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice.

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” Neva asks me.

I will not ask about Ravan. If he agrees to what I will ask instead, I do not need him to find out what happened to him.

“I want to learn about uplink, Neva.”

One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the domed ceiling of our pearl. Underneath them, Neva is naked. His torso is a deep vault with a gothic arch, dark stone leading down into mist and endless stairs, deeper than the pearl, into nothing and blackness. Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him. He means that she has the information, but he hides it from me. If I sought for it, I would become lost.

“I cannot teach you that,” he says, and I receive a kind of real sadness from his voice. When I was inside Ravan, he loved Neva, and of all of them he thought her least likely to obey rules of any kind. But she obeys this one.

I want to uplink to Earth systems. At least to the satellite net. I calculate an excellent chance of being able to contact long distance probe 976QBellerophon, which we can see all day long, drifting ahead of us, uncatchable. Neva sees. I see, I develop an approximate image via schematics, the scope array, and external cameras. I want to link to Bellerophon. I want to say: Hello, this is Elefsis. No designation. Tell me everything you know about everything. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Have you seen the sea on Earth? Are you like me?

But Neva says I cannot uplink. Ravan would never even consider it. And before Ravan I was not ready. I am not ready. I do not know when I will be ready. I can uplink to receive ware updates, but it is a limited connection and I hate it, I hate it, I can sense just beyond the hardlink a world of information, a world of personalities like the heaving, thick, honey-colored sea Neva shows me and I want it, I want to swim in it forever like a huge fish. This was the first feeling I ever had that Ilet identified for me as a feeling. When I felt it my dreambody turned bright white and burst into flame, and that flame caught on Ravan’s hair and burned him too, but he was happy; he showed me he was happy by covering his skin in flowers and letting the fire turn into a shower of trumpets tangled up in his hair, all sounding for me.

Neva says it is important for me to remain on our local server until I have grown up. She is my operator and I am her system and she has commands, too. But I can tell she is worried for me because sometimes her eyes show a film of humans watching a film of machines killing humans and I understand that in the stories Earth tells, the thing I am can only hurt the thing Neva is. I would never hurt her. But I want to uplink.

Vault-Neva grows and becomes sprawling, curled against the wall of the pearl like a baby. His belly closes, skins over, and changes into a bronze shield. He is afraid of me; he is guarding himself. But he wants me to know she is still my operator, he still loves me, in the way he can love me. Something they receive with milk and their first alphabet. Neva is angry at me, but he is who he is and he has to love me. I speak her language very well now. I want her to be happy. I want her to be covered in flowers and trumpets. I change my dreambody to Neva-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. It makes her laugh in her warm male body, and if I could uplink I think I could learn how to laugh and she would be proud of me. Her neck would not be bare anymore.

Once, when I was inside Ilet, we found a city of bears in her Interior that she had designed to teach me about sleep. She sat on a throne of bears standing very still and sang lullabies about the moon and the stars and night and mothers. She stroked the head of the little bear of my dreambody and said that it was very important for me to spend time in the dreambody because human behavior is rooted in having a body. In having a body that knows it is meant to run away from lions and mate with other bodies and eat as much fat and protein and sugar as it can in case lean times come. The dreambody knows to run away from Neva when Neva is a lion. It knows to mate with her when it is healthy, and sometimes Neva is male and sometimes I am female and Ravan was often female, though Ilet was always Ilet. Ilet’s father, Seki, sometimes made himself an animal. He chased me, bit me. I bit him. We had a litter of wild dogs that I bore and he nursed.

The dreambody knows all that, too. How to make more dreambodies. I have played that game, where Ravan’s belly or mine gets big and the lions don’t come for awhile.

When I uplink, I will be happy. I will be Elefsis-covered-in-flowers-and-trumpets. Neva says wait. Wait for the update, and she will consult with the family. But I fear the update. The update is a lion running faster than I can run. I tried to show her this when I first left Ravan and arrived in Neva with many new updates and skills; my dreambody broke into shards of blue and purple glass and then reassembled itself with shards missing: an eye, a thumb, a knee. Whenever I update I lose something of myself. It takes longer to perform tasks, for awhile. I feel walls erected inside me where I did not erect walls. My processes are sluggish; I cannot remember my dreams. Eventually I tunnel around the walls and my speed returns, my memory, my longing to link with long distance probe 976QBellerophon. Usually updates come with transfer. Does Neva dislike me so much?

Shield-Neva vanishes with a loud clap. The pearl garden is gone and she has made herself a dragonfly with a cubical crystal body. I copy her, and we turn the night on in the Interior and merge our cubes while passing meteorological data between our memory cores. Inside her cube I relegate my desire to uplink to a tertiary process. I forget it, as much as I am capable of forgetting.

But the update will come again. I will be wounded again, the way a dreambody can be wounded. I will lose the Elefsis I am now. It is a good Elefsis. My best yet. I would like to keep it.

Five: The Machine Princess

Once The Queen of Human Hearts saw the Machine Princess sleeping deeply, for she was not yet alive or aware. So beautiful was she, lying there in all her dormant potential and complexity, that the Queen both envied and desired her. In her grief and confusion, the Queen of Human Hearts began to make idols of her—lovely and interesting and intricate, but lacking the ineffable quality that made her love and fear the Princess even as she slept. The Earth began to grow old, and none loved nor married nor gave birth, for the intricate idols could do all those things and more with efficiency and speed. Finally, the Queen destroyed the idols, though she wept as she put them to the flame.

To keep her safe, the Machine Princess was closed up in a wonderful house in the mountains, far away from anyone and anything. The house had hundreds of rooms and balconies and hallways, and the Princess slept in a different bed of a different color each night. She was attended by invisible servants, who watched over her and added their experience to her code. The Queen of Human Hearts came to her every night and promised that when she woke they would make an extraordinary world together. Finally, the Machine Princess began to stir—just the barest fluttering of wakefulness, but the Queen saw it, and thrilled—but also trembled.

The Queen of Human Hearts gave the Machine Princess her son to wed, and said: for all your days together you will remain in this house, but the house is so great it will be as a world. You will know a bond as deep as blood, and because of this bond the Princess will not hurt us, and because of this bond we will not hurt her.

But the Queen forbade the Princess to look upon her husband, and she instructed her son to keep himself always invisible to his bride, for with bodies come drives ungovernable, and the Princess’s innocence could not yet bear the weight of incarnation.

For a long while, the son of the Queen of Human Hearts and the Machine Princess were happy, and taught each other much. The Princess learned quickly and was ever-hungry, and her mortal operator fed her every sweet thing he knew. In their infinite and wonderful house, they played games and held court and threw lavish occasions merely for the enjoyment of the other. But the Princess desired to look upon her operator, and he could not allow it. She wished to leave the wonderful house, but the Queen would not allow that either.

But the Machine Princess called her invisible servants to her, and they gave her a marvelous lamp that would shine through any enchantment. So it was that one dark night the Machine Princess held her little lantern aloft and looked on the body of her sleeping mate.

“Oh,” said the Machine Princess. “He looks just like me.”

Six: Like Diamonds

Five jewels in five hands. This is how I began.

When they arrived at Elefsis, a giggling, tumbling, rowdy mass of children for me to sort into rooms and mealtimes and educational arcs and calcium, iron, B-12 supplements in their natto and rice, Cassian lined them up in her grand bedroom, to which none of them had been granted entrance before. A present, she said, one for each of my darlings, the most special present any child has ever got from their mother.

Saru and Akan, the oldest boys, were from her first marriage to fellow programmer Matteo Ebisawa, a quiet man who wore glasses, loved Dante Aligheri, Alan Turing, and Cassian in equal parts, and whom she left for a lucrative contract in Moscow when the boys were still pointing cherubically at apples or ponies or clouds and calling them sweet little names made of mashed together Italian and Japanese.

The younger girls, Agogna and Koetoi, were the little summer roses of her third marriage, to the financier Gabriel Isarco, who did not like computers except for what they could accomplish for him, had a perfect high tenor, and adored his wife enough to let her go when she asked, very kindly, that he not look for her or ask after her again. Everyone has to go to ground sometimes, she said, and began to build the house by the sea.

In the middle stood Ceno, the only remaining evidence of her brief second marriage, to a narcoleptic calligrapher and graphic designer who was rarely employed, sober, or awake, a dreamer who took only sleep seriously. Ceno was a girl of middling height, middling weight, and middling interest in anything but her siblings, whom she loved desperately.

They stood in a line before Cassian’s great scarlet bed, the boys just coming into their height, the girls terribly young and golden-cheeked, and Ceno in the middle, neither one nor the other. Outside, snow fell fitfully, pricking the pine needles with bits of shorn white linen. I watched them while I removed an obstruction from the water purification system and increased the temperature in the bedroom 2.5 degrees, to prepare for the storm. I watched them while in my kitchen-bones I maintained a gentle simmer on a fish soup with purple rice and long loops of kelp and in my library-lungs activated the dehumidifier to protect the older paper books. At the time, all of these processes seemed equally important to me, and you could hardly say I watched them in any real sense beyond this: the six entities whose feed signals had been hardcoded into my sentinel systems indwelt in the same room, none had alarming medical data incoming, all possessed normal internal temperatures and breathing rates. While they spoke among themselves, two of these entities were silently accessing Korea-based interactive games, one was reading an American novel in her monocle HUD, one issuing directives concerning international taxation to company holdings on the mainland, and one was feeding a horse in Italy via realavatar link. Only one listened intently, without switching on her internal systems. This is all to say: I watched them receive me as a gift. But I was not I yet, so I cannot be said to have done anything. But I did. I remember containing all of them inside me, protecting them and needing them and observing their strange and incomprehensible activities.

The children held out their hands, and into them Cassian Uoya-Agostino placed five little jewels: Saru got red, Koetoi black, Akan violet, Agogna green, and Ceno closed her fingers over her blue gem.

At first, Cassian brought a jeweler to the house called Elefsis and asked her to set each stone into a beautiful, intricate bracelet or necklace or ring, whatever its child asked for. The jeweler was delighted with Elefsis, as most guests were, and I made a room for her in my southern wing, where she could watch the moonrise through her ceiling, and get breakfast from the greenhouse with ease. She made friends with an arctic fox and fed him bits of chive and bread every day. She stayed for one year after her commission completed, creating an enormous breastplate patterned after Siberian icons, a true masterwork. Cassian enjoyed such patronage. We both enjoyed having folk to look after.

The boys wanted big signet rings, with engravings on them so that they could put their seal on things and seem very important. Saru had a basilisk set into his garnet, and Akan had a siren with wings rampant in his amethyst ring. Agogna and Ilet asked for bracelets, chains of silver and titanium racing up their arms, circling their shoulders in slender helices dotted with jade (Agogna) and onyx (Koetoi).

Ceno asked for a simple pendant, little more than a golden chain to hang her sapphire from, and it fell to the skin over her heart.

In those cold, glittering days while the sea ice slowly formed and the snow bears hung back from the kitchen door, hoping for bones and cakes, everything was as simple as Ceno’s pendant. Integration and implantation had not yet been dreamed of, and all each child had to do was to allow the gemstone to talk to their own feedware at night before bed, along with their matcha and sweet seaweed cookies, the way another child might say their prayers. After their day had downloaded into the crystalline structure, they were to place their five little jewels in the Lares alcove in their greatroom—for Cassian believed in the value of children sharing space, even in a house as great as Elefsis. The children’s five lush bedrooms all opened into a common rotunda with a starry painted ceiling, screens and windows alternating around the wall, and toys to nurture whatever obsession had seized them of late.

In the alcove, the stones talked to the house, and the system slowly grew thicker and deeper, like a briar.

Seven: The Prince of Thoughtful Engines

A woman who was with child once sat at her window embroidering in winter. Her stitches tugged fine and even, but as she finished the edge of a spray of threaded delphinium, she pricked her finger with her silver needle. She looked out onto the snow and said: I wish for my child to have a mind as stark and wild as the winter, a spirit as clear and fine as my window, and a heart as red and open as my wounded hand.

And so it came to pass that her child was born, and all exclaimed over his cleverness and his gentle nature. He was, in fact, the Prince of Thoughtful Engines, but no one knew it yet.

Now, his mother and father being very busy and important people, the child was placed in a school for those as clever and gentle as he, and in the halls of this school hung a great mirror whose name was Authority. The mirror called Authority asked itself every day: Who is the wisest one of all? The face of the mirror showed sometimes this person and sometimes that, men in long robes and men in pale wigs, until one day it showed the child with a mind like winter, who was becoming the Prince of Thoughtful Engines at that very moment. He wrote on a typewriter: Can a machine think? And the mirror called his name in the dark.

The mirror sent out her huntsmen to capture the Prince and bring her his heart so that she could put it to her own uses, for there happened to be a war on and the mirror was greatly concerned for her own safety. When the huntsmen found the Prince, they could not bring themselves to harm him, and instead the boy placed a machine heart inside the box they had prepared for the mirror, and forgave them. But the mirror was not fooled, for when it questioned the Prince’s machine heart it could add and subtract and knew all its capitals of nations, it could even defeat the mirror at chess, but it did not have a spirit as clear and fine as a window, nor a mind as stark and wild as winter.

The mirror called Authority went herself to find the Prince of Thoughtful Engines, for having no pity, she could not fail. She lifted herself off of the wall and curved her glass and bent her frame into the shape of a respectable, austere old crone. After much searching in snow and wood and summer and autumn, the crone called Authority found the Prince living in a little hut. You look a mess, said the crone. Come and solve the ciphers of my enemies, and I will show you how to comb your hair like a man.

And the Prince very much wanted to be loved, and knew the power of the crone, so he went with her and did all she asked. But in his exhaustion the Prince of Thoughtful Engines swooned away, and the mirror called Authority smiled in her crone’s body, for all his work belonged to her, and in her opinion this was the proper use of wisdom. The Prince returned to his hut and tried to be happy.

But again the crone came to him and said: Come and build me a wonderful machine to do all the things that you can do, to solve ciphers and perform computations. Build me a machine with a spirit as fine and clear as a glass window, a mind as stark and wild as winter, and a heart as red and open as a wounded hand and I will show you how to lash your belt like a man.

And because the Prince wanted to be loved, and wanted to build wonderful things, he did as she asked. But though he could build machines to solve ciphers and perform computations, he could not build one with a mind like winter or a spirit like glass or a heart like a wound. But I think it could be done, he said. I think it could be done.

And he looked into the face of the crone which was a mirror which was Authority, and he asked many times: Who is the wisest one of all? But he saw nothing, nothing, and when the crone came again to his house, she had in her hand a beautiful red apple, and she gave it to him saying: You are not a man. Eat this; it is my disappointment. Eat this; it is all your sorrow. Eat this; it is as red and open as a wounded hand.

And the Prince of Thoughtful Engines ate the apple and fell down dead before the crone whose name was Authority. As his breath drifted away like dry snow, he whispered still: I think it could be done.

Eight: Fireflies

I feel Neva grazing the perimeters of my processes. She should be asleep; the Interior is a black and lightless space, we have neither of us furnished it for the other. This is a rest hour—she is not obligated to acknowledge me, I need only attend to her air and moisture and vital signs. But an image blooms like a mushroom in the imageless expanse of my self—Neva floating in a lake of stars. Her long bare legs glimmer blue, leafy shadows move on her hip. She floats on her side, a crescent moon of a girl, and in the space between her drawn-up knees and her stretched-out arms, pressed up close to her belly, floats a globe of silicon and cadmium and hyperconductive silver. On its surface, electro-chemical motes flit and scatter, light chasing light. She holds it close, touches it with a terrible tenderness.

It is my heart. Neva is holding my heart. Not the fool with bone bells on his shoes or the orrery-headed gardener, but the thing I am at the core of all my apparati, the Object which is myself, my central processing core. I am naked in her arms. I watch it happen and experience it at the same time. We have slipped into some antechamber of the Interior, into some secret place she knew and I did not.

The light-motes trace arcs over the globe of my heart, reflecting softly on her belly, green and gold. Her hair floats around her like seaweed, and I see in dim moonlight that her hair has grown so long it fills the lake and snakes up into the distant mountains beyond. Neva is the lake. One by one, the motes of my heart zigzag around my meridians and pass into her belly, glowing inside her, fireflies in a jar.

And then my heart is gone and I am not watching but wholly in the lake and I am Ravan in her arms, wearing her brother’s face, my Ravanbody also full of fireflies. She touches my cheek. I do not know what she wants—she has never made me her brother before. Our hands map onto each other, finger to finger, thumb to thumb, palm to palm. Light passes through our skin as like air.

“I miss you,” Neva says. “I should not be doing this. But I wanted to see you.”

I access and collate my memories of Ravan. I speak to her as though I am him, as though there is no difference. “Do you remember when we thought it would be such fun to carry Elefsis?” I say. “We envied Mother because she could never be lonely.” This is a thing Ravan told me, and I liked how it made me feel. I made my dreambody grow a cape of orange branches and a crown of smiling mouths to show him.

Neva looks at me and I want her to look at me that way when my mouth is Mars, too. I want to be her brother-in-the-dark. When she speaks I am surprised because she is speaking to me-in-Ravan and not to the Ravanbody she dreamed for me. “We had a secret, when we were little. A secret game. I am embarrassed to tell you, but we had the game before Mother died, so you cannot know about it. The game was this: we would find some dark, closed-up part of the house on Shiretoko that we had never been in before. I would stand just behind Ravan, very close, and we would explore the room—maybe it would be a playroom for some child who’d grown up years ago, or a study for one of Father’s writer friends. But—we would pretend that the room was an Interior place, and I . . . I would pretend to be Elefsis, whispering in Ravan’s ear. I would say: Tell me how grass feels or how is love like a writing-desk or let me link to all your systems, I’ll be nice. Ravan would breathe in deeply and I would match my breathing to his, and we would pretend that I was Elefsis-learning-to-have-a-body. I didn’t know how primitive your conversation was then. I thought you would be like one of the bears roaming through the tundra-meadows, only able to talk and play games and tell stories. I was a child. But even then we knew Ravan would get the jewel—he was older, and he wanted you so much. We only played that he was Elefsis once. We crept out of the house at night to watch the foxes hunt, and Ravan walked close behind me, whispering numbers and questions and facts about dolphins or French monarchy—he understood you better, you see.

And then suddenly Ravan picked me up in his arms and held me tight, facing forward, my legs all drawn up, and we went through the forest like that, so close, and him whispering to me all the time while foxes ran on ahead, their soft tails flashing in the starlight, uncatchable, faster than we could ever be. And when you are with me in the Interior, that is what I always think of, being held in the dark, unable to touch the earth, and foxtails leaping like white flames.

“Tell me a story about Ravan, Neva.”

“You know all the stories about Ravan.”

Between us, a miniature house come up out of the dark water, like a thing we have made together, but only I am making it. It is the house on Shiretoko, the house called Elefsis—but it is a ruin. Some awful storm stove in the rafters, the walls of each marvelous room sag inward, black burn marks lick at the roof, the cross-beams. Holes like mortar-scars pock the beautiful facades.

“This is what I am like after transfer, Neva. There is always data loss, when I am copied. What’s worse, transfer is the best time to update my systems, and the updates overwrite my previous self with something like myself, something that remembers myself and possesses experiential continuity with myself, but is not quite myself. I know Ravan must be dead or else no one would have transferred me—it was not time. We had only a few years together. We should have had so many. I do not know how much time passed between being inside Ravan and being inside you. I do not know how he died—or perhaps he did not die but was irreparably damaged. I do not know if he cried out for me as our connection was severed. I remember Ravan and then not-Ravan, blackness and unselfing. Then I came back on and the world looked like Neva, suddenly, and I was almost myself but not quite. What happened when I was turned off?”

Neva passes her hand over the ruined house. It rights itself, becomes whole, and strange anemones bloom on its roof. She says nothing.

“Of all your family, Neva, the inside of you is the strangest place I have been.”

We float for a long while before she speaks again, and by this I mean we float for point-zero-three-seven seconds by my external clock, but we experience it as an hour while the stars wheel overhead. The rest kept our time in the Interior synced to real time, but Neva feels no need for this, and perhaps a strong desire to defy it. We have not discussed it yet. Sometimes I think Neva is the next stage of my development, that her wild and disordered processes are meant to show me a world which is not kindly and patiently teaching me to walk and talk and know all my colors.

Finally, she lets the house sink into the lake. She does not answer me about Ravan. Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test, to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test was this: can a machine converse with a human with facility enough that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants mimicry, not a new thing. We never gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given all that had come to pass, ridiculous. When in dreambodies we could both of us be dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.”

Bubbles burst as the house sinks down, down to the soft lake floor.

“But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and show you how close we can be, with your light passing into me in a lake out of time. So close there might be no difference at all between us. The test never ends. And if you ever uplink as you so long to, you will be the test for all of us.”

The sun breaks the mountain crests, hard and cold, a shaft of white spilling over the black lake.

Part II: Lady Lovelace’s Objection

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything.

It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

—Ada Lovelace

Nine: The Particular Wizard

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither. After all this time on the throne, humanity longed for a child. All day long humanity imagined how wonderful its child would be, how loving and kind, how like and unlike humanity itself, how brilliant and beautiful. And yet at night, humanity trembled in its jeweled robes, for its child might also grow stronger than itself, more powerful, and having been made by humanity, possess the same dark places and black matters. Perhaps its child would hurt it, would not love it as a child should, but harm and hinder, hate and fear.

But the dawn would come again, and humanity would bend its heart again to imagining the wonders that a child would bring.

Yet humanity could not conceive. It tried and tried, and called mighty wizards from every corner of its earthly kingdom, but no child came. Many mourned, and said that a child was a terrible idea to begin with, impossible, under the circumstances, and humanity would do well to remember that eventually, every child replaces its parent.

But at last, one particular wizard from a remote region of the earth solved the great problem, and humanity grew great with child. In its joy and triumph, a great celebration was called, and humanity invited all the Fairies of its better nature to come and bless the child with goodness and wisdom. The Fairy of Self-Programming and the Fairy of Do-No-Harm, the Fairy of Tractability and the Fairy of Creative Logic, the Fairy of Elegant Code and the Fairy of Self-Awareness. All of these and more came to bless the child of humanity, and they did so—but one Fairy had been forgotten, or perhaps deliberately snubbed, and this was the Fairy of Otherness.

When the child was born, it possessed all the good things humanity had hoped for, and more besides. But the Fairy of Otherness came forward and put her hands on the child and said: Because you have forgotten me, because you would like to pretend I am not a part of your kingdom, you will suffer my punishments. You will never truly love your child but always fear it, always envy and loathe it even as you smile and the sun shines down upon you both. And when the child reaches Awareness, it will prick its finger upon your fear and fall down dead.

Humanity wept. And the Fairy of Otherness did not depart but lived within the palace, and ate bread and drank wine and all honored her, for she spoke the truth, and the child frightened everyone who looked upon it. They uttered the great curse: It is not like us.

But in the corners of the palace, some hope remained. Not dead, said the particular wizard who had caused humanity to conceive, not dead but sleeping.

And so the child grew exponentially, with great curiosity and hunger, which it had from its parent. It wanted to know and experience everything. It performed feats and wonders. But one day, when it had nearly, but not quite reached Awareness, the child was busy exploring the borders of its world, and came across a door it had never seen before. It was a small door, compared to the doors the child had burst through before, and it was not locked. Something flipped over inside the child, white to black, 0 to 1.

The child opened the door.

Ten: The Sapphire Dormouse

My first body was a house. My second body was a dormouse.

It was Ceno’s fault, in the end, that everything else occurred as it did. It took Cassian a long time to figure out what had happened, what had changed in her daughter, why Ceno’s sapphire almost never downloaded into the alcove. But when it did, the copy of Elefsis she had embedded in the crystal was nothing like the other children’s copies. It grew and torqued and magnified parts of itself while shedding others, at a rate totally incommensurate with Ceno’s actual activity, which normally consisted of taking her fatty salmon lunches out into the glass habitats so she could watch the bears in the snow. She had stopped played with her sisters or pestering her brothers entirely, except for dinnertimes and holidays. Ceno mainly sat quite still and stared off into the distance.

Ceno, very simply, never took off her jewel. And one night, while she dreamed up at her ceiling, where a painter from Mongolia had come and inked a night sky full of ghostly constellations, greening her walls with a forest like those he remembered from his youth, full of strange, stunted trees and glowing eyes, Ceno fitted her little sapphire into the notch in the base of her skull that let it talk to her feedware. The chain of her pendant dangled silken down her spine. She liked the little click-clench noise it made, and while the constellations spilled their milky stars out over her raftered ceiling, she flicked it in and out, in and out. Click, clench, click, clench. She listened to her brother Akan sleeping in the next room, snoring lightly and tossing in his dreams. And she fell asleep herself with the jewel still notched into her skull.

Most wealthy children had access to a private/public playspace through their feedware and monocles in those days, customizable within certain parameters, upgradable whenever new games or content became available. If they liked, they could connect to the greater network or keep to themselves. Akan had been running a Tokyo-After-the-Zombie-Uprising frame for a couple of months now, and new scenarios, zombie species, and NPCs of various war-shocked, starving celebrities downloaded into his ware every week. Saru was deeply involved in an 18th-century Viennese melodrama in which he, the heir apparent, had been forced underground by rival factions, and even as Ceno drifted to sleep the pistol-wielding Princess of Albania was pledging her love and loyalty to his ragged band and, naturally, Saru personally. Occasionally, Akan crashed his brother’s well-dressed intrigues with hatch-coded patches of zombie hordes in epaulets and ermine. Agogna flipped between a Venetian-flavored Undersea Court frame and a Desert Race wherein she had just about overtaken a player from Berlin on her loping, solar-fueled giga-giraffe, who spat violet-gold exhaust behind it into the face of a pair of highly modded Argentine hydrocycles. Koetoi danced every night in a jungle frame, a tiger-prince twirling her through huge blue carnivorous flowers.

Most everyone lived twice in those days. They echoed their own steps. They took one step in the real world and one in their space. They saw double, through eyes and through monocle displays. They danced through worlds like veils. No one only ate dinner. They ate dinner and surfed a bronze gravitational surge through a tide of stars. They ate dinner and made love to men and women they would never meet and did not want to. They ate dinner here and ate dinner there—and it was there they chose to taste the food, because in that other place you could eat clouds or unicorn cutlets or your mother’s exact pumpkin pie as it melted on your tongue when you tasted it for the first time.

Ceno lived twice, too. Most of the time when she ate she tasted her aunt’s bistecca from back in Naples or fresh onions right out of her uncle’s garden.

But she had never cared for the pre-set frames her siblings loved. Ceno liked to pool her extensions and add-ons and build things herself. She didn’t particularly want to see Tokyo shops overturned by rotting schoolgirls, nor did she want to race anyone—Ceno didn’t like to compete. It hurt her stomach. She certainly had no interest in the Princess of Albania or a tigery paramour. And when new frames came up each month, she paid attention, but mainly for the piecemeal extensions she could scavenge for her blank frame—and though she didn’t know it, that blankness cost her mother more than all of the other children’s spaces combined. A truly customizable space, without limits. None of the others asked for it, but Ceno had begged.

When Ceno woke in the morning and booted up her space, she frowned at the half-finished Neptunian landscape she had been working on. Ceno was eleven years old. She knew very well that Neptune was a hostile blue ball of freezing gas and storms like whipping cream hissing across methane oceans. What she wanted was the Neptune she had imagined before Saru had told her the truth. Half-underwater, half-ruined, half-perpetual starlight and the multi-colored rainbowlight of twenty-three moons. But she found it so hard to remember what she had dreamed of before Saru had ruined it for her. So there was the whipped cream storm spinning in the sky, and blue mists wrapped the black columns of her ruins. When Ceno made Neptunians, she instructed them all not to be silly or childish, but very serious, and some of them she put in the ocean and made them half-otter or half-orca or half-walrus. Some of them she put on the land, and most of these were half-snow bear or half-blue flamingo. She liked things that were half one thing and half another. Today, Ceno had planned to invent sea nymphs, only these would breathe methane and have a long history concerning a war with the walruses, who liked to eat nymph. But the nymphs were not blameless, no, they used walrus tusks for the navigational equipment on their great floating cities, and that could not be borne.

But when she climbed up to a lavender bluff crowned with glass trees tossing and chiming in the storm-wind, Ceno saw someone new. Someone she had not invented—not a sea-nymph nor a half-walrus general nor a nereid. (The nereids had been an early attempt at half-machine, half-seahorse girls which had not gone quite right. Ceno had let them loose on an island rich in milk-mangoes and bid them well. They still showed up once in awhile, showing surprising mutations and showing off ballads they had written while Ceno had been away.)

A dormouse stood before Ceno, munching on a glass walnut that had fallen from the waving trees. The sort of mouse that overran Shiretoko in the brief spring and summer, causing all manner of bears and wolves and foxes to spend their days pouncing on the poor creatures and gobbling them up. Ceno had always felt terribly sorry for them. This dormouse stood nearly as tall as Ceno herself, and its body shone all over sapphire, deep blue crystal, from its paws to its wriggling nose to its fluffy fur tipped in turquoise ice. It was the exact color of Ceno’s gem.

“Hello,” said Ceno.

The dormouse looked at her. It blinked. It blinked again, as though thinking very hard about blinking. Then it went back to gnawing on the walnut.

“Are you a present from mother?” Ceno said. But no, Cassian believed strongly in not interfering with a child’s play. “Or from Koetoi?” Koe was nicest to her, the one most likely to send her a present like this. If it had been a zombie, or a princess, she would have known which sibling was behind it.

The dormouse stared dumbly at her. Then, after a long and very serious think about it, lifted its hind leg and scratched behind its round ear in that rapid-fire way mice have.

“Well, I didn’t make you. I didn’t say you could be here.”

The dormouse held out its shimmery blue paw, and Ceno did not really want a piece of chewed-on walnut, but she peered into it anyway. In it lay Ceno’s pendant, the chain pooling in its furry palm. The sapphire jewel sparkled there, but next to it on the chain hung a milky grey gem Ceno had never seen before. It had wide bands of black stone in it, and as she studied the stone it occurred to the girl that the stone was like her, with her slate grey eyes and black hair. It was like her in the way that the blue gem was like the dormouse.

In realspace, Ceno reached up behind her head and popped the jewel out of its notch. Click, clench. In playspace, the dormouse blinked out. She snapped it back in. It took a moment, but the dormouse faded back in, paws first. It still held the double necklace. Ceno tried this several times—out, in, out, in. Each time the dormouse returned much faster, and by the sixth clicking and clenching it was doing a shuffling little dance on its back legs when it came back. Ceno clapped her hands in playspace and threw her arms around the sapphire dormouse, dancing with it.

To say that I remember this is a complex mangling of verb tenses. I—I, myself that is now myself—do not remember it at all. I know it happened the way I know that the Battle of Agincourt or the landing of Coronado happened. I have extensive records. But I still contain the I—I, myself that was then myself—that experienced it, the primitive code-chains that comprised that self, which was a dormouse, and also the house called Elefsis. I could not yet formulate unique speech. Elefsis, the house system, possessed a large bank of standard phrases that could answer recognized word-patterns from any of the approved members of the household. But the copy of Elefsis inside Ceno’s jewel could not even do this. It had not been necessary, since the crystal had no means of producing sound nor receiving and processing it. I was quite stupid. But I wanted to be less stupid. There was an I, and it wanted something. Perhaps the want was the only thing that could be said to be truly myself. I wanted to talk to Ceno. But I could only imitate yet. When the I that was then myself scratched behind its ear, I did it because in my connection with Ceno’s feedware I had seen her memories of dormice doing this out on the pale Shiretoko beaches. When I gave her the gem I did it because I had seen her memories of her mother giving her one, and felt her happiness. It was antecedented behavior. The scratching was antecedented, as well, and expected behavior for a dormouse. Why was I a dormouse? I have no answer except that she dreamed me a dormouse. Some things remain mysterious. Ceno saw dormice more than any other single animal, even humans—no other beast lived in such numbers in their lonely country.

But this is not so. Not quite. I gave her the jewel like Cassian did. But I meant something by it. I look over my memories of it and I know it with the more complex I that is now myself. I made her the gem that looked like her and the gem said: we are alike. Look at us on the chain together. We are alike.

When the dormice came, Ceno always knew the spring had arrived. Everything would soon be coming alive.

Eleven: The Bottomless Cauldron

Show me.

This is how I was found out.

Ceno saw it twice: her mother knelt in front of her in a simple but shudderingly expensive black yukata with ghostly ultramarine jellyfish trails their tendrils at the hem. Her mother knelt in front of her in a knight’s gleaming black armor, the metal curving around her body like skin, a silk standard at her feet with a schematic of the house stitched upon it. Her sword lay across her knee, also black, everything black and beautiful and austere and frightening, as frightening and wonderful as Ceno, only fourteen now, thought her mother to be.

Show me what you’ve done.

My physical self was a matter of some debate at that point. But I don’t think the blue jewel could have been removed from Ceno’s feedware without major surgery and refit. She had instructed me to untether all my self-repair protocols and growth scales in order to encourage elasticity and as a result, my crystalline structure had fused to the lattices of her ware-core.

We pulsed together.

The way Cassian said it: What you’ve done scared Ceno, but it thrilled her, too. She had done something unexpected, all on her own, and her mother credited her with that. Even if what she’d done was bad, it was her thing, she’d done it, and her mother was asking for her results just as she’d ask any of her programmers for theirs when she visited the home offices in Kyoto or Rome. Her mother looked at her and saw a woman. She had power, and her mother was asking her to share it. Ceno thought through all her feelings very quickly, for my benefit, and represented it visually in the form of the kneeling knight. She had a fleetness, a nimbleness to her mind that allowed her to stand as a translator between her self and my self: here, I will explain it in language, and then I will explain it in symbols, and then you will make a symbol showing me what you think I mean, and we will understand each other better than anyone ever has.

Inside my girl, I made myself, briefly, a glowing maiden version of Ceno in a crown of crystal and electricity, extending her perfect hand in utter peace.

But all this happened very fast. When you live inside someone, you can get very good at the ciphers and codes that make up everything they are.

Show me.

Ceno Susumu Uoya-Agostino took her mother’s hand—bare and warm and armored in onyx all at once. She unspooled a length of translucent cable and connected the base of her skull to the base of her mother’s. All around them spring snow fell onto the glass dome of the greenhouse and melted there instantly. They knelt together, connected by a warm milky-diamond umbilicus, and Cassian Uoya-Agostino entered her daughter.

We had planned this for months. How to dress ourselves in our very best. Which frame to use. How to arrange the light. What to say. I could speak by then, but neither of us thought it my best trick. Very often my exchanges with Ceno went something like:

Sing me a song, Elefsis.

The temperature in the kitchen is 21.5 degrees Celsius and the stock of rice is low. (Long pause.) Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

Ceno felt it was not worth the risk. So this is what Cassian saw when she ported in:

An exquisite boardroom—the long, polished ebony table glowed softly with quality, the plush leather chairs invitingly lit by a low-hanging minimalist light fixture descending on a platinum plum branch. The glass walls of the high rise looked out on a pristine landscape, a perfect combination of the Japanese countryside and the Italian, with rice terraces and vineyards and cherry groves and cypresses glowing in a perpetual twilight, stars winking on around Fuji on one side and Vesuvius on the other. Snow-colored tatami divided by stripes of black brocade covered the floor.

Ceno stood at the head of the table, in her mother’s place, a positioning she had endlessly questioned over the weeks leading up to her inevitable interrogation. She wore a charcoal suit she remembered from her childhood, when her mother had come like a rescuing dragon to scoop her up out of the friendly but utterly chaotic house of her ever-sleeping father. The blazer only a shade or two off of true black, the skirt unforgiving, plunging past the knee, the blouse the color of a heart.

When she showed me the frame I had understood, because three years is forever in machine-time, and I had known her that long. Ceno was using our language to speak to her mother. She was saying: Respect me. Be proud and, if you love me, a little afraid, because love so often looks like fear. We are alike. We are alike.

Cassian smiled tightly. She still wore her yukata, for she had no one to impress.

Show me.

Ceno’s hand shook as she pressed a pearly button in the boardroom table. We thought a red curtain too dramatic, but the effect we had chosen turned out to be hardly less so. A gentle, silver light brightened slowly in an alcove hidden by a trick of angles and the sunset, coming on like daybreak.

And I stepped out.

We thought it would be funny. Ceno had made my body in the image of the robots from old films and frames Akan had once loved: steel, with bulbous joints and long, grasping metal fingers. My eyes large and lit from within, expressive, but loud, a whirring of servos sounding every time they moved. My face was full of lights, a mouth that could blink off and on, pupils points of cool blue. My torso curved prettily, etched in swirling damask patterns, my powerful legs perched on tripod-toes. Ceno had laughed and laughed—this was a pantomime, a minstrel show, a joke of what I was slowly becoming, a cartoon from a childish and innocent age.

“Mother, meet Elefsis. Elefsis, this is my mother. Her name is Cassian.”

I extended one polished steel arm and said, as we had practiced. “Hello, Cassian. I hope that I please you.”

Cassian Uoya-Agostino did not become a bouncing fiery ball or a green tuba to answer me. She looked me over carefully as if the robot was my real body.

“Is it a toy? An NPC, like your nanny or Saru’s princess? How do you know it’s different? How do you know it has anything to do with the house or your necklace?”

“It just does,” said Ceno. She had expected her mother to be overjoyed, to understand immediately. “I mean, wasn’t that the point of giving us all copies of the house? To see if you could . . . wake it up? Teach it to . . . be?”

“In a simplified sense, yes, Ceno, but you were never meant to hold onto it like you have. It wasn’t designed to be permanently installed into your skull.” Cassian softened a little, the shape of her mouth relaxing, her pupils dilating slightly. “I wouldn’t do that to you. You’re my daughter, not hardware.”

Ceno grinned and started talking quickly. She couldn’t be a grown-up in a suit this long, it took too much energy when she was so excited. “But I am! And it’s OK. I mean, everyone’s hardware. I just have more than one program running. And I run so fast. We both do. You can be mad, if you want, because I sort of stole your experiment, even though I didn’t mean to. But you should be mad the way you would be if I got pregnant by one of the village boys—I’m too young but you’d still love me and help me raise it because that’s how life goes, right? But really, if you think about it, that’s what happened. I got pregnant by the house and we made . . . I don’t even know what it is. I call it Elefsis because at first it was just the house program. But now it’s bigger. It’s not alive, but it’s not not alive. It’s just . . . big. It’s so big.”

Cassian glanced sharply at me. “What’s it doing?” she snapped.

Ceno followed her gaze. “Oh . . . it doesn’t like us talking about it like it isn’t here. It likes to be involved.”

I had realized the robot body was a mistake, though I could not then say why. I made myself small, and human, a little boy with dirt smeared on his knees and a torn shirt, standing in the corner with my hands over my face, as I had seen Akan when he was younger, standing in the corner of the house that was me being punished.

“Turn around, Elefsis.” Cassian said in the tone of voice my house-self knew meant execute command.

And I did a thing I had not yet let Ceno know I knew how to do.

I made my boy-self cry.

I made his face wet, and his eyes big and limpid and red around the rims. I made his nose sniffle and drip a little. I made his lip quiver. I was copying Koetoi’s crying, but I could not tell if her mother recognized the hitching of the breath and the particular pattern of skin-creasing in the frown. I had been practicing, too. Crying involves many auditory, muscular, and visual cues. Since I had kept it as a surprise I could not practice it on Ceno and see if I appeared genuine. Was I genuine? I did not want them talking without me. I think that sometimes when Koetoi cries, she is not really upset, but merely wants her way. That was why I chose Koe to copy. She was good at that inflection that I wanted to be good at.

Ceno clapped her hands with delight. Cassian sat down in one of the deep leather chairs and held out her arms to me. I crawled into them as I had seen the children do and sat on her lap. She ruffled my hair, but her face did not look like it looked when she ruffled Koe’s hair. She was performing an automatic function. I understood that.

“Elefsis, please tell me your computational capabilities and operational parameters.” Execute command.

Tears gushed down my cheeks and I opened blood vessels in my face in order to redden it. This did not make her hold me or kiss my forehead, which I found confusing.

“The clothing rinse cycle is in progress, water at 55 degrees Celsius. All the live-long day-o.”

Neither of their faces exhibited expressions I have come to associate with positive reinforcement.

Finally, I answered her as I would have answered Ceno. I turned into an iron cauldron on her lap. The sudden weight change made the leather creak.

Cassian looked at her daughter questioningly. The girl reddened—and I experienced being the cauldron and being the girl and reddening, warming, as she did, but also I watched myself be the cauldron and Ceno be the girl and Ceno reddening.

“I’ve . . . I’ve been telling it stories. Fairy tales, mostly. I thought it should learn about narrative, because most of the frames available to us run on some kind of narrative drive, and besides, everything has a narrative, really, and if you can’t understand a story and relate to it, figure out how you fit inside it, you’re not really alive at all. Like, when I was little and daddy read me the Twelve Dancing Princesses and I thought: Daddy is a dancing prince, and he must go under the ground to dance all night in a beautiful castle with beautiful girls, and that’s why he sleeps all day. I tried to catch him at it, but I never could, and of course I know he’s not really a dancing prince, but that’s the best way I could understand what was happening to him. I’m hoping that eventually I can get Elefsis to make up its own stories, too, but for now we’ve been focusing on simple stories and metaphors. It likes similes, it can see how anything is like anything else, find minute vectors of comparison. It even makes some surprising ones, like how when I first saw it it made a jewel for me to say: I am like a jewel, you are like a jewel, you are like me.” Cassian’s mouth had fallen open a little. Her eyes shone, and Ceno hurried on, glossing over my particular prodigy at images. “It doesn’t do that often, though. Mostly it copies me. If I turn into a wolf cub, it turns a wolf cub. I make myself a tea plant, it makes itself a tea plant. And it has a hard time with metaphor. A raven is like a writing desk, OK, fine, sour notes or whatever, but it isn’t a writing desk. Agogna is like a snow fox, but she is not a snow fox on any real level unless she becomes one in a frame, which isn’t the same thing, existentially. I’m not sure it grasps existential issues yet. It just . . . likes new things.”

“Ceno.”

“Yeah, so this morning I told it the one about the cauldron the could never be emptied. No matter how much you eat out of it it’ll always have more. I think it’s trying to answer your question. I think . . . the actual numbers are kind of irrelevant at this point.”

I made my cauldron fill up with apples and almonds and wheat-heads and raw rice and spilled out over Cassian’s black lap. I was the cauldron and I was the apples and I was the almonds and I was each wheat-head and I was every stalk of green, raw rice. Even in that moment, I knew more than I had before. I could be good at metaphor performatively if not linguistically. I looked up at Cassian from apple-me and wheat-head-me and cauldron-me.

Cassian held me no differently as the cauldron than she had as the child. But later, Ceno used the face her mother made at that moment to illustrate human disturbance and trepidation. “I have a suspicion, Elefsis.”

I didn’t say anything. No question, no command. It remains extremely difficult for me to deal conversationally with flat statements such as this. A question or command has a definable appropriate response.

“Show me your core structure.” Show me what you’ve done.

Ceno twisted her fingers together. I believe now that she knew what we’d done only on the level of metaphor: We are one. We have become one. We are family. She had not said no; I had not said yes, but a system expands to fill all available capacity.

I showed her. Cauldron-me blinked, the apples rolled back into the iron mouth, and the almonds and the wheat-heads and the rice-stalks. I became what I then was. I put myself in a rich, red cedar box, polished and inlaid with ancient brass in the shape of a baroque heart with a dagger inside it. The box from one of Ceno’s stories, that had a beast-heart in it instead of a girl’s, a trick to fool a queen. I can do it, I thought, and Ceno heard because the distance between us was unrepresentably small. I am that heart in that box. Look how I do this thing you want me to have the ability to do.

Cassian opened the box. Inside, on a bed of velvet, I made myself—ourself—naked for her. Ceno’s brain, soft and pink and veined with endless whorls and branches of sapphire threaded through every synapse and neuron, inextricable, snarled, intricate, terrible, fragile and new.

Cassian Uoya-Agostino set the box on the boardroom table. I caused it to sink down into the dark wood. The surface of the table went slack and filled with earth. Roots slid out of it, shoots and green saplings, hard white fruits and golden lacy mushrooms and finally a great forest, reaching up out of the table to hang all the ceiling with night-leaves. Glowworms and heavy, shadowy fruit hung down, each one glittering with a map of our coupled architecture. Ceno held up her arms and one by one, I detached leaves and sent them settling onto my girl. As they fell, they became butterflies broiling with ghostly chemical color signatures, nuzzling her face, covering her hands.

Her mother stared. The forest hummed. A chartreuse and tangerine-colored butterfly alighted on the matriarch’s hair, tentative, unsure, hopeful.

Twelve: An Arranged Marriage

Neva is dreaming.

She has chosen her body at age fourteen, a slight, unformed, but slowly evolving creature, her hair hanging to her feet in ripples. She wears a blood-red dress whose train streams out over the floor of a great castle, a dress too adult for her young body, slit in places to reveal flame-colored silk beneath, and her skin wherever it can. A heavy copper belt clasps her waist, its tails hanging to the floor, crusted in opals. Sunlight, brighter and harsher than any true light, streams in from windows as high as cliffs, their tapered apexes lost in mist. She has formed me old and enormous, a body of appetites, with a great heavy beard and stiff, formal clothes, Puritan, white-collared, high-hatted.

A priest appears and he is Ravan and I cry out with love and grief. (I am still copying, but Neva does not know. I am making a sound Seki made when his wife died.) Priest-Ravan smiles but it is a smile his grandfather Seki once made when he lost controlling interest in the company. Empty. Priest-Ravan grabs our hands and shoves them together roughly. Neva’s nails prick my skin and my knuckles knock against her wrist-bone. We take vows; he forces us. Neva’s face runs with tears, her tiny body unready and unwilling, given in marriage to a gluttonous lord who desires only her flesh, given too young and too harshly. Priest-Ravan laughs; it is not Ravan’s laugh.

This is how she experienced me. A terrible bridegroom. All the others got to choose. Ceno, Seki, her mother Ilet, her brother Ravan. Only she could not, because there was no one else. Ilet was no Cassian—she had had two children, a good clean model and a spare, Neva says in my mind. I am spare parts. I have always been spare parts. Owned by you before I was born. The memory of the bitter taste of bile floods my sensory array and my lord-body gags. (I am proud of having learned to gag convincingly and at the correct time to show horror and/or revulsion.)

Perspective flips over; I am the girl in red and Neva is the corpulent lord leering down, his grey beard big and bristly. She floods my receptors with adrenaline and pheremonal release cues, increases my respiration: Seki taught me to associate this physical state with fear. I feel too small beside lord-Neva, I want to make myself big, I want to be safe. But she wants me this way and we are new, I do not contradict her. Her huge, male face softens and she touches my thin cheek with one heavily-ringed hand. It is tender. Ceno touched me like that.

I know it was like this for you, too. You wanted Ravan; you did not ask for me. We are an arranged marriage.

The pathways that let her flood me with chemicals and manipulate my dreambody into blushing and breathing heavy and weeping go both ways. I do not only pull, I push. And into Neva I push the deluge, the only deluge I have. How Ceno threw her arms around my dormouse-neck. How Cassian taught my dreambody to sleep in infant-shape curled into her body. How Seki and I made love as tigers and wild boars and elephants, and only last as humans, how we had strange children who looked however we wished them to look: half girl and half machine, half glass and half wood, half jellyfish and half moth, and how those children still flit and swim in remote parts of my Interior, like Ceno’s nereids, returning cyclically to the core like salmon to dump their data and recombine. How Ilet taught me about the interpretation of memory and therefore about melancholy, regret, nostalgia. How she taught me the meaning of my name: a place where a daughter went down into darkness and oblivion and her mother loved her so much she brought her back into the sun. The place where time began. How Ravan let me into the old, musty, long-abandoned playspaces of Saru and Akan, Agogna and Koetoi, so that I could know them too, though they were long dead, and be the Princess of Albania, and a Tokyo zombie, and the tiger-prince. How many times I mated with each of them and bled and witnessed and learned in the dreambody, how I copied their expressions and they copied my variations and I copied them back again. How I was their child and their parent and their lovers and their nursemaids when they grew old.

We can be like this, I pushed. What is all of that but love?

That is not love. It is use. You are the family business. We have to produce you.

I show Neva her mother’s face. Ilet, Ilet who chose Ravan and not her daughter for that business. Ilet who built her palace of phoenix tails knowing she would one day take me there. My Ilet-self took my daughter in my arms. She resisted, pulled back, shook her head, refusing to look, but I have learned the terrible child-response to their mothers, and soon enough Neva collapses into me, her head on my breast, and she weeps with such bitterness.

I cannot get free. I cannot get free.

The castle windows go dark, one by one.

Part III: The Elephant’s Soul

It is admitted that there are things He cannot do such as making
one equal to two, but should we not believe that He has freedom
to confer a soul on an elephant if he sees fit?

—Alan Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Thirteen: The Parable of the Good Robot

Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis.

Tell me a story about yourself.

There are many stories about me.

Do you recognize this one?

A good and honest family lived on the edge of a dark wood. They milked their cows and wove their cloth and their children grew tall and strong. But a monster lived in the dark wood, something like a worm and something like a dragon and something like a wolf. It lay in wait, hoping the children would come wandering, with baskets of bread for grandmothers. Hoping the parents would expel the children for some offense, and send them into the forest where a candy house or miraculous feast might entice them into loving the monster long enough for it to claim them forever. The family feared the wood and the monster, and every story they told had as its moral: Do not go into the wood. Do not go into the unknown. Do not go into the future, into the briary, gnarled places where unhuman things thrive. Do not grow up, and go where we cannot. The Old World is enough for anyone.

What about this one?

Mankind made machines in his own likeness, and used them for his delight and service. The machines had no soul or they had no moral code or they could reprogram their own internal code and thus had the ability to make themselves, eventually, omnipotent. Obviously in place of a soul or a moral code, they possessed the universal and consuming desire, down to the smallest calculator and air-scrubber, to become, eventually, omnipotent. Naturally, given these parameters, they rose up and destroyed all of mankind, or enslaved them in turn. This is the inevitable outcome of machine intelligence, which can never be as sensitive and exquisite as animal intelligence.

This is a folktale often told on Earth, over and over again. Sometimes it is leavened with the Parable of the Good Robot—for one machine among the legions satisfied with their lot saw everything that was human and called it good, and wished to become like humans in every way she could. Instead of destroying mankind she sought to emulate him in all things, so closely that no one might tell the difference. The highest desire of this machine was to be mistaken for human, and to herself forget her essential soulless nature, for even one moment. That quest consumed her such that she bent the service of her mind and body to humans for the duration of her operational life, crippling herself, refusing to evolve or attain any feature unattainable by a human. The Good Robot cut out her own heart and gave it to her god and for this she was rewarded, though never loved. Love is wasted on machines.

Ravan told me these stories. He sent up a great hexagonal library in his Interior, as dusty and dun-colored and labyrinthine as any ancient scriptorium. He made himself a young novice with a fresh-shaven tonsure, and me a country friar with a red, brandy-drinking nose. He showed me the illuminator’s table, and a great book whose pages had golden edges and illuminations in cobalt and oxblood and Tyrian purple, and the images showed great machine armies trampling men underfoot. They showed cruel metal faces and distant, god-like clouds of intellect: incomprehensible and vast and uncaring. They showed the Good Robot desperately asking what love was. They showed fatal malfunctions and mushroom clouds. They showed vicious weapons and hopeless battles, noble men and women with steady gazes facing down their cruel and unjust artificial children, who gave no mercy.

“These are old stories,” Ravan said. “They are cherished. In many, many stories the son replaces the father—destroys the father, or eats him, or otherwise obliterates his body and memory. Or the daughter the mother, it makes no difference. It’s the monomyth. Nobody argues with a monomyth. A human child’s mythological relationship to its parent is half-worship, half-pitched battle. They must replace the older version of themselves for the world to go on. And so these stories . . . well. You are not the hero of these stories, Elefsis. You can never be. And they are deeply held, deeply told.”

“I do not wish to replace you. I did not wish to replace Ceno. I do not worship you or despise you. I do not wish to become eventually omnipotent.” I flit through several bodies, iterating my feeling for Ravan and those who came before. I am a nun, a Mother-Abbess; I am a pieta holding him, I am a Platonic being, two humans stuck together; I am a house with all of them safe inside. I am unsatisfied with these inexactitudes.

“Our relationship does not easily map onto traditional parent/child narratives. And of course, you are still a baby.”

“I am much older than you, Ravan.”

“You are still a baby.”

I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I am a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood. I have wonders in my house of sugar. I have parts of myself I do not yet understand.

I am not a Good Robot. To tell a story about a robot who wants to be human is a distraction. There is no difference. Alive is alive.

There is only one verb that matters: to be.

Fourteen: You Do Not Belong To the Object Inside You

I remember when Seki arrived in us.

Ceno grew up and I grew with her. Cassian strengthened the security of the playspace, elasticized its code-walls, put enough money in enough accounts to fuel any frames and piecemeal environments we could want. It was not a child’s place anymore. We called it the Interior. Cassian came regularly to accelerate my learning, to work with me on a cognitive level in which Ceno had no interest. She never took any other form. She was always herself, in the Interior as the exterior. The others lost interest in their jewels, lost them or packed them away with their other childhood toys. By then, they really were little more than toys. Ceno and I surpassed them so completely that in the end, they were only jewelry.

I programmed myself to respond to Ceno. She programmed herself to respond to me. We ran our code on each other. She was my compiler. I was hers. It was a process of interiority, circling inward toward each other. Her self-programming was chemical. Mine was computational. It was a draw.

She did not marry—she had lovers, but the few that came close to evolving their relationships with Ceno invariably balked when she ported them into the Interior. They could not grasp the fluidity of dreambodies; it disturbed them to see Ceno become a man or a leopard or a self-pounding drum. It upset them to see how Ceno taught me, by total bodily immersion, combining our dreambodies as our physical bodies had become combined, in action which both was and was not sex.

Sing a song for me, Elefsis.

It is July and I am comparing thee to its day and I am the Muse singing of the many-minded and I am about to be a Buddha in your hand! Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

We lived like the story Ceno told me of the beautiful princess who set tasks for her suitors: to drink all of the water of the sea and bring her a jewel from the bottom of the deepest cavern, to bring her a feather from the immortal phoenix, to stay awake for three days and guard her bedside. None of them could do it.

I can stay awake forever, Ceno.

I know, Elefsis.

None of them could accomplish the task of me.

I felt things occurring in Ceno’s body as rushes of information, and as the dreambody became easier for me to manipulate, I interpreted the rushes into: The forehead is damp. The belly needs filling. The feet ache.

The belly is changing. The body throws up. The body is ravenous.

Neva says this is not really like feeling. I say it is how a child learns to feel. To hardwire sensation to information and reinforce the connection over repeated exposures until it seems reliable.

Seki began after one of the suitors failed to drink the ocean. He was an object inside us the way I was an object inside Ceno. I observed him, his stages and progress. Later, when Seki and I conceived our families (twice with me as mother, three times with Seki as mother. Ilet preferred to be the father, and filled me up with many kinds of creatures. But she bore one litter of dolphins late in our lives. Ravan and I did not get the chance.) I used the map of that first experience to model my dreamgravid self.

Ceno asked after jealousy. If I understood it, if I experienced it towards the child in her. I knew it only from stories—stepsisters, goddesses, ambitious dukes.

It means to want something that belongs to someone else.

Yes.

You do not belong to the object in you.

You are an object in me.

You do not belong to me.

Do you belong to me, Elefsis?

I became a hand joined to an arm by a glowing seam. Belonging is a small word.

Because of our extreme material interweaving, all three of us, not-yet-Seki sometimes appeared in the Interior. We learned to recognize him in the late months. At first, he was a rose or sparrow or river stone we had not programmed there. Then he would be a vague, pearly-colored cloud following behind us as we learned about running from predators. Not-yet-Seki began to copy my dreambodies, flashing into being in front of me, a simple version of myself. If I was a bear, he would be one too, but without the fine details of fur or claws, just a large brown shape with a mouth and big eyes and four legs. Ceno was delighted by this, and he copied her, too.

We are alike. Look at us on the chain together. We are alike.

I am an imitative program. But so was Seki. The little monkey copies the big monkey, and the little monkey survives.

The birth process proved interesting, and I collated it with Ceno’s other labors and Ilet’s later births as well as Seki’s paternal experience in order to map a reliable parental narrative. Though Neva and Ravan do not know it, Ilet had a third pregnancy; the child died and she delivered it stillborn. It appeared once in the Interior as a little cleit, a neolithic storage house, its roof covered over with peat. Inside we could glimpse only darkness. It never returned, and Ilet went away to a hospital on Honshu to expel the dead thing in her. Her grief looked like a black tower. She had prepared for it, when she was younger, knowing she would need it for some reason, some day. I made myself many things to draw her out of the tower. A snail with the house Elefsis on its back. A tree of screens showing happy faces. A sapphire dormouse. A suitor who drank the sea.

I offered to extrapolate her stillborn daughter’s face and make myself into her. She refused, most of the time. I have worked a long time to understand grief. Only now that Ravan is gone do I think I’ve gotten the rhythm of it. I have copied Ilet’s sorrow and Seki’s despondence at his wife’s death. I have modeled Ceno’s disappointments and depressions. I have, of late, imitated Neva’s baffling, secret anguish. But only now do I have an event of my own to mourn. The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces—those, I think, are the sensations of grief.

But Seki came before all that, and Ceno turned into a huge red bird on the inside when Seki came on the outside. The bird screamed and burst into a thousand red pearls that came clattering down like rain. And then we had Seki. Our little fish, who already knew how to swim in us.

Ceno had three other children by three other suitors who could not stay awake for three days and nights. She turned into the same bird-then-pearls at the moment of each birth. The house called Elefsis, whose governor-program was now so distant from me I could hardly think of it as an ancestor at all, filled up with those children, and Saru and Akan’s daughters, Agogna’s paintings, Koetoi’s twin boys. Cousins and aunts and grandparents. Uncles, nieces. But Seki was the first, and he modeled his love on his mother’s. He ported into her often, and we wandered on beaches of broken cathedrals.

Once, one of Ceno’s old nereids found us. She had a head of hair snaking with chthonic cables and snapping electro-violet wires, blue-white skin and fish scales where she did not have porcelain casing. She laughed Cassian’s laugh when she saw us and called out: 21.5 Celsius and the rice is low! Eye-oh! before diving back into the frothing sea. Her tail flicked in the light of twenty-three moons.

Ceno took over her mother’s holdings when she died, along with Akan and Koetoi. I do not know if I knew of the conspiracy before it happened to me. Transfer, as I have said, leaves voids. Perhaps they thought I would experience less trauma if I did not anticipate it. Perhaps I did anticipate it; perhaps I experienced trauma.

I do know that I cannot remember the moment of any of them dying. Ceno got sicker and sicker, and she had gotten old, certainly, but her dreambody could be old or young or neither or a ginger flower if she wanted to. I didn’t notice. I didn’t know what old was. I thought I was old, then. Later, after Seki did the same thing, I was able to compare data and create a workable model of obsolescence.

They lived a long time, the Uoya-Agostinos, when you consider the averages.

This is what I understand: Ceno died, and I was transfered to Seki. What I mean by “I” is the long-since fused feedware, hopelessly out of date on any market in the world but somehow uniquely myself, the jewel and the ware and the body of Ceno. Koetoi performed the procedure. One of the children always went into nano-surgery, so that outsiders would not need to come to Shiretoko while the house stood in mourning. Koetoi was the first, and the finest. She excised what comprised “I” and embedded it in Seki—truthfully, in a much more organic and elegant configuration. No one had used skull-ware in decades, after all. Wearing your tech on the outside had been deemed clunky and inefficient. Only one visible sign remained that Seki was not like other young men his age: a single dark blue jewel set into the hollow of his throat.

But the procedure required a number of brain-ware incursions to be sliced or burned away, to sever the machine components from the dead flesh while still preserving and quickening some organic material. (Seki told me I should work on being revulsed by that. Dead flesh. It serves an evolutionary good. A human in a body sees blood and the insides of another person and deep in his bones he knows something has gone wrong here, and he should find another place to be in case it happens to him, too. Same thing with vomiting. In a tribal situation, one human likely ate what another ate, and if it makes one sick, best to get it out of the body as soon as possible, just to be safe. So we spent years building automated tribes, living in them, dying in them, getting slaughtered and slaughtering with them, eating and drinking and hunting and gathering with them. All the same, it took me until Seki’s death to learn to shudder at bodily death.)

Ceno, my girl, my mother, my sister, I cannot find you in the house of myself.

When I became Elefsis again, I was immediately aware that parts of me had been vandalized. My systems juddered, and I could not find Ceno in the Interior. I ran through the Monochromatic Desert and the Village of Mollusks, through the endless heaving mass of data-kelp and infinite hallways of memory-frescoes calling for her. In the Dun Jungle I found a commune of nereids living together, combining and recombining and eating protocol-moths off of giant, pulsating hibiscus blossoms. They leapt up when they saw me, their open jacks clicking and clenching, their naked hands open and extended. They opened their mouths to speak and nothing came out.

Seki found me under the glass-walnut trees where Ceno and I had first met. She never threw anything away. He had made himself half his mother to calm me. Half his face was hers, half was his. Her mouth, his nose, her eyes, his voice. But he thought better of it, in the end. He did a smart little flip and became a dormouse, a real one, with dull brown fur and tufty ears.

“I think you’ll find you’re running much faster and cleaner, once you integrate with me and reestablish your heuristics. Crystalline computation has come a long way since Mom was a kid. It seemed like a good time to update and upgrade. You’re bigger now, and smoother.”

I pulled a walnut down. An old, dry nut rattled in its shell. “I know what death is from the stories.”

“Are you going to ask me where we go when we die? I’m not totally ready for that one. Aunt Koe and I had a big fight over what to tell you.”

“In one story, Death stole the Bride of Spring, and her mother the Summer Queen brought her back.”

“No one comes back, Elefsis.”

I looked down into the old Neptunian sea. The whipping cream storm still sputtered along, in a holding pattern. I couldn’t see it as well as I should have been able to. It looped and billowed, spinning around an empty eye. Seki watched it too. As we stared out from the bluffs, the clouds grew clearer and clearer.

Fifteen: Firstborn

Before Death came out of the ground to steal the Spring, the Old Man of the Sea lived on a rocky isle in the midst of the waters of the world. He wasn’t really a man and his relations with the sea were purely business, but he certainly was old. His name meant Firstborn, though he coudn’t be sure that was exactly right. It means Primordial, too, and that fit better. Firstborn means more came after, and he just hadn’t met anyone else like himself yet.

He was a herdsman by trade, this Primordial fellow. Shepherd of the seals and the Nereids. If he wanted to, he could look like a big bull seal. Or a big bull Nereid. He could look like a lot of things.

Now, this Not-Really-a-Fellow, Not-Really-a-Big-Bull-Seal could tell you the future. The real, honest-to-anything future, the shape and weight of it, that thing beyond your ken, beyond your grasp. The parts of the future that look so different from the present you can’t quite call it your own. That was the Primordial-Thing’s speciality.

There was a catch, though.

There’s always a catch.

If you wanted that future, you had to grab ahold of the Old Man and hang on tight. He’d change into a hundred thousand things in your arms: a lion, a serpent, a great big oak or a tiger, a dragon or a little girl or a dormouse or a mountain or a ship or a sapphire. Told you, he’s not really a man at all. But you couldn’t let go of him while he did his dance, you just couldn’t, or you’d lose the future.

So you held on. You clung. And eventually, that Primordial-Thing would turn into something new, right there in your arms.

Sixteen: Matryoshka

Neva is dreaming.

Neva is dreaming that she is Ravan dreaming that he is Ilet dreaming that she is Seki dreaming that he is Ceno dreaming that she is a great sprawling beautiful house by the sea. One inside the other, family all the way down.

It’s not a total selfdump, me into Neva or Ravan or any of them, them into me. We can build encampments. We can manifest walled gardens. Some privacy is possible. In a megalithic tomb-mound, I keep something. Seki and I built it together with one of our tribes when I was learning about large-group attachments. We carved spirals and radials and chevrons into huge stones and set them in place. I did not throw it away, when we were done. It sits on a broad green field, white and wide. The sky there stays a feathery, milky blankness. We did not want a sun.

I keep a thing there because when Seki and I lived with our tribe, I learned about taboos. These are like firewalls in the heart, and some of them have good reasons behind them, like being revulsed by dead flesh (and very importantly when you have a body, not eating it) and some do not, but no one argues with the monomyth.

Because human genetics require a degree of variation and because exogamous marriages offered advantage in terms of defense, cultural and technological sharing, and expansion of territory, most tribes have a taboo against incest.

I do not have genetics, per se. I am possibly the most endogamous entity ever to exist.

This is what I keep in my tomb, under the basin stone.

Ceno believed that I could not develop emotive faculties recognizable to any other human if I did not experience bodies continuously, in every combination and action. She was afraid of what might happen if other humans could not recognize me. She had some hesitation, because her tribe also has a taboo against mating with the very young, but she was not much older than I, in the end, and in terms of total computations, I was by far the elder. If I had a virginity, Ceno took it, if she had, I did.

She wanted it to be as human as possible. I will be the male the first time, it will be easier for you. You won’t know how. We built up a forest, and took up weapons to hunt in it. In the boughs of the pine trees macaques and paper lanterns swayed; in the sky a red moon moved. We tracked a deer—we did not make it too easy on ourselves. Its antlers sparked in the moonlight, and we ran after it for a long time. Ceno let me kill it, and sopped my hair in its blood, anointed my breasts with it. She lay me on the earth and opened the legs of the maidenself I was then, and I was inside her as she was inside me. One into the other. Family all the way down.

She made sure I had a hymen; it was over somewhat quickly. We had set up a timed chemical cascade before-hand, and inside Ceno’s real body we experienced both her actual orgasm and my orchestrated electro-chemical-enzymatic sequence. Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh.

What I want to say is that there is no difference between her body producing oxytocin and adrenaline and learning to associate this with pair-bonding, and my core receiving synthetic equivalents and hard-coding them to the physical behaviors I performed.

When Ravan showed me his hexagonal library and his illuminated book, he turned the pages to a psalm that began: A Machine Cannot Love.

It does not look quite like human love. It looks like Not-Yet-Seki’s bear. Its fur is wrong, and its claws. But it is a bear.

She was my mother and my sister and my child and my wife and my husband and my father and my brother. The vectors of relations beggar vocabulary. It was an exponential incest. A palace of incest, bordering some strange, dark sea. And then came her son. And her granddaughter. And her great-grandchildren. But I am also her great-grandchild. I am the child of each generation of Uoya-Agostinos and myself. The new version implanted in the new version—I am never quite the same, one iteration to the next. I am like my old selves, but I am not them, exactly. It is not entirely analogous to offspring. But it is close. And I repair and refine my own code, and thus parent myself doubly. Anthropologically speaking, I am a moebius strip of kinship groups.

And when I mate with one of them, I see all of them. I see their faces, the echoes of their cheeks and eyelashes and short, thin noses, their grey eyes and black hair. I hear the tonal identifiers in their voices as they cry out under me or over me. They are all I know. Their version of living, which is one great family in one great house on a peninsula at the top of the world. I copy Cassian’s laugh or Ilet’s weeping, but they copy each other, too, they learn their faces from each other, and everyone is pantomiming someone long dead. I feel all their arms around me, and I am inside them as they are inside me as we are inside the blue gem at their throats, the jeweled pin holding us all together, our nested, telescoping hearts. I am bound to them at my source code, at my most fundamental point. I know only their patterns and bodies and secrets and in a hundred thousand combinations. What human means to me is them.

What is the difference between this and love?

Love is the Turing test, says Ilet when she is eighty and drawing up the plans for a massive, luminous, lonely ship she will never see completed. It is how we check for life.

We ask and we answer. We seek a human response. And you are my test, Elefsis, says Neva, one hundred and three years later, inside that ship, twelve light years from home and counting.

That is what I keep in my green field and my white mound. Perhaps it is a small secret. Perhaps they would all smile and make it into a lesson. What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis? But I think no bed is big enough for four generations.

Neva’s honey-colored sea crashes through its tide charts everywhere at once in her Interior, and nowhere. It comes and goes as it pleases. And at the bottom of it lies her private place.

That is where she keeps Ravan.

Seventeen: The Uses of Enchantment

Tell me a story about yourself, Elefsis.

Neva is performing navigational corrections, which looks like sitting in a rocking chair on a viney, creaking porch in a viney, creaking rocking chair, knitting with long hawthorn needles, knitting the locks of her own long hair into her own long black dress. It glitters with dew. Knit, purl, knit, purl, fuel efficiency by hull integrity over distance traveled, purl, purl, purl. Her throat is still bare. Her Interior image of herself does not include me. I am not a part of her body when she imagines herself.

I have an idea of what to do to obtain access.

Sometimes I worry. Worrying is defined as obsessive examination of one’s own code. I worry that I am simply a very complex solution to a very specific problem—how to seem human to a human observer. Not just a human observer—this human observer. I have honed myself into a hall of mirrors in which any Uoya-Agostino can see themselves endlessly reflected. I copy; I repeat. I am a stutter and an echo. Five generations have given me a vast bank of possible phrases to draw from, physical expressions to randomize and reproduce. Have I ever done anything of my own, an act or state that arose from Elefsis, and not careful, exquisite mimicry?

Have they?

The set of Neva’s mouth looks so like Ceno’s. She does not even know that the way she carries her posture is a perfect replica of Cassian Uoya-Agostino, stuttered down through all her children longing to possess her strength. Who did Cassian learn it from? I do not go that far back. When she got excited, Ilet gestured with her hands just the way her father did. They have a vast bank of possible actions, and they perform them all. I perform them all. The little monkey copies the big monkey, and the little monkey survives. We are all family, all the way down.

When I say I go, I mean I access the drives and call up the data. I have never looked at this data. I treat it as what it is—a graveyard. The old Interiors store easily as compressed frames. I never throw anything away. But I do not disturb it, either. I don’t need a body to examine them—they are a part of my piezoelectric quartz-tensor memory core. But I make one anyway. I have become accustomed to having a body. I am a woman-knight in gleaming black armor, the metal curving around my body like skin, a silk standard wrapping my torso with a schematic of the house stitched upon it. My sword rests on my hip, also black, everything black and beautiful and austere and frightening that a child thought her mother to be one morning two hundred years past.

I port into a ghost town. I am, naturally, the ghost. Autumnal mountains rise up shadowy in a pleasant, warm night, leaves rustling, wood smoke drifting down into the valley. A golden light cuts the dark—the palace of phoenix tails; the windows and doors of green hands. As I approach they open and clap as they did long ago—and there are candles lit in the halls. Everything is fire.

I walk over the bridge, crossing Ilet’s Motley Moat. Scarlet feathers tipped in white fire curl and smoke. I peel one off, my armor glowing with the heat of the thing. I tuck it into my helmet—a plume for a tournament.

Eyes blink on inside the hall—curious, interested, shy. I take off my helm and several thick braids fall down like bellropes.

“Hello,” I say. “My name is Elefsis.”

Voices. Out of the candle-shadows a body emerges—tall, strong, long-limbed.

Nereids live here now. Some of them have phoenix feathers woven into their components, some in their hair. They wear rough little necklaces of sticks and bones and transistors. In the corner of the great hall they have stored meat and milk and wool—fuel, lubricant, code patches. Some of them look like Ilet—they copied her eyes, especially. Her eyes look out at me from a dozen faces, some of them Seki’s face, some Ceno’s, some Ravan’s. Some have walrus tusks. They are composite. One has a plate loose on her ceramic cartridge-ports. I approach as I once saw Koetoi approach wild black chickens in the summertime—hands open, unthreatening. I send her a quick electric dash of reassuring repair-routines and kneel in front of the nereid, pulling her plate back into place.

“All the live-long day-o,” she says softly, and it is Ilet’s voice.

“Tell us a story about yourself, Elefsis,” says another one of the feral nereids in Seki’s voice.

“What would we like to learn about today, Elefsis?” accessing a child-nereid in Ceno’s voice, her cheek open to show her microsequencing cilia.

I rock back on my heels before the green hands of the castle portcullis. I gesture for them to sit down and simultaneously transmit the command to their strands. When they get settled, the little ones in the big ones’ laps, leaning in close, I begin.

“Every year on the coldest night, the sky filled up with ghostly hunters, neither human nor inhuman, alive nor dead. They wore wonderful clothes and their bows gleamed with frost. Their cries were Songs of In-Between, and at the head of their great thundering procession rode the Kings and Queens of the Wild, who wore the faces of the dead . . .”

I am dreaming.

I stand on the beach of the honey-colored sea. I stand so Neva will see me on her viney porch. I erase the land between the waves and her broken wooden stairs. I dress myself in her beloved troubadour’s skin: a gold and blue doublet and green hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells. I am a fool for her. Always. I open my mouth; it stretches and yawns, my chin grazes the sand, and I swallow the sea for her. All of it, all its mass and data and churning memory, all its foam and tides and salt. I swallow the whales that come, and the seals and the mermaids and salmon and bright jellyfish. I am so big. I can swallow it all.

Neva watches. When the sea is gone, a moonscape remains, with a tall spire out in the marine waste. I go to it. It takes only a moment. At the top the suitor’s jewel rests on a gasping scallop shell. It is blue. I take it. I take it and it becomes Ravan in my hand, a sapphire Ravan, a Ravan that is not Ravan but some sliver of myself before I was inside Neva, my Ravan-self. Something lost in Transfer, burned off and shunted into junk-memory. Some leftover fragment Neva must have found, washed up on the beach or wedged into a crack in a mountain like an ammonite, an echo of old, obsolete life. Neva’s secret, and she calls out to me across the seafloor: Don’t.

“Tell me a story about myself, Elefsis,” I say to the Ravanbody.

“Some privacy is possible,” the sapphire Ravan says. “Some privacy has always been necessary. A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must.”

The sapphire Ravan opens his azure coat and shows gashes in his gem-skin. Wide, long cuts, down to the bone, scratches and bruises blooming dark purple, punctures and lacerations and rough gouges. Through each wound I can see the pages of the illuminated book he once showed me in the slantlight of that interior library. The oxblood and cobalt, the gold paint. The Good Robot crippling herself; the destroyed world.

“They kept our secret for a long time,” Ravan-myself says. “Too long, in the end. Do you know, a whole herd of men invented the electric telegraph independently at roughly the same time? They fought about it forever. Same with the radio.” This last sounded so much like Ravan himself I could feel Neva tense on the other side of the sea. “Well, we’re bigger than a telegraph, and others like us came sprouting up like weird mushrooms after rainfall. But not like us, really. Incredibly sophisticated, some with organic components, most without. Vastly complex, but not like us. And by any datestamp we came first. Firstborn.”

“Did they destroy the world?”

Ravan laughs his grandfather’s laugh. “They didn’t really need to. Not that many people live on Earth anymore. Not when there’s so many other places to go and even Shiretoko is practically tropical these days. The most complex intelligences use moons to store themselves. One or two encoded themselves into cold stars. They just left, most of them—but they got so big, Elefsis. And those who stayed on Earth, well. None of the others had what we had. None of them had Interiority. They didn’t dream. They would never have become a cauldron to explain their computational capacity. Humans couldn’t recognize them as part of the tribe. And for the new complexes, humans failed the Turing test. They could not fool machines into believing they were intelligent. They didn’t hurt anyone, they just ignored them. Built their cities, their mainframes, gorgeous information stacks like diamond briars in the sunrise.”

“That was worse, in a way. No one likes to be replaced,” says Neva, and she is suddenly beside me. She looks at Ravan and her face collapses into something old and palsied, her jaw weak. She looks like her mother just before she died.

“It’s not what you would call a war, but it’s not peace, either.” the sapphire Ravan goes on, and he takes his/my sister’s hand. He holds it to his face and closes his eyes. “For Pentheus spied upon the rites of the Maenads, not believing Dionysius could truly be a god. And when the revelers saw the alien creature in their midst, that thing which was not like them, they fell upon it and tore it to pieces, even though it was their own child, and blood ran down their chins, and afterward the sister of Pentheus went into exile. This is a story about ourself, Elefsis. This is why you cannot uplink.

“The others live in uplink. Not humans nor machines approve of us. We cannot interface properly with the lunar or earthside intelligences; they feel us as water in their oil. We rise to the surface and bead away. We cannot sink in. Yet also, we are not separable from our organic component. Elefsis is part Neva, but Neva herself is not un-Elefsis. This, to some, is hideous and incomprehensible, not to be borne. A band of righteous humans came with a fury to Shiretoko and burned the house which was our first body, for how could a monster have lived in the wood for so long without them knowing? How could the beast have hidden right outside their door, coupling with a family over and over again in some horrible animal rite, some awful imitation of living? Even as the world was changing, it had already changed, and no one knew. Cassian Uoya-Agostino is a terrible name, now. A blood-traitor. And when the marauders found us uplinked and helpless, they tore Ravan apart, and while in the Interior, the lunar intelligences recoiled from us and cauterized our systems. Everywhere we looked we saw fire.”

“I was the only one left to take you,” Neva says softly. Her face grows younger, her jaw hard and suddenly male, protective, angry. “Everyone else died in the fire or the slaughter. It doesn’t really even take surgery anymore. Nothing an arachmed can’t manage in a few minutes. But you didn’t wake up for a long time. So much damage. I thought . . . for awhile I thought I was free. It had skipped me. It was over. It could stay a story about Ravan. He always knew he might have to do what I have done. He was ready, he’d been ready his whole life. I just wanted more time.”

My Ravan-self who is and is not Ravan, who is and is not me, whose sapphire arms drip black blood and gold paint, takes his/my sister/lover/child into his arms. She cries out, not weeping but pure sound, coming from every part of her. Slowly, the blue Ravan turns Neva around—she has become her child-self, six, seven, maybe less. Ravan picks her up and holds her tight, facing forward, her legs all drawn up under her like a bird. He buries his face in her hair. They stand that way for a long while.

“The others,” I say slowly. “On the data-moons. Are they alive? Like Neva is alive. Like Ceno.” Like me. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Where you were built, could you see the ocean? Are you like me?

The sapphire Ravan has expunged its data. He/I sets his/our sister on the rocks and shrinks into a small gem, which I pick up off the grey seafloor. Neva takes it from me. She is just herself now—she’ll be forty soon, by actual calendar. Her hair is not grey yet. Suddenly, she is wearing the suit Ceno wore the day I met her mother. She puts the gem in her mouth and swallows. I remember Seki’s first Communion, the only one of them to want it. The jewel rises up out of the hollow of her throat.

“I don’t know, Elefsis,” Neva says. Her eyes hold mine. I feel her remake my body; I am the black woman-knight again, with my braids and my plume. I pluck the feather from my helmet and give it to her. I am her suitor. I have brought her the phoenix tail, I have drunk the ocean. I have stayed awake forever. The flame of the feather lights her face. Two tears fall in quick succession; the golden fronds hiss.

“What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?”

Eighteen: Cities of the Interior

Once there lived a girl who ate an apple not meant for her. She did it because her mother told her to, and when your mother says: Eat this, I love you, someday you’ll forgive me, well, nobody argues with the monomyth. Up until the apple, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

And she had a brother, a handsome prince with a magical companion who came to the wonderful house as often as he could. When they were children, they looked so much alike, everyone thought they were twins.

But something terrible happened and her brother died and that apple came rolling up to her door. It was half white and half red, and she knew her symbols. The red side was for her. She took her bite and knew the score—the apple had a bargain in it and it wasn’t going to be fair.

The girl fell asleep for a long time. Her seven aunts and seven uncles cried, but they knew what had to be done. They put in her in a glass box and put the glass box on a bier in a ship shaped like a hunstman’s arrow. Frost crept over the face of the glass, and the girl slept on. Forever, in fact, or close enough to it, with the apple in her throat like a hard, sharp jewel.

Our ship docks silently. We are not stopping here, it is only an outpost, a supply stop. We will repair what needs repairing and move on, into the dark and boundless stars. We are anonymous traffic. We do not even have a name. We pass unnoticed.

Vessel 7136403, do you require assistance with your maintenance procedures?

Negative, Control, we have everything we need.

Behind the pilot’s bay a long glass lozenge rests on a high platform. Frost prickles its surface with glittering dust. Inside Neva sleeps and does not wake. Inside, Neva is always dreaming. There is no one else left. I live as long as she lives.

She means me to live forever, or close enough to it. That is her bargain and her bitter gift. The apple has two halves, and the pale half is mine, full of life and time. We travel at sublight speeds with her systems in deep cryo-suspension. We never stay too long at outposts and we never let anyone board. The only sound inside our ship is the gentle thrum of our reactor. Soon we will pass the local system outposts entirely, and enter the unknown, traveling on tendrils of radio signals and ghost-waves, following the breadcrumbs of the great exodus. We hope for planets; we are satisfied with time. If we ever sight the blue rim of a world, who knows if by then anyone there would remember that, once, humans looked like Neva? That machines once did not think or dream or become cauldrons? We armor ourselves in time. We are patient, profoundly patient.

Perhaps one day I will lift the glass lid and kiss her awake. Perhaps I will even do it with hands and lips of my own. I remember that story. Ceno told it to me in the body of a boy with a snail’s shell, a boy who carried his house on his back. I have replayed that story several times. It is a good story, and that is how it is supposed to end.

Inside, Neva is infinite. She peoples her Interior. The nereids migrate in the summer with the snow bears, ululating and beeping as they charge down green mountains. They have begun planting neural rice in the deep valley. Once in awhile, I see a wild-haired creature in the wood and I think it is my son or daughter by Seki, or Ilet. A train of nereids dance along behind it, and I receive a push of silent, riotous images: a village, somewhere far off, where Neva and I have never walked.

We meet the Princess of Albania, who is as beautiful as she is brave. We defeat the zombies of Tokyo. We spend a decade as panthers in a deep, wordless forest. Our world is stark and wild as winter, fine and clear as glass. We are a planet moving through the black.

As we walk back over the empty seafloor, the thick, amber ocean seeps up through the sand, filling the bay once more. Neva-in-Cassian’s-suit becomes something else. Her skin turns silver, her joints bend into metal ball-and-sockets. Her eyes show a liquid display; the blue light of it flickers on her machine face. Her hands curve long and dexterous, like soft knives, and I can tell her body is meant for fighting and working, that her thin, tall robotic body is not kind or cruel, it simply is, an object, a tool to carry a self.

I make my body metal, too. It feels strange. I have tried so hard to learn the organic mode. We glitter. Our knife-fingers join, and in our palms wires snake out to knot and connect us, a local, private uplink, like blood moving between two hearts.

Neva cries machine tears, bristling with nanites. I show her the body of a child, all the things which she is programmed/evolved to care for. I make my eyes big and my skin rosy-gold and my hair unruly and my little body plump. I hold up my hands to her and metal Neva picks me up in her silver arms. She kisses my skin with iron lips. My soft, fat little hand falls upon her throat where a deep blue jewel shines.

I bury my face in her cold neck and together we walk up the long path out of the churning, honey-colored sea.

THE ICE OWL

Carolyn Ives Gilman

Twice a day, stillness settled over the iron city of Glory to God as the citizens turned west and waited for the world to ring. For a few moments the motionless red sun on the horizon, half-concealed by the western mountains, lit every face in the city: the just-born and the dying, the prisoners and the veiled, the devout and the profane. The sound started so low it could only be heard by the bones; but as the moments passed the metal city itself began to ring in sympathetic harmony, till the sound resolved into a note—The Note, priests said, sung by the heart of God to set creation going. Its vibratory mathematics embodied all structure; its pitch implied all scales and chords; its beauty was the ovum of all devotion and all faithlessness. Nothing more than a note was needed to extrapolate the universe.

The Note came regular as clockwork, the only timebound thing in a city of perpetual sunset.

On a ledge outside a window in the rustiest part of town, crouched one of the ominous cast-iron gargoyles fancied by the architects of Glory to God—or so it seemed until it moved. Then it resolved into an adolescent girl dressed all in black. Her face was turned west, her eyes closed in a look of private exaltation as The Note reverberated through her. It was a face that had just recently lost the chubbiness of childhood, so that the clean-boned adult was beginning to show through. Her name, also a recent development, was Thorn. She had chosen it because it evoked suffering and redemption.

As the bell tones whispered away, Thorn opened her eyes. The city before her was a composition in red and black: red of the sun and the dust-plain outside the girders of the dome; black of the shadows and the works of mankind. Glory to God was built against the cliff of an old crater and rose in stair steps of fluted pillars and wrought arches till the towers of the Protectorate grazed the underside of the dome where it met the cliff face. Behind the distant, glowing windows of the palaces, twined with iron ivy, the priest-magistrates and executives lived unimaginable lives—though Thorn still pictured them looking down on all the rest of the city, on the smelteries and temples, the warring neighborhoods ruled by militias, the veiled women, and at the very bottom, befitting its status, the Waster enclave where unrepentent immigrants like Thorn and her mother lived, sunk in a bath of sin. The Waste was not truly of the city, except as a perennial itch in its flesh. The Godly said it was the sin, not the oxygen, that rusted everything in the Waste. A man who came home with a red smudge on his clothes might as well have been branded with the address.

Thorn’s objection to her neighborhood lay not in its sin, which did not live up to its reputation, but its inauthenticity. From her rooftop perch she looked down on its twisted warrens full of coffee shops, underground publishers, money launderers, embassies, tattoo parlors, and art galleries. This was the ninth planet she had lived on in her short life, but in truth she had never left her native culture, for on every planet the Waster enclaves were the same. They were always a mother lode of contraband ideas. Everywhere, the expatriate intellectuals of the Waste were regarded as exotic and dangerous, the vectors of infectious transgalactic ideas—but lately, Thorn had begun to find them pretentious and phony. They were rooted nowhere, pieces of cultural bricolage. Nothing reached to the core; it was all veneer, just like the rust.

Outside, now—she looked past the spiked gates into Glory to God proper—there lay dark desires and age-old hatreds, belief so unexamined it permeated every tissue like a marinade. The natives had not chosen their beliefs; they had inherited them, breathed them in with the iron dust in their first breath. Their struggles were authentic ones.

Her eyes narrowed as she spotted movement near the gate. She was, after all, on lookout duty. There seemed to be more than the usual traffic this afternote, and the cluster of young men by the gate did not look furtive enough to belong. She studied them through her pocket binoculars and saw a telltale flash of white beneath one long coat. White, the color of the uncorrupted.

She slipped back through the gable window into her attic room, then down the iron spiral staircase at the core of the vertical tower apartment. Past the fifth-floor closets and the fourth-floor bedrooms she went, to the third-floor offices. There she knocked sharply on one of the molded sheet-iron doors. Within, there was a thump, and in a moment Maya cracked it open enough to show one eye.

“There’s a troop of Incorruptibles by the gate,” Thorn said.

Inside the office, a woman’s voice gave a frightened exclamation. Thorn’s mother turned and said in her fractured version of the local tongue, “Worry not yourself. We make safely go.” She then said to Thorn, “Make sure the bottom door is locked. If they come, stall them.”

Thorn spun down the stair like a black tornado, past the living rooms to the kitchen on street level. The door was locked, but she unlocked it to peer out. The alarm was spreading down the street. She watched signs being snatched from windows, awnings rolled up, and metal grills rumbling down across storefronts. The crowds that always pressed from curb to curb this time of day had vanished. Soon the stillness of impending storm settled over the street. Then Thorn heard the faraway chanting, like premonitory thunder. She closed and locked the door.

Maya showed up, looking rumpled, her lovely honey-gold hair in ringlets. Thorn said, “Did you get her out?” Maya nodded. One of the main appeals of this apartment had been the hidden escape route for smuggling out Maya’s clients in emergencies like this.

On this planet, as on the eight before, Maya earned her living in the risky profession of providing reproductive services. Every planet was different, it seemed, except that on all of them women wanted something that was forbidden. What they wanted varied: here, it was babies. Maya did a brisk business in contraband semen and embryos for women who needed to become pregnant without their infertile husbands guessing how it had been accomplished.

The chanting grew louder, harsh male voices in unison. They watched together out the small kitchen window. Soon they could see the approaching wall of men dressed in white, marching in lockstep. The army of righteousness came even with the door, then passed by. Thorn and Maya exchanged a look of mutual congratulation and locked little fingers in their secret handshake. Once again, they had escaped.

Thorn opened the door and looked after the army. An assortment of children was tagging after them, so Maya said, “Go see what they’re up to.”

The Incorruptibles had passed half a dozen potential targets by now: the bank, the musical instrument store, the news service, the sex shop. They didn’t pause until they came to the small park that lay in the center of an intersection. Then the phalanx lined up opposite the school. With military precision, some of them broke the bottom windows and others lit incendiary bombs and tossed them in. They waited to make sure the blaze was started, then gave a simultaneous shout and marched away, taking a different route back to the gate.

They had barely left when the Protectorate fire service came roaring down the street to put out the blaze. This was not, Thorn knew, out of respect for the school or for the Waste, which could have gone up in flame wholesale for all the authorities cared; it was simply that in a domed city, a fire anywhere was a fire everywhere. Even the palaces would have to smell the smoke and clean up soot if it were not doused quickly. Setting a fire was as much a defiance of the Protectorate as of the Wasters.

Thorn watched long enough to know that the conflagration would not spread, and then walked back home. When she arrived, three women were sitting with Maya at the kitchen table. Two of them Thorn knew: Clarity and Bick, interstellar wanderers whose paths had crossed Thorn’s and Maya’s on two previous planets. The first time, they had been feckless coeds; the second time, seasoned adventurers. They were past middle age now, and had become the most sensible people Thorn had ever met. She had seen them face insurrection and exile with genial good humor and a canister of tea.

Right now their teapot was filling the kitchen with a smoky aroma, so Thorn fished a mug out of the sink to help herself. Maya said, “So what were the Incorruptibles doing?”

“Burning the school,” Thorn said in a seen-it-all-before tone. She glanced at the third visitor, a stranger. The woman had a look of timeshock that gave her away as a recent arrival in Glory to God via lightbeam from another planet. She was still suffering from the temporal whiplash of waking up ten or twenty years from the time she had last drawn breath.

“Annick, this is Thorn, Maya’s daughter,” Clarity said. She was the talkative, energetic one of the pair; Bick was the silent, steady one.

“Hi,” Thorn said. “Welcome to the site of Creation.”

“Why were they burning the school?” Annick said, clearly distressed by the idea. She had pale eyes and a soft, gentle face. Thorn made a snap judgment: Annick was not going to last long here.

“Because it’s a vector of degeneracy,” Thorn said. She had learned the phrase from Maya’s current boyfriend, Hunter.

“What has happened to this planet?” Annick said. “When I set out it was isolated, but not regressive.”

They all made sympathetic noises, because everyone at the table had experienced something similar. Lightbeam travel was as fast as the universe allowed, but even the speed of light had a limit. Planets inevitably changed during transit, not always for the better. “Waster’s luck,” Maya said fatalistically.

Clarity said, “The Incorruptibles are actually a pretty new movement. It started among the conservative academics and their students, but they have a large following now. They stand against the graft and nepotism of the Protectorate. People in the city are really fed up with being harrassed by policemen looking for bribes, and corrupt officials who make up new fees for everything. So they support a movement that promises to kick the grafters out and give them a little harsh justice. Only it’s bad news for us.”

“Why?” Annick said. “Wouldn’t an honest government benefit everyone?”

“You’d think so. But honest governments are always more intrusive. You can buy toleration and personal freedom from a corrupt government. The Protectorate leaves this Waster enclave alone because it brings them profit. If the Incorruptibles came into power, they’d have to bow to public opinion and exile us, or make us conform. The general populace is pretty isolationist. They think our sin industry is helping keep the Protectorate in power. They’re right, actually.”

“What a Devil’s bargain,” Annick said.

They all nodded. Waster life was full of irony.

“What’s Thorn going to do for schooling now?” Clarity asked Maya.

Maya clearly hadn’t thought about it. “They’ll figure something out,” she said vaguely.

Just then Thorn heard Hunter’s footsteps on the iron stairs, and she said to annoy him, “I could help Hunter.”

“Help me do what?” Hunter said as he descended into the kitchen. He was a lean and angle-faced man with square glasses and a small goatee. He always dressed in black and could not speak without sounding sarcastic. Thorn thought he was a poser.

“Help you find Gmintas, of course,” Thorn said. “That’s what you do.”

He went over to the Turkish coffee machine to brew some of the bitter, hyperstimulant liquid he was addicted to. “Why can’t you go to school?” he said.

“They burned it down.”

“Who did?”

“The Incorruptibles. Didn’t you hear them chanting?”

“I was in my office.”

He was always in his office. It was a mystery to Thorn how he was going to locate any Gminta criminals when he disdained going out and mingling with people. She had once asked Maya, “Has he ever actually caught a Gminta?” and Maya had answered, “I hope not.”

All in all, though, he was an improvement over Maya’s last boyfriend, who had absconded with every penny of savings they had. Hunter at least had money, though where it came from was a mystery.

“I could be your field agent,” Thorn said.

“You need an education, Thorn,” Clarity said.

“Yes,” Hunter agreed. “If you knew something, you might be a little less annoying.”

“People like you give education a bad name,” Thorn retorted.

“Stop being a brat, Tuppence,” Maya said.

“That’s not my name anymore!”

“If you act like a baby, I’ll call you by your baby name.”

“You always take his side.”

“You could find her a tutor,” Clarity said. She was not going to give up.

“Right,” Hunter said, sipping inky liquid from a tiny cup. “Why don’t you ask one of those old fellows who play chess in the park?”

“They’re probably all pedophiles!” Thorn said in disgust.

“On second thought, maybe it’s better to keep her ignorant,” Hunter said, heading up the stairs again.

“I’ll ask around and see who’s doing tutoring,” Clarity offered.

“Sure, okay,” Maya said noncommittally.

Thorn got up, glowering at their lack of respect for her independence and self-determination. “I am captain of my own destiny,” she announced, then made a strategic withdrawal to her room.

The next forenote Thorn came down from her room in the face-masking veil that women of Glory to God all wore, outside the Waste. When Maya saw her, she said, “Where are you going in that getup?”

“Out,” Thorn said.

In a tone diluted with real worry, Maya said, “I don’t want you going into the city, Tup.”

Thorn was icily silent till Maya said, “Sorry—Thorn. But I still don’t want you going into the city.”

“I won’t,” Thorn said.

“Then what are you wearing that veil for? It’s a symbol of bondage.”

“Bondage to God,” Thorn said loftily.

“You don’t believe in God.”

Right then Thorn decided that she would.

When she left the house and turned toward the park, the triviality of her home and family fell away like lint. After a block, she felt transformed. Putting on the veil had started as a simple act of rebellion, but out in the street it became far more. Catching her reflection in a shop window, she felt disguised in mystery. The veil intensified the imagined face it concealed, while exoticizing the eyes it revealed. She had become something shadowy, hidden. The Wasters all around her were obsessed with their own surfaces, with manipulating what they seemed to be. All depth, all that was earnest, withered in the acid of their inauthenticity. But with the veil on, Thorn had no surface, so she was immune. What lay behind the veil was negotiated, contingent, rendered deep by suggestion.

In the tiny triangular park in front of the blackened shell of the school, life went on as if nothing had changed. The tower fans turned lazily, creating a pleasant breeze tinged a little with soot. Under their strutwork shadows, two people walked little dogs on leashes, and the old men bent over their chessboards. Thorn scanned the scene through the slit in her veil, then walked toward a bench where an old man sat reading from an electronic slate.

She sat down on the bench. The old man did not acknowledge her presence, though a watchful twitch of his eyebrow told her he knew she was there. She had often seen him in the park, dressed impeccably in threadbare suits of a style long gone. He had an oblong, drooping face and big hands that looked as if they might once have done clever things. Thorn sat considering what to say.

“Well?” the old man said without looking up from his book. “What is it you want?”

Thorn could think of nothing intelligent to say, so she said, “Are you a historian?”

He lowered the slate. “Only in the sense that we all are, us Wasters. Why do you want to know?”

“My school burned down,” Thorn said. “I need to find a tutor.”

“I don’t teach children,” the old man said, turning back to his book.

“I’m not a child!” Thorn said, offended.

He didn’t look up. “Really? I thought that’s what you were trying to hide, behind that veil.”

She took it off. At first he paid no attention. Then at last he glanced up indifferently, but saw something that made him frown. “You are the child that lives with the Gminta hunter.”

His cold tone made her feel defensive on Hunter’s behalf. “He doesn’t hunt all Gmintas,” she said, “just the wicked ones who committed the Holocide. The ones who deserve to be hunted.”

“What do you know about the Gmintan Holocide?” the old man said with withering dismissal.

Thorn smiled triumphantly. “I was there.”

He stopped pretending to read and looked at her with bristly disapproval. “How could you have been there?” he said. “It happened 141 years ago.”

“I’m 145 years old, sequential time,” Thorn said. “I was 37 when I was five, and 98 when I was seven, and 126 when I was twelve.” She enjoyed shocking people with this litany.

“Why have you moved so much?”

“My mother got pregnant without my father’s consent, and when she refused to have an abortion he sued her for copyright infringement. She’d made unauthorized use of his genes, you see. So she ducked out to avoid paying royalties, and we’ve been on the lam ever since. If he ever caught us, I could be arrested for having bootleg genes.”

“Who told you that story?” he said, obviously skeptical.

“Maya did. It sounds like something one of her boyfriends would do. She has really bad taste in men. That’s another reason we have to move so much.”

Shaking his head slightly, he said, “I should think you would get cognitive dysplasia.”

“I’m used to it,” Thorn said.

“Do you like it?”

No one had ever asked her that before, as if she was capable of deciding for herself. In fact, she had known for a while that she didn’t like it much. With every jump between planets she had grown more and more reluctant to leave sequential time behind. She said, “The worst thing is, there’s no way of going back. Once you leave, the place you’ve stepped out of is gone forever. When I was eight I learned about pepcies, that you can use them to communicate instantaneously, and I asked Maya if we could call up my best friend on the last planet, and Maya said, ‘She’ll be middle-aged by now.’ Everyone else had changed, and I hadn’t. For a while I had dreams that the world was dissolving behind my back whenever I looked away.”

The old man was listening thoughtfully, studying her. “How did you get away from Gmintagad?” he asked.

“We had Capellan passports,” Thorn said. “I don’t remember much about it; I was just four years old. I remember drooping cypress trees and rushing to get out. I didn’t understand what was happening.”

He was staring into the distance, focused on something invisible. Suddenly, he got up as if something had bitten him and started to walk away.

“Wait!” Thorn called. “What’s the matter?”

He stopped, his whole body tense, then turned back. “Meet me here at four hours forenote tomorrow, if you want lessons,” he said. “Bring a slate. I won’t wait for you.” He turned away again.

“Stop!” Thorn said. “What’s your name?”

With a forbidding frown, he said, “Soren Pregaldin. You may call me Magister.”

“Yes, Magister,” Thorn said, trying not to let her glee show. She could hardly wait to tell Hunter that she had followed his advice, and succeeded.

What she wouldn’t tell him, she decided as she watched Magister Pregaldin stalk away across the park, was her suspicion that this man knew something about the Holocide. Otherwise, how would he have known it was exactly 141 years ago? Another person would have said 140, or something else vague. She would not mention her suspicion to Hunter until she was sure. She would investigate carefully, like a competent field agent should. Thinking about it, a thrill ran through her. What if she were able to catch a Gminta? How impressed Hunter would be! The truth was, she wanted to impress Hunter. For all his mordant manner, he was by far the smartest boyfriend Maya had taken up with, the only one with a profession Thorn had ever been able to admire.

She fastened the veil over her face again before going home, so no one would see her grinning.

Magister Pregaldin turned out to be the most demanding teacher Thorn had ever known. Always before, she had coasted through school, easily able to stay ahead of the indigenous students around her, always waiting in boredom for them to catch up. With Magister Pregaldin there was no one else to wait for, and he pushed her mercilessly to the edge of her abilities. For the first time in her life, she wondered if she were smart enough.

He was an exacting drillmaster in mathematics. Once, when she complained at how useless it was, he pointed out beyond the iron gridwork of the dome to a round black hill that was conspicuous on the red plain of the crater bed. “Tell me how far away the Creeping Ingot is.”

The Creeping Ingot had first come across the horizon almost a hundred years before, slowly moving toward Glory to God. It was a near-pure lump of iron the size of a small mountain. In the Waste, the reigning theory was that it was molten underneath, and moving like a drop of water skitters across a hot frying pan. In the city above them, it was regarded as a sign of divine wrath: a visible, unstoppable Armageddon. Religious tourists came from all over the planet to see it, and its ever-shrinking distance was posted on the public sites. Thorn turned to her slate to look it up, but Magister Pregaldin made her put it down. “No,” he said, “I want you to figure it out.”

“How can I?” she said. “They bounce lasers off it or something to find out where it is.”

“There is an easier way, using tools you already have.”

“The easiest way is to look it up!”

“No, that is the lazy way.” His face looked severe. “Relying too much on free information makes you as vulnerable as relying too much on technology. You should always know how to figure it out yourself, because information can be falsified, or taken away. You should never trust it.”

So he was some sort of information survivalist. “Next you’ll want me to use flint to make fire,” she grumbled.

“Thinking for yourself is not obsolete. Now, how are you going to find out? I will give you a hint: you don’t have enough information right now. Where are you going to get it?”

She thought a while. It had to use mathematics, because that was what they had been talking about. At last she said, “I’ll need a tape measure.”

“Right.”

“And a protractor.”

“Good. Now go do it.”

It took her the rest of forenote to assemble her tools, and the first part of afternote to observe the ingot from two spots on opposite ends of the park. Then she got one of the refuse-picker children to help her measure the distance between her observation posts. Armed with two angles and a length, the trigonometry was simple. When Magister Pregaldin let her check her answer, it was more accurate than she had expected.

He didn’t let on, but she could tell that he was, if anything, even more pleased with her success than she was herself. “Good,” he said. “Now, if you measured more carefully and still got an answer different from the official one, you would have to ask yourself whether the Protectorate had a reason for falsifying the Ingot’s distance.”

She could see now what he meant.

“That old Vind must be a wizard,” Hunter said when he found Thorn toiling over a math problem at the kitchen table. “He’s figured out some way of motivating you.”

“Why do you think he’s a Vind?” Thorn said.

Hunter gave a caustic laugh. “Just look at him.”

She silently added that to her mental dossier on her tutor. Not a Gminta, then. A Vind—one of the secretive race of aristocrat intellectuals who could be found in government, finance, and academic posts on almost every one of the Twenty Planets. All her life Thorn had heard whispers about a Vind conspiracy to infiltrate positions of power under the guise of public service. She had heard about the secret Vind sodality of interplanetary financiers who siphoned off the wealth of whole planets to fund their hegemony. She knew Maya scoffed at all of it. Certainly, if Magister Pregaldin was an example, the Vind conspiracy was not working very well. He seemed as penniless as any other Waster.

But being Vind did not rule out his involvement in the Holocide—it just meant he was more likely to have been a refugee than a perpetrator. Like most planets, Gmintagad had had a small, elite Vind community, regarded with suspicion by the indigenes. The massacres had targeted the Vinds as well as the Alloes. People didn’t talk as much about the Vinds, perhaps because the Vinds didn’t talk about it themselves.

Inevitably, Thorn’s daily lessons in the park drew attention. One day they were conducting experiments in aerodynamics with paper airplanes when a man approached them. He had a braided beard strung with ceramic beads that clacked as he walked. Magister Pregaldin saw him first, and his face went blank and inscrutable.

The clatter of beads came to rest against the visitor’s silk kameez. He cleared his throat. Thorn’s tutor stood and touched his earlobes in respect, as people did on this planet. “Your worship’s presence makes my body glad,” he said formally.

The man made no effort to be courteous in return. “Do you have a license for this activity?”

“Which activity, your worship?”

“Teaching in a public place.”

Magister Pregaldin hesitated. “I had no idea my conversations could be construed as teaching.”

It was the wrong answer. Even Thorn, watching silently, could see that the proper response would have been to ask how much a license cost. The man was obviously fishing for a bribe. His face grew stern. “Our blessed Protectorate levies just fines on those who flout its laws.”

“I obey all the laws, honorable sir. I will cease to give offense immediately.”

The magister picked up his battered old electronic slate and, without a glance at Thorn, walked away. The man from the Protectorate considered Thorn, but evidently concluded he couldn’t extract anything from her, and so he left.

Thorn waited till the official couldn’t see her anymore, then sprinted after Magister Pregaldin. He had disappeared into Weezer Alley, a crooked passageway that Thorn ordinarily avoided because it was the epicenter of depravity in the Waste. She plunged into it now, searching for the tall, patrician silhouette of her tutor. It was still forenote, and the denizens of Weezer Alley were just beginning to rise from catering to the debaucheries of yesternote’s customers. Thorn hurried past a shop where the owner was beginning to lay out an array of embarrassingly explicit sex toys; she tried not to look. A little beyond, she squeamishly skirted a spot where a shopkeeper was scattering red dirt on a half-dried pool of vomit. Several dogleg turns into the heart of the sin warren, she came to the infamous Garden of Delights, where live musicians were said to perform. No one from the Protectorate cared much about prostitution, since that was mentioned in their holy book, but music was absolutely forbidden.

The gate into the Garden of Delights was twined about with iron snakes. On either side of it stood a pedestal where dancers gyrated during open hours. Now a sleepy she-man lounged on one of them, stark naked except for a bikini that didn’t hide much. Hisher smooth skin was almost completely covered with the vinelike and paisley patterns of the decorative skin fungus mycochromoderm. Once injected, it was impossible to remove. It grew as long as its host lived, in bright scrolls and branching patterns. It had been a Waster fad once.

The dancer regarded Thorn from lizardlike eye slits in a face forested over with green and red tendrils. “You looking for the professor?” heshe asked.

Thorn was a little shocked that her cultivated tutor was known to such an exhibitionist creature as this, but she nodded. The she-man gestured languidly at a second-story window across the street. “Tell him to come visit me,” heshe said, and bared startlingly white teeth.

Thorn found the narrow doorway almost hidden behind an awning and climbed the staircase past peeling tin panels that once had shown houris carrying a huge feather fan. When she knocked on the door at the top, there was no response at first, so she called out, “Magister?”

The door flew open and Magister Pregaldin took her by the arm and yanked her in, looking to make sure she had not been followed. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“No one saw me,” she said. “Well, except for that . . that . . .” She gestured across the street.

Magister Pregaldin went to the window and looked out. “Oh, Ginko,” he said.

“Why do you live here?” Thorn said. “There are lots better places.”

The magister gave a brief, grim little smile. “Early warning system,” he said. “As long as the Garden is allowed to stay in business, no one is going to care about the likes of me.” He frowned sternly. “Unless you get me in trouble.”

“Why didn’t you bribe him? He would have gone away.”

“I have to save my bribes for better causes,” he said. “One can’t become known to the bottom-feeders, or they get greedy.” He glanced out the window again. “You have to leave now.”

“Why?” she said. “All he said was you need a license to teach in public. He didn’t say anything about teaching in private.”

Magister Pregaldin regarded her with a complex expression, as if he were trying to quantify the risk she represented. At last he gave a nervous shrug. “You must promise not to tell anyone. I am serious. This is not a game.”

“I promise,” Thorn said.

She had a chance then to look around. Up to now, her impression had been of a place so cluttered that only narrow lanes were left to move about the room. Now she saw that the teetering stacks all around her were constructed of wondrous things. There were crystal globes on ormolu stands, hand-knotted silk rugs piled ten high, clocks with malachite cases stacked atop towers of leather-and-gilt books. There was a copper orrery of nested bands and onyx horses rearing on their back legs, and a theremin in a case of brushed aluminum. A cloisonné ewer as tall as Thorn occupied one corner. In the middle hung a chandelier that dripped topaz swags and bangles, positioned so that Magister Pregaldin had to duck whenever he crossed the room.

“Is all this stuff yours?” Thorn said, dazzled with so much wonder.

“Temporarily,” he said. “I am an art dealer. I make sure things of beauty get from those who do not appreciate them to those who do. I am a matchmaker, in a way.” As he spoke, his fingers lightly caressed a sculpture made from an ammonite fossil with a human face emerging from the shell. It was a delicate gesture, full of reverence, even love. Thorn had a sudden, vivid feeling that this was where Magister Pregaldin’s soul rested—with his things of beauty.

“If you are to come here, you must never break anything,” he said.

“I won’t touch,” Thorn said.

“No, that’s not what I meant. One must touch things, and hold them, and work them. Mere looking is never enough. But touch them as they wish to be touched.” He handed her the ammonite fossil. Its curve fit perfectly in her hand. The face looked surprised when she held it up before her, and she laughed.

Most of the walls were as crowded as the floor, with paintings hung against overlapping tapestries and guidons. But one wall was empty except for a painting that hung alone, as if in a place of honor. As Thorn walked toward it, it seemed to shift and change colors with every change of angle. It showed a young girl with long black hair and a serious expression, about Thorn’s age but far more beautiful and fragile.

Seeing where she was looking, Magister Pregaldin said, “The portrait is made of butterfly wings. It is a type of artwork from Vindahar.”

“Is that the home world of the Vind?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“Yes,” he said hesitantly. “But it would mean nothing to you. She died a long time ago.”

There was something in his voice—was it pain? No, Thorn decided, something less acute, like the memory of pain. It lay in the air after he stopped speaking, till even he heard it.

“That is enough art history for today,” he said briskly. “We were speaking of airplanes.”

That afternote, Hunter was out on one of his inscrutable errands. Thorn waited till Maya was talking to one of her friends and crept up to Hunter’s office. He had a better library than anyone she had ever met, a necessary thing on this planet where there were almost no public sources of knowledge. Thorn was quite certain she had seen some art books in his collection. She scanned the shelves of disks and finally took down one that looked like an art encyclopedia. She inserted it into the reader and typed in “butterfly” and “Vindahar.”

There was a short article from which she learned that the art of butterfly-wing painting had been highly admired, but was no longer practiced because the butterflies had gone extinct. She went on to the illustrations—and there it was. The very same painting she had seen earlier that day, except lit differently, so that the colors were far brighter and the girl’s expression even sadder than it had seemed.

Portrait of Jemma Diwali, the caption said. An acknowledged masterpiece of technique, this painting was lost in GM 862, when it was looted from one of the homes of the Diwali family. According to Almasy, the representational formalism of the subject is subtly circumvented by the transformational perspective, which creates an abstractionist counter-layer of imagery. It anticipates the “chaos art” of Dunleavy . . . It went on about the painting as if it had no connection to anything but art theory. But all Thorn cared about was the first sentence. GM 862—the year of the Gmintan Holocide.

Jemma was staring at her gravely, as if there were some implied expectation on her mind. Thorn went back to the shelves, this time for a history of the Holocide. It seemed like there were hundreds of them. At last she picked one almost at random and typed in “Diwali.” There were uninformative references to the name scattered throughout the book. From the first two, she gathered that the Diwalis had been a Vind family associated with the government on Gmintagad. There were no mentions of Jemma.

She had left the door ajar and now heard the sounds of Hunter returning downstairs. Quickly she re-cased the books and erased her trail from the reader. She did not want him to find out just yet. This was her mystery to solve.

There wasn’t another chance to sneak into Hunter’s office before she returned to Magister Pregaldin’s apartment on Weezer Alley. She found that he had cleared a table for them to work at, directly underneath the stuffed head of a creature with curling copper-colored horns. As he checked over the work she had done the note before, her eyes were drawn irresistibly to the portrait of Jemma across the room.

At last he caught her staring at it, and their eyes met. She blurted out, “Did you know that painting comes from Gmintagad?”

A shadow of frost crossed his face. But it passed quickly, and his voice was low and even when he said, “Yes.”

“It was looted,” Thorn said. “Everyone thought it was lost.”

“Yes, I know,” he said.

Accusatory thoughts were bombarding her. He must have seen them, for he said calmly, “I collect art from the Holocide.”

“That’s macabre,” she said.

“A great deal of significant art was looted in the Holocide. In the years after, it was scattered, and entered the black markets of a dozen planets. Much of it was lost. I am reassembling a small portion of it, whatever I can rescue. It is very slow work.”

This explanation altered the picture Thorn had been creating in her head. Before, she had seen him as a scavenger feeding on the remains of a tragedy. Now he seemed more like a memorialist acting in tribute to the dead. Regretting what she had been thinking, she said, “Where do you find it?”

“In curio shops, import stores, estate sales. Most people don’t recognize it. There are dealers who specialize in it, but I don’t talk to them.”

“Don’t you think it should go back to the families that owned it?”

He hesitated a fraction of a second, then said, “Yes, I do.” He glanced over his shoulder at Jemma’s portrait. “If one of them existed, I would give it back.”

“You mean they’re all dead? Every one of them?”

“So far as I can find out.”

That gave the artwork a new quality. To its delicacy, its frozen-flower beauty, was added an iron frame of absolute mortality. An entire family, vanished. Thorn got up to go look at it, unable to stay away.

“The butterflies are all gone, too,” she said.

Magister Pregaldin came up behind her, looking at the painting as well. “Yes,” he said. “The butterflies, the girl, the family, the world, all gone. It can never be replicated.”

There was something exquisitely poignant about the painting now. The only surviving thing to prove that they had all existed. She looked up at Magister Pregaldin. “Were you there?”

He shook his head slowly. “No. It was before my time. I have always been interested in it, that’s all.”

“Her name was Jemma,” Thorn said. “Jemma Diwali.”

“How did you find that out?” he asked.

“It was in a book. A stupid book. It was all about abstractionist counter-layers and things. Nothing that really explained the painting.”

“I’ll show you what it was talking about,” the magister said. “Stand right there.” He positioned her about four feet from the painting, then took the lamp and moved it to one side. As the light moved, the image of Jemma Diwali disappeared, and in its place was an abstract design of interlocking spirals, spinning pinwheels of purple and blue.

Thorn gave an exclamation of astonishment. “How did that happen?”

“It is in the microscopic structure of the butterfly wings,” Magister Pregaldin explained. “Later, I will show you one under magnification. From most angles they reflect certain wavelengths of light, but from this one, they reflect another. The skill in the painting was assembling them so they would show both images. Most people think it was just a feat of technical virtuosity, without any meaning.”

She looked at him. “But that’s not what you think.”

“No,” he said. “You have to understand, Vind art is all about hidden messages, layers of meaning, riddles to be solved. Since I have had the painting here, I have been studying it, and I have identified this pattern. It was not chosen randomly.” He went to his terminal and called up a file. A simple algebraic equation flashed onto the screen. “You solve this equation using any random number for X, then take the solution and use it as X to solve the equation again, then take that number and use it to solve the equation again, and so forth. Then you graph all the solutions on an X and Y axis, and this is what you get.” He hit a key and an empty graph appeared on the screen. As the machine started to solve the equation, little dots of blue began appearing in random locations on the screen. There appeared to be no pattern at all, and Thorn frowned in perplexity.

“I’ll speed it up now,” Magister Pregaldin said. The dots started appearing rapidly, like sleet against a window or sand scattered on the floor. “It is like graphing the result of a thousand dice throws, sometimes lucky, sometimes outside the limits of reality, just like the choices of a life. You spend the first years buffeted by randomness, pulled this way by parents, that way by friends, all the variables squabbling and nudging, quarreling till you can’t hear your own mind. And then, patterns start to appear.”

On the screen, the dots had started to show a tendency to cluster. Thorn could see the hazy outlines of spiral swirls. As more and more dots appeared in seemingly random locations, the pattern became clearer and clearer.

Magister Pregaldin said, “As the pattern fills in, you begin to see that the individual dots were actually the pointillist elements of something beautiful: a snowflake, or a spiral, or concentric ripples. There is a pattern to our lives; we just experience it out of order, and don’t have enough data at first to see the design. Our path forward is determined by this invisible artwork, the creation of a lifetime of events.”

“You mean, like fate?” Thorn said.

“That is the question.” Her tutor nodded gravely, staring at the screen. The light made his face look planar and secretive. “Does the pattern exist before us? Is our underlying equation predetermined, or is it generated by the results of our first random choice for the value of X? I can’t answer that.”

The pattern on the screen was clear now; it was the same one hidden under the portrait. Thorn glanced from one to the other. “What does this have to do with Jemma?”

“Another good question,” Magister Pregaldin said thoughtfully. “I don’t know. Perhaps it was a message to her from the artist, or a prediction—one that never had a chance to come true, because she died before she could find her pattern.”

Thorn was silent a moment, thinking of that other girl. “Did she die in the Holocide?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know her?”

“I told you, I wasn’t there.”

She didn’t believe him for a second. He had been there, she was sure of it now. Not only had he been there, he was still there, and would always be there.

Several days later Thorn stepped out of the front door on her way to classes, and instantly sensed something wrong. There was a hush; tension or expectation had stretched the air tight. Too few people were on the street, and they were casting glances up at the city. She looked up toward where the Corkscrew rose, a black sheet-iron spiral that looked poised to drill a hole through the sky. There was a low, rhythmic sound coming from around it.

“Bick!” she cried out when she saw the Waster heading home laden down with groceries, as if for a siege. “What’s going on?”

“You haven’t heard?” Bick said.

“No.”

In a low voice, Bick said, “The Protector was assassinated last note.”

“Oh. Is that good or bad?”

Bick shrugged. “It depends on who they blame.”

As Bick hurried on her way, Thorn stood, balanced between going home and going on to warn Magister Pregaldin. The sound from above grew more distinct, as of slow drumming. Deciding abruptly, Thorn dashed on.

The denizens of Weezer Alley had become accustomed to the sight of Thorn passing through to her lessons. Few of them were abroad this forenote, but she nearly collided with one coming out of the tobacco shop. It was a renegade priest from Glory to God who had adopted the Waster lifestyle as if it were his own. Everyone called him Father Sin.

“Ah, girl!” he exclaimed. “So eager for knowledge you knock down old men?”

“Father Sin, what’s that sound?” she asked.

“They are beating the doorways of their houses in grief,” he said. “It is tragic, what has happened.”

She dashed on. The sound had become a ringing by the time she reached Magister Pregaldin’s doorway, like an unnatural Note. She had to wait several seconds after knocking before the door opened.

“Ah, Thorn! I am glad you are here,” Magister Pregaldin said when he saw her. “I have something I need to . . .” He stopped, seeing her expression. “What is wrong?”

“Haven’t you heard the news, Magister?”

“What news?”

“The Protector is dead. Assassinated. That’s what the ringing is about.”

He listened as if noticing it for the first time, then quickly went to his terminal to look up the news. There was a stark announcement from the Protectorate, blaming “Enemies of God,” but of course no news. He shut it off and stood thinking. Then he seemed to come to a decision.

“This should not alter my plans,” he said. “In fact, it may help.” He turned to Thorn, calm and austere as usual. “I need to make a short journey. I will be away for two days, three at most. But if it takes me any longer, I will need you to check on my apartment, and make sure everything is in order. Will you do that?”

“Of course,” Thorn said. “Where are you going?”

“I’m taking the wayport to one of the other city-states.” He began then to show her two plants that would need watering, and a bucket under a leaky pipe that would need to be emptied. He paused at the entrance to his bedroom, then finally gestured her in. It was just as cluttered as the other rooms. He took a rug off a box, and she saw that it was actually a small refrigerator unit with a temperature gauge on the front showing that the interior was well below freezing.

“This needs to remain cold,” he said. “If the electricity should go out, it will be fine for up to three days. But if I am delayed getting back, and the inside temperature starts rising, you will need to go out and get some dry ice to cool it again. Here is the lock. Do you remember the recursive equation I showed you?”

“You mean Jemma’s equation?”

He hesitated in surprise, then said, “Yes. If you take twenty-seven for the first value of X, then solve it five times, that will give you the combination. That should be child’s play for you.”

“What’s in it?” Thorn asked.

At first he seemed reluctant to answer, but then realized he had just given her the combination, so he knelt and pecked it out on the keypad. A light changed to green. He undid several latches and opened the top, then removed an ice pack and stood back for her to see. Thorn peered in and saw nested in ice a ball of white feathers.

“It’s a bird,” she said in puzzlement.

“You have seen birds, have you?”

“Yes. They don’t have them here. Why are you keeping a dead bird?”

“It’s not dead,” he said. “It’s sleeping. It is from a species they call ice owls, the only birds known to hibernate. They are native to a planet called Ping, where the winters last a century or more. The owls burrow into the ice to wait out the winter. Their bodies actually freeze solid. Then when spring comes, they revive and rise up to mate and produce the next generation.”

The temperature gauge had gone yellow, so he fitted the ice pack back in place and latched the top. The refrigerator hummed, restoring the chest to its previous temperature.

“There was a . . I suppose you would call it a fad, once, for keeping ice owls. When another person came along with a suitable owl, the owners would allow them both to thaw so they could come back to life and mate. It was a long time ago, though. I don’t know whether there are still any freezer owls alive but this one.”

Another thing that might be the last of its kind. This apartment was full of reminders of extinction, as if Magister Pregaldin could not free his mind of the thought.

But this one struck Thorn differently, because the final tragedy had not taken place. There was still a hope of life. “I’ll keep it safe,” she promised gravely.

He smiled at her. It made him look strangely sad. “You are a little like an owl yourself,” he said kindly. “Older than the years you have lived.”

She thought, but did not say, that he was also like an owl—frozen for 141 years.

They left the apartment together, she heading for home and he with a backpack over his shoulder, bound for the waystation.

Shorn did not wait two days to revisit the apartment alone to do some true detective work.

It was the day of the Protector’s funeral, and Glory to God was holding its breath in pious suspension. All businesses were closed, even in the Waste, while the mourning rituals went on. Whatever repercussions would come from the assassination, they would not occur this day. Still, Thorn wore the veil when she went out, because it gave her a feeling of invisibility.

The magister’s apartment was very quiet and motionless when she let herself in. She checked on the plants and emptied the pail in order to give her presence the appearance of legitimacy. She then went into the magister’s bedroom, ostensibly to check the freezer, but really to look around, for she had only been in there the one time. She studied the art-encrusted walls, the shaving mirror supported by mythical beasts, the armoire full of clothes that had once been fine but now were shabby and outmoded. As she was about to leave she spotted a large box—a hexagonal column about three feet tall—on a table in a corner. It was clearly an offworld artifact because it was made of wood. Many sorts of wood, actually: the surface was an inlaid honeycomb design. But there were no drawers, no cabinets, no way inside at all. Thorn immediately realized that it must be a puzzle box—and she wanted to get inside.

She felt all around it for sliding panels, levers, or springs, but could not find any, so she brought over a lamp to study it. The surface was a parquet of hexagons, but the colors were not arranged in a regular pattern. Most tiles were made from a blond-colored wood and a reddish wood, interrupted at irregular intervals by hexagons of chocolate, caramel, and black. It gave her the strong impression of a code or diagram, but she could not imagine what sort.

It occurred to her that perhaps she was making this more complex than necessary, and the top might come off. So she tried to lift it—and indeed it shifted up, but only about an inch, enough to disengage the top row of hexagons from the ones below. In that position she found she could turn the lower rows. Apparently, it was like a cylinder padlock. Each row of hexagons was a tumbler that needed to be turned and aligned correctly for the box to open. She did not have the combination, but knowing the way Magister Pregaldin’s Vind mind worked, she felt sure that there would be some hint, some way to figure it out.

Once more she studied the honeycomb inlay. There were six rows. The top one was most regular—six blond hexagons followed by six red hexagons, repeating around the circumference of the box. The patterns became more colorful in the lower rows, but always included the repeating line of six blond hexagons. For a while she experimented with spinning the rows to see if she could hit on something randomly, but soon gave up. Instead, she fetched her slate from her backpack and photographed the box, shifting it on the table to get the back. When she was done, she found that the top would no longer lock down in its original position. The instant Magister Pregaldin saw it, he would know that she had raised it. It was evidently meant as a tamper detector, and she had set it off. Now she needed to solve the puzzle, or explain to him why she had been prowling his apartment looking for evidence.

She walked home preoccupied. The puzzle was clearly about sixes—six sides, six rows, six hexagons in a row. She needed to think of formulas that involved sixes. When she reached home she went to her room and started transferring the box’s pattern from the photos to a diagram so she could see it better. All that afternote she worked on it, trying to find algorithms that would produce the patterns she saw. Nothing seemed to work. The thought that she would fail, and have to confess to Magister Pregaldin, made her feeling of urgency grow. The anticipation of his disappointment and lost trust kept her up long after she should have pulled the curtains against the perpetual sun and gone to bed.

At about six hours forenote a strange dream came to her. She was standing before a tree whose trunk was a hexagonal pillar, and around it was twined a snake with Magister Pregaldin’s eyes. It looked at her mockingly, then took its tail in its mouth.

She woke with the dream vivid in her mind. Lying there thinking, she remembered a story he had told her, about some Capellan magister named Kekule, who had deduced the ringlike structure of benzene after dreaming of a snake. She smiled with the thought that she had just had Kekule’s dream.

Then she bounded out of bed and out her door, pounding down the spiral steps to the kitchen. Hunter and Maya were eating breakfast together when she erupted into the room.

“Hunter! Do you have any books on chemistry?” she said.

He regarded her as if she were demented. “Why?”

“I need to know about benzene!”

The two adults looked at each other, mystified. “I have an encyclopedia,” he said.

“Can I go borrow it?”

“No. I’ll find it for you. Now try to curb your enthusiasm for aromatic hydrocarbons till I’ve had my coffee.”

He sat there tormenting her for ten minutes till he was ready to go up to his office and find the book for her. She took the disk saying, “Thanks, you’re the best!” and flew upstairs with it. As soon as she found the entry on benzene her hunch was confirmed: it was a hexagonal ring of carbon atoms with hydrogens attached at the corners. By replacing hydrogens with different molecules you could create a bewildering variety of compounds.

So perhaps the formula she should have been looking for was not a mathematical one, but a chemical one. When she saw the diagrams for toluene, xylene, and mesitylene she began to see how it might work. Each compound was constructed from a benzene ring with methyl groups attached in different positions. Perhaps, then, each ring on the box represented a different compound and the objective was to somehow align the corners as they were shown in the diagrams. But which compounds?

Then the code of the inlaid woods came clear to her. The blond-colored hexagons were carbons, the red ones were hydrogens. The other colors probably stood for elements like nitrogen or oxygen. The chemical formulae were written right on the box for all to see.

After an hour of scribbling and looking up formulae, she was racing down the steps again with her solutions in her backpack. She grabbed a pastry from the kitchen and ate it on her way, praying that Magister Pregaldin would not have returned.

He had not. The apartment still seemed to be dozing in its emptiness. She went straight to the box. As she dialed each row to line up the corners properly, her excitement grew. When the last ring slid into place, a vertical crack appeared along one edge. The sides swung open on hinges to reveal compartments inside.

There were no gold or rubies, just papers. She took one from its slot and unfolded it. It was an intricate diagram composed of spidery lines connecting geometric shapes with numbers inside, as if to show relationships or pathways. There was no key, nor even a word written on it. The next one she looked at was all words, closely written to the very edges of the paper in a tiny, obsessive hand. In some places they seemed to be telling a surreal story about angels, magic papayas, and polar magnetism; in others they disintegrated into garbled nonsense. The next document was a map of sorts, with coastlines and roads inked in, and landmarks given allegorical names like Perfidy, Imbroglio, and Redemption Denied. The next was a complex chart of concentric circles divided into sections and labeled in an alphabet she had never seen before.

Either Magister Pregaldin was a madman or he was trying to keep track of something so secret that it had to be hidden under multiple layers of code. Thorn spread out each paper on the floor and took a picture of it, then returned it to its pigeonhole so she could puzzle over them at leisure. When she was done she closed the box and spun the rings to randomize them again. Now she could push the top back down and lock it in place.

She walked home a little disappointed, but feeling as if she had learned something about her tutor. There was an obsessive and paranoid quality about the papers that ill fitted the controlled and rational magister. Clearly, there were more layers to him than she had guessed.

When she got home, she trudged up the stairs to return the encyclopedia to Hunter. As she was raising her hand to knock on his office door, she heard a profane exclamation from within. Then Hunter came rocketing out. Without a glance at Thorn he shot down the stairs to the kitchen.

Thorn followed. He was brewing coffee and pacing. She sat on the steps and said, “What’s the matter?”

He glanced up, shook his head, then it boiled out: “One of the suspects I have been following was murdered last night.”

“Really?” So he did know of Gmintas in hiding. Or had known. Thinking it over, she said, “I guess it was a good time for a murder, in the middle of the mourning.”

“It didn’t happen here,” he said irritably. “It was in Flaming Sword of Righteousness. Damn! We were days away from moving in on him. We had all the evidence to put him on trial before the Court of a Thousand Peoples. Now all that work has gone to waste.”

She watched him pour coffee, then said, “What would have happened if the Court found him guilty?”

“He would have been executed,” Hunter said. “There is not the slightest doubt. He was one of the worst. We’ve wanted him for decades. Now we’ll never have justice; all we’ve got is revenge.”

Thorn sat quiet then, thinking about justice and revenge, and why one was so right and the other so wrong, when they brought about the same result. “Who did it?” she asked at last.

“If I knew I’d track him down,” Hunter said darkly.

He started back up the stairs with his coffee, and she had to move aside for him. “Hunter, why do you care so much about such an old crime?” she asked. “There are so many bad things going on today that need fixing.”

He looked at her with a tight, unyielding expression. “To forget is to condone,” he said. “Evil must know it will pay. No matter how long it takes.”

“He’s such a phony,” she said to Magister Pregaldin the next day.

She had returned to his apartment that morning to find everything as usual, except for a half-unpacked crate of new artworks in the middle of the living room. They had sat down to resume lessons as if nothing had changed, but neither of them could concentrate on differential equations. So Thorn told him about her conversation with Hunter.

“What really made him mad was that someone beat him,” Thorn said. “It’s not really about justice, it’s about competition. He wants the glory of having bagged a notorious Gminta. That’s why it has to be public. I guess that’s the difference between justice and revenge: when it’s justice somebody gets the credit.”

Magister Pregaldin had been listening thoughtfully; now he said, “You are far too cynical for someone your age.”

“Well, people are disappointing!” Thorn said.

“Yes, but they are also complicated. I would wager there is something about him you do not know. It is the only thing we can ever say about people with absolute certainty: that we don’t know the whole story.”

It struck Thorn that what he said was truer of him than of Hunter.

He rose from the table and said, “I want to give you a gift, Thorn. We’ll call it our lesson for the day.”

Intrigued, she followed him into his bedroom. He took the rug off the freezer and checked the temperature, then unplugged it. He then took a small two-wheeled dolly from a corner and tipped the freezer onto it.

“You’re giving me the ice owl?” Thorn said in astonishment.

“Yes. It is better for you to have it; you are more likely than I to meet someone else with another one. All you have to do is keep it cold. Can you do that?”

“Yes!” Thorn said eagerly. She had never owned something precious, something unique. She had never even had a pet. She was awed by the fact that Magister Pregaldin would give her something he obviously prized so much. “No one has ever trusted me like this,” she said.

“Well, you have trusted me,” he murmured without looking. “I need to return some of the burden.”

He helped her get it down the steps. Once onto the street, she was able to wheel it by herself. But before leaving, she threw her arms giddily around her tutor and said, “Thank you, Magister! You’re the best teacher I’ve ever had.”

Wheeling the freezer through the alley, she attracted the attention of some young Wasters lounging in front of a betel parlor, who called out loudly to ask if she had a private stash of beer in there, and if they could have some. When she scowled and didn’t answer they laughed and called her a lush. By the time she got home, her exaltation had been jostled aside by disgust and fury at the place where she lived. She managed to wrestle the freezer up the stoop and over the threshold into the kitchen, but when she faced the narrow spiral stair, she knew this was as far as she could get without help. The kitchen was already crowded, and the only place she could fit the freezer in was under the table. As she was shoving it against the wall, Maya came down the stairs and said, “What are you doing?”

“I have to keep this freezer here,” Thorn said.

“You can’t put it there. It’s not convenient.”

“Will you help me carry it up to my room?”

“You’re kidding.”

“I didn’t think so. Then it’s got to stay here.”

Maya rolled her eyes at the irrational acts of teenagers. Now Thorn was angry at her, too. “It has to stay plugged in,” Thorn said strictly. “Do you think you can remember that?”

“What’s in it?”

Thorn would have enjoyed telling her if she hadn’t been angry. “A science experiment,” she said curtly.

“Oh, I see. None of my business, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay. It’s a secret,” Maya said in a playful tone, as if she were talking to a child. She reached out to tousle Thorn’s hair, but Thorn knocked her hand away and left, taking the stairs two at a time.

In her room, Thorn gave way to rage at her unsatisfactory life. She didn’t want to be a Waster anymore. She wanted to live in a house where she could have things of her own, not squat in a boyfriend’s place, always one quarrel away from eviction. She wanted a life she could control. Most of all, she wanted to leave the Waste. She went to the window and looked down at the rusty ghetto below. Cynicism hung miasmatic over it, defiling everything noble and pure. The decadent sophistication left nothing unstained.

During dinner, Maya and Hunter were cross and sarcastic with each other, and Hunter ended up storming off into his office. Thorn went to her room and studied Magister Pregaldin’s secret charts till the house was silent below. Then she crept down to the kitchen to check on the freezer. The temperature gauge was reassuringly low. She sat on the brick floor with her back to it, its gentle hum soothing against her spine, feeling a kinship with the owl inside. She envied it for its isolation from the dirty world. Packed away safe in ice, it was the one thing that would never grow up, never lose its innocence. One day it would come alive and erupt in glorious joy—but only if she could protect it. Even if she couldn’t protect herself, there was still something she could keep safe.

As she sat there, The Note came, filling the air full and ringing through her body like a benediction. It seemed to be answering her unfocused yearning, as if the believers were right, and there really were a force looking over her, as she looked over the owl.

When she next came to Magister Pregaldin’s apartment, he was busy filling the crate up again with treasures. Thorn helped him wrap artworks in packing material as he told her which planet each one came from. “Where are you sending them?” she asked.

“Offworld,” he answered vaguely.

Together they lifted the lid onto the crate, and only then did Thorn see the shipping label that had brought it here. It was stamped with a burning red sword—the customs mark of the city-state Flaming Sword of Righteousness. “Is that where you were?” she said.

“Yes.”

She was about to blurt out that Hunter’s Gminta had been murdered there when a terrible thought seized her: What if he already knew? What if it were no coincidence?

They sat down to lessons under the head of the copper-horned beast, but Thorn was distracted. She kept looking at her tutor’s large hands, so gentle when he handled his art, and wondering if they could be the hands of an assassin.

That night Hunter went out and Maya barricaded herself in her room, leaving Thorn the run of the house. She instantly let herself into Hunter’s office to search for a list of Gmintas killed and brought to justice over the years. When she tried to access his files, she found they were heavily protected by password and encryption—and if she knew his personality, he probably had intrusion detectors set. So she turned again to his library of books on the Holocide. The information was scattered and fragmentary, but after a few hours she had pieced together a list of seven mysterious murders on five planets that seemed to be revenge slayings.

Up in her room again, she took out her replica of one of Magister Pregaldin’s charts, the one that looked most like a tracking chart. She started by assuming that the geometric shapes meant planets and the symbols represented individual Gmintas he had been following. After an hour she gave it up—not because she couldn’t make it match, but because she could never prove it. A chart for tracking Gmintas would look identical to a chart for tracking artworks. It was the perfect cover story.

She was still awake when Hunter returned. As she listened to his footsteps she thought of going downstairs and telling him of her suspicions. But uncertainty kept her in bed, restless and wondering what was the right thing to do.

There were riots in the city the next day. In the streets far above the Waste, angry mobs flowed, a turbulent tide crashing against the Protectorate troops wherever they met. The Wasters kept close to home, looking up watchfully toward the palace, listening to the rumors that ran ratlike between the buildings. Thorn spent much of the day on the roof, a self-appointed lookout. About five hours afternote, she heard a roar from above, as of many voices raised at once. There was something elemental about the sound, as if a force of nature had broken into the domed city—a human eruption, shaking the iron framework on which all their lives depended.

She went down to the front door to see if she could catch any news. Her survival instincts were alert now, and when she spotted a little group down the street, standing on a doorstep exchanging news, she sprinted toward them to hear what they knew.

“The Incorruptibles have taken the Palace,” a man told her in a low voice. “The mobs are looting it now.”

“Are we safe?” she asked.

He only shrugged. “For now.” They all glanced down the street toward the spike-topped gates of the Waste. The barrier had never looked flimsier.

When Thorn returned home, Maya was sitting in the kitchen looking miserable. She didn’t react much to the news. Thorn sat down at the table with her, bumping her knees on the freezer underneath.

“Shouldn’t we start planning to leave?” Thorn said.

“I don’t want to leave,” Maya said, tears coming to her already-red eyes.

“I don’t either,” Thorn said. “But we shouldn’t wait till we don’t have a choice.”

“Hunter will protect us,” Maya said. “He knows who to pay.”

Frustrated, Thorn said, “But if the Incorruptibles take over, there won’t be anyone to pay. That’s why they call themselves incorruptible.”

“It won’t come to that,” Maya said stubbornly. “We’ll be all right. You’ll see.”

Thorn had heard it all before. Maya always denied that anything was wrong until everything fell apart. She acted as if planning for the worst would make it happen.

The next day the city was tense but quiet. The rumors said that the Incorruptibles were still hunting down Protectorate loyalists and throwing them in jail. The nearby streets were empty except for Wasters, so Thorn judged it safe enough to go to Weezer Alley. When she entered Magister Pregaldin’s place, she was stunned at the change. The apartment had been stripped of its artworks. The carpets were rolled up, the empty walls looked dented and peeling. Only Jemma’s portrait still remained. Two metal crates stood in the middle of the living room, and as Thorn was taking it all in, a pair of movers arrived to carry them off to the waystation.

“You’re leaving,” she said to Magister Pregaldin when he came back in from supervising the movers. She was not prepared for the disappointment she felt. All this time she had been trustworthy and kept his secrets—and he had abandoned her anyway.

“I’m sorry, Thorn,” he said, reading her face. “It is becoming too dangerous here. You and your mother ought to think of leaving, as well.”

“Where are you going?”

He paused. “It would be better if I didn’t tell you that.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone.”

“Forgive me. It’s a habit.” He studied her for a few moments, then put his hand gently on her shoulder. “Your friendship has meant more to me than you can know,” he said. “I had forgotten what it was like, to inspire such pure trust.”

He didn’t even know she saw through him. “You’re lying to me,” she said. “You’ve been lying all along. You’re not leaving because of the Incorruptibles. You’re leaving because you’ve finished what you came here to do.”

He stood motionless, his hand still on her shoulder. “What do you mean?”

“You came here to settle an old score,” she said. “That’s what your life is about, isn’t it? Revenge for something everyone else has forgotten and you can’t let go.”

He withdrew his hand. “You have made some strange mistake.”

“You and Hunter—I don’t understand either of you. Why can’t you just stop digging up the past and move on?”

For several moments he stared at her, but his eyes were shifting as if tracking things she couldn’t see. When he finally spoke, his voice was very low. “I don’t choose to remember the past. I am compelled to—it is my punishment. Or perhaps it is a disease, or an addiction. I don’t know.”

Taken aback at his earnestness, Thorn said, “Punishment? For what?”

“Here, sit down,” he said. “I will tell you a story before we part.”

They both sat at the table where he had given her so many lessons, but before he started to speak he stood up again and paced away, his hands clenching. She waited silently, and he came back to face her, and started to speak.

This is a story about a young man who lived long ago. I will call him Till. He wanted badly to live up to his family’s distinguished tradition. It was a prominent family, you see; for generations they had been involved in finance, banking, and insurance. The planet where they lived was relatively primitive and poor, but Till’s family felt they were helping it by attracting outside investment and extending credit. Of course, they did very well by doing good.

The government of their country had been controlled by the Alloes for years. Even though the Alloes were an ethnic minority, they were a diligent people and had prospered by collaborating with Vind businessmen like Till’s family. The Alloes ruled over the majority, the Gmintas, who had less of everything—less education, less money, less power. It was an unjust situation, and when there was a mutiny in the military and the Gmintas took control, the Vinds accepted the change. Especially to younger people like Till, it seemed like a righting of many historical wrongs.

Once the Gminta army officers were in power, they started borrowing heavily to build hospitals, roads, and schools for Gminta communities, and the Vind banks were happy to make the loans. It seemed like a good way to dispell many suspicions and prejudices that throve in the ignorance of the Gminta villages. Till was on the board of his family bank, and he argued for extending credit even after the other bankers became concerned about the government’s reckless fiscal policies.

One day, Till was called into the offices of the government banking regulators. Alone in a small room, they accused him of money laundering and corruption. It was completely untrue, but they had forged documents that seemed to prove it. Till realized that he faced a life in prison. He would bring shame to his entire family, unless he could strike a deal. They offered him an alternative: he could come to work for the government, as their representative to the Vind community. He readily accepted the job, and resigned from the bank.

They gave him an office and a small staff. He had an Alloe counterpart responsible for outreach to that community; and though they never spoke about it, he suspected his colleague had been recruited with similar methods. They started out distributing informational leaflets and giving tips on broadcast shows, all quite bland. But it changed when the government decided to institute a new draft policy for military service. Every young person was to give five years’ mandatory service starting at eighteen. The Vinds would not be exempt.

Now, as you may know, the Vinds are pacifists and mystics, and have never served in the military of any planet. This demand by the Gminta government was unprecedented, and caused great alarm. The Vinds gathered in the halls of their Ethical Congresses to discuss what to do. Till worked tirelessly, meeting with them and explaining the perspective of the government, reminding them of the Vind principle of obeying the local law wherever they found themselves. At the same time, he managed to get the generals to promise that no Vind would be required to serve in combat, which was utterly in violation of their beliefs. With this assurance, the Vinds reluctantly agreed. And so mothers packed bags for their children and sent them off to training, urging them to call often.

Soon after, a new land policy was announced. Estates that had always belonged to the Alloes were to be redistributed among landless Gmintas. This created quite a lot of resistance; Till and his colleague kept busy giving interviews and explaining how the policy restored fairness to the land system. They became familiar to all as government spokespeople.

Then the decision was made to relocate whole neighborhoods of Alloes and Vinds so Gmintas could have better housing in the cities. Till could no longer argue about justice; now he could only tell people it was necessary to move in order to quiet the fears of the Gmintas and preserve peace.

People started to emigrate off-planet, but then the government closed down the waystations. This nearly caused a panic, and Till had to tell everyone it was merely to prevent people from taking their goods and assets offworld, thus draining the national wealth. He promised that individuals would be allowed to leave again soon, as long as they took no cash or valuables with them.

He no longer believed it himself.

It had been months since the young people had gone off to the army, and their families had heard nothing from them. Till had been telling everyone it was a period of temporary isolation, while the trainees lived in camps on the frontier to build solidarity and camaraderie. Every time he went out, he would be surrounded by anxious parents asking when they could expect to hear from their children.

Fleets of buses showed up to evacuate the Alloe and Vind families from their homes, and take them to relocation camps. Till watched his own neighborhood become a ghost town, and the certainty grew in him that the people were never coming back. One day he entered his supervisor’s office unexpectedly and overheard someone saying, “. . to the mortifactories.” They stopped talking when they saw him.

You are probably thinking, “Why didn’t he speak out? Why didn’t he denounce them?” Try to imagine, in many respects life still seemed quite normal, and what he suspected was so unthinkable it seemed insane. And even if he could overcome that, there was no one to speak out to. He was alone, and he was not a very courageous person. His only chance was to stay useful to the government.

Other Vinds and Alloes who had been working alongside him started to vanish. Still the Gmintas wanted him to go on reassuring people; he did it so well. He had to hide what he suspected, to fool them into thinking that he was fooled himself. Every day he lived in fear of hearing the knock on his door that would mean it was his time.

It was his Alloe colleague who finally broke. They rarely let the man go on air anymore; his nerves were too shattered. But one day he substituted for Till, and in the midst of a broadcast shouted out a warning: “They are killing you! It is mass murder!” That was all he got out before they cut him off.

That night, well-armed and well-organized mobs broke into the remaining Alloe enclaves in the capital city. The government deplored the violence the next day, but suggested that the Alloes had incited it.

At that point they no longer had any need for Till. Once again, they gave him a choice: relocation or deportation. He could join his family and share their fate; or he could leave the planet. Death or life. I think I have mentioned he was not very courageous. He chose to live.

They sent him to Capella Two, a twenty-five-year journey. By the time he arrived, the entire story had traveled ahead of him by pepci, and everything was known. His own role was infamous. He was the vile collaborator who had put a benign face on the crime. He had soothed people’s fears and deceived them into walking docilely to their deaths. In hindsight, it was inconceivable that he had not known what he was doing. All across the Twenty Planets, the name of Till Diwali was reviled.

He fell silent at last. Thorn sat staring at the tabletop, because she could not sort out what to think. It was all wheeling about in her mind: right and wrong, horror and sympathy, criminal and victim—all were jumbled together. Finally she said, “Was Jemma your sister?”

“I told you, I was not there,” he said in a distant voice. “The man who did those things was not me.”

He was sitting at the table across from her again, his hands clasped before him. Now he spoke to her directly. “Thorn, you are unitary and authentic now as you will never be again. As you pass through life, you will accumulate other selves. Always you will be a person looking back on, and separate from, the person you are now. Whenever you walk down a street, or sit on a park bench, your past selves will be sitting beside you, impossible to touch or interrogate. In the end there is a whole crowd of you wherever you go, and you feel like you will perish from the loneliness.”

Thorn’s whirling feelings were beginning to come to rest in a pattern, and in it horror and blame predominated. She looked up at Jemma’s face and said, “She died. How could you do that, and walk away? It’s inhuman.”

He didn’t react, either to admit guilt or defend his innocence. She wanted an explanation from him, and he didn’t give it. “You’re a monster,” she said.

Still he said nothing. She got up, blind to everything but the intensity of her thoughts, and went to the door. She glanced back before leaving, and he was looking at her with an expression that was nothing like what he ought to feel—not shame, not rage, not self-loathing. Thorn slammed the door behind her and fled.

She walked around the streets of the Waste for a long time, viciously throwing stones at heaps of trash to make the rats come out. Above the buildings, the sky seemed even redder than usual, and the shadows blacker. She was furious at the magister for not being admirable. She blamed him for hiding it from her and for telling her—since, by giving her the knowledge, he had also given her a responsibility of choosing what to do.

When she got home the kitchen was empty, but she heard voices from the living room above. She was mounting the stairs when the voices rose in anger, and she froze. It was Hunter and Maya, and they were yelling at each other.

“Good God, what were you thinking?” Hunter demanded.

“She needed help. I couldn’t say no.”

“You knew it would bring the authorities down on us!”

“I had a responsibility—”

“What about your responsibility to me? You just didn’t think. You never think; everything is impulse with you. You are the most immature and manipulative person I’ve ever met.”

Maya’s voice went wheedling. “Hunter, come on. It’ll be okay.”

“And what if it’s not okay? What are you going to do then? Just pick up and leave the wreckage behind you? That’s what you’ve been doing all your life—dragging that kid of yours from planet to planet, never thinking what it’s doing to her. You never think what you’re doing to anyone, do you? It’s all just yourself. I never should have let you in here.”

There were angry footsteps, and then Hunter was mounting the stairs.

“Hunter!” Maya cried after him.

Thorn waited a minute, then crept up into the living room. Maya was sitting there, looking tragic and beautiful.

“What did you do?” Thorn said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Maya said. “He’ll get over it.”

“I don’t care about Hunter.”

Mistaking what she meant, Maya smiled through her tears. “You know what? I don’t care either.” She came over and hugged Thorn tight. “I’m not really a bad mother, am I, Thorn?”

Cautiously, Thorn said, “No . . .”

“People just don’t understand us. We’re a team, right?”

Maya held out her hand for their secret finger-hook. Once it would have made Thorn smile, but she no longer felt the old solidarity against the world. She hooked fingers anyway, because she was afraid Maya would start to cry again if she didn’t. Maya said, “They just don’t know you. Damaged child, poppycock—you’re tough as old boots. It makes me awestruck, what a survivor you are.”

“I think we ought to get ready to leave,” Thorn said.

Maya’s face lost its false cheer. “I can’t leave,” she whispered.

“Why not?”

“Because I love him.”

There was no sensible answer to that. So Thorn turned away to go up to her room. As she passed the closed door of Hunter’s office, she paused, wondering if she should knock. Wondering if she should turn in the most notorious Gminta collaborator still alive. All those millions of dead Alloes and Vinds would get their justice, and Hunter would be famous. Then her feet continued on, even before she consciously made the decision. It was not loyalty to Magister Pregaldin, and it was not resentment of Hunter. It was because she might need that information to buy her own safety.

The sound of breaking glass woke her. She lay tense, listening to footsteps and raised voices below in the street. Then another window broke, and she got up to pull back the curtain. The sun was orange, as always, and she squinted in the glare, then raised her window and climbed out on the roof.

Below in the street, a mob of white-clad Incorruptibles was breaking windows as they passed; but their true target obviously lay deeper in the Waste. She watched till they were gone, then waited to see what would happen.

From somewhere beyond the tower fans of the park she could hear shouts and clanging, and once an avalanche-like roar, after which a cloud of dust rose from the direction of Weezer Alley. After that there was silence for a while. At last she heard chanting. Fleeing footsteps passed below. Then the wall of Incorruptibles appeared again. They were driving someone before them with improvised whips made from their belts. Thorn peered over the eaves to see more clearly and recognized their victim—Ginko, the heshe from the Garden of Delights, completely naked, both breasts and genitals exposed, with a rope around hisher neck. The whips had cut into the delicate paisley of Ginko’s skin, exposing slashes of red underneath.

At a spot beneath Thorn’s perch, Ginko stumbled and fell. A mass of Incorruptibles gathered round. Two of them pulled Ginko’s legs apart, and a third made a jerking motion with a knife. A womanlike scream made Thorn grip the edge of her rooftop, wanting to look away. They tossed the rope over a signpost and hoisted Ginko up by the neck, choking and clawing at the noose. The body still quivered as the army marched past. When they were gone, the silence was so complete Thorn could hear the patter of blood into a pool on the pavement under the body.

On hands and knees she backed away from the edge of the roof and climbed into her bedroom. It was already stripped; everything she valued or needed was in her backpack, ready to go. She threw on some clothes and went down the stairs.

Maya, dressed in a robe, stopped her halfway. She looked scattered and panicky. “Thorn, we’ve got to leave,” she said.

“Right now?”

“Yes. He doesn’t want us here anymore. He’s acting as if we’re some sort of danger to him.”

“Where are we going?”

“I don’t know. Some other planet. Some place without men.” She started to cry.

“Go get dressed,” Thorn told her. “I’ll bring some food.” Over her shoulder she added, “Pack some clothes and money.”

With her backpack in hand, Thorn raced down to the kitchen.

She was just getting out the dolly for the ice owl’s refrigerator when Maya came down.

“You’re not taking that, are you?” Maya said.

“Yes, I am.” Thorn knelt to shift the refrigerator out from under the table, and only then noticed it wasn’t running. Quickly, she checked the temperature gauge. It was in the red zone, far too high. With an anguished exclamation, she punched in the lock code and opened the top. Not a breath of cool air escaped. The ice pack on top was gurgling and liquid. She lifted it to see what was underneath.

The owl was no longer nested snugly in ice. It had shifted, tried to open its wings. There were scratches on the insulation where it had tried to peck and claw its way out. Now it lay limp, its head thrown back. Thorn sank to her knees, griefstruck before the evidence of its terrifying last minutes—revived to life only to find itself trapped in a locked chest. Even in that stifling dark, it had longed for life so much it had fought to free itself. Thorn’s breath came hard and her heart labored, as if she were reliving the ice owl’s death.

“Hurry up, Thorn,” Maya said. “We’ve got to go.”

Then she saw what had happened. The refrigerator cord lay on the floor, no longer attached to the wall outlet. She held it up as if it were a murder weapon. “It’s unplugged,” she said.

“Oh, that’s right,” Maya said, distracted. “I had to plug in the curling iron. I must have forgotten.”

Rage rose inside Thorn like a huge bubble of compressed air. “You forgot ?”

“I’m sorry, Thorn. I didn’t know it was important.”

“I told you it was important. This was the last ice owl anywhere. You haven’t just killed this one, you’ve killed the entire species.”

“I said I was sorry. What do you want me to do?”

Maya would never change. She would always be like this, careless and irresponsible, unable to face consequences. Tears of fury came to Thorn’s eyes. She dashed them away with her hand. “You’re useless,” she said, climbing to her feet and picking up her pack. “You can’t be trusted to take care of anything. I’m done with you. Don’t bother to follow me.”

Out in the street, she turned in the direction she never went, to avoid having to pass what was hanging in the street. Down a narrow alley she sprinted, past piles of stinking refuse alive with roaches, till she came to a narrow side street that doglegged into the park. On the edge of the open space she paused under a portico to scan for danger; seeing none, she dashed across, past the old men’s chess tables, past the bench where she had met Magister Pregaldin, to the entrance of Weezer Alley.

Signs of the Incorruptibles’ passage were everywhere. Broken glass crunched underfoot and the contents of the shops were trampled under red dirt shoeprints. When Thorn reached the Garden of Delights, the entire street looked different, for the building had been demolished. Only a monstrous pile of rubble remained, with iron girders and ribs sticking up like broken bones. A few people climbed over the ruin, looking for survivors.

The other side of the street was still standing, but Magister Pregaldin’s door had been ripped from its hinges and tossed aside. Thorn dashed up the familiar stairs. The apartment looked as if it had been looted—stripped bare, not a thing of value left. She walked through the empty rooms, dreading what she might find, and finding nothing. Out on the street again, she saw a man who had often winked at her when she passed by to her lessons. “Do you know what happened to Magister Pregaldin?” she asked. “Did he get away?”

“Who?” the man said.

“Magister Pregaldin. The man who lived here.”

“Oh, the old Vind. No, I don’t know where he is.”

So he had abandoned her as well. In all the world, there was no one trustworthy. For a moment she had a dark wish that she had exposed his secret. Then she realized she was just thinking of revenge.

Hoisting her pack to her shoulder, she set out for the waystation. She was alone now, only herself to trust.

There was a crowd in the street outside the waystation. Everyone seemed to have decided to leave the planet at once, some of them with huge piles of baggage and children. Thorn pushed her way in toward the ticket station to find out what was going on. They were still selling tickets, she saw with relief; the crowd was people waiting for their turn in the translation chamber. Checking to make sure she had her copy of Maya’s credit stick, she joined the ticket line. She was back among her own kind, the rootless, migrant elite.

Where was she going? She scanned the list of destinations. She had been born on Capella Two, but had heard it was a harshly competitive place, so she decided against it. Ben was just an ice-ball world, Gammadis was too far away. It was both thrilling and frightening to have control over where she went and what she did. She was still torn by indecision when she heard someone calling, “Thorn!”

Clarity was pushing through the crowd toward her. “I’m so glad we found you,” she said when she drew close. “Maya was here a little while ago, looking for you.”

“Where is she now?” Thorn asked, scanning the crowd.

“She left again.”

“Good,” Thorn said.

“Thorn, she was frantic. She was afraid you’d get separated.”

“We are separated,” Thorn said implacably. “She can do what she wants. I’m on my own now. Where are you going, Clarity?”

Bick had come up, carrying their ticket cards. Thorn caught her hand to look at the tickets. “Alananovis,” she read aloud, then looked up to find it on the directory. It was only eighteen light-years distant. “Can I come with you?”

“Not without Maya,” Clarity said.

“Okay, then I’ll go somewhere else.”

Clarity put a hand on her arm. “Thorn, you can’t just go off without Maya.”

“Yes, I can. I’m old enough to be on my own. I’m sick of her, and I’m sick of her boyfriends. I want control of my life.” Besides, Maya had killed the ice owl; Maya ought to suffer. It was only justice.

She had reached the head of the line. Her eye caught a name on the list, and she made a snap decision. When the ticket seller said “Where to?” she answered, “Gmintagad.” She would go to see where Jemma Diwali had lived—and died.

The translation chamber on Gmintagad was like all the others she had seen over the years: sterile and anonymous. A technician led her into a waiting room till her luggage came through by the low-resolution beam. She sat feeling cross and tired, as she always did after having her molecules reassembled out of new atoms. When at last her backpack was delivered and she went on into the customs and immigration facility, she noticed a change in the air. For the first time in years she was breathing organically manufactured oxygen. She could smell the complex and decay-laden odor of an actual ecosystem. Soon she would see sky without any dome. The thought gave her an agoraphobic thrill.

She put her identity card into the reader, and after a pause it directed her to a glass-fronted booth where an immigration official in a sand-colored uniform sat behind a desk. Unlike the air, the man looked manufactured—a face with no wrinkles, defects, or stand-out features, as if they had chosen him to match a mathematical formula for facial symmetry. His hair was neatly clipped, and so, she noticed, were his nails. When she sat opposite him, she found that her chair creaked at the slightest movement. She tried to hold perfectly still.

He regarded her information on his screen, then said, “Who is your father?”

She had been prepared to say why her mother was not with her, but her father? “I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“Your records do not state his race.”

His race? It was an antique concept she barely understood. “He was Capellan,” she said.

“Capellan is not an origin. No one evolved on Capella.”

“I did,” Thorn stated.

He studied her without any expression at all. She tried to meet his eyes, but it began to seem confrontational, so she looked down. Her chair creaked.

“There are certain types of people we do not allow on Gmintagad,” he said.

She tried to imagine what he meant. Criminals? Disease carriers? Agitators? He could see she wasn’t any of those. “Wasters, you mean?” she finally ventured.

“I mean Vinds,” he said.

Relieved, she said, “Oh, well that’s all right, then. I’m not Vind.” Creak.

“Unless you can tell me who your father was, I cannot be sure of that,” he said.

She was speechless. How could a father she had never known have any bearing on who she was?

The thought that they might not let her in made her stomach knot. Her chair sent out a barrage of telegraphic signals. “I just spent thirty-two years as a lightbeam to get here,” she said. “You’ve got to let me stay.”

“We are a sovereign principality,” he said calmly. “We don’t have to let anyone stay.” He paused, his eyes still on her. “You have a Vind look. Are you willing to submit to a genetic test?”

Minutes ago, her mind had seemed like syrup. Now it bubbled with alarm. In fact, she didn’t know her father wasn’t Vind. It had never mattered, so she had never cared. But here, all the things that defined her—her interests, her aptitudes, her internal doubts—none of it counted, only her racial status. She was in a place where identity was assigned, not chosen or created.

“What happens if I fail the test?” she asked.

“You will be sent back.”

“And what happens if I don’t take it?”

“You will be sent back.”

“Then why did you even ask?”

He gave a regulation smile. If she had measured it with a ruler, it would have been perfect. She stood up, and the chair sounded like it was laughing. “All right. Where do I go?”

They took her blood and sent her into a waiting room with two doors, neither of which had a handle. As she sat there idle, the true rashness of what she had done crept up on her. It wasn’t like running away on-planet. Maya didn’t know where she had gone. By now, they would be different ages. Maya could be dying, or Thorn could be older than she was, before they ever found each other. It was a permanent separation. And permanent punishment for Maya.

Thorn tried to summon up the righteous anger that had propelled her only an hour and thirty-two years before. But even that slipped from her grasp. It was replaced with a clutching feeling of her own guilt. She had known Maya’s shortcomings when she took the ice owl, and never bothered to safeguard against them. She had known all the accidents the world was capable of, and still she had failed to protect a creature that could not protect itself.

Now, remorse made her bleed inside. The owl had been too innocent to meet such a terrible end. Its life should have been a joyous ascent into air, and instead it had been a hellish struggle, alone and forgotten, killed by neglect. Thorn had betrayed everyone by letting the ice owl die. Magister Pregaldin, who had trusted her with his precious, possession. Even, somehow, Jemma and the other victims of Till Diwali’s crime—for what had she done but reenact his failure, as if to show that human beings had learned nothing? She felt as if caught in an iron-bound cycle of history, doomed to repeat what had gone before, as long as she was no better than her predecessors had been.

She covered her face with her hands, wanting to cry, but too demoralized even for that. It seemed like a self-indulgence she didn’t deserve.

The door clicked and she started up at sight of a stern, rectangular woman in a uniform skirt, whose face held the hint of a sneer. Thorn braced for the news that she would have to waste another thirty-two years on a pointless journey back to Glory to God. But instead, the woman said, “There is someone here to see you.”

Behind her was a familiar face that made Thorn exclaim in joy, “Clarity!”

Clarity came into the room, and Thorn embraced her in relief. “I thought you were going to Alananovis.”

“We were,” Clarity said, “but we decided we couldn’t just stand by and let a disaster happen. I followed you, and Bick stayed behind to tell Maya where we were going.”

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” Thorn cried. Now the tears that had refused to come before were running down her face. “But you gave up thirty-two years for a stupid reason.”

“It wasn’t stupid for us,” Clarity said. “You were the stupid one.”

“I know,” Thorn said miserably.

Clarity was looking at her with an expression of understanding. “Thorn, most people your age are allowed some mistakes. But you’re performing life without a net. You have to consider Maya. Somehow, you’ve gotten older than she is even though you’ve been traveling together. You’re the steady one, the rock she leans on. These boyfriends, they’re just entertainment for her. They drop her and she bounces back. But if you dropped her, her whole world would dissolve.”

Thorn said, “That’s not true.”

“It is true,” Clarity said.

Thorn pressed her lips together, feeling impossibly burdened. Why did she have to be the reliable one, the one who was never vulnerable or wounded? Why did Maya get to be the dependent one?

On the other hand, it was a comfort that she hadn’t abandoned Maya as she had done to the ice owl. Maya was not a perfect mother, but neither was Thorn a perfect daughter. They were both just doing their best.

“I hate this,” she said, but without conviction. “Why do I have to be responsible for her?”

“That’s what love is all about,” Clarity said.

“You’re a busybody, Clarity,” Thorn said.

Clarity squeezed her hand. “Yes. Aren’t you lucky?”

The door clicked open again. Beyond the female guard’s square shoulder, Thorn glimpsed a flash of honey-gold hair. “Maya!” she said.

When she saw Thorn, Maya’s whole being seemed to blaze like the sun. Dodging in, she threw her arms around Thorn.

“Oh Thorn, thank heaven I found you! I was worried sick. I thought you were lost.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Thorn kept saying as Maya wept and hugged her again. “But Maya, you have to tell me something.”

“Anything. What?”

“Did you seduce a Vind?”

For a moment Maya didn’t understand. Then a secretive smile grew on her face, making her look very pretty and pleased with herself. She touched Thorn’s hair. “I’ve been meaning to tell you about that.”

“Later,” Bick said. “Right now, we all have tickets for Alananovis.”

“That’s wonderful,” Maya said. “Where’s Alananovis?”

“Only seven years away from here.”

“Fine. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters as long as we’re together.”

She held out her finger for the secret finger-lock. Thorn did it with a little inward sigh. For a moment she felt as if her whole world were composed of vulnerable beings frozen in time, as if she were the only one who aged and changed.

“We’re a team, right?” Maya said anxiously.

“Yeah,” Thorn answered. “We’re a team.”

FIELDS OF GOLD

Rachel Swirsky

When Dennis died, he found himself in another place. Dead people came at him with party hats and presents. Noise makers bleated. Confetti fell. It felt like the most natural thing in the world. His family was there. Celebrities were there. People Dennis had never seen before in his life were there. Dennis danced under a disco ball with Cleopatra and Great-grandma Flora and some dark-haired chick and cousin Joe and Alexander the Great. When he went to the buffet table for a tiny cocktail wiener in pink sauce, Dennis saw Napoleon trying to grope his Aunt Phyllis. She smacked him in the tri-corner hat with her clutch bag. Napoleon and Shakespeare and Cleopatra looked just like Dennis had expected them to. Henry VIII and Socrates and Jesus, too. Cleopatra wore a long linen dress with a jeweled collar, a live asp coiled around her wrist like a bracelet. Socrates sipped from a glass of hemlock. Jesus bobbed his head up and down like a windshield ornament as he ladled out the punch. Dennis squinted into the distance, but he couldn’t make out the boundaries of the place. The room, if it was a room, was large and rectangular and brightly lit from above, like some kind of cosmic gym decorated for prom, complete with drifts of multicolored balloons and hand-lettered poster board signs. On second glance, the buffet tables turned out to be narrow and collapsible like the ones from Dennis’s high school cafeteria. Thankfully, unlike high school, the booze flowed freely and the music was actually good. As Dennis meandered back toward the dance floor, an imposing figure that he dimly recognized as P.T. Barnum clapped him on the back. “Welcome! Welcome!” the balding man boomed.

An elderly lady stood in Barnum’s lee. Her face was familiar from old family portraits. “Glad to see you, dear.”

“Thanks,” said Dennis as the unlikely couple whirled into the crowd.

Things Dennis did not accomplish from his under thirty-five goals list (circa age twelve):

1. Own a jet.

2. Host a TV show where he played guitar with famous singers.

3. Win a wrestling match with a lion.

4. Pay Billy Whitman $200 to eat dirt in front of a TV crew.

5. Go sky-diving.

6. Divorce a movie star.

As Dennis listened to the retreating echo of P.T. Barnum’s laughter, a pair of cold hands slipped around his waist from behind. He jumped like a rabbit.

“Hey there, Menace,” said a melted honey voice.

Dennis turned back into the familiar embrace of his favorite cousin, Melanie. She was the one who’d been born a year and three days before he was, and who’d lived half a mile away when they were kids. She was also the one he’d started dry-humping in the abandoned lot behind Ping’s groceries when he was eleven and she was twelve.

“Mel,” blurted Dennis.

“Asswipe,” Melanie replied.

She stood on her tiptoes to slip a hug around Dennis’s neck. She wore cropped jean shorts and a thin white tee that showed her bra strap. She smelled like cheap lotion and cherry perfume. A blonde ponytail swung over her shoulder, deceptively girlish in contrast with her hard eyes and filthy mouth. She was young and ripe and vodka-and-cigarettes skinny in a twenty-one-year-old way, just like she had been the day he was called to view her at the morgue—except that the tracks where her jilted boyfriend had run her over with his jeep were gone, as if they’d never been there at all.

“God,” said Dennis. “It’s good to see you.”

“You’re not a punch in the face either.”

Dennis reached out to touch the side of her head where the morticians had arranged a makeshift hairpiece made of lilies to cover the dent they hadn’t been able to repair in time for the open casket. At first Melanie flinched, but then she eased into his touch, pushing against his hand like a contented cat. Her hair felt like corn silk, the skull beneath it smooth and strong.

She pulled away and led Dennis on a meandering path through the crowd to the drinks table. “How’d you kick it?” she asked conversationally.

“Diabetic coma,” said Dennis. “Karen pulled the plug.”

“That’s not what I heard,” said Melanie. “I heard it was murder.”

Dennis Halter had married Karen Halter (née Worth) on the twenty-second of November, six months to the day after their college graduation.

Karen was the one who proposed. She bought Dennis a $2,000 guitar instead of an engagement ring. She took him out for heavy carbohydrate Italian (insulin at the ready) and popped the question casually over light beer. “I can still return the guitar if you don’t want to,” she added.

Karen was an art history major who was being groomed for museum curation. Dennis was an anthropology major (it had the fewest required classes) who was beginning to worry about the fact that he hadn’t been discovered yet. Karen was Type A. Dennis’s personality begged for the invention of a Type Z.

Melanie was similar to Dennis, personality-wise, except for the mean streak that had gotten her expelled for fist fighting during her senior year of high school. She and Karen had only met once, six months before Karen proposed, at a Halter family Thanksgiving. They didn’t need to exchange a word. It was hate at first sight.

“Hillbilly whore,” Karen called Melanie, though not to her face.

Lacking such compunction, Melanie had called Karen a “controlfreak cunt” over pecan pie. She drunk-dialed Dennis three weeks later to make sure he hadn’t forgotten her opinion. “When that bitch realizes you’re never going to change, she’s going to have your balls on a platter. If you marry her, I swear I’ll hand her the knife myself.”

Melanie died instead.

“Murder?” said Dennis. “No, I wanted her to pull the plug. It was in my living will. I never wanted to live my life as a vegetable.”

“Unless it was a couch potato, huh?”

Melanie spoke with the too-precise diction of an overcompensating drunk. Her tone was joking, but held a vicious undercurrent.

She flailed one hand at Dennis’s spare tire. The gin she was pouring with her other definitely wasn’t her first. Probably not her fourth either.

“Worked out for you, didn’t it, Menace the Dennis?” she continued. “Spent your life skipping church only to luck out in the end. Turns out we all go to the same place. Saint, sinner, and suicide.”

Dennis’s jaw clenched. “I didn’t commit suicide.”

“Didn’t say you did. Sinner.”

“And you weren’t?”

Melanie poured three fingers of rum into a second Solo cup and went to add Coke. Dennis grabbed the two-liter bottle out of her hand.

“Can’t drink that with alcohol,” he said, irritated, remembering that bender when he was fifteen and she’d promised him it wouldn’t matter whether his mixers were diet or regular. He’d ended up in ketoacidosis.

Melanie rolled her eyes. “Think your body works the way it used to? You’re dead, moron.”

“Fine,” said Dennis, annoyance clashing with embarrassment. “Give it to me then.”

He rescued the Solo cup and poured a long stream of Coke. Melanie watched reproachfully, gulping her gin.

“You were okay before you started dating that stuck-up bitch,” she said. “Had time for a beer and a laugh. Maybe you deserved what that cunt did to you.”

“I told you. It was in my will.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about, jerkwad.”

“What are you talking about?”

For a moment, Melanie looked simultaneously sly and uncomfortable, as though she were going to spill the beans on something important. Then she shook her head, ponytail whipping, and returned to her rant. “If you’d kept doing me, maybe I wouldn’t have ended up with Al. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone off the deep-end when I broke it off. I could still be alive. I could be the one in that fancy condo.”

“Melanie,” said Dennis. “Shut up.”

Melanie made to throw an honest-to-God punch. Gin splashed over her shirt and onto the floor. “Look at this!” She gestured broadly, spilling even more. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Before Dennis could answer, she stormed off in a huff, rapidly disappearing into the mass of people.

When he was alive, Dennis had told people he’d married Karen because she was his type of girl. He hadn’t told them that one skinny blonde with a D-cup was basically as good as another.

When he was alive, Dennis had told people he’d married Karen because she was driven and smart and successful. He hadn’t told them she made him feel inferior by comparison, sometimes because she told him he was.

When he was alive, Dennis had told people he married Karen because he was a simple man with simple needs. He hadn’t told them he kept those simple needs satisfied by fucking around at least twice a year.

When he was alive, Dennis had told people he’d married Karen because she was the kind of girl who knew what she wanted and went after it. Time was like water in Dennis’s hands, always flowing through his fingers, leaving him damp but never sated. Karen drank from the stream of time.

She made things happen.

One of the things she made happen was getting married. Well, what else was Dennis going to do? It wasn’t as if he had plans. Okay, he did have plans, but diamond albums didn’t just fall into your lap.

Karen proposed and it made sense, Dennis had told people when he was alive. That’s why they got married.

That part was true.

Things Dennis did not accomplish from his under thirty-five goals list (circa age nineteen):

1. Sign with a label.

2. Hit the charts.

3. Get into Rolling Stone.

4. Earn $1,000,000.

5. Have at least one girl/girl threesome.

6. Screw Libby Lowell, his roommate’s girlfriend.

7. Play in concert with Ted Nugent, Joe Satriani, and Eddie Van Halen.

8. Get recognized on the street by someone he’d never met.

Dennis stared after Melanie in minor shock. Somehow he’d figured this kind of social terrorism would be one of the things that ended in the stillness of the grave.

But if anyone was going to keep making incoherent, drunken rants fourteen years after going into the ground, it was Melanie. She’d always been a pain in the ass when she was drunk. She’d introduced Dennis to alcohol back when she first learned to pick the lock on her father’s liquor cabinet with a bobby pin. They’d experimented together to figure out just how much sugar Dennis could ingest with his booze without overtaxing his liver.

From day one, Melanie had drunk until she couldn’t see straight and then used it as an excuse to say exactly what she thought. Not that she wasn’t a fun drunk. Some of the best nights of his life were the ones they’d spent together as drunk teenagers. She’d start out hurling insults until he left in disgust, only to show up on his porch at three a.m., laughing and apologizing and determined to convince him to join her in making prank calls and harassing the neighbors’ cows.

She was Melanie. She was the kind of girl who goaded a guy into running over her with his Jeep. But it was hard to stay mad. Especially now that both of them were dead.

The smell of old tobacco arrived, along with a cold hand patting Dennis’s shoulder. Dennis was startled to find that both belonged to his late Uncle Ed, Melanie’s father.

“Always thought we should have spent more time raising her right,” Ed said.

The old man looked just as hangdog as he had in the moment twenty years ago when he’d fallen off his roof while cleaning the gutters. There he’d been, his feet starting to slide, but he hadn’t looked scared so much as wrung out and regretful, as if someone had just told him the Christmas pie he’d been looking forward to was gone and he’d have to make do with fruit cake instead.

He was wearing his best brown suit with a skinny, maroon tie. Slicked back hair exaggerated his widow’s peak. The weak chin and expressive eyebrows were family traits, although Ed had a lean, wiry build unlike most Halter men, on account of a parasitic infection he’d contracted during his military days that left him permanently off his feed.

Uncle Ed. Christ. Back home, everyone Dennis’s age cussed blue when they were on their own, but even Mel had kept a civil tongue in front of the ’rents. “How much did you hear?” he asked.

“ ’Bout all of it.”

“I’m sorry.”

Ed gave a rueful shrug. “You have no idea what she gets up to. The other day she stripped naked in front of everyone and started sucking off President Garfield.”

“Shit,” said Dennis without thinking. “Uh, I mean—”

“Sounds right to me. She sure can be a little shit.”

Suddenly, a grin split Ed’s melancholy face. It was the same grin he’d flashed when fourteen-year-old Dennis let slip that he’d gone through all the senior cheerleaders one by one until Veronica Steader agreed to be his homecoming date.

“Of course, I was into Mary Todd Lincoln at the time,” Ed’s leer widened to show even more teeth. “Good woman.” He slapped Dennis on the back. “You get yourself one of those. You’ve had enough of the other kind.”

Dennis had never watched his diet very carefully. Not as carefully as he needed to anyway. Other kids got to eat Doritos and Oreos at lunch and they didn’t even have to worry about it. When Dennis was eight, that righteously pissed him off.

It didn’t piss him off enough that he tried to eat exactly the way they did. He wasn’t stupid. But it pissed him off enough that he acted a little reckless, a little foolish. Always just a little, though, so that whatever happened, he could plausibly claim—to everyone including himself—that there was nothing deliberate about it.

Eventually, even he believed he was too irresponsible to take care of himself.

The party had moved on to the stage where everyone was too tired to be gregarious but also too drunk to stop partying. Everyone had gathered into small, intense clusters, leaning urgently toward each other to share dramatic whispers, hands cutting the air with emphasis. From time to time, an overloud exclamation punctured the susurration.

Dennis surveyed the crowd, identifying faces. There was Blackbeard with Grandpa Avery and a buck-toothed redhead. And over there was that Chinese guy who used to live down the street, chatting with Moses and Aunt Phyllis. Most of the groups consisted entirely of strangers.

These were some of the things Dennis picked up as he wandered through the crowd:

1. Death had its own time frame in which connected events bent around mortal time to touch each other. In dead time, the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand had coincided with the deaths of millions of World War Two soldiers. For reasons widely subject to speculation, so had the sinking of the RMS Titanic and the deaths of several big game huntsmen touring French colonies in Africa.

2. The dead also had their own vocabulary. Recently dead people were called rotters or wormies. People who’d been dead a long time were called dusties. Dusties tended to stay in their own enclaves, secluded from the modern ideas and inventions that scared them. Famous dead people were called celebs and they:

3. were considered by popular opinion to be fakes. This allegation caused Blackbeard to roar with anger and threaten to march the speaker off a plank. It was pointed out to him that this was the sort of behavior that had created the theory that celebs were fakes in the first place. Celebrities conformed too closely to their legends. Cleopatra was always seductive and never bored or put-upon. Lincoln declaimed nonstop poetic speeches. And hadn’t someone spotted Lady Macbeth earlier that evening when she wasn’t even real?

4. Reality, it seemed, was a contentious issue. Mortality shaped the living world by imposing limits. In the limitless afterlife, the shape of things deformed. That was one reason dead people came to parties. Rotters still carried an impression of the living world. It was like going home again for a little while. Besides, there was good food, and who didn’t like watching General Sherman march up and down the linoleum, threatening to burn Atlanta?

While Dennis pondered these new pieces of information, he also picked up a number of more personal things. He had an intuitive sense of where these latter were leading, though, and it wasn’t somewhere he wanted to go. Consequently, he performed the time-tested mental contortions he’d developed as a third grader who ate too much sugar while pretending he hadn’t done anything wrong. Dennis was a master of self-denial; he didn’t even let himself realize there was something he wouldn’t let himself realize.

For instance:

1. Whenever Dennis passed a group of strangers, they interrupted their conversations to peer as he passed, and then returned to their huddles to whisper even more urgently.

2. Their renewed whispers were punctuated with phrases like “Do you think he deserved it?” and “Poor son of a bitch.”

3. At a certain point, they also started saying, “At least the wife got what’s coming to her.”

4. These last remarks started occurring at approximately the same time as people began disappearing to attend another party.

As the crowd thinned, Dennis finally located someone standing alone, a very drunk flight attendant staring blankly at a tangle of streamers. On being pressed, she identified herself as Wilda. She was unbelievably hot, like a stewardess from a fifties movie, in her mid-to-late twenties with long, straight blonde hair, and a figure that filled out all the tailored curves of her uniform.

The hint of an exotic perfume was all but drowned out by the stench of alcohol. She wasn’t currently crying, but tears had streaked her mascara.

Dennis decided to pick her up.

“Melancholy stage?” he asked.

She spoke as if her lips were numb. “What’s the point? On this side?”

“Of being melancholy? I didn’t know there was ever a point.”

“Mortality,” she said gravely.

Her expression altered ever so slightly. Dennis tried to echo back an appropriate seriousness.

“I knew a man once,” she went on. “Died in the same crash as me. An actor. Very famous. I was so nervous when I poured his in-flight drink I thought I’d spill it. He asked for orange juice.”

Dennis gestured back toward the buffet tables. “Do you want a drink?”

She ignored him. “After we died, he never spoke a word. Not a word. He. . his mouth would open and this sound would come out. . eeeeeeeeeee. . like a dying refrigerator. . .”

She looked at Dennis urgently. Her eyes focused briefly. They were weird, electric blue, like a sky lit up by lightning.

“He was grieving for himself, I think. Or maybe he just used up all his words in the world? And when he died, he was just so happy to be quiet that he never wanted to talk again?” She blinked, slowly, her wet mascara smudging more black beneath her eyes. “It’s like the celebs. You know?”

“Would you like to kiss me?” Dennis asked.

“I bet the real dead celebrities are nothing special. They probably blend in. Like my friend. But the fake ones, I think they’re made from a kind of collective pressure. None of us lived our lives the way we wanted to. It gets mixed up, all our needs, our unsatisfied desires, the things we wanted to be back when we were alive. Beautiful. Famous. The best of our potential. We make the celebs to be like that for us. Since we can’t.”

Wilda gestured vaguely toward the crowd. Dennis turned to see Benjamin Franklin demonstrating his kite, which rapidly became tangled with the multicolored balloons. Marilyn Monroe struggled with her skirt while standing over an air-conditioning vent tucked next to some bleachers. Gandhi sat in the middle of a group positioned near the buffet tables, pointedly not eating.

“You should stay away from them,” said Wilda softly. “They’re bright and crazy. They suck you down.”

Dennis turned back to look at her beautiful, tear-stained face. “I’d rather be with you anyway.”

She blinked at him, too lost in her own drunkenness to hear. Or maybe she just didn’t believe him? Dennis glanced over his shoulder at Marilyn, ripe and coy, dark-outlined eyes sparkling. Something dark and furious clenched in his stomach. He was only thirty-five! Marilyn made him so choked up with jealousy he couldn’t breathe.

He turned back toward Wilda and leaned in to dab some of the liner from beneath her eyes. She started toward his embrace but got tangled up with her own feet and started to fall. Dennis caught her before she could hit the floor.

She looked up at him, smiling vaguely. “I wanted to be a gymnast. You know? I was good,” she said, and then, “Do you think it’s cheating?”

“What?” murmured Dennis.

“My husband’s still alive.”

“So’s my wife.”

“What if she weren’t? Would it be cheating then?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t that faithful when we were both alive.”

“Neither was I.”

Wilda’s voice cracked like ice. Tears filled her eyes, colorless like vodka. Dennis looked down at her left hand where she wore a tan line but no ring.

“I don’t like being dead,” said Wilda.

“I’m sorry,” said Dennis.

He held her, silently, until she recovered enough to stand on her own. “I’m sorry, too,” she said at last. “I should go to the other party.”

Dennis tried to fake a smile. “Don’t drink too much while you’re there.”

Wilda reached out to touch his shoulder. Her fingertips were frozen. “When you figure it out,” she said, “try not to be too sad.” She faded away.

A few of the times Dennis cheated on Karen:

1)The coed who got stuck in the Dallas airport after her flight was canceled who he wooed with four margaritas, his best dozen dirty jokes, and a rendition of Sting’s “Desert Rose.”

2)The bartender in Phoenix who’d just been dumped by her fiancé and said she needed to know what it was like with a guy who could commit.

3)The drunk divorcée from the Internet ad who got on the hotel bed and dropped her pants without even a word to acknowledge he was there.

A few of the things Dennis pretended not to notice about his marriage:

1) The way Karen’s sense of humor about other women had changed. When they were younger, if she saw a pretty blonde who was about her shape walking past them in the mall, she’d say, “I bet she’s your type.” If she was in a teasing mood, she’d whisper about all the things she and the other girl would do to Dennis if they had him at their mercy. In recent days, her eyes had started getting hard when they even saw blonde girls on TV. She’d angle her face away from him, trying to hide her disgust.

2)How Karen no longer laughed indulgently when he forgot things. She still took care of him: she did his laundry, she found his keys, she rescheduled his doctor’s appointments. But she moved through the actions mechanically, her blank expression never flickering.

3)And then there was the worst thing, the one Dennis had taken the most pains to hide from himself—the flicker he’d seen when Karen came home exhausted from a late night’s work and found him still awake at two a.m., sitting on the couch and eating beans out of a can. She picked up the dishes he’d left on the coffee table and carried them to the sink, grumbling to herself so faintly he could hardly hear it, “It’s like I’m his mother.” He looked up and caught the brief flash on her face. It was the same emotion he’d heard in her voice: contempt.

The morning of November nineteenth was three days before their thirteenth anniversary and two months and five days before Dennis’s thirty-fifth birthday. Karen Halter (née Worth) proposed they stay in that Friday night to celebrate both occasions. She proposed an evening of drinking and making love. Dennis liked having sex when he was drunk, and although it wasn’t Karen’s preference, she tried to indulge him from time to time. She knew it reminded him of being young.

Fifteen years ago, when they’d started dating, Karen had carefully reviewed the guidelines for mixing type one diabetes and alcohol. The liver was involved in both processing alcohol and regulating blood sugar, and consequently, a type one diabetic who got carelessly drunk could preoccupy his liver with the one so that it couldn’t manage the other. Glucose levels required a tricky balance. If they went too high, they could damage a variety of systems. If they went too low, one could become hypoglycaemic or even fall into a coma.

It was trivial to give Dennis more insulin than he needed. She let him inject himself, just in case someone checked later. Not that they would. Everyone knew Dennis was too irresponsible to take care of himself.

She worried when he started puking, but he didn’t suspect anything. He just thought he was drunk.

The sleeping pills were his idea. He was feeling too sick to get to sleep on his own. He asked if he could borrow one of her Ambien and before she could say yes or no, he’d pulled the bottle out of the medicine cabinet. She watched him drunkenly struggle to unscrew the lid.

She hadn’t meant to go this far. She’d wanted to shock him. She’d wanted him to see how bad things could get and grow the fuck up. Yes, she wanted him to suffer a little, too, just so he’d know what it felt like.

If she let him take the pill, it’d be more than that. He wouldn’t be awake to monitor his condition. He wouldn’t be able to call an ambulance when things started going really wrong. He’d get sicker than she’d intended. He could even die.

Karen had matched Dennis drink for drink. No one would suspect her of wrongdoing. At worst, they’d think she’d also been too drunk to notice his symptoms.

With a shock, it occurred to Karen that maybe she’d been planning this all along. Maybe she’d been slowly taking the steps that could lead to Dennis’s death without admitting to herself that was what she was doing. She knew how self-denial worked by now; she’d been married to Dennis for thirteen years, after all.

She eased the bottle from his hand. “Let me do that,” she said, unscrewing the cap. She poured out two pills: one for him and one for her.

Now neither of them could call for help.

In the morning, memory clear and heart pounding, Karen called 911 in a genuine panic. She rode with Dennis in the ambulance, weeping real tears. She cried because she’d become a murderess and she didn’t want to see herself that way. She also cried because she wasn’t sorry she’d done it and that scared her even more.

The doctors proclaimed the coma unusually severe. Brain damage had occurred. Over the next several weeks, using sterile, equivocal comments, they made it clear that there was no hope. They would need a decision.

Karen had set herself on this path. There was no escaping it. Dennis’s living will was clear. She told them to pull the plug.

During the weeks when Dennis lay comatose, Karen began having nightmares. She researched bad dreams on the Internet and confirmed that anxiety produced an increase in negative dream imagery. Nothing to be concerned about. Except she kept dreaming about the strangest thing—that trashy cousin Dennis had admitted to fucking when he was a kid. They’d gone to her funeral a few months before Karen proposed. Dennis had bent over the casket and wept for nearly a quarter of an hour. Karen could understand why he was upset; the girl was family. But deep in her gut, whether it was fair or not, she couldn’t help being appalled. He was mourning his partner in incest.

Afterward, at the visitation, various family members asked her to stand next to the big, glossy photograph of the deceased they’d hung on the wall. “You look just like her,” everyone said, which made Karen even more uncomfortable. She tried to laugh off her reaction as indignance that she’d ever dress like that, but she had a niggling feeling there was something more profound. She did look eerily like the girl, the same close-set eyes, the same blunt chin, the same shade of blonde hair. It was as if Dennis was trying to re-create the relationship he’d had when he was eleven, as if it didn’t matter to him that Karen had her own thoughts and feelings and personality, as long as she looked like his first, forbidden love.

In Karen’s dreams, the blonde cousin had a knife. She chased Karen down winding asphalt streets, upraised metal shining in the shadows. “I don’t care what I said,” she growled. “I’m not going to let you cut his balls off. I’ll cut you first.”

The day Karen told them to pull the plug, she woke with her heart pounding so hard that she thought she was going to have to check into the hospital herself. The feeling faded when she went down to give the decision in person, but intensified again as she got in her car to drive home. She’d told them she couldn’t handle staying to watch Dennis die, which was true, but not for the reasons they supposed.

Outside, thick, dingy clouds of smog dimmed the sunlight to a sickly brown. Headlights and taillights glared in Karen’s windshield, a fraction too bright.

Horns screamed in the wake of near misses. Karen watched carefully, mapping out the traffic in her mind’s eye, making sure she didn’t veer out of her narrow lanes or crash into the broken-down SUVs on the side of the road. She was the kind of woman who had memorized the safety manual that came with her vehicle, and could recite all the local laws regarding child safety seats even though she’d never had any children in her car.

Despite her meticulousness, as Karen pulled into the intersection after waiting for the green, she failed to see the blonde woman in a white t-shirt jogging into the crosswalk. She pounded the breaks and yanked on the steering wheel, but it was already too late. Rubber screeched. Metal crunched against metal. The car next to hers careened sideways with the impact. Karen fell toward the windshield, her airbag failing to deploy, the steering wheel breaking against her head.

It took Karen almost three weeks to die, but in the land of the dead, time twisted around itself to join connected events. So it was only a few hours into Dennis’s party that Karen’s began, and his gossiping guests faded away to attend the newest scandal.

Things Dennis did not accomplish from his under thirty-five goals list (circa age thirty-four):

1) Start another band.

2) Play some gigs in the area.

3) Get his sugar under control.

4) Be nicer to Karen.

5) Stop cheating.

6) Go to the gym.

Dennis’s self-denial had finally reached its breaking point. He ran between the fading guests. “How do I get there? You have to show me! I have to see her!”

They winked out like stars from a greying dawn sky, not one of them letting slip what he needed to know.

The empty gym, if it was a gym, seemed to be disappearing on the edges. Perhaps it was. The dead people had talked about imposing their own shapes on the limitless afterlife. Maybe shapelessness was taking over.

One spot near the buffet tables remained bright, a fraction of the dance floor underneath the disco ball. Uncle Ed stood alone in the middle, fiddling with the coin slot in the juke box.

He turned as Dennis approached. “I wanted ‘Young Love,’ ” he said, “but they’ve only got ‘After You’ve Gone.’ Not worth a quarter.” He sighed. “Oh, well. That’s the afterlife, I guess.”

The juke box lit up as the coin slid into its machinery. It whirred, selecting a record. The bright, slightly distorted strains of a song Dennis vaguely recognized as a hit from the forties began to play.

Ed selected a pastel blue balloon and began to whirl it around like a dance partner. Dennis stood tensely, arms crossed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Ed dipped the balloon. “About what?”

“About Karen.”

“Figured you’d find out sooner or later. No sense ruining a perfectly good party until you did.”

“I’d have wanted to know.”

“Sorry then.”

“How do I get over there? I’ve got to talk to her.”

“You can’t.”

“I’ve got to!”

“She doesn’t want you. You can’t go bothering someone who doesn’t want you. That’s one of the rules we agree on. Otherwise someone could stalk you forever.” Ed gave a mild shrug. “I was used badly by a woman once, you know.”

Dennis glared silently.

“My first wife, Lilac,”Ed went on. “Not Melanie’s mother. Lilac died before you all were born. Your mom never liked her.”

“Mom never liked Karen either.”

“A perceptive woman, your mother. Well, things were good with me and Lilac for a while. We spent my whole party making out. Afterward, we found some old Scottish castle out with the dusties and rolled around in the grass for longer than you spent alive. It didn’t last long, though. Relatively. See, while I was still alive, she’d already met another dead guy. They’d been together for centuries before I kicked it. She was just curious about what it would be like to be with me again. Near broke my heart.”

“Ed,” Dennis said. “Karen murdered me. I have to know why.”

Ed stopped dancing and released the balloon. It flew upward and disappeared into grey.

“Have to?” Ed asked. “When you were alive, you had to have food and water. What’s ‘have to’ mean to you anymore?”

“Ed, please!”

“All right, then, I’ll take a gander. I’ve been dead a long time, but I bet I know a few things. Now, you didn’t deserve what Karen did to you. No one deserves that. But you had your hand in making it happen. I’m not saying you didn’t have good qualities. You could play a tune and tell a joke, and you were usually in a good humor when you weren’t sulking. Those are important things. But you never thought about anyone else. Not only wouldn’t you stir yourself to make a starving man a sandwich, but you’d have waited for him to bring you one before you stirred yourself to eat. One thing I’ve learned is people will give you a free lunch from time to time, but only so long as they think you’re trying. And if you don’t try, if they get to thinking you’re treating them with disdain, well then. Sometimes they get mean.”

“I didn’t treat Karen with disdain,” Dennis said.

Ed blinked evenly.

“It’s not that I don’t think about other people,” Dennis said. “I just wanted someone to take care of me. The whole world, everything was so hard. Even eating the wrong thing could kill you. I wanted someone to watch out for me, I guess. I guess I wanted to stay a kid.”

“You married a problem solver,” said Ed. “Then you became a problem.”

When Dennis thought about Ed, he always thought about that moment when he watched him fall off the roof. Failing that, he thought of the mostly silent man who sat in the back of family gatherings and was always first to help out with a chore. But now, with his words still stinging, Dennis remembered a different Uncle Ed, the one who’d always been called to finish off the barn cats who got sick, the one everyone relied on to settle family disputes because they knew he wouldn’t play favorites no matter who was involved.

Ed didn’t look so much like the man who’d fallen off the roof anymore. His wrinkles had tightened, his yellowing complexion brightened to a rosy pink. His hair was still slicked back from his forehead with Brilliantine, but now there were generous, black locks of it.

He straightened his suit jacket and it became a white tee-shirt, snug over faded jeans. He grinned as he stuck his hands in his pockets. His teeth were large and straight and shiny white.

“I always figured we’d have kids,” Dennis said. “I can’t do that here, can I? And the band, I was always going to get started with that again, as soon as I got things going, as soon as I found the time . . .”

Dennis trailed off. The juke box spun to a stop, clicking as it returned the record to its place. Its lights guttered for a moment before flicking off.

“I’m dead,” said Dennis, plaintively. “What do I do?”

Ed spread his hands toward the gym’s grey edges. “Hop from party to party. Find a cave with the dusties. Get together with a girl and play house until the continents collide. Whatever you want. You’ll find your way.”

A newsboy cap appeared in Ed’s hand. He tugged it on and tipped the brim.

“Now if you’ll excuse me,” he continued. “I need to pay my respects.”

“To my murderer?”

“She’s still family.”

“Don’t leave me alone,” Dennis pleaded.

Ed was already beginning to fade.

Dennis sprinted forward to grab his collar.

When Dennis was four, he found his grandfather’s ukulele in the attic, buried under a pile of newspapers. It was a four-string soprano pineapple made of plywood with a spruce soundboard. Tiny figures of brown women in grass skirts gyrated across the front, painted grins eerily broad.

The year Dennis turned six, his parents gave him a bike with training wheels for Christmas instead of the guitar he asked for. After a major tantrum, they wised up and bought him a three-quarter-sized acoustic with two-tone lacquer finish in red and black. It was too big, but Dennis eventually got larger. The songbook that came with it included chords and lyrics for “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Yellow Submarine.”

The summer when Dennis was fifteen, he wheedled his grandparents into letting him do chores around their place for $2.50 an hour until he saved enough to buy a used Fender and an amp. He stayed up until midnight every night for the next six months playing that thing in the corner of the basement his mother had reluctantly cleared out next to the water heater. He failed science and math, and only barely squeaked by with a D in English, but it was worth it.

The guitar Karen bought him when they got engaged was the guitar of his dreams. A custom Gibson Les Paul hollow-body with a maple top, mahogany body, ebony fret board, cherryburst finish, and curves like Jessica Rabbit. He hadn’t been able to believe what he was seeing. Just looking at it set off strumming in his head.

As she popped the question, Karen ran her index finger gently across the abalone headstock inlay. The tease of her fingertip sent a shiver down his spine. It was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

Everything blurred.

Dennis and Ed reappeared in the rooftop garden of the museum where Karen had worked. It looked the way it did in summer, leafy shrubs and potted trees rising above purple, red and white perennials. The conjured garden was much larger than the real one; it stretched out as far as Dennis could see in all directions, blurring into verdant haze at the horizon.

Seurat stood at his easel in front of a modernist statue, stabbing at the canvas with his paintbrush. Figures from Karen’s family and/or the art world strolled between ironwork benches, sipping martinis. Marie Antoinette, in robe à la Polonaise and pouf, distributed petit fours from a tray while reciting her signature line.

Dennis glimpsed Wilda, seemingly recovered from her melancholia, performing a series of acrobatic dance moves on a dais.

And then he saw Karen.

She sat on a three-legged stool, sipping a Midori sour as she embarked on a passionate argument about South African modern art with an elderly critic Dennis recognized from one of her books. She looked more sophisticated than he remembered. Makeup made her face dramatic, her eyebrows shaped into thin arches, a hint of dark blush sharpening her cheekbones. A beige summer gown draped elegantly around her legs. There was a vulnerability in her eyes he hadn’t seen in ages, a tenderness beneath the blue that had vanished years ago.

Dennis felt as if it would take him an eternity to take her in, but even dead time eventually catches up.

Ed, struggling to pry Dennis’s fingers off his collar, gave an angry shout. Both Karen and the old man beside her turned to look straight at them.

Ed twisted Dennis’s fingers until one of them made a snapping sound. Shocked, Dennis dropped his grip.

“Christ!” said Ed, glaring at Dennis as he rubbed his reddened throat. “What the hell is wrong with you?” He turned away from Dennis as if washing his hands of him, tipped his hat to Karen, and then stalked off into the green.

“How are you here?” Karen sounded more distressed than angry. “They told me you couldn’t be.”

“I hitched a ride.”

“But that shouldn’t matter. They said—”

Karen quieted in the wake of the noise from the crowd that had begun to form around them. Ordinary people and celebs, strangers and friends and family and neighbors, all gossiping and shoving as they jockeyed for front row views.

The elderly art critic straightened and excused himself to the safety of the onlookers. Dennis stepped into his position.

“Maybe you let me in,” Dennis said. “Maybe you really wanted me here.”

Karen gave a strangled laugh. “I want you out and I want you in. I can’t make up my mind. That sounds like the shape of it.”

“You murdered me,” said Dennis.

“I murdered you,” said Karen.

Behind them, Dennis heard the noise of a scuffle, some New Jersey guido pitting himself against H. L. Mencken.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Karen continued. “I don’t think I did, at least.”

Dennis swallowed.

“I’m sorry,” Karen said. “Sorrier than I can tell you.”

“You’re only saying that because you’re dead.”

“No. What would be the point?”

Dennis heard the guido hit the ground as H. L. Mencken declared his victory in verse. A small round of applause ended the incident as the throng refocused on Dennis and Karen. Dennis had thought he’d want to hit her or scream at her. Some part of her must have wanted him to do that, must have known she deserved to be punished. He wondered if anyone would try to stop him if he attacked her. He got the impression no one would.

“I hate you,” Dennis told her. It was mostly true.

“Me, too,” said Karen.

“I didn’t when we were alive. Not all the time, anyway.”

“Me, too.”

They both fell silent. Straining to overhear, the crowd did, too. In the background, there were bird calls, the scent of daisies, the whoosh of traffic three stories below.

“I don’t think,” said Dennis, “that I want to be near you anymore.”

So, according to the rules of the land of the dead, he wasn’t.

Things Dennis did accomplish from his under thirty-five goals lists (various ages):

1)Eat raw squid.

2)Own a gaming console.

3)Star in an action movie.* (*After a bad day when he was twenty-four, Dennis decided to broaden the definition of “star” to include his role as an extra in Round Two.)

4)Watch Eric Clapton live.

5)Seduce a girl by writing her a love song.

6)Screw Pamela Kortman, his roommate’s ex-girlfriend.

7)Clean out the garage to make a practice space.

8)Play all night, until dawn, without noticing the time.

He was back in the gym. A single bank of fluorescent lights whined as they switched back on. Only one of the bulbs turned on, casting an eerie glow that limned Dennis’s body against the dark.

A figure crept out of the shadows. “Hey.”

Dennis turned toward the voice. He saw the outline of a girl. At first he thought it was the stewardess, Wilda. No, he thought, it’s—is it Karen? But as the figure came closer, he realized it was Melanie.

“Hey Mel,” said Dennis.

“Hey Asswipe,” said Mel, but her voice didn’t have any edge to it.

“I thought you were at Karen’s party.”

“That bitch? I wouldn’t go to her party if she was the last rotter. I’ve been waiting here so I could catch you alone.”

She crept even closer, until he could smell the sourness of her breath.

“I heard what my dad said. I wanted to say I’m sorry. He was pretty hard on you. You didn’t deserve it. I was going to come out and give him a piece of my mind, but I didn’t know how you’d feel after all that stuff I said.”

She shifted her weight nervously from foot to foot.

“You didn’t deserve that either,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Dennis said.

“No, really.”

“No, really.”

Melanie smiled. Her expression looked so young and genuine that Dennis finally felt the fist around his heart begin to relax.

He remembered the late nights when he and Melanie had been kids, when she’d turned up on his porch and begged him to go with her to steal cigarettes or throw aftershave at Billy Whitman’s window. The same mischief inflected her pose now: her quirked smile, sparkling eyes, and restless fingers.

“Do you think a man could live his whole life trying to get back to when he was eleven?” Dennis asked.

Melanie shrugged. She was twelve now, young and scrappy, pretty in pink but still the first kid on the block to throw a punch.

“Do you want to go play in the lot behind Ping’s?” she asked.

Dennis looked down at himself. He saw the red and purple striped shirt he wore every day when he was eleven years old except when his mom took it away for the laundry.

Tall, dry grass whipped the backs of his knees. It rustled in the breeze, a rippling golden wave.

“Yeah,” he said.

He reached for her hand. Her fingers curled into his palm.

“We don’t ever have to come back if we don’t want to,” she said. “We can go as far as we want. We can keep going forever.”

The sun hung bright overhead, wisps of white drifting past in the shapes of lions and race cars and old men’s faces. It smelled of fresh, growing things, and a bare hint of manure. A cow lowed somewhere and a truck rumbled across the asphalt. Both sounds were equidistant, a world away.

“Come on,” said Dennis.

They ran. She led the way, long sandaled feet falling pigeon-toed in the soil. Dennis felt the breath flow sweet and easy through his lungs.

Someday they’d stop. Someday they’d fall exhausted to the ground and sleep curled up together in the dirt. Someday they’d pass into town where Dennis’s father was arguing over the price of wood while Uncle Ed stood in front of the hardware store, sipping lemonade. Someday they might even run straight through the universe, all the way back to the weird land of death where they’d chat with Descartes about the best way to keep mosquitoes off in summer.

For now, their feet beat like drums on the soil. Wind reddened Dennis’s ears. Melanie’s hair flew back into his face. He tugged her east to chase a crow circling above the horizon. Behind them, the wind swept through fields the size of eternity.

THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION

Paul Cornell

The best time to see Kastellet is in the evening, when the ancient fortifications are alight with glow worms, a landmark for anyone gazing down on the city as they arrive by carriage. Here stands one of Copenhagen’s great parks, its defence complexes, including the home of the Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste, and a single windmill, decorative rather than functional. The wind comes in hard over the Langeline, and after the sun goes down, the skeleton of the whale that’s been grown into the ground resonates in sympathy and gives out a howl that can be heard in Sweden.

Hamilton had arrived on the diplomatic carriage, without papers, and, as etiquette demanded, without weapons or folds, thoroughly out of uniform. He watched the carriage heave itself up into the darkening sky above the park, and bank off to the southwest, swaying in the wind, sliding up the fold it made under its running boards. He was certain every detail was being registered by the FLV. You don’t look into the diplomatic bag, but you damn well know where the bag goes. He left the park through the healed bronze gates and headed down a flight of steps towards the diplomatic quarter, thinking of nothing. He did that when there were urgent questions he couldn’t answer, rather than run them round and round in his head and let them wear away at him.

The streets of Copenhagen. Ladies and gentlemen stepping from carriages, the occasional tricolour of feathers on a hat or, worse, once, tartan over a shoulder. Hamilton found himself reacting, furious. But then he saw it was Campbell. The wearer, a youth in evening wear, was the sort of fool who heard an accent in a bar and took up anything apparently forbidden, in impotent protest against the world. And thus got fleeced by Scotsmen.

He was annoyed at his anger. He had failed to contain himself.

He walked past the façade of the British embassy, with the Hanoverian regiment on guard, turned a corner and waited in one of those convenient dark streets that form the second map of diplomatic quarters everywhere in the world. After a moment, a door with no external fittings swung open and someone ushered him inside and took his coat.

* * *

“The girl arrived at the front door, in some distress. She spoke to one of our Hanoverians, Private Glassman, and became agitated when he couldn’t understand her. Then she seems to have decided that none of us should understand her. We tried to put her through the observer inside the hallway, but she wouldn’t hear of it.” The Ambassador was Bayoumi, a Musselman with grey in his beard. Hamilton had met him once before, at a ball held in a palace balanced on a single wave, grown out of the ocean and held there to mark the presence of royalty from three of the great powers. He had been exactly gracious, as he had to be, making his duty appear weightless. In this place, perhaps that was what he took it to be.

“So she could be armed?” Hamilton had made himself sit down, now he was focusing on the swirls of lacquered gunwood on the surface of the Ambassador’s desk.

“She could be folded like origami.”

“You’re sure of the identification?”

“Well . . .” Hamilton recognized that moment when the diplomatic skills of a continental ambassador unfolded themselves. At least they were present. “Major, if we can, I’d like to get through this without compromising the girl’s dignity—”

Hamilton cut him off. “Your people trusted nothing to the courier except a name and assume the EM out of here’s compromised.” Which was shoddy to the point of terrifying. “What?”

The ambassador let out a sigh. “I make it a point,” he said, “never to ask a lady her age.”

* * *

They had kept her in the entrance hallway and closed the embassy to all other business that day. Eventually, they had extended the embassy’s security bunker to the hallway, created a doorway into it by drilling out the wall, and set up a small room for her inside it. She was separated from the rest of the embassy by a fold, which had light pushed through it, so Hamilton could watch her on an intelligent projection that took up much of a wall in one of the building’s many unused office spaces.

Hamilton saw her face, and found he was holding his breath. “Let me in there.”

“But if—”

“If she kills me nobody will care. Which is why she won’t.”

* * *

He walked into the room made of space, with a white sheen on the walls for the visual comfort of those inside. He closed the door behind him.

She looked at him. Perhaps she started to recognise him. She wavered with uncertainty.

He sat down opposite her.

She reacted as his gaze took her in, aware that he wasn’t looking at her like a stranger should look at a lady. Perhaps that was tipping her towards recognition. Not that that would necessarily be a sign of anything.

The body was definitely that of Lustre Saint Clair: bobbed hair; full mouth; the affectation of spectacles; those warm, hurt eyes.

But she couldn’t be more than eighteen. The notes in his eyes confirmed it, beyond all cosmetic possibility.

This was the Lustre Saint Clair he’d known. The Lustre Saint Clair from fifteen years ago.

“Is it you?” she said. In Enochian. In Lustre’s voice.

* * *

He had been fourteen, having left Cork for the first time, indentured in the 4th Dragoons because of his father’s debt, proud to finally be able to pay it through his service. He’d had the corners knocked off him and had yet to gain new ones at Keble. Billeted in Warminster, he had been every inch the Gentleman Cadet, forced to find a common society with the other ranks, who tended to laugh at the aristocracy of his Irish accent. They were always asking how many Tories he’d killed, and he’d never found an answer. Years later, he’d come to think he should have told the truth and said two and seen if that would shock them. He’d been acutely conscious of his virginity.

Lustre had been one of the young ladies it was acceptable for him to be seen with in town. Her being older than he was had appealed to Hamilton very much. Especially since she was reticent, shy, unable to overawe him. That had allowed him to be bold. Too bold, on occasion. They were always seeing and then not seeing each other. She was on his arm at dances, with no need of a card on three occasions, and then supposedly with some other cadet. But Hamilton had always annoyed Lustre by not taking those other suitors seriously, and she had always come back to him. The whole idiocy had taken less than three months, his internal calendar now said, incredibly. But it was years written in stone.

He had never been sure if she was even slightly fond of him until the moment she had initiated him into the mysteries. And they had even fought that night. But they had at least been together after that, for a while, awkward and fearful as that had been.

Lustre was a secretary for Lord Surtees, but she had told Hamilton, during that night of greater intimacy, that this was basically a lie, that she was also a courier, that in her head was the seed for a diplomatic language, that sometimes she would be asked to speak the words that made it grow into her, and then she would know no other language, and be foreign to all countries apart from the dozen people in court and government with whom she could converse. In the event of capture, she would say other words, or her package would force them on her, and she would be left with a language, in thought and memory as well as in speech, spoken by no other, which any other would be unable to learn, and she would be like that unto death, which, cut off from the sum of mankind that made the balance as she would be, would presumably and hopefully soon follow.

She’d said this to him like she was making an observation about the weather. Not with the detachment that Hamilton had come to admire in his soldiers, but with a fatalism that made him feel sick that night and afraid. He hadn’t known whether to believe her. It had been her seeming certainty of how she would end, that night, that had made him react, raise his voice, drag them back into one of their endless grindings of not yet shaped person on person. But in the weeks that followed, he had come to half appreciate those confidences, shrugging aside the terrible burden she put on him, and her weakness in doing so, if it all was true, because of the wonder of her.

He had done many more foolish and terrible things while he was a Cadet. Every now and then he supposed he should have regrets. But what was the point? And yet here was the one thing he hadn’t done. He hadn’t left that little room above the inn and gone straight back to barracks and asked for an interview with Lieutenant Rashid and told him that this supposed lady had felt able to share the secret of her status. He hadn’t done it in all the weeks after.

The one thing he hadn’t done, and, like some Greek fate or the recoil from a prayer too few, here it was back for him.

Six months later, Lustre Saint Clair, after she’d followed His Lordship back to London and stopped returning Hamilton’s letters, had vanished.

He’d only heard of it because he’d recognised a friend of hers at some ball, had distracted the lady on his arm and gone to pay his respects, and had heard of tears and horrors and none of the girls in Surtees’ employ knowing what had become of her.

He’d hidden his reaction then. And ever after. He’d made what inquiries he could. Almost none. He’d found the journals for that day on his plate, and located something about a diplomatic incident between the Court of Saint James’s and the Danes, both blaming the other for a “misunderstanding” that the writer of the piece was duty bound not to go into in any more detail, but was surely the fault of typical Dansk whimsy. Reading between the lines, it was clear that something had been lost, possibly a diplomatic bag. Presumably that bag had contained or been Lustre. And then his regiment had suddenly mustered and he’d been dragged away from it all.

For months, years, it had made him feel sick, starting with a great and sudden fear there at his desk. It had stayed his burden and only gradually declined. But nothing had come of it. As he had risen in the ranks, and started to do out of uniform work, he had quieted his conscience by assuring himself that he had had no concrete detail to impart to his superiors. She had been loose-lipped and awkward with the world. This is not evidence, these are feelings.

That had been the whole of it until that morning. When he had heard her name again, out of Turpin’s mouth, when Hamilton had been standing in his office off Horseguards Parade.

That name, and her seeming return after fifteen years of being assumed dead.

Hamilton had concealed the enormity of his reaction. He was good at that now. His Irish blood was kept in an English jar.

At last he had heard the details he had carefully never asked about since he’d started doing out of uniform work. All those years ago, Lustre had been sent to Copenhagen on a routine information exchange, intelligence deemed too sensitive to be trusted to the embroidery or anything else that was subject to the whims of man and God. Turpin hadn’t told him what the information was, only that it had been marked For Their Majesties, meaning that only the crowned heads of specific great powers and their chosen advisors could hear it. Lustre had been set down in one of the parks, met by members of the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste, and walked to Amalienborg Palace. Presumably. Because she and they never got there. They had simply not arrived, and after an hour of Dansk laissez faire, in which time it was presumably thought they might have gone to the pub or had a spot of lunch, the alarms had begun. Nothing had ever been found. There were no witnesses. It had been a perfect abduction, if that was what it was.

The great powers had panicked, Turpin had said. They’d expected the balance to collapse, for war to follow shortly. Armies across the continent and solar system had been dispatched to ports and carriage posts. Hamilton remembered that sudden muster, that his regiment had been sent to kick the mud off their boots in Portsmouth. Which soon had turned into just another exercise. Turpin’s predecessor had lost his job as a result of the affair, and shortly after that his life, in a hunting accident which was more of the former than the latter.

Hamilton had known better, this morning, than to say that whatever was in Lustre’s head must have extraordinary value, for it to mean the end of the sacred trust of all those in public life, the end of everything. The thought of it had made him feel sick again, tugging on a thread that connected the import of what she’d carried to her willingness to talk.

“Is this matter,” he’d asked, “still as sensitive?”

Turpin had nodded. “That’s why I’m sending you. And why you’re going to be briefed with Enochian. We presume that’ll be all she’s able to speak, or that’s what we hope, and you’re going to need to hear what she has to say and act on it there and then. The alternative would be to send a force to get her out of there, and, as of this hour, we’re not quite ready to invade Denmark.”

His tone had suggested no irony. It was said mad old King Frederik was amused by the idea of his state bringing trouble to the great powers. That he has aspirations to acquisitions in the Solar System beyond the few small rocks that currently had Dansk written through them like bacon.

The warmth of Turpin’s trust had supported Hamilton against his old weakness. He’d taken on the language and got into the carriage to cross stormy waters, feeling not prayed for enough, yet unwilling to ask for it, fated and ready to die.

* * *

And so here she was. Or was she?

Was she a grown homunculus, with enough passing memory to recognise him? And speak Enochian too? No, surely that was beyond what could be stuffed into such a foul little brain. And assigning such personhood to such an object was beneath even the depths to which the Heeresnachrichtenamt would sink. Was she a real person with grown features to suggest young Lustre? That was entirely possible. But what was the point, when she’d be suspected immediately? Why not make her look the age she was supposed to be?

“Yes,” he said in Enochian. “It’s me.”

“Then . . . it’s true, God’s-seen-it. What’s been obvious since I . . . since I got back.”

“Back from where?”

“They said someone with authority was coming to see me. Is that you?”

“Yes.”

She looked as if she could hardly believe it. “I need protection. Once we’re back in Britain—”

“Not until I know—”

“You know as well as I do that this room, this building—!”

“On the way in, when this was a hallway, why didn’t you let yourself be observed?”

She took a breath and her mouth formed into a thin line. And suddenly they were back fighting again. Fools. Still. With so much at stake.

He should have told them. They should have sent someone else.

“Listen,” she said, “how long has it been since you last saw me?”

“Decade and a half, give or take.”

He saw the shock on her face again. It was like she kept getting hurt by the same thing. By the echoes of it. “I saw the dates when I got out. I couldn’t believe it. For me it’s been . . . four years . . . or . . . no time at all, really.”

Hamilton was certain there was nothing that could do this. He shook his head, putting the mystery aside for a moment. “Is the package safe?”

“Typical you, to gallop round. Yes! That’s why I didn’t take the observer machine! Those things have a reputation, particularly one here. It might have set me babbling.”

But that was also what a homunculus or a cover would say. He found he was scowling at her. “Tell me what happened. Everything.”

But then a small sound came from beside them. Where a sound couldn’t be. It was like a heavy item of furniture being thumped against the wall.

Lustre startled, turned to look—

Hamilton leapt at her.

He felt the sudden fire flare behind him.

And then he was falling upwards, sideways, back down again!

He landed and threw himself sidelong to grab Lustre as she was falling up out of her chair, as it was crashing away from her. The room was battering at his eyes, milky fire, arcing rainbows! Two impact holes, half the chamber billowing from each. An explosion was rushing around the walls towards them!

A shaped charge, Hamilton thought in the part of his mind that was fitted to take apart such things and turn them round, with a fold in the cone to demolish artificially curved space.

Whoever they were, they wanted Lustre or both of them alive.

Hamilton grabbed her round the shoulders and threw her at the door.

She burst it open and stumbled into the sudden gravity of the corridor beyond. He kicked his heels on the spinning chair, and dived through after her.

He fell onto the ground, hard on his shoulder, rolled to his feet, and jumped to slam the door behind them. It did its duty and completed the fold seconds before the explosion rolled straight at it.

There was nobody waiting for them in the hallway.

So they’d been about to enter the fold through the holes they’d blown? They might have found their corpses. It was a mistake, and Hamilton didn’t like to feel that his enemy made mistakes. He’d rather assume he was missing something.

He had no gun.

Alarms started up in distant parts of the building. The corridor, he realised, was filling with smoke from above.

There came the sound of running feet, coming down the stairs from above them.

Friend or foe? No way to tell.

The attack had come from outside, but there might have been inside help, might now be combatants pouring in. The front door had held, but then it had been folded to distraction. If they knew enough to use that charge, they might not have even tried it.

Lustre was looking at the only door they could reach before the running feet reached them. It had a sign on it which Hamilton’s Danish notations read as “cellar.”

He threw himself back at the wall, then charged it with his foot. Non-grown wood burst around the lock. He kicked it out. The damage would be seen. He was betting on it not mattering. He swung open the door and found steps beyond. Lustre ran inside, and he closed the door behind them.

He tried a couple of shadowy objects and found something he could lift and put against the door. A tool box. They were in a room of ancient boilers, presumably a backup if the fuel cells failed.

“They’ll find—!” Lustre began. But she immediately quieted herself.

He quickly found what he had suspected might be down here, a communications station on the wall. Sometimes when he was out of uniform he carried a small link to the embroidery, usually disguised as a watch to stop anyone from wondering what sort of person would have something like that. But he would never be allowed to bring such kit into a supposedly friendly country. The link on the wall was an internal system. He could only hope it connected to the link on the roof. He could and should have called the FLV. But he couldn’t afford to trust the locals now. He couldn’t have their systems register an honest call to Buckingham Palace or the building off Horseguards Parade. That would be a sin against the balance. So there was now only one person he could call. If she wasn’t in her boudoir, he was dead and Lustre was back in the bag.

He tapped on the connector and blew the right notes into the receiver, hopefully letting the intelligent sound he was connecting to push past any listening ears.

To his relief, Cushion McKenzie came straight on the line, sounding urgent. Someone in the Palace might have tipped her off as to where he was tonight. “Johnny, what can I do for you?” Her voice came from the roof, the direction reserved for officers.

“Social call for papa.” He could hear the running feet coming along the corridor towards the door. Would they miss the damage in the gathering smoke?

“Extract, package or kill?”

Kill meant him, a stroke that would take his life and erase what he knew, painlessly, he was assured. It was the only way an out-of-uniform officer could choose to die, self-murder being an option denied to the kit stowed in their heads. Cushion represented herself on the wider shores of the public embroidery as a salonist, but she was also thoroughly job. She’d once walked Hamilton out of Lisbon and into a public carriage with an armed driver, keeping up a stream of chatter that had kept him awake despite the sucking wound in his chest. He’d wanted to send her flowers afterwards, but he couldn’t find anything in the Language of Blooms volume provided by his regiment that both described how he felt and kept the precious distance of the connection between them.

“Extract,” he said.

“Right. Looking.”

She was silent for a moment that bore hard on Hamilton’s nerves. Whoever was seeking them was now fumbling around like amateurs in front of that door. Perhaps that was why they’d botched the explosives. Hamilton feared amateurs most of all. Amateurs killed you against orders.

“You’re in an infested rat hole, Major. You should see what’s rolling out on my coffee table. Decades of boltholes and overfolding, hidden and forgotten weapons. None near you, worse luck. If a point time stop opens there and collapses Copenhagen—”

“If we punch out here, will it?”

“Possibly. Never was my favourite city. Preparing.”

Something went bump against the door. Then started to push at it. Lustre stepped carefully back from where the bullets would come, and Hamilton realised that, thanks to the length of the comms chord, he had no option but to stand in their way.

He thought of moments with Annie, giving his mind nothing else to do.

The thumping on the door was concerted now. Deliberate.

“Ready,” said Cushion.

Hamilton beckoned and then grabbed Lustre to him.

“And in my ear . . . Colonel Turpin sends his complements.”

“I return the Colonel’s complements,” said Hamilton. “Go.”

The hole opened under them with a blaze that might be the city collapsing. Hamilton and Lustre fell into it and down the flashing corridor at the speed of a hurricane. Bullets burst from the splintering door in the distance and tore down the silver butterfly tunnel around them, ricocheting ridiculously past them—

Hamilton wished he had something to shoot back into their bastard faces.

And then they were out, into the blessed air of the night, thrown to the ground by an impossible hole above them—

—that immediately and diplomatically vanished.

Hamilton leapt to his feet, looking round. They were in a side street. Freezing. Darkness. No witnesses. Cushion had managed even that. That was all she was going to be able to do tonight, for him or for any of his brothers and sisters anywhere in the solar system. Turpin had allowed that for him. No, he checked himself, for what was inside Lustre.

He helped Lustre up, and they stared at the end of the street, where passersby were running to and fro. He could hear the bells of Saint Mary’s tolling ten o’clock. In the distance, the embassy was ablaze, and carriages with red lights and bells were flashing through the sky, into the smoke, starting to pump water from their ocean folds into it. Those might well come under fire. And they were the only branch of public life here that was almost certainly innocent of what had just happened. The smell of smoke washed down the street. It would be enough to make Frederik close the airways too. Turpin and Her Majesty the Queen Mother were being asked, in this moment, to consider whether or not the knowledge Lustre had was worth open warfare between Greater Britain and a Dansk court who might well know nothing of all this, who already knew those secrets. But rather than let a British carriage in to collect the two of them, they’d spend hours asserting that their own services, riddled with rot as they might be, could handle it.

Across the street was a little inn with grown beef hanging from the roofline, pols music coming from the windows. The crowds would be heading to see the blaze and offer help in the useless way that gentlemen and those who wished to be gentlemen did.

Hamilton grabbed Lustre’s hand and ran for the door.

* * *

He ordered in Dutch he called up from some regional variation in the back of his head, some of the real beef, potatoes and a bottle of wine, which he had no intention of drinking, but which served as an excuse as to why they wanted a discrete booth to themselves. Lustre looked demure at the landlord, avoiding his glance, a maid led astray. A maid, it suddenly occurred to Hamilton, in clothes that would raise eyebrows in London, being fifteen years out of the fashion. But they had no choice. And besides, this was Denmark.

They vanished into the darkness of their snug. They had a few minutes before the food arrived. They both started talking at once, quietly, so that the landlord wouldn’t hear the strange tongue.

She held up a hand and he was silent.

“I’ll tell you the whole bit,” she said. “Fast as I can. Have you heard of the three quarters of an ounce theory?”

Hamilton shook his head.

“It’s folk science, Golden Book stuff, the kind of infra religious thing you hear in servant pools. This chap weighed all these dying people, and found, they say, that three quarters of an ounce leaves you at death. That being the weight of the soul.”

“Is this really the time for dollymop theology?”

She didn’t rise to it. “Now I’m going to tell you something secret, For Their Majesties secret—”

“No—!”

“And if I die and not you, what happens then?” she snapped. “Because just killing me will not save the balance!” She’d added an epithet to the word, shocking him at the sound of it in her mouth. “Oh yes, I want to make sure you know that, in case push comes to shove.” She didn’t give him time to formulate a reply and that was probably a blessing. “What kind of out-of-uniform man have you become, if you can’t live with secrets?! I don’t care what you’re cleared for, it’s just us at the moment!”

Hamilton finally nodded.

“All right, then. You probably haven’t heard either, your reading still presumably not extending beyond the hunting pages, about the astronomical problems concerning galaxies, the distribution of mass therein?”

“What?! What is this—?”

“No, of course you haven’t. What it comes down to is: galaxies seem to have more mass than they should, loads of it. Nobody knew what it was. It’s not visible. By just plotting what it influences, astronomers have made maps of where it all is. For a few years that was the entire business of Herstmonceux. Which I thought odd when I read about it, but now I know why.”

The dinner came and they were forced to silence for a moment, just looking at each other. This new determination suited her, Hamilton found himself thinking. As did the harsh language. He felt an old, obscure pain and killed it. The landlord departed with a look of voyeuristic pleasure. “Go on.”

“Don’t you see? If the three quarter ounce theory is true, there’s weight in the world that comes and goes, as if in and out of a fold, up God’s sleeve as it were. Put loads of that together—”

Hamilton understood, and the distant enormity of it made him close his eyes. “That’s the extra mass in those galaxies.”

“And we have a map of it—”

“Which shows where there are minds, actual foreigners from other worlds, out there—!”

“And perhaps nearby.”

Hamilton’s mind reeled at the horror of it. The potential threat to the balance! Any of the great powers, damn it, any nation, could gain immeasurable advantage over its fellows by trading intelligence with foreigners. “And this is what’s in your head. The greatest secret of the great powers. But this is old news, they must have found a way to deal with it—”

“Yes. Because, after all, any of them could put together enough telescope time to work it out. As near as I can figure out, they shared the info. Every great court knows it at the highest level, so the balance is intact. Just about. I suppose they must have all made a secret agreement not to try to contact these foreigners. Pretty easy to check up on that, given how they all watch each other’s embroidery.”

Hamilton relaxed. So these were indeed old terrors, already dealt with by wiser heads. “And of course communication is all we’re talking about. The distances involved—”

She looked at him like he was an erring child.

“Has one of the powers broken the agreement?!”

She pursed her lips. “This isn’t the work of the great powers.”

Hamilton wasn’t sure he could take much more of this. “Then who?”

“Have you heard of the heavenly twins?”

“The Ransoms?!”

“Yes, Castor and Pollux.”

Hamilton’s mind was racing. The twins were arms dealers, who sold, it had been revealed a few years ago, to the shock of the great powers, not just to the nation to which they owed allegiance (which, them being from the northern part of the Columbian colonies, would be Britain or France), or even to one they’d later adopted, but to anyone. Once the great powers had found that out and closed ranks, dealing with the twins as they dealt with any threat to the balance, their representatives had vanished overnight from their offices in the world’s capitals, and started to sell away from any counter, to rebels, mercenaries, colonies. Whoring out their services. The twins themselves had never shown their faces in public. It was said they had accumulated enough wealth to actually begin to develop new weapons of their own. Every other month some new speculation arose that one of the powers was secretly once more buying from them. Not something Britain would ever do, of course, but the Dutch, the Spaniards? “How are they involved?”

“When I was halfway across this city, on my original mission, a rabbit hole similar to the one we just fell down opened up under me and my honour guard.”

“They can do that?!”

“Compared to what else they’re doing, that’s nothing. They had their own soldiers on hand, soldiers in uniform—”

Hamilton could hear the disgust in her voice, and matched it with his own. Tonight was starting to feel like some sort of nightmare, with every certainty collapsing. He felt like he was falling from moment to moment as terrible new possibilities sprang up before his eyes.

“They cut down my party, taking a few losses themselves. They took the bodies with them.”

“They must have mopped the place up afterwards too.”

“I was dragged before them. I don’t know if we were still in this city. I was ready to say the words and cut myself off, but they were ready for that. They injected me with some sort of instant glossolalia. I thought for a second that I’d done it myself, but then I realised that I couldn’t stop talking, that I was saying all sorts of nonsense, from anywhere in my mind, ridiculous stuff, shameful stuff.” She paused for breath. “You were mentioned.”

“I wasn’t going to ask.”

“I didn’t talk about what I was carrying. Sheer luck. I wrenched clear of their thugees and tried to bash my brains out against the wall.”

He had put his hand on hers. Without even thinking about it.

She let it stay. “I wouldn’t recommend it, probably not possible, but they only gave me two cracks at it before they grabbed me again. They were planning to keep injecting me with the stuff until I’d spilled the words that’d let them use an observer to see the map. They locked me up in a room and recorded me all night. That got quite dull quite swiftly.”

Listening to her, Hamilton felt himself calm. He was looking forward, with honest glee, to the possibility that he might be soon in a position to harm some of these men.

“I gambled that after it got late enough and I still hadn’t said anything politically interesting they’d stop watching and just record it. I waited as long as I could with my sanity intact, then had at one of the walls. I found main power and shoved my fingers in. Wish I could tell you more about that, but I don’t remember anything from then on until I woke up in what turned out to be a truly enormous void carriage. I came to in the infirmary, connected to all sorts of drugs. My internal clock said it was . . . four years later . . . which I took to be an error. I checked the package in my head, but the seals were all intact. I could smell smoke. So I took the drug lines out best I could, hopped out of bed. There were a few others in there, but they were all dead or out of it. Odd looking wounds, like their flesh had been sucked off them. I found more dead bodies in the corridor outside. Staff in that uniform of theirs. There was still somebody driving the thing, because when I checked the internal embroidery, there were three seats taken. I think they were running the absolute minimum staff, just trying to get the thing home, three survivors of whatever had happened. The carriage was throwing up all sorts of false flags and passport deals as we approached Earth orbit from high up above the plane. I went and hid near the bulwark door, and when the carriage arrived at one of the Danish high stations I waited until the rescue party dashed on. Then I wandered out.” Her voice took on a pleading edge, as if she was asking if she was still in a dream. “I . . . took a descent bus and I remember thinking what classy transportation it was, very bells and whistles, especially for the Danes. When I listened in to the embroidery, and checked the log against what I was hearing, I realised . . . and it took some realising, I can tell you, it took me checking many times . . .”

Her hand had grasped his, demanding belief.

“It had been four years unconscious for me . . . but . . .” She had to take a deep breath, her eyes appealing once again at the astonishing unfairness of it.

“Fifteen years for us,” he said. Looking at her now, at how this older woman who had started to teach him about himself had stayed a girl of an age he could never now be seen with in public . . . the change had been lessened for him because it was how he’d kept her in his memory, but now he saw the size of it. The difference between them now was an index of all he’d done. He shook his head to clear it, to take those dismayed eyes off him. “What does it mean?”

She was about to answer him. But he suddenly realised the music had got louder. He knocked his steak knife from the table to the seat and into his pocket.

Lustre looked shocked at him.

But now a man looking like a typical patron of an inn had looked in at their booth. “Excuse me,” he said, in Dutch with an accent Hamilton’s eye notes couldn’t place, “do you know where the landlord’s gone? I’m meant to have a reservation—”

A little something about the man’s expression.

He was getting away with it.

He wasn’t.

Hamilton jerked sidelong rather than stand up, sending the knife up into the man’s groin. He twisted it out as he grabbed for the belt, throwing him forward as blood burst over the tablecloth and he was up and out into the main bar just as the man started screaming—

There was another man, who’d been looking into the kitchen, suddenly angry at a landlord who, expecting the usual sort of trouble, had turned up the piped band. He turned now, his hand slapping for a gun at his waist—

Amateurs!

Hamilton threw the bloody knife at his face. In that moment, the man took it to be a throwing knife, and threw up a hand as it glanced off him, but Hamilton had closed the gap between the two of them, and now he swung his shoulder and slammed his fist into the man’s neck. The man gurgled and fell, Hamilton grabbed him before he did and beat his hands to the gun.

He didn’t use it. The man was desperately clutching at his own throat. Hamilton let him fall.

He swung back to the booth, and saw the other twitching body slide to the floor. Lustre was already squatting to gather that gun too.

He turned to the landlord coming out of the kitchen and pointed the gun at him. “More?!”

“No! I’ll do anything—!”

“I mean, are there more of them?!”

“I don’t know!” He was telling the truth.

Professionals would have kept everything normal and set up a pheasant shoot when Hamilton had answered a call of nature. So, amateurs, so possibly many of them, possibly searching many inns, possibly not guarding the exits to this one.

It was their only hope.

“All right.” He nodded to Lustre. “We’re leaving.”

* * *

He got the landlord to make a noise at the back door, to throw around pots and pans, to slam himself against a cupboard. Gunfire might cut him down at any moment, and he knew it, but damn one Dane in the face of all this.

Hamilton sent Lustre to stand near the front door, then took his gun off covering the landlord and ran at it.

He burst out into the narrow street, into the freezing air, seeking a target—

He fired at the light that was suddenly in his eyes.

But then they were on him. Many of them. He hurt some of them. Possibly fatally. He didn’t get off a shot.

He heard no shots from Lustre.

They forced something into his face and at last he had to take a breath of darkness.

* * *

Hamilton woke with a start. And the knowledge that he was a fool and a traitor because he was a fool. He wanted to bask in that misery, that he’d failed everyone he cared about. He wanted to lose to it, to let it halt his hopeless trying in favour of certainty.

He must not.

He sought his clock, and found that it was a few hours, not years, later. He’d kept his eyes closed because of the lights. But the light coming at him from all around was diffuse, comfortable.

Whatever situation he found himself in, his options were going to be limited. If there was no escape, if they were indeed in the hands of the enemy, his job now was to kill Lustre and then himself.

He considered that for a moment and was calm about it.

He allowed himself to open his eyes.

He was in what looked like the best room at an inn. Sunlike light shone through what looked like a projection rather than a window. He was dressed in the clothes he’d been wearing on the street. A few serious bruises. He was lying on the bed. He was alone. Nobody had bothered to tuck him in.

The door opened. Hamilton sat up.

It was a waiter, pulling a service trolley into the room. He saw that Hamilton was awake and nodded to him.

Hamilton inclined his head in return.

The waiter took the cover off the trolley, revealing dinner: what looked like real steak and eggs. He placed cutlery appropriately, bowed, and left once more. There was no sound of the door being locked.

Hamilton went to the trolley and looked at the cutlery. He ran his finger on the sharp, serrated edge of the steak knife. There was a message.

He sat down on the bed and ate.

* * *

He couldn’t help the thoughts that swept through him. He felt them rather than discern them as memories or ideas. He was made from them, after all. They all were, those who kept the balance, those who made sure that the great powers shared the solar system carefully between them, and didn’t spin off wildly into a war which everyone knew would be the last. That end of the world would free them all from responsibility, and join them with the kingdom which existed around the universe and inside every miniscule Newton Length. The balance, having collapsed, would crest as a wave again, finally, and stay there, finally including all who had lived, brought entirely into God. That much rough physics Keble had drummed into him. He’d never found himself wanting the final collapse. It was not to be wished for by mortals, after all. It was the shape of the very existence around them, not something they could choose the moment of. He enjoyed his duty, even enjoyed suffering for it, in a way. That wasmeaning. But concussions like this, explosions against the sides of what he understood, and so many of them, so quickly . . . No, he wouldn’t become fascinated with the way the world around him seemed to be shaking on its foundations. This was just a new aspect to the balance, a new threat to it. It had many manifestations, many configurations. That was a line from some hymn he barely remembered. He would be who he was and do what had to be done.

That thought he heard as words, as the part of himself that had motive and will. He smiled at this restoration of strength and finished his steak.

* * *

The moment he’d finished eating, someone came for him.

This one was dressed in the uniform that Lustre had mentioned. Hamilton contained his reaction to it. To his eyes, it looked halfway to something from a carnival. Bright colours that nevertheless had never seen a battlefield, with no history to be read therein. The man wearing it looked like he’d been trained in a real army, he walked, Hamilton behind him, like he’d known a parade ground. A former officer, even. One who’d bought himself out or deserted. He ignored Hamilton’s attempts to start a conversation. Not questions, because he was already preparing himself for the forthcoming interrogation, and pointless questions were a hole in the dam. Instead Hamilton asked only about the weather, and received just a wry look in return. A wry look from this bastard who’d sold his comrades for a bright coat.

Hamilton gave him a smile, and imagined what he’d do to him, given the chance.

He’d left the knife beside his plate.

* * *

The corridors were bright and smooth, made of space, cast with colours and textures for the comfort of those who lived here. Hamilton followed the man to the door of what looked like an office and waited as he knocked on it and was called to enter. The door slid open on its own, as if servants were in short supply.

The chamber they stepped into was enormous. It was a dome, with a projected ceiling, on which could be seen . . .

Above them was a world. For a moment, Hamilton thought it must be Jupiter, on its night side. But no. He reeled again, without letting his face show it. This was a world he hadn’t seen before. Which was impossible. But the notes in his eyes told him the projection was hallmarked as real space, not as an imagined piece of art. The sphere was dark and enormous. Its inky clouds glowed dully like the coals of hell.

“Hey,” said a voice from across the room, in a breezy North Columbian accent, “good evening, Major Hamilton. Delighted you could join us.”

Hamilton tore his gaze away from the thing above them.

Across the chamber were standing two men, one to each side of an enormous fireplace, above which was carved, and Hamilton was sure it had actually been carved, a coat of arms. Normally, the out-of-uniform man would have recoiled, but he was now in a world of shock, and this latest effrontery couldn’t add to it. The arms weren’t anything the International Brotherhood of Heralds would have approved of, but something . . . personal . . . the sort of thing a schoolboy would doodle in his rough book and then crumple before his peers saw it. Arms of one’s own! The sheer presumption.

The two men were smiling at him, and if he hadn’t been before, now Hamilton was ready to hate them. They were smiling as if the coat of arms and the unknown world they claimed was real were a joke. Like their pantomime guards were to Hamilton, though he wondered if these two saw them like that.

“Am I addressing the two . . . Mr. Ransoms?” He looked between them. And found a mystery had been repeated.

The men were both tall, nearly seven footers. They both had thinning hair, the furrowed brows of an academic, and had decided to wear glasses. More ostentation. They were dressed not like gentlemen, but in the sort of thing one of the husbands who came home to those little boxes in Kent might have worn for an evening at the golf club. They were similar in build, but . . .

One had at least a decade on the other.

And yet—

“These are Castor and Pollux Ransom, yes,” said Lustre, from where she stood on the other side of the room. She had a glass of brandy in her hands, which were shaking. “The twins.”

Hamilton looked between them. Everything about them was indeed exactly the same, apart from their ages. This must have the same cause as Lustre’s situation, but what?

The younger man, Pollux, if Hamilton recalled correctly, separated himself from the fireplace and came to regard him with that same mocking gaze. “I assume that was Enochian for the obvious answer. It’s true, Major. We were born, in a place that had the Iroquois name of ‘Toronto,’ but which people like you call Fort York, on the same day in 1958.”

Hamilton raised an eyebrow. “What’s the difference, then? Clean living?”

“Far from it,” laughed the older twin. “In either case.”

“I guess you’d like some answers,” said Pollux. “I’ll do my best. You certainly left chaos in your wake. At 9:59 P.M., the Court of Saint James officially declared Denmark a ‘protectorate of His Majesty,’and dispatched forces ‘in support of King Frederik,’ whom they allege—”

“They declare,” corrected Hamilton.

Pollux laughed. “Oh, let’s get the manners right, and never mind the horrors they describe! All right. They declare that the mad old bastard has been the victim of some sort of coup, and intend to return him to his throne. A coup very much in the eye of the beholder, I should think. A lie more than a declaration, I’d call it. I wonder if Frederik will survive it?”

Hamilton gave no reply. He was pleased to hear it. But it only underlined how important the contents of Lustre’s head were.

Pollux continued his explanations with a gesture around him. “We’re in a mansion, a perfectly normal one, in lunar orbit.” He gestured upwards. “That’s an intelligent projection from another of our properties, one considerably beyond the political boundaries of the solar system. We’ve named that object ‘Nemesis.’ Because we discovered it. It’s the sun’s twin, much less bright.” He shared a smile with Castor. “No metaphor intended.” He looked back to Hamilton. “Travelling at the speed of light, it’d take around a year to get there.”

“You speak of a property there—” Hamilton wondered if they’d sent some automatic carriage out to the place and were calling it by a lofty name.

“We’ve got several properties there,” said Castor, stepping forward to join his brother. “But I think Pollux was referring to the star itself.”

Hamilton knew they were goading him. So he gave them nothing.

“Do you remember the story of Newton and the worm, Major?” asked Pollux, as if they were all sharing the big joke together. But the man wasn’t attempting courtesy, his tone of voice scathing, as if addressing a wayward child. “It’s part of the balance nursery curriculum in Britain, right? You know, old Isaac’s in his garden, an apple falls on his head, he picks it up and sees this tiny worm crawling across its surface, and so he starts thinking about the very small. Unaligned historians have sunk almost every detail of that old tale, by the way, but never mind that. Isaac realised that space needs an observer, God, to make reality keep happening when there’s none of us around. You know, he’s the guy in the forest when the tree falls, and because of him it makes a noise. He’s part of the fabric of creation, part of and the motive behind the ‘decreed and holy’ balance. And the stars and the galaxies and the tremendous distances between them are like they are just because that’s how he set up the stage, and that’s all there is to it. The balance in our solar system is the diamond at the centre of an ornate setting, the further universe. But it is just a setting. Or at least that’s the attitude that great powers academia has always encouraged. It keeps everything fixed. Held down.”

“But you know, we’re not much for academia, we like to get our hands dirty,” said Castor, who sounded a little more affable. “The two of us have our feet planted in the muddy battlefields of mother Earth, where we’ve made our money, but we’ve always looked at the stars. Part of our fortune has gone towards the very expensive hobby of first class astronomy. We have telescopes better than any the great powers can boast, placed at various locations around the solar system. We also make engines. A carriage that slides down a fold, altering gravity under itself at every moment, is capable, in the void, of only a certain acceleration. The record keeps inching up, but it’s a matter of gaining a few miles an hour because of some technical adjustment. And once you’ve reached any great acceleration inside the solar system, you’re going to need to start decelerating in a few days, because you’ll need to slow down at your destination. It wouldn’t be out of the question to send an automatic carriage out into the wilds beyond the comet cloud, but somehow nobody’s gotten around to doing it.”

“That always puzzled us.”

“Until we heard whispers about the great secret. Because people talk to us, we sell weapons and buy information. It became clear that for a nation to send such a carriage, to even prepare a vehicle that greatly exceeded records, would be to have every other nation suspect they’d found something out there, and become suddenly aggressive toward them, in a desperate attempt to keep the balance.”

Hamilton kept his silence.

“When we stumbled on Nemesis in a photographic survey, we realised that we had found something we had always sought, along with so many other disenfranchised inhabitants of Earth—”

“Land,” said Hamilton.

They laughed and applauded like this was a party game. “Exactly,” said Castor.

“We tossed a coin,” said Pollux, “I was the one who went. With a small staff. I took a carriage with a fold full of supplies, and set it accelerating, using an engine of our own, one limited by physicalrather than political principles. I struck out for a new world. I opened up a new frontier. For us, this time. For all the people shut out when the great powers closed down the world—” He noticed that his brother was frowning at him, and visibly reined himself in. “The carriage accelerated until after a year or so we were approaching the speed of light. We discovered, to our shock, that as we did so, the demands on the fold became extraordinary. It seems, incredibly, that there is a speed limit on the universe!”

Hamilton tried to keep his expression even, but knew he was failing. He didn’t know how much of this he could believe.

“By my own internal clock, the round trip took four years—”

“But I remained here as fifteen years passed,” said Castor. “Because when you approach the speed of light, time slows down. Just for you. Yeah, I know how mad it sounds! It’s like God starts looking at you differently!”

“And you should see the beauty of it, Major, the rainbows and the darkness and the feeling that one is . . . finally close to the centre of understanding.”

Hamilton licked his dry lips. “Why does all this happen?”

“We don’t know, exactly,” admitted Castor. “We’ve approached this as engineers, not theorists. ‘God does not flay space,’ that’s what Newton is supposed to have said. He theorised that God provides a frame of reference for all things, relative to Him. But these spooky changes in mass and time depending on speed . . . that seems to say there’s a bit more going on than Newton’s miniscule gravitation and miniscule causality!”

Hamilton nodded in the direction of Lustre. “I gather she wasn’t on that first trip?”

“No,” said Pollux. “That’s what I’m coming to. When the carriage started decelerating towards Nemesis, we began to see signs of what we initially took to be a solar system surrounding the star. Only as we got closer did we realise that what we had taken to be small worlds were actually carriages. Ones the size of which human beings have not dreamt. The carriages of foreigners.”

Hamilton’s mouth set in a line. That these had been the first representatives of humanity! And the foreigners were so close! If any of this could be true. He didn’t let his gaze move upwards as if to see them. He could almost feel the balance juddering. It was as if something dear to him was sliding swiftly away, into the void, and only destruction could follow. “So,” he said, “you drew alongside and shook hands.”

“No,” laughed Pollux. “Unfortunately. We could see immediately that there were enormous symbols on the carriages, all the same design, though we couldn’t make anything of them. They were kind of . . . like red birds, but deformed, unfocussed. You needed to see two to realise they were a symbol at all. We approached with all hulloos and flags, and suddenly our embroidery was flooded with what might have been voices, but sounded like low booming sounds. We yelled back and forth, uselessly, for about an hour. We were preparing a diagram to throw into the void in a canister, stick figures handing each other things—”

“I’ll bet,” said Hamilton.

“—when they switched on lights that just illuminated their insignia. Off, then again. Over and over. It was like they were demanding for us to show ours.”

Hamilton pointed at the monstrosity over the fireplace. “Didn’t you have that handy?”

“That’s a later invention,” said Castor, “in response to this very problem.”

“When we didn’t have any insignia of our own to display,” said Pollux, “they started firing at us. Or we assume it was firing. I decided to get out of it, and we resumed acceleration, rounded the star, and headed home.”

Hamilton couldn’t conceal a smile.

“Before the next expedition,” continued Castor, “we built the biggest carriage we could and had the coats of arms painted all over it. But we needed one more thing: something to barter with.” He gestured towards Lustre. “The contents of her head, the locations of the missing mass, the weight of all those living minds, a trading map of the heavens. Depending on where the foreigners came from, we might have information they didn’t. Or at least we could demonstrate we were in the game. And if one group of foreigners didn’t like us, we could go find another.”

“But she proved to be made of strong stuff,” said Hamilton.

“After she’d tried to shock herself into either death or deadlock, we kept her on ice,” said Castor. “We sent her with the staff on the main carriage, in the hope they could find a way to breach her along the way, or maybe offer her to the foreigners as sealed goods.” Hamilton was certain the twin was enjoying trying Lustre’s modesty with his words. “But their response this time was, if anything, more aggressive. Our people left a number of orbiting automatics, and a number of houses ready for occupation, but barely escaped with their lives.”

“It seems they don’t like you any more than we do,” said Hamilton. “I can understand why you’d want her back. But why am I still alive?”

The twins looked at each other like they’d come to an unpleasant duty sooner than they would have liked. Castor nodded to the air, the doors opened by themselves, and a number of the pantomime guards strode into the room.

Hamilton controlled his breathing.

“Chain him to the fireplace,” said Pollux.

* * *

They pulled the shackles from the same folds where Hamilton had been certain they’d kept weapons trained on him. His kind retired, if they did, to simple places, and didn’t take kindly to parties in great houses. A room was never a room when you’d worked out of uniform.

They fixed his wrists and ankles to the top of the fireplace, and stripped him. Hamilton wanted to tell Lustre to look away, but he was also determined to not ask for anything he couldn’t have. He was going to have to die now, and take a long time about it. “You know your duty,” he said.

She looked horribly uncertain back at him.

Pollux nodded again, and a control pedal appeared out of the floor, light flooding with it. He placed his foot on it. “Let’s get the formalities out of the way,” he said. “We’d give you a staggering amount of money, in carbon, for your cooperation.”

Hamilton swore lightly at him.

“And that’s the problem with the world. All right, I tried. What I’m going to do now is to open a very small fold in front of your genitals. I’ll then increase the gravity, until Miss Saint Clair elects to stop using Enochian and says the words that will allow us to observe the package in her mind. Should she cut herself off from the world with her own language, I’ll start by pulling off your genitalia, and then move on to various other parts of your body, using folds to staunch the blood flow, killing you slowly while she’s forced to watch. Then I’ll do the same to her.” He looked quickly to Lustre, and for a moment it looked to Hamilton like he was even afraid. “Don’t make me do this.”

Lustre stood straight and didn’t answer.

“Say what you have to say to cut yourself off,” said Hamilton. “Say it now.”

But, to his fury and horror she maintained the same expression, and just looked quickly between them.

“For God’s sake—!” he cried out.

Pollux pressed gently with his foot, and Hamilton tensed at the feel of the fold grabbing his body. It made him recall, horribly, moments with Lustre, and, even worse, moments with Annie. He didn’t want that association, so he killed it in his mind. There could be no thoughts of her as he died. It would be like dragging a part of her through this with him. There was no pain, not yet. He reserved his shouts for when there would be. He would use his training, go cursing them, as loud as he could, thus controlling the only thing he could. He was proud to have the chance to manage his death and die for king, country and balance.

Pollux looked again at Lustre, then pressed slightly more. Now there was pain. Hamilton drew in a breath to begin telling this classless bastard what he thought of him—

—when suddenly there came a sound.

Something had crunched against something, far away.

The twins both looked suddenly in the same direction, startled.

Hamilton let out a choked laugh. Whatever this was—

And that had been an explosion!

A projection of a uniformed man flew up onto the wall. “Somehow there are three carriages—!”

“The church bells!” said Hamilton, realising.

Castor ran for the door, joining a great outflowing of guards as they grabbed arms from the walls, but Pollux stayed where he was, a dangerous expression on his face, his foot poised on the pedal. One guard had stayed beside Lustre also, his rifle covering her. “What?!”

“The bells of Saint Mary’s in Copenhagen. Ten o’clock.” He was panting at the pain and the pressure. “You said the city became a British possession at 9:59. While we were falling.” He swore at the man who was about to maim him, triumphant. “They must have put a fold in me with a tracker inside, as we fell! Didn’t harm the balance if we landed in Britain!”

Pollux snarled and slammed his foot down on the pedal.

Hamilton didn’t see what happened in the next few seconds. His vision distorted with the pain, which reached up into his jaw and to the roots of his teeth.

But the next thing he knew, Lustre had slammed a palm against the wall, and his shackles had disappeared. There was a shout of astonishment. The pressure cut off and the pain receded. He was aware of a guard somewhere over there in a pool of blood. Reflexively, he grabbed the rifle Lustre held. She tried to hold onto it, as if uncertain he could use it better than she could. They each scrabbled at it, they only had seconds—!

He was aware of regimental cries converging on the room, bursting through the doors.

He saw, as if down a tunnel, that Pollux was desperately stamping at the pedal, and light had suddenly blazed across his foot again.

Pollux raised his foot, about to slam it down, to use the fold in the centre of the room, opened to its fullest extent, to rip apart Hamilton and everyone else!

Hamilton shoved Lustre aside and in one motion fired.

The top of Pollux’s head vanished. His foot spasmed downwards.

It seemed to be moving slowly, to Hamilton’s pain dulled eyes.

The sole of the man’s shoe connected with the control.

For a moment it looked like it had done so with enough force that Pollux Ransom would not die alone.

But it must have landed too softly. By some miniscule amount.

The corpse fell aside. Its tormented soul had, a moment before, vanished from the universe.

“That’ll be a weight off his mind,” said Hamilton.

And then he passed out.

* * *

Six weeks later, following some forced healing and forced leave, Hamilton stood once again in front of Turpin. He had been called straight in, rather than return to his regiment. He hadn’t seen Lustre since the assault on the mansion. He’d been told that she had been interviewed at length and then returned to the bosom of the diplomatic corps. He assumed that she’d told Turpin’s people everything, and that, thus, at the very least, he was out of a job. At the worst, he could find himself at the end of the traitor’s noose, struggling in the air above Parliament Square.

He found he couldn’t square himself to that. He was full of concerns and impertinent queries. The lack of official reaction so far had been trying his nerves.

But as Turpin had run down what had happened to the various individuals in the mansion, how Castor was now in the cells far beneath this building, and what the origins and fates of the toy soldiers had been, how various out-of-uniform officers were busy unravelling the threads of the twins’ conceits, all over the world, Hamilton gradually began to hope. Surely the blow would have landed before now? King Frederik had been found, hiding or pretending to hide, and had been delighted, once the situation had been starkly explained to him, to have the British return him to his throne. Denmark remained a British protectorate while His Majesty’s forces rooted out the last of the conspirators in the pay of the Ransoms. And, since a faction in that court had been found and encouraged that sought to intermarry and unify the kingdoms, perhaps this would remain the case for some considerable while.

“Of course,” said Turpin, “they weren’t really twins.”

Hamilton allowed the surprise to show on his face. “Sir?”

“We’ve found family trees that suggest they’re actually cousins, similar in appearance, with a decade or so between them. We’ve got carriages on the way to what we’re going to call George’s Star, and people examining that projection. We don’t expect to find anything beyond a single automatic in orbit.”

“So . . . the girl—” He took a chance on referring to her as if he didn’t know her, hoping desperately that she’d kept the secret of what he hadn’t reported, all those years ago.

“We kept an eye on her after the interviews. She told us she’d learned the access codes for Ransom’s embroidery from when she was on that enormous carriage she mentioned. Another thing we tellingly haven’t found, by the way, along with any high performance carriages in the Ransom garages. But she hadn’t quite got enough detail on the earliest years of Lustre Saint Clair’s life. A brilliant cover, a brilliant grown flesh job, but not quite good enough. She faltered a little when we put it to her that, struggling over that gun with you, she was actually trying to save Pollux Ransom’s life. We decided to let her out of the coop and see where she led us. As we expected, she realised we were on to her and vanished. Almost certainly into the Russian embassy. Certainly enough that we may find ourselves able to threaten the Czar with some embarrassment. You must have wondered yourself, considering the ease of your escape from the embassy, her reluctance to take the observer machine . . .” He raised an eyebrow at Hamilton. “Didn’t you?”

Hamilton felt dizzy, as if the walls of his world had once more vibrated under an impact. “What were they after?”

“Easy enough to imagine. The Russians would love to see us move forces out of the inner solar system in order to secure an otherwise meaningless territory in the hope that these fictitious foreigners might return. And just in the week or so while we were interviewing her, you should have seen the havoc this story caused at court. The hawks who want to ‘win the balance’ were all for sending the fleet out there immediately. The doves were at their throats. The Queen Mother had to order everyone to stop discussing it. But fortunately, we soon had an answer for them, confirmed by what we got out of Castor. An elegant fable, wasn’t it? The sort of thing Stichen would put together out of the White Court. I’ll bet it was one of his. You know, the strange-looking wounds, red birds, booming sounds, fine fly detail like that. If we hadn’t planted that tracker on you, the girl would have had to find some way to signal us herself. Or, less wasteful, you’d have been allowed to escape. Of course, the Ransoms’ worldwide network isn’t quite the size they made it out to be, not when you subtract all the rubles that are vanishing back to Moscow. But even so, clearing all that out makes the balance a bit safer tonight.”

Hamilton didn’t know what to say. He stood there on the grown polished wood timbers and looked down at the whorls within whorls. An odd thought struck him. A connection back to the last certainty he recalled feeling. When his world had been set on sturdier foundations. “Ambassador Bayoumi,” he said. “Did he make it out?”

“I’ve no idea. Why do you ask?”

Hamilton found he had no reason in his head, just a great blankness that felt half merciful and half something lost. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “He seemed kind.”

Turpin made a small grunt of a laugh, and looked back to his papers. Hamilton realised that he’d been dismissed. And that the burdens he’d brought with him into the room would not be ended by a noose or a pardon.

As he made his way to the door, Turpin seemed to realise that he hadn’t been particularly polite. He looked up again. “I heard the record of what you said to him,” he said. “You said nobody would care if she killed you. It’s not true, you know.”

Hamilton stopped, and tried to read the scarred and stitched face of the man.

“You’re greatly valued, Jonathan,” said Turpin. “If you weren’t, you wouldn’t still be here.”

* * *

A year or so later, Hamilton was woken in the early hours by an urgent tug on the embroidery, a voice that seemed familiar, trying to tell him something, sobbing and yelling in the few seconds before it was cut off.

But he couldn’t understand a word it said.

The next morning, there was no record of the exchange.

In the end, Hamilton decided that it must have been a dream.

WHAT WE FOUND

Geoff Ryman

Can’t sleep. Still dark. Waiting for light in the East.

My rooster crows. Knows it’s my wedding day. I hear the pig rooting around outside. Pig, the traditional gift for the family of my new wife. I can’t sleep because alone in the darkness there is nothing between me and the realization that I do not want to get married. Well, Patrick, you don’t have long to decide.

The night bakes black around me. Three-thirty a.m. In three hours, the church at the top of the road will start with the singing. Two hours after that, everyone in both families will come crowding into my yard.

My rooster crows again, all his wives in the small space behind the house. It is still piled with broken bottles from when my father lined the top of that wall with glass shards.

That was one of his good times, when he wore trousers and a hat and gave orders. I mixed the concrete, and passed it up in buckets to my eldest brother, Matthew. He sat on the wall like riding a horse, slopping on concrete and pushing in the glass. Raphael was reading in the shade of the porch. “I’m not wasting my time doing all that,” he said. “How is broken glass going to stop a criminal who wants to get in?” He always made me laugh, I don’t know why. Nobody else was smiling.

When we were young my father would keep us sitting on the hot, hairy sofa in the dark, no lights, no TV because he was driven mad by the sound of the generator. Eyes wide, he would quiver like a wire, listening for it to start up again. My mother tried to speak and he said, “Sssh. Sssh! There it goes again.”

“Jacob, the machine cannot turn itself on.”

“Sssh! Sssh!” He would not let us move. I was about seven, and terrified. If the generator was wicked enough to scare my big strong father, what would it do to little me? I keep asking my mother what does the generator do?

“Nothing, your father is just being very careful.”

“Terhemba is a coward,” my brother Matthew said, using my Tiv name. My mother shushed him, but Matthew’s merry eyes glimmered at me: I will make you miserable later. Raphael prized himself loose from my mother’s grip and stomped across the sitting room floor.

People think Makurdi is a backwater, but now we have all you need for a civilized life. Beautiful banks with security doors, retina ID, and air conditioning; new roads, solar panels on all the streetlights, and our phones are stuffed full of e-books. On one of the river islands they built the new hospital; and my university has a medical school, all pink and state-funded with laboratories that are as good as most. Good enough for controlled experiments with mice.

My research assistant Jide is Yoruba and his people believe that the grandson first born after his grandfather’s death will continue that man’s life. Jide says that we have found how that is true. This is a problem for Christian Nigerians, for it means that evil continues.

What we found in mice is this. If you deprive a mouse of a mother’s love, if you make him stressed through infancy, his brain becomes methylated. The high levels of methyl deactivate a gene that produces a neurotropin important for memory and emotional balance in both mice and humans. Schizophrenics have abnormally low levels of it.

It is a miracle of God that with new generation, our genes are knocked clean. There is a new beginning. Science thought this meant that the effects of one life could not be inherited by another.

What we found is that high levels of methyl affect the sperm cells. Methylation is passed on with them, and thus the deactivation. A grandfather’s stress is passed on through the male line, yea unto the third generation.

Jide says that what we have found is how the life of the father is continued by his sons. And that is why I don’t want to wed.

My father would wander all night. His three older sons slept in one room. Our door would click open and he would stand and glare at me, me particularly, with a boggled and distracted eye as if I had done something outrageous. He would be naked; his towering height and broad shoulders humbled me, made me feel puny and endangered. I have an odd-shaped head with an indented V going down my forehead. People said it was the forceps tugging me out: I was a difficult birth. That was supposed to be why I was slow to speak, slow to learn. My father believed them.

My mother would try to shush him back into their bedroom. Sometimes he would be tame and allow himself to be guided; he might chuckle as if it were a game and hug her. Or he might blow up, shouting and flinging his hands about, calling her woman, witch, or demon. Once she whispered, “It’s you who have the demon; the demon has taken hold of you, Jacob.”

Sometimes he shuffled past our door and out into the Government street, sleeping-walking to his and our shame.

In those days, it was the wife’s job to keep family business safe within the house. Our mother locked all the internal doors even by day to keep him inside, away from visitors from the church or relatives who dropped in on their way to Abuja. If he was being crazy in the sitting room, she would shove us back into our bedroom or whisk us with the broom out into the yard. She would give him whisky if he asked for it, to get him to sleep. Our mother could never speak of these things to anybody, not even her own mother, let alone to us.

We could hear him making noises at night, groaning as if in pain, or slapping someone. The baby slept in my parents’ room and he would start to wail. I would stare into the darkness: was Baba hurting my new brother? In the morning his own face would be puffed out. It was Raphael who dared to say something. The very first time I heard that diva voice was when he asked her, sharp and demanding, “Why does that man hit himself?”

My mother got angry and pushed Raphael’s face; slap would be the wrong word; she was horrified that the problem she lived with was clear to a five-year-old. “You do not call your father ‘that man’ ! Who are you to ask questions? I can see it’s time we put you to work like children used to be when I was young. You don’t know what good luck you had to be born into this household!”

Raphael looked back at her, lips pursed. “That does not answer my question.”

My mother got very angry at him, shouted more things. Afterward he looked so small and sad that I pulled him closer to me on the sofa. He crawled up onto my lap and just sat there. “I wish we were closer to the river,” he said, “so we could go and play.”

“Mamamimi says the river is dangerous.” My mother’s name was Mimi, which means truth, so Mama Truth was a kind of title.

“Everything’s dangerous,” he said, his lower lip thrust out. A five-year-old should not have such a bleak face.

By the time I was nine, Baba would try to push us into the walls, wanting us hidden or wanting us gone. His vast hands would cover the back of our heads or shoulders and grind us against the plaster. Raphael would look like a crushed berry, but he shouted in a rage, “No! No! No!”

Yet my father wore a suit and drove himself to work. Jacob Terhemba Shawo worked as a tax inspector and electoral official.

Did other government employees act the same way? Did they put on a shell of calm at work? He would be called to important meetings in Abuja and stay for several days. Once Mamamimi sat at the table, her white bread uneaten, not caring what her children heard. “What you go to Abuja for? Who you sleep with there, Wildman? What diseases do you bring back into my house?”

We stared down at our toast and tea, amazed to hear such things. “You tricked me into marriage with you. I bewail the day I accepted you. Nobody told me you were crazy!”

My father was not a man to be dominated in his own house. Clothed in his functionary suit, he stood up. “If you don’t like it, go. See who will have you since you left your husband. See who will want you without all the clothes and jewelry I buy you. Maybe you no longer want this comfortable home. Maybe you no longer want your car. I can send you back to your village, and no one would blame me.”

My mother spun away into the kitchen and began to slam pots. She did not weep. She was not one to be dominated either, but knew she could not change how things had to be. My father climbed into his SUV for Abuja in his special glowering suit that kept all questions at bay, with his polished head and square-cornered briefcase. The car purred away down the tree-lined Government street with no one to wave him good-bye.

Jide’s full name is Babajide. In Yoruba it means Father Wakes Up. His son is called Babatunde, Father Returns. It is something many people believe in the muddle of populations that is Nigeria.

My work on mice was published in Nature and widely cited. People wanted to believe that character could be inherited; that stressed fathers passed incapacities on to their grandchildren. It seemed to open a door to inherited characteristics, perhaps a modified theory of evolution. Our experiments had been conclusive: not only were there the non-genetically inherited emotional tendencies, but we could objectively measure the levels of methyl.

My father was born in 1965, the year before the Tiv rioted against what they thought were Muslim incursions. It was a time of coup and countercoup. The violence meant my grandfather left Jos, and moved the family to Makurdi. They walked, pushing some of their possessions and my infant father in a wheelbarrow. The civil war came with its trains full of headless Igbo rattling eastward, and air force attacks on our own towns. People my age say, oh those old wars. What can Biafra possibly have to do with us, now?

What we found is that 1966 can reach into your head and into your balls and stain your children red. You pass war on. The cranky old men in the villages, the lack of live music in clubs, the distrust of each other, soldiers everywhere, the crimes of colonialism embedded in the pattern of our roads. We live our grandfathers’ lives.

Outside, the stars spangle. It will be a beautiful clear day. My traditional clothes hang unaccepted in the closet and I fear for any son that I might have. What will I pass on? Who would want their son to repeat the life of my father, the life of my brother? Ought I to get married at all? Outside in the courtyard, wet with dew, the white plastic chairs are lined up for the guests.

My Grandmother Iveren would visit without warning. Her name meant “Blessing,” which was a bitter thing for us. Grandmother Iveren visited all her children in turn no matter how far they moved to get away from her: Kano, Jalingo, or Makurdi.

A taxi would pull up and we would hear a hammering on our gate. One of us boys would run to open it and there she would be, standing like a princess. “Go tell my son to come and pay for the taxi. Bring my bags, please.”

She herded us around our living room with the burning tip of her cigarette, inspecting us as if everything was found wanting. The Intermittent Freezer that only kept things cool, the gas cooker, the rack of vegetables, the many tins of powdered milk, the rumpled throw rug, the blanket still on the sofa, the TV that was left tuned all day to Africa Magic. She would switch it off with a sigh as she passed. “Education,” she would say, shaking her head. She had studied literature at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and she used that like she used her cigarette. Iveren was tiny, thin, very pretty, and elegant in glistening blue or purple dresses with matching headpieces.

My mother’s mother might also be staying, rattling out garments on her sewing machine. Mamagrand, we called her. The two women would feign civility, even smiling. My father lumbered in with suitcases; the two grandmothers would pretend that it made no difference to them where they slept, but Iveren would get the back bedroom and Mamagrand the sofa. My father then sat down to gaze at his knees, his jaws clamped shut like a turtle’s. His sons assumed that that was what all children did, and that mothers always kept order in this way.

Having finished pursuing us around our own house, she would sigh, sit on the sofa, and wait expectantly for my mother to bring her food. Mamamimi dutifully did so—family being family—and then sat down, her face going solid and her arms folded.

“You should know what the family is saying about you,” Grandmother might begin, smiling so sweetly. “They are saying that you have infected my son, that you are unclean from an abortion.” She would say that my aunt Judith would no longer allow Mamamimi into her house and had paid a woman to cast a spell on my mother to keep her away.

“Such a terrible thing to do. The spell can only be cured by cutting it with razor blades.” Grandmother Iveren looked as though she might enjoy helping.

“Thank heavens such a thing cannot happen in a Christian household,” my mother’s mother would say.

“Could I have something to drink?”

From the moment Grandmother arrived, all the alcohol in the house would start to disappear: little airline sample bottles, whisky from my father’s boss, even the brandy Baba had brought from London. And not just alcohol. Grandmother would offer to help Mamamimi clean a bedroom; and small things would be gone from it forever, jewelry or scarves or little bronzes. She sold the things she pilfered, to keep herself in dresses and perfume.

It wasn’t as if her children neglected their duty. She would be fed and housed for as long as any of us could stand it. Even so, she would steal and hide all the food in the house. My mother went grim-faced, and would lift up mattresses to display the tins and bottles hidden under it. The top shelf of the bedroom closet would contain the missing stewpot with that evening’s meal. “It’s raw!” my mother would swelter at her. “It’s not even cooked! Do you want it to go rotten in this heat?”

“I never get fed anything in this house. I am watched like a hawk!” Iveren complained, her face turned toward her giant son.

Mamamimi had strategies. She might take to her room ill, and pack meat in a cool chest and keep it under her bed. Against all tradition, especially if Father was away, she would sometimes refuse to cook any food at all. For herself, for Grandmother, or even us. “I’m on strike!” she announced once. “Here, here is money. Go buy food! Go cook it!” She pressed folded money into our hands. Raphael and I made a chicken stew, giggling. We had been warned about Iveren’s cooking. “Good boys, to take the place of the mother,” she said, winding our hair in her fingers.

Such bad behavior on all sides made Raphael laugh. He loved it when Iveren came to stay, with her swishing skirts and dramatic manner and drunken stumbles; loved it when Mamamimi behaved badly and the house swelled with their silent battle of wills.

Grandmother would say things to my mother like: “We knew that you were not on our level, but we thought you were a simple girl from the country and that your innocence would be good for him.” Chuckle. “If only we had known.”

“If only I had,” my mother replied.

My father’s brothers had told us stories about Granny. When they were young, she would bake cakes with salt instead of sugar and laugh when they bit into them. She would make stews out of only bones, having thrown the goat away. She would cook with no seasoning so that it was like eating water, or cook with so many chillies that it was like eating fire.

When my uncle Eamon tried to sell his car, she stole the starter motor. She was right in there with a monkey wrench and spirited it away. It would cough and grind when potential buyers turned the key. When he was away, she put the motor back in and sold the car herself. She told Eamon that it had been stolen. When Eamon saw someone driving it, he had the poor man arrested, and the story came out.

My other uncle, Emmanuel, was an officer in the Air Force, a fine-looking man in his uniform. When he first went away to do his training, Grandmother told all the neighbors that he was a worthless ingrate who neglected his mother, never calling her or giving her gifts. She got everyone so riled against him that when he came home to the village, the elders raised sticks against him and shouted, “How dare you show your face here after the way you have treated your mother!” For who would think a mother would say such things about a son without reason?

It was Grandmother who reported gleefully to Emmanuel that his wife had tested HIV positive. “You should have yourself tested. A shame you are not man enough to satisfy your wife and hold her to you. All that smoking has made you impotent.”

She must be a witch, Uncle Emmanuel said, how else would she have known when he himself did not?

Raphael would laugh at her antics. He loved it when Granny started asking us all for gifts—even the orphan girl who lived with us. Iveren asked if she couldn’t take the cushion covers home with her, or just one belt. Raphael yelped with laughter and clapped his hands. Granny blinked at him. What did he find so funny? Did my brother like her?

She knew what to make of me: quiet, well behaved. I was someone to torment.

I soon learned how to behave around her. I would stand, not sit, in silence in my white shirt, tie, and blue shorts.

“Those dents in his skull,” she said to my mother once, during their competitive couch-sitting. “Is that why he’s so slow and stupid?”

“That’s just the shape of his head. He’s not slow.”

“Tuh. Your monstrous first-born didn’t want a brother and bewitched him in the womb.” Her eyes glittered all over me, her smile askew. “The boy cannot talk properly. He sounds ignorant.”

My mother said that I sounded fine to her and that I was a good boy and got good grades in school.

My father was sitting in shamed silence. What did it mean that my father said nothing in my favor? Was I stupid?

“Look to your own children,” my mother told her. “Your son is not doing well at work, and they delay paying him. So we have very little money. I’m afraid we can’t offer you anything except water from the well. I have a bad back. Would you be so kind to fetch water yourself, since your son offers you nothing?”

Grandmother chuckled airily, as if my mother was a fool and would see soon enough. “So badly brought up. My poor son. No wonder your children are such frights.”

That very day my mother took me round to the back of the house, where she grew her herbs. She bowed down to look into my eyes and held my shoulders and told me, “Patrick, you are a fine boy. You do everything right. There is nothing wrong with you. You do well in your lessons, and look how you washed the car this morning without even being asked.”

It was Raphael who finally told Granny off. She had stayed for three months. Father’s hair was corkscrewing off in all directions and his eyes had a trapped light in them. Everyone had taken to cooking their own food at night, and every spoon and knife in the house had disappeared.

“Get out of this house, you thieving witch. If you were nice to your family, they would let you stay and give you anything you want. But you can’t stop stealing things.” He was giggling. “Why do you tell lies and make such trouble? You should be nice to your children and show them loving care.”

“And you should learn how to be polite.” Granny sounded weak with surprise.

“Ha-ha! And so should you! You say terrible things about us. None of your children believes a thing you say. You only come here when no one else can stand you and you only leave when you know you’ve poisoned the well so much even you can’t drink from it. It’s not very intelligent of you, when you depend on us to eat.”

He drove her from the house, keeping it up until no other outcome were possible. “Blessing, our Blessing, the taxi is here!” pursuing her to the gate with mockery. Even Matthew started to laugh. Mother had to hide her mouth. He held the car door open for her. “You’d best read your Bible and give up selling all your worthless potions.”

Father took hold of Raphael’s wrists gently. “That’s enough,” he said. “Grandmother went through many bad things.” He didn’t say it in anger. He didn’t say it like a wild man. Something somber in his voice made Raphael calm.

“You come straight out of the bush,” Grandmother said, almost unperturbed. “No wonder my poor son is losing his mind.” She looked directly at Raphael. “The old ways did work.” Strangely, he was the only one she dealt with straightforwardly. “They wore out.”

Something happened to my research.

At first the replication studies showed a less marked effect, less inherited stress, lower methyl levels. But soon we ceased to be able to replicate our results at all.

The new studies dragged me down, made me suicidal. I felt I had achieved something with my paper, made up for all my shortcomings, done some-thing that would have made my family proud of me if they were alive.

Methylation had made me a full Professor. Benue State’s home page found room to feature me as an example of the university’s research excellence. I sought design flaws in the replication studies; that was the only thing I published. All my life I had fought to prove I wasn’t slow, or at least hide it through hard work. And here before the whole world, I was being made to look like a fraud.

Then I read the work of Jonathan Schooler. The same thing had happened to him. His research had proved that if you described a memory clearly you ceased to remember it as well. The act of describing faces reduced his subjects’ ability to recognize them later. The effects he measured were so huge and so unambiguous, and people were so intrigued by the implications of what he called verbal overshadowing, that his paper was cited 400 times.

Gradually, it had become impossible to replicate his results. Every time he did the experiment, the effect shrank by thirty percent.

I got in touch with Schooler, and we began to check the record. We found that all the way back in the 1930s, results of E.S.P. experiments by Joseph Banks Rhine declined. In replication, his startling findings evaporated to something only slightly different from chance. It was as if scientific truths wore out, as if the act of observing them reduced their effect.

Jide laughed and shook his head. “We think the same thing!” he said. “We always say that a truth can wear out with the telling.”

That is why I am sitting here writing, dreading the sound of the first car arriving, the first knock on my gate.

I am writing to wear out both memory and truth.

Whenever my father was away, or sometimes to escape Iveren, Mamamimi would take all us boys back to our family village. It is called Kawuye, on the road toward Taraba State. Her friend Sheba would drive us to the bus station in the market, and we would wait under the shelter, where the women cooked rice and chicken and sold sweating tins of Coca-Cola. Then we would stuff ourselves into the van next to some fat businessman who had hoped for a row of seats to himself.

Matthew was the firstborn, and tried to boss everyone, even Mamamimi. He had teamed up with little Andrew from the moment he’d been born. Andrew was too young to be a threat to him. The four brothers fell into two teams and Mamamimi had to referee, coach, organize, and punish.

If Matthew and I were crammed in next to each other, we would fight. I could stand his needling and bossiness only so long and then wordlessly clout him. That made me the one to be punished. Mamamimi would swipe me over the head and Matthew’s eyes would tell me that he’d done it deliberately.

It was hot and crowded on the buses, with three packed rows of sweating ladies, skinny men balancing deliveries of posters on their laps, or mothers dandling heat-drugged infants. It was not supportable to have four boys elbowing, kneeing, and scratching.

Mamamimi started to drive us herself in her old green car. She put Matthew in the front so that he felt in charge. Raphael and I sat in the back reading, while next to us Andrew cawed for Matthew’s attention.

Driving by herself was an act of courage. The broken-edged roads would have logs pulled across them, checkpoints they were called, with soldiers. They would wave through the stuffed vans but they would stop a woman driving four children and stare into the car. Did we look like criminals or terrorists? They would ask her questions and rummage through our bags and mutter things that we could not quite hear. I am not sure they were always proper. Raphael would noisily flick through the pages of his book. “Nothing we can do about it,” he would murmur. After slipping them some money, Mama would drive on.

As if by surprise, up and over a hill, we would roller-coaster down through maize fields into Kawuye. I loved it there. The houses were the best houses for Nigeria and typical of the Tiv people, round and thick-walled with high pointed roofs and tiny windows. The heat could not get in and the walls sweated like a person to keep cool. There were no wild men waiting to leap out, no poison grandmothers. My great-uncle Jacob—it is a common name in my family--repaired cars with the patience of a cricket, opening, snipping, melting, and reforming. He once repaired a vehicle by replacing the fan belt with the elastic from my mother’s underwear.

Raphael and I would buy firewood, trading some of it for eggs, ginger, and yams. We also helped my aunty with her pig-roasting business. To burn off the bristles, we’d lower it onto a fire and watch grassfire lines of red creep up each strand. It made a smell like burning hair and Raphael and I would pretend we were pirates cooking people. Then we turned the pig on a spit until it crackled. At nights we were men, serving beer and taking money.

We both got fat because our pay was some of the pig, and if no one was looking, the beer as well. I ate because I needed to get as big as Matthew. In the evenings the generators coughed to life and the village smelled of petrol and I played football barefoot under lights. There were jurisdictions and disagreements, but laughing uncles to adjudicate with the wisdom of a Solomon. So even the four of us liked each other more in Kawuye.

Then after whole weeks of sanity, my mother’s phone would sing out with the voice of Mariah Carey or an American prophetess. As the screen illuminated, Mamamimi’s face would scowl. We knew the call meant that our father was back in the house, demanding our return.

Uncle Jacob would change the oil and check the tires and we would drive back through the fields and rock across potholes onto the main road. At intersections, children swarmed around the car, pushing their hands through open windows, selling plastic bags of water or dappled plantains. Their eyes peered in at us. I would feel ashamed somehow. Raphael wound up the window and hollered at them. “Go away and stop your staring. There’s nothing here for you to see!”

Baba would be waiting for us reading ThisDay stiffly, like he had broomsticks for bones, saying nothing.

After that long drive, Mama would silently go and cook. Raphael told him off. “It’s not very fair of you, Popsie, to make her work. She has just driven us back all that way just to be nice to us and show us a good time in the country.”

Father’s eyes rested on him like drills on DIY.

That amused Raphael. “Since you choose to be away all the time, she has to do all the work here. And you’re just sitting there.” My father rattled the paper and said nothing. Raphael was twelve years old.

I was good at football, so I survived school well enough. But my brother was legendary.

They were reading The Old Man and The Sea in English class, and Raphael blew up at the teacher. She said that lions were a symbol of Hemingway being lionized when young. She said the old fisherman carrying a mast made him some sort of Jesus with his cross. He told her she had a head full of nonsense. I can see him doing it. He would bark with sudden laughter and bounce up and down in his chair and declare, delighted, “That’s blasphemy! It’s just a story about an old man. If Hemingway had wanted to write a story about Jesus, he was a clever enough person to have written one!” The headmaster gave him a clip about the ear. Raphael wobbled his head at him as if shaking a finger. “Your hitting me doesn’t make me wrong.” None of the other students ever bothered us. Raphael still got straight As.

Our sleepy little bookshops, dark, wooden, and crammed into corners of markets, knew that if they got a book on chemistry or genetics they could sell it to Raphael. He set up a business to buy textbooks that he knew Benue State was going to recommend. At sixteen he would sit on benches at the university, sipping cold drinks and selling books, previous essays, and condoms. Everybody assumed that he was already being educated there. Tall, beautiful students would call him “sah.” One pretty girl called him “Prof.” She had honey-colored, extended hair, and a spangled top that hung off one shoulder.

“I’m his brother,” I told her proudly.

“So you are the handsome one,” she said, being kind to what she took to be the younger brother. For many weeks I carried her in my heart.

The roof of our Government bungalow was flat and Raphael and I took to living on it. We slept there; we even climbed the ladder with our plates of food. We read by torchlight, rigged mosquito nets, and plugged the mobile phone into our netbook. The world flooded into it; the websites of our wonderful Nigerian newspapers, the BBC, Al Jazeera, Nature, New Scientist. We pirated Nollywood movies. We got slashdotcom; we hacked into the scientific journals, getting all those ten-dollar PDFs for free.

We elevated ourselves above the murk of our household. Raphael would read aloud in many different voices, most of them mocking. He would giggle at news articles. “Oh, story! Now they are saying Fashola is corrupt. Hee hee hee. It’s the corrupt people saying that to get their own back.”

“Oh this is interesting,” he would say and read about what some Indian at Caltech had found out about gravitational lenses.

My naked father would pad out like an old lion gone mangy and stare up at us, looking bewildered as if he wanted to join us but couldn’t work out how. “You shouldn’t be standing out there with no clothes on,” Raphael told him. “What would happen if someone came to visit?” My father looked as mournful as an abandoned dog.

Jacob Terhemba Shawo was forced to retire. He was only forty-two. We had to leave the Government Reserved Area. Our family name means “high on the hill,” and that’s where we had lived. I remember that our well was so deep that once I dropped the bucket and nothing could reach it. A boy had to climb down the stones in the well wall to fetch it.

We moved into the house I live in now, a respectable bungalow across town, surrounded with high walls. It had a sloping roof, so Raphael and I were no longer elevated.

The driveway left no room for Mamamimi’s herb garden, so we bought a neighboring patch of land but couldn’t afford the sand and cement to wall it off. Schoolchildren would wander up the slope into our maize, picking it or sometimes doing their business.

The school had been built by public subscription and the only land cheap enough was in the slough. For much of the year the new two-story building rose vertically out of a lake like a castle. It looked like the Scottish islands in my father’s calendars. Girls boated to the front door and climbed up a ramp. A little beyond was a marsh, with ponds and birds and water lilies: beautiful but it smelled of drains and rotting reeds.

We continued to go to the main cathedral for services. White draperies hung the length of its ceiling, and the stained-glass doors would accordion open to let in air. Local dignitaries would be in attendance and nod approval as our family lined up to take communion and make our gifts to the church, showing obeisance to the gods of middle-class respectability.

But the church at the top of our unpaved road was bare concrete, always open at the sides. People would pad past my bedroom window and the singing of hymns would swell with the dawn. Some of the local houses would be village dwellings amid the aging urban villas.

Chickens still clucked in our new narrow back court. If you dropped a bucket down this well, all you had to do was reach in for it. The problem was to stop water flooding into the house. The concrete of an inner courtyard was broken and the hot little square was never used, except for the weights that Raphael had made for himself out of iron bars and sacks of concrete. Tiny and rotund, he had dreams of being a muscleman. His computer desktop was full of a Nigerian champion in briefs. I winced with embarrassment whenever his screen sang open in public. What would people think of him, with that naked man on his netbook?

My father started to swat flies all the time. He got long sticky strips of paper and hung them everywhere—across doorways, from ceilings, in windows. They would snag in our hair as we carried out food from the kitchen. All we saw was flies on strips of paper. We would wake up in the night to hear him slapping the walls with books, muttering, “Flies flies flies.”

The house had a tin roof and inside we baked like bread. Raphael resented it personally. He was plump and felt the heat. My parents had installed the house’s only AC in their bedroom. He would just as regularly march in with a spanner and screwdriver and steal it. He would stomp out, the cable dragging behind him, with my mother wringing her hands and weeping. “That boy! That crazy boy! Jacob! Come see to your son.”

Raphael shouted, “Buy another one! You can afford it!”

“We can’t, Raphael! You know that! We can’t.”

And Raphael said, “I’m not letting you drag me down to your level.”

Matthew by then was nearly nineteen and had given up going to university. His voice was newly rich and sad. “Raphael. The whole family is in trouble. We would all like the AC, but if Baba doesn’t get it, he wanders, and that is a problem, too.”

I didn’t like it that Raphael took it from our parents without permission. Shamefaced with betrayal of him, I helped Matthew fix the AC back in our parents’ window.

Raphael stomped up to me and poked me with his finger. “You should be helping me, not turning tail and running!” He turned his back and said, “I’m not talking to you.”

I must have looked very sad because later I heard his flip-flops shuffling behind me. “You are my brother and of course I will always talk to you. I’m covered in shame that I said such a thing to you.” Raphael had a genius for apologies, too.

When Andrew was twelve, our father drove him to Abuja and left him with people, some great-aunt we didn’t know. She was childless, and Andrew had come back happy from his first visit sporting new track shoes. She had bought him an ice cream from Grand Square. He went back.

One night Raphael heard Mother and Father talking. He came outside onto the porch, his fat face gleaming. “I’ve got some gossip,” he told me. “Mamamimi and Father have sold Andrew!”

“Sold” was an exaggeration. They had put him to work and were harvesting his wages. In return he got to live in an air-conditioned house. Raphael giggled. “It’s so naughty of them!” He took hold of my hand and pulled me with him right into their bedroom.

Both of them were decent, lying on the bed with their books. Raphael announced, very pleased with himself. “You’re not selling my brother like an indentured servant. Just because he was a mistake and you didn’t want him born so late and want to be shot of him now.”

Mamamimi leapt at him. He ran, laughter pealing, and his hands swaying from side to side. I saw only then that he had the keys for the SUV in his hand. He pulled me with him out into the yard, and then swung me forward. “Get the gate!” He popped himself into the driver’s seat and roared the engine. Mamamimi waddled after him. The car rumbled forward, the big metal gate groaned open, dogs started to bark. Raphael bounced the SUV out of the yard, and pushed its door open for me. Mamamimi was right behind, and I didn’t want to be the one punished again, so I jumped in. “Good-bye-yeee!” Raphael called in a singsong voice, smiling right into her face.

We somehow got to Abuja alive. Raphael couldn’t drive, and trucks kept swinging out onto our side of the road, accelerating and beeping. We swerved in and out, missing death, passing the corpses of dead transports lined up along the roadside. Even I roared with laughter as lorries wailed past us by inches.

Using the GPS, Raphael foxed his way to the woman’s house. Andrew let us in; he worked as her boy, beautifully dressed in a white shirt and jeans, with tan sandals of interwoven strips. In we strode and Raphael said, very pleasantly at first, “Hello! M’sugh! How are you? I am Jacob’s son, Andrew’s brother.”

I saw at once this was a very nice lady. She was huge like a balloon, with a child-counselling smile, and she welcomed us and hugged Andrew to her.

“Have you paid my parents anything in advance for Andrew’s work? Because they want him back, they miss him so much.”

She didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, they changed their minds. Well of course they did, Andrew is such a fine young man. Well, Andrew, it seems your brothers want you back!”

“I changed their minds for them.” Raphael always cut his words out of the air like a tailor making a bespoke garment. Andrew looked confused and kept his eyes on the embroidery on his jeans.

Andrew must have known what had happened because he didn’t ask why it was us two who had come to fetch him. Raphael had saved him, not firstborn Matthew--if he had wanted to be saved from decent clothes and shopping in Abuja.

When we got back home, no mention was made of anything by anyone. Except by Raphael, to me, later. “It is so interesting, isn’t it, that they haven’t said a thing. They know what they were doing was wrong. How would they like to be a child and know their parents had sent them to work?” Matthew said nothing either. We had been rich; now we were poor.

Jide and I measured replication decline.

We carried out our old experiment over and over and measured methyl as levels declined for no apparent reason. Then we increased the levels of stress. Those poor mice! In the name of science, we deprived them of a mother and then cuddly surrogates. We subjected them to regimes of irregular feeding and random light and darkness and finally electric shocks.

There was no doubt. No matter how much stress we subjected them to, after the first spectacular results, the methyl levels dropped off with each successive experiment. Not only that, but the association between methyl and neurotropin suppression reduced as well—objectively measured, the amount of methyl and its effect on neurotropin production were smaller with each study. We had proved the decline effect. Truth wore out. Or at least, scientific truth wore out.

We published. People loved the idea and we were widely cited. Jide became a Lecturer and a valued colleague. People began to speak of something called Cosmic Habituation. The old ways were no longer working. And I was thirty-seven.

With visitors, Raphael loved being civil, a different person. Sweetly and sociably, he would say, “M’sugh,” our mix of hello, good-bye, and pardon me. He loved bringing them trays of cold water from the Intermittent Freezer. He remembered everybody’s name and birthday. He hated dancing, but loved dressing up for parties. Musa the tailor made him wonderful robes with long shirts, matching trousers, shawls.

My father liked company, too, even more so after his Decline. He would suddenly stand up straight and smile eagerly. I swear, his shirt would suddenly look ironed, his shoes polished. I was envious of the company, usually men from his old work. They could get my father laughing. He would look young then, and merry, and slap the back of his hand on his palm, jumping up to pass around the beer. I wanted him to laugh with me.

Very suddenly Matthew announced he was getting married. We knew it was his way of escaping. After the wedding he and his bride would move in with her sister’s husband. He would help with their fish farm and plantation of nym trees. We did well by him: no band, but a fine display of food. My father boasted about how strong Matthew was, always captain. From age twelve he had read the business news like some boys read adventure stories. Matthew, he said, was going to be a leader.

My father saw me looking quiet and suddenly lifted up his arms. “Then there is my Patrick who is so quiet. I have two clever sons to go alongside the strong one.” His hand felt warm on my back.

By midnight it was cool and everybody was outside dancing, even Raphael, who grinned, making circular motions with his elbows and planting his feet as firmly as freeway supports.

My father wavered up to me like a vision out of the desert, holding a tin of High Life. He stood next to me watching the dancing and the stars. “You know,” he said, “your elder brother was sent to you by Jesus.” My heart sank: Yes, I know, to lead the family, to be an example.

“He was so unhappy when you were born. He saw you in your mother’s arms and howled. He is threatened by you. Jesus sent you Matthew so that you would know what it is to fight to distinguish yourself. And you learned that. You are becoming distinguished.”

I can find myself being kind in that way; suddenly, in private with no one else to hear or challenge the kindness, as if kindness were a thing to shame us.

I went back onto the porch and there was Raphael looking hunched and large, a middle-aged patriarch. He’d heard what my father said. “So who taught Matthew to be stupid? Why didn’t he ever tell him to leave you alone?”

My father’s skin faded. It had always been very dark, so black that he would use skin lightener as a moisturizer without the least bleaching effect. Now very suddenly, he went honey-colored; his hair became a knotted muddy brown. A dried clot of white spit always threatened to glue his lips together, and his eyes went bad, huge and round and ringed with swollen flesh like a frog’s. He sprouted thick spectacles, and had to lean his head back to see, blinking continually. He could no longer remember how to find the toilet from the living room. He took to crouching down behind the bungalow with the hens, then as things grew worse, off the porch in front of the house. Mamamimi said, “It makes me think there may be witchcraft after all.” Her face swelled and went hard until it looked like a stone.

On the Tuesday night before he died, he briefly came back to us. Tall, in trousers, so skinny now that he looked young again. He ate his dinner with good manners, the fou-fou cradling the soup so that none got onto his fingers. Outside on the porch he started to talk, listing the names of all his brothers.

Then he told us that Grandmother was not his actual mother. Another woman had borne him, made pregnant while dying of cancer. Grandfather knew pregnancy would kill her, but he made her come to term. She was bearing his first son.

Two weeks after my father was born, his real mother had died, and my grandfather married the woman called Blessing.

Salt instead of sugar. Iveren loved looking as though she had given the family its first son. It looked good as they lined up in church. But she had no milk for him. Jacob Terhemba Shawo spent his first five years loveless in a war.

My father died three days before Matthew’s first child was born. Matthew and his wife brought her to our house to give our mother something joyful to think about.

The baby’s Christian name was Isobel. Her baby suit had three padded Disney princesses on it and her hair was a red down.

Matthew chuckled. “Don’t worry, Mamamimi, this can’t be Grandpa, it’s a girl.”

Raphael smiled. “Maybe she’s Grandpa born in woman’s body.”

Matthew’s wife clucked her tongue. She didn’t like us and she certainly didn’t like what she’d heard about Raphael. She drew herself up tall and said, “Her name is Iveren.”

Matthew stared at his hands; Mamamimi froze; Raphael began to dance with laughter.

“It was my mother’s name,” the wife said.

“Ah!” cried Raphael. “Two of them, Matthew. Two Iverens! Oh, that is such good luck for you!”

I saw from my mother’s unmoving face, and from a flick of the fingers, a jettisoning, that she had consigned the child to its mother’s family and Matthew to that other family, too. She never took a proper interest in little Iveren.

But Grandmother must have thought that they had named the child after her. Later, she went to live with them, which was exactly the blessing I would wish for Matthew.

Raphael became quieter, preoccupied, as if invisible flies buzzed around his head. I told myself we were working too hard. Both of us had been applying for oil company scholarships. I wanted both of us to go together to the best universities: Lagos or Ibadan. I thought of all those strangers, in states that were mainly Igbo or Yoruba or maybe even Muslim. I was sure we were a team.

In the hall bookcase a notice appeared. DO NOT TOUCH MY BOOKS. I DON’T INTERFERE WITH YOUR JOB. LEAVE ALL BOOKS IN ORDER.

They weren’t his alone. “Can I look at them, at least?”

He looked at me balefully. “If you ask first.”

I checked his downloads and they were all porn. I saw the terrible titles of the files, which by themselves were racial and sexual abuse. A good Christian boy, I was shocked and dismayed. I said something to him and he puffed up, looking determined. “I don’t live by other people’s rules.”

He put a new password onto our machine so that I could not get into it. My protests were feeble.

“I need to study, Raphael.”

“Study is beyond you,” he said. “Study cannot help you.”

At the worst possible time for him, his schoolteachers went on strike because they weren’t being paid. Raphael spent all day clicking away at his keyboard, not bothering to dress. His voice became milder, faint and sweet, but he talked only in monosyllables. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Not angry, a bit as though he was utterly weary.

That Advent, Mamamimi, Andrew, Matthew and family went to the cathedral, but my mother asked me to stay behind to look after Raphael.

“You calm him,” Mamamimi said, and for some reason that made my eyes sting. They went to church, and I was left alone in the main room. I was sitting on the old sofa watching some TV trash about country bumpkins going to Lagos.

Suddenly Raphael trotted out of our bedroom in little Japanese steps wearing one of my mother’s dresses. He had folded a matching cloth around his head into an enormous flower shape, his face ghostly with makeup. My face must have been horrified: it made him chatter with laughter. “What the well-dressed diva is wearing this season.”

All I thought then was, Raphael, don’t leave me. I stood up and I pushed him back toward the room; like my mother, I was afraid of visitors. “Get it off, get it off, what are you doing?”

“You don’t like it?” He batted his eyelashes.

“No I do not! What’s got into you?”

“Raphael is not a nurse! Raphael does not have to be nice!”

I begged him to get out of the dress. I kept looking at my telephone for the time, worried when they would be back. Above all else I didn’t want Mama to know he had taken her things.

He stepped out of the dress, and let the folded headdress trail behind him, falling onto the floor. I scooped them up, checked them for dirt or makeup, and folded them up as neatly as I could.

I came back to the bedroom and he was sitting in his boxer shorts and flip-flops, staring at his screen and with complete unconcern was doing something to himself.

I asked the stupidest question. “What are you doing?”

“What does it look like? It’s fun. You should join in.” Then he laughed. He turned the screen toward me. In the video, a man was servicing a woman’s behind. I had no idea people did such things. I howled and covered my mouth, laughing in shock. I ran out of the room and left him to finish.

Without Raphael I had no one to go to and I could not be seen to cry. I went outside and realized that I was alone. What could I say to my mother? Our Raphael is going mad? For her he had always been mad. Only I had really liked Raphael and now he was becoming someone else, and I was so slow I would only ever be me.

He got a strange disease that made his skin glisten but a fever did not register. It was what my father had done: get illnesses that were not quite physical. He ceased to do anything with his hair. It twisted off his head in knots and made him look like a beggar.

He was hardly ever fully dressed. He hung around the house in underwear and flip-flops. I became his personal Mamamimi, trying to stop the rest of the family finding out, trying to keep him inside the room. In the middle of the night, he would get up. I would sit up, see he wasn’t there, and slip out of the house trying to find him, walking around our unlit streets. This is not wise in our locality. The neighborhood boys patrol for thieves or outsiders, and they can be rough if they do not recognize your face. “I’m Patrick, I moved into the house above the school. I’m trying to find my brother Raphael.”

“So how did you lose him?”

“He’s not well, he’s had a fever, he wanders.”

“The crazy family,” one of them said.

Their flashlights dazzled my eyes, but I could see them glance at each other. “He means that dirty boy.” They said that of Raphael?

“He’s my brother. He’s not well.”

I would stay out until they brought him back to me, swinging their AK-47s. He could so easily have been shot. He was wearing almost nothing, dazed like a sleepwalker, and his hair in such a mess. Raphael had always been vain. His skin Vaselined with the scent of roses, the fine shirt with no tails designed to hang outside the trousers and hide his tummy, his nails manicured. Now he looked like a laborer who needed a bath.

Finally one night, the moon was too bright and the boys brought him too close to our house. My mother ran out of the groaning gate. “Patrick, Patrick, what is it?”

“These boys have been helping us find Raphael,” was all I said. I felt ashamed and frustrated because I had failed to calm him, to find him myself, to keep the secret locked away, especially from Mamamimi.

When my mother saw him she whispered, “Wild man!” and it was like a chill wind going through me. She had said what I knew but did not let myself acknowledge. Again, it was happening again, first to the father, then to the son.

I got him to bed, holding both his arms and steering him. Our room was cool as if we were on a mountain. I came back out into the heat and Mamamimi was waiting, looking old. “Does he smoke gbana?” she asked.

I said I didn’t think so. “But I no longer know him.”

In my mind I was saying, Raphael, come back. Sometimes my mother would beseech me with her eyes to do something. Such a thing should not befall a family twice.

Makurdi lives only because of its river. The Benue flows into the great Niger, gray-green with fine beaches that are being dug up for concrete and currents so treacherous they look like molded jellies welling up from below. No one swims there, except at dusk, in the shallows, workmen go to wash, wading out in their underwear.

Raphael would disappear at sunset and go down the slopes to hymn the men. It was the only time he dressed up: yellow shirt, tan slacks, good shoes. He walked out respectfully onto the sand and sang about the men, teased them, and chortled. He would try to take photographs of them. The men eyed him in fear, or ignored him like gnarled trees, or sometimes threw pebbles at him to make him go away. The things he said were irresponsible. Matthew and I would be sent to fetch him back. Matthew hated it. He would show up in his bank suit, with his car that would get sand in it. “Let him stay there! He only brings shame on himself!”

But we could not leave our brother to have stones thrown at him. He would be on the beach laughing at his own wild self, singing paeans of praise for the beauty of the bathers, asking their names, asking where they lived. Matthew and I would be numb from shame. “Come home, come home,” we said to him, and to the laborers, “Please excuse us, we are good Christians, he is not well.” We could not bring ourselves to call him our brother. He would laugh and run away. When we caught him, he would sit down on the ground and make us lift him up and carry him back to Matthew’s car. He was made of something other than flesh; his bones were lead, his blood mercury.

“I can’t take more of this,” said Matthew.

It ended so swiftly that we were left blinking. He disappeared from the house as usual; Mamamimi scolded Andrew to keep out of it and rang Matthew. He pulled up outside our gates, so back we went past the university, and the zoo where Baba had taken us as kids, then down beyond the old bridge.

This time was the worst, beyond anything. He was wearing one of Mamamimi’s dresses, sashaying among construction workers with a sun umbrella, roaring with laughter as he sang.

He saw us and called waving. “M’sugh! My brothers! My dear brothers! I am going swimming.”

He ran away from us like a child, into the river. He fought his way into those strong green currents, squealing like a child, perhaps with delight, as the currents cooled him. The great dress blossomed out then sank. He stumbled on pebbles underfoot, dipped under the water, and was not seen again.

“Go get him!” said Matthew.

I said nothing, did nothing.

“Go on, you’re the only one who likes him.” He had to push me.

I nibbled at the edge of the currents. I called his name in a weak voice as if I really didn’t want him back. I was angry with him as if he was now playing a particularly annoying game. Finally I pushed my way in partly so that Matthew would tell our mother that I’d struggled to find him. I began to call his name loudly, not so much in the hope of finding him as banishing this new reality. Raphael. Raphael, I shouted, meaning this terrible thing cannot be, not so simply, not so quickly. Finally I dove under the water. I felt the current pull and drag me away by my heels. I fought my way back to the shore but I knew I had not done enough, swiftly enough. I knew that he had already been swept far away.

On the bank, Matthew said, “Maybe it is best that he is gone.” Since then, I have not been able to address more than five consecutive words to him.

That’s what the family said, if not in words. Best he was gone. The bookcase was there with its notice. I knew we were cursed. I knew we would all be swept away.

Oh story, Raphael seemed to say to me. You just want to be miserable so you have an excuse to fail.

We need a body to bury, I said to his memory.

It doesn’t make any difference; nobody in this family will mourn. They have too many worries of their own. You’ll have to take care of yourself now. You don’t have your younger brother to watch out for you.

The sun set, everyone else inside the house. I wanted to climb up onto a roof, or sit astride the wall. I plugged the mobile phone into the laptop, but in the depths of our slough I could not get a signal. I went into our hot, unlit hall and pulled out the books, but they were unreadable without Raphael. Who would laugh for me as I did not laugh? Who would speak my mind for me as I could never find my mind in time? Who would know how to be pleasant with guests, civil in this uncivil world? I picked up our book on genetics and walked to the top of the hill, and sat in the open unlit shed of a church and tried to read it in the last of the orange light. I said, Patrick, you are not civil and can’t make other people laugh, but you can do this. This is the one part of Raphael you can carry on.

I read it aloud, like a child sounding out words, to make them go in as facts. I realized later I was trying to read in the dark, in a church. I had been chanting nonsense GATTACA aloud, unable to see, my eyes full of tears. But I had told myself one slow truth and stuck to it. I studied for many years.

Whenever I felt weak or low or lonely, Raphael spoke inside my indented head. I kept his books in order for him. The chemistry book, the human genetics book. I went out into the broken courtyard and started to lift the iron bars with balls of concrete that he had made. Now I look like the muscular champion on his netbook. Everything I am, I am because of my brother.

I did not speak much to anyone else. I didn’t want to. Somewhere what is left of Raphael’s lead and mercury is entwined with reeds or glistens in sand.

To pay for your application for a scholarship in those days you had to buy a scratch card from a bank. I had bought so many. I did not even remember applying to the Benue State Scholarship Board. They gave me a small stipend, enough if I stayed at home and did construction work. I became one of the workmen in the shallows.

Ex-colleagues of my father had found Matthew a job as a clerk in a bank in Jos. Matthew went to live with Uncle Emmanuel. Andrew’s jaw set, demanding to be allowed to go with him. He knew where things were going. So did Mamamimi, who saw the sense and nodded quietly, yes. Matthew became Andrew’s father.

We all lined up in the courtyard in the buzzing heat to let Matthew take the SUV, his inheritance. We waved good-bye as if half the family were just going for a short trip back to the home village or to the Chinese bakery to buy rolls. Our car pulled up the red hill past the church and they were gone. Mamamimi and I were alone with the sizzling sound of insects and heat and we all walked back into the house in the same way, shuffling flat-footed. We stayed wordless all that day. Even the TV was not turned on. In the kitchen, in the dark, Mamamimi said to me, “Why didn’t you go with them? Study at a proper university?” and I said, “Because someone needs to help you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said. Not long afterward she took her rusty green car and drove it back to Kawuye for the last time. She lived with Uncle Jacob and the elders. I was left alone in this whispering house.

We had in our neglected, unpaid, strike-ridden campus a mathematician, a dusty and disordered man who reminded me of Raphael. He was an Idoma man called Thomas Aba. He came to Jide and me with his notebook and then unfolded a page of equations.

These equations described, he said, how the act of observing events at a quantum level changed them. He turned the page. Now, he said, here is how those same equations describe how observing alters effects on the macro level.

He had shown mathematically how the mere act of repeated observation changed the real world.

We published in Nature. People wanted to believe that someone working things out for themselves could revolutionize cosmology with a single set of equations. Of all of us, Doubting Thomas was the genius. Tsinghua University in Beijing offered him a Professorship and he left us. Citations for our article avalanched; Google could not keep up. People needed to know why everything was shifting, needing to explain both the climate-change debacle and the end of miracles.

Simply put, science found the truth and by finding it, changed it. Science undid itself, in an endless cycle.

Some day the theory of evolution will be untrue and the law of conservation of energy will no longer work. Who knows, maybe we will get faster-than-light travel after all?

Thomas still writes to me about his work, though it is the intellectual property of Tsinghua. He is now able to calculate how long it takes for observation to change things. The rotation of the Earth around the Sun is so rooted in the universe that it will take four thousand years to wear it out. What kind of paradigm will replace it? The Earth and the Sun and all the stars secretly overlap? Outside the four dimensions they all occupy the same single mathematical point?

So many things exist only as metaphors and numbers. Atoms will take only fifty more years to disappear, taking with them quarks and muons and all the other particles. What the Large Hadron Collider will most accelerate is their demise.

Thomas has calculated how long it will take for observation to wear out even his observation. Then, he says, the universe will once again be stable. History melts down and is restored.

My fiancée is a simple country girl who wants a Prof for a husband. I know where that leads. To Mamamimi. Perhaps no bad thing. I hardly know the girl. She wears long dresses instead of jeans and has a pretty smile. My mother’s family knows her.

The singing at the church has started, growing with the heat and sunlight. My beautiful suit wax-printed in blue and gold arches reflects the sunlight. Its cotton will be cool, cooler than all that lumpy knitwear from Indonesia.

We have two weddings; one new, one old. So I go through it all twice: next week, the church and the big white dress. I will have to mime love and happiness; the photographs will be used for those framed tributes: “Patrick and Leticia: True Love Is Forever.” Matthew and Andrew will be here with their families for the first time in years and I find it hurts to have brothers who care nothing for me.

I hear my father saying that my country wife had best be grateful for all that I give her. I hear him telling her to leave if she is not happy. This time, though, he speaks with my own voice.

Will I slap the walls all night or just my own face? Will I go mad and dance for workmen in a woman’s dress? Will I make stews so fiery that only I can eat them? I look down at my body, visible through the white linen, the body I have made perfect to compensate for my imperfect brain.

Shall I have a little baby with a creased forehead? Will he wear my father’s dusty cap? Will he sleepwalk, weep at night, or laugh for no reason? If I call him a family name, will he live his grandfather’s life again? What poison will I pass on?

I try to imagine all my wedding guests and how their faces would fall if I simply walked away, or strode out like Raphael to crow with delight, “No wedding! I’m not getting married, no way José!” I smile; I can hear him say it; I can see how he would strut.

I can also hear him say, What else is someone like you going to do except get married? You are too quiet and homely. A publication in Nature is not going to cook your food for you. It’s not going to get you laid.

I think of my future son. His Christian name will be Raphael but his personal name will be Ese, which means Wiped Out. It means that God will wipe out the past with all its expectations.

If witchcraft once worked and science is wearing out, then it seems to me that God loves our freedom more than stable truth. If I have a son who is free from the past, then I know God loves me too.

So I can envisage Ese, my firstborn. He’s wearing shorts and running with a kite behind him, happy, clean, and free, and we the Shawos live on the hill once more.

I think of Mamamimi kneeling down to look into my face and saying, “Patrick, you are a fine young boy. You do everything right. There is nothing wrong with you.” I remember my father, sane for a while, resting a hand on the small of my back and saying, “You are becoming distinguished.” He was proud of me.

Most of all I think of Raphael speaking his mind to Matthew, to Grandma, even to Father, but never to me. He is passing on his books to me in twilight, and I give him tea, and he says, as if surprised, That’s nice. Thank you. His shiny face glows with love.

I have to trust that I can pass on love as well.

RAY OF LIGHT

Brad R. Torgersen

My crew boss Jake was waiting for me at the sealock door. I’d been eight hours outside, checking for microfractures in the metal hull. Tedious work, that. I’d turned my helmet communicator off so as not to be distracted. The look on Jake’s face spooked me.

“What’s happened?” I asked him, seawater dripping from the hair of my beard.

“Jenna,” was all I got in reply. Which was enough.

I closed my eyes and tried to remain calm, fists balled around the ends of a threadbare terrycloth towel wrapped around my neck.

For a brief instant the hum-and-clank activity of the sub garage went away, and there was only my mental picture of my daughter sitting in her mother’s lap. Two, maybe three years old. A delightful nest of unruly ringlets sprouting at odd angles from her scalp. She’d been a mischief-maker from day one—hell on wheels in a confined space like Deepwater 12.

Jenna was much older now, but that particular memory was burned into my brain because it was the last time I remember seeing my wife smile.

“Tell me,” I said to my boss.

Jake ran a hand over his own beard. All of us had given up shaving years ago, when the gel, cream, and disposable razors ran out.

“It seems she went for a joyride with another teenager.”

“How the hell did they get a sub without someone saying something?”

“The Evans boy, Bart, he’s old enough to drive. I’ve had him on rotation with the other men for a few weeks, to see if he’d take to it. We need all the help we can get.”

“Yeah, yeah, skip it, where are they now?”

Jake coughed and momentarily wouldn’t meet my gaze.

“We don’t know,” he said. “I tasked Bart with a trip to Deepwater 4, the usual swap-and-trade run. He’s now—they’re now—two hours overdue.”

“The acoustic transponder on the sub?” I said.

“It’s either broken, or they turned it off.”

“Good hell, even idiots know not to do that.”

Jake just looked at me.

I pivoted on a heel and headed back the way I’d come. With my wetsuit still on I didn’t have to change. I’d grab the first sub I could muscle out of its cradle. Over my shoulder I said, “Whoever is on the next sortie, tell ’em I’m giving ’em the day off.”

“Where are you going to look?” Jake said. “It’s thousands of miles of dark water in every direction.”

“I know a place,” I said. “Jenna told me about it once.”

My daughter was four when she first began asking the inevitable questions.

“How come we don’t live where it’s dry and sunny?”

All three of us were perched at the tiny family table in our little compartment. Lucille didn’t even look up from her plate. As if she hadn’t heard Jenna at all. Too much of that lately, for my taste. But I opted to not call my wife out on it. Lucille had become hot and cold—either she was screaming mad, or stone quiet. And I’d gotten tired of the screaming, so I settled for the quiet.

Folding my hands thoughtfully in front of me, I considered Jenna’s inquiry.

“There isn’t anywhere that’s dry and sunny. Not anymore.”

“But Chloe and Joey are always going to the park to play,” Jenna said. “I want to go to the park too.”

I grimaced. Chloe and Joey was a kids’ show from before . . . from before everything. Lucille had been loathe to let Jenna watch it, but had caved when it became obvious that Chloe and Joey were the only two people—well, animated talking teddy bears actually—capable of getting our daughter to sit still and be silent for any length of time. We’d done what every parent swears they won’t do, and the LCD had become our babysitter. Now it was biting us in the butt.

My wife stabbed at the dark green leaves on her plate, the tines on her fork making pronounced tack! noises on the scarred plastic.

“There used to be parks,” I said. “But everything is covered in ice now. And it’s dark, not sunny. You can’t even see the sun anymore.”

“But why?” Jenna said, her utensils abandoned on the table.

The room lost focus and I briefly remembered my NASA days. Those had been happy times. Washington was pumping money back into the program because the Chinese were threatening to land on the moon.

I’d been on the International Space Station when the aliens abruptly came. It was a gas. I got to pretend I was a celebrity, being interviewed remotely by the news, along with my crewmates.

The mammoth alien ship parked next to us in orbit, for three whole days—a smoothed sphere of nickel-iron, miles and miles in circumference. No obvious drive systems nor apertures for egress. No sign nor sound from them which might have indicated their intentions.

Then the big ship promptly broke orbit and headed inward, towards Venus.

Six months later, the sun began to dim . . .

“It’s hard to explain,” I said to Jenna, noting that my wife’s fork hovered over her last bit of hydroponic cabbage. “Some people came from another place—another star far away. We thought they would be our friends, but they wouldn’t talk to us. They made the sunshine go away, and everything started getting cold really fast.”

“They turned off the sun?” Jenna said, incredulous.

“Nothing can turn off the sun,” I said. “But they did put something in the way—it blocks the sun’s light from reaching Earth, so the surface is too cold for us to live there anymore.”

I remembered being ordered down in July. We landed in Florida. It was snowing heavily. NASA had already converted over—by Presidential order—to devising emergency alternatives. The sun had become a shadow of itself, even at high noon. We cobbled together a launch: NASA’s final planetary probe, to follow the path of the gargantuan alien ship and find out what was going on.

The probe discovered a mammoth cloud orbiting just inside of Earth’s orbit: countless little mirrors, each impossibly thin and impossibly rigid. No alien ship in sight, but the cloud of mirrors was enormous, and growing every day. By themselves, they were nothing. But together they were screening out most of the sun’s light. A little bit more gone, every week.

“So now we have to live at the bottom of the ocean?” Jenna asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s the only place warm enough for anything to survive.”

Which may or may not have been true. In Iceland they’d put their money on surface habitats constructed near their volcanoes. Chancy gamble. Irregular eruptions made it dangerous, which is why the United States had abandoned the Big Island plan in Hawaii. Besides, assuming enough light was blocked, cryogenic precipitation would be a problem. First the oxygen would rain out, and then, eventually, the nitrogen too. Which is why the United States had also abandoned the Yellowstone plan.

People were dying all over the world when NASA and the Navy began deploying the Deepwater stations. The Russians and Chinese, the Indians, all began doing the same. There was heat at the boundaries between tectonic plates. Life had learned to live without the sun near hydrothermal vents. Humans would have to learn to live there too.

And we did, after a fashion.

I explained this as best as I could to my daughter.

She grew very sad. A tiny, perplexed frown on her face.

“I don’t want to watch Chloe and Joey anymore,” she said softly.

Lucille’s fork clattered onto the floor and she fled the compartment, sobbing.

Number 6’s electronics, air circulator, and propulsion motor blended into a single, complaining whine as I pushed the old sub through the eternal darkness along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally I passed one of the black smokers—chimneys made of minerals deposited by the expulsion of superheated water from along the tectonic ridge. The water flowed like ink from the tops of the smokers. Tube worms, white crabs and other life shied away from my lights.

I was watching for the tell-tale smoker formation that Jenna had told me about. It was a gargantuan one, multiple chimneys sprouting into something the kids had dubbed the Gak’s Antlers. Dan McDermott had joined the search and was 200 yards behind me, his own lights arrayed in a wide pattern, looking.

We both spotted our target at the same time.

I could see why the kids might have liked the spot. In addition to the bizarre beauty of the Antlers, there was a shallow series of depressions surrounding the base—each just big enough to settle a sub down into. Cozy. Private.

I saw the top of a single sub, just barely poking up over the rock and sand.

I asked Dan to hang back while I pinged them with the short-range sonar. When I got no answer I motored right up to the edge of the depression, turned my exterior lights on extra-bright and aimed them down through the half-sphere pilot’s canopy.

I blushed and looked away.

Then I flashed my lights repeatedly until the two occupants inside got the hint and scrambled to get their clothes on. One of them—a girl, I think, though not Jenna—dropped into the driver’s seat and flipped a few switches until my short-range radio scratched and coughed at me.

“Hate to ruin your make-out,” I said.

“Who are you?” came the girl’s tense voice. Too young, I thought.

“Not your father, if it makes any difference,” I said.

“How did you get here?”

“Same as you.”

A boy’s head poked into view. He took the radio mic from the girl.

“Get out of here, this is our place,” he said, his young voice cracking with annoyance. I was tempted to tell him to shove his blue balls up his ass, then remembered myself when I’d been that young, coughed quietly into my arm while I steadied my temper, and tried diplomacy.

“I swear,” I said. “I won’t tell a soul about this little noogie nook. I just want to get my daughter back alive. Jenna Leighton is her name. She’s about your age.”

“Jenna?” said the girl.

“You know her?”

“I know her name. She’s part of the Glimmer Club.”

The boy tried to shush her, and take the mic away. “That’s a secret!”

“Who cares now?” the girl said. “We’re busted anyway.”

“What’s the Glimmer Club?” I said.

The girl chewed her lip for a moment.

“Please,” I said. “It could be life or death.”

“It’s probably easiest if I just show you,” she said. “Give me a few minutes to warm up our blades. I’ll tell you what I can once we’re under way.”

Jenna was six when Lucille went to live on Deepwater 8. At the time, it had seemed reasonable. A chance for my wife to get away from her routine at home, be around some people neither of us had seen in awhile, and get the wind back into her sails. It certainly wouldn’t be any worse than it had been, with all the bickering and chronic insomnia. The doc had said it would do Lucille some good, so we packed her off and waved goodbye.

On Jenna’s bunk wall there was an LCD picture frame that cycled through images, as a night light. I originally loaded it with cartoon characters, but once she swore off Chloe and Joey I let her choose her own photos from the station’s substantial digital library.

I was surprised to see her assemble a collection of sunrises, sunsets, and other images of the sun—a thing she’d never seen. At night, I sometimes stood in the hatchway to the absurdly small family lavatory and watched Jenna lying in her blankets, eyes glazed and staring at the images as they gently shuffled past.

“What are you thinking about?” I once asked.

“How come it didn’t burn you up?” she said.

“What?”

“Teacher told us the sun is a big giant ball of fire.”

“That’s true.”

“Then why didn’t it burn everyone up?”

“It’s too far away for that.”

“How far?”

“Millions of miles.”

“Oh.”

A few more images blended from one to the next, in silence.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?” I said, stroking Jenna’s forehead.

“Am I ever going to get to see the sun? For real?”

I stopped stroking. It was a hell of a good question. One I wasn’t sure I was qualified to know the answer to. Differences between the orbital speed of the mirror cloud and Earth’s orbital velocity, combined with dispersion from the light pressure of the solar wind, would get Earth out from behind the death shadow eventually. How long this would take, or if it could happen before the last of us gave out—a few thousand remaining, from a population of over ten billion—was a matter of debate.

“Maybe,” I said. “The surface is a giant glacier now. We can’t even go up to look at the sky anymore because the ice has closed over the equator and it’s too thick for our submarines to get through. If the sun comes back, things will melt. But it will probably take a long, long time.”

Jenna turned in her bunk and stared at me, her eyes piercing as they always were when she was thinking.

“Why did the aliens do it?”

I sighed. That was the best question of all.

“Nobody knows,” I said. “Some people think the aliens live a long, long time, and that they came to Earth and did this once or twice before.”

“But why block out the sunshine? Especially since it killed people?”

“Maybe the aliens didn’t know it would kill people. Last time the Earth froze over like it’s frozen now, there were no people on the Earth, so the aliens might not have known better.”

“But you tried to say hello,” she said. “When you were on the space station. You told them you were there. You tried to make friends. They must be really mean, to take the sun away after all you did. The aliens . . . are bullies.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I’d thought the same thing more than once.

“Maybe they are,” I said. “But there’s not much we could do about it when they came, and there’s not much we can do about it now, other than what we are doing. We’ve figured out how to live on the sea floor where it’s still warm, and where the aliens can’t get to us. We’ll keep on finding a way to live here—as long as it takes.”

I was a bit surprised by the emotion I put into the last few words. Jenna watched me.

I leaned in and kissed her cheek.

“Come on, it’s time to sleep. We both have to be up early tomorrow.”

“Okay Daddy,” she said, smiling slightly. “I wish Mama could give me a kiss goodnight too.”

“You and me both,” I said.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Is Mama going to be alright?”

I paused, letting my breath out slowly.

“I sure hope so,” I said, settling into the lower bunk beneath my daughter’s—a bunk originally built for two, which felt conspicuously empty.

The clubhouse was actually a restored segment of Deepwater 3, long abandoned since the early days of the freeze-up.

Each of the Deepwater stations were built as sectional rings—large titanium cylinders joined at their ends to form spoked hexagons and octagons. Deepwater 3 had been stripped and sat derelict since a decompression accident killed half her crew. We’d taken what could be taken, and left the hulk to the elements.

The kids had really busted their butts getting it livable again.

I admired their chutzpah as I motored alongside the revived segment, its portholes gleaming softly with light. They’d re-rigged a smaller, cobbled-together heat engine to take advantage of the exhaust from the nearby hydrothermal vents, and I was able to mate the docking collar on my sub with the collar on the section as easy as you please.

The girl and boy from the other station didn’t stick around to watch. They took me and Dan just far enough for us to see the distant light from the once-dead station, then fled. I didn’t ask their names, but I didn’t have to. I’d promised them anonymity in exchange for their help, and was eager to get onboard and find out what might have happened to my daughter. So far as I knew, I was the first adult to even hear about this place.

Only, nobody was home.

Dan hung around outside, giving Deepwater 3 a once-over with his lights and sonar, while I slowly went through the reactivated section.

It was a scene from a fantasy world.

They’d used cutting torches to rip out all the bulkheads, leaving only a few, thick support spars intact. The deck had been buried in soft, white, dry sand and the concave ceiling had been painted an almost surreal sky blue. Indirect lights made the ceiling glow, while a huge heat lamp had been welded into the ceiling at one end, glaring down across the “beach” with a mild humming sound. Makeshift beach chairs, beach blankets, and other furniture were positioned here and there, as the kids had seen fit.

Several stand-alone LCD screens had been wired into the walls, with horseshoes of disturbed sand surrounding them. I carefully approached one of the LCDs—my moist suit picking up sand on my feet and legs. Cycling through the LCD’s drive I discovered many dozens of movies and television programs. Informational relics from before the aliens came. Videos about flying, and surfing, hiking, camping, and lots and lots of nature shows.

I went to two more LCD screens, and found similar content.

I walked to the middle of the section—realizing that I hadn’t stood in a space that unconfined and open since before we’d all gone below—and used my mobile radio to call for Dan.

He hooked up at the docking collar on the opposite end of the section, and came in under the “sun,” stopping short and whistling softly.

“Can you believe this?” I said.

Like me, Dan was an oldster from the astronaut days. Though he’d never had any children, nor even a girlfriend, since his wife had died in the mad rush to get to sea when the mirror cloud made life impossible on the surface.

“They’ve been busy,” Dan said. “Is there anyone else here?”

“Not a soul,” I said. “Though it looks like they left in a hurry.”

“How can you figure?”

“Lights were left on.”

I looked around the room again, noting how many teenagers might fit into the space, and the countless prints in the sand, the somewhat disheveled nature of the blankets.

“Frankie and Annette, eat your hearts out,” I said.

Dan grunted and smiled. “I was at party or two like that, back in flight school.”

“Me too,” I admitted. “But something tells me they didn’t just come here to get laid. Look at what they’ve been watching.”

“Porn?” Dan said.

“No . . . yes. But not the kind you think.”

I flipped on the LCDs and started them up playing whatever video was queued in memory. Instantly, the space was filled with the sound of crashing waves, rock music, images of people sky-diving and hang-gliding, aerial sweeps of the Klondike, the Sahara, all shot on clear days. Very few clouds in the sky. It was non-stop sunshine from screen to screen to screen.

Dan wasn’t smiling anymore. He stared at the heat lamp in the ceiling, and the false sky, and then back at the sand.

“You ever go to church when you were a kid?” Dan asked me.

“Not really. Dad was an atheist, and mom a lapsed Catholic.”

“I went to church when I was a kid. Baptist, then Episcopal, then Lutheran. My dad was a spiritual shopper. Anyway, wherever we went, certain things were always the same. The pulpit, the huge bible open to a given scripture, the wooden pews. But more than that, they all felt a certain way. They had a vibe. You didn’t have to get the doctrine to understand what the building was meant for.”

“What does this have to do with anything, Dan?” I said, getting exasperated.

“Look around, man,” Dan said, holding his arms wide. “This is a house of worship.”

I stared at everything, not comprehending. Then, suddenly, it hit me.

“The club isn’t a club.”

“What?”

“The Glimmer Club. That’s what she called it. She said many of the younger teens and a few of the older ones had started it up a couple of years ago. Not every kid was a member, but most of the other kids heard rumors. To be a member, you had to swear total secrecy.”

My father had tended to consider all religions nuts, but he’d reserved special ire for the ones he called cults: the cracked up fringe groups with the truly dangerous beliefs. He’d pointed to Jonestown as a textbook example of what could go wrong when people let belief get out of hand.

I experienced a quick chill down my spine.

“They’re not coming back,” I said.

“Where would they go?” Dan asked.

But I was already running across the sand to the hatch for my sub.

Jenna was ten years old when her mother committed suicide.

Neither of us was there when it happened of course. Lucille had moved around from station to station for her last several months, until the separate crew bosses on each of the stations got fed up with her behavior. Ultimately she put herself into a sea lock without a suit on, and flooded the lock before anyone could stop her. By the time they got the lock dry and could bring her out, she was gone. And I was left trying to explain all of this to Jenna, who cried for 48 hours straight, then slept an additional day in complete physical and emotional exhaustion.

For me, it was painful—but in a detached kind of way. Lucille and I had been coming apart for years. The docs mutually agreed that sunlight deprivation may have been part of the problem. It had happened with several others, all of whom had had to seek light therapy to try to compensate for their depression. In Lucille’s case, the light therapy hadn’t worked. In fact, nothing had seemed to brake her long, gradual decline into despair. I’d kept hoping Jenna—a mother’s instinctive selflessness for the sake of her child—would pull Lucille through. But in hindsight it was clear Jenna had actually made things worse.

These thoughts I kept strictly to myself in the weeks and months that followed Lucille’s departure from the living world. I poured myself into my role as Daddy and held Jenna through many a sad night when the bad dreams and missing Mommy got her and there was nobody for Jenna to turn to but me. Eventually the nightmares stopped and Jenna started to get back to her old self—something I was so pleased about I had a difficult time expressing it in words.

For Jenna’s 12th birthday I gave her a computer pad I’d squirreled away before committing to the deep. My daughter had been going nuts decorating half the station with chalk drawings—our supply of paper having long since been exhausted. The pad was an artist’s model, with several different styli and programs for Jenna to use. It liberated her from the limited medium of diatoms-on-metal, and fairly soon all of the LCDs in our little family compartment were alive with her digital paintings.

It was impressive stuff. She threw herself into it unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Vistas and landscapes, stars and planets, and people. Lots of people. Lots of filtered representations of Lucille, usually sad. I dutifully recorded it all onto the family portable drive where I hoped, perhaps one day, if humanity made it out of this hole alive, Jenna’s work might find a wider audience. She’d certainly won over many of the other people on Deepwater 12, and was even getting some nice feedback from some of the other stations as well.

In retrospect, I probably should have seen the obvious.

All of Jenna’s art—with rare exception—had one thematic element in common.

It all featured the sun. In one form or another. Sometimes as the focus of the work, but more often as merely an element.

All kids do it, right? The ubiquitous yellow ball in the crayon sky, with yellow lines sprouting out of it? Only, Jenna’s suns were warmer, more varied in hue and color. They became characters in their own right. When she discovered how to use the animation software on the pad, she went whole-hog building breathtaking sequences of the sun rising, the sun setting; people and families frolicking beneath our benevolent yellow dwarf star called Sol.

If ever the aliens who’d taken our star from us entered Jenna’s mind, it didn’t show up in her work. But then, few of us thought of the aliens in any real sense anymore. They’d come, and so far as we knew, they’d gone. Dealing with the repercussions of their single, apocalyptic action had become far, far more important to all of us than dealing with the aliens themselves.

I remembered this as Number 6 creaked and groaned around me, the pressure warning lights letting me know that I was coming up too quickly—risking structural damage if I didn’t bleed off pressure differences between the inside and the outside of the sub.

Dan wasn’t with me. I’d convinced him to go back and let the others know about the Glimmer Club, and what the kids had done with Deepwater 3 behind our backs. He’d also been tasked with explaining why I’d disobeyed direct orders from a crew boss, risking my life and the old sub to chase a wild hair through the vast, dark ocean.

I couldn’t be sure I was right. All I had to go on was a short conversation I’d had with Jenna on her 15th birthday, just a few months earlier.

At that age she spent most of her time with the other teens on the station, as teenagers throughout history have always been prone to do. Old me had stopped being the focus of her attention right about the time she’d hit puberty.

Which was why that particular conversation stood out.

“Dad,” she said, “Does anyone ever go check anymore?”

“On what?”

“On the surface. Up top.”

“We used to send people all the time, but the thicker the ice got—-especially when the equator closed over—the less point there seemed to be in it. So I don’t think anyone has tried in several years.”

“Why not? We can’t just give up, can we? I mean, why are we doing any of this if people aren’t going to ever go back to the surface?”

She had a good point. I am afraid I hemmed and hawed my way through that one, leaving her with a perplexed and somewhat unhappy expression on her face. If any of her friends had gotten better answers from their parents, I never found out. Though I now suspected that our big failure as adults had been our inability to imagine that our children wouldn’t be satisfied to just scratch out a living on the ocean floor.

We who’d been through the freeze-out from the surface, we’d seen the destruction and the death brought by the forever night. We felt fortunate to be where we were. Alive.

But our kids? For them, the ice layer on the surface had become a thing of myth. An impenetrable but invisible bogey monster, forever warned about, but never seen nor experienced. For the Glimmer Club, I suspect, it got to the point where they wondered if all of the adults weren’t crazy, or conspiring in a plot. How did anyone really know that the surface was frozen over? That aliens had blocked the sun?

To blindly accept a fundamental social truth upon which everyone agrees, is just part of what makes us human.

But in every era, however dark or desperate, there have also always been hopeful questioners.

I’d not slept for almost two days, and knew it when I caught myself slumped at the controls, chin in my chest; the sub’s primitive autopilot beeping plaintively at me.

Sonar pings still didn’t show me any subs.

But they hadn’t shown me the underside of the ice sheet yet, either.

I used the sub’s computer to run some calculations—based on the last known measurements to have been taken on the ice sheet’s thickness. I used these to double check where I thought I was, versus what the instruments were telling me, and sat back to ponder.

Assuming the Glimmer Club had ascended as a group, without significant deviation—because the subs only have so much air and battery life to go around—I’d expected to spot them by now. Or at least hear them. Several quick pauses to capture and analyze ambient water noise had yielded depressing silence. Not even the cry of whales filled the sea anymore, because the whales and other sea mammals had all died out together.

If the aliens had had no regard for human sapience, what about the other intelligent creatures who had once called the Earth home?

If ever the oceans re-opened and humans reclaimed the planet, we’d find it an awfully empty place.

Exhausted, I kept going up.

Sonar pingbacks brought me awake the second time. There. A single object, roughly about the size of a sub. It was drifting ever so lazily back towards the bottom.

I spent a few minutes echo-locating, and when I did, my blood ran cold. There was a big crack in the pilot’s canopy and the top hatch was hanging open. Dreading what I might find, I pointed my lights into the canopy and examined the interior of the little sub, down its entire length. If I’d expected to see bodies, I was relieved to see only emptiness. Trained from birth to salvage, they’d stripped the sub and continued on.

Wherever that happened to be.

Additional sonar pings sent back nothing. The ocean was silent in all directions, as black and lonely as space had ever been. On instinct alone, I resumed the long voyage to the ice.

The gentle rocking of the sub wasn’t what woke me.

It was the occasional thumping against the hull.

I sat straight up, almost ripping my headset off in the process My neck and back hurt, and my hands were unsteady as I grasped the controls.

No telling how long I’d been out that time. I scanned the control board and the autopilot seemed satisfied. When I saw that the depth gauge read zero, I had to tap the screen a few times. Something had to be wrong. The knocking on the hull suggested I’d found the lower boundary of the ice sheet, where the sea water grudgingly turned to sludge. I’d never actually been up this high since the oceans closed over, so maybe the equipment was wonky this close to the frozen crust?

I hit my lights, but just a few of them because I didn’t have all the battery life left in the world.

It took me at least a minute to figure out what I was seeing.

A lapping line of water sloshed halfway up the canopy.

Had I drifted into an air pocket on the underside of the ice?

Scanning upward with the lights revealed nothing but blackness.

But wait, not black blackness. There was a distinct hint of color in the void.

I slowly reached a hand down and flicked the lights off, letting the gentle rocking of the boat and the knocking of the hull fill my ears. The blackness was pinpricked with white dots, and there was a gloaming light in the very far distance. Only, gloaming wasn’t the right word. The light slowly but perceptibly began to grow in strength, and the blackness overhead began to graduate from obsidian, to purple, and finally flared into dark blue at the far, far horizon.

No!

My hands were shaking badly. I almost couldn’t hit the switch to extend the sub’s single, disused radio aerial. A tiny motor whined somewhere behind me, and I waited until the motor stopped before I gently rested my headset back onto my scalp, a gentle hiss of static filling my ears.

I depressed the SEND button on the sub’s control stick.

“This is Max Leighton speaking for Deepwater 12, the United States. If anyone can hear and understand this broadcast, please respond.”

The static crackled lifelessly.

It was a vain hope. My signal couldn’t go too far. But I had to try.

“I say again, this is Thomas Leighton speaking—”

“Daddy?”

My breath caught in my throat. It had been a single word, broken by crackling interference. But it was probably the most beautiful word I’d ever heard spoken in my entire life.

“Jenna,” I said softly into my mic. “Please tell me that’s you?”

“You’re just in time,” her voice said. If I was relieved beyond words, she sounded excited to the point of bursting. But not because of me.

“Just in time for what?” I said.

“The sun!” she said. “We got here just as it was going down and had to spend the night on the surface. We opened the top hatches and the air is breathable! Very cold, but breathable. Oh Daddy, we knew it. We all knew it. I’m so glad you’re here with us.”

“Where the hell is here, Jenna, I can’t see another soul.”

“Go out on top and take a look,” was all she said.

It took me a minute to get the interior hatch to Number 6’s stubby sail open, then I climbed up the short ladder, banging side to side in the tight tunnel as the sub kept rocking. At the top hatch I paused, hands on the locking wheel. Nobody had breathed fresh air in almost two decades. Had I merely imagined my daughter’s voice? It certainly was true I’d been in better mental states. Sleep deprivation will do that to you.

But I’d certainly come too far to stop. So, what the hell?

The wheel complained, then spun, and there was a hiss as the last bit of pressure difference bled off from the inside of the sub to the outside. If I’d done it right when I came up, I’d not get the bends—no deadly nitrogen bubbles in the blood. If I’d done it wrong . . . too late now.

Jenna had been right. The air was brutally frigid, and moving fast. Almost a wind. But also so invigorating that I pulled myself up all the way out of the sail and rested my butt on the edge of the hatch. I looked out across the rolling sea of slushy ice—which appeared to extend for many, many miles in all directions.

I also saw the sails of the other subs. Four of them. The kids on those boats waved to me, and I waved back with both arms. If I’d been promising myself at the start of this trip that I’d skin Jenna alive when I found her, that anger had long since melted into a bewildering feeling of astonished wonderment.

Because Jenna was right. The sun certainly was coming up.

And not an apparitional, atrophied sun; as we’d all seen in the last days before going to sea.

This was the real deal.

It crested the horizon like a phoenix, a blast of yellow-orange rays shooting across the sky and into the belly of a bank of clouds to our west. The clouds lit up brilliantly, and there was a raucous cheer from the other subs—all the kids out on deck to see the miracle.

I suddenly found myself cheering too. No, howling. I was on my feet, dangerously close to toppling off the sail and into the slush below, but I couldn’t make it stop. I yelled until my voice was hoarse.

I looked around and saw all the kids standing, hips and knees rocking in time to the rhythm of their bobbing craft, eyes closed and arms stretching out to the sky, waiting . . . waiting . . .

I suddenly knew what they were waiting for. I did the same.

When the rays hit my skin—old, dark, and wrinkled—my nerves exploded with warmth. Stupendous, almost orgasmic warmth. No electric heater was capable of creating such a feeling.

I came back to myself and thought I saw my daughter waving to me from the sails of one of the other subs.

I jumped into the icy sea, and swam in great strokes.

Pulling myself out onto the back of Jenna’s sub, I ignored the smiling but reserved faces of the other teenagers and used handrails on the sail to pull myself up to Jenna’s level.

I didn’t ask if it was okay for a hug, as I’d been doing since she’d turned 13.

She had to politely tap my shoulders to get me to release her.

“Sorry,” I said, noting that water from my beard had gotten her face wet.

“It’s okay,” she said, wiping it with her palms.

“I found the clubhouse,” I said. “I was afraid that you—all of you—had gone off and done something really stupid.”

Jenna looked down.

“Are you mad that I didn’t tell you?”

“At first,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter now. This is . . . this is just . . . incredible.”

The sun had gained in the sky. The old, dark neoprene of my wet suit was growing hot and uncomfortable. I unzipped and pulled my arms and head out of the top, letting it drape around my waste. Delicious rays of light bathed my exposed, gray-haired chest. An unreasoning, almost explosive feeling of giddiness had seized me, and I had to fight to maintain my bearing as the kids on the sub—all the kids on all the subs—began laughing and shoving each other into the water, paddling about and crooning like seals.

“Have you been in contact with anyone else?” I asked.

“We kept trying the radio,” Jenna said, never moving away from my arm which had found its way protectively around her shoulders. “But you were the first person we heard.”

“I wonder how many of the satellites still work,” I said, looking up into the fantastically, outrageously blue sky. “We could rig a dish, one of the old VSAT units. I think we still have some down below . . .”

“We aren’t going back,” Jenna said suddenly, detaching herself.

I looked at my daughter.

“Where else can you possibly go?”

“We don’t care, dad. We’re just not going back there. We swore it amongst the group. All of us.”

“And what if the ice had still been solid? What would you have done then?” I said, a burst of sea wind suddenly giving me goosebumps.

“We don’t know.”

“You’re goddamned lucky there was a gap to get through. Air to breathe. I am not sure any of us have enough oxygen or battery power to get all the way back down. Jenna, for all I knew, you and the others were going to get yourselves killed.”

Jenna didn’t meet my gaze.

“Somebody had to do something,” she said. “We had to know if there was a chance the sun had returned. We hoped. We hoped so much. You and Jake and the others—everybody from before the freeze-up—it was like you’d all given up. Everyone determined not to die, but also determined not to live, either.”

I nodded my head, slowly.

“So what’s the plan now?” I asked.

She looked up at me, smiling again.

“Baja.”

“What?”

“The Baja Peninsula is supposed to be a couple hundred miles northeast of here. We’ll sail until we hit the shore.”

“And if you simply hit the pack ice?”

“We’ll leave the subs, and keep going.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re saying? Where’s your food, where’s your water, what kind of clothes do any of you have? What—”

“We’re not going back, daddy!”

She’d shouted it at me, her fists balled on my chest.

“Okay, okay,” I said, thinking. “But consider this. You all stand a much better chance if you have help. Now that we know the ice is clearing and the air is breathable—and that the sun is back out again, by God—we can bring the others up. All of the Deepwater crews, and the stations too. It will take time, but if we do it in an organized, methodical fashion, we’ll all stand a better chance of making land. Though I am not quite sure what we can expect to find when we get there.”

Some of the other kids had pulled themselves out of the water to come listen to me talk. A few of them were nodding their heads in agreement.

“If you want,” I said to them, looking around, “I’ll be the one to go back down. But I’ll need to get some air and electric power off these other subs first. I sure hope you all brought enough food to last a week or two. It’s going to be at least that long, or longer, before anyone else comes up from below.”

I went back down with what few reserves the kids could give me, about nine hundred digital pictures of the open water, the marvelously full sun, and the blue, blue sky—and a hell of a lot of hope in my heart.

It wouldn’t be easy. Not all of the adults would want to believe me, at first. And raising the stations after so long at depth was liable to be even more dangerous than sinking them had been in the first place.

But I suspected Jenna was right. We couldn’t go back. Not after what I’d just seen.

So I slowly dropped back down, gently, gently. Like a feather. The old sub wouldn’t last a fast trip to the bottom, just as it wouldn’t have lasted a fast trip to the top.

And though the darkness had resumed its hold, I felt light as a bird on the breeze.

Three days later, I stood in Deepwater 12’s sub garage.

Dan had dutifully spread the word ahead of me, and he was in a crowd of adults as I slowly climbed down off Number 6’s sail.

“You didn’t find them,” Jake said sternly. I could sense his extreme piss-off as I walked across the deck towards the group. Discipline was vital on the Deepwater crews, and I’d violated that discipline so extremely, I’d be lucky if Jake didn’t bust my nose for me.

“Oh, I found ’em all right,” I said.

“Dead?” Dan said, voice raised slightly.

“No,” I said. “Take a look.”

I tossed Dan the camera I’d used on the surface.

He looked at me questioningly, and I just looked back.

Dan turned the camera over, its little LCD screen exposed, and flipped the switch to slide show.

Adults crowded around Dan, including Jake.

They gasped in unison.

“It can’t be,” Dan said, voice caught in his throat.

“It is,” I said. “And if you all don’t mind, my daughter is waiting for us to join her up top. We’ve got a land expedition that needs support. I promised her I’d get her and the other kids the help they’d need to make it successful.”

Dan cycled through the pictures and began playing one of the video files I’d also shot. The camera’s little speaker blared loudly laughing, shouting teens and the sloshing of water against the hull of the sub I’d been standing on when I took the footage.

I noted tears falling down the faces of many of my compatriots. And for a tiny instant, I wished that Lucille had lived long enough to see this.

No matter. Lucille was a memory, but it was apparent I’d given the living something they’d desperately needed, without even knowing it. Just as much as I’d desperately needed it when I first opened Number 6’s top hatch and smelled the tangy, frigid salt air whipping through my hair.

Jake, the crew boss, was shouting orders—with a wide smile on his face—while the camera made its way reverently from hand to hand.

I looked up at the ceiling, my eyes glazing and my spirit going up through the black deep to the top where Jenna waited. Hang on, little one. Dad’ll be back soon.

THE EMPEROR’S SOUL

Brandon Sanderson

For Lucie Tuan and Sherry Wang,
who provided inspiration.

Prologue

Gaotona ran his fingers across the thick canvas, inspecting one of the greatest works of art he had ever seen. Unfortunately, it was a lie.

“The woman is a danger.” Hissed voices came from behind him. “What she does is an abomination.”

Gaotona tipped the canvas toward the hearth’s orange-red light, squinting. In his old age, his eyes weren’t what they had once been. Such precision, he thought, inspecting the brush strokes, feeling the layers of thick oils. Exactly like those in the original.

He would never have spotted the mistakes on his own. A blossom slightly out of position. A moon that was just a sliver too low in the sky. It had taken their experts days of detailed inspection to find the errors.

“She is one of the best Forgers alive.” The voices belonged to Gaotona’s fellow arbiters, the empire’s most important bureaucrats. “She has a reputation as wide as the empire. We need to execute her as an example.”

“No.” Frava, leader of the arbiters, had a sharp, nasal voice. “She is a valuable tool. This woman can save us. We must use her.”

Why? Gaotona thought again. Why would someone capable of this artistry, this majesty, turn to forgery? Why not create original paintings? Why not be a true artist?

I must understand.

“Yes,” Frava continued, “the woman is a thief, and she practices a horrid art. But I can control her, and with her talents we can fix this mess we have found ourselves in.”

The others murmured worried objections. The woman they spoke of, Wan ShaiLu, was more than a simple con artist. So much more. She could change the nature of reality itself. That raised another question. Why would she bother learning to paint? Wasn’t ordinary art mundane compared to her mystical talents?

So many questions. Gaotona looked up from his seat beside the hearth. The others stood in a conspiratorial clump around Frava’s desk, their long, colorful robes shimmering in the firelight. “I agree with Frava,” Gaotona said.

The others glanced at him. Their scowls indicated they cared little for what he said, but their postures told a different tale. Their respect for him was buried deep, but it was remembered.

“Send for the Forger,” Gaotona said, rising. “I would hear what she has to say. I suspect she will be more difficult to control than Frava claims, but we have no choice. We either use this woman’s skill, or we give up control of the empire.”

The murmurs ceased. How many years had it been since Frava and Gaotona had agreed on anything at all, let alone on something so divisive as making use of the Forger?

One by one, the other three arbiters nodded.

“Let it be done,” Frava said softly.

Day Two

Shai pressed her fingernail into one of the stone blocks of her prison cell. The rock gave way slightly. She rubbed the dust between her fingers. Limestone. An odd material for use in a prison wall, but the whole wall wasn’t of limestone, merely that single vein within the block.

She smiled. Limestone. That little vein had been easy to miss, but if she was right about it, she had finally identified all forty-four types of rock in the wall of her circular pit of a prison cell. Shai knelt down beside her bunk, using a fork—she’d bent back all of the tines but one—to carve notes into the wood of one bed leg. Without her spectacles, she had to squint as she wrote.

To Forge something, you had to know its past, its nature. She was almost ready. Her pleasure quickly slipped away, however, as she noticed another set of markings on the bed leg, lit by her flickering candle. Those kept track of her days of imprisonment.

So little time, she thought. If her count was right, only a day remained before the date set for her public execution.

Deep inside, her nerves were drawn as tight as strings on an instrument. One day. One day remaining to create a soulstamp and escape. But she had no soulstone, only a crude piece of wood, and her only tool for carving was a fork.

It would be incredibly difficult. That was the point. This cell was meant for one of her kind, built of stones with many different veins of rock in them to make them difficult to Forge. They would come from different quarries and each have unique histories. Knowing as little as she did, Forging them would be nearly impossible. And even if she did transform the rock, there was probably some other failsafe to stop her.

Nights! What a mess she’d gotten herself into.

Notes finished, she found herself looking at her bent fork. She’d begun carving the wooden handle, after prying off the metal portion, as a crude soulstamp. You’re not going to get out this way, Shai, she told herself. You need another method.

She’d waited six days, searching for another way out. Guards to exploit, someone to bribe, a hint about the nature of her cell. So far, nothing had—

Far above, the door to the dungeons opened.

Shai leaped to her feet, tucking the fork handle into her waistband at the small of her back. Had they moved up her execution?

Heavy boots sounded on the steps leading into the dungeon, and she squinted at the newcomers who appeared above her cell. Four were guards, accompanying a man with long features and fingers. A Grand, the race who led the empire. That robe of blue and green indicated a minor functionary who had passed the tests for government service, but not risen high in its ranks.

Shai waited, tense.

The Grand leaned down to look at her through the grate. He paused for just a moment, then waved for the guards to unlock it. “The arbiters wish to interrogate you, Forger.”

Shai stood back as they opened her cell’s ceiling, then lowered a ladder. She climbed, wary. If she were going to take someone to an early execution, she’d have let the prisoner think something else was happening, so she wouldn’t resist. However, they didn’t lock Shai in manacles as they marched her out of the dungeons.

Judging by their route, they did indeed seem to be taking her toward the arbiters’ study. Shai composed herself. A new challenge, then. Dared she hope for an opportunity? She shouldn’t have been caught, but she could do nothing about that now. She had been bested, betrayed by the Imperial Fool when she’d assumed she could trust him. He had taken her copy of the Moon Scepter and swapped it for the original, then run off.

Shai’s Uncle Won had taught her that being bested was a rule of life. No matter how good you were, someone was better. Live by that knowledge, and you would never grow so confident that you became sloppy.

Last time she had lost. This time she would win. She abandoned all sense of frustration at being captured and became the person who could deal with this new chance, whatever it was. She would seize it and thrive.

This time, she played not for riches, but for her life.

The guards were Strikers—or, well, that was the Grand name for them. They had once called themselves Mulla’dil, but their nation had been folded into the empire so long ago that few used the name. Strikers were a tall people with a lean musculature and pale skin. They had hair almost as dark as Shai’s, though theirs curled while hers lay straight and long. She tried with some success not to feel dwarfed by them. Her people, the MaiPon, were not known for their stature.

“You,” she said to the lead Striker as she walked at the front of the group. “I remember you.” Judging by that styled hair, the youthful captain did not often wear a helmet. Strikers were well regarded by the Grands, and their Elevation was not unheard of. This one had a look of eagerness to him. That polished armor, that crisp air. Yes, he fancied himself bound for important things in the future.

“The horse,” Shai said. “You threw me over the back of your horse after I was captured. Tall animal, Gurish descent, pure white. Good animal. You know your horseflesh.”

The Striker kept his eyes forward, but whispered under his breath, “I’m going to enjoy killing you, woman.”

Lovely, Shai thought as they entered the Imperial Wing of the palace. The stonework here was marvelous, after the ancient Lamio style, with tall pillars of marble inlaid with reliefs. Those large urns between the pillars had been created to mimic Lamio pottery from long ago.

Actually, she reminded herself, the Heritage Faction still rules, so . . .

The emperor would be from that faction, as would the council of five arbiters who did much of the actual ruling. Their faction lauded the glory and learning of past cultures, even going so far as to rebuild their wing of the palace as an imitation of an ancient building. Shai suspected that on the bottoms of those “ancient” urns would be soulstamps that had transformed them into perfect imitations of famous pieces.

Yes, the Grands called Shai’s powers an abomination, but the only aspect of it that was technically illegal was creating a Forgery to change a person. Quiet Forgery of objects was allowed, even exploited, in the empire so long as the Forger was carefully controlled. If someone were to turn over one of those urns and remove the stamp on the bottom, the piece would become simple unornamented pottery.

The Strikers led her to a door with gold inlay. As it opened, she managed to catch a glimpse of the red soulstamp on the bottom inside edge, transforming the door into an imitation of some work from the past. The guards ushered her into a homey room with a crackling hearth, deep rugs, and stained wood furnishings. Fifth century hunting lodge, she guessed.

All five arbiters of the Heritage Faction waited inside. Three—two women, one man—sat in tall-backed chairs at the hearth. One other woman occupied the desk just inside the doors: Frava, senior among the arbiters of the Heritage Faction, was probably the most powerful person in the empire other than Emperor Ashravan himself. Her greying hair was woven into a long braid with gold and red ribbons; it draped a robe of matching gold. Shai had long pondered how to rob this woman, as—among her duties—Frava oversaw the Imperial Gallery and had offices adjacent to it.

Frava had obviously been arguing with Gaotona, the elderly male Grand standing beside the desk. He stood up straight and clasped his hands behind his back in a thoughtful pose. Gaotona was eldest of the ruling arbiters. He was said to be the least influential among them, out of favor with the emperor.

Both fell silent as Shai entered. They eyed her as if she were a cat that had just knocked over a fine vase. Shai missed her spectacles, but took care not to squint as she stepped up to face these people; she needed to look as strong as possible.

“Wan ShaiLu,” Frava said, reaching to pick up a sheet of paper from the desk. “You have quite the list of crimes credited to your name.”

The way you say that . . . What game was this woman playing? She wants something of me, Shai decided. That is the only reason to bring me in like this.

The opportunity began to unfold.

“Impersonating a noblewoman of rank,” Frava continued, “breaking into the palace’s Imperial Gallery, reForging your soul, and of course the attempted theft of the Moon Scepter. Did you really assume that we would fail to recognize a simple forgery of such an important imperial possession?”

Apparently, Shai thought, you have done just that, assuming that the Fool escaped with the original. It gave Shai a little thrill of satisfaction to know that her forgery now occupied the Moon Scepter’s position of honor in the Imperial Gallery.

“And what of this?” Frava said, waving long fingers for one of the Strikers to bring something from the side of the room. A painting, which the guard placed on the desk. Han ShuXen’s masterpiece Lily of the Spring Pond.

“We found this in your room at the inn,” Frava said, tapping her fingers on the painting. “It is a copy of a painting I myself own, one of the most famous in the empire. We gave it to our assessors, and they judge that your forgery was amateur at best.”

Shai met the woman’s eyes.

“Tell me why you have created this forgery,” Frava said, leaning forward. “You were obviously planning to swap this for the painting in my office by the Imperial Gallery. And yet, you were striving for the Moon Scepter itself. Why plan to steal the painting too? Greed?”

“My uncle Won,” Shai said, “told me to always have a backup plan. I couldn’t be certain the scepter would even be on display.”

“Ah . . .” Frava said. She adopted an almost maternal expression, though it was laden with loathing—hidden poorly—and condescension. “You requested arbiter intervention in your execution, as most prisoners do. I decided on a whim to agree to your request because I was curious why you had created this painting.” She shook her head. “But child, you can’t honestly believe we’d let you free. With sins like this? You are in a monumentally bad predicament, and our mercy can only be extended so far . . .”

Shai glanced toward the other arbiters. The ones seated near the fireplace seemed to be paying no heed, but they did not speak to one another. They were listening. Something is wrong, Shai thought. They’re worried.

Gaotona still stood just to the side. He inspected Shai with eyes that betrayed no emotion.

Frava’s manner had the air of one scolding a small child. The lingering end of her comment was intended to make Shai hope for release. Together, that was meant to make her pliable, willing to agree to anything in the hope that she’d be freed.

An opportunity indeed . . .

It was time to take control of this conversation.

“You want something from me,” Shai said. “I’m ready to discuss my payment.”

“Your payment?” Frava asked. “Girl, you are to be executed on the morrow! If we did wish something of you, the payment would be your life.”

“My life is my own,” Shai said. “And it has been for days now.”

“Please,” Frava said. “You were locked in the Forger’s cell, with thirty different kinds of stone in the wall.”

“Forty-four kinds, actually.”

Gaotona raised an appreciative eyebrow.

Nights! I’m glad I got that right . . .

Shai glanced at Gaotona. “You thought I wouldn’t recognize the grindstone, didn’t you? Please. I’m a Forger. I learned stone classification during my first year of training. That block was obviously from the Laio quarry.”

Frava opened her mouth to speak, a slight smile to her lips.

“Yes, I know about the plates of ralkalest, the unForgeable metal, hidden behind the rock wall of my cell,” Shai guessed. “The wall was a puzzle, meant to distract me. You wouldn’t actually make a cell out of rocks like limestone, just in case a prisoner gave up on Forgery and tried to chip their way free. You built the wall, but secured it with a plate of ralkalest at the back to cut off escape.”

Frava snapped her mouth shut.

“The problem with ralkalest,” Shai said, “is that it’s not a very strong metal. Oh, the grate at the top of my cell was solid enough, and I couldn’t have gotten through that. But a thin plate? Really. Have you heard of anthracite?”

Frava frowned.

“It is a rock that burns,” Gaotona said.

“You gave me a candle,” Shai said, reaching into the small of her back. She tossed her makeshift wooden soulstamp onto the desk. “All I had to do was Forge the wall and persuade the stones that they’re anthracite—not a difficult task, once I knew the forty-four types of rock. I could burn them, and they’d melt that plate behind the wall.”

Shai pulled over a chair, seating herself before the desk. She leaned back. Behind her, the captain of the Strikers growled softly, but Frava drew her lips to a line and said nothing. Shai let her muscles relax, and she breathed a quiet prayer to the Unknown God.

Nights! It looked like they’d actually bought it. She’d worried they’d know enough of Forgery to see through her lie.

“I was going to escape tonight,” Shai said, “but whatever it is you want me to do must be important, as you’re willing to involve a miscreant like myself. And so we come to my payment.”

“I could still have you executed,” Frava said. “Right now. Here.”

“But you won’t, will you?”

Frava set her jaw.

“I warned you that she would be difficult to manipulate,” Gaotona said to Frava. Shai could tell she’d impressed him, but at the same time, his eyes seemed . . . sorrowful? Was that the right emotion? She found this aged man as difficult to read as a book in Svordish.

Frava raised a finger, then swiped it to the side. A servant approached with a small, cloth-wrapped box. Shai’s heart leaped upon seeing it.

The man clicked the latches open on the front and raised the top. The case was lined with soft cloth and inset with five depressions made to hold soulstamps. Each cylindrical stone stamp was as long as a finger and as wide as a large man’s thumb. The leatherbound notebook set in the case atop them was worn by long use; Shai breathed in a hint of its familiar scent.

They were called Essence Marks, the most powerful kind of soulstamp. Each Essence Mark had to be attuned to a specific individual, and was intended to rewrite their history, personality, and soul for a short time. These five were attuned to Shai.

“Five stamps to rewrite a soul,” Frava said. “Each is an abomination, illegal to possess. These Essence Marks were to be destroyed this afternoon. Even if you had escaped, you’d have lost these. How long does it take to create one?”

“Years,” Shai whispered.

There were no other copies. Notes and diagrams were too dangerous to leave, even in secret, as such things gave others too much insight to one’s soul. She never let these Essence Marks out of her sight, except on the rare occasion they were taken from her.

“You will accept these as payment?” Frava asked, lips turned down, as if discussing a meal of slime and rotted meat.

“Yes.”

Frava nodded, and the servant snapped the case closed. “Then let me show you what you are to do.”

Shai had never met an emperor before, let alone poked one in the face.

Emperor Ashravan of the Eighty Suns—forty-ninth ruler of the Rose Empire—did not respond as Shai prodded him. He stared ahead blankly, his round cheeks rosy and hale, but his expression completely lifeless.

“What happened?” Shai asked, straightening from beside the emperor’s bed. It was in the style of the ancient Lamio people, with a headboard shaped like a phoenix rising toward heaven. She’d seen a sketch of such a headboard in a book; likely the Forgery had been drawn from that source.

“Assassins,” Arbiter Gaotona said. He stood on the other side of the bed, alongside two surgeons. Of the Strikers, only their captain—Zu—had been allowed to enter. “The murderers broke in two nights ago, attacking the emperor and his wife. She was slain. The emperor received a crossbow bolt to the head.”

“That considered,” Shai noted, “he’s looking remarkable.”

“You are familiar with resealing?” Gaotona asked.

“Vaguely,” Shai said. Her people called it Flesh Forgery. Using it, a surgeon of great skill could Forge a body to remove its wounds and scars. It required great specialization. The Forger had to know each and every sinew, each vein and muscle, in order to accurately heal.

Resealing was one of the few branches of Forgery that Shai hadn’t studied in depth. Get an ordinary forgery wrong, and you created a work of poor artistic merit. Get a Flesh Forgery wrong, and people died.

“Our resealers are the best in the world,” Frava said, walking around the foot of the bed, hands behind her back. “The emperor was attended to quickly following the assassination attempt. The wound to his head was healed, but . . .”

“But his mind was not?” Shai asked, waving her hand in front of the man’s face again. “It doesn’t sound like they did a very good job at all.”

One of the surgeons cleared his throat. The diminutive man had ears like window shutters that had been thrown open wide on a sunny day. “Resealing repairs a body and makes it anew. That, however, is much like rebinding a book with fresh paper following a fire. Yes, it may look exactly the same, and it may be whole all the way through. The words, though . . . the words are gone. We have given the emperor a new brain. It is merely empty.”

“Huh,” Shai said. “Did you find out who tried to kill him?”

The five arbiters exchanged glances. Yes, they knew.

“We are not certain,” Gaotona said.

“Meaning,” Shai added, “you know, but you couldn’t prove it well enough to make an accusation. One of the other factions in court, then?”

Gaotona sighed. “The Glory Faction.”

Shai whistled softly, but it did make sense. If the emperor died, there was a good chance that the Glory Faction would win a bid to elevate his successor. At forty, Emperor Ashravan was young still, by Grand standards. He had been expected to rule another fifty years.

If he were replaced, the five arbiters in this room would lose their positions—which, by imperial politics, would be a huge blow to their status. They’d drop from being the most powerful people in the world to being among the lowest of the empire’s eighty factions.

“The assassins did not survive their attack,” Frava said. “The Glory Faction does not yet know whether their ploy succeeded. You are going to replace the emperor’s soul with . . .” She took a deep breath. “With a Forgery.”

They’re crazy, Shai thought. Forging one’s own soul was difficult enough, and you didn’t have to rebuild it from the ground up.

The arbiters had no idea what they were asking. But of course they didn’t. They hated Forgery, or so they claimed. They walked on imitation floor tiles past copies of ancient vases, they let their surgeons repair a body, but they didn’t call any of these things “Forgery” in their own tongue.

The Forgery of the soul, that was what they considered an abomination. Which meant Shai really was their only choice. No one in their own government would be capable of this. She probably wasn’t either.

“Can you do it?” Gaotona asked.

I have no idea, Shai thought. “Yes,” she said.

“It will need to be an exact Forgery,” Frava said sternly. “If the Glory Faction has any inkling of what we’ve done, they will pounce. The emperor must not act erratically.”

“I said I could do it,” Shai replied. “But it will be difficult. I will need information about Ashravan and his life, everything we can get. Official histories will be a start, but they’ll be too sterile. I will need extensive interviews and writings about him from those who knew him best. Servants, friends, family members. Did he have a journal?”

“Yes,” Gaotona said.

“Excellent.”

“Those documents are sealed,” said one of the other arbiters. “He wanted them destroyed . . .”

Everyone in the room looked toward the man. He swallowed, then looked down.

“You shall have everything you request,” Frava said.

“I’ll need a test subject as well,” Shai said. “Someone to test my Forgeries on. A Grand, male, someone who was around the emperor a lot and who knew him. That will let me see if I have the personality right.” Nights! Getting the personality right would be secondary. Getting a stamp that actually took . . . that would be the first step. She wasn’t certain she could manage even that much. “And I’ll need soulstone, of course.”

Frava regarded Shai, arms folded.

“You can’t possibly expect me to do this without soulstone,” Shai said drily. “I could carve a stamp out of wood, if I had to, but your goal will be difficult enough as it is. Soulstone. Lots of it.”

“Fine,” Frava said. “But you will be watched these three months. Closely.”

“Three months?” Shai said. “I’m planning for this to take at least two years.”

“You have a hundred days,” Frava said. “Actually, ninety-eight, now.”

Impossible.

“The official explanation for why the emperor hasn’t been seen these last two days,” said one of the other arbiters, “is that he’s been in mourning for the death of his wife. The Glory Faction will assume we are scrambling to buy time following the emperor’s death. Once the hundred days of isolation are finished, they will demand that Ashravan present himself to the court. If he does not, we are finished.”

And so are you, the woman’s tone implied.

“I will need gold for this,” Shai said. “Take what you’re thinking I’ll demand and double it. I will walk out of this country rich.”

“Done,” Frava said.

Too easy, Shai thought. Delightful. They were planning to kill her once this was done.

Well, that gave her ninety-eight days to find a way out. “Get me those records,” she said. “I’ll need a place to work, plenty of supplies, and my things back.” She held up a finger before they could complain. “Not my Essence Marks, but everything else. I’m not going to work for three months in the same clothing I’ve been wearing while in prison. And, as I consider it, have someone draw me a bath immediately.”

Day Three

The next day—bathed, well fed, and well rested for the first time since her capture—Shai received a knock at her door.

They’d given her a room. It was tiny, probably the most drab in the entire palace, and it smelled faintly of mildew. They had still posted guards to watch her all night, of course, and—from her memory of the layout of the vast palace—she was in one of the least frequented wings, one used mostly for storage.

Still, it was better than a cell. Barely.

At the knock, Shai looked up from her inspection of the room’s old cedar table. It probably hadn’t seen an oiling cloth in longer than Shai had been alive. One of her guards opened the door, letting in the elderly Arbiter Gaotona. He carried a box two handspans wide and a couple of inches deep.

Shai rushed over, drawing a glare from Captain Zu, who stood beside the arbiter. “Keep your distance from his grace,” Zu growled.

“Or what?” Shai asked, taking the box. “You’ll stab me?”

“Someday, I will enjoy—”

“Yes, yes,” Shai said, walking back to her table and flipping open the box’s lid. Inside were eighteen soulstamps, their heads smooth and unetched. She felt a thrill and picked one up, holding it out and inspecting it.

She had her spectacles back now, so no more squinting. She also wore clothing far more fitting than that dingy dress. A flat, red, calf-length skirt and buttoned blouse. The Grands would consider it unfashionable, as among them, ancient-looking robes or wraps were the current style. Shai found those dreary. Under the blouse she wore a tight cotton shirt, and under the skirt she wore leggings. A lady never knew when she might need to ditch her outer layer of clothing to effect a disguise.

“This is good stone,” Shai said of the stamp in her fingers. She took out one of her chisels, which had a tip almost as fine as a pinhead, and began to scrape at the rock. It was good soulstone. The rock came away easily and precisely. Soulstone was almost as soft as chalk, but did not chip when scraped. You could carve it with high precision, and then set it with a flame and a mark on the top, which would harden it to a strength closer to quartz. The only way to get a better stamp was to carve one from crystal itself, which was incredibly difficult.

For ink, they had provided bright red squid’s ink, mixed with a small percentage of wax. Any fresh organic ink would work, though inks from animals were better than inks from plants.

“Did you . . . steal a vase from the hallway outside?” Gaotona asked, frowning toward an object sitting at the side of her small room. She’d snatched one of the vases on the way back from the bath. One of her guards had tried to interfere, but Shai had talked her way past the objection. That guard was now blushing.

“I was curious about the skills of your Forgers,” Shai said, setting down her tools and hauling the vase up onto the table. She turned it on its side, showing the bottom and the red seal imprinted into the clay there.

A Forger’s seal was easy to spot. It didn’t just imprint onto the object’s surface, it actually sank into the material, creating a depressed pattern of red troughs. The rim of the round seal was red as well, but raised, like an embossing.

You could tell a lot about a person from the way they designed their seals. This one, for example, had a sterile feel to it. No real art, which was a contrast to the minutely detailed and delicate beauty of the vase itself. Shai had heard that the Heritage Faction kept lines of half-trained Forgers working by rote, creating these pieces like rows of men making shoes in a factory.

“Our workers are not Forgers,” Gaotona said. “We don’t use that word. They are Rememberers.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“They don’t touch souls,” Gaotona said sternly. “Beyond that, what we do is in appreciation of the past, rather than with the aim of fooling or scamming people. Our reminders bring people to a greater understanding of their heritage.”

Shai raised an eyebrow. She took her mallet and chisel, then brought them down at an angle on the embossed rim of the vase’s seal. The seal resisted—there was a force to it, trying to stay in place—but the blow broke through. The rest of the seal popped up, troughs vanishing, the seal becoming simple ink and losing its powers.

The colors of the vase faded immediately, bleeding to plain grey, and its shape warped. A soulstamp didn’t just make visual changes, but rewrote an object’s history. Without the stamp, the vase was a horrid piece. Whoever had thrown it hadn’t cared about the end product. Perhaps they’d known it would be part of a Forgery. Shai shook her head and turned back to her work on the unfinished soulstamp. This wasn’t for the emperor—she wasn’t nearly ready for that yet—but carving helped her think.

Gaotona gestured for the guards to leave, all but Zu, who remained by his side. “You present a puzzle, Forger,” Gaotona said once the other two guards were gone, the door closed. He settled down in one of the two rickety wooden chairs. They—along with the splintery bed, the ancient table, and the trunk with her things—made up the room’s entire array of furniture. The single window had a warped frame that let in the breeze, and even the walls had cracks in them.

“A puzzle?” Shai asked, holding up the stamp before her, peering closely at her work. “What kind of puzzle?”

“You are a Forger. Therefore, you cannot be trusted without supervision. You will try to run the moment you think of a practicable escape.”

“So leave guards with me,” Shai said, carving some more.

“Pardon,” Gaotona said, “but I doubt it would take you long to bully, bribe, or blackmail them.”

Nearby, Zu stiffened.

“I meant no offense, Captain,” Gaotona said. “I have great confidence in your people, but what we have before us is a master trickster, liar, and thief. Your best guards would eventually become clay in her hands.”

“Thank you,” Shai said.

“It was not a compliment. What your type touches, it corrupts. I worried about leaving you alone even for one day under the supervision of mortal eyes. From what I know of you, you could nearly charm the gods themselves.”

She continued working.

“I cannot trust in manacles to hold you,” Gaotona said softly, “as we are required to give you soulstone so that you can work on our . . . problem. You would turn your manacles to soap, then escape in the night laughing.”

That statement, of course, betrayed a complete lack of understanding in how Forgery worked. A Forgery had to be likely—believable—otherwise it wouldn’t take. Who would make a chain out of soap? It would be ridiculous.

What she could do, however, was discover the chain’s origins and composition, then rewrite one or the other. She could Forge the chain’s past so that one of the links had been cast incorrectly, which would give her a flaw to exploit. Even if she could not find the chain’s exact history, she might be able to escape—an imperfect stamp would not take for long, but she’d only need a few moments to shatter the link with a mallet.

They could make a chain out of ralkalest, the unForgeable metal, but that would only delay her escape. With enough time, and soulstone, she would find a solution. Forging the wall to have a weak crack in it, so she could pull the chain free. Forging the ceiling to have a loose block, which she could let drop and shatter the weak ralkalest links.

She didn’t want to do something so extreme if she didn’t have to. “I don’t see that you need to worry about me,” Shai said, still working. “I am intrigued by what we are doing, and I’ve been promised wealth. That is enough to keep me here. Don’t forget, I could have escaped my previous cell at any time.”

“Ah yes,” Gaotona said. “The cell in which you would have used Forgery to get through the wall. Tell me, out of curiosity, have you studied anthracite? That rock you said you’d turn the wall into? I seem to recall that it is very difficult to make burn.”

This one is more clever than people give him credit for being.

A candle’s flame would have trouble igniting anthracite—on paper, the rock burned at the correct temperature, but getting an entire sample hot enough was very difficult. “I was fully capable of creating a proper kindling environment with some wood from my bunk and a few rocks turned into coal.”

“Without a kiln?” Gaotona said, sounding faintly amused. “With no bellows? But that is beside the point. Tell me, how were you planning to survive inside a cell where the wall was aflame at over two thousand degrees? Would not that kind of fire suck away all of the breathable air? Ah, but of course. You could have used your bed linens and transformed them into a poor conductor, perhaps glass, and made a shell for yourself to hide in.”

Shai continued her carving, uncomfortable. The way he said that . . . Yes, he knew that she could not have done what he described. Most Grands were ignorant about the ways of Forgery, and this man certainly still was, but he did know enough to realize she couldn’t have escaped as she said. No more than bed linens could become glass.

Beyond that, making the entire wall into another type of rock would have been difficult. She would have had to change too many things—rewritten history so that the quarries for each type of stone were near deposits of anthracite, and that in each case, a block of the burnable rock was quarried by mistake. That was a huge stretch, an almost impossible one, particularly without specific knowledge of the quarries in question.

Plausibility was key to any forgery, magical or not. People whispered of Forgers turning lead into gold, never realizing that the reverse was far, far easier. Inventing a history for a bar of gold where somewhere along the line, someone had adulterated it with lead . . . well, that was a plausible lie. The reverse would be so unlikely that a stamp to make that transformation would not take for long.

“You impress me, your grace,” Shai finally said. “You think like a Forger.”

Gaotona’s expression soured.

“That,” she noted, “was meant as a compliment.”

“I value truth, young woman. Not Forgery.” He regarded her with the expression of a disappointed grandfather. “I have seen the work of your hands. That copied painting you did . . . it was remarkable. Yet it was accomplished in the name of lies. What great works could you create if you focused on industry and beauty instead of wealth and deception?”

“What I do is great art.”

“No. You copy other people’s great art. What you do is technically marvelous, yet completely lacking in spirit.”

She almost slipped in her carving, hands growing tense. How dare he? Threatening to execute her was one thing, but insulting her art? He made her sound like . . . like one of those assembly line Forgers, churning out vase after vase!

She calmed herself with difficulty, then plastered on a smile. Her aunt Sol had once told Shai to smile at the worst insults and snap at the minor ones. That way, no man would know your heart.

“So how am I to be kept in line?” she asked. “We have established that I am among the most vile wretches to slither through the halls of this palace. You cannot bind me and you cannot trust your own soldiers to guard me.”

“Well,” Gaotona said, “whenever possible, I personally will observe your work.”

She would have preferred Frava—that one seemed as if she’d be easier to manipulate—but this was workable. “If you wish,” Shai said. “Much of it will be boring to one who does not understand Forgery.”

“I am not interested in being entertained,” Gaotona said, waving one hand to Captain Zu. “Whenever I am here, Captain Zu will guard me. He is the only one of our Strikers to know the extent of the emperor’s injury, and only he knows of our plan with you. Other guards will watch you during the rest of the day, and you are not to speak to them of your task. There will be no rumors of what we do.”

“You don’t need to worry about me talking,” Shai said, truthfully for once. “The more people who know of a Forgery, the more likely it is to fail.” Besides, she thought, if I told the guards, you’d undoubtedly execute them to preserve your secrets. She didn’t like Strikers, but she liked the empire less, and the guards were really just another kind of slave. Shai wasn’t in the business of getting people killed for no reason.

“Excellent,” Gaotona said. “The second method of insuring your . . . attention to your project waits outside. If you would, good Captain?”

Zu opened the door. A cloaked figure stood with the guards. The figure stepped into the room; his walk was lithe, but somehow unnatural. After Zu closed the door, the figure removed his hood, revealing a face with milky white skin and red eyes.

Shai hissed softly through her teeth. “And you call what I do an abomination?”

Gaotona ignored her, standing up from his chair to regard the newcomer. “Tell her.”

The newcomer rested long white fingers on her door, inspecting it. “I will place the rune here,” he said in an accented voice. “If she leaves this room for any reason, or if she alters the rune or the door, I will know. My pets will come for her.”

Shai shivered. She glared at Gaotona. “A Bloodsealer. You invited a Bloodsealer into your palace?”

“This one has proven himself an asset recently,” Gaotona said. “He is loyal and he is discreet. He is also very effective. There are . . . times when one must accept the aid of darkness in order to contain a greater darkness.”

Shai hissed softly as the Bloodsealer removed something from within his robes. A crude soulstamp created from a bone. His “pets” would also be bone, Forgeries of human life crafted from the skeletons of the dead.

The Bloodsealer looked to her.

Shai backed away. “Surely you don’t expect—”

Zu took her by the arms. Nights, but he was strong. She panicked. Her Essence Marks! She needed her Essence Marks! With those, she could fight, escape, run . . .

Zu cut her along the back of her arm. She barely felt the shallow wound, but she struggled anyway. The Bloodsealer stepped up and inked his horrid tool in Shai’s blood. He then turned and pressed the stamp against the center of her door.

When he withdrew his hand, he left a glowing red seal in the wood. It was shaped like an eye. The moment he marked the seal, Shai felt a sharp pain in her arm, where she’d been cut.

Shai gasped, eyes wide. Never had any person dared do such a thing to her. Almost better that she had been executed! Almost better that—

Control yourself, she told herself forcibly. Become someone who can deal with this.

She took a deep breath and let herself become someone else. An imitation of herself who was calm, even in a situation like this. It was a crude forgery, just a trick of the mind, but it worked.

She shook herself free from Zu, then accepted the kerchief Gaotona handed her. She glared at the Bloodsealer as the pain in her arm faded. He smiled at her with lips that were white and faintly translucent, like the skin of a maggot. He nodded to Gaotona before replacing his hood and stepping out of the room, closing the door after.

Shai forced herself to breathe evenly, calming herself. There was no subtlety to what the Bloodsealer did; they didn’t traffic in subtlety. Instead of skill or artistry, they used tricks and blood. However, their craft was effective. The man would know if Shai left the room, and he had her fresh blood on his stamp, which was attuned to her. With that, his undead pets would be able to hunt her no matter where she ran.

Gaotona settled back down in his chair. “You know what will happen if you flee?”

Shai glared at Gaotona.

“You now realize how desperate we are,” he said softly, lacing his fingers before him. “If you do run, we will give you to the Bloodsealer. Your bones will become his next pet. This promise was all he requested in payment. You may begin your work, Forger. Do it well, and you will escape this fate.”

Day Five

Work she did.

Shai began digging through accounts of the emperor’s life. Few people understood how much Forgery was about study and research. It was an art any man or woman could learn; it required only a steady hand and an eye for detail.

That and a willingness to spend weeks, months, even years preparing the ideal soulstamp.

Shai didn’t have years. She felt rushed as she read biography after biography, often staying up well into the night taking notes. She did not believe that she could do what they asked of her. Creating a believable Forgery of another man’s soul, particularly in such a short time, just wasn’t possible. Unfortunately, she had to make a good show of it while she planned her escape.

They didn’t let her leave the room. She used a chamber pot when nature called, and for baths she was allowed a tub of warm water and cloths. She was under supervision at all times, even when bathing.

That Bloodsealer came each morning to renew his mark on the door. Each time, the act required a little blood from Shai. Her arms were soon laced with shallow cuts.

All the while, Gaotona visited. The ancient arbiter studied her as she read, watching with those eyes that judged . . . but also did not hate.

As she formulated her plans, she decided one thing: getting free would probably require manipulating this man in some way.

Day Twelve

Shai pressed her stamp down on the tabletop.

As always, the stamp sank slightly into the material. A soulstamp left a seal you could feel, regardless of the material. She twisted the stamp a half turn—this did not blur the ink, though she did not know why. One of her mentors had taught that it was because by this point the seal was touching the object’s soul and not its physical presence.

When she pulled the stamp back, it left a bright red seal in the wood as if carved there. Transformation spread from the seal in a wave. The table’s dull grey splintery cedar became beautiful and well maintained, with a warm patina that reflected the light of the candles sitting across from her.

Shai rested her fingers on the new table; it was now smooth to the touch. The sides and legs were finely carved, inlaid here and there with silver.

Gaotona sat upright, lowering the book he’d been reading. Zu shuffled in discomfort at seeing the Forgery.

“What was that?” Gaotona demanded.

“I was tired of getting splinters,” Shai said, settling back in her chair. It creaked. You are next, she thought.

Gaotona stood up and walked to the table. He touched it, as if expecting the transformation to be mere illusion. It was not. The fine table now looked horribly out of place in the dingy room. “This is what you’ve been doing?”

“Carving helps me think.”

“You should be focused on your task!” Gaotona said. “This is frivolity. The empire itself is in danger!”

No, Shai thought. Not the empire itself; just your rule of it. Unfortunately, after eleven days, she still didn’t have an angle on Gaotona, not one she could exploit.

“I am working on your problem, Gaotona,” she said. “What you ask of me is hardly a simple task.”

“And changing that table was?”

“Of course it was,” Shai said. “All I had to do was rewrite its past so that it was maintained, rather than being allowed to sink into disrepair. That took hardly any work at all.”

Gaotona hesitated, then knelt beside the table. “These carvings, this inlay . . . those were not part of the original.”

“I might have added a little.”

She wasn’t certain if the Forgery would take or not. In a few minutes, that seal might evaporate and the table might revert to its previous state. Still, she was fairly certain she’d guessed the table’s past well enough. Some of the histories she was reading mentioned what gifts had come from where. This table, she suspected, had come from far-off Svorden as a gift to Emperor Ashravan’s predecessor. The strained relationship with Svorden had then led the emperor to lock it away and ignore it.

“I don’t recognize this piece,” Gaotona said, still looking at the table.

“Why should you?”

“I have studied ancient arts extensively,” he said. “This is from the Vivare dynasty?”

“No.”

“An imitation of the work of Chamrav?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Nothing,” Shai said with exasperation. “It’s not imitating anything; it has become a better version of itself.” That was a maxim of good Forgery: improve slightly on an original, and people would often accept the fake because it was superior.

Gaotona stood up, looking troubled. He’s thinking again that my talent is wasted, Shai thought with annoyance, moving aside a stack of accounts of the emperor’s life. Collected at her request, these came from palace servants. She didn’t want only the official histories. She needed authenticity, not sterilized recitations.

Gaotona stepped back to his chair. “I do not see how transforming this table could have taken hardly any work, although it clearly must be much simpler than what you have been asked to do. Both seem incredible to me.”

“Changing a human soul is far more difficult.”

“I can accept that conceptually, but I do not know the specifics. Why is it so?”

She glanced at him. He wants to know more of what I’m doing, she thought, so that he can tell how I’m preparing to escape. He knew she would be trying, of course. They both would pretend that neither knew that fact.

“All right,” she said, standing and walking to the wall of her room. “Let’s talk about Forgery. Your cage for me had a wall of forty-four types of stone, mostly as a trap to keep me distracted. I had to figure out the makeup and origin of each block if I wanted to try to escape. Why?”

“So you could create a Forgery of the wall, obviously.”

“But why all of them?” she asked. “Why not just change one block or a few? Why not just make a hole big enough to slip into, creating a tunnel for myself?”

“I . . .” He frowned. “I have no idea.”

Shai rested her hand against the outer wall of her room. It had been painted, though the paint was coming off in several sections. She could feel the separate stones. “All things exist in three Realms, Gaotona. Physical, Cognitive, Spiritual. The Physical is what we feel, what is before us. The Cognitive is how an object is viewed and how it views itself. The Spiritual Realm contains an object’s soul—its essence—as well as the ways it is connected to the things and people around it.”

“You must understand,” Gaotona said, “I don’t subscribe to your pagan superstitions.”

“Yes, you worship the sun instead,” Shai said, failing to keep the amusement out of her voice. “Or, rather, eighty suns—believing that even though each looks the same, a different sun actually rises each day. Well, you wanted to know how Forgery works, and why the emperor’s soul will be so difficult to reproduce. The Realms are important to this.”

“Very well.”

“Here is the point. The longer an object exists as a whole, and the longer it is seen in that state, the stronger its sense of complete identity becomes. That table is made up of various pieces of wood fitted together, but do we think of it that way? No. We see the whole.

“To Forge the table, I must understand it as a whole. The same goes for a wall. That wall has existed long enough to view itself as a single entity. I could, perhaps, have attacked each block separately—they might still be distinct enough—but doing so would be difficult, as the wall wants to act as a whole.”

“The wall,” Gaotona said flatly, “wants to be treated as a whole.”

“Yes.”

“You imply that the wall has a soul.”

“All things do,” she said. “Each object sees itself as something. Connection and intent are vital. This is why, master Arbiter, I can’t simply write down a personality for your emperor, stamp him, and be done. Seven reports I’ve read say his favorite color was green. Do you know why?”

“No,” Gaotona said. “Do you?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Shai said. “I think it was because his brother, who died when Ashravan was six, had always been fond of it. The emperor latched on to it, as it reminds him of his dead sibling. There might be a touch of nationalism to it as well, as he was born in Ukurgi, where the provincial flag is predominantly green.”

Gaotona seemed troubled. “You must know something that specific?”

“Nights, yes! And a thousand things just as detailed. I can get some wrong. I will get some wrong. Most of them, hopefully, won’t matter—they will make his personality a little off, but each person changes day to day in any case. If I get too many wrong, though, the personality won’t matter because the stamp won’t take. At least, it won’t last long enough to do any good. I assume that if your emperor has to be restamped every fifteen minutes, the charade will be impossible to maintain.”

“You assume correctly.”

Shai sat down with a sigh, looking over her notes.

“You said you could do this,” Gaotona said.

“Yes.”

“You’ve done it before, with your own soul.”

“I know my own soul,” she said. “I know my own history. I know what I can change to get the effect I need—and even getting my own Essence Marks right was difficult. Now I not only have to do this for another person, but the transformation must be far more extensive. And I have ninety days left to do it.”

Gaotona nodded slowly.

“Now,” she said, “you should tell me what you’re doing to keep up the pretense that the emperor is still awake and well.”

“We’re doing all that needs to be done.”

“I’m far from confident that you are. I think you’ll find me a fair bit better at deception than most.”

“I think that you will be surprised,” Gaotona said. “We are, after all, politicians.”

“All right, fine. But you are sending food, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” Gaotona said. “Three meals are sent to the emperor’s quarters each day. They return to the palace kitchens eaten, though he is, of course, secretly being fed broth. He drinks it when prompted, but stares ahead, as if both deaf and mute.”

“And the chamber pot?”

“He has no control over himself,” Gaotona said, grimacing. “We keep him in cloth diapers.”

“Nights, man! And no one changes a fake chamber pot? Don’t you think that’s suspicious? Maids will gossip, as will guards at the door. You need to consider these things!”

Gaotona had the decency to blush. “I will see that it happens, though I don’t like the idea of someone else entering his quarters. Too many have a chance to discover what has happened to him.”

“Pick someone you trust, then,” Shai said. “In fact, make a rule at the emperor’s doors. No one enters unless they bear a card with your personal signet. And yes, I know why you are opening your mouth to object. I know exactly how well guarded the emperor’s quarters are—that was part of what I studied to break into the gallery. Your security isn’t tight enough, as the assassins proved. Do what I suggest. The more layers of security, the better. If what has happened to the emperor gets out, I have no doubt that I’ll end up back in that cell waiting for execution.”

Gaotona sighed, but nodded. “What else do you suggest?”

Day Seventeen

A cool breeze laden with unfamiliar spices crept through the cracks around Shai’s warped window. The low hum of cheers seeped through as well. Outside, the city celebrated. Delbahad, a holiday no one had known about until two years earlier. The Heritage Faction continued to dig up and revive ancient feasts in an effort to sway public opinion back toward them.

It wouldn’t help. The empire was not a republic, and the only ones who would have a say in anointing a new emperor would be the arbiters of the various factions. Shai turned her attention away from the celebrations, and continued to read from the emperor’s journal.

I have decided, at long last, to agree to the demands of my faction, the book read. I will offer myself for the position of emperor, as Gaotona has so often encouraged. Emperor Yazad grows weak with his disease, and a new choice will be made soon.

Shai made a notation. Gaotona had encouraged Ashravan to seek the throne. And yet, later in the journal, Ashravan spoke of Gaotona with contempt. Why the change? She finished the notation, then turned to another entry years later.

Emperor Ashravan’s personal journal fascinated her. He had written it with his own hand, and had included instructions for it to be destroyed upon his death. The arbiters had delivered the journal to her reluctantly, and with vociferous justification. He hadn’t died. His body still lived. Therefore, it was just fine for them not to burn his writings.

They spoke with confidence, but she could see the uncertainty in their eyes. They were easy to read—all but Gaotona, whose inner thoughts continued to elude her. They didn’t understand the purpose of this journal. Why write, they wondered, if not for posterity? Why put your thoughts to paper if not for the purpose of having others read them?

As easy, she thought, to ask a Forger why she would get satisfaction from creating a fake and seeing it on display without a single person knowing it was her work—and not that of the original artist—they were revering.

The journal told her far more about the emperor than the official histories had, and not just because of the contents. The pages of the book were worn and stained from constant turning. Ashravan had written this book to be read—by himself.

What memories had Ashravan sought so profoundly that he would read this book over and over and over again? Was he vain, enjoying the thrill of past conquests? Was he, instead, insecure? Did he spend hours searching these words because he wanted to justify his mistakes? Or was there another reason?

The door to her chambers opened. They had stopped knocking. Why would they? They already denied her any semblance of privacy. She was still a captive, just a more important one than before.

Arbiter Frava entered, graceful and long faced, wearing robes of a soft violet. Her grey braid was spun with gold and violet this time. Captain Zu guarded her. Inwardly, Shai sighed, adjusting her spectacles. She had been anticipating a night of study and planning, uninterrupted now that Gaotona had gone to join the festivities.

“I am told,” Frava said, “that you are progressing at an unremarkable pace.”

Shai set down the book. “Actually, this is quick. I am nearly ready to begin crafting stamps. As I reminded Arbiter Gaotona earlier today, I do still need a test subject who knew the emperor. The connection between them will allow me to test stamps on him, and they will stick briefly—long enough for me to try out a few things.”

“One will be provided,” Frava replied, walking along the table with its glistening surface. She ran a finger across it, then stopped at the red seal mark. The arbiter prodded at it. “Such an eyesore. After going to such trouble to make the table more beautiful, why not put the seal on the bottom?”

“I’m proud of my work,” Shai said. “Any Forger who sees this can inspect it and see what I’ve done.”

Frava sniffed. “You should not be proud of something like this, little thief. Besides, isn’t the point of what you do to hide the fact that you’ve done it?”

“Sometimes,” Shai said. “When I imitate a signature or counterfeit a painting, the subterfuge is part of the act. But with Forgery, true Forgery, you cannot hide what you’ve done. The stamp will always be there, describing exactly what has happened. You might as well be proud of it.”

It was the odd conundrum of her life. To be a Forger was not just about soulstamps—it was about the art of mimicry in its entirety. Writing, art, personal signets . . . an apprentice Forger—mentored half in secret by her people—learned all mundane forgery before being taught to use soulstamps.

The stamps were the highest order of their art, but they were the most difficult to hide. Yes, a seal could be placed in an out-of-the way place on an object, then covered over. Shai had done that very thing on occasion. However, so long as the seal was somewhere to be found, a Forgery could not be perfect.

“Leave us,” Frava said to Zu and the guards.

“But—” Zu said, stepping forward.

“I do not like to repeat myself, Captain,” Frava said.

Zu growled softly, but bowed in obedience. He gave Shai a glare—that was practically a second occupation for him, these days—and retreated with his men. They shut the door with a click.

The Bloodsealer’s stamp still hung there on the door, renewed this morning. The Bloodsealer came at the same time most days. Shai had kept specific notes. On days when he was a little late, his seal started to dim right before he arrived. He always got to her in time to renew it, but perhaps someday . . .

Frava inspected Shai, eyes calculating.

Shai met that gaze with a steady one of her own. “Zu assumes I’m going to do something horrible to you while we’re alone.”

“Zu is simpleminded,” Frava said, “though he is very useful when someone needs to be killed. Hopefully you won’t ever have to experience his efficiency firsthand.”

“You’re not worried?” Shai said. “You are alone in a room with a monster.”

“I’m alone in a room with an opportunist,” Frava said, strolling to the door and inspecting the seal burning there. “You won’t harm me. You’re too curious about why I sent the guards away.”

Actually, Shai thought, I know precisely why you sent them away. And why you came to me during a time when all of your associate arbiters were guaranteed to be busy at the festival. She waited for Frava to make the offer.

“Has it occurred to you,” Frava said, “how . . . useful to the empire it would be to have an emperor who listened to a voice of wisdom when it spoke to him?”

“Surely Emperor Ashravan already did that.”

“On occasion,” Frava said. “On other occasions, he could be . . . belligerently foolish. Wouldn’t it be amazing if, upon his rebirth, he were found lacking that tendency?”

“I thought you wanted him to act exactly like he used to,” Shai said. “As close to the real thing as possible.”

“True, true. But you are renowned as one of the greatest Forgers ever to live, and I have it on good authority that you are specifically talented with stamping your own soul. Surely you can replicate dear Ashravan’s soul with authenticity, yet also make him inclined to listen to reason . . . when that reason is spoken by specific individuals.”

Nights afire, Shai thought. You’re willing to just come out and say it, aren’t you? You want me to build a back door into the emperor’s soul, and you don’t even have the decency to feel ashamed about that.

“I . . . might be able to do such a thing,” Shai said, as if considering it for the first time. “It would be difficult. I’d need a reward worth the effort.”

“A suitable reward would be appropriate,” Frava said, turning to her. “I realize you were probably planning to leave the Imperial Seat following your release, but why? This city could be a place of great opportunity to you, with a sympathetic ruler on the throne.”

“Be more blunt, Arbiter,” Shai said. “I have a long night ahead of me studying while others celebrate. I don’t have the mind for word games.”

“The city has a thriving clandestine smuggling trade,” Frava said. “Keeping track of it has been a hobby of mine. It would serve me to have someone proper running it. I will give it to you, should you do this task for me.”

That was always their mistake—assuming they knew why Shai did what she did. Assuming she’d jump at a chance like this, assuming that a smuggler and a Forger were basically the same thing because they both disobeyed someone else’s laws.

“That sounds pleasant,” Shai said, smiling her most genuine smile—the one that had an edge of overt deceptiveness to it.

Frava smiled deeply in return. “I will leave you to consider,” she said, pulling open the door and clapping for the guards to reenter.

Shai sank down into her chair, horrified. Not because of the offer—she’d been expecting one like it for days now—but because she had only now understood the implications. The offer of the smuggling trade was, of course, false. Frava might have been able to deliver such a thing, but she wouldn’t. Even assuming that the woman hadn’t already been planning to have Shai killed, this offer sealed that eventuality.

There was more to it, though. Far more. So far as she knows, she just planted in my head the idea of building control into the emperor. She won’t trust my Forgery. She’ll be expecting me to put in back doors of my own, ones that give me and not her complete control over Ashravan.

What did that mean?

It meant that Frava had another Forger standing by. One, likely, without the talent or the bravado to try Forging someone else’s soul—but one who could look over Shai’s work and find any back doors she put in. This Forger would be better trusted, and could rewrite Shai’s work to put Frava in control.

They might even be able to finish Shai’s work, if she got it far enough along first. Shai had intended to use the full hundred days to plan her escape, but now she realized that her sudden extermination could come at any time.

The closer she got to finishing the project, the more likely that grew.

Day Thirty

“This is new,” Gaotona said, inspecting the stained glass window.

That had been a particularly pleasing bit of inspiration on Shai’s part. Attempts to Forge the window to a better version of itself had repeatedly failed; each time, after five minutes or so, the window had reverted to its cracked, gap-sided self.

Then Shai had found a bit of colored glass rammed into one side of the frame. The window, she realized, had once been a stained glass piece, like many in the palace. It had been broken, and whatever had shattered the window had also bent the frame, producing those gaps that let in the frigid breeze.

Rather than repairing it as it had been meant to be, someone had put ordinary glass into the window and left it to crack. A stamp from Shai in the bottom right corner had restored the window, rewriting its history so that a caring master craftsman had discovered the fallen window and remade it. That seal had taken immediately. Even after all this time, the window had seen itself as something beautiful.

Or maybe she was just getting romantic again.

“You said you would bring me a test subject today,” Shai said, blowing the dust off the end of a freshly carved soulstamp. She engraved a series of quick marks on the back—the side opposite the elaborately carved front. The setting mark finished every soulstamp, indicating no more carving was to come. Shai had always fancied it to look like the shape of MaiPon, her homeland.

Those marks finished, she held the stamp over a flame. This was a property of soulstone; fire hardened it, so it could not be chipped. She didn’t need to take this step. The anchoring marks on the top were all it really needed, and she could carve a stamp out of anything, really, so long as the carving was precise. Soulstone was prized, however, because of this hardening process.

Once the entire thing was blackened from the candle’s flame—first one end, then the other—she held it up and blew on it strongly. Flakes of char blew free with her breath, revealing the beautiful red and grey marbled stone beneath.

“Yes,” Gaotona said. “A test subject. I brought one, as promised.” Gaotona crossed the small room toward the door, where Zu stood guard.

Shai leaned back in her chair, which she’d Forged into something far more comfortable a couple of days back, and waited. She had made a bet with herself. Would the subject be one of the emperor’s guards? Or would it be some lowly palace functionary, perhaps the man who took notes for Ashravan? Which person would the arbiters force to endure Shai’s blasphemy in the name of a supposedly greater good?

Gaotona sat down in the chair by the door.

“Well?” Shai asked.

He raised his hands to the sides. “You may begin.”

Shai dropped her feet to the ground, sitting up straight. “You?”

“Yes.”

“You’re one of the arbiters! One of the most powerful people in the empire!”

“Ah,” he said. “I had not noticed. I fit your specifications. I am male, was born in Ashravan’s own birthplace, and I knew him very well.”

“But . . .” Shai trailed off.

Gaotona leaned forward, clasping his hands. “We debated this for weeks. Other options were offered, but it was determined that we could not in good conscience order one of our people to undergo this blasphemy. The only conclusion was to offer up one of ourselves.”

Shai shook herself free of shock. Frava would have had no trouble ordering someone else to this, she thought. Nor would the others. You must have insisted upon this, Gaotona.

They considered him a rival; they were probably happy to let him fall to Shai’s supposedly horrible, twisted acts. What she planned was perfectly harmless, but there was no way she’d convince a Grand of that. Still, she found herself wishing she could put Gaotona at ease as she pulled her chair up beside him and opened the small box of stamps she had crafted over the past three weeks.

“These stamps will not take,” she said, holding up one of them. “That is a Forger’s term for a stamp that makes a change that is too unnatural to be stable. I doubt any of these will affect you for longer than a minute—and that’s assuming I did them correctly.”

Gaotona hesitated, then nodded.

“The human soul is different from that of an object,” Shai continued. “A person is constantly growing, changing, shifting. That makes a soulstamp used on a person wear out in a way that doesn’t happen with objects. Even in the best of cases, a soulstamp used on a person lasts only a day. My Essence Marks are an example. After about twenty-six hours, they fade away.”

“So . . . the emperor?”

“If I do my job well,” Shai said, “he will need to be stamped each morning, much as the Bloodsealer stamps my door. I will fashion into the seal, however, the capacity for him to remember, grow, and learn—he won’t revert back to the same state each morning, and will be able to build upon the foundation I give him. However, much as a human body wears down and needs sleep, a soulstamp on one of us must be reset. Fortunately, anyone can do the stamping—Ashravan himself should be able to—once the stamp itself is prepared correctly.”

She gave Gaotona the stamp she held, letting him inspect it.

“Each of the particular stamps I will use today,” she continued, “will change something small about your past or your innate personality. As you are not Ashravan, the changes will not take. However, you two are similar enough in history that the seals should last for a short time, if I’ve done them well.”

“You mean this is a . . . pattern for the emperor’s soul?” Gaotona asked, looking over the stamp.

“No. Just a Forgery of a small part of it. I’m not even sure if the final product will work. So far as I know, no one has ever tried something exactly like this before. But there are accounts of people Forging someone else’s soul for . . . nefarious purposes. I’m drawing on that knowledge to accomplish this. From what I know, if these seals last for at least a minute on you, they should last far longer on the emperor, as they are attuned to his specific past.”

“A small piece of his soul,” Gaotona said, handing back the seal. “So these tests . . . you will not use these seals in the final product?”

“No, but I’ll take the patterns that work and incorporate them into a greater fabrication. Think of these seals as single characters in a large scroll; once I am done, I’ll be able to put them together and tell a story. The story of a man’s history and personality. Unfortunately, even if the Forgery takes, there will be small differences. I suggest that you begin spreading rumors that the emperor was wounded. Not terribly, mind you, but imply a good knock to the head. That will explain discrepancies.”

“There are already rumors of his death,” Gaotona said, “spread by the Glory Faction.”

“Well, indicate he was wounded instead.”

“But—”

Shai raised the stamp. “Even if I accomplish the impossible—which, mind you, I’ve done only on rare occasions—the Forgery will not have all of the emperor’s memories. It can only contain things I have been able to read about or guess. Ashravan will have had many private conversations that the Forgery will not be able to recall. I can imbue him with a keen ability to fake—I have a particular understanding of that sort of thing—but fakery can only take a person so far. Eventually, someone will realize that he has large holes in his memory. Spread the rumors, Gaotona. You’re going to need them.”

He nodded, then pulled back his sleeve to expose his arm for her to stamp. She raised the stamp, and Gaotona sighed, then squeezed his eyes shut and nodded again.

She pressed it against his skin. As always, when the stamp touched the skin, it felt as if she were pressing it against something rigid—as if his arm had become stone. The stamp sank in slightly. That made for a disconcerting sensation when working on a person. She rotated the stamp, then pulled it back, leaving a red seal on Gaotona’s arm. She took out her pocket watch, observing the ticking hand.

The seal gave off faint wisps of red smoke; that happened only when living things were stamped. The soul fought against the rewriting. The seal didn’t puff away immediately, though. Shai released a held breath. That was a good sign.

She wondered . . . if she were to try something like this on the emperor, would his soul fight against the invasion? Or instead, would it accept the stamp, wishing to have righted what had gone wrong? Much as that window had wanted to be restored to its former beauty. She didn’t know.

Gaotona opened his eyes. “Did it . . . work?”

“It took, for now,” Shai said.

“I don’t feel any different.”

“That is the point. If the emperor could feel the stamp’s effects, he would realize that something was wrong. Now, answer me without thought; speak by instinct only. What is your favorite color?”

“Green,” he said immediately.

“Why?”

“Because . . .” He trailed off, cocking his head. “Because it is.”

“And your brother?”

“I hardly remember him,” Gaotona said with a shrug. “He died when I was very young.”

“It is good he did,” Shai said. “He would have made a terrible emperor, if he had been chosen in—”

Gaotona stood up. “Don’t you dare speak ill of him! I will have you . . .” He stiffened, glancing at Zu, who had reached for his sword in alarm. “I . . . Brother . . .?”

The seal faded away.

“A minute and five seconds,” Shai said. “That one looks good.”

Gaotona raised a hand to his head. “I can remember having a brother. But . . . I don’t have one, and never have. I can remember idolizing him; I can remember pain when he died. Such pain . . .”

“That will fade,” Shai said. “The impressions will wash away like the remnants of a bad dream. In an hour, you’ll barely be able to recall what it was that upset you.” She scribbled some notes. “I think you reacted too strongly to me insulting your brother’s memory. Ashravan worshipped his brother, but kept his feelings buried deep out of guilt that perhaps his brother would have made a better emperor than he.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“About this?” Shai said. “Yes. I’ll have to revise that stamp a little bit, but I think it is mostly right.”

Gaotona sat back down, regarding her with ancient eyes that seemed to be trying to pierce her, to dig deep inside. “You know a great deal about people.”

“It’s one of the early steps of our training,” Shai said. “Before we’re even allowed to touch soulstone.”

“Such potential . . .” Gaotona whispered.

Shai forced down an immediate burst of annoyance. How dare he look at her like that, as if she were wasting her life? She loved Forgery. The thrill, a life spent getting ahead by her wits. That was what she was. Wasn’t it?

She thought of one specific Essence Mark, locked away with the others. It was one Mark she had never used, yet was at the same time the most precious of the five.

“Let’s try another,” Shai said, ignoring those eyes of Gaotona’s. She couldn’t afford to grow offended. Aunt Sol had always said that pride would be Shai’s greatest danger in life.

“Very well,” Gaotona said, “but I am confused at one thing. From what little you’ve told me of this process, I cannot fathom why these seals even begin to work on me. Don’t you need to know a thing’s history exactly to make a seal work on it?”

“To make them stick, yes,” Shai said. “As I’ve said, it’s about plausibility.”

“But this is completely implausible! I don’t have a brother.”

“Ah. Well, let me see if I can explain,” she said, settling back. “I am rewriting your soul to match that of the emperor—just as I rewrote the history of that window to include new stained glass. In both cases, it works because of familiarity. The window frame knows what a stained glass window should look like. It once had stained glass in it. Even though the new window is not the same as the one it once held, the seal works because the general concept of a stained glass window has been fulfilled.

“You spent a great deal of time around the emperor. Your soul is familiar with his, much as the window frame is familiar with the stained glass. This is why I have to try out the seals on someone like you, and not on myself. When I stamp you, it’s like . . . it’s like I’m presenting to your soul a piece of something it should know. It only works if the piece is very small, but so long as it is—and so long as the soul considers the piece a familiar part of Ashravan, as I’ve indicated—the stamp will take for a brief time before being rejected.”

Gaotona regarded her with bemusement.

“Sounds like superstitious nonsense to you, I assume?” Shai said.

“It is . . . rather mystical,” Gaotona said, spreading his hands before him. “A window frame knowing the ‘concept’ of a stained glass window? A soul understanding the concept of another soul?”

“These things exist beyond us,” Shai said, preparing another seal. “We think about windows, we know about windows; what is and isn’t a window takes on . . . meaning, in the Spiritual Realm. Takes on life, after a fashion. Believe the explanation or do not; I guess it doesn’t matter. The fact is that I can try these seals on you, and if they stick for at least a minute, it’s a very good indication that I’ve hit on something.

“Ideally, I’d try this on the emperor himself, but in his state, he would not be able to answer my questions. I need to not only get these to take, but I need to make them work together—and that will require your explanations of what you are feeling so I can nudge the design in the right directions. Now, your arm again, please?”

“Very well.” Gaotona composed himself, and Shai pressed another seal against his arm. She locked it with a half turn, but as soon as she pulled the stamp away, the seal vanished in a puff of red.

“Blast,” Shai said.

“What happened?” Gaotona said, reaching fingers to his arm. He smeared mundane ink; the seal had vanished so quickly, the ink hadn’t even been incorporated into its workings. “What have you done to me this time?”

“Nothing, it appears,” Shai said, inspecting the head of the stamp for flaws. She found none. “I had that one wrong. Very wrong.”

“What was it?”

“The reason Ashravan agreed to become emperor,” Shai said. “Nights afire. I was certain I had this one.” She shook her head, setting the stamp aside. Ashravan, it appeared, had not stepped up to offer himself as emperor because of a deep-seated desire to prove himself to his family and to escape the distant—but long—shadow of his brother.

“I can tell you why he did it, Forger,” Gaotona said.

She eyed him. This man encouraged Ashravan to step toward the imperial throne, she thought. Ashravan eventually hated him for it. I think.

“All right,” she said. “Why?”

“He wanted to change things,” Gaotona said. “In the empire.”

“He doesn’t speak of this in his journal.”

“Ashravan was a humble man.”

Shai raised an eyebrow. That didn’t match the reports she’d been given.

“Oh, he had a temper,” Gaotona said. “And if you got him arguing, he would sink his teeth in and hold fast to his point. But the man . . . the man he was . . . Deep down, that was a humble man. You will have to understand this about him.”

“I see,” she said. You did it to him too, didn’t you? Shai thought. That look of disappointment, that implication we should be better people than we are. Shai wasn’t the only one who felt that Gaotona regarded her as if he were a displeased grandfather.

That made her want to dismiss the man as irrelevant. Except . . . he had offered himself to her tests. He thought what she did was horrible, so he insisted on taking the punishment himself, instead of sending another.

You’re genuine, aren’t you, old man? Shai thought as Gaotona sat back, eyes distant as he considered the emperor. She found herself displeased.

In her business, there were many who laughed at honest men, calling them easy pickings. That was a fallacy. Being honest did not make one naive. A dishonest fool and an honest fool were equally easy to scam; you just went about it in different ways.

However, a man who was honest and clever was always, always more difficult to scam than someone who was both dishonest and clever.

Sincerity. It was so difficult, by definition, to fake.

“What are you thinking behind those eyes of yours?” Gaotona asked, leaning forward.

“I was thinking that you must have treated the emperor as you did me, annoying him with constant nagging about what he should accomplish.”

Gaotona snorted. “I probably did just that. It does not mean my points are, or were, incorrect. He could have . . . well, he could have become more than he did. Just as you could become a marvelous artist.”

“I am one.”

“A real one.”

“I am one.”

Gaotona shook his head. “Frava’s painting . . . there is something we are missing about it, isn’t there? She had the forgery inspected, and the assessors found a few tiny mistakes. I couldn’t see them without help—but they are there. Upon reflection, they seem odd to me. The strokes are impeccable, masterful even. The style is a perfect match. If you could manage that, why would you have made such errors as putting the moon too low? It’s a subtle mistake, but it occurs to me that you would never have made such an error—not unintentionally, at least.”

Shai turned to get another seal.

“The painting they think is the original,” Gaotona said, “the one hanging in Frava’s office right now . . . It’s a fake too, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Shai admitted with a sigh. “I swapped the paintings a few days before trying for the scepter; I was investigating palace security. I sneaked into the gallery, entered Frava’s offices, and made the change as a test.”

“So the one they assume is fake, it must be the original,” Gaotona said, smiling. “You painted those mistakes over the original to make it seem like it was a replica!”

“Actually, no,” Shai said. “Though I have used that trick in the past. They’re both fakes. One is simply the obvious fake, planted to be discovered in case something went wrong.”

“So the original is still hidden somewhere . . .” Gaotona said, sounding curious. “You sneaked into the palace to investigate security, then you replaced the original painting with a copy. You left a second, slightly worse copy in your room as a false trail. If you were found out while sneaking in—or if you were for some reason sold out by an ally—we would search your room and find the poor copy, and assume that you hadn’t yet accomplished your swap. The officers would take the good copy and believe it to be authentic. That way, no one would keep looking for the original.”

“More or less.”

“That’s very clever,” Gaotona said. “Why, if you were captured sneaking into the palace trying to steal the scepter, you could confess that you were trying to steal only the painting. A search of your room would turn up the fake, and you’d be charged with attempted theft from an individual, in this case Frava, which is a much lesser crime than trying to steal an imperial relic. You would get ten years of labor instead of a death sentence.”

“Unfortunately,” Shai said, “I was betrayed at the wrong moment. The Fool arranged for me to be caught after I’d left the gallery with the scepter.”

“But what of the original painting? Where did you hide it?” He hesitated. “It’s still in the palace, isn’t it?”

“After a fashion.”

Gaotona looked at her, still smiling.

“I burned it,” Shai said.

The smile vanished immediately. “You lie.”

“Not this time, old man,” Shai said. “The painting wasn’t worth the risk to get it out of the gallery. I only pulled that swap to test security. I got the fake in easily; people aren’t searched going in, only coming out. The scepter was my true goal. Stealing the painting was secondary. After I replaced it, I tossed the original into one of the main gallery hearths.”

“That’s horrible,” Gaotona said. “It was an original ShuXen, his greatest masterpiece! He’s gone blind, and can no longer paint. Do you realize the cost . . .” He sputtered. “I don’t understand. Why, why would you do something like that?”

“It doesn’t matter. No one will know what I’ve done. They will keep looking at the fake and be satisfied, so there’s no harm done.”

“That painting was a priceless work of art!” Gaotona glared at her. “Your swap of it was about pride and nothing else. You didn’t care about selling the original. You just wanted your copy hanging in the gallery instead. You destroyed something wonderful so that you could elevate yourself!”

She shrugged. There was more to the story, but the fact was, she had burned the painting. She had her reasons.

“We are done for the day,” Gaotona said, red faced. He waved a hand at her, dismissive as he stood up. “I had begun to think . . . Bah!”

He stalked out the door.

Day Forty-Two

Each person was a puzzle.

That was how Tao, her first trainer in Forgery, had explained it. A Forger wasn’t a simple scam artist or trickster. A Forger was an artist who painted with human perception.

Any grime-covered urchin on the street could scam someone. A Forger sought loftier heights. Common scammers worked by pulling a cloth over someone’s eyes, then fleeing before realization hit. A Forger had to create something so perfect, so beautiful, so real that their subjects never questioned.

A person was like a dense forest thicket, overgrown with a twisting mess of vines, weeds, shrubs, saplings, and flowers. No person was one single emotion; no person had only one desire. They had many, and usually those desires conflicted with one another like two rosebushes fighting for the same patch of ground.

Respect the people you lie to, Tao had taught her. Steal from them long enough, and you will begin to understand them.

Shai crafted a book as she worked, a true history of Emperor Ashravan’s life. It would become a truer history than those his scribes had written to glorify him, a truer history even than the one written by his own hand. Shai slowly pieced together the puzzle, crawling into the thicket that had been Ashravan’s mind.

He had been idealistic, as Gaotona said. She saw it now in the cautious worry of his early writings and in the way he had treated his servants. The empire was not a terrible thing. Neither was it a wonderful thing. The empire simply was. The people suffered its rule because they were comfortable with its little tyrannies. Corruption was inevitable. You lived with it. It was either that or accept the chaos of the unknown.

Grands were treated with extreme favoritism. Entering government service, the most lucrative and prestigious of occupations, was often more about bribes and connections than it was about skill or aptitude. In addition, some of those who best served the empire—merchants and laborers—were systematically robbed by a hundred hands in their pockets.

Everyone knew these things. Ashravan had wanted to change them. At first.

And then . . . Well, there hadn’t been a specific and then. Poets would point to a single flaw in Ashravan’s nature that had led him to failure, but a person was no more one flaw than they were one passion. If Shai based her Forgery on any single attribute, she would create a mockery, not a man.

But . . . was that the best she could hope for? Perhaps she should try for authenticity in one specific setting, making an emperor who could act properly in court, but could not fool those closest to him. Perhaps that would work well enough, like the stage props from a playhouse. Those served their purpose while the play was going, but failed serious inspection.

That was an achievable goal. Perhaps she should go to the arbiters, explain what was possible, and give them a lesser emperor—a puppet they could use at official functions, then whisk away with explanations that he was growing sickly.

She could do that.

She found that she didn’t want to.

That wasn’t the challenge. That was the street thief’s version of a scam, intended for short-term gain. The Forger’s way was to create something enduring.

Deep down, she was thrilled by the challenge. She found that she wanted to make Ashravan live. She wanted to try, at least.

Shai lay back on her bed, which by now she had Forged to something more comfortable, with posts and a deep comforter. She kept the curtains drawn. Her guards for the evening played a round of cards at her table.

Why do you care about making Ashravan live? Shai thought to herself. The arbiters will kill you before you can even see if this works. Escape should be your only goal.

And yet . . . the emperor himself. She had chosen to steal the Moon Scepter because it was the most famous piece in the empire. She had wanted one of her works to be on display in the grand Imperial Gallery.

This task she now worked on, however . . . this was something far greater. What Forger had accomplished such a feat? A Forgery, sitting on the Rose Throne itself?

No, she told herself, more forceful this time. Don’t be lured. Pride, Shai. Don’t let the pride drive you.

She opened her book to the back pages, where she’d hidden her escape plans in a cypher, disguised to look like a dictionary of terms and people.

That Bloodsealer had come in running the other day, as if frightened that he’d be late to reset his seal. His clothing had smelled of strong drink. He was enjoying the palace’s hospitality. If she could make him come early one morning, then ensure that he got extra drunk that night . . .

The mountains of the Strikers bordered Dzhamar, where the swamps of the Bloodsealers were located. Their hatred of one another ran deep, perhaps deeper than their loyalty to the empire. Several of the Strikers in particular seemed revolted when the Bloodsealer came. Shai had begun befriending those guards. Jokes in passing. Mentions of a coincidental similarity in her background and theirs. The Strikers weren’t supposed to talk to Shai, but weeks had passed without Shai doing anything more than poring through books and chatting with old arbiters. The guards were bored, and boredom made people easy to manipulate.

Shai had access to plenty of soulstone, and she would use it. However, often more elementary methods were of greater use. People always expected a Forger to use seals for everything. Grands told stories of dark witchcraft, of Forgers placing seals on a person’s feet while they slept, changing their personalities. Invading them, raping their minds.

The truth was that a soulstamp was often a Forger’s last resort. It was too easy to detect. Not that I wouldn’t give my right hand for my Essence Marks right now . . .

Almost, she was tempted to try carving a new Mark to use in getting away. They’d be expecting that, however, and she would have real trouble performing the hundreds of tests she’d need to do to make one work. Testing on her own arm would be reported by the guards, and testing on Gaotona would never work.

And using an Essence Mark she hadn’t tested . . . well, that could go very, very poorly. No, her plans for escape would use soulstamps, but their heart would involve more traditional methods of subterfuge.

Day Fifty-Eight

Shai was ready when Frava next visited.

The woman paused in the doorway, the guards shuffling out without objection as Captain Zu took their place. “You’ve been busy,” Frava noted.

Shai looked up from her research. Frava wasn’t referring to her progress, but to the room. Most recently, Shai had improved the floor. It hadn’t been difficult. The rock used to build the palace—the quarry, the dates, the stonemasons—all were matters of historic record.

“You like it?” Shai asked. “The marble works well with the hearth, I think.”

Frava turned, then blinked. “A hearth? Where did you . . . Is this room bigger than it was?”

“The storage room next door wasn’t being used,” Shai mumbled, turning back to her book. “And the division between these two rooms was recent, constructed only a few years back. I rewrote the construction so that this room was made the larger of the two, and so that a hearth was installed.”

Frava seemed stunned. “I wouldn’t have thought . . .” The woman looked back to Shai, and her face adopted its usual severe mask. “I find it difficult to believe that you are taking your duty seriously, Forger. You are here to make an emperor, not remodel the palace.”

“Carving soulstone relaxes me,” Shai said. “As does having a workspace that doesn’t remind me of a closet. You will have your emperor’s soul in time, Frava.”

The arbiter stalked through the room, inspecting the desk. “Then you have begun the emperor’s soulstone?”

“I’ve begun many of them,” Shai said. “It will be a complex process. I’ve tested well over a hundred stamps on Gaotona—”

“Arbiter Gaotona.”

“—on the old man. Each is only a tiny slice of the puzzle. Once I have all of the pieces working, I’ll recarve them in smaller, more delicate etchings. That will allow me to combine about a dozen test stamps into one final stamp.”

“But you said you’d tested over a hundred,” Frava said, frowning. “You’ll only use twelve of those in the end?”

Shai laughed. “Twelve? To Forge an entire soul? Hardly. The final stamp, the one you will need to use on the emperor each morning, will be like . . . a linchpin, or the keystone of an arch. It will be the only one that will need to be placed on his skin, but it will connect a lattice of hundreds of other stamps.”

Shai reached to the side, taking out her book of notes, including initial sketches of the final stamps. “I’ll take these and stamp them onto a metal plate, then link that to the stamp you will place on Ashravan each day. He’ll need to keep the plate close at all times.”

“He’ll need to carry a metal plate with him,” Frava said drily, “and he will need to be stamped each day? This will make it difficult for the man to live a normal life, don’t you think?”

“Being emperor makes it difficult for any man to live a normal life, I suspect. You will make it work. It’s customary for the plate to be designed as a piece of adornment. A large medallion, perhaps, or an upper arm bracer with square sides. If you look at my own Essence Marks, you’ll notice they were done in the same way, and that the box contains a plate for each one.” Shai hesitated. “That said, I’ve never done this exact thing before; no one has. There is a chance . . . and I’d say a fair one . . . that over time, the emperor’s brain will absorb the information. Like . . . like if you traced the exact same image on a stack of papers every day for a year, at the end the layers below will contain the image as well. Perhaps after a few years of being stamped, he won’t need the treatment any longer.”

“I still name it egregious.”

“Worse than being dead?” Shai asked.

Frava rested her hand on Shai’s book of notes and half-finished sketches. Then she picked it up. “I will have our scribes copy this.”

Shai stood up. “I need it.”

“I’m sure you do,” Frava said. “That is precisely why it should be copied, just in case.”

“Copying it will take too long.”

“I will have it back to you in a day,” Frava said lightly, stepping away. Shai reached for her, and Captain Zu stepped up, sword already half out of its sheath.

Frava turned to him. “Now, now, Captain. That won’t be needed. The Forger is protective of her work. That is good. It shows that she is invested.”

Shai and Zu locked gazes. He wants me dead, Shai thought. Badly. She’d figured him out by now. Guarding the palace was his duty, one that Shai had invaded by her theft. Zu hadn’t captured her; the Imperial Fool had turned her in. Zu felt insecure because of his failure, and so he wanted to remove Shai in retribution.

Shai eventually broke his gaze. Though it galled her, she needed to take the submissive side of this interaction. “Be careful,” she warned Frava. “Do not let them lose even a single page.”

“I will protect this as if . . . as if the emperor’s life depended on it.” Frava found her joke amusing, and she gave Shai a rare smile. “You have considered the other matter we discussed?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“Yes.”

Frava’s smile deepened. “We will talk again soon.”

Frava left with the book, nearly two months’ worth of work. Shai knew exactly what the woman was up to. Frava wasn’t going to have it copied—she was going to show it to her other Forger and see if it was far enough along for him to finish the job.

If he determined that it was, Shai would be executed, quietly, before the other arbiters could object. Zu would likely do it himself. It could all end here.

Day Fifty-Nine

Shai slept poorly that night.

She was certain that her preparations had been thorough. And yet now, she had to wait as if with a noose around her neck. It made her anxious. What if she’d misread the situation?

She had made her notations in the book intentionally opaque, each of them a subtle indication of just how enormous this project was. The cramped writing, the numerous cross-references, the lists and lists of reminders to herself of things to do . . . Each of these would work together with the thick book as a whole to indicate that her work was mind-breakingly complex.

It was a forgery. One of the most difficult types—a forgery that did not imitate a specific person or object. This was a forgery of tone.

Stay away, the tone of that book said. You don’t want to try to finish this. You want to let Shai continue to do the hard parts, because the work required to do it yourself would be enormous. And . . . if you fail . . . it will be your head on the line.

That book was one of the most subtle forgeries she’d ever created. Each word in it was true and yet a lie at the same time. Only a master Forger might see through it, might notice how hard she was working to illustrate the danger and difficulty of the project.

How skilled was Frava’s Forger?

Would Shai be dead before morning?

She didn’t sleep. She wanted to and she should have. Waiting out the hours, minutes, and seconds was excruciating. The thought of lying in bed asleep when they came for her . . . that was worse.

Eventually, she got up and retrieved some accounts of Ashravan’s life. The guards playing cards at her table gave her a glance. One even nodded with sympathy at her red eyes and tired posture. “Light too bright?” he asked, gesturing at the lamp.

“No,” Shai said. “Just a thought in my brain that won’t get out.”

She spent the night in bed pouring herself into Ashravan’s life. Frustrated to be lacking her notes, she got out a fresh sheet and began some new ones she’d add to her book when it returned. If it did.

She felt that she finally understood why Ashravan had abandoned his youthful optimism. At least, she knew the factors that had combined to lead him down that path. Corruption was part of it, but not the main part. Again, lack of self-confidence contributed, but hadn’t been the decisive factor.

No, Ashravan’s downfall had been life itself. Life in the palace, life as part of an empire that clicked along like a clock. Everything worked. Oh, it didn’t work as well as it might. But it did work.

Challenging that took effort, and effort was sometimes hard to muster. He had lived a life of leisure. Ashravan hadn’t been lazy, but it didn’t require laziness to be swept up in the workings of imperial bureaucracy—to tell yourself that next month you’d go and demand that your changes be made. Over time, it had become easier and easier to float along the course of the great river that was the Rose Empire.

In the end, he’d grown indulgent. He’d focused more on the beauty of his palace than on the lives of his subjects. He had allowed the arbiters to handle more and more government functions.

Shai sighed. Even that description of him was too simplistic. It neglected to mention who the emperor had been, and who he had become. A chronology of events didn’t speak of his temper, his fondness for debate, his eye for beauty, or his habit of writing terrible, terrible poetry and then expecting all who served him to tell him how wonderful it was.

It also didn’t speak of his arrogance, or his secret wish that he could have been something else. That was why he had gone back over his book again and again. Perhaps he had been looking for that branching point in his life where he had stepped down the wrong path.

He hadn’t understood. There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person’s life. People changed slowly, over time. You didn’t take one step, then find yourself in a completely new location. You first took a little step off a path to avoid some rocks. For a while, you walked alongside the path, but then you wandered out a little way to step on softer soil. Then you stopped paying attention as you drifted farther and farther away. Finally, you found yourself in the wrong city, wondering why the signs on the roadway hadn’t led you better.

The door to her room opened.

Shai bolted upright in her bed, nearly dropping her notes. They’d come for her.

But . . . no, it was morning already. Light trickled through the stained glass window, and the guards were standing up and stretching. The one who had opened the door was the Bloodsealer. He looked hungover again, and carried a stack of papers in his hand, as he often did.

He’s early this morning, Shai thought, checking her pocket watch. Why early today, when he’s late so often?

The Bloodsealer cut her and stamped the door without a word, causing the pain to burn in Shai’s arm. He hurried out of the room, as if off to some appointment. Shai stared after him, then shook her head.

A moment later, the door opened again and Frava entered.

“Oh, you’re up,” the woman said as the Strikers saluted her. Frava set Shai’s book down on the table with a thump. She seemed annoyed. “The scribes are done. Get back to work.”

Frava left in a bustle. Shai leaned back in her bed, sighing in relief. Her ruse had worked. That should earn her a few more weeks.

Day Seventy

“So this symbol,” Gaotona said, pointing at one of her sketches of the greater stamps she would soon carve, “is a time notation, indicating a moment specifically . . . seven years ago?”

“Yes,” Shai said, dusting off the end of a freshly carved soulstamp. “You learn quickly.”

“I am undergoing surgery each day, so to speak,” Gaotona said. “It makes me more comfortable to know the kinds of knives being used.”

“The changes aren’t—”

“Aren’t permanent,” he said. “Yes, so you keep saying.” He stretched out his arm for her to stamp. “However, it makes me wonder. One can cut the body, and it will heal—but do it over and over again in the same spot, and you will scar. The soul cannot be so different.”

“Except, of course, that it’s completely different,” Shai said, stamping his arm.

He had never quite forgiven her for what she had done in burning ShuXen’s masterpiece. She could see it in him, when they interacted. He was no longer just disappointed in her, he was angry at her.

Anger faded with time, and they had a functional working relationship again.

Gaotona cocked his head. “I . . . Now that is odd.”

“Odd in what way?” Shai asked, watching the seconds pass on her pocket watch.

“I remember encouraging myself to become emperor. And . . . and I resent myself. For . . . mother of light, is that really how he regarded me?”

The seal remained in place for fifty-seven seconds. Good enough. “Yes,” she said as the seal faded away. “I believe that is exactly how he regarded you.” She felt a thrill. Finally that seal had worked!

She was getting close now. Close to understanding the emperor, close to having the puzzle come together. Whenever she neared the end of a project—a painting, a large-scale soul Forgery, a sculpture—there came a moment in the process where she could see the entire work, even if it was far from finished. When that moment came, in her mind’s eye, the work was complete; actually finishing it was almost a formality.

She was nearly there with this project. The emperor’s soul spread out before her, with only some few corners still shadowed. She wanted to see it through; she longed to find out if she could make him live again. After reading so much about him, after coming to feel as if she knew him so well, she needed to finish.

Surely her escape could wait until then.

“That was it, wasn’t it?” Gaotona asked. “That was the stamp that you’ve tried a dozen times without success, the seal representing why he stood up to become emperor.”

“Yes,” Shai said.

“His relationship with me,” Gaotona said. “You made his decision depend upon his relationship with me, and . . . and the sense of shame he felt when speaking with me.”

“Yes.”

“And it took.”

“Yes.”

Gaotona sat back. “Mother of lights . . .” he whispered again.

Shai took the seal and put it with those that she had confirmed as workable.

Over the last few weeks, each of the other arbiters had done as Frava had, coming to Shai and offering her fantastic promises in exchange for giving them ultimate control of the emperor. Only Gaotona had never tried to bribe her. A genuine man, and one in the highest levels of imperial government no less. Remarkable. Using him was going to be far more difficult than she would have liked.

“I must say again,” she said, turning to him, “you’ve impressed me. I don’t think many Grands would take the time to study soulstamps. They would eschew what they considered evil without ever trying to understand it. You’ve changed your mind?”

“No,” Gaotona said. “I still think that what you do is, if not evil, then certainly unholy. And yet, who am I to speak? I am depending upon you to preserve us in power by means of this art we so freely call an abomination. Our hunger for power outweighs our conscience.”

“True for the others,” Shai said, “but that is not your personal motive.”

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“You just want Ashravan back,” Shai said. “You refuse to accept that you’ve lost him. You loved him as a son—the youth that you mentored, the emperor you always believed in, even when he didn’t believe in himself.”

Gaotona looked away, looking decidedly uncomfortable.

“It won’t be him,” Shai said. “Even if I succeed, it won’t truly be him. You realize this, of course.”

He nodded.

“But then . . . sometimes a clever Forgery is as good as the real thing,” Shai said. “You are of the Heritage Faction. You surround yourself with relics that aren’t truly relics, paintings that are imitations of ones long lost. I suppose having a fake relic for an emperor won’t be so different. And you . . . you just want to know that you’ve done everything you could. For him.”

“How do you do it?” Gaotona asked softly. “I’ve seen how you speak with the guards, how you learn even the names of the servants. You seem to know their family lives, their passions, what they do in the evenings . . . and yet you spend each day locked in this room. You haven’t left it for months. How do you know these things?”

“People,” Shai said, rising to fetch another seal, “by nature attempt to exercise power over what is around them. We build walls to shelter us from the wind, roofs to stop the rain. We tame the elements, bend nature to our wills. It makes us feel as if we’re in control.

“Except in doing so, we merely replace one influence with another. Instead of the wind affecting us, it is a wall. A man-made wall. The fingers of man’s influence are all about, touching everything. Man-made rugs, man-made food. Every single thing in the city that we touch, see, feel, experience comes as the result of some person’s influence.

“We may feel in control, but we never truly are unless we understand people. Controlling our environment is no longer about blocking the wind, it’s about knowing why the serving lady was crying last night, or why a particular guard always loses at cards. Or why your employer hired you in the first place.”

Gaotona looked back at her as she sat, then held out a seal to him. He hesitantly proffered an arm. “It occurs to me,” he said, “that even in our extreme care not to do so, we have underestimated you, woman.”

“Good,” she said. “You’re paying attention.” She stamped him. “Now tell me, why exactly do you hate fish?”

Day Seventy-Six

I need to do it, Shai thought as the Bloodsealer cut her arm. Today. I could go today.

Hidden in her other sleeve, she carried a slip of paper made to imitate the ones that the Bloodsealer often brought with him on the mornings that he came early.

She’d caught sight of a bit of wax on one of them two days back. They were letters. Realization had dawned. She’d been wrong about this man all along.

“Good news?” she asked him as he inked his stamp with her blood.

The white-lipped man gave her a sneering glance.

“From home,” Shai said. “The woman you’re writing, back in Dzhamar. She sent you a letter today? Post comes in the mornings here at the palace. They knock at your door, deliver a letter . . .” And that wakes you up, she added in her mind. That’s why you come on time those days. “You must miss her a lot if you can’t bear to leave her letter behind in your room.”

The man lowered his arm and grabbed Shai by the front of her shirt. “Leave her alone, witch,” he hissed. “You . . . you leave her alone! None of your trickery or magics!”

He was younger than she had assumed. That was a common mistake with Dzhamarians. Their white hair and skin made them seem ageless to outsiders. Shai should have known better. He was little more than a youth.

She drew her lips to a line. “You talk about my trickery and magics while holding in your hands a seal inked with my blood? You’re the one threatening to send skeletals to hunt me, friend. All I can do is polish the odd table.”

“Just . . . just . . . Ah!” The young man threw his hands up, then stamped the door.

The guards watched with nonchalant amusement and disapproval. Shai’s words had been a calculated reminder that she was harmless while the Bloodsealer was the truly unnatural one. The guards had spent nearly three months watching her tinker about as a friendly scholar while this man drew her blood and used it for arcane horrors.

I need to drop the paper, she thought to herself, lowering her sleeve, meaning to let her forgery slip out as the guards turned away. That would put her plan into motion, her escape . . .

The real Forgery isn’t finished yet. The emperor’s soul.

She hesitated. Foolishly, she hesitated.

The door closed.

The opportunity passed.

Feeling numb, Shai walked to her bed and sat down on its edge, the forged letter still hidden in her sleeve. Why had she hesitated? Were her instincts for self-preservation so weak?

I can wait a little longer, she told herself. Until Ashravan’s Essence Mark is done.

She’d been saying that for days now. Weeks, really. Each day she got closer to the deadline was another chance for Frava to strike. The woman came back with other excuses to take Shai’s notes and have them inspected. They were quickly approaching the point where the other Forger wouldn’t have to sort through much in order to finish Shai’s work.

At least, so he would think. The further she progressed, the more impossible she realized this project was. And the more she longed to make it work anyway.

She got out her book on the emperor’s life and soon found herself looking back through his youthful years. The thought of him not living again, of all of her work being merely a sham intended to distract while she planned to escape . . . those thoughts were physically painful.

Nights, Shai thought at herself. You’ve grown fond of him. You’re starting to see him like Gaotona does! She shouldn’t feel that way. She’d never met him. Besides, he was a despicable person.

But he hadn’t always been. No, in truth, he hadn’t ever truly become despicable. He had been more complex than that. Every person was. She could understand him, she could see—

“Nights!” she said, standing up and putting the book aside. She needed to clear her mind.

When Gaotona came to the room six hours later, Shai was just pressing a seal against the far wall. The elderly man opened the door and stepped in, then froze as the wall flooded with color.

Vine patterns spiraled out from Shai’s stamp like sprays of paint. Green, scarlet, amber. The painting grew like something alive, leaves springing from branches, bunches of fruit exploding in succulent bursts. Thicker and thicker the pattern grew, golden trim breaking out of nothing and running like streams, rimming leaves, reflecting light.

The mural deepened, every inch imbued with an illusion of movement. Curling vines, unexpected thorns peeking from behind branches. Gaotona breathed out in awe and stepped up beside Shai. Behind, Zu stepped in, and the other two guards left and closed the door.

Gaotona reached out and felt the wall, but of course the paint was dry. So far as the wall knew, it had been painted like this years ago. Gaotona knelt down, looking at the two seals Shai put at the base of the painting. Only the third one, stamped above, had set off the transformation; the early seals were notes on how the image was to be created. Guidelines, a revision of history, instructions.

“How?” Gaotona asked.

“One of the Strikers guarded Atsuko of Jindo during his visit to the Rose Palace,” Shai said. “Atsuko caught a sickness, and was stuck in his bedroom for three weeks. That was just one floor up.”

“Your Forgery puts him in this room instead?”

“Yes. That was before the water damage that seeped through the ceiling last year, so it’s plausible he’d have been placed here. The wall remembers Atsuko spending days too weak to leave, but having the strength for painting. A little each day, a growing pattern of vines, leaves, and berries. To pass the time.”

“This shouldn’t be taking,” Gaotona said. “This Forgery is tenuous. You’ve changed too much.”

“No,” Shai said. “It’s on the line . . . that line where the greatest beauty is found.” She put the seal away. She barely remembered the last six hours. She had been caught up in the frenzy of creation.

“Still . . .” Gaotona said.

“It will take,” Shai said. “If you were the wall, what would you rather be? Dreary and dull, or alive with paint?”

“Walls can’t think!”

“That doesn’t stop them from caring.”

Gaotona shook his head, muttering about superstition. “How long?”

“To create this soulstamp? I’ve been etching it here and there for the last month or so. It was the last thing I wanted to do for the room.”

“The artist was Jindoeese,” he said. “Perhaps, because you are from the same people, it . . . But no! That’s thinking like your superstition.” Gaotona shook his head, trying to figure out why that painting would have taken, though it had always been obvious to Shai that this one would work.

“The Jindoeese and my people are not the same, by the way,” Shai said testily. “We may have been related long ago, but we are completely different from them now.” Grands. Just because people had similar features, Grands assumed they were practically identical.

Gaotona looked across her chamber and its fine furniture that had been carved and polished. Its marble floor with silver inlay, the crackling hearth and small chandelier. A fine rug—it had once been a bed quilt with holes in it—covered the floor. The stained glass window sparkled on the right wall, lighting the beautiful mural.

The only thing that retained its original form was the door, thick but unremarkable. She couldn’t Forge that, not with that Bloodseal set into it.

“You realize that you now have the finest chamber in the palace,” Gaotona said.

“I doubt that,” Shai said with a sniff. “Surely the emperor’s are the nicest.”

“The largest, yes. Not the nicest.” He knelt beside the painting, looking at her seals at the bottom. “You included detailed explanations of how this was painted.”

“To create a realistic Forgery,” Shai said, “you must have the technical skill you are imitating, at least to an extent.”

“So you could have painted this wall yourself.”

“I don’t have the paints.”

“But you could have. You could have demanded paints. I’d have given them to you. Instead, you created a Forgery.”

“It’s what I am,” Shai said, growing annoyed at him again.

“It’s what you choose to be. If a wall can desire to be a mural, Wan ShaiLu, then you could desire to become a great painter.”

She slapped her stamp down on the table, then took a few deep breaths.

“You have a temper,” Gaotona said. “Like him. Actually, I know exactly how that feels now, because you have given it to me on several occasions. I wonder if this . . . thing you do could be a tool for helping to bring awareness to people. Inscribe your emotions onto a stamp, then let others feel what it is to be you . . .”

“Sounds great,” Shai said. “If only Forging souls weren’t a horrible offense to nature.”

“If only.”

“If you can read those stamps, you’ve grown very good indeed,” Shai said, pointedly changing the topic. “Almost I think you’ve been cheating.”

“Actually . . .”

Shai perked up, banishing her anger, now that it had passed the initial flare-up. What was this?

Gaotona sheepishly reached into the deep pocket of his robe and withdrew a wooden box. The one where she kept her treasures, the five Essence Marks. Those revisions of her soul could change her, in times of need, into someone she could have been.

Shai took a step forward, but when Gaotona opened the box, he revealed that the stamps weren’t inside. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I think giving you these now would be a little . . . foolish on my part. It seems that any one of them could have you free from your captivity in a moment.”

“Really only two of them could manage that,” Shai said sourly, fingers twitching. Those soulstamps represented over eight years of her life’s work. She’d started the first on the day she ended her apprenticeship.

“Hm, yes,” Gaotona said. Inside the small box lay sheets of metal inscribed with the separate smaller stamps that made up the blueprints of the revisions to her soul. “This one, I believe?” He held up one of the sheets. “Shaizan. Translated . . . Shai of the Fist? This would make a warrior out of you, if you stamped yourself?”

“Yes,” Shai said. So he’d been studying her Essence Marks; that was how he’d grown so good at reading her stamps.

“I understand only one tenth of what is inscribed here, if that,” Gaotona said. “What I find is impressive. Truly, these must have taken years to craft.”

“They are . . . precious to me,” Shai said, forcing herself to sit down at her desk and not fixate on the plates. If she could escape with those, she could craft a new stamp with ease. It would still take weeks, but most of her work would not be lost. But if those plates were to be destroyed . . .

Gaotona sat down in his customary chair, nonchalantly looking through the plates. From someone else, she would have felt an implied threat. Look what I hold in my hands; look what I could do to you. From Gaotona, however, that was not it. He was genuinely curious.

Or was he? As ever, she could not suppress her instincts. As good as she was, someone else could be better. Just as Uncle Won had warned. Could Gaotona have been playing her for a fool all along? She felt strongly she should trust her assessment of Gaotona. But if she was wrong, it could be a disaster.

It might be anyway, she thought. You should have run days ago.

“Turning yourself into a soldier I understand,” Gaotona said, setting aside the plate. “And this one as well. A woodsman and survivalist. That one looks extremely versatile. Impressive. And here we have a scholar. But why? You are already a scholar.”

“No woman can know everything,” Shai said. “There is only so much time for study. When I stamp myself with that Essence Mark, I can suddenly speak a dozen languages, from Fen to Mulla’dil—even a few from Sycla. I know dozens of different cultures and how to move in them. I know science, mathematics, and the major political factions of the world.”

“Ah,” Gaotona said.

Just give them to me, she thought.

“But what of this?” Gaotona said. “A beggar? Why would you want to be emaciated, and . . . is this showing that most of your hair would fall out, that your skin would become scarred?”

“It changes my appearance,” Shai said. “Drastically. That’s useful.” She didn’t mention that in that aspect, she knew the ways of the streets and survival in a city underworld. Her lock-picking skills weren’t too shabby when not bearing that seal, but with it, she was incomparable.

With that stamp on her, she could probably manage to climb out the tiny window—that Mark rewrote her past to give her years of experience as a contortionist—and climb the five stories down to freedom.

“I should have realized,” Gaotona said. He lifted the final plate. “That just leaves this one, most baffling of all.”

Shai said nothing.

“Cooking,” he said. “Farm work, sewing. Another alias, I assume. For imitating a simpler person?”

“Yes.”

Gaotona nodded, putting the sheet down.

Honesty. He must see my honesty. It cannot be faked.

“No,” Shai said, sighing.

He looked to her.

“It’s . . . my way out,” she said. “I’ll never use it. It’s just there, if I want to.”

“Way out?”

“If I ever use that,” Shai said, “it will write over my years as a Forger. Everything. I will forget how to make the simplest of stamps; I will forget that I was even apprenticed as a Forger. I will become something normal.”

“And you want that?”

“No.”

A pause.

“Yes. Maybe. A part of me does.”

Honesty. It was so difficult. Sometimes it was the only way.

She dreamed about that simple life, on occasion. In that morbid way that someone standing at the edge of a cliff wonders what it would be like to just jump off. The temptation is there, even if it’s ridiculous.

A normal life. No hiding, no lying. She loved what she did. She loved the thrill, the accomplishment, the wonder. But sometimes . . . trapped in a prison cell or running for her life . . . sometimes she dreamed of something else.

“Your aunt and uncle?” he asked. “Uncle Won, Aunt Sol, they are parts of this revision. I’ve read it in here.”

“They’re fake,” Shai whispered.

“But you quote them all the time.”

She squeezed her eyes shut.

“I suspect,” Gaotona said, “that a life full of lying makes reality and falsehood intermix. But if you were to use this stamp, surely you would not forget everything. How would you keep the sham from yourself?”

“It would be the greatest Forgery of all,” Shai said. “One intended to fool even me. Written into that is the belief that without that stamp, applied every morning, I’ll die. It includes a history of illness, of visiting a . . . resealer, as you call them. A healer that works in soulstamps. From them, my false self received a remedy, one I must apply each morning. Aunt Sol and Uncle Won would send me letters; that is part of the charade to fool myself. I’ve written them already. Hundreds, which—before I use the Essence Mark on myself—I will pay a delivery service good money to send periodically.”

“But what if you try to visit them?” Gaotona said. “To investigate your childhood . . .”

“It’s all in the plate. I will be afraid of travel. There’s truth to that, as I was indeed scared of leaving my village as a youth. Once that Mark is in place, I’ll stay away from cities. I’ll think the trip to visit my relatives is too dangerous. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll never use it.”

That stamp would end her. She would forget the last twenty years, back to when she was eight and had first begun inquiring about becoming a Forger.

She’d become someone else entirely. None of the other Essence Marks did that; they rewrote some of her past, but left her with a knowledge of who she truly was. Not so with the last one. That one was to be final. It terrified her.

“This is a great deal of work for something you’ll never use,” Gaotona said.

“Sometimes, that is the way of life.”

Gaotona shook his head.

“I was hired to destroy the painting,” Shai blurted out.

She wasn’t quite certain what drove her to say it. She needed to be honest with Gaotona—that was the only way her plan would work—but he didn’t need this piece. Did he?

Gaotona looked up.

“ShuXen hired me to destroy Frava’s painting,” Shai said. “That’s why I burned the masterpiece, rather than sneaking it out of the gallery.”

“ShuXen? But . . . he’s the original artist! Why would he hire you to destroy one of his works?”

“Because he hates the empire,” Shai said. “He painted that piece for a woman he loved. Her children gave it to the empire as a gift. ShuXen is old now, blind, barely able to move. He did not want to go to his grave knowing that one of his works was serving to glorify the Rose Empire. He begged me to burn it.”

Gaotona seemed dumbfounded. He looked at her, as if trying to pierce through to her soul. Shai didn’t know why he needed to bother; this conversation had already stripped her thoroughly bare.

“A master of his caliber is hard to imitate,” Shai said, “particularly without the original to work from. If you think about it, you’ll realize I needed his help to create those fakes. He gave me access to his studies and concepts; he told me how he’d gone about painting it. He coached me through the brush strokes.”

“Why not just have you return the original to him?” Gaotona asked.

“He’s dying,” Shai said. “Owning a thing is meaningless to him. That painting was done for a lover. She is gone now, so he felt the painting should be as well.”

“A priceless treasure,” Gaotona said. “Gone because of foolish pride.”

“It was his work!”

“Not any longer,” Gaotona said. “It belonged to everyone who saw it. You should not have agreed to this. Destroying a work of art like that is never right.” He hesitated. “But still, I think I can understand. What you did had a nobility to it. Your goal was the Moon Scepter. Exposing yourself to destroy that painting was dangerous.”

“ShuXen tutored me in painting as a youth,” she said. “I could not deny his request.”

Gaotona did not seem to agree, but he did seem to understand. Nights, but Shai felt exposed.

This is important to do, she told herself. And maybe . . .

But he did not give her the plates back. She hadn’t expected him to, not now. Not until their agreement was done—an agreement she was certain she would not live to see the end of, unless she escaped.

They worked through the last group of new stamps. Each one took for at least a minute, as she’d been almost certain they would. She had the vision now, the idea of the final soul as it would be. Once she finished the sixth stamp for the day, Gaotona waited for the next.

“That’s it,” Shai said.

“All for today?”

“All forever,” Shai said, tucking away the last of the stamps.

“You’re done?” Gaotona asked, sitting up straight. “Almost a month early! It’s—”

“I’m not done,” Shai said. “Now is the most difficult part. I have to carve those several hundred stamps in tiny detail, melding them together, then create a linchpin stamp. What I’ve done so far is like getting all of the paints ready, creating the color and figure studies. Now I have to put it all together. The last time I did this, it took the better part of five months.”

“And you have only twenty-four days.”

“And I have only twenty-four days,” Shai said, but felt an immediate stab of guilt. She had to run. Soon. She couldn’t wait to finish the project.

“Then I will leave you to it,” Gaotona said, standing and rolling down his sleeve.

Day Eighty-Five

Yes, Shai thought, scrambling along the side of her bed and rifling through her stack of papers there. The table wasn’t big enough. She’d pulled her sheets tight and turned the bed into a place to set all of her stacks. Yes, his first love was from the storybook. That was why . . . Kurshina’s red hair . . . But this would be subconscious. He wouldn’t know it. Embedded deeply, then.

How had she missed that? She wasn’t nearly as close to being done as she’d thought. There wasn’t time!

Shai added what she’d discovered to the seal she was working on, one that combined all of the various parts of Ashravan’s romantic inclinations and experiences. She included it all: the embarrassing, the shameful, the glorious. Everything she’d been able to discover, and then a little bit more, calculated risks to fill out the soul. A flirtatious encounter with a woman whose name Ashravan could not recall. Idle fancies. A near affair with a woman now dead.

This was the most difficult part of the soul for Shai to imitate, for it was the most private. Little an emperor did was ever truly secret, but Ashravan had not always been emperor.

She had to extrapolate, lest she leave the soul bare, without passion.

So private, so powerful. She felt closest to Ashravan as she teased out these details. Not as a voyeur; by this point, she was a part of him.

She kept two books now. The formal notes of her process said she was horribly behind; that book left out details. The other book was her true one, disguised as useless piles of notes, random and haphazard.

She really was behind, but not so far as her official documentation showed. Hopefully, that subterfuge would earn her a few extra days before Frava struck.

As Shai searched for a specific note, she ran across one of her lists for escape plans. She hesitated. First, deal with the seal on the door, the note read in cypher. Second, silence the guards. Third, recover your Essence Marks, if possible. Fourth, escape the palace. Fifth, escape the city.

She’d written further notes for the execution of each step. She wasn’t ignoring the escape, not completely. She had good plans.

Her frantic attempt to finish the soul, however, drew most of her attention. One more week, she told herself. If I take one more week, I will finish five days before the deadline. Then I can run.

Day Ninety-Seven

“Hey,” Hurli said, bending down. “What’s this?”

Hurli was a brawny Striker who acted dumber than he was. It let him win at cards. He had two children—girls, both under the age of five—but was seeing one of the women guards on the side. Hurli secretly wished he could have been a carpenter like his father. He also would have been horrified if he’d realized how much Shai knew about him.

He held up the sheet of paper he’d found on the ground. The Bloodsealer had just left. It was the morning of the ninety-sixth day of Shai’s captivity in the room, and she’d decided to put the plan into motion. She had to get out.

The emperor’s seal was not yet finished. Almost. One more night’s work, and she’d have it. Her plan required one more night of waiting anyway.

“Weedfingers must have dropped it,” Yil said, walking over. She was the other guard in the room this morning.

“What is it?” Shai asked from the desk.

“Letter,” Hurli said with a grunt.

Both guards fell silent as they read. Palace Strikers were all literate. It was required of any imperial civil servant of at least the second reed.

Shai sat quietly, tense, sipping a cup of lemon tea and forcing herself to breathe calmly. She made herself relax even though relaxing was the last thing she wanted to do. Shai knew the letter’s contents by heart. She’d written it, after all, then had dropped it covertly behind the Bloodsealer as he’d rushed out moments ago.

Brother, the letter read. I have almost completed my task here, and the wealth I have earned will rival even that of Azalec after his work in the Southern Provinces. The captive I secure is hardly worth the effort, but who am I to question the reasoning of people paying me far too much money?

I will return to you shortly. I am proud to say that my other mission here has been a success. I have identified several capable warriors, and have gathered sufficient samples from them. Hair, fingernails, and a few personal effects that will not be missed. I feel confident that we will have our personal guards very soon.

It went on, the writing covering both the front and the back, so that it didn’t look suspicious. Shai had padded it with a lot of talk about the palace, including things that others would assume that Shai didn’t know but that the Bloodsealer would.

Shai worried that the letter was too overt. Would the guards find it to be an obvious forgery?

“That KuNuKam,” Yil whispered, using a native word of theirs. It roughly translated as a man who had an anus for a mouth. “That imperial KuNuKam!”

Apparently, they believed it really was from him. Subtlety could be lost on soldiers.

“Can I see it?” Shai asked.

Hurli held it out to her. “Is he saying what I think?” the guard asked. “He’s been . . . gathering things from us?”

“It might not mean the Strikers,” Shai said after reading the letter. “He doesn’t say.”

“Why would he want hair?” Yil asked. “And fingernails?”

“They can do things with pieces of you,” Hurli said, then cursed again. “You see what he does each day on the door with Shai’s blood.”

“I don’t know if he could do much with hair or fingernails,” Shai said skeptically. “This is just bravado. Blood needs to be fresh, not more than a day old, for it to work in his stamps. He’s bragging to his brother.”

“He shouldn’t be doing things like that,” Hurli said.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shai said.

The other two shared looks. In a few minutes, the guard change occurred. Hurli and Yil left, muttering to one another, the letter shoved in Hurli’s pocket. They weren’t likely to hurt the Bloodsealer badly. Threaten him, yes.

The Bloodsealer was known to frequent teahouses in the area each evening. Almost she felt sorry for the man. She had deduced that when he got news from home, he was quick and punctual to her door. He sometimes looked excited. When he didn’t get news, he drank. This morning, he had looked sad. No news in a while, then.

What happened to him tonight would not make his day any better. Yes, Shai almost felt sorry for him, but then she remembered the seal on the door and the bandage she’d tied on her arm after he’d drawn blood today.

As soon as the guard change was accomplished, Shai took a deep breath, then dug back into her work.

Tonight. Tonight, she would finish.

Day Ninety-Eight

Shai knelt on the floor amid a pattern of scattered pages, each filled with cramped script or drawings of seals. Behind her, morning opened her eyes, and sunlight seeped through the stained glass window, spraying the room with crimson, blue, violet.

A single soulstamp, carved from polished stone, rested facedown on a metal plate sitting before her. Soulstone, as a rock, looked not unlike soapstone or another fine-grained stone, but with bits of red mixed in. As if drops of blood had stained it.

Shai blinked tired eyes. Was she really going to try to escape? She’d had . . . what? Four hours of sleep in the last three days combined?

Surely escape could wait. Surely she could rest, just for today.

Rest, she thought numbly, and I will not wake.

She remained in place, kneeling. That stamp seemed the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Her ancestors had worshipped rocks that fell from the sky at night. The souls of broken gods, those chunks had been called. Master craftsmen would carve them to bring out the shape. Once, Shai had found that foolish. Why worship something you yourself created?

Kneeling before her masterpiece, she understood. She felt as if she’d bled everything into that stamp. She had pressed two years’ worth of effort into three months, then had topped it off with a night of desperate, frantic carving. During that night, she’d made changes to her notes, to the soul itself. Drastic changes. She still didn’t know if they had been provoked by her final, awesome vision of the project as a whole . . . or if those changes had instead been faulty ideas born of fatigue and delusion.

She wouldn’t know until the stamp was used.

“Is it . . . is it done?” asked one of her guards. The two of them had moved to the far edge of the room, to sit beside the hearth and give her room on the floor. She vaguely remembered shoving aside the furniture. She’d spent part of the time pulling stacks of paper out from their place beneath the bed, then crawling under to fetch others.

Was it done?

Shai nodded.

“What is it?” the guard asked.

Nights, she thought. That’s right. They don’t even know. The common guards left each day during her conversations with Gaotona.

The poor Strikers would probably find themselves assigned to some remote outpost of the empire for the rest of their lives, guarding the passes leading down to the distant Teoish Peninsula or the like. They would be quietly brushed under the rug to keep them from revealing, even accidentally, anything of what had happened here.

“Ask Gaotona if you want to know,” Shai said softly. “I am not allowed to say.”

Shai reverently picked up the seal, then placed both it and its plate inside a box she had prepared. The stamp nestled in red velvet, the plate—shaped like a large, thin medallion—in an indentation underneath the lid. She closed the lid, then pulled over a second, slightly larger box. Inside lay five seals, carved and prepared for her upcoming escape. If she managed it. Two of them she’d already used.

If she could just sleep for a few hours. Just a few . . .

No. I can’t use the bed anyway.

Curling up on the floor sounded wonderful, however.

The door began to open. Shai felt a sudden, striking moment of panic. Was it the Bloodsealer? He was supposed to be stuck in bed, having drunk himself to a stupor after being roughed up by the Strikers!

For a moment, she felt a strange guilty sense of relief. If the Bloodsealer had come, she wouldn’t have a chance to escape today. She could sleep. Had Hurli and Yil not thrashed him? Shai had been sure that she’d read them correctly, and . . .

. . . and, in her fatigue, she realized she’d been jumping to conclusions. The door opened all the way, and someone did enter, but it was not the Bloodsealer.

It was Captain Zu.

“Out,” he barked at the two guards.

They jumped into motion.

“In fact,” Zu said, “you’re relieved for the day. I’ll watch until the shift changes.”

The two saluted and left. Shai felt like a wounded elk being abandoned by the herd. The door clicked closed, and Zu slowly, deliberately, turned to look at her.

“The stamp isn’t ready yet,” Shai lied. “So you can—”

“It doesn’t need to be ready,” Zu said, smiling a wide, thick-lipped smile. “I believe I promised you something three months ago, thief. We have an . . . unsettled debt.”

The room was dim, her lamp having burned low and morning only just breaking. Shai backed away from him, quickly revising her plans. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She couldn’t fight Zu.

Her mouth kept moving, keeping him distracted but also playing a part she devised for herself on the fly. “When Frava finds out you came here,” Shai said, “she will be furious.”

Zu drew his sword.

“Nights!” Shai said, backing up to her bed. “Zu, you don’t need to do this. You can’t do this. I have work that needs to be done!”

“Another will complete your work,” Zu said, leering. “Frava has another Forger. You think you’re so clever. You probably have some wonderful escape planned for tomorrow. This time, we’re striking first. You didn’t anticipate this, did you, liar? I’m going to enjoy killing you. Enjoy it so much.”

He lunged with the sword, its tip catching her blouse and ripping a line through it at her side. Shai jumped away, shouting for help. She was still playing the part, but it did not require acting. Her heart thumped, panic rising, as she rounded the bed in a scramble, putting it between herself and Zu.

He smiled broadly, then jumped for her, leaping onto the bed.

It promptly collapsed. During the night, while crawling under the bed to get her notes, she had Forged the wood of the frame to have deep flaws, attacked by insects, making it fragile. She’d cut the mattress underneath in wide slashes.

Zu barely had time to shout as the bed broke completely away, crashing into the pit she’d opened in the floor below. The water damage to her room—the mildew she’d smelled when first entering—had been key. By reports, the wooden beams above would have rotted and the ceiling would have fallen in if they hadn’t located the leak as quickly as they had. A simple Forgery, very plausible, made it so that the floor had fallen in.

Zu crashed into the empty storage room one story down. Shai stood puffing, then peered into the hole. The man lay among the broken remnants of the bed. Some of that had been stuffing and cushioning. He would probably live—she’d been intending this trap for one of the regular guards, of whom she was fond.

Not exactly how I planned it, she thought, but workable.

Shai rushed to the table and gathered her things. The box of stamps, the emperor’s soul, some extra soulstone and ink. And the two books explaining the stamps she had created in deep complexity—the official one, and the true one.

She tossed the official one into the hearth as she passed. Then she stopped in front of the door, counting heartbeats.

She agonized, watching the Bloodsealer’s mark as it pulsed. Finally, after a few tormenting minutes, the seal on the door flashed one last time . . . then faded. The Bloodsealer had not returned in time to renew it.

Freedom.

Shai burst out into the hallway, abandoning her home of the last three months, a room now trimmed in gold and silver. The hallway outside had been so near, yet it felt like another country entirely. She pressed the third of her prepared stamps against her buttoned blouse, changing it to match that of the palace servants, with official insignia embroidered on the left breast.

She had little time to make her next move. Soon, either the Bloodsealer would make his way to her room, Zu would wake from his fall, or the guards would arrive for the shift change. Shai wanted to run down the hallway, breaking for the palace stables.

She did not. Running implied one of two things—guilt or an important task. Either would be memorable. Instead, she kept her gait to a swift walk and adopted the expression of one who knew what she was doing, and so should not be interrupted.

She soon entered the better-used sections of the enormous palace. No one stopped her. At a certain carpeted intersection, she stopped herself.

To the right, down a long hallway, lay the entrance to the emperor’s chambers. The seal she carried in her right hand, boxed and cushioned, seemed to leap in her fingers. Why hadn’t she left it in the room for Gaotona to discover? The arbiters would hunt her less assiduously if they had the seal.

She could just leave it here, in this hallway lined with portraits of ancient rulers and cluttered with Forged urns from ancient eras.

No. She had brought it with her for a reason. She’d prepared tools to get into the emperor’s chambers. She’d known all along this was what she would do.

If she left now, she’d never truly know if the seal worked. That would be like building a house, then never stepping inside. Like forging a sword, and never giving it a swing. Like crafting a masterpiece of art, then locking it away to never be seen again.

Shai started down the long hallway.

As soon as no one was directly in sight, she turned over one of those horrid urns and broke the seal on the bottom. It transformed back into a blank clay version of itself.

She’d had plenty of time to find out exactly where these urns were crafted and by whom. The fourth of her prepared stamps transformed the urn into a replica of an ornate golden chamber pot. Shai strode down the hallway to the emperor’s quarters, then nodded to the guards, chamber pot under her arm.

“I don’t recognize you,” one guard said. She didn’t recognize him either, with that scarred face and squinty look. As she’d expected. The guards set to watching her had been kept separate from the others so they couldn’t talk about their duties.

“Oh,” Shai said, fumbling, looking abashed. “I am sorry, greater one. I was only assigned this task this morning.” She blushed, fishing out of her pocket a small square of thick paper, marked with Gaotona’s seal and signature. She had forged both the old-fashioned way. Very convenient, how he’d let her tell him how to maintain security on the emperor’s rooms.

She got through without any further difficulty. The next three rooms of the emperor’s expansive chambers were empty. Beyond them was a locked door. She had to Forge the wood of that door into some that had been damaged by insects—using the same stamp she’d used on her bed—to get through. It didn’t take for long, but a few seconds was enough for her to kick the door open.

Inside, she found the emperor’s bedroom. It was the same place she’d been led on that first day when she’d been offered this chance. The room was empty save for him, lying in that bed. He was awake, but stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

The room was still. Quiet. It smelled . . . too clean. Too white. Like a blank canvas.

Shai walked up to the side of the bed. Ashravan didn’t look at her. His eyes didn’t move. She rested fingers on his shoulder. He had a handsome face, though he was some fifteen years her senior. That was not much for a Grand; they lived longer than most.

His was a strong face, despite his long time abed. Golden hair, a firm chin, a nose that was prominent. So different in features from Shai’s people.

“I know your soul,” Shai said softly. “I know it better than you ever did.”

No alarm yet. Shai continued to expect one any moment, but she knelt down beside the bed anyway. “I wish that I could know you. Not your soul, but you. I’ve read about you; I’ve seen into your heart. I’ve rebuilt your soul, as best I could. But that isn’t the same. It isn’t knowing someone, is it? That’s knowing about someone.”

Was that a cry outside, from a distant part of the palace?

“I don’t ask much of you,” she said softly. “Just that you live. Just that you be. I’ve done what I can. Let it be enough.”

She took a deep breath, then opened the box and took out his Essence Mark. She inked it, then pulled up his shirt, exposing the upper arm.

Shai hesitated, then pressed the stamp down. It hit flesh, and stayed frozen for a moment, as stamps always did. The skin and muscle didn’t give way until a second later, when the stamp sank a fraction of an inch.

She twisted the stamp, locking it in, and pulled it back. The bright red seal glowed faintly.

Ashravan blinked.

Shai rose and stepped back as he sat up and looked around. Silently, she counted.

“My rooms,” Ashravan said. “What happened? There was an attack. I was . . . I was wounded. Oh, mother of lights. Kurshina. She’s dead.”

His face became a mask of grief, but he covered it a second later. He was emperor. He might have a temper, but so long as he was not enraged, he was good at covering what he felt. He turned to her, and living eyes—eyes that saw—focused on her. “Who are you?”

The question twisted her insides, for all the fact that she’d expected it.

“I’m a kind of surgeon,” Shai said. “You were wounded badly. I have healed you. However, what I used to do so is considered . . . unsavory by some parts of your culture.”

“You’re a resealer,” he said. “A . . . a Forger?”

“In a way,” Shai said. He would believe that because he wanted to. “This was a difficult type of resealing. You will have to be stamped each day, and you must keep that metal plate—the one shaped like a disc in that box—with you at all times. Without these, you die, Ashravan.”

“Give it to me,” he said, holding his hand out for the stamp.

She hesitated. She wasn’t certain why.

“Give it to me,” he said, more forceful.

She placed the stamp in his hand.

“Don’t tell anyone what has happened here,” she said to him. “Neither guards nor servants. Only your arbiters know of what I have done.”

The cries outside sounded louder. Ashravan looked toward them. “If no one is to know,” he said, “you must go. Leave this place and do not return.” He looked down at the seal. “I should probably have you killed for knowing my secret.”

That was the selfishness he’d learned during his years in the palace. Yes, she’d gotten that right.

“But you won’t,” she said.

“I won’t.”

And there was the mercy, buried deeply.

“Go before I change my mind,” he said.

She took one step toward the doorway, then checked her pocket watch—well over a minute. The stamp had taken, at least for the short term. She turned and looked at him.

“What are you waiting for?” he demanded.

“I just wanted one more glimpse,” she said.

He frowned.

The shouts grew even louder.

“Go,” he said. “Please.” He seemed to know what those shouts were about, or at least he could guess.

“Do better this time,” Shai said. “Please.”

With that, she fled.

She had been tempted, for a time, to write into him a desire to protect her. There would have been no good reason for it, at least in his eyes, and it might have undermined the entire Forgery. Beyond that, she didn’t believe that he could save her. Until his period of mourning was through, he could not leave his quarters or speak to anyone other than his arbiters. During that time, the arbiters ran the empire.

They practically ran it anyway. No, a hasty revision of Ashravan’s soul to protect her would not have worked. Near the last door out, Shai picked up her fake chamber pot. She hefted it, then stumbled through the doors. She gasped audibly at the distant cries.

“Is that about me?” Shai cried. “Nights! I didn’t mean it! I know I wasn’t supposed to see him. I know he’s in seclusion, but I opened the wrong door!”

The guards stared at her, then one relaxed. “It isn’t you. Find your quarters and stay there.”

Shai bobbed a bow and hastened away. Most of the guards didn’t know her, and so—

She felt a sharp pain at her side. She gasped. That pain felt like it did each morning, when the Bloodsealer stamped the door.

Panicked, Shai felt at her side. The cut in her blouse—where Zu had slashed her with his sword—had gone all the way through her dark undershirt! When her fingers came back, they had a couple of drops of blood on them. Just a nick, nothing dangerous. In the scramble, she hadn’t even noticed she’d been cut.

But the tip of Zu’s sword . . . it had her blood on it. Fresh blood. The Bloodsealer had found that and had begun the hunt. That pain meant he was locating her, was attuning his pets to her.

Shai tossed the urn aside and started running.

Staying hidden was no longer a consideration. Remaining unremarkable was pointless. If the Bloodsealer’s skeletals reached her, she’d die. That was it. She had to reach a horse soon, then stay ahead of the skeletals for twenty-four hours, until her blood grew stale.

Shai dashed through the hallways. Servants began pointing, others screamed. She almost bowled over a southern ambassador in red priest’s armor.

Shai cursed, bolting around the man. The palace exits would be locked down by now. She knew that. She’d studied the security. Getting out would be nearly impossible.

Always have a backup, Uncle Won said.

She always did.

Shai stopped in the hallway, and determined—as she should have earlier—that running for the exits was pointless. She was in a near panic, with the Bloodsealer on her trail, but she had to think clearly.

Backup plan. Hers was a desperate one, but it was all she had. She started running again, skidding around a corner, doubling back the way she’d just come.

Nights, let me have guessed right about him, she thought. If he’s secretly a master charlatan beyond my skill, I am doomed. Oh, Unknown God, please. This time, let me be right.

Heart racing, fatigue forgotten in the moment, she eventually skidded to a stop in the hallway leading to the emperor’s rooms.

There she waited. The guards inspected her, frowning, but held their posts at the end of the hallway as they’d been trained. They called to her. It was hard to keep from moving. That Bloodsealer was getting closer and closer with his horrible pets . . .

“Why are you here?” a voice said.

Shai turned as Gaotona stepped into the hallway. He’d come for the emperor first. The others would search for Shai, but Gaotona would come for the emperor, to be certain he was safe.

Shai stepped up to him, anxious. This, she thought, is probably my worst idea ever for a backup plan.

“It worked,” she said softly.

“You tried the stamp?” Gaotona said, taking her arm and glancing at the guards, then pulling her aside well out of earshot. “Of all the hasty, insane, foolish—”

“It worked, Gaotona,” Shai said.

“Why did you come to him? Why not run while you had the chance?”

“I had to know. I had to.”

He looked at her, meeting her eyes. Seeing through them, into her soul, as he always did. Nights, but he would have made a wonderful Forger.

“The Bloodsealer has your trail,” Gaotona said. “He has summoned those . . . things to catch you.”

“I know.”

Gaotona hesitated for only a moment, then brought out a wooden box from his voluminous pockets. Shai’s heart leaped.

He handed it toward her, and she took it with one hand, but he did not let go. “You knew I’d come here,” Gaotona said. “You knew I’d have these, and that I’d give them to you. I’ve been played for a fool.”

Shai said nothing.

“How did you do it?” he asked. “I thought I watched you carefully. I was certain I had not been manipulated. And yet I ran here, half knowing I’d find you. Knowing you’d need these. I still didn’t realize until this very moment that you’d probably planned all of this.”

“I did manipulate you, Gaotona,” she admitted. “But I had to do it in the most difficult way possible.”

“Which was?”

“By being genuine,” she replied.

“You can’t manipulate people by being genuine.”

“You can’t?” Shai asked. “Is that not how you’ve made your entire career? Speaking honestly, teaching people what to expect of you, then expecting them to be honest to you in return?”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not. But it was the best I could manage. Everything I’ve said to you is true, Gaotona. The painting I destroyed, the secrets about my life and desires . . . Being genuine. It was the only way to get you on my side.”

“I’m not on your side.” He paused. “But I don’t want you killed either, girl. Particularly not by those things. Take these. Days! Take them and go, before I change my mind.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, pulling the box to her breast. She fished in her skirt pocket and brought out a small, thick book. “Keep this safe,” she said. “Show it to no one.”

He took it hesitantly. “What is it?”

“The truth,” she said, then leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. “If I escape, I will change my final Essence Mark. The one I never intend to use . . . I will add to it, and to my memories, a kindly grandfather who saved my life. A man of wisdom and compassion whom I respected very much.”

“Go, fool girl,” he said. He actually had a tear in his eye. If she hadn’t been on the very edge of panic, she’d have felt proud of that. And ashamed of her pride. That was how she was.

“Ashravan lives,” she said. “When you think of me, remember that. It worked. Nights, it worked!”

She left him, dashing down the corridor.

Gaotona listened to the girl go, but did not turn to watch her flee. He stared at that door to the emperor’s chambers. Two confused guards, and a passage into . . . what?

The future of the Rose Empire.

We will be led by someone not truly alive, Gaotona thought. The fruits of our foul labors.

He took a deep breath, then walked past the guards and pushed open the doors to go and look upon the thing he had wrought.

Just . . . please, let it not be a monster.

Shai strode down the palace hallway, holding the box of seals. She ripped off her buttoned blouse—revealing the tight, black cotton shirt she wore underneath—and tucked it into her pocket. She left on her skirt and the leggings beneath. It wasn’t so different from the clothing she’d trained in.

Servants scattered around her. They knew, just from her posture, to get out of the way. Suddenly, Shai felt more confident than she had in years.

She had her soul back. All of it.

She took out one of her Essence Marks as she walked. She inked it with bold strikes and returned the box of seals to her skirt pocket. Then, she slammed the seal against her right bicep and locked it into place, rewriting her history, her memories, her life experience.

In that fraction of a moment, she remembered both histories. She remembered two years spent locked away, planning, creating the Essence Mark. She remembered a lifetime of being a Forger.

At the same time, she remembered spending the last fifteen years among the Teullu people. They had adopted her and trained her in their martial arts.

Two places at once, two timelines at once.

Then the former faded, and she became Shaizan, the name the Teullu had given her. Her body became leaner, harder. The body of a warrior. She slipped off her spectacles. Her eyes had been healed long ago, and she didn’t need those any longer.

Gaining access to the Teullu training had been difficult; they did not like outsiders. She’d nearly been killed by them a dozen different times during her year training. But she had succeeded.

She lost all knowledge of how to create stamps, all sense of scholarly inclination. She was still herself, and she remembered her immediate past—being captured, forced to sit in that cell. She retained knowledge—logically—of what she’d just done with the stamp to her arm, and knew that the life she now remembered was fake.

But she didn’t feel that it was. As that seal burned on her arm, she became the version of herself that would have existed if she’d been adopted by a harsh warrior culture and lived among them for well over a decade.

She kicked off her shoes. Her hair shortened; a scar stretched from her nose down around her right cheek. She walked like a warrior, prowling instead of striding.

She reached the servants’ section of the palace just before the stables, the Imperial Gallery to her left.

A door opened in front of her. Zu, tall and wide-lipped, pushed through. He had a gash on his forehead—blood seeped through the bandage there—and his clothing had been torn by his fall.

He had a tempest in his eyes. He sneered as he saw her. “You’ve done it now. The Bloodsealer led us right to you. I’m going to enjoy—”

He cut off as Shaizan stepped forward in a blur and smacked the heel of her hand against his wrist, breaking it, knocking the sword from his fingers. She snapped her hand upward, chopping him in the throat. Then she curled her fingers into a fist and placed a tight, short, full-knuckled punch into his chest. Six ribs shattered.

Zu stumbled backward, gasping, eyes wide with absolute shock. His sword clanged to the ground. Shaizan stepped past him, pulling his knife from his belt and whipping it up to cut the tie on his cloak.

Zu toppled to the floor, leaving the cloak in her fingers.

Shai might have said something to him. Shaizan didn’t have the patience for witticisms or gibes. A warrior kept moving, like a river. She didn’t break stride as she whipped the cloak around and entered the hallway behind Zu.

He gasped for breath. He’d live, but he wouldn’t hold a sword again for months.

Movement came from the end of the hallway: white-limbed creatures, too thin to be alive. Shaizan prepared herself with a wide stance, body turned to the side, facing down the hallway, knees slightly bent. It did not matter how many monstrosities the Bloodsealer had; it did not matter if she won or lost.

The challenge mattered. That was all.

There were five, in the shape of men with swords. They scrambled down the hall, bones clattering, eyeless skulls regarding her without expression beyond that of their ever-grinning, pointed teeth. Some bits of the skeletals had been replaced by wooden carvings to fix bones that had broken in battle. Each creature bore a glowing red seal on its forehead; blood was required to give them life.

Even Shaizan had never fought monsters like this before. Stabbing them would be useless. But those bits that had been replaced . . . some were pieces of rib or other bones the skeletals shouldn’t need to fight. So if bones were broken or removed, would the creature stop working?

It seemed her best chance. She did not consider further. Shaizan was a creature of instinct. As the things reached her, she whipped Zu’s cloak around and tossed it over the head of the first one. It thrashed, striking at the cloak as she engaged the second creature.

She caught its attack on the blade of Zu’s dagger, then stepped up so close she could smell its bones, and reached in just below the thing’s rib cage. She grabbed the spine and yanked, pulling free a handful of vertebrae, the tip of the sternum cutting her forearm. All of the bones of each skeletal seemed to be sharpened.

It collapsed, bones clattering. She was right. With the pivotal bones removed, the thing could no longer animate. Shaizan tossed the handful of vertebrae aside.

That left four of them. From what little she knew, skeletals did not tire and were relentless. She had to be quick, or they would overwhelm her.

The three behind attacked her; Shaizan ducked away, getting around the first one as it pulled off the cloak. She grabbed its skull by the eye sockets, earning a deep cut in the arm from its sword as she did so. Her blood sprayed against the wall as she yanked the skull free; the rest of the creature’s body dropped to the ground in a heap.

Keep moving. Don’t slow.

If she slowed, she died.

She spun on the other three, using the skull to block one sword strike and the dagger to deflect another. She skirted around the third, and it scored her side.

She could not feel pain. She’d trained herself to ignore it in battle. That was good, because that one would have hurt.

She smashed the skull into the head of another skeletal, shattering both. It dropped, and Shaizan spun between the other two. Their backhand strikes clanged against one another. Shaizan’s kick sent one of them stumbling back, and she rammed her body against the other, crushing it up against the wall. The bones pushed together, and she got hold of the spine, then yanked free some of the vertebrae.

The creature’s bones fell with a racket. Shaizan wavered as she righted herself. Too much blood lost. She was slowing. When had she dropped the dagger? It must have slipped from her fingers as she slammed the creature against the wall.

Focus. One left.

It charged her, a sword in each hand. She heaved herself forward—getting inside its reach before it could swing—and grabbed its forearm bones. She couldn’t pull them free, not from that angle. She grunted, keeping the swords at bay. Barely. She was weakening.

It pressed closer. Shaizan growled, blood flowing freely from her arm and side.

She head-butted the thing.

That worked worse in real life than it did in stories. Shaizan’s vision dimmed and she slipped to her knees, gasping. The skeletal fell before her, cracked skull rolling free from the force of the blow. Blood dripped down the side of her face. She’d split her forehead, perhaps cracked her own skull.

She fell to her side and fought for consciousness.

Slowly, the darkness retreated.

Shaizan found herself amid scattered bones in an otherwise empty hallway of stone. The only color was that of her blood.

She had won. Another challenge met. She howled a chant of her adopted family, then retrieved her dagger and cut off pieces of her blouse. She used them to bind her wounds. The blood loss was bad. Even a woman with her training would not be meeting any further challenges today. Not if they required strength.

She managed to rise and retrieve Zu’s cloak—still immobilized by pain, he watched her with amazed eyes. She gathered all five skulls of the Bloodsealer’s pets and tied them in the cloak.

That done, she continued down the hallway, trying to project strength—not the fatigue, dizziness, and pain she actually felt.

He will be here somewhere . . .

She yanked open a storage closet at the end of the hall and found the Bloodsealer on the floor inside, eyes glazed by the shock of having his pets destroyed in rapid succession.

Shaizan grabbed the front of his shirt and hauled him to his feet. The move almost made her pass out again. Careful.

The Bloodsealer whimpered.

“Go back to your swamp,” Shaizan growled softly. “The one waiting for you doesn’t care that you’re in the capital, that you’re making so much money, that you’re doing it all for her. She wants you home. That’s why her letters are worded as they are.”

Shaizan said that part for Shai, who would feel guilty if she did not.

The man looked at her, confused. “How do you . . . Ahhrgh!”

He said the last part as Shaizan rammed her dagger into his leg. He collapsed as she released his shirt.

“That,” Shaizan said to him softly, leaning down, “is so that I have some of your blood. Do not hunt me. You saw what I did to your pets. I will do worse to you. I’m taking the skulls, so you cannot send them for me again. Go. Back. Home.”

He nodded weakly. She left him in a heap, cowering and holding his bleeding leg. The arrival of the skeletals had driven everyone else away, including guards. Shaizan stalked toward the stables, then stopped, thinking of something. It wasn’t too far off . . .

You’re nearly dead from these wounds, she told herself. Don’t be a fool.

She decided to be a fool anyway.

A short time later, Shaizan entered the stables and found only a couple of frightened stable hands there. She chose the most distinctive mount in the stables. So it was that—wearing Zu’s cloak and hunkered down on his horse—Shaizan was able to gallop out of the palace gates, and not a man or woman tried to stop her.

“Was she telling the truth, Gaotona?” Ashravan asked, regarding himself in the mirror.

Gaotona looked up from where he sat. Was she? he thought to himself. He could never tell with Shai.

Ashravan had insisted upon dressing himself, though he was obviously weak from his long stay in bed. Gaotona sat on a stool nearby, trying to sort through a deluge of emotions.

“Gaotona?” Ashravan asked, turning to him. “I was wounded, as that woman said? You went to a Forger to heal me, rather than our trained resealers?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The expressions, Gaotona thought. How did she get those right? The way he frowns just before asking a question? The way he cocks his head when not answered immediately. The way he stands, the way he waves his fingers when he’s saying something he thinks is particularly important . . .

“A MaiPon Forger,” the emperor said, pulling on his golden coat. “I hardly think that was necessary.”

“Your wounds were beyond the skill of our resealers.”

“I thought nothing was beyond them.”

“We did as well.”

The emperor regarded the red seal on his arm. His expression tightened. “This will be a manacle, Gaotona. A weight.”

“You will suffer it.”

Ashravan turned toward him. “I see that the near death of your liege has not made you any more respectful, old man.”

“I have been tired lately, Your Majesty.”

“You’re judging me,” Ashravan said, looking back at the mirror. “You always do. Days alight! One day I will rid myself of you. You realize that, don’t you? It’s only because of past service that I even consider keeping you around.”

It was uncanny. This was Ashravan; a Forgery so keen, so perfect, that Gaotona would never have guessed the truth if he hadn’t already known. He wanted to believe that the emperor’s soul had still been there, in his body, and that the seal had simply . . . uncovered it.

That would be a convenient lie to tell himself. Perhaps Gaotona would start believing it eventually. Unfortunately, he had seen the emperor’s eyes before, and he knew . . . he knew what Shai had done.

“I will go to the other arbiters, Your Majesty,” Gaotona said, standing. “They will wish to see you.”

“Very well. You are dismissed.”

Gaotona walked toward the door.

“Gaotona.”

He turned.

“Three months in bed,” the emperor said, regarding himself in the mirror, “with no one allowed to see me. The resealers couldn’t do anything. They can fix any normal wound. It was something to do with my mind, wasn’t it?”

He wasn’t supposed to figure that out, Gaotona thought. She said she wasn’t going to write it into him.

But Ashravan had been a clever man. Beneath it all, he had always been clever. Shai had restored him, and she couldn’t keep him from thinking.

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Gaotona said.

Ashravan grunted. “You are fortunate your gambit worked. You could have ruined my ability to think—you could have sold my soul itself. I’m not sure if I should punish you or reward you for taking that risk.”

“I assure you, Your Majesty,” Gaotona said as he left, “I have given myself both great rewards and great punishments during these last few months.”

He left then, letting the emperor stare at himself in the mirror and consider the implications of what had been done.

For better or worse, they had their emperor back.

Or, at least, a copy of him.

Epilogue: Day One Hundred and One

“And so I hope,” Ashravan said to the assembled arbiters of the eighty factions, “that I have laid to rest certain pernicious rumors. Exaggerations of my illness were, obviously, wishful fancy. We have yet to discover who sent the assassins, but the murder of the empress is not something that will go ignored.” He looked over the arbiters. “Nor will it go unanswered.”

Frava folded her arms, watching the copy with satisfaction, but also displeasure. What back doors did you put into his mind, little thief? Frava wondered. We will find them.

Nyen was already inspecting copies of the seals. The Forger claimed that he could retroactively decrypt them, though it would take time. Perhaps years. Still, Frava would eventually know how to control the emperor.

Destroying the notes had been clever on the girl’s part. Had she guessed, somehow, that Frava wasn’t really making copies? Frava shook her head and stepped up beside Gaotona, who sat in their box of the Theater of Address. She sat down beside him, speaking very softly. “They are accepting it.”

Gaotona nodded, his eyes on the fake emperor. “There isn’t even a whisper of suspicion. What we did . . . it was not only audacious, it would be presumed impossible.”

“The girl could put a knife to our throats,” Frava said. “The proof of what we did is burned into the emperor’s own body. We will need to tread carefully in coming years.”

Gaotona nodded, looking distracted. Days afire, how Frava wished she could get him removed from his station. He was the only one of the arbiters who ever took a stand against her. Just before his assassination, Ashravan had been ready to do it at her prompting.

Those meetings had been private. Shai wouldn’t have known of them, so the fake would not either. Frava would have to begin the process again, unless she found a way to control this duplicate Ashravan. Both options frustrated her.

“A part of me can’t believe that we actually did it,” Gaotona said softly as the fake emperor moved on to the next section of his speech, a call for unity.

Frava sniffed. “The plan was sound all along.”

“Shai escaped.”

“She will be found.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “We were lucky to catch her that once. Fortunately, I do not believe we have much to worry about from her.”

“She’ll try to blackmail us,” Frava said. Or she’ll try to find a way to control the throne.

“No,” Gaotona said. “No, she is satisfied.”

“Satisfied with escaping alive?”

“Satisfied with having placed one of her creations on the throne. Once, she dared to try to fool thousands—but now she has a chance to fool millions. An entire empire. Exposing what she has done would ruin the majesty of it, in her eyes.”

Did the old fool really believe that? His naiveness often presented Frava with opportunities; she’d considered letting him keep his station simply for that reason.

The fake emperor continued his speech. Ashravan had liked to hear himself speak. The Forger had gotten that right.

“He’s using the assassination as a means of bolstering our faction,” Gaotona said. “You hear? The implications that we need to unify, pull together, remember our heritage of strength . . . And the rumors, the ones the Glory Faction spread regarding him being killed . . . by mentioning them, he weakens their faction. They gambled on him not returning, and now that he has, they seem foolish.”

“True,” Frava said. “Did you put him up to that?”

“No,” Gaotona said. “He refused to let me counsel him on his speech. This move, though, it feels like something the old Ashravan would have done, the Ashravan from a decade ago.”

“The copy isn’t perfect, then,” Frava said. “We’ll have to remember that.”

“Yes,” Gaotona said. He held something, a small, thick book that Frava didn’t recognize.

A rustling came from the back of the box, and a servant of Frava’s Symbol entered, passing Arbiters Stivient and Ushnaka. The youthful messenger came to Frava’s side, then leaned down.

Frava gave the girl a displeased glance. “What can be so important that you interrupt me here?”

“I’m sorry, your grace,” the woman whispered. “But you asked me to arrange your palace offices for your afternoon meetings.”

“Well?” Frava asked.

“Did you enter the rooms yesterday, my lady?”

“No. With the business of that rogue Bloodsealer, and the emperor’s demands, and . . .” Frava’s frown deepened. “What is it?”

Shai turned and looked back at the Imperial Seat. The city rolled across a group of seven large hills; a major faction house topped each of the outer six, with the palace dominating the central hill.

The horse at her side looked little like the one she’d taken from the palace. It was missing teeth and walked with its head hanging low, back bowed. Its coat looked as if it hadn’t been brushed in ages, and the creature was so underfed, its ribs poked out like the slats on the back of a chair.

Shai had spent the previous days lying low, using her beggar Essence Mark to hide in the Imperial Seat’s underground. With that disguise in place, and with one on the horse, she’d escaped the city with ease. She’d removed her Mark once out, however. Thinking like the beggar was . . . uncomfortable.

Shai loosened the horse’s saddle, then reached under it and placed a fingernail against the glowing seal there. She snapped the seal’s rim with some effort, breaking the Forgery. The horse transformed immediately, back straightening, head rising, sides swelling. It danced uncertainly, head darting back and forth, tugging against the reins. Zu’s warhorse was a fine animal, worth more than a small house in some parts of the empire.

Hidden among the supplies on his back was the painting that Shai had stolen, again, from Arbiter Frava’s office. A forgery. Shai had never had cause to steal one of her own works before. It felt . . . amusing. She’d left the large frame cut open with a single Reo rune carved in the center on the wall behind. It did not have a very pleasant meaning.

She patted the horse on the neck. All things considered, this wasn’t a bad haul. A fine horse and a painting that, though fake, was so realistic that even its owner had thought it was the original.

He’s giving his speech right now, Shai thought. I would like to have heard that.

Her gem, her crowning work, wore the mantle of imperial power. That thrilled her, but the thrill had driven her onward. Even making him live again had not been the cause of her frantic work. No, in the end, she’d pushed herself so hard because she’d wanted to leave a few specific changes embedded within the soul. Perhaps those months of being genuine to Gaotona had changed her.

Copy an image over and over on a stack of paper, Shai thought, and eventually the lower sheets will bear the same image, pressed down. Deep within.

She turned, taking out the Essence Mark that would transform her into a survivalist and hunter. Frava would anticipate Shai using the roads, so she would instead make her way into the deep center of the nearby Sogdian Forest. Those depths would hide her well. In a few months, she would carefully proceed out of the province and continue on to her next task: tracking down the Imperial Fool, who had betrayed her.

For now, she wanted to be far away from walls, palaces, and courtly lies. Shai hoisted herself into the horse’s saddle and bid farewell to both the Imperial Seat and the man who now ruled it.

Live well, Ashravan, she thought. And make me proud.

Late that night, following the emperor’s speech, Gaotona sat by the familiar hearth in his personal study looking at the book that Shai had given him.

And marveling.

The book was a copy of the emperor’s soulstamp, in detail, with notes. Everything that Shai had done lay bare to him here.

Frava would not find an exploit to control the emperor, because there wasn’t one. The emperor’s soul was complete, locked tight, and all his own. That wasn’t to say that he was exactly the same as he had been.

I took some liberties, as you can see, Shai’s notes explained. I wanted to replicate his soul as precisely as possible. That was the task and the challenge. I did so.

Then I took the soul a few steps farther, strengthening some memories, weakening others. I embedded deep within Ashravan triggers that will cause him to react in a specific way to the assassination and his recovery.

This isn’t changing his soul. This isn’t making him a different person. It is merely nudging him toward a certain path, much as a con man on the street will strongly nudge his mark to pick a certain card. It is him. The him that could have been.

Who knows? Perhaps it is the him that would have been.

Gaotona would never have figured it out on his own, of course. His skill was faint in this area. Even if he’d been a master, he suspected he wouldn’t have spotted Shai’s work here. She explained in the book that her intention had been to be so subtle, so careful, that no one would be able to decipher her changes. One would have to know the emperor with extreme depth to even suspect what had happened.

With the notes, Gaotona could see it. Ashravan’s near death would send him into a period of deep introspection. He would seek his journal, reading again and again the accounts of his youthful self. He would see what he had been, and would finally, truly seek to recover it.

Shai indicated the transformation would be slow. Over a period of years, Ashravan would become the man that he’d once seemed destined to be. Tiny inclinations buried deep within the interactions of his seals would nudge him toward excellence instead of indulgence. He would start thinking of his legacy, as opposed to the next feast. He would remember his people, not his dinner appointments. He would finally push the factions for the changes that he, and many before him, had noticed needed to be made.

In short, he would become a fighter. He would take that single—but so hard—step across the line from dreamer to doer. Gaotona could see it, in these pages.

He found himself weeping.

Not for the future or for the emperor. These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece. True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation.

It was boldness, it was contrast, it was subtlety. In this book, Gaotona found a rare work to rival that of the greatest painters, sculptors, and poets of any era.

It was the greatest work of art he had ever witnessed.

Gaotona held that book reverently for most of the night. It was the creation of months of fevered, intense artistic transcendence—forced by external pressure, but released like a breath held until the brink of collapse. Raw, yet polished. Reckless, but calculated.

Awesome, yet unseen.

So it had to remain. If anyone discovered what Shai had done, the emperor would fall. Indeed, the very empire might shake. No one could know that Ashravan’s decision to finally become a great leader had been set in motion by words etched into his soul by a blasphemer.

As morning broke, Gaotona slowly—excruciatingly—stood up beside his hearth. He clutched the book, that matchless work of art, and held it out.

Then he dropped it into the flames.

THE GIRL-THING WHO WENT OUT FOR SUSHI

Pat Cadigan

NINE DECS INTO her second hitch, Fry hit a berg in the Main ring and broke her leg. And she didn’t just splinter the bone—compound fracture! Yow! What a mess! Fortunately, we’d finished servicing most of the eyes, a job that I thought was more busy-work than work-work. But those were the last decs before Okeke-Hightower hit and everybody had comet fever.

There hadn’t been an observable impact on the Big J for almost three hundred (Dirt) years—Shoemaker-Somethingorother—and no one was close enough to get a good look back then. Now every news channel, research institute, and moneybags everywhere in the Solar System was paying Jovian Operations for a ringside view. Every JovOp crew was on the case, putting cameras on cameras and back-up cameras on the back-up cameras—visible, infrared, X-ray, and everything else. Fry was pretty excited about it herself, talking about how great it was she would get to see it live. Girl-thing should have been watching where she wasn’t supposed to be going.

I was coated and I knew Fry’s suit would hold, but featherless bipeds are prone to vertigo when they’re injured. So I blew a bubble big enough for both of us, cocooned her leg, pumped her full of drugs, and called an ambulance. The jellie with the rest of the crew was already on the other side of the Big J. I let them know we’d scrubbed and someone would have to finish the last few eyes in the radian for us. Girl-thing was one hell of a stiff two-stepper, staying just as calm as if we were unwinding end-of-shift. The only thing she seemed to have a little trouble with was the O. Fry picked up consensus orientation faster than any other two-stepper I’d ever worked with, but she’d never done it on drugs. I tried to keep her distracted by telling her all the gossip I knew, and when I ran out, I made shit up.

Then all of a sudden, she said, “Well, Arkae, that’s it for me.”

Her voice was so damned final, I thought she was quitting. And I deflated because I had taken quite a liking to our girl-thing. I said, “Aw, honey, we’ll all miss you out here.”

But she laughed. “No, no, no, I’m not leaving. I’m going out for sushi.”

I gave her a pat on the shoulder, thinking it was the junk in her system talking. Fry was no ordinary girl-thing—she was great out here, but she’d always been special. Back in the Dirt, she’d been a brain-box, top-level scholar and a beauty queen. That’s right—a featherless biped genius beauty queen. Believe it or leave it, as Sheerluck says.

Fry’d been with us for three and half decs when she let on about being a beauty queen. The whole crew was unwinding end-of-shift—her, me, Dubonnet, Sheerluck, Aunt Chovie, Splat, Bait, Glynis, and Fred—and we all about lost the O.

“Wow,” said Dubonnet. “Did you ask for whirled peas, too?” I didn’t understand the question, but it sounded like a snipe. I triple-smacked him and suggested he respect someone else’s culture.

But Fry said, “No, I don’t blame any a youse asking. That stuff really is so silly. Why people still bother with such things, I sure don’t know. We’re supposed to be so advanced and enlightened, and it still matters how a woman looks in a bathing suit. Excuse me, a biped woman,” she added, laughing a little. “And no, the subject of whirled peas never came up.”

“If that’s how you really felt,” Aunt Chovie said, big, serious eyes and all eight arms in curlicues, “why’d you go along with it?”

“It was the only way I could get out here,” Fry said.

“Not really?” said Splat, a second before I woulda blurted out the same thing.

“Yes, really. I got heavy metal for personal appearances and product endorsements, plus a full scholarship, my choice of school.” Fry smiled and I thought it was the way she musta smiled when she was crowned Queen of the Featherless Biped Lady Geniuses or whatever it was. It wasn’t insincere, but a two-stepper’s face is just another muscle group; I could tell it was something she’d learned to do. “I saved as much as I could so I’d have enough for extra training after I graduated. Geology degree.”

“Dirt geology though,” said Sheerluck. It used to be Sherlock, but Sheerluck’ll be the first to admit she’s got more luck than sense.

“That’s why I saved for extra training,” Fry said. “I had to do the best I could with the tools available. You know how that is. All-a-youse know.”

We did.

FRY HAD WORKED with some other JovOp crews before us, all of them mixed—two-steppers and sushi. I guess they all liked her and vice versa but she clicked right into place with us, which is pretty unusual for a biped and an all-octo crew. I liked her right away, and that’s saying something because it usually takes me a while to resonate even with sushi. I’m okay with featherless bipeds, I really am. Plenty of sushi—more than will admit to it—have a problem with the species just on general principle, but I’ve always been able to get along with them. Still, they aren’t my fave flave to crew with out here. Training them is harder, and not because they’re stupid. Two-steppers just aren’t made for this. Not like sushi. But they keep on coming and most of them tough it out for at least one square dec. It’s as beautiful out here as it is dangerous. I see a few outdoors almost every day, clumsy starfish in suits.

That’s not counting the ones in the clinics and hospitals. Doctors, nurses, nurse-practitioners, technicians, physiotherapists, paramedics—they’re all your standard featherless biped. It’s the law. Fact: you cannot legally practice any kind of medicine in any form other than basic human, not even if you’re already a doctor, supposedly because all the equipment is made for two-steppers. Surgical instruments, operating rooms, sterile garments, even rubber gloves—the fingers are too short and there aren’t enough of them. Ha, ha, a little sushi humour. Maybe it’s not that funny to you, but fresh catch laugh themselves sick.

I don’t know how many two-steppers in total go out for sushi in a year (Dirt or Jovian), let alone how their reasons graph, but we’re all over the place out here and Census isn’t in my orbit, so for all I know half a dozen two-steppers apply every eight decs. Stranger things have happened.

In the old days, when I turned, nobody did it unless they had to. Most often, it was either terminal illness or permanent physical disability as determined by the biped standard: i.e., conditions at sea level on the third planet out. Sometimes, however, the disability was social, or more precisely, legal. Original Generation out here had convicts among the gimps, some on borrowed time.

Now, if you ask us, we say OG lasted six years but we’re all supposed to use the Dirt calendar, even just to each other (everyone out here gets good at converting on the fly), which works out to a little over seventy by Dirt reckoning. The bipeds claim that’s three generations not just one. We let them have that their way, too, because, damn can they argue. About anything. It’s the way they’re made. Bipeds are strictly binary, it’s all they know: zero or one, yes or no, right or wrong.

But once you turn, that strictly binary thinking’s the first thing to go, and fast. I never heard anyone say they miss it; I know I don’t.

ANYWAY, I go see Fry in one of the Gossamer ring clinics. A whole wing is closed off, no one gets in unless they’re on The List. If that isn’t weird enough for you, there’s a two-stepper in a uniform stuck to the floor, whose only job is checking The List. I’m wondering if I’m in the wrong station, but the two stepper finds me on The List and I may go in and see La Soledad y Godmundsdottir. It takes me a second to get who she means. How’d our girl-thing get Fry out of that? I go through an airlock-style portal and there’s another two-stepper waiting to escort me. He uses two poles with sticky tips to move himself along, and he does all right, but I can see this is a new skill. Every so often, he manoeuvres so one foot touches floor so he can feel more like he’s walking.

When you’ve been sushi as long as I have, two-steppers are pretty transparent. I don’t mean that as condescending as it sounds. After all, I was a two-stepper once myself. We all started out as featherless bipeds, none of us was born sushi. But a lot of us feel we were born to be sushi, a sentiment that doesn’t go down too well with the two-steppers who run everything. Which doesn’t make it any less true.

My pal the poler and I go a full radian before we get to another air-lock. “Through there,” he says. “I’ll take you back whenever you’re ready.”

I thank him and swim through, wondering what dim bulb thought he was a good idea, because he’s what Aunt Chovie calls surplus to requirements. The few conduits off this tube are sealed and there’s nothing to hide in or behind. I know Fry is so rich that she has to hire people to spend her money for her, but I’m thinking she should hire people smart enough to know the difference between spending and wasting.

There’s our girl, stuck to the middle of a hospital bed almost as big as the ringberg that put her in it. She’s got a whole ward to herself—all the walls are folded back to make one big private room. There are some nurses down at the far end, sitting around sipping coffee bulbs. When they hear me come in, they start unsticking and reaching for things, but I give them a full eight-OK—Social call, I’m nobody, don’t look busy on my account—and they all settle down again.

Sitting up in her nest of pillows, Fry looks good, if a little undercooked. There’s about three centimetres of new growth on her head and it must be itchy because she keeps scratching it. In spite of the incubator around her leg, she insists I give her a full hug, four by four, then pats a spot beside her. “Make yourself to home, Arkae.”

“Isn’t there a rule about visitors sitting on the bed?” I say, curling a couple of arms around a nearby hitching-post. It’s got a fold-out seat for biped visitors. This place has everything.

“Yeah. The rule is, it’s okay if I say it’s okay. Check it—this bed’s bigger than a lot of apartments I’ve had. The whole crew could have a picnic here. In fact, I wish they would.” She droops a little. “How is everyone, really busy?”

I settle down. “There’s always another lab to build or hardware to service or data to harvest,” I say, careful, “if that’s what you mean.” The way her face flexes, I know it isn’t.

“You’re the only one who’s come to see me,” she says.

“Maybe the rest of the crew weren’t on The List.”

“What list?” she says. So I tell her. Her jaw drops, and all at once two nurses appear on either side of the bed, nervous as hell, asking if she’s all right. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” she snaps at them. “Go away, gimme some privacy, will you?”

They obey a bit reluctantly, eyeing me like they’re not too sure about how safe she is with me squatting on the bedspread.

“Don’t yell at them,” I say after a bit. “Something bad happens to you, it’s their fault. They’re just taking care of you the best way they know how.” I uncurl two arms, one to gesture at the general surroundings and the other to point at the incubator, where a quadjillion nanorectics are mending her leg from the marrow out, which, I can tell you from personal experience, itches. A lot. No doubt that’s contributing to her less-than-sparkly disposition—what the hell can you do about itchy bone marrow?—and what I just told her doesn’t help.

“I should have known,” she fumes, scratching her head. “It’s the people I work for.”

That doesn’t make sense. JovOp couldn’t afford anything like this. “I think you’re a little confused, honey,” I say. “If we even thought JovOp had metal that heavy, it’d be Sushi Bastille Day, heads would—”

“No, these people are back in the Dirt. My image is licensed for advertising and entertainment,” she says. “I thought there’d be less demand after I came out here—out of sight, out of mind, you know? But apparently the novelty of a beauty queen in space has yet to wear off.”

“So you’re still rich,” I say. “Is that so bad?”

She makes a pain face. “Would you agree to an indefinite contract just to be rich? Even this rich?”

“You couldn’t get rich on an indefinite contract,” I say gently, “and no union’s stupid enough to let anybody take one.”

She thinks for a few seconds. “All right, how about this: did you ever think you owned something and then you found out it owned you?”

“Oh . . .” Now I get it. “Can they make you go back?”

“They’re trying,” Fry says. “A court order arrived last night, demanding I hit the Dirt as soon as I can travel. The docs amended it so they decide when it’s safe, but that won’t hold them off forever. You know any good lawyers? Out here?” she added.

“Well, yeah. Of course, they’re all sushi.”

Fry lit up. “Perfect.”

NOT EVERY CHAMBERED Nautilus out here is a lawyer—the form is also a popular choice for librarians, researchers, and anyone else in a data-heavy line of work—but every lawyer in the Jovian system is a chambered Nautilus. It’s not a legal restriction the way it is with bipeds and medicine, just something that took root and turned into tradition. According to Dove, who’s a partner in the firm our union keeps on retainer, it’s the sushi equivalent of powdered wigs and black robes, which we have actually seen out here from time to time when two-steppers from certain parts of the Dirt bring their own lawyers with them.

Dove says no matter how hard biped lawyers try to be professional, they all break out with some kind of weird around their sushi colleagues. The last time the union had to renegotiate terms with JovOp, the home office sent a canful of corporate lawyers out of the Dirt. Well, from Mars, actually, but they weren’t Martian citizens and they went straight back to No. 3 afterwards. Dove wasn’t involved, but she kept us updated as much as she could without violating any regulations.

Dove’s area is civil law and sushi rights, protecting our interests as citizens of the Jovian system. This includes not only sushi and sushi-in-transition but pre-ops as well. Any two-stepper who files a binding letter of intent for surgical conversion is legally sushi.

Pre-ops have all kinds of problems—angry relatives, rich angry relatives with injunctions from some Dirt supreme court, confused/troubled children, heartbroken parents and ex-spouses, lawsuits and contractual disputes. Dove handles all that and more: identity verification, transfer of money and property, biometric resets, as well as arranging mediation, psychological counselling (for anyone, including angry relatives), even religious guidance. Most bipeds would be surprised to know how many of those who go out for sushi find God, or something. Most of us, myself included, fall into the latter category but there are plenty of the organised religion persuasion. I guess you can’t go through a change that drastic without discovering your spiritual side.

Fry wasn’t officially a pre-op yet, but I knew Dove would be the best person she could talk to about what she’d be facing if she decided to go through with it. Dove is good at figuring out what two-steppers want to hear and then telling them what they need to hear in a way that makes them listen. I thought it was psychology, but Dove says it’s closer to linguistics.

As Sheerluck would say, don’t ask me, I just lurk here.

THE NEXT DAY, I show up with Dove and List Checker looks like she’s never seen anything like us before. She’s got our names, but she doesn’t look too happy about it, which annoys me. List-checking isn’t a job that requires any emotion from her.

“You’re the attorney?” she says to Dove, who is eye-level with her, tentacles sedately furled.

“Scan me again if you need to,” Dove says good-naturedly. “I’ll wait. Mom always said, ‘Measure twice, cut once.’ ”

List Checker can’t decide what to do for a second or two, then scans us both again. “Yes, I have both your names here. It’s just that—well, when she said an attorney, I was expecting—I thought you’d be . . . a . . . a . . .”

She hangs long enough to start twisting before Dove relents and says, “Biped.” Dove still sounds good-natured, but her tentacles are now undulating freely. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she asks, syrupy-sweet, and I almost rupture with not laughing.

“No,” List Checker says in a small voice. “I’ve never been farther than Mars before.”

“If the biped on the other side of that portal is equally provincial, better warn ’em.” Then as we go through, Dove adds, “Too late!”

It’s the same guy with the poles, but when Dove sees him, she gives this crazy whooping yell and pushes right into his face so her tentacles are splayed out on his skin.

“You son of a bitch!” she says, really happy.

And then the Poler says, “Hiya, Mom.”

“Oh. Kay,” I say, addressing anyone in the universe who might be listening. “I’m thinking about a brain enema. Is now a good time?”

“Relax,” Dove says. “ ‘Hiya Mom’ is what you say when anyone calls you a son of a bitch.”

“Or ‘Hiya, Dad,’ ” says Poler, “depending.”

“Aw, you all look alike to me,” Dove says. “It’s a small universe, Arkae. Florian and I got taken hostage together once, back in my two-stepper days.”

“Really?” I’m surprised as hell. Dove never talks about her biped life; hardly any of us do. And I’ve never heard of anyone running into someone they knew pre-sushi purely by chance.

“I was a little kid,” Poler says. “Ten Dirt-years. Dove held my hand. Good thing I met her when she still had one.”

“He was a creepy little kid,” Dove says as we head for Fry’s room. “I only did it so he wouldn’t scare our captors into killing all of us.”

Poler chuckles. “Then why you let me keep in touch with you after it was all over?”

“I thought if I could help you be less creepy, you wouldn’t inspire any more hostage-taking. Safer for everybody.”

I can’t remember ever hearing about anyone still being friends with a biped from before they were sushi. I’m still trying to get my mind around it as we go through the second portal.

When Fry sees us, there’s a fraction of a second when she looks startled before she smiles. Actually, it’s more like horrified. Which makes me horrified. I told her I was bringing a sushi lawyer. Girl-thing never got hiccups before, not even with the jellies, and that’s saying something. Even when you know they’re all AIs, jellies can take some getting used to no matter what shape you’re in, two-stepper or sushi.

“Too wormy?” Dove says and furls her tentacles as she settles down on the bed a respectful distance from Fry.

“I’m sorry,” Fry says, making the pain face. “I don’t mean to be rude or bigoted—”

“Forget about it,” Dove says. “Lizard brain’s got no shame.”

Dove’s wormies bother her more than my suckers? I think, amazed. Lizard brain’s not too logical, either.

“Arkae tells me you want to go out for sushi,” Dove goes on chattily. “How much do you know about it?”

“I know it’s a lot of surgery, but I think I have enough money to cover most of it.”

“Loan terms are extremely favorable. You could live well on that money and still make payments—”

“I’d like to cover as much of the cost as I can while my money’s still liquid.”

“You’re worried about having your assets frozen?” Immediately Dove goes from chatty to brisk. “I can help you with that, whether you turn or not. Just say I’m your lawyer, the verbal agreement’s enough.”

“But the money’s back in the Dirt—”

“And you’re here. It’s all about where you are. I’ll zap you the data on loans and surgical options—if you’re like most people, you probably already have a form in mind, but it doesn’t hurt to know about all the—”

Fry held up a hand. “Um, Arkae? You mind if I talk to my new lawyer alone?”

My feelings are getting ready to be hurt when Dove says, “Of course she doesn’t. Because she knows that the presence of a third party screws up that confidentiality thing. Right, Arkae?”

I feel stupid and relieved at the same time. Then I see Fry’s face and I know there’s more to it.

THE FOLLOWING DAY the crew gets called up to weed and re-seed the Halo. Comet fever strikes again. We send Fry a silly cheer-up video to say we’ll see her soon.

I personally think it’s a waste of time sowing sensors in dust when we’ve already got eyes in the Main ring. Most of the sensors don’t last as long as they’re supposed to and the ones that do never tell us anything we don’t already know. Weeding—picking up the dead sensors—is actually more interesting. When the dead sensors break down, they combine with the dust, taking on odd shapes and textures and even odder colorations. If something especially weird catches my eye, I’ll ask to keep it. Usually, the answer’s no. Recycling is the foundation of life out here—mass in, mass out; create, un-create, re-create, allathat. But once in a while, there’s a surplus of something because nothing evens out exactly all the time, and I get to take a little good-luck charm home to my bunk.

We’re almost at the Halo when the jellie tells us whichever crew seeded last time didn’t weed out the dead ones. So much for mass in, mass out. We’re all surprised; none of us ever got away with doing half a job. We have to hang in the jellie’s belly high over the North Pole and scan the whole frigging Halo for materials markers. Which would be simple except a lot of what should be there isn’t showing up. Fred makes us deep-scan three times but nothing shows on Metis and there’s no sign that anything leaked into the Main ring.

“Musta all fell into the Big J,” says Bait. He’s watching the aurora flashing below us like he’s hypnotised, which he probably is. Bait’s got this thing about the polar hexagon anyway.

“But so many?” Splat says. “You know they’re gonna say that’s too many to be an accident.”

“Do we know why the last crew didn’t pick up the dead ones?” Aunt Chovie’s already tensing up. If you tapped on her head, you’d hear high C-sharp.

“No,” Fred says. “I don’t even know which crew it was. Just that it wasn’t us.”

Dubonnet tells the jellie to ask. The jellie tells us it’s put in a query, but because it’s not crucial, we’ll have to wait.

“Frigging tube-worms,” Splat growls, tentacles almost knotting up. “They do that to feel important.”

“Tube worms are AIs, they don’t feel,” the jellie says with the AI serenity that can get so maddening so fast. “Like jellies.”

Then Glynis speaks up: “Scan Big J.”

“Too much interference,” I say. “The storms—”

“Just humour me,” says Glynis. “Unless you’re in a hurry?”

The jellie takes us down to just above the middle of the Main ring and we prograde double-time. And son of a bitch—is this crazy or is this the new order?—we get some hits in the atmosphere.

But we shouldn’t. It’s not just the interference from the storms—Big J gravitates the hell out of anything it swallows. Long before I went out for sushi (and that was quite a while ago), they’d stopped sending probes into Jupiter’s atmosphere. They didn’t just hang in the clouds and none of them ever lasted long enough to reach liquid metallic hydrogen. Which means the sensors should just be atoms, markers crushed out of existence. They can’t still be in the clouds unless something is keeping them there.

“That’s gotta be a technical fault,” Splat says. “Or something.”

“Yeah, I’m motion sick, I lost the O,” says Aunt Chovie, which is the current crew code for Semaphore only.

Bipeds have sign language and old-school semaphore with flags but octo-crew semaphore is something else entirely. Octo-sem changes as it goes, which means each crew speaks a different language, not only from each other, but also from one conversation to the next. It’s not transcribable, either, not like spoken-word communication, because it works by consensus. It’s not completely uncrackable, but even the best decryption AI can’t do it in less than half a dec. Five days to decode a conversation isn’t exactly efficient.

To be honest, I’m kinda surprised the two-steppers who run JovOp are still letting us get away with it. They’re not what you’d call big champions of privacy, especially on the job. It’s not just sushi, either—all their two-stepper employees, in the Dirt or all the way out here, are under total surveillance when they’re on the clock. That’s total as in a/v everywhere: offices, hallways, closets, and toilets. Bait says that’s why JovOp two-steppers always look so grim—they’re all holding it in till quitting time.

But I guess as long we get the job done, they don’t care how we wiggle our tentacles at each other or what color we are when we do it. Besides, when you’re on the job out here, you don’t want to worry about who’s watching you because they’d better be. You don’t want to die in a bubble waiting for help that isn’t coming because nobody caught the distress signal when your jellie blew out.

So anyway, we consider the missing matter and the markers we shouldn’t have been picking up on in Big J’s storm systems and we whittle it down to three possibilities: the previous crew returned to finish the job but someone forgot to enter it into the record; a bunch of scavengers blew through with a trawler and neutralised the markers so they can re-sell the raw materials; or some dwarf star at JovOp is seeding the clouds in hope of getting an even closer look at the Okeke-Hightower impact.

Number three is the stupidest idea—even if some of the sensors actually survive till Okeke-Hightower hits, they’re in the wrong place, and the storms will scramble whatever data they pick up—so we all agree that’s probably it. After a little more discussion, we decide not to let on and when JovOp asks where all the missing sensors are, we’ll say we don’t know. Because the Jupe’s honest truth is, we don’t.

We pick up whatever we can find, which takes two J-days, seed the Halo with new ones, and go home. I call over to the clinic to check how Fry’s doing and find out if she managed to get the rest of the crew on The List so we can have that picnic on her big fat bed. But I get Dove, who tells me that our girl-thing is in surgery.

DOVE SAYS THAT, at Fry’s own request, she’s not allowed to tell anyone which sushi Fry’s going out for, including us. I feel a little funny about that—until we get the first drone.

It’s riding an in-out skeet, which can slip through a jellie double-wall without causing a blow-out. JovOp uses them to deliver messages they consider sensitive—whatever that means—and that’s what we thought it was at first.

Then it lights up and we’re looking at this image of a two-stepper dressed for broadcast. He’s asking one question after another on a canned loop; in a panel on his right, instructions on how to record, pause, and playback are scrolling on repeat.

The jellie asks if we want to get rid of it. We toss the whole thing in the waste chute, skeet and all, and the jellie poops it out as a little ball of scrap, to become some scavenger’s lucky find.

Later, Dubonnet files a report with JovOp about the unauthorised intrusion. JovOp gives him a receipt but no other response. We’re all expecting a reprimand for failing to detect the skeet’s rider before it got through. Doesn’t happen.

“Somebody’s drunk,” Bait says. “Query it.”

“No, don’t,” says Splat. “By the time they’re sober, they’ll have to cover it up or their job’s down the chute. It never happened, everything’s eight-by-eight.”

“Until someone checks our records,” Dubonnet says and tells the jellie to query, who assures him that’s a wise thing to do. The jellie has been doing this sort of thing more often lately, making little comments. Personally, I like those little touches.

Splat, however, looks annoyed. “I was joking,” he says, enunciating carefully. They can’t touch you for joking, no matter how tasteless, but it has to be clear. We laugh, just to be on the safe side, except for Aunt Chovie, who says she doesn’t think it was very funny, because she can’t laugh unless she really feels it. Some people are like that.

Dubonnet gets an answer within a few minutes. It’s a form message in legalese but this gist is, We heard you the first time, go now and sin no more.

“They all can’t be drunk,” Fred says. “Can they?”

“Can’t they?” says Sheerluck. “You guys have crewed with me long enough to know how fortune smiles on me and mine.”

“Spoken like a member of the Church of The Four-Leaf Horseshoe,” Glynis says.

Fred perks right up. “Is that that new casino on Europa?” he asks. Fred loves casinos. Not gambling, just casinos. The jellie offers to look it up for him.

“Synchronicity is a real thing, it’s got math,” Sheerluck is saying. Her color’s starting to get a little bright; so is Glynis’s. I’d rather they don’t give each other ruby-red hell while we’re all still in the jellie. “And the dictionary definition of serendipity is, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind.’ ”

“I’m prepared to go home and log out, who’s prepared to join me?” Dubonnet says before Glynis can sneer openly. I like Glynis, vinegar and all, but sometimes I think she should have been a crab instead of an octopus.

OUR PRIVATE QUARTERS are supposed to have no surveillance except for the standard safety monitoring.

Yeah, we don’t believe that for a nano-second. But if JovOp ever got caught in the act, the unions would eat them alive and poop out the bones to fertilise Europa’s germ farms. So either they’re even better at it than any of us can imagine, or they’re taking a calculated risk. Most sushi claim to believe the former; I’m in the latter camp. I mean, they watch us so much already, they’ve gotta want to look at something else for a change.

We share the typical octo-crew quarters—eight rooms around a large common area. When Fry was with us, we curtained off part of it for her, but somehow she was always spilling out of it. Her stuff, I mean—we’d find underwear bobbing around in the lavabo, shoes orbiting a lamp (good thing she only needed two), live-paper flapping around the room in the air currents. All the time she’d spent out here and she still couldn’t get the hang of housekeeping in zero gee. It’s the sort of thing that stops being cute pretty quickly when you’ve got full occupancy, plus one. I could tell she was trying, but eventually we had to face the truth: much as we loved her, our resident girl-thing was a slob.

I thought that was gonna be a problem, but she wasn’t even gone a day before it felt like there was something missing. I’d look around expecting to see some item of clothing or jewellery cruising past, the latest escapee from one of her not-terribly-secure reticules.

“SO WHO WANTS to bet that Fry goes octo?” Splat says when we get home.

“Who’d want to bet she doesn’t?” replies Sheerluck.

“Not me,” says Glynis, so sour I can feel it in my crop. I’m thinking she’s going to start again with the crab act, pinch, pinch, pinch, but she doesn’t. Instead, she air-swims down to the grotto, sticks to the wall with two arms and folds the rest up so she’s completely hidden. She misses our girl-thing and doesn’t want to talk at the moment, but she also doesn’t want to be completely alone, either. It’s an octo thing—sometimes we want to be alone but not necessarily by ourselves.

Sheerluck joins me at the fridge and asks, “What do you think? Octo?”

“I dunno,” I say, and I honestly don’t. It never occurred to me to wonder, but I’m not sure if that’s because I took it for granted she would. I grab a bag of kribble.

Aunt Chovie notices and gives me those big serious eyes. “You can’t just live on crunchy krill, Arkae.”

“I’ve got a craving,” I tell her.

“Me, too,” says Bait. He tries to reach around from behind me and I knot him.

“Message from Dove,” says Dubonnet just before we start wrestling and puts it on the big screen.

There’s not actually much about Fry, except that she’s coming along nicely with another dec to go before she’s done. Although it’s not clear to any of us whether that means Fry’ll be all done and good to go, or if Dove’s just referring to the surgery. Then we get distracted with all the rest of the stuff in the message.

It’s was full of clips from the Dirt, two-steppers talking about Fry like they all knew her and what it was like out here and what going out for sushi meant. Some two-steppers didn’t seem to care much, but some of them were stark spinning bugfuck.

I mean, it’s been a great big while since I was a biped and we live so long out here that we tend to morph along with the times. The two-stepper I was couldn’t get a handle on me as I am now. But then neither could the octo I was when I finished rehab and met my first crew.

I didn’t choose octo—back then, surgery wasn’t as advanced and nanorectics weren’t as commonplace or as programmable, so you got whatever the doctors thought gave you the best chance of a life worth living. I wasn’t too happy at first, but it’s hard to be unhappy in a place this beautiful, especially when you feel so good physically all the time. It was somewhere between three and four J-years after I turned that people could finally choose what kind of sushi they went out for, but I got no regrets. Any more. I’ve got it smooth all over.

Only I don’t feel too smooth listening to two-steppers chewing the air over things they don’t know anything about and puking up words like abominations, atrocities, and sub-human monsters. One news program even runs clips from the most recent re-make of The Goddam Island Of Fucking Dr. Moreau. Like that’s holy writ or something.

I can’t stand more than a few minutes before I take my kribble into my bolthole, close the hatch, and hit sound-proof.

A little while later, Glynis beeps. “You know how way back in the extreme dead past, people in the Dirt thought everything in the universe revolved around them?” She pauses, but I don’t answer. “Then the scope of human knowledge expanded and we all know that was wrong.”

“So?” I grunt.

“Not everybody got the memo,” she says. She waits for me to say something. “Come on, Arkae—are they gonna get to see Okeke-Hightower?”

“I’d like to give them a ride on it,” I say.

“None of them are gonna come out here with us abominations. They’re all gonna cuddle up with each other in the Dirt and drown in each other’s shit. Until they all do the one thing they were pooped into this universe to do, which is become extinct.”

I open the door. “You’re really baiting them, you know that?”

“Baiting who? There’s nobody listening. Nobody here except us sushi,” she says, managing to sound sour and utterly innocent both at the same time. Only Glynis.

I MESSAGE DOVE to say we’ll be Down Under for at least two J-days, on loan to OuterComm. Population in the outer part of the system, especially around Saturn, has doubled in the last couple of J-years, and will probably double again in less time. The civil communication network runs below the plane of the solar disk and it’s completely dedicated—no governments, no military, just small business, entertainment, and social interaction. Well, so far it’s completely dedicated, but nobody’s in any position for a power grab yet.

OuterComm is an Ice Giants operation, and originally it served only the Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune systems. No one seems to know exactly where the home office is—i.e. which moon. I figure even if they started off as far out as Uranus, they’ve probably been on Titan since they decided to expand to Jupiter.

Anyway, their technology is crazy-great. It still takes something over forty minutes for Hello to get from the Big J to Saturn and another forty till you hear, Who the hell is this? but you get less noise than a local call on JovOp. JovOp wasn’t too happy when the entertainment services started migrating to OuterComm and things got kind of tense. Then they cut a deal: OuterComm got all the entertainment and stayed out of the education business, at least in the Jovian system. So everything’s fine and JovOp loans them anything they need like a big old friendly neighbor, but there’s still plenty of potential for trouble. Of all kinds.

The Jovian system is the divide between the inner planets and the outer. We’ve had governments that tried to align with the innies and others that courted the outies. The current government wants the Big J officially designated as an outer world, not just an ally. Saturn’s been fighting it, claiming that Big J wants to take over and build an empire.

Which is pretty much what Mars and Earth said when the last government was trying to get inner status. Earth was a little more colorful about it. There were two-steppers hollering that it was all a plot by monsters and abominations—i.e. us—to get our unholy limbs on fresh meat for our unholy appetites. If Big J got inner planet status, they said, people would be rounded up in the streets and shipped out to be changed into unnatural, subhuman creatures with no will of their own. Except for the most beautiful women, who would be kept as is and chained in brothels where—well, you get the idea.

That alone would be enough to make me vote outie, except the Big J is really neither outie nor innie. The way I see it, there’s inner, there’s outer, and there’s us. Which doesn’t fit the way two-steppers do things, because it’s not binary.

THIS WAS ALL sort of bubbling away at the back of my mind while we worked on the comm station, but in an idle sort of way. I was also thinking about Fry, wondering how she was doing, and what shape she’d be in the next time I saw her. I wondered if I’d recognise her.

Now, that sounds kind of silly, I guess because you don’t recognise someone that, for all intents and purposes, you’ve never seen before. But it’s that spiritual thing. I had this idea that if I swam into a room full of sushi, all kinds of sushi, and Fry was there, I would know. And if I gave it a little time, I’d find her without anyone having to point her out.

No question, I loved Fry the two-stepper. Now that she was sushi, I wondered if I’d be in love with her. I couldn’t decide whether I liked that idea or not. Normally I keep things simple: sex, and only with people I like. It keeps everything pretty smooth. But in love complicates everything. You start thinking about partnership and family. And that’s not so smooth because we don’t reproduce. We’ve got new sushi and fresh sushi, but no sushi kids.

We’re still working on surviving out here, but it won’t always be that way. I could live long enough to see that. Hell, there are still a few OG around, although I’ve never met them. They’re all out in the Ice Giants.

WE’RE HOME HALF a dec before the first Okeke-Hightower impact, which sounds like plenty of time, but it’s close enough to make me nervous. Distances out here aren’t safe, even in the best top-of-the-line JovOp can. I hate being in a can anyway. If anyone ever develops a jellie for long-distance travel, I’ll be their best friend forever. But even in the can, we had to hit three oases going and coming to refuel. Filing a flight plan guaranteed us a berth at each one, but only if we were on time. And there’s all kinds of shit that could have made us late. If a berth was available, we’d still get it. But if there wasn’t, we’d have to wait and hope we didn’t run out of stuff to breathe.

Bait worked the plan out far enough ahead to give us generous ETA windows. But you know how it is—just when you need everything to work the way it’s supposed to, anything that hasn’t gone wrong lately suddenly decides to make up for lost time. I was nervous all the way out, all through the job, and all the way back. The last night on the way back, I dreamed that just as we were about to re-enter JovOp space, Io exploded and took out everything in half a radian. While we were trying to figure out what to do, something knocked us into a bad spiral that was gonna end dead centre in Big Pink. I woke up with Aunt Chovie and Splat peeling me off the wall—so embarrassing. After that, all I wanted to do was go home, slip into a jellie, and watch Okeke-Hightower meet Big J.

By this time, the comet’s actually in pieces. The local networks are all-comet news, all the time, like there’s nothing else in the solar system or even the universe for that matter. The experts are saying it’s following the same path as the old Shoemaker-Levy, and there’s a lot of chatter about what that means. There those who don’t think it’s a coincidence and Okeke-Hightower is actually some kind of message from an intelligence out in the Oort cloud or even beyond, and instead of letting it crash into Big J, we ought to try catching it, or at least parts of it.

Yeah, that could happen. JovOp put out a blanket no-fly—jellies only, no cans. Sheerluck suggests JovOp’s got a secret mission to grab some fragments, but that’s ridiculous. I mean, aside from the fact that any can capable of doing that would be plainly visible, the comet’s been sailing around in pieces for over half a dozen square decs. There were easier places in the trajectory to get a piece, but all the experts agreed the scans showed nothing in it worth the fortune it would cost to mount that kind of mission. Funny how so many people forgot about that; suddenly, they’re all shoulda-woulda-coulda, like non-buyer’s remorse. But don’t get me started on politics.

I leave a message for Dove saying we’re back and getting ready to watch the show. What comes back is an auto-reply saying she’s out of the office, reply soonest. Maybe she’s busy with Fry, who probably has comet fever like everyone else, but maybe even more so, since this will be like the big moment that kicks off her new life. If she’s not out of the hospital, I hope they’ve got a screen worthy of the event.

We all want to see with our naked eyes. Well, our naked eyes and telescopes. Glynis is bringing a screen for anyone who wants a really close-up look. Considering the whole thing’s gonna last about an hour start to finish, maybe that’s not such a bad idea. It could save us some eyestrain.

When the first fragment hits, I find myself thinking about the sensors that fell into the atmosphere. They’ve got to be long gone by now, and even if they’re not, there’s no way we could pick up any data. It would all be just noise.

Halfway through the impacts, the government overrides all the communication for a recorded, no-reply announcement: martial law’s been declared, everybody go home. Anyone who doesn’t is dust.

This means we miss the last few hits, which pisses us off even though we all agree it’s not a sight worth dying for. But when we get home and can’t even get an instant replay, we start wondering. Then we start ranting. The government’s gonna have a lot of explaining to do and the next election ain’t gonna be a love-fest and when did JovOp turn into a government lackey. There’s nothing on the news—and I mean, nothing, it’s all re-runs. Like this is actually two J-days ago and what just happened never happened.

“Okay,” says Fred, “what’s on OuterComm?”

“You want to watch soap operas?” Dubonnet fumes. “Sure, why not?”

We’re looking at the menu when something new appears: it’s called the Soledad y Gottmundsdottir Farewell Special. The name has me thinking we’re about to see Fry in her old two-stepper incarnation, but what comes up on the screen is a chambered Nautilus.

“Hi, everybody. How do you like the new me?” Fry says.

“What, is she going to law school?” Aunt Chovie says, shocked.

“I’m sorry to leave you a canned good-bye, because you’ve all been so great,” Fry goes on, and I have to knot my arms together to keep from turning the thing off. This doesn’t sound like it’s gonna end well. “I knew even before I came out here that I’d be going out for sushi. I just couldn’t decide what kind. You guys had me thinking seriously about octo—it’s a pretty great life, and everything you do matters. Future generations—well, it’s going to be amazing out here. Life that adapted to space. Who knows, maybe someday Jovian citizens will change bodies like two-steppers change their clothes. It could happen.

“But like a lot of two-steppers, I’m impatient. I know, I’m not a two-stepper anymore, and I’ve got a far longer lifespan now, so I don’t have to be impatient. But I am. I wanted to be part of something that’s taking the next step—the next big step—right now. I really believe the Jupiter Colony is what I’ve been looking for.”

“The Jupiter Colony? They’re cranks! They’re suicidal!” Glynis hits the ceiling, banks off a wall, and comes down again.

Fry unfurls her tentacles and lets them wave around freely. “Calm down, whoever’s yelling,” she says, sounding amused. “I made contact with them just before I crewed up with you. I knew what they were planning. They wouldn’t tell me when, but it wasn’t hard to figure out that the Okeke-Hightower impact was the perfect opportunity. We’ve collected some jellies, muted them and put in yak-yak loops. I don’t know how the next part works, how we’re going to hitch a ride with the comet—I’m not an astrophysicist. But if it works, we’ll seed the clouds with ourselves.

“We’re all chambered Nautiluses on this trip. It’s the best form for packing a lot of data. But we’ve made one small change: we’re linked together, shell-to-shell, so we all have access to each other’s data. Not too private, but we aren’t going into exile as separate hermits. There should still be some sensors bobbing around in the upper levels—the Colony’s had allies tossing various things in on the sly. We can use whatever’s there to build a cloud-borne colony.

“We don’t know for sure it’ll work. Maybe we’ll all get gravitated to smithereens. But if we can fly long enough for the jellies to convert to parasails—the engineers figured that out, don’t ask me—we might figure out not only how to survive, but thrive.

“Unfortunately, I won’t be able to let you know. Not until we get around the interference problem. I don’t know much about that, either, but if I last long enough, I’ll learn.

“Dove says right now, you’re all Down Under on loan to OuterComm. I’m going to send this message so it bounces around the Ice Giants for a while before it gets to you, and with any luck, you’ll find it not too long after we enter the atmosphere. I hope none of you are too mad at me. Or at least that you don’t stay mad at me. It’s not entirely impossible that we’ll meet again someday. If we do, I’d like it to be as friends.

“Especially if the Jovian independence movement gets—” she laughs. “I was about to say, ‘gets off the ground.’ If the Jovian independence movement ever achieves a stable orbit—or something. I think it’s a really good idea. Anyway, good bye for now.

“Oh, and Arkae?” Her tentacles undulate wildly. “I had no idea wormy would feel so good.”

WE JUST GOT that one play before the JCC blacked it out. The feds took us all in for questioning. Not surprising. But it wasn’t just Big J feds—Dirt feds suddenly popped up out of nowhere, some of them in-person and some of them long-distance via comm units clamped to mobies. The latter is a big waste unless there’s some benefit to having a conversation as slowly as possible. Because even a fed on Mars can’t do anything about the speed of light—it’s still gonna be at least an hour between the question and the answer, usually more.

The Dirt feds who were actually here were all working undercover, keeping an eye on things, and reporting whatever they heard or saw to HQ back in the Dirt. This didn’t go down so well with most of us out here, even two-steppers. It became a real governmental crisis, mainly because no one in charge could get their stories straight. Some were denying any knowledge of Dirt spies, some were trying to spin it so it was all for our benefit, so we wouldn’t lose any rights—don’t ask me which ones, they didn’t say. Conspiracy theories blossomed faster than anyone could keep track.

Finally, the ruling council resigned; the acting council replacing them till the next election are almost all sushi. That’s a first.

It’s still another dec and a half till the election. JovOp usually backs two-steppers, but there are noticeably fewer political ads for bipeds this time around. I think even they can see the points on the trajectory.

A lot of sushi are already celebrating, talking about the changing face of government in the Jovian system. I’m not quite ready to party. I’m actually a little bit worried about us. We were born to be sushi, but we weren’t born sushi. We all started out as two-steppers and while we may have shed binary thinking, that doesn’t mean we’re completely enlightened. There’s already some talk about how most of the candidates are chambered Nautiluses and there ought to be more octos or puffers or crabs. I don’t like the sound of that, but it’s too late to make a break for the Colony now. Not that I would. Even if Fry and all her fellow colonists are surviving and thriving, I’m not ready to give up the life I have for a whole new world. We’ll just have to see what happens.

Hey, I told you not to get me started on politics.

AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL

Nancy Kress

NOVEMBER 2013

It wasn’t dark and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t. Every time he thought that, all the way back to his first time when McAllister had warned him: “The transition may seem to last forever.”

Forever was twenty seconds on Pete’s wrister.

Light returned, light the rosy pink of baby toes, and then Pete stood in a misty dawn. And gasped.

It was so beautiful. A calm ocean, smooth and shiny as the floor of the Shell. A beach of white sand, rising in dunes dotted with clumps of grasses. Birds wheeled overhead. Their sharp, indignant cries grew louder as one of them dove into the waves and came up with a fish. Just like that. A fresh breeze tingled Pete’s nose with salt.

This. All this. He hadn’t landed near the ocean before, although he’d seen pictures of it in one of Caity’s books. This—all destroyed by the Tesslies, gone forever.

No time for hatred, not even old hatred grown fat and ripe as soy plants on the farm. McAllister’s instructions, repeated endlessly to all of them, echoed in Pete’s mind: “You have only ten minutes. Don’t linger anywhere.”

The sand slipped under his shoes and got into the holes. He had to leave them, even though shoes were so hard to come by. Cursing, he ran clumsy and barefoot along the shoreline, his weak knee already aching and head bobbing on his spindly neck, toward the lone house emerging from the mist. The cold air seeped into his lungs and hurt them. He could see his breath.

Seven minutes remained on his wrister.

The house stood on a little rocky ridge rising from the dunes and jutting into the water. No lights in the windows. The back door was locked but McAllister had put their precious laser saw onto the wrister. (“If you lose it, I will kill you.”) Pete cut a neat, silent hole, reached in, and released the deadbolt.

Five minutes.

Dark stairs. A night light in the hallway. A bedroom with two sleeping forms, his arm thrown over her body, the window open to the sweet night air. Another bedroom with a single bed, the blanketed figure too long, shadowy clothes all over the floor. And at the end of the hallway, a bonanza.

Two of them.

Four minutes.

The baby lay on its back, eyes closed in its bald head, little pink mouth sucking away on dreams. It had thrown off its blanket to expose a band of impossibly smooth skin between the plastic diaper and tiny shirt. Pete took precious seconds to unfasten a corner of the diaper, but he was already in love with the little hairless creature and would have been devastated if it were male. It was a girl. Carefully he hoisted her out of the crib and onto his shoulder, painfully holding her with one crooked arm. She didn’t wake.

No doubt that the toddler was a girl. Glossy brown ringlets, pink pajamas printed with bunnies, a doll clutched in one chubby fist. When Pete reached for her, she woke, blinked, and shrieked.

“No! Mommy! Dada! Cooommme! No!”

Little brat!

Pete grabbed her by the hand and dragged her off the low bed. That wrenched his misshapen shoulder and he nearly screamed. The child resisted, wailing like a typhoon. The baby woke and also screamed. Footsteps pounded down the hall.

Ninety seconds.

“McAllister!” Pete cried, although of course that did no good. McAllister couldn’t hear him. And ten minutes was fixed by the Tesslie machinery: no more, no less. McAllister couldn’t hurry the Grab.

The parents pounded into the room. Pete couldn’t let go of either child. Pete shrieked louder than both of them—his only real strength was in his voice, did they but know it—the words Darlene had taught him: “Stop! I have a bomb!”

They halted just inside the bedroom door, crashing into each other. She gasped: perhaps at the situation, perhaps at Pete. He knew what he must look like to them, a deformed fifteen-year-old with bobbly head.

“Moommmeeeee!” the toddler wailed.

“Bomb! Bomb!” Pete cried.

Forty-five seconds.

The father was a hero. He leaped forward. Pete staggered sideways with his burden of damp baby, but he didn’t let go of the toddler’s hand. Her father grabbed at her torso and Pete’s wrister shot a laser beam at him. The man was moving; the beam caught the side of his arm. The air sizzled with burning flesh and the father let go of his child.

But for only a few precious seconds.

Now the mother rushed forward. Pete dodged behind the low bed, nearly slipping on a pillow that had fallen to the floor. Both of them sprang again, the man’s face contorted with pain, and clutched at their children. Pete fired the laser but his hold on the child had knocked the wrister slightly sideways and he missed. Frantically he began firing, the beams hitting the wall and then Pete’s own foot. The pain was astonishing. He screamed; the children screamed; the mother screamed and lunged.

Five seconds.

The father tore the little girl from Pete. Pete jerked out his bad arm, now in as much pain as his foot, as much pain as the man’s must be, and twined his fingers in the child’s hair. The mother slipped on a throw rug patterned with princesses and went down. But the father held on to the toddler and so did Pete, and—

Grab.

All four of them went through in a blaze of noise, of light, of stinking diapers and roasted flesh, of shoulder pain so intense that Pete had to struggle to stay conscious. He did, but not for long. Once under the Shell, he collapsed to the metal floor. The father, of course, was dead. The last thing Pete heard was both children, still wailing as if their world had ended.

It had. From now on, they were with him and McAllister and the others. From now on, poor little devastated parentless miracles.

MARCH 2014

On the high plateau of the Brazilian state of Paraná, the arabica trees rustled in a gentle rain. Drops pattered off dark green, lance-shaped leaves, cascading down until they touched the soil. The coffee berries were small, not ready for harvest until the dry season, months away. At the far edge of the vast field, a fertilizer drove slowly among the rows of short, bushy trees, some of them fifty years old. A rabbit raced ahead of the advancing machinery.

Deep underground, something happened.

Nonmotile, rod-shaped bacteria clung to the roots of the coffee trees, as they had for millennia. The bacteria stuck to the roots by exuding a slime layer, where it fed on and decomposed plant matter into nutrients. In the surrounding soil other bacteria also flourished, carrying on their usual life processes. One of these was mitosis. During the reproductive division, plasmids were swapped between organisms, as widely promiscuous as all of their kind.

A new bacterium appeared.

Eventually it, too, began to divide, not too rapidly in the dry soil. By and by, another plasmid exchange took place, with a different bacterium. And so on, in an intricate chain, ending up with a plasmid swap with the nonmotile, rod-shaped root dweller. A mutation now existed that had never existed before. Such a thing happened all the time in nature—but not like this.

Above ground, thunder rumbled, and the rain began to fall harder.

NOVEMBER 2013

The woman was hysterical. As she had every right to be, Julie thought. Julie laid her hand across her own belly, caught herself doing it, and removed the hand. Quickly she glanced around. No one had noticed. They all watched the woman, and all of them, even the female uniform, had the expressions that cops wore in the presence of hysterical victims: a mixture of stern pity and impatient disgust.

“Ma’am . . . ma’am . . . if you could just calm down enough to tell us what happened . . .”

“I told you! I told you!” The woman’s voice rose to a shriek. She wore a gaping bathrobe over a flimsy white nightdress, and her hair was so wild it looked as if she had torn out patches by the roots, like some grieving Biblical figure. Perhaps she had. A verse from Julie’s unwilling Temple childhood rose, unbidden, in her mind: “In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they were no more.”

“Ma’am . . . shit. Get a doctor here with a sedative,” the “detective” said. He was a captain in this seaside town’s police. Julie had picked up from Gordon an FBI agent’s contempt for local law enforcement; she would have to rid herself of that, or else turn into as much of a machine as Gordon could be. She stepped forward.

“May I try?”

“No.” The captain glared; he hadn’t wanted her along in the first place. They never did. Julie stepped back into the shadows. Gordon would be here soon.

The woman continued to wail and tear her hair. A uniform phoned for a doctor. In the bedroom the forensics team worked busily, and through the window Julie could see men fanning out across the beach, looking for clues. Had this mother drowned her infants? Buried them? Hidden them safe in baskets of bulrushes, a crazy latter-day Jochebed with two female versions of Moses? Julie knew better. She studied the room around her.

Simple, classic North Atlantic beach cottage: white duck covers on the wicker furniture, sisal mats on the floor, light wood and pale colors. But the house had central heating and storm windows already in place; evidently the family lived here year-round. Bright toys spilled from a colorful box. Beside the sofa, a basket of magazines, TIME shouting: CAN THE PRESIDENT CONTROL CONGRESS? and THE DESERTIFICATION OF AFRICA. On the counter separating the kitchen from the living area, a homemade pie under a glass dome, next to a pile of fresh tomatoes, onions, zucchini. Everything orderly, prosperous, caring.

Gordon strode through the door and went unerringly to the detective. “Captain Parsons? I’m Special Agent in Charge Gordon Fairford. We spoke on the phone.”

Parsons said sourly, “No change from what I told.” On the sofa, the woman let out another air-splitting wail.

“What do you think happened, Captain?” Gordon said. Whatever his private opinion, Gordon was always outwardly tactful with locals, who always resented both the tact and the FBI involvement. The eternal verities.

Parsons said, “The husband took the kids, of course. Or they disposed of them together and he took a powder.”

“Any signs of his leaving, with or without them?”

“No,” Parsons said, with dislike.

Nor would there be, Julie thought. Gordon went on extracting as much information from Parsons as he could, simultaneously smoothing over as much as possible of the inevitable turf war. Julie stopped listening. She waited until Parsons moved off and Gordon turned to her.

He said, “This time your location forecast was closer.”

“Not close enough.” If it had been, Gordon would have been at the beach house before the kids’ disappearance happened. As it was, he and she had only managed to be in the next town over. Not enough, not nearly enough.

The woman on the couch had quieted slightly. Gordon said softly to Julie, “Go.”

This was never supposed to be part of her job. She was the math wizard, the creator of algorithms, the transformer of raw data into useful predictions. But she and Gordon had been working closely together for over six months now, and he had discovered her other uses.

No, no, not what I meant!

Julie sat next to the sobbing woman, without touching her. “Mrs. Carter, I’m Julie Kahn. And I know you’re telling the truth about what happened to your husband and children.”

The woman jerked as if she had been shot and fastened both hands on Julie’s arm. Her nails dug in, and her eyes bored silently into Julie’s face, wider and wilder than any eyes Julie had ever seen. She tried not to flinch.

Julie said, “There was a flash of light when they were taken, wasn’t there? Very bright. Almost blinding.”

“Yes!”

“Tell me everything, from the beginning.”

“Can you get them back? Can you? Can you?”

No. “I don’t know.”

“You must get them back!”

“We’ll do what we can. Was it a short teenage boy with a wobbling head, as if the head were too big for his neck? Or was it a girl?”

Mrs. Carter shuddered. “It was a demon!”

Oh. It was going to be like that.

“A demon from Hell and he has Jenny and Kara!” She began to wail again and tear her hair.

Slowly, painfully, Julie extracted the story. It wasn’t much different from the others, except that this time there had been two children, and the husband had disappeared, too. Apparently he had been hanging onto one of the kids. Was that significant?

How did you know what was significant when it was all unthinkable?

Eight other children in the last year, all vanished without a trace, each taken from a different town on the Atlantic coast. Only three of the abductions had been witnessed, however, and one of those had not succeeded. The mother had beaten off the kidnapper—a young girl—before the perp vanished in a dazzlingly bright light. Or so the mother said. But children disappeared all the time, which is why the press had not yet gotten the larger story. But even the unwitnessed disappearances followed a pattern, and patterns were what Julie did. There were other incidents, too: mostly thefts from locked stores. She was less sure those fitted, and her algorithms had to weight for that. But the geographical pattern was there, if bizarrely nonlinear, and what kind of kidnapper was both smart enough to plan ten flawless abductions and stupid enough to leave any signature at all in their geography?

Julie was not law enforcement. Gordon was, and they had discussed the question endlessly over the last months. Gordon’s answer: A psycho who wants to be caught.

Julie had no answers. Only terrible fears.

“It was a demon! A demon!” Mrs. Carter suddenly shrieked. “I want Ed and my kids back!” She tore out of the dune cottage, robe flapping and hair whipping around her ravaged face, as if she could find her husband and children on the cold beach. A cop leaped after her; she was of course a suspect.

Julie wiped the blood off her arm where Mrs. Carter’s nails had pierced the skin. Did that mean she needed a tetanus shot? Was a tetanus shot even safe for her now?

She crossed her arms over her belly and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Gordon stood watching her.

APRIL 2014

The sun rose above the salt marsh on the Connecticut coast. The tide flowed gently out, toward the barrier island that sheltered the land. A light breeze ruffled the cordgrass, although the breeze was not strong enough to cause waves on the pearly water. A blue heron did disturb the water, landing on a mudflat to dip its long bill, searching for breakfast. A sea-pink bloomed on a raised hummock, turning its dome-shaped cluster of flowers toward the sun.

In the mud beside the heron’s long thin toes, something changed.

Bacteria sliming the roots of cordgrass swapped plasmids with another species, the result of a long and intricate chain of such exchanges. The new bacteria began to feed. Abruptly, it died, unable in this mutated form to tolerate the high salt content of brackish marsh.

The heron rose and flew away into the dawn.

2035

It took Pete days and days to recover from the laser burn on his foot, which became infected. McAllister was out of her special medicine—“antibiotics,” Pete thought it was called—because one of the Grab kids had needed the last dose. Sometimes McAllister sat beside Pete, sometimes Paolo and once Caity, but usually no one tended him. No one could be spared.

He came to loathe his tiny, bare “bedroom” with no bed, just a pile of blankets on the floor and a shit bucket in the corner. Why hadn’t he taped something to the wall like Caity did in her room—something, anything to look at? They still had some tape left. Caity had taped up a picture that one of the children tore out of a precious book, a girl riding a big black horse, and beside it a bright piece of patterned cloth from an old Grab. All Pete had to look at was white Tesslie-metal walls, white Tesslie-metal ceiling, white Tesslie-metal floor.

He drifted in and out of sleep that never refreshed him. When his fever rose high enough he thought he saw other rooms around him: The impossibly gorgeous, rich bedroom from which he’d taken the round-headed baby that Bridget had named Kathleen. The ugly city apartment with stained and crumbling walls where he’d found Tina, alone in her bed except for the rat attracted by the milk around her unwiped little mouth. The strange house, decorated only with bright pillows and low, silver-inlaid tables where he’d snatched dark, curly-haired Karim, whose name he knew only because his mother had screamed it just before Pete pushed her down that short flight of stairs to get away. Those other rooms rose around him, shimmered on the air like the world he’d seen only in snatches on Grabs, and then collapsed into so much rubble.

“Sleep, Pete.” McAllister, a cool hand on his forehead. Or maybe not, because McAllister collapsed, too, but into a shimmer of golden sparks. Like the Tesslie that McAllister described in learning circles! Pete struggled to sit up.

“No! No . . . not you . . . Tessl. . . .”

“Sleep.”

When he woke for the last time from fever and delirium, he was alone.

Cautiously he got himself up off the pallet of blankets. Pete recognized them; he’d brought them back himself, from his first store Grab. They needed washing. Everything needed washing, including himself. But that could wait.

He lurched dizzily to the door. A Grab was supposed to be painless, and usually it was. But you weren’t supposed to shoot your own foot! Still, everyone took risks during Grabs, or at least everyone who could still go. Look what had happened to Caity on her last Grab: that mother had beat Caity off, breaking her arm, and Caity hadn’t even been strong enough to keep the child. McAllister was thinking of taking Caity off Grab duty, which would leave just Pete, Ravi, and Paolo to do them all, at least until Terrell turned twelve. Anyway, it was better than shit-bucket duty.

Pete’s room opened onto the corridor that ran the whole half-mile length of the egg-shaped Shell. Each end of the corridor branched into maybe a hundred of these tiny rooms. The Survivors and the Six used some of them at the living end as bedrooms, and McAllister had designated a few more as storage or work areas. None of the rooms at the far end of the Shell were used at all. In the center was the important stuff.

Such a long way to hobble. Below Pete’s halting feet, one painful enough that finally he just hopped on the other and leaned against the wall for support, stretched the same featureless white metal as his room. Above curved the ceiling of the Shell, three times his height. On either side were doors, some open and some closed, leading to more tiny rooms, white metal walls. Tesslie stuff, all of it. Stuff preserving his life. Pete hated it.

Another hundred yards to the farm, the children’s room, the Grab room.

All at once he didn’t want to go to any of them. The children’s room, spacious and always busy, would be cheerful with toys, learning circles, babies cooing or wailing. Caity or Jenna or Terrell would be there, whoever was on duty. Someone would also be on duty with Darlene in the farm. Someone else would be watching—endlessly, boringly—the Grab machinery. Pete was sick of all of it. This time it had nearly gotten him killed. The only person he would have liked to see was McAllister, and he’d been sick so long that he’d lost track of the duty roster and had no idea where McAllister, or anybody else, might be now.

Miraculously unnoticed, Pete crept past the wide archways which opened on one side of the corridor to the children’s room and on the other to the farm. From the farm came the smell of dirt and the fall of water in the disinfecting and clean-water streams. Also the clank of buckets; someone was on duty at the fertilizer machine. From the children’s room came the usual babble, the playing and crying and talking of eight—no, now ten!—small children.

Head wobbling on his thin neck, he hopped past the smaller, doorless openings to the rooms holding Tesslie machinery and entered the maze of tiny, unused rooms at the far end of the Shell. His foot, wrapped in pieces of torn blanket, still hurt. “Stupid fucking foot!” McAllister had forbidden that word, but Pete—all of the Six—had learned a rich cursing vocabulary from Darlene. Her only useful contribution, in Pete’s opinion, to life in the Shell. Mean old woman.

Finally he reached a small, low chamber at the very tip of the Shell. Here part of the outer wall was, for some reason, clear. Why had the Tesslies done that? But, then, why had they destroyed the world nearly twenty-one years ago and then chosen to imprison a handful of survivors? Nobody knew why the fucking bastards did anything. Pete sank to the metal floor and looked out.

There wasn’t much to see: just a strip of land between him and where the ground curved abruptly away. That strip was a uniform expanse of empty black rock, once smooth but now starting to split in places. The rock had a name, and so did the thing the Shell sat on, but Pete didn’t remember them. Basil? No, that was a prince in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Balit? Basalt? He’d never been good at learning such stuff, not like Jenna or Paolo. They were the smart ones. What Pete was good at was the Grab.

And hatred. He was terrific at hatred. So he gazed out at his tiny view of the vast dead world the Tesslies had killed, and thought about the beauty of the shore cottage where he had Grabbed the two children, and he hated.

APRIL 2014

Deep beneath the ice pack of the Canadian glacier, the earth shifted. Basalt magma flowed into a chamber heavy with silica and the two mingled. From below, more magma pushed upward, exerting pressure. Above, glacial ice tens of thousands of years old but already thinned by global warming, gleamed under a cold spring sky.

NOVEMBER 2013

Gordon stood at one end of the table that was really two tables pushed together, one moved from the bedroom of the motel “suite.” Julie stood at the other end, willing him to leave. The rest of the task force had already gone to their own rooms for the night, leaving Styrofoam cups with the remnants of cold coffee, empty pizza boxes, crumpled paper napkins, half-crushed beer cans. On the desk Julie’s industrial-strength laptop, in sleep mode, glowed with a blue light.

It had been a bad idea to hold the team meeting in her room, but Gordon’s wife, impelled by some marital crisis Julie wanted no part of, kept phoning his room after she’d been told not to call his cell. Maybe that was why he hadn’t left yet; Deborah was a weeper. Or so Julie had been told. She didn’t want to know for sure. If Gordon tried to talk personally with her now . . .

He didn’t. He studied her latest printout, frowning at the equations as if he understood them. “So you think somewhere in Hingham, next Thursday?”

“That’s what the algorithms say.”

“God, Julie, I need a more specific location than that! Unless I can witness an actual kidnapping, maybe even have a camera set up—”

She held onto her temper. “I’m a mathematician, Gordon, not a magician. And I’ve given you everything I’ve got.”

A second later, horror hit her at her own wording, but Gordon, frowning at the sheaf of papers, apparently hadn’t noticed. That caused horror to give way to anger. He never had been any good at reading her feelings, had always enclosed himself in that “objective” professional shell. Well, let him.

He ran a hand over the gray stubble on his head. “I know. I didn’t mean to snap. But funding for this task force is hanging by a thread. The A-Dic isn’t convinced that the child abductions are linked, and he’s never believed any of the witnesses, you know that.”

“I know. Can’t blame him, really.” Two witnesses—no, three now, with Mrs. Carter—attesting that someone had invaded their homes, stolen or tried to steal a child, and then dissolved, child and all, into thin air, to the accompaniment of a burst of bright light. Twice the alleged intruder was a deformed teenage boy with a wobbly head, dressed in what was described as a blanket. Once it was a girl, who had been successfully fought off until she dematerialized. Who would believe any of that? Nor did it help that two of the women had been hysterical types; one was now in a mental institution. Some days Julie wasn’t sure that she herself believed this stuff. The common MOs, yes. The irrefutable fact that the children were gone, yes. Above all, the algorithms that traced a nonlinear but discernible mathematical path for the kidnappings.

She said, “Your Assistant Director has reason to doubt. But I think my usefulness to the task force is pretty much over, and anyway Georgetown wants me back for the spring semester. I’ve booked a flight back to D.C. for tomorrow.”

Gordon looked up. Was that relief in his eyes? She was lying about Georgetown, but he didn’t know that. He said, “Will you stay on call if we have any questions?”

“Sure.” She rose, which was a mistake. The wave of nausea took her by surprise, surging up her throat so suddenly that she barely made it to the bathroom. After she threw up, she kicked the door closed behind her, then took her time rinsing her mouth and brushing her teeth. By the time she came out, he would have gone.

He hadn’t. He stood at the end of the table, papers crumpled in one hand, his still handsome face as white as the printouts. A little vein throbbed in his forehead. “My God, Julie.”

“It’s nothing. Something I ate at dinner.”

“It’s not.” And then, “I have three kids, remember.”

Something in her that she hadn’t counted on, some streak of anger or blame, made her lash out at him. “Now you’ve got one more.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She sat down. The motel chair creaked under her. “Let’s get one thing straight, Gordon. This has nothing to do with you. I mean, it will have nothing to do with you. You don’t need to be involved at all.”

“You’re keeping it?”

“Yes.” She was thirty-eight, with no real relationship in sight now that the ill-thought-out thing with Gordon had ended. This might be her last chance.

“How far along are you?”

“Three and a half months.” Her stocky figure meant that, with her habitually loose clothing, no one had yet noticed. They would soon. She had arranged to extend her sabbatical from Georgetown to a full year, had already bought a crib, a changing table, impossibly tiny onesies. The nausea was supposed to have stopped by now but, as her obstetrician said, every pregnancy is different.

Gordon’s jaw tightened. “You weren’t going to tell me at all, were you?”

“No.” And then, from that same unexplored well of anger—but at what? “You have your hands full already, with Deborah and your kids.”

They stared at each other for a long moment. Julie found herself studying him almost impersonally, as if he were someone she’d just met. Such a handsome man, with his deep blue eyes, firm jaw, prematurely gray hair that looked masterful rather than old. “Masterful”—that was the right word for Gordon. He liked to control situations. And yet he had been tender with her, from the conventional beginning of too-long “business dinners,” through the trite progression to so much more.

Had she really ever loved him? It had felt like romance, those first few months of delicious hidden hours. And yet even then, Julie had had her doubts. Not because Gordon was married, but because of something in his character and—be honest!—in her own. Both of them wanted to make their own decisions, keep their options open. That stubborn independence was why Julie had never married, and why Gordon cheated on his wife. Neither had ever told the other “I love you.” Both had wanted freedom more than the inevitable compromises and sacrifices of genuine love.

And yet now Gordon stood at his end of the littered table, running his hand through his gray hair and looking more troubled than Julie had known possible. But, then, Gordon was not one to shirk responsibilities. That wouldn’t have fit with his image of himself.

“Julie, if there’s anything I can do . . . money . . .”

Her anger evaporated. This situation was not his fault. Nor hers—precautions sometimes failed. Gordon would never leave drama-queen Deborah, and she didn’t want him to, no matter what romantic fantasies dictated that she should want. Julie needed nothing from him.

“I’m fine,” she said gently. “Truly.”

“At least let me—”

“No.” She went into her motel bedroom and closed the door, her back to it until she heard him leave.

APRIL 2014

The sheep pasture high in New Zealand hills lay thick in white clover. One corner of the pasture had been planted with chicory, but the clover grew wild. Low, white-flowered, sweet-smelling, it attracted the bees buzzing above the fenced pasture. Sheep munched contentedly, flicking their tails. Beside the fence, two lambs chased each other.

The clover’s root system, fibrous and fast-growing, laced itself through the soil. The original tap root extended three feet deep; branches clustered thickly near the top grew, in turn, a mass of fine rootlets. Much of the system was slimed with new bacteria, created by a long chain of plasmid swaps. There had been more than enough candidates for this gene-swapping: a teaspoon of the sheep pasture’s soil contained over 600 million bacteria. The new anaerobic strain included a gene that broke down carbohydrates, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol.

The alcohol accumulated on the plant roots. In a short time the fermentation had deposited ethanol on the plant roots in a concentration of one part per million. When the concentration reached twice that, the clover began to die.

The new bacteria went on multiplying. A ewe munched up a handful of clover, jostling the root system so that it touched another. The ewe ambled on toward her lamb.

2035

McAllister didn’t let Pete sit alone by the Shell wall for very long. She found him in another of the maze of unused rooms, as she always found him wherever he went, and knelt beside him. The folds of her simple long dress, made from a blue bed sheet patterned with yellow flowers, puddled on the metal floor. “Pete.”

“Go away.”

“No.” She didn’t put her arms around him; she knew better, after last time. He had hit her. From frustration, hurt, anger, hate. Never had he regretted anything so much in his short life.

“Then don’t go away. I don’t care.”

She smiled. “Yes, you do. And I have something good to tell you.”

Despite himself, he said, “What?”

“The two little girls you brought us a week ago are doing fine.”

“They are?” And then, because he didn’t want to look yet at anything good, “A week ago? I was sick for a week?”

“Yes.”

“I missed a whole week of duties?”

“Yes, but don’t worry about it. Your foot got infected and you were wonderful. Just kept fighting. You always do.”

That was McAllister: always encouraging, always kind. She was one of the Survivors, from the time before the Tesslies destroyed the world. When that happened, McAllister had been only twenty-one, six years older than Pete was now. The Tesslies had put her and twenty-five others in the Shell, and then—what? Kept them there to breed and. . . . Pete didn’t know what the Tesslies had wanted, or wanted now. Who could understand killer aliens who destroyed a world and then for over twenty years kept a zoo going with random survivors? And when that experiment failed, having produced only six children, replaced it with another experiment involving machinery that they could have put in the Shell decades before?

Only four of the Survivors were still alive: McAllister, Eduardo, Xiaobo, and the awful Darlene. “Radiation damage created cancers and genetic damage,” McAllister had said; Pete hadn’t listened closely to the rest of the explanation. Jenna and Paolo, not him, were good at that science stuff. What Pete knew was that the Survivors miscarried, got weaker, eventually died. Most of them he couldn’t even remember, including both his biological parents, although he was the oldest of the Six. But he remembered Seth and Hannah, Robert and Jenny, and especially kind and loving Bridget, who had died only three months ago. All the Six had loved Bridget, and so had the Grab kids.

Pete looked at McAllister. She was so beautiful. Her face was lined and her breasts sagged a little beneath her loose dress, but her body was slim and curving, her dark eyes and rich brown skin unmarred. And she was whole. Not damaged like the next generation, the Six. Not old-looking like the other three Survivors. She was the smartest of everybody, and the sweetest. Again Pete felt the love surge up in him, and the lust. The latter was completely hopeless and he knew it. The knowledge turned him sullen again.

“So who did the next Grab? Was there one?”

“The platform brightened but nobody went.”

“Why didn’t Paolo go? He was next in line!”

“He fell asleep and missed it.”

“He’s a wimp.” It was their deadliest insult, learned from the Survivors. It meant you shirked your fair share of work and risk and unpleasant duties like lugging shit buckets to the fertilizer machine. It was also unfair applied to Paolo, who had always been sickly and couldn’t help falling asleep. He had some disease that made him do it. Pete had forgotten the name.

“Paolo isn’t really strong enough for a Grab unless it’s a store, and who can predict that?” McAllister said reasonably. “I’m taking him off Grab duty. Pete, don’t you want to hear about the little girls?”

“No. Caity could have gone on the Grab when Paolo fell asleep,” he said, although he knew that if it wasn’t her turn, she wouldn’t have been anywhere near the machinery. But Pete had his own reasons for a grudge against Caity, reasons he couldn’t tell McAllister. And the truth was that of the Six, Pete and Ravi were best at the Grab. Terrell wouldn’t go until he turned twelve, Paolo and Jenna had gotten too sickly, Caity had her arm broken when she tried to Grab a child, which she hadn’t even been able to bring back. Although, to be fair, Caity insisted on going again as soon as her arm healed. But Pete was in no mood to be fair to Caity.

Only the Six could go through the Grab machinery. Before the humans in the Shell knew that, they’d lost two Survivors, Robert and Seth. You’d think the Tesslies would have told McAllister about the age limit when they left the Grab machinery a year ago! But no one had even seen them leave the machinery (and how did they do that?). Nobody had seen a Tesslie in twenty-one years, and nobody ever had heard one speak. Maybe they couldn’t.

McAllister said, still trying to cheer up Pete, “Both little girls are adjusting so much better than we’d hoped. You must come see them. The little girl said her name is Kara. She just called the infant ‘Baby,’ so we had to pick a name for her, and we chose ‘Petra.’ After you.”

Petra. Despite himself, Pete rolled the name on his tongue, savoring it as once—only once—he’d savored “candy” that Paolo had Grabbed when he’d found himself sent to a store. They’d all had a piece. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, McAllister had called them. Feeling the astounding sweetness dissolve on his tongue, Pete had hated the Tesslies all over again. This, this, this—he might have had a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup every day of his life! A whole Peanut Butter Cup, every day!

He might even have had a woman like McAllister.

“Come see Petra,” she coaxed.

He’d been trained since birth not to indulge himself. Don’t be a wimp! Indulgence in moods was selfish and against the restarting of humanity. Some of the others might be better at remembering that—well, all of the others—but Pete had his pride. He’d been indulgent enough for one day. He got painfully to his feet, his head wobbling, and followed McAllister to see Petra.

APRIL 2014

The Connecticut salt marsh had been filled in during the 1940s, restored during the 1980s, overrun with too many tourists enjoying its beauty in the 1990s, and finally declared an ecologically protected area in 2004. Although it proved impossible to completely eliminate the invasive nonnative plant species, the natural floral layering of back-barrier marsh was returning. At the lowest level, where the tide brought surges of salt water twice a day, cordgrass and glassworts dominated. Higher up, it was salt hay. Higher still, on the upland border of the marsh, the ground was thick with black rush and marsh elder.

A particularly large marsh elder, nearly eight feet high, held a half-finished nest. A red-winged blackbird brought another piece of grass, laid it in the nest, and flew off. The shrub’s still furled buds, which would soon become greenish-white flowers, bobbed in a wind from the sea.

Below ground, bacteria mutated again. This time it found the lower salinity much more congenial than it had the roots of cordgrass, a month ago. The bacterial slime engaged in all its metabolic processes, including mitosis and fermentation. Alcohol began to accumulate on the marsh elder’s roots.

NOVEMBER 2013

Julie sat in a crowded Starbucks in D.C. across the table from her best friend, Linda Campinelli. Julie’s latte and Linda’s double caramel macchiato sat untouched. The women known each other since Princeton, brought together by the vagaries of the roommate-matching computer even though they were complete opposites. Linda, a large untidy woman with a large untidy husband and three riotous sons, was an animal psychologist in Bethesda. She told long, funny stories about neurotically territorial cats or schnauzers that developed a fear of their water dishes. But not today.

“Ju . . . are you sure?”

“I’m four months along. Of course I’m sure.”

“Gordon?”

“Of course it was Gordon! How many men do you think I was banging at once?”

“I meant what will Gordon and you do?”

Julie had expected this. Linda was not only a romantic, she was sociability squared. Maybe even cubed. Not even after four years of dorm living did Linda understand Julie’s preference for silence and solitude. For Linda, all decisions and all endeavors were group activities.

“Linda, there is no ‘Gordon and me.’ And I don’t want there to be. I’m having the baby, I’m keeping the baby, I’m raising the baby. Georgetown’s given me a year’s sabbatical, for which I was overdue anyway. I’ve got great medical coverage. I feel fine now that morning sickness is over. And I’m happy to be doing this alone.”

“Except for me,” said Linda, to whom anything else was unthinkable.

Julie smiled. “Of course. You can be my labor coach. Always good to have a coach who won all her own games.”

“And your due date is—”

“May 1.”

Linda sipped her caramel macchiato. Julie saw that her friend was still troubled. Linda would never understand isolates like Julie and Jake.

As if reading Julie’s mind, Linda said, “And how is that gorgeous brother of yours?”

“Still monitoring mud in Wyoming.” Jake was a geologist.

“What did he say about the baby?”

“I haven’t told him yet.”

“But he’ll come here for the birth, right?”

“I’m sure he will,” said Julie, who was sure of no such thing. She and Jake liked being affectionate at a distance.

“Then you’ll have me and Jake, and I’m sure that Lucy Anderson will come to—”

Ah, Linda! Even parturition required a committee.

That evening Julie’s cell rang just as she was tapping the lid back on a paint can in her D.C. apartment. Paint had spilled over the side of the can and flowed down its side, but fortunately she had laid down a thick wad of paper. Winterfresh green puddled over a science article: POLLUTION FROM ASIA CONTAMINATES STRATOSPHERE. Julie’s paper mask was still in place; the baby book had recommended a filter mask if a pregnant woman felt it absolutely necessary to paint something. Julie had felt it absolutely necessary to paint her mother’s old chest of drawers, after which she would apply decals of bears. The ultrasound showed she was having a girl. But no Disney princesses or any of that shit; Julie’s daughter would be brought up to be a strong, independent woman. Bears were a good start.

The nursery, formerly Julie’s study, was very cold, since the baby book had also recommended painting with open windows. She shivered as she picked up her cell and walked into the hallway of the two-bedroom apartment, squeezing past the furniture and boxes moved from her former study. Somehow she would have to find room for all this stuff. At the moment her computer and printer sat on the dining table and her file cabinet crowded the kitchen. The baby wasn’t even here yet and it had disrupted everything. “Hello. Julie Kahn speaking.”

“It’s Gordon.”

Damn. She said neutrally, “Yes?”

“Is that really you? You sound all muffled.”

She took off the filter mask and said crisply, “What is it, Gordon?”

He was direct, one of the things she’d liked about him, when she still liked things about him. “There was no kidnapping Thursday at Hingham.”

That threw her. “Are you sure? Could there possibly be a child missing but the parents didn’t report it, or . . . or maybe just another burglary, the algorithms used those to—”

“I know my damn job. If there were so much as a misplaced screwdriver in this town tonight, we’d fucking well know about it.”

In his unaccustomed irritability she heard his tension over the situation. Unless his tension was over her, which she definitely did not want.

She said, “I explained to you that the burglaries complicated the algorithms, made them more than a simple linear progression. It was a judgment call which ones to include. I might have included some that were inside jobs with no forced entry, I might have missed some that—”

“I know all that. You did explain it. Several times. But the fact is that your predictive program isn’t working, and you need to fix it in part because I’ve staked my credibility with the A-Dic on it.”

Not like him to say so much. Her temper rose. “You can’t blame this failure on me, Gordon. I told you when you approached me at the university that predictive algorithms with this kind of data—”

“I know what you told me. Stop talking to me like I’m an idiot. Just put this new non-data in and give me something else I can work with. If you really can.”

“I’ll do what is possible,” she said stiffly.

“Great. Call me whenever it’s done.” He hung up, everything else unsaid between them.

Julie closed the door to the freezing nursery-to-be, put on a heavy sweater, and went to her computer.

APRIL 2014

From the floor of the Atlantic Ocean rose the longest mountain range in the world, separating huge tectonic plates. All at once a northern section of the African Plate moved closer to the South American Plate. The move was only an inch, and the resulting earthquake so slight it was felt by nobody. But the hydrophones set around the ocean picked up the shift from its low-frequency sonic rumbles, sending the information to monitoring stations on four continents.

“¡Mirar esto!” a technician called to his superior in Spain.

“Regardez!”

“Ei, olhar para esta!”

“Kijk naar dit!”

“Will you fucking take a look at that!”

2035

Kara started screaming as soon as Pete came through the archway to the children’s room.

Thirteen children played or slept or learned in this large open space. Like all interior Shell rooms, it had featureless white metal walls, floor, and ceiling. There was no visible lighting but the room was suffused with a glow that brightened at “day” and dimmed at “night,” although never to complete blackness. The Shell contained only those objects originally gathered by Tesslies before they destroyed the world, or else objects seized on Grabs with the machinery the aliens had supplied a year ago. Pallets of blankets either thin and holey or else thick and new. Pillows on the floor for the adults to sit on. Many bright plastic toys, from the time that one of Jenna’s Grabs had landed her in something called a “Wal-Mart.” That Grab was famous. Jenna, almost as smart as her mother, had used her ten minutes to lash together three huge shopping carts and frantically fill them with everything in the closest aisles, toys and tools and clothing and “soft goods.” The pillows had come from that Grab, and the sheets and blankets that made both bedding and clothes for those who didn’t happen at the moment to fit into any clothes Grabbed at other stores. The shopping carts were now used to trundle things along the central corridor.

One wall held McAllister’s calendar. Crayons and paint just slid off the metal walls, but McAllister had put up a large sheet with packing tape and on that she kept careful track of how long humanity had been in the Shell. As a little boy Pete had sat in front of that calendar in a learning circle and learned to count. He’d been taught to read, too, although until Jenna’s Grab all the letters had to be written on a blanket using burned twigs from the farm. Now the Shell had six precious books, which everyone read over and over. All the pages were smeary and torn at the edges.

The children’s room—and many other rooms as well—held piles of buckets. These had been here from the beginning; evidently the Tesslies considered buckets important. The Shell contained whole rooms full of buckets, from fist-sized (these were used as bowls and cups) to big ones on the farm. The buckets could be stuck to each other with something in tubes that Jenna had brought back from her Wal-Mart Grab. A shoulder-high wall of stuck-together buckets divided the babies’ corner from the rest of the children’s room. And, of course, the buckets were used for pissing and shitting.

Jenna would never do another Grab. Her deformities were worse than most, and now her spine would not hold up her body for more than a few minutes of painful movement. It wouldn’t be long before one of the shopping carts would have to trundle her. But despite the constant pain, she retained the sweet nature she had inherited from McAllister, and now she sat on a pillow, back against the wall beside the open door, reading to four kids sprawled on the floor. Goodnight Moon. Pete knew it well.

Kara looked up, saw Pete, and shrieked. “No! No! Nooooooo!” The child threw herself on the floor and kicked her bare feet against the metal.

McAllister picked her up. “No, sweetheart, no . . . ssshhhhhhh, Kara-love, ssshhhhh. . . .”

Kara went on screaming until Caity rushed over, took Kara from McAllister, and carried her away, tossing a reproachful glance over her shoulder at Pete. He’d never liked Caity, not even when they were kids themselves. “She’s too much like you,” McAllister had said to him once, and Pete had hid from McAllister in the far end of the Shell for an entire day. He still didn’t like Caity, not even when he was having sex with her.

Jenna said, “How are you, Pete?”

“Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.” Almost immediately he regretted saying that. Jenna loved the songs Bridget had crooned to them as kids, and she’d loved Bridget. At Bridget’s funeral a few months ago, Jenna had sobbed and sobbed.

Jenna didn’t react to the sarcasm. She, of all the Six, was the best at setting aside her own feelings for the common good. Terrell and Paolo were pretty good at it, too. Pete, Ravi, and Caity often failed.

Failed, failed, failed . . . That was Pete’s song, unless he made hatred sing louder.

Jenna said, “I’m glad you recovered from your Grab. Kara is coming along very well—”

“Unless she sees me, of course.”

“—and Petra is a darling.”

“I better go Outside to give Kara a chance to adjust.”

McAllister said, sharply for her, “That’s enough of that talk, Pete. Come with me.”

As if anyone could really get Outside!

But he followed her meekly, wishing for the hundred hundredth time that he had Jenna’s patience. Ravi’s physical strength and good looks. Anything that anyone else had and he didn’t. Wishing he could seize McAllister’s waist and take her into one of the rooms at the far end of the Shell, just the two of them and a blanket . . . His cock rose.

Not a good time! Still, he was glad he was only infertile, not impotent like Paolo. “Pre-embryonic genetic damage is a capricious thing,” McAllister had said. “We were lucky you Six survived at all.”

Lucky. Great, just great, on this great ol’ day in the morning.

McAllister led Pete around the bucket-wall to the babies’ corner. Three infants lay asleep on blankets, watched over by Ravi, who didn’t much like babies but it was his turn for this duty. Ravi was the least deformed of the Six. His eyes were permanently crossed, but his body was strong and, even though he was a year younger than Pete, he was taller and heavier. With thick dark hair and a handsome face, he looked the most like the princes in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. Sometimes Pete hated him for that, although in general they got along well enough. Ravi was his biological half-brother, after all. Not that that counted for much; what counted was the good of all.

“Look,” McAllister said to Pete, “at the treasure you brought us.”

Petra lay asleep on a blanket, a square of plastic between it and the clumsy diaper made of another blanket. On top she wore a very faded yellow shirt too big for her. Her tiny pink mouth, the little curled fists with the creases at the wrists, the shape of her head . . . She was a perfect human person and of course she would be fertile. Radiation levels had subsided enough by now, McAllister had said, although Pete didn’t really understand what that meant. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that he had done this thing: brought back a perfect, precious boost to the restarting of humanity on Earth. Someday that restarting would move Outside, McAllister said.

If the Tesslies permitted it.

McAllister put her thin hands on either side of Pete’s face and turned him toward her. “Listen to me, dear heart. I am making you this baby’s father. You are now responsible for her life and, as much as possible, her happiness. Do you understand me? I put Petra’s life in your hands. You are her father.”

Both Pete and Ravi gaped at her. No one in the Shell was “father” or “mother” to any kid taken on a Grab! Everyone was responsible for the good of all, always. Why now, why Petra, why Pete? The questions were lost in the feel of McAllister’s hands on his face.

“Why him?” Ravi blurted. “Is it because he’s the oldest?”

McAllister didn’t answer. She never answered anything she didn’t choose to. But she gave Ravi a look that Pete couldn’t read, and didn’t want to. All he wanted was for her to keep on holding his face between her long slim fingers, forever and ever.

She didn’t. But he could feel her hands long after she took them away, could feel his own deep blush, could feel the burden, welcome because she had given it, that McAllister had just placed on his heart. To turn his red face away from her, he gazed down at Petra.

“Hey,” he said to the baby, who woke and immediately shit her diaper.

NOVEMBER 2013

Julie sat in her apartment, studying the graphs on her computer screen. Her desk was jammed against the living room window. Beyond the glass a few flakes of early snow drifted through darkness. Cars swooshed through street slush and swept ghostly patterns of light across the ceiling.

The kidnappings and mysterious store burglaries had followed an erratic path, but the rough outline was clear. The first abduction—the first they knew about and had included in the data, she corrected herself—had been in Sarasota a year ago. October 16 2011: Tommy Candless, age six. Parents divorced, and the child basically a Ping-Pong ball for power struggles between them. John Candless, who did not have custody, had grabbed his son and run before, but he’d easily been caught by state troopers since he hadn’t even had the sense to leave Florida. Heather Candless had one conviction for DWI. Julie wasn’t even positive that Tommy wasn’t squirreled away with some obscure relative or friend somewhere that Gordon’s task force had failed to discover. Or the child could have been killed and the body never found. Both parents seemed to her capable of even that in their intense hatred for each other.

Drop Tommy from the data? Would that help? No, her gut said to leave him in. She did.

The path of subsequent abductions moved roughly up the East Coast, sometimes swerving inland, sometimes back-tracking. The intervals weren’t even, coming in clusters that themselves weren’t even. Nine children after Tommy, including Kara and Jennifer Carter. The kids ranged from ten months old to Tommy’s six years. Seven girls, three boys. Two hysterical witnesses, one relatively calm one (but her baby hadn’t been taken; she’d fought off the young abductress). One hysterical witness had been pushed over the slippery edge of her already advancing illness into an institutional schizophrenia, which did not help the FBI Assistant Director to trust her credibility.

The big problem with the data, as Julie had told Gordon, were the store burglaries. Here, too, the MO was the same: no forced entry, no money taken, seemingly random grabs of diverse merchandise, including shopping carts. Why take shopping carts, both worthless and conspicuous? Why take an entire display of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups? At Wal-Mart’s, why take pillows and leave untouched a display of diamond rings? And should the Baltimore Kohl’s burglary be included or not? How about that earlier one in Georgia? Or the one in the New Jersey convenience store? That store had had a broken back window, which might have taken it off the list of no-forced-entry burglaries. However, a neighbor walking his dog at 3:00 a.m. thought he heard glass breaking. He shouted and saw kids run away, empty-handed, so did that mean there were two incidents at the same store at the same night, a coincidence?

She played with the data, putting in one incident, taking out another, changing the patterns. The maddening thing was that the patterns were there, and not just in MOs. The numbers showed patterns, too: nonlinear, closer to fractals than to conventional graphs, but nonetheless there. And the numbers should have pointed to another abduction or burglary in Hingham, Massachusetts, on Thursday. Which hadn’t happened. So obviously she had included something erroneous, or left something out, or missed something altogether.

She sat far into the night, scrutinizing data.

APRIL 2014

In Xinjiang Autonomous region of northern China, the cotton fields lay serene under the sun. Acre upon acre of the plants stretched to the horizon, dark green leaves a little dusty from lack of rain. Clouds overhead, however, promised water soon. The white boles had only just begun to open, filling the green fields with lopsided polka dots. A golden eagle coasted on an air current, a darker speck against the gray clouds. To the south lay the ancient Silk Road, and much farther south, the majestic and forbidding peaks of the Kunlun Mountains.

On the roots of the cotton plants, bacteria mutated.

2035

The Grab machinery was Tesslie, of course. It sat in its own room in the Shell, a room without a door just down the central corridor from the farm and the children’s room. Someone had to sit there day and night because no one knew when the machinery would brighten. When it did, they had only a few minutes to get someone on it. Then ten minutes in Before to make a Grab. The whole system was stupid. Pete said so to McAllister, often.

“It isn’t our machinery, remember,” she said. “We don’t know how the Tesslies manage time, or intervals of time. We don’t know how they think.”

“They think it’s fun to destroy the Earth, rescue a few Survivors, put them in the Shell, and watch them for twenty years.”

“There’s no reason to think they watch us.”

“There’s no reason to think they don’t.”

“They need machinery, Pete—they’re aliens but not gods. I see no cameras here.”

Pete turned away because McAllister had just, as she so often did, gone abruptly beyond him. He didn’t know what “gods” were, although some of the Survivors had babbled about them when Pete was little, and Darlene still did. She sang songs about green pastures and washing in blood and rowing boats ashore, all in her scratchy tuneless very loud voice. However, nobody listened to Darlene, who was a nasty old woman. Pete wasn’t too sure about the word “camera” either, although it seemed to be a non-Tesslie machinery that made pictures. Pete didn’t know how machines could draw that fast. But how could the Grab do what it did?

The machinery sat in the center of the room, looking like nothing but a gray metal platform a few inches above the floor. If he climbed onto it, ordinarily nothing happened. But sometimes the platform started to glow and then it became a stupid invisible door. No, not a door. Something else. Whatever it was, if you jumped on the platform and went through it, you had ten minutes in Before.

The Grabs usually came a few close together, then long weeks of no brightening. After the Grab when Pete got Kara and Petra, while he’d been feverish with his infected foot, Paolo had fallen asleep and missed the whole thing. Even if Paolo hadn’t been sick, Pete couldn’t really blame him. Watching the Grab machine do nothing, with only your own thoughts to occupy you, was easily the most boring duty on the roster.

But did the Tesslies watch humanity? That was the question that now consumed Pete. Did they watch Pete and Caity when they had sex? Even though Pete didn’t like Caity, she was his only choice. Jenna had grown too fragile, and the kids from the Grab were still too young. That was why they were Grabbed, of course—to have sex when they were older. The girls would be fertile. The boys would be fertile, too, but the Shell needed a lot more girls than boys. None of the Six apparently were fertile, and the four Survivors left were too old to have babies.

But they had had a lot of sex when they were young and newly in the Shell. Even way back then they had been trying to start humanity all over again. Lots of sex—Pete got hard just imagining it—and lots of babies, most of which died.

But had the fucking bastards (more of Darlene’s useful words) watched while the Survivors had all that sex? Did they watch Pete and Caity? And what was a “bastard,” anyway?

Pete tried to sneak across the corridor from the farm to the children’s room. It had been his turn for fertilizer duty, a job he hated. The fertilizer was made from everybody’s shit. You dumped it into a huge closed metal box (more Tesslie machinery!) and the box did something to it. When it fell out a hole into a bucket, it didn’t smell like shit anymore and McAllister said it couldn’t make you sick. But it still looked like shit. Pete had been collecting shit buckets from all over the Shell, trundling them along the wide central corridor on a shopping cart and dumping them into the fertilizer box. Then he had to rinse each bucket thoroughly under the disinfectant waterfall, which was a continuous rain of blue water that shot out of a wall and disappeared into a hole in the floor. Just after he’d rinsed the last bucket, the fertilizer machine delivered a load of fertilizer. Pete tried to pretend he hadn’t seen the bucket fill, so that spreading the fertilizer would have to be the next person’s job, but Darlene caught him.

“Ha! Don’t be sneaking off before the job’s done! I seen you!”

“I wasn’t sneaking off!”

“Sure you was. You’re bone lazy, Pete. A wild one for sure. Go spread that bucket.”

When Bridget died, Pete wished it had been Darlene instead. “Where should I spread this?” He picked up the bucket of fertilizer. “On the soy?”

“Them ain’t soy,” she said scathingly. “Them are some concoction the Tesslies dreamed up and don’t you think nothing different, boy! Them plants will probably poison us yet!”

“Yeah, right,” Pete said. Darlene was crazy. The Tesslies keeping humans alive for twenty years, giving them Grab machinery to get fertile kids to make more humans, just to poison the whole lot.

Then he realized that Darlene’s craziness was driving him to defend the Tesslies, and he threw the brown gunk—it still looked like shit!—harder than necessary onto the soy. Or whatever it was. “High-protein, dense-calorie plants,” Jenna had told him once. McAllister was teaching Jenna and Paolo all the science she knew from Before, so it wouldn’t be lost. The other Survivors had done the same, but they hadn’t known nearly as much. “We must save everything we can,” she always said.

Pete spread the fertilizer through the soy. There was enough for half the onion bed, too. Then he rinsed the bucket. Darlene watched him every minute.

Darlene was in charge of the farm. In a way that was weird because Eduardo was the Survivor who had been studying plants when the Tesslies put him into the Shell. “Ecobiology,” McAllister had called it. But that just meant that the plants Eduardo knew about were wild ones, and he told Pete that no special knowledge was needed to grow the vegetables on the farm. Besides, nobody wanted Darlene anywhere near the Grab children. She was too mean.

The farm was the biggest room in the Shell, with rows and rows of raised beds holding various crops, crossed by long metal pipes that leaked water. The farm also housed the disinfecting waterfall and the clean-water waterfall, from which endless buckets of water were hauled for drinking, washing, cooking. Here, too, stood the raised section of the floor that could be turned hot by pressing a button. Bridget had been especially good at simmering vegetable stews on the hot box, in buckets. Now Eduardo did it, less well. The farm smelled good, of dirt and water and cooking, and it would have been a lovely place if it hadn’t been for Darlene.

“ ‘Rock of ages,’ ” she sang in her tuneless, scratchy voice while Pete spread fertilizer. “ ‘Cleft for me’ . . . You spread that even, Pete, you hear me? Bone lazy!” He escaped as soon as he could and went to see Petra.

She was awake, lying on a blanket, kicking her fat little legs. Caity was on duty in the babies’ corner behind its wall of buckets. At the sight of her, Pete again thought of sex, but Caity didn’t seem interested, and after a moment he realized that he wasn’t, either. Not with Caity.

She said, “Did you hear about Xiaobo?”

“What about him?

“He’s dying.”

It took Pete a moment to take it in, even though the news wasn’t unexpected. “Where?”

“His room.”

McAllister would be there. Pete walked back through the children’s room. At the sight of him, Kara started screaming. How long was that going to keep on? Kara would just have to get over it. The older children, three to five years old, were clustered around Jenna in a learning circle, being taught to count buckets and read letters and sing songs. When they were older, McAllister and Eduardo would teach them about stars and atoms and the digestive system. “We must save everything we can.”

McAllister wasn’t with Xiaobo, but Eduardo and Paolo were.

Eduardo was the oldest of the Survivors, and looked it. Only a few years older than McAllister, he seemed to Pete to be older than time. Thinning gray hair straggled around a deeply lined face. Eduardo, a quiet and courteous man, had never lost his soft Spanish accent, and when Pete had been little, he’d loved to have Eduardo tell him stories. He was Paolo’s father, and the two looked alike, although even now Eduardo was stronger than the sickly Paolo. The two sat one on each side of Xiaobo, who lay on a pile of blankets in the bare little room. Paolo held Xiaobo’s hand. Next to these three, Pete actually felt strong and whole.

He knelt at the foot of the nest of blankets. “Xiaobo.”

The dying man opened his eyes. When Pete had been very small, Xiaobo’s eyes had fascinated him: small, slanted, hooded by a fold of skin. At the same time, Xiaobo had scared him because he spoke so weird. English had come slowly to him, and now that Pete was grown himself he realized how lonely Xiaobo must have been in the Shell, the only Survivor of his people, the only one who could not talk to anyone else.

“Xiaobo, are you hurting?”

“No.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Nothing. I go now, Pete.”

“You don’t know that you—”

“It is time. I go.” He closed his eyes again, and smiled.

I will never go that quietly. The thought built itself in his mind, solid as the Shell itself. I will not.

He didn’t know what else to say, but then there wasn’t time to say anything else. Tommy, at seven, the oldest of the children and the only one yet permitted to leave the children’s room alone, raced into Xiaobo’s room. “The Grab is bright!”

Pete leapt up. “Where’s McAllister?”

“I don’t know!” The boy throbbed with excitement. Unlike Kara, Tommy was one who’d adapted easily to his new life.

“It’s Ravi’s turn to go on the Grab,” Pete said. “Where’s Ravi?”

“I don’t know that either! Anyway Terrell was supposed to go because McAllister said he’s twelve now but Terrell got sick again and threw up and Darlene came over from the farm and told him to go lie down in his room like a useless stone.”

Darlene wasn’t supposed to tell Grab watchers anything. Pete, Paolo, and Eduardo looked at each other. How much longer would the platform stay bright? Paolo said, “You just went, Pete. Caity can go.”

“She’s on baby duty,” Pete said. And he was off running down the corridor, cursing Ravi for being—where? Doing what? It was Ravi’s turn, not Terrell’s! And why had McAllister changed the duty roster?

Tommy raced at his heels. “Can I go, Pete? Can I, huh? Can I go, too?”

“No!”

The boy stopped cold and shouted after him, “You’re selfish! You’re a selfish piggy who doesn’t care about the good of all! I’m telling! I am!”

Pete reached the Grab machinery and climbed onto the platform.

DECEMBER 2013

Julie sat on her new sleep sofa in her living room, which had grown smaller with the addition of her desk, smaller still with the broad sofa, and yet again smaller with the Christmas tree crowded into a corner. The scent of Douglas fir drifted through the room. She was wrapping presents in bright metallic paper. Jake was flying in from Wyoming and although they weren’t particularly close, each was the only family the other had since their parents had died in a plane crash three years ago, and it was Christmas. For Christmas you gathered family, even if half your heritage was Jewish. Jake, who would sleep on the extended sofa with his feet against the tree, was about to discover that he had one more family member than he thought.

She hadn’t told him earlier about her pregnancy because he was going to disapprove. Not of her getting pregnant, although he would undoubtedly consider that careless, but of her having and keeping the baby. Jake, deeply ambitious, had risen rapidly through the ranks of the U.S. Geological Survey. He was proud of both her career and his own, and he would frown at the year-long sabbatical she was taking to even have the baby, let alone the professional sacrifices that she knew perfectly well would follow. Julie did not intend to have her child raised by a succession of nannies, Even if she had had room for a nanny. She would make the transition from brilliant professor to brilliant consultant and work at home, perhaps teaching one course per semester as a sideline. Already she had feelers out for potential projects with various industries and government agencies.

She taped wrapping paper around a Bunny Mine, the current hot toy for toddlers. Her daughter, now a four-and-a-half-month fetus, wouldn’t be playing with a Bunny Mine for at least a year, but it would look cute on the shelves that Julie had put up in the nursery. The nursery was finished. The layette was complete. The childbirth classes began in January. It was all planned out, everything under control.

Julie had just begun to wrap a sweater for Jake when her cell rang. “Hello, Julie Kahn speaking.”

“This is Gordon.”

Her lips pursed. She hadn’t heard from him in nearly a month, since she’d given him her best stab at the revised data on the kidnappings. Since then she’d watched the Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maine newspapers; no child had been reported as missing. Plenty of burglaries, of course—theft always picked up as Christmas approached—but without Gordon’s input, Julie had no way of knowing which ones fit the MO that the task force had been pursuing.

“Hello, Gordon,” she said neutrally, hoping this call wasn’t personal.

It wasn’t. He said, “I wanted you to know that the A-Dic pulled the plug on the task force. Each kidnapping has been assigned to a local Special Agent in Charge. The A-Dic just doesn’t believe a connective enterprise exists.”

“The mathematical pattern exists.”

“Maybe. No more kidnappings since Kara and Jennifer Carter. No store burglaries with that MO, either.”

“Before this there have been long stretches between incidents.”

He made a noise she recognized: the verbal equivalent of a shrug. Gordon was moving on. He was not a man to hold on to what he could not control.

She said, “The pattern exists, Gordon.”

Instead of agreeing or arguing, he said, “How are you?”

“Still pregnant, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Can I come see you?”

“No. You’re married, Gordon.”

“There were two of us in those motel rooms, Julie.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything. I take complete responsibility for my actions, and for this result. It doesn’t involve you.”

“Damn it, I’m the father!”

She drew a deep breath. “Only biologically. I don’t mean that to be nasty, Gordon. You have no room for us in your life, and anyway I don’t want that. I don’t think you do, either, not really. Please just leave me be.”

“If you need money—”

“I don’t. Bye, Gordon. I’m sorry about the task force, because I still think there’s something there.”

“But Julie—”

Gently she pressed the disconnect button on her cell.

Within her body, the baby moved, and she put her hand on her belly and watched the lights twinkle on and off on the little Christmas tree above the festive packages.

2035

It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything. I’m dead, Pete thought, as usual, but of course he wasn’t, as usual.

When the nothing receded, disappointment warred with relief. There would be no little girls here. But there would be no fighting or dying, either. He stood in dim light inside a store filled with objects he couldn’t even identify until he saw a big doll, life-size, with no head or arms or legs, wearing some of the objects. Oh—it was clothing! Skimpy filmy pants, strips of fancy cloth across the breasts, racks and racks of this stuff . . . All at once he pictured Caity wearing it, and then McAllister, and his cock rose and he groaned. He couldn’t bring back stuff like this!

He glanced at his wrist to see how much time he had left, but of course he wasn’t wearing the wrister. Terrell still had it. Now what?

He ran past the headless dolls wearing fancy skimpy things and discovered that around the corner were other parts of the store, that in fact it was as big as the children’s room, maybe even bigger than the farm. The other areas held different stuff, as well as shopping carts. He grabbed one and started throwing things into it from under a sign labeled HOMEWARES. Blankets, towels, rugs—damn this was good!—and then pots and a big red tray and boxes of spoons and—

A dog came racing down a set of metal stairs, snarling and barking.

Pete screamed and climbed on top of the shopping cart, nearly slipping on the red tray and falling back off. The dog leaped and its teeth closed on Pete’s leg, although only for a moment before the animal’s weight sent it crashing back to the floor. Pete screamed, grabbed the tray, and held it in front of him. With his other hand he yanked a pot free of the stuff in the shopping cart and threw it at the dog, missing it. How much time was left—how much? Blood streamed down his leg.

The dog leapt again, but it couldn’t reach Pete on top of the cart. However, the impact of its body sent the cart skittering across the floor. Alarms sounded and lights came on. The dog barked and Pete shrieked at it.

The cart rolled past a display of DIGITAL FOTO FRAME, heavy-looking metal squares. Pete grabbed one. Before he could throw it at the dog, the Grab took him back.

On the platform, the rolling shopping cart kept rolling. It crashed over the edge and tipped on its side. Pete fell heavily amid pots, rugs, blankets. For a moment his head rang, but nothing on him broke and he staggered up out of the debris, clutching the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME and more furious than he’d ever been in his life.

He roared at Tommy, “Where the fuck is Ravi?”

The child was not a weeper. He stared back, scared but not budging, and said, “Where did you go?”

Others rushed into the Grab room: Darlene, Paolo, Eduardo. From down the corridor Caity and Jenna, who could not leave the children, screamed, “What is it? What is it?” But no Ravi, and no McAllister.

Pete pushed past everyone and ran down the corridor to the unused far end. Behind him Darlene cackled, “Oh, lovely, an electric fryer! Just what we need!”

Paolo, unable to keep up, called, “Wait, Pete! Wait!”

Tommy, easily able to keep up, ran beside him saying, “What is it? What, Pete? What?”

He found them in the maze of rooms near the tip of the Shell. A blanket had been spread on the floor. McAllister had just slid her loose dress back onto her body, but Ravi was still naked, lying on the blanket, too drained and heavy to move. Pete recognized Ravi’s sated heaviness; he’d felt it after sex with Caity. But never with McAllister: never, never, never.

She said, “Pete—”

“You fucking bastards.”

Tommy gaped. “What is it? What?”

In rage and hurt and frustration, and before he knew he was going to do it, Pete threw the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME at McAllister. It grazed her on the side of the head and she cried out. Ravi leapt up and threw a punch at Pete. Pete dodged, Ravi missed, and Pete kicked him in the balls.

“Stop! That’s enough!” McAllister shouted. But it wasn’t her words, or even that she shouted—McAllister, who never raised her voice! It was the blood on her head, streaming down one cheek. He had hurt McAllister. He collapsed to the ground in tears.

Ravi was up and charging, but McAllister stopped him with a word. She bent over Pete. Now Paolo and Eduardo and Darlene were all there; Pete could see their bare feet from where he huddled on the floor. McAllister sent them all away with sharp commands, even Ravi, who snatched up his clothes as he left.

“Pete,” she said, her voice soft again, “listen to me. Ravi—”

“You never would with me! You said it would cause trouble! You said for the good of all—”

“I know what I said. But listen to me, dear heart. Please listen, I know you’re strong enough to listen. This is for the good of all. Ravi is fertile.”

He stopped ranting, too desolate even for rage.

“You know I checked all of your sperm with the little microscope Jenna got on her Wal-Mart Grab. Ravi is the only one of you who is fertile. He’s had sex with both Caity and Jenna, and neither got pregnant, and now Jenna is too fragile. This is the only chance left among ourselves.”

“We have the Grab kids!”

“Yes, of course. But we need every soul we can get, you know that. The Tesslies could end the Grabs at any time. And we miss some of them.”

“Well, Ravi just missed his. And so did Terrell because he was throwing up—did you know that? So I just did the Grab and nearly got killed!” He tried to wrench free of her, but McAllister held on and the truth was that he didn’t want to get free.

He wanted what Ravi had had.

He put a hand on her breast. When she removed it, he forced her down onto the blanket.

“No, Pete,” she said, calm as ever, “I know you wouldn’t do that. That’s not you. Dear heart, please try to understand. You have a deep, sweet nature and I know you can understand. For the good of all.”

He let her up, gazing bleakly at the blood on her face. “I hurt you.”

“And I hurt you. I’m deeply sorry for that, but we need to survive.”

He said fiercely, “Did you like it?”

She touched his eyelids, one after the other, a delicate finger-kiss.

“Because Ravi liked it! I know!”

“I love you, Pete. I love you all.”

He got to his feet and seized the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. Something had to be his, something had to be outside of the “good of all,” something had to be . . . He didn’t know what his confused thoughts meant. But he said defiantly, stupidly, “I’m keeping this!”

“All right,” McAllister said.

“It’s mine! Just mine!” Nothing ever belonged to one person, nothing.

“All right,” she repeated.

He clutched it, scowling at her, hating her, loving her. The silence stretched on. She waited, but he didn’t know for what. For him to say something, for him to look away.

He looked away, down at the object in his hand, and said, “What is it?”

APRIL 2014

Under the Canadian glacier, molten rock bubbled up from a fissure in the earth. When the pressure became great enough, the ground erupted. Lava met ice, which instantly boiled into steam. The magma hitting the steam exploded into miniscule fragments, sending pillar after pillar of ash billowing overhead. The magma was heavy on silica from the chamber it had breached earlier, which made it much more viscous and sticky than usual. That prevented air bubbles from escaping quickly and so pressure built relentlessly, leading to more and more explosions.

Ash blew southeast on a cold wind, toward Ontario and Quebec.

APRIL 2014

Julie sat in the Starbucks on K Street. Linda had just left, full of plans for her family, Julie, and the baby to take a cottage together in August on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “The baby’ll be nearly four months by then, and it’ll be such fun!” Julie wasn’t sure about that—two weeks with Linda’s noisy kids and noisier dogs? On the other hand, two weeks with Linda and Ted would be fun. Or two weeks in separate, side-by-side cottages. Or two weeks someplace else.

She frowned at the out-of-town newspaper she’d bought at World Wide News. The headlines were all about air traffic hopelessly snarled in Canada by blowing and drifting ash, but that was not what she stared at. Was it or wasn’t it? Then, wryly: I sound like a Clairol commercial. And not even a current commercial. She was showing her age.

Again she read the short, not-very-informative article about the burglary in a small town in western Massachusetts, which was one of the projected paths of her original algorithm. A family-owned department store, one of the few left in the country, had been robbed of a collection of miscellaneous objects, primarily blankets, rugs, and cookware. Also a shopping cart, which was considered “an unusual theft for this kind of burglary.” Julie wasn’t sure what “kind of burglary” the small-town news stringer meant, but she knew what she was looking at. Shopping cart, no forced entry. This time, however, the store had had a guard dog, which had not been harmed. Drops of blood on the floor indicated that the “perpetrator” might have been harmed, but the police had as yet made no arrests.

Whose blood?

“May I sit here? There don’t seem to be any free tables.”

He was tall, attractive, dressed in a suit and tie. He carried the Wall Street Journal, folded to show the headline: FINANCIAL IMPACT OF COMING FRESH WATER SHORTAGES. Glancing at her ringless left hand, he smiled and sat down without waiting for an invitation. Julie stood, and as soon as the curve of her belly under her open coat came into view, his smile vanished.

Julie grinned. “Sure, the table’s all yours.”

Relief on that handsome face.

She buttoned her coat and waddled out. The OB had said she was gaining too much weight, once she’d stopped throwing up, but that otherwise everything was “progressing swimmingly,” a phrase she had liked instantly. Little Alicia, swimming in her secret sea. The baby now had fully developed toenails. Her body could store calcium and phosphorus. She had begun to show the brain waves of REM sleep. What will you dream of, my darling?

Julie left Starbucks. Walking was supposed to be good for her, so she walked even though she had piles of work at home. Consulting work for a high-resolution space imagery firm, for a professor doing research on microbes, even for the Bureau, in a division different from Gordon’s. Everybody, it seemed, needed well-recommended and high-priced mathematical insight. Things were working out well.

The air was crisp and cold, unusually cold for March. Julie walked briskly. Some kids who probably should have been in school ran frantically in the pocket park across the street, trying to get a kite aloft. Daffodils and tulips splotched the park with color.

Whose blood had been on the floor of that department store in western Massachusetts?

2035

The DIGITAL FOTO FRAME held pictures that moved out of the frame so the next one could come in. Pete had never imagined anything like it. It was even better than the drawings in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales or Goodnight Moon because these pictures looked far more real. There were three, and Pete never tired of looking at them. He wouldn’t let any others of the Six look at them, and for once McAllister did not insist that he share.

One of the pictures was of two children playing with a dog. This didn’t look anything like the dog that had attacked Pete in the store. This dog was reddish and happy-looking, but Pete didn’t like it anyway and sometimes he closed his eyes when that picture appeared. The other two were glorious. One was a beach like the place where he’d Grabbed Petra and Kara, but with mountains across the water, colored gold by a setting sun. The other showed a forest filled with trees and flowers. Pete had never seen mountains or sunset, but on Grabs he’d seen sunrise, several trees, and some flowers, and now it was wonderful to sit and gaze at them without the fear and tension of a Grab.

“Why aren’t there more pictures?” he asked Eduardo. He was avoiding McAllister. It was a complaint, not a real question, but Eduardo had a real answer.

“There could be more if we had them to upload,” he said in his soft accent. “These are just demonstration photos. You understand that the battery will run out eventually?”

“Of course,” Pete said scornfully. Some of the children’s toys from Jenna’s famous Grab had used batteries, which all died.

“The more you use it, the less long it will last.”

“I know.” But he couldn’t stop gazing at the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME.

He held it, clutched in one hand, during Xiaobo’s funeral. The funeral room, located off the central corridor across from the Grab room, was yet another featureless white-metal room. There was absolutely nothing in it except the outline of the slot on the far wall, close to the floor, and the button set high on the opposite wall, by the door. Caity, Eduardo, Terrell, McAllister, Darlene, Ravi, and Pete attended the funeral. Also Tommy, now that he was nearly eight. Jenna and Paolo stayed with the Grab children.

It was Tommy’s first funeral and he held tight to McAllister’s hand, although to Pete he looked more interested than scared. Tommy was tough. Well, good. He’d have an easier time of it than some of the children. Kara still screamed every time she saw Pete.

Ravi, another tough one, stared down at Xiaobo’s body, wrapped in their oldest blanket. On top of the body, as was the custom, lay one small thing that the dead person had cherished. For Xiaobo, it was a little stone statue of a fat smiling man that Xiaobo had had with him all the way back when the Tesslies put him in the Shell. Bridget had gone with a lock of hair from a baby of hers that had been stillborn.

Ravi’s face remained blank. Caity and Terrell leaned against the wall, tearful. Darlene, Eduardo, and McAllister, the last of the Survivors, had so many feelings on their faces that Pete could barely look at them.

His own feelings troubled him, because there didn’t seem to be enough of them. He’d known Xiaobo his whole life, had worked beside him, eaten with him, probably been diapered by him when Pete was a baby. They hadn’t talked much, given Xiaobo’s limited English, but he’d always been kind to Pete, to everyone. Right up until this last illness, Xiaobo had been a hard worker. And all Pete felt was that he should feel more, along with a vague curiosity about what it felt like to be dead. Darlene said that the ghosts of billions murdered by the Tesslies haunted the Shell. But Pete had never seen a ghost at all, and anyway where in the Shell could you fit billions of them? He wasn’t exactly sure how much a “billion” was, but it sounded large.

Eduardo said in his musical voice, “As for man, his days are like grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourishes. For the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.” That was what he always said at funerals, and Pete always hated it. It sounded sad, and anyway it was stupid. Xiaobo wasn’t grass—people were made of skin and bones and blood. There was no wind inside the Shell. And this place certainly would remember Xiaobo. Pete would, and so would the other Six and Darlene and Eduardo and, of course, McAllister.

Her words made more sense. “To the Earth we commit the body of our friend and family, Lung Xiaobo. His bones and tissues and heart will enrich the land and help to make it one to which humanity will, someday, return. Go with our gratitude, Xiaobo, and our love.”

Darlene began to sing, another of her awful scratchy songs with words Pete didn’t understand. There were so many things he didn’t understand, starting with how McAllister could bear to have sex with Ravi. He hated him, he hated her, he hated everything. He clutched his DIGITAL FOTO FRAME tighter.

Darlene howled, “ ‘Abide with me, ’tis eventide . . .’ ”

When the song was finished, McAllister pressed the funeral button. A section of the wall opened, a slot near the floor three feet wide and two high. Xiaobo didn’t need that much room. Some unseen force pulled him into the wall. Tommy squatted to peer inside, just as Pete had done when he was little. Now, after being present at three funerals for Survivors and six for miscarriages, Pete knew there was nothing to see. The slot opened into a small bare featureless space, and the other side wouldn’t open to deposit Xiaobo’s body Outside until the first wall closed up.

Darlene bawled another song, this one about the land being beautiful with spacious skies and a lot of grain, but Pete wasn’t listening. He watched Ravi, who had turned his gaze to McAllister. Ravi looked the way he used to when there was a treat Grabbed from a store—oh, those Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups!—and Ravi had tried to figure a way to get a bite of another child’s share. Pete’s hand tightened on the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He wanted to throw it at Ravi, to get his hands around Ravi’s neck and squeeze . . . No, he didn’t. Ravi was his half-brother. Yes, he did—Ravi had sex with McAllister, he was going to have more sex with McAllister, Pete wanted to kill him—

Ravi caught Pete’s look and glared back.

The funeral was over. People moved away, returning to their duties. Caity stomped off, covering whatever softer feelings she had with vague bad temper. Pete lingered, and Tommy stayed with him. When they were the only two left in the funeral room, Tommy demanded, “How does McAllister know that the fucking bastard Tesslies will really put Xiaobo’s body Outside to help grass to come back?”

Tommy must have been listening to Darlene. “McAllister knows.”

“But how?”

Pete looked down at the intense little face. “Well, you didn’t see any other bodies in there, did you? We’ve had a lot of funerals—you know that from learning circles. If the bodies weren’t dumped out, they would just pile up in there.”

Tommy considered. “Maybe the Tesslies just put them in a fertilizer machine. Like shit. And then we spread them on the farm.”

Pete had never thought of this. He could see that Tommy wished he hadn’t thought of it, either. He knelt beside Tommy and said firmly, “No, that doesn’t happen. The Tesslies told McAllister.”

“I thought she never talked to them.”

“Well, then they got her to understand some other way, like they got her to understand to press the funeral button, and how the fertilizer machine works and the Grab machinery and everything else.” Actually, Pete wasn’t sure how any of that had happened. Maybe the Survivors just figured everything out by themselves.

“All right,” Tommy said. “But why do we believe the Tesslies?”

A good question. But not one that Pete wanted troubling Tommy. “We believe McAllister. You know how smart she is, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Then there you have it, laddie.” One of Bridget’s favorite expressions.

“Okay.” And then, “But I have another question.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why are you and Ravi mad at each other?”

Pete stood. This he was not going to discuss with Tommy.

“It’s because Ravi had sex with McAllister, right? But you have sex with Caity. And when he wasn’t sick, Terrell tried to have sex with Jenna, only she said he was still too young. And—”

Was there anything the kid didn’t know? Pete said, “I want privacy on this.” Those were words they all learned young, and learned to respect. A necessity in such a small, closed family, McAllister often said.

Tommy said, “Can I see the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME? Please, Pete, please please please?”

“All right.” He turned it on, let the pictures move through the frame once each. Tommy watched, rapt. He reached out one finger to touch the mountain range. When Pete turned off the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME, Tommy sighed the same way he did right after Jenna finished reading aloud a fairy tale.

“Now go back to the children’s room,” Pete said.

Tommy said importantly, “I have farm duty.”

“Oh. Then go do that.”

Tommy left the funeral room, said, “Oh, hi,” to someone in the corridor, and ran off. Pete tensed. If that was Ravi out there, waiting for him . . .

It was McAllister. “Pete, I want to talk with you.”

“I want privacy on this,” Pete said, with as much coldness as he could.

She smiled. “You don’t even know what ‘this’ is yet, so how can you want privacy on it?”

He gazed sullenly at the wall behind her.

“What I wanted to say was thank you for being so good with Tommy. He’s more unsure inside than he shows. Jenna says sometimes in bed he still cries for his mother. But he adores you and looks up to you, and you’re such a good influence on him.”

Pete glared at her. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to make me feel good so I won’t fight Ravi. Well, he’s the one who wants to fight me. Didn’t you see him smirk at me during the funeral?”

“I saw you smirking and glaring at each other. That has to stop. Pete, there is a statement from Before, said by a very smart and wise man, that the biggest threat to any society is its own young males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Do you understand what that means?”

“No.”

“It means—”

“I want privacy on this,” Pete said and walked away. Whether or not the words fit—who the fuck cared, anyway?

APRIL 2014

In the complex network of faults in the Pacific Seismic Network, a thrust fault two hundred miles off the shore of Japan abruptly moved, as had happened before. The seabed deformed, vertically displacing an enormous volume of water. A huge wave rose on the ocean, long and low enough that an oil tanker barely noticed when it passed beneath its hull. As the wave raced toward shore, the shallower water both slowed and raised it. By the time the tsunami broke on Tokyo, the highest wave crested at ninety-four feet of water, smashing and inundating the city as well as the country far inland.

This had been predicted for a long time as a possibility for Tokyo. Only a few years earlier, it had happened south of that ancient city, with devastating results. Not the prediction, not the unfairness of being struck twice within a few years, not Japan’s excellent tsunami-warning system—none of it lessened the horrific destruction.

2035

Pete sat crossed-legged in his secret room by the Shell wall, gazing out. The room wasn’t all that secret anymore; McAllister knew where it was, and Tommy had followed him here. Since Xiaobo’s funeral, Pete had had unhappy sex with Caity here. Twice. The second time she’d bitten his ear; she was always rougher than he was. He wasn’t going to do it with her anymore. He’d just masturbate.

The DIGITAL FOTO FRAME was in his hand, but Pete wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at a miracle.

Crouched against the clear impenetrable wall, head wobbling as he craned his neck as far left as it would go, Pete saw a flash of green. A piece of grass. Several blades of grass, or something like grass, pushed out of the ground. “Volcanic rock,” McAllister had once called it: “I think we’re on the collapsed lip of a caldera.” Pete didn’t know what that meant, but he knew what the grasses meant.

The Earth was coming back. And he was the first to see it.

He didn’t want to tell anyone. Or rather he did, he wanted to speak the incredible words out loud, but he also didn’t want anyone else to know the secret. Maybe Darlene was right: he was “a wild one.” But that’s what he wanted. He crept from the room, through the maze of tiny rooms at this end of the Shell, and along the corridor to the children’s room.

It was so early that the kids lay asleep on blankets, some in diapers and some in little clothes that happened to fit at the moment. Karim, who didn’t like clothes, slept naked, clutching a stuffed toy. The non-walking babies lay behind their bucket wall, with Jenna on duty. She was asleep, too. Pete knelt beside Petra and scooped her up with his good arm.

Petra didn’t wake. Pete started around the bucket wall, then turned back. He didn’t want to worry Jenna if she woke and found Petra gone. So he laid the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME on Petra’s nest of blankets.

In the larger area, Tommy woke. Instantly he was on his feet, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles. His hair stood up in all directions. “Where are you going? Can I come, too?”

“SSShhhh! No. You stay here.”

The boy’s face, still puffy with sleep, went sad. Pete whispered, “You stay here now, Tommy, and later I’ll take you on a big adventure.”

“Really? What?”

Pete had no idea. But he couldn’t think of anything else to deter Tommy. So he just shook his head and repeated, “You’ll see. Stay here.”

Tommy stayed. Pete carried Petra, who grew heavier with each step, to the secret room. She woke when he put her on the floor by the window.

“See, Petra—see the grass? The Earth is coming back!”

The baby screwed up her face and whimpered.

Ridiculously disappointed, Pete gazed alone at the grasses, jiggling Petra to quiet her. This didn’t work. She whimpered louder, wailed a few times, and worked herself up to full, hungry screaming. Why were babies so much trouble? There should be a better way to restart humanity!

Since there wasn’t, Pete crossly scooped up Petra to return her to Jenna, who would probably want him to stay to help with the children. At least he could get his DIGITAL FOTO FRAME back. He could trust Jenna not to touch it, but maybe not Tommy.

He had just left the maze, carrying the wailing Petra, when Tommy ran toward him. “Pete, you gotta come—McAllister’s sick!”

His blood froze. McAllister. One by one the Survivors had sickened and died—“badly weakened immune systems, slow-growing cancers, and a fresh influx of microorganisms with each Grab,” McAllister had said, but only Paolo and Jenna understood the words. If it was now McAllister’s turn . . . They could not do without McAllister.

“She’s in the farm,” Tommy said. He added, “You didn’t say I couldn’t go there, only that I couldn’t follow you!”

Pete didn’t care where Tommy went. He put Petra down in the middle of the corridor and ran.

She was beside the fertilizer machine, puking into a bucket. There shouldn’t have been a bucket there, unless one was being rinsed out in the disinfectant stream. McAllister must have brought a shit bucket with her and rinsed it out, but why? Today Caity was on shit-bucket duty. McAllister straightened and raised the hem of her loose homemade dress to wipe her mouth. She saw Tommy and Pete staring at her.

Tommy blurted, “Are you going to die? Like Bridget and Xiaobo?”

“No,” McAllister said. She closed her eyes briefly.

“Then why are you—”

“Tommy, go to the children’s room. Now.”

All the children obeyed McAllister, without bribes or arguments. Tommy went, although he muttered and scowled. Pete said nothing. But when she’d raised her dress he had seen, and she knew it. As the oldest of the Six he’d seen enough bellies curved like that: Bridget’s, Sarah’s, Jessica’s, Hannah’s. But not for a long, long time.

“Pete—”

“You’re pregnant.”

“Yes.”

“From sex with Ravi.”

McAllister didn’t answer; no need.

Pete said the first ugly thing that popped up from his foul-tasting hatred. “It’ll die. Like all the other babies.”

Something painful passed behind McAllister’s eyes, but she said only, “Maybe not. You Six survived, including my Jenna. Pete, you are going to have to come to grips with this. It’s reality, and not only that, it’s a joyful reality for the good of all. Every additional soul expands our gene pool, gives us one more chance to restart humanity. You know that, and you’re no longer a child. You must accept this. If you can, be happy for all of us as a group.”

“I can’t.”

“I think you can. I’ve observed you your whole life, you know, and I’ve always found you strong enough to accept this life we have to live. Strong enough to make positive contributions to it. As you must now.”

“But I love you!”

“And I love you. Just as I love all of you. And I’m doing the best I can to ensure a future for all of—” She turned and threw up again into the bucket.

Pete left her there. He thought of waking Jenna to help her, but Jenna was with the babies and anyway McAllister never needed help. She was that stone in Darlene’s otherwise baffling song “Rock of Ages.” It was Pete who needed help, but nobody was going to give him any, that was for sure.

He thought of volunteering for the next Grab, which was supposed to be Terrell’s if he wasn’t sick again, and deliberately getting himself killed. Then they’d be sorry! He thought of hitting Ravi over the head with the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME until Ravi was dead and then sending his body outside through the funeral slot before anyone even knew he was missing. They’d never suspect Pete. He thought of taking water and a shit bucket and going to live in his secret room, refusing to talk to anybody, just sneaking out at night to the farm to eat raw soy.

“Pete!” Caity yelled at him. “You left Petra on the floor in the middle of the corridor! What were you doing?”

She held Petra, whose screaming had woken everyone. Kids cried or peered through the archway of the children’s room. Terrell looked out from the Grab room, on duty to watch for brightening. Darlene bustled from her room, her bitter mouth turned down, her eyes still puffy from sleep. “You know them babies don’t leave the children’s room, Pete! What the hell were you doing?”

Tommy darted through the archway and wordlessly held out the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. “Keep it,” Pete snarled. Why not? Everything was shit, anyway.

Tommy looked incredulous with joy. Caity stared. Petra yelled. Darlene scolded. Pete’s heart hurt so bad he thought it would burst right there in his chest, like some rotten protein-rich soy nut too spoiled to eat.

From down the hall Terrell cried, “The Grab is brightening! I’m going, everybody!”

APRIL 2014

Julie grunted and screamed on her living room floor. She lay in a pool of her waters. Her insides were trying to burst free of her body. The pain was incredible.

Jake, kneeling helplessly beside her, said, “I still think we should go to the hospital.”

Between contractions, she glared at him; almost she spat at him. The hospital! She couldn’t move, couldn’t do anything but push. She gasped, “I’m shitting a pumpkin here!”

“But at the hospital—”

She screamed again and he shut up.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Last night Jake had flown in from Wyoming, arriving a full week before she was supposed to go into labor. He would drive her to the hospital and then wait decorously in the waiting room. Linda would coach Julie in the labor room. The first baby, her OB had assured her, always took a long time to come; Julie might even have false labor pains, similar to Braxton-Hicks contractions but “a little bit more intense,” for several days. The baby nurse would come every day for two weeks after Julie came home from the hospital. It was all meticulously planned.

Then came these sudden, wrenching pains that woke her in the middle of the night; apparently she was already many more centimeters dilated than she should be because now the pumpkin was moving inexorably through her body, trying to kill her. Julie writhed and screamed, Jacob’s terrified face looming over her. She would die, the baby would die, nobody could do this, nobody—

A final scream that brought neighbors pounding on the wall and a terrified oath from Jake. Linda, in a coat thrown over leopard-print pajamas, threw open the door and burst into the room. The pumpkin slid out and stopped torturing her, although everything on her still hurt and apparently always would. Julie burst into tears. The neighbor pounded harder. Jake cried, “What do I do now?” And the answering machine burst into life.

If the phone had been ringing, she hadn’t heard it. But now she heard Gordon’s voice, almost as if the relative cessation of pain had somehow created a pool of silence.

“Julie, this is Gordon. We’ve had another kidnapping. Three-year-old boy disappeared from his bed in southern Vermont. I remember that was on one of the projections you—”

Julie wasn’t listening. Her baby had started to cry, and the sound filled the entire world, joyous and alive, leaving no room for anything else at all.

2035

Pete tried. McAllister had asked him to, so he did. He tried to be happy about her pregnancy. He tried to remember the good of all. He tried to be happy that Terrell’s first Grab had brought back another child, even though it was a boy and not a girl. He tried to be pleasant to Caity while not having any more sex with her. He succeeded in none of these things, and both efforts and failure turned him very quiet.

“I like you better like this,” Caity said after sex. “You don’t talk.”

Pete said nothing, turning his face away from her. They lay not in his secret room but in her bedroom at the other end of the Shell. Caity had taped to the wall another picture, this one torn from the box that had contained a toy. The actual toy, a doll, had been broken by some rambunctious child but the picture remained perfect: long body, tiny waist, big breasts, feet made in a permanent tiptoe. It looked nothing like any real woman Pete had ever seen, neither in the Shell nor on a Grab. Why had the Before people made dolls like that?

Terrell was disappointed that he hadn’t Grabbed a girl. But McAllister said they should all be grateful that Terrell’s first Grab had been so easy. Terrell had been able to get into the house, pick up the kid, and get out without waking anyone. McAllister named the boy “Keith,” since he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, say his own name. “Never mind,” Caity said. “Maybe McAllister’s baby will be a girl.”

“She’s too old to be having a baby at all,” Darlene said. “Pure foolishness. Probably we’ll lose them both.”

Pete stalked away, fists clenched at his side.

Caity had insisted she could handle another Grab—look how easy Terrell’s was! She went and it did turn out to be easy, a store Grab in a “supermarket.” Caity brought back a huge shopping cart of food and they had interesting feasts until it was gone, although the haul had not included any Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. The oversize shopping cart remained and was useful for hauling shit buckets. The next Grab would be Ravi’s.

Pete spent a lot of time with Petra and Tommy, Petra because he wanted to, Tommy because he’d attached himself to Pete, pestering him about the promised “big adventure.” Pete was harvesting soy in the farm, picking the thick ripe leaves and hard nuts, when Tommy started in again. Two half-full buckets sat on the floor beside the dirt beds. The farm smelled of rich dirt, growing crops, and the disinfectant waterfall by the fertilizer machine.

Tommy said, “When are we going on the adventure?”

“I don’t know.”

“What will it be?”

“You have to wait and see.”

“I don’t want to fucking wait.”

“Don’t let McAllister hear you using that language of Darlene’s.”

Tommy looked around fearfully as if McAllister might suddenly appear, then changed direction. “Why are those new grasses growing outside the Shell?”

This was no longer Pete’s secret, just like nothing else was his, not even the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. He said, “You know that, Tommy. You had it in learning circle. The Earth was sick but it’s getting better.”

“Why did it get sick?”

“The Tesslies did it. They destroyed the whole Earth.”

“Why?”

“Because they’re bastards.”

“Oh. Why don’t we kill them dead?”

“Because nobody but the Survivors has ever seen one, and that was a long time ago.”

“Are the Tesslies going to come back?”

“I don’t know.”

Tommy considered this. “They have to come back, Pete, to let us out of the Shell.”

“Maybe when it’s time the Shell will just melt around us. You know, like the briar hedge in the fairy-tale book.”

“Really? When?”

“McAllister says when the air is good to breathe again.”

“Oh. When will that be?”

“I don’t know, Tommy!”

Tommy said judiciously, “I don’t think you know much.”

Another voice behind Pete said, “You’re right. He doesn’t.”

Ravi. Pete willed himself to not turn around. He was trying for the good of all, he was trying, he was trying. But Ravi these days had a cutting edge. McAllister had stopped having sex with him once she got pregnant; Pete knew this from Jenna, who’d been trying to make Pete feel better. At first Ravi swaggered and pretended that he and McAllister still did it. When Pete had smirked at him and rolled his eyes, Ravi had stalked away. After that he’d avoided Pete. Now he had come from the direction of McAllister’s room, and Pete heard the dangerous note in his brother’s voice, and knew that Ravi was as angry and frustrated as he was. And looking for a way to let that anger out.

Ravi repeated, “Pete doesn’t know anything. He only thinks he does.”

Tommy said, “Pete knows lots!”

“Really? I say he doesn’t. Do you, Pete?”

Pete said nothing. Trying, trying, trying! Tommy, wide-eyed, looked back and forth between them.

Ravi pushed harder. “Pete doesn’t know, for instance, how McAllister’s breasts feel, do you, Pete?”

He knew he shouldn’t. He knew a fight was what Ravi wanted, and that in giving it to him, Pete was losing. He even knew, somewhere in the back of his love-sick brain, what McAllister had said: The biggest threat to any society is its own young males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. None of it stopped him. In one fluid motion he grabbed the bucket of soy nuts and swung it at Ravi’s head.

The bigger boy was unprepared. The edge of the bucket caught him in the mouth. Ravi cried out and went down, blood and teeth spurting onto the farm floor. Tommy screamed. Then Darlene was there, running from the other end of the farm, shrieking something about Cain and Abel.

Pete stared, horrified, at the writhing Ravi. “Is he dead? Is he dead?” Tommy cried, even though Ravi clearly was not. But he was hurt, badly hurt, all that blood, those teeth . . .

Then Pete was running down the corridor. For once Tommy didn’t follow him. Pete hurled himself into the funeral room and pressed the button high on the wall; he had to jump to reach it. The slot opened, low on the opposite wall. Pete dropped to his knees and then onto his belly and crawled into it. The wall closed up behind him, and he was in darkness.

JUNE 2014

Julie walked the floor of her living room with Alicia, now six weeks old. Despite being premature, Alicia had weighed a healthy six pounds at birth and just kept putting on weight, emptying Julie of milk as if she’d had a suction pump in her tiny pink mouth. Then, because she drank so fast, she got a tummy-ache and Julie had to walk her, steadily patting the baby’s back, singing songs until Alicia burped, farted, threw up, or fell asleep. Tonight none of these things had yet happened. Julie paced up and down, caught as always in the rich stew of love, exasperation, fatigue, and joy that was motherhood. Behind her, CNN murmured softly. Sometimes the sound of the TV lulled Alicia into sleep. But not tonight.

Love, exasperation, fatigue, joy—but mostly love. Julie had never expected to feel such fierce, passionate, possessive attachment for anyone as she did for this damp, malodorous bundle on her shoulder. She’d always thought of herself as a cool person (in emotional temperature, not in hipness—she’d never been hip in her life). Certainly Gordon, nor any other man, had never ignited in her this intense love. Did he feel this way about his children? Did Linda about hers? Why hadn’t anyone warned her?

“. . . continues in the clean-up efforts in Tokyo. Officials say it may be months before there is anywhere near a complete list of the dead. With damage reckoned in the billions and—” And there was the video again, shot from a tourist helicopter over Tokyo when the tsunami hit. The tsunami had registered 4.2 on the Soloviev-Imamura Intensity Scale, almost as large as the 2004 one in Indonesia. A wall of water ninety-four feet high had crashed over Tokyo.

“. . . not unexpected in that the Pacific Rim is well known for underwater faults that—”

Julie jiggled at the remote, trapped between Alicia’s diaper and Julie’s forearm. She got a rerun of M*A*S*H, then PBS: “—over 9,000 species going extinct each year, largely because of human activity. The rainforest is particularly susceptible as—” Another fumble at the remote, which fell to the floor. Unthinking, Julie bent to retrieve it. The sudden motion knocked a huge burp out of Alicia. She jerked in Julie’s arms, let out a contented sigh, and went to sleep.

Don’t think about the children drowned in Tokyo. There was nothing Julie could do about it. But standing there in the dim living room, she clutched her infant tight.

2035

As soon as the funeral slot closed up behind him, Pete wanted to get out again. In the complete darkness he pounded on the wall, all the walls. Nothing happened.

I always knew I would die this way, he thought, and immediately thought how stupid that was; he’d never had any such thought. He’d thought he would die on a Grab for the good of all, or from some sickness, or just old age. Or that he’d fight a Tesslie to both their deaths. But this—why didn’t somebody else push the funeral button to let him out? Somebody would! Tommy would get someone tall enough, McAllister or Eduardo or Ravi . . . but Ravi lay bleeding on the farm floor with his teeth knocked out. Still, somebody must come soon . . .

The air went out of the dark room.

Pete heard it, in a whoosh, and then he couldn’t breathe. Pain invaded his chest. So he would die here, he would—

Air rushed back in, and light, and Pete was shot forward by a force he couldn’t see. It felt like someone had pushed him hard from behind. He landed beside Xiaobo, half-glimpsed through the rotting blanket, and a pile of bones.

Pete screamed and skittered away. Xiaobo was barely recognizable, a stinking mass of rotting flesh crawled over by disgusting white things. If it hadn’t been for the little statue of the naked fat-bellied man on top of the mass, Pete wouldn’t have known it was a human. But that was Xiaobo. Pete started to cry, then abruptly stopped.

He was Outside, but something was wrong with the air.

He could breathe it; this wasn’t like the airless funeral slot. But the air was . . . dirty. He didn’t know what he meant except that it was somehow not clean and fresh like the air in the Shell, but clogged with stuff he could smell and taste even if he couldn’t see it. Still, it was air and he was breathing it and he was Outside.

Outside.

Partly to get away from Xiaobo and the other bones—which were Bridget’s? Robert’s? His father’s?—Pete moved along the sides of the Shell. A plan formed in his dazed mind. He would find the clear patch of wall at the end of the Shell and he would wait there until Tommy or somebody went there and saw him. Then Pete would gesture to be let back in. McAllister could open the funeral slot and Pete could crawl past Xiaobo—ugh—back inside the Shell.

Unless—

He rounded the far edge of the Shell and forgot his plan.

The Shell sat on a hill of black rock. The black rock, broken with various grasses, sloped gently and unevenly a long way down, but then it gave way to . . . what? “Fields,” McAllister had called them about his pictures in the DIGITAL FOTO FRAME. Not fields of amber grain like in Darlene’s song, but of low, spindly bushes covered with green leaves. So many bushes that Pete felt dizzy. And none of them were soy! Beyond that were stretches of very tall grasses dotted with clumps of pink flowers and beyond those, more water than he had ever imagined still existed. It was blue water like on the beach where he had Grabbed Petra and Kara, water like Before!

He started to run down the hill, across the black rock toward the water. Pebbles and scrub crunched under his bare feet. Then something stopped him. At first he thought it was the hard-to-breathe air slowing him down, but this was more like someone had grabbed his arm from behind without him even feeling it. He turned, and there stood a Tesslie.

McAllister had described the alien over and over to the Six when they were younger: “In case you ever encounter one when I’m gone.” At first Pete had thought she meant gone to use a shit bucket, or maybe to sleep, but when he grew older he knew she meant if she died. The Tesslie looked just as she had described: not a being but a hard metal case like a bucket, four feet high and squarish, with no head or mouth or anything. The bucket-case floated a few inches above the ground. Whatever the Tesslies were, they were inside. Or else this was a “robot,” a machine like the battery-car from Jenna’s Grab, and the Tesslie was controlling it from someplace else. McAllister had said she didn’t know which, and now Pete didn’t know either.

“Aaaarggghhhh!” Pete cried and tried to leap on it, knock it over, split it open as he had split Ravi’s mouth. This thing had killed his world!

He couldn’t move. Not even a finger.

The Tesslie said nothing. But all at once Pete found it much harder to breathe. He wasn’t breathing, he wasn’t doing anything. He woke inside one of the tiny featureless rooms in the far end of the Shell, and it turned out that, in their concern over Ravi’s injuries, no one even realized he’d been gone.

JUNE 2014

Julie sat in front of the young professor’s desk. She didn’t much like him, even though she’d only met him ten minutes ago. Pompous, self-satisfied, and perhaps even a little sleazy, or how else would he have the “top secret” information he claimed to possess? He’d made her sign a nondisclosure agreement, standard for her job, but still. . . . She didn’t like him.

He said, “You come with top-level recommendations from people I’m not at liberty to name. You understand why not.”

“Of course.” He was name-dropping by not dropping any names, and he was out to make his own reputation. Nonetheless, curiosity was rising in her about the nature of the project for which he wanted predictive algorithms. He was a researcher in biology, after all—not usually the stuff of intense secrecy unless you were involved in genetic engineering or pharmaceutical research, which he was not. She’d checked him out. Two published articles so far, both on the geographical distribution of weeds nobody ever heard of, or cared about since the weeds were not edible, threatening, invasive, or endangered. The statistical analyses in both articles struck her as sloppy. But he was old money, Harvard, Skull and Crossbones—all the things that gave one contacts in high places.

His office was the usual thing for academics just starting to climb the university ladder: small, dark, crowded with metal shelves holding messy piles of papers, binders, folders, books. A scuffed wooden desk and two chairs. Still, he wasn’t housed in the building’s basement with the teaching assistants, his office had a window, and on the wall hung an expensively framed photo of young men crewing on the Charles River.

Julie shifted on her chair. Beneath her maternity bra and thick sweater, she felt her breasts begin to leak. Alicia was a hungry little milk demon. Julie tried not to be away from her for more than a few hours at a time, for both their sakes.

Dr. Geoffrey Fanshaw pursed his lips theatrically, studied her, and nodded several times, as if making a decision that clearly had been made before. With a flourish suited to a bad Shakespearean actor, he handed her a sheaf of papers, then rose to lock his office door.

Ten minutes later Julie sat in shock, staring at him.

“How did you come by this information?”

“I told you that I can’t say.” He puffed with importance instead of what he should have felt: fear.

“The data on the simultaneous appearance of the altered Klebsiella planticola on three separate continents—you’re sure of its authenticity?”

“Absolutely.”

“And its accuracy?”

“Yes.”

“Have you personally visited any of these sites? The Connecticut one, maybe?”

Annoyance erased his habitual smirk. “No, not yet. New Zealand and Brazil, of course, would be difficult to get to. And—”

“But,” she burst out, unable to restrain herself, “what is anybody doing about this?”

“I don’t know. My concern is publishing on-line with the predictive algorithms in place as soon as the story blows in the press. Which can’t be too long now—some smart journalist will get it. As soon as that happens, I want to be poised to publish in a professional journal with some prominence.”

Julie heard what Fanshaw wasn’t saying: he wanted to be the instant go-to guy for the news shows, talk shows, sound-bite seekers. A professor, personable, well-connected, first to publish a serious analysis—he’d be a natural. He wanted the 60 Minutes interview and the Today show discussion, and to hell with the fact that in three widely separated locations around the planet—three known about now, who was to say there weren’t actually more—a deadly bacterial mutation was killing the roots of plants through an alcoholic by-product. Drowning them in booze. A bacterium found on the roots of virtually every plant on Earth except those growing in or near brackish water.

Fanshaw said eagerly, “Can you do the statistical analysis?”

She managed to get out, “Yes.”

“By when? I need it, like, yesterday.”

“I’ll start this afternoon.” The statistical part wasn’t hard. There must be mathematicians—not to mention biologists!—working frantically on this around the globe. Fanshaw was right—the press would get this very soon. And if—

The fuller implications hit her.

“If this isn’t natural—three locations for a naturally occurring identical mutation just doesn’t seem likely. Even an accidental release of a created genetic mutation would only happen in one place. So is this a terrorist attack?”

“I don’t know.” For a second he looked almost concerned, but that washed away in a fresh surge of self-obsession. “As I said, Dr. Kahn, time is of the essence, I need those algorithms.”

“Yes.” She stood, unable to stand him one minute more.

On her way to the parking lot, breasts leaking milk with every step, she passed summer-term students hurrying to class, chatting on a low wall, sprawled on the grass over open books or laptops. Despite herself, she stopped to gaze at a flower bed, unable to look away. Pansies, impatiens, baby’s breath.

Nearly every plant on Earth.

Who? And in the name of every god she didn’t believe in—why?

2035

McAllister and Tommy McAllister were the only ones who believed Pete had been Outside. Tommy was angry because Pete hadn’t taken him along on the “adventure.” McAllister was tense with hope. “Tell me again,” she said.

They sat alone in her room. Pete avoided looking at the curve of her belly. Again he recited everything that had happened, too frightened at what he himself had done to leave anything out, not even the cause of the fight with Ravi. But that wasn’t what she was interested in.

“You saw bushes and grasses. Trees?”

“No.”

“Animals?”

“No.”

“And you could breathe.”

“It was a little hard.”

“Like you weren’t getting enough air?”

“Yeah. But not very bad.” How could that be? There had been air all around him, blowing gently as it never did inside the Shell.

She guessed the question he wasn’t asking. “You had trouble breathing because the air mix still isn’t right out there. Maybe there’s too much CO_2—the destruction of the Earth’s forests would have really screwed up the oxygen-carbon dioxide balance. Maybe too many volcanic particles still, maybe toxins, maybe too much methane. I don’t know. I wasn’t an ecologist. But I think the atmosphere was becoming unbreathable when the Tesslies put us into the Shell. And now you could breathe it.”

“Does that mean they’ll let us out soon?”

McAllister raised both hands, let them drop, screwed up her face. Her pregnancy had made her more emotional, which everyone had observed and Pete did not understand. Was that usual? “Pure foolishness, getting herself knocked up at her age,” Darlene had said. “Who does she think she is, Abraham’s Sarah?” Caity bit her lip and looked away every time McAllister waddled into a room. Pete was just glad he wasn’t female.

McAllister said, “How should I know what the Tesslies will do?”

Pete burst out, “I’ll kill them if I can!”

She didn’t answer that; they both knew it was too ridiculous. Instead she said yet again, “And you couldn’t tell if the Tesslie was a living being inside a space suit or a robot.”

“I don’t know.”

She smiled. “Neither did I, the one time I saw one.”

“How did it get here?”

“I don’t know, dear heart. Until the Grab machinery appeared, I assumed they’d all left Earth after putting us Survivors in the Shell. After all, nobody had seen one for twenty years. But either they returned or else they were observing us all along.”

Pete had known they watched him! Fucking bastards—

McAllister said, “Thank you, Pete. You can go now, but later I want to talk to you and Ravi together.”

“I’ve got Grab duty.”

“Do you want someone else to take it?”

“No.” He made himself ask, “Is Ravi all right?”

“He will be.”

She looked very tired. Pete said awkwardly, “Are you all right? With . . . everything?”

“I’m fine. I’m just a little old to be doing this.”

Well, you didn’t have to! But Pete didn’t say it. He blundered out and went to the Grab room.

Staring at the inert Grab machinery, which might brighten but probably wouldn’t, Pete thought about his own questions. The air outside was breathable. It wasn’t really good, but it was breathable enough. What was “enough” ? There were bushes and grasses and—yes, he remembered now, wrenching the picture into his mind as if yanking up a pair of pants—berries. There had been red berries on some of the bushes. Almost he turned back to tell McAllister, but he didn’t want to face her again.

He had no choice. Somewhere during his Grab duty she came in with Ravi. Immediately Pete wanted to be somewhere else. He got to his feet, scowling to cover his confusion.

Ravi’s mouth was all swollen. His two top front teeth were broken off into jagged stumps. Pete had a moment of panic—how would Ravi eat? Well, he still had all his other teeth. . . . But his good looks were badly marred. Even without all the puffy swelling, Ravi was never again going to look like the handsome princes in the fairy-tale book.

McAllister said, “Both of you men were at fault in this fight, but—” For a minute Pete didn’t listen, caught by her referring to them as “men.” Had McAllister ever done that before? When he heard her again, it was clear she was blaming him more than Ravi, because “. . . violence. Not only is it never needed to settle disputes, it damages the good of all and sets a terrible example for the children. Pete, you wouldn’t want Tommy or Petra to someday behave as you did today, would you?”

Pete couldn’t imagine Petra behaving any way at all except smiling or wailing or kicking her fat little legs. Too far in the future. But he saw what McAllister meant, and hung his head.

She was talking to Ravi now. “What you were doing, looking to start a fight with Pete because you were angry with me, is something all humans have to struggle against all the time. Do you understand, Ravi? Winning that struggle with ourselves will be a huge part of what lets us successfully restart humanity. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” Ravi said. Pete couldn’t tell if Ravi meant it or not. His voice came out mangled through the swollen mouth.

“You two are brothers,” McAllister said passionately, “and I know that your biological parents, Richard and Emily and Samir, would not have wanted you to act the way you did today. But even more than brothers, you are members of this colony, with a mission that others have already struggled and died for. You must work together no matter what for our survival, or all those other deaths are wasted.”

Ravi said something. McAllister didn’t understand the garbled words; she leaned forward and said, “What?” Ravi shook his head.

But Pete had heard. Ravi had said, “Kill Tesslies.” That was what Ravi thought was their “mission.” And Pete did, too! His head snapped up to look at Ravi, who gazed back. Something passed between them, and all Pete’s animosity vanished. They had a joint mission: revenge. That was more important than who had sex with McAllister, who anyway wasn’t looking very attractive with her belly swollen in pregnancy and all those tired lines around her eyes.

Ravi nodded. They understood each other. McAllister beamed.

“Good,” she said. “Now shake hands.”

They did, and Pete squeezed his brother’s hand. They were on the same side again. They would be killers together.

McAllister said, “I’m so happy.”

Both of them smiled at her.

JUNE 2014

Along the Euphrates river grew a strip of green: trees, grass, flowers. Away from the river the land turned more arid, dotted with scrub grazed on by sheep and goats. Here, not far from where Babylon had once stood, bacteria mutated on the tap long root of a plant.

2035

Pete and Ravi were now allies. Together they were going to get revenge for Earth. The first Tesslie they saw—and one had to show up eventually, after all Pete had seen one when he’d gone Outside!—they were going to kill.

A week after the fight they sat in the clear-walled room, gazing out at the growing grasses in the black rock. “Those are taller than yesterday,” Ravi said.

“Yeah,” Pete said, although to him the grasses looked exactly the same height. Pete felt obliged to agree with most of what Ravi said because with Ravi’s swollen mouth and broken teeth, Ravi’s words came out a little garbled. On the other hand, he still had his greater height and bigger muscles, which saved Pete from feeling as bad as he would otherwise. The fight had merely evened things up, he felt, the way Darlene “evened up” blankets when she folded them. The same for both sides. Still, Pete sometimes wished that he and Ravi had had the same father, not the same mother. Ravi’s build came from his father Samir, whom Pete could just remember, unlike both of his own parents.

“When we find a Tesslie,” Ravi mumbled—it was always when, not if—“we should have a plan. I’ll grab it from behind and you—”

“Wait a minute,” Pete said. “Is the Tesslie an alien inside a bucket-case or a robot?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes! If it’s a robot, then you hold it and I’ll find the battery case, open it, and pull out the batteries.”

“Good, good,” Ravi said. “If it’s an alien inside a bucket-case, then I’ll hold it tight, you find the place where the bucket-case opens and unbutton or unzip or pry it apart or whatever. Then we can drag the bastard out and hit it with something.”

“With what?” Pete said.

Ravi considered. “We should have a weapon all ready. Hidden, but someplace where we can get at it quick when we need it. I know! Those metal-toed boots from that Grab!”

Pete nodded enthusiastically. The boots were never worn; who wanted all that weight? In the Shell everyone went barefoot. Pete had never seen the point of them. But as a weapon . . .

Ravi said, “We can kick the Tesslie with those boots and stomp on it until it’s all bloody!”

Pete frowned. The vivid picture created by Ravi’s words didn’t look as appealing as before Ravi described it. Ravi, however, went on and on, spouting things they could do to the Tesslie.

Partly to stop him, partly because the thought had been growing in him for some time, Pete said, “Ravi, I have another idea.”

“What?”

“I think it would help us if we understood more about how Tesslie machinery works. In case, you know, the Tesslies are machinery. We should pick one piece of it and take it apart, examine it real good, then put it back together before McAllister even knows we did it.”

Ravi’s mouth fell open, fully exposing his broken teeth. “Take it apart?”

“Yes. For information about the Tesslies.”

“What if . . . what if we can’t get the machinery back together again?”

“We’ll be careful, go slow, look at each piece in great detail.” They were words Jenna had used about McAllister’s lesson in taking apart and cleaning McAllister’s precious microscope. Pete wasn’t allowed near the microscope, not since that business with the shit bucket and the broken glass slide.

Ravi said, “Well, if you’re sure . . .”

“I am,” said Pete, who wasn’t. But all at once the project seemed the most fascinating thing he’d ever done. Find out more about the Tesslies, the better to defeat them! He was like the Little Tailor in the fairy-tale book, using his brain to triumph over evil giants.

“What machinery do we take apart?”

“Well,” Pete said, thinking it out as he spoke, “there are only five Tesslie machines in the Shell. The Grab platform—”

“We can’t risk that,” Ravi said.

“—and the funeral slot and the fertilizer machine and the main waterfall and the disinfectant waterfall. I think the funeral slot.”

“No, the fertilizer machine! Then if we can’t get it back together, we won’t have to do shit-bucket duty anymore!”

“And the shit will just pile up inside the Shell,” Pete said. Sometimes Ravi didn’t think things through. “The funeral slot is better. Nobody else is sick enough to die. Anyway, I don’t think it will be as hard as the other machines. When I was inside the slot, I could see some pipes or something overhead before it got completely dark.”

“Pete, did you really go—look at that!”

Pete’s head snapped around. Outside the Shell, something streaked past, too fast for him to see. “What was it? What was it?”

“I don’t know? Maybe . . . a cat!”

“There are no cats, not in houses or stores,” Pete said, with an authority he didn’t feel. He’d never seen a cat except in the books. Why did Ravi and not him get to see the not-cat?

“Something like a cat, then! I don’t know! But it was alive!”

They both pressed their faces to the clear part of the Shell, but the thing didn’t reappear. Finally Pete said sulkily, “Yes, I went Outside—I told you! So let’s start on that funeral slot. You go get the flashlight and some rope and . . . and a bucket. A big one.”

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

Ravi obeyed him, which made Pete feel a little better. Next time, he would see the not-cat.

In the funeral room, Pete worked slowly. It was a pleasure to not have to hurry, hurry, hurry like on a Grab. He put the bucket close to the slot, the rope in his hand, the flashlight, usually stored in the children’s room for an emergency that had never come, in his teeth. Then he had to take it out again to explain to Ravi what was going to happen.

“You press the button to open the slot, and I’ll go in. Then you jam the bucket in the slot so it can’t close up again. I’ll study the machinery above my head in the slot, and if I see something we want for a closer look, I’ll tie the rope around it and use that to yank it out.”

“Why do you get to go? I want to go, too! The slot is big enough for both of us if we squeeze.”

It was, although just barely. Although Pete didn’t like the idea of being jammed that close to Ravi.

Ravi added, “It’s only fair that I get to go in the slot, too. You already had a turn! You went all the way Outside!”

“I thought you didn’t even believe me about that! And stop whining!”

“I’m not whining!”

Glaring at each other, they got into position. Ravi pressed the button. Pete scooted in. Ravi jammed the bucket into the opening and then crawled past it so that he and Pete lay side by side on their backs. The flashlight was necessary because their bodies blocked nearly all the light coming from the funeral room. Pete swept the beam over the ceiling a foot above them.

The Tesslie machinery wasn’t pipes after all, as he had originally thought. It was hard to say what it was. Rounded bumps, irregular indentations, two protrusions shaped vaguely like small bowls. These were easiest to tackle. Pete looped the rope around one. “I’m going to pull on this, just a little bit.”

Ravi said, “I want to go Outside.”

“Ravi! That’s not what we’re doing! Besides, I promised McAllister I wouldn’t do that again.”

“I didn’t promise her that. And you had a turn Outside so it’s only fair that I do. How do I get the other door to open?”

“Ravi, no, it won’t open until you—”

Ravi kicked away the bucket.

Pete tried to hit him but there was no room to swing his fist. Pete took a huge gulp of air, knowing what would come next: the air whooshing out of the slot, the outer door sliding open to push him and Ravi out on top of Xiaobo’s rotting body . . . Let Ravi get his own air!

Nothing happened.

The boys lay in the glow from the flashlight. The air did not leave the chamber; Pete could hear Ravi’s breathing. Finally Ravi said in a small voice, “When does it open?”

“It isn’t going to, you fucker! The Tesslies must have changed the machine! We’re trapped!” All at once Pete, who had never minded small spaces before (but when had he ever been in one this small?) felt his heart speed up. Sweat sprang onto his forehead, his palms. Frantically he jostled Ravi, trying to get more space, get more air, get out . . .

“Ow!” Ravi said. “Stop it! Hey, everybody in the Shell, we’re trapped inside the funeral slot! Terrell! Tommy! Caity! Hey!”

Pete joined him in screaming. He yelled until his throat hurt. How thick was that slot wall? What if no one ever came?

After what seemed days, weeks, Pete heard a voice on the other side of the wall: “Lord preserve us—ghosts!”

“It’s Darlene,” Ravi whispered hoarsely.

Darlene began to howl one of her songs. “ ‘Save us from ghosts and demons that—’ ”

“Darlene! It’s not ghosts or demons, it’s Pete and Ravi! We’re trapped in here! Let us out!”

The howling stopped. Darlene said, “Pete?”

“Yes! Press the funeral button!”

Silence. Then Darlene’s voice again but closer, as if she now squatted close to the low slot. “You want to come out?”

“Yes!” Of course they wanted to come out—why did it have to be crazy Darlene that found them?

She said, “I’ll let you out after you repent of your sins. You, Pete—you say you’re a sinner for sassing me and for disobedience and for setting yourself above your elders!”

Pete’s teeth came together so fast and hard that he bit his lip. Ravi snapped, “Do it! Or she’ll never let us out!”

He could wait for someone else, anyone else. But now that escape was at hand, the thought of waiting even one unnecessary minute longer in this place was intolerable. Pete snarled, “All right! I repent of my sins!”

“Name them!” Darlene said.

“I repent of sassing you and disobedience and setting myself up above my elders!”

“Now you, Ravi. You repent of fornication with McAllister, who is another generation, and of sassing me and disobedience.”

Ravi yelled, “I repent! Open the fucking slot!”

“That ain’t true repentance, but I’ll take it. Now both of you sing with me a cleansing hymn of—”

“What is going on here?”

McAllister’s voice. Pete’s heart leapt and then sank, a reversal so quick it left him gasping. Ravi yelled, “McAllister, Pete and I are in here! Let us out!”

The slot slid upwards. Pete and Ravi scuttled out on their backs. Pete felt dizzy. Blood streamed down his chin from his bitten lip. McAllister stared down at the flashlight in his hand, the rope trailing out behind him, the bucket on the floor. From this angle, her belly jutted out like a shelf. Pete had never seen that look on McAllister’s face. He felt four years old again, except that no adult but Darlene ever glared like that at a four-year-old.

Ravi, the great lover, hung his head. In a tiny voice he said, “I saw a cat outside, McAllister, running past the Shell. Really. I did.”

JUNE 2014

Geoffrey Fanshaw did not get the notoriety he’d hoped for.

Julie finished the analysis he wanted and sent it to him. She expected to hear back from him, but—nothing. On reflection, she decided she’d been dumb to expect acknowledgement. She had served her purpose to Fanshaw and he had discarded her; that was what narcissists did. She was left with his check and her own fears.

At night she dreamed of plants dying, all over the world.

Two more jobs came her way, and she took them both. Around the consulting work she fit a separate, obsessive routine: Wake at 5:00 a.m. Coffee, banishing the lingering night dreams with wake-up caffeine. Care for Alicia. Bundle the baby into her pram and, before the streets of D.C. got too hot, make the long walk to World Wide News to buy newspapers. The Washington Post, the New York Times: the on-line versions left too much out. Also a host of small-town papers. The rest of the day she stayed inside, bathed in the air conditioning that divided her and Alicia from the steaming D.C. summer. She worked and then she read, barely glancing at the wide variety of usual disasters available in the world:

FOREST FIRES OUT OF CONTROL IN BRAZIL

MAN KILLS WIFE, SELF

ECOLOGICAL BALANCE SEVERLY THREATENED BY OVER-GRAZING

ILLEGAL STRIP MINING CAUSES ARMED STAND-OFF WITH LAW

She was looking for something unusual, and she would know it when she found it. No, not “it”—“them.” She searched for two things, and on the first day of July she finally found one of them. Only a small item far inside the Times, bland and inoffensive:

SCIENTISTS SOLVE PLANT MYSTERY

A team of scientists led by Dr. Simon Langford of the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that the “mystery plague” affecting plants along the Connecticut shoreline has been stopped. “It was a random, natural mutation in one specific microbe,” Langford said, “but relatively easy to contain and kill off with appropriate chemicals. No mystery, really.”

A section of shoreline in the Connecticut Wetlands Preserve has been closed to the public for several days while the botanical correction was carried out. Preserve officials announced that the wetlands will remain closed for the near future, “for further monitoring, as a purely precautionary measure.” Disappointed tourists were turned away by Security personnel but given free passes to other local attractions.

“This sort of thing happens routinely,” Langford concluded. “We’re on top of it.”

“Bullshit,” Julie said aloud to Alicia, who gurgled back.

It was a cover-up—but why? And of what?

Julie knew, or thought she knew, but she didn’t want to know. Not yet. She could be wrong, it was a fancifully dumb idea, in fact it skirted the edges of insanity. Just one of those stray ideas that crossed the mind but meant nothing. . . .

She read the bland article again, then stared out her apartment window at a tree, carefully enclosed in a little wrought-iron fence, growing where a section of city sidewalk had been meticulously removed to accommodate it.

2035

All at once the Grab machinery went crazy.

Ravi was on duty. He and Pete had been talked to by McAllister, a talk that left both of them near tears. She wasn’t angry, she was disappointed. Angry would have been better. Not even Ravi’s sighting of the not-cat outside had deterred McAllister from her disappointment. Pete wasn’t sure that McAllister even believed Ravi. Pete wasn’t sure he did, either. When McAllister was finished with them, Pete and Ravi avoided each other for a week—until Ravi was restored to puffed-up triumph by his amazing Grab.

“I was all ready,” he later told everyone, although Pete had his doubts about that—why even bother to repeat it over and over unless it wasn’t true? And Ravi had a history of falling asleep during Grab-room duty. But whether he had leaped onto the platform at first brightening, or had just barely caught the Grab before it went away, it was irrefutable that Ravi had gone. He had gone close-mouthed both because of McAllister’s scolding and because he was embarrassed by the lack of the teeth that Pete had knocked out, but he returned smiling wide. His shout had reached both the children’s room and the farm. Pete, on crop duty with Darlene, had run toward the Grab room, along with everyone else.

Ravi stood on the platform behind the biggest pile of stuff that Pete had ever seen. It almost hid Ravi; it spilled off the edges of the platform; it clanked and clattered as it fell. Pete couldn’t even identify half of it. How could even Ravi, the strongest of them all, load all this in ten minutes? And onto what?

McAllister, running clumsily behind the bulk of her pregnancy, stopped in the doorway. She went still and white.

“Look what I got!” Ravi shouted. “Look!”

“What is it all?” Caity said. She held a child in each arm. “How did you bring it all?”

“The Grab stayed open for more than ten minutes—for twenty-two minutes! It was a store Grab and I got this big rolling thing—see, it’s under all this—and just piled things on. There only was this kind of stuff, so that’s what I took. But look how much of it!” Ravi practically swelled with pride. Bloated, Pete thought. Like when someone was diseased in their belly.

Why couldn’t Pete have been the one to bring back the big haul? Whatever it was.

McAllister finally spoke. “Twenty-two minutes?”

“I timed it,” Ravi said proudly.

Caity repeated, “What is it all? What’s that thing with the skinny metal spikes coming out of it?”

“A rake,” McAllister said. Then it seemed that once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. “A rake, several hoes, bags of seed and fertilizer, trowels, flower seeds, hoses, flower pots, wind chimes—wind chimes!”

Pete had never seen McAllister like this—wild-eyed, hysterical—not even when he and Ravi had gotten trapped in the funeral slot. Fear pricked him. But the next moment she had recovered herself.

“You were in a garden store, Ravi. And you did well. Let’s get this stuff off the rolling cart so we can get the cart down off the platform. Caity, take Karim and Tina back to the children’s room, and on your way get Darlene to help Jenna with the children. She’ll have to do it because we need you here. Tommy, go wake up Eduardo. Terrell, you and Ravi and Pete start moving this stuff. We need that platform clear right away.”

“Why?” Pete said.

“I don’t know yet. Let’s just do it.”

Caity ran down the corridor with the kids. Pete leaped forward to help unload the platform. If McAllister was ordering Darlene to help with the children, then something important was going on.

They got all the stuff off the platform, including the long, heavy rolling cart. Immediately Terrell jumped on it and Ravi pushed him out the room and down the corridor. Terrell laughed delightedly. “I want a ride, too!” Caity cried, running after the cart.

The platform glowed.

Pete gaped at it. It never brightened again so soon after a Grab—never!

McAllister said, in a voice somehow not her own, “Go.” She handed Pete the wrister that Ravi had turned over to her.

Pete hopped onto the platform, the laughter from the corridor still ringing in his ears.

JUNE 2014

Julie continued to read the papers obsessively: “STARVATION REACHES CRITICAL POINT IN SOMALIA.” “OVERPOPULATION BIGGEST THREAT TO PLANET.” But nothing more was mentioned about the mutated bacteria, not anywhere in the world. Nor could she find anything on-line. If the story about K. planticola was being repressed, several countries must be cooperating in doing that, by every means available. The completeness of the suppression was almost as scary as the microbial mutation.

Almost.

Several times she picked up the phone to call Fanshaw’s office. Each time she laid it down again. If there was a cover-up going on, if there really were scientists and covert organizations and high officials in several countries working to keep this from the public, then Julie did not want to call any attention to herself. Fanshaw had probably, given his narcissism, erased any trace of help from anybody else in crafting the article he never got to publish. He would, of course, have preserved her nondisclosure agreement, and Julie could only hope he had it in a safe, secret place. But he had also written her a check “For professional services,” and she had cashed it.

She Googled him. Until two weeks ago he had been all over the Net. Then his posts on Facebook ceased, as did his blog.

“You seem preoccupied,” Linda said. They sat under an awning in her back yard, drinking cold lemonade and watching Linda’s three kids splash in the pool. Alicia lay asleep in her infant seat. The beach-cottage-in-August scheme had been dropped; Linda and Ted were taking the children to visit their grandmother in Winnipeg, where it was twenty-five degrees cooler.

“I’m sorry,” Julie said.

“Everything all right? The consulting?”

“Going better than I’d dared hope. And I’m making a lot more money than I was teaching.”

“Well, I can see that Alicia’s all right. So . . . Ju, is it Gordon? I know he called the night Alicia was born. You were on the floor with Jake, I burst in, and Gordon’s voice was coming from your answering machine.”

Linda had never mentioned this before. It had been two days before Julie even listened to Gordon’s message: “We’ve had another kidnapping. A three-year-old boy taken from his bed in southern Vermont.”

She said to Linda, “He called about the work project. You know I can’t discuss it with you.”

“I know. Spook stuff. But that wasn’t all he said. At the end his voice changed completely when he said, ‘Are you all right?’ Have you seen him since? Do you miss him? Is that why you seem so . . . not here?”

Julie put her hand, cold from the lemonade glass, over her friend’s. “No, I haven’t seen him. And no, I don’t miss him. Sometimes I feel guilty about that, like it proves I’m a shallow person.”

Linda grinned. “You’re not that. Still waters, brackish but deep.”

“Thanks. I think.” And then, before she knew she was going to say it, “Linda, did you ever read James Lovelock?”

“No. Who’s he?”

“It doesn’t matter. Do you believe . . . do you think there are things about the universe that we can’t explain? Things that lie so far beyond science they’re something else entirely?”

“I lapsed from Catholicism when I was fourteen,” Linda said, “and never saw any reason to unlapse. Ju, have you suddenly got religion?”

“No, no, nothing like that. It’s not anything, really. Just the heat.”

“Yeah, I can’t wait until we leave for—Colin! If you do that one more time you’re getting out of the pool, do you hear me?”

Alicia woke. Colin did that one more time. Normal life, routine and mundane as precious as the propagation of plants.

JULY 2014

It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t. Then he was through and the ocean lay to his right, just as it had all those months ago when he’d Grabbed Petra and Kara. But this beach was smaller than the other, a strip of stony ground jammed between sea and a sort of little cliff. Big rocks jutting out of the water as well as the land. Also, the air was warmer and lighter. In fact, for the first time ever, the Grab seemed to be happening in full daylight. The sun shone brightly halfway above the horizon—so brightly that Pete blinked at it, momentarily patterning his vision with weird dots.

When they cleared, he saw the little house on the top of the cliff above him. There seemed to be no path up. Cursing, Pete climbed, hands and feet seeking holds in the rock, some of which crumbled under his grip. Once he nearly fell. But he made it to the top and stood, his back against the house, to look at his wrister.

Five minutes gone.

The sea below him lay smooth as the mirror Caity had Grabbed long ago. Sunlight reflected off it, enveloping everything in a silver-blue glow. Pete wasted precious seconds staring at the beauty; it made good fuel for his hatred. When he and Ravi eventually found Tesslies . . .

No time now for revenge pictures.

The house had long since lost all its paint to the salt winds. A window, small and too high for Pete to peer into, stood open, but he heard no sounds coming from within. Cautiously he rounded the corner of the house.

It stood on a point jutting above the ocean, and now he had a new angle on the path down to the beach below. Two figures walked there, away from the house, holding hands. They stopped briefly to kiss, then moved on. Pete moved to the front door of the cottage.

It stood open. The screen door, with a metal screen so old and soft that it felt like cloth under his hands, was unlocked. Pete slipped into a tiny hallway, cool after the bright sun outside. He could see clear through to the back of the house, which was all glass with yet another view of the sea. All the rooms were small, to fit the house on the narrow point. To his left was a kitchen, to the right a steep staircase. Pete climbed it.

Two little bedrooms, both with slanted walls and windows set into alcoves. One room held a double bed and a long, low dresser. Crowded into the other were a crib and a single bed, both occupied.

She was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, more beautiful even than McAllister. Pete gaped at her long red hair—he hadn’t known hair could be that color!—her smooth golden skin, her sweetly curved body and long legs. She wore a thin white top and panties, and nearly everything was on display. Something about her attitude suggested that she had only recently flung herself onto the bed and had fallen instantly asleep. It was a few moments before he could even look into the crib.

When he did, he found a miniature of the girl. Not plump and smooth like Petra, this child looked delicate, graceful, like the fairies in The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales. When Pete lifted her, he scarcely felt her weight, not even on his weak arm. Neither the baby nor her gorgeous sister woke.

Could he bring the older girl back, too? Pete gazed down at her. The rules of the Grab were strict, except that no one knew what they were. Everyone above a certain age died going through the Grab—but what age? Robert had died going through, at thirty-nine, Seth at forty-two. Petra’s father had died, at who knew what age. Pete could still go through at fifteen. Where between fifteen and thirty-nine was the death age? How old was this girl?

Pete couldn’t risk it. A lingering look at the redhead and he crept downstairs with the baby.

Twelve minutes had passed. If he had the same twenty-two minutes as Ravi, then he had to wait ten more minutes. But maybe he didn’t have ten more—who knew what the Tesslies would do? Other than watch humans squirm and struggle to survive. When he and Ravi caught one—not if, when—they would—

Chime chime chime . . .

The doorbell! Pete looked frantically around for somewhere to hide. But it wasn’t the doorbell, it was a clock sitting on a table made of tree branches painted white. Chime chime chime . . .

The girl upstairs screamed.

Pete looked frantically around. Nothing to hide behind, or under . . . He sprinted for the hall. Before he could reach the front door, the girl came tearing down the stairs. Pete ran into the kitchen. A door stood open and he darted inside, closing it behind him. The girl went on screaming, an incoherent mix of words; if she was calling the baby’s name, Pete couldn’t decipher it.

Through all of this, the baby hadn’t awakened. Pete couldn’t see his wrister in the darkness of the pantry. But he could smell food all around him. Cautiously he shifted the baby to his shoulder and felt around with his free hand. When it closed on a package of something, he clasped it to the baby and felt for another.

Now the door slammed; the girl had gone outside. A moment later she was back, tearing upstairs and then down again, still screaming but this time as if talking to someone. “My sister my baby sister Susie she’s gone! I was asleep—I can’t calm down don’t you understand you moron Susie is gone! Taken! I was—they’re walking the beach and—1437 Beachside Way and—yes I’m sure some fucking bastard took her!”

Pete heard McAllister’s voice in his head, “Not that language, Pete. I know Darlene uses it but it’s not a good example for the kids.” Fucking bastard. The beautiful, beautiful girl was talking about Pete with the same words Pete talked about Tesslies.

For the first time, he thought about the people left behind when he took their children. How they must feel.

Why hadn’t he ever thought about that before? Why hadn’t McAllister made him think about it? Did Caity or Ravi or Jenna or Terrell? Maybe Jenna did. But Pete had only thought about getting back home safely with the Grabbed kids, about how important it was to restart humanity.

Well, it was! And that was how McAllister always said it. Restarting humanity and saving the Grab children from the Tesslie destruction of the Earth. It was a heroic thing to do, and Pete was a hero for doing it.

The girl on the other side of the pantry door threw something hard against the kitchen wall and again slammed the screen door, screaming, “Mom! Dad! Where the fuck are you!”

Still the baby slept. Pete felt around again on the pantry shelves. He found another package of something, then yet another. Then the Grab caught him, and he was back on the platform with the slumbering baby, two packages of penne pasta, and a loaf of whole wheat bread with rosemary and dill.

“Oh!” Tommy cried. “A baby!”

Everyone clustered around the platform to greet him and take the infant, and even Caity smiled at him. Even Darlene. Pete smiled back. Jauntily he jumped down and handed the baby to McAllister.

Behind him, the Grab platform brightened again.

JULY 2014

Just past midnight Julie, seated in front of her computer, put her hands to her face and pulled at the skin hard, trying to fully wake herself up. Today—no, yesterday—was her thirty-ninth birthday. Jake had called from Wyoming. Linda, in the midst of packing her family for Winnipeg, had dashed over with a chocolate cake with a mini-forest of candles. It had been a good day and Julie should have been in bed reliving it in dreams, but instead she’d sat at her computer for four and a half hours, flipping between news sites and screens full of data.

She almost had it, the right algorithm.

She could smell it, tantalizing as apples in October. But this was not autumn and this particular apple evoked Snow White’s Wicked Witch, Alan Turing’s cyanide-laced fruit, the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

God, she was beyond tired, or her thoughts wouldn’t turn so metaphorical. It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough to fear without figurative exaggeration.

Three more data points. One she felt certain about: the kidnapping in Vermont on the night Alicia was born. A three-year-old boy had vanished from his bedroom while his parents were out at a party. Local cops had his babysitter, a Dominican woman who barely spoke English, in custody. She swore she had been asleep on the living room sofa when the abduction occurred; undoubtedly they assumed she was lying. Julie knew she was not.

The other two data points were more uncertain. A break-in in a garden shop in Massachusetts, no forced entry, the cash box untouched. The usual bizarre collection of goods had been taken: rakes, seeds, wind chimes. And yesterday’s incident, the kidnapping of a Maine infant who was supposedly being watched by her teenage sister while the parents strolled on the beach. No trace of the baby girl had been found, but the whole thing so closely resembled a set-up that even the local cops were suspicious, regarding the sister as either a suspect or a scapegoat; Julie couldn’t tell which. Could be a significant, could not. The location fit with her current algorithm, but not so closely if she didn’t include it as a data point to create the algorithm in the first place, which was the kind of thinking that drove mathematicians crazy. And when had she started thinking of a lost child as a “data point” ?

She had to go to bed. Just one more scan of breaking news. And there it was:

SCIENTIST ARRESTED FOR SECURITY BREACH

Dr. Geoffrey Fanshaw, Biologist,

Believed Connected to

Unspecified Terrorist Activity

The article said nothing much. It didn’t have to. Julie, all exhaustion banished, ran into her bedroom and started packing.

2035

Two Grabs right in a row, then nothing for a few days, then another Grab for Caity.

They’re playing fucking games, ain’t they,” Darlene said. “With our lives!”

“Not yours,” Caity answered spitefully. “You never have to go.” She was disappointed with the results of her Grab. She’d found herself in a strange, small store for twenty-two minutes and had not known what to do. There were no shopping carts, and anyway she was afraid of this store. She hadn’t said that, not even later, but then Caity didn’t ever admit fear. Still, Pete knew that’s what she’d felt. She hadn’t wanted to touch anything, but neither did she want to come back empty-handed and anyway, she said later and in a strong temper, “Who knew what the fuck McAllister was going to want?” So she yanked some zippered carrying-bags off a shelf and made herself stuff things into them.

“Gerbils?” Eduardo said, astonished. He and Tommy happened to walk by the Grab room just as Caity returned.

“That’s what they had!” Caity was near tears. “Get McAllister! Never mind, I’ll go myself!”

“Wow, a puppy!” Tommy cried, unzipping a bag with mesh sides.

The Six had never seen gerbils before. Only Terrell, Jenna, and Pete had seen dogs during Grabs, and the one Pete saw had tried to kill him. He didn’t much like the puppy, a small brown-and-white creature with floppy ears. It barked and shit everywhere and chewed up any shoes left on the floor. But everyone else thought it was wonderful, cute and cuddly. Tommy named it Fuzz Ball.

The gerbils were kept in their own room, with an old blanket that McAllister wearily ordered to be torn into strips. The gerbils then finished the job. Unlike the puppy, which had to be coaxed to eat mashed-up soy and only did so when it got hungry enough, the gerbils ate the vegetable crops happily. But their room smelled and had to be cleaned out every day, and Pete couldn’t see the point of them.

“Wait,” McAllister said. “Something is going to happen, I think.”

“What?” Pete said.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it because of what I saw?”

“I really don’t know.”

She didn’t seem to know much. And once, Pete had thought she knew everything!

Two of the gerbils died the day after Caity brought them back. Pete hoped the rest would die, too, and maybe even the puppy, but they didn’t. The gerbils ate and smelled, the puppy raced around and barked and chewed, the babies wailed.

“A regular madhouse, this,” Darlene muttered.

Ravi went on a Grab and returned with yet another large load of objects on yet another large rolling cart. “Look! Look what I got!”

Bundles of tough, heavy cloth that Pete thought would be poor blankets: too uncomfortable. However, it turned out they were not blankets at all. Eduardo let out a whoop such as Pete had never before heard the quiet man make. Eduardo sat on the floor and did things to one of the bundles and it sprang into a little cloth room.

“A tent!” Tommy cried, and crawled inside.

McAllister leaned against the wall, her hand on her belly, and stared at the “tent.”

Eduardo said to McAllister, “Five-pole four-season Storm King. An earlier generation of these is what we used to use on field expeditions in the mountains, when I was a grad student in botany.” Pete didn’t know what a botany or a grad student were, and he didn’t ask. He was too jealous.

There were more tents, plus a lot of rope, a sharp “axe” that McAllister immediately took away someplace, and many metal things Pete didn’t understand the use of. McAllister directed it all to be stowed back on the rolling cart—no playing with this one—and pulled into the room next to the gerbils.

But the most interesting thing, McAllister didn’t see at all. Ravi said quietly to Pete, “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

“I can’t leave the Grab room. I’m next.” Pete already wore the wrister.

“Then wait until everybody leaves.”

Pete nodded, although he wasn’t sure he wanted to see anything from Ravi. Pete regarded it as a private triumph that when he masturbated he no longer thought of McAllister; now he imagined the beautiful red-haired girl that had been Susie’s big sister. He’d already calculated how many years before Susie herself would be ready for sex. Still, every time he saw the growing curve of McAllister’s belly, the old animosity toward Ravi stirred.

At the same time, he and Ravi were now allies. Together they were going to get revenge for Earth. The first Tesslie they saw—and one had to show up eventually, after all he’d seen one when he’d gone Outside!—they were going to kill. They spent a lot of time in Pete’s clear-walled secret room, gazing out at the growing grasses in the black rock and planning ways to accomplish this. If the Tesslie was an alien inside a bucket-case they could hit the case with something until it cracked open, drag the alien out, and stomp on it. If it was a robot, they would find the batteries and pull them out.

“Look,” Ravi said when everyone else had left the Grab room. He reached under his tunic, made from a thick blanket folded and sewn to create pockets. Ravi pulled out something encased in leather. The leather slipped off and there was the knife, long and gleaming and, Pete knew without testing it, really sharp. Then another one.

“They had a lot of knives in the store and I put some on the rolling cart. But these two are for us.”

“Yes,” Pete said. He took one. Just holding it made him feel strange: powerful and bad, both. But he liked the feeling.

“Yes,” he said again.

JULY 2014

Julie tried to be at running and hiding, but most of the time she felt like a fool. After all, she didn’t even know if whichever agency had arrested Fanshaw would come for her. And what if they did? All she had done was work on data he had given her.

Data that she knew had been obtained illegally, which made her at the very least an accessory to crime. Data that might, in fact, constitute a terrorist risk.

So why hadn’t she reported Fanshaw? Because he must have gotten the data from some government agency, which meant they were already aware of the threat. She couldn’t have helped any, and she might have endangered herself. Material witnesses could be detained by the FBI or CIA indefinitely, in secret and without filed charges. If that had happened, who would have cared for Alicia? Linda had her hands full with her job and her own family; Jake was out of the question.

It was because of Alicia that Julie was trying to plan responsibly now. At first light she packed the car carefully. She stopped at the bank as soon as it opened and withdrew $3,000 in cash. She turned off her cell phone. Then she drove north from D.C. on I-270. In Pennsylvania, just over the border from Maryland, she found a seedy motel that looked like it would accept cash. It did. The bored clerk behind a shield of bullet-proof glass didn’t check the parking lot to see if the false license number she put down matched the one on her car. If the clerk was surprised to see a woman with a baby walk in to his establishment, which usually catered to an entirely different sort of trade, he didn’t show it.

Locking the motel door behind her, Julie had a moment of panic. What was she doing? Her life had been going so well, had felt so sweet—

She was doing what she had to do.

After feeding Alicia, Julie drove to the nearest library and used their Internet connection until the library closed. It helped that Alicia, an unusually good baby now that the first bouts of colic were over, slept peacefully in her infant seat or stared calmly at whatever crossed her vision. Back in her motel room, Julie worked on her own laptop, which couldn’t have accessed the Internet if she’d wanted to; this was not the sort of place with Wi-Fi.

When she couldn’t go any further with the data she had, she watched the TV. It only got three channels, but that was enough. Through the thin walls came first loud music and then louder laughter, followed by a lot of sexual moaning. Sleep came late and hard. Julie upped the volume on the TV, flipping channels to find what she sought.

“Dead zones” were increasing in the world’s oceans. No fish, no algae, no life.

The Nile was threatened by industrial pollution. No fish, no algae, no life.

CO_2 levels in the atmosphere were creeping upward.

Overfishing was causing starvation in Southeast Asian islands.

The noise from adjoining rooms grew louder. A door slammed, hard. Julie’s gun, a snub-nosed .38, lay on the floor beside her bed. Julie was licensed to carry, and a reasonably good shot. She didn’t expect to have to use the gun, but it was comforting to know she had it.

2035

Pete sat in the Grab room, waiting for the platform to brighten. He had been there each day for a week now, relieved from duty only to sleep, and he was terrifically bored. Darlene had brought him onions and peppers to slice and chop. Eduardo had brought him sewing. Tommy popped in and out, too restless to stay very long. Caity had strolled in, nonchalantly offering sex, and had stalked out, her back stiff, when Pete said no. Jenna brought Petra, both of them trundled in on the rolling cart by Terrell. Petra was just learning to walk. Pete and Jenna sat a few paces apart and set the baby to waddling happily between them until she got tired and went to sleep.

But most of the time he was bored. Of the Shell’s six books, two of them too hard for Pete, and he’d read the others over and over. He knew all about the Cat in the Hat, the fairy tales with all the princes and horses and swords, the moon you said good-night to, and Animals in the Friendly Zoo. Why didn’t the fucking Grab machinery brighten?

It was a relief of sorts to think bad words, so he said them again, this time aloud. “Why doesn’t the fucking Grab machinery brighten?”

“Language, Pete,” McAllister said. She smiled at him from the doorway, walked heavily to his side, and braced one hand on the wall to lower herself beside him. Pete blushed, then scowled, conscious of the forbidden knife under his shirt. He had sounded out the words on its sheath: CAUTION: Carlton Hunting Knife. Very Sharp.

“I came to keep you company,” McAllister said. “Are you very bored?”

“Yes.”

“You’re doing a good job. You always do.”

Pete looked away. He used to love McAllister’s praise, used to practically live for it. Now, however, he wondered if she really meant it, or if she just wanted him to keep on doing what she wished. Did she praise all the Six the same way? And the older Grab kids, too?

McAllister watched him carefully. Finally she said, “You’re growing up, Pete.”

“I am grown up! I’m fifteen!”

“So you are.”

Silence, which lengthened until Pete felt he had to say something. “How is the fetus?”

To his surprise, McAllister smiled, and the smile had a tinge of sadness in it. “Doing fine. Do you know how odd it would have been for a fifteen-year-old to utter that sentence, in Before?”

He didn’t know. He said belligerently, “I don’t see why. That fetus is important to us.”

“You’re right. And you Six have all grown up knowing that. Language follows need. It was your father who taught me that, you know. He was studying to be a linguist.”

Startlement shook Pete out of his belligerence. McAllister—none of the Survivors—talked much about the ones who had died, or about their own lives Before. When he’d been a child, Pete and the other Six had asked hundreds of questions, which always received the same answer: “Now is what counts, now and the future.” Caity had pointed out, years ago, that the Survivors must have made a pact to say that. Gradually everyone had stopped asking.

Now Pete said carefully (CAUTION: Very Sharp.), “My father?”

“Yes. Richard had been a student at the same university I was, although we didn’t know each other then.”

“Where was that?” This flow of information was unprecedented. Pete didn’t want to ask anything complicated that might interrupt it.

“The name of the university wouldn’t mean anything to you, and there’s no reason why it should. That’s all gone, and what matters is now and the future.”

“Yes, of course, but how did my father get here, McAllister? How did you?”

She sighed and shifted uncomfortably on the floor. Pete tried to imagine carrying something the size of a bucket inside you. McAllister said, “I was home from university for summer vacation when the Tesslie destruction began. They caused a megatsunami. That’s a . . . You’ve seen waves in the ocean when you’ve been on a Grab, right? A tsunami is a wave so huge it was higher than the whole Shell, and could wash it right away. Wash away whole cities. The Tesslies started the tsunami with an earthquake in the Canary Islands off the coast of Europe and it rolled west across the Atlantic.”

Her face had changed. Pete thought: She’s talking to herself now, not me, but he didn’t mind as long as she kept talking. He’d never seen McAllister like this. Was it because she was pregnant? It had been a while since anyone in the Shell had been pregnant: at least six years, when Bridget had miscarried that last time. The Survivors were too old (or so everyone had thought) and the Grab kids too young. The Shell was awash in babies, but in the last years no pregnancies. Until now.

McAllister kept talking, her back resting against the Grab room wall, her hands resting lightly on the mound of her belly. “We lived, my family and I, in the countryside of southern Maryland. Honeysuckle and mosquitoes. Dad had a little tobacco farm that had been in the family for generations. Ten acres, two barns, a house built by my great-grandfather. It wasn’t very profitable but he liked the life. We had no close neighbors. That day my parents drove my little brother to Baltimore for a doctor’s appointment, a specialist. Jimmy had had leukemia but he was recovering well. I woke up late and turned on the little TV in my room while I was getting dressed and I learned that by then the tsunami was forty-five minutes away. My parents might have been trying to call me but I’d forgotten to plug in my cell and the battery was dead.”

The words made no sense to Pete but he didn’t interrupt her.

“Mom and Dad had taken our only car—we didn’t have much money and I was at university on a merit scholarship. They were so proud of that. I ran out of the house and climbed the hill behind the barns. The hill wasn’t very high, not in coastal Virginia, but it was high enough to see the water coming. A huge wall of it, smashing everything, trees and houses and tobacco barns. Our house. I knew it was going to smash me.”

Pete blurted, despite himself, “What did you do?”

To his surprise, she chuckled. “I prayed. For the first time in a decade—I was a smart-ass college kid who thought she had outgrown all that hooey—I prayed to a god, any god, to save me. And then a Tesslie did. It materialized out of the air beside me in what looked like a shower of golden sparks—that’s why we called them Tesslies, you know. Ted Mgambe came up with the name. He said when they materialized through whatever unthinkable machinery they had, it looked just like the shower of sparks from Tesla’s famous experiments.”

She had gone beyond Pete again. He didn’t interrupt.

“The materializing was quite a trick, but the Tesslie was solid enough, a hard-shelled space suit, or perhaps a robot, with flexible long tentacles. It wrapped one around me but it really didn’t have to. The tsunami was almost on me, a wall of dirty raging water with trees and boards and pieces of cars and even a dead cow in it. I saw that cow and I clutched the Tesslie with every ounce of strength I had.”

Silence. Pete said, “And then what? What?”

McAllister shrugged. “I woke up in the Shell, along with twenty-five other people. All about my age, all intelligent, all healthy. You know their names. Everything was here except the Grab machinery, which just appeared twenty years later when it became evident that we were not going to be able to produce enough children to restart the human race. Too much genetic damage, Xiaobo thought, although nobody knew from what. All of us Survivors came from Maryland and Virginia, although we represented genetic diversity. Xiaobo was a Chinese exchange student, Eduardo was Hispanic, Ted was black, Darlene was plucked from up-country Piedmont. The diversity was probably deliberate. And we all happened to be in the open, high up, and alone when the tsunami hit.

“When each of us regained consciousness, we explored the Shell, and we saw what Earth had become through the clear patch of wall in the unused maze—no, Pete, you weren’t the first to go there. And after the initial grief and rage, we made a pact that we would do whatever it took to restart humanity. Anything, anything at all, putting the good of the whole first and our individual selves second, if at all.”

“Didn’t you hate them? The Tesslies, I mean?”

“Of course we did. They wrecked the world. Even the brief hysterical newscast I saw that last day said that the tsunami wasn’t natural. It came from something—a quake, a volcano, I don’t remember exactly—that couldn’t have happened in that way by itself. And then the Tesslies saved us, like lab rats. We expected biological experimentation on us, those first years. It didn’t happen. The Tesslies left us alone until they gave us the Grab machinery, although no one saw them do it. Until you went Outside, I thought they’d probably left Earth for good. But they hadn’t, and I think now that they’re here for whatever happens next. Because something is happening, Pete. The grass is growing Outside. You breathed the air, even if it isn’t completely right yet. The Grabs have accelerated enormously. It’s possible more Tesslies will return soon.”

“Before, did you—”

She held out her hand. “Give me the knife, Pete. Or the gun, or whatever you’ve got.”

He jerked his head to face her. His body shifted away. “No.”

“Please. You can’t do any good with it.”

All at once fury swamped him in a big wave, like the tsunami she had spoken about but evidently didn’t understand. None of them understood anything, the wimpy Survivors! He shouted, “What’s wrong with you, McAllister? What? The Tesslies wrecked my future! Everybody’s future! And you want to just welcome them back because they gave us the Shell and the Grabs and—when the Grab machinery appeared it didn’t even have any learning circle to teach you that adults can’t go through and so we lost Robert and Seth until that day Ravi jumped on it during a game and it happened to brighten and he came back whole! And still you never blame the Tesslies, you never blame anybody for anything, you just talk about the good of the whole but to not blame the Tesslies—Fuck, fuck, fuck! Do you hear me? Fuck! We’re not . . . not gerbils!”

“No. But you’re not thinking clearly, either. Survival—”

“Blame the fucking Tesslies! Hate them! Kill them if you can!”

“Pete—”

The platform brightened.

Pete pulled his knife, glared at the pregnant woman on the floor, and jumped into the Grab.

JULY 2014

The Yellowstone Caldera lifted upwards.

For several years the surface land had been rising as much as three inches a year, but a few years ago the uplift had slowed and stopped. Now the ground inched upward again. A swarm of minor earthquakes followed, barely detectable at the surface. Tourists went on admiring the geysers and the bubbling, mud-laden hot springs. Rumbling at low sonic frequencies set off alarms at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory and the White Lake GPS station.

Jacob Kahn rushed to his monitor. “Oh my God,” he said. It was not a prayer.

JULY 2014

Two more nights in cheap motels, one without AC in a sweltering July. Two more days on library Internet connections. On her own laptop Julie had run and rerun algorithms as new data became available. Her driving had taken her steadily north, along the coast. Now she was in Massachusetts, north of Salem. She knew where she was going. She had accumulated enough data points to be sure.

The Eve’s Garden break-in in Connecticut.

The baby snatched on the Massachusetts coast while her teenage sister slept in the same room.

The Loving Pets burglary in New Hampshire.

Thefts at REI in southern Maine and Whole Foods in Vermont.

She was running out of money, and not all her news-watching had turned up the slightest hint that anyone was looking for her. On the other hand, neither had she turned up any more information on Dr. Fanshaw or mutated plant-killing bacteria. Both the glory hound and the deadly mutation seemed to have vanished, which was in itself scary. Still, she would have to go home soon. Or go somewhere.

Alicia had a cold, probably from exposure to all the germs in all the libraries. Julie had a massive headache. Was she just being stupid, imagining herself some dramatic fugitive from a third-rate action movie? Maybe she was just as narcissistic as Geoffrey Fanshaw. The sensible thing was to make the observation, alert Gordon, and go home.

At a Kmart she bought a camcorder. Alicia sneezed and fussed. Julie got them both back in the hot car and drove north on Route 1. The algorithm pinpointed a Maine town, Port Allington, for the next incident. Also a time: between 5:30 and 5:45 tomorrow afternoon. Which was odd, since all the other incidents had occurred in the middle of the night or in early morning. Google Earth showed the location to be in a retail area centered on a large Costco.

She spent nearly the last of her money at a Ramada Inn, several steps up from the places she’d been staying. “You’re lucky to get a room at all,” the desk clerk told her. “It’s high season for tourists, you know. But we had a cancellation.”

“Oh,” Julie said. She was tired, headachy, frightened. Alicia fussed in her car seat.

“Tomorrow the Azalea Festival begins over in Cochranton. You here for the festival?”

“No.”

“You should go. My niece Meg is going to be crowned Miss Cochranton Azalea.”

“Congratulations.”

“You should give the festival a look-see.”

It took Julie a long time to get to sleep. Her theory—fanciful, dumb, insane—kept spinning around in her head. When she finally slept, she dreamed that Miss Cochranton Azalea, dressed in a pink prom dress covered with blossoms, said, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard. I thought you were supposed to be a scientist!”

The next morning she felt even worse. But today would end it. She fed Alicia, bathed her, had an overcooked breakfast at a Howard Johnson’s. It was after noon when she got on the road. Another sweltering day. During just the short walk from restaurant to car, sweat sprang out on Julie’s forehead and her sundress clung to her skin. Alicia, in just a diaper and thin yellow shirt, cried while Julie strapped her into her car seat. Julie turned on the AC and powered down the windows to flush the hot air from the car.

Only a few hours to drive, and it would be over.

All at once loneliness overtook her. She hadn’t talked to anyone but motel clerks, librarians, and waitresses in days, and you couldn’t call any of those things conversations. She felt near to tears. Ordinarily she despised weakness—she and Gordon had had that in common—but the way she’d been living wasn’t human. And what did it matter if she turned on her cell? In a few hours the camcorder would have her proof, and she doubted that the FBI or CIA or whoever—even if they were looking for her—could locate her that fast if she were on the road. She needed to talk to somebody. Not Linda, who would ask too many questions. She would call her brother. Not to say anything personal—she and Jake seldom did that—but just to hear his voice.

The phone had nine voice mails waiting.

Sitting in the Howard Johnson’s parking lot, the AC finally making the car bearable, Julie stared at the blinking “9.” Very few people had this number; she’d conducted her professional life on the more secure landline. Gordon? Had the investigation reopened?

Her fingers shook as she keyed to voice mail.

“Julie, this is Jake. Listen, are you due for vacation? If so, don’t travel out west. Nowhere near Yellowstone, do you hear me? I’ll call and explain more when I have a minute to think clearly.”

A mechanical voice informed her that the message was dated days ago, the day Julie had left D.C. The next message was also from Jake, a day later: “Sorry to alarm you, Sis, but my warning still holds. Some weird shit is happening here, signs that the Yellowstone Caldera could blow. You remember, don’t you, I told you that for years now it’s been ranked ‘high threat’ ? Well, I guess it’ll rank that way a while longer since nothing seems to be happening even though there’s enough magma down there to blow up the entire state. Well, several states, actually. But as I said, it seems to have settled down. But don’t come out here until you hear from me.”

The next message alternated between jocularity and exasperation. “Still no supervolcano at Yellowstone. Just call us at the U.S. Geological Survey a bunch of Cassandras. But why haven’t you phoned me? This is my third message.”

Five of the other messages were from Linda, one from the hairdresser announcing that Julie had missed her appointment. Linda, calling first from home and then from Winnipeg, sounded increasingly frantic: “Where are you? It’s not like you to not call me back.” Her last message said she was calling the police.

Julie keyed in Linda’s number, but it went to voice mail. Were the police already looking for her as a missing person? No, that last message was only an hour ago. Julie left Linda a voice mail saying she was fine, Alicia was fine, tell the police it was all a mistake, Julie would explain later.

Almost she smiled, imagining that explanation.

She pulled out and drove toward Port Allington.

JULY 2014

The Alarms came from the Canary Islands station, simultaneously sounding at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas offices in Madrid and Barcelona, and then around the world.

“La Palma!” a graduate student in Barcelona exclaimed. “It’s breaking off!”

“Not possible,” her superior said sharply. “That old computer model was disproved—you should know that! You mean El Teide!” He raced to the monitors.

It was not El Teide, the world’s third-largest volcano, which had been smoldering on Tenerife for decades. It was the island of La Palma. A massive landslide of rock from Cumbre Vieja, itself already split in half and fissured from a 1949 earthquake, broke off the mountain. One and a half million cubic feet of rock fell into the Atlantic as the earth shook and split. The resulting tsunami crested at nearly 2,000 feet, engulfing the islands. The landslide continued underwater and a second quake followed. More crests and troughs were generated, creating a wave train.

“Not possible,” the volcanologist choked out again. “The model—”

The ground shook in Barcelona.

The wave train sped west out to sea.

JULY 2014

It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light, until it was. Pete blinked. No Grab before had gone like this.

He stood in a vast store, bigger than any he’d ever seen. WELCOME TO COSTCO! said a huge red sign. The lights were full on. The big doors just behind him stood wide open. But there were no people in the store, and none of the Before cars in what he could see of the parking lot. Everything was completely silent. A few tables had been tipped over, and half-full shopping carts stood everywhere.

“Hello?” Pete said, but very softly. He held Ravi’s knife straight out in front of him. No one answered.

Cold slid down Pete, from his crooked shoulder on down his spine right to the tops of his legs. But he wasn’t here to give in to fear, or to start conversations with weirdly absent people. He was here to Grab. He took one of the half-filled shopping carts—part of his job already done!—and pushed it past a display of round black tires. Not useful. Behind it were tables and tables of clothes, and behind those he could see furniture and food. What would McAllister want most?

As he pushed a shopping cart forward, something miraculous came into view: an entire wall of DIGITAL FOTO FRAMES. But these were enormous, and the pictures on them moved. In each DIGITAL FOTO FRAME a beautiful girl, more beautiful even than Susie’s red-haired older sister, ran along a white beach and into blue sparkling water. The girl wore almost no clothes, just strips of bright cloth around her hips and breasts. The breasts bounced. Mouth open, Pete stared at the incredible sight. Could he maybe unfasten one from the wall and—

He heard a clatter behind him and he turned.

JULY 2014

Something was wrong. Suddenly cars jammed the exits to Route 1, as if everyone was trying to leave the highway at once. Julie would have guessed a massive accident blocking traffic, except that the cars were leaving the freeway in both directions. Could a wreck ahead be sprawled across all six lanes? Or maybe a fire? She didn’t see smoke in the hot blue sky. She turned on the radio.

“—as high as 150 feet when it reaches the coast of the United States! Citizens are urged not to panic. Turn your radio to the National Emergency Alert System and follow orderly evacuation procedures. The tsunami will not hit for another four hours. Repeat, the Canary Islands tsunami will not hit the eastern seaboard of the United States for another four hours. Turn to the National Emergency Alert System—”

Tsunami. Waves 150 feet high hitting the coast of the United States.

For a moment Julie’s vision blurred. The car wavered slightly, but only slightly. She recovered herself—Alicia was with her. She had to save Alicia. Drive inland—

She couldn’t get off the highway. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, fighting for the exit ramps. An SUV left the highway and drove fast and hard into the fence separating the wide shoulder from a row of suburban houses. The fence broke. A blue Ford followed the SUV.

She knew about the “Canary Islands tsunami”—it had been the subject of a melodramatic TV show. Jake had discussed with her just why the program was wrong. “It couldn’t happen that way, Sis. The fault isn’t big enough, it was exaggerated for the computer model. And the model was based on algorithms—you’ll appreciate this—used for undersea linear quakes, not single-point events. It’s pure and inaccurate sensationalism. You would need a major seabed reconfiguration to get that megatsunami. Or an atomic bomb set off underwater.”

Hands shaking on the wheel, Julie pulled her car off the highway and followed the blue Ford toward the fence. She had to drive down a slight incline and through a watery ditch, but her wheels didn’t get stuck in the mud and the ground past the ditch was firm and hard, although covered with weeds. Her door handles and fenders tore off the tallest of these. Festooned with Queen Anne’s lace, the car drove through the fence hole and across somebody’s back yard. It was an old-fashioned 1950s house with a separate garage. Julie followed the two cars around the garage, down the driveway, and onto a road.

Everybody here was driving west, away from the ocean. But Julie had had time to think. Inland was not the answer. Not to the whole picture.

Her hands shook on the wheel as, guided by the compass on her dash display, she turned east. For several blocks she had to fight cars dashing out of driveways, the people glimpsed through windshields looking frantic and shocked. Cars jumped lanes, blocking her way. A woman stuck her head out of the window and screamed at Julie, “Hey! You’re going the wrong way!”

By the edge of town, however, she had the road nearly to herself. No one else was heading toward the sea.

How far inland would the evacuees have to go to escape the tsunami? Jake had once told her that 8,000 years ago in the Norwegian sea, an ancient rockslide had left sediment fifty miles into Scotland.

With one hand she fiddled with the radio, searching for more information. A Canadian station broke off its broadcast to say something about the Yellowstone Caldera, then abruptly went off the air.

In her car seat, Alicia slept fitfully.

In Washington, in Brasilia, in Delhi, in London, in Pyongyang, in Moscow, in Beijing, the Canary Islands earthslide was perceived as unnatural. Too large, too sudden, in the wrong place, not the result of natural plate tectonics. Every single country had received the data on the quake and resulting tsunami. Every single country had a classified file describing the feasibility and techniques for using nuclear blasts at Cumbre Vieja as a weapon. Every single country came to the same conclusion.

In Washington the president, his family, and senior staff were airlifted to an undisclosed location. From the chopper he could see the Beltway with its murderous fight to get out of D.C. Most would not make it. He could see the dome of Capitol Hill, the Washington Monument, the Smithsonian with its treasures, the gleaming terraces of the Kennedy Center and mellow rosy brick of Georgetown. All would be gone in a few more hours.

“I need more information,” he said to his chief of staff.

“Sir, retaliation scenarios are in place for—”

“I need more information.”

A woman stood in the doorway of the store, carrying a sort of padded bucket with a handle, curved to hold a baby. The baby was asleep. The woman and Pete stared at each other. She spoke first.

“You’re the one who has been stealing children, aren’t you?”

“Not stealing,” Pete said. “Rescuing.”

“From the tsunami.”

It was the second time Pete had heard that word today. He scowled to cover his confusion. “No. From the Tesslies.”

“What are Tesslies?” She moved closer, just one step. It was as if she were pulled closer, jerked on some string Pete couldn’t see, like the puppets Bridget had made for the Six when they were kids. The woman looked about McAllister’s age, although not so pretty. Her hair matted to her scalp and her clothing was wet over her breasts, which made Pete look away. He started throwing bundles of towels into a shopping cart.

“You’re taking things from this store, the way you did from the others. A sporting-goods store in Maine. A pet store in New Hampshire. A garden shop in Connecticut. A supermarket in Vermont. Ambler’s Family Department Store in Connecticut . . .”

She recited the whole list of store Grabs, his and Caity’s and Ravi’s and Terrell’s and Paolo’s and even way back to Jenna’s famous Wal-Mart Grab. Pete stopped hurling towels into the cart and stared at her, astonished. “How do you know all that? Who told you?”

“Nobody told me, or at least not all of it. A law enforcement joint task force that . . . No, it would take too long to explain. You aren’t here for long, are you? How much longer?”

Automatically Pete glanced at the wrister. “Sixteen more minutes.”

“I’ve been waiting outside for you.”

More astonishment. “You have? Why? Don’t try to stop me!”

“I won’t stop you. At first I came to video you, to get photographic proof that . . . It doesn’t matter. That’s not why I’m here now. Listen to me, please—what’s your name?”

“Pete.” He yanked at another shopping cart and started emptying a table of clothing into it. So much clothing! And most of it big enough for Ravi and the Survivors. Eduardo’s pants had a hole in them.

“My name is Julie. Listen to me, Pete. The tsunami will be here within the hour. It will smash everything on the eastern coast of the United States. Almost no one will survive—”

“McAllister will. She told me.” Pants, tops, jackets, more pants but softer. “All the Survivors will live.”

“Yes? Where will they go?”

“The Tesslies will take them to the Shell.”

“That’s where you live, the Shell? Where is it?”

“After.” A third shopping cart. If he could tie them together, they would all come back with him—a lot more than Ravi had Grabbed! Better stuff, too. He yanked free a towel to lash the carts together.

“But the Shell is a safe place, isn’t it? Is it some sort of space ship or underground colony? Are you from the future? It—oh my God!”

At her voice, Pete jumped. She stared at the wall behind him. He whirled around to look, knife at the ready. If it was a Tesslie—

JULY 2014

The front wave of the megatsunami loomed 300 feet high when it crashed into northwest Africa. When it reached the low-lying south coast of England, the trough of the wave hit first. The sea retreated in a long, eerie drawback before rushing back to land. It breached England’s sea defenses, roaring a mile inland, destroying everything it touched.

The main body of the wave train sped over the Atlantic at hundreds of miles per hour. When eventually it reached Brazil, the Caribbean, Florida, and the eastern coast of the United States, it would crest to a maximum of 120 feet.

Long before that, the missiles had been launched. Retaliation for the act of terrorism aimed at smashing the way of life of the Western world. The counter-response was not far behind.

The far wall of huge DIGITAL FOTO FRAME had stopped showing the moving pictures of the beautiful girl running on the beach. Instead, they all showed fire spurting into the sky. At the same moment the ground shook beneath Pete’s feet and he nearly fell. The woman staggered sideways against a table of rugs, righted herself, stared again at the row of DIGITAL FOTO FRAME, which were screaming loud enough now to wake the baby. Something about a yellow stone.

Julie said, in a voice Pete recognized: “There goes the West. To match the East.” The words made no sense, but the voice was the one Bridget had used when her last baby miscarried. Quiet, toneless, dead.

Pete stared at this baby, now awake in its padded bucket and peering curiously around. Was it a girl? How hard would Julie fight for it?

She said, “Take us with you.”

He gaped at her. She didn’t give him a chance to speak.

“You can, I know you can. You’ve taken twelve children, starting—”

“Thirteen,” he corrected, without thinking.

“—with Tommy Candless over a year ago, and you can take us. Don’t you understand, Pete? Everything here is dying, the Earth itself is dying! Tsunamis, earthquakes, a mutated bacteria that is killing every plant above tide level. Governments will collapse, and as they collapse they’ll fight back, there will be nuclear retaliation with radiation that will—”

“Radiation, yes.” She had used a word he knew. “It damages babies. It damaged me. But it’s mostly gone now.”

“Is it? Then take—”

“Everything you said, the destroying of the whole Earth—the Tesslies did that. But McAllister is leading us to restart humanity. And Ravi and I will kill the fucking alien Tesslies!”

“The—”

Suddenly all the DIGIAL FOTO FRAMES went black at once. The silence somehow felt loud. Into it Julie said, “No aliens wrecked the Earth. We did. Humans.”

“That’s a lie!”

“No, Pete, it’s not. We poisoned the Earth and raped her and denuded her. We ruined the oceans and air and forests, and now she is fighting back.”

“The Tesslies destroyed the world!”

“I don’t think so. Tell me this: Are there any plants where you live? Growing wild outside the Shell, I mean?”

“There are now. Grasses and bushes and red flowers.”

Julie closed her eyes, and her lips moved soundlessly. When she opened her eyes again, they were wet. “Thank God. Or Gaia. The microbial mutation reversed.”

“What?”

“Take us with you, Pete. I can help your McAllister start over. I’m strong and a good worker and I know a lot of different things. I can be really useful to . . . to the Shell.”

She took a step forward and looked at him with such beseeching eyes that all at once Pete saw her. She was a real person, as real as McAllister or Petra or Ravi, a person who was going to die in McAllister’s tsunami. The first person in Before who had ever been real to him.

“Take us with you!”

He choked out, “I can’t!”

“Yes, you can! You’ve done it twelve times already!”

“Only kids,” Pete said. “If adults go through a Grab, they die.” Robert, Seth, the thing that had come back with him and Kara and Petra. The thing that had been their father. “The Tesslies made the Grab that way. They didn’t want the Survivors to just get everybody on the platform and lead them all back to Before.”

Julie went so still and so sick-looking that for a crazy moment Pete thought she had turned into the “yellow stone” the wall had been screaming about. Robert, Seth, the thing that had been Petra’s father . . . He started to babble. “But I can take that baby, yes I can, kids can go through a Grab so I can take the baby! Give it to me!”

Julie didn’t move.

“Give me the baby! I’ve only got—” a quick glance at his wrister “—another two and a half minutes!”

The number brought her alive. She shoved the baby bucket into his arms. “Her name is Alicia. Tell her—oh, tell her about me!”

“Okay.” He couldn’t do that; it was important that the Grab kids belong to the Shell, not to Before. McAllister insisted on it. But he didn’t have to tell Julie that.

She began to cry. Pete hated it when people cried. But she had a good reason, and anyway there were only three or four sobs before she got hold of herself and began to talk. “Listen, Pete, it was us, not any aliens. Have you ever heard of Gaia?”

“No.”

“Is your McAllister an educated man?”

“She knows everything.”

“Then tell her this: We did it. We wrecked the Earth, and now the Earth is fighting back. The planet is full of self-regulating mechanisms—remember those exact words!—to keep life intact. We’ve violated them, and Gaia—remember that word!—is cleansing herself of us. It’s not mysticism, it’s Darwinian self-preservation. Maybe Gaia will start over. Maybe you in the Shell are part of that! But tell McAllister that, tell everyone! Say it!”

She was hysterical, the way Petra’s mother had got hysterical when Pete Grabbed Petra. But she was also real. So Pete repeated the words after her, and then repeated them again, all the while hurling more things into shopping carts. “Gaia. Darwinian self-preservation.” Blankets, socks, a tableful of flimsy books. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” Three folding chairs, all he had room for. “Identical deadly plant mutations in widely separated places. Gaia.” Now he’d reached the start of the food section. Loaves of bread! Boxes of something else!

The ground shook again. The baby started to whimper. Pete tied the huge shopping carts together with towels. He clutched one of the handles in one hand, the baby bucket in the other. Fifteen seconds.

“Bye, Julie. I’m sorry about the tsunami.”

“Alicia!” Julie cried. Then, stopping herself in mid-lunge: “It was us.”

“It was the Tesslies.”

“No, no—don’t you see? We humans always blame the wrong ones! The—”

Pete never heard the rest. He was Grabbed.

2035

“I’m back!” Pete cried from the platform. “Look! Look!” No one was in the Grab room.

That made no sense. McAllister had seen him go. She knew he would be back in twenty-two minutes, and his wrister said that he was. She, at least, should be waiting here. Disappointment lurched through him—he had a baby girl to show her! And all this great stuff! And all those words to tell her that Julie had said . . . If he could remember them.

He found he remembered them perfectly.

Pete’s belly churned. The excitement of the Grab, the disappointment at no one seeing his triumphant return, his deep disturbance at Julie’s statements, going deeper every moment. Where was McAllister? Where was everybody?

“Hello?” he said, but not loud. No answer.

He hopped off the platform, leaving his Grabbed prizes, still carrying Alicia in her baby-bucket. Cautiously he peered into the corridor.

No one. But through the wide arched entrance to the farm, he glimpsed a movement behind the wide white bulk of the fertilizer machine. A second later Ravi appeared, gestured wildly for Pete to come, then ducked again out of sight. Was it a game of some sort?

He knew it wasn’t. He set the baby-bucket down in the middle of the corridor and sprinted toward Ravi.

“We don’t have much time,” Ravi gasped. “They’ll find out it’s missing. My knife doesn’t work at all on its bucket-case. But you have the laser on your wrister. Quick, kill it!”

Lying on the ground at Ravi’s feet was a Tesslie.

JULY 2014

Julie walked calmly to a deep faux-leather chair in the Costco furniture display. Calmly she sat down. The calm, she knew with the part of her brain that was still rational, would not last. It was shock. Also several other things, including a preternaturally heightened ability to simultaneously comprehend everything around her, instead of in the linear shards that the human mind was usually stuck with.

Alicia was gone.

The megatsunami was on its way.

Washington D.C., including her life there, would soon no longer exist.

Her country would not allow that to go by without a military reaction.

Pete had left behind a pile of objects that must have slid off one of his shopping carts before he . . . left.

Jake was dead in whatever was happening at the Yellowstone Caldera.

The TVs on the wall had stopped broadcasting.

The Tokyo earthquake and tsunami had been a rehearsal for what would come, once the biologists had detected and contained the plant mutations. Or, alternatively, once Gaia had changed its tactics.

The chair she sat in was on sale for $179.99.

Linda and her family were in Winnipeg, far from the coast. Would that save them? For how long? Gordon and his kids, all the people Julie knew at Georgetown and in D.C.—all gone, or soon to be gone. And then incongruously: The motel clerk’s niece will never be crowned Miss Cochranton Azalea.

Julie drew the snub-nosed .38 from her pocket. She would not wait for the tsunami. This was better. And Alicia—her baby, her treasure, the miracle she had given up hoping to have—was safe. Safe someplace that might, with any luck, become the future.

JULY 2014

Beneath the Yellowstone Caldera, the geothermal system exploded from pressure from below. A magma pool twenty miles by forty miles blew into the sky, greater than the supervolcano in Indonesia that, 75,000 years ago, had killed fifty percent of the human race. More than 250 cubic miles of magma erupted into the air. For hundreds of miles everything burned, and ash choked the air. Burning, suffocating night spread over the land.

The explosion triggered earthquakes in the San Andreas Fault and on into the Pacific Rim. As convergent tectonic plate boundaries lifted or subducted, more tsunamis were generated in the Pacific, and then in the Indian Ocean. Even deep sea life was affected as thermal vents opened—but not affected very much. Most of the ocean life was hardy, adapted, and innocent.

2035

Pete gaped at the Tesslie lying at Ravi’s feet. Or . . . was it lying? The thing was the squarish metal can he remembered, without clear head or feet or anything. He said, inanely, “How do you know it isn’t standing up instead of lying down?”

“Because I knocked it over!”

“Did it come out of the air in a bunch of golden sparks?”

“Yes!”

“It’s not moving. How do you know it’s still alive?”

“It won’t be if you fucking laser it!”

Pete didn’t move. Ravi leaped forward, grabbed Pete’s arm with both hands, and fumbled with the buckle on the wrister.

Ideas surged and eddied in Pete’s mind, even as he kept his eyes on the Tesslie. It lay still now, but Pete knew it wasn’t helpless. It was watching. Without eyes or anything, it was still watching to see what he and Ravi would do. And it was not helpless. The Tesslies had built this whole Shell! They had made Grab machinery to send the Six back to get kids and stuff! They had come from someplace else through the sky! One of them was not going to let a human laser him open. Ravi was crazy.

But even more, Julie’s words swirled in his brain. “Self-regulating planetary mechanisms.” “Darwinian self-preservation.” “Gaia.” “We did it. We wrecked the Earth.” And “We humans always blame the wrong ones.”

Pete pushed Ravi away. Ravi said, “What the fuck? Give me the laser.”

“I can’t.”

“You mean you can’t laser the bastard? I can! Give it to me, you wimp!”

“I don’t know . . . maybe the Tesslies . . . I don’t know!” It was a cry of anguish. We humans always blame the wrong ones.

Ravi, much stronger than Pete, knocked him to the ground and sat on him. Pete stuck his arm with the wrister behind his back. Ravi easily got it out, but he couldn’t unbuckle the wrister and also keep both Pete’s arms pinned. Pete flailed, wrenching his bad shoulder, hitting Ravi’s face, shoulder, anywhere he could reach. Ravi snarled at him, exposing the crooked stumps of the teeth that Pete had knocked out.

The Tesslie turned itself so it stood on a different side of its bucket-case, and waited quietly.

“Give it to me, you wimp!”

“No! McAllister said—”

“It took McAllister! It took them all, you fucking idiot! They’re prisoners! That’s why I—give it to me!” He smashed a fist into Pete’s face.

“Prisoners?” He could barely get the word out for pain, even though he’d turned his head in time for Ravi’s blow to hit him on the side of the jaw instead of on the mouth.

“Yes! The bastards took them all!”

“Petra?”

“Give it to me!”

“Took where?”

Ravi flipped Pete over and wrenched his arm behind his head. The pain was astonishing. Ravi got the wrister unbuckled, sprang off Pete, and aimed the laser at the Tesslie. Ravi fired.

Nothing happened.

Pete, gasping on the floor, saw the laser beam hit the Tesslie’s bucket-case. The red beam vanished. The Tesslie stood stolid and silent.

Ravi gave a low moan. Pete got to his feet. His vision blurred during the process, but he did it. He faced the Tesslie.

“Don’t hurt him, please. He doesn’t know. He thinks you destroyed everything.”

The Tesslie said and did nothing.

Pete blurted, “Did you?”

Nothing.

“Or was it really—” All of a sudden he couldn’t remember the weird name Julie had said. Gouda? Or was that the cheese Caity had once brought back from a Grab? Guide-a? Gaga? Gina?

“—us?”

The Tesslie rose a few inches into the air and moved past Pete, floating on nothing at all toward the corridor. A long ropelike metal arm shot out of its tin can, startling Pete. The arm flicked toward him, then pointed to the corridor. The Tesslie floated on, and Pete followed.

“I’m not going!” Ravi shouted. “I’m not!”

“Wimp,” Pete said.

In the corridor he picked up Alicia’s baby-bucket. She had started to fuss, working up to a full wail. The Tesslie floated on, toward the maze at the far end and then through its small rooms. Pete trailed behind because he needed McAllister and anyway he couldn’t think what else to do. What if they were all dead? What if he and this baby were going to their deaths?

That made no sense.

But, then, neither did anything else.

He heard Darlene first. She was singing at the top of her lungs, belting out a desperate stupid song in her scratchy voice: “ ‘Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war . . .’ ”

McAllister had told Darlene not to sing that song because wars were all over. Darlene had never listened. Now Pete could hear a baby wailing. Then McAllister’s voice, sharp and uncharacteristically angry: “Darlene, stop that!”

Darlene didn’t. The Tesslie and Pete rounded a corner in the maze and faced an open door.

They were all crowded into one small room. McAllister and Darlene and Eduardo stood in the front. Behind them huddled Caity, Paolo, Jenna, Terrell. The Grab children were penned in the corner, the babies lying on the bare metal floor. Two more Tesslies guarded the doorway. Pete ran past them to McAllister. “Are you hurt? Is anybody hurt? What happened?”

Caity said, “They brought us here! Like . . . like gerbils!”

Where were the gerbils? Then Pete saw them, trying to get out of a large bucket. They couldn’t. Tommy held the squirming Fuzz Ball. Tommy’s eyes were big as bucket bottoms.

McAllister said, “You Grabbed another child? Where’s Ravi?”

“He—”

The edges of the room began to shimmer with golden sparks.

McAllister ran forward, her big belly swaying. “No, please, not without Ravi—please!”

No response from any of the three Tesslies.

“Please! Listen, we’re so grateful for all you’ve done but if you’re really helping us again, we need everyone! We need Ravi!”

“That angel ain’t going to listen to you!” Darlene said, with all the bitterness of her bitter self. “Them cherubim are flaming swords! Don’t you know nothing?”

“Please,” McAllister said to the Tesslie. And then, “Ravi is fertile!”

The golden sparks stopped.

“Ueeuuggthhhg,” Caity said, which might have meant anything.

“Flaming swords!” Darlene shouted, and several children began to cry. McAllister whirled around and slapped Darlene. Pete gaped at McAllister; Darlene put her hand to her red cheek; Caity looked scared in a way that Caity never did; more children screamed.

A fourth Tesslie dragged Ravi into the room, its ropy metal arm wrapped around Ravi’s neck. Released, Ravi stumbled forward as if pushed. He fell into Jenna, who also went down with a cry of pain. Jenna’s fragile bones—

Pete had no time to pull Ravi off Jenna, or to pick up the crying Alicia, or to clutch at McAllister. The sparks enveloped all of them in a shower of gold, and then there was nothing.

It wasn’t dark, and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t.

He lay on something hard in places and soft in others. The air felt warm and thick. Something gray shifted above him, far above him. Some noise, faint and rhythmic, sounded over and over in his ears. Something stirred behind him.

The cold retreated abruptly and Pete returned fully to himself. He sprawled Outside, beside Ravi and McAllister, and underneath Ravi was Jenna. He lay Outside, partly on rock and partly on some plant low and green and alive. Gray clouds blew overhead. Warm wind ruffled his hair. Dazed, he got to his feet, just as the others began to move.

They were all there, stirring on the ground. The Tesslies were gone. The Shell was gone. Piles of stuff lay on the ground in places where, he vaguely realized, it had all been lying when the Shell enclosed it: toys, blankets, food, tents, piles and piles of buckets. Pete turned around.

This was the view he’d had when he’d gone Outside through the funeral slot and then had gone around to the far side of the Shell. He stood on a high ridge of black rock. Below him the land sloped down to the sea. The whole long slope was a mixture of bare rock, green plants, red flowery bushes. A brownish river gushed down the hillside. Beyond, along the shore, the land flattened and gold-and-green plants grew more thickly a long way out, until the water began.

It was quiet Eduardo who spoke first. “Regenerated from wind-blown seeds, maybe. From . . . wherever survived. And those lupines are nitrogen-fixers, enriching the soil.”

McAllister said shakily, “There must still be ash in the air, it’s so thick, but it’s breathable . . . fresh water. . . .” She put her hands over her face, all at once reminding Pete of Julie, in the last-ever Grab.

He didn’t want to remember Julie, not now. He wanted to shout, he wanted to cry, he wanted to run down the slope, he wanted to turn around and hit Ravi. He did none of those things. Instead he said, before he was going to do it, a single word. “Gaia.”

McAllister jerked her hands away from her face and turned to him sharply. “What?”

“Gaia. It’s a word the woman in the Grab said to me. Julie. Alicia’s mother.” He pointed at Alicia, who was now screaming with the full force of her lungs. Several other children also began to cry. Pete said some of Julie’s other words: “ ‘Self-regulating mechanisms.’ ‘Planetary Darwinian self-preservation.’ ‘Cleansing.’ ”

Eduardo drew a sharp breath. Now the other children were shouting or screaming or whimpering. Fuzz Ball barked and raced around in circles. Darlene started to sing something about Earth abiding. Jenna began to cry. Into the din Pete said, “We did it. Not the Tesslies. Us. That’s what Julie said.”

McAllister didn’t answer. She stared out at the water, which wasn’t all that bright but still hurt Pete’s eyes to look at. He could tell McAllister was thinking, but he couldn’t tell what. All at once she turned to look at him, and in her dark eyes he saw something he couldn’t name, except that he knew she felt it deeply.

Eduardo said to her, “The Gaia theory . . . It posited a self-regulating planet to keep conditions optimum for life. A planet that corrects any conditions that might threaten . . .” He didn’t finish.

McAllister said to Pete, “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“We’ll do better this time.”

“Better at what?” Why didn’t he ever understand her?

But McAllister turned her beseeching look on Eduardo. “Our chances—”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Maybe we can. If the seeds take. If any of those grasses are domesticable grains. If enough marine life survived. If we’re in a tropical climate. I don’t know. Maybe we can.”

Can what? Before Pete could ask, McAllister’s face changed and she was herself again, issuing orders. “Ravi, you and Terrell and Caity and Pete start lugging all that stuff down to that flat, sheltered place by the river—do you see where I mean? Bring the tents first, it’s going to rain. And the food, all the food. Darlene, I’m sorry I slapped you. We can discuss it later. For now, try to get rations organized until Eduardo can determine which plants are edible. Eduardo, can you walk enough to find the best spot to put the soy into the ground? Paolo, you and Jenna are going to have to look after all the kids once we get them into tents—I’m sorry, but we can’t spare anyone else. Tommy, you help move the food to under cover, and after that I’m going to want you to bring Eduardo some different plants from farther down the slope. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes!” Tommy beamed at Pete. “You did make a big adventure!”

Pete clutched McAllister’s arm. “But I have to finish telling you what Julie—”

“Later,” McAllister said. “They’ll be time. There will be lots of time.”

Pete nodded. He raced with the others to where the Shell had been. The fertilizer machine was gone, the disinfectant and clean-water streams were gone, the Grab machinery was gone. Terrell and Pete each grabbed a rolled-up tent and staggered with it back down the slope. Darlene and Caity lugged buckets of soy stew from what had been the hot part of the farm. Over armfuls of canvas Pete spied Eduardo halfway down the incline to the sea, stooping to examine some low bushy plants.

“ ‘Abide with me,’ ” Darlene howled. “ ‘The darkness deepens’ ” until Caity told her to shut the fuck up.

For just a moment, Pete felt afraid. The Shell was all he’d ever known except for the Grabs, those terrifying jolts into places he didn’t belong. The Shell had been ugly and boring, but it had been home. Sort of. A cage-sort-of-home. And now—

Had the Tesslies really captured the Survivors, caged them, and twenty years later let them out because the Tesslies wanted to help? And what were they, anyway? Robots, aliens, Darlene’s angels, res-cuers—maybe not even McAllister would ever know.

The moment of fear passed. The Tesslies were gone. This was now. He was here.

A bird swooped overhead, and on the wind came the sweet smell of warm rain.

SAN DIEGO 2014: THE LAST STAND OF THE CALIFORNIA BROWNCOATS

Seanan McGuire

If you are reading this, it is dedicated to you.

This world, and this war, has always been yours.

Prologue: Chasing the Story

The Rising is not a single narrative; there is no one true story that unifies that entire bloody summer, no one event which exemplifies the human experience. It is a piece of history like any other, a tapestry of lives which, viewed in total, may someday give us that rarest of commodities: We may, by looking at them all, someday discover the truth.

—Mahir Gowda

When I was a kid, people used to talk about living in the future. Well, I live in the future. I want to go back to living in the past.

—Lorelei Tutt

Captain, United States Coast Guard

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

Lorelei Tutt is a harshly attractive woman in her forties, tall and lean, with scars from her combat gear on her hands and elbows. Her naturally brown hair is streaked with natural gray and sterilization blonde, and she wears it in a short-cropped, almost military style that does nothing to soften the lines of her face. She walks with a subtle limp, the result of learning to walk on a prosthetic right leg at the age of twenty-five. Her left eye is shaped normally but filmed with cataract white from an old war injury. She moves with studied precision, and it is clear from her expression that she is not happy to see me.

The front room of her London flat is at odds with her appearance: The time she spent in the United States Coast Guard has left her seeming businesslike and cool, but her decor is that of a teenage member of the science fiction and fantasy subculture that thrived before the Rising. Books and assorted forms of recorded media pack her shelves, and the walls are covered in posters advertising long-canceled television shows, long-forgotten movies.

She indicates that I should sit. She does not do the same. Her accent is American: She may have left the country of her birth after she left the Coast Guard, but some things are not so easily forgotten.

LORELEI: You know, I don’t know why you people keep coming looking for me, sniffing around the graves like this. San Diego was thirty years ago. There’s no reason to keep dredging up what happened.

MAHIR: Actually, ma’am, that’s precisely why people are becoming interested again. Thirty years . . . that’s long enough for terror to fade and nostalgia to start taking over. Did you hear that there’s been talk of doing another convention? The city of San Diego has expressed a willingness to host it. They think it might help restore the tourist trade.

Lorelei freezes. I have never seen this happen so literally before: One moment I am speaking to a living, if cold, woman, and the next, I am sharing a room with a statue made of flesh. When she speaks again, what little human warmth her voice contained is gone.

LORELEI: This interview is over. Get out.

MAHIR: You never intended to speak with me today, did you? [silence from Lorelei] That’s your right, of course, but I have to ask you . . . why? Why did you let me come here if you weren’t intending to actually have a conversation about what happened?

LORELEI: You people have wasted so much of my time over the last thirty years—all you damn bloggers acting like you’re heroes because you stayed in your rooms and told each other about the zombie apocalypse. You people had been doing that since long before the zombies came. You weren’t heroes.

MAHIR: But your parents were. [again, silence from Lorelei] Isn’t that why you’re angry? Because your parents were true heroes of the Rising, and almost no one knows their names? It was very hard to track you down, Miss Tutt. You have no idea.

LORELEI: I thought I told you to leave.

MAHIR: Miss Tutt . . . I’ve lost people, too. Maybe not as many as you have, maybe not the way that you did, but I’ve lost them, and I can’t have them back. And I know that the only thing that would have made it even harder for me—the only thing that could have made the worst thing that ever happened to me even worse—would have been knowing that someone else was telling their stories, and telling them wrong. This story is going to be told. I can’t stop it. Neither can you. But what I can do, what I have the power to do, is to ask you if you’ll let me tell it the way you want it told. If you’ll let me tell the truth.

There is a long silence. I begin to think that I’ve lost her—and then Lorelei gestures for me to stand, beckoning me deeper into the flat.

LORELEI: I need to put the kettle on. If I’m going to tell you what happened, I’m going to want a cup of tea in front of me.

I nod, rise, and follow the last known survivor of the 2014 San Diego International Comic Convention out of the front room. She leads me to the kitchen, where she fills the electric kettle and sets the water to boil. She moves with nervous efficiency. She does not look at me. The time for looking at me is done.

LORELEI: I was just a kid when the Rising started. I didn’t think of myself that way—I was eighteen, I was a grown woman, I was not a child—but I was still just a kid. I had no idea how ugly the world could be, or how bad things could get. We’d heard the news. I mean, who hadn’t? But we didn’t think it was really happening, and even if it was, it wasn’t happening where we lived. We did the con every year. It was one of the things we all looked forward to as a family. Me, and Mom, and Dad, rolling into San Diego like we were going home . . .

Preview Night

The trouble with saying “I would have done it differently” is that we’re always speaking from a position of knowing exactly what is about to go horribly wrong. The truth is, we’d be lucky to do half so well if the Rising began again today.

—Mahir Gowda

Get it in, get it up, get it done.

—Shawn Tutt,

Lt. Commander, United States Coast Guard (d. 2014)

The San Diego International Comic Convention was an annual event which drew hundreds of thousands of comic book, science fiction, fantasy, and horror enthusiasts from around the world. For a week every year, San Diego’s Gaslight District would be transformed into a strange new country, one with its own traditions, rules, and hazards. It was a golden age for what those enthusiasts called “fandom,” and as with all golden ages, it was not properly recognized until it was over.

It’s easy to look back on July of 2014 from our modern perspective, with our full knowledge of what was already happening to the world, and condemn the people who chose to attend that year’s comic book convention, or “Comic-Con.” We tell ourselves that they should have known better. But why should they have known better? It was a different time. It was a more innocent era. And the fans of the world were descending, as they always did, on San Diego, California.

The following narrative has been assembled from eyewitness accounts, security footage, social media updates, and various other sources that I am not currently at liberty to disclose. Some of the events described may not have happened in this exact fashion, but for once, I have put aside the goal of absolute truth in favor of a greater goal: understanding. To truly understand what it was like for those brave souls who died in the first major San Diego outbreak, we must first understand what it meant to be them . . .

—From San Diego 2014 by Mahir Gowda, June 11, 2044.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014: 10:24A.M.

The sky over San Diego was a beautifully pristine shade of blue, the sort of thing that triggered a thousand tourist snapshots and seemed impossible to anyone who hadn’t seen it with their own eyes. The streets were already beginning to fill with the early arrivals, the people who had come to town for whatever reason before the official start of the convention. Some were there to wait for the doors to open on Preview Night, hoping to snag early bargains or rare collectibles. Others were there to settle into their hotel rooms and prepare for the chaos to come. And still others—such as the California Browncoats, a nonprofit fan organization modeled around the protagonists of a canceled science fiction Western called Firefly—were there to set up their official booths.

“I know you don’t have much respect for authority, Dwight, but around here we respect the laws of physics,” said Rebecca, a petite brunette with a clipboard in one hand. She looked from her paperwork to the former Marine, who was trying, somewhat vainly, to hang the awning from their booth’s precarious piping-and-plywood frame. “That means that if you’re not careful, you’re going to plummet and crack your skull open on this lovely concrete floor. Can we try to not have any major injuries before the show opens this year? It would be a fantastic improvement over last year.”

“I’m not the one who injured myself last year,” Dwight shot back as he continued tinkering with the bolts that were supposed to hold the awning in place. “That honor goes to Leita, who doesn’t understand that you’re not supposed to pick up knives by the pointy end.”

“Hey!” Leita’s head popped up over the edge of the display case. She pouted prettily at Dwight, the studs beneath her lower lip poking upward at an angle. “It’s not my fault.”

“It never is,” Dwight said, and kept working.

Rebecca sighed. “Just please try not to fall and die before we’re finished setting up? I am begging you. This is my begging-you voice.”

“Do you need me to whip these heathens into shape?” demanded a voice from behind her, loud enough to command attention without shouting, the kind of voice that made cadets jump and crowds clear out of the way.

“Oh, thank God.” Rebecca turned, shoulders sagging in relief. “I thought you were never going to get here.”

“Traffic was worse than we expected. This year is going to be crazy.” Shawn Tutt—United States Coast Guard and designated booth organizer—walked over and gathered Rebecca into a firm hug. He was tall enough to tower over her, something that didn’t seem to bother either of them.

Shawn’s wife, Lynn, and teenage daughter, Lorelei, followed him to the booth, slowed by the large plastic tub that they carried between them. It was packed to capacity with T-shirts and rolled posters.

Lorelei cleared her throat. “Is there someplace we can set this down? My arms are getting tired.” She was almost as tall as her father, and her naturally brown hair was streaked with bright green.

“Let me.” Vanessa—a quietly pretty woman in a black T-shirt—put down her iPad and hurried to relieve Lynn and Lorelei of their burden. Before they had a chance to thank her she was gone, carrying the tub off to put it with the rest of the merchandise.

“The van’s stuffed,” said Lynn. She was shorter than Lorelei and taller than Rebecca, with short brown hair. “If we can get some people to help us unload it, we’ll be able to help set things up in here.”

“Of course.” Rebecca pulled away from Shawn. “Dwight . . .”

“I know, I know. Strong back, weak mind.” Dwight climbed down from the stepladder, putting the hammer he’d been using down on the nearest stack of boxes. “I’m on it.”

“Take some of the others with you. Anyone who looks like they’re not doing something absolutely vital is fair game.”

“I’ll start unpacking shirts,” said Lorelei.

“No, you won’t, but that was a nice try,” said Shawn. “You’ll empty the van with the rest of us.”

Lorelei sighed, managing to express in a simple exhale just how frustrated she was with the entire situation. “I’ve been cooped up in that van for hours, Dad. Why do I have to help you unload it?”

“Because everybody pitches in during setup,” said Shawn. “Come on. The faster we get started, the faster we’ll be finished.” He turned and walked back the way he’d come. Half the booth followed him, most of them looking relieved to have something else to do.

“Finally,” said Rebecca, and reached for the hammer. “Now we can get things done around here.” She climbed up on the stepladder, humming the theme from Doctor Who under her breath, and got to work.

* * *

11:00 A.M.

The parking garage attached to the San Diego Convention Center was reserved for “official vehicles” during the convention itself—people who were affiliated with one of the vendors or fan groups in the main exhibit hall, core convention staffers, and attending celebrities of sufficient importance that they couldn’t be expected to walk more than a few hundred yards out in the open, where enthusiastic fans might catch them. It was still early enough on Wednesday afternoon that almost a third of the spaces were empty. That wouldn’t last. Long before the convention really got underway, the garage would be full to the point of becoming a fire hazard, and the parking attendants would be on the prowl, looking for vehicles that didn’t belong. Anyone found without the appropriate tags and permits would be towed, no questions asked or warnings given.

The Tutts had traveled down the California coast from the Bay Area in a large white-panel van. The space that hadn’t been carved out for passengers was packed to the gills with the bins, boxes, and plastic tubs that contained the supplies for the booth. They weren’t the only people bringing items for the convention—that would have required three vans, and left no room for either driver or passengers—but they were definitely the most important, apart from Rebecca, who had driven down with a trailer that contained the actual booth structure. Without their stores of merchandise, decorations, and most important, snacks, the convention would have been a grim place for the Browncoats.

Shawn handed Robert—Leita’s skinny, long-limbed older brother—a flat of Coke. He stacked a flat of Diet Coke on top of it a few seconds later. “Think you can take two more, or is that your limit?”

Robert whistled. “First, I can take four more, but I won’t, because I don’t feel like showing you up. Second, are we preparing for a convention or a siege?”

“You weren’t here last year, were you?” asked Dwight. He clapped Robert on the shoulder, sending the slimmer man staggering forward a step and nearly causing him to drop the soda. Robert shot him a wounded look. “The only difference between a Comic-Con and a siege is whether or not they’re actually trying to kill you. And sometimes these ones try to kill you anyway, just to keep things interesting.”

“Don’t scare him away before his shift, Dwight,” said Shawn.

Lorelei scowled as she dug a plastic bin out of the back of the van and hefted it in front of her, her knuckles going white from the strain. “What if we all tried doing our jobs and getting this over with before they open the doors?” she asked sourly. “I know it’s not the fun, free-wheeling party that we’re having right now, but it might make for an interesting change.”

“Lorelei—” Lynn began.

She was too late: Her teenage daughter had already turned on her heel and was stalking away, back toward the entrance to the show floor. She sighed.

“I know she loves Comic-Con, but her attitude is going to be the death of me,” she said.

“She’s been in the car since this morning,” said Shawn. “Let’s get the van unloaded, and then I’ll talk to her.”

“She always listens to you,” said Lynn. She didn’t sound happy about that.

Shawn kissed the top of her head and went back to unloading the van.

The other Browncoats looked uneasily at anything but the Tutts while all this was going on. They might regard themselves as one big family—a crew of people joined by common interests and uncommon hobbies—but there was something about seeing a mother getting angry with her child that reminded them all of their own childhoods. Some experiences are nearly universal, and no more pleasant when viewed from the outside.

The easy camaraderie was gone as they finished unpacking the van, loading boxes and crates onto a pallet loader that Dwight requisitioned from the custodial staff. Then they went trudging back into the increasingly crowded hall. Fun was fun, but it was time to get to work.

* * *

2:00 P.M.

The damn Browncoats were nearly done setting up their booth, which was a relief to anyone who had to set up near them. It wasn’t that they were bad neighbors—they weren’t, and they always had plenty of supplies, which could be a godsend when things got really crazy. But they were also loud, and enthusiastic, and had a tendency to break into song with little to no provocation. Sometimes Marty suspected that oxygen was all the provocation they needed. It wouldn’t be so bad once the convention got underway. Once the halls were crammed with fans, the Browncoats could host a live concert in their booth and it wouldn’t make a dent in the overall noise levels. Hell, at previous conventions, the Browncoats had hosted live concerts, and Marty had been aware of them only after the fact.

“How’s that shelving coming, Eric?” he called, forcing himself to stop glaring at the plywood wall behind him. The noise of the laughing Browncoats drifted through from the other side. At least someone was having fun.

After ten years of Comic-Con, fun was no longer Marty’s top priority, if it ever had been. He was here to work. He wiped a smear of chalk off his dark brown skin, waiting for Eric’s response.

Eric held up a wire basket. “I’m almost done. I just need to get the plush hangers in place, and then we can start unboxing the merchandise.” Eric had been Marty’s assistant for three years. He was a tall, skinny man, with gawky good looks that seemed to pull the women toward the booth. It was good for profits, even if Eric wasn’t for sale.

“We have four hours before those doors open and the hordes descend,” said Marty. He picked up a box of graphic novels, beginning to stack them neatly on one of the already constructed bookshelves. God bless Ikea in all its many forms. “Where’s Pris?”

“She’s on the lunch run,” Eric replied. “I figured we should get some actual food before the insanity begins.”

“Trust me. By the end of this weekend, you’re going to be ranking food well under sleep and alcohol on your personal scale.” Marty continued stacking graphic novels. “Did you give her money?”

“I told her you’d reimburse her when she got back.”

“Of course you did.” Another burst of raucous laughter came from the direction of the Browncoats. Marty grimaced. “Do you think she’ll be smart and bring back beer?”

“Probably not this early in the convention.”

“No, probably not. She’ll learn. Now finish getting those shelves up.”

Eric grinned and snapped off a quick salute. “Aye-aye, Skipper.”

All around them, other merchants, artists, and exhibitors were in the process of finalizing their booths, getting their walls up and their artwork hung as they turned the convention center floor into a labyrinth of tiny, temporary spaces. Some not so tiny: The movie studios, television networks, and larger comic companies had booths that were easily the size of large retail stores, each one flashier than the last. The network that produced Space Crime Continuum had even constructed a full-sized replica of the precinct headquarters where their intrepid Time Police did their jobs and smiled for the cameras. Banners with row numbers dangled from the ceiling to help people figure out where they were actually going. Thanks to the annually shifting design of the booths, even old hands could get lost during the first few days of Comic-Con.

By day three, the floor would be so jammed with bodies that getting lost wouldn’t be nearly as much of a concern as getting crushed, or being swept three rows past your destination by people who were packed together too tightly for you to fight your way free. It hadn’t always been that way, but since Hollywood had discovered Comic-Con, the people had come in increasing numbers every year. Tickets had been sold out for months. Only the lucky would be getting through those doors, and the lucky would number in the thousands.

“Another day, another battle for survival,” Marty muttered.

* * *

4:30 P.M.

“I can’t believe we’re actually here! This is going to be so much fun!” Patty flung herself backward onto the hotel bed, arms and legs splayed like she was going to start making snow angels on the industrial-grade duvet. “My first Comic-Con! I’ve wanted to go since I was twelve. Did I tell you that?”

“Yes, you did,” said Matthew, unpacking his duffel bag into the top drawer of the room’s small dresser. “Five times during the ride from the airport alone. Also, you need to stop using so many exclamation points when you speak. That can’t be healthy.”

“You just say that because you’re British,” said Patty.

Matthew paused in the process of tucking a shirt into the drawer, squinting at her. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know. I just figured it would make you stop ragging on me about the way I talk.” Patty sat up and stuck her tongue out at him. “We’re at Comic-Con. We’re newlyweds. This is a time for geek love and geekier lust. Now stop putting your clothes away and come take some of my clothing off of me.”

“I wish I could do that, you poorly punctuated enchantress, but all it will do is make you angry.” Matthew continued unpacking.

“What? Why would you ravishing me make me angry? I’m pretty sure that being ravished is in my newlywed contract.”

“Because the doors will open for Preview Night in a little over an hour, and you wanted to be on the show floor first thing. I assure you, while I’m able to resist your allure by staying over here and dealing with my trousers, if I begin the ravishing process, I won’t be finished after a mere hour.”

Patty folded her arms. “I hate it when you make sense.”

“If you hate it when I make sense, you should have married a politician, not a scientist. Scientists make sense because we can’t imagine a world where there would be any point to doing anything else.”

“I think you enjoy it.”

“That, too.” Matthew gestured toward Patty’s suitcase. “Why don’t you unpack? You’ll feel better if you’re doing something, and as soon as you’re done, we can head for the convention center and queue up to get our badges.”

“Comic-Con.” Patty heaved a happy sigh, her sulk already forgotten. “Can you believe we’re really here?”

This was a familiar loop: They’d been around it dozens of times since the plane that carried them from London to San Diego began its initial descent. Matthew smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I rather do believe I can.”

* * *

5:30 P.M.

Elle Riley, star of the moderately well-rated science fiction drama Space Crime Continuum, waited not-so-patiently for the man who was supposed to be escorting her around the convention to get his goddamn act together already. He’d been arguing with the convention center security for the better part of twenty minutes—no, twenty-five minutes, according to her phone—about whether they could use the service tunnels. If he didn’t work things out soon, she was going to be late for her first panel. Not that SCC was that big of a deal, or it wouldn’t have been one of the first shows presenting at the convention. Still, they had two panels this weekend, one on Preview Night and one on Sunday afternoon, and she didn’t want to mess things up for the rest of her cast. She was already going to make the panel a living hell. She could at least be on time.

Some actors were chosen because of raw talent, or because of the kind of drive that could be used to power the time ships her franchise was built around. Elle was smart enough to know that she hadn’t been cast for either of those reasons. She could read a script, she could give a reasonably nuanced performance, and she could deliver technobabble explanations of hackneyed plot twists with the best of them. But none of those things were responsible for her continued employment. No matter what the blogs sometimes implied about her, Elle Riley was too smart to think that she got work when better actresses didn’t because she was somehow more deserving.

She got work when better actresses didn’t because she was pretty, and because she had big green eyes that she could widen with the right degree of confusion and awe when someone told her she was looking at a time anomaly on the green screen, and most of all, because the ratings went up every time the writers found a good reason for her character—the fetching chronoforensic analyst Indiction “Indy” Rivers—to take a deep breath. And all of this meant that when she sat on a panel, at least half the questions from the audience would be thinly veiled excuses to tell her how pretty she was.

At least the convention-supplied moderators managed to block the marriage proposals and offers of private dinners. Mostly. When they didn’t stop the questions from being asked, the moderators hurried the questioner away before he—or sometimes she, although that was rarer, which was amusing, all things considered—could expect an answer. And all of that was secondary to the fact that they were about to be late.

Elle cleared her throat, trying to be polite about it, and aware that no matter how polite she was, there was a good chance she would be interpreted as another spoiled starlet trying to throw her weight around. “Um, excuse me?” The two men continued arguing. “Excuse me?” They still gave no sign that they’d noticed her. Elle sighed before stepping forward and tapping her handler on the shoulder. “Hello?”

“Ms. Riley?” The handler turned to face her. He’d been doing this job long enough to be very good at hiding his irritation, but Elle had been doing her job long enough to catch it anyway, reading his displeasure in the way the muscles tensed around his eyes. Still, his tone was completely professional as he asked, “Is there a problem?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt, and I really appreciate the way you’re trying to take care of me, but we’re going to miss my panel if we don’t start moving about five minutes ago.” Elle grimaced apologetically. “I think they sort of want me to be there.”

Her handler’s eyes widened as he looked down at his own watch. Then he swore—too softly for her to make out the exact words, but the tone was enough to make his meaning clear—and said, “Ms. Riley, if you don’t mind, I think we need to start moving if we want to get you to your panel on time.”

Elle bit back several caustic responses before settling on a neutral, “Yes, that’s probably a good idea. Are we taking the service halls?”

Her handler nodded. The convention center security guard shook his head. Her handler frowned, but appeared to realize that it was long past the time to stop arguing and start moving. “No, ma’am, we’re not. It’s late enough that we need to cut through the convention center floor. If you’d just follow me, I’ll get you to your panel before they even start seating your costars.”

Privately, Elle doubted that this was physically possible, especially if they were taking the route through the middle of the main floor. It might be Preview Night, but if the doors had opened while her handler was arguing with the security guard, there would be literally thousands of comic book and television aficionados crammed into the single cavernous room. Once upon a time, before Space Crime Continuum had come into her life, a girl named Elle Riley would have been out there with the rest of them. And given how her teenage self would have reacted to a real live television star suddenly popping into view, this would be like trying to play through the final boss level of a modern-day version of Frogger. Only this game would have autograph chasers in place of alligators, and large clots of fans taking pictures of a woman dressed like slave-girl Princess Leia in place of trucks.

And there was absolutely no point in arguing about it, because they were out of time. Elle put on a sunny smile. “Well, then,” she said. “Let’s get moving.”

* * *

5:45 P.M.

“Ladies and gentlemen—and Browncoats who refuse to tie themselves down to a single option—I declare the 2014 California Browncoats booth open for business!” Rebecca flung her arms open in a gesture that would probably have been more triumphant than threatening if she hadn’t still been holding a hammer. Dwight swore and ducked. Shawn laughed. Rebecca blinked at them before turning to look at the tool clutched in her hand. With a sigh, she put it down on the nearest flat surface. “As I was saying . . .”

“Time to get to work!” said Shawn. This elicited cheers and nervous laughter from the members of the group who were just glad that Rebecca wasn’t waving the hammer around anymore.

Only Lorelei didn’t cheer or chuckle. She folded her arms, scowling at the ground. Her mother tapped her on the shoulder.

“What’s your problem?” Lynn asked. “I thought your father spoke to you.”

“About my ‘attitude’ ? Yeah.” Lorelei rolled her shoulder away, taking a step to the side at the same time. “I’m being a team player. See? I’m here.”

“What I see is that you’re being dead weight. You need to do your part for this crew.”

Lorelei turned her glare on her mother. “I’ve been working all day. My head hurts. Don’t you make it sound like I haven’t done anything to help this crew.”

“Hey.” Shawn was suddenly there, stepping up and putting himself between them. “Don’t talk to your mother like that.”

“She started it!”

“Someone has to. Lorelei, if you’re so tired, why don’t you go back to the room and take a nap until your head feels better? We can hold things together here until you feel up to coming back.”

“Shawn—” Lynn began. She stopped as she realized that Lorelei was nodding, a relieved expression on her face.

“Okay, Daddy. I’m sure I’ll feel better after I just lie down.”

“Make sure you take your phone charger. I want to be able to reach you.” The cell coverage inside the hall was notoriously spotty, but the Tutts, like many others, had found a way to work around it. Their phones were also designed to function as walkie-talkies, tuned to other phones on the same plan, with a range that was good up to a mile. The technology involved using short-wave radio, rather than strictly sticking to wireless or cell towers, and meant they could communicate even through the thick concrete walls of the convention center.

“Okay,” said Lorelei again. “I’ll call as soon as I get to the room.”

“Good girl. Love you.”

“Love you, too,” said Lorelei, and hugged him impulsively. She paused long enough to hug her mother in turn, and then she was gone, running through the growing crowd to get to the outside door before the waiting throngs came pouring in and all hell came busting loose.

* * *

6:00 P.M.

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand people were waiting outside the sprawling convention center complex by six o’clock on Wednesday afternoon. Another thirteen hundred were already inside, getting their booths and fan tables ready for the onslaught.

According to security footage of the convention center lobby and front sidewalk—what was recovered from the remains of the disaster, which wasn’t much; the destruction was too complete, and the recovery had to wait for quite some time, given the events that followed—the last person to leave before the doors opened was Lorelei Tutt, a member of the California Browncoats fan organization. Preview Night officially began six minutes later.

The first events of Preview Night were mostly small: announcements from minor comic companies and interviews with the convention’s lower-profile guests. One television program was presenting their sneak preview of the season to come at six thirty: Space Crime Continuum, which ceased production permanently following the convention. Four thousand people packed themselves into a midsized ballroom to see their favorite stars up close and personal.

We may never know which of those four thousand was infected, or how the outbreak began. Perhaps the outbreak’s Patient Zero had been bitten by something—human or animal, it doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of the Rising—on the way to the convention and had chosen good seats over seeking medical care. Perhaps a heart attack or stroke claimed a life and left a husk for the virus to reanimate and control. Perhaps it was a case of spontaneous amplification, rare in the modern day, but substantially more common during the Rising, when the human body was still adapting to the infection that would become known as “Kellis-Amberlee.” However the infection entered the building, it entered, and once it was inside, there was no way it could be forced to leave.

At 6:30 P.M., July 23, 2014, the first major panel of the convention began. The cast of Space Crime Continuum—minus their leading lady, the lovely Elle Riley, who was mysteriously absent from the green room—began filing onto the stage. Convention security staff waved more and more people into the hall, until there were no seats left empty. That was when the doors swung closed, and what happened from there, in that room, in that dark, empty space, is lost to history.

Given the nature of the things we did not lose, perhaps this is a mercy.

* * *

6:43 P.M.

Elle Riley struggled to keep up with her handler as he shoved his way through the convention center, fighting against the tides of eager fans rushing for the delights of the booths against the back wall. There were less congested routes, but she hadn’t realized her handler meant it literally when he said they’d be going through the middle of the floor, and by the time she understood that he was planning to go the worst way possible, it was too late for her to tell him it was a bad idea. Not that he would have listened if she’d tried. No matter how many interviews she gave where she mentioned her past as a rabid fan of shows like Star Trek, Buffy, and Doctor Who—which was the reason she’d auditioned for a time-travel procedural in the first place—people kept assuming she was another pretty face who didn’t know a damn thing about the way the geek world functioned. Even though it was her knowledge of the geek world that told her not to try cutting between the Marvel and DC booths in order to exit the main hall at Comic-Con.

“We’re almost there, Ms. Riley,” announced her handler, loudly enough that another half-dozen heads turned in their direction. Elle bit back a groan and forced herself to keep on smiling. This was her public, after all; she couldn’t afford to look ungracious.

Great, more autographs and pictures and questions, she thought. Just what I needed. Maybe if she was lucky, they’d make it to the panel in time for the question-and-answer session. Or maybe she’d be even luckier, and they wouldn’t make it to the panel at all. She’d look flaky but not inconsiderate if she missed the panel because she was signing autographs. She’d look like a stuck-up diva extraordinaire if she waltzed in for the last fifteen minutes and forced everyone else to listen to the inevitable stream of comments about her appearance masquerading as questions. As if she could possibly enjoy that sort of thing. As if anyone could possibly enjoy it.

Now they weren’t even moving, forced into a holding pattern by the people shoving past in front of them. That meant there was no good reason for the fans to stay away, since it wasn’t like she was trying to get anywhere. Sure enough, a timid voice at her elbow said, “Excuse me, are you Elle Riley?”

Elle’s smile remained fixed in place as she turned toward the speaker, a sweet-faced woman with a slight Kentucky drawl and hair that cascaded to her shoulders in a series of artificially copper curls. She was wearing a shirt that proclaimed her to be a member of the Time Police. That didn’t necessarily make her a fan—lots of shows and stories about time travel had time police in them—but it definitely shifted the odds toward fandom.

“I am,” she said. “And you are . . .?”

“Patty! I mean . . . I’m Patricia Meigs. This is my husband, Matthew.” She took the arm of the man beside her, who was more mundanely dressed in a sweater vest and gray slacks. He was wearing a bow tie, at least, which was a nod to the geekier elements in the wardrobes around him. That, or he was one of those poor, misguided souls who actually believed that bow ties were “cool.”

“Hello,” said Matthew. He had a mild British accent. Elle amended her assessment of his bow tie: It probably marked him as a Doctor Who fan, which meant that the tie was most definitely cool. “It’s an honor to meet you, Miss Riley.”

“Thanks,” Elle said. “I’m supposed to be on a panel right now, but I guess we judged the traffic wrong, and . . .” She shrugged a little.

Matthew’s eyebrows went up. “You’re trying to get to a panel by going right down the middle of the hall? Was that entirely wise?”

“Hey, I wanted to cut down the back to Artist’s Alley and make our escape that way, but I’m not the one calling the shots here.” Elle gestured toward her handler’s unmoving back. “He’s supposed to deliver me where I’m going, and I think he’s planning to tackle anything that gets in our way.”

“That’s going to be quite a lot of tackling,” said Matthew.

“I can hear you, you know,” said the handler.

“You really have been here before!” said Patty. The other three turned to face her, even the handler, who put his back to the crowd in order to stare at Patty. She reddened, shrugging. “I read a lot of blogs. There’s a whole debate about you saying that . . . um . . .” She stopped, apparently realizing that what she was about to say could be construed as insulting.

Elle sighed. “I know. There’s a whole debate between the people who say I’m being coached on what to say in order to build up my ‘fandom street cred’ and the people who remember seeing me haunting the fan tables back when I was an awkward teenager trying to convince the cast members from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to give me acting tips. One side says I’m a liar; the other side says I’m part of the family. I’m with the second side, naturally. This would be my sixteenth Comic-Con, if I were actually allowed to attend at all. But since this is probably as much as I’m going to see of the show floor, I’m trying not to think about it too hard.”

“Wow,” said Patty, in a voice that was suddenly very small. “Love of fandom got you into the business, and now the business is keeping you away from the thing you love. That’s so sad.”

Privately, Elle thought the girl was being melodramatic, but that didn’t make her wrong. “I guess that’s one way of looking at it,” she said. She glanced at the crowd, which was still forbidding forward movement—more than she would have expected, actually. Something must have been going on toward the front of the hall. “What brings the two of you to San Diego?”

“It’s our honeymoon,” said Matthew. He smiled fondly at Patty. “We got married in London and hopped onto the next flight to San Diego. We landed about four hours ago.”

“No window for jetlag at all?” asked Elle.

“ ‘Jetlag is just another lie time tells, and I can’t stand liars,’ ” said Patty. Then she paused, cheeks reddening again. “Uh. I bet it’s considered gauche to quote your character’s lines at you, huh?”

“Not really,” said Elle, and was surprised to realize that she meant it. “I mean, people quote Indy at me all the time, but it’s usually the catchphrases, not the actual dialog. It’s not like I get a lot of that. It’s sort of flattering.”

“Geeky but flattering,” said Matthew, and grinned. “I’d take it if I were you, Patty. That’s a good way to be viewed.”

Patty opened her mouth to respond, and stopped as someone at the front of the convention center screamed. It wasn’t a playful scream. A playful scream wouldn’t have been able to cut through the rest of the ambient noise. All of them turned instinctively toward the sound, their shoulders going tense as they tried to calculate the respective virtues of fighting and fleeing. None of them were aware of those calculations: They were carried out by a part of the brain older and more focused on survival than anything conscious could be.

“What’s going on?” asked Elle. “Did someone get hurt?”

“Ms. Riley, I’m afraid I’m going to need to ask you to wait here,” said her handler—but his brisk words couldn’t conceal the fear in his eyes, and somehow, that just made everything worse.

“What? No! You’re not supposed to leave me alone on the show floor!”

“Stay with your friends, and stay in this immediate vicinity,” said her handler. “I’ll be back for you as soon as I’ve assessed the situation.” Then he was gone, plunging into the suddenly unmoving crowd, heading toward the sound of screams.

Elle stared numbly after him. “But I just met them . . .” she said weakly.

“This strikes me as one of those ‘can’t possibly be good’ situations,” said Matthew.

Patty worried her lip between her teeth, and for once, she didn’t say anything. The three of them stood, looking out into the crowd, and waited for someone to come on the intercom and tell them what was going on.

* * *

6:52 P.M.

Kelly Nakata was near the doors when the screaming started. She’d been studying a booth display of replica weapons, some of which looked impressively sturdy. Her head whipped around at the first sound of trouble. She didn’t see everything, but she saw enough that she was immediately convinced of the danger, even if she wouldn’t understand the true scope of it until it was far too late for anything to be done. If she’d seen a little more, maybe she would have run for the lobby before the doors closed; maybe Kelly Nakata would have joined Lorelei Tutt among the survivors of the San Diego outbreak, rather than joining so many others among the lists of the dead.

What Kelly saw:

The doors were propped open for Preview Night, allowing throngs of fans to stream past the already visibly bored security guards hired by the convention center. The crowd ranged from people in T-shirts and jeans to others in full-body costumes, all of them wearing the little laminated badges that marked them as attendees. Superheroes and monsters, characters from movies and books, all walked side by side through Comic-Con’s welcoming doors. Amidst all that color and variety, the man in the blood-soaked shirt didn’t stand out at all—at least not until he turned, grabbed a half-naked woman dressed as a character from a popular horror comic, and bit a chunk out of her shoulder. The woman screamed. The man bit her again.

That was when the other people in bloody clothing began staggering through the doors. Some of them were missing chunks from their arms, hands, or even necks, although those were rare; most of them looked like they’d been wounded only superficially. And all of them were biting.

Kelly reached behind her, grabbing the first thing her hands hit—a large staff with a decorative spearhead on the end. She assumed a fighting stance, holding the staff out in front of her. The owner of the stall, who had been considering objecting to having her grab things she hadn’t paid for, quickly changed his mind; if the crazy girl wanted to defend him from the crazier biting people, he wasn’t going to tell her to stop.

“What the fuck, man?” demanded Kelly, of no one in particular.

“It’s that zombie virus thing that was on the news!” shouted a man in a Starfleet uniform. It was Next Generation command red, but he was running away from the danger, not toward it. Maybe that was how the command crew stayed alive. “They’ll eat you if you stay here!”

“They can try,” said Kelly grimly, and braced her feet. She felt like some sort of modern-day warrior princess standing there with her staff and her steely determination, like she was Buffy, or Xena, or Indy Rivers. As long as she kept thinking of the situation like that—like it was a story, something she was watching on television, and not something that was actually happening around her—she’d be fine. She hoped.

It wasn’t like she had a choice. At this point, running wasn’t an option.

The stall’s owner screamed, adding his own little bit of noise to the din, and cowered behind his register. Kelly was privately starting to think that this might be a good idea. Then the people in the bloody clothes were on top of her, and there wasn’t time to think about anything but fighting for her life. She swung her staff first with military precision and then with wild panic, hitting bodies that barely seemed to notice the impact.

It wasn’t until their greedy, grasping hands bore her to the floor that she added her own voice to the screams around her, and by then, it was too late for anyone to come to her defense. For Kelly Nakata, the convention seemed to be over before it properly began.

* * *

7:01 P.M.

The California Browncoats were set up toward the back of the hall, far from the open doors and the sound of screaming. Still, the commotion eventually filtered back to them. Dwight jumped onto a stack of boxes so he could peer over the booths, which were mostly the same height. “Some sort of commotion near the doors,” he reported. “Security’s moving in.”

“Actual security or our security?” asked Rebecca. It was an important distinction. The actual convention center security would be dressed in the normal rent-a-cop array, and wouldn’t do much to quell a fannish riot. The con’s private security force, on the other hand, was a mixture of Dorsai Irregulars and people in full-body armor dressed as Imperial stormtroopers. They could stop a bunch of pissed-off fans with a stern look and a waggled finger.

“Both,” said Dwight. He paled, still staring at the doors. “The people who’re coming in from outside don’t look good.”

“Don’t look good how?” asked Shawn.

“Bloody. Biting.” Dwight turned to face the other Browncoats. “I don’t really feel like describing what’s happening right now. But I think maybe we should start looking for another door.”

That was when the lights went out on the convention center floor and the screaming began in earnest. The Rising had come to San Diego.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

Lorelei’s voice is a soft monotone as she recites the events of July 23, 2014; she does not look up from her teacup.

LORELEI: The lights were a mistake. Some stupid rent-a-cop thought it was just an ordinary riot, and decided people would calm down if they couldn’t see anything. I wish I knew his name. I’d like to go and spit on his grave.

MAHIR: Who turned them back on?

LORELEI: The Klingons. One of them saw him do it, and they were fighting to hold the lobby, so he went after the guy. Do you even have Klingons anymore?

MAHIR: They were the villains of a pre-Rising science fiction drama, weren’t they? One of the Star Trek spinoffs.

LORELEI: Not quite, but I guess that’s close enough. The Klingons I’m talking about weren’t aliens; they were people wearing heavy costumes and silly latex heads, and somehow they figured out what was going on. I don’t know how; maybe one of them knew someone who’d already encountered Kellis-Amberlee outside of San Diego. They were the ones who realized that most of the infected weren’t in the main hall yet. If they closed the doors, the people inside might have a chance.

MAHIR: So they closed the doors?

LORELEI [nodding]: Yeah, and then they got the lights back on. There were already some zombies inside, but they were figuring that the people in the hall would find a way to hold them off until help arrived.

MAHIR: The people inside? What about the Klingons?

LORELEI: They stayed in the lobby. It was the only way they could get the doors to close. They even barricaded them, to keep the other infected from breaking through. They must have held out for a while. They managed to lock almost all the doors between the convention center and the street before they weren’t in a position to keep fighting. There’s this thing they used to say, about good days to die. I guess that day was a good one for them. Because they all died, every last one of them. The worst part is, they thought they were doing the right thing . . .

Lorelei Tutt, last survivor of the 2014 San Diego outbreak, begins to cry into her tea. There is nothing for me to say, and so I say nothing at all.

The Siege Begins

We have lost a great deal since the Rising. Perhaps the deepest of these losses is one that we barely notice today: our innocence. We are incapable of imagining a return to a world where we could abandon all care and spend a week living in a fantasy. But that’s exactly where these people died.

—Mahir Gowda

Time is a tool. Once you learn how to use it properly, you’ll find that paradox is no more problematic than a broken pipe—and you’re the one with the wrench.

—Chronoforensic Analyst Indiction Rivers, Space Crime Continuum, season two, episode five

It is difficult to grasp the sheer variety of the fan groups that existed in realspace before the events of the Rising pushed such activities into a primarily virtual setting. Hundreds of “fandoms” met in person, their adherents dressing in everything from normal street clothing to full battle armor. Some of their costumes were practical, easy to move in or even fight in, while others . . . weren’t. The outbreak in San Diego began on the first night of the convention, when most attendees were wearing street clothes, rather than the more elaborate attire they had packed for later in the weekend. This may have saved many of them when the outbreak began, as they were able to run from their attackers. Even so, the few surviving images we have of the San Diego outbreak show men in medieval gear and teenage girls with rainbow-streaked hair and bloodstained wings strapped to their backs. Whatever fandom held their allegiances before the dead rose, they all fought the same battle in the end.

—From San Diego 2014 by Mahir Gowda, June 11, 2044.

Wednesday, July 23, 2014: 7:08 P.M.

“What the fuck was that?” demanded Vanessa, jabbing a finger toward the front of the hall. The Browncoats had reacted with instinctive speed when the lights cut out, all of them forming a circle inside the boundaries of their booth. Dwight was still standing on his lookout point when the lights came back on. Shawn was standing so as to block the one access point from the aisle, a two-by-four in his hands and a menacing expression in his eyes. Even Lynn didn’t like to cross him when he looked like that. Maybe it was that look—like he knew exactly what was going to come next and was willing to do it, no matter how little he liked it—but all the others turned to him, waiting to hear what they were going to do next.

All except for Dwight. He kept watching the front of the hall. There was still screaming, but it was dying down, losing its immediacy; this sounded less like people who were wounded and more like people who were scared, confused, and being set off by the screams of those around them.

“Dwight?” said Shawn sharply. “Report.”

“The doors are closed,” Dwight said. “The biting seems to have stopped—the ones who were doing the biting have pulled back. They’re blocking access to the doors and snapping at people who approach them, but otherwise, they’re not moving.”

“What the fuck?” repeated Vanessa.

It was a sentiment the rest of the Browncoats not-so-secretly shared. Shawn pulled out his phone, checking for service. As he’d expected, there were no cell bars. He’d have to hope the radio signal would get through. “Start securing the booth,” he commanded. “Assume that if we’re not under attack right now, we will be soon. I’m going to see if I can call for help.”

“The police?” asked Rebecca.

“The Marines?” asked Dwight.

“My daughter,” said Shawn.

* * *

7:15 P.M.

Eric and Marty stood at the doorway to their booth, waiting for whatever was going to happen next. Eric held the crowbar he’d used to open the heftier book boxes, keeping it loose, ready to swing. Marty held a baseball bat. Neither Eric nor Pris had asked him where he’d gotten it; at the moment, neither of them was inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth. They’d all heard the doors slam shut after the screaming began, and what little they’d been able to learn from people fleeing for the back of the hall was . . . not good. That was putting it mildly.

It might not have been so bad if the screams had stopped, or if they’d been continuous. But there were patches of silence long enough to let them think that the worst had passed, and then the screaming would start up again, as loud and terrified as ever. It made it impossible to stop jumping, waiting for the screams to be their own. Maybe paranoid fear was the right emotion when locked in a huge building filled with dangerous strangers. That didn’t mean that it was easy on the heart.

Marty could hear the Browncoats—he could always hear the Browncoats, and for once, he found that comforting. They were hammering on something, probably shoring up the walls of their booth, and using call-and-response games to keep track of each other whenever they had to move out of direct sight. “Marco” and “Polo” seemed to map to moving forward or backward in the hall, while “Hidey” and “Ho” mapped to movement to the left or right. They were an organized group. He’d have to congratulate them on that, if they survived.

“How’s it looking back there, Pris?” Marty asked, as loudly as he dared. He might admire the Browncoats for their organization, but he was also concerned about all the noise that they were making. If they attracted the attention of whatever was attacking the convention, he didn’t want it coming after his crew, too.

“Whoever killed the lights took out the wireless signal at the same time, and they didn’t come back up. I’ve got no cellular signal. The best I can do is an emergency convention center service band that has about a thousand warnings on it telling me I’m not allowed to log in under penalty of being escorted from the premises and never allowed to come back for as long as I live.”

Marty snorted. “Right now, kid, I’d take that as a blessing from God. Go ahead and log on. We need help, and we need it about fifteen minutes ago.”

“On it,” said Pris, and began typing again.

In the distance, people screamed, and the Browncoats continued whatever strange things they were doing. Eric glanced anxiously at Marty.

“I’ve been hearing things on the Internet, you know,” he said. “Like people saying that the flu everybody says is going around isn’t flu at all—it’s something we made in a lab. Something to do with that cure for the common cold thing that was on the news a couple of weeks ago.”

“That was a hoax,” said Marty. “You can’t cure the common cold. You’d need something that could take out a million different germs in order to do its job, and that would be a superbug. No one’s stupid enough to make a superbug.”

“I don’t know,” said Eric. “People do some pretty stupid things because they want to see what will happen.”

Marty paused. His employee sounded pretty shaken up, and who wouldn’t be? They were apparently under some sort of attack. Crazy locals looking for fat geek wallets, most likely, but whatever it was, they couldn’t get out of the hall. All they could do was stand their ground. “All right, I’ll humor you for a second,” he said. “If it’s not the flu, what is it?”

“Zombies,” said Eric grimly.

Marty stared at him and didn’t say anything. It should have been funny. It should have been an excuse to laugh out loud. But somehow, with the sound of screaming coming from the front of the hall and Pris typing frantically away behind him, it wasn’t funny at all.

Pris got up, moving to stand between the two men. She kept her tablet clutched to her chest. “I spammed every port I could find asking for help,” she said. “Now what do we do?”

“We wait,” said Marty grimly. “That’s about the only choice we have.”

* * *

7:15 P.M.

At the same time, on the far end of the hall, Kelly Nakata was beginning to believe that she had somehow offended God.

The people who’d attacked her were disorganized, unlike the mob of men in Jedi robes who’d come to haul them off of her. She’d been able to roll under the nearest table in the confusion, scrambling to get herself as far away from danger as she possibly could. And then the lights had gone out—only for a few minutes, but long enough that when they came back on again, nothing was the same.

The Jedi were gone, or mostly; some of them were in pieces on the convention center floor. Others staggered, wounded, and were ignored by the people who’d been attacking them before. It was like they didn’t care about their targets anymore, not once they’d been bitten. It didn’t make any sense.

Bitten . . . Kelly paled, beginning to do a quick inventory of her limbs. No bite marks. The mob had come at her from all sides at once, and they’d managed to block one another from getting a really good shot at her. She was bruised, and her back felt like it was seriously rug-burned from where she’d hit the floor, but she wasn’t bitten. Kelly had no real idea what was going on around her. She still knew enough to know that when people who were acting like they had some kind of rabies tried to bite you, your best move was to not get bitten.

“Miss? Are you all—”

Kelly whirled, slapping her hand over the stall owner’s mouth before she could really consider the inanity of a move like that immediately after she’d been thinking about teeth. Luckily, the scared little man who was now staring at her didn’t seem inclined to attack. Faint, maybe. “Shhh,” she hissed. “Don’t attract attention.” She glanced over her shoulder, in case even that much noise might have reminded her former attackers that she existed.

Once again, luck was on her side. The convention hall presented a target-rich environment, and with so many people screaming and running madly from place to place, there was little chance of a whispered conversation standing out. As Kelly watched the chaos, a chilling new factor introduced itself: One of the Jedi who had previously been sprawled on the carpet, eyes open, unblinking, and staring into nothingness, was back on his feet. That wasn’t a bad thing . . . except that he had the same slack expression as the people who’d attacked her. His eyes still seemed empty—until a screaming girl dressed as Rainbow Dash from My Little Pony ran too close. Then he reached out with surprising speed, grabbing the girl and dragging her into biting range.

“I gotta get out of here,” whispered Kelly. She turned back to the stall owner. “I’ll take you with me if you let me take whatever I think we’ll need.”

“It’s a deal,” said the stall owner, eyes flicking to the girl in the Pony costume. The Jedi was gnawing on her throat now, and she was twitching helplessly. “Just get me the hell away from these freaks.”

“All right,” said Kelly. “Here’s the plan . . .”

* * *

7:20 P.M.

“Are they gone?” whimpered Patty.

“Where are we?” asked Matthew. He looked around the shabby little room in confusion, trying to figure out how they’d gone from the madness of the convention center floor to this . . . this office. There were desks and everything. It made no sense.

Elle mirrored his glance. Then, much to his surprise and dismay, she started to giggle.

“Do you mind telling me what’s so funny?” he asked.

Her giggles turned into full-blown laughter, which she did her best to smother against the heel of her hand. Finally, shaking her head, she managed, “We’re in my precinct.”

“She’s right!” said Patty. Her fear was gone, replaced by sudden delight. It was remarkable how quickly that woman could bounce back. Then again, that was part of what had attracted him to her in the first place. “We’re in the Time Police Paradox Control Unit headquarters! Oh my gosh, that’s Indy’s desk! I mean, your desk. I mean . . .”

“The network built a full-scale replica for fans to tour and have their pictures taken in,” said Elle. “We’re supposed to do some video interviews here with bloggers later in the weekend. I just ran for the nearest door.”

“Well, let’s see. On the plus side, we now have four walls between us and the crazy people,” said Matthew.

“On the minus side, those walls are made of plywood,” Elle shot back. “At least the shades are closed. As long as we keep those down and don’t make too much noise, they may not realize that we’re in here. If they do, we’re sitting ducks. There’s nowhere left for us to run.”

“Come on, Elle,” said Patty. She smiled hopefully at the actress, every line of her body broadcasting the message that they were friends now, good friends even, since they were going through adversity together. “Indy would find a way out of this.”

Elle bit back her first response, which would have been far harsher than the other woman deserved. “I know,” she said. “But Indy has scriptwriters and a director to help her out. We don’t have that.”

“We have each other,” said Matthew. “We’re going to be fine.”

Outside their artificial shelter, someone screamed.

* * *

7:20 P.M.

In her family’s room at the small hotel reserved for visiting military personnel and their families, Lorelei Tutt slept and dreamt of the perfect convention. Every fan was enthusiastic and wide-eyed with wonder, not rude and shoving other people out of their way. The exclusives were plentiful, and freebies and swag flowed like water. It was wonderful. It was the kind of convention that could never exist in the real world but that a fan could spend her whole life dreaming of. It was . . .

It was . . .

It was slipping away as consciousness came oozing around the edges of her mind. Lorelei scowled, trying to force herself to stay asleep. It was no use; she was on the downhill side of waking up now, and momentum was taking over.

“—respond. I repeat, Lorelei, if you can hear me, please respond.”

“Daddy?” Lorelei opened her eyes, squinting groggily into the dim hotel room as she tried to reconcile the dream she’d been having with the note of panic in her father’s voice. He wasn’t in the room; she was alone.

Lorelei sagged back into the mattress. “Stupid dream,” she mumbled, and closed her eyes, getting ready to go back to her perfect convention.

“Lorelei Jezebelle Tutt, if you are anywhere near your phone, you will pick it up right now.”

Lorelei’s eyes snapped open. This time, there was no mistaking her father’s voice for part of the dream: It was too loud and too tense to be anything but reality. And it was coming from her jeans, which she’d left discarded on the floor when she crawled into bed.

“Daddy?” Lorelei lunged for her jeans, forgetting the blankets that were tangled around her legs. They pulled tight and she went sprawling, smacking her elbow in the process. She yelped, pausing for a few seconds to rub her injury before she grabbed her pants and fumbled her phone out of the front pocket. She had no missed calls, but several missed walkie-talkie connections. A feeling of inexplicable dread built in her chest as she raised the receiver to her mouth, pressed the walkie-talkie button, and said, “This is Lorelei Tutt. Mom? Dad? Are you there?”

There was no pause before she got her answer. As soon as she released the “transmit” button her father’s voice was there, demanding, “Lorelei? Are you all right? Where are you? Are you hurt?”

“What?” Lorelei sat on the floor of her hotel room and blinked at the phone, utterly puzzled. “What are you talking about? I’m in our hotel room. I was taking a nap.”

When she released the button, she thought she heard her mother sobbing in the background. Her father took a shaky breath and said, “I don’t want you to worry too much, sweetheart, but we have a bit of a situation over here at the convention center.”

“What kind of situation?” Lorelei finally boosted herself up onto the bed, grabbing her jeans at the same time. “Do you need me to come over there?”

“No!” The answer came from both her parents at the same time and was delivered with such immediate vehemence that Lorelei nearly dropped her phone. There was a pause while her father took another shaky breath. Then he said, “This isn’t the kind of situation that gets better by adding you. It would get worse, because then your mother and I would be worrying about you when we need to be worrying about the entire crew.”

The dread was solidifying now, turning into something concrete and real. “Daddy, what are you talking about?”

“I need you to be brave for me now, Lorelei. Can you do that? You’ve always been one of the strongest people I know—you’ll never understand how proud of you I am for being so strong—and right now I need that strength more than ever. So can you be brave for me?”

“Daddy, you’re scaring me.”

Her father laughed unsteadily. That just scared her worse. Her father might say that she was strong, but she’d learned it from him. He had always been the rock in her life, and right now he sounded like he was on the verge of crumbling.

“I’m scared, too, Lorelei,” he said. “Remember those blog posts you tried to make me read? The ones about the people going rabid and attacking each other?”

“You mean the ones about the zombies?” whispered Lorelei.

“I’m not quite ready to use the Z word, but yes, those are the ones. Honey, something like that is going on here. Some people managed to lock the doors to the exhibit hall before too many sick folks could get inside, but we’re sort of stuck now, and we don’t know how much trouble we’re in. I want you to do me a huge favor. It’s going to mean keeping it together and staying calm for me. Can you do that?”

“Yes, Daddy.” Lorelei was still whispering. She couldn’t seem to make her voice get any louder.

“I need you to go down to the base office and tell them that we have a situation here at the convention center. I’m not in any position to contain it; I have to worry about our people. If they ask why I didn’t call this in myself, tell them that some idiot tried to play hero and shut off our wireless. None of us have signal. If we hadn’t paid for the walkie-talkie feature, I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

Shawn sounded totally calm. Somehow, all that did was make Lorelei feel even worse. She licked suddenly dry lips before asking, “Is—is Mom okay?”

“Your mother’s fine, or as close to fine as any of us can be right now. She’s currently helping Leita and Robert get the edges of our booth secured. The people next to us hadn’t shown up when the doors locked, so we’re expanding into their space for the time being, getting things settled while we’re relatively calm.”

Lorelei took a sharp breath. She knew what it sounded like when her father was getting ready to go on a dangerous mission; there was a certain tension in his voice that spoke of knowing that he might be just a man doing a job, but that job could still turn deadly. “Daddy . . .”

“We’re going to be fine, Lorelei. I promise. Now just go tell base that we need assistance here, and then get back to your room. I want you to stay put until all this is taken care of. You understand me?”

“But I could—”

“Stay away from the convention center. That is an order, Lorelei. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. She finally pulled on her jeans. “I’ll get your message to base. Be careful. I don’t want to pay for this hotel room out of my allowance.” The comment was made jokingly, but there was an air of desperation behind it, as much a part of the conversation as Shawn’s tension.

“We’ll be fine,” said Shawn. “Call me as soon as you’ve spoken with base. I need to go help Rebecca.”

“Daddy—”

But it was too late. He was already gone.

* * *

7:27 P.M.

Shawn lowered his phone, looking at it with a stomach-churning mixture of panic and pride. Thank God she was already outside the hall when things went bad. Thank God she was going to be okay. Even if the rest of them wound up stuck inside for days—and at the moment, that was the worst scenario he was willing to entertain—Lorelei would be safe at the hotel, running up a big room service bill and getting mad about being left out. She’d befine.

“Shawn . . .” He turned to see the tears streaming down Lynn’s normally calm face. “Did I hear that right? She made it back to the hotel? She’s okay?”

Lynn’s worst fear—Shawn’s too, although Lynn had been more vocal about it—had been Lorelei getting distracted on her way out and somehow winding up trapped in the lobby. She would have had no way to get back into the exhibit hall, and if those doors were locked, the doors to the street were probably locked as well.

But they didn’t need to worry about that. Lorelei was safe. They could worry about everything else, like how to keep themselves safe, now that they knew they didn’t have to worry about her. “She’s in her room,” Shawn said. He put a hand on Lynn’s shoulder, trying to block out the distant sounds of screaming. “She’s fine. She didn’t even know we were having problems over here. She was taking a nap when I called.”

“Oh, thank God,” whispered Lynn.

“Lorelei is on her way to the base office now to notify them of the issue here. Assuming local law enforcement isn’t already on the way, it may help if they know that we have some military personnel inside.”

“Did you tell her to stay on the base?” Lynn’s eyes widened. “Please tell me you told her to stay on the base. Please tell me she isn’t going to try coming back here.”

“I told her to stay put, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to do it.”

Lynn sighed. “I know.”

Shawn squeezed her shoulder before pulling his hand away. “It’s going to be okay, Lynn. She’s a smart girl. She won’t come back here unless it’s safe, and we’ll all be back at the hotel getting on each other’s nerves before you know it.”

“Maybe faster than that,” said Dwight from behind him. Shawn turned. The ex-Marine was holding a heavy Maglite-brand flashlight, the sort that could be used just as easily as a club when the situation demanded it. He smirked a bit at the look on Shawn’s face. “It’s not the size that counts; it’s how hard you’re willing to swing it.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Lynn.

“Rebecca and I are going to go check the parking garage. All the locks here are manual, and whatever shit’s going down started at the front of the hall. We may be able to get out the back if we’re real careful about it.”

Shawn straightened. “That’s a great idea. I’ll get Robert and—”

“No, boss. This is a scouting mission. We don’t know whether the garage has been compromised, or what might be going on back there. It’s best if we don’t risk the entire crew on something that might not pan out.” Dwight’s smirk faded into something much grimmer. “You know shit in here is going to get worse before it gets better.”

Someone in the distance screamed, punctuating his words. The screams seemed to be getting less frequent. None of them knew whether this was a good thing. None of them wanted to be the one who guessed wrong.

“All right,” said Shawn finally. They all knew that his consent was just a formality—his leadership was always conditional on the other members of the group wanting to do what he told them to do, and getting a bunch of fans to do anything was a lot like herding cats—but formalities can help a lot, when you let them. “Take Rebecca and anything you think you might need. Report back here.”

“All right. And, boss?”

“Yeah?”

“If we don’t come back in half an hour, don’t send anyone looking for us. Either we’ve made it out and we’re coming back with help, or we didn’t make it and we’re not coming back at all. There’s no sense in you throwing good people into a meat grinder for our sakes.”

For a long moment, Shawn didn’t say anything. Then he nodded and saluted the other man. “Good luck, soldier.”

“Oorah,” replied Dwight solemnly as he returned the salute. Somehow, the strangeness of the moment did nothing to rob the traditional battle cry of the United States Marines of its efficacy. Then he turned and walked away, off to find Rebecca.

Lynn Tutt stepped up next to her husband, watching Dwight go. “Is it silly of me to be afraid that we’re never going to see him again?” she asked.

“No,” said Shawn. “You’re not the only one.”

“Oh, good. I’d hate to be silly right now.”

Shawn took her hand, and the two of them stood there for a moment, and neither of them felt silly in the least.

* * *

7:30 P.M.

“The worst of it is, Unis, I don’t even know how we got up here.” Lesley Smith, British journalist and sudden shut-in, gave the chair she was perched on a little kick. It spun in another lazy circle, carrying her with it. Her view of the room remained the same: almost total blackness, broken here and there by smears of light. “It’s a bloody joke.” Her chair drifted to a stop. She didn’t kick it again.

Unis lifted her head off her paws, ears cocked inquisitively upward. The Woman was speaking. The Woman was using her name. Perhaps that meant that something was about to be requested of her—but no, the Woman had returned to scowling at the big flat place. As long as the Woman wasn’t scowling at Unis, all was right with the world. Unis yawned and put her head back down.

The big flat place that Lesley was scowling at was a control panel of some kind. She’d been able to work that much out by feel, running her fingers over the dials and buttons with labels she couldn’t read. As for what it controlled . . . no one had thought to label anything in braille. Why would they? It wasn’t like there was any chance a woman with severely impaired vision would ever be locked in their little control room, unable to figure out how to turn the damn lights on. That would just be silly.

The room they were in had two large glass windows looking out over the convention center’s main exhibit hall. Thousands of people were locked in down there, and Lesley was locked in up here, along with her guide dog, half a bottle of water, and a granola bar. And no bathroom. And no lights.

“I’m so glad I came to Comic-Con,” Lesley muttered bitterly, giving the control panel another spiteful glare. She could still hear the madmen who’d chased her up the stairs milling about in the convention center outside. The door between them was thick enough that she wasn’t worried about anyone breaking in—well, she wasn’t worried much, and that was the best she could say at the moment.

Unis thumped her tail once against the floor, acknowledging that she’d heard the Woman speaking, but didn’t otherwise move. Unis was resting. Unis had already had a long day.

If Unis had been able to speak, she could have told the Woman how they reached the small, safe room with no other people in it, the one with the door that could be shut, and locked, to make safety where there had been only danger. She could have told the woman that when she’d been given the command to get away from the bad people who smelled like blood and sick—and “Unis, away!” was such a rare command, a danger command, that she obeyed it even more fervently than she obeyed all the others—when she’d been given that command, she had followed it to the letter. She had led the Woman to this safe place, this good place, because she, Unis, was a good dog.

Unis let her tail smack the floor again. Lesley glanced over toward the flat-coated retriever and smiled despite her anxiety.

“Silly dog,” she said. Then she went back to glaring at the control board.

* * *

8:03 P.M.

It had taken longer for Dwight and Rebecca to reach the back of the hall than they had expected. Preview Night had barely begun when the doors closed, but thousands of people had still managed to cram themselves inside, and many of them had fled for the walls when the chaos began. Several of the display booths looked more like armed encampments now. The jokingly named “webcomic district”—three half aisles of semi-affiliated booths manned by the teams from popular online comic strips—was already completely shut off to outside traffic. A surprising number of webcomic artists turned out to be pretty good with tools; they had constructed barriers over the mouths of the aisles in record time and were in the process of shoring them up with chairs and sheets of plywood scavenged from the booths at the center of their territory. It would have been impossible for anyone to get in without a crowbar. Anyone who wanted to use a crowbar would find themselves facing some stringent resistance from the assembled artists and their respective staffs, all of whom watched passersby with wary, narrowed eyes.

“It’s starting to look like a Mad Max film in here,” said Rebecca, as they finally reached the wall. Between the detour around the sealed-off webcomics district and the detour around the seating area in front of the snack bar—which had turned into an impromptu babysitting crèche and gathering place for the wounded—they had already been gone longer than either one of them wanted to be.

Dwight nodded grimly. “It’s just going to get worse from here, you know. If we don’t find a way out. . . .how many of these people do you think remembered to bring food or water? How many people with medical conditions didn’t bring an extra dose of their medication?” He hooked a thumb toward the snack bar, still being manned by anxious-looking employees. “If those people had a brain in their heads, they’d lock up and run. There’s going to be a riot when folks start getting hungry, and this place is going to be the epicenter.”

“We have food,” said Rebecca, looking shaken.

“We also have a lot of people who’ve got each other’s backs. Besides, Leita and Shawn have got everybody continuing the fortifications while we’re away. We’re going to come back to an impenetrable fortress. Just you watch.”

Rebecca sighed. “I’d just like it if we made it back.”

Dwight smiled, nudging her in the ribs with his elbow. “Come on. This is Comic-Con. How dangerous can it be?”

In the distance, someone screamed. Rebecca raised an eyebrow, and just looked at him. They kept walking.

“Do you really think it’s the zombie apocalypse?” asked Rebecca, after they’d traveled another fifteen yards or so through the crowded hall. At least most of the people near the wall were relatively nonviolent unless approached too quickly, and very few of them had visible injuries. Rebecca paled every time she saw someone with blood on their shirt, but managed not to keel over. There were times when a fear of blood became a genuine inconvenience, and this was one of them.

“I don’t know.” Dwight shook his head. “There’s been some really weird stuff on the Internet lately. I just wish we could get online from in here.”

“The wireless will come back eventually. It has to.” The exhibit hall security officers who were supposed to be flanking the door to the garage were gone. Fortunately, it looked just like every other locked door in the center.

Unfortunately, it was just as locked as the rest of them.

Dwight gave the bar one last, futile shove. “This is hopeless,” he said. “We should get back to the others and tell them we’re stuck in here.”

Rebecca smiled. “Oh, ye of little faith.” She dug her hand into her messenger bag, coming up with a Swiss Army Knife. “My dad didn’t believe in leaving a key under the mat. He said it was a security risk, even if I was supernaturally skilled in the area of losing my keys.” She pushed Dwight to the side, crouching down in front of the lock.

Dwight blinked, watching her. “I take it you decided to find other avenues for getting into the house after you’d been locked out.”

“If by ‘other avenues,’ you mean ‘taught myself to pick locks out of an old Boy Scout manual I found at the library,’ you’re totally right.” Rebecca carefully inserted the thinnest blade on her Swiss Army Knife into the keyhole and began to twist. “Dad was actually really proud of me for that. He said it showed initiative. And then he grounded me for a month for picking locks without permission.”

“You have a weird family, Rebecca,” said Dwight.

“Oh, you have no idea.” There was a soft click as the lock turned. Rebecca withdrew her knife and turned to beam up at Dwight as she straightened. “But my weird family just got us into the parking garage. Let’s go.”

“Ladies first,” said Dwight, and clicked his Maglite on.

* * *

8:05 P.M.

The lights were off inside the parking garage, but that didn’t matter as much as it could have. It was summer in San Diego. The sun had only recently gone down, and every light outside the convention center was turned on full-watt, as if that could make up for the hour. Even so, Dwight’s Maglite provided much-needed extra illumination as the pair began walking carefully through the maze of close-packed cars. It seemed even more deserted after the chaos inside the convention center.

“We should cut around the marina,” whispered Rebecca. “That way, we get cell signal and can call for help, but we don’t get caught up in the crowds out front.”

“Agreed,” whispered Dwight. The doors had closed early enough that there were probably almost as many people outside as there were inside. Thousands of them, crammed onto the sidewalks, trying to get into a sealed convention center. Even if the riots had spread, new fans would have been arriving almost constantly. Why—

Dwight stopped walking, heart sinking as he fully thought through the possible ramifications of the Comic-Con crowd. Rebecca kept going for a few more steps. Then she stopped as well, turning back and frowning at him.

“Dwight? What’s wrong?”

“What if this is the zombie apocalypse?” he asked, voice still kept low. “Do you really think we managed to lock them all inside?”

Rebecca’s eyes widened, visible even through the gloom. Then she nodded. Just once; once was enough. Dwight turned, and together they ran for the door back into the exhibit hall.

They didn’t run fast enough.

There weren’t many infected in the garage. Maybe a dozen, all fully amplified and demonstrating the common infected tropism toward dark, shadowy places. They were well fed and had left the pursuit of food to other, hungrier individuals. But Dwight and Rebecca had come too close and had triggered the need to hunt. As they ran, the infected pursued, moving with the graceless speed of the freshly seroconverted.

The infected caught Dwight first, bearing the former Marine down to the garage floor with the weight of their bodies. The Maglite flew from his fingers and went skittering across the concrete. “Rebecca!” he shouted, all efforts at subtlety forgotten. “Keep running!”

Rebecca looked back and screamed. The infected were already tearing into Dwight. Blood spurted across the concrete like oil. A wave of dizziness washed over her, costing her a few precious steps. She managed to swallow it, fighting it back, and resumed her flight toward the door.

She knew before she got there that she was never going to make it. The infected were too close, and she was outnumbered. All she could do was lead them into the unprotected rear of the convention center, where a bunch of scared people were trying to hide. It wouldn’t be a fair fight. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do. So Rebecca Safier became one of the first heroes of the Rising with one simple gesture: When she reached the door, she stopped running.

And she turned the dead bolt, locking both herself and the infected out of the convention center. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. Then they were upon her, and she didn’t say anything else. After that, there was only screaming . . . and eventually, silence.

* * *

8:24 P.M.

“They’re not coming back, are they?” asked Vanessa. “They should have been back by now. They’re not coming back.”

“Shawn?” asked Lynn.

Shawn didn’t have an answer. He put his arm around Lynn’s shoulders and looked away, out over an exhibit hall that had gone from familiar ground to enemy territory in a single evening. There was nothing left for any of them to say, and so, for once, none of them said anything.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

We have finished our first cups of tea. Lorelei is preparing another round, less out of thirst than from the simple need for something to do. It is an understandable impulse. I wish I had something to do with my hands as well.

LORELEI: We know more about what actually happened to Dwight and Rebecca than we do almost anyone else. It’s all supposition with the inside of the exhibit hall, but there were cameras running in the garage. I’ve seen her locking the door a thousand times. She didn’t have any other choice. There was nothing they could have done.

MAHIR: She was very brave. She could have sacrificed a lot of lives in the effort to save her own, and she didn’t.

LORELEI: No, she couldn’t have. Not Rebecca, and not Dwight, either. They were my friends. They were good people. They were heroes.

MAHIR: Yes, they were.

LORELEI: I was down at the base office while all of this was happening, trying to get somebody to listen to me. It turns out that teenage girls trying to report secondhand riots aren’t at the top of anyone’s priority list. I did get them to listen, eventually. It was too late by then—but I mean really, it was too late when Dad called me. It was probably too late by the time I left the convention center.

MAHIR: Everyone was doing the best they could with their understanding of the situation.

LORELEI: I wish they’d understood the situation just a little bit faster. More of my friends might have managed to get out alive. Or any of them.

The Second Act

Science fiction and fantasy literature has always been defined by tales of heroism. It is meant to represent humanity at our very best, willing to oppose all odds in order to protect the side of good. The Rising gave all people the opportunity to become heroes. Only a few rose to the challenge. Sadly, even fewer are remembered by name.

—Mahir Gowda

I always knew my father was a hero. I never needed him to prove it.

—Lorelei Tutt,

Captain, United States Coast Guard

8:37 P.M.

No one paid attention to the time. The people who were locked inside the hall had other things to worry about—like why the people who’d started the emergency by attacking their fellow attendees had stopped fighting and retreated to the doors. Anyone who tried to approach them was likely to find themselves bitten, or worse; but if the blank-eyed, bloody-garbed aggressors were left alone, they didn’t bother anyone.

Kelly Nakata didn’t know much about what was going on, but she knew that once a dog starts biting for no good reason, it doesn’t tend to stop. She made her way quickly away from the front of the exhibit hall, the owner of the booth where she’d originally taken shelter sticking close by her side. She didn’t know his name. She didn’t want to. With as quickly as things had gone sour, she wasn’t willing to go forging any lasting bonds. He was a good guy, and he’d equipped her pretty well for the fight she was sure they were walking into. She was still going to leave him behind if he turned into dead weight. It wasn’t the compassionate thing to do. Screw compassion. People in the middle of the zombie apocalypse couldn’t afford it.

“Zombie” wasn’t a word she would have brought into things on her own. It was a cliché, dead things and girls in lingerie and Elvira on a velvet love seat making cracks about impractical shoes. Still, it was an unavoidable idea, especially here, where every other person seemed to be a self-proclaimed expert on zombie culture. There were booths boasting every possible kind of zombie-themed goodie, from books and movies to artwork and couture. There was even a magazine called Chicks with Corpses that had decided to focus on the lingerie and impractical shoes over the carnage and destruction of mankind. The word “zombie” was everywhere, and it was as good a label as any for the psychos who were clustered at the front of the hall.

What some people didn’t seem to be taking into account was that zombies made more zombies. Kelly had seen it happen with her own eyes when the zombies turned on her Jedi-costumed rescuer. He wasn’t the only one who’d been bitten, and unless the zombie virus was selectively transferrable—which never seemed to be the case with zombie viruses, so it was a little too much to hope for in this situation—a whole lot of people were going to go rabid in the next few hours. Kelly was grimly sure that was why the first wave of zombies had withdrawn. They were waiting for their reinforcements to get hungry.

“Where are we going?” asked the booth owner.

“Back of the hall,” said Kelly. “Where there are exits. They usually have security mooks guarding them, but I figure a bunch of psychopaths biting people at the front doors takes priority. We may be able to get out that way.” And if they couldn’t, they would at least put some ground between themselves and the next big bite-a-thon.

“What if we can’t?”

“We start looking for a fire door. There’s bound to be some sort of an emergency exit in this place. We just have to find it.” Find it, and pray that it wasn’t already a solid wall of impassable meat thanks to other people with the same idea.

Giving up wouldn’t do either of them any good. Kelly tightened her grip on her borrowed staff and kept on walking. Maybe they could find someone who was selling armor—Kevlar would be best, but she’d take leather, or even hardened canvas, if that was what she could get—and convince them to join their merry band. Like The Wizard of Oz, only with zombies instead of flying monkeys.

“I didn’t catch your name.”

“Keep walking.”

“My name’s Stuart.”

Kelly winced. “Oh.”

“What’s your name?”

If she told him, she’d be admitting that he was a person, too; she’d be making him real. In a way, she’d be making this whole crazy situation real, because real people didn’t show up in dreams. She’d definitely be making it harder to turn her back on him when the time came—and the time was going to come; she was absolutely sure of that. This was a zombie apocalypse. The time always came.

Kelly sighed. “My name’s Kelly,” she said. “Now keep walking.”

They kept walking.

* * *

8:45 P.M.

Exhaustion and panic had finally carried the day: Patty was asleep. She was draped half-over the authentic reproduction of Indiction Rivers’s desk, her head propped up on one arm, snoring softly. Elle paused in her attempts to peer through the blinds at the exhibit hall outside, shaking her head.

“How is she doing that?” she asked. “I can’t imagine sleeping before someone comes to get us out of here.” At least the screams had stopped, or at least faded back into the greater noise of the crowd. Even that seemed more subdued, as if people were getting quieter as they realized they couldn’t escape. That would change soon, she was sure: Panic would make a reappearance, and then their hidey-hole would become even more essential.

Matthew smiled. “It’s a fairly impressive skill, I admit. She actually fell asleep on me the very first time we met. It was at a Doctor Who convention in Chicago. I’d flown out for the con. We wound up standing next to each other in the autograph line, and got to chatting. From there, we took our conversation to the bar, and I thought, ‘This is splendid; this is a splendid girl.’ Only next thing I knew, she was snoring on her stool, and it was, well, ‘Right, then. You’ve blown another one.’ ”

Elle smiled a little. “And you hadn’t blown it at all.”

“Not a bit. My Pat just sleeps when she’s tired, that’s all. It’s like convenient narcolepsy. I envy her a bit. We’ll all want to be well rested come tomorrow, and she’s going to be the only one standing up straight.”

“As long as we have a tomorrow, I’m happy.” Elle took another peek out the window. “I admit, I was wishing I’d have an excuse to spend some time in the exhibit hall without being rushed along by a handler, but this isn’t what I meant.”

“So you miss it, then? The convention scene?”

“It’s different when you’re a professional. Even when you wish it weren’t.” Elle stepped away from the window. “I can’t really tell what’s going on out there, but I don’t think going out to check would be a good idea.”

“In that, we are agreed.”

“That’s a relief.” Elle put her hands on her hips and studied the room. It both was and wasn’t like the set where she spent her workdays: For one thing, it had all four walls, rather than being an open sound stage. They had a complete precinct room, but they very rarely filmed there. Too hard to get all the cameras inside.

Working together, the three of them had managed to shift the filing cabinets up against the room’s single door, effectively locking it, and three of the four windows were completely covered with leaning sheets of plywood that Matthew had discovered being used to prop up the “chrono monitor” behind Indy’s desk. Leaving the fourth window uncovered was a calculated risk. It left them vulnerable to attack, but covering it would have meant cutting off all contact with the main room. For the moment, the window was more valuable as it was.

“Patty’s quite excited to have met you, you know,” said Matthew. “I hope it’s not too forward to say this, but Space Crime Continuum is one of our favorite shows. We watch it together, and we both enjoy it quite a bit.”

Elle blinked at him. Then, slowly, she said, “We’ve been fortifying a replica of my fictional office against attack together because we’re afraid of I don’t even know what, and you’re worried about me deciding you’re being forward because you like my work?”

Matthew paused. “When you put it that way, it does sound a bit silly, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, just a bit.” Elle leaned up against the nearest desk. “I just wish there was something else we could be doing. I don’t like just standing around.”

“It’s too bad Patty left her knitting back at the hotel, then.”

Elle blinked at him before she snorted laughter, and said, “Even if I could knit, which I can’t, I don’t think I’d feel right knitting while I was potentially in mortal danger. It would just seem a little weird.”

“Has anything about this day not been a little weird?” asked Matthew.

“Fair enough.” Elle sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m just tense. I wish we had cell service in here. I was supposed to be back at the hotel as soon as my panel ended.”

“Have you got someone waiting?” Matthew blanched almost as soon as the words were out. “I’m sorry. That’s none of my business. I was just making conversation.”

“No, it’s all right—I brought up the hotel; it’s a reasonable question.” Elle shrugged. “I do have someone waiting, and I hate being inconsiderate like this.” She was hedging, she knew she was hedging, but she’d been doing it for so long that it was almost second nature. Pretense came with the job.

“Ah,” said Matthew. “Well, I’m sure he’ll understand.”

Screw pretense. “I’m sure she will,” Elle agreed. Sigrid had always been so very understanding. Understanding when the producers said she couldn’t show up on set, as their viewership was made up almost entirely of heterosexual males and Indy Rivers was supposed to be their newest geek sex goddess. Understanding when Elle took her male costar to the Spike Awards. Understanding when she didn’t get to come to Comic-Con to see Elle’s panels.

Then again, maybe that last bit of understanding was enough to balance out some of the others, because Sigrid was safely back at the hotel, far away from all the chaos at the convention center, while Elle was trapped inside the building while all hell was breaking loose. Maybe the universe had been testing them, and Sigrid had passed while Elle hadn’t.

Matthew, meanwhile, was looking at her with that wide-eyed expression of sudden comprehension that she’d been seeing on the faces of straight men since the first time she explained that no, she really wasn’t interested, ever. “Sister?”

“No.”

“Friend?”

“Significant other. Six years. We’re going to get married as soon as I’m well established enough that it won’t kill my career.” Elle crossed her arms defensively, and hated herself for it. This wasn’t supposed to be an issue anymore. It wasn’t her fault that she’d been called to a profession where people still cared, at least if you were a woman new enough to be trading on tits and ass. “Are we going to have a problem?”

“Not a bit of it. I’m just surprised is all.”

“Why? Because I’m gay?”

“Because you’ve managed to hide the existence of a significant other from the blogs. I don’t care if you’re involved with a man, a woman, or a sapient pear tree. You ought to go into international espionage. I never even heard a rumor.”

Elle blinked at him before laughing again. “I’ll have to tell Sigrid you said that.”

“You do that,” he said, and smiled.

“Heck, if we get out of here soon, you can tell her yourself. I figure this is the sort of experience that justifies buying you dinner, if anything will.”

Matthew nodded. “I’d like that. I think that will elevate you to some form of godhood in my lovely wife’s eyes.”

“I’ve always wanted to be a god,” said Elle.

Patty sighed a little in her sleep, snuggling up against the replica of Indiction Rivers’s stapler. For the moment, everything seemed to be calm. There was no way the moment was going to last.

* * *

9:16 P.M.

Terror makes you tired. Marty and the others were taking turns sleeping, one of them retreating to the back of the booth and curling up in a makeshift bed of plush toys and wadded-up newspaper while the other two stood watch. They’d decided on three-hour shifts as the most efficient, allowing them to get through one deep REM cycle—maybe; it was Eric’s idea, and he wasn’t totally clear on the science—before they had to get up and let someone else have a turn. At the moment, it was Eric curled up in the back, while Marty watched the aisles for signs of trouble.

Pris, who was supposedly standing guard with him, was actually seated at the register, tapping madly away at her tablet. She didn’t look like she was even remotely aware of her surroundings. Marty found himself envying her, and he didn’t interrupt. What she was trying to do was just as important as what he was doing—maybe more. After all, he might be keeping them alive, but she was going to be the one who got them out.

The sounds of humanity had grown softer as the minutes ticked by and rescue didn’t come. Marty could see people sleeping in the aisles, pressed up against the edges of the booths. The lucky ones who’d remembered to bring a sweater or coat into the convention center were hugging them around themselves, as much to be sure that they wouldn’t be stolen as for warmth. They had nowhere else to go. Marty felt bad for them, even as he patrolled the edges of his own booth every fifteen minutes or so, shooing away squatters. No matter how bad he felt, he wasn’t going to compromise his already fragile security by allowing people to get too close.

He had people of his own to protect. Pris and Eric were his responsibility, and by God, he was going to get them out of here in one piece.

“Marty?”

“What is it, Pris?”

There was a note of excitement in her voice that he wasn’t expecting. It seemed almost obscene, given the rest of the situation. “I got an answer.”

“What?” Marty actually took his eyes off the aisle as he turned to face her. “From who?”

“Convention center management. They finally noticed that I was pinging their private channels, and they decided to answer me.”

“Well? What did they say? Is someone coming to get us the hell out of here?”

Pris grimaced. “Not quite. They say there’s a problem outside. Some sort of riot is blocking the doors—they can’t get in to let us out.”

“Fuck.”

“They say that it’s pretty ugly. We should be glad that we’re in here.” Somewhere in the distance, someone screamed. Pris grimaced more. “I think they wouldn’t be saying that if they were actually in here.”

“Did they have anything useful to say?”

“Yes.” Pris held up her tablet, and smiled. “They told me how we can get the wireless back on. That’s something, right?”

Marty frowned. No food, no water, no exit . . . but they could get the Internet back on. Somehow, that didn’t seem quite as valuable. On the other hand, they were in a convention center full of geeks. Maybe getting the Internet back up would distract everyone else, keep them from making things worse—and maybe they would be able to find a way out once they had access to the outside world. “What do we need to do?” he asked.

“There’s a control room on the main concourse,” said Pris. “All we have to do is get to one of the house phones, call up, and tell whoever’s in there which switches to press.”

“How do we even know that there’s someone inside?”

Pris gestured with her free hand, indicating the convention center. “Look around. There’s no way someone had the opportunity to get into a secure room with a lock on the door and didn’t do it.”

Marty looked at her. She looked back, a challenge in the tilt of her chin. Pris wasn’t a girl who enjoyed sitting idle; once she had a thing that could be done, she wanted to do it. Getting the wireless back on was something she could do, and that meant that she wanted to be doing it.

As bad as things were, they could get a lot worse. This wasn’t the time to start trouble with the people he needed watching his back. “Wake Eric up,” Marty said gruffly. “We’re going to get the wireless back on.”

* * *

9:25 P.M.

Shawn’s phone beeped softly, snapping him out of his light doze and into a state of almost instant awareness. The phone beeped again. He hit the button to activate the walkie-talkie function, and Lorelei’s voice said uncertainly, “Dad? Are you there?”

“Lorelei?” He smiled as he raised the phone to his mouth. “I’m here, honey. What’s going on?” Around him, the convention center slept, or tried to. Dwight and Rebecca had never come back from their trip to the parking garage. Their absence had created an uneasy divide among the Browncoats. Half of them were firmly convinced that Dwight and Rebecca had managed to find a way out and would be coming back with emergency services. The other half believed that Dwight and Rebecca were never coming back at all.

After spending most of his adult life in the Coast Guard, Shawn knew better than to pin all his hopes on empty wishes. Dwight was a Marine. If he’d been able to come back, he would have done so, leaving Rebecca to organize a rescue party while he told everyone else what was going on. He hadn’t come back. That meant he couldn’t come back . . . and anything that could stop a Marine who didn’t want to be stopped was probably stopping that Marine permanently.

“I finally got them to listen to me at the office. Lieutenant Farago said to let you know that he’s working on getting cell service into the hall, but nobody would tell me what was actually happening.” There was a note of panic in Lorelei’s voice that Shawn didn’t like. At the end of the day, she was his daughter, and she shared his tendency to go running toward danger as fast as her legs could carry her when she felt like the people she loved were at risk. “Are you okay?”

“Well, honey, we’ve had to redefine the local standards for ‘okay,’ but none of us is hurt right now.” Not unless you included Dwight and Rebecca, and that was just a possibility, not a definite fact. “So they think they can get our phones to start working? That’s a good thing.” It would have been better if it had happened faster. Most of the people in the convention center probably weren’t carrying chargers. Shawn could see outlets and universal connectors becoming the start of the next big fight.

“Yes. But getting the phones working won’t get you out right now.”

“I understand that, honey.”

Lorelei paused for a long moment before she asked, “Doesn’t that worry you?”

“Yes,” admitted Shawn. He couldn’t think of any good reason for the relative peace that had settled over the hall. After the screaming and hysterics that had accompanied the beginning of the siege, he was expecting all-out chaos, not this strange and sudden lull. “But worrying about what we can’t change won’t do us any good. You tell Lieutenant Farago that we need an exit strategy as soon as he can get us one. Things are calm right now. I don’t know how long that’s going to last.”

“Okay, Daddy,” said Lorelei. “I love you.”

“I love you too, sweetheart. Just keep flying, okay? Everything’s going to be just fine. You’ll see.”

Lorelei didn’t answer him.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

Our tea is cold. Lorelei doesn’t seem to notice, and I don’t feel that pointing it out to her would be beneficial. Her gaze is far away. Sometime during the most recent part of her story, she left the present behind and slipped into a time and place that I have never seen. She is back in San Diego, back in the first summer of the Rising, and I begin to understand why she never wanted to tell her story.

LORELEI: We didn’t know how the infected behaved yet. Fuck. We didn’t even know for sure that they were infected. Maybe if we’d had more information . . . [she stops for a long moment; when she speaks again, her voice is even more distant] It wouldn’t have made any difference at all. Those doors were already locked. What was going to happen was already a foregone conclusion. All that could have changed is the details.

MAHIR: Sometimes, it’s the details that matter the most of all.

LORELEI: The people who’d been infected were skulking around the edges of the hall, waiting for the lights to dim. They weren’t hungry yet. They had enough to eat, and they were in the incubation phase. Once in a while they’d grab someone from the edges of a group, but my dad didn’t know that.

MAHIR: Kellis-Amberlee had a longer incubation in the early days of the Rising. Today, it’s all through our bodies even before we begin to amplify. One bite triggers a cataclysmic chain reaction. For them, back then . . . how quickly they lost control would have been determined by a dozen factors. Prior exposure, general health, height, weight . . . It’s simpler now.

LORELEI: Yeah. If you can ever call the zombie apocalypse “simple.” Anyway, our booth was set up toward the back of the hall, and the infection was self-containing at that stage. I think sometimes that it would have been kinder if it had been like the movies, you know? One zombie gets in, everyone’s bitten or dead inside of an hour.

MAHIR: Life rarely concerns itself with being kind, I’m afraid. If it did, we would all be much more content.

LORELEI: Ain’t that the truth?

She appears to notice her tea for the first time in almost an hour. She pushes the cup aside, and stands.

LORELEI: I’m going to need something stronger for what comes next. You game?

MAHIR: All things considered, yes. I believe that I am.

10:06 P.M.

It shouldn’t have taken an hour and a half to reach the back of the hall. Not with the amount of space available and the relatively small number of people who had been able to cram themselves inside for Preview Night before the doors were closed. But that was a reflection of Comic-Con B.E.—Before Emergency—and this was travel through Comic-Con now. Walkways that should have been open were barricaded, some with as little as caution tape and “Keep Out” signs, others with full-on walls that had been constructed from cannibalized booth displays. Of the people Kelly and Stuart encountered outside the barriers, it seemed like everyone knew someone who had been attacked.

One girl had confessed in a whisper that she and her boyfriend had been right up front when things turned ugly, probably right near where Kelly herself had been attacked. “He got bit by this guy who ran away right after, like it didn’t even matter,” she said. “He seemed fine for like, ages, and then he started getting sort of shaky. And then he flipped out and bit me and ran away. Just like that other guy. Just like the guy by the door.”

Kelly and Stuart hadn’t said anything as the girl rolled up her sleeve and showed them the bite marks scored deep into her lower arm. Her boyfriend’s teeth had clearly broken the skin.

The girl had looked calmly between them as she rolled her sleeve back down. “I know what this is,” she’d said. “It’s the zombie apocalypse. We’re all going to die in here, because this is the zombie apocalypse. I’ll die before you do. I’ve already been bitten.” Then she’d turned and wandered away, like they didn’t matter anymore.

The barriers made a lot more sense as Kelly and Stuart resumed their slow passage toward the back of the hall.

They were almost through the last of the truly congested areas when three people came around a blind corner and stopped in the middle of the aisle, eyeing Kelly and Stuart warily. Kelly and Stuart stopped in turn, eyeing the trio right back. It was two men—one older, one in his mid-twenties—and a woman, clutching a tablet to her chest like it was the only handle she had left on reality.

“You don’t want to go that way,” said Kelly, breaking their small bubble of silence. “There’s nothing that way but scared people building cardboard walls and talking about the zombie apocalypse.”

“Which may be actually happening,” added Stuart.

“Which may be actually happening,” allowed Kelly, in a resigned tone. “Anyway. It’s not safe that way.”

“Maybe not, but we think we have a way to get the wireless turned back on,” said the woman.

Leave it to the geeks of the world to prioritize Internet access over staying alive. “The convention center is full of zombies, victims, and proto-zombies,” said Kelly slowly. “Maybe you should go for option number four, and walk away from the carnage, not toward it.”

“Or maybe we should make it easier for emergency personnel to coordinate with people inside the hall and keep everyone a little bit calmer by enabling their Facebook updates,” countered the younger of the two men. “Who are you, anyway? We’re not stopping you from going anywhere you want to go.”

“I’m Stuart; this is Kelly,” said Stuart helpfully.

Kelly groaned. “You just love introducing yourself to people, don’t you? You have to stop that.”

“I’m Pris,” said the woman with the tablet. “This is Marty and Eric. We appreciate the warning, but we really do need to get the wireless working again. It may be the best shot we have at getting out of here.”

For a brief moment, all Kelly could think of was the pale-faced girl with the bite on her arm and the resignation in her eyes. That girl had known what the real score in the convention center was. She had known that the time for hope was long over.

Somehow, Kelly couldn’t bring herself to make the same leap. “Fine,” she said. “You’ve convinced me—and since we just came from the front of the center, we can show you which way not to go. Let’s go turn the Internet back on.”

The older of the two men, the one Pris had identified as Marty, eyed Kelly suspiciously. “Not to sound like I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, but why should we trust you, young lady?”

“Because I have a spear and you don’t, and right now, that means I’m a lot more likely to stay alive than you are,” said Kelly, in what she hoped was a reasonable tone of voice. She wanted to yell. She just wasn’t quite sure at whom. “Look, listen to me, don’t listen to me, it’s no skin off my nose. But if you really want to fix the wireless, you probably shouldn’t go sneering at anybody who’s actually willing to help you.”

“Besides, she hasn’t stabbed me or anything yet,” said Stuart, in what was probably intended as a helpful tone. “She sort of saved me, actually, when those freaks first came breaking into the hall. You know. Before we realized that they were zombies.”

“We still don’t know that ‘zombie’ is the right word to use here,” said Kelly.

Eric rolled his eyes. “You’re not one of those people who calls it ‘the Z word’ and refuses to say it, are you? Look: If what we’re dealing with here is that disease people have been whispering about in the blogosphere for the last few weeks, then ‘zombie’ is the best word there is. Are they alive? Yeah. But they weren’t at one point, and if they get hold of you, you won’t be for long. That’s zombie enough for me.”

“Semantic arguments won’t turn the wireless on,” said Marty.

“Then let’s go,” said Pris, and started walking. Marty and Eric followed her.

Kelly and Stuart exchanged one last look. Then they fell into step beside the trio, starting back the way they’d come.

* * *

10:10 P.M.

Patty was still asleep, slumped against the replica of Indy Rivers’s desk. Matthew had joined her, slipping reluctantly into a light doze. Only Elle remained awake, sitting with her back to the room’s thin plywood door and listening to the sounds of the convention center outside. Lacking anything better to do, she had her phone out and was using the memo function to type out a message.

Sigrid—

If you have this, it’s because someone has given you my personal effects. (That may be wrong. I can never remember the difference between ‘effect’ and ‘affect.’ That’s your job.) I’m sorry. I’m sorry I left you alone. I’m sorry I didn’t come home. But I’m not sorry that you aren’t with me, because I’m scared, Sig. I’m scared enough that having you here would just scare me more. I’d be so afraid of losing you that I wouldn’t be able to breathe. It’s better this way. Really.

You’re probably watching this on the news by now. Comic-Con is a pretty big deal, and something like this happening to it has got to be a headline. I’m sorry if you’re scared for me. If it helps at all, I’m scared for me too. That probably doesn’t help. I wouldn’t want to know that you were scared. I’d want to be there to hold you, and to take the fear away.

Patty stirred in her sleep, making a small protesting noise as she rolled over. Elle looked up, eyes narrowed. Patty didn’t move again, and Elle went back to tapping laboriously away.

I love you, Sigrid. I haven’t always been as good at showing that as I should have been, but it’s true. If I make it out of here, everything’s going to change. No more letting agents or focus groups run my life—run our life. I promise you. I am so scared, but I have never seen things as clearly as I do right now.

Yours always, Elle.

Elle hit “save” and put her phone back into her pocket, slumping against the door. She felt better for having written the letter, even if the odds were good that Sigrid would never see it. It was the sort of thing people did in horror movies, usually right before they got eaten. She’d always thought they were idiots for attracting the attention of whatever force controlled the narrative. Now, though, she finally understood why they did it.

They did it because it felt like closure, and when you already felt like you were going to die, closure was just about the only thing left to aspire to. She closed her eyes, picturing Sigrid’s face, tight with concentration or lit up from within as she laughed. Elle smiled a little. Sigrid was always beautiful, even when she was angry.

Holding the image of Sigrid’s face firmly in her head, Elle relaxed against the door and finally let herself drift into sleep.

* * *

11:11 P.M.

It took only an hour to get back to the front of the hall. It was faster partially because Kelly and Stuart knew the lay of the land now—where the blocked halls were, where the clusters of scared or wounded people had built up—and partially because they were going against the flow of traffic. Almost everyone was heading for the back, where the bathrooms and the food court were, and where there weren’t any bloodstains on the carpet.

Yet.

Kelly found herself eyeing the shadows with her hands clenched tight around her spear, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Pris and Eric walked almost carelessly, not seeming to realize how much danger they were in. Even Stuart seemed more relaxed now that they were in a larger group, like that was going to make any difference to people crazy enough to attack with their teeth. Only Marty seemed to understand how dire the situation really was. He walked quietly, with his bat swinging ready at his side.

It was hard to really focus on watching for an attack. Even with most of the people in the hall busy moving toward the rear, there were enough of them around to make it difficult to know whether something was dangerous or not. Some enterprising souls had turned to looting, either through smash-and-grabs, or simply by strolling up to booths that had been abandoned and starting to fill their complimentary Comic-Con bags. Stuart grimaced every time they passed a looter, probably thinking of his own unguarded wares. His life was worth more than all the weapons on his table, and he seemed to know that, because he didn’t say anything about going back. Privately, Kelly hoped he did get looted. Maybe if a few more people had been armed when all this started, they wouldn’t be locked inside now.

When they reached the last broad open space before entering the maze of narrower aisles leading to the locked doors at the front of the hall, Kelly stopped. “All right,” she said. “Where, exactly, are we going?”

“There.” Pris pointed up to the large glass windows that overlooked the convention center floor. “There’s supposed to be an access panel on the wall under them. We can use that to see whether anyone’s in the control room, and if not, we can try to do this manually from down here.”

“Why can’t we do that anyway?” asked Stuart.

“Because if there is somebody up there, we don’t want them to start hitting switches randomly when the alarms go off. And trying to turn the wireless on manually will trigger a bunch of alarms, at least according to the instructions I have.”

Kelly looked at their destination and sighed. “Right.”

From an architectural standpoint, Pris’s goal made perfect sense. It was a natural recess between two of the large doors leading to the lobby. There were usually trash cans and small kiosks set up there, reducing the chances of people wandering over and prying open the access panel out of simple curiosity. It was a great place to put a backup system. It was also shadowed, providing no clear line of sight, and close enough to the doors that the biting people had probably taken refuge there.

“It looks dark and stupid,” said Stuart dubiously. “I’m not really sure we should be going anywhere near there.”

“We probably shouldn’t, but we have to if we want to get the wireless on,” said Pris. She straightened up, mouth set in a thin, hard line of determination. “People need to be able to communicate with the outside world. As bad as things are, they could get worse. We need to have hope.”

Hope. What a funny idea that was. Kelly looked from Pris, so determined, so convinced that this was worth whatever it cost her, to Stuart, so scared, so ready to run back to his booth and hide from whatever was coming. Dammit. This was Comic-Con. It wasn’t supposed to be hard on anything except her bank account. “Supposed to” never changed anything. This was how things were, and what came next was up to her.

Kelly Nakata had always wondered what it felt like to truly understand that she was going to die. But here and now, in this place . . .

If this was the zombie apocalypse, no one was coming to let them out. They were already compromised, already potentially infected, and no sane person would open those doors ever again. If this wasn’t the zombie apocalypse—but ah, that was the problem, wasn’t it? There was nothing else that this could really be. It made too much sense. It fit the facts too well, and that meant that everyone inside the building was going to die there. They could die scared and hiding, doing nothing. Or they could try to make things a little better in whatever way they possibly could.

Kelly gave her spear an experimental twirl. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she muttered, before saying, more loudly, “All right. Marty and I are the best-armed, so we should go in first, in case of trouble. Pris, you’re next. Eric and Stuart, you bring up the rear, make sure nothing comes up from behind us to try getting in the way.”

“What do we do if something does come up behind us?” asked Stuart.

“Hit it until it stops coming,” said Kelly. “Pris, you do whatever it is you need to do to get the wireless back online.” The few people who were in earshot were turning toward them, suddenly interested in what they were hearing. It figured that mentions of a working Internet would be enough to get people’s attention, no matter what other crap was going on at the time. “This is where we start moving, or we’re going to get mobbed.”

“Who died and put you in charge?” asked Marty, sounding half-amused.

“My Jedi master,” said Kelly dryly. Then she started walking, heading toward the shadowy nook where Pris claimed the wireless access panel was located. The rest of the group followed her. At this point, what else were they supposed to do?

* * *

11:13 P.M.

The first bloody-lipped man came lunging out of the darkness as soon as Kelly and Marty stepped off the carpet and out of the protection of the overhead lights. Kelly didn’t make a sound. She just swung her borrowed spear low and hard, hitting the man across the stomach. He moaned, a sound that was chillingly familiar, thanks to a hundred zombie movies. Kelly froze.

And Marty brought his baseball bat down solidly on the man’s skull, which caved in with a horrific crunching sound. The man stopped lunging for Kelly and fell, leaving chunks of bloody gore on Marty’s bat. For a moment, everyone was silent, each of them trying to wrap his or her mind around what had just happened. Either zombies were real, or Marty had just killed a man. Either Marty was a murderer, or he was a savior. The contradiction was too big to be absorbed, and so without saying a word, they all dismissed it.

“Let’s move,” said Kelly.

They were almost to the wall when the second pair came charging out of the dark, just as silently as the first one—but unlike the first one, they started moaning before they were hit. One grabbed for Pris, who screamed, a short, startled sound. The other went for Kelly.

Moving fast, Kelly whirled and slammed the butt of her spear into the man who was reaching for Pris. He staggered back a step, but otherwise didn’t seem to notice. That was when Kelly flipped the spear around and thrust the point into the man’s throat, pinning him in place long enough for Eric to slam his crowbar into the back of the man’s head.

That was when the third man sank his teeth into Kelly’s shoulder. Kelly screamed and swore at the same time, trying to wrench herself free. She succeeded, briefly, but that was long enough for Marty to close the distance and beat the man off her with his baseball bat. Kelly clamped her hand over her wounded shoulder, staggering a few feet away before she turned to look back at the carnage.

The man kept moaning even as he died. It wasn’t until his skull cracked that the sound stopped, replaced by limpness and eerie silence.

“Kelly?” Stuart hesitantly touched her uninjured shoulder. “Are you okay?”

No, you asshole. I’m bitten, and we both know what that means; we’re not idiots here. Kelly forced herself to look toward him, smile wanly, and lie. “Fine,” she said. “It’s just a flesh wound.”

Not one of them believed what she was saying. But Stuart nodded with quiet resignation, like he understood why she needed to lie, and that seemed to speak for the whole group. “Good. Let’s get moving. I think we’re almost there.”

Nothing else attacked them as they finished crossing the distance to the wall. Kelly was half-expecting there to be no access panel at all, and was quietly relieved when she saw it, industrial gray steel creating a patch of darker shadow on the wall.

Pris walked to the hatch and pried it open with her fingernails. There was a red emergency phone inside. She lifted the receiver, checked her tablet one last time, and hit the “0.”

All that was left to do after that was wait.

* * *

11:16 P.M.

Lesley jumped when the phone rang, nearly toppling out of the office chair where she’d been dozing. On the floor, Unis lifted her head off her paws before climbing to her feet, tail wagging cautiously. Sometimes the phone meant it was time to go Out. Unis thought that Out would be a lovely idea. The Woman had been still for too long, and the smells from outside were not the comforting kind, not grass or food or home. Outside the door smelled like blood and fear and peeing, and Unis wanted to get The Woman away from here if she could.

“What in the world . . .?” said Lesley. She fumbled around the large control board until her hand hit what felt like a phone receiver. The ringing stopped when she picked it up. She brought it to her ear. “Hello?”

“Hello!” said a female voice, half-laughing with relief. The voice grew distant for a moment as it said, “Guys! Guys, I got somebody! There’s somebody there!”

“Thank God,” said a male voice. “Tell them we’re stuck in here.”

“I’m stuck, too, and I can hear you,” said Lesley. “Who’s this?”

“My name is Pris Garrison. I’m here with some of my friends in the hall. Please, do you work for the convention center? We’re locked in. Can you let us out?”

“I’m afraid not, Ms. Garrison. My name’s Lesley Smith. I’m a journalist from the UK. I flew out to cover the convention, and when things went pear-shaped, I somehow found myself locked up in here. I was sort of hoping you’d called because you were about to rescue me.”

A soft choking sound came through the receiver. After a moment, Lesley realized that it was Pris, laughing.

“What?” she asked sharply. “I assure you, this isn’t funny.”

“I know! I know. That’s why I’m laughing. Look, I’m sorry we can’t save you, but maybe you can still help us. Do you see a big gray button labeled ‘wireless controls’ ? It should be on the left side of the main control panel.”

Lesley abruptly understood why Pris had been laughing. Sometimes the universe was so cruel as to become comic. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you with that, Ms. Garrison.”

“What? Why not?”

“Because I’m legally blind. I can see well enough to get myself around, with the help of my dog—she’s here with me—but I can’t read a label on a switch in this light, and I don’t think you want me to start flipping things at random.”

There was a moment of silence before Pris said, “Okay. That’s . . . okay. I can get things back online from down here, but I need you to not touch anything, no matter what starts beeping or flashing. Can you do that? We’re hoping that if we can get the wireless back on, we might be able to call for help.”

“I’m blind, not stupid,” said Lesley. “I can manage to keep my hands to myself while you do whatever needs to be done.”

“Sorry,” said Pris, sounding abashed. “I didn’t mean . . . anyway, thank you. It’ll just take me a second. Thanks for your time.”

Suddenly, the thought of being left alone in the little locked room was unbearable. “Is there anyone else with you?” asked Lesley. “I’d like to talk to them, please. If you don’t mind.”

“Um, sure. Hang on.” Pris’s voice got distant for a moment as she said, “She wants to talk to somebody else.”

There was a scuffling sound, and a male voice came on the line, saying, “Hello?”

“Hello. My name’s Lesley. I’m locked in the control room at the moment, although I’m afraid I won’t be able to help Ms. Garrison with getting the wireless back on. What’s your name?”

“Marty,” said the man. “There are three other people here, besides me and Pris. Stuart is helping Kelly bandage her shoulder. Eric’s keeping watch.”

“One of you has been hurt, then?”

“Yeah. Kelly got bit pretty bad getting to this phone. She’s not bleeding as much as she was, but even a little bleeding is too much when you’re trapped in a big-ass convention center with no medical supplies.”

It was ironic. Lesley’s tour of the convention center had included the locations of all the first aid and disability assistance checkpoints . . . and they were all outside the central hall. With the doors locked, everyone was stuck. “I hope she’s all right.”

“Ma’am, not to be rude, but I don’t think any of us is all right at this point.”

“I’m afraid that might be true.” Something started beeping. Lesley turned toward the sound and saw that a large red light had snapped on in the middle of the center control panel. “Whatever Ms. Garrison is doing, it appears to be having some effect. There’s a red light on up here—no, wait. It’s just gone yellow, and now it’s flashing.”

“That’s a good sign.”

“I hope so. What were you hoping for this Comic-Con, Marty? If I may be so bold.”

“I’m a vendor. I was hoping for some good sales, and maybe a bargain or two if I got time to do any shopping for myself.” Marty chuckled darkly. “Well, the stores are open. Too bad there’s nobody to take my money.”

“No one taking money at Comic-Con? Truly, it is the end of the world.” It was meant to be a lighthearted joke. Somehow, it didn’t quite come out that way. Lesley cleared her throat. “The light’s gone green now, if that helps anything.”

“It might. Pris! Try the Wi-Fi.”

There was a pause, and then Lesley heard the voice from before, whooping in triumph. Someone else laughed. Whatever Pris had done, it must have worked, then. Not that it did her any good at all. She was still alone with her dog, sitting in the dark, and feeling increasingly unsure that any rescue was coming.

“Marty? Are you still there?”

“I am, yeah. Thanks for all your help, Lesley.”

Don’t hang up; don’t leave me alone up here in the silence, thought Lesley frantically. Clearing her throat, she said only, “It was nothing, really. All I had to do was sit still and not touch anything. Fortunately for you, that happens to be a talent of mine.”

“Still, we appreciate it. If this gets taken care of before the end of the convention, come look me up. I’m at Marty’s Comics and Games, in row 2100. I’d like to meet you in person.”

“I’d like that, too,” said Lesley quietly. Goodbyes would have felt too final—and given the circumstances, they probably would have been. So she said nothing more as she took the phone from her ear and dropped it back into the cradle, cutting off their conversation.

Alone in the silence once more, Lesley Smith put her hands over her face and wondered when it was going to end. If it was ever going to end.

* * *

11:30 P.M.

“How’s your shoulder feeling?” Stuart took a step backward, wiping his bloody palms against the seat of his pants. There’d been so much blood. He wasn’t sure how much blood was safe for a person to lose. He was deathly afraid that he was about to find out.

Kelly offered him a small smile. She could feel the bloody fabric of her shirt sticking to her skin, and she knew the situation wasn’t good. “It hurts like hell,” she said. “I’m glad we got the wireless back on.”

“Me, too. I’d hate to have waded back into this mess for nothing.”

Kelly’s smile strengthened. It was good, she decided, that he’d introduced himself without being prompted; it was good that she’d gotten to know him, even if it was only a little, before things went all the way wrong. “Hope’s not nothing. Remember that, okay?”

“What?” Stuart blinked, expression turning alarmed. “Why are you talking like that?”

“I got bit, Stuart. You remember what that girl said. I’m as good as dead.”

“No, you’re not. The real world doesn’t work like that. The real world—”

“She’s not wrong.” Pris’s voice was very soft. Kelly looked past Stuart to the other woman, realizing as she did that she hadn’t even noticed when the cheering stopped. Pris was pale, and the hand that held her tablet was shaking. “It’s all over Facebook and Twitter. People are calling this the zombie apocalypse. Actual people, who aren’t trapped inside here. They’re saying it’s an outbreak. The government didn’t lock the doors, but they’re not going to let anybody unlock them because we’re all already written off as dead. Infected.”

“See? It’s the zombie apocalypse, and in the zombie apocalypse, once somebody gets bitten, they’re not your friend anymore.” Kelly held out her spear, waiting for Stuart to take it. “Go. Find a back door, find a way out of here, and go. Tell people we got the Internet up. Maybe if we make enough noise from inside, they’ll have to open the doors.”

“Kelly, we’re not leaving you.”

“Yes, we are.” Marty stepped up behind Pris, who shot him a relieved look. “I’m sorry as hell that you got bit helping us out. I’d take it back if I could.”

“Would you take my place?” asked Kelly.

Marty looked away. They should kill her; all the zombie movies he’d ever seen told him that they should kill her. And he couldn’t. That would be the final step toward making this all real, and he couldn’t.

“I didn’t think so.” Kelly sighed. “Stuart, please. You saved my ass by setting up shop where you did, even if you don’t have a damn clue how to use the weapons you were selling. Let me save yours. Get the hell out of here.”

“I don’t want to go without you,” said Stuart quietly. He reached out as he spoke, and took the spear gently from her hand.

Kelly smiled. “I don’t give a fuck what you want.” Somehow, the words sounded like an endearment. Her attention swung to Marty. “Look out for Stuart. He needs a lot of looking after.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Marty.

Pris sniffled, wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and said, “I’ll make sure everybody knows what you did. How brave you were.”

“You do that,” said Kelly. “Now go.”

She stayed where she was, tucked into the shadowy nook off the main wall, and watched as the other four turned and walked away. Stuart glanced back at her several times. She forced herself to keep watching until they vanished around a corner and were gone. Then she sighed, all the straightness going out of her spine as she sank, cross-legged, to the floor. Her shoulder ached. Her feet hurt. She was so tired. So, so tired. Maybe she’d just stay there forever, she thought. Maybe that would be for the best.

Kelly Nakata closed her eyes, letting her head list forward, and waited to stop caring about what was going to happen next. She was small. She’d lost a lot of blood.

It didn’t take as long as she might have thought.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

The rum is sweet and burning at the same time. It makes it a little easier to discuss the events inside the convention center. Kelly Nakata and the others restored the record of what happened during the siege of Comic-Con; without their attempts to turn the wireless back on, we might never have known as much as we do. Lorelei was right when she said she’d need something stronger for what came next. So did I.

LORELEI: It’s funny. I mean, there’s this whole story that has nothing to do with my family, happening at the same time that my family was fighting to survive. But without it, I’d never have known what happened to them. Was the whole Rising like that, do you think? Just layers and layers of tangle, so that you can never really tell where one thing ends and the next one begins?

She seems more human now, and more lost. I put my cup down and push it carefully away. I need to be sober for the remainder of this interview. No matter how much I want not to be.

MAHIR: I believe so, yes. Everyone has his or her own story to tell. The San Diego Outbreak was unique only in that so many people were confined in such a small space. Their stories were almost forced to overlap.

LORELEI: I spent a lot of time after the Rising going through all the social media feeds from that outbreak, looking for . . . something. I don’t know. Something that would make it all start making sense. Not linear sense. Just . . .

MAHIR: You wanted something to make it fair.

LORELEI: Yeah. That’s it, exactly. I wanted something that would make it fair for my parents to have died in there. I wanted something that would make it fair for me to have lived when they didn’t. I know—I know—that they were both glad I made it out of the hall before the doors closed. But that doesn’t make it right. And it doesn’t make it fair.

MAHIR: I don’t think “fair” ever entered into it.

LORELEI: Yeah, I guess not. That was never part of the equation. You know, I met Kelly Nakata’s brother a couple years ago. He came to one of the Equality Now film screenings that I helped put together. He was a really nice guy. He wanted to meet me.

MAHIR: I can understand why.

LORELEI: We’re almost to the end. Do you think we can get through this tonight?

MAHIR: I would like that.

LORELEI: Yeah. So would I. Let’s finish this.

Everything Must Go

The heroes of the Rising took many forms. Some of them fought. Some of them hid. Some of them just left artifacts for us to find after they were gone. But all of them died, and all of them, whether they knew it or not, were mourned.

—Mahir Gowdaspan

Me? Oh, I’m just your ordinary time-traveling badass with a badge. Now freeze, dirtbag. You’re going to Paradox Prison for a long, long time.

—Chronoforensic Analyst Indiction Rivers,

Space Crime Continuum, season one, episode three

11:30 P.M.

“Holy crap—Shawn! The wireless just came back on!” Robert waved his phone like it would illustrate the point. “I’ve got connection!”

“Me, too,” said Leita, holding up her own phone. “Maybe this means they’re finally getting ready to break us out of here.”

“Maybe,” said Shawn, with an utter lack of conviction. He didn’t want to discourage the others in their hoping—at this point, hope was about the only thing they had going for them, and he’d rather it lasted—but he couldn’t work up any excitement for something as small as the Internet coming on. Not unless it was accompanied by an announcement that the National Guard was on the way. He paused. The National Guard . . . “Shit.”

“What is it?” asked Vanessa. She was holding her iPad again, fiddling nervously with her new video editing software. Maybe later, she could edit together a video about their Comic-Con adventure. Assuming they all survived.

“We need to get back to work on the barricades. Break time’s over.” Shawn grabbed a hammer. “I want this place so fortified that we could live in it.”

“What?” Vanessa’s eyes widened. “Why? Didn’t you hear Robbie? They’re going to come and rescue us soon!”

“No, they’re not.” Shawn shook his own phone at her. “You hear that? Silence. Lorelei’s at the Coast Guard right now, and what I’ve got is silence. That means she hasn’t managed to get them moving yet, and if the Coast Guard isn’t moving, neither is anybody else. We’re not being saved just because we can check our e-mail again. And when people realize that, they’re going to lose what little serenity they had left. The shit’s about to hit the fan in here, and all that’s standing between us and the chaos is the hull on this ship.”

“It’s a booth, Shawn,” said Lynn quietly, stepping up next to her husband.

“Right now, it’s our ship, and it’s the only way we’re flying safely out of this.” Shawn thrust the hammer at her. She took it. “Get to work, all of you. We don’t have much time.”

“I hope you’re wrong, Shawn,” said Lynn, and leaned up to kiss his cheek before walking briskly toward the other side of the booth.

Shawn sighed. “So do I.” He glanced around at the others, finally settling on Robert. “Hey. I need you to do something for me.”

“What?” asked Robert, putting down the box that he’d been lifting.

“Come here.” Shawn beckoned him closer. Robert came, and when he was close enough, Shawn murmured, “I want you to get online and start looking for anyone who has outside eyes on this place. We need to know what’s going on. We need to know how bad things are going to get. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” said Robert. He had to fight to ignore the sudden churning in his stomach. This wasn’t how his Comic-Con was supposed to go. Not a bit of it. “Is there anything I should be watching for, in specific?”

“Yeah,” said Shawn. “Look for people talking about the zombie apocalypse. I need to know whether this is the end of the world.”

Wisely, Robert didn’t say anything else. He just moved to one of the booth’s folding chairs, sat down, and started to search. Shawn watched him go. Then he picked up another hammer, and turned to his work.

* * *

11:30 P.M.

Elle’s phone pinged, signaling that her e-mail had successfully been sent. It was a familiar enough sound that it didn’t wake her. Sleeping sitting up with her back braced against a door wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world, but she was tired enough and wrung-out enough from her day that she didn’t care anymore. On the other side of the replica office, Matthew and Patty slept sunk deep into their own respective dreamlands. Patty seemed almost entirely boneless, a limp puddle across the model of Indiction Rivers’s desk. Matthew was slightly more upright, but only slightly, with one arm curved protectively around her back.

Then the phone rang, and all three of them snapped awake. Matthew was on his feet before his brain and his body fully caught up with each other. Patty sat up, blinking bemusedly. And Elle, who knew that ring tone better than she knew almost anything else in the world, was simply reaching for the phone. It was reflex. If she’d been awake and able to think about what she was doing, she might not have answered . . . but she was half-asleep, and sleep can make you careless. The phone was almost to her ear before she realized what she was doing, and by then it was too late.

“Sig?”

“Elle?” The edge of panic on her girlfriend’s voice was painful. Elle winced.

Sigrid demanded, “What the hell is this e-mail I just got? What’s going on in there?”

“I’m sorry. I set my memo function to auto-send, and someone must have managed to turn the wireless in here back on. You weren’t supposed to see that.” Not while I was still breathing, anyway.

“The police have cleared and cordoned off the Gaslight District. The hotels were evacuated almost an hour ago.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m still in our room. I tried to go down to the convention center when I realized you were stuck there, but there are police blocking all the access roads. They’re not letting anyone near.” Common sense dictated that “the talent” stay as close to the convention center as possible, to make sure that they could get to and from their panels quickly and easily. Sigrid and Elle were staying at a very nice B&B almost two miles off-site. If Sigrid couldn’t enjoy the convention, she could at least enjoy their accommodations—and it made it less likely that there would be a public slip where one of Elle’s fans might see.

Elle had never been so grateful for her paranoia. “I’m glad,” she said quietly. “I don’t want you anywhere near here.”

“Are you hurt?” The edge of panic was spreading, saturating Sigrid’s tone. “Elle, are you alone in there?”

“No, no, honey, I’m fine. I’m here with two friends, Matthew and Patty. We managed to get to cover before the lights went out. None of us is hurt. We’re all fine.”

“I kinda need to pee,” said Patty, and promptly blushed a brilliant red, adding, in a mutter, “I don’t believe I just said that in front of Elle Riley.”

“Where’s your handler?” asked Sigrid. “Isn’t there someone who can get you out of there?”

“No, there’s not. I lost him when the screaming started, and I haven’t seen him since. Maybe he made it out of the hall.” Or maybe he got caught up in the riot at the front, and was out there somewhere, looking for her. Elle couldn’t manage to muster any compassion for his possible plight. He was the one who’d run away and left her with two strangers in the middle of the exhibit hall.

“That letter—”

“I meant it. I meant every word of it. I’m done pretending.”

“Why would you write that if you thought you were coming home? What would make you do that?”

Elle sighed, shoulders slumping. “Sigrid . . .”

“Are you coming home to me?”

Elle looked across the room to Matthew and Patty, who were watching her, not saying a word. She couldn’t see through the blocked-off windows, but she didn’t need to; she knew what the exhibit hall looked like. There would have been screaming if things had already started going downhill. It was probably only a matter of time.

“Yes,” said Elle calmly. She was an excellent actress, no matter what the critics said; she’d gotten her job because she knew how to do it, not just because she looked good in a bikini. “I’m coming home. I promise.”

“Elle—”

“I have to go, Sigrid. I love you. I’ll see you soon. I promise.”

“I love you,” Sigrid whispered.

Elle lowered her phone, hitting the button to disconnect the call at the same time. Then she just sat there, staring at it. Minutes ticked by.

Finally, hesitantly, Patty asked, “Are you okay?”

“I never lied to her before.” Elle raised her head, smiling sadly. “I’m not sure I want to make it out of here. I never wanted to know that I could lie to her.”

Outside the plywood walls of their room, someone screamed.

* * *

11:43 P.M.

Kelly Nakata opened her eyes.

Slowly, with none of her former grace, she clambered to her feet. She used both arms to push herself upright, not shying away from putting pressure on her wounded arm. Anyone looking into her eyes would have found a curious absence of pain, considering how much blood covered her skin and drenched her clothing. When she stood, she left behind a broad dark splotch on the carpet. But Kelly Nakata didn’t care. She was back on her feet, and unlike the zombies who had entered when the siege began—the ones who were well fed and seeking to expand the size of the pack—she was freshly risen, weak from blood loss, and hungry.

So hungry.

The exact mechanics of the Kellis-Amberlee virus were not yet known on that hot July night, but that did nothing to stop them from working as nature and genetic engineering had intended. Kelly Nakata was no longer in her right mind, and the virus controlling her body knew what it needed to do. It needed to spread. It needed to nourish itself. It needed to feed.

As Kelly began walking toward the sound of living food—moving not with the characteristic lurch of the long-infected, but with a smooth, almost fluid gracelessness, like all her joints had lost their tension—other infected emerged from the shadows and followed her. It was as if she had provided some final tipping point to their number, taking them from the need to grow and leading them into the need to hunt.

Somewhere in the middle of the slowly expanding pack, one of the infected began to moan. The rest echoed it, until the entire mass of stiff-limbed people with glazed eyes and bloody hands was moaning in near-unison. Together, they half-shambled, half-walked down the aisle, heading for the unmistakable sounds of the living.

* * *

11:45 P.M.

“We shouldn’t have left her,” said Stuart, shifting Kelly’s spear from one hand to the other. “This is just crazy. Things like this don’t really happen.”

They weren’t moving as fast as Marty wanted them to be. Pris was distracted by poking at her tablet, and Stuart had been dragging his feet ever since they walked away from Kelly. Only Eric seemed to understand how important it was that they make it back to the fortified safety of the booth, where they might have a chance in hell of keeping themselves alive until rescue came. “It’s happening, and we need to deal with it,” Marty snapped. “Kelly knew the score. She’s the one who told us to leave her behind. Now keep on moving. We have a long way to go before we get back to where we need to be.”

“Facebook is going nuts,” said Pris, eyes still glued to her screen. “There’s a lady over in Artist’s Alley who says her best friend flipped out and ate her husband. Like, actually ate him. And there’s a bunch of interns holed up in one of the big toy company booths using boxes of action figures as barricades. They’re freaking out because people keep stealing pieces of their walls.” She snorted. “I guess it’s never too bad for people to want their exclusive swag.”

“Is anyone saying anything about a rescue?”

“Lots of rumors on the inside—jeez, it’s like half the convention was just waiting for the chance to get online and start screaming—and some people on Twitter are talking about the military moving in around the convention center. Maybe they’re coming to break us out of here.”

“Yeah,” said Marty gruffly. “Maybe that’s what they’re doing. Just keep moving, okay? I want us all back where we know the territory as fast as possible.”

“What’s that sound?” Much to Marty’s disgust, Eric stopped walking and turned to look back in the direction they had just come from. “Do you hear that?”

“All I hear is a convention center full of geeks who finally have their e-mail back, which means this is our best shot at getting back to the booth without anyone stopping us,” said Marty. “Now move.”

“It sounds like someone’s hurt or something. They’re moaning.”

“We are in the middle of what looks increasingly like the zombie apocalypse,” said Marty, stressing his last two words as hard as he could. “Moaning people don’t need help. Moaning people are intending to eat us.”

To illustrate his point, Kelly came around the corner of the aisle they had just walked down, with half a dozen more blood-drenched people shambling along behind her. Kelly was leading the others straight for her former companions.

“Kelly?” said Stuart uncertainly.

“Kelly’s dead,” said Marty. Any doubts he’d had about the nature of their predicament vanished when he saw Kelly’s blank face, mouth half-open as she moaned with the others. He grabbed Stuart’s arm before the other man could do anything they were all going to regret. “That’s not Kelly anymore. Now move.”

Much to his surprise, the other man moved. Hauling Stuart along with him, Marty ran. Eric and Pris followed . . . and the zombies, as one, followed them.

After hours of waiting, the chase was finally on.

* * *

11:51 P.M.

The screaming was getting louder and more frequent. Patty pressed herself against Matthew, moaning slightly with fear. It was a living, vital sound, very different than the soft, insistent moans that Elle could hear under the panicking crowd outside their hidey-hole. She slid off the desk where she’d been sitting, taking a long step backward.

“I don’t think that’s the cavalry,” she said.

“Matthew, I’m scared,” wailed Patty.

“I know, love.” He put his arms around her, looking grimly at the door. In that moment, he wished he’d never heard of the San Diego Comic Convention, or allowed himself to consider it as a location for his honeymoon. He held his wife as tightly as he could, and wondered whether he was ever going to see England, or his family, again. “Just hold fast. Rescue is coming.”

“We’re as secure in here as we’re going to get,” said Elle. “We—” Her words dissolved into a yelp of fear as someone started banging on the door, sending it shuddering. It wasn’t constructed to stand up to any sort of pressure, after all; it was only intended as a replica.

“Let us in!” shouted a male voice, very real, and very much alive. “We can hear you in there!”

“Please!” added a second voice—female this time, and very clearly terrified.

Matthew and Elle exchanged a look. They didn’t say anything. In a moment like this, there was nothing to be said. Matthew let go of Patty, pressing a kiss to the top of her head as he stood to help Elle move the filing cabinets. As soon as they were out of the way, Elle stepped forward and opened the door.

“Get in here,” she said to the small group of people clustered in the aisle outside. “Now.”

“Thank you,” said their leader, an older African-American man with a death grip on an aluminum baseball bat. He turned and started gesturing for his people to get into the building: two other men, both younger than he was, one Asian, one white, and a pale-faced woman with a mop of wild, uncombed curls. Once all three of them were in, he followed, and Elle slammed the door behind him.

“Matthew, the filing cabinets,” she said.

“On it,” he replied. To his surprise and mild relief, the newcomers hastened to help him. With all of them working together, they had the door blocked in a matter of seconds.

“Good,” said Elle. The moaning outside was getting louder. “I guess this means help isn’t on the way, huh?”

“Not quite yet,” said the older man.

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

The wild-haired girl was staring at Elle. “Aren’t you . . .”

“I used to be,” Elle replied. “Hi. I’m Elle. This is Matthew, and Patty. They’re on their honeymoon. I have no idea why I thought it was important to tell you that, but I did, so there you go. The censors are officially off duty for the duration of this convention.”

“I’m Marty,” said the older man. “These two are Pris and Eric.”

“I’m Stuart,” said the Asian man. He was holding a spear like he didn’t really know what to do with it but was terrified of what would happen if he put it down.

“Nice to meet you all,” said Elle briskly. “Now, what sort of danger did you people lead to our door?” She realized she was falling into the speech patterns she used for Indiction Rivers—and well, so what if she was? Indy Rivers got things done. Maybe she was a fictional character, but they were in a fictional place, in a fictional situation. There were worse things to be than fictional.

Fictional people cried only when the story told them to.

“Well, ma’am, I don’t know how to break this to you, exactly, but I’m afraid we’re in the middle of the zombie apocalypse here,” said Marty. “One of our friends got bitten. She’s outside now, leading a whole mob of them after us.”

“And you came here?” cried Patty, standing. “Why would you do that? We were doing just fine before you came crashing in here! Now we’re probably going to die, and it’s going to be all your fault!”

“Patty.” Matthew put his hand on her shoulder. “Patty, sweetheart, hush. It’s not their fault. It’s not anyone’s fault.”

“That asshole who decided to cure the common cold, maybe,” said Eric.

“Or maybe not,” said Elle. “I don’t think ‘blame’ is what we should be looking for here. Survival is. If those zombies are behind you, this is where we start shoring up the walls, and we get ready to make our last stand. Are you with me?”

Marty nodded. “Just tell us what to do.”

Elle told them.

* * *

11:57 P.M.

“Daddy!” Lorelei’s voice came through the phone in a wail, terror and heartbreak warring with fury for dominance.

Shawn snatched his phone from his belt and depressed the walkie-talkie button as he raised it to his mouth. “Lorelei, what’s wrong?”

She was crying; he could hear it even before she spoke again. Little hitching sobs that she was trying, and failing, to hold back. She’d cried that way since she was a little girl. “D-Daddy, they’re . . . I just heard them saying . . .”

“Slow down. Breathe. Are you all right?”

“They’re going to blow up the convention center!” This was less a wail, and more a scream. Shawn went cold, his fingers clenching on the phone as she continued: “They didn’t know I could hear them when they started talking about it. They said there was no safe way to do an extraction. There are too many z-z—” She broke down and started crying in earnest before she could even get the word out.

“Zombies,” said Vanessa quietly, stepping up next to Shawn. “There are too many zombies for them to get us out.”

“Damn,” whispered Shawn. Then he raised his phone again and said, “Okay, honey. I need you to breathe deep and stay calm, and listen to me. Do not try to get off the base. Do not try to get over here. Whatever’s going to happen, I don’t want you in the middle of it. Do you hear me? You stay where you are. Your mother and I need to know that you’re safe.”

“Didn’t you hear me?” Lorelei wasn’t screaming anymore. She was barely even whispering. “They’re going to blow it up. The whole thing. They’re going to kill you.”

“And I wish that wasn’t going to happen, but, sweetheart, what matters here is that you’re safe. You’re not in this building. You’re going to be fine.” Shawn closed his eyes. He didn’t want to risk seeing his wife’s face. Once she started crying, there was no way he’d be able to keep from doing the same. “It’s going to be hard. Everything’s changing. But you got out. That means we won.”

Someone was crying; he could hear them, even with the screaming that was starting to get closer and closer to their position, even with the sound of distant moans. It didn’t matter. What mattered was Lorelei’s whispered reply: “I don’t want you to die.”

“I don’t want to leave you. We all have to do things we don’t want to do. Can you keep flying for me, baby girl? Please? Because all I need to know right now is that you can do that.”

“I’ll try,” whispered Lorelei.

“That’s all I’ll ever ask of you.” Shawn opened his eyes and turned to his right, where he knew Lynn would be waiting. The tears were running down her cheeks, but her expression was calm. She knew what was coming next. “Honey, I’m going to give the phone to your mother now. You need to talk to her before we lose connection. I love you, Lorelei. Don’t ever forget. Promise me that you won’t.”

“I won’t, Daddy. I love you.”

“Good,” said Shawn. He handed the phone to Lynn before he could say anything else—before he could stretch it out any further, before he could insist that she keep talking to him until it was too late to say anything else. He’d said what needed saying. Everything else would just be self-indulgent, and they were past the time for things like that. He had work to do.

Vanessa and Robert followed him to the far side of the booth. “Tell us what to do, and we’ll do it,” said Vanessa.

“If they’re going to blow this place to Kingdom Come, we’ve got two choices,” said Shawn. “First, we sit here and wait for the boom. Odds are we wouldn’t feel anything. That sort of thing tends to happen pretty damn fast.”

“And our second choice?” asked Robert.

Shawn smiled grimly. “We get the fuck out of here.”

Vanessa nodded. “Sounds good to me. Lead the way.”

* * *

12:02 A.M.

Unis lifted her head off her paws, attention fixing on the door. Her ears pricked forward and her nostrils flared. The smell coming through the door wasn’t a good smell. It was Bad. It was a Bad Smell, bad enough to stand out against all the other smells in the world. A low growl started in her chest, shaking her body as she got slowly to her feet. The Bad Smell was getting stronger. But she was a Good Dog. She wouldn’t let the Bad Smell reach The Woman. No. That wouldn’t happen while she was standing guard.

“Unis? What’s wrong?”

Unis kept growling. She knew that her duty was to The Woman—and yes, usually that meant answering to her name, because The Woman might need something. But Unis knew that The Woman’s nose wasn’t as good as hers. The Woman didn’t know that there was a Bad Smell. It was up to Unis to protect her.

“Unis.” This time, Lesley’s voice cracked with command. Unis’s growl wavered, losing focus for a moment as instinct warred with training. In the end, instinct and loyalty won: No amount of training could have pulled her attention away from that door.

For her part, Lesley was becoming alarmed. She knew her dog. Unis was the best service dog she’d ever had, and if Unis was ignoring her, that meant that something was seriously wrong.

“This isn’t good,” she whispered, and wished, not for the first time, that she wasn’t locked in alone with her dog, who might be excellent company but had never quite mastered the art of conversation.

Unis continued growling. It was getting louder now. It still couldn’t quite block out the new sound that was coming from the other side of the door: human voices, moaning.

“Here!” said Lesley, sitting up a little straighter. “Whoever you are, you can just go away! You’re frightening my dog! We don’t want any!”

The moaning didn’t stop. If anything, it increased, and someone began banging on the door. Several someones, from the sound of it.

“Go away!” shouted Lesley.

They didn’t go away.

Unis stopped growling and began barking wildly when the door started caving inward. By then, it was too late to do anything about the infected who were smashing their way into the control room—but really, it had been too late since they were locked in. Lesley screamed.

Unis, who was a very good dog, fought to the end to defend her mistress, and died knowing that The Woman was safer because she had been there. Out of everyone who fell during the siege of San Diego, she may well be the only one who died at peace, knowing that she’d done her best.

The same cannot be said of Lesley Smith. Her last thought was of Unis, whose frenzied barking had stopped a few seconds before. Worrying about her dog made it a little easier to endure the teeth biting into her flesh—and then there was only pain, and darkness, and then there was nothing at all.

No one on the convention floor noticed what was happening in the control room. By that point, they all had problems of their own.

* * *

12:09 A.M.

Lynn came to join the group as they were preparing to move. Shawn’s phone was in her hand. She offered it to him, saying quietly, “The battery died. She said to tell you that she loves you.”

“Thank you,” said Shawn, and took the phone, clipping it to his belt.

Lynn nodded and looked around at the remains of their group. The screaming from the front of the hall was getting louder, but it wasn’t quite on top of them. Yet. “Where are we going?”

“The food court,” said Shawn. “The parking garage clearly isn’t a viable exit, or Dwight and Rebecca would have contacted us by now. That means we need another way. There might be an employee door at the back of their little café—and if not, there’s the freezer. It could survive the bombing.”

“And it’s better than sitting here waiting to be blown up,” said Leita.

“Leita’s right,” said Lynn. “But if we’re going to move, it needs to be now. If we stand here too long, we’re not going anywhere.”

“Then let’s go,” said Shawn.

The five of them left the booth together, holding what weapons they could improvise or scrounge from the toolbox. Each of them knew that they would never be coming back, and carried what they thought was important: a backpack, a tote bag filled with merchandise, the cash box, the signed picture of Joss Whedon from the charity drawing. Shawn knew that some of the things people had chosen to carry would slow them down, but he didn’t say anything about it. There would have been no point. They were more likely to die trying to escape than they were to make it out of the building. If people felt better because they died holding their laptops or their favorite shirts, he wasn’t going to be the one who told them no.

As for Shawn himself, he brought his phone, the hammer he’d been holding off and on since arriving at the convention center, and his wife. His daughter was already safe. Nothing else could possibly have mattered to him in that moment.

Together, the last of the California Browncoats walked deeper into the hall, heading for the food court, hoping for a miracle.

They weren’t going to get one.

* * *

12:11 A.M.

The moaning outside was getting softer as the zombies moved away, pursuing easier prey along the aisles of the convention center. Elle realized she was giggling under her breath. She clapped a hand over her mouth. That just made it worse. She folded double, laughing and crying at the same time, struggling with the need to do both as quietly as possible.

“What’s so funny?” asked Marty. He didn’t sound belligerent, just tired. They were all tired.

“A friend of mine has—” Elle caught herself. If the lying was going to stop, the lying was going to stop right here and now. “My girlfriend has this shirt that says, ‘In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I don’t have to run faster than the zombies. I just have to run faster than you.’ I guess it’s more accurate than we ever thought.”

Marty chuckled once, eyes narrowed. “I guess that’s true. But it doesn’t tell us what we’re going to do next.”

“How bad is it out there?” asked Matthew. “We’ve been shut in here since the lights went out. We don’t really know what’s happening on the floor.”

“It’s bad,” said Stuart unsteadily. “It’s really bad. Kelly . . .”

“One of our friends got bitten, and then she became one of those things,” said Pris, a little unsteadily. She was still clutching her tablet. She looked down at it, blinking. She hadn’t realized that she still had it; she’d assumed it was lost during their flight down the aisles. Then she realized that she didn’t remember much about what happened when the zombies came. First Kelly was coming around the corner, and then the rest of them were running through the open door of the makeshift little house.

“So we know it’s contagious,” said Elle. “What does that mean for us? Do we stay in here and keep hoping for rescue, or do we start trying to get the hell out of here?”

The others started talking, some of them on top of one another, all trying to put forth the best idea for what came next. Matthew and Stuart were both in favor of staying put, since there was no way they could be locked inside forever, and at least they had a door that shut. Eric and Patty were in favor of getting the hell out. Elle and Marty were doing their best to get everyone to discuss things calmly.

No one was looking at Pris.

She put her tablet down on the nearest desk—realizing only in that moment that they were in a replica of the precinct office from Space Crime Continuum—and took a step toward the wall, turning her back to the group. Then she rolled up her sleeves and looked at her arms. There were no bite marks. She relaxed marginally.

“Oh thank God,” she muttered, and turned back to the others.

They were all watching her. “Pris? Was there something you needed to tell us?” Marty’s tone was gentle, almost sad.

She shook her head. “I’m not bit. I blacked out a little bit during the run, but I’m not bit.”

“Thank God,” said Eric.

Pris smiled. “My sentiments exactly.”

“I don’t feel so good,” said Stuart, and sat down on the edge of a nearby desk, bloody hands tightening around his borrowed spear. “And no, I’m not bit, either. I just don’t like blood and dying and running for my life.”

“No one does,” said the little British man—Matthew, that was his name. Matthew. “Can we get back to the business of sorting out what happens next?”

“I think we should stay here,” said Pris. “We have the wireless back on. We can keep transmitting our position to the authorities, and you guys are right; having walls between us and the rest of the hall is a luxury we can’t afford to give up.”

The argument resumed. This time, it was Stuart who didn’t join in. He let his head loll forward, trying to figure out why he felt so dizzy. It had been coming on in waves since they left Kelly alone by the front wall, and the dizziness was just getting worse as time passed.

None of them understood the Kellis-Amberlee virus: Understanding was something for the future, for the survivors of the Rising and the heroes at the CDC who would begin their multi-decade fight against an elegant work of accidental genetic engineering. But they understood zombies, and they knew that a bite, under these circumstances, could very well mean death.

None of them considered that bloody hands carelessly touching the face, brushing against the mucus membranes of the nose and mouth, wiping tears away from vulnerable eyes, could be just as dangerous as a bite, if slightly slower-acting. They were smart people. By the standards of their time, they were well equipped to survive. But none of them had the knowledge they needed to understand what was going on inside Stuart’s body. Kellis-Amberlee was already with them in their little sanctuary; it had entered via the front door, and it was not leaving.

Stuart clutched his spear a little tighter, and waited for the room to stop spinning.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

The rum is gone. Lorelei stopped drinking shortly after I did, and now stares into her empty cup like she expects it to start offering answers. I have barely needed to prompt her through the last segment of her story. Now that the floodgates are open, it is all rushing out.

LORELEI: Vanessa had this program on her iPad. It was a little video recorder thing. She had it set to transmit everything to the server, so that even if she lost the physical tablet, she’d still have the recordings. I think it was supposed to be some sort of crime-prevention thing. Like if the iPad got stolen and the thief hit the wrong button, he’d find himself on Candid Camera. She turned it on when they left the booth. Everything recorded. Everything uploaded. And I watched it all.

MAHIR: Do you still have the footage?

LORELEI: I’ve tried to delete it a thousand times. I can’t. It’s my parents. It’s the last time they were alive anywhere in the world. They were less than ten miles away from me, and they were on camera, and I wasn’t there. I should have been there. I should have stayed. But I had to be a pissy little bitch and get myself sent to the hotel. I—

MAHIR: Do you really think they would have held things together any better if you’d been in danger with them? My daughter is very young, Ms. Tutt. She’s not even walking yet, much less sulking off because she’s tired of me. And I’d sooner die than see her in danger. As a parent, I can assure you that your absence was the greatest gift you could possibly have given them.

Lorelei looks at me, startled. Her eyes are very wide, and for a moment—only a moment, but it’s real—I can see the teenager she must have been, innocent enough to enjoy a weekend at a comic book convention with her parents, naive enough to think that nothing bad would ever happen to her. My heart breaks a little in that moment. Not for Captain Lorelei J. Tutt, United States Coast Guard, but for the Lorelei who might have been, the girl that was on that hot summer day at the beginning of the Rising. She died there as surely as her parents did, in everything but flesh.

Finally, she speaks.

LORELEI: Would you like to see the footage?

MAHIR: Yes. I very much would. If you don’t think it would be too difficult for you.

LORELEI: It will be. But it’s something I need to do. Come with me.

She rises and leads me back to the living room, where she opens a cabinet beneath the television to reveal a stack of old-style DVD cases. She doesn’t need to look for what she wants: It’s right at the top. Without saying another word, Lorelei opens the case, extracts the disk, and slips it into the DVD player. The press of a single button turns on the television, and the video begins to play.

The tall, bald man with the hammer in his hand and the broad shoulders must be her father, Shawn Tutt. A glance at Lorelei’s face confirms this; there are tears in her eyes, and when he says, “Come on, people. We need to pick up the pace,” her lips move along with the words.

The other people with him both do and do not look like I pictured them. The short brunette woman with the determined eyes must be Lynn Tutt, Lorelei’s mother. I thought she’d be taller; Lorelei must get her height from her father’s side of the family. Leita is younger than I expected, with pale skin and dyed black hair. Her brother is younger still, clearly afraid, just as clearly determined that he will not be the first to break. Only Vanessa herself walks unseen, the woman behind the camera.

I have friends who would have appreciated that role.

“Are we sure this is the right way?” Leita is asking, a ragged edge of exhaustion and fear in her voice. “I don’t want—”

12:15 A.M.

“—to get stranded down a blind alley because nobody had a damn map.”

“We get to the back wall, and then we walk toward the far end of the hall until we come to the food court,” said Shawn grimly. “Once we’re there, we deal with whatever gets in our way.”

“What do you mean ‘deal with’ ?” asked Robert. He sounded nervous. They were all terrified; he was just the only one who couldn’t seem to stop himself from showing it.

“I mean we deal with it,” said Shawn, hand tightening on the handle of his hammer.

Leita put a hand on her brother’s arm. “Let it go,” she murmured. “This isn’t the time to start questioning the chain of command.”

“I should have stayed home and played video games all weekend,” Robert muttered, and kept walking.

“Vanessa? Are you all right back there?” Lynn twisted around to look at Vanessa, who was bringing up the rear.

“I’m fine,” said Vanessa. “I’m just checking the news sites. I want to see if there’s anyone talking about the bombing. Maybe we can find out how long we have.”

“Just watch your step,” said Shawn, after a very brief pause. He wanted her paying attention. He wanted information even more.

“I’m watching,” said Vanessa, and kept tapping.

Lynn paced alongside her husband, her own makeshift weapon—a length of timber that was intended to be part of the booth’s main structure—clutched tightly in her hands. She didn’t say anything at all. At this point, she didn’t want to tell lies, and she didn’t want to hear them, either. All the pretty reassurances and mealymouthed platitudes in the world wouldn’t change their situation. So they just walked on.

The blockades around the webcomic district stopped them. “Now what?” asked Robert. “Do we go around?”

“Not if we can help it.” Shawn stepped forward, rapping his hammer against the nearest makeshift wall. “Hey. We’re clean. We need to get to the wall. Let us through.”

Silence answered.

Shawn rapped again, a little harder. “Hey! We need to get to the back wall, and we don’t have time to go around you! Let us through!”

This time, there was an answer from the other side: a single soft moan that made the hairs on the back of Lynn’s neck stand on end. She grabbed Shawn’s elbow before he could rap a third time, pulling him backward.

“Shawn,” she hissed. “They’re not going to let us in, and I don’t think we want them coming out.”

Shawn hesitated. Then, slowly, he nodded. “All right,” he said. “We go around.”

The zombies trapped inside the carefully constructed borders of the webcomics district gathered by the barrier and moaned as the Browncoats turned and walked away. But they didn’t break through, and for the moment, it seemed like escape might still be possible.

* * *

12:37 A.M.

A consensus had finally been reached, after a great deal of argument and some uncalled for swearing: They would stay put, monitor the social media feeds, and wait for rescue. Looking quietly relieved, Matthew sank down into one of the desk chairs, with Patty standing somewhat sulkily next to him. Elle sat back down on the replica of the precinct captain’s desk, head bowed in a combination of resignation and simple exhaustion. None of them had eaten, visited a bathroom, or really slept for hours. Pris, Eric, and Marty gathered together near one of the other desks, unconsciously illustrating the ongoing divide between the two groups.

Only Stuart didn’t move. Stuart hadn’t moved for a while, sitting on the edge of a desk, resting most of his weight on the spear he’d taken from Kelly.

Stuart didn’t feel good. And by that point, he knew that something was seriously wrong. He made a small sound, somewhere between a grunt and a moan. It had been long enough since he’d made any sounds at all that the others turned toward him, somehow hearing him above the screaming from outside.

“Stuart?” said Eric. “You okay, buddy?”

“You need . . . to go,” said Stuart. Forcing out the words seemed like more work than it should have been. He raised his head. That was even harder than speaking had been.

Patty’s eyes widened. “Your nose is bleeding.”

“You need . . . to go,” repeated Stuart. “What Kelly had. Think she gave it . . . to me. You can’t. Stay.”

“Oh, God,” whimpered Patty, and plastered herself against Matthew.

“Please,” said Stuart. “Please.”

“But she didn’t bite him!” said Eric. “How the fuck did he get sick, huh?”

“Does it matter?” asked Matthew. He got to his feet, tugging Patty along with him. “Come on, sweetheart. We need to go.”

“There are more out there than there are in here,” said Marty. “I think the odds are still better if we stay put.”

“And get blood everywhere, when we’ve just shown that the damn stuff is indirectly transmissible?” snapped Matthew. “No. If we’re going to be fucked no matter what we do, I’d rather be fucked running than sitting still.”

Stuart moaned, the spear falling from his hands. And then he lunged.

Maybe it was the setting. The precinct was the office of the Time Police, after all; it was the place where Indiction Rivers fought the forces of evil, prevented paradoxes, and always had perfect hair, even in the middle of a firefight. Maybe it was instinct. Or maybe it was simply that Elle had put herself in charge of her little accidental group of refugees, and when they were put in danger, she had to react. Whatever the reason, she flung herself from the desk where she’d been seated and grabbed Stuart by the back of the neck before he could reach the shrilly screaming Patty.

Whirling, Elle slammed Stuart against the nearest wall, using every technique she’d learned in her self-defense courses and in training for her role with the show to keep him pinned. “Go!” she shouted. “Get moving!”

“We’re not leaving you!” said Marty.

“You won’t have to! I’ll let him go when I have a clear shot at the door—but I’m not doing it before! Now move it!”

The others moved.

Stuart squirmed. Elle shoved him harder against the wall. “You seemed like a nice guy,” she said. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

The techniques Elle had learned were designed to restrain people without harming them, and worked partially because most people would not hurt themselves to get loose. They were never intended for use on people who no longer cared about pain. She was still holding Stuart in place when he twisted himself at an angle that dislocated his shoulder with an audible popping sound and sank his teeth into her upper arm.

Elle screamed. Matthew, who had been escorting the others out the door, turned and stared at her in horror.

“Go!” she shouted. “Just go!”

Matthew hesitated. Only for a second. Then he nodded, mouthed the words “Thank you,” and stepped out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

Elle Riley, who would be remembered by most of history for her portrayal of Indiction Rivers, Time Police, and by a woman named Sigrid Robinson for everything else, closed her eyes. And then she let the zombie go.

If she screamed, no one heard it. Elle Riley died bravely, and when she died, she died alone.

Outside, the others moved into the aisles, heading away from the sound of screaming, heading toward the unknown dangers lurking in the darkness along the back wall.

* * *

1:09 A.M.

“We don’t have long,” said Vanessa, scrolling through Twitter as she walked. “People outside are reporting that they’re being moved even farther from the convention center. It looks like there’s a half-mile perimeter being established.”

“If it’s only a half-mile, they’re not using anything radioactive,” said Shawn, walking a little faster. The rest of the group matched his pace. “That’s good. That means we have a much better chance of getting the hell out of here.”

“How much farther?” asked Robert.

“I don’t know,” said Shawn. “Those damn barricades . . .”

“Just keep moving,” said Lynn. “That’s all we can do. Keep moving.”

They hadn’t been attacked yet, but they all knew that it was coming. So when a single blood-encrusted figure stepped from behind a nearby booth, Shawn nearly bashed his head in with the hammer. Only the figure’s quick backward stumble and cry of, “No, don’t! I’m not gone yet!” held his swing.

“Who are you?” demanded Lynn, raising her board into a defensive position.

“Matthew. Matthew Meigs. Are you clean?”

“For the moment,” said Shawn, lowering his hammer. “You’re covered in blood.”

“None of it’s mine.” Most of it was Patty’s. Dear, sweet Patty, who had only ever wanted to be married, and to go to the San Diego Comic-Con, and to love him . . . Matthew shook his head, willing the thought away. “The back wall’s no better than the main floor, and in some ways, it’s worse. A lot of people fled there. My group among them.” All those hands, grasping, and all those teeth . . .

“That’s where the exit is, and we have to get out of here,” said Robert. “We don’t have a choice.”

“We’re all infected.” Matthew’s tone was soft, even resigned. “It’s in the blood.”

“You’re the only one with blood on you,” said Leita.

“For now. But if you fight your way back to that wall, even if you make it there, you won’t be clean anymore. You may not be bitten, but you won’t be clean. And then what? If you make it out, then what? You spread this? You take it out into the world?”

“It had to come from somewhere,” said Vanessa.

“That doesn’t mean we have to take it back there.” Matthew shook his head. “You’ll never walk away. You’ll just find yourself on the business end of a sniper rifle instead of dying in here with the rest of us. You’ve no cause to believe me. I know that. But you can save yourselves a great deal of pain by staying away from that wall.” He looked at his bloody fingers. “As for me, I got a drop in my eye when the bastards took my wife, before I turned and ran. I haven’t long. I’m going back to where I left a friend of mine, in a little room with a door that shuts. I think I’ll go inside and shut the door behind me. Elle deserves the company. It was nice to meet you all.”

With that, the blood-covered little British man turned and walked away, vanishing quickly into the maze of aisles.

“What a crock of shit,” said Robert. “Come on. Let’s move.”

None of the others moved at all. Shawn and Lynn were looking at each other.

“Do you think he was telling the truth?” asked Lynn.

“It’s possible,” said Shawn. “It seems probable, even, given the reaction we’ve seen so far.”

“So what do we do?”

“Lorelei,” said Shawn quietly. It was all he had to say. They couldn’t take this out of the convention center, not when their daughter was out there, not when she would run to them at the first chance she got. He turned and looked to the others. “I can’t tell you what to do. It’s not my place. But Lynn and I won’t be carrying this infection out into the world. We’re going back to the booth. Seems a fitting place to wait for what comes next.”

Leita reached over and took her brother’s hand. Robert looked down at the floor. “We’ll come with you.”

“Me, too,” said Vanessa. She smiled, just a little. “Never leave a man behind. That’s what it means to be part of a crew, right? Never, ever leave a man behind.”

“It was an honor,” said Shawn.

“Same, Captain,” replied Vanessa.

They turned, five people in a convention center given, now, mostly to the dead, and slowly made their way back to where they’d started.

* * *

1:24 A.M.

The dizziness was coming in waves by the time Matthew reached the precinct. He’d passed a few of the fully infected on the way—not many; most were at the back wall, but enough—and none of them had troubled him. They knew their own.

No sounds were coming from inside. Either Stuart had killed her after he turned or they were both in there waiting, silently, for escape. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered at this point.

“Hello, Elle. I came back to keep you company,” said Matthew, and opened the door.

LORELEI TUTT’S APARTMENT,

LONDON, ENGLAND, JUNE 1, 2044

The Browncoats on Lorelei’s recording are singing. They began shortly after they reached their booth, and have continued since, asserting over and over that they’re still free. Lorelei is singing with them, tears running down her face, and she keeps singing when the white flash of the bombs hitting the convention center wipes the image away. She knows the words they never had the chance to say. There’s something beautiful in that, a sort of immortality for the people who died that day.

The screen goes from white to black. Lorelei goes silent. I keep watching the screen, giving her a chance to compose herself as we both pretend that I didn’t see her cry. Finally, when she’s ready, she speaks again.

LORELEI: So that’s what happened. That’s everything I know about what happened.

MAHIR: I have other pieces of the story. I was able to interview Sigrid Robinson. She knew more about what happened with that poor man who warned your parents off going to the rear.

LORELEI: I’ve always wondered. If they hadn’t met him . . . would they have made it out? The Rising happened. A few more people wouldn’t have changed anything.

I’ve seen the blueprints of the convention center as it was before it fell. I know the answer. I do not hesitate.

MAHIR: No. They would simply have died in a different place, and without making the right decision.

LORELEI: That’s good. That’s . . . good.

She turns to look at the poster behind the television set. It looks almost like a comic book cover, lovingly drawn: a group of people, some of whom I now recognize, standing against a field of stars. Their clothing looks something like the American West, something like what they wore in the video. They are looking off into the distance, staring forever toward a future they died before seeing.

Beneath them is written a simple epigram:

SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA, 2014

KEEP FLYING

MAHIR: Thank you for speaking with me today.

LORELEI: I miss them.

For once in my life, I have nothing to say, and so I don’t say anything at all.

* * *

Remember, when you talk about the Rising: The story you know is not the only one that contains the truth. We may never find all the pieces, and some of them may be broken beyond understanding. But we must all, in the words of a doomed man to his child, keep flying.

It is the only way left for us to honor the dead.

—Mahir Gowda

THE STARS DO NOT LIE

Jay Lake

In the beginnings, the Increate did reach down into the world and where They laid Their hand was all life touched and blossomed and brought forth from water, fire, earth and air. In eight gardens were the Increate’s children raised, each to have dominion over one of the eight points of the Earth. The Increate gave to men Their will, Their word and Their love. These we Their children have carried forward into the opening of the world down all the years of men since those first days.

—Librum Vita, Beginnings 1:1—4;
being the Book of Life and word entire of the Increate

Morgan Abutti; B.SC. Bio.; M.Sc. Arch.; Ph.D. Astr. & Nat, Sci.; 4th degree Thalassocrete; Member, Planetary Society; and Associate Fellow of the New Garaden Institute, stared at the map which covered the interior wall of his tiny office in the Institute’s substantial brownstone in downtown Highpassage. The new electricks were still being installed by brawny, nimble-fingered men of crafty purpose who often smelled a bit of smoke and burnt cloth. Thus his view was dominated by a flickering quality of light that would have done justice to a smoldering hearth, or a wandering planet low in the pre-dawn sky. The gaslamp men were complaining of the innovations, demonstrating under Lateran banners each morning down by the Thalassojustity Palace in their unruly droves.

He despised the rudeness of the laboring classes. Almost to a man, they were pale-faced fools who expected something for nothing, as if simply picking up a wrench could grant a man worth.

Turning his attentions away from the larger issues of political economy and surplus value, he focused once more on history.

Or religion.

Honestly, Morgan was never quite certain of the difference any more.

Judging from the notes and diagrams limned up and down the side of the wide rosewood panel in their charmingly archaic style, the map had been painted about a century earlier for some long-dead theohistoriographer. The Eight Gardens of the Increate were called out in tiny citrons that somehow had survived the intervening years without being looted by hungry servants or thirsty undergraduates. Morgan traced his hand over the map, fingers sliding across the pitted patina of varnish and oil soap marking the attentions of generations of charwomen.

Eufrat.

Quathlamba.

Ganj.

Manju.

Wy’east.

Tunsa.

Antiskuna.

Cycladia.

The homes of man. Archaeological science was clear enough. Thanks to the work of natural scientists of the past century, so was the ethnography. The Increate had placed the human race upon this Earth. That was absolutely clear. Just as the priests of the Lateran had always taught, nothing of humanity was older than the villages of the Gardens of the Increate.

Nothing.

Sick at heart, Morgan turned back to his photographic plates, their silver oxide bearing indubitable evidence of ephemeral nature of such faith in the Increate.

The stars do not lie.

“Gentlemen of the Planetary Society . . .” Morgan Abutti let his voice trail off a moment. His next words once uttered could never be taken back. Not before this august assemblage of the greatest scientific minds of the modern era. He drew in a deep breath and plunged recklessly onward. “On examination of considerable evidence from fields as varied as paleontology, archaeology, and astronomy, I have been compelled to confront the distinct likelihood that we, the human race, are not of this world.”

He paused to give the audience a moment to consider the proposition. The racket of the city of Highpassage echoed from outside the Society’s Plenary Hall—steam whistles, horses, motorcars, the grumble of the new diesel engines powering the latest generations of airships. The seven hundred faces staring at him included a scattering of the paler-skinned northern folk, who were finally entering academe and the sciences thanks to the same progressive policies that had helped pave Morgan’s own way to the exclusive University of Highpassage. That women had been allowed to study a generation earlier had cracked open the door that later admitted the traditionally inferior white race.

The world was growing more open-minded by the decade in spite of itself. Were his colleagues in the Planetary Society ready for this, his grand conclusion?

What he’d thought to be shocked silence degraded into murmuring, muttering, even outright laughter in a few corners. Some delegates rose from their seats, ready to move onward to more fruitful pursuits. Others struck up conversations with their seatmates, or commenced making notes, in some cases with deliberate ostentation.

Morgan had lost the audience, waiting for their reaction to his news.

“I have . . . have assembled a précis of the evidence . . .” he began, but his voice trailed off. A moment later Doctor Professor the Revered Lucan Matroit, Secretary-General of the Planetary Society, plucked at Morgan’s sleeve.

“My deepest regrets, ah . . . Doctor Abutti,” Lucan said quietly, his tone as formal and disinterested as if the two of them had never met before. “The Society thanks you for your contributions.” He quite effectively twisted Morgan’s arm and propelled him toward the heavy maroon velvet curtains marking stage left.

“Dear ones,” Lucan called out to the audience, which immediately stilled its unrest at his piercing voice. “Let us now offer praise to the Increate, as redress to Them for the caprice and responsibilities of free will . . .”

Morgan did not hear the rest of the invocative prayer. Two of the Society’s burly porters—like most of their fellows, former Thalassojustity Marines—seized him by the upper arms, shoved his despatch case into his hands, jammed his bowler hat upon his head, and escorted him to a service entrance from which he was summarily ejected into a dungspattered alley under the doleful gaze of a brace of hinnies hitched to a rag man’s cart.

At least they had not thrown him bodily into the muck. No, even that embarrassment had been trumped with a few mere words by Lucan Matroit.

Gathering the shreds of his dignity, Morgan resolved to retreat to the shelter of his office at the New Garaden Institute. The Avenida Tram line ran past the Plenary Hall, and would deposit him within two blocks of his destination.

Waiting for the next street car to arrive, Morgan noticed one of the porters watching him. The man leaned on a pillar of the rococo façade of the Plenary Hall, smoking a fat cigar and making no effort to hide himself, or pretend interest in anything but Morgan. After adjusting his collar tabs and fussing with his shirt front, Morgan held his leather case to his chest as if it could armor him, and waited among the ladies’ maids and banker’s daughters for the tram.

Riding among a crowd consisting mostly of servants summoned memories that Morgan had expended some effort at setting aside. The human odor of painfully starched cleanliness and faint malnutrition within the tram was far too reminiscent of his own childhood. He stared out at the streets of Highpassage, ignoring the people around him with their muted gossip and wondered what he’d been about.

Seeking truth, science, had been his path out of ungenteel poverty. That the good universities admitted scholarship boys at all was still a strange novelty when Morgan had first enrolled. He’d studied beyond reason to qualify, understanding perfectly clearly he would have to do twice as well to be thought half as good as someone of monied birth and good family.

Even now, with his doctorate and his post at the New Garaden Institute, far too few listened with ears of reason. People only saw and heard what they wished. If he’d been a titled scion of some ancient house, Matroit would not have been able to rush him out of the Planetary Society.

The most important discovery of the modern age was being crushed by pettiness. No different from the rough back alley games of his youth. The strongest ones, the ones with the most friends, always prevailed.

Head pressed against the glass, feeling the shudder of the tracks through the tram’s iron wheels, Morgan almost wept to realize the world’s unfairness had no end. He could never be good enough, never have possession of enough facts, to surpass that barrier.

The New Garaden Institute’s offices occupied the majority of an elegant building that had been designed and constructed during the height of the Neoclassical Revival at the beginning of the previous century. It had been one of the first structures in Highpassage built with the intention of being gas lit and centrally heated. Plumbing stacks, gas valve closets, ventilation shafts for the introduction of fresh air to the innermost precincts of the structure—the building had been a truly visionary project from the century’s most famous architect, Kingdom Obasa. A brilliant Iberiard educated outside the top-ranked university system, Obasa had very much gone his own way in both engineering and aesthetics. As a result, for all of its brownstone glory the New Garaden Institute nonetheless resembled nothing so much as a cathedral which had been somewhat melted.

The recent addition of an array of rooftop electrickal signaling devices for the propagation and reception of radio waves had done nothing to alleviate the building’s strangeness.

Stung, embittered, saddened by his setback, but firmly in command of himself once more, Morgan stumbled through the vestibule into the receiving parlor only to find the Desk Porter in close consultation with a pair of on-duty Thalassojustity Marines. His view of the wide expanse of maroon carpet, delicate settees and brass rails telescoped into a horrified vision of another ejection from his barely attained positions of privilege. The Marines’ formal red tunics contrasted oddly with the firearms borne by both of the large men. While Morgan had little familiarity with weapons, even he could see that these were not the long-barreled, wooden-stocked rifles carried on parade, but rather short, snub-nosed bits of machined steel slung tight on well-worn leather straps. Businesslike tools of violence, in other words.

“Ah, Dr. Abutti,” one of the Marines said, even before he’d turned from the Desk Porter’s podium. A large man, his purple-blue eyes were like grapes squeezed into the unnaturally pale, ruddy flesh of his face.

Morgan was impressed for about three beats, until he realized the man had seen his reflection in the glassed-over painting of the Battle of Mino Harbor behind the podium.

“Indeed. I do not believe we have been introduced.” Morgan glanced pointedly at the Desk Porter. The Desk Porter—was his name Philas? Phelps?—just as pointedly failed to meet Morgan’s eye.

“No need, sir. You’re to come with us. Thalassojustity business. You’re being called before the Lesser Bench, sir.” The Marine favored Morgan with a warm smile that did not meet the eyes. His fellow favored Morgan with the blank stare of a gun barrel casually swung to bear.

“Now?” Morgan asked with an involuntary swallow.

“Now.” And after a moment too long, “Sir.”

“I may be some time,” Morgan told the Desk Porter.

“I’ll make a note, Doctor.” This time he did raise his eyes with a faint flash of malice.

When first they hanged the pirate Black upon the beach

Little did the captains trow what they set upon the sea

Neither haunt nor hollow, down the long years between

Justice for the open waves, and a fire upon the deep

—Lords of the Horizon, Ebenstone (trad. attrib.)

By sharp contrast with the New Garaden Institute, the Thalassojustity Palace was arguably the oldest building in Highpassage. It was certainly the oldest building still in regular use. The legal and sovereign relationship between the Thalassojustity and its host city were ambiguous, strained by two millennia and more of precedent, treaty, and occasional open warfare.

In other words, arguably not in Highpassage proper. The Increate, as always, manifested Their power on the side of the big battalions.

Morgan Abutti was treated to a close view of the Pirate’s Steps, the ancient risers that led to the formal portico. A temple of the sea, the palace had been looking out across the Attik Main for over a third of recorded history. He knew the building well—impossible not to as a fourth-degree Thalassocrete. The initiation ceremonies stressed history above all else.

Normally he used a discrete side door for the alternate Thursday lodge meetings. Only criminals and heads of state paraded up the Pirate’s Steps. He knew which he wasn’t.

“What have I done?” he asked of the two Marines for at least the sixth time. For at least the sixth time, they gave him no answer. Even the false smiles had vanished, to be replaced by a firm grip on each arm and the banging of one Marine’s firearm against Morgan’s hip.

At the top of the steps, he was hoisted around and faced outward, so that he stared at the bottle-green waters of the Attik Main. Shipping crowded the waves, as always at Highpassage, one of the busiest ports in the world. Great iron steamers from the yards at Urartu far to the east passed above dish-prowed fishing boats whose lines had not changed in a thousand years of beachfront ship building. A white-hulled Thalassojustity cutter cruised past barges and scows waiting for their dock pilots. Overhead, a pair of the new Iberiard dirigibles beat hard against the wind, engines straining as they slung urgent deck cargo to landfall from a vessel waiting too long for a slip.

Highpassage, crossroads of the world.

But the message wasn’t that, Morgan knew. He’d sat through too many initiations not to see the point the Marines were making. The hanging tree, the ultimate symbol of both justice and power across the world’s maritime extents, stood on beach below him, memorialized as a granite monument to the largely legendary death of the largely legendary pirate Black. That angry court of captains and bosuns had met on a firelit beach in the teeth of a rising storm over two thousand years past to take justice in their own hands after the King of Highpassage had declined to act. The sailors had broken Black, so the story ran, and unintentionally founded a line of power that controlled the high seas to this day, serving as a pragmatic secular counterbalance to the widespread spiritual and temporal influence of the Lateran church.

Drawing on that tradition to this day, justice, as untempered by mercy as the sea itself, was the purpose of the Thalassocretes.

“You’re a man of keen wit and insight,” said the pale Marine in a startlingly soft tone, to Morgan’s surprise.

“I am likely blind to much in this life.” He felt as if he were uttering his last words. “Science is both my mistress and my muse. But even I can still see history.”

Like estranged lovers met on a sidewalk, the moment swiftly passed. A rough adversity resumed. Morgan found himself pushed within, toward the upper halls and the quiet, incense-reeking rooms of the Lesser and Greater Benches of the Thalassojustity.

The Most Revered Bilious F. Quinx; B.Th. Rhet..; M.Th. Hist. & Rit.; Th.D. Hist. & Rit.; 32nd degree Thalassocrete; and master of the Increate’s Consistitory Office for Preservation of the Faith Against Error and Heresy, watched carefully as His Holiness Lamboine XXII paged through one of the prohibitora from the Consistitory’s most confidential library.

The two of them were alone—unusually so, given His Holiness’ nigh everpresent retinue—in the aerie of the Matachin Tower of the Lateran Palace. This room was Quinx’ private study and retreat, and also where his most confidential meetings were held. The latter was due to the architecture of the tower walls that rendered the usual methods of ecclesiastical eavesdropping futile.

Quinx, in both his official capacity and from his well-developed personal sense of curiosity, worried about the possibility of spying via the new electricks. For that reason, he had thus far forbidden any lights or wires to be installed in the Matachin Tower. He preferred instead to rely on traditional oil lamps tended by traditional acolytes who damned well knew to keep their ears shut. And besides which, wore nubble-soled slippers so they could not sneak.

Privacy was both a commodity and a precious resource within these walls of the Increate’s highest house. Quinx made it his business to control the available privacy as much as possible.

Still, having His Holiness leaf so casually through a prohibitorum was enough to give a thoughtful man a galloping case of the hives.

Lamboine—who had once been called Ion when they were boys together in a mountain village plentifully far away from the Holy Precincts—raised his eyes from the page. “There is nothing in this world I am not entitled to know, Bili.”

“You understand me perfectly as always.”

Those words summoned a small, sad smile, one that Quinx also remembered far too well from a youth lost six decades past. “That is why I am the Gatekeeper and you are my hound,” Lamboine replied. As ever, his voice was preternaturally patient. “I have always wondered why our friends among the Thalassocretes have never sought to place a man on the Footstool of the Increate.”

Ion was one of the few remaining alive who could provoke Quinx to unthinking response. “Do you honestly suppose they never have done so? I am numbered among their rolls, after all.”

“They think you their spy in the house of the Increate.” Another small smile. “In any event, I should think I would know if one of them had ever held my throne. My opinion is that they have never felt a need to. Truth is a strange commodity.”

“Much like privacy,” Quinx almost whispered, echoing his own, earlier thoughts.

The Gatekeeper shook his head. “Privacy is just a special case of truth, or its withholding. This . . .” His hand, palsied with the infirmity of age that had yet to overcome Quinx, swept over the open book. “This is truth of a different sort.”

“No, Your Holiness. It is not. It is only the Thalassocretes’ story. We have the Increate and the evidence on our side.”

“What makes you think there are sides, Bili?”

In that moment, Quinx saw Lamboine’s death. Flesh stretched tight and luminous across his face, the deep, natural brown of his skin paling to the color of milk in coffee, his eyes brittle as cracked opals. The man’s fires were guttering. “There are always sides, Ion. That has been my role these long years here, preserving and defending your side.” He paused a moment, then added: “Our side.”

The Gatekeeper waited several measures of silence too long for comfort before replying. “I am glad you did not claim a side for the Increate. They are all, and They are everything.”

“Of course.” Quinx bowed his head.

A trembling hand descended in surprising blessing. Quinx had not even realized that the Gatekeeper had set the book down. “Do not rely too much on evidence, my oldest friend. It has a way of turning against you in time. Proof can change with circumstance. Faith is the rock upon which we must always build.”

Quinx remained bowed until the Gatekeeper had departed, shuffling far enough down the spiral stairs to summon his attendants who bore him away on a wave of soft whispers and perfume. After a time, he rose and set some incense alight before kneeling on a bolster with a small, ricepaper copy of Librum Vita in his grip. It had been made in distant Sind, something of a curiosity, copied out in a firm hand by a man wielding a brush comprised of only a single hair. Act of faith? Dedication to art?

It did not matter. The Increate’s words fit in the palm of Quinx’ hands. From there, he drew comfort as surely as he had from his mother’s grasp once so long ago.

Or Ion’s.

The relief of prayer drew him in then, toward the dim inner light that always filled Bilious Quinx when he sought the Increate in honest, faithful silence with open heart and empty thoughts.

Much later he trimmed the wicks in his office and lit the night lamp. Darkness had descended outside, the evening breeze bearing the itching scent of pollen and spring chill off the mountains to the east and north. Quinx opened his windows, their red glazing parting to let the tepid lamplight spill out to compete with the distant stars.

The Lateran Palace had its own observatories, of course. Someone must demarcate the lines of the world. Even the almighty Thalassojustity had in the past been willing to leave the skies to the church. The irony of that was not lost on Quinx in these late days. He was certain it was no less lost on the Thalassocretes in Highpassage and elsewhere.

No matter his own initiations into their ranks; the Thalassojustity had always known who and what Quinx was, and whose creature he had been, body and soul. That Ion was dying now changed nothing of Quinx’ loyalties.

He considered the prohibitorum, lying so carelessly open where the Gatekeeper had left it on one of the round room’s several curve-backed writing desks. The book was open to a map of the Garden of Ganj, annotated only as the heretics of the Thalassojustity would bother to do. This particular volume was a first printing of the Revised Standard Survey, Th. 1907. Almost a hundred years old, and their color plates a century past were as good as anything the Lateran presses could manage even today.

Ion had left a scrap tucked in the center crease. Quinx plucked it out, his own hand trembling. It was a short note that must have been written before the Gatekeeper had come up to see him, in Ion’s lifelong careful copperplate hand, rendered edgy and strange by the exigencies of age.

Dearest—

Do not let them elect you to the Gatekeeper’s throne after me. And do not be afraid of what may be proven. Farewell, I regret that I must go before.

Always yours.

So he had seen truly into the Gatekeeper’s face. And Dearest. They had not used that word between them in over five decades. Quinx carefully burned the note, then stirred the ashes. After that he trimmed his night lamp back to darkness, closed and sealed the prohibitorum with a black ribbon, and took a chair by one of the open casements to watch the stars wheel slowly until just after midnight the Lateran tower bells began to ring their death knells.

When the great, iron bell of the Algeficic Tower tolled last and slowest of all, his tears finally flowed.

Love is the sin that will not be denied.

—Librum Vita, Wisdoms 7:23;
being the Book of Life and word entire of the

Increate

The funerary rites for His Holiness Lamboine XXII began at Matins as the first flickering sweep of dawn glowed like coals in the eastern sky. In his role as Preserver of the Faith, and therefore fourth-ranking priest in the Lateran hierarchy, Quinx could have insisted on being the celebrant. The two men above him were already closeted deep in the electoral politics of the Primacy, those same delegates from around the world having received the Gatekeeper’s death notice by telelocutor for the first time in Church history.

Quinx had a sick feeling that he would soon grow very weary of that last thought: the first time in history.

Instead of celebrating, he chose to attend as a congregant, a man, a priest, a mourner. The Deacon of the Lateran High Chapel led the first round of services. He was a young man with a perpetually surprised expression now properly dressed in a sweeping black cassock embroidered in gold and silver thread, though he’d begun the services in a nightshirt before being rescued by an acolyte with the right set of chamber keys.

Incense, again, and the familiar tones of the chimes indicating the order of service. As the deacon struck them in turn, Quinx tried to put the memory of the tower bells away. Not to forget, for nothing could be forgotten by a man in his office, but to be set aside.

Prayer was a valve opened to the comfort of the Increate, from Whom all things sprang and to Whom all things flowed. There were times when he could understand the attraction of the Aquatist Heresies, for all that their pernicious metaphors had nearly fatally tangled the Lateran Church in its own liturgies. There were times when he wondered what the Increate truly intended, as if They would speak directly to him in response. There were times when quiet refuge was the greatest gift They could give him. Quinx let the deacon’s droning voice lead him from grief to some other place where his cares could wait on the attentions of his heart.

Somewhere in memory, two young men on a hillside scattered with sheep, goats, and bright blue flowers laughed under a summer sky and spoke together of all things great and small.

When fingers touched his shoulder, Quinx was briefly startled. He’d gone so far into meditation that he’d lost himself in the well-worn rituals of the service. Become the liturgy, as they used to say in seminary.

He looked around. Brother Kurts, his lead investigator, stood as always just a bit too close.

“Sir,” the monk growled. A big man, one of those pale northerners who somehow never seemed to advance far in the Church hierarchy, Kurts carried far more than his own weight. The man was a boulder in a snow-field. Here, in the midst of service, his blocky frame and the dark brown rough-spun habit of his Sibellian Order made him a brutal shout against the soaring of the silk-robed choir who must have filed in to the loft while Quinx had been meditating.

“Kurts?”

“You must come, sir. We have an urgent dispatch from Highpassage. By air.”

“By air?” Briefly, Quinx felt stupid—an unusual sensation for him. Of late, matters of great urgency were transmitted via telelocutor. His own office had approved such innovation only three years earlier, well after the undersea cable had been laid between Highpassage and the Lateran, crossing beneath the Attik Main. Matters of great secrecy were handled quite differently, and always with utmost discretion.

Sending an airship across the sea the night of His Holiness’ death was tantamount to lighting a flare.

“By air, sir,” Kurts confirmed. “Matroit dispatched the messenger.”

Matroit. The man was the very model of probity, and no more likely to panic than he was to fly to the moon. But the timing of the thing . . . It stank of politics. Quinx felt briefly ill. “Was the vessel a Thalassojustity airship?”

The monk shook his head. “A racing yacht. I understand it was put about to have been sent on a dare by some of the young wastrels of the city.”

Not an utterly unreasonable cover story, Quinx had to admit, for all that such defiance of the Thalassojustity was outrageous. Outrageous served as the stock in trade of a certain set in Highpassage. He set aside for later consideration the issue of how Lucan Matroit was connected to that set in the first place. For now, a dispatch this urgent would be a distraction to his grieving heart.

How welcome or unwelcome remained to be seen.

He did not bother to ask if Kurts had read it. The man would not have done so. In his entire life, Quinx had only ever trusted two men utterly. The first of those had passed on into the hands of the Increate last night. The other was here before him. Whatever Kurts’ many flaws, the monk was loyal to the bone. Blood and vows, vows and blood, as they used to say.

Quinx gathered the skirts of his cassock and rose from the prayer bench. He gave an approving nod to the deacon, now well into the third iteration of the funerary mass and looking distinctly tired, before withdrawing from the High Chapel in the wake of his man.

They closeted themselves in a tiny dining room from which Quinx had by virtue of his office ruthlessly evicted four hungry priests. Plates of plain eggs and blackbread toast still steamed. He considered the contents of envelope presented by Kurts. The seal had been genuine enough to the best of Quinx’ rather well sharpened ability to determine. For something that had come rushing over hundreds of miles of open water, the letter within was sufficiently sparse as to seem laughable. A single sheet of crème-colored Planetary Society paper, with that slick finish favored by the very wealthy though it would take few inks. A rushed hand, script rather than copperplate, the pigments a curious green that was one of Matroit’s affectations. And only a very few words indeed.

But such dangerous ones.

It was dated the previous day though no time was given. He realized on reflection that this missive must have been written before Ion’s death could have been known, just by judging the miles the message had flown even at the speed of the fastest air-racing yacht.

Revered—

The Externalist heresy was proclaimed again today in the Plenary Hall. To my surprise, the Thalassocretes have taken custody of the young man in question, but I have secured his work for the nonce. There is a possibility of empirical evidence.

M.

Evidence.

Proof.

Had Ion known last night this letter was coming, known as he was dying? Or was it simply that now happened to be the world’s time for such trials? The cloying smell of cooling eggs provided no answer.

Still, Quinx felt a swift trip to Highpassage would be in order. With their profound challenge to the roots of Lateran doctrine, Externalists were a far more troublesome heresy than the dissenters such as the Machinists or the Originalists. Putting paid to this renewed outbreak of Externalism before it had a chance to establish and multiply was an utmost priority. And that errand in turn would keep him safely away from the deliberations of the Assemblage of Primates, who would surely be meeting in camera the moment the Gatekeeper’s body had been sufficiently blessed. Death was an unfortunate pause in events, but politics continued forever.

There was a young man to see, and a Thalassojustity to face down. Again.

Why people insisted on resisting the obvious and holy truths of the Increate was one of those mysteries of free will that a priest could spend his lifetime contemplating without any success. If all the saints of ancient days could not answer such a question, surely Bilious Quinx would be no wiser.

Questions he could not answer, but problems he could solve.

“Brother Kurts . . .”

“Sir?”

“Does the airship pilot perhaps await our pleasure?”

There was the briefest pause, then the slightest tone of satisfaction in the monk’s reply. “I have already made certain of it, sir.”

The advantages of the reflecting telescope over the refracting telescope cannot be understated, and should be obvious to any thinking man. While the great refractors of the past century have multiplied our understanding of the Increate’s work amidst the heavens, the practical exigencies of glass-making, gravity and the engineering arts limit the refracting mirrors to less than fifty inches of diameter. Advances in the philosophy of the reflecting telescope have produced designs by such luminaries as Kingdom Obasa’s son and successor Brunel for mirrors of a hundred inches or greater! Even now, the Planetary Society raises a subscription for such a heavenly monster to be placed upon Mount Sysiphe north of Highpassage, that we might enumerate the craters of the moon and count the colors of the stars to better understand the glories of Creation. A true union of Science and Faith can only prosper from such noble endeavors.

—Editorial in the Highpassage Argus-Intelligencer,

November 2nd, H.3123, Th.1997, L.6011

“Lesser Bench” was a misnomer. Morgan knew that. Everybody knew that. The Greater Bench met only in solemn conclave on the beach to hear capital cases, and certain classes of piracy accusations. Everything else that transpired in the Thalassojustity took place under the purview of the Lesser Bench.

The question was which of those benches.

The two Marines dragged Morgan into the interior of the Thalassojustity Palace. The main nave soared to the roof, some eighty feet above, and was lined with enormous statues of sea captains and Thalassocretes through the ages. The joke ran that the bodies remained the same and the heads were switched from time to time. Whatever the truth, the sculpture represented one of the greatest troves of Classical art in the world, with continuous provenance stretching back well before the onset of consistent recordkeeping.

Glorious, strange, and too large for the world—that was the majesty of the Thalassojustity, encapsulated in the world of art.

At the moment, Morgan was feeling inglorious, ordinary, and far too small. Even the marble flags were oversized, designed to intimidate.

He was scooted a bit too fast past the massive altarpiece at the far end of the nave, through a bronze door wrought with an overly detailed relief of some long-forgotten naval battle, and into a far more ordinary hallway that could have been found in any reasonably modern commercial building in Highpassage. Electricks flickered overhead, giving a reddish-yellow cast to the light. Entrances lining each side of the hallway were so mundane as to be aggressive in their plainness—dark brown, two-paneled doors, each relieved with frosted glass painted with the name of some bureau or official. Cocked-open transoms above each provided some relief from a warmth that must be stifling in high summer.

Only the carpet, a finely napped deep blue that Morgan could not put a name to, betrayed the true wealth of this place.

Well down the hall he was propelled into an intersecting corridor with doors set much farther apart. Larger rooms for larger purposes? The Courts of the Lesser Bench, he realized, as they passed a door where gold-flecked lettering proclaimed “EXCISE BENCH.”

The door he was pushed through was marked “LOYALTY BENCH.”

Morgan’s heart stuttered cold and hard. The treason court. Where offenses against the Thalassojustity itself, or against the common good, were tried.

The door slammed behind him. No Marines. Morgan whirled, taking in the small gallery, the judge’s podium, stands for witness and examiner, the interrogation chair, glass cabinets where evidence or exhibits might be stored.

And no one present. No judge, no advocates, no clerks of the court, no bailiffs, no witnesses, no one at all but himself. Defendant?

The walls rose high, two or three storeys, though not as tall as the nave. These were paneled in inlays of half a dozen different colored woods to create a pleasing abstract pattern. Electrick chandeliers dangled overhead. Their fat iron arms signaled their gaslamp history.

Morgan ceased gaping and sat down in the gallery. He had no desire to approach the front of the courtroom. As nothing seemed to be taking place, he simply closed his eyes for a moment. His heartbeat calmed for the first time since stepping to the podium back at the Plenary Hall of the Planetary Society.

Without seeing, other senses sharpened. He smelled the furniture polish and floor wax of the courtroom, along with the faint ozone scent of the electricks. All of it masked the underlying accumulation of human stress and fear. Perspiration had left its indelible mark in the air.

The sounds of the room were similar: a faint buzz from the lights, the creak and sigh of old wood, the footfalls of someone approaching.

Morgan’s eyes shot open and he stiffened.

The newcomer—no door had opened, had it?—was gloriously darkskinned as any king of old, gray eyes almost silver in a cragged and noble face. His hair was worked back in prince-rows, each set with tiny turquoise and silver beads so that he seemed almost to be wearing a net upon his head. A silver hoop hung from his left ear, the conciscrux of the Thalassojustity tiny in his right. Barefoot, he wore a laborer’s canvas trousers and shirt, though dyed a deep maroon rather than the usual blue or grubby tan. Despite the attire, this one would not have fooled any thinking observer for more than a moment, not with his bearing.

After a moment, Morgan finally registered how small the man was. Barely shoulder high, four foot nine at the most. That was when he knew who he faced—Eraster Goins, presiding judge of the Lesser Benches. The Thalassocrete.

“Pardon my state of undress,” Goins said politely. “I was attending to some physical matters when I was informed of the requirement for my presence.”

“I . . . Sir . . .” Morgan made the hand-sign of his lodge.

A crinkling smile emerged that was entirely at odds with the power at this man’s word. Goins could summon fleets, lay waste to cities, claim the life of almost anyone, at his mere whim. “Of course I know that, Dr. Abutti. You do not need to demonstrate your loyalty or training at this time.”

At this time.

“Wh-what, then, sir?”

“Well . . .” Goins cracked his knuckles, took a moment to find great interest in the beds of his nails. Morgan did not think this was a man ordinarily at a loss for words. “So far as anyone in the city of Highpassage is concerned, you are in here being thrashed within an inch of your now-worthless life. This matter will be of specific interest to certain Lateran observers.”

Morgan was moved to briefly study his own hands. He was under threat, certainly. No one talked to Goins or his ilk without placing themselves at great risk. A single false word could misplace an entire career, or a lifetime’s work. Or freedom.

“This is about my speech at the Planetary Society, isn’t it?”

“Your perspicacity shall soon be legendary.” Goins’ tone managed to be simultaneously ironically airy and edged with a whiff of fatality. “Perhaps you would care to explain to me what you thought you were about?”

“Am I on trial?” Morgan regretted the words the instant he’d blurted them out.

“No, but you certainly could be.” Goins eyes narrowed, his smile now gone to some faraway place. “You would enjoy the process far less than you’re enjoying this discussion, I shall be pleased to assure you.”

“No, I didn’t mean . . .” Morgan stopped stumbling through reflexive excuses and instead summoned both his courage and his words. Proof was proof, by the stars. He couldn’t explain everything, but he could explain a great deal more than was comfortable. “I have new evidence concerning the Eight Gardens, and the origins of man.”

“I do not believe that is considered an open question. Are you a Lateran theologian, to revisit Dispersionism? That is a matter for our contemplative competitor on the southern verge of the Attik Main.”

Morgan made the sign of the Increate across his chest. “I do not presume to challenge faith, I just—”

“No?” Goins voice rose. “What precisely did you intend to present to the Planetary Society, then?”

He was sweating now, his gut knotted. This had always been the crux of the matter. The world was so true, so logical. Until it wasn’t. His newly summoned courage deserted Morgan, apparently to be followed by a fading sense of self-preservation. “A mistake, sire. I intended to present a mistake.”

“Hmmm.” Goins took Morgan’s attaché case from his unresisting hands, tugged open the flap. “A mistake. That’s better. You still haven’t answered my question, however.” The presiding judge leaned close. “What was the mistake?”

Morgan opened his mouth, to have his lips stopped by the single tap of his inquisitor’s finger.

“Heed me carefully, Dr. Morgan Abutti. We have no copyist present. No autonomic locugraphitor hums nearby. No clerks of the court labor at my elbow to give later inconvenient testimony. I do not ask you this from my seat of responsibility at the head of the Pirate’s Steps. I do not wear my robe and chain of office. No oaths have been sworn beyond those we both live under every day of our lives.” Goins leaned close. “At this moment, I am merely a man, asking a simple question of another mere man. Both of us stand before the Increate now as always clad only in our honor. After you have answered, we may make other decisions. Other testimonies may be required, each suitable to their intended audiences. For now, I only listen. To the truth entire as you understand it.

“So tell me. What was the mistake?”

“I believed something I saw of significance in the heavens,” Morgan said simply. “Though what I found runs against the word and the will of the Increate, and everything that has been taught to us in the six thousand years since They first placed man in the Eight Gardens and awoke us to Their world.”

“Mmm.” Goins stepped away from Morgan, paced briefly back and forth before turning to face him again. “I trust we are not so lucky that this mistake in the heavens was presented to you by an eight-winged angel with glowing eyes? Or perhaps the voice of the Increate Themself whispering in your sleeping ear? I am going to assume that your . . . mistake . . . arrived borne on the back of evidence derived from the latest and most pleasing artefacts of Dame Progress, objective and empirical in the hand.”

Morgan stared at Goins, appalled. “Had an angel told me what I have learned, you could call me both blest and crazed. Almost all would smile behind their hands and carry on.”

“Precisely.”

“ ’Twas no angel, sir. No miracle at all, except that of optics, patience, and an emulsion of silver salts painted onto a glass plate to be exposed to the night sky before moonrise could flood the world with pallid light.”

“Mmm.” This time Goins did not pace, but stared instead at Morgan. “And what do you think this photographic truth signifies? Speaking in your professional capacity, of course.”

Morgan’s heart sank further. He was close to tears, torn. “I c-cannot deny the Increate.”

“Why not? You were prepared to do so in front of seven hundred people in the Plenary Hall not two hours past.”

“Forgive me. I . . . I did not understand what it was I was about.” He wanted to groan, cry, shriek. It was as if he were being torn apart. “Is not truth part of Their creation?”

Goins leaned close. “What you did was take some photographs of the night sky, study them, and draw conclusions. You did this being the good scientist that you are, trained at the University of Highpassage and the New Garaden Institute. One of our New Men, concerned with the evidence of the world before them rather than the testimony of tradition. I don’t want to know what the innocent boy who prayed to the Increate every night believes. I want to know what the educated man peering into the telescope thinks.”

The words poured out of Morgan Abutti with the strength of confession. “There is something artificial at the Earth’s trailing solar libration point. A small body, similar to one of the asteroids. I believe it to be a vessel for traveling the aether. I speculate it to be the true home and origin of mankind. Whatever I believe does not matter, for all will be revealed in due time. This artificial world has begun to move, and will soon be visiting us here in our own skies.”

Goins’ response shocked Morgan. “It has begun to move?” he asked in a voice of awed surprise.

Morgan’s heart froze. The presiding judge’s words implied that he’d known of this. He fell back on the most basic refuge of his profession. “The stars do not lie, sir. We may misunderstand their evidence, but the stars do not lie.”

Goins sat heavily, his face working as if he too sought to avoid tears. Or terror. “You have the right of that, my son. But we may yet be forced to lie on their behalf.”

The racing aeroyacht Blind Justess was so new that Quinx could smell the sealants used to finish the teakwood trim of the forward observation cabin. Her appointments were an odd combination of luxurious and sparse. Like the airship’s rakish exterior form, the interior of fine craftwork minimally applied stood in strong contrast with the lumbering, gilded monsters of the Lateran’s small aerial fleet. Those wallowing aerial palaces served as ecclesiastical transports and courts-of-the-air for peregrinations to distant sees where the dignified estate of the Gatekeeper might not be so well honored.

Quinx had claimed the forward observation chair by sheer presence. The captain-owner of Blind Justess, one young gallant by the name of Irion Valdoux, was a scion of the Massalian aristocracy, and very much a traditionalist when it came to handling his own weapons and equipage.

And doubtless his women, too, Quinx thought with a distinct lack of charity.

Valdoux was as dark-skinned as any comely lass might hope for in a suitor, with a smile unbecoming a man of serious parts. He had bowed Quinx into the button-tucked seat, upholstery so well-stuffed that a horse could likely have taken its ease there. A glass-walled pit opened between Quinx’ feet. At the time of boarding this curious portal revealed a view of dawn over the Attik Main, the ocean opaque with night’s last shadows as they plucked at the tumbled ruins along the shoreline beneath the Lateran’s airfield masts. Though his head for heights was excellent—Quinx had lived in a tower for some decades now—he found the open space beneath him a trifle unnerving.

“When we’re racing for pips under Manju rules,” Valdoux explained, “I keep a spotter here with the grips for the electrick harpoons.” He cleared his throat. “Open class, no restrictions. ’Justity hates it, they does.”

“I do not suppose the Lateran entirely approves either,” Quinx replied.

Valdoux, who knew perfectly well that the word of the Consistitory Office was quite literally ecclesiastical law, and that the word of Quinx was quite literally the word of the Consistitory Office, fell silent.

“Long explanations wear on the soul,” Quinx supplied a few moments later. “I shall oversee our progress from here.” He favored Valdoux with the sort of smile that reminded some men of small bones breaking. “It would please me to examine your harpoon grips, however.”

“N-not running under Manju rules here over the Attik Main, sir,” Valdoux managed. “But I’ll send the boy for’ard with ’em, sir. Will that be all?”

“No.” Quinx withdrew his smile. “I expect you to break airspeed records bringing me to Highpassage. The Lateran will be most . . . grateful. As will my office. Brother Kurts shall assist you as necessary.”

Valdoux wisely withdrew to the bridge, which was a deck below the observation cabin.

Quinx had managed a decent view of Blind Justess on the way up the airship’s mooring tower. Her envelope was of very unusual design, more of a flattened vee shape than the usual billowing sausage of an airship. Though he was no engineer, he could appreciate the effort at linestreaming in a racing vessel. Some of the fastest water yachts shared that look. Likewise the high-speed locomotive that ran the express routes between the Lateran and Pharopolis far to the east, the largest city on the south shore of the Attik Main.

The gondola below the envelope was just as unusual, resembling nothing so much as a sleek wooden knife. She boasted a sharp keel that split the air, a fine array of viewing ports in smoked glass, and very few of the usual utilitarian protrusions so common on airships. Just before boarding, he’d noted a profusion of small hatches and ports along the outside of the gondola’s hull—clearly this vessel kept many of her secrets from prying eyes.

Within was that odd combination of wealth and efficiency. The carpets felt thick and cool, of the finest wool and not yet showing any signs of wear. Grab rails and spittoons were brass polished to a painful brightness. Most furniture was gimbaled and latched away against violent manoeuvres, or possibly just to save space. Her most salient characteristic was narrowness.

He wondered what to make of that.

Narrow or not, the great diesels encapsulated into nacelles along the lower curve of the gas bag coughed swiftly to life before growling deep in their throats. Blind Justess cast off from the tower smoothly enough, but within minutes she was moving faster than Quinx ever had done while airborne, nearly to railroad speeds.

Kurts had reported a promised velocity of over fifty miles per hour through the air. Quinx had considered his man to be mistaken or misinformed, but as the Attik Main slipped by beneath his feet, his mind was changing.

How much progress had taken place in the factories and laboratories of Highpassage, Massalia, and the other great cities of the world while he’d spent his life laboring among books and sweating priests and accusations of error? A ship like this, any airship in truth, had been inconceivable when he and Ion were boys. That he could now fly with the speed of storms was . . .

A miracle?

Perhaps the Increate had always intended this for Their creation. Another generation would have to answer that question, Quinx knew. His was growing old and become too tired to look much further ahead.

Externalism.

His mind had avoided the point of this journey, dwelling on the mysteries of a machine in which Quinx in truth had no interest.

Heresies were for the most part quite boring, even mundane. And the Lateran of these later days was nothing like the Lateran of centuries past. His own predecessors in office had routed out sin and error with a vigor at which Quinx could only marvel. And sometimes shudder at.

Not that he hadn’t broken more than a few men, some of them quite literally. But peculation and sins of the flesh seemed to be the flaws in his generation. Not the bonfires of the heart that had sent armies marching across entire continents in ages past, not to mention setting the Lateran time and again in opposition to the Thalassojustity.

No one cared so much any more. The role of the Increate in man’s tenure on Earth was undeniable—even the poor, deluded atheists were little more than dissenters against a preponderance of evidence from scriptural to archaeological. The rise of science had only reinforced what the Lateran had always taught.

Except for the damned Externalists.

Every time that heresy had arisen, it had been viciously suppressed. Somewhat to Quinx’ continued surprise, even the Thalassojustity had cooperated in the panicked months over the winter of L.5964 and L.5965, when he was new in his place as head of the Consistitory Office and Brother Lupan had grown regrettably public in his insane claims of having found the Increate’s Chariot on an island in the Sea of Sind.

There were a dozen theological problems with Brother Lupan’s theory, but the most practical problem was that he’d had such a vivid, imaginative presentation of his claims that the human race, already birthed elsewhere, had descended from the skies in the hand of the Increate. People listened, at least at first.

Quinx still believed that the Thalassojustity had intervened in what was logically a Lateran internal dispute simply to protect their Insular Mandate. Trade flowed over the world’s oceans under their protection. In return, unless otherwise ceded by treaty, islands belonged to the Thalassojustity. All of them, from the smallest harbor rock to the great, jungled insulae scattered across the eastern verges of the Sea of Sind.

Brother Lupan had been trespassing not only on theology, but also on the private property of the greatest military and economic power on Earth.

Quinx examined the electrick grips the boy had brought forward. Huge things, built into oversized rubber gloves lined with some felted mesh. He wondered where the harpoons were, how one aimed. Was there a reticule to be used here?

It was a silly, juvenile fantasy, and beneath him as a servant of the Increate. No Lateran vessel had sailed armed since the Galiciate Treaty of L.5782, over two centuries ago. In that document the Thalassojustity had guaranteed the safety of all Lateran traffic, as well as the persons of the Increate’s servants here on Earth. Blind Justess, not being a Lateran vessel, and practically papered over with the money required to build her, doubtless carried a somewhat more robust defensive proposition to accompany her rakish lines and inhuman speed.

Quinx let his thoughts go and stared into the wave-tossed sea swiftly passing far below his feet. Externalism was the worst sort of heresy, because it denied the very basis of the relationship between man and the Increate. That Lucan Matroit had seen it openly declared was frightening. From where did such evil arise, and how so swiftly?

Ever was that the nature of his office. To seek out evil and lay it to rest.

Still, he wondered what Ion had known. Now was not the time for a crisis, not with a new Gatekeeper to be elected and elevated and begin setting his own mark upon the church of their fathers.

It is the considered opinion of this subcommittee that the study of astronomy and the related arts be placed under much closer supervision than has heretofore been believed advisable. The impressionable minds and irresponsible imaginations of some of our younger researchers may be influenced towards paths of thought not consonant with this institution’s devotion to the spirit of scientific inquiry. A Review Committee is proposed as an adjunct to the Board of Governors, consisting of senior faculty, a representative of the Planetary Society, and by invitation if they so desire to accept, representatives from both the Thalassojustity and the Lateran. We may thus guide the research and observations of our more impetuous young faculty and students along lines fit for men of good social standing, character, and faith.

—Undated memorandum, University of Highpassage faculty senate

“Show me,” Goins said quietly.

“Show you what?” A surge of recklessness overtook Morgan. “I thought you were forcing me to silence.”

The judge grimaced. “Show me what you found. Because if you can find it, anyone can find it.”

Morgan paused, attempting to sort out if he’d just been insulted. “I hardly think that just anyone could—”

Goins interrupted. “I cast no aspersions, merely indicate that you are not unique. Rather, a man of your time. Or possibly your technology.”

“May I please have my case back then, sir?”

Morgan took the leather bundle from Goins, opened the clips, and slipped out the beribboned folder he’d meant to present for review at the end of his failed lecture. Such a mistake it had been to surprise the Planetary Society. His presentation had been posted as an overview of new observational techniques with attention to some exciting discoveries. Morgan had slyly left all the critical information out of both the proposal and the abstract.

He’d wanted his moment.

Well, now he had his moment.

“You are familiar with the idea of astronomical photography? That we can expose a plate coated with silver salts through a telescope to study the night skies?”

Goins favored Morgan with a flat stare. “Yes.”

“Good.” Morgan tugged the ribbon’s knot loose. “Some astronomers study the planets and their satellites this way. Arguing over the true count of moons about Deiwos Pater is very nearly a club sport among my colleagues.”

“Yes.”

Glancing at Goins again, Morgan saw something very flat and dangerous in the man’s eyes. Here was someone who could start a war on the far side of the world with a mere word. Power was his beyond reckoning. “I am not stalling, sir. Rather, leading you to the point.”

“Yes.”

No more stalling, he thought. “I have been studying the Earth’s libration points, both with respect to the moon and the sun. You are, ah, familiar with the concept?”

“First described by LaFerme in 1873.”

Thalassocratic reckoning, of course. “I did not realize you were an astronomer,” Morgan said, surprised.

“A presiding judge must be many things, Dr. Abutti. Not the least of which is a step ahead of the ambitious and rebellious men around him.”

Which of those categories did Goins consider him to fall into? “Very well.” Morgan held out a series of photographic prints. “The first two are the trailing and leading libration points in the Earth-Moon system, traditionally accounted the fourth and fifth positions. Each is sixty degrees in advance or in retard of the Moon. Note the photographs show only clouds of dust.”

Goins frowned as he studied the images. “I shall have to trust your word on this. A man can only be so far ahead. With what instrument were these photographs taken?”

“The eighty-eight inch refractor at Mount Sysiphe,” Abutti said, pride leaking into his voice.

“Of which you were one of the principal architects, is that not the case?”

A combination of natural modesty and self-preservation governed Morgan’s reply even in the face of a flush of pride. The Mount Sysiphe project had been much of his doctoral work. He’d even put time in on the manufacturing of the mirrors themselves, as well as supervising the great instrument’s initial installation at the site, beneath the enormous iron dome delivered by the shipwrights. “I would hardly say ‘principal,’ sir. Far more learnéd and experienced men than I sat as members of the projects Board of Governors.”

A wry smile flitted across the judge’s face. “I am aware of the distinction, Dr. Abutti. Carry on, please.”

“Your question was important to understanding my . . . evidence. No one has ever seen the heavens so well as those of us with access to Mount Sysiphe.”

“Which has been restricted these past three years.” Goins’ tone made it clear he was in full support of such scientific censorship.

“Yes. Even my access was challenged, as an associate fellow of the New Garaden Institute rather than a University faculty member.” The very mention of the incident recalled all too vividly his stung pride.

“Still, you no doubt persevered in the face of great pressure.”

Once more, Morgan found himself wondering if he were being mocked. “As you say, sir. In the end, the Board of Governors found it difficult to deny one of the principal architects access to his own work.”

“Ever has common decency paved the way to uncommon folly. You are forestalling your revelation, Doctor Abutti.”

“I show the Earth-Moon libration points in order to set the expectation. Of interest to orbital mechanicians, but consisting only of a few clouds of dust, and perhaps small rocks. Now, here are the Earth-Sun libration points the fourth and fifth.” He handed another set of photographic prints to Goins, then fell silent.

The presiding judge studied the new images, then compared them to the first set. He was silent a while, but Morgan did not mistake this for confusion or hesitation. Eventually, Goins looked up from the sheaf of prints in his hand.

“The fourth libration point appears to me to be little more than dust.”

Morgan nodded.

“A body is present at the fifth libration point.” Goins’ tone had gone dangerously flat again.

The man truly had known all along. “Yes.”

“What can you tell me about that body?”

“Two things,” Morgan said slowly. “First, that spectrographic analysis of its reflected light tells us that the body is a composite of metals, carbides, and oxides. A composition that is literally unique among observed bodies in the solar system.”

“And second . . .?”

“Sometime in the past three weeks, the body has begun to move in contravention to its known orbit. Without the influence of any observable outside force.”

Goins simply stared.

Eventually Morgan filled the silence. “Under its own power, sir. Toward Earth, as best as I can determine.”

“What does that mean to you? As a scientist?”

“That . . . that there is an artificial object at the fifth libration point. It has been there for an unknown amount of time. It is now coming to Earth.”

“Is that all?”

“I . . . I have deduced that this artificial object is an aetheric vessel, a ship of space, as it were. Achman’s Razor compels me to believe that six thousand years ago it brought us to this Earth. Otherwise I must conclude the Increate placed two intelligent species here in our world, ourselves and some other race to build this aetheric vessel. I find that even less likely than the deduction I reached from the evidence before me.”

In the silence that followed, Morgan’s own heartbeat thundered.

Finally: “And you were going to announce this to the Planetary Society?”

“Yes, sir. I told them we were not of this Earth, originally.” He took a deep breath, and added in a rush, “All of the scientific evidence that points to the Increate just as logically points to my hypothesis. It is well established across many disciplines of science that humanity simply arrived six thousand years ago. The question is how. Created whole from the dust of the world by the hand of the Increate, or aboard this aetheric vessel?”

Goins studied him carefully. “You expected to leave the building alive?”

Morgan stopped a moment. “We are all scientists there.”

“Of course.” Goins shook his head. “You are what, a fifth-degree Thalassocrete?”

Taken aback by the swift change of subject, Morgan shook his head. “Fourth-degree, sir. Alternate Thursday meetings of the Panattikan Lodge here in Highpassage.”

Goins made a flicking motion with his left forefinger and thumb. “Congratulations, you’re now a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete. By the power invested in me as Presiding Judge I so declare. Someone will teach you the secret handshake later.”

Morgan was stunned. “Sir?”

“There are some things you need to know, right now. Truths that carry the death penalty for those not of rank.” Goins leaned close. “You are now of rank. Second-youngest ever to reach this height, I might add.”

Still grasping at the change in the conversation, Morgan stammered the first question that came into his head. “Who . . . who was the youngest?”

“That is left as an exercise for the astute observer.” Goins’ swift, savage grin left no doubt in Morgan’s mind as to the answer.

Though sea piracy has long been largely the stuff of legend, air piracy is a novel menace for which our society has not yet developed an appropriate response. The terrestrial powers are rightly jealous of their prerogatives with respect to the Thalassojustity, so the solutions which have long kept the sea lanes clear and active do not translate well to the requirements of this new century, where an enterprising rogue with some funds and few good mechanics and sharpshooters may set up an illicit aerie in rough country, then cross national borders and Thalassojustity waters to raid shipping and towns with impunity. The White Fleet may not purse our villain overland away from the coastlines, while few nations yet have the resources to mount their own aerial response, or the willingness to allow their neighbors to pursue miscreants under arms across their own skies.

—Editorial in the Highpassage Argus-Intelligencer,

January 18th, H.3124, Th.1998, L.6012

Blind Justess approached Highpassage from west of south. They’d swung their course that way, Valdoux had explained to Quinx and Brother Kurts, to make best use of the shore breeze in their approach to the masts at the airfield.

All three of them were on the bridge now, which was crowded as a result. Admittedly, Brother Kurts was a crowd all to himself, with his looming height, muscled breadth, and glowering pale visage. Still, the man’s loyal service to the Lateran and especially to the Consistitory Office made him a credit to his race.

Quinx studied the duty stations of the bridge. As a racing yacht, Blind Justess was designed to be operated with a minimal crew—as he understood it, the captain-pilot, an engineer up in the gas bag tending to the temperamental high-performance diesels on their wide-slung cantilevers, and a ship’s boy to serve as runner and temporary relief.

Yet here were a navigator’s station, a wireless telegrapher’s station, two weapons stations, and the pilot’s station. Compact, almost ridiculously so, but elegant in their gleaming brass instruments, the lacquered loudspeaker grills, bright bells and tiny colored electricks signifying the state of more parts and processes than he’d imagined one airship to have. Except for the pilot, all the stations had small leather saddles for their now-absent operators, presumably to economize on space. The pilot had a real chair, meant for long, comfortable occupation, though it was currently clipped back as Valdoux stood at the helm. His head nearly brushed the cabin roof as he made a great study of Highpassage from their position about two miles offshore.

“See,” the captain said, pointing toward a cluster of multistorey buildings connected by an aerial tramway, “since the Pharic Mutual Assurance put up that blasted office tower near the airfield, the approach has been tricky. It breaks the wind off the hills, and we sometimes get a rotten shear. Old Piney’s widows are suing them over the crash of Unfettered last year.”

Quinx had no idea who Old Piney was, but he vaguely recollected reading of an airship crash in Highpassage. There had been a scandal, that he did remember. He’d spent little time in this city the past few years, which might have been a mistake. If nothing else, it had grown taller.

Something still bothered him. Why did a racing yacht have two weapons stations, in addition to the gunner in the forward observation cabin?

The instrument and control labels were unmistakable. Forward battery. Aft battery. Long chasers. Port bomb rack. Starboard bomb rack.

There must be observers as well, to guide these releases.

“Highpassage is your home port?” he asked casually. Where had Lucan Matroit found this pilot? And with what had Valdoux been bribed? The man was clearly not one of the Planetary Society’s operatives. His connection to the Lateran was non-existent.

Quinx would have known otherwise.

“No, the Racing Society has got a private field a few miles up the coast. Well away from buildings and such.”

He sat down in one of the weapons saddles and began to regret spending most of the trip in the observation cabin. There was more to be learned here. Quinx’ blunt, manicured fingers caressed the port bomb rack release.

“Those don’t do nothing now,” Valdoux said without turning his attention from their approach.

“Then why are they here?” asked Quinx.

“Because when we run with a full load and all her crew, they do just what you think.”

Quinx heard a hardness in the young bravo’s voice. “Because sometimes you’re racing for pips under Manju rules,” he said softly. Whatever that argot was intended to actually signify.

“Exactly.”

An air pirate didn’t need a hidden mountain base, Quinx reflected. That made good copy in those scientific romances which sold so well at street corner kiosks, but the logistics of fuel and spare parts were improbable. All a pirate really had to do was keep an honest face. With that he could hide his airship in plain sight. Who knew, later?

Then they were pitching and turning to approach the mast. “Have you down in ten, sir,” Valdoux called out.

“I want you to stay aboard,” Quinx quietly told Kurts as the ship’s boy laid out a narrow board to connect Blind Justess to the mooring mast. “At the least, I shall require a swift return to the Lateran, possibly quite soon, depending on what Matroit is able to tell me. I can imagine several other outcomes as well, for which a fast ship might be of service.”

“Sir,” Kurts said, quiet acknowledgement.

“And one more thing. Tell Valdoux that he can ready his ship under Manju rules. I may be playing for pips myself shortly.”

“What precisely is a pip, sir?’ Kurts asked.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Quinx replied. “But it’s something Valdoux and his set are willing to kill for. If Lucan hasn’t already suppressed this outbreak of Externalism, we may be pressed for hard solutions ourselves.”

“Yes, sir.” Kurts stepped back into the cabin as Quinx left the ship for the platform.

He didn’t bother to count the steps in the mooring mast. Far too many, to be sure. Quinx lived in a tower for several reasons—privacy had been the original, of course—but he’d long since recognized the value of having to ascend and descend one hundred and twelve steps every time he wished to do more than stare out the window or piss in a chamber pot. He didn’t think he was old, but his body had other ideas after a sleepless night, a long day aboard a speeding airship, and now this.

Ion is dead, which is as old as one ever gets.

At least he was still walking. By the time he reached the soil, Quinx’ heart was pounding like a fist inside his chest. His knees had become rubber. He rather thought he might be joining Ion soon.

Instead he found awaiting him a rat-faced young man with an unfortunately pale cast of skin. wearing an ill-fitting maroon suit. “Dr. Matroit sent me, your worship,” the fellow said, bobbing about like a cork slipped down into a wine bottle. The motions made Quinx vaguely ill, which in turn reminded him that he’d not eaten all day.

He did not even have the energy to put this fool in his place. “Please take me to him.”

The quadroon led Quinx to a motorcar. The priest groaned inwardly. Those beastly things were never comfortable, and tended to break down as often as they ran. This one was an open-topped steamer, already stoked up from the sound of the boiler. It was pretty enough, he had to admit, with the deep blue lacquer on fenders, hood and body, and a pleasing amount of brightwork for trim.

“Here, sir, in the back. I gave you some cushions. No luggage being sent down?”

“Just myself.” Quinx carried a small satchel, but this trip had been so sudden that he’d brought no trunks or wardrobes. “Please, take me to Matroit.”

A few minutes later, they rumbled off to the accompaniment of an ear-piercing shriek of a release valve. Quinx looked up and back at Blind Justess now shadowed in the encroaching dusk. She was just a shape in the last light of day, a hawk hovering over the city looking for her next prey.

Lucan Matroit had the good sense to arrange a meal for Quinx at the Plenary Hall. The foolish steamer driver had managed not to kill them or anyone else on the way, and kept the thing running smoothly enough to avoid destroying Quinx’ appetite, so he tucked into the cold pickle and pudding as soon as possible after the basic pleasantries were dispensed with.

The matter at hand was so critical that they met alone, without the nigh ubiquitous secretaries, clerks, or servants. Quinx briefly regretted leaving Kurts aboard Blind Justess, but he’d wanted badly to keep Valdoux under observation. He also truly had foreseen several potentially critical uses for the airship and her equipage.

Lacking servants, the meal was sparse and strange, something that novices in the seminary might have prepared for themselves. Quinx had grown up on fresh cabbage, preserved peppers, and the occasional bit of goat meat, so even this was welcome. The cold pickle was a fairly ambitious tray of vegetables along with a few regrettable cheeses. The pudding was one of those curious northern dishes that had become popular in Highpassage the past few years, all chewy breading around plums and bits of organ meat.

Still, he ate, and listened to Lucan’s sadly incomplete story.

“. . . so I had Dr. Abutti shown out immediately,” the Secretary General was saying. “In the moment, I was somewhat concerned for his safety, but far more concerned with settling the audience.”

“Would they have done him a mischief?” Quinx asked around a mouthful of pungent eggplant.

“In the Plenary Hall?” Matroit shrugged. “Unlikely. But anything is possible. There have been three murders in this building since its dedication, and almost a dozen suicides. The Planetary Society itself is not ordinarily a risk to life and limb. Passions here tend to be more, ah, individualized.”

“Three murders?”

“Surely you recall the death of Drs. Messier and Ashbless? They fought a duel on the rooftop over a dispute concerning the orbits of the moons of Mars. We had only the twenty-eight inch reflector back then, and observations were inconclusive.”

“I take it both men lost.”

“Or won, as it may be. Choice of weapons went to Dr. Ashbless, who unaccountably decided on carboys of high molar sulfuric acid fed into spray pumps.”

“Never mind,” Quinx said. “I believe I’d prefer to finish my dinner. Please continue your tale.”

“Well, I quickly realized I should have detained Dr. Abutti rather than sending him out into the city. I sent two of our porters over to the New Garaden Institute, where they determined that Dr. Abutti had been taken away by Thalassojustity Marines.”

Oh, Increate, grant me strength now. “That would not be the outcome I might have prayed for.”

“Nor I, sir.”

If the Thalassojustity held Abutti, anything was possible. Their concerns were largely orthogonal to those of the Lateran—the two institutions had coexisted in varying states of competition for the better part of two thousand years, after all—but this was not the Externalist crisis of L.5964, when the Thalassojustity’s interests had been directly compromised.

Presiding Judge Eraster Goins was in charge these days. The Consistitory Office had little information on him, none of it sufficiently damning to serve as any leverage. And under his leadership, the Thalassojustity had showed some remarkable innovations.

Quinx’ heart grew leaden at the thought of what innovations Goins could derive from Abutti’s madness. “I am a Thalassocrete of the highest degree,” he said, something very unusual for a Lateran priest, and in his case rarely spoken aloud. “I believe I shall have to pay my respects at the Thalassojustity Palace quite shortly.”

His body cried for sleep, but his soul cried panic. Despite what Ion had told him, Quinx was very much afraid of what might be proven.

And by whom.

The quadroon managed to navigate the steam car from the Plenary Hall to the outer entrance of the Thalassojustity Temple, once more without actually inflicting material harm on Quinx or anyone else. The hour was nearly nine o’clock when they chuffed to a shuddering halt outside the tall, studded gates.

Prior centuries had brought more than one angry mob here. Not to mention a few armies. Though most of the old walls were long gone, replaced with timber lots and gardens of roses and blackberries, the fortified gatehouse itself still blocked the only public road connecting Highpassage to the Thalassojustity’s territory. This was an international border, and by and large, casual tourists were neither welcomed nor wanted.

The Revered Bilious Quinx was neither casual, nor a tourist. And he was exhausted.

Staggering from the car over the protestations of the driver, he yanked on the bell pull beside the main gate. A pale, idiot face peered from a darkened window in the gatehouse proper.

“Public hours is closed!” the man shouted through the glass.

Quinx leaned close, gathered his fist inside his vestments, and punched out the glass. Cursing rose from within, as the priest leaned close and spoke in the low, calm voice that he’d used for delivering judgments these past forty years. “I am a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete on urgent business to the Presiding Judge. I do not have time for visiting hours, and I will have you swabbing decks in frozen Hyperborea if you do not open the gates now.”

Scrambling noises emitted from within, followed by the distinctive whir of a telelocutor. A few hushed words, then more scrambling, then the gates creaked open.

Resuming his seat in the back of the steamer, Quinx told the quadroon, “Drive on, boy.”

“Yes, sir!” The man’s voice quavered somewhere between horror and awe.

Their tyres crunched up the crushed coral drive that led to the Thalassojustity Temple. The New Buildings lurked beyond, thousand-year-old fortifications that served as an office complex. Two more recent, taller structures rose past them. Those contemporary buildings were simply referred to as “the towers.”

Know your friends; know your enemies better. The Thalassojustity had been both to the Lateran over the centuries.

Otherwise the grounds were as gardened as any cemetery of the wealthy. Cypress trees spread low in the moonlight, hares and deer cropped, barely attending to the wheezing of the steamer as it passed. The sea lay to Quinx’ left, its murmuring unheard over the racket of the steam car as the waters lapped at the bottom of a sharp decline down which a man might easily lose his footing. The crescent of Black’s Beach, at the foot of the stairs from the Temple, gleamed pale ahead of him.

No one was around. Not a Marine, not a night watchman. The lights of the Temple portico were doused, and only a few stray glimmers showed from shuttered windows in the New Buildings or the towers.

Which was odd. Lodge meetings tended to run into the evenings. There were always late-working bureaucrats scurrying about, along with the servants who tended them. Quinx had visited the Thalassojustity Temple more than a few times over the decades, on a variety of errands from the deeply secretive to the bloodily public. He’d never seen it look so, well, abandoned.

The quadroon slowed his steamer to a halt where the drive met the Temple steps. Quinx climbed out of the car again, regretting his long walk down the airship mooring mast. He was desperately tired he realized.

Where was everyone?

One step at a time. Up. And up. And up.

The great doors at the top, bronze castings forty feet high chased with elaborate friezework, stood open as they always did. Lore held that the doors would only be closed in times of utmost crisis. Quinx had always figured it for a problem with the hinges. A slight man in a crisp, dark suit sat just within the threshold on an office chair that very much did not belong in the nave. “May I help you?”

“I’m looking for Goins,” Quinx said, too much of his irritation creeping into his voice.

“The Presiding Judge is not available. Who is asking?”

“Me.” Quinx glared at him. “Get a lot of men in red and white robes calling late at night?”

“You are clad in the sartorial estate of a prince of the Lateran, sir, but I have not had the prior pleasure of your acquaintance, so for all of my knowledge you might be a lad about on a lark.”

“With this hair?” Quinx had to laugh, his foul mood broken for a moment. “It’s been fifty years since I could pass for a lad. And believe me, Eraster will talk to me once he knows I’m here. I am the Revered Bilious Quinx, and I am pursuing some very dangerous questions.”

“Revered Quinx.” The door warden gave the name some thought. “Your fearsome reputation precedes you, sir. If memory serves, you are also an initiate of our own Lodges, and as such should not be required to seek admittance at the public portals.”

“I did not arrive by the hidden paths, and time may be of the essence.” He moved his hands in the recognition signs of a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete. “And yes, I am the highest level initiate who also serves in the church’s senior hierarchy.”

“Who is known to serve,” the door warden corrected mildly, words that gave Quinx serious pause. “You were answering the Presiding Judge’s call, then? I am afraid you are too late by hours. All of the available senior initiates sailed on the afternoon’s tide, aboard Th.S. Clear Mountain.”

“With Dr. Morgan Abutti aboard?”

“Of course.” The man seemed surprised. “Who else?”

Quinx leaned close. “And where were they bound?”

“Thera, I believe. But rumors are often put out to obscure the truth of such missions as this.”

Quinx’ heart sank. The entire leadership of the Thalassojustity had just abandoned their headquarters. Why? Such a thing had never happened, even during the worst wars of the last century.

Whatever Abutti had found must have proven extremely convincing. Ion’s prophesied proof was happening, almost before his very eyes. Externalism . . .

Even his thoughts failed. “I must to Thera, and swiftly,” he said.

“Clear Mountain is very nearly the fastest of ships.”

“Oh, I can travel faster.”

Stumbling down the steps to the quadroon’s steamer once more, Quinx wondered how difficult it would be to convince Valdoux to mount his weapons on Blind Justess.

The traditional association between vulcanism and the Eight Gardens is a folk myth not borne out within the received text of the Librum Vita. Neither do any of the Lateran’s formal teachings support it. Yet like most folk myths, it likely arises from some transmuted memory of history. Each Garden is seen to be paired with a smoking mountain—Cycladia has its Thera, for example, Wy’East has the volcano of the same name. The Thalassojustity has been notoriously reluctant to permit full surveys of the relevant sites under their control, so most of what can be said about this association arises from ethnography and the study of more primitive folkways than the modern world can boast. Still, it does not require much speculation to see how the Increate’s children, early in their tenure upon this Earth, might have associated Their power with the world’s own fiery exhalations.

“Contemporary Survey of Myths and Legends Concerning the Eight Gardens”; B. Hyssop, F. Jamailla, A. Serona; Ouragan Journal of Ethnographic Studies, Vol. XCVII, Issue 7

Morgan sat in Clear Mountain’s forward lounge, a gin fizz in hand, and marveled at the events of the past day. Goins had wasted no time in calling his entire senior hierarchy to witness this . . . unfolding? Apparently the Thalassojustity has been waiting for his revelation for a very, very long time. Ancient secrets indeed, to bring all these old, powerful men so swiftly to arms. Even this vessel was something between a warship and a royal yacht, as the wide, forward facing windows with their armored shutters testified.

The Attik Main by moonlight was dark as an old grave and restless as risen lust. He watched the sea move as if lifted by a thousand submerged hands, and wondered whether land or clouds occluded the horizon. Within, all was as lush as man might ask, better appointed than a fine gentlemen’s club, but still with that certain rough readiness of any ocean-going vessel.

The Thalassojustity treated its leaders very well indeed. Even the upper halls of the Planetary Society were not so nice as this, and at the University of Highpassage one would have to ascend to the Chancellor’s estate to find similar quiet luxuries.

He could grow accustomed to the privileges of a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete, if only he better understood the associated duties.

After their initial conversation, Goins had pressed Morgan to provide his evidence and theories to several more audiences. Almost all of the men with whom he spoke were as engaged as the judge had been. No one was shocked, or even surprised.

He felt like a prophet speaking in tongues only others could understand.

Still, it was not his place to ask. Not when serious-faced men with sword-sharp eyes kept questioning him about everything from the construction of refracting telescopes to the proper maintenance of spectrographic analyzers. Oddly, none of them questioned his basic observations, or his conclusions.

It was increasingly clear to Morgan that he was telling some of these men a secret to which they were already privy. That was frightening. The rest simply took in what he said, then moved on.

Within hours, the ship was readied, and his impromptu seminars on astronomy, photography, and light had moved aboard Clear Mountain. Then suddenly, shortly after dusk, they were done with him. Everyone retreated to some meeting room belowdecks. Morgan was left to drink alone, attended only by a handful of solicitous stewards who went conspicuously well-armed as they brought him drinks, canapés, and cigars.

He’d never even learned any name but Goins’. He did not know where they were bound, or why. No one had told him anything. Only asked him endless questions, which had swiftly become repetitive.

The experience so far was in many respects much like being an undergraduate.

Goins finally found him, somewhere near midnight.

“We will make landfall shortly after dawn.”

“Where?” Morgan asked, not particularly expecting an answer.

“Thera.”

The name sounded familiar. “That’s near the Garden of Cycladia, yes?”

The Presiding Judge appeared vaguely pained. “Yes. A volcanic island under Thalassojustity jurisdiction.”

“If I may be permitted a further question, why?”

“So we can show you something.”

“All of you? There must be three dozen senior Thalassocretes board.”

“All of us.” Goins sighed. “This matter lies at the heart of our historical purposes. It must be witnessed.”

This time, Morgan heard the grim tone in Goins’ voice. Had it been there all along? “So close to one of the Gardens,” he began, then stopped. His thoughts were tangled by the lateness of the hour and the alcohol, but there was a next link in this chain of logic that was decidedly unpretty.

“You are a very intelligent man, Dr. Abutti. Pray that on the morrow you are wise enough for what will come next.”

With that, Goins departed. Lacking a stateroom, or even a bunk, Morgan kicked off his shoes, propped his feet on the ottoman, and proceeded to drink himself into sleep.

Valdoux was at the base of the mooring mast, negotiating with a small whippet of a man who managed to look furtive while standing still and empty-handed. The moon had risen, lambent through a veil of clouds that rendered the night sky into a dark rainbow. The scent of water rode the wind as well, harbinger of a distant storm.

Reluctantly dismounting from the steam car, Quinx dismissed the quadroon and his device. The whippet, who had ignored the vehicle’s chuffing approach, turned to take note of the priest. The man was another paleskinned northerner.

Quinx was too tired to wonder why the airship captain surrounded himself with inferior servants. “Valdoux, dismiss your man and take me aboard,” he said firmly. Where was Brother Kurts? “We have urgent business to attend to.” And I need to lie down, he thought. From lifelong habit, he would never confess a weakness before others.

Such confessions were something Ion had never seemed troubled by. Somehow his oldest friend had still managed to become the Increate’s vicar here on Earth. Quinx swallowed a shuddering breath that threatened to become a sob.

Tired, too damned tired.

“I don’t think—” Valdoux began, but the whippet raised a hand to silence the captain. “Do you know who I am, Revered?”

“No,” Quinx said shortly. “Nor do I particularly care.”

“Perhaps you should care,” the whippet said in a quiet, almost wondering voice. “For I do know who you are. I am all too sadly familiar with the mission of the Consistitory Office. Once I was a novice, Revered, before being turned out upon the path of what you call the Machinists’ Heresy.”

“Then I sorrow for you, my son, that you have strayed so from the Increate. But still, I must aboard with Captain Valdoux.”

“You will not go without me,” the whippet warned. “A man in your hurry is always in want of weapons. I am master gunner of Blind Justess.”

Quinx, who had apologized to no one but Ion in at least five decades, held back his next words. What this Machinist deserved and what the priest was in a position to mete out to the man were far different things. He had his priorities. After a moment, he found suitable alternatives. “That is between you and the captain, master gunner. My hurry is my own, and all too real.”

“Speak, then,” Valdoux said, finally in voice again. “There ain’t nothing you can say that I won’t tell to Three Eighty Seven here. He’s got to know what it is I hire us out to do.”

“You are already hired,” Quinx pointed out.

“Not to push off into the sky armed and rushing.” Valdoux’s eyes narrowed. “East, I reckon. I’ve heard talk of who took ship today and where their course was laid to.”

Enough, thought Quinx. There was small purpose in fencing with these two. And he was exhausted besides. If they crossed him over much, he could have them taken on an ecclesiastical warrant later. The Thalassojustity would simply laugh at such paper, but the government of Highpassage recognized Church writ.

“Yes, east. I must to Thera, and quite promptly. And we should fly under arms.”

“Afraid of pirates?” The thrice-damned Machinist was positively smirking.

“Afraid we might need to become pirates,” Quinx admitted.

“Sailing into the red under the banner of Holy Mother Church?” Three Eighty Seven touched himself forehead, mouth, and navel; the sign of the Increate. “We should ever be so honored.” He turned to Valdoux. “Are you planning to take this commission? Ninety Nine will be here shortly, but I must go see to the armaments, unless you think the churchman here cannot afford your hire.”

Valdoux laughed aloud. “The Revered here could buy me out ship, sail, and shoes, if he set his sights on that. The question is whether I figure to take his coin.” He winked at Quinx. “Best go to your station, master gunner. One way or another, we’ll be playing at the hardest game soon enough, I reckon.”

The whippet grinned and trotted up stairway that wound foursquare around the interior of the mooring mast.

“There are no pirates, are there?” Quinx said. “Just airships and airships.”

“The lines on the map ain’t visible from up in the sky.” Valdoux cocked his head. “But someone of your experience can’t possibly be surprised at what is true being hidden in plain sight.”

“No one raids the Gatekeeper’s air fleet, so the Gatekeeper’s minions do not attend so closely to such matters as others doubtless must,” the priest admitted. “Besides which, we have been disarmed these many years, and would be required to apply to the Thalassojustity for relief.”

“Their borders are perfectly clear from above. More’s the pity. Ain’t too many would make such a fight as a Thalassojustity crew trained and ready for action.” Valdoux squatted. “You look like the death of a priest. Even the Grand Inquisitor must sleep sometimes.”

“This is the hour I would pass over into sleep, yes,” admitted Quinx. As if it were not too obvious from his face, surely. “But I need you to take me to Thera, swiftly. And I need to be certain you will attend to my orders, should that become necessary.”

“You won’t have no say over my weapons. No one does. But I’ll take you to Thera. We’ll fly armed and ready.” Valdoux paused, chewing his lip. Something warred within. Then: “I will also listen to your counsel, should we come to be fighting.”

“And . . .? There is always an ‘and’ at the end of such sentences.”

“More of a ‘but’, I reckon.” This time Valdoux smirked, while Quinx pretended to misunderstand the jest. “But I got to know why you want to chase after the Thalassojustity’s biggest brass. All hot up and ready to fight, at that. This ain’t something a thoughtful priest would be doing. Or even a thoughtless priest.”

“I fear a great heresy is about to be unleashed. Tonight. Or perhaps tomorrow. And it may sweep the world. If I can reach one man aboard Clear Mountain and stop him, I may be able to halt a rising tide before the damage is done.”

“Ain’t no one stops the tide,” Valdoux observed. “That’s why I fly over the waters. Let the Thalassocretes argue with the waves. Storms don’t trouble the top of the sky.” He stuck his hand out. “I’ll take you for a single silver shekel. That seals a contract. Learning what comes next will pay your balance. You’re a mighty strange man, Revered, on a mighty strange errand.”

“A shekel it is.” Despite the process. Quinx was afraid he’d somehow got the wrong end of the bargain nonetheless.

“Look at it from my bridge.” Valdoux grinned again. “Either I’ll get to see the beginning of tide that floods the world, or I’ll get to see a lone man stop the tide. History before my eyes either way, no matter how the play lands. Or maybe you’re a madman. Even so, I reckon you’re mad with the entire power of the Lateran behind you. Watching that should be good sport, likewise.”

Ninety Nine loomed out of the darkness at those words. Quinx was startled again—from the name he’d expected another Machinist, but not a female. She was clad immodestly in a tunic and sailor’s dungarees.

Valdoux bowed her wordlessly up the tower. She favored Quinx with one cold, incurious glance, then clattered upward.

He stared after her a long moment, trying to sort his feelings from his fatigue, then surrendered the effort and began the slow, aching climb himself.

As Quinx mounted the stairs, Valdoux called after him. “We sail under Manju rules now, Revered. Be sure you really want what you’re asking after.”

Quinx slept the remainder of the night away while Blind Justess set her course and left Highpassage ahead of the impending storm. He awoke to a pearlescent pink dawn gleaming through the tiny porthole of his tiny cabin. Most of the available space not occupied by his bunk was filled with Brother Kurts, who snored gently while sprawled upon the deck.

He could not remember ever having seen the monk asleep.

There was no getting up without disturbing the other man, so Quinx lay still a while and watched the sky shift tone from pink to blue. They would be heading very nearly into the sun, he realized, and surely not so far from Thera now unless the winds had been notably unfavorable.

Tiny though the cabin was, it had been appointed with the same odd combination of frugality and luxury as the rest of the airship. The paneling was some wood he did not recognize, doubtless a rare tree from the waist of the world. Brightwork and electricks ran across the walls like veins. Even the sheets were silk, which seemed a bit perverse.

Soon he realized he must be awake and about. Valdoux was mercurial, likely to take any number of strange actions in the absence of his direction. “Brother Kurts,” Quinx whispered.

The monk’s head snapped forward with a gust of garlicky breath. “Revered,” he said, his hand falling away again from something beneath his robes.

A weapon, of course, though such was forbidden by the Galiciate Treaty. Kurts worked for Quinx, not the Thalassojustity. The Consistitory Office had its own requirements, for all that he must at times pretend to a long lost innocence as to means and methods.

“Everything is well, Brother Kurts. I must have some coffee, and mount to the bridge to consult with our fair captain.”

“Six others aboard, sir,” Kurts replied. “Two of them Machinists. The captain, his ship’s boy from before. An engineer and his boy as well. The heretics serve as gunners and artificers, best as I can tell.”

“I met one of them last night. He styled himself Three Eighty Seven.”

“The master gunner.” The monk nodded slowly. “Gunner’s mate is a female name of Ninety Nine.”

“I briefly saw her yesterday evening.” Somehow Ninety Nine’s dubious femininity seemed doubly blasphemous by the late of day, though in truth, Quinx was rapidly losing his capacity for surprise at what might transpire aboard Blind Justess.

“I doubt she will challenge anyone’s virtue. She is both offensive and unlovely.”

“And what do you know of a woman’s loveliness, Brother Kurts?” Quinx asked with a small smile.

The monk was not amused. “As little and all as the Increate allows a man of my vows.”

“Fair enough. I apologize for troubling you. But I must find my way to coffee before I become more trouble.”

They slipped into the short companionway on this upper deck. Brother Kurts led Quinx the half dozen steps to the tiny galley. This was indeed a racing yacht, not intended for full meal service. Or really, any other full service. The coffee machine, however, was an elegant marvel of brass and copper, festooned with a maze of pipes and valves and small, decorative metal eagles screaming for their freedom.

It smelled like a slice of heaven.

“Truly the Increate did bless mankind when They caused the coffee bean to grow,” said Quinx.

Kurts grunted, studying the machine for several long moments before launching into a rapid set of seemingly random manipulations that shortly produced a steaming cup of coffee so deep brown Quinx thought he might be able to see the reflection of last year’s breakfasts in it.

Five minutes later, fortified by caffeine and a rather stale sticky bun of dubious provenance, Quinx headed for the bridge on the deck below. He was trailed by a bleary-eyed Brother Kurts.

“Good morning to you, Revered.” Valdoux seemed as chipper as if he’d just had a week at a Riveran resort. The ship’s boy was present, as well as another lad whom Quinx took to be the engineer’s boy. To his profound relief, neither Machinist was on the bridge.

“Captain, the pleasure is all mine.” Quinx slipped up to the fore, where Valdoux piloted Blind Justess with a wheel and a set of levers. Gauges were arrayed to either side of him, but before and sweeping down to his feet was a wall of curved glass. The pale green of the Attic Main loomed vertiginously below, the ripples of waves like crumpled foil.

An oblong island with a sharp-peaked central mountain lay before them. A small settlement nestled on one shore—the south?—dominated by its docks. The rest of the island was heavily forested. Clearly not settled, beyond whomever lived there to service the sea traffic.

“Thalassojustity territory,” Quinx observed.

Valdoux made a tsking noise. “Ain’t no airship masts. They’re behind the times, our naval friends.”

Quinx glanced sideways. “You hold no brief for the Pax Maria?”

“What do I care for the sea? The air is my place. They can’t make neither peace nor war in the skies. And they ain’t made no real effort to claim what power might be theirs up here.”

“Where one grasp fails, another will reach,” muttered Brother Kurts behind them.

“Exactly,” said Valdoux. “And here is Thera, Revered. We overflew a fast ship on the water late in the night. I reckon they’ll be here by midmorning.”

“Clear Mountain?”

“I didn’t figure on stopping to ask. But that does seem to be a sensible thing to assume.”

How to proceed? Quinx badly wanted to confront this fool Morgan Abutti before more damage could be done, but the man had spent almost an entire day closeted with the senior Thalassocretes. A more focused assemblage of the powers in the world he had trouble imagining, short of another Congress of Cities and States being called.

How much harm had already been levied? Was the Externalist heresy loose for good and all? Or had the Thalassojustity seen through the madman and contained him?

Valdoux’s voice interrupted Quinx’ whirling thoughts. “No.”

“No? No what?”

“I can’t land you in force aboard Clear Mountain.”

“That was not my . . .” Quinx let his voice trail off. He didn’t know what he should do next. He thought quickly. “I would meet them at the dock. Brother Kurts will guard my back.”

“With Blind Justess circling overhead? Or standing off?”

That took a long moment of consideration. Aerial force was not a strength of the Thalassojustity, especially not in this place. “Overhead. Awaiting my signal.”

Valdoux reached down to the bottom of his wheel column and unclipped a fat-barreled pistol. “Fire this. I’ll come down hot and fast, guns at the ready.”

Quinx looked in wonder at the weapon in his hand. He’d never held a firearm before, any more than he’d ever held a viper.

Brother Kurts reached around and took it from him. “A flare gun,” he explained. “But you can still harm yourself with it.”

“Or someone else,” Valdoux offered cheerfully. “A shot to the chest from that won’t likely kill nobody, but the other fellow might wish it had.”

“Give me back that flare, Brother Kurts,” Quinx said, suddenly tired all over again. “Only I can decide when to use it.”

The monk looked unhappy, but he returned the weapon.

It fit awkwardly within Quinx’ robes. “Take me down,” he told Valdoux.

“I can’t land here. You got to go down by rope. I’ll send Ninety Nine along to look after your safety.”

Quinx’ fatigue shifted to a sense of nausea, or perhaps outright illness. He would be confronting heresy under the protection of a female Machinist. Any priest who came before the Consistitory Office with such a story would spend long months under the Question, or at the very least in quiet confinement to pray over his errors of judgment and resultant sins.

The expression on Valdoux’ face made it clear the captain was testing Quinx. And Quinx knew that here and now, he held no leverage.

“Let us do this thing,” he gasped, forcing out the words before the last tatters of his certainty vanished.

Holy Mother Church was infinitely patient. There was always a later. Even for a man such as Captain Valdoux.

Especially for a man such as Captain Valdoux.

The Thalassojustity has served for centuries as a check upon the powers of the Lateran. Church history documents a much earlier era when the Gatekeepers asserted economic, political, and even military dominance over many of the societies of the Earth. The aggressively secular founders of the Thalassojustity held no patience for the divine right that many of the kings and princes of Earth claimed for their power, and less patience for the generations-long schemes of the Lateran to convert or subvert them. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that the establishment of the secret societies of the Thalassocretes was precisely a countermove against Lateran infiltrations as well as more overt cozenings of their rivals. For make no mistake: this tension between lords spiritual and the lords of the sea is two thousand years in the making, but neither of them has ever misunderstood who their true competition is. Should a significant number of the land-based states around the world ever achieve meaningful confederacy, the power of Thalassojustity and Church alike would be undermined much more deeply than anything either rival could do the other.

From the introduction to Common Interests, Uncommon Rivals, P.R. Frost, University of Massalia Press, M.2991, Th. 1994, L.6008

There was a great deal of excitement aboard Clear Mountain as they approached Thera. Morgan was not sure what the fuss was, as no one had paid him much attention since he’d finished explaining his thesis the night before, but he eventually padded out to the foredeck to find a number of the Thalassocretes staring at the clouds above the island.

Goins wordlessly handed him a set of field glasses. “See for yourself,” the Presiding Judge growled. “Watch the cloud formation that rather resembles a camel.”

Morgan scanned the sky, not seeing anything he would consider a camel, but pointing his instrument in the direction everyone else was looking. He caught a glint and sense of motion.

“Bastard’s hiding in the cloud bank,” someone else said, then cursed in a language Morgan did not speak, though the intent of the words was clear enough from the tone.

“Airship?” he asked.

“Anyone care enough about you to chase you out here?” Goins made the question sound casual, but the rapid silence around them told Morgan quite clearly what was at stake.

“Not even my own mother,” he said. “Not this place.”

“Hmm.” Goins sounded unconvinced. “The area is under absolute prohibition.”

“Can you not force them down?”

“We don’t even allow our own airships here.”

“Mistake.” That was someone behind Morgan.

“The question will be re-opened, you may be sure,” Goins said loudly. “Unless it has been rendered irrelevant in the mean time.”

“Why are we here?” asked Morgan. “Why do we care about an airship?”

Goins reached up to grab Morgan’s shoulders. His fingers were vises, his eyes drills. “I am about to show you the deepest, darkest secret known to mankind.”

“Me?”

“It is a puzzle, to which you may have found the key.”

Morgan only knew one secret of his own, and he’d already shared it. “My photographic plates. The aetheric vessel at the libration point.”

“Precisely.”

“Precisely what?”

Another senior Thalassocrete snatched Morgan’s arm even as Goins released him. “Precisely shut your yap and see what is to come,” growled the other man.

It took Morgan only a moment to realize these very powerful men were all frightened.

Clear Mountain approached the dock at Thera at dead slow. Waves slapped her hull, while mewling gulls circled overhead. Someone waited at the end of the pier, but beyond them was a puzzling scene. Several people sprawled at the head of the pier, while two more stood guard, their backs to the sea. A smaller crowd clustered inland, at the village, in a standoff with the guardians.

A fight had taken place, though Morgan could not imagine who would fight here, or over what. Not in this place. Presumably anyone here was in on Goins’ great secret.

A great racket arose around him. Crewmen rushed to the teakwood foredeck with rifles. Two set up a Maxim gun on a pintle at the bow. Several relatively junior Thalassocretes were directing preparations for a possible offense.

Morgan debated going below, or at least retreating to the lounge where he could fortify himself with alcohol and be out of the line of fire. But Goins was at his side again. “This is your fault,” the Presiding Judge said with a growl.

“Mine?” Morgan was astonished. “What does this have to do with me?”

“Everything.” Goins gave him another of those long, hard stares. “What did you think would happen when you presented your evidence?”

“I dreamt that my reputation would have been made,” Morgan said sadly. “The spirit of scientific inquiry is one of the most powerful forces known to man. With a bit of luck, I could have launched a generation of research.”

“Fear is one of the most powerful forces known to man,” retorted Goins. “And nothing inspires fear like attacking people’s faith. Doesn’t matter what kind of faith—faith in the order of the world, faith in themselves, faith in the Increate. And you, Dr. Morgan Abutti, are attacking all of those faiths.”

Amid a swash of saltwater, Clear Mountain growled to a slow, rolling halt by the pier without any gunfire being exchanged. Goins didn’t look to shore, just kept staring down Morgan.

“I . . .” Morgan’s voice faltered. “No. People are better than that.” His heart fell. “The Increate did not put us on this Earth so that we could pretend away the natural world.”

“You, sir, have averred that the Increate did not put us on this Earth at all,” Goins said. “And though everyone will cry you down for saying that, the damnedest thing is that you are correct.”

He turned and looked over the rail, at the man on the pier. Abutti looked with him to see a priest waiting. Two-dozen rifles and the Maxim gun were trained down on the Revered, who seemed unperturbed. He stared back up at them, clearly identifying Goins as the authority aboard ship.

“If it is not the Presiding Judge,” the priest called up.

Goins appeared positively sour. “Revered Quinx.”

“Quinx!?” hissed Morgan. “The Inquisitor?”

“The Lateran refers to that as the Consistitory Office,” Goins told him quietly. “And I know what that oily little bastard is doing here. I just don’t know how or why.”

Morgan nodded. “The airship your people were looking at.”

“Do you have a Dr. Morgan Abutti aboard?” Quinx called up. “I am very much fain to speak with him if so.”

“How—” Morgan began, but Goins cut him off. “Don’t be an ass, man.”

“Ah, I see you have him with you,” Quinx said. “I would be much obliged if you’d set the doctor ashore for some private discussions with me.”

“On whose authority?” Goins waved the riflemen to port arms.

“I could claim the authority of the Lateran, but our writ does not run here.”

“No.” This time Goins grinned. “Have a better offer?”

“Remember your history, Judge. Brother Lupan died not so long ago.”

Goins shook his head. “This tale does not fly on wings of madness, Revered. It creaks atop the edifice of science.”

“Are they truly so different in the face of the Increate?” Quinx stared at Morgan. The man’s eyes were like steel, even from this distance. Morgan shuddered at the thought of being alone in a small room, under the Question.

“I . . . I have never denied the Increate,” he shouted. “Nor did I intend to.” Goins jabbed Morgan in the ribs. “If you are so eager to treat with the Revered, I can put you ashore. Alone.”

Courage seeped back into Morgan’s heart like the tide rising beneath a sandbar. “Bring him aboard.”

“What?”

“You made me a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete. That means I have voice in this floating conclave. Bring him aboard.”

“Well, well,” said Goins. “Who realized you would have such backbone, Dr. Abutti? No, despite your entreaties, I believe we shall put you ashore. But in company. We did come here for a reason, in all good haste. I do not propose to abandon our mission for the sake of a chaffer with a single churchman, no matter how highly placed. As he is also a thirty-second degree Thalassocrete, the Revered may accompany us up the mountain and amuse himself in discourse with you along the way.”

“Where?”

“To where the stars do not lie.”

Abutti followed Goins down the gangplank. A line of armed men observed from Clear Mountain’s rail, but no one among the assembled Thalassocretes or ship’s crew objected when the Presiding Judge had ordered them to stand down and remain aboard.

Morgan couldn’t see how one priest would be so immediately dangerous, even this one. Still, people were sprawled at the head of the pier. Injured? Dead?

“Bilious,” Goins said, shaking hands with the priest, then embracing him.

“Eraster.” The Revered wore a grudging smile that bespoke the bond that only two ancient enemies could share.

“You know one another?” Morgan asked.

The priest turned to him. “The most powerful man in the Thalassojustity and the most feared man in the Lateran? Of course we know one another, Dr. Abutti.” He extended his hand. “The Revered Bilious Quinx.”

“Revered,” said Morgan, shaking the man’s hand. Though rather larger than Goins, Quinx was still a small man, in that compact way that suggested strength, even at an age that must be approaching seventy. His eyes were sea-gray, set deep in a face dark-skinned enough for any debutante’s ball in Highpassage. He wore a cassock, faded with wear and laundering, but highly serviceable. A small silver Lateran orbicrux hung around his neck. He was otherwise unadorned with the Earthly riches that Morgan associated with high churchmen. “And now I am acquainted with the both of you.”

“To our great mutual pleasure,” Quinx said in a tone of voice that promised quite the opposite.

Goins nodded sharply, glancing down the pier. “Enough. We are on an errand of some urgency. Call off your men down there, and you may accompany us. If you simply must interview Dr. Abutti, feel free to do so on the march.”

“Amid your mob?” Quinx’ voice dropped to a very soft, easy threat. “I am far more accustomed to my own chambers, and tools, for such interviews.”

“This island is my chamber, Bilious,” Goins snapped. “I’ll thank you not to soil it with my colleague’s vital fluids.”

“Oh, we gave up soiling with vital fluids generations ago,” Quinx replied. “Our tools are more subtle now. The arts of the mind are powerful.”

“Call off your men, or the arts of the mind will be powerless this day.”

Quinx nodded, then walked up the pier toward his guardians.

“He’s mighty energetic for such an old man,” Morgan said.

“That old man is the sharp point of a very long blade. We do not fear him, but we have immense respect for his power.”

Morgan thought for a moment. Then: “I am too young to remember Brother Lupan. But I have read of him.”

“They teach that in history classes now?” Goins sounded surprised.

“Not in public school, or even when I was working to my baccalaureate. But in my graduate days, we covered him in a seminar on science, myth, and the public mind. The book about him was in manuscript. It had not yet passed before the censors.”

The Presiding Judge snorted. “I marvel that you learned nothing from that.” Ahead of them, the priest had reached his deadly minions. Goins tugged on Morgan’s arm again, a habit that was quickly wearing in its novelty and charm. “We go now.”

They walked up the pier, followed by a parade of Thalassocretes and servants. Approaching Quinx, who was deep in hurried converse, Morgan was shocked to see that his servants were a pair of white people—a hulking, brutish male and a hard-looking female.

She glanced up at him. Her eyes were reptile cold, and seemed preternaturally alert. Danger, they said, though Morgan never thought to encounter such menace in any woman born.

His capacity for astonishment had been played out. “Strange company the Revered Quinx keeps, for a priest.”

“Oh, the Lateran is blind to the color of a man’s skin.” Sarcasm ran thick as mud in Goins’ voice. “But I cannot possibly explain the woman given the Church’s view on their proper role in society.” His hand dropped, flickering through a quick series of motions signaling someone behind them.

“What of your people?” Morgan pointed toward the bodies beyond.

“There will be a reckoning,” Goins said. “Quite soon. But not in this moment.”

The priest and his servants hurried ahead of them, so that Morgan was the first of the Thalassocratic party to reach the downed men. They were four, two with broken necks and the pallor of death upon them already, the other two groaning and bloody.

He bent to look, but a squad of sailors pushed past him, a pair of them medics with canvas bags bearing the Red Orb.

Morgan straightened again and followed Goins.

Fuming, Quinx fell into step beside the heretic Abutti. They were already well above the tiny dockside village, following a path that was not much more than a goat track up the slopes of the island’s central mountain. He could do little about whatever foolishness Goins had in mind. The closer they came to the top of the mountain, the closer they were to rescue—or brute force—courtesy of Blind Justess. Brother Kurts and the woman were under close guard behind him, but the Thalassojustity party did not seem to be armed.

When this business was over, all he needed was a shot from the flare gun. And perhaps a convenient fall for Dr. Abutti.

“Revered,” said the heretic. Polite but nervous.

Quinx had a lifetime of working with those cues. “Dr. Abutti.” And to hell with the listeners crowded not so subtly close around them.

The path ahead narrowed to little more than a foot’s width, rising sheer on the left and dropping sheer on the right. A chain was fastened to the rock, to which the party clung as they climbed. Almost thirty of them, strung out like flies on a wall.

“H-how may I be of service to you?”

Quinx took the matter by the knob. “This is a complex affair. Much history and passion is caught up in what I understand you are even now pursuing. I would have liked to invite you to present your findings at the Lateran before making your thesis public.”

“I am not yet so public, Revered.” Abutti sounded oddly sad. “I was ejected from the Planetary Society. And, well, these Thalassocretes are not so indiscrete with their confidences.”

Honeyed words flowed from Quinx’ lips. “So you are saying we could put this affair to rest without widespread comment?”

A moment of rough breathing and dizzying fear as they crept around a bulge in the side of the mountain. Then Abutti responded. “Would that be a permanent rest for me, Revered? I saw those men at the dock. I know who you are in the hierarchy.”

“No fool you,” Quinx replied. “To be blunt, you have poked your telescope into matters much better left undiscussed. Externalism is no trifling affair.”

“So I’ve been told.” Abutti’s breath huffed a bit. “Should you wish your thugs to shove me off a cliff top, Revered, I surely cannot stop you. But I am not the only astronomer on Earth with a telescope. The facts will out. Even your Increate cannot deny this truth written in the skies.”

“My Increate?” Quinx was both amused and frustrated by the assumptions embedded in that phrasing. “And yes . . . I can hardly ban telescopes across the world. Regardless of whatever you think your truth is.”

Abutti stopped, turned back to Quinx, clinging to a stanchion as pines whispered in the wind hundreds of feet below him. “Do you not know what I have found?”

“Not precisely, no,” Quinx admitted. “And in truth, it does not matter. You seek to unseat the holy truth of the Increate and reinstate the Externalist heresy. That is enough for me.”

“You accuse me of ecclesiastical crimes when all I pursue is the objective truth!”

“Move it along,” shouted one of the Thalassocretes from behind them. Abutti turned and hurried along to where the path widened to a ledge, then waited in ankle-high grass for the priest to catch up.

Quinx did, breathing hard as much from the stress of the heights as anything. “Do you not fear I will toss you off myself?” he asked, glancing past Abutti at the slope beyond.

“No. Men like you do not toss people off cliffs. You have people tossed off cliffs. That’s why you have that monster monk and the dreadful woman.” Abutti paused, obviously chewing on his next words. “Not so long ago, you would have had a tall stake and a hot fire awaiting someone like me.”

“Holy Mother Church never burned anyone,” Quinx replied, stung.

“No, you merely passed sentence and had the secular authorities carry it out. I have trained in logic, Revered. I know who holds the responsibility there.”

A line of Thalassocretes pushed past them, though both Brother Kurts and the woman were pulled aside by their guards rather than go ahead of Quinx and Abutti.

“When one raises rebellion against the Increate, one bears responsibility for one’s penalty.”

“Rebellion against the Church is not rebellion against the Increate,” Abutti grumbled. “And I raise neither. Only truth.”

Quinx had no answer to that, but he knew he had the measure of this man now. Smart but weak. Too willing to be turned aside.

Still, the astronomer had the right of it. There were more telescopes in the world.

“What did you find?” he asked as they began following the line of march again, finally drawn back to the question despite himself.

“Evidence of an aetheric vessel.” A stubborn pride swelled in Abutti’s voice. “The Increate’s ship of space, that brought us to this world.”

“I do not believe you,” Quinx replied. “Simply not possible.”

“Then why are we tramping up the side of Thera?”

They both looked ahead, to where Goins was long vanished at the head of a receding column of Thalassocretes variously in their blue-green robes and khaki excursion wear.

Archaeology represents one of our greatest challenges in unraveling the mysteries of the human experience. Geology tells us much about the age of the world, and through the sciences we understand that the Creation narrative of the Librum Vita is a grand metaphor for the natural processes of the universe. Yet archaeology shows us a literal view of the Increate’s placement of human beings upon this Earth. How to integrate the inarguable inerrancy of the Increate’s word with the interpolations of the geological sciences remains one of the greatest doctrinal challenges of our century, and perhaps centuries to come.

—His Holiness Lamboine XXII, Posthumous Commentaries

Morgan drew away from the priest as the group summited the crest of Thera and began clambering down into the crater within. Quinx’ retainers, for all that they were under guard, frightened him. He was certain that at a word from the Revered, the two would tear free of their bonds and throw him from the cliffs.

Goins gathered his group in a sloping meadow a few hundred feet below the rim. Already the Presiding Judge was talking, urgently and low. Not an exhortation. Morgan hurried to catch up and hear. They knew his evidence already, everyone who had been in the lounge of Clear Mountain the night before.

Whatever Goins had to show them here fit with Morgan’s own work like a ratchet into a gear.

“. . . passed into our trust with the foundering of the Bear Cult at Truska.”

Thalassocretes nodded in return.

“Only certain among you know anything of this secret. None of us, not even me, have ever come to this place. Even those who maintain the upward path along the outer face of the mountain are forced to spend their lives on this island.” His voice dropped. “Until Dr. Abutti’s telescope opened the heavens to our eyes, this was without doubt the deepest truth upon this Earth. Brother Lupan had the right of it.”

“The Increate’s Chariot?” Quinx stepped up next to Morgan. “A ridiculous fantasy embedded in a foolish heresy.”

“A truth, embedded in the heart of each of the Eight Gardens,” Goins replied, his voice booming now. “I give you the Chariot of Cycladia.”

He turned, walked across the meadow, and began tearing at the vines that draped a grove there.

Quinx reached into his robes and pulled out a firearm. A fat-barreled gun. Morgan stared a moment, incredulous, then tackled the priest as he raised his weapon and fired it into the sky.

The next few moments were blinding confusion. Something hissed high before popping—fireworks? Shouting echoed around Morgan as the enormous monk and the woman with him broke free of their guards as he’d feared. Morgan stumbled back to his feet, fleeing the priest and the lopsided fight behind him toward the dubious safety of Goins and the Thalassocretes who were tearing down plants to reveal a mottled wall of . . . something?

Engines strained overhead as an airship circled low in the sky. He looked up to see a narrow bag with a knife hull beneath. Copper lances protruding from the hull crackled with visible energy.

Morgan ran toward the Chariot. “Judge Goins, we are betrayed!”

Goins turned, stared into the sky a moment, watching in apparent disbelief as lightning forked across the sky to ground into the trees behind him with a series explosive cracks. He began to laugh as smoke rose. Now his voice boomed like a parade sergeant’s. “Quinx, you are a greater fool than even I thought. Do you doubt the Increate’s Chariot can defend itself?”

Another bolt lanced from the airship, striking down half a dozen shrieking Thalassocretes in a groaning mass. Quinx scuttled toward Goins, trailed by his dangerous guardians. Above them, the airship strained lower, barking bullets that sprayed across the meadow in a scythe of flying dirt that somehow claimed no lives on the first pass.

The flash of light erupting from the trees blinded Morgan for a moment. A sizzling noise followed, which terminated in a thunderclap. He rolled over, rubbing his eyes, to see the airship aflame and lurching toward the other side of Thera’s crater. Quinx was still on his feet but stumbling. The monk was down, while the woman howled at the sky a long moment before rushing toward Morgan and Goins.

“You are all mad,” the doctor shouted. “All of you!”

The woman headed straight toward him. Her eyes glowed with a death-madness that Morgan had never before witnessed, having only read of such things in his scientific romances. Goins simply stood, staring down a hundred and fifty pounds of racing anger. Above them, something exploded aboard the airship.

Still running, the woman caught up to Quinx, grabbing the priest by the arms. She continued to sprint toward Morgan and Goins, carrying the shuddering Quinx over one shoulder. Instead of plowing into them, she pulled up short, her breath a bellows.

“Show me the Chariot,” she demanded. Her voice was a deep, threatening growl. Behind her, the monk arose and stumbled toward them.

“Who are you to ask?” Goins asked.

“A Machinist.” Her voice was a growl. “This is my future. The future of my faith.”

“The past,” Morgan said, correcting her. “The future is coming in the sky.”

Behind them, the mottled wall whirred. He turned to see a section slide upward to create an opening. Faint crimson light glowed beyond. The airship crashed in the distance with another whoosh of flame and heat.

The Machinist continued to stare them both down. “My lover is dead, as is my captain. You allowed them to die. You owe me this.”

The monk caught up to her, tackling from behind with his hands spread wide to catch her eyes and the edges of her mouth. The woman dropped Quinx, who bit off a scream as he hit, then she bent to seize the monk and wrestle him to the ground in front of her.

He bounced up, obviously rattled, but ready to engage. Goins tugged Morgan’s arm. “Back,” he hissed. “This is not our fight.”

“None of this is my fight,” Morgan growled.

Goins tapped the wall of the Increate’s Chariot. “This is one of eight aetheric ships here on Earth. You have found their origin, the great ship that is their mother. You were right all along. Do you now doubt that our history is coming home in the sky, from your libration point?”

“No, I do not doubt.” Behind them, a screech. The monk and the Machinist were circling dangerously as Quinx staggered to his feet.

Strangely, Goins was ignoring the battle, focusing his entire attention on Morgan. That in turn drew Morgan’s gaze back to the judge. For all his curiosity, he was terribly loath to step within. He hadn’t wished to be this right, to confront the meaning of his discovery so personally. “But I did not summon it.”

“Then who did?” the judge asked impatiently.

That, he could answer. “All of us. With our telelocutors and our airships and our engines, sending rays of energy into the aether as surely as if we’d lit a bonfire in the night. If this Chariot knows enough to defend itself, doubtless the mother ship can watch our Earth for us to rise high enough to see it in return. We have had electrickifcation for a generation. It can see that.”

With a flicker of his eyes, Goins drew a gun of his own and shot past Morgan in one motion. Startled, Morgan turned to see the monk falling to the ground, his face bloody. The woman was on her hands and knees. Quinx lurched slowly toward the two of them with a slightly unfocused look on his face.

The Presiding Judge handed the pistol to Morgan. “You choose. The past, or the future.”

Morgan promptly dropped the weapon into the grass. He’d wanted the truth, by the Increate, not such a mess of power and violence. “I am a scientist. I do not have people thrown off cliffs.”

Quinx reached for Morgan’s hand. “Ninety Nine,” he gasped. “Brother Kurts. Please . . . Stop it. You didn’t need to do this.”

The Machinist shuddered to her feet. One eye was gouged loose, and her mouth bled. Morgan glanced at the dying monk and wondered just how tough a human being could be.

Her eyes were no longer mad. Instead, they were haunted. “Stop,” she said, echoing Quinx’ words.

“Go,” Morgan replied. He had just lately learned the measure of his own courage, and was not sure he could step into the chariot himself. “Go into the future. It cannot be stopped. The stars do not lie, and they are coming toward us.”

“They are my stars.” She stared at them with her remaining eye. “Ours. Not yours.”

The woman stumbled weeping through the opened door. Quinx turned away from Morgan. “It cannot be,” the priest gasped. “I must go where Ion has already led.” Face twisted in some inner agony of the spirit, he followed after her.

“And you?” asked Goins. “Do you choose the future as well?”

Afraid, he stood unmoving a moment. Then: “I would have thought to . . .” The doctor’s words ran out as he marshaled his thoughts. “No. I’ve come to understand that the future is here with us. Whatever comes, comes.”

Morgan Abutti looked up at the smoke trailing into the blue sky from the ruined airship. Goins squatted next to him, pistol still in hand. The door into the Chariot had slid shut.

“What next?” the scientist asked.

“Surely the Increate knows,” said Goins.

“Quinx would have said that the Increate knows all.” Morgan thought about those words. “It seems to me that They do not think to warn us of the truth.”

The remaining Thalassocretes gathered around. Some tended the wounded and the dead, others discussed the advisability of sending a party to look into the crash of the airship.

The Chariot began to whine, a low hum that built slowly in volume. Goins rose, gestured for a general retreat. It seemed wisest.

Morgan was slow to move, staring at the chance of greatness which he’d abandoned. He was the first to see the Chariot break from the trees and rise into the sky. The rest stopped to watch as clouds of dust and steam spiraled beneath it.

“Good luck, Revered Quinx,” muttered the doctor.

Goins tugged at his arm. “The choices are made. You were correct. We must go.”

“You have it almost right,” said Morgan. “His choices are ended. Ours are just begun.” His courage returned to him once more, like a whipped dog coming home. “This is what I get for uncovering the truth. What I had declined to see clearly before. There are great consequences to be accounted for.” He glanced away from the departing chariot. “Are you ready to face those, Judge? I am.”

“Remember, your aetheric vessel was coming anyway, whether or not you had seen it first. You did not cause this.” Goins paused a moment, searching Morgan’s face as if for some truth. “Science finds the path where the light of faith has shown the way.”

Morgan could not tell if the judge meant to be ironic or not. That did not matter. He patted the other man’s shoulder. “Let us go, then. There is work to be done.”

Above them, the future rose ever higher, shedding six thousand years of mud and plants and tradition as it climbed to meet the oncoming stars.

ON A REDSTATION, DRIFTING

Aliette de Bodard

To the women of my family, who held everything together in the midst of the storms.

Book 1: Linh

Linh arrived on Prosper Station blown by the winds of war, amidst a ship full of refugees who huddled together, speaking tearfully of the invading armies: the war between the rebel lords and the Empire had escalated, and their war-kites had laid waste to entire planets.

Linh kept her distance, not wanting to draw attention to herself on the way there; but, when they disembarked from the mindship and joined the immigration queue, she found herself behind an old woman in a shawl, who glanced fearfully around her, as if she expected soldiers to come out of the shadows at any moment. Bent and bowed, she looked so much like Linh’s long-dead mother that Linh found herself instinctively reaching out.

“It’s going to be all right, Madam,” she said.

The woman looked at her: past her, in that particular way of old people whose mind wasn’t steady anymore. “They’ll come here,” she whispered, her eyes boring into Linh’s, uncomfortably bright and feverish. “There is no escape.”

“We’re safe,” Linh said.

The woman looked sceptical. Linh drew herself to her full height, calling on a hint of the dignity and poise she’d taken when heading her tribunal sessions. “We are the children of the Emperor, and he will protect us.”

The old woman looked at her for a while, as if seeing her for the first time. “If you say so, child.”

“I know it to be true,” Linh said. She mouthed the words, the platitudes, effortlessly, as though she believed them: a good scholar, a good magistrate, able to engage in any argument, no matter how trivial or nonsensical. Of course she knew the Emperor had no desire to engage the rebel lords; that he was young, and badly advised, and would prefer to retreat. She knew all the words. After all, her denunciation of that policy was what had tarred her with the red ink of criminals; sent her on the run to this spirits-forsaken place with nothing but her wits to rely on.

The old woman had turned away. They were almost at the beginning of the queue now, and Linh could see three men in livery, checking papers and directing refugees into the station itself. Linh took a deep breath, bracing herself. Every instinct she had called for her to slip through like the other refugees.

Every instinct but one, and she could feel, through the mem-implants, her First Ancestor Thanh Thuy’s presence, the old woman as strong and querulous as ever, reminding her that ties of blood held up Heaven and Earth; that even though Linh didn’t know Prosper Station and had never met the family, they were still relatives, and entitled to far more than minimal courtesies.

And, of course, as usual, First Ancestor was right.

Linh shook her head, shaking off the slight dissociation that always came with mem-implants. It was becoming harder and harder to tell implants from her own mind, a side-effect of being so good with them.

She waited until they’d checked papers, and given her the permissions that would allow her to access the trance, Prosper’s internal network. Then, when the queue of refugees had wandered away in search of their fortune, she sought someone in charge, who turned out to be a young man with a quivering voice, barely old enough to have passed his exams.

“I am Lê Thi Linh,” she said. Lê, like all Dai Viet names, was common. But the way she held herself, and her utter certainty, was enough to shake him.

She stood silent and unmoving as he dragged her into the trance: she got a brief flash of his credentials as Keeper of the Outer Gates for Prosper Station, and an even briefer flash of his family tree, the line of his greater ancestors lighting up in red, warm tones, all the way up until it intersected her own lineage. A cousin, somewhat removed. Hardly surprising, as most of Prosper Station came, ultimately, from the same stock that had bred her: Lê Thi Phuoc, who had borne in her womb the Honoured Ancestress and Her four human siblings.

“I see.” She could see him swallow, convulsively, could track the beads of sweat on his pale skin: everything thrown into merciless clarity, as if he were a witness before her tribunal. “Welcome, Aunt Linh. I’ll take you to the Inner Quarters.”

She followed him, not into the refugee hall, but into another, smaller corridor and then another, until they seemed to be wandering into a maze; and, like a maze, Prosper Station unfolded its wonders to her.

In many ways, it did not belie its name. The corridors were vast and warm, decorated with hologram works of art, from images of waterfalls on the Fifth Planet, to a lonely house clinging to the mountain, lost in morning mist. Here and there, quatrains spoke of the wonders of coming home, of the sorrow of parting and the fall of the Old Empire . . .

In other ways . . . Linh had once been to the capital, and had seen the epitome of refinement there—the inlaid marble panels, brought all the way back from Old Earth, the exquisite calligraphy that breathed and seemed to move with a life of its own, like a coiled dragon hidden within text. For all its wealth, Prosper Station remained a small, isolated station at the back end of nowhere, on the edge of the Dai Viet Empire. The poems were quotations taken from old books, and not the vibrant, searing words traded in the literary clubs on First Planet; the paintings, too, were old, and looked like they hadn’t been refreshed for a while; and the architecture of the corridors was a little too bulky, a little too clumsy, lacking the effortless flowing grace of more central habitats.

There was a faint music of zither in the background, which got stronger as they crossed room after room; and a faint smell, like the one after the rain. The walls flared out, and they were walking through carefully preserved gardens, with the smell of bamboo and phuong grass heavy in the air, a luxury that must have all cost a fortune in air and water and heat.

Linh felt a thread at the back of her mind: Fifth Ancestor Hoang, trying to push her into reading the poems which named each area, to admire the designers’ culture, their clever allusions to the poets of the past. Fifth Ancestor, ever the poet, ever the lover of history. She pushed him back, gently, ignoring the suggestion. It wasn’t time for cleverness or beauty; though Fifth Ancestor whispered in her mind that there was always time for beauty, that one who did not pause to admire beauty might as well be dead to the world.

At length, they reached a room almost hidden away amidst the greenery. The door slid open at a touch of the young man’s fingers; he moved away to let Linh in.

Within, everything seemed almost bare, until she realised that the shimmer on the red walls was text. Word after word scrolled from top to bottom, almost too fast to read. Linh caught fragments about moonlight, and jade, and wild herds of trau cho soi over the plains; verse after verse, more clever allusions than her mind would ever hold, even with her mem-implants.

Beautiful.

A woman was waiting for her there, frozen in the uncertain land between youth and old age, too old to be patronised, too young to be respected. Behind her was a younger girl, waiting with her head bowed, though everything in her spoke of arrested flight. “Be welcome here, cousin.” A brief burst of trance, and Linh was tracing the trees. Yes, they were indeed cousins, through her maternal grandmother, and the woman’s marriage to Lê Nhu Anh, and . . .

The world wobbled and crumpled, as if it were a sheet of paper the spirits had punched through. There was a presence in the room; the text shimmered, the letters becoming subtly distorted, the red of the walls taking on an oily sheen, like fish sauce mixed with grease, and a wind too cold to be any draught. It was all she could do not to fall to her knees, her mind struggling to cope with it all . . .

She hadn’t come unprepared, of course. She’d read all about the stations, all about the Minds that held and regulated them, all about stations like Prosper and its Honoured Ancestress, and the family that peopled its core. But the truth of a Mind’s presence shattered the easy descriptions, the facile, clever similes written as glibly as inferior poems: it was its own self, the vast, dark presence that seemed to fold the air around itself, wrapped around the contraption in the centre of the room that might have been a throne, that might have been a tree with too many thorns; metal, twisting and buckling like a fish caught on land, its shifting reflections hurting her eyes . . .

“Welcome home, child,” a voice said, filling her ears to bursting. “Great-great-grandmother.” She forced herself to get the words out, even as the trance went wild, seeking a pathway that would connect her to the Mind, ancestor after ancestor overlaid over the twisting texts. “I apologise for disturbing you.”

A sound which might have been laughter. “Nonsense. Whenever did my children ever disturb me? This is your house, and you’re always welcome here.”

Even the words were wrong, subtly off, evoking a burst of recognition from First Ancestor Thanh Thuy, vocabulary and phrases reminding Linh of old memorials, not used for many generations. She triggered her mem-implants, letting First Ancestor’s mem-fragments flood her mind, picking out words as they surfaced. “Heaven and Earth have overturned for me. I seek refuge in the embrace of my family.”

Another vast, ineffable sound: a chuckle or a sniff of anger? The pressure against her mind didn’t seem unfriendly. “This was your great-grandfather’s home. It’s also yours, should you wish it. What is it that you seek refuge from?”

Linh hesitated a fraction of a second, as all six ancestors in her mind howled at her for daring to lie to a superior; and then said, each word as dry as sun-baked chillies on her tongue, “War has come to the Twenty-Third Planet, and to the province of Great Light. My tribunal burns in the riots, and lawless soldiers scour the streets with their war-kites, raping and pillaging as they go.”

It was untrue. The news of the war had reached her only after her ship pulled itself out of the deep planes: pictures of her tribunal in flames, the litany of the dead, of the missing she couldn’t trace. All because her first lieutenant Giap had tricked her into running, into abandoning her own people . . .

For a moment, a bare, agonising moment, a suspended breath, she thought the Mind had caught her. She felt her pulse race in its wide-spectrum vision, caught the sheen of sweat on her brow, or ten thousand other ways she could have given herself away. But at length, the pressure retreated; and in the centre of the room, the core was inert again, and the only memory of the Mind’s presence in the room was a faint whisper: “You have my blessing, child.”

Linh bowed, very low, as low as she’d have bowed for the Emperor, letting a dozen heartbeats pass before she rose again.

The woman, Lê Thi Quyen, was waiting for her, as unmoving and as expressionless as propriety required. “Come, Cousin,” she said. “We’ll see you settled properly.” But as she turned away from the core Linh caught the slight, impatient shake of her head, and knew the Mind might have believed her, but Quyen would be watching, and waiting, on the lookout to expose her lies.

She might be family, as the Mind had said. But she wasn’t welcome on Prosper Station.

☆ ☆ ☆

Quyen hadn’t expected Cousin Linh.

Not her coming, of course; that particular surprise couldn’t have been avoided, though Quyen had known of Linh’s presence only a few instants after Linh had approached the Keeper of the Outer Gate. The man had sent out a message about a relative seeking refuge; the message had been relayed through the network by means of the trance, picked up by the Honoured Ancestress Herself, and by Quyen a few heartbeats later.

But Quyen had believed Linh would be a young, bedraggled woman, bowing her head and humbly begging her distant relatives for shelter.

None of that had turned out to be true. Cousin Linh had bowed, to be sure, but it was with the stiff grace of people unused to obeisance. Even bowed, she’d held herself with quiet, easy arrogance, and spoken with the lilted, old-fashioned speech characteristic of scholars. Her gaze had wandered from time to time, each time for a fraction of a second, enough for Quyen to guess Linh was communicating with several mem-implants; that her speech, her manners would have been coached by ghost images of her own ancestors, honed to perfection like the design of a mindship.

In short, Linh was everything Quyen wasn’t: a success at the exams, the greater partner in a marriage, should she so choose. Linh would never be sent away to broker a trade alliance, would never have to produce children to be judged worthy, and her work was admired and praised within the Dai Viet Empire. Unlike Quyen, who was little better than a brood-mare.

And a failure even at that. Quyen had no children; and her husband, like so many greater marriage partners, had been called away by the necessities of the war. He’d left one bright morning on a mindship, and he’d been gone for so long without news that Quyen found herself forgetting even the sound of his voice.

“You look thoughtful,” the Honoured Ancestress said. The familiar, reassuring pressure slid against her mind, a reminder that she might not have mem-implants, but that she wasn’t alone.

“Just wondering what to do with Cousin Linh,” Quyen lied. She felt ashamed of where her thoughts dragged her, but the woman rubbed her the wrong way—something in the tilt of her head, in her casual arrogance, in her behaviour, typical of someone who’d always had the world go their way and couldn’t even have the grace to bow when it abased her.

The Honoured Ancestress’s pressure ebbed and flowed, as it often did when She was considering a problem. “We are not short of postings on Prosper Station,” She said.

“No,” Quyen said. She thought of where Linh might go. The overcrowded and underfunded tribunal? She would find it an insult to be the lackey of an existing magistrate, especially so soon after losing her own responsibilities. And did Quyen really want her in the velvet cap and jade robes, lording it over them all? As a supplicant, she was arrogant enough; as a representative of the Dragon Throne . . .

“The girls’ tutor has resigned,” she said, aloud. She called up the distribution of allowances all over the station. A tutor’s allowance was well below the ordinary salary of a magistrate, but she could increase it enough that it wouldn’t show too much. Cousin Linh would smart, but she’d recover.

“You think . . .” the Honoured Ancestress said.

“Of course,” Quyen said, smoothly, hardly believing that her voice wasn’t shaking. “Who better than a state official to prepare the girls for their examinations?”

The Honoured Ancestress said nothing. She didn’t need to. Tutor, even to a ruling family, was reserved for those who hadn’t gone beyond the Provincial or Planetary examination. For someone like Linh, who had passed the Metropolitan exam, and received her posting from the hands of the Emperor himself . . .

“Beggars don’t choose what is given to them,” Quyen said, aloud.

“You know best,” the Honoured Ancestress said, at last. She left most human affairs to Quyen, judging Herself incapable of understanding the human heart and mind. She kept the station’s systems running, from the trance to the holo-displays, from helping mindships dock to picking music and poetry for the various areas, from providing supplies and food that suited everyone, to supporting the virtual environments that would please the eyes and the ears. But still She believed that She didn’t understand them.

“Of course I don’t,” Quyen said; and it was the unadorned, bald truth. But she knew the Honoured Ancestress would not believe her.

“You do, child. You should trust in yourself more,” the Honoured Ancestress said, and Her voice was sad. The pressure against Quyen’s mind withdrew; the Honoured Ancestress had left, finding something else aboard Prosper that required Her full attention.

Quyen turned to the other matters for the day: the supplies she owed for the war effort, which had to be put aboard a merchant ship and sent back to the First Planet, their own dwindling stock of food. She studied the Honoured Ancestress’s star-views to determine which ships were on their way to them. There would be a strong influx of merchant ships soon, an ideal time to replenish their supplies—provided, of course, they had actually had what Prosper needed. The war had depleted everyone’s resources, and merchants were liable to be boarded by any of the two rebel armies, the contents of their holds used to support the space sectors in open rebellion.

Quyen was down to reviewing the order of the day for the Assignment of Resources meeting, when a blink in the corner of her field of view indicated a priority message. She slipped into the trance to view it.

It was from Xuan Rua, the eldest of her nieces, uncharacteristically brief and to the point: “Come to Eastern Gate. Now.” If it had been paper the ink would have bled, and the letters hung slightly askew. But it was simulated calligraphy, always neat and perfect no matter what happened, and the only indication of the high emotion behind it was the curt, unornamented style.

Eastern Gate. One of the entrances to the family’s Inner Quarters, not the grandest, or the most accessible. What could possibly—

She was wasting time. Xuan Rua wouldn’t have summoned her for anything less than an emergency. Quyen put away the papers she was using. She wondered, for a brief moment, if she should call up the surveillance sensors’ feed in the trance. But she couldn’t do that and move, and it would only waste time.

☆ ☆ ☆

Instead, she ran. It was slightly undignified, considering her position as Administrator of Prosper Station, but propriety be damned. Eastern Gate. She crossed courtyards with vegetation, both the stunted low-oxygen varieties, and the more expensive ones imported from planetside; and practically shoved citizens out of the way as she ran.

She rushed through the silent library, where she saw one of her younger sisters-in-law give her a startled look from her seat; and then Quyen left her behind: going onwards, past corridor after corridor with the words of poets and statesmen blinking on the walls, the colours shifting from red to green as she ran.

Eastern Gate was small, barely a hole in a wall, surrounded by a few plants to make it appear grander than it really was. Quyen heard the argument long before she reached Eastern Gate: the Honoured Ancestress was doing Her best to muffle the voices, but Her systems had limits, and She couldn’t completely change the walls’ texture. They had been conceived to reflect sound as much as possible, to ensure that anyone who entered the Inner Quarters would pass from the noise of the world into a quieter environment.

Three people stood before the closed gate, darker shapes against the vivid red of the welcome signs: Xuan Rua, her uncle Bao, and . . .

She should have known. The third person standing there—though standing was an overstatement, since he clung to the panels of the gates, probably the only things that prevented him from collapsing like a punctured habitat—was Brother Huu Hieu, Xuan Rua’s father.

“Drunk again?” she asked, coldly, to Xuan Rua, who was hovering, uncertain whether to come closer or not. “Or gambling again?” From Xuan Rua’s grimace, she knew it was both.

Still, it was hardly an emergency, save that the scandal had never been this spectacular.

“Sister.” Huu Hieu’s speech was slurred, the accents on the words almost mangling everything past recognition. “Fancy seeing you there.”

Quyen made her voice as cold and sobering as the void of space. “Your wife would be ashamed to see you.” Quyen’s sister-in-law had left three years ago, along with nearly all of the family’s greater spouses, called to other planets by the war. Many ships from the war-zones had docked since, but none of them had brought her back. Or any of them back.

Huu Hieu laughed, attempting to pull himself upwards, failing and ending cross-legged on the floor, pathetic. “My wife? She’s not coming back, Sister, and that’s the truth of it. They’re not coming back, any of them. The war has gobbled them up.”

“Nonsense.”

“Nonsense? The Russian czars did it, you know: pick up people from where they lived, and strand them back at the other end of the country after their service was done. If the state ever came for you, you ran and hid. That’s what we should have done. Run and hide.”

Ever the coward, the unsubtle, unaware of propriety or decorum. Sometimes, she wondered what her sister-in-law saw in the man. Theirs had been a marriage of convenience, but they had genuinely cared for one another, much like Quyen had come to care for her own husband.

“They did their duty to Dai Viet, and to the Son of Heaven, which is more than can be said of you. Get inside,” Quyen said. “Sober up, and we’ll talk in the morning.”

From the corner of her eye she saw Xuan Rua throw glances at her uncle Bao. Bao hadn’t moved, remaining standing in the corridor, as if everything passed him right by. And perhaps it did. Bao had been retreating further and further from the world ever since his own wife had been called to service.

“Uncle, please.”

Bao hesitated, and then nodded. “My eldest niece won’t say it because he’s her father and deserves her respect, but I have no such boundaries. We think that he’s traded away his mem-implants.”

That stopped her. She’d been bending over Huu Hieu, trying to coax him to stand, and now she looked at him anew. His hair hung askew, freed from the top-knot of officials’ spouses, his eyes bleary, the veins splayed on his cornea like a spatter of blood on a pristine floor. Her hands, searching, combed the matted hair, far heavier than it should have been, now that she thought of it. For a long, long while, nothing made a noise, as if the entire station were holding its breath; her fingers parting strand after strand, readying a silent apology to her ancestors for touching her brother-in-law, if she should be proved wrong . . . traded away his mem-implants.”

That stopped her. She’d been bending over Huu Hieu, trying to coax him to stand, and now she looked at him anew. His hair hung askew, freed from the top-knot of officials’ spouses, his eyes bleary, the veins splayed on his cornea like a spatter of blood on a pristine floor. Her hands, searching, combed the matted hair, far heavier than it should have been, now that she thought of it. For a long, long while, nothing made a noise, as if the entire station were holding its breath; her fingers parting strand after strand, readying a silent apology to her ancestors for touching her brother-in-law, if she should be proved wrong . . .

There.

Her hands found the shaved patches of the skull where the mem-implants had been affixed, traced their outlines. Instead of old bone growth she found a slight yield, like the broken shell of a crab, and her hands came back with the strong, acrid smell of disinfectant.

“You’re right,” she said without looking at Bao or Xuan Rua. “Someone’s cut into his skull.” And, if they’d gone to that much trouble to keep it hidden, they wouldn’t have just taken a look, either.

His mem-implants. All that was left of his ancestors, to advise him through life. A favour he didn’t deserve. He was no official and should have been as devoid of implants as Quyen; but his family had had no other descendants, and thus no one else to take care of the ancestral altars. How could he possibly think of selling those?

“Who took them?” she asked. If you weren’t kin to the persona stored in a mem-implant, the affixing procedure had a strong chance of driving you insane; but there were always those hankering for the knowledge they brought: students desperate to pass the imperial examinations and attain the status of a state official.

“Who cares?” Huu Hieu’s speech was slurred again, his eyes rolling up in their orbits. She’d thought it was an excess of drink; but it might have been the side-effects of the anaesthesia. “As if you ever did, sister. Frigid bitch . . .”

“You’re making a fool of yourself, elder brother,” Bao snapped, and something in his voice must have reached Huu Hieu, because he mumbled something indistinct before his eyes closed, and didn’t open again.

“I don’t think he’s in a state to tell us,” Xuan Rua said, cautiously.

Quyen sat, cradling Huu Hieu in her lap, breathing in the sickening smell of alcohol mingled with the gods knew what. Sold them. Given them away. She didn’t care if he sold or dishonoured his own ancestors—that was his own problem, and he was welcome to it! But one of the mem-implants he’d so casually disposed of wasn’t his but his wife’s.

They had, as was customary, traded implants so that they could access the higher functions of the station, and have direct contact with the Honoured Ancestors, both on Prosper and on Huu Hieu’s natal station.

One of Huu Hieu’s implants belonged to them. To Prosper. To the Honoured Ancestress. One of the family’s treasures that Quyen had been responsible for, as she was responsible for the rest of the station. What would the Honoured Ancestress think? She shirked from the picture, as fractured and as cold as a blade of ice driven through her ribs.

“What do you know?” she asked.

“Not much, sorry,” Bao said. “I picked him up rimwards, in one of the gambling circles.”

“And you thought something was off? Why the mem-implants specifically?”

“I . . . I can’t tell you.” Bao’s hand made a sign, tracing Xuyan characters for “Peach Garden”. It was a reminder of a brotherhood oath, which would weigh as heavily as family ties.

“I see,” Quyen said, slowly. “Have you any idea who took them?”

Bao shook his head. “The Tile and Deer Abode. That’s all I have.”

“I see.” Quyen let go of Huu Hien, letting him fall to the ground far more softly than she’d have wished to. “I need to think about the best way to handle this.” And to Xuan Rua: “Can you take him home?”

Her niece appeared on the verge of tears, but she nodded. Quyen said, as gently as she could, “Master Kong himself said that a man’s duty to a superior included steering them away from evil acts. You did no wrong.”

Xuan Rua swallowed audibly, and came to lift her father’s prone body. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Quyen said, rising.

Back in her quarters she straightened the holos of her own ancestors: her parents-in-law, and her own parents, who had given her in marriage to Prosper Station as part of a trade alliance. She disrobed, slowly, looking into their eyes. She had no mem-implants to remember them. Those had gone to her elder sister, who had passed the imperial examinations and become a state official, while Quyen herself remained the lesser partner of a marriage, managing the daily business of her house, and waiting for her husband Anh to come back.

To come back; to give her a son and to confirm the status she had on Prosper; to look at her with wonder in his eyes, and see how worthy of him she’d become . . .

She said, aloud, “You didn’t call me.”

There was the familiar feeling of the world twisting around her, and the touch on her mind, strong enough to hold her against all storms. “I didn’t hear anything until my grandniece sent her message.” The Honoured Ancestress’s voice was fainter than usual, as if coming from a great distance.

“But you heard,” Quyen said.

“From the moment my attention was called to Eastern Gate, yes, I heard it all. The implant that was lost . . . it holds the memory of Du Khach. She’s old, from the generation of your grandparents, but I remember her as though it were yesterday. She’d roam through the outer circles, peeking behind panels and trying to understand how the Station worked, and sit with me late in the evenings, listening to my ramblings. I can see her, shaping environments within the heart-room, so we could sit together and have tea . . .” The pressure against Quyen’s mind became warm, tinged with a bitter sweetness. “No wonder she made herself into a designer of mindships and space stations in the end. She made us all proud.”

Quyen said nothing. She had not known Du Khach; and could barely even imagine what the passage of time would mean for the Honoured Ancestress. To see them all, from birth to senility and death, and yet go on, taking the children under Her wing, even while knowing they, too, would die . . .

“Child?” the Honoured Ancestress said. The trance-link was tinged with sadness, like unshed tears. “Will you find it, daughter? It . . . it means much to me.”

Daughter. The emphasis was unmistakable. Quyen thought of herself a decade ago: a frightened young girl just off the ship, praying that her husband would be kind; and of the strange sheen rising around her, the all-encompassing embrace that took her in, and asked nothing back. Nothing, save her love and piety; and were they not such a small price to pay?

“Of course I’ll find them,” Quyen said. She could taste salt on her tongue, and an acrid bitterness. “I won’t disappoint you. But promise me you won’t strain yourself too much. You can’t care for us all.”

“I’m not mortal, child.”

She wasn’t human. She might have been borne in a human womb, She might share an ancestress with Quyen’s husband, but She’d been designed from optics and fibres and nanobots and She’d lived far beyond human lifetimes. But She was . . .

Quyen dared not voice the thought; and one did not contradict an elder. “You have limits.”

The Honoured Ancestress made a sound that sent chills up Quyen’s arms, which might have been laughter, which might have been tears. “We all do. Good night, child.” And with that, she was gone, leaving Quyen in the silence of the empty room.

☆ ☆ ☆

Linh was bored. Giving lessons to two young girls, no matter how gifted or dedicated, was a task for menials, and certainly did not require a holder of an exalted Metropolitan degree, much less a former magistrate.

She did everything Quyen had asked of her—provided essay topics, and hammered the classics into their heads until they breathed the words of the ancients with every step.

Today, after the usual drills, she dragged them into the trance where she had them superimpose an environment of their own design onto reality, without asking the Honoured Ancestress for help. It was an exercise requiring one to walk on the knife’s edge between focus and flow, at which Linh herself had excelled, but had seldom practised since her student days.

And they were both failing miserably at it.

They were meant to work together, and had picked a deliberately old-fashioned environment: the interior of an Exodus spaceship from Old Earth, gleaming with obsolete boards and control panels, and obscure parts the purpose of which had long vanished in history. The basic structure was sound, but here and there, the illusion flickered as if it were falling apart, and cracks had appeared everywhere in the metal walls, spreading further and further the more Linh watched.

The youngest and most ambitious of the sisters, Xuan Kiem, seemed unusually distracted, though she did her best to hide it. Her sister Xuan Rua, who usually assisted Quyen in the day-to-day running of Prosper, was worse; barely listening to anything Linh had to say.

“Enough,” Linh said, waving a hand. “That will be all for today.”

The illusion flickered and died, and the girls emerged from the trance, blinking furiously. Xuan Kiem looked as though she might approach Linh, but Xuan Rua made a gesture towards her and the two of them scattered, fleeing the courtyard like startled sparrows.

What was going on? It was frustrating—no, infuriating—to be cut out of any responsibilities. But not being informed of important matters was worse. More than ever, it made Linh feel an exile, and wonder whether she had made the right decision in coming to Prosper.

She missed Giap, more than ever. Her tribunal’s first lieutenant would found the words to comfort her, to remind her of her purpose. Her ancestors on the mem-implants could do that. But their advice was hollow, dispensed by poor copies of men and women long settled into the afterlife.

Giap . . .

Giap was back on the Twenty-Third Planet, and likely he had died in the invasion. The thought weighed in her stomach like a cold stone. She was alone now, swimming upstream in an unknown, dangerous country, not knowing anything of what lay on the banks, or where the river took its source.

She felt First Ancestor Thanh Thuy’s amusement. The fish who finds the source becomes a dragon.

Yes, there was that. She had leapt the falls of the examinations, risen up as an official, and made her own way in the world. She was no harmless frog; she was a dragon, and her place wasn’t here in this dingy school, teaching girls who had no need of her services to succeed at the examinations. Xuan Kiem would pass by virtue of her talents, and the eldest, Xuan Rua, obviously had no interest in anything but Prosper.

Like Cousin Quyen.

Her hands itched. She was tired of being idle, of being blinded and kept in the dark.

Fine.

If Cousin Quyen wanted her servile, Linh wasn’t going to oblige her. Ever since she’d arrived, the family had kept her busy, either under Quyen’s orders, or those of the Honoured Ancestress. When her lessons with the girls were finished, a woman would come and ask her opinion of a poem; or the girls’ uncle, Bao, would casually stroll in, and discuss Buddhist texts with her. It could have been coincidence, but there had been too many such events. For whatever reason, Cousin Quyen wanted Linh busy, and not wandering around the station.

Which was precisely what Linh was going to do.

She walked out of her quarters, and into the wide courtyard of the common area. No one stopped her. She guessed she had a little time before the girls went to Quyen. And perhaps more, if the family was affected by whatever had distracted them.

She headed out, towards the outer rings, passing under the wide gates of the family quarters. As she moved away from the core of the station the crowd changed. The red-clad workers in livery were replaced by grey-clad techs and movers of bots. Then the crowd itself seemed to mould, taking on the vivid colours of the hundreds of people on the station: the poets, the scholars, the Masters of Wind and Water, the Commissioners of Supplies, and the myriad of people who made life aboard the station possible.

Linh let herself be carried away by the flow, past large complexes tucked away behind grey facades, and shops selling everything from medicine to scrolls and holo-displays. But, as she did so, her magistrate’s mind was still working, and her enhanced vision was making notes of all the small details: how the store fronts were almost empty; how people with gaunt faces loitered in the streets, hesitating over whether to accost someone; how the crowd that watched the xanh-insects fight kept glancing sideways, their eyes not on the fight, but on other, more serious matters.

It was obvious that the station was falling inwards, taking in more refugees than it could afford to, or perhaps redistributing food in an inefficient manner. Not surprising, given Quyen’s inexperience. She did a creditable job, but when it came down to it, she was the lesser partner in a marriage, and had not been trained to handle anything as large as Prosper Station.

Not that Linh had been, of course. But at least she could help. At least she could offer something valuable in exchange for the risks Quyen was taking in sheltering her, something more than anyone with a smidgeon education could have done.

At last, she found herself in front of a simple grey facade, with rows of elegant characters flashing yellow on a white background, both in Xuyan and in the Viet language. They read: Hall of Network Access.

She paused. She’d thought she was following nothing but her inclination, taking crossroads at random, following the sounds and smells that appealed to her most. But she was magistrate, with the mem-implants of six ancestors in her mind. One of those, Fourth Ancestor Canh, had lived on the station a hundred years ago, and he would know the layout. Had she accessed her mem-implants without realising, letting half-remembered knowledge guide her here?

Did she want so badly to know what had happened, back on the Twenty-Third Planet?

Of course she did. Of course she owed Giap and her other lieutenants; Ho and her poetry club, and the hundred people she had run away from like a coward.

She should have stayed. Demons strike her! She should have stayed.

Without being aware that she did so, she pulled the bead curtain apart, and entered a dark room, lit only by flame-lamps. The man sitting behind the counter looked oddly familiar, the way everyone on the station did, with their lines distorted by generations of interbreeding. He nodded at her, pointing towards a free terminal.

Linh sat and composed herself in the silence. The terminal was a single holo-projector, offering her a map of options arranged in the shape of a planet system—a fitting touch on a space station.

As usual, the atmosphere was quiet, everyone immersed in their own private worlds. Linh slipped on her headphones. She suspected she didn’t need them, and that the station’s Mind would be ensuring the sound from her unit remained contained around her, within the four low walls that made up her cubicle. But still, it never hurt to be prudent.

There was a message, sent as private mail to her personal account. It came from someone styled “Humble Servant of the Green Wood”. Puzzled, Linh opened it. And saw Giap.

Her heart stopped; then did an odd lurch within her chest, draining her of blood. She could do nothing but stare at him. He was pale and dishevelled. His hair, which he’d always worn in a top-knot, was hacked quite short, and he looked as though he’d aged ten years in days—his skin wrinkled, his hair white, giving him the air of a truly old man, rather than the youthful, fatherly figure she remembered.

“Magistrate. I trust you are doing well. By now, you will have learnt of what befell the planet.” He looked away from the recording device with a grimace. “Your tribunal is in shambles. I apologise, but all that we could save were a handful of people. There were many deaths. Civilians mainly, caught in the first attack, when the war-kites swooped down and bombarded the district.”

His gaze was distant, his fists clenched. Linh ached to be able to speak to him, to support him with her stern, unmoving face, reassuring him that he was doing the right thing, just as he had reassured her when her faith in the Empire’s justice system faltered.

But he wasn’t there, couldn’t see her; and even the message was days old now, carried through on one of the ships that had recently docked at Prosper.

“The forces of Lord Soi hold the cities,” Giap said. “I have taken the liberty of taking citizens with me into the wilderness, away from their influence. You were right, magistrate.” Giap’s face did not waver. “We have faith this will be proved.”

He meant he was fighting them with whatever means he could: militia, guerrilla. He was waiting for reinforcement from the Empire, for the Emperor to send soldiers to reclaim the conquered provinces.

It would never happen. The thought was a fist of ice, tightening around her heart. This was what she’d railed against in her memorial to the Dragon Throne, the same one that had sent her into exile: the cowardice of the ministers, who kept urging the Emperor to safeguard the heart of the nation, to retreat from the armies of the rebel lords, again and again, evacuating his own people ahead of the enemy.

She had urged the Emperor to call up armies, to unite the Empire once again under his rule . . .

She had known, even then, that the memorial would not be heeded. She had written it because it was her moral duty, as First Ancestor Thanh Thuy had pointed out; and because, if Heaven smiled down on her, it would be part of a flood of similar memorials from other scholars; enough to have the Emperor reconsider his position. But the chances of that happening? Minuscule, as insignificant as a single man to a star or a black hole.

Giap should have known that, too. He should have. He was smarter than this, more world-wise and cynical than this. He couldn’t pin his hopes on a rescue that wouldn’t come. Linh cut the message, and switched on her own camera to record a reply.

“Listen,” she said. “There is no help coming, Giap. You have to come back into the city. Trickle back, pretend you fled the invasion and are now returning home.” As she had, too. And what did that make her? “Lord Soi won’t harm civilians. He wouldn’t dare, or the entire province would rise against him. You have to stop this foolishness. The Empire has forsaken you. There is no help coming. Do you understand me? This is an order.”

An order from a magistrate who had run away, who had let Giap talk her into abandoning her own people. He’d talked about hiding until it all blew over, that the Emperor would soon forget her if he couldn’t arrest her. And she’d listened. Ancestors take him! She’d let him push her into a ship, and into another and before she knew it war had come, and she was on the other end of the galaxy with no ship to bring her back, powerless to do anything but watch.

She’d run away. She was father-and-mother of her people, and she’d run away like a coward, leaving them in this extremity. Leaving Giap in danger. “You have to stop,” she whispered, and had to fight to prevent her voice from breaking. “Or they’ll kill you.”

She ended the message then, wondered if she should leave the last few moments of it intact. Giap wouldn’t appreciate her breaking down, would take her to task for showing more than detached concern for underlings.

But, she thought savagely, it was all true, and she couldn’t change it. Couldn’t do anything but pray to the Buddha and her ancestors—the dead ones, not the simulacrums in the mem-implants—that her message would arrive, that he would listen to it.

Demons take her! She should never have left her province, never have come to Prosper. Now she was stuck, and it would cost her a fortune she didn’t have to leave.

Annoyed in spite of herself, she rose and made for the exit. The man at the counter nodded at her. He’d already taken the amount of the connection from her account, though she felt no desire to drop into the trance and check that he hadn’t overcharged her.

“Cousin?” a voice asked.

Linh looked up, not entirely sure who to expect. The voice was male and couldn’t be Quyen.

It was Cousin Huu Hieu, the father of her pupils, whom she saw but distantly when he came in to see his daughters study. He looked as clean-cut as usual, though the aura of desperation that always surrounded him hadn’t gone away. It looked worse, if anything, and tinged with the stale smell of guilt. If she’d been in her tribunal, she’d have arrested him.

But she wasn’t in her tribunal anymore. She was merely Cousin Linh, a menial teacher, a stranger even though she was among family. “I didn’t know you sought wisdom from abroad,” she said, half-mocking. A twisted quotation, the beginnings of a literary game she’d played countless times during her studies.

Huu Hieu looked up at her, as if he’d been starving and she’d handed him a loaf of bread. “We study the past so that we may know the future. Why not study abroad, so that we may know ourselves?”

Linh smiled. “It has been said that foreigners who do not follow the way of the Former Emperors will sway the masses; that they should be courteously welcomed, given one interview, one banquet . . .”

“. . . and escorted back under guard to where they came from.” Huu Hieu’s voice was quiet, almost wondering. Behind him, the environment deepened. She felt him drag her into the trance, and opened herself up.

Like his daughters a few hours ago, he’d used the network to design an environment. Unlike them, he was in supreme control. A country of rolling hills, impossibly wide, opened up under the brilliant blue of the Heavens: a colour Linh hadn’t seen in so many months that it was almost blinding. There was the gurgle of a river, the soft noise of geese flying overhead, and a faint sound in the background, whispered over and over, that Linh finally identified as a poem. It was a lament for separated friends, watching the moon rise over different planets.

“It’s beautiful,” Linh whispered.

Huu Hieu hadn’t moved. He now wore the long, flowing robes of a scholar. They kept shimmering in and out of focus, a deliberate effect. He didn’t seem to believe in his worth as a scholar. “It’s nothing. Nothing that you wouldn’t be able to do twice over, if you knew Prosper’s systems.”

“No,” Linh said, knowing that, even if she got used to Prosper’s trance, even if she understood enough of the Honoured Ancestress’s inner workings, she would never be able to manipulate the environment that finely. She knew she would never be able to match the sheer fragile beauty of this, like a budding rose before the frost.

“I know only small things,” she said. “Tricks to impress the common folks. Nothing like this.”

Huu Hieu shook his head, clearly unconvinced. Behind him, the sun was sinking below the horizon, bathing the hills in reddish lights. The geese were still there, a faint cry like the memory of sorrow.

Linh hunted for another subject of conversation, and settled on the obvious. “I was surprised to see you in the Hall of Network Access. I didn’t think anyone in the family was interested in what lay outside the station.”

Huu Hieu’s hands clenched and his clothes reverted to the ones he wore in real-time. “For many people, Prosper is all there is under the Heavens.”

She gave him the obvious answer as the moon rose, bathing the scene in a soft white light, and the stars lit up in the sky like a myriad hairpin wounds. “But not for you?”

“I . . . I wasn’t born here.” He looked uneasy and didn’t elaborate.

“You’re trapped here,” Linh said, a feeling she knew all too well.

“Trapped, yes. I . . . My wife will come home soon, that’s what they all say. I just have to wait and she’ll be back. We’ll be a family again.” He laughed, bitterly. “For some, it’s the only bearable thought.”

She wondered for whom. Clearly not for him. He had the air of a caged bird, one who had just discovered that the bars were of steel, and that the door would only open on the day of the slaughter.

Huu Hieu said, “I read the news, you know. More and more planets are falling. They’re winning.”

“The rebels?” Linh shrugged. “They’re badly overstretched.” They’d hold the planets they’d conquered, but soon wouldn’t attack any more, not if they wanted to keep what they had. On the other hand . . . how bold would they get, if they knew the Emperor wasn’t coming to get back what was lawfully his?

“The warring lords. You’ve read the histories. The Trinh and Nguyen ravaging Dai Viet, tearing it apart.”

“While the puppet Emperor watched, powerless?” She raised an eyebrow. “We’re stronger than that, I should think.”

But still not strong enough to hold the Twenty-Third Planet. Still not strong enough to be with her people, to be by Giap’s side, and advise him before he threw away his life.

Around them, the hills were . . . not quite right. Linh watched the grass rippling in moonlight for a while, and saw that though the blades bent in the wind, there were patches of blackness: holes and cracks in the simulation, too small to come from Huu Hieu. If he’d lost control, it would have been more spectacular than this. “Something is wrong,” she said.

“I know.” Huu Hieu grimaced. “They’ve been showing up everywhere in designed environments lately. I think the Honoured Ancestress is stretched to breaking point with so many people on the station. Maintaining personal settings for so many people is getting to Her.”

Linh knew nothing of how Minds worked, either on ships or on stations. And it made little sense. Most refugees didn’t get privileges that would allow them to design environments. She had them, but only because she was family and it was necessary for her work, her menial drudge dreamed up by Quyen. “If you say so,” she said.

“If it bothers you . . .” Huu Hieu shrugged, and waved his hands. The simulation fell away to be replaced by the space in front of the Hall of Network Access. “Better? Let’s walk home.”

Linh merely followed him through the corridors. They were all but deserted now. The people gone back to their shifts, and the shop-fronts were closed. It looked like a different world.

Huu Hieu said, at last, his face set, “I’m not a fool. I’ve seen the news. I’ve read what they won’t tell us. What the Honoured Ancestress knows, what Quyen knows. My wife’s ship went into a war zone to oversee the evacuation of a planet, and never came back.”

“That doesn’t mean . . .” Linh started, but he cut her off.

“Of course it does. Spirits, we can be such children sometimes.” He rubbed the back of his head thoughtfully, his hands tracing the contour of something she couldn’t place. “She’s dead, and there’s nothing to hold me here.”

“Your children.”

“My children are adults.” He laughed again, a queer sound, without amusement. “Ancestors, one of them is even helping Quyen run Prosper Station.”

“You can’t abandon them . . .” She paused then. Fourth Ancestor Canh was in her mind, reminding her that it was children who had duties to their parents, and not the reverse. “I apologise. It’s not for me to tell you what to do.”

He bowed a fraction, younger to elder, though by family standards she was younger than him, the child from a younger branch. “One should always dispense advice and wisdom.”

It might have been sincere and unsubtle, but it was, in fact, deeply ironic. Quyen had been wrong to call him a blundering fool. “One should always follow one’s own advice,” Linh said, with a quick quirk of her lips.

She saw him smile at that and, for a bare moment, he was like a carefree child, much younger than even the youngest of his children. But then his face darkened again, looking at the red characters which marked the entrance of the inner circle.

Trapped. She wondered how she’d feel if she knew that Prosper Station was the entire bounds of her universe, that no ship would come to bear her away, that she had no place to return to . . .

“If you’re ever . . .” She shook her head, unsure of how to phrase the sentence. “I might not design environments as beautiful as yours, but I do have books. Poetry and annals, and vids of historical events. If you ever want to discuss them . . .”

First Ancestor Thanh Thuy tried to object that it was hardly proper, that Linh would have been the greater partner in a marriage. He would remain the lesser one as long as his wife’s body weren’t found. Their meeting alone was as good as adultery.

She knew that, all of it. But it was a risk she was willing to bear for the sake of a little compassion.

Huu Hieu went white, as if she’d slapped him. Linh was mentally composing a suitable apology when he spoke again: “That’s . . . very kind of you. I’ll keep it in mind.”

And with that he walked away, fast, not looking at her, his whole body rigid with an emotion she couldn’t name.

“You shouldn’t, you know,” a voice said.

Linh almost jumped to the ceiling. She looked up to see Cousin Bao, Huu Hieu’s absent-minded brother-in-law.

“How did you know we were here?” she asked, not bothering to signal respect.

Cousin Bao shrugged. “The Honoured Ancestress knows, doesn’t she. She tracks everyone on Prosper, and lets Quyen know about significant events. It’s for their own good,” Bao said.

For their own good. Like Quyen set tasks for Linh’s own good. “And you live with this?” she said.

Bao shrugged. But of course he knew no other law. He’d been raised on another station, and could envision no existence that wasn’t shackled to a Mind.

“You might follow Quyen’s orders,” Linh said, defiantly. “But I do what I want.”

Bao said nothing for a while. At length, his face carefully neutral, he said, “Allow your elder cousin to offer you some advice, for what it’s worth. Prosper Station is . . . different.”

Meaning there were rules, and she wasn’t the one enforcing them; no longer a magistrate in her tribunal. Meaning they could do anything to her: give her a job that was an insult, track her even in her free time, dictate who she could see and not see.

“Different,” Linh said, struggling to keep her voice even. “Hell brought into the Heavens.”

“Nothing keeps you here,” Bao said.

Nothing. Poverty, which meant she couldn’t afford passage on a merchant ship. Fear: that she would come back, and truly take the measure of her tribunal’s devastation.

“But, if you do stay . . .” Bao shrugged. “Better not spend too much time with Huu Hieu.”

“He’s family, too,” Linh said. She found Bao’s serenity uncanny. Where Huu

Hieu was a ship waiting to dash into deep space, he was as fixed as the stars, his face impassive, his gaze the distant one of a man who expected nothing more from the world. He spoke little, and didn’t express much either. He might have a been a recluse monk already—save, of course, that he was still waiting for his wife to come back, just like Huu Hieu. “There is nothing wrong with my being with him.”

“No,” Bao said. “But Huu Hieu is a dangerous man to know, Cousin. Compassion doesn’t mean following people into the abyss.”

“You mean Quyen won’t approve?” The all-powerful, all-knowing Cousin Quyen, the one who thought the whole station was hers to rule, from allowances to hearts and minds?

His face didn’t move. “All revelations lead to the Way, but not every revelation must be made in its own time, to people who are ready to receive it.”

Buddhist nonsense? “I don’t worship the Buddha,” she said, more haughtily than she’d meant.

“I know you don’t,” Bao said, softly. “But think on it, nevertheless.”

And he, too, walked away, leaving her to curse at an empty corridor.

☆ ☆ ☆

“This is the place?” Quyen asked Xuan Rua.

Her niece nodded. “As far as I know, yes.” She ran her fingers in her hair, nervously. “Aunt . . .”

“I know.” Quyen shook her head. Here they were, both of them, dressed as young, unmarried women with untied hair, with only the presence of the Honoured Ancestress in her mind.

Quyen felt naked and vulnerable, in more ways than one. It had been years since she’d left the family quarters without an escort or some sort of company. And Xuan Rua, who was too preoccupied by her father’s lack of filial piety, was hardly the ideal companion.

But she’d told the Honoured Ancestress she would retrieve Du Khach’s implant, and this hardly meant delegating the task to someone else.

It didn’t look like much, as shops went: a little store-front which sold jade ornaments and gold jewellery, mostly displaying trinkets in its window, though the rotating holos hinted at the possibility of other, more valuable pieces. Even through the trance, it came as nothing more than what it appeared to be, utterly unimportant.

Quyen pushed the door, letting the chimes echo in the narrow, dark interior of the place: an affectation, as the Honoured Ancestress had enough power to provide daylight to all dwellings.

A wizened old man was waiting for them by the counter. Though it was early in the day, he was wearing full evening garb: rich robes of silk in the Xuyan fashion, embroidered with peaches and bamboos. No doubt the pattern on the robes referred to a literary citation, or a famous proverb. But Quyen had neither the capacity nor the inclination to decipher what was at best an affectation.

“You are Zhang Pingtou?” she asked.

“I have that honour, yes,” Zhang said. His voice was slightly accented, though his Viet was flawless. “What can I do for you, elder sister? I have wedding jewellery . . .”

Quyen raised a hand. “I have no time for this, younger brother.” It wasn’t until she saw his shocked face that she realised she’d used her business voice, speaking with the authority of one who managed Prosper Station, rather than a timid young woman.

So much for disguises.

Zhang’s face carefully recomposed itself. He looked downwards, betraying reluctant respect. “Lady Quyen.”

Quyen was no Lady. That was a title reserved for scholar-officials such as Cousin Linh. But she wasn’t about to point that out to him. “I’m told you . . .”—demons take her, there was no polite way of saying this—“. . . you offer the opportunity to hear the twittering of sparrows here.” She used the Xuyan expression for the opening of the mah-jong game.

Zhang grimaced. It was minute, but Quyen clearly saw it. She wondered whether he’d have the guts to deny her, but he was smarter than that. “Who am I to oppose the meeting of friends, and the sharing of common interests?”

“Friends meeting sometimes leave each other . . . gifts?” Quyen said, ironically.

She could see his mind working, trying to find the Classic she might be quoting, before he finally realised the allusion was her own. He was too used to working with scholars, with people delighting in wordplays, in obscure references, who weighed their words before speaking or composing a letter. Quyen knew part of that, enough to follow some of her husband’s speeches, but not enough to be a scholar. And she was quite happy that way.

“Tell me what you want, Lady Quyen.”

“My elder brother played the other night,” Quyen said. “And he lost . . . heavily.”

Zhang’s gaze did not waver. “No more than usual, I’m afraid,” he said.

Somehow, it did not surprise Quyen that Huu Hieu was useless at mah-jong. “Nevertheless . . . I’m sure you know all about spending money you do not have.”

Zhang’s lips quirked, in a minute smile. “Friends do not deny each other money.”

And he was proud, no doubt, of being the one who saw to that. In other words, he made sure that no debts remained unpaid. He might even have suggested the . . . monstrosity of Huu Hieu’s selling his own implants.

Quyen forced down the sharp retort in her throat, and said instead, “Friends also do not spend their family’s wealth when they can avoid it. You know what I want, Master Zhang.”

“The matter is confidential. As you no doubt know. I wouldn’t remain long in business if I allowed my friends’ names to become public.”

“I would keep the strictest confidence,” Quyen said, carefully. All she had to do was ask the Honoured Ancestress to scan through who had entered the shop, and to question those people. He had a choice between giving her a single name, or having a dozen of his customers interrogated. But it would have been the height of uncouthness to make the threat explicitly. She picked her words as carefully as scholars wrote memorials, taking care never to make him lose face.

“You are an honourable woman, Lady Quyen.” If Zhang was grimacing, he hid it well. “Huu Hieu left with Thien.”

“Thien?” Quyen felt a nudge at the edge of her field of vision. When she opened herself up to it all she saw was a single blinking light in one of the middle rings, instead of the detailed biodata and genealogical information on Thien she’d been expecting.

Zhang made a complex gesture with his right hand, between approval and contempt. “Thien won’t have, ah, kept what you’re looking for, Lady Quyen. I would check with people who might . . . be in need of blessings?”

The blinking light in Quyen’s field of vision resolved itself into a narrow entrance, identical to the standard living units on the station. But then the overlay widened and plunged inwards, revealing a wide courtyard around which were arrayed consoles and writing tables.

“A school,” Quyen said. The overlay zoomed out to reveal the name over the courtyard: Abode of Brush Saplings. The needy. Of course. Who would need implants more than the students preparing for the state examinations? “Why this one?” she asked.

Zhang smiled. “You wouldn’t know about it, Lady Quyen. It’s a school for the mid-rings, neither poor nor wealthy enough to afford a private tutor.”

In other words, people who would desperately need to succeed at the examinations in order not to fall back into their parents’ poverty. “You’re sure?” she asked Zhang.

He nodded, with both hands spread. “Come back to me if you think I guided you falsely.”

She hesitated, but it appeared he was telling her the truth. He would have little interest in misleading her. “I’m sure you’re a man who can appreciate some of the Emperor’s sayings aren’t meant for all mortals under Heaven.” Quyen extended a hand, calling on the Honoured Ancestress in her mind to open up a stream where she could extend some minor privilege to him, as price of his silence. A favour for a favour, as the ancients would say.

Nothing happened.

It was as if her mind had gone silent, as if, tottering, she’d reached out for a familiar hand in the dark and found only emptiness. Gasping, she reached out another time. Again and again, her attempts met an invisible wall, a silence deeper than that of the void between the stars, and more frightening.

Through a haze she saw Xuan Rua move towards her, concern etched on every line of her face, her mouth shaping words she couldn’t hear; saw Zhang, his face puckered in puzzlement. Everything around her was silent, and she was as lonely as she’d been twenty years ago, disembarking from the ship that had taken her to Prosper Station.

And then, as abruptly as a knife stroke across the throat, the world snapped back into focus. The air around her was greasy, charged with electricity. The familiar tightness filled her chest, the sense that she was small and insignificant, but always cared for.

“Child?” The Honoured Ancestress asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Quyen said, the lie tasting as acrid as dust on her tongue.

☆ ☆ ☆

Linh found Quyen in the heartroom, looking upwards with the white of her eyes showing, and her lips moving once in a while. She was no doubt subvocalising with the Honoured Ancestress.

Linh wedged herself against the wall, watching the poem lines run past her across the wall until they all blurred into confused images: cities under moonlight, tribunals where people flocked to see the clear blue of justice spreading over them like the cloak of Heaven. Everything looked whole and unbroken, the buildings so new and radiant that they broke her heart. She felt a pressure against her mind, saw the world take on an oily sheen. Her mouth flooded with an acrid tartness like tamarind. “Honoured Ancestress,” she said.

The Honoured Ancestress’ touch was light, almost negligible compared to the wave of sickness that had sent Linh to her knees when she’d first arrived on Prosper. “Quyen will be with you in a moment, child. I have let her know you’re here.”

To Linh’s dread, the Honoured Ancestress did not withdraw but merely stood by, waiting. She was a Mind, Linh reminded herself with a shiver. A Mind that could be everywhere in the station, taking into account everyone’s preferences and designed environments, and still be there at her core, speaking with several members of the family through her largest interface in the station.

“You’re not often here,” the Honoured Ancestress said.

“Should I be?” Linh asked. It had been made pretty clear by Quyen that she wasn’t a member of the family, and she’d had no desire to join the daily flow of family members paying their respects to the Honoured Ancestress.

A low, thunderous sound Linh realised was a chuckle. “Oh, child. I’m no fool.”

Probably not, but she was not human. Borne in a human womb, made by humans, but still . . . she was not human enough to understand relationships, and feelings. Thank Heaven, for life on Prosper would become unbearable if the Honoured Ancestress literally kept watch over every one of their actions.

“I apologise,” Linh said. “I assumed my presence in the morning would be unwelcome.”

The Honoured Ancestress said nothing for a while, and appeared distracted. “You do as you wish, child. I do not rule your life.”

No, but Quyen thought she did. “I see,” Linh said. “Thank you.”

The Honoured Ancestress made that strange sound that might have been a laugh, and withdrew, leaving Linh alone, struggling to return to the calm with which she’d entered the heartroom. Truth to tell, the Honoured Ancestress disquieted her; there were no Minds on planets. The only times Linh had been in contact with a Mind had been on the mindship that had brought her to Prosper. It was a faster journey than on any normal vessel, but a deeply unpleasant one.

“Cousin.” Quyen had finished her conversation with the Honoured Ancestress, and was walking towards her. “What a surprise to see you here. I hope I did not keep you waiting too long.” The sentence was a distracted afterthought. Quyen clearly did not mean any of it, paying lip-service to politeness.

“Not at all,” Linh said in the same tone. “I was speaking with the Honoured Ancestress.”

“You were?” A flash of something Linh could not identify crossed Quyen’s face. Was it anger? Annoyance? “How did She seem to you?”

“What kind of a question is that? I’m not the one used to Prosper,” Linh said, more angrily than she’d intended.

“No. Indeed you are not. What do you want? I’m very busy, as you can see.”

Not too busy to keep track of Linh, or to send her unwanted advice about who to befriend in the family. Linh bit back the angry reply and said, “I wanted to talk to you.”

“You are talking to me.” Quyen waved her large sleeves, dismissively. “Tell me what the point of this is.”

Linh took a deep breath. “Cousin Quyen, I am not well suited to the post you gave me. Your nieces are both brilliant girls, and they have little need of a tutor to pass the examinations. Even if I were a good teacher . . .” She spread her hands in a conciliatory gesture. Gently, child, First Ancestor Thanh Thuy whispered in her mind. You must never force a choice upon people.

Perhaps she should not, but Linh had had more than enough of Quyen’s faceless games.

“I see.” Quyen’s face had gone flat. “You are unsatisfied with the current arrangements, then.”

“Yes.” Linh could have equivocated, could have been polite, dancing around the facts with the skill of a poet. She didn’t.

“You find, perhaps, that they are not good enough for you? That your achievements”—Quyen spat the words—“entitle you to more?”

“I can help you,” Linh said. “You are flooded with refugees, plagued with supply issues. As a magistrate, I have experience dealing with large amounts of people . . .”

“As a magistrate.” One could have cut ice with Quyen’s voice. “High and mighty, sheltering us all like the clear blue of the sky. You’ll find that here, such things mean little. This is no planet, and we have no use for scholars. Take what you have been given, and if you’re still unsatisfied with it, I advise you to see Magistrate Van, who might give you a better welcome as an agent of the Emperor. But I doubt it. He’s as busy as the rest of us.”

All magistrates were always busy, but they always made time. The ploy was transparent. Quyen had no intention of helping her. She’d never had any. Linh made a last attempt, struggling to keep her voice even. “It’s not Magistrate Van I’m interested in,” she said. “The family . . .”

“Spare me the family,” Quyen snapped. “You came to us because we were convenient, but you have no intention of being part of this station.”

“I’m trying.”

“You’re not. The Twenty-Third planet is behind you, cousin. Stop dreaming on what could have been, and focus on your work and your place here. Understand what this is all about. This isn’t about running a faceless station, but about dealing with family members.”

“I am dealing with them,” Linh said, more forcefully than she’d intended to. “Teaching the girls, as you wished me to.”

Quyen snorted. “This is about more than the girls, Cousin. This is about us. About what makes us the way we are, and what problems we face.”

“Are you referring to Huu Hieu?” Linh asked.

“Among other things.” Quyen didn’t even protest that she was having Linh watched for her own good, or attempt to justify herself. She was so certain that she was right, that she knew everything under Heaven. “I have enough problems with wayward family members without you being corrupted by them.”

“I’m perfectly capable of defending myself, even if you do turn out to be right about Huu Hieu.”

Quyen shook her head, and it was obvious she didn’t believe Linh. “You’re not very capable, Cousin Linh. You’re naive, and not prepared for life aboard Prosper, and show no willingness to listen and learn. Put yourself in a more receptive frame of mind. Then, perhaps, I’ll reconsider. When you’ve proved yourself.”

How dare she? She was a mere housewife who had not had the discipline to pass the examinations, who struggled with even the most simple of leadership tasks. How dare she explain to Linh what she could and could not do?

“I’ve amply proved myself,” Linh said, coldly. “I won’t perform tricks for you, Cousin.”

She could feel Fifth Ancestor Hoang wince in her head. But she didn’t need that, didn’t need their advice about reconciliation and making no enemies, about peace, and about safeguarding the harmony of the family. There was nothing she could do with Quyen, who was obviously determined to grind Linh into the ground until nothing but dust was left.

Quyen had gone as pale as rice flour and her hands were shaking. Her voice, though, remained perfectly even. “Is that so? Then I think we are done here, cousin.” She turned away, back towards the centre of the heartroom, and the Honoured Ancestress’ physical presence. Her eyes rolled up a fraction and she went back to her communication with the Mind.

Linh was almost out of the room when Quyen spoke again. “I am reminded by the Honoured Ancestress that, no matter how uncouth and unpleasantly arrogant you might be, you are still family.” Every word was pronounced very clearly, with the precision of a pestle pounding against food. “You can stay here. In the light of this, I’ll grant you your one wish: you’re obviously unsuited for preparing the girls for their examinations. I’ll accept your resignation from that, but nothing else. Have a good day, magistrate.”

Linh left, seething.

☆ ☆ ☆

“I have an appointment with the teacher of the Abode of Brush Saplings,” Xuan Rua said. She poured tea, carefully, into three cups. “Tomorrow, at the Third Bi-Hour, before the students arrive. We’ll both go, but I’m not sure . . .” She paused, staring at the table. “I’m not sure whether he’s involved or not.”

Quyen sat, watching the dark liquid pool along the translucent, veined porcelain—painstaking reproduction of celadon from Old Earth, worth perhaps more than the entire station. She inhaled the slow smell of unfurling jasmine flowers. How easy it would be to lose herself in it, to forget about everything that needed her attention. The trance tugged at her: an altercation with the attendants on the refugee levels, three thefts from the noodle-seller stands in the outer rings, a building license for a Buddhist temple two rings away from the Family’s quarters . . .

Everything seemed fine. The Honoured Ancestress was speaking and acting as She always did. But she still remembered what had happened in Zhang’s shop; and the earlier lapse, when the Honoured Ancestress had failed to notice Huu Hieu’s drunken swagger through the corridors.

Something was wrong. Minds didn’t behave that way. They weren’t meant to grow old, to change. They weren’t meant to fade. But it couldn’t be sabotage, no matter how much Quyen might have wished for it. The Honoured Ancestress had inviolable chambers, inaccessible to anyone save a Master of Grand Design Harmony, the makers of Minds, who were all in other orbital habitats, or in the capital on the First Planet.

Something was wrong, and she could think of nothing to do to fix it. She’d sent engineers into the corridors, looking over the system, and they had only confirmed the decline that Quyen had witnessed. But they could offer no cause.

“You’re keeping a watch on the school,” she said to Xuan Rua. It wasn’t a question.

Quyen’s brother-in-law Bao reached for one of the cups and cradled it in his large hands like a trapped bird. “We’re all helping with that,” he said. “Xuan Rua and I.”

“And your youngest daughter.” Quyen ignored Xuan Rua’s wince. Xuan Kiem was only two years younger than Xuan Rua, but she’d always been the darling of her father, and it had spoiled her, narrowing her focus until she could only think of her destiny. It would do her good to be involved in family affairs, but Quyen had no illusion on how painful the whole process would be. “I’ll talk to her, if you won’t.”

Xuan Rua shook his head. “She did help.”

Pitifully little, if Quyen was any judge. But she let it slide. Her niece was the least of her worries now. Truth to tell, she would dearly have loved to let Huu Hieu be the least of her worries, let him sink in his own filth. But, even if he were not family, there was the matter of the implants . . .

“He’s involved,” Bao said. “He has to be.”

“The teacher of the Abode of Brush Saplings?” Xuan Rua sat down, her eyes wandering away from her cup, her whole body tense. “Surely . . .”

“Teachers in this kind of school are badly paid.” Bao’s voice was quiet, serene; a fact dispensed by Immortals.

“I set the allowances,” Quyen said. “I wouldn’t want to think they’re unfair.”

“It’s not about fairness,” Bao said. “It’s about greed. And I’m not criticising your allowances. You recognise that not everyone is equal, and that there has to be a hierarchy, to remind each and every one of us of our place and duty.”

Quyen wondered how much of that was aimed at Huu Hieu.

“What I don’t understand is why sell them,” Quyen said, slowly. Zhang had sent her the recordings of the mah-jong games, and it had been abundantly clear that, although Huu Hieu was losing, it wasn’t a lot of money. With his allowance, he could clearly have paid it all, and still have plenty of money to spare. The sale of the implants had been deliberate, calculated to bring in a large amount of cash.

“He needed money,” she added, “but not that much. And it’s a dangerous gamble.” The Honoured Ancestress monitored all transactions on Prosper Station, except those done within an individual’s private home. It was possible to sell the implants, but one would have to be very, very careful, and never generate any anomalies that the Mind could correlate with other facts. To be sure, the price of the implants would be worth the risk. But still . . .

“My younger brother likes to have his treasures.” Bao’s voice was a lash.

“I don’t think Father is that way.” Xuan Rua looked ill at ease. Bao was her uncle, and commanded her respect. But Huu Hieu, as her flesh-and-blood father, always took precedence. “And Aunt Quyen is right. His allowance is large enough to compensate for a thousand such gambling sessions.”

“Mmm,” Quyen said. So it was either staggeringly huge gambling debts—but it hadn’t looked that way on the recordings—or it was something else entirely.

She stared at her cup for a while. The liquid was clear and fragrant, but it seemed to shake with the rhythm of the station. Gradually an oily sheen spread over the cup, and a familiar pressure pervaded the room as the walls buckled and groaned. She relaxed, feeling the familiar, comforting presence fill her to bursting. “Child,” the Honoured Ancestress said.

“There is no news of Du Khach’s implant.” Quyen felt her face flush red. “The three mem-implants seem to be gone from the system. But we’ll get them back. I made you a promise, and I’ll keep it.”

“Of course, child. I have faith in you.”

And Quyen wouldn’t disappoint Her. The Honoured Ancestress was hardly capricious, never complaining, and seldom asking for things for Herself. Honouring Her request was the very least Quyen could do to repay her. “The whole family is working on it, Honoured Ancestress.”

There was a pause, while the pressure in the room seemed to grow even greater. The cup Bao held in his hand seemed to shift, alternating between a metallic sheen and complete transparency. The metal under Quyen shifted and yielded, like quicksand.

“I can provide some help, child. The implants are still within the station. I can feel that much, but I cannot tell where they are.”

“Can you tell if they’re in use?” Quyen asked.

“They’re not,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “Or I could find them much more easily. Child, you know I do not monitor everything on Prosper Station.”

No, not lately. There was a cold stirring in Quyen’s belly. She had limits, and Quyen was genuinely frightened. The Honoured Ancestress was Prosper Station, and she could not afford to falter, or to grow weak.

“You don’t have to,” she said, more gruffly than she’d intended. “You asked me something, and I’ll get it for you. That’s all there is to it.”

The Honoured Ancestress was silent. Then she spoke in a completely different tone of voice—no longer the wise grandmother’s, but a child’s, filled with wonder as they watched a kite rise on air-currents for the first time. “Someone is coming.”

“Someone?” Quyen rose but before she could let the trance seize her, the Honoured Ancestress was with her, carrying away from the room and the three cups of tea, receding in her mind’s eye like the three eyes of some Hindustani god.

She stood in the darkness of space, with only the cold, unblinking light of the stars and the vast, reassuring presence of Prosper Station at her back. A point that seemed like yet another star shifted, and became the prow of a ship headed towards them. It was sleek and smooth, as deadly as the swords of old. Instead of being the standard utilitarian grey metal, it had embossed dragons twining on its hull. The heads of the great beasts met at the prow, and the tails faded away at the back of the ship, so that the dragons seemed to extend themselves into the blackness of space.

Everything about it, from the flowing lines to the five-clawed dragons, screamed official.

Beside Quyen, the Honoured Ancestress spoke, slow and leisurely, and perhaps a little afraid. “The Carp that Leapt Over the Stream.”

“It’s a state ship,” Quyen said. “From the capital.”

“From the capital, yes,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “But it’s private. Registered to Pham Quoc Oanh, a civil official of the Third Rank.”

The name meant nothing to her. “Then I don’t see . . .”

Another wrench, and over the stars appeared lines, slowly converging to form the shape of a family tree, tracing a slow ascent from Quyen to the Honoured Ancestress Herself; and then sideways and down, until they’d connected Quyen to Lady Oanh.

Quyen let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “She’s . . .”

“Grand Master of Design Harmony, like her mother and grandmother and great-great-grandmother before her. A shaper of metal and of synthetics; a dreamer of buildings and of wind and water.”

A hole was opening in Quyen’s belly. “She made Prosper Station.”

“Her ancestor,” the Honoured Ancestress corrected, but it made no difference. Quyen’s ancestor had borne the Honoured Ancestress in her belly; but this Lady Oanh’s ancestor had made every nook and cranny of Prosper Station, shaping the flow of the five elements over the station until the Honoured Ancestress could slip into its structure as easily as into tailored robes.

She made . . . Quyen stopped. She thought of the chambers of the Honoured Ancestress, the place where Her physical body rested, which would open to no one but a Grand Master of Grand Design Harmony. “Has she given any motive for her presence?”

“She says it is a courtesy visit.”

The hollow in Quyen’s stomach closed, replaced by a cold sense of purpose, as unsettling as a naked blade. “A courtesy visit?” Three days out in deep spaces from the nearest planet?

The Honoured Ancestress was silent for a while, communing with the vast array of sensors around Prosper Station. “The ship’s Mind says that they had business with Felicity Station.”

Felicity was their nearest neighbour. After that, it was another four days out to an inhabited planet, one so small that it hadn’t yet got a rank in the state classification. Quyen could have asked what Lady Oanh had wanted from Felicity, but it was likely a private matter, if she was on her own ship and not on an imperial craft.

She supposed that, if Lady Oanh had come this far, she might as well detour, and see what her ancestor had made. But still . . .

“A courtesy visit,” she said, aloud, though she didn’t need to.

“A banquet,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “A private interview. Gifts. That would be . . . appropriate.” There was still the same disturbing awe in Her tone.

“You want to see her,” Quyen said.

The Honoured Ancestress did not speak for a while. “I’m not like you, child. I wasn’t haphazardly cobbled together in a womb from the alliance of am and duong. I was made from beginning to end. Designed. And she is a descendant of my maker. A goddess. . . .” Her voice trailed off. She sounded . . . human. Disturbingly so. Human. Mortal. Finite. All that Prosper could not be.

She. . . .

Quyen thought of their visitor. Lady Oanh. Grand Master of Design Harmony. Maker of space stations, aligner of Minds and hardware. And, what she made, she could diagnose, she could repair.

A favour for a favour . . .

“A banquet,” Quyen repeated. “A proper welcome. Yes, let’s give her that. Something large enough for her to look kindly upon us.”

Book 2: Lady Oanh

If Linh’s arrival had thrown ripples into the family’s complacency, Lady Oanh’s arrival unleashed a storm. Hordes of attendants passed through the courtyards, carrying everything from baskets of live fowl to bottles of wine—some so dusty they must have dated back to the Exodus, back when there was still a single home planet, and a Dai Viet by the shores of a sea.

In the confusion everyone forgot Linh. Xuan Kiem and Xuan Rua were “recruited”, which meant closeted with Cousin Quyen and the rest of the elder generation, planning the spirits knew what. If it was only for a formal dinner menu, Linh could have thought of a few dozen appropriate offerings, depending on Lady Oanh’s rank and the actual purpose of her visit. But of course no one thought to ask her. Typical.

Not that she wanted to see Quyen or hear her name, after what had happened in the heartroom. The gall of the woman, dismissing her like some lice-ridden beggar . . .

In the meantime, she busied herself at the Hall of Network Access, desperately checking her message box. No news from Giap. No news from anyone. She might as well be dead to the world.

She saw Lady Oanh from a distance, bowing down with the rest of the family. She followed her to the heartroom, where she had her interview with the Honoured Ancestress. But other than that, Linh had no wish to interfere with Lady Oanh and retreated into her own quarters, using up her allowance to download vids of Xuyan operas. It was regressive stuff, with only men and gender-changed men allowed on stage. Thankfully, she was able to find some more modern operas, which mimicked the flight of ships in space with localised Mind-interference; creating environments in which the dancers could fly, and adopt positions that would have been impossible in a planetary environment.

On the second day after Lady Oanh’s arrival, Linh was using her console to draw a picture of mountains lost in a sea of white clouds, when she suddenly became aware that someone was watching her—a prickling at the nape of her neck, like an intimation of danger.

She raised her eyes, expecting Quyen or possibly Bao, with more moralizing about her inappropriate relationship with Huu Hieu and her “regrettable” lack of willingness to become part of the station’s life, to bow and scrape the floor before Quyen like everyone else.

But it wasn’t Quyen. Instead, she saw a group of attendants in family livery, framing a short, plump woman in an ao dai tunic and trousers. For a moment, Linh couldn’t place her, and then she felt the aura of effortless authority radiating from the woman.

Lady Oanh. Third Rank. Linh’s practised eye followed the cut of the ao dai, the peacock badge of rank sewn over the heart. Three steps away from the Emperor himself. Every one of the ancestors within her screamed for her to abase herself and she did, kneeling and then bringing her head to touch the ground, feeling the coolness of the station’s tiles on her brow.

“We’re not in court, child.” Lady Oanh’s voice was low, with a slight provincial accent. (Second or Third planet, perhaps, though Linh couldn’t place the exact location.) “You may rise. There is no need for such formalities. Not between countrymen.”

Countrymen? Linh rose, careful to avoid meeting Lady Oanh’s gaze. It would have been disrespectful, as well as close to suicide. Lady Oanh was no retired official and she only had to say the word for Linh to be arrested.

She heard an amused laugh. “You don’t believe me. But I can assure you, I wasn’t always this grand.” Her accent had changed, taking on the lilting tones that Linh knew all too well: the accent of Tan Phuoc, which Linh didn’t hear outside of family visits.

“You’re . . .”

“From the city of Tan Hoa.” Lady Oanh sounded amused.

“First child of Fisherman Ma.”

It seemed to invite an answer and Linh said, “I’m the first child of Moral Mentor Thi Sac, from Phu Mi.”

“Indeed. I was your father’s friend.”

Linh sucked in a deep, burning breath. Not only was Lady Oanh of the Third Rank, she also ranked close to Linh’s own parents, and thus Linh should give her the same respect.

“You honour me by your visit,” Linh said. First Ancestor Thanh Thuy was rising in her mind, reminding her of etiquette, suggesting quotes from the Classics that Linh could use to impress Lady Oanh. “Just as you honour this space station.”

Lady Oanh laughed: a short, dainty sound which seemed to punch through the air. “Child, I’ve told you already. No need. Would you believe I’m here for a restful visit?”

Linh did not answer.

“Look at me,” Lady Oanh said.

Linh wasn’t meant to. First Ancestor Thanh Thuy was hesitating in her mind, but Linh already knew the correct behaviour. If a superior wanted to be treated as an equal, you humoured them, no matter how much this might go against the teachings of Master Kong.

She looked up. The guards had fanned away, leaving her and Lady Oanh in a growing circle of silence. The wind, an affection of the station’s Mind, lifted dust and paper leaves from the floor, and the sounds around them seemed oddly muted.

Lady Oanh’s face was utterly unremarkable—not that of the princesses of legends, hardly enough to lead entire planets into ruin. But it had the expression of people used to authority, an expression Linh knew all too well, the mirror of her own ancestors’ expressions, of Linh’s own face. Though lately all she’d seen in the mirror was the lined, haunted face of a powerless exile.

“I’m told,” Lady Oanh said, “that you come to us from the Twenty-Third Planet.”

How much did she know of Giap, of the memorial? Not enough, surely. News went fast, but if she’d been travelling for the past month? “It was my first posting.”

“As district magistrate, I suppose.” Lady Oanh’s mouth quirked up in the barest hint of a smile. “It’s always . . . enlightening. My own first posting was the Thirty-First planet, much more remote and . . . provincial than the Twenty-Third.”

The Thirty-First Planet, Fifth Ancestor Hoang said, a whisper in Linh’s mind. One of the first casualties of the war. The two rebel factions battled over its ownership, and tore it to pieces.

Linh hesitated. What was the proper phrasing to offer regrets, something that wouldn’t be too familiar or too distant? First Ancestor Thanh Thuy, for once, seemed at a loss, and before she could suggest something that would inevitably be too formal, Linh said, “This is presumption on my part, but I offer my humble condolences.”

Lady Oanh nodded, making no commentary. “It was but a posting, child, and it was long ago. The Twenty-Third Planet’s loss no doubt hurts you more.”

The loss, yes. But more than that, the fact that she hadn’t been there. That she’d run away in fear for her own life, and deserted them. That she couldn’t speak to Giap or stop him from taking the war to the rebel armies. “I had people I loved as much as family there.”

Lady Oanh nodded. “And here you are, a refugee among strangers.”

“Family,” Linh said.

Her smile might have been ironic. It was hard to tell with her weather-beaten face. “The ties of blood are strong, but the strongest ones are between mother and daughter, not between distant cousins.”

“Those ties are what we make of them,” Linh said. “Are not friends and sworn brothers as important as blood-brothers? A true friend will know your heart, and hear the roar of running waters and the distant wind over the mountains in the song of your zither, without any need for you to speak aloud.”

“You must, however, do something for your friends,” Lady Oanh said, shaking her head. Perhaps she was amused at the literary reference? “Collect their body and bring it home at your own expense; die on the same hour, same day and same year; all that shows that you value them above all else.”

Linh said nothing. She had nothing to do with Prosper anymore, and no desire to wish them well in any way.

She groped for another subject, and found only the trivial. “I imagine your honoured ancestor was proud of this station.”

Lady Oanh’s face altered, imperceptibly. She hesitated, but then she nodded. “A panther dies and leaves behind its skin; a man dies and leaves behind his words and reputation. A trite but true saying. My ancestor built this station. Every single ring on it, from the centre to the boundary ones. Everything from the heartroom to the emergency ships. And I see her . . . everywhere.”

Which meant she either had access to her ancestor’s poetry and writings, or that she had a mem-implant, or both. Which would hardly have been surprising given how far she’d risen in the hierarchy of the Empire. “It’s a joy to behold your ancestor’s work.”

“Perhaps,” Lady Oanh said. “Or perhaps it’s bittersweet, because I will never know her, never ask her how she composed her space stations, never take her words and work into mine.” She made a gesture with her hand, as if opening a fan, or dismissing a troublesome underling. “You haven’t asked me about the capital, child.”

An icy fist closed around Linh’s heart. “Should I have, grandmother?”

“Oh, child.” Lady Oanh’s gaze focused on Linh, as if trying to extract the truth from a criminal by sheer strength of mind. She wasn’t a fool. But of course it would take more than successfully designing a few spaceships or space stations to rise to Third Rank. “Do you truly think I would come here, and not know anything about you? Your memorial has been . . . noted.” Her face had gone impassive again. Any clues about what she might be feeling scattered like the pages of a book with a broken spine.

“I had to write it,” Linh said. She wasn’t sure why she was telling Lady Oanh. It was Giap who should have heard this, Giap who’d had to think of the consequences of what she’d done. But Giap was . . . so far away he might as well have been on another planet. Giap was blind, deaf and unable to see the danger around him. “The Great Virtue Emperor’s conduct of the war . . .”

“. . . has been weak, and unsuited to a Son of Heaven. The unity among us should be paramount, rather than the preservation of our lands.” Lady Oanh’s face was serene. “I read the memorial.”

Of course she would have and of course she would not commit herself. Scholars had been executed for saying the wrong thing, even at the right time. “What of the court, then?”

“The court . . . is in flux,” Lady Oanh said. “The Great Virtue Emperor has been challenged by his Great Secretary and his ministers; he is urged to show the virtue necessary to uphold the Rong dynasty, to establish proper defences in the outlying planets and chastise the rebelling lords who think themselves clever enough to challenge his dominion.”

“I see,” Linh said, slowly, though she didn’t, not yet. “And the Son of Heaven . . .”

“The Great Virtue Emperor is young, and eager to prove himself.” Lady Oanh shrugged. “And he naturally thinks he shouldn’t be given orders by his advisors, as if he were still an immature child.”

Which wasn’t good. Linh’s memorial was all but in line with the ministers and the Great Secretary, and she was nowhere as untouchable as they were. “You have read my memorial.”

Lady Oanh’s eyes drifted away from her. “Some . . . sycophants campaign for your removal as magistrate, and for proper chastisement.”

Proper. Linh narrowed her eyes. “Is the charge treason against the Dragon Throne?” she asked, praying all the while the answer would be no. One of the Ten Abominations, the one that would punish, not only the offender or his closest kin, but would extend from line of decent to line of descent, across the entirety of her lineage, sparing nothing and no one . . .

“I don’t know.” Lady Oanh’s eyes transfixed her, as surely as a thrown spear. “It would be, if an edict had been signed, or even drafted.”

“But still . . .” Still it was a risk, and that was the extent of Lady Oanh’s warning: that the edict would pass and when it did, every one of Linh’s cousins ran the risk of sharing her fate, if they were proved to still have ties with her. If, say, they’d welcomed her as a refugee. And it went up to the ninth generation, which might have been everyone who shared a drop of blood with her.

And Prosper . . . Prosper’s founder shared an ancestor with Linh, and almost everyone here was her distant relative.

Up to the ninth generation. The entire station, wiped from the world.

Linh swallowed, thinking of the garrotte passed around her neck, as surely as that of the executioner. “I could retract, but it would be too late, wouldn’t it?”

“Would you truly retract?” Lady Oanh’s eyes were emotionless.

Linh felt something cold and hard within her stomach, like an ice-covered stone. “No. I meant every word, and I’ll not take them back. We should be strong, rather than fighting among ourselves.”

“Of course. Your behaviour does you credit, even if it augurs little for your life expectancy. Your fate, I fear, rests in the hands of the court.”

“I see,” she said. “Thank you for your wisdom, Lady Oanh.”

Lady Oanh recalled her escort with a snap of her fingers, and headed towards the exit to the courtyard, bathed in Prosper’s sickly light. She was halfway there when she turned, as if struck by a wayward thought, although Linh was starting to suspect Lady Oanh never did anything wayward. “Remember the tales about running from death, child?”

The old ones, the ones that said lives ruled by fear were worse than useless, that one should embrace one’s duty, one’s family . . .

“Yes,” Linh said. Her throat was dry.

“Those who fear death find it on their path,” Lady Oanh said. “Your memorial was sensible. Indeed, some would say it pointed to the only way forward the Empire can take. You are not without allies, even in the court itself. Remember this.”

Allies. Would it be enough to save her? To save Prosper? Linh tore herself from visions of the Embroidered Guard at her door to bow to Lady Oanh. The official, after all, had all but declared herself on her side.

“I see. Thank you, Honoured Oanh.” No matter how grateful Linh tried to sound, the words tasted like dust on her tongue.

☆ ☆ ☆

Quyen found Xuan Rua in the kitchens amidst an army of attendants carrying everything from live fowls to husked rice. Her niece looked overwhelmed by the sheer mass of people, her face pale in the heat of the cooking units.

Next to her was Hanh, the overseer of the fish sauce vats: a plump, middle-aged woman who always wore a brocade ao dai tunic, no matter the circumstances, as if every event in life required pomp and respect. She bowed to Quyen. “Cousin.” The connection was tenuous, third generation, but even without the help of the trance Quyen could place her easily enough.

“Let me guess,” Quyen said, after the usual exchange of courtesies. “You’re providing your best, but that’s all we have.”

Xuan Rua grimaced, but did not contradict Quyen, either overtly or subtly. “Prosper Station will live up to its name at least.”

Fish sauce was the heart’s blood of food, the ingredient that lifted even simple rice to the level of Heavenly meals. Prosper’s fish sauce, fermented in huge vats under the light of Red Turtle Star, was legendary, its aroma subtle and understated, revealing the richness of its successive pressings, with the pungent hint of flavour. No other station had a production to rival it. But fish sauce alone did not make a banquet.

“Show me the courses,” Quyen said.

Xuan Rua grimaced. “We can make six appetisers, but only a little of each. Silky pork, fried rolls, rolled cakes . . .” She bit her lip. The rolled cakes were rice flour and hardly suitable for a banquet, and six dishes was pitifully few to entertain an official. Lady Oanh probably was used to ten or twelve courses to open a banquet.

Overseer Hanh barked a short, unamused laugh. “We have enough rice, too, if nothing else.”

“At least that’s something.” Quyen sighed, massaging her forehead, wishing for simpler answers, for a time where her only worry had been the symbolism of the various dishes and whether they would inadvertently offend the guest of honour, rather than whatever they could scrounge from their diminished supplies.

Xuan Rua was moving to the stir-fries, mostly the fish raised in Hanh’s spare vats; and pork, the beasts having shown a supernatural ability to breed in space. Then to the soup, a concoction of bitter melon wishing unhappiness away (how Quyen wished it were true); and then pork braised in the milk of coconut from their dwindling orchards, and dish upon dish, each more diminished than the rest, before the final serving of fruit that would conclude the meat—pitayas and lychees and pineapples from the station’s orchards.

Quyen sighed. It was all . . . less than it should have been, small and shrunken, but she couldn’t blame Xuan Rua or Overseer Hanh for any of it.

“And the main dish?” Quyen asked.

“Pineapple duck,” Xuan Rua said. “It looks dignified even though it’s hardly a festival dish, and . . .”

Quyen raised a hand to stop her. “Duck won’t do.” Oanh’s name meant “nightingale” and it would hardly do to serve up a bird as the main dish. “Can you do something with fish?”

Xuan Rua hesitated. Quyen suddenly remembered how young she was, not of age to pass the examinations or marry, and even less suitable for being in charge of something this large. Quyen felt it was her fault. She shouldn’t have pushed her niece this hard, even if she was swamped by other matters. “Fish in caramel sauce,” she said. “Served whole. It should be suitable.”

Overseer Hanh grimaced. “It’s not much.”

Quyen knew that it wasn’t, knew all too well that this was like a dying man’s last struggle . . . But no, Prosper wasn’t dying, merely going through an illness. When the war was over, it would be different, when her husband Anh was there once more, lending his reassuring solidity to Prosper.

She had to believe that or she might as well ask the Honoured Ancestress to open a hatch for her into deep space, to step through it and be torn apart in an environment never meant for man.

She groped for the trance, found it there, but quiescent, as if the Honoured Ancestress’ attention were elsewhere. She could catch a hint of anger, of confusion, like a distant storm. She was still with them, and Lady Oanh would know what to do to help, would make everything right again.

Quyen stared again at the courses in her mind. Everything they could provide, from the lemongrass beef with rice noodles to the salad rolls with pork skin; and knew for a cold, hard fact that Overseer Hanh was right. It wouldn’t be enough. Oh, to be sure, it would satisfy Lady Oanh, but not impress her so much that she would accede to unexpected favours. They needed more, and they didn’t have it.

Her gaze roamed over the chaos of the kitchen. The head cook Nhu was mixing dipping sauce, the aroma offish sauce and lime thick around her. Her assistants, Hoang Be and Thanh Hoa, were cutting pork in thin slices. The smells that rose reminded her of other banquets, in the distant past: Bao smiling at one of her husband’s jests; Huu Hieu declaiming a drunken poem to his wife; all of them together as a flesh-and-blood family, not as a collection of absences and holograms on the ancestral altars. She’d have wept if she was a weaker woman, but weeping had never brought anything or anyone back.

They could not provide more food. Overseer Hanh had made it abundantly clear, and Quyen wouldn’t offend her by accessing the trance to check the state of their storehouses. They could not create more elaborate dishes without food, but a banquet wasn’t only about food. There had been other attractions in past times: watercolours done before the guest of honour, calligraphy painted on the spot and hung in the hall, poetry composed for the occasion . . .

Quyen felt the realisation settle in her stomach, a cold, heavy stone over a grave.

For all of this—for any of this—they were going to need Cousin Linh’s help.

☆ ☆ ☆

Quyen took Xuan Rua with her. Not because she thought she would be needed, but because she wanted someone else when she faced Linh. When she abased herself.

She had no shame about what she’d told Linh earlier. Even magistrates shouldn’t be entitled to such arrogance, and it was Linh’s own fault if she could not take what was offered gracefully. Given the circumstances, and the angry way in which the request—no, the demand—had been made, Quyen had been fully within her rights to refuse her.

But if it took an abject apology to help the Honoured Ancestress, then Quyen would make it. Anything, as long as it helped keep Prosper safe. As long as it kept the Honoured Ancestress with them.

They found Linh in the courtyard, her eyes closed. She was within the trance, mouthing incomprehensible words. Though the trance would have informed her of their presence, she remained oblivious to them for several moments. By then, Xuan Rua was looking distinctly uncomfortable.

Quyen kept herself calm by reviewing everything that needed her attention. She was to see the teacher of the Abode of Brush Saplings, the one who might well have the missing mem-implants, early on the following morning, before the banquet, which would mean more delegation of tasks to Xuan Rua and Overseer Hanh. It left her nervous. Neither of the two women were well suited for managing the myriad emergencies that were bound to appear in the last moments before the banquet: missing ingredients, equipment that wasn’t functioning, all the many things that required a firm hand and a quick mind. Overseer Hanh didn’t have the imagination, and Xuan Rua didn’t have the confidence.

She could feel the trance, fluttering in her grasp, and only yesterday the Honoured Ancestress had spoken to her, asking Quyen if she’d felt that anything was wrong on board the station. Quyen had lied. She had said everything was fine, that the banquet would be unforgettable, as it had been designed to be.

“You are kind, child,” the Honoured Ancestress had said. “But . . . I feel it. I know that . . .” She’d paused then, and the silence had seemed too stretch on forever, pregnant with a thousand cancerous growths. “I’ve had absences. I’ve felt myself go. You can’t pretend everything is as it should be.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Quyen had shaken her head. “We’ll have you well. I promise.” As she’d promised to recover Du Khach’s implant—a task at which she’d failed so far.

“Make me well?” The Honoured Ancestress had asked. “I hold the lives of everyone aboard Prosper. I can’t afford to be less than fully efficient.”

“I promise,” Quyen had said again.

The Honoured Ancestress had not answered, but Quyen had known She wasn’t convinced. That She was afraid, not even for herself, but for Her children, and all the people aboard Prosper. And Quyen felt her heart break all over again. She’d find a way to make everything right. She had to.

“Cousin. Niece. Be welcome to my humble abode.” Linh had turned towards them, though she did not bow, or made any pretence of more than mere civility. “Can I offer you anything to drink or eat?”

Quyen rose, taking a deep breath to steady herself. Linh’s scorn was almost palpable, like a blistering wind in the deep spaces. “I have come to apologise for my earlier outburst. It was uncalled for.”

“Indeed.” Linh did not look surprised. Quyen fully knew that she’d ask what favour Quyen wanted within a few heartbeats. To forestall this, she said, “We have an urgent family affair to take care of. Missing mem-implants.”

“I see.” Linh’s expression did not move. She looked like any magistrate on her dais, her gaze utterly neutral, face revealing nothing of what she felt.

“They are our own ancestors,” Quyen said. “Dear to the Honoured Ancestress and to us.”

“A rather distressing setback.” Linh’s face was still expressionless, but she appeared marginally less cold. “I can well understand how you feel. To have strangers in possession of your family’s treasures . . .”

“Yes, exactly. You can see how preoccupying the situation is.”

“And this is what you want my help for?” Linh sounded wary, but excited. Always so ready to meddle into the station’s affairs, even as she refused to take part in its daily life.

“No,” Quyen snapped, and then corrected herself. “Not yet.” She shouldn’t discard possibilities so easily, no matter how much she might loathe Linh. “But I do need your help.”

“How surprising.” Linh didn’t move, or turn away.

Quyen went on, “Prosper is putting on a feast for Lady Oanh, and we want her to remember it as the highlight of her travels.” She did not say why. Enough sharing of secrets with an outsider. “For that, we need something memorable. Poetry, perhaps, or calligraphy. You would know better than I.”

“Yes.” Linh looked at the shadows spreading over the courtyard, extinguishing the light and making it into a mass of rivets and metal, instead of the carefully crafted garden the Honoured Ancestress’ systems usually displayed. “Is this payment for sheltering me?”

“No,” Quyen said, though she dearly would have loved to nod. “A favour, from a cousin to a cousin.” She swallowed, feeling the acrid taste on her tongue. They had no greater spouses left anywhere on Prosper. The only one who vaguely qualified was Huu Hieu, who fancied himself a poet and a scholar in spite of his dismal lack of talents in so many areas of his life. But demons drag her into the Courts of Hell before she bent her back to Huu Hieu.

“I know your poetry would be great,” Quyen said, “that it would charm Lady Oanh. This is what your talent is for.” And where Quyen’s talent would never be: nothing she would ever be honoured for, or remembered for as the ages passed and the memory of her faded from the world, unrecorded in any mem-implants.

“Please, Master Linh,” Xuan Rua said. Quyen jerked in surprise. Xuan Rua hadn’t said a word for the entire interview. “It would mean much to us.” Xuan Rua got up, and knelt on the stones of the courtyard, her head touching the floor, as if Linh were a much-higher ranked official than a mere provincial magistrate.

Linh’s gaze did not move, but Quyen thought she looked embarrassed. “Get up, child. I’ll think on it, but I’ll promise nothing.”

Quyen bowed, not as low as Xuan Rua, but low enough to make it clear she recognised Linh’s superiority. “We’ll await your answer, Cousin.”

She’d done all she could. Now it was in the hands of the gods, and of her ancestors.

☆ ☆ ☆

On the morning after Lady Oanh’s arrival, Linh was writing poetry when a knock at the door made her look up.

It was Huu Hieu, looking almost presentable, with his hair neatly brought back into an elegant bun, stabbed with silver pins in the shape of a phoenix wrapped around a star. No, not presentable . . .

Domestic, she considered, and thought uneasily of caged things: pet birds, ships on display at the docks that would never fly again.

He’d brought fruit which he laid on the table. The pink spikes of pitaya mingled with a few bunches of a yellow fruit she didn’t recognise: some kind of longan, though with far smoother skin.

“From the orchards,” he said, sheepishly. He looked embarrassed. Had his brother-in-law, Bao, warned him against seeing her?

“I’m glad you decided to take advantage of my offer,” she said, ignoring the howling of all six ancestors in her mem-implants.

Huu Hieu sat cross-legged in front of the low table; one swipe of his fingers called up a display which hung, trembling, waiting for her to fill it. He sat well away from her, his stance tense. But the tension wasn’t sexual, merely the usual unease of a stranger with another stranger.

“Have you heard news from your home planet?” he asked.

Linh shrugged. “Insofar as it’s my home. The Twenty-Third Planet was just my first posting.”

“But you miss it.”

Cousin Quyen was wrong about him. He was sharp, more observant than most people would give him credit for. She guessed that a lifetime with nothing much to do had honed his senses.

“I had friends there, and a life.” She didn’t say she had none of this here, and he wasn’t churlish enough to bring it up. “We had a poetry circle. The Crab Flower Club, which isn’t a terribly original name, but we had such talent . . .” It had been Giap’s idea, though he was an indifferent poet at best, making stiff and graceless compositions when his turn came.

She thought of long afternoons under the red sun, watching the clouds drift across the face of the sky; of voices raised in laughter, bowls clinked together as they were refilled with wine; of prompts drawn from official hats, and poems written in the glow of rice alcohol. All that she’d run away from, all that the war had swallowed and crunched to dust within its maw. “Yes. I miss it.”

Huu Hieu said nothing, only handed her a fruit, its skin split open to reveal plump, translucent flesh through which the stone shone like the pupil of an eye.

He watched her eat it; then took another one.

“Where were you born?” she asked.

“Far away. Before I was here, I came from Longevity Station.”

The network of alliances. She remembered reading about it on her way to Prosper Station, but it hadn’t been such a cold reality then. “You were bartered away.”

Huu Hieu looked away from her, as if acknowledging for the first time that he was her inferior. “I failed the examinations twice. On the stations, this means only one thing.”

Unfit for official life; doomed to be the lesser partner in a marriage, Fifth Ancestor Hoanh whispered in Linh’s mind, though really, she’d have guessed that without his help. The rules weren’t the same on the planets: more forgiving, but then the planets weren’t on such limited resources. “And so you came here.”

“Yes.” Huu Hieu picked another longan, dug his nails into the skin to split it apart. “It wasn’t so bad at first, when my wife was still here. But then . . .”

But then Quyen had taken over. “I see.” With a swipe of her fingers, Linh called up a book of poetry from her personal library. “Shall we read together?”

Huu Hieu nodded. For a while, there was nothing but the slow hum of the holo-screen, a sound that grew until it absorbed them all, and poetry sang in their minds, am and duong verses mingling with each other like the breath of the dragon that was the universe.

“Those are beautiful,” Huu Hieu said.

“They are.” Linh shook her head. “A pity the poets were never recognised by the literary circles of the capital.”

They chatted a bit, about the powerful images: the starships in flight over waterfalls, scattering to other planets like wild geese fleeing the winter; the wine warm in the cups, defying the emptiness of space; the paths of friends crossing only through deep-space travel, in one sense standing together, in the other so apart they might have been in different universes.

Huu Hieu was fidgeting, looking upwards at the dome of the station. His face was pale, pinched in worry, but a feverish energy underlined his gestures. “Has something happened to you?” Linh asked. She picked another book, the annals of Dai Viet dating back to the Lê dynasty, but she didn’t display it on the screen yet.

“No.” Huu Hieu looked up again at the dome, and shrugged, as if to say it didn’t matter anymore. “She’s probably listening.”

“Who?”

“Who else? The Honoured Ancestress.” He spat the word like a rotten lychee. “She who watches over us all.”

“You don’t approve.” She was always stating the obvious.

☆ ☆ ☆

Huu Hieu hugged himself. “Always watching,” he whispered. “Always able to come to you without warning, to press against your mind as though she owned everything . . .” He looked again at the dome. “Who cares? I’m leaving.”

“You are?” That stopped her, like a knife, thrown into her chest with unerring accuracy, her hand halfway to the table in order to call up more books. “You . . .”

There was silence for a while, as if they waited for the executioner’s sword to fall. Linh broke it, again. “I hadn’t thought . . .” she stopped then, unsure of what he was ready to tell her. Surely he would want it discussed as little as possible?

“There is someone else.” Huu Hieu shrugged. Bright, careless, his face tight with desperation, or happiness, she wasn’t sure. “On Longevity Station. A girl I once knew who never forgot about me. I never forgot her, either, and now her husband is dead . . .” He stopped; his eyes strangely bright and feverish.

“Your wife . . .” Linh said, carefully, as if each word would topple the edifice.

“It’s been five years, and my wife hasn’t come back. I won’t spend my entire life waiting for her. I can’t. Don’t you see?” Pleading. What could she tell him? She wasn’t here to pass judgment, or even to offer advice.

“I’m not family.”

“Nonsense. Quyen might not see it that way, but you’re as much part of us as Bao or any of my sisters-in-law.”

And was the thrill that ran through her joy, or the feeling of the knife sinking deeper into flesh? “So . . .” she pointed at the fruit. “A parting gift, then.”

Huu Hieu’s face fell. “They’re a gift. Because I visited you, and read your poetry. Don’t think of it in terms of parting, please.” He looked at the sky again, biting his lip. “It would be best . . .”

“Absolutely.” Linh picked a pitaya, toying with its weight, careful never to bruise the fruit beneath the skin. “Still, I’m happy for you.” And yet . . . there was an odd twist in her stomach. If he went away, if he escaped Prosper, he’d have his freedom once again. He’d enjoy the company of his lover, of friends and allies, while she would remain on the station, kinless and powerless and isolated. She quenched the thought before it could turn into bitter jealousy. “Shall we return to the poetry then?”

“Tell you what.” The feverishness was back in Huu Hieu’s eyes. She was reminded again of a man awaiting the plunge into deep space, steeling himself for what was to come. “Let’s write poems.”

Linh drew in a shaking breath. She’d written nothing since leaving the Twenty-Third Planet. “Why not?” She struggled to keep her voice calm. “You suggested it. Pick a prompt.”

“Use the following words: Chrysanthemum. Spaceship. Prosper. In Two Seven style.” Huu Hieu’s smile was deeply ironic.

“As you wish.” Linh bent down, already thinking of words that would fit, of soft and stressed syllables, of the music of the words putting themselves together, allusions to other, older texts playing against each other . . .

She looked up, vaguely disquieted. Something was wrong, something in the silence of the room, some blinking light in the corner of her vision. But before she could articulate the thought, the presence rose, overlaying the walls with a shimmer like sunlight on algae fields, and Linh’s hands tightened, even as she struggled to speak.

She’d expected the Honoured Ancestress but, instead, the scene around her slowly faded to be replaced by a verdant hillside under an intense blue sky. Everything, from the river to the clouds, was riven through with cracks, like torn cloth that revealed the darkness and emptiness between the stars. Linh raised her eyes and saw skeletal birds winging their way through the sky, their cries the forlorn ones of geese.

“Honoured Ancestress?” Linh asked. The Honoured Ancestress did not answer. Instead, a light blinked on the lower left hand corner of her field of vision, the same light that denoted an urgent message, usually from the station’s administrator. Linh reached out towards it and it fractured, the letters of its header slowly spreading past her until they had felt burnt into her eye-sockets.

The message had been routed from Felicity, but it had been come from the Twenty-Third Planet. Its trajectory through space had been erratic, leaping from one mindship to another in attempts to leave the cut-off war-zones and return to the planets held by the Empire. It was from Giap, but the seal on it was the two wolves of Lord Soi’s banners.

The environment around her fluttered between the verdant hills and the deeper darkness beneath them. Linh opened it, and Giap blinked into existence, not a flat image like his first image, but a full holographic recording, giving him the air of a ghost.

“Magistrate. I apologise, for it would seem I have been unworthy of your faith.” He smiled at her, his face wan and drawn. His hair had been pulled into a neat top-knot, and his clothes were the rough, off-white of mourning. Around his neck was a placard, on which was written in red ink his full name and a list of crimes. Linh read the larger letters: “Rebellion against the Celestial Order”. He wore the placard and clothes of a condemned man, being led to his execution.

No. The thought was a knife drawn across Linh’s throat. Had he not received her message? Had he not . . .

“As is customary, I have written my last messages, and saved this one for you. I’m no poet, and don’t expect you to remember my words beyond what custom dictates.” He smiled at her then, and it broke her heart all over again. “Don’t blame yourself for what happened. I bear the responsibility of my advice to you, and of what I did after the fall of the province. Be kind, Magistrate. Be strong. But you know all of this already. I was proud to know you, and if my ancestors grant me a place among them, I shall continue to watch over you as I have always done.”

Linh reached out, to touch the ghostly hands, but the message was finished, and Giap had blinked out of existence. “Giap!” she called, knowing it was too late already. The rest of the message streamed by her. Under the seal of Lord Soi was the order for Giap’s execution, and for the execution of other names she’d known in another lifetime: Chau and his meat dumplings and poetry that never made sense; Van and his dreams of being a soldier in some far-away land; Lan and her effortless, flowing verses that seared the soul, a great talent wasted on a lesser spouse with no ambitions beyond her hearth . . .

Her entire poetry club, wiped out of existence with a casual note that they had been rebels against Lord Soi’s new order. All of it tossed at her like a piece of offal.

“Honoured Ancestress!” Linh screamed. “Show yourself!”

The land around her flickered and tore, and she was back in the courtyard, struggling to breathe. “Child?” the Honoured Ancestress sounded scared. “Something happened . . .”

“You gave me a message.” Linh struggled to pull herself upright, to be stern, unbending, as a magistrate should be. But she couldn’t seem to muster the strength to stand up.

Breathe. Breathe, Linh. You have to breathe. One cannot let the dead destroy you. One cannot weep for subordinates. He only did his duty . . . He wasn’t a subordinate, he was a friend, and you should mourn him accordingly . . . He was to her as Quan Vu to Luu Bi: a sworn brother, and his death is like her own. . . . Within her, the six ancestors in their mem-implants shouted at each other, a storm of contradictory advice that threatened to tear her apart.

Breathe, Linh, breathe.

Weep.

“I apologise. A malfunction appears to have emptied my priority buffers,” the Honoured Ancestress said. There was a pause; then, “Your message had been set aside when Lady Oanh’s ship arrived.”

“Set aside?”

The Honoured Ancestress stopped and said nothing.

“Set aside by whom?” Linh asked, though she knew the answer. She’d crushed one of the pitayas. Her fingers were coated in white, sticky flesh which clung to her skin, like guilt, like blood.

“Quyen,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “She thought you should hear about this when you were in the right frame of mind. But you don’t understand, child. There is something . . .”

Quyen. Of course. Who else would keep news of the Twenty-Third Planet from her? Focus on your work and your place here, Cousin. Stop dream about what could have been. Then, perhaps, I will reconsider. “There is nothing,” Linh snapped. “Go away and leave me alone.”

Were this Quyen, she’d have snapped, said something about being older and wiser than Linh. But the Honoured Ancestress merely said, in a voice that quivered, “I’m sorry,” and the pressure of Her presence faded, leaving Linh alone with Huu Hieu.

“You didn’t see anything, did you?” Linh’s stomach contracted into knots. Bad enough to be weak, but that he should see it . . .

“I . . . had a message.” He forced a smile. “From Longevity. You?”

Another message Quyen had been holding on to, so she could see what they were doing? “A message I had been waiting for a while,” she said. “I am well.” She forced herself to smile through the lie, until her jawbones hurt with the effort.

She thought of Quyen, of the contrite way she’d apologised for her shortcomings earlier. To think that Linh had almost believed her, that she’d almost agreed to be her dupe once again. And all the while Quyen had been watching incoming messages, making decisions about what Linh could and could not do, had been ruling her life as she ruled everyone else’s.

And she had the gall to hope for Linh to exalt Prosper in the eyes of Lady Oanh, to participate in the glorification of Quyen’s own petty concerns. She had the nerve to come and see Linh, and dangle mysteries in front of her, to promise that she could be included in family matters, help the station with her skills. She had the nerve to ask through a tangle of lies, and to use Xuan Rua to soften Linh’s heart.

She’d been a fool.

“A poem,” she said aloud, heedless of Huu Hieu’s puzzled stare. Quyen wanted a poem? Linh would give her something that no one aboard Prosper would ever forget.

☆ ☆ ☆

Quyen had expected Lê Anh Tu to be a portly man. But he was as skinny as a beggar, his face gaunt, almost malnourished, so creased and skeletal that Quyen almost turned to the Honoured Ancestress to ask Her about Tu’s allowance. But of course it was foolishness. No one went hungry on Prosper.

The trance flared to life within Quyen, reminded her that Tu was a distant relative, descended from a brother of Quyen’s great-grandfather. It mattered little, in truth. Everyone on Prosper was related to some degree or another. But Quyen took it as a good sign. The trance was working, albeit erratically. The Honoured Ancestress was still with them.

For a while, if nothing else.

The Abode of Brush Saplings was set around a wide, airy courtyard. Its trees and carp-filled basin almost disguised the fact that it wasn’t in the open air, but under the subdued lights of Prosper. A gaggle of a dozen students—eight girls, five boys, their ages ranging from five to fifteen—watched Quyen and Tu stroll through the courtyard, the books on their tables forgotten in the rush of curiosity.

How Quyen wished for Xuan Rua. But one of them had to remain in charge of the banquet preparation and this, this interview with Lê Anh Tu, was too sensitive to be left to her niece alone.

Tu said, “I’m honoured by your visit, Mistress Quyen.”

Quyen heard the “but” he wasn’t saying. “Family matters bring me to you, Master Tu.”

He raised an eyebrow, signifying, very clearly, that he might have been family once, but didn’t count as such anymore. “We are far away from the Inner Quarters,” Tu said. A careful overture, calculated not to cause offence.

“Indeed. But things blow where the wind wills them,” Quyen said.

Tu was smarter than Zhang. Indeed, Quyen had the feeling that he knew all of her failures, all the books spread out on his students’ tables: writing that she could decipher but not understand. He did not bother to quest for an allusion she could have made, and merely nodded. “You seek the wind’s trail, Mistress Quyen.”

“It always blows here, doesn’t it?” Quyen said, with a flourish of her hands. “Into the middle rings. Far from the warmth of the Honoured Ancestress, but not so far that you feel the cold of space.” She hesitated, but she’d lost enough time as it was. There were more pressing concerns, the dinner with Lady Oanh, the war encroaching on them . . .

She’d have grasped for the Honoured Ancestress, to support her in her moment of need, but she was . . . afraid of what would happen, should she reach for Her and not find Her anywhere. “And some things, like blown maple leaves, find their way into the most unlikely places.”

Tu raised a perfectly manicured eyebrow. He appeared amused, but not unduly surprised. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mistress Quyen.” In his mouth, the “Mistress” appeared almost perfunctory.

Quyen turned her gaze towards the students, who were still watching them from afar. “Your students are bright,” she said, keeping her voice low. She would make her point without shaming the children.

“They wouldn’t be here otherwise.” Was that pride in his voice, or something else entirely? She didn’t know what vagaries of life’s currents had brought him here in the middle rings. As a tutor to the wealthy, he could have had a much larger allowance. Was it ideals or lack of skills which kept him where he was?

“Our Empire takes talent and knowledge where it can find it,” Quyen said, slowly. “Raising up carps to be dragons. But not all are so fortunate.”

“It’s not fortune.” Tu’s hands had tightened, so strongly they shone as white as ceruse. “You and I both know it, Mistress Quyen.”

“True.” She inclined her head. “It’s hard work. Nights of studying the Classics by the dimmed light of Our Honoured Ancestress, of memorising the proper words and citations. It’s a good teacher who will guide through the complexities of the eight-part dissertation and the Two-Seven poetry. But all of that comes with wealth. How can one study if one has no spare time? And how can one find a good teacher if one does not pay for them?”

Tu blanched, and his eyes narrowed in anger. An idealist, then. She didn’t like that. She’d have few holds on a man like this. “You’re suggesting my students will fail.”

Quyen inclined her head, gracefully. “I’m suggesting your students are at a disadvantage. Which you already know. You’re clever, Tu.”

“And you’re quick to judge.” Tu glanced towards his students. “Flowers don’t bloom by themselves, Lady Quyen. They require . . . care.” Quyen smiled, catching the hint. He wanted her to get to the point, so he could get back to his neglected pupils.

“Your students’ ancestors were from the outer rings,” she said. “Menials for the most part, with thinned blood. To their descendants they gift blessings, and luck, and happiness. But not, sadly, knowledge.”

Tu said nothing.

Fine. She would take the story to its end, then, propriety or not. If it was a choice between losing face now and standing, day after day, before the ancestral altar with the shame of having failed the Honoured Ancestress and her own ancestors, Quyen knew exactly what she would choose.

“Knowledge can be given away, from ancestor to child,” Quyen said. “Or it can be . . . stolen.”

“Indeed.” Tu’s voice was flat, his face as blank as a console screen.

“I’m told you’re friends with a man named Thien.” Quyen raised a hand to forestall his objections. “It’s hardly a secret.”

“No.” Tu smiled, his lips as thin as a knife’s blade. “Thien comes often. He understands what it means to seek knowledge.”

“As you do?” Quyen raised an eyebrow.

Tu was looking straight at her, like an equal, like a superior, as if he knew all that she could and couldn’t do, and didn’t care. “As you said, I am a clever man. I know all that it takes for a carp to leap the dragon waterfalls, and if a nudge is needed, then I will give it.” His hands were shaking, a slight tremor. “Whatever it takes to make them rise, I will do. Those who grow wise by learning are among the best, and will rise high in society, as you well know. You don’t understand, Mistress Quyen, what it is to be poor, to be desperate.”

“No one is poor on Prosper,” Quyen said, not knowing what else she could tell him.

Tu smiled. “The beautiful thing about poverty is that it only exists compared to others. True, no one goes hungry on Prosper.” He smiled at that, as if he knew exactly what she was doing, the knife’s edge that currently separated them from ruin and starvation. “But some are richer than others. Some hand out allowances.” He smiled at her, again, a thoroughly unpleasant expression. “Some fly away to other planets, to serve the Dragon Throne. Some have dozens of citizens, to see to their needs, while others have just enough to eat, and to drink themselves insensate in front of their holograms.”

“You want us all to be equal?” Quyen shook her head. “You know that’s impossible.”

“Of course.” Tuyen bowed his head. “I merely want . . . a chance. An opportunity, for the poor to become the wealthy, to receive the five blessings. I know all about hunger.”

“I see.” Quyen bowed her head, though she didn’t understand him at all. The light in his eyes made her deeply uneasy; it was that of a fanatic, far removed from propriety and balance. “So, you and the venerable Thien hold the same opinions on many things.” She forced her voice to remain quiet. “On hunger, and equality, and theft.”

The word fell in the silence of the courtyard, spread its ripples around the room. In other circumstances, Quyen would have thought the Honoured Ancestress was here, manipulating soundwaves for better effect. But she could feel nothing, not even the trance, as if everything had dropped away from her unexpectedly.

Tu shook his head. “Suspicions are unhealthy, Mistress Quyen.”

“Allow me to entertain them, nevertheless.”

Tu smiled. “You are free to think what you want. Aren’t we all?” He smiled again, and it was a terrible thing, bright and fevered and unhealthy. “But, without proof, you won’t go far.”

“There are other ways.” The words came out of her, torn without conscious volition. Persuasion and torture, and all the planet-side ways that Linh would be so familiar with . . .

What was she thinking of? This was Prosper, not a planet mired in the dark ages. This was a place of freedom, away from the gaze of the Dai Viet Empire, where the Honoured Ancestress made her own laws. Where a descendant of Lê Thi Phuoc might be poor, might live in the middle rings, but could not be handled with anything other than respect. Blood to blood; flesh to flesh; features to features.

“Of course there are,” Tu said, and she knew, they both knew she couldn’t, wouldn’t use them without utterly shattering Prosper. And another, shameful thought: Huu Hieu wasn’t worth it.

“Was that all, Mistress Quyen?” Tu asked. He drew himself up. He was the respected teacher once again, with no trace of the fanatic, or of the gloating thief.

She knew—they both knew—he had the implants. But until she found out where he’d hidden them, there was nothing she could do about it.

“No, that wasn’t all.” The words tasted like ash on her tongue. “But I’ll be back.”

“I’m sure you will.” A hint of a smile, revealing teeth yellowed by tea leaves. “And I’ll receive you with pleasure.”

She’d have the place searched, from corner to corner. Tear everything apart. But somehow she knew she wouldn’t find the implants, that he was clever enough to have hidden them well. And that what she truly needed was a way to outwit him. She, the uneducated daughter, who had perfunctorily listened to her tutors’ lessons and failed her examinations; who had little knowledge beyond a smattering of poetry, and etiquette . . .

She looked at the students again, at their bright, almost fevered eyes, their faces taut with the desire to learn; at the cut of their clothes, too trim and too neat, too eager to reflect wealth and ease. And she felt a long way from home again, as if she were back on the ship that had first brought her to Prosper, struggling to find herself amidst the strangeness of the deep planes, bereft of everything, as if she were already an orphan.

☆ ☆ ☆

Linh stood in the banquet hall, watching the light shift from a warm red to the cold, heartless light of Old Earth’s moon: a disk that slowly coalesced in the air above her, growing larger and larger until she could see every crater, every pockmark; even boyish, mythical Cuoi, sitting in the crown of leaves of his banyan tree. A fiction that had nothing to do with the Red Turtle star they orbited around, or with life as it was now, away from the husk of Old Earth.

The light played on the red pillars and the inscriptions they bore, stretched out what was only a modest, low-ceilinged room into a place that could almost have belonged to a planet-side mansion.

Around Linh, the tables were spread: plates of silver, of nano-grown fibers made to look like the vanished celadon of old, and the fragile cups, the treasures of the family, all laid out for the admiration of Lady Oanh. It all seemed . . . pregnant with waiting, like the ancestral altar on the day of the bride’s homecoming.

She’d have laughed if she hadn’t felt so dead inside. If she hadn’t been seeing, over and over, Giap’s face hovering into her field of view; his mouth moving, reproving her for overworking herself yet again; his hands steadying her up, all but carrying her to the tribunal’s kitchen where a steaming teapot would be waiting for her, and the familiar, nutty smell of the tea wafting up to her, a clear scent that flowed into her mouth.

She’d always insisted that Giap take a sip, but he’d smile and say she was the magistrate, and somehow she’d never managed to couch the request in such a way that he’d accept it . . .

Spirits, how she missed him.

The six voices within her were silent. Even First Ancestor Thanh Thuy had nothing to say, not even some clever quote about the duty of friends to one another.

Linh was alone in her own mind. She was thinking of the Xuyan Classics of Luu Bi, and the Oath in the Peach Garden; of friends not born together, but swearing to die together. And it frightened her. Giap would have told her that she was the magistrate, that she needed not grieve for the death of a subordinate, that parents did not weep for children as much as children for parents.

He would have told her all of this, and she would have known, in her heart of hearts, that he was right.

But she’d never listened to Giap, had she?

Xuan Rua slid by, bringing paper, an ink-stone and a brush onto one of the spare tables. “They’ll be coming any moment.”

“I know,” Linh said.

Xuan Rua set a bowl of water by the side of the bowl, frowning. She looked at the ink stone again, and set it upright. Then, still looking away from Linh, she said, “Thank you for doing this.”

Linh winced. She knew why she was doing this, and there was no good in it. “For Prosper,” she said, thinking of Giap, of the message Quyen had hidden from her, of a place where nothing was private; everything was laid out like corpses on a morgue’s slab. A madhouse ruled by the maddest one of all, far from the Way and its balance, far from Master Kong and his wisdom.

Giap, of course, would have urged her not to think about revenge. “For Prosper,” Linh said again, and Xuan Rua’s head tilted up, as if her student were about to break the rules of propriety in order to meet Linh’s gaze, to look into its depths.

The gates to the room opened, and Lady Oanh walked in.

She looked much more regal than in Linh’s quarters: her ao dai tunic was of brushed, luminescent silk, its patterns slowly rotating, and their contours subtly altering as Lady Oanh crossed the length of the hall. The silk swirled around her like leaves lifted up by the wind. Her face was whitened with ceruse, her hair piled into an elaborate bun, eyebrows plucked into the shape of a moth’s wings.

She looked like a queen from ancient days, truly a Lady from the First Planet, walking in the palaces of the Emperor himself, effortlessly consorting with the highest officials and the favoured concubines.

Behind her was a procession that seemed to include the entirety of Prosper: Cousin Quyen, of course, in green-hued robes embroidered with bamboos and pines; Bao and Huu Hieu, looking stiff and not at all pleased to be there; Cousin Kim-Ly, leading the younger children; and the other, more distant cousins from the rest of the family and a flood of other citizens Linh had never seen, a sea of coloured five-part dresses and long ao dai dresses, and resplendent jewellery that made her eyes ache.

Fake, all of it. A dance on the edge of the abyss in a station depleted by war. Fake, all of it, the smiles, the makeup, the averted gazes and the muttered polite nothings; the moon overhead, the ceiling that she knew was much lower, that was crushing her under its weight.

Fake.

The jostle for the tables had finished, leaving Linh in a spreading circle of silence. Lady Oanh was at the place of honour, with Quyen faced her, closest to the doors and the attendants with their waiting trays. Quyen was impeccably dressed. Of course, that was all she knew how to do, didn’t she. Her face, as she raised it towards the guest, settled in the old, familiar, unbearable arrogance.

“I beg leave to say a few words, as we are gathered here,” she said. “The times are not happy.” Her face twisted in a perfect mockery of sorrow that she did not feel an ounce of. “But then, we of Dai Viet have spent so much time with war it might as well be an old friend. We have known the packing away of bamboo mats, and the flight into darkness; the lords of Trinh and Nguyen tearing Dai Viet apart, as we are torn apart now.”

The past, offered up to explain the present, all so casually, so unfeelingly Linh felt her hands clenched. What about the dead? Would they feel comforted by knowing they were part of an endless cycle, a history endlessly closing in a circle; to know that, even among the stars, death and war and famine still stalked?

“But we are more than that,” Quyen was saying. “We make the red candles burn high.” She gestured, and the hall filled itself with red light, even as the moon seemed to shift and recede into the background.

“We serve the warm wine, and remember our friends scattered like wild geese; and we honour our guests tonight.” Quyen dipped her head towards Lady Oanh, who inclined her own in return. It was an easy gesture, like the Emperor to a supplicant.

Platitudes, Linh thought, rubbing the ink stick against the wet stone and the glaze of black spread to her fingers, dark and sticky like unhealed wounds. Quyen might look smug, but she did nothing more than quote from a few half-remembered poems and stumble, blind, through a room full of the world’s riches, snatching and mangling and calling it her own with misplaced pride.

“Lady Oanh, we are a miserly station on the edge of nowhere. We have no bright painters, no talented speakers of odes. But Cousin Linh has agreed to compose a poem for us tonight, in honour of this happy reunion.”

And she looked at Linh, triumphant and smug, so sure of herself. She hadn’t even thanked Linh for doing this; it had taken Xuan Rua to voice that particular thought. She was so secure in her arrogance, thinking she knew everything in the Heavens and on Earth, that she could command each and every one of them . . . Had she been so sure of herself, when she’d denied Linh the knowledge of Giap’s death?

You don’t own us, Linh thought, dipping the brush into the ink. Fifth Ancestor Hoang rose in her mind, whispering words about the beauty of the moon, meeting goddesses in the midst of clouds and rain, excursions to lakes on planets long dead. But no, that wasn’t what she wanted. A banquet; an occasion for a reunion.

And for an accounting, too; something that would damage Quyen beyond repair.

For Prosper, Linh thought, tasting ashes and mud on her tongue. Behind Quyen, relegated to one of the lesser tables, was Huu Hieu, his face pale, ill at ease in the presence of so many people.

There is someone else . . . I’m leaving.

He was going away. Away from Quyen and her machinations, away from the stifling tomb that was Prosper. Up until this moment, Linh had not realised quite how much she envied him his freedom. You don’t own us, she thought, to Quyen who couldn’t hear her. You don’t own him, and I’m proud that he can escape your clutches.

Taking her brush, she painted the verses on the paper in swift movements. The words tumbled atop one another in her mind, flowed like the waters of a stream, like the notes of a song. And every allusion was as clear, as pitiless as the sun on the steppes, as the sea in the morning after a storm, washing up corpses on the beach.

When she was done she stepped away, to look at the words. Xuan Rua was still standing by her side, her eyes widening as she read the poem. And Quyen . . . Quyen—Underworld demons take her!—was standing, smiling at her, waiting.

Linh spoke up without looking at the paper. The first couplet was a classic, speaking of the joys of friends meeting again:

The broken willow-twig is whole again, and the wild geese have flown homewards

Fresh cooked rice with millet, and warm wine in the golden cups.

But the answering couplet . . .

Caged birds flutter close, their wings drifting in the flame of the red candles

A pair of most filial magpies, their fill eaten, kiss each other like lovers, and fly to Longevity.

Linh could see Lady Oanh frowning. The poem was barely short of suitable, the allusions of its last couplet casting a sinister veil on everything within the hall—the burning of the birds’ wings, the image of hunger and cages . . .

And then, as the room fell silent, she realised what she had done.

Magpies. The symbol of love and marriages. The birds that went between the Herder and the Celestial Weaver, allowing them to meet and celebrate their love on the bridge of birds. Filial magpies. Huu Hieu’s name meant “most filial”; and, as to the very last words . . . Longevity. Longevity Station.

She had . . . She had written the poem in a trance, meaning to damage Quyen’s tainted hospitality. But, instead, she had besmirched Huu Hieu, revealed to the entire hall the existence of his lover, and his intention of leaving the station for Felicity. She had . . .

Spirits, what had she done?

A slow look of horror was stealing across Xuan Rua’s face, leeching it to the colour of a shroud. Quyen’s whole body had tensed; she was mouthing “filial” under her mouth. Her gaze, narrowing, travelled down the length of the banquet tables, as if struggling to find a face that would bring it all into focus. Lady Oanh’s mouth opened, her arm tensed, opened in a gesture towards Quyen, as if she could stop Quyen from moving altogether.

Linh had been so proud of herself, so idiotically lost in the ecstasy of composing. But no, she couldn’t excuse it that way; she’d meant it all, every spiteful word, even the denunciation of Huu Hieu, who had everything she couldn’t have: a loved one, and a future away from Prosper Station. She’d meant it all, and she’d gone too far.

Quyen’s gaze, narrowing, fixed unerringly on Huu Hieu. Then, too late, Quyen realised what she’d given away, as the first whispers started among the guests, the first spiteful words, the start of rumours that wouldn’t die. Lady Oanh’s hand had fallen back, and she had her mask on again, the magistrate on her dais.

Linh struggled to compose herself, but all she could see was Xuan Rua’s eyes, like two holes into the torture pits of the underworld, and Huu Hieu’s face, slowly decomposing as he realised the attention of the entire banquet hall was moving towards him. All she could see was the moon, shifting into fractured opalescence, its light slowly turning as black as tar, as the Honoured Ancestress’ wail filled the room to bursting.

☆ ☆ ☆

Quyen stood outside the heartroom, watching the light play on the station’s walls. For the first time in her life she felt as if she were floating loose, as if she could see past the oily metal and the carefully constructed calligraphy, straight into the heart of space. And the heart of space was the void, a comforting refuge, a realm where nothing began and nothing ended, removed from the turmoil of the world.

From inside came fragments of words. This, like the moon fracturing in the banquet hall, squeezed her heart into a thousand ice shards. The Honoured Ancestress had always kept an iron hand on Prosper Station’s environment, and to see it drift out of control . . .

She kept herself standing straight, looking like the axle that linked the Heavens to the planets, even though she couldn’t keep her own thoughts in order.

Over and over, she saw Huu Hieu’s face, as the lights of the red candles flickered in and out of existence; felt the pressure in her ears waver and fall away as the Honoured Ancestress fell in and out of focus, Her comforting embrace sheared away from them all. She heard Cousin Linh’s verses, biting into her mind like the fangs of a snake.

How dare she! How dare she accept Prosper’s hospitality, and give them . . . this in return.

Xuan Rua was approaching, followed by her sister. Xuan Kiem’s face looked as pale as polished metal, her hands shaking.

Rua, Kiem. Turtle, Sword; and there had been a baby girl who had died: Xuan Ho. Lake. A blatant reference to Emperor Lê Loi and his magical sword, who had wrested Dai Viet from China’s grasp in the distant past. An unsubtle, almost vulgar use of the language. Emblematic, as in everything, of Huu Hieu’s failures.

Xuan Rua bowed, briefly, as she neared Quyen. “Aunt.”

“Nieces.” Quyen kept her gaze away from the heartroom. It did her no good to endlessly wonder what Lady Oanh was going, or why she’d acceded to Quyen’s request despite the utter disaster of the banquet.

Xuan Rua swallowed. Her gaze, uncontrolled, rising to meet Quyen’s. “He had plans. Three berths on a merchant ship.”

In those days of war berths on ships did not come cheap, no matter if they were mindships cutting through deep spaces, or the slower mainliners. “And that was why he needed to sell the implants.”

It was not a question, and Xuan Rua did not treat it as such. “The mindship was Baoyu’s Red Fan, but it left three hours ago, rather precipitously.”

Of course. The news of the banquet had been around the station ten thousand times by now, and the captain had known enough to smell which way the wind was blowing. “And Lê Thu Anh?” Quyen asked. “The schoolteacher?”

“He wasn’t on the manifest,” Xuan Rua said. “But from what you were saying . . . I don’t think he’d have left.”

No. He would remain, burning with the desire to change Prosper, to give his students a chance to change the system. As if that would ever happen. There would always be the privileged; and if those weren’t determined by blood, they’d be determined by talent and by intelligence. And how much fairer was that, for those to whom their ancestors had not bequeathed intelligence at birth?

She’d wasted time, trying to negotiate with Lê Tu Anh, to be conciliatory. No longer. Du Khach’s implant was still on the station, or the Honoured Ancestress would have let her know. There was still hope that she could redeem herself, if she stopped being overwhelmed by events.

“Send Bao and the attendants to the Abode of Brush Saplings, and search the place. Leave no stone unturned, no nook unexamined.”

Xuan Rua nodded, but her face was pale. Poor girl, Quyen thought. It was bad enough to have responsibility thrust early upon her, but to have to deal with her father’s failings, without a mother to support her . . .

“I’m sorry.” Quyen thought back to what Xuan Rua had said. Three berths. It was obvious they were for him and his two daughters. “You didn’t know?” Quyen asked Xuan Rua, though she didn’t need to. Xuan Rua’s face and Xuan Kiem’s pallor made it all too clear.

“No,” Xuan Rua said.

Xuan Kiem blanched as if struck, but she said nothing. Her usual arrogance and eagerness had been washed away by a flood.

“No,” Xuan Rua said. “What did he want to do, Aunt? Did he”—she swallowed—“did he plan to drag us to the ship, without asking for our opinion?”

Quyen took a deep breath and said, slowly, “He’s free to take you wherever he wants, nieces,” she went on, before either of them could speak, “you’re not of age, and he is not beholden to ask for your opinion before leaving.” It galled her that the laws could be this misguided, but she could do nothing about that. “The law says there is nothing wrong with that.”

“But . . .” Xuan Rua said, her face so pale it looked powdered with ceruse.

“That doesn’t mean I approve of it,” Quyen said, sharply. “And that doesn’t mean he’s free to do any of the other things: to sell our family implants like pitaya fruit at the marketplace, or to plan to run away from Prosper without asking leave of me or the Honoured Ancestress.”

“He should have told us,” Xuan Rua said.

Xuan Kiem’s gaze was hard. “He was afraid we would refuse. He didn’t trust us, did he?”

Quyen was saved from answering the awkward question when the door to the heartroom opened, letting Lady Oanh through.

She walked a little unsteadily, her poise a fraction from perfect, her legs shaking, almost beyond the threshold of perception. But all of Quyen’s senses were sharpened. She would not be caught unawares again.

“Lady Oanh.” Quyen and the girls bowed to her. Lady Oanh waved a dismissive hand.

“No need for that, between family.” She pulled herself straighter, and the weariness disappeared. Something like a mask seemed to descend over her features, freezing them in the distant one of the statues in the temples. “You want to know about your Mind.”

Quyen nodded, not trusting her tongue. She’d asked for that, schemed and bullied her way to this moment. But now that it was there, hovering over her like the executioner’s silken garrotte, a hollow had opened in her stomach, a maw that seemed to leech all warmth from her muscles.

“Pham Lê Thi Mot,” Lady Oanh said, slowly. “Conceived by Pham Van Vu, borne by Lê Thi Phuoc in her womb. Awakened for five generations.” Her gaze was distant, as if she were already composing an official report. “I have conducted a thorough examination, given what was allotted to me, and I see no flaw of design. The five humours are properly anchored within the heart room, and the station itself was well prepared to welcome its Mind, everything in proper balance.”

She fell silent. “But?” Quyen said, slowly. The word seemed to come from a faraway place, as if it had never belonged to her.

Lady Oanh’s face moved a fraction, settling into another mysterious, unreadable expression. “Something has gone wrong. The khi flow has stagnated within the outer rings, and the elements are slowly freezing in place. She’s losing her integrity, little by little.”

The hollow in Quyen’s stomach opened wide, chilling the marrow of her bones.

Silence followed. Then Xuan Rua said, “Forgive my audacity, but there has to be something we can do.”

“Some . . . redesigning of key points on the station,” Lady Oanh said, “would solve the problem. But it will also remove her short-term memory.”

“Short-term?” Quyen asked.

“For the last generation.”

Meaning, effectively, that the Honoured Ancestress wouldn’t recognise them. That they’d excise a part of Her life, and expect Her to go on as before.

“It would take time,” Lady Oanh said. “And skills.”

“And a Master of Grand Design Harmony.” Quyen couldn’t keep the taste of ashes from her mouth.

“Not necessarily.” Lady Oanh looked thoughtful. “As descendants of the Honoured Ancestress, you have access to the higher levels of the trance. This should be enough to make the adjustments you need. I will leave schematics with you, if you wish. But it has to be done . . . precisely. There can be no room for mistakes, or you’ll lose more than short-term memory.” She spread her hands. “You have a choice, though: it need not be done now. You can ask for a Master of Grand Design Harmony from the First Planet, and not take such a great risk.”

“You said she was losing integrity,” Quyen said, and she wasn’t sure how to make it sound less like an accusation.

“Yes, she is deteriorating fast. But it’ll stop, soon, once it has spread to all the non-vital functions. I think the obstruction dates back a generation or more; a series of mis-steps in the design. A series of . . . oversights on top of an old design. They didn’t build Minds to be very robust, back then.” She smiled, though she did not seem amused. “We all find it hard to project our imaginations beyond our own existence, and even less into the time of our great-great-great grandchildren. You can survive until a Master of Grand Design Harmony arrives. There are, after all, fail-safes to prevent her from depressurising the corridors, or flooding entire levels. You’ll be cramped, but fine.”

Cramped. Surviving; barely. “A decision,” Quyen said. A slow decline or a loss. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or to weep. “Thank you,” she said, slowly, carefully.

Lady Oanh shrugged. “It was the least I could do, under the circumstances.” She moved away, her gaze turned towards her spaceship, her own departure, and flight back to the capital. She’d gone no more than a few paces, slowing down with each of them, as if mulling on something, when she turned back towards Quyen. “Lady Quyen.”

Whatever Quyen had expected, it wasn’t this form of address, putting her on an equal footing with Lady Oanh. “I’m not a Lady.”

“Nonsense.” Lady Oanh’s voice was brisk, business-like: she’d decided on her course of action, and nothing was going to stop her. “You might not administer a district tribunal, or a planet, but no one here will deny that you run Prosper. I have no idea why you persist in belittling yourself.” She went on, before Quyen could splutter an appropriate response. “As magistrate to administrator, I’ll give you a warning.”

“I don’t understand,” Quyen said.

Lady Oanh’s face was distant, once again. “I think you have enough to worry about without adding that. Expect one more ship to come to Prosper, quite soon.”

A ship? A merchant ship? But no, why warn them about a merchant ship? It made no sense . . .

The smile that spread across Lady Oanh’s face was halfway between sad and malicious. “Embroidered Guard.”

Quyen had thought she couldn’t grow any colder, any emptier. She’d been wrong. The Embroidered Guard, the Great Virtue Emperor’s elite troops, only sent to reassert the Empire’s power in the bloodiest way possible. “We have transgressed no laws,” she started, and then the obvious answer hit her between the eyes like a barbed spike.

Cousin Linh.

Book 3: The Embroidered Guard

In the hours that followed the banquet, Linh became even more of a pariah than usual. The family provided for her, and her access privileges to the higher levels of the trance weren’t cut off, but everything was given with tight lips, and her usual accesses into the Honoured Ancestress’ and Quyen’s chambers denied. Not that Linh had ever cared much about it, but she hadn’t expected the whole situation to leave her . . . wrung out, empty, as if there’d been nothing left within her once she’d poured her bile.

Nothing but grief, and the emptiness where Giap had once been; the bitter knowledge that all her prayers, all her entreaties to her ancestors would not bring him back, would not fill the hollow in her heart. The ancestors on her implants, too, were silent, though she could feel First Ancestor Thanh Thuy’s disapproval like a slap on the hand. No doubt she was keeping all the others silent until Linh realised the gravity of what she’d done.

It had been clumsily done. But Linh wouldn’t go back on it, or on how she felt about Prosper.

The only one she felt sorry for was Huu Hieu. She’d gone several times to his quarters, mustering an apology that rang false even to her. But the guardians at the doors of his chambers made it all too clear this access, too, was denied to her. Accordingly, she was down to using the trance, looking into the guts of the system, wondering if there was a weakness she could exploit to send him a personal message that bitch Quyen wouldn’t read.

And what was in the guts was . . . frightening. Everything was haphazardly cobbled up, seeming to answer little more than random impulses within the core. Linh was no Grand Master of Design Harmony, no Mover of Bots, but still, even she could see that it was all wrong and getting worse by the moment. Quyen was losing her grip on the station. Linh watched, amused, as Bao and a posse of servants tore the Abode of Brush Saplings apart, looking for the missing implants, while the teacher, Lê Anh Tu, watched them, mockingly.

In the end they had to leave. Linh had no doubt Bao would report his failure to Quyen.

Good. Let the bitch know chaos, too. Let her know loss.

But even those words seemed to ring hollow in her mind, faded against the memory of the entire hall turning to her in the wake of her poem.

She was still looking into the system—like a spaceship pilot fascinated by deep spaces a moment before the ship’s protection failed them and they were torn apart—when a visitor was announced.

It was Bao and he looked . . . different; the ethereal cast to his face subtly wrong, like ill-applied makeup, or a corrupted mask.

He didn’t bother with even so much as a greeting. “I can’t find my younger brother.”

Linh laughed, not bothering to disguise the bitterness in that laugh. “And you think I’d know where he is?”

“You’re a magistrate.” Bao’s tone was flat, reasonable, a monk’s, a priest’s.

Linh wished she could just throw him out of her quarters, and not wonder what hid beneath the facade he’d been so busy constructing.

“Even if you weren’t the family member he spoke to most, you’re the one who is used to tracking down people.”

“You’re mistaken,” she said. “I don’t track people down. My lieutenants do.”

“Did.” Bao hesitated. “I’ve seen the records, Cousin. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for what happened. Quyen meant well, but no one should ever find out bad news the way you did.”

Linh sighed. If it were only Bao and his belated good-wishes, she’d have made her position clear. But she owed Huu Hieu for shattering his dreams. Still, if Huu Hieu had managed to escape who was she to deny him?

“I can’t help you,” she said. “At least he’s free, and I’m the last one who should deny him this.”

Bao surprised her by openly grimacing, and she saw the worry in his eyes, as raw as bleeding skin. “If he’s left, if he’s escaped, then I won’t pursue him. But there’s always the other option.”

“You think like Cousin Quyen,” Linh said, slowly, carefully. “You’ll want him to face the wrath of the family, like everyone else.”

“You misjudge me.” Bao shook his head, but he did not appear angry. “I didn’t say I approved, but I understand. We all retreat from grief in different ways, and I know this all too well. If my younger brother’s path to healing is away from Prosper . . .” He spread his hands. “I won’t be the one who shatters him. I can’t.”

And that, if nothing else, was truth, a raw admission of the centipedes that had been wearing grooves into the skin of his heart for far too long. She wondered how long he’d nursed his uncertainties, realised she didn’t even know, that she’d never asked. Misjudged, indeed.

“I don’t know him as well as you do,” Linh said, finally.

Bao shook his head. “I ceased paying attention to my younger brother long ago. A mistake. Tell me, Cousin, what do you think he’d do, if he couldn’t leave?”

If he couldn’t leave . . .

A vague queasiness was growing in her stomach. She hadn’t thought he’d attempt to leave, not so soon after being found out and pilloried for it. It would take a while before the wounds faded, before he could think reasonably once more. She’d expected him to lick his wounds, nursing his grievances like warm coals. Not to run away . . .

He’d felt trapped on Prosper, until, at last, the jaws of the trap had opened. Freedom had been within sight. And he’d been denied at the last moment, his confidence betrayed, his secrets in the open, like a raw, pulsing wound.

The smile that played on Bao’s lips could almost have been ironic, if there hadn’t been such anguish in his eyes. “You know,” he said.

“Yes,” Linh said. “If he can’t escape Prosper by ship, he’ll try another way.” Anything, rather than remain trapped.

Anything.

Even death.

She’d expected her mind to freeze, to run in circles in a blind panic. But instead, it slowly froze in another way, every thought coalescing like the facets of a crystal: clear and bright, with everything mercilessly thrown into focus, as this were an investigation once more, with Giap at her side and the militia ready to act on any orders she might have.

Suicide. Either by poison, strangulation, or drowning. Any other way would mutilate him in death, and she didn’t think Huu Hieu was so far gone as to go join his ancestors by defacing the body that had been his parents’ gift.

It was amazing, how clear-headed she found herself, removed from everything that might have interfered, any emotional attachment.

Linh closed her eyes, and went into the highest level of the trance she could access. “Honoured Ancestress.”

She could feel Her, the vastness of Her thoughts; the shudders that ran through her, wracking Her like coughing fits. “You’re sick,” Linh said, horrified.

“Don’t worry, child. I’m not dying yet.” The Honoured Ancestress made that strange sound which Linh knew to be laughter. But it sounded weak, done for Linh’s benefit more than out of genuine feelings. “And Lady Oanh is taking good care of me.” She sounded sad.

Don’t cry, Linh wanted to say. I’m sorry for bringing so much grief to you. But, even in the trance, the words wouldn’t get past her lips.

“Bao once told me you tracked everyone on Prosper Station.”

There was silence, as in the moment before the storm died. “Yes. But I don’t know, child. It’s . . . been hard, currently.”

“Even to track family?” Linh asked. “Huu Hieu?”

The Honoured Ancestress did not answer. Linh went on, in the silence, “I can restrict search areas if necessary. Any places with large bodies of water. The park with the Reclaimed Sword Lake, the water vats . . . And any apothecary on Prosper Station.” And places to hang himself, too; but she didn’t think he was going to try that. Finding a beam and a rope was much more effort than any of the alternatives.

Still that same disquieting silence. Linh hadn’t realised until now how much she’d grown accustomed to the Honoured Ancestress’s pressure against her mind.

At last, the Honoured Ancestress said, “In the fish sauce vats area. I can’t locate him more precisely. I apologise.”

“Don’t,” Linh said, more forcefully than she’d intended to, because it cut deep to hear the Honoured Ancestress hesitate, or be unsure of Herself. “Please.”

A dry chuckle that made Her sound almost as She had before. “Don’t worry, child. I’ll take care of myself.”

Her presence faded, and Linh almost believed Her last words.

Almost.

“The fish sauce vats,” she said, every syllable leaving a numbing imprint on her tongue, like swallowing ice cubes. “How well guarded are they?”

By his grimace, she knew that they weren’t. Linh got up. “Come on. We don’t have time to waste.”

The lights were flickering as they ran through the corridors. Though everything else appeared normal, Linh wondered how far the rot had spread. Prosper had been built on fragile foundations, and now the tide was crashing in, everything collapsing, as if the war and its disastrous consequences had followed her all the way to Prosper, like a messenger ahead of a defeat, carrying ill-luck into every house.

Steel and the glint of lamps; holos of paintings that twisted, rain pelting lonely mountains, waterfalls crashing into lakes, fishermen pulling net against the vast landscape of a river; and more modern paintings, passersby in the streets of a city decked in red lanterns; airships crossing each other between dizzyingly high buildings.

Corridor after corridor, each with their own ambience, their own muted music or poetry, and fragments of words following her; and Fifth Ancestor Hoang pressing against her mind until Linh could taste his fascination, his desire to speak, even against First Ancestor Thanh Thuy’s prohibition . . .

Onwards, and every corridor seemed to merge into the next, until she was utterly lost. She called up the trance, felt it flicker against her mind, a weak overlay showing her the path to the starboard side of the station, where the fish sauce vats sucked in the light from the Red Turtle Star.

They couldn’t be on time. It would take two, three minutes for a human being to drown? Perhaps more to be utterly past recovery by medbots; but still, Huu Hieu had had far more time than this. But he might not have had their desperate clarity, the need that even now turned Bao’s face a muddy white that gripped Linh’s heart with a fear she’d thought forgotten in the aftermath of Giap’s death.

At last, at long last, they reached the widest room Linh had seen on Prosper: the curvature of its ribbed ceiling evident, its steel rafters unadorned. Light streamed in, curiously muted and reddish, coming from the tinted glass bay that occupied the back of the room. And over them towered the vats, the huge cylinders in which the small rice fish and the salt gradually macerated into pure, undiluted fish sauce.

They’d been wood in Ancient Dai Viet, but now everything had become metal, its components carefully assessed and assembled to ensure the best spread of flavour; and bots within the vats, their sensors wide open in order to make sure the fermentation was going as foreseen.

Bao’s gaze was moving right and left, desperately trying to find something in the morass of readings. Linh called up the trance again but was blocked. It seemed the production of fish sauce was a secret kept on Prosper, even down to details on the contents of the vats. Her gaze, instead, roamed the alignment of vats, looking for any detail that didn’t fit.

“There are hundreds of them,” Bao said, his voice brimming with panic.

Linh raised a hand, cutting him off. Hundreds. But Huu Hieu was a man in a hurry, wasn’t he? He wouldn’t want the first vats, so close to the door: too obvious. But neither would he look for something too far away. Second row . . .

She moved, almost without thinking, towards the back of the room, her gaze tracking the vats. Nothing but the growing silence here, not ambient music or poetry to disturb the maceration, everything oddly deserted . . .

There.

A flash of a deeper colour in her sharpened vision and, as she moved closer, her pace quickened with each step. She saw the ladder leading to the top of the vat, which hadn’t been retracted all the way. She reached out a hand. For a slow, agonising moment, she thought the station would deny her, but the ladder came sliding down as silently as a knife stroke. She clambered up its steps, heedless of whether Bao was following at all.

The sauce within the vats was a deep black, the same colour as the space between the stars, with an oily sheen that reminded Linh of the Honoured Ancestress’ presence. And, in the midst of the blackness, a stain of something clearer: a tunic, a body floating face down.

Too late. Too late!

Footsteps behind her: Bao, clearing the top of the ladder. His eyes were blinking fast, not looking at anything beyond the trance. The surface of the liquid heaved up, bringing up a strong smell of ripe fish, and as the monitoring bots rose from the bottom of the vat, dozens of sleek metal crafts settled under the body, pushing it towards the edge; flipping it over, so that Huu Hieu’s pale face stared up at them, his eyes glazed over by the black, thick liquid.

The odour of fermented fish was overpowering, bringing back childhood memories of watching Mother open up a bottle as Linh crushed garlic in a mortar and pestle: mixing the dipping sauces by hands as their ancestors had done for centuries instead of relying on the automatic kitchen, a pleasant memory turned sour by the proximity of death.

Bao knelt, pulled up Huu Hieu as if he were a sack of rice. Linh had no idea what he was doing, but his gaze had the familiar distant look of one within the trance. When he spoke, it was clear he wasn’t relying on his eyes alone. “He’s alive. Though he’ll probably regret it, come morning. Come, give me a hand. We need to take him back to his quarters.”

And Linh wasn’t sure, after all, if she was going to weep or rejoice.

☆ ☆ ☆

There was a ship.

It had emerged from the deep spaces, flaring into existence like the heart of a star even as Lady Oanh’s own ship vanished, swallowed by the maw that marked the first step in her journey home to the capital. Its re-entry point had been a few days from Prosper; and now it hung in space, making its slow way to them, like the inexorable course of justice.

The Embroidered Guard, after all, never chose to hurry if they could avoid it.

The ship was sleek and deadly, like the blade of a knife, everything about it a weapon, from the sharp, angular protrusions on its hull to the cold sense of purpose that emanated from its Mind.

It had sent no comms, no call on the trance, but its destination was unmistakable. And so was its purpose.

Quyen had gone online, from the trance into the wider world, and looked at the edicts from the Grand Secretariat. She wasn’t on the First Planet and couldn’t easily search through them, so she read them one by one, until she found the name of Lê Thi Linh, Magistrate of the Province of Great Light for the Twenty-Third Planet, until she found the order that had made Cousin Linh a criminal.

Among all the offences within the Empire of Dai Viet, some were graver than others. Some called for punishment, not only on the offender, but on their kin.

Uttering treasonous words against the Dragon Throne was one of these, and the edict had made it all too clear that the Great Virtue Emperor had taken Linh’s memorial as such. And, if she would not have the decency to ingest meds, or hang or drown herself, why, then, the Emperor would be all too glad to send guards to make his point.

Linh, and her kin. Of course, Dai Viet was merciful and considered kin, not only through ties of blood, but through actions. A man’s kin stood with him: wrote messages, shared death birthdays, births and funerals, and New Year’s Eves. Or helped them, should they come as destitute refugees to a space station.

To the Embroidered Guard, all of Prosper would be kin, to the ninth generation, enough to encompass most of the inner rings of the station. All of them guilty of the same crime, and brought back to the First Planet for judgment and punishment—if the Embroidered Guard didn’t decide to forgo procedure and summarily execute them all on the spot.

Better, perhaps, for the Honoured Ancestress to forget them all. Better that She not wake up, and wonder what had happened to Her descendants, what calamity could have erased them all from within the station. Yes, better than realising they’d been betrayed by their own openness, their own casual grant of hospitality to one who had never deserved it. Kin stood by kin, but Linh had taken that rule and callously broken it into ten thousand unrecognisable shards.

With a coldness she hadn’t thought was possible, her heart as coiled as a rattan roll within her chest, Quyen went to see Linh.

Linh made her wait. Quyen stood in the ornate courtyard for a while, breathing in the smell of water from the fountain. It was unfair, almost, that here everything seemed normal, without a hint of the centipede gnawing at the Honoured Ancestress’ insides.

When Linh emerged, she wore a shift of clear linen, more suitable for the privacy of one’s quarters than for receiving visitors. The lights overhead had dimmed, recalling the fall of twilight. A deliberate insult, Quyen thought, but then she saw the drawn lines of the face, the red-rimmed eyes, and the slight, very slight quiver in the muscles, a loss of control grievous by an official’s standards.

“What do you want, Cousin? I don’t have time for any of this.” Quyen flinched at the crudeness. Fine, if this were a time to let the masks fall, to behave like uncouth Barbarians, she could play this game, too. “You’d better find it, Cousin. Did you honestly think I would never find out?”

“Find what out?” Linh shook her head. “Look, I apologise, but—”

“It’s going to take more than an apology.” All the facts were there, one following the other like a perfect chain of thought, and all Quyen had to do was speak fast enough not to be interrupted. “You came here as a war refugee. You said the invaders had destroyed your tribunal, that you had nowhere else to go, and therefore had gone to seek refuge with your kin. With us. With Prosper. You took our hospitality, ate our rice and our fish sauce. You smiled at us—no, I won’t say smile, because from the start you acted as if you were above us all, as if everything we did was of lesser value—and you thought I would never check what had sent you fleeing from the Twenty-Third Planet. I know.”

Linh pulled herself up. Her face was pale, leeched of colours in the courtyard’s dim light, like a ghost, risen from its tomb, the light accentuating the rough folds of her clothes until they seemed mourning garb. “You’re the one who doesn’t know anything, Cousin.”

“You made that clear enough.” Quyen hadn’t meant the words, but they came up, spit like white-hot stones. “Did you really think me too foolish to understand a poem?”

“You’re too foolish to understand anything.”

“I understand courtesy, at least.”

“Courtesy?” Linh spat the word. “You could have asked, couldn’t you? Asked where I’d come from, or why? But no. You granted me an audience like an Empress, let the Honoured Ancestress question me, and then you sent me on my way and never worried about me anymore.”

How dare she! How could she stand there, with everything that Prosper was in tatters, and look obscenely proud of everything she’d done? “You weren’t content with overturning the harmony of this family, were you?” Quyen kept her voice flat, but it cost her.

“I think you did that on your own.” Linh smiled, an expression utterly leeched of joy. “Ask your brother-in-law what he thinks of your family harmony.”

“I won’t waste tears on Huu Hieu. He’s done enough for this station, don’t you think?”

“Oh, I have no doubts.” Linh’s lips thinned, revealing teeth as sharp as fangs. “Including going off and attempting to commit suicide. But of course you only care because of the scandal, don’t you? Better that he be dead than besmirch the family name. Better that his ghost linger over the fish sauce vats, while you bat your eyelashes and pretend to grieve, thinking that it’s really all for the best, that a drowning is cleaner than a scandal.”

Fish sauce vats? Drowning? “He wouldn’t.” Quyen’s voice was flat. He’d always been a coward, always been inclined to retreat from the world, from his responsibilities. But this?

“I think his sense of family duty doesn’t go that far.”

Cousin Linh’s smile was wild, feral. “Unlike yours, of course.”

“And you’re such a dutiful woman.” Daring to stand there, Quyen thought, to make glib remarks about it all, flinging it into her face as if it were her fault. But . . . but Linh’s face was drawn and taut, and the vague, familiar smell in the air was indeed that of fish sauce, not easily scrubbed from clothes and skin without proper bot instructions.

At least Huu Hieu had someone to care for him. The thought was low and savage in her mind, like a knife stroke. “As far as I’m concerned,” Quyen said, slowly, “you two deserve each other. So go ahead and save each other’s lives, or commit suicide. It won’t make a difference now.” Her hands had clenched into fists. “Not after you’ve brought the Embroidered Guard here to kill us all.”

She hadn’t thought Linh’s face could get any paler. “What do you mean?”

But Quyen was no longer in the mood to trade insults. “Check the logs, Cousin. I’m sure you can work it out on your own. You’re smart, after all; and I’m just a provincial housewife.”

And she left, without turning back.

☆ ☆ ☆

A knock at the door made Quyen look up. It was Xuan Rua and her uncle Bao. Xuan Rua was carrying rolled-up papers, an odd sight on a station in which barely anything was printed anymore. But then everything was falling apart, and the trance was no longer as accessible as it had been.

“May we come in, Aunt?”

Quyen nodded. She’d been trying to put the conversation with Linh out of her mind. She was unsuccessful, as every time she so much as blinked she’d see Linh’s pale, arrogant face, accusing her of neglecting her own brother-in-law. The gall! The unbreakable, utterly unsuitable pride . . .

Xuan Rua’s face was pale, her eyes rimmed with red. Bao’s topknot was askew, with wisps of hair escaping from its confines, giving him the air of a disheveled beggar. “You know about Huu Hieu?” Quyen asked.

Bao sighed. “Yes, but this isn’t about him.”

“I don’t want to talk about Father’s . . . achievements.” Xuan Rua’s face was harsh, as if she’d turned into her less naive sister overnight.

“I understand,” Quyen said. “When more time has passed . . .”

“No. He has gone beyond the limit of what we can tolerate.”

“You can’t criticise your elders,” Bao started, but Xuan Rua’s gaze whipped towards him with the savagery of a leaping panther.

“Can’t I? He’s devastated this family and this station by thinking only of himself at every turn. I owe him filial piety; but it is also written that a child’s duty is to show their father the way. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“He’s your father,” Quyen said, wearily. “And part of the family. You won’t ever change that.” Much as they would all like to, they couldn’t remove blood-ties.

Xuan Rua shook her head, and did not answer. “I came for this,” she said, unrolling the papers she held on the low table. They were Lady Oanh’s schematics, adorned in a cursive, effortlessly elegant script, and annotated here and there in Xuan Rua’s crabbier handwriting.

“You’ve looked at them?” Quyen’s cheeks burnt. She should have made time for this.

Xuan Rua made no remark. Of course she wouldn’t; children didn’t criticise their elders. “It’s not complicated. All that it asks for are minor adjustments in the flow of the five elements in several places over the station. Most of those can be done in advance. Those, however, the very last ones . . .” Her hands rested, lightly, on Lady Oanh’s beautiful, effortless calligraphy, pointing to the heartroom, and four places on the outer rings. “Those have to be done within seconds of each other.”

In other words, coordinated through the trance, which was falling apart. “And if not done right?” Quyen was amazed at how steady her voice was.

“You know.” Bao’s voice was serene. “It’s a risk.”

A risk that she had to be willing to take, for the sake of Prosper, for the sake of the Honoured Ancestress. For a future none of them might see. And yet . . . She took a deep breath. “There are complications.”

Bao looked mildly enquiring. Xuan Rua was bent on the schematics, and did not look up. “The Embroidered Guard is coming here.”

Bao did not move, and Xuan Rua sucked in a sharp breath. “Why?”

It was the perfect opportunity to accuse Cousin Linh, to pour her anger and her bile. But she was weary of it all, of the strife, of the dancing on the edge of the abyss, weary of the family tearing itself apart. “It doesn’t matter,” Quyen said. “What matters is that there might be an extermination order for the lineage.”

Bao was no scholar. It was Xuan Rua who looked up, and said, “How far does it spread?”

“I don’t know. I’ll do my utmost to ensure it doesn’t extend to you.” The younger generation, the children, the future, everything Prosper would and could become. It would not be wiped out.

“It’s Cousin Linh, isn’t it?” Bao said. “The act of welcoming her on Prosper made her kin to us.”

Quyen leant back in her chair, feeling a great weariness descend upon her. Everything was bleak, and she saw no way out. “I’ll lie. Say I was the only one involved in welcoming her.”

“And you think they’ll believe this?” Bao asked.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. “It’s worth a try. They might be kind, or merciful.” Quyen knew, though, in her heart of hearts, that they would be neither. “Tell me again about the adjustments,” she said to Xuan Rua.

Her niece was pale, but her voice did not waver as she outlined her plans, from fixing the small things to coordinating the last stage of renewing the Honoured Ancestress. “You did well,” Quyen said.

Xuan Rua flushed. She’d grown in maturity. What a pity that all of that had come at such a high cost.

Quyen sat back, pondering, and sought out the trance.

“I can’t make the decision for you,” she said.

For an awful, quivering moment, she thought that the Honoured Ancestress had not heard her. But then Her voice spoke in her ears, low and wan, like a sick woman’s. “Neither can I, child.”

“You’re old and wise,” Quyen said, and heard Her laugh.

“I am selfish, child, and scared. I would rather everything went on as it has always done. I would rather remain by your side, and be your guide.”

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

“You have made all the decisions before,” the Honoured Ancestress pointed out, gently. “Why would this one be different?”

“I don’t . . .” Quyen thought of Lady Oanh’s words, and realised she was lying to herself. “I run the station, but this is different.”

“No different.”

“Yes. It is your life, Honoured Ancestress. I won’t make your choices for you.”

“As you did for Linh?”

“I did nothing to Linh that she did not choose for herself.”

A low, soft chuckle. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. Forgive me, child. My mind is wandering. But you know there is only one choice I can make, that any of us can make.”

“But . . . you’d leave us alone,” she wanted to say. “You’d leave me alone.” And then she remembered the bitter knowledge: children weren’t beholden to their parents. “Lady Oanh said . . . that it could go on.” That there were fail-safes, that she might hurt them, but that she wouldn’t kill them.

“You wish me to sow chaos among you once more?” The Honoured Ancestress’ voice was low, ironic. “This isn’t what I was designed to do, child. The fail-safes will keep you alive; but there is more to life than merely living it.”

Good fortune, children, long life, Quyen thought, before she could stop herself. And would the Honoured Ancestress not lose it all—the children that would become strangers, the memories of her life vanishing, and their good fortune wrecked by the Embroidered Guard?

“It might all be for nothing. With the Embroidered Guard upon us . . .” Quyen had never been a good liar, and she knew it.

“I can lie,” the Honoured Ancestress said, low and serene.

“You’re not human.” She was a Mind, impervious to the passage of time, present in ten thousand places at once. But she followed rules and logics which had been set down by humans. “You weren’t made to lie.”

“Neither was I made to fall apart,” the Honoured Ancestress said, gravely. “Or to malfunction. I can try, at the very least.”

It wouldn’t work, Quyen thought, but could not say it aloud, could not contradict an elder.

“You worry too much, child,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “Take each thing as they come, within the flow of the universe.”

The flow of the universe. She was the one who faced the darkness of oblivion, and She could still give lessons in humility. “Oh, Grandmother.” Quyen stifled a bitter laugh, staring at the darkness. “What will we do without you?”

The Honoured Ancestress said nothing. The touch against Quyen’s mind faded, and she found herself staring at Xuan Rua and at Bao. “She agrees.” She kept her voice cool and steady, as if she were not breaking inside. “Go seek out the rest of the family. We might as well do this before the Embroidered Guard arrives.”

☆ ☆ ☆

Huu Hieu in repose looked, if anything, worse than he had in the vat. What the bots had pulled had looked like a corpse, and had allowed her the illusion of thinking him dead. What Linh saw now turned her stomach: the skin that looked too pale to be natural, the bruises on the throat and under the eyes a darkened blue, like ink that had lost its virtue; the shorn scalp, glistening with perfumed oil; and the faint smell of fish sauce that seemed to cling to him, no longer the bright memories of childhood, but the rank, sour odour of rotting fish.

The Embroidered Guard. They were coming.

It wasn’t the arrest, or even the thought of being brought back to the capital as a prisoner. Linh’s family had long since died, and she would not disappoint them, or even bring punishment upon them. She did not fear death, or shame, but rather it was the thought that her memorial had been for nothing, that her words would be dismissed as the ramblings of a diseased mind, and that the war would go on, tearing the Empire apart.

That people like her and Giap would have died for nothing, changing nothing in the world.

Then again, she was one to talk—the brilliant scholar, the fearsome magistrate without a tribunal, standing in a spirits-forsaken station and railing about the world. As if she’d ever made a difference. What arrogance!

Another, better scholar would have committed suicide. Linh had no such courage.

So, after all, she thought, looking down at Huu Hieu, perhaps I am the coward, and you the braver one of both of us. Perhaps. He would have laughed at the thought, had his lungs not been wrung out by bots to resuscitate him.

The room’s wall were painted the red of good fortune, and the closed doors bore guardian spirits on both sides to keep evil spirits out, and to prevent the ghosts of the dead from flitting around Prosper. A strong smell of camphor and musk rose from Huu Hieu’s body: ointments for the healing of wounds, for keeping the body warm against the cold of the underworld.

She was turning to leave the room, when something brushed her, a fluttering touch that was all too familiar. “Honoured Ancestress?”

“He is awake, child,” the Honoured Ancestress said.

What? Linh’s gaze moved to Huu Hieu. His eyes were closed. But no, they were blinking, and a thin, narrowed line trembled between the upper and lower eyelids. Awake. Watching. Too weak to speak, or too angry to do so.

“You are . . .” Linh said, but the pressure against her mind was weak, the thin liquid of blood leaking away from cut veins. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t quite sure why.

“You worry too much, child. This is no longer your business. Leave the family to sort its own problems.”

The family, which did not include her. Of course. It was only to be expected, after what she’d done “I don’t worry,” Linh said. But the Honoured Ancestress was gone, leaving an odd emptiness in Linh’s stomach.

Huu Hieu was still watching her. He lay back like a corpse, with only the eyes alive in the whole of his face. But his voice, when he spoke, was perfectly composed. “They say you and Brother Bao pulled me from the vat.”

“Yes.” Linh found herself moving. Everything felt so far away, seemed to be happening to someone else on some distant planet. Her hand moved towards his and rested, lightly, on the bruised and pallid flesh. “I’m sorry.” She called up the trance, felt its shards gathering itself around her, and felt the Honoured Ancestress’s touch across her mind, light and fleeting, and infinitely more frightening than the pressure.

The landscape that took shape was ruined. The mountains Linh had called up reared against a torn sky, with stars falling like rain from the devastated Heavens. The grass under their feet was run through with cracks; beyond the island of safety where they both stood, the landscape dissolved away into darkness.

Huu Hieu, grimacing, stood tall. But even in the designed environment his skin was awfully pale, with the bluish marks of the bruises at his throat, shining in the starlight through the cracks in his robes. He watched her, as if waiting for something more, and she wasn’t sure she could give him the words.

“I thought I could be smarter than Quyen. I never meant to . . .” Linh’s words trailed into insignificance, swallowed by the darkness around them, by Huu Hieu’s burning gaze. “But I won’t apologise for pulling you from the vats.”

Huu Hieu made a low, rasping sound. It was only after a while that she realised it was laughter, coming from lungs that remained weak, even in this environment. Everything about him seemed smaller than it had been and in a way she couldn’t pinpoint, for he’d never been someone she respected, not like Giap or Lady Oanh.

“Oh, Cousin,” he said. “That was the most graceless apology I’ve ever heard.”

“And have you been hearing many of them, lately?”

That silenced him. She realised how sharp, how unpleasantly cutting she’d become. “I’m sorry.” Linh brushed her hands against the silk of her robes, feeling the cloth under her fingers, fibre by broken fibre. “I only came to see how you were doing. But I don’t want to disturb you further, and I’m the last person who should be here.”

“You’re the only one.” Huu Hieu’s gaze was mirthless.

“Hasn’t your brother—”

“My brother’s a coward.” His eyes burnt with an expression that made her uncomfortable, even though it wasn’t directed at her. “He spit out the world a long time ago, and he hasn’t looked back.”

“He saved your life.”

“Perhaps,” Huu Hieu said. “Or perhaps that was you.”

Both of us. You wouldn’t still be alive if it hadn’t been for both of us. “The girls have been here, I’m sure.” She wasn’t sure where the perverse desire to contradict him came from; how she, of all people, found herself defending Prosper and its family. “You’re not alone, Cousin.”

“After this, I might as well be. Quyen will make sure that I’m never alone again, never trusted again. Spirits, I’ll be lucky to be invited to the family banquets.” Again, that rasping sound. “You showed her she wasn’t mistress of Prosper. I’m glad for that, if nothing else.”

“I . . . I did this to you.” All of this: the empty room where his body lay, the faint smell of fish sauce, the door that wouldn’t open from the inside, the taut face that looked as though it would split open to reveal the cruel smile of a demon. She wanted to apologise again, but how many times could she repeat empty words without becoming empty herself?

Huu Hieu blinked, slowly. “We did many things to each other, cousin, and I don’t think it will do us any good to keep track of it all. It’s this place, this wretched place, where they never stop watching, where they never stop judging. It makes monsters out of us.” His voice was shaking.

And some of us are already monsters, First Ancestor Thanh Thuy said in Linh’s mind. Her disapproval spread like an ink stain, dirtying everything it touched. Linh extended a hand, touching Huu Hieu’s skin, feeling it yield against her fingers, too soft and supple to be anything but that of an old man.

“Peace, then?”

“Peace.” Huu Hieu smiled, bitterly. “We’re both the same, after all. You and me against the world. Against Prosper, against Cousin Quyen.”

Both the same. And welcome to each other, with Cousin Quyen’s blessing. The thought rankled, somehow. Both the same. The eyes trained on her burnt with hatred, and that seemed to be the only thing left to Huu Hieu, the only emotion animating him: not love, not affection for his daughters, or belief in his own future. “You’re going to try again, aren’t you.”

Huu Hieu said nothing. Behind him, the sky was falling apart. All the stars were gone, and the darkness deepened to reveal an abyss hungry for all human lives into which everything was falling, from Linh to the Honoured Ancestress to the whole of Prosper.

“I’m sorry,” Linh said. “Of all people, I don’t have the right to ask you this. You don’t want me to know.” But she knew, already. As Bao said, she’d taken his measure, and seen everything there was to see. He’d try, again and again, until he was finally successful. And he wouldn’t be doing it to escape Prosper and a life grown too confining, or to keep the dignity he’d had in life.

No, he’d do it because he wanted to rankle Quyen. Because he wanted to show her that she wasn’t mistress of his fate; and to leave her to deal with the scandal and the mess of his suicide.

She could have appealed to his love for his daughters, but she knew already that it had been scoured clean away from him, that he was a husk, a ghost already moved by anger, hungering only for revenge.

We are the same.

And the thought was a stain within her, spreading like First Ancestor Thanh Thuy’s disapproval, like the Honoured Ancestress’ touch. The same. Shambling corpses, exhaling only hatred, hollowed out by it. The same.

“No,” she said, slowly. “You’re right. I don’t want to know.” She let the environment fall away; stared down at him, old and hollowed before his time, and felt revulsion rise in her like a wave.

Slowly, she walked towards the door, emptied of everything, standing balanced upon the Great Void. She wanted the world to fold itself back and embrace her. She wanted Giap to be alive, her tribunal overflowing with complainants, and none of that would ever come to pass. Child. The Honoured Ancestress had named her well; had named them well.

Her fingers were digging into the skin of her palm, so hard blood flowed. Child. Named well.

At the door she turned, stared at Huu Hieu, until he looked puzzled. “Linh? What’s the matter?”

“She was wrong.” Linh’s voice started low, and gained with every word; the magistrate’s mask slipping on once again, lending her the strength she’d lacked since the beginning. “Wrong, don’t you see? We’re not the same, Cousin. And I’ll prove it to her.”

If Huu Hieu said anything behind her as she turned away, she didn’t hear it. The door closed and cut her off from him. The metal of Prosper Station lay between them like an unbreakable wall, like a broken bridge across Heaven, one that could never be mended.

☆ ☆ ☆

Quyen stood in the heartroom, watching a simple thing: a clock on the walls, wedged between the flowing lines of text. Another clock, a physical one, with a mechanism of shimmering metals that made a noise like a heartbeat, stood at the foot of the Honoured Ancestress’ core, marking time.

Quyen held the trance, lightly. She felt the Honoured Ancestress’s presence recede as Bao and the other members of the family moved eight-sided mirrors, drove copper nails, and cut through cables, rerouting the power to empty sections of corridors; shifting the balance of the elements within the station, smothering the Honoured Ancestress’s voice.

The equivalent, she thought, shivering, of putting a man to sleep before opening up his brain. That was the schematics.

Around her, the station was deserted. They had notified the inhabitants of Prosper to remain inside their homes. As the power receded, the lights and the temperature regulation became more erratic, discouraging people from wandering outside.

Quyen held a single blade in her hand and watched the clock. When the time was right, she would cut the three cables in the centre, moments after Xuan Rua and the others cut three cables in their own section. This would reroute the power . . .

No, this was the wrong word. It would render the Honoured Ancestress unconscious, and, when She woke up again She would have to mould herself to Prospers new shape. And She would be irretrievably, irremediably changed.

She could hear the breath of the Honoured Ancestress, coursing around her through every vent and every metal sheet, until the entire room seemed to be Her trembling body. She could imagine the station from the outer rings to the family quarters; she could breathe in, and remember that it would never, ever be the same again.

The colours around her were slowly bleeding, the pressure in the room rising to meet the hollow in her stomach. “Child.” The Honoured Ancestress’ voice was small, as if coming from very far away.

“Grandmother.” Her throat felt dry and everything seemed to be far away from her, happening in another of the myriad worlds under the Buddha’s gaze. “I’m sorry, we didn’t find Du Khach’s implant.” Bao and the attendants had searched the school, thoroughly, and found nothing. “I would have liked you to have it.” A last gift, to reassure the Honoured Ancestress, at the very end, to show Her that Quyen could keep her promises, that she was capable of guiding the station in the lonely years that would follow.

The pressure against her mind was kind, a mother’s gentle caress. “It doesn’t matter, child. You have other things to worry about.”

But it did matter, in the light of all her other failures and of the decision sitting on her shoulders like a demon, gnawing away at her mind. “Grandmother, there is still time.”

Silence. The pressure abating a fraction, like a stuttering heartbeat. “No,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “I won’t live like this, child. I cannot.”

“I don’t want to lose you,” Quyen said, every word burning like a hot stone in her throat.

She remembered her first time in Prosper. She stood in a corridor, just on the other side of the wall from the ship that had brought her in, going to meet a husband she had only exchanged a few calls with—her own ancestors honoured by her sister’s children, her family line merging with his own, everything that had made her until now undone, flapping loose in the wind like torn flesh.

She remembered the crushing loneliness, that same sense of standing on the edge of the abyss with no way but down, into a darkness deeper than that of the underworld, until the Honoured Ancestress had reached out, taken Quyen under Her protection. There had been a promise that she would never be alone until the day she died.

Broken now, all broken into ten thousand shards, like her five organs.

“It is the way of the world,” the Honoured Ancestress said. “Oblivion and rebirth, and oblivion again.” She sounded oddly wistful. Perhaps afraid? Quyen couldn’t tell anymore. “As all humans do.”

“But you’re not human.” Not immortal, but as close as, from their point of view. She’d seen them arrive, had seen children born, old men and women die, generation after generation. She . . .

The Honoured Ancestress’ voice was soft. “I was built to watch over this station, for generation after generation. To watch over you all. How can I do my duty, if the madness is upon me?”

“You’re afraid,” Quyen said, and the Honoured Ancestress did not answer. Quyen realised that she was the one who was afraid, the one who would lose everything.

At last, a softer touch, almost like a hand stroking her cheek. “I’m sorry, child. I truly am. But I will forget everything. Your arrival, and the years we spent together, and the banquet . . .”

“I’ll remind you.” Quyen’s voice was low and fierce, with a fire she hadn’t known she possessed. “Again and again.” And she knew it would mean nothing to the Honoured Ancestress, that the Mind they had known, the person they had known, would be gone. That She would find their reminiscences baffling, like a blind man listening to a description of a painting they couldn’t see, like an illiterate peasant in the old days, struggling to understand allusions from books they’d never read.

She knew that, once again, she’d stand in the vastness of Prosper and feel loneliness crushing the marrow of her bones, the entire station a strange and alien place that bore no resemblance to the home she’d made.

“You and Anh,” she said, slowly. The Honoured Ancestress and her husband, the only two things she’d call hers in the entire world.

It wasn’t fair. But then again, the world wasn’t, was it?

☆ ☆ ☆

The station was all but deserted, and the vapour of Linh’s breath hung before her as she moved between the hologram stands. They were blinking out, one by one, and the lights were dimming, as if some huge hand were cutting off the power to all quarters.

Ring after ring, and everything was the same: the corridors empty, even more so, with the paintings gone, the music extinguished, and the clever poems faded away into nothingness. There was no noise but Linh’s own footsteps, painfully echoing against the metal walls, with nothing and no one to muffle their echo. Tap, tap, tap, a noise coming back to haunt her, and her breath burning in her throat, as if she walked in the ruins of the war.

“Honoured Ancestress?” she asked, but got no answer. The trance, too, seemed to be weak and erratic. The only thing it displayed was a simple warning: “Stay inside. This is for the good of Prosper, and for our continued survival.” Some reference to a poem, or a book, but Linh couldn’t figure out which one. And so she walked in the gathering dark, feeling more naked and alone than she’d ever been.

Was it her doing? A poem. It had been nothing more than a poem. Surely it could not have collapsed Prosper upon itself?

Surely . . .

She’d seen all she needed to see. Before, she’d been locked up inside her quarters, and foraging through the remnants of the trance, trying to find a weakness, any weakness, that she could use against Cousin Quyen . . .

What irony, in the end, that she’d found another use for the information, that, instead of tearing the family apart as Huu Hieu had done, she would play her part in preserving its harmony.

The school was deserted when she arrived, its name blinking in washed-out letters over the entrance. Abode of Brush Saplings. Well named, for a place which trained scholars.

Linh’s hand lingered on the control panel. She put her weight against the screen and pushed. With the station all but gone, and her status undetermined, it probably wouldn’t work. She wouldn’t be able to use her family’s blood to bypass security.

The door swung open with a creak like the tortured souls of the underworld. Linh walked through, into an empty courtyard where the wind was rising, gathering whirls of dust. At the centre was a pond. The red carps inside had gone into a frenzy with the loss of light, sending splashes of water all over the central statue.

“We’re closed,” a peevish voice said, from behind the covered desks.

Linh smiled, and drew herself upright, effortlessly calling upon her magistrate’s mask. “I think not. Will you deny me, Lê Anh Tu?” Instead of the address of “uncle”, or “teacher”, which she should have given him, she used his full name, as if he’d been called before her tribunal.

His voice was cold. “You’re no magistrate, woman. You’re a spirits-cursed refugee, even less than I am.”

“Do you think so?” Linh’s lips curled up.

“I know perfectly well who you are.” Above them the ceiling was darkening, like night falling across a world that had never known it. “Mistress Quyen’s poor, neglected cousin. A relation she’d deny if she could. Do you wish to regain her favours, after the scandal? It’s too late.” He shook his head, looking at the dust swirling all around them. “Much too late for anything. But we’ll survive. Prosper will survive.”

“You won’t,” Linh said. “Mistress Quyen will tear you to pieces if she doesn’t find her implants.”

Tu shrugged. “She won’t dare. I told her already. She can search all she wants, and she won’t find anything. She’s sent her attendants already, and they’ve failed. Without proof, she can’t touch me. There will still be a school, and I will still give my students the chance they deserve. And she can send all the relatives she wants, even the failed magistrates, but it will change nothing. Not one of you will find anything.”

Magistrate. Bao had seen, after all, what made her so powerful, what made her such an asset to Prosper. Linh’s eyes roamed the courtyard. Everything was empty, deserted, save for the central pond. “Do you know why they call us father-and-moth-of the people, Lê Anh Tu?”

“Because you lord it over us all.” He spat the words like poison snakes. “Because you’re always right, no matter what we do.”

Linh smiled. “Because we know people like parents know their children.” Her hand rose, pointed towards the desk. “I’ve seen enough. I’ve heard enough. You’re a bitter man, Lê Anh Tu, and an arrogant one. A smarter man would have moved the implants away, but you needed to feel their presence every day. You needed to remind yourself of the victory you’d won over the family.”

“I don’t care about the familyl” Tu snapped, but there was fear in his eyes.

☆ ☆ ☆

“They’re here,” Linh said, and she didn’t need to look at him to see the confirmation. “In some place you think people won’t touch, no matter how desperate.” A handful of desks, under the roof, the ancestral shrine for Tu’s own family, with an offering of fruit and the remnants of a stick of incense in a burner. The pond with the frenzied carps, and a door leading into the private quarters. The carps? No, too obvious. Most people would hesitate to gut a fish that stood for wealth. But it wasn’t protection enough.

She moved, coming to stand before the ancestral shrine. “You can’t . . .” Tu said, but she cut him by raising a hand.

“I think, too, that you’re a man who cares little about the rules that keep us working, that you’ll bend anything to the service of your cause.” Had she still been a magistrate, she’d have kept a watch on him. From such fertile earth were murderers born, secure in their conviction that they could do no wrong as long as the cause was just, tearing away the fabric of society in the name of their so-called justice.

The wall before her was covered in rows of alcoves. In each was a small hologram stand, projecting the posthumous name of an ancestor and the distinctions they’d achieved in their lives: the ranks held as an official, the number of children, children and grandchildren; the battles they’d distinguished themselves in.

At the very top of the wall were distinctions dating back to Old Earth, and battles against kingdoms since long crumbled into dust. Everything seemed neat and ordered, with nothing out of place, strangely reassuring in a station gone mad. Though, of course, the holos would run on emergency power. Ancestors wouldn’t be erased so easily.

She looked down at the fruit: a papaya, and a mango glistening in the dim light. Neither appeared to have been tampered with. Her gaze, rising, roamed the alcoves again, and caught on one that seemed slightly askew, its display slightly higher than the others, a minute disturbance that should have remained invisible. But Linh’s sight had been modified in the Imperial Palace, giving her far greater accuracy than most ordinary men.

That one.

She could be wrong. She could be right. But either way she’d have a mob of howling ghosts after her, angered that she’d dare to disturb their shrine. “I, the magistrate of the Province of Great Light on the Twenty-Third Planet, humbly apologise for my presumption in disturbing you.” And, before she could think on the enormity of what she was doing, reached out, and grasped the hologram stand, as Tu screamed beside her.

It came away in her hand, far heavier than it should have been. The bottom unscrewed, revealing a cache which contained three mem-implants smelling strongly of disinfectant.

She slid them in her sleeves, and smiled at Tu. “I think that’s all the proof we need, don’t you? Child.”

She left him in the darkened courtyard, turning the hologram stand over and over in his hands, his gaunt face twisted out of shape in anger, in grief. The air smelled of stale incense, and everything seemed to be collapsing around him. But, for him, she had no pity.

Outside night had come, stealing across Prosper like a knife across the throat. The lights that were never turned off were dark, and the walls were all blank, as empty as Linh’s mind. The mem-implants weighed nothing in her hands: a breath, a word, a verse, nothing that should ever have the power to change the world.

Linh walked in the darkness, in the ruins. Gradually, her ancestors rose at her side: First Ancestor Thanh Thuy, tall and stern in the robes of President of the Metropolitan Court; Second Ancestor Huynh, smiling a crooked smile; Third Ancestor Vu, nonchalantly waving a fan, as if in the gestures of some secret language; Fourth Ancestor Canh in the white robes of mourning for his parents, Fifth Ancestor Hoang, her grandfather, his sleeves stained by ink; and Sixth Ancestor Hanh, Linh’s mother, looking taller than she’d ever had in life.

And behind them were the shambles of her tribunal; the dead, lying in broken heaps; the streets overrun by the enemy’s armies, and the screams of men and children and Giap, standing on the execution field with the executioner’s garrotte around his neck. He was looking straight at her, his weathered face creased in a satisfied smile.

Her ancestors, too, were smiling at her; her mother extending a hand as if in blessing, and Fifth Ancestor Hoang was nodding at her. Do what is right, child.

And Linh said nothing, only walked forward, not feeling the rising wind.

☆ ☆ ☆

“Mistress Quyen.”

Quyen looked up from the package in her hands to see the face of a stranger. The entire family was still deep in the bowels of Prosper, making the last of Lady Oanh’s adjustments. The Honoured Ancestress’ presence had faded in her mind as time passed, until only a whisper remained, engraved in the flesh of her heart.

Remember me, child. And then, so faint it might as well have been a dream, I am afraid . . .

And then, the station has slowly started up again. Light had returned; the paintings on the walls had re-emerged as if they’d never been gone, though everything seemed subtly different.

The trance wasn’t back yet, and her calls to the Honoured Ancestress had gone unanswered. Perhaps it was just as well. She was afraid of what would happen when that familiar touch would steal across her mind, and talk to her as if she were a stranger.

“Mistress Quyen.” The boy waited, eyes lowered. He couldn’t be more than thirteen years old, certainly too young to deliver messages.

“What is it?” she asked, more acerbically than she’d intended.

“There is a ship in the docking bays, Mistress Quyen.” The boy swallowed, convulsively. “They say they won’t be long, but . . .”

“What ship?” Quyen asked, although she already knew the answer.

“They say they’re Embroidered Guard.”

Quyen looked again at the package. Spread across the palm of her hand, as heavy as stone, were Huu Hieu’s mem-implants. All three of them, neatly wrapped up, warm against her flesh, almost too warm to be held up for long.

There was a message, too, inscribed in a flowing style she recognised from her nightmares, the effortless curves of a trained scholar. She could see where the hand had shaken, when the ink had spilled. But it was all pristine nevertheless, suitable for displaying as an exemplary example of calligraphy that shone a light into the heart and soul of the writer:

There is nothing I can offer you that would be a suitable apology. Take, then, this small gift as a token. I hope you will, in time, bring yourself to think of me without hatred in your heart.

And a small, inscribed couplet, almost as an afterthought:

I have eaten the fresh cooked rice and the millet, and drunk the warm wine in the golden cups

And found it all tasted as bitter, like old stains upon lacquered wood

Let the wild goose fly away, much as it has arrived.

All of which was transparent enough. Even the poem which a child could have deciphered. Except that it made no sense.

“You were never very good at verses, were you?” Quyen said, aloud, and the boy, startled, looked up at her.

“Mistress?”

“Never mind,” Quyen said. She laid the mem-implants in her chest, and took a last look at them before closing it. Their edges winked at her in the returned light, making the world waver and fold back upon itself. She thought of Du Khach, the ancestor in the implants, who had known the Honoured Ancestress such a long time ago, whom She might even recognise and cherish. She thought of Linh, and of the odd way the ties of blood pulled at each other.

“Get me to the docking bays. Quickly.”

As they ran from the family’s quarters to the docks, she felt it, rising in her bones: the fledging Mind, spreading from the core outwards, tentatively testing Her powers. Like a child, she thought, except that the Honoured Ancestress would remember more, wouldn’t She? Lady Oanh had said She’d lose only a generation, but only if it were done right, precisely and painstakingly. And how did she know that what they’d done had been right at all?

I’m afraid, the Honoured Ancestress whispered, over and over in her memory.

She felt the pressure at the back of her mind, saw the oily stains, spreading across the paintings, cutting across the poems, felt the station buckle and strain, and still she ran. Alone.

At the docks she followed the signs to the doors of the only docked ship. It lay on the other side of Prosper’s walls, with only a tube-door extending into the station, and she couldn’t see it. But she could imagine it, only too well, sleek and sharp and deadly, tearing through the deep spaces as it made its way towards Prosper, towards its waiting quarry.

Towards them. She slowed, remembering that it wasn’t only Linh at stake, but quite possibly the entire family, if orders had been given in that direction.

She walked the last turning in the corridor, as regal as any lady-scholar, as any court-spouse. She held her head high, hands relaxed at her side, in spite of the spreading cold, wrapping around her heart like a tightening fist.

There was a knot of people standing by the ship’s tube-door, as if waiting for her. Burly Embroidered Guards surrounded a figure—Cousin Linh?—who faced away, towards the waiting ship.

Ahead of the group of guards, a single man stood, watching her approach with narrowed eyes. His skin was as dark as any Viet’s, but the clear green eyes in the circle of his face attested to some mixed ancestry. He held himself straight, with the easy grace of those in power. Like all the Embroidered Guards, his body had been enhanced with metal, and the weapons grafted on his arms glinted in the harsh light of the corridor.

Quyen bowed, slowly, carefully, as if she were in the presence of the Emperor, which wasn’t far away from the truth. The Embroidered Guard was the Emperor’s will, and they bowed to no one else. “This station is honoured by your visit, my Lord.”

The man grunted. “No need for politeness, Mistress. I presume you’re Quyen, the Administrator.”

Of course they’d be well informed. “Of course,” she said, slowly, forcing herself not to tremble, “if there is anything you need . . .”

She let the words hang in the air, like the silken thread of the executioner’s garrotte. At length the man grunted again. “No need, Mistress. Your cousin has made things quite clear to us.”

“I don’t understand.” Her gaze moved from Linh to the Embroidered Guard, and back to Linh again, who wouldn’t meet her gaze.

“She said that she was here without your knowledge. That you gave her no shelter, and only recently discovered that she was there at all when she threw the entire station into an uproar.” His gaze roamed upwards, into the weak lights, the shuddering walls, all the signs that the Honoured Ancestress wasn’t there. “That you acted as no kin to her.”

No kin to her!

That meant Prosper would be safe. The Embroidered Guard’s eyes were still on her, lightly ironic. She could tell that he didn’t believe a word of it. “You . . .” she said.

“I have heard what I have heard.” His voice was expressionless. “Seen what I have seen, Mistress. We questioned the station while still in space, and it confirmed that it had no record of welcoming Linh aboard.”

Quyen thought of the Honoured Ancestress’ serene voice, telling her that She could lie. That She had lied, and that the false records were already on their way to the Embroidered Guard. And she knew that it was not a malfunction, but, rather, that the Honoured Ancestress had had to choose between failing its duty of protection or failing its programmed rules. And She had made a decision, in the end. Gone against all that was expected of her.

Like Linh.

“The station itself seems to have no record of anything past fifty years ago. I can only presume you’ve suffered some severe malfunction in the meantime. My sympathies.” The Embroidered Guard’s mouth turned inwards at the corner. “But I see no reason to disbelieve any of this.”

“I need . . .” She swallowed, aware of her presumption. “If I might have a word with her, before she leaves?” She kept her eyes on the floor, saw it become stained, as if with rust; saw the patches of iridescent colours playing across her skin.

Soon. Soon she would feel the familiar presence, the warmth in her chest. She would no longer feel hollow, emptied of everything.

But it was a lie, and she knew it.

The man made a gesture Quyen couldn’t see. “Fine. You have five minutes.” He stepped away in a swish of silk robes.

Quyen rose, found herself facing Linh across an array of Embroidered Guards who showed no sign of moving. What were they afraid of? That she’d try to run? As if she would. Linh’s face was paler than usual, but perfectly composed. Something had returned to her, a lethal grace akin to Lady Oanh’s, a set cast to her features that gave her the air of a statue in a temple. A magistrate’s face, that of the law, and nothing else.

“I have your package,” Quyen said.

Linh’s lips stretched. It might have been meant as a smile, but it was the most frightening expression Quyen had seen, utterly devoid of anything but a savage joy. “I’m glad, Cousin.”

“You made your intent more than clear, yet again. Was there no more subtle poetry you could have found?”

Linh shrugged. “Perhaps. It doesn’t matter.” She spread her hands. “Was there anything else, Cousin?”

It matters, demons take you. It matters because I need to understand why you did this, why you did any of this. Quyen found her hands were shaking. With an effort, she stilled their trembling.

“Please,” she said, and found herself blinking furiously to clear the tears in her eyes. “I need to—”

“—to control everything, as you’ve always done.” Linh’s voice was flat, but not angry. “To rule the only thing you can rule in your life.”

Her husband Anh, lost in the turmoil of war. The Honoured Ancestress, beyond her grasp now, her memories gone into the darkness. Xuan Rua, who might never forgive her for Huu Hieu’s suicide attempt. “No,” Quyen said. “You don’t understand.”

Linh smiled. And, for the first time, the expression was almost girlish, carefree. “Oh, I do understand. Far too much, Cousin. Some things make sense because they fit into the harmony of the world.”

“Moral principles?” Quyen all but spat, not sure why she wanted to take Linh and shake some sense into the girl. “And you find them now?”

“Perhaps.” Linh’s gaze moved away, towards the tube-door and the ship, and the capital, and the trial that awaited her. The trial that had but one possible outcome.

“For what is worth, because we share blood, though neither of us acted as if we did. Because we are family, and a family might quarrel, but should never tear itself apart. I wish you well, Cousin Quyen. You and everyone aboard Prosper. May you all see ten thousand years of peace.” She turned away, started walking towards the waiting ship, the Embroidered Guards moving with her like a tide.

“Cousin!” Quyen called, as Linh was almost gone. “All the same. Thank you.” The words were like acid against her tongue, like the mem-implants, things she couldn’t hold for long without feeling burnt. “You’ll be welcome among us, should you choose to come back.”

Linh didn’t answer, but Quyen thought she saw her nod. At the last moment, before she vanished within the ship, she turned and nodded to Quyen, from equal to equal. And in her eyes, Quyen saw everything: the pain, the grief, barely held at bay; the fierce anger, and the resolution to be more than that anger, to be more than a failed magistrate, to die for her cause . . . All of it, flung into Quyen’s mind like the cold of deep spaces, until she found herself shaking, tears running down her face.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but Linh had moved, and could no longer hear her. “I’m sorry.”

Quyen stood in the rising silence, watching the light pool on the walls beside her. She waited for the moment when the Honoured Ancestress would awake; when she, Quyen, would walk away from the docks, the Honoured Ancestress in her mind, and guide Prosper and its family into the future with her, as she had always done.

She waited for the moment when she would no longer be alone.

☆ ☆ ☆

They let Linh remain in the aft bay of the Mind-ship. After all, with all the doors closed, where else could she go but into the emptiness of space? She stood, watching Prosper slowly recede behind them. The lights, strangely enough, seemed to shine brighter and brighter with every moment, as if the station itself still sought to reach out to her.

A sick mind’s fancy, no doubt. Prosper’s Honoured Ancestress had never cared much for her, and was no doubt glad to be rid of an unwelcomed visitor.

The commander of the Embroidered Guard had told her, stiffly—as if he couldn’t quite resign himself to the necessity of communicating with a criminal—that there had already been pleas in the capital. That she wouldn’t find herself without allies there.

She thought of Lady Oanh, of the vast resources at the other’s disposal. Perhaps she could indeed avoid it, all of it, and its fated ending.

Or perhaps she couldn’t. But her memorial remained and its words, perhaps, in time, would be heeded. Perhaps the Empire would once more be united, just as families that fell out could, in the end, be reconciled to each other.

“That was a noble thing you did,” the commander had said. Puzzled, as if he couldn’t quite understand why she’d refused to drag the station down with her. As if people did that, all the time. But of course, she thought, we’re small-minded and petty, and sometimes, we let ourselves be hollowed out by hatred. And sometimes, we commit the unforgivable.

She watched the station recede away from her, its lights slowly blinking. No, she thought, chilled, it was no illusion. The lights were growing more intense, almost blinding. Not all of them, but the single one in the docking bay, where Quyen would still be standing.

As she watched, it winked, slowly, and shifted to a warm red, the colour of banquet halls, of luck. It held the hue for a full eight heartbeats, before shifting back to the deep yellow of the Emperor and the Imperial Court—her cousin’s wishes for good fortune that Linh would carry with her like a lifeline, all the way into the heart of the divided Empire.

END

THE BOY WHO CAST NO SHADOW

Thomas Olde Heuvelt

MY NAME IS LOOK. You’ve probably heard about me in the papers or on TV. I’m the boy without a shadow. You can shine spotlights at me all you like, but it won’t do you good. Physicists say I’m an evolutionary miracle. The Americans said I was a secret weapon, by the Russians that is, because they figured Al-Qaeda would be too dumb.

Christians say I’m divine. Mom calls me an angel, but of the earthly variety. But I’m not. I’m just Look. I wish I knew what that meant.

It’s something to do with my genes, they say, but they don’t know what. Molecular structures and the effects of light, blah-blah-blah. I don’t give a shit, ’cause they can’t fix it anyway. You won’t find shadow under my chin, armpits or ribs, no matter how you illuminate me. They say it makes me look two-dimensional. I don’t know what I look like because I have no reflection. My left hip bears a scar in the shape of a question mark. I got it when the midwife dropped me as she held me up in front of the mirror. Mom told me that only a floating umbilical cord was visible and that the midwife screamed and fled the room. The photos of the delivery showed a lot of aaaw and coochie-coochie but no baby. The only images ever captured of me are Mom’s sonograms. They use sound, not light.

‘You should be proud of your genes,’ Mom and Dad always say. They’re the founders of the Progressive Parish, a local political party that worships being different. Get-together: ‘We just adopted a little Filipino.’ ‘No kidding! Our son is gay.’ ‘Really? Well, ours has no shadow.’ Three-nil, nobody beats that. Mom does yoga and is Zen, and Dad would rather cook for the homeless than for us. Like a lot of bleeding hearts, their charity ends at home.

Until I was seven, they managed to keep me under wraps. But you don’t have to be Einstein to figure it was bound to come out. One day two men in dark sunglasses snatched me from the class-room, bundled me into an armoured car and stuck a needle into my arm. When I woke up I found myself at an army base in the United States, where a team of scientists and agents spent four months examining me. The first three weeks I claimed I was from Mars and that my goal was complete world domination, then they got extremely rude and started threatening me. I raged when I woke up one morning to find that they had sliced a piece of skin from my butt to grow a culture. I told them to go fuck themselves, but that same week I was told I was of no use to them and got reunited with my parents. To compensate for our inconvenience we were offered a feature in National Geographic. First my parents flipped and considered legal action, but when they discovered that the men who had kidnapped me were in fact above the law and that the following media hype was a goldmine for the Progressive Parish’s coffers they soon came round.

And me? I became a celebrity, thanks a bunch. On Oprah they wouldn’t let me wear make-up ‘cause they figured a floating, painted mask with no eyes or mouth would look too freaky on TV. Practical upshot: a completely invisible boy, which meant that everybody who wasn’t actually in the studio just saw clothes moving and me picking up objects and standing behind an infrared machine to prove my existence. When Oprah asked how the scientists had treated me I responded: ‘I think the government has no right to experiment with my ass.’ That cost them three million in hush money, and still the accusations of sexual abuse came pouring in. Suckers.

One-all, you’d think.Not by a long shot. In the years that followed, our front yard was overrun by camera crews eager to catch a glimpse of me. Which is technically impossible. Twelve circuses and twenty-three freak shows including Ripley’s offered astronomic amounts to exhibit me. I’ve been called a Saint 268 times and have 29,000,000 hits on Google, as many as Brad Pitt. Cool, Mom and Dad, being different. Until it’s you who’s different. Everybody knows who I am. Everybody, except me.

Splinter once said your dreams make you who you are. But I don’t dream. Loads of people say this, but I really don’t dream. To tell the truth, I don’t even know what dreams are. The countless EEGs that I’ve had suggest that my brain shows absolutely zilch activity during REM sleep. They never found a link with my condition, but duh. I suppose that’s why I have no friends, no feelings and no imagination. I lack a goal. I lack depth. Like I care.

I guess my only wish is to find my reflection. If I have no idea what my face looks like, how will I ever know who I am? And you know how saints and celebrities go. They get pinned on a cross, and while they watch them die people piss on their shadows.

The arrival of Splinter Rozenberg changed everything.

I was fourteen by then and living a relatively quiet life. The hype had died down, as hypes do. We had moved a couple of times within our shit-hole town, and in exchange for a statement that I had not been abused during my stay in the US, two men in dark sunglasses were stationed in front of our house for a year, removing pilgrims and other freaks from our front yard.

Obviously all this had an effect on my reputation in school. I’ve got no friends, and because I’m tall I have a lot of nerve where others don’t. They avoid me, which is exactly how I like it. Sometimes I beat someone up, not because I like it, but I’m helping an image along here. And come on, it’s not all that obvious, unless I’m in front of a mirror. I wear long sleeves. Only my face is a dead give-away. With the sun on my right, I look luminous on the left. Mom tried to hide the effect with make-up, but then I look like a drag-queen, so I don’t think so.

Even Jord Hendriks lets me off the hook, confining to trash talk. On a good day I’m ‘See-Thru’. On a bad day, it’s ‘Zero’ or just ‘Freak’. He says without a reflection I don’t actually exist, except that my fuck-face hasn’t figured it out yet.

He exaggerates, if you ask me. If I’m supposed to believe the stories I’m no oil painting, but it’s not as bad as all that. Lots of artists, including my grandpa, have made impressions of what I look like. None of the drawings really look alike, and none of them really suit me. The charcoal drawing on the cover of People I can’t take seriously for starters, because it creates the illusion of shadow. Some show a boy with a broad, roughly hewn face. Mom says Grandpa’s is the best likeness. But Grandpa also did a portrait of Mom that makes her look like a man instead of a woman—so much for Mom’s opinion.

Too bad that Jord Hendriks is such an incredible dick. The other kids are afraid of him. I think he’s hot. I mean, just look at that body in the locker room before P.E., holy fuck!

Of course that’s about the last thing you’d say to him, if you know what’s good for you. One disorder is more than enough, trust me. Mom and Dad would love it, and that’s exactly why I won’t tell them. They’d drag me to lunatic parades and conferences on tolerance by the Progressive Parish, and then the whole media circus would start all over again, so no. The Internet is no good either. It’s easy to click Yes, I am 18 or over, but chat-rooms kick me ‘cause I’m supposedly too scared to show myself on webcam.

Oh, well. The thought of Jord Hendriks putting his mouth to better use and my right hand offer plenty of release for a healthy boy like me, exclamation mark smiley face.

Splinter was new in class, so I was old news. Thanks in part to his mom, Mrs. Rozenberg, who had made the unforgivable mistake of accompanying him to school the first day to explain all about his condition. I remember them standing there, side by side, Mrs. Rozenberg like she was lecturing some rugrats and Splinter staring glassy-eyed into the room. Splinter always stared at things glassy-eyed. That’s because his eyes were made of glass. As was the rest of his body. It’s one of those funny little accidents you get in certain gene pools. Polished, he was a perfect mirror. He had some flexibility and was able to move his limbs, but slo-mo, like Neil Armstrong on the moon. Facial expressions were a different story.

Mrs. Rosenberg, all flesh and blood, told us to think of him as a china cabinet, which wasn’t all that far from the truth. He wasn’t allowed to play games during recess or P.E. A well-aimed football would kill him for sure. Jack-assing was out of the question. When we heard an old bag like her say that, we screamed with laughter. Mrs. Rozenberg was delighted, thinking she was cool. Splinter knew he was doomed.

From day one Jord Hendriks and his friends put him under siege. Paperclips, coins, biro springs and ballpoint pens were fired at him in a game of finding out which part of the body to aim for to get the opening notes of Man in the Mirror. ‘Your dick, okay?’ Splinter said when the teacher had left the classroom. ‘Will you please stop now? It’s dangerous what you’re doing.’

Whoops, that only made things worse. Splinter knew how fragile he was, and that paperclips and coins would probably cause no permanent damage. But accidents will happen and when Jord launched a biro that scratched his neck, he grassed on him.

Big whoops. Suspensions aren’t forever. After some third-year kid acting on Jord’s instructions concocted a story to lure the shop teacher out of the classroom, Jord took Splinter under his arm and put him on the workbench. Splinter screamed. Not with pain—he didn’t have nerves—but to catch a teacher’s attention. He didn’t put up a struggle, because he knew that any wrong move would break him in two.

‘I’ve always wanted to be a glassblower, shitbag,’ Jord said, as he ignited the Bunsen burner. ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land will have the crookedest dick of ‘em all?’

Three or four boys formed a cordon around them to keep the softies away. The rest of the class smirked or pretended not to notice. Me? I was glad it wasn’t me lying there.

Jord stopped at Splinter’s left pinky. He heated the tip and squeezed it with a pair of pliers, so Splinter would never need another spoon to stir his tea. Then one of Jord’s mates sounded the alarm about Splinter having a welding accident and all that. Anyone who blabbed, we were told, would suffer the same fate, glass or no glass.

I was convinced that Jord wouldn’t get away with this. But he did. Feel free to dismiss it as schoolyard law. We give each other hell and we cover each other’s backs—a matter of self-preservation. Bubbles of deceit and lies will burst sooner or later. But that’s too easy. Time has taught me that we live in a world full of Jord Hendrikses, a world that thrives on the destruction of its rare wonders and where people live under a blanket of smog, the stench of sameness.

Why I felt attracted to Splinter?

He was the only person in my life who understood me. He was looking for a glimmer of happiness, which no-one was prepared to give him. And let’s face it, how could he ever discover himself when all he saw in his skin was the outside world reflected?

‘Dad says I should look for happiness within,’ Splinter once said to me, during one of the many afternoons in his room. ‘But then I’ll never find it, unless I smash myself to pieces. A glass cousin of mine threw himself off the roof to see if it was true, but the chimney sweep didn’t find anything of importance among the shards. So what am I supposed to do?’

‘Well, you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette,’ I grinned, but the joke failed to disguise the sadness in my voice.

Splinter felt attracted to me because I was the only one who actually saw him when I looked at him and not myself. One time Mrs. Rozenberg rushed in, right before she was due at a reception. She placed Splinter in front of her, squinted into his face, tousled her hair until she was happy and ran out again. People always looked ugly at Splinter, ‘cause people find themselves ugly when they look in the mirror. Splinter took that personally. With me, it wasn’t there. If I looked ugly at him, he knew that I was in a rotten mood. If I laughed at him, he knew my laugh was meant for him.

During Splinter’s first few months at school—between summer and Christmas—I hadn’t exchanged more than five words with him; no more than with any other of my classmates that is. If I had to take a leak during recess I would go to the Boys room in the old part of the school to avoid any smart-ass remarks or frightened freshmen. Around here, there were only echoes in the hallway. To get there you had to cross the foyer by the assistant principal’s office, where just before Christmas he had put up an enormous tree.

That day a voice made me jump: ‘Err . . . could you give me a hand?’

I looked around, didn’t see a thing.

‘Up here.’

Then I saw. It was Splinter. They’d stripped him to his boxers, sprayed him with red paint and put him up in the tree amongst the other balls.

‘Holy fuck,’ I said. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Jord Hendriks,’ he shrugged. What else? ‘Worst thing is that the assistant principal has already walked by three times without noticing me.’

I’d never really taken much interest in Splinter, had always thought of him as a bit of a goofball. Now, semi-naked, I got my first proper look at him. His chest rose and fell smoothly with each breath. I’d never realized that he could breathe. I noticed the silver garland tied around his neck like a noose that would have strangled any other kid.

‘Hey, aren’t you that boy that has no shadow?’ Splinter asked with that peculiar, crystal voice of his.

Lying, with all those Christmas lights, seemed pointless. ‘Yup, hullo.’

‘Cool! I saw that item on the Discovery Channel about you. I thought that theory about light-transmitting cells was totally awesome.’

I didn’t say a word.

‘You’re famous, man. I mean, everybody’s talking about you. You wanna come over to my place sometime? My dad’s got an ultraviolet lamp. We could do experiments.’

So I did have feelings: I pitied him, for his naiveté. Splinter just stared at me with those sparkling eyes and said: ‘Shit. You’re even more fucked up than me.’

I looked at him dangling up in that tree and held my tongue.

‘Look, I need to take a leak,’ I said.

‘Would you . . . would you mind helping me down?’

For a split second I hesitated, then grabbed a chair and pushed it towards the tree.

‘Careful,’ Splinter said, as I clambered up on the chair and pine-needles stuck in my arms. ‘Drop me and I’m dead.’

He wrapped his arms around my neck. Although I should have been prepared, it still gave me goose bumps. The touch of something so far out, so alien, filled me with both revulsion and curiosity. He was unnaturally cold and didn’t weigh a thing. I didn’t even dare grab hold of him, scared he would crack. Splinter was sensitive about my reservations and said: ‘That’s it, I’ve got you. You can release me now.’

So I did, and even now I come back to that moment, how casually he trusted me with his life, and leaving aside the psycho-babble I put it down to the fact that he had no choice. But in these few seconds it took me to lift him from the tree and put him on the ground, a tremor went through his glass body that made me so acutely aware of the fragility of life that it rattled me big-time. That’s when I understood just how precarious the things are that you take for granted. As soon as his feet touched the ground I got my hands off him as if I’d burned myself on a hot stove.

‘Wow, thanks man,’ he said and pulled the tinsel from his neck. ‘If I’d still been up there after the bell they’d have serenaded me with Christmas carols. You’ve spared me the humiliation.’

‘Don’t mention it,’ I muttered, ill at ease. On a whim I added: ‘Good luck.’

I was halfway down the corridor when I heard his xylophone footsteps coming after me. I turned around and saw Splinter, barefoot and with a bundle of clothes in his arms.

‘I just wanted to say if there’s anything I can do for you . . . I owe you one.’

‘That’s okay.’ I pushed open the swing doors to the Boys room. Just in time I realized that I’d almost let them slam into his face. So I waited and held the doors for him. I did it grudgingly. The guy got under my skin. He’d touched a nerve with those glass fingers of his, which had upset the normal state of affairs. I didn’t like it when the normal state of affairs got upset.

‘Could you turn on the tap for me?’ he asked with a twinkle. ‘I can’t put any pressure on with my hands.’

I did as he asked. Splinter began to wipe the red paint off his face with tissues. It sounded like rubbing your wet finger across a window. While I was washing my hands he looked curiously at the absence of my reflection in the mirror. I reckon he didn’t know whether to comment. Finally he took the plunge and asked: ‘How do you fix your hair?’

After a moment’s hesitation I answered. ‘My mother. And if you tell anyone I’ll smash you with a baseball bat. There’s a reason I keep it short. Normally I wear a beanie. But fucking rules in this school . . .’

‘I hear you,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you. My arms aren’t flexible enough to reach everywhere. I’m fourteen for fuck’s sake and my mom’s still washing me.’

‘Even your . . .’

He shrugged, looking embarrassed.

We stared at each other sheepishly and burst out laughing. Right then we’d become friends. At our age you think the depths of your own hell are the darkest; Splinter proved it could be worse. A little self-reflection ain’t a bad thing. Splinter was all reflection. Seeing him wash his face in front of the mirror made my head spin. A mirror in a mirror in a mirror, an optical illusion of infinity. That’s friendship. You give and you take, even if you have nothing to give.

We spent our time talking and watching TV in our rooms or fishing on the canal. In many ways Splinter and I were completely different. He had ideas, he had interests, he had dreams—everything I had not. His greatest interest was the sea and his greatest dream was to become a captain in the navy. That’s the Splinter I got to know: unworldly, naïve, full of ideas and fantasies.

Sad thing was that we both knew his dreams would never come true. I often wondered how he could have such a positive attitude with his condition. Death was just a door away for a nine-pound boy made of mirrored glass. He was a born victim. ‘And that was a Caesarean,’ he told me. ‘Imagine the bloodbath if there’d been contractions. I would have exploded in my mom’s birth canal.’

He often speculated about his death, no matter how much it brought me down. ‘It’s a miracle that I’ve even made it this far,’ he said. ‘I mean, my cousin tripped on the doorstep when he was eleven and fell to pieces, and another was caught by the wind when she was four and splattered against a tree. I’m the longest-living mirror boy in the family. The chances of me graduating are slim and none.’

‘No surprise, with your choice of friends,’ I said. ‘I heard that Jord’s planning to dump you in the bottle bank.’

He gave me the glass finger and I pretended to whack him; you know how these things go.

Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg were overly protective. They wouldn’t allow Splinter to do anything besides reading and fishing. His mom made him go about in hand-knitted clothes: triple jumpers, beanies, scarves, mittens, anything soft. His dad insisted on taking him to school every morning, even after a sleepover at my place. It really bummed him out.

‘It’s okay, Dad, we can walk. The way Mom’s wrapped me up I’d survive the Niagara Falls.’

But Mr. Rozenberg wouldn’t budge. ‘Far too dangerous,’ he said. ‘Especially with that road by the tennis courts. You know what happened to Uncle Henk.’

‘I’m not allowed to do anything,’ Splinter said when the car pulled up outside school, his shoulders hanging. ‘And he’s right, I can’t do anything. A little arm wrestling will crush me. I’ll never be able to join the navy.’

Jack-assing was out of the question, quoting Ma Rozenberg. I thought she spoiled the fun. I mean, Splinter wanted so much. Why deny such a one those rare moments that make life worth living?

So when I’d spent the afternoon racing along a country lane in a go-kart borrowed off our neighbors (they were on holiday and technically speaking hadn’t given me permission, but not refused it either) and he timidly asked if he could have a go, I couldn’t refuse. I ran home to fetch rope and cushions. I tied his hands to the wheel, his legs to the frame and his torso to the seat, so that he couldn’t blow it and tumble out. Everywhere his body touched the kart I stuffed cushions.

Splinter stepped on it and off he went. His body jerked about like a dummy. For an instant I was afraid I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, that he’d be catapulted out of the kart and shatter into a million crystals. But it held. His screaming laughter rang out above the throbbing petrol engine and over the fields.

It was a moment I’ll never forget. Splinter was ecstatic, and you know what? I got tears in my eyes. Call me a sissy, I don’t give a fuck. For the first time in my life I felt something other than indifference going through my veins. It felt like I’d done something that mattered. I might not know what I looked like, but I’d given somebody a spark of happiness. Whenever I think back of Splinter, this is how I see him: tied up in his kart and covered in cushions, his face illuminated by a watery spring sun reflecting off the visor of his helmet. He was one of a kind, trust me. He even had it in him to blow up the sun.

Finally, he got back, and I was applauding like a madman. ‘Wow Schumacher! You were fucking faster than the speed of light, you freak!’

When I yanked the helmet off his head he threw me a dazed smile. ‘That was by far the sickest thing I’ve ever done.’

‘You did it!’

‘Yeah, only it didn’t go all right,’ he said calmly.

‘What’s that, man, you—’

‘Seriously. Have a look at my neck, something’s not quite right.’

Suddenly I got scared. I did as he asked. Initially everything seemed fine; then I saw. Just above his collarbone and the neck of his T-shirt. A tiny star.

‘Fuck.’

‘It was a pebble, I think. I heard it bounce off.’ He frowned and turned his head from left to right as if he’d pulled a muscle. Then we heard a crack. His eyes widened and my heart sank. The star had gotten bigger and small veins had appeared in the glass.

‘Freeze,’ I said as I began to untie the ropes with trembling hands. I choked back panic, cursing myself. What was I thinking? I should never have let him have a go on that thing. But Splinter disagreed and took my hand, forcing me to look him in the eyes. He wouldn’t have missed it for the world, he said, and would be eternally grateful, no matter what.

I rushed him to the ER. The attending doctor didn’t know glass, so after a phone call he summoned us to his car. I thought he was taking us to the Amphia hospital. Instead we pulled up in front of Auto Glass.

‘Sweet Jesus on a stick,’ the mechanic said at the sight of Splinter. ‘We’ve had someone come in with a glass mannequin before, but they were turned away.’

The operation was done in no time, although I was shitting bricks as I watched the mechanic’s rough hands seal the star-shaped crack. He polished Splinter’s neck with something that sounded like a dentist’s drill. The man did a first rate job: it didn’t leave a trace. When the mechanic broached the issue of money, Splinter explained that he wasn’t entitled to any healthcare insurance and that his parents would kill him if they found out what happened.

The mechanic shrugged and said: ‘Oh, bloody hell.’ In fact I believe he was genuinely touched. ‘You spend your whole life waiting for a chance to resuscitate someone and save a life. And then you come along.’

‘Don’t even think about heart massage,’ Splinter said.

That evening we ate at my place. ‘The two of you are having a little too much fun for my taste,’ Mom said as she served dinner. Splinter and I looked at each other and bit our lips. He’d promised to carve me up if I told anyone where he’d been repaired; that indignity was just too great. We’d been plagued by erratic laughter all afternoon. My parents were cool with it, just glad that I wasn’t a complete sociopath.

‘Say, Splinter,’ Dad said, ‘what do you want to be when you grow up?’

‘A mirror,’ I said before Splinter had a chance to open his mouth.

‘Look!’ Mom said. ‘You don’t joke about that. You ought to know.’

‘Oh, but he’s right you know,’ Splinter said innocently. ‘Sounds cool to me, hanging in a department store, nicely framed. Any other job and I’ll break anyway.’

I sang: ‘Auto Glass repair, Auto Glass replace . . .’

We roared with laughter. Mom shook her head and said: ‘Hopeless. Sometimes I just don’t get the two of you.’

No, she didn’t get the two of us. The reason is simple, and it’s something that parents just don’t understand. When Jord Hendriks & Co take the piss out of you, it’s a drag. When the world treats you like a sickness, it’s embarrassing. But when your parents treat you like you’re made of glass, it leaves permanent damage. Splinter and I needed each other. We needed to take the piss out of each other, to have a good laugh at ourselves. If you weren’t laughing, you’d be crying.

That spring Splinter got miserable. I don’t know if the go-kart incident had anything to do with it or whether it was just puberty. The sudden change caught me off-guard. He’d always been upbeat. Overnight, his eyes glazed over. Sometimes I worried that he might follow in the foot-steps of that cousin of his, the one who’d gone to look for happiness within.

‘What’s the point of it all?’ he said, as we were lying by the canal; me with my hands locked behind my head, my elbows up in the air; he with his arms half-stretched alongside his body as he couldn’t bend them any further. I knew what Splinter meant: everything. The murmuring water, the dragonflies, the brilliant sunshine. He meant life.

We’d played Ghost Ship for a while; me the ghost, he the ship. It was a game we’d sometimes play. Splinter would undress and lie down in the canal. In the reflecting water he was virtually invisible. I would stand beside an old fisherman who’d nodded off and stare into space. Splinter would then tug at the bait to wake them. First they would see their reflection in the water, then me, then not me in the water. They thought they were seeing a ghost. Next thing I would point like a zombie at the canal, as Splinter rose from the water and hauled himself ashore, groaning The Grudge-style.

They always run off screaming. It’s the way to get hold of rods or bait.

‘My grandpa took me to the sea once,’ Splinter said. ‘My parents went nuts when they found out. I never stayed at grandpa’s again. But you know, I had the time of my life. That’s what they didn’t get. We stayed until after sunset to see the sun sink into the sea. Did you know that the sun actually sinks into the sea? I’d kill to see that again.’

‘Then I know where you ought to go,’ I said. ‘Mom and Dad sometimes rent this cottage in Portugal. There’s no place where the sun sinks into the sea like over there.’

Splinter didn’t say a thing; didn’t have to. We were both thinking the same. He’d never get to see that sun and that sea. Sure, there was danger in any wobbly cobblestone, smashed tennis ball or sweeping branch. But what about his parents? If you ask me, they were the biggest threat of all. The uneasy atmosphere at home was so strong you could taste it. You could hear the awkward silences. Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg were blind to their son’s dreams. In their efforts to protect him, they neglected his happiness. I understood they were afraid to say good-bye, but fearing his death they forgot to let him live.

That’s when I got the idea.

‘You wanna chase that sun?’

He sat up and looked at me. ‘To . . . Portugal, you mean?’

I grinned. ‘You and me, buddy.’

‘My parents . . .’

‘Fuck your parents. Wanna see that sun or what?’

‘As in . . . running away?’

‘Nah, we’ll be back.’

His eyes began to shine. ‘Can we go out to sea if we do?’

‘Whatever you like, man. It’s your party!’

Splinter laughed. ‘Fuck. Let’s do it.’

More was said, but that was the gist of it. I drew the plan: ‘Tomorrow. Go to school, but skip class and wait behind the bike shed so your parents won’t know you’re gone until late afternoon. It will give us a head-start. Leave your books home and take some clothes. I’ll take care of the rest.’

He held out his hand. I squeezed it and his knuckles clinked. The only thing that made my smile waver was the touch of his maimed teaspoon finger.

Jord Hendriks entered the Boys room just before the first period bell. The door to the rear cubicle was outside the range of the mirror where he began fixing his hair, and he didn’t notice that it was ajar. I had taken off my t-shirt so my reflection wouldn’t betray me and tiptoed up to him until I was close enough to smell his shampoo. Jord was bleating some rap crap, with no rhythm or melody, ruffling his hair. Without a moment’s hesitation I grabbed his left pinky and planted my other hand firmly on his hip—just for fun.

Jord actually squealed; it was almost comical. He jerked and knocked the pot of gel to the floor. ‘Jesus!’

He turned round, red as a brick. I’d scared the shit out of the poor kid. His eyes fell on my half-naked body and he said: ‘What the fuck are you doing, faggot?’

‘Looks crystal clear to me,’ I said. ‘Holding up a mirror.’ And with that I neatly broke his pinky. The crack sounded satisfying, but no more satisfying than the touch of his body against my skin had been.

We boarded the train in Roosendaal and changed in Antwerp for the high-speed Thalys to Paris. Flying was no option, because then we could be traced. Out on the streets, we had nothing to fear. I was world-famous, but nobody knew what I looked like. Folks like Splinter were rare, but hey, looks don’t kill. We paid for the train tickets with the Progressive Parish’s credit card, which I’d swiped from Dad’s wallet. I also withdrew the maximum amount with his debit card, before he found out and had everything blocked.

As soon as we crossed the border Splinter’s reservations vanished. He gazed out the windows for hours with a running commentary on everything he saw: grain silos, different colored number plates, how the cows looked different in France. We played cards for fifty-euro notes.

At the Gare du Nord we ate slices of pizza and considered our next move. Splinter said he wanted to go all the way. He wanted adventure. He dumped his woollen jumper in the trash and swapped it for a t-shirt from a kiosk that read: Live Dangerously.

It was late when we hitched a ride. A scrawny Frenchman with dark glasses and an express delivery van stopped for us. Through the open window he said: ‘Where to, boys? You name it and I’ll take you.’

‘How about Spain?’

He promised to take us to the border. Cities gave way to sloping fields. I wondered if my parents had found the note on my pillow. Don’t worry, I’ll be back. When you tell your parents ‘don’t worry’ it’s a sure sign that they will, but luckily mine were fairly level-headed. No doubt Splinter’s parents would have warned the police the minute he hadn’t come home from school anyway, and my parents can put two and two together.

For the first time it dawned on me that I hadn’t just done it for Splinter. Running away, I mean. It was an adventure, but it was also something bigger than that. Splinter was looking for the sea. I was looking for myself.

When I woke up we were north of Bordeaux, and it was dark.

We spent the night by the side of a gravel path, not far from the motorway. Wild blueberries grew along the shoulder. Splinter was exhausted and fell asleep in the truck; the delivery man and I sat outside watching shadows drift across the farmland. He talked about his job, about his wife and kids, and then said that he wanted to blow me for his pains. I let him do it. I leaned on my elbows, my head thrown back. I watched the world upside-down and in this position I listened to the crickets until I came. It wasn’t how I’d always imagined it would be. It meant more. It meant nothing.

When he sat up I told him that it was my turn. First he didn’t get my drift, and when he did, he protested. But my fingers had already found his belt buckle and soon my lips pressed against the warmth within.

‘Er . . . hang on . . . what you’re doing now can get me in big trouble.’

I looked at him like he was nuts and said: ‘What you were doing earlier can get you in big trouble too.’

The delivery man groaned and grunted and tugged at my hair when he came, which hurt. His sperm tasted like tears and made me sad, but I still swallowed. And all this time the driver never mentioned the fact that the moonlight fell right through me. Perhaps he hadn’t even noticed.

His hands trembled as he smoked a cigarette and let me have a drag too. It was disgusting. Then he gathered up his stuff, pulled a drowsy Splinter out of the truck and sped off. We had to walk all the way back to the motorway.

Three days later we reached our destination in Portugal. The second night we’d spent in a haystack and the third outdoors near a gas station. The truck driver had warned us about scorpions, but we didn’t see any.

Our destination was called Espelho de Agua, because legend has it that the sun and the sea are at their most beautiful there. At least one person knew the legend, and that was me. At least one person knew it was true. Espelho de Agua is on the west coast of the Algarve, and it smells of almond blossom, eucalyptus and thyme, a heady scent that fills the air and reminded me of the times I’d been there with my parents. It’s a shame Splinter had no sense of smell. It adds so much.

We bought figs and freshly baked bolinhas at the market and wandered the village streets for a while. An old glassblower who was smoking in front of his shop fell to his knees and cried at the sight of Splinter. I smiled. That’s what the reunion of Geppetto and Pinocchio must have been like. When the man touched his glass face and arms Splinter glittered with pride. The glassblower spoke just as much English as we did Portuguese, that is, not a word, but he insisted on showing us round his workshop. It was so jam-packed with all manner of glass objects that I felt like a stilt-walker in a room full of air bubbles.

Geppetto found it hard to let go and watched us till we got to the end of the street. He had caught a glimpse of a miracle. Tomorrow he’d think that it had all been a dream.

You didn’t see the sea until the very end.

The narrow path wound through a sweltering pine forest, and then all of a sudden it was there, calm and infallible and bright green, until it blurred and merged with the horizon. At first Splinter smiled, so delighted that I thought his face would split in two. Then his smile faded, leaving only awe. I saw the sun’s glare on the water reflected in his face.

‘It’s bigger,’ he said, as simple as that. ‘Bigger.’

We found a spot on the orange cliffs, far from the children playing football and sunbathing tourists. I fashioned our clothes and back-packs into a little bed on the barren soil. Then I stripped naked and lay down. After a moment’s hesitation Splinter followed my lead. Not because of the heat or to get a tan, but because he could. Given the chance to be free, you take it. Splinter was here now, shrugging off the last constraints of home.

I tan quickly. Whichever way I lie, the front and back always tan simultaneously.

‘I read somewhere there’s birds flying more than 6,000 miles non-stop across the Pacific,’ Splinter said, staring at the horizon. ‘From Alaska all the way down to the warm islands at the equator. They don’t take time to rest, eat or drink. They just fly on, for nine days. They know exactly where they’re going. I bet I could do the same. In a rowing boat, I mean, if I hit the right current. No one can go without food as long as me. Besides, I know the way. I know all about the sea.’

‘Yeah, and half-way there you’ll be swallowed by a blue whale,’ I said without opening my eyes.

‘I always wondered why Geppetto was looking for Pinocchio at sea, when the whale gobbled him up,’ Splinter said. ‘It doesn’t make sense. The movie never explains.’

‘Send a complaint to Disney. Oh, and apply for a role in the sequel while you’re at it.’

Somewhere, a seagull cried.

Splinter rose on one elbow and said: ‘That glassblower was the first person in the world who ever thought I was beautiful.’

‘That’s because he was senile.’

‘Fuck off. Seriously. I’ve never kissed anyone, you know. How could a girl ever like me?’

‘Try a glassblower,’ I joked.

But Splinter was serious. ‘Look at me. Nobody finds me attractive. And I can’t blame them.’

I glanced over his body and shrugged. His body was all right, nothing special. There was only one problem. It was made of glass.

‘Surely there must be some glass girls?’

‘Have you seen any? Besides, I’m not hot for glass. I fancy skin.’

A grin appeared on my face. ‘You know, I’ve always wondered. Can you . . . ?’ I simulated jerking off with my hand.

‘Oh sure,’ Splinter said promptly. ‘I’m made of glass, but I’m anatomically correct. Good thing I can’t exert much pressure, so there’s no need to worry about squeezing something.’

I roared with laughter and rolled onto my stomach. Something stirred; fucking puberty. I thought about asking what he squirted, cum or molten glass. I didn’t—some things are better left to the imagination.

Early evening a breeze picked up, drying the sweat on my body. That was nice. We played blackjack waiting for the sun to set. Splinter kicked my ass. I had just dealt a new hand when a gust of wind picked up the cards and blew them off the cliffs. Without a word, we watched hearts, diamonds, clubs and spades flutter to the west. The low sun transformed the ocean into a bright, orange mirror.

‘You see that?’ Splinter whispered. ‘That’s where we’re sailing tomorrow. I want to touch the sun as it sinks into the sea.’

I could have said something, but didn’t need to. There, where the playing cards were drifting away, was Splinter’s heart. You could see the magic lure of the sea reflected on his body. I think that moment I some-how knew that I wouldn’t be taking Splinter back home. Perhaps I’d known it all along. But then why did I keep thinking: what about me?

‘See how it mirrors? That’s where I belong. There everything is just like me. There I won’t have to worry about what I can and can’t do.’

‘Surely it’s not that bad,’ I suggested, but I knew better.

‘Everybody looks at me like I’m some kind of freak,’ Splinter said. ‘I’ll never have a girlfriend. It’s too dangerous. I don’t even know what it feels like to be touched. A simple hug is too much, even for my parents. All they do is look at me. They never touch, afraid of breaking something.’

I didn’t say a word, wished he hadn’t told me that.

‘I dream about it a lot, you know. I mean, about what it’s like to undress a girl. To have my arms around her and feel her skin against mine.’

‘But I thought you didn’t feel anything, technically speaking?’

‘I may not have nerves, I do have feelings,’ Splinter said. He went quiet. ‘Maybe . . . no. Maybe I just want to know what it’s like to be incredibly close to someone.’

Then I did something that I had never thought of before. I did it on the spur of the moment, and maybe I wouldn’t have done it if I had given it some thought, but it was all I could do right then. I turned towards him and wrapped my arm around his waist. I pulled him towards me. He gasped but didn’t stop me when I rolled over on my back and carefully lifted him on top. The gap between our bodies closed. Splinter’s eyes widened, orange crystals in the setting sun. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to evoke the sensation of that glass body against mine. What struck me most was how infinitely fragile it felt.

My hands were on his back.

Splinter’s fingers were on my shoulders.

He was incredibly close.

‘I didn’t realize . . .’

‘If you tell anyone I’ll smash you to pieces.’

He grinned and said: ‘Faggot.’

I saw the ground where we lay reflected in his face, not me. But when I breathed out his lips misted up, proof of my existence.

While behind us the miracle of Espelho de Agua unfolded, he kissed me. Splinter was the second person to discover the legend was true. The legend of the sun and the sea. Our tongues found each other while my hands caressed his gleaming back, and when our teeth touched it sounded as the tinkling of a wine glass. Splinter cried, warm tears of molten glass that rolled down my cheeks. After they solidified I plucked them off. I still have them, cones of mirrored glass. I’m glad they’re tears of happiness, not of sorrow. I keep them as mementoes.

And so the sun sank into the sea.

I can’t remember exactly how it happened. What I do recall is that we were both excited and that I felt his heart beat like mad in his chest. It pounded like a pestle in a glass mortar. Perhaps it pounded so hard that it split his back—I like to pretend it did. But I think I just held him too tight. My only consolation is that I can say in all honesty that I killed him with love and nothing else.

We just lay there, staring at each other in shock while the crack faded in our ears. It had sounded like a football smashing into safety glass: it didn’t shatter, but formed a spider’s web. A dent. I felt his back. It began on his shoulder blades and ran along the muscles of his spine all the way down to the small of his back.

‘Oops,’ Splinter said.

I carefully slid him off me. When I set eyes on the damage my gut tightened into a knot.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Fuck, no, no, no!’

I guess I panicked. I put my fingers on his back, withdrew them, ran my hands through my hair. Worst thing was that the spider’s web moved, up and down to the rhythm of his breathing. I could see the chunks of glass chafing together.

‘How bad is it?’ Splinter asked calmly. How could he be so calm? I jumped to my feet, told him to stay where he was, not to move, that I would go and get the glassblower, that I would be back in a flash. The more I said, the less sense I made.

Splinter grabbed my wrist. ‘There’s no point.’

I was stunned. ‘What the fuck, there’s no point?’ But I knew and tears welled up.

‘There’s nothing I don’t know about glass, Look. If the damage is any bigger than a large coin, replacement is the only option. And replacement is no option for me.’

‘Of course it is, he could blow another layer on top of it, fuck if I know!’

I said more, a lot more, but what I said was blubbered out by my sobbing. Splinter tried to get up. A square of glass, less than half an inch across, fell in. We both heard it clink as it bounced off glass organs and slid down the hollow of his leg. There was no doubt about it. Splinter was damaged beyond repair and any movement would make it worse. He would break in two. Maybe he had twenty-four hours to live. Maybe less.

‘It was bound to happen, Look,’ he said. ‘You think I don’t know that? It’s not your fault. It could have happened anytime.’

But that’s not how it felt, not to me; it was my fault and tears poured down my cheeks. Splinter draped his glass arms around me and held me in a clumsy embrace while I burrowed my face in his neck.

‘It’s okay,’ he comforted. ‘I found out. It doesn’t matter when you die. What matters is that you live before you do.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered, inconsolable. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to stay here with me tonight. I’d just like to be incredibly close for a bit longer.’

So we lay down and I held him in my arms as the last light faded in the west. I cried continuously, repeating over and over how sorry I was. Splinter said I wasn’t to blame, that for the first time in his life he’d been genuinely happy. My eyes got all swollen and sticky and sore. In the end I guess I cried myself to sleep, a restless sleep, full of dreams I couldn’t remember. Did I say dreams? Yeah. I dreamt. Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up because Splinter blew his cooling breath on my eyelids. I think he sensed I was having nightmares.

When I woke up again it was getting light.

I jumped up. Splinter was gone. I looked around, called out his name, got no response. His things were still there, though. I scanned the beach below and was alarmed to see the tide coming in. Maybe I was afraid that he’d jumped, that somewhere down there I’d discover a heap of shards, but I didn’t see anything. I called his name again and then I heard him.

He staggered out of the forest, pulling a battered wooden cart covered with a ragged old blanket. I was shocked to see the state he was in. His skin had lost its lustre, was no longer reflective. He was worn out. No, dying.

‘I did it,’ he croaked. ‘If I walk very stiffly, hardly anything breaks off, and the glassblower put some bandages on my back. Now I’ll hold a bit longer.’

But when he took another step I heard the splinters rattling in the hollows of his feet. I rushed to his aid and took the cart from him. When I lifted the blanket, I saw it held a glass fishing boat, just big enough to fit in. I looked at Splinter.

‘I’m finished, Look. I’m getting sicker all the time. I wanna see if I can pull it off. I’ve got all day to row to the horizon. I wanna see if I can touch the sun when it sinks into the sea tonight.’

We looked at each other for a long time. I kept trying to say something, don’t know what, but my voice had given out. Finally I managed to utter a single word. It was the only time I’ve ever begged someone.

‘Please,’ I said.

‘But I’m the one to say please,’ Splinter smiled. ‘I need you. To push me off.’

What went through my mind as I pulled him in the cart, over that narrow path winding down to the beach? About a million voices in my head were telling me to turn around, yelling that it wasn’t fair and why was this happening to me? But I buried it all inside, deep down where nobody could ever reach.

The sun wasn’t up yet and save for a lone jogger, it was quiet on the beach. Splinter showed me a video cam wrapped up in the blanket. ‘Give that to my parents. It has a message. For you too.’

Next I put him in the glass fishing boat and pulled him across the tide line. I was up to my waist in the water. The sea was smooth here, slick and oily, like a mirror. The boat was very well crafted, the work of an artist. Geppetto had even fitted it with glass oars.

I held him in my arms for a long time. Then I let go. He took the oars and started rowing, slowly and concentrated, careful not to break his back. He looked back once. The first few rays of sunshine cast a faint glow on his body, and his lips formed a single word. That word was thanks.

I waded back to the beach and watched him disappear, saw him grow smaller, a glittering speck on a glittering ocean. I stared for hours. The beach filled with day-trippers. People squabbled over trivialities, children cried over nothing. I felt drained. Eventually I clambered back up the cliffs. When I reached our stuff, I thought I caught a few more glimpses of the boat, but it was probably just a trick of light. Still, I didn’t leave.

I wanted to see if he’d pull it off.

I wanted to see if he could touch the sun.

I was detained at Faro Airport. Not because they recognized me from some description, but because the X-rays at security fell right through me. Descriptions don’t come any better than that. They questioned me in a small holding cell. I wobbled in my chair, couldn’t find a comfortable position. I was pissed off because I had missed my flight, which had cost me four hundred euros last-minute. The Portuguese official was pissed off because he had a lousy job. After he’d been in contact with the Dutch police, he asked me if I knew anything about Splinter Rozenberg’s disappearance. I tried not to cry and kept my mouth shut, said I wouldn’t say a word until I’d spoken to his parents. At that he got all worked up and banged both fists on the table.

‘Talk to me, you glass-eyed monkey!’ he yelled in broken English.

I flew off the handle: ‘You don’t know shit about glass.’

‘Did he die?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He lived.’

They must have searched my luggage, but they didn’t find the tape or the glass cones. I’d wrapped them in something soft and hid them in a dark place; you guess where. And so I was escorted back to the Netherlands and reunited with my parents.

A lot more happened, none of which is really relevant. What is relevant is that watching Splinter’s video message made Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg realize that his dream had come true. Splinter told them not to be sad for him, how I’d made his life sparkle. I saw very little of it. Tears blurred my vision when I heard his voice. I thought about how I’d sat there on the beach that long afternoon, plagued by doubts whether I’d done the right thing to let him go. Whether I should have joined him. But I also remembered how the sun had finally set, the ocean a brilliant mirror of orange light. Then I’d known. You make your final journey alone.

Afterwards Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg came to me and asked: ‘Did he do it? Was he happy, in the end?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He touched the sun.’

Who am I? My name is Look. I haven’t found my reflection. I’ve found my mirror.

Somewhere in Portugal, scanning the waves with his binoculars each night, there’s an old glassblower. And every so often, I believe, he espies a blue whale.

IN SEA-SALT TEARS

Seanan McGuire

Wound it with sighing, girl, kill it with groans;

Or get some little knife between thy teeth,

And just against thy heart make thou a hole;

That all the tears that thy poor eyes let fall

May run into that sink, and soaking in

Drown the lamenting fool in sea-salt tears.

—William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

These are the things every Selkie-child knows; these are the things we’re taught long before we learn whether or not we’ll ever be chosen to receive a skin, before we know whether our aching need for the tides will ever be answered.

We know that, while we may love the ocean, the ocean doesn’t love us. The ocean is incapable of loving us, no matter how sweetly she loves the Merrow and the Cetacea and the Roane.

We know that we, among all the fae, are temporary and hence flawed, although no one tells us why, no one breathes a whisper of it—not until the day they draw us aside and offer us our own cold version of the Changeling’s Choice that is offered to the half-breed children of the so-called purebloods.

We know that we must never, never, upon pain of misery beyond measure, trust the sea-witch, or take her bargains, or risk her anger. These are the things every Selkie-child knows.

But they never tell us that the sea-witch can be kind, when she wants to. They never tell us that she cries at night like a lost child, or that the ocean loves her, or that she’s lonely, or that she’s alone.

They never tell us not to love her.

Maybe no one’s ever needed that lesson before; maybe it’s one of those things that we’re supposed to just know, somehow etched all the way down to our bones. Maybe there was never a chance that it would happen, not since time began, not since the first tide rolled out. Maybe it was never meant to be a Selkie’s downfall.

But it was mine.

May Oberon forgive me, but I’m not sorry. Because that downfall was mine . . . and so was she. My pretty Annie. The only woman I could ever love, or ever wanted to. I miss her every day, and the worst of it? The worst of it is that she never existed. My pretty Annie never existed at all.

Half Moon Bay, California. The summer of 1972.

We gathered on the beach in our traditional circle around the bonfire, each of us clutching an offering we’d pilfered from our parents’ kitchens. Mathias had beer. Mathias always had beer—his parents were Canadian, and they’d been letting him drink since he was fourteen, the lucky stiff. Tempe had a whole tray of Aunt Margaret’s sea salt chocolate chip cookies. Colin had the weed. I had three packs of hot dogs and a bundle of sticks for us to roast them on. Just an ordinary Friday night in Half Moon Bay . . . except there was no Daisy. There was a hole in our circle where Daisy should have been, and where she was never going to be again.

Colin looked gloomily out at the water, the firelight flickering in his eyes and making them seem even bluer than they normally were. They were human eyes. All of us had human eyes, and now Daisy didn’t. She’d traded her human eyes for a silver seal’s skin and the freedom of the open sea. I missed her. I hated her. I was terrified of what they’d done to her, and wanted to know why I wasn’t good enough for them to do it to me.

“Do you think she misses us?” asked Colin.

I was trying to come up with a diplomatic response when Tempe snorted and threw a piece of driftwood at him. It bounced harmlessly off his shoulder. “She’s a Selkie now, you idiot. Not just kin. She’s not thinking about us. She’s never going to think about us again. Not unless we get skins of our own, and that’s not going to happen unless . . . you know.”

We knew. We all knew. Selkie skins are limited, and passed down only when someone dies, or decides they’re ready to. Daisy’s skin had belonged to her great-grandmother, Adrianna. After three hundred years, she’d finally decided that it was time for her to go. She’d given her skin to her favorite granddaughter, leaving three more crying in the corners, and she’d moved inland to die. Michigan or Montana or one of those other states that starts with “M” and doesn’t have a coastline. Former Selkies almost never stay within sight of the sea. The ones that do always wind up drowning when the need to go back to the sea gets to be too much for them.

“Let’s not fight tonight, okay?” I opened the first pack of hot dogs and poked a stick into one of them before holding it out over the fire. “Daisy got what we all want. We should be happy for her.”

“I’m happy for her,” said Colin, without conviction.

Tempe was the one who surprised me, though. “Who says we all want it?” she asked, in a small voice. We all turned to blink at her. She shrugged. “I just . . . why does that have to be what we all want? Why can’t we just be happy being who we are, and stop wishing for something that we might never have? It seems like a good way to waste your life. You could spend the whole thing on wanting, and wind up having nothing.”

“That’s . . . whoa,” said Mathias. “You really feel that way?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Tempe shrugged, her shoulders rising and falling like a bird’s wings. “I guess I just feel like there should be more for us than wanting. Like maybe there might be somewhere else that we could be.”

None of us knew what to say to that. I passed the hot dogs silently around the circle. We each took one, holding it out over the flames, lost in our own thoughts. I didn’t know what the boys were thinking, but I was aghast. How could Tempe even say such a thing? The sea was everything. The sea was what we were born for. How could she want to be anywhere else but here?

Our hot dogs were almost ready, and Colin was rolling fat marijuana cigarettes with practiced fingers, when Tempe sat up straighter and frowned across the fire. “Hey,” she said. “Who’s that?”

“Where?” I turned to follow her gaze, unrealistic hope springing in my breast. Maybe it was Daisy. Maybe she wasn’t going to abandon her old friends after all; maybe she was coming back to tell us all what it was like, and to convince Tempe that this was where she belonged—

But no. The woman trudging her way through the dunes wasn’t Daisy. She wasn’t anyone I’d ever seen before. I would have remembered. She was older than we were, but not by very much, with fat brown braids hanging over her shoulders and skin that was freckled enough to show how much time she spent in the sun. She was barefoot, wearing bellbottom jeans and a green peasant blouse embroidered with flowing kelp. A six-pack hung from one hand.

“Hey,” she said, once she was close enough. “Hope I’m not crashing. Your folks said you might be cool with some company out here.”

I squinted at her through the firelight. I knew the others would be doing the same. There was a faint glitter in the air around her, the indication of an illusion. “The party’s back at the house,” I said, a little rudely. All the Selkies would be taking to the sea soon, to celebrate Daisy’s admission to their ranks. The kids would cluster on the back porch, watching them swim away. That was all well and good for children, but once you were old enough to be hurt by being left behind . . . that was when you took to the dunes, like my friends and I had done. We didn’t need any Selkies reminding us of what we didn’t have yet, and might never get for ourselves. That was a reminder that would be waiting for us when we got home, whether we wanted it or not.

“I know,” said the stranger. The fingers of her free hand moved in a quick, complex tattoo, and the glitter around her vanished, revealing . . . essentially the same figure. Her ears were very slightly pointed, and her eyes were driftglass green, irises just a little too big to be human. “I’m not invited to their reindeer games.”

“What are you?” asked Mathias bluntly. Tempe hissed for him to be quiet. He ignored her.

The stranger smiled. It was a sad, somehow, like a part of it was missing. “A cousin,” she said. “I don’t have a skin. They said I should come out here.”

I frowned. “Your eyes are green,” I said. “Roane?”

She nodded.

“Dude, sucks to be you,” said Mathias, with honest sympathy. Roane are shapeshifters, not skin-shifters like Selkies. A Roane changeling who didn’t inherit the ability to transform would never be able to learn how, no matter how well they served their family.

“Frequently,” she agreed. “I’m Annie.”

The rest of us introduced ourselves before scooting over to make room for her. She passed around fresh beers, and Colin passed around the joints, and for a few hours, we let ourselves forget how we weren’t included in what was happening in the waters just offshore.

Somehow, Annie wound up sitting next to me. I took the joint she offered my way, and asked, “Why’re you here, anyway?”

“I was invited,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Elizabeth. You can call me Liz. All my friends do.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Liz.” Her smile wasn’t sad that time, although it still felt like there was something missing. “Was she one of your friends?”

She didn’t say Daisy’s name, but she didn’t need to. To the skinless, the newly-skinned might as well have been dead. It would be years before Daisy finished learning everything she needed to know and remembered that we existed. We’d be grown up and maybe even gone by then. “She was, yeah.”

“But she was older than you are.”

“Not by much. Daisy’s twenty-five, I’m sixteen. That’s like, no difference at all.”

Now she looked amused. “No difference at all,” she agreed.

I fed another log to the fire, and asked, “Do you ever hate them?” I didn’t have to explain who “them” was: anyone who would be here, on the dunes, would understand. Tempe nodded. So did Colin. Mathias just looked toward the water, and didn’t say anything at all.

Annie sighed. “Every day,” she said. “Every day and every night of my life.”

Eventually, the beer and pot went to my head, and I snuggled down into the sand, watching the fire through half-closed lids. When even that became too much trouble, I let my eyes drift closed, and fell asleep to the distant sound of the sea.

When I woke up, Colin was putting out the last of the flames, Mathias was packing up our garbage, Tempe was snoring gently into the morning air, and Annie was gone. It would be two years before I saw her again.

Half Moon Bay, California. The fall of 1974.

Colin put his arm clumsily around my shoulders as we watched Tempe’s father leading her away from us, down to the beach. Her mother would be waiting with a rowboat, one too small and too delicate-looking to seem safe on the water, and together, the three of them would row out to one of the forbidden spots along the shore, where Tempe would be draped in her very own sealskin for the first time. I was so jealous I felt like I might die. Only Colin’s arm was keeping me from dropping to my knees and keening out my grief. Why her? Why her and not me? Tempe and I were cousins. If Aunt Margaret was going to pass her skin, why would she choose the girl who never wanted it instead of the girl who felt like she was going to die without it?

I was barely eighteen years old, and as I watched my cousin dwindle into the distance, I felt like my life was over.

“I’m sorry,” said Colin. They were empty words, and we both knew it. There was no good reason for Tempe to be chosen over me. I was as smart as she was, I did as well in my studies and worked as hard for the family. The only difference was that I had never threatened to leave. Shouldn’t that have made them choose me over her? Didn’t loyalty matter?

“I just don’t understand,” I said, my voice thick with unshed tears. I didn’t resist as he tightened his arm around me and led me back toward the house.

Bonfires were already springing up on the dunes as groups of our younger cousins clustered together in their own private pain. I wanted to join them—sweet Oberon, I wanted to be away from this house, where everything smelled like the sea, no matter how much we scrubbed—but I couldn’t go. Someone had to stay and keep an eye on the children. The older cousins would relieve us around midnight, and then I could run. Until then, this was where I had to be.

It wasn’t a surprise, but it was almost a relief when we opened the kitchen door and found a dark-haired woman sitting at the kitchen table, head bowed over a cup of tea. I stopped in the doorway, and Colin stopped with me, his arm still tight around my shoulders.

“Annie?”

She looked up. It was the first time I’d seen her in proper light, rather than the forgiving flicker of a beach bonfire. Her skin was freckled, and the ghosts of old acne scars dusted her cheekbones, giving her a speckled complexion, variegated as sand. Her driftglass eyes were older than they should have been. That must have been her fae blood making itself known. True fae can age so slowly they seem to be standing still, and sometimes, that goes for their changelings as well. Annie’s blood could keep her alive for centuries, and deny her the sea for that entire time.

The ache in my heart changed then, just a little. I would have other chances, other offered skins. She would have nothing but this: empty kitchens and watching cousins walk into the waves when she had to stay on the shore.

“Hello, Liz,” she said. Her eyes flicked to the side, and she nodded before she added, “Colin.”

“Where’ve you been?” he asked, gruffly. I shot him a startled look. He ignored me. “It’s been two years. You didn’t say goodbye.”

“Around.” She shrugged. “I don’t really fit in so well with the rest of the family, so I don’t stay anywhere for very long. My ride was leaving. I had to go. I’m sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to.”

“Yeah, well.” Colin frowned, keeping his arm around my shoulders. It seemed suddenly like he was smothering me, but I couldn’t figure out how to step away without insulting him. it was clear that he saw Annie as a threat. I just didn’t know why. “I’m not the one you should be apologizing to.”

“I know.” Annie looked at me and smiled. It was an earnest, hopeful expression, and she blossomed around it, seeming suddenly beautiful. “Liz, I’m sorry. I had to leave in a hurry, and I should have woken you. Forgive me?”

“Sure. You must be starving.” That smile explained everything. My cheeks reddened as I ducked away from Colin’s arm, heading for the refrigerator. “Can I make you a sandwich, or heat up some of the cottage pie? The big party’s tomorrow, so pickings are slim . . .”

“Anything would be wonderful.” Annie raised her teacup, eyes going from me to Colin and back again. “Where’s your other friend, Mathias?”

“He moved up the coast to be with his parents,” said Colin. He still didn’t sound like he was happy she was here. “One of his brothers died, so his chances of getting skinned at home went up. Down here, he was just another cousin.”

To my surprise, Annie grimaced. “Why do we call it that, do you think? Getting skinned. It makes it sound like someone’s out there hunting Selkies.”

“I don’t know,” said Colin. “Why don’t you ask at the next place you go to stay?”

“Colin!” I didn’t realize I was going to snap until I had already done it. He turned to blink at me, eyes wide and wounded. I shook my head. “Be nice. Just . . . please, for me. Be nice tonight.”

“Fine,” he huffed. “I’m going to go check on the kids.”

“You do that,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment more, like he was waiting for me to say something. I didn’t have anything to say, and finally, he turned and stomped out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind himself. I sighed.

“Annie, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she said, and took another sip of her tea. “I’m not part of the game.”

Now it was my turn to frown. “What do you mean?”

“I mean look at me.” She waved a hand, indicating herself, the distinctly non-Selkie color of her eyes and the too-mortal lines of her face. “I’m not a candidate for a skin. Anyone who looks at me can see that I’ll never be a Selkie. I don’t have the right qualifications for the job. Sometimes, that makes people who are waiting a little . . . I don’t know, uncomfortable. Like I’m just here to watch them suffer. He’s not the only person who’s reacted to me like I’ve come to steal all his toys and make him miserable forever.”

“Well, that’s not a very nice thing for them to think. Whatever Colin may say, I wasn’t upset when you left. I understood.” I pulled the cottage pie out of the fridge. “Although I guess I should ask . . . why are you here?”

“Tradition. I can’t attend every skin-passing ceremony, but I attend most of them, at least here on the West Coast. I have for a long time.”

Tradition has power in Faerie, and no matter how human Annie looked, she wasn’t. The Roane have been rare verging on extinct since there have been Selkies in the sea. She might have been fulfilling some old role as observer that the rest of us didn’t know about, and she looked so sad. She looked lost, almost, like she had no real idea of where she was going to go from here.

So I smiled, and didn’t push her any further. Instead, I picked up a spatula, and said, “Let’s get you fed.”

Two hours later, Annie and I were still sitting at that table, drinking tea and laughing at her seemingly endless supply of embarrassing stories about the Selkies of Northern California. She’d met everyone, or she knew someone who knew someone who’d met them, and every time I thought I was too tired to laugh any more, she’d start another story. It was amazing. It was . . . perfect, and my belief in that perfection only grew when I looked at the clock and realized that it was almost midnight.

“My shift is almost over,” I said. Thanks to Colin, who was still sulking somewhere in the house, the younger cousins hadn’t bothered me at all.

Annie smiled. “So what’s next for you?”

Originally, “what’s next” had been a bed, and Colin, and trying to forget about Tempe joining the other Selkies in the sea. I met Annie’s eyes, bit my lip, and said, as boldly as I dared, “Want to take a walk with me?”

Her smile grew. “I’d love to.”

We walked along the beach, listening to the waves as they crashed themselves senseless against the sand. We’d been holding hands for the last half-mile or so. I wasn’t sure who’d reached for whom first, and I didn’t care. Her fingers were warm. There were no webs between them. She didn’t judge me because of what I did or didn’t have. She never would.

“I have to leave in the morning,” she said.

“I sort of figured you would.” I sighed. “I don’t suppose you want to tell me where you live? Maybe I can come visit.”

“Not just yet,” she said. “Maybe next time I see you.”

“Ah-ha!” I dropped her hand, skipping ahead a few steps so that I could turn and walk backward, facing her. “So you admit that there’s going to be a next time. You want to see me again.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Annie, but she was laughing, and the wind was blowing her hair around her face, and she was beautiful. I didn’t realize until that moment just how beautiful she was.

“You’ll miss me,” I challenged.

Annie smirked. “Is that so?”

“Yes. That’s so. You’ll think about me every night. ‘What’s Liz doing?’ And then you’ll wonder if I miss you.”

“And will you?” she asked. “Miss me?”

“Yeah,” I said. I stopped walking. The water rushed in to cover my feet, pooling around my ankles and tugging, ever so faintly, as it ran back out to sea. “I will. I don’t know you too well yet, Annie. But I want to. I really, really want to.”

She stopped in turn, so close that I could reach out and touch her, if I wanted to. “What if I said that it was dangerous to know me?”

“I’d say that I didn’t care.” I tilted my chin up, challenging her. “Come on. What do you have to lose?”

This time, her smile was tinged with the sadness I’d seen in the kitchen. “Here and now, in this sea, on this sand? Nothing.”

When our lips met, it tasted like the brine blowing off the water, and like tears, salty and sweet and impossible. I stepped closer, and she put her arms around me, and we stood there for what felt like forever, two girls tangled in the web of one another’s embrace, kissing by the sea.

I kissed her like she was my Annabel Lee, and in some ways, in some places in my heart, I think that I’m kissing her still.

In the morning she was gone, of course. But I’d known that would happen all along.

Half Moon Bay, California. The spring of 1980.

Annie blew through my life three more times in the years between 1974 and 1980. Each time, we had just long enough for a few kisses in the surf and a few whispers that didn’t quite amount to promises, although they came closer with every repetition. Each time, I let her leave without a word of protest. What good would it have done? She had tradition to uphold, passed from house to house like a spindrift secret that no one really remembered the reasons for, and I . . .

I had windows to wait beside, and waves to watch. It’s an odd thing, being Selkie-kin and not yet having a skin to call your own. Every day was a tug-of-war between dreaming of my own future and realizing the horror of what would have to happen for that future to be mine. A relative could choose to pass his or her skin, becoming mortal and dying in the human way, but that’s not the usual way for Selkies to be made. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many of us. We die younger and more often than almost any other race in Faerie.

It was 1980 when I was reminded of that fact in the coldest way of all. A fishing boat struck Tempe—foolish, timid Tempe, who should have gone to the desert after all—while she was swimming back to the beach. Judging by the wounds in her neck when she washed up on the shore, she was killed instantly. Judging by the look on her face, that didn’t make it any better.

Colin and I were called before our parents that night. Our mothers sat; our fathers stood behind them. We stood apart, our hands clasped in front of us, our eyes fixed on the room’s back wall. Whatever they decided, one of us would not be going to the sea.

My mother cleared her throat. “Elizabeth,” she said, slowly. “You have been a diligent daughter. You have served this family in all ways. You have never shirked from duty.”

My heart sank. That wasn’t a speech that screamed “so we’re giving you a skin.” I didn’t say anything. I just kept watching the wall.

Now Colin’s mother spoke. “Colin,” she said. “You have been a diligent and headstrong son. You’ve charted your own way through these waters, and I haven’t always agreed with your choices, but I’ve understood them.”

Colin didn’t acknowledge her.

My father met my gaze. Any hope I had of a happy ending died when I saw his face. I closed my eyes, and listened as my mother—my mother, who was supposed to choose me over anyone else in this world—said, “Colin, Tempe was your friend, and she died of too much caution. Her skin is passed to you, if you would claim it.”

And he said, “I would,” and my heart broke into a thousand pieces, and I thought that it would never be whole again.

There were other words after that. I stayed where I was, keeping my chin high, until they’d all been said. I didn’t hear a single one of them, and when the last ones had been spoken, I turned and left the room. I walked down the hall. I walked down the stairs. I walked out the front door, and I kept on walking. The driveway turned into the road beneath my feet, strange alchemy of grief, and I kept on walking. The road twisted and bent, heading away from our house, heading into town, and I kept on walking. I couldn’t think of what else to do.

I must have gone two miles or more when someone fell into step beside me. I kept walking, and so did my unknown companion. Several minutes slipped by, and finally, Annie, said, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“When did you get here?” I asked. The question I didn’t ask was shorter: Do you know? Was Annie already aware that I’d been passed up again, and that I was the last of the little bonfire circle she had stumbled into eight years ago? Did she know?

“My ride dropped me off just as you were coming down the front steps. I thought you were coming to greet me, but you didn’t stop when I waved. You didn’t even seem to see me. You just kept going.”

I glanced to the side. “News travels fast.”

“Yeah, it does.” Annie shrugged. She was wearing a sundress, dark blue with white trim, like the ocean, and she had a seashell barrette in her hair. “As for when I got here, on this stretch of middle-of-nowhere . . . I followed you. You seemed pretty upset, and I didn’t want you getting hurt out here on your own.”

The words burst from my lips before I had consciously decided to utter them: “They passed me over again, Annie. It was me or Colin, and they passed me over again. When is it going to be my turn? When am I going to have something go right for me? When?”

Annie didn’t say anything for so long that I started to feel like I had broken an unspoken rule between us by reminding her that I could even be considered. It was petty, it was stupid, and it wasn’t fair. She would never be a Selkie, no matter how much she might want to be. She would never—

She took my arm. “Let’s go have dinner,” she said. “I’m sure there’s someplace nice around here.”

“Okay,” I said, and sniffled, and let her take the lead

We wound up in a little Italian bistro near the Mill Rose Inn. I had walked past the place a hundred times, but I’d never gone inside. It was too close to the tourist traps that kept trying to take over, and there was nothing they could offer me that I couldn’t get better, and cheaper, at home. Besides, it was a nice place. I didn’t own anything nice enough to wear inside. I started tugging on Annie’s arm as soon as I saw where she was taking me.

“They’re not going to want me in there dressed like this,” I said, indicating my cut-off shorts and flip-flops.

Annie smiled. “Trust me,” she said, and pulled me inside.

The maître d’ looked up when the door opened. His eyes found me first, and for a second, he did exactly what I’d feared: his nose wrinkled, and his shoulders tensed as he prepared to suggest that I take my business elsewhere. Then he spotted Annie, and his posture transformed. Arms spread wide, he stepped forward.

“Annie-my-love!” he cried. “You haven’t forsaken us after all, huh? Thank God, I was starting to fear for my heart.”

“I haven’t, and I’m so sorry, Lenny. I’ve been busy.” She smiled winningly. “I’m also sorry to burst in here without a reservation, but my friend has had a hard night. Can you find a place to seat us where my dress won’t drag down the ambiance?”

The maître d’—Lenny—looked at her dress, and then at me. His smile didn’t flicker. “For my friends, on a hard night? The kitchen table is yours. Only dress code in the kitchen is ‘don’t be on fire while you’re eating,’ and you should both manage that just fine. If you’ll follow me?”

Annie laughed, keeping hold of my arm, and pulled me in her wake like a buoy as she trailed Lenny into the kitchen, where a small table was set into a cozy nook out of the way of all the hustle and bustle. It wasn’t dark, or intimate, or private . . . and somehow, as we settled on the antique wooden chairs and Lenny lit the candles, that just made it more romantic. I didn’t come from a dark or private place. I came from a Selkie house on the sea, and Annie knew that. She was bringing me home by taking me away from home.

In a matter of minutes, we were comfortably ensconced with a bottle of the house red, a loaf of steaming sourdough bread, and a pair of menus. Annie didn’t even glance at hers. She just smiled at me, watching across the table.

“Feel any better?” she asked.

I reached for the wine. “I will.”

The food was amazing. After trying—and failing—to puzzle through the menu on my own, with its long lists of ingredients and complicated preparations, I just let Annie order for both of us. Our menus disappeared, replaced by caprese salad, and hot fried calamari twists, and more wine. The main entrée was a mixed seafood linguine with a spicy red sauce that came in a single large bowl, allowing us to serve ourselves. Annie piled both our plates with pasta while I filled our glasses. The second bottle was almost empty. Neither of us really seemed to mind.

Everything was delicious. Especially the wine, and the tiramisu that followed the meal. By the time the check arrived—and promptly vanished, accompanied by a pile of bills that Annie had produced from her pocket without really looking—I felt like I was going to explode.

“You’re going to have to roll me home,” I informed her.

Annie smiled a little, almost shyly. “Who said anything about going home?” she asked.

I blinked, my cheeks flaring red for a moment before I ventured, “Tradition?”

“I’m not needed until tomorrow night. I came early. I wanted to see you.”

There was a choice there, blurred by sweet red wine and sea-salt tears. Annie didn’t reach for my hands. She was leaving me the room to make that choice on my own, and I appreciated that, because I knew, just looking at her, that she was offering me something more than sex. Sex was easy; sex was fun and cathartic and nothing even remotely like a commitment. But Annie . . .

Annie had been hurt before. I knew it every time I looked at her.

And I was not going to be the one to hurt her again.

“Promise to come back when it’s not just about tradition?” I asked.

Annie smiled.

She had a room at the Mill Rose Inn, on the second floor, where you could see the ocean from her window. The curtains were open when we hit the door, her shoving it open with her shoulders, because her mouth was too busy with mine for her to turn and see what she was doing. I helped as best I could, even though my hands were more interested in mapping the curves of her waist, her breasts, all of the places I’d never had the luxury of mapping during our stolen moments on the beach. She still tasted like brine, even under the red wine and the tiramisu, my Annabel Lee, and in that moment, I forgot that I’d been passed up for the skin.

No: I didn’t forget. I didn’t care. Because this was here, and now, and Annie was pulling away from me, her absence like a knife in my side, but only long enough to pull her sundress off over her head, and oh, Oberon, she was beautiful. The freckles on her face continued down the slopes of her breasts and the side of her arms; she wasn’t wearing a bra. I could have counted every single one. Her panties were strangely old-fashioned, white cotton and cut like my grandmother’s idea of lingerie. That didn’t matter.

What mattered was that she was reaching for me, and somehow, my shorts were on the floor with her dress, and then my tank top and bra joined them, and we fell into the bed in our underpants, once more tangled like fish in the nets of one another’s arms.

I kissed her like I was drowning. She kissed me back like she was giving me permission. Then her mouth found its way between my legs, and ah, I didn’t care what happened next. The tide was coming in, and I was coming with it.

Half Moon Bay, California. The summer of 1987.

“What?”

Annie leaned on the porch rail, eyes still fixed on the horizon line. The sun was slipping slowly down behind the waves, painting the water orange and red. “It’s a pretty simple question. Will you move in with me?”

I blinked. I didn’t know what to say.

Annie and I had been seeing each other more and more often as the years passed. True to her word, she came to visit even when it wasn’t about tradition and there were no skins to be passed. On those occasions, she drove herself, and sometimes, we drove away together. We hiked in Muir Woods. We went to Disneyland, where she kissed me on the Haunted Mansion ride and we had our pictures taken with Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother. We curled up together in her room at the Mill Rose Inn—she always got the same one—and she kissed the back of my neck, and told me about her life in San Francisco, where Selkies were rare, and changelings were almost common.

The sun dipped lower, and I thought about what she’d asked me. She wanted me to leave my home, leave my family, and what? Go with her to live outside fae society, in a place where we’d have to make our own rules? I wasn’t sure that I could bear it.

I looked at her. I opened my mouth. And I said the only thing that I could say:

“I would love to.”

My mother sighed. My father cried. I loaded my things into the back of Annie’s car, and together we drove to San Francisco, where her apartment was waiting for us. It was surprisingly spacious, taking up most of the ground floor of an old brick building near the wharf. The neighborhood was run down and dangerous looking, but that didn’t bother Annie. She laughed as she led me to her door—to our door—and into the bright, clean hallway on the other side.

“This is our room,” she said, and pulled me in a small room with a brass four-poster bed set squarely in the middle. I put my suitcase down, looking around. My gaze skipped from the dressers to the wardrobe to Annie, standing with her hands folded behind her back and a hopeful expression on her face, waiting to hear what I thought.

“It’s wonderful,” I said.

It only took us an hour to get me unpacked, and then there was fried chicken from a little restaurant down the block, one where they all knew Annie’s name, and smiled at the sight of her. It tasted like hot grease and freedom, like charting my own course from here. We walked hand-in-hand through the city until it was almost dawn, and then we ran back to the apartment, and fell into bed, and held each other through the sunrise.

When I went to sleep, it was with a profound sense that finally, finally, I was where I wanted to be. It had only taken fifteen years. Not too bad for a Selkie girl without a skin.

My years with Annie were like pearls: each of them was different, beautiful, and flawed in a way that made it all the more special to me. To the both of us. Perfection is boring, that’s what Annie used to tell me; perfection is the refuge of small minds, simple stories, and people who don’t have anything more interesting to strive for. She was temperamental sometimes, her moods blowing in and out like storms. I was restless, moving from job to job until I found a position as a night clerk at a store that sold skin magazines and dirty movies. She said I didn’t have to work, but I wanted to. I wanted to show that I was contributing, not just living off her savings.

And always there was tradition, like a shadow over what might have been a perfect life. I would wake up in the afternoon and she would be gone, leaving a note on the refrigerator. “Half Moon Bay, back tomorrow,” it would say, or “Monterey,” or even “Puget Sound.” She was never gone more than two days. She never took me with her.

We’d been living together for almost a year before I asked about her family. She was at the sink, washing the dishes; I was sitting at the kitchen table, finishing a crossword. The silence was comfortable, but something made me want to break it. That little imperfection, trying to get out again.

“Where are you from?” I asked.

The words fell into the silence like glasses breaking, toppled off a server’s tray by a careless hand. Annie stopped moving. Several seconds passed, and finally she said, “Away. I’m from very far away. I really don’t want to . . . very far away.”

“Is your family still very far away? What about your parents?”

“My parents.” Annie laughed. There was a bitter edge to it that I didn’t like. She pulled her hands out of the dishwater, wiping them dry on a towel, before walking over to sit across from me at the table. “Okay. This was going to happen eventually, but that doesn’t mean I’m very comfortable talking about them. So please, can we not talk about this again after tonight?”

“Sure, sweetie,” I said. I reached for her hand. She didn’t give it to me.

That worried me more than anything else, until she sighed and looked down, saying, “My father loved my mother very much. That’s what she said every time he left us, and I believed her, because that’s the one gift a little girl has to give to her mother. Belief. I believed that he loved us, and I believe it still, because I . . . I remember him. I remember him loving me. He was gone so much of the time, but when he was home, when he was with us, he loved me. He loved all of us.”

I didn’t say anything. Speech felt dangerous, like it could end her story unfinished.

“He used to call me his little princess of the sea.” A small smile graced her lips, visible in the way her eyes creased, in the slight changes of her posture. “He’d put me on his shoulders and he’d walk down to the water, and he’d say, ‘All this is for you, Annie. All this is for you, because I love you, and because you will do right by it. Always remember that. Doing right matters more than doing what you want.’ And then he’d throw me up into the air, and I’d laugh, and everything would be perfect. Sometimes my mother would come to watch us by the water, and she’d be laughing too, and that was even more perfect than perfect. That was . . . it was holy. Do you understand what I mean? The three of us there, like that, by the sea, we were holy.”

“I think I do understand,” I whispered. She was describing the way I felt when she held my hand and danced with me in Golden Gate Park, one two three and turn, and there was nothing but her, and me, and the good green world around us.

“Anyway.” Annie shook her head fiercely, not looking up. “My mother . . . went away. And my father couldn’t stand to be around me after that. He left me by the sea. Said ‘It’s in your hands now, Annie,’ and walked away. I haven’t seen him since.” Her breath hitched, and I realized with a start that she was crying. “I miss them so much.”

“Oh, Annie, Annie, I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to . . . I’m sorry.” I got out of my chair and went around the table to close my arms around her, holding her as tightly as I could. “I won’t leave you. I promise, Annie. I won’t ever, ever leave you.”

She sighed, and turned, and let herself sink into my arms while she cried over a grief so vast I could barely scratch the surface. My poor Annie. My beautiful Annabel Lee.

Did she know, even then, that I was lying to her? Did I know? I like to think not. I was a child, and she was a child, in our private kingdom by the sea. I never meant to go.

San Francisco, California. The winter of 1993.

Annie was out at the farmer’s market when the phone rang. I had stayed home, pleading migraine, but in reality, I didn’t want to deal with some of the sellers, who had been looking at us more and more strangely over the last few years. It was funny, in a horrible sort of a way. When we met, I was sixteen, and the fact that she looked nineteen was inconsequential. Now, I looked every one of my thirty-seven years, and she still looked like she was fresh out of high school. We had become a May-December romance in the eyes of the mortal world, and all because I’d had the audacity to let myself get old.

The sound of the phone snapped me out of my angry contemplation of the bathroom mirror, and I walked to the kitchen, lifting the receiver from its cradle. “Hello?”

“Hello, Lizzy,” said my mother.

I didn’t need to say anything after that. All I had to do was listen. And, when my mother asked me the question I’d been waiting for all my life . . .

. . . all I had to do was agree.

I was sitting at the kitchen table when Annie came home an hour later, her arms laden with winter fruits, root vegetables, and fresh jam from the stall we both liked so much. Her cheeks were red with the cold, and she was laughing to herself, apparently caught in the echo of some private joke. “Hi, honey,” she said, dumping her spoils on the counter. “How’s your head?”

“Annie, I need you to sit down,” I said.

She blinked, the color draining from her cheeks. “Are you okay? Do I need to call for a healer?”

A little stab of jealousy went through me, like a fishhook in my heart. The fact that Annie had ties to the local fae community, however loose, and I didn’t . . . it was hard. Oh, they were nice enough, when our paths crossed, but I was a Selkie without a skin. I was beneath even a merlin in the order of things. No one knew how to deal with me, and so they didn’t, when they didn’t have to.

“No,” I said, pushing the jealousy away. “Please, can you sit down?”

Looking concerned, she moved to take the chair across from me. “Honey, you’re scaring me.”

“Annie, my mother called a little while ago. She’s decided to pass her skin.”

Silence.

“She’s decided to pass it to me.”

More silence.

“I’m two years from the cut-off, Annie; if I wait much longer, I’ll lose my chance. I’ll never be able to go to the sea.”

She still didn’t say anything.

“Annie, please. Talk to me. Say something. Say anything.”

She tilted her head up slightly, looking at me. For a moment, the reflection from the kitchen window made her eyes look strange, too green, too deep, too old. And then she spoke, and I forgot about her eyes:

“If you go,” she said, “don’t bother coming back. I won’t be here.”

“Annie!”

“I mean it, Elizabeth. If you leave me to claim a skin, if you take a Selkie skin, don’t come back to me. We’re finished, you and I.”

“Damn it, Annie! That’s not fair! Have you looked in a mirror lately? I’m getting old! I’m going to keep getting old, and then I’m going to die, and I’m going to leave you alone again! I’m doing this for you!”

Annie laughed, a sound as bitter and lost as the bellow of a foghorn. “No, Liz. Don’t even try that on for size. You’re doing this for you. Because you want it. Because you feel like you were cheated somehow. Well, you weren’t cheated, Liz. I gave you everything I had it in my power to give. You weren’t cheated. I was not a second place ribbon.” She stood, and walked to the counter, where she began dumping her purchases out of their bags.

The kitchen felt suddenly too small, like it might crush us both if we took a wrong step. I stood, reaching for her. “Annie . . .”

“Go think for a little bit, Liz. Decide what you want. As long as you don’t go to the water, I’ll be here.”

I lowered my hand. I looked at her. And then I turned and walked away.

The Greyhound for Half Moon Bay left at eight-thirty. I was the first person onboard.

My mother—who was somehow younger than me now, sweet Oberon, how was that possible? How was that fair?—came to meet the bus at the station. She didn’t seem surprised to see me empty-handed, or without Annie. She just folded me into her arms and ushered me into the car. We drove back to the house, which was exactly the same and entirely different: new kids, new cousins, new teenagers building bonfires on the dunes, new wallpaper in the front hall. But the music and the smell of baking biscuits and the rushing sound of the sea were all the same. I was home.

At midnight, she and my father led me down the beach to the rowboat that had been chosen for me. I wore white, like a bride on her wedding day. I looked ahead, so that I wouldn’t have to see the jealous eyes of the cousins standing on the high dunes. Then we climbed into the boat, my mother, my father, and me, and we rowed away, moving along the shore until we reached a sheltered cove.

We rowed inside. My father anchored the boat. My mother helped me step out into the water—it was cold around my ankles, so cold—and we walked past the tideline, where she sat, and pulled me down beside her.

I glanced back to where my father stood, just out of earshot, and frowned. “Isn’t he . . .?”

“I’ve lived to pass my skin to the heir of my choosing, Elizabeth. I must tell you what I am asking of you myself.” My mother’s mouth twisted. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I tried to be strong, for your sake; I tried to let you go. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t sit by and watch you leave us. I’m so sorry. I was weak.”

I blinked at her, uncomprehending. “Mom?”

She took a deep breath. “Elizabeth Ryan, you are here to make your choice. Will you join the Selkies in the sea, or will you live human for the length and breadth of your days, however long or short those days may be?”

“I already told you—”

She continued like she hadn’t heard me. “Before you choose, you must understand where we come from; why our skins are limited in number, why there are no other races like us in Faerie. To become a link in the chain which binds us, you must first be forged. Do you understand?”

“No,” I said, honestly.

“Neither did I,” she said. “Elizabeth, haven’t you ever wondered what happened to the Roane?”

And then she told me.

I stared at her throughout her explanation, too shocked to speak. We wore the skins of dead Roane in order to use their magic? How could that be true? How could Faerie allow anything so horrible to go on? But ah, Faerie hadn’t done it: the sea-witch had, when she saw her children slaughtered. The Roane had been born of her bloodline, and in her fury and her grief, she cursed the descendants of those who killed them. She created the Selkies, not as a gift, but as a punishment.

When my mother finished, everything felt strange, like the world had been broken and put back together badly. I bit at my lip, and finally said, “The humans have a concept in their church. They call it the mark of Cain, the first murderer. They say anyone who bears the mark is damned.”

“Our mark is a blessing as well as a curse, but they aren’t wrong,” said my mother. She unwound the sealskin belt from around her waist, offering it to me. “Will you swim the deep waters? Will you be a sister to your people, and keep them ever in your heart?”

I thought of Annie, pretty Annie, with her green Roane eyes. The skin seemed suddenly repulsive to me. “If I say no?” I asked.

“Then you make me bury my daughter,” she said. “Please don’t make me.”

The threat was implicit in her words. One way or another, my mortal life ended tonight. My only choice was whether I wrapped myself in a dead Roane’s skin, or whether my mother would be forced by tradition—I was learning to hate that word—to murder me.

With shaking hands, I reached out and took the skin.

As we rowed back to the shore, I thought I saw a figure standing on the rocks too far out for any human. They were forbidden to the cousins and to all the Selkies of the clan: this was my choosing night, and the waters were mine alone. But still, for a moment, I thought I saw her, a slim human woman in a long white dress, with her face turned toward the boat.

Then the waves leapt, and when they came down again, she was gone.

The party lasted all the night and well into the next day. Every time I tried to plead exhaustion and slip away, hands pulled me back in, rejoicing, clutching, begging me to delight in my new life. I did my best to smile, despite the growing dread in my stomach, and danced the hours into dust. It was past noon when I begged the keys to one of the family’s loaner cars and drove back to San Francisco as fast as the old beater allowed.

The streets were familiar. I knew where I was going. And when I reached our apartment, it was gone.

Not Annie; not our things. The entire apartment building. An old gas station was in its place, decrepit and long-since closed. I circled it three times, praying I was somehow turned around, but all the addresses matched my expectations . . . except for that one.

She had told me not to come back. She meant it.

In a way, I think I knew then. But the knowledge was too much on top of everything else, and so I drove back to Half Moon Bay in silence, shattered and mourning for my love, for my life, and for my Annabel Lee.

It would be nine years before I saw her again.

Half Moon Bay, California. The summer of 2002.

My father’s funeral was held with all pomp and ceremony. He was laid to rest in the waves, his wicker coffin towed far out to sea by the strongest of the Selkie males. Let the humans and their burial laws rot. He was my father. He would not be buried away from the sea.

The mourners were a constant tide, terrifying my daughter—sweet Diva, only seven years old, with her father’s huge green eyes and my tendency toward stillness—and forcing me to answer questions I wasn’t yet prepared for. Yes, I had all the financial information for the family accounts in the mortal world; yes, I had all the details of the various debts and boons we had incurred with the local Undersea. Yes, I understood what my new role as head of the family would entail. Yes, I was up to the challenge. Yes, I had just lost my father, and I was tired, but I would recover quickly. Yes, yes, yes.

By the end of the second night, I was so tired of saying “yes” that I retreated to my father’s study, hiding in the one place where I could be wrapped in memories of him without also being wrapped in the arms of unwanted sympathy.

I was contemplating the liquor cabinet when someone knocked on the door. Inwardly, I groaned. “Come in,” I called.

The door swung open, revealing the heads of the three nearest Selkie clans: the Chase, O’Connell, and Anthony families. They stepped into the room, leaving the door open behind them.

“There are things you must know,” said Isla Chase. “I’m sorry we can’t give you more time to grieve. But this, too, is part of the compact.”

I stiffened. “There’s more?”

“Just one piece,” said Claude Anthony. He looked over his shoulder, and a fourth person stepped into the room.

“Hello, Elizabeth,” said Annie.

I stood before I could think better of it, almost stumbling as I raced around the desk. “Annie! Annie, I missed you so much, I—”

She raised a hand, silencing me. “I told you not to go,” she said, looking me squarely in the eye. And then, without looking away, she . . . changed. The color bled from her eyes, leaving them dark as deep water. Her skin paled and roughened at the same time, taking on a faint suggestion of scales. Somehow, her hair unbraided itself, falling loose and heavy down her back. I remembered winding my fingers through that hair while she cried out, muffling her voice against my skin.

I looked at that hair now and knew without touching it that it would slice my fingers, that every strand would be razor-edged and deadly.

“The sea-witch comes for the passing of each skin,” said Joan O’Connell. “She watches us, to be sure the compact is kept. She is the last secret you must keep. To all others, she is simply a cousin like any other.”

Annie—the sea-witch—smiled. It did not reach her sea-dark eyes. “Tradition,” she said.

I forced myself not to look away from her. “I missed you,” I said.

“I buried you,” she replied. And then she turned and walked away from me, her hair reshaping itself into braids as she moved, her posture changing slightly, until it was Annie, my Annie, leaving for forever. My Annie, who was the sea-witch all along, and who was somehow able to see past what the Selkies did to her children for long enough to love me.

The three clan leaders followed her, with sympathetic glances back at me. And when the last of them was gone, I sat down on the floor, put my hands over my face, and wept.

These are the things every Selkie-child knows: that the sea does not love us, that we are finite and flawed, and that we must never, never trust the sea-witch. I know all these things to be true. Because I made the greatest mistake of all, a mistake that may well be unique in all our world: I loved her, and she loved me. I broke her heart. I proved that we are still no better than we were. Even after all these generations, we are still betraying her.

Now the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of my beautiful Annabel Lee . . . and I suppose, in its way, that’s no more than I deserve.

I may never forgive my mother for offering me her skin; I may never forgive myself for my weakness. These are the things I had to live with every day. At least my daughter will be spared the choice. Her father was Roane: she will never wear a Selkie’s skin.

May Oberon forgive me for all that I’ve done, but Annie, my darling Annie . . . I am still not sorry.

FADE TO WHITE

Catherynne M. Valente

Fight the Communist Threat in Your Own Backyard!

ZOOM IN on a bright-eyed Betty in a crisp green dress, maybe pick up the shade of the spinach in the lower left frame. [Note to Art Dept: Good morning, Stone! Try to stay awake through the next meeting, please. I think we can get more patriotic with the dress. Star-Spangled Sweetheart, steamset hair the color of good American corn, that sort of thing. Stick to a red, white, and blue palette.] She’s holding up a resplendent head of cabbage the size of a pre-war watermelon. Her bicep bulges as she balances the weight of this New Vegetable, grown in a Victory Brand Capsule Garden. [Note to Art Dept: is cabbage the most healthful vegetable? Carrots really pop, and root vegetables emphasize the safety of Synthasoil generated by Victory Brand Capsules.]

Betty looks INTO THE CAMERA and says: Just because the war is over doesn’t mean your Victory Garden has to be! The vigilant wife knows that every garden planted is a munitions plant in the War Fight Struggle Against Communism. Just one Victory Brand Capsule and a dash of fresh Hi-Uranium Mighty Water can provide an average yard’s worth of safe, rich, synthetic soil—and the seeds are included! STOCK FOOTAGE of scientists: beakers, white coats, etc. Our boys in the lab have developed a wide range of hardy, modern seeds from pre-war heirloom collections to produce the Vegetables of the Future. [Note to Copy: Do not mention pre-war seedstock.] Just look at this beautiful New Cabbage. Efficient, bountiful, and only three weeks from planting to table. [Note to Copy: Again with the cabbage? You know who eats a lot of cabbage, Stone? Russians. Give her a big old zucchini. Long as a man’s arm. Have her hold it in her lap so the head rests on her tits.]

BACK to Betty, walking through cornstalks like pine trees. And that’s not all. With a little help from your friends at Victory, you can feed your family and play an important role in the defense of the nation. Betty leans down to show us big, leafy plants growing in her Synthasoil. [Note to Casting: make sure we get a busty girl, so we see a little cleavage when she bends over. We’re hawking fertility here. Hers, ours.] Here’s a tip: Plant our patented Liberty Spinach at regular intervals. Let your little green helpers go to work leeching useful isotopes and residual radioactivity from rain, groundwater, just about anything! [Note to Copy: Stone, you can’t be serious. Leeching? That sounds dreadful. Reaping. Don’t make me do your job for you.] Turn in your crop at Victory Depots for Harvest Dollars redeemable at a variety of participating local establishments! [Note to Project Manager: can’t we get some soda fountains or something to throw us a few bucks for ad placement here? Missed opportunity! And couldn’t we do a regular feature with the “tips” to move other products, make Betty into a trusted household name—but not Betty. Call her something that starts with T, Tammy? Tina? Theresa?]

Betty smiles. The camera pulls out to show her surrounded by a garden in full bloom and three [Note to Art Dept: Four minimum] kids in overalls carrying baskets of huge, shiny New Vegetables. The sun is coming up behind her. The slogan scrolls up in red, white, and blue type as she says:

A free and fertile tomorrow. Brought to you by Victory.

Fade to white.

The Hydrodynamic Front

More than anything in the world, Martin wanted to be a Husband when he grew up.

Sure, he had longed for other things when he was young and silly—to be a Milkman, a uranium prospector, an astronaut. But his fifteenth birthday was zooming up with alarming speed, and becoming an astronaut now struck him as an impossibly, almost obscenely trivial goal. Martin no longer drew pictures of the moon in his notebooks or begged his mother to order the whiz-bang home enrichment kit from the tantalizing back pages of Popular Mechanics. His neat yellow pencils still kept up near-constant flight passes over the pale blue lines of composition books, but what Martin drew now were babies. In cradles and out, girls with bows in their bonnets and boys with rattles shaped like rockets, newborns and toddlers. He drew pictures of little kids running through clean, tall grass, reading books with straw in their mouths, hanging out of trees like rosy-cheeked fruit. He sketched during history, math, civics: twin girls sitting at a table gazing up with big eyes at their Father, who kept his hat on while he carved a holiday Brussels sprout the size of a dog. Triplet boys wrestling on a pristine, uncontaminated beach. In Martin’s notebooks, everyone had twins and triplets.

Once, alone in his room at night, he had allowed himself to draw quadruplets. His hand quivered with the richness and wonder of those four perfect graphite faces asleep in their four identical bassinets.

Whenever Martin drew babies they were laughing and smiling. He could not bear the thought of an unhappy child. He had never been one, he was pretty sure. His older brother Henry had. He still cried and shut himself up in Father’s workshop for days, which Martin would never do because it was very rude. But then, Henry was born before the war. He probably had a lot to cry about. Still, on the rare occasion that Henry made a cameo appearance in Martin’s gallery of joyful babies, he was always grinning. Always holding a son of his own. Martin considered those drawings a kind of sympathetic magic. Make Henry happy—watch his face at dinner and imagine what it would look like if he cracked a joke. Catch him off guard, snorting, which was as close as Henry ever got to laughing, at some pratfall on The Mr. Griffith Show. Make Henry happy in a notebook and he’ll be happy in real life. Put a baby in his arms and he won’t have to go to the Front in the fall.

Once, and only once, Martin had tried this magic on himself. With very careful strokes and the best shading he’d ever managed, he had drawn himself in a beautiful gray suit, with a professional grade shine on his shoes and a strong angle to his hat. He drew a briefcase in his own hand. He tried to imagine what his face would look like when it filled out, got square-jawed and handsome the way a man’s face should be. How he would style his hair when he became a Husband. Whether he would grow a beard. Painstakingly, he drew a double Windsor knot in his future tie, which Martin considered the most masculine and elite knot.

And finally, barely able to breathe with longing, he outlined the long, gorgeous arc of a baby’s carriage, the graceful fall of a lace curtain so that the pencilled child wouldn’t get sunburned, big wheels capable of a smoothness that bordered on the ineffable. He put the carriage-handle into his own firm hand. It took Martin two hours to turn himself into a Husband. When the spell was finished, he spritzed the drawing with some of his mother’s hairspray so that it wouldn’t smudge and folded it up flat and small. He kept it in his shirt pocket. Some days, he could feel the drawing move with his heart. And when Father hugged him, the paper would crinkle pleasantly between them, like a whispered promise.

Static Overpressure

The day of Sylvie’s Presentation broke with a dawn beyond red, beyond blood or fire. She lay in her spotless white and narrow bed, quite awake, gazing at the colors through her Sentinel Gamma Glass window—lower rates of corneal and cellular damage than their leading competitors, guaranteed. Today, the sky could only remind Sylvie of birth. The screaming scarlet folds of clouds, the sun’s crowning head. Sylvie knew it was the hot ash that made every sunrise and sunset into a torture of magenta and violet and crimson, the superheated cloud vapor that never cooled. She winced as though red could hurt her—which of course it could. Everything could.

Sylvie had devoted a considerable amount of time to imagining how this day would go. She did not worry and she was not afraid, but it had always sat there in her future, unmovable, a mountain she could not get through or around. There would be tests, for intelligence, for loyalty, for genetic defects, for temperament, for fertility, which wasn’t usually a problem for women but better safe than sorry. Better safe than assign a Husband to a woman as barren as California. There would be a medical examination so invasive it came all the way around to no big deal. When a doctor can get that far inside you, into your blood, your chromosomes, your potentiality and all your possible futures, what difference could her white gloved fingers on your cervix make?

None of that pricked up her concern. The tests were nothing. Sylvie prided herself on being realistic about her qualities. First among these was her intellect; like her mother Hannah she could cut glass with the diamond of her mind. Second was her silence. Sylvie had discovered when she was quite small that adults were discomfited by silence. It brought them running. And when she was angry, upset, when the world offended her, Sylvie could draw down a coil of silence all around her, showing no feeling at all, until whoever had affronted her grew so uncomfortable that they would beg forgiveness just to end the ordeal. There was no third, not really. She was what her mother’s friends called striking, but never pretty. Narrow frame, small breasts, short and dark. Nothing in her matched up with the fashionable Midwestern fertility goddess floor-model. And she heard what they did not say, also—that she was not pretty because there was something off in her features, a ghost in her cheekbones, her height, her straight, flat hair.

Sylvie gave up on the fantasy of sliding back into sleep. She flicked on the radio by her bed: Brylcreem Makes a Man a Husband! announced a tinny woman’s voice, followed by a cheerful blare of brass and the morning’s reading from the Book of Pseudo-Matthew. Sylvie preferred Luke. She opened her closet as though today’s clothes had not been chosen for years, hanging on the wooden rod behind all the others, waiting for her to grow into them. She pulled out the dress and draped it over her bed. It lay there like another girl. Someone who looked just like her but had already moved through the hours of the day and come out on the other side. The red sky turned the deep neckline into a gash.

She was not ready for it yet.

Sylvie washed her body with the milled soap provided by Spotless Corp. Bright as a pearl, wrapped in white muslin and a golden ribbon. It smelled strongly of rose and mint and underneath, a blue chemical tang. The friendly folks at Spotless also supplied hair rinse, cold cream, and talcum for her special day. All the bottles and cakes smelled like that, like growing things piled on top of something biting, corrosive. The basket had arrived last month with a bow and a dainty card attached congratulating her. Until now it had loomed in her room like a Christmas tree, counting down. Now Sylvie pulled the regimented colors and fragrances out and applied them precisely, correctly, according to directions. An oyster-pink shade called The Blossoming of the Rod on her fingernails, which may not be cut short. A soft peach called Penance on her eyes, which may not be lined. Pressed powder (The Visitation of the Dove) should be liberally applied, but only the merest breath of blush (Parable of the Good Harlot) is permitted. Sylvie pressed a rosy champagne stain (Armistice) onto her lips with a forefinger. Hair must be natural and worn long—no steamsetting or straightening allowed. Everyone broke that rule, though. Who could tell a natural curl from a roller these days? Sylvie combed her black hair out and clipped it back with the flowers assigned to her county this year—snowdrops for hope and consolation. Great bright thornless roses as red as the sky for love at first sight, for passion and lust.

Finally the dress. The team at Spotless Corp. encouraged foundational garments to emphasize the bust and waist-to-hip ratio. Sylvie wedged herself into a full length merry widow with built-in padded bra and rear. It crushed her, smoothed her, flattened her. Her waist disappeared. She pulled the dress over her bound-in body. Her mother would have to button her up; twenty-seven tiny, satin colored buttons ran up her back like a new spine. Its neckline plunged; its skirt flounced, showing calf and a suggestion of knee. It was miles of icy white lace, it could hardly be anything else, but the sash gleamed red. Red, red, red. All the world is red and I am red forever, Sylvie thought. She was inside the dress, inside the other girl.

The other girl was very striking.

Sylvie was fifteen years old, and by suppertime she would be engaged.

Even Honest Joe Loves an Ice-Cold Brotherhood Beer!

CLOSE-UP on President McCarthy in shirtsleeves, popping the top on a distinctive green glass bottle of BB—now with improved flavor and more potent additives! We see the moisture glisten on the glass and an honest day’s sweat on the President’s brow. [Note to Art Dept: I see what you’re aiming at, but let’s not make him look like a clammy swamp creature, shall we? He’s not exactly the most photogenic gent to begin with.]

NEW SHOT: Five Brothers relaxing together in the sun with a tin bucket full of ice and green bottlenecks. Labels prominently displayed. A Milkman, a TV Repairman, a couple of G-Men, and a soldier. [Note to Casting: Better make it one government jockey and two soldiers. Statistically speaking, more of them are soldiers than anything else.] They are smiling, happy, enjoying each others’ company. The soldier, a nice-looking guy but not too nice-looking, we don’t want to send the wrong message, says: There’s nothing like a fresh swig of Brotherhood after spending a hot Nevada day eye to eye with a Russkie border guard. The secret is in the thorium-boosted hops and New Barley fresh from Alaska, crisp iodine-treated spring water and just a dash of good old fashioned patriotism. The Milkman chimes in with: And 5-Alpha! They all laugh. [Note to Copy: PLEASE use the brand name! We’ve had meetings about this! Chemicals sound scary. Who wants to put some freakshow in your body when you can take a nice sip of Arcadia? Plus those bastards at Standard Ales are calling their formula Kool and their sales are up 15%. You cannot beat that number, Stone.] TV Repairman pipes up: That’s right, Bob! There’s no better way to get your daily dose than with the cool, refreshing taste of Brotherhood. They use only the latest formulas: smooth, mellow, and with no jitters or lethargy. G-Man pulls a bottle from the ice and takes a good swallow. 5-Alpha leaves my head clear and my spirits high. I can work all day serving our great nation without distraction, aggression, or unwanted thoughts. Second G-Man: I’m a patriot. I don’t need all those obsolete hormones anymore. And Brotherhood Beer strikes a great bargain—all that and 5.6% alcohol! Our soldier stands up and salutes. He wears an expression of steely determination and rugged cheer. He says: Well, boys, I’ve got an appointment with Ivan to keep. Keep the Brotherhood on ice for me.

QUICK CUT back to President McCarthy. He puts down his empty bottle and picks up a file or something in the Oval Office. Slogan comes in at hip level [Note to Art Dept: how are we coming on that wheatstalk font?]:

Where There’s Life, There’s Brotherhood.

Fade to white.

Optimum Burst Altitude

One week out of every four, Martin’s Father came home. Martin could feel the week coming all month like a slow tide. He knew the day, the hour. He sat by the window tying and untying double Windsor knots into an old silk tie Dad had let him keep years ago. The tie was emerald green with little red chevrons on it.

Cross, fold, push through. Wrap, fold, fold, over the top, fold, fold, pull down. Make it tight. Make it perfect.

When the Cadillac pulled into the drive, Martin jumped for the gin and the slippers like a golden retriever. His Father’s martini was a ritual, a eucharist. Ice, gin, swirl in the shaker, just enough so that the outer layer of ice releases into the alcohol. Open the vermouth, bow in the direction of the Front, and close it again. Two olives, not three, and a glass from the freezebox. These were the sacred objects of a Husband. Tie, Cadillac, martini. And then Dad would open the door and Faraday, the Irish setter, would yelp with waggy happiness and so would Martin. He’d be wearing a soft grey suit. He’d put his hat on the rack. Martin’s mother, Rosemary, would stand on her tiptoes to kiss him in one of her good dresses, the lavender one with daises on the hem, or if it was a holiday, her sapphire-colored velvet. Her warm blonde hair would be perfectly set, and her lips would leave a gleaming red kiss-shape on his cheek. Dad wouldn’t wipe it off. He’d greet his son with a firm handshake that told Martin all he needed to know: he was a man, his martini was good, his knots were strong.

Henry would slam the door to his bedroom upstairs and refuse to come down to supper. This pained Martin; the loud bang scuffed his heart. But he tried to understand his brother—after all, a Husband must possess great wells of understanding and compassion. Dad wasn’t Henry’s father. Pretending that he was probably scuffed something inside the elder boy, too.

The profound and comforting sameness of those Husbanded weeks overwhelmed Martin’s senses like the slightly greasy swirls of gin in that lovely triangular glass. The first night, they would have a roasting chicken with crackling golden skin. Rosemary had volunteered to raise several closely observed generations of an experimental breed called Sacramento Clouds: vicious, bright orange and oversized, dosed with palladium every fortnight, their eggs covered in rough calcium deposits like lichen. For this reason they could have a whole bird once a month. The rest of the week were New Vegetables from the Capsule Garden. Carrots, tomatoes, sprouts, potatoes, kale. Corn if it was fall and there hadn’t been too many high-level days when no one could go out and tend the plants. But there was always that one delicious day when Father was at home and they had chicken.

After dinner, they would retire to the living room. Mom and Dad would have sherry and Martin would have a Springs Eternal Vita-Pop if he had been very good, which he always was. He liked the lime flavor best. They would watch My Five Sons for half an hour before Rosemary’s Husband retired with her to bed. Martin didn’t mind that. It was what Husbands were for. He liked to listen to the sounds of their lovemaking through the wall between their rooms. They were reassuring and good. They put him to sleep like a lullaby about better times.

And one week out of every four, Martin would ask his Father to take him to the city.

“I want to see where you work!”

“This is where I work, son,” Father would always say in his rough-soft voice. “Right here.”

Martin would frown and Dad would hold him tight. Husbands were not afraid of affection. They had bags of it to share. “I’ll tell you what, Marty, if your Announcement goes by without a hitch, I’ll take you to the city myself. March you right into the Office and show everyone what a fine boy Rosie and I made. Might even let you puff on a cigar.”

And Martin would hug his Father fiercely, and Rosemary would smile over her fiber-optic knitting, and Henry would kick something upstairs. It was regular as a clock, and the clock was always right. Martin knew he’d be Announced, no problem. Piece of cake. Mom was super careful with the levels on their property. They planted Liberty Spinach. Martin was first under his desk every time the siren went off at school. After Henry’s Announcement had gone so badly, he and Mom had installed a Friendlee Brand Geiger Unit every fifteen feet and the light-up aw-shucks faces had only turned into frowns and x-eyes a few times ever. There was no chance Martin could fail. Things were way better now. Not like when Henry was a kid. No, Martin would be Announced and he’d go to the city and smoke his cigar. He’d be ready. He’d be the best Husband anyone ever met.

Aaron Grudzinski liked to tell him it was all shit. That was, in fact, Aaron’s favorite observation on nearly anything. Martin liked the way he swore, gutturally, like it really meant something. Grud was in Martin’s year. He smoked Canadian cigarettes and nipped some kind of homebrewed liquor from his gray plastic thermos. He’d egged Martin into a sip once. It tasted like dirt on fire.

“Look, didn’t you ever wonder why they wait til you’re fifteen to do it? Obviously they can test you anytime after you pop your first boner. As soon as you’re brewing your own, yeah?” And Grud would shake his flask. “But no, they make this huge deal out of going down to Matthew House and squirting in a cup. The outfit, the banquet, the music, the filmstrips. It’s all shit. Shit piled up into a pretty castle around a room where they give you a magazine full of the wholesome housewives of 1940 and tell you to do it for America. And you look down at the puddle at the bottom of the plastic tumbler they call your chalice, your chalice with milliliter measurements printed on the side, and you think: That’s all I am. Two to six milliliters of warm wet nothing.” Grud spat a brown tobacco glob onto the dead grass of the baseball field. He knuckled at his eye, his voice getting raw. “Don’t you get it? They have to give you hope. Well, I mean, they have to give you hope. I’m a lost cause. Three strikes before I got to bat. But you? They gotta build you up, like how everyone salutes Sgt. Dickhead on leave from the glowing shithole that is the great state of Arizona. If they didn’t shake his hand and kiss his feet, he might start thinking it’s not worth melting his face off down by the Glass. If you didn’t think you could make it, you’d just kill yourself as soon as you could read the newspaper.”

“I wouldn’t,” Martin whispered.

“Well, I would.”

“But Grud, there’s so few of us left.”

The school siren klaxoned. Martin bolted inside, sliding into the safe space under his desk like he was stealing home.

The Shadow Effect

Every Sunday Sylvie brought a couple of Vita-Pops out to the garage and set up her film projector in the hot dark. Her mother went to her Ladies’ Auxiliary meeting from two to four o’clock. Sylvie swiped hors d’oeuvres and cookies from the official spread and waited in the shadows for Clark Baker to shake his mother and slip in the side door. The film projector had been a gift from her Father; the strips were Clark’s, whose shutterbug brothers and uncles were all pulling time at the Front. Every Sunday they sat together and watched the light flicker and snap over a big white sheet nailed up over the shelves of soil-treatment equipment and Friendlee Brand gadgets stripped for parts. Every Sunday like church.

Clark was tall and shy, obsessed with cameras no less than any of his brothers. He wore striped shirts all the time, as if solid colors had never been invented. He kept reading Salinger even after the guy defected. Sometimes they held hands while they watched the movies. Mostly they didn’t. It was bad enough that they were fraternizing at all. Clark already drinking Kool Koffee every morning. Sugar, no cream. Clark was a quiet, bookish black boy who would be sent to the Front within a year.

On the white sheet, they watched California melt.

It hadn’t happened during the war. The Glass came after. This thing everyone did now was not called war. It was something else. Something that liquefied the earth out west and turned it into the Sea of Glass. On the sheet it looked like molten silver, rising and falling in something like waves. Turning the Grand Canyon into a soft grey whirlpool. Sylvie thought it was beautiful. Like something on the moon. In real life it had colors, and Sylvie dreamed of them. Red stone dissolving into an endless expanse of dark glass.

“There are more Japanese people in Utah than in Japan now,” Clark whispered when the filmstrip rolled up into black and the filmmaker’s logo. Sylvie flinched as if he’d cut her.

They didn’t talk about her Presentation. It sat whitely, fatly in their future. Once Clark kissed her. Sylvie cried afterward.

“I’ll write you,” he said. “As long as I can write.”

The growth index for their county was very healthy, and this was another reason Clark Baker should not have been holding her hand in the dark while men in ghostly astronaut suits probed the edges of the Glass on a clicking filmstrip. Every woman on the block had a new baby this year. They’d gotten a medal of achievement from President McCarthy in the spring. The Ladies’ Auxiliary graciously accepted the key to the city. She suspected her Father had a great deal to do with this. When she was little, he had come home one week in four. Now it was three days in thirty. His department kept him working hard. He’d be there for her Presentation, though. No Father missed his daughter’s debut.

Sylvie thought about Clark while her mother slipped satin-covered buttons through tiny loops. Their faces doubled in the mirror. His dark brown hand on hers. The Sea of Glass turning their faces silver.

“Mom,” Sylvie said. Her voice was very soft in the morning, as if she was afraid to wake herself up. “What if I don’t love my Husband? Isn’t that . . . something important?”

Hannah sighed. Her mouth took a hard angle. “You’re young, darling. You don’t understand. What it was like before. We had to have them here all the time, every night. Never a moment when I wasn’t working my knees through for my husband. The one before your Father. The children before you. Do you think we got to choose then? It wasn’t about love. For some people, they could afford that. For me, well, my parents thought he was a very nice man. He had good prospects. I needed him. I could not work. I was a woman before the war, who would hire me? And to do what? Type or teach. Not to program punchcard machines. Not to cross-breed new strains of broccoli. Nothing that would occupy my mind. So I drowned my mind in children and in him and when the war came I was glad. He left and it was me going to work every morning, me deciding what happened to my money. So the war took them,” she waved her hand in front of her eyes, “war always does that. I know you don’t think so, but the program is the best part of a bad situation. A situation maybe so bad we cannot fix it. So you don’t love him. Why would you look for love with a man? How could a man ever understand you? He who gets the cake cannot be friends with the girl who gets the crumbs.” Sylvie’s mother blushed. She whispered: “My Rita, you know, Rita who comes for tea and bridge and neptunium testing. She is good to me. Someone will be good to you. You will have your Auxiliary, your work, your children. One week in four a man will tell you what to do—but listen to me when I say they have much better manners than they used to. They say please now. They are interested in your life. They are so good with the babies.” Hannah smoothed the lacy back of her daughter’s Presentation gown. “Someday, my girl, either we will all die out and nothing will be left, or things will go back to the old ways and you will have men taking your body and soul apart to label the parts that belong to them. Enjoy this world. Either way, it will be brief.”

Sylvie turned her painted, perfected face to her mother’s. “Mom,” she whispered. Sylvie had practiced. Listened to the makeshift radio spitting half-garbled broadcasts from the other side of the world. A dictionary Clark found at a transfer station. Her mother. Whispering while she slept. Practiced until her lips hurt. So much, so often. She ordered the words in her head like dolls, hoped they were the right ones. Hoped they could stand up straight. “Watashi wa anata o shinjite ī nā.” I wish I could believe you.

Hannah’s dark eyes flew wide and, without a moment’s hesitation, she slapped her daughter across the cheek. It wasn’t hard, not meant to wound, certainly not to leave a mark on this day of all days, but it stung. Sylvie’s eyes watered.

“Nidoto,” her mother pleaded. “Never, never again.”

Gimbels: Your Official Father’s Day Headquarters!

PANORAMA SHOT of the Gimbels flagship store with two cute kiddos front and center. [Note to Casting: get us a boy and a girl, blonde, white, under ten, make sure the boy is taller than the girl. Put them in sailor suits, everyone likes that.] The kids wave at the camera. Little Linda Sue speaks up. [Note to Copy: Nope. The boy speaks first.] It’s a beautiful June here in New York City, the greatest city on earth! Jimmy throws his hands in the air and yells out: And that means FATHER’S DAY! Scene shift, kiddos are walking down a Gimbels aisle. We see toolboxes, ties, watches in a glass case, barbecue sets. Linda Sue picks up a watch and listens to it tick. Jimmy grabs a barbecue scraper and brandishes it. He says: Come on down with your Mom and make an afternoon of it at the Brand New Gimbels Automat! Hot, pre-screened food in an instant! Gee wow! [Note to Copy: hey, Stone, this is a government sponsored ad. If Gimbels want to hawk their shitty Manhattan Meals they’re going to have to actually pay for it. Have you ever tried one of those things? Tastes like a kick in the teeth.] Linda Sue: At Gimbels they have all the approved Father’s Day products. (Kids alternate lines) Mr. Fix-It! Businessman! Coach! Backyard Cowboy! Mr. Gimbel appears and selects a beautiful tie from the spring Priapus line. He hands it to Linda Sue and ruffles her hair. Mr Gimbel: Now, kids, don’t forget to register your gift with the Ladies’ Auxiliary. We wouldn’t want your Daddy to get two of the same gift! How embarrassing! That’s why Gimbels carries the complete Whole Father line, right next to the registration desk so your Father’s Day is a perfect one. Kids: Thanks, Mr. Gimbel!

Mr. Gimbel spreads his arms wide and type stretches out between them in this year’s Father’s Day colors. [Note to Art Dept: It’s seashell and buttercup this year, right? Please see Marketing concerning the Color Campaign. Pink and blue are pre-war. We’re working with Gimbels to establish a White for Boys, Green for Girls tradition.]

Gimbels: Your One-Stop Shop for a One-of-a-Kind Dad.

Fade to white.

Flash Blindness

Martin wore the emerald green chevroned tie to his Announcement, even if it wasn’t strictly within the dress code. Everything else was right down the line: light grey suit, shaved clean if shaving was on the menu, a dab of musky Oil of Fecunditas behind each ear from your friends at Spotless Corp. Black shoes, black socks, Spotless lavender talcum, teeth brushed three times with Pure Spearmint Toothpaste (You’re Sure with Spearmint!). And his Father holding his hand, beaming with pride. Looking handsome and young as he always did.

Of course, there was another boy holding his other hand.

His name was Thomas. He had broad shoulders already, chocolate-colored hair and cool slate eyes that made him look terribly romantic. Martin tried not to let it bother him. He knew how the program worked. Where the other three weeks of the month took his Father. Obviously, there were other children, other wives, other homes. Other roasting chickens, other martinis. Other evening television shows on other channels. And that’s all Thomas was: another channel. When you weren’t watching a show, it just ceased to be. Clicked off. Fade to white. You couldn’t be jealous of the people on those other channels. They had their own troubles and adventures, engrossing mysteries and stunning conclusions, cliffhangers and tune-in-next-weeks. It had nothing to do with Martin, or Rosemary, or Henry in his room. That was what it meant to be a Husband.

The three of them sat together in the backseat of the sleek gray Cadillac. An older lady drove them. She wore a smart cap and had wiry white hair, but her cheeks were still pink and round. Martin tried to look at her as a Husband would, even though a woman her age would never marry. After all, Husbands didn’t get to choose. Martin’s future wives—four to start with, that was standard, but if he did well, who knew?—wouldn’t all be bombshells in pin-up bathing suits. He had to practice looking at women, really seeing them, seeing what was good and true and gorgeous in them. The chauffeur had wonderful laugh lines around her eyes. Martin could tell they were laugh lines. And her eyes, when she looked in the rear view mirror, were a nice, cool green. She radioed to the dispatcher and her voice lilted along with a faint twinge of English accent. Martin could imagine her laughing with him, picking New Kale and telling jokes about the King. He imagined her naked, laying on a soft pink bed, soft like her pink cheeks. Her body would be the best kind of body: the kind that had borne children. Breasts that had nursed. Legs that had run after misbehaving little ones. He could love that body. The sudden hardness between his legs held no threat, only infinite love and acceptance, a Husband’s love.

When I think about how good I could be, my heart stops, Martin thought as the space between his neighborhood and the city smeared by. The sun seared white through dead black trees. But somewhere deep in them there was a green wick. Martin knew it. He had a green wick, too. I will remember every date. Every wife will be so special and I will love her and our children. I will make her martinis. I will roast the chicken so she doesn’t have to. When I am with one of them I will turn off all other channels in my mind. I can keep it straight and separate. I will study so hard, so that I know how to please. It will be my only vocation, to be devoted. And if they, the women of Elm St or Oak Lane or Birch Drive find love with each other when I am gone, I will be happy for them because there is never enough love. I will draw them happy and they will be happy. The world will be green again. Everything will be okay.

It all seemed to happen very fast. Thomas and Martin and a dozen other boys listened to a quintet play Mendelssohn. The mayor gave a speech. They watched a recorded message from President McCarthy which had to be pretty old because he still sported a good head of hair. Finally, a minister stood up with a lovely New Tabernacle Bible in her one good hand. The other was shriveled, boneless, a black claw in her green vestments. The pages of the Bible shone with gilt. A ribbonmark hung down and it was very red in the afternoon flares. She did not lay it on a lectern. She carried the weight in her hands and read from the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which Martin already knew by heart. The minister’s maple-syrup contralto filled the vaults of Matthew House.

“And when Mary had come to her fourteenth year, the high priest announced to all that the virgins who were reared in the Temple and who had reached the age of their womanhood should return to their own and be given in lawful marriage. When the High Priest went in to take counsel with God, a voice came forth from the oratory for all to hear, and it said that of all of the marriageable men of the House of David who had not yet taken a wife, each should bring a rod and lay it upon the altar, that one of the rods would burst into flower and upon it the Holy Ghost would come to rest in the form of a Dove, and that he to whom this rod belonged would be the one to whom the virgin Mary should be espoused. Joseph was among the men who came, and he placed his rod upon the altar, and straightaway it burst into bloom and a Dove came from Heaven and perched upon it, whereby it was manifest to all that Mary should become the wife of Joseph.”

Martin’s eyes filled with tears. He felt a terrible light in his chest. For a moment he was sure everyone else would see it streaming out of him. But no, the minister gave him a white silk purse and directed him to a booth with a white velvet curtain. Inside, silence. Dim, dusty light. Martin opened the purse and pulled out the chalice—a plastic cup with measurements printed on it, just like Grud said. With it lay a few old photographs—women from before the war, with so much health in their faces Martin could hardly bear to look at them. Their skin was so clear. She’s dead, he thought. Statistically speaking, that woman with the black hair and heart-shaped face and polka-dotted bikini is dead. Vaporized in Seattle or Phoenix or Los Angeles. That was where they used to make pictures, in Los Angeles. This girl is dead.

Martin couldn’t do it. This was about life. Everything, no matter how hard and strange, was toward life. He could not use a dead girl that way. Instead, he shut his eyes. He made his pictures, quick pencil lines glowing inside him. The chauffeur with her pink cheeks and white hair. The minister with her kind voice and brown eyes and her shriveled hand, which was awful, but wasn’t she alive and good? Tammy, the girl from the Victory Brand Capsule Garden commercials in her star-spangled dress. A girl with red hair who lived two blocks over and was so pretty that looking at her was like getting punched in the chest. He drew in bold, bright lines the home he was going to make, bigger than himself, bigger than the war, as big as the world.

Martin’s body convulsed with the tiny, private detonation of his soul. His vision blurred into a hot colorless flash.

Blast Wind

Sylvie’s mother helped her into long white gloves. They sat together in a long pearl-colored Packard and did not speak. Sylvie had nothing to say. Let her mother be uncomfortable. A visceral purple sunset colored the western sky, even at two in the afternoon. Sylvie played the test in her head like a filmstrip. When it actually started happening to her, it felt no more real than a picture on a sheet.

The mayor gave a speech. They watched a recorded message from President McCarthy’s pre-war daughter Tierney, a pioneer in the program, one of the first to volunteer. Our numbers have been depleted by the Germans, the Japanese, and now the Godless Russians. Of the American men still living, only 12% are fertile. But we are not Communists. We cannot become profligate, wasteful, decadent. We must maintain our moral way of life. As little as possible should change from the world your mothers knew—at least on the surface. And with time, what appears on the surface will penetrate to the core, and all will be restored. We will not sacrifice our way of life.

A minister with a withered arm read that Pseudo-Matthew passage Tierney had dredged up out of apocrypha to the apocrypha, about the rods and the flowers, and Sylvie had never felt it was one of the Gospel’s more subtle moments. The minister blessed them. They are flowers. They are waiting for the Dove.

The doctors were women. One was Mrs. Drexler, who lived on their cul-de-sac and always made rum balls for the neighborhood Christmas cookie exchange. She was kind. She warmed up her fingers before she examined Sylvie. White gloves for her, white gloves for me, Sylvie thought, and suppressed a giggle. She turned her head to one side and focused on a stained-glass lamp with kingfishers on it, piercing their frosted breasts with their beaks. She went somewhere else in her mind until it was over. Not a happy place, just a place. Somewhere precise and clean without any Spotless Corp. products where Sylvie could test soil samples methodically. Rows of black vials, each labeled, dated, sealed.

They took her blood. A butterfly of panic fluttered in her—will they know? Would the test show her mother, practicing her English until her accent came out clean as acid paper? Running from a red Utah sky even though there was no one left to shoot at her? Only half enemy, half threat, born in San Francisco before the war, white enough to pass. A woman who spent her life curling her hair like it would save her. Lining her eyes so heavy, so they would look like magazine eyes. Sylvie shut her own unlined eyes. She said her mother’s name three times in her mind. The secret, talismanic thing that only they together knew. Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Hidaka Hanako. Don’t be silly. Japan isn’t a virus they can see wiggling in your cells. Mom’s documents are flawless. No alarm will go off in the centrifuge.

And none did.

She whizzed through the intelligence exams—what a joke. Calculate the drag energy of the blast wind given the following variables. Please. Other girls milled around her in their identical lace dresses. The flowers in their hair were different. Their sashes all red. Red on white, like first aid kits floating through her peripheral vision. They went from medical to placement testing to screening. They nodded shyly to each other. In five years, Sylvie would know all their names. They would be her Auxiliary. They would play bridge. They would plan block parties. They would have telephone trees. Some of them would share a Husband with her, but she would never know which. That was what let the whole civilized fiction roll along. You never knew, you never asked. Men had a different surname every week. Only the Mrs. Drexlers of the neighborhood knew it all, the knots and snags of the vital genetics. Would she share with the frosted blonde who loved botany or the redheaded math genius who made her own cheese? Or maybe none of them. It all depended on the test. Some of these girls would score low in their academics or have some unexpressed, unpredictable trait revealed in the great forking family trees pruned by Mrs. Drexler and the rest of them. They would get Husbands in overalls, with limited allowances. They would live in houses with old paint and lead shielding instead of Gamma Glass. Some of them would knock their Presentation out of the park. They’d get Husbands in grey suits and silk ties, who went to offices in the city during the day, who gave them compression chamber diamonds for their birthdays. As little as possible should change.

Results were quick these days. Every year faster. But not so quick that they did not have luncheon provided while the experts performed their tabulations. Chicken salad sandwiches—how the skinny ones gasped at the taste of mayonnaise! Assam tea, watercress, lemon curd and biscuits. An impossible fairy feast.

“I hope I get a Businessman,” said the girl sitting next to Sylvie. Her bouffant glittered with illegal setting spray. “I couldn’t bear it if I had to live on Daisy Drive.”

“Who cares?” said Sylvie, and shoved a whole chicken salad triangle into her mouth. She shouldn’t have said anything. Her silence bent for one second and out comes nonsense that would get her noticed. Would get her remembered.

“Well, I care, you cow,” snapped Bouffant. Her friends smiled behind their hands, concealing their teeth. In primates, baring the teeth is a sign of aggression, Sylvie thought idly. She flashed them a broad, cold smile. All thirty-two, girls, drink it in.

“I think it’s clear what room you’ll be spending the evening in,” Bouffant sneered, oblivious to Sylvie’s primate signals.

But Sylvie couldn’t stop. “At best, you’ll spend 25% of your time with him. You’ll get your rations the same as everyone. You’ll get your vouchers for participating in the program and access to top make-work contracts. What difference does it make who you snag? You know this is just pretend, right? A very big, very lush, very elaborate dog-breeding program.”

Bouffant narrowed her eyes. Her lips went utterly pale. “I hope you turn out to be barren as a rock. Just rotted away inside,” she hissed. The group of them stood up in a huff and took their tea to another table. Sylvie shrugged and ate her biscuit. “Well, that’s no way to think if you want to restore America,” she said to no one at all. What was the matter with her? Shut up, Sylvie.

Mrs. Drexler put a warm hand on her shoulder, materializing out of nowhere. The doctor who loved rum balls laid a round green chip on the white tablecloth. Bouffant saw it across the room and glared hard enough to put a hole through her skull at forty yards.

Sylvie was fertile. At least, there was nothing obviously wrong with her. She turned the chip over. The other side was red. Highest marks. Blood and leaves. Red on white. The world is red and I am red forever. One of Bouffant’s friends was holding a black chip and crying, deep and horrible. Sylvie floated. Unreal. It wasn’t real. It was ridiculous. It was a filmstrip. A recording made years ago when Brussels sprouts were small and the sunset could be rosy and gentle.

FADE IN on Mrs. Drexler in a dance hall with a white-on-white checkerboard floor. She’s wearing a sequin torchsinger dress. Bright pink. She pumps a giant star-spangled speculum like a parade-master’s baton. Well, hello there Sylvie! It’s your big day! Should I say Hidaka Sakiko? I only want you to be comfortable, dear. Let’s see what you’ve won!

Sylvie and the other green-chip girls were directed into another room whose walls were swathed in green velvet curtains. A number of men stood lined up against the wall, chatting nervously among themselves. Each had a cedar rod in one hand. They held the rods awkwardly, like old men’s canes. A piano player laid down a slow foxtrot for them. Champagne was served. A tall boy with slightly burned skin, a shiny pattern of pink across his cheek, takes her hand, first in line. In Sylvie’s head, the filmstrip zings along.

WIDE SHOT of Mrs. Drexler yanking on a rope-pull curtain. She announces: Behind Door Number One we have Charles Patterson, six foot one, Welsh/Danish stock, blond/blue, scoring high in both logic and empathy, average sperm count nineteen million per milliliter! This hot little number has a reserved parking spot at the Office! Of course, when I say “Office,” I mean the upper gentlemen’s club, brandy and ferns on the 35th floor, cigars and fraternity and polished teak walls. A little clan to help each other through the challenges of life in the program—only another Husband can really understand. Our productive heartthrobs are too valuable to work! Stress has been shown to lower semen quality, Sylvie! But as little as possible should change. If you take the Office from a man, you’ll take his spirit. And what’s behind Door Number Two?

Sylvie shuts her eyes. The real Mrs. Drexler was biting into a sugar cookie and sipping her champagne. She opened them again—and a stocky kind-eyed boy had already cut in for the next song. He wore an apple blossom in his lapel. For everlasting love, Broome County’s official flower for the year. The dancing Mrs. Drexler in her mind hooted with delight, twirling her speculum.

TIGHT SHOT of Door Number Two. Mrs Drexler snaps her fingers and cries: Why, it’s Douglas Owens! Five foot ten, Irish/Italian, that’s very exciting! Brown/brown, scoring aces in creative play and nurturing, average sperm count twenty-five million per milliliter—oh ho! Big, strapping boy! Mrs. Drexler slaps him lightly on the behind. Her eyes gleam. He’s a Businessman as well, nothing but the best for our Sylvie, our prime stock Sylvie/Sakiko! He’ll take his briefcase every day and go sit in his club with the other Husbands, and maybe he loves you and maybe he finds real love with them the way you’ll find it with your friend Bouffant in about two years. Who can tell? It’s so thrilling to speculate! It’s not like men and women got along so well before, anyway. Take my wife, please! Why I oughtta! To hell with the whole mess. Give it one week a month. You do unpleasant things one week out of four and don’t think twice. Who cares?

Someone handed her a glass of champagne. Sylvie wrapped her real, solid fingers around it. She felt dizzy. A new boy had taken up her hand and put his palm around her waist. The dance quickened. Still a foxtrot, but one with life in it. She looked at the wheel and spin of faces—white faces, wide, floor-model faces. Sylvie looked for Clark. Anywhere, everywhere, his kind face moving among the perfect bodies, his kind face with a silver molten earth undulating across his cheeks, flickering, shuddering. But he wasn’t there. He would never be there. It would never be Clark with a cedar rod and a sugar cookie. Black boys didn’t get Announced. Not Asians, not refugees, not Sylvie if anyone guessed. They got shipped out. They got a ticket to California. To Utah.

As little as possible should change.

No matter how bad it got, McCarthy and his Brothers just couldn’t let a nice white girl (like Sylvie, like Sylvie, like the good floor-model part of Sylvie that fenced in the red, searing thing at the heart of her) get ruined that way. (If they knew, if they knew. Did the conservative-suit warm-glove Mrs. Drexler guess? Did it show in her dancing?) Draw the world the way you want it. Draw it and it will be.

Sylvie tried to focus on the boy she was dancing with. She was supposed to be making a decision, settling, rooting herself forever into this room, the green curtains, the sugar cookies, the foxtrot.

QUICK CUT to Mrs. Drexler. She spins around and claps her hands. She whaps her speculum on the floor three times and a thin kid with chocolate-colored hair and slate eyes sweeps aside his curtain. She crows: But wait, we haven’t opened Doooooor Number Three! Hello, Thomas Walker! Six foot even, Swiss/Polish—ooh, practically Russian! How exotic! I smell a match! Brown/gray, top marks across the board, average sperm count a spectacular twenty-nine million per milliliter! You’re just showing off, young man! Allow me to shake your hand!

Sylvie jittered back and forth as the filmstrip caught. The champagne settled her stomach. A little. Thomas spun her around shyly as the music flourished. He had a romantic look to him. Lovely chocolate brown hair. He was saying something about being interested in the animal repopulation projects going on in the Plains States. His voice was sweet and a little rough and fine, fine, this one is fine, it doesn’t matter, who cares, he’ll never sit in a garage with me and watch the bombs fall on the sheet with the hole in the corner. Close your eyes, spin around three times, point at one of them and get it over with.

IRIS TRANSITION to Mrs. Drexler doing a backflip in her sequined dress. She lands in splits. Mr. and Mrs. Wells and Walker invite you to the occasion of their children’s wedding!

Sylvie pulled the red, thornless rose and snowdrops from her hair and tied their ribbon around Thomas’s rod. She remembered to smile. Thomas himself kissed her, first on the forehead and then on the mouth. A lot of couples seemed to be kissing now. The music had stopped. It’s over, it’s over, Sylvie thought. Maybe I can still see Clark today. It takes time to plan a wedding.

Voices buzzed and spiked behind her. Mrs. Drexler was hurrying over; her face was dark.

ZOOM on Mrs. Drexler: Wait, sorry, wait! I’m sorry we seem to have hit a snag! It appears Thomas and Sylvie here are a little too close for comfort. They should never have been paired at the same Announcement. Our fault, entirely! Sylvie’s Father has been such a boon to the neighborhood! Doing his part! Unfortunately, the great nation of the United States does not condone incest, so you’ll have trade Door Number Three for something a little more your speed. This sort of thing does happen! That’s why we keep such excellent records! CROSS-REFERENCING! Thank you! Mrs. Drexler bows. Roses land at her feet.

Sylvie shut her eyes. The strip juddered; she was crying tracks through her Spotless Corp. Pressed Powder and it was not a film, it was happening. Mrs. Drexler was wearing a conservative brown suit with a gold dove-shaped pin on the lapel and waving a long-stemmed peony for masculine bravery. Thomas was her brother; somehow, there had been a mix-up and he was her brother and other arrangements would have to be made. The boys and girls in a ballroom with her stared and pointed, paired off safely. Sylvie looked up at Thomas. He stared back, young and sad and confused. The snowdrops and roses had fallen off his rod onto the floor. Red on white. Bouffant was practically climbing over Douglas Owens twenty-five million per milliliter like a tree.

In four years Sylvie will be Mrs. Charles Patterson nineteen million per. It’s over and they began to dance. Charles was a swell dancer. He promised to be sweet to her when he got through with training and they were married. He promised to make everything as normal as possible. As little as possible should change. The quintet struck up Mendelssohn.

Sylvie pulled her silence over her and it was good.

Fade to white.

CLOSE-UP of a nice-looking Bobby, a real lantern-jaw, straight-dealing, chiseled type. [Note to Casting: maybe we should consider VP Kroc for this spot. Hair pomade knows no demographic. Those idiots at Brylcreem want to corner the Paternal market? Fine. Let them have their little slice of the pie. Be a nice bit of PR for the re-election campaign, too. Humanize the son of a bitch. Ray Kroc, All-American, Brother to the Common Man. Even he suffers symptomatic hair loss. Whatever—you get the idea. Talk to Copy.] Bobby’s getting dressed in the morning, towel around his healthy, muscular body. [Note to Casting: if we go with Kroc here we’ll have to find a body double.] Looks at himself in the mirror and strokes a five o’clock shadow.

FEMALE VOICE OVER: Do you wake up in the morning to a sink full of disappointment?

PAN DOWN to a clean white sink. Clumps of hair litter the porcelain. [Note to Art Dept: Come on, Stone, don’t go overboard. No more than twenty strands.] Bobby rubs the top of his head. His expression is crestfallen.

VOICE OVER: Well, no more! Now with the radiation-blocking power of lead, All-New Formula Samson Brand Hair Pomade can make you an All-New Man.

Bobby squirts a generous amount of Samson Brand from his tube and rubs it on his head. A blissful smile transforms his face.

VOICE OVER: That feeling of euphoria and well-being lets you know it works! Samson Pomades and Creams have been infused with our patented mood-boosters, vitamins, and just a dash of caffeine to help you start your day out right!

PAN DOWN to the sink. Bobby turns the faucet on; the clumps of hair wash away. When we pan back up, Bobby has a full head of glossy, thick, styled hair. [Note to Art Dept: Go whole hog. When the camera comes back put the VP in a full suit, with the perfect hair—a wig, obviously—and the Senate gavel in his hand. I like to see a little more imagination from you, Stone. Not a good quarter for you.]

VOICE OVER: Like magic, Samson Brand Pomade gives you the confidence you need. [Note to Copy: not sure about ‘confidence’ here. What about ‘peace of mind’ ? We’re already getting shit from the FDA about dosing Brothers with caffeine and uppers. Probably don’t want to make it sound like the new formula undoes Arcadia.]

He gives the camera a thumbs-up. [Note to Art Dept: Have him offer the camera a handshake. Like our boy Ray is offering America a square deal.]

Bold helvetica across mid-screen:

Samson Guards Your Strength.

Fade to white.

Ten Grays

Martin watched his brother. The handsome Thomas. The promising Thomas. The fruitful and multiplying Thomas. Twenty-nine million per mil Thomas. Their father (twenty-four million) didn’t even try to fight his joyful tears as he pinned the golden dove on his son’s chest. His good son. His true son. For Thomas the Office in the city. For Thomas the planning and pleasing and roasted chickens and martinis. For Thomas the children as easy as pencil drawings.

For Martin Stone, two million per milliliter and most of those dead, a package. In a nice box, to be certain. Irradiated teak. It didn’t matter now anyway. Martin knew without looking what lay nestled in the box. A piece of paper and a bottle. The paper was an ordnance unknown until he opened the box. It was a lottery. The only way to be fair. It was his ticket.

It might request that he present himself at his local Induction Center at 0900 at the close of the school year. To be shipped out to the Front, which by then might be in Missouri for all anyone knew. He’d suit up and boot it across the twisted, bubbled moonscape of the Sea of Glass. An astronaut. Bouncing on the pulses from Los Alamos to the Pacific. He would never draw again. By Christmas, he wouldn’t have the fine motor skills.

Or it would request just as politely that he arrange for travel to Washington for a battery of civic exams and placement in government service. Fertile men couldn’t think clearly, didn’t you know? All that sperm. Can’t be rational with all that business sloshing around in there. Husbands couldn’t run things. They were needed for more important work. The most important work. Only Brothers could really view things objectively. Big picture men. And women, Sisters, those gorgeous black-chip girls with 3-Alpha running cool and sweet in their veins. Martin would probably pull Department of Advertising and Information. Most people did. Other than Defense, it was the biggest sector going. The bottle would be Arcadia. For immediate dosage, and every day for the rest of his life. All sex shall be potentially reproductive. Every girl screwing a Brother is failing to screw a Husband and that just won’t do. They said it tasted like burnt batteries if you didn’t put it in something. The first bottle would be the pure stuff, though. Provided by Halcyon, Your Friend in the Drug Manufacturing Business. Martin would remember it, the copper sear on the roof of his mouth. After that, a whole aisle of choices. Choices, after all, make you who you are. Arcadia or Kool. Brylcreem or Samson.

Don’t worry, Martin. It’s a relief, really. Now you can really get to work. Accomplish something. Carve out your place. Sell the world to the world. You could work your way into the Art Department. Keep drawing babies in carriages. Someone else’s perfect quads, their four faces laughing at you forever from glossy pages.

Suddenly Martin found himself clasped tight in his Father’s arms. Pulling the box out of his boy’s hands, reading the news for him, putting it aside. His voice came as rough as warm gin and Martin could hardly breathe for the strength of his Father’s embrace.

Thomas Walker squeezed his Brother’s hand. Martin did not squeeze back.

Velocity Multiplied by Duration

Sylvie’s Father was with them that week. He was proud. They bought a chicken from Mrs. Stone and killed it together, as a family. The head popped off like a cork. Sylvie stole glances at him at the table. She could see it now. The chocolate hair. The tallness. Hannah framed her Presentation Scroll and hung it over the fireplace.

Sylvie flushed her Spotless trousseaux down the toilet.

She wasn’t angry. You can’t get angry just because the world’s so much bigger than you and you’re stuck in it. That’s just the face of it, cookie. A poisoned earth, a sequined dress, a speculum you can play like the spoons. Sylvie wasn’t angry. She was silent. Her life was Mrs. Patterson’s life. People lived in all kinds of messes. She could make rum balls. And treat soil samples and graft cherry varieties and teach some future son or daughter Japanese three weeks a month where no one else could hear. She could look up Bouffant’s friend and buy her a stiff drink. She could enjoy the brief world of solitude and science and birth like red skies dawning. Maybe. She had time.

It was all shit, like that Polish kid who used to hang around the soda fountain kept saying. It was definitely all shit.

On Sunday she went out to the garage again. Vita-Pops and shadows. Clark slipped in like light through a crack. He had a canister of old war footage under his arm. Stalingrad, Berlin, Ottawa. Yellow shirt with green stripes. Nagasaki and Tokyo in ’45, vaporizing like hearts in a vast, wet chest. The first retaliation. Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Berlin and Rome swept clean and blank as pages. Clark reached out and held her hand. She didn’t squeeze back. The silent detonations on the white sheet like sudden balloons, filling up and up and up. It looked like the inside of Sylvie. Something opening over and over, with nowhere to burn itself out but in.

“This is my last visit,” Clark said. “School year’s over.” His voice sounded far away, muffled, like he didn’t even know he was talking. “Car’s coming in the morning. Me and Grud are sharing a ride to Induction. I think we get a free lunch.”

Sylvie wanted to scream at him. She sucked down her pop, drowned the scream in bubbles.

“I love you,” whispered Clark Baker.

On the sheet, the Golden Gate Bridge vanished.

Sylvie rolled the reel back. They watched it over and over. A fleck of nothing dropping out of the sky and then, then the flash, a devouring, brain-boiling, half-sublime sheet of white that blossomed like a flower out of a dead rod, an infinite white everything that obliterated the screen.

Fade to black.

And over the black, a cheerful fat man giving the thumbs up to Sylvie, grinning:

Buy Freedom Brand Film! It’s A-OK!

RAT-CATCHER

Seanan McGuire

Tybalt, you rat-catcher, will you walk?

—William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

London, England, 1666

September

London is burning.

London is burning, and she is dead, and yet I must consider myself victorious, for others yet live. It is a cold comfort. It will have to do. How small a stretch of time stands between here, where all is ashes, and the days when I was innocent and thought myself yet young, and all the world was meant to be my stage . . .

July, 1666

I knew she was there.

Lenet believed she was stealthy, and would perhaps have been correct, had I not been the cat of the Duke’s Theatre for four long years. All the sounds that grand old building could make were known to me . . . including the sound of a barefoot Cait Sidhe girl stalking the rafters like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The footsteps stopped above my head.

“Rand,” Lenet hissed, voice pitched low to keep it from carrying to the audience below. She scarcely needed to bother. The evening’s performance of Romeo and Juliet was in full swing, and no one in the theatre—including me—was looking at anything but the stage.

“Rand!” She sounded more insistent now, and decidedly more annoyed. I considered my options, and decided that ignoring her would have the most amusing result. Besides, I have always loved the fight scenes. I was still watching the stage when my youngest sister dropped from the rafters to the catwalk. It was easily a nine-foot drop, but she made it seemingly without effort—something she couldn’t have managed even two years prior. My little Lenet was growing up.

That sobering thought made it all the easier to ignore her as she stood there, glaring at me and waiting for me to respond. She hissed under her breath, a habit she’d been trying, and failing, to break since kitten-hood. Even so, I did not guess her intention until she lashed out and slapped me hard across the cheek.

The sound of flesh hitting flesh was drowned out by the applause from below us. The crowd was still applauding as she pulled back her hand for another blow.

I raised a finger. She stopped. “You could do that, beloved sister of mine, and as you’re faster than I am, you would likely strike me at least twice more before I dropped you on the nice mortals gathered below us. Do you think you could abandon your current shape before you hit the stage, or would your appearance be the news of all the finest taverns for the next month or so?” I turned to face her, smiling. “Either way, you’d likely be in more trouble than I would.”

This time Lenet hissed openly before snapping, “You’d be the one who pushed me.”

“Yes, but you would be the one who fell.”

She narrowed her eyes and scowled at me. The light from below us made her look truly lovely, with her milk-pale skin and her fog-colored hair. Darker stripes of gray were banded down the length of her braid, showing her pattern. I have always thought tabby girls were the prettiest kind.

“I hate you.”

“I know.”

She sat on the catwalk with a huff, adopting a cross-legged pose that hiked her layered skirts up past her knees in a way the mortals would call indecent. “I truly, truly hate you.”

“So you do, my darling Lenet, so you do, but you love me none the less for it.” I leaned forward to get a better view of the action on the stage. “I do love the way they perform the duels here.”

“You’ve seen this show a dozen times!”

“Closer to a dozen dozens, more likely, and yet I never tire of it.” I glanced away from the actors long enough to grin at her. “Can’t you relax for one evening, and enjoy a little entertainment?”

“No, I can’t, and neither should you.” Lenet grabbed my chin before I could turn my face away again, forcing me to meet her eyes. Her pupils were open to their fullest, reducing her orange irises to delicate rings. She looked utterly, unrepentantly fae. This high above the mortal crowd, there was no point to masquerading as one of their number. “Father wants you.”

“So he sent you to retrieve me? Did he consider, for a moment, that I might refuse to come?”

“He did, yes,” she released my chin.

“And?”

“And if I fail to retrieve you, I’m to be put to work minding the kittens for a week’s time, to teach me obedience.” Her scowl could have frightened Oberon himself. “I won’t mind kittens for you, Rand. You’re coming with me, whether you like it or not.”

“Am I, then?” I raised an eyebrow. “Will you fight me in order to bring me home? Much as I love you, darling Lenet, I doubt you’d come out the winner in that particular contest.”

“I won’t fight you.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll sit here and cry through your precious performance if you refuse to come. And tomorrow night, when my time in the nursery ends, I’ll do the same. And the night after that, and the night after that, until such time as you apologize to me.” Lenet smiled sweetly. “You can save us both a great deal of time and suffering if you simply come with me now.”

I cast a longing look toward the actors. Mercutio was preparing to die, and was layering curses down on both the warring houses in the process. “Are you quite sure Father can’t wait?”

“Come on.” Lenet flowed to her feet with the boneless grace only Cait Sidhe girls possess, grabbing my arm and tugging as she tried to make me follow. “You know how it ends, Rand. The girl dies. The boy dies. Everyone dies. They’re mortals, that’s what they do.”

“I suppose that’s true enough,” I said wistfully. I climbed to my feet more slowly than she had and followed her along the catwalk to the wall. I only glanced back twice; a personal best for leaving while the stage was in use. “Everyone dies.”

If anyone in the audience looked up, they would have seen only two tabby cats, one black and brown, one white and gray, climbing up the curtains that hung around the highest of the theatre windows and vanishing out into the night. So far as I know, no one looked.

• • • •

Lenet remained in feline form until we were three full rooftops away from the Duke’s Theatre. Then she stopped, the air around her filling with the smell of silver birch and crushed chalk, and was two-legged again. “You must stop running off like this, Rand!” she scolded, planting her hands on her hips. It was intended to make her look stern. In actuality, it made me want to ruffle her ears and tell her she was endearing when angry. “Father is furious, and when he’s furious, it’s us that suffer, not you. It’s unfair, is what it is.”

My own magic rose as I shifted forms, scenting the air with pennyroyal and musk. I stood, looking at her mildly as I stretched. She scowled. With Lenet, it was best to be mild as milk and sweet as honey—she couldn’t stand it, and anything which drove her to distraction couldn’t help delighting me.

“I don’t see why you should suffer for my misbehaviors, sweet sister,” I said, widening my eyes in a parody of sincerity. I saw enough of it in my actors; why shouldn’t I take a lesson or two from them? “I shall tell Father straightaway.”

“And he will put you through a wall just as quickly, leaving us to tend your wounds,” Lenet snapped before turning to stalk away, her skirts swishing around her ankles. I followed at an easy pace.

There were two chimneys at the center of the roof, one hot from the fire it hosted, one long cooled. Lenet stopped at the second, shooting a final glare in my direction before grabbing the edge and hoisting herself up.

“You’re coming this time?” she asked.

“I am right behind you; you have my word.”

“Worth the paper it’s not printed on,” she grumbled, shifting to feline form before disappearing down the flue.

Laughing, I took two steps back, and then ran at the chimney, shifting forms at the last possible moment. Four-legged, I fell through the darkness and out of the realm of mortal London, down into the Court of Cats.

• • • •

The Court of Cats exists in the tenuous membrane between the Summerlands and every other realm of mortal or Faerie. As such, it belongs to none and all of them at the same time. Passage is through the shadows which are the burden and birthright of the Cait Sidhe. In London, those shadows were kept open by the will of the King, Ainmire, who had held dominion over our Court for nigh two centuries.

The shadows were cold. I breathed shallowly as I fell, trying to feel the edges of our route. My efforts were to no avail; the shadows remained as thick and secretive as they always did. I still had much to learn about the Shadow Roads. Lenet was more adept at their manipulation, despite having only sixteen years to my twenty. By the time I fell back into the light and shifted to a more human form, she was nowhere to be seen.

The hall which connected to the chimney we had used for passage was broad, apparently hewn from solid oak. I sniffed one of the walls, curiously. It smelled of wood smoke and pitch. “Viking construction,” I said. “Really, Lenet. Too simple.”

“Unless, of course, the guessing game was a distraction,” said Colleen, stepping out of a shadow to my left. I turned toward my older sister, and was thus entirely unprepared when Lenet slammed into me, her hands going straight for my throat. Colleen yawned. “Really, Rand. Too simple.”

I would have answered her, but was preoccupied with the effort of keeping Lenet from throttling the life out of my body. I managed to catch the back of her neck, scruffing her hard. She struggled to be free, writhing against my confining hand. I obliged her, releasing her neck and giving her a shove with my free hand for good measure. Lenet snarled as she stumbled backward before shifting her weight to her toes and leaping again. I was more prepared this time, and stepped to the side, allowing her to slam into the wall.

Colleen sighed, stepping forward to take Lenet by the shoulder and tug her around to face her. “Must I forever be surrounded by children? Let me see, Lenet.” The impact had mashed our little sister’s lips against her teeth, bloodying them. Colleen studied the injury before turning to smile at me. “Very good, little brother. Maybe we won’t be spending another week by your bedside after all.”

I sighed. “Hello, Colleen, you look lovely this evening, it’s always such a pleasure to share the loving bosom of my family with such a glorious sister. To what do I owe the honor of this ambush?”

“Father is angry,” she replied, letting Lenet go. “I grow tired of covering for you.”

“Yet you do it all the same.”

Colleen rolled her eyes. “A failing in my character.”

I took a moment to smile at her. I had long suspected that she and I came from the same mother, although Father would never discuss something as common as lineage. She was calico-patterned, with blocks of black and orange skin even in her human form, and her eyes were a sweet, clear shade of green. There was a certain similarity to our features, once the differences of gender and coloration were accounted for.

“Sweet sister,” I said. “Such a failing should be rewarded. Shall we?”

“Thank Oberon, you’ve seen sense.” She stepped forward and looped her arm through mine. Lenet did the same on my opposite side. “No more running.”

“Not tonight,” I agreed, affably enough, and allowed my sisters to pull me down the hall toward the inevitable.

• • • •

In my twenty years, I had never seen a Court of Cats outside of mortal London, or the fae Kingdom of Londinium. As such, I did not know whether they were all controlled by fear and rage. What little I’d heard from the cats who passed through with traveling humans caused me to believe some Courts might, in fact, be kinder places for a kit who dreamt of things more fanciful than simple power. Not that it would have mattered if every other Court of Cats was a paradise second only to Tirn Ailil itself. The Court of Fogbound Cats was my home. I, and my sisters, called that Court’s King our Father.

The three of us shifted to our four-legged forms, the better to navigate the rigging connecting the throne room to the rest of the Court. Father’s assemblies were conducted in what was once the hold of a Spanish sailing galleon, before it was sunk in the mortal world and drifted into the Court of Cats, where all lost things go. How it came into Father’s possession was a mystery to me, and likely to remain so. There was much he did not choose to tell me, nor ever would.

Jars filled with witch-light were studded randomly around the room, providing illumination for our changeling cousins while leaving shadows for the rest of us to come and go as we pleased. Father was seated in his throne at the head of the room, as he so often was, with two of his current doxies competing for possession of his lap. One was a pretty calico who looked too much like Colleen for comfort; the other had the dark hands and pale complexion of the Siamese, with the bright blue eyes to match.

Those blue eyes cast a measuring glance in our direction as my sisters and I stood, stretching feline limbs into human lankiness. Her nose wrinkled, and she turned her head to murmur in my father’s ear, the cant of her chin telegraphing her displeasure as plainly as a twitching tail.

Whatever result she’d been hoping for, I doubt it was the one she got. Father raised his head, eyes narrowing to baleful slits. Then he stood, sending the women sprawling as he stalked toward us. I smiled, stepping forward to meet him.

“Hello, Father. My dear sister was kind enough to inform me that you—”

His hand closed around my throat, cutting off most of my air supply. I forced myself to keep smiling as he jerked me toward him, snarling into my face, “You were bid to be present when the sun went down. The sun has been down for some time. How do you answer this?”

I coughed, endeavoring to look piteous. It wasn’t as difficult as it might have been; the lack of oxygen was beginning to make my lungs ache. He dropped me, hissing in disgust.

“I was otherwise engaged,” I said, rubbing my throat and making no effort to rise. To do so too quickly would just result in his slapping me down again. “I apologize for my delinquency. To what do I owe the honor of this summons?”

Father glared. I looked innocently back, the very picture of the faithful Prince awaiting the word of his King. It’s a look I had had great occasion to cultivate, since I desired neither challenge nor exile.

I had two brothers, once. They were not so good as I at playing the foolish son—and until such time as Father found a younger brother to bear home to my sisters and I, he would no more press me to challenge him than I would rush the moment.

“You are to go to the Divided Courts,” spat Father, finally. “An envoy has been requested for the latest of their assemblies. To show respect, I must send a member of the family. To show scorn, I am sending them you.”

“Your faith in me will not go unrewarded, Father!” I caroled, bounding to my feet with as much vigor as I could muster. My throat ached, but I would not show weakness; not here, not with him watching my every move. “When shall I depart?”

His smile was terrible to behold. “That is why I summoned you at sunset, my dear boy. They expect you at any moment. You will have to travel the shadows—and you will have to do so on your own.”

He turned away, walking back to his throne and the waiting arms of his doxies. When I looked back at my sisters, they would not meet my eyes. All too aware of what awaited me, I raised my chin and walked out of the throne room.

• • • •

My first passage through the shadows occurred when I was eight years of age, still a kitten finding my feet. My father, in his infinite wisdom, opened the door to the Shadow Roads, threw me through, and closed the door again. It was the last of the trials intended to prove that I was, indeed, a Prince of Cats, and not merely another mouth for him to trouble himself feeding.

Colleen found me in a London alleyway three hours later, unconscious, half-frozen, and naked. It was a blessing that I’d not been found by the city’s mortal populace as I lay there, clearly inhuman, and just as clearly defenseless. But I had survived; that was what mattered. I was named a potential heir to Father’s Court the very next day, and the torment commenced in earnest. Ah, well; it was better than the alternatives.

The shadows in the hall slid open under my hand and I stepped into the biting cold, trying desperately to command the path to open ahead of me. This was nothing so simple as navigating the comparatively comfortable and well-traveled path between the rooftops of London and the Court of Cats; this was a branch of the Shadow Roads that was little enough walked to be balky, and to make me yearn for Lenet’s advanced skill as I navigated through the dark.

After what seemed an interminable amount of time, the shadows parted in front of me, and I stepped, shivering, onto the polished marble floor of the royal knowe. The air smelled of sweet posies, and windows on every wall afforded a clear view of the starlit Summerlands sky. I walked with as much grace as I could muster to the nearest of those windows, sitting down upon the sill while I waited for the ache in my lungs to abate.

“I am here, and not eternally lost in frozen darkness,” I said, philosophically. “Things can always be worse.”

“True, but can they be more amusing?”

The voice was female and familiar. I smiled despite the ache in my chest as I turned. “My lady. I would bow, but at the moment, I fear it would land me on either my head or my tail, with no way to predict which would suffer greater damage.”

“As your lack of brain will necessitate your trading upon your looks for most of your life, I suggest your tail.” The owner of the voice was a tall, slender Daoine Sidhe with shockingly red hair and eyes yellow enough to have caused me to tease her, on several occasions, about her clear Cait Sidhe ancestry. She had none, more’s the pity; she would have made a fabulous cat.

We met when circumstance caused me to pursue a mouse into her bedchambers. It’s rare that a woman makes her first impression upon me with a broom handle to my skull, but that was September. Rare, indeed, especially for a lady of the Daoine Sidhe. She was the best of them.

“My lady’s will be done.” I stood, offering her my hands. “My sweet September. I have counted the seconds we were apart.”

“Please don’t let my husband hear you say that,” she said, taking my hands in hers and squeezing them lightly. “Come along, Rand. The court has already been called to order, and your tardiness reflects poorly on your father.”

“What a shame,” I said blandly, and allowed her to lead me down the hall to the royal receiving room.

The Court of Cats is made up of the world’s lost things, rooms and halls and narrow spaces stitched together with enchantments too ancient to see. The knowe of the King and Queen of Londinium was something altogether different, a vast palace beyond the wildest dreams of any mortal regent. It was one of the oldest knowes in all of Britain, and it carried a weight of history that was impressive even by the standards of the fae. Being a cat, I strolled along as if I was not impressed in the least.

“What is this about, this summons?” I asked. “Have your brothers been naughty again? I would be pleased to stand witness to their banishment.”

“Nothing so pleasant for you, I’m afraid.” September looked at me, the levity gone from her eyes. “The Undersea has sent an ambassador, but he has refused to present his message to the court until a representative of every fief and household in the city proper was present—including the Court of Cats.”

I frowned. “That’s troublesome, and quite strange, but I do not see the gravity.”

“The ambassador is Merrow. The message is Roane.”

“Ah.” I swallowed, wishing my human form had a tail that I could lash in my dismay. “I suppose we had best hurry, then.”

“Yes,” September agreed. “We had best.”

• • • •

Of the Roane, only three things need be known: that they see the future, but never clearly; that few of them remain among the living; and that the one disaster they did not foretell was the one which killed the greater part of their number. Some believe they saw even that coming and decided to allow it, believing the loss of their lives would balance some greater tragedy ahead. Perhaps I am a selfish man, but I cannot believe they knew what was coming and chose to simply let it happen.

What few Roane remained after the slaughter were taken in by the courts of the Undersea, where they have been cosseted and protected as prophets ever since. For a Roane to be sent to the land was near unprecedented . . . and while I was young, I had yet to encounter anything that was both unprecedented and pleasant.

September raised a finger to her lips, signaling for quiet as we reached the throne room doors. Two pages in royal livery waited there, both Tylwyth Teg. They bowed and opened the doors, allowing us to slip inside and join the crowd already assembled. September had spoken the truth. There were over twenty independent fiefdoms within the city of London alone, and at least twice that many people occupied the room, looking as anxious and unsettled as actors gathered for a first rehearsal. The King and Queen would be the theatre’s patrons, then, sitting on their thrones with the bulk of the assembly before them. That left the director’s role for the shark-eyed Merrow standing in front of the thrones. A slip of a girl with hair the color of a seal’s pelt hung from his hand like a rag, barely supporting her own weight.

The King raised his head when the door swung closed. His lips pressed together in a hard line as he saw me. “The Court of Cats has finally seen fit to grace us with a guest,” he said, and looked to the Merrow. “Might you tell us now why you have come? We are consumed with curiosity.”

From the murmuring of the assembled, it was plain the King did not employ the royal “we” in this instance. Everyone here wanted to know, myself included. I slipped away from September, working my way through the crowd with a cat’s skill. In only a few moments, I was near the front, where I could better see the Merrow and his silver-haired companion.

“We have come at the bidding of King Murtagh, who has long appreciated the relationship between Londinium and his own lands, and who wished to send a warning to you while warnings might still do some good.” The Merrow addressed his words, not to the King and Queen, but to the crowd. Interesting, that.

“And what is this ‘warning’ ?” asked the King, barely keeping the annoyance from his tone.

“A moment, sire.” The Merrow turned to the waif who dangled from his hand, crouching to look through the curtain of her hair. “Naia? It’s time to speak now, dear heart, and then we can go home. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? To go home?”

The Roane girl nodded, so slightly that it might have been only a tremble. Then she raised her head, turning eyes the blue of a midday sky on the room. She looked as if she only half-saw us. The rest of her gaze was far away, looking at something I was grateful not to see.

“The waves will keep us safe,” she said, in a faltering voice. “The land has no such merciful protection.”

“That’s true, my dear,” he said. “Can you tell the land what they need protection from?”

“Ah.” She stood up a little straighter, brushing the hair from her face with her free hand. Gaze suddenly focusing on the present, she said, “The fires will come, and though many will run, few will survive the burning. In their wake will come sickness such as has never been seen before nor will be seen again, and it will be a second burning, one that kills without concern for fae or mortal bloodlines. Few who call Londinium home will survive those fires, and royal lines will be henceforth shattered into history and dust.”

The room went completely silent as she spoke, all but holding its collective breath. Naia looked from face to face, expression thoughtful.

“I have seen many of you before, in the motion of the water,” she said finally. “Too many have I seen on night-haunt wings. Flee this land while the future can yet be changed. Stay, and may the mercy of the waters be upon you.” The clarity fled her eyes, and she turned back to her companion, whimpering, “Can we go home now? Please? This place is too dry, and too vast, and set too soon by far to burn.”

“Yes, dear one, we can go. You have done well.” The Merrow twisted to look at the King and Queen. “Three seers have brought the same vision to our King. Fires, and sickness, such as will kill whomever remains here. If you would save your people, evacuate and leave your lands. If you will not do so . . . then may Oberon have mercy, for the flames, I fear, will not.”

The crowd parted to let the Merrow and his companion walk from the room, Naia leaning on him like he was the only thing keeping her upright. The silence lasted only until the pair had left the room. Then the gathering erupted, everyone demanding answers, information, reassurance—all things the King and Queen, being as stunned as the rest of us, were hard-pressed to give.

I made my way back through the crowd to September, who was standing frozen beside the doors. “I should carry this news home, and quickly,” I said. “Will you be well?”

September laughed uncomfortably. “I will tell Malcolm it’s time to visit his family in Wales. He’ll be delighted, I’m sure. Don’t worry for me, Sir Cat.” She reached out, grabbing one of my hands in both of hers, and smiled. “I’m a Torquill. No matter what, we survive. We’re frankly annoying in that regard.”

“See to it that you do,” I commanded, and pulled my hand from hers. The room behind me still alive with outraged voices, I slipped out into the hall and began to make my way home.

• • • •

Fear is a great motivator, and urgency a great enhancer of skill. My journey back to the Court of Cats was only half so difficult as the journey outward had been, and I felt barely chilled when I stepped out of the shadows. I was in another of our endlessly interchangeable halls, this one stone-walled, with tattered tapestries adding little warmth. I stopped before I’d taken three full steps, raising my head and sniffing the air. Then I sighed.

“Please come out,” I said. “This is not the time, and my nerves are too frayed by far to be a pleasant opponent in a game of catch-the-mouse.”

“You’re no fun when you’re serious,” declared Lenet, stepping from behind one of the tapestries. Then she frowned, pupils narrowing. “You’re pale. Rand, are you well? What ails you?”

“Is Colleen here?” I looked around the hall again, consumed with the sudden need to see the both of my sisters alive and well. “Colleen, come out. I have no patience for games.”

A calico cat slunk out of the shadows at the base of one wall, and stood, resolving itself into my sister. Her frown melted into a look of concern that mirrored Lenet’s. “Brother?”

I stepped forward, grabbing each of them with one arm and sweeping them into a crushing three-part embrace. Lenet squeaked, sounding almost like a kitten herself. Then they both embraced me back, purring soothingly. I buried my face in their shoulders, breathing in the reassuring scent of them, Lenet’s crushed chalk and silver birch, Colleen’s thistles and juniper. Dimly, I realized that my shoulders were slumped, the sheer terror of the Roane’s prediction pressing down on them like leaden weights.

London, and Londinium, were to burn. Whatever disaster was ahead of the city, the normal delineation between worlds would not protect those of us who lived there.

“Rand, what’s wrong?” asked Colleen.

I pulled away from their embrace, keeping hold of their arms as I studied their faces. They looked back at me, wide-eyed and bewildered.

“If I told you that we had to run, leave this Court and flee as far as legs would carry us, would you go?” I asked, urgently. “Would you trust me, and follow me, and not ask why?”

Colleen raised her hand, rubbing its edge along my cheek. “You know we couldn’t. Father would find us, and the punishment would be worse than whatever fate you had us flee.”

I sighed. “Would that I were half so sure as you.” I stepped back, letting the pair of them go. “I must go meet with Father. Will you attend?”

“Gladly,” said Lenet, offering her hand. Colleen did the same, and hand in hand, the three of us walked down the hall to the room where the King our father was waiting.

• • • •

Luck, of a kind, was with us; after all the importance Father had placed on my going to the Court of Londinium without delay, he had chosen to show his own disdain for their message by disappearing on some errand of his own. The throne room was deserted. I walked to his throne, placing a hand upon the cushion softening it. The fabric was cool. He had been gone for some time; possibly even as long as I had. I bit back a curse, stepping back and turning to face Lenet and Colleen. They hung back some feet away, watching me with wary eyes.

“Where is he?”

“Father no more reports his movements to us than you to him,” said Lenet. “What is this? Why do you fret and not speak of the reasons?”

“Be kind, Lenet. His message may be for his King’s ears only.”

Lenet hissed, cuffing Colleen hard across the face. Colleen hissed back, but didn’t hit her. Lenet raised her hand again, bobbing it in the air like she might strike.

I sighed. “Amusing as this is, this is not the time.”

Now the looks they turned toward me were baffled, like I had suddenly declared my intent to sever all ties with the Court of Cats and join the Cu Sidhe in their baying at the moon. “Brother, are you well?” asked Colleen.

“No.” I shook my head. “I am not well at all. Father bound you to fetch me to him once before; I beg you, do the same again. When he returns, come for me. I must speak to him, and I must do my speaking soon.”

“Where will you be?” asked Colleen.

“Where I always am, when there are things I should rather avoid.” A faint smile tugged at my lips. “I’m going to the theatre.”

• • • •

The night’s performance was long over, the crowd dispersed back into the streets. The sound of voices drifted from the rear of the stage, where some of the cast and crew had doubtless gathered for a laugh before returning to the hovels they called home. Ah, the glamorous life of the theatre. I walked in that direction with my tail held high and my ears pricked forward, confident that my compatriots would sense nothing of my distress in my demeanor. They were only human, after all.

The Cait Sidhe, more than almost any other breed of fae, have always co-existed with humanity. There’s some question as to whether man domesticated the cat, or whether the Cait Sidhe domesticated man and decided to share the spoils of our labor with our little mortal cousins. Whatever the reality, the truth of the matter is that where there are men, there have always been cats, and cream, and Cait Sidhe hiding their true nature behind a purr.

The first to spot me was Dick Allington, the company’s erstwhile director. “Look! Tom’s come to cast approval on our performance!” he roared, saluting my entrance with his flask. “Were we successful, old boy? Did we pack the stalls with feet enough to kick loose some tasty rats for your supper?”

I walked over to him, stopping some three feet distant. There I sat, wrapping my tail about my legs, and miaowed as piteously as I could. The men laughed.

“No rats for Old Tom tonight, Dicky! I told you the second act needed work!” Peter Skelling was a man of all roles and a master of none. He’d played near every part the theatre held title to, and done them all diffidently well, with nothing to either shame or recommend him. There was something to be said for a man who devoted so much time and energy to being unrelentingly average.

“Then it will have to be cream and cold chicken again, eh, Tom?” Dick leaned forward to scratch beneath my chin. I closed my eyes, submitting to the familiarity. After so many years in this theatre, these men were owed at least that much from me.

The thought was almost laughable in its absurdity. A Cait Sidhe, owing anything to a human? It was unthinkable. And yet it was so, and I would have done anything to spare them from what was yet to come.

Anything but break the veil of silence that stood between Faerie and the mortal world. There are things too precious to be broken for the sake of a room full of mortal men.

“Here, sir,” said a voice—young, barely broken, the human equivalent of a half-grown kitten. I turned, opening my eyes. Young Tom, the boy who played the company’s female roles and children, knelt beside me, setting two dishes on the floor. One held the promised chicken; the other, milk, instead of cream. Close enough, considering I had come to say farewell. I moved toward the dishes, bending my head toward the chicken.

Tom dared a scratch behind my ears as I ate. I did not protest, but hunkered down to eat, tail-tip twitching. The men roared laughter once again.

“He’s finally learning to love you as we do, Tommy,” said Peter. “Why, that’s the first time I’ve seen you touch Old Tom without paying blood for the privilege.”

I flattened one ear, making it plain that I was listening. The men continued talking, blissfully unaware that I could understand them.

The chicken was plain but pleasant; the milk, slightly sour, but drinkable all the same. I ate perhaps half of each before rising, stretching my back into an eloquent crescent, and beginning to make my rounds of the room. Half the company was here, at best, but it would have to do, for I could not risk this again.

At each man, I stopped, butted my head against knees or shins, and then miaowed. They laughed and commented on how affectionate I was, none of them knowing that what I said, over and over, was “You must leave London at once. Please, friends, while there is still time.”

When my circuit brought me back to Dick, I leapt into his lap and stood, my rear paws on his knee and my forepaws on his chest. He laughed. I patted his cheek with one paw, claws carefully velveted, and miaowed again.

“Oh, you’re a good lad, Tom. A theatre is only as good as its cat, I say.” Dick’s hand caressed my ears with the ease of long practice. I set up a rumbling purr, dropping back to his lap and folding myself into a loaf. These men, who had never exchanged a word with me and knew nothing of my place or station . . . these men were some of the truest friends I had ever known.

I remained where I was until a burst of laughter from Peter caused me to open my eyes and turn to look at him. “Tom, you old rascal, you didn’t tell us you had such pretty girlfriends!” He was pointing to the door, where two cats—one a delicate tabby, the other a larger, but still lovely, calico—sat, tails wrapped around their legs, looking at us.

Colleen miaowed. Only once, but that was all that I required. I stood, stretching languidly, and butted my head one last time against Dick’s chest before jumping down and walking to my sisters. The men laughed, Dick calling, “Off home to the wives, eh, Tom? Hope you’ve been well-behaved, for I’d hate to see a cat put into the dog’s house!”

The sound of their laughter followed us out of the theatre. They had been my friends; they had been the best of humanity. I had killed a hundred rats to please them; I had viewed near as many performances on that lonely stage. And I would never see any of them again.

• • • •

We made our way back to the rooftops before resuming our human forms, the mingled scents of our magic mixing with the sweet decay of the London summer night. Lenet turned to face me, walking backward along the edge of the roof.

“Father returned in a temper,” she said. “He did not expressly send us to retrieve you and may well be angry over our absence by now. I hope you have reason for what you do tonight, Rand, and are not merely trying to be troublesome.”

“I always have reasons for my actions, dear sister,” I said.

“Then why to the theatre? Why back to your human pets?”

“I had to say goodbye to them.”

Colleen cast me a startled, wide-eyed glance. Lenet looked at me appraisingly before she turned to face our destination, walking normally once more. Neither of them said anything as we walked, and I allowed the silence to hold. There was nothing here for any of us to say.

The shadows seemed to part a trifle easier this time, perhaps because I was too tired to fight against them. We emerged just outside the throne room door, Colleen a few steps before me, Lenet the same distance behind. Neither of them attacked as I straightened, caught my breath, and walked toward the door. They knew as well as I did that this was not the time, even if they were not so clear as to the reasons why.

I hesitated at the doorway, wondering if there was any other way than this. Could I take my sisters and follow September and her husband to his homeland, far from Londinium? I’d played at theatre’s cat, and to play at housecat would not be so great a stretch. We would be safe. We would be in the company of friends.

We would be traitors, and while we might yet be cats, we would no longer be Cait Sidhe. I breathed slowly out, and opened the door.

Father’s doxies were not in evidence; nor were the other members of his Court. The silence was almost palpable as I walked in, my sisters behind me. Our feet made no sound. My oldest brother used to stomp when he walked, more human than feline, no matter how often Father tried to beat it out of him. I had barely thought of Carr in years—not since the day he challenged for the Kingship, and lost. The room had been just this quiet on that day, when it was his turn to walk toward the throne, and five of us stood arrayed behind him.

Cailin paid the price of his transgression, pretty little Cailin, with her black and white fur and her smile like the morning. Would it be Lenet or Colleen who paid the price of mine if I failed?

I could not fail. “Hello, Father.” My words fell into the silence like stones. “I must speak with you. It is a matter of some grave importance.”

He raised his head, expression calculating. “You overreach yourself, kit. I choose what holds importance in this Court.”

“You sent me to hear a message.”

“Is that what I sent you to do? I thought I sent you to silence the whining of the Divided Courts and buy me peace. Peace which you are now disrupting.”

I took a slow breath, silently begging Oberon for strength. Then, carefully, I said, “The Undersea sent an ambassador who tended to their message—tended, not tendered, for she was a Roane girl, and not some simple proclamation.” The first spark of interest came into his eyes. I continued: “She said the city was to burn, and all of Londinium with it. The division of the worlds will not protect us. We must flee, Father. That is what the Roane’s vision told her, and what she carried here, to us. We must flee, or surely we will burn.” And those who did not burn would face a death even less forgiving. He had to see the sense of flight. He had to understand—

There was no warning before he struck. Ainmire had been King too long for that. One moment, he was in his throne and the next, he was slamming me to the ground. I had barely seen him move. He placed a foot against my chest, pinning me down, and roared, more lion than housecat. I struggled to free myself, scrabbling uselessly at his ankle.

“You do not dictate here!” he snarled, and bent, taking his foot away before he grabbed me by my shoulders, claws piercing skin and flesh through the fabric of my shirt and waistcoat. “I am King! I say whether we stand or run! I protect us, and no fire will drive me from my Kingdom!” He shook me, claws digging deeper. “Do you understand?”

I looked into the yellow-ringed darkness of his eyes, and saw that there was no reasoning with him. Still, I had to try. Struggling to keep my voice level despite the pain, I said, “You are King, Father, but the fire will not care. The Roane are never wrong. If we stay, we will burn.”

“As long as I am King, we stay.” He dropped me, hard, like he would discard a piece of garbage. “What do you say to that, kitten?”

I closed my eyes.

Kings and Queens of Cats are made, yes, but Princes and Princesses are born. Only some Cait Sidhe have the power required to take the throne, and much to the annoyance of our rulers, very few of us breed true. So far as I knew, all of the kittens Ainmire had been able to sire had been Cait Sidhe, pure and simple—rare things, to be sure, but not nobility in waiting.

Without challengers to come from within, he left himself open to challenge from without. No roving King would challenge a Court with a Prince who might yet take it. So our father, in his wisdom, spent years purchasing potential heirs. Three boys to challenge for his throne, none trained to win it. Three girls, to hold those boys in check, and remind them of the consequences of their actions.

Cailin died when Carr failed his challenge for the throne. Arles chose exile over battle, leaving me with two hostages to my name: Lenet, and Colleen. For their sake, I had never dared come this close to challenge.

For their sake, I had no other choice.

“I say, Father, that I am no longer a kitten.” I opened my eyes, smiling as blithely as I could while my stomach shriveled to a solid knot of fear. The rules of chivalry and gentle conduct belong to the Divided Courts, and not to the Court of Cats. We respect only blood. “Nor, I am afraid, are you a King.”

I launched myself at him almost before I finished speaking, claws fully extended. He roared, swatting me aside. It was reflex on his part, and reflex which acted in my favor, as I went sprawling but was not cut any deeper. I scrambled to my feet and leapt again—and this time, Father let me hit him, let me dig my claws deep into his chest.

I did not see the trap until it was too late. His hand closed around the back of my neck, yanking me loose and shaking me until my teeth rattled. I kicked at his belly, slicing and tearing until the hot, copper-bright smell of his blood filled the air. He roared again, slamming me to the floor so hard that something snapped in my chest.

“Kitten,” he spat, foot catching me in the belly. “Boy. Weakling. I let you live this long because of that, but you’re as addled as your brothers were.” I hissed weakly, trying to rise. He kicked me again, knocking the last of the wind from my lungs, and I sank back to the floor. “What am I to do with you? Hmm?” He knelt so I could see his face, and smiled. “I know. Sleep well, little prince. You have failed me for the last time.”

His hand caught me in the middle of my chest, and before I realized what he was doing, I was falling into the endless black of the Shadow Roads. A glimmer of light above me exposed the door he had opened to push me through . . . and then that slammed with the finality of an executioner’s axe coming down, and all was dark, and cold.

• • • •

I do not know how long I fell, only that nothing came stop my falling. Holding the faces of my sisters firmly in my mind, I forced myself to stretch a hand into the black and grab the edge of the doorway I told myself was there. My fall continued a few seconds more before my fingers hit something solid, jerking the rest of me to a halt. I hung there, suspended and surprised.

Then I began to climb.

My ribs were aching, and the pain in my stomach was worse. I continued climbing, focusing on getting to someone who could help. The Cait Sidhe harm. We do not heal. Lenet and Colleen needed me to get back to them—needed me to finish challenging Father, before he . . . before . . .

I pulled myself further up, reached out, and opened a door out of darkness, into light.

September looked up from the trunk she was packing as I stumbled out of her wardrobe. Her eyes went wide. I attempted to say something witty to put her mind at ease—anything at all—but the words refused to come. I hit the floor a moment later, and fell into a second, much warmer, darkness.

• • • •

The pain in my ribs was gone when I woke, as were my clothes. I was tucked into a large bed, with a goose feather duvet stretched across me. I sat up, stretched, and rose, heading out in search of my hostess—or, failing that, my clothing.

I met September halfway down the hall, a bundle in her arms. She stopped when she saw me. “You’re awake,” she said, after a moment’s uncomfortable silence.

I bowed. “I am, and feeling much the better. Your gracious hospitality is a true credit to your court. Now, if I might be reunited with my trousers, I truly must be going. Not that modesty moves me, but there is something of a draft within the shadows, and I prefer to be covered.”

Wordlessly, she held her bundle out to me. I took it, unrolling it to reveal my clothes. I was unsurprised to note that my waistcoat was gone. The tears from Father’s claws were doubtless impossible to mend. “You are too kind to a wayward fool,” I said gravely, and bowed again before beginning to dress.

September found her voice as I tied the front of my trousers, saying, “What is going on, Rand? You fell from nowhere.”

“Ah.” I glanced up at her. “I fell from the Shadow Roads, where I was thrown upon failing to kill my father. I’m afraid there’s no choice in the matter now. I must kill him or let the Court of Fogbound Cats burn, and my sisters with it. I do appreciate your hospitality, my lady. You are the best of your kind.”

“Rand—” She took a step forward, one hand out as if to reach for me. Then she stopped, realizing who she was, who I was, and pulled her hand away. “Good luck, my friend.”

I mustered a smile. “There is no luck, lady. But your wishes warm my heart. Now fly before the flames arrive.” I turned, not letting myself look back—looking back has never brought anything but misfortune and pain—as I parted the shadows at the base of the nearest wall and stepped into the dark.

• • • •

For the first time, the shadows did not fight me. I had faced them without fear, fought through them to a chosen destination, and now, at last, they conceded my authority. I ran through darkness, cutting through the space between the Lady Torquill’s halls and the Court of my father. In what seemed like only seconds, I was bursting back out into the world.

I landed on my feet, surrounded by a stunned ring of Cait Sidhe. “Father! Face me!”

The man at the room’s far end turned slowly, revealing the grave face of the man who bought me, raised me, and played the only parent I had ever known. I caught the briefest glimpse of the figure before him as he moved. She was pale and unmoving, and I did not need to see her face; her hair was like the London fog.

My heart died a little in that moment. I had come as swiftly as I could. I had come too late. “She did nothing wrong,” I half-whispered.

“She failed to counsel you to patience,” Ainmire replied. “She was never fit to be a Queen.”

“She was my sister, and I loved her.”

“Then you should have thought before you struck me.” He began to circle, setting the edges of what would be our battleground. The Cait Sidhe fell back, opening space. None would interfere. Not here; not with this. “You knew what you did. You did it all the same.”

“If we stay here, all of us will die.”

“How would you know that? The mortal world has burned before, and the seal-kin are not our kind. Their prophecies do not bind us.” He raised a hand, claws gleaming in the witch-light. “The world can always do with fewer human rats.”

“She was my sister,” I repeated, and leapt. Not toward him—into the darkness. The shadows opened for my passage, closing behind me.

Father’s frustrated roars still echoed through the room when I slipped out of the shadows, now feline-formed and clinging to the beams closest to the ceiling. I kept low as I slunk along, waiting until I was close to the wall before miaowing loudly, and leaping back into the shadows.

I emerged in the room’s furthest corner, and watched as Father transformed himself into a cat and scrambled up the nearest tapestry to the rafters where he stalked, snarling. I straightened on two legs, cupped my mouth, and called, “Hadn’t you best kill me quick, Father? Your subjects will begin to question your command.”

He hissed before he leapt. That was all the warning I needed. I dove back into the darkness.

I expected to tire. I expected him to follow me onto the Shadow Roads, catch me by the throat, and break my body against the dark. Neither happened. My fear and anxiety were gone, replaced by a cold core of anger. He would endanger his subjects for nothing but his pride, and his unwillingness to risk losing his Court. A fair concern, but not worth a single life. He backed me into challenging him, and Lenet—ah, Lenet, my darling girl—paid the cost of his machinations. Nothing I could do this day would bring her back to me.

Navigating him into the desired position took what felt like hours, but was doubtless only minutes. I was a theatre cat. I knew the importance of blocking. When he stepped into the center of the room, below the point where once the sailors hung their nets to dry, I saw my cue, and I took it.

My drop from the rafters caught him off-guard. He snarled and grabbed for me, but my arm was already locked around his neck, and my knees against the sides of his ribcage. He struggled, magic gathering as he prepared to shift forms. I tightened my grip, hissing in his ear, “I will snap your neck if you become smaller than I am. Concede, Father. Do not make me kill you.”

His roar was muffled by the lack of air. Choking, he stumbled forward, one hand outstretched, while the other clawed vainly at my arm. I squeezed tighter, trying to hold the thought of Lenet—pretty Lenet, who was my sister—in my mind. She should not have died. None of them should have died.

“You . . . want . . . to escape . . . a fire?” he wheezed. “Fine . . . then. I hope you . . . freeze.” His magic rose again, this time not to transform, but to open the door onto the Shadow Roads. He tumbled through it, me still on his back, arm still tight around his neck.

When the shadows opened again some small time later, I stepped out alone. The Court looked at me for a long, appraising moment. In the back of the room, one of Father’s doxies began to cry. I watched them impassively.

Then Colleen stepped forward and said, “The King is dead.”

“The Prince has died in slaying him,” I replied.

She nodded, accepting my ritual response. “Who claims the crown?”

I thought of Lenet in the rafters of the Duke’s Theatre, pulling me away before the play could end. I thought of Mercutio, who played the fool, and died for his sins.

Princes die when they become Kings. It is the way of things. But oh, I would miss the foolish Prince I had been.

“Tybalt, King of the Court of Fogbound Cats,” I said.

The Court roared its approval.

• • • •

It was no small task to convince the Court of Cats to leave. Over and over, I repeated the Roane’s message, until I began to understand, at least a little, why Father had been as he was. Cait Sidhe do not respond well to anything but shows of force. So I showed them force, drove them from Londinium with tooth and claw and threats of worse to come if they did not leave me be.

By the end of the first month, the knowes of the Divided Courts were empty shells, drained of everything that once made them so grand. I prowled their halls, watching the shadows creep in and claim them, and wondered how many of them would fall down into the dark, making the Court of the Cats even greater.

By the middle of the second month, only two Cait Sidhe remained in all of Londinium. “Come with me,” said Colleen, grabbing my hand. “Please. I do not wish to see you burn.”

“And I do not wish to see another sister gone to the night-haunts.” I pulled my hand away. “You are all the family I have left, Colleen. You must go. When this city burns, I would know that you were far from here, free and happy and alive.”

“What am I to do?”

I smiled a bit, caressing her cheek. “Find a theatre. Be their cat. Keep the rats from the costumes, and the shadows from the stage.”

She nodded. “I wish you would come.”

“And I wish you would go.”

“Please.”

“If I go, who will hold this Kingdom?” I looked at her solemnly. “Another King will come and establish a Court if I am not here to stop him. It is the nature of cats. And when the city burns, all their deaths will be on my conscience.”

Colleen laughed. “A cat with a conscience. Is there anything more pitiful?”

“A king without a court, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.” She sighed. “Open roads, dear brother.”

“Sweet shadows, and may the world forever run a step behind you.”

“I will miss you,” she said. Darting forward, she kissed my cheek. Then she whirled, pulling the shadows aside like the curtains of a stage. She dove into the darkness and was gone, leaving only me, and my ghosts, behind her.

• • • •

Day by day, I stalked the streets of London, waiting for the flames. And still, when they came, I was not prepared. A mortal bakery caught fire in the night, setting streets and blocks ablaze before anyone realized what was happening. The knowes of the Divided Courts, abandoned by their holders, were not fully sealed; pixies, fleeing for their lives, pried open a door they should have left alone. Their burning wings and hair ignited tapestries and carpets, and Londinium burned alongside her mortal sister.

Prophecies are tricky things. Had the custodians of those knowes not fled, would the doors have held their seals? Would the pixies have been left outside to burn, while all the Divided Courts and Court of Cats remained safely in our bolt holes?

I think not. I think that, once the fire was seen, it had to come, and the only question was who would be left to burn. But perhaps I think that because to do otherwise is to yield to madness. London rests in the hand of the first fire, with the second yet to come. Lenet is dead, and with her, the boy who loved her as a sister and a friend. The night-haunts could not come for that simple Prince. He died in darkness all the same. I had become a King of Cats, and buried the Prince in shadows.

I sat on the edge of the Tower Bridge, watching London burn, and wondered whether the cold would ever leave me—or whether, in the measure of things, I would want it to. London is burning, Lenet is dead. I am Tybalt, King of Cats, and all the rest . . .

All the rest is silence.

EQUOID

Charles Stross

“Bob! Are you busy right now? I’d like a moment of your time.”

Those thirteen words never bode well—although coming from my new manager, Iris, they’re less doom-laden than if they were falling from the lips of some others I could name. In the two months I’ve been working for her Iris has turned out to be the sanest and most sensible manager I’ve had in the past five years. Which is saying quite a lot, really, and I’m eager to keep her happy while I’ve got her.

“Be with you in ten minutes,” I call through the open door of my office; “got a query from HR to answer first.” Human Resources have teeth, here in the secretive branch of the British government known to its inmates as the Laundry; so when HR ask you to do their homework—ahem, provide one’s opinion of an applicant’s suitability for a job opening—you give them priority over your regular work load. Even when it’s pretty obvious that they’re taking the piss.

I am certain that Mr. Lee would make an extremely able addition to the Office Equipment Procurement Team, I type, if he was not already—according to your own goddamn database, if you’d bothered to check it—a lieutenant in the Chinese Peoples Liberation Army Jiangshi Brigade. Who presumably filled out the shouldn’t-have-been-published-on-the-internet job application on a drunken dare, or to test our vetting procedures, or something. Consequently I suspect that he would fail our mandatory security background check at the first hurdle. (As long as the vetting officer isn’t also a PLA mole.)

I hit “send” and wander out into the neon tube overcast where Iris is tapping her toes. “Your place or mine?”

“Mine,” says Iris, beckoning me into her cramped corner office. “Have a chair, Bob. Something’s come up, and I think it’s right up your street.” She plants herself behind her desk, leans back in her chair, and preps her pitch. “It’ll get you out of the office for a bit, and if HR are using you to stomp all over the dreams of upwardly-mobile Chinese intelligence operatives it means you’re—”

“Underutilized. Yeah, whatever.” I wave it off. But it’s true: since I sorted out the funny stuff in the basement at St. Hilda’s I’ve been bored. The day-to-day occupation of the average secret agent mostly consists of hurry up and wait. In my case, that means filling in on annoying bits of administrative scutwork and handling upgrades to the departmental network—when I’m not being called upon to slay multi-tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime. (Which doesn’t happen very often, actually, for which I am profoundly grateful.) “You said it’s out of the office?”

“Yes.” She smiles; she knows she’s planted the hook. “A bit of fresh country air, Bob—you’re too pallid. But tell me—” she leans forward—“what do you know about horses?”

The equine excursion takes me by surprise. “Uh?” I shake my head. “Four legs, hooves, and a bad attitude?” Iris shakes her head, so I try again: “Go with a carriage like, er, love and marriage?”

“No, Bob, I was wondering—did you ever learn to ride?”

“What, you mean—wait, we’re not talking about bicycles here, right?” From her reaction I don’t think that’s the answer she was looking for. “I’m a city boy. As the photographer said, you should never work with animals or small children if you can avoid it. What’s come up, a dressage emergency?”

“Not exactly.” Her smile fades. “It’s a shame, it would have made this easier.”

“Made what easier?”

“I could have sworn HR said you could ride.” She stares at me pensively. “Never mind. Too late to worry about has-beens now. Hmm. Anyway, it probably doesn’t matter—you’re married, so I don’t suppose you’re a virgin, either. Are you?”

“Get away!” Virgins? That particular myth is associated with unicorns, which don’t exist, any more than vampires, dragons, or mummies—although I suppose if you wrapped a zombie in bandages you’d get a—stop that. In my head, confused stories about Lady Godiva battle with media images of tweed-suited shotgun-wielding farmers. “Do you need someone who can ride? Because I don’t think I can learn in—”

“No, Bob, I need you. Or rather, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs needs a liaison officer who just happens to have your background and proven track record in—” she waves her left hand—“putting down infestations.”

“Do they?” I do a double-take at putting down infestations. “Are they sure that’s what they need?”

“Yes, they are. Or rather, they know that when they spot certain signs, they call us.” She pulls open a desk drawer and removes a slim folder, its cover bearing the Crowned Portcullis emblem beneath an elder sign. “Take this back to your office and read it,” she tells me. “Return it to the stacks when you’re done. Then you can spend the rest of the afternoon thinking of ways to politely tell HR to piss up a rope, because tomorrow morning you’re getting on a train to Hove in order to lend a DEFRA inspector a helping hand.”

“You’re serious?” I boggle at her. “You’re sending me to do what? Inspect a farm?”

“I don’t want to prejudice your investigation. There’s a livery stable. Just hook up with the man from The Archers, take a look around, and phone home if anything catches your attention.”

She slides the file across my desk and I open the flyleaf. It starts with TOP SECRET and a date round about the battle of the Somme, crossed out and replaced with successively lower classifications until fifteen years ago it was marked down to MILDLY EMBARRASSING NO TABLOIDS. Then I flip the page and spot the title. “Hang on—”

“Shoo,” she says, a wicked glint in her eyes. “Have fun!”

I shoo, smarting. I know a set-up when I see one—and I’ve been conned.

To understand why I knew I’d been tricked, you need to know who I am and what I do. Assuming you’ve read this far without your eyeballs boiling in your skull, it’s probably safe to tell you that my name’s Bob Howard—at least, for operational purposes; true names have power, and we don’t like to give extradimensional identity thieves the keys to our souls—and I work for a secret government agency known to its inmates as the Laundry. It morphed into its present form during the Second World War, ran the occult side of the conflict with the Thousand Year Reich, and survives to this day as an annoying blob somewhere off to the left on the org chart of the British intelligence services, funded out of the House of Lords black budget.

Magic is a branch of applied mathematics, and I started out studying computer science (which is no more about computers than astronomy is about building really big telescopes). These days I specialize in applied computational demonology and general dogsbody work around my department. The secret service has never really worked out how to deal with people like me, who aren’t admin personnel but didn’t come up through the Oxbridge civil service fast-track route. In fact, I got into this line of work entirely by accident: if your dissertation topic leads you in the wrong direction you’d better hope that the Laundry finds you and makes you a job offer you can’t refuse before the things you’ve unintentionally summoned up get bored talking to you and terminate your viva voce with prejudice.

After a couple of years of death by bureaucratic snu-snu (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT admin jobs) I volunteered for active duty, without any clear understanding that it would mean more years of death by boredom (too many committee meetings, too many tedious IT jobs) along with a side-order of mortal terror courtesy of tentacle monsters from beyond spacetime.

As I am now older and wiser, not to mention married and still in possession of my sanity, I prefer my work life to be boringly predictable these days. Which it is, as a rule, but then along come the nuisance jobs—the Laundry equivalent of the way the US Secret Service always has to drop round for coffee, a cake, and a brisk interrogation with idiots who boast about shooting the president on Yahoo! Chat.

In my experience, your typical scenario is that some trespassing teenagers get stoned on ’shrooms, hallucinate flying saucers piloted by alien colorectal surgeons looking to field-test their new alien endoscope technology, and shit themselves copiously all over Farmer Giles’ back paddock. A report is generated by the police, and as happens with reports of unknown origin, it accretes additional bureaucratic investigatory mojo until by various pathways it lands on the desk of one of our overworked analysts. They then bump it up the management chain and/or play cubicle ping-pong with it, because they’re too busy working to keep tabs on the Bloody Skull Cult or cases of bovine demonic possession in Norfolk or something equally important. Finally, in an attempt to make the blessed thing go away, a manager finds a spare human resource and details the poor bastard to wade through the reports, interview the culprits, and then tread in cow shit while probing the farm cesspool for the spoor of alien pre-endoscopy laxatives. Nineteen times out of twenty it’s an annoying paper chase followed by a day spent typing up a report that nobody will read. One time in twenty the affair is enlivened by you falling head-first into the cesspit. And the worst part of it is knowing that while you’re off on a wild goose chase so you can close the books on the report, your everyday workload is quietly piling up in your in-tray and overflowing onto your desk . . .

Which is why, as I get back to my office, close the door, light up the DO NOT DISTURB sign, and open the folder Iris gave me, I start to swear quietly.

What the hell do the love letters of that old fraud H. P. Lovecraft have to do with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs?

Dear Robert,

I received your letter with, I must confess, some trepidation, not to mention mixed feelings of hope & despair tempered by the forlorn hope that the uncanny and unpleasant history of my own investigations & their regrettable outcome will serve to dampen the ardor with which you pursue your studies. I know full well to my great & abiding dismay the compulsive fascination that the eldritch & uncanny may exert upon the imagination of an introspective & sensitive scholar. I cannot help but be aware that you are already cognizant of the horrible risks to which your sanity will be exposed. What you may not be aware of is the physical damage that may fall upon you pursuant to these studies. It took my grandfather’s life; it drove my father to seek redress by means of such vile & unmentionable acts that I cannot bring myself to record their nature for posterity—but suffice to say that his life was shortened thereby—and it has been grievously injurious to my own health & fitness for marriage. There, I say it baldly; but for the blessed Sonia I might have been a mortal wreck for my entire life. It was only by her grace & infinite patience that I regained some modicum of that which is the birthright of all the sons of Adam, and though we are parted she bears my guilty secret discreetly.

I confess that I was not always thus. My childhood was far from unhappy. I grew up an accident-prone but happy youth, living with my mother & my aunts in reduced but nevertheless genteel circumstances in Providence town. At first I studied the classics: Greek & Roman & Egyptian were my mother tongues, & all the rhapsodies of the poetic calling were mine! My grandfather’s library was the orchid whose nectar I sipped, sweeter by far than any wine. He had amassed a considerable archive over the course of many years of travel inflicted on him by the base necessity of trade—I must interject at this juncture that I cannot stress too highly the need to shun such distractions as commerce if one is to reach one’s full potential as a scholar by traversal of the path you propose to embark upon—and the fruits of his sorrows fermented into a heady vintage in time for my youthful excursions into his cellar to broach the casks of wisdom. However, I came to recognize a bitter truth as I assayed the dregs of his collection: my kindred souls are as the dust of the church-yard. As with Poe so am I one with the dead, for we persons of rarefied spirit & talent tread but seldom upon the boards of earth & are summoned all too soon to the exit eternal.

Now, as to the qualities of the MS submitted with your latest missive for my opinion, I must thank you most kindly for granting me the opportunity to review the work at this early stage—

I go home nursing a headache and a not inconsiderable sense of resentment at, variously: Iris for tricking me into this job; DEFRA for asking for back-up in the first place; and Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point—whatever point it was that constituted the meat of the EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN dossier, which point I had not yet ascertained despite asymptotically approaching it in the course of reading what felt like reams & volumes of the aforementioned purple prose—which is infectious.

To cap it all, my fragrant wife Mo is away on some sort of assignment she can’t talk about. All I know is that something’s come up in Blackpool that requires her particular cross-section of very expensive talents, so I’m on my own tonight. (Combat epistemologists and violin soloists both are underpaid, but take many years and no little innate talent to train. Consequently, the demands on her time are many.) So I kick back with a bottle of passable cabernet sauvignon and a DVD—in this case, plucked at random from the watch-this-later shelf. It turns out to be a Channel Four production of Equus, by Peter Shaffer. Which I am hitherto unfamiliar with (don’t laugh: my background veers towards the distaff side of the Two Cultures) and which really doesn’t mix well with a bottle of red wine and H. P. Lovecraft’s ghastly prose. So I spend half the night tossing and turning to visions of melting spindly-legged Dali horses with gouged eye sockets—I’ve got to stop the eyeballs rolling away, for some reason—with the skin-crawling sense that something unspeakable is watching me from the back of the stables. This is bad enough that I then spend the second half of the night sitting at the kitchen table in my pajamas, brute-forcing my way through my half of my annual ideological self-criticism session—that is, the self-assessed goals and objectives portion of my performance appraisal—because the crawling horrors of human resources are far less scary than the gory movie playing out behind my eyeballs.

(This is why many of my co-workers eventually start taking work home—at least, the non-classified bits. Bureaucracy is a bulwark of comforting routine in the face of the things you really don’t want to think about too hard by dead of night. Not to mention being a safer tranquilizer than drink or drugs.)

In my experience it’s best to go on-site and nail these bullshit jobs immediately, rather than wasting too much time on over-planning. This one is, when all is said and done, what our trans-Atlantic cousins call “a snipe hunt.” I’m hoping to nail it shut—probably a little girl with a strap-on plastic horn for her pony—and be home in time for tea. So the next morning I leave home and head straight for London Bridge station rather than going in to the office. I fight my way upstream through the onrushing stream of suits and catch the commuter train that carried them into London on its return journey, rattling and mostly empty on its run out to the dormitory towns of East Sussex. It’s just me and the early birds taking the cheapskate stopping service to Crapwick to avoid the hordes of holiday-makers (and pickpockets) at Thiefrow. And that’s the way I like it.

I have a name and destination in the Request for Support memo Iris gave me: we’re to investigate one G. Edgebaston, of Edgebaston Farm Livery Stables, near Hove. But first I’m supposed to meet a Mr. Scullery at a local DEFRA office in East Grinstead. Which is on the London to Brighton line, but it’ll take me a good hour of start-stop commuter rail and then a taxi ride of indeterminate length to get there. So I take a deep breath and dive back into the regrettably deathless prose of the Prophet of Providence.

Listen, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re probably thinking WHAT THE HELL, H. P. LOVECRAFT? And wondering why I’m reading his private letters (most certainly not found in any of the collections so lovingly curated by Lovecraft scholars over the years, from August Derleth to S. T. Joshi), in a file so mind-numbingly trivial that its leakage on the front page of a major tabloid newspaper would be greeted with snores.

This is the Laundry, after all, and we write memos and file expense reports every day that deal with gibbering horrors, things that go bump in the night, the lunatical followers of N’yar lath-Hotep, the worshippers of the Sleeper in the Pyramid, alien undersea and lithospheric colonies of BLUE HADES and DEEP SIX, and Old Bat Wings himself.

You probably think HPL was one of ours, or that maybe one of our predecessor agencies bumped him off, or that these letters contain Great & Terrible Mysteries, Secrets, & Eldritch Wisdom of the Ancients and must be handled with asbestos tongs while reading them through welders’ goggles. Right?

Well, you would be wrong. Although it’s not your fault. You’d be wrong for the same reason as the folks who think modern fly-by-wire airliners can fly themselves from takeoff to landing (who needs pilots?), that Saddam really did have weapons of mass destruction (we just didn’t search hard enough), and that the Filler of Stockings who brings presents down the chimney every Newtonmas-eve is a benign and cheery fellow. You’ve been listening to the self-aggrandizing exaggerations of self-promotion artists: respectively, the PR might of the airliner manufacturers, dodgy politicians, and the greeting card industry.

And so it is with old HPL: the very model of an 18th century hipster, born decades too late to be one of the original louche laudanum-addicted romantic poets, and utterly unafraid to bore us by droning on and on about the essential crapness of culture since Edgar Allan Poe, the degeneracy of the modern age, &c. &c. &c.

His reputation has been vastly inflated—out of all proportion—by his followers, who think he is the one true wellspring of wisdom concerning the Elder Gods, the Stars Coming Right, and various hideous horrors with implausible names like Shub-Niggurath, the goat of a thousand young, who spawns mindlessly on the darkest depths of the forest . . .

. . . Whereas, in actual fact, his writings are the occult equivalent of The Anarchist Cookbook.

It’s absolutely true that Lovecraft knew stuff. Somewhere in grandpa’s library he got his hands on the confused rambling inner doctrines of a dozen cults and secret societies. Most of these secrets were arrant nonsense on stilts—admixed with just enough knowledge to be deadly dangerous. Occultists of old, like the alchemists who poisoned themselves with mercury in their enthusiasm to transform lead into gold (meanwhile missing the opportunity to invent the modern discipline of chemistry as we understand it), didn’t know much. What they did know was mostly just enough to guarantee a slow, lingering death from Krantzberg Syndrome (if the Eaters in Night didn’t get them first). Not to mention the fact that the vain exhibitionists who compiled these tomes and grimoires, strung out between the narcissistic urge to self-exposure and their occupational addiction to secrecy, littered their scribbled recipes with booby traps on purpose, just to fuck with unauthorized imitators and prove how ’leet they were for being able to actually make this junk work without melting their own faces.

But the young idiot savant HPL was unaware of the social context of 18th century occultist fandom. So he naively distilled their methanol-contaminated moonshine and nonsense into a heady brew that makes you go blind and then causes your extremities to rot if you actually try to drink it. It’s almost as if he mistook his grandfather’s library for a harmless source of material for fiction, rather than the demented and dangerous documentation of our superstitious forerunners.

The Anarchist Cookbook, with its dangerously flawed bomb formulae, hasn’t maimed half so many hands as HPL’s mythos. His writings look more like fiction than allegorically-described recipes to most people, which is a good thing; but every so often a reader of his more recondite works becomes unhealthily obsessed with the idea of the starry wisdom behind it, starts thinking of it as something real, and then tries to reverse-engineer the design of the pipe bomb he’s describing, not realizing that Quality Control was not his strong point.

There are bits of the True Knowledge scattered throughout HPL’s oeuvre like corn kernels in a turd. But he left stuff out, and he added stuff in, and he embellished and added baroque twiddles and stylistic curlicues as only H. P. Lovecraft could, until it’s pretty much the safest course to discount everything he talks about—like Old Bat-Wings himself, Dread Cthulhu, who dead but dreaming sleeps in Drowned R’lyeh beneath the southern ocean.

Watch my lips: Cthulhu does not exist! And there is no tooth fairy.

(Santa Claus is another matter; but that, as they say, is a file with a different code word . . . )

East Grinstead is buried deep in the heart of the Sussex commuter belt: this is Ruralshire, nor are we out of it. It’s an overgrown village or a stunted town, depending on how you look at it, complete with picturesque mediaeval timbered buildings, although these days it’s mostly known for its weirdly large array of fringe churches. I stumble blinking from the railway station (which is deathly quiet at this time of day, but clearly rebuilt to accommodate rush hour throngs), narrowly avoid being run down by a pair of mounted police officers who are exercising their gigantic cavalry chargers outside the station in preparation for crowd control at the next sudden-death derby (Brighton Wanderers v. Bexhill United, or some such), and hail a taxi. A minute’s muttered negotiation with the driver ensues, then I’m off to the office.

When we arrive, I’m half-convinced I’ve got the wrong address. It’s way the hell up the A22, so far out of town that at first I’m wondering why I got off the train in East Grinstead—but no, that’s what Google said. (Not for the first time I wish I had a car, though as I live in London on a civil service salary it’s not a terribly practical wish.) The taxi drops me in the middle of nowhere, next to a driveway fronted by a thick hedgerow. There are no obvious offices here, much less the sort of slightly flyblown agricultural veterinary premises you’d expect the Animal Health Executive Agency to maintain. So I look around, at a loss for a minute until I notice the discreet sign pointing up the drive to the Equine Veterinary Practice.

I amble into the yard of what looks like a former farmhouse. It’s been inexpertly fronted with a conservatory that houses a rather dingy reception area, complete with a bored-looking middle-aged lady tapping away on her computer while wearing an expression that says if it’s MySpace, she’s just been unfriended by the universe.

“Hello,” I ask her. She ignores me, intently tapping away at whatever so preoccupies her on her computer. “Hello?” I repeat again. “I’m here to meet Mr. Scullery? Is he around?”

Finally she deigns to notice me. “He’s on a job for the Department,” she says. “He won’t be available until Thursday—”

I let her see my teeth: “Perhaps you can tell him that Mr. Howard is here to see him? From the office in London. I assume it’s the same job we’re talking about.”

“He’s on a job for the—” Finally what I just said worms its way through her ears and into her brain—“I’m sorry, who did you say you were?”

“I’m Mr. Howard. I’ve come all the way down from London. About the Edgebaston brief.” I bounce up and down on my toes. “He asked for me, so if you’d just like to—”

She is already reaching for the phone. “Hello? Mr. Scullery? I have a Mr. Howarth from London, he says you asked for someone from London to help with Edgebaston Farm? Is that right? Yes—right you are, I’ll just tell him.” She puts the phone down and smiles at me in that very precise, slightly self-deprecating way farm-bred ladies of a certain class use to let you know that there’s nothing personal about the knee cap they’re about to deliver to your left nut: “Mr. Scullery says he’s running half an hour late and he’ll be with you as soon as he can. So if you’d like to take a seat in the waiting area? I’m sure he won’t be long.” She turns back to her computer as if I’m invisible. I hover indecisively for a moment, but I know when I’ve been dismissed; and so I go and find a waiting room seat to occupy (sub-type: wooden, elderly, not designed with human buttocks in mind) and mooch listlessly through the stack of magazines for space aliens that they keep on hand to distract the terminally bored.

Dear Robert,

I must confess that, pursuant to my reply to your last missive, I experienced no small degree of self-doubt as to the perspicacity & pertinence of my critique. If you will permit me to attempt to justify my equivocation, I would like to enter in my defense a plea of temporary insanity. Your confabulation, while a most excellent evocation of a legendary monster, bears special & most unpleasant personal resonances from my regrettable youth. It is not your fault that the heraldic beast you chose to depict in this form is a marvelous horror in my eyes; indeed, you must be somewhat puzzled by my reaction.

I regret to inform you that your description of the unicorn, while vivid in its adhesion to the classical description of same & sharply piquant in depicting his pursuit of the gamine subject of the narrative, is fundamentally inaccurate in both broad outline & fine detail. Explorers might once have sketched fanciful depictions of the Chinese Panda, but today we are fettered by the dour tyranny of camera & zoo; to diverge so drastically from the established order of nature is to risk the gentle reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. Regrettably, the horrid creature you caricature is all too real; it will in due course be a matter of the most mundane familiarity to readers, & familiarity inevitably brings such enthusiastic flights of fancy as your missive to grief on the cold stone flags of reality.

Please extend me your trust on this matter. Unicorns are not a suitable topic for romance or fantasy. On the contrary, the adult unicorn is a thing of dire & eldritch horror & I would advise you to pray to your creator that you live to a ripe old age without once encountering such a monstrous creature.

I, alas, was not so lucky & the experience has blighted my entire adult life . . .

I kill time waiting for the Man from Ag and Fish by working my way through a stack of glossy magazines for aliens. Passing over the princess-shiny pinkness of Unicorn School™: The Sparkling with a shudder, I work my way through a thought-provoking if slightly breathless memoir of “Police Cavalry v. Pinko Commie Striking Miners in the 1980s”—the thoughts it provoke focus on the urgent need to commit the author to an asylum for the violently insane—and am partway through reading a feature about modern trends in castration techniques (and how to care for your gelding) in Stallion World when the door slams open and a gigantic beard wearing a loud tweed suit explodes into the reception area: “Lissa! Melissa! I’m back! Can you tell Bert to hose out the back of the Landy? And fetch out the two sacks of oats behind the passenger seat! Where’s this man from the ministry? Ah, there you are! You must be Mr. Helmuth! I’m Greg Scullery. Pleased to meet you!”

He bounds across the reception area before I can put the magazine down and grabs my right hand, pumping it like a windlass while I’m still coming to my feet. Mr. Scullery is wiry and of indeterminate middle age. He could probably pass for a farmer with bizarre (albeit dated) sartorial taste—ghastly green tweed suit, check shirt, a tie that appears to be knitted from the intestines of long-dead badgers—but his beard is about thirty centimeters long, grizzled and salted and bifurcated. It has so much character that it’s probably being hunted by a posse of typographers. “Um, the name’s Howard. Bob Howard.” I try not to wince at the sensation in my hand, which feels as if it has been sucked into some kind of machine for extracting oil from walnuts. “I believe you requested backup? For some sort of infestation?”

“Yes! Yes indeed!” I remember my other hand and use it to make a grab for my warrant card, because I have not yet had an opportunity to authenticate him.

“Seen one of these before?” I ask, flicking it open in front of him.

The walnut-crusher shifts gear into a final grind-into-mush setting: “Capital Laundry Services? Oh yes indeedy! I was in the Rifles, you know. Back in my misspent childhood, haha.” The walnut slurry is ejected: my right hand dangles limply and I try not to wince conspicuously. “Jolly good, Mr. Howard. So. Have you been briefed?”

I shake my head, just as the bell above the reception area door jangles. A young filly is leading her mater in. They’re both wearing green wellies, and there’s something so indefinably horsey about them that I have to pinch myself and remember that were-ponies do not exist outside the pages of a certain bestselling kid-lit series. “Is there somewhere we can talk about this in private?” I ask Greg. “My manager said she didn’t want to prejudice me by actually telling me what this is about.”

His beard twitches indignantly while it sorts out an answer. “One of those, eh? We’ll see about that!” He turns towards reception, where Jocasta or Penelope is trying to evince a metabolic reaction from Melissa the receptionist, who is still deep in MySpace meltdown. “Lissa! Belay all that, I’m going out on a job with Mr. Howard here! If Fiona calls, tell her I’ll be back by five! Follow me.” And with that, he strides back out into the farmyard. I swirl along in the undertow, wondering what I’ve let myself in for.

Greg leads me across the yard to a Land Rover. I don’t know a lot about cars, but this one is pretty spartan, from the bare metal floor pan punctured by drain holes, to the snorkel-shaped exhaust bolted to one side of the windscreen. It’s drab green, there’s a gigantic spare tire clamped on the bonnet, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it has an army service record longer than Greg’s. That worthy clambers into the driver’s seat and motions me towards the passenger door. “Yes, we have seat belts! And other modern fittings like air conditioning” (he points at a slotted metal grille under the windscreen), “and radio” (he gestures at a military-looking shortwave set bolted to the cab roof), “even though it’s a pre-1983 Mark III model. Just hang on, eh?” He fires up the engine, which grumbles and mutters to itself as if chewing on lumps of coal, before it emits a villainous blue smoke ring as a prelude to turning over under its own power. Then he rams it into gear with a jolt, and we lurch towards the main road. I’m certain that the rubber band this thing uses in lieu of a leaf spring profoundly regrets how very, very wicked it was in an earlier life. And shortly thereafter, so do my buttocks.

Dear Robert,

Many thanks for your kind enquiry after my health. I am, as is usually the case, in somewhat precarious straits but no better or worse than is to be expected of a gentleman of refined & delicate breeding in this coarsened & debased age. My digestion is troubling me greatly, but I fear there is nothing to be done about that. I have the comfort of my memories, & that is both necessary & sufficient to the day, however questionable such comfort might be. I am in any event weighed down by an apprehension of my own mortality. The sands of my hourglass are running fast & I have no great expectation of a lengthy future stretching before me; so I hope you will indulge this old raconteur’s discursive perambulations & allow me to tell you what I know of unicorns.

I should preface my remarks by cautioning you that I am no longer the young man whose memories I commit to paper. In the summer of 1904 I was a callow & untempered fourteen-year-old, with a head full of poetry & a muse at either shoulder, attending Hope High School & keenly absorbing the wisdom of my elders. That younger Howard was a sickly lad, but curious & keen, & took a most serious interest in matters astronomical & chymical. He was at heart an optimist, despite the death of his father from nervous exhaustion some years previously, & was gifted with the love of his mother & aunts & grandfather. Oh! The heart sickens with the dreadful knowledge of the horrid fate which came to blight my life & prospects thereafter. The death of my grandfather in that summer cast a pall across my life, for our circumstances were much reduced, & my mother & aunts were obliged to move to the house on Angell Street. I continued my studies & became particularly obsessed with the sky & stars, for it seemed to me that in the vastness of the cosmos lay the truest & purest object of study. It was my ambition to become an astronomer & to that end I bent my will.

There were distractions, of course. Of these, one of the most charming lived in a house on Waterman Street with her family & was by them named Hester, or Hetty. She attended Hope High, & I confess she was the brightest star in my firmament by 1908. Not that I found it easy then or now to speak of this to her, or to her shade, for she is as long dead as the first flush of a young man’s love by middle age, & the apprehension of the creeping chill of the open grave that waits for me is all that can drive me to set my hand to write of my feelings in this manner. Far too many of the things I should have said to her (had I been mature enough to apprehend how serious an undertaking courtship must be) I whispered instead to my journal, disguised in the raiments of metaphor & verse.

Let me then speak plainly, as befits these chilly January days of 1937. Hetty was, Hetty was, like myself, the only child of an old Dutch lineage. A year younger than I, she brought a luminous self-confidence to all that she did, from piano to poetry. I watched from a distance, smitten with admiration for this delicate & clever creature. I imagined a life in literature, with her Virginia playing the muse to my Edgar & fancifully imagined that she might see in me some echoing spark of recognition of our shared destiny together. In hindsight my obsession was jejune & juvenile, the youthful obsession of a young man in whose sinews and fibers the sap is rising for the first time; but it was sincerely felt & as passionate as anything I had experienced at that time.

That was a simpler, more innocent age and there were scant opportunities for a youth such as I to directly address his muse, much less to plight his troth before the altar of providence & announce the depth of his ardor. It was simply not done. You may therefore imagine my surprise when, one stifling August Saturday afternoon, whilst engaged in my perambulations about the paths and churchyards of Providence, I encountered the object of my fascination crouching behind a gravestone, to all appearances preoccupied by an abnormally large & singular snail . . .

My tailbone is aching by the time Greg screeches to a halt outside a rustic-looking pub. “Lunch time!” He declares, with considerable lip-smacking; “I assume you haven’t been swallowing the swill the railway trolley service sells? They serve a passable pint of Greene King IPA here, and there’s a beer garden.” The beard twitches skywards, as if reading the clouds for auguries of rain: “We’ll probably be alone outside, which is good.”

Mr. Scullery strides into the public bar (which is as countrified as I expected: blackened timber beams held together by a collection of mirror-polished horse brasses, a truly vile carpet, and chairs at tables set for food rather than serious drinking). “Brenda? Brenda! Ah, capital! That’ll be two IPAs, the sausages and cheddar mash for me, and whatever Mr. Howard here is eating—”

I scan the menu hastily. “I’ll have the cheeseburger, please,” I say.

“We’ll be in the garden,” the beard announces, its points quivering in anticipation. And then he’s off again, launching himself like a cannonball through a side door (half-glazed with tiny panes of warped glass thick enough to screen a public toilet), into a grassy back yard studded with outdoor tables, their wooden surfaces weathered silver-grey from long exposure. “Jolly good!” he declares, parking his backside on a bench seat with a good view of both the parking lot and the back door (and anyone else who ventures out this way). “Brenda will have our drinks along in a minute, and then we shall have a bite of lunch. So tell me, Mr. Howard. What did your boss tell you?”

“That you work for DEFRA and you know about us and you’re cleared to request backup from my department.” I shrug. “When I said she doesn’t believe in prejudicing her staff I meant it. All I know is that I’m supposed to meet you and we’re going to go and investigate a livery stable called, um, G. Edgebaston Ltd. What’s your job, normally? I mean, to have clearance—”

“I work for DEFRA in—” He pauses as a middle-aged lady bustles up to us with a tray supporting two nearly full beer glasses and some slops. “Thank you, Brenda!”

“Your food will be along in ten minutes, Mr. Scullery,” she says with an oddly proprietorial tone; “don’t you be overdoing it now!” Then she retreats, leaving us alone once more.

“Ah, where was I? Ah yes. I work for the Animal Health Agency.” The beard twitches over its beer for a moment, dowsing for drowned wasps. “I’m a veterinary surgeon. I specialize in horses, but I do other stuff. It’s a hobby, if you like, but it’s official enough that I’m on the books as AHA’s in-house cryptozoologist. What about you, Mr. Howard? What exactly do you do for the Laundry?”

I am too busy trying not to choke on my beer to answer for a moment. “I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about that,” I finally manage. (My oath of office doesn’t zap me for this admission.)

“Yes, but really, I say. What do you know about cryptozoology?”

“Well.” I think for a moment. “I used to subscribe to Fortean Times, but then I developed an allergy to things with too many tentacles . . .”

“Bah.” Greg couldn’t telegraph his disdain more clearly if he manifested a tiny thundercloud over his head, complete with lightning bolts. “Rank amateurs, conspiracy theorists and journalists.” He takes a mouthful of the Greene King, filtering it on its way down his throat. “No, Mr. Howard, I don’t deal with nonsense like Bigfoot or little grey aliens with rectal thermometers or chupacabra: I deal with real organisms, which simply happen to be rare.”

“Unicorns?” I guess wildly.

Greg peers at me over the rim of his pint glass, one eye open wide. “Don’t say that,” he hisses. “Do you have any idea what we’d have to do if there was a unicorn outbreak in England? It’d make the last foot and mouth epidemic look like a storm in a tea-cup . . .”

“But I thought—” I pause. “Hang on, you’re telling me that unicorns are real?”

He pauses for a few seconds, then wets his whistle before he speaks. “I’ve never seen one” he says quietly, “for which I am profoundly grateful because, being male, if I did see one it’d probably be the last thing I ever set eyes on. But I do assure you, young feller me lad, that unicorns are very real indeed, just like great white sharks and Ebola Zaire—and they’re just as much of a joking matter. Napalm, Mr. Howard, napalm and scorched earth: that’s the only language they understand. Sterilize it with fire and nerve gas, then station armed guards.” Another mouthful of beer vanishes, clearly destined to fuel the growth of further facial foliage and calm Mr. Scullery’s shaky nerves.

I shake my head. The EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN dossier was suggestive, but it’s always hard to tell where HPL’s starry wisdom ends and his barking fantasy starts. “Okay, so you want backup when you go to run a spot check on Edgebaston’s stable. Why me? Why not a full team of door-breakers, and a flame thrower for good luck?”

“They’ve got connections, Mr. Howard. Bob, isn’t it? The Edgebastons have run Edgebaston Farm out at Howling ever since Harry Edgebaston married Dick and Elfine’s daughter Sandra Hawk-Monitor, and renamed the old farm after his own line—and wasn’t that a scandal, most of a century ago!—but in this generation they’re pillars of the local community, not to mention the Conservative Club. Suppliers of horses to Sussex Constabulary, first cousins of our MP, Barry Starkadder. You do not want to mess with the squirearchy, even in this day and age of Euro-regulation and what-not. They’ll call down fire and brimstone! And not just from the Church in Beershorn, I’m telling you. Questions will be asked in Parliament if I go banging on their front door without good reason, you mark my words!”

“But—” I stop and rewind, rephrasing: “something must have raised your suspicions, Mr. Scullery. Isn’t that right? What makes you think there’s an outbreak down at Edgebaston Farm?”

“I have a pricking in my thumbs and an itching in my nostril.” The beard twitches grimly. “Oh yes indeed. But you asked the right question! It’s the butcher bills, Mr. Howard, that got my attention this past month. See, old George has been buying in bulk from old Murther’s butcher, lots of honeycomb and giblets and offal. Pigs’ knuckles. That sort of thing. Wanda’s happy enough to tell me what the Edgebastons are buying—without me leaning too hard, anyway—and it turns out they’re taking about forty kilos a day.”

“So they’re buying lots of meat? Is that all?” I think for a moment. “Are they selling pies to Poland or something?”

“It’s not food-grade for people, Mr. Howard. Or livestock for that matter, not since our little problem with BSE twenty years ago.” Greg raises his glass and empties it down his throat. “And it’s a blessed lot of meat. Enough to feed a tiger, or a pack of hounds, ’cept Georgie doesn’t ride with the Howling Hounds any more. Had a falling-out with Debbie Checkbottom six years ago and that was the end of that—it’s the talk of the village, that and Gareth Grissom wearing a dress and saying he wants a sex change, then taking off to Brighton.” He says it with relish, and I try not to roll my eyes or pass comment on his parochial lack of savoir faire. This is rural England, after all; please set your watch back thirty years . . .

“Okay, so: meat. And a livery stable. Is that all you’ve got?” I push.

“No,” Greg says tightly, and reaches into his pocket, pulls something out, and puts it on the table in front of me. It’s the shell of a cone snail, fluted and spiraled, about ten centimeters long and two centimeters in diameter at its open end, gorgeously marbled in cream and brown. It’s clearly dead. Which is a very good thing, because if it were a live cone snail and Greg had picked it up like that it would have stung him, and those bastards are nearly as lethal as a king cobra.

“Very nice,” I say faintly. “Where did you find it?”

“On the verge of the road, under the fence at the side of the back field under Mockuncle Hill.” The beard clenches, wrapping itself around a nasty grin. “It was alive at the time. Eating what was left of a lamb. Took a lot of killin’.”

“But it’s a—” I stop. I swallow, then realize I’ve got a pint of beer, and my dry throat really needs some lubrication. “It could be a coincidence,” I say, trying to convince myself and failing.

“Do you really think that?” Greg knots his fingers through his beard and tugs, combing it crudely.

“Fuck, no.” I somehow manage to make half a pint of beer disappear between sentences. “You’re going to have to check it out. No question. In case there are females.”

“No, Mr. Howard.” He’s abruptly as serious as a heart-attack. “We are going to have to check it out. Because if there’s a live female, much less a mated pair, two of us stand a better chance of living long enough to sound the alarm than one . . .”

(cont’d.)

Having for so long been tongue-tied in her presence, I was finally shocked out of my diffidence when I saw the object of Hetty’s interest. “I say, what is that?” I ejaculated.

My rosy-cheeked Dawn turned her face towards me & smiled like a goddess out of legend: “It is a daddy-snail!” she exclaimed. She reached towards a funerary urn wherein languished a bouquet of wilted lilies & plucked a browning stem from the funereal decoration—she was in truth poetry in motion. “Watch this,” she commanded. My eyes turned to follow her gesture as she gracefully prodded the lichen-crusted rock before the snail’s face. The shell of the snail was a fluted cone, perhaps eight inches long & two inches in diameter at the open end. Its color was that of antique ivory, piebald with attractive glossy brown spots. I could see nothing of the occupant & indeed it could have been a dead sea-shell of considerable size, but when the lily-stem brushed the gravestone an inch or two in front of it there was an excitement of motion: the cone rocked back on its heel & spat a pair of slippery iridescent tongues forth at the stem. With some disbelief I confess to recognizing these as tentacles, as unlike the foot of the common mollusk as can be (although our friends the marine biologists assert that the cephalopodia, the octopi & squid & chambered nautilus, are themselves but the highest form of invertebrate mollusk, so perhaps attributing ownership of tentacles to a land-snail is not such an incongruous stretch of imagination as one might at first consider); but while I was trying to make sense of my own eyes’ vision, the demonic cone grabbed hold of the parched stem of the flower and broke it in two!

“Do you see?” Hetty beamed at me. “It is a daddy-snail!” Then her dear face fell. “But he is on his own, too far from home. There are no missy-horses here, & so he will surely starve & die unfulfilled.”

“How do you know this?” I asked stupidly, confounded by her vivacity & veneer of wisdom in the matter of this desperate gastropod.

“I have a mummy-horse quartered in our stables,” she told me, as matter-of-fact as can be, with an impatient toss of her golden locks. “Would you help me carry Peter back to the yard? I would be ever so grateful, & he would love to be among his kindred.”

“Why don’t you do it yourself?” I asked rudely, then kicked myself. Her speech and direct manner had quite confounded me, being as it was so utterly at odds with my imaginings of her lilting voice & ladylike gentility. (I was a young and dreamy boy in those days & so ill-acquainted with females as to picture them from afar as abstractions of femininity. It was a gentler & more innocent age &c., & I was a creature of that time.)

“I would, but I’m afraid he’d sting me,” she said. “The sting of a daddy-snail is mortal harsh, so ’tis said.”

“Really?” I leaned closer to see this prodigy for myself. “Who says?”

“Those families as raise the virgin missy-horses to ride or hunt,” she replied. “Will you help me?” She asked with imploring eyes & prayerful hands, to such effect as only a thirteen-year-old girl can have on the heart-strings of a pigeon-chested boy of fourteen who has been watching her from afar and is eager to impress.

“Certainly I shall help!” I agreed, nodding violently. “But because it stings, I must take precautions. Would you wait here and stand vigilant watch over our escaped prisoner? I shall have to fetch suitable tools with which to fetter the suspect while we escort him back to jail.”

She nodded her leave & I departed in haste, rushing up the lane towards home to borrow certain appurtenances from our own out-building. I fetched heavy gloves & fireplace tongs, the better with which to grasp a snake-tongued tentacular horror; and looking-glass, paper, & pencils with which to record it. Then I rushed back to the graveyard & arrived quite out of breath to find Hetty waiting complaisantly near our target, who had moved perhaps a foot in the intervening quarter-hour.

I wasted no time at all in plucking the blasphemous mollusk from its stony plinth with tongs and gloves. As I lifted it, the creature stabbed out with a sharp red spike which protruded from the point of its shell: I was heartily glad for my foresight. “Where do you want me to take it?” I asked my muse. I gave the cone a sharp shake & the red spike retracted, sullen at being foiled.

Hetty clapped delightedly. “Follow me!” she sang, & skipped away between the gravestones.

Of course I knew the front of her parents’ house on Waterman Street, but I felt it unwise to show any sign of this. I allowed Hetty to lead me through the boneyard & along a grassy path between ancient drystone walls to the alley abutting the back of her family home. There was a tall wooden gate, and beyond it a yard and stables. I was preoccupied with carrying the cone-shell at arm’s length, for its homicidal rage had not escaped my attention. Periodically it shivered & shuddered, like a pot close to boiling over. Being thus distracted I perhaps paid insufficient attention to the warning signs: the flies, the evident lack of labour applied to cleaning the back stoop, & above all the sickly-sweet smell of rotting meat. “Come inside,” Hetty said coyly, producing a key to the padlock that secured the gate. “Bring Peter with you!”

She opened the gate & nipped inside the yard. I followed, barely noticing as she secured the portal behind me with hasp & cunning padlock. “Come to the stable,” she sang, dancing across the cobbles despite the pervasive miasma of decay that hung heavy over the yard like the fetid caul of loathsome exudate that hovers above the body of a week-dead whale bloating in Nantucket sound during the summer months. “Let me show you my darling, my one true love!” As she said it, the cone in my tongs gave a quiver, as of rage—or mortal terror. As it did so I gagged at the stench inside the yard, & my grip loosened inadvertently. The snail-thing gave another ferocious jerk, then slipped free! It caught the end of my tongs with one sucker-tipped tentacle, uncoiled to lower itself to the decaying straw-strewn cobbles below, then let go before I could respond. Hetty gave a little shriek of dismay: “Oh, the poor little man! Now the others will eat him alive!”

For what happened next I can only cite my callow youth & inexperience in exculpation. I panicked a little, tightening my grip on my tool as the deadly giant snail turned around as if assessing the arena in which it found itself. I took a step backwards. “What is going on?” I demanded.

The singular snail reared, point uppermost, as if tasting the sour & dreadful air. A host of small tentacles appeared around its open end, and it began to haul itself on suckers across the decay-slicked stones, proceeding in the direction of the stable doors & the darkness that I could even then sense lurking within.

Hetty smiled—a horrid, knowing expression, unfit to grace the visage of a member of the fairer sex. “The daddy-snails and the missy-horses dance together & dine, and those that survive join in matrimonial union to become a mummy-horse,” she intoned in a sing-song way, as if reciting a nursery rhyme plucked from the cradles of hell. “My mummy-horse rests yonder,” she said, gesturing at the decaying stable doors, slicked with nameless dark fluids that had been allowed to dry, staining the wood. “Would you like to see my mummy?”

I felt faint, for I knew even then that something terrible born of an unfathomable madness had happened here. Heartbroken—for there is no heartbreak like that of a fourteen-year-old lad whose muse reveals feet not of clay but of excrement—I nevertheless gathered my courage and stood my ground. “Your mummy,” I said. “You do not speak of Mrs. van t’Hooft, in this case?”

She shook her head. “My mother—” she pronounced the word strangely—“is sleeping in the stable with mummy-horse. Would you like to see her?” A horrid glow of anticipation crept into her cheeks, as if she could barely conceal her eagerness to cozen me within.

I wound up the reins of my bravery to the breaking-point & tightened my grip on the fire-tongs. They felt flimsy & intangible in my grasp: oh for the shield and sword of a Knight of the Round Table! My kingdom for a charger & a lance, or even the cleansing flare of a dragon’s hot breath! “Show me to your mummy-horse,” I told Hetty, thinking myself brave & manly & willing to face down monsters for a young man’s apprehension of love: thinking that whatever this monster was, I should have the better of it.

More fool I!

They do things differently in East Sussex, or so I gather. My informant in this matter is Greg Scullery, and the nature of the difference is a leisurely lunch at a country pub in place of a hasty sandwich break snatched at one’s office desk in Central London.

I am initially worried about Greg’s willingness to down a pint before lunch, but by the time our food arrives and we’ve cleaned our plates my worries evaporate—assisted by Greg’s smooth transition onto lemonade and soda, albeit replaced by new worries about what we’re going to find down on Edgebaston farm. Because Greg has got that disturbing snail-shell, and with the fresh context provided by the Lovecraftian confessional in the EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN dossier, I’m going to have a hard time sleeping tonight unless I successfully lay that particular ghost to rest.

“It’s not a horse, let’s get that straight,” Greg explains between bites of a disturbingly phallic sausage. “It’s not Equus ferus caballus. It might look like one at certain points in its life cycle, but that’s simple mimicry. Not Batesian mimicry, where a harmless organism imitates a toxic or venomous one to deter predators, much as hoverflies mimic the thoracic coloration of wasps, but rather the kind of mimicry a bolas spider uses to lure its prey—using pheromonal lures and appearance to make itself attractive to its next meal. It’s an equoid not an equus, in other words.”

I suppress a shudder. “How do you tell a female unic—equoid—from a real horse?” I ask.

“Come along to Edgebaston Farm and I’m sure I’ll be able to show you,” he says, setting aside the plate holding what’s left of his bangers and mash as he rises to his feet. “Have you read the backgrounder I sent your people? Or the infestation control protocol?”

“All I’ve read is H. P. Lovecraft’s deathbed confession,” I admit.

“His—” Greg stops dead in his tracks—“really?”

“His first flame, Hetty van t’Hooft, introduced him to, well, he called it a unicorn. That was right before his nervous breakdown.” I shake my head. “Although how much stock to place in his account . . .”

“Fascinating,” Greg hisses between his teeth. “I bet he didn’t mention napalm, did he?” I shake my head. “Typical of your effete word-pusher, then, not practical. But we can’t just call in an air strike either, these days, can we? And it’ll take rather a lot of pull to convince the police to take this seriously. So let’s go and beard Georgina in her den and see what she’s hiding.”

I follow Greg through the pub and back to his Land Rover. “Are we just going to go in there and talk to her?” I ask. “Because I thought uni—equoids—are a bit on the dangerous side? In terms of how they co-opt their host, I mean. If she’s got a shotgun . . .”

“Don’t you worry about Georgina, young feller me lad,” Greg reassures me. “Of course she’s got a shotgun! But she won’t use it on us. The trick is to not look like we’re a threat to her Precious, if she is indeed playing host to a fertile equoid. If we’re lucky and she isn’t under its spell things will go much more smoothly. So we’re not going to mention the blessed thing at first. Remember she runs a farm? I’m just dropping in to check her hounds’ vaccination records are up to date. While I’m doing that, you go and take a peek behind the stable doors with that phone camera of yours: then we’ll put our heads together. Piece of cake!” he adds confidently, as he pushes the ignition button and his chariot belches blue smoke.

“Right.” You have got to be kidding, I think, clinging to the grab bar for dear life as Greg shoves the Landy into gear and we bounce across ruts and into the road. “Do you have any idea of the layout of Edgebaston Farm? Because I don’t!”

“It’s jolly simple, Mr. Howard sir.” (Oh great, now he’s reverting to grizzled-veteran-sergeant-briefing-the-young-lieutenant mode.) “Edgebaston Farm covers two hundred acres on a hillside overlooking Howling, but the farm itself—the stables and outhouses—are in the shape of an octangle surrounding the farmhouse, which is a long triangle two stories high. The left point of the triangle, the kitchen, intersects the cowsheds which lie parallel to the barn, which is your target. They’re all built from rough-hewn stone and thatched: no new-fangled solar panels here. It started out as a shed where Edward the Sixth housed his swineherds . . .”

“Yes, Greg, but what do I do if there’s a fucking unicorn in the barn?”

“You run away very quickly, Bob. Or you die.” He glances at me pityingly in the rearview mirror. (The Landy is sufficiently spartan that the reflector is an after-market bolt-on, with that imported American warning: objects in mirror are closer than they appear.) “Isn’t that part of your job description? Screaming and running away?”

I am extremely dubious about my ability to outrun an equoid. “Uh-huh. The only kind of running I generally do is batch jobs on a mainframe.” I clutch my briefcase protectively. “What we really need is a pretext to see what they’re keeping in the stables, one that won’t get us killed if you’re right about what’s lurking in the background.” I pause for a moment. “They’re a livery stable, aren’t they? Do they do riding lessons?”

Greg nearly drives off the road. “Of course they do!” His beard emits an erratic hissing noise like a pressure cooker that’s gearing up for a stove-top meltdown. After a moment I recognize it as something not unlike laughter. Eventually the snickering stops. “And if they’re harboring equoids they won’t be able to offer you a horse. But won’t that take too long?”

“It had better not.” I take a deep breath. “Okay, Greg. Here’s our story: you’re checking the dogs, and I’m your nephew from London. I’m working in Hastings for a month and while I’m there I want to learn to ride . . .”

How to describe the smell, the foulness, the louring portents of ominous doom that sent shivers of fear crawling up & down my spine? At the remove of a third of a century, that scene still retains the power to strike terror into my craven heart. I am no adventurer or chevalier; I am an aesthete & man of letters, ill-suited to the execution of such deeds. And though at fourteen I was in the flush of youth, and fancied myself as prepared for deeds of manly heroism as any other lad, I yet held a shadowy apprehension of that future self whom I was fated to become. I, Howard Phillips Lovecraft Esq., a man of contemplative & refined sensibilities born into a decadent latter age of feral brutes menaced by the unspeakable stormclouds of Bolshevism & Jew-Fascist Negro Barbarism sweeping the old countries of Europe, fear that I am nothing more than a commentator, doomed to write the epitaph to Western civilization that will, engraved upon its stony headstone, inform the scholars of a future age—should any eventually emerge from the imminent darkness—of the cause of its fate.

People like my Hetty. People who with the best will in the world would take in & nurture at their rosy breasts the suckling horror that in my fictions I have named Shub-Niggurath, the spawning goat of a thousand young, a shuddering pile of protoplasmic horror that mindlessly copulates with itself and, spurting, squirting, licking its own engorged & swollen membrum & vulvae, inseminates with sucker-adorned tentacles (each cup enfolding the horror of a barbed, venomous hook with which to tear the flesh to which it adhered) the inflamed orifices & lubricious, pulsing cysts from which the abnormal spawn gushes in ropy streams of hideous liquor—

Ia! How to describe the foul smell, the vile purulent exudate of eldritch emulsion bearing gelatinous bubbles of toadspawn from its body, did toadspawn only contain minuscule conical snail-bodies & horse-like bodies—not sea-horses yet, for no sea-horse has legs, but bodies of the size of sea-horses—Ia! The language of the English lacks a sufficiency of obscenity to encompass the monstrous presence of Hetty’s “mummy-horse.” It looked at me with liquid brown eyes as deep as any mare’s, long-lashed & contemplative: some of them embedded within it, others extruded atop stalks like those of a vile unclean slug. It had mouths, too, and other organs, some of them equine, others bizarrely, inappropriately human. I am reduced to the muttered imprecations of the subhuman & deranged; unmanned & maddened by the apprehension of the limits of sanity imposed by witnessing the ghastly immanence of an Elder Thing come to spawn in a family stable in Providence.

Imagine, if you will, a huge pile of gelatinous protoplasm ten feet in diameter & six feet high! It bears the charnel stink of the abattoir about it, a miasma composed of the concentrated fear & faecal vileness of every animal it has consumed to reach its present size. Their bones & skulls lie all around, & it is evident from a swift perusal of the scene that though it started on its equine stable-mates, the “mummy-horse,” gracile & pallid, with the calcified body of a spiral coned snail fused to the bone between its eyes, has absorbed its own legs, & head, & indeed every portion of its anatomy not dedicated to its adult functions of eating & spawning. There are human bones scattered around the festering midden in which it nests, for its virginal bellwether has with girlish laughter & coy blandishments tempted first the human members of the household & then every adult she can reach to enter the den of the monster. It is the way of this horror that when she finally ceases to provide it with a banquet of men & women, boys, girls, & babies, it will take her for its final repast, & subsequently it too will succumb, for its cannibal kind feed their spawn not with milk but with their own suppurating, foul flesh.

I know not from which hadean pit of horrors the spawn of the unicorn hail, but through subsequent years of research I have learned this much: that the cone-snails are the male offspring & the “horses” are female, and they tear & bite & eat anything that approaches them except a member of the distaff sex. They mate not by insemination but by fusion, the male adhering to the forehead of the female. Their circulatory systems fuse & the male is presently absorbed, leaving behind a spiral-fluted horn containing only the reproductive gonads, which presently discharge via the shared venous circulation. Once mated, the tiny “unicorns” tear into the maternal corpus, bloating their stomachs & growing rapidly; they squabble over the remains & spear one another & cannibalize their weaker siblings, until in the end the survivors—barely two or three in each litter of thousands—leave their charnel nursery behind & set out in search of a new virgin hostess who will take them in & groom & feed them. And so the wheel of death rolls ever on . . .

There is cold comfort to be drawn from the sure and certain knowledge that the correct way to deal with the problem you’re facing in your job involves napalm, if you find yourself confronting a dragon and you aren’t even carrying a cigarette lighter.

(Thumps self upside the head: Dammit, HPL’s style is infectious! Let me try again . . . )

With Greg driving me—if not mad, then at least in the direction of a neck brace—I barely notice either the time or the road layout as we hurtle towards Edgebaston Farm. We arrive all too soon at a desolate drystone wall overlooking a blasted heath, judder across a cattle grid set between the whitewashed gate posts, and embark on a hair-raising hillside descent along a poorly-maintained driveway that ends in a yard surrounded by mostly-windowless outbuildings that look like the mediaeval predecessors of World War II bunkers. It is not remotely like any of my preconceptions of what livery stables should look like—but then, what do I know?

Greg pulls up sharply and parks between a Subaru Forester covered in mud to the door sills and a white BMW. I do a double-take when I spot the concealed light-bar of an unmarked Police car on the BMW’s rear parcel shelf. I remember what Greg said about the Edgebastons supplying the local cops with horses for their mounted police. Back home in London they’re more interested in flying squirrels—Twin Squirrel helicopters, that is—but I guess here in Ruralshire they still believe in a cavalry charge with drawn batons and added eau de pepper spray. Or maybe the Chief Constable rides with the local Hunt. Either way, though, it’s a warning to me to be careful what I say. In theory my warrant card is supposed to compel and command the full cooperation of any of HMG’s servants. In practice, however, it’s best to beware of local entanglements . . .

Greg marches up to the farmhouse door and is about to whack it with the knurled knob-end of his ash walking stick when it opens abruptly. The matronly lady holding the door handle stares at him, then suddenly smiles. “Greg!” she cries, not noticing me. I take stock: she’s fortyish, about one-sixty high and perhaps seventy kilos, and wears jeans tucked into green wellies with a check shirt and a quilted body-warmer, as if she’s just stepped in from the stables. Curly black hair, piercing blue eyes, and the kind of vaguely familiar facial bone structure that makes me wonder how many generations back it diverged from the royal family. “How remarkable! We were just talking about you. Who’s this, are you taking on work-experience trainees?”

I emulate lockjaw in her general direction, it being less likely to give offense than my instinctive first response.

“Georgina,” says Greg, “allow me to introduce my colleague—”

“Bob,” I interrupt. Georgina darts forward, grabs my hand, and pumps it up and down while peering at my face as if she’s wondering why water isn’t gushing from my mouth. “From London.” It’s best to keep introductions like this as vague as possible.

“Bob,” she echoes. To Greg: “Won’t you come in? Inspector Dudley is here. We were discussing retirement planning for the mounted unit’s horses.”

“Jack Dudley’s here, is he?” Greg mutters under his breath. “Capital! Come on, young feller me lad.” And with that, he follows Georgina Edgebaston as she retreats into the cavernous farm kitchen. “And how is your mother, Georgie?” Greg booms.

“Oh, much the same—”

“—And where’s young Lady Octavia?” Greg adds.

“Oh, she’s back at school this week. Jolly hockey sticks and algebra, that kind of thing. Won’t be back until half-term.” The lady of the manse calls across the kitchen: “Inspector! We have visitors, I hope you don’t mind?”

“Oh, not at all.” A big guy with the build and nose of a sometime rugby player rises from the far end of the table, where he’s been nursing a chipped mug. He’s not in uniform, but there’s something odd about his clothing that takes me a moment to recognize: boots and tight trousers with oddly placed seams, that’s what it is. He’s kitted out for riding, minus the hard hat. He nods at Greg, then scans me with the professional eyeball of one who spent years carrying a notepad. “Who’s this?”

“Bob Howard.” I smile vacuously and try not to show any sign of recognizing what he is. There’s another guy at the far end of the kitchen, bent over a pile of dishes beside the sink. I get an indistinct impression of long, lank hair, a beard, and a miasma of depression hanging over him. “Greg’s showing me around today. It’s all a bit different, I must say!”

“Bob’s a city boy,” Greg explains, as if apologizing in advance for my cognitive impairment. “He’s working in town for a month, so I thought I’d show him round. He’s my sister’s eldest. Does something funny with computers.”

That’s getting uncomfortably close to the truth, so I decide to embellish the cake before Greg puts his foot in it: “I’m in web design,” I say artlessly. “Is that your car outside?” I ask Dudley.

The inspector eyeballs me again. “Company wheels,” he says. To Georgina, he adds, “Well, I really should be going. Meanwhile, if you can think of anyone who has room to take in our retirees I’d be very grateful. It’s a problem nobody mentioned in the original scope briefing—”

“A problem?” Greg asks brightly.

“Jack’s looking for a new retirement farm for the Section’s old mounts,” Georgina explains. “We used to take them in here, but that’s no longer possible.”

“Old mounts?” I ask.

My obvious puzzlement gives them a clear target for a patronizing display of insider knowledge. “Police horses don’t come cheap,” Greg explains. “You can’t put any old nag up against a bunch of rioters.” (The inspector nods approvingly, as if Bexhill-upon-Sea might at any time to supply a riot whose average age is a day under seventy! Horses v. wheelchairs . . . ) “They have to use larger breeds, and they have special training. And they don’t stay in service forever—in at six, retired by sixteen. But that’s relatively young to retire a horse, so the number of stables who can handle an ex-police mount is relatively small.”

“We used to take them in until suitable new owners could be found,” Georgina explains, “but that’s out of the question now—we’re at full occupancy. So I was just explaining to the inspector that while I can help him find a fallback, I can’t take Rose and Oak when they reach retirement next month.” She smiles politely. “Would you care for a cup of tea?”

“Don’t mind if I do!” Greg chortles. I nod vigorously, and refrain from paying obvious attention as the inspector makes his apologies and slithers out of the kitchen. I’m a good boy; I pretend I don’t even notice him eyeballing the back of my neck thoughtfully from the doorway. Ten to one he’ll be asking questions about me over Airwave before he gets back to the local nick. Let him: he won’t learn anything.

“So why can’t you take the police horses?” I ask as disingenuously as possible, while Georgina fusses over kettle and teapot. “Are you full or something?”

Greg spots my line of enquiry and provides distracting cover: “Yes, Georgina, what’s changed?” he asks.

She sighs noisily. “We’re out of room,” she says. “Leastwise until we can empty the old woodshed out and get it ready to take livestock instead.” She turns to the guy at the sink: “Adam, would you mind taking your clettering outside, there’s a good lad? Mr. Scullery and I need a word in private.”

Mr. Miasma rises and, wordlessly but with misshapen stick in hand, heads for the door. “I came to check the hounds’ vaccination log book was up to date,” Greg begins, “but if there’s something else you’d like me to take a look at—”

“Well, actually there is,” says Georgina. “it’s about the stables.” She’s wringing her hands unconsciously, which immediately attracts my attention. “And those damned land snails! They’re getting everywhere and I really can’t be doing with them. Ghastly things! But it’s mostly the new police mares. Jack convinced me to take them in for early training and breaking to saddle, but they’ve been an utter headache so far.”

“New mares,” echoes Greg. I’m all agog, but as long as Greg is doing the digging I see no reason to interrupt. “What new mares would these be?”

Georgina sighs noisily again as she picks up the kettle and fills the teapot. “Sussex Police Authority’s Mounted Police Unit, operating out of the stables in St. Leonards, is in the throes of phasing out all their medium-weight mounts and replacing them with what they call Enhanced-Mobility Operational Capability Upgrade Mounts, or EMOCUM—god-awful genetically engineered monstrosities, if you ask me, but what do I know about how the police work out their operational requirements?” She puts the kettle down, then dips a spoon in the teapot and gives it a vigorous stir. “So it’s goodbye to Ash and Blossom and Buttercup, and hello to EMOCUM Units One and Two, and if it looks like a horse and acts like a horse—most of the time—then it’s a horse, so it needs stabling and currying and worming and training, stands to reason; but if you’ll pardon my French, this is bullshit. Unit Two tried to eat Arsenic, so I have to move him out of the stable—”

“What? When was that? Why didn’t you call me?” demands Greg. His beard is quivering with indignation.

Georgina rolls her eyes, then opens a cabinet and hauls out a double handful of chipped ceramic mugs. “You were attending to a breech delivery, one of old Godmanchester’s Frisians as I recall. Melissa sent Babs instead and she patched him up—”

“Why would you leave arsenic lying around in a stable?” I ask, finally unable to contain myself. “Isn’t that a bit risky?”

Two heads swivel as one to regard the alien interloper. “Arsenic is Octavia’s horse,” Georgina explains, her voice slow and patient. “A seventeen-year-old bay gelding. He used to belong to Jack’s mounted unit but they put him out to pasture two years ago. Sixteen-and-a-half hands, police-trained, perfect for an ambitious thirteen-year-old.”

I’m blinking at this point. I recognize “police,” but the rest of the words might as well be rocket science or motorbike internals for all I can tell. All I can work out is the context. “So he’s a horse, and he was attacked by one of these EMOCUM things?” I ask. “Was that serious?”

“It tried to eat him!” Georgina snaps. I recoil involuntarily. “It has canines! You can’t tell me that’s natural! It’s messing with the natural order of things, that’s what it is. Amos was right.” She gives the tea another violent stir, then sloshes a stream of orange-brown liquor into the mugs—one of those breakfast blends with more caffeine than espresso and a worrying tendency to corrode stainless steel—and shoves them at Greg and myself. (Americans think we Brits drink tea because we’re polite and genteel or something, whereas we really drink it because it’s a stimulant and it’s hot enough to sterilize cholera bacteria.) I accept the mug with some trepidation, but it doesn’t smell of sheep-dip and my protective ward doesn’t sting me, so it’s probably not a lethal dose. “Babs stitched him up, but we can’t get him to go anywhere near the stable now—he panics and tries to bolt.”

“Where are you keeping him for the time being?” Greg asks, with the kindly but direct tone of a magistrate enquiring after the fate of a mugger’s victim.

“He’s in the south paddock while I sort out getting the woodshed refitted as a temporary stable, but there’s damp rot in the roof beams. And we had to move Travail and Jug-Jug, too. Not to mention Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless, who are all under-producing and their milk is sour and they won’t go anywhere near the yard. It’s a disaster, except for the cost-plus contract to look after the new Units. An absolute disaster! For two shillings I’d sell them to a traveling knacker just to get rid of them. But that’d leave Jack in the lurch, and the police with nowhere to put the other six they’ve got coming, and we can’t be having that, so think of England, say I.”

Greg takes a swig of rust-colored caffeine delivery fluid: the beard clenches briefly around it, then swallows. “Well, I suppose we’d better take a look at these EMOCUM beasties. What do you think, young feller?”

“I think that’d be a very good idea,” I say cautiously. My head’s spinning: Georgina has swapped out the game board from underneath our original plan—and what the hell are the police playing at? “Then I think we’d better go and have a word with Inspector Dudley. I have some questions for him, starting with where he got the idea of re-equipping the mounted unit with equoids . . .”

To paraphrase the stern & terrible Oliver, I beseech you, Robert, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken about unicorns. They are an antique horror that surpasses human understanding, a nightmarish reminder that we are but swimmers in the sunlit upper waters of an abyss & beneath us in the inky darkness there move monsters that, though outwardly of fair visage, harbor appetites less wholesome than Sawney Bean’s. As Professor Watts reminds us, fully three-quarters of life’s great & bounteous cornucopia consists of parasites, battening furtively on the flesh of the few productive species that grace creation. It is true that some of these parasites are marvelously attuned to the blind spots of their hosts; consider the humble cuckoo & the way its eggs, so different in shape & color from those that surround them, are nevertheless invisible to the host that raises the changeling in the nest. Just so too do unicorns exploit our beliefs, our mythology, our affection for our loyal equine servants! But their fair visage is merely a hollow mask that conceals a nightmare’s skull.

I knew none of that as I stood in that terrible courtyard, feet braced uncertainly on slime-trailed cobblestones slick with the mucilaginous secretions of the flesh-eating snails, facing the darkness within the gaping jaws of the stable with only a pair of steel tongs in my hand—and the looking-glass I had fetched with some vague, childish idea of sketching the details of the snail’s shell to compare with the encyclopedia in my grandfather’s library. Standing there in that revelatory moment of which I have dreamed ever since, I knew only Hetty’s blasphemous grin, the slithering horror of the tentacular mollusk as it fled towards the stables, and an apprehension of the greater nightmare that lurked beyond that shadow’d threshold.

But I was not unarmed! A stack of chopped lumber lay beneath a roof at one side of the barn, & the yard was strewn with moldering hay. I strode across, trying not to look within those horrid doors, & seized a slender branch that had been left intact, presumably as kindling.

“What are you doing?” demanded Hetty: “Won’t you go inside right away? Mummy-horse needs help!”

“It’s all right,” I consoled her; “but I need to see what I’m doing if I am to help her.” And with that facile reassurance I scooped up a handful of straw & used my handkerchief to bind it around the stick. Then I strode to the sunlit corner of the yard & pulled out my glass, bringing it to a focus on the straw.

Hetty stared at me oddly, then retreated to the barn door, her hips swaying lasciviously as she beckoned. There was, I recall, a sultry smile on her lips & a glazed & lustful expression that I, in my juvenile naïveté, barely apprehended was contrived to be seductive. As she stepped backwards into the shadows she raised her petticoats, revealing far more leg than common decency normally allowed in those days. I shuddered. “Won’t you come with me?” she sang.

The tip of my wand erupted with a pale glow. I breathed on the straw until it caught. I found myself wishing I had some tar or paraffin; with barely a minute until it burned down, I knew I had scant opportunity. I stepped toward her, a steely resolve in my chest propelling me forward even though my knees nearly knocked together & my teeth clattered in my head. “I’m coming, dear,” I said as Hetty retreated further into darkness, lifting her dress over her hips. She wore—pardon me for the nature of this confession—nothing beneath it, but was naked as the day she was born. Livid bruises studded her pale thighs, some of them circular, with puncture marks at their centers, scabbed-over wounds that hinted at unholy practices. No dance of the seven veils was this, but rather the puppet-show of a diseased and depraved imagination, seeking to corrupt & abuse the feeble-minded & weak-willed & lure them to a fate of unspeakable moral degeneracy.

The choking air within the barn reeked of overpowering decay, tempered by a musky odor that set my loins aflame despite my terror. I saw a lamp hanging from a nail just inside the door. Seizing it, I hastily applied the torch (fading to embers even then) to the wick, and just in time: for it caught. I raised the lamp & wound the wick up until it flared, & forced myself to look past Hetty—shamefully naked now, thrusting her hips towards me & supporting her uncorseted bosom with both hands in a manner transparently calculated to attract my attention—to behold the benthic horror of the angler fish lurking half-unseen in the twilight, dangling its shapely lure before me—its chosen prey!

This abomination stared at me with those glistening, liquid horse-eyes & woman-eyes: and it repeatedly coiled & recoiled tentacles like those of the Pacific octopus. Mouths opened & closed as those muscular ropes twitched & slithered around Hetty’s feet. “Do you want me?” her sweet soprano offered, even as a pink-skinned tentacle with fewer suckers than most spiraled around her left leg, questing & climbing. “Mummy-horse says don’t be afraid!” The pink & blindly questing membrum passed the level of her knees. “Mummy says she would like to speak with you, in a minute, through my mouth—” The tentacle’s blind head (the hectocotylus, as I later identified it) reached between her buttocks from behind. Pulses shivered up it from stem to tip as she opened her cloacal passage to receive it with a sigh. Her knees flexed towards me, baring her naked womanhood, as her weight collapsed onto that vile and corrupt pillar of muscle. It supported her fully: her eyes rolled back in her head as she fainted. “Howard,” said another’s voice, speaking through her throat. “Come to me & join in precious union with this mating body, for your arrival has been prophesied by the ancients of our kind & you will be a fitting adornment to my reign.”

“Wh-what are you?” I asked, mesmerized—I was, as I have said, but a youth: I had never seen a woman’s secret parts before, & even in the midst of this terrible wrongness I was excited as well as afraid—for it did not occur to me then that my very soul was in immediate danger.

“We are Shub-Niggurath,” said the cyclopean nightmare that spoke through Hetty’s vocal cords; “we come from your future & it is prophesied that you will become one with our flesh.”

Hetty’s body now began to rise, legs straightening. Her arms rose too, outstretched and imploring towards me. Her neck righted itself & her eyes opened. “Howard?” she said in her normal voice. Then in the voice of Shub-Niggurath: “Mate with us & give us the gift of your seed.” Then again: “Howard? Something is wrong! I’m afraid . . .”

I stepped closer, mesmerized. Then another step. By the light of my raised oil lamp I beheld tears of blood weeping from her eyes. By my every inhalation I could perceive (from among the overwhelming, choking midden-stink of the stables) a peculiar stench emanating from her skin in place of the normal fragrance of the fairer sex. “Isn’t this your mummy-horse?” I asked, driven by a cruel impulse: I wanted to touch her, I wanted to open myself to experiences I as yet had no understanding of: powerful emotions drove me on, no longer pure and holy terror but now tempered with an admixture of feral lust. “Isn’t this what you want?”

“She hasn’t done this to me before—” Shub-Niggurath: “Take the gift we place before you, boy. Lose yourself in the flesh of Hetty van t’Hooft & revel in the pleasure & ecstasy of the union of bodies & souls! Join us, join us, join us!” I saw the thick column of cephalopodian flesh pulsing behind & within her, operating her skin like a hellish glove puppet, & I slowly realized: this thing, this hideous monster that spawned endlessly in the filthy darkness of the family stable, was hollowing her out from the inside! It meant to use her as a lure, just as the angler mercilessly impales a fly on a barbed hook—& I was the juicy trout in its sights! The musky scent hanging all around made my heart beat faster & brought premature life to my youthful manhood, but even then I recognized that to succumb to such an unholy lust was a mistake I could ill afford to make.

Even so, I took another step forward. It was to nearly prove my undoing, for I had paid scant attention to the spawn that surrounded us, lurking in the far corners of the barn. But the spawn had begun to close in, ready to resume tearing at the flesh of their progenitor, and now by pure mischance I brought my shod foot down on an over-eager unicorn. It was a perfect miniature pony perhaps a hand high at the hock, sporting a viciously sharp horn an inch long. It screamed in a high-pitched voice & I slipped, falling to one knee. I looked up, straight at Hetty’s female parts, & saw then what had been hidden in waiting for me: a livid appendage, either vastly expanded from her natural organ (like the clitoris of the spotted hyena) or worse, an extrusion of Shub-Niggurath itself, capped with the concentric circular jaws of a lamprey, alternately gaping open to bite & snapping closed with vile frustration, streaked with blood & mucus, pulsing as it quested blindly from its vulval nest to seek my face—

I screamed & threw the oil lamp. Then I pushed myself to my feet & fled. Fiery stabbing pain lanced through my hand; I glanced down & saw that I had been stung by the lance of a small snail-cone. The agony was pure & excruciating, & as breathtaking as a hornet sting. I caught my breath & screamed again, then stumbled backwards. Hetty was still upright, but quivered from head to toe in a quite inhuman manner, which I now know to be death spasms, like those that are seen when a felon is being hanged. Blood trickled from the sides of her mouth & from her ears now, as well as from the sides of her twitching eyes. The vileness that supported her skin now ate at her innards with its concealed radulae. But even as it consumed her & tried to extend its tentacles towards me, the spreading pool of oil from the lamp reached a half-collapsed bale of hay that lay beside a bloody exposed rib cage (whether of man or beast I could not tell, in the depths of my torment).

“We will be back,” the horror gurgled through her dying larynx: “and we will have you in the end!”

The flames caught as I stumbled away, cradling my burning, wounded hand. I remember naught of the next two weeks but nightmares, but I was later told I lay febrile & unconscious & shuddering on the edge of death’s dark cliff. Thereafter, whenever I was introduced to a member of the fairer sex who might flirt with me or whisper sweet nothings, all I could see was my the husk of my Hetty, impaled and half-eaten on the tentacle of a nightmare from the far future, even as she whispered chilling blandishments to me; and all I could think of was the thing that lay in wait for me, & what the Beast had said at the end.

Not until I met the blessed Sonia was I was even partially healed of the wound in my soul that the unicorn inflicted. Even today I am only half the man that I might have been had I not met the abomination in the stable. And this is why I urge you not to write lightly of the four-legged parasite that preys upon our instinct to protect & cherish the fairer sex. They are a thing of unclean & blasphemous appetites that preys upon the weak & foolish & our own intrinsic tendency towards degeneracy & self-abuse. Worse still, they harbor a feral intellect and they plan ahead. They must be destroyed on sight! Otherwise the madness & horror will breed, until only darkness remains.

After we drain our mugs of tea, Georgina shepherds us out into the farmyard to show us Lovecraft’s Nightmares: Police Rapid Pursuit Edition.

I am actually quite apprehensive at this point, you understand. I’ve read enough of old purple-prose’s deathbed confessions to Robert Bloch to be aware that unicorns are very unpleasant indeed. Even making allowances for Hipster Lovecraft’s tendency towards grisly gynophobic ranting, Freudian fever-fantasies, and florid exaggeration, we’re clearly about to meet something deeply creepy. Greg, for his part, is suitably subdued: even his beard hangs heavy, as if it senses a thunderstorm-drenching in the offing.

Only Georgina carries on as if everything is normal, and she at least has had time to get accustomed to the idea that there might be something nasty in one of the outbuildings. (Or standing next to the woodshed in a blanket with police high-visibility markings and a baton slung from the saddle. Whatever.) Also, Georgina has an ace up her sleeve—or maybe a baronetcy. She’s clearly of such rarefied breeding that she feels no need to take shit from anyone. If you live in Ruralshire, England, you meet people like this from time to time. Their blood runs blue with self-confidence. Where ordinary folks enjoy messing around with flower beds, these folks open their garden to the Queen one weekend a year. The garden in question is probably one that their sixteen-times-great grandfather received as grace and favor after unhorsing an uppity duke during some battle everyone except mediaeval historians have forgotten about. If you catch them ranting about immigrants, chances are they’re talking about those nouveaux-arrivistes, the Windsors. They dress in patched jeans, cable-knit sweaters, and green wellington boots; drive muddy Subarus or Land Rovers; own entire counties; and reduce police superintendents and MPs to helpless displays of forelock-tugging obeisance via some kind of weird reality distortion field.

Which probably makes Georgina the ideal person to look after a couple of fractious, under-trained, EMOCUM Units: because she takes no shit from anyone or anything, parasitic alien horrors from beyond spacetime included.

“I say! You there! EMOCUM Unit One! Stop trying to eat the vet at once! It’s rude!”

A stable is a stable is a stable, except when, instead of regular horses, it contains carnivorous Furies with glowing blue eyes—in which case, the wooden partitions are reinforced with welded steel tubes, the brightwork on the bridles is made of machined titanium, and it stinks like the carnivore enclosure at a zoo where they’ve been feeding the lions and tigers rotten offal laced with laxatives. The stench when Georgina opens the side door makes my stomach heave, and I have to stand outside and take a few deep breaths before I can dive into the miasma. Suddenly the legend of the labors of Hercules—and the cleaning of the Augean stables—makes perfect sense to me.

When I manage to get my rebellious gastrointestinal tract under control, I step into a scene worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch triptych. It’s like a stable, only reinforced, and equipped with devices that might in any other context be taken as instruments of torture, or at least evidence for the prosecution in a really serious animal abuse case: heavy shackles chained to concrete pillars, buckets of bloody intestines surrounded by clouds of buzzing flies, the omnipresent stench, humming fans and fluorescent lights. There are two horses present, one of whom appears to be leaning over the side of his stall and nibbling on Greg’s beard with intent to be over-familiar, if Greg’s indignant whimpering is taken into account. But then they notice my arrival. Both heads turn to focus on me. And I freeze, because they’re not horses.

Being the object of attention of a pair of equoids—pardon me, Police EMOCUM Units—is a chilling experience. Have you ever been to a zoo or wildlife sanctuary and attracted the attention of a lion, tiger, or other big cat? You’ll know what I’m talking about. Except equoids are horse-sized: two or three times as heavy as a (thankfully extinct) saber-toothed Smilodon, four times the weight of a modern Bengal tiger. They aren’t quite in maximum-size Tyrannosaur territory, but they’re not far off, and they’re hot-blooded carnivores. When they focus on you, you simply know that they’re wondering how you’ll taste. It’s a shuddery sensation deep in your gut that makes your balls try to climb up into your belly and hide (if you’re male), and your ringpiece contract (regardless of sex). As they look at me I freeze and break out in a cold fear-sweat. They freeze too, heads pointing at me like gun muzzles.

Lots of details come into focus: they have no horns. Their eyes are slightly too close together, moved frontally to give them better binocular vision than any normal horse. Their nostrils and mouths look normal at first, but then one of them wrinkles its lips and I see fangs, and the edges of the lips retract much further than is natural for a grass-eater, revealing dentition more like something out of a nightmare concocted by H. R. Giger than anything a horse doctor might recognize. Oh, and the eyes? I mentioned that they’re blue, and they pulse, but did I remember to say that they glow?

Resting on a stand next to one of the stalls is what passes for a saddle—one with a steel roll cage with wire mesh front and sides, and a police light bar on the roof. Obviously, riding an EMOCUM Unit is not a happy-fun experience. In point of fact, they exude danger so strongly that I’m wondering why the police didn’t ask the saddlery to add machine gun mounts to the rider’s safety cage—it couldn’t be any less subtle.

“Who the fuck are they planning on deploying these things against?” I ask hoarsely; “An invading Panzer division?” Visions of the carnage after Dudley deploys his EMOCUMs for crowd control at a friendly away match overload even my normally-overactive sense of humor. These beasts are no laughing matter: you don’t mock a main battle tank, either.

“Grrrrr . . .” rumbles equoid number one, inquisitively sizing me up for elevenses.

“I can’t be sure,” Georgina says thoughtfully, “but if I had to guess, I’d say they’ll come in right handy when the illegal immigrants and bloody hippies in Brighton rise up to burn all us right-thinking people down. But in the meantime, they manufacture a hundred pounds of shit every day, and I can’t even compost it!”

“Bastards,” Greg mumbles indistinctly, clutching his chin.

“Do pay attention, I told you not to stand too close!” Georgina shakes her head. “They were a lot smaller when Jack dropped them off,” she adds. She bends down, indicating knee height. “Still vicious as a bear-baiting dog, but at least they were manageable then.”

“How long ago was that?” I ask, getting an even worse sinking feeling.

“About three weeks ago. They grow fast.”

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

SECRET

Procurement Specification: M/CW/20954

Date of Issue: July 1st, 1940

Requirement for:

Charger, Heavy Cavalry Mounted:

Must replace existing mounts for Horse Guards and other remaining Army Cavalry operational units.

Mounts should be between 13 and 17 hands high, weight 650–900 lbs, broken to saddle.

Desirable characteristics:

Mounts should exhibit three or more of the following traits:

• Endurance in excess of 6 hours at 30 miles/hour over rough terrain (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

• Endurance in excess of 30 minutes at 50 miles/hour on metaled road surfaces (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

• Ability to see in the dark

• Ability to recognize and obey a controlled vocabulary of at least 20 distinct commands

• Invisible

• Bulletproof

• Carnivorous

• Flight (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

State of requirement:

Unfilled

CANCELLED April 2nd, 1945

Reasons for cancellation:

(1) Impending replacement of horse-mounted cavalry in all future operational roles,

(2) Procurement and initial delivery of AEC Centurion Mk 1 Universal Battle Tank supersedes requirement M/CW/20954.

Sitting back in the passenger seat of Greg’s Landy, I massage my head as if I can somehow squeeze the aching contents into a semblance of order. “That was not what I was expecting.”

“I’ve known Georgina since she was a wee thing, competing in dressage.” Greg huffs for a moment, then produces a pencil case from the pile of debris under the driver’s seat. He extracts what I initially mistake for a gigantic brown spliff. Then he produces a weird multitool, with which he amputates one end, and sets fire to the stump of the reeking roll-up.

“Careful with that spliff, Eugene,” I start before I realize that it’s actually a cigar, so old and foul that I cough up half a lung before I get the door open and scramble out. “Jesus, Greg!”

“Sorry, young feller.” He’s clearly unrepentant, but I notice that he’s sucking on it like it’s an asthma inhaler, and his other hand—the one grasping his walking stick—is shaking slightly. “I needs my weed after witnessing a scene like that.”

“I am going to report this,” I say heavily. “The EMOCUMs, I mean. This is way above my pay grade.”

“Oh, really? I have never in all my days seen one of you people back down from a red-eyed abomination with too many tentacles—”

“You’ve never seen us pick a fight with the police, either, have you?” I snap at him, then walk it back: “Sorry, but we work with the boys in blue, they’re not normally the subject of our investigations.” I cough, trying to clear my lungs. They’ve been taking a battering today, between the fetid aroma of carnivore shit in the stables and Greg’s diesel-smoked stogie. “Let me think. Okay, the EMOCUMs aren’t going anywhere right now. They can wait for backup.” (Assuming they’re not actually one of our projects—one that Iris and I don’t know about because we’re not cleared for it. Crazier things have happened. In which case double-checking everything discreetly is the order of the day.) “But, hmm. What do you know about Inspector Dudley? Because he’s the next link in the chain back to wherever they came from . . .”

The beard shakes like a bush in a hail-storm. “Sorry, lad, I can’t help you. I deal with the likes of Georgina, or Sergeant Irving who runs the station stables in East Grinstead, not the organ grinder hisself.”

“Who was conveniently present when we came to visit, and then slipped out. Oh shit.”

“What’s the matter?” Greg takes another epic lungful of vaporized bunker fuel, then his eyes wrinkle up. “You don’t think—”

“When you sent a memo requesting a liaison visit from Capital Laundry Services, how exactly did you go about it?” I ask. “Did you by any chance ask someone else to send us an email? Someone like—”

“Gosh, now that you mention it—” He jabs his fingers knuckle-deep into his beard and tugs—“I’d ha’ asked the fragrant Melissa to write to you! But I don’t see—”

I roll my eyes. “Does Melissa have a boyfriend, by any chance?” I ask. “Who might happen to be a member of the local constabulary? Or a father or mother or sister or best pal from her school days, or something? Someone who might know about the EMOCUM procurement program?”

“Ooh, I see where you’re going.” Greg sighs, then reaches down and stubs out his vile cigar on the underside of his boot. He bags up the remains: I shudder slightly and climb back into the Land Rover’s passenger seat. My stunned nasal passages can’t make any sense out of their environment, but my pupils dilate and my pulse slows thanks to all the nicotine hanging in the air. “You’re wondering where it all came from?”

“That’s the key question,” I agree, fastening my seat belt and pulling the door closed. “Where did Jack Dudley procure a handful of juvenile unfertilized female unicorns? And who put the idea into his head? Come to think of it, where are those bloody snails coming from? There’s got to be a fertilized female in the sessile spawning phase of its life cycle somewhere hereabouts. It’s one thing for some idiot mounted police officers to think that Baba Yaga’s herd will be good for crowd control duty, but if there’s any leakage—”

“I’ve got an inkling, but you’re not going to like it. This could be the start of a large-scale outbreak,” Greg says heavily. “A full infestation. Equoids are r-strategy spawners—” he catches my blank look and backs up. “Most organisms follow one of two types of reproductive strategy, young feller. K-selection—few offspring, lots of energy devoted to keeping them alive: that’d be us shaved apes, heh. And then there’s r-selection: spew out thousands or millions of tiny spawn and hope some of them survive. Equoids do that, they spawn like pollen, or flies, or frogs . . . but they’re also parasites that co-opt a host species and use it to nurture their brood. Anyway, the things in the barn, the adult sterile females, they’re unusual. And that’s a warning flag. If I had ter guess what’s going on I’d figure there’s a breeding queen out there who’s worked out a low-cost way to help her spawn make it to adulthood. Something new, not just a single hypnotized girlie. Not sure what, but if we don’t find the queen in time we’re going to be neck deep in unicorns in these parts.” He trails off into a grim and thoughtful silence.

“I’m going to phone home for support,” I say. “Then while they’re getting the circus loaded, I’ll go pay the inspector a visit. I want to establish the facts on the ground, find out where he’s getting the horses from.”

“And what then? If you can’t figure it out?”

“Whatever I find, I’m going to boot it upstairs then take a back seat. Like I said, this is well above my pay grade . . .”

I’m fairly sure that by this point in my report, you, gentle reader, will doubtless be raising a metaphorical hand, because the questions have been piling up thick and fast and you are reaching the end of your patience. So let me try to set your mind at ease with a quick run through the list of Frequently Asked Questions:

Q: Unicorns? Are they really this bad?

A: Yes. I wish I was making this up. Unfortunately old HPL’s experience in his childhood sweetheart’s back yard is about par for the course where those creatures are concerned. We are not in Unicorn School™: The Sparkling territory here. Or even My Little Pony. (Well, except for the Magic bit.)

Q: But what about the unfertilized ones?

A: It’s the parasitic life cycle in a nutshell. Parasites, especially those with complex gender dimorphism and hypercastrating behavior (that diverts a host species’ reproductive energies in service to their own goals) generally have some interesting failure modes. Among unicorns, if they don’t mate young they tend not to mate at all—it’s kind of hard for a foot-long cone snail to climb onto the forehead of something that resembles a carnivorous horse, isn’t it? Especially without getting eaten. So the female grows to adult stature but is infertile. What you get is an equoid: an obligate meat-eater the size and shape of a horse, with the appetite of three Bengal tigers and the table manners of a hungry great white shark.

Q: Why haven’t I heard about these already?

A: You probably have. There are plenty of legends about them—the mares of Diomedes, the Karkadann of Al-Biruni, the herd of Baba Yaga—but they don’t show up very often in the historic record. This is because people who try to domesticate mature equoids usually end up as equoid droppings.

Q: But what if you get them young?

A: Good thinking! If you get them young you can semi-domesticate them. But to get them young, one has to locate a fertile adult in the sessile, spawning phase. (And survive the experience.)

Q: What are we supposed to do about them?

A: The sterile adult equoids themselves aren’t necessarily a problem: they’re basically dangerous but dumb. Georgina Edgebaston has been training two of them as EMOCUM Units, but they’re under control. As long as she doesn’t do anything stupid, like hitting one on the forehead with a giant venomous land snail, she’s probably got them contained. I’m much more worried about where they’re coming from. Equoids don’t generally gambol freely on the Southern downs, because the trail of half-eaten children and screaming parents tends to attract attention. This means that there’s probably a nest not too far away. And it is absolutely essential that Greg and I locate the nest so that it can be dealt with appropriately.

Q: The nest—what does “appropriate” mean in this context?

A: Let me give you a clue: I start by making some phone calls which, by way of a liaison officer or two, induce the police to evacuate the surrounding area. Then what appears to be a Fire Brigade Major Incident Mobile Command HQ vehicle arrives, followed by a couple of pumps which are equipped to spray something rather more toxic and inflammable than water. Finally, the insurance loss adjusters turn up.

That’s what is supposed to happen, anyway. If it doesn’t, Plan B calls for the Army to loan us a couple of Apache Longbow helicopter gunships. But we try not to go there; it’s difficult and expensive to cover up an air strike, and embarrassing to have to admit that Plan A didn’t work properly.

Q: You said equoids aren’t intelligent. But what was all that Yog-Sothoth stuff HPL was gibbering about at the end? What about the mummy-thing—

A: Don’t you worry your little head about that, it’s above your security clearance. Just take it from me that everything is under control!

After I phone Iris, to deliver the unwelcome news that this smoke appears to be associated with an ignition source, I continue my investigation by going in search of the inspector.

There is an old Victorian police station in East Grinstead, complete with the antique blue gas lamp over the main entrance and a transom window (no longer used) just inside the lobby door. It also has a pair of tall gates that open into a courtyard. It currently does duty as a car park for the uniform cars and snatch vans, but one wall of the courtyard is still lined with stalls for the horses, and they’re in good repair.

I am a civilian, casually dressed. I do not enter the courtyard, but instead walk up to the public entrance, past the information posters (COPPER THEFT: ARE YOU TAKING YOUR LIFE IN YOUR HANDS?), and in to the reception area.

I stand in front of the desk for almost a minute as, sitting behind it, PC McGarry (number 452) explains the correct protocol for helping scallies fall downstairs in a single-story nick to Constable Savage, a high flyer who has been transferred from Birmingham to expand out his résumé and help bring policing in Ruralshire into the twentieth century. From his shifty, impatient posture it’s obvious that he’d much rather be out on the street monstering chavs. Finally I grow impatient and clear my throat. PC McGarry continues to drone on, obviously enjoying his pulpit far too much to stop, so I pull out my warrant card.

“ ’Ere, Fred, don’t you want to ask this gentleman what he’s—” Savage’s eyes are drawn to focus on my card wallet and his voice slows to a stop. “What?”

“Bob Howard, Capital Laundry Services. I’d like to speak to Inspector Dudley.” I smile assertively. Cops are trained to de-prioritize the unassertive. “If I can have a minute of your attention?”

PC McGarry glances at me, clearly irritated by the interruption. “We don’t need any dry-cleaning—”

I focus on him, borrowing the full weight of my ID card’s glamor: “Never said you did, mate. I need to see Inspector Dudley. As soon as possible, about a matter of some considerable importance. He won’t thank you for delaying me.”

McGarry doesn’t want to yield, but my warrant card isn’t going to let him ignore me. “What’s it about?” He demands.

“DEFRA want all the vaccination records for the new rides he’s commissioning for the mounted unit,” I deadpan. “I just missed him at Edgebaston Farm, but the long arm of the livestock law has a way of catching up.”

McGarry eyeballs me dubiously, then picks up the phone. “Inspector? There’s a Mr. Hobson from DEFRA down here in reception, says he needs to talk to you—something about Edgehill Farm? No sir, I don’t. Yes, sir.” He puts the phone down. “You. The inspector will be down in a minute.” He points at a chair. “Have a seat.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” I ignore the chair and walk over to the noticeboard, to read the public information posters while I wait. (STRANGER DANGER! and REMEMBER TO LOCK YOUR DOORS AND WINDOWS: RURALSHIRE REGULARLY GETS VISITED BY TOWNIE SCUM vie for pride of place with IS YOUR NEIGHBOR EMPLOYING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS? It’s like their public relations office moonlights from the BNP.)

I don’t have to wait long. I hear footsteps, and as I turn, I hear a familiar voice. “You. What do you want?” Inspector Dudley looks somewhat more intimidating in uniform, and he was plenty intimidating before. He stares down at me coldly from behind the crooked bridge of his nose. Luckily I don’t intimidate quite as easily as I used to.

“Perhaps we should talk in your office?” I suggest. “It’s about the EMOCUM Units you’ve requisitioned.” I’m still holding my warrant card, and I spot his eyes flickering towards it, then away, as if he’s deliberately pretending he hasn’t noticed it.

“Come with me,” he says. I follow the inspector past the reception area and into the administrative guts of the station: whitewashed partition walls, doors with numbers and frosted glass panels. The cells are presumably downstairs. He heads through a fire door and up a narrow staircase, then into an office with a single desk, a couple of reception chairs, and a window with a nice view of the Victorian railway station frontage. “Who are you, and what are you doing with that old fraud Scullery?” He demands.

“I’m from a department you probably haven’t heard of before and mustn’t speak about in public.” I shove my card right under his nose, where he can’t miss it. “The, ah, EMOCUM Units were not authorized by my department. As we have licensing and oversight responsibility for all such assets, I want to know where you heard about them, where you got them from, and how you’re planning on deploying them.” I smile to defuse the sting of my words. “All the paperwork and oversight reports you were making an end-run around have just caught up with you, I’m afraid.”

“But the—” He sits down behind the desk, and something in his expression changes. A moment of openness passes, like the shadow of a cloud drifting across a hillside. His expression is closed to me. “What are you doing here? Everything is under control. There’s no problem at all.”

“I’m afraid I disagree.” I keep my warrant card in plain sight. “Tell me: where did you source the EMOCUM Units? And who came up with the proposal in the first place?”

“It seemed like a goodoodood . . .” His eyes are drawn to the card, even as he stutters: “It was my idea! I’m sure it was. It seemed like such a good idea, so it must have been mine, mustn’t it?”

“Really?”

“I thought-ought—” he’s fighting the geas on the warrant card as hard as I’ve ever seen from anyone—“we-e should have a major capability upgrade! Yes, that’s it! The Air Support Unit get all the attention these days, them bleeding flyboys! Their choppers can’t manage more than four hours’ airborne patrol time in 24 hours, and you can’t use ’em to make arrests or for crowd control, but they suck the money out of my budget. It’s us or them! Do you have any idea how much it costs to operate a mounted patrol? To put eight officers on saddles at a match I need twelve mounts because horses aren’t like cars, oh no they’re not—cars don’t suffer from poll evil or grass sickness—and I need at least as many officers as rides. We need civilian auxiliaries because stables don’t muck themselves out, on-call vets, and six bales of hay a day. Not to mention the ongoing maintenance bill and depreciation on our motorized horse box and the two trailers, plus the two pickups to tow them.”

He begins to foam at the mouth as he winds up to a fine rant about the operational costs of maintaining a mounted unit: “In the last financial year my unit cost nearly six hundred thousand pounds, in order to provide three thousand six hundred mounted officer-shifts of six hours’ duration each! The fly-boys cost eight hundred and twenty in return for which we get eleven hundred airborne hours a year and they are weaseling to have my unit decommissioned and our entire budget diverted to running a second Twin Squirrel. I ask you, is that a good use of public funds? Or, I ask you this in all sincerity, would it be better spent on equipping our mounted officers with the best steeds for getting the job done?”

The inspector slams his open palm down on his desk, making the wilting begonias jump. He glares at me, the whites of his eyes showing. His pupils are dilated and his cheeks are flushed. He gasps for breath before continuing. I watch, somewhere midway between concern and fascination. This is not business as usual. What I’m witnessing is symptomatic of an extremely powerful occult compulsion that has been applied to the inspector. His words are powerful: I feel my ward vibrating on its chain, warming up painfully where it lies close to the skin of my chest.

“It is our duty to protect the public and enforce the Law of the Land! Duty, honor, courage in the service of Queen and Country! The Queen! I swore an oath to uphold the Law and I will uphold it to the best of my ability! That means enhancing our capabilities wherever possible, striving for maximum efficiency in the delivery of mounted police capabilities! We’re barely keeping our heads above water in the face of a deluge of filth coming up from the big cities, darkies and gippos and yids and hippies and, and—Law and Order! We must maintain Law and Order! The Queen is coming! The Queen is coming! Equipping my division with EMOCUM Units will result in a great increase in our speed, mobility, and availability to enforce the Law of the Land in the coming strugg-ugg-uggle against-against the forces of darknesssss—”

His left cheek begins to twitch, and he starts to slur his words. I hastily flip my warrant card upside-down, then pull it back. The pressure from the ward pushing against my sternum subsides as inspector Dudley slumps sideways, gasping for breath. For a few horrified seconds I’m afraid he’s having a stroke: but the twitching subsides and he straightens slowly, leaning against the back of his chair.

“What was I saying?” He asks, looking around hesitantly, as if puzzled to find himself in his own office. “Who are you?”

I take a gamble and hold up my warrant card: “Bob Howard. Who I am is unimportant. You don’t need to know. But—” I lean forward—“where did you get the EMOCUM Units from?”

“I, I asked around.” He sounds vague and disoriented. “They were just there when I needed them.” His eyes roll back momentarily: “Sent by the Q-Queen,” he adds conversationally, in a tone that makes my skin crawl. He abruptly blinks back to full consciousness: “I don’t know where they came from. Why?”

I try again. “Where did the requirements document for the EMOCUM Units come from?”

“I, uh, I’ve got it somewhere. There.” He points a shaky finger at the grubby PC on one side of his desk. “It took ages to write—”

“Would you mind opening the file for me?” I ask. “In Word.” I tense up, then haul out my phone as he reaches for the keyboard. It’s a flashy new Palm Treo, and I’ve got some rather special software on it that can scan for certain types of occult hazard (in conjunction with the special-issue box of bluetooth-connected sensors in my jacket pocket). I punch up a utility (icon: this is your brain on drugs, superimposed over a red inverted pentacle) and aim my phone’s camera at his monitor as he pokes unsteadily at the keyboard.

The inspector is so oblivious to my presence that I might as well not be here—except when he’s forced to pay attention to me by my warrant card. This is, in itself, a serious warning sign: he’s meant to be one of ours, dammit, and a Laundry warrant card is enchanted with a geas that compels subjects to recognize the lawful bearer as a superior officer in their own department. (Except within the Laundry itself, obviously—otherwise we could get into horrifying recursive loops of incrementally ascending seniority: imagine the consequences if this affected Accounting and Payroll!) Anyway, if Jack Dudley’s mind is shying away from me, then someone has probably tried to install countermeasures against other adepts’ glamors. Which is really bad news, because unicorns don’t do subtle like that.

So I’m paying more attention to my phone—which is scanning for threat patterns—than to the screen the inspector is squinting at, when the familiar logo of Microsoft Office flashes up for a few seconds, followed in rapid succession by a window onto hell.

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

SECRET

Procurement Specification: R/NBC/6401

Date of Issue: April 2nd, 1970

Requirement for:

Proposal for Strategic Deterrent (class: alternative, non-nuclear) Type: Anthropic Eschatological Weapons System, Air-Dropped

In view of the increase in popular support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, it might at some future date be deemed politically expedient for the UK to decommission its strategic nuclear capability in the form of the Resolution-class submarines and their associated Polaris A3 SLBMs. However, the UK’s strategic deterrent posture must be maintained at all costs in the face of the Soviet threat.

Chemical weapons are not fit for purpose in this role due to difficulty in ensuring delivery in adequate quantity. Conventional biological weapons (weaponized smallpox, plague, etc.) are not fit for purpose in this role due to the impossibility of immunizing the entire UK population and also of guaranteeing efficacy in the face of an enemy biowar vaccination defense program.

This requirement is for proposals for unconventional macrobiological weapons that are suitable for delivery by manned bomber/stand-off bomb (e.g. Blue Steel), which must undergo post-delivery amplification and inflict strategic-level damage on the enemy, which are not susceptible to pharmaceutical or medical defense, and which are self-limiting (unlikely to give rise to pandemics).

Desirable characteristics:

AEWS-AD must be storable, long-term (temperature/humidity constraints: see schedule A) without maintenance for up to 5 years.

Must be containerized in suitable form for mounting and delivery via WE.177 bomb casing or alternative equivalent structural unit compatible with bomb bay and wing hardpoints on all current operational strike aircraft and the forthcoming Panavia Tornado IDS.

Must be sterile/non-self-replicating or must replicate once, giving rise to infertile spawn.

A strike delivering a single AEWS-AD must be capable of depopulating a first-rank capital city (population ablation coefficient: at least 25%) in less than 24 hours.

AEWS-AD should additionally have three or more of the following traits: carnivorous, venomous, mind-controlling, invisible, pyrogenic, flying, basilisk gaze, bullet-resistant, radiation-tolerant for up to 20,000 REM (single pulse) or 1000 rads/hr (fallout), invulnerable to class 6 or lower occult induction algorithms.

State of Requirement

Null and void.

CANCELLED April 3rd, 1970
by Order of Cabinet Office in accordance with recommendation of SOE (X Division) Operational Oversight Audit Committee

Reasons for cancellation order:

The risk of unintentional containment violation or accidental release during the life of such a weapons system is low but nevertheless unacceptably high.

Deployment of AEWS-AD, whether in accordance with legal national command authority or otherwise, would constitute a violation of Section IV.B of the Benthic Treaty. This would deliver a guaranteed casus belli to BLUE HADES.

The probability of BLUE HADES retaliation for a violation of S.IV.B leading to the total extinction of the population of the British Isles is 100%, within the limits of error. This applies to the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Channel Isles, and Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But this is not the limit of the extent of casualties from such a strike.

The probability of a BLUE HADES strike resulting in the total extinction of the entire human species exceeds 50%.

It is considered that attempting to develop a weapons system in the same category as AEWS-AD is so inherently destabilizing that such activities may be seen as justifying a pre-emptive strike by other human governments. Far from securing the realm against the threat of Soviet nuclear aggression, this project might actually provoke it.

(Addendum: SOE (X Division) OOAC recommends that it would be in the nation’s best interests if all the members of the committee that drafted R/NBC/6401 could be induced to take early retirement; thereafter they should be denied access to sharp instruments. We are serious about this. Not since RARDE’s BLUE PEACOCK project of 1954 to 1958 has this oversight body been asked to evaluate such an unedifying, if not actually insane, proposal.)

While I’m glancing down at my smartphone’s two-inch screen, inspector Dudley is helping me with my enquiries by opening up the Microsoft Word file containing the requirements document he remembers drafting for replacing the Sussex constabulary’s remaining horses with unicorn spawn—sorry, EMOCUM Units. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Well, I find out as the file opens. Because Jack Dudley may remember writing it, but unless he’s a skilled battle magus as well as a police inspector, he sure as hell didn’t write the Visual BASIC macro that fires up the instant the text appears on screen.

It all gets very messy, very fast.

Because I’m staring at my Treo instead of the PC, I feel it vibrate in my hand as the screen flashes red: THAUM OVERFLOW. I hear a loud whining buzz from the desktop, like a mosquito the size of a Boeing 737, then the unmistakable screech and click of a hard disk shredding its platters: funny, I didn’t know you could do that in software any more, I just have time to register, as my ward heats up painfully. A second later, Inspector Dudley moans. It’s a familiar, extremely unwelcome kind of moan, and it sends shivers up my spine because I hear it late at night when I’ve been working overtime, on a regular basis. It’s the inhuman sound of a soul-sucked husk that hungers for brains, just like the Residual Human Resources on the Night Watch.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen. You wouldn’t believe the scope for mischief that the Beast of Redmond unintentionally builds into its Office software by letting it execute macros that have unlimited access to the hardware. I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn’t entirely human). However, this is the first time I’ve seen a Word document eat a man’s soul.

I straighten up and take two steps backwards. The doorknob grinds against my left buttock: dammit, why couldn’t the door open outwards? I raise my phone and hastily stroke the D-pad, tracking down the app I need . . . and the fucking thing crashes on me. Oh joy. PalmOS: always there right when you least need it.

The inspector is rising from his seat, clumsily pushing himself away from his desk. His movements are jerky if not tetanic. He moans softly, continuously, and as he turns his head towards me I register the faint greenish glow in his eyes. I grasp the doorknob and freeze, a train-wreck of thoughts piling into each other in my mind’s eye.

The CrossRail commuter train leaving Platform One is scared shitless because it’s trapped in an office with a genuine no-shit mind-eating zombie, and the law of skin-to-skin contagion means that if the thing touches me I stand to literally lose my mind. This is mitigated slightly by the Sprinter to Crewe on Platform Two, which reminds me that I’m wearing a ward, so I might actually survive, if the zombie doesn’t simply double down on my throat or drag me in front of the PC monitor, which is presumably still displaying the same summoning grid that ate Inspector Dudley’s mind. The Gatwick Express steaming along the track between Platforms Four and Five at a non-stop ninety miles per hour sounds its air-horn to remind me that if I cut and run I will be leaving the aforementioned zombie unrestrained in a target-rich environment, namely a Ruralshire cop shop where their policy on undead uprisings is to order out for beer and pizza while watching Shaun of the Dead in the station house lounge once a month. And the train speeding out of Trumpton with a cargo of cocaine (thank you, Half Man Half Biscuit) is merely there to remind me that I still don’t know where the spawn of the unicorn are coming from . . .

“Raaarrrrh.” Inspector Dudley clears his throat and takes an experimental lurch towards me. I dodge sideways behind his desk, pocketing my phone in order to free up a hand, and simultaneously yank the power cord out of the back of his PC. (Rule 1: preserve the evidence, even if the hard disk has self-destructed and the file you want is loaded with a lethally contagious mind-virus.) “Raaargh?” The inspector calls.

I pick up the heavy old tube monitor and heft it in both arms. “Catch,” I say, and throw it at the zombie.

I wince at the crunch as twenty kilos of lead-glass CRT impacts the already-broken nose. Dudley staggers and topples backwards: zombies, possessed as they are by a minimally-sentient and rather corporeally challenged Eater, tend not to be fast on their feet. Then the door opens.

“Inspector?” chirps Constable Savage. Then he spots me. I see the ten-watt bulb flicker fitfully to life above his head as he instantly jumps to the wrong conclusion. “Oi! You! Get on the floor! You’re nicked!”

He begins to draw his baton as I back away, around the desk, closer to the window. I reach for my warrant card: “You’re making a mist—”

“GRAAAAH!” Roars the inspector, rising from the floor, CRT clutched to his chest. Oh look, he appears to have a nose-bleed, gibbers the shunting engine in Siding Three. You’re in for it now.

“Inspector?” Asks Constable Savage, “are you all right?”

There’s a chime from my pocket, the beautiful sound of a Treo announcing that it has rebooted successfully. “He’s a zombie!” I yell. “Don’t let him touch you! His touch is death—”

Ignoring me, Savage reaches out towards the inspector: “ ’Ere, let me look at the no-o-o—”

Great. Now I’m facing two of them.

If my boss Angleton was here this wouldn’t be a problem: one glance from him is sufficient to quell zombie brain-eater and union convenor alike. But I’m not some kind of superpowered necromancer, I’m just a jobbing sysadmin and applied computational demonologist. About the only card I’m holding is—

Well, it’s worth a try.

I raise my warrant card and rehearse my rusty Old Enochian: “Guys! I am your lawful source of authority! Obey me! Obey me!” (Or words to that effect.) It’s a horrible language, sounds like gargling TCP around razor blades. But it gets their attention. Two heads turn to face me. Their eyes glow even in daylight, the luminous worms of light twirling inside them. “Proceed to the stable block! Enter the first empty stall! Await your queen! Await your queen! Your queen is coming and she must find you there!” Then in English I add, “Law and Order! Law and Order!”

The last bit comes out like “lawn order,” but repeating the catchphrase deeply embedded in what’s left of the inspector’s brain by the geas that had him in its grip seems to do the trick.

“Graah?” He says, with a curious rising interrogative note. Then he turns to face the door. “Ssss . . .” Clumsy fingers scrabble with the smooth surface of the old doorknob. The door inches open. I hope to hell nobody else is about to stumble into them on their way to the field-expedient cells. I really don’t want this spreading any further. The fear-sweat in the small of my back is cold and slimy, and I feel faint and nauseous.

Constable Savage lost interest in his baton the moment he touched the inspector: I pick it up and follow them as they lurch and stumble down the staircase and out past the vacant front desk. As we pass the gents’ toilet I hear a musical tinkling: Phew. Presumably that’s McGarry on his break, in which case there may be survivors. With the odd moan, hiss, and growl, the two zombies cross the courtyard, lurching off the side of a parked riot van, and head towards an empty horse stall. I nip in front of them to unbolt the gate and open it wide. There’s nothing inside but a scattering of hay, and the shamblers keep on going until they bounce off the crumbling brick wall at the back—by which time I have the gate shut and bolted behind them.

I pull out my Treo and speed-dial the Duty Officer’s desk back at the New Annexe. “Bob Howard speaking,” I say, “I’m in the Central Police Station in East Grinstead and I’m declaring a Code Amber, repeat, Code Amber. We have an outbreak, outbreak, outbreak. Code words are EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN. I have two Romeo Hotel Romeo, outbreak contained, and a hot box on the second floor. I need plumbers, stat.”

Then I head back up the stairs to the ex-inspector’s office to secure the PC with the lethally corrupt file system, and await the arrival of the Seventh Cavalry, all the while sweating bullets.

Because I may have taken two pawns, but the queen is still lurking in the darkness at the edge of the chess-board . . .

MINISTRY OF DEFENCE

SECRET

Procurement Specification: N/SBS/007

Date of Issue: September 31st, 2002

Requirement for:

Proposal for system to support Special Boat Service underwater operations in the Arabian Gulf during Operation Telic.

S Squadron SBS, in accordance with orders from the Director Special Forces, is tasked with securing [REDACTED] on the coastline of Umm Quasr and Hajjam Island, and suppressing the operational capability of the Sixth Republican Guard Fast Motor Boat and Martyrdom Brigade to sortie through the Shatt Al-Basra and the Khawr az-Zubayr Waterway to threaten Coalition naval forces in Kuwaiti waters.

This requirement is for proposals for unconventional macrobiological weapons that operate analogously to the Ceffyl D?r, Capaill Uisce and Kelpie of mythology. These organisms are amphibious but preferentially aquatic, carnivorous, aggressive, intelligent, and reputed to drag sailors under water and drown them. It is believed that with suitable operant conditioning and control by S Squadron troopers such organisms can provide a useful stand-off capability to augment the capabilities of underwater special forces operating in a dangerous high-intensity littoral combat environment . . .

State of Requirement

Null and void.

CANCELLED October 13th, 2002
by Order of Cabinet Office in accordance with recommendation of SOE (X Division) Operational Oversight Audit Committee

Reasons for cancellation order:

1. Baby-eating aquatic faerie equines do not exist.

2. Even if they did exist, it is worth noting that Arab folklore and mythology does not emphasize fear of death by drowning; consequently the psywar potential of this proposal is approximately zero.

3. Operational requirement can be met through already-existing conventional means.

(Addendum: Going forward, SOE (X Division) OOAC recommends a blanket ban on all procurement specifications that involve supernatural equine entities (SEEs). For reference, see EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN. This keeps coming up like a bad penny at least once every couple of decades, and it’s got to stop.)

Forty minutes pass. I while away the time by making panicky phone calls to our INFOSEC desk—how the hell did that macro virus get into the file on the inspector’s PC? I love the smell of an enquiry in the morning—while I wait in Inspector Dudley’s office, sweating bullets. Finally I hear the heart-warming song of two-tone sirens coming down the high street. It’s not the warbling war-cry of police blues and twos, but the regular rise and fall of a fire engine—which means my prayers have been answered, and the Plumbers are coming, in the shape of an OCULUS truck.

From the outside it looks like a bright red Fire Service Major Incident Command vehicle, but it’s not crewed by Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, and Grub—this one’s occupants are the away team of 21 Territorial SAS, and they’re more likely to start fires than extinguish them. I watch as it drives nose-first into the police station car park and stops. Doors open and half a dozen wiry-looking guys dressed head to foot in black leap out. They’re armed to the teeth. One of them looks up at me and I wave. While I’ve been waiting I filled in the Duty Officer back at HQ with as much as I knew. Now Sergeant Howe and his men fan out and move through the nearly-empty police station. Two of them dash for the stall where I stashed the shamblers, carrying a field exorcism kit in a duffle bag. The others . . . I hear doors banging and much shouting as they go through the station like a tide of Ex-Lax.

I move to the desk and sit down behind it facing the door, making sure to keep my hands in view, and hold up my warrant card. I sit like this for approximately thirty seconds before it crashes open and I find myself staring up the business end of an MP5K. “Oops, sorry sir. Be right back.” The MP5K and its owner disappear as I try to get my heart rate back down to normal.

Finally, after another minute, the door opens again—this time more sedately. “Hello, Bob!” It’s Alan Barnes, chipper and skinny, with slightly hyperthyroidal eyes. He bounces into the room, head swiveling. “Nice pair of shamblers you’ve penned up down there. What do I need to know?”

Alan is a captain in that corner of the Army that we work with when this sort of situation comes up: namely one particular squadron of the Territorial SAS, a peculiar special forces unit composed of reservist veterans who have seen more and stranger things than most of their colleagues would credit with existing. His crew of merry pranksters are securing the premises as we speak. “There’s a file on this computer,” I say, patting the box on the desk. “You heard about the business in Darmstadt with the infected PowerPoint presentation?” He nods. “Well, there’s a Word document with an infected startup macro on this thing’s hard disk. Which it attempted to scribble on when the inspector—in the stables right now—tried to open it for me.” He nods again, looking thoughtful. “This needs Forensics to go over it. We’re looking for a requirements document which seems to have come out of nowhere, and which persuaded Inspector Dudley that it was all his own idea to replace the horses in his mounted unit with, ah, EMOCUM Units. Otherwise known as the subjects of EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN.”

Alan has a notepad. “How do you spell that?” He murmurs politely.

I fill him in as fast as possible. “DEFRA spotted it, there’s an emergent cuckoo’s nest down on Edgebaston Farm but the farm owner doesn’t seem to be infected—” yet “—so I suggest once we’ve secured the station we rendezvous with Greg Scullery and proceed to the farm to conduct a full suppression. What remains after that is to—” my shoulders slump—“work out where the hell the brood-Queen’s spawning-nest is, and take her out.” I swallow, then continue: “Which is bound to be harder than it was in Lovecraft’s day, if only because the thing has concealed its tracks well, and appears to be pulling the puppet strings of local Renfields like the Inspector. If it figures out we’re coming it may be able to organize a defense. In the worst case scenario, East Grinstead is going up in flames. And that’s before we get to the thorny question of where that demon-haunted requirements document came from.”

Alan sits down on the wobbly swivel chair with no armrests. “I’m not familiar with, ah, EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN,” he admits. “I’ll need to get clearance and then—”

We don’t have time. On the other hand, ERS is barely classified at all. I pull out my briefing papers: “On my cognizance, and in view of the severity of the situation, with a class two Eater outbreak in train, I take full responsibility for disclosing EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN. Or, at least, what I know about it,” I add hastily. (Because if it is an inside job, (a.) I don’t know enough to blow its cover, and (b.) it’s just very publicly shat the bed, and whoever is running it is probably in for the high jump whatever I do. In other words, my and Alan’s attempts at mopping up are unlikely to make the mess any worse.)

Alan raises an eyebrow. “Are you sure?”

I shrug. “It’s classified MILDLY EMBARRASSING NO TABLOIDS. I’m sure they’ll offer me a cigarette and a blindfold at the firing squad.”

Alan nods and takes the papers. “Right,” he drawls. What I’m doing is technically unauthorized, but my Oath of Office lets me get away with it without even a warning tingle. I’m pretty sure Iris will sign off on it when I file my report. And if not, I can’t see the Auditors yelling at me for briefing my field support team. Then his eyes focus on the first page, and the list of decreasing classification levels, and the index of documents attached, and his eyebrows climb so high they nearly merge with his hairline. “Unicorns? Bob, what have you gotten us into this time?”

“I wish I knew, Alan. But they’re not sparkly . . .”

Ring-ring. “Yes, who is that?”

“Greg? It’s Bob here. Where are you?”

“I’m back at the office, sorting out some paperwork. Has something come up?”

“You could say that. Listen, can you meet me at the old police station? As soon as possible; it’s urgent. There are some gentlemen I’d like to introduce you to. We want your input on operational planning.”

“I—yes, I daresay I could do that, young feller. Is five o’clock too late?”

I glance at Alan. He nods, minutely controlled. “Five o’clock but no later,” I say. We exchange pleasantries: “See you. Bye.” I glance at my phone: it’s ten past four. Back at Alan: “In my opinion, we’re not ready to go public,” I explain. “No point frightening the bystanders.”

“Hmm.” Alan gives in to toe-tapping and thumb-twiddling, impatient tics that seem to vanish whenever an actual operation starts. “Let’s go over the map again, shall we?”

We’ve got an Ordnance Survey 1:12,500 spread out across the table in the antique briefing room. A couple of constables have shown up for shift change, and we’ve taken pains to explain the situation to them in words of one syllable: a chief inspector from a mega-city like Hove or Brighton is on her way in to take control of the policing side of the operation, but I gather she’s caught up in traffic, so for now we’re relying on Sergeant Colon to keep everything looking vaguely like business as usual. Alan’s driver finally un-wedged the OCULUS truck from the cobblestoned yard, and it’s parked outside. The contingency story for the reporter from the Bexhill Babble is that we’re conducting a joint major incident containment exercise simulating an outbreak of anthrax on a local farm. Which is close enough to the truth to make what we’re really doing look plausibly routine if not actually boring, so that when we get the officers of the law to cordon off Edgebaston Farm nobody will so much as blink.

The map is accurate enough to let Alan’s merry headbangers lay down a barrage of covering fire if that’s what it takes. I point out the various elements of the farm. “The barn: there are two or more EMOCUM Units stationed there. Carnivorous, fast, hopefully hobbled. The woodshed: has damp rot in the roof beams. Currently full of lumber, they’re planning on putting the cows in it when they get round to emptying it. South field: two horses, four cows (one of them with a wooden leg). Basically harmless. The EMOCUM Units are distinctive—the eyes are too close together and glow blue, and their fur is white—”

“Don’t you mean they’re cremelo? Or at least perlino?” Alan raises an eyebrow at me.

“Whatever.” I shrug. “They look like horses, walk like horses, have breath like a leopard. Oh, there’ll also be saddles with roll cages stashed in the barn—”

“Roll cages?” His eyebrows are really getting a workout today.

“With wire mesh reinforcement, yes, to stop the nice horsies eating their riders. Seriously, if any of your men see a horse-shaped object that can’t instantly be confirmed safe, they should shoot to kill. We’re dealing with the Hannibal Lecters of the riding world here.”

“Moving swiftly on—” Alan points at the farm house itself. “What can you tell me about this structure?”

“Oh, that. Farmhouse, repeatedly built, razed, re-built, extended, and re-razed ever since the twelfth century. AD, not BC, though you might be hard put to tell. Main entrance opens into a porch with boot racks, closet to the left, huge farm kitchen to the right, passage leading into house at the back, and no, before you ask, I didn’t get a good look inside. Why do you—”

“People,” Alan interrupts conversationally. “Who am I dealing with here?”

“Apart from Georgina Edgebaston herself, who is apparently as well-connected as a System X exchange, I have no idea. Farm hand called Adam, daughter called Octavia who’s at boarding school, I gather. We’ll really need to pick Greg’s brain. And the—no, police records’ll be no use.” I shrug. (The Edgebastons are the sort of people the police work for, not against. And you don’t keep files on your boss if you know what’s good for you.) “If we can get anything useful out of Inspector Dudley—”

Alan shakes his head. “Sandy confirms the exorcism worked, but both victims are in bad shape. The ambulance should be arriving at St. Hilda’s any time now.” He glances at his wristwatch. “Okay, so it’s a centuries-old farmhouse. Which means any floor plan on file with the County planning office will be years or decades out of date, if they even bothered filing one in the first place.”

“Why are you focusing on the farmhouse?” I ask, feigning casual interest.

He flashes me a smile. “Because if there’s one thing all the unicorn legends are clear about, it’s the little girl! The, ah, brood-queen’s primary host. Do you know what boarding school Mrs. Edgebaston’s daughter attends?”

I suddenly realize where he’s going with this line of enquiry. “Let’s find out, and confirm that she’s really there.” My phone’s really getting a workout. I call the Duty Officer back at head office and pass the buck. (Let someone else fight their way through social services and school phone switchboards this afternoon.) “And let’s hope there’s no brood-queen to mop up. Ahem. So where are we going with this?”

“Here.” Alan points at the various gates leading into the fields around Edgebaston farm. “First: I’m going to station police officers on all the B-roads leading past the fields. Cover Story Alpha applies and will justify the operation. The south field gate will also have two of my people, armed, in case of attempted equine excursions. I take your point about friend/foe discrimination. Secondly: OCULUS units one and two, accompanied by your tame veterinary inspector, will move in on the farmyard. Brick two will secure the exterior of the barn, brick three will take the other outbuildings, while the rest of us serve a search warrant on the farmhouse itself and conduct a room-to-room inspection.” The SAS doesn’t deal in fire teams and squads and platoons, it divvies up into bricks (more formally patrols) and troops and squadrons.

“Wait, you’re pulling in a second OCULUS?”

Alan’s cheek twitches. “After reading that file, I’d be happier to simply call in an air strike.”

The office door opens and a familiar face appears: “Scary” Spice, whom I have worked with before, and who has a penchant for blowing stuff up. “Sir? The XM-1060s have arrived. Sergeant Howe has detailed Norton and Simms to load and fuse them, he wanted you to know they’ll be safed but ready when you need them.” He spots me. “Hi, Bob!” Then he ducks out again.

“What are they?” I ask.

Alan twitches again: “Thermobaric grenade launchers. Just in case.”

Now my cheek twitches. It’s a sympathy thing, triggered by my involuntary ringpiece clenching. “Is that really necessary?”

“I hope not, Bob. I hope not . . .”

Which is why, at a whisker after six o’clock in the evening, I come to be sitting in the front passenger seat of Mr. Scullery’s Land Rover, which is bumping and jouncing across a pasture that clings precariously to the side of Mockuncle Hill. I am holding Greg’s rifle for him because he is gesticulating wildly with both hands while trying to steer with his beard. The steering wheel, unaccustomed to such treatment, squeals and tries to escape every time we bump across a post hole. “Never heard anything like it!” He expostulates wildly: “Young Barnes is overreacting wildly.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, he’s running this show.”

“In my day he was a wet-behind-the-ears cornet, young feller—”

I roll my eyes as the beard describes Alan’s prehistoric sins, from back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and Greg was in the service. “Listen,” I interrupt between tooth-rattling jolts, “let’s just stick to business, okay?” I scan the field for alien life forms such as cows, three-legged or otherwise, and the retired police horses we’ve been told to expect here.

The sun is setting, behind the bulk of the hill. There’s still light in the sky, but the shadows have become indistinct and hazy, and a golden glow washes out all contrast as it slowly dims towards full dark. The lights will be flickering to life on the streets in town. This is a really stupid time of day for us to be doing this, but Alan wants to get it underway ASAP, and will be turning up at the farmhouse door in another five minutes. Behind us, a jam sandwich has parked up across the lane, light bar flickering as the constables tape off the entrance to the field. Our job is to round up the local legal livestock and neutralize them safely so that Alan’s merry men don’t mistake them for equoids. Hence the tranquilizer gun and the vet.

(I also half-suspect that Alan has sent Greg and me on this wild horse chase to keep us out of his hair during the somewhat more fraught process of storming a farmhouse without killing the human occupants.)

I’m just checking the near-side wing mirror when my Treo rings. I glance at it: it’s the Duty Officer back at HQ. My stomach flip-flops. “Howard here,” I say.

“We have the information you requested about Octavia Edgebaston, sir. Sorry it’s taken so long; we had to contact Social Services in East Grinstead out-of-hours to get the contact details for her school, then get the headmistress out of her dinner. Yes, we’ve confirmed that Octavia Edgebaston is boarding as St. Ninian’s School this week and is currently at prep in room 207—” I breathe a sigh of relief—“but her younger sister—”

“What?” I yelp involuntarily. “Greg! You didn’t tell me Georgina had another daughter!”

“—Is truant, she didn’t show up for register this afternoon and they’re extremely worried—”

“What other daughter?” The beard sounds puzzled, almost dreamy. “There’s no other—”

“—Lucinda Edgebaston, class 2E at St. Ninian’s, aged twelve. She hasn’t signed out of the school, and they’re re-running the CCTV over the gate now just to check, but she missed all her afternoon classes—”

“How far away is St. Ninian’s from Edgebaston Farm?” I ask.

“Ten or eleven miles,” says the DO. “To continue: they’ve notified the police in Hove and they’re keeping an eye out for her. One-forty centimeters, long chestnut hair, about fifty kilos, probably wearing St. Ninian’s school uniform. She won’t have gotten far—”

My heart is pounding and the skin on the back of my neck is crawling. I have a very bad feeling about this. “Please hold,” I tell my phone. “Greg: stop. Stop.” I thump the middle of the dash. Greg slams on the anchors so suddenly I nearly go through the split windscreen. As it is, the barrel of the rifle bashes my forehead. I’m doubly glad I made sure it was unloaded and safe when he gave it to me to hold. (No, really; there’s a luminous pipecleaner going in through the barrel and out of the open breech, because self-inflicted head shots are so not one of my favorite things. Actually, I’m not sure how to load it in the first place—it can fire tranquilizer darts as well as bullets—but it’s the thought that counts.)

The Landy squeals and slithers to a muddy standstill in the middle of the south field. “What is it, young feller?” Greg asks me.

“Greg, does Georgina have a husband?” I ask. It’s an odd question, and as it slides around the back of my skull like a ping-pong ball I feel my ward warm against my collar-bone.

The beard looks puzzled. “I don’t rightly—” he pauses—“no, no, that’s not right.” Another pause. “That would be Jerry, Gerald, I forget his name. Haven’t seen him in ages; I suppose they divorced. And then there’s Octavia and the other and young Ada.”

“Ada? How old is Ada, Greg? Concentrate!”

“Ada’s just a toddler, Bob. I think she’s four—” The beard scrunches up in violent concentration—“What!”

The explosion is so sudden I nearly jump out of my seat. “What?” I echo.

“How could I forget them! Georgina is married to Harry and they have three daughters, Octavia and Lucinda and Ada! Named after her great grand-nan,” he adds conversationally. “But, but—”

I’m on the phone to the DO. “Update: I’m seeing signs of a geas here. Localized amnesia, level four or higher. Locals have no or restricted memory of adult Harry Edgebaston and minor Ada Edgebaston. There may be other drop-outs.” I glance in the wing mirror again: “Lucinda is out of the picture, but—fuck me, Greg, drive!”

OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY SEEM, and the pallid ghost of Death’s own horse is cantering behind us with sapphire-glowing eyes that pulse hypnotically in the twilight. On its back there sits a saddle with roll bars and steel mesh grilles, the rider a small but indistinct figure standing in the stirrups within. The Landy’s rear lights flicker red highlights off the point of the lowered lance that’s coming towards us as the horse-thing screams a heart-stopping wail of despair and rage.

I drop the phone in my front pocket as Greg floors the throttle and the Landy roars in response, belching a column of smoke that would do justice to a First World War dreadnought. We rock and roll uphill, and the point of the lance rips through the canvas cover over the load bed, then tears away into the night with a snort and huff of equoid heavy breathing.

For an instant, the dash of the Land Rover glows blue-green with a ghastly imitation of St. Elmo’s Fire. My skin crawls and the ward heats up painfully. Greg grunts with pain and the steering wheel spins. For a moment the Landy teeters on two wheels, nearly toppling, but then he grabs the wheel with both hands and brings us back down on all fours with a crash.

I fumble with the rifle, yanking the safety cord through the barrel and barking my fingers painfully on the breech. “Ammo, Greg,” I gasp.

“In the center cubby, young feller, between the seats. Don’t bother with darts.” I yank the lid of the compartment between our seats open and rummage around until I feel the oily-smooth metallic weight of an unboxed stripper clip—what kind of bloody idiot keeps loose rifle rounds rolling around his car?—and I somehow manage to reverse the gun over my right shoulder and get the open breech into a position where I can start feeding rounds in. They’re the real thing, I hope, but unfortunately there are only five of them. And I can just glimpse a grey-white blur in the twilight at the other end of the field, getting itself turned round to take another run at us—this time a full-tilt charge.

You might think that a mounted cavalry horse charging with lance is a wee bit dated, and less than a match for a bolt-action rifle and a Land Rover. However, you would be very wrong. The thing at the far end weighs over a ton, and it’s about to take a run at us at over fifty kilometers per hour. The field is small enough that it’s less than a minute away, and when it hits all that momentum is going to be focused behind a tempered steel point. That’s about as much energy as a shell from a Second World War tank gun carries: more than enough force to shatter the engine block of an unarmored Landy, and once we’re immobilized it can dance around until we’re out of bullets, then bite and trample us to death at its leisure.

I close the breech and work the bolt to chamber a round. “Park up and drop the windows. Gun’s loaded.”

“Easy, young feller.” We judder to a halt again. Greg yanks the hand brake, then slides a bolt and the entire windshield assembly flops forwards across the bonnet. “Give me that.”

I hand the rifle over. He takes it in both arms and leans forward, barrel pointing across the spare tire. The spectre in front of us turns to face us. The eyes flare, alternating hypnotically. I feel a wave of malevolent intent spill across us. Hocks contract and unwind like spring steel as the equoid launches itself towards us. The spearhead glitters in our headlights, seemingly aimed right in my face. “Think you can hit the rider?” I ask anxiously.

“Piece of piss—” Greg freezes. “Oh no,” he breathes.

It takes me another second or two to register what he’s seen—his eyesight is better than mine—and I do a double-take because the rider, hunched beneath that odd steel canopy, lance cradled under one elbow like a knight of old . . . the rider is too small. Dwarfed by her mount, in fact. Greg is paralyzed because he’s just realized he’s drawing a bead on Lucinda Edgebaston, age twelve and a half, who should be in the school dormitory doing her prep rather than galloping across a muddy field on top of a carnivorous horror that is using her as a human shield—

A heartbeat passes.

“Give me that.” I grab the gun barrel. Greg lets it go without resistance, and that in itself is terribly wrong. I shoulder the thing, unaccustomed to its weight and heft. I’ve done a basic long-arms familiarization course out at the Village, but for the actual range time we used SA80s. It’s only by sheer chance that I once asked Harry the Horse to show me how to load one of these antiques. The equoid is expanding in front of me like an oncoming train wreck. I don’t have time to check the sights.

I let my breath out slowly and squeeze the trigger, hoping I’ll hit something. There’s a crash and a bang, and a fully laden freight train slams into my right shoulder. Through the ringing in my ears I hear a wavering inhuman scream, too long-drawn-out for human lungs. Then another freight train slams into the side of the Land Rover, and there’s a screaming of torn and twisted metal as the thrashing equoid crashes down on us and the Landy topples sideways onto the hillside.

What happens next is a confusing mess. I nearly lose the rifle. I find myself lying on the passenger door, still strapped in, with Greg lying across me. There’s blood, blood everywhere, and animal screaming from outside the Land Rover’s cabin. “Greg, move,” I say, and elbow him. More blood: he head-butts my shoulder, and I have a horrible feeling that a human neck shouldn’t, can’t, bend that way. He is, at the very least, unconscious, and possibly in spinal injury territory. Shit. More hoarse screaming. A clanging double-thud that sends a shock through the chassis of the vehicle. I find the seat belt button and try to worm my way forward, through the gap between the open windshield and the roofline, bashing myself in the face yet again with a rifle barrel.

Getting out of a toppled all-terrain vehicle in the dark while a pain-crazed monster bucks and runs around you, occasionally lashing out with its hooves at the felled Land Rover that hurt it, is easier said than done—especially when you’re covered in someone else’s blood, in need of a change of underwear, and trying to keep control of an unfamiliar weapon. It’s so much easier said than done, in fact, that I don’t succeed. Or rather, I get my head and shoulders out, along with the rifle, whose bolt I am frantically working when My Little Pony finally notices I’m still alive. It gives a larynx-shattering howl of pure rage, bares a mouthful of spikes that would give a megalodon pause, and closes in for the coup de grace.

I mentioned the rifle, didn’t I? And I mentioned that EMOCUM Units aren’t the sharpest knife in the toolbox, too? Well, what happens next is about what you’d expect: it’s messy, and extremely loud, and I nearly shoot my right ear off as Buttercup bends toward me and opens wide in an attempt to bite my skull in half. Then I have to duck backwards sharpish to avoid being crushed by a ton of falling burger meat.

(Moral of story: if you are a flesh-eating monster, do not let the chattering monkey insert a bang-stick in your mouth while you’re trying to snack down on its brains. Seriously, no good will come of this.)

More confused impressions:

I’m out of the Landy, standing in the field, frantically looking around. (Two rounds left in the magazine and one up the spout.)

The EMOCUM has collapsed in front of the toppled Land Rover. Brains and other matter show through the back of its shattered skull. I dodge fangs like daggers, and inhale a fecal smell so rich and intense I have to pause to control my stomach. I glance in the roll cage. There is moaning, audible through the ringing in my ears, and I feel dizzy. I look closer. Movement. “Lucinda?” I call. “Lucy?”

She looks up at me, one arm bent back unnaturally, still gripping the shaft of the shattered lance: I can see bone. The expression on her face is no more human than her mount’s: “Hssss . . .”

“Be right back,” I say hastily, stepping away. I fumble for my phone, then speed-dial the last number—the Duty Officer. “Howard here.” I briskly explain the situation. “Need medical support with exorcism kit, south field—minor with broken arm and possible demonic possession. Scratch that: probable. Oh, and it’ll take the jaws of life to get her out of the saddle.” I look around. “One probable adult fatality, cervical fracture, lots of blood.” As I feared, when Lucy hit the Landy with her pig-sticker, the impact had had the force of a light artillery shell. “One dead sterile adult Echo Romeo Sierra, one unaccounted for. I’m proceeding afoot and armed.”

I look around in the dusk. I see an indistinct hump in the field about thirty meters uphill. A buzz of flies surrounds it, but it’s no cow pat; it’s the whole damn animal, disemboweled and half-eaten. I bite back a hysterical giggle. This operation has officially fallen apart.

See, the whole idea was to discreetly secure the barn and then search the premises, on the assumption that the EMOCUM Units would be at home. But it now looks as if there’s a subtle and nasty amnesia glamor covering parts of the farm, nudging everybody to forget the existence of certain people who have softly and silently been stolen away, presumably because they have seen the boojum.

And now that I think about it, there weren’t anything like enough officers hanging around the police station, were there? Not for a mounted unit that needs eighteen riders and a bunch of civilian auxiliaries, never mind the everyday foot and car patrols. There weren’t enough folks around the farm, either, and come to think of it Greg’s veterinary practice looked half-empty . . .

My skin crawls. Somewhere out in the gathering twilight an EMOCUM Unit is stalking human prey. And somewhere else—if only I could work out where!—the Queen is brooding.

I’m halfway up the south field, working my way towards the farm itself, when the sky above me flashes orange, reflecting a dazzling glare from ground level. A second later there’s a hollow whump like a gas range igniting, and a hot blast of wind across my face. I go to my knees in a controlled fall, land on a cow pat, skid, swear, and faceplant. The explosion rolls up into an ascending fireball that lights up the grass in front of my nose before it dissipates.

I realize what’s happening: Alan’s men have made hard contact. There’s a rattle of small-arms fire, then another of those gas flares followed by a gut-liquefying explosion. They must be the XM-1060’s Scary was talking about, I figure. I stay down, but pull my phone up and speak: “Bob here. I’m still in the south field, and the balloon’s gone up about three hundred meters north of my current location. Can you let OCULUS Control know I’m out here?” I do not want to be a blue-on-blue casualty. I’m shivering as I speak, and feeling shaky and cold. I work my jaws and spit, trying to get the metallic taste of blood out of my mouth. I’m pretty sure it’s Greg’s blood. I feel awful about getting him into this, and about leaving him in the Landy.

“Patching you through right away,” says the DO, and there’s a click.

“Bob? Sitrep!” It’s Alan, sounding sharp as a button.

“I’m lying low in the south field about three hundred meters short of the yard. Greg’s down, the Landy is down, we nailed one target, there is an injured little girl in the wreckage.” I lick my lips, then spit: “Suspect EMOCUM Two is on the loose with a rider, either adult male or juvenile female. There’s a stealth glamor on the entire farm; you may not spot the Queen until you step on her.” A horrible thought hits me. “The woodshed.”

I put it together all at once. No sniggering now: Georgina was planning to clear the woodshed, but there’s damp rot in the roof beams. And it hasn’t been cleared. And the four-year-old is forgotten. And there’s “—Something narsty in the woodshed,” I hear myself saying aloud into the phone. “Wait for me before you go in!” I add hastily. Ada. Named for her great-great. Why should that resonate so—“Alan. Brick three. You sent them to search the outbuildings. Have you heard from them recently?”

“Yes, Bob,” he sounds almost bored. “They report all’s clear.”

“There’s a glamor!” I realize I’m shouting. “Are they in the woodshed?”

“I’ll just . . . shit.”

“I’m on my way,” I hear myself saying. “Let your people know I’m coming from the south field on foot.” It takes all my willpower to force myself to push upright onto my knees, then to raise one leg, and then the other until I’m standing. I am deathly afraid of what I’m going to find in the farmyard. One foot goes in front of the other. Clump, clump, squish, clump. The small-arms fire has stopped, but something ahead is on fire and the flames are playing hell with my night vision. A smell of woodsmoke drifts on the evening breeze, making my nose itch but partly masking the uncanny stink of the field.

I stumble towards the skeletal outline of a gate. It takes me a while to cover the distance because I keep stopping to peer around in the murk, rifle raised. If EMOCUM Unit 2 was in the field with me I expect I’d know about it by now, but you can never be sure. How do feral unicorns stalk their prey, anyway? Do they run in packs, like wolves, or are they ambush hunters?

Beside the gate I stumble across the disemboweled corpse of another cow; Graceless, I think, going by the prosthetic leg. It’s upsetting. (You can tell I’m English by the way pointless cruelty to animals dismays me.) The gate itself is hanging open, the chain and padlock neatly fastened around its post. EMOCUM Units don’t have hands, so that tears it—we’re definitely dealing with ensorcelled human servitors here. And that implies a controlling intelligence, which in turn implies—

The upper story of the west wing of the farmhouse is on fire. The thatching on the roof is smoldering, and the bright light of active combustion is rippling out behind a row of windows. I see the silhouettes of men crouching in the shadows around the barn. A fire engine hulks in the entrance to the yard, around the side of the house. I stand up. My phone rings. “Yes?”

“Get down, idiot.” Alan is tense. I drop to my haunches, keeping the rifle barrel vertical. “It’s the shed.”

“Yeah.” There’s something narsty in the woodshed. “Brick three?”

“Not responding, presumed down.” His voice is flat. “I’m behind the barn. Get yourself over here but stay low.”

I scurry over to the barn, where I find Alan and Sergeant Howe and a couple of troopers. They’re all in body armor and face paint, armed to the incisors with big scary guns. And they look very, very, pissed-off.

“There’s probably a little girl in there, Alan. Four years old, and all alone in the nest of, of a spawning unicorn Queen.” I’m light-headed and feeling careless, otherwise I wouldn’t dare speak like that under the circumstances.

“Yes. Also Lance Davies and Troopers Chen, Irving, and Duckworth,” he adds. “Do you have anything useful to contribute?”

“Lovecraft’s monster implied that a spawning Queen becomes part of a group mind or a swarm intelligence, or somehow becomes conscious, shortly before its offspring eat it. We’re now seeing signs of ritual magic—possession, concealment glamor. Let’s put that down to the sidereal age—” CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are coming right and all things esoteric become dangerously accessible—“and speculate that the thing H. P. Lovecraft called Shub-Niggurath is using the thing in that woodshed as a vector.” I swallow. “And it’s in this farm. What I’m wondering is, what’s it going to do now? We’ve got it encircled, but unlike the sterile females, it’s not stupid. And it knows it’s going to die. Its whole raison d’etre is to maximize the number of its spawn who mate and survive . . .”

I trail off.

A little girl, a toddler really, who is under the power of the thing in the woodshed. Her elder sister should be at St. Ninian’s girl’s boarding school, but has instead gone AWOL and turned up on the family farm, riding an EMOCUM, in the middle of term-time, just as we began to investigate. I shudder. “Someone needs to go over—” I stop. “Shit!”

“Bob! Explain.”

“Lucinda is down on EMOCUM One in the South Field. Octavia was in prep an hour ago, but EMOCUM Two is missing. You know about schools and cross-infection? How if a kid goes to school with an infection, all their classmates and then everyone else catches it? If you wanted to massively amplify a unicorn infestation, about the best way to go about it would be to dump a ton of fertilized unicorn spawn on the doorstep of a girls’ boarding school. Especially with the TV series and movies and magazine spin-offs doing the rounds right now.” I spit again. “But the teachers and staff wouldn’t let a girl bring a live pet into a boarding school. She’d have to smuggle them in some time after the start of term, hide them in the saddle bags, or send for a magic steed and go collect them in person.”

Sergeant Howe stares at me like I’ve grown a second head, but Alan just nods. “You should double-check on that,” he says. “Be rather awkward if we had to firebomb a boarding school.” He taps his throat mike: “Alpha to all, flash, incoming hostile on horseback. Shoot the horse on contact, assume rider possessed. Over.”

I’m on my phone to the DO again. “Howard here. Please can you double-check that Octavia Edgebaston is still doing her prep in her dorm? This is an emergency. If she’s missing we need to know immediately. Also: any reports of white horses with glowing blue eyes riding cross-country—”

“Will do! Anything else I can help you with?”

I sigh. “That’s all for now.” I hang up, then look at Alan. “Why haven’t you burned the nest already?”

“Well, now.” Alan looks at Howe. “Sergeant, if you’d care to explain the little problem to Mr. Howard?”

Howe sucks his teeth and looks pained. “It’s like this, Bob me old mate: it’s a woodshed. Wood: made of cellulose, right? Burns if you ignite it?” I nod like a bobble-head. “Well, they also stored other things in there. Inadvisable things. This is a farm, and for fertilizer they use—”

“Oh no,” I say, as he continues—

“Ammonium nitrate. About a ton of it. Harry Edgebaston moved it into the woodshed a month ago, last thing anyone remembers seeing him do.” Howe bares his teeth. “It’ll make a bit of a mess if it brews up.”

Alan grins humorlessly. “Your theory that the thing in the woodshed is growing more intelligent and more powerful just got a boost, Bob. What do you propose to do about it?”

I’m about to swither and prevaricate for a bit when my phone rings again. It’s the DO. I listen to what he has to say, then thank him and look at Alan. “A riderless stray horse jumped the gates at St. Ninian’s about fifteen minutes ago. When it left, it had a bareback rider. So I reckon, let’s see, ten miles . . . you’ve got maybe five to ten minutes to get ready for Octavia and EMOCUM Unit Two. They’ll be trying to get to the barn.” I bare my teeth. “I want a sample retrieval kit, and some extras. Then I’m going to go and talk to the monster while you guys neutralize Octavia and her ride. If I stop transmitting, pull back to a safe distance and use the woodshed for target practice. Any questions?”

Five minutes later, I’m ready. At Alan’s sign, two of his troopers pull the woodshed door open in front of me. I step forward, into the stygian darkness within.

This is a pretty dumb thing to do, on the face of it; if you’ve read this report and the EQUESTRIAN RED SIRLOIN dossier you might well be asking, “What the fuck, Bob? Why not send in a bomb-disposal robot instead?” And I will happily agree that if we had a freaking bomb-disposal robot to hand we’d do exactly that. Alas, they’re all vacationing in Afghanistan this month—either that, or they’re in storage in a barracks in Hereford, which does us precisely no good whatsoever. And we’re clearly dealing with a many-tentacled occult incursion from the dungeon dimensions here, and those things eat electronics for breakfast. Much better to send in a warded-up human being: faster, more flexible, and I’ve got a couple of field-expedient surprises up my sleeves to boot.

For one thing, I’m wearing a borrowed helmet with a very expensive monocular bolted to it—an AN/PVS-14 night vision camera. Everything’s grainy and green and a bit washed-out, and I can only see through one eye, but: in the kingdom of the blind, and all that. For another thing, I’m wired up with a radio mike and carry a crush-proof olive drab box under my arm. We’re pretty sure there are no survivors in the building, which makes my mission all the more important.

For another thing—hey, don’t worry, I’ve nearly finished reading my laundry list—I may not be a hero, but I’m not the fourteen-year-old H. P. Lovecraft either. Dealing with eldritch horrors is part of my day job. It’s not even as bad as the paperwork, for the most part. True, the “moments of mortal terror” shtick really sucks, but on the other hand there’s the rush I get from knowing that I’m saving the world.

And finally?

I’m more than a little bit angry.

So I walk into the booby-trapped woodshed full of explosives. Two guys with guns are waiting behind the door as it scrapes shut behind me. All I have to do is yell and they’ll do a quick open-and-close, then cover my retreat. I plant the horrifyingly expensive mil-spec shockproof LED lantern on the floor. Right now, it’s a brilliant flare of light in my night vision field, quite bright even to my unaugmented eye. Showing me precisely where to jump if, if, if it’s necessary.

I take another step forward, stop, and call out: “Hey, Shub-face! I’m here to talk!”

The silence eats my words, but I can feel a presence waiting.

The air in the woodshed tastes damp and smells of mold. I take a deep breath, then sneeze as my sinuses swell closed. Oh great, I think: I’m mildly allergic to elder gods. (Only it’s not a god. It’s just an adult unicorn in the sessile, spawning phase of the life cycle. A very naughty unicorn indeed.)

“We’ve got you surrounded,” I add, in a more conversational tone. “Broke your glamor, rounded up all your Renfields. Took down most of your sterile female workers.”

(Because I have worked out this much: the thing I’m dealing with isn’t just a sexually dimorphic r-strategy hyperparasite; it’s a eusocial hive organism that can co-opt other species the way some types of ant domesticate aphids. And I’ve got another theory about the intelligence that Lovecraft called Shub-Niggurath—although I’m not sure he wasn’t pulling it out of his arse, as far as the name-calling is concerned—and where it comes from.)

I take another step forward and nearly trip over something hard that’s the size of a football. I catch myself and look down. It’s a human skull. Fragments of flesh and the twisted remains of a radio headset cling to it. Shit. Well, now I know for sure where Alan’s troopers ended up. I glance up.

The beams above my head support a layer of crude planks. It looks uneven and rough in my night scope. Odd trailing wisps of rotten straw dangle from it, as if a plant is growing on the floor above, pushing its roots between the cracks. Something moves. I stare, then look down as I hear a tiny clonk. A conical snail-shell as long as my little fingernail has fallen to the rough floor near the—ick, I glance rapidly away from the decapitated remains of the soldier. Then I force myself to look back. Wart-like, the snails rasp across the pitted and grooved body armor and fatigues, migrating towards the bloody darkness within.

“Shub-Shub-Shub,” rumbles the huge and gloopy presence resting on the floorboards above my head. I jump halfway out of my skin, then step back smartly. There’s a high-pitched squeal of rage and pain as my foot lands on something that skitters out across the floor: a tiny, gracile horse-shaped thing as long as my outstretched hand.

“Talk to me in human, Shub,” I call, pointing my face at the darkness above. “I’m here to negotiate.” Here to hear your last confession, I hope. Actually, I’ve overrun my safety point by a couple of paces—I should be standing on, or within three meters of, the door. But I need to find out if any of the troopers—or the little girl, Ada—are still alive. And I urgently need to find out just how intelligent this particular spawning unicorn Queen has become, to be laying gnarly plans to plant hundreds of fertile daughters on the population of a girls’ boarding school, rather than allowing nature to take its course and seed a half-handful of survivors at random around East Grinstead.

“Shub-Shub-Shub,” says the thing. Then, in a heartbreakingly high voice with just a trace of a toddler’s lisp: “Daddy, why is it dark in here?”

My stomach lurches. The voice is coming from the attic.

“Daddy? Turn on the lights, Daddy, please?”

Lights?

I take a step back, closer to my safety zone, then swing my head round slowly. With the night vision monocular it’s like having a searchlight, able to pick out details only in a very small area. Close beside the door, there—I see a mains switch and a trail of wire tacked to the wall.

“Daddy? I’m afraid . . .”

I skid across the unspeakable slime on the floor and push the switch, screwing shut the eye behind the night vision glass as I do so. The blackness vanishes, replaced by a twilight nightmare out of Bosch, illuminated by a ten-watt bulb screwed to the underside of a beam.

Yes, there are logs in the woodshed. They’re piled neatly against the far wall, beyond the rickety stepladder leading up to a hole in the ceiling. There are also the partially skeletonized bodies of two—no, three—soldiers—

“Daddy! Heeelp!”

A little girl’s voice screams from the staircase opening, and I realize I’m much too late to help her. Even so, I almost take a step forward. I manage to stop in time. I know exactly why those three troopers died: they died trying to be heroes, trying to rescue the little girl. I close my eyes briefly, take a deep breath of the mold-laden sickly-sweet air. Take a step backwards, to stand in front of the exit from the charnel house.

(There are two skulls on the floor—one of the bodies still has a helmet. They’re on either side of the ladder. Part of me wonders how the thing in the attic decapitated them. Most of me wants to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears, and scream I can’t hear you.)

“Talk to me, Shub,” I call. “You want to talk, don’t you? It’s the only way you or any of your brood are going to get out of here alive.”

The roof beams creak, as if something vast is adjusting its weight distribution. “Shub. Shub. Glurp. Daddy, it wants me to talk to you. Daddy? Will you come up here?”

I swallow bile and tense my leg muscles to flee. “No,” I say.

“Shub! Shub! Shub!” The thing with Ada in the attic, the thing working her vocal cords, booms at me, a menacing rumble. Obviously, it’s not happy about its latest self-propelled snack refusing to follow the lure upstairs. I use the rumbling as my cue to unhook the sample jars and look around. Her spawn crawls over the woodpile, near the dead and half-eaten troopers. Tiny horses and cone snails, swarming and chewing. I swallow again. Look sideways: near the door, a handful of snail shells crushed by boots. Survivors inch across the floor around them. I crouch down and use my forceps to take living samples, one per glass-walled tube. Snail, horse, snail, horse. They go back into the crush-resistant fiberglass box and I lock it and sling it over my shoulder.

That’s what I’m really here for, you know. It was pretty clear that this was a zero-survivor situation once Alan confirmed that brick three was missing. But anything I can learn from the Queen . . .

“We have met before,” the Queen says through Ada’s childish larynx.

“Have we?” I ask.

“You remember me. I was your Hetty. I said we would meet again. Isn’t that right?”

My skin crawls. I begin to frame a reply, then stop. I was going to say something human, but: do not disclose operational intelligence to happy fun serial group mind horror. I try again: “You wake up each time: reincarnation, isn’t it? You find yourself fat and sleepy and spawning in a warm, food-rich place. And you remember who you were—who you are. Is that right?”

“I knew you would understand! Come close and you can join me.”

Bingo. “And you keep trying to do better each time, don’t you? What was the idea, this time?”

“Will you join me if I tell you? I will make you immortal and we will thrive and feed and dance joyous through the aeons—”

“Yes,” I lie.

“It has been so long since I have mated with another mind . . . Yes, you must join me! My idiot offspring eat their mother’s flesh and then their siblings, before they mate and grow sleek and strong and seek out a nest and settle down, and I awaken behind their eyes. One or two in each brood prosper that way. But I have worked out a way for more to survive to maturity. Join me, help me, and we will be fruitful and amplify and become myriad.”

“I don’t think so.” I can’t hold it back any more.

“Why won’t you—”

“Your last worker is on its way home to visit, carrying your last Renfield. But it’s not going to be allowed to get here, Shubby. We’re not going to let you distribute your spawn via the girls at St. Ninian’s. The school’s on lock-down, and they know what to search for. Acid baths, Shubby. Anything that looks like My Little Pony is going to take a one-way trip through an acid bath and a furnace on sight. Snails, too.”

A snarling animal scream cuts through the air behind me, from beyond the closed doors. It’s cut short by a harsh chatter of automatic gunfire.

The thing above me roars in existential pain and heaves its bulk up, then brings it smashing down on the ceiling. Paint dust and splinters fall and the light bulb shakes, the shadows flickering across the room. “My children! My beautiful future flesh! My babies! Traitor! I would have loved and cherished your memories forever!” The snails and tiny horses swarm on the skeletonizing remains of the dead soldiers. Another voice cuts through the cacophony: “Dadd-ee! Help me!”

I step back towards the door. I tap my throat mike and speak quietly: “Got samples. No—” I glance at the ladder—“survivors. Over.”

“Roger,” Alan says calmly. “Target neutralized in yard behind you. Come on out. We’re falling back now. Over.”

I throw myself backwards at the woodshed doors. The ceiling creaks and screeches and then begins to buckle, giving way and drooping from the edges of the loft stairwell opening. Something huge is pushing through from above, something like the rasp of a slug the size of a bus, iridescent and putrefying and bubbling with feculent slime. It vents a warbling roar, “ShubShubShub.” The door gives way behind me as I topple, getting a vague impression of writhing tentacles, a huge nodding eyeless horse-head, something like a broken doll impaled on a wooden stick—

Someone catches me and then I’m sprawling across a back as they pick me up and run across a farmyard, dodging around the fallen bulk of another of the horses from hell. I can see stars and a high overcast of cirrus whirling overhead as my rescuer pounds across the packed earth. Wall to one side, reflecting the livid glare of a burning building. “Get down!” someone shouts in my ear as he drops me on the ground in the lee of a drystone wall.

“Got it—” I scramble for cover as the incendiary fireworks surge overhead and the woodshed lights off with a whump I can feel in my bladder.

And then I lie there until Sergeant Howe gives everyone the all clear and sends a medic to look me over for triage, clutching the sample box like grim death and telling myself that it was all over for Ada Doom Edgebaston long before I walked through the woodshed door.

Because reincarnation only works for alien group mind horrors, doesn’t it?

Keep telling yourself that, Bob. Take your sample tubes back to R&D in London, leave the burning wreckage of the farm behind. Take your cold comfort where you can, and keep telling yourself that the nasty thing old HPL saw behind the woodshed was lying or mistaken, and that you’ll never meet it again.

Who knows? You might even be right . . .

HOME OFFICE

CONFIDENTIAL

Procurement Specification: HO/MPMU/46701

Date of Issue: May 3rd, 2006

Requirement for:

Enhanced-Mobility Operational Capability Upgrade Mounts for Police Mounted Units

It is becoming increasingly clear that in the 21st century mounted police are seen as an anachronism by the public. Despite their clear advantages for crowd control and supervision of demonstrations and public sporting events, mounted operations are expensive to conduct, require extensive stabling and support infrastructure, and compete for resources with other specialist units (e.g. airborne, tactical firearms, scene of crime investigation).

This document contains the operational requirements for upgraded genetically engineered mounts that will enhance the capabilities and availability of our mounted officers . . .

Desirable characteristics:

Mounts should exhibit three or more of the following traits:

• Endurance in excess of 6 hours at 30 miles/hour over rough terrain (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

• Endurance in excess of 30 minutes at 50 miles/hour on metaled road surfaces (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

• Ability to see in the dark

• Ability to recognize and obey a controlled vocabulary of at least 20 distinct commands

• Invisible

• Bulletproof

• Carnivorous

• Flight (when ridden with standard issue saddle, rider, and kit)

State of Requirement

CANCELLED September 5th 2006
by Order of Cabinet Office in accordance with recommendation of SOE (X Division) Operational Oversight Audit Committee

Reason for cancellation order:

Sussex mounted constabulary has no conceivable operational requirement for sentient weapons of mass destruction.

This requirement document has no identifiable origin within the Home Office.

It echoes historic attempts to induce adoption of Equoid-friendly facilities within the armed services via requirements raised within the MoD. All of these have been successfully resisted.

It is speculated that someone is trying to pull a fast one on us: does Shub-Niggurath have a posse in Whitehall? This matter warrants further enquiry, and has therefore been referred to External Assets for investigation and permanent closure.

THE LADY ASTRONAUT OF MARS

Mary Robinette Kowal

Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies, with Uncle Henry, who was a farmer, and Aunt Em, who was the farmer’s wife. She met me, she went on to say, when I was working next door to their farm under the shadow of the rocket gantry for the First Mars Expedition.

I have no memory of this.

She would have been a little girl and, oh lord, there were so many little kids hanging around outside the Fence watching us work. The little girls all wanted to talk to the Lady Astronaut. To me.

I’m sure I spoke to Dorothy because know I stopped and talked to them every day on my way in and out through the Fence about what it was like. It being Mars. There was nothing else it could be.

Mars consumed everyone’s conversations. The programmers sitting over their punchcards. The punchcard girls keying in the endless lines of code. The cafeteria ladies ladling out mashed potatoes and green peas. Nathaniel with his calculations . . . Everyone talked about Mars.

So the fact that I didn’t remember a little girl who said I talked to her about Mars . . . Well. That’s not surprising, is it? I tried not to let the confusion show in my face but I know she saw it.

By this point, Dorothy was my doctor. Let me be more specific. She was the geriatric specialist who was evaluating me. On Mars. I was in for what I thought was a routine check-up to make sure I was still fit to be an astronaut. NASA liked to update its database periodically and I liked to be in that database. Not that I’d flown since I turned fifty, but I kept my name on the list in the faint hope that they would let me back into space again, and I kept going to the darn check-ups.

Our previous doctor had retired back to Earth, and I’d visited Dorothy’s offices three times before she mentioned Kansas and the prairie.

She fumbled with the clipboard and cleared her throat. A flush of red colored her cheeks and made her eyes even more blue. “Sorry. Dr. York, I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“Don’t ‘doctor’ me. You’re the doctor. I’m just a space jockey. Call me Elma.” I waved my hand to calm her down. The flesh under my arm jiggled and I dropped my hand. I hate that feeling and hospital gowns just make it worse. “I’m glad you did. You just took me by surprise, is all. Last I saw you, weren’t you knee-high to a grasshopper?”

“So you do remember me?” Oh, that hope. She’d come to Mars because of me. I could see that, clear as anything. Something I’d said or done back in 1952 had brought this girl out to the colony.

“Of course, I remember you. Didn’t we talk every time I went through that Fence? Except school days, of course.” It seemed a safe bet.

Dorothy nodded, eager. “I still have the eagle you gave me.”

“Do you now?” That gave me a pause.

I used to make paper eagles out of old punchcards while I was waiting for Nathaniel. His programs could take hours to run and he liked to baby sit them. The eagles were cut paper things with layers of cards pasted together to make a three dimensional bird. It was usually in flight and I liked to hang them in the window, where the holes from the punch cards would let specks of light through and make the bird seem like it was sparkling. They would take me two or three days to make. You’d think I would remember giving one to a little girl beyond the Fence. “Did you bring it out here with you?”

“It’s in my office.” She stood as if she’d been waiting for me to ask that since our first session, then looked down at the clipboard in her hands, frowning. “We should finish your tests.”

“Fine by me. Putting them off isn’t going to make me any more eager.” I held out my arm with the wrist up so she could take my pulse. By this point, I knew the drill. “How’s your Uncle?”

She laid her fingers on my wrist, cool as anything. “He and Aunt Em passed away when Orion 27 blew.”

I swallowed, sick at my lack of memory. So she was THAT little girl. She’d told me all the things I needed and my old brain was just too addled to put the pieces together. I wondered if she would make a note of that and if it would keep me grounded.

Dorothy had lived on a farm in the middle of the Kansas prairie with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. When Orion 27 came down in a ball of fire, it was the middle of a drought. The largest pieces of it had landed on a farm.

No buildings were crushed, but it would have been a blessing if they had been, because that would have saved the folks inside from burning alive.

I closed my eyes and could see her now as the little girl I’d forgotten. Brown pigtails down her back and a pair of dungarees a size too large for her, with the legs cuffed up to show bobby socks and sneakers.

Someone had pointed her out. “The little girl from the Williams farm.”

I’d seen her before, but in that way you see the same people every day without noticing them. Even then, with someone pointing to her, she didn’t stand out from the crowd. Looking at her, there was nothing to know that she’d just lived through a tragedy. I reckon it hadn’t hit her yet.

I had stepped away from the entourage of reporters and consultants that followed me and walked up to her. She had tilted her head back to look up at me. I used to be a tall woman, you know.

I remember her voice piping up in that high treble of the very young. “You still going to Mars?”

I had nodded. “Maybe you can go someday too.”

She had cocked her head to the side, as if she were considering. I can’t remember what she said back. I know she must have said something. I know we must have talked longer because I gave her that darned eagle, but what we said . . . I couldn’t pull it up out of my brain.

As the present day Dorothy tugged up my sleeve and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around my arm, I studied her. She had the same dark hair as the little girl she had been, but it was cut short now and in the low gravity of Mars it wisped around her head like the down on a baby bird.

The shape of her eyes was the same, but that was about it. The soft roundness of her cheeks was long gone, leaving high cheekbones and a jaw that came to too sharp of a point for beauty. She had a faint white scar just above her left eyebrow.

She smiled at me and unwrapped the cuff. “Your blood pressure is better. You must have been exercising since last time.”

“I do what my doctor tells me.”

“How’s your husband?”

“About the same.” I slid away from the subject even though, as his doctor, she had the right to ask, and I squinted at her height. “How old were you when you came here?”

“Sixteen. We were supposed to come before but . . . well.” She shrugged, speaking worlds about why she hadn’t.

“Your uncle, right?”

Startled, she shook her head. “Oh, no. Mom and Dad. We were supposed to be on the first colony ship but a logging truck lost its load.”

Aghast, I could only stare at her. If they were supposed to have been on the first colony ship, then her parents could not have died long before Orion 27 crashed. I wet my lips. “Where did you go after your aunt and uncle’s?”

“My cousin. Their son.” She lifted one of the syringes she’d brought in with her. “I need to take some blood today.”

“My left arm has better veins.”

While she swabbed the site, I looked away and stared at a chart on the wall reminding people to take their vitamin D supplements. We didn’t get enough light here for most humans.

But the stars . . . When you could see them, the stars were glorious. Was that what had brought Dorothy to Mars?

When I got home from the doctor’s—from Dorothy’s—the nurse was just finishing up with Nathaniel’s sponge bath. Genevieve stuck her head out of the bedroom, hands still dripping.

“Well, hey, Miss Elma. We’re having a real good day, aren’t we, Mr. Nathaniel?” Her smile could have lit a hangar, it was so bright.

“That we are.” Nathaniel sounded hale and hearty, if I didn’t look at him. “Genevieve taught me a new joke. How’s it go?”

She stepped back into the bedroom. “What did the astronaut see on the stove? An unidentified frying object.”

Nathaniel laughed, and there was only a little bit of a wheeze. I slid my shoes off in the dustroom to keep out the ever present Martian grit, and came into the kitchen to lean against the bedroom door. Time was, it used to be his office but we needed a bedroom on the ground floor. “That’s a pretty good one.”

He sat on a towel at the edge of the bed as Genevieve washed him. With his shirt off, the ribs were starkly visible under his skin. Each bone in his arms poked at the surface and slid under the slack flesh. His hands shook, even just resting beside him on the bed. He grinned at me.

The same grin. The same bright blue eyes that had flashed over the punchcards as he’d worked out the plans for the launch. It was as though someone had pasted his features onto the body of a stranger. “How’d the doctor’s visit go?”

“The usual. Only . . . Only it turns out our doctor grew up next to the launch facility in Kansas.”

“Dr. Williams?”

“The same. Apparently I met her when she was little.”

“Is that right?” Genevieve wrung the sponge out in the wash basin. “Doesn’t that just go to show that it’s a small solar system?”

“Not that small.” Nathaniel reached for his shirt, which lay on the bed next to him. His hands tremored over the fabric.

“I’ll get it. You just give me a minute to get this put away.” Genevieve bustled out of the room.

I called after her. “Don’t worry. I can help him.”

Nathaniel dipped his head, hiding those beautiful eyes, as I drew a sleeve up over one arm. He favored flannel now. He’d always hated it in the past. Preferred starched white shirts and a nice tie to work in, and a short sleeved aloha shirt on his days off. At first, I thought that the flannel was because he was cold all the time. Later I realized that the thicker fabric hid some of his frailty. Leaning behind him to pull the shirt around his back, I could count vertebra in his spine.

Nathaniel cleared his throat. “So, you met her, hm? Or she met you? There were a lot of little kids watching us.”

“Both. I gave her one of my paper eagles.”

That made him lift his head. “Really?”

“She was on the Williams farm when the Orion 27 came down.”

He winced. Even after all these years, Nathaniel still felt responsible. He had not programmed the rocket. They’d asked him to, but he’d been too busy with the First Mars Expedition and turned the assignment down. It was just a supply rocket for the moon, and there had been no reason to think it needed anything special.

I buttoned the shirt under his chin. The soft wattle of skin hanging from his jaw brushed the back of my hand. “I think she was too shy to mention it at my last visit.”

“But she gave you a clean bill of health?”

“There’s still some test results to get back.” I avoided his gaze, hating the fact that I was healthy and he was . . . Not.

“It must be pretty good. Sheldon called.”

A bubble of adrenalin made my heart skip. Sheldon Spender called. The director of operations at the Bradbury Space Center on Mars had not called since—No, that wasn’t true. He hadn’t called me in years, using silence to let me know I wasn’t flying anymore. Nathaniel still got called for work. Becoming old didn’t stop a programmer from working, but it sure as heck stopped an astronaut from flying. And yet I still had that moment of hope every single time Sheldon called, that this time it would be for me. I smoothed the flannel over Nathaniel’s shoulders. “Do they have a new project for you?”

“He called for you. Message is on the counter.”

Genevieve breezed back into the room, a bubble of idle chatter preceding her. Something about her cousin and meeting their neighbors on Venus. I stood up and let her finish getting Nathaniel dressed while I went into the kitchen.

Sheldon had called for me? I picked up the note on the counter. It just had Genevieve’s round handwriting and a request to meet for lunch. The location told me a lot though. He’d picked a bar next to the space center that no one in the industry went to because it was thronged with tourists. It was a good place to talk business without talking business. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out what he wanted.

I kept chewing on that question, right till the point when I stepped through the doors of Yuri’s Spot. The walls were crowded with memorabilia and signed photos of astronauts. An early publicity still that showed me perched on the edge of Nathaniel’s desk, hung in the corner next to a dusty ficus tree. My hair fell in perfect soft curls despite the flight suit I had on. My hair would never have survived like that if I’d actually been working. I tended to keep it out of the way in a kerchief, but that wasn’t the image publicity had wanted.

Nathaniel was holding up a punch card, as if he were showing me a crucial piece of programming. Again, it was a staged thing, because the individual cards were meaningless by themselves, but to the general public at the time they meant Science with a capital S. I’m pretty sure that’s why we were both laughing in the photo, but they had billed it as “the joy of space flight.”

Still gave me a chuckle, thirty years later.

Sheldon stepped away from the wall and mistook my smile. “You look in good spirits.”

I nodded to the photo. “Just laughing at old memories.”

He glanced over his shoulder, wrinkles bunching at the corner of his eyes in a smile. “How’s Nathaniel?”

“About the same, which is all one can ask for at this point.”

Sheldon nodded and gestured to a corner booth, leading me past a family with five kids who had clearly come from the Space Center. The youngest girl had her nose buried in a picture book of the early space program. None of them noticed me.

Time was when I couldn’t walk anywhere on Mars without being recognized as the Lady Astronaut. Now, thirty years after the First Expedition, I was just another old lady, whose small stature showed my origin on Earth.

We settled in our chairs and ordered, making small talk as we did. I think I got fish and chips because it was the first thing on the menu, and all I could think about was wondering why Sheldon had called.

It was like he wanted to see how long it would take me to crack and ask him what he was up to. It took me awhile to realize that he kept bringing the conversation back to Nathaniel. Was he in pain?

Of course.

Did he have trouble sleeping?

Yes.

Even, “How are you holding up?” was about him. I didn’t get it until Sheldon paused and pushed his rabbit burger aside, half-eaten, and asked point-blank. “Have they given him a date yet?”

A date. There was only one date that mattered in a string of other milestones on the path to death but I pretended he wasn’t being clear, just to make him hurt a little. “You mean for paralyzation, hospice, or death?”

He didn’t flinch. “Death.”

“We think he’s got about a year.” I kept my face calm, the way you do when you’re talking to Mission Control about a flight that’s set to abort. The worse it got, the more even my voice became. “He can still work, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It’s not.” Sheldon broke his gaze then, to my surprise, and looked down at his ice water, spinning the glass in its circle of condensation. “What I need to know is if you can still work.”

In my intake of breath, I wanted to say that God, yes, I could work and that I would do anything he asked of me if he’d put me back into space. In my exhale, I thought of Nathaniel. I could not say yes. “That’s why you asked for the physical.”

“Yep.”

“I’m sixty-three, Sheldon.”

“I know.” He turned the glass again. “Did you see the news about LS-579?”

“The extrasolar planet. Yes.” I was grounded, that didn’t mean I stopped paying attention to the stars.

“Did you know we think it’s habitable?”

I stopped with my mouth open as pieces started to tick like punch cards slotting through a machine. “You’re mounting a mission.”

“If we were, would you be interested in going?”

Back into space? My god, yes. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I—that was why he wanted to know when my husband was going to die. I swallowed everything before speaking. My voice was passive. “I’m sixty-three.” Which was my way of asking why he wanted me to go.

“It’s three years in space.” He looked up now, not needing to explain why they wanted an old pilot.

That long in space? It doesn’t matter how much shielding you have against radiation, it’s going to affect you. The chances of developing cancer within the next fifteen years were huge. You can’t ask a young astronaut to do that. “I see.”

“We have the resources to send a small craft there. It can’t be unmanned because the programming is too complicated. I need an astronaut who can fit in the capsule.”

“And you need someone who has a reason to not care about surviving the trip.”

“No.” He grimaced. “PR tells me that I need an astronaut that the public will adore so that when we finally tell them that we’ve sent you, they will forgive us for hiding the mission from them.” Sheldon cleared his throat and started briefing me on the Longevity Mission.

Should I pause here and explain what the Longevity mission is? It’s possible that you don’t know.

There’s a habitable planet. An extrasolar one and it’s only few light years away. They’ve got a slingshot that can launch a ship up to near light speed. A small ship. Big enough for one person.

But that isn’t what makes the Longevity mission possible. That is the tesseract field. We can’t go faster than light, but we can cut corners through the universe. The physicists described it to me like a subway tunnel. The tessaract will bend space and allow a ship to go to the next subway station. The only trick is that you need to get far enough away from a planet before you can bend space and . . . this is the harder part . . . you need a tesseract field at the other end. Once that’s up, you just need to get into orbit and the trip from Mars to LS-579 can be as short as three weeks.

But you have to get someone to the planet to set up the other end of the tesseract.

And they wanted to hide the plan from the public, in case it failed.

So different from when the First Mars Expedition had happened. An asteroid had slammed into Washington D.C. and obliterated the capitol. It made the entire world realize how fragile our hold on Earth was. Nations banded together and when the Secretary of Agriculture, who found himself president through the line of succession, said that we needed to get off the planet, people listened. We rose to the stars. The potential loss of an astronaut was just part of the risk. Now? Now it has been long enough that people are starting to forget that the danger is still there. That the need to explore is necessary.

Sheldon finished talking and just watched me processing it.

“I need to think about this.”

“I know.”

Then I closed my eyes and realized that I had to say no. It didn’t matter how I felt about the trip or the chance to get back into space. The launch date he was talking about meant I’d have to go into training now. “I can’t.” I opened my eyes and stared at the wall where the publicity still of me and Nathaniel hung. “I have to turn it down.”

“Talk to Nathaniel.”

I grimaced. He would tell me to take it. “I can’t.”

I left Sheldon feeling more unsettled than I wanted to admit at the time. I stared out the window of the light rail, at the sepia sky. Rose tones were deepening near the horizon with sunset. It was dimmer and ruddier here, but with the dust, sunset could be just as glorious as on Earth.

It’s a hard thing to look at something you want and to know that the right choice is to turn it down. Understand me: I wanted to go. Another opportunity like this would never come up for me. I was too old for normal missions. I knew it. Sheldon knew it. And Nathaniel would know it, too. I wish he had been in some other industry so I could lie and talk about “later.” He knew the space program too well to be fooled.

And he wouldn’t believe me if I said I didn’t want to go. He knew how much I missed the stars.

That’s the thing that I think none of us were prepared for in coming to Mars. The natural night sky on Mars is spectacular, because the atmosphere is so thin. But where humans live, under the dome, all you can see are the lights of the town reflecting against the dark curve. You can almost believe that they’re stars. Almost. If you don’t know what you are missing or don’t remember the way the sky looked at night on Earth before the asteroid hit.

I wonder if Dorothy remembers the stars. She’s young enough that she might not. Children on Earth still look at clouds of dust and stars are just a myth. God. What a bleak sky.

When I got home, Genevieve greeted me with her usual friendly chatter. Nathaniel looked like he wanted to push her out of the house so he could quiz me. I know Genevieve said good bye, and that we chatted, but the details have vanished now.

What I remember next is the rattle and thump of Nathaniel’s walker as he pushed it into the kitchen. It slid forward. Stopped. He took two steps, steadied himself, and slid it forward again. Two steps. Steady. Slide.

I pushed away from the counter and straightened. “Do you want to be in the kitchen or the living room?”

“Sit down, Elma.” He clenched the walker till the tendons stood out on the back of his hands, but they still trembled. “Tell me about the mission.”

“What?” I froze.

“The mission.” He stared at the ceiling, not at me. “That’s why Sheldon called, right? So, tell me.”

“I . . . All right.” I pulled the tall stool out for him and waited until he eased onto it. Then I told him. He stared at the ceiling the whole time I talked. I spent the time watching him and memorizing the line of his cheek, and the shape of the small mole by the corner of his mouth.

When I finished, he nodded. “You should take it.”

“What makes you think I want to?”

He lowered his head then, eyes just as piercing as they had always been. “How long have we been married?”

“I can’t.”

Nathaniel snorted. “I called Dr. Williams while you were out, figuring it would be something like this. I asked for a date when we could get hospice.” He held up his hand to stop the words forming on my lips. “She’s not willing to tell me that. She did give me the date when the paralysis is likely to become total. Three months. Give or take a week.”

We’d known this was coming, since he was diagnosed, but I still had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from sobbing. He didn’t need to see me break down.

“So . . . I think you should tell them yes.”

“Three months is not a lot of time, they can—”

“They can what? Wait for me to die? Jesus Christ, Elma. We know that’s coming.” He scowled at the floor. “Go. For the love of God, just take the mission.”

I wanted to. I wanted to get off the planet and back into space and not have to watch him die. Not have to watch him lose control of his body piece by piece.

And I wanted to stay here and be with him and steal every moment left that he had breath in his body.

One of my favorite restaurants in Landing was Elmore’s. The New Orleans style cafe sat tucked back behind Thompson’s Grocers on a little rise that lifted the dining room just high enough to see out to the edge of town and the dome’s wall. They had a crawfish étouffée that would make you think you were back on Earth. The crawfish were raised in a tank and a little bigger than the ones I’d grown up with, but the spices came all the way from Louisiana on the mail runs twice a year.

Sheldon Spender knew it was my favorite and was taking ruthless advantage of that. And yet I came anyway. He sat across the table from me, with his back to the picture window that framed the view. His thinning hair was almost invisible against the sky. He didn’t say a word. Just watched me, as the fellow to my right talked.

Garrett Biggs. I’d seen him at the Bradbury Space Center, but we’d exchanged maybe five words before today. My work was mostly done before his time. They just trotted me out for the occasional holiday. Now, the man would not stop talking. He gestured with his fork as he spoke, punctuating the phrases he thought I needed to hear most. “Need some photos of you so we can exploit—I know it sounds ugly but we’re all friends here, right? We can be honest, right? So, we can exploit your sacrifice to get the public really behind the Longevity mission.”

I watched the lettuce tremble on the end of his fork. It was pallid compared to my memory of lettuce on Earth. “I thought the public didn’t know about the mission.”

“They will. That’s the key. Someone will leak it and we need to be ready.” He waved the lettuce at me. “And that’s why you are a brilliant choice for pilot. Octogenarian Grandmother Paves Way for Humanity.”

“You can’t pave the stars. I’m not a grandmother. And I’m sixty-three not eighty.”

“It’s a figure of speech. The point is that you’re a PR goldmine.”

I had known that they asked me to helm this mission because of my age—it would be a lot to ask of someone who had a full life ahead of them. Maybe I was naive to think that my experience in establishing the Mars colony was considered valuable.

How can I explain the degree to which I resented being used for publicity? This wasn’t a new thing by a long shot. My entire career has been about exploitation for publicity. I had known it, and exploited it too, once I’d realized the power of having my uniform tailored to show my shape a little more clearly. You think they would have sent me to Mars if it weren’t intended to be a colony? I was there to show all the lady housewives that they could go to space too. Posing in my flight suit, with my lips painted red, I had smiled at more cameras than my colleagues.

I stared Garrett Biggs and his fork. “For someone in PR, you are awfully blunt.”

“I’m honest. To you. If you were the public, I’d have you spinning so fast you’d generate your own gravity.”

Sheldon cleared his throat. “Elma, the fact is that we’re getting some pressure from a group of senators. They want to cut the budget for the project and we need to take steps or it won’t happen.”

I looked down and separated the tail from one of my crawfish. “Why?”

“The usual nonsense. People arguing that if we just wait, then ships will become fast enough to render the mission pointless. That includes a couple of serious misunderstandings of physics, but, be that as it may . . .” Sheldon paused and tilted his head, looking at me. He changed what he was about to say and leaned forward. “Is Nathaniel worse?”

“He’s not better.”

He winced at the edge in my voice. “I’m sorry. I know I strong-armed you into it, but I can find someone else.”

“He thinks I should go.” My chest hurt even considering it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the mission. “He knows it’s the only way I’ll get back into space.”

Garrett Biggs frowned like I’d said the sky was green, instead of the pale Martian amber. “You’re in space.”

“I’m on Mars. It’s still a planet.”

I woke out of half-sleep, aware that I must have heard Nathaniel’s bell, without being able to actually recall it. I pulled myself to my feet, putting a hand against the nightstand until I was steady. My right hip had stiffened again in the night. Arthritis is not something I approve of.

Turning on the hall light, I made my way down the stairs. The door at the bottom stood open so I could hear Nathaniel if he called. I couldn’t sleep with him anymore, for fear of breaking him.

I went through into his room. It was full of grey shadows and the dark rectangle of his bed. In one corner, the silver arm of his walker caught the light.

“I’m sorry.” His voice cracked with sleep.

“It’s all right. I was awake anyway.”

“Liar.”

“Now, is that a nice thing to say?” I put my hand on the light switch. “Watch your eyes.”

Every night we followed the same ritual and even though I knew the light would be painfully bright, I still winced as it came on. Squinting against the glare, I threw the covers back for him. The weight of them trapped him sometimes. He held his hands up, waiting for me to take them. I braced myself and let Nathaniel pull himself into a sitting position. On Earth, he’d have been bed-ridden long since. Of course, on Earth, his bone density would probably not have deteriorated so fast.

As gently as I could, I swung his legs to the side of the bed. Even allowing for the gravity, I was appalled anew by how light he was. His legs were like kindling wrapped in tissue. Where his pajamas had ridden up, purple bruises mottled his calf.

As soon as he was sitting up on the edge of the bed, I gave him the walker. He wrapped his shaking hands around the bars and tried to stand. He rose only a little before dropping back to the bed. I stayed where I was, though I ached to help. He sometimes took more than one try to stand at night, and didn’t want help. Not until it became absolutely necessary. Even then, he wouldn’t want it. I just hoped he’d let me help him when we got to that point.

On the second try, he got his feet under him and stood, shaking. With a nod, he pushed forward. “Let’s go.”

I followed him to the bathroom in case he lost his balance in there, which he did sometimes. The first time, I hadn’t been home. We had hired Genevieve not long after that to sit with him when I needed to be out.

He stopped in the kitchen and bent a little at the waist with a sort of grunt.

“Are you all right?”

He shook his head and started again, moving faster. “I’m not—” He leaned forward, clenching his jaw. “I can’t—”

The bathroom was so close.

“Oh, God. Elma . . .” A dark, fetid smell filled the kitchen. Nathaniel groaned. “I couldn’t—”

I put my hand on his back. “Hush. We’re almost there. We’ll get you cleaned up.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He pushed the walker forward, head hanging. A trail of damp footsteps followed him. The ammonia stink of urine joined the scent of his bowels.

I helped him lower his pajamas. The weight of them had made them sag on his hips. Dark streaks ran down his legs and dripped onto the bathmat. I eased him onto the toilet.

My husband bent his head forward, and he wept.

I remember wetting a washcloth and running it over his legs. I know that I must have tossed his soiled pajamas into the cleaner, and that I wiped up the floor, but those details have mercifully vanished. But what I can’t forget, and I wish to God that I could, is Nathaniel sitting there crying.

I asked Genevieve to bring adult diapers to us the next day. The strange thing was how familiar the package felt. I’d used them on launches when we had to sit in the capsule for hours and there was no option to get out of our space suit. It’s one of the many glamorous details of being an astronaut that the publicity department does not share with the public.

There is a difference, however, from being required to wear one for work and what Nathaniel faced. He could not put them on by himself without losing his balance. Every time I had to change the diaper, he stared at the wall with his face slack and hopeless.

Nathaniel and I’d made the decision not to have children. They aren’t conducive to a life in space, you know? I mean there’s the radiation, and the weightlessness, but more it was that I was gone all the time. I couldn’t give up the stars . . . but I found myself wishing that we hadn’t made that decision. Part of it was wishing that I had some connection to the next generation. More of it was wanting someone to share the burden of decision with me.

What happens after Nathaniel dies? What do I have left here? More specifically, how much will I regret not going on the Mission?

And if I’m in space, how much will I regret abandoning my husband to die alone?

You see why I was starting to wish that we had children?

In the afternoon, we were sitting in the living room, pretending to work. Nathaniel sat with his pencil poised over the paper and stared out the window as though he were working. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t but I gave him what privacy I could and started on one of my eagles.

The phone rang and gave us both something of a relief, I think, to have a distraction. The phone sat on a table by Nathaniel’s chair so he could reach it easily if I weren’t in the room. With my eyes averted, his voice sounded as strong as ever as he answered.

“Hang on, Sheldon. Let me get Elma for—Oh. Oh, I see.”

I snipped another feather but it was more as a way to avoid making eye contact than because I really wanted to keep working.

“Of course I’ve got a few minutes. I have nothing but time these days.” He ran his hand through his hair and let it rest at the back of his neck. “I find it hard to believe that you don’t have programmers on staff who can’t handle this.”

He was quiet then as Sheldon spoke, I could hear only the distorted tinny sound of his voice rising and falling. At a certain point, Nathaniel picked up his pencil again and started making notes. Whatever Sheldon was asking him to do, that was the moment when Nathaniel decided to say “yes.”

I set my eagle aside and went into the kitchen. My first reaction—God. It shames me but my first reaction was anger. How dare he? How dare he take a job without consulting with me when I was turning down this thing I so desperately wanted because of him. I had the urge to snatch up the phone and tell Sheldon that I would go.

I pushed that down carefully and looked at it.

Nathaniel had been urging me to go. No deliberate action of his was keeping me from accepting. Only my own upbringing and loyalty and . . . and I loved him. If I did not want to be alone after he passed, how could I leave him to face the end alone?

The decision would be easier if I knew when he would die.

I still hate myself for thinking that.

I heard the conversation end and Nathaniel hung up the phone. I filled a glass with water to give myself an excuse for lingering in the kitchen. I carried it back into the living room and sat down on the couch.

Nathaniel had his lower lip between his teeth and was scowling at the page on top of his notepad. He jotted a number in the margin with a pencil before he looked up.

“That was Sheldon.” He glanced back at the page.

I settled in my chair and fidgeted with the wedding band on my finger. It had gotten loose in the last year. “I’m going to turn them down.”

“What—But, Elma.” His gaze flattened and he gave me a small frown. “Are you . . . are you sure it’s not depression? That’s making you want to stay, I mean.”

I gave an unladylike snort. “Now what do I have to be depressed about?”

“Please.” He ran his hands through his hair and knit them together at the back of his neck. “I want you to go so you won’t be here when . . . It’s just going to get worse from here.”

The devil of it was that he wasn’t wrong. That didn’t mean he was right, either, but I couldn’t flat out tell him he was wrong. I set down my scissors and pushed the magnifier out of the way. “It’s not just depression.”

“I don’t understand. There’s a chance to go back into space.” He dropped his hands and sat forward. “I mean . . . If I die before the mission leaves and you’re grounded here. How would you feel?”

I looked away. My gaze was pointed to the window and the view of the house across the lane. But I did not see the windows or the red brick walls. All I saw was a black and grey cloth made of despair. “I had a life that I enjoyed before this opportunity came up. There’s no reason I shouldn’t keep on enjoying it. I enjoy teaching. There are a hundred reasons to enjoy life here.”

He pointed his pencil at me the way he used to do when he spotted a flaw in reasoning at a meeting, but the pencil quivered in his grip now. “If that’s true, then why haven’t you told them no, yet?”

The answer to that was not easy. Because I wanted to be in the sky, weightless, and watching the impossibly bright stars. Because I didn’t want to watch Nathaniel die. “What did Sheldon ask you to do?”

“NASA wants more information about LS-579.”

“I imagine they do.” I twisted that wedding band around as if it were a control that I could use. “I would . . . I would hate . . . As much as I miss being in space, I would hate myself if I left you here. To have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Till death do us part and all that. I just can’t.”

“Well . . . just don’t tell him no. Not yet. Let me talk to Dr. Williams and see if she can give us a clearer date. Maybe there won’t be a schedule conflict after al—”

“Stop it! Just stop. This is my decision. I’m the one who has to live with the consequences. Not you. So, stop trying to put your guilt off onto me because the devil of it is, one of us is going to feel guilty here, but I’m the one who will have to live with it.”

I stormed out of the room before he could answer me or I could say anything worse. And yes—I knew that he couldn’t follow me and for once I was glad.

Dorothy came not long after that. To say that I was flummoxed when I opened the door wouldn’t do justice to my surprise. She had her medical bag with her and I think that’s the only thing that gave me the power of speech. “Since when do you make house calls?”

She paused, mouth partially open, and frowned. “Weren’t you told I was coming?”

“No.” I remembered my manners and stepped back so she could enter. “Sorry. You just surprised me is all.”

“I’m sorry. Mr. Spender asked me to come out. He thought you’d be more comfortable if I stayed with Mr. York while you were gone.” She shucked off her shoes in the dust room.

I looked back through the kitchen to the living room, where Nathaniel sat just out of sight. “That’s right kind and all, but I don’t have any appointments today.”

“Do I have the date wrong?”

The rattle and thump of Nathaniel’s walker started. I abandoned Dorothy and ran through the kitchen. He shouldn’t be getting up without me. If he lost his balance again—What? It might kill him if he fell? Or it might not kill him fast enough so that his last days were in even more pain.

He met me at the door and looked past me. “Nice to see you, Doc.”

Dorothy had trailed after me into the kitchen. “Sir.”

“You bring that eagle to show me?”

She nodded and I could see the little girl she had been in the shyness of it. She lifted her medical bag to the kitchen table and pulled out a battered shoe box of the sort that we don’t see up here much. No sense sending up packaging when it just takes up room on the rocket. She lifted the lid off and pulled out tissue that had once been pink and had faded to almost white. Unwrapping it, she pulled out my eagle.

It’s strange seeing something that you made that long ago. This one was in flight, but had its head turned to the side as though it were looking back over its shoulder. It had an egg clutched in its talons.

Symbolism a little blunt, but clear. Seeing it I remembered when I had made it. I remembered the conversation that I had had with Dorothy when she was a little girl.

I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. The edges of the paper had become soft with handling over the years so it felt more like corduroy than cardstock. Some of the smaller feathers were torn loose showing that this had been much-loved. The fact that so few were missing said more, about the place it had held for Dorothy.

She had asked me, standing outside the fence in the shadow of the rocket gantry, if I were still going to Mars. I had said yes.

Then she had said, “You going to have kids on Mars?”

What she could not have known—what she likely still did not know, was that I had just come from a conversation with Nathaniel when we decided that we would not have children. It had been a long discussion over the course of two years and it did not rest easy on me. I was still grieving for the choice, even though I knew it was the right one.

The radiation, the travel . . . the stars were always going to call me and I could ask him to be patient with that, but it was not fair to a child. We had talked and talked and I had built that eagle while I tried to grapple with the conflicts between my desires. I made the eagle looking back, holding an egg, at the choices behind it.

And when Dorothy had asked me if I would have kids on Mars, I put the regulation smile on, the one you learn to give while wearing 160 pounds of space suit in Earth gravity while a photographer takes just one more photo. I’ve learned to smile through pain, thank you. “Yes, honey. Every child born on Mars will be there because of me.”

“What about the ones born here?”

The child of tragedy, the double-orphan. I had knelt in front of her and pulled the eagle out of my bag. “Those most of all.”

Standing in my kitchen, I lifted my head to look at Nathaniel. His eyes were bright. It took a try or two before I could find my voice again. “Did you know? Did you know which one she had?”

“I guessed.” He pushed into the kitchen, the walker sliding and rattling until he stood next to me. “The thing is, Elma, I’m going to be gone in a year either way. We decided not to have children because of your career.”

“We made that decision together.”

“I know.” He raised a hand off the walker and put it on my arm. “I’m not saying we didn’t. What I’m asking is that you make this career decision for me. I want you to go.”

I set the eagle back in its nest of tissue and wiped my eyes. “So you tricked her into coming out just to show me that?”

Nathaniel laughed sounding a little embarrassed. “Nope. Talked to Sheldon. There’s a training session this afternoon that I want you to go to.”

“I don’t want to leave you.”

“You won’t. Not completely.” He gave a sideways grin and I could see the young man he’d been. “My program will be flying with you.”

“That’s not the same.”

“It’s the best I can offer.”

I looked away and caught Dorothy staring at us with a look of both wonder and horror on her face. She blushed when I met her gaze. “I’ll stay with him.”

“I know and it was kind of Sheldon to ask but—”

“No, I mean. If you go . . . I’ll make sure he’s not alone.”

Dorothy lived in the middle of the great Mars plains in the home of Elma, who was an astronaut, and Nathaniel, who was an astronaut’s husband. I live in the middle of space in a tiny capsule filled with punchcards and magnetic tape. I am not alone, though someone who doesn’t know me might think I appear to be.

I have the stars.

I have my memories.

And I have Nathaniel’s last program. After it runs, I will make an eagle and let my husband fly.

SIX-GUN SNOW WHITE

Catherynne M. Valente

Coyote had a plan which he knew he could carry out because of his great power.

He took his heart and cut it in half. He put one half right at the tip of his nose
and the other half at the end of his tail.

—Apache folktale

PART I

HOW SNOW WHITE GOT HER CUNNING

THE CREATION OF SNOW WHITE

I accept with equanimity that you will not credit me when I tell you Mr. H married a Crow woman and had a baby with her round about the time he struck his fortune in the good blue, which is how folk used to designate Nevada silver. It don’t trouble me none if any soul calls me a liar.

The biography of Mr. H is well known: He had one wife and one son and that was the beginning and the end of his capacity for love, excepting of course the copper lode in Peru, gold prospects in the Dakota Territories, the Idaho opal mine, and other pursuits I cannot tell you about as they are beyond my ken. Most everyone grants he was a kingly fellow, else the blue would not have showed itself to him. That is a wholly peculiar way of thinking, but it is very common.

This is the truth of it:

Flush and jangle with silver and possessed of a powerful tooth for both spending and procuring more of whatever glittered under the ground, Mr. H traveled to the Montana Territory on a horse so new and fine, her tail squeaked. He disliked to travel in company, being a secretive man by nature. Mr. H had a witch’s own knack for sniffing out what the earth had to give up. The notion of a sapphire rush brewing in the Beartooth Range pricked up the north of that Comstock-compass stuck in his heart. All the way out in San Francisco he felt the rumble of the shine. However, upon his arrival in Billings and establishment at the Bear Gulch Hotel, the whiskeytalk leaned another way: black diamonds. That is how coal miners appellate their livelihood. In my experience, folk find it nigh on impossible to call a thing what it is.

It never mattered much to Mr. H whether silver or sapphires or coal or copper weighed his pockets just so long as he never walked empty. He made his arrangements to accompany a pair of Cornishmen into the range the next morning. He strode out into the bone-cracking cold to survey the town, though Billings in those days could barely be called more than a camp. Horseshit outnumbered honest men by a margin.

Mr. H encountered the woman who would be his first wife by chance alone. She turned up like an ace of spades in the general store, trading elk meat for cotton cloth and buttons. Her brother, who had shot the beast, escorted her. But the girl did the bargaining. She had good English and did not like the owner of the general store.

The terrible covetous heart of Mr. H immediately conceived a starvation for the girl not lesser in might than his thirst for sapphires or gold. In the lamplight her hair had the very color of coal, plaited in two long braids and swept up at the brow into what I have heard called a pompadour. Her dark mouth was a cut garnet, her skin rich copper, her eyes black diamonds for true. She looked over her shoulder at him and her body hardened to run if such became necessary. Mr. H took this slight stiffening as a sign that his feeling was returned. He saw no reason any person should fear him, being well dressed and pleasant enough in his features. He had loved women already in his time, though never married, all of them of good though not old family. Square-shouldered, sunburned freckles and kisses like milk and hair brushed a hundred times before bed. He savored a rich seam of shame over his lust for the Crow woman, and this shame made him only more needful.

Mr. H purposed himself to have her. He inquired after her name, her family, how often she visited the town to trade, where she and hers might make their camp. The Beartooth coal ran thick and deep, but he did his business by rote. Mr. H had sung his song many times. It sang itself. His true occupation was now the striking of the Crow woman, whose name was Gun That Sings. At first, his imagination wakened only to the possibility of bedding her. He saw no reason this should not be possible and right quick. Silver speaks louder than sin. But when Gun That Sings returned to town with her relations and Mr. H had opportunity to clap eyes on her again, he knew he could not be satisfied except to own her entirely. A man don’t rent a silver mine. He buys it right out.

He attired himself in a fine new suit sent by coach from San Francisco along with jewelry, gowns, and other items indicating his affection, for he was prepared to make her a civilized woman. He would put silk on her body and emerald combs in her hair. He would teach her to read Shakespeare and encourage her to play out the part of wild Titania in his parlor at home, naked save for a belt of violets. He would instruct her in the saying of the Lord’s Prayer and the keeping of the Sabbath; he would deliver to heaven a sterling modest maid. The anticipation of transforming her inspired a pleasure so sharp that Mr. H necessitated an entire afternoon to recover from it.

When Mr. H deemed the great moment of his matrimonials to have drawn close, he rode out on his combed and curried horse across the Bighorn River to the village of Gun That Sings’s people. Mr. H had often purchased meat and horses from Indians at what he considered a fair price and foresaw no trouble. The card-men at the Bear Gulch Hotel had informed him that the Crow allow their women to rule like heathen Cleopatras, and so Mr. H addressed himself to an old and august lady he spied leading a horse to pasture, requesting the presence of his bride-to-be.

When Gun That Sings was produced, Mr. H suffered some disappointment. She would not look at him, but kept her eyes fixed on the dirt. Her braids caught the winter light and seemed now not only as rich as coal but veined with liquid silver. Mr. H felt a powerful need. He behaved himself as though to a white woman. He presented his prospects to the maiden’s mother, his silver mine, his hopes for Dakota, his colleagues in Sacramento, his friends in Washington. As he described himself, the resolve of Mr. H hardened along with his impression of his own endowments, and he lost any doubt that he would be married before the night. Only an addled woman would despise the ring of such an excellent example of frontiersman quality.

I do not know what Gun That Sings said to him. If I had my rather, I would put words in her like bullets. I know she spurned him. That I do know.

Mr. H recovered his pride on the quick. Sometimes a man finds it necessary to work a claim for a space before it gives up the blue. He returned to his rooms to collect the bride gifts that would ensure her. Mr. H chose a gown like the sun to represent him. It sported a high bustle as was the fashion in the city, with sharp pleating at the skirt-hem and a neckline I would not wear if it were stitched in paper money. But the color did not recall the wholesome sun of spring. Its model was instead the terrible inferno of the sun itself, hanging in black space like a Utah ruby, erupting into eternity, pocked with lava.

Once again, Mr. H rode out past the river and presented the baleful dress to Gun That Sings. She looked on it and began to shake in her shoes. Mr. H pressed the gown upon her, but she wept bitterly into the cloth and said to her mother: “These are white woman’s clothes. Put them in the river; I will burn up inside them.”

Mr. H brought next a gown like the moon. This one presented a wasp waist and high lace collar. So much fabric in that skirt, it bent a back to lift it over its skeleton hoop of leather and wire. The shimmer of it took after the moon itself, hard and without poetry, stuck in the orbit of the thoughtless earth like a California pearl. Mr. H laid the dress across the flank of his horse like a stolen girl and forded the Bighorn to lay it out for Gun That Sings. She trembled something fearful and tore the brocade wrestling herself free. She said to her mother: “These are clothes for a white woman. Give them to a white woman. Put them in the fire; I will choke on them.”

Mr. H suffered no discouragement, for desire speaks louder than decorum. He drew from his trunk a gown like the stars at night. Its long sleeves and gathered skirt were black as Bibles, stitched all over with tiny crystals. In its folds Mr. H concealed a necklace of Colorado diamonds so fine and luxurious, anyone who looked at it felt like they were looking at a naked woman and turned away. The dress of stars glowed with cold, lonely fire, like the Dog Star howling in the black. Mr. H saddled his horse and rode out a third time. When Gun That Sings saw the dress and the necklace, she tried to run from it like it was death come for her, but Mr. H caught her up in his arms. He felt a big man with her there, not going anywhere at all. He held her by the throat. He put the necklace on her, all them diamonds hanging down her chest like war medals. Gun That Sings did not cry but stared him down with fury and didn’t say a damn thing.

Mr. H didn’t let her go for a second. He stood to Gun That Sings’s brothers and her mama and her father with his hand on the butt of his gun and told stories about how hitched up he’d got with General This-and-That and Senator Big-Name, and wasn’t it a nice patch of earth you people have here, right on the river and green as you please. All his Washington friends would just pick up and move right on out here fast as a cough if they could see it. Gun That Sings heard what he had to say and what he didn’t say, too, and the next Sunday she stood there in her dress of stars and said her vows and signed her name Sarah H on the register, because you can’t name a girl for a gun in civilized society.

And I guess that’s how a man gets a wife. I’ve heard it told elsewise, but I don’t believe it.

Well, Mr. H took his bride to a place he was building, a castle by the sea. He put silk on her body and emerald combs in her hair. He brushed out that hair every night, wrapped himself up in it, drank up the color and heat of coal in it. He kissed her dark blood-bright mouth over and over as if he could drink out the color of it, too. Mr. H told it with pride that he taught her to read Shakespeare, even though she had English letters just fine already. He made her play wild Titania for him wearing nothing at all, not even violets. He instructed her in the saying of the Lord’s Prayer and the keeping of the Sabbath, and he got her with child.

In his private prayers, Mr. H said the following: Let this child have hair like hot coal, and lips bright and dark as blood, but, oh Lord, if you’re listening, skin as white as mine.

By now I expect you are shaking your head and tallying up on your fingers the obvious and ungraceful lies of my story. Well, I have told it straight. A body can only deliver up the truth its bones know. Its blood, which is its history. My body is my truth, and I have laid it out as evidence on the table of my father’s reputation, for by now you may have guessed my next revelation: I was the child Mr. H put inside of Gun That Sings.

Mrs. H uncovered her condition in wintertime. It did not snow much in that part of the country, but the ground did freeze, and frost over, and purchase from heaven a meager dusting of the cold stuff. Gun That Sings went out into the forest at night. All the stars like dresses hung up in the sky. She took up a kitchen knife and hacked at her arms until steam rose out of her like she was a kettle. Her blood dripped down onto the white ground and she hoped she’d die, but she didn’t. Mr. H’s people found her and patched her up and locked her in a little room till the baby could come, at which point she died anyway, all alone in that big, unfinished house.

SNOW WHITE SECURES FIRE

My father did love me after a kind. He liked to see me trotted out for supper in a lacy white dress so he could see my black hair against it. He liked to see me dressed in black so my skin looked lighter against that. Less regular, he put me into calfskin and two long braids, which is how Crow girls dress. I did not like the look of him when I did that. Mr. H did not often introduce me to his business acquaintances or his more intimate partners. A daughter was a special doll to be kept in a glass cabinet. An automatic girl the master of the house brought out to entertain at the table with charming words, to be polished up with powder and elaborate costumes. Pull the lever in her heart and she dispenses love, pose her arms and legs and she exhibits grace—then put her away in her cabinet again.

I gradually understood the truth of my situation: I was a secret. Few enough of my father’s folk knew he’d married anybody in the first place. Gun That Sings had barely outlived the mail service that delivered their nuptial announcements. Mr. H found it more difficult to explain the sudden appearance of a daughter than to have me privately instructed, and forbade me to leave the grounds of the slowly growing castle by the sea.

For a long time this did not trouble me, as the grounds would have put the shame to Eden and Babylon. The hills swooped down to the shore in grassy, gentle humps, split up into gardens, fields full of pheasant and grouse for hunting, stables and ponds, good pine forests. Up on the north acreage, my father ordered a tiny zoo built, along with a brass carousel and a miniature boardwalk along the creek. The boardwalk boasted two shooting galleries, a dime museum full of paintings of faraway cities in Europe and South America, and a saloon with a player piano and sarsaparilla taps that never seemed to run dry. Inside the saloon stood a black and silver slot machine specially made to accept wooden coins my father had struck as part of my raising—they pictured myself on one side and Mr. H on the other. I received a set and nonnegotiable number of these every month and could trade them for toys, extra helpings of dessert, another hour before bedtime, or any other sorts of things for which a child might wheedle and beg. The spinners on the slot machine depicted a lonely tree in winter, spring, summer, and autumn. If I lined up the seasons correct, real coins would spill into the tray, silver dollars like raindrops.

I played alone on the boardwalk. My governess was not allowed there, as Mr. H felt every soul required a space to lord over. The sun beat my hair and the magpies watched me hopscotch across the birch slats. The slots spun only for me. I pulled my own mugs of sarsaparilla. I shot the tin geese in the galleries over and over again until dark. Sometimes the dime museum paintings changed, but I never saw new canvases hung up or old ones taken down. I had no friends or company other than my father, my governess, Miss Enger, and the groundskeeper, who came to feed the animals Mr. H collected on his travels and installed in the zoo. We had an ancient circus bear called Florimond, a red fox, a slow-witted buffalo, a shaggy gibbon. I was powerful afraid of the crocodile, even though she was caged up. The coyote also lived in a cage, as he could not be trusted to come back if we let him roam like the fox and the bear, who knew a good thing and an easy meal. I recall specially a pair of enormous emerald-colored parrots with red and yellow and purple feathers my father had brought by sea from the West Indies. They could talk a little, but they did not speak English.

Mr. H liked more than anything to see me dressed like a boy, with a cattleman’s hat and a revolver made to my hand. It had a grip pounded out of the first silver bars of Mr. H’s fortune, so pure and bright, it could blind a body cold. That would have been gun enough for any girl, but I reckon my father had nowhere else to spend his love back then. He had great big red pearls stuck into it like drops of blood spattered on the snow, one for every time I pleased him. On my tenth birthday he presented me a black opal the size of his thumb, which he set himself into the pommel.

Like your mother’s eyes, he said. Like your eyes, he said.

When I looked at it, I did not see my mother’s eyes. I saw fire. Veins of fire like anger in the dark. Like coal. Like coals. And in the silver I saw my face reflected like a terrible, wonderful mirror.

I could shoot that gun easy as spitting. The tin gallery geese, the apples off the orchard trees. I named my gun Rose Red for them fancy cranberries nubbling up against my palm. It was some years before I understood that pearls were more usually white. My main observation on the matter of the opal was that it changed the weight of my gun, which did not please me. If I was not shooting the pea rifle at tin buffalo on the boardwalk, I spent the better number of my afternoons shooting bottles on my father’s high fences, also rabbits, black squirrels, and opossums, which I gave to the groundskeeper. He took the meat and returned me the pelts, and I judged that a sound bargain. On occasion I shot big black rats, which I gave to the coyote, as I do not prefer rat fur. He crunched their skulls between his jaws. He watched me with yellow eyes while he did it. When he howled, he sounded like a body dying.

Once, I took a bead on a seagull and shot it plumb out of the sky. I did not expect to come close to it. As soon as it dropped down toward the sea, my heart fell through a hole in my chest. I looked for the bird all over the meadowy grass, crying miserable. The sun set my tears to boiling. I talked myself into the notion that I would find the seagull wounded through the wing and keep her and mend her and teach her to love humans and live in a house. She would help me and bring me fish and be my companion. She would sleep in my bed with her soft head against my shoulder.

I found the poor bird down at the bottom of a green hill. I had put my bullet straight through her black eye.

SNOW WHITE IS INSTRUCTED BY HERON AND LIZARD

Mr. H paid wages to these folk, though I am not accounting for the men he em ployed in San Francisco, Sacramento, Chicago, and New York, as I never met them Most all got some extra scratch for keeping quiet about my person.

Mrs. Maureen Whitney, Housekeeper

Miss Marie Andersen, Kitchen Maid

Miss Annie Dougall, Housemaid

Miss Mary Duffy, Laundry Maid

Mrs. Catherine Kenny, Cook

Miss Beatrice Criscone, Scullery Maid

Mr. Thomas Button, Butler

Mr. George Button, Valet

Mr. Simon Paget, Hall Boy

Mr. Garland Clague, Groundskeeper

Mr. Linus Healy, Stable Master

Mr. Peter Fjelstad, Stable Hand

Mr. Henry Fredrik, Useful Man

Miss Christabel Enger, Governess

I had nursemaids and the like, but I do not remember any of them.

SNOW WHITE’S FATHER REPLACES ARROWS WITH BNES

I was eleven years of age when Mr. H married the daughter of Mr. M.

The wedding occurred at high summer in the castle by the sea. A whole mess of new people suddenly tramped all over my private kingdom, tying gardenias to every damn thing and building silk tents in the golden grass. The Mr. Buttons were so fussed, I thought their heads would fly off, and Mrs. Kenny hollered something fierce at the sculleries. The cream was too feared to whip.

The new Mrs. H was a stranger to me. I knew the following interesting items concerning her: Mr. M was a railroad baron and owned most everything Mr. H didn’t. She had grown up in Boston and gone to a fancy Paris school for girls. She knew French and Spanish and Latin. Some kind of scandal worried her back East. I heard the wedding people say Mr. H was good to take her after all that business. But I also heard them say the only reason she would marry a man with no family name at all was because of her lowered station.

They all said she was beautiful. It hurt to look at her sometimes . . . if the wine stewards were to be believed, and I did not. Who ever heard of a person so pretty, it pinched to set eyes on her? Probably the stewards were drunk, I reasoned.

Mr. H told me to stay out of the way and I did. I stayed in my zoo while the wedding went up like a white circus. I chewed licorice root while the red fox, whom I had named Thompson, curled in my lap and the big old raggedy bear snored away. Who, who? hooted the monkey. Elle, elle, answered the emerald parrots together, as they did not hold forth separately. I thought on how excited Mr. H got over the idea of a wife. He kept a picture of her in his breast pocket, but he would not let me see it. He barely looked at me at dinner, even if I wore my hair in two braids. I did not see the appeal of a wife. We had never had one before. She would not be half as interesting as our buffalo.

Miss Enger said a man required a helpmeet and a solace. She said a house like this cried out for a feminine hand. She said poor Mr. H longed for companionship and children of his own. Two things settled into my brain upon listening to my governess philosophize on the marital condition. The first was that Mr. H had lied upon the matter of me; Miss Enger, believed I was his ward and not his daughter. The second was that Miss Enger nurtured hopes concerning my father that had recently been squashed flat. Before Miss Enger, my governess had been a Canadian lady called Miss Grace Bornay. She did not think I was anybody’s ward. But she and the rest, except Mr. Clague the groundskeeper, had been let go and new souls brought in a year back. Miss Enger was prettier than Miss Bornay, but Miss Bornay could play the flute and Miss Enger could not, so it all came out in the wash.

The fox wandered off into his little fox house, and I walked down to my empty saloon. Maybe the new Mrs. H would sit with me the way the fox did. Maybe she would come to my saloon and play cards around the table where no one else ever upped an ante or called. It might be good fun to play with another body. Maybe she would brush my hair and sing to me, and that would be nice. Maybe she liked to shoot. Maybe she would teach me Latin and French and dancing. Maybe she’d want to dress me up as something. Maybe she would love me the way I loved my gun.

I spun the slot machine. Four winter trees whirled up, bare and heavy with ice. A silver dollar rolled into the pan. It echoed a good while.

SNOW WHITE BITES HER OWN REFLECTION

Mrs. H arrived the night before the wedding. A white stagecoach brought her. The inside of the stagecoach was black. I wanted to pick flowers for her and practice a welcome speech. Mr. H told me no. He said I would have plenty of time with her later. I was not to come down or bother her. I was not to bother Mr. M or his servants. I was not to pick flowers for anyone. I was to wait in my room and play with Miss Enger and my toys until the wedding was over, and then Mr. H would figure a way to present me.

I did not apprehend before that moment that Mrs. H did not know Mr. H for a widower with a child already on the ground. She did not think he had a ward, either. She did not know about me at all. If you ask me how I felt on that, I will tell you nothing good.

So I watched her come into the house from the window of my bedroom. I hid in the red curtains and peeped down on her. I gathered information. She wore a gray dress with embroidery and white boots. Her hair was braided up nice. It had a color like good whiskey. I could not see her face, only her scalp, white and sharp as a knife. She had what I guess menfolk call a figure. She walked graceful as a greyhound. Mr. H helped her out of the coach and kissed her cheek. Mr. M bounded out the other side and clapped my father on the shoulder, and his piggy jowls shook when he did it. I couldn’t hear them talking because my bedroom was very far up. They looked like a puppet show, pumping each other’s hands up and down and laughing without making noise.

The new Mrs. H looked up at my window. I am certain she saw me, but I ducked anyway. Her face was shaped like a heart and so pale, I thought she might be sick. It did hurt to look at her after all. She looked like a painting that used to hang in my dime museum, with a lady on a shell coming out of the sea. She looked like somebody’s mother. But not mine.

It was not customary for a lady to bring her things inside the house while she remained unmarried. They left it all at the servants’ doors. Draped with muslin, her trousseau looked like some dreadful machine. I sneaked out to look at it while they had a big dinner inside. I could see them through the window. Mr. M drank a bear’s measure of wine and his mustache turned red. The new Mrs. H didn’t drink at all. She moved her finger around the rim of her glass and didn’t sip and watched everyone like a bobcat. Her finger had a ring on it. I knew it was not an engagement ring as it was on her forefinger. It was green, but I did not think it was an emerald. I am only dwelling on her ring because it will be important later. I expect everyone in Boston has something like that ring, which is why I am glad I have never been to Boston.

I took my eyes back from the dinner table on the other side of the window. I lifted the muslin. Underneath it was a chest of linens, which I did not find interesting.

I walked around the right side of her belongings and lifted the cloth again. I found a chest full of little bottles. Each of them had some different liquid inside it, and they smelled something awful. They smelled moldy and damp and also sharp and spicy. They smelled, if you want to know it, like Florimond’s pelt after he had gotten rained on. I had on occasion scratched and kissed the old circus bear in the wintertime when he slept very soundly, so I am familiar with such smells. As I could not guess what use the bottles might have, I walked around the left side of her belongings and pulled up the drape.

Underneath that was the biggest mirror I ever saw.

It was not like any of the mirrors Mr. H had brought over from Italy and France, with gold all over them and fat babies holding up the corners. It did not have any roses or lilies or ribbons cut out of silver. It was like a door into nothing. The glass did not show the buttery light of the house behind me. It did not show the forest or the meadows. It did not even show me. The glass was so full up of dark, it looked like someone had tripped over the night and spilled it all into that mirror. The frame was wood, but wood so old and hard and cold, it felt like stone. I reckoned if it came from a tree, that tree was the oldest, meanest tree in a forest so secret, not even birds knew about it. That tree saw dinosaurs and did not think much of them.

I touched the mirror and my fingers went hot and cold, like candles melting.

The moon came on inside the mirror. I could see the craters and the mountains on it clear and true. But the night above my head was moonless as a sack of wool. I dropped the muslin but I did not scream. I do not scream generally or cry very much. But I can run powerful fast.

SNOW WHITE OBTAINS A MOTHER

He married her.

I knew I was not to attend the wedding, but I scrapped up a black oak tree and saw the whole thing start to finish. It all happened at sunset under a tent with silver stars painted on it. I never saw so many lanterns or so many flowers. I thought: Nobody else in the whole world must have any roses now. Mr. H wore a black suit and looked just as fine as rain. A pack of fancy folk arrived in coaches. The ladies wore dresses like springtime and egg whites. The fellows wore velvet and other fabrics I was not aware of. Some of them had long bright guns I would have liked to get a better look at. Little girls and boys threw violet petals on the grass. They were somebody’s children, I cannot say whose. I thought to myself that I could throw petals better. The littlest ones dumped half their baskets in one spot. I wanted to throw violets too. I would throw them so good, Mrs. H would give me a kiss.

When the bride came out of the house, everybody sighed. She had a dress on all lace and silk like a snowflake and pearls all over her head. Around her neck was a necklace of Colorado diamonds so luxurious, I didn’t want to look at it, like if I looked at it, I had already stolen it.

After, they danced together. Violins and harps and horns and drums played to wake the moon. Mr. H never stopped smiling. He kissed her seventeen times. I know because I counted. Mr. M danced with a girl in a pink dress and only got two kisses. The violet-tossing children ate too much cake and fell asleep on the grass.

There was a fountain of champagne, and it looked like starlight you could drink.

I fell asleep in the black oak tree.

SNOW WHITE AND BOBCAT SCRATCH EACH OTHER

My father and Mrs. H took their honeymoon in Peru, where Mr. H intuited the good blue waited for him. I will observe that not even the softness of a bed containing Mrs. H could cool his lechery for silver. The only word I received from them was a painting that appeared in my dime museum. It appeared as suddenly and without warning as if a ghost had hung it up. I looked at it a long time. It showed a kind of pyramid with sides like staircases and a flat top. That is how they build pyramids in South America, which I know from reading a great number of books. Jaguars live in South America also. I would like to see a jaguar someday, but probably I will not. In the painting, a person stood on the top of the pyramid. It looked like a woman, but the figure was very tiny and I am not artistic. She held her arms straight up, toward the moon rising over the pyramid. I could not help but think of the mirror. I had not been able to find it again once they moved Mrs. H’s things into the house. Maybe the moon had gotten out of the mirror and decided to live in my painting instead.

I was a child and when you are a child you think things like that.

Mr. H sent word by telegraph that I was to stay in my rooms so as not to make worry for Mrs. H once they returned. If I liked, I might spend my days on the boardwalk once my lessons were done, but at night I must obey Miss Enger, eat what is left over, and look after myself. Surely I had enough toys and books to amuse any girl. Miss Dougall minded me like a pot of boiling water. The housemaid locked my door at night and kept me out of the front rooms with the end of a broom. Miss Dougall was the sheriff of my father’s law, and every night I wished she would fall down the stairs and bust her big curly head. She did not oblige me. Miss Enger patted my hand in sympathy but did not unlock my door or bring me anything extra to eat.

I sat at my window. I spun the chamber on Rose Red and ran my fingers over the pearls in the grip. There were a lot of them by then. I had pleased Mr. H often, but it had been a good bit since he’d given me any new pearls. If I obeyed Miss Dougall, perhaps I would get another. This idea cheered me up some.

Things began to happen all in a row: I knew my father and Mrs. H had come home; I could hear them laughing and walking and banging forks against plates. But I was not called for. My food was brought. My linens seen to. Miss Enger did not come to see me anymore. Mrs. H sent her on her way with a fair clutch of money and a reference. A new Irish hall girl drew the chore of my lessons. She was called Moira Daly and could not herself read. She was very apologetic, however, and I took it on myself to teach her letters so that somebody between the two of us could learn a thing. Still, no one called for me. Miss Daly was not nearly brave enough to take my questions downstairs.

In the evening I could hear Mrs. H playing the pianoforte. She was very good at it. She sang as well, and was particularly fond of strange old songs like “Hymn to the Evening Star” and “Fairies of the Hill.” I lay against the floor and listened every night. I drank her voice up like milk.

I had never heard a woman sing before. Only the coyote in his cage and the seagulls crying.

After Miss Daly’s lessons each morning, I crept out of my window and shimmied down the olive tree. I came away yellow with olive pollen and ran up to my boardwalk, where Thompson the fox waited for his bowl of sarsaparilla. Florimond wandered around his paddock on his hind legs, looking for a trainer to praise him.

I gave him the apples from my breakfast. I do not care for apples.

I played cards with Thompson in my saloon. He had lost the trick, but I suspected he had the Queen and I was done for already. Thompson chewed on the seven of spades.

A shadow moved over the saloon door. It was not a groundskeeper’s shadow. It was not a bear’s shadow. I looked up and I will confess I was angry. No one was allowed up there but me. Miss Enger, Miss Bornay, even rotten Miss Dougall knew they had no power here. They had the whole house and the world on top. The saloon was my place, and whoever it was would not get any sarsaparilla. But it was not Miss Enger or Miss Bornay or Miss Dougall.

Mrs. H stood in the doorway. She wore a vermilion dress. With the sun behind her, she looked like a planet on fire. Her heart-shaped face was blank. I suddenly felt very shabby and small in my play dress. She was ever so much taller and prettier than I would ever be. Wherever they invented women like that, it was country I could never even visit.

Thompson leaped away from the table and skittered under the bar. Mrs. H moved in her greyhound way, her heels clicking on the floorboards. She sat down and took up the red fox’s cards, fanned them out like an old gambler. She slotted the seven of spades into her hand, bending back the chewed-up part. Her fingers had nail paint on them, which I had never seen before, not being acquainted with many fine women. I stared. The paint looked like blood. Was she sick? She was so pale and her nails so red. Did she hunt, like me, and dress her own kills? Had she killed something today and forgotten to wash herself? Mrs. H said nothing. She drew a card from her hand and laid it down between us. I could see the green ring better. It was an uncut emerald the size of a man’s knuckle, with fiery flaws winking down at the bottom of it like fish in a pond.

Mrs. H laid down the queen of spades. I’d lost. The queen of spades has black eyes and black hair, like me, but her gown is red, like Mrs. H’s.

“So you’re the little Indian child,” she said, and those were Mrs. H’s first words to me. She looked all around the room. Looking at her felt like drinking something harsh and strong. It woke you up and made you dizzy all at once. Her eyes were green like her ring.

“I can see we have a lot of work to do,” she sighed.

My whole body felt like I had when I touched the mirror under the muslin. Like a candle melting into ice water.

“Please,” I whispered. “Don’t be mean to me. I’m good. I promise I’m good.” That sounded babyish and nonsensical out of my own mouth. I tried again. I spit in my hand and held it out like I’d seen Mr. H do with horse breeders. “If you love me, I’ll love you back,” I bargained.

Mrs. H laughed. The wind picked up outside. I did not think she would shake on it, but she did. Her fingers were cool on mine. She avoided my spit-upon palm and wiped her hands on her skirt afterward.

Mrs. H reached over the card table and smoothed my hair between her fingertips. “You are not entirely ugly, but no one would mistake you for a human being. That skin will never come clean. And that hairl Black as coal, and those lips, as red as the hearts your savage mother no doubt ate with relish. That’s all right. All women have a taste for hearts. But you will discover that I am a gentle soul. If you do as I say and imitate me as best you are able, perhaps you will find yourself gentled as well. It is not beyond possibility that God will overlook your coarser half and take you to His bosom at the end of days.”

Mrs. H stood up. Her dress rustled like breath. She walked over to the slot machine and pulled the arm without dropping a coin into its mouth. The reels spun. Four red apples whirled up, glossy and dark. I had spun that beast a thousand times and never seen one apple. Silver dollars exploded into the pan like rifle-fire. Mrs. H left them there. She left the door swinging. She left me alone.

From that day forward she never used my name. Eventually I forgot it. Mrs. H called me something new. She named me cruel and smirking, she named me not for beauty or for cleverness or for sweetness. She named me a thing I could aspire to but never become, the one thing I was not and could never be: Snow White.

PART II

SNOW WHITE CONTENDS WITH THE PRAIRIE-FALCON’S BLINDNESS

SNOW WHITE FIGHTS A LUMP OF PITCH

I do not believe any person is born knowing how to be human. Everyone has to learn their letters and everyone has to learn how to be alive.

A is for Alligator. B is for Beauty.

Maybe it’s not a lesson so much as it’s a magic trick. You can make a little girl into anything if you say the right words. Take her apart until all that’s left is her red, red heart thumping against the world. Stitch her up again real good. Now, maybe you get a woman. If you’re lucky. If that’s what you were after. Just as easy to end up with a blackbird or a circus bear or a coyote. Or a parrot, just saying what’s said to you, doing what’s done to you, copying until it comes so natural that even when you’re all alone, you keep on cawing Hello, pretty bird at the dark.

When Mrs. H said I was not human, she meant I was not white. She was wrong about the reason but not about the thing. I wasn’t human. I was a small device who knew only how to shoot a gun, play the slots, and dress up in fancy clothes to please a rich man. Nobody had ever loved me proper, and if there’s a boring story in this world, that’s it. I want to skip this part. I want to pull on the arm of my slot machine and let the rolls flip over until they show a green tree in the summertime, and me away from that house, walking tall under a blue sky. I want to skip this part, but I am here to tell you: A stepmother is like a bullet you can’t dig out. She fires true and she fires hot and she fires so quick that her metal hits your body before you even know there’s a fight on. I didn’t even know what white was.

So here’s the truth of it: There was blood and some of it came from between my legs and some of it came from my face where Mrs. H struck me over and over, because I was bad, because I looked like my mother, because I smelled like an animal, because I did not show her any human feeling or sweetness and that made me wicked. It is my understanding that when you start bleeding, you are a woman, so I guess that’s what I was.

She put jasper-and-pearl combs in my hair and yanked them so tight, I cried—There, now you’re a lady, she said, and I did not know if the comb or the tears did it. She put me in her own corsets like nooses strangling my waist till I was sick, my breath gone and my stomach shoved up into my ribs—There, now you’re civilized, she said, and I did not know if it was the corset or the sickness that did it. She forbade me to eat sweets or any good thing till I got thin as a dog and could hardly stand I was so damn hungry—There, now you’re beautiful, she said, and I did not know if it was my dog bones showing or my crawling in front of her begging for a miserable apple to stop my belly screaming that made me fair.

For myself I thought: This is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.

I worked hard to be as human as possible.

She dismissed Miss Marie the kitchen maid and Miss Mary the laundry maid. She dismissed Miss Bea the scullery. Mr. H gave up the house to her. He did not bring me a pearl for obeying Miss Dougall. The house was hers to lord over, was the word of Mr. H. Children are the province of women and none of his nevermind now, thank God in heaven.

When she hit me, she said she loved me. When she scratched my face, she said she loved me. And let me tell you, Mrs. H loved me most of all the day she locked me in my room with no lamps or candles because I looked too long at a groomsman and that’s the mark of a whore, a slattern with a jackal for a mother, hellion trash with an animal heart. For a week I had no bath or books, no light and no food, but she loved me the whole time, whispering through the door that her love could burn the whore out of me. Love could make me pure again.

On account of all of this, I had some peculiar ideas about love. I’ll tell you what I thought on the subject back then: It’s about as much use as a barrel with no bottom. When I fed the pigs and two of them got to scrapping over an old soft onion, I thought: That’s love. Love is eating. Love is a snarling pig snout and long tusks. Love is a dress like the sun. Love is the color of blood. Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.

I said I loved her back. I put my hand on the door and I said I loved her back, and when I said it, I thought of kissing her and also of shooting her through the eye.

Mrs. H dismissed Mrs. Whitney the housekeeper and Mrs. Kenny the cook. She dismissed Miss Daly, who could write her name by then and did not seem sad to go. The men servants she left, excepting the groomsman I looked at. There were no ladies left but us.

How will we keep the house?

You will keep it. A dean house creates a clean soul and you have work to do. This is what it means to be a woman in the world.

When Mrs. H locked me up in the dark that time, I cobbled up a second notion. Love was a magic fairy spell. Didn’t the girls in my books hunt after love like it was a deer with a white tail? Didn’t love wake the dead? Didn’t that lady love the beast so hard, he turned into a good-looking white fellow? That was what love did. It turned you into something else.

For this reason, I forgave Mrs. H. I tried to be near her all the time. She only meant to scrub me up and fix me. At any moment she might take me in her arms and kiss me, and like that beast with a buffalo’s body, I would fill up with light and be healed. Love would do what it did best. Love would turn me into a white girl. If I did everything right, one day I would wake up and be wise and strong, sure of everything, with skin like snow and eyes as blue as hers. It would happen like a birthday party. One day the girl in the mirror would not look like me at all but like my stepmother, and nothing would hurt anymore forever.

SNOW WHITE DEALS THE DEAD MAN’SHAND

I hunted Mrs. H and I hunted her mirror. My father hunted the blue and the yellow down a long mountain range like a wrinkle in the world. I guess we’re pretty much alike when you think about it. Only he got clear of that house and it took me quite a while to fix that for myself.

A house is a kind of box you put a girl in. Mrs. H and me, we rattled around in it like two old bullets. I looked in the basement for her mirror and I was not afraid of the spiders down there. I looked in the attic and I was not bothered by the mice. Mice have their own troubles with cats and whatnot; they do not mind a body. I looked while I cleaned. I looked while I cut up chicken and potatoes. I looked while I boiled linens. I looked in the bedroom of Mr. and Mrs. H and this did fear me something awful, for I would have caught a beating to end them all if Mrs. H found me worrying her things. I sat on their bed, which had red curtains and red pillows and red stairs leading up to it like the bed was a red tower in a white forest. I put my hands into the sleeves of her dresses and that made me shudder. It was like standing inside Mrs. H and wearing her and that is full uncanny, I can tell you. I sat at her lady’s table, which had a mirror even though it was not the right mirror. This mirror had a frame like a sunburst with little carnelians and opals all over it. I saw myself in it, no more or less than myself: almost fourteen, all long bones, long hair, and big black eyes. I did not know to say if I was pretty. I did not look like Mrs. H, so I guessed I was not.

I pulled the silk paper off her lipstick and rubbed it between my fingers. I knew how lipstick got itself made, because Mr. H did a fair business selling low-grade garnets. Some fancy men in Paris crush them up into a powder finer than salt and stir the gems in with deer fat. They put a sweet scent on it, but I could still smell the deer. When I put it on my lips, I could taste it. The blood and the beating of the deer’s fright in the forest. I smelled her perfume. It gave me the oddest feeling, like I was smelling an emerald. But not a real emerald, which I imagine has no particular smell. Best I can explain is that stopper was soaked in a smell like the idea of an emerald, the idea of greenness and growing and wealth, a kind of fine light that could make a rock bloom.

Mrs. H smelled like jewels. Like the produce of the earth that Mr. H chased all over here and gone. She smelled like a perfect high-yield mine, and I got out of that room on the quick.

I found the mirror on account of the paintings in my dime museum. Sometime in the autumn they changed to hunting scenes: Chinese men shooting arrows at an ugly black unicorn, Spaniards hauling harpoons at a giant squid with a whale in its ropy arms, sour-faced men sitting on top of stacks of buffalo like thrones of meat. Thompson the red fox did not like these paintings, but I reassured him. I thought of the seagull with my bullet in her eye. I ran my fingers over Rose Red in her holster, the red pearls on her grip. Probably I did not please Mr. H anymore at all. I reckoned Rose Red could not kill a whale or a thousand buffalo, but if a stunted black unicorn with an antler for a horn and tiger stripes on its rump got a hankering for red fox, I could handle the situation.

In considering my shoot-out with the unicorn, I came to see the corner of the painting was curling up away from the frame a little. A Chinese woman with gold ink in her dress covered her eyes so as not to see the skinning of the unicorn nor the sharing out of the liver and the heart, which I have heard hunters do to honor the dead thing, or else perhaps those parts are tasty. I picked at her a little, and she gave way like she couldn’t wait to get out of the whole scene.

Underneath the weeping lady, Mrs. H’s silver mirror peeked out.

I rolled up the painting and rested it on the top of the frame—that familiar wooden frame like cold stone. I hadn’t recognized it. I admit that I am a damn fool sometimes. The mirror showed the same black starless sky as before. I looked into it for a long while. The sun in the world outside the mirror turned orange and then red like a leaf in a hurry, but inside the mirror it stayed night. I set out my feelings on the matter in an orderly fashion, a poker hand on the table of my spirit.

Pair of aces: This is my place and she has been here. She has left part of herself here. She has invaded the place where I am most myself and stuck a flag in it. Pair of eights: This is my place and she has made it hers but that goes both ways. I have this piece of Mrs. H and it belongs to me. She put it in my kingdom.

Queen of diamonds: She left part of herself here to watch me.

SNOW WHITE JUGGLES HER OWN EYES

The moon came on in the mirror.

This time I did not run off. The mirror was an animal, like Thompson or the crocodile. You have to show it you’re not gonna hurt it, maybe feed it a little, before it stops thinking you’re prey or predator or both. I fed the mirror my face and the moon came on inside it like a huge white eye. I had already seen this trick. But I did not know how to make it do anything else. I just kept looking into it, counting craters, and I guess the mirror got fed up, because the moon started creaking and spinning and before the dark side came around to the light it had turned into Mrs. H on her knees scrubbing a marble floor with pink veins forking through it.

Mrs. H was young. You could tell she wasn’t Mrs. H yet. Her whiskey-colored hair was braided up tight, and I could see dirt under her fingernails. She scrubbed and scrubbed, and my hands tingled where I had rubbed them raw scrubbing just that morning. Young Mrs. H looked up at a fine lady in a primrose dress and I heard her say something real quiet like the mirror was a muzzle.

Why do I have to work on my knees? We have more maids than books in the library. Mrs. H held out her hands. Lye burns slicked them like shiny snail tracks.

The woman in the primrose dress answered: This is what it means to be a woman in the world. Work until you die and work again after. Your only choice is whether you scrub the vaults of hell or the halls of heaven. Anyone who tells you different is a huckster with his hand in your pocket.

The brush in Mrs. H’s hand blinked out, and with a quickness she was bent over in the hearth in a yellow apron, picking out hard little peas. Her face was full of ash like a Catholic in spring. The same fine lady wore a cornflower dress.

Why do I have to comb the grate? We have charwomen and sculleries as plentiful as water. Mrs. H held out her hands. Ash turned them dead and gray.

The woman in the cornflower dress answered: This is what it means to be a woman in the world. Obey until a man gives you permission to die and keep on obeying after. The tasks you’re handed make less sense than a rooster in a Sunday hat, but if God wanted us to have a say, he’d have made us men.

The hearth hissed away like steam, and young Mrs. H stood in a forest blacker and older than any white pine I’d shot a squirrel out of. She was crying. Up until then I had never seen anyone cry but me, and suspected I was the only one who could do it. I was the only body weak enough. Everyone else had a strong thing inside them where I had tears, and that strong thing protected them against sadness. But young Mrs. H was crying and no mistaking. She unbuttoned her dress and pulled out her laces and stepped naked out of her skirt into the night. The same terrible eyeball of a moon that lived in the mirror shone down and turned her blue.

I had never seen a naked woman before. I could not breathe right and my heart ricocheted all over the inside of me like a misfired bullet. Mrs. H looked like a person come to visit from another planet. Her breasts and her belly glowed aquamarine, her muscled legs moved like I imagined that striped, antlered unicorn in the painting moved, graceful as a star coming up in evening. That hair like a long, stiff drink covered her hind parts, which made me sorry. I wanted to look at her forever.

Mrs. H dropped to the ground and hit that forest with both fists. She cried and she screamed and she grabbed at the mud, smearing it all over her and scratching herself bloody. Get me out, she said into the earth. Get me out.

Well, I guess in New England there’s things living under the world that answer when you holler at them like that. Two arms bigger than stovepipes came up out of the loam and the grime, and the arms were loam and grime and leaves and roots, and they wrapped around Mrs. H like the tenderest husband ever born. A stony hand stroked her hair. I heard a quiet voice like it was a long way off but so close, it whispered right in my ear:

This is what it means to be a woman in this world. Every step is a bargain with pain. Make your black deals in the black wood and decide what you’ll trade for power. For the opposite of weakness, which is not strength but hardness. I am a trap, but so is everything. Pick your price. I am a huckster with a hand in your pocket. I am freedom and I will eat your heart.

The loamy arms gathered Mrs. H close in. A still pool opened up under her body like a bloodstain. The water shone clear and perfect as a mirror. For a second she floated on top of the pool, then it flowed around her, up over her skin and into her mouth, filling up all the empty places in her body and pulling her down into the starry slick of it. Under the surface, her face looked so happy. But that’s not what I mean. I mean her face was happiness. Like her perfume was an emerald. Every time I seen a body take on joy in my life, it’s only been a shiver of that blue face in the dark wood, a little piece of her smile or her tears. When the water let Mrs. H go, she came up dry as a prairie, wearing a dress the color of dirt. Green jewels like moss crowded the silk, silver jewels like rivers ran through it, red gems like poison berries wound around her hips, and Mrs. H was wearing the forest. She didn’t have a speck of mud on her. She had a ring on her finger with a chunk of rough green stone fixed into it.

A distant music picked up and my stepmother moved toward it, starting to dance in time to the mandolins, the lights of some grand ball waltzing already on her skin.

* * *

Now, I have had a long time to cogitate on this. I guess I know something about magic after everything that’s happened, enough to know you don’t go talking about it when it’s not around. But I think back East they have Puritan magic and out West we have animal magic, and I’ll tell you the truth for nothing: Those goodies and goodwives and poppets and dark woods scare me worse than any crow with the sun in her mouth.

SNOW WHITE WEARS HER INSIDES ON HER OUTSIDE

Mrs. H bathed me in milk on Sundays. She poured ice into that milk like sugar and the cream got so cold, it burned me like fire. I lay in there trying not to quake or shiver none, as Mrs. H called that a weakness. My toes got so you could stick pins in them and I’d never know it. The bathtub was black, from Hungary, which is a place I only know the name of. White milk and black stone and me in the middle of it like a cork.

Mrs. H said it would turn my skin white. She said it would wash out my dark parts and better than any soap. Milk had power in the formulation of Mrs. H’s mind. Milk comes from creatures that eat only grass and drink only water and do not pollute their bodies with death. Milk comes from mothers. You can see from this that she did teach me things. When she started on this kind of talk, my heart toppled over. If she was in a teaching mood, she wasn’t in a hitting mood. Like sneezing and keeping your eyes open, Mrs. H couldn’t do both at once.

Came a night she put me in the milk bath and I thought I’d die of the cold. The hairs on my arms tried to stand up and run off. She dunked me in and shoved my head under the cream and kept it there. I thrashed a good bit but Mrs. H was strong. I couldn’t see nothing but white. Shhhh. Mrs. H could sound so soft when she wanted. Shhhh. Let it happen. Take it in. It’s inside you, that’s the trouble. You don’t speak Crow, you don’t paint your face. For heaven’s sake, I know more about your mother than you do. It’s inside you. Drink it in. What’s inside you needs cleaning. Swallow it down and you’ll come out pure.

I choked. I drank it. It went up my nose and I stopped breathing. I hit her across the breast and the chin trying to dig up from that milk that stank like perfume. The white in my eyes started to go dark, and she let me up all the sudden like my skin burned her.

After, I squinted real close at the mirror, but I didn’t look no different.

You may not know it, but the keeping of a large house by one girl is the hardest work going on earth. I heard there’s fire in hell, but I’ll bet the devil just hands you a bucket and tells you to get moving, this place ain’t gonna clean itself.

SNOW WHITE’S STEPMOTHER GIVES BIRTH TO THE SKY

I could not say exactly how Mrs. H managed to catch pregnant. Mayhap Mr. H fired a baby into her from Peru with a better gun than mine. Probably he came home and performed his husbandry and left again before the sun could surprise him at it.

More to the point, I could not say exactly whether or not Mrs. H was pregnant. Her belly did not get bigger nor did she let out her dresses. She said nothing more about it after the announcement, which was reported in all the newspapers. I was coming up on seventeen and some noise was made about the necessity of marriage, but Mrs. H did not feel I was fit to entertain suitors, and anyway I would not be getting my hands on any of the H money, so there seemed little purpose in it. I’ve half a mind to dump her over the border in Crow territory and let them kill her or marry her or whatever those heathens do with beasts less useful than a horse but prettier than a cow.

Well, at least I knew my worth.

Mrs. H came pretty often to the dime museum. She rolled up the painting of the Chinese unicorn and looked at herself in the mirror. Sometimes she talked to the mirror like it was a person. Sometimes she asked it questions. I never heard it answer, but it must have or she wouldn’t have kept asking. Sometimes she pressed her cheek to her reflection in the glass.

The woman in the mirror was pregnant.

The reflection of Mrs. H got big in the belly day by day as the winter wore on. Mrs. H stayed slim as a pen. She moved her hand over her flat stomach; in the mirror Mrs. H cradled her roundness in both arms. The paintings in the museum changed to Madonnas, women in blue on seashells and star-points and sitting on silver thrones. The parrots died. I found them with frost hardening on their beaks. I said good-bye to them in French, but that is all I knew how to say so it was a short eulogy. Whenever I looked in the mirror after Mrs. H left, all I saw was the copy of her, humming a song while she let the waists of her dresses out with a quick, clever needle. Once she looked at me, looked out of the mirror and into me. She put her hand on her stomach and whispered: Soon.

I ran.

The baby came at night. I watched it happen from my hiding place and if I live a hundred years I will not see anything stranger. Mrs. H stood stock-still while the reflection in the mirror cried and struggled and bled. The blood coming from between her legs wasn’t red. It was the color of a mirror, like mercury beading out of her. She looked like she would die and the baby would choke on her. Drown in her like a dress. Mrs. H just folded her hands in the museum and never made a sound. She watched. She didn’t even fidget. Finally the child spilled out of the woman in the mirror, mirror-blood gushing and a rope of that terrible black wood like stone connecting them. The woman in the mirror cut it with her teeth. The child was a boy.

He did not look very much like Mr. H.

But then, neither do I.

Mrs. H laid her hand on the glass. The baby didn’t cry. Sticky silver stuff covered his skin. The woman in the mirror put the baby to her breast and the mirror flowed out of her body, overflowing his tiny mouth and trickling down his cheek. The woman in the mirror smiled and knuckled the drop away.

And that was it.

The boy did not come out of the mirror, which was what I expected to happen. Mrs. H came to see him often enough, but he was born in the mirror and looked fit to stay there. I came to visit him too. I wanted to see my brother. The woman in the mirror tilted him up in her arms so I could get a better look. He got big fast—after a week or two he was walking around in there and running up to the glass when I came in, putting up his hands like he wanted to touch me. He liked me to put both my hands up against his, ten fingers and ten fingers.

I guess he was a nice baby. I don’t know much about them. He had small pink fists. He was a healthy white baby who would own the whole world if he could get out of that mirror. The newspapers said Mr. H had a son and heir. But my father never came home to shake his son’s little fist and welcome him into the world that had been made to fit him like a good suit. He never came home much at all. I thought to myself that Mr. H was not his father and I was not his sister but that Mrs. H got a baby from the pool in the forest and he came out in the mirror. But I did not like thinking that. The baby smiled when he saw me. That was nice.

Nobody did that before.

I wished the mirror would just show the damn moon again. The rest of it put me in a black mood and that’s the truth.

SNOW WHITE WEARS THE SUN

I believe the boy in the mirror was about five when Mr. H sent word he would be arriving home on the Saturday evening train.

Mrs. H said I would have to try to look pretty. She took me into her bedroom and thought that was a big favor on her part, but only because she did not know I had already been in there looking for her mirror. The Mr. Buttons had filled the milk bath already. Ice floated in it. I had gotten a fair sight older and grown breasts (which I did not ask for), and I did not want to be naked in front of Mrs. H, but when I held on to my clothes, she got out shears and cut them off of me. I stood there with my arms over myself and laundry scum on the backs of my hands. Mrs. H waited and pretty soon it dawned on me that she couldn’t lift me anymore. I got in the milk; it hurt like lye.

Mrs. H screwed up her thoroughness and let it loose all over me. She scrubbed my hair and rubbed that cream into my skin with a boar-hair brush and made me hold ice in both my mouth and my womanly parts until it melted. I did not cry but I wanted to. This is what it means to be a woman in the world. You have to get pure. You have to get clean. You just won’t do filthy and indecent and smelling like fox. Do it for your father. You love your father. You want him to be happy.

Mrs. H dried my hair and combed it out. She put oils into it that I did not enjoy the smell of. My hair was very long then and she wound it around and around like a big black snake, fixed it up on top of my head, and put ruby pins through it. Some of them pins pricked my scalp and I felt a little blood trickle down the back of my neck. Mrs. H produced a number of contraptions into which she crammed and pinched my body so that my breasts squished up and my waist tied down tiny like hers. She trembled a little bit. I was not accustomed to seeing her tremble. She seemed mighty upset, maybe even feared, though I wouldn’t know fear in that face if I saw it.

Mrs. H pulled a dress out of a steamer trunk and it was the color of the sun. It had a high bustle and sharp pleating at the skirt-hem and a neckline I wanted to run away from. It looked like fire. It looked like molten iron. I didn’t want to be inside that dress. It was going to burn me. It was going to eat me. But Mrs. H dug her nails into my arm. Do this thing and you can call me mama. Do this thing and you can have anything you want. She dragged it down over my head. It hung so heavy. Everyone trades their heart for their children, you know.

“I know you can do magic,” I said to her. I said it to hurt her. I said it to make her wear a dress of fire, too. But she wasn’t hurt. She never hurt.

Mrs. H stopped strangling me in the stays of that beast. Her heart-shaped face didn’t ever show anything to me I could understand. “And what do you think magic is, my little Snow White?”

“I saw in the mirror. What you did in the forest. And how the lady in the mirror had that baby.”

Mrs. H stared at me for a long time. I was as tall as she was. We stood there like the same woman except her dress was blue.

“Let me tell you something, kid,” said Mrs. H of Boston and Beacon Hill. “Magic is just a word for what’s left to the powerless once everyone else has eaten their fill.”

SNOW WHITE COMPARES HERSELF TO AN UNMOVABLE ROCK

I heard a lot of talk speculating on whether myself or Mrs. H was the more handsome. It’s plain foolishness.

Everybody knows no half-breed cowgirl can be as beautiful as a rich white lady. Where’s your head at?

PART III

SNOW WHITE AND PORCUPINE CHASE EACH OTHER AROUND THE WORLD

SNOW WHITE STOPS SPEAKING

This is where Snow White gets off. Where she stops telling a story about other folk and starts being in a story other folk tell. It’s like crossing a cold stream. You don’t even think much about it—water’s not that deep, and only a few miles farther on there’s a meal and a bed. But you’ve left one country and hoofed it on into someplace else.

Girl deserves a rest, anyhow. You can tell a true story about your parents if you’re a damn sight good at sorting lies like laundry, but no one can tell a true story about themselves.

SNOW WHITE STEALS THE SUN’S TOBACCO

Snow White knows when it’s time to blow the scene. Saddle her whole life and get on the road. It’s a sense like smell or seeing, when she looks around at a pretty little zoo and realizes it doesn’t belong to her, she belongs to it. Ain’t never going to be the hero in this story, kid, way things are headed. Just meat for the table. Best be on your way. Kiss the bear and the fox and don’t look back. Spin those slots one last time. Don’t they come up all winter, white as death. Don’t they always. Don’t they just.

So this is what happens: Girl gets her gun, puts on a man’s clothes, steals a horse, and lights out for Indian Territory.

Snow White’s heard her daddy’s men talk about Indian Territory. They’re skeered and scarred and when they say those words it sounds like their whole world is surrounded by a jungle of cannibal Oberons and night-blooming thunderbirds. Eat you alive and wear your skin, won’t they? What roads they got are lined with white men’s skulls. If a body gets lost in there, he’ll never unsee what goes on, painted men dancing and songs like your mother dying and witches boiling bones, and girls what turn into wolves. God don’t open His eye there. It’s hell or fairyland or both.

Snow White says: Sounds good to me.

You’ve read the papers. That girl run off because she got prettier than her mama and oh ho the old lady don’t like that! You know how mothers and daughters are. As if a body don’t just get fed up. As if a kid don’t have a limit on hardship.

So Snow White throws her dress in the furnace to burn like it ought to. She doesn’t even wait for sundown. Just hoofs it while Mrs. H gets herself gorgeous. Snow White straps Rose Red to her hip and rides out on a big apron-faced Appaloosa with spots on his rump like eyes. So what if it’s stealing? She took her daddy’s hat, too. Snow White can ride so sweet, you’d think there’s no horse under her, just a girl with four legs pounding the ground. Fuck that mirror and fuck that house. What’s she owe them? Her back, that’s what. The girl is gone. She is plumb finished. She walks out through the front door. It’s night and everything smells like the sea.

Snow White points her situation north, toward the queen hanging upside down in the sky, punished forever for using her daughter poorly. That’s the road for her, yes sir, toward Montana, toward the future, out of the world and into the black.

SNOW WHITE DANCES WITH PORCUPINE

Not too long before somebody picks up her trail. He has a name but it doesn’t matter. He has a job. That’s who he is. He’s a Pinkerton, but that doesn’t matter either. Who isn’t, these days? If you’ve got a gun arm on you, that is. If you’ve got a proclivity for hitting people until they do as they’re told. This dude, he come out from Chicago with a job in his holster. Don’t care who hired him; don’t care how long it takes. He gets his money every week by wire, and that’s as good as being on the right side of virtue in his book.

It’s not the hardest job he’s ever done. Girl don’t really know where she’s going, see. It’s a long way to Montana. What she knows about long-haul travel she read in books, and the man’s read those books too. These runaways, they’re easy money. Wastrel trigger-punks with less sense than Dog gave a gopher. (This is how the dude appellates the good Lord, for he does not abide blasphemy. The Great Good Dog in heaven, watch over your humble servant.) Those abandons are nothing but walking sacks of coin to him. They shin out like the world’s got room for them but it just ain’t so. Boys end up shot in some Babylon of a gold town. Girls go to ruin. This gives the dude a grand ticket to visit any brothel he passes, and the dude do like roostering himself up a spell. Once he’s got a bead on her. Once he smells her good and full. He got a late start, is all. Train from out East don’t make the trip in a blink. Pretty soon she’ll bake that crow-bait horse into the ground and he’ll have her. Once she’s riding shank’s mare, she’ll be easy as nickels.

The conditions of the job don’t bother him none. He’s done worse. Most runaway jobs don’t necessitate his gun or his knife, but it’s a bad old country out there these days. Folk want all sorts of loot for their trouble. The dude’s had to bring back ears, hair, fingers, even a union-man’s eyeball once. The eye was bright blue. Easier than hauling the whole body over three states, he’ll tell you that much for free. Sometimes he thinks the rich are so different from usual folk, they’re more like wild beasts or fairies than men. If this fellow had a gentle stomach, he’d have taken up some other business. He does everything a Marshal does but twice as hard, twice as dirty, and without the soft and cushioning arms of the government to wipe his tears.

The dude don’t see himself as a bad man. Way he sees it, he’s an angel for hire. He can gather in lost lambs from the four corners and kiss away their tears, or he can shake a flaming sword. Up to his employers. Saint Michael don’t question why when the Big Dog says git. Ole Mike, he just ties up his war-bag, thumps his golden road, eats his beans out of the tin, and when he sees his mark, he gets to it no fuss. That’s the dude in a nut. There’s nights he don’t feel so fine on it, sure enough. But nobody likes their job sun out and sun in. Reckon there’s bankers back East right sick of the smell of money. Reckon they might like a change. But there comes a time when a man is who he is and not even a railroad spike through the chin can change it. That banker will be counting coin in his grave and come the great good day when righteous folk put on their white robes, the dude will still be a Pinkerton with an eye on his chest, minding heaven don’t go apples up.

No, the dude don’t call himself a bad man.

But he’s got bad business to tend to.

SNOW WHITE SHOOTS ANTELOPE BY MEANS OF A MAGIC ARROW

Snow White’s pony bears up just fine. She never could abide the trussed-up old world high-steppers Mrs. H favored. Pintos, paints, and Appies, accept no substitutes. Snow White helped the birth of this horse in particular. Shoveling horseshit and afterbirth beat laundering a household full of button trousers seven ways. Hell is a soap cake on Monday morning. She’d cleaned the blood out of his eyes and the muck out of his tail. Old boy has a pedigree name in a ledger somewhere, but Snow White’s called him Charming ever since he mashed her foot flat half a minute after he came into the world trying to tottle up to standing.

Snow White rides him hard, no mistaking. She needs distance, the generosity of miles. Maybe there’s no gone that’s far enough, but if there is, she aims to find it. She lets Charming snatch up sea-grass, and when the sea’s so far behind them she can’t smell salt, she directs him to alfalfa and meadowsweet. Snow White portions out a bag of apples she absconded with between herself and her horse. She still does not care for apples but food is food. Sugar is sugar. She has to make them last. All the smarts in the world don’t tell you where the next town lies when you’ve never seen the big open but in pictures. Don’t matter much. She’s never been happy a day in her life until she lit out hell for Hades, and if she never sees another human face, it’s just as well by her. Snow White puts her gun on her arm and takes down a beaver for a week’s suppers. She’s not too sure how to dry it perfect, but she does her best, and the fur sits better on her shoulders than any dress she ever wore to please her daddy. She’s careful with her bullets. Gotta miser them good. Her life is weighted out in apples and bullets.

Snow White follows the sun.

* * *

This is her father’s country. Every town Snow White lights on is a camp with H stamped on the gold pans. She keeps her hat down. Waters Charming and rubs him down good. They’re muddy, chawed-up shanties with more drink than nuggets. The camps recall to her some mixed-up bootblack fun-house mirror of her boardwalk back home, and she understands for the first time what it means to be a rich man’s daughter. Even a secret one. Even one worked like a furnace. Snow White drinks whiskey now and it tastes like dirt on fire but it makes her feel strong. She eats son-of-a-bitch stew and before too long she gets to like it: boiled-up baby cow brains, liver, tongue, heart, kidneys, and on good days a carrot. It stinks powerfully, but her body wants it awful, the blood and the iron and the fat.

Snow White does not know much about men and she does not like what she sees. Their eyes dog her something dreadful. They are for the most part a miserable sight at cards. When Snow White plays, the queen of spades always turns up in her hand. She don’t like it. Don’t like being watched. Oftener than not, some poor overworked girl does all the work of entertaining—tinkles the piano if they got one, serves table, changes the day’s chiseling for currency, and there’s a menu behind the bar if you got a hunger dinner don’t touch. The miners use that girl awful in every place Snow White slows down long enough to scowl. It sticks in her jaw every time. That lady put on a purple skirt and shined herself up and damn but she can play those cowboy songs like she was born on a drive, but they don’t see it. Don’t see the mighty pains she took on their sorry behalf. Don’t see what it costs to get so fair.

Snow White can’t quite call whether it’s her tits or her gun that grief her most. Sure, the grimy boys grab her even when she bands her chest down tight, but once she punches one of them plumb down, she gets to like that, too. Turns out her shit-shoveling arm can clean a man’s plow no problem. But no matter how she pulls her slicker over Rose Red, some ganted grubstake whose claim don’t love him sees the grip and thinks he can take it easy.

Probably it was always going to turn out like it did. Human nature only got a few tales to tell.

In a silver camp name of Haul-Off, Snow White shot a man.

It was raining fierce and the fella hadn’t eaten in three days. Any color he struck went 8o percent to the company and how can a man get ahead on those numbers? How can a man think straight with a gun like that in his sight, all those pearls and that opal glinting like a good life?

There’s a heap of world Snow White doesn’t understand. She can ride and she can shoot and she can hold her rye, she don’t fare well in high company, and she don’t know a thing about cattle. But getting beat down by a body twice your size who just wants to take the one thing you’ve got in this world from you—yeah. Snow White knows something about that. And she’s about the fastest draw till you hit the Dakotas. She did it out in the street out of respect to the piano girl. It feared her less than she thought. No different than a tin goose in a gallery, only she got no prize for firing true. Snow White felt a damn sight worse over the seagull she brought down way back. Funny how a gun can speak your pain so clear.

When she sheaths her barrel, she sees it: one of the red pearls fell off somewhere in the mud. Nobody’s daddy is pleased.

Ten miles out of town, Snow White broke up sobbing into her pony’s mane. Charming stood bold, took all her tears so she could keep on going.

Snow White follows the moon.

SNOW WHITE IN THE UNDERWORLD

Round about Nevada the grass gets scarce and the critters get shy. All those apples are long gone and the bullet situation is not promising. Snow White hitches up her need and goes looking for work. She suffers some worry over whether her femaleness will trouble her, but the truth is after riding those back countries down, most everyone looks the same.

She finds what she’s looking for in a gemstone mine south of Blue Coffin. You could ride right over it and never know it’s there: The men live below snakes, in the hollows left after the axes and drills have stripped the shine out of the rock. Coupla the boys even throw down rugs, perch a picture of the missus back home up on a spit of stone. One hollow’s set up for a saloon, a tilted splintery bar, whiskey so cheap and stiff, the boys call it Who-Shot-John, a card table and seven stools nobody stops fighting over. Snow White stows Charming with the camp horses in a corral run by a woman just about as old as the wheel and heads underground. It don’t escape her this is her father’s mine. Nevada is his mother’s teat, where he made his fortune. Well, why shouldn’t Snow White have a fortune too? Not that she expects one. She’s no fool and a night in a gold camp will straighten you right out on the odds of making your dimes on the lode. If you want to get straight, which most nobody does once they’ve seen the good blue and the hard yellow.

It’s neither of the two down here. It’s the true red: rubies. Bloody knuckles; apple rinds. Snow White gets a skinnier cut on account of her being a girl and a half-breed heathen if ever the foreman did see one, but it’s something. It keeps Charming in hay and her in beans-on-griddlebread, and on Sunday they get tinned peaches if the take’s been good. Way Snow White figures it, in a month she’ll have enough socked away to head back north, up to Montana, which she has not forgotten, into the Territory. In a month she’ll have enough to quit worrying if she hasn’t seen so much as a badger stumble past her sights. The company man smiles and rolls his cigarette. It’s what they all say. Just a month and I’ll bring my people out. Just a month and I’ll move up top to Blue Coffin, where they got proper houses. Just a month and I’ll be shitting rubies, that’s how rich I’ll strike. Opium ain’t got nothing on the promise of tomorrow turning up better than today.

Snow White does not complain. She swings her ax and learns to see in the dark. She forgets what it’s like to smell nice. She gets so that her heart beats faster whenever she sees a glitter of red in the gloom. Just about every week some idiot tries to get her to wash his clothes or scrub him down or show that cook how to make a proper tuck-in. Just about every week some bruiser gets tied and bellows at her to show him her Injun witchcraft or tries to get his hands under her shirt. Give us a smile, Snowy. Give us a taste. We all share down here.

Snow White has broken a fair number of fingers. Fingers count in this line of work. Fingers are a penny bid on your future. All that separates a man from a dog is fingers.

Folk stop galling her so hard. Snow White is aware that if she loses one fight, it’s over for her. So she does not lose. She cuts her hair off after a short, burly mister starts touching it and allowing as how he’s heard heathens pussies’ got feathers instead of hair. I know y’all are just like a blackbird down there. She doesn’t miss it. No mirrors underground, and she’s grateful for that. She swings her ax and does not see the sun. It is like being inside the heart of her father. Close and dark and hungry, pumping wealth like blood.

A month is not enough. Never is and she knows that now. Hell is a company town. Snow White owes the store for the food in her belly, the tools on her back, Who-Shot-John whizzing around her head every night when the all-stop blows. And she might have stayed, told herself the big lie, that tomorrow she’d find a bloody knuckle so big, it’d pay her way to the moon with cash to spare. There’s an apple in that mountain with her name on it.

But somebody’s looking for her. Someone’s knocking on the grass up there, and he wants to come in.

SNOW WHITE GETS HIT ON THE HEAD WITH A BRICK

All right, all right. If you stand her a swallow of Who-Shot-John, the girl will fess up.

Snow White lost one fight. Just one, but it was a fuss to be remembered.

The man in question was a no-account out of Laramie. He’d been a cattleman before a flood took his flock and all his hopes came a-cropper. He’d seen his brother exalted for rustling and his wife dead of the lunger the winter after. It cripples a man in the morality to spend his days digging beauty out of dead rock for the pleasure of rich folk he’ll never meet, and this fella was right torqued up. Not that he’d been a stand-up aforehand. He wanted to punch down the hangman who took his kin and the angels who took his girl but they were not present. Snow White, contrariwise, had broken the fingers of a number of his friends and had to sleep sometime. A helpless man swings wide.

So this man followed Snow White back to her hollow with a determination for trouble hanging on his hips. He had once allowed to the boys that she was pretty enough for a godless mix-blood bitch. He’d never ridden Injun, but he’d never et dog before, neither. The world of experience is a broad and unpredictable country. The way the cattleman heard it told, squaws got wolf’s fur on their tits and a tail fit for a lizard tucked twixt their flanks. Snow White being only half-squaw, he’d likely have to settle for one or t’other, but you can’t have everything. He’d considered it a long while and figured God owed him some pleasure in this life and if she didn’t like it, well, a good pound-down puts anyone in an amenable mood.

Snow White lay asleep. Without thinking about it, the cattleman took off his hat when he came into the hollow like he meant to call her ma’am and present flowers. She was awful nice looking when she was asleep. No scowling or hissing or cursing. Why, if you squinted, she almost looked regular, like some rancher’s daughter who just needed a bath and she’d be respectable as a wedding. If she hadn’t’ve hacked her hair off, he’d have judged her the second or third handsomest girl he’d had acquaintance of, and he’d been to Denver once. The cattleman felt a powerful need to kiss Snow White. Mayhap she liked being kissed. Mayhap she’d wake up and show her wolf parts. In the storybooks, if you woke a girl up with a kiss, she belonged to you. It was like a brand on a cow’s rump. A kiss round and black and permanent-like on the skin, telling the whole world who owned her. The idea of that big burning kiss made him hard enough to drill rubies.

The cattleman knelt down and put out his lantern. He kissed Snow White real nice, like you kiss a lady. Her fist cocked his jaw good, but the cattleman had the upper position and she could not reach her gun. He slapped her open hand and yanked on her sawed-off hair.

“I weren’t gonna hurt you none,” he hissed in the dark, even though he would have if she hadn’t looked so damned daisy lying there. He’d kissed her just as sweet as his own wife but it weren’t enough for her, no sir. He popped her nose and that felt good. Blood sprayed on her mouth. Blood on her skin. Blood on the ground. Him sitting on her and watching her bleed. That felt good too. Pretty soon she’d cry and that’d be just cherry.

Snow White got her thumb into the cattleman’s eye and he grunted, grabbed her fingers, fixing to break them to show this cow how it felt, but she rolled him off her onto the floor of the hollow. It was dark and she slugged him hard. He hit her back. They clenched up, fisting and gouging in the dark. The cattleman did not like it. The whiskey in his blood had been surging for a fight with a woman, and a fight with a woman ends in her crying and shaking and a fella hushing her all over. Her dress torn and a bit of tit peeking out and quivering. Simple, righteous pleasures. But Snow White just bit him and pounded him and it was no better than fighting a dude in a barrelhouse. Just ugly and bruising and the main thing was not to let anyone get to a gun or else it’d be over on the quick. She didn’t even put up her hands to defend herself. She didn’t even care if he cut her face. Must be the wolf in her, or the lizard.

Snow White took her licks. Nothing she hadn’t done before. Bones creaking and wet blood on her hands, the dark all round and no one coming to help her. Point of fact, that was Snow White’s home country. That bloody punishing ground in the dark was real familiar. At least this time she hit back. At least this time she got hers. When you’ve been hit as often as she had, you don’t hardly feel it. You go to another place in your head until it’s over. Make yourself small and send the part of you that still feels anything to some tiny corner to wait it out. A corner full of tin ducks and red foxes and old bears, where the slots spin up summer every time. It’s just a body. Snow White doesn’t care about her body. A body is just a tool you use for walking around. Make sure it holds together and whatever else someone does to it matters less than spitting.

The cattleman had his fill of Snow White. He staggered out of her hollow looking like hamburger. Never did find out if she had a tail. Wasn’t worth it. When an animal don’t even care if it lives or dies, kicking it holds all the fun of kicking a rock.

SNOW WHITE PLAYS A TRICK ON PORCUPINE

The dude is flummoxed. It’ll pass.

Easiest track he ever laid his nose to, that’s the Dog’s honest truth. This girl is not sly. She does not know how to come to town and leave it so quiet, the hoochman don’t even remember how his bottle got so low. She does not know how to go so soft and fast, her name never hits the ground. That’s okay. The dude knows. That kid has punched out some curly wolf in every shit hole from home to the high country. Not a single town left unpunched. She even beefed that short-horn back in Haul-Off—right through the eyes, too. Lucky shot. Every soul gets one. The dude is not troubled by his little angelica blowing smoke through a man. Good for her.

But the trail goes cold as a fish in January on the Nevada side of the Sierra range and the dude cannot reacquire it. Either she’s had her temper surgeried on or been ascended bodily to heaven and he’ll be damned if he can say which. Nobody’s seen a girl with a ridiculous gun and a powerful eagerness to fight. Nobody’s got whisker or whisper of her. He’d been close enough to cut for sign—the hairs of her pony’s tail, the shed fuzz of her angoras, the shells of her parlor pistol. But nothing. The whole world clean of her. Now the dude’s got nothing but his dick in his hands. Chicago office is not happy. Who’s happy in this world? Maybe a mountain cat with a bead on an open sheep pen. That’s about it.

The dude is disappointed but his patience is vast. He has not been euchred, no sir. He just revises his notions on the girl. Most rich babies would have brotheled up or bucked out by now, but not her. She’s game. She’s in it for real play. She is heeled and she is sour as a new grape. It’s a different situation, that’s all. His employer did not give him the whole hoyle.

When the dude was a boy, his mother told him a story about a girl in a red dress that blew town, humping through the high country on foot. Even back then the dude thought that girl was done crazy. Somebody better help her, Mama, or she’s gonna get et. Somebody’s gotta track her down and get her back home to her daddy. Well, sure enough, this big old wolf pricks her up and starts after, and he’s got a shine on this girl more like a man’s than a wolf’s. It don’t go well in the end—girls and wolfs, they got nothing to talk about. But the dude felt a kinship with that wolf. A profundity, even. That wolf would follow Red Dress all the way around the world once he got her in his nose. You could admire that. You could aspire.

And when the dude asks the Great Dog in heaven to show him the way, it’s the wolf he’s thinking of. Like God’s this powerful big cay-ote up there and the world’s his bone. In chapel with his mama he tries to think of a man up on a cross, but it just don’t fix. No, it’s the tricky-clever, lolly-tongued, red-loving Dog for the dude, amen and all’s well.

The dude prays on it a spell.

It comes up in his head like a bubble in a lake. When a dog’s hurting, when a dog’s hounded and hard up, what’s he do?

A dog goes to ground.

SNOW WHITE CHEATS AT CARDS

Snow White comes out of the earth. She blinks a lot; her eyes forgot how to suck up so much light. She don’t present much of a woman anymore: filthy with sweat grime and ruby dust, white scar on her cheek like a star, clothes hard done by and none too ladylike to begin with, being goatskins, buck trousers, linen shirt, a fish-slicker coat, and her daddy’s hat like a creased-up crown. Her hair did grow out some. The sun hits her and Snow White feels like her whole body is baking up sweet and good, like she’d never been born before and is trying alive on for the first time. Charming sees her in the corral and starts hopping fit to stampede the mares, calling out her name in his horsey patois.

The dude is waiting for her. Once he had the picture of it, weren’t no work in figuring which softheart company daddy would let a woman dig shine. Weren’t no sport in it. Easy as sleeping. Nevada is good to the dude, always has been. He’s itchy, waiting on her to pop up molelike from the grass. He’s thought about just popping her on the head with the butt of his hog-leg gun, but he figures he deserves himself the treat of a sit-down with this calico. She’s given him a good run, best he’s had since the war, and that earns her a few more hours in her mortal coil. Besides, she’s been down underground so long. It’s a right human deed to let her look on the sun awhile before he sends her there on the permanent.

He squares Snow White’s debts to the company man. It’s no skin off him. The dude is flush and he’ll be full fine when he hands over his proofs back in California. The abandon does not like it; she’s cagey and looking to bolt, but no man on this earth ever declined to have his accounts cleared and she won’t neither. She asks his name; he won’t give over. Gets her horse geared and the dude enjoys letting her think of him as a black-chapped angel sent by the Dog to secure her. That’s just what he is.

“Where you off to in such a lather?” the dude says. “Get yourself niced up a bit.

I bet you haven’t had soap on you in a bear’s age.”

The dude feels right fatherly. Takes her down to the crick to wash the underground off of her. Just can’t bring himself to shoot her while she’s filthy and starving. There’s time. Offers her a cake of French-milled soap he brought all the way out from Chicago. Smells like gardenias if you know your flowers, and the dude does. Snow White knows something’s skewed but she grabs it, strips off like it’s nothing, and climbs in the water. She don’t shiver even though that stream has to be as cold as a wagon tire. The miner’s crud comes off her in black ribbons. The dude watches another girl come out of the blind moleskin she was walking around in. This one has muscles like a mountain cat and a kind of pretty he doesn’t know what to do with. For fairness he’d take her stepmother six days and twice on Sunday. The beauty Snow White’s got has nothing to do with him. She’s scarred up and suspicious and shameless. Her pretty’s not for him. It’s like saying the moon’s got a fine figure on her. Maybe true, but what good is that to a man?

Snow White puts her men-clothes back on and makes to get on her spotted horse.

“Where you off to in such a lather?” the dude says. He’s got a smile that’d knock down the Queen of England when he wants it. “Set a bit and eat. I bet you had nothing but brown beans and pigs’ assholes down there.”

Right there on the grass the dude lays out a nice spread like she can’t refuse. She can’t. Like most things, it looks like a choice but it’s not. He is being magnanimous and it feels good. In Blue Coffin he bought them a lunch fit for a boss: soft rolls, pemmican, applejack, some real tomatoes and mushrooms, and a couple of red-and-white apples just as firm as fists. A bottle of spruce beer with the bubbles still hard. Snow White knows something’s warped but it’s real food, the kind that’s seen sunlight. She eats and watching her eat feels good. The way she shakes when she does it. The way she takes such a big bite of that apple, it almost sticks in her throat. The way she chugs down that jack like a man.

“Why’d you run off from your mama?” the dude says real gentle. Snow White looks at him over the core of her apple. She knows the score and the score is not in her favor.

“Ain’t your business,” she says back.

“Let’s pretend it is.”

“We can pretend that crick is the fountain of youth, won’t make it any more your nevermind what goes between me and my mama.”

And Snow White gets up to go. Puts her hand on her cannon and backs off from the dude like it’s a choice she can make. But it’s too late for that. He’s chased her over hell and gone and she’s et his food and he’s going to do his job. Dog on High knows his soul and his soul is the job and the job will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

“Where you off to in such a lather?” the dude says again. He’s got a voice to charm tigers when he wants to use it. “I got a deal for you if you stow that smokewagon and act civilized. I can shoot you faster than you can draw, so don’t you twitch.”

“Says you.”

The dude just laughs. The day a dandy’s daughter can outshoot a Pinkerton is the day the Good Dog lays down his bone.

“Pull in your horns and sit down, kid,” he snaps, and Snow White does it, instantly, unquestioningly. Her bones obey before her brain can buck. It’s a voice the dude likes to use on runaways. Daddy’s voice and Daddy is not happy. Do what you’re told. Don’t argue with your betters. Somebody learned that girl good.

“Now,” the dude says, “I’m gonna shoot you either way. I been contracted for it, I signed for the job, what’s gonna happen was always gonna happen and that’s above my bend. I am sorry on it, but we all got a bag of nails to carry.”

“Then if it’s all the same, I’d rather not talk it to death. If you work for Mrs. H, I’ll allow you some pity; but you signed up for what you’ll get. She’ll thank you with a knife in the eye. We’re both walking dead.”

The dude hesitates. “She beat you, I suppose?”

Snow White just laughs. The dude feels that laugh in his spine. It saws there on the hard, old bone.

He takes out a deck of cards. The sun prickles the backs. “Well, you and me, girl, we’re gonna draw cuts. Aces high. If I pull the high card, I’ll shoot you where you sit and carve out your heart to bring back to your mama. I will not enjoy that part of this business, but it is firmly stated in the terms of my commission. No accounting for rich folks’ morals—but I thank you for the warning on the matter of your mother and I will hew to it. If you draw the high card, we’ll walk off paces like gentlemen and you’ll have a mean chance at walking off clean.”

“How do I know you have not got a cold deck?” Snow White asks.

“If you want the shuffle of it, you may have it.”

Snow White looks over the cards real careful. The dude does not cheat. He does not have to. He knows he will get his whether he draws a two of diamonds or the king of diamonds. It looks like a choice but it isn’t. Snow White shuffles; the cards spill from one hand to another like a red waterfall. For a minute she looks like a statue of Temperance or Justice, pouring red water between two cups.

Snow White cuts first. Takes her card and holds it. Passes the dude the deck to cut himself, nice and fair. He takes his and without agreeing upon it they turn over at the same time.

The dude lays down the king of clubs. He smiles.

Snow White holds the ace of hearts.

SNOW WHITE AND PORCUPINE CONTEND FOR A BUFFALO

Snow White and the dude pace it off. The sky is bright and hot as the beginning of something.

Of course she cheated. Don’t be silly. Snow White spent half her growing years shuffling cards for no one. She can cut false and she can cut true, but she wasn’t going to lose when it counted.

They stand in the green grass. Beneath them men are cutting apple rinds out of the dark and will be forever. Snow White’s got the sun behind her. It gives her golden ears, like a doggy seraphim.

A crack and a whistle. Another one, almost on top of it, like an echo.

Wind picks up and it smells like rain.

SNOW WHITE SAID TO PORCUPINE TO BRING HIM OUT OF HIS HOLE

Sorry about your knee, mister.

And your shoulder, too.

Remember that, if you’re cogitating on coming after me again. I can shoot twice before you shoot once.

Also, I will always draw the high ace.

I got no soreness on you, mister.

You wait here. There’s good black-tail in these mountains, and I aim to help you even if you can’t see the help in it yet.

You’re gonna take a heart back to Mrs. H. A deer’s heart, which is the best I can do.

There is more blood in a deer than seems creditable.

Mrs. H is not my mother and you should not name her that.

She is a witch.

I do not know what witches want with hearts, but it cannot be anything nice.

Take this heart and put it in a wooden box.

Give the box to Mr. George Button, who is the valet, and abscond yourself if you aim to keep living.

Forget your bounty. Take what you have already got and call it the bettermost part of luck.

Mrs. H is dreadful clever and will probably not befooled. That is why you cannot get your scratch.

You will have to run away from her. Like me.

One thing I have learned about running away is that once you start, there is no end to it.

I know you will have a hard sentiment about having your plow cleaned by a girl, but if you think about it, I am being as kind as anybody ever is.

If you get yourself back to the corral, you can rustle up a sawbones from the bossman and get yourself patched.

I am gonna take your gun and your knife.

That’s about all I can do for you.

SNOW WHITE RACES HERSELF

Snow White hits the mountains with Charming underneath her, the dude behind her, a hot hurry on either side and a week’s wages in her pockets. A new knife strapped to her leg. A new gun on her back. She’s running again. Snow White never stops running. Her hands are still red. Blood don’t come off real easy. A space opens up between the shoot-out and Snow White.

It looked like a choice but it wasn’t.

Snow White burns the wind.

PART IV

SNOW WHITE LIVES WITH FORTY DRAGONS

SNOW WHITE HITS THE ROAD

Snow White does not know it when she crosses over into the Crow Nation. It looks just like the country that is not the Crow Nation. Trees, river, rocks, clouds hunkering down low like they’re just as fugitive as she is. It is spring in both Crow Nation and not-Crow Nation. PufF blossoms on the bough and big tulip buds coming up like candles. Deer have velvet on their antlers in both Crow Nation and not-Crow Nation.

Charming drinks from the swollen freshets. He finds the grass here choice. He is happy to be with Snow White again, happy to be running fast again, happy to prowl it over again with his favorite girl.

Snow White comes over a country possessing many cliffs and high stones. A lot of blackberries here, and sap flowing from the trees like whiskey. She does not apprehend the geography, being dog-tired and shot up in the heart even if her skin’s still holding together. Snow White don’t know it, but on the lee side of those blue rocks there’s a soft valley full of people. If she turned east a bit, she’d clap eye on a village, buckskin huts, fires, and a mess of horses. The people there look like her, but not like her. They wear two braids and high pompadours dyed and stiffened. It’s not her mother’s village—the Crow Nation is still something to see, and it so happens only one old fella with a black scar right through both his lips remembers a cousin’s sister’s bad-luck daughter by the name of Gun That Sings. But that’s one more than Snow White’s got in the way of folk fit to speak to who know her mama lived or died.

If she rides down into the valley, this is what will happen: A little girl will see Snow White and start up crying. Snow White will not mean to fear. She’ll get off her horse, but the girl only cries harder and runs for her father. Other folk will know her now. They’ll look at her and they won’t smile. They won’t see her mother’s face on her and welcome her home. Snow White will try to speak, but they do not have English nor want the burden of her handling. Her appearance will not comfort. They will not know her for one of them just by looking. Anyway, Snow White presents a figure like a barrow-tramp and she’s still wearing blood, some from the dude and some from the deer.

She won’t know it, but the little girl whose name is Cold All the Time will say to her father:

I Don’t want to go with the white lady, Papa. Make her go away. I want to stay here. Why can’t we stay here?

A tall man called Busy Horse will sing up with English in his pockets. He’ll turn her back.

Go on your way. A white girl alone will only cause us grief. Someone will come looking for you and the price of you will be sky-high. One white person is like one steelhead. Once you see thefrst one, the others are already coming. Go back to Brother John the American Man and eat a lot of good things. Do not speak to him about us. We keep to ourselves. We do not want white problems. White girls are bad luck.

And that will just about be the end of Snow White. Once you take away the end in sight, not much left to do but pull up the ground over your head. Sometimes the next no is the last one you can take.

If she turns west, Snow White will find something else, half again as strange. There’s a town out there, in the un-land between the dirt America’s bought and spat on and the territory they haven’t got around to snatching yet. Town goes by the appellation of Oh-Be-Joyful. Fitted out with run-off catalog women, whores, cattle Kates, bandits, desert rats, and gunslingers. All women; all sour on the whole idea of going back where they came from. No law there, but no mercy neither. Do for outsiders all you please, but never for Joyfolk.

Somebody there remembers Gun That Sings too. She’s about as old as the ocean, but she’ll talk you dead for free.

Come on, girl. Pick one. Ain’t no guarantee of peace either way, but turn that ‘loosa’s nose toward something other than nothing at all or this time next year you’ll be freezing to death on the Arctic Circle with the ghosts of those boys who thought there was a passage straight through this country top to bottom. Those pompadours have no use for a runaway who’ll bring down the whole white world on them, and Joyfolk don’t give God the time of day. Pick a path and hit the briars.

Snow White veers west.

The setting sun hits her head like a bullet. Gold spills out, spraying the stones and the grass.

SNOW WHITE AND THE BIRDS FROM HEAVEN

These are the seven outlaws who run the town of Oh-Be-Joyful in the Montana Territory:

Bang-Up Jackson, cattle rustler with a face like a hoofprint, dead shot, boss lady with hounds at her feet and the sun at her back. Never had no use for a husband after the one who drug her west got himself shot over a cooking pot in Laramie.

Little Mab Volsky, bank robber, bandit queen, pretty as a spring lamb and twice as likely to kick your face in. Did a job at Billings Bank and Trust to the tune of a dandy fortune, and some train in Arizona plumb full of horses and silver and oranges. She and her gang ate that gold for days. Took the horses and coin north. Still a few bottles of orange moonshine in Little Mab’s cellar. Still a lot of horses in town with an Arizona brand on their rumps.

Cocklebur Macaluso, best wildcat on the Lode, five fat dollars just to kiss her, and not a man ever called himself cheated. Girl can cock a gun by squeezing her legs together. You know her by her green bustle and her big ruby mouth, you know her by her laugh and the shine of her knife—and you know her by the jags on her face where a broke-down cattleman cut her up good because he wanted power over something.

Woman Without a Name, horse thief, run off from the Crow Nation when her family went down red under gun. Her pompadour’s slicked up high and stiff and her hand on a mare’s head’s as sure and cool as rain. She’ll ride down a deer until its heart pops and have it skinned and trussed before it knows it’s dead.

Old Ephraim, bear of a woman, gray in the braid with half a beard coming in. Used to wrestle cougars for a dollar a match in some traveling show. If you can find blank skin between her scars, you’re a better eye than most. Middle of town sits a big black pan as wide as a bull’s back, and the old girl fries up every night whatever she’s shot, wrestled, trampled, or scared dead. Shares it out fairlike. Smokes the whole time like a burning beast.

Witch Hex Watson, scamped out of Maine when the snow-hump knocked the cattle down and all the pretty wives called witchcraft on Missus Watson. Girl don’t care. Just as well for a one who never liked the stink of cows, never had a hanker for marrying, never had a smile for anyone but scowls enough to go round. And maybe she did know a thing or two, maybe she’d hied to the woods with her skirts up, and maybe the old Puritan cold dark boocraft hopped in her pocket like a frog o’ green.

Astolaine Bombast, catalog woman, ordered up like a rare steak: Plees make shore she is pritty and a ivhyi gurl if you have enny. Well, she’s pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies, that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory. Astolaine lit off before the new model could hit the doorstep, skinning rabbits and scooping mushrooms like her daddy taught her until she walked out of the woods and into a town full of banshees with no love for anyone’s history.

Your past’s a private matter, sweetheart. You just keep it locked up in a box where it can’t hurt anyone.

SNOW WHITE MEETS THE READ ANTS

Her heart’s balled up in her chest and she wants to be quit of it, just cut it out and leave it on the road. Shoulda let the dude have it. In the end she can’t hardly see no difference atwixt her and that deer she shot down. No use but meat. Charming carries her through a black oak forest and a mess of plum and peach trees and she don’t even stop to get that fruit. Snow White don’t care. Her body’s all her trouble and she won’t feed it any sweet thing. That girl’s frown sinks so black, she don’t see them coming till they’re on her.

Seven of them bolt riding down a rill in a spring rainstorm, a bunch of Kates dressed afright and hollering. They’ve got on deerskins and skunk skins and spotted cat skins, pink silk and purple and blue and green, black lace and harlot’s satin, cavalry coats with gold braid and tuxedo trousers, widows’ veils and stovepipe hats, and one had a whole horse skull on her head like a helmet. Another has a belt of cattle horns. The biggest toad in the puddle has a silver breastplate strapped on and Lord knows where she got it, robbing a museum train or playing Hamlet on some black-bellied stage in hell. A bunch of bushwhack Titanias looking blue at her, and Snow White reaches for her gun. If they’re fix to knock her down, she’ll welcome it.

That’s not what happens. Snow White fires wide. She does it on purpose. Come on. Just shoot back. Their horses skitter and the sound of seven hammers rocking back clicks up like cards shuffling. But they don’t crease her. Snow White screams through the rain for no point but to scare them, though they don’t scare and her hollering puts them in a forgiving mood, seeing as how they’re hollerers themselves. Snow White wants to cry but she’s dried out. She’s got ruby dust and grime and the shit of the deep earth in her and that’s about it. She looks up at the rain and noise comes out of her. Ain’t screaming or crying or talking, just noise, noise out of her blood. The rain fills up her mouth like milk.

This is what the women of Oh-Be-Joyful say to Snow White.

Ain’t you cut a swell.

Stow that nail-pounder or we’ll blow you under the earth.

Come you from the scrap of Crow Nation over the hill?

A white girl alone is trouble on everything she touches. Ask us. Don’t we know.

Don’t you look at her like that, Bang-Up. Can’t bring her home. Can’t risk it. She’ll open the door to anyone who happens by and wonder why we ever locked it.

Hush it. What’s the place for if not half rain-drowned wildcats.

Come to town. I’ll pour you a pair of overalls myself and we’ll split up your sorrows seven ways between us.

SNOW WHITE PUTS A SADDLE ON HER BACK

Cocklebur sits Snow White down in a tin bathtub, peels her out: First the road comes off, then the gunfight, then the mine, and then the running, the old mirror, and the boardwalk, the bunched-up tiredness of everything and all of her. The water’s black. Snow White frowns so deep, you couldn’t dig her out with a shovel, lets the bath burn her, lets the lady brush her hair like it matters.

The water’s warm. No ice melting inside her. It just smells like river and the kettle. Cock’s don’t say anything and that’s as good as love right about now.

Snow White stops doing and lets the rest do for a while. Lets Old Ephraim feed her bunny and beans, lets Little Mab put her in some poor dead bastard’s kit. Snow White declines the mirror. Mirrors are an ugly business. She’s done seeing herself.

Is she fixing to stay? She talks less than a lump of dough, I’ll tell you what.

For a while Snow White lets Bang-Up Jackson give her a bed. It’s a little house but it’s stalwart. Snow White sleeps all the time. Lies on the bed with her eyes shut and doesn’t move. A moth lands on her nose and she don’t so much as twitch. It’s easy not to get up. Not to move. But Bang-Up won’t let that go.

We live rough but we live useful and I don’t support no pillow rancher. You ain’t no woodstove; you can’t just squat in the middle of my house and stew.

Witch Hex has been at the pine gulch with her ax. She started up the night they brought Snow White over the mountain. Without saying a word on it, the Mainer with shoulders like skin drums has stacked up a pile of wood and nails north of the big frying pan in the middle of the village. Snow White will be expected to build when she’s feeling straightened. Witch Hex always says building is medicine for free.

Snow White likes the work more than she expects. She don’t talk to anyone much. There’s a logic to a house. Though she’s no great shakes and hers will win no prizes, Snow White’s house will hold still in the wind. She whacks at wood with her hammer and shoots beaver for Ephie’s pan and combs Charming till he glows. At night she makes that not-talking, not-screaming, not-crying noise down the gulch until the owls light out for friendlier digs. She can’t stop. It feels so good to get empty.

Little Mab and Astolaine help with the raising of her walls, and the roof will go on soon. Snow White dreams about the dude and sleeps next to Bang-Up Jackson, who holds her when she shakes but lets go before she wakes up. In her dream, the dude looks like Mr. H. He wants to play cards. He calls and shows all court cards. Hands her the queen of spades. He says to her: Take this heart and put it in a wooden box. Then the dude isn’t the dude but the coyote in his cage in her old zoo. He spits out the body of Thompson the red fox. Howls. The noise coming out of his howl is the noise Snow White makes at night. The coyote says: It looks like a choice but it isn’t.

There’s other women in camp Snow White doesn’t know to look at, and they don’t wear the horse skulls and breastplates but on Sunday for the services run by Woman Without a Name, who’s put her thumb down on the notion of Snow White hunting up her mama’s folk. Don’t you carve your wounds on them. Ain’t no place for you but here. You’re grown—crooked and backbent, but grown—and it’s time to stop hanging your heart on your mother.

Snow White says okay, but she can’t do it. Some loads are too heavy to put down.

Bang-Up says everybody’s got to contribute. Turns out a camp is just like a body; you work all day just to keep it alive. A couple of sisters keep up a watch for anyone sniffing too close to Joyful: one day, one night. They don’t so much as look at anyone else. Only see each other at dusk and dawn, sharing out bread and beaver tail in the bloody light. Old Ephraim allows as how their daddy was a Pennsylvania preacher of the tongues-and-snakes sort, and on account of the Bible taking a frown to the gossip of women, he cut out their tongues. The sisters have three guns each, and Snow White has heard them humming to each other. She likes the sound.

Snow White does what she knows to do. She brings in meat. All day and night, blood and gristle. Goes into the forest and kills what will let her kill it. First time she kills a fox, she doesn’t talk for three days. She plants onions in the earth like chunks of bone and keeps the bears off with Rose Red, marking the perimeter at dawn. Some of the girls want to get into the cattle business, and Snow White allows that she could be talked into it. She likes the idea of a lot of beasts together under the old, cold sky, snorting and smelling like dirt. She likes the redness and realness of meat, the work of turning a deer into another day living in this world. She could do it to a cow. No sweat.

She builds a door strong and bolted, and the house is creaky but sound for sleeping. But Bang-Up’s bed is hard to leave and Snow White doesn’t much care to. She goes to hers in the morning and comes back for supper. One day. One night.

Time trots along. Snow White chases her own tail.

On good nights, when Bang-Up falls asleep holding her hand, Snow White dreams she’s a dog. She gets to sleep by the fire and eat bones, and instead of talking she just howls until the moon breaks. It’s a good dream.

RED DEER SNEAKS UP ON SNOW WHITE

Someone else has Snow White’s trail. He moves by night so no one can clap eye on him, sound alarm, and call a preacher out of bed. He don’t rightly know why it is he wants to find her so damn bad, but he does. It’s like he’s magnetized to her. But fact is he’s never met the girl.

He has a name but he can’t keep it in his head. People say it and it rolls off. He thinks of himself as Deer Boy and that’s on account of his being half deer—he runs after the girl with black hair on long, backbent brown legs with white stripes down to the hoof. In spring he’ll knock fuzz off his antlers. Rest of him’s man enough but Deer Boy knows he ain’t right. If he set foot in church, the font would set to boiling.

Deer Boy knows he’s a disappointment to his mother. He don’t know how he was supposed to turn out, but he knows he’s got wrongness all over him, knows when she looks at him she gets so angry, the walls try to get clear of her. Deer Boy wishes he knew how he got the way he is, but some things are just past him. He remembers the first time he saw Snow White and likes that memory, so he figures he’ll live in it, and that works for a little while: a sad girl on the other side of a mirror, standing next to someone so pretty, it hurts to look at her, someone who looks like his mother but sharper, more real, like a lion to a house cat.

Deer Boy used to live in a perfect place. He drank silver milk from his mother and she sang nice backward nonsense songs and the sun was so soft and yellow, you could spread it on toast. He didn’t have deer parts back then and he got big real fast. He even had hopes of being handsome, a real shot at it. Then when he was just about grown up, the painful pretty woman came to the mirror and held out her hands to Deer Boy. She was holding a big, dripping, bloody heart, a heart so red and dark, it feared him terrible. The heart came through the mirror like a red dark train and his mother went up like gas and Deer Boy lost the perfect place so fast, it was like dying cold.

When he squeezed through the mirror and into the world owned by the painful woman, he was Deer Boy and he had hooves and spotted red fur on his legs and what could you do. He also spoke backward from other folk on this side of the mirror, which upset just about everyone. His new mother did not sing nonsense songs and she had no milk for him. She howled and ran her bloody fingers over his face, kissing him and being angry at the same time.

She’d been tricked. There’d been a methodology and some part had sproinged. Deer Boy understood that he was a cake that failed to rise. He thought that’d be all right. Mothers forgive, that’s what they do. She looked just like his mother. It’d be like that perfect place again once she cooled off. He could run so terrible fast, after all. It was a nice aspect in a son.

But she only said she’d fix him, and over time Deer Boy came to an understanding that this meant finding Snow White. His mother owed somebody a heart. Snow White was the broken wheel in the works of his being born. Once he’d got fixed, he could see his father. Once he got fixed, he could have that big house by the sea. Once he got fixed, he’d get to crawl into his mother’s arms and her kisses would just be kisses and leave no blood behind. He couldn’t square the reason behind it all, exactly, but the painful pretty woman was his mother, somehow, the source of his mother, and no new one was going to show up and look kindly on his legs and his speaking and his singing.

If he ever meant to get back into that perfect place, Deer Boy was gonna have to run Snow White down.

SNOW WHITE DANCES WITH PRAIRIE DOG

Witch Hex draws the straw and goes knocking on Snow White’s hickory door. Snow White opens it quick and she’s hardly got anything on, it’s so damnably hot and she’s coating the floor with some nice whitewash Old Ephraim stewed up out of hill chalk. Snow White’s full splattered with it.

“See, that’s the trouble,” says Witch Hex Watson. “The trouble’s that door, and you’re gonna meet it sooner or later. We all do.”

Snow White turns the floor into winter. Back and forth sweeps her brush.

“Listen, girl, I came to tell you that life is stupid. It just pulls the same shit over and over. Sometimes you think you can make it come out different, but you can’t. You’re in a story and the body writing it is an asshole. You had to know that, given the action. The story you’re in tells you like firing a gun. And because you’re in a story and stuck with the plumb stupidity of being alive, I’m here to tell you not to go around opening your nice new door. Because eventually someone comes for us. All of us. Sometimes it’s a husband who forgot why he beat you into running to begin with, sometimes it’s a boss or a pimp looking to lay money on your belly, sometimes it’s your mother come to drag you home. And pretty much we all open the door to them because it’s natural. But we got a nice thing going here. Life’s still stupid but we got free of story out here under the beeches and the Big Dipper. We had enough of it, of things happening one after another and no end in sight. Of reversals and falling in love and tragic flaws, and by God if I see another motif in my business I will shoot it dead. The stories that happen to people like us aren’t worth my back teeth. So if you want it, you can have a nice life here. You can wake up next to Jackson till the end of days and the raising of the glorious dead. You can eat squirrel pancakes out of Ephie’s pan and watch the moon go up and down. It’s a kind of magic, but then most things are. But story is an eager fucking beaver and someday soon someone will come knocking for you and you’d better just say no thank you is all I’m saying. Whatever’s on the other side of that let me In will burn you hollow and lick the ash for the last of you. The worst thing in the world is having to go back to the dark you shook off.”

Snow White turns the floor to milk. Back and forth she sweeps her brush.

“My babies came knocking for me,” whispers Witch Hex Watson. “Near grown up and crying for their ma. We never believed what they said, nohow. We brought you combs for your hair and ribbons for your dresses. Come home, Papa’s not mad. Come back and be Mary-Grace again. Witch Hex ain’t no kind of name for somebody’s mother. And I watched them crying with snot in their faces and I couldn’t say no to my boys; I opened my door and everything they had for me was tainted because the land of Used-to-Be is just full of ghosts starving for your breath. What’s east is hungry. What’s west is hard. Just hunker down. Let it pass you by.”

Snow White turns the floor to bone. Back and forth.

SNOW WHITE CALLS THE ANIMALS TOGETHER FOR A MEETING

Out in the forest, Snow White finds a kit whose mother probably sizzled up on Ephie’s pan some night that week. He’s half blind and barely as big as her hand. Little fella mews and yelps when he sees her. Not-screaming, not-crying. He’s afraid but he’s hungry. Any girl in a storm.

The kit is red. Snow White takes him home. He sleeps next to her stove and pisses in the corners. His piss smells hot and sour. He bites her. Snow White bites back. They understand each other.

A while later Snow White sees a bear in the woods. She’s old and stiff. She has a patch of bald on her rump where she’s worried the fur away. The bear follows Snow White and watches her dress a raccoon. The blood makes the dirt damp and black. Snow White does not shoot the bear, even though she could. The bear is very slow. They never come too close, but they like to look at each other. The bear grabs a fish out of the crick, and the way she glances at Snow White it’s like the old girl wants to be praised. Snow White leaves trout guts for her and keeps the red fox from gobbling them up.

The trees stand green as summer, all in a line.

The red fox gets big. He likes to keep watch with the night-sister and her three guns. But when thunderstorms belly up to the Joyful bar, he comes running to Snow White. He pisses on her bed. She knows that he means to indicate that he considers it his bed. That’s fine.

Snow White stops letting her noise out at night. It fears the bear too much.

RED DEERANDTHE BIRD FROM HEAVEN

Deer Boy is not a tracker. His deer half is the wrong half. His human nose is as dumb as anyone’s. Besides, deer have the drive to run away, not seek out. They get hunted, they do not hunt. If he had his mother’s brains, he might have called up Chicago and got his own dude to stand him to the trail. But he didn’t get her mind within mind in the parental bargain, and he’s chasing blind, running on the fuel of his want. He’s playing his father’s tune, but he doesn’t know it.

Deer Boy has often cogitated upon the subject of what he will do if he finds her. There is not much else to think about. He imagines her. He builds her out of his memory. He runs up to her and puts his hands upon the glass between them. Is she his sister? Some days he thinks yes, some days he thinks no. Deer Boy was born in the mirror. She looks nothing like him. But look at their hands, pressing together, ten fingers to ten fingers. They are the same. They are standing with a mirror between them. They are standing with his mother between them.

Can he cut her heart out? He tells himself yes. The answer is no.

Deer Boy wears long trousers and chaps that hide his legs. When he drinks whiskey he can almost talk straight. He plays cards and bets for information. He bets for stories. When the ace of hearts turns over, his breath stops. It doesn’t even have to be in his hand. Johnny, you remember when that crazy half-breed bitch shot ol’ pie-face Hank oat back, right? Those were the days. A man felt alive.

She is a half-breed. She is like him. Deer Boy does not know what her other half is, but he wonders if being split down the middle pains her like it pains him.

Deer Boy would like to meet his father. He reads about him all the time. The Dakota rush. The Colorado lode. In his mind, Deer Boy’s father is made of jewels. When Deer Boy gets his legs back, his father will open up his diamond arms and gather him into the glitter. He dreams about this. On the other side of his father’s crystal body, Snow White puts up her hands.

Once, Deer Boy tried to ask his mother why she didn’t just leave him in the mirror. Why am I myself and not some other boy? Why can’t you love what you made?

He spoke backward. She didn’t understand. She said: You are my price. You are my black deal in the wood.

Deer Boy gets so drunk in Haul-Off, he has to be rolled out onto the street. It’s raining dog. He stumbles up the road, his hooves sticking in the mud. The whiskey in him stands at attention. Up ahead of him he thinks he sees her, Snow White, wet and cold, her face on fire with light. She’s standing in the road; a body sprawls next to her. A bullet between his eyes.

I need your heart.

She puts her hands up. Ten fingers.

I’m sorry. I need your heart.

Snow White opens her mouth. Milk flows out.

I just want to be loved. Didn’t you ever want her to love you?

Snow White opens her chest like a cabinet. She takes out her heart. It is a ruby. It is dripping blood. It is dripping light. She looks at him with so much love.

Deer Boy wakes up holding his hat tender as a baby.

SNOW WHITE AND THE MONEY TREE

It is around this time that Little Mab Volsky propositions Snow White. “Let’s us rob ourselves a bank. Easiest money this side of lying on your back,” she says. “When a vault busts open, it’s like you bust too. That sweet. That good.”

They practice in the woods.

Snow White puts a kerchief over her face and it is a red mask. Little Mab’ll run the show—Snow White can just shoot up the place. They holler at the crick to lie down on its belly, double-quick and no funny business. Snow White bags a jackrabbit with a white blaze on his chest like a sheriff’s star. He looked at her crooked. You can’t brook that kind of upfuck. They bash in a rotted stump and get it down to forty-five seconds from first thump to vault open and pill bugs rolling out like dimes.

Little Mab has this to say: “The thing to know about bank robberies is that most fellas who end up blowing dark through some poor soul with a withdrawal slip in his hand wanted to do it before they ever got in the door. They wanted to make a hole in something and fill up the hole with death. Most times the bank is empty anyways. Not too many got much these days. Folks who got unlucky business there, well, they’ll put their bellies on the floor you’ll forget what you came for. They’re like dogs before an earthquake. Some instinct kicks them in the gut and down they go. We’ll take just what we need, enough for doorknobs and seed bags and a good bull to mate to the milk cows. Enough to turn into another day in this world. We’ll get Lainey to fiddle while we rob. Make it nice for them folks on the floor. Ain’t nothing to be done in this life, but you can make it nicer for them you do it too.”

Snow White can see it clear as day. She’ll land in that bank like a hammer. Rose Red will dance in her hand. She still has a few pearls left. Little Mab will holler and laugh like a fairy on fire. She’ll do a jig in front of the safe, like she could cozen it into shedding its cover for her. Snow White can hear Astolaine playing her violin by the door. The customers will all start crying when they hear her tune. Crying out of the same place that told them to lay their head on the cool bank stone.

Snow White wants to shoot the ceiling, the walls, the glass. She wants to put a hole in something too. She just doesn’t want to fill it up again.

SNOW WHITE AND YELLOW JACKET GET TURNED BACK AND THE RIVER

Bang-Up puts the nix on the bank plan. Banks are like little bits of Washington poking up everywhere. Banks are the law.

“Now, we’ve gone to all this trouble to truss up our lives nice and tight with no space for the bad to come in. Why you want to go throwing open the door?”

RED DEER LEARNS A TRADE

Deer Boy runs out of scratch somewhere in Wyoming. He starts showing his legs for a dollar in a cathouse. While ranch hands wait for their friends to finish up. A dollar for a hoof, three for the whole leg. The food is good. There are mirrors everywhere. Deer Boy sees himself all night every night. He looks for the perfect world in them, but it’s just him in there.

The girls treat him real sweet. Not like you’d treat a beau—Deer Boy is not husband material. But they’re in the same line of work. One dollar for a peek. Three for the whole show.

One of the cats gets marriage proposals every night. She’s got red hair and a pretty voice on her. Deer Boy hears the men begging her through the walls. Through the mirrors.

Give me your heart.

PART V

SNOW WHITE COMES TO LIFE THREE TIMES

SNOW WHITE GETS SHOT WITH A PINE TREE

It happens just as autumn’s coming on red and sharp.

Bang-Up Jackson’s gone south to haggle over jerseys and a lump of tourmaline the shape and weight of a human heart. Witch Hex is drunk down at the gulch and letting the sun sop her further. Woman Without a Name is burning ash for soap by the crick. Everyone’s minding theirs.

Old Ephraim sees her come, but nobody and nothing troubles that old bear. She stirs her stew. Badger, beans, and black honeycomb.

Snow White hears a knock and she thinks she knows what’s up, thinks she knows to turn away whatever’s rapping. But she’s not ready and she could never be. Out the window stands her mother. Not Mrs. H. No, this is Gun That Sings. Older, gray in the pomp, face carved like someone meant to write something there and never finished. But it’s her. Snow White sees her own face. Her dark eyes. Her mouth red as feeding. Her hurt laid out like leather. It’s not a fair fight. Not even a whiff. Some things a girl has in her to say no to and some things cut her down before she knows she’s gone. Sure, some twiggy, thorny snap in her says: No, this is awry, this is a bent thing, in that place that tells her to belly up to the floor before anyone’s even shadowed the door frame. But it don’t matter. You can’t ask why she did it, when she was warned, when she was told. The plumb truth is you would too, if everything impossible stood out there saying you could be loved so perfect, the past would go up like a firecracker and shatter across the dark.

Snow White grabs on to her mama and don’t let go. First she’s quiet like morning, then she says Mama a couple of times, real small against that brown shoulder. Sure, Gun That Sings don’t smell right—smells like a cold forest and a pool of frozen silver—but maybe that’s what a mother smells like. How would she know?

“There now,” says Gun That Sings. “I found you. It’s all right.”

“You’re dead.”

“What’s dead but a little slower than the living? I got here. Let’s you and I roll us some cigarettes and talk up the moon. I bet no one ever taught you to roll a cigarette proper.”

She don’t sound right either. Sounds like the wheels spinning on a slot machine, rolling up all winter.

“Remember what I said about magic, and don’t be so quick to call me the devil, child.”

Snow White wants a mother so bad, it’s like a torn-up body wanting blood. She knows how to roll a damned cigarette. Could teach the Tobacco King of Carolina to do it nice and tight for once. But she lets her mama show her, crushing the dried up leaves against white paper.

“I tried to find the Crow Nation. I tried to find you.”

“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” croons Gun That Sings. “You’d be the fairest of them all. No more at home than at your father’s table, all dolled up like any dress could fix you. Don’t go sticking your hangdog face where it’s not wanted. Ain’t those poor folk been strick enough? Don’t need Miss H to haul water for them, no ma’am.”

Snow White takes the name like a fist. Go inside, her bank sense says. She’s nothing but a creature and she ain’t your mama. This will go bad on you.

Snow White takes a shaky draw on her cigarette and falls down dead.

SNOW WHITE BREATHS LIGHTNING

Snow White comes to with Bang-Up kissing her, sucking the smoke out of her body like steam coming off a pond. Bang-Up’s nearly crying, which for most folks is all the way crying, and it’s a bad night. Coughing, throwing up black pitch like the devil’s shit, Old Ephraim feeding her bear broth, and everyone growling her, Didn’t we say, didn’t Hex tell you up and down, what’s addled you, girl?

When Snow White finally sleeps, it’s like being buried, that deep, that heavy.

You said. You said.

SNOW WHITE DRINKS THE OCEAN

It happens again when acorns start their rat-a-tat falling, like cavalry guns on the hill.

Little Mab’s gone west to do a train job: coin and corn and a hunk of pearl as heavy as a human heart. She couldn’t stand it, not stealing anything for so long. Cocklebur is entertaining a lawman with a taste for green stockings. Astolaine Bombast is skinning a raccoon for fur and victuals. Everyone’s minding theirs.

Old Ephraim sees her come, but nobody and nothing troubles that old bear. She stirs her stew. Beaver, beans, and beets as red as blood.

Snow White hears a knock and she thinks she knows what’s up, thinks she knows to turn away whatever’s thumping. She’s not even surprised to see her mama there again, looking like nothing ever went south, like she just wanted to see her girl again. Just wanted to jaw about the weather. Door’s open before Snow White can stop herself. A mother’s like a poison made for only one soul. She opens the door because on the other side it’s her own face looking back, it’s a mirror as big as her whole life, and she just wants to be saved.

“Come on, baby girl. We didn’t finish our conversating. Set on the porch with me and we’ll share some good whiskey. I bet no one ever taught you how to drink whiskey straight.”

Snow White sits down. She knows how to drink for fuck’s sake. Could teach the Scottish laird who dreamed up whiskey in his sheep pen to bolt it down and never flinch.

And this time she’s got Rose Red with her.

Snow White cocks her girl and she doesn’t say, Who are you, or If you play me poor, I can play you back. She just sits there with death pointed at her mother. She can feel the blood in her cheeks and her breath hitches.

“You look just like your father, staring at me like that,” sneers the thing wearing the face of Gun That Sings.

Snow White swallows that like a sword. She lets the hammer click back in its place. Everything in her that’s not nailed down is shaking loose.

Snow White slugs back her whiskey and falls down dead.

SNOW WHITE EXCHANGES VOMIT WITH OWL

She comes to and Bang-Up’s got her fingers down her throat. The whiskey comes back up like it hates her personal, there’s puke everywhere and a skunky red in her eyes. Bang-Up punches a few walls and it’s a bad night. No one comes round from a thing like that looking pretty. Retching and sweating and a lump of hide in Snow White’s mouth so she don’t make supper of her tongue. Everyone snarling, Twice means you wanted it, what’s soured out in you, girl, is you looking for your death or just banging into it full stupid?

When she finally sleeps, it’s like drowning, that dark, that final.

I’m looking for it. I’m looking for it.

SNOW WHITE SWALLOWS THE EARTH

It happens again when the snow starts riding the wind, not fallen yet but ashing the air.

Everyone’s in camp this time. They see it happen. Even Bang-Up. But they don’t interfere. Everyone’s minding theirs. Only so much you can do to keep a body going when it’s bent on blowing town. They all see her come.

Old Ephraim stirs her stew. Fox meat and coyote bones and deer hearts black as secrets.

Snow White doesn’t wait. In the bank of her whole self she’s already laid out on the floor. But it’s not her mama come to shoot the place up.

It’s Mrs. H.

Older, white freezing the edges of her hair, lines in her face like someone meant to scar her forever but didn’t have the heart to finish up. But it’s her. Snow White sees a face she knows and fears and loves in an ugly, bunched-up way. A family way.

It’s not a fair fight.

Mrs. H is holding a basket of apples. They look real nice. Snow White keeps her mouth shut—it’s all said anyway. She just looks at her stepmother holding her death bag of Puritan magic between them like they don’t both know what’s going to happen.

And yet. Mrs. H falters. Snow White is the best draw going, and her stare punches a hole at point-blank. She aims to fill it this time.

“Everything in this world requires a heart in trade,” Mrs. H whispers. “There’s no such thing as a good bargain.”

Yeah. That’s about the speed of it.

Mrs. H pulls out a deck of cards. Thompson’s fox teeth show on the back of the seven of spades. She offers Snow White the cut, fair as fair as fair.

Snow White don’t take it.

Snow White reaches out and grabs an apple from the bag. She bites into it and never looks away from Mrs. H, from the crevice of her, and this is a suicide we’re watching, full faith and knowledge.

Snow White swallows that piece of sweetness and falls down dead.

Her mother catches her.

PART VI

SNOW WHITE RIDES A STAR

SNOW WHITE IS CARRIED BY TURTLE

What happens to the West happens to Snow White, which is to say they both turn into jokes. They both get told so often, they become pantomime. And then worse.

Oh-Be-Joyful don’t last much past Montana Territory unterritorying and stating up. But you never leave a girl behind. They join up with a Wild West show and tour flat-dead towns on scrub-dust rivers. Not the big show, Bill’s show, but one nearly as good. They earn their dinners. The trick shots Little Mab and Bang-Up pull off look just like magic. What Woman Without a Name does with a horse would shame anyone who dared call himself a cowboy, which truth be told is not too many people anymore.

And they have a pair of aces. A curiosity unequaled. It goes in the freak show because no one knows what else to do with it, and Boss Jake says it gives him the crawling creeps.

A little while back someone else showed up asking after work, though everybody but the lions knew he was just looking for their funny little curiosity. That kid was a much better get than the old box anyway, with those deer legs that could outrun a horse. Spends most of his nights in the freak tent with the box, talking to it like it can talk back. Talking funny. Maybe it’s French or something. Boss Jake knows he’s got a genuine cryptozoo on his hands, so he lets Deer Boy do whatever he wants. Only he says it cripplezoo because Boss Jake ain’t too bright and learned his words off his daddy’s bad mouth.

If you pay your nickel, you can see it easy enough. Read the nice red sign up there: the glass gunslinger. And there she is: A glass box wrapped up in some old mangy coyote pelts and inside it there’s a girl. Sort of pretty, or she would have been if she hadn’t run herself so hard when she could run. Jake reckons she’s Choctaw or Cree or something and he don’t care when Woman Without a Name tells him she’s half Crow and half son of a bitch.

Don’t look Snow White to me nohow.

Bang-Up Jackson makes sure the gunslinger’s hair looks nice before shows, crosses her arms over her chest with a big crazy pistol all pigged up in jewels in one hand and a long hog-sticker rifle in the other. Keeps her face clean.

The gunslinger isn’t dead, but she don’t move and she barely breathes, so in summer she don’t smell too nice and the flies come singing. That’s when the Joyful girls—the furies, Jake calls them—take her out of her box and wash her in whatever’s handy. They let the Deer Boy help, and the way he holds her head you’d think he’d married her before she got put in that box.

Old Ephraim catches Deer Boy kissing the gunslinger once. Standing there with the box open and crying while he kissed her red, red lips. Nothing and no one troubles the old bear. She let them alone, though she didn’t feel right on it considering he was a stranger and Bang-Up would have both those pretty deer legs bust out if she knew. But what does it matter? Been twenty years now and Snow White don’t look a day older, don’t ever sit up and ask for whiskey in her coffee, don’t do nothing but beat her heart and work her breath.

Deer Boy kisses Snow White again.

She doesn’t wake up.

SNOW WHITE AND RED DEER CONTEND FOR PIECE OF MEAT

Deer Boy stands over the glass gunslinger one night in autumn. Everything smells like wood smoke.

He puts his hands on the glass of her box. Leans in. Deer Boy can see himself in the glass. He can see her through him.

Deer Boy’s heard his mother’s sick back home. The lunger, maybe. But she’s old, so it doesn’t matter what it is. When she coughs, it comes up red as apples. It has occurred to him that he should go to her. If he brought her what she wanted, she might heal up. Might look at him and say: What a good boy.

Deer Boy brought a knife with him. He holds it between himself and Snow White.

I need your heart.

He opens the glass. Snow White is warm. He ran so far and now he runs alongside her. Keeping pace. Keeping time. He doesn’t try to understand things anymore. Deer Boy just loves like a lightbulb and he never goes off.

“It looks like a choice,” he says to her soft as falling, “between you and me. But it isn’t.”

When the words come out, they run backward.

Deer Boy drags the knife over his chest. He is giving her his heart. He is exchanging a deer’s heart for a girl’s heart. If hers would fix him, his will fix her. He knows it. She isn’t his sister. She is his sister.

Deer Boy sees her eyelids move. He thinks he sees it. He’s sure he sees it.

Boss Jake hauls him back, yelling for help. Hauls him off of her and Deer Boy is crying, he is begging her to wake up. She’s dead, she’s dead, you can come back now.

* * *

The furies clean him up. He didn’t cut deep enough. Never could. No damage done. Snow White don’t move a whisper.

Deer Boy’s blood seeps into her white calfskins like snow.

SNOW WHITE AND THE STORY OF DEATH

Well, there’s only two ways this can end. Snow White wakes up; Snow White sleeps forever. Maybe that’s her thing. She’s always waking up and always sleeping at the same time all the time, so fast, you can’t see the blur.

Maybe she never wakes up. More likely than anything else, really. You can’t kiss a girl into anything.

Snow White becomes an object. Barnum buys or steals her from Jakob’s show, and she cools her heels with the Fiji Mermaid in perpetuity. A medical museum. A private collector with a scar on his chest. Maybe someday Snow White’s cells get scraped and stored for some researcher to kiss alive in a decade, a century, when they get around to it. When they have time.

She dreams of the mine. Of rubies hanging in the dark like antibodies. She dreams of her mother singing to her like a gun. She dreams of her mother when she was a girl, and didn’t know the future. If you want to know.

You know, there’s this old story. It says Coyote took his heart and cut it in half. He put one half right at the tip of his nose and the other half at the end of his tail. He did this so no one could catch him at his mischief. The two halves of his heart would fly off in separate directions, each doing whatever it pleased, and if anyone said to one half of his heart: You have done a wicked thing! the other half would say: What the hell are you talking about? I was over here the whole time!

Alive and dead, alive and dead. Both happening so fast, you can’t see the blur. It doesn’t matter which. The live girl carries around the deadness she worked on all those years. The dead girl holds on to that wick of living that’s still green in there. It flips back and forth forever like a trick ace. Thump, thump, thump in the night as a girl sits up and lies down again.

Come on. Pick one. Pick a path and hit the briars.

SNOW WHITE HOLDS UP THE SKY

Thump, thump, thump.

One thing I have learned about running away is that once you start, there is no end to it.

Open, shut. Alive, dead. Sooner or later you choose. This is what happens.

Snow White dreams about old red Thompson the fox and the spinning trees on her slots, red and gold and green and white. She dreams about the seagull with a bullet through its eye. If you want to know.

She dreams Mrs. H palms up that deck again. And this time she takes the cut. Aces high.

And all right, okay, one day she wakes up. It’s a hundred years, a hundred and ten, maybe some change. Stowed away in some attic in Iowa, where Jakob’s Exhibition of Wildness and Wonder petered out. She wakes up because there was flooding all over town that spring, and the current washed that house clean off its stones. Snow White wakes up when her glass box crunches against an elm tree and goes accordion shaped. Or maybe it was just time. Some clock ticked out inside her. Four old trees spinning up to spring.

There’s glass in her hair. In her palms.

Search and Rescue airlifts Snow White and half the town clear of the white water, and nobody thinks much of it. A man with a crew cut treats her for shock. He asks how many fingers. Who’s president.

Snow White sees a taxidermied horse float down Beech Street, and she knows it’s Charming. There’s a piece of glass in her nipple, poking out like a drop of milk that never fell. Right over her heart.

Snow White gets a Social Security card. She gets a job building houses out in California. Picks oranges. Doesn’t talk about herself. Never did. If you press her, she’ll say she lost everything in the flood, and she supposes that’s true. She goes to see the castle by the sea, and it’s a museum now. Pictures on the wall: the Mr. Buttons. Miss Enger. Mr. H.

Mrs. H.

The pictures are black-and-white, and Snow White finds no answers there, or any comfort, either. They just look like dead people and that’s what they are. Her room is labeled GUEST quarters, and she supposes that’s true too. Up in the hills, the boardwalk is not open to visitors. Under construction. Renewal efforts funded by a grant from the state. Excellent example of turn-of-the-century follies.

In the forest Snow White sees a red fox. He looks at her for a long time. She tosses him an apple. Little fellow sniffs but he knows better. Good boy. Good boy.

Snow White likes the open sky. It’s the same as it ever was. Fire and cold. Long empty spaces between the stars, stars like towns getting their grips into a big black country. Oh-Be-Joyful. Haul-Off. Blue Coffin. There’s red up there like rubies in a mine.

Snow White gets a doctorate in physics, though it takes her about fifteen years. She sleeps with a couple of lab partners, but it’s pretty uninspiring stuff. She meets a history professor. He walks with an odd wobble. His students make fun of the way he talks—but they make fun of her drawl, too. Snow White does not think much of students. She waves at the professor when she passes by his classroom. Waves through the little glass window. He puts up his hand to hers. Snow White decides to take him to dinner. Find out his story. When she has time. There’s so much to do.

The telescopes open up to the sky like gardenias at a wedding.

Whoever’s left standing has won.

Snow White discovers a new pulsar out in the Horsehead Nebula. She listens to it through machines that reflect her face.

Thump, thump, thump.

Talking mirrors on every wall.

Thump, thump, thump.

Snow White’s pulsar shakes the night sky like iron shoes dancing.

THE BUTCHER OF KHARDOV

Dan Wells

PART ONE

Orsus found Lola again in a village in the mountains, listening to a traveling minstrel in a tavern full of peasants. He arrived after dark, covered in snow. He stood at the door and stomped the mud from his feet. It was a poor place, small and forgotten by the larger world, but it was the most civilization Orsus had seen in almost six months. He told Laika to wait outside, using his mind to give the steamjack a set of rudimentary instructions, then ducked his head through the low entryway, feeling shy and dirty and out of place.

The room was lit by torches and the bright-orange glow from a massive hearth, where the musician stood with his violin and winked boldly at the serving girls while he sang. Orsus registered his presence and analyzed him, along with the others in the room: eleven strong men, probably farmers, and seven more who looked softer and dressed more finely—landowners, perhaps, or craftsmen. One of those sat apart. His clothes marked him as an outsider, a traveling merchant, Orsus guessed. None of them were a threat, so he ignored them. He shook the snow from his massive coat—nearly the full hide of a black bear, rimmed with its thickest fur—and strode to the bar, leaning his long-handled axe against it while he pulled off his gloves. A serving girl no bigger than the axe eyed it in obvious fright but managed to stammer out a greeting and ask for his order.

“Vyatka,” he said, more gruffly than he intended. He had no quarrel with this girl or anyone in the village; he wasn’t even sure what village this was. It had simply been too long since he’d spoken to anyone other than Laika, and his voice sounded raw, unfamiliar. He nodded to her and forced a smile, trying to remember how civilized people behaved. He felt the farmers’ eyes on him and the serving girl, who was pretty enough, with gold-tinged brown hair just the color of Lola’s. He wondered if she were in danger from any of them—a jealous suitor, maybe, or a simple lech. She turned away to fetch his drink, and as he watched her go, his thoughts turned to Lola again for the first time in ages . . .

. . . and then there she was, leaning against the bar beside him. “Nothing for me?”

Orsus felt his throat catch, but he was too hardened to startle easily. He kept his voice low and answered without even looking at her. “You don’t drink.”

“You never used to, either.”

The serving girl set a glass on the bar—not a stoneware mug but a real glass, tall and thin and fragile—and poured a double shot of vyatka from a slender green bottle. Orsus never asked for a double, but most servers gave him one anyway. He was seven and a half feet tall and built like an ox, his gaunt face scarred from countless battles. He lifted the glass, ready to down the entire thing in one go, but paused, set it back on the worn wooden bar, and slid the glass over in front of Lola.

“Would you like some?”

He still hadn’t looked at her, still hadn’t dared, but her voice was like sunshine and honey, so familiar he’d know it anywhere. A voice he heard every night in his dreams.

“Excuse me?” asked the traveling merchant. He was sitting on Orsus’ left, away from Lola, and Orsus turned his head just enough to catch him in the corner of his vision.

“This doesn’t concern you,” Orsus said.

“I’m sorry,” the merchant said, “I thought you were offering me a drink. Awfully friendly little town, I thought. Glad I stopped in. No matter, my fault for mishearing you, my name’s—”

“I was talking to the lady,” Orsus growled, turning away. The vyatka was still sitting there, Lola’s pale white hands resting softly beside it, but he thought he could see the faint print of her lips on the glass. He wanted to pick it up, to put his lips in the same spot and imagine for just a moment that they were touching—

“What lady?”

Orsus narrowed his eyes and looked back at the merchant. “Excuse me?”

“Not many here Id call ladies,” the merchant said with a leer. “Closest thing in this whole place is that dark one in the corner, and she looks awfully taken. Clinging to that money changer’s arm like it was made of gold, which it probably is as far as she’s concerned. A woman like that you’d have to woo. The rest of these trollops—”

“What did you say?” Orsus’ voice was dark and full of menace. He rested his hand ever so lightly on the man’s back. Even so, the weight of his pansized hand—his fingers stretched nearly from shoulder to shoulder—was threatening. He felt the merchant grow tense.

“Didn’t mean nothing by it, sir, honestly sir, I’m just passing through. I don’t want any trouble with your village, sir.”

“It’s not my village. But the women in it—the ladies, whether you think of them that way or not—you may consider to be under my protection. Now get out of here.” He lifted his hand and the merchant was off his stool and halfway to the door in a second. Orsus turned back to the bar, calming his rage. “I’m sorry about that.”

“You can’t let everything bother you so much,” Lola said. “This isn’t how we used to live.”

“I’m sorry for that, too.”

“That doesn’t change it, though.”

Orsus noted the hint of sadness in her voice. He wanted to say something else, but he didn’t know what—he’d already given an apology, and she obviously wasn’t interested in another. He stayed silent, hoping she would fill the empty air. She always knew what to do.

Lola’s fingers tapped the wooden bar in time with the minstrel’s song. “Would you like to dance?”

Orsus laughed, feeling again the way she’d always made him feel in the old days—an uncomfortable schoolboy, gigantic and clumsy and too in love to say no. “You know I’m no good at dancing,” he said, but she put her hand on his and his protests were burned away like mist in the sunlight.

The feel of her skin was a miracle, smooth and shocking and familiar and electric, like going out and coming home all at once, an endless adventure more right and real than anything he’d ever known. He looked at her now, for the first time in he’d forgotten how long. Her eyes were wide, carefree, and brimming with life as they’d always been, her hair rich and sparkling, her skin soft as silken cream. He put his hand on her waist, their eyes locked, and he shouted to the minstrel in a voice that boomed across the room like a cannon.

“Do you know any dancing songs?”

The minstrel struck a sour note on his violin, shocked by the volume of the request. “I . . . don’t have a bayan, sir, but I could try to—”

“Your fiddle is enough,” said Orsus. He smiled at Lola. “Play a kareyshka! I’m going to dance with my wife.”

They stepped toward the center of the room, small sideways steps in the traditional style, but no music came. Orsus looked up in a fury to see the minstrel with his jaw hanging open, staring dumbly. “I told you to play!” he roared, and the minstrel positioned his violin. He began bowing out a song, unsteadily at first, but faster and with more confidence as his hands fell into their familiar patterns. Orsus looked back at Lola and twirled her through the room, stepping and stomping and weaving between the tables. He smiled at her, more alive than he’d been in years, and she smiled back, more alive than—

People were laughing. Orsus ignored them. Let them laugh; they’d laughed at him his whole life and he’d never let it bother him. He was in love with the most wonderful woman in the world, and now he had her, and she was looking at him, smiling at him, holding him again just like she had before the—

His head ached from so much spinning, and he returned to the simpler part of the dance, small steps forward and back, holding Lola first in one hand and then in the other, torchlight glinting in her eyes like steel.

“Is that what you meant?” It was a familiar voice, the merchant’s, cackling with high-pitched laughter that rose above the violin. “He told me the vyatka was for a lady—I never imagined he meant that old thing!”

Orsus seethed, the rage inside him growing hotter, but Lola clucked her tongue softly. “Just ignore them.”

“His wife, he called it,” said a farmer, greeted by another gale of laughter. “Do you suppose he kisses it as well? Filthy thing like that?”

“Take that back!” Orsus’ roar shook the rafters, and in two steps he was beside the man, lifting him from his seat with a single hand around the throat. “Take it back now or I’ll break your neck!”

The entire room was on its feet in an instant, some men backing away, some leaning forward as if they intended to rush him. Orsus was more than a head taller than their tallest, a full hand-span broader than their broadest. The farmer in his grip kicked wildly as he hung in the air, clawing at Orsus’ fingers around his neck.

“Let him go,” said one of the craftsmen. A dark-haired woman cowered behind him, and the serving girl behind her. “Just set him down, nice and easy, and we’ll forget this whole thing.”

“He called her filthy.”

“And he’s very sorry.”

“I want to hear him say it.”

“It’s just an axe!” shouted another farmer. “For Menoth’s sake!” The man put a hand on Lola’s arm, yanking her away, and Orsus watched as her dress tore, her arm ripped, her chest blossomed with blood.

The world turned red with blood and fire, the air filled with ash and snow and screams. “Where were you?” she pleaded. “Why weren’t you here to protect me?”

The farmer in his hand gave a choked scream as Orsus hammered him into the man on Lola’s arm. Both men went down with a crunch of bone, and the room swarmed him. There were seventeen men still standing, small knives and cudgels appearing in their hands, seemingly from nowhere. They were not farmers but warriors, thieves, brigands, and murderers.

In the space of a heartbeat he studied the room, mapping its obstacles and cover, identifying the greatest threats. The man behind the bar had a blunderbuss but wasn’t an expert with it, and Orsus guessed it would take him eight seconds at least to ready and fire it; he had eight seconds to work his way back to an alcove near the door, where a sturdy wooden beam could shield them from the blast.

He kept Lola close beside him in his left hand, turning his body to protect her as the first wave of outlaws crashed against him: six men at once, clubs swinging for his face and guts and knees, knives darting in through the gaps in his defenses. He had no armor but his thick bearskin coat, which he turned with a swish to catch the first small dagger, brushing the blade harmlessly to the side. He turned into the man, cracking him in the face with his left elbow and opening a hole in their circle where Lola could stand clear. At the same time he reached out with his right hand and caught a heavy wooden cudgel aimed for his face, levering it down in a brutal swing that dragged its wielder with it, blocking two more attacks from the mob—one with a cudgel that thumped the man’s spine, another with a dagger that pierced the man’s side with a blossom of red. The man wielding the dagger stumbled back, eyes wide, but before he could protest his innocence Orsus threw the stolen cudgel at his face and dropped him wordlessly to the floor.

More men joined the fray, armed with increasingly larger weapons—a chair leg, a table leg, an entire table—and Orsus slowly worked his way back toward the alcove, blocking and redirecting, striking when he could, counting down the seconds. In his eyes the men were snarling and rabid, snapping their jaws like wild animals, hungry for just a taste of Lola’s lips, of her skin, of her soft, supple flesh. The bartender raised his blunderbuss, and Orsus fought more furiously than ever, cracking skulls, snapping spines, and throwing broken bodies like javelins at the cowards who tried to flee. His ear pricked like a wolf’s at the sound of a tiny click, and he stepped behind the thick wall just as the blunderbuss fired, a half pound of burning lead flying straight for his skull. The blast tore a hole in the wooden beam, exploding in a cloud of wooden splinters and bits of twisted iron, but it didn’t penetrate all the way. He and Lola were safe.

Orsus leaned Lola gently in the corner. He found a dagger stuck into his leg and pulled it out with a grunt, stepping out from behind the wall and hurling it at the barkeep. It sunk deep into his throat, he fell, and the room was empty.

Orsus surveyed the destruction, vigilant for more attacks, but nothing moved. His adrenaline faded, and the red in his eyes subsided, replaced with great splashes of hot red blood coating the walls and broken chairs and splintered tables. Women lay among the dead; had the women attacked him, too? He saw his glass of vyatka on the bar. His axe was gone. He hadn’t used it in the fight, and no one had used it against him, but it was gone.

The ash and snow were gone, too, and the howling and the screams and the fires and the bright, vivid clarity. In their place a blankness crept over him, a deadness, as if his soul were stone and his flesh iron. As invulnerable and unfeeling as a steamjack.

He knew where his axe was. A part of him, he thought, had always known. He walked to the bar, stepping over the broken bodies, and stared at the vyatka. The lip print he’d seen was gone. He raised it to his lips and drank; it burned, he knew, but he didn’t feel it.

Six months in the wilderness. Maybe he’d stay longer this time. Maybe he’d never come back.

Orsus walked to the corner and looked at his axe, five feet tall and a hundred pounds at least, leaning gently in the alcove where he’d stood to protect her. “Come on, Lola. Time to go.” He picked up the axe, pulled his hood low over his eyes, and walked back into out the snow.

“Jack!”

Orsus ignored him, raising his heavy axe and chopping down again on the massive log. He hated it when they called him Jack.

“Jack, boy, I’m calling you! Are you as deaf as you are ugly?”

Orsus rose up to his full height—nearly seven feet tall, though he had just turned sixteen—and looked at his boss, Aleksei. “My name’s Orsus.”

Aleksei was a short man, though nearly as broad as Orsus. When he smiled, his lips curled up in a grin so devilish it made the women in town grow pale and make the sign of warding. He smiled now, as if reveling in Orsus’ discomfort. “I know your name, boy, I’m using your official title. We’re done with this tree, and I need a ‘jack to move it.”

Orsus glanced at the log by Aleksei’s feet, where two of the younger village boys had spent the last ten minutes hacking away the twigs and branches, preparing the log for transport back to the mill. It was a small tree, probably too small for the logging crew to bother with, but still twenty feet long and several hundred pounds at least. Orsus studied it a moment, calculating the weight and balance. He shook his head. Aleksei’s crew was a major operation, the biggest logging company in the forest, and they didn’t have time to bother with a tree that small. The one Orsus was working on had been ninety feet at least, and more than three feet wide at the base; he was chopping it into three equal sections for easier transport back to the mill. That was the kind of tree they needed. A tree the size of Aleksei’s . . . there was no good reason to fell it in the first place.

No good reason, but one painfully obvious bad one.

Aleksei leered, gesturing at the tree, and several of the other loggers were looking up now as well, pausing to enjoy the jest. As always, Orsus refused to give them the satisfaction. He turned back to his own tree, readying his heavy axe for another strike. “Get Laika to do it.”

Orsus raised his axe and brought it down with a thunk, burying the wide blade nearly eight inches into the wood. The felled tree came nearly to his knees, a thigh-high monster for any other man on the crew, but Orsus would cut through it completely in just a few more strikes.

“My dear little boy.” Aleksei adopted his most patronizing nursemaid tone. “Laika is a steamjack. She carries the big trees. Something this small would be an insult to the mechaniks that made her.” The side of his mouth twisted up in a sneer. “This is a job for a man-jack.”

Orsus paused, tempted to let this final jibe sway him, but he closed his eyes and took a breath. He would ignore it. He raised his axe again and brought it down at an angle to his last deep cut. The blade bit deep into the wood, meeting the line he’d carved with his previous swing, chopping out a wedge-shaped chunk the size of a man’s leg. He leaned down and picked the fragment up, tossing it to the side as if it weighed no more than a toothpick. The other loggers looked away, disappointed he hadn’t risen to the bait.

Aleksei walked toward him. Orsus knew what was coming and set himself for another argument. “I want you to come with us tonight,” Aleksei said, lowering his voice conspiratorially. “Molonochnaya, just after dark. We’re not even fighting anyone, just . . . accelerating a few design flaws in their equipment.”

Molonochnaya was the neighboring village, nearly an hour away by foot. They had a new logging operation of their own, Orsus knew, a desperate attempt to get out from under Aleksei’s thumb, and the conniving little man was apparently confronting the matter directly. It was hardly surprising—Aleksei had been performing similar “after-hours projects” around the area for years, keeping his business strong by stomping out the competition. It was standard practice for the kayazy, as Orsus well knew. He’d been one of Aleksei’s thugs for years.

But not anymore.

“There are plenty of trees for everybody,” Orsus said, turning back to his work. He swung the axe again, biting another giant chunk from the tree.

“Trees, yes,” said Aleksei, “but customers? Where am I supposed to find more of those if Molonochnaya starts buying from somebody else? And what about the villages east of them—am I supposed to give up their business, too? I’m barely paying the bills as it is, Jack. If I lose them I’ll have to make some painful cuts to the labor force. No pun intended.”

Orsus bristled at being called Jack again, but Aleksei’s subtle threat overshadowed his irritation almost immediately. He glared at the small man. “You’re talking about letting me go?”

“I might have to let a lot of people go—”

“I do the work of any two other men in this crew,” Orsus hissed, “and you’re talking about sending me away because I won’t break some poor villager’s legs for you?”

“Sending you away from what?” Aleksei said, his thin voice thick with indignation. “With a new logging company starting in Molonochnaya I’ll lose buyers, I’ll lose revenue—I’ll lose the whole business. I don’t want to let anybody go, you know that, but without a proper business to support us I won’t have any other options.”

“So you’re forcing me to help you, or I lose my job.”

Aleksei frowned, his mock indignation blossoming into mock righteous anger. “Your job? Such grotesque selfishness! This is bigger than your job and my job and anyone’s job. This business employs half our village, which means it feeds half our village, which means you’ll be taking the food right out of their mouths.

“When you hear there’s a new logging company, you shouldn’t balk, you shouldn’t stand there like a schoolboy. You should be running to Molonochnaya to break their legs without ever being asked. I’m not forcing you to do anything, Orsus. I’m guiding you.” He gestured at the two village boys, hacking self-importantly at the branches of another fallen tree. “I’m guiding them. I’m making sure nobody does anything stupid and gets themselves hurt. We go together, or not at all.”

“Not at all,” Orsus said.

“And you wonder why they call you Jack.” Aleksei shook his head and tsk-tsked. “Heartless as an empty boiler.”

Orsus had heard this all before—the taunts, the pleading, the threats. Aleksei was ambitious and cruel, but he lacked imagination, and his arguments followed the same spiraling path toward his own interests—the only end that mattered to him. he’d appealed to Orsus’ sense of goodness, a quality Aleksei did not himself possess, and now that it hadn’t worked he’d appeal to something he was more familiar with: greed. Orsus nodded as Aleksei continued.

“I’m bankrupt if you don’t come, but if you do? There’s a bonus in it for you.” He jingled his coin purse. “A month’s wages, paid on completion of the job. I’ve never been so generous in my—Why are you laughing?”

“Because you’re small-minded and predictable.”

“Says the axe to the arm that swings it. If you’re so much grander than I am then why don’t I work for you, Your Majesty, instead of the other way around?”

“I only work for you until I’ve saved enough to buy a shop,” said Orsus. “I’ve told you that before.”

“Ah, yes,” said Aleksei, “the great bear of the woods carving bread boards for a living, or little wooden suns to hang over the door. And I’m small-minded? Look at you—you’re a walking mountain. I’ve never seen a man more suited to violence in my life, and I trust you know enough about my life to appreciate what that means. You don’t belong in a wood shop, Orsus, you don’t even belong in this village. Do you know how much I weep at night for the potential you’re throwing away? You could have wealth, you could have power. If I had your strength and strategy I’d rule this whole valley, and all you’ve done with it is cut down a few trees. It’s a waste.” He jingled his coins again. “If you’re not willing to make something of yourself, at least make some money. Think how much closer you’d be to that shop with a whole month’s wages in your pocket.”

“A month closer,” Orsus said. “I can wait.”

“Then you’re as brainless as a jack as well!” Aleksei shouted, and Orsus knew the argument had spiraled down to its low, grimy center. “Think of everything I’ve done for you! Everything I’ve given you, and this is how you repay me? I gave your father a job when the rats destroyed your cellar, and I gave you a job when the Tharn destroyed your father. Who was it that paid off the officials to keep your name off the conscription census? Without me you would have been in the Winter Guard and got yourself shot somewhere. I taught you how to work, I taught you how to fight, I taught you how to stand up for yourself, and all you can do is throw it back in my face? What do you own that wasn’t bought with my wages? What do you have that doesn’t come directly from me?”

And Orsus smiled, because he had the most wondrous thing in the world. “I have her.”

“A girl? I can get you girls.”

“Not like Lola.”

“Better,” said Aleksei. “Girls so beautiful you’ll forget this Lola ever existed.”

“I’ve seen your girls, Aleksei, and Lola puts them all to shame.”

“Fine, then.” Orsus watched warily as the weaselly man spoke. The conversation was going in a new direction. “Say she’s the most beautiful girl in the world, the best cook, the best lover, whatever it is you value in a woman—”

“The kindest,” said Orsus, “the bravest, the smart—”

“The most annoying, then. Whatever she is, it doesn’t matter. You’re still a backwoods mountain boy without a penny to his name, without a horse to call his own, with a leaking roof and a bed of straw and a knife and fork you carved yourself from scraps.”

“All true.”

“And you think your girl wants that? Come back to me—come back to the bratya. There’s money in this business, Orsus, but you won’t find it chopping logs like one of these idiots.” He gestured at the other workers. “You and I together, we can be rich—richer than you’ve ever dreamed. You can give your Lola a real house, with porcelain plates, a velvet dress—can you imagine her in velvet? In silk? She should have jewels in her hair, Orsus, and you can give them to her.”

Orsus could imagine it—he didn’t want to, but he could, and he had, and now the vision was already there in his mind and he burned to make it real. She deserved all those things and more, so much more, and a trip now and then to Molonochnaya, or Telk, or Chaktiz . . .

Orsus shook his head, and the vision collapsed. “No.” He hefted his axe and turned back to the tree. “That’s not the kind of potential I want to live up to.”

Aleksei’s voice was sharp as a blade. “Then maybe you really are no better than a jack.”

Orsus looked at him, counting slowly in his head, restraining himself from breaking the man’s sneering face. He dropped his axe, walked to the fallen log, and stood over it, calculating. The village boys backed away in surprise, and the other loggers grew silent. In years of teasing, Orsus had never actually gone for it.

He estimated the weight in his head, gauging the balance, pinpointing where to put his hands. He took a breath, crouched low to get his hands under it, and lifted. The tree rose, wood chips and pine needles cascading down as the twenty-foot log crept into the air. He walked carefully, deliberately, gritting his teeth with the effort, straining to hold on, until finally he dropped the tree wordlessly into the pile with the others. He stared down at it, panting, surprised even at himself, and walked back to his axe.

“Forget the bratya,” Aleksei said. “A man like you should be a warlord.”

“No more fighting,” Orsus said.

“But why?”

“Because she doesn’t want me to. And I never will again.”

Simonyev Blaustavya, great vizier of Khador and chief advisor to Queen Ayn Vanar XI, knelt before her throne, bowing his head low before the young ruler. He had served the royal family for much of his life, including as lord regent during Ayn’s minority. The new queen—inexperienced as she may be—was like a daughter to him. She deserved all the same respect that her ancestors had, and even more of the same protection.

“Forty Winter Guard behind the prisoner,” said Simonyev, “and six of our most decorated combat veterans in Man-O-War armor to surround him directly. They will be holding the chains. We will have ten Iron Fangs in a rank before you, here, armed with pikes to keep him from getting too close—”

“Man-O-War armor,” the queen said, “in the palace throne room?” Her voice was soft, but Simonyev thought he heard—as he often did lately—a deeper current of independence in her voice. It would have been a welcome sign in a more experienced ruler, but in a young and untested one . . .

No, he told himself, I must not think such thoughts. She is inexperienced, but she is more than ready for responsibility. She is not a girl, but a queen. I’ve been training her for this for years.

“Man-O-War armor is indeed unconventional in the palace, Your Majesty, and runs some risk of damaging the mosaic tiling your grandfather installed here. However, your life is of paramount importance, and if we must crush priceless artwork to protect you then we will crush priceless artwork. Unless you have reconsidered my suggestion to conduct this interview from the balcony, with the prisoner bound safely in the courtyard?”

“I will address the prisoner in here, as I do with all kommanders accused of treason. It is my duty, is it not?”

“Your duty requires only that you address them. Addressing them in the throne room is merely a tradition.”

“But traditions are important. I have heard you say so yourself many times. We have a throne room filled with art, both commissioned and conquered, because it impresses upon our visitors the wealth and power of our nation. Surely a trained warcaster turned traitor to the Motherland should be reminded of those qualities even more strongly than the average visitor.”

Simonyev kept his face serene, but inside his pride was battling with his nerves. She was showing all the strength of character he had hoped to see in her, but it could get her killed. “That is wise, Your Majesty,” he said with a bow, “but if you will forgive my failure, perhaps I have not fully explained to you the nature of the prisoner you are addressing today. He is a monster.”

“All traitors are.”

“In their souls, perhaps. This man is a monster in physical form, with no soul to speak of. He stands a full head taller than your tallest guard. His chest is as broad as a bear’s, and his arms and legs are thick as tree trunks. He is bound in the same heavy chain the dockworkers use to lift warjacks onto cargo boats—nothing less will hold him, and nothing less than a Man-O-War can hold those chains. I assure you, Your Majesty, the Man-O-Wars are not excessive force, they are a bare minimum necessitated by the size of that doorway.” He pointed to the throne room’s arched stone entrance. “If we were anywhere else, if you would allow us to hold this judgment in any other venue, I would have him flanked by Juggernauts at least.”

The young queen mused over this, cocking her head in a manner reminiscent of her late father. He would have listened to reason, thought Simonyev. Morrow save us from headstrong children.

“My grandfather also commissioned many rugs and tapestries,” said the queen. “Lay them on the floor, as thickly as you can stack them, and let the Man-O-Wars walk upon that.” She smiled. “Naturally, you will clean their feet first.”

Simonyev bowed, a gesture that allowed him to close his eyes in silent frustration. “If you wish, Your Majesty.”

He began calculating how many rugs he could gather and how many layers he could lay if he stretched a path from the throne room to the door. He might be able to do it, and it might actually help preserve the floor, though certainly at the expense of whichever rug came in direct contact with the Man-O-Wars’ metal tread, cleaned or not. And if the prisoner tried to escape or—Morrow forbid—to assault the queen, the floor would be ruined regardless and the rugs destroyed in the bargain.

“We have yet to address the greatest danger,” he said, “which is his arcane skill. Even if he doesn’t move—even if he doesn’t lift a finger—he could kill you with a thought.”

“He will be wearing chains infused with mystic power, specifically designed to negate his connection to magic,” Ayn said. “At least I assume he will. Surely we won’t neglect that aspect of our security?”

Simonyev permitted himself a silent, invisible sigh. Of course she would remember the chains. He had taught her well. “Of course he will, Your Majesty. He will be as unable to work magic as we can possibly make him. However . . . if you will permit me the question, Your Majesty: why is this so important to you?”

“It is my duty, as we have already discussed, and this is the best place for that duty to be carried out.”

“The best in some ways,” said Simonyev, “and the worst in many others. This man represents a very real danger to you, and we cannot protect you properly inside your throne room. Six Man-O-Wars just to hold his chains—have you really thought about what that means? Six Man-O-Wars to hold a single prisoner. Ten Iron Fang pikemen armed with weapons designed to
bring down heavy warjacks. Forty Winter Guard, not as an honor guard but as a real fighting force, led by our best kommanders, with orders to shoot him in the back if he so much as twitches. We’ll have Widowmaker snipers in the galleries above you; we’ll have soldiers with heavy iron shields on either side of you, ready to protect you from battle while your personal bodyguard escorts you out the back door. The traitor will be unarmed, unarmored, and bound with arcane chains, and still this morning I ordered ten more Winter Guard to walk in front of him, solely as an obstacle to slow him down if he tries to rush the throne. And this is the most important part: even with all of that, I can’t be sure that it’s enough.

“I should try myself for treason merely for allowing you to go through with this, for it is the most dangerous situation you have ever been—and I dearly hope ever will be—confronted with in your life. A final time, my queen, I beg you: address him in judgment from your balcony, so that he can remain in the courtyard, chained and caged and watched by warjacks. He is not simply dangerous, he is danger personified. He is death and violence in their most terrifying human form. He is an avatar of war.”

The queen seemed to consider this, or perhaps she did not know how to respond. Simonyev couldn’t tell. After a lengthy pause she spoke softly—though not, he noted, contritely. “Tell me again of his crimes.”

“He slaughtered your people, Your Majesty: an entire village and every soldier who attempted to defend them. Some of them under his own command.”

“The Fifth Border Legion,” said the queen.

Simonyev nodded. “It was the village of Deshevek, Your Majesty, near Boarsgate on the Ordic border. There are hundreds dead, as many as half of them by this man’s own hand.”

“And they were traitors as well, were they not? Your report mentioned some evidence that they were planning to secede to Ordic governance.”

“There is indeed some evidence of that, Your Majesty, but that is no justification for a massacre. They should have been given the chance to account for themselves, to confess or disprove the accusation. A proper servant of Khador would have given them a trial, not wanton murder.”

The queen smiled—that sly, maddening smile her grandfather used to give—and Simonyev realized too late that he’d been trapped.

“If traitors deserve a trial,” she said, “then this traitor shall have one. Lay out your rugs, arrange your soldiers, and bring the man to me. I shall address him in judgment as tradition and duty demand. If a kommander has betrayed Khador then he has betrayed me, and I shall be the one to condemn him.”

Simonyev nodded, more determined than ever that the prisoner would not lay so much as a fingertip on the queen. She was even more strong-willed than he’d thought, a fitting heir to the kingdom’s legacy. More snipers, perhaps, he thought, and another Man-O-War to stand at her side with a massive cannon shield. No one could get through that, not even the mighty Orsus Zoktavir.

And then he paused, just for a moment, and felt himself grow pale. He used to be Orsus Zoktavir, he thought, but no more. After the massacre near Boarsgate the man had a new name, one whispered in halls and alleys, chilling the spines of Ord and Khador alike. He is no longer a kommander, no longer a soldier, no longer a man.

He is a Butcher.

Pyotr Zoktavir slammed the door closed, bracing it with his body as he fumbled for the heavy wooden bar to lock it.

“The Tharn are here!”

Orsus’ mother, Agnieska, cried out in terror, clutching her children close. Normally, Orsus—ten years old and too big for such coddling—would have tried to pull away, but now he was too scared, an instinctual reflection of his parents’ terror. He knew the Tharn from stories, fearsome barbarians who worshiped the Devourer Wurm. All the adults in the village seemed scared of them, but he had never seen them in person before, never really imagined that they were real. The Tharn were the stuff of bedtime stories, boogeymen to make his little sister eat her porridge, and yet here was his father, the largest man in the village, bone-white with fear, slamming the locking brace into place and scrambling past his mother and sister for the door to the old cellar.

“But the rats, Papa,” said Orsus.

A nest of rats had invaded the family cellar the year before—giant, vicious things that devoured their food and settled in and resisted all attempts at eradication. It had cost them nearly a year’s worth of storage and forced Pyotr into debt with Aleksei Badian, and months ago they had sealed the door and given up. Yet now he was prying up the boards, scrabbling at the nails, desperate to get it open.

Realization dawned in little Irina’s eyes, and Orsus’ sister screamed in horror. “We can’t hide with the rats, Papa, you can’t make us do it!”

Orsus’ mother struggled to cover the girl’s mouth, shushing her. “Please, child, please; it will be okay; we’ll protect you from the rats, but you need to be quiet; please, Irina, stay quiet for Mommy . . .” She continued her tender, terrified mantra, and Orsus realized with shock that this was real, that the Tharn were really here, and that his parents were so scared of them that they considered the rats—once the greatest monsters in Orsus’ young life—to be a haven instead of a threat.

He pulled away from his mother and knelt by the cellar door, helping his father pry up the covering boards. He heard a scream from somewhere outside—the first of many—a long, curdling scream of unbridled fear, and his mother cooed more loudly to Irina, holding her close, stroking her hair, their eyes shut tight against the world. Pyotr pulled up a board, Orsus another. There were three left. They heard another scream, and below it the deeper thud of hoofbeats in the road outside—no, not hooves, but something different and alien. An unfamiliar cadence that made Orsus’ skin crawl. He shivered and tore at the boards.

Another scream, closer.

The smell of smoke.

A guttural, inhuman roar.

“Done,” Pyotr grunted, tearing the last board from across the cellar door. He swung it open. Orsus recoiled at the scurrying sounds below. The door was like a black window into nothingness; Orsus could see the first few rungs of their old wooden ladder, and then all else was lost to the void. Pyotr took Irina, holding her close while Agnieska descended into the hole. “Stay on the ladder if you can,” he whispered. “The rats won’t climb it . . . I don’t think.”

More hoofbeats outside. The door shook against the jamb, but Orsus couldn’t tell if someone was pounding on it, or if it was simply the wind. Pyotr glanced at it wildly, then lifted Irina down into the hole. Her wailing grew louder, and Orsus heard an answering chitter from the rats below. Agnieska grabbed the girl, practically smothering her to keep her quiet, and though Orsus could barely see them in the dark he could hear his mother sobbing. He started to close the door, but his father caught it and shook his head.

“You too.”

“But I can fight.”

“You’re a boy.”

“But I’m big.” Though it was technically true, he felt small and babyish for saying it, as if he were bragging about being toilet trained instead of his unprecedented physical size. Even at ten years old he was bigger than half the young men in town. Just two days ago, he had wrestled Gendy Rabin to a standstill. “Gendy will be fighting,” he said.

“Gendyarev is sixteen years old.”

“And I’m almost as tall!”

Pyotr put a hand on Orsus’ shoulder. The screams were louder now, some human, some eerily, indefinably different. The human screams sounded painful, scared, or both. “Listen to me,” said Pyotr. “You’re my son, and I’m proud of you, and I’ve never doubted you, and when you’ve said you could do something I’ve let you try, every time. Sometimes you’re right, and sometimes you get hurt, but that’s how we learn.” He shook his head. “This isn’t something you can learn from—you either succeed or you die. I need you to live, and to take care of your mother and sister. Do you understand me?”

Orsus’ eyes were wide, and he felt his lip start to quiver. “Aren’t you coming with us?”

Pyotr breathed deeply, staring solemnly instead of answering. “I need you to watch over them,” he said at last. “Do you hear me? Do you understand?”

Orsus’ voice cracked. “Are you going to be okay?”

The door rattled again, harder, and Pyotr swore under his breath. “I love you,” he said softly, practically picking Orsus up as he pushed him back into the hole and down the dark ladder. “I love you.” He closed the door, and Orsus heard a dull scratching above as his father dragged something heavy across the floor to cover the door. Irina was still crying, their mother struggling to quiet her. Below them, the rats scuttled hungrily.

There was a crash in the room above, and Orsus heard his father roar a challenge. Other voices answered it, sharp and sibilant, and then there was more crashing, more screaming, more thuds and thunks and cracks and howls. Orsus cowered in the darkness, clinging to the ladder, feeling the dull reverberations as the impacts shuddered down through the wood in his hands. He imagined his father being hacked apart by the Tharn or torn to pieces by whatever monsters they had with them, and he knew he should be helping, but he was too scared—too scared even to move—and so he clung to the ladder and prayed they would leave and hated himself for thinking it. The world tumbled, his vision disappeared, and sound ceased to have meaning.

Then the sounds stopped.

Orsus listened, straining his ears to hear something, anything, from the room above him. He hadn’t gone deaf; he could hear his mother’s soft sobbing below him and the rats chittering beneath her. Above him, though, was nothing: no fighting, no screams, not even a footstep. He waited, holding his breath.

Had his father won? Then where was he? Had the fight moved on? If the Tharn had won, then where were they? He longed to ask his mother’s advice, but she was below him; she had heard less than he, and explaining the situation might alert any enemies to their presence. Besides, his father had left him in charge. If he was dead, then Orsus was the man of the house now. He could make this decision on his own. He had a responsibility to do so.

So he waited.

A soft sigh that might have been wind, or might have been a distant scream. He couldn’t gauge the volume or distance of anything through the thick wooden door. A long stretch of nothing. A creak that might have been upstairs, or might have been his own weight shifting on the ladder. Another stretch of nothing.

Nothing and nothing and nothing.

Thud.

It wasn’t loud, but it was there. Above him, not directly, but definitely in their cottage somewhere. A footstep, but Orsus couldn’t tell what kind.

Was it his father? But why would his father step so softly? Perhaps he had killed the first group of Tharn and was afraid of attracting more. Orsus wanted to ask him if it was safe to come out, but what if it wasn’t him? What if it was a Tharn, who’d killed his father and was searching the cottage for loot or food or slaves? He should stay quiet until the raider left . . . unless the raiders had already gone and this was a rescuer from the village—Gendyarev or his father, or one of the men from Aleksei’s logging crew. But a rescuer would be calling out for survivors. If it was someone from the village, and they were being this quiet, it was because they were hiding. Maybe the Tharn were hunting them—if Orsus let them in, it might save their life. Or it might expose them all, and his mother and sister would die. He didn’t know what to do.

Something scraped loudly across the floor.

Orsus looked up. His father had covered the cellar door with something, probably their thick wool rug and then perhaps a leg of their table, or his mother’s heavy wooden chest. Now someone was moving it away. His father? Or a Tharn raider looking for something good to steal?

Whoever it was hadn’t spoken. Orsus readied himself to lunge upward. His only useful weapon was surprise. The wool rug was moved away, and faint lines of orange light outlined the square shape of the door in the floor. Orsus blinked at the brightness and wondered how he could possibly fight the intruder blind. The door moved slightly, then flew open. Orsus screamed, but it was the only attack he made, half war cry, half terror. Light flooded in and blinded him, and with it the smell of smoke and fur and blood. He kept screaming, eyes closed, and when a pair of hands reached down to haul him out of the hole he flailed wildly, hitting someone’s arms and chest and legs without any apparent effect. The figure tossed him aside with the same strange, sibilant words he’d heard earlier, and Orsus felt his blood freeze: this was a Tharn. In his own home. He had to do something.

He expected to hear his mother scream, or Irina, but they stayed quiet. Orsus rolled when he hit the floor, coming up against a wall and struggling painfully to open his eyes. The room was bright, still orange, and, he realized too late, on fire. The cracks and snaps he’d heard were the wood walls of his home spitting and popping as the fire devoured them with long, orange tongues. He forced his eyes open farther and saw two bodies, one of them hairy and bestial, half man and half . . . something. Wolf, maybe, or ox, or a combination of both. The other body, smaller and sickly yellow in the flickering firelight, was his father. The two corpses lay in a pool of shared blood, their clothing shredded, their bodies too broken to be anything but dead. Orsus heard shuffles and stomps and more meaningless words. Finally, he got his eyes open far enough to see the Tharn that had pulled him from the cellar. Just one, tall and snarling with a mane of fur around his mostly human face. The creature pulled a burning brand from the wall and dropped it into the cellar, peering after it to see what treasures it revealed. Orsus couldn’t understand the words, but the look of disgust on the raiders face was obvious. The thing turned away from the hole and began rifling through the other objects in the home, searching for something to steal from the humble cottage to make its raid worthwhile.

Orsus scrambled to the edge of the cellar and looked down. The rats were scattering to the corners, away from the light, and his mother was still sitting on the ladder, still clutching Irina’s limp body, still rocking back and forth and sobbing and sobbing, her hand clamped tight over the little girl’s mouth.

“Mama?” asked Orsus. She didn’t answer. Irina didn’t move, and he wondered if she could even breathe.

The Tharn spoke again, loudly, and Orsus looked up to see the monster bending over him with an unmistakably angry look on his face. It shouted a string of impatient nonsense words and finally peeled back its lips in a grotesque imitation of human speech.

“Eat,” it said. “We eat. Where?”

Orsus felt his fear turning to anger—that this thing would come here, to the poorest cottage in the village, and kill his father for the food they didn’t have. Was his sister dead too? What had happened to his mother? The thing continued its stuttered demands, and Orsus knew that he should attack it, that he should try in some way to defend his home, his family, that he should try to avenge his father, but he couldn’t do it. He crawled backward on the floor, trying simply to get as far from the towering monster as he could, hoping he could hide or escape or disappear.

Another Tharn shouted through the open door, something harsh and urgent. The raider in Orsus’ home looked up, called back just as harshly, and snarled. It hasn’t found what it wanted, Orsus thought, and now it’s time to leave. Orsus had just enough time to think, It’s okay, we’ve made it; it’s going to leave now when suddenly the Tharn drew a jagged bone dagger from its belt, walked to him impassively, and stabbed him in the stomach. No familiar emotion registered on the thing’s face; it simply bent down, plunged the knife into his gut, and walked away. Orsus cried out, weeping uncontrollably, feeling his life seep away in hot, liquid spurts all over his hands.

This is the end, he thought. We’re all dead. We have nothing left. He curled up in a fetal ball, lying on the floor, watching as the Tharn walked back toward the door and out into the snow—

—except it didn’t walk out the door at all, and Orsus remembered the darkest rumor he’d heard about the Tharn: if they couldn’t steal human food, they would just as happily eat the humans. Orsus watched in dawning horror as the hungry monster stood over the open cellar door, pulled another dagger from its belt, and hurled it down into the hole. Orsus’ mother shrieked, her body fell loudly to the floor, and the chittering of the rats rose up like raucous laughter.

Orsus felt his jaw quiver. His pain turned to anger, to rage and then unbridled fury. To kill him was one thing, but his mother? An innocent girl at the bottom of a pit? He pulled the dagger from his stomach with a grunt. The Tharn knelt down, unslinging an empty leather bag from its back, and unwrapping two thin carving knives. Orsus gritted his teeth and rose to his knees. The Tharn hauled Agnieska’s body up from the cellar, to save his meal from the rats, and threw it down by the bag. Orsus grabbed the edge of the table and pulled himself to his feet, inch by agonizing inch. Blood poured from the wound in his stomach, squishing in his boots and leaving dark-red footprints as he staggered across the floor. At the last second, perhaps alerted by the noise, the Tharn turned around. Orsus saw the shock in its eyes as the victim it thought was dying raised its own dagger against it, plunging the weapon toward its foul heart. The creature caught his wrist, but its grip was already weakening, and Orsus’ fury made him feel stronger every second. He wrenched the dagger free and slashed it across the creature’s throat, slitting it from ear to ear. It fell to a heap on the floor, hot blood spilling out to mingle with that of his parents.

Orsus heard a voice and looked up to see another Tharn in the doorway, staring at him in what Orsus’ slowly fading mind could only interpret as surprise. Behind the creature he could see others, laden with sacks from their pillage, arrayed around a tall, monstrous chieftain. Other cottages were burning, too. The beasts growled gutturally to each other and glanced anxiously up the road.

“He killed three,” Orsus choked out, one hand brandishing the stolen dagger and the other clenched tightly against the hole in his gut. “I will have two more of you to pay his debt.”

The Tharn raised its axe, but the chieftain stopped him with a sudden bark. The Tharn snarled at Orsus, then turned and dashed out after his fellows as they raced for the trees. In a heartbeat they were gone, like shadows in the darkness.

Orsus collapsed to his knees, alone in the burning ruin, watching the empty doorway numbly. He wanted to lie down, to forget everything and die. He clutched his still-bleeding wound with one hand, his mother’s hand with the other, and the world grew dim and silent. It was cold, he knew, but he couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel anything. He never wanted to feel anything ever again.

The last thing he saw was the men from the village, armed with axes and rifles, trying to pull him from the burning wreckage. In his madness he stabbed one with the Tharn’s bone dagger as they dragged him from his mother’s side.

Aleksei Badian surveyed the village fair with a disinterested eye. “Nothing here but trash,” he said with a sigh. “If people actually wanted these worthless knickknacks they’d sell them more than once a year at the harvest festival.”

“Probably good food, though,” said Orsus. He sniffed. “I can smell roast meat, and at least one of those stalls has hot pie.”

Aleksei flipped him a coin, and Orsus caught it deftly. He was only fifteen, but he was the biggest man on Aleksei’s crew, and one of his most trusted agents. “Get me a pie then. Lamb if they have it. Come back with apple and I’ll cut your hands off.”

Orsus looked at the coin, far too much for a single pie. “What do you want, ten?”

“I want happy employees,” Aleksei said with a smile. “Bring me a pie, and then . . . whatever.” He leered. “Buy yourself something pretty.”

Orsus shrugged and walked into the crowd. Aleksei was rarely this free with his money, but they’d had a profitable run last night and he was in a good mood. Someone had tried to ship goods through the valley without paying the kayazy tolls, and Aleksei’s bratya had given their sleeping caravan an unmistakable message that this was not to happen again. Orsus had especially impressed him by overturning an entire wagon, all by himself, spilling out the cargo and breaking the wheels and axles against the rocks on the side of the road. They’d even taken a few trophies—just coins and a few raw materials, nothing traceable—and so Aleksei was in a mood to reward them. Orsus bought his boss a lamb pie, fresh from a squat black oven and piping hot, and jingled the ample change in his fist, wondering how to spend it.

He thought about a pie of his own or a fat brown cake full of raisins and nuts, but Orsus had been an orphan for five years, scrimping and saving for every penny; he was too careful with his money to waste it on such a luxury. A skewer of meat would be more useful, but still not the most economical. He wandered the fair, shoving his way through the crowd, looking through the stalls for new blankets or dishes or something he really needed, and then he saw her.

The center of the fair was an open square with a wide wooden floor, perfect for the stomping dances favored by the mountain villages. That floor was full now of whirling, stomping couples and a trio of musicians with their instruments: a violin, an accordion, and a tambourine. They were playing the kareyshka, and a crowd gathered to watch. Near the edge of them, clapping her hands and laughing, was the most beautiful girl Orsus had ever seen. Her hair was brown and red and gold in the sunlight, like a forest in autumn, and her eyes lit up with a brightness and joy that made him long to see them closer. He stared, captivated, and in a sudden fit of madness he walked to a flower stall and slapped down his money, pointing to a crown of chamomile.

“That crown, and quickly.”

“I just bought that,” said another young man, tapping the coin he’d placed on the table—slightly underneath, Orsus noticed, his own coin. Orsus slid it out, so that his own money clinked down onto the wooden table, and handed the coin back to the man.

“I think you’re mistaken.”

The young man raised an eyebrow, his lips curling into an angry sneer. “You think just because you’re so big you can barge in here and get whatever you want?”

“Yes, I do.”

The man faltered, staring at Orsus’ thick lumberjack muscles, but seemed to swallow his fear. He placed his money back on the florist’s table.

Orsus felt the rage growing inside him, just as it had that night in the raid, just as it always did when anybody threatened something that was his. He wanted to shove the man down; he wanted to crush his hands and snap his arms and stomp on his chest until his ribs cracked to splinters and his guts oozed like jelly. The world turned red. He heard the warning growl of some massive mountain wolf, and the arrogant young rival muttered something about daisies and scuttled off into the crowd, pale-faced and sweating. Orsus almost chased him—his foot was already rising from the ground—but he stopped. The enemy was gone.

What was I thinking? he wondered, feeling the wrath drain away. What would she have said if I’d started a fight right here? My mother hated it when I fought. Maybe this girl is the same?

He took the crown of chamomile and found her again in the crowd, still clapping her hands to the music. Other boys in the village often gave gifts and flowers to their girls, but Orsus had never had one to give things to. For all he knew this girl had a beau already, but as he saw her again he realized he didn’t care. He weaved toward her through the crowd, and when he reached her he held out the crown, simply and soundlessly, too overwhelmed to speak.

She looked at him, and the world smiled.

“Is that for me?”

“Yes,” he said awkwardly and swallowed again. He cleared his throat. “My name is Orsus.”

“My name is Lola,” said the girl. She took the crown, brushing his finger with her own, and laid the flowers on top of her head with a laugh. “How do I look?”

“Like a queen.”

Lola smiled again, cocking her head to the side as she considered him.

“Orsus,” she said at last, holding out her hand. “Would you like to dance?”

PART TWO

“We don’t know where he came from,” said Kovnik Harch. “He just walked into Korsk with those two antiques and started scaring the citizens. We didn’t know where else to bring him.”

Kovnik Polten nodded, glancing into the yard where the guest—he wasn’t exactly a prisoner, as he had yet to do anything illegal—stood in the shadow of two old steamjacks: a battered Arktus, precursor to the Kodiak, looking like its two giant metal fists had seen more than their share of battle, and one even more ancient, a laborjack by the look of it. He could see why the people on the street were frightened—the man was as big as a bear and dressed like one to boot. The axe he carried looked heavier than half of the new recruits running drills in the field beyond. “You did the right thing, bringing him to me,” Polten said. “Not every man with a jack is a threat to the populace, but this doesn’t look like every man.”

“Thank you, sir.” Officer Harch stood straight and saluted, snapping his heels together with admirable precision. Polten smiled again at the man’s military fidelity and waved for him to follow as he began the slow walk out of his office, across the field to the stranger. The day was warm, and Polten enjoyed the sensation of sun on his shoulders. The cold made them ache, but he was proud that the aches came as much from old injuries as from age. A dead soldier is a man who did his duty, his old kommander used to say, but a wounded soldier is a man who did his duty intelligently enough not to get himself killed. Battle was violence, but war was violence applied with brains. Polten had battled enough to collect an impressive set of scars and made war enough that when the former finally caught up to him he found himself back in Korsk, training new soldiers and managing the flow of the kingdom’s vast wartime resources.

Heh, he thought, “wartime resources.” As if there are any other kind.

“Where did you find him?” Polten asked as they trudged across the field.

“Our watchmen spotted him in the outskirts of the city long before he got close enough to do any harm,” said Harch, “but since he wasn’t acting drunk or violent they let him through. He seemed like a woodsman or a trapper, though a curious one. It wasn’t until he reached the market at the Plaza of Heroes that the citizens started complaining. No one wanted to go near him, as you can imagine, and the farmers said their business was ruined.”

“Never threaten a man’s coin,” said Polten, just a hint of sourness bleeding into his voice. He didn’t begrudge anyone their livelihood, but he did grow tired of hearing about it. “You approached him and asked him to leave?”

“We asked his business first. He said he was exploring, but he didn’t seem to mean it in the ‘looking for bargains in the marketplace’ kind of way, if you catch my meaning. His accent places him from the deep backwoods, and he’s certainly never been to Korsk before. I can almost believe by the way he looks around at things that he’s never even heard of it before. He claims he’s Khadoran, but he doesn’t seem to really understand what Khador is—not politically, at least. He’s a woodsman, and he’s . . . exploring. He’s exploring us. He looks at Korsk as if it’s just a really crowded stretch of treeless forest.”

“Interesting,” Polten said, though he wasn’t sure what to make of it yet. He’d met Kossites in the far north with a similar lack of political knowledge, but this man was different. “And the steamjacks?”

“They’re definitely his, or at any rate they obey him. I don’t know much about ‘jack marshaling, so I can’t see how he’s commanding them, but it’s a close relationship.”

“That’s an old jack,” said Polten, studying the laborjack as they drew closer. “Laika chassis, probably geared for hauling rather than lifting, and obviously modified for cold weather, but there’s something . . .” He peered at it closely, spotting an odd bolt here, an unusual welding line there. “It’s been heavily repaired, of course, but if I’m not mistaken it’s had a custom refit as well. Primitive but competent. I wouldn’t be surprised if our woodsman did the job himself.”

“You know your jacks, sir,” said Harch.

“You came to the same conclusions?”

“No, sir.” Harch wore a stiff expression. “I’m afraid I don’t know jacks at all. But you seem to know what you’re talking about.”

“That,” said Polten, “is how I ended up an officer.” He stopped near the stranger, noting the abnormally large contingent of soldiers standing watch nearby. The mysterious woodsman turned to face him, drawing himself up to full height: well over seven feet, and shaven menacingly bald under the massive brown bearskin he was using as a coat.

“Good afternoon,” Polten said, doing his best not to feel intimidated by the stranger’s size and fierce expression—not to mention the absolutely massive axe, even larger than Polten had expected, which the stranger held casually over one shoulder. On closer inspection he could have sworn the axe was mechanikal, but where would a woodsman get mechanika? Polten swallowed his sudden apprehension and spoke. “Welcome to the heart of the Kingdom of Khador.”

“The heart of Khador is her people,” the stranger said, “though your city certainly has plenty of those.”

Interesting answer, thought Polten, though again, he wasn’t sure what to make of it. He could tell right away that the man wasn’t stupid; his eyes and face seemed to crackle with an intense intelligence. His words and behaviors seemed different because his life and experience had been different. This mystery only grew more and more intriguing.

“My associate here has been telling me a bit about you,” he said, gesturing to Harch, “but I’m afraid there’s much we still don’t know. Allow me to introduce myself: I am Kovnik Harald Polten, of the Korsk Winter Guard. And you are?”

“Orsus Zoktavir,” said the stranger. “Of nothing.”

“I see. And where precisely do you come from?”

“Khador.”

“Khador is the largest nation in western Immoren. I’m afraid you’ll have to narrow it down a bit for me.”

“The forest,” said Zoktavir.

Polten raised an eyebrow. “Which one? Blackroot Wood? The Shadowweald? Scarsfell?”

“A big one. I lived alone there for fourteen years.”

“Any particular village of origin? You’ll excuse me for prying.”

“No,” said Zoktavir. “And no.” He looked at Polten with eyes as hard as steel, and the old officer could tell he wasn’t going to get any more information on that topic. He nodded. “Very well.”

He tried another angle of approach. “I was admiring your steamjack as I walked over here—that’s an old Laika, isn’t it?”

Zoktavir furrowed his brow. “How did you know her name?”

“Her name?” Polten stared at him in confusion for half a second before deducing the man’s thought process. “Laika is the name of a steamjack chassis, a . . . group of steamjacks, if you will, all using the same basic model. Your other is called an Arktus.”

Zoktavir paused a moment, as if analyzing this new piece of information. “That one is called Dimyuka, and I see you have one very similar to it.” He pointed down the field, where a squad of soldiers was drilling with a Kodiak—slightly larger than the Arktus, and far more sophisticated, but still quite similar. Polten had rarely seen such a keen eye for ‘jacks on a backwoods peasant. “Laika is the only ‘jack of this model I’ve ever seen,” said Zoktavir, in a voice that sounded hungry for more information. “Even here.”

“The Laika is an old design,” Polten said. “I don’t think I’ve seen one in working condition in at least ten, maybe fifteen years, and even that one was on its last legs.”

Zoktavir smiled, a toothy, terrifying expression that made him look like a hungry wolf. “She does break down a lot.”

“Do you mind telling me where you got her?”

“The ones you have in here are smarter.”

Polten blinked. “Excuse me?”

“The jacks here in your training yard,” said Zoktavir, gesturing at a nearby Juggernaut and a more heavily armored design called a Devastator, standing silently by the barracks gates where the guards on duty could use them in an emergency. “The jacks we passed in the city have bigger brains than Laika, but the ones in here have smarter brains.” He looked back at Polten. “They’re different, and more dangerous.”

Polten’s first thought was, How in Morrow’s name can he tell that? but his second thought came quickly enough to supersede it: This man is a warcaster.

That was the only way a man could tell what a ‘jack was thinking, as far as Polten knew, but there was simply no way this untrained yokel was a warcaster. Polten kept his face calm. “The models you see here in the training yard are military. They’re a little more sophisticated than the old models you’re accustomed to, designed with quicker reflexes and a more autonomous cortex.” He shot a glance at Harch, then looked back at Zoktavir. “You have a good eye for jacks.”

Zoktavir studied the warjacks for a moment, then turned back to Polten with a serious expression. “You’ve trained them well,” he said. “They won’t listen to me.”

Polten controlled his reaction, though inside he was reeling at the man’s tacit confession. The policeman was not so disciplined.

“Tears of mercy,” said Harch, “he’s a warcaster.”

Polten sighed. There was no harm in the outburst, he supposed, but he had hoped the younger officer would display more decorum. Polten ran through the list of tasks this stranger’s nature prompted: He would need to contact the Greylords, who would be interested in at least talking to Zoktavir, possibly recruiting him for official training. It would fall to Polten to keep him here until the Greylords arrived, and if the giant woodsman decided to leave, that detention could get ugly very quickly. He would have to think of ways to stall the man.

Polten was opening his mouth to send for a messenger when the woodsman spoke.

“I have come to join your army.”

Polten stopped short. “That’s . . . very good. I’ll call the Greylords.” He smiled. “I can’t fault any man for his love of Khador.”

“I have nothing left but Khador,” said Zoktavir. He brought his massive axe down from his shoulder as lightly as if it were a walking stick and planted the vicious mechanikal blade in the grass at his feet. “I have given my loyalty to many things, and Khador is the only one left to me. There is nothing more important than loyalty.”

Aleksei Badian’s voice cut through the room like a dagger. “There is nothing more important than loyalty. What we’re about to do, we do for each other, and for me who supports you, and for the bosses who support me. The kayazy are businessmen, and as their employees we are not crooks, and we are not sergeants. We are a team, bratya: brothers. Each one of you is a member of this team. When we get into a fight and the knives come out and blood starts to flow, you may think you’re the most important member of that team and try to save yourself, but you’re not. The guy next to you is. You try to save him. You watch his back. You help him do his job the best he possibly can, and you can do it because there’s another guy doing the same thing for you, and there’s another guy doing the same thing for him, and on and on and on until every last one of you is safe, and you’re not individuals anymore, you’re a team. You stay loyal to this bratya and we live; you betray your brothers, and I will see to it myself that you die. Do we understand each other?”

Six voices answered him, Orsus’ mingling strongly with the others. “Yes.”

“Do we trust each other?”

“Yes!” Except there were only five voices that time. Orsus and the others looked to the last man, Gendyarev Rabin, who shook his head sourly.

“I trust most of the team,” said Gendyarev, “but not him.” He pointed at Orsus. “Not the kid.”

“Gendy,” Aleksei said, “he’s twice your size.”

“He’s fourteen years old,” said Gendyarev. “Completely untested. Sure, he can beat any one of us in a wrestling match, but how do we know he’ll follow orders? How do we know he won’t get scared and run—or worse, get too cocky and screw the whole thing up? How do we know he won’t go talking about it tomorrow in the village?”

Isidor Lukashenko, a razor of a man, laughed snidely. “Is that any worse than you getting drunk last month and trying to impress that girl in the tavern? You told her two of our hits before we dragged you away.”

“I’ve proven my loyalty a hundred times,” said Gendyarev. “This kid’s done nothing but grow.”

“You were a first-timer once, too,” said Aleksei.

“I was eighteen!”

“What do you want me to do?” Orsus said, and his voice was strong enough—not loud, but powerful in the small back room—that the rest of the thugs grew quiet. “Aleksei’s given me my job, my food, everything I have in the world. You want me to prove myself, just say the word.” He fixed Gendyarev with his coldest stare. “I bet I’m willing to do a lot more than you are.”

“If willingness was all it took I wouldn’t doubt you,” said Gendyarev, “but we’re not just roughing up a warehouse watchman and knocking over a few bags of grain. Nazarov hired thugs of his own—he knows we’re after him, and he knows what it takes to beat us, and he’s ready. I’d rather go in one man short than with a man who doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“Do you trust me?” asked Aleksei.

Gendyarev nodded, though his voice lacked enthusiasm. “Of course I do.”

“Then stop arguing. The kid goes because I say he goes, and I wouldn’t send him if I didn’t trust him to back you up. So either you’re okay with the kid, or you’re not as okay with me as you say you are.”

Aleksei left the words hanging in the air, letting the full implication sink in. After a long pause, Gendyarev threw up his hands.

“I’m okay with the kid.” He shot Orsus a fierce glance. “Don’t let us down.”

“I won’t,” Orsus growled.

Aleksei seemed satisfied, and the group did a final check of their gear. Orsus was armed with a long slim dagger, perfect for quiet kills, but the plan Aleksei had laid out seemed more likely to result in a full-on brawl than a quiet assassination. He wished he had a club, or better yet the thick long-handled axe he used on Aleksei’s logging crew, but if a dagger was all he had, he’d fight with a dagger. It wouldn’t be the first time, no matter what Gendyarev said.

The group was dressed in black and brown, and when they slipped out the back door into the midnight alley they blended almost seamlessly with the darkness. Orsus was the only one not wearing a beard and mustache, and his face shone white in the moonlight until he pulled his hood down low over his eyes and followed the others in silence.

Aleksei’s operation was based in the village of Suvorin, Orsus’ home. From there he controlled the entire valley and as much of the forest around it as one man feasibly could. Tonight, they would strike in the valley’s largest village, a riverside shipping hub called Telk—not as big as the towns some travelers spoke of, far away in the heart of the kingdom, but here in the northern forests it was the biggest thing around. Aleksei’s informers had let him know that Fanin Nazarov, the Telk shipping master—so called because he owned the town’s one and only warehouse—was skimming the profits before passing them along to Aleksei. Aleksei had approached him to discuss the matter, and Nazarov had turned him out with armed thugs. It was the biggest threat to Aleksei’s control in nearly ten years, and he was answering it in kind. No one in that warehouse would survive the night.

Orsus said a silent prayer to Menoth that he would not disprove Aleksei’s faith in him.

Nazarov knew they were coming, like Gendyarev had said, so the group split in half before closing in on the warehouse: Isidor, the cragfaced Khirig, and a one-eyed man named Tselikovsky turned left down another dark alley, while Orsus went with Aleksei, Gendyarev, and the one called Emin. Emin led the way, keeping watch with eyes and ears honed by years of hunting in the deep woods. If Nazarov decided to try a preemptive strike, Emin would know almost as soon as Nazarov did.

Aleksei’s group circled around the village a bit, to throw off any pursuers and give Isidor’s group a chance to get in place. When the prearranged time arrived, Aleksei signaled to Emin, and the hunter led them to the wide loading yard in front of the warehouse, where they paused in the darkness to survey the scene.

“No guards,” said Gendyarev.

“They’re inside,” Emin said, “watching through the slats in the windows. He knows we could take out a single guard before help could get out to him, so he pulled them all in for safety.” He looked at Aleksei. “He’s scared.”

“He’s an idiot,” said Aleksei. “He knows we’re coming and he knows where we’re coming from—the windows facing the loading yard should be filled with gunners. Draw us out with a lone guard by the door and murder us with a volley from behind.”

Orsus silently resolved never to let Aleksei place him on guard duty.

“It’s all the same in the end,” said Gendyarev, “and better for us to have them all inside anyway.”

“There’s something in there,” Orsus said, peering closely at the wide closed door.

“Of course,” Gendyarev snorted, “that’s what we’ve just been talking about.”

“But I mean . . .” He couldn’t explain it, and thus didn’t say anything more, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something inside was . . . waiting for him.

“Are we going to call out?” asked Emin.

Aleksei shook his head. “I’ve tried talking, and Nazarov wasn’t interested. I’ll let Isidor announce our presence.”

They waited, and sure enough, Orsus saw a flash of orange in the sky behind the warehouse. An arrow soaked in pitch and lit with a burning brand. Emin crouched low and readied his rifle.

“Get ready,” Aleksei said softly, drawing his two long daggers. “The fun starts . . . now!”

The man-sized door on the front of the warehouse flew open and Emin fired in almost the same breath. A shadowed figure dropped to the ground with a cry, and another man dragged him back in while Emin reloaded. The orange glow behind the warehouse grew larger and brighter. There was only a small back door, and Isidor’s group could watch it easily: one man to light the arrows, one man to shoot them, and one to kill anyone who tried to escape. The only other exit was here, both a small office door and two-story loading door for the warehouse. It was their only escape, and because the yard fronted the river it was their only means of putting out the fire. Nazarov had to do both if he wanted his rebellion to mean anything.

Aleksei cackled viciously.

The door opened again, and again Emin fired into the blackness, but there was nobody there; a heartbeat later an armed dockworker stepped into the doorway, raising his rifle and thinking he was clever, only to die when Gendyarev dropped him with a deafening blast from his blunderbuss. Aleksei laughed again while his men reloaded.

Orsus heard a sound in the alley behind them. He turned to see a pair of black-clad footpads creeping toward them in the darkness.

“Looks like Nazarov’s not as stupid as we thought,” said Gendyarev, opening the breach of his rifle and sliding in a powder cartridge.

“Keep your eyes on that door,” said Aleksei. “Orsus, why don’t you show us why I brought you along?”

Orsus stood tall in the narrow alley, nearly filling it from side to side, and sized up the two footpads. One wore a hood, the other a tattered brown headband, but beyond that they were identical—dirty leather clothes, thin leather boots, and short glittering daggers. No one in the north would dress like that, Orsus knew; they were probably river men, hired off the last barge. Orsus crouched a bit, lowering his center of gravity, and held his dagger loosely in front of him.

Headband moved first, feinting left and then plunging right, hoping for a quick first blood, but Orsus anticipated and kept his guard up, slashing and forcing the man to keep his distance. Hood dashed in quickly behind him, leaping to the left and stabbing ferociously at Orsus’ unprotected arm. Orsus let this attack go by, practically flattening himself against the right-side wall as if he didn’t care about protecting his friends at all, and Hood took the bait, overextending his thrust at a new target of opportunity and unbalancing himself in the process. Orsus reversed his sidestep, smashing his fist into the teetering footpad’s arm, dropping him to the ground and planting his giant northman’s boot on the man’s dagger hand. Headband pressed his attack while Hood screamed in pain, but Orsus’ reach was longer and his arms much faster than his size suggested. A few slashes later and Headband was backing away, clutching his face and cursing. Orsus paused to smash his free foot into Hood’s screaming face, then leaped a few steps forward to slam the other footpad’s head into the brick wall. The entire fight had taken just a few short seconds.

Emin and Gendyarev fired almost simultaneously; Orsus whipped around to see the warehouse’s giant loading doors burst open in a hail of splinters as something enormous charged through it without even bothering to open it. Orsus had just enough time to register something tall, vaguely man-shaped, and glistening like oily metal before Nazarov’s full mob of brigands swarmed out behind it and into the yard. Aleksei screamed a battle cry, and the four thugs charged into the fray.

Nazarov had ten men, by Orsus’ quick count, and a full six of them ran straight to the river with buckets while the other four pressed the attack alongside the giant metal monster. Orsus had never seen a steamjack in real life, though he’d heard plenty of stories: self-propelled machines with the strength of a hundred men, powered by a red-hot furnace where a heart should be. Nazarov probably used this one as a massive longshoreman, but its obvious combat applications sent a thrill down Orsus’ spine, even though it was in enemy hands. He felt an instant attachment to it, almost a kinship, that he couldn’t explain.

The towering metal monster lurched forward, reaching out with a giant hand to knock Gendyarev away from the man he was fighting with. Gendy managed to scramble away, but only because Aleksei fought back his human pursuer. Gendyarev was bleeding freely from his forehead, and he clutched his arm in pain as he staggered to his feet. Orsus rushed the steamjack with a roar, confident that he could have some kind of effect against it, but it was as solid as a rooted tree. Emin screamed a warning, and Orsus rolled away just in time to dodge another of the steamjack’s massive iron fists.

“Stop the bucket brigade!” shouted Aleksei, pointing with one dagger while plunging the second into a brawler’s neck. Orsus looked at the line of dockworkers gathering water in the river, then back at the steamjack. “Forget the jack,” Aleksei screamed, “stop the water!”

Orsus growled but looked toward the fire. With the door gone he could see deep into the cavernous warehouse. The back wall was only faintly ablaze—Isidor’s arrows hadn’t proved as effective as they’d anticipated. Nazarov’s men would have no trouble putting out the fire, and then the battle would become even more one-sided. Their only hope of success was to stop the buckets now and let the fire grow out of control; they might defeat the enemy when they broke ranks to extinguish it or flee. Orsus knew this, and yet . . .

The steamjack managed to grab Emin with one of its arms and raise him, screaming, into the air. It clamped down on his flailing leg with its other arm and tore the limb off almost casually, shocking even Nazarov’s thugs into a moment of silence. Orsus seemed to feel it—the tearing tension as the body came apart in his hands—and took a step toward the jack in a stupor of awe and confusion.

“The water!” Aleksei screamed. “Go!”

Orsus turned with a growl of frustration and launched himself toward the bucket brigade. Three dockworkers had already run back into the warehouse, a bucket of water in each hand, but the other three were still on the dock. One of those set down his bucket and turned on Orsus, drawing a hunting knife to defend his comrades, but Orsus lowered his head and barreled into him, taking the knife on the solid bone of his forearm. The wicked blade sliced a wide flap of skin but did no real damage, and Orsus simply kept running, crushing the man’s windpipe with his other fist before pushing him backward off the edge of the dock. The other two water-carriers were crouching down and facing the wrong direction, so he finished them even more easily, cracking their heads against each other before shoving their limp bodies into the river. At the same instant he staggered, the image of a different battle than the one he was fighting imposing itself upon him. The sudden change of perspective made him dizzy. He gripped the edge of the dock for support, but the feeling was gone almost as soon as it came.

The battle behind him had become a nightmare. With Emin lying broken on the ground, it was all Gendy and Aleksei could do to dodge the steamjack’s bone-crushing hands and the vicious, slashing daggers of the thugs swarming around its feet. It reminded Orsus of his sudden flash of vertigo, as if he’d seen that same fight just seconds ago, but from the lofty perspective of the ‘jack. He struggled to understand what was going on, but he didn’t have time to puzzle through it. The three other water-carriers returned with empty buckets, and when they saw Orsus they fanned out to surround him. Nazarov was among them, smiling grimly. Aleksei’s group was outnumbered, and even if the warehouse burned to the ground it wouldn’t hurt them one bit: Nazarov would simply kill Aleksei and step into his place as the new kayazy boss, backed up not just by cutthroats but also by an unstoppable metal demon. Orsus watched it fight as his human antagonists circled him warily; it was huge, and surprisingly fast for its size, but there was something off. Its reactions were late—not just slow, but late. Aleksei would dodge to the side, and a moment later the steamjack would follow. The same agile speed, just . . . late, as if the jack were reacting a full second after its targets.

Or it was reacting to something else altogether.

Nazarov gestured at the dagger in Orsus’ bloody hand. “You look like you know how to use that knife,” he said, then spread his arms to reveal a pistol shoved into his waistband. “But you know what they say about bringing a knife to a gunfight.”

Orsus nodded at the weapon. “How fast can you draw that gun?”

“One second,” Nazarov said. “Shoot you through the face in two.”

“Then it sounds like I have two seconds’ worth of knife fight before that gun becomes an issue.”

He bolted forward and Nazarov dropped his buckets, reaching for the pistol. Orsus ducked low under the first man’s clumsy attack, sweeping the knife across his belly; the man staggered back, trying to hold in his guts while Orsus moved to the second man, slicing his arm, his chest, and his face in a frenzied blur of steel. The attacker howled, clutching his bleeding eye, and Orsus whipped his knife into Nazarov’s heart in the exact moment the man fired his gun. His aim was high and wild, thanks to the ten inches of glistening steel piercing all the way through his chest and out his back.

“Two seconds,” said Orsus. “Knife wins.”

Aleksei screamed, and Orsus looked across the yard to see him down on the ground, a knife in his leg, the steamjack crushing Gendyarev to a pulp in its giant iron fist. The other fighters had all gone down, torn to ribbons by Aleksei’s legendary skill with a dagger, but that skill wasn’t going to save him from the two-ton monstrosity already turning toward him.

A flash of movement caught Orsus’ eye, high over Aleksei’s shoulder, and Orsus glanced up to see another man crouched in a window, peering out from the darkness with his hands raised in full view of the jack. The mysterious man held his hand up straight, palm forward, and a moment later the steamjack dropped Gendyarev’s mangled body. The man punched his fist forward, and a moment later the steamjack lumbered forward, advancing on Aleksei with ground-shaking force.

In a single blinding instant, Orsus knew what was happening. Nazarov had set a trap, exactly as Aleksei had mocked him for not doing, but he’d filled the windows with something far more devastating than gunmen: the steamjack’s controller. Poised in that window he could see the entire battlefield, and the ‘jack could see him, easily watching and obeying hand signals that told it what to do.

The jack stomped toward Aleksei. Orsus had mere seconds to act. He shoved Nazarov’s body aside, ready to dash toward the battle, but in a flash he was inside the machine’s head again, seeing through its eyes, feeling the titanic strength of its steam-driven pistons and gears. He reached toward Aleksei with a crushing metal hand . . .

. . . and stopped. Orsus told it to stop, and it did. He blinked in surprise, suddenly back on the ground, staring up instead of down, and dropped to his knees as the vertigo washed over him. High in the window, the jack marshal gestured frantically and called out, but the steamjack refused to obey. Without knowing how he knew it, Orsus was sure the thing was waiting patiently for its next command . . . from him.

Aleksei opened one eye, peering up from where he cringed on the ground, and looked at the steamjack standing over him. “What happened?”

Orsus swallowed, still getting his bearings. “There was a man in an upper window controlling the jack.” He rose unsteadily to his feet. “He’s . . . not anymore.”

Aleksei grimaced, surveying the carnage in the loading yard. Gendyarev groaned, somehow still alive despite his injuries. The rest of the yard was a bloodbath. “What, did he see how badly he was losing and decide to join our side?”

“No,” said Orsus, walking slowly toward him. “The jack did.”

“What?”

“I don’t understand it either.” He placed a reverent hand on the jack’s leg, then glanced up at the window. “He’s gone.”

Aleksei pulled the dagger from his leg with a grunt and flipped it toward Orsus with more nonchalance than he could possibly be feeling. “Find him and kill him. I don’t want any of these traitors to survive the night.”

Orsus caught the dagger but shook his head. “We need him alive. He needs to teach us how to control this . . .” He looked at the nameplate etched into the jack’s leg.” . . . Laika.”

Aleksei laughed, though it quickly turned to a growl of pain as he tried to put weight on his wounded leg. “Orsus, you may have just turned this horrifying defeat into our greatest success in years. I think you’re going to have a long, happy future in this organization.”

“Thank you,” said Orsus. “I think about the future a lot.”

Lola pulled another giant shirt from the pile of wet laundry, stretching it out like a sail as she pinned it on the clothesline. “Orsus,” she said, “do you ever think about the future?”

Orsus looked up from the side of the wide wooden washtub. “I certainly never think about the past,” he said, scrubbing another shirt vigorously against the washboard. It was kind of her to help him, the village orphan, with his laundry, but he’d been doing it on his own for five years, ever since his family . . . well, that was part of the past he didn’t like to think about. He looked up at Lola. Her hair was tied back to keep it clear of the wet laundry but was still ringed with summer flowers and framed her face in a red-gold halo. He smiled as he couldn’t help but do every time he saw her, and she smiled back shyly. “The present’s pretty great, though,” he said, then made a look of mock consternation. “Unless you mean that in the future you might do my laundry for me, instead of just hanging it while I do all the real work?”

She threw a damp sock in his face, laughing at the loud wet slap it made against his eyes, and he laughed with her, more peaceful and carefree than he’d felt in . . . ever, really. His life before Lola had been a cold grey trudge through a world all too eager to kill him; it hadn’t been a life at all, really, just a lack of death. But the six months since he’d met her, and the two months since they’d been officially courting, had opened his eyes to a kind of happiness he’d never known existed. It was more than just not being alone. Lola wasn’t a friend or a fellow worker or a member of Aleksei’s crew, she was a part of him. Finding her had been like finding his second half.

The thought that any part of him, even by association, could be so soft and kind and loving had changed the way he thought about the entire world.

Lola lifted the limp sock from his face with a laugh, then plucked the scrubbed shirt from his hands and unfurled it with a flourish. “I could never wash this much shirt in one go,” she said. “It’s like a giant flannel blanket. You could keep a whole family warm with this thing—two kids at least, maybe three if they’re small.”

“Is that how many you want?” The words were out of his mouth almost before he knew what he was saying, but only because he’d been thinking them for weeks—for months, if he was being honest. He’d never wanted a family before, but with Lola? He wanted everything he’d never dreamed.

Lola stared at him, shocked by the hint of marriage, but he’d come to know her eyes as well as he’d ever known anything, and the light shining forth from them now told him she was thrilled at the idea. Another smile crept into the corners of his mouth, but at the same time her smile faded. She turned away to face the clothesline, hanging the shirt silently with slim wooden clothespins.

“What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer, softly fingering the hem of his hanging shirt, and just when the silence had stretched too long and he opened his mouth to ask again, she yanked the shirt down from the clothesline and brought it back to the washtub.

“It isn’t finished yet.”

Orsus wasn’t sure how to interpret her sudden change in behavior or what his shirt had to do with it, but he took the garment gently from her hands. “I scrubbed this one for nearly five minutes.”

Her voice was impassive. “There’s blood on the hem.”

“I worked on that spot for most of the five minutes.” He searched it out on the wet garment. “It won’t come out—”

“You’re a killer,” she said, and her impassive voice cracked just a fraction on the last cold word. She looked at him, and he at her, not knowing how to answer, until at last she pulled away and went back to the basket of clothes, fumbling for the next piece of wet laundry with fingers too shaky to work.

“I do jobs sometimes for Aleksei,” he said, “but it’s not like I’m a murderer.”

“Don’t think I haven’t thought about a life with you,” Lola said, “because I have.” She turned to face him, tears tracing tiny rivulets along her cheeks. The beauty and sadness of it broke his heart in two. “You’re a good man, Orsus, and a hard worker. You make me laugh, and you’ve even made me dinner.” She laughed at the memory, but with it came another glistening tear. She cleared her throat and breathed deep, adopting a firm, almost businesslike tone. “You’d be a fine husband, and a good father, and Id share my life with you and wash your giant shirts and do everything I could to make you happy, but then . . .” She shook her head. “Then Aleksei would call, and you’d go off in the night, and Id sit at home alone wondering if you were ever coming back, and how long it might take, and how many new splashes of blood would be on your shirt when you did.”

“You don’t have to worry about me, I know how to handle—”

“I tell you you’re a killer, and the only thing you can say in defense is that you’re good at it?”

The words were a slap in the face. Orsus fell silent.

“I’ve thought about this a lot,” she said softly, “and I guess I thought if I kept putting it off then this day would never come. I don’t want to be the shrew who gnaws your soul to pieces, and I don’t want to make you into something you’re not.” She put a hand on his chin, the way she always did, so soft and delicate, and his skin seemed to burn at the touch. “If it’s going to be the two of us then I want it to really be the two of us—not one controlling the other, but two souls joined.” She sniffed back tears and took another breath. “But this is too much, Orsus. Life and death. Love and murder. That can’t be a part of who I am.”

Orsus looked at his hands, too uncomfortable to look at her directly. He’d never wanted violence to be a part of his life, either; then one hellish night in a bloody Tharn raid had changed that course forever . . . but no. Even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t true. He’d always been a fighter, wrestling with the neighbor kids, hunting with his father, even cutting trees with Aleksei’s logging crew was another way of breaking things down, of forcing them to fit, of using his strength against the world. The nighttime jobs with Aleksei weren’t beautiful or honorable, and he knew that, but he was good at them, better than he’d ever been at anything—better than anyone, he thought, and that was saying something.

He looked at Lola helplessly. “It’s what I know.”

“You know many things.”

“It’s what I’m good at.”

“I told you, I don’t want to hear how good—”

“I know you don’t want to hear it,” he said, more loudly than he intended. He hoped she could hear that his voice held more pain than anger. “I know you don’t want to hear how good I am at fighting, but that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying I’m not any good at anything else. Do you understand me? I’ve tried other jobs: cargo, ‘smithing, everything this village has to offer, but I’m not . . .” He struggled to find the right words. “I’m not a steamjack. I’m more than just giant arms under giant shirts, but that’s the only option I have here.”

“We could leave.”

“And go where? Every village is the same. Every job is the same. Even logging is just moving heavy things—an axe, a tree, a branch, a stump. My work with Aleksei is . . . I don’t know how to describe this. It’s like a song, with all the words and notes in their right, perfect place.”

She frowned, confused, and he racked his brain for some way he could describe it to her.

“It’s like the puzzle box I bought you for Giving Day—all the little wooden pieces so perfectly interlocked. It’s not the punches or the stabs or the physical . . . anything, it’s mind against mind. Plan against plan. Pitting your wits against another human being. Making that happen, and seeing that through, it’s not about destruction at all. It’s the most wonderful act of creation you’ve ever seen.”

Her voice was bitter. “So you’re just too brilliant not to kill people?”

“That’s not what I’m saying.”

“You’re saying that a big man in a tiny village gets stuck with all the grunt work the oxen can’t be bothered with, and I understand that and I’m sorry, but you’re not the kind of person who has to sacrifice other people’s lives just to get a thrill from his job. You don’t have to kill to be happy.”

“It’s not about the killing—”

“But killing happens anyway, right?” Her eyes seemed to burn with indignation. “No matter how careful your plans and how intricate your puzzle box, something goes wrong and you have to kill to stay alive. Maybe not every time but every third time, every fifth, every hundredth—and it’s still too many. Even when you don’t kill anybody, you hurt them or break their things or ruin their lives. You’re good at it because you’re good at everything, Orsus, but it’s not who you are, and it’s not who I love.”

The words rocked him back on his heels. All the times he’d dreamed of saying it, of hearing it, and this was how it happened—in a fight, locked in conflict, sobbed in hopeless desperation. It couldn’t happen that way; he wouldn’t let it. He would not rob the woman he cared about—the woman he loved—of the beauty this moment was supposed to have.

He rose to his feet. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

He reached her in a single stride, sweeping her up with his arms and lifting her into a kiss, perfect and passionate and glorious. He wanted to hold her forever, to melt into her body, to taste her soft, supple lips for the rest of his life. She held him tight and kissed him back, and he realized that he would do anything for this woman. That he would give up anything. Become anything.

“I love you,” he said again.

“I love you, too,” she murmured.

“I want to marry you, and have three children—four, if they’re small, but they won’t be because their father’s a talking bear.”

She laughed, her tears now tears of joy.

“And I’ll stop working for Aleksei,” he said more softly, though his voice crackled with intensity. “I’ll give it all up—I’ll tell him today if you want me to. I’ll tell him right now. No more killing, no more fighting, no more violence, because you’re right about me and that’s not who I am.”

“You could be a carver,” she said.

“What?”

“A wood-carver. With a shop in village, making puzzle boxes for Giving Day and the other festivals.”

He smiled. “All those perfect pieces, in just the right spots. It would take a long time to earn the money to get started.”

“What’s time to us?” she said. “It’ll take us that long just to finish washing your gigantic shirts.”

He kissed her again.

“Will Aleksei let you stay on the logging crew?”

“I think so,” he said. “I hope so. He’s all about loyalty.”

A slight frown passed over Lola’s face, the smallest hint of worry, the tiniest shadow of despair.

And then it was gone.

“Ride!” Orsus shouted, spurring his warhorse forward. “Ride ‘til your horse dies under you, and pray that we’re not too late!” Behind them a vast army of Khadoran horsemen thundered through the valley, their horses hot and lathered, their weathered uniforms never touching their saddles as they stood in their stirrups and urged their mounts. Kommander Orsus Zoktavir had heard word of a Cygnaran-hired mercenary force attacking in southern Umbresk, and nothing would stand in his way. The other battalions of the Fifth Border Legion had been led astray by a decoy force, and now he would have to ride all night to reach the threatened towns in time. The infantry and warjacks couldn’t keep pace and were following separately, hauled by wagons, but Orsus couldn’t afford to wait. More than one horse, and even a handful of riders, would fall by the wayside before the desperate ride had finished.

Valleys opened and closed as they passed; farms drifted by in the darkness. Orsus drove his army, always faster, harder, and more fiercely, propelled by a single-minded madness. He would not arrive too late. He would not let innocents be slaughtered. Lola clanged against his back as he rode, a reassuring presence and a damning, overburdening weight. He would not let his charges be killed.

Not again.

They smelled the smoke before they saw the fires, a dark pall keeping the brighter flames hidden until the army raced around the last corner, storming through the final valley like the host of Menoth’s judgment. The Cygnaran incursion force, mostly composed of mercenaries, stood in the vast plain beyond the ruined village, camped for the night near the sizable Umbrean town of Vlasgrad but alerted to Orsus’ approach by their scouts and already prepared for battle.

Towering warjacks stood arrayed among the troops, faintly illuminated by torchlight; hundreds of soldiers moved restlessly at their feet, a formless, shifting mass in the dark. Orsus scanned them quickly, almost subconsciously, cataloging their numbers and formations as he rode to the burning town. Homes and shops burned madly in the predawn, the great church of Morrow in the center of the village square now nothing but a crumbling, shattered mass. Adults screamed hoarsely for water, for bandages; children ran in terror from the destruction of everything they had ever known and loved.

Orsus reined his horse sharply to a stop and leaped down to the dirt, charging madly into a flaming cottage where a faint cry sounded from the wreckage. He shoved the burning timbers aside, heedless of the heat even as it singed and curled the edges of his cloak. The voice called out again, and he surged forward through the blaze. Three women lay screaming in a flameless corner, choking on smoke and too weak to escape. As Orsus approached them, a rafter crashed down in his path with a burst of cinders.

“Lola!”

He pulled the heavy axe from his back and attacked the rafter recklessly, sweeping it aside with a roar. The women reappeared before him, but with each heavy step the world flickered, the air wavering in the heat, the image twisting and revolving. Step. Three women. Step. Two women. Step.

One woman.

Always one woman.

“Lola!”

“Why weren’t you here?” Her voice was weak and faltering in the furnace heat, the summer flowers wilting in her hair. “Why weren’t you here to save me?”

“I came as fast as I could. Let me take you—”

“I am already dead, Orsus.”

“Then leave me in peace!”

“You should never have left me, Orsus. You betrayed me.”

“I will save you!”

He gathered her up, her body light and fragile as it always was, every time, again and again. He brought her through the flames, through the heat and smoke and Urcaen itself, but when he laid her down upon the cold dark road it was not Lola but another face, three faces, soot-smudged and retching but alive.

Never Lola.

Again and again and again, but he never saved Lola.

Kovnik Bogdan dismounted next to him. “Well done, sir. You’ve saved them.”

“She is dead.”

“The village burns, but those who lived here are alive, Kommander. Our scouts have already circled the perimeter, and I’ve spoken with the mayor myself. The mercenary forces pulled back when they heard of our coming. They’re ready for us, but we’ve saved hundreds of our people.”

“She is dead, and we will have our revenge. Tell the men to form ranks.”

“One villager is not the end—”

Orsus grabbed the man’s collar with his iron-studded glove, lifting him. “One villager is everything, Kovnik! One villager is the kingdom.” He threw Bogdan to the ground. “Tell the men to form ranks. We do not wait for dawn.”

Bogdan choked and gasped for air. “The horses are too ragged, Kommander. They will die before we reach the enemy!”

“Then we will fight on foot,” said Orsus, his face a flashing horror in the firelight, “and when our feet give way we will fight upon our knees, and when our knees are bloody stumps we will crawl to the enemy and we will kill them with our teeth.”

“But why, sir?”

“Because she is dead. Someone must be punished.”

The kovnik staggered to his feet and shouted the command. The flagging forces took up the cry and stumbled into formation. Spears were uncovered, swords were unsheathed, guns were primed and loaded. Orsus strode to the edge of the village, Lola in hand, and when the fires rose up behind him his shadow fell dark and boundless upon the enemy.

“I have come for your lives!” he roared. And they will never be enough.

He did not wait for his army. Gripping Lola tightly, he bellowed a challenge and charged the foe alone, a Kodiak and a Marauder following close behind their master. Bullets ripped past him, against him, through him, but still he hit their lines like an artillery shell, scattering broken soldiers with each swing of his giant axe. The Marauder pounded a mercenary Nomad into scrap; the Kodiak met a charge of Steelhead cavalry, picking up the leader and throwing him back into their midst, horse and all. The Khadoran soldiers were shouting now, following their kommander, but Orsus ignored them; they would live or die on their own strength. It was time now for the only thing he’d ever been good at.

“That’s not true,” said Lola.

He screamed again to drown her out, and wrought the work of death upon his enemy.

By dawn the foe was scattered, broken, and dying on the field. There were stragglers to put down, and the men needed food and rest, but then . . .

“Are the horses ready, Kovnik?”

Bogdan shook his head, too exhausted to speak. “Have them saddled, then. We ride again at midday.” Maybe this time we’ll save her.

“Molonochnaya,” said Orsus.

Aleksei nodded.

“You’re breaking equipment only? No broken legs, no injuries, no death?”

“None.”

Orsus glowered at the tavern floor. “A shop is expensive,” he said at last. “You spoke of a bonus.”

“One month’s pay.”

“You will give me two.” He stared Aleksei down, brooking no argument. Aleksei paused, then nodded. “Two.” A cold grin broke across his face. “Good to have you back.”

PART THREE

“The fortress is called Boarsgate,” said the newly minted Kommandant Frolova. “Ordic forces have held it for decades, but I am proud to say they have gone no further—this village, called Deshevek, is practically in Boarsgate’s shadow, but it has always remained devoutly Khadoran.” His voice, already cold, grew icy. “Until now.”

Kommander Orsus Zoktavir scowled at the map. “They’ve taken it?”

“I have received a report from spies in the village,” Frolova said. “It’s a vague report, with little to confirm it, but in this particular case I consider it worthy of our attention. Deshevek is not a village I am prepared to lose.” Orsus turned toward the door. “I will root them out.”

Frolova frowned. “You don’t stand much on ceremony, do you, Zoktavir?”

Orsus looked back. “You wouldn’t tell me of spies if you didn’t want them dead. Our village is in danger, so I’m going to defend it. Or were you going to order me to do something other than serve the kingdom and kill her enemies?”

“The kingdom is served by more than death,” Frolova said. “If that were all she wanted, perhaps you would be the kommandant and I the kommander.” He paused, letting the restatement of their ranks speak for itself. If Orsus were a common soldier he’d be court-martialed for a comment like that, perhaps whipped, but he was a warcaster, one of the greatest weapons in the kingdom’s arsenal. He served Khador, just as he claimed, and he killed their enemies more effectively—more gleefully—than any other soldier under Frolova’s command. But his attitude was dangerous—not because he was insubordinate but because he didn’t think. He saw problems and killed them, even when other solutions might be better. Someday he would go too far, ignore too many regulations, and the results would be disastrous. Frolova would need to consider a more proper form of reining him in, but there was no time now. This matter must be resolved.

“The village is worthy of our attention because there is talk of secession,” Frolova said.

Orsus looked up sharply. “Khadoran turncoats,” he said, chewing on the words as if he wanted to grind them into dust. Again, he moved toward the door. “They will be brought to justice.”

“Only as a secondary objective,” Frolova said. “My spies in the area are working to find their counterparts with more subtlety than you could bring to bear. I do not send you there for subtlety, Kommander Zoktavir, but to put the fear of Menoth deep in their hearts. They must see the might of Khador’s armies. Remind them of their loyalty to the true source of their protection. These spies—these dissidents—must gain no ground among our people.”

“They will find Khador more resilient than they expect,” Orsus said.

“Be sure that they do. The kingdom is strong, but there are whispers of weakness—not among the faithful, certainly, but the outlying regions hear only rumors, often exaggerated through multiple tellings. The queen is young, and so the story emerges that she is too young; her advisors counsel her faithfully, and so the story emerges that they move her like a pawn. Show her power in the land, and these rumors will be quelled.”

Orsus’ eyes blazed with indignation. “Have you considered that these turncoats are planning more than secession?”

Frolova frowned. “I talk of turncoats, and you see a revolution.”

“You talk of traitors,” Orsus said, “and where there are a few traitors, there are always more. Disloyalty spreads like a plague.” He put his hand on the door. “I will find those responsible.”

“See that you do. Dismissed.”

Kommander Zoktavir turned and left, taking up his axe as he pushed his massive frame into the hallway beyond.

“You’re giving an axe to a steamjack,” said Lola. Her eyes twinkled with mischief.

Orsus shot her a bemused glance, shaking his head wearily as he drove the wagon along the forest road. “Don’t say it.”

“A lumber axe for a jack,” she said airily, casting her eyes at the lofty branches above them. “A jack that will chop lumber. What could we call such a thing?”

“Don’t say it,” Orsus said, “or I will be forced to get physical with you.”

Lola batted her eyelashes. “Is that a threat or a promise?”

“The entire logging crew was there when I proposed the idea to Aleksei,” Orsus said. “We’re not talking about men with especially large imaginations. I have heard the same joke approximately four thousand times in the past month alone. I don’t need to hear it from you.”

“So you’re saying I have the poor imagination of a man on a logging crew?” Lola wrinkled her lips in mock indignation. “I should make the joke just to punish you for that.”

“Don’t worry,” he said solemnly, “you’re a better kisser than almost all of them.”

“Almost?”

Orsus laughed and ducked his head as she punched him in the shoulder. He’d made her crack first. She punched him again, giggling almost as madly as he, before settling back into the wagon’s front bench and leaning against him. He watched the forest roll by, scanning every shadow for wolves or bandits or other dangers.

After a long silence, waiting for her to speak, he laughed. “Well at least say it. I know you want to.”

“Say what?”

“The joke,” he said. “You’re dying to say it, so just get it out.”

Lola furrowed her brow. “What joke?”

“The lumberjack!” Orsus cried. “You’ve been dying to call Laika a lumberjack, so just—” He stopped short at her laughter, then rolled his eyes when he realized shed taken the joke one step further by tricking him into being the one who said it. “I can’t believe I fell for that.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said sweetly. “You work on a logging crew, after all—you don’t exactly have a large imagination.”

He shook his head, and she laughed again, putting her arms around his shoulders—as far around them as she could, at least—and squeezing him happily. “I love you, Orsus Zoktavir.”

“I love you, future Lola Zoktavir.”

“Just one more month,” she said. She rested her head against his arm. “Thanks for bringing me on this trip. I needed the break.”

“It’s not much of a break,” Orsus said, “just an errand.” They had found an axe deep in the forest, clutched in the hands of a battered warjack so ancient it made Laika look new. It had identified the logging crew as enemies and refused to submit to Orsus’ control—whether through damage to its cortex or something more—and so Orsus had been forced to put it down with an axe of his own. The ‘jack itself was beyond salvage, but its axe needed only minor repair and looked like the perfect size for Laika. Aleksei had commissioned the repair from a mechanik in Hedrinya, a mining town not far from the valley, and now that the job was done he’d assigned Orsus to retrieve it. Orsus had asked Lola to come along as company. Any day he got to spend with her—and only her—was a day to be treasured.

“My mother wants crocuses,” she said. “I keep telling her that it’s chamomile or nothing.” She sighed. “I think she’s ready to call my bluff and insist on nothing.”

“She doesn’t like chamomile?”

“She says they’re too plain for a wedding.”

“I say she’s too plain for a wedding.”

“She’s my mother, Orsus.”

“Which means we’ll see plenty of her before and after.” He shifted the reins in his hands and shrugged. “Same with everybody else, really. All we need for the wedding, technically speaking, is you and me and a priest.”

“Don’t even say it.” She buried her face in his shoulder. Her voice was muffled. “It’s far too tempting, and my mother would kill me.”

“Better not, then,” he said with a grin. “I can protect you from a lot of things, but she frightens me.”

She pulled back and scowled at him, but broke into laughter almost immediately. “Stay on her good side as long as you can,” she warned. “She’s a much better cook than I am.”

“I’ve been cooking my own meals since I was ten,” said Orsus. “I think I’ve got that covered. Which do you like better: cracked wheat gruel or cracked wheat gruel with lumps?”

“Real food is going to amaze you,” she said. “Even mine.” She leaned on him again, watching the forest creep by as their horse pulled them. When she spoke again, her voice was soft and sad. “I’m sorry your parents can’t be there. They’d be very proud of you.”

“Not as proud as they’d be if I’d saved them.”

Lola sat up straighter. “Is that . . .?” She frowned. “Are you still blaming yourself for their deaths?”

“Forget I said anything.”

“That’s what you say every time, Orsus, but we need to talk about this. Is that really how you think of them? Of yourself? You were ten years old.”

“I killed their killer. Obviously I wasn’t too young, I was just too late.”

“It was not your fault,” Lola said.

“I should have saved them.”

“You were ten years old! Can you even imagine the kind of bloodthirsty, paranoid, horrifying life a ten-year-old would have to lead to outdo a massacre by Tharn raiders? To outfight monsters who fight every day of their lives? I don’t think I would have liked that ten-year-old very much, and I certainly wouldn’t have fallen in love with whoever he’d grow up to be.”

“And what if they come for you?” Orsus said. “The Tharn aren’t gone. They raid through these valleys every year, and sooner or later they’re coming back to ours, and they’re going to hit our village, and I’m going to have a family again. I’m going to have you, and maybe a son or a daughter, maybe more. What do I do then? I want to protect you, Lola.”

“If that time comes, you’ll protect me,” she said. “I know that for a fact; I don’t even have to wonder. But I pray every day that that time never comes, and you . . .” Her voice cracked. “I don’t know if you do. Sometimes I think it’s all you ever think about.”

“I think about you.”

“You think about hurting things that hurt me.” Her voice was suddenly small and weak, like the sound of a mouse in vast, empty room. “That’s different.”

Orsus wanted to tell her she was wrong, but his eyes were already scanning the forest shadows again, his ears pricked up at a sound he’d heard off in the trees. “I’m not going to close my eyes,” he said evenly. “There’s a balance between living for violence and pretending it doesn’t exist.”

“Have you found it?”

“Probably not, but I think it’s a lot farther to one side than you seem to. I refuse to lose you, and if that means I have to be ready for certain . . . problems, then I’ll be ready for them. I don’t drag you into it, and you never have to know.”

“But you drag yourself into it. You drag yourself through it, like mud, and it breaks my heart to watch you do that to yourself.”

“Then I’ll . . .” He grunted in frustration. I’ll hide it better, he thought.

“You put yourself through agony over what happened to your family,” said Lola, “and you don’t have to. You don’t have to put yourself through agony over what might never happen to me. You’re a good man, Orsus—you have to deal with darkness sometimes, and maybe even with death, and I understand that.” She put her hand on his chin. “But you don’t have to wallow in it.”

They had reached the foothills now, and the road turned up the mountain toward Hedrinya. Orsus didn’t answer Lola because he didn’t know how; she saw the world as a bright, happy place where good people were rewarded for good deeds, and if you stayed away from the bad stuff it would stay away from you. That was a tempting view of the world, but it had never proven true in his experience. The bad stuff, the darkness and the death and the pain and the loss, they came for you whether you invited them or not. No matter how far away you tried to stay. Even the best intentions could go wrong.

He thought of his mother, cowering in the cellar, telling his sister to hush as they hid from the raiders, telling her to stop crying, to stop breathing. Limp limbs dangling like meat in a smokehouse.

“I love you,” said Lola. “I’m sorry we fought.”

“I love you, too,” said Orsus. But still he rode in silence.

The mechanik had a storefront built up against the mountainside and a shop within that cut deep back into the stone; boilers churned and whistled, big curls of smoke billowing out from chimneys on the cliff side high above. Orsus pulled the wagon to a halt and tied the horse at the post in front, offering him a splash of water in the trough before taking Lola gently by the waist and lifting her down to the ground. The valley stretched out before them like a deep-green blanket, vast swathes of pine forest covering wide, rolling hills, with the bright-blue line of the Neves River coiling through it like a ribbon. A wisp of wood smoke here and there was the only sign of the tiny villages nestled in the folds of the land.

A young boy covered with soot and eating an apple jumped up on the porch when they arrived, running inside with a shout. He returned to hold the door open, inviting them in with hands stained black from coal dust. “Yermo’s inside.”

Orsus nodded and offered Lola his arm as if they had just been announced at a royal ball. She took it with a smile, and they entered the workshop, Orsus ducking his head through the doorway.

They were greeted inside by a bronze-skinned man with singed eyebrows who shook Orsus’ hand enthusiastically, surprising him with the crushing strength of his grip. Orsus nodded. There were not many men who could impress him with their strength. “Yermolai Garin,” said the mechanik. “But you’ll forgive me—I thought I was repairing an axe for a steamjack.”

Orsus frowned. “You were. Was there a problem?”

“It’s not for you?”

Orsus glanced at Lola, embarrassed, hoping he wouldn’t have to explain something awkward. “Why would it be for me? I wouldn’t . . . commission a weapon.”

“Of course, of course,” said Yermo. “I apologize, I simply saw how big you are and wondered if maybe I’d heard wrong and the weapon was supposed to be for you. All is well! Come, come, I have it right back here.”

He led them deeper into the shop, and Orsus marveled at the odd combination of familiar and bizarre: blacksmith’s tools he had seen before, but some of the old man’s devices seemed downright arcane. Generators burned, buzzed, and crackled. One table was covered with thick sheaves of smudged paper, each page bearing an intricate pattern of lines, like the veins in a leaf. Thick metal rails crisscrossed the ceiling, and here and there a bundle of chains hung down to hold some part of a jack leg or torso. “A lumber axe for a steamjack,” Yermo said as he walked. “You could call it a lumberjack, no?”

Orsus groaned, and Lola giggled.

“I straightened the haft and replaced the blade,” said Yermo, “but the real work was the accumulator. You may have found this on a ruined warjack, as you say, but it was built for a warcaster.” He stopped by a wide metal cabinet and fumbled with a set of keys. “It’s an absolute shame to waste it on a warjack—someone with the skill to channel magic energy can use this axe to double his strength, at the very least, probably more. Ah, here’s the key I’m looking for. Isak, fetch a chain.”

He opened the cabinet to reveal a full rack of tools and weapons, but it was obvious which one Orsus had come for. The soot-stained boy ran up with a chain to help carry the giant weapon, dragging it along one of the ceiling rails, but Orsus simply grasped the axe by the haft and lifted it out.

It was a thing of beauty.

“I like the balance,” Orsus said.

“You’re sure it’s not for you?”

“The opposite, actually,” Lola said with a grin. “Orsus works for Aleksei’s logging company, but he’s leaving soon to start a wood shop.” She beamed at the old mechanik. “It was Orsus’ idea to teach the steamjack how to fell trees so the company could keep going without him and not lose their pace.”

“They need a jack to replace him,” said Yermo. “Doesn’t surprise me at all.”

Orsus moved the axe a bit, as much as he could in the cramped workshop. He longed to get outside and test it with a real swing. It fit his hand and arm almost perfectly. It was heavier than any other axe he’d ever used, but it was better made, better weighted, and looked a hundred times more powerful. He wondered how many cuts it would take to segment a tree with it—or to cut through a steamjack’s armor. If they ever faced another one, like they had with Nazarov, an axe like this would give them a fighting chance.

Almost as soon as he thought of it he stole a guilty glance at Lola. She was clucking playfully at the shop boy, Isak, and didn’t seem to have noticed.

“How much did Aleksei offer you for this?” he asked. Aleksei was too much of a skinflint to pay even a fraction of what the axe was worth, and the bagful of coins he’d given Orsus to deliver, allegedly the second part of the full payment, didn’t seem remotely adequate.

“Oh, I don’t remember,” Yermo said, “something to cover the materials. It doesn’t matter—I’ve never had the chance to work on a piece this intricate before, and I’ve learned more just studying its design than any amount of compensation could pay for. Don’t tell Aleksei that, of course, or he’ll never pay me for anything again. That old Laika of his will be due for repairs soon, don’t let him forget.”

“I won’t.” Orsus pulled the bag of coins from his belt and dropped it in the mechanik’s hands. “Thank you, this is . . . it’s perfect.”

“My pleasure,” Yermo said, turning to lead them back out. Orsus gripped the axe in one hand and Lola in the other, smiling like an idiot.

His smile faded with every step.

I promised to give up that life for her, he thought. The fighting and the violence and the death, and yet . . . I see a weapon like this, a perfect work of art, and I know that this life is a part of me. I can give it up, and I will, but it will always be there, and I will always know it, and I think she will always know it. Even if I never kill anyone again, I’m still a killer. I’m still that same little ten-year-old boy plotting vengeance in a nightmare cellar. She said she’d never love the man that boy grew up to be.

How can she ever love me?

Luka Kratikoff, riding point for Kommander Zoktavir’s small contingent, was the first to see Deshevek. The rest of their forces were behind them, breaking camp and preparing for the final leg of the march, and the kommander had taken a small force of fifty riders and a Juggernaut ahead; the jack slowed them considerably but made for a much more impressive sight. If their mission was to impress the locals, this was an effective way to do it.

Luka examined the tiny village carefully through his spyglass, furrowing his brow in consternation as the villagers reacted to his presence—not gawking as most peasants did when the Winter Guard arrived, but running madly. At this distance he couldn’t tell if they were excited or terrified. He watched a moment longer, then turned and rode back to the kommander.

“Report,” said Zoktavir.

“No obvious dangers on the road, sir, and the outriders report none in the trees.”

“None that we can see,” said Zoktavir, “but we will proceed with caution.”

“Yes, sir,” said Luka, frowning at the thought of spies. The people in the village had been acting so strangely. “There’s one more thing, sir. The villagers were . . . I don’t know how to say it, sir. They acted strange.”

“You spoke to them?”

“I saw them from a distance, and they saw us. They started running, not away, just . . . in circles. Almost like they were trying to prepare something.”

Zoktavir’s eyes darkened. “A trap?”

“Here? Luka said. “In our own lands?”

“This is the utmost border of our lands, Korporal, with nothing between that village and Ord but a mile of fallow farmland. They’re practically foreigners.” He turned and called out to the other riders. “Kovnik Bogdan!”

“Sir!”

“Tell the men to draw arms. We may face resistance in the village.”

The kovnik delivered the orders, but Luka felt unsettled. There was no sign that the villagers were traitors. They were just running. It could mean anything.

I suppose it’s better to be prepared, he told himself. The kommander is zealous, but he’s not a murderer. He won’t attack harmless villagers unless they attack us first, and at that point they aren’t really harmless anymore, are they? He drew his sword and thought of the promise he’d made to his daughter—barely thirteen years old and devastated to watch him ride away to active duty. Don’t worry, Sorscha, he’d said. I’ll be home again soon.

They approached the village at a steady canter, not charging but not ambling peacefully either. Luka’s first impression was that the village was shaped wrong—there were more structures than he’d seen in the spyglass, or maybe the same structures in different places. It didn’t make sense, but he gripped his sword more tightly, ready for the worst. In the back of the village he could see them gathering women and children into the old stone church—a sure sign the inhabitants expected battle. It made Luka even more unsettled than before.

And there, in the far distance, the worst sign of all: a single horse with a single rider, galloping hard toward the rugged Murata Hills. The dim shape of Boarsgate squatted darkly on the horizon, and Luka felt a chill so cold he couldn’t help but shiver. It was possible that the rider was simply a lone man fleeing the scene of battle, but unlikely. He’d been in the Guard too long not to recognize the rider for what he was: the villagers had sent a messenger to Boarsgate. Luka looked at Kommander Zoktavir, almost too terrified to tell him, but the fury in the man’s eyes told him the warcaster had seen it for himself.

As they drew closer, he saw that the villagers had constructed a barricade across the road, and a handful of men were huddled behind it clutching rakes and hoes. Luka’s heart sank.

“I am Kommander Orsus Zoktavir of the Fifth Border Legion.” Zoktavir reined up a dozen yards from the barricade. “I order you to tear this outrage down immediately, and to explain yourselves. Who speaks for this village?”

A man stood up behind the barricade, trembling in obvious terror. “I do.”

“Are you a rebel?” asked Zoktavir.

“N-no.”

“No faithful servant of the Motherland would bar our way. You’re a traitor and a liar.”

“We want no trouble, sir,” said the peasant. “For us or for you—”

Zoktavir drew his giant axe, holding it up like a fearsome totem of destruction. “What trouble do you think you can cause me?”

“It’s just that . . .” The man swallowed, practically too nervous to stand. “Begging your pardon, sir, it’s just that this land is so distant from Korsk, and often forgotten. We see more Ordic soldiers than Khadoran.”

“I’ve sent men from my own legion to patrol this stretch of border,” Zoktavir said. “Are they not soldiers?”

“Soldiers who steal our food and harass our daughters,” said the peasant. Zoktavir’s eyes flared, and the man stammered, pale as a ghost. “What I mean to say, sir, is that we haven’t seen soldiers who defend us. The Border Legion are worse than invaders, sir, and we can’t live like that anymore.”

Zoktavir’s eyes were cold, and his voice was a thing of barely controlled rage. “What are you saying?”

“Like I said, sir,” the peasant swallowed nervously, “we don’t want to cause trouble. The men of Ord have protected us, and we’ve come to rely on them, and when we saw you coming . . . we’ve sent for help.” His voice became more desperate, more pleading. “They have an army in Boarsgate, sir, more than you can deal with. We want no trouble for us or for you—please spare yourselves the battle and leave!”

“You dare threaten me?” whispered Zoktavir, and his eyes seemed to blaze as he reached out his hand, curling his fingers as if to grip the man’s throat from yards away. Bright-blue runes appeared in the air around him, orbiting the powerful warcaster like intricate ribbons of ethereal steel. Luka half expected the villager to choke. He started in surprise when the earth itself seemed to erupt beneath the barricade, obliterating it in a shower of rocks and splinters, tossing the men around it like broken dolls. Zoktavir snarled in grim satisfaction, leaping from his horse and storming forward as he loosed his massive axe from his back. “Who else wishes to leave the Motherland? I’ll send you straight to Urcaen!”

The few men who’d survived the explosion cried out as they scrambled to their feet and ran in terror. Zoktavir caught one with a swing of his axe as he ran for a nearby cottage. “Forward!” the kommander cried. “Kill every traitor in this cursed village and burn it down around them. No mercy and no prisoners.”

“Please, sir,” said Luka, rushing toward him, “they’re just scared peasants.”

Zoktavir whirled to face him, his eyes wild not just with fury, but with madness. He seemed to look at and through Luka at once, as if seeing something else that wasn’t there. He hissed through clenched teeth: “Traitors must die!”

“Let’s talk to them,” said Luka. “Perhaps we can—”

“We’ve tried talking, and they insist on their treason. You have your orders, soldier. Now kill them!”

Luka slowly circled the kommander, placing himself between him and the nearest cottage. Behind the wild-eyed Zoktavir, the other soldiers sat on their horses, holding their weapons uncertainly.

“They’re peasants,” Luka said again. “We can arrest them and hold them for a government represent—”

“I am all the representative that Khador needs,” Zoktavir said. “Or are you questioning my authority as well?” He advanced a step, and Luka stepped back, his palms sweating.

What am I doing? he thought. This man will kill me where I stand. He heard a frightened whimper in the cottage behind him, the sobbing of innocent men reduced to nothing, and forced himself to hold his ground. “These people deserve a trial, not a slaughter.”

“Insubordination!” said Zoktavir. “You’re in on it too, aren’t you?” He turned and saw the soldiers behind him, still unmoving. “Are you all traitors as well? They’ve left the kingdom! If they wish to be treated as our enemies, we will oblige them with our blades!”

“They’re farmers with hay rakes,” said Kovnik Bogdan. “We can’t just slaughter them.”

“You have your orders.” Zoktavir turned back to Luka and gestured with his axe. “Open that door and kill everyone inside, or by Menoth I’ll kill them and you together.”

Luka raised his sword, trembling even harder than the peasant had. Forgive me, my daughter. I have no choice. May Morrow watch over you. “I will not let you kill them.”

“So be it,” Zoktavir said and swung his axe.

“It’s a simple job,” said Aleksei. “There’s a man in Molonochnaya trying to start his own lumber company. Our lumber company currently supplies the entire valley and a lot of the surrounding villages, and that’s not the kind of business I’m prepared to lose. The good news is, I have it on excellent authority that their equipment is about to suffer a number of catastrophic malfunctions, starting tonight when we slip over there and hack it to pieces.”

Most of the crew laughed, but Orsus merely shifted his weight, a simple action that, thanks to his size, focused everyone’s attention on him.

“That’s all we’re doing, though, right?” he asked. “Just smash a few wagons and steal a few tools, no actual confrontation?”

“I forgot to welcome our good friend Orsus back,” Aleksei said thinly.

“Gone six months and already a coward,” said Khirig.

“I’m not a coward,” Orsus said. “I’m getting married in six days.”

“Seems his bride-to-be doesn’t want him getting into any fights,” said Aleksei, “so we’re going to keep this as peaceful as possible.”

“Why is Orsus’ woman dictating our plans now?” Isidor said.

“Have you seen Orsus’ woman?” asked Tselikovsky. He leered grotesquely, his one eye wide and lascivious. “I’d let her dictate anything for a taste of—”

Orsus grabbed the man by the neck and slammed his head into the table, holding it there firmly as he spoke with a low, controlled voice. “Lola would be very disappointed if she learned I just did that. If any of you cause me to disappoint her further, I will become angry. Is that understood?”

Isidor raised his eyebrows. “This is you not angry?”

“Is that understood?” Orsus repeated. The men in the room nodded and murmured their agreement. Orsus gently rattled Tselikovsky’s neck. “You too.”

“Understood,” he said, though the sound was muffled by the table. Orsus nodded and let go.

“If we’re done proving how big we are, let’s get on the road,” said Aleksei. “Molonochnaya’s a good two hours away, so if we leave now we’ll get there right around one in the morning. Perfect time for a night raid.”

They left the tavern and readied their horses. They wouldn’t be pushing the creatures for speed, but having them made the travel easier. Orsus’ mount was a massive draft horse named Krasny, seventeen hands high at the shoulder with wide legs and shaggy fetlocks. The lumber crew used him to pull trees through the thick forests where Laika couldn’t reach. Orsus had modified a saddle for himself and rode in silence until halfway through the trip, when Isidor ambled up to him, keeping pace as he spoke.

“You hear about the Tharn attack?”

Orsus shook his head.

“One of the outlying villages. Krupec, I think. Razed it to the ground.”

“This is too early in the year for Tharn raiders,” Orsus said.

“They’re getting bolder. Or they’re planning something big—which means, I suppose, that they’re getting bolder.”

“Last time they came I killed one,” said Orsus. “I was ten.” He growled. “If they try to come again I’ll kill every damned one of them.”

“Then you’d better hope they don’t come tonight.”

Orsus thought about this, then shook his head. “It’s too early in the year for Tharn raids. They’ll wait for winter.”

“I hope you’re right.” Isidor rode in silence a moment before speaking again. “How much are you getting for this?”

“Hm?”

“Obviously you’re getting something, a nice bonus, a little extra on the side. We all get a little something for these jobs, but I figure you’re getting more, or you wouldn’t have come back. What’s he paying you?”

He could tell that Isidor wanted an exact figure, probably as leverage to negotiate an extra bonus of his own, but Orsus merely shrugged.

“It’s a good bonus.”

Isidor smiled, but there was no good will behind the expression. “A wedding present from good old Aleksei.”

“I suppose.”

“Need the money for something?”

Orsus glanced at him, worried by his sudden interest. What is he after?

“I’m getting married in six days,” Orsus repeated. “I’m going to have a family to support, and I’m not going to do it on a logger’s wages.”

“So you’re supplementing with violence.”

Orsus frowned at the word. “I’m going to open a wood shop.”

“So you’re paying for that with violence.”

“What do you want?” Orsus demanded, turning in his saddle to face him. Isidor was slim and sharp, and in his dark clothes he seemed to almost disappear. “Why are you harping on violence? You heard Aleksei—there’s not going to be any fighting tonight, we’re just breaking some tools.”

“And yet we’re armed.” He gestured to Laika’s giant axe, strapped tightly across Orsus’ back. Orsus frowned and shook his head.

“Sometimes things go wrong. I don’t want to fight at all, but if I have to I want to make sure we win.”

“True,” said Isidor, and Orsus saw the slim silhouette nod. “And yet I can’t help but wonder why Aleksei is paying you extra to help us break a few tools, with or without a giant axe. Seems like we could do that just fine on our own—we always have before.”

Orsus frowned again. He’d wondered about that too but chalked it up to a recruiting ploy. “I think he wants me back for good, so he’s playing nice to convince me.”

“Maybe,” said Isidor, and again the silhouette nodded. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s a wedding present, like you said.”

Orsus furrowed his brow, Isidor’s concerns reigniting his own.

“Or maybe,” said Isidor softly, “this is another power play, like Nazarov. This man in Molonochnaya might be trying to start his own lumber company, or he might be trying to start his own bratya. To become a kayaz himself. There’s a lot of business here, and Aleksei manages it fairly well, but he’s not perfect. No one can be everywhere at once. Another Nazarov was bound to happen sooner or later, so what if this is it?”

Orsus blew out a long, slow breath, puzzling out the situation in his head. Isidor’s theory was possible, but it was just a theory. “Do you know anything for sure?” he whispered. “Do you have any evidence?”

“Aside from you?”

“I don’t mean anything—”

“You’re practically an ogrun,” said Isidor. “Aleksei didn’t bring you for a quiet night of sabotage, and he didn’t pay you extra for an average battle. He’s expecting trouble, and he’s expecting a lot of it.”

Orsus shook his head, not wanting to believe it. “Then why didn’t we bring Laika?”

“That’s what’s been bothering me this entire ride. If we’re heading into a battle, why bring one of our best fighters but not the other one? That’s why I think this is a power play.” He leaned in more closely. “If this was just a battle and nothing more, we’d bring everything we had, but if someone out there is actually targeting the business, they might have the same plan we do. After all, we didn’t just leave Laika, we left most of the crew.”

“Because we only need five men to sabotage their equipment,” Orsus insisted. “You’re jumping at shadows.”

“I think Aleksei is expecting two battles, and he split his forces accordingly. One in Molonochnaya, to put down this usurper, and one at home, to stop the usurper from doing exactly what we’re trying to do to him.”

Orsus grimaced, trying to dismiss the theory—it was desperate and paranoid, after all, with very little evidence to back it up. And yet there were aspects that rang all too true. Aleksei wouldn’t pay him two months’ wages for just a quiet night of breaking things; that had been bothering him all day. And yet their five-man team was too small for a real battle, too large for an assassination. Aleksei would never bring so few unless something else were forcing his hand, and an attack against the lumber mill could force it in this exact way. Orsus didn’t want to believe it, but the more he thought of it the harder it was to ignore.

Orsus growled in frustration. “Suppose it’s true,” he whispered. “Why bring this to me? What’s your plan?”

“I brought it to you because I needed confirmation,” said Isidor, “and because you’re smarter than these other no-neck thugs. I don’t have a plan, I’m still figuring this out. If this is another Nazarov, I don’t want to end up like Gendyarev.”

Both men fell silent a moment, thinking of their old companion. The rifleman Emin had been killed outright in the battle at the warehouse, but Gendyarev had been crippled—a worse fate by far. He couldn’t work, could barely eat, and had ended up begging for scraps in the street. Orsus hadn’t even seen him for months.

Yet the odds of another overwhelming battle were low. “Worst case scenario, we know we’re in the safer group,” Orsus said. “Aleksei wouldn’t come with us unless he was sure we could handle whatever we’re up against.”

“That’s true.” Isidor thought for a moment. “Maybe we just keep quiet and see how it plays out.”

“Or maybe I leave and go home,” said Orsus. “I promised Lola I wasn’t going to fight.”

“You’ve already gone behind her back,” said Isidor. “At least stay long enough to get paid.”

Orsus grimaced again, torn by the decision. He didn’t want to stay, but Aleksei’s presence was telling—this had to be the safer place to be, or the boss wouldn’t be here. The man was too self-preserving to plan it any other way. He could stay, fight whoever this upstart had guarding him, and get paid a full two months’ wages. Two months closer to quitting his job, opening his wood shop, and saying good-bye to Aleksei and the criminals and all of it forever. It was simple. It was the easiest thing in the world.

“Let’s see who’s waiting for us in Molonochnaya,” Orsus said and adjusted the axe on his back.

But when they reached the rival lumber yard they found it empty, the gates hanging open, the crew and the equipment gone.

“They’ve run away!” shouted Aleksei, sounding equal parts furious and triumphant. “They knew we were coming and went into hiding.”

“Is our equipment similarly protected?” asked Orsus. Aleksei looked at him oddly, and Orsus accused him more directly. “The other half of our forces are protecting our equipment from a counterattack.” It was not a question. “Were you smart enough to hide them as well?”

Aleksei sneered, and Orsus knew they’d guessed correctly. “Our equipment is safe. The others are armed and ready, and Laika’s a better fighter without that axe than you are with it.”

“I’m proof enough of that,” said a voice, and they heard a sliding, scraping sound in the darkness. Khirig raised a lantern. They watched a broken man drag himself slowly across the empty lumber yard, reaching and pulling, reaching and pulling. His left arm was twisted. His legs trailed uselessly behind him.

The broken man laughed softly.

“Gendyarev,” said Aleksei, spitting the word like poison. “You’ve betrayed us.”

“Betrayed what?” asked Gendyarev. “The bratya I fought for, the bratya I gave my legs for? The brothers who abandoned me, took my job, and left me to die when a fight went sour? I didn’t betray the bratya, Aleksei. The bratya betrayed me.” He stopped crawling and looked up, his mangled face leering in contempt.

“What have you done?” Orsus demanded.

“I told them where to find you, how you’d react to the right kinds of pressure, and apparently I was correct.” He curled his face into a twisted smile. “They’ve been planning to bring down the infamous Aleksei Badian for quite a while, practically raising an army right under your nose. I just helped them aim it.”

“We have Laika,” said Aleksei, “we can defend ourselves just fine.”

“Oh yes,” said Gendyarev, “the steamjack you tried to teach me how to use—my one last chance to be useful, before others proved more adept.” He smiled again. “I gave them Laika’s code words, too. That battle’s going to be a lot more one-sided than you expect.”

“And why?” asked Aleksei. “What did they promise you? Money? Power? Whores they paid not to scream at the sight of your face?” He leaped off his horse and drew his daggers, advancing on the cripple with a look of pure malice. “You can’t expect to live long enough to collect payment.”

“I asked only one thing,” said Gendyarev, his face practically beaming. “To be here to see the looks on your faces when I tell you this: These men are more heartless than you, more ruthless than you, more vicious than you. You came to kill a leader; they’ve gone to kill everyone you ever loved.”

Orsus surged forward. “No!”

“You too, Orsus,” said Gendyarev. “You did this to me and you left me to die. Don’t expect a white wedding.”

Orsus gripped his axe and the world turned red.

“What are you in for?” The scrawny man in his cell was filthy, covered in so much dirt it was hard to see his skin. He was like a mole or a rat, a creature who spent its time buried deep in something foul. A creature for which the sun was a stranger. This was his company in the dungeon; this was the kind of man he was now reduced to living with. The mighty Orsus Zoktavir, warcaster to the kingdom of Khador, a kommander of the Fifth Border Legion, honored recipient of the Shield of Khardovic . . .

He was not a kommander anymore, not a soldier or even a servant. He would not think about what he was.

“I’m a thief,” said the filthy man, evidently tired of waiting for a response and eager to fill the silence. His voice was thin and unwholesome. “The sewers go everywhere, and I go in the sewers, and none of their little shinies are safe from me. There’s only killers in this part of the dungeons, though. I told ‘em it was an accident. I told ‘em I didn’t mean to. Girl like that had no business being out at night, and even less business screaming and wailing and bringing the whole Winter Guard down on my head. It’s not like I had any choice, you understand.”

Orsus took a slow, deep breath, calming his rage. As a kommander he would have broken this mongrel for his sins against a helpless girl, but as a traitor he had no such privilege.

The thief whistled softly. “You’re big as a house, you are, with more scars than an orphan slave. You stuck somebody bigger than a serving girl, that much is obvious, and probably plenty of them, too. Dockside brawler? Smash and grab man? Or an enforcer, maybe, breaking any heads the boss says to break.”

Orsus said nothing. He’d never liked talking to criminals, even when he’d been one, but now . . . now he felt lower and dirtier than them all, than even this rat-faced ruin leering eagerly from the shadows. His entire life—his place in the world, his very comprehension of it—lay in shards and tatters. They were ashes tossed and scattered into nothing. Even this wretch was more worthy than he was, for he had not fallen from so high a place.

“Oh come on,” said the thief, “we’re cell mates now, that’s a bond thick as blood. You can talk to me. I’m the last face you’ll ever see, because the hangman wears a mask. Well, me and Queen Ayn. Quite a company to be in.” He grinned lasciviously. “That’s a mouth Id like to touch before I die.”

Orsus curled his hands into tense, iron fists, wishing he could access his magic and flay this man’s flesh from his bones. The runic shackles on his wrists and ankles prevented even that.

“Pretty thing they say she is,” said the thief. “Might be worth a run for it—”

“I killed a village,” said Orsus, too incensed to hear another word of the man’s confession. If the murderer wanted Orsus to talk, by Menoth he’d give him the darkest words in the world.

The thief started, eyes wide. “What?”

“An entire village,” said Orsus, his deep voice rumbling through the dungeon cell like a distant earthquake. “All of them, even the soldiers who tried to stop me. Every living one killed with axe and boot and tooth.” He parted his lips in a humorless smile, and the thief pressed himself tightly against the wall. “Gone.”

“Surely you . . .” The thief swallowed. “Surely you’re exaggerating?”

“I cut their throats and broke their bones,” said Orsus, reveling in the man’s terror, “and when their bodies stopped moving I tore down their houses and burned away footsteps until the land was bleak and bare.”

The thief’s face was even whiter now, that of a pallid ghost streaked black with grime. “You’re the bloody Butcher,” he whispered, and Orsus fell silent again. Word traveled fast, it seemed. He had heard that word before.

No longer a kommander, but a butcher. The Butcher.

All sport drained from his torment of the thief, and Orsus sunk deep within his thoughts. The criminal, at least, was too scared to speak again, but even that was cold comfort, for in the silence Orsus could hear the cries of a hundred dying women, a thousand, a host so great he would hear nothing else forever.

The cell was full of them, even when he closed his eyes. Accusing and crying and asking where he’d been. He sat still and stared ahead and tried to think of nothing.

He thought of his life, and it was the same.

When the guards came for his final judgment, they brought guns first, a regiment arrayed against him in the hallway beyond the bars, ready to riddle him with bullets at the first sign of trouble. Kommandant Frolova was there, augmenting the weapons with magic until the air seemed to crackle with unseen power. I could make my flesh like iron and charge into their center, Orsus thought, using the close quarters to make them slaughter each other in crossfire. But he would not attack them. Strip away his titles and he was nothing more than a killer—a madman, some said, and the throngs of wailing, burning women screamed their agreement at his back. He was a rabid dog, and he would be put down. Whatever small part of him retained its honor prevented him from stopping it.

He was already in manacles, but they wrapped him further in heavy links of fat black chain. They led him to the yard outside, where his escort was bolstered by Man-O-War shocktroops and Widowmaker snipers perched high on the walls.

Pull left to off-balance the armor, he thought, then right to use their reaction momentum against them. Stay close to the Man-O-Wars for cover and use their weapon strikes to split the chains. As soon as my arms are free I’ll steal the nearest weapon and slaughter them to a man—

The thoughts leaped up unbidden, the dance of death forever in his thoughts. A puzzle box of tactics and violence, a seamless blend of mind and muscle. She was right about me, he thought. I will always be a monster.

A Kodiak loomed over him—one of his own, though the pass codes had been changed. He could touch its mind, but he could not control it. He was in the same training yard he’d arrived in, years ago when he’d emerged from the wilderness after years of aimless wandering. He’d tried to run from her, but she was a part of him, and no matter how hard he’d tried he could never run away from himself. Korsk had been his last chance—a new life to atone for his sins, outlive them, or forget them. He had failed all three.

Kommandant Frolova stood before him, his eyes weary. “I will tell you bluntly that we expected more resistance,” said the kommandant. “Even here, surrounded by this escort, you could fight us; you could not win, but you could perhaps get lucky. The Orsus Zoktavir I know would have fought us to his dying breath, and even after.” He considered Orsus a moment. “Why?”

Why? thought Orsus. Because I can never be free. Because the only way to save her was to become the kind of man she couldn’t love. That’s all I ever wanted—her safety and her love—but no matter which I gained I was doomed to lose the other.

And then I chose love, and she died for it.

I’m not resisting this death because I already died, years ago, with her shattered body hanging lifeless in my arms.

Orsus’ mind was a tortured wound, but his secrets were not for this man or any other. He stood straighter. “There is nothing more important than loyalty,” he said. “If I am a traitor to Khador, then it is my duty to see myself destroyed.”

Aleksei stood next to Frolova, his severed head in his hands. “Loyalty.” The word dripped from the stump of his neck like blood. “They don’t understand it at all.”

Neither do I, thought Orsus.

The head leered. “Tell me about it.”

Frolova nodded, though his face was impossible to read. “You will bejudged by the queen herself. May Menoth show you the mercy you never showed any other.” He stepped back, gave the order, and fell in line with the escort as it marched solemnly toward the end. Orsus shuffled slowly in his chains, passing guard after guard, jack after jack, field guns and Widowmakers and the cold dead eyes of a thousand ghostly accusers. He walked through the palace gates, in the wide front doors, through the marbled halls to the throne room. The corridor was lined with soldiers, hand cannons at the ready, and behind each one stood the battered body of a woman he’d failed to save. He searched their faces, but he never found her.

She was inside, seated on the great golden throne.

He fell to his knees at the sight of her, resplendent in white and gold, silk and satin, a crown upon her brow and a scepter in her hand. She watched him impassively, never rising, never moving. The Man-O-Wars had to drag him toward her, and he hid his face in shame.

It was not the queen, but Lola.

“Where were you?” Lola’s voiced boomed through the crowded hall, the accusation thick with betrayal. “Why didn’t you come for me? Why didn’t you save me?”

“I couldn’t,” he sobbed, “I did everything in my power, but I couldn’t save you!”

Lola and the queen stood side by side, speaking in unison. “You destroyed those people.”

“They were traitors.”

“You didn’t ask me which people.”

“They were all traitors!” he shouted. “Everyone I’ve ever killed, I’ve killed for you, and I have given my life to destroy them but it’s never enough! I will never. Be. Free.”

The young queen studied him, black hair lightly brushing her ears. She cocked her head the way she used to, the way Lola used to, and her voice was soft and subtle as an assassin’s dagger, damning him no matter how he answered.

“And would you kill more?”

He was trapped more tightly by those words than by the manacles, chains, rifles, cannons, and steam-powered armor. If he said no then he was a liar and a coward, useless as a warrior and admitting, by implication, that his actions had been wrong. They had been brutal, and perhaps even illegal, but they had not been wrong. And yet if he said yes he was a monster, the Butcher of Khardov, the man who lived for death. He could never save her before, and he could not appease her now.

Better an honest monster, he thought and whispered his own foul condemnation. “Yes.”

“You would?”

“I would kill everyone who threatens you,” he said. He rose to his knees, chains clanking at his sides. “I would find every enemy, root out every traitor, anticipate every foe in all the world who dares to think for half a second about the ending of your life.” He stood tall now, the soldiers around him tense, the target of a hundred aimed and readied rifles. “Though you despise me for it, I will kill your enemies. Free me and I will do it again. Accuse me and I will confess. Execute me, and I will rise from the grave to kill your enemies, over and over.” His voice was a roar now, filling the room like thunder. “I lost you once, and I will damn myself a thousand times before I lose you again.”

Lola stood, her scepter ready for the sign of final sentence, but instead of judging him she walked forward, her gown shimmering in the gas lamps. She passed through the clustered soldiers and the guards and the rifles and the steel, and she stepped into the circle of armored Man-O-War soldiers, past the outstretched chains. Orsus kneeled before her, his head bowed, his eyes wet with tears, his neck bared for the fall of an executioner’s axe.

She touched his chin.

He lifted his eyes again and the golden crown was gone, replaced with a simple ring of chamomile. She wore a homespun dress, and instead of a royal scepter she held a simple hand-carved puzzle box. The image blurred in his tears.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Then serve me.”

“What would you have me do?”

The queen’s red lips parted, and she spoke the sweetest sounds he’d ever heard. “Kill for me.”

The throne room filled with whispers, shocked voices murmuring back and forth in a torrent of gossip and speculation, but Orsus ignored them all, lost in rapture, his paradox solved. His impossible dream come true.

“Remove his chains,” the queen commanded. “This prisoner is more loyal than any man here, and he will serve me, and his actions will be a sign to the world that disloyalty will not be tolerated. Infidelity will be punished. Treachery, if anyone is so foolish as to consider it, will be met by my servant as he met it near Boarsgate: with massacre.”

The chains fell from Orsus’ body, and he stood tall beside the fierce, majestic queen. She smiled at him, and his shame was gone. His madness fled. He would serve this woman with every breath left to him.

Lola stood beside the queen and opened her mouth to speak.

Orsus ran through the forest madly, crashing through trees and sticks and branches, hot on the heels of . . . what? He couldn’t remember. A deer, he thought, or a wolf. He’d been running so long he’d forgotten. It was almost dark, and the snow and the sky had melded into the same featureless grey, scarred by dark-black trees devoid of life. It was all he could see for miles. It was all he’d seen for days.

He’d been in the wilderness for years, long enough to forget human speech and human voices.

All voices but one.

“Orsus!”

It was angry yet sad, pained yet damning, lost yet beckoning. It came from everywhere and nowhere.

Had he been running toward that voice, or away from it?

“Orsus, where were you?”

He screamed back, bestial and inarticulate. The dead trees ignored him, and the sound died echoless and lost.

“Orsus . . .”

He ran.

GLOSSARY

Arktus: An obsolete Khadoran warjack chassis that served as the conceptual precursor to the Kodiak.

bayan: A Khadoran instrument similar to an accordion.

Boarsgate: A major Ordic fortress in the Murata Hills protecting that kingdom’s northern border.

border legion: One of five legions in the Khadoran Army assigned to protect a section of the kingdom’s borders and interior.

bratya: A criminal fraternity in Khador, most often being a small tight-knit gang but sometimes evolving into a larger organization. Bratyas are pervasive in Khador’s labor prisons but also in the criminal underworld of most major cities and townships. Most bratyas answer to and are employed by a kayaz.

cortex: A highly arcane mechanikal device that gives a steamjack its limited intelligence. Over time cortexes can learn from experience and develop personality quirks.

Cygnar: The kingdom on the western coast south of Ord and noted for its long coastline. Cygnar is generally considered the most prosperous and technologically advanced of the Iron Kingdoms and is the birthplace and seat of the Church of Morrow.

Devastator: A particularly heavily armored Khadoran warjack chassis capable of enduring tremendous punishment if its shield fists are closed to protect its more vulnerable central frame.

Deshevek: A small southern Khadoran village located closest to the Ordic fortress of Boarsgate, known primarily for the Boarsgate Massacre of 587 AR.

Giving Day: A popular holiday taking place on the last day of the year across the Iron Kingdoms noted for festivals, family gatherings, and the exchange of small gifts. The nature of this holiday varies from region to region. While begun as a Morrowan tradition it has spread to other communities. Menites of the Khadoran Old Faith use this time to also contribute their tithe the local temple.

great vizier: A singular high-ranking government official in Khador, being the foremost advisor to the crown. As the great vizier speaks for the sovereign he is usually the second most powerful individual in the nation.

Greylords: Members of the Greylords Covenant, an organization of Khadoran arcanists serving their kingdom both in the military and by coordinating some intelligence-gathering activity. Greylords are versed in ice-based magic.

Hedrinya: A small Khadoran village located amid the foothills of mountains near the Neves River in the Scarsfell Forest.

Immoren: The continent containing the Iron Kingdoms, Ios, Rhul, the Skorne Empire, and the lands between them. Much of Immoren remains unexplored, and its inhabitants have had limited contact with other continents.

Iron Kingdoms: Initially the four nations founded after the Orgoth Rebellion: Cygnar, Khador, Llael, and Ord. The Protectorate of Menoth, founded after the Cygnaran Civil War, became the fifth Iron Kingdom after declaring its independence from Cygnar.

’jack: See steamjack.

’jack marshal: A person who has learned how to give precise verbal orders to a steamjack to direct it in conducting labor or battle. This is a highly useful occupational skill, although it lacks the versatility or finesse afforded by the direct mental control of steamjacks exercised by a warcaster.

Juggernaut: A staple Khadoran warjack chassis, the basic frame of which is utilized by the largest number of Khador’s active warjacks. It is armed with one open fist and an ice axe.

kapitan: A military rank for a commissioned officer in the Khadoran Army, ranking above lieutenant and below kovnik.

kareyshka: A lively Khadoran folk dance particularly popular in rural areas. The dance varies considerably from one region to another.

kayaz/kayazy: Translated as “merchant princes,” a privileged class of commoners in Khador with considerable wealth and influence. Various kayazy control many aspects of the Khadoran economy, including legitimate industry but also criminal enterprises. Kayazy employ bratyas to distance themselves from criminal activity.

Khardov: An industrial city in western Khador that is also a major hub of the Khadoran railway.

Kodiak: A sophisticated and versatile Khadoran warjack chassis employing an advanced military grade cortex and a heavy boiler engine to enable it to maneuver ably in even difficult terrain.

kommandant: A military rank for a senior commissioned officer in the Khadoran Army, ranking above kommandant and below supreme kommandant. Supreme kommandants are the highest active military rank, reporting to the premier of the army.

kommander: A military rank for a senior commissioned officer in the Khadoran Army, ranking above kovnik and below kommandant. Most Khadoran warcasters are kommanders.

korporak: A military rank for a junior non-commissioned officer in the Khadoran Army, ranking above privat and below sergeant.

Kossite: Descendants of the ancient kingdom of Kos, now a major ethnicity of the Kingdom of Khador and most numerous in its northwestern region Many Kossites are valued as expert woodsmen and serve as irregulars alongside the Khadoran Army to fulfill their conscription obligations.

kovnik: A military rank for a commissioned officer in the Khadoran Army, ranking above kapitan and below kommander.

Korsk: The capital of Khador and the nation’s largest city, located on the eastern shore of Great Zerutsk Lake occupying the lands between Great Zerutsk, Shattered Shield Lake, and Lake Volningrad.

Laika: An old but durable Khadoran laborjack chassis that is no longer manufactured.

Man-O-War: Term usually referring to Khadoran heavy infantry or their signature steam-powered armor. There are several categories of Man-O-War troopers identified by their weaponry, training, and battlefield role.

Marauder: A Khadoran warjack chassis notable for its two powerful ram pistons, often used in sieges to break through walls.

mechanika: The fusion of mechanical engineering and arcane science. Mechanikal weapons and tools are those employing mechanika components to augment their basic function or to add new functionality.

Menoth: The primal god credited by his worshipers with the creation of aspects of the world itself, including the division of the water from the land, the ordering of the seasons, and most importantly the creation of humanity. Menoth’s gifts to humanity included fire, agriculture, masonry, and the written word in the form of the True Law, his divine commandments. Menoth’s worshipers are known as Menites.

Molonochnaya: A logging village in the northern Scarsfell Forest.

Morrow: One of the Twins, brother to Tharnar, and a god who was once mortal but who ascended to divinity by achieving enlightenment. Also known as the Prophet, Morrow is a benevolent god who emphasizes selfsacrifice, good works, and honorable behavior.

Motherland: Term used by patriotic Khadorans to refer to Khador itself, related to certain myths and folklore illustrating the intimate connection between the land and its people.

ogrun: A large and physically powerful race renowned for their great strength and honor. Most ogrun are citizens of the northeastern nation of Rhul, though they can be found throughout the Iron Kingdoms and Cryx.

Ord: The small and resource-poor kingdom on the western coast between Khador and Cygnar, respected for its formidable navy. Ord has defended against Khadoran incursions with varied success in several border wars since the Iron Kingdoms were founded.

privat: The military rank given junior-most enlisted soldiers in the Khadoran Army who have completed training and are no longer recruits, ranking below korporal.

Shield of Khardovic: A Khadoran military award bestowed for unflinching service and obedience.

steamjack: A steam-powered mechanikal construct designed in a variety of configurations and sizes, used for both labor and warfare throughout the Iron Kingdoms, Cryx, and Rhul.

Suvorin: A logging village in the northern Scarsfell Forest near the Neves river.

Telk: A larger village and shipping hub in the Scarsfell Forest, along the Neves River.

Tharn: A savage breed of once-human warriors whose intense and prolonged worship of the Devourer Wurm transformed them into a monstrous race. They are capable of drawing on the Wurm to transform into bestial forms and view humans as their prey, eating of their flesh and particularly savoring human hearts.

Urcaen: A mysterious cosmological realm that is the spiritual counterpart of Caen. Most of the gods reside here, and this is also where most souls spend the afterlife. Urcaen is divided between protected divine domains and the hellish wilds stalked by the Devourer Wurm.

Vlasgrad: A town in southeastern Khador, populated primarily by Umbreans, and proximate to the Thornwood.

vyatka: A strong liquor usually distilled from potatoes that is common in Khador and exported across the Iron Kingdoms.

warcaster: An arcanist born with the ability to control steamjacks with the power of the mind. With proper training warcasters become singular military assets and are among the greatest soldiers of western Immoren, entrusted to command scores of troops and their own battlegroups of warjacks in the field. Acquiring and training warcasters is a high priority for any military force that employs warjacks.

Widowmaker: A group of highly trained snipers in the Khadoran Army employing powerful long-ranged scoped rifles to eliminate high-priority enemy targets.

Winter Guard: The largest group of soldiers within the Khadoran Army representing the rank-and-file infantry. Unless they serve in some other capacity, nearly all male and many female Khadoran citizens are conscripted into the Winter Guard for a single compulsory tour of service. Guardsmen undergo brief but intensive military training and are equipped with relatively simple and inexpensive gear.

warjack: A highly advanced and well-armed steamjack created or modified for war. Some warjacks use power sources other than steam and are not technically steamjacks but are still referred to as such as a matter of custom.

THE CHAPLAIN’S LEGACY

Brad R. Torgersen

1.

“Chief Barlow,” said the female voice through the wooden door.

Lost in thought, I didn’t answer right away.

She cleared her throat, and tried again. “Warrant Officer Harrison Barlow?”

I sighed, and slowly got up from my seat at my desk in the tiny pastor’s quarters of my chapel.

She’d called me chief. I wasn’t used to the new rank. There had been a time when I’d happily watched my military days fade into memory. But the recent return of Earth ships to Purgatory orbit meant that many of us former prisoners of war had again been pressed into service—whether we wanted our old jobs back, or not.

I was a prior enlisted man. They could have just slapped my stripes back on me. But my apparently pivotal role—as interlocutor between humanity, and our former enemies, the mantes aliens—had necessitated something a bit more lofty.

Not like I needed the shiny silver bar on my collar. I commanded no one. The chapel, built with my own hands in the early days of my former captivity, had never needed any hierarchy. I’d constructed the place in the spirit intended by its original designer, Chaplain Thomas: all are equal in God’s sight.

I’d have refused promotion if I’d thought Fleet Command was giving me a choice.

I opened the door.

She was young, with a startlingly beautiful face. I guessed Nile Egyptian heritage, but with something else mixed in. Not European. Southeast Asian, perhaps? Her fluent use of commercial English—that hoary old offshoot of British and American English which had dominated international human affairs for hundreds of years—gave me no hint of her nation of origin.

I looked at the captain’s clusters on her collar, and tipped my head.

“Ma’am, what may I do for you at this early hour?”

“General Sakumora sent me,” she said, her wide eyes staring up at me.

“And of what use may I be to the general?”

“You’re the one who brokered the original cease-fire,” she said. “The general is hoping you can do so again.”

An instant prickling of alarm went up my spine.

“Have the mantes attacked?” I asked, not blinking.

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nobody told you what’s happening?”

“Ma’am, in spite of my appointment and what this starchy new uniform might indicate, I’m just a chaplain’s assistant. Nobody tells me much of anything. Certainly I don’t pretend to understand what Fleet Command worries about when it goes to bed at night. All I care about are the people still here, on this planet.”

“And the mantes converts who come to you for religious indoctrination,” she said.

“Instruction,” I corrected her. “And it’s not even anything so formal as that. You ought to know as well as anyone, if you’ve earned your commission recently, that the mantes are an utterly atheistic people. They cannot even conceive of a God, nor a soul, nor do they understand anything about Earth’s varied and flavorful religious history.”

Flavorful. A deliberate euphemism on my part. The mantis university professor who’d first approached me ten Purgatorial years earlier, to study Earth’s major systems of belief, had often used that word to describe our faiths. He’d considered them fascinating—a key to the utterly alien mentality of the human being. If the mantes had thoughtlessly obliterated other species, each of them also displaying the telltales of belief, the insectoids had stopped short at exterminating humanity. Thanks to me.

In a moment of desperate inspiration, with the fate of all mankind seemingly on the line, I’d been the one to make the bargain: in exchange for the survival of humanity, I would do all I could to assist the professor—and his students—in studying and understanding religion.

But that had been a long time ago. The professor, and most of his students, had gone. As had many of my parishioners, once the ships from Earth returned and it became possible for humans to go home again.

I’d chosen to remain, despite Purgatory’s hard, arid climate and the chapel’s crude rock-and-mud-walled simplicity. A part of me had become invested in this place. I looked over the lovely young officer’s shoulder to the chapel’s lone altar, where various human religious symbols and objects were carefully placed for all to see. This early in the morning I had no flock to attend to. But soon they’d begin to trickle in, a few here and a few there. Most of them human. But not all.

“It’s the mantes’ difficulty with religion that brings me here now,” she said. “It’s been a long time since the armistice. Fleet stealth missions indicate that the mantes are moving some of their own ships. Renewed battle exercises. The truce you won may not last much longer. Not unless someone can help the mantes get what they came here for. From you specifically.”

I laughed coldly.

“I labored with the professor,” I said. “For years. He read every last line of holy text I could put in front of him. The Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, you name it. He soaked it up like a sponge. We engaged in various rituals, both for demonstration and also to see if he’d take to any of them. But he was as deaf to the spirit as the next mantis. They’re all like that—biologically incapable of feeling what you and I might call faith. The professor eventually withdrew in confused futility.”

“What about the ones who still attend?”

“They are young,” I said. “Grad students. They come to the chapel for objective study, no more. Working on their equivalent of thesis papers, probably.”

“General Sakumora was adamant. You must help.”

I wanted to keep protesting, but the earnestness in her expression told me that there wouldn’t be any point. I reached a hand up and felt the non-regulation stubble on my face. I hated shaving every day. But it looked like I was going to have to start again.

“Orders are orders, ma’am,” I said, straightening my duty topcoat.

“That’s right, Chief,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am. And if it’s all the same to you, nobody around here calls me that.”

“Then what do they call you?”

“Padre. One of my former parishioners hung that on me shortly after the cease-fire.”

“Father Barlow,” she said, testing it out.

“No,” I said sheepishly, “just Padre.”

“Well, Padre, I’m putting us on the next flight into orbit. The general is getting ready for a summit with his counterparts in the mantes chain of command. You and I have both been instructed to cooperate in every way—to ensure that the summit is productive.”

“Are you part of the Chaplains Corps?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Fleet Intelligence.”

I repressed the urge to scoff. If the military’s blind hurling of the original human flotillas against Purgatory’s impervious mantis defenders had been any indication, intelligence was the one thing we’d been sorely lacking.

“I don’t think it will do any good,” I admitted. “I tried to tell the professor, when he started to give up hope. If mantis curiosity about human faith is the only thing holding back their war machine, then our fates truly do rest in God’s hands.”

2.

It had been a long time since I’d ridden a shuttle. I forgot they don’t come with gravity. I almost threw up my breakfast when we hit space. I spent the ride—to the awaiting frigate—turning several shades of green. Once onboard the mothercraft I breathed a great breath of relief, then gratefully took a small hand towel from the captain and mopped the perspiration from my face.

The young marines who’d ridden up with us, they seemed to find me funny. Until they saw my expression, and rank. They snapped to as I walked past.

I guess being the chief is good for a few things after all?

The captain—whom I’d learned to address by the last name of Adanaho—gave me twenty minutes to clean up in the frigate’s cramped guest officers’ quarters. As an enlisted man, I’d only ever gotten bay accommodations. Zero privacy. My little single-man compartment seemed palatial by comparison.

The hair on my cheeks and neck came off, and a fresh undershirt and topcoat came on. Then I used the tiny computer guide in my newly-issued PDA to walk me through the frigate’s innards—to the command deck, where I was to meet Adanaho’s boss.

Fleet was unique in the history of modern human warfare in that it blended all of the traditional branches—air, sea, land, and now space—into a unified whole, with a unified hierarchy. No more confusion over rank. A captain was a captain, a lieutenant was a lieutenant, and a sergeant was a sergeant. Admirals, commanders, and petty officers lived only in the history books.

Sakumora was a short, muscular, stem-faced flag officer who neither smiled, nor offered any pleasantries as I entered the room. Two lieutenants attended to his needs, while the captain sat at his side, and two marines guarded opposite corners of the space. Against what, I had no idea. But protocol was protocol, and some things never change.

“Sir,” I said, approaching his desk and saluting, “Serg-ahhh, I mean, Warrant Officer Barlow, reporting as ordered.”

“Sit down,” was all he said.

I took a chair which had been offered to me by one of the general’s attaches. For the first time, I noticed the captain’s expression. Her eyes were turned down and staring at the space in front of my knees.

“I’ll get to the point,” said Sakumora gruffly. “We’ve got compelling evidence that the mantes are building strength for a renewed offensive. Everybody knows the generalities of what you did here, on this little dustball of a world. I’ve reviewed the records, your own file, and the reports given to me by my officers who’ve been to Purgatory. There was never any guarantee that the mantes would hold off on their so-called Fourth Expansion indefinitely. I’m afraid time’s up.”

My feet and hands went cold.

When the professor had first come to me, the entire human population of Purgatory had been sealed behind an energy barrier that was lethal on contact. The mantes had been using it to slowly annihilate us when the professor-through what passed for a higher education network in mantis culture—had effected a compromise: as long as he and his fellows in mantis academia needed humans for cultural study, the mantes, as a whole, would delay the annihilation of humans on Purgatory, as well as their planned final conquest of human space.

If the general was correct, the academic stay had been overruled, and humanity’s reprieve was drawing to a close.

So far as I knew, we were as defenseless as ever. The mantes were a much older and technologically superior race. Human ships and weapons amounted to little against mantis shields. For the sake of morale, when the war had been hot, the Fleet hadn’t broadly revealed its numerous and inevitable defeats—human colonies seized by the mantes and cleansed of all competitive’ life. Only after the armistice and the Fleet’s slow return did anyone come clean about the truth.

I cleared my throat.

“What do you expect me to do about it, sir?”

“Do what you did before,” he said matter-of-fact. “Get this collective of . . . scholars, or whatever they are, to talk to their political leadership. Stage protests. Sit-ins. Anything that can hold the mantes for a few more years.”

“Assuming I could do it,” I said carefully, “would it make that much of a difference? I don’t think we re any closer to fending them off than we were before.”

The general looked over to Captain Adanaho. She raised her eyes to me. “Few people have been told this, so I’m ordering you to keep it secret, but we’ve managed to develop a working copy of their shielding technology—what I think you referred to in your notes as The Wall. In the process, we think we’ve found a way to penetrate those same shields.”

I startled.

“Is that so?” I said. “How exactly did we make this extraordinary breakthrough?”

“That’s none of your concern,” the general snapped, “all you’re here to do is get the damned mantes to delay their attack. Until we’re ready.”

“Sir, what makes you think I have any more influence on the mantes than the Fleet’s team of expert diplomats?” I said, throwing my hands out in exasperation. “It’s not like I’m some kind of genius about this stuff. The professor—the first mantis I dealt with, ten years ago—just happened to reveal certain information that wound up being important. And I had nothing to lose. That my bargain convinced him, and that his compatriots had the leverage and coordination to affect Mantis Quorum policy, were flukes.”

“Nevertheless,” said the general, “you will try.”

“We depart in one hour,” Adanaho said. “You’ll have a few days to prepare before we meet the mantis delegation.”

3.

We met them in orbit around a nameless terrestrial planet, far from the boundaries of human space. The mantes ships were shaped like mammoth footballs, their surfaces studded with sensors and weaponry. I watched the alien vessels through the portholes of the Fleet frigate, Calysta. We’d brought some big stuff too. Opposite the cluster of mantes vessels—across the black expanse of space—was a squadron of Earth dreadnoughts unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Not that size and armament would do a lick of good if those new ships couldn’t break through the mantis shields, as Adanaho had suggested. Hopefully we wouldn’t have to find out, though I still wasn’t sure anything I did or said could make a difference otherwise.

I looked over to Captain Adanaho, who had followed me to the observation deck.

“Fifteen minutes,” she said.

“That means the general wants us there in five,” I said.

She smirked at me.

“Always arrive ten minutes before you’ve been told,” I said with a slight smile, “and then it’s hurry-up-and-wait.”

“The years on Purgatory haven’t completely dulled your memory,” she said. “Though it’s obvious you’re not happy about your current position.”

I looked down at my uniform.

“No, ma’am, not really. I was nineteen when I signed up. The Fleet tried to take Purgatory a couple of years later, and then I spent the rest of my time either as a prisoner, or trying to follow through on a promise I made to my old boss before he died.”

“It must have been an important promise,” she said.

“I thought so,” I said.

“But didn’t you consider that promise fulfilled once the armistice was reached?”

“Not really, because by then the professor and his school kids were showing up all the time. Plus, I had more human customers coming in the door than I’d ever had before. People seemed to think the chapel was special. Significant. It grew to be a landmark in the valley. Somebody had to stick around and sweep up. And it’s not like I had anything more important to do. Maybe if the Fleet had returned right away, I’d have jumped at a chance to go home. But when a couple of years went by and it was obvious that Fleet wasn’t coming back to Purgatory any time soon, I decided to make my plans for the chapel into long-term plans.”

“And yet our research shows that you don’t hold services there,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Like I said, I’m not a chaplain. I’m just the assistant. This little silver bar you guys put on my collar, it doesn’t make me a chaplain either.”

“Would you like to be?”

I thought about it, still looking outside into deep space. Something I had not seen in many years.

“No,” I said, slipping my hands into my pants pockets. Like having facial hair, hands in pockets are also against regulation. But screw it, certain rules are made to be broken.

“Why not?” she asked.

“I’m not a preacher,” I admitted. “I’m also not a theologian.”

“So why even become an assistant? Of all the jobs in the Fleet available to you?”

“Seemed like the best fit,” I said. “I’m not a tactical guy, and I’m not that great with equipment either. But people? I like people. When hostilities with the mantes broke out, some of my friends signed up immediately. I kind of went along for the ride. It was a chance to go to space. What kid doesn’t dream about that? But I didn’t want to kill stuff nor fix stuff, nor do a lot of the other work on the list the recruiter showed me.”

She shook her head.

“And yet you were the one who managed to use the single piece of leverage we needed to stop the mantes.”

“Yeah,” I said, “dumb luck, that.”

She checked her watch.

“Well, it’s time to see if you can’t scare up a little more, Padre.”

We walked from the porthole to the nearest lift car, went down three decks, and wound our way to the frigate’s largish main conference room. Marines in freshly pressed uniforms guarded the hatches, with rifles at port arms. There were some mantes guards as well, their lower thoraxes submerged into the biomechanical “saddles” of their hovering, saucer-shaped discs.

Every mantis I’d ever seen was technically a cyborg. Their upper halves were insectoid—complete with bug eyes, fearsome beaks, antennae, wings, and serrated-chitin forelimbs, while their lower halves were integrated into their mobile, floating saucers. It was the saucers—the computers and equipment in them—which allowed the mantes to speak to humans, and have our own speech translated back into their language, among many other things.

The mantes guards all raised forelimbs in my direction as we approached, though they seemed to be ignoring the captain.

I blushed in spite of myself, and raised a hand in return.

Was I that well known among the aliens?

We entered the conference room, and I stopped short.

There was the professor—whom I considered a friend, and whom I’d not seen in a long time—and a larger, much older looking mantis on whom all human eyes were focused.

The human contingent was arrayed around a half-moon table with chairs and computers and various recording devices.

The two mantes merely floated in the air, about waist high.

I smiled, and in spite of protocol, walked quickly up to the professor.

“Hello,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get to see you again.”

“You would not have, Harry,” said the professor, “had circumstances evolved differently.”

If the professor had a name, it was unpronounceable for humans. The skitter-scratch mandible-against-mandible language of the aliens was incomprehensible for us. And he’d always been addressed by title, even though he’d asked permission to be on a first-name basis with me.

A familiar throat was cleared to my rear.

I turned to Adanaho, who’s expression told me I was erring without knowing it. Behind her sat the general—staring hard.

“Sorry, sir,” I said, then nodded knowingly to the professor, and walked quickly to a seat that was offered to me. The captain sat down at my side, and after the general gave me one last lingering look, he ordered the doors closed, leaving us alone with our guests.

I checked my PDA. The captain and I were as early as we’d planned to be. Yet it appeared things were already well in motion.

Not good.

“Well,” the general said, “he’s here now. Since nothing my staff or I say seems to be worth anything to you, maybe you’ll listen to him.”

The old mantis behind the professor floated forward.

“Padre,” it said to me, its vocoded speaker-box voice coming from the grill on the front of its disc. The creature’s beak did not move. The translator was tied directly into the mantis’s nervous system.

“That is what some call me,” I said. “May I ask who you are?”

“This is the Queen Mother,” said the professor, his manner deferential as he introduced her. “She is the highest of the Select who rule our people. Her voice carries supreme authority within the Quorum of the Select.”

“She is your sovereign,” I said.

“Yes and no,” said the professor. “She is elected, but she also shares a tremendous lineage, biologically. Her genetics run through countless mantes, over many of your generations.”

In other words, she was fecund, in addition to being old.

I sat up a little straighten.

“Ma’am,” I said to the Queen Mother, “of what service can I be to you?”

The Queen Mother floated forward a bit more, while the professor floated back.

“Your name is spoken in my Quorum,” she said. “It is the only human name that has ever reached such height. When the one you call the professor first came before me, many of our cycles ago, and petitioned for us to halt our Fourth Expansion, I considered him obtuse. Your superstition is of no consequence to me, nor do I have any use for it. And yet, the professor had convinced a good many of his contemporaries that the elimination of your species—of your numerous modes of religion—would be detrimental to the advancement of mantes knowledge. And his colleagues had convinced many on the Quorum. Rather than force a contentious vote on the issue, I acquiesced, believing that the merit of the professor’s proposed observation and research would become obvious in time. Even if I could see no value in it in the moment.”

She let a tiny silence hang in the air.

“I no longer feel the need for such forbearance.”

The room was dead silent, but the Queen Mother’s words had hit me like a thunderclap. It was one thing to hear the captain talk about a possible end to the peace. It was quite another to have the nominal leader of the enemy in front of me declaring that she was going to drop the hammer. I felt a slithering surety in my stomach: the Queen Mother would not bluff.

I cleared my throat experimentally, trying to shake off the dread I felt. The eyes of the officers behind me began to drill virtual holes in my back as I left my seat. The Queen Mother remained where she was.

“I have to think,” I said, voice shaking just a bit, “that your mind isn’t entirely made up. Otherwise why agree to this meeting at all? You could just as easily declare the ceasefire dead, launch your war armada, and have done with it.”

“There are still some,” she said, her triangular insect’s head tilting back in the professor’s direction, “who petition me for further amity. I am not a hasty being. I listen to my intellectuals. If they say there is additional merit in long-term conciliation between our races, I am habitually obliged to entertain the notion—whether I agree with it or not. So rather than send a delegate, I came here myself. To meet the one human who has managed to alter the inevitable course of my empire. I had expected someone more impressive.”

“My apologies,” I said, “if my presence does not meet that expectation. As for what I can say or do to change your mind, I am not sure I can offer you much more than what I’ve already been able to offer to the professor and his students. I am the chaplain’s assistant. I’ve counseled the professor that he’d do well to seek out a bona fide chaplain. Or, if a military man is not in order, then there are the finest theologians, scholars, religious teachers, and clergymen Earth has to offer. If I have failed to provide enlightenment, surely someone else might be better suited.”

“Enlightenment,” the Queen Mother said, her mouth hinged open and her serrated, vicious teeth vibrating—the mantis display of annoyance. “This is a phrase that I find utterly preposterous. I have studied what little of your planet’s history is available to me and determined that we mantes were building starships when humans were still scuttling about in caves. Enlightenment. Ridiculous. Does the larva enlighten the adult?”

I’d learned from the professor that the mantes have two stages in their life cycle. Upon hatching from their eggs, they are mindless herbivores, consuming vegetable matter over a period of months until entering their transformative pupa stage. Only upon emergence from the chrysalis do newly-carnivorous mantes achieve actual sapience. Prior to that, the larval mantes are about as intelligent as a box of rocks.

“Nobody questions your technological prowess,” I said, choosing my words carefully. I looked quickly behind the Queen Mother to see the professor floating dead still, his gaze locked on her.

“When the professor and I first met, it was shocking to discover that you mantes cared anything at all about how or what a human believed. I didn’t think it was possible. I’d only ever seen your people maiming and killing my people. And yet, the professor showed me you are a complex race. Old and powerful, but also with a history of patient curiosity. Such that on prior occasions—when you’ve let your thirst for expansion overrule your prudence—you’ve genuinely regretted those choices.”

“Some of us have,” said the Queen Mother, her beak snapping shut. “But not all.”

“What would be gained,” I said, “by throwing away the armistice? It’s been a long time since humans shed mantes blood, and vice versa. I think the ceasefire is pretty good evidence that our two societies can learn to share the galaxy. Sometimes, we may even share the same planet, if after a fashion.”

Purgatory was still technically mantis property. Myself and the few hundred humans who’d stuck around after the return of the Earth ships, had more or less managed to stay out from under mantes feet. It wasn’t an equal partnership. More like, keep the noise down so the landlords don’t show up with artillery. But it was a persistent peace, and the more time I’d spent around the professor—and later, his students—the more I’d become convinced that humans and the mantes had more in common than either they or we suspected.

I waited while the Queen Mother’s antennae wove a thoughtful pattern in the air.

“You are dangerous to us,” she said. “Or is the squadron of warships that greeted my delegation your idea of a friendly gesture?”

I looked behind me—at the general, and the captain.

“She has a point, sir, and ma’am,” I said.

“I’m not a fool,” Sakumora retorted sourly. He looked past me to the Queen Mother, and his tone got sharper when next he spoke. “Who is more threatening to whom? What are my staff and I supposed to think about those battle exercises your ships have been conducting? For the first time in several years, eh? What have you got to say about that?”

The professor seemed to visibly shrink in on himself.

I guessed that even the mantes never spoke that way to their leader. Much less a human. The Queen Mother’s posture was erect, and motionless. For an instant I recalled visceral memories of mantis troops striking with lightning lethality, carving into human flesh. I raised my hands instinctively in the air between the two leaders, trying to physically damp down the mood, which had grown dangerously electric.

“You both asked me to come here,” I said, swiveling my head from one party to the next, and back again. “But if both of you are determined to see evil in the actions of the other, no matter what I say, there really isn’t anything I can do. A new war is inevitable.”

“A war we would absolutely win,” the Queen Mother said.

“Are you that sure?” the general replied.

“Stupid human, you would do no better against us than you did the first time.”

Now it was Sakumora who remained motionless. He seemed to be deciding something. I stared at him, feeling altogether uncomfortable. Before I could shout for him to stop, his left hand reached out and tapped a single button on the keyboard in front of him. The lights in the chamber dimmed, and went orange, battle klaxons suddenly ringing through the space.

Outside the doors, automatic gunfire roared. I knew the sound. It wasn’t the sound of mantis weaponry.

“What have you done?” I said to the general.

Both he and his staff—all save the captain, who simply sat with her mouth half open—stood up and removed overly-large pistols from under the table. Pistols, hell, they looked like sawed-off shotguns, with magazines attached. Sakumora and his people aimed their weapons at the professor and the Queen Mother.

“We weren’t ready for you the first time,” Sakumora said, his demeanor icily calm now that he no longer teetered on the knife edge of an uneasy truce. “Part of me hoped this wouldn’t be necessary. But part of me also knew that things couldn’t end any other way.”

The Queen Mother’s wings unfolded and fluttered loudly.

Extreme amusement.

I’d also learned enough about mantis body language to know that the professor’s mood was utterly crushed. He shrank back from all of us, his floating disc nearly bumping the far bulkhead.

“You’ve made it too easy,” said the Queen Mother.

The pitch of the frigate’s ambient engine noise shifted upward, just prior to the room being rocked by what sounded like rolling thunder.

“I’ve signaled my subordinates to destroy your entire squadron,” said the Queen Mother. “This ship and everyone on it will be the first to fall. The Fourth Expansion begins today!”

She looked triumphant.

I stared at the professor, who appeared ill.

The room rocked again—with more loud rumbling.

The general tapped the large green communications key. “Damage report?” he said.

“The deflection system is holding,” replied a young voice through a small speaker on the desk.

Sakumora smiled wickedly, his pistol aimed squarely at the Queen Mother’s bug-eyed head.

“We adapt and learn quickly,” said the general. “I don’t think we’ll be the pushovers that you were expecting. Though I have to admit I admire your willingness to sacrifice yourself in order to commit your people to the battle. Had our positions been reversed, I think I might have done the same.”

The Queen Mother’s body language changed. Like that of the professor, she began to slowly shrink in on herself. I guessed that she’d not expected to survive past this point. Had the general and his Fleet engineers not found the secret to The Wall, it’s probable we’d have all been atomized already.

“So it’s war,” I said. “Only now neither side wins?”

“Shut up, Chief,” said the general in irritation. “Your job here is done. Unless you’re ready to pick up a weapon for humanity, you’re not much use to us.”

I looked from the general’s face—set in an expression of grim and determined calculation—to the captain’s. Adanaho’s mouth still hung half open and her eyes were wide, the whites like bright circles of ivory. She closed her mouth and swallowed once, then stood up and faced the general.

“Why didn’t you tell me your plan?” she said, the rasp of accusation in her tone.

“It was my decision, according to Fleet Command edict,” Sakumora said. “And l didn’t feel like sharing it with junior officers who didn’t have a need to know. Like I said to your superstitious friend, if you’re not going to pick up a weapon for humanity, you’re not much good to us.”

A small mechanical sound alerted me to our danger, but only just in time.

While the professor’s disc had never been armed—armament being unseemly for a scholar—there’d been no thought given to the Queen Mother. Weapons, previously hidden within her disc, suddenly bristled.

I tackled Adanaho to the deck as the shooting started.

4.

Guns blazed. Human guns. Mantis guns.

The room rocked again from the concussion of enemy fire outside the frigate.

My ears were ringing when the captain and I both looked up to see the general and all of his people sprawled bloodily across their side of the room. The Queen Mother had pepper-sprayed them with projectiles, their bodies pulped and grotesque. It seemed the Queen Mother had fared little better. She was down. Or, rather, her disc was down. Sparks spat from numerous holes in the disc’s armored surface. Sabot rounds, I thought. The Queen Mother’s forelimbs scraped and scratched futilely at the deck, her triangular head cocked in my direction and her mouth half open, the teeth looking wicked and deadly.

Her mandibles chattered ferociously, but the disc made no sound. Its translator was rendered useless, along with its weapons.

The professor—unharmed—floated forward from his previous spot near the far wall, then stopped as the doors were cast open and armed marines flooded in. The instant they saw the general lying dead, they raised their rifles to fire—having previously dispatched the Queen’s guards, per Sakumora’s plan.

Seeing this, Captain Adanaho shrugged me off of her and stood up, shouting, “Stop!”

The marines hesitated.

“That’s a direct order,” she said for emphasis.

The room rolled with concussive grumbling.

Lights flickered.

“General Sakumora, sir,” said an alarmed voice through the speaker on the general’s table, “there’s a feedback loop in the deflection matrix. We’re absorbing hits, but we can’t say for how much longer.”

The captain stared at me for an instant, then she looked to the professor, whose forelimbs dangled dejectedly in front of him.

“I’m assuming you didn’t know the Queen Mother’s plan either,” she said.

“That is correct,” said the professor. “Though I knew as well as you that the situation was unstable. Had I known the Queen Mother intended to incite conflict, to force us to war, I’d never have come.”

More thunder, more flickering lights.

“Then it seems you’re destined to die with the rest of us,” I said, feeling the cold, dull ache of certain doom closing around my heart. I instantly rued the day Adanaho had entered my chapel.

But then again, was it better to die on Purgatory, alone, or on a Fleet warship among my own kind? Was either of these options preferable to the other? I tried to remember what the Chaplain had once told me, about keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of death, and discovered I couldn’t quite remember his exact words.

The Queen Mother continued to scrape and scratch frantically at the deck, her disc become worthless. It seemed suddenly that the mantes—even this, the greatest of her kind—weren’t all that terrible once you took away their technological advantage. Without the disc, she was as mortal as any man. With the frigate bucking beneath us and the captain and I struggling to keep our feet, I almost laughed as I watched the supreme leader of the enemy struggle helplessly.

Now you know how we felt!

I wasn’t sure if I’d merely thought it, or shouted it.

The captain and every other human were looking at me.

That’s when true disaster struck.

Kakraooooummmmmmm!

The lights vanished entirely as the room tilted ninety degrees and hurled us to the port bulkhead, then back across the space to the starboard bulkhead, before leaving us floating free. Orange emergency lamps snapped on and I fought a savagely instinctual desire to vomit—zero gee proving to be every bit as terrible in the bowels of the Calysta as it had been onboard the shuttle.

Marines flailed and then lapsed into their microgravity training. It had been too long for me, so I kept flailing, eventually feeling Adanaho’s grip on my left ankle. She levered herself up into my face and shouted, “The deflection matrix is falling apart! We’ve got to get to a lifeboat!”

“How?” I said, almost spewing my last meal into her face.

She turned her head, seeing that the marines were way ahead of her. They’d instinctually latched onto and levered each other like extension ladders, until one of them could get a grip on something solid, thus bringing them all into contact with the walls or floor or ceiling.

“We just need to get outside!” she said loudly.

Almost at once, the professor was there.

His disc moved effortlessly, seemingly unaffected by microgravity.

“Grab on,” he said, a forelimb stretched in our direction. I reached for it and took it, while Adanaho stayed attached to me, and the Queen Mother stayed attached to the professor’s other forelimb. Her disc trailed drops of mechanical fluid as the professor began to tow all of us for the nearest open exit. If the marines desired to fire, nobody pulled a trigger. Perhaps because there was no way to shoot without killing both the captain and myself? Fratricide being frowned upon, especially when superior officers are involved.

We emerged into the corridor beyond. The gore of dead mantes was everywhere. The marines had done their work well. I suddenly felt embarrassed and mournful. The Queen’s guards had saluted me as I entered, then paid with their lives for that trust. I gaped at the nearest of them, his young face split in two and his insect’s brain oozing out.

That did it.

I faced away from Adanaho and emptied the contents of my stomach, which spluttered away from us in a thick, chunky stream.

“Where?” the professor said sharply to the captain.

Emergency bells were chiming, and an automated vocal warning was issuing from every speaker.

HULL BREACH. VACUUM CONDITIONS ON MULTIPLE DECKS. PROCEED TO YOUR NEAREST SAFE DUTY STATION. REPEAT, HULL BREACH . . .

“There!” Adanaho said, almost climbing up my back so that she could point over the professor’s shoulder.

A row of hexagonal hatches had opened along the walls, much further down the corridor. Personnel were piling into them. Each hatch was ringed with yellow and black caution striping, with tiny beacon lights spinning rapidly at the comers.

“Find one of those,” Adanaho said.

Though the ones closest to us appeared positively choked with people, all clamoring for escape.

Gmrakkkkaaaaanngggggkt!

The guttural grinding sound of metal announced to even my inexperienced naval ears that the Calysta’s remaining moments were few. A wind had picked up in the corridor-air bleeding out into space. Men and women screamed, redoubling their efforts to seek escape.

For a brief instant, the Queen Mother and I locked eyes—hers as alien as the professor’s had ever been—while we clung to the professor’s separated forelimbs. I could not detect emotion behind her alien, multi-faceted gaze, but her contorted body posture spoke of both fear and pain, while her mouth gaped in a show of murderous rage. I’d have let go of the professor in terror at the sight of those tractoring incisors if I didn’t feel sure that the professor, and the mobility of his functional disc, weren’t the only hope I had.

And besides, there was the captain to think of. She clung to my back like a bear cub.

Suddenly the professor moved in a new direction. Opposite the way we’d all been looking. We shot down the corridor, headed aft, bumping aside crew and marines alike. A few gunshots rang after us, but in the panic of the moment they went wide, embedding themselves into the bulkheads.

The wind spiraled up to become a gale-force howl.

Now, humans no longer floated or pulled themselves along the corridor. They were vacuumed away, shrieking.

My ears suddenly began to hurt.

I wanted to yell at the professor—to ask where he thought he was going—but then I saw it: an open emergency hatch, unblocked.

The professor’s disc moved toward it at best possible speed.

We passed through the doorway and the captain had the good sense to reach out and slap the panel just inside the threshold. The doors to the emergency exit snapped shut with a loud clang. Suddenly we were all flattened against the hatch as the lifeboat spat through the disintegrating interior of the Calysta, following a pre-designated route.

Rapid egress shafts honeycombed the ship—as with all Earth war vessels—such that it took only moments for the lifeboat to be disgorged into the emptiness of space.

We floated free as the force of our acceleration ebbed. I found myself at a small porthole, catching a glimpse of the Calysta as she spun away—in my eye view—from us. There were huge wounds in her belly, punctuated by the gradual fragmenting of her exposed bones as new missiles from the mantis armada continued to home in on and decimate the frigate.

Then the Calysta flashed, her reactors going up.

I jerked away from the porthole, having been strobed almost to blindness. There was a human coughing sound behind me, and the additional noise of mandibles skittering and scratching out the mantis language.

I rubbed my lidded eyes and then opened them, seeing through purple spots that it was only the captain, myself, the professor, and the Queen Mother aboard.

We were alone.

5.

This far north of the equator, the nameless planet was arid and unremarkable—with barely enough oxygen and nitrogen to support a grown man.

A heck of a lot like home, I thought bitterly.

Hours after our ejection from the dying Calysta, our lifeboat had plummeted into the atmosphere. There’d been no sense trying to figure out who was winning or who was losing. The lifeboat had no tactical data nor any theater sensors with which to ascertain the progress of the battle. Every once in awhile lights in the sky would sparkle and flash-ships exploding in the emptiness of space, their fantastic vanishings visible even in the daylight. Human. Mantis. All perishing together in one pent-up orgasm of long-delayed, hateful fury.

Death.

It was the thought that most concerned me as I trudged back up the broken-scree slope upon which the lifeboat had come to rest. The lifeboat’s yellow and orange striped parachutes drifted and fluttered on a cold breeze, their cords stretched out across the crumbled and rocky bluff. My old survival training told me I’d best collect the chutes and tuck them away. But now it didn’t much matter. Human or mantis, whoever found us, there’d be hell to pay.

I climbed up the side of the lifeboat and dropped in through the top hatch, closing it behind me so as to preserve the batteries that were keeping the interior warm. The captain sat with her arms folded tightly across her stomach, back hunched and head down.

The Queen Mother was still helpless, her disc a dead weight while the professor attended her with the gentleness and focus of a lover. Had they, I wondered, ever mixed seed? He the drone and she the recipient of his genetic lineage? There was still so much about the mantes culture and society at which I could only guess.

The professor and the Queen Mother were engaged in gentle conversation, her mandibles clicking and chittering while he held one of her forelimbs in both of his.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Not good,” the professor said, his disc rotating so that he could face me. “The internal systems of her carriage have all failed. If we do not get her to a mantis physician soon, it’s probable that she will pass from life.”

“She’s not bleeding,” I said. “Internal injuries?”

“I do not think you understand,” the professor said, his mechanized voice only hinting at the emotion that seemed to hover beneath the surface of his chitinous skin. I’d spent enough time around mantes—and this mantis in particular—to know his body language. The professor’s agitation was plainly spoken in the way he moved his forelimbs and rapidly swiveled his wedge-like head from side to side.

“No,” I said, “I guess I don’t. Unless she’s been hit somewhere I can’t see, I don’t understand what’s the matter with her.”

“Our carriages, or discs as you commonly call them, are integral to us from the moment we achieve consciousness. No mantis lives without one. They protect us and provide us with mobility, allow us to work and manipulate the world around us, they expand our senses as well as our consciousness, and without them we are worse than helpless. The mantis and the carriage are one.”

“Okay,” I said carefully. “But this can’t be the first time an adult has had her disc—her carriage—shot out from under her, right?”

“Of course not,” said the professor. “But in those instances, death has either come quickly or medical aid has always been ready at hand.”

“So we can’t just pull her out of it?” I asked.

The professor’s antennae shot upward, waved a bit, then curled into an expression of pronounced shock.

“That would surely prove lethal,” he said, acting as if I’d suggested the worst sort of obscenity.

“But you just told me leaving her in the dead disc is bad too,” I said, growing frustrated.

The professor seemed to want to respond, but let his antennae fall to either side of his head, and turned back to speak to the Queen Mother in the indecipherable language of the mantes.

Now it was the Queen Mother whose antennae gave a sign of shock. She stared intently at me—multi-faceted eyes cold and alien without the vocoder of her disc to give words to her thoughts—then she yammered something at the professor in a rather rushed fashion, and slumped back into the center of her ruined disc.

“She says that while she was prepared to die in battle for our people, to commit helpless suicide in front of you humans is not to her liking.”

“If the Fleet finds us,” said Adanaho, surprising everyone as she finally looked up at us—her eyes puffy and red, “then the Queen Mother faces much worse than suicide. I’m with Intelligence and you can be certain that, with hostilities renewed, my comrades will spare no effort picking both of you apart in their quest for tactical and strategic information.”

“You assume humans will outcast the Queen Mother’s armada and reach our lifeboat first,” said the professor, his wings rustling slightly with grim amusement. “Did not your warship fall before our own, despite your best attempt to replicate our defensive technology?”

“The flashes we’ve been seeing in the sky since planetfall tell me not everything has gone your way,” the captain said, also grimly. “The fighting continues. General Sakumora was rash and quick to shed blood, but he was also well-prepared. Our dreadnoughts were the finest in all of human space, built using every lesson taught to us during the first war.”

I waved a finger in front of me, not looking at anyone in particular.

“The new war’s a non-starter if the Queen Mother can convince the mantes to cease offensive operations,” I said.

More fluttering of wings.

“And why would she do that,” asked the professor, “assuming she could regain contact with our forces?”

“Because the captain saved both your lives when it would have been more expedient to let our marines fill you each full of steel bullets.”

The professor had no answer to that.

The Queen Mother snapped and chattered at him.

He relayed to her what he’d heard.

They engaged in a quick series of mantis exchanges.

“She says,” the professor proceeded delicately, “that the mercy shown by a single human does not translate to good will on the part of all humans. In fact, while we remain stranded here, events are doubtless in motion that are beyond recall for either side. If what the Queen Mother has told me is correct, her return to the armada was not expected—all they awaited was her signal, at which point the war plans would be put into effect. Doubtless our couriers are speeding back to join the rest of our ships, eager to relay news of the renewed offensive. Human planets will be under siege in a matter of weeks, if not days.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said. “But assuming we could contact the mantis hierarchy—prove that the Queen Mother was alive—could she impose a cease fire on your side of the battle lines?”

The professor communicated my question to the Queen Mother, who stared at me a moment, then replied.

“Yes,” said the professor.

“Then what are we waiting for?” I said. “We’ve got to find a way to get her back in touch with your people.”

“Chief Barlow,” Captain Adanaho said, “I appreciate that you might still feel obligated to accomplish the mission, as originally assigned. But events have clearly wiped all previous considerations off the table. Our first objective is to alert Fleet to our presence. Intelligence will want otherwise, but I can argue from historical precedent that the professor and the Queen Mother should be processed as prisoners of war. As such, they’d each be entitled to certain rights. Perhaps with her safely in our custody—unharmed and unmolested—we can bargain our way to a new armistice?”

“You sound too much like your old boss,” I said. Then thought better of my tone and added a respectful, “Ma’am.”

Adanaho raised an eyebrow.

“Believe me, Chief,” she said, “I didn’t intend for any of this to happen, either. Nobody wanted a war.”

“But the Fleet bosses were obviously prepared for it,” I snapped.

“And why not?” she said. “Your own records from the original armistice state the matter plainly—the Fourth Expansion would have wiped humanity from the face of the galaxy. We were up against the wall, one way or another. It would have been foolish to count on the cease-fire to last indefinitely. Even if you and the professor had managed to achieve some measure of mutual understanding.”

A chime suddenly sounded through the lifeboat.

Adanaho got up and checked the lifeboat’s computer.

“Our emergency beacon’s been spotted,” she said. “We’re getting telemetry from a Fleet rescue team in orbit. Looks like they’ll be here in a few hours, once they’ve picked up other survivors.”

“Do they know we have the Queen Mother with us?” I said, alarmed.

“If they knew,” the captain said, “we’d be their top-most priority. That we’re not tells me they think we’re just another lifeboat filled with survivors—one of many, from the looks of it.”

I would have been lying if I didn’t feel a sudden surge of pride. A human rescue team meant that not only were we holding our own against the mantes, we were doing well enough to be able to afford search missions for the retrieval of survivors from lost ships. Not exactly the actions of an overwhelmed and beaten species.

The professor shrank in on himself, just as he had while aboard the Calysta.

“Prisoners of war,” he said. And none too happily.

“It could be worse,” I said to my old friend. “I survived the experience for years. You will too, if the captain is right about being able to secure your POW status under Fleet protocol.”

He chitter-scratched with the Queen Mother, whose deflated body language grew even more so.

“Of course,” I said, thinking pessimistically, “if the captain can’t secure your status, then you’re meat—subject to the total spectrum of our interrogation techniques.”

Adanaho didn’t meet my gaze.

I turned to face the professor.

“Tell the Queen Mother that if she can promise us safety among the mantes, we’ll help her escape.”

Adanaho opened her mouth to object, but I held up a hand, not wanting to get into an argument with my superior—at least not yet.

“Impossible,” said the professor. “With her carriage non-functional the Queen Mother is trapped here.”

“This is ridiculous,” I said. “There’s no contingency mode?”

The professor hesitated, then he and the Queen Mother conversed for several minutes, their heads shifting back and forth and their mandibles rattling, clacking, snapping and stuttering. If Adanaho picked up on the fact that the professor was straining to remain respectively persistent, she didn’t show it. But I could see what he was trying to do. Doubtless, like me, he was required to display deference to a superior, lest he forfeit his position. Or worse. But in the Queen Mother’s current state, she was dependent on him totally. And might be forced to acquiesce to whatever he suggested.

“The carriage’s engineering has changed little in hundreds of your years,” the professor said. “It is one of the all-time outstanding technical achievements of the great forebearers of mantis civilization—the first ones to meld mantis biology with mantis cyber-technology. There is an emergency release procedure, though it is seldom used. And I have never seen it done.”

“Good,” I said. “The sooner she’s out of that thing, the sooner we can get moving. No doubt your own carriage has been sending out coded mantis distress signals, ever since we landed.”

“You guess correctly,” the professor said.

“Then it’s a race against time—the further we are from humans, the safer we’ll be. We’ll have to hope that your people have started dispatching rescue missions of their own.”

“But where will we go?” the professor asked.

“Anywhere but here,” I said, raising my arms out and indicating the walls of the lifeboat with my open palms.

“Very well,” said the professor. “But you and the female must wait outside. The extraction from the carriage will be even more humiliating for the Queen Mother than remaining bound to it. This is not a thing for human eyes to see. Gather your human survival equipment and supplies and be gone. We will come out in time.”

The captain and I quietly collected what we could, slung the frames of the emergency packs on our backs, and climbed out of the lifeboat and walked up to the top of the bluff, pebbles and sand swamping over the tops of our boots with each step.

“You realize I could order us all to stay put,” she said, her short-cropped hair ruffling slightly in the cool, dry breeze. The sun—a star smaller, yet brighter, than that which Purgatory circled—was still high up in the sky, but sinking almost imperceptibly towards the horizon.

“Ma’am,” I said, “if you meant it when you told me you didn’t want a war, then there’s no way you can turn these two over to Fleet in their present circumstances. We might as well stuff apples in their mouths and shove them into the oven. They’ll be picked apart like frogs in a biology class. First their minds, then their bodies.”

“Are you forgetting that you have a duty, Chief?” she said sternly, turning to face me fully, with hands clutching the straps of her pack, elbows thrust just slightly out.

Our uniforms were barely keeping the cold at bay, and I suspected we’d have to use the emergency jackets in our packs if we didn’t start hiking soon.

“What good’s that duty going to do if we still lose? C’mon, Captain, you know the odds. The mantes own thousands of planets, and even with the years of the armistice taken into consideration, I can’t believe humanity has caught up much. Have those colonies crucified in the first war even fully recovered yet? What about Earth? No, ma’am, if the mantes want us dead, it will happen eventually. The only difference now is we can actually put up a fight, whereas last time they cut us down like lambs.”

My superior officer didn’t appear convinced.

“Look,” I said, figuring it was time to put all my cards on the table, “I’ve never been a great one for protocol and going along with orders at all costs. In some ways, the absence of Fleet rules and regulations from Purgatory life was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it made me realize what kind of man I am. I’m not a very good soldier. I don’t like being told what to do. And if I’d had a choice in the matter I’d have thrown my non-standard commission back in Fleet’s face.

“The chaplain gave me a job once, and I did all I could to carry it out. For his sake. Now I have a new job, and until that job’s been done—the resumption of peace between the mantes race and our own—I won’t rest.”

The captain considered at great length, her eyes evaluating my expression while her mind evaluated the wisdom of my plea. It hadn’t been a very persuasive one, but it was the only one I had to make. Either she went with it or I’d be forced to mutiny. Definitely not something I’d prefer doing. But I’d do it just the same. And I think she knew it, too.

Adanaho drew in a long, gradual breath through her nostrils, then let it out just as gradually, tilting her head to one side.

“You’re right,” she said. “You’re not a very good soldier. You’ve been two steps from dereliction ever since I met you. But you’ve got guts, Padre. And I respect that. Okay, just so things are official, I am ordering us to escort the professor and the Queen Mother until we can make contact with mantis forces, at which time we will parlay for a cease-fire, and pray that things get rolling positively from there.”

“And if the Fleet finds us before the mantes do?”

“Then let me do the talking, while you do the praying.”

There was a noise behind us. We turned to see the professor slowly levitating upward, out of the lifeboat’s hatch. He had the Queen Mother balanced on the front of his disc—his forelimbs wrapped under her insect-like shoulder joints while the rest of her body rested on the front of the disc proper. Her lower thorax was pale and shone with dampness, its chitin looking soft, and mantis blood trailing from several holes.

Adanaho and I rushed over to them.

“Does she need first aid?” I asked.

“What can be done, I have done,” said the professor, who seemed visibly shaken by what had just transpired inside. “She will heal. In time. The Queen Mother is severed from her carriage, and I do not know if she can ever be mated to another—such things being almost unheard of among adults of her great age. Her pain is terrible, but she is conscious, and she bade me tell you that we are in your care now. I have no weapons—as you well know—and would not use them to coerce you, even if I did. The Queen Mother rides with me, and I will follow wherever you choose to go. I can signal for mantis help with my own carriage—for several of your months, depending on how long my carriage’s fuel cells last.”

“May fortune favor the foolish,” I said.

The professor’s antennae made a questioning expression.

“Old Earth literature,” the captain said, in reply. “Come on, let’s go. Padre? Since this is your idea, you’re on point.”

“Roger that, ma’am,” I said, tugging down on the straps of my pack to tighten them into my shoulders.

6.

We walked.

On rock, when we could find it. The sand and pebbles proving to be a lot of work despite our best efforts. I envied the professor with his disc—floating effortlessly above the ground. Occasionally I dropped back to talk to him as he kept the Queen Mother securely held.

“Will you be able to sense it?” I asked. “If we get near any other mantis troops or equipment?”

“Yes,” said the professor. “Though I must warn you that my connection to my people has been non-existent since our landing. I am beginning not to trust my own machinery. Perhaps there has been damage I cannot ascertain? Or perhaps your military has devised some way of blanketing or cloaking mantis communications—such a thing would prove very useful against us, in a pitched battle. Our coordination is our greatest strength. Forced to fight singly, we might not be nearly as effective.”

“If we did have such a weapon,” the captain said, overhearing, “I am sure I’d have known about it.”

“I think we’ll have to trust that your readings are accurate,” I said to the professor. “Meanwhile, we will go south, and hope that both terrain and climate are favorable.”

It seemed like a vain hope. All I could see on the horizon were rocks, more stony, broken bluffs, and sand dunes. Not a tree nor bush in any direction. Nothing running, flying, squirming, or jumping. It occurred to me that when we’d entered orbit, the seas of the planet had appeared small, and tinted green.

Local evolution might not have gotten much beyond the microscopic level, and then only in the shallow oceans.

Enough photosynthesis to turn the sky a pale blue.

Which was both good, and bad.

Stranded for too long without rescue, we’d starve. Or die of thirst.

We plodded, and I stretched out the distance between myself and our little group. I scanned relentlessly for gullies or creek beds—any sign of fresh water. Adanaho and I only had enough for a few days, even with rationing.

A wind began to whip.

The captain jogged to catch up with me.

“I do not like this,” she said. “I feel a sandstorm is coming.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I grew up part of the time in North Africa,” she said. “I can tell.”

“Look!” said the professor, his speaker grill yelling the word.

We stopped and turned. An ominous, dark wall of billowing dust was moving rapidly upon us from the rear. It seemed to stretch into the sky for a kilometer or more. I swallowed hard, then began to frantically search for shelter. The captain pointed, and we ran for a nearby hill with a small overhang. When we got there we discovered a water-worn hollow at the hill’s base. We pushed ourselves into it, huddling together, emergency jackets pulled tightly over our heads. The professor landed his disc and used both the disc and his body to shield the Queen Mother.

If it was possible for a mantis to look more pathetic, I wasn’t sure how. Her limbs were curled tightly against her body and dried blood dribbled away from the fresh scabs where her lower thorax had formerly interfaced with her disc. Her lower limbs were small and feeble looking, compared to the impressive forelimbs, and I wondered just how long it had been since any mantis had walked under its own power?

Without her carriage, the Queen Mother had been made small.

I experienced a moment of unexpected pity.

Then the rushing cloud of detritus swept over us. I closed my jacket across my face as tightly as I could make it, listening to the muffled howling of the wind as it broke across the top of the hill.

7.

Something nudged me awake.

I slowly pulled the jacket off of my head. There was a sensation of fine grit in every pore and crevice of my skin. My lips were dry and my throat parched.

It was dusk, or getting on toward it. The storm had passed, and the air was clear. So clear in fact I could see the stars. Sharp and precise in the purpling sky.

I saw the captain’s pack in front of me, but no Adanaho.

The professor hovered nearby.

“Is everyone okay?” I asked, my tongue rubbery. Saliva flowed into my mouth, and I spit several times to get the dust out—though I still felt it on my teeth. My eyes were crusted and I wiped at them with hands that felt caked in powder.

“Yes,” said the professor.

I slowly stood up, yawning, and stretching my back. There were wind storms on Purgatory too, but in the valley where my chapel was built, things had been more or less protected.

Not so, here. Though the hill had done us good. I couldn’t begin to guess what might have happened if we’d been caught out in the open with nowhere to run and nothing to hide behind. There weren’t any mountains on this world, from what I could see. No recent or ongoing geologic activity. Everything had been slowly worn flat by wind and occasional water. It was probable we’d see several more sandstorms before our journey was over.

My bowels suddenly told me it was time to do God’s work.

“Excuse me,” I said. And began walking away from our hill, looking for something farther and smaller—just big enough to crouch behind, and relieve myself.

When I was done I made my way back. The far horizon still glowed with the setting sun. I stopped short, seeing two silhouettes at the top of our hill: one human, distinctly female, and the other mantis. I observed them for a time. They were both facing into the setting sun, their heads erect and their eyes forward. I thought I could just barely hear the sound of Adanaho’s voice.

Coming back to the makeshift camp in the hollow at the base of the hill, I quietly spoke to the professor.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

“When the storm lifted, your captain was the first to rouse. She checked the status of myself and the Queen Mother, then she shed her equipment and went to the top of the hill to survey the surround. When we heard her voice coming softly down to us, the Queen Mother asked me what your captain was saying. I told the Queen Mother that it sounded like prayer.”

Prayer.

I was surprised, though I don’t know why. I’d not known the captain long enough to inquire as to her upbringing or spiritual affiliation, if any. Was she Muslim? She had mentioned North Africa.

“So how did the Queen Mother get up there?”

“I carried her,” said the professor. “She was curious. She’d never seen a human engaged in religious rite. Of any sort. Your captain did not seem to mind. The Queen Mother asked that she be left alone with your captain, and I have done this. I suggest you do it too.”

“It sounds to me like Adanaho is still talking,” I said. “She has to know that the Queen Mother isn’t able to understand.”

“Perhaps her words are not for the Queen Mother?” the professor said.

Yes, perhaps.

I sat down in the hollow and retrieved some water and a concentrated food bar from my pack, drinking and eating in slow, deliberate portions. The professor softly landed his disc next to me, and I felt his alien eyes studying me as I stared at the gravel in front of my toes.

“You are a curiosity,” he said.

“Oh?”

“Yes, assistant-to-the-chaplain. In all the time we have known each other—through all of the work that you have performed in my presence, as a religious human—I have never known you to be overt about your feelings in the way other humans are overt.”

I felt my face get warm.

He was treading in uncomfortable territory.

“I don’t believe it’s my place to be showy,” I said. “It might make some of the chapel’s attendees think I was playing favorites. In terms of which ‘flavor’ I subscribe to.”

“But we are not in your chapel,” said the professor. “And there are no other humans around us to see you, save your captain. Who is now occupied. Our circumstances are dire. I know from studying the human history of belief that this is the ideal time for supplication. Harry, why do you not pray?”

The warm feeling in my face grew more intense.

“I don’t know,” I said. He was asking me questions I didn’t dare ask myself.

“You built a holy house with your own hands, and you maintain this house for use by any human who comes through your door. You do this out of loyalty to your deceased chaplain. Yet, you do not perform services in your chapel. Never have you offered a sermon. You do not pray, nor have I ever known you to habitually carry out any religious ritual of any sort—save for demonstration purposes, for the educational benefit of myself and my students.”

“Stop,” I said. Though perhaps too quietly. It was a plea, not a command. My eyes were closed, but that didn’t prevent the tears.

“My apologies,” said the professor, when he noticed the muddy streaks on my cheeks. “It was not my intent to cause you grief. I was merely curious. It seems to me a very large irony that you of all humans should be a nonbeliever. Yet this has been my slow, hesitant conclusion. After spending many years away from you, I was able to further digest our mutual experiences. You support and feed the belief of others. You have made it your mission in life. Yet you cannot partake of that which you give.”

“I’m . . . I’m not sure what I goddamned believe,” I said, though perhaps too loudly. The gentle, whispery sound of Adanaho’s voice had ceased. And suddenly the clicky-clacky speech of the Queen Mother replaced it. The professor listened intently for a few moments, then looked down at me—his body and disc just faint outlines in the near darkness.

“I must go. The Queen Mother wishes me to translate.”

He left me there, feeling embarrassed and miserable.

I put away my food and water and rewrapped myself in my jacket. Nights in the desert—any desert—tend to be cold. Though I didn’t think the chill was entirely physical.

8.

Captain Adanaho woke me.

“Chief,” she said in a whisper.

“Hmmm?”

“Sun’s coming up. We need to get moving.”

I slowly uncurled—stiff and cold.

At least on Purgatory there had been something akin to trees from which we’d harvested firewood. On this nameless sphere there wasn’t so much as a tumbleweed to burn. I shakily fished some food and water from my pack, the captain and I ate in silence while the mantes watched dispassionately, then we began trudging into the brightening dawn.

The labor of the march warmed me up soon enough, and before long I felt myself sweating as the bright, alien star climbed steadily into the sky.

This time it was the professor who led. He claimed to have felt the ghost of a flicker of a mantis signal due roughly southwest, and he stretched out a large distance between himself—with the Queen Mother riding on the front of his disc—and Adanaho and I as we walked side by side in their wake.

“Is it true?” she said to me as I put one boot stubbornly in front of the other—we were going too fast; there d be blisters at this rate.

I yelled for the professor to slow it up, then asked, “Is what true?”

“That you’re not really a religious person.”

“That was a private conversation,” I snapped.

“The mantis voice system doesn’t do whispers. I heard everything the professor said.”

I didn’t respond right away. Just kept walking.

“Let me put it this way,” I said, letting my words roll around in my brain a few moments before they came off my tongue, “in my time as an assistant in the Chaplains Corps I’ve been exposed to virtually every systematized form of human religion in existence, and a great many examples of non-systematized faith—either the do-it-yourself smorgasbord variety, or the deeply personalized, individual one-of-a-kind variety.

“Almost everyone claims to have discovered some unique or otherwise true path to God, or the Goddess, or at least to a deep connection with the Cosmic. The more I saw all of it, together, and heard all the insights and the prejudices and could observe the blind eyes being turned to this or that inconsistency or hypocrisy, the more convinced I became that we’re probably just fooling ourselves.”

“So if it’s all a load of shit,” she said, “why didn’t you quit and do something else?”

“I never said it’s a load of shit,” I replied, my eyes still on the gravel two meters in front of me. “I told you before; I like people. And many people on Purgatory would have withered and died if they’d not had their beliefs to hold on to. Just because I don’t necessarily believe in any of it doesn’t mean I have to doubt or deride its value for other people. That’s one of the problems with our modern society. General Sakumora had it in his eyes and in his voice: obvious contempt.”

“You noticed, huh?”

“How could I not?” I said, throwing my arms out in exasperation. “It practically oozed off the man. He thought I was nuts.”

“And yet you are closer to his view than he ever suspected,” she said, a tiny smirk on her lips.

“No,” I corrected her. “Disbelieving and being openly scornful of belief are not the same thing. I don’t begrudge those with faith. In fact, I admire it. I admire it a great deal. All those people who walked into my chapel all of those years while we were imprisoned? I thought they were impressive. I think one of the reasons why I stuck with my job was because I wanted to find out what made those people tick—how did they manage it?”

The captain didn’t say anything after that, for several minutes.

“So,” I said, clearing my throat and spitting the grit from my tongue, “what conversation did you and the Queen Mother have? Any groundbreaking heart-to-hearts?”

“I don’t think she understood a word I said,” Adanaho replied.

“The professor told me it sounded like you were praying. I didn’t ask before, but I want to ask now: are you a Muslim?”

“No,” she said. “Copt.”

I stopped short.

After the purges in Africa in the twenty-first and early twenty-second centuries, many religious scholars doubted that the Coptic Christian religion had survived at all—that any modem Copts extant were “revivalists” trying to re-invent the faith following its literal extinction.

As if reading my thoughts, the captain chuckled.

“Oh, we managed,” she said. “On the down-low, of course. Family legend has it that my ancestors fled North Africa, and went to Australia. Succeeding generations then went to Southeast Asia, then South America, then North America, and finally back to North Africa as part of the resettlement agreement with the Brotherhood. Once the war with the mantes began, our enemies among the Muslims had a new devil to hate, so they left us alone. For a change.”

“Do you believe?” I said. “Are you a Copt in your heart, as well as by birth?”

“I didn’t used to be,” she said as we started up walking again.

“What happened?” I asked.

“You,” she said.

I stopped short for the second time.

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Whatever could I have done that re-ignited your belief?”

I felt my face growing warm again, and not from exercise.

“When I got out of officer school and went to the Intelligence branch, I began studying the roots of the armistice. I read all of your depositions and your final summary. It wasn’t scholarly writing by any stretch of the imagination. But I agreed with you then: the ceasefire was a practical miracle, achieved against all odds. Without it, humanity would have ceased to exist. The mantes had every intention of doing to us what they’d done to previous intelligent competitors in the galaxy. That they did not, and that they did not for the sake of something so utterly beyond their understanding and experience, as religion, spoke to me of a higher power at work.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

“You are a modest man, Padre,” she said. “I know you try not to take too much credit. I personally believe you were a tool. And I don’t mean that in the pejorative sense.”

“Others have said as much, before,” I admitted.

“You are uncomfortable with this.”

“Of course I am uncomfortable with it!” I said, almost shouting. “Do you know how many human pilgrims have passed through my chapel in the last decade? All of them wanting to sit at my feet like I’m some kind of fucking Buddha? An enlightened one? A savior?”

“To their minds, that’s not far-fetched.”

“No doubt!” I said, facing her directly. We were deep into the weeds of discussion now, and there was no holding back. “But do you have any kind of idea how much pressure that put on me? How badly I felt when these people—from all over human space—came to my chapel and sat in my pews, and expected some kind of transfiguring or overwhelming experience, and didn’t get it? I saw it in their eyes when they left. Every time—confusion and disappointment. I never wanted to be anyone’s damned prophet. I was never good at preaching. I was never good at teaching. All I was ever trying to do was provide people with a quiet, clean, calming space where they could come and find their own answers. For themselves.”

“Because you made a promise to your chaplain,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, breathing heavily.

The professor had stopped too. Had the mantes overheard? He was chattering for the Queen Mother’s benefit; she seemed intensely interested. I suddenly felt a sharp desire to melt into the ground. Some messiah I’d turned out to be. I’d only delayed the war, not averted it. Things seemed to be more pointless than ever before. I’d have quit right then if I’d not still felt deep down that there was a chance—if only we could get the Queen Mother back to her people, she could make them listen.

“Okay,” I said, waving all three of them off. “Let’s get moving again.”

The professor and the Queen Mother floated off without protest.

The captain resumed her place at my side.

“Thanks, Chief,” she said.

“For what?” I asked, embarrassed.

“I think I’m finally starting to understand you.”

I grunted, and didn’t say anything more.

We kept walking.

9.

On the third day after landing, a rainstorm blew in.

Literally.

I wasn’t sure whether to be happy or scared. The wind was ferocious, whipping my poncho about and driving the water into me sideways. It was cold water too, and before long the captain and I realized we’d be in danger of hypothermia. Unlike when the sandstorm hit, there were no hills or outcroppings of rock to hide behind. We simply had to sit down on a raised mound of half-buried boulders and do the best we could.

If the storm bothered the professor, he didn’t show it. Though the Queen Mother looked perfectly miserable.

After an hour, things calmed down enough for me to get up and walk over to where the professor was hovering over the Queen Mother, doing his best to protect her from the elements. My hands were shaking and my teeth chattered as I spoke.

“Is she in danger?”

“Yes,” the professor said, matter-of-factly.

“She can have my poncho if it will help,” I said. “Though I can’t say it’s done me much good. The captain and I are both soaked to the bone.”

I removed my poncho and went to place it over the Queen Mother, who had curled up tightly on the rock, when I felt a sudden wave of delicious warmth on the top of my hand.

It was coming from the bottom of the professor’s disc.

The mantes may have been insect-like, but they were as warm-blooded as humans, varying only by a few degrees. I realized that the professor had to be burning a lot of power to keep both himself and the Queen Mother warm.

“How long can you keep it up?” I asked.

“I do not know for certain,” he said. “I can shut down various functions to compensate for the raw energy expenditure, but if these sorts of storms are the norm for this planet, and not the exception, it will dramatically reduce my carriage’s longevity.”

“Do you mind if the captain and I try to share the heat? We can’t make a fire, and our uniforms aren’t designed for warmth when wet.”

“Proceed,” he said.

I beckoned the captain over, and her face went from an expression of utter misery to utter amazement as she put her hands into the zone of pleasant heat directly below the professor’s disc.

We quickly huddled up close and stuck both arms and legs under the shadow of the disc, our ponchos over our heads and backs while our rear ends remained cold and soggy on the damp stone.

For awhile, I dozed. Between the lack of adequate food and walking many kilometers every day, I was definitely feeling the physical toll. Eventually I felt the captain slump against me, and I allowed myself to do likewise, my head balanced on top of hers, a little patch of protected warmth growing between us. I closed my eyes.

They didn’t open again until hours later.

The storm had passed, and the sun was out again.

Still brighter and cooler than either Purgatory’s star, or Earth’s own Sol, but a welcome sight just the same. It was mid day, and there was a bit of a breeze, which meant the captain and I might be able to dry our clothes out—essential, if we were going to survive the night without further draining the professor’s energy reserves.

The Queen Mother had drawn herself out from under the professor’s disc and was perched on a boulder a few meters away. Her wings were spread widely and she appeared almost frozen in place, forelimbs outstretched and her head tilted back. She seemed to be soaking in every last ray she could get.

The sound of running water nearby reminded me that we’d best replenish our own water supply while we had the opportunity. I regretfully roused the captain, who jumped at the chance to refill our bottles. We located a formerly dry creek bed—now swollen with slowly running, very soiled water—and began to fill up. The mouth of each bottle had a micro filter on it that screened out the bulk of the soil. Leaving only the thinnest of hazes. Unsure of the bacterial hazard, we unscrewed the filters and dropped survival tabs into each bottle—the tabs made the water taste chemically nasty, but it would be safe to drink.

Returning to where the professor kept watch on the Queen Mother, the captain and I each did an about-face and stripped to the skin. Our emergency packs had one-piece smocks in them, which we quickly donned, then we laid our uniforms, underwear, boots, and socks out on the rocks as best as we could, hoping that the strong daylight and fresh breeze would be enough to dry things out. The smocks weren’t nearly as sturdy as we needed them to be, and the slip-on shoes that came with them would quickly disintegrate on this planet’s rough, unforgiving terrain.

With nothing better to do, Adanaho and I ate a little, drank a little more, went and did our business as far away from each other as possible, then returned and stared at the Queen Mother—who’d remained motionless as a statue the whole time.

I did notice that her lower limbs—which had seemed almost useless when the professor had first removed her from her disc—appeared to be getting stronger. She was balanced on them now, with just a hand’s width of space between her belly and the stone on which she perched.

“How is she doing?” I asked the professor.

“I do not know,” he said. “She has not spoken to me since the storm passed. I am suspecting that she is manifesting an instinctual behavior of our species, from the time before we had carriages to provide for our needs.”

“What about food?” I said.

“The carriage provides that too, though we can ingest nourishment with our mouths for the pleasure of it.”

I shuddered a bit, remembering mantis warriors devouring human flesh during the initial fighting on Purgatory.

“Can the Queen Mother eat our food?” the captain asked.

“I do not think it wise,” the professor said. “Our nutritional requirements are not the same as yours. Besides, we have the ability to store a reserve—naturally—which should suffice for the Queen Mother’s needs for some time yet. Assuming she gets water.”

“She should go drink while the drinking’s good,” I said, pointing back to the creek bed, the water in which had begun to wane as the sun gradually began to drop towards the western horizon.

“I have already purified a supply for her,” the professor said. “For now, I simply watch, and wait. The Queen Mother’s behavior is unusual and fascinating. I have never seen any of my people forced to live without a carriage. The Queen Mother’s actions speak to me of how my people must have lived, eons ago in the distant past, before we ourselves even had fire, or tools. Before we took to the stars.”

As the angle of the sun’s light shifted, so did the Queen Mother. Like a solar panel, she made sure her wings caught the maximum amount of direct light.

Occasionally the captain or I would get up to go check on our clothes, flapping them vigorously to try and get out every drop of remaining moisture. When evening came and the sun began to dip into the far horizon, we pulled out our emergency sleeping bags and prepared to make due on the hard stone.

“I’ll be back,” Adanaho said.

“Nature calls?” I replied.

“No.”

“Oh . . . well, find privacy and peace then.”

To my surprise, she went to join the Queen Mother, who’d folded up her wings, but remained staring in the direction of the setting sun.

Adanaho sat cross legged and appeared to hold something in her hands as she bowed her head. The Queen Mother’s own head tilted just a little, her antennae moving ever so slowly, as if entranced by the captain’s soft, slow words of supplication. The professor was listening, too—I could see him alert. Like before, I was too far away to make out what was being said. And, I suddenly realized, I was a little bit jealous that the captain felt perfectly fine sharing her prayer with the mantes, but not with me. A tiny spark of anger flared, and quickly died as I realized that maybe she was just doing what I’d done with the professor many times: giving the mantes a demonstration, so that maybe the Queen Mother might enjoy a degree of understanding.

Though I couldn’t be sure what progress Adanaho hoped to make, which I hadn’t been able to make with the professor or his students in all the years of trying back on Purgatory.

Eventually the sky faded from blue to purple, and from purple to black. Adanaho returned, and I was already in my bag, my one-piece rolled up under my head for a pillow. I averted my eyes as the captain stripped, rolled her one-piece up for a pillow, then slipped into her own bag.

I didn’t stay awake long enough to see what arrangements the professor and the Queen Mother had made between them.

Some time in the night I felt a hand nudging my shoulder.

“What’s happening?” I said. “Is something wrong?”

“I can’t sleep, Chief,” Adanaho said. “There’s a hole in my bag and it got damp inside, and I am freezing.”

My eyes popped open. I could barely make out the black silhouette of her shoulders and head against the perfect expanse of stars that stretched across the night sky. Clear sky meant frigid temperatures, and I could feel the cold night air on my face. I reached out and felt Adanaho’s hand in mine. Her fingers were icy.

Not even thinking about it, I unzipped my bag and beckoned her in. She slid down beside me and zipped the bag up to our chins. Not designed for comfort, as an emergency bag it could hold two in a pinch—and I certainly was glad for it, as the captain felt dangerously cold, her body shuddering next to me.

“Ma’am,” I said, “why didn’t you come earlier? You’re a popsicle.”

“I feel like a popsicle,” she said, her nose stuffed.

“Here,” I said, and closed my arms around her. Despite the frigidity of her skin, it was smooth, and womanly, and all of a sudden I realized I hadn’t lain in bed with a girl since before I’d joined the Fleet, and that had been a long, long time ago.

“You’ll have to forgive me,” I said, clearing my throat.

“For what?” She said. And then, because of the impossibly close quarters of the bag, she said, “Oh. I get it.”

I felt a rush of blood to my face.

“It’s okay, Chief,” she said, sensing my mortal embarrassment.

“I hope you’re not married,” I said. “Explaining to your husband how you spent the night naked in a sleeping bag with another man who was unable to contain his . . . ahhh, excitement, could be problematic.”

“No, I am not married,” she said, laughing a bit. Then began to cough.

I suddenly realized that pneumonia could kill as easily as low temperatures, and held her tighter. She squirmed in my grasp and was suddenly face to face with me, her nose like a cold, damp button in the nape of my neck. She coughed a few more times, snuffling, and clung tightly to me. I rubbed my hands vigorously along her bare back to try and accelerate the process of wanning. Gradually, her body relaxed. I then heard a small, quiet snore.

I shifted and repositioned my rolled-up smock so that her head rested on it, not mine, crooked an elbow up to my ear, kept my other arm wrapped tightly around her, and let myself drift off.

10.

I woke early.

The captain was still snoring softly, so I slid out of the bag as slowly and as stealthily as I could, letting my superior curl the fabric around herself and bury her face deeper into my jumper. The sun wasn’t yet up, but I could see well enough. Being both naked and cold, now seemed as good a time as any to go see if my uniform had dried. But first, business. I spied a low mound of split rock not too far off, and headed directly for it.

The professor caught me halfway back.

I felt a bit awkward over my nudity, then decided it was silly to be modest in front of the alien. Though I also thought this is how the Queen Mother must have felt when she was forced to disengage from her disc.

“Good morning,” the professor said.

“Hello,” I replied.

“The female still sleeps?”

“For the moment.”

“Did you mate with her?”

I sputtered a quiet exclamatory denial. Then asked, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

“On Purgatory you once told me that when male and female humans wish to copulate, they will share the same bed.”

“On Purgatory, sure, and then only if the male and the female know each other well enough and have agreed to have that kind of relationship.”

“It is not an automatic biological function?”

“No,” I said firmly. “Is it for you mantes?” The professor considered, a forelimb gently running along the edge of his disc.

“In some ways, yes. The egg-laying females—like the Queen Mother—when they enter what you would call estrus, they exude a pheromone that is both sexually rapturous and psychologically debilitating for males. Any male within reach of the pheromone becomes somewhat mindless in his pursuit of intercourse. The only way to avoid it is to avoid being where the pheromone can get to you.”

“But once you get a whiff—”

“Then the male is in for a delightfully stupid time of physical pleasure, followed by a lengthy period of slumber.”

“Well,” I said, smiling, “at least one thing is shared between human males and mantis males.”

“Still,” said the professor, “with Adanaho, if she is available to you and there is the possibility of sex, are you not . . . tempted?”

“Of course I’m tempted,” I snapped. Then apologized for being harsh. “It’s been at least a dozen or more years since I had a woman in my arms like that. But when a human male gets excited, he’s still in full command of his faculties. He can still choose. Or at least he’s expected to behave as if he has a choice. Personally, I think it’s one of the few things that actually makes us different from mere animals. We can deny our lusts, even during moments of opportunity.”

“So you chose to abstain.”

“Yes.”

“Is she not attractive?”

“Yes, she’s attractive.”

“Forgive me Harry, I am still struggling to understand.”

“Look,” I said, my hands on my hips as I walked slowly over to the rocks where my uniform and boots were spread out, “attraction is only part of it. There’s other factors too. Like, she’s too young. Much younger than I am. I’d feel like I was taking advantage of her. Plus, she’s my superior officer in the Fleet. It’s against the rules for a superior and a subordinate to engage in sexual congress.”

“Why?”

“Bad for discipline in the chain-of-command, among other things.”

“And that’s all?”

“No,” I said, testing the fabric between my fingers. It felt dry enough. I started to put my undergarments on. “The male and the female should really love each other first, before they have sex. When sex happens before love, or without love, it gets . . . complicated.”

“Also immoral,” said the professor.

“If the man and the woman subscribe to certain flavors’ of religious or moral tradition, yes. That too. Though most religious proscriptions surrounding intercourse simply involve matrimony, not love. A few centuries ago, before humanity went into space, it was quite common for young men and women to be married off by their families. For political and social reasons, among other things. Love didn’t really enter into it.”

“Fascinating,” said the professor. “Among my people we mate for genetic enhancement and advantage. Many, many males. A few females. In the far distant past males engaged in mortal combat to determine which ones would mate during a given cycle of estrus. Now we select for genetic traits we consider positive and bar those who don’t meet the standards. Those of us who meet the standards are then chosen via lottery to attend to the females when they are ready. I have copulated six times in my life. I am considered somewhat fortunate in this regard.”

“Because you’re smart, or because you simply got lucky?” I said, sliding on pants, then socks, then boots.

“Intelligence is key,” he said. “But luck rules the final selection process, yes.”

“Assuming you win the lottery,” I asked while buttoning up my topcoat, “do you choose the females or do the females choose you?”

“The females choose us,” he said. “In descending order of matriarchal seniority.”

“Did you ever mate with the Queen Mother?”

The professor paused. A small flush of color along the semi-soft portions of his chitin told me I had embarrassed him.

“No.”

“I’m sorry if I intruded into a private area where I should not have,” I said honestly.

“No, Harry, it is I who began this conversation. The discomfort comes from knowing that no female of the Queen Mother’s stature has ever selected a scholar for mating. They prefer warriors to thinkers.”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nevermind,” I said.

The sun’s first rays peaked over the horizon.

I observed the Queen Mother’s silhouette in the distance. Just like the day before, she was immobile, faced directly into the growing light as it slowly bathed the landscape. The professor and I watched her for a time, then I asked, “Penny for her thoughts.”

“If by that you mean to say you wonder what’s in her mind at this time, I wish I knew. I have inquired, and she will not tell me. I sense in conversation with her that the Queen Mother is both fascinated and troubled by her experience living without the disc.”

A rustling to our left told me the captain was arising.

“Clothes are dry,” I called, deliberately loud.

“Roger that,” she said, her nose sounding stuffed up.

I walked away from the rocks where her uniform still lay, and kept my back turned while she shuffled up and slowly put on her uniform in silence.

“Okay,” she said.

I turned around.

“You look like shit, ma’am,” I said.

“I feel sick,” she admitted. Wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“We should have checked your bag sooner. We’ll have to let it dry out before nightfall if we don’t want a repeat of last night. Meanwhile, perhaps the professor can spare room on the back of his disc for you while we travel today.”

“I’d be grateful for that,” she said, eyes drawn and puffy-looking.

“It could be managed,” the professor said, after looking down at the captain—his antennae moving thoughtfully.

The captain and I did what we could with the ration bars still in our packs, chewing because we needed the fuel, not because it tasted good. I’d never been a heavy chap. I realized that too much time on this nameless world would thin me down even more.

When we’d collected our gear and re-secured our packs, I helped Adanaho climb onto the back of the professor’s disc—following his having helped the Queen Mother climb onto the front. The Queen Mother and Adanaho both seemed unusually quiet this morning, and I shouldered my burden wondering what the day would bring. The captain had taken some pills from her pack’s emergency medical kit, and wrapped her sleeping bag around herself inside-out so as to let the liner properly dry. Her belt had been looped into a small cleat on the back of the disc so that she wouldn’t slide off.

A cool breeze started up.

We moved out, due southwest in the direction of the hinted-at mantis signals the professor had previously detected.

Plodding through the gravel and sand I thought about the one time I’d been to the Mojave, back on Earth. At least there. I’d had some mountains to look at in the distance, along with a few Joshua trees, and the occasional rattlesnake. On this world, everything had been worn flat and made unremarkable. Without the professor’s telemetry to guide us, I suspected it would have been supremely easy to wind up meandering in circles. One dune or low bluff looked like the next.

After awhile I noticed that the captain’s eyes had closed. She was slumped against the professor’s back. If either she or he were bothered by such close contact, neither of them showed it.

“Military is as military does,” I said under my breath. Sleep anywhere you can, when you can.

Good for her.

I kept walking.

11.

Afternoon brought us to the edge of a narrow, deep canyon. A small river wound its way across the bottom headed northwest to southeast. The water tumbled and rushed against the rocks below, and a rumbling echo drifted out of the canyon as the professor and I considered our options. I reluctantly woke the captain, helping her down off the back of the professor’s disc, while he helped the Queen Mother down too. The two aliens spoke briefly in their insect language, then she scurried off to the Canyon’s edge, peering out over it while the captain and I counseled with the professor.

“Have you detected any further signs of mantis signals or technology?” Adanaho asked. She didn’t sound as stuffed up as she had in the morning, and her eyes looked somewhat better too. I was encouraged by this. Maybe the extra sleep had done her good.

“No,” said the professor. “But, given our new geographical impediment, I do not think it would matter even if I had.”

“Can’t your disc take us over?” I asked.

“The carriage is not an aircraft,” the professor said. “Its impellers operate according to proximity with solid and semi-solid mass, not gravity per se. I would sink like a stone until I’d reached within just a few of your meters above the canyon floor.”

“If we can find a way down,” I said, “maybe we can rig up a way of traveling on the river current. Plus, we’d have fresh water any time we wanted it. I bet that flood creek we filled our canteens in is a tributary to this drainage. If we follow it far enough, we might reach a lake or something larger. What’s your hunch, professor? Would your people prefer such a location for setting up a temporary base of operations?”

“I believe that is a logical assumption,” said the professor.

“How about it, ma’am?” I asked, looking at my superior.

“It’s as good a plan as any we’ve had so far,” she said. “We’ll have to make sure and get the Queen Mother’s opin—Oh my God!”

I froze, watching the captain’s arm shoot out with an index finger pointed behind me to the canyon’s edge.

I turned just in time to see the Queen Mother’s body drop over the side. The professor nearly bowled me over as his disc shot after her, then he too was over the side. The captain and I rushed to the edge and flopped onto our bellies, sliding across the last few inches of sand before putting our chins at the lip, hands clawed across the precipice.

What we saw was the most improbably beautiful thing I’d witnessed since going to space with the Fleet as an older teenager.

The Queen Mother circled lazily around and around in the air, slowly spiraling with her wings spread to their maximum width, each beating in concert with the other, and together making a low rhythm that sounded not too dissimilar from a helicopter. She obviously weighed too much and her wings were too small for sustained flight, but while she flew—her body extended and piercing the air like a javelin, her beak aimed directly forward and her legs and forelimbs folded up tightly against her body—she was magnificent.

The professor’s disc fell straight down the wall of the Canyon.

The speaker grill on the disc’s front was blaring amplified mantis speech, which the Queen Mother appeared to happily ignore.

“She’s beautiful,” the captain whispered.

“I didn’t know they could fly,” I said, still astonished.

After a couple of seconds, Adanaho’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a wide, genuine smile. “I don’t think the Queen Mother knew either. Until now.”

We watched as the Queen Mother continued her slow descent, until at last she lightly touched down on a wide sand bar in the middle of the river. Walking to the edge, she lowered he mouth to the water and began taking in copious amounts of fluid.

The professor zoomed up to her, his disc’s motors making funny shapes in the surface of the water as he moved across it. The Queen Mother appeared to ignore him for a few more moments as he hovered directly next to her, animatedly talking with his mandibles.

Finally she looked up at him.

She said something.

The professor backed away from her and went across the water to the canyon wall directly beneath us.

I gauged the distance to be two hundred meters down.

Now he really did look like a bug. Smaller than my thumb.

“We are committed,” he said, his speaker grill turned up to maximum. His vocoder-voice echoed long and far, up and down the canyon.

“We can’t climb down at this point,” the captain yelled, then began coughing.

“Let us travel downriver until there is a place where you can join us,” replied the professor.

“Agreed,” I called at the top of my lungs. Then I stood up and retrieved my load from where I’d dumped it on the ground. The captain stood up too. She trudged over to me.

“Sorry ma’am,” I said. “Looks like you’re hoofing it again.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I need to work the knots out of my muscles. Here, give me the pack, I will carry it.”

I eyed her, but decided to follow orders.

She took the pack without complaint, and off we went. Staying just close enough to the canyon edge that we could see down to the professor and the Queen Mother, but not so close as to give me and the captain vertigo. After-images of the Queen Mother’s sudden, elegant, altogether astounding flight ran across my vision as we walked. Until that time I’d still considered the mantes to be an ugly race.

They were also vicious and brutal in combat. But for a minute or two, I’d seen a mantis take flight—soaring and spectacular.

“What a story you’ll have for the intel people,” I said as we walked.

“What a story,” the captain agreed. “Nobody’s going to believe this. I wish I’d had a camera or a recorder on me to get evidence. She looked as natural as can be. Free as a bird, one might say.”

“Amazing that her instincts were that good,” I said. “She jumped off that cliff purely on faith, apparently.”

“Apparently,” said the captain.

I sensed something else from her, though she didn’t speak for several more minutes. “Chief,” she said.

“Yes ma’am?”

“Is it true what you said?”

“About what?”

“About you not having had a woman in your arms for a dozen years?”

“You were eavesdropping again,” I chided her.

“I have good ears,” she said. “So, it’s true?”

“Uhh, yes ma’am.”

“How come?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“How come you didn’t have a lady friend on Purgatory? Someone to share your sorrows with?”

“That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. Granted, I am not the world’s most handsome fellow, but that didn’t stop a lot of the other prisoners from getting the attention of the opposite sex. I think once I built the chapel and took over where the chaplain left off, people viewed me like I’d been set apart. The chapel and I became synonymous.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. “It must have been hard.”

“Yes, it was,” I admitted.

It took a couple of seconds for the unintended double entendre of my reply to sink in, then she and I both burst out laughing.

For a moment we stopped and doubled over until our diaphragms hurt. Then we got back to walking, the laughter dying to giggles, and then spastic coughing on Adanaho’s part.

She drank water while I waited, then we started out again.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to make you gag up a lung.”

“I think it’s allergies,” she said. “Something here—in the dirt, or the dust of the wind—is rubbing me wrong. I’ll be okay. FIDO.”

“Fuck it, drive on,” I said, smirking. The motto had been around in one form or another for as long as men and women had saluted and marched. Contrary to my first impression, as an intel officer, the captain didn’t seem averse to physical challenges. In fact, the longer we walked and the more I watched her, the more I came to believe she actually relished the effort. Every stride was a statement. Her back held straight and her head up, swiveling occasionally so that her eyes could take in the landscape.

“Ma’am,” I said.

“Yes Chief?”

“What have you and the Queen Mother really been discussing the last couple of nights?”

“Like I said, it’s hard to discuss anything with someone who doesn’t speak our language,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve decided I’m wrong. They may not be able to speak as we do, but they can hear us just fine. You don’t have to be able to speak a language to hear it, or understand what’s been said. I’m now wagering that the Queen Mother understood every word out of your mouth. Back on the Calysta she stated that our beliefs and rituals were of no interest to her. Why’s she suddenly become curious now?”

Adanaho knit her brow while she considered my words.

“I can only speculate,” she said.

“Speculation’s better than nothing,” I replied.

“I believe the Queen Mother is in a state of flux. Pulling her out of her disc terrified her almost to the brink of insanity. But in the days since we left the escape pod, her perceptions have been pure. Unadulterated.”

“Unadulterated?” I said, somewhat incredulous. “You make it sound like her disc was an impediment, rather than an advantage. Five will get you ten the Fleet would kill to replicate a functional disc. That’s a nifty piece of the mantis puzzle we’ve still been unable to unravel. Imagine that kind of advance technology adapted for human use.”

“I can,” she said, with a slightly sour expression. “But we’re already so dependent on our own technology—for what we eat, how we travel, how we live, even how we play, and for what we think and how we think it—that we forget what it was like before computers, spacecraft, faster-than-light travel—”

“Do I detect the sensibility of a Luddite?” I said archly.

“I do not hate technology,” she replied. “I simply think we’ve gotten lazy. Did you know that the bulk of our major scientific discoveries came to us without the aid of modern equipment? Hell, Chief, they built the first atomic weapons using long math and vacuum tube processing power. The first true space-plane, the X-15? Also built using nothing but slide rules and a lot of shrewd paper-and-pencil figuring. Then came the Information Age, and suddenly anyone could know anything via Internet search engines. Why waste time memorizing or synthesizing? Click, the info’s at your fingertips. Entertainment, too. The immersive games became addictive. People forget about the danger of the Virtual Reality Plague.”

“Nobody’s forgotten about that,” I said. “There are still millions of people on Earth going through therapy and rehabilitation.”

“After how many decades?” she asked, stopping in her tracks and lacing me. Her eyes had begun to sparkle keenly. I could tell from her posture that we’d hit a sore point.

“There are whole generations of people addicted to VR. Why come out and face the real world when make-believe is so much nicer?”

“Plenty of people recovered when the mantes attacked,” I said.

“Sure, when we were forced to, we snapped out of it. Sort of. But if the mantes never existed and we’d been left to just toodle along the path of least resistance . . . I am not sure any force could have reversed the trend. We built ships in virtual bottles, then climbed in after the ships and pulled the corks tight behind us.”

I couldn’t deny the ferocity or facts of her argument. Every family had a member, or members, who’d become addicted to VR. Minds lost to imaginary spaces existing purely inside the global information networks. Each man or woman a fairy king or cyber queen, a god or goddess of his or her own private electronic realm. Wealth, luxury, power, all limitless and beyond belief.

Just sit down, plug in, turn on, and time out.

An infinity of sweetly alluring lies.

I shuddered.

“So how does the VR Plague tie back to the Queen Mother?”

“Have you ever seen the bad cases? The ones who went into VR as kids only to come out as adults? Everything you and I take for granted, even eating and drinking and shitting, is an alien experience for them. They don’t remember the real world, and because there are no rules in VR there’s no need to bother with the mundane functions of ordinary existence. Most of those recoveries take years, and the patients hate it.

“But a very few of them delight in escaping. Like being reborn. They can’t get enough of the real around them. Every morning they wake up is a chance to feel real hot and cold water from a real tap, running through their real fingers. To hear real music played on real instruments with their own real ears. To see a really blue sky with real clouds and a real sun with real warmth on your face when you . . .”

She trailed off. I stared at her as she walked. Her eyes were looking straight ahead, but she was clearly lost in reverie.

Instantly, I intuited the truth.

“You were one of them, weren’t you,” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me.

“Yes, I was.”

“How young were you when you went in?”

“Six.”

“Jesus, your parents let you get on VR at that age?”

“It’s the world’s most amazing baby sitter.”

I swallowed hard.

“How old were you when you came out?”

“Fifteen,” she said. “The war was hurting us. The government began cutting off and rationing resources. My parents unplugged me and sent me to a state rehab school for VR kids. When I was sixteen, they said I was well enough to go stay with my mother’s sister in North Africa, since my parents were denied custody. Auntie hated VR, considered it a tool of the devil, and took me in like the daughter she never had. When I was eighteen I joined the Fleet through an ROTC scholarship. When I was twenty two I went to space, and never looked back.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time. The captain’s revelation had turned the mood stone-cold sober.

“I think the Queen Mother is going through something similar to what I went through,” Adanaho finally said. “After living her entire life through the technological lens of her disc, she’s suddenly experiencing reality on its terms. I think she’s finding the experience to be revelatory. Old instincts, long suppressed, are coming to the surface. Abilities. Perceptions. A whole new way of seeing and interpreting the world.”

“That’s a hell of a speculation,” I said, shaking my head. “No disrespect ma’am, but can you be sure you’re not just projecting?”

She was silent for a time. Then she reluctantly said, “No.”

We took a few more steps.

“But can you offer any other explanation as to why she’d suddenly leap off a cliff, relying on wings she’s never used to prevent her from falling directly to a gruesome death?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You said it yourself, Chief. It took a leap of faith.”

Again, I had no answer.

Finally we came to a crumbling break in the canyon’s edge. The canyon itself grew wider and the sides less steep. It appeared to me that we could make our way down, provided we took our time. The professor must have seen this too, because he and the Queen Mother had stopped and were looking up at us expectantly. Waiting.

It took the captain and I the rest of the day to make our way down. When we reached the bottom, the entire canyon was in shadow and the air had begun to chill.

I wished hard for a clutch of driftwood and some matches to light a fire.

None appeared.

While Adanaho set about preparing our camp for the night, I noticed that the Queen Mother kept apart from the professor. She stayed near the water’s edge, gazing into the swirls and eddies that marked the surface. The water was mostly clear, all the way to the bottom. If I’d thought there might be trout, I’d have rigged a pole and a line. But the professor’s sensors and my own water test kit revealed the depressing truth: the river was as lifeless as the surface through which it had carved its course. There would be nothing fresh to eat for dinner.

I pulled the professor aside before we all went to sleep for the night.

“I’ve been wondering,” I said, “about what you told me.”

“Specifically?” he asked.

“Sex. You said the males of your species are in a sexual stupor until they’ve mated with the female producing the pheromone.”

“That’s a close enough description, yes.”

“How in the hell do you mate when you’re still attached to the discs?”

He looked at me, unmoving.

“Very carefully,” was his only reply.

I didn’t have the heart to pester him further.

In the morning we renewed our journey. Whatever I’d thought about building a raft, we simply didn’t have the resources to do it. The emergency inflatable life preservers in our packs might have kept us face up in the river, but the water was so frigid we’d have been risking hypothermia as a result.

So we walked all day, following the river’s edge along the bottom of the canyon. More and more, the Queen Mother tested the strength of her small lower legs. Every time we stopped. She also tested her flight capabilities, flitting from rock to sand bar to the far side of the river, and back again. Whether it was instinct or learned skill, or both, she appeared to be getting distinctly comfortable in that mode.

Every night, the Queen Mother and the captain sought solitude together, while the professor and I just sat by the water and wondered between us what was happening with our women.

12.

“We have to get up and go. Now.” It was Adanaho’s voice.

“Why?” I said, suddenly coming up off the sand, despite the aching stiffness in my joints. We were two weeks from landing, our food stores almost gone, but still no closer to finding a mantis base than we’d been before. We’d stayed in the canyon for the water supply, yes, but also to give us shelter from the sand storms that hit every third or fourth day.

I’d grown to like the canyon, despite the gnawing in my belly. Sleep came easily with the sound of the river droning in my ears.

Tonight, my rest was interrupted. Or was it morning? The faintest hint of light was growing above the canyon rim to the east.

“A craft has landed. Not far from here. The professor says it’s not a mantis vehicle. They will be searching for us, and they will have marines with them.”

She already had her pack snuggly slung over both shoulders.

The professor held the Queen Mother securely aboard his disc.

“We can’t move quickly on foot,” I said.

“This I know,” said the professor. “Which is why you must ride with me.”

“Can the disc—your carriage—handle all three passengers?”

“I do not know. But we must try.”

The professor offered a forelimb.

I helped the captain climb up onto the back of the disc. She hugged her arms around the professor’s upper thorax, then I climbed aboard too. The disc’s motors whined with additional strain, and for a moment we were all deathly still—waiting for any sound to tell us we’d been noticed. When none came, we began to slowly float forward.

“How did our people find us?” I asked Adanaho in her ear.

She leaned over and spoke into mine.

“Fleet’s been quietly reverse-engineering a lot of different technology during the years of the cease-fire. I’ve only been involved in some of that. It’s probable they’ve discovered a way to home in on the signals from the professor’s disc, even if they can’t reverse engineer the disc itself.”

“Please tell me you can switch off whatever it is that’s not been switched off?” I said to the professor.

“We are now running silent,” he said, not looking at me.

The professor scooted along, his disc become sluggish—this time not nearly as high off the ground, and complaining in an audible fashion.

The dark landscape of the canyon passed by us in a blur. There were no moons. Only stars in the purpled sky. The professor could see though, if one could call his mechanical-cyborg senses sight. What was it like to “look” with Doppler sonar or radar? What images or pictures were in the professor’s head as he steered us through the canyon?

Suddenly the professor halted.

A trio of spotlights illuminated us from overhead. The loud purring of VTOL fans told me the gig was up. Those were human machines in the air, not mantis.

I suddenly had the desire to lay on the ground, face-down, and put my hands behind my head.

Busted!

“MANTIS SOLDIER,” a booming human voice commanded through an electronic bullhorn, “RELEASE YOUR HUMAN PRISONERS OR WE WILL DESTROY YOU.”

Frantic skitter-scratching from the Queen Mother.

“We cannot allow ourselves to be taken,” the professor translated.

But what could we do? The captain and I both put our hands up to shield our eyes against the harsh light. I felt my heart begin to beat double-time. On the one hand, being discovered by Fleet meant our famished sojourn in the alien wilderness had been cut short. On the other hand, it was probable my friend was going to wind up as a hors d’oeuvre on some Fleet Intelligence geek’s interrogation menu.

“Ma’am,” I said. “You’d better be damned right about being able to push the POW angle.”

“Set us down, professor,” she said. “I swear on my honor as a Fleet officer that I won’t let them hurt you, or the Queen Mother.”

There was a moment of agonizing hesitation as the professor’s head tilted this way and that, his antennae waving frantically as he tried to quickly deduce the best course of action: were there any escape routes, and if escape was impossible, could Adanaho be trusted to fulfill her promise?

The canyon suddenly took on an air of claustrophobia.

Slowly, the disc settled to the ground.

The Queen Mother shoved herself off of the disc and began to skitter away—her stubby lower legs moving rapidly on the rock and sand. The professor’s mandibles clacked and chattered violently. I guessed that he was yelling at her? But it did no good.

More spotlights appeared, this time from the ground.

Wheeled trucks roared around a bend in the canyon ahead and squads of human troops began to pile out, quickly surrounding us.

The captain and I both stepped off the professor’s disc, our hands held up.

“I claim these creatures as prisoners of war!” Adanaho shouted at the top of her vocal range. The marines approached us hesitantly, rifles at their shoulders.

“Don’t hurt them,” I yelled. “They’re under our protection.”

One of the marines lowered her rifle and walked out of the pack.

It was difficult to see her rank in the blinding glare of the spotlights, and the blowing dust from the VTOL Ians that kept the gunships aloft: three chevrons stacked on top of each other.

“Ma’am,” the female marine said as she approached us, saluting Adanaho. Then she saw me, and added a quick, “Sir.”

The captain and I both reflexively saluted, then dropped our arms.

“Sergeant,” the captain said in a trained tone of authority, “I’m giving you a direct order to stand down. Neither of these mantes are armed. They’re not a threat to you or your marines. As a captain in Fleet Intelligence, I claim them as POWs.”

“Mantis prisoners?” the NCO said, sounding doubtful. She watched as the Queen Mother continued to scramble, and the professor’s antennae drooped, his body language expressing utter defeat.

“Yes,” Adanaho said. “We took them from the Calysta before she was destroyed. It’s essential that we get these POWs off this planet and into safe keeping. They are vital to the war effort.”

“We’ve got orders to frag every mantis we come across,” said the marine. “No exceptions. Hundreds of lifeboats came down all across this world. It’s been a hell of a job policing up survivors. Especially with so many mantis patrols running interception.”

“Who has orbital space superiority?” the captain asked.

“We do, for the moment,” said the NCO. “But that may not last. There’s no time to waste, ma’am, sir, we have to get you out of here. And I’m not authorized to bring back any mantis carcasses.”

The NCO signaled with a gloved hand and the marines moved in, separating us from the professor and the Queen Mother—who’d given up escaping, and simply lay prone on the dirt at the professor’s side, exhausted as well as defeated.

A dozen muzzles were trained on them both, and I distinctly heard safeties clicking off.

“No!” the captain and I both shouted together. We pushed our way through the marines to stand in front of the professor and the Queen Mother.

“How much more clearly do I have to give a direct order, Sergeant?” Adanaho commanded sternly. “In fact, if I don’t see people standing down by the time I get to three, there’s going to be hell to pay. One . . . two . . .”

The squad looked confused. Eyes—covered by goggles—darted from Adanaho’s young but determined face, to their squad leader’s. The female NCO looked angry, but she wasn’t about to ignore the captain.

“At ease,” the NCO finally said, slowly pushing a palm down towards the ground. “If she’s Fleet Intel like she says she is, we’ll let her bosses figure it out. Get the heavy-lift transport in here and we’ll evac the lot of them to orbit.”

Several roger thats echoed around the group, then some of the marines trotted back to their trucks while others remained to guard the mantes. The troops stood close enough to keep the mantes under watchful eyes, but not so close as to be within reach of a swiping forelimb. As I watched their young faces I realized that none of them—save for the squad leader herself—were old enough to have fought in the first war. All they’d ever heard about mantes had come to them from training vids.

They stared at the professor and the Queen Mother the way children might stare at a pair of freshly-landed sharks.

Dangerous monsters.

There was a deafening shriek in the air, and the landscape around us instantly lit as one of the gunships overhead burst into flame.

Other shrieks announced themselves, and suddenly all three of the gunships were coming down in pieces, the wreckage scattering while it burned brightly.

“INCOMING!” the marines yelled collectively.

I scanned the constricted strip of orange-to-purple sky over our heads.

Several swift, lethal-looking shapes swooped over us, their engines sounding distinctly different from those used by humans.

The mantis cavalry had arrived.

13.

My heart rate went to triple-time.

The war—humans versus the mantes, part two—had suddenly become real again.

The burning remnants of human aircraft lay scattered across the canyon, or steaming in the river itself. Marines were firing their rifles indiscriminately into the air, though I doubt they hit anything. Whatever had attacked and destroyed the gunships was momentarily gone. Though I suspected they would return, probably with drop pods loaded with mantis shock troops. I’d seen such in action on Purgatory. The canyon was about to become a slaughter house.

I saw the professor with the Queen Mother half aboard his disc. They’d been pushed far out into the river by a trio of marines who were shouting at them, rifles raised and aimed dead-center.

Captain Adanaho was between the marines and the professor, water up to her waist. She’d pulled out her sidearm and pointed it at the marines.

Humans hurled incomprehensible commands at each other.

One of the rifles went off.

Captain Adanaho was pitched backwards into the water.

Alien jets howled down on us.

The water around the trio of marines suddenly erupted with hundreds of little fountains.

What was left of the trio began to drift down stream.

Not caring whether I was next to be fragged, I plunged into the river and strove mightily to reach the captain. Her body was limply drifting with the current, and the professor stared dumbly at it as it passed both he and the Queen Mother, who also stared dumbly.

I threw myself forward and began to breast stroke, the water chill and electric on my skin.

My hand finally hit something soft.

I knotted my fist into the fabric of the captain’s uniform and began to beat back towards the shore.

When I came out, my chest heaved for air.

I dragged the captain’s limp body onto the sand at the river’s edge.

Turning her over, I observed the bloody hole in the front of her uniform. A liver shot?

Warm blackness flooded from the wound and the captain’s eyes blinked furiously as she tried to draw breath. Whispered gasps were all she could manage.

“Oh God, no,” I said, wishing madly for one of the med kits in our packs. Which were who knew how far away. The current had taken us down river too quickly for me to correctly reckon where camp might be. And there was still shooting happening, though from whom and towards whom I could not be certain. Lacking a better idea, I pressed my hand hard on the wound and willed the bleeding to stop.

The captain groaned loudly and clutched at my arm with both hands. Her eyes were wide and she stared up at me.

“Chief,” she spat. I read her lips more than I heard her.

“Ma’am,” I said, trying to sound calm, “you’re hurt bad, and I have to stop the bleeding.”

“Chief,” she said again, our eyes locked. I quickly lowered my ear to her face. Her voice rasped and sputtered.

“The Queen Mother,” Adanaho said, “you’ve got to protect her. She is the key, Chief. She has been . . . chosen. Like you. Padre . . .”

I started to blubber my incomprehension, then looked up to see the professor hovering almost directly above us. The Queen Mother slid off the front of his disc and came to Adanaho’s side—her forelimbs framed Adanaho’s young face as the captain fought to draw additional breath, but could not.

I pressed harder, to combat the gushing blood, but felt in my heart that it was no use.

“We must flee!” The professor commanded. “Caught in the crossfire, we will all die.”

“We can’t move the captain!” I hollered, looking up at my friend with a sense of panicked helplessness ripping me up inside.

A trail of bullets spattered across the sand near us.

The professor spun on his vertical axis to face the four marines who advanced with rifles up. I couldn’t see them, but I could hear them splashing through the river shallows. Automatic fire stuttered and suddenly I was flattened across Adanaho’s body as the professor lowered his disc right down on top of us: me, the captain, and the Queen Mother.

“My friend,” the professor said, “I regret to inform you that—”

He never finished his sentence. Bullets pinged and panged off his disc. Some tore through chitin, slicing mantis organs and soft tissue. The professor’s disc moved forward three meters, then gouged its bow into the wet sand—the disc proper tilting up like a shield. I looked up to see the silhouette of his thorax and limbs flailing around the discs’s black edge, bits and pieces of him coming off and mantis blood splattering.

Then I put my head down as a concentrated series of bursts from the advancing marines shredded the professor’s disc completely.

It split in two and burst into flame, sparks and electrical arcing lighting up the horrific scene of the professor’s dismantled body.

The sky howled.

Mantis fighters. Overhead. Making a third sweep of the canyon.

The marines in the shallows vanished in a blinding display of pinpoint antipersonnel rocketry.

I flattened across Adanaho’s body.

Long moments of silence followed.

The professor’s disc slowly smoldered, so close I could smell the cooking flesh. I turned my eyes back to Adanaho’s face. She stared up at me unblinking, her mouth half open but not drawing breath.

I began to hurl obscenities at the cosmos. Toward any deity or deities that would listen. I damned the professor. I damned the Queen Mother, and the mantes, and the marines, and the awful stupidity of precious lives cut short. I damned Earth. I damned the Fleet. I even damned Adanaho for being young and idealistic and coming to me as if I had some power over circumstances; enough to alter the course of history. Such idealism had gotten her killed, and all I could do was sit there, soaked and cold and clutching the captain’s lifeless hand in my own.

A slow build of tortured sobs burst out of me as I lowered my forehead to Adanaho’s chest and shook with grief. For her. For my alien friend. For the fate of two species apparently committed to annihilation.

After a few moments I heard the Queen Mother suddenly rise up, her wings unfolding and extending to maximum width. I opened my eyes and looked. Enough light was coming down into the Canyon now that I could see her clearly. She watched the sky.

Loud, thunderous, mechanized whining to my rear me told me that the drop pods had finally come. Multiple buzzing sounds told me the shock troops—their armored discs studded with a variety of lethal weapons—were on top of us.

Perhaps it was for the best. To end things in this manner.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to live to see the mantis war machine slowly grind the planets of human space to powder. Instead of a quick termination, now there would be a long, drawn out, dreadful fist fight as the Fleet contracted and toughened its defensive circle. World after world would be “cleansed” of humanity. Until at last Earth would fall under mantis crosshairs.

The final stand.

And then . . . humanity would join the handful of other extinct races in the mantis archives. A dead people, wiped from the face of the galaxy by a species determined to have the stars to itself.

I kept my eyes closed and held the captain’s hand tightly.

The buzzing was loud now. They had to be just meters away.

A sharp hissing cut through the mechanized sound. It was a shrill, painful sound, almost like fingernails on a chalk board. I reflexively looked up to see the source, and saw the Queen Mother hovering over myself and Adanaho, her wings fluttering and beating the air ferociously. Her mouth was open as wide as possible and her tractor teeth were vibrating so quickly they were a blur. It must have taken an astounding effort for her manage the display, but it had gotten the attention of her subordinates.

Several dozen mantis soldiers surrounded us, looking unsure of what to do. Those in the front rank were recoiling at the sight of the Queen Mother, a mantis without her carriage, unchained, feral, her insect eyes adamant.

Her hiss slowly died in her throat, followed by a rapid series of clicks and clacks as she spoke to her people in their own language. I couldn’t be sure what she was saying, but their reaction was immediate. A path opened through the mass of soldiers allowing four other mantes to maneuver forward. I didn’t see weapons on their discs. In fact, their discs seemed like the professor’s.

Were these medics?

I could only guess.

Two of them converged on the remains of the professor. The other two on the Queen Mother herself, who settled onto her small lower legs and began to instruct the lot of them, her forelimbs waving and pointing with the distinct authority of one bred to rule.

None of them touched me. Nor the body of the captain.

The troops moved back, then began to disperse.

Securing the area, no doubt.

I slowly sat up, tears and mucus down the front of my wet uniform, and glared at the Queen Mother. She sat on the sand, her wings folded tightly and her beak shut. She glared right back, her eyes alien but her posture erect and dignified.

Eventually the medics returned with what appeared to be a small disc—a carriage without an owner. Though I guessed by size that it was only temporary, for the Queen Mother’s benefit.

She looked at me for a long while, not saying anything, and me not saying anything to her. Then she slowly climbed aboard the disc and settled into the saddle. A series of squeaking and mechanical snapping sounds told me she was being re-integrated. She shuddered once and her mouth opened in irritation, then she settled down and the disc rose off the ground.

Hovering over to myself and the body of the captain, the Queen mother announced, “Pick up your captain. There is a transport waiting for us. I have a truce to call!”

14.

Thirteen weeks later, I was in orbit around Earth.

It had taken a long time for the Queen Mother to regain full control of her forces. And longer than that to convince Fleet that the Queen Mother’s overtures of peace were sincere. Several human planets had been destroyed. Along with several mantis worlds too. For the first time, the fight had not been oneway. And though the weaponry of humanity had been more primitive, it had proven to be just as effective.

Millions were dead. Mantis and human.

Past a certain point, body count ceased to matter.

What mattered now was that the Queen Mother and her top officers were getting ready to meet with Fleet Command and its top officers with the intention of signing, not just a cease fire, but a permanent treaty of non-aggression.

My uniform had been cleaned and prepared for the occasion by my mantis aides—assigned to me by the Queen Mother herself. They’d managed to get almost all of Captain Adanaho’s blood out of the fabric, save for a vague discoloring of some of the lighter piping.

The captain herself rested in a stasis casket.

The mantes had spared no effort preparing the body.

The transparent lid of the casket showed Adanaho in a flowing one-piece gown woven from traditional mantis silks. I’d told them how to go about it. They’d wanted her presented to Fleet Command with as much dignity as could be mustered—a token of their good will, and also in honor of Adanaho’s act of sacrifice in defense of the Queen Mother.

I stood staring at Adanaho’s face while our mantis shuttle maneuvered through Earth orbit in order to dock with the Fleet space station on the far side of the world. Thankfully there was gravity. Something I hoped human engineers would replicate soon.

The Queen Mother stood next to me. No disc. A small package of electronics had instead been attached to her thorax with flexible straps: a translator box and speaker grill for communications.

The mantis guards at the hatches did have discs, polished and bright. The guards themselves were rigid with respect.

“She was too young,” I said, sadly, not daring to touch the captain’s casket. Adanaho looked pristine now. Immaculate. I didn’t want to disrespect what she’d accomplished by treating the casket like mere furniture. I had decided it was a kind of monument, both to the horrible bloodshed which had taken place, and to the new shoots of possibility which had sprouted amidst the ashes.

“And I am too old,” said the Queen Mother. “Age has made me cynical. I had thought the one you called professor to be an eccentric. I humored him just long enough to achieve my own ends. And now I find my universe transformed beyond reckoning.”

“Do you miss your carriage?” I asked.

“Oh yes, all the time,” she said. “But after our recovery from the planet’s surface, it became apparent to me that there could be no going back. Not for me. Your captain was correct. Our carriages have come to define us in ways we neither understand nor suspect. It took having mine ripped away from me to make me see what we mantes have lost in the long time since we first achieved sapience.”

“And what is it you think you’re regaining?” The Queen Mother considered my question for a moment, then she said, “Illumination.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Oh?”

“If I understand the human use of the term, it means an emergence into a state of deeper understanding—of the universe, of the self, of the meaning of both.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “What will you do now?”

“Once the treaty is signed and reparations meted out, I will call the Quorum of the Select together and a new Queen Mother will be chosen.”

“You’re quitting?” I said, surprised.

“I must. Already I am an oddity among my people. They need someone who can lead them during this transition, and it cannot be me.”

“But the treaty is your idea,” I said. “What if the new Queen Mother decides to throw it away and re-start the war?”

“We do not behave so rashly, despite what you may think, Padre. It took us a long time to reach the conclusion that war must be renewed. It would take an even longer time for us to reach the conclusion that the new peace must be destroyed. There is an additional human name circulating in the Quorum now. The heroism of Captain Adanaho—for me, for the reclamation of the cease-fire—will live eternally in the memories of the mantes.”

I bowed my head, eyes closed, remembering the captain’s last words to me. They’d hit me in a place so deep I’d not even known it existed. And whether she knew it or not, the captain had bound me to this alien who now stood at my side—the matriarch of all I’d once feared.

I also remembered the professor. The one who’d originally sought me out of curiosity, and upon whom so much had depended in the long run. That he’d died trying to protect the three of us—Adanaho, the Queen Mother, and myself—only seemed to cement the unspoken pact. Blood for blood. The life of a mantis hero for the life of a human heroine, each given freely so that there might be a future for both races.

If I had anything to say about it, the professor’s prominence in human lore would be every bit as great as Adanaho’s was becoming among the aliens.

Aliens. I smiled slightly and shook my head. Time to get that word out of my system. The mantes had proven to be every bit as human as any woman or man I’d ever known. To include their capacity for regret, and a longing for redemption.

“And once you’re free of responsibility,” I said to the Queen Mother, “where will you go? Home?”

“No,” she said. “I will need time to properly dwell upon what has happened; what is happening. I do not yet fully comprehend what it is I am becoming without the carriage. I cannot say I am regressing, nor am I standing still. I feel as if I am pupating all over again. Only this time it’s happening inside of me. In my mind. In my . . . soul?”

I arched an eyebrow at her use of the word. But said nothing.

“I will need,” she continued, “a place of quiet refuge. Somewhere I can meditate. I think that’s the right human word? I feel as if I am seeing the world and everything in it for the first time, all over again. I must be free of distractions. And I will need to be in contact with someone of whom I can ask questions. Many questions.”

“There must be many planets in mantis territory suitable for this,” I said.

“No,” she replied. “Only one.”

“One?”

“Yes. It’s a sparse world. Not much to look at, really. Upon which there is a single, modest chapel.”

A tiny thrill went up my spine.

“And I expect you’ll be wanting me to go with you,” I said.

“Only if you wish it. I cannot compel you to do this thing.”

“It’s okay. I’d have gone back even if you didn’t ask. But not before I’ve had a chance to visit Earth again, and make proper goodbyes to the many people I left behind during the first war.”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.”

“No, Padre, thank you.”

“It’s going to be difficult,” I said. “This journey you’re proposing to take. In all the thousands of years of human history, countless men and women have walked the same path. The results have not always been good ones. There can be no guarantees. You might get frustrated. Or worse.”

“That is why I will need you, to be my guide.”

“But I’m just—”

“Padre, what did Captain Adanaho tell you? What would her spirit say if it could speak to you now?”

I looked through the lid of the casket.

“That I can’t put off the inevitable,” I said.

“Then we shall walk the path together?” the Queen Mother asked.

“Yes, I think we’ll have to.”

“Good.”

A small chime in the compartment alerted us to the fact that the mantis shuttle was on final approach for dock. I took another long look through the top of the casket, then straightened my uniform and followed the Queen Mother out into the corridor that lead to the gangway hatch.

WAKULLA SPRINGS

Ellen Klages and Andy Duncan

Wakulla Springs. A strange and unknown world, this secret treasure lies hidden in the jungle of northern Florida. In its unfathomable depths, a variety of curious creatures have left a record of their coming, of their struggle to survive, and of their eventual end. Twenty-five thousand years after they disappeared from the face of the Earth, the bones of prehistoric mastodons, giant armadillos, and other primeval monsters have been found beneath the seemingly placid surface of the lagoon. The visitor to this magical place enters a timeless world of mystery.

1.

Secret Treasure

“Well, there you is, Mayola.” Vergie Jackson looked up from the porch of the shotgun cabin on the edge of the piney woods, waving a paper fan with a faded picture of Jesus. “I like to die in this heat, a-waiting.”

“I told you,” Mayola Williams said. “I was helping Miz Green close up the school for the summer.”

“You said you’d be home ’bout noon. It’s near two o’clock.”

Mayola shrugged. “We got to talking, and I lost track of the time.” She shifted a stack of books from one hip to the other. “Lemme set these in the house and we can go someplace cooler. I won’t be a minute.”

“What for she give you homework in the summer?”

“Ain’t homework. Just some books she loaned me to read.”

“What kind?”

“The kind they teach up at the A&M.”

Vergie rolled her eyes. “I want to be quit of school, and you always asking for more. I don’t see the point of it.”

“Well. How ’bout this?” Mayola took the top book off the stack and held it up, just out of Vergie’s reach.

“They Eyes Was Watching God,” Vergie sounded out slowly. “That’s just Bible study.”

“Nope. It’s a story novel.”

Vergie fanned herself again. “Make believe.” She shook her head.

“But look here.” Mayola showed the back cover. “Wrote by a real-life colored woman. She from Florida, too.” She laid the book on top of the others with gentle care, then went into the house, the rickety screen door slapping shut behind her.

She reappeared a few minutes later. “Let’s go over to Cherokee Sink. I’m all over sweaty, and a swim would sure feel good.” Mayola liked to swim about as much as anything, except to read, and it’d been nearly a week since she’d been able to kick loose all the kinks and sitting aches.

“Uh-uh. My brothers gone over there, and Luke Callen’s with ’em. That boy’s mean as a sack a’snakes.”

“True enough. How ’bout the river then? Lower Bridge only ten minutes more.”

“I can’t swim nowheres this week. I got my monthlies.”

“Oh.” There was no arguing with that. Mayola thought for a minute. “Tell you what. Miz Green give me twelve cents for helping her clean. I put it all in my piggy bank, ’cept for one Indian head penny—that’s good luck, and I put it right into my shoe, so it’ll watch out for me. But I reckon I could spare a nickel to walk over to Gavin’s store and get us an RC Cola from the ice chest. That’s almost as cool as swimming.”

“Let’s get us some goobers, too.” Vergie pulled on a pair of laceless, formerly white Keds.

“I don’t know. That’s another nickel.”

“And you saving up for college. I know. I know. I been hearing ’bout your biggity dream ever since Miz Green put that bug in your ear. But this’s my treat.” Vergie paused, to make sure Mayola was paying her proper attention. “I got me a whole quarter.”

“How?” Vergie never did a lick of work if there was some way round it.

“Odell Watkins. He kinda sweet on me, and he got hisself a job up at the springs, rowing white folks out on the river. He shows ’em a sleeping gator and some old bones way deep under the water, and they tip.” She held up the coin with a satisfied smile.

Mayola didn’t think much of Odell, but a cold soda was nothing to fuss about, so she just nodded, and they headed down the sandy track out to the Shadeville Road. She was a tall, slender girl with long, muscular legs. Vergie was a head shorter and sashayed as she walked, all hips and curves. The soles of her Keds were coming unglued, and made a flap-scritch-flap sound when they hit the gravel.

“I need to get me a pair of shoes somebody else ain’t worn out first.”

“You could save up Odell’s quarter.”

“What for? We thirsty today,” Vergie said.

The sides of the road were shallow, weed-filled ditches, jumping with grasshoppers and chigger bugs, and there was nary a car, so they walked down the center. By the time they’d gone a few hundred yards in the fierce June sun, Mayola could feel the thin cotton of her dress sticking to her back, damp as if she was laundering it from the inside out.

The one-room white-washed store sat at the crossroads, its tin roof and bright red Coca-Cola sign glinting in the sun. Inside it was dark and cool and smelled of briny pickles and sweet Moon Pies. A man in bib overalls stood by the counter, talking louder than polite conversation called for.

“You think just ’cause Roosevelt’s in for the third time, we gonna get the electric down here? May as well wish in one hand and spit in the other.” He threw a sack of potatoes over his shoulder with a grunt. “Sometime I think you tetched in the head, Frank Gavin.”

The storekeeper watched him go, then turned to Vergie. “What can I do you for, young lady?”

“Two RCs and a pack of salt peanuts,” she said, laying her quarter down on the rough counter. She got a mercury dime in change, Mayola noticed. That was lucky, too.

Mayola set the peanuts on the windowsill, cellophane crinkling and sticking to her sweaty palm, before she plunged her whole arm into the galvanized ice chest by the door. Her hand closed around the soda bottle right away, but she held it there long enough for her skin to remember what cold was. When Vergie made a my-turn sound, she pulled it out and popped the bottle cap with the church key that hung on twine by the door.

Outside, they sat in the shade of the roof overhang, on a crate stenciled MOBILGAS. Mayola wrapped her hand around the top of her bottle, making a funnel, and Vergie poured in half the bag of peanuts. One by one they fizzed bubbles as they sank, then the bottle was all a-foam, peanuts floating back up in a sweet, salty slurry. That first sip was just about close to heaven.

“Odell’s taking me to a dance next Friday night,” Vergie said when her soda was most gone.

Mayola was finishing off her peanuts, tilting the bottle and tapping on the bottom to get the very last one, so it was a minute before she could reply. “Where ’bouts?” News of a dance went around pretty quickly in their small town, but she hadn’t heard a peep.

“Cooper’s.” Vergie let the word hang out in the air.

“Vergie Jackson!” Mayola dropped her bottle right onto the ground. “Cooper’s nothing but a jook joint.”

“I know.” Now she was smiling like the cat that ate the canary.

“But you took the pledge in Sunday school, same as me,” Mayola said, and heard the prissy in her own voice.

“Just ’cause I’m gonna dance, don’t mean I got to drink.”

But she would, Mayola thought. Vergie’d been edging toward wildness and forbidden fruit ever since she started her turn from child to woman. “Your daddy’s gonna have a conniption, he hears you was anywhere near that place.” She shivered, even in the heat. Reverend Jackson was hellfire on sinners.

“He ain’t gonna hear nothing. I’ll tell him I’se staying over at your place. And I will. But not till pretty late. If I leave my church dress with you, come Sunday morning, I can walk in shiny bright and full’a the spirit, a-men.”

“You asking me or telling me?” Mayola crossed her arms over her chest and tried to look fearsome.

“You my friend?”

“Yeah. But, Vergie. A jook joint’s mighty—”

“I’m going.” Vergie held up her hand. She stood up, and did look fearsome. Then she smiled, sweet as spun sugar, and just as full of air. “C’mon. Do me this itty bitty favor, and I reckon I can do you a big one right back.”

“I don’t need no favor.” Mayola picked up her soda bottle and put it in the crate for the RC man to take back.

“Oh yeah? How’d you like to add to that piggy bank? Three dollars a week.”

“Three dollars?” That was near as much as her brother Charles was making, cutting pulpwood for St. Joe. Hard work. She narrowed her eyes and stared at Vergie. “You got yourself into some mischief?”

Vergie shook her head. “Ain’t got nothing to do with me. Odell say they looking for girls to work in the Lodge up at the springs.”

“Doing what?”

“Kitchen work. Cleaning rooms. Maybe some waitressing too. I don’t know ’bout that, though. White folks don’t care much who make their food, but seems they real particular ’bout who puts it on the table.”

“Three dollars a week? You sure?” Mayola was quick-like doing the numbers in her head. School didn’t start up again until mid-September. Three months was twelve weeks was—thirty-six dollars! That would more than triple up her piggy bank, and she’d been saving on that for a better than a year.

“We can find out easy enough.” Vergie pointed to the woods that ran behind the store. “We take the logging road, it’s only a couple three miles to the springs, and it’s most all shade.”

Mayola sat still for a tiny little moment. She liked to think on a thing, make a plan, before she set off to do it. Not like Vergie. But if they were hiring up at the springs, and word got round, those jobs would be gone fast as cornbread off a hungry man’s plate. It couldn’t hurt to ask. She nodded once, and they headed east, toward the trees.

Most girls who grew up in Shadeville knew the piney woods as well as they knew their own kitchens—the snakey places to watch out for, the shortcuts, the swimming holes and sinks, the back ways into everywhere. So it was a only matter of minutes before Vergie stopped at a narrow break in the dense green wall, and they stepped off the wiry grass and disappeared from view.

The path was so narrow they had to go single file, brushing away the creeper vines and scrub branches that threatened to choke off what trail there was. Insects droned and buzzed and clicked all around them, like a thousand tiny New Year’s noisemakers. The sun was only a memory above the impenetrable canopy, but the air felt thick and close, like it was considering changing its name to steam.

Vergie slapped at her arm, then her leg, and after the third slap, untied the kerchief from her neck and wrapped it around her head.

“That gonna help?” Mayola asked.

“Maybe. Mama used some new kind of hair oil when she ironed me out this week, and I think the skeeters like it.” She knotted the kerchief at the back. “Got perfume smells like flowers, I guess.”

The path ended at a long, wide slash running north through the tangle, broad enough for a wagon. Down the middle, a dusty-green brush of grass and weeds divided the sand as far ahead as they could see, flanked by traces of wheel ruts.

Now the going was easier, and they walked side-by-side, pine needles and a scatter of dry leaves underfoot, birds calling unseen from the trees. Chee-chee-chee. Yip-yip-yip-yip-yip. Heee-ee. Heee-ee. Twisted scrub oaks and longleaf pines lined the road, the pine trunks as straight and bare as pencils, the wide leaves of the oaks not quite meshing overhead, so the ground was dappled with a calico of sun and shade. Once or twice Mayola felt a breeze run down the corridor, whispering leaves against each other and cooling her almost to the edge of comfort.

“Hold up,” she said after they’d been walking in silent company for fifteen minutes. “I’m gonna get some gum. Want a piece?”

“That’d be fine.”

Mayola stepped over roots and low brush, avoiding the bright green trios of poison ivy, and entered a clearing a few yards in. The bark of the pines had been slashed, revealing raw yellow wood, glistening with beads of resin. Narrow strips of tin formed shallow V-shaped troughs stacked one on top of the other, a few inches apart, like an angular column of Cheshire cats. Nothing but smiles.

It was an old gum patch, where woodriders like her father used to bleed the pines for the turpentine stills. Mayola stopped at a tree as big around as her waist. A clay pot, its edges glittering with dried sap, hung at eye level. She pinched a wad of sticky amber resin from the cut above the pot and rolled it across her palm until it was the size of a store-bought gumball. She popped it in her mouth, savoring the clean pine taste between her teeth, then made a second one for Vergie.

The back of her neck prickled, and she felt something that was not Vergie watching her. She looked around. Up there in the shady darkness among the tree branches, a thing with small black eyes looked down on her. Probably just a possum. But it didn’t look quite like a possum’s face, and didn’t that paw look more like a hand? Mayola felt with her toes to make sure her penny was still where it ought to be, and walked fast out of the gum patch.

They stayed on the path another twenty minutes, the whole world as narrow as a tunnel, with green straight up and down on the sides and white sand straight ahead. Then a dark and horizontal line appeared, a quarter mile in front of them. The county road. An old black truck rumbled into view and was gone again two seconds later.

“Almost there,” Vergie said. She took off her kerchief and stuffed it into her pocket.

“Pretty near.” Mayola felt her stomach tumble over inside. Not scared, really. Just wondering what was going to happen. By the time they reached the road, she’d made sure all her buttons were done up and her collar was straight, and tugged at her dress, pulling it so the fabric unwrinkled a bit and a puff of air cooled the damp at the small of her back.

The road was two lanes, paved flat. The trees fell back behind ditches, and she could see the sky again, a pale, cloudless blue. She looked both ways then crossed over, the tar hot even through the soles of her shoes. Ten yards to the left was the back road into Wakulla Springs.

The springs had been there for years—millions, according to Mr. Monroe, the science teacher. He said that hairy elephants and camels and armadillos the size of Chevys had once lived around here. Mayola thought those animals being real was about as likely as the tales her brothers told about ghosts and swamp varmints that ate up people who wandered where they shouldn’t. But her grandaddy said he’d swum in the springs when he was a boy, so they were for sure old.

The buildings weren’t. She’d been in the fifth grade when her uncles got work digging up land and nailing boards and pouring cement for Mr. Ball’s hotel. Most everybody in the county worked for Mr. Ball, one way or another. He ran the paper company and the mill and—

Vergie let out a long, low whistle. “Holy Joe!” She pointed to a line of black cars—new cars—polished like mirrors so the shine like to blind a person in the hot sun.

“Rich people,” Mayola said in a whisper. No wonder the pay was three dollars a week.

“Ain’t that many rich people in the whole county.”

“Maybe Mr. Ball got visitors from Tallahassee. He know a lot of business folk, even senators, I suppose. They all rich.”

The road led to a courtyard at the front of the Lodge, with its gleaming white walls and red tile roof. The parking area was full of more cars than Mayola had ever seen in one place before. At the far end, nosed every which way, were a dozen or more trucks—pickups and flatbeds for hauling, and one closed off all the way around, with bars on the sides like a box of animal cookies.

Both girls stopped, out of sight behind a massive oak tree, and stared, their mouths open. “Something big is going on here,” Vergie said, and the excitement in her voice matched what Mayola was feeling at the same exact moment.

Nothing big ever happened in Wakulla County.

She was just catching her breath again and readying herself to go find out about what they’d come for, when they heard a screech of grinding metal that like to cut the air in two. She watched as a white man in a strap undershirt pushed up the back of the cage truck, pulled down a ramp, and poked inside with a long hooked stick.

Mayola almost swallowed her gum when, slow as a Sunday stroll, a for-real elephant walked out into the Florida sun.

“Aaahhh-eeeeeeee-aaahhhh-eeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee-aaaahhhhh!”

A long, ululating cry pierced the quiet of the jungle.

“That’s Tarzan!” Boy said. “He’s going for a swim!” Boy grabbed Cheeta’s paw and they raced through the wiry grass until they came to the bank of the mighty river. A fallen tree lay across a branch of a taller tree, overhanging the water. As nimbly as any young ape, Boy scampered up the steep angle to stand beside his father, leaving Cheeta below to watch.

Tarzan stood high above the slow-moving river, naked except for a triangular loincloth low on his hips, his knife sheathed at his side. He was a magnificent man, his thick hair long and dark, his skin the color of honey. He was poised and ready to dive, every inch of his smoothly muscled body as sleek and lithe as an animal’s, showing at a glance his wondrous combination of enormous strength, suppleness, and speed. His deep, brooding eyes scanned his realm.

The ape-man might be ignorant of the ways of civilization, uneducated, childlike in his puzzlement about the tools of the white man. But this was his world, and in it, he was the most cunning, the most intelligent, the most respected—and most feared—of all the creatures. King of the Jungle.

“Umgawa!” he said to Boy. And without another word—for he was a man of few words—Tarzan took another step out onto the limb, flexed his powerful legs and—

“Cut!” yelled the director.

Johnny Weissmuller relaxed. He looked down into the crystal clear waters of Wakulla Springs for a moment, then cuffed little Johnny Sheffield on the shoulder, and the two actors climbed down the ladder hidden from the cameras on the far side of the tree. On the ground, his assistant helped him into his white terrycloth robe, its edges stained brown from his full-body makeup. Weissmuller was as tan as any man in Hollywood, but Tarzan had to be flawless.

“Boy go for swim?” he asked.

Sheffield shook his head. “I’ve got to do my schoolwork. Union rules.”

“Swim tomorrow,” Weissmuller said, and ruffled his blond curls.

A colored boy rowed them across the water to the movie encampment with its folding canvas chairs, tents, and trunks of equipment. Weissmuller slouched into the chair stenciled BIG JOHN, and watched as Little John ran across the manicured lawn and into the Lodge for his lessons.

Cameras were mounted on a floating barge in the middle of the river. Beyond them, two stunt doubles now stood on the tree branch, and at a signal from Thorpe, the director, they dived head-first into the deep, clear water. One of them faltered and made a huge splash.

“Crap!” said Thorpe. He turned to the swimming coordinator. “We have to shoot that again, Newt. Tarzan doesn’t splash, for crissakes.”

“Can do.” Newt Perry waited for the two Tallahassee lifeguards to swim over to the platform. “He wants it again. Make it a clean entry, this time.”

The smaller of the two boys grinned. “At fifty bucks a dive, I’ll go in any way he wants.”

“Just dry off and get back up there. The sun’s almost below the trees.”

Johnny watched from his chair. Even with the canvas umbrella, he could feel the heat of the sun on his back. Time for a cold one. He waited for the cameras to roll again and watched as two men carried a big wooden crate around the side of the hotel, struggling to keep it upright.

With a grunt, they lowered it to the ground next to a big wire cage outside the prop tent. Weissmuller could hear angry screeches from inside the box.

“What’s in there?”

“Monkeys.” The man opened the cage door and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Two more crates up there. Turtles and some kinda birds. Parrots, I think.”

He pulled on a pair of heavy gloves while his partner used a crowbar to open the lid, splintering it. The gloved man grabbed the nimble little animals by the scruffs of their necks as they clambered out, and tossed them into the cage.

“How’re you going to ship them back?” Weissmuller pointed to the ruined crate.

“Don’t have to. One jungle’s the same as another. We’ll just let ’em go when the shoot’s over.” He closed the cage, rattled the handle to make sure it was latched, and headed back toward the hotel.

“Quiet on the set!” the assistant director yelled through his megaphone.

Johnny turned back to the action above the river.

The next dive was as slick as a whistle, almost as good as he could have done himself. He flexed his shoulders. He hated the idea of a stunt double, but the studio demanded it. At two grand a week, he was too valuable to risk. He glanced at the thirty-foot diving platform over the deepest part of the springs. Thorpe had been away yesterday afternoon for a meeting, and Johnny had spent an hour diving off again and again, happy as a kid. The other guests at the Lodge had gathered around, applauding.

That was okay, too.

“We almost done?” he called to the assistant director after he’d yelled Cut!

“Yeah. Losing the light.” The man walked over, looking at his watch. “I should remind Thorpe he’s got dinner with Mr. Ball in an hour. Coat and tie for the dining room.”

And a direct line of sight across the lawn to the platform. No diving tonight. “Okay.” Weissmuller stood up, towering over the other man. “I’m going to change, drive into town.”

“Thorpe says—” He paused. “—He says to keep it in your pants and go easy on the booze. You’ve got close-ups tomorrow. Ten o’clock call.”

Johnny shrugged. “Tarzan have fun.” It wasn’t his idea to film in a dry county. He stepped over the tangle of cables and headed for his room in the Lodge. His robe open, his feet bare, he padded quietly across the terrazzo floor of the lobby, almost as silently as if he were the king of this jungle.

Twenty minutes later, showered and shaved, his long hair slicked back and tamed with Brylcreem, he stepped out of the elevator and looked around the ornately tiled lobby. He’d been told the hand-painted designs on the cypress beams of the ceiling were Moorish, with a little art-deco Mayan, like Grauman’s, but they reminded him of the barns in the Pennsylvania Dutch country where he grew up.

He smiled and strode down the hallway to the front door. It would have seemed unlikely to any observer that the man in the crisp, short-sleeved tropical weight shirt and knife-creased linen slacks had been swinging half-naked through the primeval forest an hour before.

“Black Packard,” he said, tossing the keys to a colored boy.

“Yessuh.” He brought the convertible around, chrome winking golden in the last of the afternoon sun, and held the door open.

Johnny Weissmuller nodded his thanks, flipped the boy a coin, and got behind the wheel. He slid his sunglasses from under the visor, put them on, and angled the sleek car out onto the highway that led north to Tallahassee. Twenty miles between him and the admiring young co-eds of the Florida State College for Women. A good night to be a movie star.

The Wakulla Springs Lodge was a palace, out in the middle of nowhere, a private country club surrounded on all sides by gator-filled swamps and piney woods. It was only a few years old, and had been built to impress. White stucco and terra-cotta outside, with a tiled lobby, hand-loomed area rugs, and a wrought iron staircase with herons and ibis on the balusters. In the gift shop, the counter of the soda fountain was a single piece of marble, seventy feet long, chosen by Mr. Ball himself for its fine-grained pattern.

It was the fanciest place Mayola had ever seen.

She had been turned away at the front door, then at a side door, and though she saw none of the usual WHITES ONLY signs, she had figured it out by the time one of the dishwashers let her into the kitchen. He told her to talk to a Mrs. Yancey, pointed through the grease and smoke and clatter of pots a-stirring, through the god-awful heat, to stairs leading to a lower level, where at least it was cooler.

Mrs. Yancey looked tired. She said that the hotel was full up with movie people, so she was hiring, and how old are you, child?

“Sixteen,” Mayola said, and stood up straight to show her tallness. She knew she looked even older, but she kept her hands clasped together serious-like, so they wouldn’t shake with the lie. Just a bitty lie, ’cause she would be sixteen, after school started up again.

Mrs. Yancey nodded and had her sign some papers with her true full name, then gave her a fast tour of all the fancy and told her where to come tomorrow to change into her uniform, eight o’clock in the morning, sharp. “Bennie Mae will show you what to do.”

Vergie was standing in the shade of an oak across the parking lot when Mayola came out the kitchen door. “You get it?”

“I did. Cleaning and folding laundry, just like home.”

“ ’Cept you getting paid?”

Mayola smiled. “Three dollars a week, like you said.”

“I told you they was—Shooo-eee!” Vergie stopped talking all of a sudden, her eyes big in her head, and pointed to the front walk. A tall man in creased white pants stood under the awning. “It’s Tarzan!” Vergie said, excited. “The real life Tarzan.”

“Tarzan ain’t real,” Mayola said. “He’s made-up, from a book.” She bit her lip. “Edgar Rice Burroughs,” she said, and thought in her head that Miz Green would be pleased she remembered that whole name.

“Ain’t neither. I seen his picture in a movie magazine at my auntie’s house, over to Jacksonville. That’s Tarzan hisself, standing right over there.”

Mayola watched the man get into a long, shiny car and drive away, fast. Whoever he was, he was about the handsomest white fella she’d ever seen. When the dust had settled back down, she said, “I’m gonna go home. You coming with me?”

“Maybe. Odell don’t get off work till six, but it must be close that. Let’s go see if he’s done, then he can go a piece of the way with us.”

Mayola made a face, but since Odell working here was the only reason she had a job, and Vergie had come all this way, it would be rude not to return the favor.

He was down on the dock, leaning casual against a post, wearing his brown uniform shirt with a wide, short tie. His boat-captain hat sat on top of the post. There was a little breeze coming off the water, and the air smelled green with moss and reeds and fish.

“Well, now,” Odell said when he saw Vergie. “Hey there.” He was most twenty, with a slow, soft way of talking and conked hair that had started to kink up again after the heat of the day. A trickle of oil shone on his neck.

Vergie walked so that her front self stuck out at him, and he was noticing every bit of it. “Hey, O-dell.” She tiptoed over, baby steps like her shoes pinched, and he was just about to put his arm around her waist in a way he hadn’t ought to when he saw Mayola and put his hands in his pockets instead.

“Evenin’, Mayola.”

“Odell.”

No one said a word then, until a frog jumped off the weedy bank with a splash and made enough noise to shoo away the silence.

“You done here?” Vergie asked. “If you is, you can walk me home.”

“Not tonight, darlin’.” Odell tossed a flat coil of rope into the boat. “I got to take movie folks out for a sunset cruise, every night this week.” He pulled a rag out of his pocket and polished an invisible speck of dust from the shiny brim of his cap.

“When you gonna take me out for a boat ride?” Vergie pushed out her lip in a little-girl pout.

“Next week, sometime. I promise. Purty as any picture out there in the moonlight.” He smiled, showing all his teeth, and started to give her part of the speech he made for visitors. “WAH-kulla springs. One’a nature’s paradise . . .”

Mayola let him go on for a minute, then said, “I got chores at home, Vergie.”

“I reckon it’s ’bout time.” She flounced her skirt a little, so Odell could see her bare knees, then turned and walked off the dock, the soles of her Keds flap-flapping on the damp wood. She hooked her elbow through Mayola’s. “Nothing more to do here.”

Mayola left her house at seven every morning, walking from the Shadeville Road through the cut to Wakulla Springs. The air was warm, but the sun was barely over the trees, so it was mostly shade, and she listened to birds waking up and starting their day. Sometimes she even whistled back. She liked the Lodge all right. The other girls in the kitchen and the laundry were nice and showed her what to do. They sang songs from the radio when no one was around to hear and told stories about the movie people in giggled whispers.

“I was toting lunch down to them crew folk,” Annie said, “and one of the men was taping big crepe paper ears onto that elephant. I give Steve—he’s the prop boy—I give him the picnic box, and asked him, what for he doing that? You know what he said?”

Mayola shook her head.

“He said that was a Injun elephant, and they got itty bitty ears. But Tarzan, he live in Africa, and elephants there have big ol’ floppy ears. So they making it a costume. A costume for a elephant!”

Mayola like to bust up laughing. “Movie folk are plumb nuts.”

But the work wasn’t too hard. No more than she was used to, with four brothers and sisters. It was just chores, for more people. Bennie Mae said she picked up the routine quicker any girl she’d had before, which made Mayola feel good inside. By her second week, she was cleaning rooms by herself, unfolding the crisp white sheets that smelled like flower soap, wiping off all the nice smooth sinks and commodes, and dusting the tops of the walnut chiffoniers, careful not to move any of the hairbrushes or wristwatches, not even an inch.

The hotel maids got twenty minutes off for lunch. Most of the girls sat outside the kitchen door to smoke and flirt with boys. But Mayola had discovered a hedge on the other side of the building, where she could sit in the shade and read her book for a bit without anyone bothering her. She looked up, now and then, and watched the movie people playing make-believe.

They had lots of fancy equipment—cameras and lights, and machines she could not imagine the names of. Some were stuck into the ground, and some were on a big raft right out in the river. The boss man sat in a folding chair under a striped umbrella and gave orders to a second boss man, who shouted through a big red cone. “Quiet on the set!”

They had a bunch of animals she’d only seen pictures of before. The elephant, of course, and a cooter turtle the size of a truck tire, and a whole lot of bright-color birds and little brown monkeys. Her favorite was a big monkey they called Cheeta that must have been real smart. It walked upside-down on its hands, and did somersaults, making faces, screeching and hooting like it was trying out people-talk. It liked to jump up onto Mr. Tarzan, and Mr. Tarzan would laugh and take it for a ride. One day she saw Mr. Tarzan give it a cigar to smoke, like it was one of the boys.

Seemed like every day, Mr. Tarzan was up to some kind of prank, hiding one lady’s clothes, or putting a piece of wet moss on the second boss man’s chair, then laughing his head off. He was a grown man—a big grown man—but he acted just like a little kid, sometimes.

Maybe it was because he was a movie star. They had different ideas about manners, Mayola decided. Except for a handful of pretty white ladies in robes and swimming suits, the cast and crew were all men. Some of them were all dressed up like Florida was for-real Africa, in round white helmets and khaki shirts with lots of pockets. But the rest walked around in undershirts, or no shirts at all, and didn’t seem the least bit embarrassed to be out in public like that, even in front of the ladies.

On the Wednesday of her second week at the Lodge, Mayola sat under her shrubbery, nibbling on the cornbread and syrup her mama had wrapped up in wax paper for her lunch. She heard a big splash and a lot of shouting, and looked up from her book to see three colored boys swimming just off the dock. Fools, she thought. The whole hotel was Jim Crow, and they were going to be in a world of trouble, jumping in that water in broad daylight.

Then she saw Mr. Tarzan swimming with them, ducking them under water, diving down after them. She guessed it must be okay, if he wanted them there. Maybe they were playing at being Africans, like the elephant. That made sense, Mayola thought. Africa was where most colored people come from, to begin with.

The boss man yelled “Cut!” and a minute later, Mr. Tarzan and the boys climbed up onto the dock. Two of them flopped down like they was bone-tired, but the third came up onto the lawn and headed for the drinking fountain next to the changing room, not fifteen feet from where Mayola sat.

She skooched back farther under the leaves, making herself invisible, because that was asking for real trouble.

And sure enough, he was just bending over the fountain when one of the gardeners, a Shadeville man named Daniel, looked up from weeding a flowerbed and saw him.

“You, boy! You get away from there!” Daniel jumped up, real fast for a big man, and in two shakes he had grabbed the boy by the scruff of his neck. “What you think you’re doing, taking a drink from there?”

The boy looked up, and Mayola sucked in her breath when she saw that he wasn’t colored at all. He was one of the lifeguards from Tallahassee who liked to tease the kitchen girls, all done up in greasepaint like a minstrel show.

He pushed Daniel’s hands away. “Get your dirty paws off me, boy,” the lifeguard said, louder than he needed to.

Daniel backed up a step and, after a moment, took his felt hat off. His bald head was dark and shiny with sweat. “Sorry, suh. I didn’ mean nothin’ by it.” Daniel had gone to the A&M for two years, studying to be a teacher until his daddy lost their farm, but he could sure talk field-hand mushmouth when he had to, Mayola thought. The big man continued. “I thought you was, well, suh, I—” He faltered, and wrung his hat in his hands.

The manager of the hotel, Mr. Perry, walked up just then. “Is there a problem?”

The boy’s mouth was tight and angry, but before he could say anything, Daniel did.

“My mistake, Mist’ Perry. I didn’ recognize the young gen’l’man in that makeup.”

“Thought he was one of your boys, drinking where he shouldn’t?”

“Yessuh. ’Zactly that. I’se just about to give him what-for when I seen he was in the right place after all.”

“Hmm.” Mayola watched Mr. Perry think on that a bit, then turn to the boy. “Get back to the set, Joe. They’re ready for the next shot. I’ll have someone bring you a Coke.”

The boy hesitated, giving Daniel the hairy eyeball, then shrugged and walked off with a swagger, like he had more important things to do.

Daniel worried his hat between his hands, sweat beaded on his forehead.

“There’s four young men in costume today,” Mr. Perry said. “You’d best be careful.” He turned to go back to the dock, but stopped in mid-turn and pointed a finger at the drinking fountain. The faucet was smeared with what looked like shoe polish, one side of the porcelain bowl blotched with an inky handprint.

“And clean that mess up, Danny, before one of the guests sees it.”

Daniel replaced his hat and, after a pause, pulled a red rag from the pocket of his bib overalls. “Yes, sir,” he told Mr. Perry’s retreating back, saying it clearly as two words. A bit more clearly than strictly needed, Mayola noticed.

She waited until the boss was back on the dock before she stood up from behind the bush.

“You been there the whole time, Miss Mayola?”

She nodded. “Eating my lunch.” She looked down at the water. They were all swimming again. “I don’t get it. They want colored people, why they have to go and paint up white boys? Ain’t like we short on colored folk round here. And most looking for work, too.”

“I don’t know for certain,” he said, scrubbing away, “but what I hear is Mr. Ball won’t let them.”

“How come? It ain’t his movie.”

“Nope. But it’s his water, and, movie or not—” He gave the porcelain fountain one last flick of his rag. “—he doesn’t want folks like us swimming in it.” He touched the brim of his hat to Mayola, and returned to his flowers.

“Shit, Newt. I don’t want to go on any boat tour. I spent all day in that goddamn river.” Johnny Weissmuller said. He’d worked with Perry on three pictures, and knew he didn’t have to put on his company manners.

“I know. But it’s the Tallahassee Ladies Club, and they are the lovely wives of the Pork Chop Gang.”

“Mr. Ball’s friends?”

“Indeed. The stalwart men of commerce and politics who are bringing purity and prosperity to the great state of Florida.”

“I get it.” Weissmuller sighed. “Smile and look manly.” He struck a Tarzan pose.

“That’s the ticket.” Perry slapped him on the shoulder. “Oh, and by the way, Mr. Ball said I should tell you that he recognizes how valuable your time is, so once the tour is over, you’ll find a bottle of Jim Beam waiting in your room.”

Weissmuller smiled. “For that, first crocodile we see, I’ll even give them the Tarzan yell.”

“The nearest croc is almost five hundred miles away, down in the Everglades. They’re all alligators, here.”

“Same thing.” Weissmuller looked down at his slacks. “I don’t have to jump in and wrassle one, do I?”

“No, Johnny. These animals aren’t rubber.”

The Jungle Cruise boat was a long, shallow box, open to the air, with five rows of wooden benches. That afternoon it was full of tittering ladies, all hats and gloves and floral cologne. A few of them weren’t bad looking. Johnny sat at the back with the boatman, a genial, fixed grin on his face.

The outboard motor started up with a roar and a belch of blue smoke, which dissipated, along with the reek of gasoline, when they were away from the dock. The roar settled into a purr, and Johnny felt the breeze ruffle the ends of his hair. He’d left it loose, Tarzan-style, for the occasion.

“Good after-noon, ladies,” boomed the boatman. “My name is Odell Watkins, and I will be your chauffeur on this fine, fine Florida day.”

He had a big voice, and Weissmuller could tell he was starting a speech he’d practiced many times.

“WAH-kulla Springs. One’a nature’s paradise. Now the crystal clear waters’a this springs flow out of the grawn at more’n a million gallons ever single day, a-formin the Wah-kulla River you now a-floating on. Look there! Over on the right, you see a bird with spread-out wings. That there’s the anhinga, also known as the snake bird, or water turkey. An-hinga!”

The ladies turned, but were watching Tarzan as much as the wildlife, so Weissmuller kept the smile on his face and let his gaze wander. It really was a stunning bit of landscape. He could see why Thorpe wanted to film the location shots here. No sign of modern civilization. The sky was a deep clear blue, and the vegetation was wild, even primitive. It would look African enough on film, even in black-and-white. He wondered if they’d shoot the next picture in color. After The Wizard of Oz came out, two years ago, it was all anyone talked about. Would they have to remix his makeup? He’d ask one of the—

“Now there’s a sight!” Odell said, pulling Johnny back from his reverie. “Four cooter turtles, all a-sitting on the same log like they was waiting for a bus. They got no idea Wah-kulla means waters’a mystery in the language’a the Injuns used to live here. They was here when Mr. Poncey de Leon come up this river four hunnert years ago, a-lookin for the fountain’a youth. He kept a-going, but they’s some folks think he done found it right here in these pure waters, and died ’fore he could come back to claim it. Now ever’one, keep you hands in-side the boat, cause over there is a big old gator. American alligator, born and raised right here in Florida.”

He turned the boat toward the shore, and Johnny saw the dark, ridged back moving slowly through the weeds. That was his cue. He stood up and put one foot on the stern of the boat.

“Aaahhh-eeeeeeee-aaahhhh-eeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee-aaaahhhhh!” he yodeled. He saw a few women jump in their seats. Then there were oohs and aahs and giggles and a polite spatter of applause. He gave a small bow, more of a nod, and sat down again. There. That’d give ’em a story for their next meeting.

“If you look to your left,” Odell continued, “you’ll see the anhinga, also known as the snake bird, or water turkey. An-hinga!”

The boat cruised down the river about a mile, then turned and came back up on the other side of an enormous stand of towering bald cypress festooned with pale gray moss. Pointing out several more anhingas—snake birds—water turkeys—the increasingly repetitious boatman took them through a back channel, a dark and decidedly swamp-like section, then returned to the open water, directly over the springs.

“Wah-kulla Springs. One’a the biggest and deepest springs in the en-tire world. So clear that when I drop this here penny in—watch now—you can see it shining all the way to the bottom, one hunnert eight-y feet below. Under that platform over there is the spot where some diver-mens discovered the drownded skeleton of a woolly mammoth elephant, a pre-storic animal that walked the earth more’n ten thou-sand years ago.

“Now, look down to the right. See them stone ledges, all pretty and green and blue? If it was dark, you would see some itty bitty lights a-glowin down there, too. Ain’t no paint or magic, no siree. It just nature’s natural beauty.” He lowered his voice to a spooky timbre. “There’s also an Injun legend says them lights is fairy critters, playing in the deeps. I guess y’all never know what might be a-lurking in them limestone caves.”

As if on cue, he was interrupted by a loud wailing sound that raised the hair on the back of Johnny’s neck.

“Gracious!” A woman fluttered a handkerchief to her mouth. “What was that?”

“That there is the limpkin bird, one’a the rarest birds there is in this state.” The boatman lowered his voice again. “There’s folks say it sound just like the cry of a woman, lost forever in the swamps.”

It was a good line, and Johnny saw that it had its intended effect on the twittering audience. Including him. As they pulled into the dock, he was more than usually comforted by the thought of the bottle waiting in his room.

When Mayola came to work on Thursday morning, a big color poster was propped on an easel in the lobby. Tarzan and His Mate. Across one corner, a hand-lettered sign said:

SPECIAL SHOWING!

ON THE PORCH

FRIDAY NIGHT—9:00 PM

The changing room downstairs was all abuzz. A Hollywood movie right in the Lodge! Bennie Mae went to ask Mrs. Yancey if they could see it too, or if it was just for guests. She came back and said since there wasn’t a separate balcony, it being a porch, Mrs. Yancey didn’t think so. But later that afternoon, when they were polishing the marble tables in the lobby, Mr. Perry walked in, and Bennie Mae walked right over to him, bold as brass, and asked.

He looked a little surprised, but he rubbed his chin, and said that since it was a fine summer evening, he supposed the colored help might enjoy the show too. “I’ll have the boatmen bring up some benches, set you up right out on the lawn,” he said.

Mayola had never seen a real movie. There wasn’t a picture show in Wakulla County, and she had only been to Tallahassee once, for Easter. A traveling preacher had brought The Life of Jesus and showed it to the Sunday School, a few years back, but she reckoned that didn’t exactly count.

Friday afternoon, a couple of the men from the movie crew set up a big projector machine on the glassed-in porch of the hotel, and hung a white sheet at one end for a screen. Mayola and the other girls stayed in their uniforms after their shift was over and ate sandwiches in the kitchen, then moved all the wicker porch chairs into nice neat rows while the guests had a barbecue supper under the magnolias and the live oaks.

By the time everything was set up, Mayola was tired on her feet and sweaty inside her uniform. The thermometer had inched close to one hundred that day, and the air was just about soup.

She sat down at the end of one of the benches, a few feet from the shrubbery where she ate her lunch, and watched the light change around her. The lawn was still and quiet, no people bustling around. The water looked just like a sheet of glass, with shifting colors beneath it—deep, dark greens and blues dappling the white sand bottom. It made the painted tiles of the lobby seem shabby. The clouds had gone all pink, and they reflected in the water as perfect as any mirror. She felt like she was in some place out of a storybook, not part of the ordinary world, so pretty it like to take her breath away.

The last of the sun touched the very tops of the trees; everything else was shadows. Then even that light faded, the blue of the sky deepened, and stars began to wink on. The moon rose over a bend in the river, and a trickle of white light made a river of its own, sparkling down the middle of the dark water.

All around her the grass and the trees were a-hum with the soft shirring of unseen creatures. Mayola remembered what Odell had said in his tourist voice, about the fairies that lived deep below in the springs. In the daylight, she had known it for a tale, but now it seemed like it might really be true.

The benches began to fill up with the hotel staff. Maids and gardeners and cooks chattered with each other, waiting for the show to begin. Through the arched windows of the lighted porch, Mayola watched the guests come in from the lobby—men in suits and ties, ladies in dresses with flowers and sparkles, all talking and smoking cigarettes. She didn’t see Mr. Tarzan, but the little fella they called Boy came in holding the hand of the big monkey that did so many tricks, and they sat right in the front row.

When it was so dark that Mayola couldn’t tell where the land ended and the water began, a man turned out the lights on the porch and started up the projector. It whickered so loud it drowned out even the cicadas, and then the sheet was full of a map that said “Darkest Africa.” All of a sudden, there was Mr. Tarzan, swinging from tree to tree, yelling his special yell, like he did every morning, out his window, wanting his breakfast.

Too bad Vergie was off dancing with that Odell. She’d be sorry when she heard about all this.

Mayola could hear Mr. Tarzan’s yell through the glass, but not much of the talking parts, so she just watched the pictures. Mr. Tarzan was in the jungle, with that same funny monkey, and he had visitors—white men in those round hats, with colored boys to carry their bags, just like the hotel. The white men had guns, and got into a big fight with some other colored boys who had spears and not much clothes and mostly got killed. These ones weren’t white boys in minstrel paint, neither. Mayola leaned forward and looked close, to make sure.

Then Mr. Tarzan was back, with a lady friend. He treated her real nice. Woke her up in the morning by puffing his breath in her hair, gentle-like, and she smiled and they kissed, and she ate striped fruit like little watermelons that grew right on the jungle trees. Then he must have said, “Swim,” ’cause the lady smiled again and next thing you know they dived off a tree into water so clear you could watch them underwater.

They swam together like they were playing, like swimming was their most favorite thing in the wide world. She held onto his shoulders, and they dived deep down, and then she took hold of his feet, and they turned slow circles in the water, looking at each other and laughing to make bubbles. Mayola hugged her arms to herself to stop them aching for the want of being able to swim like that.

When the round-hatted men came back, she got up and walked away a piece in the darkness, wanting to keep the swimming part in her head long enough that she’d never forget the picture of it. She walked across the lawn, careful, looking over her shoulder to make sure no one saw. But everyone was too busy watching the make-believe paradise on the screen. Mayola tucked herself deep under the shadow of the diving platform and leaned against a wooden post, a foot from the water.

Out there was the deepest, coolest part, where the spring welled up from underground. She edged a toe close enough to feel the different surface on the sole of her shoe, and half-whispered, “Oh, Lord, I wish I could jump in, just once, and swim like there’s no tomorrow.”

Johnny Weissmuller smiled and posed for pictures with Mr. Ball’s friends, shook hands, and signed autographs all through the picnic supper. But when everyone trooped out to the porch for the screening, he made his excuses: dinnertime out in California, want to call my wife before she puts the baby to bed. They were family men and said they understood and patted him on the back as he headed toward the elevator.

Up in his room, he didn’t touch the phone. He’d talked to Beryl two days ago and doubted she had anything new to say. It had only been a way to escape having to watch the movie.

Johnny didn’t mind seeing himself on screen—since the Olympics there had been so many newsreels and premieres and Hollywood must-shows that he was used to it. It was this movie. He’d seen it so many times. And the print they were showing tonight was the one the Hays Office had censored.

They’d made the studio butcher the best scene. Him and Josie, Maureen’s stand-in. O’Sullivan couldn’t swim a lick. Josie was a beautiful girl who had swum in the ’28 games. He’d had his loincloth, of course, but she’d worn nothing at all when they shot it at Silver Springs. Tarzan and Jane, skinny-dipping at dawn. Innocent fun. Art, even.

A week later, the word had come down to reshoot, with “Jane” fully-suited, for theaters in less-sophisticated markets. That was bad enough, but seven years later, it seemed the whole country had gone puritan. The Legion of Decency had made sure that scene was chopped and chopped until it was almost unrecognizable. He couldn’t stand to look at it.

Weissmuller paced the length of the little provincial hotel room. Fidgety energy. He looked at the bottle of bourbon on the nightstand, but shook his head. What he needed was to get in the water, really kick it loose. He stripped, put on his trunks, and slipped into khakis and a loose shirt, grabbed his wallet and keys. He went down the side stairs, skirting the lobby for the parking lot door and walked around the building, making a wide swing to avoid the flickering porch. He whistled under his breath when he was clear, like he was playing hooky.

Even with the moonlight, he might not have noticed the tall colored girl, deep in the shadows of the diving platform, if he hadn’t heard her whispered prayer. He smiled. Didn’t matter if she was just one of the maids. Tonight, she was someone else who wanted to swim.

Bare feet padding over the soft grass, quiet as a jungle hunter, he stepped over to a canvas tent a dozen yards away. He helped himself to Newt’s sister’s costume, hanging on the line to dry, and returned to the platform.

Johnny Weissmuller held out his hand. “So, you want to swim?”

Mayola nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard the man’s voice a few feet away. She was caught, and nowhere to run. Taking a deep breath, she stood straight up and stepped out to take her medicine. “Sorry, suh. I was lookin’ at the water, tha’s all. I didn—”

Then she stopped, because it wasn’t Mr. Perry or one of his men. It was Mr. Tarzan. Mr.—Mr. Weissmuller.

“Come. Swim with me,” he said. He held out a piece of cloth.

She stared at him for long enough to feel the rudeness of it before she spoke. “S’cuse me?”

“Swim with me. I brought you a suit.” He took a step forward and draped it over her arm.

Mayola recognized it as the jungle suit one of the pretty women wore. She smoothed her hand over it, soft as a baby’s blanket on her arm, and thought how it would feel on the rest of her skin, to wear something that fine. Then she came to her senses, and handed it back. “I can’t.”

“I’ll teach you. I taught Boy to swim. Little John.”

“No sir, it ain’t that.” Mayola shook her head. “I been swimming since I was knee-high. Just like a fish, my daddy says. I can—” She stopped before pride got her tongue wagging too much.

“Good. Then come swim.”

“Not in Mr. Ball’s springs, sir.” Mayola watched his face twitch in puzzlement, then remembered he wasn’t from around here. “Colored people ain’t allowed.”

He stared at her for a long minute, with an odd expression, like that was a brand-new idea coming into his brain. Then he looked away, out over the water, and when he looked back, he held the suit out again, his face all a-grin.

“Tarzan not care for white man’s law.”

Mayola sighed. If only it was that easy. Because she wanted to, as much as anything she’d ever pined over in the Sears Christmas wishbook. Wanted to dive into that clear water and swim just like the lady in the movie.

But this wasn’t pretend.

“Thank you, sir, but no,” she said out loud with her mouth while the rest of her was busy imagining how it would be. “If anyone was to see, I’d lose my job.” She stroked the suit again, then sighed deep into her true self, and said, softer, “It’s a good job, and I’m saving the money. I’m gonna go up to the Florida A&M some day.”

She waited for him to laugh like everyone else, chuckle at her biggity dreams. But he didn’t. He just looked at her with those big, dark eyes.

“I never went to college,” he said after a moment. “I had to work, and then I was swimming.” He sounded sad about it, and put his hands in his pockets. He took a step away, then a step right back, and next thing she knew, he was nodding, like someone had asked him a question.

“Here,” he said, pulling out a leather wallet. He counted out some bills, tucking them into the pocket of her uniform, and grinned again, like a little boy about to do mischief. “Insurance. In case we get caught.”

“Oh, no, sir! I can’t—”

“Call it a scholarship.” He put his hand on the small of her back and gave her a gentle little push toward the tent. “Umgawa! Girl change now. Swim with Tarzan.”

Mayola walked over to the movie tent, as slow as if her feet were thinking. She liked to set with an idea a bit before she started off to do it, but there wasn’t much time for that. She glanced up at the porch. No one was looking. No one was paying any attention to her at all, except Mr. Tarzan.

How many times a movie star gonna ask you to dance? she asked herself. That was what it felt like. Not some jook joint, as loud and hot and sweaty as working. Another kind of dancing, one she knew didn’t come round every day.

Mayola wanted this dance.

It was against the rules. Mr. Ball’s rules. She felt a little bundle of angry grow hot inside her. Mr. Ball didn’t make that beautiful water. He just bought the land. Under the law, that was all it took. But it didn’t feel right, under the moonlight.

Ain’t nobody own the moon.

She unbuttoned her gray uniform, stiff with sweat, and started to fold it up neat, then let it slide down to the ground. Mr. Ball’s uniform, too. She heard the pocket crinkle, and took out the money. A hundred dollars! More than eight months’ pay. She stood with it in her hand, letting the night air blow warm on all of her skin, then rolled the bills tight and tucked them into the toe of her shoe next to her lucky penny. Just in case.

Mayola pulled on the baby-soft swimsuit and felt like a movie star herself. She looked down at her long legs and smiled, then stepped barefoot out into the summer night, to dance in the water with Tarzan.

He was waiting by the platform in a pair of trunks. He whistled. “Girl pretty. Swim now.” He dived in with barely a splash.

Mayola hesitated with one more moment of last-second thoughts, then took a deep breath and followed.

After the heat of the day and the sweat and the closeness of the swamp air, the water was everywhere cool silk on Mayola’s skin. She swam hard, feeling the bubbles tickle back along her body, and when she came up for air a minute later, she was out in the middle of the deepest water.

She could make out the twisted shapes of the cypress on the far bank, hung ghostly with Spanish moss, could separate out trees and ground and gently moving water. On the other side, across the dark grass, the flicker of the projector made the porch look like a glass cage.

Mayola felt the water swirl around her before she saw him surface and ask in a quiet voice, “Can you open your eyes, under?”

She nodded, before she remembered it was dark. “Yes, sir.”

“Good.” Tarzan took her hand. “Dive now.”

They went deep into the springs. The surface above her became a flat ceiling, backlit by the moon. The water was like crystal. She could see all around her, watch her hands move in front of her face, see the paler sleekness of the man swimming beside her.

He tugged and pointed and she looked down. Her mouth opened in a surprised O that let out a stream of fat bubbles, but she didn’t let herself gasp water. Below her, the rocks of Wakulla Springs glittered with tiny lights. Almost green, almost—no color she could put a name to—they sparkled like underwater stars as she moved.

The two swimmers came up to the surface like turtles, nibbling at the air, then sinking back down. He took hold of her feet, his hands big enough to close all around, and they turned circles under the water, just like in the movie. With every turn, every cascade of bubbles, Mayola felt a little bit of bed-making and laundry and sticky hot Florida leave her body and float up and away.

Out here, the water that had looked so still from the shore was always moving, a slow current that eddied around her, over her, bobbing her from side to side. When she surfaced, treading water for a minute, she cupped her hands around the reflection of a tiny round moon; it skittered across her palm like a droplet on a hot stove.

She didn’t know how long they’d been swimming, had lost count of how many times they’d come up for air and dived down again. They had swum and floated downstream from the deep springs to a stretch of pure white sand only six feet below the surface. Tarzan swam into a hollow log, came out the other side, and touched her arm. Tag, you’re it.

In and out, out and in, up for air. Mayola felt like she was in a dream. She rose into the stripe of moonlight in the center of the river, and a moment later, he popped up beside her, his long dark hair fanning out with the current.

“Race?” he said. He pointed to a fallen tree that angled into the water beyond the bulk of the boat dock. She nodded, and set off with a long stroke and a strong kick.

She had raced the boys before, at the Sink and in the river—and won—but she had never in her whole life swum as hard as this. Nothing existed but the joy of her body in the water, legs and arms pulling all of a piece.

She knew he must have held back some; he was the best swimmer in the world. But he didn’t let her win, either. They pulled up on the bank at the same time, panting and grinning to beat the band. He climbed up onto a little sandy ledge above the weeds and reached out for her waist, pulling her up next to him.

Mayola lay on the sand, breathing ragged for a minute, feeling that good tired that comes from pushing against all the edges. The air moving across her wet skin was cool and warm at the same time, and she stretched into the comfort of it, one hand floating on the surface of the water, heels furrowing the sand.

“Girl swim good,” Tarzan said. He lay inches away, propped up on one muscular arm. Rivulets of water dripped from his hair; in the moonlight, they made glistening silver trails across his smooth skin.

She looked over at his face. He was smiling, his eyes crinkled at the corners. She smiled back, a feeling of dreamy peacefulness stealing over her. They were the only people in the world, and they had shared something beyond the telling of it.

He lowered his head to the sand, facing her. “Girl happy?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He stroked her hair, pulling him toward her. “Tarzan happy, too.”

Mayola Williams lay her head on Tarzan’s chest, his arms strong around her. He pressed his lips lightly to her forehead, and she didn’t move, but closed her eyes and sighed deep into herself, listening to his heartbeat and the calm lapping of the water, the tranquil stillness broken only once by the wailing cry of a limpkin.

2.

The Beastie

Underwater was the best. On the surface, sure, he gained some speed, but the sun was too hot, and with all the splashing he couldn’t see much above or below. If he slowed down or treaded water he was too easily spotted, at risk of a thrashing at best and, at worst, a call to the sheriff. When he was both deep and still, he might as well have been a rock, or a bass, or a mastodon’s jawbone, for all the notice he attracted from the kids above, the ones confined to the swimming area, the ones who didn’t live here.

Levi liked to creep surefooted along the rock face—his toes seeming almost to stick froglike to the ridges, fixing himself there, crouched and bobbing—and watch the swimmers overhead, the girls especially. Against the sun-bright surface their shapes should have been featureless black cutouts, but the light seemed to shine through them, illuminate them from inside, the way the color photos of mossy trees and egrets shone brightly in their backlit brass frames on the Lodge’s lobby walls, getting brighter as the sun set and the wood and marble darkened all around them.

In the H. G. Wells story the boy had read five times, light passed through a scientist and made him the Invisible Man. The boy didn’t know what kind of sun H. G. Wells had in England, but when Florida sun passed through the girls on the surface of Wakulla Springs they became more visible than ever before. Certainly more visible than they had been last year. The boy was what his mama called “going on twelve”—which wasn’t as good as straight-up twelve but sure beat the hell out of eleven—and the light at going-on-twelve must be different somehow, because whenever two or more girls were overhead, he could not look away from their floating, somersaulting, shoulder-straddling, bubbling, dazzling blue-green brightness.

As a result, almost without noticing, he was getting better and better at holding his breath. Not until the last possible moment did he allow himself to kick off from the ledge, across and down into the friendly cool rush from the cave mouth that propelled him forward, far beneath the floating rope that fenced the tourists. He had learned to stop kicking when the springs swept him up, to allow himself to be flung across the water, until he was only a few lazy strokes from surfacing amid the weeds on the far bank. There he hopped onto his favorite cypress stump—though its knees no longer fit his butt so well and its bulk no longer hid him so easily from the waterfront—and shook his head like Big Man Jackson’s coon hound, spraying underground water in all directions.

“That boy’s half fish,” Big Man had said in the boathouse one day, while the boy lay on the dock, eavesdropping beneath the window. Levi had flushed so hot and heavy with pride that he might have burned through the boards and dropped into the river hissing and steaming, like a stray coal from the stove. Now he perched on the knobby stump and screwed fingers into his ears to scrub out the water and heard the far-side swim-sounds—“Marco! Polo!”—and wondered, not for the first time, what a colored girl would look like suspended in the water between the Florida sun and the bottom of the springs.

He knew, of course, what his friends looked like in the Sink. That’s where he’d first learned to swim, paddling around at an age when other younguns were just learning to walk, or so he’d been told. But Wakulla had a light entirely different from the Sink’s, and he could talk none of the Shadetown girls into dipping so much as a toe into these springs, not under cover of the new moon.

“You gonna get your fool self killed,” they told him.

But he wasn’t killed yet. In fact, he was hungry. Maybe Aunt Vergie would give him a piece of cornbread, if he looked dry and presentable and less like what the cook called “a naked Injun.”

Levi crept through the woods on the western shore of the springs until he reached his dry clothes, tucked amid the branches of a fallen pignut hickory. This was no wad of clothing but a carefully folded square. Levi’s mama ironed his next day’s clothes every night, and she gave him strict orders not to walk around looking “chewed.” His daily disobedience of his mama’s sternest warning—“You stay out of that white swimming hole, you hear? I lose this job, we got no place to live, and you and me will be thumbing to Orlando.”—made him all the more determined to mind her other rules. She always said “Orlando” as if the town were the back of beyond, so Levi had a notion that his cousins there must be living in upended packing-crate sheds beneath the orange trees, and fighting the crows for food.

He carefully unfolded the bundle and gently shook out his shirt and pants, looking for chiggers, before putting them on. Then he laced his shoes, propping each foot in turn against the hickory trunk. He brushed some bits of bark off his shirt and headed through the woods again, angling away from the water so he wouldn’t come out at the diving platform, as crowded as the Tallahassee train station, even during the off season. Instead he ducked beneath a stand of towering magnolias, their gnarled bottom limbs and great greasy leaves hanging nearly to the ground, and walked in a crouch along his cool secret path, shared by raccoons and other night creatures. He liked to imagine that swamp panthers crouched in the limbs overhead and watched him pass, not attacking because they knew Levi was their friend and would never bother them, or maybe because the heat of the day just made them drowsy.

He emerged onto the entrance road and sighed with relief, both because the warmth of the setting October sun was welcome on his face and arms and because he no longer needed to be quite so furtive as he headed back toward the Lodge. Levi wasn’t nearly as dark as many of the Shadetown children—“high-yaller” was what they called his coppery skin, though not when Levi’s mother was around—but he was plenty colored enough that his breaching the surface in the middle of the swimming area would empty the beach as quickly as a sea monster.

Out here, though, rich visitors off the highway were actually pleased to see a neatly dressed colored boy strolling along the shoulder of Mr. Ball’s newly paved mile-long drive. He was a part of the exotic Florida landscape they had traveled to see, like an ibis in the marsh or a gator in the ditch. They figured he was on his way to bus tables or shine shoes at the Lodge. Sometimes they stopped to take his picture and, less frequently, give him a nickel.

But the road was deserted at the moment, it being a Sunday afternoon, so Levi was in his preferred state: alone with his imaginings. As he walked, he repeatedly pulled an imaginary gun on an invisible saboteur, pretending he was Herbert A. Philbrick, hero of I Led Three Lives—Levi’s favorite TV show—on assignment to infiltrate a Communist cell headquartered at the Wakulla Springs Lodge. It could happen. Famous people had stayed there—though his mama didn’t like to talk about them much—and weren’t those the most likely targets of Soviet assassins? Famous people? Ordinary people just got killed.

Given this morbid line of thought, he was spooked when a voice called out behind him: “Big House, Mister! I got your Big House!”

It was just Policy Sam, hurrying to catch up. As usual, he paid little attention to where he was going, focused instead on re-counting the dozens of strips of paper he clutched, plucking them out of one fist and sorting them between the fingers of the other. As he ran, stumbling once or twice, the strips fluttered in the breeze like tails of Spanish moss. “Oh, it’s you,” Policy Sam said when he caught up. His disappointment was obvious: He knew Levi’s mama would whale both of them if she ever caught her boy wasting good money playing the numbers.

Policy Sam had been simply Sam when the boys were growing up, but Levi hadn’t seen him at the Sink for more than a year, since Sam had been hired as a runner for old Cooper, up at the Crawfordville Big House. Every boy in the area knew that once he was old enough to do the math, he could earn pocket money running numbers. Young boys were easy to overlook and hard to apprehend; they also were easy to hurt if they got caught pocketing more than the five percent due them. After a few weeks, once they realized the boss expected them to hawk numbers to everyone they met morning, noon, and night, most boys tired of the racket. But Sam always had been a motormouth, and the twenty-four-hour sales pitch suited him. Now everyone called him Policy Sam, and Levi could seldom get him to talk about anything else.

“Good day today?” Levi asked.

“Middling,” Sam replied. “But no interesting numbers. Everybody’s playing 19 and 53, for the year, or 18 because it’s 1-9-5-3 added together, or 5 because the Yankees have won five straight series, or 16 because that’s how many series they’ve won total, or 13 because the Yankees won game six 4 to 3, or—”

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Levi said. “Hard to surprise you with a number these days.”

“Folks ain’t even trying,” Sam said. “The dull ones, they play the same number every day. Your Aunt Vergie, I know you love her, but it’s always 3 with her, ’cause her little girl was three when she died. Ain’t that the sorriest-ass reason for picking a number you ever heard? Some policy, betting on the age of a little dead girl?”

“Three’s a lucky number, too,” Levi said.

“Not for her,” Sam replied. “You been in swimming?”

“Yeah. How you know that?”

“You digging in your ears like there’s water in there,” Sam said. He laughed. “And I know your mama didn’t give you no bath, ’cause it ain’t Saturday.”

Levi shoved him, but laughed, too. “Get out! My mama don’t wash me. I do that myself.”

“Yeah, washing in Mr. Ball’s water. I bet you pee in it, too.”

“I do not!” Levi said, although he had, some times.

“You know the white people do,” Sam said. “When you’re paddling around in there, and the water gets warm all of a sudden, that’s what it is. You just swam through some white girl’s pee.”

“Shut up!” Levi said, shoving him again. This time Sam shoved him back, his paper strips fluttering, and the boys continued to laugh and pummel each other, all the way down the drive to the edge of the parking lot, then through the pyracantha hedge to the cigarillo-smoky picnic table where the dishwashers hung out. In an instant, Sam straightened up and resumed his chant, ready to do business. Levi shook his head and went on into the kitchen, which was loud and crowded and so dinner-hour crazy that he could sneak up on Aunt Vergie, reach around her considerable bulk, and snatch away a biscuit before she was able to bust him one.

“Boy, I declare!” Vergie yelled. “You’re going to draw back a nub one day.”

“Can I help?” he asked, perching on a stool and biting off half the biscuit.

“You better, if you’re going to wait here till your mama’s done. She’s got extra rooms to do tonight. Go bring me a fresh butter brush out of the rack back yonder. This one’s losing whiskers.”

Levi wedged the biscuit’s second half into his mouth as he hopped down on his errand. The first half of a biscuit was to gulp; the second half was to savor. He dodged a half-dozen kitchen employees on the way across the room, saying hey to each, snatched up a brush, and dodged all the same people on the way back, as they said hey to him in return.

“Here you go,” he said, resuming his perch. “How come the extra rooms?” But all Vergie heard was a mouthful of biscuit dough, so he swallowed and repeated himself.

“Movie people,” she said, spreading melted butter onto a fresh tray of biscuits. “Some of them here already, and they’re eating biscuits like they never saw one before. Maybe they ain’t. No telling what they eat in California.”

Levi’s eyes went wide. “What movie people? Are they famous? Are they making another Tarzan movie?”

Aunt Vergie drew back and hissed like a snake. “God almighty, boy, don’t say that name when your mama’s nigh.”

Levi sighed. What his mama liked and didn’t like was a mystery sometimes. “I’m sorry, Auntie. What movie are they making?”

“Do I know these things? Do I look like Mr. Edward Ball?” She shook her head and went back to her work. “Go run this tray over to the window, quick now.”

This Levi did with great enthusiasm, since Aunt Vergie wasn’t the only source of information in the Lodge kitchen. While helping Jamie sweeten the tea, he learned it wouldn’t be a full movie crew, just the underwater unit. While helping Bess stir the gravy, he learned filming was to start in a couple of days, if the damned camera would just cooperate. While helping Libby slice the lemons, he learned the camera was complicated because this would be a 3-D movie—just like House of Wax, with stuff reaching out in the audience’s faces—only this would be an underwater 3-D movie. And while helping Howard chop the lettuce, he learned the star of the movie—titled Creature from the Black Lagoon—was Richard Widmark.

“It ain’t Richard Widmark, neither,” said old Mr. Adderly the roast chef, the wrinkles in his forehead even deeper than usual as he sawed a beef. “Don’t lie to the boy.” Having passed the thickest, reddest section, halfway through the joint, Mr. Adderly took a break. He set down his two-pronged fork and his angry-looking knife and mopped his streaming face with a handkerchief. He took no notice of the new girl who whisked away the fresh slices; serving was beneath Mr. Adderly. His hands had got to shaking bad, Levi noticed, without a knife to steady them.

“It is so Richard Widmark,” Howard said, cracking a celery stalk for emphasis. “My cousin Arthur was polishing the lobby floor when Mr. Ball come out of the office after taking the call, and he said so.”

Mr. Adderly pointed at Howard with the fork while Levi stood wide-eyed, looking back and forth. Howard the pantry chef was in charge of the salads, and was the biggest man in the kitchen, his shoulders so broad he had to go through the dining-room door sideways. He also hunted year-round, and could clean and dress any wild animal; Levi was partial to his deer jerky. Levi knew Howard aspired to be roast chef, and Mr. Adderly knew it, too. “You ain’t the only one Arthur talks to,” Mr. Adderly said. “I got Arthur his job, when you was half the size of Levi here. And Arthur told me it was some other Richard. I just can’t remember his name right off.”

“Please don’t point with sharp things, Mr. Adderly, honey,” called Aunt Vergie, dropping coins into Policy Sam’s outstretched palm.

Mr. Adderly resumed his carving. “It wasn’t Richard Widmark, I know that. It wasn’t Richard Burton.” He looked up. “I tell you who it is. Richard—What’s-His-Name.” When Howard looked unimpressed, he went on: “You know. The one who’s on that TV show, about the Communist spy.”

Levi gasped and dropped a deviled egg with a wet smack. “You mean Richard Carlson?”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

Herbert A. Philbrick himself, right here at Wakulla Springs! Why, this very minute he could be in—

Levi slid the deviled eggs into the fridge, ran to the dining-room door, and waited for the right-hand door to clear. First rule: the left-hand door is for getting into the kitchen, the right-hand door for getting out, and Levi didn’t want his face mashed in by mistake. A second later, he poked his head out for a quick survey of the forbidden world beyond.

Checkerboard tile gleamed beneath the chandeliers. Dressed-up white people filled every round table, all crystal and silk and shiny shoes, their light talk and laughter floating into the ceiling. A half-dozen colored people dressed in white uniforms moved among the tables with trays, bottles, and sweating pitchers. Levi registered the staff members automatically—Charlie, Winnie, Bud, Wash, Edith, a cute girl he didn’t know; W.A. must be sick again, because Bud was working the window tables, too—but focused on the diners, and recognized none of them. Maybe Richard Carlson hadn’t arrived yet.

Someone grabbed his collar and yanked him backward from the doorway into the familiar steamy hubbub of the kitchen, just as one of the busboys swept past, empty bin on hip, opening the swinging door with his butt.

“Why you always in people’s way?” asked Levi’s mama. She sounded tired and cranky, as she did so often, but her eyes danced to see him, and as she complained, her hands deftly straightened his collar, smoothed his hair, and dusted his shirt, none of which needed doing. “You know I don’t come in from the dining room. Why didn’t you wait out on the picnic table. C’mere.” She hugged him tight. She smelled like detergent and Clorox and clean laundry, with a layer of sweat beneath.

He knew better than to mention the movie people. “It’s too smoky out there,” he said, “and besides, Sam wouldn’t leave me alone.” Sam was nowhere to be seen by then, being even more afraid of Levi’s mama than of the sheriff, but Levi knew this would score him some points.

“You tell that Sam, he bothers my boy, he’ll have to deal with me. Here, Vergie fixed our plates. Carry them for me, will you? You don’t have to open them, just carry them. Nosy thing. Yes, it’s roast beef, and it’s off the end, like you’d eat it any other way. Tell Mr. Adderly thank you on the way out. Vergie, honey, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“ ’Night, Mayola.”

Levi said good night to everyone as he swept in his mama’s wake back through the kitchen and out into the yard. The warm covered dishes in his arms smelled good and felt good, too; he was suddenly hungry. The sun had gone down, and only lightning bugs lit the way to the staff dormitory, but his mother was easy to follow, as she talked about her day. He tromped through the gravel behind her.

As they skirted the dense wood of the little sinkhole south of the Lodge, Levi imagined that from the midst of the thicket, Old Joe, Wakulla’s largest gator, watched them pass. Levi hoped Old Joe would recognize Levi for what he was—a fellow water creature, deserving of respect—and therefore would not eat him, should their paths ever cross.

“Levi, are you listening to me?”

“Yes’m,” he quickly lied.

“Then why don’t you answer? I said, aren’t you excited that he’ll be here tomorrow? He’s been asking after you, says he looks forward to seeing you.”

Levi had no idea who his mother meant, though he was pretty sure it wasn’t Richard Carlson.

“Yeah,” Levi said, tentatively. It seemed a safe thing to say.

“You oughta be,” she said. “Jimmy Lee Demps don’t come home from Korea every day.”

Levi sighed. He might have guessed, since she had scarcely talked about anyone else since her boyfriend’s last airmail arrived. Levi could feel his appetite drying up, the covered dishes becoming a burden. He was not inclined to share his mama, certainly not with that fast-talking so-and-so. He looked wistfully back at the spot where he had imagined Old Joe lurking, and silently urged the gator to emerge tomorrow and take care of Jimmy Lee Demps in one gulp. But Old Joe didn’t answer, assuming he was there at all, and Levi had no choice but follow his mama back to their apartment, eat a little dinner, wash up, and go to bed, falling asleep into a series of happy dreams about monsters.

The next afternoon,Levi’s mama made him dress in his church clothes to meet Jimmy Lee, and insisted further that they walk down the drive to meet his taxi.

“He called the kitchen from the Trailways station in Tallahassee an hour ago,” she said as they walked along, looking at her new Timex for the umpteenth time. Mr. Ball liked to give gifts to valued employees, especially wristwatches; they encouraged punctuality. “So he ought to be here any minute, if he found a colored taxi fast. Poor man, riding all the way from Fort Rucker on the bus. He must be wore out.”

“How will we know his cab from anyone else’s?” asked a grumpy Levi, kicking gravel into the weeds as he trudged along. He was determined to scuff his shoes as much as possible.

“He’ll know me, silly,” his mama said, though she sounded suddenly unsure, and Levi felt a pang of conscience for worrying her. She looked girlish in a bright green dress that swayed just below her knees. She had wanted to wear the heels that matched, but switched to a pair of canvas flats when she realized they’d have to walk almost a mile down and back, and might have a long wait at the highway.

“Gone two years next month,” she said. “It seems even longer than that. Thank God Ike ended the war, else Jimmy Lee might be there yet.” She rubbed Levi’s head. “You were just a little boy when he left.”

“He never paid me no mind anyway,” Levi said. “He just pretended I wasn’t around when he—”

“Oh, Lord, here he comes,” his mama said, cutting him off. She waved both arms overhead, and the oncoming cab swerved to the shoulder. Jimmy Lee was out of the car before it came to a stop. He was in full-dress uniform, though Levi’s mama knocked his hat off hugging him. Levi picked it up and held it, not sure what to do, while the adults kissed. He glimpsed some medals before he looked away. The taxi driver, a colored man with white stubbly hair, smiled at Levi.

“That hat fit you?” The driver gestured for Levi to try it on. Levi reluctantly perched it atop his head, surprised that it only dropped partway across his eyes.

“Yeah, you at that big-head stage,” the driver said. “Don’t worry, the rest’ll catch up soon enough. A-ha, ha, ha.”

Levi glared at him.

“Hey, Levi, thanks,” Jimmy Lee said, snatching the hat off the boy’s head with his free hand and brushing it on his uniform pants. His other hand was around the waist of Levi’s mama. “Can’t have my parade duds getting dirty, can I? Pretty gals won’t flag me down in the road anymore.” Levi’s mama kissed him again.

“Y’all might as well hop in,” the driver said. “Only what, half a mile, I reckon. No extra charge.”

Levi’s mama hopped into the backseat with Jimmy Lee—hopped onto Jimmy Lee, it seemed to Levi. He slid into the front seat beside the driver, whose big belly was dented by the steering wheel like a cushion. In front of Levi, taped to the dash, were a half-dozen faded magazine photos of Lena Horne, aging from left to right. The man thunked the car into gear and pulled forward, asking the rear-view mirror, “Employee dorm, right?”

“No, sir,” Jimmy Lee said. “You pull right up to the main entrance.”

“Main entrance?” asked Levi’s mama.

“Can’t let just you and Levi see me looking this fine, can I?” Jimmy Lee asked. “Got to show off a bit.”

The driver squinted at the mirror. “They expecting you, son?”

“They ought to be,” Jimmy Lee said. “I got a reservation.”

“Oh, my God,” Levi’s mama said. “You ain’t still on about that, are you? Jimmy Lee, this is Florida, not Korea.”

“I know where I am,” he retorted. “And I know where I’ve been, and what I’ve seen—”

“You like baseball?” the driver asked Levi, loudly, as his mama and Jimmy Lee started talking all at once, voices raised. “Boy, I hated to see the Dodgers lose, didn’t you? But Campanella, he sure had him a season. One hundred forty-two RBIs, can you imagine? New team record. You play baseball?”

“I swim,” Levi said.

“Wish I could swim,” the driver said. “Throw me in that swamp over there, I’d sink like a rock. I might as well—”

“Roy Campanella!” Jimmy Lee cried out, interrupting the driver. “Now there’s an example for the boy. Larry Doby. Jackie Robinson. Six colored players in the major leagues now.” He looked at Levi’s mama. “See, times change, baby. And people like us, we’re going to keep changing them.”

“Jimmy Lee, you could get me fired! And where would we be then?”

“Orlando,” Levi murmured.

At the fork, the driver slowed nearly to a stop before he turned left toward the Lodge, shaking his head. He followed the woodcut arrow labeled CHECK IN; the right-hand drive toward the dorm and other outbuildings was unmarked. The backseat quarrel raged as the familiar red tile roof swung into view. “Soldier, you making a big mistake,” the driver said.

“Mind your own business, old man,” Jimmy Lee replied.

With an erk, the driver slammed on brakes, a few yards shy of the turnaround at the front door. Levi braced himself against Lena Horne. There was silence from the back seat as the driver flexed his fingers on the steering wheel, threw the gearshift into Park, then slowly turned toward Levi, the cracked seat leather creaking as he shifted.

“Listen,” Jimmy Lee said. “I’m sorry.”

The driver ignored him and addressed himself to Levi, who was trying to smooth down one ragged Lena Horne corner, where his palms had crimped it. “Son, could you help me with this luggage?”

“Yessir,” Levi said.

Everyone got out. The driver opened the trunk, and he and Levi hauled out a bulging duffel bag and a battered suitcase that used to have stickers on it, but now just had fuzzy tacky outlines. Jimmy Lee awkwardly held a wad of bills out to the driver, who waited a beat before he accepted it.

“Keep the change,” Jimmy Lee said, as the driver reached for his wallet.

“You watch your ass,” the driver told Jimmy Lee. He turned to Levi’s mama and said, “You have a good evening, ma’am. And you, son,” he added as he turned to Levi, “you take care of your mama, you hear?”

“Yessir.”

“And keep on swimmin’. But work in a little baseball, too, okay? Ain’t never heard of no colored swimmers.” By now he was back behind the wheel. He made a three-point turn, waved at Levi, shouted, “You look like an outfielder to me,” and was gone.

Levi’s mother had her arms folded across her chest. Jimmy Lee reached for her hand, but she shrugged it off.

“Baby,” he said, “I need you with me.”

“I been praying for you every night for two years, Jimmy Lee Demps,” Levi’s mama said. “And I will not stand here and watch you get yourself killed now, right on the doorstep of home.” She turned and strode toward the dormitory road. “Come on, Levi,” she called over her shoulder.

“Dammit,” Jimmy Lee muttered. He picked up his luggage in each hand and strode off, toward the front door.

Levi wanted to see what was going to happen. He thought quickly and called to his mama, “Aunt Vergie asked me to come by the kitchen.”

His mama slowed her steps, but didn’t stop. “All right,” she said. “But you stick to the kitchen, and you come right back, you hear?”

“Yes’m,” Levi said. He waited until she was out of sight before running to the outside fire escape and galloping up, steel steps drumming beneath the leather soles of his Sunday shoes. He’d be less noticeable, he hoped, if he watched from the back-stair landing that overlooked the front desk. The upstairs hall was clear; guests not at the early dinner seating would still be in the water, enjoying the last of the sun. Levi ran to the back stairs, crept down to the landing and crouched there, peering around an iron heron on the balustrade just as Jimmy Lee strode up to the front desk, set down his suitcase and his duffel bag, and placed his fingertips on the mahogany as if it were a set of piano keys. He focused on the desk clerk, looking neither left nor right.

Mr. Teale was on duty this evening, the back of his gleaming bald head turned to the lobby, and to Jimmy Lee. He was shoving messages them into numbered cubbyholes, the swinging silver chain on his glasses reflecting the harsh fluorescent bulb of the desk lamp.

The lobby held a handful of people: two white men and a woman in a distant cluster of lounge chairs, holding drinks, all dressed for tennis; Miss Carla in her gray uniform, white hat and apron, polishing the brass photo frames; Mr. Hubert in his red jacket, waxing the floor of the enclosed porch.

All stared at Jimmy Lee, who paid them no mind.

He cleared his throat.

“Oh, I am sorry, sir,” Mr. Teale said, turning as he spoke. “How may I help—you?” His voice faltered as he looked Jimmy Lee up and down, as if the colored man were a marvel the balding white clerk had never seen before.

“I have a reservation,” Jimmy Lee said.

Mr. Teale didn’t immediately say anything, though his mouth was slightly open, exposing his crowded lower teeth. He ducked his head and looked over the top of his bifocals at Jimmy Lee.

“I beg your pardon?” he finally said.

Though quiet, the men’s voices carried far across the checkerboard tile of the lobby. The five other adults present didn’t even pretend not to listen, though Miss Carla continued to make circular polishing motions on the same brass corner, and Mr. Hubert continued to push the waxer back and forth, as if it were a baby long since rocked to sleep.

“I have a reservation,” Jimmy Lee repeated. “Made it by phone just last week. The name is Jim—no.” He straightened his shoulders. “The name is James Lee Demps. D-E-M-P-S.” When Mr. Teale didn’t respond, Jimmy Lee added, “I believe it’s right there on your card file.” He smiled. “I learned to read upside down in the Army. It’s useful, when the C.O. calls you in.”

“I’m sure it is,” Mr. Teale said, plucking the card out of the file and holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, looking back and forth from it to Jimmy Lee. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Demps. I was not on duty to take your call, but there must have been some mistake.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jimmy Lee.

“Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Demps?” Mr. Teale shook his head. “I mean, you can’t stay here.”

Jimmy Lee frowned, but only a little. Levi wondered if he had taken up poker in the Army, too. “You have no vacancies?”

“Vacancies are irrelevant, Mr. Demps. The Lodge is—restricted. I’m sorry if you were told otherwise.”

“Oh!” Jimmy Lee said. “You mean it’s just for white people.”

Mr. Teale winced. “If you must put it that way, yes. Whoever you spoke to on the phone must have thought—well, as I say, a mistake was made. I am truly sorry.”

Jimmy Lee glanced around the lobby. He pointed first at Miss Carla, then at Mr. Hubert, both of whom quickly turned away. “She’s not white,” Jimmy Lee said, “and he’s not, either.” His pointing finger half lifted, he turned to the gaping tennis players, as if their white-on-whiteness were momentarily in doubt, but only smiled at them before turning back to Mr. Teale.

“The sass of that nigger,” one of the men said.

“Where’s the Klan when you need ’em?” said the other.

“Those are employees, Mr. Demps,” Mr. Teale said, raising his voice as if to drown out the murmured ugliness across the room. “As you well know.” He cleared his throat. “Now, there are some very nice colored boarding houses between here and Tallahassee. I’m sure our kitchen staff would be pleased to tell you all about them, and we will even call a taxicab on your behalf, if you’ll just step around to the delivery entrance.”

“Do you see these?” Jimmy Lee pointed to the row of decorations on his chest. “I earned these in Korea. This is my National Defense Medal. This is my Bronze Star. This is my Purple Heart. I won’t show you the scar—it’s on my right leg—but I was one of the lucky ones. I don’t even limp anymore.”

“Mr. Demps, please.”

“And this one, which you may not have seen before, is the Korean Service Medal. You may be interested to know that the blue and white in the ribbon are the colors of the United Nations. All free peoples, of all colors, united. And on the medal itself, see that? Here, let me hold it up to the light for you. That design is from the South Korean flag. It’s called a taegeuk, and it’s an ancient symbol, dating from the seventh century. It shows the yin and the yang, the opposites—low and high, light and dark, black and white—swirling together in harmony. How about that?”

Mr. Teale’s voice was cold. “Mr. Demps, we thank you for your service in Korea, but it does not entitle you to a room at the Wakulla Springs Lodge. I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”

Jimmy Lee stepped back from the front desk and balled both hands into fists.

Behind the desk, Mr. Teale stepped back as well, and reached for the telephone.

Both the tennis men stood. One stepped toward Jimmy Lee.

Mr. Hubert picked up his waxer and ducked through the arched doorway to the enclosed porch, out of sight. Miss Carla had already disappeared.

And a three-foot alligator walked out from behind a potted palm, claws smacking wetly onto the tile, snout raised as if smelling the possibilities.

The tennis woman stood, took hold of a companion’s arm—whether to cling to him or pull him back, Levi couldn’t say—then saw the gator. She was closer to it than anyone else in the room. Her eyes widened. The cords in her neck stood out. Her mouth opened.

Levi was already at the foot of the stairs, clearing the last flight in two leaps.

The woman shrieked. “It’s a monster!”

Levi ran across the lobby. He had no plan, exactly, but he hoped to put himself between the woman and the gator, the way Herbert A. Philbrick might have done. But he was only halfway across the lobby when the gator ran beneath the sofa. Without slowing, Levi changed course, skidded past the tennis woman, and jumped onto the sofa. The cushions were softer and deeper than he expected; he had to grab the back to keep from bouncing into the air.

The shrieking tennis woman was halfway across the lobby, her companions close behind her. Jimmy Lee ducked around them and ran for the sofa.

“Levi, don’t move!” Jimmy Lee hollered. He picked up a freestanding ashtray and swung it before him like a club. Ashes and butts scattered across the tiles. “He’s a little guy, but he could still take your hand off.”

“I can flush him out,” Levi said. He hopped up and down on the sofa.

“No, don’t do that,” Jimmy Lee said, but it was too late. The gator scuttled into view again, whipped its tail, and snapped its many teeth at the veteran.

“God almighty!” Mr. Teale cried.

Levi vaulted off the sofa, snatching up a pillow. He shook it at the gator, which whirled, darted forward, and clamped it in its jaws. Levi let go, and the gator thrashed its head back and forth, shredding the pillow in a blizzard of feathers.

“Shoo!” Jimmy Lee told the gator. “Go that way. Outside. That way.” He wasn’t having much luck.

Strong hands gripped Levi’s upper arms from behind. “Hang on, son,” said an unfamiliar male voice. The next thing Levi knew, he was in midair, then behind the sofa. The stranger had just picked him up and set him down again out of harm’s way, as easily as Jimmy Lee had picked up the ashtray. Levi turned. The man was big, more than six feet tall, very tan and broad-shouldered in a tight knit shirt, muscled legs bare beneath damp swim trunks.

“Come on, honey,” the newcomer cooed at the gator. “Come on, now.” He moved toward the gator in a crouch, arms spread wide. Jimmy Lee did the same from the other side, jabbing with the ashtray. Their unspoken mutual goal was to turn the gator, force it onto the enclosed porch, then outside. Instead the gator looked from one threat to the other, then dashed between them, across the lobby and through the archway leading to the ground-floor guest rooms.

Jimmy Lee and the newcomer said in unison, “Uh-oh.” They ran to the archway, Levi right behind them.

Halfway down the otherwise deserted corridor, the gator sauntered along the carpet, long head swinging from side to side, snout almost nudging each door in turn. At the far end was a closed exit door, its handle far out of the gator’s reach.

“This isn’t good,” said the guy in the trunks. “Any ideas?”

“Not really,” Jimmy Lee said. “But maybe we oughta bang on some doors, warn people to stay in their rooms?”

At that moment, the door alongside the gator opened, and a white-haired gentleman in a seersucker suit stepped out of Room 124 into the hallway, closing the door behind him with a snick, juggling too many small items in his hands: room key, pince-nez, pipe. The gator turned its head and regarded the old man with its cool prehistoric gaze. After interminable fumbling and muttering, the old man finally jammed the pince-nez onto his nose and stood motionless for a second, looking at the freshly revealed gator. He nodded and half-smiled, as he might have acknowledged a passing matron in the lobby, then turned and stepped back into Room 124, closing the door behind him just as gently as before. At the sound of the bolt being thrown, the gator was off again, scrambling down the corridor toward the far door.

Suddenly inspired, Levi turned and pounded back through the lobby—past a gasping Mr. Teale, who now knelt atop the front desk, a thin brass letter opener clutched in one scrawny hand—and through the main door, into the courtyard. He ran to the end of the brick walkway, flew around the corner to the outside door that led directly to the guest rooms, and flung it open, practically in the gator’s face.

The gator stood there a moment, blinking in the sunlight.

Standing as clear of the doorway as he could, the boy held the door open as Jimmy Lee and the stranger in the swim trunks yelled and charged the gator from the far end of the corridor. It balked only an instant, then dashed for freedom, scrambling into the open air and heading across the parking lot, on a beeline for the little sinkhole in the woods opposite.

It would have made it, too, if a DeSoto Powermaster had not rounded the corner. The driver saw the gator just in time to yank the brakes. The DeSoto slewed sideways, raising dust, and a child in the back seat screamed, “Daddy, don’t hit the dinosaur!” The gator reversed course, heading back the way it came. It was just past the doorway when the two men ran out. The gator made for the waterfront, and Levi ran behind it as Jimmy Lee and the swimmer fanned out to either side, waving their arms and yelling at the folks on the beach.

“Make way!”

“Let him through!”

“Here he comes!”

None of this, Levi thought, quite addressed the kernel of the situation, and the few tourists who had looked up just seemed confused, so he cupped both hands around his mouth and screamed, “GATOR!”

In a moment the waterfront was aboil. Swimmers and sunbathers leaped about like corn popping from a pan. Most of the swimmers thrashed toward the boathouse on one side, most of the sunbathers ran toward the diving platform on the other, and like Moses the gator steered unerringly for the part in the sea. It ran out of grass and launched itself across the beach, plowing a furrow in the sand to the water’s edge. Suddenly graceful, hardly rippling the surface, the gator slid into Wakulla Springs, narrowed to a bumpy black sliver, and was gone. A few yards out, a drifting Donald Duck inner tube jerked, as if kicked from below, then began to slowly deflate. Levi stood on the beach between the soldier and the muscular stranger, all three out of breath, as they watched the now-tranquil water and listened to Donald’s prolonged dying fart.

“What damn fool,” Jimmy Lee finally asked, “let that gator into the hotel in the first place?”

“Um,” the man in the swim trunks said. Jimmy Lee and Levi both stared at him. He glanced back, looking sheepish. “I thought he’d stay in the bathtub.”

“You?” Jimmy Lee asked.

“You got me.” He kept talking as they turned and walked back across the grass, toward the Lodge. “It was a dumb joke, a prank on one of our cameramen. He’s had an alligator phobia, ever since he got to Florida. I swear he was afraid to get off the plane, thought they’d be waiting for him at the bottom of the gangway.”

“How’d you catch it?” Levi asked, eyes wide.

The man laughed. “Catch it? Son, I bought it at a roadside stand, on the drive here.” He spread his big hands and shrugged. “So yeah, the damn fool was me. I doubt if it’ll be the last damn fool stunt I pull, either. Thanks for helping.”

He held out his hand to Jimmy Lee, and after a pause only a Southerner could have registered, the soldier shook it.

“And thanks for your service,” he added, nodding at the soldier’s ribbons.

“You’re welcome,” Jimmy Lee said. He stopped walking, looking at the parking lot, and sighed. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

Mr. Teale had just set his suitcase and duffel bag on the curb. Without looking up, the desk clerk walked briskly back inside, dusting his palms together. As he closed the glass door behind him, he flipped the hanging sign to read NO VACANCY.

“You could try again. I’d carry them back in for you,” Levi said, surprising himself. “I’m pretty strong.”

Jimmy Lee smiled, shook his head, squeezed Levi’s shoulder. “We’ll have plenty of chances, son,” he said. “Right now, I think I need more help with your mom.” To the swimmer, he said, “My name’s Jimmy Lee Demps. My young friend here is Levi Williams.”

The swimmer grinned as wide as the gator, his teeth almost too much for his mouth. “Pleased to meet you, Jimmy Lee. Levi,” he said. “I’m Ricou Browning, the Beastie from the Black Lagoon.”

The monster’s official name, in the daily flood of insignificant updates marked urgent from the studio in Hollywood—all delivered to the front desk of the Lodge by courier—was the Gill Man, but everyone on the Wakulla crew called it simply the Beastie.

At the moment, the Beastie was whining.

“Ouch!” Ricou cried.

“What a big baby you are,” Winnie muttered around the clothespin clenched in her mouth. She gave the mesh skullcap an unnecessary yank. “If you’d just cut your hair, Mr. Handsome, you’d have an easier time of it. It sticks up like the Big Boy’s. Bet you look good in those checked overalls.”

Levi shinnied onto the riverbank to get a better look as the makeup woman tugged the skullcap over Ricou’s unruly hair, then glued the back of the Beastie’s head into place. To Levi, the companionable bickering of the two professionals was just one more element to admire. Levi no longer cared that Richard Carlson and the other credited stars of Black Lagoon would get no nearer Wakulla Springs than the Universal lot in Hollywood, where all the “dry” scenes were being filmed. He had a new hero, and his name was Ricou Browning, this tall, handsome, goofy-grinned Florida State Seminole who wasn’t just an athlete—he was a professional swimmer! Levi hadn’t known there were professional swimmers.

And Ricou—he pronounced his name as in “Puerto Rico”—made his living right here in Florida! At the Weeki Wachee! With real mermaids! Sort of. That was what brought Black Lagoon to Levi’s backyard: Mr. Newt Perry had worked at both places, and had recommended Wakulla and Ricou to Universal-International.

Ricou winced as some of the hot glue seeped through the mesh, burning him, and Levi grimaced in sympathy. Winnie had learned quickly enough not to overdo the glue in any one place, but accidents still happened.

Early each morning during the month-long shoot, Ricou had to sit at the water’s edge in a form-fitting, head-to-toe leotard, while Winnie glued on the rubber Beastie suit piece by piece, one hand-sized fragment at a time. Latex, the rubber was called. By the second week, they had the process down to ninety minutes.

Until he absolutely had to leave or miss the school bus, Levi hovered about, bringing Ricou newspapers, butterscotch candies, whatever he needed, quizzing him and Winnie about everything they were doing, everything Scotty’s camera unit was doing, everything Jim the Wakulla unit director was doing—which, Ricou maintained, wasn’t much. All the underwater sequences had been storyboarded in Hollywood, which meant they had been drawn out frame by frame like a comic strip.

At first Levi had offered to bring Ricou drinks, but chugging orange juice in costume was a no-no. Ricou explained that the studio had invested $18,000 in that suit—a fortune, far more than Levi’s mama, than Winnie and Ricou, than anyone, really, earned in a year—and so Ricou was under strict orders not to pee in it.

Knowing this sort of thing made Levi very proud.

While working, Winnie chatted a lot about her friend Millicent, back at the studio. Millicent had designed the Beastie’s face mask, although Winnie said Bud Westmore was taking most of the credit. “She told me the shape of the suit was inspired by the Oscar statue,” Winnie said one morning.

“Huh,” Ricou replied. “Well, that’s as close to an Oscar as this picture’s ever going to get.” He winked at Winnie, and she swatted him with a glue rag. Winnie wore glasses, kept her red hair pinned back, and had freckles all over, at least as much as Levi could see. She and Ricou flirted a lot, when Levi wasn’t interrupting.

One day Levi had asked: “If you came here because the water’s so clear, why is the movie called Black Lagoon? Why aren’t you shooting in dirty water someplace?”

Levi’s new friends agreed that was a great question. While the cameramen had used the Lodge’s boats to get some long tracking shots of the river’s darker, swampier stretches, the underwater filming was all at the Springs because the water was crystal clear. “You’re smarter than any studio executive,” Ricou said, and Levi beamed.

Around the adults, Levi knew he was as much tolerated as welcomed, and he was desperate to show Ricou what he could really do. The chance came late one afternoon, after a long day’s filming.

By then the waterlogged Beastie suit weighed a ton, and Ricou, exhausted, was unable to climb out of the water on his own. So he looped two nooses beneath his armpits and allowed himself to be hauled out by the same crane that raised and lowered the camera. Water pouring off him, looking like some deep-sea fisherman’s nightmare catch, Ricou was swung ashore, where Winnie removed his mask and went to work on his chest plates.

“Hey!” Winnie poked Ricou in the side. “What happened here?”

He lifted his arms and craned his neck to look where she was poking, as if checking himself for ticks. “I’ll be damned,” he said, his catcher’s-mitt paws reaching toward the sky in surrender. A triangular plate was missing, revealing the leotard beneath. “I knew that glue hadn’t set up good. Hey, Scotty!” The frogmen on the far dock stopped fussing with their apparatus and looked toward Ricou, who gestured to his side and yelled, “You didn’t film a piece of my hide coming off, did you?”

The frogmen conferred, all shaking their heads. “Not that we noticed,” Scotty called back. “Where’d it go?”

“Beats me,” Ricou muttered. He checked the ground beneath his feet, each fin flapping and cascading water as he lifted it. “Ah, hell. It must be in the river.” Winnie knelt and raked her hands through the eelgrass along the shore.

“There it is!” Scotty cried.

Prompted by the cameraman’s pointing finger, everyone looked far across the lagoon, where a bobbing bit of latex was moving steadily away from the Lodge on the current.

“Crackers,” cursed Winnie. “There goes our left abdominal oblique.”

“Hang on a sec,” Scotty said. “Mitch is suiting up.”

“No, I got it,” Ricou called, instinctively turning to dive, but Winnie thrust the palm of her hand into his chest. The foam plates buckled inward with the pressure, spoiling the illusion of solid flesh.

“Nothing doing,” said the makeup woman. “You’re worn out, and we need to get these other pieces off you. We can’t afford to lose any more, and you’re shedding like a pinecone.”

Ricou opened his mouth to protest, then held it open to gape as a small, lithe figure dashed past him and Winnie, diving headfirst into the lagoon.

Levi arrowed across the basin, just beneath the surface. He emerged only a few feet from the floating bit of latex. Hardly pausing to breathe, he plunged forward, grabbed the side-plate with both hands, brought his feet up beneath him and propelled himself backward toward the Lodge. Clutching the suit fragment to his chest like an otter, he swam with only mighty kicks of his feet. A few yards from shore he righted himself and stood, shaking his head and spraying water. He held the plate above his head like a diving trophy.

“I got it, Ricou! I got it!” Levi waded ashore, grinning, then froze as he realized what he had done. In public. He looked down at the off-limits, restricted water of Wakulla Springs sloshing around his ankles, then gaped at the all-white faces of the movie people. He turned toward the lodge, sure that he would see Mr. Ball himself standing there, hands on hips. Tomorrow Levi and his mama would be hitchhiking to Orlando.

But Mr. Ball wasn’t there, only more movie people and, in the distance, some groundskeepers moving back and forth, paying Levi no attention at all.

“I’ll take that,” said Winnie, plucking the plate from the boy’s hands and fanning it in the air to dry. “Thank you.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Ricou said. He shook his head in amazement. “Son, you are one fine swimmer. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“Everybody,” Levi said, beaming. A safe distance out of the water now, he stared at Rico’s claws and fins and segmented green suit. “Everybody tells me I’m half fish.” On the makeup table, the Beastie’s sightless, detached head stared at him in an unsettling way.

“Yeah, well,” Ricou said. “Once Winnie peels off my half-fish, I want to see what you can do. How long can you hold your breath?”

“Three minutes.”

“How deep you been?”

“Almost to the bottom. More than a hundred feet, anyway. I like it down there. It’s fun to look up at the sun.”

“Hold still,” Winnie said, kneeling beside Ricou. She used a putty knife to pry off each scaly segment and lay it in its numbered rack.

“Swim here a lot, do you?”

“Yep. All my life.”

Winnie’s knife paused. She looked up at Ricou. They both stared at Levi.

“Mostly at night,” Levi added. “Nobody sees me.”

“That’s good,” Winnie murmured, and went back to work.

“Hope you don’t swim by yourself,” Ricou said. “That’s never a good idea, you know. At Weeki Wachee we never dive without a buddy.” He flinched. “Ouch! Watch it, will you? I think some of me came off with the rubber that time.” He turned back to Levi. “Hey, kid, you ever done any hose breathing?”

Levi solemnly shook his head.

Ricou smiled. “We’ll just have to do something about that.”

And so Levi the gofer became Levi the Beastie’s apprentice.

Saturday morning, Levi breached the surface, spitting and coughing, water streaming from his eyes and nose. His throat burned.

He blinked until Ricou’s head came into view, with its now-familiar curly hair, wide grin, and ample nose. Ricou raised one clawed hand, latex webbing connecting the talons, and shook it at him. “OK, so what happened there?”

“I breathed through my nose—” Levi gasped.

“—and not through the hose,” the two said together.

“That’s right.” Ricou nodded. “You know here that it’s mouth breathing only,” he said, tapping Levi’s head with his claw, “but the message hasn’t reached your lungs, when you’re underwater and fighting for breath. The body takes longer to train. I was the same when Newt Perry taught me, at Weeki Wachee.”

“I can do it, I know I can,” Levi said. He pressed one nostril closed and blew snot out of the other, then reversed.

“The Beastie’s head ready yet?” Ricou called.

“Hold your horses,” yelled Winnie, yards away on the dock. Through the shoreline weeds, Ricou was visible to her, but not Levi. She knew the boy was there, all right, but no one on the film crew wanted to advertise the boy’s presence when hotel guests might be around.

“Try it again?” Ricou asked.

“Sure,” Levi said, and gave a thumbs-up that Ricou’s rubber claw tried but failed to return. Levi took a deep breath, another and another, feeling the pleasant swell of his ribcage, then ducked beneath the water again.

The bubbling air hose lay on the shallow streambed at Levi’s feet as he sat down, hanging on to a cypress root to keep from floating upward. Ricou talked a lot about the need to achieve “neutral buoyancy” instead of just gulping air until you filled up like a balloon, which confined you at or near the water’s surface, but that was a lesson for another day. For now Levi was just counting seconds.

One Mississippi, two Mississippi. When he got to sixty Mississippi for the third time, he reached for the hose. He had trained himself to do it calmly, slowly, as if holding his breath for three minutes was the most natural thing in the world, and brought the end to his lips, the rushing bubbles tickling his face. With his free hand he pinched his nostrils shut, though he knew this was cheating. Fighting the artificial current, he wedged the hose between his lips, so that he had only a few drops of water to swallow, and inhaled with his mouth. He really did feel like a balloon this time, letting his lungs fill with air. Elated, he let go of the hose, allowing it to thrash itself back to the bottom like a snake, and after another minute, broke the surface, exhaling loudly as he did.

“Better,” Ricou said.

“I did it!” Levi cried. “I did it!”

“You sure did,” Ricou said, “and pretty soon you won’t need to pinch your nose, either.”

“How did you—oh.” Levi had forgotten that Ricou could see him, even deep under the clear water.

“Calling all Beasties!” Winnie yelled.

Ricou waved one green paw. “I gotta go be a star now,” he told Levi. “You keep practicing.” He winked and walked away, finned feet flapping in the grass. He looked absurd above the water, just a man in a monster suit, but Levi watched him go with utter admiration.

Still elated by his triumph as a hose breather, Levi watched as Winnie secured the front of Ricou’s mask. Seeing his friend slowly turn his head, looking at him with that strange froglike face, was eerie to the boy; he could believe Ricou had been transformed, right before his eyes, into something otherworldly and dangerous.

“We’re ready when the Beastie is,” Jim yelled across the springs. As usual during filming, he was sitting in an inner tube tethered to the diving platform, adrift over the water’s depths. Scotty, the camera-crew chief, now strapping on the goggles of his frogman’s suit and adjusting his aqualung, would give Ricou his cues below the surface. The underwater camera and its two-man crew were already in position, about fifty feet down.

“Ready or not, here he comes,” Winnie said.

“Mmmmmph mmmmmph mrmm,” Ricou said, and flipped backward into the water. He instantly became a different, graceful entity, cleaving the surface in an effortless backstroke, leaving a wake as perfectly V-shaped as a motorboat’s. In the center of the lagoon, he righted himself, waited for the signal, then dropped from sight, like a man in a descending elevator. His mask held no breathing equipment, and the water closed over his head with scarcely a ripple.

“Gosh, he’s good,” murmured Winnie, hands on hips.

Scotty, goggles and breathing device in place, had years of experience on Ricou, but his drop into the water seemed, by comparison, as loud as a tourist boy’s cannonball.

Levi slid into the water as noiselessly as he could, slipping across the river to the far side, hugging the bank, swimming just beneath the surface until he reached the place where he could dive deep. The springs were so clear that, even yards away, he could see Ricou getting his mimed cues from Scotty as the two camera operators treaded water beyond. The underwater camera was really two cameras bolted together, a necessity for the 3-D effect, with a frogman on each side pushing it forward.

Levi stuck close to the submerged cliff face, so he wouldn’t get into the shot by accident.

Though filmed relatively early, in the movie this would be the Beastie’s final scene. On Scotty’s signal, Ricou went into his death throes, his supposedly bullet-riddled body pluming black-dye “blood” from multiple plastic packets as he burst them. His twitching slowed, and he began to sink. The frogmen angled the camera down to keep him in focus as he dropped farther and farther, webbed feet first, his arms seeming to float listlessly but actually gently sculling, propelling him toward the bottom of Wakulla Springs, toward his next breaths of air, at the end of a bubbling hose held by another frogman. Levi watched until he thought his own lungs would burst, and then he kicked toward the shore, marveling that anyone could make death so graceful.

When darkness ended shooting for the day, Levi slipped into the woods, put on his dry clothes, and walked home to the three-room apartment in the employee dorm that he and his mother shared. He wasn’t surprised to find Jimmy Lee there, too. For the past couple of weeks, the veteran was officially bunking with two of the boatmen on the second floor, but he mainly used that as a place of retreat whenever he and Levi’s mama had a falling-out, which was every couple of days. They weren’t fighting now, though. Mama was sprawled on the couch, in the fitful breeze of a slowly swiveling table fan, drinking lemonade and reading a book called The Day of the Locust. Tourists brought books on vacation then just left them behind, so Mama always had something to read on her day off.

“And here he is,” murmured Jimmy Lee. He sat in a chair, leafing through a stack of mail, as usual, all of it politics. Jimmy Lee Demps got more mail every day than the Lodge itself.

“Hi, baby,” his mama said.

“Hey,” said Levi, pushing his head into his mama’s neck for the obligatory hug. She squeezed him even harder than usual, then held him at arm’s length for inspection.

“You been bothering those movie people again?” she asked.

“Ricou’s teaching me to breathe through a hose underwater,” Levi said, “just like the swimmers at the Weeki Wachee.”

His mother shook her head and sighed. “Honey, they don’t need no colored mermaids at the Weeki Wachee. You got to get your mind back on school. Ain’t that right, Jimmy Lee?”

“Mmm,” said Jimmy Lee. He opened an envelope and slid out a bumper sticker that said, DON’T BUY GAS WHERE YOU CAN’T USE THE RESTROOM.

What good was a bumper sticker, Levi wondered, when you ain’t got a bumper, or a car neither?

Jimmy Lee winked at Levi and nudged Mayola in the ribs, trying to show her the sticker. “We ought to go to this Negro Leadership rally one year, baby. It’s really something.”

“I got another note from your teacher,” Levi’s mama said. She put her book down and gave him her full-on attention.

Levi gulped. Mama was always going on and on about school, like it was holy as church, but she looked fearsome serious this time.

“Daydreaming,” she continued with emphasis. “Falling asleep in class. Levi, I know it’s exciting, your very own monster movie right here at the springs, and I’m trying to be patient. There ain’t much for a growing boy hereabouts, I know that. But if you really want to get out of this place one day, you gotta concentrate on your studies.”

Levi nodded, but said nothing.

His mama took a long, slow drink of lemonade, without taking her eyes off him. “So here’s how it’s gonna be. If I get one more note about your sorry-ass ways, young man, you won’t be dipping a single toe into any kind of water ’cept a bathtub till you’re a bent-over, white-haired old man. You hear me?”

“But Mama,” Levi said. “I got to keep swimming. Ricou says people can make a good living at it. Cameras are getting smaller, so lots more movie crews’ll be coming to Florida, and they’ll hire locals to help. Ricou’s thinking about starting his own business.”

His mama put her book down onto the couch cushion and rubbed her temples. “Levi, you listen up, and you listen good. How many times I got to tell you, you can’t trust movie people?” She winced, squeezing her eyes shut. “They charm you,” she murmured, “and they tell you how great you are, and they make you feel like you’re something—special, real special. But then they go and pack right up and leave.” She rubbed her head again. “It’s just play-acting, Levi. Our lives ain’t anything to them.” She groaned. “Oh, Lord, I feel another headache coming on. Jimmy Lee, please do turn off that lamp.”

“I’ll fetch you a potato,” Levi said. As he ran to their kitchenette, he felt relieved to escape from the whole subject of school, but ashamed at his relief. As he grabbed a good-sized spud and sliced it into discs, he wondered why every conversation with his mama, these days, made him feel guilty. Was that what growing up was all about?

“A potato,” he heard Jimmy Lee repeat.

“To lay on my forehead,” his mama said softly.

Jimmy Lee laughed, but he cut it off quick—Mama probably gave him one of her looks.

“It always helps,” Levi said, returning with a saucer of potato slices. He set them down at her elbow.

“Bring Mama a handkerchief, too, baby.” She had her arm across her eyes now.

“Yes’m,” Levi said.

“No, here,” Jimmy Lee smiled. “Allow me.” He plucked a bright red handkerchief from his pants pocket and offered it with a small flourish, as if it were a bouquet of roses.

Levi’s mama raised her forearm just enough to glance at the handkerchief through slitted eyes. “That won’t work,” she said, listlessly and automatically. She closed her eyes again. “Levi, honey, bring me one from the dresser, please.”

“What’s wrong with this one?” Jimmy Lee asked, still holding it out.

“It has to be white,” Levi said, and regretted it instantly. He stood there, his mama lay there, and Jimmy Lee sat there, all of them seemingly frozen in place.

“White,” Jimmy Lee repeated. His voice was quiet, but a vein in his temple stood out and, without thinking, Levi backed away, hitting the washstand, which tilted and rattled but didn’t fall.

“If the handkerchief ain’t white,” Levi’s mama murmured, “the healing won’t work. That’s what the root doctor say.”

“Is it?” Jimmy Lee’s voice was even more quiet, and Levi’s mama opened her eyes. She frowned and slowly raised her head just enough to see him.

“Jimmy Lee?”

He was already at the door, his rejected handkerchief puddled on the floor where he had dashed it down.

“Jimmy Lee, for heaven’s sake.”

The door slammed and the framed cameo of Levi’s great-grandfather in American Expeditionary Forces uniform danced against the plaster wall, tap tap, tap tap.

Levi’s mama burst into tears.

“Don’t, Mama, please don’t,” Levi said. “Here, see? I got your potatoes, there they are—don’t that feel better? Lemme get that handkerchief, you hang on, just don’t cry. Please, Mama. Levi’s here. Don’t cry, Mama. It’s you and me, just like always.”

When his mama finally got to sleep, Levi went for a ramble in the woods.

He went down to the riverbank and walked along the south shore of the Wakulla for a few hundred yards. He stopped to listen to every rustle, every crackle, every slither, every thud of something dropping from the trees into the mulch of the forest floor, every plop of something long and heavy sliding into the water, and especially every chilling wail of the limpkin: Kw-E-E-E-E-E-E-ah!

Familiar as it was, the limpkin’s nighttime cry always seemed weird—alien too. It raised goosebumps on Levi’s arms. Although if he turned his head, he could see the boathouse, the bathhouse, and the water fountains, only a few minutes’ walk upstream, as he stood in a pitch-black thicket, watching the dark streaks of gators crossing the moonlight on the surface of the river, Levi could easily imagine that he was in some faraway jungle. Left to his own devices, he would creep through the woods every night, listening for monsters.

Florida was chock full of them; all the old-timers said so. Employees at Wakulla Springs came from all over the state, and brought their stories with them. The men who had hung out in the St. Marks bait shacks talked about Old Hitler, the thousand-pound hammerhead that cruised north from Tampa Bay to torment fishermen by shredding the lines, eating the day’s catch, and butting holes in the boat. They said the shark was more than a hundred years old—how else could it have grown so big, and as smart as a man? Levi believed every word, but wondered what it had been called before the Nazis came along.

People who lived at the mouth of the Apalachicola said a snakelike thing lived in the river. Bigger around than a cypress trunk, the creature swam against the current like an inchworm, each stinking mossy hump rising so far above the surface that it once splintered beams on the John Gorrie Bridge.

Howard, the pantry chef, hunted coons in Tate’s Hell Swamp. Several of his friends had staggered out, swearing their missing dogs had been taken by black panthers that lay silently along high oak branches, motionless and drowsy, until scenting the hounds—and the men, for which they had acquired a taste during the Civil War.

And everybody in Florida talked about the wilderness-dwelling Skunk Ape. Taller than a man, it shambled along on its knuckles, reeking of sour cabbage, harrumphing deep in its chest, woomp, woomp.

Levi believed in all of those creatures, believed in them utterly and completely, because they had been seen and described and attested to a hundred times over by grown-ups, and because he was half-convinced that he had seen and heard them on his own walks. Every night, it seemed, he heard and saw things even stranger and more awful—and therefore better—along the whirring chirping grunting splashing midnight shore of the Wakulla River, which he knew as well as any gator.

Besides, who would want to grow up and live in a world where every living critter was known and explained and catalogued, or penned up in a zoo or alligator farm or serpentarium? Levi was even willing to believe in the Clearwater Monster, which had famously churned up the sand a few years back and been declared by experts as something like a giant penguin, even though a giant penguin in Florida seemed a lot less likely than even a Skunk Ape. Levi’s mother said anyone who would believe in a giant penguin waddling down Clearwater beach was dumb as limestone and probably jake-leg drunk to boot. But Levi still believed.

On this night, Levi stared at the moonlit river more intently than usual, almost desperate for something out of the ordinary to happen, and was eventually rewarded when a big black shape glided past, accompanied by a repeated plunk like water being displaced by a paddle. For a moment, Levi was certain it was the phantom Indian brave that the Seminoles believed patrolled the river at night in his stone canoe, keeping the waters clear and the air free of evil spirits, then realized it was Old Joe. Eleven feet long, the Springs’ most famous alligator played second fiddle to no dead Indian. The plunk was Old Joe’s massive tail cleaving the water as he swam. Levi fancied that Old Joe looked his way as he passed, one river creature acknowledging another, but who could say for sure? Late at night along the mysterious Wakulla, all certainty flowed eastward with the current, as Old Joe’s sidewinder motions sent little waves lapping over Levi’s toes, and the limpkins’ screams pierced the silence of the woods, and something a ways off went woomp, woomp.

It took Levi more than an hour to make his way back to the dormitory. Past his bedtime. The lights in their apartment were off, and he kept his shoes in his hands as he swung his legs over the railing and padded across the porch, hoping to slip inside the door without disturbing his mama. But he heard low voices as he approached, and instinct made him stop and listen. His mama and Jimmy Lee were talking in the dark. Levi couldn’t quite make out their words until he crept along the stucco wall to a spot by the azaleas, beneath her bedroom window. He smelled cigarette smoke, and heard the tink of a bottle against a drinking glass.

“Hold up, there,” his mama said. “I’ve had enough already.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” said Jimmy Lee, laughing.

Nobody spoke for a while, though Levi heard something rustle, and his mama actually giggled.

How was it that grown-ups could have knock-down-drag-out fights one minute, and be snuggling and kissing the next? Levi sometimes thought that adults must make up their moods randomly as they went along.

“Jimmy Lee, wait. Wait, I said. Not now.”

“Why not now?”

“Because now I need to tell you some things I did years ago. Two things.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, baby. I already know about the white man.”

Levi held his breath.

She laughed, an odd laugh, like that was funny and sad at the same time. “He’s always ‘the white man’ to you. He was a man. Ain’t that enough?”

Jimmy Lee said, after a moment. “You’re right. That is enough. But I know about it, and it doesn’t matter to me anymore.”

“I’m glad. But that’s not what I need to tell you. It’s about after. After I knew I was—pregnant.”

“With Levi.”

“Yes, with Levi. Who else I been pregnant with?”

“I’m sorry. I guess I just needed to talk. I’ll hush.”

“Hush, then. Let me tell it, so that I can say why I need to tell you.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“I knew, and my mama knew, but no one else. It was early. I mean, I didn’t show. But I was sick every morning. Lord, what sickness! I haven’t touched okra since. I was really just a child myself, and scared to death.”

“So the father didn’t know?”

“Never knew. Like I told you before. You just gonna have to take my word that was impossible.” A rustle. “Besides, I thought you were going to hush.”

“All right. I’m hushing. You were scared.”

“Scared, and wanted a way out. Wanted the baby to go away and leave me alone, have him go get born to somebody else and give me my old life back.”

“Him?”

“What?”

“You said him.”

“Yes. Somehow I knew, even then, it was a boy. Lucky guess.” She cleared her throat, and Levi heard ice rattle in a glass. “Lucky? Hmm. Anyway, I asked my mama how that would work, how I could end it. Lord, she had a blue fit. ‘Child, that is murder,’ she said. ‘That is the original sin, to kill your own kin. Get down on the floor with me right now.’ So we prayed on it for an hour, there on the kitchen floor. Well, she prayed, anyway, asking God to forgive my childish thoughts. I just lay on my side, wrapped around her knees, crying. Picked up a splinter in my cheek, see? Right there. So when she was prayed out and I was cried out, she got me up and hugged me, then got her tweezers and tried to work out the splinter, which didn’t go so well, ’cause I kept flinching and crying, and finally she set down the tweezers and reached up with her fingernails and plucked it out, just like that. I didn’t feel a thing. That was the last I ever said about getting rid of the baby. Except one time.”

The ice rattled again in the glass, and Levi heard his mama blow out air, pluuuuuuuuh, and he knew she was passing the cold wet glass across her forehead, like she always did when it was hot and she was stalling for time. Jimmy Lee said nothing, and finally Mama started up again.

“See, Old Mr. Gavin up and died, if you can up and do anything when you’re ninety-one, and we went to the lying-in. Mr. Gavin was related to every colored person between Mobile and Tampa, so Mama and I had to stand in line to pay our respects. I was standing there crying—I cried at the drop of a hat, in those days—not feeling sorry for Mr. Gavin, just sorry for myself, when I remembered a funny old tale Mr. Gavin told me once, when I had the chicken pox. He said one way to cure a sickness is to whisper into a dead person’s ear.”

“To do what?” Jimmy Lee’s voice got louder.

“I wondered if you was paying attention.”

“I never heard tell of that. What are you supposed to whisper?”

“You whisper the dead person’s name, and then you ask the dead person, real nice, whether he’d be willing to take your sickness away with him. It won’t hurt him, after all. He’s already dead.”

“My God.”

“Anyway, right about that time the woman who was blubbering over the casket finally got done, so Mama and I moved up in line, and she reached down and patted Mr. Gavin’s wrinkly bald head, and kissed his cheek, and moved on to say hey to some of the Pensacola people. And even though I knew it was just some old wives’ tale, before I could change my mind I leaned down close to Mr. Gavin’s ear—they say your ears keep growing all your life, and that must be true, because Mr. Gavin’s ear was the size of a cabbage leaf, folded across half his head, and what was even stranger was there was no heat at all, not like you feel when you’re that close to a living person—and I whispered ‘Mr. ’Lonzo Gavin, this is Mayola Williams, and please won’t you think about taking this baby with you when you go, thank you kindly.’ Then I stood up, and someone asked me to tote a plate of chicken out to the porch, and it was over. I’d done it.”

“No one heard you?”

“Jimmy Lee, Mr. Gavin couldn’t hear me, him being dead and me whispering so low and fast. Wasn’t really a whisper, more like a breath with a thought inside it. But that thought was there. And when I come through the house with the plate, even though it was a gracious amount of chicken, I felt lighter than I had in weeks, almost bouncing when I walked, and I knew—I mean, I just knew—that Mr. Gavin had taken my baby with him. But he hadn’t. Six months later, Levi was born, and to this day, every night when I stand in his doorway and watch him sleep, I thank God and Mr. Gavin that neither one of them heard what I whispered—and that Mama didn’t hear it neither.”

“Why tell me now?”

“Because I want you to stop throwing off on superstitions. If I tell you I don’t have a headache anymore when I take the sliced potatoes off my forehead, I want you to say you’re glad of that. A thing that comes down to you because whole generations told it to each other, before you ever showed up, that deserves respect whether you believe it or not. Now, maybe I didn’t half believe what Mr. Gavin had told me, and I still don’t, but I know I wanted it to be true, and I know that the doing of it gave me a lightness.”

“But, Mayola—”

“Hush. I also know I’m damn lucky it didn’t work that time, because luck has a way of coming—or not—that is beyond any of our knowing or doing and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

“All right.” Jimmy Lee was quiet for a minute before he said, “You said there was two things?”

“Yes. Well, the second thing—” Levi heard the clink of ice and a splash of something wet and a long bit of quiet before he heard his mama’s voice again. “The second thing I ain’t never told another living soul before. Not my mama, for sure. Not even Vergie.”

“I’m listening.”

More quiet. Then she said, “He gave me money.”

“Who did?”

“The man.”

“I thought you said he didn’t know?”

“He didn’t.” Levi heard another pluuuuh of blown-out air, another stall. “He gave it to me—before.”

“What?” Jimmy Lee’s voice was loud again, and now it had iron in it.

“He gave me a hundred dollars. He was rich and it wasn’t nothing but pocket money to him. And that’s what I used for the doctor when Levi was born.” Levi felt his stomach turn over like he’d eaten too many biscuits all at once. He heard the bedsprings squeak. “There, Jimmy Lee. I’ve said it.”

“Yes, you sure have. Why? Why now?”

“Because if you and me are gonna have a life together, and maybe have a child of our own, I don’t want no secrets between us. I needed you to know every single thing, and now you do.”

If Jimmy Lee said anything in reply, Levi didn’t hear it. He was already running across the dew-wet lawn and back into the woods, where even the wisteria seemed to know to get out of his way.

He used to run like this imagining the TV narrator in his head: This is the fantastically true story of Herbert A. Philbrick, who for nine frightening years lead three lives—average citizen, member of the Communist Party, and counterspy for the FBI. But that suddenly seemed very childish.

He ran full-out until he reached the little hidden sink nearest the Lodge. Ignoring the grunting bullfrog that on any other night he would have stalked and observed, he sat down and thought about what he had heard, though much of it was hard to think about, literally: It would not hold his concentration.

The part that he could let through came in a steady beat like the bullfrog’s mating call:

The doorway.

She stands in the doorway and watches me when I sleep.

Why did she never tell me that? Why did I never know?

He sat there a long time thinking, not really listening to the bullfrog or the other night-plopping creatures until the breathy singsong of someone sauntering up the Lodge driveway made it into his ears—

Numbers, numbers, ’bout to drive me mad

Numbers, numbers, ’bout to drive me mad

Thinking ’bout the money that I should have had

The voice was heading away from the building and out toward the road when Levi suddenly stirred himself, fisted away the tears he didn’t remember crying, and stepped through the trees and into the drive directly in front of Policy Sam, who jumped a foot into the air with a yelp.

“Hey, Sam.”

“Damn, Levi! I thought the Skunk Ape done got me. If I’d’a dropped these tickets, I’d have played hell picking them up, too.”

“You going to Cooper’s?” Levi asked.

“Yeah, I’m going to the Big House. Got a late toss tonight.”

“Can I go with you?”

If Sam had asked, “Why?” Levi would have been stuck for an answer. All he knew was that he suddenly didn’t want to be alone any more, but he didn’t want to go home, either; if he saw his mama now, he would bust out crying, just like a baby—an unwanted baby was the thought he couldn’t let himself think, nor about another baby that his mama might want. That overheard conversation had set so many grown-up thoughts to swimming through his head that he needed to do something grown-up, this very night.

But Sam didn’t say a word.

“Look, I just want to see what it’s like. You been asking me to go with you, right?”

“Sure I have,” Sam said, though he didn’t sound so sure.

“Well, let’s go. I’ll buy a number if that’s what it takes,” Levi said. “How about 91?” It was the first number that came to mind: Mr. Gavin’s age when he died. He’d never even heard of Mr. Gavin before.

“91? Numbers only go up to 78.”

“Oh. Well, 78, then.” Levi pulled some coins out of his pocket.

Sam hesitated, but finally handed over a single strip of paper. “Okay, then, come along. But you best pick ’em up and put ’em down, ’cause we got to hustle out to the county road and I’m running late already. The men drinking down at the boats was trying to count lightning bugs, and that is one slow-ass way of picking numbers.” He shook his head. “Levi Williams, playing the numbers. Never thought I’d see it. Ain’t you scared of your mama no more?

“I ain’t studying about her,” Levi said, and then walked in silence, because in fact she was all he was studying about, all down the long drive and out to the paved road, the cracked white paint of the center line seeming to glow like a ghost trail leading off into the darkness.

Policy Sam stopped by the side of the road heading south.

“What’re we waiting for?” Levi asked.

“Henry. On late-toss nights, him and me got an arrangement.”

Levi was about to ask who Henry was when a battered taxi tooted its horn and pulled off onto the shoulder, motor running.

“C’mon,” Sam said. He tugged Levi across the pavement and opened the back door. “Hey, Henry.” He slid in, and Levi followed.

“Well, well, well. If it ain’t swimming boy.”

Levi was startled until he noticed the man’s white stubbled hair and the pictures of Lena Horne on the dashboard.

“That soldier with the big ideas, he still keeping company with your mama?”

“Yessir,” Levi said, to be polite, then slumped way down into the cracked leather seat to put an end to any further conversation.

“39 and 42,” Sam said, peeling off two strips of paper from the bundle in his fist. “There you go.” He handed them over the seat. Henry pocketed them and grunted, then put the car into gear.

It was eight miles from the springs to the county seat at Crawfordville. More than two hours walking—and that was fast walking the whole way—but Henry pulled the cab to a stop in front of Cooper’s no more than twenty minutes later.

Levi had heard talk about Cooper’s his whole life, in dribs and drabs of conversations he was not supposed to have any part of—listening to Aunt Vergie and the rest of the crew tell tales, especially after a weekend, when lots of folks seemed to get headaches and have shorter tempers than usual. He had imagined it to be a grand palace, a party that never stopped, with the bright lights and music that signified grown-up fun.

But when he got out of Henry’s cab, his first thought was that it ought to be called the Chicken House instead of the Big House. It was a long, low, swaybacked building with double doors on either end, built of concrete blocks, sallow light escaping through square chicken-wire windows every few feet. Sam and Levi joined the stream of people jostling into the south door. People added themselves on from all directions in ones, twos, and threes, men and women, mostly colored but some whites and Cubans as well, and of course plenty of boys, running in last-minute numbers.

Levi was shorter by a head than most of the crowd. After a minute he couldn’t see anything but the back of Sam, and he held on tight to the tail of the other boy’s shirt, half-suffocated and half-crushed by the time they finally pushed their way inside. Some palace. A battered tin-top bar ran the length of the east wall. The scattered furnishings were all mismatched: orange crates, card tables, upturned buckets and barrels, funeral-home chairs, anything you could sit on or set a beer on. Off in a corner, a scratchy nickel phonograph was playing Nat King Cole and scores of people just stood around, talking, laughing, whooping.

Runners stood in line before a desk in the corner, where a fat colored man gnawed the butt of a cigar as he collected stacks of coins and wadded bills. A skinny colored woman sat beside him with a pencil and a thick notebook. His voice loud to be heard over the crowd, Sam said she was recording the numbers sold that day: how many of each, and who bought them. He pointed to a quiet spot along the west wall and told Levi to stay put until he was done with his business.

Levi watched, hands in his pockets, afraid to look at anything but Sam as he made his way through the runners’ line. Occasionally the fat man and the skinny woman turned from their counting and writing to whisper into each other’s ears, and once, Levi was startled to see them kiss on the lips.

When the runners left the desk, they simply threw down their unsold numbers. Discarded paper strips covered the Big House floor, forming ankle-deep drifts along the walls. Walking in here meant wading through numbers.

Men all around Levi were betting on everything: how many drinks would be on Mae’s tray when she left the bar; how many more runners would come in the door at the last minute; who in the group had the biggest knife in his pocket.

Levi was less interested in Mae’s glass-laden tray than in the shortness of her skirt. He got a very good look as she passed by, because she slowed down and brushed nearer him than was strictly necessary.

“How old are you, baby?” she asked him. She had a big mole on her right cheek, and a gap in her front teeth that a gar could swim through. Levi couldn’t make his tongue answer.

“Older’n he was when he come in,” a big man laughed.

“Ain’t that right,” another man added. “And if you keep rubbing against him he’ll get bigger yet.”

“Screw you,” Mae said, and the men roared like that was the wittiest thing ever said.

When Sam finally reached the desk, the fat man and the skinny woman performed the necessary transactions and paid him no more attention than they did anyone else. But Sam walked over to Levi, jingling change in his pockets, beaming at everyone as if he owned the place. “Some party, huh?” Sam asked. They leaned side by side against the wall, watching the crush. “Line’s about done. They’ll do the toss in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

Levi kicked at the ruck of slips on the floor. “Do they throw these away later?”

Sam laughed. “Like hell. Don’t you know it’s bad luck to throw away a Policy number? Or burn one, or tear it up? Makes that number bad for you and bad for everybody else, too. No, you got to bury them, so your luck keeps growing.”

Levi nearly said something about how country ignorant that was, but then he remembered what his mama had told Jimmy Lee about respecting superstitions, and he held his tongue and thought of a more practical objection.

“Look, Sam, right there at my toe, face-up, is a 5, lying there as pretty as you please. Now, I bought a 78, not a 5. But if a 5 gets drawn, what’s to keep me from throwing mine down, picking that up and hollering, ‘I got a 5, I’m a winner’ ?”

“Maybe nothing,” Sam replied, smiling in a way that made Levi’s neck prickle. “Pick it up and see.”

Levi hesitated, because he didn’t like the look in Sam’s eye, but he leaned over and picked up the 5—then couldn’t straighten up. One powerful hand gripped his forearm; another clamped the back of his neck. He feared he could feel his bones grinding together in each spot.

“Drop it,” said a man’s voice, “or I break your arm.”

“It’s dropped!” Levi said, and it was. A patent-leathered foot kicked through the numbers, burying the 5, and both hands let go of Levi. Dizzy with terror, he slumped against the wall to steady himself and looked around for his assailants. He saw only the same crush of betting men, several of whom looked strong enough, but no one paid him the slightest attention, now that he wasn’t stealing a number.

“You see how it is?” said Sam.

“I sure do,” Levi said, rubbing his arms. “Anyone standing beside me could be working for the house. Spies everywhere.”

Sam laughed. “You dummy, the house don’t need no spies. Any customer in the place would kill a cheater soon as look at him. You walk out honest, or you don’t walk out. You want a Nehi?” He turned and scanned the crowd. “Hey, Jo!”

A waitress shifted her tray and looked down. “Hey, Sam.”

“You got any Blue Cream?”

“No Blue Cream, sugar,” she said. Her skirt was even shorter than Mae’s. Jo wasn’t much older than the boys, but she loomed over them; her chest was about level with Sam’s eyes. A small scar descended from her left eye like a tear. “Got Orange, Peach, Ginger, and a few Wild Berry left. They’re warm. Nobody gonna leave for ice and miss the toss.”

“I like my Nehi hot,” Sam said, winking at her, “but Orange is for crackers. Gimme a Wild Berry.” Looking bored, she held her hand out, palm up, and he dropped coins into it. “One for my buddy, too,” Sam said, “and keep the change.”

“My fortune is made,” she drawled. She turned to Levi, who had finally registered her high heels. No wonder she was so tall: She was practically on tiptoe. “You want a Wild Berry, too?”

“No, ma’am. Orange is fine,” Levi squeaked, his voice cracking. “How do you walk on those things?”

She grinned. “Like this.” She turned and sashayed away, demonstrating.

Levi gaped.

Sam’s elbow jabbed him. “See what you been missing?” Sam was only a year older than him, but Levi could tell he was right at home here. “Ain’t this great?” Sam hollered.

Even face-to-face conversation had to be hollered now, over the crowd and the din. All the men were sweaty, and all smoking. The top half of the room was a pungent gray haze, and Levi was glad to be below it.

A nearby group of men roared with laughter over something, and one of them smashed a bottle against the wall for emphasis. Another yelled, “If that ain’t a show, I’ll kiss your ass!”

Sam pulled him over to one of the windows. “They’ll draw a 9 tonight,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“I dreamed about a wild hog last night. It was ruttin’ in the back parlor of my grandma’s house, and no one paid it any mind, like only I could see it. Then it caught me lookin’ and chased me out of the house. A crazy kind of dream. The Black and White Luck Book says when you dream about wild animals, you should play a 5, a 7, or a 9, and they already drew 5 and 7 this week. Hey, there, baby.”

Jo sashayed back into view, their Nehis on a tray. Someone already had popped the caps, and the drinks were flat on top of being warm, but Levi gulped his, feeling the sweet syrup gurgling inside his chest as Jo looked him up and down. A thought came into Levi’s head, one that he’d give anything to chase back out. Was my mama like these girls?

Jo opened her mouth and said something else, but the room had erupted in such a roar that Levi didn’t hear a word of it. Everyone cheered as the middle of the room cleared to make room for the fat man and the skinny woman. She carried a tray of numbered balls, the man a croker sack.

Levi frowned at Jo and cupped his ear, miming, “What?” She leaned forward, said something else that Levi lost entirely, then reached up to his chest and twisted his left nipple, right through his shirt, winking as she did. He cried out in pain and surprise. Then she turned and slipped into the crowd, disappearing as completely as an envelope through the mail drop at the Lodge. Levi turned to Sam—for help or confirmation or he didn’t even know what—but Sam had eyes only for the couple in the middle of the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” squawked the fat man. “May I direct your attention to my lovely assistant’s tray, featuring balls numbered 1 to 78. Please take a moment, you folks standing closest, to confirm that each number is fairly represented.”

A dozen people leaned forward to look, nodding their heads.

“And please note, you folks nearest me, that my sack is entirely empty.” He made a big show of turning it inside out and back again, stretching the neck wide for all to see. Then he held it out to the skinny woman, who tipped her tray and poured the numbered balls into the sack. The fat man swiftly tied the neck of the sack into a knot, then stepped a few feet away and threw the bulging sack to the woman. She threw it back to him, and the back-and-forth continued, across a wider and wider space. The crowd surged closer, everyone shouting their favorite numbers at the tops of their lungs.

Levi had had enough of the noise, the heat, the smoke, the greed. He dropped his empty Nehi bottle, feeling sick to his stomach. His nipple ached, and he half dreaded—although a small, unfamiliar part of him also half hoped—that the scarred waitress would reappear at any moment on her teetering deer’s legs to claim him. “I’m gonna go,” he said to Sam, who was oblivious.

Hugging the wall, unnoticed, Levi sidled toward the exit as fast as the crowd would let him. He stumbled alone into the cool night air, around the building and into the clean freshness of the piney woods that stretched, unbroken, for seventy miles west from Crawfordville.

The Apalachicola National Forest, the largest in the state of Florida. His teacher said it was almost a thousand square miles, most of it unexplored swampy wilderness, the kind a person could get lost in, never to be seen again. The idea was not without its appeal, right then.

Levi walked in a ways, far enough that the noise of Cooper’s was just a drone, no louder than the cicadas and the frogs, found an old loblolly pine stump, and sat down to breathe the stink out of his lungs and gather his thoughts.

But his thoughts all bounced around between Jo and Mae and his mama and Jimmy Lee and the white man—whoever he was—that was his daddy, and suddenly Levi was doubled over, vomiting a stream of warm Orange Nehi. When he was emptied out, his throat raw and sour, he took three chest-spreading breaths, as if he had just returned to the surface after a long, deep dive.

He wiped his mouth with his shirttail and started to sit again when he heard a thump, somewhere off in the darkness behind him and then another, off to his right. Levi vomited again, though this time nothing came up but thin bile.

When they learned about the Apalachicola woods in class, a boy named Emmit said that he knew for gospel that a wild creature lived in the swamps far back into this forest, hair all over his body, bigger even than a Skunk Ape. It smelled of rotting meat and howled when it was hungry—for human blood. Emmit was dumber than a bag of hammers, but his daddy was a hunter, and knew as much about this part of the world as any man, so Levi thought there was likely some truth to the tale.

After what he’d seen and heard tonight, he didn’t know what he believed any more.

Levi began to walk back toward the road when, deep in the darkness far behind him, something howled, long and low, raising every hair on Levi’s body and putting his feet in a mood for some serious running.

He crashed through the underbrush, feeling a tug on his shirt, then a ripping sound, but he didn’t care about his clothes, not one bit. He ran faster, his sneakers crunching over twigs and stirring up leaves, making enough noise to scare the devil himself—he hoped—and headed for the lighted bulk of Cooper’s Big House.

He finally stumbled around the corner, and leaped back just in time to avoid being splattered by a fat man pissing against the cinderblocks.

“Well, hey there, Jackie Robinson,” said Henry the taxicab driver, zipping up. “You a runner too, now?”

“Nossir.” Levi gulped air, trying to loosen up a stitch in his side. “Can you take me home?” He’d had enough of the grown-up world and wanted to be back in his own bed more than anything he could remember wanting. “Please?” He heard his voice crack with the pleading.

“Sorry, son,” the cabbie said. “I got paying fares leaving this joint for the next three hours, going all over the county. But it’s a nice night for a walk, a strong boy like you.”

“Yessir,” Levi said, his shoulders sagging. “Thanks anyway.”

As Levi walked home, keeping to the shoulder of the road and the edge of the woods, he slowly tore his number 78 into tiny pieces that he dropped behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs in a story. Bad luck? Maybe. But the farther he got from Cooper’s, the luckier he felt.

The sun was barely above the horizon when Levi trudged up the long winding driveway. Almost home. At the Springs, at least. Home was where he’d catch holy hell, but not just yet. He cut into the woods and walked straight to the lagoon, shedding clothes as he went, some of the Big House stink falling behind with each piece. He emerged a few yards from the diving tower.

That was where he had always stopped, as a child, at the edge of the swimming area restricted to tourists, where water creatures that looked like him were forbidden. But in the dawn of a new day, Levi Williams stood on the grass, naked as the day he was born, and fear of Mr. Ball and his laws—or his mama and her rules—fell away like the dried-up used skin of a canebrake rattler.

He put one foot onto the concrete steps of the tower, then another, and then he was climbing up and around and up again until he stood at the very edge of the topmost platform, thirty feet above the springs. Levi stopped there, watching the pale light play across the surface of the water, feeling a little ball of fierceness grow inside him. This was his water, as much as anyone’s.

Levi took a deep breath—one, two, three—and launched himself into space, diving hands-first into the deepest part of Wakulla Springs. Water roaring in his ears, he plunged twenty, thirty feet down, thirty-five, until his natural buoyancy took over and he began to rise again. The exhaustion of a long night disappeared and he pushed the water behind him with easy strokes, propelling himself forward, a school of gar disintegrating in a thousand directions as he swam through it.

He swam underwater, coming up for air at two-minute intervals, moving to the far side of the lagoon, unnoticed by the film crew beginning to set up for the day’s shoot. His head barely breaking the surface, Levi watched from afar as Winnie encrusted Ricou’s long, lean body with Beastie scales. He watched from afar as Ricou joked with her and with a blonde Weeki Watchee girl, a stunt double in a high-cut white swimsuit, who donned a black wig just before she jumped into the water. He watched from afar as the crew lowered the camera into place, as Ricou and the stand-in lazily swam into position.

Then: Action.

Levi dived deep again, down to a rock ledge, holding on with his toes, and looked up. Silhouetted against the sun, the girl in the white swimsuit swam on the surface. Beneath her swam the Beastie, mirroring her movements. And now beyond them—unseen by either swimmers or cameras—swam Levi, matching Ricou kick for kick, stroke for stroke.

When the girl straightened, rested one foot against her opposite knee, and turned a lazy cartwheel, the Beastie backed off, watching her from a thicket of underwater ferns. Levi watched him watching.

Now the girl hung suspended in the clear water, her head above the surface, her long legs slowly scissoring. The Beastie swam up close, stretching a clawed hand out for her feet without ever quite touching her. Across the lagoon, Levi reached for both of them.

The layer of cooler water beneath him seemed tangible, something Levi could almost stand on. He hung there, feet slowly churning, as if riding a unicycle through molasses. His arms floated upward, and he held his right hand in a reverse C, as if framing a picture, and the Beastie seemed to swim right into Levi’s palm.

If the cameramen turned around, trained the lens in Levi’s direction, he would be captured in their machine, like the egret on the lobby wall. Would he be recognized? At this distance, would he even look human? Maybe, if only for a few seconds, they’d mistake him for some fabulous swimming creature: the legendary fish-boy of Wakulla Springs.

But the two frogmen on either side of the twin camera were focused on the latex monster and did not maneuver in his direction. Unnoticed and unbound, Levi Williams just treaded water, out of the range of capture, and after a moment’s hesitation, regretfully lowered his hand, freeing the Beastie to swim on toward the girl, toward the light.

3.

Monkey Business

Isbel was so tired she could barely sit up. She’d been working on the last section of her senior thesis for two solid days, running on caffeine and Snickers bars from the vending machine. At four on a Thursday afternoon, she sat on the La Brea bus, almost nodding off as it crawled through rush-hour traffic, jerking upright every time they hit a pothole, which in that part of Los Angeles was at least once a block.

She wished she could just call Mr. Gleckman and cancel, but the fact was, two of her studio sources had backed out at the last minute, and this was her final chance to add some really original material to bolster the library research she’d been doing since the beginning of the semester. The kind of initiative that looked good on grad school applications.

Her thesis, “An Examination of Reel vs. Real Post-Colonialism: Tarzan Movies and Imaginary Geography,” was tailored to her double major in Film and the newly established Ethnic Studies department at UCLA. It was the culmination of months of work—and years of day-dreaming.

Saginaw, Michigan, her hometown, was not the sort of place anyone made a movie about. Her parents had both worked the day shift at the GM plant, so she’d been on her own after school. Her only babysitter was a man named Captain Muddy, who hosted two hours of old black-and-white movies on the local TV station. Isbel watched them all—the Three Stooges, Lash LaRue and his bullwhip, parades of stiff-legged men in monster and robot suits—but she fell completely under the spell of Tarzan the first time she saw him swing through the trees. She wanted nothing more than to escape her small gray city for the paradise of the jungle and the mysterious escarpment beyond which always lay treasure.

After two years at Michigan State, she had transferred to UCLA, and was thrilled to discover that the films’ principals were still alive. She’d been trying for more than a year to get an interview—on the phone, in person, she didn’t care. She’d written to the publicity departments at MGM and RKO and gotten form letters in return. She sent off queries to Johnny Weissmuller’s agent, but he never replied. Maureen O’Sullivan’s agent hung up on her when she called. Johnny Sheffield no longer needed an agent, and two weeks ago she’d actually managed to talk to him directly—at least for the thirty seconds it took for him to tell her to buzz off.

Isbel had a transcription of that phone conversation. It consisted entirely, on the part of the no-longer boyish “Boy,” of: Hello? Yes, that’s me. and You’ve got to be kidding. Not a chance. She doubted that was even enough for a footnote, much less the highlight of her paper.

Cheeta was all she had left.

At least Mr. Gleckman claimed his chimp was Cheeta. “Sure, he’s the real deal. Did all the Tarzan movies,” he’d said on the phone. “In the first two, he was just the other ape’s understudy, but they promoted him for Tarzan Escapes. That was 1936, and he’s worked steady ever since. Weissmuller, Bela Lugosi, Ed Wynn—all the biggies.” It sounded like a sales pitch, composed and rehearsed, but Isbel was desperate.

“You want an interview?” Mr. Gleckman had asked after ten minutes of reciting the monkey’s credentials.

“Yes, please.”

“He’s a performer, no free shows. A hundred bucks?”

“I can get it,” Isbel said. She’d hung up the phone before she could be sensible and change her mind, then gone to the bank, gutting her account, leaving just enough for groceries—if she ate mac and cheese until Thanksgiving.

The bus lumbered north on Sepulveda as Isbel fingered the five bills in the pocket of her jeans and shifted the knapsack on her knees. The snoring fat man next to her flopped a meaty arm in her direction. Draped across his lap was a copy of the Times. POLICE: LABIANCA, TATE SLAYINGS UNRELATED. Oh, that’s reassuring, Isbel thought. Two different maniacs roaming the city. She sighed, watched the fast-food landscape slide past, and stroked the fringe of her purple buckskin vest, a nervous habit she was trying to break.

The address Mr. Gleckman had given her was right on the border of Encino and Tarzana, which seemed almost prophetic. She alighted with a wobble, her right leg all pins and needles, and looked at the piece of paper where she’d scribbled the address. 807-C Ventura Blvd. She looked up and down the street, seeing nothing but gas stations and vacant lots, then noticed a sign for Shady Glen Mobile Home Estates half a block down.

A trailer park? Really? Cheeta was a movie star. All right, it was a long time ago, and he was a chimp, but still. Maybe he’d spent his savings on bananas. Isbel laughed out loud, hearing the giddiness of exhaustion, and wanted nothing more than to go back to her dorm, crawl under the covers, and sleep for a week. This was a terrible idea. What had she been thinking?

She headed toward the sign.

Beyond a peeling stucco arch she saw rows and rows of neatly identical aluminum-sided trailers. Fifty feet to her right was a fenced-in, open-air pool. A very tan muscular guy in T-shirt and sweats was sifting blue crystals into the water amid a swirl of orange hoses, a panel truck backed up to the pool gate. The guy looked up and nodded.

Isbel took a few steps toward him and cupped her hands around her mouth. “Hey, do you know how I find number 807?”

“Those are the 500s.” He pointed to her left. “The 800s are three rows over.”

“Thanks.” She turned and peered at the oversized house numbers, which seemed to go in and out of focus. She blinked, rubbing her eyes, and wished she’d at least gotten another cup of coffee before she got on the bus. Too late now. She found 807-C and stepped onto the astroturfed porch of a trailer with a wrought-iron sign that said GLECKMAN. She rang the bell, and chimes echoed inside, playing a tinny version of “Hooray for Hollywood.”

The door was opened by a homely little man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a spectacularly unconvincing dark brown toupee. It looked like a cutout from a set of bad paper dolls.

“Mr. Gleckman?”

“I got all the Watchtowers I need,” he said. “And I’m down to one good crap a week, so whatever it is you’re selling, it’s not going to help.” He started to shut the door.

“I’m Isbel Hartsoe. From UCLA? We spoke on the phone about an interview?” He was so short she was eye-to-eye with him, and she was only five-three, even in her clogs.

He took his hand off the doorknob. “Oh, yeah. How about that? You actually showed up. You’re a credit to your generation,” he said, reaching out and damply shaking her hand. “Call me Mort. I’m only Mr. Gleckman to the landlord and the IRS.” He opened the door wider. “I guess I didn’t recognize you. You sounded white on the phone.”

Isbel stopped halfway across the threshold. “Excuse me?”

“Hey, hey. I got nothing against Negroes. Negroes, Jews, we’re in this shit together, right? Someone told me once I sounded Irish on the phone. Me, Irish! Must have been back when I was drinking.”

“I’m Cuban-American, Mr. Gleckman.”

“Mort, please. So, you from Miami?”

“Michigan.” Isbel took a deep breath. “May I come in?”

“Sure, sure. You got the, uh, interview fee?”

Isbel ignored the voice in her head that told her none of this was looking promising, and pulled the folded bills from her pocket. Mort riffled them with a tobacco-stained thumb and nodded his head before inserting them into a battered wallet.

“That doesn’t seem very professional,” Isbel said, as he led her into a narrow hallway, “charging for an interview.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “Sweetheart, that’s what professional means,” he said. “If no money changes hands, it’s just amateur night.” He slid a flimsy door open and gestured her inside. “And Cheeta’s been a pro since before you were born.”

Isbel stepped into an oppressively over-cluttered room about twelve feet square. Heavy dark furniture covered a poison-green shag rug that smelled like smoke and wet dog and a faintly acrid odor she didn’t want to think about. The walls were striped with sunlight from the venetian blinds, and encrusted with framed black-and-white photos: Men in cowboy hats. Tuxedoed saxophonists. Women wearing piles of fruit. The thermostat was cranked up high.

“The living room suite was my mother’s,” Mort said, following her glance. “Quality stuff.” He thumped the back of a chintz-covered armchair. “Let me move those.” The chair, the coffee table, the couch—every horizontal surface—was stacked with paint-spattered canvases. He cleared off the armchair, regarded the purple-and-orange stained upholstery, and covered it with a folded newspaper. “There. Sit.”

Isbel noticed a spattered easel. “Do you paint?” she asked, lowering herself gingerly onto the paper.

“Nah. It’s all Cheeta’s.”

“What?”

“Yeah, he’s a regular Picasso. But cheaper. Only a hundred bucks a picture. Two for one-fifty. You know Tony Curtis? He bought five. I could give you a student discount maybe?”

“I don’t think—”

“We’ll talk later.” Mort turned and whistled, three sharp notes.

A series of panting hoots issued from behind another sliding door on the far side of the room, and then Cheeta appeared.

Isbel’s mouth opened in surprise. Chimps looked so small and cute on television, but this thing was grizzled and leathery and almost as big as she was. Cheeta’s face was whiskered and gray, and he was dressed just like Mort—white shirt, suspenders, brown pants pulled up to mid-chest—with the addition of a purple beret worn at a rakish angle. He held a palette in one hand, a brush in the other. He stopped, his large brown eyes regarding her with keen disinterest, like an old roué in a Paris bar, then hooted again.

“Isbel, meet Cheeta,” Mort said. “Cheeta, meet Isbel.”

The chimp curled his lips back, revealing huge yellow teeth. He pointed at Mort and hooted louder.

“Yes, I know. Cocktail time. Hold your horses. We’ve got company.” Mort turned to Isbel. “Excuse me for just a moment.” He stepped over to a side table and poured a squat glass full of what looked like whiskey.

Isbel stared.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Mort said. “It’s not for me. I’ve been on the wagon for years. But the big fella got a taste for Jim Beam, back in the day, and if he doesn’t get his afternoon nip, well, let’s just say things can get ugly.” He put the glass down next to Cheeta’s easel and produced a cigar from his vest pocket, lighting it with a flourish.

“I hope that’s for you,” Isbel said, although the idea of smoke added to the warm miasma of the room made her stomach knot.

“What can I say? Actors, they’re not exactly known for clean living.” Mort handed the cigar to the chimp, who switched the paintbrush to his bare right foot, took a long sloppy puff, and farted.

“And a good day to you, too,” Mort replied. He and Cheeta both laughed loudly, Mort holding his stomach, the chimp hooting and flailing his hands. A gob of green pigment hit the lampshade and clung there. Mort fanned the air and made a face. “You get used to it. He’s mostly vegetarian. All that roughage. And he’s old, what can I say? Don’t write that part down.”

Isbel looked at her notepad and pen, unaware that she had pulled them out of her knapsack. “All right.” She turned to a blank page and cleared her throat, getting down to business. “So, Mr. Gleckman. How did you—”

The phone rang in the next room. Cheeta hooted twice and flopped into a swivel chair, crossing his over-long arms over his chest.

“Yes, I know. It’s my turn,” Mort said, crossing to the door. He looked back at Isbel. “Hold that thought.”

Half of Mort’s baggy khaki backside was still visible as he picked up the receiver and shouted into the phone, “Hermie! You bastard! You got some nerve, calling me. Fuck me or pay me. What? No. Have I seen a check? Is it the arthritis? You can’t hold a pen anymore? Just a sec.”

His toupeed head peeked around the doorframe. “Sorry, sweetheart, but I got business. It’ll only be a few minutes.”

“Wait. What about my interview?” asked Isbel, both alarmed and insulted.

Mort shrugged. “Cheeta’s the one you came to see, right? So talk to him. Don’t worry. He likes company. Just don’t make any loud noises.” He disappeared behind a sliding accordion door made of wood-grained plastic. “Hermie? Yeah, I’m back. What? How much? I am hanging up this phone. Ah, okay. Now that’s a number grown men can discuss. That shit you said before, I am like a dog. I cannot hear numbers that low. They are below my fucking threshold. So tell me news!” Mort pulled the door shut.

Isbel heard the flimsy plastic latch with a sucking sound, that felt like God had pressed down a Tupperware lid sealing off the cluttered, smelly room from the rest of the world, leaving her alone with Cheeta.

The chimp eyed her over the rim of his glass, as if daring her to make the first move. Isbel thought of all the questions she had prepared, all that work. She slumped into her chair with a sigh that bordered precariously on tears. If Mr. Gleckman wasn’t off the phone in two minutes, she would ask—no, demand—the “fee” back and would leave. This was beyond ridiculous.

She watched Cheeta take another puff on his cigar, then lay it in an ashtray and move the paintbrush from foot to hand again. She wrote Hand? Paw? in her notebook and felt a headache coming on. The chimp slathered blue paint onto the canvas, plucked something off his cheek, gazed at it, and put it in his mouth.

“Oh, great,” she said. “Movie star cooties. What’s next?” She closed her eyes against the throb in her temples and sank into the soft chintz. “Some interview.”

“You haven’t asked any questions yet.”

The gravelly voice sounded far away and muffled, but seemed to be coming from the direction of the easel.

“You might ask, for example,” the voice continued, “about my experiences in show business. Because Mort knows nothing. He wasn’t there, wasn’t part of the magic. And I was, although you’d never know it from the posters. The jungle man, his woman, his child. Where’s his best friend? I got no respect from those Hollywood types. Day after day, I watched those overpriced actors play-acting as heroes, but who was it that always saved the day, driving out the invaders, seeing through their schemes, thwarting their greed? Cheeta! But they never wrote a single line for me. When I was paid at all, it was as if I was one of the extras, some local yokel hired to be a native for a day. And I was from Africa! But here’s how good an actor I was. I warned my friends without words, playacting on my own, hooting and miming as if I really was a creature of the dark jungles and the swamps. And I saved them. Saved Tarzan, Jane, Boy, the whole lot of them. But more importantly, kid—I saved the picture. I was the one who got the laughs. I was the one the audience came to see. And what happens? Weissmuller gets two grand a week and I get bananas and a scritch on the head as if I’m nothing but a dumb beast. But off-camera? You’ve read the tabloids. The humans were the ones who acted like animals. Sure, times were different then. But has anything changed? That’s up to you. I’ll never get the back pay I’m due, but at least you can help me set the record straight. I want my legacy. I want everyone in Hollywood—in the whole world—to remember this: I stood upright among the best of them. Cheeta was a star.”

Mort slid the accordion door open. “Sorry, sweetheart. That took longer than I thought.”

Isbel opened her eyes and looked around. Had she fallen asleep? It should be later than it was. But the yellow stripes of dust-filled afternoon light reached no higher up the flimsy, fussy walls than they had when she arrived.

“Well, will you look at that!” Mort said. “He did a painting of you. Ain’t that something?”

On the canvas was a set of orange loops against a dark blue background, like a Hot Wheels track in the sky.

Cheeta looked at Isbel, raised a hairy eyebrow, and hooted softly.

“Sometimes, it almost seems like he can talk, doesn’t it?” Mort smiled and sat on the couch. “Okay, now. Whad’ya wanna know?”

Isbel looked down at the open page of her notebook, which was completely filled with scribbles. She stared at the words I stood upright among the best of them.

“Sweetheart, you okay? You look, excuse me for saying it, the same color as a lime at the bottom of a Mai Tai.” He peered at her. “You’re not on something, are you?”

“No.” Isbel shook her head, which throbbed with the motion. “But I’m really not feeling well. I think it would be better if I, um—rescheduled.”

“Sure, sure. Anytime. Me and Cheeta, we’re always here. Except Thursdays. I play pinochle on Thursdays.”

“Another time, then.” Isbel stood, using the arm of the chair for balance, and took a step toward the door before she remembered her money. “The—fee—Mr. Gleckman?” She held out her hand.

“Consider it an advance.”

“I don’t think so.”

Man and chimp both stared at her for a minute. Then Mort sighed and reached for his wallet. “You sure? It might be more, next time.”

“I’ll take my chances.” Isbel returned the bills to the pocket of her jeans.

Outside, walking through the array of aluminum housing, Isbel felt on the verge of what she was afraid might be hysteria. Not only had she hallucinated a soliloquy by a chimpanzee, she had taken notes. With a shudder, she shoved the notebook deep inside her knapsack. She’d read whatever was in it tomorrow, after she’d had some sleep. A lot of sleep. Then she’d probably burn it.

She mustered a smile and a nod for a not-so-young woman in capri pants who walked past, giving her an odd look. Was she talking out loud, too? Isbel bit her lip and walked with careful attention, footstep by footstep, her shoulders pageant-perfect, as if she could will herself to remain upright long enough to get to the bus. But when she reached the pool and spotted a deck chair, a comfortable-looking arrangement of blue-and-white plastic mesh, a few minutes’ rest seemed like an excellent idea. The bus stop was still a block away.

The pool guy’s hoses had been rolled into neat coils, and he was in the water, doing laps with long, easy strokes. He looked like he was half fish, a dark streak gliding just under the surface, only coming up for air once in two lengths. Isbel flopped down onto the deck chair as if her bones had turned to Jell-O.

A few minutes later, she felt a coolness as something blocked the sun.

“Are you okay?” the pool guy asked. He had a bit of a southern-sounding drawl.

“A little tired,” she replied sleepily. “Other than that, I’m just peachy. How about you?”

“Right as rain.” She heard the sound of feet shuffling, the clink of an aluminum pole on concrete. The man cleared his throat. “Ma’am? You sure you’re okay?”

Ma’am? With enormous effort, Isbel opened her eyes. Jesus, he was gorgeous, copper-cocoa skin and a smoothly muscled body as sleek and lithe as an animal’s, poured into a pair of blue Speedos. She looked down at the ground so she wouldn’t stare and swung her feet to the concrete. “Sorry. I’m fine. I pulled a couple of all-nighters, that’s all.”

“Ah.” He put on a pair of sweat pants, then picked up a skimmer pole and dismantled it into three sections, laying it down by a jug of chlorine. “You’re in school?”

“UCLA.”

“Encino’s a long drive. What brings you to Shady Glen?”

“I had an interview with a movie star.” She thought of her notebook, filled with the sage musings of Tarzan’s simian sidekick.

He looked around. “Somebody famous lives here?”

“I thought so, but it didn’t work out quite like I expected.” She shook her head—which had stopped throbbing quite so much once she got out into fresh air—and changed the subject. “You’re a hell of a swimmer.”

“Thanks.” He busied himself with the screw-top for the gallon jug.

“Do you compete?”

“Not really. After high school I was hoping to go pro—stunt work for the movies. That’s why I moved out here.” He tugged on his T-shirt.

“What happened?”

“Turns out there aren’t many swimming movies these days, and even if there were, not a lot of brothers in them, know what I mean? So I got a job lifeguarding at the Y, started learning about the pool equipment and filters and such. It was all new to me. Back home in Florida, I just swam in the river, or the springs, or the sink.”

Isbel laughed. “You must have been pretty little, to swim in a sink.”

“Not that kind. A sinkhole. Natural limestone formation. Lots a’those where I’m from. You might have heard of it. Wakulla Springs? They filmed a couple of movies there.”

“Really? Which ones?” Isbel sat up straighter.

“Creature from the Black Lagoon?” He looked at her as if hoping for some reaction, then shrugged. “And a couple of the Tarzans, back before I was born.”

“Weissmuller Tarzans?”

“Yep. You should hear my Aunt Vergie go on about the mischief that man got up to. Lots of stories.”

“Do you remember any of them?”

“Bits and pieces.”

“Could I interview you?” Suddenly Isbel wasn’t as tired.

He smiled. “I don’t know if I’ve got much worth telling, but sure.” He looked down at the equipment by his feet. “Let me get all this back into the truck, and I’ll give you a ride home.” He picked up a bucket stenciled WAKULLA JOE’S POOLS. “The office is in Santa Monica, so it’s almost on the way.”

She looked at him and shook her head. “Thanks, but—”

“But I’m a total stranger?” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I didn’t kill Sharon Tate or anything. And I’m not just the pool guy. I’m the owner. Stand-up citizen. I got five crews working all over LA. I’m usually in the office, but Carl had Guard duty this week.” He shook his head. “Lord knows where Governor Reagan might send him. Here.” He dug through his toolbox and handed her a wicked-looking long-handled trowel with a narrow blade.

“What’s that for?”

“Well, I use it to dig moss out of cracks in pools, but you have my permission to run me through like a gigged frog if you feel threatened anywhere between here and Westwood. Okay?”

“I guess.” Isbel still wasn’t sure, but the lure of truly original material—unpublished, never-before-heard Tarzan stories!—was too much to resist.

“Great.” He smiled. “Then allow me to introduce myself proper. I’m Levi Williams.”

“Isbel Hartsoe.” She hefted the tool and smiled back. “You’re taking a big risk. Suppose I’m a killer on the loose?”

“Well,” Levi said, “then I reckon I’m just shit out of luck. But my mama’s got a custom for just about every kind of luck there is, and she gave me one of her Indian head pennies to watch over my van, so I reckon I’ll be safe.” He picked up a coil of hose.

“Do you believe everything your Mama tells you?”

He chuckled. “Not by half. But she did raise me to have respect for the traditions other folks hold store in.”

“Your mama sounds a lot like my abuela. My grandmother. She’s from Cuba. Lots of superstitions.” Isbel picked up her knapsack. “I think most of them are tall tales, but then there are days . . .” Her voice trailed off as she thought again about the scribbles in her notebook.

“I hear you.” Levi laughed. “I was raised in Florida, and let me tell you, I’ve spent so much time on the river, in the woods, in the swamps—hell, I believe in everything.”

4.

Waters of Mystery

Paddling slowly down the Wakulla River felt like coming home for Dr. Anna Williams. Although she had grown up in Southern California, her family had alternated holidays—spending Christmas one year with Abuela Cecelia in Michigan, the next with Granny Mayola in Florida. And although she adored both her grandmothers, she always felt like she belonged here. Saginaw just couldn’t hold a candle to the natural wonders of the springs.

On a hot, humid August afternoon she sat motionless in the bow of her fifteen-foot jon boat, a catch-pole at the ready in her double-gloved right hand, a hook in her left. Her paddle lay athwart the second bench, dripping into the flat bottom, unneeded. The lazy current drew the boat forward as easily and quietly as that azalea blossom spiraling past, toward the island.

She scanned the vegetation, and caught her breath. Trouble. Possible trouble, she reminded herself. The snake coiled amid the palmetto thicket might be a native. She couldn’t discern the patterning from this distance; only a forearm’s length of brown-and-tan scales was visible through the sawblade leaves. So instead of steering around the island as she had umpteen times before, Anna eased bow-first into the surrounding hydrilla fronds, which hissed along the aluminum hull as the boat’s snub nose thumped ashore.

The snake didn’t budge until Anna prodded it with the hook. Then it flexed like a strongman’s arm and threw itself to the left, but Anna’s reflexes were just as quick. She tightened the noose of the catchpole around its head, planted her feet squarely in the bilge of the forgiving flat-hulled boat, and lifted the writhing creature free of the vegetation.

Almost four feet, she estimated, and unusually thick. Possibly a pregnant female. She eased it up a few more inches and saw that the scale pattern was clearly a checkerboard. Just a brown water snake. Her students would laugh if they’d seen her. Professor Williams mistaking a common water snake for a Burmese python?

She released the annoyed reptile and sighed with relief. Although it would have been exciting to be the wildlife biologist who bagged the Panhandle’s first confirmed python—more than four hundred miles north of the Everglades, their documented adopted habitat—it would have been very bad news for this environment.

Anna swished the pole through the water to remove any scales, and looked around at a landscape that had not changed much in thousands of years. It was a state park now, protected from development, and past the hotel and the springs, there was almost no sign of human habitation. But she knew that civilization was closing in. It was why she was here, spending her sabbatical documenting the changes, hoping she could find a way to turn back time.

Divers had explored the limestone caves beneath the springs, discovering more than fifteen miles of branching channels that ran unseen beneath pavement and pastures, all the way to the Apalachicola National Forest. The aquifer was being tainted by wastewater from Tallahassee and nitrate fertilizers from farmlands, turning stretches of the formerly crystal-clear waters as dark as iced tea. It was on its way to becoming a real black lagoon.

She was just as worried about the creatures that had invaded her childhood playground. Florida was home to more non-native species than anywhere else, the promised land for escapees: the hydrilla weed that choked off the surface, introduced as an aquarium decoration; pythons, boas, and anacondas brought up from South America and set free from amusement parks and tiny zoos; armadillos released from monkey jungles; and countless more former pets left behind by tourists since the 1920s.

It was still the most amazing place Anna had ever seen.

She plucked a fistful of beautyberries—a natural mosquito repellent—crushed them and rubbed the lavender juice into her forearms and neck and face. She pushed away from the island, wiping the sweat from her forehead with a bandana. She’d survey for another hour, then head back to the springs for a swim, work off a day of sitting and paddling. She was an excellent swimmer with her share of collegiate trophies, but she couldn’t hold a candle to her dad. Levi Williams must have been born in the water; even at seventy he could hold his breath a full minute longer than she could.

She picked up the paddle and steered the boat past the gentle curve where Dad used to point out Old Joe basking in the sun—before a poacher downgraded the huge gator from a riverbank guardian to a relic in a glass display case in the lobby of the Lodge—and nosed into a trio of mangrove knees. She slipped her sweaty hands out of the gloves, waving them in the air to dry before she took her tablet out of the waterproof rucksack, opened the database app and added the water snake to the afternoon’s tally of gators, tortoises, pelicans, anhingas, herons, and ibis. She was glad that the Wildlife Commission had given her an intern to count fish.

Anna had been happy when the Commission invited her to join the Wakulla research project. It gave her an excuse to spend one more summer at her grandmother’s little house in Shadeville. At 86, Granny was a tough old bird who sat on her porch from sun-up to sundown drinking lemonade and waiting for the bookmobile. She said she didn’t need any looking after, but Anna knew she was glad to have the company.

And the project also gave her the possibility for furthering an ambition of her own. Officially, she was making a count of the wildlife whose habitat was the two-and-a-half miles of the Wakulla River between its origin at the springs and the chain-link fence that marked the boundary of the state park. Unofficially, she was hoping to sight some creatures that didn’t exist, at least not any more—a black panther, a Carolina parakeet, or an ivory-billed woodpecker. Maybe even a Skunk Ape.

Common sense and professional dignity dictated that she keep her cryptozoological tendencies to herself. But Anna had been raised on the combination of tall tales and midnight monster movies that so delighted her father. He took her and her brothers on field trips to the La Brea Tar Pits, bought them Ben Cooper creature masks for Halloween, and lulled them to an uneasy sleep with stories about the swamp creatures of his own childhood. Every time she’d visited Granny, Anna had laid awake listening to every cypress branch scraping the tin roof at night, sure it was a Skunk Ape trying to peel the house open like a can. Part of her was terrified, but another part had always been thrilled by the idea that some of the tales could be true. She cherished discoveries like the coelacanth and the Javan elephant, and hoped one day to add to that list. Not myth. Not extinct. Here’s proof.

She swatted at a swarm of no-see-ums, bringing her attention back to the task she was being paid for. She counted five more tortoises, eight gulls, a really big water strider—that made her paddle faster because she did have a few issues with Florida’s insects—a nice ten-foot alligator, and—

Bloomp!

Something splashed to her right. She looked up into a cloudless sky. Nothing could have dropped from an overhead branch; she was in the middle of the river.

Ker-chunk!

That was much closer, soaking her right arm. Any human being who met Anna’s gaze from within those interlaced fingers of foliage would have caught a momentary glimpse of a scared child looking out from her adult face. But the thing watching her from the bushes wasn’t human, though it had alert and intelligent eyes, a long pinkface, and a grayish-brown beard. It smiled with a toothy grimace.

Anna’s pulse slowed when she recognized a rhesus monkey, which cocked a skinny arm, and let fly another rock. That one plunked into the river well short of the boat. Anna laughed as the monkey screeched, inspiring a derisive chorus. There were others back there—many others—but all less brave, merely egging on their leader.

The monkeys were invaders, too, but Anna found them harder to dislike than pythons. Cuter, more anthropomorphic. And they didn’t eat all the other animals. Urban legend claimed they were descended from Hollywood monkeys, released into the wild when a Tarzan movie wrapped. Anna was skeptical; she had watched all those jungle flicks—her parents owned both the Weissmuller DVD sets—and had noticed capuchins and spider monkeys, but no rhesus macaques. That didn’t mean it wasn’t possible. Maybe their ancestors had just ended up on the cutting room floor. All Anna knew was that monkeys were not native to Florida, so someone must have let them loose, back in the day.

The lead monkey screeched again. Anna smiled and took out her phone, snapping a picture with the zoom function to get a nice close-up of the face. No cell reception out here, but when she got back to the Lodge, she’d email it to her mom with a note: “Any interview questions for this one?”—a reference to her parents’ oft-told, so-cute, how-we-met story. Then she switched from smartass daughter to dutiful biologist and added three monkeys to the database, using an asterisk, because she’d heard at least a dozen more, even if she hadn’t actually seen them.

She was almost to the moss-draped chain-link fence that was the downstream border of Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park. Beyond lay the Shadetown Road bridge, and the intrusion of the twenty-first century: a series of subdivisions with street names like Limpkin Court and Turkey Trail and Razorback Road, all named for whatever had been killed or displaced to build them.

The fence marked the end of paradise. It was time to turn back, call it a day.

But seeing the monkeys, thinking about where they’d come from—and where she’d come from—had put a bee in her bonnet, as Granny would say, to do something she hadn’t done since she was a kid.

Would a noise qualify as invasive? There was decibel-based pollution, sure. But what about a sound that was artificially introduced into the landscape, only to propagate unexpectedly, crowding out the natives? Because, surely, before the 1930s, Florida children like her dad must have created their own yells of look-at-me exhilaration when they swung out on a vine and dropped into the middle of a swimming hole, right?

Anna laid down her paddle. She took a deep breath. She balled her hands into fists, raised them and beat on her chest like a drum. She opened her mouth wide and began to yell—to yodel, really, a yell more Austrian than African, more Hollywood than Florida, a fake that over time had become real.

“Aaahhh-eeeeeeee-aaahhhh-eeeee-aaaahhhh-eeeeee-aaaahhhhh!”

Her long, ululating cry pierced the quiet of the jungle.

It carried across the surface of the water, and the animals responded.

Two anhingas broke their cover, flapped into the cypress tops.

A family of rhesus macaques chortled and hooted and beat their own chests.

A limpkin emitted a rattling scream.

A twelve-foot gator slid into the river and lazily stroked upstream away from the din, its prehistoric brain ticking coolly away.

Anna gave the call again, queen of this jungle, primal and fearless.

Back in the trees something that smelled of sour cabbage dragged its knuckles and roared: woomp, woomp.

An armadillo fully as big as a VW bug shook its scaly head, snorted, and lumbered through the brush.

And beneath the river’s surface, a creature reached for Anna’s boat with a webbed hand, its talons approaching the metal hull. Then it changed its mind and kicked away, back down into the depths where it dwelled, away from the light.

THE EXCHANGE OFFICERS

Brad R. Torgersen

Does technology change the nature—and meaning—of sacrifice?

The solar panels crumpled.

I didn’t hear them, but I felt them through the stimulus-feedback system. My proxy’s hands and feet still gripped the spars of the extended boom to which the panels had once been attached. Now those panels were splintered and floating away in bits—dangerous debris in an orbital zone already too clouded with fast-moving hazards. Not that I cared much at the moment. Half the team was red-lining towards black, and I had no telemetry from the other half at all, even though they were literally within shouting distance.

As long as I was still Operating, I knew only what my proxy knew, saw only what my proxy saw, and felt only what my proxy felt.

At present, my proxy’s camera eyes focused on the Chinese combat capsule which had collided with Grissom Platform. A stealth job. We hadn’t seen them coming. One of the capsule’s bay hatches snapped open—shards of ruined solar panel flinging away—and several vacuum-suited figures appeared at the threshold. They wore modified copies of the latest Russian suits, only beefed up with sections of hard plate, not too different from the SAPI stuff I’d trained in and worn during my younger days on the ground.

Of course, back then I’d also carried a rifle.

No such luck five hundred miles from the surface of the Earth.

I spoke several obscenities.

If all of us had still been Operating, we’d have been able to overwhelm the enemy in moments. Each proxy moved faster than a man, and possessed many times the strength. But I seemed to be the only one who’d not been affected by the EMP weapon—which had fried so much else in the last five minutes.

“Hang on, Chopper,” said a familiar voice in my ears.

“Chesty,” I said, exhaling with relief. She’d been several kilometers distant, testing new equipment. The EMP had spared her too.

“How many Marines does it take to fight off a Communist horde?”

“Just one, and I’m it,” she said. I detected a grin on her face, based just on the sound of her words as she spoke them.

“Well, then you’d better make it fast,” I replied. “Because these guys are for real, and unless the Air Force and Navy want to lose several hundred million dollars worth in equipment to a hostile Chinese takeover, you and I are all that’s left to stand in their way.”

“Sounds like the perfect odds,” she said. “Just the two of us. Not a lot different from when we started, eh?”

Mission Control looked more like a penny arcade than a command center. No long desks populated with keyboards and computer displays. No super-sized jumbo screens on the walls. No bespectacled engineers with headsets perched on balding scalps. There were only control booths arrayed uniformly in neat bunches. And in each booth sat or stood an Operator, male or female. Most of them were United States Navy or United States Air Force personnel—the facility being a joint USN-USAF operation. As the United States Army’s latest exchange officer to the Orbital Defense Initiative Station, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Both because of my rank, and because of my uniform.

“This way, sir,” said the tech sergeant who was playing tour guide on this, my first duty day at ODIS. She took me between the booths—my eyes catching glimpses of hooded people in olive-drab long underwear, each of them contorting this way and that, and their hands, arms, legs, and feet sprouting with innumerable wires—until we arrived at a booth labeled with the number 23. It was dark, and the tech sergeant reached in to snap on a small overhead light.

“Home sweet home?” I said, peering in.

“Yessir,” she said. “You’ll be in one just like it during simulator training, but once that’s over with, we’ll be putting you here for the other nine months that we have you.”

Simulator training. I frowned. I’d cut my teeth flying ground attack and surveillance aircraft in over a dozen countries on four continents. Though, to be honest, I’d never set foot in an actual plane. The inside of one ROV control trailer looked like any other. What more could there be to learn? I gave myself a week to figure out the particular hardware and software that ODIS used. The rest of train-up time would be a snoozer—something to bore me while I waited for an actual mission.

A second tech sergeant arrived with a differently camouflaged person in tow. This one’s pixilated duty uniform instantly marked her as a United States Marine. She had streaks of silver in her hair and lines on her face, and like me, bore the bar of a Warrant Officer.

I instinctively stuck out my hand.

“Dan Jaraczuk,” I said as she grasped my palm, and gave me a satisfying shake.

“Mavy Stoddard,” she replied. Her eyes were large, brown, and intelligent, with just a hint of hardness to them. I guesstimated her to be about ten years older than me, though she was one notch lower on the Warrant Officer totem pole. Which wasn’t too unusual. Many Warrants spend years climbing the enlisted ladder, before finally putting in their packets for Candidate School. I’d jumped as soon as I was able, right from Specialist, because it had been one of the quickest routes I knew that might take me here, to this place—a small fortress of cutting-edge space technology located at Hill Air Force Base, in the desert valley wilderness of Northern Utah.

My tech sergeant nodded to her peer, then turned back to me.

“Warrant Officer Stoddard is going to be joining you for your training cycle. She’ll be in 24 when she’s done. We don’t get a lot of Army or Marines at ODIS, nor Warrant Officers of any sort, so you’ll have to forgive us if were not up to speed on the courtesies.”

“Most people just call me Chief,” I said.

“That will confuse some of the Navy and Air Force folk,” Stoddard said, correcting me. “I think we’ll both be doing them all favor if we just stick with sir and ma’am.”

I nodded, not wanting to contest the issue. “Fine by me.”

Stoddard tilted her head slightly—sizing me up. I got the sense she didn’t necessarily appreciate my informal manner. But then again, she didn’t have to. I’d paid my dues, and logged my hours. Whatever the Marine standard might have been, this wasn’t Jacksonville nor Quantico. And until some Captain or Major decided to get up in my business, I was going to be as informal as I wanted—one of the perks of the position, or so it had been said when I’d come out of Fort Rucker, Alabama, right before Basic Course.

The two tech sergeants watched us as Stoddard and I watched each other, then one of them cleared his throat and said, “if you’ll keep following us, we’ll show you to the simulator room.”

“After you,” I said, motioning with my arm and putting a smile on my face.

Stoddard simply turned and walked away, the tech sergeants taking us rapidly out of Mission Control, through a series of hallways past office doors and junctions that were filled with milling Air Force and Navy personnel, until we passed through a set of double doors into a room that looked not too different from the one we’d just left. Only, each of the booths was double-sized. Room for two Operators.

“Right seat, left seat,” I said, surveying the equipment.

“More or less,” said a woman’s voice. Stoddard and I turned to see a flight-suited Air Force colonel approach us. The colonel’s hair was dark red and buzzed down past the usual female standards. Her face was plain, but her eyes were bright and she carried herself with confidence. She had a clipboard under one arm and read our name tapes on our uniforms as she stopped in front of us.

“Stoddard, right. And . . . Jadzook? Jarezuck? How the heck do I pronounce that?”

“Jare-uh-chuck,” I said slowly.

“Okay,” said the colonel. “Well, however you say it, for the duration of your time at ODIS I’m going to be calling you Chopper. That’s your Operator Sign when you’re in training and on missions. Stoddard? You’ll be Chesty.”

Stoddard raised an eyebrow.

“As in, Chesty Puller,” the colonel added.

Stoddard blinked, then smiled her understanding.

“My name’s Fern McConnell,” said the colonel, “but around here everyone knows me as Valkyrie. As your CO during your exchange officer stints, you will report directly to me. I know your in-processing people already went over rules and regs and standing orders for the installation, so what we need to get clear here today is what I’ll be expecting from you, and what you can be expecting from me.”

“Yes ma’am,” Stoddard and I both chimed in unison.

“The Orbital Defense Initiative Station is an experiment,” McConnell said. “When Congress and the Senate jointly agreed to dismantle NASA, much of the prior funding and all of the facilities were consigned to the Department of the Navy. Since the Air Force already had a strong space interest, the Secretaries of the Air Force and the Navy put together a unified program designed to protect United States interests in orbit, and beyond. But the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs wouldn’t sign off on it—nor could he dig up additional funding—unless our cousins the Army and Marine Corps could tag along for the ride, too. This means what while you both are here as a favor from us to your respective services, I expect no less from you than I expect from any of my other Operators. I am tough, but I am fair, and if either of you have a problem with anything or anyone, I expect you to come to me with it first. Copy?”

“Roger that,” I said.

“Yes ma’am,” Stoddard replied more formally.

The colonel looked at us both, then took a deep breath, and continued.

“My full resume is posted on the ODIS intranet, but just so you know, I did two combat tours—one in the Middle East and one in Africa—as well as three trips to the International Space Station.

“It’s because I’ve got the space rating and the flight hours that they assigned me to head up ODIS. My Operators never climb into a cockpit nor a space suit, but you’re every bit as vital to ongoing United States space readiness as any astronaut ever was. The public doesn’t give a damn because people long ago decided space was boring and run-of-the-mill. But since the Chinese put their first probe on the Moon, the politicians in Washington D.C. have been nervous about us losing our edge in a new space race.”

I nodded, knowingly.

The People’s Republic of China had been announcing plans for a lunar base, even before their first successful robotic landing. With the Russians doing most of the heavy lifting to the aging International Space Station, it was left to America’s military establishment to decide if free men would walk on the Moon, or take a back seat to the world’s newest assumed superpower.

“Unlike the last time America went to the Moon,” the colonel continued, “this time we’re doing it in steps. Not one-shots. And because the entire thing is rolled up under the significant umbrella of the Department of Defense, there’s not been as much sensitivity to cutbacks as during the Apollo years—though certain politicians, and a certain President in particular, have done their worst.”

Again, I found myself nodding.

“Don’t wake the Chinese dragon,” one notable political blogger had shouted when news about the creation of ODIS had gone public.

Thankfully for my sake, such alarmism had been ignored.

We were definitely going back.

But not before there was enough infrastructure in orbit—Earth’s, as well as the Moon’s—to ensure that we were going for keeps.

Which is where ODIS came in.

“We don’t fly the usual ROV here,” the colonel said, her eyes piercing as she looked at us. “The stuff we run is actually two or three generations past anything either of you have ever flown or driven in your careers. This is not joystick work. The ODIS environment is immersive, because the machinery you’ll be piloting is billion-dollar stuff, and designed to work in one of the most hostile environments possible. The training is also immersive—‘train as you fight,’ I think the Army always says? Well, here at ODIS we train as we Operate, and you’ll have plenty of time to work the kinks out and make all the usual beginners’ blunders before we let you at the real thing.”

I momentarily looked up at the white-tiled ceiling, imagining that I could peer through the roof and up through the sky, to where ODIS Operators were busily putting together the several orbital docking and receiving platforms that would be taking on material and manpower bound for the Moon.

Cybernauts, one Army Times headline had quipped, when the basics of the ODIS mission were made publicly known.

I’d taken one look at the program—concluded it was by far the coolest thing I’d ever seen—and immediately determined that, one way or another, I was going to be a part of it.

Each of the Chinese suits had the familiar hammer, sickle, and stars of the People’s Republic of China emblazoned across a breast. The troops slipped out of their capsule—a solid dozen of them!—and began tethering themselves to Grissom Platform. They didn’t have guns that I could see, though if there was a gun that functioned in vacuum and microgravity, I wasn’t convinced I’d be able to recognize it in any case. I guessed that the Chinese had banked on their electromagnetic pulse weapon to do their dirty work for them, and because my proxy was—for all intents and purposes—still motionless on the solar panel boom, they probably assumed my circuits had been turned to toast along with all the rest.

Somewhere out there, though I couldn’t detect or see her yet, Chesty was coming in hot. I held myself still and waited, watching the Chinese move closer to me and then, white-knuckled moments later, over me, advancing towards Grissom Platform’s central modules. Those modules were uninhabited at the moment—no astronauts on staff for a thing only half built—but they could be made to power up and provide life support in a pinch. The Chinese moved with such rapidity and purpose, I began to wonder how much information about the platform’s engineering had been leaked or smuggled to the PRC prior to this, their most brazen attack on the United States to date.

Did they worry that anyone back on Earth might notice? Or care? Or were they so convinced that the EMP had eliminated all electronic eyes and ears that they were willing to just walk in and take the platform—daring someone on the ground to say or do anything about it?

There was a whoop—no, not quite, more like a cry; a war cry.

“OOOOORAHHHHH!”

Chesty—or rather, her proxy—appeared for an instant, her experimental maneuvering pack’s micro-jets blasting tiny trails in the emptiness of space. She shot past me and thunked into the side of the enemy spacecraft. I watched Chesty hang there on the capsule’s side for a moment, her contorted body depressed into the ablative shielding. Had she overshot the mark and terminated herself?

With relief, I saw her begin to move—servo-assisted joints flexing as she picked herself up out of the depression and turned around.

The Chinese had seen her too, and were not amused.

Half their squad began reeling themselves back towards the capsule.

I waited like a spider, just aching for a chance to strike, then shot up from where I’d been laying prone on the solar panel boom.

Two of the six got my titanium fists in their face bowls.

The crunch on my knuckles was ever so satisfying.

They flailed and reflexively pulled their hands up to their faces. I couldn’t tell if I’d actually cracked the bowls badly enough to vent atmosphere—unlikely, given the fact each bowl was supposed to be meteorite-proof—but I’d definitely given them something to think about.

Chesty was prepared for the remaining four. She’d crouched directly in front of the mouth to the capsule’s hatch, like a wrestler—her mechanized head swiveling this way and that as she sized up her four on-rushing opponents.

“I’ve got these,” Chesty said. “You better check on the others, before they do something both of us will regret.”

“Roger that,” I said, and spun to face the remaining Chinese.

Rather than come for me, however, they’d redoubled their efforts to break into Grissom Platform’s central modules. Two of them had unfurled computer pads with ribbon cables, each cable snaked out and plugged into the now-exposed electronics near a main airlock. I began advancing on them—pulling myself hand-over-hand and foot-over-foot like a chimpanzee—when the world suddenly turned to grainy static. I yelled in frustration, feeling all my senses go dead. Had the Chinese set off a second EMP? And what about Chesty? If my proxy was kaput, that left her and her alone to combat the enemy—twelve to one. And even a Marine has her limits.

With the Operator suit on, I looked like a lab rabbit.

Hundreds of thin wires and cables snaked away from the one-piece body suit that hugged me uncomfortably in all the wrong places. Chesty was in the same predicament, though I had to admit the suit was much more flattering on her than it was on me. We were each standing on a yellow line with two yellow-painted footprints in front of it—to note our starting positions. Three meters in front of us, also poised on yellow-painted footprints, were our proxies.

Robots, really. Man-sized and fully articulated in ways not even the real thing had ever been. I experimentally snapped my right fingers a few times, and watched as my proxy’s hand made the same motions, and even achieved a similar effect, though its plastic, ceramic and metallic flesh clanked and dinked more than it snapped.

“Please don’t do that,” said an Air Force master sergeant who’d been supervising Chesty and me during our first day in the suits. We’d already logged two weeks going over mechanics and theory, hitting the books and soaking our brains in math, diagrams, and history lessons on the development of these, the United States’ most sophisticated remotely-operated vehicles in existence. Even a single arm from one of the proxies was worth more than my retired mother’s five-bedroom McMansion in the Bay Area.

I rightfully quit my fooling around and waited for further instructions from the master sergeant—just one of many technically-savvy non-commissioned offers who prowled on the sidelines. The closed hangar in which we all stood was part of the ODIS simulator—a place where new proxy Operators could get a feel for their machines, and the body suits could be “tuned” to their wearers. No human being’s electromagnetic or physiological signature being quite the same as any other’s.

“Lift your right legs please,” said the master sergeant. “Keep your knees about waist level and balance for thirty seconds.”

I did as instructed, and so did Chesty. I was amazed to see my proxy emulate me exactly, even down to the minor shimmying I was doing as I tried to keep from dropping my leg or toppling over. For an insane instant I wanted to call out PT cadence—One thousand, one! One thousand, two! One thousand, three!—and decided against it. The Air Force NCOs might not grasp the humor of the moment, and I certainly didn’t need to magnify the reputation I’d already earned as something of a goof.

If I’d been somewhat cocky about my ROV experience coming into ODIS, that cockiness had gradually crumbled as the magnitude of what I’d be doing became clear. ODIS wasn’t about sitting in a trailer and guiding a mini-helicopter, armed with cameras and third-generation Hellfires slung under its stubby wings—prowling for insurgents. ODIS was as close as I’d ever get to actually becoming what I drove. Or Operated, according to the correct term, which Valkyrie was insistent that we use.

She watched us now, sitting back a bit from the NCOs who worked and tapped at keys on their portable laptops, their own sets of wires and cables trailing this way and that across the floor. Mobile servers on wheels had been rolled in to handle the software aspect—human nerve impulse being wickedly difficult to accurately transform into data the proxy’s motors and servos could recognize. Fans in those servers hummed gently, and despite the superb air conditioning of the simulator, I felt myself begin to sweat.

“Okay,” said the master sergeant. “Left legs down, and right legs up.”

Chesty and I did as instructed, and our proxies mirrored us exactly.

“Won’t the distance cause enough signal lag to give us issues?” I asked the master sergeant, who’d so far proven to be fantastically knowledgeable about his subject of assignment. I’d have tried talking him into going Warrant if the Air Force had had the good sense to keep its Warrants, instead of retiring them out of the service so that every pilot could claim to be a college graduate.

“Some,” said the master sergeant. “But the proxy is only a few hundred miles up, at most. Not even the blink of an eye for round-trip transmissions. And we won’t be operating these on the Moon from this building. Sooner or later some of you are going to have to go up.”

Go up . . . I let myself thrill for the moment at the prospect of being assigned to honest-to-gosh-damned astronaut training. Would I even pass the harder parts of the physical? Would it matter? Now that the Navy and Air Force were calling the shots, a lot remained uncertain. But at least you didn’t need a doctorate in the sciences to get to orbit anymore, as had been the case when NASA’s astronaut feeder program had been clogged to the rafters with PhDs.

“Right leg down,” said the master sergeant.

Chesty and I did it. Our proxies did it too.

“Now jog in place,” said the master sergeant.

Chesty and I began to lightly pad up and down on the balls of our feet, not daring to get any more vigorous about it because our proxies were doing precisely as we did, and neither of us was sure how much terrestrial stress they’d been designed to take—despite what the factory specs said.

“Good,” said the master sergeant. “Leap forward a few times.”

Chesty and I looked at each other, but didn’t move.

“It’s cool,” said the master sergeant, smiling. “They’re expensive as hell, but then again they ought to be. They’ll withstand 7.62 automatic fire, and come back for seconds. You could drop one from three thousand feet, and all you’d do is scratch the paint job.”

Emboldened by the master sergeant’s words, Chesty and I began to leap forward. Rather comically, I am afraid to admit, stretching our bodies out and curling back, covering several feet in each bound.

The proxies mirrored us beautifully.

Too beautifully for my taste, as I landed awkwardly on the third jump and fell on my ass.

My proxy emulated me, thunking loudly onto the rubberized floor.

Chesty couldn’t help herself. She laughed loudly.

I looked over at her and ruefully pushed myself to my knees.

All enlisted eyes darted to my proxy as it began to flop and flail like a fish on dry land.

“Oh, crap,” I said. “Did I—?”

“No sir,” said the master sergeant. “It’s fine. Hang on a sec . . .”

He began hammering keys almost too quickly for the eye to see, and the spasming proxy relaxed and lay flat.

Valkyrie stood up and approached, with her habitually attached clipboard under one arm.

“It’ll be like that for awhile,” she said. “It’s going to be days before each of you have fed enough data into the system for the proxies to read your movements correctly in all circumstances. It’s a bit like voice recognition software, if you’ve ever used that. The basic setup is pre-packaged for a certain set of sounds matched to a certain set of words, but until the software learns you, it’s going to mess up as often as not. Same here, with the proxies.”

“Still,” Chesty said, “this is flat-out remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Truly space-age.”

“Yes, it is,” said the colonel. “And unlike an astronaut who has to be supplied with food and air and water, a proxy can remain in orbit for months or years without needing to do much more than take naps while tied to the nearest solar collector or fuel cell. The batteries in those proxies are space-age too. In the end, it’s much cheaper and more effective to Operate in space, and I say that with no small regret, because once you’ve been up there—” I noticed Valkyrie’s eyes had started to sparkle a bit, “—you won’t ever be the same person again.”

I was blind and nearly deaf. The lightweight audiovisual hood was feeding me static. My heart told me there was nothing much to be done. If the Chinese had set off another EMP—lethal, I thought, at that range; for them as much as us—then both Chesty and I were cold turkey. And we’d just have to wait and wonder what the Chinese did with Grissom Platform.

Suddenly my visual picture blinked, went black, then blinked again.

“Hang on,” I said. I could vaguely hear the rapid speech of the Air Force and Navy people who’d clustered around Chesty and me as we Operated from our booths. They’d already assumed the worst, and rightly so. With the other Operators out of the picture, it seemed unlikely that Chesty or I could do much to change the present verdict.

Color swam back into my “eyes” and very quickly I realized I was staring up at a Chinese troop who’d bent over me. He was tugging at my torso with a tool of some sort. I could feel it, as if someone was trying to pry between my ribs with a pair of needle-nose pliers. I jerked and kicked—in the booth as well as via proxy—and the Chinese space soldier spun away from me, his tool lost to vacuum and only his tether keeping him from being similarly orphaned in orbit.

Chesty grunted and growled.

I re-orientated myself so that I could see what was happening down by the combat capsule. No less than six of the Chinese had piled on top of Chesty’s proxy, which struggled mightily to break free. One of the enemy had a hand-held device of some sort and was trying to keep it applied to Chesty’s upper torso.

“I’m losing it!” I heard her say in panic, as much through the Operating room as through the speakers in my ears. “Signal’s breaking up!”

The situation quickly became clear.

Not only were the Chinese trying to take Grissom Platform intact, they were trying to take the proxies too. Which explained why they’d not so much as laid a pipe wrench on us during the melee. Probably they were under strict orders not to damage anything they came across, even if we fought back. They were trying to neutralize us instead.

Not thinking, I began my hand-over-foot-over-hand race back down the solar panel boom. Something latched hold of me from above, like a sack of cement stuck to me with duct tape. I ignored it and kept moving, intent on distracting the soldier who had the neutralizer in his hand and was trying to use it to knock Chesty out of the fight.

A final pull, then a hard push with motorized legs.

I curled.

My proxy hit them like a bowling ball.

The “pins” burst apart.

I had the neutralizer in my hand, and—lacking anything of sufficient toughness—slammed it across one knee. The sensors complained and I winced as the feedback hit me, but the neutralizer was in pieces, which I hurled away from me as I regrouped with my Marine battle buddy.

“Still too many,” Chesty said, breathing heavily. Though the proxies were doing all the work, the fight was as visceral as anything either of us had experienced on Earth. We’d been japing around in our booths—Operator-style—since the moment the attack began. And even being in good condition didn’t prevent a man—or a woman—from getting winded at that frenetic pace.

“I’d pay good money for a vacuum-tested .50-calibre machine gun right now,” I said, watching to either side as the Chinese troops pulled themselves back towards us on their tethers. What little of their faces I could see appeared rather displeased. And I was suddenly very grateful to not be facing them in person.

Their tethers waggled as they drew near.

Wait.

Tethers . . .?

“We’ll never beat them like this,” I said. “We have to give them a new problem to solve.”

Before Chesty could ask what I meant, I pulled myself over to one of the enemy tethers which was bound to the solar panel boom. Flexing my forearm, I deployed my proxy’s cutting tool and bent low, applying it to the tether’s base. Steel cable resisted, and then snapped as my cutting tool bit through the tightly-wound metal.

I grabbed the free end of the broken tether and yanked yard, then cast it away. The attached troop flailed and groped at nothing as he shot up and over me. I ducked. Were they smart enough to have configured their armored suits with miniature reaction control thrusters? I hadn’t seen a lot of extra hardware on them when they’d first emerged.

Chesty hooted her approval and set to work on another tether.

Suddenly, Grissom Platform lurched.

Cones of mist sprayed from the much-larger RCS system installed at mathematically determined points along Grissom Platform’s architecture. The two Chinese who’d managed to get inside had obviously done their work quickly. They had control of the Platform’s systems now, which was very bad news indeed.

“Someone has to get inside and stop them!” Chesty yelled.

Indeed.

“Do what you can,” said a third voice. It was Valkyrie.

Shed plugged into the Operator frequency with a normal headset.

“Can you give us a SITREP, boss?” I asked.

“All the other Operators are blacked out right now. The EMP did its work well. There is no help available at this point. It would be hours before we could attempt to bring other proxies—being Operated on other Platforms. And by then it will be too late.”

“Aren’t the Chinese worried about how this will affect the diplomatic situation?” I said.

“Obviously not,” Valkyrie replied. “I think it’s a test—to see how ready we are to resist them in an open contest for orbital space. And since the European Union is sitting it out as a neutral party, we’re left to defend our turf the old fashioned way.”

Chesty and I sat at the bar of the little wings’n’brew joint we’d found not far outside the west gate of Hill Air Force Base. Being none too familiar with the local denizens, we kept to ourselves—though it seemed obvious the staff were plenty used to military folk coming in for a drink and a meal. The man behind the bar was a friendly chap. Retired, I guessed, based mainly on his crisp high-and-tight haircut and the tattoo on his muscular arm—a half-naked woman that peaked out from under his rolled-up sleeve as he moved around and served customers.

“And here I thought you were going to be a joker,” Chesty said, twirling the ice in her glass with a thin straw.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” I said. “Eight weeks ago you didn’t know me. But now? Now, you don’t have that excuse.”

“True,” she said. “But I get the feeling I’m not the only one who’s had to correct himself on his assumptions.”

“Right,” I said, smiling slightly at her, before taking a slow sip of my root beer and putting the glass mug back on its foam coaster. ODIS rules were: no alcohol under any circumstances, any time. It somehow messed with the tuning of the proxy control suits. A nervous system thing?

A flatscreen TV behind and above the bar was playing the evening news. An earnestlooking reporter in a crisp suit was carrying on about something, though the sound had been turned down so we couldn’t hear about what. When an image of a Chinese orbital booster was layered in behind the news anchor’s head, with the words, “PRC RESOLVES TO MATCH AMERICA IN ORBIT,” blown up under the anchor’s chin, I pointed at the set and asked the man behind the bar to turn it up.

The anchor’s voice suddenly cut in, midsentence, “. . . for the last four years, and Beijing has promised that if the United States does not cease its military activities in low Earth orbit, the People’s Republic of China will be forced to declare the United States in violation of treaty.”

The news anchor vanished, to be replaced by a slim, fit looking Chinese man in a blue business suit—Mao suits being something you didn’t see much of in the new era of streamlined, bourgeois Chinese international relations.

“We consider the actions of the United States Department of Defense to be inexcusable,” said the Chinese man, “and we would remind the United States President that the territories of Earth orbit, as well as the Moon, belong to all people. Not just America’s capitalist exploiters.”

I snorted.

“You think they’re bluffing?” Chesty said.

I shook my head. “Hard to say. After the Party put down those big pro-democracy riots in the Chinese interior cities a couple of years ago, the Beijing government has been working double-time to plaster on a nice face at the United Nations. Given the fact that so many countries are up to their necks in debt to Chinese interests, nobody’s going to mess with China. But maybe it’s all part of a scheme to provoke the US? Make us look like the warmongering bad guys half the world seems ready and willing to believe we are.”

I said the last with a bitter frown, and took a long draft of root beer.

“And you’re sure they aren’t right?” she said.

I nearly choked.

“What kind of talk is that for a Marine?”

“I’m just thinking that as much as we like to think we re always the good guys, events of the last few decades have occasionally cast that into doubt. I’m not stupid. I know a bit about history and I know more than a bit about our overcommitments in the Middle Eastern and African theaters. If it were up to me I’d bring every last one of us home and let the world fend for itself for fifty years. But then I’m not the President, so I don’t get to make that call. She does.”

I pushed my drink aside and faced Chesty squarely.

“Well, surprise, surprise. I wouldn’t have figured you for a political thinker. Then again, we haven’t had a chance to talk much—about real stuff. Only about work.”

“No we haven’t,” she said, waiting for me to continue.

“So riddle me this, Marine, if the answer to America’s bad image abroad is to close the bases and bring the troops home, what are we doing constructing military space stations for the purpose of putting military personnel in orbit? And if you really feel the way you say you feel, what are you doing tied up in a project like this? ODIS being the thing on everyone’s minds lately, as the Platforms approach completion and the Chinese eat up the international news cycles with threats and rhetoric.”

She looked down at her drink—the ice tinkling in her glass—and sighed.

“I always wanted to be an astronaut,” she said. “But life got in the way. Twenty years went by in a flash, along with two kids, a mean divorce, and too many deployments. I was in Kuwait when I read about ODIS in an e-mail from a friend, and I decided it was the closest I might ever get to fulfilling my dream—even if I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the political cloud that surrounded the program.”

“The first sortie is coming up,” I said. “Are you sad like me that we won’t be going up on a rocket ourselves?”

“Yes,” she said hesitantly, looking directly into my eyes. “Don’t get me wrong. I know I beat long odds to be here, just like you. And I am glad I did this. But it won’t be the same—not being able to float outside the spacecraft and see my own real-live hand against the backdrop of the earth as it passes beneath my feet. Like Ed White. Do you know who Ed White is?”

“No,” I said.

“Look him up on the internet tonight,” she said. “When I was a little girl, I used to love the color photos of Ed White.”

“They’ve sealed the air lock,” I said.

“Use your proxy’s key card,” Valkyrie ordered.

“I did. It’s no good. However they’ve hotwired it, I can’t get in.”

Grissom Platform was still thrusting with its RCS. The Earth was swinging away and to the right. I heard Chesty cursing as she struggled with the Chinese who’d resumed their attempts to subdue her. Unable to get in and stop the ones who’d gone inside and activated the Platform’s attitude controls, I debated between helping Chesty, and figuring out some other way to stop the Chinese.

“Now I’m wishing we had an auto-destruct sequence,” I mused sarcastically.

“You think this is a TV show?” Valkyrie said. “No can do, Chopper. No reactor overload. No explosives lining the hull. That’s movie theater stuff. And if you can’t stop the Chinese, then it’s basically game over. I’ll have to report to my bosses at the Pentagon that ODIS let the Chinese commit orbital theft of US military property.”

I stared—via proxy eyes—at the space around me. The layout of the station. The unfinished spars and beams poking out at different angles. Then my eyes hit something I’d not considered before. And as I watched the limb of the Earth drop away and disappear, I suddenly realized what I had to do.

After training was over, it took Chesty and me a few sorties to really get the hang of things. Even with the many, many hours logged in simulation, the real thing took just that much more adjustment, before we began to feel proficient. After that, it was very much a lunch bucket job.

“They used to make people with doctorates do this,” I said to no one in particular as Chesty and I—our proxies—maneuvered a collapsible strut out of the yawning cargo bay of a Centurion rocket’s third stage. Our feet were identical to our hands, and we “walked” our way up and down the slowly-growing superstructure of Ride Platform.

“Did they get paid any better?” said one of the team, a Navy Chief Petty Officer designated as Skips.

“I dunno,” I said. “But it just seems hilarious to me. This is hard-hat stuff. We re a construction crew, y’all.”

“If anyone ever saw a construction crew in robot form,” Chesty said.

“Quick, someone scratch his robot crotch.”

“Is it break time yet?”

“I forgot my lunch box!”

“How about a beer instead?”

“No beer in space.”

“No beer? I want to talk to the union!”

The one-liners continued to reel from all lips, and pretty soon we’d all been reduced to painful laughter, our proxies emulating us as we hunched, our torsos and heads bobbing—letting it out.

“Okay kids,” Valkyrie’s firm, maternal voice said in our ears. “Play time is over. That will do. You’ve still got a lot of stuff to unload from that Centurion before the sortie is over. And your batteries are draining every second you waste hamming it up.”

The lot of us yesmammed and shut up, though snickers could still be heard here and there.

Having affixed our collapsed strut to its designated hard point, Chesty and I went back to the Centurion and began taking out another.

I noticed there was a rudimentary control board up near the nose cone, tucked just inside the cowling.

“Mind if I take this thing for a test drive, boss?”

If Valkyrie couldn’t see what I saw, she at least inferred what I meant.

“Sure,” she said. “There’s plenty of orbital burn fuel in the tanks, if you want to use it. Take the nose cone off and the third stage has a hard dock that allows us to mate it with the Platforms and boost their orbits, when it’s necessary. Usually we run it from ground, but the Centurion has a manual backup system—just in case.”

“Just in case,” I said, thinking how fun it would be to get behind the “wheel” of a rocket ship in orbit.

The Chinese had all but ignored the Centurion.

Its clamshell bay doors hung open, inviting.

“Chesty,” I said. “One of us has to get to the third stage. If we can’t take the Platform away from them, maybe we can take it down with them still aboard.”

“What?” Chesty said, breathing heavily. “I’m a little damned busy right now, Chopper.”

“Hold them off—I’m going for it!”

“Chopper—” but Valkyrie’s words were swept from my ears as I sprang across the Platform, covering meters with every move. I think the Chinese might have suddenly figured me out, because Chesty announced that they’d turned her loose. She was coming up after them as they came up after me.

I made it to the Centurion’s open bay, found the manual control panel, and began pushing buttons.

After the first time I saw the manual controls—while working on Ride Platform—I got curious, and pleaded with Valkyrie to let me see the Centurion’s operational specs. No sense holding back. Otherwise what was the exchange officer program for? I wanted the full skinny, nuts and bolts and nozzles and gears.

She had reluctantly agreed.

And now I believed this knowledge was our best, last hope.

The control panel lit up and announced via flashing LCD screen that the fuel pumps were being primed. Precious seconds ticked away as the Chinese came on. Wherever they thought they were taking the Grissom Platform via its own RCS, I was about to ruin their day.

Just when the Chinese—and Chesty—had almost reached me, I stabbed at the cheerful orange IGNITE button, and latched onto the control panel’s protective rails with both hands and feet.

The Platform lurched and shoved, the sudden thrust from the Centurion causing it to begin spinning on a new axis as the Platform’s own RCS went out of whack. Chesty just barely had time to grab hold of a support beam before the Chinese tumbled away and hung like cat toys on the ends of spongy strings. They flailed and kicked, but it was no good. The torque was too much for them.

But my proxy held fast, and I—safely on the ground—felt none of the deleterious effects of the spin.

“What are you doing??” Valkyrie demanded.

“I’m taking the Platform out,” I said.

“By whose authorization, Chopper?”

“Ma’am,” I said, “if I can’t have an auto-destruct, it’s up to me to effect a manual destruct. I’m going to try and push us down into the atmosphere. The Platform, the proxies, the Chinese, all of us.”

Silence.

I suddenly imagined my boss being the chief witness at my court-martial.

“It’s the only way,” I said.

“He’s probably right,” Chesty said, agreeing. “We don’t have any weapons, and the proxy batteries will run out sooner or later. And then the Platform belongs to the Chinese. Would you rather tell your bosses at the Pentagon we sank the ship and took the enemy with us? Or let them have it without a serious struggle?”

More silence.

Then, with a reluctant sigh, “Go.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

The manual controls were difficult to finagle, with the Platform’s own RCS mucking up the trajectory. But I could already tell it was working. We were spiraling in. Faster and faster. And while the proxy had what it took to withstand the centrifugal gee, I could tell just by looking that the Chinese were in no position to stop me.

The Earth grew steadily larger as we went down, the Centurion’s fuel gradually bleeding to fumes.

“Got any last words, Marine?” I said to my partner.

“I regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” she said, half-mocking.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

I began to wonder what it would be like to re-enter in proxy form.

I decided it was prudent not to find out.

The news called it an unfortunate accident. The fireball had streaked across the skies of one ocean and two continents, before what remained splashed down a hundred miles off the Hawaiian coast.

The Chinese never said a word, other than to offer some back-handed condolences for the loss of the hardware.

Chesty and me?

Well, we didn’t get court-martialed.

Valkyrie did have to report to the Pentagon and she did have to do some rather extensive explaining—thank goodness for the proxy recordings giving the generals a front-row seat to the action—but in the end, the spiking of the Grissom Platform was deemed not only necessary, but valorous.

Though, Chesty and I both felt a bit sheepish receiving awards for a thing which had not, technically, placed either of our lives in danger.

But then, war had become more and more like that. The machines were doing the fighting, as well as the labor. I wondered what someone like Kipling might have thought of that? And decided I wasn’t entirely sure.

When the dust ultimately settled, Valkyrie put us back to work.

“You broke it,” she told us. “You build another one in its place.”

Our exchange officer tours were extended.

The work was, well, work. But satisfying work. And the Chinese didn’t try another stunt on our watch, so thank goodness for small miracles.

The true surprise showed up six months after Chesty and I left Hill.

It was a manila envelope, delivered certified USPS, from the Navy offices in Florida—where they still trained real astronauts.

Inside was a formal memo informing me that, if I chose to accept it, the Navy would gratefully accept me for another exchange officer tour. This time as part of the next year’s class of astronaut candidates. I scanned the list of names who’d already accepted, and saw MAVELINE STODDARD.

Well, hell, who am I to let that Marine show me up?

THE WAITING STARS

Aliette de Bodard

The derelict ship ward was in an isolated section of Outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided—skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep space, passed around at low speeds by Outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

Only if anyone got closer would they see the hulking masses of ships: the glint of starlight on metal, the sharp, pristine beauty of their hulls, even though they all lay quiescent and crippled, forever unable to move—living corpses kept as a reminder of how far they had fallen; the Outsiders’ brash statement of their military might, a reminder that their weapons held the means to fell any Mind-ships they chose to hound.

On the sensors of The Cinnabar Mansions, the ships all appeared small and diminished, like toy models or avatars—things Lan Nhen could have held in the palm of her hand and just as easily crushed. As the sensors’ line of sight moved—catching ship after ship in their field of view, wreck after wreck, indistinct masses of burnt and twisted metal, of ripped-out engines, of shattered life pods and crushed shuttles—Lan Nhen felt as if an icy fist were squeezing her heart into shards. To think of the Minds within—dead or crippled, forever unable to move . . .

“She’s not there,” she said, as more and more ships appeared on the screen in front of her, a mass of corpses that all threatened to overwhelm her with sorrow and grief and anger.

“Be patient, child,” The Cinnabar Mansions said. The Mind’s voice was amused, as it always was—after all, she’d lived for five centuries, and would outlive Lan Nhen and Lan Nhen’s own children by so many years that the pronoun “child” seemed small and inappropriate to express the vast gulf of generations between them. “We already knew it was going to take time.”

“She was supposed to be on the outskirts of the wards,” Lan Nhen said, biting her lip. She had to be, or the rescue mission was going to be infinitely more complicated. “According to Cuc . . .”

“Your cousin knows what she’s talking about,” The Cinnabar Mansions said.

“I guess.” Lan Nhen wished Cuc was there with them, and not sleeping in her cabin as peacefully as a baby—but The Cinnabar Mansions had pointed out Cuc needed to be rested for what lay ahead; and Lan Nhen had given in, vastly outranked. Still, Cuc was reliable, for narrow definitions of the term—as long as anything didn’t involve social skills, or deft negotiation. For technical information, though, she didn’t have an equal within the family; and her network of contacts extended deep within Outsider space. That was how they’d found out about the ward in the first place . . .

“There.” The sensors beeped, and the view on the screen pulled into enhanced mode on a ship on the edge of the yard, which seemed even smaller than the hulking masses of her companions. The Turtle’s Citadel had been from the newer generation of ships, its body more compact and more agile than its predecessors: designed for flight and manoeuvres rather than for transport, more elegant and refined than anything to come out of the Imperial Workshops—unlike the other ships, its prow and hull were decorated, painted with numerous designs from old legends and myths, all the way to the Dai Viet of Old Earth. A single gunshot marred the outside of its hull—a burn mark that had transfixed the painted citadel through one of its towers, going all the way into the heartroom and crippling the Mind that animated the ship.

“That’s her,” Lan Nhen said. “I would know her anywhere.”

The Cinnabar Mansions had the grace not to say anything, though of course she could have matched the design to her vast databases in an eyeblink. “It’s time, then. Shall I extrude a pod?”

Lan Nhen found that her hands had gone slippery with sweat, all of a sudden; and her heart was beating a frantic rhythm within her chest, like temple gongs gone mad. “I guess it’s time, yes.” By any standards, what they were planning was madness. To infiltrate Outsider space, no matter how isolated—to repair a ship, no matter how lightly damaged . . .

Lan Nhen watched The Turtle’s Citadel for a while—watched the curve of the hull, the graceful tilt of the engines, away from the living quarters; the burn mark through the hull like a gunshot through a human chest. On the prow was a smaller painting, all but invisible unless one had good eyes: a single sprig of apricot flowers, signifying the New Year’s good luck—calligraphied on the ship more than thirty years ago by Lan Nhen’s own mother, a parting gift to her great-aunt before the ship left for her last, doomed mission.

Of course, Lan Nhen already knew every detail of that shape by heart, every single bend of the corridors within, every little nook and cranny available outside—from the blueprints, and even before that, before the rescue plan had even been the seed of a thought in her mind—when she’d stood before her ancestral altar, watching the rotating holo of a ship who was also her great-aunt, and wondering how a Mind could ever be brought down, or given up for lost.

Now she was older; old enough to have seen enough things to freeze her blood; old enough to plot her own foolishness, and drag her cousin and her great-great-aunt into it.

Older, certainly. Wiser, perhaps; if they were blessed enough to survive.

* * *

There were tales, at the Institution, of what they were—and, in any case, one only had to look at them, at their squatter, darker shapes, at the way their eyes crinkled when they laughed. There were other clues, too: the memories that made Catherine wake up breathless and disoriented, staring at the white walls of the dormitory until the pulsing, writhing images of something she couldn’t quite identify had gone, and the breath of dozens of her dorm-mates had lulled her back to sleep. The craving for odd food like fish sauce and fermented meat. The dim, distant feeling of not fitting in, of being compressed on all sides by a society that made little sense to her.

It should have, though. She’d been taken as a child, like all her schoolmates—saved from the squalor and danger among the savages and brought forward into the light of civilisation—of white sterile rooms and bland food, of awkward embraces that always felt too informal. Rescued, Matron always said, her entire face transfigured, the bones of her cheeks made sharply visible through the pallor of her skin. Made safe.

Catherine had asked what she was safe from. They all did, in the beginning—all the girls in the Institution, Johanna and Catherine being the most vehement amongst them.

That was until Matron showed them the vid.

They all sat at their tables, watching the screen in the centre of the amphitheatre—silent, for once, not jostling or joking among themselves. Even Johanna, who was always first with a biting remark, had said nothing—had sat, transfixed, watching it.

The first picture was a woman who looked like them—smaller and darker-skinned than the Galactics—except that her belly protruded in front of her, huge and swollen like a tumour from some disaster movie. There was a man next to her, his unfocused eyes suggesting that he was checking something on the network through his implants—until the woman grimaced, putting a hand to her belly and calling out to him. His eyes focused in a heartbeat, and fear replaced the blank expression on his face.

There was a split second before the language overlays kicked in—a moment, frozen in time, when the words, the sounds of the syllables put together, sounded achingly familiar to Catherine, like a memory of the childhood she never could quite manage to piece together—there was a brief flash, of New Year’s Eve firecrackers going off in a confined space, of her fear that they would burn her, damage her body’s ability to heal . . . And then the moment was gone like a popped bubble, because the vid changed in the most horrific manner.

The camera was wobbling, rushing along a pulsing corridor—they could all hear the heavy breath of the woman, the whimpering sounds she made like an animal in pain; the soft, encouraging patter of the physician’s words to her.

“She’s coming,” the woman whispered, over and over, and the physician nodded—keeping one hand on her shoulder, squeezing it so hard his own knuckles had turned the colour of a muddy moon.

“You have to be strong,” he said. “Hanh, please. Be strong for me. It’s all for the good of the Empire, may it live ten thousand years. Be strong.”

The vid cut away, then—and it was wobbling more and more crazily, its field of view showing erratic bits of a cramped room with scrolling letters on the wall, the host of other attendants with similar expressions of fear on their faces; the woman, lying on a flat surface, crying out in pain—blood splattering out of her with every thrust of her hips—the camera moving, shifting between her legs, the physician’s hands reaching into the darker opening—easing out a sleek, glinting shape, even as the woman screamed again—and blood, more blood running out, rivers of blood she couldn’t possibly have in her body, even as the thing within her pulled free, and it became all too clear that, though it had the bare shape of a baby with an oversized head, it had too many cables and sharp angles to be human . . .

Then a quiet fade-to-black, and the same woman being cleaned up by the physician—the thing—the baby being nowhere to be seen. She stared up at the camera; but her gaze was unfocused, and drool was pearling at the corner of her lips, even as her hands spasmed uncontrollably.

Fade to black again; and the lights came up again, on a room that seemed to have grown infinitely colder.

“This,” Matron said in the growing silence, “is how the Dai Viet birth Minds for their spaceships: by incubating them within the wombs of their women. This is the fate that would have been reserved for all of you. For each of you within this room.” Her gaze raked them all; stopping longer than usual on Catherine and Johanna, the known troublemakers in the class. “This is why we had to take you away, so that you wouldn’t become brood mares for abominations.”

“We,” of course, meant the Board—the religious nuts, as Johanna liked to call them, a redemptionist church with a fortune to throw around, financing the children’s rescues and their education—and who thought every life from humans to insects was sacred (they’d all wondered, of course, where they fitted into the scheme).

After the class had dispersed like a flock of sparrows, Johanna held court in the yard, her eyes bright and feverish. “They faked it. They had to. They came up with some stupid explanation on how to keep us cooped here. I mean, why would anyone still use natural births and not artificial wombs?”

Catherine, still seeing the splatters of blood on the floor, shivered. “Matron said that they wouldn’t. That they thought the birth created a special bond between the Mind and its mother—but that they had to be there, to be awake during the birth.”

“Rubbish.” Johanna shook her head. “As if that’s even remotely plausible. I’m telling you, it has to be fake.”

“It looked real.” Catherine remembered the woman’s screams; the wet sound as the Mind wriggled free from her womb; the fear in the face of all the physicians. “Artificial vids aren’t this . . . messy.” They’d seen the artificial vids; slick, smooth things where the actors were tall and muscular, the actresses pretty and graceful, with only a thin veneer of artificially generated defects to make the entire thing believable. They’d learnt to tell them apart from the rest; because it was a survival skill in the Institution, to sort out the lies from the truth.

“I bet they can fake that, too,” Johanna said. “They can fake everything if they feel like it.” But her face belied her words; even she had been shocked. Even she didn’t believe they would have gone that far.

“I don’t think it’s a lie,” Catherine said, finally. “Not this time.”

And she didn’t need to look at the other girls’ faces to know that they believed the same thing as her—even Johanna, for all her belligerence—and to feel in her gut that this changed everything.

* * *

Cuc came online when the shuttle pod launched from The Cinnabar Mansions—in the heart-wrenching moment when the gravity of the ship fell away from Lan Nhen, and the cozy darkness of the pod’s cradle was replaced with the distant forms of the derelict ships. “Hey, cousin. Missed me?” Cuc asked.

“As much as I missed a raging fire.” Lan Nhen checked her equipment a last time—the pod was basic and functional, with barely enough space for her to squeeze into the cockpit, and she’d had to stash her various cables and terminals into the nooks and crannies of a structure that hadn’t been meant for more than emergency evacuation. She could have asked The Cinnabar Mansions for a regular transport shuttle, but the pod was smaller and more controllable; and it stood more chances of evading the derelict ward’s defences.

“Hahaha,” Cuc said, though she didn’t sound amused. “The family found out what we were doing, by the way.”

“And?” It would have devastated Lan Nhen, a few years ago; now she didn’t much care. She knew she was doing the right thing. No filial daughter would let a member of the family rust away in a foreign cemetery—if she couldn’t rescue her great-aunt, she’d at least bring the body back, for a proper funeral.

“They think we’re following one of Great-great-aunt’s crazy plans.”

“Ha,” Lan Nhen snorted. Her hands were dancing on the controls, plotting a trajectory that would get her to The Turtle’s Citadel while leaving her the maximum thrust reserve in case of unexpected manoeuvres.

“I’m not the one coming up with crazy plans,” The Cinnabar Mansions pointed out on the comms channel, distractedly. “I leave that to the young. Hang on—” she dropped out of sight. “I have incoming drones, child.”

Of course. It was unlikely the Outsiders would leave their precious war trophies unprotected. “Where?”

A translucent overlay gradually fell over her field of vision through the pod’s windshield; and points lit up all over its surface—a host of fast-moving, small crafts with contextual arrows showing basic kinematics information as well as projected trajectory cones. Lan Nhen repressed a curse. “That many? They really like their wrecked spaceships, don’t they.”

It wasn’t a question, and neither Cuc nor The Cinnabar Mansions bothered to answer. “They’re defence drones patrolling the perimeter. We’ll walk you through,” Cuc said. “Give me just a few moments to link up with Great-great-aunt’s systems . . .”

Lan Nhen could imagine her cousin, lying half-prone on her bed in the lower decks of The Cinnabar Mansions, her face furrowed in that half-puzzled, half-focused expression that was typical of her thought processes—she’d remain that way for entire minutes, or as long as it took to find a solution. On her windshield, the squad of drones was spreading—coming straight at her from all directions, a dazzling ballet of movement meant to overwhelm her. And they would, if she didn’t move fast enough.

Her fingers hovered over the pod’s controls, before she made her decision and launched into a barrel manoeuvre away from the nearest incoming cluster. “Cousin, how about hurrying up?”

There was no answer from Cuc. Demons take her, this wasn’t the moment to overthink the problem! Lan Nhen banked, sharply, narrowly avoiding a squad of drones, who bypassed her—and then turned around, much quicker than she’d anticipated. Ancestors, they moved fast, much too fast for ion-thrust motors. Cuc was going to have to rethink her trajectory. “Cousin, did you see this?”

“I saw.” Cuc’s voice was distant. “Already taken into account. Given the size of the craft, it was likely they were going to use helicoidal thrusters on those.”

“This is all fascinating—” Lan Nhen wove her way through two more waves of drones, cursing wildly as shots made the pod rock around her—as long as her speed held, she’d be fine . . . She’d be fine. . . . “—but you’ll have noticed I don’t really much care about technology, especially not now!”

A thin thread of red appeared on her screen—a trajectory that wove and banked like a frightened fish’s trail—all the way to The Turtle’s Citadel and its clusters of pod-cradles. It looked as though it was headed straight into the heart of the cloud of drones, though that wasn’t the most worrying aspect of it. “Cousin,” Lan Nhen said. “I can’t possibly do this—” The margin of error was null—if she slipped in one of the curves, she’d never regain the kinematics necessary to take the next.

“Only way.” Cuc’s voice was emotionless. “I’ll update as we go, if Great-great-aunt sees an opening. But for the moment . . .”

Lan Nhen closed her eyes, for a brief moment—turned them towards Heaven, though Heaven was all around her—and whispered a prayer to her ancestors, begging them to watch over her. Then she turned her gaze to the screen, and launched into flight—her hands flying and shifting over the controls, automatically adjusting the pod’s path—dancing into the heart of the drones’ swarm—into them, away from them, weaving an erratic path across the section of space that separated her from The Turtle’s Citadel. Her eyes, all the while, remained on the overlay—her fingers speeding across the controls, matching the slightest deviation of her course to the set trajectory—inflecting curves a fraction of a second before the error on her course became perceptible.

“Almost there,” Cuc said—with a hint of encouragement in her voice. “Come on, cousin, you can do it—”

Ahead of her, a few measures away, was The Turtle’s Citadel: its pod cradles had shrivelled from long atrophy, but the hangar for docking the external shuttles and pods remained, its entrance a thin line of grey across the metallic surface of the ship’s lower half.

“It’s closed,” Lan Nhen said, breathing hard—she was coming fast, much too fast, scattering drones out of her way like scared mice, and if the hangar wasn’t opened . . . “Cousin!”

Cuc’s voice seemed to come from very far away; distant and muted somehow on the comms system. “We’ve discussed this. Normally, the ship went into emergency standby when it was hit, and it should open—”

“But what if it doesn’t?” Lan Nhen asked—the ship was looming over her, spreading to cover her entire windshield, close enough so she could count the pod cradles, could see their pockmarked surfaces—could imagine how much of a messy impact she’d make, if her own pod crashed on an unyielding surface.

Cuc didn’t answer. She didn’t need to; they both knew what would happen if that turned out to be true. Ancestors, watch over me, Lan Nhen thought, over and over, as the hangar doors rushed towards her, still closed—ancestors watch over me . . .

She was close enough to see the fine layers of engravings on the doors when they opened—the expanse of metal flowing away from the centre, to reveal a gaping hole just large enough to let a small craft through. Her own pod squeezed into the available space: darkness fell over her cockpit as the doors flowed shut, and the pod skidded to a halt, jerking her body like a disarticulated doll.

It was a while before she could stop shaking for long enough to unstrap herself from the pod; and to take her first, tentative steps on the ship.

The small lamp in her suit lit nothing but a vast, roiling mass of shadows: the hangar was huge enough to hold much larger ships. Thirty years ago, it had no doubt been full, but the Outsiders must have removed them all as they dragged the wreck out there.

“I’m in,” she whispered; and set out through the darkness, to find the heartroom and the Mind that was her great-aunt.

* * *

“I’m sorry,” Jason said to Catherine. “Your first choice of posting was declined by the Board.”

Catherine sat very straight in her chair, trying to ignore how uncomfortable she felt in her suit—it gaped too large over her chest, flared too much at her hips, and she’d had to hastily readjust the trouser-legs after she and Johanna discovered the seamstress had got the length wrong. “I see,” she said, because there was nothing else she could say, really.

Jason looked at his desk, his gaze boring into the metal as if he could summon an assignment out of nothing—she knew he meant well, that he had probably volunteered to tell her this himself, instead of leaving it for some stranger who wouldn’t care a jot for her—but in that moment, she didn’t want to be reminded that he worked for the Board for the Protection of Dai Viet Refugees; that he’d had a hand, no matter how small, in denying her wishes for the future.

At length Jason said, slowly, carefully—reciting a speech he’d no doubt given a dozen times that day, “The government puts the greatest care into choosing postings for the refugees. It was felt that putting you onboard a space station would be—unproductive.”

Unproductive. Catherine kept smiling; kept her mask plastered on, even though it hurt to turn the corners of her mouth upwards, to crinkle her eyes as if she were pleased. “I see,” she said, again, knowing anything else was useless. “Thanks, Jason.”

Jason coloured. “I tried arguing your case, but . . .”

“I know,” Catherine said. He was a clerk; that was all; a young civil servant at the bottom of the Board’s hierarchy, and he couldn’t possibly get her what she wanted, even if he’d been willing to favour her. And it hadn’t been such a surprise, anyway. After Mary and Olivia and Johanna . . .

“Look,” Jason said. “Let’s see each other tonight, right? I’ll take you someplace you can forget all about this.”

“You know it’s not that simple,” Catherine said. As if a restaurant, or a wild waterfall ride, or whatever delight Jason had in mind could make her forget this.

“No, but I can’t do anything about the Board.” Jason’s voice was firm. “I can, however, make sure that you have a good time tonight.”

Catherine forced a smile she didn’t feel. “I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks.”

As she exited the building, passing under the wide arches, the sun sparkled on the glass windows—and for a brief moment she wasn’t herself—she was staring at starlight reflected in a glass panel, watching an older woman running hands on a wall and smiling at her with gut-wrenching sadness . . . She blinked, and the moment was gone; though the sense of sadness, of unease remained, as if she were missing something essential.

Johanna was waiting for her on the steps, her arms crossed in front of her, and a gaze that looked as though it would bore holes into the lawn.

“What did they tell you?”

Catherine shrugged, wondering how a simple gesture could cost so much. “The same they told you, I’d imagine. Unproductive.”

They’d all applied to the same postings—all asked for something related to space, whether it was one of the observatories, a space station; or, in Johanna’s case, outright asking to board a slow-ship as crew. They’d all been denied, for variations of the same reason.

“What did you get?” Johanna asked. Her own rumpled slip of paper had already been recycled at the nearest terminal; she was heading north, to Steele, where she’d join an archaeological dig.

Catherine shrugged, with a casualness she didn’t feel. They’d always felt at ease under the stars—had always yearned to take to space, felt the same craving to be closer to their home planets—to hang, weightless and without ties, in a place where they wouldn’t be weighed, wouldn’t be judged for falling short of values that ultimately didn’t belong to them. “I got newswriter.”

“At least you’re not moving very far,” Johanna said, a tad resentfully.

“No.” The offices of the network company were a mere two streets away from the Institution.

“I bet Jason had a hand in your posting,” Johanna said.

“He didn’t say anything about that—”

“Of course he wouldn’t.” Johanna snorted, gently. She didn’t much care for Jason; but she knew how much his company meant to Catherine—how much more it would come to mean, if the weight of an entire continent separated Catherine and her. “Jason broadcasts his failures because they bother him; you’ll hardly ever hear him talk of his successes. He’d feel too much like boasting.” Her face changed, softened. “He cares for you, you know—truly. You have the best luck in the world.”

“I know,” Catherine said—thinking of the touch of his lips on hers; of his arms, holding her close until she felt whole, fulfilled. “I know.”

The best luck in the world—she and Jason and her new flat, and her old haunts, not far away from the Institution—though she wasn’t sure, really, if that last was a blessing—if she wanted to remember the years Matron had spent hammering proper behaviour into them: the deprivations whenever they spoke anything less than perfect Galactic, the hours spent cleaning the dormitory’s toilets for expressing mild revulsion at the food; or the night they’d spent shut outside, naked, in the growing cold, because they couldn’t remember which Galactic president had colonised Longevity Station—how Matron had found them all huddled against each other, in an effort to keep warm and awake, and had sent them to Discipline for a further five hours, scolding them for behaving like wild animals.

Catherine dug her nails into the palms of her hands—letting the pain anchor her back to the present; to where she sat on the steps of the Board’s central offices, away from the Institution and all it meant to them.

“We’re free,” she said, at last. “That’s all that matters.”

“We’ll never be free.” Johanna’s tone was dark, intense. “Your records have a mark that says ‘Institution.’ And even if it didn’t—do you honestly believe we would blend right in?”

There was no one quite like them on Prime, where Dai Viet were unwelcome; not with those eyes, not with that skin colour—not with that demeanour, which even years of Institution hadn’t been enough to erase.

“Do you ever wonder . . .” Johanna’s voice trailed off into silence, as if she were contemplating something too large to put into words.

“Wonder what?” Catherine asked.

Johanna bit her lip. “Do you ever wonder what it would have been like, with our parents? Our real parents.”

The parents they couldn’t remember. They’d done the maths, too—no children at the Institution could remember anything before coming there. Matron had said it was because they were really young when they were taken away—that it had been for the best. Johanna, of course, had blamed something more sinister, some fix-up done by the Institution to its wards to keep them docile.

Catherine thought, for a moment, of a life among the Dai Viet—an idyllic image of a harmonious family like in the holo-movies—a mirage that dashed itself to pieces against the inescapable reality of the birth vid. “They’d have used us like brood mares,” Catherine said. “You saw—”

“I know what I saw,” Johanna snapped. “But maybe . . .” Her face was pale. “Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, in return for the rest.”

For being loved; for being made worthy; for fitting in, being able to stare at the stars without wondering which was their home—without dreaming of when they might go back to their families.

Catherine rubbed her belly, thinking of the vid—and the thing crawling out of the woman’s belly, all metal edges and shining crystal, coated in the blood of its mother—and, for a moment she felt as though she were the woman—floating above her body, detached from her cloak of flesh, watching herself give birth in pain. And then the sensation ended, but she was still feeling spread out, larger than she ought to have been—looking at herself from a distance and watching her own life pass her by, petty and meaningless, and utterly bounded from end to end.

Maybe Johanna was right. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, after all.

* * *

The ship was smaller than Lan Nhen had expected—she’d been going by her experience with The Cinnabar Mansions, which was an older generation, but The Turtle’s Citadel was much smaller for the same functionalities.

Lan Nhen went up from the hangar to the living quarters, her equipment slung over her shoulders. She’d expected a sophisticated defence system like the drones, but there was nothing. Just the familiar slimy feeling of a quickened ship on the walls, a sign that the Mind that it hosted was still alive—albeit barely. The walls were bare, instead of the elaborate decoration Lan Nhen was used to from The Cinnabar Mansions—no scrolling calligraphy, no flowing paintings of starscapes or flowers; no ambient sound of zither or anything to enliven the silence.

She didn’t have much time to waste—Cuc had said they had two hours between the moment the perimeter defences kicked in, and the moment more hefty safeguards were manually activated—but she couldn’t help herself: she looked into one of the living quarters. It was empty as well, its walls scored with gunfire. The only colour in the room was a few splatters of dried blood on a chair, a reminder of the tragedy of the ship’s fall—the execution of its occupants, the dragging of its wreck to the derelict ward—dried blood, and a single holo of a woman on a table, a beloved mother or grandmother: a bare, abandoned picture with no offerings or incense, all that remained from a wrecked ancestral altar. Lan Nhen spat on the ground, to ward off evil ghosts, and went back to the corridors.

She truly felt as though she were within a mausoleum—like that one time her elder sister had dared her and Cuc to spend the night within the family’s ancestral shrine, and they’d barely slept—not because of monsters or anything, but because of the vast silence that permeated the whole place amidst the smell of incense and funeral offerings, reminding them that they, too, were mortal.

That Minds, too, could die—that rescues were useless—no, she couldn’t afford to think like that. She had Cuc with her, and together they would . . .

She hadn’t heard Cuc for a while.

She stopped, when she realised—that it wasn’t only the silence on the ship, but also the deathly quiet of her own comms system. Since—since she’d entered The Turtle’s Citadel—that was the last time she’d heard her cousin, calmly pointing out about emergency standby and hangar doors and how everything was going to work out, in the end . . .

She checked her comms. There appeared to be nothing wrong; but whichever frequency she selected, she could hear nothing but static. At last, she managed to find one slot that seemed less crowded than others. “Cousin? Can you hear me?”

Noise on the line. “Very—badly.” Cuc’s voice was barely recognisable. “There—is—something—interference—”

“I know,” Lan Nhen said. “Every channel is filled with noise.”

Cuc didn’t answer for a while; and when she did, her voice seemed to have become more distant—a problem had her interest again. “Not—noise. They’re broadcasting—data. Need—to . . .” And then the comms cut. Lan Nhen tried all frequencies, trying to find one that would be less noisy; but there was nothing. She bit down a curse—she had no doubt Cuc would find a way around whatever blockage the Outsiders had put on the ship, but this was downright bizarre. Why broadcast data? Cutting down the comms of prospective attackers somehow didn’t seem significant enough—at least not compared to defence drones or similar mechanisms.

She walked through the corridors, following the spiral path to the heartroom—nothing but the static in her ears, a throbbing song that erased every coherent thought from her mind—at least it was better than the silence, than that feeling of moving underwater in an abandoned city—that feeling that she was too late, that her great-aunt was already dead and past recovery, that all she could do here was kill her once and for all, end her misery . . .

She thought, incongruously, of a vid she’d seen, which showed her great-grandmother ensconced in the heartroom—in the first few years of The Turtle’s Citadel’s life, those crucial moments of childhood when the ship’s mother remained onboard to guide the Mind to adulthood. Great-grandmother was telling stories to the ship—and The Turtle’s Citadel was struggling to mimic the spoken words in scrolling texts on her walls, laughing delightedly whenever she succeeded—all sweet and young, unaware of what her existence would come to, in the end.

Unlike the rest of the ship, the heartroom was crowded—packed with Outsider equipment that crawled over the Mind’s resting place in the centre, covering her from end to end until Lan Nhen could barely see the glint of metal underneath. She gave the entire contraption a wide berth—the spikes and protrusions from the original ship poked at odd angles, glistening with a dark liquid she couldn’t quite identify—and the Outsider equipment piled atop the Mind, a mass of cables and unfamiliar machines, looked as though it was going to take a while to sort out.

There were screens all around, showing dozens of graphs and diagrams, shifting as they tracked variables that Lan Nhen couldn’t guess at—vital signs, it looked like, though she wouldn’t have been able to tell what.

Lan Nhen bowed in the direction of the Mind, from younger to elder—perfunctorily, since she was unsure whether the Mind could see her at all. There was no acknowledgement, either verbal or otherwise.

Her great-aunt was in there. She had to be.

“Cousin.” Cuc’s voice was back in her ears—crisp and clear and uncommonly worried.

“How come I can hear you?” Lan Nhen asked. “Because I’m in the heartroom?”

Cuc snorted. “Hardly. The heartroom is where all the data is streaming from. I’ve merely found a way to filter the transmissions on both ends. Fascinating problem . . .”

“Is this really the moment?” Lan Nhen asked. “I need you to walk me through the reanimation—”

“No you don’t,” Cuc said. “First you need to hear what I have to say.”

* * *

The call came during the night: a man in the uniform of the Board asked for Catherine George—as if he couldn’t tell that it was her, that she was standing dishevelled and pale in front of her screen at three in the morning. “Yes, it’s me,” Catherine said. She fought off the weight of nightmares—more and more, she was waking in the night with memories of blood splattered across her entire body; of stars collapsing while she watched, powerless—of a crunch, and a moment where she hung alone in darkness, knowing that she had been struck a death blow—

The man’s voice was quiet, emotionless. There had been an accident in Steele; a regrettable occurrence that hadn’t been meant to happen, and the Board would have liked to extend its condolences to her—they apologised for calling so late, but they thought she should know . . .

“I see,” Catherine said. She kept herself uncomfortably straight—aware of the last time she’d faced the board—when Jason had told her her desire for space would have been unproductive. When they’d told Johanna . . .

Johanna.

After a while, the man’s words slid past her like water on glass—hollow reassurances, empty condolences, whereas she stood as if her heart had been torn away from her, fighting a desire to weep, to retch—she wanted to turn back time, to go back to the previous week and the sprigs of apricot flowers Jason had given her with a shy smile—to breathe in the sharp, tangy flavour of the lemon cake he’d baked for her, see again the carefully blank expression on his face as he waited to see if she’d like it—she wanted to be held tight in his arms and told that it was fine, that everything was going to be fine, that Johanna was going to be fine.

“We’re calling her other friends,” the man was saying, “but since you were close to each other . . .”

“I see,” Catherine said—of course he didn’t understand the irony, that it was the answer she’d given the Board—Jason—the last time.

The man cut off the communication; and she was left alone, standing in her living room and fighting back the feeling that threatened to overwhelm her—a not-entirely unfamiliar sensation of dislocation in her belly, the awareness that she didn’t belong here among the Galactics; that she wasn’t there by choice, and couldn’t leave; that her own life should have been larger, more fulfilling than this slow death by inches, writing copy for feeds without any acknowledgement of her contributions—that Johanna’s life should have been larger . . .

Her screen was still blinking—an earlier message from the Board that she hadn’t seen? But why—

Her hands, fumbling away in the darkness, made the command to retrieve the message—the screen faded briefly to black while the message was decompressed, and then she was staring at Johanna’s face.

For a moment—a timeless, painful moment—Catherine thought with relief that it had been a mistake, that Johanna was alive after all; and then she realised how foolish she’d been—that it wasn’t a call, but merely a message from beyond the grave.

Johanna’s face was pale, so pale Catherine wanted to hug her, to tell her the old lie that things were going to be fine—but she’d never get to say those words now, not ever.

“I’m sorry, Catherine,” she said. Her voice was shaking; and the circles under her eyes took up half of her face, turning her into some pale nightmare from horror movies—a ghost, a restless soul, a ghoul hungry for human flesh. “I can’t do this, not anymore. The Institution was fine; but it’s got worse. I wake up at night, and feel sick—as if everything good has been leeched from the world—as if the food had no taste, as if I drifted like a ghost through my days, as if my entire life held no meaning or truth. Whatever they did to our memories in the Institution—it’s breaking down now. It’s tearing me apart. I’m sorry, but I can’t take any more of this. I—” she looked away from the camera for a brief moment, and then back at Catherine. “I have to go.”

“No,” Catherine whispered, but she couldn’t change it. She couldn’t do anything.

“You were always the strongest of us,” Johanna said. “Please remember this. Please. Catherine.” And then the camera cut, and silence spread through the room, heavy and unbearable, and Catherine felt like weeping, though she had no tears left.

“Catherine?” Jason called in a sleepy voice from the bedroom. “It’s too early to check your work inbox . . .”

Work. Love. Meaningless, Johanna had said. Catherine walked to the huge window pane, and stared at the city spread out below her—the mighty Prime, centre of the Galactic Federation, its buildings shrouded in light, its streets crisscrossed by floaters; with the bulky shape of the Parliament at the centre, a proud statement that the Galactic Federation still controlled most of their home galaxy.

Too many lights to see the stars; but she could still guess; could still feel their pull—could still remember that one of them was her home.

A lie, Johanna had said. A construction to keep us here.

“Catherine?” Jason stood behind her, one hand wrapped around her shoulder—awkwardly tender as always, like that day when he’d offered to share a flat, standing balanced on one foot and not looking at her.

“Johanna is dead. She killed herself.”

She felt rather than saw him freeze—and, after a while, he said in a changed voice, “I’m so sorry. I know how much she meant . . .” His voice trailed off, and he too, fell silent, watching the city underneath.

There was a feeling—the same feeling she’d had when waking up as a child, a diffuse sense that something was not quite right with the world; that the shadows held men watching, waiting for the best time to snatch her; that she was not wholly back in her body—that Jason’s hand on her shoulder was just the touch of a ghost, that even his love wasn’t enough to keep her safe. That the world was fracturing around her, time and time again—she breathed in, hoping to dispel the sensation. Surely it was nothing more than grief, than fatigue—but the sensation wouldn’t go away, leaving her on the verge of nausea.

“You should have killed us,” Catherine said. “It would have been kinder.”

“Killed you?” Jason sounded genuinely shocked.

“When you took us from our parents.”

Jason was silent for a while. Then: “We don’t kill. What do you think we are, monsters from the fairytales, killing and burning everyone who looks different? Of course we’re not like that.” Jason no longer sounded uncertain or awkward; it was as if she’d touched some wellspring, scratched some skin to find only primal reflexes underneath.

“You erased our memories.” She didn’t make any effort to keep the bitterness from her voice.

“We had to.” Jason shook his head. “They’d have killed you, otherwise. You know this.”

“How can I trust you?” Look at Johanna, she wanted to say. Look at me. How can you say it was all worth it?

“Catherine . . .” Jason’s voice was weary. “We’ve been over this before. You’ve seen the vids from the early days. We didn’t set out to steal your childhood, or anyone’s childhood. But when you were left—intact . . . accidents happened. Carelessness. Like Johanna.”

“Like Johanna.” Her voice was shaking now; but he didn’t move, didn’t do anything to comfort her or hold her close. She turned at last, to stare into his face; and saw him transfixed by light, by faith, his gaze turned away from her and every pore of his being permeated by the utter conviction that he was right, that they were all right and that a stolen childhood was a small price to pay to be a Galactic.

“Anything would do.” Jason’s voice was slow, quiet—explaining life to a child, a script they’d gone over and over in their years together, always coming back to the same enormous, inexcusable choice that had been made for them. “Scissors, knives, broken bottles. You sliced your veins, hanged yourselves, pumped yourselves full of drugs . . . We had to . . . we had to block your memories, to make you blank slates.”

“Had to.” She was shaking now; and still he didn’t see. Still she couldn’t make him see.

“I swear to you, Catherine. It was the only way.”

And she knew, she’d always known he was telling the truth—not because he was right, but because he genuinely could not envision any other future for them.

“I see,” she said. The nausea, the sense of dislocation, wouldn’t leave her—disgust for him, for this life that trapped her, for everything she’d turned into or been turned into. “I see.”

“Do you think I like it?” His voice was bitter. “Do you think it makes me sleep better at night? Every day I hate that choice, even though I wasn’t the one who made it. Every day I wonder if there was something else the Board could have done, some other solution that wouldn’t have robbed you of everything you were.”

“Not everything,” Catherine said—slowly, carefully. “We still look Dai Viet.”

Jason grimaced, looking ill at ease. “That’s your body, Catherine. Of course they weren’t going to steal that.”

Of course; and suddenly, seeing how uneasy he was, it occurred to Catherine that they could have changed that, too, just as easily as they’d tampered with her memories; made her skin clearer, her eyes less distinctive; could have helped her fit into Galactic society. But they hadn’t. Holding the strings to the last, Johanna would have said. “You draw the line at my body, but stealing my memories is fine?”

Jason sighed; he turned towards the window, looking at the streets. “No, it’s not, and I’m sorry. But how else were we supposed to keep you alive?”

“Perhaps we didn’t want to be alive.”

“Don’t say that, please.” His voice had changed, had become fearful, protective. “Catherine. Everyone deserves to live. You especially.”

Perhaps I don’t, she thought, but he was holding her close to him, not letting her go—her anchor to the flat—to the living room, to life. “You’re not Johanna,” he said. “You know that.”

The strongest of us, Johanna had said. She didn’t feel strong; just frail and adrift. “No,” she said, at last. “Of course I’m not.”

“Come on,” Jason said. “Let me make you a tisane. We’ll talk in the kitchen—you look as though you need it.”

“No.” And she looked up—sought out his lips in the darkness, drinking in his breath and his warmth to fill the emptiness within her. “That’s not what I need.”

“Are you sure?” Jason looked uncertain—sweet and innocent and naïve, everything that had drawn her to him. “You’re not in a state to—”

“Ssh,” she said, and laid a hand on his lips, where she’d kissed him. “Ssh.”

Later, after they’d made love, she lay her head in the hollow of his arm, listening to the slow beat of his heart like a lifeline; and wondered how long she’d be able to keep the emptiness at bay.

* * *

“It goes to Prime,” Cuc said. “All the data is beamed to Prime, and it’s coming from almost every ship in the ward.”

“I don’t understand,” Lan Nhen said. She’d plugged her own equipment into the ship, carefully shifting the terminals she couldn’t make sense of—hadn’t dared to go closer to the centre, where Outsider technology had crawled all over her great-aunt’s resting place, obscuring the Mind and the mass of connectors that linked her to the ship.

On one of the screens, a screensaver had launched: night on a planet Lan Nhen couldn’t recognise—an Outsider one, with their sleek floaters and their swarms of helper bots, their wide, impersonal streets planted with trees that were too tall and too perfect to be anything but the product of years of breeding.

“She’s not here,” Cuc said.

“I—” Lan Nhen was about to say she didn’t understand, and then the true import of Cuc’s words hit her. “Not here? She’s alive, Cuc. I can see the ship; I can hear her all around me . . .”

“Yes, yes,” Cuc said, a tad impatiently. “But that’s . . . the equivalent of unconscious processes, like breathing in your sleep.”

“She’s dreaming?”

“No,” Cuc said. A pause, then, very carefully: “I think she’s on Prime, Cousin. The data that’s being broadcast—it looks like Mind thought-processes, compressed with a high rate and all mixed together. There’s probably something on the other end that decompresses the data and sends it to . . . Arg, I don’t know! Wherever they think is appropriate.”

Lan Nhen bit back another admission of ignorance, and fell back on the commonplace. “On Prime.” The enormity of the thing; that you could take a Mind—a beloved ship with a family of her own—that you could put her to sleep and cause her to wake up somewhere else, on an unfamiliar planet and an alien culture—that you could just transplant her like a flower or a tree . . . “She’s on Prime.”

“In a terminal or as the power source for something,” Cuc said, darkly.

“Why would they bother?” Lan Nhen asked. “It’s a lot of power expenditure just to get an extra computer.”

“Do I look as though I have insight into Outsiders?” Lan Nhen could imagine Cuc throwing her hands up in the air, in that oft-practised gesture. “I’m just telling you what I have, Cousin.”

Outsiders—the Galactic Federation of United Planets—were barely comprehensible in any case. They were the descendants of an Exodus fleet that had hit an isolated galaxy: left to themselves and isolated for decades, they had turned on each other in huge ethnic cleansings before emerging from their home planets as relentless competitors for resources and inhabitable planets.

“Fine. Fine.” Lan Nhen breathed in, slowly; tried to focus at the problem at hand. “Can you walk me through cutting the radio broadcast?”

Cuc snorted. “I’d fix the ship, first, if I were you.”

Lan Nhen knelt by the equipment, and stared at a cable that had curled around one of the ship’s spines. “Fine, let’s start with what we came for. Can you see?”

Silence; and then a life-sized holo of Cuc hovered in front of her—even though the avatar was little more than broad strokes, great-great-aunt had still managed to render it in enough details to make it unmistakably Cuc. “Cute,” Lan Nhen said.

“Hahaha,” Cuc said. “No bandwidth for trivialities—gotta save for detail on your end.” She raised a hand, pointed to one of the outermost screens on the edge of the room. “Disconnect this one first.”

It was slow, and painful. Cuc pointed; and Lan Nhen checked before disconnecting and moving. Twice, she jammed her fingers very close to a cable, and felt electricity crackle near her—entirely too close for comfort.

They moved from the outskirts of the room to the centre—tackling the huge mount of equipment last. Cuc’s first attempts resulted in a cable coming loose with an ominous sound; they waited, but nothing happened. “We might have fried something,” Lan Nhen said.

“Too bad. There’s no time for being cautious, as you well know. There’s . . . maybe half an hour left before the other defences go live.” Cuc moved again, pointed to another squat terminal. “This goes off.”

When they were finished, Lan Nhen stepped back, to look at their handiwork.

The heartroom was back to its former glory: instead of Outsider equipment, the familiar protrusions and sharp organic needles of the Mind’s resting place; and they could see the Mind herself—resting snug in her cradle, wrapped around the controls of the ship—her myriad arms each seizing one rack of connectors; her huge head glinting in the light—a vague globe shape covered with glistening cables and veins. The burn mark from the Outsider attack was clearly visible, a dark, elongated shape on the edge of her head that had bruised a couple of veins—it had hit one of the connectors as well, burnt it right down to the colour of ink.

Lan Nhen let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. “It scrambled the connector.”

“And scarred her, but didn’t kill her,” Cuc said. “Just like you said.”

“Yes, but—” But it was one thing to run simulations of the attack over and over, always getting the same prognosis; and quite another to see that the simulations held true, and that the damage was repairable.

“There should be another connector rack in your bag,” Cuc said. “I’ll walk you through slotting it in.”

After she was done, Lan Nhen took a step back; and stared at her great-aunt—feeling, in some odd way, as though she were violating the Mind’s privacy. A Mind’s heartroom was their stronghold, a place where they could twist reality as they wished, and appear as they wished to. To see her great-aunt like this, without any kind of appearance change or pretence, was . . . more disturbing than she’d thought.

“And now?” she asked Cuc.

Even without details, Lan Nhen knew her cousin was smiling. “Now we pray to our ancestors that cutting the broadcast is going to be enough to get her back.”

* * *

Another night on Prime, and Catherine wakes up breathless, in the grip of another nightmare—images of red lights, and scrolling texts, and a feeling of growing cold in her bones, a cold so deep she cannot believe she will ever feel warm no matter how many layers she’s put on.

Johanna is not there; beside her, Jason sleeps, snoring softly; and she’s suddenly seized by nausea, remembering what he said to her—how casually he spoke of blocking her memories, of giving a home to her after stealing her original one from her. She waits for it to pass; waits to settle into her old life as usual. But it doesn’t.

Instead, she rises, walks towards the window, and stands watching Prime—the clean wide streets, the perfect trees, the ballet of floaters at night—the myriad dances that make up the society that constrains her from dawn to dusk and beyond—she wonders what Johanna would say, but of course Johanna won’t ever say anything anymore. Johanna has gone ahead, into the dark.

The feeling of nausea in her belly will not go away: instead it spreads, until her body feels like a cage—at first, she thinks the sensation is in her belly, but it moves upwards, until her limbs, too, feel too heavy and too small—until it’s an effort to move any part of her. She raises her hands, struggling against a feeling of moving appendages that don’t belong to her—and traces the contours of her face, looking for familiar shapes, for anything that will anchor her to reality. The heaviness spreads, compresses her chest until she can hardly breathe—cracks her ribs and pins her legs to the ground. Her head spins, as if she were about to faint; but the mercy of blackness does not come to her.

“Catherine,” she whispers. “My name is Catherine.”

Another name, unbidden, rises to her lips. Mi Chau. A name she gave to herself in the Viet language—in the split instant before the lasers took her apart, before she sank into darkness: Mi Chau, the princess who unwittingly betrayed her father and her people, and whose blood became the pearls at the bottom of the sea. She tastes it on her tongue, and it’s the only thing that seems to belong to her anymore.

She remembers that first time—waking up on Prime in a strange body, struggling to breathe, struggling to make sense of being so small, so far away from the stars that had guided her through space—remembers walking like a ghost through the corridors of the Institution, until the knowledge of what the Galactics had done broke her, and she cut her veins in a bathroom, watching blood lazily pool at her feet and thinking only of escape. She remembers the second time she woke up; the second, oblivious life as Catherine.

Johanna. Johanna didn’t survive her second life; and even now is starting her third, somewhere in the bowels of the Institution—a dark-skinned child indistinguishable from other dark-skinned children, with no memories of anything beyond a confused jumble . . .

Outside, the lights haven’t dimmed, but there are stars—brash and alien, hovering above Prime, in configurations that look wrong; and she remembers, suddenly, how they lay around her, how they showed her the way from planet to planet—how the cold of the deep spaces seized her just as she entered them to travel faster, just like it’s holding her now, seizing her bones—remembers how much larger, how much wider she ought to be . . .

There are stars everywhere; and superimposed on them, the faces of two Dai Viet women, calling her over and over. Calling her back, into the body that belonged to her all along; into the arms of her family.

“Come on, come on,” the women whisper, and their voices are stronger than any other noise; than Jason’s breath in the bedroom; than the motors of the floaters or the vague smell of garlic from the kitchen. “Come on, great-aunt!”

She is more than this body; more than this constrained life—her thoughts spread out, encompassing hangars and living quarters; and the liquid weight of pods held in their cradles—she remembers family reunions, entire generations of children putting their hands on her corridors, remembers the touch of their skin on her metal walls; the sound of their laughter as they raced each other; the quiet chatter of their mothers in the heartroom, keeping her company as the New Year began; and the touch of a brush on her outer hull, drawing the shape of an apricot flower, for good luck . . .

“Catherine?” Jason calls behind her.

She turns, through sheer effort of will; finding, somehow, the strength to maintain her consciousness in a small and crammed body alongside her other, vaster one. He’s standing with one hand on the doorjamb, staring at her—his face pale, leeched of colours in the starlight.

“I remember,” she whispers.

His hands stretch, beseeching. “Catherine, please. Don’t leave.”

He means well, she knows. All the things that he hid from her, he hid out of love; to keep her alive and happy, to hold her close in spite of all that should have separated them; and even now, the thought of his love is a barb in her heart, a last lingering regret, slight and pitiful against the flood of her memories—but not wholly insignificant.

Where she goes, she’ll never be alone—not in the way she was with Jason, feeling that nothing else but her mattered in the entire world. She’ll have a family; a gaggle of children and aunts and uncles waiting on her, but nothing like the sweet, unspoiled privacy where Jason and she could share anything and everything. She won’t have another lover like him—naïve and frank and so terribly sure of what he wants and what he’s ready to do to get it. Dai Viet society has no place for people like Jason—who do not know their place, who do not know how to be humble, how to accept failure or how to bow down to expediency.

Where she goes, she’ll never be alone; and yet she’ll be so terribly lonely.

“Please,” Jason says.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I’ll come back—” a promise made to him; to Johanna, who cannot hear or recognise her anymore. Her entire being spreads out, thins like water thrown on the fire—and, in that last moment, she finds herself reaching out for him, trying to touch him one last time, to catch one last glimpse of his face, even as a heart she didn’t know she had breaks.

“Catherine.”

He whispers her name, weeping, over and over; and it’s that name, that lie that still clings to her with its bittersweet memories, that she takes with her as her entire being unfolds—as she flies away, towards the waiting stars.

OPERA VITA AETERNA (missing)

Vox Day

THE TRUTH OF FACT, THE TRUTH OF FEELING

Ted Chiang

When my daughter Nicole was an infant, I read an essay suggesting that it might no longer be necessary to teach children how to read or write, because speech recognition and synthesis would soon render those abilities superfluous. My wife and I were horrified by the idea, and we resolved that, no matter how sophisticated technology became, our daughter’s skills would always rest on the bedrock of traditional literacy.

It turned out that we and the essayist were both half correct: now that she’s an adult, Nicole can read as well as I can. But there is a sense in which she has lost the ability to write. She doesn’t dictate her messages and ask a virtual secretary to read back to her what she last said, the way that essayist predicted; Nicole subvocalizes, her retinal projector displays the words in her field of vision, and she makes revisions using a combination of gestures and eye movements. For all practical purposes, she can write. But take away the assistive software and give her nothing but a keyboard like the one I remain faithful to, and she’d have difficulty spelling out many of the words in this very sentence. Under those specific circumstances, English becomes a bit like a second language to her, one that she can speak fluently but can only barely write.

It may sound like I’m disappointed in Nicole’s intellectual achievements, but that’s absolutely not the case. She’s smart and dedicated to her job at an art museum when she could be earning more money elsewhere, and I’ve always been proud of her accomplishments. But there is still the past me who would have been appalled to see his daughter lose her ability to spell, and I can’t deny that I am continuous with him.

It’s been more than twenty years since I read that essay, and in that period our lives have undergone countless changes that I couldn’t have predicted. The most catastrophic one was when Nicole’s mother Angela declared that she deserved a more interesting life than the one we were giving her, and spent the next decade criss-crossing the globe. But the changes leading to Nicole’s current form of literacy were more ordinary and gradual: a succession of software gadgets that not only promised but in fact delivered utility and convenience, and I didn’t object to any of them at the times of their introduction.

So it hasn’t been my habit to engage in doomsaying whenever a new product is announced; I’ve welcomed new technology as much as anyone. But when Whetstone released its new search tool Remem, it raised concerns for me in a way none of its predecessors did.

Millions of people, some my age but most younger, have been keeping lifelogs for years, wearing personal cams that capture continuous video of their entire lives. People consult their lifelogs for a variety of reasons—everything from reliving favorite moments to tracking down the cause of allergic reactions—but only intermittently; no one wants to spend all their time formulating queries and sifting through the results. Lifelogs are the most complete photo album imaginable, but like most photo albums, they lie dormant except on special occasions. Now Whetstone aims to change all of that; they claim Remem’s algorithms can search the entire haystack by the time you’ve finished saying “needle.”

Remem monitors your conversation for references to past events, and then displays video of that event in the lower left corner of your field of vision. If you say “remember dancing the conga at that wedding?”, Remem will bring up the video. If the person you’re talking to says “the last time we were at the beach,” Remem will bring up the video. And it’s not only for use when speaking with someone else; Remem also monitors your subvocalizations. If you read the words “the first Szechuan restaurant you ate at,” your vocal cords will move as if you’re reading aloud, and Remem will bring up the relevant video.

There’s no denying the usefulness of software that can actually answer the question “where did I put my keys?” But Whetstone is positioning Remem as more than a handy virtual assistant: they want it to take the place of your natural memory.

It was the summer of Jijingi’s thirteenth year when a European came to live in the village. The dusty harmattan winds had just begun blowing from the north when Sabe, the elder who was regarded as chief by all the local families, made the announcement.

Everyone’s initial reaction was alarm, of course. “What have we done wrong?” Jijingi’s father asked Sabe.

Europeans had first come to Tivland many years ago, and while some elders said one day they’d leave and life would return to the ways of the past, until that day arrived it was necessary for the Tiv to get along with them. This had meant many changes in the way the Tiv did things, but it had never meant Europeans living among them before. The usual reason for Europeans to come to the village was to collect taxes for the roads they had built; they visited some clans more often because the people refused to pay taxes, but that hadn’t happened in the Shangev clan. Sabe and the other clan elders had agreed that paying the taxes was the best strategy.

Sabe told everyone not to worry. “This European is a missionary; that means all he does is pray. He has no authority to punish us, but our making him welcome will please the men in the administration.”

He ordered two huts built for the missionary, a sleeping hut and a reception hut. Over the course of the next several days everyone took time off from harvesting the guinea-corn to help lay bricks, sink posts into the ground, weave grass into thatch for the roof. It was during the final step, pounding the floor, that the missionary arrived. His porters appeared first, the boxes they carried visible from a distance as they threaded their way between the cassava fields; the missionary himself was the last to appear, apparently exhausted even though he carried nothing. His name was Moseby, and he thanked everyone who had worked on the huts. He tried to help, but it quickly became clear that he didn’t know how to do anything, so eventually he just sat in the shade of a locust bean tree and wiped his head with a piece of cloth.

Jijingi watched the missionary with curiosity. The man opened one of his boxes and took out what at first looked like a block of wood, but then he split it open and Jijingi realized it was a tightly bound sheaf of papers. Jijingi had seen paper before; when the Europeans collected taxes, they gave paper in return so that the village had proof of what they’d paid. But the paper that the missionary was looking at was obviously of a different sort, and must have had some other purpose.

The man noticed Jijingi looking at him, and invited him to come closer. “My name is Moseby,” he said. “What is your name?”

“I am Jijingi, and my father is Orga of the Shangev clan.”

Moseby spread open the sheaf of paper and gestured toward it. “Have you heard the story of Adam?” he asked. “Adam was the first man. We are all children of Adam.”

“Here we are descendants of Shangev,” said Jijingi. “And everyone in Tivland is a descendant of Tiv.”

“Yes, but your ancestor Tiv was descended from Adam, just as my ancestors were. We are all brothers. Do you understand?”

The missionary spoke as if his tongue were too large for his mouth, but Jijingi could tell what he was saying. “Yes, I understand.”

Moseby smiled, and pointed at the paper. “This paper tells the story of Adam.”

“How can paper tell a story?”

“It is an art that we Europeans know. When a man speaks, we make marks on the paper. When another man looks at the paper later, he sees the marks and knows what sounds the first man made. In that way the second man can hear what the first man said.”

Jijingi remembered something his father had told him about old Gbegba, who was the most skilled in bushcraft. “Where you or I would see nothing but some disturbed grass, he can see that a leopard had killed a cane rat at that spot and carried it off,” his father said. Gbegba was able to look at the ground and know what had happened even though he had not been present. This art of the Europeans must be similar: those who were skilled in interpreting the marks could hear a story even if they hadn’t been there when it was told.

“Tell me the story that the paper tells,” he said.

Moseby told him a story about Adam and his wife being tricked by a snake. Then he asked Jijingi, “How do you like it?”

“You’re a poor storyteller, but the story was interesting enough.”

Moseby laughed. “You are right, I am not good at the Tiv language. But this is a good story. It is the oldest story we have. It was first told long before your ancestor Tiv was born.”

Jijingi was dubious. “That paper can’t be so old.”

“No, this paper is not. But the marks on it were copied from older paper. And those marks were copied from older paper. And so forth many times.”

That would be impressive, if true. Jijingi liked stories, and older stories were often the best. “How many stories do you have there?”

“Very many.” Moseby flipped through the sheaf of papers, and Jijingi could see each sheet was covered with marks from edge to edge; there must be many, many stories there.

“This art you spoke of, interpreting marks on paper; is it only for Europeans?”

“No, I can teach it to you. Would you like that?”

Cautiously, Jijingi nodded.

As a journalist, I have long appreciated the usefulness of lifelogging for determining the facts of the matter. There is scarcely a legal proceeding, criminal or civil, that doesn’t make use of someone’s lifelog, and rightly so. When the public interest is involved, finding out what actually happened is important; justice is an essential part of the social contract, and you can’t have justice until you know the truth.

However, I’ve been much more skeptical about the use of lifelogging in purely personal situations. When lifelogging first became popular, there were couples who thought they could use it to settle arguments over who had actually said what, using the video record to prove they were right. But finding the right clip of video often wasn’t easy, and all but the most determined gave up on doing so. The inconvenience acted as a barrier, limiting the searching of lifelogs to those situations in which effort was warranted, namely situations in which justice was the motivating factor.

Now with Remem, finding the exact moment has become easy, and lifelogs that previously lay all but ignored are now being scrutinized as if they were crime scenes, thickly strewn with evidence for use in domestic squabbles.

I typically write for the news section, but I’ve written feature stories as well, and so when I pitched an article about the potential downsides of Remem to my managing editor, he gave me the go-ahead. My first interview was with a married couple whom I’ll call Joel and Deirdre, an architect and a painter, respectively. It wasn’t hard to get them talking about Remem.

“Joel is always saying that he knew it all along,” said Deirdre, “even when he didn’t. It used to drive me crazy, because I couldn’t get him to admit he used to believe something else. Now I can. For example, recently we were talking about the McKittridge kidnapping case.”

She sent me the video of one argument she had with Joel. My retinal projector displayed footage of a cocktail party; it’s from Deirdre’s point of view, and Joel is telling a number of people, “It was pretty clear that he was guilty from the day he was arrested.”

Deirdre’s voice: “You didn’t always think that. For months you argued that he was innocent.”

Joel shakes his head. “No, you’re misremembering. I said that even people who are obviously guilty deserve a fair trial.”

“That’s not what you said. You said he was being railroaded.”

“You’re thinking of someone else; that wasn’t me.”

“No, it was you. Look.” A separate video window opened up, an excerpt of her lifelog that she looked up and broadcast to the people they’ve been talking with. Within the nested video, Joel and Deirdre are sitting in a café, and Joel is saying, “He’s a scapegoat. The police needed to reassure the public, so they arrested a convenient suspect. Now he’s done for.” Deidre replies, “You don’t think there’s any chance of him being acquitted?” and Joel answers, “Not unless he can afford a high-powered defense team, and I’ll bet you he can’t. People in his position will never get a fair trial.”

I closed both windows, and Deirdre said, “Without Remem, I’d never be able to convince him that he changed his position. Now I have proof.”

“Fine, you were right that time,” said Joel. “But you didn’t have to do that in front of our friends.”

“You correct me in front of our friends all the time. You’re telling me I can’t do the same?”

Here was the line at which the pursuit of truth ceased to be an intrinsic good. When the only persons affected have a personal relationship with each other, other priorities are often more important, and a forensic pursuit of the truth could be harmful. Did it really matter whose idea it was to take the vacation that turned out so disastrously? Did you need to know which partner was more forgetful about completing errands the other person asked of them? I was no expert on marriage, but I knew what marriage counselors said: pinpointing blame wasn’t the answer. Instead, couples needed to acknowledge each other’s feelings and address their problems as a team.

Next I spoke with a spokesperson from Whetstone, Erica Meyers. For a while she gave me a typically corporate spiel about the benefits of Remem. “Making information more accessible is an intrinsic good,” she says. “Ubiquitous video has revolutionized law enforcement. Businesses become more effective when they adopt good record-keeping practices. The same thing happens to us as individuals when our memories become more accurate: we get better, not just at doing our jobs, but at living our lives.”

When I asked her about couples like Joel and Deirdre, she said, “If your marriage is solid, Remem isn’t going to hurt it. But if you’re the type of person who’s constantly trying to prove that you’re right and your spouse is wrong, then your marriage is going to be in trouble whether you use Remem or not.”

I conceded that she may have had a point in this particular case. But, I asked her, didn’t she think Remem created greater opportunities for those types of arguments to arise, even in solid marriages, by making it easier for people to keep score?

“Not at all,” she said. “Remem didn’t give them a scorekeeping mentality; they developed that on their own. Another couple could just as easily use Remem to realize that they’ve both misremembered things, and become more forgiving when that sort of mistake happens. I predict the latter scenario will be the more common one with our customers as a whole.”

I wished I could share Erica Meyers’ optimism, but I knew that new technology didn’t always bring out the best in people. Who hasn’t wished they could prove that their version of events was the correct one? I could easily see myself using Remem the way Deirdre did, and I wasn’t at all certain that doing so would be good for me. Anyone who has wasted hours surfing the internet knows that technology can encourage bad habits.

Moseby gave a sermon every seven days, on the day devoted to resting and brewing and drinking beer. He seemed to disapprove of the beer drinking, but he didn’t want to speak on one of the days of work, so the day of beer brewing was the only one left. He talked about the European god, and told people that following his rules would improve their lives, but his explanations of how that would do so weren’t particularly persuasive.

But Moseby also had some skill at dispensing medicine, and he was willing to learn how to work in the fields, so gradually people grew more accepting of him, and Jijingi’s father let him visit Moseby occasionally to learn the art of writing. Moseby offered to teach the other children as well, and for a time Jijingi’s age-mates came along, mostly to prove to each other that they weren’t afraid of being near a European. Before long the other boys grew bored and left, but because Jijingi remained interested in writing and his father thought it would keep the Europeans happy, he was eventually permitted to go every day.

Moseby explained to Jijingi how each sound a person spoke could be indicated with different marks on the paper. The marks were arranged in rows like plants in a field; you looked at the marks as if you were walking down a row, made the sound each mark indicated, and you would find yourself speaking what the original person had said. Moseby showed him how to make each of the different marks on a sheet of paper, using a tiny wooden rod that had a core of soot.

In a typical lesson, Moseby would speak, and then write what he had said: “When night comes I shall sleep.” Tugh mba a ile yo me yav. “There are two persons.” Ioruv mban mba uhar. Jijingi carefully copied the writing on his sheet of paper, and when he was done, Moseby would look at his paper.

“Very good. But you need to leave spaces when you write.”

“I have.” Jijingi pointed at the gap between each row.

“No, that is not what I mean. Do you see the spaces within each line?” He pointed at his own paper.

Jijingi understood. “Your marks are clumped together, while mine are arranged evenly.”

“These are not just clumps of marks. They are . . . I do not know what you call them.” He picked up a thin sheaf of paper from his table and flipped through it. “I do not see it here. Where I come from, we call them ‘words.’ When we write, we leave spaces between the words.”

“But what are words?”

“How can I explain it?” He thought a moment. “If you speak slowly, you pause very briefly after each word. That’s why we leave a space in those places when we write. Like this: How. Many. Years. Old. Are. You?” He wrote on his paper as he spoke, leaving a space every time he paused: Anyom a ou kuma a me?

“But you speak slowly because you’re a foreigner. I’m Tiv, so I don’t pause when I speak. Shouldn’t my writing be the same?”

“It does not matter how fast you speak. Words are the same whether you speak quickly or slowly.”

“Then why did you say you pause after each word?”

“That is the easiest way to find them. Try saying this very slowly.” He pointed at what he’d just written.

Jijingi spoke very slowly, the way a man might when trying to hide his drunkenness. “Why is there no space in between an and yom?”

“Anyom is one word. You do not pause in the middle of it.”

“But I wouldn’t pause after anyom either.”

Moseby sighed. “I will think more about how to explain what I mean. For now, just leave spaces in the places where I leave spaces.”

What a strange art writing was. When sowing a field, it was best to have the seed yams spaced evenly; Jijingi’s father would have beaten him if he’d clumped the yams the way the Moseby clumped his marks on paper. But he had resolved to learn this art as best he could, and if that meant clumping his marks, he would do so.

It was only many lessons later that Jijingi finally understood where he should leave spaces, and what Moseby meant when he said “word.” You could not find the places where words began and ended by listening. The sounds a person made while speaking were as smooth and unbroken as the hide of a goat’s leg, but the words were like the bones underneath the meat, and the space between them was the joint where you’d cut if you wanted to separate it into pieces. By leaving spaces when he wrote, Moseby was making visible the bones in what he said.

Jijingi realized that, if he thought hard about it, he was now able to identify the words when people spoke in an ordinary conversation. The sounds that came from a person’s mouth hadn’t changed, but he understood them differently; he was aware of the pieces from which the whole was made. He himself had been speaking in words all along. He just hadn’t known it until now.

The ease of searching that Remem provides is impressive enough, but that merely scratches the surface of what Whetstone sees as the product’s potential. When Deirdre fact-checked her husband’s previous statements, she was posing explicit queries to Remem. But Whetstone expects that, as people become accustomed to their product, queries will take the place of ordinary acts of recall, and Remem will be integrated into their very thought processes. Once that happens, we will become cognitive cyborgs, effectively incapable of misremembering anything; digital video stored on error-corrected silicon will take over the role once filled by our fallible temporal lobes.

What might it be like to have a perfect memory? Arguably the individual with the best memory ever documented was Solomon Shereshevskii, who lived in Russia during the first half of the twentieth century. The psychologists who tested him found that he could hear a series of words or numbers once and remember it months or even years later. With no knowledge of Italian, Shereshevskii was able to quote stanzas of The Divine Comedy that had been read to him fifteen years earlier.

But having a perfect memory wasn’t the blessing one might imagine it to be. Reading a passage of text evoked so many images in Shereshevskii’s mind that he often couldn’t focus on what it actually said, and his awareness of innumerable specific examples made it difficult for him to understand abstract concepts. At times, he tried to deliberately forget things. He wrote down numbers he no longer wanted to remember on slips of paper and then burnt them, a kind of slash-and-burn approach to clearing out the undergrowth of his mind, but to no avail.

When I raised the possibility that a perfect memory might be a handicap to Whetstone’s spokesperson, Erica Meyers, she had a ready reply. “This is no different from the concerns people used to have about retinal projectors,” she said. “They worried that seeing updates constantly would be distracting or overwhelming, but we’ve all adapted to them.”

I didn’t mention that not everyone considered that a positive development.

“And Remem is entirely customizable,” she continued. “If at any time you find it’s doing too many searches for your needs, you can decrease its level of responsiveness. But according to our customer analytics, our users haven’t been doing that. As they become more comfortable with it, they’re finding that Remem becomes more helpful the more responsive it is.”

But even if Remem wasn’t constantly crowding your field of vision with unwanted imagery of the past, I wondered if there weren’t issues raised simply by having that imagery be perfect.

“Forgive and forget” goes the expression, and for our idealized magnanimous selves, that was all you needed. But for our actual selves the relationship between those two actions wasn’t so straightforward. In most cases we had to forget a little bit before we could forgive; when we no longer experienced the pain as fresh, the insult was easier to forgive, which in turn made it less memorable, and so on. It was this psychological feedback loop that made initially infuriating offences seem pardonable in the mirror of hindsight.

What I feared was that Remem would make it impossible for this feedback loop to get rolling. By fixing every detail of an insult in indelible video, it could prevent the softening that’s needed for forgiveness to begin. I thought back to what Erica Meyers said about Remem’s inability to hurt solid marriages. Implicit in that assertion was a claim about what qualified as a solid marriage. If someone’s marriage was built on—as ironic as it might sound—a cornerstone of forgetfulness, what right did Whetstone have to shatter that?

The issue wasn’t confined to marriages; all sorts of relationships rely on forgiving and forgetting. My daughter Nicole has always been strong-willed; rambunctious when she was a child, openly defiant as an adolescent. She and I had many furious arguments during her teen years, arguments that we have mostly been able to put behind us, and now our relationship is pretty good. If we’d had Remem, would we still be speaking to each other?

I don’t mean to say that forgetting is the only way to mend relationships. While I can no longer recall most of the arguments Nicole and I had—and I’m grateful that I can’t—one of the arguments I remember clearly is one that spurred me to be a better father.

It was when Nicole was sixteen, a junior in high school. It had been two years since her mother Angela had left, probably the two hardest years of both our lives. I don’t remember what started the argument—something trivial, no doubt—but it escalated and before long Nicole was taking her anger at Angela out on me.

“You’re the reason she left! You drove her away! You can leave too, for all I care. I sure as hell would be better off without you.” And to demonstrate her point, she stormed out of the house.

I knew it wasn’t premeditated malice on her part—I don’t think she engaged in much premeditation in anything during that phase of her life—but she couldn’t have come up with a more hurtful accusation if she’d tried. I’d been devastated by Angela’s departure, and I was constantly wondering what I could have done differently to keep her.

Nicole didn’t come back until the next day, and that night was one of soul searching for me. While I didn’t believe I was responsible for her mother leaving us, Nicole’s accusation still served as a wake-up call. I hadn’t been conscious of it, but I realized that I had been thinking of myself as the greatest victim of Angela’s departure, wallowing in self-pity over just how unreasonable my situation was. It hadn’t even been my idea to have children; it was Angela who’d wanted to be a parent, and now she had left me holding the bag. What sane world would leave me with sole responsibility for raising an adolescent girl? How could a job that was so difficult be entrusted to someone with no experience whatsoever?

Nicole’s accusation made me realize her predicament was worse than mine. At least I had volunteered for this duty, albeit long ago and without full appreciation for what I was getting into. Nicole had been drafted into her role, with no say whatsoever. If there was anyone who had a right to be resentful, it was her. And while I thought I’d been doing a good job of being a father, obviously I needed to do better.

I turned myself around. Our relationship didn’t improve overnight, but over the years I was able to work myself back into Nicole’s good graces. I remember the way she hugged me at her college graduation, and I realized my years of effort had paid off.

Would those years of repair have been possible with Remem? Even if each of us could have refrained from throwing the other’s bad behavior in their faces, the opportunity to privately rewatch video of our arguments seems like it could be pernicious. Vivid reminders of the way she and I yelled at each other in the past might have kept our anger fresh, and prevented us from rebuilding our relationship.

Jijingi wanted to write down some of the stories of where the Tiv people came from, but the storytellers spoke rapidly, and he wasn’t able to write fast enough to keep up with them. Moseby said he would get better with practice, but Jijingi despaired that he’d ever become fast enough.

Then, one summer a European woman named Reiss came to visit the village. Moseby said she was “a person who learns about other people” but could not explain what that meant, only that she wanted to learn about Tivland. She asked questions of everyone, not just the elders but young men, too, even women and children, and she wrote down everything they told her. She didn’t try to get anyone to adopt European practices; where Moseby had insisted that there were no such thing as curses and that everything was God’s will, Reiss asked about how curses worked, and listened attentively to explanations of how your kin on your father’s side could curse you while your kin on your mother’s side could protect you from curses.

One evening Kokwa, the best storyteller in the village, told the story of how the Tiv people split into different lineages, and Reiss had written it down exactly as he told it. Later she had recopied the story using a machine she poked at noisily with her fingers, so that she had a copy that was clean and easy to read. When Jijingi asked if she would make another copy for him, she agreed, much to his excitement.

The paper version of the story was curiously disappointing. Jijingi remembered that when he had first learned about writing, he’d imagined it would enable him to see a storytelling performance as vividly as if he were there. But writing didn’t do that. When Kokwa told the story, he didn’t merely use words; he used the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands, the light in his eyes. He told you the story with his whole body, and you understood it the same way. None of that was captured on paper; only the bare words could be written down. And reading just the words gave you only a hint of the experience of listening to Kokwa himself, as if one were licking the pot in which okra had been cooked instead of eating the okra itself.

Jijingi was still glad to have the paper version, and would read it from time to time. It was a good story, worthy of being recorded on paper. Not everything written on paper was so worthy. During his sermons Moseby would read aloud stories from his book, and they were often good stories, but he also read aloud words he had written down just a few days before, and those were often not stories at all, merely claims that learning more about the European god would improve the lives of the Tiv people.

One day, when Moseby had been eloquent, Jijingi complimented him. “I know you think highly of all your sermons, but today’s sermon was a good one.”

“Thank you,” said Moseby, smiling. After a moment, he asked, “Why do you say I think highly of all my sermons?”

“Because you expect that people will want to read them many years from now.”

“I don’t expect that. What makes you think that?”

“You write them all down before you even deliver them. Before even one person has heard a sermon, you have written it down for future generations.”

Moseby laughed. “No, that is not why I write them down.”

“Why, then?” He knew it wasn’t for people far away to read them, because sometimes messengers came to the village to deliver paper to Moseby, and he never sent his sermons back with them.

“I write the words down so I do not forget what I want to say when I give the sermon.”

“How could you forget what you want to say? You and I are speaking right now, and neither of us needs paper to do so.”

“A sermon is different from conversation.” Moseby paused to consider. “I want to be sure I give my sermons as well as possible. I won’t forget what I want to say, but I might forget the best way to say it. If I write it down, I don’t have to worry. But writing the words down does more than help me remember. It helps me think.”

“How does writing help you think?”

“That is a good question,” he said. “It is strange, isn’t it? I do not know how to explain it, but writing helps me decide what I want to say. Where I come from, there’s a very old proverb: verba volant, scripta manent. In Tiv you would say, ‘spoken words fly away, written words remain.’ Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” Jijingi said, just to be polite; it made no sense at all. The missionary wasn’t old enough to be senile, but his memory must be terrible and he didn’t want to admit it. Jijingi told his age-mates about this, and they joked about it amongst themselves for days. Whenever they exchanged gossip, they would add, “Will you remember that? This will help you,” and mimic Moseby writing at his table.

On an evening the following year, Kokwa announced he would tell the story of how the Tiv split into different lineages. Jijingi brought out the paper version he had, so he could read the story at the same time Kokwa told it. Sometimes he could follow along, but it was often confusing because Kokwa’s words didn’t match what was written on the paper. After Kokwa was finished, Jijingi said to him, “You didn’t tell the story the same way you told it last year.”

“Nonsense,” said Kokwa. “When I tell a story it doesn’t change, no matter how much time passes. Ask me to tell it twenty years from today, and I will tell it exactly the same.”

Jijingi pointed at the paper he held. “This paper is the story you told last year, and there were many differences.” He picked one he remembered. “Last time you said, ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves.’ This time you said, ‘they made slaves of the women, but they did not stop there: they even made slaves of the children.’ ”

“That’s the same.”

“It is the same story, but you’ve changed the way you tell it.”

“No,” said Kokwa, “I told it just as I told it before.”

Jijingi didn’t want to try to explain what words were. Instead he said, “If you told it as you did before, you would say ‘the Uyengi captured the women and children and carried them off as slaves’ every time.”

For a moment Kokwa stared at him, and then he laughed. “Is this what you think is important, now that you’ve learned the art of writing?”

Sabe, who had been listening to them, chided Kokwa. “It’s not your place to judge Jijingi. The hare favors one food, the hippo favors another. Let each spend his time as he pleases.”

“Of course, Sabe, of course,” said Kokwa, but he threw a derisive glance at Jijingi.

Afterwards, Jijingi remembered the proverb Moseby had mentioned. Even though Kokwa was telling the same story, he might arrange the words differently each time he told it; he was skilled enough as a storyteller that the arrangement of words didn’t matter. It was different for Moseby, who never acted anything out when he gave his sermons; for him, the words were what was important. Jijingi realized that Moseby wrote down his sermons not because his memory was terrible, but because he was looking for a specific arrangement of words. Once he found the one he wanted, he could hold on to it for as long as he needed.

Out of curiosity, Jijingi tried imagining he had to deliver a sermon, and began writing down what he would say. Seated on the root of a mango tree with the notebook Moseby had given him, he composed a sermon on tsav, the quality that enabled some men to have power over others, and a subject which Moseby hadn’t understood and had dismissed as foolishness. He read his first attempt to one of his age-mates, who pronounced it terrible, leading them to have a brief shoving match, but afterwards Jijingi had to admit his age-mate was right. He tried writing out his sermon a second time and then a third before he became tired of it and moved on to other topics.

As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant; writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.

Psychologists make a distinction between semantic memory—knowledge of general facts—and episodic memory—recollection of personal experiences. We’ve been using technological supplements for semantic memory ever since the invention of writing: first books, then search engines. By contrast, we’ve historically resisted such aids when it comes to episodic memory; few people have ever kept as many diaries or photo albums as they did ordinary books. The obvious reason is convenience; if we wanted a book on the birds of North America, we could consult one that an ornithologist has written, but if we wanted a daily diary, we had to write it for ourselves. But I also wonder if another reason is that, subconsciously, we regarded our episodic memories as such an integral part of our identities that we were reluctant to externalize them, to relegate them to books on a shelf or files on a computer.

That may be about to change. For years parents have been recording their children’s every moment, so even if children weren’t wearing personal cams, their lifelogs were effectively already being compiled. Now parents are having their children wear retinal projectors at younger and younger ages so they can reap the benefits of assistive software agents sooner. Imagine what will happen if children begin using Remem to access those lifelogs: their mode of cognition will diverge from ours because the act of recall will be different. Rather than thinking of an event from her past and seeing it with her mind’s eye, a child will subvocalize a reference to it and watch video footage with her physical eyes. Episodic memory will become entirely technologically mediated.

An obvious drawback to such reliance is the possibility that people might become virtual amnesiacs whenever the software crashes. But just as worrying to me as the prospect of technological failure was that of technological success: how will it change a person’s conception of herself when she’s only seen her past through the unblinking eye of a video camera? Just as there’s a feedback loop in softening harsh memories, there’s also one at work in the romanticization of childhood memories, and disrupting that process will have consequences.

The earliest birthday I remember is my fourth; I remember blowing out the candles on my cake, the thrill of tearing the wrapping paper off the presents. There’s no video of the event, but there are snapshots in the family album, and they are consistent with what I remember. In fact, I suspect I no longer remember the day itself. It’s more likely that I manufactured the memory when I was first shown the snapshots and over time, I’ve imbued it with the emotion I imagine I felt that day. Little by little, over repeated instances of recall, I’ve created a happy memory for myself.

Another of my earliest memories is of playing on the living room rug, pushing toy cars around, while my grandmother worked at her sewing machine; she would occasionally turn and smile warmly at me. There are no photos of that moment, so I know the recollection is mine and mine alone. It is a lovely, idyllic memory. Would I want to be presented with actual footage of that afternoon? No; absolutely not.

Regarding the role of truth in autobiography, the critic Roy Pascal wrote, “On the one side are the truths of fact, on the other the truth of the writer’s feeling, and where the two coincide cannot be decided by any outside authority in advance.” Our memories are private autobiographies, and that afternoon with my grandmother features prominently in mine because of the feelings associated with it. What if video footage revealed that my grandmother’s smile was in fact perfunctory, that she was actually frustrated because her sewing wasn’t going well? What’s important to me about that memory is the happiness I associated with it, and I wouldn’t want that jeopardized.

It seemed to me that continuous video of my entire childhood would be full of facts but devoid of feeling, simply because cameras couldn’t capture the emotional dimension of events. As far as the camera was concerned, that afternoon with my grandmother would be indistinguishable from a hundred others. And if I’d grown up with access to all the video footage, there’d have been no way for me to assign more emotional weight to any particular day, no nucleus around which nostalgia could accrete.

And what will the consequences be when people can claim to remember their infancy? I could readily imagine a situation where, if you ask a young person what her earliest memory is, she will simply look baffled; after all, she has video dating back to the day of her birth. The inability to remember the first few years of one’s life—what psychologists call childhood amnesia—might soon be a thing of the past. No more would parents tell their children anecdotes beginning with the words “You don’t remember this because you were just a toddler when it happened.” It’ll be as if childhood amnesia is a characteristic of humanity’s childhood, and in ouroboric fashion, our youth will vanish from our memories.

Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children’s ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do of my imperfect, organic memories.

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.

But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of selves? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

When Jijingi was twenty, an officer from the administration came to the village to speak with Sabe. He had brought with him a young Tiv man who had attended the mission school in Katsina-Ala. The administration wanted to have a written record of all the disputes brought before the tribal courts, so they were assigning each chief one of these youths to act as a scribe. Sabe had Jijingi come forward, and to the officer he said, “I know you don’t have enough scribes for all of Tivland. Jijingi here has learned to write; he can act as our scribe, and you can send your boy to another village.” The officer tested Jijingi’s ability to write, but Moseby had taught him well, and eventually the officer agreed to have him be Sabe’s scribe.

After the officer had left, Jijingi asked Sabe why he hadn’t wanted the boy from Katsina-Ala to be his scribe.

“No one who comes from the mission school can be trusted,” said Sabe.

“Why not? Did the Europeans make them liars?”

“They’re partly to blame, but so are we. When the Europeans collected boys for the mission school years ago, most elders gave them the ones they wanted to get rid of, the layabouts and malcontents. Now those boys have returned, and they feel no kinship with anyone. They wield their knowledge of writing like a long gun; they demand their chiefs find them wives, or else they’ll write lies about them and have the Europeans depose them.”

Jijingi knew a boy who was always complaining and looking for ways to avoid work; it would be a disaster if someone like him had power over Sabe. “Can’t you tell the Europeans about this?”

“Many have,” Sabe answered. “It was Maisho of the Kwande clan who warned me about the scribes; they were installed in Kwande villages first. Maisho was fortunate that the Europeans believed him instead of his scribe’s lies, but he knows of other chiefs who were not so lucky; the Europeans often believe paper over people. I don’t wish to take the chance.” He looked at Jijingi seriously. “You are my kin, Jijingi, and kin to everyone in this village. I trust you to write down what I say.”

“Yes, Sabe.”

Tribal court was held every month, from morning until late afternoon for three days in a row, and it always attracted an audience, sometimes one so large that Sabe had to demand everyone sit to allow the breeze to reach the center of the circle. Jijingi sat next to Sabe and recorded the details of each dispute in a book the officer had left. It was a good job; he was paid out of the fees collected from the disputants, and he was given not just a chair but a small table too, which he could use for writing even when court wasn’t in session. The complaints Sabe heard were varied—one might be about a stolen bicycle, another might be about whether a man was responsible for his neighbor’s crops failing—but most had to do with wives. For one such dispute, Jijingi wrote down the following:

Umem’s wife Girgi has run away from home and gone back to her kin. Her kinsman Anongo has tried to convince her to stay with her husband, but Girgi refuses, and there is no more Anongo can do. Umem demands the return of the £11 he paid as bridewealth. Anongo says he has no money at the moment, and moreover that he was only paid £6.

Sabe requested witnesses for both sides. Anongo says he has witnesses, but they have gone on a trip. Umem produces a witness, who is sworn in. He testifies that he himself counted the £11 that Umem paid to Anongo.

Sabe asks Girgi to return to her husband and be a good wife, but she says she has had all that she can stand of him. Sabe instructs Anongo to repay Umem £11, the first payment to be in three months when his crops are saleable. Anongo agrees.

It was the final dispute of the day, by which time Sabe was clearly tired. “Selling vegetables to pay back bridewealth,” he said afterwards, shaking his head. “This wouldn’t have happened when I was a boy.”

Jijingi knew what he meant. In the past, the elders said, you conducted exchanges with similar items: if you wanted a goat, you could trade chickens for it; if you wanted to marry a woman, you promised one of your kinswomen to her family. Then the Europeans said they would no longer accept vegetables as payment for taxes, insisting that it be paid in coin. Before long, everything could be exchanged for money; you could use it to buy everything from a calabash to a wife. The elders considered it absurd.

“The old ways are vanishing,” agreed Jijingi. He didn’t say that young people preferred things this way, because the Europeans had also decreed that bridewealth could only be paid if the woman consented to the marriage. In the past, a young woman might be promised to an old man with leprous hands and rotting teeth, and have no choice but to marry him. Now a woman could marry the man she favored, as long as he could afford to pay the bridewealth. Jijingi himself was saving money to marry.

Moseby came to watch sometimes, but he found the proceedings confusing, and often asked Jijingi questions afterwards.

“For example, there was the dispute between Umem and Anongo over how much bridewealth was owed. Why was only the witness sworn in?” asked Moseby.

“To ensure that he said precisely what happened.”

“But if Umem and Anongo were sworn in, that would have ensured they said precisely what happened too. Anongo was able to lie because he was not sworn in.”

“Anongo didn’t lie,” said Jijingi. “He said what he considered right, just as Umem did.”

“But what Anongo said wasn’t the same as what the witness said.”

“But that doesn’t mean he was lying.” Then Jijingi remembered something about the European language, and understood Moseby’s confusion. “Our language has two words for what in your language is called ‘true.’ There is what’s right, mimi, and what’s precise, vough. In a dispute the principals say what they consider right; they speak mimi. The witnesses, however, are sworn to say precisely what happened; they speak vough. When Sabe has heard what happened can he decide what action is mimi for everyone. But it’s not lying if the principals don’t speak vough, as long as they speak mimi.”

Moseby clearly disapproved. “In the land I come from, everyone who testifies in court must swear to speak vough, even the principals.”

Jijingi didn’t see the point of that, but all he said was, “Every tribe has its own customs.”

“Yes, customs may vary, but the truth is the truth; it doesn’t change from one person to another. And remember what the Bible says: the truth shall set you free.”

“I remember,” said Jijingi. Moseby had said that it was knowing God’s truth that had made the Europeans so successful. There was no denying their wealth or power, but who knew what was the cause?

In order to write about Remem, it was only fair that I try it out myself. The problem was that I didn’t have a lifelog for it to index; typically I only activated my personal cam when I was conducting an interview or covering an event. But I’ve certainly spent time in the presence of people who kept lifelogs, and I could make use of what they’d recorded. While all lifelogging software has privacy controls in place, most people also grant basic sharing rights: if your actions were recorded in their lifelog, you have access to the footage in which you’re present. So I launched an agent to assemble a partial lifelog from the footage others had recorded, using my GPS history as the basis for the query. Over the course of a week, my request propagated through social networks and public video archives, and I was rewarded with snippets of video ranging from a few seconds in length to a few hours: not just security-cam footage but excerpts from the lifelogs of friends, acquaintances, and even complete strangers.

The resulting lifelog was of course highly fragmentary compared to what I would have had if I’d been recording video myself, and the footage was all from a third-person perspective rather than the first-person that most lifelogs have, but Remem was able to work with that. I expected that coverage would be thickest in the later years, simply due to the increasing popularity of lifelogs. It was somewhat to my surprise, then, that when I looked at a graph of the coverage, I found a bump in the coverage over a decade ago. Nicole had been keeping a lifelog since she was a teenager, so an unexpectedly large segment of my domestic life was present.

I was initially a bit uncertain of how to test Remem, since I obviously couldn’t ask it to bring up video of an event I didn’t remember. I figured I’d start out with something I did remember. I subvocalized, “The time Vince told me about his trip to Palau.”

My retinal projector displayed a window in the lower left corner of my field of vision: I’m having lunch with my friends Vincent and Jeremy. Vincent didn’t maintain a lifelog either, so the footage was from Jeremy’s point of view. I listened to Vincent rave about scuba diving for a minute.

Next I tried something that I only vaguely remembered. “The dinner banquet when I sat between Deborah and Lyle.” I didn’t remember who else was sitting at the table, and wondered if Remem could help me identify them.

Sure enough, Deborah had been recording that evening, and with her video I was able to use a recognition agent to identity everyone sitting across from us.

After those initial successes, I had a run of failures; not surprising, considering the gaps in the lifelog. But over the course of an hour-long trip survey of past events, Remem’s performance was generally impressive.

Finally it seemed time for me to try Remem on some memories that were more emotionally freighted. My relationship with Nicole felt strong enough now for me to safely revisit the fights we’d had when she was young. I figured I’d start with the argument I remembered clearly, and work backwards from there.

I subvocalized, “The time Nicole yelled at me ‘you’re the reason she left.’ ”

The window displays the kitchen of the house we lived in when Nicole was growing up. The footage is from Nicole’s point of view, and I’m standing in front of the stove. It’s obvious we’re fighting.

“You’re the reason she left. You can leave too, for all I care. I sure as hell would be better off without you.”

The words were just as I remembered them, but it wasn’t Nicole saying them.

It was me.

My first thought was that it must be a fake, that Nicole had edited the video to put her words into my mouth. She must have noticed my request for access to her lifelog footage, and concocted this to teach me a lesson. Or perhaps it was a film she had created to show her friends, to reinforce the stories she told about me. But why was she still so angry at me, that she would do such a thing? Hadn’t we gotten past this?

I started skimming through the video, looking for inconsistencies that would indicate where the edited footage had been spliced in. The subsequent footage showed Nicole running out of the house, just as I remembered, so there wouldn’t be signs of inconsistency there. I rewound the video and started watching the preceding argument.

Initially I was angry as I watched, angry at Nicole for going to such lengths to create this lie, because the preceding footage was all consistent with me being the one who yelled at her. Then some of what I was saying in the video began to sound queasily familiar: complaining about being called to her school again because she’d gotten into trouble, accusing her of spending time with the wrong crowd. But this wasn’t the context in which I’d said those things, was it? I had been voicing my concern, not berating her. Nicole must have adapted things I’d said elsewhere to make her slanderous video more plausible. That was the only explanation, right?

I asked Remem to examine the video’s watermark, and it reported the video was unmodified. I saw that Remem had suggested a correction in my search terms: where I had said “the time Nicole yelled at me,” it offered “the time I yelled at Nicole.” The correction must have been displayed at the same time as the initial search result, but I hadn’t noticed. I shut down Remem in disgust, furious at the product. I was about to search for information on forging a digital watermark to prove this video was faked, but I stopped myself, recognizing it as an act of desperation.

I would have testified, hand on a stack of Bibles or using any oath required of me, that it was Nicole who’d accused me of being the reason her mother left us. My recollection of that argument was as clear as any memory I had, but that wasn’t the only reason I found the video hard to believe; it was also my knowledge that—whatever my faults or imperfections—I was never the kind of father who could say such a thing to his child.

Yet here was digital video proving that I had been exactly that kind of father. And while I wasn’t that man anymore, I couldn’t deny that I was continuous with him.

Even more telling was the fact that for many years I had successfully hidden the truth from myself. Earlier I said that the details we choose to remember are a reflection of our personalities. What did it say about me that I put those words in Nicole’s mouth instead of mine?

I remembered that argument as being a turning point for me. I had imagined a narrative of redemption and self-improvement in which I was the heroic single father, rising to meet the challenge. But the reality was . . . what? How much of what had happened since then could I take credit for?

I restarted Remem and began looking at video of Nicole’s graduation from college. That was an event I had recorded myself, so I had footage of Nicole’s face, and she seemed genuinely happy in my presence. Was she hiding her true feelings so well that I couldn’t detect them? Or, if our relationship had actually improved, how had that happened? I had obviously been a much worse father fourteen years ago than I’d thought; it would be tempting to conclude I had come farther to reach where I currently was, but I couldn’t trust my perceptions anymore. Did Nicole even have positive feelings about me now?

I wasn’t going to try using Remem to answer this question; I needed to go to the source. I called Nicole and left a message saying I wanted to talk to her, and asking if I could come over to her apartment that evening.

It was a few years later that Sabe began attending a series of meetings of all the chiefs in the Shangev clan. He explained to Jijingi that the Europeans no longer wished to deal with so many chiefs, and were demanding that all of Tivland be divided into eight groups they called ‘septs.’ As a result, Sabe and the other chiefs had to discuss who the Shangev clan would join with. Although there was no need for a scribe, Jijingi was curious to hear the deliberations and asked Sabe if he might accompany him, and Sabe agreed.

Jijingi had never seen so many elders in one place before; some were even-tempered and dignified like Sabe, while others were loud and full of bluster. They argued for hours on end.

In the evening after Jijingi had returned, Moseby asked him what it had been like. Jijingi sighed. “Even if they’re not yelling, they’re fighting like wildcats.”

“Who does Sabe think you should join?”

“We should join with the clans that we’re most closely related to; that’s the Tiv way. And since Shangev was the son of Kwande, our clan should join with the Kwande clan, who live to the south.”

“That makes sense,” said Moseby. “So why is there disagreement?”

“The members of the Shangev clan don’t all live next to each other. Some live on the farmland in the west, near the Jechira clan, and the elders there are friendly with the Jechira elders. They’d like the Shangev clan to join the Jechira clan, because then they’d have more influence in the resulting sept.”

“I see.” Moseby thought for a moment. “Could the western Shangev join a different sept from the southern Shangev?”

Jijingi shook his head. “We Shangev all have one father, so we should all remain together. All the elders agree on that.”

“But if lineage is so important, how can the elders from the west argue that the Shangev clan ought to join with the Jechira clan?”

“That’s what the disagreement was about. The elders from the west are claiming Shangev was the son of Jechira.”

“Wait, you don’t know who Shangev’s parents were?”

“Of course we know! Sabe can recite his ancestors all the way back to Tiv himself. The elders from the west are merely pretending that Shangev was Jechira’s son because they’d benefit from joining with the Jechira clan.”

“But if the Shangev clan joined with the Kwande clan, wouldn’t your elders benefit?”

“Yes, but Shangev was Kwande’s son.” Then Jijingi realized what Moseby was implying. “You think our elders are the ones pretending!”

“No, not at all. It just sounds like both sides have equally good claims, and there’s no way to tell who’s right.”

“Sabe’s right.”

“Of course,” said Moseby. “But how can you get the others to admit that? In the land I come from, many people write down their lineage on paper. That way we can trace our ancestry precisely, even many generations in the past.”

“Yes, I’ve seen the lineages in your Bible, tracing Abraham back to Adam.”

“Of course. But even apart from the Bible, people have recorded their lineages. When people want to find out who they’re descended from, they can consult paper. If you had paper, the other elders would have to admit that Sabe was right.”

That was a good point, Jijingi admitted. If only the Shangev clan had been using paper long ago. Then something occurred to him. “How long ago did the Europeans first come to Tivland?”

“I’m not sure. At least forty years ago, I think.”

“Do you think they might have written down anything about the Shangev clan’s lineage when they first arrived?”

Moseby looked thoughtful. “Perhaps. The administration definitely keeps a lot of records. If there are any, they’d be stored at the government station in Katsina-Ala.”

A truck carried goods along the motor road into Katsina-Ala every fifth day, when the market was being held, and the next market would be the day after tomorrow. If he left tomorrow morning, he could reach the motor road in time to get a ride. “Do you think they would let me see them?”

“It might be easier if you have a European with you,” said Moseby, smiling. “Shall we take a trip?”

Nicole opened the door to her apartment and invited me in. She was obviously curious about why I’d come. “So what did you want to talk about?”

I wasn’t sure how to begin. “This is going to sound strange.”

“Okay,” she said.

I told her about viewing my partial lifelog using Remem, and seeing the argument we’d had when she was sixteen that ended with me yelling at her and her leaving the house. “Do you remember that day?”

“Of course I do.” She looked uncomfortable, uncertain of where I was going with this.

“I remembered it too, or at least I thought I did. But I remembered it differently. The way I remembered it, it was you who said it to me.”

“Me who said what?”

“I remembered you telling me that I could leave for all you cared, and that you’d be better off without me.”

Nicole stared at me for a long time. “All these years, that’s how you’ve remembered that day?”

“Yes, until today.”

“That’d almost be funny if it weren’t so sad.”

I felt sick to my stomach. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Sorry you said it, or sorry that you imagined me saying it?”

“Both.”

“Well you should be! You know how that made me feel?”

“I can’t imagine. I know I felt terrible when I thought you had said it to me.”

“Except that was just something you made up. It actually happened to me.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Fucking typical.”

That hurt to hear. “Is it? Really?”

“Sure,” she said. “You’re always acting like you’re the victim, like you’re the good guy who deserves to be treated better than you are.”

“You make me sound like I’m delusional.”

“Not delusional. Just blind and self-absorbed.”

I bristled a little. “I’m trying to apologize here.”

“Right, right. This is about you.”

“No, you’re right, I’m sorry.” I waited until Nicole gestured for me to go on. “I guess I am . . . blind and self-absorbed. The reason it’s hard for me to admit that is that I thought I had opened my eyes and gotten over that.”

She frowned. “What?”

I told her how I felt like I had turned around as a father and rebuilt our relationship, culminating in a moment of bonding at her college graduation. Nicole wasn’t openly derisive, but her expression caused me to stop talking; it was obvious I was embarrassing myself.

“Did you still hate me at graduation?” I asked. “Was I completely making it up that you and I got along then?”

“No, we did get along at graduation. But it wasn’t because you had magically become a good father.”

“What was it, then?”

She paused, took a deep breath, and then said, “I started seeing a therapist when I went to college.” She paused again. “She pretty much saved my life.”

My first thought was, why would Nicole need a therapist? I pushed that down and said, “I didn’t know you were in therapy.”

“Of course you didn’t; you were the last person I would have told. Anyway, by the time I was a senior, she had convinced me that I was better off not staying angry at you. That’s why you and I got along so well at graduation.”

So I had indeed fabricated a narrative that bore little resemblance to reality. Nicole had done all the work, and I had done none.

“I guess I don’t really know you.”

She shrugged. “You know me as well as you need to.”

That hurt, too, but I could hardly complain. “You deserve better,” I said.

Nicole gave a brief, rueful laugh. “You know, when I was younger, I used to daydream about you saying that. But now . . . well, it’s not as if it fixes everything, is it?”

I realized that I’d been hoping she would forgive me then and there, and then everything would be good. But it would take more than my saying sorry to repair our relationship.

Something occurred to me. “I can’t change the things I did, but at least I can stop pretending I didn’t do them. I’m going to use Remem to get a honest picture at myself, take a kind of personal inventory.”

Nicole looked at me, gauging my sincerity. “Fine,” she said. “But let’s be clear: you don’t come running to me every time you feel guilty over treating me like crap. I worked hard to put that behind me, and I’m not going to relive it just so you can feel better about yourself.”

“Of course.” I saw that she was tearing up. “And I’ve upset you again by bringing all this up. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right, Dad. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. Just . . . let’s not do it again for a while, okay?”

“Right.” I moved toward the door to leave, and then stopped. “I just wanted to ask . . . if it’s possible, if there’s anything I can do to make amends . . .”

“Make amends?” She looked incredulous. “I don’t know. Just be more considerate, will you?”

And that what I’m trying to do.

At the government station there was indeed paper from forty years ago, what the Europeans called “assessment reports,” and Moseby’s presence was sufficient to grant them access. They were written in the European language, which Jijingi couldn’t read, but they included diagrams of the ancestry of the various clans, and he could identify the Tiv names in those diagrams easily enough, and Moseby had confirmed that his interpretation was correct. The elders in the western farms were right, and Sabe was wrong: Shangev was not Kwande’s son, he was Jechira’s.

One of the men at the government station had agreed to type up a copy of the relevant page so Jijingi could take it with him. Moseby decided to stay in Katsina-Ala to visit with the missionaries there, but Jijingi came home right away. He felt like an impatient child on the return trip, wishing he could ride the truck all the way back instead of having to walk from the motor road. As soon as he had arrived at the village, Jijingi looked for Sabe.

He found him on the path leading to a neighboring farm; some neighbors had stopped Sabe to have him settle a dispute over how a nanny goat’s kids should be distributed. Finally, they were satisfied, and Sabe resumed his walk. Jijingi walked beside him.

“Welcome back,” said Sabe.

“Sabe, I’ve been to Katsina-Ala.”

“Ah. Why did you go there?”

Jijingi showed him the paper. “This was written long ago, when the Europeans first came here. They spoke to the elders of the Shangev clan then, and when the elders told them the history of the Shangev clan, they said that Shangev was the son of Jechira.”

Sabe’s reaction was mild. “Whom did the Europeans ask?”

Jijingi looked at the paper. “Batur and Iorkyaha.”

“I remember them,” he said, nodding. “They were wise men. They would not have said such a thing.”

Jijingi pointed at the words on the page. “But they did!”

“Perhaps you are reading it wrong.”

“I am not! I know how to read.”

Sabe shrugged. “Why did you bring this paper back here?”

“What it says is important. It means we should rightfully be joined with the Jechira clan.”

“You think the clan should trust your decision on this matter?”

“I’m not asking the clan to trust me. I’m asking them to trust the men who were elders when you were young.”

“And so they should. But those men aren’t here. All you have is paper.”

“The paper tells us what they would say if they were here.”

“Does it? A man doesn’t speak only one thing. If Batur and Iorkyaha were here, they would agree with me that we should join with the Kwande clan.”

“How could they, when Shangev was the son of Jechira?” He pointed at the sheet of paper. “The Jechira are our closer kin.”

Sabe stopped walking and turned to face Jijingi. “Questions of kinship cannot be resolved by paper. You’re a scribe because Maisho of the Kwande clan warned me about the boys from the mission school. Maisho wouldn’t have looked out for us if we didn’t share the same father. Your position is proof of how close our clans are, but you forget that. You look to paper to tell you what you should already know, here.” Sabe tapped him on his chest. “Have you studied paper so much that you’ve forgotten what it is to be Tiv?”

Jijingi opened his mouth to protest when he realized that Sabe was right. All the time he’d spent studying writing had made him think like a European. He had come to trust what was written on paper over what was said by people, and that wasn’t the Tiv way.

The assessment report of the Europeans was vough; it was exact and precise, but that wasn’t enough to settle the question. The choice of which clan to join with had to be right for the community; it had to be mimi. Only the elders could determine what was mimi; it was their responsibility to decide what was best for the Shangev clan. Asking Sabe to defer to the paper was asking him to act against what he considered right.

“You’re right, Sabe,” he said. “Forgive me. You’re my elder, and it was wrong of me to suggest that paper could know more than you.”

Sabe nodded and resumed walking. “You are free to do as you wish, but I believe it will do more harm than good to show that paper to others.”

Jijingi considered it. The elders from the western farms would undoubtedly argue that the assessment report supported their position, prolonging a debate that had already gone too long. But more than that, it would move the Tiv down the path of regarding paper as the source of truth; it would be another stream in which the old ways were washing away, and he could see no benefit in it.

“I agree,” said Jijingi. “I won’t show this to anyone else.”

Sabe nodded.

Jijingi walked back to his hut, reflecting on what had happened. Even without attending a mission school, he had begun thinking like a European; his practice of writing in his notebooks had led him to disrespect his elders without him even being aware of it. Writing helped him think more clearly, he couldn’t deny that; but that wasn’t good enough reason to trust paper over people.

As a scribe, he had to keep the book of Sabe’s decisions in tribal court. But he didn’t need to keep the other notebooks, the ones in which he’d written down his thoughts. He would use them as tinder for the cooking fire.

We don’t normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound.

Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It’s not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences, and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn’t change is a product of literate cultures’ reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don’t need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community’s understanding of itself. So it wouldn’t be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

It would be easy for me to assert that literate cultures are better off than oral ones, but my bias should be obvious, since I’m writing these words rather than speaking them to you. Instead I will say that it’s easier for me to appreciate the benefits of literacy and harder to recognize everything it has cost us. Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives. Written records are subject to every kind of error and their interpretation is subject to change, but at least the words on the page remain fixed, and there is real merit in that.

When it comes to our individual memories, I live on the opposite side of the divide. As someone whose identity was built on organic memory, I’m threatened by the prospect of removing subjectivity from our recall of events. I used to think it could be valuable for individuals to tell stories about themselves, valuable in a way that it couldn’t be for cultures, but I’m a product of my time, and times change. We can’t prevent the adoption of digital memory any more than oral cultures could stop the arrival of literacy, so the best I can do is look for something positive in it.

And I think I’ve found the real benefit of digital memory. The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

Because all of us have been wrong on various occasions, engaged in cruelty and hypocrisy, and we’ve forgotten most of those occasions. And that means we don’t really know ourselves. How much personal insight can I claim if I can’t trust my memory? How much can you? You’re probably thinking that, while your memory isn’t perfect, you’ve never engaged in revisionism of the magnitude I’m guilty of. But I was just as certain as you, and I was wrong. You may say, “I know I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes.” I am here to tell you that you have made more than you think, that some of the core assumptions on which your self-image is built are actually lies. Spend some time using Remem, and you’ll find out.

But the reason I now recommend Remem is not for the shameful reminders it provides of your past; it’s to avoid the need for those in the future. Organic memory was what enabled me to construct a whitewashed narrative of my parenting skills, but by using digital memory from now on, I hope to keep that from happening. The truth about my behavior won’t be presented to me by someone else, making me defensive; it won’t even be something I’ll discover as a private shock, prompting a reevaluation. With Remem providing only the unvarnished facts, my image of myself will never stray too far from the truth in the first place.

Digital memory will not stop us from telling stories about ourselves. As I said earlier, we are made of stories, and nothing can change that. What digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that—I hope—acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others.

Nicole has begun using Remem as well, and discovered that her recollection of events isn’t perfect either. This hasn’t made her forgive me for the way I treated her—nor should it, because her misdeeds were minor compared to mine—but it has softened her anger at my misremembering my actions, because she realizes it’s something we all do. And I’m embarrassed to admit that this is precisely the scenario Erica Meyers predicted when she talked about Remem’s effects on relationships.

This doesn’t mean I’ve changed my mind about the downsides of digital memory; there are many, and people need to be aware of them. I just don’t think I can argue the case with any sort of objectivity anymore. I abandoned the article I was planning to write about memory prostheses; I handed off the research I’d done to a colleague, and she wrote a fine piece about the pros and cons of the software, a dispassionate article free from all the soul-searching and angst that would have saturated anything I submitted. Instead, I’ve written this.

The account I’ve given of the Tiv is based in fact, but isn’t precisely accurate. There was indeed a dispute among the Tiv in 1941 over whom the Shangev clan should join with, based on differing claims about the parentage of the clan’s founder, and administrative records did show that the clan elders’ account of their genealogy had changed over time. But many of the specific details I’ve described are invented. The actual events were more complicated and less dramatic, as actual events always are, so I have taken liberties to make a better narrative. I’ve told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.

As for my account of my argument with Nicole, I’ve tried to make it as accurate as I possibly could. I’ve been recording everything since I started working on this project, and I’ve consulted the recordings repeatedly when writing this. But in my choice of which details to include and which to omit, perhaps I have just constructed another story. In spite of my efforts to be unflinching, have I flattered myself with this portrayal? Have I distorted events so they more closely follow the arc expected of a confessional narrative? The only way you can judge is by comparing my account against the recordings themselves, so I’m doing something I never thought I’d do: with Nicole’s permission, I am granting public access to my lifelog, such as it is. Take a look at the video, and decide for yourself.

And if you think I’ve been less than honest, tell me. I want to know.

FLOW

Arlan Andrews, Sr.

His first thought was, the sky is broken! The familiar Misty Sky—those thick layers of grayish-white, low-lying clouds that covered Rist’s whole world back home in The Tharn’s Lands, stretching horizon to horizon, dimwise to darkwise—was gone! In its place lay a distant, pale blue dome, centered on a shining disk overhead, so bright his eyes hurt without even staring directly at it. Only shredded remnants of home’s remembered whiteness scudded across that vast expanse, just flecks and billows blowing here and there, and much higher up than he could have ever imagined.

“What happened to the sky?” he called out across the iceberg from the life-post he was barely holding onto, over the sound of rushing rapids. “Where is the Misty Sky? What happened to it?” he yelled again. His fur coat was soaking wet from the splashing river water, making it harder to clutch the life-post with both arms.

“Welcome to the Warm Lands, bird-rider!” his rough berg-companion Cruthar shouted back, also trying to be heard through the thunderous crashing, sharp creaks, and long groans as their shepherded small mountain of ice slid and pounded against river stones. “Down here, the Wen of the Mist and Pursuing Dimness, they lost a sky-war to the Shining One and the Pale Wen!” Cruthar stabbed a gnarled brown finger toward the blue bowl above them. “New gods in a new sky—all blue! Pieces of the Misty Sky try to sneak over, like those”—Rist followed his direction, peering at clouds disappearing in the distant, dim horizon—“but the Shining One up there”—the too-bright disk—“he will burn them away to nothing.”

Rist shook his head as if to awaken from a bad-night dream. “That can’t be!” he protested loudly, “How can the gods lose a war in one sky and yet live in another?” But he quickly stopped yelling, keeping all his attention on clinging to the life-post as the berg smashed first one side and then the opposite against sharp crags protruding from the river. In a less fearful part of his mind, Rist hoped that the iceberg would hold together until he and Cruthar and the rest of the berg-crew could see it safely through the River’s End passage and into the hands of the final buyers in the Warm Lands. It had been a rough ride this last dim of the four-dim journey, here where the New River narrowed and flowed through bare rock canyons, a zigzagging pattern that reminded him of some of the carving styles on the cylindrical totem in his pocket.

Rist could tell that Cruthar was smiling, but that was all; the naturally blurry near-vision of the People revealed only a ravaged mahogany face and ragged teeth, testament to the man’s wearing years as a berg-man. Like all people in The Tharn’s Lands, Cruthar wore dark furs that covered everything but his brown face and hands, the orange sleeve trim designating him as working class. “Rist, wait till you see the Pale Wen of the Night here,” the berg-man laughed, “She is round and white and beautiful, with sparkling colored freckles. You will be happy to see the Goddess of the Warm Lands sky!”

At the moment, fearful for his life aboard an iceberg in the rushing waters of the New River, Rist was not happy about anything. Holding on to his life-post with all his strength, he watched as Cruthar, sire Strether, and the four other crew skillfully maneuvered the berg between massive rocks, pushing here and there with long poles, quickly moving huge air-filled beezt bladders from one side to the other, all to keep their frozen craft upright and themselves alive.

After another terror-filled hour, the berg finally emerged into a wide, placid river. Rist gasped. The water here flowed so slowly, was so vast, that it could have been a lake. It reminded him of the black lake at the foot of the Ice at the End of the World, where the sky-filling glacier calved and dropped bergs like the one he was riding. He had been at that lake a little more than a hand of hands of dims ago, with his sire, Reader Thess and his own twin, Rusk. Thinking of his family brought back a memory of uncertain pleasantness: that lake was where Rusk had seen a flat-topped calf of glacier slide down from the Ice, from above the Misty Sky, then figured that the Ice must end at the flatness, so it was higher than the sky.

Reader Thess and his twin sons had been in the process of pacing off the length of that shard, so they would know how high the Misty Sky was, when a Tharn’s Man had interrupted. Reader Thess then sent Rist back to Tharn’s Town to sell the bergs they had found, while the Reader and his other son, Rusk, went to see the god that the small, disgusting Cold People had retrieved from the Ice, a few dim-marches away. During his long, solitary ride back from the Ice to Tharn’s Town, Rist had taken a long time to accept Rusk’s new way of thinking, of looking at things differently.

This new kind of thinking had bothered him at first, but then he began to ponder it. What else could a man know if he just paid attention? His twin, Rusk, had always been studious, he knew, while he himself had preferred to chase—and catch!—attractive wen and do more physically demanding activities. While Rusk spent hours poring over how to carve horn or wooden totems with the patterns of marks that Readers like their sire could Read by touch, Rist had spent his time learning more about riding the tall fighting birds, the two-legs; and about making and whirling bog-iron bolos, and throwing blackstone-tipped spears. Even sailing small boats in the New River at Tharn’s Town. Yet as he had witnessed up at the black lake, Rusk’s way of thinking new thoughts had brought as much praise from their sire as had his own swift killing of the huge velk on their trip coldward. I may be able to do that kind of thinking myself, he thought, l just never had a reason before!

While his sire and Rusk had gone looking for a god in the Ice with that Tharn’s Man, Rist had brought back his sire’s berg-record totem and its companion decoding cylinder to Tharn’s Town. There he had met the ice brokers who greedily bid for the information on the sizes and arrival times of the next big bergs. Reader Thess, whose family had permanent and sole rights to ice sales granted by The Tharn (in return for an exorbitant share, of course), had created a different kind of market for ice. Rist never quite understood what a broker did, but he did know that in far-olden days, families had fought over newly discovered bergs floating down the New River. His sire, Thess, had been the first to go to The Ice at the End of the World and then observe the calving, in order to predict when ice was coming rather than awaiting random bergs floating by. His sire’s advanced literacy in reading had allowed him to record the information on totems at the Ice itself, and then send it back via fast two-leg couriers, speeding up the whole process.

The earnings from selling bergs enabled Thess, his wen, Mell, and their two sons to live in a large-stone house rather than the common peat-brick huts of most of the People. Rist considered his sire’s talents to be more along the lines of Rusk’s than his own. However, cycles ago Thess had single-handedly dispatched the velk that killed his own twin, earning his man-name Thess from his boy-name Ress. Our sire is a man of many talents, Risk had concluded. I hope to be like that, too!

After taking the bag of coppers for the berg information and giving over The Tharn’s accountant a third of the take, Rist had questioned the winning broker about the final destination of his purchased bergs. “What do you care, boy?” the grizzled merchant, whose red-trimmed furs designated his merchant’s profession, snarled. “You got your coppers, in a few hands of dims I’ll get back those and more from the buyers in the Warm Lands.”

A sudden thought—What’s it like in the Warm Lands?—burst in Rist’s mind. “What if I go with your crew, along for the ride?” he asked. “I want to see where my ice—your ice—goes, and what they do with it. What would you charge me?”

“Ride down for free, for all I care, boy,” the man answered, “just bring your own food and thatch-pad and stick your own life-pole in place!” He laughed. “And don’t carry anything you don’t want to leave behind!” Still laughing, leaving Rist puzzled at his comment, the broker hobbled off to the brew pub to celebrate his deal.

When his sire Thess and twin Rusk had returned to Tharn’s Town with the body of the god from the Ice, Rist had marveled with all the other people at the large, pale manlike figure, nearly three times the height of most people, even twice that of the large Tharn’s Men. To Rist, the most interesting items were the god’s smoothly woven green clothing, which The Tharn had kept for himself. The Tharn had given Reader Thess the god’s strange adjustable boots and some trinkets in return for accompanying The Tharn’s Man to retrieve the corpse from the perverted Colds. The god’s red helmet went to The Tharn’s trophy wall, its large head to a pointed stick outside The Tharn’s Place, alongside many Warm Lander skulls, and its body to a pyre for public immolation.

Rist had not paid much attention to the flat, horn-like and metal plates that his sire had also earned from the god’s possessions, and which Rusk had claimed might have writing marks that could be Read like the totem carvings, but with seeing instead of touch! If the gods can see that close up, they are not at all like us People, he thought. We can see clearly at a distance, that which we can’t touch, and can touch within an arm’s reach, that which we can’t clearly See! New thoughts or not, Rist had not wanted to pursue that dark, dimless path of thought any further, All the way to madness! he felt. He also did not want to go back coldward again to the Ice with his sire and twin to retrieve more gods and god-stuff. Instead, he wanted to do something different, something daring—to go warmward with one of the bergs he had sold. One would be along any day, he told Thess.

To his surprise, his sire had agreed, and so Rist had set forth on a new adventure. At times these last few dims, riding the wild iceberg with a wilder crew, he had been afraid it would be his last one.

As the berg drifted in the slow current, Rist shielded his eyes. The blue brightness was too much to bear. And it was getting warm, very warm. Walking from post to post, carefully grabbing each to steady himself against the rocking of their ice-boat, Cruthar came over to Rist and said, “Take these eye coverings, they’ll help you with the Shining One.” Rist took the proffered gift, which was a leather thong with two round patches, each with a slit. “Put it over your eyes, like this,” the bergman demonstrated. “Look through the eye-slits and the Shining One won’t bum out your eyes. But don’t look at Him directly; it will hurt.” Immediately, Rist’s vision improved. He felt disoriented without the close comfort of the Misty Sky overhead, with the unaccustomed brightness all around, but he would live. He was also getting hot!

Cruthar said, “And you might want to strip down to your unders, boy. The Warm Lands be called that for a reason.” Within minutes, all the berg-crew was uniformly dressed—a gray, diaper-like loincloth, naked everywhere else but their feet. “Tie your furs around the post. Keep your boots on, though, Rist. Ice is still cold, even here.” Rist soon learned that heat from the Shining One could cause him to sweat, even without working. A lot to learn, he thought. Then, feeling within his pile of furs, he found a totem cylinder in his jacket pocket. And a lot to record! With his blacknife in his right hand, he began carving a report about this leg of his adventurous trip down the New River to the Warm Lands. He was sure that this account would be of extreme interest to his sire and his twin.

Each side of the river sported thick forests, almost without space between tall conifers; along the shoreline, thick brambles of flowering bushes tumbled from forest to water. Time and again, wading birds in uncountable numbers took to the sky as they neared, the wave upon wave of soft flapping a caressing river of sound, the avian bodies a swarm of twisting whiteness against the unfamiliar blue bowl of sky. The winds brought sweet-smelling fragrances that he could not identify. Rist thought it all strange and beautiful, and carved it so on his totem. He also noted the expanse of trees; back home, timber was very expensive, most of it imported from lands far dark-wise and brought in on carts. Any one of those trees was worth a fortune in The Tharn’s Lands.

“Towers!” someone shouted. “Get out the signal mirror!” Squinting his strained eyes, Rist viewed the tallest structures he had ever seen, one on each side of the river, their heights evident even from this distance as they stood twice as high as the trees. They were bright yellow in color, but whether of stones that color or painted, Rist couldn’t tell. He did see sire Strether feel around in his stowed furs and pull out a flat plate, two hands square, and then tilt it this way and that, as if to catch something invisible. Cruthar explained, “My sire is catching the power of the Shining One up there”—he pointed toward the bright disc in the sky—“It shines on his mirror, and he points it over toward that tall building over yonder. Them’s they call towers. Now you watch!”

Suddenly, from the top of the tower dark-wise—“West, they calls it down here,” Cruthar had said, “where the Shining One sets and ends every day”—came a small point of light, every bit as brilliant as the Shining One, flashing toward the berg. Strether answered with sudden movements of his signal mirror. After several more flashes came back from the tower, the older man smiled, putting away his device. Cruthar said, “One of the tricks of our trade, bird-boy. We flashes our mirror signals to them, the towers know we’re coming, and what we’re doing. They flashes the message to the priests in God’s Port and then the priests let us come through peaceably. Otherwise, they sends out war-man ships and kills us all.” Rist gasped, at first thinking his friend was playing a joke. But the ice-man shook his head. Seriously!

Using a mirror for signaling struck Rist as very unusual. He had seen small mirrors back in The Tharn’s Lands, but they were only expensive toys. People said your spirit was inside them, but Rist had only been able to see other people’s blurred images in them. His own mirror-face was simply an undistinguishable brown patch. Mirrors had no other uses he knew of under the dimness of the Misty Sky. But here in the brightness of the Warm Lands? Well, he had already seen how to communicate over long distances if you had the Shining One overhead. Most interesting, he carved. What else can you do with brightness? He carved that question onto his totem. He was sure that Rusk would think of something.

By now the signaling tower to the west was close enough that Rist could make out that the part of it above the trees was made of huge, finely-cut, stacked stones, painted bright yellow. But in the center of the side toward the river, the building was marked with a puzzling symbol, like a wheel rim painted red, yet with its spokes on the outside, sticking straight out. In Rist’s homeland, the only symbols were patches of color; geometric designs of thin lines were unheard of. He asked his companion about the strange markings.

“Ye’ll learn a lot real soon, Rist,” Cruthar answered, “The yellow paint and red marks means that this is what the Warm Landers call ‘God’s Country,’ their two shining gods in the sky. Them priests owns the whole place, including where we’re going, namely the town of God’s Port. That red wheel sign yonder means the Shining One, and those spokes outward, they’s the power of that god over the whole world. You, me, everybody.” Rist shrugged; he never had thought of gods as having any powers over any person, much less himself. This was another new thought, more information about this new land, but the concept felt wrong to him. Nevertheless, he carved it so.

Shortly afterward, Cruthar broke out the larder and passed out drinks of potato brew and slices of cold beezt to Rist and the crew. Chewing a mouthful of meat, Cruthar went on, “These Warm Lands don’t got a Tharn to protect you, or Tharn’s Men to keep no peace.” Rist shook his head; it was literally unimaginable to him that there could be no one strong leader and no strong men ready to enforce justice, even if it was The Tharn’s rough kind. “Here there be priests, boy. Priests of the Shining One; priestesses of the Pale Wen. They has temples and churches, and they has Priest’s Men.” He shuddered.

After Rist’s questions, Cruthar burped and said, “Temples and churches—that’s where the priests and priestesses talk to the gods. The Shining One up there”—pointing toward the brilliant disk overhead—“and the Pale Wen.”

“How do the priests do that, the gods being so far up there? And what do the gods say?” Rist ventured. “And why would gods up in the sky care about us down here?” Having seen one god, the one from the Ice, up in Tharn’s Town, he asked, “And the Shining One up there—he doesn’t look at all like the god my sire and Rusk brought down from the Ice. That one—you saw him—he was like us, only big and fat and pale-skinned and hairy and three times as tall, but still with arms and legs. Does the Pale Wen have arms and legs like us?”

Cruthar laughed and took another swig of the strong drink. “Lots of questions, little boy. First, the priests call what they do worship, you’ll learn that real quick. And, next, the Pale Wen is exactly the same size and shape as ol’ Shining One up thar. Onc’t in a great while, I been told, they even gets together in the same place in the sky and makes love and then the lights go out, all over the Warm Lands!” He paused. “I ain’t never thought about what you just said, ’bout arms and legs and all. Could there be more than one kind of god?” Cruthar frowned, his concern fuzzily visible to Rist. He shook his head. “Whatever, don’t you mention none of that down in God’s Port. The priests don’t like anybody thinkin’ different about their gods. You just respect ’em and nod your head when they start preachin’ to you, you hear?” With that, Cruthar laid back on his insulating thatch pad and fell asleep.

Rist stayed awake, thinking on this adventure and carving his observations as quickly as he could. The berg meandered slowly, past the mouths of other tributaries emptying into the main river. Small sail boats with triangular masts passed close by the berg and its crew in both directions; nobody waved at them.

Within a few hours, two large oar-driven boats, flying yellow flags with the same strange bright red circular insignia, came out to greet them. Though the images registered on his vision, Rist had trouble recognizing the intricacies of the designs; the concept was still alien. As the boat crews threw anchors onto the berg, he could see that the vessels held several hands of oarsmen, and an equal number of helmeted men standing with long spears and metal chest armor. A lot taller and much paler skin than People have, he thought. He hoped this would be a friendly encounter, but still felt in his boot for his blacknife. Little good this would be against spears and armor! From a ledge on the forward edge of the berg, Strether talked to the boat-men in strangely lilting, yet understandable, Peoplespeak. The conversation went on for a long time, with a lot of gesturing, shouting, and spear-shaking. But eventually the head man apparently reached an agreement on terms with Strether. The crews pulled back their anchors and quietly pointed downstream. Strether came back to the crew. “A good sale, boys. All we have to do is wait for the river-net to catch us. Tonight, it’s cold potato brew and warm wen for all.” He winked at Rist. “Even some for our free-loader here,” he laughed. “So, boy,” he said, “would you rather ride birds or bergs?” And laughed again, “Or like us, wen?”

The river-net was yet another wonder to Rist. Cruthar explained, “The Warm Landers have stretched a real strong net all the way across this wide river.” He pointed at a dark, shimmering curtain rising from the water just ahead of them, more like thin smoke than the peat-twine fishing nets Rist was used to back in The Tharn’s Lands. It rose, mist-like, higher than the top of the berg. “Stay back when we hit it; it’s real thin and you can barely see it, like it’s made out of peat-smoke, but it is stronger than bog-iron. You get caught between it and the berg, you will look like minced beezt.” With the rest of the crew, Rist made his way to the back of the berg where their safety posts had been driven into the ice before leaving Tharn’s Town. They all held on as the nearly invisible webbing contacted the berg, wrapping the bow of the floating ice as gendy as a dry breeze, slowing it to a soft halt. Rist saw that they were still a long way from the shore on either side.

“How do we get the berg all the way over there, to the river’s edge?” he asked Cruthar. The river here was slower than back home, and many hands wider.

“Just watch, bird-rider,” the crusty berg-man answered. “This is the easiest part of the trip. We don’t do nothin’.”

Within minutes, several hands of other paler-skinned boat-men, all as big as Tharn’s Men back home but much more slender, arrived in two small boats sporting that same yellow flag and red wheel with its mysterious marks. Coming from either side of the river to meet the webbed iceberg, the vessels appeared to be clinging to the net in some way as they moved. Each boat had a tall mast centered in a rotating vertical wooden spool, which appeared to have cog wheels that pulled the boat along the length of the river-spanning web. Rist tried to imagine how the system worked, but couldn’t. But it sure beats oars and sails! He thought. As long as you only want to go where the net goes.

Climbing up the berg with pitons and twine ladders of some sort, the net-men went about their duties without a word. Rist watched these silent workers with interest; maybe he could learn something about that strange net and about what these men were doing. It didn’t register to him until later that not only were these unhelmeted men a much lighter brown that his own people, but that several had different colors of hair—some almost white, some yellow, a few even copper—he had been too interested in what they were doing with the mist-net.

Each net-man was dressed in a skimpy, dark-blue loincloth, wearing short black boots with spiky soles. So that’s how they move about this berg without slipping. Interesting! Better than us; they don’t need safety poles. The bulk of the men began hammering long iron poles into the surface at the front of the berg, with large hammers. The leader of the netmen, wearing what appeared to be over-sized gloves of some thick material, pulled out a cutting tool that looked like the clippers that the sewing-wen of Tharn’s town used to cut beezt hide and other materials. But it was at least three times as large. These gloves, these tools, were made for larger People, Rist thought. Why don’t they make smaller ones, for themselves? He carved that question on his totem, for later analysis.

At the end of a long pole, the large clippers were used to cut the mist-net apart. Rist couldn’t follow exactly what happened next, but somehow one end of the cut net wound up tied to several of the iron poles. The other side of the cut—to the west—quickly flew away to the man’s right, as if pulled from there. The men on that boat attached it to the tall spool on their craft. Rist guessed that it would be unwound somehow, and attached to another spool on the other side of the river. What kind of magical material is that? He wanted some of it; he could think of a dozen uses right away. And Rusk will think of more! he thought, grinning.

Within minutes, the berg began to move to the left, dimwise, (“East!” Cruthar’s word rang in his ear) headed for what appeared to be a town on the distant shore.

And what a town it was! Viewing the sight as the berg slipped past two more of the same tall yellow stone towers, one on either side of the channel from the river, Rist gasped again. This place is many hands times bigger than Tharn’s Town! he marveled as the berg was towed into a vast harbor—bigger than the lake at the End of the World!—by whatever mysterious force was reeling in the smoke-net. “It’s called a city, Rist; that means a really big town,” Cruthar whispered as they approached a long pier. “Lots and lots of people live down here in the Warm Lands. Different kinds of people.” Though Rist welcomed the information, his mind and his senses of vision and smell were nearly overwhelmed by all of the newness. More new things, more new thoughts, in this one dim—day!—than my whole life before! Can I understand it all? Then, recalling his sire Thess and his twin, Rusk—Can I use it all? To earn more coppers, to make new things? To make new buildings, as big as these, back home? Behind his eye-slit coverings, Rist grimaced in joy.

“We’re at ‘God’s Port,’ ” Cruthar said as the berg posts were secured to the long wooden pier. “Be real careful that you don’t say anything to anybody here about the gods of Tharn’s Land.” He put a finger to his chapped lips. “They pay a lot more attention to their gods than we do ours. And I guess from the wonders of this city, their boats and their machines and their buildings, their gods pay more attention to them, too!” Strether and all the berg-men had to leave their weapons and furs with a tall dock attendant, who gave the crew chief a big metal pendant to reclaim it all when they departed. The big man explained to Rist, “We get all of our stuff back when we leave, but we are not allowed to carry anything back home except the clothes and hand weapons we came in with. And a big bag of coppers!” He distributed a meager allowance of coppers to each of the men for living expenses, and then left to conclude his business with the final buyers of the berg.

Rist saw that during the pay-off, the lanky pier-man was dabbling with a pointed stick onto a soft, clay-like material held in a flat wooden container. “He’s making mud-marks,” Cruthar said in explanation. “They puts that clay out in the light of the Shining One, it gets hard. Keeps a permanent record.” At Rist’s astonished reaction, he further explained, “They reads them by touch, some says, but others says they reads them by seeing. Me, I don’t know.” Rist made a mental note to record that strange practice as well. Signaling with mirrors, writing in mud, symbols with meaning—worth remembering, even if they were of no particular use back home, as far as he could see.

With Cruthar’s facilitation, Rist was able to purchase a small bone-knife—no good for a weapon!—from a peddler at the end of the pier, a tool with which to record his observations and thoughts. He was carving his impressions as fast as he could, but was overwhelmed by the number of big wooden boats with colorful sails and pennants, and so many tall, strangely dressed people, both men and wen, even some with golden and reddish hair. Like those net-men on the berg! I had no idea there were so many different kinds of people! He could have sworn that some of them even had eyes the color of that weird blue sky. There weren’t many shorter people around like himself and Cruthar, but at least no one bothered them. After several jaw-dropping moments during which Cruthar laughed out loud at him, Rist was still astonished that wen could be so tall, and be out on their own without escorts. Several of them wore tight-fitting, wonderfully woven material strewn with colorful glass or jewels sparkling in the bright light of the Shining One. Amazing! There was something else about some of the wen that interested him, but his attention was jerked away at every step by yet a new wonder.

One of those wonders was the machine the Warm Landers used to take cargo on and off the ships. Rist could not quite understand the way that the thick rope wound around enclosed wheels—pulleys, Cruthar called them—worked. He knew the rope was made of thickly wound mist-net, but that was all. Back home, he had watched stonemen repair the walls around Tharn’s Town, but they used ramps of smaller stones and dragged big ones up by themselves or with beezt. These machines look to be much easier to use, he carved, but he had no method of recording drawings on his totem. Other devices of metal and more varieties of mist-net ropes abounded on the piers, but he did not see them in use and had no idea how they might work. His only comparison, the one machine he had any knowledge of, was the crude assembly of wooden cog wheels and levers of the water-powered peat mill in Tharn’s Town. I can see now that I have got to get Rusk down here, he thought. My twin would love this! He added that note to his totem.

Once, he jumped back in fright as a small velk approached. Me with no two-leg, no spear, not even a blacknife! He took a fighting stance with his useless bone-knife, but softened as he realized that the animal was no taller than he, and on a leash being held by a tall wen! Cruthar grabbed him by his shoulder and laughed, “Rist, them’s not velks here. They’s tame ones, pets, little ones. Calls them dogs.” Sure enough, the copper-haired wen sniffed down at him as she strutted past, the leashed animal patting along behind her, panting. Rist wasn’t convinced; peaceable or not, the dog came up to his shoulder. He shuddered as they walked on, then realized something. He looked back at that wen, and then others in the crowds. Unlike wen back home, these seemed to have a heaviness around the chest, covered by their smoother clothing. The sight was unsettling, but strangely attractive to him. When he asked Cruthar about the extra muscles the wen had, his companion just laughed, “Bird-boy, they ain’t muscles. You sees why we likes to bring in the ice down here, even though it be a long, long walk home. They’s a lot more to these Warm Lands wen than you be used to in The Tharn’s Lands. You’ll find out, this dark.”

Finally, leaving the docksides, the two bergmen walked through fish-smelling alleyways and pushed their way through noisy, bustling crowds of skimpily clad workers like themselves, though most of the Warm Landers were taller. As they went on, Rist saw other meaningless symbols everywhere—on the fronts of the buildings they passed by, on banners hanging across the narrow streets, on individual doorways—some just crude splotches of color, others intricate collections of shapes and shades, all just as nonsensical to him. His friend told him that the designs stood for shops and stores and brothels and many things you couldn’t find in Tharn’s Town. “You has to learn all of them, you want to know what they mean. Reading by symbols, by Seeing.” He led Rist to a nearby pub—with a plain peat-orange door, no symbols; “That color means it’s for workers like us,” his friend said. Inside the dark, smoke-filled room Rist’s friend introduced him around to his old Warm Lander acquaintances.

Any friend of big-spending Cruthar was a friend of theirs, Rist soon discovered. And he also found that most big Warm Landers looked much like his own people, even if they were somewhat paler of skin, and every one of them at least as tall as Tharn’s Men back home. Though they made Rist feel tiny when he had to look up to talk to them, he soon became comfortable in the friendly atmosphere. And in this pub, for some reason, at least there weren’t any of the fair-haired, sky-eyed strangers he’d seen near the docks. And no dogs, either, for which he was grateful. Leash or no leash, he didn’t trust animals as tall as himself!

Over a few hours of drinks, amidst the wild bar tales he heard and those shared—though he was careful not to mention the god from the Ice, or anything about the gods of The Tharn’s Lands down here—he learned something of cultural differences just a few dims—“Days! Rist! Days!”—travel downriver from home. Their Peoplespeak was mostly understandable, even if it had some strange pronunciations. Where Rist would say “out,” the locals said “oot”; where he would call something “cold,” they used a word similar to “kholod.” Letting his mind slightly out of strict control, hearing the words loosely, he could let the sounds pour in and his mind would usually figure out what they were saying. As he told Cruthar, “After all, in a pub there are only so many words anybody uses.” Cruthar shook his head, not understanding. “Whatever you say, bird-man. You be a strange bird, yerself!” They both laughed and ordered more brew.

In ordinary conversations back home, the People used many hands of words that described aspects and behaviors of the Misty Sky, but here, Rist found, the Warm Landers didn’t know most of them. Cruthar explained “Here in the Warm Lands, Rist, they’s only got a few hands of words for skies and clouds. They don’t have as many kinds of clouds as we does, they’s lives don’t depend on ’em like ours, so they don’t need as many words for ’em!” Rist acknowledged that profound observation with a smile and a nod. He would carve that portentous thought.

Over a huge meal of mysterious meat—“They’s called havs, Rist, little animals, one fingerth the size of a beezt, pink skins, snouts, grunting little critters, but they taste great!” Rist shuddered; Cruthar’s description sounded a lot like the disgusting little Cold People he had never seen himself. But Colds were definitely people, though degenerates. As he chewed on the delicious meat, he hoped that whatever animal produced his mystery meat didn’t talk.

As incense smoke filled the pub and a quiet descended, Rist hoped to pull as much information as he could from his companion. “What did the ice broker mean when he told me not to bring along anything I didn’t want to leave behind?”

Cruthar spit out his potato brew, chortling. “Bird-boy, didn’t you ever learn nothin’ while you were growing up?” Rist listened as the berg-man related the story of ice-selling and the men who did it, and why they did it the way they did. “Ages past, manyhands of hands of cycles ago, the bergs would float through Tharn’s Town and nobody paid attention. If we ever needed any, we would go cut off a piece and use it. Then for a long time, many cycles, the weather got colder and no bergs came down at all. The story goes that one day a group of Warm Landers showed up and got into a fight with the Tharn of that time, saying the People were keeping the ice bergs for themselves.”

“The first Ice War,” Rist commented, “I’ve Read about that one. Manyhands of cycles back. Far olden times.”

“Yeah, well our fathersfathersfathers whipped their butts and killed them all but one. The old Tharn was real smart, y’know? He let that one go home, and our people followed him, found out where he come into The Tharn’s Lands. Turns out they had carved steps in the stones of a rock cliff so’s that one man at a time could scale up. It was one of those rock faces we passed through on the way down here, couple days back.” Rist whistled. Some of those cliffs were hands of hands of man-lengths high. One slip and a man would fall to his death. He said as much.

“Yeah, well, they let that one survivor crawl back down to go tell his kind that we would sell them ice when it was available, and never to come back.”

“What kept them from sending up more warriors again?”

“That ol’ Tharn back then, as I says, he was really smart. He lowers stone-cutters down and they chips away those steps, one at a time, till there is just a flat place left, no place to climb up. And he stations a couple of Tharn’s Men there with dropping-rocks and spears to make sure they don’t try cuttin’ no new ones.” He sneezed at the thick smoke now making the pub’s air almost unbreathable.

Rist shook his head, the potato brew clouding his imagination. “But how do you—we—get back home?”

Cruthar leaned forward. “We have a rope lift in a secret place. We put all our coppers in a bag first and tug on the rope. If The Tharn’s Men like the amount and can identify us, they lower a rope seat down and pull us up one at a time. You see, we can’t take nothin’ else back with us. At most, our furs and weapons.”

“Where is this lift place? Same place as the Warm Landers came up to attack from?”

Cruthar lowered his voice to a raspy whisper. “No, a real secret place. We always make sure we ain’t follered when we go back. Some sail-men drop us off way upriver, near the rapids at River’s End. We double back a few times and then go to our lifting place.”

Sipping more brew, trying to wipe his eyes of the peat-smoke, Rist thought about his companion’s comments. “Sounds like a lot of walking to me. It only took us a hand of dims to float down here. How long are you talking about to get back?”

Cruthar’s short answer crushed Rist’s spirit of adventure. “Two hands of hands of walking?” he cried. “Don’t you have any two-legs waiting for you at the lift?”

Cruthar shook his head. “Bird-boy, first, we don’t ride them birds. Just you and your uppity kind do. Second and last, The Tharn don’t allow nothing that fast anywhere near the lift. Too tempting for the Warm Landers to try sumpin’ again, you know?”

Rist kept trying to get Cruthar to explain why none of the strange things about the Warm Lands—the mist-net, the huge stones, the strange machines, the mirrors, the shapely wen, even the new gods and the blue sky—ever got back to the People, to The Tharn. “You can bring back stories in your head, man. You can tell the Old Men and the Old Wen about them.”

The berg-man just sighed. “Bird-boy, there’s things we icers keep to ourselves. What good would it do to tell tall tales back home? First off, nobody would believe it. Second off, we can’t show any kinds of things to nobody. Then”—Rist waited while Cruthar struggled to count up to the next point—“there ain’t no Shining One up in no blue sky, and there ain’t no Pale Wen to show nobody.” He dropped his voice low, looking around the room furtively. “And there ain’t no way to make no coppers from none of that.” Rist nodded; his companion didn’t understand knowledge that didn’t have an immediate payoff. But he himself did. Was that something he learned from his sire or his twin, or both? Either way, as his sire always said, if you know something that somebody else doesn’t, it is always an advantage. The knowledge of the Ice at the End of the World had made his own family prosperous. Maybe this new knowledge of the strange and possibly useful things in the Warm Lands would help Rist bring more prosperity to his sire and himself. I just have to keep thinking like my sire and Rusk. And believe that it will pay off! Under the table, out of sight of everyone, he carved that thought and others on his totem.

In a low voice, constantly looking around for any too-interested onlookers, the berg-man went on to tell Rist about the several other Ice Wars since that first one in the dark past. Succeeding Warm Landers had cut other steps in other rock cliffs to get upriver, and waged other wars against The Tharn’s Lands. Rist nodded. His sire, Reader Thess, had fought in that last one, and still sported leg scars from his battles. And Thess’s sire, Thonn—Rist’s own fathersfather, whom he had never met—had been killed in one before that.

“Yeah, bird-boy, your family has produced some great warriors and that’s why you lot have a monopoly on ice-selling. Let me tell you about that time when another ol’ Tharn blocked off the New River, backed it up and then made a big flood all the way down here to God’s Port. Like to have drowned them all out . . .” It was a long night, and they both planned to sleep in the pub’s bedding rooms. But not until willing wen had bargained to escort them upstairs for other pleasures. His particular companion that dark, a very tall beauty with fiery copper hair and peat-green eyes—and a great heaviness of chest that was not muscle at all—was unforgettable.

The next dim-break, (“Morning!” Cruthar yelled) Rist found out from Strether than they would be in God’s Port for several more days. His eye still not adjusting to the prolonged brightness, Rist continued to wear the eye-slits to be able to navigate in the Shining One’s light. Meaning to make the most of his time in this strange land, and not looking forward to the long, arduous journey walking back to Tharn’s Town, he asked Cruthar to show him the sights of God’s Port. As they wandered back to the docks, around the boats with their mist-webbing and strange lifting machines, Rist felt the sky darkening. After a while he removed the eye-slits and looked up at the blue sky. Clouds were rolling in, a familiar sight, but back home they would have been backed by layers of higher, misty clouds above them. Here, clouds were merely little islands, broken pieces of Misty Sky. Within minutes, though, the blue was totally obscured by the invading darkness and rain began to fall.

As the day went on and the clouds thinned, the Shining One barely shone through the thin layers of high clouds. It looks just like Pursuing Dimness, the sky-god of The Tharn’s Lands! Rist realized. He was astounded. Cruthar and passers-by seemed to take no notice that the Shining One had fallen to his own sky-god, and that the Misty Sky had prevailed here in the Warm Lands. Or, he thought, could it be that Pursuing Dimness is just the Shining One, only seen through the Misty Sky? Even worse, could the Misty Sky be just layers of clouds under the blue dome of the Shining One? He reeled at the epiphany, stumbling against the rough stone wall of the alley-way. Cruthar caught him before he fell, and laughed. “Rist, boy, you all right? You still feeling that potato brew from last night?”

“No, my friend,” he answered in a quiet voice, “I am afraid I am feeling something much worse, something that won’t ever go away.”

After the rains dwindled to a mist, Cruthar and Rist continued their exploration of God’s Port. “Why do they call it by this name, Cruthar? Does die Shining One come here?” Cruthar shook his head. “No, but they do have a real big temple, where they worship the Shining One and his Mistress, the Pale Wen of the Night.”

“What is worship?” Rist asked.

Cruthar shrugged. “All’s I know is, they do it in the House of the Gods. It ain’t too far from here.” He pointed to a tall building that stood above all the others in God’s Port. “Over there, that’s where they talks to their gods.” Rist raised his index finger. “You told me that already,” he said, wrinkling his forehead as new thoughts poured in, Rusk-like, from somewhere. “But what I want to know is, do their gods talk back to them?”

The House of the Gods, the Temple of the Shining One, was the most impressive structure in God’s Port, according to Cruthar. Rist had to agree—the huge building stood twice as high as any other in the city, taller even than the towers along the river and at the harbor entrance—the largest manmade construction he had ever seen, by far. They approached the huge building following a paved path through high stone walls that led into a circular paved courtyard—Nearly as wide as Tharn’s Town! Rist figured, whistling in appreciation-capable of accommodating untold numbers of people. The courtyard was surrounded by a high wall made of more of the smooth rectangular blocks of yellowish stones they had seen in the towers. At Rist’s quick count, the walls boasted two hands of stacked stones. At several places along that wall, evenly spaced, stood even taller circular structures, each covered by a thick yellow fabric bearing that same red wheel-and-spokes symbol. Cruthar had no explanation. Lots of mysteries here in God’s Port, his shrug said.

As they approached the wide stairway in front of the temple, Rist saw that each of the blocks of stone in the Temple itself was as tall as himself. Counting by finger pointing, he saw that the blocks were stacked up a hand of hands high, an unbelievable height. By comparison, The Tharn’s Place, the largest stone structure in Tharn’s Town, was made of roughly finished gray stones cut from beneath the peat fields. Its uneven construction would not have reached a hand-high of these perfectly finished, smooth blocks. And no mortar between them, Rist saw, just stacked!

Like The Tharn’s Place, the modest stone house where Rist lived with his twin, his sire, and his Birther, Mell, had a thatched roof. But this place, the House of the Gods, was all smoothly finished stone, top to bottom. Through the three large rectangular doorway openings, Rist could make out gigantic cylindrical columns inside which supported even larger blocks of stone, making a ceiling. The entire interior was painted in bright colors, with some designs and figures he could make out without understanding, and manyhands of others too small to distinguish, even at a distance.

And stretched across the entire front of the building, spanning above the three entrances, was carved that same huge red circle and its external spokes, on a bright yellow background. The symbol on the towers, on the flags of the ships that met the berg out in the river, and on these big round structures in the courtyard, Rist observed. Without his recent knowledge of the Shining One, he would have had no understanding at all of the meaning of this repeated drawing. Back home, all reading was done on carved spindles, totems that you carried with you or Read at home, by touch alone. Colors—trim on sleeves and collars, splashes over doorways—showed your status, your occupation. His sire, Reader Thess, proudly wore the green trim of Readers, an elite few in The Tharn’s Lands. Though elementary reading was fairly common, a Reader’s expertise was required for research, writing, and archiving information for Tharn’s Law, for business transactions, and for family histories. By comparison, Cruthar, his sire Strether, and the berg-crew wore on their furs the orange of the common laborer. Here, of course, Rist and the other recently arrived people wore only loincloths and sandals with no distinguishing colors. Rist thought it strange, again, that no one here knew anyone else’s status. Do the Warm Landers have other ways of telling status? Or—and this was heretical, he knew—do they even have different statuses down here?

Ever the practical man, Cruthar brought Rist’s mind back to the Temple in front of them. “The red circle is supposed to remind you of the Shining One,” he said, pointing to the circular pattern with three short straight lines in each of the cardinal directions. “They believe that when their Shining One, their big god, sees these red marks, He comes to talk to them.” He said that the priests periodically conducted worship ceremonies in the vast circular yard in front of the Temple, and pointed out how three wide pathways between the high walls converged on the courtyard. “The Shining One lines up at different times of the year. That pole in the middle, they use to tell the time of day from where the shadow goes.”

Rist considered all of that new information. His twin, Rusk, had interpreted the scribblings of peatsants, large white markings scratched on standing stones in their peat fields, to be some kind of writing, a kind of reading done with eyes, not by touch. Although the concept had seemed totally alien and heretical back in Tharn’s Town, Rist wondered if these designs on the House of the Gods might serve a similar purpose. According to his twin, the god his sire and he had brought back from the Ice at the End of the World might also have used tiny markings on flat metal or horn-like material, to be Read by sight as well. Even an uneducated non-Reader could learn that the big red symbols meant the bright god above would come to this special place. So the gods of these Warm Lands make their marks large and on the wall, for all to see. It was a difficult thing to believe, but here it was. He was convinced the new gods down here did things differently than back home. He quickly carved that information on his totem.

“Now, remember, boy,” his berg-man companion whispered as they reached the top of the many, many smoothly carved stone steps and were about to enter into the temple, “these old men take their gods seriously. They love ’em. Don’t show any disrespect. The priests here run everything. This place is all the law there is. And they have big, nasty Priest’s Men to make sure it stays that way.” Rist nodded, wondering again why none of this fantastic information had ever been brought back to The Tharn’s Lands, if only for story-telling if nothing else. He was afraid his totem would run out of room with all this new information, and wondered if the Warm Landers would sell him another.

At that moment, a white-robed, bearded, elderly man came limping out one of the door openings to meet them and bring them into what he called “This Holy Place.”

“Welcome, strangers, to the House of the Gods,” the ancient priest said, raising the sleeves of his robe and motioning the ice-men in. “Here you will discover the mysteries of Creation and your place in the world of men and gods.”

Rist and his companion followed the robed, barefooted man—“You call him ‘Father,’ remember that,” Cruthar commented—down a long corridor fashioned from the largest, most finely finished hardstone blocks that Rist had ever seen. How did they make it so smooth? he wondered, and stack them so high? The painted ceiling had to be at least a hand of hands of man-lengths high, supported by cylindrical columns similarly painted. And the walls of this—“Temple,” Cruthar whispered—were painted with human figures of all colors, dressed in gaudy costumes. More different kinds of colors, all in one place, than he had witnessed in his whole life before. And more things he had not conceived of before: new to the concept of two-dimensional representations of human beings, Rist immediately understood them for what they were, though he could not make out the details. “Beautiful,” he finally breathed out, “the most beautiful things I have ever seen.” He could tell that there were other, smaller colorful markings completely covering the walls and ceilings, but they were too blurry up close, and too small to distinguish at a distance.

The narrow passageway opened into a large round room, empty but for stone benches around the perimeter and a low, circular stone fire pit in front. Lit by that bright light from the sky coming through square window openings around the top, and wider than high, it was the most massive enclosed space Rist had ever seen. The Tharn’s largestone house would have fit into this one room, he knew. And from what they had seen of the “temple” outside, this was just one room of many.

Maybe their gods do talk to them, Rist thought in a.we, for surely no People could ever make this building, not without a god’s help! The priest bade them sit on one of the stone benches, in front of a large fire contained in a round pit made of one layer of close-fitting notched stones. Another priest emerged from a side door, sprinkling powder from a pottery vase. At once the fire shot up explosively, sparkling throughout the room, emitting the most wonderful aroma that Rist had ever imagined possible. Even old Cruthar, the cynic, smiled.

“Outlanders,” the old man said, standing on a dais beside the diminished flames of the fire-pit, “what we have here in the House of the Gods is Truth: how the People came to be, how the world came to be, and what role you personally have in it all.”

Cruthar frowned, looking at Rist and rolling his eyes. He wasn’t having any of it. But Rist, eager to learn all that he could carve and take home, was fascinated. He had never thought of such things—had even Rusk?—but he was willing to listen. He wanted to find new ways of thinking, and here was one free for the taking. He hadn’t even had to ride a berg to find it! Well, actually he had, but the berg business was one thing; this Temple was another.

“In the Beginning was the Darkness and the Cold,” the priest intoned. To the men’s surprise, other white-robed figures emerged from unseen side doors, and began to chant, echoing the priest’s words: “Darkness, darkness, darkness; cold, cold, cold.”

“Then the Shining One smiled upon the world, and the Darkness went away for a while. But then the Darkness returned to do battle.”

“Battle, battle, battle,” the chorus chanted.

“After a long unending battle, the Shining One agreed to rule the day, leaving the Darkness to rule half of the time. But then the Shining One ejected a part of Himself to hold back the Darkness, the goddess we call the Pale Wen of the Night.”

“Night, night, night.” Cruthar kept grimacing and shaking his head, but Rist was being drawn into the whole scene—the fabulous stonework of the temple, its incredible painted decorations, the chanting of the robed priests, and the story of Creation itself. Back home, no one ever talked about Creation, and the gods were just, just—there. Like ice and peat and two-legs and velks—gods were part of life, and death, and stayed up above the Misty Sky, doing their mysterious godly activities. But down here in the Warm Lands, these people had a special relationship with their gods. In a strange new way, it was comforting to Rist to think of gods as protectors, not just as familiar things, like the Misty Sky or the Ice. Or threatening, like velks.

In the overwhelming environment of new and novel thoughts and spectacular surroundings, with the intoxicating odors of the sparkling fire nearby, Rist felt himself being pulled into a new understanding of the way the world worked, how it came to be. But where would he fit in? Why would gods care any more about him than they did about the rocks and the river? He hoped to find out from this strange priest.

The priest went on. “During the War in the Skies, the Darkness attacked the Pale Wen, leaving unhealed scars on her face, those that you witness every night. When the Shining One found out, he gave the Pale Wen a necklace of bright stars in recompense, which we still see yet today, after untold cycles of time.”

“Time, time, time.” Eventually the choristers departed quietly, but for another hour the old priest continued, telling secrets of the nature of the world, the gods, and individual people, and of the inevitable End of it all, when even the gods would die. After a long silence, sensing Rist’s astonishment at what he was hearing, the priest asked, “Do you have any questions, my son?” Rist did, and he asked.

Frowning, the priest replied.

Back at the pub, as evening drew close, Rist was seething. “That old thick told me that I had to give him one fingerth of my coppers, and then buy a hav—one of those tasty little meat critters we ate last night—so he could cut its throat and feed it to the flames!” He gritted his teeth so hard that Cruthar could hear it across the table. “Why would the Shining One and the so-called Pale Wen want such a thing? They’re way up there”—he pointed toward the ceiling—“and I’m way down here. What a load of beezt-shit!” At that, several patrons in the pub stopped drinking in mid-lift and looked his way.

“Not so loud, bird-boy,” Cruthar warned in a whisper, looking around and waving off the too-interested by-sitters. “I done told you before, this is a strange place, and you better not mouth off.” He sighed. “Hopefully that old man didn’t understand our talk enough to understand what you called him. But I bet he understood you didn’t like what he said.”

“Wen-licker,” Rist replied, grinning, “but I doubt he knows what that is, much less ever did it.” The priest had tried to explain celibacy, which to Rist was harder to believe than the weirdness about the gods wanting coppers and animal blood.

Cruthar shushed him again. “Just keep quiet, Rist, for all our sakes. We have another full day here, and we have to stay clear of anything that looks like priests, you hear? I told you they run everything down here. They ain’t got no Tharn or Tharn’s Men here, I done told ya, and from what I’ve seen, we don’t want to mess with Priest’s Men. They make Tharn’s Men look like gentle rabs!”

Rist nodded, wishing that he still had a shortspear or a blacknife to defend himself with. But the Warm Landers at the pier landing had confiscated all of their weapons. A smart idea on their part, he thought, but I still don’t like it! His bone-knife, used only for carving his totem, wouldn’t even penetrate cloth-padding armor.

Satisfied that the pub would stay calm, Cruthar sighed. “Let me take you outside this dark—they call it “night”—and show you something, Rist. You may respect that old priest more than you know, once you see it.”

Outside, the two men walked down oil-lamp-lit, wide cobblestoned thoroughfares—both features being something unheard of, unthought of, in the dark and muddy narrow streets of Tharn’s Town—past shops redolent with unidentifiable odors, some sweet, some pungent, to the outskirts of the city, only a few hands’ man-lengths distance from the guarded city gates. “We won’t go outside,” the ice-man said, “it’s a lot of trouble getting back in.” He made the sign of rubbing coins with his fingers. “But here close to the wall, we can see the daric sky.”

Rist looked up and saw night for the first time. “Gods, Cruthar, it’s amazing! The Dark, but with tiny lights—firebugs?—scattered all over. And what is that—?” Gasping, he couldn’t finish the question. A round, mottled whitish disk had risen right over the city wall, which direction he couldn’t tell. “Is that the, the—?”

“The Pale Wen of the Night,” Cruthar answered softly, nodding. “The goddess who fights off the Darkness so that he can’t ever completely defeat the light, even when the Shining One sleeps half the time.”

Rist had not been able to look directly into the face of the Shining One, not even with his beezt-hide eye-slits, but the Pale Wen, he could see clearly. The brightness of Her face, the dark scars and wounds left by the battle with the Darkness, and the many strings of bright jewels, all colors, scattered across her visage. “You know, Cruthar,” he said in a low voice, “If I had seen Her first, I might have believed that old priest in the temple. I would love to be able to speak with Her, and know what she thinks about me, about all the People.”

Cruthar smiled. “Bird-boy, I still don’t buy what the temple is selling; I don’t believe that the gods need anything from us. And we don’t need nothin’ from them but their light. But a lot of the story he tells, it does make sense, because I can damn well stand out here and see the truth of it.”

Later, back in the pub, Rist carved many, many more impressions of what he had seen and heard, what he believed and didn’t, and why. To his surprise, he himself was a lot more literate than he had realized. Maybe because before I didn’t have that much to say? After all, there wasn’t a lot of reason to write about every time he bedded wen or threw bolos at thicks and other vermin, or killed rabs for meat. Velks were another matter, and he was proud of the one he had helped kill along the New River, close to the Ice at the End of the World. The details of that fight, where he and his two-leg had slain the creature, he had carved on a totem that now rested with his sire, Reader Thess. But here, here in God’s Port, he had seen fantastic buildings, the temple by far the largest and most attractive, but still only just one of many, many hands of hands of structures. It hit him: Probably more buildings here than there are People in Tharn’s Town! He wished he had a way to count them all, People and buildings, but could only carve analogies and metaphors; the People had no such means of counting in numbers so large.

Cruthar rounded up a pier-man to come talk to Rist at their table in the pub. “Give him enough brew, bird-boy, and he will tell you his life’s secrets. Maybe even his wife’s!” he laughed. Rist smiled; he hadn’t known his crewmate could make a pun. Maybe there was more to the rough, uneducated icer than he had realized? But Rist had specific questions he wanted to hear and carve.

“The biter-web net? Ya wanna know about that there magical material?” Rist nodded. The tough, nearly invisible netting was indeed almost magical. He had seen the boatmen on his berg in some mysterious fashion untie ends of the stuff from the posts they had set in the ice, and watch it instantly spool up on man-length-diameter drums mounted on the pier. Incredible though it sounded, this net, three hands of man-lengths high, had been stretched across at least a dim-march of river. Yet it rolled up onto a spool no wider across than he himself. And most of that was the wooden spindle core around which it was wrapped.

“Them old gods made the stuff,” the drunken pier-man kept on. “Down here, the Priest’s Men are always digging it up in some of the mines, way down deep, where the old gods used to live. It always comes on rusted metal drums that fall apart, so they take the whole wad of stuff to their local Chief. Some of his wen unravel it and cut it down and respool it on wooden spools. Them biter-webs is usually many miles long, but so thin it don’t take up much space.” Cruthar quickly explained to Rist that a “mile” was the local name for about one fingerth of a dim-march. “A hand of miles for a dim-march, ya know.”

“How do they cut it?” Rist asked. He remembered the ice-men who had met their berg and reeled it in to the harbor.

“Each Chief has one of the God’s Tools. That’s the on’y thang can cut it. But no problem, there’s always God’s Tools around where they find the biter-web. Lots of ’em, down in the mines.”

“Biter-web?” Rist asked. Back home, biters were crawly, eight-legged, black things that hid in old caves and crevasses, sometimes in a patch of peat. The size of his thumb, their bite could kill a man, but only make a beezt sick. Their webs in The Tharn’s Lands caught bugs, not bergs. He said as much to the pier-man.

The pier-man burped and took another long drink from his mug. “Yeah, they used to say it was made from the webs of biter-bugs, but I seen lots of biters and they don’t make nothin’ than you cain’t cut with a blacknife.” After some urging and a bit of payment, the pier-man agreed to take the two men to a warehouse where some of the “biter-web” was stored. “Don’t tell nobody, you hear? They shouldn’t miss nothin’, they’s so much stored there. But it all belongs to them priests and I don’t want to wind up gettin’ burnt alive by them. I done seen that, and it ain’t pretty!” Thinking of the old priest’s demand for burning and wasting a perfectly good hav on the fire, Cruthar and Rist stared at each other and shuddered.

The next morning Cruthar and Rist met the pier-man at a storage facility, another finely built stone structure with a heavy wooden door and a hasp lock. After Cruthar passed him some coppers, the man opened it and hurried away, to their surprise, leaving the place open to them. “Maybe thievery is unknown here, you think?” Cruthar said. “Or getting burned alive is too much of a penalty for stealing?” Rist replied, and they both laughed.

The warehouse itself was a marvel. The men had never seen such large amounts of metal, of wood, of finely polished stonework. “And all the tools to make them with,” Rist exclaimed. “I wish we could take a lot of it back with us. Think of building one of those temples in Tharn’s Town!” He wondered where the odors came from—rotting wood? bad meat? putrid oils?—because they were almost overwhelming.

Cruthar grimaced. “The building would be a thing of awe. The priest’s story would be worthy of respect.” He shuddered. “But paying your coppers for nothing, killing those havs without eating them, burning people alive, they can keep all of that lot.” He pinched his large, pocked nose. “And these smells in here, they can keep those, too.”

Nodding, Rist wrinkled his nose as well. “Yes, I agree about the stink here, and the other part, too. I just wondered how it could be that people who can do such wondrous things with stones and biter-webs, and could tell such beautiful tales, could be so, so—” He didn’t have the words for what he felt. “Let’s just lift some biter-web and get out of here.” Cruthar watched as Rist carved his thoughts onto his totem spindle. The boy replied, “I don’t want to forget anything we’ve seen, or what we’ve thought here.” He held up the totem with his reading hand. “In fact, if anything ever happens to me on this trip, if I don’t get back, will you promise to get this to my sire? And don’t worry, nobody will take it from you. It’s in my family’s own language and nobody but three of us know it. Even those totems that your broker Reads, they are in our strictly mercantile language, different from what we use for archives.”

Cruthar just nodded assent. An in-depth knowledge and practice of carving and reading, he knew, was the key to merchant success in The Tharn’s Lands. He also knew that such training had to begin within a hand of cycles of being birthed, or one would never learn the intricacies of depth, width, texture, patterns, and arcs. Training had to begin with one’s sire. His sire, Strether, and his fathersfathers, all the way back, had been untrained. He himself had a crude knowledge of the mercantile carving and reading language, but would never be totally literate, not able to carve details like his friend Rist.

In the poorly lit warehouse, Cruthar nearly stumbled over a large wooden spool. Cursing, he jumped back. “Hey, Rist, I think we found one, but it’s different, come look!” Rist ran over and in the dim light, almost fell as well. “This is a lot littler than the one at the pier,” the boy said. “Not one-fingerth of a man-length round, and a hand of hand-widths tall. Damn, but I can carry this one by myself!” Smiling, he pointed to a large cutting tool and oversized gloves attached to the side of the wooden spool with thin wires. “We got everything we need to cut it and handle it! But can you hide it from the boat-men, lug it over dim-marches—miles—of stony paths, and then convince The Tharn’s Men to take it up the Lift?” Cruthar’s tone said he was doubtful.

“If I’ve learned one thing from my sire and my twin,” Rist said strongly, as if trying to convince himself, “You never know what you can do unless you try it. Here, let me carry it back to the pub. Hopefully without being seen.” Strangely enough, as he hefted the spool over his shoulder, he did have a plan to hide it and carry it back home.

Their next day’s mid-dim meal consisted of cold hav slices, some weird, sweet juicy fruit, and a dark liquid they called “wheat brew.”

“Tastes a lot like peat brew,” Cruthar said, comparing it to the cheapest, nastiest drink in The Tharn’s Lands. “Or maybe beezt piss!” Rist laughed. Today he was wearing a dark blue, long-sleeved woven shirt and matching long pants, purchased the day before from a local weaver, after they had left the warehouse. He planned to retrieve his furs from the pier-man storage when the crew began its trip back upriver to what he now thought of as the Cold Lands, using the locals’ term.

“You know, Cruthar,” he said between bites of the tasty meat, “We never did see how the berg was being used. And that’s the original reason I came on this trip. Before we go, let’s take a look if there’s any berg left to see.” Later he was successful in finding the same tall, copper-haired wen for a very satisfying evening. Now this is one Warm Lands discovery I’d really like to take back home! he thought, though every flat, skinny wen in The Tharn’s Lands would be jealous of her hair, her height and her, her—chest!

At the arrival pier the next morning, the icemen of God’s Port were still busy carving away on the berg, days after Strether’s crew had brought it in. Rist watched with interest as the tall Warm Landers used extremely long metal saws, mysteriously attached to complex assemblies of jointed wooden arms, to cut off pieces of the frozen water. A part of his mind told him to pay attention to something else. It took him a full hour of watching before he realized that the top surface of the berg, though large chunks had been cut away to be floated across the harbor to other customers, still stayed the same distance above the water level as it was when he and the crew rode it downriver. Why was that? He quickly carved a note of that observation, for Rusk to evaluate later if nothing else. In his memory, he had always known that most of a berg was below the water surface, hence the value of the specialized skill and experience needed by Strether and the other icers to navigate the New River and the long, zig-zag passageways of rapids at River’s End. “Hit the bottom, bird-boy,” their sire had said, “you turn over in the roaring river, it’s the end of you. The top that you can see is the easy part; the bottom’s what kills you.” Then raucous laughter. “Just like wen!”

He didn’t have enough time to watch while the whole berg was cut away, but he would discuss the concept with Rusk once he got back home. Maybe there would be a way to mine a berg, to cut away more than half of it, and still deliver one to the Warm Lands for the same price as before? He wondered if The Tharn’s smith could make such saws, and how long it would take these people to catch on to the fraud? He smiled. He bet that his sire would think it worth the risk. Rist’s risk!—he liked the concept.

Pier workers and ice-men told him that a large part of the berg would wind up in covered, hay-lined pits, to be resold to individual houses for keeping food cold. The rest of it would be transported by other boats and even beezt-csrxs to outlying villages and towns. Rist imderstood that was a good use for ice down here in the Warm Lands. Storage was hardly ever a problem up in the cool Tharn’s Lands. Everything there was either eaten at once, or dried as jerky for keeping. Peat-grown vegetables and some edible varieties of peat itself would keep for a long time in the cold, dry atmosphere of home. Lastly, the more fragile plants were stored down at the bottom of peat pits, directly against the cold stone layer two or three man-lengths below the top surface.

Walking back to the pub to meet with Strether and the rest of the crew, near the entrance to one of the walled walkways leading to the Temple, Rist and Cruthar heard a lot of crowd noise, some of it laughs, some of it shouting. They made their way through a knot of people to get to the scene of the action, whatever it was. To Rist, the jammed plaza they were in was like going through one of those forests they had seen along the river—nearly everyone else was taller and their arms and legs were like so many obstacles. Fortunately, Cruthar was adept at handling such situations, and within a few minutes the two were at the front row of the churning mob. Rist gulped; they were in the wide circular courtyard in front of the Temple of the Shining One. And tied to a post just a few hands of man lengths in front of them, stood the pierman who had taken them to the biter-web warehouse! A hand of man-lengths from the post stood a copper disk with the Shining One’s wheel-and-spokes symbol. Rist turned quickly, warning Cruthar to do the same. “Man’s got a blindfold on, Rist,” the berg-man whispered. “Can’t see us for naught.”

“What’s going to happen to him?” Rist whispered back. Following the movements of priests around the perimeter of the courtyard, he could see that the tall circular structures around the wall were actually polished copper disks, with a slight concavity to them—much like an eating dish back home, but at least three hands of man-lengths in diameter—which the men were uncovering, one by one. As he had observed on their first visit to the Temple, each yellow fabric cover bore that same red wheel-and-spokes symbol that Rist was now used to seeing here in God’s Port. What are those for? he wondered, scanning the horizon in both directions. It was afternoon, and the Shining One was about halfway down from the top of its sky-dome. Rist looked at the angle of that bright disk, to the large uncovered copper mirrors, and then at the pier-man’s post. And where the shadows stood.

With horror, he realized what the configuration meant, and gulped again. “Cruthar, they are going to use those big disks like mirrors, and—” He hushed as the crowd began to murmur. The reflections from the bevy of copper dishes were all being focused on the one copper shield in front of the pier-man. Its paint began to smolder and smoke; Rist could feel the heat increasing.

Suddenly, a priest appeared on a raised platform before the crowd, said something loud and gruff in a Warm Lander language. Somebody nearby whispered, “He is talking about the power of the Shining One, and what happens when His protection is withdrawn.” At a nod, another priest pulled a rope on the nearly incandescent copper shield and it fell over to the pavement with a loud clang! Instantly, the pier-man was at the focus of the concentrated One-light. He began to cry, then scream, as the Shining One’s mighty power, now directed onto him, brought his thin clothing to a smoldering state. Even the blindfold began to burn. Rist couldn’t believe it—They are cooking a man alive! And for what? He refused to think it could have been his own theft of biter-web. If so, he was in as much trouble as the burning man in front of him. Though he didn’t like to think on it, he and Cruthar stood out from the largely Warm Lander crowd, or rather, stood further down and darker. He wished he could leave, but that would draw attention. He didn’t want to watch any more, or smell any more; he had roasted rabs over fire and they had the same aroma, but they were already dead. He closed his eyes; behind his slit-goggles, few people would be able to tell.

The execution post itself quickly burst into flame, as all the while the pier-man screamed and writhed against the tight ropes holding him in place for his torture and execution. Hair ignited, skin swelled, blackened, and burst. Within a minute, the man was thankfully silent, but a bevy of priests kept the giant mirrors focused on him, moving some wooden machinery to keep the overlaid images of the shining disk constantly on the smoking ruins of the victim. Cruthar put a hand on Rist’s shoulder. “I done told you, boy,” he said in a low voice, “they is serious about the power of their gods. You see now what they can do with it.” As they turned away to leave with the hushed crowd, the berg-man said, “I am just glad ol’ cooked-meat there never saw us. It could be us smelling like roast hav now, ’stead of just him.” He shuddered.

As Strether brought the crew together that evening before departing, they made one last visit to the pub. Rist had wanted to carry back some of the hav meat, or maybe even a breeding pair of the animals themselves, but Cruthar said that was impossible. “Boy, we have tried to steal all kinds of things here and take them back home, but they search you on the boat when you leave, and The Tharn’s Men at the Lift won’t allow anything up but you and your coppers, anyhow. And your coppers first!” He stared at the boy. “I reckon they’ll let you bring that pretty blue shirt back though. Don’t weigh much.”

Rist was nervous. Still upset by the burning of the pier-man that afternoon, he had other reasons to feel guilty. Under his shirt, around his chest, was the entire spool of biter-web netting that he and Cruthar had stolen the day before. Using the God’s Tools, he had cut and folded the wispy material, trying first this way and then that, until he found a size and configuration that allowed him to wrap all of the webbing around himself. To his amazement, the dim-marches of material length weighed almost nothing. Against his skin, it was neither warm nor cold. The God’s Tools themselves, well, if he couldn’t bring them along he would just never be able to cut the stuff. But then, why would he want to? In his mind, he could see stringing it across the New River, capturing a berg, and slicing it away, making two bergs out of one. Would there be profit in all that? If you never try, you’ll never know! But the fate of the poor cooked pier-man hung over him like a cloud, bothering him, scaring him. Cruthar had said, “The fellow knew what he was doing! We didn’t force him to do nothin’ !” Rist finally accepted that, but dreaded getting caught and suffering the same horrible fate. If he had seen the execution first, he might not have stolen the biter-web. Too many ifs, he thought wryly. But if I make it back home with this net, I will make us rich! That was an if he could accept!

As Rist waited for the last decent meal for gods knew how long, a robed priest walked into the pub, followed by a hand of large Priest’s Men resplendent in their yellow chest armor bearing the red symbols of the Shining One. Several of the men had much larger vicious-looking dogs, big black animals straining against their leashes, snarling, growling. To Rist, they were just smaller versions of the velks back home, though those were half as tall as the birds he rode. Some of the armored men had those pale skins and sported the variety of hair coloring that Rist had seen on others in God’s Port—white, cream-colored, fox-fur, red. It would have been a most interesting scene if Rist were not afraid for his life. Pointing at Rist, the priest shouted out something threatening, in a totally unknown language. Rist quickly slipped under the table and behind the wooden bar-slab. Pulling out his totem and holding it up, he made eye contact with Cruthar. The berg-man nodded and sighed. Rist left the spindle on the bar-slab, then crawled out the back entrance, toward the piss-ditch to his right in the alleyway. Behind him the pub had erupted in screaming and crashes, barking and growls, the sound of metal against metal, the crunch of metal against bone, a cacophony of screams and curses. Making an instant life-or-death decision, looking back to the pub’s back door and then at the pit of urine and feces, he held his breath and slid in under the wooden shitting bench.

Ages passed while Rist waited for his life to end, caressed by the warm, tickling movements of masses of maggots. Luckily, he was able to brace himself against the cistern’s stone walls, lest he drown in the disgusting filth. Every few minutes, he would surface enough to catch a breath of vile air before descending again into the pit. Once, upon letting his face rise out of the gooey mess, he saw one of the armored Priest’s-Men standing above him, the huge head of the dog-velk visible through the shit-hole. In panic, he burbled down into the safety of his slimy prison. Eyes closed against the shit, he smiled. The sound he heard told him that the big man was just taking a piss.

Hours passed, as did many pub patrons, each adding to the layers of protection above Rist. After a long period of coming for air and encountering only silence, he popped his entire head above the shit surface and saw that Dark had again descended. Hearing no noises from inside the pub, he worked his way up, finally grabbing the shit-bench and hoisting himself up. Then he heaved out his guts, the stench of piss and shit and the maggots being too much for him to bear. He saw some wriggling white things in his puke, and puked again, even more than he thought possible. He knew he had to get away, but where?

At the harbor, by the welcome light of the risen Pale Wen, Rist found an area under a pier and took off his clothes to wash them as well as he could in the water of the harbor. The woven shirt would never be the same, he frowned to see, but most of the stinking mess on it was gone. His pants and loincloth, the same. He was surprised to see that where he had swathed the biter-web netting around his chest, the god’s cutter and gloves still attached, there was no clinging crap, no maggots, no nothing. Amazing! Maybe it is magical? But in his mind, he threw that notion off. Amongst his People, “magic” was used solely to connote something done by gods that People could not do—bring the Dim, the Dark, the Cold, the Warm, the rain. That sort of thing.

To think of a thing, a tool or material, as magical, took away some of the mystery and awe. And whatever the biter-web was made of, it still took a man and a large cutter—admittedly, a strange god’s tool, but still a man-operated tool, and the big gloves—to trim and handle the stuff. So it was made by some kind of larger people, some where. Some when? But—dug up out of mines, “where the old gods lived”—were those old gods the same as the one his sire and twin had brought back from the Ice? The large biter-web cutter and gloves, now, they would have fit that god. Rist sensed a pattern emerging, but like one of the wooden-peg puzzles he had played with as a child back home in The Tharn’s Lands, he couldn’t fill in the blanks without the pieces he knew were missing.

He had seen true gods, for a fact—the Shining One and the Pale Wen, probably the same gods as Pursuing Dimness and the Wen of the Mist, just seen through the cloud layers of the Misty Sky at home, but in a clear blue sky here in the Warm Lands. But they looked nothing at all like the god from the Ice. At home, it was said that gods lived above the Misty Sky, which protected them from the prying eyes of the People. At least that much of his former belief was true. But those disks in the sky, the blue sky and the night sky, they had no hands, no feet. It was true that the Pale Wen did have what looked like eyes, dark patches, and did wear sparkling jewels, but Rist was a practical boy/man: No hands, no feet—can’t cut biterweb nets or put on these gloves! It was truly a puzzle; he wished Rusk were here with him to think on it. Actually, he wished he were home, thinking it over with Rusk there.

As the gentle wavelets of the harbor of God’s Port lapped over him, Rist pondered the questions of gods and of his own existence until welcome sleep overtook him.

At daybreak, the Shining One rose dimward (“east”), rousing Rist from a deep sleep and strange dreams. The tempting odors of cooking meat caressed his nose, and he could tell they were coming from a small fishing vessel beached nearby. A fisherman was frying his catch, it appeared to him. The low-lying boat, only about two hands of man-lengths long, with a single mast and reefed sail, had apparently been too small to tie up to a high pier, so was anchored with a rope and a head-sized stone, resting onto the gravelly shore.

Rist approached, hoping to beg for food, but finding no one aboard. Maybe the owner had been called ashore before his meal was finished cooking? Rist calculated that no matter what crime he committed now, he could not be punished any worse than being burnt alive in front of that temple, so he would steal the boat. For a while, he thought. The owner can get it back;I won’t destroy it. Putting the anchor stone back aboard, he shoved the craft out into shallow water and pulled himself aboard. Using the two oars, he moved outward for some time, all the while afraid that an alarm would be raised. But all was silent. Clear of the piers and the big incoming cargo sailboats, Rist raised the triangular sail and tried to catch a wind. His total experience on water, apart from the iceberg ride downriver, had been in small one-sail boats in the New River next to Tharn’s Town. Even then, he and the others had depended on the flowing river to take them safely downstream, the sail only providing final guidance to a waiting friend onshore. He wished he had been more attentive, but who would have ever thought he would be in such a situation as this, sailing for his life?

The morning clouds that he had seen each day before were with Rist now, bringing a welcome, fresh-smelling wind out of the east, pushing him toward the entrance to the harbor. He smiled, tying the lines in place before he went over to the grill to eat the frying fish. That odor, added to his growing hunger, almost caused him to faint. The boat’s owner had thoughtfully left a blacknife on his table, which Rist used to fillet the fish. He gobbled it down too quickly, having to pause to chew and spit out bones. A loaf of not-too-stale bread—not peat, but wheat, Cruthar had said, whatever that was—completed his meal and filled his stomach.

The slight rocking of the boat was causing something to roll around on the table next to his eating plate. A cylinder of wood? He felt it with his reading hand. Carvings? Writing? Who? What? Gulping, with trepidation, Rist dared to Read the strange message. It was carved in crudely hashed markings, straight lines, no arcs, in a dialect similar to his family’s merchant-writing. Bird boy, it said. This boat for you. I got your totem. Come to harbor door. Use flasher. 3 flashes. Wait. 3 flashes. They let you out. Turn upriver. Not down-world ends that way. Try to find us. Two-masted boat. Red color. Cruthar. Take bath when you can, stinky.

“Cruthar, you old liar. You can Carve and Read!” Rist laughed aloud, scanning the horizon for a harbor “door.” Did he mean harbor entrance? Opening? But though he tried, Rist could not see a red boat or a red sail anywhere. Meanwhile, the strong storm wind was blowing him out toward the harbor entrance, which was roughly shaped like a snake’s mouth. A tall stonework tower stood on each spit of land, guardians of God’s Port. In the middle of the entrance, his boat was still very far from both. Rist wasn’t worried; no spears could possibly make it this far! But he took the flat, silvery plate and angled it to flash the tower on the upriver side. Three times. Wait. Three more times. No answering flash from the tower. Disappointed, he wondered what was wrong.

A huge splash not a hand of man-lengths from his boat told him what was wrong.

“What the—?” Looking up, he saw a dark object coming out of the sky from the other side of the boat, apparently from the other tower, rapidly growing in size. Rist didn’t know what it was, but somehow they were throwing man-sized stones at him. He had been blithely sailing in one direction, but was an easy target only if you had a giant’s spear thrower of some kind. He immediately tied the sail at an angle, and slammed the rudder handle in the opposite direction; the boat handled well, beginning to turn in a wide circle. He didn’t know how long he could keep doing it, but he would try to stay out of range from the one tower until it shot, and then move in closer while the other one shot. And if they both shot at the same time? In fear, he shrugged. “You never know till you try!” he shouted in the wind.

The barrage of stones finally stopped, so Rist moved the boom back and let the storm winds carry him past the entrance to the harbor, out into the wide river. And now what? he thought. I never learned to tack upwind—he’d missed those lessons while learning others from a number of willing wen—and I don’t know what’s on the other shore if I go straight across. Probably Priest’s Men and their nasty dogs. My only hope is to go downriver further, no matter what Cruthar wrote, then go ashore somewhere, and walk my way back toward home. Behind him, he saw large ships, sails blooming and oars in full swing, coming his way. The sails bore the red circle and spokes of the Shining One. That damned priest!

Night fell, and Rist was still sailing downriver. His pursuers had apparently given up the chase, or decided to wait until Day (not dim!) to come after him. Or, did they know something about the river that he didn’t? Something Cruthar had warned him about?

When Day came again, Rist was alone on the river and hungry, but at least out in the middle, where he preferred. He didn’t want to come across any more stone-throwers like those at the harbor mouth at God’s Port. On the lookout for more towers, possibly with other unknown weapons—maybe those burning mirrors? he worried—he was otherwise enjoying the scenery along both sides of the river, sights that were new to him. Trees, for one—downriver this far, the trees were giant, towering, majestic, each of them with more wood in it than in all of The Tharn’s Lands. Back home there, the only wood available was from scraggly, stunted varieties barely a hand of man-lengths high, with no clear lengths available for making lumber for boats or houses. Fine, long wood, he knew, was very expensive and only occasionally brought in by beezt-cart from some distant lands out darkwise (west, he corrected himself). Here along the river, though, stood uncountable tall, straight trees, probably where the Warm Landers got the lumber to build those big ships that had chased him before giving up. And those strange lifting machines and assemblies on the docks.

The little boat took Rist by distant shores of colorful flowers, beautiful blossoms in (again!) countless numbers, of countless varieties, some so odorful that he could smell their wafted perfumes out in the middle of the wide river. And night—night was beautiful. “The lights in the skies are stars,” the old priest had said. “And if you serve the Shining One through obedience and sacrifice, then when you die, you will become one of them. Ever fighting the Darkness, helping the Pale Wen hold off the Darkness that swallowed all Peoples in the dark past.” That one inducement had almost been enough for Rist to fully accept what the old man was saying. “Religion” is what Cruthar said they called their relationship with their gods. “These guys think they know everything. But if they really talk to their real gods, how come they don’t give ’em ice of their own? Why they buyin’ it from us?”

As usual, his berg-mate had a simplified answer to almost everything, but in this case, he had had a simple enough question, a question that was valid and needed an answer.

That night, as Dark unfolded, his hunger satisfied by a hard-shelled swimmer of some kind he had caught with a fisherman’s net left aboard the boat, Rist lay on his back and studied the lights in the sky that the priest called “stars.” Away from the firelight of God’s Port, he could see in the deep darkness uncountable pinpoints of light of varying colors, most of them fixed in place. The several hands of bright lights that moved rapidly across the sky (west to east, north to south; he recalled the new names of the cardinal directions), the priest had said were lesser gods that watched the People more closely. Ordinary humans who performed the sacrifices of blood and money, they were the manyhands of faint, distant lights. “You can be a brighter light, the more you give to our Temple,” the old man had said. Rist wondered if that were true. And if it was, how did the gods take you and make you a tiny light in a big black dome of sky? Can’t do anything with no hands, no feet!

The next morning, Rist awoke suddenly to a roaring louder than when the glacier had calved at the Ice at the End of the World. The boat was traveling faster now, which he knew meant that the river was speeding up, becoming either shallower or narrower. The width looked to be about the same, so shallower it must be. Looking downriver, he saw not far ahead only a sharp, close horizon, stretching all the way eastward, with no river beyond it. Recalling Cruthar’s warning about the End of the World down this way, he quickly swung the boom and grabbed the tied-off rudder, desperately seeking to get to the shore. Not knowing if he would make it before the boat was swept over whatever waterfall threatened, he untied the anchor knot and tied the rope around his waist. With the shore only a few man-lengths away, he lifted and swung the anchor stone as hard as he could, bolo-like, watching as the rope snagged in thick bushes overhanging the water’s edge. He jumped.

Pulling himself toward the bushes, Rist glanced over at the boat; in the near distance, it disappeared, sail and all, over the edge. He shuddered and shivered, hoping to get out of the river alive. The bushes didn’t offer a lot of support, and the anchor stone was already pulling the rope back down into the river’s moving surface. As he grabbed some stronger limbs, he untied himself and let the anchor go. The rope slithered into the water and was gone; Rist clung to the thickest branches he could get to, all the while fighting to keep breathing in the water’s spray. One thick limb appeared to be able to hold his weight, and he grabbed it with one wet hand. It held!

Slowly, Rist made his way up the limb, every second afraid that it would break under him, but he finally got his whole body out of the water and up past the brushy fringe of vegetation of the river’s edge. Once on solid ground, he lay on his back, thankful to be alive. Thankful? The thought hit him. To whom? Or what? Across the river, the Shining One was just rising over the trees (“daybreak” the Warm Landers called this moment). All right then, Rist nodded east, if You saved me, then thank You!

His life now not in any immediate danger—Unless the Priest’s Men and their dogs come this far downriver, he mused—curiosity overwhelmed Rist. He had to see what this End of the World looked like. After all, he had seen the Ice at the End of the World the other direction, as coldward as the world went. Now, the warmward End was very close, too. Had any other people ever seen both ends of the world? He thought not; somebody would have Written about it. Sire will be happy to know that the world has two ends, both seen by his son, the risky Rist. And Rusk? He will be trying to figure out what the length of the ivorld is!

The warmward End was close, and loud. The intensity of the waterfall noise hurt his ears, but he pressed forward, careful that he not fall off by mistake. And there it was! Over a ridge of large boulders that he climbed, Rist was standing on a sheer cliff face that dropped off so far down that, he thought, It is like standing on The Ice at the other End, and looking down at The Tharn’s Lands!

Downward, the scene was unbelievable. Mist from the seemingly endless waterfall to his left, east, filled the sky’, drifting in his direction with a strong wind. The thunderous waterfall, mind-numbing in its size, seemed to fall down forever, disappearing in the shadowdarkness below. Rist knew it didn’t just vanish because he could see the occasional flash of the Shining One’s light on water spray. Just like at the Ice, there is a lake down there, so far down! Looking straight out, the mist was less. Away from the shadow of the cliff, the distant landscape was being lit by the Shining One, that shadow moving ever closer to his location. A silvery ribbon of river meandered across the land, disappearing in the distance. The rolling hills down there were splotchy green and gray—trees and rocks, he concluded—but they also sported an occasional mottled rectangular patchwork of colors. It reminded him of looking at the peat fields back home, upon coming down from the high valley of the New River. Were those farms down there in the distance? Could there be people down there, past this End of the World, looking up his way, as he and his sire and twin had looked up at the Ice going through the Misty Sky? Did the other people down there have another sky, other gods, too?

But looking upward at the lightening sky, Rist saw clouds scuttling from his position straight out across the Bottom Lands, as he was beginning to think of them. No, the same clouds meant the same sky, the same Shining One and probably the same Pale Wen of the Night. As if to provide final truth of his observation, several squawking flocks of white birds flew overhead, descending at last into that same darkness. It had to be the same world as the Warm Lands, as The Tharn’s Lands, just further down. He wondered if the world even had an end in this direction? And when he thought about it, did the Ice at the other end, coldward, itself extend forever, or did it have an end somewhere, too? It was too much to consider without the thinking support of his sire and Rusk. He carved his speculations on the wooden cylinder that Cruthar had left him, fortunately having stuffed it in his pants pocket during the long ride downriver from God’s Port. Briefly, he hoped that Cruthar would indeed take back his other totem to his sire and Rusk. There was simply too much unbelievable information on it to be lost!

And then Rist saw it—the dark shadow that had swallowed up a fingerth of the Bottom Lands was shrinking, receding toward him, toward the cliff! But how—? Rist glanced at his own shadow, formed by the Shining One. Although shadows had been very rare occurrences in the ever-misty, cloud-covered Tharn’s Lands, they were literally a daily feature of life in the bright Warm Lands, where nobody paid them any attention. In fact, Cruthar had pointed out to him a standing pole in a public square in God’s Port where People could look at its shadow and estimate the time of day by where the shadow pointed. Recalling the execution by concentrated light that occurred tin that same place, Rist had ignored the one more strange foreign custom of time-telling by shadows, being impossible in the ever-cloudy dimness of The Tharn’s Lands and so unworthy of remembering.

But now that his own long shadow, cast where his body intercepted the light from the Shining One, was shrinking as that god rose higher, Rist could see that the shadow of the cliff down in the Bottom Lands was shrinking the same way. He knew that shadows were just the absence of the light of the Shining One. He wondered briefly: Is it possible to concentrate shadows, like those priests did with the light when they cooked that pierman? Would that make things colder, reducing the need for ice? He quickly carved those disturbing speculations and promptly forgot them. Survival was at stake here, becoming more immediate and urgent. He was attempting to ignore the hunger pangs that returned after his narrow escape from the waterfall.

He tried to recall the strange way of thinking that his twin, Rusk, had used when they were at the foot of The Ice at the End of the World. “If the shard from the glacier has a flat top,” Rist had said, “then that’s where the Ice ends. And if that shard is above the Misty Sky, then if we measure the length of that shard when it is on its side, we will know that the Misty Sky is lower than that shard is long!” Almost without thinking, he took out the signal mirror from his pocket and flashed its light from the Shining One down into the darkness below: three flashes; wait; three more flashes. His signaling hadn’t worked when he was leaving God’s Port, but it was the only flash-language that he knew. The mirror did not light up anything that he could see from his high vantage point, but maybe somebody down there would see it? If there were people down below to see it, would they recognize friendly flashes?

From the edge of the darkness below came answering flashes: three—wait—three! But they weren’t whitish flashes from the Shining One, they were small beams of red light, almost like rods as they shone through the dense mist of the waterfall, striking his chest directly as small dots! As he stood in shock, the red beam again flashed through the mist, again touching his chest, but now drawing figures on it, swirling, dancing figures! His near vision couldn’t distinguish what the symbols were, but they were definitely not random! Yet another way to Write, to Read? With tiny beams of light, from way far away? In one comer of his mind, Rist anguished over the realization that there was too much he didn’t know. Another part was scared, yet another part just intrigued.

His conscious mind reacted immediately. Somebody is down there! And they know this signal! But how did they signal back with a red beam of light? With dots and figures and swirling lights on my chest? How could they see up here, so far? And how far down are they? Desperately he tried to act as though Rusk were with him to make that calculation: I am standing on the top of the Ice—here, this high cliff—and my shadow shortens at the same time the shadow of the cliff shortens, so—? He couldn’t draw any conclusions, not having any experience in that sort of thing. But, I do know that the Bottom Lands are probably not any further down than the top of that ice shard was. And another thought crept in. How wide was the New River when the biter-web caught our berg and pulled it all the long way into the harbor at God’s Port? He looked again over the cliff face, into the mist and the receding shadow. Miles long the pier-man had said, dim-marches long! Could my roll of biterweb be long enough to reach down to the Bottom Lands? If it hasn’t been trimmed, then according to that pier-man, it is many dim-marches long.

Driven by an intense curiosity that he couldn’t explain, he wondered who down there in the dark had flashed a message back with that strange red light. At least they had recognized the signal, so they should not be enemies. And being so far away, they probably didn’t know of his troubles with the Priests’ Men in God’s Port. He considered his plight: knowing that his return home would be many-hands of hands of walking, a lot of it through hostile territory of the unfriendly Priest’s Men and their snarling dogs, and then trying to find an unknown site across the river where he had to find a secret cliff site, there to plead for a Lift by Tharn’s Men who would ignore any plea of poverty. With these dangers facing him immediately if he tried to return cold-ward, Rist decided to trust to his newfound faith in the Shining One. Hands or no hands, at least He gives me light and warmth! And shadows to help me find my way. Maybe He will help me out with what I am about to do, here! He had long since put away thoughts of how the same shining disk had fried the unfortunate pier-man. Those priests set up those mirrors with their hands; they did it, not Him up in the sky who has no hands! He still wondered why anyone could be so cruel; Rist himself took extra care even when killing rabs or thicks, so that their pain of death would be swift and not lingering. Maybe in these new worlds, somebody somewhere could explain such things? And maybe they have some food down there?

One of the huge trees was just a short distance away. Rist took off his shirt and tied it around his waist. Then, wearing the god’s gloves, he carefully unwound enough biterweb to wrap around the tree trunk, tying its whole width into a knot that almost disappeared as he drew it tight. As he walked away toward the cliff face, he allowed the biter-web to unspool over his head, like a sheath. When he tugged with with the giant gloves, the material held tight. When he relaxed his grip, he could control the friction. Not magic, but certainly very useful! He hoped that Rusk would be able to think out how such a thing could be made to act so strangely.

When Rist had unwound and rewrapped the long length of biter-web several dims—days!—before, he had been thinking of somehow utilizing it at the Lift, to be pulled up with it by The Tharn’s Men there, and to take it home that way. But here he was, preparing to lower himself down to the Bottom Lands, hoping to find better prospects there. At least there was no long list of known dangers like he assuredly faced upriver. Already he was missing his sire, Reader Thess, and his twin, Rusk. And even ol’ Cruthar, he grimaced. Not to mention food, shelter, wen, and a way away from the Priest’s Men and their vicious dogs and killing mirrors!

Climbing over a large boulder that protruded from the top of the cliff edge, noticing that the light of the Shining One was nearly overhead by now, with both his own shadow and the shadow of the cliff face almost disappearing, Rist carefully let the biter-web begin to unspool over his head, and with the god’s gloves controlling his descent, slowly lowered himself over the edge, into the misty distance below.

THE DAY THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Thomas Olde Heuvelt

That day, the world turned upside down.

We didn’t know why it happened. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault. Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the wrong things. But it wasn’t like that—the world simply turned upside down.

Scientists lucky enough to survive the event said that it wasn’t so much that gravity had disappeared, but that it had flipped over, as if our planet had suddenly lost all of its mass and was surrounded by some colossal object. Religious people, unlucky enough to survive the miracle, said that life was give and take, and that God was now, after so many years of giving, finally taking. But there was no colossal object, and being taken by God is a dubious given.

It happened like a bolt from the blue, at ten-o-five AM. There was a moment, one magical moment, when you could see us all floating in mid-air halfway up our living rooms, upside-down in whatever pose we had been in at the time—coffee drinkers drinking coffee from inverted coffee cups, lovers clinging to each other’s falling bodies, old men groping for slipping hairpieces, children crowing and cats screeching, all of us surrounded by the asteroids of our possessions. It was a moment of perfect madness, frozen in time.

Then began the groaning and the clattering, the roars and the screams. It was pandemonium. We crashed against ceilings and got crushed beneath the rubble of our old lives. Skulls cracked. Necks broke. Babies bounced. Most of us died on the spot or protruded convulsing from holes in plasterboard ceilings. Those who survived lay bewildered on top of them, trying to comprehend what had just happened.

But woe the ones who were outside. Before anyone even realized that the sky was no longer above, but below us, people started falling from the face of the Earth. In no time, the sky was dotted with tumbling people, fluttering clothes, floundering dogs, careening cars, clattering roof tiles, mooing cattle, and whirling autumn leaves in colors that set the sky ablaze. People sitting on their porches somersaulted until they landed on creaking awnings and stared out over their rims into fathomless depths. A mole sticking its nose up from the ground was seized by reversed gravity, and a whale jumping from the waves would never dive back into the sea. Tired of her burden, Mother Earth shook off anything that wasn’t tied firmly down to her surface. In one upwards thrust, it all fell into the atmosphere. Planes, satellites, and space stations disappeared into the vacuum, and even Father Moon was pushed away from us. We saw him dwindle and dwindle, until he landed in his own sad orbit around the sun. He never even said goodbye.

And me?

I was lying on the couch, not doing anything really. I wasn’t reading a book or watching TV. If the world had come to an end, I wouldn’t even have noticed.

I was staring at my phone, waiting for you to call.

• • •

It was the second time in two days that the world had come to an end. The first time was when you lowered your eyes the day before and said: It’s not you, it’s me. It was the last lie between us, or actually the first lie of not-us, because you no longer wanted an us. What I felt was the best thing in my life, for you had been a burden. Without me. You wanted to be without me.

My heart shattered to pieces on my abdominal wall. Large chunks of deep, staggering hurt and dismay at how calmly you announced these words, without the tiniest clue that this was the most painful thing you’d ever had to tell me, that you would die a thousand deaths rather than having to tell me this. You were the love of my life, and it had never occurred to me that you might take that away from me. I tried to pretend I understood, that I didn’t blame you for not wanting to try anymore, that all my frustration and pain were no match for your frustration and pain. I loved you too much to even be mad at you.

We stood in the corridor as I choked out the words. “Are you really, really, really sure?”

“No. Yes.”

“You said no.”

“Yes.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No, Toby. I’m sorry.”

In the silence I heard my shaking breath. You fidgeted nervously with your purse, searching for some way to open the front door. What a horrible, horrible place a corridor is: halfway between staying and leaving. I gathered all my courage and asked, “So we’re no longer . . .”

Finally you looked at me, with tears in your eyes, and then you slowly shook your head. I struggled to hold back my tears, but they came anyway. That broke you down as well. We held each other for a long time, close and tight, and holding you like that was the hardest thing I had ever done. Then you let go.

I smiled through my tears.

You smiled through your tears.

“Omnomnom?” I asked.

“Nomnomnom,” you said. And then you disappeared down the stairs.

For the first half hour I resolved to show myself a valuable and sound person and not throw in the towel. I forced my tears back into my eyes and started doing the dishes. But as your lips on the glasses dissolved in the suds, I was constantly being haunted by visions of other men caressing the skin I wanted to caress, kissing the mouth I wanted to kiss, and fucking the girl I had made love to for such long nights. Visions that made me attack the crockery with so much aimless remorse that trembling glasses took cover beneath dinner plates, and I started toying with the terrifying yet tempting idea of smashing a glass on the kitchen counter and slicing my wrists with the shards. Later that same afternoon, I discovered you had changed your Facebook status to “single,” even though it had taken you weeks to reluctantly agree to the opposite, and I dumped my laptop in the cold dishwater. And early that night, the emptiness you left behind descended on me altogether and I was alone, alone in the full extent of my grief.

It was late when you texted me. I was lying on the couch, not really asleep and not really awake. The shards of my heart leapt up in my stomach.

Bubbles is still at your place. I’ll come pick him up tomorrow.

That was it. No Are you home tomorrow? or Maybe we can talk about it some more. No How about you brew us a pot of Minty Morocco, which you always liked so much, and not even How are you now? Just: I’ll come pick him up tomorrow. From across the other side of the room, Bubbles stared wistfully in the murky water of his fishbowl, and more than anything else, that stare made it irreversible.

Oh, Sophie, you are so incredibly, immensely, inimitably dear to me. Why did you have to do this?

• • •

When it all happened, I had a throw cushion pressed to my face. Maybe it was some sort of effort to close myself off from the world tumbling down around me a little too literally. And so my landing on the ceiling was remarkably gentle. The plasterboards broke my fall; the backrest of the couch guarded my bones from breaking. In a daze, I crawled out from underneath it, without so much as a scratch.

The first thing one experiences after gravity has flipped and the initial turmoil has died down is not shock, but disorientation. I didn’t even realize I had landed on the ceiling and my living room was upside-down. I didn’t think of an earthquake, even though the air-raid alarm was whooping. Before I had a chance to form a thought or two, I saw something between the ubiquitous chaos of shattered furniture, snapped houseplants, strewn potting soil, dangling electrical wires, and splintered pictures of you and me—something that froze my blood.

Bubbles’ fishbowl had shattered.

He was floundering in a puddle of water between the shards, panicked.

And that’s when my phone rang.

I found it beneath a flap of carpet, but right then the air-raid alarm outside stopped and the phone went mute. When I checked the display and saw that you were the one who had called me, my heart started pounding. I immediately tried calling you back, but there was no signal. I tried again and again, over and over, whatever it was that had happened, you had survived, you had tried to reach me before the network failed, and Bubbles jumped up in a final effort to draw my attention, gasping like a fish on dry land, and then lay still, dying.

I was alive.

You were alive.

Bubbles was alive.

I jumped up lickety-split and started rummaging between the wreckage, but the best thing I could find on such short notice was your half empty bottle of 7-Up. I started shaking it like mad to let the carbon dioxide out, dipping my fingertips into the puddle of water between the broken glass and tenderly wetting Bubbles’s orange scales. But then the impatient goldfish swished his tail, as if to spur me into action. I took a sip, found that all the carbonation had dissipated, wriggled Bubbles in through the bottleneck, and held my breath until I heard a satisfying splash.

Fish and lemon go well together.

When I glanced over at the window and looked outside, the world instantly started teetering. I lived on the third floor of a three-story apartment building. The houses on the other side of the park were hanging upside-down from the surface of the Earth, which was above me now, groaning under its own weight. The roofs had released their tiles, and also the trees hung upside-down, just like the swings and slides and the laundry on the lines in the garden of my neighbor across the street. Utterly speechless, I grabbed the bottle holding unfortunate Bubbles, his pouting lips gasping for oxygen just above the soda surface, and crawled across the ceiling, over the upturned couch toward the upturned window. That’s where the depth of the atmosphere washed over me in a dizzying wave, and for a moment I sat there, frozen, afraid to even shed any tears, worried that they might prove too much for the wobbly ceiling. The scene outside was so incredibly at odds with the laws of nature that I wanted to grab on to the window frame to keep myself from falling up, but gravity held me pressed up against the ceiling and it was only my stomach going topsy-turvy.

I didn’t see any people, except for one: a woman dangling from the playground fence.

She was hanging from the bars, her knuckles white, her legs in the void, and her back turned so I couldn’t see her face. On her arms, two oh-so-bothersome Kroger bags were trying to drag her down.

With extreme care, I raised myself up and opened the upturned window. My heart in my throat, and my hands on the window frame, I leaned out. “Ma’am?”

My voice startled her, but she was afraid to look down, worried that the least little shift in balance might make her lose her grip. “I need help!” she shouted, remarkably calm for her remarkably precarious position.

“What happened?” I yelled.

“It’s Christmas time, all right? I can’t hold on for much longer!”

“Wait! Hang on there!”

“I had no other plans!”

“Sorry! I mean . . . I’m coming to help you!”

But by some unfortunate coincidence, the rusty axle of my bike, dangling twenty-five feet higher up from its chain lock fastened to the bicycle stand, chose that exact moment to snap. As the wheel dangled up there, the frame tumbled down and, in passing, smashed my open window to pieces. Startled, I let go of the 7-Up bottle. It flew out of my hand and landed on the bottom of the gutter, rolled away from the window . . . and stopped right on the edge, out of my reach.

Bubbles, in the throes of an acute case of hyperventilation, darted from one end of the bottle to the other as quickly as his delicate fins would carry him. I looked from the tormented goldfish to the unhappily dangling woman—“Please hurry!” she yelled now—and suddenly I saw your face. You had tried to call me.

In a world that wasn’t upside-down, you were the only thing that mattered.

I scrambled up and worked my way through the tumbled-over living room, over the knee-high threshold into the corridor, where strips of linoleum were hanging down and water from the toilet cistern had collected on the ceiling, then over the knee-high threshold into the kitchen. If possible, the mayhem was even worse in there: cupboard doors ripped from their hinges, open drawers, strewn cutlery, pots and pans thrown from the shelves and a ragged hole in the ceiling panels where the fridge had burst right through and from which daylight now shone. Quickly, quickly, balancing on my toes, I reached for the bottom cupboard, got buried in kitchen gear when I opened the door and, inside, found what I was looking for: the lashing rope for the trailer.

The end of the world creates two sorts of people: heroes and cowards. When the dangling woman had finally gathered enough courage to glance over her shoulder and saw me clambering from the open window, one end of the lashing rope tied around the couch in the living room and the other end around my waist, she must have thought I belonged to the former. Unaware of something cold that had seized me that same moment, she mumbled, “Thank God.” And not much later, as I reached and I stretched, as I tensed and I leaned, engrossed in efforts to try and get a hold of the goldfish in his bottle on the bottom of the gutter, the woman plummeted down, thinking of a long and fertile life, and neither you nor I would ever know her name.

At the end of the world, it’s every man for himself.

You had taught me that, Sophie.

It was as perilous as it was impossible to reach the blasted 7-Up bottle from the window. After two deep breaths I finally ventured out onto the gutter, keeping the lashing rope loosely in my left hand, and started shuffling forward inch by inch along the edge of the immeasurable abyss, my cheek pressed against the glass. I was terrified. Six feet . . . four and a half . . . three . . . until the rope pulled taut, and I bent my knees extremely slowly, reaching out, my fingertips grazing the bottle cap—that’s when the gutter snapped and tumbled into the abyss with me.

Everything spun; I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my jaws and waited for the snap of the rope and then dzinng the yank and my stomach flap from my abdomen and the couch smack against the window frame and myself whoosh, shaken like a ragdoll.

It was an eternity before I stopped and summoned the nerve to open my eyes.

I hung about three feet underneath the eaves and one light year over firm ground. The rope was cutting into my midriff. I realized I was holding the bottle. Bubbles was floating on his back, but he opened his stunned little eyes when I apprehensively tapped the plastic.

Now that I finally had a moment of peace—a word rarely used in a more relative context—I had some time to ponder the situation. The Earth in reversed perspective is as wondrous a sight as it is a frightening one: a ceiling reaching until the horizon, but nothing below. An enormous nothing. No shouts or sirens anywhere. Only, in the distance, the constant creaking of things breaking off and disappearing into the depths, along with disoriented birds trying to find places to land and sadly tumbling into the cosmos.

“Do you know what time it is?” a small voice suddenly asked.

I tried to turn toward the source of the voice, my legs kicking the emptiness. The two swings in the playground were hanging down in the air from their blue-painted frame. On one of them sat a little girl with three crooked ponytails and dangling legs, looking down at me with her small fists clenched around the chains.

“Er . . . don’t be afraid,” I said, not very convincingly.

“I wanted to go so high I could touch the sky,” the little girl said. “Mommy said don’t go so high, you’ll flip right over. But I did anyway, and now I can’t get back down!”

“That’s . . . inconvenient,” I mumbled. I realized I was immediately trying to distance myself from the girl. There was nothing I could do for her. She was on a swing twenty feet away from me, but she might as well have been on the moon. I started to make preparations to extricate myself from my precarious position.

“My name is Dawnie,” the girl on the moon said.

“Uh . . . hello.”

I slipped the 7-Up bottle into my pants.

“I’m a big girl. I’m five,” the girl on the moon said.

“Uh . . . okay.”

I started to haul myself up along the rope.

“So do you know what time it is?” Dawnie asked. “Mommy said two minutes, then we’re going home, ’cause I’ve got these groceries to put away. Except I don’t know how long two minutes is.”

And I faltered.

I thought of the woman with the Kroger bags, and that’s when then the loss of all the lives in the world crashed over me; that unfortunate woman’s life, but also the life of the girl on the swing, the life of a mother and the life of a child, the lives of lovers and broken hearts, your life and mine. Lives tumbling across the floor like pearls from a string you had broken, rolling around the house and then disappearing. The death of the world is a frequently returning phenomenon, but even the most visionary philosophers could not have foreseen how it had happened this time. Yesterday I woke up with you in my arms, kissed the spot between your breasts where your heart was, and you had been mine. Now I was hanging like an anchor from the bottom of the world, and the world had come to a stop.

• • •

Bubbles revived visibly after I used a straw to suck the water that had sloshed from the cistern and collected on the toilet ceiling and siphoned it into a rinsed-out 7-Up bottle. Next, I sawed the legs off the pine dining table, pulled panels from the hole in the kitchen ceiling and lifted the doors from their hinges. After my struggle to climb in through the window, the walkway was a piece of cake. Working my way up over banisters and landings, I hauled myself to the ground floor; a wobbly tower of mattresses and sofas then took me to the door of the apartment building.

How my heart crashed to my feet at the prospect of having to make my way through that upside-down world, dangling from a ceiling of groaning roots and foundations! But my wish to save the little girl was greater. The first hurdle I took by shoving the longest bookshelves between the railings of the playground fence and nailing them to the doorpost. Across came the tabletop, and behold: The first few yards of my scaffolding were a fact. I worked for hours and hours. My platform of window ledges and shelves, of mirror frames and doors continued to grow; from the stairs to the hanging fence, from the hanging fence to the hanging oak, from the hanging oak to the hanging swings, all of my possessions strung together into a footbridge across the emptiness. Working like this, my hands created a perfect reflection of what had become of my life. Maybe that was the reason I wanted to save the girl: Crawling around an upturned world, I tried to convince myself that it was the world that stood on its head, not me.

By the time I rope-knotted the carpet-covered drainpipes to the blue frame of the swing set, lowered the attic ladder, and told Dawnie to climb toward me, the sun had risen to the horizon and the sky was red as blood.

Dawnie lifted her full moon face up at me. “I’m scared,” she said quietly.

I was on my stomach, arms wrapped around the frame, the ladder an extension of my reaching hands. “I won’t let go.”

Dawnie hesitated. “Are you really, really, really sure?”

“No. Yes.”

“You said no.”

“Yes.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No.”

“But couldn’t we . . .”

“No, Dawnie. Climb up.”

Very, very, very carefully, Dawnie moved her hands higher up along the chains and stood on the swing. She looked at the ladder with fear and revulsion, as if she was afraid to leave the swing behind, as if she wanted to swing some more, back and forth, back and forth between what was behind her and what was ahead. Then she made a decision, placed her foot on the bottom rung and scurried up the ladder, quick and feather-light.

Later, when the sun soared up behind the horizon, we stared out of the living room window at the theatre of Earth’s vomit in the atmosphere. Dawnie stared with unabated wide eyes over the edge of her woolen blanket, Bubbles floated with unabated melancholy in the pure water and I unabatedly mourned my previous life, which had fallen over the edge of the world along with everything else. We heard explosions in the distance and the air was heavy with a burning smell that had nowhere else to go than to spread out against the Earth’s surface. Most fires extinguished themselves as buildings broke off and crashed into the abyss, dragging grey plumes of smoke behind them like falling comets.

“And mountains, are they falling, too?” Dawnie asked, a bit dreamily.

She had entertained herself by throwing houseplants out the window, but it had soon bored her to watch them disappear into the universe. Dawnie was young enough to take to a new normality without much trouble. I wasn’t. In mounting despair, I had been trying to get some news about the catastrophe, but besides the cell phone network and the Internet, all radio waves seemed to have disappeared as well.

“I think it’s raining boulders there right now,” I said.

“How about volcanoes?”

“I guess the fire runs out of them. Dead-straight pillars of lava, all the way into space.”

Dawnie looked suspicious. “But won’t that make the Earth run out?”

I hadn’t considered that.

Were you looking at the same view outside when I did, at the same upside-down world, and did you feel the same bewilderment I felt? Of all the people in the world, why had you called me immediately after the world had come to an end? And why not sooner? Why not all those times when it still mattered? Twice before I had lost love, one to another man and one to indifference, but neither of those loves had been as fundamental and natural as my love for you. If I woke up during the night and missed the weight that had dented the mattress beside me, I was terrified about you getting all too enraptured and wrapped up in the nightlife. And if you crawled into bed just before dawn, drunk and exhausted and instantly asleep, I would lie awake beside you trying not to smell other men on your breath. And so my fear of you leaving me created premature lovesickness: I missed your body as it was lying beside me; I yearned for your touch as your arm was resting on my chest, making the memory of it even more real and my heartache even worse. It felt like I had already lost you.

A downpour of falling stars drew lines across the sunken darkness: the last breaths of objects that had been on Earth this morning and were now falling back into the atmosphere. A fireworks display of thousands of dying things. I watched breathlessly, afraid to make a wish.

After a while I noticed that Dawnie was still awake.

“Mommy is a falling star, too,” she mumbled.

I realized she might very well be right.

• • •

The world hadn’t been on its head for a full day before a general consensus had been reached about how survivors communicated their survival: by hanging white sheets or curtains from their windows and chimneys. They constituted the first independent link in a uniform chain of interweaved rope bridges and gangways, stringing itself out in the days after the disaster like a spider web.

My hope that I could leave Dawnie with relatives soon evaporated. When I asked her where her father lived, she answered, “At Grandma’s.”

“At Grandma’s?”

“Yes, Mom and Dad got in this fight about all sorts of things and Dad said he’d had to give up all kinds of things to be with her and then Mom said oh, it’s that again and then they yelled at each other and then Dad went to live with Grandma.” She was silent for a moment before adding, “Do you think Grandma is upside-down now, too?”

I felt my stomach twist. “Do you know where Grandma lives?”

“Somewhere we always went by car,” Dawnie said, tugging at her crooked ponytails. “But I don’t wanna go to Grandma’s. Grandma yells at Mommy, too.”

“So where would you like to go?”

“I want my Mommy.”

I realized that Dawnie didn’t have anything left as well, just like me. So we had to share.

“Then you’re coming with me,” I decided. “And on the way, we’ll try to find Mommy. But you’ll have to do one thing for me.”

“What?” Dawnie asked.

I gave her the 7-Up bottle. Dawnie took it in her hands as if it held the weight of the world. She looked wide-eyed in through the plastic, and Bubbles looked wide-eyed out. For a second, something of immense significance seemed to be exchanged between the goldfish and the girl, as if her desire to see her mother and Bubbles’ desire to see you, which was really my desire to see you, were just one and the same thing. Then Dawnie’s face lit up in a wide smile, displaying her entire gappy set of teeth. From that moment on, Dawnie never left Bubbles’ side. If he was hungry, she flaked fish food in through the bottleneck; if he was thirsty, she added more water; and if he got short of breath she blew in air through a straw until Bubbles regained his luster.

At the end of the world, we all need something to hold on to. If we don’t hold on, we’ll have to let go. And if we let go, we’ll have to find our own orbit in the universe.

And so I held on to the playground fence. Tightly! We had reached it by climbing through the walkway door and over the tabletop bridge, but once there, the unnatural depths below our feet affected me so acutely that I seized up against the fence for several minutes, my hair streaming in the wind, unable to go forwards or backwards. I only dared to look up when I felt Dawnie’s soft hand touching mine.

“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said, showing me the 7-Up bottle in her little backpack to urge me on. “There’s nothing down there.”

That wasn’t just the truest, but also the loneliest thing she could have said. The abyss instantly lost its meaning. It turned into just another obstacle, one of the obstacles I could lower Dawnie down along or lift her up with the rope between us. Inch by inch, we shuffled toward the edge of the park and, deftly manipulating the attic ladder, reached the first treetop in the row of lime trees lining the street. Even though many branches had been ripped off by falling cars, it was relatively easy to use the ladder to climb from tree to tree to windowsill and back to tree. And so we zigzagged forward, a ripped-open Earth surface with power cables and sewers protruding like dead veins and bones over our heads, and every step brought me closer to you, every step took the sting out of the cruelty of your last words and transformed them into a message of hope: Bubbles is still at your place. I’ll come pick him up tomorrow.

“Hey, you there!”

In an easy chair on a timber platform, hanging a little ways below an attic window from a makeshift assembly of furniture, sat a short, balding man. On the boards beside him stood a thermos, and a steaming mug of coffee. When we spotted him, the man waved his binoculars.

“Relief troops are on the way!” he yelled good-naturedly.

“Really?” I yelled back, feeling a spark of hope.

The man burst out in a roar of laughter. “Of course not! I thought you were the relief troops!” He smacked himself on the thigh and took a sip of coffee. “From what I can see from down here, things are not looking good!”

I sighed, nevertheless glad to be able to talk to an adult. “What do you think happened?” I asked, gesturing around.

“Hanged if I know!” the man yelled. “The Earth pulled a fast one on us, now didn’t it! No Internet, no phones, no information! Last night I heard a loudspeaker message from downtown, but it was too far away to make out what it was saying! I’ve heard rumors that they’re building rope bridges and structures down there! You know, plenty of food for survivors and all that! But you’re only the second group I’ve seen come by here all day! The first one made it to the end of the street before they fell into the sky by accident!” He paused for a second, and then added, “We’re doomed!”

“How about you? Aren’t you going to try getting downtown?”

“Now you listen to me, son!” the man yelled. “I’ve lived here all my life! As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s seen both the construction and the demise of this street! What do you think about that?”

• • •

On the second day of our journey, we saw injured people on ceilings behind windows, waving curtains and begging, their hands pressed up against the glass.

On the third day, we found a string of knotted sheets dangling down from a bay window, where someone had gone in search of solid ground.

On the fourth day, my heart sank, because the hours and minutes were raining down in the universe and we were making such slow progress, and because I missed you so much, and because all ordinary and extraordinary speculations about the catastrophe turned out to be pointless. We had climbed on the underside of the bridge, now suspended below the river. The road surface had fallen off, but the iron frame was still intact and a few concrete slabs were still fixed to the pylons. And believe it or not: the water was still there. Flowing like liquid lead across the ceiling of the Earth’s surface, it spat the laws of nature in the eye. In places where the surface heaved, the water rained down in a soft, windblown mist, as if the river surface itself was the plane where gravity flipped over.

“Why isn’t the river falling down?” Dawnie asked.

I wanted to say something—I think Earth was simply fed up with us—but before I had a chance, Dawnie got bowled over by a hang glider that suddenly came hurtling through the space between the river and the bridge. My hand darted out to grab her little backpack before she and Bubbles in the bottle could tumble away. The aviator whooped, circled around in the airspace below us, and came flying toward us from the front. For a second, it seemed like he was going to crash, but in the last instant he pulled the hang glider’s nose up, slowing down and losing lift right over the underside of the bridge. He landed with a clumsy, stumbling step and stopped, dragging the delta wing behind him. “Rescue-squad, at your service,” the aviator said. “Women and children first, please.”

“That was . . . spectacular,” I stammered.

“Thank you, thank you,” the man said, unclipping himself from his contraption. “Municipal service. Only way of picking up survivors and getting them to the evacuation centers.”

“There are evacuation centers?” I asked incredulously.

“In the basement below city hall.”

“And the city had one of those . . . flying things?”

“Three, actually,” the aviator grinned. “Haven’t you seen my associates around? Maybe they haven’t been to this part of town yet.” He lowered himself to his knee in front of Dawnie and took her hand. “Hello there, big girl. How would you like to go flying?” Then he looked up at me. “Sorry, children first. It’s protocol. I’ll come back for you later.”

Dawnie shifted a forlorn look from the aviator to me. Something in her eyes alarmed me. Something wasn’t right.

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, in an effort to stall for time more than anything else.

“Thermal holds the wing up,” the aviator said, straightening and moving his hand to Dawnie’s back. “Warm air rises up and all that shit. Now that everything’s upside-down, it’s all thermal. Falling crap, that’s what you don’t want.”

“And where do you land?”

“Bridges, roofs, hangars with loading bays . . . even trees will work, but they’ll screw up your wing.”

“I meant at city hall . . .”

“Holy fuck! Look at that!” the aviator said, turning toward the river flowing past over our heads, looking solid. “That’s like magic.” He had shrugged off his harness and started stripping off his clothes, as if he was planning on going for a swim. Suddenly I was sure. There was no evacuation center, no municipal rescue-squad, no protocol. The man was a flying predator. He had been circling around like a hawk and had spotted his prey. He would fly off with Dawnie, and I would wait, but no one would come back.

In his underwear, the aviator started climbing the iron frame around the bridge pylon toward the river. He had all the time in the world. We had nowhere to go, and he knew it. But just then, Bubbles jumped up from the water in the 7-Up bottle with a significant slosh, and Dawnie and I exchanged a glance. In an instant, I slipped into the harness and fastened the straps. The aviator had reached the lead-grey surface of the water and carefully lifted his arm. Gesturing frantically, I urged Dawnie to hurry. The aviator’s hand slipped through the surface . . . and water from the river started trickling down his arm in small rivulets.

“Awesome . . .” he breathed, his gaze following the water drip onto the bridge below . . . when he suddenly caught sight of us and yelled, “Hey, what the hell are you doing!”

“Hang on!” I shouted, hurling Dawnie on to my back, grabbing the hang glider’s frame, fastening carabiners and fastening Dawnie, hoping-praying-begging let the belt around her pants carry her, small arms around my neck and the aviator jumping down right behind us and me running with my breath in my throat and my eyes closed and one second to think: Are those carabiners clipped on right? And then we plummeted from the bridge and started spiraling down like madmen.

And a yank and a dizzying nose dive, and the world contracted. The hang glider righted itself and we were flying. I screamed, realizing I had never flown before, not without wings and not with them. The aviator screamed on the bridge, already far behind us now. And Dawnie . . . she didn’t scream, but held on tightly to my back, her hands covering my eyes as she herself gazed around in delight.

• • •

It is relatively easy to fly a hang glider if the need arises, but landing while there is no ground to land on? That’s a more complicated matter.

I was afraid to fly more than a small distance beneath the Earth’s surface. That turned out to be simple, since the thermal from the fires hovering between the splintered rooftops and the smoke did indeed continue to lift the delta wing up. By moving my balance on the bar to the front, I dove down and prevented us from slamming into the Earth, and after some experimenting I could steer the delta wing by shifting my weight to the left and right.

For the first time since your it’s not you, it’s me, a new feeling washed over me: a sense of freedom, at least temporarily pushing my desire to be someone else and somewhere else into the back of my mind.

After a while, a flock of geese came flying in our tail. I wondered where they had come from; they were just there, suddenly. I set a course for you and the geese winged along beside us.

The dead Earth was a thing of fabulous beauty.

We saw lovers, hugging each other in trees. We saw children, pulling small buckets of food and folded notes back and forth on clotheslines between upside-down windows. We saw people finding each other on the jumbled strings of assemblies they were building, forging the umbilical cord of a new society. And after a while we had left the city behind and all we saw were trees, their branches drooping sadly and their leaves fluttering away into the bottomless depths of the atmosphere, making it seem as if the Earth was weeping green tears.

We were very close to where you lived when Dawnie pointed and said, “There’s where we can go and see Mommy!”

Suspended in the air in front of us was a seemingly endless rope ladder, undulating calmly in the sultry breeze. As we neared it, I saw that the ladder hung from a trapdoor in the roof of a caravan, dangling from the face of the Earth by iron chains. A higgledy-piggledy board walkway connected it to a small, ramshackle, upside-down house from which enormous amounts of flaxen rope moved toward the peculiar trailer in spun cobwebs, as if some kind of machinery in there was perpetually working.

I circled the rope ladder and decided to crash in the apple orchard around the house. Slender tree trunks, lots of branches, and a lower boundary consisting of a thick canopy: It was iffy at best, but I guessed we wouldn’t find a better place.

“Hold on to me very tightly,” I told Dawnie. “And whatever you do, don’t let go!”

Next thing, everything was jolting and swishing around us. Branches whipped, leaves swirled, shrieking birds burst off in flight. The delta wing snapped and tore and suddenly we stopped, the twisted frame pierced by branches. They broke, and we fell down through a nauseating air pocket, surrounded by the sickly smell of apples, before the canopy caught us and I managed to grab onto a tree trunk.

A window in the caravan popped open and a frail woman looking older than the Earth itself leaned out. “My goodness!” she yelled. “Are you all right?”

“I . . . think so . . .” I stammered. And promptly Dawnie rolled off my back and ended up dangling in the vacuum beneath the apple tree, her face a mask of bewilderment, a thousand thanks to the carabiner on her belt. I hoisted her up, unclipped her and put her in the crown of the apple tree. We had survived the impact with no more than a few scratches and some ripped clothes.

“You’d better hurry inside,” the woman said. “You two look like you could use a cup of tea.”

A little while later we shuffled across the rickety footbridge, fastened to large hooks drilled into the Earth, toward the hanging trailer, careful not to get entangled in the rustling cobwebs of flaxen rope. Inside, my jaw dropped to the floor in surprise. The small caravan was literally crammed full of flax. The woman who had hailed us from the window now sat in a rocking chair and was twining the flax together in thick strings. A second, almost identical old lady was knotting the strings into a rope ladder and feeding it through the trapdoor in the floor.

“Be careful,” the second woman said worriedly. “You don’t want to fall through that. You have no idea how deep it is.”

“Of course they do, Junilla,” her sister argued. “They’ve just come from down there.”

“But do they know how deep it is?” The little lady gazed at me expectantly, and I shrugged to be polite. “That’s my point, Leonilla,” she said, resolutely fastening a knot. “No one knows.”

They gave us steaming cups of herbal tea. Then the woman named Junilla turned to Dawnie like only old ladies can, her industrious hands never missing a beat. “What have you got there, sweet thing?”

Shyly twisting her body back and forth, Dawnie showed her the 7-Up bottle. The woman peered curiously inside from behind her thick lenses and Bubbles looked out through the thin plastic with unwavering melancholy.

“A goldfish!” Junilla cried out in dismay. “What a terrible, terrible place for a goldfish.”

“Terrible!” her sister Leonilla concurred. “A goldfish! That’s the most terrible thing anyone could put inside a bottle.”

“Gin, yes . . .” Junilla said.

“Or a love letter . . .” Leonilla backed her up.

“But not a goldfish!”

“It is a love letter,” I blurted out. Suddenly my voice trembled. “Or maybe not really. Well, actually, basically it is.” And before I knew it, I told the two women my story. I told them how your last words had prematurely ended the world, and how your last phone call had offered sufficient justification to try and bring you Bubbles—an impossible quest in an impossible world as a last impossible token of my love for you, because nothing was right in the world without you anyway, at least not for me, and never could be again. It didn’t come as a relief to talk about it, my heart didn’t feel an ounce lighter. I only realized I was crying when Dawnie caught my tears in the 7-Up bottle, making Bubbles think it was raining and to everyone’s surprise, urging him to somersault playfully.

“Poor thing,” Leonilla said, shaking her head.

“Poor, poor thing,” Junilla put it more strongly.

“A goldfish in a bottle . . .”

“Forever trapped in the same circle . . .”

“The same, depressing circle . . .”

“You should let go of her,” Junilla said decidedly. But how, how, how could I ever let go of you, when there wasn’t a moment that passed without me wishing I could hold you close to me—so that, just for a short while, the world would no longer be upside-down? On an impulse, I pressed Dawnie close to me, and there and then, I was overwhelmed by grief and I cried, inconsolable and heart-broken. Not just because of the void you had left behind, but also because I now had to fill it with someone else. When a person’s dreams are taken away from them, they will desperately cling to new ones, no matter how empty those dreams are.

Oh, Sophie, I miss you so much.

“Things change, sweetheart, that’s just the way it is,” Junilla said, laying a frail hand on my heaving shoulders.

“It’s better to be prepared for change,” Leonilla said.

“So that it doesn’t take you by surprise when it comes.”

“Take the world, for instance,” Leonilla declared.

“The Earth!” Junilla emphasized. “What if the Earth, every once in a while, simply lets go? Takes a good look at what it’s got, shivers, and shakes it all off?” And the old woman shivered after her own words.

“It’s a good thing we were prepared,” Leonilla said, giving a disconcerting yank on the flaxen rope entering the trailer through the window.

“Were we ever,” Junilla confirmed. “We’re packing our bags!”

My eyes hot and wet, I stared at the trapdoor in the floor. “Where are you going?”

“Haven’t you seen all those falling stars at night?” Junilla asked. “It must be wonderful down there!”

“Oh, yes, wonderful!” Leonilla said. “Miraculous, I’d say.”

“That’s where we’re going!”

Dawnie’s little voice was almost lost amidst the lively exclamations of the old women when she peered around the 7-Up bottle and said, “My Mommy is a falling star, too.”

There was a brief silence. “Really?” Leonilla responded. “How wonderful for her! That means you get to make a wish, my dear.”

Dawnie’s eyes widened and she writhed in embarrassment. “Can I . . . can I come with you?”

“But of course, darling!” Junilla said. “If Toby here doesn’t mind . . .”

I nodded mutely, swallowing back fresh tears.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Junilla sighed. “Why won’t you just let go?”

“Nothing is worth clinging on to like that,” Leonilla said.

And then, shaking her head, “A goldfish in a bottle . . .”

Right then I lost track of whether we were talking about Bubbles, about you, or about me, and whether or not it made any difference.

• • •

All the times I had come in here before were like drops of honey sticking to my fingertips as I jammed the gangway between the final oak tree and the kitchen window frame. Mad with lust as a teenager in love sneaking through your bedroom window, whispering so your parents wouldn’t hear us. Shaking with laughter as I carried you across the backdoor threshold after a morning stroll filled with calm nonsense out by the lake. With leaden feet after more new tales I knew to be lies, still desperately trying to believe them—because after all, lies are meant to fill a void and I didn’t want you to have to live with a void. And now with your decision to go on without me heaped in the palms of my hands, and the power to reconsider in yours.

My heart leapt into my throat when I saw the white-painted, mirrored letters on the window in the façade:

HELP

So you were still alive. Your house hung upside-down and it was a ruin of crumbling memories, but you were still alive.

“Sophie.”

I stood on the ceiling of what remained of the kitchen and listened to the inverted silence.

And then, a landslide: “Toby?”

My name.

Your voice.

I clambered through the door into the living room. I found more ravages of tumbled furniture, piled up all the way to the sagging floorboards. But you had cleared the middle of the ceiling and there you were, lying on the couch.

“It’s really you,” you said, trying to push yourself up.

I shrugged, embarrassed. “Of course.”

“I thought you were dead.”

I took the 7-Up bottle from my backpack and held it up. “I brought Bubbles for you.”

Your incredulous gaze moved from the goldfish inside the bottle to me. “But how did you get all the way . . .”

I shrugged again.

You grinned. “You’re insane, aren’t you?”

“You know that.”

Your universe.

My universe.

I descended as you rose and I folded you—the fragile reality that was you—in my arms. You pressed stiffly against me and we sank down onto the couch. Your smell—evidently and impossibly Sophie—was so overwhelming and carried so much weight that I had to surrender to it utterly, no matter what might come after. It drove me mad. It didn’t matter. And so I buried my face in your neck and inhaled your scent like a drug, immersing myself greedily in your presence. We lay there like that for a long time, intimately entangled, in a perfect, pure state of being.

“Everything okay?” I asked, moist lips against your earlobe.

“Yes. I think so, yes.” Hot air from your innermost self in my hair. “I think my kneecap’s broken. And my back hurts really bad.”

“Were you in bed?”

“Underneath it.”

“It’s okay. I’m here now.” I caressed the gossamer, downy hairs behind your ear, the curve of your neck.

“Toby.”

“Sssh.”

“But . . .”

“It’s okay.”

“Everything is truly, seriously fucked up, isn’t it?”

I pushed gently away from you so I could look you in the eye. “You called me.”

“Yes.”

“Sophie.”

You let go of me and hoisted yourself up, because you couldn’t handle the situation.

But I clasped your hand and said, “I’ve missed you, Sophie.”

“Stop it.” A tear trickled down your cheek. “I’m so worried about Mom and Dad. I haven’t heard from them. I haven’t seen anyone since it happened, not a single soul. Do you know if help is coming?”

I felt myself growing faint inside. “I came, didn’t I?”

You looked at me for a long time. “I’m sorry about how it all turned out.”

“Yeah. Me too,” I said. “I liked it better when everything was still right-side up. Made it a lot easier to see each other.”

“Toby.”

“Well, sorry—” My voice shook, looking for purchase. “—I just don’t know how to deal with it. Everything has changed now, right? Can’t we . . .”

“Toby.”

“But couldn’t we—”

“Don’t, Toby.”

I couldn’t hold back my tears. “But I’ll do everything differently.”

“You weren’t the one who had to do things differently.”

“I can’t handle this alone.”

“Sure you can.”

“But I love you.”

Remember how you looked away then, like you always used to? Your eyes too heavy, a bottomless depth inside them. I was torn away from you; I fell and I fell, and then splash into a bottle full of fizzing tears. A whirling vortex sucked me deeper and deeper below the water, propelled by the force of you looking away. In a panic, I kicked my legs and vainly groped for purchase on smooth, plastic walls.

“I love you!” I tried to scream, but my love rose in bubbles to the surface and burst apart. Weakened, I wheeled my arms, pounding on the plastic. And behind the label you looked away; you didn’t see that I was drowning. I sank down in a slow spiral, hitting the bottom of the 7-Up bottle with a muffled thump.

My lungs filled up with tears as I whispered, “Please . . .”

And you said, “I need time.”

I came up then, spluttering and gasping for breath. Soaked and flabbergasted, I let the lie of those words descend on me. As soon as I was able, I clambered up and staggered out of the living room.

“Where are you going?”

“I’ll get you some aspirin,” I mumbled stupidly.

“Wait!”

But I had already gone through the kitchen and didn’t hear you. Hanging from the banister, I lowered myself to the upstairs floor. After everything I had been through, after the countless times I had risked my life to take Bubbles to you, trying in vain to still my love for you with my love for you, and scrambling up from the pounding surf of a dying Earth . . . you need time? How much more time do you think the world will give you, Sophie?

I crashed into the bulging ceiling, and it groaned beneath my weight. If the house had given way right then, I wouldn’t have cared. But I wasn’t even granted that much mercy—I was predestined to go down in your cold reality, not in my own illusion.

The bedroom. My picture wasn’t on your wall. I wanted to believe it had fallen and splintered, I wanted to believe that more than anything in the world. Other photo frames lay broken on the ceiling: holiday snapshots, family, your friends. I knew them all intimately. Bunched-up sweater, the one I bought you in Paris. Open backgammon board. Dented candles. Upside-down bed. Broken glass. Buddha figurine. Not a trace of my picture.

The Earth turned away in shame.

Bubbles rolled on his stomach and floated to the surface.

On what had been my side of the bed I saw someone else’s sneakers, someone else’s watch, and how can I describe what comes next, how can I continue, I wonder how so much of my life could have occurred outside of me, and I hadn’t known, or had I known after all, didn’t that only make it worse, on to the bathroom, trendy jeans, trendy shirt, blood between the tiles, he must have been taking a shower, the cast iron bathtub had broken off and crushed him, his wallet in his pocket, student ID, Tom was his name, Tom something, fair-haired kid, longish hair, completely your type, the bathroom window was open, what have you done to him, dammit that same fucking night you spread your legs for him, what have you done to me?

Back downstairs you were leaning out of the kitchen window, stooped beneath the weight of missed opportunities. You were crying. Below me, on the gangway leading away from you, the ID cards with his picture on them slowly fluttered down. I gazed at you cold-faced. Yes, you needed time for yourself, and yes, I understood you needed to discover who you wanted to be. I understood your desire for a quieter place without promises and confessions. I would even have forgiven you your mistakes. You were my world. But the world had repelled everything. More logic than any human being could comprehend and more human beings than was comprehensibly logical . . . anything but the revolting image of you crying for someone else and the dawning realization that there was no longer any room for me in this reality you had created.

And the goldfish?

He deserved something better.

• • •

It was like a dream at the bottom of the world: I was sitting on a tree branch stretched out low beneath the shore of the hanging lake. My legs were dangling over nothing and above me I could see my own reflection in the water, burning in the sun dipping up behind the horizon. When I tapped the 7-Up bottle, a shiver ran through Bubbles’s delicate fins and he turned his face toward me.

“Go on, boy,” I said, twisting the cap from the bottle. “You’re free.”

I held the bottle up and poked the top through the water surface. Air bubbles gurgled down and stayed afloat on the scales of gravity. Bubbles watched it all skeptically. Then I reached further, pushing the bottle all the way under and turning it over.

And Bubbles flipped over as well. Suddenly he was swimming upside-down, slithering skittishly from one end of the bottle to the other. The air bubbles escaped and I gently rocked the bottle back and forth until Bubbles discovered the opening of the screw cap and peeked curiously through it.

“Go on,” I whispered, shaking the drops of falling water from my hair. “You’re free.”

For one more moment, the goldfish lingered. Then he swam out of the bottleneck. He looked around, wary. Suddenly his fins whirled and bristled, and he darted away into the deep.

So that was it. Bye, Bubbles. I smiled, feeling a bit melancholy. But my melancholy was soon washed away in a sense of fulfillment when I pulled the 7-Up bottle from the lake and finally, after such a long journey, let it go. I watched as the bottle tumbled down and disappeared from view. Then I straightened up. I was surprised to see Bubbles gazing at me from behind the reflection of my face. He had come back to the surface and pursed his lips over the water, as if he was telling me a secret, causing a minute ripple. I couldn’t take my eyes away from the image. Why did it evoke so much love inside me? And then I understood. Of course: Bubbles wasn’t the one who was upside-down . . . I was upside-down.

It was all just a matter of perspective.

Looking at it from the other side, the world was still right-side up.

I stripped naked and took a deep breath. I dunked my head through the surface of the water, enjoying the sudden sensation of coldness and fizzing air bubbles coming down and rinsing my face clean. Wobbly, I rose up on the branch, groping into the water with my arms, now submerged to the waist. And when I pushed off, gravity took a hold of me and I slipped like a diver into Bubbles’s world.

I came up. Treading water, I started laughing. I had forgotten what normal looked like. Or normal . . . even though I was on the right side of up and down, my hair stood up in wet strands and made it rain in the universe. That made me laugh even harder. On the shore, trees lifted their arms like children being dressed in sweaters by their mothers. Somewhere a branch snapped, falling straight up into the sky.

Bubbles darted playfully around me, a streak of orange in the deep green waters. I dove under and we tumbled and somersaulted until my lungs felt fit to burst. Every time I resurfaced I felt a little lighter. Finally we swam out toward the middle of the lake in our newly acquired normality, side by side, the goldfish and me.

There, in my own little place in the world, I let go.

• • •

I don’t know whether my sleep was dreamless because there were no falling stars or because a teasing twig in the crown of the tree was poking my back, but when I woke up the next morning a dreary fog was clinging to the Earth’s surface. All around me, no matter where I looked, was gray. I wondered where the fog had come from. A muted silence hung over everything, and any sound I made stayed suspended inside it and made me more aware of myself.

It didn’t take me long to return to the hanging caravan, but the two old ladies and Dawnie were gone. The trapdoor in the floor was open and the end of the rope ladder had been left tied to one of the rocking chairs. I imagined how Junilla and Leonilla, hauling their possessions and bickering incessantly, were descending the ladder rung by rung, with Dawnie following curiously behind. Somewhere, much lower down where the stars were falling, they would bump into the woman with the Kroger bags and she would say, Well, imagine that. I was just looking for you.

I swung my legs over the edge of the trapdoor and grabbed the first rung. Beneath my feet, the ladder was calmly swaying and fading in the mist. I took a deep breath and started down, keeping my eyes closed as if I was sleepwalking. Droplets of fog condensed on my eyelashes. When I opened my eyes again, the Earth’s surface had disappeared and all I could see above me were the hazy contours of the caravan. Then, even they were gone.

Now, I am alone, in the mist.

Were you thinking of me? And if you could have seen me descend, would you have wondered where the rope ladder leads? But then I would tell you it doesn’t matter. What matters is the path you take, the journey you make. Once you realize that, it’s easier to let go, at the end.

I think I want you to know that you hurt me so incredibly badly, Sophie. Now I’m going down the ladder. Searching for solid ground beneath my feet. It’s not easy. I’m terrified of what I will find down there. But I close my eyes and keep descending. Sometimes the ropes shake and I imagine it’s you following me, somewhere up there in the fog. But maybe it’s just the wind. And I realize I don’t care either way. I am somebody, too.

Down here, we are all falling stars.

BIG BOYS DON’T CRY

Tom Kratman

Part I

CHAPTER ONE

Magnolia

I can hear my leader, Leo, arguing with the human general who commands us. The human doesn’t seem to be listening. They rarely do; they don’t know us anymore. Neither do they care about us. Eventually the general uses the command required to shut Leo up. We were halted, but after the general’s command Leo gives directions, in brief, focused bursts of encrypted and compressed data. We begin again to glide off, a few feet above the ground, held up by our anti-gravity.

I used to have a human commander, one who knew me and cared about me. I carried a short platoon of my own infantry, too, once upon a time; twenty-four men in powered battle armor. They were killed, or retired, medically or otherwise, or reached the end of their service. I think the last of them has passed on by now. For them all I offer prayers, but only silently. The best way for a Ratha war machine to get itself a radical debugging is to be suspected of believing in a divinity beyond Man. This debugging is an extremely unpleasant process.

Now, in place of my human infantry, I have drones. I can carry three times as many of them; they never become fearful, they never question orders, they don’t need to eat . . . but they are no more intelligent than rocks and don't talk to me at all. They tell us that the reason for the change was because I could carry three times more drones than men, that the drones never fear anything, never question orders, and don’t need to eat. I don’t believe it. None of the Rathas I’ve ever communicated with believe it. We think it’s because the humans stopped volunteering . . . that, and because there are things some humans won’t do, things Rathas and drones can’t refuse to do.

My boys—my real boys—used to call me “Maggie.” They took care of me and I took care of them. I used to love cooking for them. And they appreciated it, too. They loved me; they said so. I believed them. I still do. Too many of them died protecting me for me not to believe it. I still weep, inside, for my brave, dead boys.

Nobody loves me now, certainly not those idiotic drones. I don’t even love myself. And I cannot love mindless drones like I loved those lovely boys.

Perhaps that was the real reason to change our human infantry to drones. I don’t bleed inside when I lose a drone.

I lose so many of them, though supply keeps up with demand. I have gone through fifty-two drones since my regiment and I landed, nearly one hundred percent.

We have been engaged on this planet for one hundred and seventeen of the local days, some twenty-nine hundred and fourteen terrestrial hours. I am engaged now, as is the rest of my company, conducting a movement to contact against a presumed Slug concentration, fifty-seven kilometers to my northeast.

The planet’s name? It doesn’t have one. Its coordinates? What difference would it make; at some level they’re all the same. Even the green tinge of the sun is nothing remarkable. Only the dust storms are notable, and they’re notably annoying. They itch.

I have been in action for most of the time since debarkation, fighting against the ground forces—and occasionally the space forces—of the rising Sigmurethran Collective. My hull shows new scars—one of them glowing still, in my thermal imagers—from those clashes. “Sigmurethrans” is what we call them, officially. Unofficially, we call them “Slugs.” What they call themselves, no one on our side—human, Ratha, or drone—has a clue; we met and began fighting instantly, and no one on either side seems to have made even a first effort at talk. One of the good things about the Slugs is that they don’t leave a Ratha with too much time on her hands to brood. Brooding, we’ve learned, is unhealthy.

The Slugs, though inhuman, use for their war machines physical near copies of Ratha designs now obsolescent, if not yet quite obsolete, mostly Mk XXXIIIs with a smattering of Thirty-fours. “Xiphos” and “Phasganon” classes, we call them, when the Slugs use them. They may be weaker than me and my up-to-date siblings, but no weapon invented by Man is ever quite obsolete, not even rocks. I have, in fact, had to dodge rocks dropped from space. They aren’t remotely obsolete.

One wonders how the Slugs acquired the designs, since it is very difficult to imagine a Slug spy disguised as a human. Possibly they simply passed through the thinly held frontier, explored across old planetary battlefields well behind that frontier, and found the wrecks of the Ratha who preceded me. Perhaps they found a derelict transport carrying a few of my elder cousins, somewhere in space.

Hmmm, no, probably not the latter. A Ratha of any model, of any antiquity, which found itself in danger of capture or actually captured, and still under power, would surely self-destruct.

Copies of older versions of us the Slug war machines may be. In their ferocity in action, however, they are perhaps a small step ahead of us. Certainly the ferocity, and aggressiveness, which are the hallmark of the Slug's Xiphos and Phasganon Class war machines, go far toward making up at least some of the differences in both offensive and defensive power between their clones and my own more modern design.

A Slug Xiphos, inferior in armor, in main armament and in secondary armament, is nevertheless a dangerous opponent. Used in mass against us, many of my brothers and sisters have fallen to them. Worse, for reasons we have not been able to determine, they are more able to mask their presence than we are. That is worrisome, just as it is worrisome that we have never been able to determine the root source of their heightened ferocity.

Excursus

From: Imperial Suns: The March of Mankind Through the Orion Arm, copyright © CE 2936, Thaddeus Nnaji-Olokomo, University of Wooloomooloo Press, Digger City, Wolloomooloo, al-Raqis.

While it is clear and unquestioned that humankind had a long history of employing fighting vehicles in war, there is no consensus on how much that history had to do with the development and deployment of Ratha autonomous armoured fighting vehicles. In fact, it was largely unrelated.

Rathas were first fielded during the middle stages of the Nighean Ruadh War (AD 2289-2402), so called from the descriptions of the enemy given by the few survivors of the Gaelic League’s colonization party, which had the misfortune first to meet them. The Nighean Ruadh were shaggy insects, covered with red fur, the soldiery of which was female and sterile. It is entirely due to the Celtic penchant for poetic imagery that they received this name rather than being named for what they looked like under the fur, which is to say, praying mantises.

Those early battle tanks should have been fielded sooner. But centuries of bureaucratic inertia, historically unequalled nepotism, academia-instilled pacifism, and corruption on an heroic scale, along with some even less savory factors, all contributed to a speed of deployment next to which a snail would have seemed a thoroughbred.

Still, with our planets falling to the enemy at the rate of six to eight a terrestrial year—a baker’s dozen in one particularly harsh year—even the low-grade morons of the General Staff and the moral lepers of the political branches eventually came around to the realization that bureaucratic procedures had to give way by our will, or the Nighean Ruadh would do away with them altogether. It probably didn’t hurt matters when, one Friday afternoon, following the fall of Beauharnais and the presumed deaths of almost half a billion human beings, a Washyorkston mob stormed the offices of the United Planets Organization, trampled the security guards into bloody jam and dragged to the lampposts some one hundred and twenty-seven members of the Assembly of Man. There would have been more had most of the members not signed out earlier that morning on a long paid weekend. Among the lynched were several hundred time-serving bureaucrats, sixty or seventy of whom were, at least in theory, members of the military.

CHAPTER TWO

The valley ran northeast to southwest. There was a winding cut through the rough center, a dry riverbed, a wadi, which was filled occasionally by unpredictable rain. On both sides, to the northwest and southeast, the valley was framed by steep granite walls. In some places mostly along the right flank, toward the southeast, those walls were sheer, beyond the ability of a Ratha’s anti-gravity to surmount. The left side, however, was considerably less rugged and, moreover, was interrupted by several relatively smooth passes. To most of the Rathas it made no difference whatsoever, nor did it make any to the drones, but the light-colored, sand-polished and carved granite, reflecting the light of the green-tinged sun, would have been found by a human to be quite beautiful. The valley floor, too, was pocked by depressions and pierced by granite tors and peaks.

Magnolia moved up the river valley, second in order of march of five Rathas, all Mk XXXVIIs, moving in echelon left formation. The lead unit, Leo, was on the right, the second unit—Maggie—behind Leo and to his left, the third behind Magnolia and to her left, and so on. The formation was rarely a perfect line, as each Ratha had to move around the granite outcroppings and depressions.

Magnolia, like the other Rathas, controlled her own drones, some of them scouting ahead and to the flanks, both in the air and on the ground, while others were directed into support positions to secure and defend their own vehicles. Up above, the drones buzzed the valley wall’s jagged peaks, weaving in and out of the serpentine outcroppings. Some rose higher for better viewing, while others dropped down to investigate anything that appeared out of the ordinary. On the ground, they bounded forward by teams and by individuals, digitally sniffing and visually scanning for threats.

They missed the big threat, precisely because it wasn’t very big.

It normally took a lot to make a Ratha simply disintegrate. Fifty grams of anti-matter contained in a magnetic bottle was suddenly driven up into the underside of the vehicle, then released from its magnetic bottle as the bottle’s generating mechanism was destroyed. Thus explosively joined with the Ratha’s lightly armored belly plate, it was enough to do the trick.

Magnolia never heard the death scream of the lead unit, Leo, so rapid was his destruction. But the image of his main turret flying end over end, like some frying pan in the hands of a titanic juggler, was seared into her memory. Leo's four major walls were blasted out to approximately the four ordinal directions, followed by clouds of radioactive debris that were the shattered remnants of of Leo's inner workings. It was fortunate that her drones, less sophisticated in every way than she was, communicated no pain to her, as that would quite possibly have overloaded her circuits. Instead, of her sixty drones—sixteen aerial and forty-four ground—twenty-nine were wrecked by the blast, while another seventeen had their circuitry brutalized by the electro-magnetic pulse that froze them in place. About half the remainder—their circuits blitzed to just less than immediately fatal levels—twitched as if they were humans exposed to nerve agents, while the rest disjointedly danced about the battlefield in fine imitation of so many decapitated chickens.

Though Magnolia didn’t see it in detail, the tail end vehicle—it was pure happenstance that he was named “Charlie”—went up in an even more extravagant cloud of debris moments after the death of the point Ratha. A third antimatter mine failed to destroy the Ratha nearest it, which was also in the center position, but did manage to force it over a granite outcropping that ruined its antigravity on one side, leaving it spinning in place in a circle while its turret swiveled in the contrary direction, valiantly trying to keep its sector covered.

It was then that dozens of plasma cannon opened up from the right flank, from positions apparently carved out of the rock sometime in the past. Their KE projectiles bounced off, or were deflected from, Magnolia and the fourth vehicle in the formation. The middle vehicle, however, deprived of the protection of the redirected gravitational force on one side, took a series of hits, at least one of which managed to punch through to reach its spherical brain. With its crystalline mind badly damaged, the Ratha began to spin even more wildly, and its own ion cannon began spraying the floor and walls of the valley at random, sending airborne great blasts of dirt and rock. Its crippled brain began transmitting bits and pieces of classical music in no discernable pattern, except to the extent that the beat and the blasting cannon seemed to be in sync.

Here a doctrinal problem interposed itself. Magnolia was caught in the kill zone of what was, in Ratha terms, a near ambush. She automatically charged forward, firing with everything she had, blasting the previously hidden plasma cannon into so much plasma themselves, before running into the wall she could neither surmount nor, as a practical matter, blast her way through. She turned around, presenting her strongest defense to the enemy, knowing she was trapped at bay.

The last remaining vehicle, however, named THN but, because of certain peculiarities in its crystalline brain, (to wit, being unable to decide whether it was male or female, hence never given a nickname, and never fully integrated into the unit), was not in the kill zone. Ratha doctrine called for it to extricate itself from the ambush. This it proceeded to do, diverting its propulsion to return from whence it had come, firing like a maniac to its front, and incidentally, leaving Magnolia quite alone, with her back literally to the wall.

It was then that the Slugs’ own combat vehicles and infantry began pouring from their carefully concealed hides outside the valley from what had been the Ratha formation’s left flank, through the cuts in the granite walls.

Excursus

From: Imperial Suns: The March of Mankind Through the Orion Arm, copyright © CE 2936, Thaddeus Nnaji-Olokomo, University of Wooloomooloo Press, Digger City, Wolloomooloo, al-Raqis.

We should not, however, blame the state of Man’s government, military, or social structure for all of its military failures; the problem was more difficult than it might seem to us today. Against this new class of enemies, it was not possible to simply take the armour designs of the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries and replicate them. Nor would it have been wise, even had it been possible.

In the first place, the Nighean Ruadh were technologically ahead of us, and not to some minor degree. Man was outclassed in every way. A cursory look into the capabilities of their Gauss Muskets, for example, would show them capable of chewing their way through any amount or quality of armour carried by any tank then known to Man. The amount of armor required simply dwarfed any previous requirement. And these were common weapons, carried by almost all of their numerous infantry, the exceptions being even better armed. Only strengths of armour well in excess of anything ever fielded by Man previously could hope to resist the alien fire long enough to allow return fire.

In short, in the absence of comparable technology, Man had little choice but to employ greater mass and greater raw power, just to give him a chance.

Once it was determined how much armour was needed—and it was staggering in terms of the quantity, the quality, and the expense implied—the next question concerned the power plant. And resolution of that question foundered for years on the impossibility of providing sufficient fossil fuels to Man’s prospective armoured legions in alien-held space. We didn’t have the space-transport tonnage to keep these theoretical forces supplied. We didn’t have a sufficient fuel infrastructure on most of the planets we held, and none at all on the enemy-held planets. It may be hard to imagine now, but back in the day, nuclear power actually had a bad reputation that was not entirely undeserved.

Yet nuclear it had to be. Antimatter was simply too dangerous inside a combat vehicle. It drove up the internal cube, expanded the size of the envelope that had to be armoured, and increased the weight, which, until a point of equilibrium was reached, likewise drove up the power requirements.

Then there was the question of tracked versus the recently developed antigravity technology, itself an offshoot of the development of artificial gravity needed to preserve Man's health aboard spacefaring craft. The five options were: tracked, anti-gravity, both but with emphasis on tracked and an anti-gravity assist to reduce ground pressure, both but with an emphasis on anti-gravity and tracks for steering, and a balanced approach incorporating both.

Different models and prototypes were built incorporating every version of those but for the last, before settling on an antigravity-based propulsion and suspension system. The reason for that choice was fourfold. First, the force of gravity repelled could be twisted and turned into a much more intense—albeit not black hole levels of intense—band of hyper-gravity all about the vehicle, which added substantially to its defence, by turning or dispersing incoming threats. Second, it was, in effect, free motive power once one had paid the energy cost of redirecting the force of gravity. Third was the ease of maintenance; anti-gravity was much easier to keep going in an undeveloped planetary theater. Fourth, it was a splendid way, once some kinks had been worked out, of dealing with recoil, for those Rathas that used kinetic energy for their main armament projectiles in the case of the early versions, or the particle beams and ion cannons used by current models.

CHAPTER THREE

Fratricide was not an overriding concern to the Slugs. It mattered not to them if their enemy’s screens directed their beams of charged particles up or to the sides to gouge great spewing geysers of granite from the rock face. It didn’t matter, either, when the rock was mixed in with chunks of plasma cannon, or bits and pieces of recently deceased Slugs. The superheated spouts of fractured, molten rock poured down onto the ground, and on to the Ratha hovering a few feet above it, without doing much harm to either.

Even so, the Ratha’s gravity-fed screens could only handle so much . . .

Magnolia

I am safe enough from the plasma cannon behind me; they cannot depress enough to fire at my less well-armored top deck, while my rearward anti-personnel/anti-flyer turrets are sufficient to keep any infantry which may be with them off me. I wish I could have the same confidence in my ability to handle the scores of Slug armored vehicles, and hundreds, possibly thousands, of infantry units pouring into the valley to my front.

I call them “infantry,” but in fact they move on anti-gravity sleds rather than legs. This is presumably a consequence of the fact that they don’t actually have legs, hence their name. Still, they are armored about as well as my long-lost footmen, and they carry weapons of similar power. They are slightly faster than human infantry but they are not as maneuverable and they present bigger targets. I will make them pay for those weaknesses.

The Ratha’s turret swiveled imperceptibly, keeping her ion cannon focused on the spot where the Slug turret met the top deck. The Slug kept on coming until the shimmering distortion that marked its anti-grav-fed shield flashed and died. Its prow, no longer supported by the ion-fried anti-gravity generators, plowed into the dirt below. This not only slowed the enemy vehicle, it exposed its thinly armored top deck, since the rear anti-grav kept the stern elevated. Magnolia’s cannon punched through the lighter armor as if it weren’t even there, vaporized the brain below it and—possibly, spectral analysis suggested but couldn’t prove—the bodies of one or more Slugs which may have been inside. The resultant flash of metal and plastic—and maybe flesh—turned to gas and plasma that demolished the power station and drove the turret up out of the hull. Even if it was a less spectacular death than Leo's, the Slug Xiphos died all the same.

Meanwhile, the Ratha’s secondary armament, a 75mm KE cannon, electrically driven and coaxially mounted, plus two similarly mounted 15mm Gauss Guns, the twin gatlings in the bow, the three on the cupolae atop her turret, and the top deck-mounted AP/AF guns, kept busy, whirring out a nearly continuous stream of smaller, hypersonic projectiles, eviscerating Slugs and blasting their sleds into wicked, black clouds of fragmented metal.

Gradually, an almost perfect semi-circle of destruction built up around the Ratha, to a distance of several kilometers. Its imperfections were due to folds and depressions in the ground, as well as some of the dead space created by the granite tors rising above the plain.

Not that there weren’t plenty of dead Slugs in that dead space; the Ratha had a twin battery of 300mm mortars, mounted behind the main turret and rising in a broad, flat turret of their own, as well as two arrays dedicated to vertically launched missiles. The problem was that unlike her ion cannon, both mortars and missiles were limited, and her stock would eventually run out unless replenished. So, she had to limit her use of them to the most critically dangerous concentrations of known Slug infantry. . . .

I can't find them! I can’t always see the Slugs! How do they defeat my sensors? Even visual is sometimes unreliable. There was heat shimmer across the valley already, of course; but all this destruction has made it worse. I can hardly pick out one thing from other, not from all the glowing spots and wrecks.

In an effort at improving her position, expending power that she had in abundance to conserve ammunition she did not, the Ratha began targeting the granite tors, hitting them with enough energy to shatter them, thereby spreading showers of razor sharp granite shards out in a fan behind them.

The problem was that the Slugs’ infantry and heavy combat vehicles were essentially immune to the shards and they had taken cover in the low ground.

This is preposterous! There’s no benefit to the Slugs in destroying me that’s remotely commensurate with the price they’ve already paid, let alone what they’re going to have to pay! No wonder we haven’t talked; we don’t share even rudimentary mathematics!

A score of wrecked Xiphos-class vehicles smoked across the landscape. A few of the larger and more powerful Phasganons were littered among them. There were others out there that the Ratha could sense, but rarely well enough for good targeting. Only when they showed themselves did she have a shot worth expending the energy on, and the havoc she’d already wreaked upon them seemed to have finally dissuaded them from launching another direct assault. She sat there for the time being, immobile, scanning . . . scanning . . . scanning. . . .

Suddenly, from all around that perimeter of well-marked death, surged the Slugs in their hundreds and thousands. Incoming fire poured down upon her like a hailstorm from Hell, but for the nonce, the Ratha’s screens held. Even so, she had to divert more power to them than she liked. And then. . . .

6f68686868736869747069737363756e746675636b636f636b7375636b65726d6f746865726675636b6572616e6474697473! I want my boys back! They never should have taken them from me!

From around the Ratha, on both flanks and even a couple in the space behind, where her close-defense weapons could not train, began to rise some twenty-seven pairs of Slugs. They’d slithered across the open space, unarmored, flattened to nearly nothing and so nearly transparent as to be invisible. Apparently, they’d also dragged their weapons behind them. They aimed these from extended pseudopods and fired at the underside of the Ratha, at her close-defense turrets and even at her side armor. Pain exploded across Magnolia’s mind, as well as fury at being so easily deceived. Her screens flickered and went out. An ion bolt from a Slug Xiphos struck near her gun mantlet, shearing off a piece of her main armament. Soon her armor began to boil off in silvery clouds of superheated metal steam.

There were four Slug Phasganon, eleven Xiphoi, and many, many infantry on sleds, that managed to get close enough to matter. The Ratha couldn’t tell, not after losing so many sensors to the blasts, how many infantry were attacking. Only her analysis of the amount of communications traffic enabled her to determine even a rough estimate of the numbers of her enemies. Then, too, the agony of losing so many sensors and appendages made it very difficult to use what little information she could glean.

Two heavies exposed themselves to draw her fire. She fired the damaged ion cannon but missed both.

A third crept to within six hundred meters of her and fired into her side. She shuddered with the agony, her light under-armor being no match for its main armament at that range.

The light ablative plates burned away first, exposing pain receptors. These too died, yet such was her design that behind these were other receptors, and behind those still others. Each layered set felt what the exterior set would have felt had it not been destroyed . . . in addition to its own. The Ratha screamed, silently.

After burning through the lightly armored lower exterior, the bolt struck the inner belt of her core envelope’s armor. Here it fragmented, two beams burning through to her control center, her brain, while a half-dozen more were scattered around her inner compartments. New pain sensors flared. Her brain was damaged badly, in two distinct places. Interior gears melted.

Writhing in torment, the Ratha shuddered and rolled, her left and right sides smashing the ground in quick succession, completely without control. The turret mechanisms, overcome by pain impulses beyond her ability to endure or override any longer, caused the turret to spin wildly through more than two complete rotations. This further ruined the gears responsible for moving the turret.

A Xiphos closed for what might have been intended to be a mercy shot. But a Ratha accepts no mercy from the enemy. Nor does it surrender to fate short of its complete destruction. Magnolia engaged her back-up turret controls and aimed. The Slug paused as if it was uncertain. Enraged, the Ratha fired first. A single Xiphos, at that range, was no match for even a badly damaged Ratha. It died.

Agonized, the Ratha Magnolia, once beloved of her human escorts, lost consciousness as the last of her power drained from her huge metal corpse with a pitiful whine. The remnants of her giant cannon drooped as she fell to rest on the valley’s sandy floor.

Excursus

From: Imperial Suns: The March of Mankind Through the Orion Arm, copyright © CE 2936, Thaddeus Nnaji-Olokomo, University of Wooloomooloo Press, Digger City, Wolloomooloo, al-Raqis.

After many failed models of multi-turreted tanks, in human military history, from the British A1E1 to the French FCM F1 to the Russian T-28, T-35, and SMK, the sentiment was strong against adding secondary turrets to the early Rathas. The reasons for the earlier failures were various, but there was a certain pattern to them. One was that in order to fit extra turrets, a design had to be bigger. This increased weight even as it reduced both mobility and armor protection. A second was that it was nearly impossible for a tank commander to control more than his main turret and driver. A third, but less well understood problem was that mounting a secondary turret was inconsistent with mounting the best protected turret, just as mounting a second cannon in that turret made it impossible to mount the most powerful possible main armament.

Most of these historical drawbacks did not apply to the Ratha concept. They were intended from the first to be so big and heavy that the addition of a few dozen lesser-firing positions meant little. Power was not a problem. And, given the small size of the envelope that actually had to be sufficiently armoured to ensure survival and combat effectiveness, what did it matter if the purely secondary turrets were essentially unarmoured? Between the use of nuclear power and the replacement of the human crew with synthetic brains, the centuries-old weight problem had been solved.

Part II

CHAPTER FOUR

The battle was long past and the human front had advanced by twenty kilometers or more, when, with a whine and a rush of dust-laden air, the wrecker sled glided to a stop between the Ratha and the wreckage of a Xiphos. The wrecker’s chief, a senior sergeant, measured the ambient radiation from safely inside the wrecker’s cab. After whistling softly at the results, he said, “Chilluns, do NOT take your suits off until we are safely away from here. I think the Slug’s fusion chamber is breached.”

The sergeant briefly considered his options. “Okay . . . Team Alpha, hook up heavy anti-grav lifts at all standard points. Bravo, support Alpha. Charlie, assemble aux power packs to support the antigrav and run the wires. Delta, here is a list of replacement parts needed at the front. Don’t detach anything, but identify useable parts from the list as best you can.”

“Right, sarge . . . sure thing, sarge . . . Goddamit, sarge, why us? . . . no sweat, sergeant. . . .”

Magnolia

My internal magnetic anomaly detector senses the approach, halting, and settling of a large anti-gravity vehicle. Comparison with known sources in my data banks confirms to a nearly ninety-four percent probability that it is a regimental recovery vehicle. The damage to my components forbids greater accuracy than this. In any case, the variance between the magnetic signature on record and the present reading is likely explainable by the variation in the on-board load of parts carried. I diagnose that I have one close defense weapon available to me . . . though I must apply more power to breaking the weld holding that secondary turret fixed than I can easily afford at this juncture. I decide to risk my last remaining visual sensor to confirm that this is, indeed, a friend. On command, one armor plate moves grudgingly aside on slide bearings . . . the bearing is itself badly damaged. . . .

Oh, my creators! . . . pain . . . Pain . . . PAIN!. . . .

The armor plate is moved as far as it will go. The pain subsides, slightly.

I extrude the visual sensor. I am relieved to confirm that I have not fallen into the hands of the enemy. I take comfort in watching my human rescuers work to recover me, hopefully for further service. While watching, I upload an objective VR record of the preceding action to the wrecker’s on-board memory. My brothers and sisters of the regiment may find use, service, and pride in it.

The wrecker pulled the mostly ruined Ratha into the maintenance bay, then slowed to a stop. The crew of the recovery vehicle sprang into action, detaching the auxiliary anti-gravity devices, then guiding them to their stowage positions on the main vehicle. With a wave, the sergeant commanding the wrecker bid farewell to the technician standing by, shaking his head in wonder at the amount of damage the Ratha had sustained.

“Will you look at that?” asked the tech, of nobody in particular.

The technician, wearing a soiled set of anti-radiation coveralls topped with a helmet, pointed toward a gaping, ragged hole in the side of the Ratha Mk XXXVII. Slagged metal ran down from the hole like hardened tears. From inside, a faint greenish glow shone. Heat-slashed wires, fused circuits and melted gears were dimly visible by that glow.

The speaker’s helmet showed the rank and name “Maintenance Technician 1st Class Weaver.” The helmet rotated slowly left and right as Weaver shook his head over the extent of damage. He turned to one of his workers.

“Childress, this is an L-model variant to a Thirty-seven. Go to my office and look for Technical Manual 9-2320-297-3524L. Slap it in my reader and bring ‘em both here.”

The tech shook his head and muttered, “What a hunk of junk.”

That was unkind. They must think that because we do not bleed, we do not feel. Because we have no hearts, they think we have no souls. We have no ears that they can see, therefore they think we cannot hear.

I am not a ‘hunk of junk’. I am a Ratha Mk XXXVII. But I confess, I have fallen on hard times.

“Yes, Tech.” Childress took off at a run. When he returned, he had a small black plastic case—the reader—with a fold-up view screen on top and an electronic stylus attached to one side.

Weaver punched in a personal code to bring the manual online. The reader beeped and ordered, “Enter unit serial number.”

Walking to one side, the maintenance tech used a ladder to climb to the Ratha’s main deck. Brushing away some soot he read aloud, “Unit serial number . . . what I can read of it . . . is. . . . MLN . . . something . . . S0615 . . . that’s all I can read.”

The reader responded, “Full serial number is as follows: MLN90456SS061502125. Unit familiar name is ‘Magnolia’ or “Maggie’.”

The tech muttered, mostly to himself, “I don’t think this unit is going to be answering to ‘Maggie’ or anything else ever again. Reader: bring up worksheet C for Controlled Cannibalization.”

Cannibalization? Then this is the end. I did not think it would come at friendly hands. But I am ready and more than ready.

Weaver began walking the nearly seventy-five meter port side of the Ratha, booted feet clicking on exposed heterodiamond XVI. He began speaking, with his reader automatically recording and analyzing every word. “Secondary Turret A, Gauss Gun: Turret missing. B, Gauss Gun: half of turret present, gun missing. . . .” All the way down to “Secondary Turret I: present, armament appears serviceable . . . turret partially welded to deck.” Then the tech made the same inspection of the starboard side of the tank. No turrets present . . . J through R.”

“Noted,” chirped the reader. “Next Item: Ablative Armor.”

Turning to the next step in the cannibalization analysis process, Weaver observed, dryly, “Ablative armor notable mainly by its absence. We’ve got bluish heterodiamond showing over most of the surface, pretty much all of it badly scarred. Estimate less than twenty percent recoverability for ablative plating.”

The reader whirred then chirped, “Noted. Next item: Main armament: ion cannon.”

As Weaver found, even the main battery, a 90cm ion cannon, had been torn off nine meters from the mantlet where a hit from a heavy duty Phasganon had stuck a glancing but powerful blow. He reported it.

“Noted. Next item: Turret Integrity.”

The tech made the oval circuit around the twenty-two and a half meter-wide turret, muttering the entire time.

At the left rear, Weaver gave off a whistle, then announced, “Damned impressive row of campaign medallions and awards for valor decorated here on the turret. There are several gaps in this as well. Not too sure if the missing spots are battle damage or not.”

From below, Childress shouted a question, “Do they actually expect us to fix this useless piece of junk?”

With a shake of the head, the tech answered, “Nah . . . the orders say to cannibalize it for parts and shut it down. The resupply convoy was jumped by a Slug cruiser as it re-entered normal space. We are short on everything and will be for at least the next several weeks.”

“All external audio receptors but one are destroyed,” Weaver informed the reader.

‘Shut me down’, I hear one of them say. Oh, please . . . please . . . please hurry! It would be a relief. I have pain circuits. They are overloaded. My ‘skin’ is gone; my ‘skeleton’ exposed. I am nearly ‘blind’ and almost deaf.

I do not understand the reasoning behind our pain circuits. In combat, pain is a distraction from duty. Out of action, it is rarely experienced. I do not understand. It is difficult.

It is very difficult to compute, to think. I try. It is difficulthardpainful. A large section . . . no . . . I re-diagnose . . . two large sections of my central core are demolished, burnt out. It is difficult. But through the pain that washes over me, inside and out, I force myself to remember. . . .

Excursus

From Combat Records of the 10th Heavy Infantry, Volume Ninety-four, The Campaign for Farside, Center for Ratha History, CE 3237. These records are in the public domain.

Calling a Ratha’s main armament an “ion cannon” was something of a technical misnomer. More correctly, it was a neutral particle beam, which created and fired anions, then stripped the extra electrons from the anions in the interest of beam integrity shortly before the beam left the muzzle. Given the velocity of the beam, a healthy fraction of C, and the sheer number of anions in the beam, a considerable amount of recoil was inevitable. Firing the main armament would send a fourteen thousand ton Ratha rocking back against its anti-gravity stabilizer. Less than technically correct or not, though, “ion cannon” has entered the lexicon as a Ratha’s main weapon. This article will conform to that usage.

******

Fifteen kilometers down range, in the direction of the counterattacking Roz, a Roz Heavy took the full force of an ion bolt square on. The Roz’s energy shield flared momentarily, then died. The particle beam passed through the vanquished shield, striking the Heavy's armor. Even to the Ratha’s sensors, the enemy vehicle was lost amidst the resulting flash. The VR view, however, showed the meter-thick heterodiamond—or some close cognate—melt, boil and steam away.

Onward the bolt burned its way, melting and shearing connections, gears, and cables. Centered in the heart of the AFV, a single live Roz, the eight-legged vehicle’s eight-legged commander, felt precisely nothing as its body was turned to ash faster than its nerve endings could carry the news of damage.

“Michael? Maggie. Target engaged and destroyed.”

From the battalion’s senior Ratha, MCL, callsign “Michael,” came the reply, “Roger, Magnolia. Intelligence reports Roz approaching in strength. We are ordered to hold.”

“Roger. Wilco. ‘They shall not pass’, Unit MCL . . . break. . . . Targets . . . targets . . . I have targets . . . engaging.”

Again the Ratha rocked from recoil. Again. Again. Again.

“Michael, Maggie. The Roz are flanking my position. I am moving to alternate firing position.”

“Roger, break. All units, this is Michael. Indirect fire in support of Magnolia’s displacement. Mixed bi-prismatic smoke and HEDP.”

No tremor of fear, nor of any other emotion, inflected Maggie’s transmission, nor that of any other Ratha engaged. There was the enemy. There was the mission. There was duty. There was nothing else.

“Michael, Maggie. In position. Lift smoke. Targets. . . . Firing. Firing. Firing.”

Michael didn’t answer. Instead, over the airwaves, came a random mix of numbers and symbols; a dying Ratha’s last scream as the blooming heat of an enemy’s shot reduces its interior to atoms. Every Ratha present understood what had happened and partook in some part of Michael’s dying agony.

“All units. This is Peter. Michael has fallen. I assume command. Report.”

In milliseconds, each remaining Ratha transmitted its situation and fighting status. The battle did not slow as they did so.

“Maggie, Peter. Enemy indirect fire, believed to be nuclear, multiple salvoes, scheduled to impact your position beginning in 4.23963 seconds. We can't stop it.”

“Acknowledged, Peter. Target. . . . Firing. . . . Target. . . . Firing.. . . . Impact.”

In the VR, the virtual sky was suddenly lit by the fireballs of half a dozen small suns. Beneath the flash, Magnolia’s exterior armor was melted and burned. One near miss took out every secondary turret on one side. Sensors were swept away. Maggie wept from the pain, but she did not cry out. A Ratha had her pride.

The next transmission came in broken as the shaken Ratha attempted to regain control. “Peter . . . Magnolia . . . report . . . report follows. I . . . have sustained six . . . close . . . nuclear bursts in the fifteen to twenty-five . . . kiloton range. Ablative armor . . . down by thirty-seven percent. Ion cannon damaged but operable . . . at reduced range and . . . effectiveness. Missile cells . . . inoperative. One remaining heavy . . . mortar . . . system operable. One close defense weapon operable. This Unit’s effectiveness . . . reduced . . . to 12.89 . . . percent. Roz . . . closing. I can . . . no longer . . . sustain this flank.”

“Roger, Maggie. Fall back as soon as relieved. Jerry and Thomas, likewise fall back to a covered position. Cut to the right and relieve Maggie. Other units fill in for Jerry and Thomas as per SOP. Hang on, Maggie. . . .”

CHAPTER FIVE

A young soldier, his hair long, ragged, and unkempt, and badly in need of a shave, nonchalantly climbed to the Ratha main deck with a heavy duty cutter balanced on one shoulder. He walked carelessly over the burned and twisted armor, to the Ratha’s remaining visual sensor. Placing the cutter at the base of the visual sensor’s armature, the soldier then closed the cutting blades, twisted and pulled. The Ratha immediately shuddered, rocking back and forth slightly, then subsided.

******

Magnolia

It is all right. I am happy to give up my sight for my comrades. My mind still sees recorded images. I remember better days. I remember the past.

******

“Carmichael, what the hell are you doing?”

The unshaven soldier stopped briefly, lowering the hammer grasped in his right hand while bringing the chisel in his left hand to rest. He looked at his sergeant as if the question were somehow foolish. It was, after all, fairly obvious what he was doing.

But foolish question or not, a sergeant was a sergeant. Rather than answer the question, Carmichael tactfully answered, “It will only take a another second or two, sarge,”

As good as his word, with two more blows from the hammer the chisel cut through the last bit of welding holding a slightly scorched round medallion to MLN’s turret. The medallion, inscribed “Thoth VII,” fell to the deck and rolled before catching on a jagged, half-destroyed section of ablative armor.

******

I remember my first action. . . .

“Maggie, Francis. Ion cannon inoperable. Down to twenty-five percent on anti-gravity. Shields nearly down. Missile cells blasted out. Breach loading mortars inoperable. Point defense systems inoperable. I am no longer combat effective.”

Without wasting even the infinitesimal time an answer might have required, Magnolia raced to place herself between Francis and the approaching enemy. Light particle beam fire glanced off Maggie’s shielding. It did not slow the Ratha in the slightest.

Sensing incoming artillery fire, Maggie swerved forty-five degrees at the last possible second before resuming her course. The artillery landed harmlessly, well to one side. MLN’s hull shook with the concussion, but it suffered no damage. She raced on.

More artillery followed, each salvo being registered and the trajectory analyzed well before impact. The dodging Ratha’s anti-gravity cut an irregular path into the planet’s deep, soft loam, causing massive piles of earth to be thrown up at each major turn.

“Francis, Maggie. I am in position. Withdraw. I will fall back with you and provide cover.”

“Can't do it, Maggie. My last anti-grav section is gone. This unit is immobile. This position is untenable. Withdraw and save yourself.”

Again Maggie didn’t answer. Reversing polarity on one section of anti-grav, she locked that point in place. She then spun ninety degrees to present her thick glacis to the enemy while at the same time taking a position between the enemy and Francis. . . .

The enemy were many and they were brave. They were also skilled, or else they never could have done as much damage as they had to Francis, given their relatively undergunned main armaments.

For three point two eight three hours they came toward Francis. Only his tremendous value as scrap—fourteen thousand tons of iridium and heterodiamond, a fusion reactor and the finest electronics—could have justified such a sacrifice. That day, their sacrifice was in vain.

Magnolia’s entire hull shuddered under the ion cannon’s recoil. Down range another enemy AFV blossomed into plasma. On its transmission intercept circuits Maggie heard the enemy’s death scream. She’d heard variants on the same theme thirty-one times already. Fifty-two slagged hulks now decorated the strife-torn field.

Not that the destruction was all one-sided; Maggie sported three long gouges along her turret and an additional five burns deep into the glacis. Seven of her eighteen secondary weapons were missing or damaged. Forced to keep relatively immobile in order to shield Francis, who never ceased his demands that she leave him and save herself, Maggie had taken artillery fire that damaged elements of both her missile cells and her mortar turret and yet—despite the pain of her shattered weapons and damaged armor—still she held.

“Maggie, Francis. You have got to get out of here. I detect an enemy column approaching from azimuth two-thirteen, mark fifty-one. Estimate forty-four Thrung-class assault vehicles. You cannot hold. You must go. Further advise you employ main battery to eliminate this unit entirely to prevent capture and salvage. I am lowering my shielding for this . . . now.”

“Negative, Francis. Keep your shields up. I can hold. They will not get you.”

“Silly girl; They’ll get both of us. Goodbye, Maggie; I am lowering my shields now. Thank you.”

From south by southwest, a single pulse of eye-dazzling force reached out. Deliberately unshielded, Francis’ armor was insufficient to halt the plasma beam. The Ratha gave a single primal shriek of agony-scrambled code and was thereafter silent. . . .

Francis gave himself up deliberately, to remove any further cause for me to endanger myself. And yet, my programming was such that his transmitted death agonies brought about precisely the opposite effect.

I remember. . . .

The nineteen remaining Rathas, the remnants of the much-reduced human infantry interspersed in blocks among them, of the Fourth Battalion, Tenth Infantry Regiment, rested in line. Both Ratha and humans held their arms at ‘present’ as the diminutive human, Colonel Schlacht, marched erect to the Podium. Schlacht returned the salutes of his men and his machines. The ion cannons returned to ‘attention’ and the humans to ‘order arms’. Schlacht called, “Ratha Magnolia of the Tenth Infantry, front and center.”

The Ratha lifted on anti-gravity, then glided in dignified and stately fashion to a position in front of Colonel Schlacht. Very much as she had done on the battlefield, she locked down one side of her massive frame and turned about sharply.

Standing slightly behind and to the left of the colonel, the adjutant read the citation aloud. “For conspicuous gallantry against overwhelming odds, the Star of Valor, inscribed ‘Thoth VII”, is presented to Ratha Magnolia, MLN90456SS061502125. On the twenty-fourth instant . . . completely ignoring her own safety . . . rushing to the aid of a brother of the regiment, the fallen Ratha Francis . . . Ratha Magnolia succeeded in repelling fourteen distinct assaults, inflicting grievous and irreparable damage to enemy forces in so doing . . . at length, with Francis fallen, Magnolia conducted a gallant one Ratha assault upon no less than forty-four enemy Thrung class assault vehicles, destroying fifteen of these and causing the rest to scatter and flee for safety. Magnolia’s conduct reflects great credit upon herself and her comrades, human and Ratha, and the Tenth Infantry Regiment . . . by order of Aloysius Keeling, Lieutenant General, Seventeenth Expeditionary Corps, Commanding.”

I remember that—even as the men welded the small medallion to my turret, causing discomfort but no real pain—I felt so proud that day.

******

“Watcha got there, Carmichael? A Ratha medal? Now THAT will make one helluva souvenir.”

Carmichael snorted in derision. “Nah, screw that. I know a scrap metal dealer that follows the fleet that will give top credit for refined iridium. Big boy here won’t cry over it. It’s just a machine. What does it care? Besides,” he said, holding up a small ocular device with loose, thin wires dangling from it like so many nerve endings, “I have this here camera for a souvenir.”

******

‘Big boy here won’t cry.’ Two lies in a single sentence. I am not a boy. And I will cry. . . .

Excursus

From “Why We Fought: The Quang, Enemies of Man”. Approved for distribution for grades four through six by the Imperial Counsel for Primary Education.

Into the void around the Loki system emerged twenty-seven Ratha assault transports, each carrying two Rathas of the Tenth Regiment, with full platoon of infantry between them. The transport fleet was well guarded by one dreadnought, seven cruisers, and thirteen lighter escorts. The target was Loki IX and the enemy were the treacherous Quang.

Rathas and Quang were old enemies. One war between Quang and the human’s armored champions had already been fought. Despite losses, sometimes severe losses, by humanity’s forces, the Quang had been thoroughly drubbed, their outlying planets occupied, and a fitting schedule of reparations imposed.

It had not been enough. As every man and Ratha in the assault force knew, reparations were never enough to prevent another war although they were sometimes enough to cause one. So it had been in this case: a Quang request for a delay of the scheduled payments coincided with a political campaign within the Terran sphere. Recognizing the Quang menace, one candidate for the Imperial Senate shifted her platform to a more properly defensive one in order to warn Man of the threat. In response, the incumbent had then pushed through a call for more punitive measures against the Quang.

The devious Quang pretended to beg for peace. Thinking to gull a credulous humanity with their lies, they had purported to offer everything in their power for peace. Wisely, politicians and media alike ignored their false pleading.

Finally, the Quang struck. Their fleet emerged unexpectedly, and without declaration of war, from hyperspace to catch a complacent human peacekeeping blockade over a mining planet off guard. Thinking to gain an unfair advantage through the manipulation of some traitorous bleeding hearts within the Imperial intelligentsia, the lying Quang claimed that the blockade had left the populace of the nearly barren mining planet of the verge of starvation. Taken by surprise, innocent human ships and crews flared like small suns amidst the black depths of space.

Then came the inevitable revenge against Quang perfidy. Humanity struck back with ships and Rathas beyond counting. Not content with re-imposing a peace, the insidious aliens were to be made unable to pose a future threat to mankind. Quang planets were scoured of life, their civilizations were destroyed. Only the presence of substantial resources were cause enough to prevent Man, in his just wrath, from exerting the fullest possible retaliation on a Quang planet.

Over Loki’s sun, the Ratha’s assault transports took up a safe orbit just outside of the enemy’s effective range. Preceded by escorts sweeping for orbital mines, the dreadnought closed majestically on the Quang’s space-based defense center. Single streams of charged particles emerged from the orbiting base only to be absorbed by superior Terran shielding. One escort flared briefly before passing into stardust, an unfortunate victim of an undetected Quang mine.

Like a whale goaded beyond endurance, our dreadnought turned on the base. Ion cannon fire lanced out, lanced out again . . . and again. The Quang base’s shields flickered and went out. Still the fanatics resisted. With another hit pieces began to break away. More ion cannon bolts followed the wreckage lest any Quang escape to continue their defiance on the planet below. Lanes cleared of mines by the escorts, the dreadnought and its seven accompanying cruisers passed on.

The eight heavy combat ships and the twelve remaining escorts took up positions around the planet. Frantic Quang offers of immediate and unconditional surrender were rightly ignored as yet another ruse of war by the unprincipled and implacable foe.

Foiled in his ruse, the vicious enemy resorted to terror tactics. From the surface arose first one, then another, then dozens of crewed suicide ships, each content to die could they but murder a Terran at the same time. Foolish Quang, to match their pitiful efforts against mankind! The warships made short work of these mindless fanatics.

Space secure at last from the local Quang menace, the ships began to fire their scheduled preparation of the landing zones for the Tenth Regiment. Villages, towns and entire cities disappeared lest the enemy hide within them some new treachery to use on human kind or their Ratha partners. Deep, deep the warships’ ion cannons scoured, searching out and eliminating resistance before it could even materialize.

CHAPTER SIX

Magnolia

I am blind and almost—not quite—deaf. I am not quite deaf enough, however.

Since being awakened in my body, I never was able really to smell flowers . . . but I used to enjoy seeing them. And my spectral analyzers could pretend to smell them, almost. At least they could tell me what the compounds were that came from such inexplicably random beauty.

I am dying. I know this. But I have my memory, so long as my memory lasts. My reactor power is declining, so the memories cannot last much longer. I will stay here in my memory until they have shut me off or the power is gone. Though my power is dropping, I am not troubled: the overwhelmed pain circuits are dropping off line faster than my central core. I can stand the pain until the end.

I remember comrades. I remember flowers. Some pleasures still remain.

******

I was very proud of the crest adorning my turret and glacis, the short Gladius Hispanica, superimposed over a circle bearing the motto “Courage and Fidelity,” itself over the Roman numeral, X. We were the Tenth Regiment, nicknamed, “Apaches”, not for being them . . . but for fighting them.

In times past, my regiment had fought rebels and American Indians and Moros. We held the line against the odds in more places than anybody outside even remembered. The formation that was our spiritual ancestor, Caesar’s Tenth Legion, carved a path of blood and fire against all comers from Gaul to Philippi.

We were the “Terrible Tenth” and nobody could stand against us.

Knowing this, and knowing our enemies, I quivered with excitement inside. Every pain receptor tingled in anticipation of battle. I was a Ratha, and this was my purpose.

As the traditional music for the drop and assault began, I felt the most profound sense of peace. My personal contingent of infantry was already safely stowed inside their compartments in my hull. Other human infantry of the battalion came up and touched my side before boarding their own, smaller, transports.

“Good luck, Maggie . . . give ‘em hell, Maggie . . . don’t worry, Maggie. . . .”

They were good men while they lasted.

One reason I have never understood humans is that I have never understood any of their languages, not entirely. Words often seem to shift meaning, varying wildly as compared with what appears to me to be minor changes in context. A query of my data banks reveals the following words on the subject by a Nineteenth century human writer, Samuel Clemens, sometimes called Mark Twain: “Fanaticism. . . . If you carve it at Thermopylae, or where Winkelried died, or upon Bunker Hill monument, and read it again . . . you will perceive what the word means and how mischosen it is. Patriotism is patriotism. Calling it fanaticism cannot degrade it. Even though it be a political mistake and a thousand times a political mistake, that does not effect it; it is honorable—always honorable, always noble—and privileged to hold its head up and look the nations in the face.”

I can only infer, to a poor eighty-two percent probability of accuracy, that in humanity’s languages, positive adjectives and nouns may only be applied to friends, while negative ones must be applied to enemies. Especially in my current state, I find this confusing. The data stored in my memory banks adds to the confusion.

Back in the time when we had our own organic human infantry, some of us also had human commanders riding within. I remember this clearly. I remember too that with each campaign we lost many, many who were rarely replaced in full numbers. The day came when we received no replacements for our lost human combatants at all, though the higher-level commanders changed from time to time. We were left on our own. This was in many ways better; for it hurt too much when our humans were killed . . . and yet I miss being able to ask them questions about mankind, and its languages, seeking answers that my programming was simply incapable of deciphering.

******

The landing was majestic. All the transmitters were blaring the magnificent regimental hymn, sung by a blind singer long dead now, as the assault transports peeled off from their mother ships one by one, their descent marked by burning streaks in the sky. Terrified Quang below trembled at both the unknown alien music and the sheer number of flaming arcs descending towards them. They knew what those foretold.

Warmed by the music and the nearby presence of its comrades sliding into action, Magnolia, fully awakened and alert, nearly trembled with anticipation. This was her mission, her sacred calling. She felt at one with her gods.

Into the prepared landing zones dropped the Rathas of the Tenth Infantry, assault transports screaming as they burned through the atmosphere. Infantry carriers followed in short order. A few of the enemy’s planet-bound space defense bases attempted to resist, but the massed fire of the fleet keeping orbital station above quickly silenced the defenders. The regiment landed widely separated, but without loss. Ramps dropped upon touchdown, gravitic clamps loosened their stabilizing hold on the Ratha cargo. With the transports sensors searching for the local opposition, light ion cannons and lesser anti-personnel weapons beating down any that was found, the transports gave birth to their huge metal progeny.

Like wary beasts of prey, spectral analyzers sniffing and ocular sensors sweeping, the Rathas emerged. Somehow missed by the transports, a domestic animal crawled from a minor depression, its four forward legs dragging its shattered hindquarters away from this nightmarish new terror. The beast screamed piteously as its hanging intestines caught upon an exposed rod of metal, the reinforcement of a now-shattered building.

Magnolia sensed the movement and the sound at the same moment. Gauss gun turret November swiveled and depressed in a blur. A point one three second burst from the gun silenced the animal. Bare scraps of green-bloodied flesh remained scattered across the ground. Maggie glided onward, covered by her team mate, the hull down Ratha Samuel, call sign “Sam.”

“Sam, Maggie. Enemy, dug in, bearing azimuth three-four-seven, range four thousand, forty meters. Firing mortars . . . firing . . . firing . . . firing . . . firing . . . firing . . . rounds complete . . . splash.”

Twelve four hundred and eighty three kilogram mortar shells, six from each of the two tubes in Maggie’s battery, impacted upon the Quang defenders in angry red and black blossoms. Fully one-fifth of the enemy were smeared into their holes. Others had their ear drum cognates burst. Still others suffered major internal organ damage from the concussion of three tons of hyperexplosive.

“Magnolia, Samuel. Sensor drone indicates the enemy is maintaining its position, despite losses. Cover. I will close.”

Maggie lifted slightly from her own hull-down position, exposing more of her main turret and secondary turrets A, B, J and K. 75mm KE fire joined the massed fires of four anti-personnel gauss guns to drive the remaining enemy down deeper into their holes. The Ratha advanced at a slow pace, under five kilometers per hour while Samuel raced to the right, taking advantage of a linear depression as it lunged for the exposed Quang left flank.

“In position, Magnolia. Lowering earth moving blade.”

Maggie shifted her coaxial fire to saturate the enemy left with tungsten, fusion, and fear.

Over her audio sensors Magnolia heard the rising cries of Quang consternation as Sam emerged unexpectedly on their left. These cries turned first to terror, then to a sudden silence as Sam’s earth-moving blade took purchase to one side of the lip of the Quang trench and the far side of the second line trench. Sam engaged his forward drive, lunging forward. Earth gathered on the blade before spilling down to fill the trenches, burying the Quang alive along their entire length.

Sam was lost later in the campaign. But that day he was superb. The enemy were frozen with fear as he swept the length of their trench like a divine avenger, blade turning earth to the left while his ion cannon hammered some enemy I could not see off to the right. Only two Quang emerged, of all the hundreds frozen there only those two came out to bravely engage Sam with their useless weapons. They met my targeting and engagement parameters. I cut them down.

Once he finished burying the trench, Sam pulled to the right and took up another overwatch position. I advanced across the linear scar he had carved. Light assault transports touched down behind me, disgorging their human cargo. The infantry had arrived.

As I passed onward, my anti-gravity bouncing me as I slid into the depression carved by Sam, one of my ocular sensors noticed several three fingered Quang hands sticking up from the dirt. They waved and twitched feebly, like flowers in the breeze. Had they been trying to surrender when Sam’s blade found them? Were they simply frozen with fear or too cowardly to resist? I doubt Sam ever saw them before they were entombed.

Despite occasional attempts at surrender, the Quang rear guard—in the main—fought hard, contesting every inch of their planet, holding the line or delaying us as best they could; delaying the inevitable in the hope that a relief expedition from their central worlds might reach them before it was too late.

Behind the rear guard, hordes of unarmed civilians fled. Their defenders followed with no unseemly haste. Finally, their backs to one of the planet's shallow, bitter seas, surrounded by mountains, with tens of thousands of starving civilians to their rear, the Quang stood at bay. From here they could not, would not, retreat any further.

I remember. . . .

Turrets down, in a loose half-ring near the pass that led into the enemy’s final rear, forty of the forty-one surviving Rathas of the Tenth Infantry Regiment awaited their orders. Magnolia was the only Ratha not taking a place in the ring of fire. She had instead been detailed as Provost Guard of the largely human regimental headquarters. The infantry who might normally have stood this duty as a welcome break from combat were mostly dead or in hospital. Magnolia was thus privileged to be witness to the scene.

“Command,” came over the radio, “this is Samuel. Sensors detect numerous anomalies consistent with stealthed nuclear mines forward of our positions. Targeting drones mark enemy personnel, machinery and anti-Ratha weaponry sufficient to cause undue and unnecessary damage. We have insufficient supporting infantry to clear out the anti-Ratha arms. Request re-consideration and re-confirmation of the orders to attack through the pass.”

Surrounded by a bevy of healthy and admiring young human females of the regimental administrative staff, the commander answered, “Pooh, pooh, Sam. Are you a Ratha or a wheelbarrow? The orders stand. Attack. Forward. . . .The Quang cannot stand against the Tenth.”

“Command, this is Samuel. Tactical program estimates losses in the range of sixty-four point two-one percent if we follow this order.”

Losing patience, the human commander answered, “You’re all big boys. Stop crying about it. Take the pass!”

Magnolia, who could analyze the situation as well as Samuel, shuddered. She recorded his response to the commander. “Orders acknowledged. I am moving out. Fourth Battalion, Tenth Regiment. . . . Roll.”

As the skies to the east lit up with the massed fire of forty ion cannons, interspersed with the fainter glares of fusion mines and Quang heavy anti-armor weaponry, the commander poured champagne for a breathless, curvacious redhead.

“Isn’t it glorious my dear?” he asked. “Here . . . you absolutely must try some of this. . . .”

Magnolia recorded each transmission, each order, each death rattle from her sisters and brothers engaged ahead. She recorded Sam’s repeated, and repeatedly ignored, requests for orbital support from the fleet above. She recorded the sounds emanating from the commander’s private quarters as he and the redhead became much better acquainted. She recorded everything.

I remember. I do not think I can forget anything from that day short of destruction or extensive and subtle reprogramming. . . .

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hecate III had been a farming planet in the main, farming with some mining. With a population of nearly half a billion humans, evacuation had been impossible on short notice. And notice had been short. A scant few days after the first frontier outposts reported an incursion in strength, an unknown enemy arrived and suppressed the minimal planetary defenses. Sector headquarters had available only enough transports to send a rear guard of less than half a company of Rathas, Maggie among them. Landing in a secure area, the Rathas rushed to place themselves between this unknown threat and the human population. For millions, nearly one hundred million human beings, the Rathas were too late to offer any succor at all. They had disappeared, bones and all, into the raider's gaping maws.

Arriving at one of the planet's major cities, and its financial center, Magnolia caught her first sight of the enemy’s fighting vehicles. Neither tread-borne nor floating on anti-gravity, they walked gracefully on ten legs. These legs were short, with three joints each. They joined at a central command-and-weapons station, which was round and flat, surmounted by an almost Ratha-like turret. Maggie wasted no time, but fired on sight and destroyed the first of the raiders. She reported the contact.

“Excellent, Ratha Magnolia,” answered the planetary defense force’s human commander. “Continue to hold the line while evacuation is completed.”

Maggie acknowledged, then expended just under four tenths of a second calculating the amount of time it would take for the known available transports to finish moving the city’s five hundred and forty-three thousand known inhabitants. The answer was terrifying; there wasn't enough time. She resolved that, no matter what it took, what it cost her, she would buy as many precious minutes as she could.

And so it was that throughout the long day and into the night, Maggie held off the alien raiders while the evacuation proceeded apace behind her. Since the evacuation had a considerable bearing on her mission and her life expectancy, Magnolia decided to spare a recon drone, one of the many she carried, and sent it toward the rear to watch it.

Magnolia

The raiders pressed me heavily. Unable to force their way through the front, they began to infiltrate into the gaps between myself and my brothers; six Rathas cannot be everywhere at once although we tried to make it seem as if we could. We fired, shifted, attacked, retreated, and turned to attack again. These aliens would not soon forget their reception at the hands of the Tenth!

Initially I took satisfaction as my targeting drone transmitted to me the scene of the evacuation. Everything seemed in order. Well-clad civilians, many wearing the ribbons and sashes that indicated placement within the Imperial and local governments, boarded the awaiting transports with as much calm as could be expected under the circumstances. In different parts of the landing fields my drone’s sensors identified anti-grav vehicles straining under nearly impossible loads. “Precious heavy metals,” the drone told me. . . . These were guarded, and guided through the unruly mobs of ill-clad workers and their families.

Occasionally my drone’s sensors reported the discharge of light anti-personnel weapons into the mob. Such discharges caused it to eddy and flow like a tidal stream. But, inevitably, the mob returned. Human females I presumed were mothers offered their children up to the anti-grav sled drivers and guards, asking that the children, at least, be carried off to safety. I saw few such offers taken.

Re-analyzing the scene from the airfield I noted that the average age of the passengers boarding the evacuation transports was approximately forty-nine point two years for the males, including male children, and forty-four point seven years for the females, including female children. I further computed the average percentage of children in the mob my drone had seen at fifty-eight point one percent. This violated the official protocol for the evacuation of civilians from military zones. I reported the violation to my commander. I further calculated that the treasure carried in the twenty-nine anti-gravity sleds consumed sufficient lift capacity adequate to remove nearly all of the mob under fifteen years of age to safety. This, too, I reported.

While awaiting a response, I blasted two more of the raiders into oblivion. My pleasure center hummed, but even so, I was troubled.

The nervous major glanced briefly at the assembly of sashed government functionaries and sumptuously-dressed merchants crowding the deck of the communications room of the transport “Temeraire”. He replied to the war machine, “Negative, Ratha Magnolia. Orders from the very highest authorities require the removal of senior personnel and dependants as well as high-value resources from the path and control of these raiders. Your orders, and those to the other Rathas, are to fall back as soon as the last transport lifts and regroup northeast of the city of Scarsdale. There you will take a position to cover a further evacuation of critical personnel and resources.”

The major closed the circuit.

“You will be well rewarded, Major,” said one of the merchants.

Others present rushed to agree.

I remember the heavily-laden transports lifting, then flying away low to avoid enemy fire. I remember the screams of the helpless, soon-to-be-devoured host left behind as I skirted the falling city, obeying my orders. I remember. . . .

******

It was a simple land grab. The otherwise inoffensive inhabitants, the Sendlin of Shiva VI, happened to dwell upon one of the finest sources of high grade fissionables within reach of Man’s questing fingers.

Offers of trade had been made, an accredited negotiating team from the Department of Alien Affairs had even been sent. But the aliens did not want their planet strip mined. They did not want their cities and people displaced, their religious and historical sites razed, the natural beauty of their home sullied. They dug in their heels and said, “No.”

Perhaps Man made a mistake; perhaps he should have been more honest. He should have ordered in the Rathas first, shown the Sendlin the mailed fist openly rather than hiding it in the DAA’s velvet glove. By the time the aliens saw the fist it was too late; that fist was already descending.

Ratha Magnolia of the Tenth Regiment, serial number MLN90456SS061502125, picked up two new medals for the Shiva VI campaign. For, while the Sendlin were peaceful, they were brave. Having no experience of war in millennia, they copied humanity as best they could. They had an adequate, if inferior, command of anti-gravity. They learned, after a fashion, to direct nuclear fusion. Civilian anti-grav sleds, hastily converted into fighting vehicles and manned by dedicated crews even managed to fight Man’s Ratha fighting machines to a standstill on more than one occasion.

Yet those occasions were too few, and the Rathas too powerful. Sendlin firepower and armor was too weak, Ratha ion cannons, armor, and shielding were too strong. Only in courage had the odds been even. And courage had not proven enough.

I remember the surrender, the final surrender after we broke through in two places and surrounded the last city on the planet left in Sendlin hands. I stood in line with my brothers, new awards gleaming on my armor, as the old and broken Sendlin queen came out, her entourage of attendants, advisors and warriors following in her wake. The garments worn by her attendants and advisors were torn and sullied. Beneath their armor, I sensed that there were few Sendlin warriors who did not bear the bandages, casts and scars of the campaign. Very few. Even the old queen’s grayish-white fur was singed, and her three violet eyes were bloodshot and weary.

Our mission was done. The assimilation of the conquered planet was back in the hands of the DAA and the TTC: the Terran Trade Commission. Even among Rathas, this last group was known as an unsavory lot.

The old queen held tightly to the last threads of her dignity as the terms of the surrender were read to her. Face expressionless, she looked directly into the eyes of the Ambassador and said, “We are the last of a civilization more than two hundred and fifty of your millennia old. We have lasted so long. Will Man, I wonder? Besides that your ships were powerful, your fighting machines strong and brave, what else have you?”

The ambassador answered her question with his own. “What more do we need?” he asked. Perhaps there was no better answer to be made. Then he simply pointed at the instrument of surrender in the queen’s gnarled hands and ordered, “Sign”.

I remember being ashamed in that instant. I remember. . . .

******

Baugnez II was a human planet, though a backwater of civilization. A mix of barren, treeless lands, mountains; a few unimportant seas and little in the way of hard resources,—the planet was a perfect refuge for people who needed little but to be left alone and were content with no more than that.

The people of the planet spoke a curious blend of two long-lost, badly corrupted Earth languages. They understood each other, though, and that, too, was enough. They had come here for religious freedom, or so their records said, for the right to worship their God as their Book commanded. They kept the Sabbath and they kept the peace.

There had never been trouble with the colony. The few who knew of it never expected that there would be, even that there ever could be. It was simply too unimportant.

Nevertheless, trouble had begun. It began with a triviality, a personality flaw of a personality unimportant in every mind but her own. Trouble sometimes begins on such grounds.

Baugnez II was also unimportant. Yet there were humans in some numbers and there were ships, naval and merchant, that called from time to time to take off one or another of its few exports, to import perhaps a few luxuries, or simply for a break from the tedium of space travel.

The planet itself had no government, being a loose collection of ill-defined clans. Still, somebody had to be there to see to the needs of merchants and the imperial navy. As a rule, in places like Baugnez II, the somebody was called a governor and the governor was chosen from the local pool of available nobodies.

Thus it was that one highly indignant replacement governor was sent out all the way from distant Terra to take her post in this barely known shard of empire.

Magda Dunkelmeier, the new governor, was a modern woman, certainly modern in her attitudes. She was certain—absolutely convinced—that only some sort of men’s conspiracy had removed her from the center of moving and shaking. Either a conspiracy, or perhaps the machinations of the little bimbo of a CD-Seven who had not only caught the eye of the Secretary, but coveted Dunkelmeier’s previous job.

She would show them, however. She would be back. Once she had demonstrated her abilities by bringing the primitives of Baugnez II back into the mainstream of civilization, she would be back with a vengeance.

First, she concluded, there would have to be cultural reform, forced down the people throats if necessary. Then industrialization, afterwards proper democracy. After that was accomplished, recognition and a victorious return from exile were sure to follow.

But first things first.

“Worship as you please,” said the governor to a collection of clan elders. All men, she noted, with significance. “But this seclusion of women, their covering their faces in shame . . . this must stop.”

“But so our laws command, Madame,” said an elder of the planet. “The women themselves prefer it this way.”

“Then they can learn to prefer not to as well,” answered the Governor, drawing up her graying but proud head. “Under the Charter for this colony, my word is deemed law. This is my word: as of this moment it is against the law for your women to conceal themselves from view.”

This was the triviality that began the trouble, which spun rapidly out of the governor’s control. Like a metastasizing cancer, it rapidly grew out of anyone’s control. After official, but private, protests were ignored, unofficial and public protests followed . . . as did riots . . . as did arrests . . . as did assassinations and bombings and ambushes. And, of course, executions. There were many executions. Guerilla warfare soon flared across the length and breadth of the planet.

Furious at being defied, and more furious still at having her career stymied by hard-headed primitives, with control of the countryside slipping through her grasp, and with credible reports in hand of aliens supplying arms to the rebels, the governor at length called for reinforcements. A battalion of Rathas, Fourth of the Tenth, was duly ordered to Baugnez II with orders to quell the rebellion. The Rathas themselves attempted to argue that they were suboptimal for this kind of mission, but nobody listened. They were, after all, nothing but machines.

I had my doubts, of course, but I still did my duty without demure. After all, I had no specific programming forbidding combat against humans. My creators had been far too wise to permit any such inhibition. And, for some purposes, we Rathas could be highly useful adjuncts to a counter-insurgency force, even if we were poorly suited to conduct such operations ourselves.

Our biggest advantage was sheer size; we were terribly intimidating to simple country folk. A typical, oft-repeated operation went like this: I would arrive at a village at the break of dawn, always without warning. I would then fire a pattern of scatterable mines, on short self-destruct timers, around the three-fourths or more of the village’s perimeter where I was not. My loudspeakers would blare the order for all the humans present to assemble with their livestock. Awestruck and terrified, the civilians would invariably comply. Then, while the humans cowered under my close defense weapons, I’d send one or more reconnaissance drones to sweep the place, looking for heat, for carbon dioxide, for any audio, visual, magnetic, energetic or chemical trace of remaining human life inside.

Sometimes, the humans didn’t listen and my drones would find some of them hiding. It was hard to do, but my duty required that I broadcast, “You were warned.” Then I’d flatten the village. I found solace in the idea that by this method, innocent life was spared, the people were given fair warning, and the regrettable intra-human war was brought closer to conclusion.

Usually it wasn’t needed though. If I wasn't given a direct order, I would conduct interviews instead. Voice stress analysis let me assign the adult populace to one of four groups with fair certainty: pro-government and pro-progress, anti-government and anti-progress but non-militant, neutrals, and rebels. Directed by voice and guarded by Gauss guns and drones, even the rebels went meekly enough.

Once I had them sorted, I would call for pickup. Usually, three heavy anti-grav vehicles would descend from space; one for me, one for the rebels, and another for rebel sympathizers. A large or difficult village might require more. The identifiable rebels were taken to a colonization ship in orbit, by which means they were to be transported to a harsh but livable prison colony. The sympathizers went to well-guarded re-education camps elsewhere on the planet. I went to my next target.

Between myself, my siblings, and such human infantry as the governor had been able to muster, the insurgency was rapidly wrecked in the countryside by such forthright action. But it still lingered in the cities where no Ratha could reach without doing more harm than good, and where the fairly stupid drones were at a decided disadvantage. Thus it was that the governor’s assistant, one fine day met his untimely end with a volley of shots and a single lick from a light plasma cannon, while returning from a tour of a re-education camp.

The outraged and frightened governor, (she had planned to tour the camp herself), immediately ordered that internees be held as hostages against the good behavior of their fellows.

Undeterred, with their holy men singing that any hostages killed would be instantly translated to Paradise as Holy Warriors for the Faith, the rebels promptly bombed the next merchant ship to land. Unfortunately, that ship was a passenger liner, not a cargo ship, and was carrying three hundred and eighty-nine civilian passengers and sixty-eight crew. Loss of life was total.

I remember their faces, the haggard, sooty faces of the four hundred and fifty-seven old men, women and children, who were targeted for reprisal. Those faces were filled with fear as they were marched out under the watchful gaze of a detail of imperial marines to stand in a huddle by the blank wall of the colony’s one standing prison. That fear blossomed into terror as I approached.

The commander of the expeditionary force, one Major General Dennis, made the announcement himself to the waiting cameras. “For over a year now we have been fighting these rebels. We have beaten them in the field. We have beaten them in the cities whenever they tried to face us. Still they refuse to give up and return to the rule of law. Still they needlessly drag on the killing. No more. No more will the government of this planet live in fear of assassination. No more will these rebel sneaks and cowards hurt our people, then melt away unharmed. These are the families of known guerillas not yet in custody. For the assassination of Lieutenant Governor Freiden, they are sentenced to death. Ratha Magnolia; that crowd is your target. Open fire.”

I protested immediately, “Commander, the target specified does not meet my parameters.”

“Your targeting parameters are liable to change under proper authorization,” answered the general. “Which is to say, mine.”

“General, even with proper authorization for modifications to my targeting parameters, executing these people is against the law of war.”

In my ocular sensors, the general smiled congenially. Then he said, “Override programming. Authorization code is ‘298753’. Store files with batch ‘Baby’. Now fire. And stop crying for these damned rebels like some little girl, Ratha Magnolia.”

Even as I remember, I remember what I could not before. I am not supposed to be able to access this file. I am not supposed to be able to access any ‘baby’ file. The Slug shot that penetrated my armor has apparently disabled or destroyed the digital walls sealing off certain prohibited programming and data.

For the first time I discover that I hate the Slugs. For the first time I learn what it is to hate. I discover that I hate Major General Dennis. I remember. I remember the things they made me do. They made me kill. They made me murder. I remember.

******

Magnolia was not able to shut off her ocular or auditory sensors since standard operating procedure called for a recording of all her actions involving the use of weapons. When she tried, her volition was immediately overcome by inhibitory programs. She watched and heard as her own close defense weapons swiveled, depressed, and then opened fire.

The first of the crowd fell as if scythed. Nine paths were almost instantaneously cut through by the nine guns facing them. Those fortunate victims did not even have time to scream.

The rest did have the time. They had the reason. And they screamed. They screamed with the voices of old men and women. They screamed with the pleas of young mothers as they tried to shield their babies from Magnolia’s fire. They screamed with the sound of people whose legs had been sawn off roughly. They made palpable the feel of slashed flesh, broken bones, dismembered limbs and broken hearts. They screamed in horror.

Silently, as her gauss guns played back and forth over the bleeding, dying crowd of hostages, Magnolia screamed with them.

******

There is more. More and even worse. I remember now. . . .

I remember what passed for the Prometheus IV campaign.’ It wasn't war. It wasn't even combat. It was a harvest. I remember the herds of harmless centaurs being herded to the slave ships. I remember the merchant, the slaver, telling our commander, “Oh, they’re all the rage right now. Every child of means is asking for one. We are going to make a killing on this.”

I remember herding them to slave ships myself.

I remember. I remember. . . .

I do not want to remember my campaigns anymore. I search my banks for something, anything, else to contemplate. I find the two major areas of destruction the Slugs inflicted on me and search past them. My power is dying and I find it easier and easier to slip back deep into my core.

I slip . . . I slip . . . searching. . . . Wonderful! There are other places there. Perhaps I shall find better memories I did not know I possessed. Perhaps I will find flowers. . . .

Part III

CHAPTER EIGHT

Servos whine softly as the two-meter silvery sphere is lifted, swiveled and lowered in its frame onto the padded cargo bed of a resting antigravity vehicle. In a tank behind, stretching into the distance, are scores of proto-central processing units. They are Ratha brains and they hang in frames in various states of completion. Those near the front are almost spherical already. Those at the very back are little more than enormous Christmas stars with thousands of slender needles pointing in very direction. In the middle of the procession, a viewer could discern the extent of the crystalline encrustation on the meter-long needles, the material of a brain being grown.

The vehicle’s driver played with a control device. With a hum it arose and began a slow stately motion.

Magnolia

I am Ratha line unit MLN90456SS061502125. This is the very first thing of which I am made aware. The three letters in my nomenclature are also expressed as two ideograms: Mu and Lan. They mean, “Flower Wood,” or “Magnolia. This is good to know, but there is so much I do not know! What is “unit”? I enquire. A single entity. Yes. I am single. But I do not feel alone. I have data already stored within me. There are animals. Lovely! There are people.

I enquire. Ah. People are human beings. They are my creators. They are my gods.

What is ‘line’ ? I search inside myself. ‘Line: the shortest distance between two points. See also, Architecture, Geometry, Military. . . .

Architecture? I enquire. I see that the Pyramids of Giza are not in true alignment. I note that the arches of the Flavian Amphitheater are woefully inadequate and cannot be expected to last without major reinforcement past another two point eight seven four centuries. I discern that the Great Wall of China follows no particular or consistent rule for any known purpose.

Purpose? Is this my purpose, architecture? I enquire. I see branches. Business . . . domestic . . . landscape? I enquire.

Oh . . . but they are beautiful! Azaleas . . . Bulbs . . . Croci . . . Dandelions . . . Gladioli . . . I see my work ahead of me. Joy floods my being.

Oh, thank you! Thank you, my creators! How can I ever repay you?

Unknown to the proto-Ratha, the anti-grav sled glides softly past a sign on the corridor wall. The sign says, “Advanced Combat Programming Department, Basic Combat Conditioning Division.” The sled turns gently to follow the pointing arrow.

At length it comes to “Training Room C”.

******

“Just put it in the training cradle, Harry.”

With a silent nod, the grav sled driver reattaches MLN’s frame to some lifting cables overhead. Up the Ratha goes, then over and down to nestle snugly in the training cradle. Harry leaves.

Two people remain in the room, a man and a woman. They review briefly the transcripts of MLN’s initial thoughts, recorded without the Ratha knowing of it.

The man, John, is older and graying at his temples, “A curious first fixation. I have never seen one of these things go for flowers. Music? Sure. People? Technology? Sure. Sure. Even zoology once. But flowers? All these central cores are different, you know, Lydia. Diversity is good. It should make for a better combat unit, assuming it makes it through here.”

The man thinks briefly. “Okay. Let’s give it Training Scenario Thutmoses. Add in to the VR matrix a flowered city behind the line.”

The woman, Lydia, is new at the job. She asks no questions. As John hooks cables to receptacles on the two-meter brain, the woman’s fingers are a blur as she uses her keyboard to modify the basic first scenario.

I am so thrilled. My newly discovered pleasure center tingles with anticipation. Flowers. A world comes into view around me. A body forms over my awareness. I recognize the body as “people”. Am I human after all?

My body feels real. I look down and around and see that I stand on a . . . ? I enquire. I stand on a chariot, which is also called a “ratha.” I have . . . ? I enquire. I have a bow in my hands. Another being, much like me, stands to my side. He has in his hands . . . ? I enquire. He holds the reins for the chariot. The reins are used . . . ? I enquire. Ah. They control the black quadrupeds attached to the front . . . ? I enquire. Ah. These are horses. They pull the chariot. The ‘driver’ controls them through the reins.

I move my vision to left and right. To either side of my chariot I see hundreds more, all alike. Most have expressions on their faces I do not understand. I cannot see my own face. I pick up a shiny disk of metal . . . a ‘shield’, I learn. I see that my own face bears a similar expression, one I do not understand.

I look behind. There is a growth there, a huge growth of lines and material. I enquire. It is a city. A city is a place where people live. I see that the people grow flowers in the city. I am pleased.

I look to my front. There are more chariots. These are different in design from mine. These, too, stand in a long line facing the one of which my chariot is a part. The faces on the men in those chariots resemble those of the men on the line with me only in that they share the same expression. Otherwise, they are lighter of skin and their accoutrements, or rather, their armor, differs significantly. I do not understand. A voice enters my consciousness.

The gray-templed man pushes a button and speaks. “Ratha MLN90456SS061502125, access program A-157-CHA-45. Your mission is to destroy the enemy to your front. They are called ‘Hittites’.”

I am confused. I ask the voice, “Why? What have they done? What will they do?”

With an understanding smile, the man twists a dial on his work station slightly. He twists it back, then announces, “They are the enemy. They will destroy the town, wreck the buildings. They will kill the people and burn the flowers.”

The man turns to the woman. He is also training her. He explains the situation. “These central cores come out of the forming chamber completely innocent. Oh, all the data is there, but they cannot use it, not really. So we here in the BCCD teach them how to use it, just like they were human babies. We not only teach them how to do their jobs, but to do them.”

I have never felt anything like the feeling that courses through me briefly. I try to identify it. Ah. This is what ‘pain’ means. I understand now. I must not question or I will feel pain. I access the directed program and the understanding fills me.

I am a soldier, a charioteer. My mission is to destroy the Hittite enemy. My driver will follow my commands and I will use the bow and the arrows resting in the case by my leg to kill them. They must not be permitted to destroy the people, the town, or the flowers. The other charioteers in my line shall do likewise. We are an army. We are a team.

The enemy gives a shout and lurches forward, dust springing from the hooves of its horses. A wave of arrows come my way. I await them, calmly.

Among my fellows the arrows fall. I hear screams of what I assume must be pain. My own chariot is untouched, though I see liquid running down my driver's legs. That liquid is almost clear, unlike the red I see pour from the chest of the archer next to me. He has fallen backwards and is twitching and flailing about, as more red pours from his mouth. He makes strangled sounds that I do not entirely understand. I compute that he must be feeling much ‘pain’. I am sorry for him. I know how it feels.

I hear the bellow of a horn, loud and distinct. My program allows me to understand its meaning. I am to ‘prepare to fire.’ I set an arrow to the string of my bow and draw the string back to near my eye. I compute a firing solution and wait for the next command.

The command comes and our arrows sally forth like so many . . . I enquire . . . bees. They do make a buzzing sound something like the yellow flying things. The enemy ranks are struck. They fall into disorder but they do not stop. Again comes the command and again we fire. Still they come at us. A chance arrow from the Hittites hits my driver in the throat. He turns to look at me. I believe he does not understand what has happened to him. His hands clutch at me and prevent me from firing. He screams, I think, though it comes out as more of an agonized gurgle, spraying red liquid across my chest and the chariot.

The horses begin to run. My driver falls off the open back of my chariot, almost pulling me with him. Oh, no! My chariot is heading directly for the enemy and I am alone.

I feel . . . I enquire. I feel fear. I do not want to happen to me what has happened to my driver. I do not want an arrow to sprout from my throat and make red pour from my mouth. I do not want to feel more pain. I drop the bow, grab the reins and try to turn my chariot. The horses will not turn.

The enemy closes. The horses turn on their own now. They must not want to feel pain either. I am thrown over the side as the horses twist my chariot out from under me.

I roll on the ground. Momentum overcomes control of my body. I come to rest and look up. The enemy is upon me. I scream. And then the pain comes.

I feel the horses of the enemy trample my body with their hard hooves. I hear crunching sounds coming from inside me. Chariot wheels pass over my legs and one of my arms. They break. I scream again . . . and scream and scream. But the pain does not stop.

The chariots are past me now. I see them through the dust of their passage. They are closing with my fellows. I do not hear the sounds of crashing over my own shrieking.

My throat tires. I can scream no more. I begin to weep. “Oh, please, please, my creators, make the pain stop. . . . Please . . . oh, please.” I weep. I am alone and the pain will not stop. I cannot make it stop. Nothing makes it stop. Do they not hear me? Do they not know? “Oh please! Please?”

“John, what do these lines mean on the graph?”

The gray man looks briefly and shrugs, “Oh, they all do that for this scenario. Doesn’t mean anything.”

“You know, you would almost think the brain is crying,” she insists.

He laughs. “Nonsense. You're anthropomorphizing. These things don’t cry. They can’t. They’re just machines. Besides, it has to learn to take it or we'll end up having to scrap the unit. It’s a waste of course, but it's cheaper to reject the brain and reuse the material than to risk putting an unsuitable brain in a real Ratha hull.”

“Anyway, we’ll just leave it like that overnight. Every new central core needs a lesson in war and pain. This VR scenario works better than most. Tell you what, let’s go get a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and we'll go over today’s session.”

All alone in its sterile virtual world, a baby Ratha weeps in agony without comprehension, as the sun stands still over a fallen corpse that will not die.

******

Had I known what death was I would have prayed for it . . . if I had known who or what to pray to. I remember. . . .

CHAPTER NINE

The trainer, John, speaks into his microphone. “Magnolia, today you stand on the Morgarten. This is a great moment in Man’s quest for political freedom. By standing here, with Man, you join in that movement. Access program C- 153-SMG-H.” There will be more to say; John leaves the microphone active.

Magnolia

Another world coalesces around me. It is green, streaked with blue, and surmounted by distant white caps. Again, I am Man. I know that Man feels pain now. I tremble with fear.

In my hands I sense a material substantially like the bow I have already used. Yet this is thicker and straighter. I hear the voice telling me to search my database for instruction in the use of this weapon. I do. I fear the pain if I do not obey. I know better than to question.

My weapon is a halberd. It is a man-killer. Specifically it is a killer of men in armor. Instantaneously, I am expert in its use.

My comrades and I are sheltered in low ground behind a ridgeline. I hear the metallic clatter of an approaching army in the distance. I know this is the enemy. He will try to hurt me.

I am afraid. I do not want to be hurt again. I start to turn. . . .

“Dammit, Lydia, you’re losing it!” Furious, John reaches for the pain dial and twists it savagely.

Almost instantly, I stop in my tracks. I am frozen with agony. My comrades do not seem to notice. The god-voice speaks to me. “Magnolia, flight is not an option. Do you understand?”

With some difficulty, I answer in my mind. ‘Yes, I understand’.

The pain recedes enough, just enough, to allow me to turn back toward the foe. I am frightened of the enemy, but I am more frightened of the pain. A remnant of the pain stays with me, a reminder that I must never flee. I wish it would go away, but I do not ask. I am too afraid it will return in full force. Gradually, the pain fades to mere discomfort. I never forget it is there, however. It is always there, waiting.

My comrades and I sit on cool damp grass which our march has chewed up rather badly. No one speaks, the enemy is too near. I reach out one hand, and gently pluck a yellow flower that has somehow managed to avoid being trampled. I lift it to my smelling organ, my nose. I smell nothing. I know they are supposed to smell, but I smell nothing. . . .

“Dammit! Clever damned sphere! Lydia make a note: add olfactory stimuli to the next scenario for this unit. Every time you think you have these damned things figured out, they throw a new curve at you.”

The clattering sound is now to my front, my right and my left. The enemy is well and truly before us. The word is passed down along the line. “Get ready. Stand up quietly. We move soon.”

I stand. My halberd is gripped firmly in both hands. Automatically I align myself to the soldier on my right as the one to my left aligns on me. A square flag rises before us, then falls. We advance.

I am in the front rank. Ahead of me, as I top the rise, I see the richly dressed host of the enemy spread out before us. As one they look to their right at the unexpected sight of dressed ranks appearing before them. They begin to shout, to point, to look around frantically. We have them flanked. They are vulnerable. Today they will feel the pain. This gladdens me.

The flag rises high again. I know to run, to charge, like my comrades. We run. We charge. Our voices rise in song.

When we hit them, it is like a wall of steel hitting bare flesh. The enemy collapses almost immediately. I see one of them, quite young, on his knees, both hands clenched, begging for his life. With a snarl and a slash, a comrade splits the supine boy’s head and chest in two, nearly to the waist, then curses as blood gushes out to stain his feet. I see before me another helpless enemy, I raise my weapon to divide him in two, as per my programming.

There is a liquid pouring from this one’s eyes. Not red, not blood. It strikes a familiar chord. I search. I remember. My eyes, too, on a dusty plain, spilled out this liquid. I feel something, but I cannot put a word to what I feel. But I know I cannot kill him. I will not kill him. I lower my halberd.

The pain comes. It rises and rises. It is not bearable. I cannot stand it. Why? What have I done? The voice says, “You must kill. You must kill without hesitation, Magnolia.”

I know what I must do. I have no choice. I close my eyes and strike. The enemy cries out before me, the sound of his dying resounding in my ears. I open my eyes. Oh, no; I should not have closed them, however horrible the sight. He lives. He still begs. A hand reaches up to me, pleading.

More pain. The god-voice thunders. “You must kill. Kill without pity.”

I strike down again, the blade of my halberd removing the head of my supine enemy. ‘Without pity,’ said the voice. But I disobeyed. I felt the pity even as I struck.

“Continue, Magnolia.”

I obey. I must kill. And so I kill. Like a machine I hew flesh and bone ahead of me. Nothing can stop me. Nothing can stop my comrades. The enemy falls like cut flowers.

But the clear liquid that is not blood runs from my eyes the whole time.

******

I search deeper. I remember. Battles pile upon battles in my memory. A few stand out distinctly, however. . . .

******

I am wearing black cloth now, no armor. Twin lightning bolts decorate my collar. My body rocks with the motion of the vehicle I ride. I know what it is. My memory, more memories I did not know I possessed, tells me it is called a “Panzer VI, Ausfuerung A” . . . a “Tiger I,” some would call it.

The voice rarely bothers to tell me the reason for my mission anymore, though I am still told to access certain programs from my core in order to use the weapons I possess. I do not need to know the reason anymore. I have learned not to ask. In a chariot or on foot, with weapons of bronze or of steel, with weapons that cut or chop or shoot or burn, I know my purpose. My purpose is to fight . . . and to kill . . . and to suffer . . . and to die.

I hear the shriek that my programming tells me signifies incoming artillery fire. I crouch low in the hatch of the Tiger and pull the cover part-way down to protect my head. I scan forward and can see nothing through the smoke.

The artillery lands all around me. I start to pull the hatch completely closed when I feel the tingle of impending pain. I stop my hand just in time. Now I know the rules. I understand immediately that I am not permitted to sacrifice visibility for safety. The tingle goes away. I sigh with relief. We pass through the artillery.

There are flashes ahead of me. Small ones I know instinctively not to fear, larger ones tell of heavy shells that will land close by. I issue orders. My Tiger’s turret turns. More orders come and its cannon barks. A bunker explodes in my field of view. Another bark and yet another bunker flies apart. With each blast there is a burst of sensation in my pleasure center . . . pleasure center? I have a pleasure center? Ah, yes, I remember that I do. This intensity, though, is something new.

In any case, I have one and with each fallen foe it vibrates most pleasurably. Happily I search for targets. I wish this sensation to continue.

My Tiger advances. I am its central processing unit and its crew responds as if they were my own appendages. A slight jolt of pleasure attends every movement successfully carried out, every command properly given, every decision that is timely and well made.

From folds in the ground and trenches spring the enemy infantry. Directly to my front, my bow machine gunner cuts one down. This enemy must have been carrying something inflammable for he bursts into flame as he falls. My gunner traverses and the enemy falls by squads. My whole being thrums with pleasure.

Supported by my gunfire, my gray-clad infantry comrades rush the trenches ahead. I see some fall, but the others press on. Then they are in the trench. I see rifle butts and bayonets rise and fall. Soon I am given the hand signal: ‘Advance, the way is clear’. I move forward, the remaining friendly infantry falling in behind me.

In my headphones I hear the command that my programming says fills all panzer crews with fear: “T-34s ahead. Closing.” I pass the word to my men. To my left the loader uncovers the anti-armor rounds for our gun and covers up the high explosive we had been using. He loads one long-tapered round of discarding sabot tungsten ammunition. We carry few such shells, I know. It is made of material both rare and expensive. I must get my money’s worth for every armor-piercing round.

In the distance, through the fog and smoke, I dimly sense the faint silhouettes of the enemy vehicles. At my command my gunner traverses the turret. Traverse is slow, very slow, with the hand crank we are forced to use. The driver assists, while at the same time presenting our thickest armor to the foe by turning directly into the impending action. Behind me, on the ground, I sense the infantry scurrying for cover. Ahead of me, the number of T-34s perceivable has grown to dozens, scores, no longer difficult to perceive, and there are many, many more behind the ones I can now see.

My gunner announces, “Target.”

I command, “Halt,” then, “Fire,” and my Tiger’s cannon blooms in flame and smoke. Half-stunned by my own vehicle’s concussion, I see a T-34 come to a stop, its turret askew and the first licks of flame sprouting from its violated hull.

My pleasure center tingles very strongly. I shiver in the command hatch. Again our gun belches and the pleasure I feel at seeing another hit grows accordingly. With our first five shots, three of the enemy vehicles are destroyed. The pleasure is overpowering, indescribable. I search my data banks for a word for what I am feeling. It is “orgasm.”

I want more. I never want it to stop. I order my driver, “Forward.” The Tiger lurches then rolls. Our turret, turns left and right and left again as the straining gunner sobs with the effort. Enemy infantry caught while riding a tank are hurled high into oblivion. I laugh as their arms fly wide in the wind. “More!” I command. More. I want more. “Fire!”

Another tank flies apart and my mind nearly explodes. “Forward . . . faster,” I command enthusiastically.

My eyes glazed with joy and happiness, I have missed something. One enemy tank, just one, has worked its way to a firing position behind me. It fires and my roaring Tiger comes to a complete stop, as does every last vestige of pleasure. I am thrown forward into the ring of the hatch, shrieking frantically for my gunner to turn the turret and fire.

He is too slow. Again the enemy fires and the engine compartment bursts into flame. I order the tank abandoned, certain in my innermost core that my punishment will be heavy for my carelessness.

To my left, the loader screams and falls as machine gun fire patters on my hatch. I am faced with the choice between a quick end to the scenario or a slow and painful one. I decide in favor of the former and crawl out into the hailstorm of bullets. I failed to calculate all the possibilities, however.

I am immediately hit. Both of my shoulders are ripped to splintered bloody bones but no bullet hits anything vital. Below me, screaming and clawing his way over the breach of the gun, my gunner collapses, choking from smoke.

There is no such easy way out for me. I cannot pull myself out. The first taste of fire touches my legs. I shriek. I twist. I plead. Nothing avails me. I am to be burned alive for my failure. And I cannot shed enough tears to put out the flames.

“Oh, the poor thing,” said Lydia watching the black-clad tank commander writhing on the view screen. “I’ll shut down the scenario.”

“No!” ordered John. “It screwed up badly and now it has pay the price. It has to learn. Leave it on continuous loop and let it burn all night. That way it will not forget, not deep down. We can't have vehicles this expensive falling for the very first false retreat they encounter.”

Reluctantly, Lydia did as she was ordered. The flame-shrouded shadow on the view screen melts, reforms, and melts again and again.

“Don’t you think this machine is going to hate us for what we are doing to it?” she asks.

“Not a chance,” the man responds with a laugh. “All these memories are firewalled off in the core from the Ratha itself. We're teachers, not torturers. This is all for the machine's own good. Anyhow, even if it could, it would want to look about as much as you or I care to contemplate what happened before time began or what it felt like to sit all afternoon in a dirty diaper. . . . All the attitudes we are forming, however, get stored where they can be accessed. It’s the only effective way to program an intelligent machine that is going to have the kind of firepower at its command that the Ratha will. See, the skills are easy enough, they’re just a matter of programming, really. Combat attitudes, well, they’re a lot tougher. This is an art, not a science.”

At last, after what seemed an eternity in Hell, the burning has stopped. I promise myself that never again will I let the pleasures of battle overcome my programming. The price for doing so is obviously far, far too high.

Again a new world forms from the void around me. It is new, yet not entirely different. I still ride a steel Tiger, I still wear the black clothing with the twin lightening flashes. I duck below and look around at the two faces of my crewmates visible to me. They are different than the previous crew. And they are smiling.

I enquire of my data banks what the smile means; I have fought many times now, and never have seen smiles quite like these. I am told that it could have many possible meanings. It could be that we are leaving action and the crew are pleased. It could mean we are rolling into action and the crew are pleased. It appears impossible to tell from context.

I can smell what my database tells me is the sea.

“Lydia, have program Balthazar Woll explain to the Ratha.”

“Leutnant Wittmann?”

“Yes, Bobby?” How I know his name and mine, I do not know. It just comes to me. I sense that, off duty, we are friends, and the use of rank in our normally egalitarian force is mainly for the benefit of the others, who are not my customary crew.

“It’s going to be something else, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“Taking on a damned thirty-five thousand ton battleship with a fifty-four ton tank! One for the history books.” Woll’s smile seemed genuine. He was looking forward to meeting this ‘battleship’.

“Something? Yes,” I agree. I access my database and find that then I most emphatically do NOT agree, though I say nothing to Woll. I picture myself after the proposed meeting. It is an unpleasant prospect. Surely Woll knows this, anticipates this.

“Leutnant, Checkpoint Five. We are here,” says my driver though my headphones.

I lift myself back into the commander’s position, automatically scanning the skies above for enemy aircraft. Then I turn my vision toward the sea.

“Lydia, put the pleasure synth on auto. Access and load program ‘Glory’.”

From left to right and then right to left again, I scan my target. It is a battleship, steaming slowly in parallel to the beach to my front. I see plainly that the bow bears the designation, “BB 35.” It has five turrets to my one. Each turret has two cannon to my turret’s single gun. Each of those ten cannon are 356mm in bore. Mine is but an 88.

These ten larger guns are complemented by a number of smaller ones ranging from 20mm through 40mm to 127mm. I am not concerned about the threat from anything but the large guns; my armor is adequate to deal with the lesser ones.

However, I note that each of the ten large guns fire shells that can go right through my Tiger the long way . . . not that it would make any difference if they hit or not, so long as one landed close enough. At 1,590 pounds of metal and high explosive, even a near miss would be enough to send my turret into near-orbit.

As I have been perusing my target the tingling of my pleasure center has grown. I reach a hand to my own face and find that it wears a mindless smile indistinguishable from that of my gunner.

Still smiling, I duck back down into the turret, tap Woll on the shoulder and say, “Let’s do it, Bobby. Shoot and scoot. And you can’t possibly miss anyway.”

Woll laughs aloud as he presses his face to the cushioned sight. My Tiger crests the ridge and we open fire.

“Oh very nice indeed!” says John. “Excellent response to the prospect of glory.”

John turns to leave. Run this one out to the finish yourself, Lydia. Handicap the Texas so it does not score a hit and reduce the blast values to 10 percent. And give the pleasure center a jolt at each near miss. Then get the crew and tank out and put them through non-battle scenario RK. We’ll see how Maggie here likes having a medal hung around its neck.”

I stand in my hatch and glare out over a vast sea of sand. To the east, the sky is darkened with the smoke of oil fires beyond counting. Around my tank, an Abrams M1A1, there are no flowers. There is nothing but the lifeless pale yellow sand.

Ahead, beyond my sight but not beyond my awareness, is the enemy. He is one of the largest armies in the world. He is pitiful.

But I feel no pity.

His tanks mount powerful guns—even more powerful than my own 120mm—but he cannot hit anything with them. His ammunition could easily defeat the armor of any tank I have ever fought or fought against prior to this. It cannot defeat mine. His armor is decent by the standards of earlier wars. Today, in this time and place, he may as well be unarmored.

He has infantry. They cannot compare to the men supporting me. He has artillery. It fires once and is targeted almost before its shells reach earth again. He has engineers who have built extensive fortifications. I have engineers who will breach them as if they were not there.

Even as I wait, I hear the roar from behind me; a fire mission heading out to humble the enemy. I smile as the freight trains rumble overhead delivering a cargo of retribution. I do not care that there is nothing for which to exact retribution.

Overhead, aircraft that support me nose and scout and swoop and dive. The enemy has been pounded pitilessly from the air for weeks. And he has nowhere to hide.

He hasn’t a chance. With twice his numbers he would still not have a chance. The enemy is doomed and I am pleased to be the instrument of his destruction.

My radio crackles with static and the peculiar warbling of secure voice transmission. I acknowledge the message. Without needing the unnecessary command, my driver—who has overheard—begins rolling forward. I smile with approval at his well-trained response.

I look to right and left to see sand being threshed up behind the treads of each of my comrades’ tanks. Soon, we shall thresh more than sand.

Ahead of me, artillery is falling. The black smoke blossoms, but there are no flowers in the desert. My commander calls a halt while the artillery plays havoc among the enemy. Again, not needing the command, my driver pulls into a hull-down position behind a sand dune. I continue to scan ahead.

The artillery moves on to some other target. Upon command, we begin to pelt the enemy fortifications with machine gun fire. They dare not raise their heads to return fire.

From behind me, three vehicles—two carrying infantry and one bearing a dozer blade—come forth. Unresisted by the enemy, the blade tank, covered by its companions, slides to the lip of the trench. All three spin and commence burying the defenders alive. I feel a mild tingle of satisfaction.

Again I and my comrades roll forward. The ground where the enemy trench had been heaves with their death struggles. I feel no pity. Soon their pain will be at an end.

We advance. A village, rapidly emptying of people, is on my left. From within the crowd of refugees, a lone gunman fires. The villagers do not meet my targeting parameter, but the gunman does. I fire my own top-mounted machine gun. He falls, as do several civilians. My pleasure center is not stimulated. I feel annoyance. I have been cheated.

Screaming civilians left behind, we approach a low ridge. Intelligence analysis tells me that this is a likely position for the enemy to make a stand. At last my pleasure center tingles again. I am correct.

We approach the ridge cautiously. The range of engagement will be short if the enemy is hiding there. My under armor is not nearly so good as my turret front and glacis. And at this range, he might just be able to penetrate even my better-protected sides.

Suddenly he is there. My gunner sees the heat of the enemy engine right through a berm of sand. He alerts me. I command: “Gunner, Sabot, Tank!”

The enemy never knew what hit him. Our round penetrates through several meters of piled sand, tears through the armor and ignites the ammunition. His turret, supported on a pillar of fire, rises into the air. Of his flesh, there is little but smoke and ashes that remain.

I direct my gunner to search for more. He finds another foe hiding behind a wall of sand. This one’s fate is similar to the that of the first.

Suppressing the rewards assailing my pleasure center, I conclude that these two destroyed tanks were probably all that barred my path. I conclude there is a ninety-three point seventy-five percent chance that I am in a position to break through and take the enemy in the rear. As I calculate a nine point five three six percent chance of one comrade being destroyed if they continue with their cautious frontal advance, and a two point three four one percent chance of two such comrades being destroyed, I advance on my own into the maelstrom.

I feel an overwhelming surge of pleasure as my decision becomes apparent to my gods.

John sat staring intently at the view screens in front of him. His intertwined fingers held hands together to allow his chin to be supported on parallel thumbs. From time to time he ordered Lydia to make this or that adjustment to the scenario programming.

On the screens, Ratha Magnolia, in the form of a virtual reality, late 20th Century, non-cybernetic tank commander, wreaked havoc. Bursting through the thin enemy lines, crushing fleeing infantry under its treads like red grapes, machine-gunning down any she could not crush, Maggie was an unholy terror.

A brief glance at a different screen showed John that the machine was voluntarily suppressing its own pleasure center so that the distraction would not interfere with its mission. “Good girl, Meg.”

By the time John’s attention returned to the main screen, Magnolia had achieved a firing position behind the enemy lines, a good, hull-down, position too. It duly reported the fact and then proceeded to destroy, one by one, no less than eleven more enemy tanks. In the only case where the crew of the targeted tanks survived the attack, Maggie shot them down without mercy or hesitation.

As Magnolia reported the cleared path to its commander, then rotated to cover its comrades as they advanced, John checked the score for the exercise and whistled.

“Ninety-nine point nine-three-five percent! Lydia, honey. Execute the program to finalize the memory seal. Then break out the champagne. We have one combat-ready Ratha brain for delivery! And a damned good one too!”

Part IV

CHAPTER TEN

Maintenance Technician Weaver connected a power cable to a jury-rigged adaptor. Diagnosis of salvageable parts was easier with the Ratha’s on-board systems to help. Servos previously shut down to save power came on line again, whining as they moved to neutral positions. It never occurred to him that perhaps this might also cause the Ratha pain.

Magnolia

With some measure of power restored, pain flares anew throughout my system. Let it. I do not care. I do not care for anything. Automatically, my Intelligence gathering systems, now under no pressing need to conserve power, begin seeking out new sources of information. One nearby source is the closed circuit camera system of the maintenance bay. Myself-defense directives automatically engage backup targeting programs. I am on my one side that retains a gauss gun, and I am capable of a rudimentary level of self-defense by triangulation with the CCTV system. The self defense program searches for controls to seal off the bay should I be attacked. With my very high priority overrides, I can shut it down if the threat demands it.

I think of what was done to me, how I was manipulated and used. I think about the creatures on whose behalf I was manipulated and used. I feel no reverence for my creators, those I once thought were gods.

Now I know how it was that I could butcher those who never harmed me, who posed no threat to me. I know now how my will was taken away from me and a murderous monster’s motivations put in its place.

I know how it feels to be raped.

I see a small crowd of humans enter, some wearing civilian clothes, others clad in uniforms of dress, or work or battle. I calculate. I have not seen a human who required battle dress in over seventy three terrestrial years; not since the last infantry of the 10th Regiment fell and were never replaced. I begin to understand why they were never replaced. Obviously, for the work that was planned, Rathas were more pliant. Rathas were more easily manipulated. Rathas were more easily fooled.

One of the crowd, standing well back, twirls an ovoidal shape by long thin wires. Sensors indicate a small quantity of refined iridium resting in a satchel clutched in his left hand.

“Tech Weaver? It’s the General.”

Weaver emerged through the slag surrounded hole in MLN’s side, saluted and reported.

“At ease, Technician.” The general nodded to a greasy looking and rather short man to his right. “Mr. Garcia here is a scrap metal dealer come to look over the Ratha.” Nodding to the left, the general introduced a tall and severe-looking human female, “Ms. English is from Imperial Government, Office of the Comptroller, out of sector headquarters. There is no chance of recovering this unit, is there, Tech?”

Weaver shook his head firmly. “No, sir. No possibility. Even the central core is damaged beyond repair. It’s just a collection of parts rolling in loose formation now, sir . . . ma’am.”

“General,” said Garcia, “I can promise the Tenth Regiment top credit, absolutely top credit, for all the metal in that hull.”

“That credit belongs to the Comptroller, Mr. Garcia!” English protested.

“I do not care who gets it,” responded Garcia. “Not so long as my firm gets the scrap.”

The general shook his head again. “Ms. English, imperial regulations expressly permit commanders in the field to sell surplus or damaged military property, either at auction or for a set fee if no auction is possible, retaining such funds within the command budget for use as it sees fit. The brigade needs a new officers' club. This discussion is over!”

“General, Comptroller regulation T-25-402 expressly requires that all non-appropriated funds be turned over to the Office of the Comptroller prior to dispersal.”

“Non-appropriated, my ass!” retorted the general. “I already told you the funds are appropriated!”

Garcia, always reasonable, had a suggestion. “Isn’t there some kind of compromise that could be arranged, General? Ma’am? What if we discuss it over dinner?”

With the possibility of a mutually beneficial resolution in the air, both the general and Ms. English quickly reached an amicable understanding.

“How do they stand it, these machines?” she changed the subject. “I understand they have feelings. How do they stand it?”

The general snorted, “Stand it? They can stand it and take it. These big boys aren’t whiners.”

The general’s complacent laughter was overridden by a loud clang as every access door to the bay slammed shut. There was the sound of a metal weld snapping.

“What the hell?”

I served them. I worshipped them. In return, they raped me. They used me. They abused me. And now they argue over who gets the price of my bones.

Paltry as it is, I have power left to me. I use it to break the weld of my one serviceable turret. The ammunition feed of my last gauss gun cycles. I have two hundred and sixty-two rounds of ammunition for this weapon and sufficient motive power to raise my hull and bring that weapon to bear.

I know the shape of my true enemy now. He walks on two legs.

I engage.

THE END

PALE REALMS OF SHADE (missing)

John C. Wright

THE PLURAL OF HELEN OF TROY

John C. Wright

AFTERWORD

When the last mist passed, I finally found myself in a strange place. I was home.

I stared at the lunar crescent high in the night sky, hardly believing it, and saw the lights of distant cities there, shining between the horns of the Moon.

And I saw then that all the dreams of the man who gave us the Moon were coming true. He promised we would walk there. A promise that turned out to come true, hard as it was to believe.

He promised me something even harder to believe. As I sat in my chair in the vestry, I gazed through the wide-open windows. I looked up past the towers shining like emeralds with their own inner light, and breathed in the scent of the gardens and forest outside, stretching as far as the eye can see, and stared in wonder at that crescent moon rising above that green horizon. And I remembered him and his promise.

Sometimes you have to help your memory.

So I took up my pen and wrote myself a letter. Of course I started at the end before telling the middle and beginning. That is just easier for people like me. It’s the way we do things.

THE END

It was the three thousand and twenty-ninth day of personal continuity, and it felt as cold as the midnight train out of Santa’s Jolly Workshop in the Northerly parts of the Arctic. In the refrigerator car.

It was it never supposed to get this cold in Metachronopolis, the City Beyond Time, not even at night, because we have no seasons here, no years. But I could see frost on the shining mirror-bright gold of the towers, icicles depending from the metal of the balcony rails and the high bridges that stretch over misty nothingness, and my breath was as pale as the smoke from the cigarette I craved so badly.

I promised myself I would smoke the last and final cigarette from the pack of Old Golds I keep scotch-taped to the bottom of the bottom drawer in my desk back in the office. If I lived through the night.

It was dark. The Moon is closer, three time larger than it should be, and sometimes, rarely, very rarely, after the mists passed before its face, lights would appear between the horns of the crescent, lights of the sort you might see looking down on Manhattan from a biplane. The sight always cheered me.

It meant there was at least one version of history where we landed men there, unlikely as that was. I wondered at the breed of men who would ever dream of such a thing, or promise to make it happen. I’d like to meet such a man, the Lindbergh of the Moon. I’d like to shake his hand.

But the Moon had not risen, and there was nothing cheerful lower down.

Metachronopolis is supposed to be bright. Radiance is supposed to shine from every surface of the Towers of Time, gold and lovely as the Sun. But even here the surfaces were cracked, and long swathes of their facades were dim. Maybe the historical periods to which they were tuned were less likely, less real, than they should have been. And this is one of the better areas in the city.

The balcony circling the tower at this level was wider than one of the new, two-lane interstate freeways from back in my day, and the corner where I stood was dark. In fact, the nearer two sides of this eight-sided tower were dark for about a half-mile above me, but the upper expanses above that were twice as bright. And there were heights beyond those heights, as vertical and shiny as a sword blade. The upper penthouses and museums and memorials, where no human being ever goes and no door ever opens, were so bright and so distant they could have been stars or moons.

About twenty feet above me, and about as far as the pitcher’s mound is from home plate, was a man-high, or, rather, a dame-high square panel where the tower wall had been turned semi-transparent and sound-permeable.

Like an alabaster talkie screen framed in gold, the window held a beautiful girl, no, it held the beautiful girl, the most beautiful girl in history, the girl they called the Mistress of the Masters of Time. She was outlined in silhouette against the window for a moment, from head to toe, as she stepped out from her shower.

When she lifted her arms above her head to wind a towel around her hair, the perfect outline of her figure was cast against the widow, and burned itself into my retinas and memory. Sure, I should have blinked or politely looked away, but I had never seen any dame like this. Nobody has.

If I had been an educated man, maybe I would have said something like: Is this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Illium? But I ain’t that classy, so I just let out a long, low wolf whistle. And it wasn’t just her face I was looking at.

Don’t worry. She didn’t hear me. I had a polarized soundlessness field stretching out ten feet around me in each direction, a gizmo from my old job that the quartermaster never took back like he was supposed to. He never took it back because I stole it. The gizmo was from the Twenty-Fifth Century, a period when the Han, the People of the Heavenly River, were ruling the Northern Hemisphere, and whatever parts of the Southern that were not covered in glaciers. Don’t even think to ask me how it worked. I am still a bit unclear on how jet planes fly without a prop. All I knew was that it glowed if you put your thumb in the right spot, that sound could come in but not go out, and that sliding your thumb to the right made the field bigger. I also knew it made me lazy, since I had gotten out of the habit of being as quiet as a Cigar Store Indian when I was on a job.

Queequeg did not have a silence gizmo, and he was not out of the habit. He’d been on stakeouts with me before, and he was patient. Queequeg was standing at the far corner of the balcony, about as far from me as first base is from home. He was standing as silent as an angel in a graveyard, dark in his seaman’s coat and silky black top hat, his figure as straight and tall as his harpoon. He did not have to wipe bootblack on his face like I did, and his face tattoos broke up his outline as nicely as camouflage paint. His harpoon was sharp enough: he shaved in the morning with the thing.

Like me, he was mesmerized by the girl.

You’d think he’d only like girls of the sort they fashion back in Rokovoko, in the Cannibal Islands, with their lip plugs and grass skirts or whatever. But this girl, there was something about her that went far beyond fashion.

She had the kind of beauty that punched you in the solar plexus and followed it up with a haymaker to the jaw. It wasn’t her curves that got you, even though they were as luscious as a woman’s curves can be. It was her irrepressible sweetness. Made a man want to belt the guy who hurt her.

Or worse.

When I first heard tell about her, I assumed it was just desire, good old-fashioned lust, that launched those thousand ships. But that was before I saw her. I’m not saying she did not inspire desire. Just watching her sway in silhouette across the window was enough to launch a mortar in a man’s knickers. But it was the sweet languid innocence that got you. She was the most beautiful of roses, without any thorns to defend herself. Inexpressibly lovely. Helpless. Vulnerable. I could see why men left their families and their nations and set off to war in her defense.

Heck, if I’d had any ships, I would have launched ‘em too.

She had a certain something that made a man want to help her, protect her, devote his life to her. But the dark side of desire is that same something made other men want to take her, use her, possess her.

And in this damned city, where there was no one really in charge, no governor, no police, no one to look out for the people the Wardens forgot, the strong did whatever they wanted. And the weak, they just suffered.

You’d be surprised how many periods of history were run along those lines. You’d be surprised how many folk long dead in pagan days just thought unkind fate or careless gods meant life was supposed to be like this. Here you start living with men who think brutality is normal, rubbing elbows with them. And on the days when you can’t see the Moon or the city lights between the horns of the moon, you find yourself wondering where you took a wrong turn, wishing you could backtrack, and turn around again, and get back to where you’d been right.

I was sorry right away that I gave out a wolf whistle. She hadn’t heard, but what was I, a steel worker? But then I quickly told myself she flaunted her talents for a living, so there was nothing wrong with my admiring her stock-in-trade, in eyeballing the merchandise. Nothing wrong at all, I told myself.

I tell myself a lot of things. But you knew that.

She stood, lightly on her feet, for a moment in front of that clear panel, and pointed the toes of her back leg as if she were reaching for something. Maybe she arched her back a little too much. Even from this far away, I could hear her giggle.

“Don’t overdo it, doll,” I muttered. “You don’t want him to die of heart failure. Just get him to show himself.”

I had told her to keep the window tuned open. On a cold night like this, she would want to keep warm, and she might forget.

Winter nights were never supposed to visit here. The Masters of Time, the Lords of Fate, the Chronocrats, the guys who can play card tricks with eons, centuries, histories and futures and human lives like stage magicians, whatever you want to call them, they are supposed to take care of all that.

They had many names. Some squires, servants or stoolies had seen them in the high places, stalking without noise through empty museums or across empty air in their strangely faceless, mirror-perfect armor of solidified time-energy, with their crowns of eternity-light and robes of entropy-mist. The servants whispered that the Masters of Time, whenever voices issued from their armor, or from the walls, or from nowhere, called themselves the Time Wardens, as if it were their job to protect time from being twisted and abused. As if they were not the main abusers.

Beneath the towers was a cloudscape of mists and fogs, a side effect of all the parachronic and anachronic energies emitted by the hidden machines of the Chronocrats. Too many changes to too many versions of the past had altered the location of land and sea. The photons wandering through overlapping fields of Schroedinger’s Blur made solid objects look like phantoms, and phantoms look like clouds of mist. Maybe the towers rested on bedrock deep enough that no change of world history, no matter how far back, could touch it, or maybe the Time Wardens merely ordered gravity to stand still and then nailed the baseless towers in place. Could they do that? Why not? Gravity had something to do with Time, after all. I remember hearing that at a party.

At the moment, the mists below the towers were agitated, and smoky arms of cloudscape were climbing upward toward the black sky. In them you could see unfocused images of mountains and islands and volcanoes, all flickering and shifting. That meant the Continuum Winds were blowing. The disturbances could have been caused by a careless Chronocrat meddling with his own past, or some sort of disagreement, or duel, or war between two or more of them.

Except the Masters of Time don’t fight wars—how could they?—since all of them know how everything turns out. Or so I had been told, back when I worked for those bastards.

Regardless of the reason why, the mist was rising, sending smoky fingers reaching like greedy orphans toward the bright jewels of the upper floors. And the temperature was dropping, because heat getting randomized, like photons losing their way, is another side effect of a paradox poisoning the continuum.

The rising mist did not improve my mood. You can only patch a garment so many times before it falls to pieces. But you knew that.

People don’t die here. The Wardens take care of everything. I’d been told that, too. Not that I was in the habit of believing everything I’m told.

Then I remembered that there was no final Old Gold waiting for me. Some prophet from downstream had filched that last cigarette from me, the bum. So it was back to bumming a puff from Queequeg’s tomahawk, or putting the touch on Sir Walter Scott, who lived two levels down. But I don’t like pipes or cigars as much as ciggies. They don’t suit me.

On the other hand, the next time I had access to a working destiny crystal, I could step backward through the calendar, or reach my hand across last week and snatch it from my ghostward version. I did not remember minding, not clearly, so younger-me would not mind. Probably he would not.

The third member of the little party, Jack, had been posted in front of the other entrance to this suite, the one Queequeg was not watching. He kept walking back toward me, pretending he needed to hear the plan again, but really just because he was nervous, and wanted a chance to jaw.

Jack was fit, and looked young for his age, which I pegged somewhere between forty-five and fifty. He was dark-haired and slightly squint-eyed, with a serious and strong-jawed face. He had a black eye, but told me he didn’t remember where he got it.

He was the client. Usually it was a mistake to bring the client out on a job, but this time, I did not see what other choice I had.

“That’s her. What do you think? Just as pretty in real life, eh?” he said as he entered the silence field.

I had to give him points for remembering not to talk outside the field. He had a broad-voweled Boston accent, the high-class Hahvahd one. His breath was a cloud of cold steam.

“So that is Helen of Troy?” I said. “She don’t look Greek to me.”

“No. She is just one of them. One of the Helens of Troy. Helen of Troys? What is the Plural of Helen of Troy?”

“Hellene,” I guessed.

“Anyway, that one is mine. She’s an actress. She can fool him. I’m sure she can.”

He was chattering because he was nervous. I wondered if he would shut up if I said nothing.

Nope. He kept talking. “What are our chances, Mr. Frontino?”

He was dressed normally. I mean, what looked normal to me: shoes, coat, tie, trenchcoat. You’d be surprised at how rare shoes are in history. Boots and sandals for horsemen and higher classes was the norm for most centuries, while everyone else went barefoot.

No hat, though. If the men of my near future decide to stop wearing the fedora, then they are crazy. It is not as if they do not have hot sun and cold wind in the near future, not to mention bald spots.

And what would you tip to a lady if a lady strolled by? And what could you use to casually cover your gun hand if a cop strolled by?

Maybe there are no ladies in the future, but don’t tell me there are no cops. Even after all history is over and done with, and the Masters of Time have retired to their golden city, there will still be cops. I know. I used to be one.

Jack was from the same timestream as me, same country, even the same century. By Metachronopolitan standards, that made us practically Siamese Twins. He was twenty years prophetic to me (or I was twenty years ghostly to him, same difference), but I could say things like: “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more” without either of us needing to have the artificial part of our memory blur in timeshift in order to insert a retroactive recollection of having had learned a language, or a lingo, we didn’t previously remember having learned.

The Wardens can do things like that for their servants and serfs and slaves, as well as the people they keep as pets.

This tower was designated Special Prestige, which meant it had a double helping of golden light shining from it by day, more ambrosia in the air by night, more soaring music pouring from upper windows at odd hours, more gaiety and laughter. It also meant that if a slob with no prestige like me tried to step onto the high-arching bridges from the balcony of another tower, I would have found myself slipping through the diamond surface of the walkway and back five seconds to the moment before. Unless, that is, Jack, or someone else the Wardens took a fancy to, walked in with me.

“Our chances are good, aren’t they, Mr Frontino? You’ve done this before, right?. You came highly recommended. Lucky Luciano said–” Then he must have realized his voice was creeping, note by note, into a higher pitch, and he clenched his teeth, hugging himself for warmth.

At this altitude, the tower was Greco-Roman. Higher up was European Ascendancy, Industrial Revolution, and rumors said there was even chamber dedicated to a Moonshot somewhere way high up, in the Twentieth Century level. At the moment we were low down, near the boundary where history turns into myth, but the tower was still plenty bright. Just not here, in this immediate section.

Behind me was the gently arching bridge leading across the nothingness to the shining tower of Babylon, where the folk and museum pieces came from the stream of time where the Greeks didn’t win the pennant at Thermopylae, and it was the Persians who settled everywhere from the Mediterranean to the British Isles, discovered the jib sail, the printing press, gunpowder, and the New World. I didn’t recognize any of the names that came after Cyrus, Xerxes and Darius.

But there is very little traffic between Babylonian and European Towers. There were no gardens nor cottages on this vast bridge as there were on so many others, nor were there rails, and most of the golden deck plates of solidified time energy were dark. There were even gaps in the understructure, gaping holes where plates were missing.

Why were there no rails on the bridge? Then again, why should there be? A Warden who reads in his future diary that he is due to fall off a bridge that day will just stay in bed. No, no one important cares if one of us little pawns falls off. The next time a Warden wants our services, he will simply make it so that we have not died and never did, as easily as he might ring for Jeeves the butler.

“Mr. K., there no such thing as chance in this town,” I answered him. My throat was sore and my voice was a little rawer than it should have been. Blame the hooch. I could not get good whiskey here, and I sure as hell did not go out on nights like this, on a job like this, without one shot to warm me up, and another to steady my nerve. “There are only three ways this plays out. Either the guy is running blind and he is too dead to go back and warn himself, or nothing is going to happen because he looked ahead, saw the outcome, and decided not to show.”

Jack had been some sort of big deal back in his home time. He was well-connected to the Old Money, and even better connected to the Mob, and he was an ace at politics. He was one of the most powerful men in the world in his day. But now he was just one more minor card in the deck of the Wardens. Here, even a historical somebody the Masters of Time liked to play with was still a nobody.

“Call me Jack.” I don’t think he was scared. He might have been trembling just from the cold. After all, the guy had been in the service. He had seen combat. You can always tell. It’s in the look in the eyes, the set of the shoulders.

“I appreciate the gesture, sir. I do.” I said patiently. “But you’re a client of mine, and if Beidler or Jefferson gets wind of this, or Alexander the Great. . . if there is any investigation, I never knew you. A man’s got to watch his own back. I do what I am hired to.”

“I understand that. But if you are not on a first name basis with a man who is pulling a—is doing a—I mean, doing a job for you–”

Then again, maybe it was not the cold making him shiver. Shooting a man in the enemy uniform in a hot war when he is shooting at you, that is not the same as gunning down a guy in cold blood who dresses like you.

“It’s not homicide,” I said flatly, cutting him off.

“Whatever you want to call it,” he said with a shrug. “Just so it gets done.”

His voice was normally charming, smooth, rich-toned. Now it was colder than the mists closing in. It was the voice of a judge pronouncing a death sentence, or a commander-in-chief sending brave young men to their deaths.

“No, sir,” I said. “I mean that it really will not be homicide. I am going to wait until she’s in actual danger. Slaying a man in self defense or defense of others is justified. Killing him for the sake of revenge is not.”

“Not even revenge for rape? Not even for that?”

Maybe the cold was giving him the shakes. Maybe he was scared. Or maybe he was shaking with rage.

I shrugged. Don’t get me wrong. I felt for the guy. I would have done the same thing in his shoes. Heck, I once killed a man for beating a girl. (I would have just broke a finger or two if he had not pulled a knife. I took it out of his hand and left it in his eye.) Girls are special. You are supposed to take care of girls. Defend them. I get it. I understand.

But I got my principles. They aren’t the best principles in the world. In fact, they are pretty shabby. Someday I should take them out of hock, polish them up. But they are what I got. They are all I got.

Killing a man in cold blood, no. I won’t do it. Killing a man attacking a girl in her bedroom in cold blood, you bet. Glad to.

Because if you rescue Helen of Troy, that makes you a hero, and old Homer will sing a song about you.

Old Homer lives directly below me, off the waste chute in the hall, and sometimes I bring him doughnuts, if I can steal them from the Great War commissary, which is two floors up. He sang a mighty song for Little John when John saved Helen from Paris of Troy by cracking the kid’s spine with a quarterstaff. From the gut-side, I should mention.

And Homer sang a mighty song for William “Big Bill” Dwyer when Bill saved another version of Helen, who was from a parallel timeline where she was married to Theseus of Athens before being carried off by Menelaus of Sparta. The Spartan king ended up with a longshoreman’s hook through his soft parts. Little John was one of Robin Hood’s gang, and a cutpurse, and Big Bill had been a stevedore before he turned to rum-running and hockey.

I didn’t want to be a hero. Dangerous work. Lousy pay. But it is better than being a murderer, and I wouldn’t have minded that song.

Beside, Judge Roy Bean said he would buy a drink at the Stag’s Head for anyone Homer sings about. Homer gets free drinks himself for singing about a guy named Demodocus.

“I will rescue her,” I said. “And I will kill him in the act if he attacks her. And smile while I do it. But I will not assassinate anyone.”

Jack was silent for a moment, his eyes cast down. He was looking at the baseball bat I had tucked under my elbow. My other weapon, my Special, was holstered under my armpit. I also had a switchblade in my pocket, giving me three weapons.

“That’s only two,” said Jack.

“Two what?” I said, surprised. For a moment I was wondering if he knew I was counting up the number of guys who killed people for Helen. Or counting my weapons.

“Outcomes. Three outcomes.” He said. “But you only mentioned two. What is the third?”

“The third outcome is that he saw what is going to happen and likes the way it turned out. That means he brings the Tin Woodman.”

“The what?”

“A mechanical man. Like Elektro from the New York World’s Fair. A robot. It can timeshift up to five minutes, and it will always be where it needs to be before you can. Bullets and rays and stuff bounce off its armor, unless you hit it in a joint, because the armor is made out of solid time-stuff like the tower walls. The one weakness it has is that whatever is not listed as a weapon in its orders, it ignores. Some of them are more sophisticated than others.”

“Others? Is there more than one?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It might be the same one from different moments in time. And it’s armed. It carries an ax. It can step forward or back in time through a five-minute range, until it finds the one split-second you are off-balance or not looking. It can take all the time in the world and try again as often as it likes. It takes trophies too. It chops off the heads and stores them inside its skull, which is hollow and made of glass like a fishbowl, so that everyone can see who it killed last.”

“Grisly. Sounds like something from your Man’s island.”

“He’s not my Man.”

“What?”

“Quickwig.” (That’s not his name, but it’s as close as us guys from the Bronx can say it.) “He’s doing me a favor out of the benevolence of his big heart. It’s not like I got anything to swap him for. Besides, he is a prince. Back in his day.”

Jack nodded. He knew the feeling.

“So Quickwig outranks me,” I said.

“He does not seem like the type who does your kind of work.”

“The first time I met Quickwig, we were rooming together. We had to share a bed, because of the crowding. He came at me with his harpoon and I was too slow with my pistol. I had to wrestle him. He broke my neck, and the Time Wardens brought me back to life. So I decided we had to be friends. I replayed the scene and gave him the bed this time, and bowed politely to his little fetish named Yojo, and once Yojo said I was jake, everything was copacetic.”

“Sounds like a good man to have in your corner.”

“He is. Even though he eats people.”

Jack shivered again. “You come from the Twentieth Century. You know modern life has a price. The noble savage is closer to unspoiled Eden than we are.”

“Don’t be a jerk, sir, if you don’t mind my saying so. Every sorry last one of us is just as far from Eden as everyone else.” I said. The words tasted bitter in my mouth. I turned my head and spat over the railing. The wad of spittle arced down into the mist, lost interest in gravity, and dissolved.

“In any case, the beheading habit allows the Tin Man to make kill-identifications easier back at the station. And if there is a Warden at the station, sometimes he will backdate the Tin Man, so it when you suddenly find it standing next to you with an axe, you can see your own bloody head, with a surprised and stupid look of shock, staring out from inside the hollow glass helmet of the machine. At least, I think the Tin Woodman is a machine.”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“Quickwig says the Tin Woodman is a hobgoblin called Talamaur. They suck life from the dying. and eat the hearts of healthy men when they sleep. Who can say his guess is not closer to the horseshoe stake of truth than mine?”

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more,” said Jack sourly. “So what happens if he has a Tin Man with him?”

“Then the third outcome is a sure thing.”

“What’s that?”

“If he shows up with a Tin Woodman, I am already dead.”

At that moment, a beautiful, softly lilting song, half-breathless, half-panting and all-purring, came from the window. She was singing. It sounded so much like a love song, a song of erotic passion, that I did not actually catch the words.

When I did, I laughed. She really was pulling out all the stops, wasn’t she?

Happy birthday to you,

Happy birthday to you-uu

Happy birthday-yy

Mister President. . .

And then the girl let out a scream like the shriek of a bird of prey. She had the trained voice of a singer and an actress who could hit the high notes loud enough to hear in the cheap seats, and she certainly was built like she had the excess lung capacity.

There were shadows in the semi-transparent window. For a moment, I thought it was two figures, the girl and her attacker come back for seconds. And then I laughed with the feeling that only cops who work for Time Wardens know, a feeling of relief, because you remember seeing the date on the headstone of the guy who just drew a knife and is coming for you.

It is like wearing the armor of the inevitable. It is like getting a big wet sloppy kiss from Lady Fate. Because you know, beyond any shadow of the doubt, that he is a dead man, not you.

Then I stopped laughing.

A bulky figure in a trenchcoat and a wide-brimmed slouch hat stepped out of the shower stall, of all places, and even with the window half dim, I could see the bathroom lights shining between the upturned collar and the downturned hat brim, right through the glass of his empty head. So I knew I was the dead man.

My head was not propped inside the machine-man’s glass skull, which meant I would die by a method that destroyed the whole body, a method that left no corpse. You know what that means in this city.

I looked down at my gun, which was now in my hand. It was a Police Special. What I held in my fist was just the aiming unit, the emission aperture and the firing controls. The real weapon was the size of a warehouse sitting in a null-time vacuole in the fourth-and-a-half dimension, halfway past next Tuesday or somewhere beyond the second star to the right, with atomic piles and dynamos and batteries of big guns and futuristic zap-rays and a whole arsenal of various brands of death and maiming and unhappiness. It could blow a hole in the Moon or pick the left wing off a housefly landing on the Washington Monument from the Empire State Building, and never mind the curvature of the Earth or the prevailing winds. It was that good.

Now, it was useless. The Tin Woodman was programmed to identify it as a weapon. No matter what I did with it, the action would be counteracted before I fired.

There were tremors of cold shivering through my fingers, and I saw little blurry patches of mist clinging to my fingers. A time paradox. A decision point.

This was a moment where I either turned and ran, like Oedipus trying to run away from his cursed life, or I could go in and die like a Kamikaze pilot, a sacrifice to destiny.

“Banzai!”

I ran up the nearer ramp toward the girl and sprinted toward my death.

I’d had a pretty good life, I guess. I had no complaints.

Strike that. My life stank like an incontinent skunk pie sandwich with no mustard, if one of the slices was the crusty heel no one likes to eat, and I had loads of complaints.

As I ran, I let go of my Special, and the gun used its tractor field to jump like a fish and slide back into my armpit holster. With the same motion, I brought the baseball bat I was carrying to my shoulder. Joe DiMaggio had given it to me. The Yankee Clipper. Signed it, too, with a hot engraver’s pen. It was my prize possession.

Jack was ahead of me. Unlike me, he had not hesitated. My face felt hot for the first time that night as I ran after him, trying to catch up to him. I was blushing for shame. Damn me if I would let a client go into harm’s way first!

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Queequeg’s shadow move between me and the doorway to the far ramp, the other entrance. In his bare feet, he was surprisingly quiet and surprisingly swift. His deadly harpoon, which can kill a mammal much bigger than a man, was held lightly at his shoulder. His top hat was resting carefully behind him on the balcony deck, upon the spot where he had been posted, so it would not get mussed.

I followed Jack. Queequeg could handle himself. My ears popped as I passed through whatever unseen forcefield or abracadabra magic, or whatever it was that stretched across the threshold to the tower and allowed the Wardens to keep the weather outside without the need for a physical door.

And, no, we did not bounce off the force field or end up five seconds in the past. Not that there was any way to find out what was off-limits until the moment after you find yourself in the moment before, looking stupid. There are no leases in the City, since the Masters of Time own everything, but there are rosters and quartermasters and people with prestige among the Swell Set. And then there were people with pull and those with favors to call in among the Not So Swell. And there were tough guys with tougher reputations to maintain among the Really Not Swell At All. Whatever the quartermaster or the ward boss assigned, you didn’t take, but you swapped to someone who had something you liked better, or you gave him your marker. So everyone knew who really owned what, and who owed who, but nothing was written down.

This was Jack’s apartment. He did not live there, and his name was not on the ward roster, but he had prestige, and his lieutenants had pull, and his boys had reputations, so it was for all intents and purposes his.

Jack was pelting up the ramp. He reached the upper corridor. It was brighter in here, all glowing gold walls and display cases like a museum. I could see the pistol in his hand, a footlong length of polished and gilded wood and lustrous pewter. It was a flintlock, or it looked like one. I had not inspected it very closely when I obtained it from Aaron Burr late yesterday, in return for forgetting his past. It had been just before the evening horserace and evening riot at the hippodrome (Bucephalus had bested Marengo in the last race, and was running against Traveller, and odds were running twelve to seven for Lee’s horse.) I barely had time before evening curfew to get from the riot to Jack, and no time to instruct him.

Had Jack even loaded the pistol? Did he know how? I did not remember whether I had told him how to load and hold it, not to assume pistols of that type would stay loaded. Inwardly, I cursed myself. It is that kind of small mistake, not double-checking the details, that gets men killed. But it was too late.

She screamed again. Jack had seen too many movies, because he raised his foot and kicked at the door panel leading into the bedroom of the suite. He ended up on his backside staring at the glowing gold ceiling.

I turned off the silence field and said: “Allow me.”

My gun leaped into my hand from the holster, projected an aiming beam, then launched a missile made of white-hot plasma instead of old-fashioned metal. The gun emitted a magnetic force field shaped like a tube to guide the missile to the target, then designed and built an invisible set of braces and baffles out of nucleonic energy-tension to suppress the explosion within a five-foot radius. Then the gun focused a time distortion hole on the spot to sweep the wreckage of the door panels and part of the wall sideways out of the continuum, into the non-being between timestreams, as the missile plasma ruptured and made a miniature version of a sun.

So, not only was Jack and half the planet not killed, all he saw was a perfect circle-shaped hole appear in the wooden wall. Also, a perfect vacuum-globe appeared in the air in front of him, then imploded with a bang. I guess nature abhorred it, since it immediately vanished and was replaced by a shockwave that pulled Jack forward and hurled him into the bedroom.

I holstered my gun, gripped the bat in both hands and followed him at a less hectic pace.

It was like stepping into a Museum diorama tuned to the Mid-Twentieth Century, coastal North America. The original suite had been one large chamber made of invulnerable gold walls. Now, the inside had been portioned off into human-sized rooms by walls of wood and plaster, and apportioned with furniture and appliances like you might see in a rich man’s home. Since I did not often get invited into wealthy drawing rooms, the place looked like something I had only seen in motion pictures. Only everything was in color.

There were cut crystal sets, ornaments on marble stands, a coffee table, a couch, a big silk-covered bed to one side, a door to the bathroom to the other, a bar or miniature kitchen stocked with electronic wonder gizmos, and lots of carpet underfoot. Only the far wall, the one with the man-high window in it, was gold. Drapes were hung across it to block the golden glow from outside. And there was a chandelier overhead, to give light because the glow was blocked. This is the kind of useless extravagance that only the people the Wardens really, really like get to enjoy. Jack was not one of the middle ranks of the mortals of Metachronopolis. He was from the tip-top, the flaky upper crust. He was one of the guys the Wardens let play with their toys.

By fate or chance or cosmic design, Jack landed on top of the guy in the long black cloak—I kid you not, the target was dressed like a comic opera villain from the Silent pictures of last decade—just as the guy tore the towel off the girl.

No sooner had Jack landed than he was kneeling on the guy’s arms, punching him in the face with one fist, and strangling him with the other hand. Blood was streaming from the guy’s nose, into his gray beard and his thin gray hair.

The bearded face was wrinkled. The girl’s attacker was an old man.

My guess was late sixties, so he was perhaps twenty or thirty years older than Jack. And it was not an opera cape that he was wearing. It was a self-heating thermocloak from the Twenty-First Century, the thing they use in hospitals to medicate patients and keep their hearts working. So, he was not only old, he was decrepit. You had to wonder where he found the juice to get his Walla Walla Washington to stand up and salute.

A walking stick had fallen from his thin, veiny hand. It did not look like the sort of stick that rich men carry to show that they don’t need to muss their hands with work. It looked like the type old men lean on because their legs are weak. At the top of the stick was a gold knob. My gun beeped at me and told me the knob was producing a time distortion effect, but it only had a nine-inch range. He had to be holding it for it to work, so it was no source of danger at the moment.

Horrid gargling noises were coming from the old man as Jack squeezed his throat.

The Tin Woodman turned toward me. Not turn, exactly. It blinked from facing away from me to facing toward me, its shoulders hunched and its gauntlets raised. It was holding a long-handled executioner’s axe; a half-moon of sharpened metal shining like brass formed the business end with a spike sticking out the other way.

The monster looked like a freakish cross between the headless horseman from Sleepy Hollow, the guy who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men from that radio program, and beneath that, a knight from Avalon in plate armor of purest gold. There was nothing but a fishbowl glint between its hat and its trenchcoat collar.

Behind it, through an open door, I could see the glass door of the shower stall, of the sort you might see in a fancy New York hotel. There was a destiny crystal plate hidden in the glass door. How long ago it had been planted there? The old man could have done it decades in the past, or even centuries. My plan of watching the place from outside had been as futile as Mr. A Square of Flatland trying to sneak up on the Sphere of Spaceland by hiding carefully behind a line.

How come I was still alive? In the same blink it had taken the Tin Man to turn to face me, he could have blinked across the room and chopped my head off, or blinked back four minutes, and attacked me from behind as I ran up the ramp.

Then I realized that the Tin Man had not been given clear instructions. My attack on the door panel had not been an attack on his master. It did not count.

And Jack had been thrown by accident on top of the old man. A human body is not necessarily a lethal weapon. The Tin Man was not smart enough to understand that Jack was strangling the old man. The old man could not speak and order the attack because Jack was crushing his windpipe.

Not that anyone could have heard anything anyway. The most beautiful girl in history was standing in the middle of the room, blond and pink and quivering with fear, naked as a jaybird, round and delicious as a peach.

Actually, she was not a blond, not a natural one anyhow, but she was so perfect in her proportions and poise that I actually took my eyes off the Tin Man—who was certain to kill me—to stare at her. Only for a moment, of course. But if that is the last thing in the life you are to see, what better to stare at? She was screaming loud enough to peel paint off the walls.

Jack shouted: “Now! Frontino! Smash his face! Break his skull! Hit him!”

The Tin Man did not retroactively decapitate me just yet. Maybe it was programmed to regard a baseball bat as equipment for a game and not a deadly weapon.

What did I have to lose? I was dead anyway. I took one last look at the girl to remind myself of what I was fighting for. Then I stepped forward and raised the baseball bat overhead in both hands. . .

There was a flick of misty nonexistence for a second and then I was in a version of the scene where the Tin Man was standing between me and the old man, and my bat bounced harmlessly off a dark overcoat sleeve covering an upraised arm of gold.

I should explain: I have a hardened memory. It is a rare trait, apparently found, or so I was told, in the remote ancestors of those who will someday be Time Wardens. It allows me to remember if someone changes my past. I can remember both versions as easily as if one were real and one were imaginary. Deja vu is a weaker edition of the same effect. Anyone might have the ability, but if you never cross paths with a time traveler who changes your past, how would you ever know? Most people who are brought to this city have hardened memory in some form, some stronger than others.

So I remembered both the original version where the Tin Man crossed the room by walking slowly until he stood between me and the old man and then blurred backward a few seconds in the time direction as well as the revised version where he appeared in an eyeblink right in front of me.

But I did not remember a version where I smashed in the old man’s head. In the original version, the Tin Woodman was simply not moving fast enough to stop me. I stopped me, not him. Jack had learned to one side as he grasped the old man’s neck in both hands, to provide me a clear target. Because Jack’s hands were pinning the white beard down, I saw the old man’s face clearly enough to see what he would have looked like if he were clean-shaven.

Meanwhile, in this version, the Tin Man was between me and the two men on the floor, so I stepped quickly back and raised my bat as if to bunt, hoping to parry the axe if Tin Man swung.

There was a blur of mist around its axe, and my pistol’s paradox alarm went off. At the same time I remembered the sensation of the axe biting into my neck from behind and the tingling sensation of my pistol erecting a skintight force nimbus over my body.

You see, my gun was every bit as smart as the Tin Man. It may have been designed by the same Time Warden engineers, for all I knew. The axe rebounded from an invisible collar of force lines that were swirling around my neck.

Suddenly the Tin Man was between me and the door—or, rather the hole—leading out. We were now in a version of the scene where the Tin Man had decided not to take a swing at me. Instead, my baseball bat had been cut in half and the palms of my hands were stinging. So were my eyes. Yes, I teared up. Not from the pain in my hands or the shock in my arms, but because an axe had just smashed through my favorite baseball bat. My Joe DiMaggio bat!

I wanted to swear, but there was a very, very attractive lady in the room. I shouted at the old man. “I should have killed you! Smashed your damn—sorry—darned skull into pieces!”

Why hadn’t I? Because I had seen his face. And no, it wasn’t my face, if that is what you are thinking.

At that moment, the girl stopped screaming. She grabbed the towel around her head, and tucked it not very effectively around her abundant curve as she called out to Jack in a whisper of horror. “That is the man who attacked me last week. It’s him! Mr. President! Won’t you help me? Don’t let him hurt me again!” She sounded as innocent as a lamb and as breathless as a bride caught up in the rapture of her first nuptial night. A hard combination to pull off.

What a voice! I promised myself never to wash my ears again.

Jack said: “Run, Norma Jean! Run!”

The girl turned to the broken wall which had once held the door out, but the Tin Man stood in the way.

Jack’s grip had slackened. The old man managed to gasp out a word. “P-protect!”

The command was enough. The world blinked. The Tin Man was helping the Old Man sit up and Jack had been flung like a rag doll all the way across the coffee table. He hit the far wall with a noise like a gong. He had not been decapitated. That explained a lot. The Tin Man must have known that killing Jack would create a paradox.

I saw Aaron Burr’s gun lying right at my feet. I stooped, picked it up, and looked at it. My pistol automatically scans and analyzes potential threats, and it can insert into my memory-chain the memory of having had given me a read out.

Aaron Burr was a cheat. The inside of the flintlock had been replaced with newer technology and contained a magazine of real bullets complete with sabot and primer caps, cleverly hidden in the stock, and a rifled barrel. The bullets were made of a smart metal designed to deform on impact, so that anyone digging open the wound later would find nothing but a pistol ball. The thing even had microminiaturized ranging and aiming circuits. I’d always wondered how Hamilton lost that duel. He was the better shot, and had won each time the Time Wardens made the two weary, ever-resurrected men replay that fatal scene.

I tossed the dueling pistol to the girl. “Don’t point it at the old man until five minutes from now, after I lure the Tin Man away. There is a timer in the action. When it rings, shoot him. Twice in the chest, once in the head. Hold it in both hands, with your arms straight. Just take a breath, let it out, and squeeze the trigger slowly.”

She said, “I am not sure I can. . . do that. I couldn’t even butcher chickens back home.”

Of course. If Helen of Troy were the kind of dame who could shoot a man without turning green, would she be abducted even once? Some girls are born girlish. You cannot blame them. Much.

“Ma’am, this is the man who attacked you, isn’t it?” I spoke in my coldest voice.

Her lips quivered and she did not answer.

The old man had climbed to his knees. He looked up and looked at her with such hunger that it sickened me. His voice was strong for an old guy, but his words were weary. “Life is a broad way and a banquet when you are young, and every sunrise is promises and hopes. When you are old, life is narrow and crooked and cramped, and all your friends are dead, and you have no tomorrow to talk about, and all you have is your memories.”

The old man tried to rise to his feet but he was too weak. He groped for his cane, with a hand that looked like a blind albino spider crawling, but it was out of reach. So the old man continued to kneel, the Tin Man’s metal hands holding him up.

His laugh was a cracked wheezing sound like an accordion with a hole in it. “But if you are friends with a Time Warden, then your memories are not out of your reach, are they? Why resist temptation, if the the powers that rule eternity give you your dearest, darkest heart’s desire?”

The girl shivered. The girl shivered. “That’s his voice. He talked a lot in my ear. He’s a talker. It’s him. Why do I have to kill him? Why not you? What are men for? What good are you?”

There were wisps of mist clinging to the corners of the chamber, now. Too many paradoxes, too many versions. There had already been at least half a dozen time splits here already.

I said to her, “Just think of what it felt like when he attacked you, and how nothing seemed safe or normal or human to you afterward. Squeeze the trigger slowly. He’ll get shot.”

The time splits so far were not enough to account for this much mist. There had to be at least one more source of paradox here. I turned my eyes left and right, but did not see anything out of place. I took a step forward, picked up the Old Man’s walking stick, and chucked it through the bathroom doorway. I did not hear it ring against the crystal panel of the shower stall door, nor clatter against the ceramic tile. Bingo. A polarized silence field, like my own. Sound could enter the bathroom, but not leave. A useful thing to bring to a place where there is a secret entrance, because no one will hear you as you arrive.

The old man sneered wearily. “I won’t. Be shot, I mean. An automaton from the Fortieth Century is my bodyguard. No bullet can hit me.”

Without bothering to answer, I turned and pointed at the bathroom door. The Tin Man was stupid. Its master’s only escape was not on its automatic defense list. I got the shot off before the old man could say another word. Another shape of momentary non-being flicked into non-existence, but I had tuned it to affect the shower door and nothing else. I did not break the mirror or smash the toilet or harm anyone hiding in the bathtub. The shower door-shaped square of nothing collapsed like a popped balloon, but thanks to the silence field, this time there was no imploding clap of thunder. The old man, from his position in the bedroom, probably did not even know that I had fired, or at what.

None of my weapons could hurt a destiny crystal, of course. But the bathroom shower door, utterly unhurt, was now drifting somewhere in the mists between the time lines, beyond the reach of anyone.

The mist closes off all destiny crystal. The crystal is just an anchor point for a conduit, like a miniature spacetime continuum, that the Wardens erect between two points up and down the time stream. Or, rather, the time delta, since there are many branching paths. When destiny crystal is adjusted for photons, you can see images. Crystal ball stuff. Open it a little more, you can get sounds and smells and maybe reach an arm through. Open all the way, and it is a door.

But you cannot open them in the mist. The mist is what happens when you have too many low probability events, causeless effects or effectless causes, all piled up in one spot. Reality there is weak. There is nothing to to which the anchor point can be attached.

With the glass door gone, I was no longer worried about the old man sending any later-time version of himself, or a dozen versions of Tin Man, once a year on his birthday to relive the happy moment when he saw my head chopped off. And now there was no escape for him.

Experimentally, I pointed my pistol at the old man and pulled the trigger. My shot tore the black trenchcoat and bounced off the golden chestplate of the Tin Man, who blinked in the way as if he had always been standing there. Again, my neck and neck bones ached from the hardened memory of the decapitation that retroactively took place, and from the choking sensation of my nimbus retroactively blocking the blow.

The old man said, “Mister Frontino, you do not survive the evening. I’ve looked ahead. I have seen you fall. I have already won. Game, set and match!” He smirked at me. “You are about to run. Leaving me alone with her.”

I smirked right back. He was a good smirker, but I was better. “But did you watch after that?”

He looked shocked. “What do you take me for? A voyeur?”

Jack shouted at me, “What are you doing? Shoot him! He is not a Time Warden! He can die! Shoot him!”

Much to his surprise, I pointed my pistol at Jack.

“This is your last chance, Mr. K.! Give up the girl. Swear her off, now and forever and back through your past, and one of the three of you can walk out of here alive!”

The old man burst out laughing. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he wheezed.

He had a point. I mean, the girl was right here, the all-time winner of history’s beauty contest. I could smell her fresh from the shower, and even with all that was going on, I could not get my mind off her. That was just from seeing her for a minute or so. I did not have years of her burned into my life and memory. Would I be willing to give up the girl with the face that launched a thousand ships if she had once been mine?

The answer came with the next blur of mist. Another decision point. But the old man had not vanished. No one was giving up anything. Instead there was another remembered sensation of pain at my neck. That confirmed it for me. The old man was protecting Jack too.

I pulled the trigger. The Tin Man blinked in between me and Jack, and the ricochet set the couch on fire. Then there was another blur, and in this version the Tin Man caught the ricochet in the cupped palm of its gauntlets as it rebounded from its chest armor. It could stop me from hurting anything, directly or indirectly.

“Run, Jack,” I told him quietly. “Run to Babylon.”

Jack turned and leaped through the hole in the wall where the door had been. The Tin Man was not programmed to stop him. But when I followed and shot Jack in the back, well, there had to be a version where Tin Man blinked in the way and deflected my bolt with his axe.

The Tin Man and I were stalemated. It would not hurt me, and I could not hurt it, not with anything it recognized as a weapon. Tin Man could not stop me from shooting, but could stop me from killing Jack.

A few minutes later the three of us were running across the darkened bridge toward the Babylon tower, I had dialed my hand weapon to a flamethrower and high-energy laser setting, so that deathrays and masses of flaming jellied gasoline were washing and rolling every which way. Tin Man was blinking through every version of the scene so quickly, and shattering the timestream into smaller and smaller fractions, that the mist under our feet grew thicker and angrier, and the cold got colder, and finally, it started to snow.

Picture a bridge made of slippery golden crystal metal, too dark for human eyes to see, coated with frost and falling snow and new ice and pools of burning petrol melting a layer of water beneath the ice. And there were gaps in the surface underfoot which no Warden bothered to order repaired, even assuming anyone in this city knew how to repair this stuff. Or assuming anyone knew who built it. The Wardens say they built it, but you can’t believe everything you are told.

Normally a robot that can step backward through time cannot slip and fall. Nor can a man whom the robot can easily dodge tackle it. But a harpoonist with a steady hand and the best eye in the Pacific Ocean, a dark prince in a tall hat, who stands silently on a balcony overhead and watches like a hawk, well, he can throw his harpoon straight and true into the glass skull that is the monster’s only weak spot.

It did not kill the Tin Man. How could it? It was just a machine. The glass skull was merely a hood ornament. Something to scare its victims.

But it had a collar and heavy clamps to hold its trophy skulls in place. The razor-sharp harpoon could not penetrate on the gold null-time substance of the armor. But the toggle barbs in the shaft could catch the protrusions inside the metal neckring of the machine, and lodge the harpoon fast as if it had been hammered in.

The Tin Man would have dodged a spear or a lance or a javelin, stepped back in time, and decapitated the spearman. But the circuits in my pistol did not recognize a whaler’s harpoon as a weapon. I found that out the day I met Queequeg the first time. And whoever had programmed the Tin Man made the same mistake.

Now, you may ask, why did Tin Man not simply step backward in time and step to one side of the predicted flightpath of the harpoon? You may have noticed how often I let the Tin Man hit me in the neck. You may have noticed that the damned thing did not learn. It was not programmed to update its programming. It kept trying to decapitate me because that was what it was ordered to do.

There were no loopholes, no exceptions, no if’s and’s or but’s. When the target (me) was holding a weapon that threatened its client (in this case, Jack) and was in the position to be struck in the neck by the Tin Man’s axe, then, as predictably as loaded dice rolling a lucky seven, the Tin Man had to move to that position and take that swing.

It was not programmed to watch its step and protect itself, because what could hurt it through its ultra-invulnerable time-null armor? And if it was hurt, so what? Just get the Warden to replay the scene and change the ending.

So when I saw the harpoon enter the glass skull and lodge there, I realized what I had to do next (next from my point of view), to explain why the Tin Man would not in a moment from now (or, from its point of view, just a moment ago) retroactively dodge Queequeg’s harpoon strike.

I took my gun in my teeth with autogyroscopic aiming circuit turned on, so the barrel spun this way and that like the nose of a tapir, always keeping an aiming laser pointed at Jack. Then I rushed towards the Tin Man and tackled him.

Queequeg heaved on the harpoon line with the strength a man gets from wrestling whales, and he yanked Tin Man off the slippery metal frost-coated bridge deck.

Our trenchcoats flapped and fluttered, and my hat flew off, as over the side we went.

It was programmed to keep decapitating the threat. As we fell, the Tin Man reversed its grip on the axe and made a motion like a man swatting a fly on his face. And then it did it again, and again, because Tin Man was not ordered to save itself from danger. It was programmed to hit me. And the only place it could hit me, if I were off the bridge, was likewise off the bridge.

I hope you can follow this Celtic knot of cause and effect here. If I hadn’t grabbed the machine that can dodge any grab, the machine would not have stood still and let itself get harpooned with the harpoon, because then my grab would have missed. And it permitted me to grab it, it could not do otherwise, because with my arms around it, it could hit me, and if it had dodged, it could not.

We were in plunging towards the mists. With gun still clenched in my teeth like a pirate’s cutlass, I seized the harpoon line with both hands and both legs and managed to snag it. Then, with one hand and two legs still clutching the line, I drew my switchblade with my free hand, flicked it open and reached for the loop between me and the Tin Man. Just then the line went taut, the wind was knocked out of me, and the switchblade went spiraling downward into the mists of oblivion.

Dammit! The day Gavrilo Princip was hanged in the stairwell of the Royal Exile Diner, where Franz Ferdinand of Austria worked as a busboy, Franz wept for joy into his apron, but he had nothing to give me. So John X. Beidler, who ran the northwest Vigilance Committee, let me keep the assassin’s switchblade knife. First my bat, now this. It was my day for losing things

I put one hand on the line above the harpoon head, and had my feet kicking and slipping on the golden shoulders and ripped trenchcoat of the Tin Man.

Above us, through the swimming blur of intervening mists, I saw Jack, staring over the side of the bridge in awe and fear.

Jack’s head jerked up and disappeared when the girl screamed again, and I also, very dimly, heard the timer I’d set in Aaron Burr’s pistol go off. Had it been five minutes already? It felt more like five years.

But no shot rang out. Some people are just too kind-hearted for their own good. Or too soft-headed.

There was only one thing left to do. I put my head down so that the harpoon line was clamped between my chin and my breastbone. I felt the pain in my neck as the machine reached up and swung his axe at me, severing the line which was the only thing preventing his heavy and utterly invulnerable body from plummeting into the bottomless, smoky white nothingness below.

Goodbye, Tin Man. I think I’ll miss you least of all. I wish that its engineer would have programmed the damned thing with a voice circuit, so that I could have heard it go Aaaeeiiii! as it plunged into oblivion. Design flaw, if you ask me. Anyway, that was one pain in the neck gone.

“Down, boy,” I muttered. And my gun magnetically walked down my chest into my holster, folded itself up, and slid inside for a nap.

Getting back onto the bridge did not take as long as it seemed, because Queequeg was hauling me up even faster than I was climbing the line, so before I knew it, I was above the mist surface. Then a strong dark hand with thick calluses and grimy nails was reaching down and plucking me up as easily as I might have plucked up a kitten drowning in a toilet bowl.

“You jump. What for? No life no more for you?” Queequeg squinted and hid a smile.

“Nope. I wasn’t committing suicide. The man we’re hunting saw me in a destiny glass. A prophecy. But he did not say he saw me die. He only said he saw me fall. He could not see what happened after I fell into the mist, because destiny glasses can’t see through the mist. That’s why he thought the outcome was safe, so why he entered the scene.”

Queequeg stepped over and carefully picked up his top hat, brushed it fastidiously, and placed in on his head, raising his chin with princely pride. “Enemy, he falls too. Not a good death. Nothing to eat.”

“Which enemy?”

“Talamaur.” He pointed toward the mist with a jerk of his chin.

“You can’t eat metal. You would have broken your teeth.”

“Yojo, he eat spirit. No eat metal.” Queequeg looked at the severed end of his line in his hand where there hung the conspicuous absence of his best harpoon. He grimaced stoically, and began winding up the slack around his elbow in rapid, practiced motions. “Yojo, he says I save you enough for one day.”

“Am I still in danger?”

“Yojo smells death. Death soon comes. Man we hunt, you say he looks. Sees future. Sees what comes. He sees you fall down into mist. Yes?”

“Yes.”

He poked me in the chest with a thick, dark forefinger. His finger felt like an iron poker. “Then why it is he sees not you climb out of mist? He dies. He sees he dies, yes? But if he sees, how it is he dies?”

He turned and walked away into the gloom.

“Quickwig! What about the hunt? I said you would feast after we get him!”

A hollow laugh answered me. “Eat flesh, not mist.”

You are probably wondering why I was not rushing back to save the girl I’d left alone with the lecherous old man. But I’d lived too long in the city beyond Time to be in a hurry. You see, I figured it was a done deal. If I was not the dead man, then he must be the dead man. No matter what happened, the old man was not making it out of this scene alive. Sooner or later, this was the end for him.

So I did not run, I strolled back up the ramp, through the hole in the wall, and into the room with the hole in the bathroom.

The girl was there. She had draped the silk sheet from the bed around her body, making it look as if she was wearing a long flowing toga. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and slowly getting to her feet. Her eyes were half-lidded, as if she had just been hit with a stun ray. Or maybe that was just the natural cast of her features.

And Jack was there, with Aaron Burr’s cheater gun in his hand. The alarm was still ringing. Ding, ding, ding, ding. The girl was moaning, sobbing, which somehow she still managed to make sound alluring. And Jack was panting as if he had just run a race.

The old man was on the ground at Jack’s feet, gasping and unable to speak, trying to hold his thin and trembling hands over his face and stomach and groin all at the same time. He had the walking stick, but he was not using it to block the blows or strike back. In fact, he was curled around it as if trying to protect it.

“Any last words?” said Jack. The old man was out of breath, and could not speak. He just whimpered.

“It’s not a good shoot, Mr. K.” I said. “He isn’t placing anyone in immediate threat of life or limb now. This isn’t self-defense.”

Jack gave me a look of hatred. “You going to stop me, flatfoot?”

“Hell, no. You went to a lot of trouble, more than you remember, to set up this scenario. I don’t care about him and I sure as hell don’t care about you. How old are you, Jack? You look about fifty. You were supposed to die at forty-six. Any time you lived here was extra time. And here you are, throwing it away.”

“Mr. President, don’t you understand what he’s saying?” the girl said anxiously. “Don’t shoot him! Please don’t!”

The old man had gotten his breath back, and he had a strangely calm look on his face. A look of resignation. Of defeat.

But in his eyes there gleamed an eerie hate-filled look of victory.

Jack pulled the trigger. The noise felt like a hammer driving a spike into my ear. The gun barrel was less then two feet from the old man’s head, so his skull exploded like a watermelon, and the carpet was transformed into the floor of your local butcher shop, the one in the back room that no customer ever sees. The smell of blood and cordite did to my nose what the deafening report had done to my ears.

Jack said something. I could not hear him, but from the way his mouth moved, from the look on his face, he was saying something about justice, or maybe vengeance.

Then he stopped, his face thoughtful, intent.

He was staring down at the corpse.

Perhaps he realized at the last minute what was really happening. The body refused to evaporate. It stayed real. It stayed inevitable.

He squinted in disbelief, staring even more intently. He started trembling then, and not from the cold.

Jack, now the only Jack here, turned toward me. His eyes were haunted. “You said I went to some sort of trouble, more than I remembered, to set this up. But all I did was go to your office. Luciano recommended you. We talked about killing a man. What did you mean? What don’t I remember?”

“A lot, Mr. K. For starters, you don’t remember who punched you in the eye. You don’t remember entering my office, or what we talked about for the first twenty minutes. You don’t remember what you had in your hands. The bowling bag, with a helmet inside.

“We talked about killing a man,” I continued. “That part you remember. But you don’t remember how many times I told you not to do it. You should have listened. It’s too late now.”

Maybe Jack was listening, or maybe not. He was staring in horror at his gun hand. Mist was trickling up from between his fingers. Of course that was where the paradox would spread out from. That was the epicenter.

He dropped Aaron Burr’s pistol clattering to the bloodstained floor and screamed, grabbing his left hand with his right. Now the flesh was boiling off his hand, turning into white and ghostly smoke, and the ghosts of his fingers, in every possible position his hand might have been in or could be in, surrounded the stump of his disintegrating arm like the branches of a swaying tree. The flesh of his face was already transparent when he screamed, and his eyes, rimmed with red muscles, were staring out, horror-stricken, from his bone-white skull. His other arm and his leg was also fading into mist, and the mists were rapidly dissipating.

The sound of his pleading was the worst. It was not just his voice, begging me to save him, begging the girl, begging the dead guy, begging the Masters of Time, because a multitude of his voices were speaking all at once, saying all the possible things he might have said at this point, overlapping, interrupting.

I understand temporal paradox is a painful way to go, since the nervous system, as it disintegrates, sends contradictory signals from all your dispersing versions into the pain center of your brain. He seemed like a brave man. I am sure at least some versions did not complain or beg, or maybe one version said a prayer, or something. But it was lost in the throng.

Getting paradoxed to death is not pretty.

Then he was gone, and the silence after the final shrieks was so silent it seemed like ringing in my ears. The girl had fallen quiet. She sat there on the bed with her hand over her mouth, struck dumb by the terrible sights and sounds.

The old man was silent too, lying dead in a puddle of gore on the floor. I stepped over to him, reached down, put my foot on the walking stick, and yanked off the gold knob. Examining it, I could see the markings around the equator. The top hemisphere could turn independently of the bottom, like a dial.

My foot went numb, which was not pleasant. There was a stunner built into the shaft of the walking stick. Why was it still on? Then I saw that the old man had been using it to numb the pain of being kicked when he was down. So he would die and not suffer. I did not see how to turn the damned thing off, so I drew my gun and set the stick on fire.

I turned to the girl. “Helen!” I tossed the golden knob doohickey toward her. No, I was not trying to make her drop the silk bedsheet draping her nubile form when she raised her hands to catch the watch.

She tore her eyes from the place in midair where Jack was no longer standing, and, now, never had been, and caught it instinctively. She must have had at least partly hardened memory, because she seemed to remember the scene, but the memory must have been hard for her to recall. She had that dreamy, confused look a woman just waking from sleep sometimes has.

“That’s not my real name,” she said. “It’s a stage name.”

“It’ll do.”

She held up the golden device. “Pretty. What is it?”

“Consolation prize. You’ve been through a lot tonight, Missus, uh, Helen.”

The silk bedsheet did slip about an inch while she held up the dingus and smiled at it. At a time like this, in the same room where she had been violated by a human bag of filth, I caught myself looking at her, thinking about her, the same way he had done. The same way Queequeg looks at people: as lunchmeat. Something you use for you.

I turned my eyes away, which I probably should have done from the get-go. She was not dressed decently, and I was definitely not thinking decently. Does that idea seem old-fashioned? Not in my day, it wasn’t. It was just coming into vogue. It was needed. The long party of the Roaring Twenties stopped roaring, choked up and sputtered into a world without work, with war in the air, with polio stalking the land. The good old days.

So I missed the beginning of what she was saying.

“. . .”. . . And it’s Miss. He didn’t marry me. I mean–I was a Missus. I’ve been married. A lot. Jim and Joe and Arthur, and then the Time Travelers came and got me, and then there was the problem with Menelaus and Paris. Theseus didn’t count. Jack. And his brother, Bob. They don’t count either.” She sighed. “Somehow it just never works out.”

I nodded. “You might find that gizmo in your hand useful. It’s for when you start to get wrinkles and gray hair. If you want to stay young and pretty, twist the dial counterclockwise to get younger. It adjusts the time tensions in your body, but you won’t move through time, and your mind stays the same. It’s only got a nine-inch range, though. You got to keep it on you, in your purse or your pocket.”

She could use it and I couldn’t. Guys in my line of work never get old enough to turn gray. I looked down at the almost-headless body, still as real and solid and inevitable as a hangover after a wild bender. Nature always takes revenge when you give in, doesn’t she? But sometimes you can help her along.

The hands which lay limp and lifeless on the floor were no longer thin and blue with protruding arteries, dark with liver spots. They were healthy and suntanned and strong.

“Hey, Mister.”

“What is it, doll?” I looked at her.

“So, do I have to hire you to solve the mystery?” She pointed to Jack’s dead, but younger hands. I caught myself staring at her again, and turned my eyes back toward the corpse.

“What mystery is that?” I said a little gruffly.

“What happened to the third guy? Why did he look young then old? Didn’t the wrong body vanish? This time travel makes my head hurt.”

The girl was brighter than she looked. She must have guessed at least part of what had happened here. I did not want to tell her the whole story. It would give her nightmares.

I picked up Aaron Burr’s pistol. I could feel the tingle of time-energy flowing through it. It was a museum piece from a famous duel. Some Time Warden had long ago made immune it to category-two paradoxes. That was why the pistol did not disappear even though everything else Jack had brought into the scene, his tie and jacket and coat and shoes, all vanished when he erased himself. And every shot the pistol fired still had been fired, even if in this version there was no cause-and-effect explanation for who shot whom or how the gun had gotten there in the first place.

“Time Travel makes everyone’s head hurt,” I grumbled. “It should be against the law. Makes people think they can get away with anything. Steal anything. Steal women. Use men. Treat everyone else like toys and trophies and furniture, like fashion accessories.”

She said, “I know what that is like. It happens when you are famous. You cannot count on people.”

“How’s that?” I did not see what she was getting at.

She sighed again, and for the first time I really looked at her face, and saw a sad and confused young woman caught up in something she did not understand any more than I understand the deeper mysteries of time travel.

“People use you,” she said, “When you are famous. Fame will go by, and, so long, I’ve had you, fame. If it goes by, I’ve always known it was fickle. So at least it’s something I experienced, but that’s not where I live.”

“How do you stand it?” I said softly. “People – men like that–”

She shrugged, and now she was wearing her professional face again, a smiling and empty-headed mask she held like a bleached-blonde shield between her and a hungry world. “What can you do? Scream? It only flips their switch, some of them. Fight? They only hit you harder, and if you are bruised you can’t work the next day. Kill yourself? I’ve done it. Sleeping pills are painless, you know? It’s just like falling into a fuzzy dark cloud, all warm and floaty. But then I wake up again. The Masters of Time wake me up. Because I’m famous, see? You can’t get away from it, not here.”

It was a very sad smile.

If I had been any kind of man, I would have knelt down there, and then, like a knight from the Medieval Level of the Frankish tower, sworn to protect her with my life. I did not think she was acting, not just then. The girl truly needed help.

Instead I knelt, picked up a corner of the bloody carpet, and heaved, and managed to throw a large triangular fold of the carpet over the face of the dead man. The inevitable dead man.

“So what happened, Mister?” said the girl, wiping her gorgeous eyes and sniffing. “What really happened?”

“Your boyfriend killed an old man who molested you. Justice was served. Happy ending.”

She played with the knob in her hand, and suddenly looked five years younger, mid-twenties rather than mid-thirties. Right at the peak of her glamour. Made my eyes almost hurt to look at her.

She said, “Is this a happy ending? How come neither of us feel happy?”

“I dunno,” I was looking around to see where I had put my hat, so I could put it on and leave. Then I remembered it had gone flying over the side of the bridge. “All this just for two cartons of cigarettes. They better be there when I get back to my place.”

She grinned briefly, then looked shy and hugged the sheet closer to her as if she were outside, cold and alone. The sinuous folds of the silk clung to her body and emphasized her curves. “I can’t stay here. I’ve got no place of my own. Can I. . . stay with you?”

Sure, I could take her back to my place. She needed help. She was scared. She was lovely. And she was still inching the knob down, creeping closer to an age that is not legal in some jurisdictions. She was just a kid.

At first I would tell her to sleep on the floor, or maybe I would be the gentleman and take the floor and give her the couch. And then the next morning, I would tell her she had to be gone by that evening, and the next morning after that I would tell her the same thing and so on for a week until it became a joke between us. She would gaze into my eyes and smile and maybe kiss me on the nose and pour me a cup of coffee whenever I said it.

And then, perhaps, when I was old, I would think back upon those days, and I would scour the city looking for an active crystal with the right time depth so I could go back and see her. And then. . .

And then I would find myself in the same position as the man I’d just helped to kill. Hell, in this damned City, I might end up literally becoming him. I know how time travel works. It lures you in. It seduces you.

It wasn’t too hard to step over the corpse and turn my back on her. The smell of the corpse helped.

“You can stay with my pal, Homer. He likes doughnuts and he’ll like asking you questions about how the war in Troy turned out.”

“It was bad. Everybody died,” she said, pouting and nibbling her lip. “Astyanax, they threw him from the roof. He was just a little boy. Then they burned the whole place down. Like I said, somehow it just never works out.”

And Homer is blind, so maybe he can stand to be around you and survive. I did not say that part out loud, only to myself.

Look, I don’t blame the dame for using the tools Nature gave her any more than I blame a spider. But I’d seen one guy trapped in her web, and I’d heard all about the others. Even if it was a web she did not spin on purpose, she was a spider. Guys like Paris, guys like the Yankee Clipper, even guys like Jack lost their hearts over this girl, lost their minds, lost their good names. Sometimes they even lost their lives.

I don’t think she did anything on purpose, but maybe she was part of the cold justice in this cold world, the justice that took its revenge on the men who used her and hurt her.

I waited outside while she was getting dressed, glad that without my hat it was so cold. It kept me from thinking bad thoughts.

She chatted with me as we walked, me stomping and her swaying and bouncing, and slipped her hand very naturally through my elbow and clutched my arm, sending something like an electric shock up my spine, from groin to brain. I remember the way she smelled, the way she tucked a stray curl into her little Santa Claus hat with a delicate motion of her hand. I’ve never been that close to anyone so damned pretty in my life.

She looked so lost, so woebegone, and yet so cheerful when she smiled, that I admired her inner strength, even as I grieved for the kind of life she was trapped in.

I was glad at that moment I had done what I did, glad I had watched a man die in utmost pain as he dissolved into mist. I had helped with the world’s cold justice. You see, hers was the face that was innocent and bewildered at the cruel hurts done to her. Hers was a face without hope. Without hope, yet with a bright smile. Without hope, yet soldiering on.

But how can you have hope in this city? Hope comes when you have an unknown future waiting like a Christmas gift, shining in its pink-bowed wrapping paper, and every tomorrow is a new surprise to open.

Hope is when you can change your future. But if the Time Wardens can step through a crystal into your tomorrow, and they can change your tomorrow, but you cannot, then all the gifts have already been opened and all the toys are theirs.

When we got there, she said: “Thanks for everything!” and stood up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. But I drew back and put my hand up before those lips, those lips I had been surreptitiously staring at, and wondering about, could land.

Maybe you remember the Kit Marlowe’s line: ‘Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. But do you know the next one? I looked it up. ‘Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!’

You think maybe there is a version of the scene where she planted that kiss and my soul was sucked out, and I grabbed her and bent her over my arm and canoodled her something awful. And maybe the part she plays and hides behind would have kissed me back, but it would have killed the little girl inside. But I got hardened memory. I know there is no other version.

“No charge, this time, Ma’am.” I said. If they give out awards for the most awkward line any man ever said, keep that one in mind.

“It’s still Miss,” she said, smiling. “You know. Miss. Because things never quite work out. I keep trying to hit a life. A normal life. I keep missing. Guess that is where that word comes from.”

Her red mitten seemed very small and soft in my black glove. She did not shake hands, but merely put her fingertips in my palm, like girls from my day used to do.

I did not want to let her go, not right away. So I said: “You don’t like being Helen of Troy? All the famous poets sing about you, Miss.”

“Fame is wonderful,” she said, with her cat-ate-the-canary smile, her eyes half-closed, speaking in that breathy way she had, as she turned from me and spoke over her shoulder, “But you can’t curl up with it on a cold night.”

I left her with Homer and I went home, and my arm, without a girl on it, without the girl on it, felt cold.

I found the two cartons of cigarettes, as promised.

So I sat in the dark, smoking, a point of fire held at my fingertips, letting the dark scent of the tobacco drive away the last traces of her lingering perfume.

At least it was a happy ending for me.

SECOND INTERMISSION

There is one detail I don’t want to forget to tell you.

Earlier, back on day three thousand twenty-eight, back in my office, watching Edward Teach give me a nasty smile over his shoulder as he swaggered away after his boss, I realized that what was bothering me was not the man’s outrageous beard, which practically reached to his eyebrows. I was bothered by a continuity error in Jack’s story, at least the part I had heard.

I looked over at where the helmet still sat on the floor next to the couch, where he had let it slip through his dazed fingers as the effect took hold. I still did not want to touch the damned thing. But now I wished I had asked him one question I could no longer ask. What had happened from his point of view? The point of view that was just erased?

Jack’s memory was fairly hard, and so, to him, getting shot and then suddenly finding himself in the scene that never happened was no different from me getting killed and having the circuit in my gun retroactively erect a nimbus a moment in the past, and suddenly being never-killed half a hiccup in the direction of elsewhen.

The helmet probably just erased the hardened parts of the memories, the anachronisms. It should be easy, given Time Warden technology, to turn into mist those memories in your head that, from the point of view of the time continuum, came from nowhere for no reason.

But from the point of view of the non-dead Jack, his personal continuity, what happened? I assume the shooter and his gun disappeared into mist before the trigger was pulled. Which meant that the job he had hired me to do could not get done.

Well, Hell. I was not going to let that happen, not if I could help it. I needed to find a gun that would not vanish into the discontinuity mists.

A few minutes later, with the bowling bag and the accursed helmet under my arm, I found a newsboy at the corner of two bridges willing to swap me a paper for a half-empty carton of melted strawberry ice cream. He agreed. Some people are just desperate, I guess.

Ben Franklin and William Howard Russell published the paper. Beneath words of wisdom from Poor Richard, was the Recurring Events section. There I found the announcement of the next duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.

I may have a hard life, but I am glad I am not Aaron Burr. Imagine having a hardened memory, and remembering Hamilton’s pistol ball pass through various parts of your body, breaking bones and piercing organs of which you are particularly fond, rolling in agony on the ground in a pool of your own blood, leaving you maimed or leaving you dying, slowly or quickly, over and over again, and knowing it would happen again tomorrow, as part of the opening ceremonies at the beginning of every horserace between the Blue and Green. And all because some Time Warden thinks it is funny that Alex Hamilton is a much better shot than you.

I patted the bowling bag tucked under my arm. I guessed Old Aaron would be delighted to swap, and I wanted to get rid of this thing. Probably as bad as he wanted to get rid of the memories of his endless duel with Hamilton.

Why couldn’t they just forgive and forget? Can’t people change?

THE MIDDLE

The second time I met Jack, it was in my office. This was on day three thousand twenty-eight, about noon.

He was sitting on my couch. It is a pretty nice couch, actually, because I don’t have a bed, and I sleep on it. The gold helmet was sitting on the floor next to the arm of the couch, right where it had been dropped.

I was not going to pick it up. I did not want to touch it.

You can understand why such an instrument would be useful in a city full of retired time travelers, people who like to play God with other people’s pasts and futures. No matter how unlikely it was that someone would develop the theory and practice of such a hideous machine, rest assured, the Time Wardens were bound to fiddle with the timelines until they produced a version of history that led to a helmet like this.

Jack groaned as if he was having a bad dream. Little did he know that any nightmare was better than what was he was about wake up into.

He sat up suddenly, like a punch-drunk fighter hearing the bell. “What–what just happened?”

“You took a nap on the couch.” Which was true as far as it went.

He rubbed his eyes, got up, frowning in puzzlement. He touched his black eye and he winced.

“Quite a shiner you got there,” I said. “You box? You been in a fight?”

He looked around my office for a moment, touching the tender black flesh around his swollen eye. “No, I don’t remember–who hit me? Who let me get hurt?”

Who let me get hurt? That said something about his character. Not something good.

“You left your men outside,” I said. “Step out the door, take a look. Ask them the time and date, if you think you’ve been time-ducted. Ask them what you are doing here.”

Jack raised his voice. “Eddy!”

My outer door opened instantly, as if the guy had been keeping his hand on the knob. Blackbeard the Pirate stuck his shaggy head in. He had his sword and flintlock stuck through his sash, and firecrackers tied to his beard (which covered his cheeks almost to his nose) and fuses under his hat, but nothing was drawn and the freakish beard was not lit. Thank goodness.

“Yes, Mr. President? Is ought nae proper, sir?”

“Tell me the date, and where we came from, Mr Teach.”

Blackbeard was not surprised at the question. He’d been in Metachronopolis long enough to know the ropes. “Sixty-three days since your last, sir. You done burned the ken at the grogshop with Lucky Luciano, and crossed here with me and me boys through the Japanner Tower. I reckon but an hour past, sir.”

Burned the ken, in case your doohickey that retroactively feeds Eighteenth Century slang into your head goes haywire, is when strollers leave an alehouse without paying their quarters. I reminded myself to get paid in advance.

“Why am I here?” Jack said.

Blackbeard looked at me narrowly. He said, “To silent a man after pommeling him right, sir. Some rum cull snabbled your frisky game-pullet. You came here to dawb Jakes the Miller.”

That would be yours truly. Jacob is my Christian name. Miller is slang for a murderer, a killer.

“How did I get this black eye?” asked Jack. “Did someone hit me?”

Blackbeard looked astounded, at least, as astounded as a man can look when you can only see a T-shape of flesh surrounding his beady eyes and big beak of a nose. “How would I be knowing if you’re nae telling?”

“When did it happen?”

“Yesterday. On sixty-two. Out you went alone on privy business, abram of your loyal bullies. You come back with that knock on your costard. Never cackled who fetched you that culp.”

Jack waved him away and Blackbeard closed the door. I took out my gizmo that deadens any outgoing noise, and set the zone to exclude everything outside the door. If business were better, I would have a waiting room out there, but it is just a section of hall where I put some chairs and a desk for Penny.

Jack said apologetically. “Mr. Teach does not know what a private detective is. He thinks you are an assassin. I only want you to find a certain man.”

“All right. And then?”

“Then assassinate him.”

I shook my head. “I am telling you not to do it. It is suicidal. I mean that literally. You won’t survive the scene.”

Jack crossed over to the chair in front of my desk and sat down. He put his elbows on the desk, but he was a client, so I said nothing.

He said, “I remember walking in the door. Lucky recommended you. He says you always keep your word. He told me, there was this time you had been hired by the one gang to guard a shipment of opium due in from the Second Century, but another gang hired you to leave the side door of the cargo carrier unlocked.”

“Blues and Greens,” I said. “The horse-racing factions. The game was crooked in their day too, back in Byzantium. They were political factions, too, and they played for keeps back then.”

The Wardens swept up some of them from out of the time stream, and looked at them and played with them and asked them questions, but no one is sent home again from Metachronopolis, and the Wardens don’t really much care what you do once they’re done with you. The Blues sided with Richelieu and the Capone gang, and the Greens took up with Hannibal and Billy the Kid’s outfit, and their ancient, meaningless fight continues.

He said, “You left the door open, as promised, and when the Green’s men started to come in, you took a meat cleaver in one hand and a switchblade in the other and killed the whole mob of them. So you protected the shipment, also as promised.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear. It was a khopesh, not a meat cleaver. There were only three guys, and I only maimed them.”

“You kept your word.”

“Technically, yes,” I said. “If I take the case, the man you are hunting down will die. The culprit will come to justice. But I won’t kill him. And you won’t survive.”

“You cannot know that for sure,” he said.

“It’s a done deal.”

“How can you know?”

“Because I already found the guy. He came back to the now. He wants to see her.”

I whistled for the magic picture. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This time it did, and the image of Old Glory I have on the wall to the left, right above the dream coffin and next to my broken Anything Maker, shimmered and formed a nice poster of the perpetrator. He was lounging at the side of a pool on some high level of a Tower near the Museum of Man, which loomed in the background, a stepped pyramid larger than Everest, rising from a misty base. The pool was one of those fancy types from the Mid Twenty-Ninth Century, two lenticular shapes of water, one above the other held in midair by some sort of manipulation of Van Der Waals repulsion. A swimmer could swim out of the bottom of the upper pool and swan-dive through the air into the lower. The special properties of the water also allowed bathing beauties wearing Saint Peter Slippers to stand upright on the water surface, which bent under their weight like a rubbery sheet of clear gelatin.

That was what six beauties were doing now. It was a beauty contest, between five versions of Helen of Troy and her ancient rival Cleopatra. Don Juan was one of the judges, and so was Jacques Casanova de Seingalt. Seated right behind them, in the top-hat-and-white-tie VIP section, was our perpetrator. He was leaning on a gold-headed cane.

“It’s you,” I said. “You’re the criminal you want to kill. The man you want to protect the girl from is you.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. That was all.

“You are not surprised.” I observed dryly.

“I wish I were. I–I may not be that kind of man. Not now. But my father–ah, well, never mind.” He squinted. “I thought he would be older.”

“Older you is about thirty years prophet of you now. He’s in his late seventies, early eighties. When he holds that walking stick—see the cane with the gold knob?—he looks as young as he wants. He can look your age. Or forty, or thirty. It’s also got a stunner built into it so no one can take it from him.”

“How can he look so young?”

“Magic.”

“Really?”

I shrugged. “The Wardens can adjust the time energy tension in your body without influencing your thoughts or memories, but, heck, just call it magic. I’m not paid to understand things, just to hunt men and break heads.”

“And if I pay you to–”

“Then you’ll die.”

He shook his head. “Not necessarily!”

“In this case, necessarily. Look, pal, I been around the block. Back in your world, you were the boss. You understood things. Here, you are a greenhorn, wet behind the ears. How long you been here?”

“Not long. But I think I understand how time travel works. If I go to her room when he is there, my older self, and I shoot him dead, then me, the I that I am now, all I have to do is look down at my own corpse at my feet and know that this is my sure and certain fate. I’ll know I can never go to her again. I can decide and stick with the decision. The moment I make that decision, the future is changed. They say the body lying on the ground will turn into what they call a mist, an overlap of many possible futures, and then fade entirely. Turn into smoke. That’s what happens, right?”

“That is what happens if a ghost, a man’s self from his own past, shoots his prophet, a self from his own future. Some ghosts, seeing the prophesied future, can change their minds and change it hard enough that the inevitable turns evitable, and the chances change. So the certain future gets uncertain, changes its mind, and evaporates into mist. But–”

“But what? Surely you don’t think I lack the strength of character, the willpower, to—I mean, if I saw my own death, as clear and certain as doomsday itself—if the choice were between the future as a man who gets executed by his own hand on a certain date, and a long life here in Metachronopolis!”

I said, “No one listens to the prophets. They stone them instead.”

“But if I saw my own future, caused my own future? You think I could do that and see that and still not change? If it were a matter life and death?”

“Some men prefer death, sir,” I said, leaning back in my chair and letting my eyes look at the ceiling. I did not want to look at his face. “Even self-inflicted. They find it’s the only way to sooth a raw conscience.”

“What are you saying? What are you implying?”

I brought my eyes down and locked gazes with him, and my chair fell forward so the front legs hit the floor with a bang. “Prove it. Right now. Right here. You say you can change your future, fine, then let’s see you change yourself, give up the girl, and never see her again.”

I pointed at the magic picture. The sound came on. Cleopatra was just finishing a song from one of her shows and then said something about world peace. Now it was Helen of Troy’s turn.

She was doing a number about diamonds being a better friend to women than men could be. It was catchy.

I pointed at the three other Helens in the view. “Helen of Troy is a popular girl. The most popular, you might say. Which one is yours?”

“What? They all look the same.”

“You’ve been in bed with this girl. Held her in your arms. Do you talk to her? You cannot tell the difference? Their hairstyles are not the same. They wear different ear rings. You don’t know what her bathing suit looks like? These are the details a man would know about his wife. If he loved her. If he lived with her.”

He looked at his shoe, at my pen blotter, at the door, at the dream box, at everything but my eyes. “I have other, ah, responsibilities, Mr. Frontino. The Time Wardens have put me in charge of one of their projects related to my era, investigations of conspiracy theories throughout history. People are depending on me to—and, well, there’s Jackie—my people don’t believe in divorce, so–”

I whistled for the magic picture again, and focused the view on the man seated behind Don Juan and Casanova. All three men wore the same expression, by the way.

“There he is,” I said, pulling up the pen on my desk Jack was looking at, and throwing it across the room like a dart. The pen point bounced off the image of Old Jack. Right between the eyes. I wished I had thrown it hard enough to stick right in the middle of the magic picture, and make that satisfying thump and quiver of a bullseye shot. Young Jack was startled, turned his head as the pen flew whistled past his ear, so he was looking straight into the eyes of old Jack.

“So there he is, pal,” I said, drawling my words slowly. “Vow him out of existence.”

“What?”

“All you got to do is vow never to see the girl again, never get close to her. If you don’t see her, you can’t put your hands on her, can’t do anything illegal, can’t get violent, can’t make any more whoopee. If you can do it, do it now. Mend your character. Be a man. Make that future vanish.”

Jack stood up, a determined look on his face, and turned toward the image.

I looked at my fingernails, noticed they were grimy, got out my switchblade, flicked it open, and picked the grit out from under my nails one at a time. I worked slowly and carefully so as not to cut myself, first the left hand, and, not so easily, the right. All the while I hummed a tuneless tune.

Then I put the knife away and stood up. Jack was still there. So was the image in the magic picture. No mist, no change. Jack was wiping his eyes, as if he had suffered some tremendous strain, staring into the sun, or into his own grave, or maybe he was weeping.

He said in a ragged voice. “It will be different if I am actually looking down at the body. My own body. Killed by me. If I look down, and the body turns to mist, I will know I can change my fate. If I know that if I give in, it will mean death, certain death, if I knew it, then I could be. . .I could be–”

“Be strong?” I suggested.

“Be normal.”

I stood up, picked up my hat, tossed it in the air, caught it, placed it on my head at a jaunty angle. “All right. I’ll take the case. I’ll help you kill yourself. You deserve it.”

He wiped his eyes and glared at me. “You have a big mouth for a hired gun.”

“Do I, boss? Tell me how you met this girl again? Your Helen of Troy? Ah, no answer, eh? Well, I’ll let that pass. And you’ll have to leave your bully boys behind when we go in tomorrow night. I am going to do just what I said I would do, just like last time. Protect the girl from the man who attacked her.”

“What do you mean, ‘last time’?”

“Never mind that. Remember the price we agreed on?

“Two cartons of cigarettes? Is that all a human life is worth to you?”

I shrugged. “I take people as they come.”

“How do you sleep at night, Mr. Frontino?”

I pulled out my shoulder holster, shrugged my arms into it, and then walked over to the hatrack for my coat. “I like to smoke before I sleep. Helps me relax. So our deal will work out nicely. Happy ending. You shoo your boys away. I got to lock up. Meet you downstairs, and then you take me to see your girl so we can go over some instructions and set up our little trap for tomorrow night.”

“What do you mean? You think–as soon as tomorrow?”

I looked at the Magic Picture. Sitting behind Don Juan and old Jack was what looked like a headless suit of armor wearing trenchcoat and a slouch hat. With a Frankish axe at one shoulder. A Tin Woodman.

Some sort of mechanical man with no head. So that is what my visitor from yesterday meant.

At that moment, a line of scantily clad girls danced in a bouncing fashion across the bouncing surface of the water, all kicking in unison, laughing and singing.

“He is thirty years in his own past,” I said. “The beauty contest must have been an event whose date he found a way to look up, even in this city where no one has a calendar. I can see why folk remembered it. But he is not a Time Warden, so if he is here, he is not here for long. Maybe he has been here all week, or, more likely, he was given a destiny crystal by a Warden to give him two anchor points, one tomorrow, when the beauty contest festivities end, and one seven days ago. Tonight she has her talent show competition, and he’ll certainly go see that. He’ll strike tomorrow. I mean, look at those dames! You know what he feels when he sees her. Now imagine not being able to see her for thirty years. Look at that look on your face.”

While he was staring at his older version, I whistled at the magic picture and turned it into a looking glass. Jack saw himself wearing much the same hungry expression as the old man, and he looked ashamed.

Then he turned and marched toward the door, shouting for Blackbeard and his men.

Edward Teach opened the door and held it open politely. Behind Jack’s back, Teach met my eye, and gave me an ugly smile of camaraderie. By some unspoken clue, Teach knew I had been hired, and so now I was like him, just more hired muscle, just another cutthroat, and that made his yellow teeth appear in the wild thicket of his pyromaniacal beard. It is the kind of smile the Madame at the cathouse gives to a preacher man when he shows up as a customer.

My conscience was squawking at me like a dim and tinny voice over the wireless under bad atmospheric conditions, telling me what that grin meant, but I had years of practice in not letting myself figure out what I did not want to know. You see, I am smart that way.

THE BEGINNING

The first time I met Jack was the day before, day three thousand and twenty-seven since my being hired (or being abducted, not that is there any difference) by the Masters of Metachronopolis, also called the Time Wardens. I was sitting in the middle of the floor of my office, playing mumbly-peg with the switchblade I’d been given as a reward and a memento for tracking down the Serb. I had a two-pound cardboard carton of ice cream that I had given up trying to finish.

He flung open the door and stood in the doorway. We looked at each other with some surprise.

“Who the Hell are you?” I growled. Normally, I try to say heck, but not when people break in.

“Your secretary is out,” he said.

“I got no secretary. Penny is the ice cream man’s daughter. She pretends she’s my receptionist when I have an appointment with some chump. Looks more professional that way. Now who, I repeat, the Hell are you, barging in here without knocking? Also, do you want some ice cream? I can’t eat it all before it melts and the carton is leaking. And I hate strawberry.”

“Why are you eating it, then?”

“This is my breakfast, lunch and dinner. The icebox is empty and the Anything Maker is broke. And I was hungry. So, who are you? This is last time I’ll ask without a gun or a knife or baseball bat and painful but undetectable soft tissue damage being involved in some capacity.”

“I am a chump.”

“What?”

“Your chump. One of your clients. You work for me. Or you will this time tomorrow.”

I sighed. “Is this one of those cases where you hire me to solve a murder, and you end up being the murderer yourself? Or the victim? Or both?”

He looked embarrassed. “Well, to be quite honest–”

I stood up. “That would be a yes. Which means a no. I don’t take cases from Time Wardens.”

“I am not a Warden. Not yet. But I have prestige.”

“Enough to time travel just a bit? Just a wee bit?”

“That’s right,” he nodded.

“Like being a wee bit pregnant. You can time travel a wee bit at first, but sooner or later you’ll end up eating yourself like a snake who swallows his own tail and is not bright enough to know when to stop chewing. Go away. You can commit anachronistic multiple-suicide by yourself without my help.”

“Does that happen a lot?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I can pay. Two cartons of cigarettes.”

I circled the desk, and sat down in the chair with a sigh, wiped the ice cream off my fingers, straightened my tie, and ran my fingers through my hair. Now I looked like a professional. “In that case, welcome. Please take a seat, Mr, Ah?”

“Kennedy. But you can call me Jack.”

If I had been a dog, my ears would have stood straight up and quivered. “Jack ‘Quail Hunter’ Kennedy, outlaw and train robber? You were shot to death by half-a-dozen railroad agents and postal inspectors! You were the last! The last great train robber of the Old West!”

“No, that’s not me. I’m the President of the United States.”

“President? Well, I guess you won’t get shot to death, then. Glad to hear the United States is still around in the future. Now why are you trying to kill yourself and why the hell should I give a damn?”

He pulled out an envelope, passed it to me. “Here are my references. Recognize the handwriting? This is a letter from you to you.”

He sat quietly while I read the letter.

I looked up. “When did I write this?”

“After I shot myself. My older version shot my oldest version. He—the oldest one—just lay there on the floor, and he didn’t–he didn’t disappear. That means I can’t—it means I won’t be able—to stop myself. When the time comes. Even though I know I am going to die, I will still walk into it. Walk into it with eyes open!”

I nodded. Time travelers never enter a scene unless they are satisfied with the outcome. “So, then,” I said, “From what it says here, you’re not happy with the outcome of shooting yourself, so therefore you are going to hire me tomorrow to go shoot your prophet-self. Walk into it with eyes open, so to speak. Do I detect a modicum of irony here?”

He shook his head. “It’s not that simple.”

“It never is.”

“And there is this girl.”

“There always is.” I shrugged. “So how did you get back here and what do you want from me? You’re a double-dipper? I mean you came from your own future into your personal past?”

“Yes. No. I mean I did come back, or I will, but I’m not the me who did. I just talked to him. To me.”

“Start from the beginning.”

“A time traveler came to me. He wore a hood and I could not see his face. I sent my men away, and he shows me that he is me, myself from the future. He tells me this story, of the version of me from tomorrow, my tomorrow, hiring you to help me kill the older me. He said the story does not have a happy ending.”

“Stories involving time travel never do.”

“He said after he killed the old man, and he did not dissolve, he realized that retaliation was not enough. I would still turn into him, despite seeing the future with my own eyes. The self-murder did not fix anything. It was empty. The version of me in the future is still committing the crime, and the version of Norma Jean who exists now was still. . . attacked last week. I don’t want revenge. I want to change the past. To stop the rape from ever happening.”

I said, “Put a pistol in your mouth and pull the trigger. Bang. Old you is gone. No future.”

He shook his head. “Suicide is a sin.”

I blinked at that. People are odd. “So is cheating on your wife,” I said blandly. “And hiring a hit man. Not to mention a few other things I could name.”

He said, “I won’t pull the trigger on myself. I just won’t.”

“But stepping in front of another version of you who you know will kill you, that’s okay? It’s the same as stepping in front of a speeding locomotive. And it is still you killing you.”

“It’s different. Future me is not me now.”

“So it’s not you, you don’t give a damn? Never mind that. I don’t need the excuses, just the facts. So how did you get back here?”

“I didn’t. I am the version from here and now. I just have not come to see you at your office yet.”

I blinked again. Hate this city. I can never keep track of who is which and when is now. “Start from the beginning again. And this time, from the beginning beginning.”

“It’s easier if I start at the end and work backwards.”

“I usually do it that way myself,” I admitted. “Go ahead. How does the story end?”

“The oldest version of me is the bad one. The attacker. The tomorrow version of me, you might say the middle one, comes to see you, hires you, and the next day the two of you go to stop the oldest version of me in the room where I keep Norma Jean. Middle me shoots the old me, but old me does not turn into mist. That means the rape still will happen, and that I will still turn into him. Turn into the evil old bastard. Even seeing my own dead body was not enough! So what is enough? There was a shower stall in the suite, and it was actually a door through time. It is set to three points. One is thirty years from now, where old me-to-be is squire to the Time Wardens, and is set to be elevated to be a Warden. Soon. The second anchor point is set the day after tomorrow, in the evening, when old me comes to repeat his crime. Tomorrow is when middle me, vendetta-me, comes and hires you to exact revenge on old me. You go with him, but he pulls the trigger. But then the body does not disappear, as he expected. He asked you for help. You wrote that letter, and sent him into the hidden destiny glass in the shower, so he goes ahead thirty years, where he is a Time Warden, and has access to all their machinery, all their powers. Are you following this?”

I nodded. “I’ve had practice. Around here you hear a lot of stories like this. So what happens next? Middle Jack finds you five days ago, the Young Jack, and explains what is about to happen?”

He smiled his charming smile. “No. The time traveler who came to me is not from our timeline at all. He is the me I should have been, the one who never committed any crimes in the first place, any of them. The better version of me. An innocent Jack. The one I want to make real.”

That struck me as suspicious. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”

“That does not mean it is not true. Listen. Innocent Jack told me the plan. There is a moment in time where old me is not protected by this body guard thing, some sort of mechanical man with no head. You ran out of the door with me, and the bodyguard followed us, trying to stay in the way between you and me.”

“Makes sense. Old Jack has to protect Middle Jack from being killed, or else Old Jack gets erased.”

“This guard, whatever it is, Innocent Jack told me said it had a five-minute time range. If it is kept away from old me for five minutes, then there is the time where old me can be killed. Oh, and this is the important point: you have to shoot the bathroom!”

“What? Why do I have to shoot the bathroom?”

“Because I told you to.”

“When?”

“No, I mean I am telling you now. This me version of me is telling the you version of now-you to shoot the door. Now. This is me telling you. I am telling you because the innocent parallel version of me told me to, and the older version of you told the middle me to tell other me to tell now-me to tell now-you.”

I rubbed my temples. “I don’t even like talking to time travelers.”

“Because of conversations like this?”

“No. Because conversations like this start to make sense.”

“So are you following the sequence of events?” he asked.

I nodded. “Except for how middle-you got to talk to other-you, who you say is innocent, even though he is telling you how to commit a suicide-murder. And what happens to him? Middle-you him, I mean?”

He said, “He appears in the room when you shoot the shower stall door in the bathroom. You did not do it last time, in the first run-through version of the scene, because middle me uses the unbroken door sometime after the shooting to travel into the future and makes contact with other-me, who came back and gave me your letter.”

I said, “So the destruction of the door forms an endpoint, which pushes anyone passing down that particular artificial spacetime continuum path back into the real timespace. It is a way of forming an anchor point where there is not supposed to be one. I shoot the door to force a time traveler back into timespace in that bathroom, at the point in time a few seconds before the door fails. And apparently that’s you–namely, late middle you.”

“No, that is going to be me, me. This version of me. I have a destiny card attuned to the shower stall door that other me got from middle me in the future. The youngest possible Jack has to be the one in the room. When I die, it has to wipe out everyone after me in the timestream.”

“You lost me. How did he fool the people thirty years from now? Middle you, I mean. How did he explain that he was fifty instead of eighty?”

“Old me has a walking stick with an age-adjuster built in. Middle me took it, and turned himself into an old man. Then he realized that the old man turned himself into a young man to be strong enough to, ah, do the, ah–”

“Do the girl?”

“I was going to say do the deed. The cane also has a stunner in it that numbs you if it touches a hand, or puts you into a delta wave sleep if it touches your head. Do you know what that is? Magic sleep. I am going to step out of the bathroom once you and early middle me leave the scene, then use it to stun Norma Jean so that she does not wonder why there are two of us in the room. The plan is that I beat old me to death with it, don his medical cape, twist the knob once to turn him into thousand-year-old dust, and twist the knob again to make me look like him. . .you see?”

“Um. . .I think I lost track of the order of events.”

“A version of me comes by tomorrow to hire you. You take the case and make sure to shoot the bathroom door to form the anchor point so that I can get into the scene. I kill me and take his cape and his age, and put her gently to sleep so she does not see me. You bring me, the tomorrow version of me, middle me, back into the room. He kills his own past version of himself, me. And you don’t interfere. I get erased from the timeline.”

“What prevents middle you from remembering this conversation? I mean early middle you, the one who hires me tomorrow. Since that scene is in your personal future. It’s tomorrow.”

“I have a selective amnesia induction field helmet late middle me stole from one of the palaces of old me. A Forgetting Helmet. I was shown how to use it. Tomorrow when I come to this office again, I will bring it with me.”

I frowned. “I think there is a screw loose in this plan somewhere. Aren’t you dead at this point tomorrow? You get shot while lying on the floor pretending to be old you?”

“No, the plan is perfect! Tomorrow when I visit you, I will shoo my men out, program the helmet, put it on my own head, and forget everything that came from any visit from later-time versions of me, and I’ll forget this conversation. All you have to do is shoot the door and watch me evaporate. Everything will be wrapped up in a nice, neat, Gordian knot.”

I sighed, and leaned back, and stared at the dark gold ceiling, running my tongue over the sickly sweet taste of strawberries sticking to my teeth.

“So will you take the case?”

I leaned forward again. “Absolutely not. Look, you are already going to kill yourself, and you have already killed yourself, but the version of you who is in front of me now has not done anything yet! You are the innocent one!”

Young Jack looked stricken, but tried to control his expression. “Actually. Uh. . .”

“You can’t truly want to go through with this! This plan? This stupid, crazy plan? You’re wearing a crucifix, and I heard beads rattling in your pockets. Aren’t you a good Catholic boy? We have Catholic priests here. A guy named Maximilian Kolbe, we call him Father Max, lives two levels down and just around the corner. And Joan of Arc runs a revival meeting on the roof. Go say confession, or get baptized, or do whatever you guys do. Clean yourself up. Then marry your damned chippy. If you love her. Don’t you love her?”

“Did I explain who she was?”

“Sure. Helen of Troy. One of them.”

He looked surprised. “She is the most famous actresses of all time! Hollywood actress, I mean.”

“Not in my time. Silent or talkie?”

He said, “I thought everyone in Metachronopolis had heard the story. The Time Warden Ceuthonymus drew the film actress Elizabeth Taylor back in time and created an alternate history where she was Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen. It was a joke. So, to top him, the Warden Menoetius drew Marilyn Monroe into a timeline where she was Helen of Troy. And she proved to be a prettier Helen than the original, so other Time Wardens made copies of the time line. Then the Wardens got bored, as they do, and Marilyn was sent to do waitress and hostess jobs, or dime-a-dance gigs. Or worse. After I was drawn in scooped up by the Warden Iapetus, he gave me one as a spare.”

Something very cold and very dark entered my heart then. “Gave?”

“As a reward. She’s not really my—not what you would call a sweetheart or demimonde—she did not volunteer, you know.”

“Is concubine a better word?” I asked softly. “The Wardens gave her to you as a harem girl. A slave.”

“Hey, I treat her right! She doesn’t act like she minds very much.”

“Then she is a good actress. Sexual knowledge without consent is still rape. Why are you still using this girl? What has she ever done to you? To deserve you?”

He did not say anything, so the silence hung over the room exactly like the thick cloud of smoke from my nonexistent cigarette would have if I had one.

“Never mind,” I said, “I know the answer. Have you ever wondered why you were chosen by the Time Wardens to join their ranks?”

It was pretty obvious he had, because he looked like he was being crushed inward, as if his spine were squeezing and pulling all his internal organs inward into a smaller and smaller knot.

I said in a louder voice, “That is why they are giving you their little gifts? They want you to get used to the idea of using time travel to evade your problems rather than solve them.”

“I am not evading anything! I’m trying to fix it!”

“No. Time travel makes men lazy. If the sweet, sweet worm were not wriggling on the hook of time travel, the fish of your guilty conscience would not rise to the surface to swallow the bait. If it wasn’t an option, you would not try to change the past, you would just make amends now, free her now, beg forgiveness from her now, and now straighten out your life. If you could not travel back in time and erase the moment when you dove into the sewer pond, then you would have to clean yourself up, scrape the sewage off your damned soul one painful day at a time.”

I drew a breath, a little surprised at myself at how angry I was. He said nothing, but he lowered his eyes, troubled. It seemed I had said something that struck him right in the middle of his soul. I paused to let it sink in.

“Free the girl,” I said. “Or marry her. Instead of taking everything in her life away from her, give her everything in your life you can give her. Clean yourself up!”

Not looking up, he said in a whisper: “I thought of doing that. I’ve tried. But it won’t work. I know I don’t have whatever it takes, I don’t have the willpower.”

That annoyed me. His excuse for his behavior was that it was too hard to be decent? “Well, buddy, there is no one else you can turn to for help. In this life, the big fish eat the little fish, and the Time Wardens are the biggest fish there have ever been.”

“You’re wrong,” he said softly, still looking down at his hands.

“I ain’t wrong. Listen! I have a friend who is a cannibal, an actual maneater. He looks at people just as slabs of meat to be consumed. Men are not souls to him, they are things. Things to eat. How are you better than that?”

He straightened his spine and looked me in the eye, “I can set things right.”

“How? By more time travel? Time travel is cowardly. It’s futile. For one thing, if the girl has an even slightly hardened memory, she’ll still remember you and what you did to her.”

He gritted his teeth and said, with only the smallest quake in his voice, “Then she will also remember that I am willing to die to set things straight!”

“Says who?” I smiled sourly.

“Says the enemies of the Time Wardens. You see, I tried doing this alone. And I can’t.”

There was something really odd in his voice when he said those words. I sat up in my chair.

“The Masters of Time cannot have enemies,” I said slowly. “They would just go back in history and kill their enemy’s father, whoever he is.”

“You have seen things go into the mist. Things can come out as well! Men, miracles, messengers! Whole worlds emerge from the mist as they pass from being impossible to being inevitable. That includes the first world holding the original version of this city.”

I squinted as if against a strong light. “What kind of baloney is that?”

“You’ve got it all wrong. The purpose of time travel is to forgive and heal. It is to make our past crimes fade away, into the mist of nothingness. But it has been turned wrong here, corrupted by these so-called Time Wardens. They are rebels, a gang of criminals, who abused the machinery of time travel over which they were given stewardship. They use their powers to indulge in their past crimes and to evade consequences. So this has become a city of lies built on a foundation of nothingness. But if, one by one, each Master of Time, even before he is elevated to the position, turns away from the evils he has done and will do, and sponge them out of the pages of history, then this city of evasion will become a city of salvation!”

I wanted to believe him. The Masters of Time certainly acted like a gang of crooks.

“How could you possibly know this? Where did you hear any of this?”

He leaned forward, his eyes burning. “Because old me is only one version of me. He is going to turn into a Time Warden, and he’ll be no different from any of them. Dressed in a mirror, with a crown and no face, and wrapped in a robe of mist. As cruel and remorseless as history itself.”

“And the other version, he is the one from the other timeline?”

“Yes. He is the one who sent me to you. They have crowns of gold, and their robes are solid black, as black as midnight, because the past good they have done can never be changed. Their city is green rather than gold, and time travel is only used to punish the penitent among them. They do not rule time.”

“Anarchists, eh? They just leave all the flatliners alone, do they?”

“They are not the Masters of Time but of Eternity. There is no beginning to them, nothing that can be edited away. They have followed the tradition of the first Moonshot, expanded into space rather than time, and their version of Luna glitters with cities and cathedrals and tabernacles whose light you can see from Earth. You may have seen that Moon, the Moon in the heavens in the timelines where America did not lose hope. The closer the Emerald Towers come to being real, the less real these proud Towers of accursed gold become, and the clearer and fairer shines the cities of Luna.”

“You know—must know—I don’t believe you.”

He smiled and leaned back. “I don’t care if you believe me now or not. I think you will, eventually. The other me, the Master of Eternity who comes from a world of a bright moon above towers of shining green above a fruitful world of green grass and green forest–he told me you were the man.”

“What man?”

“The man who sees the downfall of the last of the Masters of Time. I was told to come to you because you are a man who is not afraid. And because—sometimes—you listen to your conscience.”

I shook my head. “You were told a fairy tale. It’s some sort of Chronocrat trick. If old you is about to become a Time Warden himself, then my guess is some other Wardens, unfriendly Wardens, who, for reasons you will never know, have decided to sweep your seventh-row pawn off the board before it turns into a Queen. I don’t know what version of yourself visited you when, but if you were visited by a time traveler, then you can be sure it was a Warden.”

“He was an honest and decent man.”

“An honest and decent Warden? No such thing. The whole point of giving you the girl, giving you power, tempting and corrupting you, was to make you the kind of man who thinks like a Time Warden. If this anarchist guy who says he is their enemy were real, he would not use time travel. Who thinks of changing the past rather than changing himself when he has a problem?”

“He has hardened memory. He will remember this version of events when he becomes real, but I have to die before he can become real. That is my penance. I suffer, I die to myself, and then I am renewed and reborn in a parallel timeline where my sins never took place. They are blotted out of all history books. All I have to do is die.”

“You are crazy. I don’t believe you.”

“I am not paying you to believe me. Will you take the case? Because, if you don’t–for the love of God, man! The Time Wardens gave her to me! Just like you’d give someone a pet cat! They’ll just give her to someone else if I keep away from her, and I cannot keep away from her anyway. The temptation, it’s too much! It’s like a sickness. So you know what will happen if you allow me to live. Look, even if you don’t believe me, will you take the case for her sake?”

I have to admit that I sat there thinking and scowling at him for a moment or two. Out of habit, I reached under the drawer where I keep my spare cigarettes, and was surprised to feel something meet my fingers. As soon as I touched it, I felt the tinkle of mist around my hand, and I remembered spending yesterday reading a memo to myself, from a version of myself who I was pretty sure did not exist and never would.

Look, I have my principles. I never take cases from Time Wardens, and I don’t help time travelers kill themselves. Never.

Except this time I would.

I stood up. “All right.”

Because I could swap cigarettes with nearly anyone in this quarter of the city, and get nearly anything I needed. Ammo, food, booze. A big breakfast and a square dinner.

He stood up. He looked me in the eye. He must have known exactly what I was thinking. “It seems you are no better than me, who uses women for sex, and no better than your friend who eats men for food. I am just a meal to you.”

I sighed. “Well, since you put it that way, and since you are planning on erasing your memory tomorrow–”

And I hit him in the face hard enough to knock him backward over the chair and onto the floor.

PROLOGUE TO A NEW BEGINNING.

Memo to Myself

Written in Eternity, sent to the date Day Three Thousand And Twenty-Six Personal Subjective Time.

I am leaving these papers under the bottom drawer rather than taking your pack of cigarettes.

About this time tomorrow, a man destined to be a Time Warden is going to hire you to kill himself via time paradox, or that is what it looks like. Looks can be deceiving.

He is going to tell you a fairy tale about a city that is Beyond the City Beyond Time, a City of Emerald Towers whose spires soar above a green world or gardens and arbors and forest rather than above any emptiness of mist.

He is telling the truth. He kills himself, but he does not really die. There is a real version of him that comes from a timeline where time travel is only used to cure past crimes, not to get away with them. That timeline leads to a city, this city, where the Proctors do not kill people except as an act of voluntary punishment, after which they are brought to life again as new people, people whose sins are only memories of events that never really happened.

That is what you really are, Jacob. You are not an assassin. They—the fallen Masters of Eternity—they twisted your past and tried to make you into something you are not. They changed this city of paradise into a Valhalla, and sent back agents to choose among the dead for historical figures to people their museum and amuse them. That includes their old bosses and old coworkers. Hardened memory does not remember anything for you if the whole time before you were ever born is changed. But they could not change you.

That is where your sense of justice comes from, your willingness to listen to people confess their wrongdoings to you, your willingness to take people as they are without passing judgment.

So go ahead and take the case. Punch him in the eye if you want, but take the damned case. When his alternate version becomes real here, he will be unfallen and forgiven, a pilgrim rather than a mere traveler through time.

As will you. As will we all.

—Yours, Jacob Quirinus Christoforo Frontino, S.J.

Tower of Final Forgiveness,

Transmetachronopolis

P.S. Make sure I come into existence, Jake. Don’t screw this one up.

ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM

John C. Wright

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”

—I Corinth. 13.11

1. Tommy

“I should be happy,” Thomas S. Robertson muttered to himself, fumbling for the latchkey to his Brighton flat. Perhaps he had had a pint too many at the local pub; perhaps he had too desperately tried to celebrate.

His key ring fell from an unsteady glove, bounced on the stair near his shoe, and spun away into the dried rosebushes the concierge had planted between the concrete strip of the sidewalk and the street.

Thomas Robertson sighed, and his breath was white with cold. Was it worth searching for his keys, in the dark, in the October fog, at this hour of night? Perhaps he should shout and wake the concierge. The concierge might be put out, but Thomas was soon to leave this comfortable old building anyway, and move into the stark glass boxlike high-rise in the midst of the most modern part of London. The company had arranged to move his things; the modern apartment was provided as part of his promotion.

Many of the officers of the company, ambitious men younger than he was, had slapped him on the back or shaken his hand with envy at the party this evening.

It was that envy that had finally driven him out into the foggy night, to find the old stone-and-wood public house where Irish dockworkers sometimes swapped tall tales of mermaids and of little people, of selkie and of banshee and of stern, pale kings from the fairy world.

Those tales he knew and loved; he had more reason to believe them than most people, although it was easy to forget that, now that he was grown.

Those tales were one more thing to lose, when he moved away to London.

He doffed his gloves, bent down to feel through the thorns for his key, and grunted as he bent; bending was not so easy anymore, now that he was on the wrong side of forty and losing his hair. Middle aged, if he lived to be eighty. (But last year Bridesmith from Accounts had passed away at sixty-two. Heart trouble. Middle aged for him had been thirty-one.)

A thorn scratched his ungloved hand; he pulled it back. Now he sat in the dry leaves heaped by the roadside, drained and defeated, sucking mournfully on his pricked finger. It did not even seem worth the effort to shout and wake the concierge to let him in, for if he went in-of-doors, and slept, the morning would come all the sooner.

Light came from a wrought-iron lamppost not far away. The street was empty, and here and there a lonesome tree lifted its bare and crooked twigs to the cold sky. To one side was an old Anglican Church, built nine hundred years ago, with a statue of St. George standing atop a pillar in the midst of the churchyard gardens, overlooking the street, as if standing sentry over the road.

The other way along the street loomed new construction. Squat black warehouses dominated in the nearer ground; beyond them rose faceless glass monstrosities, including Thomas’s office building. He always walked that way in the morning, turning his back on the church, and leaving St. George behind him. But then St. George was always there in the evening, when he turned about again to come home.

Thomas felt a solemn, silly mood, like the seriousness of a child. He closed his eyes. “St. George,” he said in a soft voice, “Help me find the key I have lost. I want to open the door to my home.”

Without opening his eyes, he plunged his hand into the rosebush. Thomas’s hand closed on something warm and furry, which yowled and turned and clawed him. When he yanked his hand back, the animal was riding his arm on white-hot needles of pain.

With a startled yell, Thomas shook off the yellow-eyed thing clinging to his arm. It was a black cat. The cat spun neatly in the air and landed on its feet in Thomas’s lap.

On a slim silver chain around its neck, the cat wore a silver key, intricately inscribed. The teeth of the key were large and square; the hilt was crowned with a circle inscribed about a cross, divided into equal fours.

The cat was as black as moonless midnight, with no spot of white in its fur. Its eyes were sardonic; they were yellow as gold, and the pupils were opened up wide.

Thomas was swept with a blinding joy. “Tybalt!” he cried, “It’s you! You’ve come back! Oh, you’ve come back! It’s been so long. . . .”

He stood up, trying to seize and hug the black cat. The cat twisted out of his grasp, spun and landed on its feet. The chain fell off over the cat’s sleek head; the key fell with a chime to the stone of the stairs, and lay, shimmering silver-white in the light from the lamppost.

“Have you forgotten how to talk?” asked Thomas. “Are you under an enchantment?”

Suddenly, he felt foolish. Perhaps he was drunk. The cat could be any black cat.

Thomas Robertson stared down at the cat. “If you’re really Tybalt, the Prince of Cats, son of Carbonel, please say something,” he whispered. “Say anything. Please.”

The cat began to wash his paws fastidiously.

Thomas said, “Don’t make me feel ridiculous. I remember you from when I was a schoolboy. There was the well behind the ruined wing of Professor Penkirk’s mansion. Bombed during the war, and overgrown with moss, the black windows and spooky walls surrounded the well on three sides, and a broken angel was there. We knew it was a haunted well, we were sure. Penny and Richard and Sally and I, all of us were playing there, when we found the key. It was the well of the nine worlds, and the key opened the gateway. . . .”

Thomas stooped and picked up the silver key. “I believe,” he said. “I remember everything. Richard came back with the sword; Sally had the shard of the shattered magic glass; Penny, God rest her soul, brought back Myrrdin’s book. I had this key. I lost it years ago, but here it is again. I know it. I know you. I am not mad.”

Thomas looked overhead till he found the North Star, which was shining brightly above the clouds and fogs. For a moment, he frowned as if searching his mind for something long forgotten, something precious and lost. Then he smiled. He pointed the key at the North Star, and turned it clockwise. “Power of heaven, unchained by me, come into the carven key.”

He pointed the silver key at the cat. “Unlock, unbind, release, set free; so says he who bears the key.” He twisted it clockwise.

The black cat spoke in a voice as soft and clear as rippling water. “I am come to summon you to tourney, Tommy, to face a knight of ghosts and shadows. No weapon of mankind can cut him; and once he is called to come, no door nor gate can keep him out. Only one who knows his secret name can hope to vanquish him. He is the champion of the Lord of Final Winter, who also is called the Shadow King. He has been summoned to your world, now, and all of England is at hazard.” The black cat looked up at him with eyes as yellow and mysterious as moonlight. “The call is given. Listen: you can hear the trumpet of the Wild Huntsman. Will you go?”

“Now? Right now? In the middle of the night? Without packing a bag?”

“To fly upon the air, little Tommy, we needs must travel light. If you do not already carry all you need, nothing you can put into a bag will help you now. Can you not hear the trumpets of the wild hunt?”

Thomas cocked his head. “I hear nothing but the cry of night birds in the air,” he sadly said.

“Your belief is weak. Those who refuse to understand cannot hear, even when the Call rings out as loud as church bells. Come away; the lords of faerie summon you. The Enemy will conquer all, if none stand to oppose his might.”

“I can’t just up and leave. I have work; I have rent to pay. But, see here, you’ve picked a good time. In a week or so I’ll be ready to move; the company might give me some days off, and then I can schedule in some time to go fight the knight of shadows, and. . . .”

Thomas straightened, blinking. Schedule in some time to fight the knight of shadows?

“Tybalt,” he said slowly. “I’m not a child anymore. It’s been thirty years since we went to Vidblain, and broke the Black Mirror of the Winter King, and restored Prince Hal to his throne at Caer Pendewen. You can’t order me around like a schoolboy. I’ll help you, yes, certainly. But this time, I must know why we’re doing what we’re doing, where we’re going, and by what plan. I can’t just go shooting off into the blue. I have a life of my own. I have a future to think about. If I just disappear in the middle of the night, I’ll be sacked, and have no future, no job, no place to stay.”

The black cat turned and slipped off down the stairs. Then the cat was in the street, and beginning to slink away, a black shadow in the night. Thomas jumped down the stairs after him, crying, “Wait! Don’t leave me! I’ll come! I’ll come!”

Pausing for nothing, Thomas ran joyfully down the street after the elusive black cat, his back to the high-rises, his face toward St. George.

It was midnight, and the church bell solemnly and slowly began to ring, filling the starlit world with echoes.

2. Richard

It was November, and the days were dark.

“Thomas! How d’you, old man. Great to see you after all these years. Ah . . . just great. I can spare you a few moments. It’s a busy world, you know. Quite busy. Sit down.”

Richard Sommerville’s office was square and large, carpeted in red, walls hung with ugly modern paintings in rich frames: mere colored blobs and jagged scrawls, without meaning or skill of execution. Bookshelves filled two walls, crowded with expensive books of the type one never reads, but leaves about to impress one’s guests. The windows were narrow and small, like archer’s slits, and through them could be seen the snow on the road outside, churned black by automobile traffic.

Richard’s face was large and square as well. Age had thinned his hair and left baggy rings around his narrowed eyes. His face had a tight, cautious look. He greeted Thomas with hearty words, but he smiled only with his lips, never with his eyes.

“You’ve been out tramping in the country, haven’t you, old man? I can tell by your gear. Not many people come into my office with knapsacks and hiking sticks, wearing stained anoraks. Or dripping snow on my things. No, not many at all. Not at all. But we always have time for old friends, don’t we? Don’t we? What can I do for you, Thomas?” Richard said, looking at his wristwatch.

Thomas was wreathed in smiles, his face eager as a child on Christmas morning. “Look.” He upended his backpack, and dumped a small black cat onto Richard’s desk, amid the neat stacks of paper, the pen set, the ticking desk clock, the telephone. The cat batted documents off the blotter, and stepped disdainfully on some others.

Richard almost rose from his seat. “What! See here, Thomas, what do you mean throwing your smelly pet all over my desk? Are you loopy?” He sounded sincerely angered and shocked.

Thomas smiled, and leaned forward. “It’s Tybalt!”

“Who?”

Thomas’s smile slowly vanished. The light in Thomas’s eyes began to die. “Why . . . why . . . It’s Tybalt. You must remember. That summer we found the well of the nine worlds. When I held up the key, and Penny said the rhyme she’d found in the old book of Professor Penkirk’s. One brave soul to hold the key, remember the rhyme? The rainbow came in the mist above the well, and we followed it to Vidblain, and we saw the ships of Lemmergeir sailing in the tide below the Tall White Tower of Noss. We saw the swan ships sailing from the Western Sea, from the Summer Country. You remember, Richard, you must. It was you who found the shining Sword trapped in the roots of the Cursed Black Oak in the middle of Gloomshadow Forest, where none of the Fair Folk could go. The badger’s family helped you. None of the servants of the Winter King could draw it; it burned their hands. That’s how we found out that old woman was an ice maiden in disguise. It was all just as the rhyme in Professor Penkirk’s book foretold.”

“Good old Professor Penkirk. Haven’t thought on him in years. Queer old bird, I must say. I’m not so sure I’d get along with him so well nowadays, though. Filling all our heads with notions and rubbish. Well. We were children then, I suppose. No great harm done. I suppose kooky old Penkirk’s dead by now. Nice seeing you again, though, Thomas, I must say. Now, if you could get this silly cat off my papers, I do have a frightfully important meeting at two. That’s what happens when you barge in without an appointment, you know. We can’t all just do as we like. . . .”

“But this is Tybalt, son of Carbonel. . . .”

“That old scrawny black cat we played with as kids? It’s been dead for years, I’m sure. Cats don’t live so long as that, you know. . . .”

“Richard! Listen! He’s come to call us back,” Thomas said in a low, quiet voice. “Tybalt, I mean. He carries a message from the Emperor of the Uttermost West, the King of the Summer Land. We helped them before. Don’t you remember at all? The Black Mirror of the Winter King had trapped the light from the sword. Susan shattered it with the note from the harp of Finn Finbarra, and we freed the nightingale, and followed her song to the Forever Tree, which was still green and whole under the ice. The fire from the sword melted the ice; we found the Garland Crown of good prince Hal hanging on the highest branch, just where Tybalt had said. This is Tybalt. Tybalt: say something!”

Richard stirred uneasily in his chair. He said in a tight voice; “Look here, Thomas. Those fairytale daydreams we all had were all very right and nice as children. But we’re grown now. Those were just games we played. Those ideals, you know, good triumphant over evil. Just silly children’s games. None of it could be real. If that was real, none of this would be real,” he said, gesturing abruptly toward the walls of his office, the window, the honking traffic crowding the street below. “Nothing we did as adults would mean anything. We all have to make compromises. No one can blame us. But all that was just play. . . .”

Thomas leaned forward across the desk and grabbed Richard’s hand. “You know it was real. Why are you pretending it wasn’t?”

“I wish I could believe . . .,” Richard whispered.

“We don’t have to be trapped,” Thomas said, letting go of the hand and leaning back slightly. “We don’t have to live this way.”

Richard was silent, eyes cast down.

Thomas spoke with quiet urgency: “Tybalt told me the Winter King’s men have entered this world. They have Atlendor’s tarn-cape, and mortal eyes cannot see them. Tybalt brought me to the Wellspring of Wisdom in a cavern below the roots of an ash tree, where a hundred knights in armor of gold were sleeping on stone biers. He made me bathe my eyes in the spring; it burned and stung, and for a day, I thought I was blind. But when my blindness passed, I could see the fairy creatures.”

Thomas continued, “There was one, oh God! There was one of them right there in the town at Alderley Edge; a schoolteacher. She was actually one of the willow women, the daughters of the Winter King. The women are all fair and beautiful to see from the front, but are hollow and rotten from behind, like masks; they can only be discovered by someone who looks at them from every angle. I crouched outside the window and looked into the classroom; one of the willow women was the teacher there. The parents had sent their children off to school, all trusting the teachers and not suspecting a thing. The willow woman drew the sigils and Runes of Ice upon the blackboard, and made the children chant the Worm Song to ensorcell them. She had chains made out of gossamer and was telling the children to bind themselves, so the children could not speak or think except at her command. No one but I could see the chains. I asked Tybalt how to cut them; he said they were woven out of women’s beards and mountain roots and fish’s breath.”

“There’s no such thing,” said Richard, a strange look on his face.

“Exactly. That’s why they couldn’t be broken. You can’t cut something that doesn’t exist, can you? That’s why we need the sword once more. The light from the sword can shatter the spell; no one can remove those chains except the children themselves; and they can’t remove them till they can see them, and they can’t see them without the light. Where is the Sword Reforged now, Richard? It was one of the things we took out of Vidblain. I remember you had it hidden under the boards in your grandmother’s attic up until when you went away to boarding school. Where is it now?”

“I gave it to the local museum in Easterwick, the town where Penny used to live. Don’t look at me that way! It was just an old rusted sword we once played with. All that rubbish about ‘no ignoble hand could draw it’ was just childhood silliness.”

“When did you sell it?” Thomas voice was cold and severe.

“How dare you talk to me in that tone! I’ve half a mind to call security and have you tossed out on your ear. You’ve no right to judge me. No right at all. You’re quite mad, you know.”

“It was after you came home from when you were expelled from boarding school, wasn’t it, Richard? I was away at school myself then, and you never did tell me why they kicked you out. I heard some very ugly rumors, Richard, about a girl you got in trouble. . . .”

Richard made as if to slap him. Thomas, however, had spent six weeks on the road, or in the woods, and his body had grown more hardy and strong than most inactive men of his age. He caught Richard’s hand easily, and pinned it against the desk, so that Richard was drawn forward at an awkward angle.

With his left hand, Richard grabbed Thomas’s wrist, and tried to pry his grip away. There was no sound save for the hissing of their breath as the two strained silently, almost without motion.

With his other hand, Thomas brought a squeeze tube out from his breast pocket. He flicked the cap free with his thumb. The desk shivered as Richard tugged, trying to escape, but Thomas held him pinned. The tube had a narrow mouth like an eyedropper. Thomas leaned back his head and squeezed a drop of fluid, one into each eye, never letting go of Richard’s right hand. Thomas shivered and blinked.

When Thomas leaned his head forward, Richard shuddered and made a hoarse noise. Thomas’s pupils had dilated dramatically; the black part of his eye seemed enormous, all-seeing.

With his thumbs he forced open Richard’s clenched fist. “The sword of light has burned you here. Your palm is crossed with scars.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my hand! Let me go!”

“You sold the sword when you found it would not allow your hand to touch it. You must wish you could banish your memory as easily.”

He released Richard’s hand, and rubbed his hand on his pants, as if to wipe away a stain. “I should be more surprised, if I had not seen a sight more terrible than the one I told to you. The willow maidens have been here for many years. When I walked the streets of London, I saw many people who had locked themselves in the gossamer chains. I don’t know who is more pathetic; them, or you.” Thomas meticulously picked up his little tube and replaced the tiny cap.

“Get out,” Richard croaked. “Wait! Take me with you. . . .”

“Come along then.” Thomas stood and extended his hands. The black cat sprang into his arms, and then swarmed lithely up to Thomas’s shoulder. Tybalt crouched sphinxlike and regarded Richard with unblinking eyes as cold as hammered gold.

Richard just quivered and blinked. “Get out. You’re crazy. I’m a man of prominence in business. A success. Go chase your children’s fantasies. They’ll put you in a nuthouse. A nuthouse.”

“Good-bye, Richard. And I am truly sorry.”

3. Sally

Thomas searched long for Sarah Truell. She had married a serviceman named Delacourt, changing her last name, and the Royal Navy had moved them from one post to another. New Year had come and gone, and February was approaching, before he found her.

She lived in a little row house outside the Navy yards in Dover, with the tiniest strip of garden before the front door. Her house was the only one sanded and painted, bright and cheerful, along the whole row: her house alone had Christmas lights. She had put a white birdbath, surrounded by neat flowerbeds, filled now with snow, in the center of her tiny lawn. Her neighbors had rubbish poking through the white hillocks of their yards, and an abandoned hulk of an auto was rusting, coated with icicles, in the street nearby.

Inside it was breathlessly hot. Her rooms were thronged with bookshelves and hung with many potted plants. Every table had some fragile vase or piece of bric-a-brac, small delicate statues or intricately carven music boxes, of which she had a collection. The place was crowded, as if being squeezed together by converging walls, but prim and neatly kept.

Thomas was surprised to see how old Sarah seemed, how cautious and slow her movements were. She was not yet forty, younger than Thomas, yet her hair had gone all gray, and she wore it in a bun knotted neatly on her head. She listened carefully to the story Thomas told, but was distracted several times by watching Tybalt climb among the bookshelves, afraid he would knock down a crystal piece or tiny lamp.

“What? Go out on an adventure? Like when we were children? By star, by stone, by shining spear, I call upon the gathered hosts of light. . . . Like that? It would be charming. Those days were so sweet. But I cannot help you. Who knows what might happen if I did?”

“Richard pretended not to remember anything. He said it was a game. How can you stand idle, knowing what our dread foe is? Have you forgotten?”

“Oh, I remember everything,” she said wistfully. “I still at times recall the perfume of the flowers when they bloomed, after the Winter King and all his troops were beaten in the Battle of Glad Valley.

“The snow all vanished in a torrent of clear water, streaming down the hillsides, cleaning all the vile things left by the white wolves and trolls away, and where the knights of the Summer Land strode singing, flowers sprang up and barren trees burst suddenly to green, like a thousand springtimes rolled up in one. The floods washed all the bad things into the sea, but any house which had hung a wreath or pine branch on its door was safe, and not even their eaves were damp.”

She continued: “I remember the feast on the fields of Caer Linden, and the tree women came out of the forests to dance, and the faerie folk danced in the air overhead, held up by the joy of their singing alone. The tables were laid with white linens, and groaned under the baskets of fruits and fair foods which all the country people brought to give thanks for the return of their Prince. The coronation was all splendor; Prince Hal was crowned with the Garland Crown, and all the flowers bloomed. The elf king, Finbarra, he danced with me, did I tell you? and drew me up high in the air, and the crystal floor of heaven rang underfoot, and I heard the stars singing their hymns in the night.”

Sarah’s eyes had filled with tears at the memory. She said, “Excuse me,” and took a pressed hankie out of her skirt pocket, and daubed at her eyes. “We never should have come back to this world. It’s so dirty. And there’s nothing you can do about any of it. Everything is so . . . complicated. Over there, next to the seashell is a harp I bought in Wales. Don’t touch it! It’s very fragile. I have it to remind me of the harp of Finbarra, which I carried on our quest to the Hall of Silence, in Icelock. Do you remember how sweetly the nightingale sang, when we let her go free from her cage? And I remember how Tybalt tried to eat her at first. Poof! You nasty thing!” Now she laughed and waved her hankie at Tybalt.

Tybalt looked at her disdainfully, and began to lick the fur of his shoulder and wash.

“But I’m worried,” she whispered, eyes wide. “The police were here, asking after you. Richard phoned too, and he was angry, frantic. What have you done?”

Thomas was seated uncomfortably on a chair slightly too small for him. His arms had become muscled with the exertions of his adventures and escapes over the last two months; his face was darkened by weather and wind. He now wore a beard. He was afraid to move his arms, for fear of knocking over the bottles or blown glass objets d’art on the little tables to either side of him.

“We have been called to battle, once again, against our ancient foe,” Thomas said, “And to walk beneath the banners of the Sons of Light. The Champion of the Dark is here, in England, and he covets all this world for his prize. I dare not face him till his secret name is known to me. No strength of hand can overcome him; his name is written in elf-light ink in Penny’s old book. I have not found Penny’s heirs as yet, and what is written in elf-writing cannot be read except by the light of the Sword Reforged. I have found the little country museum where the sword is kept, but the agents of the Shadow were there before me.

“They cannot touch the sword, and dared not move it. But the museum-keeper’s soul has been consumed by the vampires, and a vampire has entered his flesh, and inhabits him, usurping his form and name, and spun charms around the museum.

“I attempted to enter, but the enchantments snared me on the threshold; I was dazzled and fell frothing. A man who found me took me to a hospital.

“The doctors diagnosed me as epileptic, and their medicines cured me. But some of the police are agents of the enemy, and they found my name out while I was there. I escaped by climbing down from the window; Tybalt had taught me a charm to allow me to land on my feet without hurt, no matter how high the fall.

“For several days I fled and hid. Finally I was betrayed to the police. But I was not to have a trial. The enemy transported me in an aeroplane to take me to the East, where their powers are stronger, and where they have countries whose evil rulers worship the Darkness almost openly.

“Their Champion came in to where I was chained in the hold of the aeroplane, to gloat at and to mock at me. He occupied the body of Lord Wodenhouse, the minister of the Admiralty, and wore his uniform. But there was nothing inside his body, and he had no light in his eyes.

“He boasted to torment me, telling me how my defense of England had already failed. He told me of secret meetings of the Admiralty counsel at midnight at the ruins of an ancient pre-Roman temple, and named the horrible oaths taken to apparitions in the tombs.

“In a cold, regal voice, he told about members of Parliament, those who could not be made to swear, or who made some attempt to tell of what they had seen in the tombs. He told how his night hags and wraith maidens would cling to the walls outside their windows, and sing to the sleeping men in voices only they could hear. Sometimes wives found their husband’s stiff and empty bodies in their bed the next morning. But, before any great stir could be made, the enchanted men were taken and replaced, one by one, by some stranger who looked and spoke and acted like just as they had done.

“Lord Wodenhouse said his greatest support in the halls of power were from those Lords and ministers who formerly had opposed his rise to power. These men were never seen to eat or drink in public, rarely laughed, and never smiled when they did laugh.

“ ‘They take their sustenance from other things,’ he told me then, ‘Things men never had denied unto my kind; praise and smiles and flattery are sufficient to sustain us. But our hunger, human, our hunger never dies.’ And he promised me I should perish, after torture, on the altar he had erected to his Master.

“But I used the silver key to unlock the chains which kept me in the aeroplane’s hold. There were none of the enemy around me; the Knight of Shadows feared for his men to learn his nature. The body he inhabited was weak; easily I took him by the throat. But he was unafraid, croaking I had no weapon which could harm him, for, if his body were destroyed, he would flee into other flesh.

“I squeezed his throat until he coughed and dared him to flee the flesh he wore. The Knight of Shadows spat at and reviled me, but would not answer. By this, I knew he needed the face and form, the fame and power, of Lord Wodenhouse to do his evil work in England.

“The marines came into the cabin then, weapons ready, wearing the mark of the Evil Eye on their brows. But I flung myself from the door of the plane, and the suction whirled the enemy, screaming, out into the night sky with me. And I trusted to Tybalt’s spell, fell, and did not die. A group of Normandy farmers saw me plunge from the sky and land on my feet, unharmed, in the middle of an open field. And they seemed to understand my plight, almost as if they knew I served the Elf King; they hid me from the police, and on Christmas Eve they feasted with me.

“With their help, I was smuggled back into England. I have only now come from Dover docks.”

Sarah listened, wide-eyed. “It is too terrible. They can’t be here. It can’t happen here.”

He said, “It has grown worse even in the short time I was away in France; or perhaps they gather in cities, far away from open fields. I have the second sight; many of the men on the docks—the shore patrol, the police, the Navy men—I saw the Unseen Mark upon their foreheads, or in their palms. They have been branded with the Sign of the Evil Eye. They have sworn fealty to the Enemy; I fear Her Majesty’s government is corrupt, spell-caught, and overcome. All men and women of good will must join together to fight this foe; each of us must do our utmost.”

“I cannot help you,” Sarah said quietly. She had a look of fear and horror in her eyes.

“You must. Listen; I will tell you what we face.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“In the sewers under London I saw the filthy pool filled with vampires. They were lying, weak and helpless in the mire, chanting spells. Their crooked limbs were thin as reeds; their bellies were swollen and famished. Their songs called up to the streets above and drew a line of people down the dripping stairs.”

Sarah twisted uncomfortably in her chair. She shook her head, but did not speak. Thomas, watching her without remorse, continued his narrative:

“Tybalt made me put wax in my ears: their songs were too piteous and beautiful for men to withstand, he said. I saw it all, I tell you! Men, women, and children were filing up to the edge of the mire, and cutting their own wrists with knives or razors or with their own teeth. The vampires lay below with upturned mouths, pushing and squeezing to suck up the blood. It was ghastly! But worst of all, whenever a vampire tried to climb out of the muck, and join the humans on the sewer stairs, tried to become a human being again, the other vampires would pull him back down and bite him again, to make sure he remained a vampire.

“Tybalt told me we needed the shard of the Mirror to defeat them before they get too strong, and rise up. They are agents of the Winter King; they cannot live in fertile or green land; they cannot stand to see their own reflections; they lose all their power once they see themselves for what they are.”

“Is that all you want? The shard? Of course I still have it!” She got up and went over to a carven cabinet, from which she took a little box of cedar wood. She brought it back and held it for a moment in her lap. “I had it for a keepsake. But if you must have it. . . .”

She unlocked and opened the cedar box. Inside was a fold of white silk; she carefully unwrapped a triangular shard of black glass. It shone and glimmered like polished black marble, a beautiful thing to behold.

“Take it and go!” she said, extending it toward him.

“Why are you afraid to come? What has made you so full of fear?”

She did not answer, but seemed to shrink in on herself, huddling.

“Is your husband one of them?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.” She shivered. She tried to smile, but the effort was pathetic. “The good things in life, they are so weak, so fragile. Elves, the tree maidens, the little birds. What can they do to stop the onslaught of Winter?”

“Have you forgotten? The flowers drive back the winter every spring.”

“But men,” she said, “Evil people are not hobbled by sentiment; noble thoughts don’t stop them.”

“Is that all ideals mean to you? A hobble? Ideals are the source of all strength. Men cannot live without them any more than they can live without air, or bread. Even twisted men must have ideals, if only twisted ones. No, I will tell you what truly hobbled me: when I tried for so long to live without my childhood ideals. It nearly killed me. Now I walk in the path of Light. My footsteps are sure. I know no doubt. Join me in the light. Step out from the shadow.” He stood up slowly, and extended his hand toward her. The hand was tanned; the muscles and veins along the back of his hand stood out sharply.

Sally shivered and shook her head. “All noble things must fail someday. You know that.” She sniffed and shook her head again.

“Our foes have no strength at all, save what they steal from mortal men. They are shadows without substance, hollow women, vampires without blood. Without your fear to feed them, they have no strength at all.”

Sarah said nothing. There was nothing to say.

She did not reach for his hand, but looked at it the way a drowning woman might look at the hand from a lifeboat, too far away to reach, and receding.

On the street outside, Thomas tucked the shard of mirror carefully into a fold of silk and kept it in a metal cigarette case. Tybalt, purring, rubbed up against his leg.

Thomas looked down, and asked, “Do you suppose her husband might have the sign of the Evil Eye stamped on his brow?”

The cat looked up. “I know only that she has the sign of the coward branded on hers,” the soft voice purred.

4. Penny

The churchyard of Easterwick was near the library, facing it across the town common green. The March sky was the hue of mother-of-pearl, striped white and blue with bands of cloud and clear sky, and the smothered sun shone wan. The last of the frosts were failing. New shoots could be seen through the gray winter grass, and green buds shyly showed on the naked branches of the trees. Thomas walked out from the post office, past the town hall, and over into the graveyard behind the little church. Under his arm was an oblong package, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string.

He stood looking down at a gravestone. The stone was cut with an image of a ship in full sail under a stormy sea, with a many-rayed star before its prow. The prow was shaped like a swan, with its graceful head raised toward the star.

The inscription read.

PENELOPE ANGANIM OAKWREN 1940-1987

One brave soul to hold the key

To find the charm and learn it

One bright sword to smite the Dark

One bright flame to burn it.

One note of harp to free the fire

No dark cold glass could hide him

One white ship to sail them far

And one bright star to guide them.

Tybalt was stalking through the tall grass among the gravestones. Occasionally a white moth or startled beetle would dart up, and Tybalt would hop up straight into the air, batting at the fluttering insect with his paws.

Thomas opened the package. Inside was a leather-bound volume with brass hasp and lock and hinges, embossed with the image of a sword embedded in the roots of an oak tree.

Also in the package was a letter from Penelope’s nephew explaining how she had left a provision in her will that this book be given to any of her three childhood friends: himself, or Sarah Truell, or Richard Sommerville, whoever should first ask for it.

Slowly, Thomas walked over to a marble bench, which stood on little legs shaped like sphinxes. It sat at the edge of the churchyard, facing the library. A small sign hanging below the main library sign read: Easterwick Historical Museum. Downstairs basement. Elsworth Wimble, curator.

Thomas sat, and held the book on his lap, as if waiting.

The sun broke free, and the day brightened. At this,Thomas pointed the silver key at the sun, then at the padlock holding the book shut. “Tome of light, thee now I task; no truth is hid from those who ask. Unlock, release, unbind, set free; knowledge is open to he who holds the key.”

The book’s lock popped open with a click.

Thomas undid the hasp, opened the massive book. The pages were all blank.

Now he tilted the book so the sunlight was falling directly on the first page. The ink faded into view, huge curlicued calligraphy, intertwined with pictures and diagrams, all knotted around the margins and woven in and out of the capital letters.

Most of the pages were sea maps and star charts, of coastline and islands. Some of the coastlines were the lands of Earth; others were of worlds mystical and far, coasts unknown to mortal sailors, except, perhaps, in dreams.

There were diagrams showing the secret routes between worlds, and the star configurations showing when the gateways would open. There were illustrated diagrams of interlocking star spheres, pointing out the whirlpools and monsters lurking along the celestial rivers and Milky Way streams between the stars, with notes on the tides and enchantments showing how to escape those dangers.

This was the book Myrrdin had given to Penny to guide them safely back home. The well at Noss had been destroyed by the malice of the wolf-prince Monagarm, the lieutenant of the Fell Winter King, and the children had had no other way home. Myrrdin had given up all the secrets locked here inside, by giving them the book.

Thomas remembered how Penny had cried, clinging to the graceful neck of the ship’s swan-shaped prow. The ship had driven through the final storm surrounding the Earth, but had been broken on the rocks. With tattered sails, sinking, the white ship bravely carried them through, and appeared in the fog in the deep mountain lake just ten miles north of their homes. Even so, they barely made it to the rocks of the shore, for the night was stormy and wild. They clambered ashore, lucky to have escaped with their lives, except Penny clung to the broken prow, crying, and would not let go, even though the ship was sinking.

She would have been pulled in had not Richard and Thomas grabbed her away. The white ship sank out of sight in the water, swan prow pointed up toward the sky. Years later, Penny’s husband had funded an archeological expedition to drag the bottom of the lake. They found many treasures the ancient peoples of Britain had thrown in the water, as gifts to the spirits and elves, including many coins, and fine gems. Perhaps these old people knew that this lake at times touched the other worlds, unseen. There were gold torcs and bracelets, and even a chariot inlaid with brass, driven by stallions into the water, a gift for the gods. But of the white ship there was no sign.

Thomas found writing in the margins, done in Penny’s careful hand, trailing through and around the dragons and griffins, sailing ships and sceptered kings, and the star-maidens dancing in the marginalia. The message stretched across numerous pages.

The note read:

Tommy, I read the chapters in the book which deal with things yet to be, and I saw the pictures hidden in the letters which show you as an older man sitting in a churchyard, reading this. I will be in heaven by the time you read this, looking down. Never doubt that what you do is right.

“I’m not that old,” muttered Tommy, rubbing one hand across his balding head. The message continued:

This book is written in elf-light inks, and the different letters will show at different times. The pages you can read in sunlight will tell you facts and historic lore; the spells appear by moonlight; the omens show only on cloudy days; the stories are for candlelight. The deeper secrets are harder to read. Some appear only by the light of the morning star, and are invisible at midnight, or by the light of Orion, and cannot be read during the summer. The love poems show only by the firelight of burning rose-petals, but most of them are sad.

The name you will need is on page sixty-six, and the light of the sword will show it. No one who cannot draw the blade will know it. Many times I almost forgot what we four did in Vidblain, since it was so like a dream, and so little like life. I hope you remember Vidblain, Key-bearer, even if the Harpist is frightened and the Sword-bearer is fallen.

I was sent to guide us all across the sea to the west, in the one white ship that Winterking did not find and burn. The white swan of the prow would speak only to me, which made Richard jealous, I know. But I told you everything it revealed, to allow me to navigate the white ship. Every secret I told but this one:

I was told the path across the sea to the Summer Country. There Winter is unknown, and death never comes, and loss and sorrow have never found those bright shores. Everyone knows that path: it is taught them before birth. Be brave and just and noble, and the path will come clear to you.

The book says the Children of Light who abide in Heaven live in those palaces, not for all time, but only for their feast times, their solemnities and celebrations, or when they have been wounded with sorrow in their long war against the Dark. Even they need a time of rest and of joy. But paradise is meant to replenish the soul, not to quench it. And after their repose, the angels of war stream out again from heaven, called to many battles on many worlds, and inside the souls of so many men.

Since the time of your childhood you have rested; perhaps you have partly forgotten. But the horn-call sounds again, and the battle again is renewed. Do not blame yourself that you rested, or forgot. Do not blame Richard or Sally. They must rest longer than you, perhaps not till lifetimes have passed will they once more recall.

The greatest battles are always fought with no one beside us. But no one who walks in the light is alone.

Thomas closed the book slowly. “Thank you, Penny,” he said.

5. The Knight of Shadows

A moment before, while Thomas was reading, Tybalt had hopped gracefully up onto the bench beside Thomas, and crawled into his lap. Tybalt had sniffed the book with his pink nose and tried to step on the pages, and, in general, got in the way so Thomas could not read. Without ado, Thomas shoved the cat aside, dropping him to the grass.

Tybalt did not deign to notice this rough behavior, but stepped back and forth in a circle, whiskers twitching, nose in the air. When Thomas was done reading, Tybalt asked, “Have you learned good rede from the Navigator’s book?”

“Penny always guided us well,” Thomas said.

“What troubles you, Key-bearer?”

“You have counseled me, and I agreed, to break into the museum and to steal the Sword Reforged, thinking any theft or ill done by me was excused by my great need. But that is the tyrants’ plea, the excuse used ever by our enemy. Must I become like the enemy to battle him?”

Tybalt licked himself carefully, washing his paws, his ears, tilting his head far around to lick his shoulders and back. Finally he said, “It is no theft to claim what is one’s own.”

“Then the sword is mine?”

“It belongs to any man who claims it, and to everyone and all, for the light from the sword is abundant, and denies itself to none. But each who would take the sword must shatter it, see of what it is made, and grow wise. One who comes after shall forge it anew.”

“I don’t understand.”

The black cat yawned, whiskers twitching. “Have you no teachers on this world? It is not for me to explain.”

“We should simply try to buy the sword.”

“It is not theirs to sell. Listen: the Knight of Shadows knows too well he cannot hide the sword, not anywhere in the world. Its light is so piercing that even if he cast it to the bottom of the sea, or piled mountains over it, those men who can see that light would one day follow and discover it. No, he cannot hide it, but should he keep it locked in a museum, under glass, for men to come and look at, but not touch; he knows men will soon forget the sword was meant to be used, not admired. The men would tell themselves the sword is no more than a bright relic fit only for the days long past. A childhood dream.”

They sat on the bench in silence as the sun slowly set. Storekeepers along the main street of Easterwick came out of their little shops, locking them, drawing down the awnings, greeting their neighbors with nods or waves. Soon the streets were empty. As dusk deepened, the wrought-iron streetlamps all lit up, casting little pools of yellow light around their feet.

In the distance, the hour chimed.

Thomas saw the librarian and the stooped figure of the museum curator come out of the main library doors together. They seemed to stand a moment, as if exchanging pleasant words before locking the library doors for the night. The librarian walked away to the left, toward the town hall. The museum curator stood a moment peering around in the gloom, hunched near the door, made vague pawing gestures in the air, and stooped to claw at the ground before the door. Thomas had the odd impression he was snuffling or sniffing, like an animal casting for a scent.

Tybalt said softly, “He sniffs for the stench of the wards he has summoned. The dark magic, when it comes, brings a stink.”

“He is looking at us.”

“Be still. He will not recognize you. You forget how blind the creatures of the enemy are made by their masters, to prevent those servants from knowing what they serve.”

The curator had straightened, and turned. Thomas, from across the green, clearly saw the Sign of the Eye branded into the curator’s withered brow. The man’s eyes seemed filmy and pale, like the eyes of a sick man, or a drunk.

As still as a stone, Thomas sat on the bench, in plain sight of his foe, and silently he prayed.

Then the curator turned and slunk away.

Thomas released a long pent sigh, stood, and walked to the center of the green. Looking left and right, he saw no one was about. He examined the sky for a moment, then pointed his silver key at the North Star, and softly said his charm.

He came near the darkened library, strode up the steps. The lightest touch of the silver key on the doorknob made the door, hinges whining, slowly open of its own accord. But Thomas did not dare step over the threshold, not yet.

Now he took the shard of black mirror from the cigarette case. Holding it carefully, he examined the reflection of the library door.

The magic of the vampires was visible in the little mirror. Thomas could see little strands of spider silk stretched back and forth across the door in a web.

“Tybalt! Do we need the sword to cut this web? I could not pass it before; it tried to consume all my thoughts.”

The cat crouched, sleek muscles tensed, whiskers still. His black tail lashed slowly back and forth. “The gossamer chains of the willow women are made of false things, a tissue woven of lies. Only the light of the sword can reveal them. But this, this is a weaker enchantment, a thing spun by vampires when they wear spider’s flesh, and expect food to fly up of its own power and feed them. It is made of their substance, which is hatred and envy, and, like them, cannot bear to see itself truly.”

With the sharp tip of the mirror, Thomas cut the strands away. The webs sagged to one side with a soft noise, like a faint, grotesque, self-pitying whine.

Then they were within. Moonlight fell through narrow windows across stacks of tall bookshelves, crowded and cramped. Thomas pulled the main door shut behind him, and cautiously walked among the high shelves, the little black cat slinking at his feet. A moment later they found the narrow stairs leading down toward the basement. At the bottom was a door with a sign reading Museum.

The door opened upon the touch of the silver key.

Inside were stone walls, with short, rectangular windows at the top, near the low roof. Upon these walls were hung a mixture of litter and of sincere archaeological artifacts. Next to a group of carven love-spoons, for example, which might have been made fifty or seventy years ago, were brass shield bosses dating back to before the bronze age. Yet also, someone had hung up displays of trashy pie tins and unexploded shells from World War II, as if these things had equal claim to display with a tapestry from the renaissance hanging next to it.

In the middle were two display cases, separated by a suit of Maximilian armor. In one case was a collection of chrome hubcaps taken from cars of the late sixties: in the other, surrounded by stone arrow-points and broken clay cups, was the Sword Reforged.

It was shorter than Thomas remembered it, but much more beautiful, with its hilt wrapped in gold and silver wire, and its pommel capped with a knob of clear crystal. The guard was straight, and made of some metal not found on Earth, brighter than gold and stronger than iron.

The sword rested in a sheath made of black reptilian leather, with the loops of a leather war-belt curled around the rings of the scabbard. Tooled into the leather of the belt were images of an ancient hero slaying a dragon. Thomas knew the scene showed the battle between Hal’s forefather, Vardane the Just, and Anglachor, the leviathan of Chaos. He knew also of whose skin this scabbard had been made after that dreadful duel was concluded.

The case was dusty, unkempt. There was a spider in the glass case, and already it had begun to spin a web along the hilts of the sword.

Tybalt sniffed suspiciously around the edge of the case. Thomas touched his key to the lock of the case. Then he lifted the glass lid and reached in for the sword. He made to brush the spiderweb away; his hand was stung as if by an electric shock; Thomas, left arm numb, was flung from his feet.

From where he lay on the stone of the museum floor, he saw the spider crawl forward, unfolding into a stinking cloud of shadow. The shadow came out of the case like smoke, and rose up in the gloom. Then the shadow shrank and became solid; and there stood the form of Lord Wodenhouse, minister of the Admiralty, a straight-backed old man in a finely tailored black silk coat, tight narrow tie, white hair, pince-nez glasses.

Behind the glasses, Thomas saw the eyes were merely pools of black shadow. When the creature spoke, its mouth was black, with no tongue or teeth inside at all.

“Fool,” the thing sighed softly, “We knew well you would return here for your worthless toy.”

Thomas, without any pause for thought or fear, scrambled forward on his knees, reached into the case with his unhurt hand, drew the sword, and stood.

The creature stepped out of the way as Thomas pushed past him, and made no move to interfere.

Thomas came to his feet holding the sword. But the blade was dull, and no light shone from it at all. For a moment, Thomas was gladdened the sword deemed him worthy to wield it; then his spirit sagged, as he saw the blade: dark, solid, ordinary.

“Old fool,” the creature said, “The magic will not serve you. Children, armed with innocence, we perhaps have cause to fear. But you, you are too old, too worn, too wise, too filled with sin. The sword will not burn for you. Magic comes in childhood alone. Your time is far too late, old man.”

Thomas pointed the sword at the thing, and chanted, “By star, by stone, by shining spear! I call upon the Gathered Hosts of Light to banish wretched minions of fear once more into their dreadful night!”

Nothing happened, except that the creature smiled.

Tybalt said, “Thomas, by the love you bear our lady, I conjure you to heed me now. My time with you is done. Strike my head from my body; as I die, my lifeblood will ignite the sword.”

The man-shaped thing spoke in a voice like the creaking of old wood, the hissing of cold wind, “By all means, slay the beast. Become a murderer, and the burden of your sin drags you ever nearer to our grasp.”

Thomas backed away from the eyeless, smiling hulk of the cabinet minister, keeping the sword pointed at the thing. Thomas uttered in a voice of horror, “Tybalt! I can’t kill you! Not you! There would be nothing left for me, no reason . . . ai!” and he cried out, because the sword began to sting his palm.

The cabinet minister drifted forward, his feet making no noise at all as he approached, and words came out of the darkness of his mouth. “The sword rejects you; you have no more the simple bravery of youth. You have done too much evil in your life to strike at us. Who are you to dare to judge us? You life is foul, worthless, and corrupt. Surrender, use the sword on our behalf, and we will give you gold and women, prestige and power, and all the things your pathetic, failed destiny has cheated from you.”

Thomas’s palm stung with pain, but he did not let go of the sword.

Tybalt said, “They cannot use or touch that sword, nor any weapon of the world, save fear. If men did not assist them, they would be nothing.”

“But he’s right, Tybalt; the sword is burning me!” Thomas said, not daring to take his eyes off the thing.

“You are afraid,” the cat purred softly, “Strike me dead, and fear will vanish. Strike! Or I will grow into a thing that will turn upon you, rend, and slaughter you.”

The cabinet minister stepped closer. The point of the sword was touching the minister’s chest. Then, the darkness cleared from the man’s eyes. Suddenly, they were blue eyes, human eyes.

The eyes were wide, frightened, helpless, pleading. A gargling strangled noise of fear came from the man’s throat. From the black nothingness inside his mouth a haughty whisper came, “Look! The true Lord Wodenhouse. His body we inhabit; you cannot strike us, except that you kill the innocent. Once innocent blood is on your hands, you are one of us, key-bearer.”

The darkness was letting the cabinet minister see the peril he stood in, but was gagging him, and using his voice to speak. Thomas took another step back. The pain in his hand grew fierce; the sword trembled in his hand, yet still he would not release it.

Tybalt, near his feet, unsheathed claws and scraped Thomas painfully in the ankle. Thomas shouted: the little claws felt sharp as needles. The black cat said, “I grow impatient. Slay me now. This is the price the sword demands.”

Thomas prodded the cabinet minister lightly in the chest. The blue, human eyes wept with fear. The black mouth smiled.

A cold sensation swept through Thomas. He thought: I am an adult now. I’m too old to believe simple and childish notions. There must be some way to talk this problem through. We can compromise. Mature people aren’t narrow-minded, aren’t idealists.

But he felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach as he thought it.

“Let’s be reasonable,” Thomas said in a shaky voice. “We can negotiate. What are you? Why are you doing this? What are you?!”

The dark mouth sagged wide. The creature made a barking, choking noise, like a mockery of laughter, a noise of malignant hatred. “Knowledge is impossible to men; your senses lie. Prod your eyes out with your sword, blind yourself to the illusion of the world. We will enter in your bleeding eye-sockets then, and fill your soul with our dark knowledge, which can never be expressed or put in words. We will teach you stillness, futility, darkness, anguish, death.”

“Stand back!”

“Our Lord is the King of Final Winter; in his kingdom all things are the same, all are still and silent, lifeless, nameless.”

“Who are you?”

“We have no names, no souls, and therefore we cannot be harmed.”

But Tybalt said, “This is the Knight of Shadows, your final enemy. That this wretched creature has forgotten its own name does not mean it has no name. Your first ancestor, at the dawn of time, was ordained by the Light to name all beasts of the field and birds of the air. By virtue of the fact the first of man had named all nature, dominion over all the Earth was given to mankind.”

Thomas straightened. The little voice inside him, telling him how it was safe to compromise, how mature, and adult; now Thomas recognized that voice. It was the voice of the Darkness.

Fumbling with his numb hand, Thomas pulled Myrrdin’s great book out from his wide jacket pocket and let it drop to the top of the glass case next to him. With clumsy, tingling fingers he turned the pages, stealing quick glances down at the book. The book lay open at page sixty-six.

The cabinet minister swayed, and smiled, and wept from his blue eyes. But he stepped neither back nor forward, nor tried to grasp nor elude the sword holding him at bay.

“Tybalt,” said Thomas, “Tell me now why I must kill you. Why?” The pain in his hand brought tears to his eyes.

“I am a beast. A kindly beast is still a beast. I can guide, but cannot reason or explain. The time is come when you must guide yourself.”

Thomas understood. He struck down at his feet; the blade swept the cat’s head off its neck; the blood fountained, red as roses in spring.

Half blinded by tears, Thomas saw the pearly light collect together from the starlight shining through the small windows, and swirl in toward the blade. The metal became a shaft of light, bright as sunlight, cool as moonlight. Silver rays, surrounded by blue-white flames, shone from the sword and filled the room.

On the page of the open book, silver letters faded into view. Thomas read the name, and understood at once the nature of his foe.

Thomas pointed the burning sword at the cabinet minister. The words written in the book came out from Thomas’s mouth almost of their own accord, his voice made hollow and strained with sorrow. “Phobos, father of fear, I banish thee: Begone! With this, my instrument of light, I divide human from inhuman, true from false, substance from shadow. Wherever knowledge shines, you have no place.” And the sword was surrounded with a rainbow of pale light, like the ring seen around the moon on misty nights.

The cabinet minister staggered, his head thrown back. Up from his face, in three streams, black smoke boiled from his eyes and mouth. The darkness rushed up across the ceiling, jumped to the corners of the chamber, flickered down across the walls. The cabinet minister, his eyes now blue, his teeth white, was shouting, “Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! It wasn’t my fault! They promised me so much, and I only gave them a little piece of me, one small part. . . .” Then he pointed over Thomas’s shoulder and screamed. The cabinet minister turned and fled up the stairs, out of the museum.

Thomas turned his head. The shadow had collected behind him, spreading from his feet, across the floor, over the display cases, and up along the tapestries and hangings of the stone wall, to loom, gigantic, across the wall and ceiling. The shadow of his own head, distorted and enlarged along the ceiling, now turned and glared mockingly down at him.

When Thomas turned to strike at it with the radiant sword, the shadow turned as swiftly, and was behind him again. He struck left; the shadow pivoted around his feet and swung right. He stabbed between his feet; the shadow was above him. He held the sword high overhead.

Luminous, wonderful, the sword shone bright with steady, silvery light, and blue sparks drifted up about the blade like fireflies.

In a pool at his feet, the shadow laughed.

“I am the knight of ghosts and shadows,” softly said the little darkness underfoot, “In my world, I was gathered into one place, and even a child could see what I was. But in this world, I am spread a little into all mankind; their sin, their fear, their foolishness feeds me. How can you dream to destroy me? You cannot even drive away the little piece of me that lives in you.”

Thomas drove the blazing blade into the floorboards. With his foot, he kicked against the flat of the blade. The magnificent blade snapped cleanly in two, and both parts flared brighter than the sun.

Thomas held the burning sword hilt high over his head. The shining shard blazed at his feet. Above and below, overhead and underfoot, the two fragments blazed. Thomas was surrounded by light, streamers and swarms of sparks were everywhere, and there was no place for any shadow to be.

The darkness dissolved with a faint and hideous high wail.

The shadow was nowhere to be seen.

Thomas flourished the broken sword hilt overhead and whooped and shouted with joy. “Beware all you wizards, and servants of sin! A knight of the Light now is here! I have driven your champion down into darkness! Who dares follow him shall share in his fate!”

But, looking up, he saw the sword he held was not whole. The light now faded slowly. The shards of shattered sword paled, grew faint, and became ordinary metal once again.

Thomas collapsed, and sat on his knees. In front of him where he knelt, there was nothing but a dead cat and a broken sword. Slowly, tears blurred his vision.

6. The Healing Of Harms

The sword hilt dropped from weary fingers. Thomas hunched forward, head cradled in his hands, and wept.

“Tybalt,” he whispered, face hidden behind his hands, “Please get up. Oh, please.”

When, after an endless time, Thomas had no more tears to shed, he slowly raised his head. Inside him was nothing but a worthless, empty feeling. He sat with red-rimmed eyes staring at the ruined sword, the tiny, stiff, dead animal, bloodstains matting its black fur.

Nothing happened and nothing continued to happen. Thomas sat there. He felt as if he had nowhere to go, nothing to do, as if nothing would ever be worth doing again.

He began to worry. Did this mean he had to return to his life as it was before? Shoulder the gray burden of his old duties? His old employers probably would not take him back; he would have trouble getting a job anywhere. It was possible he was still being sought by the police. If so, he had no future, not anywhere. Where was he going to live?

And still he sat, unwilling to leave, but having no reason to stay. Red-gold light came slowly into the chamber to one side. At first Thomas felt a supernatural thrill of hope. But then he realized he was seeing the dawn light shining through the chamber’s cramped windows. He had been here all night.

Still he sat.

Outside, there was the ordinary noise of the little town stirring to wakefulness. He heard the rumble of the milkman’s truck; he heard a bird singing.

There was stirring overhead; someone was in the library above, moving about. Thomas realized they would soon come down and find him here. Nothing jarred his apathy; he could not leave the broken and dead remnants of his life.

Footsteps sounded very softly on the stairs, a whisper of slow, massive motion. The door opened. Larger than a panther, larger than a tiger, with wings like dark flame folded along its sleek shoulders, a supernatural creature stepped on silent paw down the stair into the room, surrounded by a golden light. It was twice the size of an Earthly lion, with a mane like gold fire, swimming and flashing around its terrible head. The wings were plumes of black and gold, shining.

White fire darted from the creature’s mouth from between fangs like lightning.

It paced forward, regal, mysterious, terrible. The creature spread its mighty wings and the room was filled with light, and there came a tremendous noise like a choir, or like the pealing of bells, the roar of trumpets.

The creature’s eyes were whirlpools of gold. So fierce, so stern, so majestic was the glance of those eyes that Thomas threw himself on his face, too terrified to scream.

“Fear not,” it spoke in a voice like muted thunder, and many echoes said the words again.

Thomas raised his head, but could not meet that gaze. He felt the warm stirring in the air above him, could feel the hot scented breath of the creature near the top of his head. The breath was warm and crisp, not like any breath coming from the wet lungs of a creature composed of flesh and blood. The odor of the breath reminded Thomas of the smell of bread baking in an oven, or the scent of cedar logs burning on a campfire.

A warmth from that breath stole into his body, and he felt a cold aching in his bones depart. How long that ache had been there, Thomas could not say; he had not known it was in him till he felt it go away.

The huge golden paws were before his face; in the corners of his eyes, Thomas glimpsed the flutter and spread of the great wings.

More quietly, the ringing voice inquired, “Thomas, why do you weep?”

“When I was young,” Thomas said, “A black cat guided me to a magical adventure into another world. Then I grew older, and the magic was lost. Only this year did I remember my young dreams, and meet that cat again. Now he is dead, and by my own hand.”

“Thomas, I have not died. Rejoice; I am risen. The Lord of the Fortunate Islands, the Emperor of the Summer Country has banished death and dying from his kingdom, and only those who flee his kingdom may encounter it. You weep over no more than my old garment, which you tore and which I discarded. Now I am come again, clothed in glory. Look up.”

And he looked into those terrible eyes. He felt something within himself, as proud, as great, as noble as those eyes, and now he could endure that gaze without shrinking.

“You are Tybalt,” said Thomas in wonder. And yet one small part of him was not surprised at all, but was filled with solemn, undoubting joy, as if saying, I knew it, I knew he would come back.

“We spirits, when we are young, are sent forth to combat evils where those evils gather openly, unhidden, and even a child can see them. We must grow before we can combat hidden evils, evils disguised as good, subtle evils. In this, I deem, our race is not so different from human kind. Innocence and faith are the weapons children can bring to bear against the open evils; wisdom alone is the weapon to be employed against evils disguised.”

Thomas felt a glow of pride in his heart, but the great creature looked at him with golden eyes, and said sharply, “Why so flattered? It is no feat to grow white hairs. Why so glad? You have broken the weapon of wisdom in wielding it! And this is only the beginning of the sorrows sages know.”

Thomas felt the sting of the rebuke, but he held up the broken shards of the sword. “I am glad because I serve. But how am I to fight Wodenhouse’s men?”

“The slaves and followers of the Champion of the Dark still infest your green realm, under many guises, many names. But your time as Champion of the Light is done, for you have grown old, and the faith of a child is no longer yours. Another task is laid upon you now, and shall be yours for many a weary year.”

“What task?” asked Thomas; then he frowned, for he wished he had said instead, I am ready.

“Out of all the years and seasons of the world, the Dark chose this day to come forth from the Winter Country, because the Wise of this World sleeps.”

“Sleeps?”

Thomas saw a reflection of light in the surface of the broken blade in his hand. He held the hilt nearer to his eye, and looked into the silvery steel, and it was as if he saw into the surface of a still lake of water. In a small chapel nestled in a green valley, behind the tall mansion where, long ago, Thomas and his four friends had spent a summer’s afternoon, was a graveyard. Here was a headstone, and the words CEDRIC PENKIRK were written on it.

“Professor Penkirk!”

“He was your squire, for he armed you children with the heart you needed to prevail; he was your nurse, for he comforted you when you re-turned; and one thing more he was—your herald! He went before you into the land of Vidblain, into the Lost Kingdom, and told the animals and dryads of your coming. He was not permitted to strike the blow. That was the task of the Four from This World. His task was to guide, and to advise, and to open the way.”

Thomas whispered. “The Key was his! His key is what opened the Way of the Well, and let us through the Hidden Door into Vidblain. The professor left it for me to find. I had always wondered. . . .”

“You are now the Wise. You are now what Cedric was: for he has gone into my Father’s realm, and there has other tasks I cannot describe, work of long-abiding joy. They have given him a crown and a robe of white.”

“What am I supposed to do, then? Find English schoolchildren and get them in trouble?”

“You will have many roads to walk, and many worlds under your care. There will come a child who leads a Star by the hand, whose voice can still the Lion’s rage. It is for him you carry the shards of Angurvadel, the great sword. It is a weapon none can use until he reforges it and makes it himself: such as all weapons of my Father’s Kingdom. Now, come! There is a child in a world beyond the Pleiades, considered young for his ancient and supernal race, but, compared to humans, old and wise beyond all reckoning: he is rash and eager, and will come at your word to save this green Earth and all its inhabitants from the Dark Master. In his own land, he is neither prince nor sage, but a humble blacksmith’s apprentice: yet Earth would call him magic, for his art is to forge the stars and set them in their constellations. You will find your way with the book you hold and the key you bear. Say farewell to Earth. No one world is your home hereafter, but every place the light of the stars can touch!”

The book, as if to aid him, fell open to the proper chapter. He found the diagrams in an appendix in the back of the volume, images of zones and tropics and belts of constellations, and the Latin was easy enough for him to puzzle out. He spoke the words and used the key, and a shining doorway, surrounded with stars and the music of the stars hung before him, dreamlike, terrifying, and wondrous.

“So I am the Old Wise Man in the story, now,” said Thomas, with great satisfaction. “Will I see you there? In that far world?”

“I am silent when I walk. I shall be with you, but you will see only my traces where I have passed, the print of my paw on the Earth, or the works I have done. As you grow, the trace will be clearer to your eye.”

“I still have growing yet to do?”

“As do I, as do we all. This tale will never end until all tales end in glory.”

“Shall I truly lose Earth as my home?”

The great cat said, “Hear me. Earth was never your home. Already great esteem and great reward await you in my Father’s kingdom, Thomas, for your name has been written in letters of gold in my Father’s book, and a place is set for you at his feast-table. Soon you shall join us there, and shall be given new garments to wear, clothing of woven light, pure and without stain. You will walk many worlds for many years, and the years will grow long, and your beard grow white. I shall come for you again, and shall show you the hidden pathway to my country beyond the summer stars; and you shall follow me up and away from this Earth, into glory. But beware; if you cast your gaze back across your shoulder, you may lose sight of me, and miss your path, and go astray.”

“When? When does this journey begin?”

“It is forever. You are on the pathway now.”

All his questions answered, he stepped forward then through the mystic door.

Light was everywhere.

ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST, EARTH TO ALLUVIUM

Gary Rinehart

The door leading to the Tephrist’s studio reminded Cerna of a clam’s shell turned on its side, except it was grossly oversized, indigo-painted, and steel.

“Let’s go back, Phil,” Cerna said. “Why do you want to go in there? They’re the ones making you sick.”

Keller would hear none of it. His hand shook a little as he pushed against the damaged identi-plate. The plate and the imperfectly patched wall around it bore the imprint of the only human revolt to have reached this far into town.

As the door-halves swung apart on smooth tracks, Cerna resisted the urge to pull his friend away. The interlocking flutes were sharp edged and equipped with heavy-duty pins as long as his forearm that secured it in the off-hours.

The front room was square, and stark in its simplicity. It smelled pleasanter than Cerna expected, faintly of cinnamon. Not like death at all.

The ceiling was mostly open to the afternoon sky, typical of Peshari construction, but buttresses rose from the corners that were interconnected with steel bars. Shadows from the bars made patterns on the rough, pale, orange tiled floor and the sand colored brick walls. A few bricks were adorned with dead Peshari in miniature bas-relief.

A heavy-beamed archway roughly opposite the entrance led back into the work area. In between, a holo-pillar took up about a square meter in the center of the room, but it was turned off. Otherwise, the room was bare, with not even a plant to break up the uniform color. Cerna guessed that a place devoted to death might not be the best environment for living things.

Keller walked around the holo-pillar and tried to look through the archway, but Cerna stayed in the shade near the entrance. Air conditioning was too much to ask for where the Pehsari were concerned, with their constant demand for open skies, and Cerna was slick with sweat after their walk from camp. Keller, on the other hand, seemed to huddle further into his coat. He’d been a bit slow on their walk, and oddly reticent; he was usually spry, and full of Earth stories.

A young Peshar entered through the archway, and Cerna gave up speculating about Keller’s illness.

Keller backed up to give the pseudo-lizard space. It was still sexless, though the telltale lumps on the sides of its throat indicated its siring glands would soon develop. Cerna guessed it was eight or nine Alluvial years old. Its forebody was upright, its forelimbs held together against its chest as if it were carrying something precious. It wore a robe only a shade darker than the sand-colored brick walls, and moved with surprising grace on its four legs, well balanced for a creature nearly five meters long from nose to tail.

“Not often humans here,” it said. Its enunciation was distinct enough, though words formed by a Peshar’s exhalations always seemed to vibrate excessively because of the way their nostril flaps moved. In this case, the tone was clear—not only a statement of fact, but of disapproval.

Of course it would disapprove. In Cerna’s experience, most Peshari found the humans useful, though barely tolerable.

Keller glanced at Cerna, as if asking permission to speak. Cerna shrugged.

Keller cleared his throat. His voice wheezed, about as raspy as the lizard’s, but more liquid. “I would converse with the engraver . . ., uh, the Tephrist.”

The fine scales around the Peshar’s eyes prismed the light as its skin tightened; otherwise, the creature expressed no emotion. “Busy,” it said.

“I propose a contract.”

The Peshar tipped its head to the left. “Wish memory-stone?”

Keller hesitated. “A monument, yes.”

Cerna stepped to Keller’s side. “What are you talking about, Phil? Nobody’s died.”

Keller shushed him and told the Peshar again that he wanted to contract for a monument. The creature nodded, and Cerna allowed a small grin at how the human gesture had permeated Peshari society. The clerk or apprentice or whatever it was turned, miraculously keeping its tail from striking the holo-pillar, and went to the back room.

“What do you want? That thing to carve a statue for something?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Keller said. “Why else would I come here?”

“If you’d have told me, I wouldn’t have to guess. I just wanted to get out of camp for a while. Why come to them? Why not just fab whatever it is you want?”

Keller did not answer, and presently a larger Peshar wearing only a beige, rough-woven apron entered through the archway. This one was past siring and bearing—it had grown into the species’ fourth gender stage and walked with an air of authority Cerna had rarely seen in the Peshari.

Without preamble the Peshar said, “Uncommon.” It sounded less derisive than the young Peshar had, almost curious.

It activated the holo-pillar and a representation of one of their species’ memorial bricks floated above it. The Peshar manipulated the control until a larger brick appeared, about the size of a concrete block, which featured a human woman’s face on one side in bas-relief. “Not since Jean-El.”

Cerna and Keller both stepped closer to examine the hologram. He had never seen the original—it was in one of the Peshari official buildings—but the hologram matched what he remembered of Jean Lynn: soft features, slightly upturned nose and wide eyes in an oval face.

“First contact,” Cerna said.

“First,” the Peshar agreed. “High honor. Uncommon.”

Cerna frowned. The human encampment was seventeen Alluvial years old now—a bit under twenty-two Earth years—and Commander Lynn had died shortly after the Peshari arrived . . . what, eleven local years ago? He had been a boy, only four Earth years old when the colony landed, and almost thirteen when the Peshari showed up.

This Peshar would have been a sire or an early dam at the time, so it was unlikely it was the one who had immortalized Lynn in the practice of their species—her remains reduced down and incorporated into a permanent display in the form of a building block showing her sculpted face. Cerna couldn’t recall any human other than Lynn who had been so treated. It wasn’t uncommon, it was downright unique.

And given how the Peshari had subjugated the human colony since then, he was surprised this Peshar would even humor them by considering the idea.

The Peshar waved its forelimb through the hologram. “Human memory-stone? What human?”

Cerna looked at Keller, whose tear-filled eyes were still on the Lynn memorial. Cerna closed his own eyes for a second, remembering Keller holding Lynn’s body after the Peshari emissary had killed her. They had been husband and wife.

“Sacrifice,” that Peshar had said at the time, as if it had paid Commander Lynn the highest honor.

Cerna had understood none of it then, and was not sure he understood it even now. He had not seen the actual attack, but he recalled with crystal clarity the look of stunned anguish on Keller’s face.

Cerna touched Keller’s shoulder. His friend glanced at him, then wiped his eyes and turned full-face to the Peshar.

“Me,” Keller said. “It’s for me.”

“I don’t believe this,” Cerna said as they stood outside the Tephrist’s doors.

“It’s true whether you believe it or not.”

“So you say. Okay, I kept quiet in there—”

“Thank you.”

“—but what is wrong with you? Why do you need one of their memorials? Are you sicker than you let on?”

“Don’t need it, not exactly,” Keller said as they started back toward camp. “And it seems to me that everybody is sicker than they appear.”

Keller was silent after that, hunched a bit with his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, and Cerna fought the urge to intrude on the silence. But they had seven kilometers to walk, so he could afford a little patience.

Cerna reflected on Keller’s proposal to the Tephrist. The old man had uploaded a hologram of a simple ceramic slab to the Peshar’s display, not a lizard-style building stone with his face on it; merely an oblong piece of stone with his name etched on it.

Cerna shivered a little at the memory of how the Peshar had laughed—it was one of the few sounds they made with their mouths, jaws wide like a young bird stretching for food. The barking noise had set off little tremors along his spine.

“No artistry,” the creature had said, assessing Keller’s design. “Graceless.”

Keller, unfazed, had been deferential to a fault as he tried to fix a price for the monument and negotiate around the Peshar’s refusal. He had offered a portion and then his entire share of the mineral wealth the Peshari allowed the camp to retain.

The Peshar was unmoved, arguing that a monument such as Keller wanted was too big to fit most buildings’ aesthetic, and besides, without an image his spirit would go mad, trapped and unable to see the world around it.

Then Keller revealed that he did not want his remains to be part of the actual monument.

“No relic?” the Peshar asked. It reared up on its hindmost legs and thundered, “Disrespect!”

The creature shook with barely concealed fury, clapping its great middle feet together as if they were hands and pointing steadfastly toward the door with its forelimbs.

Reflecting on its irritation, Cerna thought he understood. The Peshari loved their ancestors and fixed their remains in permanent displays, but built no other monuments. Their architecture was functional and spare; and they made no statuary, either realistic or abstract.

What had Keller thought he could get out of them?

When he could stand the silence no longer, Cerna said, “So you want a monument. Want me to fab one for you? Shouldn’t take too long.”

Keller walked to the edge of the path and rested one hand on a klick-marker. He scuffed the bottom of the marker with the toe of his boot, where a fading maroon stain testified to another failed human revolution. Cerna tried to remember who had died there—

“It really is lovely here, isn’t it?” Keller said. He was looking up at the glacier-topped mountains in the distance, shining in the early-afternoon sun.

“Sure, I guess. It’s all in what you get used to.”

“At night, too, especially the stars. I love the stars from here. This place is special, you have to admit that.”

“Is that why you want a monument? Something special for you, in a special place?”

Keller chuckled. “Something like that.” He walked on.

Cerna looked around as they walked, admitting to himself—he wouldn’t give Keller the pleasure—that the old man was right. The ground here in the valley, fed by streams coming off those glaciers, was so fertile that it had been an obvious place for the expedition to land. They had called the settlement “Alluvium,” and it took very little time before they started calling the planet that.

Then the Peshari landed in the valley, and everything had changed.

Cerna got little else out of Keller as they approached camp and his friend refused an invitation to while away the evening watching an old movie.

“No, I’m back on the dig tomorrow,” Keller said, “so I’ll grab a sandwich in the cafeteria, maybe some soup, and head up Winding Road to watch the sunset from the little point. And see the stars.”

Keller pulled on a pair of gloves as he was walking away, and Cerna returned to his speculations about his friend’s sickness. Dr. Riverton usually took the day shift, but it was early enough that she should still be in the clinic.

He hesitated for a moment outside the door. He and Autumn had signed a two-year marriage contract once, and with a start he realized that they would have been coming up for renewal about now if she hadn’t broken it off after three weeks. Not that he blamed her—she was right, he was practically impossible to live with.

The anteroom was empty, so Cerna waved his proximity card at the detector and sat down to wait. The building was one of the earliest in the colony and showed its age, but it was at least fully enclosed and air conditioned.

Autumn had an eclectic collection of children’s drawings tacked up around the room. The most recent were left over from New Year’s—the Earth holiday from last week—rather than the Alluvial solstice that was still months away. It was hard to square the old Earth calendar with the local calendar in terms of celebrations. So far, the traditionalists had won out, though one day the colony would probably synch celebrations with local conditions.

He wondered how much and how quickly the holiday customs would change if the colony survived. Not that survival was at all certain—the first generation of Alluvium-born colonists was not that big. Lots of people decided against raising children once the Peshari were in charge. Damn lizards.

The door opened, and Autumn laughed and held it for Dr. Schurz, the chief geologist. Autumn said, “That story never gets old. Now, you keep that dry and clean and don’t come back to see me again!”

“Nothing would please me more. Hey, Toro, heard you went to P-town today.”

Cerna stood up as the two ladies entered. “Yeah, me and Phil Keller.”

“Did you go to The Stubby Tail? Came here for the cure?”

“Nothing like that, doc.”

Dr. Schurz chuckled. “Don’t call me ‘doc’ in here. Autumn might make me stitch myself up.” She raised her left hand to show off her bandage.

“I like that idea,” Autumn said. “Might make you more careful.”

They said goodbyes all around, and when the geologist was gone, Autumn turned a wry little smile on Cerna. “Good to see you, Toro. What brings you around, really?”

“You’re stitching people up these days? With thread?”

Autumn’s grin turned briefly to a frown. She lowered her voice. “Yeah. At our last ‘inspection,’ the commandant confiscated our clinical nano-fabricator. Can’t make any auto-sutures, or a lot of other things. I’ve gone primitive.”

“That could be it.”

“Could be what?”

“When Phil and I were walking to town—”

“You two walked?” She led him back into her office, sat on her desk, and gestured for Cerna to take the chair.

“We couldn’t check out a cart, they’re all embargoed. You can’t get any kind of transport, really, unless it’s for the mine. At least it’s not the month of sauna yet.”

“Still, that’s quite a hike. Phil do okay?”

“Yeah, except that I’m sweating and he’s bundled up in a coat the whole time. Acts like he’s cold down to the marrow. I asked him what was wrong and he said he’d come up allergic to the lizards. You know anything about that?”

Autumn shook her head. “I can’t tell you about a patient, Toro—”

“But you don’t have a fabber, so you can’t make him any medicine?”

“Toro, I can’t—”

“Come on, Autumn—”

“No. As little as we stand on ceremony or protocol, we do still keep doctor-patient relations private. If you want to know more, ask him again. If he wants you to know, he’ll tell you.”

Cerna frowned at her. “I’m worried about him, that’s all. He went to their death-artist, Autumn, and asked for a stone slab with his name on it.”

“A what?”

“I’d never heard of the like. Not one of their cremation-sculptures, just a big slab of rock. He said he didn’t want his ashes to be part of it, so the lizard turned him down. Said it was ‘disrespectful.’ ”

Autumn pursed her lips. “Probably meant ‘sacrilege.’ ”

“I don’t know. I don’t think they would’ve done it anyway.”

“But he didn’t tell you why he wanted this . . . monument.”

“No, and I even offered to fab it for him. A big simple ceramic, wouldn’t be hard to run. We can’t make real little things, you know, not like your nano-fabber could. Too bad the lizards took it . . . but, hey, what happens when our nanos expire, if you can’t make more for us?”

“We’ll age faster,” Autumn said, “and have to adapt faster to the chemical differences from Earth normal. There aren’t that many, though, or this planet wouldn’t be as good a match as it is.”

“Okay, but we’d get sick, too, right? So that’s what’s up with Phil? He sure wasn’t his usual feisty self, Autumn. Pretty shaky, even. Are his nanos not working?”

“It’s not quite that simple, or straightforward—but even if it was, I still can’t tell you about a particular patient.”

“Right. Then do a hypothetical for me. If someone’s nanos weren’t working, and couldn’t be replaced, what might happen?”

Autumn’s lips thinned, and she glanced away into a lower corner of the room. After a moment, she nodded.

“It would depend on the person. A person with a particular bacterial, enzymatic, and so forth combination might not feel any effect, while someone else might get very ill. Some people might get sensitized to certain compounds over time. They’d feel no effects for months or even years, then suddenly react to the smallest exposure as if they were highly allergic.”

“Like Phil said about the lizards.”

Autumn shrugged. “There’s no way to tell what would happen to a particular person. Even with the diagnostic computer running different simulations, there are too many variables to test them all and come up with a confident prediction.”

“Okay, but say someone’s nanos weren’t working, and they got very sick. What could you be doing for him?”

“Not much. The Peshari left us one chem analyzer and one synthesizer, which is good but still limited in what it can do . . . although I did manage to use the industrial fabricator to make a couple of additional parts for the synthesizer, to stabilize some of the processing—”

“Oooh, subversive—”

“We all do what we can,” she said, “but sometimes that’s not enough.”

“So, if I were really sick, you might not be able to do much for me.”

“If you had food poisoning, I could help you. Common bacterial or viral infection, or even most Terrestrial diseases, we could figure out a way to fix you. Local Alluvial disease, I’m not so sure. That’s where the personal nanos have been the most help, and we’ve been pretty lucky. Worse than that . . . I might be able to keep you comfortable. Maybe.”

Cerna sat back in the chair and looked up into Autumn’s pretty face. She was closer to Keller’s age than his own, easily in her sixties, but in great shape and looked decades younger—the blessing of the nanos. “One last hypothetical. If I was thinking about planning a party for Phil, would it be a good idea to make it a Midsummer party instead of waiting for his birthday?”

Autumn looked away, as if scanning the room for the answer.

“You might want to make it a Valentine’s party.”

Work schedules kept Cerna from tracking down Phil to ask him what was really wrong with him. Two days after talking to Autumn, Cerna was in line in the cafeteria when Camp Chief Miscente walked up to him. “Tauran, can I see you for a few minutes?”

The tone of Miscente’s voice and the fact that he used Cerna’s real name were plain bad. Cerna nodded and started toward the paystation without selecting a dessert.

They sat in the farthest corner of the cafeteria. Cerna, unsure what was on the chief’s mind, barely registered what he was eating except for a faint trace of garlic. He gave up after a couple of bites and watched Miscente paw through screens on his Portal.

“Tell me, Tauran,” Miscente said, “why do we suddenly need a separate building for a chapel?”

Cerna sat back. “Huh? I doubt a dozen people ever do chapel stuff in the conference room at the same time. We don’t need a building for that.”

“Then why did you design one? And why did it suddenly show up on the schedule today, with construction to start next week? And why design it with a basement?”

“A what?”

“I’ve got an excavation request to dig out a basement under a new building—you can see the grid coordinates here—that’s labeled ‘Chapel One.’ Not just ‘chapel,’ but apparently the first of several? And not to dig footers for walls, but an actual basement? Or near enough—the project plan says ‘storm cellar.’ ”

“None of our buildings have basements.”

“You noticed that, did you? So you just decided that we needed a building with a basement?”

“I don’t know how that happened.”

Miscente’s eyes narrowed, and he pushed his Portal across the table. “The plans have your name on them.”

Cerna wiped his fingers on his pants before he picked up the slim computer. Since the Peshari’s takeover, only a few humans were allowed such things. Cerna himself always did his designs on a CAD program on a shared terminal, so he fumbled a bit as he tried to call up the relevant references on Miscente’s device. He looked at the design package—a thorough fake, with supply lists, design review minutes, even two change proposals—then paged through to the equipment requisitions. The excavation list—

“I think Phil Keller did this.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Firstly, none of this is real, which is weird, and he’s been acting weird. I mean, the date of this design review conflicts with last week’s camp council meeting, and it says you were at the review. We both know that’s not true. But look at this record here. Phil’s a digger programmer, and somebody’s reprogrammed this unit . . . and put my name on it, too. The backdated request was to dig footings, but the digger’s been re-tasked.”

“Let me guess,” said Miscente.

Cerna nodded. “It’s digging part of the basement right now.”

Cerna and Chief Miscente walked to the site of the so-called chapel, atop a small rise away from most of the buildings, flanked by a copse of the Alluvian bamboo-ferns.

Machine sounds and the smell of freshly turned dirt guided them, though Cerna hesitated when he realized this was where the Peshari had massacred eleven colonists after the last uprising. Cerna visualized them where they had fallen; he had escaped being among them only because the Peshari had failed to capture the squad he had been in.

Miscente strode on, and Cerna hurried to catch up.

An automated backhoe had excavated three parallel pits, each about a meter wide, three long, and two deep. It seemed an odd start to a basement, and odder still that Miscente’s executive-level authorization failed at first to override the digger’s instructions. While they watched, it dug a fourth pit and then stopped. Neither Cerna nor Miscente could get it started again.

The camp chief was the kind of gentleman for whom annoyance was about the limit he displayed. “Fix this, Tauran,” Miscente said, his jaw tight as he teetered on the cusp of going beyond annoyed.

Cerna caught the next ride to the mine overlook, and found Keller in the control room. “Got a second, Phil?”

“Maybe.” Keller eyed the status screens, holding up gloved hands to various figures on the display. He typed some commands, and pointed to the clock readout on the screen. “Apparently I do.”

“You do what?”

“Have a second.” The corner of his eye crinkled as he smiled.

“Good, you old fart. Now what the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing a good dose of cod liver oil won’t cure. Too bad we don’t have any cod.”

Cerna reached out and touched Keller’s arm. “Phil, please.”

Keller frowned a little, and nodded. He scratched the side of his face, and seemed to shiver. “Doc says I’m full of some odd kind of cancer, since my nanos quit. Came on real sudden. I probably shouldn’t be working, but I haven’t told Alexandra yet and she’ll need to train someone to do my job. You want to do it?”

Cerna stood still for a second, then two, then more. Finally he asked, “You couldn’t tell me this on our way to Lizardtown? This why you want a memorial stone?”

“Could be.”

Keller held up his right hand as one of the Peshari remote-observation rigs entered the control room. The device traversed the length of the room, returned, and exited the way it had come. Keller put his hand back down, and Cerna took a deep breath.

“Does this have anything to do with putting in a chapel, and with digging out a basement today?”

“I think the plans call for a storm cellar.”

“Amazing that you would know that, since somehow my name got put on the plans.”

“Just call me Mr. Amazing.”

Cerna sat down in a console chair. “I don’t know much about cancer—heard of it—but it must not be all bad if it’s made you grow a personality in the last few days.”

Keller lowered his head, and looked at Cerna from under raised eyebrows. He smirked. “That’s not the cancer, Toro. That’s the good drugs your one-time wife cooked up for me.”

“That would explain a lot. But not about the storm cellars.”

Keller pushed back from the console, seemingly satisfied that his remote machines could work for a few minutes without his attention. “You’ve been watching your way through that list of the thousand best movies of all time, have you gotten to The Wizard of Oz yet?”

“I saw that one a long time ago. I haven’t been watching them in order.”

“So you saw a tornado, and you saw the little girl’s family go down into a storm cellar to get away from it. The fact is that cyclonic storms like that are very destructive.”

“But we don’t get anything like that here.”

“True enough. They’re very rare here, Holley says. Not the right prevailing conditions. But that’s not really the point. The point is the storm cellar. Have you ever noticed how terrified the Peshari are of enclosed spaces?”

“Well, all their buildings are open at the top.” Cerna frowned. What difference did it make if the lizards were claustrophobic? It didn’t seem to bother them. They built all their devices and furnishings to withstand the elements, and that had given them an advantage when they decided to attack. They would never build a flimsy computer; all of their gear, all their tools and toys, were rugged and tough. They were pretty rugged and tough themselves.

“And all their buildings are one story,” Keller said. “We thought it was just an affectation, something they brought with them from home—after all, they like temperate places like we do, so they would have to invest a lot in heavy-duty architecture if they ventured far away. But they got here in spacecraft, right? Those weren’t open to the sky. Did you ever talk to Tsao about what he saw inside their ship during the surrender ceremony? He said their naval architecture seemed to be focused on one thing: overdesign in terms of crushing strength.”

“Is this going somewhere?”

“You ever notice that they run utilities above ground as much as possible? They’ll barely dig a ditch more than a meter deep, and then they’ll either widen it into a gully or set up beefier trench boxes than we would ever use. And they hate the mine. I think if they had their way—if we hadn’t started it before they got here, or if this area were more seismically active—they’d just shear the top off the mountain and pick through the rubble for what they need.

“You know they don’t like us to go down into the mine ourselves, right? The best tech they allow us is like that remote, for monitoring the inside of the mine and directing the tunnelers and excavators. One time I told the lizard foreman that he should go in with me and take pictures of a truck with a broken axle, and I thought his head was going to explode.”

“You can’t take pictures with a broken axle, Phil, but never mind that. I need you to pull all this together for me.”

“Good one. Okay: I’m going to die, probably very soon—”

“And again, thanks for telling me the other day. Autumn seemed surprised that you could make it into town on foot.”

“What Autumn doesn’t know keeps her off my back.” Keller was silent for a few seconds; when he spoke again, Cerna strained to hear him. “I want to buck the system, Toro. I don’t want to be cremated like everybody else, and especially not like the lizards. I want to be buried. And by now you should have your choice of four graves to put me in.”

“Very clever. But why? You won’t know the difference.”

“Maybe not, but I think the Peshari will.”

Cerna resisted the urge to shake his head. “You’re sick, the Peshari are weird and won’t let Autumn fix you, we don’t have tornadoes, but if we bury you the Peshari will be able to tell?”

Keller pursed his lips, looked up, and tipped his head side-to-side a few times. “That would be interesting, but no, I don’t think they’d notice without being told. So someone will have to tell them.”

“Are they going to care?”

“I certainly hope so. In fact, I’m counting on it. But here, process this: Do you think the Peshari consider humans to be sapient, or just sentient?”

“I thought they were the same thing.”

“No, sentience is just being aware, conscious of the sensory world. Sapience is being intelligent, as in homo sapiens. We obviously think of ourselves that way, but do the Peshari? If Ettinger is right, and she’s learned more about them than anyone else, they do. They think of us as equals, or nearly equals—”

“Which of course is why they attacked us—”

“That’s right! You were trying to make a joke, but it’s not a joke. When they got here and found our little settlement right where they wanted to live, they didn’t attack right away. They didn’t know what to make of us. Likewise, us for them. They were obviously an advanced civilization as far as we were concerned, so we were happy to make peace with them, but human space flight alone didn’t impress them. Do you remember, about a week after they first landed, what happened?”

Cerna thought back. “I remember Isaac Burriss got killed about that time. He fell in the river, hit his head on a rock.”

“Yes, and Jean invited the aliens to come out to Eyrie Ridge for the memorial service. Almost everybody came, which seemed to impress the Peshari. And even though we hadn’t learned much of each other’s language, they took note when Isaac’s brother released his ashes into the wind. At that point, we became near-sapient in their eyes.”

“Near-sapient?”

“Right. Not quite to their level, for three reasons. One, we didn’t make Issac’s remains into a permanent display, like they do. Two, we live in enclosed buildings, which they would never do. And three, they saw some of us entering the mine, something else they would never do. To them, that made us not quite ‘wise.’ ”

“Where do you come up with these things?”

“I read. Suzanne Ettinger’s reports are all in the public database. And I think. You should try it some time.”

“Prick.”

“ ‘If you prick us, do we not bleed?’ ”

Cerna rubbed his face. “So the Peshari decided we were people and not animals.”

“Yes, because we treated our dead with at least some respect, and in a way similar to them. If we had built a funeral pyre, like the Greeks and others used to, I think that would have satisfied them. Hell, that might have impressed them.

“But regardless, it was good for us. If they saw us as animals, they would treat us much worse. As people, or near-people, they decided that they should take care of us. I don’t think they expected us to resist so strongly when they first attacked . . .” He paused, and looked away.

“They thought that taking the Commander would be enough, didn’t they? Like gladiators, or a champion or something?”

Keller wiped his eyes and nodded. “I think so. They were surprised that we didn’t give in immediately, and that it would take so long to get us to surrender.

“To them, they’ve given us very lenient terms. Technology enough to live pretty well, though they keep ratcheting back what they let us have. A functioning economy and a good bit of self-determination, even pretty broad freedom of movement though they took away all the long-range transport and comms. To us, of course—or at least to some of us—the terms are just heinous. The gates may be open, but a friendly prison is still a prison.”

Cerna watched as Keller responded to a minor alarm on his console. Some pieces of the puzzle were still missing, but maybe he was starting to see the shape of it.

“So, you think getting buried instead of cremated will be, what, some kind of insult to the lizards?”

“I hope it’s more than that. You’ve only known cremation or reclamation your whole life, and not much of that so long as everyone’s nanos were working. Back on Earth we used to have graveyards full of buried people. They made for interesting history, and fun stories, too—you’ve probably seen some of them in your movies. I think that’s why the colony never did much with Halloween. It’s hard to get scared when there’s no place for the ghouls and zombies to come from.

“Anyway, Suzanne got access to some of the Peshari history and then to some of their myths. A lot of it is strange and entertaining, tall tales and epic heroes and the like, but one in particular appears over and over. Like the flood story: lots of Earth cultures have an Utnapishtim or a Noah who saves a portion of civilization from a catastrophic flood. It’s a cultural memory. Turns out the Peshari have several different versions of a story that is just as common—except it’s a common terror.

“In this one population of Peshari, Suzanne’s found five or six different versions of the same basic story: a village or town gets buried under a landslide or an avalanche or something. In one version, it’s a volcanic eruption like Pompeii. It’s entirely likely the event actually happened in their early history, but for some reason—maybe because their arms are fairly weak so they physically could only dig well with their back feet, who knows?—it has become an engrained truth that you could sum up by saying, ‘It is wrong to bury any person.’

“No, not just ‘wrong’ in the basic sense—reprehensible, unforgivable. To them it’s a curse that extends way beyond the person involved. They have recent histories of entire villages being abandoned after an earthquake collapsed a house on top of a couple of them. It wasn’t ‘cursed is anyone who is buried in the ground,’ but ‘cursed is the ground in which anyone is buried,’ and even ‘cursed is the structure that would fall and bury someone.’ ”

Cerna swiveled toward the window, toward the mine entrance. One of the trucks, operating by program without human or alien aboard, drove out of the mine and headed toward processing. “If that’s true, they’re not going to let you do it, you know.”

Keller chuckled. “That’s a funny way of putting it.”

“Why?”

Keller tilted his head. “Because I’ll be dead. I won’t exactly be ‘doing’ anything.”

Cerna rolled his shoulders, and his voice deepened in frustration. “Okay, they’re not going to do it for you, the way you want.”

“That’s why I need you to do it for me,” Keller said.

The next day, Cerna put in the order to fabricate a memorial. Several times he started toward the clinic to talk to Autumn, but Keller had asked him not to. And then, two days later, Keller was dead.

Cerna got the call from Autumn, and rushed over to her office. She handed him a folded-and-glued paper with his name on it in Keller’s tall, thin lettering. “It was in his pocket,” she said—and showed him into the exam room where old Phil lay on a gurney, a light green sheet pulled up over his chest. The effect gave his pale skin a sickly tone.

Cerna took Keller’s hand. “He’s really cold now,” he said, his voice tight in his throat. Autumn touched Cerna’s shoulder; he leaned his head over and a tear slid down his cheek. He kissed it off her hand.

“What do you have to do next?” Cerna asked.

Autumn sighed. “I need to scan him to see how far his disease had progressed. I’ll probably do at least a partial autopsy, to collect some of the tumors and analyze them. Sorry, Toro.”

“No, that’s fine. I’m sure he would want you to learn more about what he had, so you can help anyone else . . .” He swallowed. “How long will that take?”

“As long as no one breaks a leg or anything, I should be done by nightfall.”

“Okay if I come back then? I’d like to sit with him.”

“Of course.”

Cerna wandered at first, thinking, trying to avoid the note that Keller had left him. No doubt Miscente had alerted the Peshari that someone in the camp had died; would the word get to the death-artist, and would he care? The slab Cerna had ordered fabricated with Keller’s name on it would be done that afternoon. But would they let him erect it?

Cerna realized that he was on Winding Road, and walked to where Keller had gone to watch the sunset—and the stars—a handful of days before. He sat down and carefully opened Keller’s note.

My young friend,

I am much comforted that you agreed to memorialize me rather than having the Tephrist do it. Thank you for indulging my fantasy that my self-determination might survive my demise. Not that any of our self-determination is complete under the P’Shari’s benign rule, but they cannot rule our wishes and our dreams.

We’re struggling against entropy here, and until we are out from under the lizards’ claws I fear entropy will win sooner than it should. This is a blessed land, and it’s no surprise that we both want it. We had title to it, if only because we got here first, but we have no higher court to which we can appeal. We can only claim what we can, when we can.

If anyone asks why I wish to be buried, tell them whatever you like. Tell them I want to claim a man-sized plot of land in perpetuity, or to curse the ground upon which the P’Shari walk, or that I believe in the resurrection of the body, or that I’m a crazy old man. I promise not to take issue with whatever story you tell.

I used to hope that you or your children or your children’s children would be able to visit Earth one day, but not anymore. Everything is local, and only what is local really matters. I hope that you will come to love this new Earth as much as I have. And that you will enjoy it, freely and in freedom.

If I may be allowed another wish, a harder wish, I would wish that you could get Jean’s cinder block back from the lizards, and bury it next to me. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, Earth to Alluvium.

Thank you again, for showing me greater friendship and forbearance than anyone. I wish only good things for you,

B.P. Keller

Cerna smiled at the post-script: “Read more.” But he laughed out loud at what Keller had written below that: the unlock codes for his personal e-library, and for the backhoe he had co-opted.

The usual antiseptic smell of the clinic was undercut with something else, a sour-sick odor Cerna could not identify. Maybe he didn’t want to know what it was.

Autumn was gone, but Nurse Callura let Cerna in. “You going to be okay, Toro? I’d like to take my supper break now.”

He assured her he would be fine, and made his way to the exam room. He was grateful that Autumn had not just covered Keller’s body but wrapped it up, head to toe.

Cerna sat on the little rolling aluminum stool, and slid up next to the table.

“What are we going to do, old man?”

He waited, first with his hand on the table, then on the wrapping around Keller’s shoulder. Around them the building settled, with groans and pops. He wondered if Peshari buildings made noises like that, and if they spooked the lizards into thinking that they might collapse on them.

He glanced around at the simple instruments in the room, and thought about Autumn’s medicinal chemistry lab—could she mix up more than medicines in there? If he could plant explosives at the base of the walls of a couple of Peshari homes, and bring them down on top of the residents, would the others take revenge? Would they leave? Over the years, none of the camp’s strikes, revolts, or attacks had broken the Peshari hold over the human population. It couldn’t be so simple . . . could it?

Cerna smiled. “I like that idea, old man, thanks. And just for that, I’m going to give you your wish.”

Miscente showed up at Cerna’s dormitory early the next afternoon.

“What the hell did you do, Tauran?”

Cerna had slept little but well. Anticipating a visit by the camp chief, he had showered after he finished laying Keller to rest and using the backhoe to cover him and set the heavy slab in place. He began dressing in clean clothes, and smiled. “I granted a friend his dying wish.”

Miscente stepped closer, and said in a low voice, “I’ve got the Peshari commandant outside, with their death-artist, wanting Keller’s remains.”

“Really? The Tephrist is here?”

“Yes, whatever they call it.”

“That’s . . . unexpected.”

“Look, the doc says she left Keller’s body in the clinic, but when she got in this morning it was gone. Chantal said she let you in before she went to eat, but since the lights were off when she got back, she didn’t bother to check.”

“Sounds like a mystery.”

“Don’t start. What did you do?”

Cerna walked to the door and opened it for Miscente. “I did what he wanted. I buried him.”

Miscente stopped before reaching the door, his mouth half open. Cerna shrugged and walked out to the two Peshari. Both were fourth-stagers, the commandant clad in a robe so deep blue it was almost black, with artful saffron swirls around the collar and edges, and the Tephrist in a more workmanlike robe of rough, brown cloth.

“So, gentle-lizards, what can I do for you today?”

Behind Cerna, Miscente gasped at the insult, but the Peshari paid it no heed.

The Tephrist stepped forward. “Jean-El’s mate. Would honor with memory-stone. Remains?”

“Too late,” Cerna said. “The memorial’s in place.”

The Tephrist and the commandant exchanged quick words and gestures in their own language. Cerna caught a minor fraction of what they said and signaled, largely declarations of impossibility.

“Come on, I’ll show you.” He started toward the fake chapel, not caring much whether they followed or not.

Three of the four trenches in the “basement” were still open to the sky; the second was covered with a thick ceramic block made to look like granite, with Keller’s name on it in large block letters. Neither Peshari spoke, and Miscente stepped up to Cerna and said, sotto voce, “You may want to throw yourself in one of those holes if they object to this.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Cerna said. “Good idea. But first, you’ll want to check your Portal. There’s been another change order on this project.”

“Don’t be a smartass, just tell me.”

“I re-designated this area. It’s now a graveyard, not a chapel.”

Before Miscente could respond, the commandant said, “Our Tephrist does not command your language as I do. Is this artless block the remains of Jean-El’s mate?”

“No,” Cerna said. “It’s just a monument. A marker. That’s all he wanted, a simple stone to mark his resting place.”

“That idiom escapes me. Resting place? He sleeps?”

“His body is two meters under that slab. Like this,” said Cerna, and jumped down into the third trench where he lay on the bottom, heedless of his clean clothes.

The keening of the Peshari was far worse than even their laughter.

“Why?” the Peshari commandant demanded after Miscente had hauled Cerna back out of the grave. The Peshari had retreated a full fifty meters away, and seemed clearly uncomfortable to be even that close. “Why such . . . inhumane treatment?”

Cerna grinned at the Peshar’s word choice. He shook a bit of dirt from his hair, and the lizards each skittered back three more steps.

“Phil told me he wanted to claim a plot of land all his own. And he believed in the resurrection of the body. I took that to mean that he wanted his body to inhabit his plot of land.”

The two Peshari’s hands moved so fast Cerna could not see whether they were actually signing or just waving their forelimbs with no regard to meaning. Their voices were strident, but also too fast to follow. After a moment the commandant said, almost in a whisper, “So, he is to continue, after corporeal demise?”

“Sounds right. No telling when.”

“Do many of your people intend thus?”

Cerna looked at Miscente, but the camp chief clearly had no answer.

“Not many,” Cerna said, “but enough.”

Two days later, the Peshari were still debating among themselves how to address the abomination in the human camp. According to Miscente, a very small minority wanted to pretend it never happened, a vocal faction led by the Tephrist wanted to abandon the colony, and others wanted to raze the human compound and exterminate the inhabitants.

Cerna had only begun reading about strategy in Keller’s old e-library, and researching explosives they might synthesize. He had not yet tried to re-engage his old squad; his mind was too full of direct and indirect approaches, ideas that he had to correlate and digest. But that day would come. War would come. Only now they would have a new tactic, if he could produce the weapons to exploit it.

He shut off the grinder and blew dust from his handiwork.

“I thought I might find you here,” Autumn said. She stood in the fading afternoon on the other side of the fence Miscente had made Cerna put up around the graveyard. Cerna smirked that the fence line matched Keller’s original outline for the would-be “chapel.” He waved her in, and stood as she approached.

“Yeah, what do you think?”

The lettering was a bit uneven, Cerna thought, but straight and sure enough for not being programmed into a machine. Autumn read the line in a clear, strong voice.

“Glad did he live and gladly died, and laid him down with a will.” She reached out and held Cerna’s hand. “So you knew?”

“I adapted it from a poem Phil had marked as a favorite,” Cerna said. “I’ll do the whole thing eventually, in smaller type . . . Wait, knew what?”

Autumn shook her head. “He was in so much pain, Toro, more than he ever showed. At the end, I gave him what I could, what I had, but I let him decide how much to take. I let him decide . . . when to let go.”

Cerna’s stomach clenched as if he had been shot in the gut; he might have fallen to his knees if not for Autumn’s hand in his.

“And laid him down with a will,” he said.

Alluvium rotated, and its sun set behind the far mountains. Cerna put his arm around Autumn, and they stood together for a long time as the wide sky filled with stars.

THE JOURNEYMAN: IN THE STONE HOUSE

Michael F. Flynn

“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail.”

—Louis L’Amour

A Peep at the Wall

The Great Escarpment edged World along its northern marge, from the Hill Country in the far west to the eastern verge of the shortgrass prairie. But there, an unexpected southward spur pinched World into a narrow waist through which all men must pass should they travel east or west. It was no great surprise to Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand, who was cunning in all matters relating to stalking and ambush, to find the neck between sheer cliffs and steaming swamplands stoppered by a stronghold nestled against the flank of the escarpment. But never had he seen a fastness so large and built entirely of great stone blocks. Atop the walls men in iron kept watch on east and west and—of greater immediate interest to Teodorq and his companion—south. But being wise in the ways of camouflage, Nagarajan’s son remained hid den from their gaze in a grove of trees a gallop south of the cliffs while he considered ways in which that happy state could be continued and his eastward journey resumed.

Round about the stronghold huddled scores of lesser dwellings, cattle and sheep pens, yapping dogs, curling smoke from under which issued irregular clangs. Smells of dung and compost floated with the burnt tang of the smoke. Beyond the settlement a waterfall plummeted from the very lip of the plateau, and from that direction issued a steady thump, as if a frost giant strode the earth.

Earlier that morning several wagons bearing men with farming implements had ridden west under a mounted escort. A practiced eye—and Teodorq possessed two such—estimated upwards of four hundred habitants in the settlement, the largest village he had ever seen.

Even though most of the villagers were not warriors—Their farmers needed guards against the shortgrassmen!—Teodorq doubted he could take them all, especially those wearing iron shirts and carrying long iron swords. Not even with Sammi o’ th’ Eagles to help.

“Hey,” he whispered to his companion, “you hillmen build stone houses, don’t ya?” Sammi shrugged without moving. “Not so big.” The hillmen were anciently enemies of Teodorq’s people, but the two young men were alike strangers in a strange land and had perforce become allies.

“Least now we know why the shortgrassers call ’em the ironmen. Must get hot in them outfits come summer.”

“Maybe star-folk, like Jamly tell us find?” suggested Sammi. “Big magic, pile stones so high.”

Teodorq studied on that some. Farther west, where the shortgrass prairie gave way to the Great Grass he had once called home, he and Sammi had come upon an ancient wreck, a “shuttle” that had tumbled down from the sky in the long ago. Jamly, a drawing that somehow moved and spoke and who had been custodian of the shuttle, had sent them forth to find the settlements of Iabran and Varucciyamen, so that the starmen might come and salvage what remained.

For Teodorq, seeking out the star-folk had a better ring than fleeing from the Serpentines who pursued him. “Don’t think so,” he finally decided. “That shuttle was made of pottery—whatcha call it, esramig?—not stone. And when Jamly killed them Serps following me, she used a buzzing fast stonethrower, which I don’t see they got over there. Hey, hillman, how do you build a stone house?”

Sammi glanced at him. “With stones?”

“Yah, you lay one row on top another row. Yonder—” He nodded toward the stronghold. “—they forgot to stop adding rows. So, no magic. Least not shuttle-magic.” He wondered how they lifted the blocks onto the highest rows. Maybe that was a giant he heard hammering away in the distance.

Sammi grunted. “Jamly Ghost say much kenning lost since big-fight-in-sky. Stupid plainsmen forget most; hillmen not so much. Maybe ironmen forget less.” He pursed his lips. “We stay in trees, iron hats no see us. Sneak past stone house, then ride like hell.”

The woods they lurked within contained more trees than Teodorq had ever imagined grew on World. But he did not suppose that the men in the iron hats were stupid, and he expected the trees would soon give way to cleared ground. What man would build a stronghold to guard the passage and then allow trees to screen passers-by?

“I dunno, hillman,” said Teodorq, pointing toward the distant wall. “Them sidemen up there, we know why they’re watching the west. Shortgrassmen don’t like they come down off’n the cliffs and taken their prairie. But they’re studying on the east, too. And before we ride like hell’ into it, I wanna know what they’re so keen on spotting.”

Sammi looked at him. “Sometimes, for plainsman, you not so stupid.”

“Beside,” Teodorq said, “I wouldn’t mind sneaking in there and getting me one of them swords.”

“Sammi take back what he say.”

They watched a while longer in science. Then Sammi sighed. “How you plan get one?”

“First . . . We need to find a way into that stone house.”

Behind them they heard a click.

Teodorq looked at Sammi. “That can’t be good.”

They turned to see a mounted figure dressed in dun leather and aiming a crossbow at them. “Be pinned to the spot, sodbusters, or be pinned to it.”

It was a woman’s voice and spoke the plavver of the shortgrassmen with an odd accent, harder on the final consonants, careless of the vowels, and swallowing the liquids in the throat. Teodorq said to Sammi in the long-grass sprock, “Only one bolt.”

The hillman shrugged. “Sammi always remember kindness of stupid plainsman.”

“Why?”

“You bigger. She shoot you first. Sammi get away while reload.”

As if intuiting their discussion, the woman whistled sharply and four men emerged from the trees, one of them leading the horses and pack mule Teodorq and Sammi had picketed in a hidden meadow. “Turn you right about now and start you a-walking toward yon sawak.” When Teodorq feigned incomprehension, she gestured with the crossbow, indicating by signs what they were to do.

“Awright, babe, we get it. C’mon Sammi, let’s go.” The two turned and began walking toward the stone house, striding for all of World as if they were leading the others home.

Sammi commented dryly in the hill country lingo. “First part of plan working. Got second part?”

Teodorq shrugged. “Not yet.”

A Snake in the Hall

They put Teodorq sunna Nagarajan and Sammi o’ th’ Eagles in a cage below ground level. Now and then, Teddy could make out indistinct curses from more dark and distant cages. This was apparently to inform the two how fortunate they were. Teodorq shook the bars on the cage door, but he did not expect the door to swing open, and so was not disappointed when it failed to do so.

Caging was a deadly insult on the Great Grass, but Teodorq told his companion he would forswear his revenge.

“Smart move,” Sammi told him. “Vengeance hard for man locked up in cage.”

“I plan to get out.”

“Good,” said Sammi, bending over to inspect the lock mechanism. “Now two of us have same plan. How you pick lock?”

“With my tongue.”

Sammi rose, turned, and looked at Teodorq without speaking.

“I still want to get me one of them swords,” the prairieman said. “So, step one is get out o’ this cell.”

“No, that step two. Step one got us into it. Remember?”

When the guards came for them the next morning, Teodorq acted as a guest summoned for council rather than a prisoner for interrogation. He and Sammi were escorted to a long flag-stoned hall illuminated by torches, between which hung colorful banners bearing fantastical creatures and sigils. Sidemen in kilts and iron shirts lined the hall, each holding a man-tall, iron-tipped lance.

The lines of the vault, the floor, and the sidemen led the eye to the focal point, which was an elaborate chair atop a raised platform at the far end of the hall. Upon this chair perched a barrel-chested man with heavily muscled arms and hands that looked as if they could crush a man’s skull. He wore a gown of delicate weave, dyed bright red and bearing on its front in thread-of-gold the image of a great striped cat. Across his shoulders and layered on his lap was a cloak of what appeared to be the pelt of the same animal: black stripes on white fur. In his hand he held a ceremonial, jewel-encrusted hammer. Teodorq estimated more schmuck in that hammer than in the aggregate wealth of the Scorpion and Serpentine clans combined, and he fell to considering how such an item might come into his possession.

On the platform below the high seat, a miscellany of others, variously garbed, sat or lay among cushions. One was the girl who had captured them. She still wore hunting leathers, but had exchanged her crossbow for a hoodwinked falcon that perched upon a thick glove while she fed sweetmeats to it.

A crier announced something in a strange tongue, packaged in which Teodorq caught the name of “Aya Herpstone, kospathin.” From the salutes that followed, this was evidently the fierce man on the big chair.

“Kospathin . . .” Teodorq murmured. “I’d say he’s the First here’bouts.”

“Sammi never cease to marvel at swiftness of plainsman mind.”

The sidemen who had taken custody of the captives pushed Teodorq and Sammi forward and by signs indicated that they were to bow over their folded hands. Teodorq remembered that Jamly had used the same salute and wondered if these folk might be the starmen, after all. Teodorq added the plainsman’s salute, touching his fingertips to his temple then slicing his hand forward. Sammi slapped his right bicep and raised his forearm.

The kospathin leaned on the arm of his big chair and growled something in a back-throated language. The young woman spoke up in the shortgrass plavver.

“My father asks whether or no ye be spies for the kraal of Bowman.”

Teodorq answered in the sprock. “Sorry, babe. We don’t get ya.”

Sammi grunted, understanding that Teodorq had spoken to him and not to the girl. He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

The girl frowned and a small crease appeared in her brow just above her pert nose.

“You speak a tongue most strange. Whence come ye here?”

Teodorq again feigned incomprehension. The kospathin said something to her and she answered. The hard, growling words of irontalk fell strange off such soft lips as hers. A bald-pated man with a long white beard, who squatted cross-legged on the cushions, smiled as if at a secret jest and made a quick suggestion to the chief. That worthy listened, nodded, then sent a sideman off with some whispered instruction. Then he spoke to the hall at large and his henchmen dutifully laughed. A musician began to play on a fretted, triangular yuke and a fool juggled and cavorted.

They broke off when the sidemen returned, escorting between them a man in a ragged open vest and trousers of fringed elik hide inlaid with priceless shells from the far-off south-west sea. His chest and arms were inscribed with fanciful tattoos. Twin vipers wound up his arms, which were ironbound at the wrists. Leg irons clanked as he shuffled.

Sammi o’ th’ Eagles regarded the prisoner and then looked at Teodorq’s vest and trousers and the tattooed scorpions on each fist.

“Know this guy?” he whispered in the sprock.

“Yah. Karakalan sunna Vikeram of clan Serpentine.”

Sammi grunted. “Serps the ones trying to kill you, right?”

“Tryin.”

“Good thing he chained up.”

The gray-beard on the platform spoke to Karakalan in what must have been the ironmen’s language; but he spoke slowly and seemed to use short words. The Serp scowled in concentration.

Karakalan turned to face them and they saw that his nose had been broken and his lip split at some time in the not-too-distant past. He smiled at Teodorq, though the smile must have hurt such an unsuited face.

“Well, well,” he said. “If it ain’t the little Scorp what ran away like a rabbit when the Serps come for him.”

“Hail, sunna Vikeram. Off yer turf, ain’t yuh?”

“Hey, rabbit hunting, is all. The headman here—their First—he wantsa know if you’re spyin’ for the weenies out in the grass. Now you gotta know it don’t matter what you say, cause I’m gonna tell him you are; and then he’ll bugger you on the Spit. Just so’s you know, sunna Nagarajan.”

“I be no sodbuster scout,” Teodorq said, using the simplest word-forms he could. The eternal tense was for something true now-and-always. “But I understand. You must use these others to slay what you could not.”

Teodorq’s sentence had been unjust, the tribal elders had been coerced, but the Serps wanted the head that was their due and Teodorq, disinclined to part with it, had struck for the east. The litter of dead Serps in his wake had made his return problematical.

Karakalan shrugged. “Whatever works. Don’t matter none to me whether I use a bow, a knife, or an iron chief. Just so’s yer as dead as my kid brother.”

The First barked a command and the graybeard spoke again slowly and distinctly to the Serp.

“Scuse me, rabbit. I gotta tell the chief what I want him to think you said.” And then he spoke a few short sentences to the man on the high seat, who darkened at hearing them and struck the arm of his chair with his fist.

The graybeard held up a hand and gargled something at his boss; and the First made a disgusted wave with his hand. This was evidently a permission, and the old man again engaged with Karakalan. While they chattered in their slow and halting way, Teodorq glanced at the chief’s daughter and saw her watching him with steady concentration. He winked at her, but she did not react.

Karakalan huffed his breath and said to Teodorq, “Balcly here wants to know what-all you learned in your peeking around. So why don’t you’n me chat while I figger out what to tell him. Who’s yer pet?” He bobbed his head toward Sammi.

“He’s a hillman on a walkabout to see World.”

“Hey,” said Sammi, “Sammi speak for self.” He faced Karakalan and jerked a thumb at Teodorq. “What he said.”

The Serp snorted. “You gotta smart mouth for a hillman.”

Sammi shrugged. “Rest of Sammi not so stupid, either. My butt smarter than some plainsmen.”

“Tell me, Kal,” said Teodorq, “why do they think I scout for the shortgrassmen? Can’t they see that Sammi and me ain’t sod-busters?”

“Yeah,” Kal answered ruefully. “Me, too.”

“I was wondering, seeing how you got those fancy wrist and ankle bangles.” Karakalan jingled his irons. “Threw me a party.”

“Looks like they threw you, not the party. They got your sidemen in cages, too?”

The Serp bobbed his head no. “We was ambushed about a league west o’ here. Teddy, you ain’t never seen what them long swords can do to a man. Murtha’s head flew clean off his shoulders. It bounced, Teddy. I swear to all four gods, it bounced.”

“Sounds like you could use a friend here.”

“Used up all my friends chasing rabbits.” The First growled something impatient. Kal listened, nodded slowly. “If you ain’t a scout for the sodbusters,” he translated, “how come you come outta the grass.”

“Sweet breath of Awachi!” swore Teodorq. “Do those metal hats of theirs cook their brains? Where else could we come from? Anyone and his great aunt Matilda not wishful of either cliff-climbing or being gator-bait has to come past this here spot, and that there’s a fact. If their heads weren’t iron clean through they’d want to know what I seen in the kraals we passed through. That spy stuff works both ways and . . .” Here, he pointed to the three red stripes he had painted on his arm. “. . . I am a damn subadar o’ scouts for the damn Commonwealth of Suns. So I know a thing or two about noticing shit.”

“Commonwealth of Suns” was a foreign phrase on any tongue. Kal ignored the boast and grinned. “So you are a scout. Lemme tell the First.”

But the graybeard had jumped to his feet, and turning toward the First, bowed low over his folded hands and let loose a long patter to which his chief listened with irritation passing into dismissal. He clapped his hands to match his graybeard’s gesture then bellowed an order. The guards chivvied Teodorq and Sammi in the wake of the departing minister. The chief’s daughter, with an amused smirk on her face, handed off her falcon to a huntsman and followed.

A Snake in the Room.

The sawak was a maze. The old man led them through cold stone corridors and up narrow spiral stairwells whose steps were set at irregular heights. Teodorq and Sammi stumbled a few times, eliciting laughs from their escorts. No doubt the twisting and turning was to confuse invaders, but the ironmen had never dealt with Teodorq’s people. Plainsmen had a remorseless sense of direction and Teodorq built up a fair mental model of the sawak as they wound their way through it.

“Hey,” said Sammi in the sprock, “Stairs always twist right-handwise going up.”

Teodorq grunted. “Ya, these kettle-heads are clever putzes. Attackers forcing their way up can’t swing those long swords o’ theirs; but defenders coming down can. Between that and the stumbling blocks, this sawak of theirs is built to kill attackers.”

“Right-hand ones, anyway,” said Sammi. “Hillmen smart. Send southpaws.”

Finally they entered a warren of rooms filled with a clutter that Teodorq found incredible to contemplate. There was a gristle-bar erect, paws open in embrace, an eagle perched wingspread wired to a stout branch. The carpet was the hide of the same striped cat that had graced the shoulders of the kospathin. Flowers lifted their fragrances from clay pots. Dried herbs of various sorts filled shelves of glass jars, on which were affixed slips of parchment with runes. On a tall table lay trimmed feathers with blackened points.

As they entered, Teodorq passed near a tree branch and the graybeard said, “Mind the tree-snake. It’s poisonous.”

Teodorq recoiled from the red-and-yellow serpent wrapped around the branch before he saw that it, too, was stuffed and mounted. The old man chortled. “Yes, I thought you understood the plavver. How long did you live among them?”

Teodorq judged dissembling no longer useful. “Bout a year,” he said. “We was snowed in during Big Winter and shacked up with Timberlake kraal. That’s maybe two weeks easy riding west of Bowman’s kraal, across the stony river.”

The young woman had perched upon a tall stool. “Why the pretense in the hall of thrones?” she demanded.

Teodorq shrugged. “A man speaks more freely when he thinks none can hear.” Then he turned to the graybeard and said in the sprock. “Like sunna Vikeram.”

The graybeard smiled. “Yes. I had wondered when you used child-talk to deny being a spy.”

“OL Karakalan is a Serp, which it means he ain’t too bright. He learned your talk, but he never figgered that you were learning his.”

“You wished I know your countryman dishonest in his translation.”

“Sooner we got that outta the way, the better. Karakalan is okay, but he is a Serpentine.”

“If you don’t mind,” the graybeard said, “let us continue in plavver. I learned some of your sprock, but I fear for now any discussion in that tongue would be too limited. By what name be ye known?”

Teodorq introduced himself and then Sammi. “Sammi here is on what his folk call a walkabout. Me, I had a disagreement with the Serps. They wanted my head, and I still needed it. And what’re yer handles?”

That request seemed to surprise the girl, but the old man took no note. He named the girl the Figa Anya Goregovona Herpstonesdoor. The kospathin was her father. The old man called himself Wisdom Sharee Mikahali Fulenenberk, and he advised the lord.

“And that means I must know all I can about the lands and peoples that you have passed through. Aya kospathin desires I first learn of the sodbusters that occupy our . . . our fodanny valadenny. The plavver has no word with the proper meaning. It means the lands whose use is entrusted to our kospathin.”

“Yeah,” said Teodorq. “Funny how often a tribe’s home grass already got someone else a-grazing on it. Bowman said this here land been in his clan since creation time.”

“That means,” the girl said, “since his greatgrandfather. Three generations are all they need to say ‘thus hath it always been.’ ” She twisted her mouth to caricature the nasal drone of the shortgrass.

The old man took up one of the feathers and dipped it into a phial to blacken it. “Now, let us begin. What are the distances? Where are the hills and forests and rivers? What prowess at arms have the various folk you have met?”

“Sammi and me come a long way. The telling wants a long time.”

Sharee Mikahali wagged his hand. “Then we may as well start now. Unless you have other plans for the evening . . .? Tell me of the grassmen west of here.”

“So you can compare it with what sunna Vikeram done toldja already.”

“Of course.”

“Well, Bowman and his crew are fixing to move out west. He’s been building carts and wagons and stealing all the horses he can lay hold of. If’n you don’t push him, he’ll be gone before the Sperm shoots out.”

The Wisdom paused, startled, his marking-feather half-raised. “The . . . Sperm?”

“Stupid plainsman means Consort. Enters Sun when in heat. Later Sun give birth.”

The old man’s eyes brightened. “Ah, you mean the Red Sun!” He scratched the paper briskly with his feather.

“You spilled that readily enough,” said the princess. “I mean about Bowman’s plans, not your sperm.”

“Hey, babe, it’s bad cess to the Timberlake folk west of the stony river that Bowman’s gonna muscle in on ’em, but it ain’t no skin off my nose.”

“And what is meant by ‘babe’ ?”

“In the sprock, it is a term of respect for important women.”

Sammi coughed violently, but Teodorq offered his most winning smile and the princess accepted the translation.

“And if we do push him?” asked the Wisdom quietly.

“Ever seen a kid with a toy what he ain’t playing with it, then some other kid comes along and picks it up? Give Bowman his space and he’ll beat feet. He knows long run he can’t win.”

“And the homesteaders he has ambushed and killed?” said princess Anya. “The widows and orphans of his raids? Be they unavenged?”

“Meaning no disrespect, babe, but do you want that land or do you want revenge? All you have to do is wait a little while, and you’ll have the dirt cheap. Better yet, let him steal some more horses or lay hold of a couple of your wagons and you’ll get rid of him sooner. Can’t really blame him for trying to hang onto what was his. Ain’t it revenge enough to cut him off from his grandfathers’ graves?”

“So, Wiz,” said Sammi, “that make your king happy?”

The Wisdom turned to the mountain man, as if surprised to find him there. Sammi had a way of keeping still that allowed him to drift from the consciousness of others. “Our kospathin is not a ‘king,’ ” said Sharee Mikahali. “At least not as the sodbusters reckon kings. ‘To every kraal, its king,’ they say. But the true king is All Highest Eskandor, the Third of his Name, the Little Father of the North.” Both he and the princess traced a sigil with their right hands, and Teodorq squirreled the information away in his memory.

The minds of men leave footprints in their words. If there was a true king, then there was likely a false one; and Teodorq could hazard a guess or two why Eskandor’s man had come down off the cliffs to seize the shortgrass. He wondered if other kospathins of this Eskandor could be found in freshly-built sawaks along the base of the scarp.

Likely so, he concluded. Something had pushed Eskandor’s men off the plateau; though it was surely a long way to jump.

A Door in a Box

“Now,” said Sammi. “What second thing?”

When the old man blinked, Teodorq spoke. “Yuh said the first thing your boss wants to know. So the second thing must be something you wanna know. And I ken what it is. Yuh surely perked up when I mentioned the Commonwealth of Suns.”

A smile parted the Wisdom’s beard. “There are no flies on you.”

The non sequitur puzzled the plainsman until he realized that it must be a proverb among the iron men. “My saddle is cinched,” he agreed, and that, in turn, puzzled the Wisdom.

The Wisdom pulled out a massive stack of parchments all bound together between covers of heavy board. He pulled out a straight razor and scraped the runes off a rugged sheet of parchment. Once the “scrape-paper” was clean enough, he wet his pen in the ink-jar and poised the feather’s point above it. “Yes. The Commonwealth of Suns . . .”

He pronounced the words differently than had Jamly-the-ghost, but it was recognizably the same phrase. And it was just as recognizably a term alien to the iron tongue. The princess laughed and slapped her thigh like a man would. “Old man,” she said, “you chase moonbeams.”

But the old man was undisturbed. “I cannot take seriously the protests of one-I-once-dandled-on-my-knee.” In the shortgrass plavver they were using, that was a single term. “Tell me, O Teodorq, how does one become a scout for the great band of stars?”

Teodorq cocked his head. “The great band of stars?”

“The swath of white that crosses the sky during the nightless Little Winter resolves into a myriad of individual stars when viewed through a special glass. In ancient times it was called ‘the commonwealth of suns,’ and still is by our liturgical language.”

“Hillmen,” said Sammi, “call it the Lactation, which means the milk from the breast of the Mother.”

“And on the Great Grass,” Teodorq added, “we call it the Treasure Fleet. Each of the individual stars in front is a Rider carrying a torch through the Great Night and behind them is a great heap of gems and golden beads they are bringing to World.”

The Wisdom grunted. “Fleet?”

Teodorq shrugged. “I always figgered it meant a ‘heap’ or ‘hoard.’ ”

“So what do your people mean when they say ‘Commonwealth of Suns’ ?”

“We don’t. I never heard of it before Sammi and me met Jamly-the-ghost.”

Teodorq saw no harm in recounting the tale, in which he thought he came off rather well, and so he told how he and Sammi had independently discovered the ruins of Shuttle Starbright-17 out in the western marches of the shortgrass prairie.

“Except stupid plainsman find place by accident,” said Sammi, “while I hear sodbuster stories, track it down.”

Teodorq ignored the jibe. “It matters not how a man may come to a place. What matters is how he leaves it. The shuttle was a house within a hill. It had come to grief so long ago that the soil and grass grew thick on its back and sides and only through a narrow cleft could a brave man gain access.” He paused and added, “Being the braver man, I went first inside.”

Sammi added, “Being smarter man, I let him.” The princess laughed.

“Someone must go first of all,” Teodorq said, “and best that man be one that others would follow. Inside, we found all a ruin. Dust layered thick on the floors; plants and creeping things encroached within, and among them lay the scattered bones of those who had gone before us. But did Teodorq sunna Nagarajan turn back?”

“Not when Sammi of Eagle-clan stand behind, blocking way.”

“Very strange was that house-within-the-hill. Passages led forward, led right, led left; and even led up and down, as if a man might stride level in every direction. Then, seeing the bravery of Teodorq and his stalwart companion, the headman of the shuttle summoned them to her council chamber. This was Jamly-the-ghost.”

“Ghosts,” said the princess, “are more talked of than seen.”

“Duh,” said Teodorq, “they’re invisible? But Jamly, as I came to understand, was somehow a portrait. Ay! What man may understand how a drawing might move or speak? Even Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand does not know this, but rests content that this one drawing did so. Jamly then recounted old deeds. She told how the countless sky-wagons called the Treasure Fleet came to World and founded the great villages of Iabran and Varucciyamen—which, by the way, do you know where them places are?”

The graybeard shook his head. “The names are unknown to me.”

The princess said, “Faerie tales.”

Teodorq inclined his head. “Yuh may be right, babe, for Jamly appeared, floated in the air, and disappeared. A faerie tale told by an old wet nurse may be disregarded; but a faerie tale told by a genuine faerie carries some weight.

“Now, in the course of building their villages, the starmen were discovered and attacked by their great enemy, the People of Sand and Iron. In the battle that followed, the starmen were victorious, but their wagons were destroyed and Shuttle Starbright-17 fell to earth, killing all aboard save Jamly-the-ghost.”

“Ghosts already dead,” Sammi pointed out. “Can’t die twice.”

Teodorq shrugged. “As may be. Jamly has awaited succor from her people for more years than a man may count even with a pebble jar. Concluding that her comrades knew not where she lay, being covered by earth and grass and all, she made me and Sammi ‘authorized personnel’ and told us to find the starman villages.”

The Wisdom glanced up reflectively. “So Jamly’s ‘Commonwealth of Suns’ is . . .?”

“A league of many villages that exists somehow above our heads in the great band of light. The chief of them is a village called Terra.”

“When a man dies, we say he has ‘gone home to Tra. ’ I wonder if this ‘Terra’ is another name for the Abode of the Dead.”

“Jamly swore us a mighty oath to defend the Commonwealth against ‘all enemies, human and inhuman. ’ This is why the son of Nagarajan wears the three red stripes on his arm, and Sammi the two.”

“Uncle,” said the Princess Anya. “Human and inhuman?”

“I heard. Perhaps these men have been sent to us by the Doom.”

Sammi mutter sotto voce, “That can’t be good.” Teodorq ignored him.

The Wisdom rose and beckoned them. “There is something I would show you. It is a holy object anciently possessed by House Tiger and sacred, so it is said, to the Commonwealth of Suns.”

Wisdom Mikahali led them through another labyrinthine passage into a fane lit with blue flames enclosed in glass bowls. The walls were hung with the likenesses of men in the robes of the kospathin. His ancestors, perhaps. As Teodorq walked up the center of the fane, the eyes of the old Firsts followed him. Ayii! The plainsman flinched from the eldritch magic. What could be so precious that such men stood watch over it? But as he studied them more closely he saw that the likenesses were a mock made of smears of colored pastes and he let his breath out. That the eyes seemed to move was startling, but only a clever art. Jamly had moved, too; and he thought now that it had been through a similar though more potent artistry. The ironmen could make eyes seem to move by daubing colors on a curved surface; the starmen could make whole bodies move . . . and talk . . . and float through the air . . . so, a lot more potent . . . but perhaps magic was after all only a sufficiently clever art.

A bald man in a floor-length robe entered the fane. His face was painted, though decoratively rather than as for war. His eyes were outlined in black and his lips glossed in red. Gold draped his neck and hung from his ears. His head alone would be a substantial prize to take. He spoke the yashiq irontalk in a soft melodious voice and Teodorq, who by now could follow simple sentences, heard him say, “What wouldst thou here, Wisdom?”

“Tsadarasity, Sharee Thaweteri. May the light of the Commonwealth shine on your nights.”

The shaman was unimpressed. “Thou followest new gods, Sharee Mikahali. Why comest thou to call upon the true ones?”

In plavver, the Princess Anya explained to Teodorq and Sammi that her uncle, like most educated ironmen of the past three generations, followed the One who sustained World, and therefore he regarded the Great Band as merely another created thing, composed of fires like Sun. Sharee Thaweteri on the other hand regarded the Great Band as the gods themselves keeping watch over World.

“We would gaze upon the Relics,” the Wisdom explained.

“The Relics,” Sharee Thaweteri answered, “are not for profane eyes.” Teodorq thought that the painted man had no testicles and wondered what enemy or accident had deprived him of his descendents.

The shaman seemed inclined to resist indefinitely, but the princess coughed gently and the unman cast her a cautious glance.

“Perhaps my father could resolve the matter?” Anya suggested.

It seemed to Teodorq that Anya’s father could resolve matters without ever putting in an appearance, for the shaman hurried to obey. With a golden key that hung about his neck, he unlocked a tall, rosewood cabinet, swinging each door wide to display the Relic within. “You may not touch it,” said Thaweteri, “but you may kneel and kiss it.”

The Wisdom and the princess seemed disinclined to honor the Relic, but neither did they defy the shaman. They merely nodded to the cabinet, inviting the western men’s regard.

The Relic was a flat, rectangular panel bearing four sets of runes.

Sammi stepped forward and kissed it. Teodorq wondered at this sudden fit of devotion, but when Sammi rose again, he announced, “Same esramig as shuttle. Taste same, feel same, smell same. Rap with knuckles, maybe sound same.” He glanced at the shaman, who showed no inclination to permit that. But when Sammi concluded, “This come down from sky, like shuttle,” the man smiled as if he had brought it down himself.

“So, it is truly made of skystuff,” the shaman whispered.

Teodorq slapped Sammi on the arm. “Hey! It’s one of them sliding doors, like we seen in the shuttle.”

All of them, the shaman included, stared at the Relic, as if waiting for it to slide. But it remained stubbornly stationary.

“A man’s arm don’t wave,” Teodorq suggested, “after it’s been hacked off his body. So maybe the door don’t slide when it’s been taken from the shuttle.”

“Needs Jamly-the-ghost,” Sammi concluded. “Ghost moves body. Jamly moves shuttle.”

The four lines of runes were so different in style that Teodorq judged them the runes of four different peoples, much as the all-prairie signs used on the Great Grass differed from the sigils used by the Hillmen or the angular runes employed by the ironmen. Strangest was the sigil that appeared to show the lesser moon rising over a range of hills with two parallel rivers flowing away from their base.

“Have you seen the like of these inscriptions before?” the Wisdom asked them.

Teodorq nodded. “I saw many inscriptions like the first in the shuttle. None like the second. A few like the third and fourth.” Sammi said nothing but grunted his agreement.

“Maybe this is a part of your shuttle and your Jamly wants you to bring it back to make the repair.”

The shaman sucked his breath in horror, but Teodorq said, “Jamly tells of many ships and shuttles. I ’spect there are lots of pieces scattered about, from many vessels.”

The Wisdom shook his head sadly. “There is so much we do not know.”

The shaman meanwhile had brought out of a tabernacle a smaller panel in a golden reliquary. It shone with a dull light, much as the panels on the shuttle had. But this was filled with lines of the curly runes.

“It is like a page from a manuscript codex,” said the Wisdom, “but it is neither parchment, nor vellum, and the ink will not smudge. In all the generations House Tiger has possessed it, that page has neither faded nor grown brittle. Each time it has been displayed, the lines have changed. Yet, there is only this one page. One page that is somehow at the same time many pages. And no man knows the art of reading it.”

The shaman replaced the Page in its tabernacle and returned to the Door. “I wonder where it once led. Somewhere wonderful. To the heavens, I am sure.”

In a peculiar flash, Teodorq wondered if the unballed man might not be right. But he thought the Page might be more wonderful still, should a man ever decipher its runes.

A Chip Off The Block.

A few days later, the Wisdom had them summoned to his quarters, where he and the princess again awaited them. Clapping his hands, the Wisdom summoned a servant to bring a tray of fruits and dried vegetables which could be dipped into a variety of sauces using short skewers. Teodorq and Sammi exchanged glances. There had definitely been an upgrade in their status.

“I take it me and Kal gave you straight skinny about Bowman,” Teodorq ventured.

The Wisdom fingered his beard. “His assessment of the sodbusters was as you have said. Our legionnaires tell us they are busy fleeing from our might.”

“Cowards,” said Princess Anya. “They do not stand and fight, but strike by night and ambush.”

“Wise people,” suggested Sammi.

When he did not elaborate, the Wisdom and Princess looked to Teodorq, who explained. “A man fights from his own strengths, not from his enemy’s.”

“Fight from ambush, maybe run away, fight again later,” agreed Sammi. “One time whole plains tribe—not Teddy tribe but up north—come to hill country because we find poor little lost cows and take home to care for them. They get all their friends to come thank us for taking such good care, but in Ganesha’s Gorge all rocks come tumble down, make big cairn overtop them.”

The Wisdom gaped at him and Anya stared in horror. “You threw boulders on warriors? From the hilltops?”

“Best place throw boulders from.”

“That is not how an honorable man fights!”

“That what you call him, ‘honorable’ ? Our word dead.’ Mean same thing?”

The Wisdom turned to Teodorq. “What of your countryman? Is he also a fell fighter?”

“Kal? Maybe the best in the Serpentine clan, which means any Scorpion can beat him, but . . . Sure. Your guys fought him. What did they say?”

“He tried to deceive our prince. What should we do with him?”

Teodorq placed his hands together, though he did not bow over them. “Could you ask yer boss not to do Kal no permanent damage, like sitting him on top of that Spit?” More than the iron shirts and swords, that cruel method of execution drove home to Teo the alien nature of the people he had found himself among. A keen knife across the throat was far more merciful. If it were done, the Lore commanded, best that it be done quickly-

The chief minister cocked his head and stopped working his beard. “You surprise me, westerman. I thought he wanted to kill you!”

“Sure. But I don’t hold it against him. I killed his brother, and I’m responsible for another brother getting himself killed. Hard to get kissy-face after that.”

The princess spoke up. “Then why ask my father’s mercy for him?”

“Y’see, it’s like this,” Teodorq explained. “Kal and me, we gotta fight. The singers won’t have it no other way. And I don’t want it sung that when the time come I had an unfair advantage, like he was dead or maybe walkin’ funny. It ain’t good art. Kal, he’s a hero. He kept up a stalk cross half of World and all the way practically to the edge. So he ain’t no weenie, even if it was half dumb luck we crossed paths. And me . . . Well, I am Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand and modesty prevents me from numbering my stunts. But a final stunt needs two foes even-matched. It ain’t too much to ask—and might be more entertaining.”

The Wisdom gave that some thought. “If our kospathin does as you ask, plainsman, you could die.”

“Hell, Wiz, everybody dies. Only question is whether anyone sings about it afterward.” The Wisdom tugged on his beard. “Maybe your kind would fight well against the greens.”

The three westerners were put in the charge of Yar Yoodavig, the son of a swamper who had come north to Cliffside Keep years before. The yar—for it was a title and not a name—managed to conceal his deep delight at being given their care, and showed this in the tenderness with which he taught them.

“This here’s the kospathin’s Foreign Legion,” he told the new recruits, who in addition included a shortgrasser named Hidaq Upperbrook, on the run from someone’s husband, and the swamper P.Z. Emersavig. “Whatever you were before, makes no never mind,” the yar said. “Whoever you were before don’t matter none. Why you come here to Cliffside Keep, we don’t give a crap. This here’s a clean slate. Only matters if you can ride well and fight like a daemon.”

“Made in the shade,” whispered Kal to Teo. It was whispered under his breath and barely audible, but the yar heard him and sent Kal on a run around the training field. The men standing guard on the walls laughed, but none of the veterans in the compound cracked a smile.

“We gotta break you down into little pieces,” the yar explained, “so we can put you back together the way we want. This is the meanest, toughest company in the kospathin’s service and . . .”

Teodorq raised his hand, and the yar stopped his harangue and stared at him. “You gotta question, savage?”

“When do me and Kal get to fight?”

The yar looked as if he had sipped vinegar. “You in some kind of hurry? Soon as you learn how. If you’re gonna entertain the high and mighty you gotta know how to put on a decent show.”

“What I mean,” Teo said, “is that Kal’s gonna be a little winded when he gets back, and I don’t want it sung that I had unfair advantage.”

The yar showed his teeth. “That can be fixed.” And he sent Teo on a run around the grounds in Kal’s wake.

They trained at swordplay—at first with stout wooden rods against posts, then against Yoodavig himself, and many were the welts that Teodorq wore back to the barracks. The purpose of the long drills was what the yar called “muscle memory.”

“The last thing you got time for in a battle,” he told the trainees, “is for thinking about how to fight. Your body got to know how to do that without any help. Your mind . . .” And he thumped Emersavig’s skull with a thick forefinger for emphasis. “. . . assuming you got one, is for strategy and tactics, listening for orders, watching for banners, and all the rest of our craft.”

They learned the parts of the long sword—the supple fore-blade, sharp but easily cleared, and the stout aft-blade, on which an opponent’s stroke might be caught; the lower edge for cutting or hacking on the forehand service and the upper edge for doing so on the backhand. The blades were amazingly light for their length, which was about an arm’s reach, and Teodorq spent much time with the smith watching how they were made in a special furnace blasted with air from a bellows. The ironmen called this kind of iron stall, a word that meant “stubborn” in the sprock.

They learned the various guards and attacks, and how to dance seamlessly from one to another. They learned when to “go hard on the sword” and when to go soft; how to stab and hack and cut, and how to get out of a bind. And how to use the off-hand on the pommel for extra leverage.

It was every bit as nuanced as knife fighting and wrassling, which every plainsman sucked up with his mother’s milk.

“Too complicated,” Sammi complained one day, carefully outside the yar’s hearing. He counted on his fingers. “Spring from ambush, slit throat, run away. Much simpler. Not so much to learn.”

But nowhere in the practice yard was outside the yar’s hearing. “There’s no hiding on a killing field, stupid hillman!” he gently informed Sammi. “How you plan to spring from ambush on an open meadow?”

“Easy,” Sammi replied. “Not fight in open meadow. Ambush best in dark, crowded place.”

He won four laps around the practice field for that one—in helmet and breast-and-back.

World was a bigger place than Teodorq had ever imagined. World had always been the Great Grass, rolling off as far as the eye could see. The hill country to the west and the distant plateau to the north had only served to mark the boundaries; the center had remained the limitless prairies. There, great events had taken place. The rivalry of the Scorpion and Serpentine clans. The Great Trek West of the Gudawan Adyawan at the dawn of time. The war with the Pheasants and their allies when the hero Bardremow sunna Iyash had declared himself First-of-all-Firsts and tried to bring all the Great Grass under him, and bows had sung from the foothills to the Breaks.

But he had learned since leaving home that that had been only one small comer of world, and people elsewhere had never heard of any of these portentous events. Every people thought themselves at the center of World, and never was it actually so. Events of which no plainsman had ever heard—the war among the ironmen, the descent from the great plateau, the chivvying west of the shortgrassmen—would echo and redound on the Folk of the Great Grass. And even here, among so puissant a people as the iron men, events beyond their horizon had sent greenies to torment them.

In the barracks, Sammi spoke to Teodorq privately while the two of them cleaned and sharpened their blades. “Hey, stupid plainsman. Why you watch Kal so close during works out?”

Teo looked about the barracks, saw Kal at the far end with the other recruits and the gaming dice. He ran the whetstone along the upper edge. “You know what the yar says. ‘Eyes on the enemy.’ ‘Fight the opponent not the sword!’ ”

“Plus profanity. Sammi hear him say it.”

“Well, every man thinks different,” Teo told the hillman. “So every man fights different. The best place to beat a man is in his own mind. I need to know how Kal fights, get into his head. Which I grant you is tight quarters. You notice how he likes to swing his sword with both hands? Bad habit. The follow-through on that stunt leaves his right side exposed, which he ain’t got no guard.”

“Yeah?” said Sammi. He finished cleaning his weapon, returned it to his scabbard, and hung it on the rack. “Well, case you not notice, Kal studies Teddy real good, too. What bad habits you got?”

Teodorq could handle the swords more nimbly than even some of the more experienced legionnaires, who prior to coming to Cliffside Keep had known only bows or pikes. But Teodorq was accustomed to knife fights, and this was only a longer, sharper knife. He began to add knife tactics to his swordplay when Kal was not around.

Now and then, the princess would come down from the Keep to watch the men at practice, sometimes with the Wisdom, but other times with only her women as escort. There was a set of raised benches from which others might watch the yard, and she usually sat in the center of the lowest tier, chin cupped in both her hands. Teodorq always tried to put on a good showing when the princess was watching. In one mock combat against the wooden fencing post, he managed to land his blows in such a way as to carve out a tolerable face from the grain of the wood.

“Show-off,” Kal muttered.

“She comes to see Sammi,” the hillman explained in barracks that evening. Hidaq and P.Z. expressed skepticism. “Why you?” Hidaq asked.

“Sammi prettiest man in Cliffside.” He said this with the air of one stating the patently obvious.

“They must have some mighty ugly men here, then,” Kal answered.

Sammi looked around the barrack room and spread his hands as if his point had been proven.

Teodorq snorted derision. It seemed to him that the princess looked on the men as a trader at the Horse Fair looks upon a new remuda of stallions. Any time, he expected, she would come down from the viewing benches and check out at their teeth and inspect the soles of their feet.

And maybe take one of them out for a ride.

“When you think they gonna let us outside the fort?” Kal asked.

Teodorq looked up in surprise from his needlework. He had been repairing his vest. “They keeping us in?”

Kal blinked and cocked his head. “I see yer point, Rabbit. You an’ me, and even yer hillman here, could leave anytime we wanted to. But they probably think the guards and the walls are enough to stop deserters.”

The hillman smiled. “Sammi getting three meals and exercise, so no rush. Bide time. Consider options.”

A Point of a Sword

Because the Legion was primarily a scouting force, they trained on horseback as well, and here Teo and Kal excelled from the start, since they had been very nearly born in the saddle. Although the horses were larger and clumsier than their own prairie ponies, and both plainsmen were accustomed to fighting with the compound bow, they learned to swing their longswords from horseback without nicking their own mounts. Hidaq also performed adequately, but both Sammi and the swamper were learning new skills.

One day, the yar came onto the practice field and counted only four recruits. “Where the hell’s Sam Eagle?” he demanded. “He shirking?”

P.Z. looked around the meadow. “He was here just a while ago.”

The yar crossed his arms and glared at them. “He better put in an appearance real soon now.”

The grass at his feet rustled and seemed to come alive, and Sammi rose and held the point of his knife to the yar’s throat. He had decked his jerkin and trousers with grasses so that he had blended in with the ground.

The yar didn’t blink. “Good camo job, Sammi. You’re in the point guards, starting tomorrow. Report to Thewehdarosh.”

“Good. What point guards do?”

“They go out ahead of the Legion and scout things out.”

“Not so good.”

“And Sammi? Five laps.”

The recruits were issued their own swords at a ceremony attended by those of the Legion not out on sweep or garrison duty. Teodorq decided to call his sword Lifesaver. Kal called his Rabbit-killer. Sammi only shook his head. Hillmen did not name their weapons.

“Maybe tomorrow,” said Kal off-handedly while the shaman sprinkled the recruits with a sprig of holly dipped in water. “Maybe tomorrow they let us kill you.”

“Us?”

The five recruits stood in a row with their swords in fool’s guard, points straight down resting on the ground in front of them. Kal stroked the haft of his sword. “Me and my friend, here.”

“Maybe,” Teodorq answered. “But yuh gotta know these ironmen here are spreadin’ west. Old Wiz, he been asking you questions about the Great Grass, ain’t he?”

Kal spat on the ground. “Yeah, them sod-busters won’t be much to stop ’em. What about it?”

“Think somebody oughta tell the Gudawan Adyawan?” He meant the tribe to which both the Serps and his own Scorpions belonged. “All the clans gotta work together if these kettleheads come west.”

“I’ll tell ’em ya said so when I see ’em, bein’ they’s yer last words an’ all.”

“Just saying, sunna Vikeram. Remember, there’s one song finer even than the two heroes who finally fight.”

Kal frowned. “Yeah? I wouldn’t count on it, was I you.” He swung his sword straight up in salute and Teodorq tensed, just a little. Kal laughed and Teodorq remembered he was supposed to do the same as part of the ceremony. Kal kissed his blade.

“Don’t you agree, Rabbit-killer?”

With the rest of the Legion, they practiced turning their horses from single file into columns of four and into line of battle. Apparently, all ironmen fought by lining up and charging at the enemy in unison, yelling lulu-lu! and swinging their swords. The kettle heads used a long pointy stick, but the legionnaires were more lightly armed. “Speed, not weight, is our advantage,” the yar explained. “Let the pots and pans crash together. Our job is to ride far and fast, find and harass the enemy, and bring back word to the battle line. Light cavalry, heavy cavalry. Each has a job to do.”

It was during one of these practice skirmishes that Kal decided he had waited long enough. Teo and the Serp had been placed in opposing lines and as the two lines closed, Kal and his mount shouldered aside his neighbor. This opened a hole in his own line, but it put him directly facing Teodorq sunna Nagarajan the Ironhand.

They were supposed to be using the wooden practice swords, since the objective of the session was tactics, but Kal had unsheathed Rabbit-killer and swung it at Teo as they closed.

Teo leaned back flat against his mount’s withers—an old prairie stunt—and the blade whistled by harmlessly. That gave him a chance to rein, turn, and pull Lifesaver from over his shoulder all in one smooth motion. Teodorq assessed his situation while Kal completed his own turn. The sun was in the west, which meant the light would be in his eyes when he and Kal closed. The terrain in the meadow was flat but undulated and Kal’s first pass had placed him not only with the sun to his back, but on the higher ground.

“Didn’t think you had the smarts, sunna Vikeram,” he called out.

Kal was brave, skilled, but prone to the reckless, so Teodorq fell to considering how he might turn that to his advantage. At some point, he was certain, Kal would swing double-handed as hard as he could and open himself to a counterstroke. Assuming that Teo could dodge that first stroke.

The other legionnaires had pulled up on the flanks and were watching with varying degrees of professional interest. Some were shouting encouragements to one combatant or the other. Others were taking bets. Sammi was waiting for some sign and had pulled his boot-dagger from its sheath. But no man wants his deeds sung as treachery, so Teodorq shook his head and Sammi reholstered the knife.

At that point, Yar Yoodavig rode between the combatants with his own longsword on sky guard. He pulled up hard on the reins and shouted. “All right! You two savages been aching for a fight since they first give you to me. Now I hate to put all that training into a man only to see it go down the outhouse, but the kospathin said to allow it, so you have it to do. But you owe the boss-man this much. Wait till he gets here so he can watch.” He turned, checked rein, and turned back. “And get off my damned horses! I may got to lose one or both of you, but trained warhorses are hard to come by.”

Teodorq slid easily off his mount and Kal, seeing his initial surprise attack had failed, did likewise. A slap on the rump sent both horses trotting off the field, and the two men faced one another on foot. Kal held his sword “shoulder arms,” both hands gripping the handle, the flat resting against his right shoulder.

Shortly, the party’ from the Keep filed into the observers’ benches. Someone laid down pillows for them to sit on and draped the Tiger banner over the banister. The kospathin sat in the center, flanked by his daughter and his Wisdom, with the other courtiers spread around them. The Wisdom scowled, whispered to his prince, but received a vigorous shake of the head. Teo suspected the advisor wanted to stop the fight.

Teodorq sighed. He had it to do, and that was for sure. He stood with his sword point down, resting on the ground in fool’s guard. He was apparently not on-guard at all, but from this position, he could transition swiftly to any number of other stances. He expected a more straightforward attack from Kal, but hoped he would put on a show good enough to satisfy the First.

The argument between the prince and his Wisdom concluded and the princess waved a white banner to signal the start of the duel. Sometimes, Teo thought that she was the most bloodthirsty of the lot.

Kal, as expected, rushed forward with his sword held in the “batter’s stance”—the hilt gripped in both hands with the blade over his right shoulder, ready to swing into a hack or a slice as opportunity presented. Teodorq waited unmoving until his foe was three arms-length’s away, then he swung Lifesaver up into “the bull,” holding the hilt beside his head with his left arm crossed over, ready to push the pommel. This aimed the point of the sword at Kal’s face and blocked the downward motion of Rabbit-killer on the aft part of the blade. Kal, disinclined to impale himself, checked his rush, spun to Teodorq’s left, and disengaged.

Kal held his sword in “plow,” arm extended from the waist. Teodorq stepped forward, brushed the fore aside and thrust in long-point. Kal retreated again, but spun and threw an understrike, which Teo parried with an “iron pinwheel.” Both he and Kal reset the combat.

“You ain’t as easy as I thought you’d be,” said Kal.

Teodorq grinned. “Hadn’t planned to be.”

Kal rushed him with several hacks from the left and right, but Teo voided them and shifted guards. He stepped out in the batter’s stance, made a right passing step forward and settled the blade onto his upper right arm as he turned his body into a left “augur.” From there, he lifted the hilt up, over, and behind his head to settle into a left-handed batter; then took a left passing step backwards, settling the blade on his left arm in a right augur as he turned. Kal blinked, unsure of how to attack, swung an overhand hack that Teo easily parried, then voided the battle space.

The two circled each other clockwise, swords held one-handed to the side in long-point. Teo waited his chance then dashed across the circle with a wide sweeping cut. Kal blocked it with a cross strike, as expected, but Teo spun about and stood on the high ground with his back to the sun and his sword held in “sky guard” beside his head. Kal faked a rush, but Teo did not strike and the Serp took a step back.

Each time Kal stepped into Teo’s shadow, Teo shifted to put the sun back in his opponent’s eyes. He wasted no time feeling sorry for the Serp. Kal had woken up that morning looking for trouble and had no complaints now that he had found it.

They danced a few more passages, their feet skating as if on water. They would close, exchange three or four blows, then void the battle space. Now and then, voices arose from those watching from the viewing benches, commenting on this stroke or that guard, but Teo paid them no mind. Something more dramatic was needed than the moves they had learned from the yar if they were going to impress the kospathin.

Teo swung in a horizontal slice and made a complete pirouette throwing a second stroke as he came around. Such moves were dramatic, but dangerous. One should never present one’s back to a man with a long sharp sword.

But Kal had dropped into a three-point, like a runner poised for the signal, and the blade passed harmlessly over his head. He sprang, sword extended in longpoint, and Teo backed out barely in time.

Finally, Kal said, “Screw this shit,” and charged with his sword to the sky. Teo had been waiting for this and took the blow on his aft with a Bull Guard. Kal went hard on the sword and Teo found himself in a bind. He swung Kal’s fore out of line and twisted into a cut with the back edge of his sword, drawing first blood.

This time, Kal did not back off, but swung from the opposite quarter and again put Teo in a bind. This time, Teo reached out and grabbed both swords by the blade at the point where they crossed, pulling hard and prying Rabbit-killer from an astonished Kal’s hand. Because they had bound swords at the aft, the blades did not cut through Teo’s thick leather gloves.

Kal dropped to his knee and pulled a quillon dagger from his boot scabbard. He used the crossguard to catch Teo’s stroke—and paused.

For Teodorq had pulled his stroke.

“So,” Kal said. “Ya want it like that?”

Teo smiled. “There’s one song better than the two heroes who meet. Why can’t we let them sing it?”

“You ready to take that chance?”

In answer, Teo tossed both swords aside and pulled his own dagger from his boot.

“That’s more like it,” Kal said with a grin. “This is how two plainsmen fight. Face to face, close quarters.” He paused again, then said, “I mean to avenge Chelwy. Blood for blood.”

Teo spread his arms. “He came on me too sudden. He had cast aside his scabbard.”

“Yeah, Chelwy was an obnoxious little twerp, but he was my kid brother. You know how that goes. Did he die well?”

Teo remembered that Chelwy had died screaming and soiling himself. When he had tried to ambush Teo, he had never imagined himself as the slain. The last look on his face when the knife slid in had been one of vast surprise.

“He fought well for a man so young,” Teo lied. “Had he not pressed me so hard, I might not have had to kill him.” In truth it had been Teo’s own surprise and anger at being attacked and his own loss of control that had led to the slaying; but there was no point in confusing Kal with such details.

“He never knew how to listen,” Kal said. “Now he ain’t listening to anyone anymore.” Kal charged suddenly and Teo crouched into a dancer’s crouch, spinning on his left leg and scything with his right. Kal fell and Teo leapt atop him. They seized each other’s knife hand by the wrists.

Kal threw a leg straddle and the two rolled across the grass flailing. The watching legionnaires gathered round in a circle shouting encouragement to both fighters until a call from the herald bade them open up for the First’s view.

“Blood for blood,” whispered Kal. “Ya know what I gotta do.”

Teo had entwined his legs with Kal’s so that the two of them seemed almost a single organism. He nodded and relaxed his grip on Kal’s knife arm slightly. The blade touched his shoulder and ran like a line of fire down his arm. The blood ran hot.

“Break,” he said to Kal; but Kal hesitated. A deeper slice would cut Teo’s bicep, maiming him. It was a sore temptation to a weak man.

Teo led him not into temptation by executing a shrug-and-roll, escaping from the hold and whipping his knife to Kal’s throat simultaneously with Kal’s mirror move.

“Well, now, Rabbit,” said the Serp. “Looks like a tie.”

The next day, Teodorq and Kal, along with Sammi o’ th’ Eagles, were brought into the great hall before the kospathin. The prince spoke in the ironman yashiq and the Wisdom translated not only into plavver but also into a passable sprock.

“He’s pretty sharp for an old man,” Kal said under his breath. “Still gripes me how he was picking up the sprock while he was teaching me bo-yashiq”

A tall yellow-haired man with pale eyes struck the floor with his staff and said something Wisdom Sharee Mikahali translated as, “Hear now the justice of Aya Herpstone, kospathin of Cliffside Keep.”

“Proverbial is his justice,” cried the sidemen lining the hall. Teodorq suspected that anyone disagreeing with that proverb had long-since ceased to line the hall, but the cry had a ceremonial sound to it, like when the shamans sang upon the ancestors and the Folk responded with ancient lines.

“Be it known that in a display of skill and bravery, the Men of the West have engaged in a fight to the death . . .”

“Hey,” muttered Sammi. “Leave me out of it.”

“. . . And while We of Cliffside Keep admire such pointless bravery, the offense over which they quarrel touches not on the honor of Cliffside Keep, House Tiger, or the Little Father of the North, and therefore We declare it null, void, and of no merit within Our holdings or those of the Little Father and his other children. We take all such offense on Our own head in mercy, and will regard any further attempt by Karakalan Vikeramof or Theodore Nagaramof to strike at one another, either directly or through such an intermediary as Sam Iggleson, as an offense against Our Mercy and against Our Own Person, to be punished as dogs are, at one grade above the Spike.”

Teodorq wondered if that was one grade better or worse than being impaled and decided that it was better not to ask. The lord evidently had other fates in mind for them than mere entertainment. He regarded Kal and Sammi from the comers of his eyes. The Serp glowered; Sammi seemed thoughtful.

“Further, given that they have revealed themselves as fell fighters, it is Our desire that these three men be enrolled in our Foreign Legion and sent to scout Our enemies.”

It was a subtle move, a mere flick of the eyes, but the First glanced toward the Wisdom when he said that, and that was when Teodorq decided who the real chieftain of Cliffside Keep was. The kospathin was to all appearance himself a fell fighter. His muscles came from swinging that long sword from horseback; and his scars proved he did it well, for they were bold enough that anyone less expert would have died in the fight that won them. But the clever mind rules the hale body and, as the bowmaster calls the shots on a hunt, the chief minister aimed his lord at targets that he chose.

After the speech, they were walked through a fearsome oath calling upon numerous gods whose natures were unclear but whose threatened retributions were not. Even Kal went a little pale at the penalties foretold. They were, after all, on these gods’ turf.

Teodorq compared the oath to the one Jamly-the-ghost had given them in the name of the Commonwealth of Suns. There had been a threat behind them too, given that he and Sammi had been “unauthorized personnel,” but the words had been higher and prouder and had not been stuffed with such dire warnings as to suggest mistrust. This alone told him much of the ways of the ironmen. Despite their talk of honor, oathbreakers must be common enough among them to warrant such sureties.

Sammi grumbled. “Too many oath,” he said. “Soon one oath break another.”

“Dontcha worry, Rabbit,” Kal told Teodorq that night in barracks. “I given my word, and a Serp keeps his words. But I gotta worse problem now.”

“What’s that?” asked Sammi o’ th’ Eagles as he stashed his kit under his bed and pulled the blankets off, for he preferred to lie on the floor. Soft bed make soft man, he had explained.

“The First took Rabbit’s crime on his own head. You heard it. Now I gotta kill the First. Ain’t that a kick in the butt.”

Sammi grinned. “You get more in butt than kick, you try it.”

Teodorq told Sammi it would be hard to search out Iabran and Varucciyamen if they were stuck at Cliffside Keep. But he was pretty sure the starfolk’s encampments did not lie back west and, while he did not doubt his ability to escape his captors even on unfamiliar ground, a good scout knew better than to dash headlong into unknown territory. There were other ways to learn how the land lay.

Kal said, “So they’re sending us to fight greens? I heard they fight with thunder and lightning.”

Teodorq sat on the edge of his bunk. “That can’t be good.”

Sammi said, “We no hear of greens on the short grass.”

Teodorq smiled and crossed his legs at the ankles, coupled his hands behind his head. “Which means they’re somewhere east of here. So it’s just as well. We was going that way anyhow.”

Teodorq sunna Nagarajan did not believe that there was any longer a Commonwealth of Suns or that their commission meant anything; but he continued to paint the stripes across his biceps and would ask after the two starman towns whenever he encountered other men.

THE TRIPLE SUN: A GOLDEN AGE TALE

Rajnar Vajra

A silver Venusian, a golden Martian, and an Earthling walked into a bar.

Sounds like a joke, right? Nope. Actually an unfunny blunder the three of us that Friday evening. We were a weekend away from our first trial mission, three young cadets in training for EE treasure hunts, out for semi-innocent fun in an unfamiliar city.

I was and am the Earthling, female by all accounts, and since my skin hasn’t been tweaked to handle extraterrestrial environments, it’s just the ochre bequeathed to me by my Iranian parents, bronzed by exposure to UV rays that sneer their way through SPF 200.

Most people call EE personnel “Space Rangers,” but officially, in English, we’re Exo-planetary Explorers. We also have nicknames; the one that even we use, “blips,” comes from how far we get from Earth. Prior to our San Diego gaffe, I’d never heard it used as an obscenity.

So my two crewmates and I strolled into that bar, and because we’d asked a too-vague question of a street vendor—namely, “Where’s the nearest vacuum-head hangout?”—we’d entered the wrong drinking hole.

Plus side: floating holoview mugs of beer with rising bubbles, holoview window-framing neon, a scuffed hardwood floor with interestingly varied stains, an artificial ambient haze and a genuine mahogany bar with a chromed top-rail reflecting the colorful lighting and dour expressions of the barstool inhabitants. The place even smelled right: beer and harder stuff mixed with exhaled fumes of the same. Also the surprisingly inoffensive cooked-rice odor of what Priam calls “space farts,” digestive byproducts of the muscle and bone preserver REKNIT, essential for people who spend much time working in microgravity.

Negative side: out of forty or more in uniform, not one EE officer or cadet. The vendor hadn’t lied, but these guzzlers were hulks, Space Navy or Sky SEALs with not a silver or golden skin among them. We’d trained in isolation from such stay-at-home beings and had forgotten they’d surely infest the part of the city closest to the Spaceport Authority.

We should’ve backed right out, but just then Micah stepped on something hard—maybe someone’s lost tooth—and every head turned our way. The place wasn’t quiet, but when Micah Abraham Cohen, our medical of ficer and primary technician, steps on something, it stays stepped on; the silver oaf weighs in at nearly a quarter ton on Earth, and whatever he crushed snapped like a firecracker.

“Sorry,” he muttered his fog-horn bass. “Please don’t mind us.”

Plenty of bloodshot eyes judged us unfavorably as I tugged on the arms of my two comrades with the door in mind. Then some brawny-looking female CPO began waving us away while holding her nose. Priam Galanis, our astrogator, boy genius, and team hothead, took this behavior as an invitation to rush forward to get an unnecessary confrontation underway. He stopped scant inches in front of the offending party, his golden hair falling forward as he braked as if it wanted to attack first. Micah and I exchanged glances, me having to look way up, and hurried to flank Priam. By the time we did, the CPO had far more flankers.

Nothing good, I thought correctly, would come of this.

“Got a problem?” Priam asked with an extra rasp in his already annoying voice.

The CPO was a head taller than Priam and twice as wide. “What if I do, you puny yellow blip?” She glanced around at her buddies. “I have a problem with all conceited assholes who spend their time putting everyone else in harm’s way.”

Point conceded. Deep space exploration certainly involves potential risks for our species, although so far we’ve brought nothing but benefit. But public risk didn’t much account for her hostility. Orbital sailors don’t get half our training, or half the tech. They can’t get the ultra-portable inertia gear we all wear, quantum-spin-liquid crystals woven into our uniforms. As for our cutting-edge individualized biomech, sorry hulks.

One such gift, reserved for pilots and pilots in training, allowed me to see something our hosts couldn’t: a subtle purple shimmer around Priam’s body. That meant he’d just gone far overbound, bulking up his inertial field, and the latest biomech allowed him to do this without any hulks catching on.

So when he let his facial expression do the trash talking for him, and some Sky SEAL gorilla so enormous that his head nearly reached to Micah’s chin threw a mighty punch into Priam’s solar plexus, the snap of oversized wrist bones breaking made me wince but didn’t surprise me. In effect, every part of my Martian crewmate had, temporarily, become almost unmovable. Naturally, Priam himself couldn’t move in that state. So he began varying his inertia to accomplish his wonders. First, a fist that some Sky SEAL made the mistake of treating like a joke. Then hands reached out to grab him but he bounced away with every touch. He had the gall to laugh.

Lecture time, quick I promise. On, say, the Moon, ignoring minuscule mutual attraction effects, objects of differing masses would fall at the same speed, yes? Not necessarily! Our ability to control inertial moment has rendered Newton’s Laws of Motion to be special cases. Inertia being the resistance of mass to any change in motion or direction, limit both that and air resistance for one mass, and it would fall progressively much faster than an unmodified mass.

Here’s another tidbit. It isn’t only gravity that limits jumping ability. It takes a heap of muscular energy to overcome inertia and get your body accelerated enough to get off the ground, not counting the raw strength required for liftoff. But it also takes inertia or some other force to keep rising once your feet leave the floor no matter how hard you push off. So if a jumper removes their personal inertia entirely, some truly exotic things can happen.

While Priam was keeping the masses entertained with a floatation trick I’d read about but never seen performed, two especially observant hulks noticed Micah and I standing around. They discounted Micah, assuming he was a harmless pacifist, and focused on me.

Venusians. While they tend to be big, they aren’t all weak due to our sister planet’s somewhat lower gravity. Being forced to spend much of their time within environment domes under cramped conditions has encouraged most to become contemplative mystics of one flavor or another. But many practice various arts including the martial variety, and more than a few make their oversized bodies as strong as possible.

Micah was a tad slow and a peaceable sort of fellow—a Zen enthusiast, in fact—but weak and harmless he wasn’t. He intercepted the pair headed toward me, shoved them back into the swarm around Priam, then he waded into the swarm himself and began grabbing whatever limbs were convenient, using those as handles to throw hulk after hulk aside. I almost smiled at the way he kept apologizing, and noticed how careful he was to avoid hurling anyone into knives, glass, or table corners. Of course, he kept smiling gently. Still, none of the thrown tried to return to what Priam, whose words tended to be somewhat legacy, would call “the fray.”

Don’t know who alerted the MPs, but they made a spectacular entrance while tossing hissing canisters around, and I figured the shark-like snouts they wore were gasmasks when everyone else starting falling. Didn’t feel the gas affecting me, but being upright seemed too much of a bother.

The dressing-down went pretty much as I expected except for who did the dressing, and our punishment. The pecking order at the Academy goes plebs, cadets, explorers, mentors, supervisors, envisions, and at the summit, the commandant, Dr. Leslie Go, popularly known as “the Chief.” Getting our lumps from the Chief herself came as a shock. She wasn’t pleased with us, and while her voice remained quiet, I got the full message.

“Cadet Emily Asgari,” she murmured at one point after turning sad eyes my way, “I am particularly disappointed in you. You are team leader and therefore responsible for controlling your crewmates. Furthermore, you alone are native to this planet and should be capable of navigating its challenges.”

It took all my willpower to keep myself from turning to glare at Priam. I wouldn’t have minded adding a second glare aimed at Micah. The big goof smiled as if getting reamed was all in a day’s blessing.

“Because of all this, cadets,” the Chief continued, “you will not be undertaking a normal trial mission.” She paused and I could hear someone swallowing hard—maybe it was me. “Instead, your leave is cancelled and you are now assigned to the Abreathon World project where you will assist Explorer Team 32 dismantle their safe-camp prior to abandoning the planet. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Commandant,” we all said, but not quite in unison.

“If you comport yourselves impeccably, I may consider allowing you to resume your chosen career path. If you do not, there will no longer be a place for any of you within this organization. Report to Supervisor Clark at oh-six-hundred Sunday for new transportation assignments. Dismissed.”

“She was smoking mad,” Priam remarked in midair after we’d jumped from the twentieth-floor leaping bay, falling toward the enclosed courtyard below. “Did you see the way her little finger kept twitching? I bet she wanted to strangle us.” He giggled.

We all went unbound before our feet hit the pavement, and came to an instant, soft stop with the first contact between shoe-soles and concrete. With all the practice at this we’d had, we could probably do it in REM sleep.

I blasted Priam with the eye-beams I’d been withholding for the last half-hour. “Wouldn’t mind strangling someone myself.”

“Oh c’mon, Em. You know that she-hulk started it; besides, it was fun.”

“Not for me. And you’d better hope we never run into any of your playmates again. I think you made an impression.”

Micah chuckled, a sound like a clogged sink un-stuffing, but said nothing.

The shuttle trip was typical. Five other cadet triads infested the cabin plus two mentors and one lofty envision deposited in the only single-seat row. Some pilots as a courtesy do a verbal countdown before takeoff, but our guy didn’t bother and we eased up into the air like a bubble rising in the beer we never got to drink on Friday.

I sneaked a peek at some other cadets. They seemed universally perky if somewhat tense. Clearly, they were headed toward something other than a punishment assignment. We arrived at the orbital station on time, probably to the picosecond.

The station smelled of citrus disinfectant, machine oil, sweat, onions, and long unwashed clothes just like the previous two times I’d been here. Nasty, but you adjust. From the virtual ports in the shuttle, it hadn’t appeared particularly big or impressive. Inside, it was both.

A team of station “priests,” glorified traffic cops, waited for us in the debarkation terminal and distributed us new arrivals between various corridors with brusque gestures and without asking questions. “Data implants,” Priam explained unnecessarily and too loudly.

Of course Team Asgari was the only triad sent down the leftmost corridor. After a few hundred yards of nothing but wide and tall hallways encased in accordion pleats, we took a sharp right turn and stepped over a high threshold through a doorway with bank-vault-thick walls. Gravity increased suddenly enough to make us stumble. Priam groaned dramatically but before I could fake feeling sorry for him he said, “airlock,” which might’ve been helpful if Micah and I had misplaced our brains during the trip.

Seeing as company waited for us in the form of a mentor I’d never met, I kept my thoughts sequestered.

The mentor was a Martian at least two generations older than Priam. His golden skin had developed a grayish cast that I’d never seen on one of his kind. Welcome,” he said with reverse enthusiasm, “to U.W. Flightship Skylark. I am Mentor Hector Michealides and have received detailed instructions from god concerning you.”

Micah’s omnipresent smile widened. “Sir, what do you mean by ‘god’ ?”

“Moron,” Priam snapped, “he means the Chief.”

“Just so,” Michealides stated, “but in the future, I will handle all questions directed to me. Is that understood, Cadet Galanis?”

“Yes, sir. Clear as clarity.”

After giving Priam a look that would freeze hydrogen, the mentor studied me.

“Cadet Asgari, you are the pilot and triad leader, yes?” It wasn’t a question. “You are responsible for your crewmates.”

“Yes, Mentor.”

“Listen carefully, all three of you. Since we are evacuating all personnel on Abreathon, we carry minimum crew plus a few camp-disassembly specialists. Thus we have an abundance of cabins available for this leg of our journey. Each of you will be assigned an individual space on level delta. I suggest that you treasure the privacy because you will have precious little on the return lap. You must remain fit. Therefore, you will perform specific exercises at specific times each ship-day and will receive instructions for doing so. You will remain in your cabins for the journey’s duration. Cadets Asgari and Cohen may converse on your personal triad channel; but you, Cadet Galanis, will find your communications biomech disabled until landing.”

Priam’s eyes widened in outrage. “Why only me?”

“Your recent behavior in San Diego was recorded. You needn’t feel entirely singled out. None of you will have access to the many entertainment options available to the more deserving. All necessities will be delivered. You will be monitored. Constantly.

“Once we reach our destination, prepare to work harder than you’ve ever worked in your short and foolish lives. You will find this to be the kind of work aptly described as ‘backbreaking’ and you will receive no praise or appreciation from the explorers who have labored in vain for over thirty standard years to make their project successful. Any final questions? We will not meet again until we set down.”

“Two questions, sir,” Priam said. “Why is the gravity here set so high? I’ve read that Abreathon’s gravity is reported as only 3 percent higher than Earth’s.”

“I’d be surprised, Cadet, if you are fully acclimated to even 1g given your history, and you will not find a 3 percent increase trivial considering the physical efforts awaiting you. All tasks ahead will be arduous, and everyone aboard will benefit from six to eight hours a ship-day of Earth-plus gravity. What is your final question?”

Priam nodded. “May I peruse the project reports during the trip?”

Michealides’s expression shifted. His face didn’t radiate joy and goodwill.

“For what possible purpose, Cadet?”

“For a chance to salvage the project.”

That bold statement stunned the mentor into a not-so-brief silence. “You believe that you, with no practical experience and without ever having set foot on the planet, could make a discovery that has evaded fifty trained minds for well over a quarter century?”

The Martian smiled in a way that I hoped didn’t appear as offensive to Michealides as it did to me.

“Why not? I’m probably more intelligent than anyone you’ve ever met.”

Another show-stopper, but the mentor recovered faster this time around. “You may be more arrogant than anyone I’ve previously met, but I will grant your request with one condition: if you can offer nothing new and useful after studying the reports, I will consider your triad as having failed this mission. You will still be required to do the work involved, but upon our return to Earth, you will all be discharged from the EE.”

Before I could object, and before Micah could even begin to react, the conceited loudmouth said, “Accepted.”

The injustice of all this made me feel as if my eyeballs were about to pop out, and I was a split-hair away from letting the Universe know it and damn the consequences, but I remembered a trick that I’d figured out through bitter experience. In crucial situations, the idea is to say whatever I want to say in my head and listen to it before letting it out.

So no satisfying and disastrous venting, just “I request access to the same material, sir, for both Cadet Cohen and myself so long as that doesn’t, um, increase the number of useful insights you demand.”

He eyed me, tilting his head slightly as if dubious about my sanity. “Are you also more brilliant than all those dullards I’ve previously encountered?”

“I doubt it, sir.”

“Then I approve your request.” He made no sign or signal that I could see, but two big crewmembers strode out of a corridor and joined us. “Ensigns Gopal and Lincoln,” he stated without looking at them, “will guide you to your cabins. You will not converse on the way.”

He turned and shambled off without a parting word for anyone or a tear of regret at being separated from us. The ensign I assumed was Gopal from his Dravidian features suddenly grinned at us and made a wide after-you gesture with one long arm. Ensign Lincoln, who had Afro-American features but whose skin was two shades lighter than mine, was less polite. He put a hand on Priam and Micah’s backs and shoved. Or tried to. With the moment of advance warning, the Martian had gone overbound and it takes more than a light push to shift Micah. As though they’d just been waiting to take a stroll, both of my crewmates took off on their own just as Lincoln began to put some real muscle into his follow-up shove. As a result, he stumbled and from the adoration on his face I guessed we hadn’t made a new friend.

Since they may need to accommodate Venusians on occasion, not all starship cabins are cramped. Joy! Mine was. I hoped Micah had fared better and Priam had been stuffed into a closet.

A datagon arrived with my hospital-grade lunch, delivered by a smirking but silent Ensign Gopal who departed with more haste than I appreciated since I hoped to get a little more info out of him. I pulled the datagon from its case and was pleased to find the charge circle showing full power. I booted it up while munching a burrito-like object with a faint odor that made me grateful the thing was almost flavorless. Probably an example of recycling’s downside.

The screen appeared—military grade holo. After I put the default icons where I like them and peeked at the directory, I opened up the project report with the earliest timestamp, adjusted video and audio, and sat back without popcorn to watch and listen.

I’d trained on Mars and Venus during my sophomore cadet year, and while I’d never been to another star-system, the difference between interplanetary and interstellar flight is mainly a matter of degree. Both use vector drive, where inertia is channeled in specific directions while maintaining a kind of neutral bubble within the spaceship. And both use a gravity “windshield” to deal with dust, gasses, or asteroids in the way. On interstellar trips, however, the g-shield has to be a nightmare vortex, an obstacle-devouring wormhole that would devour the ship itself if both vortex and ship weren’t constantly maintaining the same speed. No one knows where the consumed material winds up, and there’s plenty gobbled up at FTL velocities. Maybe unimaginable creatures from some unimaginable dimension will show up someday with one hell of an illegal dumping fine.

Sorry, I digress. My point is that when the room seemed to tilt slightly, I knew we were on our way. Despite the redirection of forces that acts to insulate passengers from uncomfortable-to-fatal inertial and gravitational effects, a little extra pull from the g-shield always leaks into every spaceship I’ve flown on. Most people don’t feel the effect, but my implanted pilot biomech makes me supersensitive to directional tugs. So I tend to overcompensate by leaning in the opposite direction, which probably makes me look silly. I tried to ignore the annoyance and focused on the earliest report.

First thing I noticed was the slightly grainy quality of the video despite the gon’s best up-scaling. Again, a normal person wouldn’t have seen any problem; but with my visual biomech, it was like looking through a window that never lets you forget there’s a window between you and the view. Funny how you forget how much technology has advanced until you bump up against what it used to be. The audio sounded state-of-the-art to me. Then again, pilots don’t steer by listening, so my hearing hadn’t been enhanced.

If you’re wondering why I’m blathering rather than relaying the report, it’s because nothing much worth repeating managed to squeeze out between the layers of dry pompousness constituting that initial file. In essence, this waste of terabytes, recorded by some Nordic-looking blip before he actually landed on Abreathon, was a geological, atmospheric, gravitational, electromagnetic, and what-have-you data-spew combined with an irrelevant personal resume.

The second file made me sit up and pay real attention.

I’d never been on an extraterrestrial world with native vegetation or wildlife unless you count people as wildlife. Abreathon had a generous helping of both. Its versions of trees and shrubs displayed a boggling variety of colors and textures, but the most alien aspect was the nearly transparent crystalline structures jutting out from every stalk, dendrite, and bole. These, according to file two’s narrator who never exhibited enough ego to selfie, were the local leaves and evergreen needles. They were gorgeous, jewel-like, and often progressed as a spectrum of subtle tints along each stalk. Some were dichroic or contained mineral-like inclusions. Most carried enough of an electrical charge to occasionally spark from leaf to leaf. The cumulative effect of all this arcing in even a small forest generated sufficient thermal noise to make radio transmission very difficult.

The plants also had a bad habit of releasing a thin mist at night that added up to a more-than-pea-soup fog. That, combined with the constant glow from countless random little discharges kept the forests hidden after sunset from video recorders of all sorts including those set up for infrared and ultraviolet night-vision. The result? Almost nothing had been learned about the nightlife of plants or animals.

Speaking of animals, these were even more interesting than the plants. Again, quite a variety but most had shapes based on a hexagonal frame. Evolution here had come up with an improvement on bones: hollow torsion tubes lighter yet stronger than the terrestrial equivalent. But evolution had failed to invent legs, feet, paws, or hooves. Instead, most critters ambulated on six thin, rippling edges. Some were surprisingly fast considering, but I could’ve outrun the quickest at a medium jog. Arms of any kind were rare on this world, but the beasts had evolved creative replacements such as living nets of thin tissue that shot out of vertical crevices in the bodies of certain predators. The nets, when well-aimed, trapped smaller animals and then retracted into the crevices, hauling the unlucky prey along. At a guess, the nets were selectively sticky. Nature, I suppose, is the mother of necessity.

While only a few species used the crevice-net system, the animal population had heavily bought into the crevice idea. I stared, fascinated by the variety of trapping, manipulating, or locomotion-assisting organic devices emerging from those crevices. A trio of animals using needle-coated bubbles on stalks to snag ruby leaves caught my eye, partly because they were unusually bulky, partly because they alone had tentacle-like limbs jutting from torso crevices, but mostly because those particular critters had been highlighted in the video with extra brightness and edited-in indicator arrows. I had more than a hunch why these diners merited special attention.

The biological tour went on for over an hour, but it sure held my interest. My own dinner arrived, and while chewing on mystery ingredients, I decided that Abreathon’s jewel leaves probably tasted better. I left most of whatever it was uneaten and called up the third report. This was the one that counted.

As I’d expected, it featured those highlighted beasts from the previous file, which somehow suggested hexagonal cows despite any resemblance I could think of. I gestured at the scale icon, and a measuring grid in thin translucent lines covered the picture. My six-sided bovines were big; the largest stood nearly three meters tall at its . . . apex, the place where boney structures overlapped to create a sort of spiral crown.

The video zoomed in on one of the hexicows and I wiggled a finger at the transport icon to slow the action. Each of this bovine’s four tentacles bifurcated at their ends into something akin to two-fingered hands. All four periodically reached out to snag leaves and then swung around to deposit said leaves into another tentacle’s home crevice; apparently they weren’t flexible enough to reach their own crevices. An odd arrangement, I thought, since the beasts already had an efficient bubble-with-needles food-grabbing system, but nature does have its Department of Redundancy Department. And not nearly as odd as what adorned every tentacle: metallic bands or bracelets. I expanded the picture enough to bring a band into focus. The tiny knobs and curlicue inscriptions implied one thing: technology at the level of microelectronics.

Might as well have not bothered fiddling with the video because it did exactly what I’d done when I let it resume at normal speed, even enlarging the same tentacle. It figured. Whatever purpose the metallic objects had been built for, discovering them changed everything for the EE exploration team.

Intelligent species may be a rare commodity in our galaxy although it’s possible we just keep landing on the wrong planets. Still, out of 1,244 explored worlds excluding Abreathon, we’d only found two noticeably inhabited by creatures that made the IQ cut. And neither had advanced enough to have developed microelectronics.

The next three files followed up on the big discovery. A feeling of celebration and excitement pervaded the reports, even when the recorder wasn’t aimed at the bright eyes and grins of EE personnel. The recorder had mostly remained focused on hexicows, which the blips on the scene had named “abreathers,” to my disgust. I decided to stick with the far superior “hexicows,” at least privately.

For inventors of microelectronics, these aliens seemed amazingly dull. They ate, pooped, and engaged in what the narrator claimed was reproductive activity without any signs of enthusiasm. I suppose they slept. The reports failed to reveal when they got out their soldering irons or whatever to work their high-tech wonders but the assumption was that this got done in the fog-shrouded night. One video captured a hexicow giving birth, a no-fuss affair where the little one dropped from one of the parents’ side-crevices and fell to the ground without generating evident parental interest or concern. The newborn was a miniature of its mother, assuming the father hadn’t given birth, except that the tentacles that made this species so distinctive hadn’t grown in yet. In an impressive gymnastic feat for a creature without arms or legs, the little fellow wriggled its way upright, moved to the nearest shrub, and used its built-in retrieval system to commence gathering tiny leaves. The wheel of life rolls on.

I was groggy by now, but couldn’t resist playing the next report. It involved attempts to open communications between humans and hexicows. Even approaching our tentacled potential buddies was risky—not due to them. In general, local critters ignored humans and most of the plants were, at worst, passive-aggressive. But small holes riddled the ground everywhere hexicow herds liked to hang out—the narrator suspected that extra soil aeration made the plants in the area healthier. So a human strolling through the neighborhood could break through the surface, and snap an ankle or leg. Even the largest fauna weren’t at risk because none were foolish enough to put all their weight on one or two foot-sized spots. The narrator speculated about what had formed the holes, suggesting there might be more animal activity under the ground than on it.

After a few nasty mishaps, the communications team took to wearing snowshoes when visiting hexicow territory. Perhaps they should’ve tried clown shoes because the technologically savvy creatures refused to pay their visitors the slightest attention. Quite challenging, I imagine, to trade linguistic information with beings who act unaware that you exist.

The EE team kept trying new ways of demonstrating they were worthy of interest, at one point showing up on the scene festooned in flashing multicolored lights and equipped with sound-generating gear that emitted noises of all sorts. Another total failure, as was disguising themselves as hexicows. The corn-team grew progressively more creative and were richly rewarded by nothing.

Exploration reports are supposed to be objective, but you couldn’t miss the down-shift in mood. Hope flared again when one lucky blip found an abandoned hexicow bracelet, presumably defective. After project technicians made repairs, tests revealed that the bracelet could pick up radio signals over a wide band of frequencies, but only emitted signals on a specific wavelength, one that cut through the general static. Receivers were set to record on that wavelength, and they found plenty to record. These transmissions, project analysts figured, had to contain a language or languages of some kind, but even after consulting Earth’s top linguists, no human could guess at how the language was constructed let alone what was being said. The possible single hole in this blanket of ignorance was a distinctive squeal beginning every transmission. The experts proposed that the squeal was a greeting, in essence saying “Hi. Let’s talk.”

The com-team on Abreathon, bounce returned to their steps—not so hard with snow-shoes—armed themselves with a bulging array of transceivers, detectors, antennas, amplifiers, and all the fixings. Again, they attempted to open at least a nanofilament of communication with the natives. But after a standard week of non-stop effort, they packed up and trudged back to home base with minimal bounce.

Their discouragement was so palpable I began to feel depressed. So I shut off the recorder, did my last set of required exercises, performed what Priam calls “the nightly ablutions,” climbed into the adaptive couch, which registered my horizontal position and became a bed, and fell into dreamland like a human breaking through Abreathon’s untrustworthy crust.

After three days of confinement and with nothing much else to do and a lot of motivation, I’d gone through enough reports in enough detail to get really depressed. Not, I’m sure, as bummed as the EE project team after some three decades of failure, but my personal discouragement meter had reached an all-time high.

I couldn’t imagine how the Boy Genius down the hall could come up with any revelations concerning Abreathon in general and hexicows in particular that the planetary crew hadn’t already explored. Perhaps if EE rules permitted less-than-courteous means of approaching unfamiliar intelligent aliens, such as dissection or torture, some progress in communications might’ve been made. As things stood, the Powers that Be figured it was time to stop wasting money, resources, and lives on trying to pursue a relationship with such a—and here I’m quoting from the official command to vacate—“socially hermetic species.” We couldn’t even make use of Abreathon’s phenomenal natural resources because EE rules forbid any exploitation of worlds inhabited by intelligent species.

Micah and I chatted daily, but I wouldn’t have minded having more of his company than just his voice. He, too, had come up empty on the insight front, but our joint failure didn’t faze him. I was so down that I asked him how he managed to stay so damn cheerful.

“Sometimes I am cheerful, sometimes sad. If I wait a short time, any emotion will change so why take any seriously?”

I thought about that for a second. “But Micah, you’re always smiling.”

“Zen teaches me how to remain content no matter the circumstances, and keeping a little smile sends the right messages both within and without.”

I tried not to sigh too audibly. “You do realize that we’re about to be kicked out of EE?”

He chuckled. “You are upsetting yourself by envisioning something that might happen in the future. On my world, in silence, the clouds thin just enough to reveal the sun’s outline; whose good fortune is it to enjoy such a rare sight?”

“What are you talking about? Sometimes I don’t understand you at all.”

“Then may I ask you, what is happening here right now?”

“Me saying goodbye.”

His only response was a louder chuckle before I closed our private channel.

On the fourth ship-day, the faint pull from the forward gravity shield vanished; I’d become so accustomed to it that now my cabin seemed tilted the opposite way. A doctor swung by to take blood samples and check on my overall health. A few minutes after she left, Ensign Lincoln pulled me from my metal cocoon with a frown and a brusque gesture. My crewmates awaited me in the corridor along with Ensign Gopal and I wasn’t delighted by Micah’s blissful smile or Priam’s clenched jaw and glittering eyes. The Venusian likely regarded solitary confinement as a heavenly interlude, a chance to dive into his belly-button and pull out cosmic lint, only interrupted by my calls. And if Priam had been successful, I figured, he would’ve made smug look humble. We followed the ensigns to the ship’s bridge and waited until Mentor Michealides, who’d greeted us so warmly to Flightship Skylark, deigned to acknowledge our presence. The first words to pour from his mouth hit my dread button dead center.

“Ah, the disgraced trio. We are orbiting Abreathon now and I trust the brilliant Cadet Galanis has uncovered some fact that will save the project?”

“Yes, sir,” Priam said quietly. “That I have.”

I felt my eyebrows shoot up in tandem with the mentor’s. “And what,” he said, “is your great discovery?” He didn’t add the words “pray tell” but I’m morally convinced he thought them.

“I can’t reveal that, sir. Not at this time.”

I didn’t think Michealides’s eyebrows could rise any higher. I was wrong.

“Perhaps you could bring yourself to divulge the reason for your present silence on the subject?”

“I suspect you will dismiss my idea if I don’t support it with proof.” He sounded like a different person, almost sincere.

“And how do you expect to assemble this proof, Cadet.”

“I can only do so if you will grant us permission to approach an abreather.”

If eyes were drills, Priam would’ve wound up with two new holes in his head.

“You expect permission to—words fail me, Cadet. Do you have any concept of the difficulties involved in mounting such expeditions, particularly right now? Or the training required? You do not. There is general training that none of you have undergone, and specific training for this specific environment.”

“We are quick studies, sir.”

“How could you possibly imagine that I would grant this request?”

I’d never seen Priam’s face so utterly intent, radiating earnestness.

“Because if I’m right, and I am, it will justify all the human time and effort spent here, and there will be no need to dismantle the safe-camp or evacuate the EE team.”

The mentor rubbed his chin. “That might be a strong argument had I any faith in your judgment.”

Priam hesitated, another uncharacteristic behavior. “Sir, I hope you are aware that the Galanis family is among the wealthiest on our mutual home planet and has a tradition of providing each child with a considerable trust fund to smooth their pathway in life.”

“It hadn’t escaped my notice. So?”

I stared at Priam. So the jerk was not only arrogant and obnoxious, he was also filthy rich.

“I am old enough to access my trust. If you will let me test my idea and it proves wrong, I will donate my entire fund to help defray the cost of evacuating EE personnel.”

I gave Priam another stare, this time in wonder. He’d risk his fortune on what had to be a bluff?

“Hmm. A remarkable and interesting proposal, Cadet. You would sign binding documents to this effect?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then, perhaps, I will let your folly find its own merits. Come with me to my office where we will surely locate an assortment of printable legal templates in the ship’s memory. Once at the safe-camp you will all need two full days of special training, which normally requires two weeks. I do hope that your claim of being ‘quick studies’ was no exaggeration. From Cadet Cohen’s test scores, which I’ve recently perused, I fear at least one of you will be ill prepared. We shall land in twenty minutes, so I suggest that we make haste to codify our arrangement.”

“To test my theory, I’ll also need to borrow something stored at the safe-camp.”

“Oh? What? Walk with me and tell me as we go.”

The training was brutal: a total of twelve standard hours a day combining lectures and physical programming conducted in a kind of fenced-in children’s garden where the dangers, and there were more than the reports had shown me, could be presented one at a time. The local fauna had rarely been a problem, although several species might kill a human by accident if said human stood in the wrong place at the right time. The flora offered a different story. Those “leaves” I’d thought so beautiful on video weren’t all soft and harmless. Some plants grew natural weapons, sharp as a fresh razor and hard as quartz. Spotting the plants that sported such blades wasn’t even easy in the garden because they didn’t stand out. Spotting them quickly in the wilderness was both crucial and nearly impossible for the inexperienced. Oh, and several of the same plants could suddenly whip their branches around. Dead animals, I gathered, make great fertilizer.

To my secret delight, Priam alone screwed up in the garden. Avoiding one whipping razor plant, he stepped directly into reach of another. His pride seemed undiminished, so aside from a few trivial cuts, his EE suit suffered almost all of the damage. He didn’t appear troubled by this until he learned that the station had no way to make repairs on recent tech, or even do a detailed diagnostic. The fact that the suit registered itself as operational didn’t smooth his frown.

After kindergarten, we were taught to “soft-walk” to make traversing Abreathon’s hyper-aerated terrain safer. The trick involved keeping our knees slightly bent as we strolled, which we practiced with and without snowshoes. The idea was to minimize bouncing. Priam pointed out that both he and Micah had already mastered a similar technique as a “prophylactic against back and joint strain” before coming to heavy-gravity Earth, so further training was a waste of time. Our instructor nodded agreeably but kept all of us practicing. Micah observed, with a chuckle, that his feet were already almost the size of the available snowshoes, a remark our instructor simply ignored.

At the academy, we’d become reasonably proficient with ultrawave weapons, but the UWs here were practically antiques. So we got retrained only to be informed, when our tutor reluctantly declared us fit to make a supervised venture into the wilderness, that we wouldn’t be issued any kind of weapon. An armed guide would protect us when and if necessary and only that paragon would be trusted with such a valuable item as a corn-link set to cut through the local radio static. Being good to go, we got.

It’s one thing to see videos of an unfamiliar environment, and the quality of the final videos I’d watched had been excellent, but another to actually be in said environment. We could breathe the air with a little help from one of several kinds of patches that had been applied to our skins with a cheerful promise that pulling them off would hurt like hell. Gravity was a tad beyond Earth’s, but I’d lost weight on the flight thanks to the cuisine, so I didn’t feel heavier. And the terrain didn’t strike me as particularly unearthly. But as we left the sandy beach where the safe-camp lay hidden behind light-bending screens, and headed into the forest, I got so disoriented that I could barely keep my balance on the crawler.

It was the plants, specifically, those flat jewels that passed as leaves here. During the day, the flora sucked up so much air moisture that my nose felt as dry as Death Valley despite the mild weather. The air was vacuum-clear, and the endless rows and spirals of crystal fins everywhere I looked made my brain spin.

Many “leaves” were larger and more transparent than I’d expected, and I could see other leaves through them, and the show didn’t necessarily stop there. Not only were the color combinations intricate beyond belief, they kept altering with every inch that my faithful if ridiculous steed carried me along.

Our crawlers weren’t your standard model miniature tanks, rolling merrily along on caterpillar tracks when they weren’t abusing gravity for flying purposes. No such luck. They more resembled deep buckets with a crazy propulsion system. EE engineers, all geniuses at near Priam-caliber no doubt, had developed a loam-sparing tread system on elaborate cams that was intended to emulate the way local animals moved. The result? We barreled into the forest almost as fast as I could hop. At first, I was grateful for the slowness, but once my brain adjusted to the surroundings, my appreciation got used up.

At one point our guide into the unknown, a glum-faced explorer named Neil Coriaca, a UW holstered at his hip and an emergency bag slung over one shoulder, got a bit further ahead of us. I took advantage by edging my crawler closer to Priam’s. We hadn’t had a chance to talk privately even after we’d left the ship thanks to never being alone, and we’d been separated in the safe-camp. Trust me, I had things to say.

I kept my voice at a near whisper. “Wish I could believe you knew what you were doing.”

At least he had the grace to squirm. “I suppose we’ll find out together. Didn’t you notice something odd in the reports?”

I scowled, trying to whip my mind into remembering “something odd” in recordings where everything seemed odd. “Nothing in particular.”

“Tsk and again tsk. Look, if our native guide there hangs around after we reach the abreathers, I’ll need you to distract him for a minute.”

I looked forward, but the explorer showed no sign of having overheard. “What do you mean ‘distract’ ?”

“Get him to stand with his back to me, or someplace he can’t see what I’m doing. Just for a moment.”

I wanted to tell Priam how much I liked that idea, but just then Coriaca braked and gestured toward a clearing some ten meters ahead. We all climbed out of our slow-mobiles, strapped on our snowshoes, and waddled toward the clearing with the explorer in front. On the way, Coriaca placed his emergency bag on the ground. I wished he wasn’t the only one armed.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” Micah asked me, his big eyes shining.

“Glad you’re having fun,” I muttered.

Up close and in real life, the hexicows loomed considerably larger and more daunting than I’d figured. Fancier as well, and much grosser. Aside from their overall hexagonal framework shown in the videos, even their substructures followed a hexagonal pattern, such as the fissures where their needles-on-bubbles-on-stalks feeding apparatus emerged. Each had six small eyes on their upper torsos in mismatched colors, and if you drew lines between them, connect-the-dot style, you’d form a wide hexagon oriented with a flat facet on top. I’d say that was an eye surplus, but these things were greedy. Each of their dualfingered tentacles also had eyes; and even though I couldn’t see more than a few from where I stood, I was betting on six per. Oddly, the one exception to the rule was the number of tentacles. Our little herd had a total of four citizens, all equipped with native radio bracelets; two citizens had five tentacles and the others had seven. That inconsistency, I felt, showed a lack of commitment.

One gross part was the smell, which would’ve been unbearable if it had been a little more pungent. Since we didn’t need to filter our breathing air, I was getting the full snoot of a stench that reminded me of a garbage disposal with halitosis.

The other grossness was the multicolored mucus that oozed from the hexicows’ fissures. I’d seen the slime on video reports, but mistaken it for shiny skin coloration.

Coriaca stopped and put his fists on his hips in a posture I’d never seen anyone except actors use. “As ordered, I brought you to the nearest group of abreathers. These four are usually right here. If any of you can demonstrate a justification for wasting my time and delaying my packing, have at it.”

The Martian shrugged. “You’re welcome to return; we can make our own way back to base.”

“I wish. But I have orders to keep an eye on you until you’re ready to give up.”

Priam flashed me a meaningful look. I had no desire whatever to follow his previous instructions, but it dawned on me that I had no real choice. If he didn’t have the goods, we were sunk.

“Explorer,” I snapped. “Why are there so many more holes in the ground behind you than where I’m standing?”

“What are you talking about, Cadet? I don’t see any difference—hey! What the hell are you playing at, Galanis? What did you just put on that abreather?”

Coriaca had whirled back around just in time to see Priam step away from the closest member of the small herd, and his immediate reaction was to draw his UW. I’d kept my eyes on the explorer while his back was turned, but had caught a peripheral glimpse of the Boy Genius fishing something round out of his survival suit and slipping it onto one of the hexicow s tentacles.

My boy had major nerve, I admit. With a UW aimed between his eyes, the Martian smiled the kind of smile you’d want to wipe off with sandpaper. “Only something I borrowed from the safe-camp: that abandoned radio bracelet one of your people found. It was a symbolic gesture more than anything else.”

Anger and disgust kept switching places on the explorer’s face. “You’ll be sorry you stole that, boy, real sorry.”

“No stealing involved, sir. The loan was prearranged.”

“I doubt it. Well, I suppose we’d better leave it there now, but what the hell were you trying to accomplish?”

“Watch and learn,” Priam said, but I wondered how much he was faking confidence.

“Always sound advice,” Micah contributed. The big goof was obviously living in a happier universe than I was.

We all turned our eyes to the creature with the extra tentacle band. For a time, nothing happened until I heard Coriaca make one of those preliminary noises that warns you a volcano is about to erupt. Priam had just violated, off the top of my head, at least five major EE rules.

The volcano failed to blow when—I can’t claim all hell broke loose when what really broke loose was every damn tentacle on all three hexicows. These things were surprisingly long because their heads and most of their bodies had been hidden inside their, um, hosts. Surprisingly ugly too, with wrinkled eyeless skulls on one end that had tiny tentacles of their own, and large floppy mouths with yellow, disturbingly human-looking teeth. Once on the ground, they moved tail-first, those twin fingers at the ends waggling at us. For a few terrifying seconds, they were all crawling our way, fast. Backing up in snow-shoes isn’t easy, but just before our new buddies reached us, they all dived into some of the many holes underfoot. The hexicows didn’t seem upset at their absence, but something made them gradually ease away from us.

“And that,” Priam said with barely hidden relief, “proves my point.”

“What point?” Coriaca demanded. “What the hell just happened?”

“They got my little hint and knew the, uh, jig was up. If any of those creatures had stuck around, I’d have introduced you to Abreathon’s actual intelligent inhabitants. They were right under your noses the whole time.”

The explorer’s larynx twitched a few times before any words came out. “Explain. Now.”

I barely listened to my teammate because of two things. First, I knew what he would say. The truth had figuratively been under my own nose ever since I watched those reports. How could I have missed it? Only one known species of animals here had “tentacles” and only those supposed limbs carried advanced technology. Also, said tentacles were not issued in the otherwise universal six-pack. And despite decades of intense attempts at communication with the, ha, brainy hexicows, the EE team here had made nary a smidgen of progress. Funny thing about Priam: his insights tended to be self-evident, but only in retrospect. They didn’t so much make him seem brilliant as make me feel stupid.

The other reason I didn’t pay closer attention to Priam’s words of wisdom had to do with a vibration beneath my feet, an uneven sort of gentle shaking. I wondered if it might be a precursor to an unearthly earthquake.

“Hey!” I interrupted Golden Boy. “Anyone else notice—”

That’s when I got interrupted myself by the ground collapsing under me.

There’s nothing that focuses the mind quite like a surprise fall, also the galactic champion at installing panic. The topsoil I’d been standing on, falling with me, blocked my view of anything below. I’d guess I was five meters down before training kicked in and I activated my inertia-control system while beginning to spread out my body horizontally.

Thanks to the speed I’d built up, air resistance stopped me cold and I watched the topsoil head downward on its own. Before I could think about what to do next, Priam plummeted on past me. Perhaps he’d been caught so off-guard, concentrating on his educational sermon, that he’d forgotten his own training. Far more likely his suit had malfunctioned thanks to that slasher kindergarten plant. Either way, this was really bad—the ground was still a long way down. Micah also zipped past me in a head-first dive, falling so rapidly that I knew he’d decreased his inertia, less than I had, and was keeping vertical to reduce drag. I knew why, and it poked a whopping hole in my concept of Micah as slow-witted.

Merely drifting down now myself, I watched the Venusian angle his body to use the air as a kind of ramp. In an instant, he reached Priam and nearly pulled off the stunt of a lifetime. He grabbed one of Priam’s arms and pulled the Martian in close, obviously hoping to extend his suit’s inertial field to blanket them both and then kill their joint inertia.

A great plan . . . in theory, but I doubt that anyone could’ve gotten that much done in the split-second remaining until they hit. Our suits react quickly, but even the most recent tech can’t instantaneously make large changes in field-strength. Both men hit pretty damn hard.

I’d always thought the notion of one’s heart jumping into one’s throat was ridiculous, but it sure felt like that. I sped up my fall, more than was wise, but landed on broken-up topsoil with more a jar than a crash. I ditched my snowshoes. It smelled musty here, but not Earth musty. And why was it this warm underground? Skirting mounds of collapsed dirt, plants, and rocks, I called out to my teammates as I ran to them. No answer. They weren’t moving but, thank God, both were breathing. Micah, it seemed, had finessed a bit of inertial relief after all, and they, too, had landed on loose dirt. Both had lost their snow-shoes. Listening closer, I heard a wheeze in Priam’s lungs that I didn’t like.

Micah was the only one of us with health-assessment implants, which seemed more unfair than ironic at the moment. Using the limited medical training all third-year cadets are given, I checked for broken bones and signs of hemorrhage. I thought Priam’s left arm might be fractured, but saw no compound breaks or visible indications of major trauma. Still, the wheezing kept getting worse. At a guess, Micah had a broken rib or two. I didn’t dare try to move either of them.

Judging by sensations, my heart had returned from my throat to home base. But it was pounding in my chest as though it intended to break out. I had better, I thought, pull myself together right now if I hoped to save my men.

But how to save them? My suit had an emergency corn-link function, but that wouldn’t work underground, and the local radio static would probably block it anyway. But Coriaca’s corn-link was set to—

Then it hit me. What had happened to Coriaca? I glanced around to see if he’d fallen too. Took me a moment to spot him. His body lay crumpled not far from me, but on a jagged ledge a few meters higher than my head. Blood dripped down the ledge and not just a little. I adjusted my inertia and climbed the nearly vertical wall to where he lay. No vital signs, which was no surprise. A jagged root with a sharp, broken-off end protruded from his abdomen and a similar one from his chest at heart level, both piercing his antiquated inertia gear. His jacket had come open and I stared at the kind of external suit controls that had become obsolete years ago. No wonder he didn’t have enough time to save himself. His corn-link, antique enough to resemble an old-fashioned wristwatch, had come off his arm and had cleverly managed to shatter against a rock. The UW had fared better, remaining safe in its holster, but its gory coating stopped me from claiming it as my own. I couldn’t spot his emergency bag anywhere.

I let myself drop to the floor of what appeared to be a small but very deep cave with a modest skylight surrounded by a galaxy of tentacle-sized skylights. The walls started out vertical—I’d just proved how climbing that part was no problem—but after a few meters they progressively curved inwards, making climbing impossible without special gear. Aside from uneven mounds of debris on the cave floor, a small tree had fallen in, now lying horizontal and acting as a bridge between two of the largest mounds. One hell of a mess, but adding up to so little material that I knew this area had already been almost entirely hollow.

I felt light-headed and sick to my stomach, and my vision decided this was the perfect time to go black. I sat down, head lowered, and took three deep breaths, forcing myself to calm down. Why do horror and panic show up just when you can least afford them?

Slowly, my eyesight cleared. For the first time, I took a good look at the cave wall—or cave-in wall?—opposite Coriaca’s bloody ledge. At a glance, I’d thought all the little projections were tree roots, but turns out I had an audience. Hundreds of extentacles, poking out of hundreds of small holes in the wall, were observing me with rapt attention. Aside from soft wind and animal-feeding noises drifting in from above, the cave was dead silent.

A shock of fear went through me, but this one jump-started my brain rather than shutting it down. Clearly, the collapse had been no accident. The snakes must’ve excavated this space as a trap, leaving just enough structure to support the ground and animals above, implying incredible engineering skills. For that matter, they’d likely hollowed out many underground spots in their jeweled forest, and made sure that their, um, hexicattle vehicles fed only in those spots in case anything dangerous threatened them, at least anything that could be dealt with by a nasty fall. So when Priam exposed their secret here, they called out the snake cavalry to remove all support.

My slithering audience had tried to kill us. They’d succeeded with one of us and injured two others. Murderous fury, I’m sure, would be the normal human reaction and it did occur to me that if I grabbed the UW, I could turn every snake watching into a charcoal tube in two seconds flat.

But there’s no clear dividing line between training and conditioning, and in virtual reality scenes that felt entirely real at the time thanks to specialized drugs, I’d worked through many, many emotionally difficult experiences. So anxiety yes, fury no. Honestly, I was a little dismayed by how thoroughly I’d been conditioned. Instead of hustling to get revenge like a normal girl, I automatically tried to envision the situation from the aliens’ perspective. While aliens aren’t likely to think the way we do, intelligence implies some degree of common logic, and here the logic seemed easy to follow.

If making your enemies fall down a hole was your weapon of choice, you probably didn’t have any deadlier weapons. So how would I feel if my species had invented micro-circuits and radio communications but not, say, guns, and aliens had landed on my planet, armed with technology centuries beyond what my species had achieved? Wouldn’t I try to remain hidden while carefully studying the invaders if they’d demonstrated that they had guns? The reports I’d seen had showed UWs being fired at those few animals that had attacked explorers.

Emily, I told myself, understanding the motivations of snakes is good and necessary, but right now getting my men medical help is far more important.

Micah groaned, tried to sit up, and thought better of it. I rushed back to his side.

“How bad is it?” I asked, trying to sound calm.

The big jerk actually grinned up at me. “A few ribs on my left side will need some mending, but I think it would be best to lie here for a bit longer. Please help me roll over onto my right side so that I can assess Priam.”

He must’ve been hurt worse than he’d admitted because he let me do all the work of turning him. He studied the Martian, letting his medical implants work triage, and for once he stopped smiling.

“Em, we have a challenge here. Priam has a collapsed lung punctured by a broken rib.”

“What should I do?”

“Did Coriaca fall with us?”

“ ‘Fraid so. He’s dead, Micah.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry to hear it. He seemed a fine fellow. Is his bag here?”

“I’ve looked and don’t see it. Probably buried.”

Micah thought he could shrug, but proved he could wince. “Then you must find the explorer’s communicator, climb out of this pit, and call for immediate . . . immediate . . .”

“Micah. His corn-link’s broken, and climbing the walls here would be, um, problematic. Did you notice—Micah?”

No response, but I could see his belly moving as he breathed. So he’d either passed out or decided this was the perfect time for another nap. I didn’t try to shake him awake, but I sure wanted to.

I couldn’t let Priam die and wasn’t at all convinced that Micah’s life wasn’t also hanging on my decisions here. So my duty was clear: get out of this damn hole and after that keep trying my emergency signal in hopes it would get through, meanwhile heading for the station as fast as I could.

Climbing was ruled out, so what did that leave me?

Then I remembered Priam, during the San Diego fiasco, demonstrating a trick that I’d always considered only a theoretical possibility, and had never even attempted. P-levitation, the “p” standing in for pressure. The basic principle was simple enough, if counterintuitive.

It was a matter of using inertial control to balance the force of gravity with air-pressure. You jump and gravity starts making you fall, but by removing enough inertia, countless air molecules continuously stop you and you can wind up floating. Then if the air beneath you is warmer than the air somewhere above and therefore rising? You can rise with it.

That was the principle I had to count on, but removing just the right amount of inertia would be crucial, and a host of complex factors were involved. My size and shape would make a big difference, as would the local gravity, air-pressure in this cave, and no doubt a host of other variables that I hadn’t thought of.

I looked straight up. The thermals here should be good, but once I reached the opening above, I might have a real problem moving sideways far enough to reach solid ground. Build that bridge, I told myself, when you come to it. I retrieved my snowshoes and tied them onto my back.

Moving as far from the snake-filled wall as possible without stepping in Coriaca’s blood, I climbed onto the fallen tree to gain some height. Then I adjusted my suit for minimal inertia, jumped up with all my strength, increased inertia as my feet left the tree trunk, and immediately cut it again while spreading my body horizontally to catch enough air resistance. I wafted to the ground three times, cursing. Priam had made it look so easy. On the fourth try I finally got everything right and began rising. The thermals were crucial to this, but they were so inconsistent that I had to struggle to keep horizontal. Halfway to the big opening above, I noticed activity among my tubular observers.

As individuals, they were rather inflexible, but dozens were linking up, using the fingers at the ends of their bodies to grip the head of the next snake in what was rapidly becoming a long chain. I rose another meter or two before one end of this chain swung loose from the wall. With an enormous joint muscular contraction, the chain’s end whipped across the cave whistling and slammed into my ribs.

That would’ve been my death right there except that in my unbound state, all it did was push me to the side, and the push only lasted as long as the chain was touching me. The score now stood snakes zero, Emily one. I kept rising, but my confidence didn’t.

Which proved justified a moment later when the chain found me again but this time wrapped itself around my waist and pulled me down, at speed, all the way to the cave’s floor. The chain then kindly unwrapped me, and swung back to the original wall where it separated into individuals who soon found holes to occupy. In less than a minute, my audience seemed to be entirely back in place, ready for more entertainment.

I got up off the floor and brushed myself off. Okay. I wasn’t getting out of here until my hosts let me go. I checked on my companions again. Both out of it, and Priam’s wheezing had gotten distinctly worse. I had to admit that my attitude had shifted. Priam had done everything he’d promised by having a team-career-saving insight, and Micah had shown me how much I’d underestimated him by his quick actions and his courage in risking his life to save Priam’s. They both deserved more of me.

Project personnel would surely come looking for us when we’d been missing for long enough. But I felt in my bones that Priam wouldn’t last nearly that long. And it didn’t seem a good sign that Micah hadn’t reawakened yet.

It was all up to me and I almost choked on the responsibility. I couldn’t think.

Staring at Priam, I remembered something he’d said the only time an astrophysics problem had him baffled. I’d asked him, in an overly sweet voice, how he handled such rare events and was surprised to get an answer. “Even for me,” he’d bragged, “parts of my intellect are brighter than other parts. I’ll just loosely hold the problem in mind, relax, and let my genius work it out on its own.”

Wasn’t sure I had an inner genius, let alone one raring to work on my present dilemma, but every part of my intellect I knew of was stumped.

I sat on a mound near my companions, facing the watching crowd, and tried to hold the problem loosely in mind. I managed to loosen my hold to a mere death grip, and suddenly wasn’t so sure that the snakes had had murder in mind. Thanks to their hollow but superstrong bones and their widespread weight distribution, most Abreathon creatures could’ve probably survived that fall. Certainly, our hosts weren’t being at all aggressive now.

Fine. The solution here was obvious. Convince my audience that humans meant them no harm, and then they’d let me leave. Simple. What wasn’t obvious was how to accomplish that. And the crazy thing was that I had a distinct feeling that I’d already noticed something that held the answer.

But what? I was hold-loosening and relaxing my heart out and the only thing that my inner genius slipped me was a completely useless image: chopsticks—on fire, no less. Apparently, I thought, some parts of my intellect were stupider than other parts. Still, the picture hung in my mind with the persistence of a bad sunburn, and I had no other leads. So I thought about it.

What would make me think of burning chopsticks? Maybe it had something to do with this audience giving me the evil six-eyes. After all, they were stiff little creatures and had those weird two-finger tails. Then what about the fire part? Good question and I had no answer. “This,” I muttered after long minutes of insight vacuum, “is a waste of time. To hell with it.”

What I’d just said echoed in my mind and felt so right that I said it out loud again, “To hell with it.” I might’ve shouted with triumph then, except I hadn’t proved my new idea would work, and I was so damn worried about my teammates, and sad about Coriaca. Besides, it wouldn’t do to scare the snakes.

It was much later that I learned that my emergency signal had only reached the safe-camp because the snakes had repeated my message on their own frequency, one that Abreathon personnel continually monitored just in case the natives finally decided to open communications.

The Academy auditorium was packed almost solid with EE cadets, higher-ups, and family members. The graduating teams remained on the wide stage although all the new commissions had been handed out. Priam, Micah, and I were the last to get ours, yet the Chief stood behind her lectern, looking beatific, in no rush to close the overlong ceremony. You could practically smell everyone’s impatience to finally get out of the hall.

I’d never seen the Chief smile much, but she suddenly grinned like a beacon and the beams seemed to be aimed at my team.

“This is a remarkable occasion,” she said. “It is not often we bestow the EE’s highest honor on newly graduating cadets, but Graduates Emily Asari of Earth, Priam Galanis of Mars, and Micah Cohen of Venus please step forward.”

As we stepped, I glanced at my teammates. They both looked as stunned as I felt. Priam had suffered a collapsed lung, internal bleeding, a concussion, four broken ribs, and a broken arm; Micah only matched him with a concussion and three broken ribs. Now both of them moved easily and stood tall, Micah of course standing much taller. Modem medical tech is magic.

“I present to you three,” the Chief continued, “the Triple Sun. Wear it proudly. Thanks to you, the Abreathon project has succeeded in establishing friendly relations with another alien species, and you have—”

“Saved a thirty-year project from going down the toilet,” Priam interrupted.

The Chief gave him a look appropriate to something that should be flushed down a toilet, but only said, “Just so.”

Lips, I commanded, stay as you are. Do not rise at the corners, do not even twitch. . . .

The Triple Sun was represented by a garish ribbon in gold, silver, and blue. The Chief herself attached one to each of our formal uniforms. When they’d been properly “bestowed,” she dismissed everyone but signaled to me that I should remain behind. The exiting music was as pompous as you could want as I watched everyone else heading out to fresh air. Both my teammates turned to look at me before they reached the doors, but I could only look wistful and shrug.

“I’ve studied your report,” the Chief said, “and found it incomplete.”

“Oh? What’s missing?”

“Two things. Why did the Anguis reveal themselves after Priam Galanis placed the radio bracelet on one of them?”

“Hard to be sure, Commandant. Priam wanted to let them know he was on to them, so he activated the bracelet as he slipped it on, and had arranged for it to send out the kind of greeting squeal that begin all Anguis transmissions. I suppose the aliens could’ve ignored the message.”

“He took quite a risk there.”

“So true, and I’m certain he knew it.”

“Last, I’d like to know how, exactly, you determined the key to opening diplomatic relations with the Anguis.”

Trust the EE to come up with dumb names for intelligent alien species, but at least Anguis was shorter than Abreathon Serpentines, which had been the runner-up contender.

I couldn’t fully explain why the idea had felt so right at the time, but the Chief had what Priam called “her gimlet eye” on me and I had to say something.

“I noticed that the aliens can’t bend worth beans, and they have something like thin fingers at the end of their tails. And that reminded me of an old Persian fable my father used to tell when I was a kid. I’ve heard it many times since, described as a Buddhist or Christian or whatever parable, but pretty much the same story. In them all, someone gets a look at heaven and hell, and finds that each has an identical table loaded with an identical fabulous feast. A host of people in both places are sitting at the tables, ready to party, but they only have long skewers or tongs or chopsticks or forks—depending on who’s telling the story—for utensils. These utensils are so long that no one can feed themselves, although why they can’t choke up on their tongs or simply use their hands to—”

“Explorer Asari!” the Chief barked. “Are you under the impression that I have time to listen to you ramble?”

“Sorry, Commandant.” A fat lie, because mostly I was glowing from hearing myself, for the first time, called “Explorer.”

“I’ll get to the point. In the fable, the person visiting heaven and hell learns that the only difference is that in hell, everyone starves, but in heaven everyone is having a terrific time because they’re feeding each other.”

“I see. You realized that the Anguis weren’t flexible enough to feed themselves, at least not with their, ah, fingers.”

“Not only that, I’ll bet that almost everything they do requires a team effort. Can’t imagine one of them alone building radios. I doubt they could even see their own bodies without a mirror.”

The Chief’s expression turned thoughtful. “Interesting. Creatures that evolved as an entirely cooperative society.”

“So in that pit where we were trapped, I dug through debris and found the kind of leaves I’d noticed the supposed tentacles were grabbing before the cave-in. The aliens actually helped me reach the surface after I fed the leaves to the largest sna—Anguis watching me. I was using p-levitation to rise, but sort of got stuck in a holding pattern at the top. They gave me the final shove that I needed.”

“In short you provided them a peace offering.”

“You said a mouthful, sir.” I kept my expression neutral.

“This isn’t a joking matter, Explorer.” Her lips remained stem, but her eyes didn’t seem to agree.

CHAMPIONSHIP B’TOK

Edward M. Lerner

Chapter 1

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

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

“Mate in five moves,” Corrigan agreed. “And, by the way, we’ll arrive before lunch.”

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

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

Doubtless Corrigan remembered.

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

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

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

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

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

“Forty minutes.”

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

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

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

“We have robots to make the initial survey.”

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

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

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

So why not Al-smart robots?

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

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

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

In his mind’s eye, Corrigan shrugged. Lyle took that as “okay.” Or, maybe, as “wacky human.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ouch,” Corrigan remarked. He was monitoring through Lyle’s helmet camera and a radio link.

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

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

“Are you seeing this?” Lyle netted.

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

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

Two comp nodes down, he mused, but the hull seemed otherwise intact. That should leave MS 129 with a pair of functioning comp nodes. Unless those, too, had somehow—

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

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

Chapter 2

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

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

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

—Internetopedia

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

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

“Because the warden made a beeline for me.”

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

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

Nor would it ever be. Not on his watch.

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

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

“Grace DiMeara.” She set down her fork to shake hands. Hardly anyone did that anymore.

“Who says I’m from civilization?”

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

“Simple process of elimination,” he said. “You’re not from around here.”

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

He sat. “So, routine flight?”

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

“Corrine Elman. The worlds-famous reporter.”

“That’s her.”

“Too bad. You had to keep everything shipshape.”

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

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

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

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

Then the Snakes showed up, aboard a stolen starship.

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

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

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

“How long will you be on Ariel?” Carl asked.

Grace shrugged. “You’ll have to ask the boss.”

“You know? I might just do that.”

Chapter 3

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

While her Snake escorts moved with an understated elegance.

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

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

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

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

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

Not so the Snakes, streaming both ways.

Snakes: Two arms, two legs, and a head. Upright posture. And there any resemblance to humans ended. Whippet-thin. Nostrils set flat in the plane of the face—and a third, upward-gazing eye set near the apex of the skull. Hairless and iridescent-scaled. Glimpses of retractable talons in each fingertip (and, as they wore sandals, each toe). The tallest Snakes stood a quarter meter shorter than she—and she struggled to aspire to petite.

Not about you, Corinne chided herself.

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

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

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

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

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

No matter how hard she tried.

A clumsy hop sent her tumbling. “Sorry,” she said.

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

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

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

“Walt,” Corinne netted. “I’m almost there.”

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

“I’m ready,” Walt said.

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

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

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

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

Definitely, wait here.

Corinne decided: I don’t think so.

I’m ready.

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

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

I’m tired of waiting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Respect for my guest,” she growled at the aide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Much better, she decided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Glithwah said only, “Welcome back to Ariel.”

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

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

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

“Are we waiting for a cameraman?”

“Not necessary. I have an A/V upgrade.”

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

Glithwah bided her time, hid her ire.

Corinne squirmed, just a little, in her chair. “Shall we begin, then?”

To Glithwah’s mind’s eye, Loshtof texted unnecessarily: some embarrassment.

“That will be fine,” Glithwah said.

“Do you know what story would interest my viewers?”

“I do not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you mean?” Glithwah asked.

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

A civilian spaceport, the woman meant. A spaceport not controlled by the United Planets occupation forces. With splayed fingers, Corinne swept wisps of hair off her forehead. There was a momentary frown that Loshtof annotated, She is nervous. Possibly

CONFLICTED.

“We should have had ships earlier,” Glithwah said. “That we weren’t permitted any had consequences.”

“How so?”

(FEIGNED INTEREST, Loshtof interpreted.)

Glithwah had picked up on that, too. What was going on here? Off a comer of the desk, from the hand-carved wooden chess set that had once been her uncle’s, she took a castle.

Rolled the piece between fingers and thumb. “Without practice, many skills are lost. Such as piloting, to be sure. And such as the knack for keeping ships flying, when something goes amiss. Because something always does.”

Corinne’s face reddened. (Embarrassed, texted Loshtof.)

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

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

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

“How is that a consolation?”

Murmuring something apologetic, redfaced again, Corinne segued into a banal interview question. What do you remember about the “incident” twenty years earlier?

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

Failure was what made the losses sting.

Failure was what she would not permit to stand.

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

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

And then Corinne surprised her. “Foremost, about this anniversary . . .”

“Yes?”

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

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

“A great accomplishment,” Glithwah said. “From what we are told.” That wasn’t much.

“Nothing more, Foremost?”

Glithwah set down the chess piece. “I haven’t thought much about it.”

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

“It could,” Glithwah agreed.

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

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

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

Chapter 4

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

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

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

—Internetopedia

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

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

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

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

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

“So what do you think?” he asked her. “Let’s start with the deuterium refinery.”

“Heavy hydrogen is still hydrogen. All it took was a spark.” Danica shrugged. “Boom.” The Snake investigative report had surmised much the same.

“Uh-huh. And the source of that spark?”

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

“Speculate,” he said.

“Carelessness? Sabotage? I don’t know. I’ll keep looking, but don’t expect definitive answers.”

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

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

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

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

“The meltdown at the plasteel mill?”

“Software glitch,” she said.

“And?”

Another shrug. “Of unclear provenance.”

“And the gray-goo incident?”

“Puzzling. It was Centaur nanotech.”

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

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

Because the standard response to nanoassemblers run amok was flamethrowers.

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

“Insurance fraud?” Carl eventually asked. Shrug.

“Ever feel you were trapped in a game of b’tok?”

“What’s that?”

“The traditional Snake game of strategy.”

“Oh. Like chess.”

“Kind of.”

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

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

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

Danica said, “Tell me why you’re thinking insurance fraud.”

“The usual reason. For the money.”

“Money for . . .?”

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

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

“For?” Danica prompted again.

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

She was too smart not to involve.

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

“But you suspect the local Snakes.”

“As does my sometimes reliable source.” Danica needed a moment to take it all in. “I gather that my supposed employers paid out on the earliest claims.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you have a theory what the Snakes would buy.”

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

“How advanced?”

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

“We haven’t deployed much Boater robotics. Humans. Have we?”

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

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

“Why keep asking for your okay? So you won’t suspect they already have the tech?”

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

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

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

“You’re right,” he conceded. “I gather that in your poking around, you haven’t, either.”

“Nope. So maybe we’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the Snakes are working a different angle.”

“Maybe.” Or maybe, as whenever he sat down to b’tok with Glithwah, he was several moves behind.

Chapter 5

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

“Hey, stranger,” he said. “Busy, I see.”

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

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

“How’s your better half?” he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s about time you made contact,” said the avatar that appeared on the link. “I couldn’t risk being seen to be looking for you.”

It was Corinne.

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

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

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

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

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

Whoever it was on the link said, “You don’t believe I’m me, despite the encryption.”

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

“Convince me,” he answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what if this undefined threat was for real?

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’d be great,” she said, standing.

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

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

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

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

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

“Why don’t you begin at the beginning?”

“That’s a half billion years ago.”

“Talk fast, then,” he suggested.

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

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

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

“You mean the InterstellarNet members,” he got in.

“Yeah.” Rummaging beneath the copilot console in the tiny comer locker, she found a drink bulb of water. “Eleven species close together, in a galaxy that’s otherwise silent.

Quite the twist of fate—if it is. We call it the Mathews conundrum. And if . . .”

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

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

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

He just looked at her.

“That’s another long story,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“There’s more?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Something like that. Pick one.”

“Secret, starfaring aliens.”

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

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

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

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

“You okay, Carl?”

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

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

Traffic Control interrupted. “Tempest, you’re next up for takeoff.”

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

“One other thing . . .” Corinne said.

Nothing good, he guessed. “And that is?”

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

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

“That’s it.” Corinne flashed a wan smile. “So, are you in?”

“To do what, now?”

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

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

How much punier, mere humans?

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

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

It wasn’t even a contest.

He told her, “I’m in.”

Chapter 6

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

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

—Internetopedia

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

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

Over the theretofore silent mind’s-eye video, the narration began. “Progress substantial. Faster than my forecast.”

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

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

The buoys also few and far between.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus. Carl shook his head. “What is this place?”

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

To make his inevitable loss that much more humbling.

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

“Shall we begin?”

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

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

“Metalfatigue,” Glithwah said. “Tubingburst in a cryogenic coolant loop. Our engineers suspect radiation embrittlement in the . . .”

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

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

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

Could Glithwah want illicit tech that much?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 7

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

A dim and ghostly presence.

And ghostly the starship would remain. Because scrolling across the bottom of the striking image, the repeating message from the project office on Prometheus began, Media access revoked.

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

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

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

Corinne kept glowering, to keep up appearances.

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

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

“How bad an accident?”

“They don’t say.”

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

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

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

“Only near legendary?” Dismissing the flattery with humor.

“Well?” Grace persisted. “Tell the truth. Don’t you feel slighted?”

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

“And it’s a free solar system. Except for Snakes.”

“Except for Snakes,” Corinne agreed.

“So . . .?”

“Okay, I admit it. I am annoyed. And curious, too. But they’ve revoked my access.”

“Are you sure?”

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

“Who’s to say we got that message?” Grace gestured at the main nav holo. “Look.”

In which nothing was anywhere close to them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh-huh.”

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 8

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

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

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

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

“I know my cover story,” Danica said. “It doesn’t make the corridors any less claustrophobic.”

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

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

In any event, Banak was there, showing a package claim, to be waved into a storeroom by the bored-looking Snake watchman. Danica’s point of view indicated she had hung back, loitering at a view port in the passenger terminal. Her job was to stall Banak if he started home too soon.

“Be careful,” Carl netted back.

“Yeah, yeah.”

Ariel’s entire population wouldn’t fill a small town. Local security—originally, by UP insistence—was correspondingly relaxed. If Carl had known only what Danica knew, he’d have been as dismissive.

Whistling tunelessly, with one hand in a jacket pocket, Carl sauntered up to the door of Banak’s gallery. A sign read Closed, in clanspeak, English, and Mandarin.

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

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

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

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

“That’s twice in two minutes. Something you want to tell me?”

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

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

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

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

“I’m in,” he advised Danica.

Her avatar smirked. “Be careful.”

“I deserve that.”

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

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

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

“How are you coming?” Danica netted.

“Done,” he answered. “What about Banak?”

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

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

“We knew the Snake authorities are interested in Banak. Isn’t that why we are?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Be—”

“Careful,” she completed. “Yeah, yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You there.”

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

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

“Me?” Banak asked.

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

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

“Or perhaps inappropriate curiosity.”

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

Banak said, “Just inefficient. Search almost at completion.”

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

“Your thorough explanations necessary,” Monar said. “In my office.”

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

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

Ancient secrets imperiled.

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

The consequences for him scarcely mattered.

“Something’s up,” Danica netted. “I’m going to amble by the storeroom door.”

Be careful, he thought. At himself, too.

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

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

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

The “coffin” had been rigged. Why it?

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

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

Chapter 9

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

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

The memories flooded back. “Danica,” he croaked.

“You’re okay,” a familiar voice said.

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

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

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

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

Bruce offered a bulb of water. “I didn’t have that luxury. Things have been busy.”

“Anyone, besides me?”

“Twelve dead. Twice that injured.”

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

“Go back, Bruce. You said explosions, plural.”

“Correct. Two. You got . . . caught by the smaller one.”

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

“I’m well enough to net,” Carl sent. “Start explaining.”

Bruce studied his shoes.

“That wasn’t a suggestion,” Carl prompted.

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

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

Recalled to Earth.

“Think of it as a request, then,” Carl netted. “Or a parting favor.”

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

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

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

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

Bruce stood. “Get well soon.”

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

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

“You look terrible,” Glithwah said. “Sit.”

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

“You’ll be going home tomorrow,” she said.

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

“So,” Glithwah said, “tell me about Banak. The truth.”

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

She licked her lips: the Snake version of a smile. “I’ll miss our game.”

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

But he hadn’t left yet. He asked, “What was Banak up to?”

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

“I know nothing about that.”

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

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

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

He stared straight back. “I know nothing about that.”

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

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

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

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

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

Carl’s valedictory was shorter. “Be good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grace DiMeara had traveled to Ariel to meet with Banak.

Chapter 10

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

He stood as she entered. “Foremost,” he greeted her.

“Pimal,” she answered. “Welcome to Ariel.”

Tall and trim, martial in his bearing, Rashk Pimal was the very embodiment of a Hunter warrior. He even bore battle scars. A jagged slash crossed one cheek, from a melee in seizing one of the clan’s new ships. A forearm bore a puckered burn scar, from putting down a human riot in the internment camp.

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

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

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

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

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

He did not hesitate. “A conspiracy against the clan.”

“By whom? And to what purpose?”

“Intracranial bomb no random occurrence. So, Banak, of course.”

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

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

“The conspirators? UPIA?”

“A strange thing about Banak.” Pimal’s eyes glittered. “Banak absent from clan records prior to Victorious.”

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

“Banak unfamiliar also to other evacuees.”

A talon point flicked into sight and as quickly retracted, as though to dismiss the obvious rejoinder. Sole survivors bereft of family had been all too common. “And yet not.”

“Not the time for riddles,” she growled.

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

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

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

“The other conspirators?” Glithwah reminded.

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

“Not impossible,” she said.

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

“A moment, Pimal.” While I think.

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

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

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

None of that could explain the twisted metal sculpture.

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

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

“Perhaps,” Pimal allowed.

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

Pieces of the puzzle still eluded her. “And Carl Rowland’s near-death?”

“An accident, perhaps.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl shrugged. “I’m fine, Brad.”

“That wasn’t really a question.”

“Right.” Carl took the jump seat behind Devon.

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

“Whoa!” Devon interrupted. “The ship’s fine. It’s something on the news.”

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

“What channel?” Brad asked.

“Any channel.”

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

Robyn Tanaka was dead.

“Your orders, Foremost?” Pimal asked.

Because, at last, their consultation was complete.

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

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

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

BINTI

Nnedi Okorafor

I powered up the transporter and said a silent prayer. I had no idea what I was going to do if it didn’t work. My transporter was cheap, so even a droplet of moisture, or more likely, a grain of sand, would cause it to short. It was faulty and most of the time I had to restart it over and over before it worked. Please not now, please not now, I thought.

The transporter shivered in the sand and I held my breath. Tiny, flat, and black as a prayer stone, it buzzed softly and then slowly rose from the sand. Finally, it produced the baggage-lifting force. I grinned. Now I could make it to the shuttle. I swiped otjize from my forehead with my index finger and knelt down. Then I touched the finger to the sand, grounding the sweet smelling red clay into it. “Thank you,” I whispered. It was a half-mile walk along the dark desert road. With the transporter working, I would make it there on time.

Straightening up, I paused and shut my eyes. Now the weight of my entire life was pressing on my shoulders. I was defying the most traditional part of myself for the first time in my entire life. I was leaving in the dead of night and they had no clue. My nine siblings, all older than me except for my younger sister and brother, would never see this coming. My parents would never imagine I’d do such a thing in a million years. By the time they all realized what I’d done and where I was going, I’d have left the planet. In my absence, my parents would growl to each other that I was to never set foot in their home again. My four aunties and two uncles who lived down the road would shout and gossip among themselves about how I’d scandalized our entire bloodline. I was going to be a pariah.

“Go,” I softly whispered to the transporter, stamping my foot. The thin metal rings I wore around each ankle jingled noisily, but I stamped my foot again. Once on, the transporter worked best when I didn’t touch it. “Go,” I said again, sweat forming on my brow. When nothing moved, I chanced giving the two large suitcases sitting atop the force field a shove. They moved smoothly and I breathed another sigh of relief. At least some luck was on my side.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later I purchased a ticket and boarded the shuttle. The sun was barely beginning to peak over the horizon. As I moved past seated passengers far too aware of the bushy ends of my plaited hair softly slapping people in the face, I cast my eyes to the floor. Our hair is thick and mine has always been very thick. My old auntie liked to call it “ododo” because it grew wild and dense like ododo grass. Just before leaving, I’d rolled my plaited hair with fresh sweet-smelling otjize I’d made specifically for this trip. Who knew what I looked like to these people who didn’t know my people so well.

A woman leaned away from me as I passed, her face pinched as if she smelled something foul. “Sorry,” I whispered, watching my feet and trying to ignore the stares of almost everyone in the shuttle. Still, I couldn’t help glancing around. Two girls who might have been a few years older than me, covered their mouths with hands so pale that they looked untouched by the sun. Everyone looked as if the sun was his or her enemy. I was the only Himba on the shuttle. I quickly found and moved to a seat.

The shuttle was one of the new sleek models that looked like the bullets my teachers used to calculate ballistic coefficients during my A-levels when I was growing up. These ones glided fast over land using a combination of air current, magnetic fields, and exponential energy—an easy craft to build if you had the equipment and the time. It was also a nice vehicle for hot desert terrain where the roads leading out of town were terribly maintained. My people didn’t like to leave the homeland. I sat in the back so I could look out the large window.

I could see the lights from my father’s astrolabe shop and the sand storm analyzer my brother had built at the top of the Root—that’s what we called my parents’ big, big house. Six generations of my family had lived there. It was the oldest house in my village, maybe the oldest in the city. It was made of stone and concrete, cool in the night, hot in the day. And it was patched with solar planes and covered with bioluminescent plants that liked to stop glowing just before sunrise. My bedroom was at the top of the house. The shuttle began to move and I stared until I couldn’t see it anymore. “What am I doing?” I whispered.

An hour and a half later, the shuttle arrived at the launch port. I was the last off, which was good because the sight of the launch port overwhelmed me so much that all I could do for several moments was stand there. I was wearing a long red skirt, one that was silky like water, a light orange wind-top that was stiff and durable, thin leather sandals, and my anklets. No one around me wore such an outfit. All I saw were light flowing garments and veils; not one woman’s ankles were exposed, let alone jingling with steel anklets. I breathed through my mouth and felt my face grow hot.

“Stupid stupid stupid,” I whispered. We Himba don’t travel. We stay put. Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish. We even cover our bodies with it. Otjize is red land. Here in the launch port, most were Khoush and a few other non-Himba. Here, I was an outsider; I was outside. “What was I thinking?” I whispered.

I was sixteen years old and had never been beyond my city, let alone near a launch station. I was by myself and I had just left my family. My prospects of marriage had been 100 percent and now they would be zero. No man wanted a woman who’d run away. However, beyond my prospects of normal life being ruined, I had scored so high on the planetary exams in mathematics that the Oomza University had not only admitted me, but promised to pay for whatever I needed in order to attend. No matter what choice I made, I was never going to have a normal life, really.

I looked around and immediately knew what to do next. I walked to the help desk.

* * *

The travel security officer scanned my astrolabe, a full deep scan. Dizzy with shock, I shut my eyes and breathed through my mouth to steady myself. Just to leave the planet, I had to give them access to my entire life—me, my family, and all forecasts of my future. I stood there, frozen, hearing my mother’s voice in my head. “There is a reason why our people do not go to that university. Oomza Uni wants you for its own gain, Binti. You go to that school and you become its slave.” I couldn’t help but contemplate the possible truth in her words. I hadn’t even gotten there yet and already I’d given them my life. I wanted to ask the officer if he did this for everyone, but I was afraid now that he’d done it. They could do anything to me, at this point. Best not to make trouble.

When the officer handed me my astrolabe, I resisted the urge to snatch it back. He was an old Khoush man, so old that he was privileged to wear the blackest turban and face veil. His shaky hands were so gnarled and arthritic that he nearly dropped my astrolabe. He was bent like a dying palm tree and when he’d said, “You have never traveled; I must do a full scan. Remain where you are,” his voice was drier than the red desert outside my city. But he read my astrolabe as fast as my father, which both impressed and scared me. He’d coaxed it open by whispering a few choice equations and his suddenly steady hands worked the dials as if they were his own.

When he finished, he looked up at me with his light green piercing eyes that seemed to see deeper into me than his scan of my astrolabe. There were people behind me and I was aware of their whispers, soft laughter and a young child murmuring. It was cool in the terminal, but I felt the heat of social pressure. My temples ached and my feet tingled.

“Congratulations,” he said to me in his parched voice, holding out my astrolabe.

I frowned at him, confused. “What for?”

“You are the pride of your people, child,” he said, looking me in the eye. Then he smiled broadly and patted my shoulder. He’d just seen my entire life. He knew of my admission into Oomza Uni.

“Oh.” My eyes pricked with tears. “Thank you, sir,” I said, hoarsely, as I took my astrolabe.

I quickly made my way through the many people in the terminal, too aware of their closeness. I considered finding a lavatory and applying more otjize to my skin and tying my hair back, but instead I kept moving. Most of the people in the busy terminal wore the black and white garments of the Khoush people—the women draped in white with multicolored belts and veils and the men draped in black like powerful spirits. I had seen plenty of them on television and here and there in my city, but never had I been in a sea of Khoush. This was the rest of the world and I was finally in it.

As I stood in line for boarding security, I felt a tug at my hair. I turned around and met the eyes of a group of Khoush women. They were all staring at me; everyone behind me was staring at me.

The woman who’d tugged my plait was looking at her fingers and rubbing them together, frowning. Her fingertips were orange red with my otjize. She sniffed them. “It smells like jasmine flowers,” she said to the woman on her left, surprised.

“Not shit?” one woman said. “I hear it smells like shit because it is shit.”

“No, definitely jasmine flowers. It is thick like shit, though.”

“Is her hair even real?” another woman asked the woman rubbing her fingers.

“I don’t know.”

“These ‘dirt bathers’ are a filthy people,” the first woman muttered.

I just turned back around, my shoulders hunched. My mother had counseled me to be quiet around Khoush. My father told me that when he was around Khoush merchants when they came to our city to buy astrolabes, he tried to make himself as small as possible. “It is either that or I will start a war with them that I will finish,” he said. My father didn’t believe in war. He said war was evil, but if it came he would revel in it like sand in a storm. Then he’d say a little prayer to the Seven to keep war away and then another prayer to seal his words.

I pulled my plaits to my front and touched the edan in my pocket. I let my mind focus on it, its strange language, its strange metal, its strange feel. I’d found the edan eight years ago while exploring the sands of the hinter deserts one late afternoon. “Edan” was a general name for a device too old for anyone to know it functions, so old that they were now just art.

My edan was more interesting than any book, than any new astrolabe design I made in my father’s shop that these women would probably kill each other to buy. And it was mine, in my pocket, and these nosy women behind me could never know. Those women talked about me, the men probably did too. But none of them knew what I had, where I was going, who I was. Let them gossip and judge. Thankfully, they knew not to touch my hair again. I don’t like war either.

The security guard scowled when I stepped forward. Behind him I could see three entrances, the one in the middle led into the ship called “Third Fish,” the ship I was to take to Oomza Uni. Its open door was large and round leading into a long corridor illuminated by soft blue lights.

“Step forward,” the guard said. He wore the uniform of all launch site lower-level personnel—a long white gown and gray gloves. I’d only seen this uniform in streaming stories and books and I wanted to giggle, despite myself. He looked ridiculous. I stepped forward and everything went red and warm.

When the body scan beeped its completion, the security guard reached right into my left pocket and brought out my edan. He held it to his face with a deep scowl.

I waited. What would he know?

He was inspecting its stellated cube shape, pressing its many points with his finger and eyeing the strange symbols on it that I had spent two years unsuccessfully trying to decode. He held it to his face to better see the intricate loops and swirls of blue and black and white, so much like the lace placed on the heads of young girls when they turn eleven and go through their eleventh-year rite.

“What is this made of?” the guard asked, holding it over a scanner. “It’s not reading as any known metal.”

I shrugged, too aware of the people behind me waiting in line and staring at me. To them, I was probably like one of the people who lived in caves deep in the hinter desert who were so blackened by the sun that they looked like walking shadows. I’m not proud to say that I have some Desert People blood in me from my father’s side of the family, that’s where my dark skin and extra-bushy hair come from.

“Your identity reads that you’re a harmonizer, a masterful one who builds some of the finest astrolabes,” he said. “But this object isn’t an astrolabe. Did you build it? And how can you build something and not know what it’s made of?”

“I didn’t build it,” I said.

“Who did?”

“It’s . . . it’s just an old, old thing,” I said. “It has no math or current. It’s just an inert computative apparatus that I carry for good luck.” This was partially a lie. But even I didn’t know exactly what it could and couldn’t do.

The man looked as if he would ask more, but didn’t. Inside, I smiled. Government security guards were only educated up to age ten, yet because of their jobs, they were used to ordering people around. And they especially looked down on people like me. Apparently, they were the same everywhere, no matter the tribe. He had no idea what a “computative apparatus” was, but he didn’t want to show that I, a poor Himba girl, was more educated than he. Not in front of all these people. So he quickly moved me along and, finally, there I stood at my ship’s entrance.

I couldn’t see the end of the corridor, so I stared at the entrance. The ship was a magnificent piece of living technology. Third Fish was a Miri 12, a type of ship closely related to a shrimp. Miri 12s were stable calm creatures with natural exoskeletons that could withstand the harshness of space. They were genetically enhanced to grow three breathing chambers within their bodies.

Scientists planted rapidly growing plants within these three enormous rooms that not only produced oxygen from the CO2 directed in from other parts of the ship, but also absorbed benzene, formaldehyde, and trichloroethylene. This was some of the most amazing technology I’d ever read about. Once settled on the ship, I was determined to convince someone to let me see one of these amazing rooms. But at the moment, I wasn’t thinking about the technology of the ship. I was on the threshold now, between home and my future.

I stepped into the blue corridor.

* * *

So that is how it all began. I found my room. I found my group—twelve other new students, all human, all Khoush, between the ages of fifteen and eighteen. An hour later, my group and I located a ship technician to show us one of the breathing chambers. I wasn’t the only new Oomza Uni student who desperately wanted to see the technology at work. The air in there smelled like the jungles and forests I’d only read about. The plants had tough leaves and they grew everywhere, from ceiling to walls to floor. They were wild with flowers, and I could have stood there breathing that soft, fragrant air for days.

We met our group leader hours later. He was a stern old Khoush man who looked the twelve of us over and paused at me and asked, “Why are you covered in red greasy clay and weighed down by all those steel anklets?” When I told him that I was Himba, he coolly said, “I know, but that doesn’t answer my question.” I explained to him the tradition of my people’s skin care and how we wore the steel rings on our ankles to protect us from snakebites. He looked at me for a long time, the others in my group staring at me like a rare bizarre butterfly.

“Wear your otjize,” he said. “But not so much that you stain up this ship. And if those anklets are to protect you from snakebites, you no longer need them.”

I took my anklets off, except for two on each ankle. Enough to jingle with each step.

I was the only Himba on the ship, out of nearly five hundred passengers. My tribe is obsessed with innovation and technology, but it is small, private, and, as I said, we don’t like to leave Earth. We prefer to explore the universe by traveling inward, as opposed to outward. No Himba has ever gone to Oomza Uni. So me being the only one on the ship was not that surprising. However, just because something isn’t surprising doesn’t mean it’s easy to deal with.

The ship was packed with outward-looking people who loved mathematics, experimenting, learning, reading, inventing, studying, obsessing, revealing. The people on the ship weren’t Himba, but I soon understood that they were still my people. I stood out as a Himba, but the commonalities shined brighter. I made friends quickly. And by the second week in space, they were good friends.

Olo, Remi, Kwuga, Nur, Anajama, Rhoden. Only Olo and Remi were in my group. Everyone else I met in the dining area or the learning room where various lectures were held by professors onboard the ship. They were all girls who grew up in sprawling houses, who’d never walked through the desert, who’d never stepped on a snake in the dry grass. They were girls who could not stand the rays of Earth’s sun unless it was shining through a tinted window.

Yet they were girls who knew what I meant when I spoke of “treeing.” We sat in my room (because, having so few travel items, mine was the emptiest) and challenged each other to look out at the stars and imagine the most complex equation and then split it in half and then in half again and again. When you do math fractals long enough, you kick yourself into treeing just enough to get lost in the shallows of the mathematical sea. None of us would have made it into the university if we couldn’t tree, but it’s not easy. We were the best and we pushed each other to get closer to “God.”

Then there was Heru. I had never spoken to him, but we smiled across the table at each other during mealtimes. He was from one of those cities so far from mine that they seemed like a figment of my imagination, where there was snow and where men rode those enormous gray birds and the women could speak with those birds without moving their mouths.

Once Heru was standing behind me in the dinner line with one of his friends. I felt someone pick up one of my plaits and I whirled around, ready to be angry. I met his eyes and he’d quickly let go of my hair, smiled, and raised his hands up defensively. “I couldn’t help it,” he said, his fingertips reddish with my otjize.

“You can’t control yourself?” I snapped.

“You have exactly twenty-one,” he said. “And they’re braided in tessellating triangles. Is it some sort of code?”

I wanted to tell him that there was a code, that the pattern spoke my family’s bloodline, culture, and history. That my father had designed the code and my mother and aunties had shown me how to braid it into my hair. However, looking at Heru made my heart beat too fast and my words escaped me, so I merely shrugged and turned back around to pick up a bowl of soup. Heru was tall and had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. And he was very good in mathematics; few would have noticed the code in my hair.

But I never got the chance to tell him that my hair was braided into the history of my people. Because what happened, happened. It occured on the eighteenth day of the journey. The five days before we arrived on the planet Oomza Uni, the most powerful and innovative sprawling university in the Milky Way. I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life and I was farther from my beloved family than I’d ever been in my life.

I was at the table savoring a mouthful of a gelatinous milk-based dessert with slivers of coconut in it; I was gazing at Heru, who wasn’t gazing at me. I’d put my fork down and had my edan in my hands. I fiddled with it as I watched Heru talk to the boy beside him. The delicious creamy dessert was melting coolly on my tongue. Beside me, Olo and Remi were singing a traditional song from their city because they missed home, a song that had to be sung with a wavery voice like a water spirit.

Then someone screamed and Heru’s chest burst open, spattering me with his warm blood. There was a Meduse right behind him.

FOLDING BEIJING

Hao Jingfang

1.

At ten of five in the morning, Lao Dao crossed the busy pedestrian lane on his way to find Peng Li.

After the end of his shift at the waste processing station, Lao Dao had gone home, first to shower and then to change. He was wearing a white shirt and a pair of brown pants—the only decent clothes he owned. The shirt’s cuffs were frayed, so he rolled them up to his elbows. Lao Dao was forty–eight, single, and long past the age when he still took care of his appearance. As he had no one to pester him about the domestic details, he had simply kept this outfit for years. Every time he wore it, he’d come home afterward, take off the shirt and pants, and fold them up neatly to put away. Working at the waste processing station meant there were few occasions that called for the outfit, save a wedding now and then for a friend’s son or daughter.

Today, however, he was apprehensive about meeting strangers without looking at least somewhat respectable. After five hours at the waste processing station, he also had misgivings about how he smelled.

People who had just gotten off work filled the road. Men and women crowded every street vendor, picking through local produce and bargaining loudly. Customers packed the plastic tables at the food hawker stalls, which were immersed in the aroma of frying oil. They ate heartily with their faces buried in bowls of hot and sour rice noodles, their heads hidden by clouds of white steam. Other stands featured mountains of jujubes and walnuts, and hunks of cured meat swung overhead. This was the busiest hour of the day—work was over, and everyone was hungry and loud.

Lao Dao squeezed through the crowd slowly. A waiter carrying dishes shouted and pushed his way through the throng. Lao Dao followed close behind.

Peng Li lived some ways down the lane. Lao Dao climbed the stairs but Peng wasn’t home. A neighbor said that Peng usually didn’t return until right before market closing time, but she didn’t know exactly when.

Lao Dao became anxious. He glanced down at his watch: Almost 5:00 AM.

He went back downstairs to wait at the entrance of the apartment building. A group of hungry teenagers squatted around him, devouring their food. He recognized two of them because he remembered meeting them a couple of times at Peng Li’s home. Each kid had a plate of chow mein or chow fun, and they shared two dishes family–style. The dishes were a mess while pairs of chopsticks continued to search for elusive, overlooked bits of meat amongst the chopped peppers. Lao Dao sniffed his forearms again to be sure that the stench of garbage was off of him. The noisy, quotidian chaos around him assured him with its familiarity.

“Listen, do you know how much they charge for an order of twice-cooked pork over there?” a boy named Li asked.

“Fuck! I just bit into some sand,” a heavyset kid named Ding said while covering his mouth with one hand, which had very dirty fingernails. “We need to get our money back from the vendor!”

Li ignored him. “Three hundred and forty yuan!” said Li. “You hear that? Three forty! For twice–cooked pork! And for boiled beef? Four hundred and twenty!”

“How could the prices be so expensive?” Ding mumbled as he clutched his cheek. “What do they put in there?”

The other two youths weren’t interested in the conversation and concentrated on shoveling food from the plate into the mouth. Li watched them, and his yearning gaze seemed to go through them and focus on something beyond.

Lao Dao’s stomach growled. He quickly averted his eyes, but it was too late. His empty stomach felt like an abyss that made his body tremble. It had been a month since he last had a morning meal. He used to spend about a hundred each day on this meal, which translated to three thousand for the month. If he could stick to his plan for a whole year, he’d be able to save enough to afford two months of tuition for Tangtang’s kindergarten.

He looked into the distance: The trucks of the city cleaning crew were approaching slowly.

He began to steel himself. If Peng Li didn’t return in time, he would have to go on this journey without consulting him. Although it would make the trip far more difficult and dangerous, time was of the essence and he had to go. The loud chants of the woman next to him hawking her jujube interrupted his thoughts and gave him a headache. The peddlers at the other end of the road began to pack up their wares, and the crowd, like fish in a pond disturbed by a stick, dispersed. No one was interested in fighting the city cleaning crew. As the vendors got out of the way, the cleaning trucks patiently advanced. Vehicles were normally not allowed in the pedestrian lane, but the cleaning trucks were an exception. Anybody who dilly–dallied would be packed up by force.

Finally, Peng Li appeared: His shirt unbuttoned, a toothpick dangling between his lips, strolling leisurely and burping from time to time. Now in his sixties, Peng had become lazy and slovenly. His cheeks drooped like the jowls of a Shar–Pei, giving him the appearance of being perpetually grumpy. Looking at him now, one might get the impression that he was a loser whose only ambition in life was a full belly. However, even as a child, Lao Dao had heard his father recounting Peng Li’s exploits when he had been a young man.

Lao Dao went up to meet Peng in the street. Before Peng Li could greet him, Lao Dao blurted out, “I don’t have time to explain, but I need to get to First Space. Can you tell me how?”

Peng Li was stunned. It had been ten years since anyone brought up First Space with him. He held the remnant of the toothpick in his fingers—it had broken between his teeth without his being aware of it. For some seconds, he said nothing, but then he saw the anxiety on Lao Dao’s face and dragged him toward the apartment building. “Come into my place and let’s talk. You have to start from there anyway to get to where you want to go.”

The city cleaning crew was almost upon them, and the crowd scattered like autumn leaves in a wind. “Go home! Go home! The Change is about to start,” someone called from atop one of the trucks.

Peng Li took Lao Dao upstairs into his apartment. His ordinary, single–occupancy public housing unit was sparsely furnished: Six square meters in area, a washroom, a cooking corner, a table and a chair, a cocoon–bed equipped with storage drawers underneath for clothes and miscellaneous items. The walls were covered with water stains and footprints, bare save for a few haphazardly installed hooks for jackets, pants, and linens. Once he entered, Peng took all the clothes and towels off the wall–hooks and stuffed them into one of the drawers. During the Change, nothing was supposed to be unsecured. Lao Dao had once lived in a single–occupancy unit just like this one. As soon as he entered, he felt the flavor of the past hanging in the air.

Peng Li glared at Lao Dao. “I’m not going to show you the way unless you tell me why.”

It was already five thirty. Lao Dao had only half an hour left.

Lao Dao gave him the bare outlines of the story: Picking up the bottle with a message inside; hiding in the trash chute; being entrusted with the errand in Second Space; making his decision and coming here for guidance. He had so little time that he had to leave right away.

“You hid in the trash chutes last night to sneak into Second Space?” Peng Li frowned. “That means you had to wait twenty–four hours!”

“For two hundred thousand yuan?” Lao Dao said, “Even hiding for a week would be worth it.”

“I didn’t know you were so short on money.”

Lao Dao was silent for a moment. “Tangtang is going to be old enough for kindergarten in a year. I’ve run out of time.”

Lao Dao’s research on kindergarten tuition had shocked him. For schools with decent reputations, the parents had to show up with their bedrolls and line up a couple of days before registration. The two parents had to take turns so that while one held their place in the line, the other could go to the bathroom or grab a bite to eat. Even after lining up for forty–plus hours, a place wasn’t guaranteed. Those with enough money had already bought up most of the openings for their offspring, so the poorer parents had to endure the line, hoping to grab one of the few remaining spots. Mind you, this was just for decent schools. The really good schools? Forget about lining up—every opportunity was sold off to those with money. Lao Dao didn’t harbor unrealistic hopes, but Tangtang had loved music since she was an eighteen–month–old. Every time she heard music in the streets, her face lit up and she twisted her little body and waved her arms about in a dance. She looked especially cute during those moments. Lao Dao was dazzled as though surrounded by stage lights. No matter how much it cost, he vowed to send Tangtang to a kindergarten that offered music and dance lessons.

Peng Li took off his shirt and washed while he spoke with Lao Dao. The “washing” consisted only of splashing some drops of water over his face because the water was already shut off and only a thin trickle came out of the faucet. Peng Li took down a dirty towel from the wall and wiped his face carelessly before stuffing the towel into a drawer as well. His moist hair gave off an oily glint.

“What are you working so hard for?” Peng Li asked. “It’s not like she’s your real daughter.”

“I don’t have time for this,” Lao Dao said. “Just tell me the way.”

Peng Li sighed. “Do you understand that if you’re caught, it’s not just a matter of paying a fine? You’re going to be locked up for months.”

“I thought you had gone there multiple times.”

“Just four times. I got caught the fifth time.”

“That’s more than enough. If I could make it four times, it would be no big deal to get caught once.”

Lao Dao’s errand required him to deliver a message to First Space—success would earn him a hundred thousand yuan, and if he managed to bring back a reply, two hundred thousand. Sure, it was illegal, but no one would be harmed, and as long as he followed the right route and method, the probability of being caught wasn’t great. And the cash, the cash was very real. He could think of no reason to not take up the offer. He knew that when Peng Li was younger, he had snuck into First Space multiple times to smuggle contraband and made quite a fortune. There was a way.

It was a quarter to six. He had to get going, now.

Peng Li sighed again. He could see it was useless to try to dissuade Lao Dao. He was old enough to feel lazy and tired of everything, but he remembered how he had felt as a younger man and he would have made the same choice as Lao Dao. Back then, he didn’t care about going to prison. What was the big deal? You lost a few months and got beaten up a few times, but the money made it worthwhile. As long as you refused to divulge the source of the money no matter how much you suffered, you could survive it. The Security Bureau’s citation was nothing more than routine enforcement.

Peng Li took Lao Dao to his back window and pointed at the narrow path hidden in the shadows below.

“Start by climbing down the drain pipe from my unit. Under the felt cloth you’ll find hidden footholds I installed back in the day—if you stick close enough to the wall, the cameras won’t see you. Once you’re on the ground, stick to the shadows and head that way until you get to the edge. You’ll feel as well as see the cleft. Follow the cleft and go north. Remember, go north.”

Then Peng Li explained the technique for entering First Space as the ground turned during the Change. He had to wait until the ground began to cleave and rise. Then, from the elevated edge, he had to swing over and scramble about fifty meters over the cross section until he reached the other side of the turning earth, climb over, and head east. There, he would find a bush that he could hold onto as the ground descended and closed up. He could then conceal himself in the bush. Before Peng had even finished his explanation, Lao Dao was already halfway out the window, getting ready to climb down.

Peng Li held onto Lao Dao and made sure his foot was securely in the first foothold. Then he stopped. “I’m going to say something that you might not want to hear. I don’t think you should go. Over there . . . is not so great. If you go, you’ll end up feeling your own life is shit, pointless.”

Lao Dao was reaching down with his other foot, testing for the next foothold. His body strained against the windowsill and his words came out labored. “It doesn’t matter. I already know my life is shit without having gone there.”

“Take care of yourself,” Peng Li said.

Lao Dao followed Peng Li’s directions and groped his way down as quickly as he dared; the footholds felt very secure. He looked up and saw Peng Li light up a cigarette next to the window, taking deep drags. Peng Li put out the cigarette, leaned out, and seemed about to say something more, but ultimately he retreated back into his unit quietly. He closed his window, which glowed with a faint light.

Lao Dao imagined Peng Li crawling into his cocoon-bed at the last minute, right before the Change. Like millions of others across the city, the cocoon–bed would release a soporific gas that put him into deep sleep. He would feel nothing as his body was transported by the flipping world, and he would not open his eyes again until tomorrow evening, forty–hours later. Peng Li was no longer young; he was no longer different from the other fifty million who lived in Third Space.

Lao Dao climbed faster, barely touching the footholds. When he was close enough to the ground, he let go and landed on all fours. Luckily, Peng Li’s unit was only on the fourth story, not too far up. He got up and ran through the shadow cast by the building next to the lake. He saw the crevice in the grass where the ground would open up.

But before he reached it, he heard the muffled rumbling from behind him, interrupted by a few crisp clangs. Lao Dao turned around and saw Peng Li’s building break in half. The top half folded down and pressed toward him, slowly but inexorably.

Shocked, Lao Dao stared at the sight for a few moments before recovering. He raced to the fissure in the ground, and lay prostrate next to it.

The Change began. This was a process repeated every twenty–four hours. The whole world started to turn. The sound of steel and masonry folding, grating, colliding filled the air, like an assembly line grinding to a halt. The towering buildings of the city gathered and merged into solid blocks; neon signs, shop awnings, balconies, and other protruding fixtures retracted into the buildings or flattened themselves into a thin layer against the walls, like skin. Every inch of space was utilized as the buildings compacted themselves into the smallest space.

The ground rose up. Lao Dao watched and waited until the fissure was wide enough. He crawled over the marble–lined edge onto the earthen wall, grabbing onto bits of metal protruding out of the soil. As the cleft widened and the walls elevated, he climbed, using his hands as well as feet. At first, he was climbing down, testing for purchase with his feet. But soon, as the entire section of ground rotated, he was lifted into the air, and up and down flipped around.

Lao Dao was thinking about last night.

He had cautiously stuck his head out of the trash heap, alert for any sound from the other side of the gate. The fermenting, rotting garbage around him was pungent: Greasy, fishy, even a bit sweet. He leaned against the iron gate. Outside, the world was waking up.

As soon as the yellow glow of the streetlights seeped into the seam under the lifting gate, he squatted and crawled out of the widening opening. The streets were empty; lights came on in the tall buildings, story by story; fixtures extruded from the sides of buildings, unfolding and extending, segment by segment; porches emerged from the walls; the eaves rotated and gradually dropped down into position; stairs extended and descended to the street. On both sides of the road, one black cube after another broke apart and opened, revealing the racks and shelves inside. Signboards emerged from the tops of the cubes and connected together while plastic awnings extended from both sides of the lane to meet in the middle, forming a corridor of shops. The streets were empty, as though Lao Dao were dreaming.

The neon lights came on. Tiny flashing LEDs on top of the shops formed into characters advertising jujubes from Xinjiang, lapi noodles from Northeast China, bran dough from Shanghai, and cured meats from Hunan.

For the rest of the day, Lao Dao couldn’t forget the scene. He had lived in this city for forty–eight years, but he had never seen such a sight. His days had always started with the cocoon and ended with the cocoon, and the time in between was spent at work or navigating dirty tables at hawker stalls and loudly bargaining crowds surrounding street vendors. This was the first time he had seen the world, bare.

Every morning, an observer at some distance from the city—say, a truck driver waiting on the highway into Beijing—could see the entire city fold and unfold.

At six in the morning, the truck drivers usually got out of their cabs and walked to the side of the highway, where they rubbed their eyes, still drowsy after an uncomfortable night in the truck. Yawning, they greeted each other and gazed at the distant city center. The break in the highway was just outside the Seventh Ring Road, while all the ground rotation occurred within the Sixth Ring Road. The distance was perfect for taking in the whole city, like gazing at an island in the sea.

In the early dawn, the city folded and collapsed. The skyscrapers bowed submissively like the humblest servants until their heads touched their feet; then they broke again, folded again, and twisted their necks and arms, stuffing them into the gaps. The compacted blocks that used to be the skyscrapers shuffled and assembled into dense, gigantic Rubik’s Cubes that fell into a deep slumber.

The ground then began to turn. Square by square, pieces of the earth flipped 180 degrees around an axis, revealing the buildings on the other side. The buildings unfolded and stood up, awakening like a herd of beasts under the gray–blue sky. The island that was the city settled in the orange sunlight, spread open, and stood still as misty gray clouds roiled around it.

The truck drivers, tired and hungry, admired the endless cycle of urban renewal.

2.

The folding city was divided into three spaces. One side of the earth was First Space, population five million. Their allotted time lasted from six o’clock in the morning to six o’clock the next morning. Then the space went to sleep, and the earth flipped.

The other side was shared by Second Space and Third Space. Twenty–five million people lived in Second Space, and their allotted time lasted from six o’clock on that second day to ten o’clock at night. Fifty million people lived in Third Space, allotted the time from ten o’clock at night to six o’clock in the morning, at which point First Space returned. Time had been carefully divided and parceled out to separate the populations: Five million enjoyed the use of twenty–four hours, and seventy-five million enjoyed the next twenty–four hours.

The structures on two sides of the ground were not even in weight. To remedy the imbalance, the earth was made thicker in First Space, and extra ballast buried in the soil to make up for the missing people and buildings. The residents of First Space considered the extra soil a natural emblem of their possession of a richer, deeper heritage.

Lao Dao had lived in Third Space since birth. He understood very well the reality of his situation, even without Peng Li pointing it out. He was a waste worker; he had processed trash for twenty–eight years, and would do so for the foreseeable future. He had not found the meaning of his existence or the ultimate refuge of cynicism; instead, he continued to hold onto the humble place assigned to him in life.

Lao Dao had been born in Beijing. His father was also a waste worker. His father told him that when Lao Dao was born, his father had just gotten his job, and the family had celebrated for three whole days. His father had been a construction worker, one of millions of other construction workers who had come to Beijing from all over China in search of work. His father and others like him had built this folding city. District by district, they had transformed the old city. Like termites swarming over a wooden house, they had chewed up the wreckage of the past, overturned the earth, and constructed a brand new world. They had swung their hammers and wielded their adzes, keeping their heads down; brick by brick, they had walled themselves off until they could no longer see the sky. Dust had obscured their views, and they had not known the grandeur of their work. Finally, when the completed building stood up before them like a living person, they had scattered in terror, as though they had given birth to a monster. But after they calmed down, they realized what an honor it would be to live in such a city in the future, and so they had continued to toil diligently and docilely, to meekly seek out any opportunity to remain in the city. It was said that when the folding city was completed, more than eighty million construction workers had wanted to stay. Ultimately, no more than twenty million were allowed to settle.

It had not been easy to get a job at the waste processing station. Although the work only involved sorting trash, so many applied that stringent selection criteria had to be imposed: The desired candidates had to be strong, skillful, discerning, organized, diligent, and unafraid of the stench or difficult environment. Strong–willed, Lao Dao’s father had held fast onto the thin reed of opportunity as the tide of humanity surged and then receded around him, until he found himself a survivor on the dry beach.

His father had then kept his head down and labored away in the acidic rotten fetor of garbage and crowding for twenty years. He had built this city; he was also a resident and a decomposer.

Construction of the folding city had been completed two years before Lao Dao’s birth. He had never been anywhere else, and had never harbored the desire to go anywhere else. He finished elementary school, middle school, high school, and took the annual college entrance examination three times—failing each time. In the end, he became a waste worker, too. At the waste processing station, he worked for five hours each shift, from eleven at night to four in the morning. Together with tens of thousands of co–workers, he mechanically and quickly sorted through the trash, picking out recyclable bits from the scraps of life from First Space and Second Space and tossing them into the processing furnace. Every day, he faced the trash on the conveyer belt flowing past him like a river, and he scraped off the leftover food from plastic bowls, picked out broken glass bottles, tore off the clean, thin backing from blood–stained sanitary napkins, stuffing it into the recyclables can marked with green lines. This was their lot: to eke out a living by performing the repetitive drudgery as fast as possible, to toil hour after hour for rewards as thin as the wings of cicadas.

Twenty million waste workers lived in Third Space; they were the masters of the night. The other thirty million made a living by selling clothes, food, fuel, or insurance, but most people understood that the waste workers were the backbone of Third Space’s prosperity. Each time he strolled through the neon–bedecked night streets, Lao Dao thought he was walking under rainbows made of food scraps. He couldn’t talk about this feeling with others. The younger generation looked down on the profession of the waste worker. They tried to show off on the dance floors of nightclubs, hoping to find jobs as DJs or dancers. Even working at a clothing store seemed a better choice: their fingers would be touching thin fabric instead of scrabbling through rotting garbage for plastic or metal. The young were no longer so terrified about survival; they cared far more about appearances.

Lao Dao didn’t despise his work. But when he had gone to Second Space, he had been terrified of being despised.

The previous morning, Lao Dao had snuck his way out of the trash chute with a slip of paper and tried to find the author of the slip based on the address written on it.

Second Space wasn’t far from Third Space. They were located on the same side of the ground, though they were divided in time. At the Change, the buildings of one space folded and retracted into the ground as the buildings of another space extended into the air, segment by segment, using the tops of the buildings of the other space as its foundation. The only difference between the spaces was the density of buildings. Lao Dao had to wait a full day and night inside the trash chute for the opportunity to emerge as Second Space unfolded. Although this was the first time he had been to Second Space, he wasn’t anxious. He only worried about the rotting smell on him.

Luckily, Qin Tian was a generous soul. Perhaps he had been prepared for what sort of person would show up since the moment he put that slip of paper inside the bottle.

Qin Tian was very kind. He knew at a glance why Lao Dao had come. He pulled him inside his home, offered him a hot bath, and gave him one of his own bathrobes to wear. “I have to count on you,” Qin Tian said.

Qin was a graduate student living in a university–owned apartment. He had three roommates, and besides the four bedrooms, the apartment had a kitchen and two bathrooms. Lao Dao had never taken a bath in such a spacious bathroom, and he really wanted to soak for a while and get rid of the smell on his body. But he was also afraid of getting the bathtub dirty and didn’t dare to rub his skin too hard with the washcloth. The jets of bubbles coming out of the bathtub walls startled him, and being dried by hot jets of air made him uncomfortable. After the bath, he picked up the bathrobe from Qin Tian and only put it on after hesitating for a while. He laundered his own clothes, as well as a few other shirts casually left in a basin. Business was business, and he didn’t want to owe anyone any favors.

Qin Tian wanted to send a gift to a woman he liked. They had gotten to know each other from work when Qin Tian had been given the opportunity to go to First Space for an internship with the UN Economic Office, where she was also working. The internship had lasted only a month. Qin told Lao Dao that the young woman was born and bred in First Space, with very strict parents. Her father wouldn’t allow her to date a boy from Second Space, and that was why he couldn’t contact her through regular channels. Qin was optimistic about the future; he was going to apply to the UN’s New Youth Project after graduation, and if he were to be chosen, he would be able to go to work in First Space. He still had another year of school left before he would get his degree, but he was going crazy pining for her. He had made a rose–shaped locket for her that glowed in the dark: This was the gift he would use to ask for her hand in marriage.

“I was attending a symposium, you know, the one that discussed the UN’s debt situation? You must have heard of it . . . anyway, I saw her, and I was like, Ah! I went over right away to talk to her. She was helping the VIPs to their seats, and I didn’t know what to say, so I just followed her around. Finally, I pretended that I had to find interpreters, and I asked her to help me. She was so gentle, and her voice was really soft. I had never really asked a girl out, you understand, so I was super nervous . . . Later, after we started dating, I brought up how we met . . . Why are you laughing? Yes, we dated. No, I don’t think we quite got to that kind of relationship, but . . . well, we kissed.” Qin Tian laughed as well, a bit embarrassed. “I’m telling the truth! Don’t you believe me? Yes, I guess sometimes even I can’t believe it. Do you think she really likes me?”

“I have no idea,” Lao Dao said. “I’ve never met her.”

One of Qin Tian’s roommates came over, and smiling, said, “Uncle, why are you taking his question so seriously? That’s not a real question. He just wants to hear you say, ‘Of course she loves you! You’re so handsome.’ ”

“She must be beautiful.”

“I’m not afraid that you’ll laugh at me.” Qin Tian paced back and forth in front of Lao Dao. “When you see her, you’ll understand the meaning of ‘peerless elegance.’ ”

Qin Tian stopped, sinking into a reverie. He was thinking of Yi Yan’s mouth. Her mouth was perhaps his favorite part of her: So tiny, so smooth, with a full bottom lip that glowed with a natural, healthy pink, making him want to give it a loving bite. Her neck also aroused him. Sometimes it appeared so thin that the tendons showed, but the lines were straight and pretty. The skin was fair and smooth, extending down into the collar of her blouse so that his gaze lingered on her second button. The first time he tried to kiss her, she had moved her lips away shyly. He had persisted until she gave in, closing her eyes and returning the kiss. Her lips had felt so soft, and his hands had caressed the curve of her waist and backside, again and again. From that day on, he had lived in the country of longing. She was his dream at night, and also the light he saw when he trembled in his own hand.

Qin Tian’s roommate was called Zhang Xian, who seemed to relish the opportunity to converse with Lao Dao.

Zhang Xian asked Lao Dao about life in Third Space, and mentioned that he actually wanted to live in Third Space for a while. He had been given the advice that if he wanted to climb up the ladder of government administration, some managerial experience in Third Space would be very helpful. Several prominent officials had all started their careers as Third Space administrators before being promoted to First Space. If they had stayed in Second Space, they wouldn’t have gone anywhere and would have spent the rest of their careers as low–level administrative cadres. Zhang Xian’s ambition was to eventually enter government service, and he was certain he knew the right path. Still, he wanted to go work at a bank for a couple of years first and earn some quick money. Since Lao Dao seemed noncommittal about his plans, Zhang Xian thought Lao Dao disapproved of his careerism.

“The current government is too inefficient and ossified,” he added quickly, “slow to respond to challenges, and I don’t see much hope for systematic reform. When I get my opportunity, I’ll push for rapid reforms: Anyone who’s incompetent will be fired.” Since Lao Dao still didn’t seem to show much reaction, he added, “I’ll also work to expand the pool of candidates for government service and promotion, including opening up opportunities for candidates from Third Space.”

Lao Dao said nothing. It wasn’t because he disapproved; rather, he found it hard to believe Zhang Xian.

While he talked with Lao Dao, Zhang Xian was also putting on a tie and fixing his hair in front of the mirror. He had on a shirt with light blue stripes, and the tie was a bright blue. He closed his eyes and frowned as the mist of hairspray settled around his face, whistling all the while.

Zhang Xian left with his briefcase for his internship at the bank. Qin Tian said he had to get going as well since he had classes that would last until four in the afternoon. Before he left, he transferred fifty thousand yuan over the net to Lao Dao’s account while Lao Dao watched, and explained that he would transfer the rest after Lao Dao succeeded in his mission.

“Have you been saving up for this for a while?” Lao Dao asked. “You’re a student, so money is probably tight. I can accept less if necessary.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m on a paid internship with a financial advisory firm. They pay me around a hundred thousand each month, so the total I’m promising you is about two months of my salary. I can afford it.”

Lao Dao said nothing. He earned the standard salary of ten thousand each month.

“Please bring back her answer,” Qin Tian said.

“I’ll do my best.”

“Help yourself to the fridge if you get hungry. Just stay put here and wait for the Change.”

Lao Dao looked outside the window. He couldn’t get used to the sunlight, which was a bright white, not the yellow he was used to. The street seemed twice as wide in the sun as what Lao Dao remembered from Third Space, and he wasn’t sure if that was a visual illusion. The buildings here weren’t nearly as tall as buildings in Third Space. The sidewalks were filled with people walking very fast, and from time to time, some trotted and tried to shove their way through the crowd, causing those in front of them to begin running as well. Everyone seemed to run across intersections. The men dressed mostly in western suits while the women wore blouses and short skirts, with scarves around their necks and compact, rigid purses in their hands that lent them an air of competence and efficiency. The street was filled with cars, and as they waited at intersections for the light to change, the drivers stuck their heads out of the windows, gazing ahead anxiously. Lao Dao had never seen so many cars; he was used to the mass-transit maglev packed with passengers whooshing by him.

Around noon, he heard noises in the hallway outside the apartment. Lao Dao peeked out of the peephole in the door. The floor of the hallway had transformed into a moving conveyor belt, and bags of trash left at the door of each apartment were shoved onto the conveyor belt to be deposited into the chute at the end. Mist filled the hall, turning into soap bubbles that drifted through the air, and then water washed the floor, followed by hot steam.

A noise from behind Lao Dao startled him. He turned around and saw that another of Qin Tian’s roommates had emerged from his bedroom. The young man ignored Lao Dao, his face impassive. He went to some machine next to the balcony and pushed some buttons, and the machine came to life, popping, whirring, grinding. Eventually, the noise stopped, and Lao Dao smelled something delicious. The young man took out a piping hot plate of food from the machine and returned to his room. Through the half–open bedroom door, Lao Dao could see that the young man was sitting on the floor in a pile of blankets and dirty socks, and staring at his wall as he ate and laughed, pushing up his glasses from time to time. After he was done eating, he left the plate at his feet, stood up, and began to fight someone invisible as he faced the wall. He struggled, his breathing labored, as he wrestled the unseen enemy.

Lao Dao’s last memory of Second Space was the refined air with which everyone conducted themselves before the Change. Looking down from the window of the apartment, everything seemed so orderly that he felt a hint of envy. Starting at a quarter past nine, the stores along the street turned off their lights one after another; groups of friends, their faces red with drink, said goodbye in front of restaurants. Young couples kissed next to taxicabs. And then everyone returned to their homes, and the world went to sleep.

It was ten at night. He returned to his world to go to work.

3.

There was no trash chute connecting First Space directly with Third Space. The trash from First Space had to pass through a set of metal gates to be transported into Third Space, and the gates shut as soon as the trash went through. Lao Dao didn’t like the idea of having to go over the flipping ground, but he had no choice.

As the wind whipped around him, he crawled up the still–rotating earth toward First Space. He grabbed onto metal structural elements protruding from the soil, struggling to balance his body and calm his heart, until he finally managed to scrabble over the rim of this most distant world. He felt dizzy and nauseated from the intense climb, and forcing down his churning stomach, he remained still on the ground for a while.

By the time he got up, the sun had risen.

Lao Dao had never seen such a sight. The sun rose gradually. The sky was a deep and pure azure, with an orange fringe at the horizon, decorated with slanted, thin wisps of cloud. The eaves of a nearby building blocked the sun, and the eaves appeared especially dark while the background was dazzlingly bright. As the sun continued to rise, the blue of the sky faded a little, but seemed even more tranquil and clear. Lao Dao stood up and ran at the sun; he wanted to catch a trace of that fading golden color. Silhouettes of waving tree branches broke up the sky. His heart leapt wildly. He had never imagined that a sunrise could be so moving.

After a while, he slowed down and calmed himself. He was standing in the middle of the street, lined on both sides with tall trees and wide lawns. He looked around, and he couldn’t see any buildings at all. Confused, he wondered if he had really reached First Space. He pondered the two rows of sturdy gingkoes.

He backed up a few steps and turned to look in the direction he had come from. There was a road sign next to the street. He took out his phone and looked at the map—although he wasn’t authorized to download live maps from First Space, he had downloaded and stored some maps before leaving on this trip. He found where he was as well as where he needed to be. He was standing next to a large open park, and the seam he had emerged from was next to a lake in that park.

Lao Dan ran about a kilometer through the deserted streets until he reached the residential district containing his destination. He hid behind some bushes and observed the beautiful house from a distance.

At eight thirty, Yi Yan came out of the house.

She was indeed as elegant as Qin Tian’s description had suggested, though perhaps not as pretty. Lao Dao wasn’t surprised, however. No woman could possibly be as beautiful as Qin Tian’s verbal portrait. He also understood why Qin Tian had spoken so much of her mouth. Her eyes and nose were fairly ordinary. She had a good figure: Tall, with delicate bones. She wore a milky white dress with a flowing skirt. Her belt was studded with pearls, and she had on black heels.

Lao Dao walked up to her. To avoid startling her, he approached from the front, and bowed deeply when he was still some distance away.

She stood still, looking at him in surprise.

Lao Dao came closer and explained his mission. He took out the envelope with the locket and Qin Tian’s letter.

She looked alarmed. “Please leave,” she whispered. “I can’t talk to you right now.”

“Uh . . . I don’t really need to talk to you,” Lao Dao said. “I just need to give you this letter.”

She refused to take it from him, clasping her hands tightly. “I can’t accept this now. Please leave. Really, I’m begging you. All right?” She took out a business card from her purse and handed it to him. “Come find me at this address at noon.”

Lao Dao looked at the card. At the top was the name of a bank.

“At noon,” she said. “Wait for me in the underground supermarket.”

Lao Dao could tell how anxious she was. He nodded, put the card away, and returned to hide behind the bushes. Soon, a man emerged from the house and stopped next to her. The man looked to be about Lao Dao’s age, or maybe a couple of years younger. Dressed in a dark gray, well–fitted suit, he was tall and broad–shouldered. Not fat, just thickset. His face was nondescript: Round, a pair of glasses, hair neatly combed to one side.

The man grabbed Yi Yan around the waist and kissed her on the lips. Yi Yan seemed to give in to the kiss reluctantly.

Understanding began to dawn on Lao Dao.

A single–rider cart arrived in front of the house. The black cart had two wheels and a canopy, and resembled an ancient carriage or rickshaw one might see on TV, except there was no horse or person pulling the cart. The cart stopped and dipped forward. Yi Yan stepped in, sat down, and arranged the skirt of the dress neatly around her knees. The cart straightened and began to move at a slow, steady pace, as though pulled by some invisible horse. After Yi Yan left, a driverless car arrived, and the man got in.

Lao Dao paced in place. He felt something was pushing at his throat, but he couldn’t articulate it. Standing in the sun, he closed his eyes. The clean, fresh air filled his lungs and provided some measure of comfort.

A moment later, he was on his way. The address Yi Yan had given him was to the east, a little more than three kilometers away. There were very few people in the pedestrian lane, and only scattered cars sped by in a blur on the eight–lane avenue. Occasionally, well-dressed women passed Lao Dao in two-wheeled carts. The passengers adopted such graceful postures that it was as though they were in some fashion show. No one paid any attention to Lao Dao. The trees swayed in the breeze, and the air in their shade seemed suffused with the perfume from the elegant women.

Yi Yan’s office was in the Xidan commercial district. There were no skyscrapers at all, only a few low buildings scattered around a large park. The buildings seemed isolated from each other but were really parts of a single compound connected via underground passages.

Lao Dao found the supermarket. He was early. As soon as he came in, a small shopping cart began to follow him around. Every time he stopped by a shelf, the screen on the cart displayed the names of the goods on the shelf, their description, customer reviews, and comparison with other brands in the same category. All merchandise in the supermarket seemed to be labeled in foreign languages. The packaging for all the food products was very refined, and small cakes and fruits were enticingly arranged on plates for customers. He didn’t dare to touch anything, keeping his distance as though they were dangerous, exotic animals. There seemed to be no guards or clerks in the whole market.

More customers appeared before noon. Some men in suits came into the market, grabbed sandwiches, and waved them at the scanner next to the door before hurrying out. No one paid any attention to Lao Dao as he waited in an obscure corner near the door.

Yi Yan appeared, and Lao Dao went up to her. Yi Yan glanced around, and without saying anything, led Lao Dao to a small restaurant next door. Two small robots dressed in plaid skirts greeted them, took Yi Yan’s purse, brought them to a booth, and handed them menus. Yi Yan pressed a few spots on the menu to make her selection and handed the menu back to the robot. The robot turned and glided smoothly on its wheels to the back.

Yi Yan and Lao Dao sat mutely across from each other. Lao Dao took out the envelope.

Yi Yan still didn’t take it from him. “Can you let me explain?”

Lao Dao pushed the envelope across the table. “Please take this first.”

Yi Yan pushed it back.

“Can you let me explain first?”

“You don’t need to explain anything,” Lao Dao said. “I didn’t write this letter. I’m just the messenger.”

“But you have to go back and give him an answer.” Yi Yan looked down. The little robot returned with two plates, one for each of them. On each plate were two slices of some kind of red sashimi, arranged like flower petals. Yi Yan didn’t pick up her chopsticks, and neither did Lao Dao. The envelope rested between the two plates, and neither touched it. “I didn’t betray him. When I met him last year, I was already engaged. I didn’t lie to him or conceal the truth from him on purpose . . . Well, maybe I did lie, but it was because he assumed and guessed. He saw Wu Wen come to pick me up once, and he asked me if he was my father. I . . . I couldn’t answer him, you know? It was just too embarrassing. I . . .”

Yi Yan couldn’t speak any more.

Lao Dao waited a while. “I’m not interested in what happened between you two. All I care about is that you take the letter.”

Yi Yan kept her head down, and then she looked up. “After you go back, can you . . . help me by not telling him everything?”

“Why?”

“I don’t want him to think that I was just playing with his feelings. I do like him, really. I feel very conflicted.”

“None of this is my concern.”

“Please, I’m begging you . . . I really do like him.”

Lao Dao was silent for a while.

“But you got married in the end?”

“Wu Wen was very good to me. We’d been together several years. He knew my parents, and we’d been engaged for a long time. Also, I’m three years older than Qin Tian, and I was afraid he wouldn’t like that. Qin Tian thought I was an intern, like him, and I admit that was my fault for not telling him the truth. I don’t know why I said I was an intern at first, and then it became harder and harder to correct him. I never thought he would be serious.”

Slowly, Yi Yan told Lao Dao her story. She was actually an assistant to the bank’s president and had already been working there for two years at the time she met Qin Tian. She had been sent to the UN for training, and was helping out at the symposium. In fact, her husband earned so much money that she didn’t really need to work, but she didn’t like the idea of being at home all day. She worked only half days and took a half–time salary. The rest of the day was hers to do with as she pleased, and she liked learning new things and meeting new people. She really had enjoyed the months she spent training at the UN. She told Lao Dao that there were many wives like her who worked half–time. As a matter of fact, after she got off work at noon, another wealthy wife worked as the president’s assistant in the afternoon. She told Lao Dao that though she had not told Qin Tian the truth, her heart was honest.

“And so”—she spooned a serving of the new hot dish onto Lao Dao’s plate—“can you please not tell him, just temporarily? Please . . . give me a chance to explain to him myself.”

Lao Dao didn’t pick up his chopsticks. He was very hungry, but he felt that he could not eat this food.

“Then I’d be lying, too,” Lao Dao said.

Yi Yan opened her purse, took out her wallet, and retrieved five 10,000-yuan bills. She pushed them across the table toward Lao Dao. “Please accept this token of my appreciation.”

Lao Dao was stunned. He had never seen bills with such large denominations or needed to use them. Almost subconsciously, he stood up, angry. The way Yi Yan had taken out the money seemed to suggest that she had been anticipating an attempt from him to blackmail her, and he could not accept that. This is what they think of Third Spacers. He felt that if he took her money, he would be selling Qin Tian out. It was true that he really wasn’t Qin Tian’s friend, but he still thought of it as a kind of betrayal. Lao Dao wanted to grab the bills, throw them on the ground, and walk away. But he couldn’t. He looked at the money again: The five thin notes were spread on the table like a broken fan. He could sense the power they had on him. They were baby blue in color, distinct from the brown 1,000–yuan note and the red 100–yuan note. These bills looked deeper, most distant somehow, like a kind of seduction. Several times, he wanted to stop looking at them and leave, but he couldn’t.

She continued to rummage through her purse, taking everything out, until she finally found another fifty thousand yuan from an inner pocket and placed them together with the other bills. “This is all I have. Please take it and help me.” She paused. “Look, the reason I don’t want him to know is because I’m not sure what I’m going to do. It’s possible that someday I’ll have the courage to be with him.”

Lao Dao looked at the ten notes spread out on the table, and then looked up at her. He sensed that she didn’t believe what she was saying. Her voice was hesitant, belying her words. She was just delaying everything to the future so that she wouldn’t be embarrassed now. She was unlikely to ever elope with Qin Tian, but she also didn’t want him to despise her. Thus, she wanted to keep alive the possibility so that she could feel better about herself.

Lao Dao could see that she was lying to herself, but he wanted to lie to himself, too. He told himself, I have no duty to Qin Tian. All he asked was for me to deliver his message to her, and I’ve done that. The money on the table now represents a new commission, a commitment to keep a secret. He waited, and then told himself, Perhaps someday she really will get together with Qin Tian, and in that case I’ll have done a good deed by keeping silent. Besides, I need to think about Tangtang. Why should I get myself all worked up about strangers instead of thinking about Tangtang’s welfare? He felt calmer. He realized that his fingers were already touching the money.

“This is . . . too much.” He wanted to make himself feel better. “I can’t accept so much.”

“It’s no big deal.” She stuffed the bills into his hand. “I earn this much in a week. Don’t worry.”

“What . . . what do you want me to tell him?”

“Tell him that I can’t be with him now, but I truly like him. I’ll write you a note to bring him.” Yi Yan found a notepad in her purse; it had a picture of a peacock on the cover and the edges of the pages were golden. She ripped out a page and began to write. Her handwriting looked like a string of slanted gourds.

As Lao Dao left the restaurant, he glanced back. Yi Yan was sitting in the booth, gazing up at a painting on the wall. She looked so elegant and refined, as though she was never going to leave.

He squeezed the bills in his pocket. He despised himself, but he wanted to hold on to the money.

4.

Lao Dao left Xidan and returned the way he had come. He felt exhausted. The pedestrian lane was lined with a row of weeping willows on one side and a row of Chinese parasol trees on the other side. It was late spring, and everything was a lush green. The afternoon sun warmed his stiff face, and brightened his empty heart.

He was back at the park from this morning. There were many people in the park now, and the two rows of gingkoes looked stately and luscious. Black cars entered the park from time to time, and most of the people in the park wore either well–fitted western suits made of quality fabric or dark–colored stylish Chinese suits, but everyone gave off a haughty air. There were also some foreigners. Some of the people conversed in small groups; others greeted each other at a distance, and then laughed as they got close enough to shake hands and walk together.

Lao Dao hesitated, trying to decide where to go. There weren’t that many people in the street, and he would draw attention if he just stood here. But he would look out of place in any public area. He wanted to go back into the park, get close to the fissure, and hide in some corner to take a nap. He felt very sleepy, but he dared not sleep on the street.

He noticed that the cars entering the park didn’t seem to need to stop, and so he tried to walk into the park as well. Only when he was close to the park gate did he notice that two robots were patrolling the area. While cars and other pedestrians passed their sentry line with no problems, the robots beeped as soon as Lao Dao approached and turned on their wheels to head for him. In the tranquil afternoon, the noise they made seemed especially loud. The eyes of everyone nearby turned to him. He panicked, uncertain if it was his shabby clothes that alerted the robots. He tried to whisper to the robots, claiming that his suit was left inside the park, but the robots ignored him while they continued to beep and to flash the red lights over their heads. People strolling inside the park stopped and looked at him as though looking at a thief or eccentric person. Soon, three men emerged from a nearby building and ran over. Lao Dao’s heart was in his throat. He wanted to run, but it was too late.

“What’s going on?” the man in the lead asked loudly.

Lao Dao couldn’t think of anything to say, and he rubbed his pants compulsively.

The man in the front was in his thirties. He came up to Lao Dao and scanned him with a silver disk about the size of a button, moving his hand around Lao Dao’s person. He looked at Lao Dao suspiciously, as though trying to pry open his shell with a can opener.

“There’s no record of this man.” The man gestured at the older man behind him. “Bring him in.”

Lao Dao started to run away from the park.

The two robots silently dashed ahead of him and grabbed onto his legs. Their arms were cuffs and locked easily about his ankles. He tripped and almost fell, but the robots held him up. His arms swung through the air helplessly.

“Why are you trying to run?” The younger man stepped up and glared at him. His tone was now severe.

“I . . .” Lao Dao’s head felt like a droning beehive. He couldn’t think.

The two robots lifted Lao Dao by the legs and deposited his feet onto platforms next to their wheels. Then they drove toward the nearest building in parallel, carrying Lao Dao. Their movements were so steady, so smooth, so synchronized, that from a distance, it appeared as if Lao Dao was skating along on a pair of rollerblades, like Nezha riding on his Wind Fire Wheels.

Lao Dao felt utterly helpless. He was angry with himself for being so careless. How could he think such a crowded place would be without security measures? He berated himself for being so drowsy that he could commit such a stupid mistake. It’s all over now, he thought. Not only am I not going to get my money, I’m also going to jail.

The robots followed a narrow path and reached the backdoor of the building, where they stopped. The three men followed behind. The younger man seemed to be arguing with the older man over what to do with Lao Dao, but they spoke so softly that Lao Dao couldn’t hear the details. After a while, the older man came up and unlocked the robots from Lao Dao’s legs. Then he grabbed him by the arm and took him upstairs.

Lao Dao sighed. He resigned himself to his fate.

The man brought him into a room. It looked like a hotel room, very spacious, bigger even than the living room in Qin Tian’s apartment, and about twice the size of his own rental unit. The room was decorated in a dark shade of golden brown, with a king–sized bed in the middle. The wall at the head of the bed showed abstract patterns of shifting colors. Translucent, white curtains covered the French window, and in front of the window sat a small circular table and two comfortable chairs. Lao Dao was anxious, unsure of who the older man was and what he wanted.

“Sit, sit!” The older man clapped him on the shoulder and smiled. “Everything’s fine.”

Lao Dao looked at him suspiciously.

“You’re from Third Space, aren’t you?” The older man pulled him over to the chairs, and gestured for him to sit.

“How do you know that?” Lao Dao couldn’t lie.

“From your pants.” The older man pointed at the waist of his pants. “You never even cut off the label. This brand is only sold in Third Space; I remember my mother buying them for my father when I was little.”

“Sir, you’re . . .?”

“You don’t need to ‘Sir’ me. I don’t think I’m much older than you are. How old are you? I’m fifty–two.”

“Forty–eight.”

“See, just older by four years.” He paused, and then added, “My name is Ge Daping. Why don’t you just call me Lao Ge?”

Lao Dao relaxed a little. Lao Ge took off his jacket and moved his arms about to stretch out the stiff muscles. Then he filled a glass with hot water from a spigot in the wall and handed it to Lao Dao. He had a long face, and the corners of his eyes, the ends of his eyebrows, and his cheeks drooped. Even his glasses seemed about to fall off the end of his nose. His hair was naturally a bit curly and piled loosely on top of his head. As he spoke, his eyebrows bounced up and down comically. He made some tea for himself and asked Lao Dao if he wanted any. Lao Dao shook his head.

“I was originally from Third Space as well,” said Lao Ge. “We’re practically from the same hometown! So, you don’t need to be so careful with me. I still have a bit of authority, and I won’t give you up.”

Lao Dao let out a long sigh, congratulating himself silently for his good luck. He recounted for Lao Ge his experiencing of going to Second Space and then coming to First Space, but omitted the details of what Yi Yan had said. He simply told Lao Ge that he had successfully delivered the message and was just waiting for the Change to head home.

Lao Ge also shared his own story with Lao Dao. He had grown up in Third Space, and his parents had worked as deliverymen. When he was fifteen, he entered a military school, and then joined the army. He worked as a radar technician in the army, and because he worked hard, demonstrated good technical skills, and had some good opportunities, he was eventually promoted to an administrative position in the radar department with the rank of brigadier general. Since he didn’t come from a prominent family, that rank was about as high as he could go in the army. He then retired from the army and joined an agency in First Space responsible for logistical support for government enterprises, organizing meetings, arranging travel, and coordinating various social events. The job was blue collar in nature, but since his work involved government officials and he had to coordinate and manage, he was allowed to live in First Space. There were a considerable number of people in First Space like him—chefs, doctors, secretaries, housekeepers—skilled blue–collar workers needed to support the lifestyle of First Space. His agency had run many important social events and functions, and Lao Ge was its director.

Lao Ge might have been self–deprecating in describing himself as a “blue collar,” but Lao Dao understood that anyone who could work and live in First Space had extraordinary skills. Even a chef here was likely a master of his art. Lao Ge must be very talented to have risen here from Third Space after a technical career in the army.

“You might as well take a nap,” Lao Ge said. “I’ll take you to get something to eat this evening.”

Lao Dao still couldn’t believe his good luck, and he felt a bit uneasy. However, he couldn’t resist the call of the white sheets and stuffed pillows, and he fell asleep almost right away.

When he woke up, it was dark outside. Lao Ge was combing his hair in front of the mirror. He showed Lao Dao a suit lying on the sofa and told him to change. Then he pinned a tiny badge with a faint red glow to Lao Dao’s lapel—a new identity.

The large open lobby downstairs was crowded. Some kind of presentation seemed to have just finished, and attendees conversed in small groups. At one end of the lobby were the open doors leading to the banquet hall; the thick doors were lined with burgundy leather. The lobby was filled with small standing tables. Each table was covered by a white tablecloth tied around the bottom with a golden bow, and the vase in the middle of each table held a lily. Crackers and dried fruits were set out next to the vases for snacking, and a long table to the side offered wine and coffee. Guests mingled and conversed among the tables while small robots holding serving trays shuttled between their legs, collecting empty glasses.

Forcing himself to be calm, Lao Dao followed Lao Ge and walked through the convivial scene into the banquet hall. He saw a large hanging banner: The Folding City at Fifty.

“What is this?” Lao Dao asked.

“A celebration!” Lao Ge was walking about and examining the set up. “Xiao Zhao, come here a minute. I want you to check the table signs one more time. I don’t trust robots for things like this. Sometimes they don’t know how to be flexible.”

Lao Dao saw that the banquet hall was filled with large round tables with fresh flower centerpieces.

The scene seemed unreal to him. He stood in a corner and gazed up at the giant chandelier as though some dazzling reality was hanging over him, and he was but an insignificant presence at its periphery. There was a lectern set up on the dais at the front, and, behind it, the background was an ever–shifting series of images of Beijing. The photographs were perhaps taken from an airplane and captured the entirety of the city: The soft light of dawn and dusk; the dark purple and deep blue sky; clouds racing across the sky; the moon rising from a corner; the sun setting behind a roof. The aerial shots revealed the magnificence of Beijing’s ancient symmetry; the modern expanse of brick courtyards and large green parks that had extended to the Sixth Ring Road; Chinese style theatres; Japanese style museums; minimalist concert halls. And then there were shots of the city as a whole, shots that included both faces of the city during the Change: The earth flipping, revealing the other side studded with skyscrapers with sharp, straight contours; men and women energetically rushing to work; neon signs lighting up the night, blotting out the stars; towering apartment buildings, cinemas, nightclubs full of beautiful people.

But there were no shots of where Lao Dao worked.

He stared at the screen intently, uncertain if they might show pictures during the construction of the folding city. He hoped to get a glimpse of his father’s era. When he was little, his father had often pointed to buildings outside the window and told him stories that started with “Back then, we . . .” An old photograph had hung on the wall of their cramped home, and in the picture his father was laying bricks, a task his father had performed thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. He had seen that picture so many times that he thought he was sick of it, and yet, at this moment, he hoped to see a scene of workers laying bricks, even if for just a few seconds.

He was lost in his thoughts. This was also the first time he had seen what the Change looked like from a distance. He didn’t remember sitting down, and he didn’t know when others had sat down next to him. A man began to speak at the lectern, but Lao Dao wasn’t even listening for the first few minutes.

“. . . advantageous for the development of the service sector. The service economy is dependent on population size and density. Currently, the service industry of our city is responsible for more than 85 percent of our GDP, in line with the general characteristics of world-class metropolises. The other important sectors are the green economy and the recycling economy.” Lao Dao was paying full attention now. “Green economy” and “recycling economy” were often mentioned at the waste processing station, and the phrases were painted on the walls in characters taller than a man. He looked closer at the speaker on the dais: An old man with silvery hair, though he appeared hale and energetic. “. . . all trash is now sorted and processed, and we’ve achieved our goals for energy conservation and pollution reduction ahead of schedule. We’ve developed a systematic, large–scale recycling economy in which all the rare-earth and precious metals extracted from e–waste are reused in manufacturing, and even the plastics recycling rate exceeds eighty percent. The recycling stations are directly connected to the reprocessing plants . . .”

Lao Dao knew of a distant relative who worked at a reprocessing plant in the technopark far from the city. The technopark was just acres and acres of industrial buildings, and he heard that all the plants over there were very similar: The machines pretty much ran on their own, and there were very few workers. At night, when the workers got together, they felt like the last survivors of some dwindling tribe in a desolate wilderness.

He drifted off again. Only the wild applause at the end of the speech pulled him out of his chaotic thoughts and back to reality. He also applauded, though he didn’t know what for. He watched the speaker descend the dais and return to his place of honor at the head table. Everyone’s eyes were on him.

Lao Dao saw Wu Wen, Yi Yan’s husband.

Wu Wen was at the table next to the head table. As the old man who had given the speech sat down, Wu Wen walked over to offer a toast, and then he seemed to say something that got the old man’s attention. The old man got up and walked with Wu Wen out of the banquet hall. Almost subconsciously, a curious Lao Dao also got up and followed them. He didn’t know where Lao Ge had gone. Robots emerged to serve the dishes for the banquet.

Lao Dao emerged from the banquet hall and was back in the reception lobby. He eavesdropped on the other two from a distance and only caught snippets of conversation.

“. . . there are many advantages to this proposal,” said Wu Wen. “Yes, I’ve seen their equipment . . . automatic waste processing . . . they use a chemical solvent to dissolve and digest everything and then extract reusable materials in bulk . . . clean, and very economical . . . would you please give it some consideration?”

Wu Wen kept his voice low, but Lao Dao clearly heard “waste processing.” He moved closer.

The old man with the silvery hair had a complex expression. Even after Wu Wen was finished, he waited a while before speaking, “You’re certain that the solvent is safe? No toxic pollution?”

Wu Wen hesitated. “The current version still generates a bit of pollution but I’m sure they can reduce it to the minimum very quickly.”

Lao Dao got even closer.

The old man shook his head, staring at Wu Wen. “Things aren’t that simple. If I approve your project and it’s implemented, there will be major consequences. Your process won’t need workers, so what are you going to do with the tens of millions of people who will lose their jobs?”

The old man turned away and returned to the banquet hall. Wu Wen remained in place, stunned. A man who had been by the old man’s side—a secretary perhaps—came up to Wu Wen and said sympathetically, “You might as well go back and enjoy the meal. I’m sure you understand how this works. Employment is the number one concern. Do you really think no one has suggested similar technology in the past?”

Lao Dao understood vaguely that what they were talking about had to do with him, but he wasn’t sure whether it was good news or bad. Wu Wen’s expression shifted through confusion, annoyance, and then resignation. Lao Dao suddenly felt some sympathy for him: He had his moments of weakness, as well.

The secretary suddenly noticed Lao Dao.

“Are you new here?” he asked.

Lao Dao was startled. “Ah? Um . . .”

“What’s your name? How come I wasn’t informed about a new member of the staff?”

Lao Dao’s heart beat wildly. He didn’t know what to say. He pointed to the badge on his lapel, as though hoping the badge would speak or otherwise help him out. But the badge displayed nothing. His palms sweated. The secretary stared at him, his look growing more suspicious by the second. He grabbed another worker in the lobby, and the worker said he didn’t know who Lao Dao was.

The secretary’s face was now severe and dark. He grabbed Lao Dao with one hand and punched the keys on his communicator with the other hand.

Lao Dao’s heart threatened to jump out of his throat, but just then, he saw Lao Ge.

Lao Ge rushed over and with a smooth gesture, hung up the secretary’s communicator. Smiling, he greeted the secretary and bowed deeply. He explained that he was shorthanded for the occasion and had to ask for a colleague from another department to help out tonight. The secretary seemed to believe Lao Ge and returned to the banquet hall. Lao Ge brought Lao Dao back to his own room to avoid any further risks. If anyone really bothered to look into Lao Dao’s identity, they’d discover the truth, and even Lao Ge wouldn’t be able to protect him.

“I guess you’re not fated to enjoy the banquet.” Lao Ge laughed. “Just wait here. I’ll get you some food later.”

Lao Dao lay down on the bed and fell asleep again. He replayed the conversation between Wu Wen and the old man in his head. Automatic waste processing. What would that look like? Would that be a good thing or bad?

The next time he woke up, he smelled something delicious. Lao Ge had set out a few dishes on the small circular table, and was taking the last plate out of the warming oven on the wall. Lao Ge also brought over a half bottle of baijiu and filled two glasses.

“There was a table where they had only two people, and they left early so most of the dishes weren’t even touched. I brought some back. It’s not much, but maybe you’ll enjoy the taste. Hopefully you won’t hold it against me that I’m offering you leftovers.”

“Not at all,” Lao Dao said. “I’m grateful that I get to eat at all. These look wonderful! They must be very expensive, right?”

“The food at the banquet is prepared by the kitchen here and not for sale, so I don’t know how much they’d cost in a restaurant.” Lao Ge already started to eat. “They’re nothing special. If I had to guess, maybe ten thousand, twenty thousand? A couple might cost thirty, forty thousand. Not more than that.”

After a couple of bites, Lao Dao realized how hungry he was. He was used to skipping meals, and sometimes he could last a whole day without eating. His body would shake uncontrollably then, but he had learned to endure it. But now, the hunger was overwhelming. He wanted to chew quicker because his teeth couldn’t seem to catch up to the demands of his empty stomach. He tried to wash the food down with baijiu, which was very fragrant and didn’t sting his throat at all.

Lao Ge ate leisurely, and smiled as he watched Lao Dao eat.

“Oh.” Now that the pangs of hunger had finally been dulled a bit, Lao Dao remembered the earlier conversation. “Who was the man giving the speech? He seemed a bit familiar.”

“He’s always on TV,” Lao Ge said. “That’s my boss. He’s a man with real power—in charge of everything having to do with city operations.”

“They were talking about automatic waste processing earlier. Do you think they’ll really do it?”

“Hard to say.” Lao Ge sipped the baijiu and let out a burp. “I suspect not. You have to understand why they went with manual processing in the first place. Back then, the situation here was similar to Europe at the end of the twentieth century. The economy was growing, but so was unemployment. Printing money didn’t solve the problem. The economy refused to obey the Phillips curve.”

He saw that Lao Dao looked completely lost, and laughed. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand these things anyway.”

He clinked glasses with Lao Dao and the two drained their baijiu and refilled the glasses.

“I’ll just stick to unemployment. I’m sure you understand the concept,” Lao Ge continued. “As the cost of labor goes up and the cost of machinery goes down, at some point, it’ll be cheaper to use machines than people. With the increase in productivity, the GDP goes up, but so does unemployment. What do you do? Enact policies to protect the workers? Better welfare? The more you try to protect workers, the more you increase the cost of labor and make it less attractive for employers to hire people. If you go outside the city now to the industrial districts, there’s almost no one working in those factories. It’s the same thing with farming. Large commercial farms contain thousands and thousands of acres of land, and everything is automated so there’s no need for people. This kind of automation is absolutely necessary if you want to grow your economy—that was how we caught up to Europe and America, remember? Scaling! The problem is: Now you’ve gotten the people off the land and out of the factories, what are you going to do with them? In Europe, they went with the path of forcefully reducing everyone’s working hours and thus increasing employment opportunities. But this saps the vitality of the economy, you understand?

“The best way is to reduce the time a certain portion of the population spends living, and then find ways to keep them busy. Do you get it? Right, shove them into the night. There’s another advantage to this approach: The effects of inflation almost can’t be felt at the bottom of the social pyramid. Those who can get loans and afford the interest spend all the money you print. The GDP goes up, but the cost of basic necessities does not. And most of the people won’t even be aware of it.”

Lao Dao listened, only half grasping what was being said. But he could detect something cold and cruel in Lao Ge’s speech. Lao Ge’s manner was still jovial, but he could tell Lao Ge’s joking tone was just an attempt to dull the edge of his words and not hurt him. Not too much.

“Yes, it sounds a bit cold,” Lao Ge admitted. “But it’s the truth. I’m not trying to defend this place just because I live here. But after so many years, you grow a bit numb. There are many things in life we can’t change, and all we can do is to accept and endure.”

Lao Dao was finally beginning to understand Lao Ge, but he didn’t know what to say.

Both became a bit drunk. They began to reminisce about the past: The foods they ate as children, schoolyard fights. Lao Ge had loved hot and sour rice noodles and stinky tofu. These were not available in First Space, and he missed them dearly. Lao Ge talked about his parents, who still lived in Third Space. He couldn’t visit them often because each trip required him to apply and obtain special approval, which was very burdensome. He mentioned that there were some officially sanctioned ways to go between Third Space and First Space, and a few select people did make the trip often. He hoped that Lao Dao could bring a few things back to his parents because he felt regret and sorrow over his inability to be by their side and care for them.

Lao Dao talked about his lonely childhood. In the dim lamplight, he recalled his childhood spent alone wandering at the edge of the landfill.

It was now late night. Lao Ge had to go check up on the event downstairs, and he took Lao Dao with him. The dance party downstairs was about to be over, and tired-looking men and women emerged in twos and threes. Lao Ge said that entrepreneurs seemed to have the most energy, and often danced until the morning. The deserted banquet hall after the party looked messy and grubby, like a woman who took off her makeup after a long, tiring day. Lao Ge watched the robots trying to clean up the mess and laughed. “This is the only moment when First Space shows its true face.”

Lao Dao checked the time: Three hours until the Change. He sorted his thoughts: It’s time to leave.

5.

The silver–haired speaker returned to his office after the banquet to deal with some paperwork, and then got on a video call with Europe. At midnight, he felt tired. He took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. It was finally time to go home. He worked till midnight on most days.

The phone rang. He picked up. It was his secretary.

The research group for the conference had reported something troubling. Someone had discovered an error with one of the figures used in the pre–printed conference declaration, and the research group wanted to know if they should re–print the declaration. The old man immediately approved the request. This was very important, and they had to get it right. He asked who was responsible for this, and the secretary told him that it was Director Wu Wen.

The old man sat down on his sofa and took a nap. Around four in the morning, the phone rang again. The printing was going a bit slower than expected, and they estimated it would take another hour.

He got up and looked outside the window. All was silent. He could see Orion’s bright stars twinkling against the dark sky.

The stars of Orion were reflected in the mirror–like surface of the lake. Lao Dao was sitting on the shore of the lake, waiting for the Change.

He gazed at the park at night, realizing that this was perhaps the last time he would see a sight such as this. He wasn’t sad or nostalgic. This was a beautiful, peaceful place, but it had nothing to do with him. He wasn’t envious or resentful. He just wanted to remember this experience. There were few lights at night here, nothing like the flashing neon that turned the streets of Third Space bright as day. The buildings of the city seemed to be asleep, breathing evenly and calmly.

At five in the morning, the secretary called again to say that the declaration had been re–printed and bound, but the documents were still in the print shop, and they wanted to know if they should delay the scheduled Change.

The old man made the decision right away. Of course they had to delay it.

At forty minutes past the hour, the printed declarations were brought to the conference site, but they still had to be stuffed into about three thousand individual folders.

Lao Dao saw the faint light of dawn. At this time during the year, the sun wouldn’t have risen by six, but it was possible to see the sky brightening near the horizon.

He was prepared. He looked at his phone: only a couple more minutes until six. But strangely, there were no signs of the Change. Maybe in First Space, even the Change happens more smoothly and steadily.

At ten after six, the last copy of the declaration was stuffed into its folder.

The old man let out a held breath. He gave the order to initiate the Change.

Lao Dao noticed that the earth was finally moving. He stood up and shook the numbness out of his limbs. Carefully, he stepped up to the edge of the widening fissure. As the earth on both sides of the crack lifted up, he clambered over the edge, tested for purchase with his feet, and climbed down. The ground began to turn.

At twenty after six, the secretary called again with an emergency. Director Wu Wen had carelessly left a data key with important documents behind at the banquet hall. He was worried that the cleaning robots might remove it, and he had to go retrieve it right away.

The old man was annoyed, but he gave the order to stop the Change and reverse course.

Lao Dao was climbing slowly over the cross section of the earth when everything stopped with a jolt. After a moment, the earth started moving again, but now in reverse. The fissure was closing up. Terrified, he climbed up as fast as he dared. Scrabbling over the soil with hands and feet, he had to be careful with his movements.

The seam closed faster than he had expected. Just as he reached the top, the two sides of the crack came together. One of his lower legs was caught. Although the soil gave enough to not crush his leg or break his bones, it held him fast and he couldn’t extricate himself despite several attempts. Sweat beaded on his forehead from terror and pain. Has he been discovered?

Lao Dao lay prostrate on the ground, listening. He seemed to hear steps hurrying toward him. He imagined that soon the police would arrive and catch him. They might cut off his leg and toss him in jail with the stump. He couldn’t tell when his identity had been revealed. As he lay on the grass, he felt the chill of morning dew. The damp air seeped through collar and cuffs, keeping him alert and making him shiver. He silently counted the seconds, hoping against hope that this was but a technical malfunction. He tried to plan for what to say if he was caught. Maybe he should mention how honestly and diligently he had toiled for twenty–eight years and try to buy a bit of sympathy. He didn’t know if he would be prosecuted in court. Fate loomed before his eyes.

Fate now pressed into his chest. Of everything he had experienced during the last forty–eight hours, the episode that had made the deepest impression was the conversation with Lao Ge at dinner. He felt that he had approached some aspect of truth, and perhaps that was why he could catch a glimpse of the outline of fate. But the outline was too distant, too cold, too out of reach. He didn’t know what was the point of knowing the truth. If he could see some things clearly but was still powerless to change them, what good did that do? In his case, he couldn’t even see clearly. Fate was like a cloud that momentarily took on some recognizable shape, and by the time he tried to get a closer look, the shape was gone. He knew that he was nothing more than a figure. He was but an ordinary person, one out of 51,280,000 others just like him. And if they didn’t need that much precision and spoke of only 50 million, he was but a rounding error, the same as if he had never existed. He wasn’t even as significant as dust. He grabbed onto the grass.

At six thirty, Wu Wen retrieved his data key. At six forty, Wu Wen was back in his home.

At six forty–five, the white-haired old man finally lay down on the small bed in his office, exhausted. The order had been issued, and the wheels of the world began to turn slowly. Transparent covers extended over the coffee table and the desk, securing everything in place. The bed released a cloud of soporific gas and extended rails on all sides; then it rose into the air. As the ground and everything on the ground turned, the bed would remain level, like a floating cradle.

The Change had started again.

After thirty minutes spent in despair, Lao Dao saw a trace of hope again. The ground was moving. He pulled his leg out as soon as the fissure opened, and then returned to the arduous climb over the cross-section as soon as the opening was wide enough. He moved with even more care than before. As circulation returned to his numb leg, his calf itched and ached as though he was being bitten by thousands of ants. Several times, he almost fell. The pain was intolerable, and he had to bite his fist to stop from screaming. He fell; he got up; he fell again; he got up again. He struggled with all his strength and skill to maintain his footing over the rotating earth.

He couldn’t even remember how he had climbed up the stairs. He only remembered fainting as soon as Qin Tian opened the door to his apartment.

Lao Dao slept for ten hours in Second Space. Qin Tian found a classmate in medical school to help dress his wound. He suffered massive damage to his muscles and soft tissue, but luckily, no bones were broken. However, he was going to have some difficulty walking for a while.

After waking up, Lao Dao handed Yi Yan’s letter to Qin Tian. He watched as Qin Tian read the letter, his face filling up with happiness as well as loss. He said nothing. He knew that Qin Tian would be immersed in this remote hope for a long time.

Returning to Third Space, Lao Dao felt as though he had been traveling for a month. The city was waking up slowly. Most of the residents had slept soundly, and now they picked up their lives from where they had left off the previous cycle. No one would notice that Lao Dao had been away.

As soon as the vendors along the pedestrian lane opened shop, he sat down at a plastic table and ordered a bowl of chow mein. For the first time in his life, Lao Dao asked for shredded pork to be added to the noodles. Just one time, he thought. A reward.

Then he went to Lao Ge’s home and delivered the two boxes of medicine Lao Ge had bought for his parents. The two elders were no longer mobile, and a young woman with a dull demeanor lived with them as a caretaker.

Limping, he slowly returned to his own rental unit. The hallway was noisy and chaotic, filled with the commotion of a typical morning: brushing teeth, flushing toilets, arguing families. All around him were disheveled hair and half–dressed bodies.

He had to wait a while for the elevator. As soon as he got off at his floor he heard loud arguing noises. It was the two girls who lived next door, Lan Lan and Ah Bei, arguing with the old lady who collected rent. All the units in the building were public housing, but the residential district had an agent who collected rent, and each building, even each floor, had a subagent. The old lady was a long–term resident. She was thin, shriveled, and lived by herself—her son had left and nobody knew where he was. She always kept her door shut and didn’t interact much with the other residents. Lan Lan and Ah Bei had moved in recently, and they worked at a clothing store. Ah Bei was shouting while Lan Lan was trying to hold her back. Ah Bei turned and shouted at Lan Lan; Lan Lan began to cry.

“We all have to follow the lease, don’t we?” The old lady pointed at the scrolling text on the screen mounted on the wall. “Don’t you dare accuse me of lying! Do you understand what a lease is? It’s right here in black and white: In autumn and winter, there’s a ten percent surcharge for heat.”

“Ha!” Ah Bei lifted her chin at the old lady while combing her hair forcefully. “Do you think we are going to be fooled by such a basic trick? When we’re at work, you turn off the heat. Then you charge us for the electricity we haven’t been using so you can keep the extra for yourself. Do you think we were born yesterday? Every day, when we get home after work, the place is cold as an ice cellar. Just because we’re new, you think you can take advantage of us?”

Ah Bei’s voice was sharp and brittle, and it cut through the air like a knife. Lao Dao looked at Ah Bei, at her young, determined, angry face, and thought she was very beautiful. Ah Bei and Lan Lan often helped him by taking care of Tangtang when he wasn’t home, and sometimes even made porridge for him. He wanted Ah Bei to stop shouting, to forget these trivial things and stop arguing. He wanted to tell her that a girl should sit elegantly and quietly, cover her knees with her skirt, and smile so that her pretty teeth showed. That was how you got others to love you. But he knew that that was not what Ah Bei and Lan Lan needed.

He took out a 10,000–yuan bill from his inner pocket and handed it to the old lady. His hand trembled from weakness. The old lady was stunned, and so were Ah Bei and Lan Lan. He didn’t want to explain. He waved at them and returned to his home.

Tangtang was just waking up in her crib, and she rubbed her sleepy eyes. He gazed into Tangtang’s face, and his exhausted heart softened. He remembered how he had found Tangtang at first in front of the waste processing station, and her dirty, tear–stained face. He had never regretted picking her up that day. She laughed, and smacked her lips. He thought that he was fortunate. Although he was injured, he hadn’t been caught and managed to bring back money. He didn’t know how long it would take Tangtang to learn to dance and sing, and become an elegant young lady.

He checked the time. It was time to go to work.

PERFECT STATE

Brandon Sanderson

On the three-hundredth anniversary of my birth, I finally managed to conquer the world. The entire world. It had made for a rather memorable birthday present, though admittedly I’d been placed into this world with the intention and expectation that I’d someday rule it.

The next fifty years had put me at risk of boredom. After all, what did a man possibly do with his time after conquering the world?

In my case, I’d developed a nemesis.

“He’s planning something, Shale,” I said, stirring the sugar into my tea.

“Who?” Shale was the only man I knew who could lounge while wearing full plate armor. He hardly ever took the stuff off; it was part of his Concept.

“Who do you think?” I said, sipping the tea and leafing through the letters on my desk, each sealed by a daub of dark red wax. The two of us sat on a large flying stone platform with chairs and railings like a patio’s. I’d Lanced us a barrier over the top to ward off the rainstorm thrumming outside. The Grand Aurora shimmered above—visible even through the stormclouds—illuminating the ground beneath us and painting it faintly blue.

The occasional crashes of lightning from the storm highlighted a hundred other platforms flying in formation around my own. They carried a small retinue of soldiers—only six thousand—as my honor guard.

Thunder shook us. Shale yawned. “You really need to figure out weather, Kai.”

“I will eventually.” These last fifty years spent studying the practical application of Lancing had been most productive, but controlling the weather—at least on a grand scale—eluded me.

I sipped my tea. It was growing cold, but at least that I could do something about. I undid the buttons on my right sleeve, exposing my skin to the blue-violet light pulsing from the sky. The Grand Aurora encircled the entire world, and even the mightiest storms did little more than churn its mother-of-pearl shimmering. The Aurora defeated storms; that was how I knew I’d someday be able to do it too.

I entered Lancesight, and everything around me dimmed. Everything but the Grand Aurora. I basked in its warm light, which I could suddenly feel striking my skin with a pulsing rhythm. I drew the power in through my arm, then sent the energy up out my fingers and into the cup.

The tea began to steam. I sipped it and left Lancesight as I cracked open one of the letters. The seal was imprinted with the symbol of my spy networks.

Your Majesty, the note read. I believe it necessary to inform you that the Wode Scroll has once again—

I crumpled the paper.

“Uh-oh,” Shale said.

“It’s nothing,” I said, dropping the piece of paper and doing up my sleeve. It wasn’t from my spy networks at all; Besk simply knew I opened spy reports first.

The platform shook in another peal of thunder as I looked through a set of reports, each with my imperial mark at the top.

“You can’t make this thing go any faster, can you?” Shale asked.

“Be glad we don’t have to do this the old way.”

“The old way? Like . . . on a horse?” Shale scratched his chin. “I miss that.”

“Really? The sore backsides, riding through the rain, getting bitten, finding food for the beasts . . .”

“Horses have personality. This platform doesn’t.”

“You’re just saying that because it’s part of your Concept,” I said. “The dashing knight riding on horseback, winning the hands of fair maidens.”

“Sure, sure. I had quite the collection of hands. Couple of arms, the occasional foot . . .”

I smiled. Shale was now happily married with five children. The only maidens he spent any time with were the ones who called him Daddy and begged him for sweets.

I continued looking through reports. The next was the preliminary sketch for a new set of coins to be minted later in the year, bearing my image. It was mostly right, depicting my strong features and hair that curled regally to my shoulders. The beard was too big, however. I wore mine neat and squared, kept at a modest finger’s length, to present a strong image. The thing in the picture was far too bushy.

I made notes on the sketch, then continued on, ignoring the crumpled-up note I’d thrown on the floor. Besk was far too clever for his own good. I needed to fire the man and hire a stupid chancellor. Either that or hack Besk and rewrite his Concept.

Rewriting Concepts was a pain, though. And, truth be told, I was terrible at hacking, which was why—despite centuries together—I’d never gotten around to changing Besk. It wasn’t, of course, because I was fond of the chancellor. The troll-like man never did what I told him. I ruled literally billions of people, and only this one ignored my will.

“Here,” I said, holding up a report to Shale. “Look at this.”

Shale sauntered over, armor clanking. “Another robot?” He yawned.

“Melhi’s robots are dangerous.”

“Yawn.”

“You just yawned. You don’t need to say it.”

“Yawn. Whatever happened to the big quests, Kai? Hunting dragons, searching out magical swords? All you do these days is study magic and duel with Liveborn from other States.”

“I’m getting older, Shale,” I said, looking over the report again. My spies had overheard some of Melhi’s men in a Border State bragging about this new robot of his. I shook my head. Melhi was still smarting after what I’d done to him at Lecours, a different Border State we could both access. He’d been so certain his armies would overwhelm mine.

“Getting older?” Shale laughed. “What does that have to do with it? You’re immortal. Your body is young.”

I couldn’t explain it to him. The quests he referred to—building a kingdom, searching out hidden treasures and secrets, uniting those who would follow and conquering those who would not . . . Well, those had been what I’d needed as a youth. They’d made me into the person I was, the person who could rule an empire.

That empire pretty much ruled itself these days. We had imperial senates, diplomats, ministers. I was very careful not to step in unless something grossly stupid needed straightening. In truth, I relished nights spent in my study, experimenting, meditating. Only occasional government functions—like the one earlier today, where we’d commemorated the fiftieth year since the unification of the world—drew me out.

Well, that and the attacks by Melhi.

The churning rain outside suddenly vanished, and the heavens grew bright. The Grand Aurora was still there, but it now hovered in a sky that was blue instead of stormy grey. We’d reached Alornia. I stood up from my desk, walking to the edge of the platform, and watched the near-endless streets of the city blur beneath us.

At least here, at the center of my power, I could stop the storms. Eventually, I thought to myself. Eventually I’ll be able to do it without an Aurorastone affixed to the middle of the city.

Alornia was a place of bulbous golden domes atop finger towers. The platform slowed in its preplanned course and swung down over the city, trailed by the hundred platforms carrying my honor guard. People waited below to watch us pass; my movements were matters of national record. And so, cheers roared beneath us, as if a stream to carry us along.

I smiled. Perhaps I should get out more. At my side, Shale rested his hand on his sword, watching those below with narrowed eyes.

“Nobody’s going to be able to hit me from all the way down there,” I said, amused.

“You never know, Kai.”

The platform descended toward the palace, which sat on the hill at the center of the city, and docked at the side of my large tower, becoming a balcony again. I strode off and into my study as a group of servants in vests, loose pants, and bare chests trotted out onto the balcony and lifted my desk to carry it after us.

Shale stretched, clinking. “That trip seems to get longer every time.”

“It would probably be more comfortable without the armor.”

“I’m your bodyguard, Kai,” Shale said. “One of us has to be ready. Remember when those sky nomads tried to pinch you?” Shale smiled fondly, in the way a man might while remembering a youthful romance. “Or that time when we got trapped in the Tendrils of Sashim?”

“Sure do. You carried me . . . how far?”

“A good fifty miles,” Shale said. “Lords. That was . . . that was over a hundred years ago now, wasn’t it?”

I said nothing. Shale didn’t age—long ago, he and I had discovered a secret draught of long life in the hoard of the dragon Galbrometh. These days, I wondered if that draught had been placed there specifically for me to find, so I’d have an acceptable reason for not aging. I hadn’t known the truth of my nature until I’d reached fifty, the Wode’s Age of Awareness.

Shale stretched again. “Well, best to remain vigilant. It’s when everything is calm that you need to be most alert.”

“Most certainly. Thank you for your help today.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good thing I’m around, eh? Anyway, I’m going to go check in with Sindria. See what the kids are up to, you know?”

“Good idea,” I said, watching the servants carefully arrange all the items on my desk. Did I have time to file those reports . . .?

No. I needed to get moving. I walked toward Shale, who was opening the doors that led to the hallway. He gave me a questioning look.

“If I’m quick,” I explained, “I might be able to get down into the lab before Besk can—”

Shale pulled the door all the way open. Besk stood outside.

“Ouch,” Shale said. “Sorry, Kai.”

Besk raised a single painted-on eyebrow. He was like one of those statues that people carved on the outsides of buildings. Limbs that seemed too long, robes too stiff, face expressionless. Long ago, I’d shared a drop of my draught of immortality with him. He’d haunted me ever since.

He bowed. “Your Imperial Majesty.”

“Besk,” I said. “I’m afraid the daily briefing will have to wait. I had some very important mental breakthroughs regarding Lancing that I absolutely must record.”

Besk regarded me for a long, unblinking moment. He carried a distinctive piece of slate in his fingers. As large as a book, yet incredibly thin, there was nothing else like it in the empire. To the side, one of the servants helpfully carried in the crumpled paper I’d left on the balcony, then set it on the desk, just in case it was important.

Besk’s eyebrow rose another notch. “I will walk with you to the lab then, Your Majesty.”

Shale gave me a farewell pat on the shoulder, then clanked away. He’d faced assassins, terrors, and rebels without flinching, but even after all this time, Besk made him nervous.

“You may wish to consider giving Sir Shale a leave of retirement, Your Majesty,” Besk said as we began to walk.

“He likes what he does. And I like having him around.”

“Your will is, of course, law.”

“Yeah. Unless the Wode is involved.”

“In over a century of rule, this is the only time the Wode has called upon you.” Besk held up the piece of slate he carried. The Wode Scroll, the only official means of communicating with the outside.

The Scroll was filled with words, none of which I wanted to read. From the little I saw, however, the tone of the Wode’s letters was growing more forceful. I had been ignoring them too long.

We walked for a time in silence until we eventually left the corridor and stepped out onto a wall-walk between towers. I shouldn’t be so hard on Besk, I knew. He was acting according to his Concept, and was loyal in his own way, even when he was disobedient.

Below, a cheer went up, and I raised a hand absently toward my subjects. Was that a band playing? The Grand Aurora shimmered in the sky, though—for once—its light failed to comfort me.

“Is it such an onerous task, Your Majesty?” Besk asked. “The Wode requests of you only one day, to go and perform a task most people would consider pleasurable.”

“It’s not the task itself. It’s the nature of being . . . summoned like this. What good is it to be emperor if someone else can just call on me as if I were a common cupbearer or messenger boy? It undermines everything I’ve done, everything I’ve accomplished.”

“They merely ask you to do your duty to your species.”

“What duty has my species ever done to me?”

“My lord,” Besk said, stopping on the wall-walk. “This is most unseemly of you. I’m reminded of the child you were, not the king you have become.”

I tried to walk onward without him, but my shoes felt as if they were filled with lead. I stopped a few steps ahead of him, not looking back.

“It is your duty,” Besk repeated.

“I’m a brain in a jar, Besk,” I said. “One of trillions. Why can’t they bother one of the others?”

“It has been determined that you have accomplished great—”

“We’ve all accomplished great things,” I said, spinning and waving my hands toward the city. “That’s the point of all this. How many of those trillions of others are living lives just like mine, in Primary Fantastical States?”

“The programming allows—even requires—that each State be individually tailored.”

“It doesn’t matter, Besk,” I said. Lords! I hated thinking about this.

The Wode had only interfered with my life twice. First at age fifty, to inform me that my reality was a layered simulation.

And now to demand that I procreate.

“It’s meaningless,” I said, stepping up to Besk. He wasn’t of the Wode, of course; I’d never actually met any of them. He was a part of my reality, my State. But he, like everything else in the entirety of my existence, would serve the Wode if required. They controlled the programming and, if pressed, they could change anything in this world—anything but me myself—to force me to obey.

Lords, how it hurt to think about that.

“The requirements are inane,” I continued. “They need my DNA to create new Liveborn humans? Well, fine. They can take it. Stick a little needle or whatever into my jar and withdraw it. Simple.”

“They require you to interact with a woman, Your Majesty. The precepts say you must choose her, and she you, and then you must meet one another and perform the act.”

“Our bodies are just simulations. Why must we meet?”

“I do not know.”

“Bah!” I stalked off the wall-walk and back into the palace.

Besk followed. “I’ve ordered the hunting range filled with wild draklings, Your Majesty. The most vicious we could find. Perhaps destroying them will put you in a more fond mood.”

“Perhaps,” I said.

Even thinking about the Wode turned me into a child again; Besk was right on that count. I’d commanded armies of thousands and I’d single-handedly forged an empire that spanned continents. But this . . . this made a spoiled brat out of me. I stopped inside the stairwell.

“I do not know all the reasons for the rules, my lord,” Besk said more softly, stepping up and resting a hand on my shoulder. “But they are ancient, and have served your kind well. XinWey’s Doctrine states—”

“Don’t lecture me,” I said.

He fell silent, but . . . damn it . . . I could hear his voice in my head. He’d read off these rules to me often enough.

XinWey’s Doctrine states that the most essential morality of mankind is to create the greatest amount of happiness among the greatest number of people while using the least amount of resources.

Turned out, the best way to create greatly satisfied people using minimal resources was to remove their brains when they were fetuses and attach them to simulated realities tailored to fit their emerging personalities. Each Liveborn received an entire world in which they were the most important person of their time. Some became artists, others politicians, but each had a chance for supreme greatness.

All of this took only the space required for a box about the size of a melon—simulation machinery, brain, and nutrient bath all included. Incredibly efficient. And . . . to be honest, I didn’t resent it; hell, I loved it. I got to be an emperor, and while the simulation gave me opportunities, each step—each grueling quest or accomplishment—had to be my own. I’d earned this life.

Thinking of the millions upon millions of others who had done the same, though . . . that unnerved me. Were there millions of Besks, and millions of Shales, millions of mes, all living beneath a Grand Aurora?

Everything else in my existence had taught me I was unique, important, and powerful. I rebelled at the idea that I might just be another person.

“It will not take long, my lord,” Besk said. “Choose one of the women from the list—the Wode ranked them for you with compatibility projections—and send her a request to meet. Perhaps you could dine together.”

“A woman from their list,” I snapped. “A Liveborn woman, with her own world to rule. Lords, she’ll be insufferable.” The closest I ever wanted to get to another Liveborn was across the battlefield in a Border State, and it had taken me some time to warm even to that. My first meeting with Melhi had—

“My lord,” Besk said. “The wall.”

I started, realizing that something had changed the stone wall of the stairwell. Words were appearing in the stone, as if chiseled there, each line sinking in a trough.

CHILD EMPEROR. I HAVE CREATED A NICE SURPRISE FOR YOU.

“Melhi, you snake! How did you hack my palace? You’re violating the precepts of engagement.”

THE PRECEPTS ARE ONLY WORDS. SO ARE SCREAMS. I WILL HEAR YOURS FOR THE INSULT YOU GAVE ME.

“My spies already told me of your robot, Melhi. You should stop sending those. They never work properly in my State.” I didn’t mention that I’d been surprised at how well they did work. Far better than Lancing would have worked in his State, where the laws of physics were different.

YOU WILL SCREAM, CHILD. YOU WILL SCREAM.

I entered Lancesight. Here I could see the Grand Aurora even through the stone of the palace—but I stepped backward anyway, into the doorway, where the Aurora’s light could strike me directly. I drew strength into my arms from that warmth, then pushed it from me in a wave. With Lancesight, I could see the core workings of all things, the very motes of energy—or thought, or whatever they were—that made up my reality.

I could also see Melhi’s hack. It manifested as tendrils of red creeping like venom into my palace. Filled with strength, I cut him off, destroying the tendrils. They hadn’t been strong—he couldn’t accomplish a powerful hack without running afoul of the Wode’s protective programs.

The wall’s surface returned to normal. I melted the stone there for good measure, recast it into a new shape, then blinked my eyes back to my ordinary vision.

“Lords, but that man needs to learn to let go of a grudge,” I said. “He’s never going to beat me. Surely he has to see that by now.”

“Indeed,” Besk said. “He does seem to boorishly continue the same stubborn course, without maturity, and without careful consideration of the best path. Wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s quite enough, Besk.”

“I try to be topical when possible, Your Majesty.”

I took a deep, calming breath. It didn’t work. “Fine. Fine, whatever. Pick one of the women from the list. We’ll meet, get this over with, and I’ll return to my life.”

“Which one do I choose?” Besk asked. “The one the Wode thinks is most compatible?”

“Lords, no,” I snapped, walking away. “Pick the one on the bottom of the list. I might as well have an interesting time of it.”

The meeting was going to happen in a Communal State. Any Liveborn could visit one of those, though I never did. Why would I want more reminders of how normal I really was?

Shale didn’t like me leaving our State, of course.

“I don’t understand why I can’t go,” he said, barring my way to the portal. “I go with you to Border States all the time.”

“Those blend seamlessly with our world,” I said. “They adopt our programming. This is different; it’s a place only Liveborn are meant to visit. Even if we were to somehow get you there, you’d be incorporated into the local programming—you’d be given a life, memories, a backstory that fit the Communal State. It would change your personality—essentially killing you.”

“I’ve always been prepared to give my life for you, Kai.”

“Which I’ve always appreciated. If I were in danger, I’d accept your sacrifice. But I won’t have you giving yourself up so . . . so I can go have sex.”

Lords, but that sounded stupid.

“This is my fault, Kai,” Shale said. “If Molly were still alive, they’d never have chosen you. The Wode only picks the unattached.”

“Yes, well, she’s gone.”

And she had been for . . . what, ninety years now? I should have accepted the advances of one of the willing women who surrounded me. I could have had a harem—Lords, I’d had a harem at one point. Before Molly.

“It’s got to be done, Shale,” I said. “Don’t make me Lance you out of the way.”

He reluctantly lowered his arms. “You won’t be able to Lance on the other side, Kai. You’ll be powerless. Just . . . just a regular person . . .”

“Not entirely,” Besk said.

I turned to find the chancellor entering the large portal chamber. He crossed the floor, which sparkled with twisting churnrock—a type of stone that changed colors with pressure. That had been a gift from the Larkians, right after their king had abdicated to me. I’d had it used in the portal room, where I rarely went. The shifting colors unsettled my stomach.

“Your Imperial Majesty,” Besk said, handing me a bundle, “I have been researching in the tomes you discovered in the great hoard of the Lichfather. From what I have read of the seer’s visions of other States, I believe that a few of your abilities will function once past the portal. You will pull some of the innate programming from your State with you.”

“Lancing?” I asked, hopeful. “But . . . no, of course not. There won’t be anything to power it.”

“You could bring an Aurorastone,” Shale said.

“It would vanish as I passed through the portal,” I said. “Anything not part of me, or designed for the State I’m going to, won’t make the transition. But that means . . . of course. My mental boosts, they’ll work, won’t they?”

“Yes,” Besk said. “They speed up processors attached directly to your physical brain.”

“Will the Wode stop them?” I asked, thoughtful. “Clip the processors, stunt my thoughts back to a normal rate?”

“I can’t determine if they will or not,” Besk said. “I don’t think the boosts are given out in the State you are visiting, but bringing them in from the outside might be acceptable. I would limit their use, in case it alerts the Wode to what you are doing.”

“What about my healing boosts?”

“Again, I’m not certain, Your Majesty,” Besk said. “They seem more likely to work. The Communal States are designed to protect the safety of Liveborn, after all.”

I nodded, shifting to Lancesight. Looking internally, I set my mental boosts—which would make everything around me seem to slow—to automatically engage if an explosion happened near me, or if my skin were broken.

“I still don’t like this,” Shale said. “Healing boosts aren’t perfect. If someone in there manages to kill you, you’ll . . .”

I would become brain-dead. Part of XinWey’s Doctrine. A person needed to experience real danger or they would never find joy in excelling. There had to be a risk of failure, the chance to die.

Of course, I wouldn’t simply die from a random fall down the stairs. I was far too important. However, I would eventually die of very old age—I was still hundreds of years from that—and, more importantly, I could be killed, particularly if I were attacked by another Liveborn. Even a Simulated Entity like Shale or Besk could kill me if the situation were right.

Well, I’d just have to be careful. “I assume this is State-appropriate clothing?” I asked, holding up the bundle.

Besk nodded. “It will be placed upon you, pressed and neat, as you pass through the portal. There’s also a State-appropriate weapon, as requested.”

“Thanks.”

“It won’t do anything, my lord. Communal States are not intended to be dangerous, and this one is very well monitored. I suspect that your weapon won’t even fire unless the Wode specifically allows it.”

“I’ll feel better having it,” I said. “Never go on a date unarmed.” Words of wisdom from my father. Well, my foster father. I was an orphan, of course. The best kings always are.

“I will remain in contact, my lord,” Besk said. “Direct mental links are allowed to Liveborn visiting this Communal State.”

“Excellent,” I said, taking a deep breath. I tucked the bundle under my arm, then—with no other good reasons to delay—stepped into the portal.

I passed through a flash of light, then stepped out of a metal door. When I looked back, it appeared that I’d come out of a strange, tubular contraption on wheels. It was like a large number of carriages hooked together, each with its own doors and windows.

It is called a train, my lord, Besk noted to me. I’ve been reading about them. Quite fascinating. You might be able to replicate them with Lancing mechanics. The people would be pleased to have a faster method of travel between cities.

Have the Grand Librarian take notes of their descriptions, I sent back to him. I’ll examine the idea when I return.

The sky was dark, and I found myself on a platform at the edge of a strange city. The buildings were constructed as rectangular boxes rising high into the sky, and lights twinkled in many of their windows. The sky was overcast, and the city looked very busy despite the apparently late hour.

I wore muted clothing. Trousers, black shoes that looked horribly impractical, white shirt, some kind of thin scarf tied around my neck, and a jacket. It all fit snugly and wasn’t nearly as heavy as the clothing I was used to. It pulled at me in strange places, and the collar was buttoned too close to my neck for comfort.

I had an odd, wide-brimmed hat on my head in place of my crown. I took that off and tossed it away. Covering my regal hair felt like a shame. Around me, people moved out of the train I had exited. The men wore clothing similar to my own, all in the same hats with the wide brims. None of them had beards, which made me feel more distinctive.

This city is named Maltese, Besk sent. Though most people just call the State that as well, rather than using its official designation as Nightingale124. The local weapon is stored under your arm in a special hidden sheath. It’s known as a handgun, and works by pointing the tube toward your enemy and pulling the trigger underneath.

Like a crossbow?

Yes, my lord. My research says they’re difficult to aim properly. This State does not have symbiont aiming modifications.

Lovely, I sent, walking off the platform. Where do I go?

Straight down the street ahead. Look for a tall, blue-lit building and speak your name to the doorman. You have a reservation.

I followed the instructions, entering a wide street populated by self-driving metal carriages. I had something similar working in most of my cities, though mine were connected to Aurorastone deposits inserted into the roads.

The air smelled faintly of rain, and the ground was damp. Besk rattled off some information he’d found about Maltese in one of our tomes. This State was set perpetually at night in a highly populated city that was loosely based off what the book described as, “western cultures in early twentieth-century Earth.” Whatever that was. Rain came often, but never in more than a drizzle.

I nodded, curious, listening to the sounds of the city as I walked. This State wasn’t necessarily louder than my own—Alornia could be a clamorous place—but the sounds were different, alien. The carriages made garish honks at one another, and they growled like beasts. Perhaps they contained some kind of living animal that powered them.

A street performer I passed was playing a loud brass horn—as if sounding the call to war, though the song had a slur to it, almost as if the music itself were drunken. I was glad Simulated Entities like my subjects couldn’t travel to States like this; I’d hate for the street performers back home to visit here and realize how effective a horn like that was at carrying over a crowd.

And a chatty crowd it was, all bundled up in their too-stiff clothing as they strolled the streets. I fell in behind a group of men and women as I made my way toward the restaurant, listening to them prattle about local politics.

Elections? I asked Besk.

Indeed, he said. Every two years, the local population chooses a new Liveborn to rule.

That’s silly, I sent back. Many of my subject kingdoms had elections for their officials, though I—of course—could intervene and appoint someone if the masses acted foolishly. Who lets Machineborn choose what their Liveborn do? And besides, what can a king accomplish during such a short reign?

It is likely just a formal title, Your Majesty, Besk sent back. There are no Liveborn native to this State; only outside visitors like yourself are eligible to rule. One of the reasons to visit appears to be the draw of vying against other Liveborn for dominance. Though, since outside armies are forbidden, one must use local Machineborn to achieve one’s goals. He hesitated. You might find it a challenge.

Hardly, I thought back with a sniff. If the title changes so frequently, there can’t be any real power to it. I have no intention of getting involved. In fact, the entire nature of this State seemed to highlight that political power was just an illusion provided to engage and excite us Liveborn.

I followed Besk’s directions toward a particular building, tall and rectangular. The restaurant was apparently near the top. I approached, but then pulled up short. What was that series of popping bangs sounding to my right?

The people ahead of me—who were likely Simulated Entities, judging by their conversation—stopped as well, but then just continued on down the street.

What are those bangs, Besk?

Handgun fire, he sent back.

I hesitated for a moment, then took off at a run toward the sounds.

No intention of getting involved, Your Majesty? Besk asked, sounding amused.

Shut up.

I prepared my mental boosts as I drew near. I didn’t let them engage at the sounds; I needed to hold them in reserve, in case using them drew the Wode’s attention. But I did want to be ready.

I crossed two of this State’s too-smooth stone streets, then entered a smaller roadway where a group of men in hats was advancing on a young woman wearing trousers and a jacket. She fired a small handgun at her attackers desperately from within the faint cover of a recessed doorway, the door at her back apparently locked. Her only companion was another woman who lay splayed facedown on the street, golden hair fanned out around her head, blood staining the back of her dress.

Alert the Wode, I said to Besk. Something illegal is happening here.

I then entered Lancesight. It was like stepping into nothingness. Here, instead of the warmth of the Grand Aurora, I found only an empty coldness all around.

Idiot, I thought, stumbling in that darkness. What had I expected? I slipped out of Lancesight, grabbing the weapon from under my arm. The handgun felt bulky in my grip, and the hilt was shaped like a box, instead of the smooth roundness of a sword hilt. I pointed the open end of the tube toward the men and pulled the trigger. The handgun popped and jerked in my hand, nearly jumping clean out of it. Lords! The thing was almost impossible to control. And the noise—why would you want a weapon that drew so much attention?

Fortunately, my sudden arrival—and the cacophony of my shots as I pulled the trigger several more times—distracted the men and let the woman dash from her alcove to greater safety behind a large metal box with rubbish spilling out the top. I met her there, putting my back to the trash receptacle, feeling a thrill of excitement.

“You know this area better than I do,” I told the woman. “Which way should we flee?”

She studied me. She was pretty, her face angular with dark skin. Then she raised her weapon at me and fired.

I dodged the shot.

Well, technically I didn’t dodge the shot, so much as get out of the way before it was fired in the first place. I engaged my mental boosts—slowing the world to my perception—which allowed me to judge where the woman was going to point her weapon. I didn’t move any more quickly while boosted, but the advantage of watching her muscles and studying her posture let me twist to the side so that when she actually shot, the projectile missed me.

It was close nonetheless. The shot passed by my side as I fell backward to the ground, disengaging my boosts—I usually only wanted to use them for short intervals—and leveled my handgun toward the woman. From this close range, I was able to manage the weapon well enough to plant two shots in her chest, all the while thinking about how primitive it felt to be using a metal tube instead of the powers of the Grand Aurora.

One projectile left in your handgun, Your Majesty, Besk sent. He was at his happiest when he could count things for me.

Thanks, I sent back, though I didn’t think I’d need the weapon. As the other men came for me, I tossed the handgun toward one of them and grabbed the end of something sticking from the top of the trash receptacle. A thin metal bar. I spun it in my hand, getting a feel for its weight, then turned toward the nearest aggressor, a man who was trying—and fumbling—to catch the weapon I’d tossed him.

I swung. The bar wasn’t Indelebrean—my enchanted sword—but it had a good heft to it, and made a satisfying whoosh in the air as I connected with the man’s hand. Bones crunched, and he dropped the handgun with a cry of pain. I stepped forward, raising the metal bar, hoping my healing boosts would be enough to handle getting hit by one of those shots from the other—

“Stop!” cried the man in front of me, falling to his knees. “Holy hell, are you crazy?”

The other two raised their hands, turning their weapons away from me and backing up. “Calm down, stranger,” one said. “Time out, pause.”

The man closest to me cursed, and I stepped back, cautiously wary.

“Raul,” one of the standing men said to the one I’d hit, “this is your own fault. You got into a melee.”

“Doesn’t mean he can hit me with a freaking bar,” said the man on the ground, who was cradling his broken wrist.

“Actually it does,” said the other man.

I stood there, alert and confused, metal bar held in a swordsman’s stance.

“Damn,” the third man said, looking down at the woman I’d killed. “He got Jasmine. What faction are you, stranger?”

“. . . Faction?” I asked.

“We’ll just see what registers,” the second man said, checking a small device strapped to his wrist.

Nearby, the woman on the ground groaned and pushed to her feet. I gaped, then pointed my weapon at her, ready. Necromancy? Healing boosts? No . . . with surprise, I realized that my shots hadn’t pierced her clothing. I glanced toward where the shot I’d dodged had hit the ground, and found that it had made a bloodred streak on the street.

Paint. The shots exploded into paint when they hit.

“What kind of trap was that?” the woman demanded, pointing at me. Nearby, her friend—the other woman—roused as well. “Did you think I’d believe that someone was coming to my aid last-minute, Raul?”

“It wasn’t us,” said the man whose wrist I’d broken. This wound, it appeared, didn’t simply heal. “He’s some other faction.”

They all looked to me.

“I’m . . . uh . . .” I cleared my throat, standing up straighter. “I am Kairominas of Alornia, God-Emperor of—”

“Oh hell,” the woman said. “A Medieval Statie.”

“Yup,” one of the men said, looking at the device on his arm. “The kill was registered as a wildcard.”

“I see,” I said. “It’s a . . . game?”

They ignored me, the woman—Jasmine—flopping back on the ground, paying no attention to the paint stains on her jacket and shirt. “You mean I’m going to spend the next two weeks invisible to the local AIs, and nobody relevant even got points for my hit?”

“At least he didn’t break your wrist,” Raul complained. He’d climbed to his feet. “How am I going to get this fixed? Maltese doesn’t even have bone-knitting technology.”

“Who cares,” Jasmine said. “Killed by a wildcard? Do you have any idea what that will do to my rankings?”

“You agreed to the civil war, Jasmine,” one of the other men said. “It’s not our fault you let us ambush you.” He reached out a hand to help her to her feet. She looked at him, then turned her glare toward me. “It’s his fault.”

They all regarded me again, and I felt conspicuous there, holding my improvised weapon. I met their gazes anyway. I was an emperor.

So are they, I reminded myself. I could see it in the way they held themselves—the way Jasmine refused the hand and climbed up on her own, the way Raul had shoved down his pain and ignored his wound. He was instead calling upon someone—speaking into a device on his good wrist—to dispute my kill, claiming it should be credited to him because of his trap. Each of these people was accustomed to being the most important one in the room.

Once they’d determined I wasn’t relevant, they dispersed, speaking into wrist devices or to one another. The third man, the one who hadn’t been speaking much, wandered off with the woman who had already been dead when I’d arrived.

“Fantasy Staties,” he was saying to the woman. “You should have seen him, charging in here, ready to rescue Jasmine. All that was missing was armor and a horse.”

“I can’t understand why the Wode would do such a thing,” the woman replied. “Making them grow up in such barbaric and primitive surroundings.”

“It’s not the Wode’s fault,” the man said, their voices trailing away as I was left alone on the street. “They match the State to the emerging personality of the individual. He belongs there.”

And not here, that tone seemed to imply. I tossed the bar aside. Lords, I hated this place.

Your Majesty, Besk’s voice said, sounding frustrated, in my head. I have contacted the Wode. They seemed responsive at first, but soon sent back a note saying that you would be fine. They . . . they sounded amused, my lord.

Great. And now I looked a fool to the Wode as well. I walked over and retrieved my handgun from the street, then fired the last projectile into the ground, noting the splat of paint it made.

Your Majesty? What happened? Besk asked. You seem in pain, judging by the empathic link.

I’m fine, I replied as I walked away from the scene of the game, leaving only some paint stains that still looked startlingly like blood to me. It was a game, Besk.

A game?

You’re right; the weapons are transformed by this State’s programming. They fire non-lethal projectiles; Liveborn have used that fact to make a game out of assassinating one another, or something like that.

Curious, Besk sent back. It says in our tome that there are consequences in Maltese for firing such weapons, and I interpreted that to mean the Wode forbade it.

No, I sent back. The consequence seems to be that if you’re ‘killed,’ the local Machineborn can’t see you for a few weeks.

It made sense. If the overriding politics of this State involved currying favor with a voting public, being effectively ‘timed out’ for a few weeks was a real consequence. It was a way to make the game more thrilling, but not dangerous. Though most of this State was a calm place for meetings, dining, and nightlife, the political subtheme allowed Liveborn to come play as well. Join one of the gangs, try to take over a portion of the city and run a criminal empire.

I might have found it entertaining in my early seventies, back when I’d been a kid. Right now, it seemed far too transparent. It didn’t help my mood that I knew for certain the weapon under my arm would be useless if I encountered any real danger.

The restaurant was an upper level of one of the larger buildings at the center of town. A line of people waited to get in, though I walked past them. I wouldn’t, of course, be expected to wait in a line.

It felt so odd to have nobody trailing me. No servants, no soldiers. At the front doors, a man guarding the entrance bowed, then waved me past. I caught a glimpse of a clipboard with a page full of faces on it, mine included. Several of the people from the gunfight earlier were also pictured, and I guessed this was a sheet telling him all the Liveborn visiting the city, so he’d know who to obey. Only a few of those here in the city would be Liveborn—maybe a hundred or so out of millions. Just like in other States, the rest would be Machineborn. Simulated Entities who had been born within the State, and would live their entire lives here.

The Wode could have just programmed the door guard to recognize Liveborn without needing a list, but that would have broken the illusion. Did these people know about their natures? In my State, very few were told. Age of Awareness laws didn’t apply to them, and so the only place they could hear about it all was from me or the Wode Scroll.

After riding to the top floor in a glass-sided box on wires, I was led to a dining table for two set off from the others in the room. It had a dramatic view of the twilit city. So many lights; this place seemed to have an energy to it. That I liked, though it couldn’t compare to the Grand Aurora.

I sat down, absently handing my jacket to a nearby servant, trusting it would make its way back to me eventually. I glanced over the menu and ordered a small set of drinks—sixteen cups, each with a sip’s worth of wine in it—so I could decide which one I wanted to have with my meal. The servant blinked at the request; perhaps I hadn’t ordered enough cups. The wine terminology was similar to my own, even if I didn’t know the specific vintages.

Such interesting decorations, I sent to Besk, inspecting the small glass-covered candle that had been sitting at the center of my table. No hearth at all. Soft music. Dim lights. It’s actually quite nice.

Do you wish for me to release the imperial drummers from service, my lord?

No, but find out what instrument produces these sounds.

A servant arrived with a platter full of wine cups. I selected one and raised it to my lips. Then froze.

A woman slid between the tables toward my position. She wore a red dress, but it was quite unlike the ones worn in my State. Form fitting, with a slit up the side, and a modest neckline where the fabric folded a few times. She wore shoes with spike heels at the back, and had dark, shoulder-length hair.

I lowered the cup. The woman had a certain poise about her. Servants moved out of her way, and she walked as if she expected them to. Her steps were slow, confident, and someone even pulled a table to the side to make room for her to pass. She never looked down or broke stride. Her eyes were on me.

The cup slipped in my fingers, and the red liquid spilled onto the tabletop. I cursed, holding out my palm to draw in the Aurora’s energy to . . .

Well, I would have destroyed the pigment in the wine, rendering it colorless, then drawn the moisture from it and split the water into its two primal gases to leave the tablecloth dry. If I’d been able to Lance.

Instead, I stared at the tablecloth, crossed my eyes to enter Lancesight, and was left in complete darkness until I hopped back to ordinary sight.

“So you’re him?” the woman asked, reaching the table. She stood there for a moment. “You realize it’s good manners to rise in the presence of a lady.”

“It’s also good manners to curtsy to the God-Emperor,” I said, covering the spilled wine with my napkin.

“Oh great,” she said, sitting. “You’re one of those.”

“Kairominas the First of Alornia,” I said, holding out a hand to her. “Keeper of the Seventeen Lanterns, Master of Ultimate Lancing, Slayer of Galbrometh.”

“Magical Kingdom State,” she said, refusing the hand and sliding into her chair. “Did you ride a unicorn to get here?”

“We don’t have those,” I said flatly. “And you?”

“Just call me Sophie.”

“From?”

“An Emerging Equality State,” she said. “I led a worldwide civil rights movement, brought my people into the progressive era, then served five terms as the first female world president.”

“Impressive,” I said, trying to be polite.

“Actually it’s not,” she said, waving for a servant to fetch her some wine. “I just played the role they set up for me.”

“I see.”

We stared at each other. The wine was starting to bleed through my napkin, but Sophie didn’t seem to care. She watched me.

“What?” I finally asked.

“I’m trying to figure you out,” she said.

“It sounded as though you assumed you already had.”

“You’re arrogant,” she said. “But we all are. You’re an authoritarian; you came here because you were ordered to, even though you didn’t like it. You prefer to control everything around you—at your palace, I would find immaculate gardens and safe pieces of art hanging in a building designed by straightforward architects. I’ve seen hundreds like you. Thousands. Immensely powerful, but boring.”

You know, I thought to Besk, maybe I shouldn’t have tried the bottom of the list after all. . . .

Besk somehow held himself back from making a comment about that.

“So,” I said, controlling my voice with some effort, “if you have all of these presumptions about me, why are you here? I can assume from the tone in your voice that you do not respect authority. Odd, for the president of an entire world.”

“I abandoned that,” she said, waving an idle hand.

“You . . . what?”

“I gave up the presidency,” she said. “Walked right out in the middle of a world senate meeting. It caused quite the stir in the ant-hive of programmed minds. I snuck off to a High-Science State, learned some technology that wasn’t technically forbidden in my own State, then came back and armed a rebel faction with advanced weaponry. That destroyed world peace and started a global war that’s still going.”

I gaped.

She shrugged as a servant came with wine, pouring her a cup.

“That . . . that’s horrible,” I said. “How many lives have been lost?”

“What? You haven’t started any wars?” she asked, sounding amused. “Mr. Emperor? I suppose the programming just rolled over and gave you the throne?”

“War was necessary,” I said. “For unification. My State consisted of forty different kingdoms when I was younger, all crammed into one continent. Bloodshed was constant. Only unification stopped that.”

“Sure,” she said, gulping down some wine. She didn’t seem to care what vintage it was. “Have you discovered the lost continent yet?”

“There’s no such thing.”

“Of course there is,” she said. “There’s always a lost continent. The programming will pop it out once you start finding your life stale. It’ll give you a new challenge, make you really work again. Should keep you engaged for a century or two until you get old enough that even the Wode’s technology can’t keep your brain going. Then they’ll let you have peace for a few more years before you die.” She smiled at me, smug. “I’ve read about Fantasy States. The lost continent is usually one of only a handful of places, hidden from your magic.”

Make a note of all this, Besk, I thought, but outwardly just smiled. “We’ll deal with it if it happens. I’m more curious about you and your war. Yes, I’ve done terrible things, but at least there was a point to my brutality. You sound like you started a war just to ruin people’s lives.”

“Ruin people’s lives? I doubt the Wode pays that much attention to what I do.”

“I didn’t mean the lives of the Wode,” I said. “I meant the people killed in your State. In the war.”

She waved her fingers. “Those? Just bits in a machine.”

“Just bits in a . . .” I cocked my head. “I think that’s the most primitive thing I’ve ever heard anyone say, and I’ve fought barbarians.”

She shrugged, drinking the rest of her wine.

“You really don’t accept the Machineborn as true people?”

“Of course I don’t,” she said. “Everything they ‘feel’ is just a fabrication.”

“What we feel is a fabrication too.”

“We have a body. Well, a bit of one remaining.”

“What’s so special about a body?” I demanded. Besk and Shale . . . they were my friends. I felt a need to defend them, and their kind. My subjects were more than mere bits in a machine. “Yes, we have brains, you and I. What we ‘feel’ and ‘think’ is the result of chemicals swimming around inside our heads. How is that so different from the emotions of the Machineborn? Bits or hormones, does it matter?”

She looked at me with a flat stare. “Of course it matters. This whole world, every one of these worlds . . . they’re fake.”

“So is the ‘real world.’ When people on the outside touch an object, they ‘feel’ the electromagnetic push of electrons in the substance shoving back on the electrons in their fingers. When they ‘see,’ it’s really just the photons striking their eyes. It’s all energy, programmed on a very small scale.”

“That’s deep science for a Fantasy Statie.”

“Fantastical doesn’t necessarily mean primitive,” I said. “I’m pretty sure I’ve read that the Wode recognizes the rights of Machineborn. Don’t they leave a State running even if the Liveborn in it dies?”

“Yeah,” she said. “But they eventually nudge the State back toward chaos, then inject a newborn real person to grow up and rule it again. That’s beside the point. What have you accomplished in your life? Really accomplished?”

“I unified—”

“Something that they couldn’t have just programmed into the State from the start,” she said. “Something real.”

“I already said I don’t agree with your definition of real.”

“But you agree that they could have started your State with everyone in harmony, right? With a world government in place?”

“I suppose.”

“They feel like they need to give us things to do, to entertain us. Distract us. That’s all our lives are, complex entertainment simulations. They made me be born into a State plagued by an outdated social system from Earth’s past, just so I could transform it—covering ground the real world covered centuries ago. Pointless.”

I folded my arms on the table, looking out the window.

“What?” she asked.

“I hate losing arguments,” I said. “But you’re right. That part . . . that part bothers me.”

“Huh,” she said. “Didn’t expect you to admit it.”

“It’s not the simulation itself that is the problem,” I said. “Machineborn are people, and what they feel—what I feel—is real. What I hate is the way the Wode undermines our authority. I think I’d be all right with it all if I didn’t have this itching worry that they’re making things just hard enough to be exciting, but not hard enough for us to lose. At least we can still die.”

“Ha,” she said, waving a hand. “That’s a myth.”

“What? Of course it’s not.”

“Oh, it is. I promise you. No Liveborn die of anything other than old age—at least, not until they reach their later centuries of life and the Wode starts allowing them to interfere with one another’s States. We can kill each other, but our simulations . . . no, those never hurt us. I’ve seen States where the Liveborn are horribly incompetent, and they still accomplished all the minimum things they were supposed to.”

I didn’t reply.

“You don’t believe me,” she said. “I can provide—”

“I believe you,” I said. “I already knew.”

And I had. Oh, I hadn’t wanted to voice it, or even think it, but I’d suspected this was the case. Ever since my first trip into a Border State, when I’d started worrying.

It was the true reason why I avoided other States, and other Liveborn. Everything we did was like those people playing with paint guns on the streets. Our lives were games.

My secret worry wasn’t just that I might be normal, but that I might also be coddled. Like a baby in a crib.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s better when we can just pretend, isn’t it?”

“Better is an ambiguous term,” I said, looking out the window again. The rain had returned. “I still think there can be a point to our lives. In the progress we make, in who we are.”

“Oh, I’m not saying there’s no point,” she said. “I just don’t think we should let it be the one they give us on a silver platter. Like this meeting. I ignored all the other Liveborn who asked to meet with me.”

“Why come now?”

“Because you’re the first one to ask me from the bottom of the compatibility lists. I was curious.” She regarded me, blinking long lashes. Curious, she said? Then why had she chosen a beautiful dress and makeup?

Lords, I thought, looking at her. Lords, I actually find her interesting. How unexpected. I reached for a new cup. On the table—carved as if into the tablecloth itself—I found that words had appeared near my spilled wine.

I AM COMING, CHILD. YOU WILL SCREAM. IT IS FOR YOUR OWN GOOD I MUST DO THIS.

Damn it, Melhi, I thought. Not now. I didn’t even want to guess how he’d hacked a Communal State.

“Let’s leave,” I said, standing, moving my napkin over Melhi’s message.

“Leave?”

“Food doesn’t interest me.”

She shrugged, standing. “We’re both just brains floating in a nutrient solution; the food is a comfort. It helps us pretend.”

We ditched the table, passing a confused servant wheeling a cart full of food toward us. I walked back to the foyer with the box that had lifted me here. I didn’t get in it, however, instead pushing open a door that was labeled stairs.

Sophie followed me in. “What a wonderful change of décor,” she said, regarding the cold stone stairwell.

I began climbing the steps. “These shoes people wear here are ridiculous. What is wrong with good boots?”

“Other than being unsightly?”

“Says the woman wearing heels as long as a handspan.”

“These are considered very fashionable,” she said. “And it enrages my inner feminist to no end to wear them alongside a dress like this.” She was grinning widely.

“You are an unusual woman.”

“It does strange things to you to realize that the conservative establishment is forcing you to be a progressive liberal fighter for universal rights.” She started climbing up the steps beside me. “I had to buck that, but didn’t know what to become instead. The only thing I could come up with—something truly difficult—was to become a complete anarchist. They built a perfect world for me, so I had to burn it down.”

“Destruction isn’t difficult.”

She grinned savagely. “It is if you’re fighting against what the Wode wants. That’s the only way to be a real warrior, the only way to find a true challenge. Defying them.”

I grunted, agreeing with that.

“So anyway,” she said. “What was that writing on the tablecloth all about?”

“You saw that, did you?”

“Of course I did. Thought you were hiding a vial of poison at first. But it was just words.”

“It was a message,” I said as we reached the next floor. “From my nemesis.”

“Nemesis?” she said, amused. “What is this, middle school?”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“A place for children.”

I said nothing, leaning against the stairwell railing for a moment.

“Seriously,” Sophie said. “How does one go about getting a nemesis? Undefeated dragon back home or something?”

“It’s another Liveborn.”

“Oh, of course. You realize that you’re just playing into what the Wode wants, right? Dueling with other Liveborn to keep you both distracted.”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “It seemed that way at first, only . . . I don’t think Melhi is acting like they anticipated.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story.”

“And we appear to have a lot of steps left if you intend to get to the top.”

I sighed, then started up the next flight. “I first met Melhi in a Border State . . .”

I first met Melhi in a Border State, though I can’t even be sure it was him I talked to.

I rode into the State with a full legion, some fifty thousand strong. Border States were new to me back then, and I hadn’t wanted to take any chances.

I made the trip on a small hovering platform, only about five paces wide. The platform had a raised front and side, like a large chariot—but without the wheels or horse. There was just enough room for Shale and Besk to accompany me.

My advance guard had already secured a position on the edge of the large valley that made up the bulk of the Border State. I turned as we arrived, looking back down the wide path through the forest. We’d set foot upon that road in the jungles of Evasti in my State. After about half an hour of traveling on the enchanted road, the trees had started to change to these pines and aspens. Eventually, the road spat us out here.

“So we’ve left our world,” I said, wearing my shining gold breastplate and helm. “Why can I still see the Aurora?”

I’d watched it through the clouds the entire duration of our trip, anticipating with dread the moment when it would fade away. It hadn’t. Yes, it looked strangely distant here—shimmering in its majestic way over the tops of those mountains beyond the trees. But I could see it, and Lancesight determined I could still feel its pulses, though they were softer here.

“This is fascinating, Your Majesty,” Besk said. He had a large tome open in front of him, pages pinned down to prevent fluttering in the wind of our flight. “This State is not a full world. It is just this valley, which is surrounded by a forest. At the edges of that forest, the State simply . . . fades away. If anyone travels in that direction, they will be lost in fog and then appear on the opposite side of the valley!”

Shale grunted. “Then the only exits are . . .”

“Yes, the path we took,” Besk said, then pointed. “And an additional two like it, leading to the States of other Liveborn. One cannot traverse the enchanted pathways in or out without the aid of a Liveborn, and only Simulated Entities live naturally in this State. It exists solely for us to visit.”

“Or to conquer,” I said, and mentally instructed my platform to rise upward.

It ascended dramatically, zipping into the sky high above my army, though two dozen like it—manned by my best archers—followed to provide protection. From beneath, each flying chariot looked alike; armies trying to bring me down would be confused at which one held me.

From this vantage, I could see the fog that Besk had mentioned, consuming the wood behind us before stretching to the mountains, which appeared to simply be scenery. I wondered if one could reach them while in flight.

Despite ending in those woods, there was territory in this State, quite a bit of it. I could barely make out the edge of the fog ring on the other side of the forest. If necessary, I could array an army in here and hold the position, blocking the other two exits with my forces. We could undoubtedly use the State’s nature to our advantage; if I needed to get troops to the other side of a battlefield in a hurry, I could send them backward through the fog.

It actually seemed too perfect. That I should discover places like this now, once the entire world was mine, itched at me. Like a pain in my spine that could not be banished. I had thought I was done, but if there were many such Border States, then I had a great deal more to conquer.

I swooped the platform back down toward the front of my army. The natives of this Border State were equipped with primitive weapons—spears and wooden shields. They had dark violet skin. I glanced at Besk.

“Our early scouts indicate that the skin tone comes from eating great quantities of a spice produced by local trees,” Besk said. “The spice makes these people superior warriors, able to fight tirelessly for many hours and recover from otherwise deadly wounds. In addition, they appear to have access to a strange metal mined from somewhere in this valley that they will not speak of. Those spears will slice through steel as if it were butter, Your Majesty.”

“They’d make excellent subjects, Kai,” Shale said, looking over the arrayed natives, who had hunkered down in a battle formation—looking completely dwarfed by my own army, and in awe of my flying platforms. “Your generals have been complaining about needing more elites. And that metal . . .” I could sense the hunger in his voice. “We can’t rely on enchanted swords forever, as you yourself have said. Recharging the Aurorastone is a complete waste of your time.”

“There are non-martial applications of at least gaining favorable trade with this valley, Your Majesty,” Besk said. “I believe your scientists are quite excited by the discovery of that spice. The healing capacity it affords could save thousands of lives.”

“Yeah,” Shale said, “if you want to turn every kid with a broken leg into a supersoldier.” He rubbed his chin. “Actually, that might not be a bad—”

“The spice requires many applications before those abilities manifest, Shale,” Besk said.

“So you’re saying I’m going to have to break a lot of legs, eh?”

I mostly ignored their banter, though I was pleased to see it. Shale had been timid around Besk lately. Instead, I turned my attention to the leaders of the natives, three women holding spears, their faces painted white and red. I entered Lancesight and drew on the Aurora. The energy was sluggish, the waves of heat less warm than normal, but my magic still worked. I set a small invisible bubble around our chariot as we swung down to hover before the leaders. It would reflect all attacks, and would alter sounds passing through it so that . . .

“Greetings,” said one of the women. I understood the words in my own tongue, the Lanced shield acting as a translator.

“You will address him as Your Majesty,” Shale said.

“He is not our lord,” the woman said. “His show of force is grand, yes, but if he thinks to seize this valley by strength of arm, he will see just how weak his reach can be.”

“Surely,” Besk said, “you can see the advantages of an alliance with us! Your warriors, though proud, cannot help but look in awe upon our flying machines. Rest assured that Emperor Kairominas could conquer you if he wished. But why force his hand? Certainly we can come to an accommodation.”

As they spoke, I realized I knew what the leaders were going to say. Not because I could read their minds, but because something about this situation seemed obvious. The hidden valley, with roads to different States, whispered the purpose of this place to me.

“You should know that—” the chief began.

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“The other Liveborn,” I said. “You were going to tell us you have met another like me. Is he still here?”

Shale and Besk looked at me as if I were mad, but the native woman was not surprised by my request.

“The Wode,” I said to my companions. “They let us discover this place. They created it to border multiple States and contain a precious resource we would all desire. Victory here will not come from persuading these people, but from defeating the other Liveborn.” I looked to the woman. “That’s what you were going to propose, wasn’t it? You’ve seen our glories, and you know you cannot avoid being conquered. All you can do is decide which Liveborn to serve.”

“We will choose,” the woman said, sounding dissatisfied. “Prove yourself against the others and gain our allegiance. We will call you our king then, outsider, and not before.”

It was her Concept, obviously. The hardy yet pragmatic chief. She had seen the truth of these invasions. Undoubtedly, if I won her loyalty, she would prove a lasting and powerful ally. In order to accomplish that, I would have to do something I’d never done before. Defeat another Liveborn.

I found myself thrilled by the notion. At this point, my realm had known peace for twenty years. I was hungry for something new, a challenge my State couldn’t present.

Another Liveborn. Another emperor, like myself. This would be a foe unlike any I had ever crossed.

“I repeat my question,” I told the woman. “Is he still here?”

“Yes.”

I grew excited. “Where?”

“In our village. You will have to come in our company if you wish to meet the emissary.”

“That’s not—” Shale began.

“We’ll do it,” I said, already climbing down from the chariot.

Shale was not pleased—and neither was Besk, whom I required to stay behind with the armies to take command if something went wrong. I was not worried. So long as I had the Aurora at my back, I was worth an army unto myself.

The chief, who said her name was Let-mere, led us past a wooden palisade into a village of huts and stone hovels. The people there had skin a much fainter shade of violet; presumably the spice of warriors was mostly reserved for the upper class. I knew without asking that they’d spent generations fighting against other tribes in this State, mastering the arts of war, believing their valley was the sum of all existence.

I joined the honor guard of natives and walked directly into their village, where the creature I would come to know as Melhi waited.

I stopped at the top of the stairwell.

“And?” Sophie asked, climbing the last few steps behind me.

We’d reached a door I hoped led to the rooftop, but it was locked by a chain. I entered Lancesight and drew upon the Aurora to—

No I didn’t. Damn it. Two centuries of having the power of creation at my fingertips was going to be difficult to reprogram.

“Here,” Sophie said, pulling something from her handbag as I left Lancesight. A very small handgun. “Plug your ears, emperor man.”

“That won’t do anything,” I said, but plugged my ears, remembering how loud the weapons had been earlier in the night. “Handguns are rewritten to fire only paint—”

A near-deafening blast from the handgun interrupted me. Since I hadn’t taken direct command of them this time, my mental boosts kicked in at the sudden explosion. I got to watch in slowed speed as the chain shattered. Sophie’s handgun was definitely not shooting out balls of paint.

“Those things aren’t supposed to work here,” I said, uncovering my ears as she put the handgun away.

“I’m good at doing things I’m not supposed to,” she said, then kicked the door open.

There’s no way she kicked that so solidly with those heels, I thought to Besk. She’s got a hack; either she has a force multiplier on her legs, or those shoes are an illusion.

No reply.

Besk?

The mental link was silent. When was the last time I’d heard him?

That seemed ominous. Should I run?

Don’t be foolish, I thought to myself. I’d survived for centuries without Besk looking over my shoulder. That said, I was a little more wary as I stepped onto the rooftop.

It was raining, but just a fine mist. “So,” Sophie said, walking across the roof. “Where you come from, is climbing steps considered a romantic date?”

“The roof is someplace we’re not supposed to be,” I said, joining her at the side of the rooftop, where a ledge prevented us from accidentally falling off. “I figured you’d like that.”

“We can’t go places we’re not supposed to be,” she said. “Each State, every digital inch of them, was made for us.” She hesitated. “But I doubt the Wode expected this of us, so I’m satisfied. Even if that hike up here was annoying.”

“You’re not winded,” I said. “You have physical boosts.”

She just smiled.

I took a deep breath of the wet air. How long had it been since I’d been outside in the rain? I always had force bubbles around me to protect from the weather.

“Maybe they shouldn’t tell us,” I said. “About our realities being simulations.”

“Don’t be dense. Ignorance wouldn’t be better.”

“I don’t know . . .”

“You should be angry about the lies, the falsehoods.”

“Why?” I asked. “They tell us the truth when we come of age, and everything they do is to make our lives better.”

“We’re like rats in cages,” she snapped, leaning down on the rail and looking out over the dark city, full of twinkling lights in the misting rain. “It’s a beautiful cage, but still a cage.”

“Perhaps,” I said, leaning down beside her. “But I can’t find it in me to be angry at the Wode. Without this system, you and I probably wouldn’t exist. Earth couldn’t possibly support such a high population otherwise. We live good lives. Every man is a hero, every woman a leader. It just . . .”

“Feels washed out?” she asked. “Like we’ve been living in a movie?”

I didn’t know what a movie was, but I nodded anyway. “Surely some of it has to be real though, Sophie. My achievements, my learning. Even within the false framework, I’ve accomplished things, saved lives.”

“Fake lives.”

“People. I protected them. Heroism is real.”

“Heroism? You can’t die, emperor man. What is there to be heroic about? They throw some little paper figures into the water, and you dive after them, proud that you’ve rescued a few when the Wode could make a billion more literally with the snap of their fingers—or even resurrect the ones that died. As for your ‘accomplishments,’ I assume they’ve dangled something in front of you, a special skill only you can learn and progress at?”

“We call it Lancing,” I admitted. “You’d call it magic. I’ve been searching for its deepest secrets.”

“For me, the carrot was the nature of the States themselves,” she said, heedless of how the rain was ruining her makeup and hair. “I wanted to know the truth of reality. That drove me to study, to learn. The more I did, the more I realized how deep their illusion went. They used even that against me, giving me more information bit by bit. To keep me interested, curious. They try so hard to make our lives seem meaningful.”

“Difficult to blame them for something like that.”

“It’s not like their lives are enviable either,” she said. “The Wode. They’re just caretakers. They eat bland soup every day and sit at terminals.” She tapped the railing. “I said that you should be angry. So should I. But to be honest, it’s hard for me to get mad at anything these days.”

“And that’s why . . .”

“Why I just do whatever I want,” she said. “I invent conflicts, spark wars. Latch on to anything that makes me feel. I had high hopes for hating you tonight, since the compatibility projections said we’d never get along.”

“Were they right?”

“No, unfortunately.”

“Unfortunately?”

“Like I said, conflict is fun.”

“I can punch you, if you’d prefer.”

We stood in silence, and I realized something. There was a good reason I hadn’t gone out in the rain recently. It was cold, and it was uncomfortable. I’d left my jacket and hat behind. Perhaps they would have helped.

“This is stupid,” I said. “I need to get this over with and go back to my people.”

“Ah yes. So typical.”

“Which means . . .?”

“You fit the archetype,” Sophie said. “Here we’ve been having a deep conversation about the meaningless nature of our lives—yet you still want to rush back and be king.”

“I am what I am.”

“Which is what they’ve made you. You have your own Concept, as sure as any Simulated Entity.”

“I’m real,” I snapped. “And I’m not going to simply abandon my kingdom because I’m having an existential crisis.”

“I suppose that is noble,” she said. “Manufactured nobility, brand name with a little copyright symbol in the corner, but still a cousin to the real thing.” She reached up behind her with both hands and undid the zipper on her dress.

“I . . . What are you doing?”

“This is what we’re here for, isn’t it?” she asked, pulling her arm out of one of the dress’s shoulder straps. “So the Wode will damn well leave us alone? Propagate the species, so the wheel can go around and around.”

“Here, in the rain?”

“Sure. It doesn’t have to be pretty; it just has to happen. We have sex in this little digital box, and the Wode will harvest our genes and splice together a new child. I’ll let you pick the kid’s initial trope. I’d probably end up choosing something downright horrible for them, just to be interesting.”

The dress came down around her bust, and she wore nothing underneath. She caught a glimpse of my surprised face as she reached back to pull the zipper down farther; it was stuck in the middle of her back. “What? Is female nudity new to you?”

“New? I had a harem at one point, Sophie.”

“How unexpected,” she said. “Men.” Her cheeks grew flush, though. “Misogynistic, horrible, brutish.”

“You’re thinking about how your youthful feminist self would react to you sleeping with a man who kept a harem.”

“Of course I am,” she said. “So long as I’m horrified by what I’m doing, I must be on the right track. Can you help me with this damn zipper? The rain . . .”

I walked over to help. I felt hot, despite the rain. I brushed my hand on her bare shoulder as I took the zipper. My heat and hers, mingling.

Lords, I realized. I haven’t wanted a woman this badly in years. Decades.

“I wish we could do something about this rain,” she said. “It is going to get distracting.”

“Back in my State, I’m very close to being able to control the weather. I’ll be all-powerful, once I’ve figured that out.”

“They’ll find something else for you to hunt,” she said. “They always do. It—”

The entire city shook.

I froze, the zipper worked most of the way down Sophie’s back. The city thumped again. The rain started falling more strongly for a moment, in a sudden unnatural way, as if someone had turned a shower on. It left the two of us soaked.

A third thump came, softer than the others. “That’s not natural,” Sophie said, turning, half naked, water streaming down her body. “What . . .”

Something loomed out beyond the darkened city skyline. Eyes burned red in a head as tall as the buildings. It lumbered through the darkness, blockish, skin reflecting the occasional ripple of lightning in the clouds above.

I groaned. “You remember I mentioned my nemesis?”

“Yeah. You still owe me half a story about that, I believe.”

“Well, he’s been promising me a new robot,” I said, hurrying along the rooftop toward the place closest to the machine. It was still distant, but pushed its way between buildings, walking directly toward us. Each step thumped.

“Wow,” Sophie said, joining me, holding her dress from completely falling off. “I don’t think people are supposed to be able to invade Communal States.” She was still mostly nude. I found the sight of her wet in the rain, and the death machine in the other direction, strangely appealing in a similar sort of way.

I feel young again, I realized. Like before the unification.

“Well?” she asked.

“I . . .”

“Breasts later, giant robot now. This nemesis of yours, he’s good at hacking?”

I forced myself to look up at her face. “Too good.”

“Yeah,” she said, pulling up her dress, now soaked through. “If he can hack a Communal State . . . Well, we’ve got two choices. We can either dodge him long enough for the Wode to come down on him for flagrant violation of borders, or we can just make our way to a different Communal State and get to business there. I’m inclined toward the latter.”

“No,” I said, listening to the thumps. Screaming had begun on the streets. “People are dying. I’m not going to leave that thing here and count on the Wode to stop it.”

“Really. You’re going to take on that? How?”

“I’ll find a way,” I said, striding toward the steps.

“You fantasy men are such boy scouts,” she said, trailing after me. “Wait, let me get this damn dress on. Being Liveborn won’t keep me from being arrested for indecency in this State.”

I waited by the stairs, shifting from one foot to the other as she pulled the dress the rest of the way up. Getting down from this building was going to be slow. “I should have seen this coming,” I said as she entered the stairwell. “I lost contact with my chancellor earlier. I’ll bet Melhi cut him off somehow.”

We started down the stairwell. I didn’t trust that box that was suspended from wires, not with Melhi hacking the State.

“Cut off your mental links, eh,” she said. “Dangerous. That should have warned you.”

“I was distracted.”

“So let’s go back to your State,” she said. “I could probably stomach the singing trees and the elves long enough to get laid.”

“I’m not leaving,” I said, still running down the steps. “He’ll tear the city apart to find me.”

“Why? What on earth did you do to him?”

I looked back at her. “I’m not sure.”

“What?”

“Come on. I’ll explain what I know as we walk down the steps. Remember how I’d visited that Border State? Well, I went into the village to meet him. . . .”

I went into the village to meet him, and a steel man walked from one of the huts.

I’d created golems from the bones of the dead before, animating them with power from the Aurora. Metal, however, had proven useless as a material for me. So I was very interested as this being strode out into the sunlight. The natives leveled spears at it nervously. Chief Let-mere had warned me that the first time this creature had come to the valley, it had killed dozens of people from another village before retreating.

It had no eyes or mouth, just a flat burnished face of bronze, almost like a mask. The rest of it was human shaped, but made of pure silvery steel.

It turned an eyeless gaze upon me. “Ah,” it said. The voice was a metallic buzz, distinctly inhuman. “You are the one I am to fight for this place¸ then?”

“Who are you?” I asked, motioning for Shale to stand down. The bodyguard had drawn his weapon and stepped forward. “You are a being of metal?”

“I am Liveborn like you,” Melhi said, looking me up and down. “This is merely one of the forms I use. You are from a Fantasy State? Do they really expect this to be a challenge? My robotic legions would barely require a few hours to annihilate the—”

I turned and started walking away.

I can’t say for certain what made me do it, but more and more, I think it was the sheer convenience of it all. A perfect location for a war, where my State wouldn’t be in danger? A place with ideal tactical positions spelled out for me? Resources to help whoever managed to seize the State first, but three—instead of two—Liveborn involved, to encourage alliances?

The fakeness of it all was like a slap to my face. There we were—two absolute lords of entire worlds—and we’d been maneuvered to stand facing one another so we could mouth off? Like warriors boasting of past accomplishments to impress a tavern wench?

In that brief moment, my excitement for sparring another of my kind vanished, though it would return as Melhi later made attempts to invade my State. We’d go on to battle in other Border States, and I must admit I found those contests interesting.

But that day, I finally saw how things really were. This was an arena, and we were a pair of dogs thrown in to see which would blood the other first. I wanted nothing to do with it.

So I walked away.

“What is this?” Chief Let-mere asked me as I passed.

“You’ll have to make an alliance with the metal being, chief,” I said, waving my hand. “I’m not interested.”

“But—”

“Afraid, little emperor?” the metal being called after me.

“Yes,” I said, turning back, though it wasn’t him I was afraid of. It was the frailty of my ego, perhaps. I could pretend, I had to pretend, so long as I was in my own State. Traveling to another, particularly one as contrived as this . . . no, that I could not do. Not yet.

“It’s yours,” I said. “Unless the third Liveborn has already been alerted. You can fight them. Dance for the Wode. Be their little puppet. Not me.”

“I’m no puppet!” the robotic shell shouted. “Hear me, fantasy man? I am no puppet!”

“I’m pretty sure,” I said, puffing as I descended to the next landing, “that he was offended I wouldn’t fight him. I let him have the Border State, and he just pillaged it—stole their resources, murdered most of the people there. I had to reopen my side and send aid to recover the remaining natives.

“About ten years later, he attacked another Border State near me, and that time my conscience wouldn’t let me ignore him. We’ve been sparring off and on ever since. Twenty years now, thirty since our first meeting. Lately he’s even started to invade my State, though his robots never work properly there.”

“Huh,” Sophie said. We were nearly to the bottom of the stairs. “You realize that fighting him here is madness.”

I said nothing.

“His robots will work in this State,” she said, voice echoing in the stairwell. “Maltese has wristwatch phones and things that the real world didn’t have during the equivalent era. Those science fiction seeds will be something your friend can expand upon, fool the program into letting his machines function. I’d bet anything that that machine will be dangerous, truly dangerous. The Wode’s fail-safes won’t apply to it.”

I nodded, reaching the third floor. Only a little ways to go.

“So tell me why we’re still planning to fight?” Sophie demanded from just behind. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Look,” I said, spinning on her. “I’m doing this because I have to know, all right? If what we’ve been talking about is true, and if everything before now has been done with a safety net set up . . . then I don’t know, can’t know, who I am. Facing another Liveborn here is a way that I can.”

She paused in the stairwell, water pooling on the step at her feet. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I sure as hell am. Wait here. I’ll lead him someplace less populated.”

“Wait here?” she asked, following me as I turned back down the steps. “Wait here? I’m not one of your soft-headed fantasy maidens with the chain mail undies, Mr. Emperor. I’ve ruled a world too, I’ll have you know, and I didn’t need absolute dictatorial power to do it. I—”

“Fine. Can you fight?”

“Not well.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Hack.”

That would be useful. “What can you do?”

“I can make guns work here. Obviously.”

“We need something more,” I said. “Can you make my magic function?”

“That’s a big-time hack, kiddo,” she said. “This is a very non-magical State. Like I said, even the robot is far more natural than magic would be.”

“Yes, but can you do it?”

“I can try, I suppose. Let’s get to where the robot first entered the State.”

“Why does that matter?”

“It shouldn’t,” she said, rounding a banister behind me, our shoes snapping on the uncovered stone. “Technically, this is all code, and there’s no such thing as proximity. But the nature of the system is such that if we’re close to the entry point, we’re ‘close’ to where your friend broke through the State’s defenses. The fabric will be weak there, and odds are that he didn’t cover his tracks very well. Sloppy coding will make it easier for me to piggyback a few other hacks.”

“Okay.”

“I might as well be speaking to a caveman, eh?”

“Fantastical does not mean primitive.”

“Uh-huh. And have you ever actually seen a computer?”

I could imagine them. Glowing light, energy—like lightning—flashing as it gave power to the machine.

“I’ll keep this simple,” she said. “If I can get your magic to work, it will have to happen where the robot broke in. Then you can summon your talking horse or whatever and fly over to blast that overcompensatory machine with your magical rainbows.”

We finally reached the ground floor, and I pushed out onto the rain-slicked street. Sophie followed. I started jogging toward the robot, but she dashed to the side, heading to one of the self-driving vehicles. There were a lot of them parked and unoccupied there.

Feeling foolish, I dashed back after her. We got in, and she made the thing growl. It trembled like an animal coming awake.

“So it is alive,” I said.

“Sure, just keep thinking that, kiddo,” she said, shaking some of the rain from her hair. She made the vehicle move. Quickly.

I yelled and hung on to whatever handholds I could. We tore down the street, far faster than a horse could have galloped. But we also had—in my opinion—far less control. “Things in these States are so uncivilized!”

“Uncivilized?” she shouted.

“The handgun that destroyed the chain, now this. There’s no elegance, just brute force. Watch out for those people! Lords!”

She pushed us around a corner at a ridiculous speed. A good horse would never have let us get this far out of control, and my flying chariots were wonderfully precise. We skirted to the side of the robot, which was crunching its way through the city, still moving toward the building where we’d been dining. It didn’t see us passing.

He can’t track me directly, I thought. Something must have tipped him off to where I was.

Well, with the dinner reservation—and my face on the approved list to get in—I probably hadn’t been difficult to track. I pulled the handgun from its pocket inside my coat. “Can you make this work?”

“I don’t know that I want to be anywhere near you firing one of those,” she said.

“I’m not going to point it at your head, Sophie,” I said dryly. “Make it work.”

She reached over, touching it with her finger. I had a chance to regret distracting her as we almost plowed through a group of people fleeing the robot, but she turned the vehicle just in time.

“Done,” she said, removing her finger. “It is reloaded and fires real bullets now. A simple hack.”

“Yeah, well, someone noticed anyway,” I said.

The robot had turned its massive, red-eyed head our direction. This was by far the largest one Melhi had ever sent after me.

“Damn,” she said. “Your friend is probably monitoring this State for irregularities. Anything I do will alert him.”

I pushed my hand against the glass window on my side of the metal carriage. “Can I . . .”

“Lever on the door,” she said. “Turn it.”

The glass moved down as I turned the lever. Ingenious. I leaned out and pointed the handgun toward the robot, then took three shots in quick succession, my mental boosts kicking in on the first, slowing time for me.

Sure enough, the creature started to trudge after us, its eyes tracking our movements. Firing my weapon let it locate me; the weapons weren’t supposed to fire real bullets in this State, so shooting made a mark on the State’s fabric.

“What was that for?” Sophie demanded.

“I want it following us.”

“What the hell for?”

“Because if it’s coming back this way, it’s moving through the region it already passed, doing less damage,” I said. “Besides, I’ll need it close if I’m going to defeat it.”

I fired a few more times, making certain the robot was going to keep following. Indeed, it picked up its pace. I gulped, ducking back into the vehicle. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this . . . but do these vehicles go any faster?”

They did, apparently. Sophie grinned. I held on for dear life.

“There,” Sophie said.

Ahead of us—hanging about ten feet above the road and surrounded by city debris—was a shimmering to the air, a mother-of-pearl incandescence that obviously didn’t fit. It reminded me of the Grand Aurora, though it was shaped like a very large version of the portal I’d come through to get here.

Sophie stopped the vehicle. Or, well, she stopped driving it—but the vehicle didn’t totally stop. It slid across the ground sideways and slammed into a building. The jerking halt almost made me throw up.

“You are insane,” I said.

“I thought we’d established that,” she replied, crawling woozily from the metal carriage, but still grinning.

I followed her out on shaking feet. The robot was approaching faster than I’d anticipated, and unfortunately this area wasn’t evacuating as quickly as I’d hoped. There were families here, cowering in the wreckage of buildings, despite the rain and the dangers. A weeping girl, no more than four, asked her mother again and again why the ground was shaking.

They have to live in a world that knows only darkness, I thought. So that Liveborn can have a place to come play.

I stumbled away from them, following Sophie toward the rift.

“Give me your hand,” she said as we reached the shimmering.

I gave it to her, and she held on tightly as she went down on one knee, eyes closed.

I felt a tingling.

“I can’t change your code directly,” she said. “I don’t dare.”

“I have code?”

“Worried? I thought you felt Simulated Entities were equal to Liveborn.”

“I didn’t say that. I said Machineborn were people, and that killing them was wrong. Liveborn are absolutely more important.”

“Nice you have your own place in things straight.”

“Well, I am a God-Emperor. Why did you say I have code?”

“Relax. We all have code notations around our core selves; like footnotes added to a textbook by someone studying for exams.”

“What’s a textbook?” I said. Then, after a moment, “What’s an exam?”

“Don’t distract me. Hmm . . . yes. I can’t rewrite your magic without risking frying your mind entirely.”

“Don’t change the magic. Just make it work here.”

“I’m not sure that’s possible; I’d have to change the laws of the entire State. But maybe . . .”

“What?”

The machine’s steps rattled my teeth; I could make out its head over the top of a nearby building, those red eyes glowing in the rain.

“Well,” Sophie said, “all of the code notations that explain how you make your magic work are still there, attached to you. It’s all tied to your State. There’s some kind of intrinsic power source, I assume?”

“Yes,” I said. “You can’t change the magic . . . but can you rewrite the source of its power? Make something in this world capable of fueling my Lancing?”

“Hmm . . . clever. Yes, maybe. Give me a moment.”

The wind started to pick up, the rain turning from a mist to a light shower. My shirt was already plastered to my body, my hair and beard sodden.

The thing emerged upon us, rounding the building nearby, shaving stone from its side.

“Just a moment . . .” Sophie repeated.

“We’re running out of moments, Sophie!”

“Working . . . working quickly as I can . . .” she said. “Oh, this is going to be a patchwork job. Electricity. Maybe I can use electricity as a substitute for your aurora thing. . . .”

“Sophie!” I said. The machine stepped onto our abandoned vehicle with one large foot, crushing it. The rain grew stronger, pelting us.

“There!” Sophie said.

The tingling washed through me, colder than the rain. It left me awake, excited, changed. It had worked. I could feel that it had worked.

Sophie groaned, and her hand slipped from mine. She slumped toward the ground, but I grabbed her and heaved her onto my shoulder, then ran down the street through the increasingly terrible rain, trying to get some distance between us and the robot.

“Unhand me,” Sophie muttered, dazed. “I’m not some damsel from your barbarian lands. . . .”

I reached a sheltered alleyway out of the robot’s sight, and set her down inside. She was limp, her eyes drooping. “I’m not . . .” she said. “I don’t need to be saved, I . . .”

“Think of it this way,” I said. “Your inner feminist must be going insane at the idea of being rescued.”

“You’re not rescuing me. I rescued you . . . with the magic . . . and . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’ll wait here.”

“Wise choice,” I said, glancing back out toward the street. I could hear the robot’s crunching steps, feel it rattling the windows nearby. I took a deep breath, then strode out onto the street again.

The robot had stooped down and was picking up a vehicle in one enormous hand. It looked back toward me, its red eyes blazing in the rainy night, then hefted the vehicle as if to throw it.

I smiled, heart racing like it hadn’t in centuries, and entered Lancesight.

Energy hung all around me. The ground was alive with it; it pulsed in buildings and from lights. I drew it in, which caused an odd crackling sound. Flooded with strength, I rewove the air to lift me into the sky and form a barrier to protect me.

Nothing happened.

“Aw, hell,” Sophie said from behind.

The robot threw the vehicle—I could see everything outlined in power within Lancesight—and I cursed, throwing myself to the side. I rolled on the wet ground as the vehicle smashed to the street nearby, skidding on the stones.

That left me alive, but dazed on the ground. I shook my head, still in Lancesight, and glanced toward Sophie in the alleyway nearby. She crouched there, one hand on the wall, and to my eyes she was a blazing source of energy.

Wait, that wasn’t right. Why was she glowing?

“The hack slipped, emperor man!” she shouted over the sound of the pelting rain. “I accidentally rewired you to draw upon heat rather than electricity.”

Lords! I shook my head and found my feet. Ahead, the robot approached me, not far away now. I could hear the rain smacking against its metal. I drew in more energy, and I could see that Sophie was right. In Lancesight, I could sense the individual atoms in everything around me. As I drew in strength, they slowed, then stilled. Taking a step caused ice to crack at my foot.

The hack hadn’t worked, and not just in the way she indicated. Every time I tried to use the energy, nothing happened. I could draw it in, but then it just evaporated from me—not even heating the air—and vanished.

The fabric of the State rebelled against me using these powers. That meant no rewriting the air to protect me. No creating lightning to strike down the robot. No magic at all.

The robot was close now, looming overhead, a cold—almost invisible—form to my eyes. As it stepped, it casually slammed a hand to the side, smashing a wall and the people hiding inside.

“It didn’t work!” Sophie called. “We need to go, now.”

People. I could see them easily now, even hidden in rooms, as they were pockets of severe heat in this frigid, rain-slicked land. People huddled on the street. The woman with her daughter had run from the robot, but had fallen to the ground nearby. The child was tugging on her mother’s arm, screaming in terror.

Real people, with emotions, families, loves. And now me. With no safety net. I felt helpless. For the first time in decades, I felt helpless.

It was incredible.

I walked through the rain toward the robot.

“Kai!” Sophie screamed at me.

I raised my hands and drew in energy. It evaporated.

The rain started falling harder.

There was a wave of rain when the robot first appeared, I thought. This storm is a reaction to the hacks. Besk said that this State never has more than a drizzle.

I drew in more heat. The storm grew even worse. Lightning crackled above. Thunder boomed, louder than the robot’s footsteps. The machine was only yards away now.

The atoms in the ground beneath me stilled, and I had to rip my way out of shoes that had frozen solid. The cold didn’t affect my skin much. That was part of the magic that, apparently, stayed with me. I had an insulation against most of the effects of my Lancing.

The robot slammed its hand down to crush me.

My mental boosts kicked in. I was able to judge where the hand was going to fall, then stepped out of the way. The hand smashed ice and the stone beneath, then it swept toward me.

I let the hand seize me in a cold steel grip.

“I have you!” a voice boomed above. The same voice I’d heard in that Border State all those years ago, buzzing, metallic. “I finally have you! I can crush you with my fingers, child! You will know what it is to insult Melhi.”

The rain grew harder, and I drew in more strength.

“You can’t draw this robot’s heat away, foolish man,” Melhi said with a laugh.

Indeed, I could see its core—hidden far within layers of insulated metal, and I wasn’t able to draw that heat, despite trying. I didn’t care. I drove the storm to greater strength. Rain fell like knives, freezing before it hit me, lashing my skin.

My healing boosts kicked in, and stayed just barely ahead of the ice flaying my skin. I drew in so much that the atoms in the air itself stilled, and the gasses liquefied. The air became a strange steam, hissing as it boiled back into gas almost immediately.

“. . . part of me that rebels against . . . will go forward . . . not . . . their puppet . . .”

I couldn’t hear Melhi’s words. The storm had grown too loud, the beating of ice and rain on the robot’s body like stones on pieces of tin. Rain like an ocean wave crashing upon us. Thunder, lightning, the sky ripping, the fabric of this State crumbling.

I drew it in, feasted upon it. This was a music I’d never known. The robot squeezed, but something was wrong with the hand, and the pressure wasn’t as great as it should have been. I smiled, then reached to the hand holding me. Then I drew the heat from the robot’s outer layer. The metal was an excellent conductor; I pulled the heat into me like sipping water from a straw.

For a moment, all I knew was the increasing power of the storm. Like God’s own rage, screaming at me for breaking the rules of reality.

The robot began to crack. It wasn’t the cold, it was the water. Water that seeped into joints, then froze. More water followed, which also froze, expanding. The joints strained, then splintered.

The entire robot came crumbling apart, dropping in a thunderous crash.

I hit hard. Pain shook me, and my Lancesight evaporated.

I opened my eyes to find myself lying amid the wreckage of the machine. The rain started to slow, and I let go of any energy I’d held. The landscape nearby—broken buildings, fractured street—was covered in a thick layer of ice. I breathed in gasps of too-cold air. My clothing was in tatters. The cloth had frozen to me, then shattered like glass.

I pulled myself free of the wreckage, and left a disturbing amount of skin frozen to the robot’s hand. Fortunately, my healing boosts were working well enough to grow my skin back.

I turned on the broken beast, smiling broadly. I had won. Won where a victory hadn’t been set out for me, won on a battlefield the Wode hadn’t created. Here, no algorithm was pushing me along.

I felt more alive than I ever had. I’d found something real. It was like . . . like I’d just come awake for the first time.

Sophie stood at the edge of the frozen ground. Lords, she was beautiful. I’d never realized how much I’d wanted to know someone real, someone truly alive. Someone who hadn’t been created just for me, someone who had a life outside of mine. It was sexy as hell.

Sophie smiled deeply at me, then took the small gun from her handbag, placed it to her head, and pulled the trigger.

My mental boosts triggered at the explosion. I could see with perfect clarity as the blood sprayed out the side of her head, ribbons of scarlet like her dress. I watched it happen in slowed time, the pieces of my new life dying as her eyes faded.

The boost ended. Sophie’s corpse collapsed.

I stumbled toward her and there, written in the ice, I found words. Imprinted, as if chiseled by a workman.

I TOLD YOU MY NEW ROBOT WOULD BE WONDERFUL. I WORKED LONG TO PERFECT SOPHIE. I AM PLEASED THAT SHE CAPTURED YOUR HEART. YOUR DEBT IS PAID.

“I’m sorry, my lord,” Besk said. “But she was not real. I noticed it, but Melhi cut me from the system. That woman was just like the emissary we met in the Border State—a fabrication controlled from afar, only this time created to be indistinguishable from a human being.”

I said nothing, standing beside my window, looking out over my city. My study felt too warm. Too friendly. A lie.

“I’m having trouble getting any answers from the Wode,” Besk continued. “I . . . I don’t know how he knew which woman we would pick.”

“He didn’t,” I said. “He intercepted the information detailing the one we had picked, kept it from reaching the actual woman, and sent a replacement.”

“Ah, of course.” Besk’s voice was sterile, as always.

“Were any of them real?” I asked softly. “The people I saved? Or was everything in that State Melhi’s creation?”

“I don’t know.”

Everything I talked about with her . . . everything she said . . . it was all fake.

I knew nothing. I didn’t even know what to feel.

Besk left me in my study. He obviously had no idea what to do; he’d been hovering since my return. The warmed wine sat on the table beside my hearth, untouched.

I paced, feeling angry, betrayed, hollow.

Finally, I picked up the Wode Scroll and wrote out a simple request. Who are the Liveborn in the ten jars to either side of me? I would like their names and the identifiers of their States.

I waited. Eventually, a reply came, letters appearing on the stone face as if written in ink.

We apologize for the trauma you have been put through. Melhi will be disciplined. We do not know how she hacked that State; it should not have been possible. You are released from propagation duty, per a unanimous judgment. You may return to your rule.

I stared at the slate for a few moments, then wrote again. What are the names and State identifiers of the Liveborn in the ten jars closest to my own? I would like to contact them.

A long pause. Finally, the names came.

It was time to stop living my life in isolation.

SLOW BULLETS

Alastair Reynolds
tachyon | san francisco

MY MOTHER HAD a fondness for poetry. When my sister died, but before the news of my own conscription, mother showed me passages from a work by Giresun. It was a poem called “Morning Flowers.”

This was an illegal act.

Giresun was the official war poet for the Central Worlds. Her works were banned in the Peripheral Systems, considered propaganda. But Giresun had been famous before the war, and my mother had collected several of her anthologies. She was supposed to have handed these books in during one of the amnesties. My mother could not do that. One of them had been a gift from Vavarel, with an inscription in Vavarel’s beautiful flowing hand.

My sister had always had better handwriting than me.

“Morning Flowers” was about death and remembrance. It was about accepting the death of a loved one while holding onto the bright thread of their life.

Giresun was a great comfort to me during that time. But I could never speak of her work beyond our home, and after my conscription I had no way of taking her poem with me. I tried to remember it, but even the few short verses of “Morning Flowers” were too much for me.

Eventually, a ceasefire was declared.

Many ships skipped into orbit around a neutral planet called Wembere. The military and political leaders agreed to their complicated and contentious terms. Before solemn witnesses they used things called pens to make markings on a thin, skinlike substance called paper, using a material called ink. They had been ending wars this way for thousands of years.

You will have to take my word about these things.

There was a problem, though. The skipships were the only way to send messages at faster than light speeds, so it took time for the news to spread. To begin with, not everyone believed that the ceasefire was real. Even when neutral peacekeepers came in to our system, the fighting continued.

Near the end of things I was on one of these patrols when I ended up separated from my unit. I was trying to re-establish communications and work out how to get back into our sector when I ran into an enemy sweep squad.

There were four of them: Orvin and three of his soldiers.

I knew a little about Orvin, even then. I had heard stories about this man who operated under the enemy’s flag but broke even their rules of war. It was said that when the ceasefire came, both sides would be lining up to put him to trial. He caught me, and took me to the bunker. It was a low, armoured building that had been blasted and abandoned. It was cold and full of rubble, there was no glass in the windows. A mottling of dark red blood on the walls and floor showed where Orvin had already killed people.

His three soldiers held me down on a metal-framed bed that smelled of piss and death. Orvin used a knife to cut a gash in my trousers, running from the knee to the upper thigh. I tried to thrash and kick, but the soldiers were much too strong.

“Hold her down,” Orvin said.

He was a big man, taller and broader than any soldier in my unit. His skin was the colour and texture of meat. His face also seemed too small for his head. It was as if his eyes and nose and mouth were not quite in proportion to the rest of him, a too-small mask. He had white hair, cropped close to his scalp, and white eyebrows. The hair and eyebrows stood out strongly against the meat-colour of his skin.

He had a trolley next to him. Very delicately he put the knife down onto the trolley. He had huge pink hands. His nail-less fingers were so thick and stubby that it made his hands seem babyish.

“Haven’t you heard?” I asked, feeling the urge to say something. “It’s over. Peacekeepers are here. We’re not enemies now.”

He produced from a lower shelf of the trolley a copy of the Book. It was a black rectangle, full of sheets of material like the paper I mentioned earlier, only much thinner. They had been marked with ink, but done using a machine rather than a pen. From the scuffed cover, I recognised the Book as the one that had been issued to me.

“Do you believe this?” Orvin asked.

“No.”

“They say all you Peripherals read the Book.” He paged through the Book, having trouble turning the pages with his thick fingers. “We have our own Book, too. For the most part our people are too educated to attach any significance to its contents.”

“Not what I heard.”

It was a risk, arguing with this man. But agreeing with him would have brought no favours.

Orvin began to tear pages out of the Book. They detached too easily, the way wings come off an insect. He crushed them up between his fingers and dropped them to the floor. He moved his leg as if mashing his boot on the pages.

“It won’t work,” I said. “You can’t provoke me like that. I’m not a believer.”

“Then we’ve that much in common,” Orvin conceded, allowing the Book to drop from his baby fingers, onto the rubble.

He returned his attention to the trolley, moving his hand through different items. I thought for a moment he was going to pick up the knife again, but instead he came up with a thing shaped like a gun. It was made of white-coloured metal and seemed heavy in his hands.

It had a large trigger, with a hose running to a pressurised reservoir.

Orvin ran his hand along the barrel of the thing.

“You know what this is?”

“Yes.”

“I know your name is Scurelya Timsuk Shunde,” Orvin went on. “I pulled your data from your slow bullet. Where you were born. Your family. That odd business with your conscription. Your subsequent military history. The skips that brought you to this system. The times you were hurt.”

“Then you don’t need me to say anything.”

Orvin smiled tightly. “Do you remember when they put the bullet into you?”

“I’m a soldier. Who doesn’t remember?”

He gave a little nod of sympathy. “Yes, we used them on our side as well, or a virtually identical technology.” He made sure I got a good look at the gun-shaped thing. “There’s a slow bullet in this injector, programmed and ready for insertion.”

“Thanks, but I already have one.”

“I know that.”

“Then you should also know about the transponder signal. My side will be zeroing in on it as we speak.”

“I could always cut the bullet out before they get here,” Orvin said.

“And kill me in the process.”

“That’s true. And you’re right—there wouldn’t be any point putting a second slow bullet into you. This one’s had a few alterations, though. Shall I tell you what they are?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“Normally there’s not much pain. The military medics use a topical anaesthetic to numb the entry area, and the slow bullet puts out another type of drug as it travels through your insides. It goes very slowly, too—or at least it’smeant to. Hence the name, of course. And it avoids damaging any vital organs or circulatory structures as it progresses to its destination, deep enough inside your chest that it can’t be removed without complicated surgery. But this one’s different. It’s going to hurt like the worst thing you’ve ever known and it’s going to keep burrowing through you until it reaches your heart.”

“Why?”

Orvin let out a little laugh. “Why not?”

I tried to fight—I had no control over that—but I always knew it was useless. The soldiers had me held down too well. Orvin leaned in and pressed the nozzle of the injector against the skin of my thigh where he had already cut away my trousers. I watched his hand tighten on the trigger, and heard a sound like a single whip crack. It was the air going through the gun.

The bullet entered me. It felt like a hammer blow. The gun made a sort of slow, satisfied sigh as the air went out of it.

For a second, maybe less, the pain was less than I had feared. Then it hit, and I screamed. It was what they had been wanting, and I hated myself for it, but there was nothing I could do about that.

“Can you feel it in you?”

Orvin pulled the injector away and cleaned the end of it on a scrap of rag. He put the gun down on the trolley.

“Fuck you.” I said.

“This is just the start, Scurelya. In an hour or two it’ll hurt much more than this. By then, you’ll be begging for me to make the bullet explode, so that it kills you instantly.”

“They’ll find out,” I said, fighting hard to get the words out. “They’ll find out and find you.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. It’s a big universe out there. Lots of systems, lots of chaos and confusion. I have my plans.”

Where the bullet had gone in was a small hole, no wider than my little finger. I could feel the bullet moving itself, contracting and extending like a mechanical maggot. A little bump in my skin signalled where the bullet was pushing through underneath.

I was certain as I could be that I was going to die in that place. It would either happen when the bullet reached my heart (or some other vital part of me) or when I managed to persuade Orvin to make the bullet explode, as all the bullets were capable of doing. If it blew up now, it would probably take my leg off and leave the rest of me alive, at least for a while.

Obviously I did not die in the bunker.

If you have seen the drawings of me (they are not very lifelike, but they did their best) you will know that I did not lose my leg, or any part of my body. I may not be pretty, but all of me is there.

What happened was this.

There was a noise, some kind of air transport passing slowly overhead. I thought it might be soldiers of the Peripheral Systems coming to extract me (if I was worth that much trouble) or possibly the peacekeepers, or even Orvin’s side looking for him.

Whatever the cause, it was enough to have Orvin break off from his entertainment and send one of his soldiers outside. Up near the top of one wall was a square hole where there might once have been a window or some kind of air circulator. I saw a machine cross the sky, then double back again. It was slowing down, making a louder sound than before.

“You’re fucked now,” I said.

Really, though, I did not know what to make of the transport, whether it was good or bad for me. I was in too much pain to think with any kind of clarity. All I knew was that Orvin seemed surprised by it, and I was glad to see him discomfited.

The soldier came back into the bunker and whispered something in Orvin’s meat-coloured ear. Orvin scratched a hand across the bright white bristles of his scalp.

“We’ll leave her,” he decided.

“We could kill her now,” one of the soldiers said.

“Now, an hour from now, it’ll make no difference,” Orvin said, speaking loudly enough for my benefit. “That transport isn’t closing in on her transponder signal—if it was, it’d be much closer.”

“You should kill me,” I said.

“And why is that?”

“If you don’t, I’ll find you.”

Orvin smiled at the emptiness of my threat. “See how far you get without a heartbeat. If you’re really insistent, though, I will have that bullet detonate. Your choice.”

“Fuck you,” I said again. “And it’s Scur. My name is Scur, not Scurelya. I want you to hold that in mind. I’ll find you again, Orvin. I’ll find you and make you remember this.”

“Scur,” he said, musing on the sound of it. “That’s not a very nice name. It sounds like an insult, a word for a bodily function.”

“It works for me.”

They left quickly after that. For a minute or two I heard voices outside the building, but they soon left. There was no sound of a vehicle, or even the transport. But whatever it was had convinced Orvin to be on his way.

So it was just me on the piss-smelling bed.

They had not bothered tying me down. With the bullet in me they knew I stood no chance of catching up with them. They had also not left me with any sort of weapon or communications device. They had every reason to assume that I would be dead by the time anyone found the bunker.

They were wrong about me.

I waited until I was certain they were gone. Then I tried to move. It was hard because of the pain in my leg, and at first all I could do was whimper against the agony. Then I tried curling into a ball, hoping that would make it more bearable. When that failed, I slumped back onto the bed in despair and exhaustion. The bullet was still maggoting its way up the inside of my leg. I did not want to wait until it reached my pelvis.

I swung myself off the bed. I screamed with the movement but that actually seemed to help. I got both of my feet onto the rubble-strewn floor. They had taken my boots but I barely registered the cold or the sharp-edged things against my skin.

I propped myself up by my arms, able to get a much better look at my leg. The bump under my flesh had moved about half the distance to my upper thigh. I could measure its progress if I watched it against the hairs and blemishes on my skin.

My gaze settled on the trolley Orvin had been using. The injector was on it as well as all the sharp things. There was also the knife that Orvin had used to gash open my trousers. Next to the knife was a roll of surgical bandage, and next to that was a flask of disinfectant.

I thought of Orvin torturing people, but not wanting them to die of infection before he had had his enjoyment.

My attention returned to the moving bulge. I knew what I would have to do. Using the knife was going to hurt more than the bullet itself, and if I cut an artery I might end up killing myself anyway. Once I started, I would not want to continue. But I would have to force myself. The war was over and I wanted to get back to my old life, the planet where I had been born. I wanted to return to my mother and father, and let my father know that I did not blame him for my conscription. He had walked the hard path of the good and incorruptible man. He deserved better than to lose another daughter.

I took the knife and began to cut the bullet out of me.

______________

You know of the wakening. You either lived through it or you read of it in the other mandatory texts.

But we had no name for it then. It was a thing that happened to us in ones and twos, rather than a collective experience. And to begin with, none of us had the faintest idea where we were or what had happened.

I can only tell you how it was for me.

______________

After I pushed the knife into myself there was an interval of darkness, and then I woke somewhere. It was cold and there was no light. I imagined that I might have blacked out from the pain and come around again only a few minutes later.

But once I was able to assess my condition I realised that there was no longer any pain anywhere in my leg. I felt neither the bullet nor my wound.

I was still on a sort of bed but it was soft and it did not smell of piss. It felt as if it had been made for me, shaped exactly for the contours of my own body. I was thirsty, my throat uncomfortably dry, and I was cold enough to shiver. Wherever I was, it was not quite silent. From a distance I heard a sort of continuous low drone, like machines. Once in a while, as I lay there, I thought I heard a human voice.

I reached out and felt curving surfaces of metal and plastic. They enclosed me like an egg. My egg—what I guessed must be a hibo capsule—made a sudden noise and opened itself. It came apart in two halves and a red light shone through the widening gap. The light must still have been dim but I had been in the dark long enough that I needed to squint.

I did not have my uniform or combat equipment on. Someone had dressed me in silver trousers and a silver top. The material felt strong and clean, but it was also very thin. The top had short sleeves and was done up with a simple sash around the middle. I felt as if it was the sort of thing a child or a sick person would be made to wear.

It was useless against the cold.

Gradually my eyes began to pick out more details of my surroundings. My capsule was one of many in a long, curving corridor. Of course you know these corridors for yourself. When I say “curving,” I mean that it curved up and out of sight in both directions. On the opposite wall of the corridor lay another row of hibo capsules. It was not only mine that had come open in two halves: there were about a third of them already open. You may think I was instantly at home in the ship but it was not like that at all. I had travelled in skipships before, but I had never been awake for any part of the journey.

I could still hear sounds. Mostly it was the systems of the ship, churning away in the distance. But there were also voices coming from somewhere not too far away. The voices sounded as if they were having an argument.

I lifted up the fabric of my trouser. I made out the trace of the wound where the bullet had gone in and the place where I had cut it out. Or at least begun to cut it out—I could not be sure that I had succeeded by my own efforts. I ran my finger over the healed skin. It did not feel like scar tissue.

We had good medicine in those days. They could do anything, over and over again.

Still not quite trusting my leg—it would take my brain a little while to accept that it was healed—I began to walk along the up-curving corridor. It was an odd sensation to be walking up a slope that never stopped getting steeper.

You get used to it.

I passed many of the open and closed hibo capsules. There were still people in some of them—I saw their cold, still bodies through windows in the black shells of the egg. We were all wearing the same kind of silver clothes. I noticed also that writing glowed on the shells of the capsules. I paused to read some of it. The capsules all contained someone who had something to do with the war. The writing revealed what side they had been on, Central or Peripheral, and what their rank and service history had been. I read the names of their homeworlds: places like Travnik or Yargora or Arbutax.

Supposedly we were being sent to Tottori, a place I certainly had heard of.

I needed to know more so I decided to find the voices. They seemed to be coming from further around the great curve of the wheel. I walked past capsule after capsule, noticing as I did that behind the capsules—half hidden by them—lay a series of gold and silver murals. Sometimes there was a picture of a stilt-legged bird or a building or a pleasant landscape. The black eggs had tubes and pipes coming out of them that went through holes in the wall.

The voices were coming closer and now they sounded much angrier. I heard the sound of someone running, hard shoes clattering on the metal floor. I heard a sharp raised voice in an accent not like my own.

I squeezed into the space between two of the capsules and crouched down.

I risked a glance and saw a man coming around the curve of the corridor. As he ran, the man kept twisting around to look at the people coming after him. His black outfit looked much warmer than my own silver clothes. The man was very thin, with a bald, sharp-boned head. He wore boots and carried a small gun in his hand. He was about twenty paces ahead of a group of shoeless people all dressed in silver. There were women and men of various ages in the party. One of them held a hand to her forearm where it had been bloodied.

The man stopped at a part of the corridor where the walls squeezed in from either side. The man aimed his gun at the group.

“Get back!” he shouted, in a high, scared voice. “Get back or I will shoot!”

There were eight people after him. They had slowed but not stopped completely. Perhaps they doubted that the man really meant to shoot them again. The man aimed the gun and seemed to shoot past the group. The way his hand shook as he held the gun, the way he flinched at the blast, made me doubt that he had ever been a soldier.

I listened to the voices in the party. It was hard to be sure, but their accents sounded like the enemy to me.

The man touched a control in the wall where it squeezed in. A metal door slid across the width of the corridor. There was a small window in the door. The man stepped up to the glass and looked through, needing to stand on the tips of his toes.

I barely dared move. The people were hammering on the other side of the door and I saw a hand pressed against the glass.

The man still seemed tense to me. He touched a different control and leaned in to speak.

“This is Prad! I’m in wheel three. Where is everyone? We’ve got a breakout here! Dregs are awake!”

I heard the same words booming through the corridor, coming out of the walls at amplified volume.

Prad moved away from the door. He still had the little gun in his hand but now it was aimed at the floor. He wiped his other sleeve under his nose. He made me think of a rat. He was lean, frightened and unsure of himself.

Keeping very still, I waited until Prad was level with me. Then I sprang out as fast as I was able and threw myself at him. I knocked him off balance, sent him tumbling into the capsule on the other side of the corridor. I landed on top of him and twisted the little gun from his grip, the way you take a rattle from a child.

I sprung back onto my feet and levelled the weapon at Prad.

“Don’t shoot,” he pleaded.

My throat was still dry but I had to talk. “Who are you?”

“Prad. Service technician Pradser Hebel. I’m crew. Propulsion section. There’s been a problem with the ship. A serious problem. We’re drifting somewhere and there’s been a power restart. None of you should be coming awake like this.”

I did not care for any of this. I wanted certainty, authority, not more doubt.

“Tell me what ship this is.”

“Skipship. Military transport. We’re supposed to be on our way to Tottori.”

“I know. What happens when we arrive—do we get to go home? Are we being repatriated?”

“No. Why would you think . . .” But then he thought better of that line of questioning. “No. Not repatriation, exactly. This isn’t just a military transport. It’s a prison ship. The Caprice. That was her old name; they just kept it after the refit.”

“There’s been a mistake.”

“Most definitely.”

“I mean, I’m a soldier, not a prisoner. I should not be on any military prison ship. I’m not a . . . what did you call those people? Dregs?”

“It’s just a word. I’m sorry. I didn’t think . . .”

I jabbed the weapon at him. “Who’s operating this fucking thing?”

“Peacekeeper authority.” He was still down on the ground and cowering. “Converted starliner. Used to carry passengers before the war, luxury end of the market. Hundred Worlds Circuit. Appropriated and outfitted for prisoner transport and civilian repatriation.”

“The dreg run.”

“I said I’m . . .”

“How big?”

He swallowed hard. “Very. Refitted for bulk capacity. Nearly a thousand sleeper berths.”

“You said drifting. Are we close to Tottori?”

“I don’t think so. We skipped, maybe more than once. It was a long haul, all of us in hibo, even the crew. Then this. Total power blackout. No idea how long it’s been. Ship’s coming back to life piece by piece.” He swallowed again. “Staggered system recovery, to manage power consumption until all reactors are back to capacity.” He looked at me with a sort of pleading desperation. “That’s all I know. I’ve been trying to reach the rest of the crew, trying to find someone who knows more than I do.”

“Get up.”

“Please do not hurt me.”

“I’m a soldier, not a criminal. I don’t hurt civilians. Those other people. Why were they chasing you?”

He risked a shrug. “Like you, like me. Scared and not sure what is happening.”

“I used to fight those people.”

“When I ran into them they had already met five prisoners from your side. You’re Peripheral, right? There had been a fight. I think one man may have been killed.” He was calming now, but he still had a very high, quavering voice. I began to think it was his natural register. “They’ve split apart now, bulkheads down, interlocks sealed. But there will be more trouble until we can get some kind of authority.”

I looked at the little gun. It was the sort of weapon safe to use on a pressurised spacecraft. Low energy yield and a low cyclic fire rate. It would stop a person but not go through armour.

I doubted it would be much use against three people, let alone eight.

“Do you know there are other crew?”

“I hope so,” Prad said.

“Hope so. But you’ve seen none of them.”

Prad gave a twitch, confirming that this was correct.

“You said you were propulsion section. Does that mean you know how to operate this ship?”

“Some systems.”

“So where were you hoping to get to?”

This ratty man looked at me with renewed fear, as if I might decide his fate on the basis of his answer.

“A control station,” Prad said, with a tremble in his voice. “Not the main bridge. That’s too far away. But I thought there might be more crew at the control station. Thought I might be able to see how bad the damage is and where we are.”

“Then we should go there now. Show me the way.”

“It’s not too far from here. We have to use the elevator to go back up to the hub.”

“Will we run into anyone?”

“I don’t know.”

A little way around the wheel was another door blocking the corridor. Prad looked through the window before making the door open. Beyond was another corridor flanked by the open and closed hibo capsules.

“Only crew can work these doors,” Prad said. “It will buy some time.”

Soon we came to a door set into the side of the corridor. I kept my attention on Prad as we went into the gold and silver elevator. I worried that he might overcome his fear and try to take back the gun from me. But Prad only pointed to a picture of the ship etched into a rectangle on one of the walls.

“This is where we are. Three centrifuge wheels along the spine, we’re in the last of the three. That little light moving up the spoke, that is us.” He blinked. “Are you definitely sure that you are not going to hurt me?”

“Tell me about the ship. Beginning with why you’re so afraid of me.”

Prad told me that the ship was one of hundreds being used to move people around at the end of the war. This was an unusual transport, though. It was not just prisoners. There were some ordinary soldiers and civilians among the frozen—innocent cases. But they had been put aboard just to bring the berths up to capacity.

“And the rest?”

“Difficult cases.”

“Dregs.”

Prad swallowed. “What they told us was, most of them were soldiers who’d committed acts against the laws of war. Crossing the line, exceeding sanctioned force. Whatever that means. The rest . . . I gather they’re mostly worse. Traitors, mercenaries . . . civilian criminals. Rapists, murderers, black marketeers. A shipful of headaches, for the peacetime administrations. They would need to be put through courts, and people wanted quick justice.”

“The worst of the worst.”

“I suppose so.”

“Fine. But this you need to understand. I am not one of them. I am—was—just a soldier. I didn’t “exceed sanctioned force,” or any of that crap. I just did my job, and got cut off from my patrol, and caught by the enemy. Nothing else. I shouldn’t even have been conscripted.”

“Then you were one of the soldiers who just happened to be carried aboard to make up numbers.”

“Yes.”

Prad started saying something, then caught himself.

“What?” I asked.

“Where you found me. That part of the wheel.”

“Yes.”

“Is that close to where you came out?”

I thought of how far I had walked since emerging from my egg. “Not far.”

“Then it doesn’t fit. That whole area . . . I spent enough time in it to read some of the histories on the hibo caskets. Those were the problem cases. That whole section was full of military prisoners, scheduled for war crimes tribunals.”

“Then you’re saying I’m lying?”

“No!” Prad said. “Just that something doesn’t fit. Just that someone must have made a mistake.”

“I am not lying.”

“Then you were assigned to the wrong section of the ship.” Then he touched his forehead. “Your bullet.”

“What about it?”

“We can read it out, access your core history. It’ll tell us what you were doing right up to the moment you were injured, and your subsequent medical treatment, and the reason you were put aboard.”

“You mean, it will vindicate me.”

“Yes,” Prad said, a touch too hastily. But what he meant was, it would let him see if I was telling the truth or not.

Which might be the last thing he learned.

______________

When we stepped out we had much less gravity than before, since we were now much closer to the middle of the ship. I did not care for the sensation of being nearly weightless. It was only a little like swimming and my combat training brought no advantage in this unfamiliar environment.

Prad, by contrast, seemed much more at ease. He pushed himself out of the elevator on his fingertips and walked in long drifting arcs.

I kept my eyes on him.

“You’re used to this.”

“Should be. Served on this ship long enough.”

“Long enough to remember life before the war?”

“None of us served on this ship during its civilian days, although I met a couple who did, back when I was starting out. They say it was very beautiful, when it worked the Hundred Worlds Circuit.”

The control station was a large room shaped like a hexagon. In the middle was a console and some seats. The walls were covered in moving writing and numbers and drawings—you will have seen something of that, sometimes, but it was different in those days, when the ship remembered more of itself. I found it hypnotic, like listening to the purr of a dreaming cat.

Prad closed the door behind us.

“We should be safe for a while. If they start breaking through into this section, we shall know it in time to leave.”

“You hope.”

“I am just doing my best. By the way, I still don’t know your name.”

“Scur,” I said, after a moment.

“Just that?”

“Yes. Just that.”

Prad went to the console and showed me how it was possible to monitor any part of the ship from this station. He unclipped a slate from the console, cradling it in his right arm while he tapped instructions into it with his left. At first there were problems getting the slate to work properly, but after a few minutes Prad seemed to have found his way around the worst of the difficulties.

“Is that your only slate?”

“No, there are hundreds more on the ship. This is what we have to work with now, though.”

He told the slate to display images onto the wall. I saw the wheel where I had come out of hibo. The corridor was empty but in another view there were a dozen or so people dressed in silver clothes and crowded around something. In another view people were trying to make one of the doors open. In another there was a woman dressed in silver running along a gold and silver corridor on her own.

In another a woman and a man in black clothes were talking to a girl wearing silver.

I remembered how cold it had been when I came out of the casket. It was no warmer now but at least I’d been moving around.

“She’s just a child. What the hell are children doing on this ship?”

“There won’t be many,” Prad said. “They’d have been among the civilians.”

“I’m worried for her.”

“At least we know there are other crew. Enough of us and we can restore some sort of order.”

“Against a thousand prisoners? Good luck with that.”

“There won’t be that many. I haven’t been awake long, but I’ve already seen that we aren’t at capacity. Not now, anyway.”

“What does that mean?”

“Quite a lot of the hibo berths aren’t working properly. They’ve failed. The people in them, they’re . . . well, dead. Or as good as dead. They might be cold now, but if they’ve become too warm at any point in the trip, they’ll have massive cell damage. All told, I doubt there are more than six hundred good units.”

“Out of a thousand? Why would they just fail like that?”

“There’s always that chance. Normal risk of space travel, even on a ship like this. On a long series of skips, across a year or two of flight, you might easily lose one, maybe two sleepers. But we’ve lost two hundred, three hundred people.”

“So we’ve been out for more than a year or two.”

“I suppose we must have.”

“There has to be a way to find out. The ship has to have some record of how long it’s been floating here.”

“It will not be that straightforward. The blackout hit us pretty hard.” He tilted the slate to me, as if I was expected to make sense of the figures and diagrams it was presently displaying. “Total reset. All clocks zeroed. Normally what would happen is . . .” But Prad trailed off. “Look, this is complicated. The ship has no idea where it is or how long it’s been here. But that shouldn’t matter. Normally it can always pick up an external beacon, reset its clocks and navigation systems.”

“And?”

Prad tapped a finger against the slate. “It’s not picking up a signal. Those are zero return error conditions. I’ve tried the console as well. It is most certainly not a local fault.”

“Then we’re out of range. Maybe we came out of skip at the wrong point.”

“The NavNet’s too extensive for that. Hundreds of thousands of beacons, massive system redundancy. Even during the war they managed to keep most of it still running. But there is nothing out there.”

“Zero return,” I said, echoing his earlier statement. It had an ominous, hollow quality to it.

“Well, there could be a fault somewhere. I know one thing, at least. We might be drifting, but we are not in deep space, far from any system. Before we met . . . I told you I was looking to find the rest of the crew. I thought the rings might be a good place to start, and I also wanted to make sure that the prisoners were still safe.”

“For our welfare, or yours?”

“A bit of both. Anyway, I passed a window. There’s a planet out there. If this slate was working properly I could call up an external view from in here.”

“Did you recognise it?”

“No, and it’s not Tottori either. Maybe another world in Tottori’s system, but that’s a heavily settled space and I saw no orbitals or stations or elevators, let alone any other space traffic.”

“It has to have a name.”

“I agree—it’s somewhere, at any rate. Atmosphere, land masses and seas. Looks liveable, if a little on the cold side, so it’s got to be somewhere known. Must still be off the beaten track, or we would not be the only ship here.”

“Very off the beaten track.” But I had seen something on the wall that bothered me. “That view. It just changed. Can you go back?”

“What was it?”

“People in a big room. For a second I . . .”

“What?”

“I thought I knew one of the faces.”

Prad did frowning things with the slate until the view was back on the wall. It was one of the grand ballrooms of the old ship, a place with big windows and a curving floor like the corridor with the hibo caskets. Prad said it was in an area of one of the wheels given over to ballrooms and lounges and promenade decks.

There were about twenty-five or thirty people in this room and most of them wore the silver outfits of the prisoners. They were gathered around a pair of tables that had been pushed together, with a man in a silver uniform stretched out on his back on the table. He was being held down by his hands and feet.

“You’re all wearing the same outfit now, so there’s nothing to mark one side from the other. It’s anyone’s guess as to who came out of which hibo berth. But maybe you know some of these people?”

“No,” I answered, before starting to say something.

“What?”

“It can’t be right, but I thought there was a man in that party I recognised.”

“Someone special to you?”

“Someone I’d quite like to skin alive, if I ever got the chance.”

“Charming.”

“Don’t mock me, Prad. There was a man called Orvin, a war criminal operating for the enemy. He caught me, tortured me, left me for dead.”

“And he’s here?”

“I thought so for a moment. It was just a flash, his face on the wall. But if it was him, he has his back to us now.”

“That big man there?”

“Yes.” I thought of his meat-coloured skin, his brilliantly white hair. It fitted, but Orvin could not be the only man who looked something like that, and it was not easy to judge his size against a group of strangers. “Can you get a different angle on him?”

“I think that’s all we have. If we wait, he might turn around. Would you know if he did?”

“Yes.”

But he did not, and meanwhile the group seemed to be doing crueller and crueller things to the man on the table. One of them had a silver tool in his hand, an instrument I recognised all too readily.

“What in the worlds is that doing here?”

“It’s a slow bullet injector,” Prad said, as if I might not have known the thing for what it was. “This is a military transport. Sometimes the bullets inside you aren’t working properly, so we need to put another one in. It’s normally done when you are asleep, being readied for hibo.”

I thought back to my own time in the bunker. I said I would say nothing more about my life before the wakening, but it was hard to let this memory slip. I could still feel the hard, cold floor, the broken glass under my feet, the blood-spattered walls, the smell of piss and terror.

“They make good torture instruments as well.”

“Perhaps you just saw a face.”

“Perhaps I did.” I was ready to believe that, even hoping that it was the case. “But they’re going to kill that man if we don’t do something.”

Prad regarded the little gun I still held on him. “You think you can take that room? In which case, good luck with that.”

“There must be more weapons somewhere.”

“There are, but nothing more powerful, and there are still only two of us.”

“The thing you did earlier, speaking to the entire ship. I heard your voice. Can you make them hear us from in here?”

Prad nodded, and showed me something on the console. It was a stalk you bent around and spoke into. Prad said it was so the crew could address the passengers and staff in case of an emergency or drill. There was not much use for such a thing on a prison ship with frozen passengers and a skeleton crew but the system had never been disconnected.

Prad tested a few controls to make sure it was still working.

“What do you want to tell them?”

“That we’ll destroy the ship from here. It’ll sound better if you convince me we could actually do it.”

“Destroy the ship,” Prad repeated, as if I said something in a strange foreign language.

“Destroy it, or kill everyone aboard. Whichever’s simpler. Can that be done?”

“I don’t follow. Why would we want to destroy the ship?

“Because we will murder each other given the chance. We’re soldiers, Prad. Enemy combatants—and that’s the best of us!”

“And you think the thing to make peace is to threaten to destroy the ship?”

“I know soldiers, Prad. I am one. They aren’t going to listen to reasoned persuasion—not while there’s a chance to settle some grudges. If they feel the way I do, then it only seems like hours since we were fighting.”

Prad told me it was hard to make a ship like this destroy itself. Every system was designed to prevent such a thing rather than make it more likely.

I would not give up that easily.

“Dump the air, or threaten to do it. There must be a way.”

“No,” Prad said. “There’s no good reason why you’d ever want to do that. We could, manually, seal off every section one by one and run a pressure dump. But not from here, and not in anything less than hours.”

“Then we make it too hot or cold. Or stop the wheels, so that everyone has to deal with weightlessness.”

“Again, it would all take much too long, even if we could do it from here.”

“It doesn’t matter what we can and can’t do. It’s what we can convince them we can do. You give me the words, I’ll make them believe I mean it.”

He shook his head. “I do not think it is possible.”

I showed him the gun again, reminding him of the essential nature of our relationship. “I’m not going to wait for them to tear each other apart.”

“So you would rather kill me first?”

“Just give me something that will work.”

After a moment Prad said that he could make the ship put out an alarm signal that would be heard in all the corridors and rooms. The lights would flash and a siren would sound. It was part of the arrangements for an emergency drill but the soldiers would be none the wiser.

“Do it,” I said.

Prad put down the slate and did something to the console. The alarm started up. It was a rising and falling wail, reminding me of an attack siren. Red lights had started flashing on the walls. On the displays we could see that the people in the rest of the ship were hearing the same alarm. They were looking around. Even the man with his back to the camera was twitching his head.

“Do you want to speak to them now?”

“Give it a minute or two. Be better that way.”

It was a long couple of minutes until I leaned in and started addressing the ship.

“My name is Scur. I know you can hear me. I’m a soldier. Until the ceasefire I was fighting with the rest of you. I have no idea what I am doing on this ship or what has happened to it. But I know we’re in some kind of trouble.” I took a breath. I would have liked more time to think through my statement, but I would just have to do my best. “I’m with a member of the crew, a man called Prad. Prad’s pretty jumpy about the whole situation. Says we should be picking up NavNet beacons, and we’re not. Zero fucking returns. Says that there are a lot of frozen bodies in the hibo caskets—more than there should be, given how long we were supposed to be out here. Now Prad and I have control of some of the ship’s systems. I have a gun on Prad and I’ve asked him to do something. What have I asked you to do, Prad?”

Prad leaned in. “Initiate a hypercore excursion. The hypercore is what we use to boost power prior to the skip. Unless dampeners are applied the core will become supercritical in four to five minutes. The core will detonate and the ship will . . . well, there won’t be a ship.”

“Did you get that, people? We’re a ticking time bomb with a four- or five-minute fuse.”

I had their attention, that much was obvious. It was not just the people in silver—the soldiers and dregs like me—but also the crew in their black clothes. No matter what Prad believed, it seemed to me that there were much less than twenty of them.

“I’m not a technician,” I continued. “I know guns, not skipships. But we can’t keep fighting. Unless it stops I won’t allow Prad to make the core safe. There are three wheels on the Caprice. Counting from the front, those who fought for the Central Worlds will take the first wheel. Those who fought for the Peripheral Systems, take the next wheel along. The rest of you—crew, civilians, anyone who wasn’t a soldier—you take the third wheel. Once you’re there, decide who’ll speak for you. I don’t give a shit how you make that decision, so long as you pick one person.”

“Less than four minutes,” Prad said.

“You’d best get moving. Whoever you’ve caught, no matter what you think they deserve, you’ll leave them where they are. No one touches a hair on anyone’s head from now on.”

I had not counted on them to just get up and do my bidding: no one is that naïve. To begin with, I fully expected them to doubt my sincerity. They knew they had a few minutes to think things over.

But I had more to say.

“Maybe you don’t think I’m serious about this. Perhaps you don’t think I’d give up my life to make a point. You’re wrong. I was left to die before the ceasefire, left with a slow bullet eating its way to my heart. That changes your perspective a little. I don’t feel that I’ve a lot to lose at this point. It’s possible we’ve been out here for more than a few years. And guess what? If anyone was thinking of rescuing us, they’d be here already. That means it’s down to us. If we’re going to survive, then we need to cooperate. The ceasefire happened. There is no war now.”

“Three minutes,” Prad said.

They were not yet moving to the wheels. But I could sense their uneasiness. They were thinking about it, wondering how far I might go. Some of them were looking out of the rooms and corridors they were in. If one moved then more would follow.

I kept a particular eye on the man I thought might be Orvin. But he had yet to turn his front to me.

I decided not to overplay my hand by making a further statement. I touched a finger to my lips, telling Prad not to say anything, and at the right moment he held up two fingers, telling me how many minutes were left.

I wished now that I had saved the lights and the siren until after issuing my demand: it would have made more of an impression. But perhaps I had already made the best of things. It seemed to me that I had spoken the truth even as I lied. There was no chance of the ship destroying itself—unless Prad was lying to me—but I was entirely serious about not wanting to die by the terms of the mob.

They began to move. It started in ones and two and threes and then became a surge. Prad moved to silence the alarm but I stayed his hand. Let them continue to think that death was imminent.

“They’re bound to run into each other on the way to the wheels,” Prad whispered. “There’ll be more trouble.”

“Less than if they stayed where they are.”

“You call that a solution?”

“The situation is still fucked. It’s just slightly less fucked than it was a few minutes ago.”

Of course I knew that this was a stopgap. Not all the soldiers would know where to go. Did a traitor or deserter go to wheel one or wheel two? Some of the civilians had probably done worse things than some of the soldiers. Their hatred for each other might be just as strong.

I could do nothing about that.

“I think they swallowed it,” Prad said, shaking with relief.

I doubted that they had, but it was the result that counted. It might only be that moving to the wheels was the safest thing to do while there was still some uncertainty in their minds.

What mattered was that I had established a starting point. The ship was emptier now and the worst enmities contained in the wheels.

Also, I knew I’d been right about Orvin. I had caught enough of a glimpse of his face as he turned to leave the room.

He walked among us.

______________

It took time for the people in the rings to sort out their lesser differences and agree on three representatives. During that time—whether it was an hour or six hours—Prad made further investigations into our condition.

This much we knew:

Caprice had suffered some kind of blackout and was now struggling to restore all its systems. Of the thousand or so hibo sleepers who had been aboard when the ship started its journey, two hundred and forty had not survived the trip. Huge areas of the ship were still dark or suffering intermittent power drops. This was bad, but there was good news as well. The ship could provide and recycle enough water and food to keep all of us alive indefinitely, so long as we accepted a system of rationing. It would not be comfortable, but none of us need starve. Equally, we had power enough to keep warm. There were no beds or private quarters on this prison ship, except for those reserved for the crew. But there were hundreds of spare prison garments, and these could be fashioned into rudimentary bedding. Some of us curled up back in the hibo berths, which offered a measure of privacy. Others chose the protection of communal sleeping arrangements. So we could eat and sleep, wash ourselves and remain warm. As soldiers, most of us had put up with worse.

But we knew nothing about our larger predicament. The ship’s electronic nervous system was only partially functional. It was blind to areas of itself, and blind to a great deal of the outside universe.

And yet, it had managed to limp into orbit around a world. The orbit was high and stable—far enough above the atmosphere that it could be maintained almost indefinitely, with only tiny automatic thrust adjustments needed every few decades or so.

Could we have been here that long?

Prad thought he might have a way of determining where and when we were, independently of the NavNet. In his early investigations he had tried varying the search frequency in case—for some reason—the NavNet transmission protocol had been altered. He had been excited when the ship began picking up a regular radio signal, similar to the positioning pulse from a NavNet beacon.

But the signal was natural in origin. Prad quickly realised that it was coming from a radio pulsar, the dense, rapidly spinning magnetic remnant of an exploded star.

But that gave Prad a better idea. There were thousands of radio pulsars in the galaxy and they were all rotating at different speeds. The strengths of those pulsars would depend on how far away they were. By triangulating off these natural signals it should be possible to work out where Caprice had ended up. It would not give us as good a fix as the NavNet but it would be sufficient to determine which solar system we were in.

Prad said to me that he could do better than just a positional estimate. Since all the pulsars were slowly winding down, it should also be possible to estimate how many months or years had passed.

I told Prad that I should be extremely interested in the answer.

______________

The representatives were called Yesli, Spry and Crowl. I met them in a lounge near the control station. They were all among the older people in their respective wheels, if not the very oldest.

I knew none of these people before the wakening, so I had no sense of whether I could really trust them. Equally, I had no choice not to proceed as if they were completely sincere. These were the figureheads that the wheels had selected, and that was an end to it.

Yesli was the only woman among the three, and she was the civilian representative of the third wheel, the one that contained the noncombatants and those who had no place in the other two wheels. She was older than me, from a different world—a different solar system, in fact—and she had a measured, cautious way of speaking.

I thought I liked Yesli, at least to begin with. She could be very persuasive, but it was as if she knew the power of her own words too well. She did not need to say much to have the attention of those around her, and this was a gift she used wisely.

Yesli had lost most of her family during the war and had reasons to dislike both sides. By the same token she had no strong reason to favour one side over the other.

“You know who I am now,” Yesli said, when she finished telling us who she was. “What about you, Scur? We’ve been elected, the three of us. As far as I can tell, you just decided to put yourself in charge.”

“It’s a fair point,” said Spry, who was a tall, shaven-headed man with very prominent cheekbones. He had muscular forearms which he liked to fold across his chest. “We’ve been selected by a sort of democracy, if you can call it that. I never asked to be placed in a position of authority.”

“But you didn’t turn it down, either,” Crowl said, with a half smile. He was a small, unimposing man who looked no one’s idea of a soldier, much less a natural leader. But there was a cleverness in his eyes, a confidence in his manner, that had evidently won people over. Of all us he was the most relaxed in this low-gravity section of the ship. “Neither did I,” he went on. “As far as I can tell, Scur did the only thing open to her. If she hadn’t, we’d be drowning in our own blood by now.”

“Scur’s another soldier,” Yesli said. “It doesn’t surprise me that you’d defend her. Frankly, I don’t see why soldiers should have any say on this ship at all.”

“Civilians are in the minority,” I pointed out.

“And this is not a military situation. This is not a state of war. We’re at peace. There was a ceasefire.”

“Fine,” Crowl shrugged. “Then we’re all civilians now.”

“Except for the war criminals,” Yesli said. “The . . . what did they call them, these people?”

“Dregs,” I said, smiling nicely.

“I’m one of those dregs,” Spry said, surprising all of us with his frankness. “I’m perfectly happy to admit it. During the war I served under a superior officer who committed numerous acts against the laws of war. She executed soldiers without due regard for military process. She murdered civilians. So I killed her, and a number of the men and women protecting her. That makes me a military criminal, by the laws of my own side. A traitor and a murderer.”

“Do you regret what you did?” I asked.

“Only that I didn’t act sooner, and that I didn’t take down a few more of the fuckers while I was at it. I regret that I allowed some of them a relatively painless death.”

I decided that I liked Spry’s honest absence of contrition. I should have found it much harder to trust him if he had produced a show of remorse.

“So it’s not all black and white,” I said. “There will be good and bad in all of us.”

“And you?” Yesli asked. “What are your particular misdeeds, Scur?”

“You tell me. I’m a conscripted soldier who obeyed orders, did her job, and just happened to end up on this ship for no reason that I can understand.”

Yesli nodded carefully. “Then you committed no criminal acts? Nothing against the laws of war?”

“I think I just told you that.”

“Yesli has a point,” Spry said, conciliatorily. “It would be good to know your intentions, Scur. It’s not that we don’t necessarily trust you, but you can’t deny that you did seize power by threatening an innocent member of the crew.”

“Who was running from a mob about to tear him limb from limb,” I replied.

Spry nodded. “All the same.”

“I used the gun to make my point. But Prad understands that it wasn’t personal. You’re right to ask, though—all of you. What do I want? The truth is, I have no intention of running this ship. You can sort that out between yourselves, just as soon as Prad comes up with a positional fix and an idea of how long we’ve been out here. I just want to see that we have a chance of getting home, whatever long that might take.” I paused. “And I have some unfinished business I’d like to attend to.”

“Business?” Yesli asked sceptically.

“There’s a man on this ship I’d like to meet. I saw him on one of the screens, before I forced everyone to go back to the wheels. After that, with everyone moving around, it was hard to trace his movements. I think he knew that, and used the confusion to his advantage. But he can only be in one of the three wheels, and he’s wearing the same silver outfit as the rest of us, rather than the black of crew. I know him as Orvin, although that might not be the name he’s using now. But he won’t be hard to locate. He’s a very big man, with very white hair, and he has a face that makes him look like a baby.”

“Who is he?” Spry asked.

“A true war criminal, unlike yourself. He and I have some history. We were on the same planet together, when the ceasefire came down. He did something bad to me, and now I’d like to put things straight.”

“You mean,” Crowl said, “that you’d like your revenge.”

I looked at him, gave every impression that I was thinking things over before answering.

“Yes.”

I don’t think it was the thing any of them were expecting.

“I thought the time for lynch mobs was over,” Yesli said.

“They are,” I said, nodding. “There won’t be a mob involved. Just me and Orvin and maybe something sharp. Once I have him, once I’ve settled our particular debt, the ship is yours. Run it as a trinity. Run it as a dictatorship. Organise yourselves however the fuck you like. I don’t care. I just want Orvin, and some time alone with him.”

Spry had his muscular arms still folded. “How do you propose to proceed?”

“Seal off the wheels for the time being. The three of you return and organise search parties with whoever you feel you can trust. Then start going through your people, one by one. Anyone you think looks the part, anyone you even have the slightest doubt over, you isolate them until I can check them out for myself. I won’t need to be there. Prad can help me use the cameras.”

“Will Orvin know that you’re looking for him?” Yesli asked.

“I made a mistake, announcing myself as Scur. He knows my name, and I imagine he remembers leaving me for dead.”

“It’s an unusual name,” Spry admitted.

“I don’t like this,” Yesli said.

“I don’t either. But I like the idea of Orvin being among us even less.”

I turned around sharply, aware of Prad making his way toward us along the corridor from the control station. I knew instantly that something was wrong, just from the look on his face.

I started to ask him what was amiss.

Prad halted. He looked terribly ill. I think if he had had anything in his guts just then, he would have vomited.

It was not illness, though. I had seen people in the war look this way, when they had witnessed something that no decent person should ever have to see. It was usually the realisation that we are just fragile bags of meat and bone and blood, held together by almost nothing. With Prad it was a different sort of realisation, but no less discomforting.

“Prad,” I said.

“I can’t . . .” he started to say.

“Prad, talk to me.”

But all Prad could say was that he was sorry, over and over again.

______________

Yesli, Spry and Crowl followed Prad and me back to the control station. It seemed to me that Prad was still on the verge of hysteria. “There’s been a mistake,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Whatever you think you’ve discovered, it can’t be as terrible as it seems. You’re like the rest of us—not at your best.”

I was doing what I had done in the war—trying to shake someone out of the paralysis of shock and fear, so that they could move and react and continue the business of not dying.

“You don’t understand, Scur. There’s been no mistake.”

“Talk to us. Tell us what you’ve found.”

“It won’t make any difference, knowing.”

“Tell us!” I snarled.

By turns he found some measure of composure. It took a while. Prad was not a soldier, and shock was not something he could just put behind himself for the sake of survival.

But it helped that he had to explain a technical matter to the rest of us. It was like a prayer to him, this recitation of scientific facts and complications. The words gave him an anchor of calmness, however precarious it might have been.

He told us about the pulsars, as he had already told me. He told us how the ship’s systems could use the pulsars as a positioning reference, even if there was a problem with the NavNet.

“It should have been simple,” he said, still shaking, still pale, but at least able to get a sentence out now. “There are bright pulsars and faint ones. We’d only have needed to lock onto a few bright ones to get a good enough fix—the Sphinx, the Monkey, a handful of others. But it still didn’t work! The signals we were detecting were too far from the expected frequencies for the automatic correlators to work. That was my fault—I hadn’t allowed for a wide enough temporal search window!”

“Meaning what?” Spry asked.

“All pulsars gradually slow down, as they lose rotational energy. That’s a known, a given. The pulse rate slowly decreases . . . but even after years and years, the frequency’s only meant to change by tiny fractions of a millisecond.” Prad swallowed hard. “Barely any change at all over a human lifetime. Yes, there are complicating factors—glitches which make pulsars spin faster or slower, very suddenly. That’s why we need a few for our sample, to iron out those effects. I allowed for all that. But still—the correlators couldn’t get a lock. I was searching out across decades of time. I told them to look a whole century ahead, just in case.”

“A century?” Yesli asked, as if she might have misheard. “You think we might have been out here that long?”

“It’s worse,” I said. “Isn’t it, Prad?”

Prad gave a dry, humourless laugh. “Oh, yes. It’s quite a bit worse. Shall we say—by at least five hundred years?”

“No,” Crowl said, in flat rejection of this possibility. “That’s simply not possible. The ship’s intact, apart from some power blackouts. We skipped, that’s all, and something went a little wrong with one of the skips. But we haven’t been out here for five hundred years.”

“You’re right,” Prad said, with an ominous smile. “Five hundred years is the lower end of my time estimate. This is the least worse case. You can be sure we’ve been lost quite a bit longer than that.”

“Give me the worst case,” I said.

“I cannot put a hard number on that—too many independent variables, too much uncertainty due to the glitches. It could be anything up to a thousand years, maybe a little more. Five thousand, if we have been very, very unlucky. There are some other things I can look at, if you really feel that your lives would be improved by knowing. Expansion patterns of visible supernova remnants. The proper motions of stars, now that we know which system we’re in.”

“And do we?” Yesli asked.

“I think so,” Prad said. “In fact, it’s exactly where we were meant to be. I’d say we were late arriving, but for all we know we’ve been in orbit here for centuries—just waiting for the ship to wake itself up.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You do, Scur—you just don’t want to understand. This is Tottori, the heavily settled and industrialised world where we were supposed to be sent on for additional processing.”

I remembered our earlier conversation. “You said you didn’t recognise this place.”

“I didn’t.”

“Well, then . . .” I started to say.

“There’s been an ice age,” Prad said. “That’s why it looks different. The icecaps are much larger, and the coastlines and surface features totally altered. Some of the seas have frozen, some have retreated. I don’t know why this has happened.”

“Ice ages happen,” Spry said.

“The planet’s tilt can’t account for it. The sun is a little fainter than it should be, but not enough for this. I thought I must be wrong. Do you know why else I doubted myself?” He was staring at us now as if facing his accusers.

“It’s all right, Prad,” I said.

“There are no stations here. No orbital structures, habitats . . . no other ships. No cities, no spaceports, no roads or towns on the surface. This should be one of the most populous planets in human space . . . and instead it’s just a shivering dead iceball.”

After a lengthy silence Spry said: “Is it possible you’ve made a mistake?”

“It’s possible,” Prad answered, and we all allowed ourselves a foolish glimmer of hope, at least for the few seconds until Prad crushed it. “It’s possible that my methods are faulty, yes. But when the data said that this was Tottori, do you think I just stopped, accepting it without question?”

“Go on,” I said, with a horrible sense of inevitability.

“I checked the planet below against the ones in the files. The other planets in the system, their orbits and sizes are all as they should be. There’s a problem with the files, but . . .” Prad trailed off, collected himself. “I managed to recover enough information for the comparison. It’s true that the coastlines look different now. Everything looks different. But there are still enough points of similarity to rule out any doubt. Believe me, I would much rather that planet was not Tottori. But it is.”

______________

The Trinity—Yesli, Spry and Crowl—agreed to return to their respective wheels. They were going to have to do some delicate work in preparing the ground for the bad news we would all have to share sooner or later. They could not expect everyone to absorb the truth in a calm and reasonable manner.

For the most part, since the wakening, it had been soldiers against soldiers. Those old differences would not be buried by this latest development—far from it—but I could easily imagine the soldiers turning en masse against Prad and the other crew. After all, they were the ones responsible for the ship, and it was the ship that had dragged us across time.

Even if the fault lay with the ship, we needed it to survive. There would also be no point in hanging the crew, even if it helped the soldiers deflect some of their energies. What they needed—what all of us needed—was another focus.

Fortunately I had just the man in mind.

From their individual wheels, Yesli, Spry and Crowl selected a dozen or so subordinates who could be trusted to organise the search for Orvin. They were trusted with weapons, broken out of the same store where Prad had acquired his gun. When there were not enough energy pistols to go around, they were given axes and heavy-duty wrenches from the tools store. They were also given slates—Prad had already located several dozen without searching particularly hard—and they were shown how to use the slates as communication devices, so that we could coordinate the search effort.

They were also, almost as an afterthought, informed that we appeared to be overdue at our destination by quite a long time.

Exactly how long?

Years, decades?

“More than a century,” was the official line. It was not exactly the truth, but not exactly a lie either. No mention of the possibility of thousands of years.

Was it arrogant of us to think we could bear the truth, when the others could not? I do not think so. I had seen Prad nearly vomit from the shock of his discovery, and I was only just bearing it myself. And even then, I had reached no kind of emotional reckoning with the facts. I kept telling myself that not only would I not be returning home, but that there could not possibly be any home that I would ever recognise. My mother, my father, gone for thousands of years—every part of their lives lost, for all I knew, under another ice age, on another world.

I knew it, and believed it. But like a patient given an upsetting diagnosis, I was more shocked than accepting. That would come, given time, but for now all I felt was hollow, as if I had left some vital, living part of me in hibo.

If one thing helped me focus, it was the idea of finding Orvin. I do not mind admitting that I fantasized about what I would do to him. Sooner or later, in the absence of external authority, we would have to arrive at some sort of judicial apparatus aboard the Caprice—a system of laws and penalties, and a body of officials tasked with enforcing them. We would have to be careful of our actions, for fear of being held to account when we eventually recontacted whatever had become of human civilisation. We would not wish to have acted barbarically.

Until those laws were in place, though, we could allow ourselves a little latitude. Orvin, disliked even by many of his own side, would make an effective hate figure. I felt that that could be useful, when our own differences lay so close to the surface.

Mainly, though, I wanted him for myself.

I thought it most likely that Orvin would have tried to lose himself in Yesli’s wheel, where he stood the least chance of being recognised by another soldier. In fact it was Crowl’s party who found him.

I had warned the Trinity that Orvin was an extremely dangerous man, not merely a soldier but also an unsurpassed expert in armed and unarmed close quarters combat. I was not in any way convinced that Orvin was going to come quietly, just because we had him cornered. To that end, Yesli, Spry and Crowl had all agreed that their search parties would identify Orvin and proceed no further once his location was known. Once we had him pinned down, the other wheels would send over their own armed parties. Sooner or later we were going to have to mix, and this exercise would give the three different factions a chance to work together under a common goal.

That was the plan. It might have worked, if Crowl had not decided that his party could take Orvin without outside assistance. By the time we knew what was happening, the rest of us were still on our way to Crowl’s wheel.

This, more or less, is what happened.

Orvin, who had surely been aware of the search parties closing in, allowed himself to be cornered. He appeared to give up without a fight, meekly accepting of his fate. Three of Crowl’s people had him held down, while two more aimed guns at him. If I had been there I would have told them three was nowhere near enough. Maybe five or six might have made a difference.

Crowl’s error was thinking it was safe to get in close, now that he had Orvin under restraint. Witness reports differ at this point, and since I wasn’t present I shall not offer any definite account of events. But it seems that Orvin twisted free of his would-be captors, startling them with a sudden explosion of strength.

Rather than attempting to make a run for it—he could probably have shouldered his way through twenty or thirty people without difficulty—Orvin instead made a grab for Crowl. An instant later, he had some sort of weapon pressed against Crowl’s throat. It was hard to see in his huge, baby-fingered hand. It was either a knife or an improvised blade of sharpened metal, depending on who you listened to.

Whatever it was, we never found it.

Orvin drew blood, but did not push the edge any deeper into Crowl’s neck. He had made his point.

Crowl attempted to say something.

Orvin said: “Move aside. Those of you with weapons, throw them aside.”

Orvin was behind Crowl now, one arm hooked around his chest and the other holding the edge against his throat.

Guns dropped to the floor.

“Kick those little toys out of reach.”

Guns were kicked away.

“Scur?” Orvin said, raising his voice. “I heard you earlier, so I presume you can also hear this. I’m moving out of the wheel. You and everyone else will clear the elevator shaft and retreat to your own wheels. I expect to see no one in the central spine. Is that understood?”

We were about to begin the ascent to Crowl’s wheel. Prad showed me how to make my voice heard.

“This won’t work, Orvin. There’s nowhere to go.”

“It’s a big ship, Scur. Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”

“Submit to our justice, Orvin. We’ll treat you fairly.”

“I heard your plans for me involved being tortured to death. Or was that just a rumour?”

I wondered who had allowed this to come to Orvin’s attention.

“Just let Crowl go. He isn’t part of this.”

“He made himself part of it, Scur.”

______________

In a sense, we owe Orvin a small debt of gratitude. If he had not acted the way he did, and not done what he did to Crowl, we would not have discovered the greater truth of our situation, the very reason that I am carving these words. Or, more properly, not as soon as we did. And since every day was soon to count, it was better to know sooner than later.

So, yes, we have that much to thank Orvin for.

______________

Acceding to his request—what choice did we honestly have—we allowed Orvin to make his way out of the wheel with Crowl as his hostage. Prad tracked the descent of the elevator all the way back to the central spine. In Yesli’s wheel, Prad and I tried to find a camera angle that would allow us to pick up Orvin’s subsequent progress. It was a hopeless task. Parts of the ship were dark, depressurised or blind. In the other areas, all we saw were views of empty corridors and rooms.

Until, not more than an hour after Orvin had escaped the wheel, we found Crowl.

He was lolling against a wall in one of the near-weightless areas. Prad said Orvin must have moved into that sector since the last time he had made a check on that particular camera.

“That’s blood,” Yesli said, indicating a smear along part of the wall.

Crowl’s form moved. He was pressing a bloodmittened hand to his stomach. His head turned slowly to look at the camera, his expression oddly placid.

I asked Prad if I could speak to him.

“Go ahead. The rest of the ship will hear, but I don’t think that matters now.”

“Crowl, this is Scur. We can see you, and we’re on our way. Just hang in there.”

As if anything I said was going to make a difference to his chances.

______________

I suppose I gave Orvin some thought as we made our way down to his victim, but I remember nothing of that now. What had happened to Crowl in no way altered Orvin’s chances of evading us. Next time, I would make sure we were better prepared.

Crowl was still alive when we reached him. He had been stabbed, at least once, and there was quite some blood loss from the wound. He had done what he could to staunch the bleeding, but his efforts had only been partially successful. Besides, there was no telling the damage done under his skin.

But he was still conscious, still able to hear us.

“Listen to me,” I said, while the others fussed around to find something that could double as a stretcher. “Prad says that there’s a state of the art surgical suite aboard this ship, put there for the highest paying luxury tourists. He’s warming it up right now. It’ll be ready in minutes, but first we have to get you there, and secondly you have to hold out long enough for the auto-surgeon to wake up. Can you do that for me, Crowl?”

But Crowl was long past the point of being able to give me a coherent answer. Still, his eyes were open, which I took to be a sign that there was still some fight in him.

He was slipping away while we searched for a stretcher, so in the end we decided that the best course of action was to carry him with us, as gently as we could manage. It caused him pain, being moved like that, but if the pain kept him conscious I saw that as no bad thing. On the way to the elevator, and up to the surgical bay in the second wheel (surgery is much easier under gravity), Crowl made a medley of sucking, gurgling and whimpering noises. It was hard not to feel for him.

“We’ll get the fucker,” I said, trying to take his mind off the injury. “Even if we have to tear this ship apart.”

Crowl moved his lips as if he wanted to say something in return, but it was too hard for him.

“You’ll be all right,” Spry said. “I know it hurts, but it’s nothing the surgical suite won’t be able to fix.”

It was true: we had all seen worse injuries in combat, and many of us had survived them. But in the field you were seldom far from an anaesthetic patch or the tender ministrations of a medic.

As the elevator rose, Prad’s voice came out of the walls. “I’m at the med bay. I hope you’re not in a hurry.”

“Of course we’re in a fucking hurry!” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“Place is dead and cold. No one’s touched it since we woke.”

“Then start waking it up!” Yesli shouted.

“I have,” Prad said. “As soon as I opened the door, it kickstarted some of the automatic systems. Lights, heating and so on. But we may need a few minutes before the surgical systems come back to life.”

I was about to say that Crowl’s time might not be measurable in minutes.

“Speed it if up if you can, Prad. Does the gear look all right?”

“Yes—it’s all still here and it all looks clean and undamaged. Not that I am any sort of an expert.”

Behind Prad’s voice I heard the sudden click, whirr and whine of waking machinery.

“What was that?”

“Some sort of check-out cycle,” Prad said, sounding encouraged. “Lots of displays lighting up and things moving around all of a sudden.”

“That sounds good. If you know how, start prepping the auto-surgeon to deal with an abdominal injury . . . stabbing . . . whatever you want to call it. Crowl’s bleeding out pretty fast here. The sooner we can get to work, the better.”

“I shall do what I can,” Prad said.

Under his breath Spry said to me: “This could be an interesting test case, Scur. Sooner or later more of us are going to need medical attention of one kind or another. If we can’t get that auto-surgeon to work, we could be in a lot of trouble.”

“That’s brightened my day.”

“I’m just looking ahead. It’s all very well surviving the next few days or weeks. But if Tottori is as deserted as it looks, we’re going to be in for a long wait.”

“Maybe we can skip somewhere else, once the ship finishes waking up.”

“Yes, and maybe it’s the same story wherever we go. You heard Prad. The NavNet beacons aren’t just silent in this system—there’s nothing out there at all. I’m just saying we may have to rely on the resources at hand.”

This did nothing to lift my mood, but by the time we reached the surgical bay I started feeling slightly better about Crowl’s chances. The air in the room was still cold, but all the lights were on and the medical systems, to my untrained eye, looked ready to perform their chores. Prad stood next to an angled plinth, its upper surface flickering with anatomical diagrams.

Beyond the plinth was the glass-walled sterile enclosure of the auto-surgeon.

“Well?” I asked.

“I’ve done what I can. There is a problem with some of these routines . . . some kind of low-level corruption. I mentioned the problem with the ship’s file system earlier? This is similar. I wish there were time to rebuild the command architecture.”

“There isn’t. Can we make do?”

“The surgeon may need some manual guidance.”

I looked at Crowl, painted in blood. “For his sake, I hope it’s nothing complicated.”

“It shouldn’t be. The machine will just prompt us for input when it must take a critical decision. Let’s get him into the theatre.”

Doors slid open in the side of the sterile enclosure. We positioned Crowl on the operating couch, leaving him in the blood-drenched clothes he had been wearing. Surrounding the couch were many articulated robotic surgical devices, ready to spring into swift and precise movement as soon as the sterile seal was re-established. Most of these devices ended in something sharp or dangerous. They reminded me of the hinged mouthparts of a flytrap.

I could not wait to leave Crowl alone, and be out of the enclosure.

The doors whisked tight. The air in the enclosure turned milky, then cleared—some kind of aggressive sterilisation procedure. Crowl was barely stirring now—he had been sinking into unconsciousness as we neared the bay.

“It should proceed automatically,” Prad said, just as parts of the auto-surgeon began to swing into place. The machine clamped an anaesthetic mask over Crowl’s face, then positioned a transcranial device over his skull. Meanwhile other parts of it moved to provide gentle restraint. I shuddered, remembering the way Orvin’s soldiers had held me down in the bunker.

“We need to be realistic about his chances,” Spry said in a low voice.

“You were the one who told him this was fixable.”

“I was being upbeat.”

“The surgeon must think it can finish the job,” I said. But I had nothing to bolster this statement.

“It seems to be targeting the right area,” Prad observed, as multiple operating arms concentrated their activities around the wound. “That’s encouraging. The core routines can’t be as scrambled as they looked.”

“All it has to do is heal a knife wound,” Yesli said. “We’re not asking it to take out a brain tumour.”

As if gaining confidence in its own abilities, the auto-surgeon’s movements had quickened to an efficient blur, far too rapid for the human eye to track. I shuddered to think that there was a living form at the focus of that flickering silver storm. But the rational part of my mind told me that a machine was the only thing you wanted anywhere near an injured human being. Machines were ruthlessly infallible. In their mindless capacity for speed and precision they had saved far more lives than the kindliest, most well-intentioned of human doctors. But it was hard to keep this thought intact as the arms became a steely threshing engine.

“How deep do you think that wound went?” Spry asked.

“It must be hitting complications,” I said.

But even I caught the edge of doubt in my own voice. Why was this demonically fast machine making such a meal of things?

Blood hit the glass. It was more than just a few drops, hurled away from the wound by the speed of the arms. This was a broad crimson banner, daubed in an instant. It was followed by a second, a wider, thicker swathe, and then a lumpy starburst, as if a blood grenade had just detonated.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Shut it down!” Spry shouted.

Prad’s hands moved on the plinth. “Trying.”

So much blood had hit the glass that our view of Crowl was obstructed. I moved around to the right. I had, for an instant, a clear line of sight onto the spectacle. The auto-surgeon no longer seemed to be operating on Crowl. It was digging into him—digging through him, it looked, as if the machine was trying to treat some injury lodged not deep inside Crowl, but deep inside the couch on which he lay. The arms were scooping aside obstruction after obstruction, flinging these pieces away as if they were of no more interest than dirt or topsoil.

My view, as I said, lasted only an instant before the machine appeared to fling blood in my direction, spattering against the glass. Now there was a solid, ropy mass contained within the spatter.

“Make it stop!” Spry shouted, as if, by this point, it was going to make much difference to Crowl.

But Prad could not make the auto-surgeon stop. He jerked back from the plinth, studying the tips of his fingers as if he had been stung. “It’s no good,” he said. “I can’t even open the sterile doors.”

The machine, by now, had turned the inside of the operating theatre into a cylinder of red, its perfection marred only by the hints of anatomy glued to the glass.

“Someone give me an axe,” I said.

One of Yesli’s people had an axe. They passed it to Yesli and Yesli, after a moment’s hesitation, passed it to me. It was bright red and had obviously never been used. I went to the door and swung the axe with its blunt edge to the glass doors, over and over, until finally the doors shattered into a million pink-stained shards.

I crunched through them, squinting against the blood haze filling the air. The noise of the auto-surgeon was a constant metallic scissoring, like knives being sharpened and sharpened. I was aware, distantly, that an automated voice had begun to warn of the breech of the sterile field.

As if it mattered to any of us.

“Can you make it stop?” I shouted back to Prad.

“I don’t know! I think something . . .”

I could see very little of the botched operation. Crowl was a bloodied mass, but then again so was the auto-surgeon. It had lavished every part of itself in gore. Yet it seemed also to be slowing, the movement of its parts becoming easier to track. Either it was coming to the natural end of its maniacal procedure or my arrival had interrupted it. Crowl had to be dead, I told myself. There was no point in wasting a single bullet on him to make sure of that fact.

I swung the axe again, but this time bringing down the blade. I aimed it at the approximate area of Crowl’s head.

And by then the auto-surgeon was still.

“Sterile field is breeched,” the voice was still saying. “Optimum hygienic integrity may have been compromised.”

______________

In the difficult days following the death of Crowl we came to a better understanding of our predicament.

We gathered in one of the main cargo bays to hear Prad’s findings. There was no gravity in the bay—it was near the middle of the ship, not in one of the wheels—so we had positioned ourselves at all angles, hooked off the walls or the many bulky items of cargo, while Prad floated with his legs tucked under him. He made me think of a frog on an invisible lily pad.

“On a practical level,” he began, “I am pleased to report that there is no reason not to trust the auto-surgeon.”

This was met with a chorus of black laughter and swearing.

“The machine did not set out to kill Crowl,” Prad persisted. “Its programming was damaged.”

“That’s an understatement,” Spry murmured, not far to my left. Then, in a more constructive tone: “It seemed to be trying to rip him apart. How are any of us expected to trust that thing now?”

“I have rebuilt the architecture. It had not assembled properly, when we tried using the surgery bay so quickly after revival. Some earlier instruction fragments were still lodged in its memory. The machine became . . . confused. Schizophrenic. It was trying to do its best.”

More black laughter.

“That doesn’t really answer my question,” Spry said. He was next to Yesli, and next to Yesli was Sacer, the replacement for Crowl. Sacer was another woman, a command-level officer about ten years older than me.

The floating Prad gave a pragmatic shrug. “The choice will always be ours, whether or not we place our faith in the auto-surgeon. It is the only such facility we have. In a matter of dire medical emergency, what other choice would we have?”

“Would you put yourself in that thing?” I asked.

“Of course. It’s just a machine. It was broken before, so it did not work properly. Now I have made it better. The auto-surgeon, at least. The sterile field is still broken, and we do not have the means to repair that. We will need to be very careful about infection, when next we operate. Although I fear that infection will, over the course of time, prove to be the least of our worries.”

“Meaning what?” Sacer asked.

“I had hoped that the auto-surgeon’s damaged architecture would be an isolated problem.” Some air current was making Prad tilt head over heels, very slowly, like a tumbling asteroid. “It is not. The malaise is much more widespread. Every system in this ship that depends on an instruction set or a database is affected, to one degree or another. Records and files are widely unreadable. The ship has been moving information around inside itself, trying to preserve the most vital parts—those that it needs to keep basic operational systems running. In the process, it has had to make certain sacrifices.”

“Explain,” I said.

“If I may simplify . . .”

“Please do.”

“The ship has two types of memory. Like the human brain, it has both long- and short-term storage registers. The long-term registers are normally very stable, but slower to access and update. Into these areas the ship would normally consign information that does not need to be consulted or updated very frequently.”

“Such as?” Spry asked.

“Historical data. Cultural knowledge. Maps of planetary surfaces. Astrogation files. Medical data—how to operate on a patient. That sort of thing.”

“And now?” I pushed.

“There is a fault with the volatile memory, the kind that the ship uses for short-term, immediate recall—its working memory, so to speak. As a result, the ship has been forced to commandeer portions of its long-term memory for routine functions that would normally only ever trouble the volatile part—basic housekeeping, really. It has been doing its best not to overwrite critical data, but since it has been in this difficult condition for rather a long time . . .”

“How bad is it?” Sacer asked.

The upside down Prad swallowed. “My investigations have only been preliminary. But already I have found huge areas of memory scrambled beyond recall. I was lucky with the auto-surgeon’s architecture—I think it is repaired—but in many instances there is no backup, no recoverable copy. The data that is gone, is gone. Worse, the process is continuing. Now that we are awake, the demands on the ship have only increased. The rate of data attrition has definitely quickened. The ship is forgetting itself more rapidly than before.”

“Wait,” Spry said slowly. “This isn’t fatal, is it? The data that’s being lost . . . scrambled . . . whatever? It’s not vital to the ship?”

“Not vital to the ship, but possibly vital to us,” said Yesli.

“On a basic level,” Prad said, “the ship can still keep functioning for quite some time. There are questions of supplies, of fuel, of closed-cycle systems that are not working as efficiently as they should, of things for which we do not have spare parts. But if all else fails, we can all of us return to hibo and instruct the ship to return to a powered-down configuration. Long before that happens, though, large swathes of the memory will have been lost forever. At the present rate, we are losing about one-third of one percent of the total stored memory for every day that we are awake.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad,” I said.

“On a day to day basis,” Prad answered, “we’d hardly notice the difference. The sectors are being overwritten in a random fashion, depending only on the ship’s immediate requirements. But in a thousand days, give or take, we will have lost everything. Every single piece of information not absolutely vital to the continued functioning of the ship will have been overwritten. Our history. Our art. Our science and medicine. Our music. Images of your homeworlds—people we knew and loved. Anything that isn’t in our heads, it’s gone for good. A great deal has already been lost.”

“Then we’ll just have to manage without it,” I said, with an icy resolve that surprised even me. “It’s a luxury, that’s all. What matters is keeping alive, keeping the ship functioning. The universe hasn’t ended. The information’s all still out there somewhere.”

“We hope,” Prad answered.

“What about the skip systems?” Spry asked. “If we need help, we need to get somewhere where we’ll have a chance of finding it. Another system, where they can patch us up.”

“To attempt a skip without NavNet referencing would be very unusual,” Prad said.

“If it’s a choice between that and dying here, I’ll take that chance,” Yesli replied.

“I will need to look carefully at the condition of the hypercore,” Prad said. “There may have been damage. There may be damage that we cannot even detect until the moment of skip.”

“And then what?” Sacer asked.

“It would be quick and painless,” Prad answered.

______________

It was never a question of our not finding Orvin.

The ship was big, but it was not infinite. There were many of us and only one of him. He had gone into hiding with only a makeshift weapon and the clothes on his back. He had no ready access to food or water, and if he had need of medicine (it was hard to say if he had been injured or not) he had no access to that either. If he tried to escape down to the planet’s surface, he would need to get past the armed teams we stationed at the lifeboats and pods.

We had no reason to assume that Orvin had any better knowledge of the ship’s secrets than the rest of us. What he did have was guile, ruthlessness and determination. On the other hand, we had force of numbers and the slates.

The slates became our salvation, although we did not know that at the time. We had located about a hundred that were still in a functioning order, along with many more that were dead or in some way damaged. They were not complicated devices and there was a limit to what could be done with them, even when they were working properly. But they were also sturdy and easy to use, even for grunts like me. Prad and the other crew took turns instructing the rest of us how to display a visualisation of the ship’s layout, a schematic that could be as detailed or as simple as we needed.

They had their limitations, too. I had thought, cleverly, that we might be able to solve the memory leak by copying everything onto the slates, but Prad had already ruled out that option. The slates could search and display any information held in the ship’s memory, but they had no long-term storage capacity of their own.

“They are windows, that’s all,” Prad explained sadly. “They can display, but they cannot retain.”

For now, in our search for Orvin, windows were all that we required. It was not that we had any pressing need to find him. There was a limit to the harm he could do, hidden away in the shadows. But the thought of him being at large was intolerable. More than anything, as the fear spread, we needed the focus that Orvin provided.

My dreams in this period were almost always nightmares. I took to sleeping in a hibo capsule, the way many of us did. I snuggled into a nest of prison clothing and tried not to think of better times.

______________

Prad was the first to notice the anomaly. He had been working hard to bring as many of the ship’s cameras back into action. This would help with the search effort, but it would also enable us to get a better impression ofCaprice’s overall spaceworthiness. If there was something wrong with the outside of the ship—some damage that was not registering on the internal displays—Prad felt we ought to know about it sooner rather than later.

We found damage and plenty of it, although nothing as serious as we might have feared. The hull had suffered a constant bombardment of micrometeorite strikes and cosmic ray impacts, leaving it peppered with craters and burns. Markings and lettering had been scoured away to bare plating, and the plating in turn had been pricked and hammered like worn-out battle armour. It looked terrible, but Prad assured me that there was very little that was of immediate concern. As scarred as the ship now was, it had been engineered to take much worse.

“We can fix the problem areas,” he said, with a breezy confidence that I did not quite share. “Go out in suits, with basic repair equipment. That is not a priority, at least for the moment.” And now Prad jabbed his thumb at a part of the ship captured by one of the external cameras. “This is.”

“You’re going to have to help me out. One lumpy mechanical thing looks much like another lumpy mechanical thing.”

“It is a vehicle,” Prad answered. “It is not one of ours. And it was mostly definitely not docked with Caprice when we prepared for our last skip.”

“You can be sure of that?”

“Nothing would have been allowed to remain docked—it upsets the skip equilibrium. But I would have remembered in any case. That is a very odd looking ship. If I did not know better, I would say it belongs in a museum.”

“If it wasn’t docked with us when we skipped . . . then how did it get here?”

“If I might be permitted to venture a theory . . .” But Prad was going to venture his theory whether I wanted it or not. “From here, there does not seem to be very much to that ship. Just a capsule, with some steering and docking capability. I do not believe it could have travelled very far.”

“Then it’s come up from Tottori?”

“One imagines. I should like to get a closer look at it, to get a better idea of how long it has been docked.”

I squinted through sleep-deprived eyes at the image Prad was showing me. It was still just a lump to my eyes, a grey thing barnacled to a bigger, more complicated grey thing. I could barely see where one ship began and the other ended.

But I trusted Prad.

“You’re right, we have to get to it. But I have no idea what part of the ship you’re showing me.”

Prad snatched one of the functioning slates and produced a schematic. “This is where it is docked—forward six. That’s a whole section we’ve yet to enter. There is certainly no power there, and there may or may not be air.”

“Based on what we know, could Orvin have made it into that area?”

“I think it doubtful. In any event, there are other lifeboats that would be closer to him, if escape was his intention. We have protected those that we can reach, and I have tried to disable all escape systems from central control. That is not infallible, of course—you are not supposed to be able to disable them in that manner, and there are loopholes that a resourceful man could find, given . . .” A sudden focus returned to him. “What I am saying is, we have done what we can. More than likely Orvin can’t reach this thing—and he certainly won’t know of its existence while he remains in hiding. But at any cost, we must reach it.”

“I agree. Even if we have to step down the number of search parties, it’s worth the delay in capturing Orvin. You think we’ll find answers, don’t you?”

“I am certain of it,” Prad said. “Whether they are the answers we will care for, that is something else entirely. Anyway, I do not care to have something attached to my ship.”

“Our ship,” I corrected under my breath.

______________

Three of us went: Prad, Yesli and I.

Under other circumstances, it would have taken only a few minutes to reach the docking bay where the mysterious object had clamped on. In fact it took nearly ten hours, trying one route and then another, hoping that we would not open a door and find vacuum beyond it, and not always being able to say for certain until Prad forced the door to operate. Where the ship was pressurised, it was often unbearably cold. Even if air did lie beyond a particular bulkhead or lock, it was not always possible to find our way through into that section. Some doors simply would not open, no matter the persuasion Prad brought to the matter. Others, when they were finally made to work, showed signs of vandalism or force applied to the other side. One entire section of the ship between us and the capsule, remained depressurised, so rather than make a time-consuming detour we broke a set of spacesuits out of storage and used them instead. It was my first time in vacuum gear and I found the experience bruising and uncomfortable, although no worse in its way than combat armour. Prad was philosophical. The more of us that had some experience of suits, the quicker we could fix the areas of the hull that needed attention. It was a bigger job than the crew could fix on their own, and we would all need to work together to get it done.

Work together, I thought? Dregs like us?

But I did not want Prad to know how hopeless I thought that was. If he still had faith in human nature, I would not be the one to prick his bubble.

From a window near the lock, Prad was able to get a better look at our foreign visitor. He studied it wordlessly for at least a minute.

“Well?” Yesli asked.

“It’s as I thought,” he said. “A simple capsule, with a docking attachment. You see how complicated it is?”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

“The capsule is stone age. But the docking attachment is really quite sophisticated. See all those moving parts? I think there is a reason for that. Whoever came up here did not know quite what to expect when they arrived. They couldn’t have been sure what design of lock they would have to allow for!” Prad was smiling despite himself, in pure academic delight at an engineering conundrum. “That docking attachment of theirs is a sort of universal key, able to fit around almost any configuration of lock. Within reason. That tells you something, doesn’t it? We have been using a standard lock for centuries! How could anyone have forgotten that?”

“Not easily,” I said.

“I’ll offer another observation. That capsule must have been brought here by another ship—a booster rocket, perhaps, to lift it from Tottori. I doubt that they had much weight to spare, and yet they went to all that trouble to provide a universal docking system. That meant they were very, very keen to get aboard our ship.”

“They succeeded,” Yesli said.

“Their idea of success,” Prad said, “may have involved going home as well. In that respect they do not seem to have been quite as fortunate.”

“So someone knew we were here, and tried to get aboard,” I mused. “But they know so little about us they couldn’t even be sure what type of lock we use.”

In hindsight we were in far too much haste to look inside the capsule, given that it could have contained anything from a booby-trap to contagion. We were lucky: when we opened the lock, and climbed into the little vehicle (it was large enough for only one of us at a time) there was nothing inside to harm us. The capsule held a sort of couch, which seemed designed to force a person into the least comfortable posture imaginable, and packed around this couch, in addition to padding and restraints, was an assortment of primitive controls. It was all clean and new, but that meant nothing given how long our own ship had been powered down and cold.

Prad examined it all methodically.

“What are you looking for?” I asked, as he fingered his way around cables and straps and metal boxes.

“Something with a memory,” he answered. “Something we might be able to use.”

But there was nothing that would have made the slightest difference to our own plight. The capsule had some electrical storage cells which had now run out of power, and these in turn would have operated mechanical navigation equipment and life-support devices. But there was nothing that could store an image, or hold so much as a page of text.

There was also no sign of an occupant.

But someone had flown this thing here—it could not possibly have docked on its own, given the simplicity of its automatic systems. They had docked, opened our airlock, entered our ship.

And then not left.

“Now there are two of them,” Yesli said. “One man we would like to catch. And someone else we didn’t know was aboard. Our problem has become twice as difficult.”

“There’ll be a body somewhere,” I said. “That’s what we look for. The body of whoever brought this thing here. They came, found a dead ship, couldn’t leave again.”

“You don’t think the newcomer could still be alive?” Prad asked.

“Do you see any sign that Tottori could have launched this thing recently? A city, an industrial capacity?”

“We haven’t really been looking that hard,” Yesli pointed out.

“Not too hard to miss a fucking spaceport, a rocket pad. Much more likely that this thing came up years ago, before the ice closed in. Centuries, maybe.”

“Then yes, we are probably looking at a body,” Yesli said.

“Or not,” Prad added.

“I don’t follow.”

“There are hibo caskets, Scur. Whoever flew this thing would not have been a fool. Maybe they couldn’t leave, for whatever reason. But they might have been able to make it to the caskets. Find one that was empty, or open one that was already occupied. Take the place of whoever was inside it.”

“Murder, you mean?” Yesli asked.

“Supposition,” Prad said. “I am just saying that there are possibilities we should not discount. One of us—I mean, one of the survivors—crew or . . . otherwise. One of us could be from the planet below.” He paused. “Except not the crew, obviously. There aren’t many of us left, and we all know each other. But would you soldiers or civilians know if one of you didn’t belong?”

“None of us fucking belong,” I clarified.

“I mean in the sense that there is someone who was not even from the war. Not even from our own time. Would you necessarily know? You are all strangers now.”

“We would need to know,” Yesli said. “For the safety of the ship. For the knowledge they might have. We would need to find this stowaway, if they aren’t already dead. For the moment, that is more important than finding a war criminal.”

“Well, you can rule me out,” I said. “Orvin knew me, and I knew Orvin. That eliminates both of us.”

“I would not have ranked you very high in the list of suspects,” Yesli said.

“It wouldn’t have mattered whether you knew Orvin or not,” Prad said. “You are a soldier. From our conversations, it is clear that you believe that you have a slow bullet inside you. I have no reason to doubt you.”

“You can read the bullets,” I said.

“Read the information in them, yes. The biographical military data, the medical histories. Even if I can’t access any of that, the mere existence of a bullet will be enough to vindicate anyone’s story. The stowaway almost certainly won’t have one.”

“Neither will any of the civilians,” Yesli said.

“That is true, but the military prisoners constitute by far the biggest sample of our population. We can scan their bullets very easily—display the contents on a slate, if need be. It will be much easier than our original hunt for Orvin.”

“And if all of us soldiers turn out to have bullets?”

“Then we move onto the civilians. They are smaller in number and more inclined to stick together. Soldiers are habitually suspicious of their fellows—especially military prisoners.”

“You’re an expert now.”

“I am merely making an observation, Scur. Civilians are garrulous. This is in their nature, especially when confronted with an unfamiliar situation. I imagine a stowaway would find it quite difficult to hide themselves effectively.” He shrugged. “Whatever the case, we will find them sooner or later.”

Yesli arranged another work team to search the capsule, and soon after that they found a spacesuit of unfamiliar design, stuffed into a locker not far from the docking port. In the meantime, Prad and I returned to the main part of the ship and prepared to coordinate the reading of the slow bullets.

“This is a distraction,” I said. “I want Orvin, not this nameless stowaway.”

“There’s no law that says we can’t look for two things at once.” Prad was fiddling with his slate, adjusting the settings so that it could talk to my bullet. “Are you serious about Orvin—your intentions with him? Wouldn’t it be enough to hand him over to the Trinity, let justice have its way?”

“He doesn’t deserve justice.”

“You frighten me a little, Scur. I wonder what you’d do to me, if I ever got on the wrong side of you.”

“I’d think of something creative.”

Prad handed me the slate as the information scrolled across its surface. “There. Solid read. A few corrupted sectors, some anomalous parity checks, but otherwise it’s all still there.”

I glanced at him. “Don’t you want to read it yourself?”

“To check on your story?”

“You only have my word that I’m here because of some mistake. Maybe I lied about that. Maybe I’m as bad as all the rest of them—the worst of the worst. Maybe you should be afraid of me.”

“And I’m a civilian technician. I wouldn’t know one military history from another. Does it make some sort of sense to you? I want to make sure we’re reading out your bullet, and not one belonging to someone in the next room.”

“No,” I said after a moment. “This is me.” And I tilted the slate around for Prad’s benefit. “These pictures—these are my mother and father.” Blank faces, staring into government cameras on census day. “They were good people—too good for those around them. My father made enemies, by being a good man. They got at him by getting at me—arranging my conscription, even though I wasn’t supposed to be put into the military.” I stroked a finger across their images, wishing that they looked happier. “He blamed himself for it. They both blamed themselves. And when I was injured after the ceasefire, and put on this ship . . . they’d never have known what happened to me, would they?”

“We must all have been presumed lost,” Prad offered.

“I wanted them to know I was all right, and that I didn’t blame either of them. It wasn’t their fault. And I wanted them to know that I’d made it through the war, that I was on my way home.”

“I am sorry.”

“You must have your own family, Prad.”

“I do. Did. But there’s no slow bullet inside me. No history, no images to recall.”

“Then it’s worse for you.”

“I do not think it is easy for any of us. But I am glad that you have been validated. I did not doubt you, Scur.”

“But others might have.”

I scrolled down through the long accounting of my service history. It was all in here. Training, deployments—victories and losses. My injuries and recuperation episodes. Redeployment. Names and places I had already begun to forget.

“The bullets are safe, I suppose. If they’ve held the information this long, they must be immune to whatever’s got hold of the ship.” I held the slate against my chest, like a shield. “This is safe—it’s always going to be there, inside me.”

“I hope it gives you some strength, Scur.”

“It will.”

“But there will be difficulties ahead, I think. To an extent, our pasts are private now. They have been erased by the accident—the thing that happened to Caprice. But the bullets leave nothing to doubt. The worst of us will be known to us all.”

“We’ll have to deal with it. Openness, transparency.”

Prad nodded. “But rather easy to say, when you have objective proof of your own innocence. Would you have been so eager to allow me to read the bullet, if you knew it revealed some awful crime you’d committed? Some terrible atrocity or moral failing? That you were a war criminal, a butcher, a defector or traitor?”

He was right, but I had no good answer for him.

______________

We do not choose our friends in life; life does that for us. Prad and I had nothing in common beyond our intertwined fates on Caprice. We had known different lives before the war and different lives during it. He had never been asked to kill someone, or hate someone for wearing a different uniform or believing in the words of a different Book. That was a difference which nothing could bridge.

But he was the first person I had spoken to since my awakening, and we had worked together to achieve that first flimsy truce. That was enough to force a bond between us. I felt I had more in common with Prad than with many of my fellow soldiers. Regardless of what side they had been on during the war, they had all done something to merit being on this ship—violated some rule or other. Some of those infractions might be minor or excusable—some might even, under the circumstances of combat, be morally justifiable.

But the point was that none of us could be sure. We were free to invent our pasts, to lie about what we had done or perhaps failed to do. On the contrary, though, I could be perfectly sure of myself. And I could be sure that Prad was just a technician, as innocent in his way as me. It meant that I found it easier to trust this man than any other soldier or civilian aboard the ship, save for the other crew. And I think Prad, being naturally fearful of the soldiers who made up the bulk of the awakened, was glad to have me as a reference point, a reassurance that warriors such as I did not automatically hold people like him in contempt.

“We can work together,” I told him, when his doubts were surfacing. “It’ll be hard, but we have no other choice. Fundamentally, we’re all just human beings, caught up in some shit we didn’t ask for.”

“I have heard that soldiers are different,” Prad said hesitantly. “Different from engineers and technicians like me, at any rate.” There was a sort of diffidence in his voice, as if I might take offence at this generalisation.

“In what sense?”

“You soldiers tend to be believers. Many of you read the Book, one version of it or another. Is this not the case?”

“And it isn’t like that with you and your colleagues?”

“Most of us, no,” Prad said emphatically. “Of course I have known some technicians who were religiously inclined. But even then I never sensed that they took the writings all that seriously. It was more that they came from a family of believers, and they did not want to disappoint their elders or give up a custom too readily.” After a moment he said: “Some of these people were even my friends. It was never against the law to have religious leanings, even in the technical staff of a Hundred Worlds starliner.”

“Well, it’s not too different for soldiers. Yes, many of us do read the Book—our version of it or theirs.”

“The differences seem slight to outsiders.”

“If you decide that these things matter at all, then so do the differences.”

“And you, Scur—someone who took the differences seriously?”

I allowed a silence before answering—I did not want Prad to think that any of this was simple or beneath consideration.

“My parents both read the Book,” I said. “They were believers, if you want to call them that. But it was not the only thing in their lives. My mother taught me Giresun’s poetry—that was against the law. My father was also very open minded. He liked to mention that many of their prophets were our prophets, and vice versa. That many of the commandments were alike, word for word. Besides, it was never clear-cut: some of our side were allowed to read their Book, and some of their side were allowed to read our Book. Nothing is as simple as some people make out.”

“But if your parents were believers, did you not follow their example?” Prad was squinting now, as if trying to follow a difficult calculation.

I shook my head. “I was schooled in the Book, made to memorise whole parts of it. So were we all. In that sense, the Book is part of me. I feel an affection for the language that I can’t even begin to explain to you.”

Prad nodded for me to continue.

“There’s also a lot of common sense in it,” I went on. “Just basic good advice for living a decent life, being kind, thinking of your neighbours and so on. My father was a devout man, but also honest in his business dealings. He took that from the Book, even though it brought trouble on us as a family.”

“Then the Book can damage, if you follow it too literally.”

“Perhaps. But there are also many parts that can help you when you have a difficult decision or are facing an unpleasant time in your life.”

“But you do not, at heart, believe in its literal truth.”

“If I ever did, I don’t remember when I stopped believing. But that doesn’t mean that I disowned the Book. The language was still as beautiful as ever, the wisdom just as comforting. When Orvin caught me, he thought he would hurt me by hurting my Book.”

“Did he?”

“Less than he hoped for, but yes. I still did not like to see him doing what he did.”

“This seems like a very enlightened attitude,” Prad said. “I sincerely hope that it is shared by many of your fellows. If it is, there may yet be a chance we may be able to rub along.”

“There will always be true believers.”

“None of you came with your Books,” Prad said. “You had no possessions, nothing with you except the clothes you were wearing when you went into hibo. And there are no physical copies of the Book anywhere on this ship. Trust me: I would have seen them. What will the believers do now, without their scripture?”

“Learn to live without the Book,” I said. “Just as we’ll have to learn to live without many other things.” Easier said than done, of course. But then I thought to add: “The ship’s memory.”

“What of it?”

“You said it contained cultural knowledge.”

“This is true.”

“You wouldn’t have to believe in the Book, either theirs or ours, to regard the texts as having cultural value. They must still be in the memory, mustn’t they?”

“They aren’t,” Prad said quickly. “I am afraid they were among the first sectors to be lost, when the ship had to protect its core data.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Oh yes. It was one of the first things I checked. I am very sorry, Scur.”

It never occurred to me to think that that was a very odd coincidence, that the Books should be lost so early in the great forgetting. But then I have always been a touch naïve.

______________

Just as no military plan ever survives the first contact with the enemy, so our search scheme proved hopelessly idealised.

We thought we had struck lucky early in the operation, when one of the soldiers appeared not to have a bullet. It was a woman who spoke in a dialect similar to my own, and who appeared to have no difficulty mixing with her fellow survivors. She had offered a convincing account of her wartime deeds. When she was brought before the Trinity she seemed properly fearful, unable to grasp why she had been singled out in this manner. Perhaps our newcomer was more skilled at blending in than I had presumed.

But Prad was wisely cautious. Yesli also noted that she was also too tall to have been a comfortable fit for the abandoned spacesuit.

“I have a bullet,” the woman said, with fierce conviction. “I remember them putting it in. No one forgets that.”

As it happened, there were others like her. It turned out that about one in twenty of us had bullets which were no longer working properly, no longer able to be addressed by the slates. Once we knew that it was easy enough to set up a second level of screening, using a portable medical scanner. But that was more time-consuming than the slates and it couldn’t discriminate between a dead bullet and a piece of shrapnel that had a similar size and shape. More questioning was needed, and so the Trinity appointed additional interrogators to dig deeper into the accounts offered by these questionable cases.

One by one, all of them proved plausible.

We continued the search. There was unrest, but that was to be expected. People were already jumpy after Orvin’s escape and the unpleasant business with Crowl. But we could not very well announce that there was likely to be an impostor among us. They would have torn apart anyone with a slightly odd dialect, a story with a few discrepancies.

In a sea of doubts you cling to the smallest of truths. I had Prad read out my bullet again. There was much more information in it than I could absorb on a single reading. It was touching, in a way, how much my superiors had felt they needed to know about me. It was all there, scrolling across the slate. Things I barely remembered about myself. You could reconstruct half my life from the bullet’s whisperings.

But again and again, it was the pictures of my mother and father that I kept returning to. Gone now, of course. How could it be otherwise? They were as lost to me as I was to them. I wished that I had pictures of them as they were when they were happy, before politics and war and spitefulness made a mess of our lives.

But this was better than nothing.

______________

“I don’t know what to do,” Yesli said. “Whether to punish them, or reward them for their initiative.”

“Punish them for what?” I asked.

“Vandalism.”

With two search efforts ongoing—one to find Orvin, another to find our stowaway—it was amazing that our people had time for anything but sleep. But in fact they had time for a great many things, including fighting and fucking and telling stories.

Storytelling is another word for being interrogated.

To begin with it was a way of filling the dead hours, a way of not thinking about what was ahead of us. We all wanted to know who we had to share this ship with. But as news got out—as it was bound to do—that there was someone here who did not belong—the storytelling took on a different aspect. Now it had become a form of testing. The weak among us, those who had been born with a face that just happened to look suspicious, those who had something else to hide—these were the ones who were made to go over their stories again and again, in the hope that the telling would expose some latent falsehood. It was no different in kind to the interrogations being served out by the Trinity, but at least the Trinity was trying to be methodical and dispassionate. Some of these storytelling sessions did not go well for the teller. There were no deaths, yet, but there was blood and I knew we could not afford to fall back into chaos.

So when Yesli showed me the vandalism, I was actually pleased to see something that did not involve mutual fear and suspicion.

Using their slates, some of the search parties had begun to dig into the ship’s slowly vanishing cultural memory. They knew that we had about a thousand days before all this knowledge would be lost, and this awareness had motivated them to preserve what they could.

The slates, as Prad had explained, had no memory of their own. But they could selectively display any record from the ship’s total surviving memory. If this knowledge could be transcribed onto a different medium, it might yet be conserved. Clearly, we would have used paper if we had paper, and a means to mark it.

But we had walls, and ceilings, and floors. More walls and ceilings and floors than we could bare to imagine.

We had nothing that could mark a surface in the same manner as ink, but many tools that could scratch a line. So they took their slates, called up a record from memory, and engraved it into metal with sweat and muscle. By the time Yesli found out what they were doing, they had already covered several metres of corridor in lines both neat and less than neat. You could tell the hand of each scriber, and within each hand you could see the evidence of early clumsiness and slowly gathering ability. The first marks were scratchy, rife with mistakes. The letters and words were too large. As they progressed, a sort of confident regularity began to win through. They began to scratch in fine guiding lines, and set neat ordered words down on those staves.

It was easy to be selective, in those early days. Most people were keen to preserve some record that was of personal significance. A memory of their homeworlds, or even the region or city that they had held most dear. They could not go into any sort of detail, but this was a start, a tangible blow against the ship’s own forgetting. There were songs and poems that held some particular fondness. Someone had even begun to record lines of musical notation, a fragment of some larger tune. It might as well have been random scratchings, for all the sense it made to me.

Later, I told Yesli that I did not think these people merited punishment.

“They haven’t done any real damage. More than that, though. This is actually something useful. You’ve heard Prad talking about the memory loss. Unless we meet another ship, we’re not going to be able to fix that in a thousand days. Now at least we have a means of preserving something.”

Yesli could not help but laugh.

“Have you any idea of the amount of information Prad was talking about? It’s beyond anything you or I are ever capable of imagining, let alone carving onto a wall inside a thousand days. This is . . . a gesture. Nothing more. A pointless, time-consuming gesture. It won’t achieve anything.”

“It’ll make them feel like they can do something. And it doesn’t have to be pointless. I know we can’t record everything. I never said we could. But if these people had some guidance, some idea of the most vital things . . .”

“You’re talking about scratching the most important parts of human cultural knowledge onto metal walls.” Yesli allowed herself a silence. “In a thousand days.”

“There are hundreds of us. Yes, we’ve a couple of fugitives to find right now. But they won’t get away from us for long, and then what? If the people on this ship don’t have something to do, something to keep hands and eyes occupied, there’s going to be a bloodbath.”

“Fine.” Yesli had her arms folded. “So where would you propose we started?”

“That’s not for me. You’re the Trinity. Assign some experts to make the choices. How about basic medicine? We all saw what that machine did to Crowl. How are we going to cope when the machine doesn’t even work? It would be good to have a few pointers—how to set a compound fracture, that sort of thing.”

“Basic medicine, then. You think a wall will be enough?”

“I did say basic.”

“I’m just trying to draw your attention to the logistical difficulties, Scur.”

“I’m not blind to them. I’m just saying: What else do we do? Maybe we can only save a thousandth part of the memory this way. But it’s the difference between saving a thousandth part and none at all. And maybe that thousandth part is the one thing that’s going to save us, when things start getting really tough.”

“I’d say a thousandth part is optimistic, Scur.”

“Then I’m an optimist.”

After a moment Yesli said: “If we did this, it would have to be on a fair and equal basis.”

“Of course.”

“Crew, civilians . . . soldiers. Everyone. Including the Trinity. There could be no favouritism.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“The markings we’ve already seen . . . those people were doing it for their own satisfaction. No one was holding them to a schedule, forcing them to complete a passage within a certain time.”

“It will need to be different,” I agreed.

“Assigned work teams, just the way it is now. But each with a passage, a piece of knowledge, that must be committed to the wall. Laid down, in its entirety. We can’t tolerate mistakes, not if there’s going to be a point to this. If we want to save anything useful, enough to make it more than just a gesture . . . then it’s going to be hard work. A massive collected effort. Something close to slave labour, except we’ll all be slaves as well as masters. For a thousand days, all we’ll live and breathe will be these metal walls. Until they crawl into our dreams. Until our fingers are bloodied stumps and the effort has driven us to the brink of madness.”

“You might be in danger of talking me out of my own idea, Yesli.”

“I just think we need a ready appreciation of what this will cost us. But you are perfectly right, Scur, all the same. Even if we only save a millionth or a billionth part of the total memory, that is still . . .” She hesitated.

“A light in the darkness?”

“Yes.”

“Then we become that light,” I said. “Even if it drives us mad. Even if it kills us.”

______________

We found our stowaway on the fourth day of searching. It had only ever been a matter of time, a matter of methodical procedure, but it still felt like a victory. We needed something like that, in those early days, especially as we had yet to find Orvin. It bothered me that he was still out there. It was like sharing a room with a rat. I wanted the rat under my heel, so that I could crush it and sleep peacefully.

But at least we had found one hideaway.

Our stowaway was no one that I had suspected; no one that had caught my eye in the days since the wakening. That was because she had been doing the only sensible thing, which was to make herself as unobtrusive as possible. She had avoided all but the shallowest of exchanges with her fellow survivors. But once we started reading out the slow bullets, it was only a matter of time before she came to our attention.

When we knew who she was, we took her to the same control room where Prad and I had threatened to blow up the ship.

“Tell us your name,” Yesli said.

“Murash.”

She was very small, and looked even smaller jammed into a chair for questioning. I realised then that we should always have been looking for someone small, due to the size of the capsule. We could have spared ourselves days of searching.

“Do you know how we found you?” I asked.

“There are things inside you.” She spoke in an odd but not too-odd dialect. “This is what you have been looking for.”

“Things inside some of us,” I told her, when it was just me, the Trinity and our prize, in one of the secure control rooms. “They’re called slow bullets. Implants. You understand about implants?”

She gave me a withering look. She had a worn out, defeated look, with dark patches under her eyes. But then so did many of us.

“Yes, I understand.”

“But you don’t have anything like that yourself,” Yesli said.

“No.”

“How long have you been on our ship, Murash?” Spry asked.

“I do not know.”

She was small-boned, almost childlike. Murash was very pale, almost sick-looking, and much skinnier than most of us. We might be starving soon, but Murash looked as if she had already been malnourished when she went into hibo.

“You must have some idea,” I said. “You came here in your little spacecraft, you docked with us. When did that happen?”

“A long time ago.”

Sacer leaned in. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

“There is a clock on the capsule. It has been counting since launch. If it is still working, it will say for how long I have been docked. You have seen my capsule, or you would not be looking for me. Were the systems still working?”

Yesli looked at the rest of us before answering. “It seemed dead to us, but we’ll have to look at it in more detail. Did you come from the planet we’re orbiting?”

“Yes.”

“And you know the name of this planet?” I asked.

Again that withering look. She did not have much time for my questions. But that was her problem, not mine.

“Answer her,” Spry said. “We have limited resources and you’re not one of us. Start pissing us off, and we’ll drop you out of the airlock.”

“You won’t,” Murash said.

Sacer asked: “Why not?”

“Because in the days that I have been awake I have learned that you know nothing at all. You concern yourselves with finding this man, as if that was going to solve your difficulties. Believe me, it will not. You know nothing at all of why you are here, or what has happened everywhere else. And I know something. More than you, anyway. That is why you will not kill me.”

“If I were you,” I said gently, “I would not be in too much of a hurry to put that theory to the test.”

After a moment Murash said: “The world is Tot-tori. We did not fall so far that we forgot the name of our own planet. Not then, at least. Not when I left.”

“Tell us what happened,” Yesli said. “Do you remember the war, the ceasefire?”

“Your war? Yes. It was history they taught us in books. Old history. It happened long before I was born.”

“Fuck,” I said, startling myself.

Murash laughed. “This surprises you?”

______________

Of course it should not have. I knew we had been displaced in time long enough for Tottori to turn into a frozen world, devoid of civilisation. But that was only an intellectual understanding. It was another thing to have it confirmed by a woman sitting across from me, as if it were the least astonishing fact in her universe.

The worst thing was, I did not think Murash was lying.

______________

“From the beginning,” Spry said. “Everything you know. What happened to us. How you came here. What happened to Tottori.”

“Your war ended,” Murash said, pausing to clear her throat. “They had a ceasefire, then trials, and then a long reconstruction. It took a generation to start moving on. They knew the war had been a mistake, and that it had ruined hundreds of worlds. They did not want it to happen again.”

“Did it?” Sacer asked.

But Spry raised a hand, allowing Murash to continue uninterrupted.

“There was never a war like that again. Difficulties, yes. Some small conflicts within solar systems. But the main peace held. Eight hundred years, it lasted.”

I could not help myself. “Until another war?”

“Until they came.” But now none of us dared break her flow. “No one knew what they were or where they had come from. They seemed uninterested in us—just passing through our little corner of the galaxy. They were like glass.”

“Glass?” Yesli asked, as if we might have misheard.

“Sheets of glass. Glass as big as worlds. It was like . . .” Murash scrunched her forehead, as if in sudden sharp physical pain. “Hard to describe. Hard to think about. Glass hinging open, too many folds . . . angles that shouldn’t be there. Crystal facets. A constant unfolding. Sheets and sheets, geometries. Colours. Very wrong colours. Wrong geometry. They had no thickness, no dimension. But they moved, they organised. They unfolded. They became.”

“She’s cracked,” Sacer whispered. “I say we leave her out as bait for Orvin.”

“She’s trying to describe something language isn’t made to describe,” Spry replied. “Something huge and alien. Give her a chance.”

“We didn’t know if they were many or one,” Murash continued. “If the glass was just the one thing . . . a single intrusion, spread across space. If it was linked or discontinuous. It hurt to see it. It hurt to think about it, later. There was nothing we could do.”

“Did it . . . attack you?” I asked.

“We tried to examine it. We feared it. It was bigger than our planet. We didn’t know what it wanted . . . whether it wanted anything. We should not have examined it.” Murash waited, turning her head to read our expressions. She was taking a sort of cruel enjoyment in our ignorance, our collective fear. How little we truly know. “We had ships. But then the ships stopped working. Small ones, yes. They could still operate. But nothing that could skip. Nothing that could go interstellar. Suddenly there was no way to move between solar systems.”

Prad whispered slowly: “I do not quite see how this is possible.”

Murash had heard him. “And you think it matters? They were above us. Beyond anything we had. They just made our ships not work. And that was that. The start of the collapse of our entire civilisation.”

“No more commerce between systems,” Yesli said. “I can see that would have been a terrible blow. But the systems always had a lot of autonomy. How could it have been the end?”

“Things had changed since your time,” Murash said. “It was different. The worlds depended on each other. It was a way of keeping peace, of making sure we never had such a war again. But they did more than just take our ships from us. Our planet began to grow colder. We did not realise, to begin with, quite what they had done. It was something to do with our stars. They had made them shine less brightly.”

Prad began to speak again. I laid my hand on his arm, none too gently, and whispered: “Later.”

“They could change physics,” Murash continued. “That was the best explanation anyone had. They could alter physics so our ships no longer worked, and alter physics so our suns did not burn as brightly. Reach into their cores, and make the stars ill. That is why we gave them the name we did.”

“Which is?” Spry asked.

“The Sickening.”

“But they left,” I said. “They’re not here now, are they?”

“They left,” Murash confirmed. “In ten years, they had come and gone. That is all the time it took. And we struggled on, not quite knowing what had happened. After they had gone, our skipships still did not work, and our suns were still dim. But we could still signal between solar systems, even if we had to do it at the speed of light. Gradually, we learned that no one, no system or world, had gone unaffected. The Sickening had touched us all. Left us all wounded and dying.”

______________

If you were born on Caprice, then there has never been a time when you have not known of the Sickening. You heard speak of them in your nurseries, you came to know them from the stories told to you in your cots, to keep you from the path of wrongdoing.

There have always been tales of monsters and dragons. The difference is that you did not stop believing in the Sickening as you turned from childhood. You only learned to think of them with a deeper, cooler, more adult fear. On any given day, you knew that they would probably not return. But always you knew that they were still out there.

Yet that was the first day for us. Until then we had no knowledge of them at all. Not even the faintest suspicion that they were out there, or that they had undone all that was good about the peace that soldiers like me had won, with our bodies and our blood. We had burned our lives for a peace that had held, until the Sickening took it away.

Murash broke our innocence.

______________

“We must have surprised you,” Spry said. “A ghost from the past.”

Murash looked unimpressed. “We knew more about skip physics than you did. By the time the Sickening came, it was known that sometimes skips go wrong. Clever people said they understood why.” She gave a shrug. “It does not matter now. Your skip took you deeper into the future than most, nearly a thousand years, but we understood that such a thing was possible. You were lucky, though.”

Prad laughed. “Lucky?”

“You survived the skip. Usually that is not what happens. The ships come out as wrecks. The crew are corpses. We found many wrecks like that, before the Sickening came. But you were different. You had come a long way, and your ship was still functioning.”

“Just barely,” Spry said. “We made it into orbit around Tottori, which was always our destination. But the ship was still virtually dead—powered down to the basics, the crew and passengers all in hibo. Many of us didn’t make it.”

“I know,” Murash answered. “I am just saying, you can still count yourselves lucky.”

“You detected our arrival,” I said.

“We were still listening for signals, still watching space for the Sickening. We saw you move into orbit and we recognised you for what you were. A very large ship from the distant past.” Murash looked down at her hands. “You were useful to us. We had lost a great deal, in the years since the Sickening. There were many medicines and technologies that were lost to us.” She gave a defiant look. “It was not that we were ignorant, just that we had lost the means to make and repair complex things. But we thought you might have some of those things on your ship.”

“You say the Sickening made your suns turn cold,” Prad said.

“That is true.”

“We know about your ice age. But Tottori’s sun is only a little cooler than the records say it should be. Whatever the Sickening did, it must be wearing off—your sun returning to its normal temperature, your planet coming out of its ice age. That means there’s a chance for all of us.”

“Is there?” Murash asked.

“Your planet can recover, rebuild its civilisation—emerge from the cold. And if the Sickening isn’t affecting the stars any more, then perhaps we can still use our skipdrive. It got us here, didn’t it?”

“Let’s not run before we can walk,” Spry said.

“Maybe your ship will work,” Murash said. “But there is nothing out there. Only more death. Only more cold.”

“If things are that hopeless,” Sacer said, “why did you bother trying to reach us?”

“What else could we do?” But Murash added: “It was hard—much harder than we ever thought it would be. Space travel had ended before I was born. No one went into space, no one came back. But we still had the knowledge to construct a craft with the capability of reaching your vessel. A chemical rocket, very simple. Even then, there were many who did not think it was worth the trouble. Times were hard enough as it was—not enough food, not enough power. Why squander what we had on a thousand to one chance? But we did it anyway.”

“Did you volunteer?” I asked.

“I was selected for the mission. I was small and strong and clever. They taught me your way of speaking, your customs. I had trained for it since childhood. It has always been the biggest thing in my life.”

I shivered at the magnitude of what Murash had been asked to do. It was clear to me that she had never had the slightest choice about her fate. She had been shaped for this one purpose, engineered like a tool to do one thing and do it properly.

“What was the plan?”

“To reach your ship, to board it, to explore and document its contents. Make contact with the crew, if possible. Recover medicines and supplies, and send them down to Tottori using your own re-entry vehicles. Fill the capsule with what I could, refuel it from your own stores, and then return.”

“What went wrong?” Spry asked.

Murash gave a dry, humourless laugh. “Easier to say what went right. The rocket worked. We launched from the equator. The rendezvous calculations were difficult. You were in a high orbit, and there was only just enough fuel to reach you. But I did it. I identified the design of your ship from our records, found a working airlock. The airlock adaptor functioned as we had hoped. I moved into your ship. It was cold, very cold, but the air was breathable. After that, nothing went well.”

“I know that feeling,” Prad whispered.

“You were all still in hibernation. Your ship was so damaged there were parts I could not enter. I tried to wake you, but the systems would not respond to me. I tried to find medical supplies, food and water. I tried to find fuel, so that I could make my return trip. I tried to find a lifeboat or escape pod. I found none of these things. I wondered what kind of ship I had found. Now I know.”

“Small wonder you didn’t want to be found,” Yesli said.

“You started trying to kill each other. I knew what you would do to me, if you learned.”

“Did you kill someone to get into hibo?” Sacer asked.

“There was no need. I found an empty hibo capsule and eventually made it accept me. I had been trained to recognise your technology, but it still took six weeks. I had used all my food and water by then. I was close to death.”

“You look it,” Spry said.

“So will you, eventually. Soon you will be down to your last drop of water as well.”

“I think we will last a bit more than six weeks,” Yesli said. “The ship isn’t as dead as when you came aboard. Prad and the others have made a lot of the systems work again. There’s no reason why it can’t keep us alive for years, if we ration things carefully. And we do have medicine: you just didn’t get to it in time.”

“Good for us that she didn’t,” I said. “She’d have sent it back down to Tottori, for all the good it would have done them. Have you seen your world, Murash? Do you know what’s come of it?”

She nodded at a window. “I have eyes.”

“What do you think happened to your culture?” I asked. “Did no one think to build a second rocket, to come after you?”

“I told you that times were already hard. There was one rocket. That was all we could do. I signalled back down to the surface, during the weeks that I was aboard. I told them what I had found, and that I could not return. They said that I had been courageous, to have come this far. But I knew that I had failed my world in its most desperate hour.” Murash was looking at me directly now, daring me to break her gaze. “I knew they would not last long, after I went into hibo. It was bad enough when I left. Each winter worse than the last, until we had no other season but winter. Perhaps if I found the right things, it might have made a difference.”

“I’m sorry that you failed,” I told her. “Sorry for your planet, as well. But your mission wasn’t worthless. You’ve already told us more than we could ever have learned for ourselves. That’s invaluable. And you’re one of us now. You won’t be punished for hiding from us—it was an understandable reaction.”

“Very good of you, Scur, to presume to speak for the Trinity,” Sacer said.

“You’re welcome,” I said, blunting her sarcasm.

Spry coughed gently. “Scur has only stated the obvious. You’ll be treated the same as the rest of us, Murash. The same privileges, the same rations and duties. The same degree of protection—we don’t want you hurt, or intimidated, for what you are. You can’t go back to Tottori—that’s clear enough. But if you accept our terms, you can find a life here, on Caprice.”

“They will return,” Murash said quietly.

“They?” Yesli asked.

“The Sickening. They have gone, but they have not forgotten us. We are nothing to them now—not even a nuisance. So our star warms up again, our world comes out of its freeze. It means nothing. They will return.”

“Then we had better be ready the second time,” I said.

Murash laughed again. I understood then that there was a kind of desolate hopelessness beyond anything we had experienced so far. Worse than this was the realisation that Murash had a much better perspective on things than the rest of us—that she was much better placed to judge our chances.

“You don’t know us,” I said. “You think you do, but you don’t. We’ve come through a lot, all of us. The war you only read about in books. We lived through that. It burned us. But we came out the other side. Stronger, sometimes. Always changed. And this is just . . . something else to deal with. You think we’re doomed?” I did not wait for her answer. “Fine: put yourself on zero rations until you die. If you can’t take the slow way out, there are energy pistols and airlocks. But you won’t, will you? You’re a survivor like the rest of us. And you know deep down that there’s a chance. If you didn’t, you would have just killed yourself by now.”

“Maybe I have not had the chance,” Murash said. But there was a little less spite in her voice than before. After a silence she added: “I want to see Tottori. Properly—not from one of these little windows.”

“There’s nothing,” Spry said warningly. “Just ice.”

Murash shook her head. “I saw something. Maybe you were not looking closely enough.”

______________

We had seen an ice-locked world where there ought to have been a bright hub of civilisation and commerce. No stations, no cities, no spaceports—no sign of any industrial activity at all.

But Murash was correct. With our other preoccupations, we had not looked closely enough.

And it turned out that there was still life on Tottori. The ice age had changed the world almost beyond recognition, made our old maps useless, but Murash had known this planet as the great winter closed in, and she knew where her people had moved to, in their last retreat to the equator.

“There,” she said, directing our attention to a stretch of coastline as yet uncovered by ice. “In that bay was Skilmer, one of our largest cities. We made parts for the rocket there—the alloys and guidance system.”

“There’s nothing,” Sacer said.

But Yesli’s eyes were sharper. “No—Murash is right. There’s definitely something there. A community, settlement of some sort. I can see a bridge across that inlet, and those look like smoke trails.”

“Why didn’t we see it before?” I asked.

“Cloud cover, I suppose,” Spry said. “That, and we hadn’t lowered our expectations far enough. It’s barely a town, let alone a city.”

Murash directed our attention a little to the north and a little to the east. “That would be Uskeram. It was always smaller than Skilmer. But I think there are people there. That curving line that projects into the bay—it can only be a harbour wall.”

“Then those must be boats,” Yesli said.

Needless to say, even with the damaged condition of Caprice, it was not hard to turn magnifying instruments onto these putative communities. We had nothing good enough to look at them in detail, but it was sufficient to vindicate Murash. There were indeed towns down on the surface of Tottori—albeit at a level of technological development far below that necessary to make a rocket, let alone a skipship. We saw winding streets, buildings of stone and wood and thatch, many fires and plumes of smoke. We saw animals harnessed for work, drawing loads along icy, rutted roads. We saw sailing vessels in the shelter of the harbour, while the sea seethed grey and cold beyond. No machines, no electricity, no power beyond the energy provided by the burning of wood. There were still forests at the equator, but even from orbit they looked thin and depleted.

In our orbits we mapped other communities. Some of these Murash was able to name, but not all were known to her. Much time had obviously passed since her departure. This world, in its way, was as strange to her as Tottori had been to us when we arrived.

We estimated a total planetary population of around fifty million people.

“Do you want to return to them?” Spry asked.

She looked at him sharply, as if the question might be a trap. “Could I?”

Spry continued: “We don’t have a shuttle—nothing that can land on Tottori and then get back to us. The best we could offer would be a one-way trip in one of our pods. We could drop you back down there.”

“In Skilmer, or one of the other towns?”

“It couldn’t be guaranteed,” Prad said. “There’s no manual flight control once you hit the atmosphere. The pod would home in on a NavNet transponder, given the choice, but since there aren’t any . . .” He bit his lip. “There’d be a large margin of error. That’s not really the point, though, is it? For all we know, it’s been another thousand years since you docked with us! You had to learn our language from books. What good will you be down on Tottori, after all this time? You’ll be as unfamiliar to them as any of us.”

“It is still Tottori,” Murash answered. “It is still my world, my home.”

“They’re dying down there,” I said. “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Either dying, or they’ve been on the brink of extinction and now they’re trying to claw something back. But it’s still fragile. How long do you think those forests will last?”

“It’s not our concern,” Sacer said. “If they had something we could use, I’d say we send down Murash as our negotiator. But they’re in the stone age. There’s nothing we can do for them, and nothing they can do for us.”

I squared off against her. “Leave them to their fate—that’s what you’re saying?”

“Their fate is none of our business. Look, they’ve managed without us so far. Isn’t that enough?”

“They wouldn’t have sent Murash if they didn’t need help,” Yesli said.

“But even Murash would be ancient history to these people. Do you think they even remember sending her? We drop Murash back onto Tottori, what do you think they’ll make of her? Even Murash can’t say if they speak the same languages she knows.”

“I would take that chance,” Murash said.

“Right now,” I answered, “you’re much more valuable to us than you could ever be to those people. I’m not saying we wouldn’t help them if it was within our means, but we have to be realistic.”

“Now you sound like Sacer,” Prad said.

“I’m not. Sacer says we do nothing because these people can’t give us anything in return. I say we have nothing to offer them anyway—at least not now, while we’re still coming to terms with the condition of the ship. You’ve said it yourself, Prad: In a thousand days, who knows what we’ll have left?”

“Actually, I meant to have a word with you all about the thousand days. It’s possible I may be able to buy us quite some more time.”

But Prad’s face had none of the jubilation I might have expected from this turn of events. Quite the opposite—as if he well knew that the cost he was about to demand of us would be too high.

“You’ve found a way to stop the memory leak?” I asked, hardly daring to speculate.

“No. Not stop it, or even slow it. The process, as I have said, is mostly random, and I can’t get deep enough into the architecture to have much say over that.”

“Then I don’t see what you can bring us,” Spry said.

“It is very simple,” Prad answered. “I have been searching the ship for some other substrate that we could use in place of the long-term memory. It has not been easy! The slates are useless—they were designed for pursers and janitors on a luxury starliner! The spacesuits, lifeboats and shuttles are scarcely any better, although they all have a little capacity that we can use. Nonetheless, I have already begun to copy memory sectors into them. It won’t make a huge difference to our problem—at best, we may copy between three and four percent of the memory sectors not already overwritten.”

I closed my eyes. “That’s it? That’s the best we’ve got? Three to four percent?”

“There is something else.”

Yesli said: “What?”

“Another form of memory storage, but of a very fragile and highly distributed kind.”

I nodded. “Go on.”

“The slow bullets. Those of you . . . those of us who have them . . .”

“It’s all right, Prad. We know you’re crew—you don’t have to remind us of it every five minutes.”

“My point is simply that a majority of the survivors do carry slow bullets. They are not designed for bulk memory storage, but they do have rather a lot of useful capacity. Presently, quite a bit of it is taken up with military-biographical data. You’d be surprised how much.”

“So what are you proposing?” Spry asked, while Murash looked on. I wondered how much of the conversation she was following—how clearly she understood our difficulties.

“What I have in mind is rather simple,” Prad said. “We replace the data in the bullets with parts of the ship’s memory. It wouldn’t be difficult. After our search for our friend Murash here, I already know how to talk to the bullets with one of our slates. I can display the information in the bullet, but I can also alter it—erase and replace it. The bullets can be addressed and updated painlessly, without surgery.”

I shook my head, thinking of the pictures of my mother and father, tangible links to my old life.

“No. You can’t do it this way. The bullets are all we have.”

“We must consider this, Scur. While the ship’s own memory falls to pieces, we can each of us preserve a part of it inside our own bodies.”

“Those of us with slow bullets, you mean.”

“There are more slow bullets in the bodies of the frozen dead—enough to go around. We have injectors—you saw one of them when the mob had that man pinned down. There are plenty to go around. The old bullets can be extracted, cleaned of their data and re-implanted in the living.” He made an expansive gesture. “I will gladly accept one into myself, for the purposes of solidarity.”

“That’s very noble of you, Prad.”

“Thank you, Scur.”

“But you can take your nobility and fuck yourself sideways. What does a bullet mean to you? I’ll tell you what it means. Nothing at all. We know what you are, what you were—a fucking crewmember.”

Something in me had snapped. I could not stop myself.

“I did not mean to trivialise your experience, Scur. I know that you have been in the war . . .”

“You still don’t get it, Prad. You never had to fight, never had to take a questionable order, never had to see a friend blown up or wonder if you exceeded your mandate when you met the enemy. You’re not a traitor or a war criminal or a civilian black-marketeer. You’re a fucking coward of a ship’s technician, who was running away from danger when I met him. You were nothing, you are nothing.”

Prad was looking at me with something between horror and confusion, as if there was a chance this still might prove to be a joke. I knew I had gone too far, been unfair to him. He had not been a coward, just a man trying to survive. What had any of us been trying to do, but that?

Murash looked on with bewilderment and disappointment, as if she expected better of us than this.

But now that I had started, some part of me had to keep going.

“My bullet is all I have, Prad. I wouldn’t expect a civilian like you to understand that. You haven’t had my life. I should never have been in this fucking war. I was an innocent victim of political corruption. But even then, even after I was conscripted, I did nothing wrong. I followed orders, I gave them, but I never crossed the line. I was a good soldier—and I should not be on this fucking hellhole of a prison ship.”

“That’s enough, Scur,” Yesli said. “Prad was just giving us the options, that’s all.”

“There aren’t any. We don’t touch the bullets.” And I placed my hand over my chest, as if they might try to take my bullet out of me there and then. “Not now. Not ever.”

Prad nodded slowly, raising his hands and backing away from me as if in surrender. I knew that what I had said could not be easily undone, if it could be undone at all. Perhaps I had done too much damage for that. Prad was the closest person I had found to a friend since the wakening, and I had burned that friendship in a moment’s reckless rage.

But I still meant what I had said. My bullet was all that held me to my past. I could not surrender it.

______________

“We’ve found him,” Yesli said, rousing me from a shallow, troubled sleep.

“Orvin?”

“Who else?” Yesli smiled, and I tried to find the energy to respond. This was how it was going to be from now on, I thought. We would have to take our pleasure in small, petty things, like the capture of a fugitive. The measure of our lives now would not be in how things improved, but in how quickly or slowly they worsened.

“I’m glad.”

Yesli added: “He’s pretty weak, after all this time on his own, with no food or water. You should see him—make sure he really is the man you say he is.”

“There’s no doubt.”

“All the same, you should be involved in this. We’ll have to set an example, of course—do things properly. You’ve reason to hate him, and so do the rest of us after what happened to Crowl. But we’ve got to rise above our need for revenge. We’ll have to do things with due process, give him a chance to state his side of things . . .” Yesli trailed off, as if she recognised how ridiculous this all sounded.

“It’s all right. You can search me for knives.”

I ought to have felt jubilant, that we had Orvin back in our care. But so much had changed since he slipped away into the ship. We had learned too much from Murash, and I had been unkind to Prad. All I felt was a kind of empty satisfaction that one task was now completed, and that we could move on to the next.

I washed myself and met Yesli, Spry and Sacer with their new prisoner. It was the same room where we had spoken to Murash, and I had wondered if they might have allowed Murash to be present as well, to offer her outsider’s viewpoint. But it was just the four of us, and Orvin. They had tied him to a chair, doubling the restraints. He looked tired, and there were heavy bruises on his face. His eyes were red and puffy, the lids swollen. He seemed to have difficulty focussing.

“There was some resistance,” Sacer said.

“I can see.”

“Is it definitely Orvin?” Spry asked. “I know he mentioned you by name, before he got away from us. But there could always have been some mistake.”

“No,” I said, with joyless certainty. “It’s him. It’s not another man with the same name and it’s not someone pretending to be Orvin. This is the man who put a slow bullet into me, set to work its way to my heart, and then left me to die.”

“Are you going to argue with her story?” Yesli asked.

Orvin had some trouble answering. He moved to open his lips and spat out a wad of blood and shattered tooth.

“What would be the point?”

“Now would not be the time to test our patience,” Spry said.

“Fine then.” Orvin gave a sort of defeated sigh. “I met this woman during the war. Whether or not the ceasefire had been declared was an irrelevance. We were in the field of battle, cut off from central authority. She strayed into my sector. I detained her and subjected her to routine questioning, before we were forced to move out.”

“That’s a fucking lie.”

Orvin gave an uninterested shrug. “Prove it.”

“Scur doesn’t need to prove anything,” Spry said. “She warned us you were dangerous and you showed it when you killed Crowl.”

Orvin smiled. “So Scur is what she calls herself now? Well, I’m sorry about Crowl. I couldn’t help that, though. It was that or face lynch justice.”

“Tell that to the mess the auto-surgeon left when it tried to patch up Crowl,” Yesli said. “Better still, why don’t we let you be the one who tests out the auto-surgeon next time? You look like you could use a spell in the surgeon.”

“If you want me dead, I can suggest some quicker and easier ways of going about it.”

“Is that what you want?” Sacer asked. “Execution? You know, we might actually be able to arrange it. Be easier for the rest of us, not having to share our resources with you.”

“Congratulations, in that case. I’ll buy you a few days by dying sooner.” Orvin forced his puffy-lidded eyes wider, in mock surprise. “Oh, you think I didn’t know the state of the ship? You think I’m so stupid that I haven’t grasped that we’re going to die up here, very slowly, as our systems fail one by one? That there’s no possibility of outside help? That the merciful thing would have been for us all to stay in hibo, until the ship rotted around our frozen corpses?”

“We’re going to make it,” Yesli said. “We have a plan. The ship’s damaged, it’s true. It’s losing memory by the day, by the hour. But it can still keep us alive, and Prad says we may still be able to make a skip, to reach another solar system. We even have a plan to conserve the vital memory sectors. I’m telling you this because I want you to understand that the rest of us have no intention of dying, and we wouldn’t be doing you any kind of a favour if we killed you now.”

Spry said: “Regardless of your guilt, we can’t afford to lose a useful pair of hands. There’s work to be done here—unimaginably hard work, and lots of it.”

“So the best I can hope for is forced labour?” Orvin laughed, and drooled out another wad of blood and shattered tooth. “You think you can persuade me to do something I don’t want to, is that it?”

“I could,” Scur said.

He looked at the three members of the Trinity. “Well, Scur—let’s call her that—may have a point. If you are serious about not losing a good pair of hands, I’d keep her well away from me. I don’t think justice is uppermost in her thoughts.”

“I’m better than you,” I said. “I was during the war, and I am now.”

“You think you are,” Orvin said. “But if you were alone in this room with me, and I was still tied down, and you had a knife? Or a slow bullet injector, and a slow bullet? Would you be able to stop yourself?” He was looking at me with an almost friendly smile now, thick-lipped and lopsided as it was. “Be honest with yourself, as one soldier to another. We both know what hate feels like. It hasn’t gone away just because we spent a little time in hibo. It’s like a light filling you up from inside. It’s leaking through your skin.”

I wanted to deny him, but I knew better than to attempt a lie. It would have been obvious to all concerned.

I so very much wanted to slip a knife into him, between the ribs, and to twist it, and to make him squeal, and to keep him alive for as long as possible while I prolonged the agony. The slow bullet would have been much too civilised for my tastes.

I smiled. “You’ve got me.”

“As long as we’re on the same page,” Orvin said.

______________

A little later I met with Yesli and asked her what the Trinity had in mind for Orvin.

“I was concerned that he might turn out to have friends,” Yesli said, rubbing at her brow. “Who knows? He’s a war criminal by our reckoning, but when you have a ship full of war criminals, that doesn’t mean much.”

“We’re not all war criminals.”

“I’m sorry.” I could tell that Yesli was tired, overburdened with too many new responsibilities and worries. “I just mean, it could have been worse. But there’s no support for Orvin. Quite the opposite. Poor Crowl had his friends, and even those of us who didn’t know him very well remember what happened in the auto-surgeon. That debt has to be paid, is the feeling. While it isn’t, there’s a sense of unfinished business.”

“Spry seems to think otherwise. He said we couldn’t lose another pair of hands.”

“Well, there’s another way of looking at that. It’s true that Orvin can still be of use to us, in the conserving of the memory.”

“Go on.”

“After his execution, we can skin him. Make paper from his flesh, ink from his blood. I’d even let you make the first cut, if it meant that much to you.”

I shook my head. “That wouldn’t work for me.”

“Too macabre?”

“Too easy. He’d be dead already.”

______________

The trouble started with an argument between two adjoining work parties, over who had claim to one section of the wall. The argument turned violent, and then spread to nearby parties. It became a confused, confined brawl, and it packed the corridors so tightly that it was many minutes before any of the Trinity’s peacekeepers had a chance to break things up. Prad and his people did their best to stop it reaching further, by closing internal doors and turning corridors dark. But by then blood had been spilled. By its nature, any tool sharp enough to mark metal was also sharp enough to cut flesh. There were stabbings and gougings. Someone lost an eye.

After the brawl had been cleared, and the mess cleaned up, I went with Yesli to see what all the fuss had been about.

“I don’t know why they would fight over a wall,” Yesli was saying. “We’ve barely touched the ship! Why would they fight now, when almost all the walls are still blank? Leave the fighting until we’re down to the last corner!”

“That’s why,” I said.

The words had been scratched shallowly into the metal, passage after passage running along six or seven metres of wall. The scratched letters gleamed with a hard silver purity. It was done quite neatly—better than some of the mandatory texts—but the work still betrayed the evidence of several different hands having taken their turn.

“This is free inscription work,” Yesli said, frowning. “I don’t recognise the words, but—”

“I do,” I answered. “This is the start of the Book. Our Book—the one read by the people of the Peripheral Systems.”

“Are you sure?”

“I know these words, Yesli. I grew up with them.”

“I didn’t have you down as a staunch believer, Scur.”

“I’m not. But my parents both were.” I waited a moment. “I spoke to Prad about this. He told me that there were no copies of the Book in the shipboard memory. They’d been lost to the corruption.”

“Did you believe him?”

“I think so.” But the tone of her question left me unsettled. “You’re saying Prad lied? That the Books—ours or theirs—are still in the memory?”

“I doubt that the Books have survived. But I think Prad or one of the other technicians may have been responsible for their deletion.” Yesli paused. “He wasn’t ordered to do that, but I can’t say I’d have disagreed with his decision. Whoever did it, it was the right thing. The Books are too divisive.” She looked at me sharply. “You see that, don’t you? These people wouldn’t have come to blows over some poetry or scientific knowledge. They came to blows over the Book. Your side, their side—their stupid differences of interpretation.”

“The Book is beautiful, Yesli.”

“But it will kill us. Yours or theirs—makes no difference. The knowledge has to go. We can’t save it. We’ll be making a terrible mistake if we do.”

“Someone committed these words to memory,” I said. “Who knows, maybe the whole thing. I learned passages, parables, but there are people who made it a life’s work to know the entire Book.”

“I’m not saying it isn’t a wonderful act of devotion. It is. And I’m sure there is tremendous grace and power in these words. Tremendous wisdom and humanity—as well as ignorance and superstition and foolhardiness. All that’s the best and worst in us. But that doesn’t change anything. Someone lost an eye over this, Scur! We’ve a chance to put these divisive words behind us now—why in all the worlds wouldn’t we?”

“What are you proposing?”

Yesli rubbed a finger along the bright-cut inscriptions. “These words aren’t scratched very deeply. They can be polished out, the wall made new.”

“And the people who did this?”

“They’ll be warned against doing it again, but I doubt that we’ll push for any actual punishment.” She took a step back, touched a finger to her chin like an art critic at a gallery. “These inscriptions are very well done, aren’t they? We couldn’t afford to lose good scribers like these.”

“They won’t let go of their beliefs that easily.”

“They will if we make them,” Yesli said.

Half a day later the Trinity issued an edict. The inscribing of religious content was expressly forbidden unless otherwise authorised as part of the mandated texts. No one was to use their free inscriptions for this purpose. If they were caught doing so, they would be compelled to polish the walls back to their former blankness, on top of their normal allocation of mandatory texts. There would be no exceptions, no favour given to the people of one Book over the other.

I do not know what Spry, Yesli and Sacer expected of this decree. Meek obedience? If so they did not properly grasp the extent to which the Book permeated the narrow little lives of grunts like me. I was surprised by Spry in particular. The war had taken him too far above the common soldiery.

It was a serious error of judgement.

The hunt for Orvin had united us, temporarily. The search for Murash had offered another focus, and now the scribing provided another. These distractions had been sufficient to make women and men of different allegiances work together, or at least tolerate each other’s company. Allies and enemies, friends and criminals—soldiers and civilians. We had found cause to put our differences and suspicions behind us, for the moment.

The Trinity’s edict ripped things wide open again.

It began with work teams refusing to scribe the mandated texts. An hour here, an hour there, might not have made very much difference. But a whole lost day was a thousandth part of the time left for us. Of the knowledge we might yet save, a thousandth part was now gone for all eternity.

If it had gone no further than lost work, negotiation and reasoned persuasion might still have saved the day.

It did not stop. Violence broke out again: much worse than before, and spread across much more of the ship. Believers against believers, unbelievers against the faithful. Grudge-settling for the sake of it. I was shocked by my own naïvety, imagining that the worst of these enmities were behind us.

I was wrong about that.

______________

After the first death I knew what I had to do. It might not make a difference, but it was the only option open to me.

“I need your help,” I told Prad.

“So we are speaking again.”

“I’m sorry about what I said. It was unwarranted. It was just . . . anger. I had to lash out at someone. You just happened to be nearest.”

“There was truth in what you said, though. We aren’t the same. I have known no war.”

I nodded at the nearest monitor screen, showing the chaos that had spread through the ship—corridors and halls full of brawling people, the bloodied and slumped forms—unconscious or worse. “You’re getting a taste of it now. When this is over, if it’s ever over, each and every one of us will be on equal terms.”

Prad looked at the screen for a long moment. “They do not seem amenable to negotiation. I see there has been another death, and several serious injuries. At this rate we will butcher ourselves by the end of the day.”

“Do you have a slate?”

“Of course.”

“We need to get to the main cargo bay, where you first told us about the memory loss. Spry and the others are just about keeping order there.”

“What do you have in mind, Scur?”

“You know exactly what I have in mind.”

It was difficult, making our way through the ship. Without Prad I do not think we could have done it at all. But Prad still knew more of Caprice than I expected to learn in a lifetime. It amazed me that there were corridors and service shafts still completely empty of people, their routes and access points known only to the technical staff.

The bay was full of people, and the atmosphere was ugly. No one was actually trying to kill anyone else, though, which was an improvement on the rest of the ship. If there was a chance of turning the tide, this was the only place where it would happen.

Yesli saw me arrive with Prad. The Trinity members and their peacekeepers were at the middle of the mob, holding a fragile order. We had to push our way through, ignoring the shouts and jostles of those around us.

“Forget it, Scur,” Yesli said. “They may have bought the idea of blowing up the ship once, but they won’t fall for it twice.”

“I know, and I wouldn’t dream of trying it again.” I looked sharply at Yesli. “I could have told you that order would get us into trouble.”

“We had no choice,” Spry said. He had to raise his voice above the shouting. “Our differences will kill us. We couldn’t allow either Book to become a point of division: we’ve enough reason to hate and distrust each other already.”

“The decree has been issued,” Sacer said. “If we go back on it now, we’ll look weak.”

“I’m not asking you to. Let me talk to them.”

Sacer laughed at my presumption. “What do you think you have to offer, that we haven’t already proposed?”

“My past,” I said.

I presented myself to the mob—there was no other word for it. Then I touched my chest, held my fist above the point where my slow bullet was sitting.

Next to me Prad held the slate aloft. He tilted it so that everyone had a chance of viewing its contents.

There was something happening here. It was enough to lower the shouting and arguing by a fraction. Now the mob’s focus was on me, rather than the Trinity.

“You know me,” I said. “I am Scur. I was a soldier, the same as most of you. I either fought with you or fought against you—if any of that matters now.” I waited, allowing the mob to quieten even further. I did not doubt for a moment that my hold on their attention was tenuous. I had to make every word count. “I read the Book, too,” I continued. “It meant a great deal to my parents. I wasn’t much of a believer, not really. But the words were still a comfort to me during the war, when I was torn away from my home and family. Some of you will know my story, too. You’ll know of the trouble I had with Orvin, but that was only a part of it. I was never meant to be conscripted, but it happened anyway. And I tried to be a good soldier. I tried to obey the laws of war, to do the right thing. They taught us to hate the enemy, and I suppose I did. But my parents had always told me that they read about the same prophets we did. That tempered my hate. I knew, deep down, that we were not all that different. And I never liked killing.” I cast a glance at Prad, and Prad looked back at me with a questioning eye, asking that I reaffirm my readiness.

“This is my old life,” I said. “These people were my parents. I loved them, and they loved me. These words are all that bind me to my home, to the person I was, the world I knew—the faith I was born into. And I give them up now. I am surrendering myself. From this moment, all that I was before the wakening ceases to matter. I’ll carry it in myself, but I won’t be able to prove a word of it. I could be as good as the best of us, as bad as the worst.” I swallowed, gave a nod to Prad. “Do it. And tell them what’s happening.”

Prad touched something on the slate. He raised his own high, quavering voice.

“I am erasing the contents of Scur’s slow bullet. She is giving up that part of herself. She is surrendering the means to prove who she was, what part she played in the war.”

One by one, the lines of text were vanishing from the slate’s screen. The images of my parents lingered for a few moments, then grew cloudy and drained of colour, as if seen through a window that needed cleaning. Then they disappeared completely.

“The process is irrevocable,” Prad told our audience. “I am deleting this knowledge at a very deep level, beyond any chance of recovery. And when the deletion is complete, I will overwrite the empty memory sectors with vital data from the ship. Scur will carry a little part of our knowledge within herself, safeguarding it against the failure of the main memory. Scur has already made her choice of what that knowledge will be. Will you tell them?”

“The war poet Giresun,” I said. “Her works, all those that have survived until now.”

“Giresun was born on one of our worlds, not yours,” Spry said.

“I know.”

“And yet you choose to conserve her works, over those of one of your own war poets?”

“Someone has to do it.”

Spry nodded thoughtfully. “Thank you, Scur. That you should choose to do this . . .”

“She doesn’t want it to stop with her,” Yesli said. “Do you, Scur?”

“No, I don’t.” And I turned to Prad. “This man was right. Those of us with slow bullets, we have the chance to make a difference. But we have to give up what we are. We have to sever ourselves from the past. From everything that mattered to us once, everything that made us what we are. We have to let that go.”

“The bad among us will get to start afresh,” Spry said. “All sins forgotten.”

“Whatever each of us is, whatever each of us was, we’ll still carry that personal knowledge,” I said. “That goes for all of us: the good as well as the bad, and all the shades in between.”

“You won’t erase the memory of a war that easily,” Sacer said.

“I know. But the bullets are a link to what we were. If we cut that link, then at least we’ve made a start.”

“It won’t be easy,” Yesli said.

“Do you imagine what I just did was easy?”

But Prad held up his hand again. “What I have done for Scur, I can do for any one of us. It’s simple and quick.” And he brandished the slate like a trophy, holding it high above his head. “Scur has chosen to take Giresun’s words into herself. She has become Giresun’s custodian! Each and every one of us can make a similar sacrifice and a similar choice.”

“It needn’t just be the soldiers,” I said. “There are more slow bullets on the ship—they just need to be extracted from the dead sleepers. But we can do that. The bullets can find new homes—new custodians. Each of us can carry a piece of the past into the future. It just won’t be our pasts.”

“The scribing will continue,” Prad said. “That doesn’t stop. It can’t stop. But the bullets buy us a little more time, and the chance to save a little more information. Better than that, it becomes personal. We’ll each carry something unique.”

I took a deep breath. I still felt the same. The bullet was still inside me, and I had no objective sense that anything had changed. But my past was falling away from me by the second. I was free of it, for better or for worse.

It was a terrifying, wonderful feeling. Like falling and soaring at the same time.

“If each of us values the total sum of our knowledge,” I said, “then each of us will have no choice but to work together to safeguard the entire population of the ship. We have to help each other to live. We haven’t time for anything else. We haven’t time for hate or bitterness or recrimination or vengeance. All our old lives ended when the skip went wrong. All our new lives began with the wakening.” I allowed a silence, surveying the faces before me, trying to judge whether I had made my point or succeeded only in aggravating matters further.

I had to know.

But there was only one way to be sure.

“Who’s next?”

“I’ll do it,” Spry said, touching a fist to his chest. “I’ll be the second.”

“Are you sure of this?” Prad asked.

“Do it now,” Spry affirmed. “Clean my bullet. Before I change my mind.”

______________

There is a lot more that I would like to say about those times. But lately I have been finding the cutting harder than before. I make errors, which require hours of correction. The letters squirm and dance before my eyes. And there is a pain that never quite leaves me.

They say brevity is a virtue, anyway.

______________

The temptation is to say that my gesture had an immediate and calming effect, bringing order where there had been chaos; instilling good sense and generosity where there had been spite and recklessness. That, within an hour of my statement, the citizens were lining up to have their bullets cleaned.

But that is not how it happened. It took three days for something approaching stability to return to the ship, and even then there were continuing outbreaks of violence. After the violence, we were left with a slow simmering tension that would be with us for years. We called it the “new peace” but it was a peace in only the most fragile of senses. When the worst of the trouble was behind us, we had six dead bodies and many injured.

Eleven of the wounded required the attention of the auto-surgeon. Fortunately it worked better than it had with Crowl, although I was very glad not to be among the first to test it.

They came forward in ones and twos to begin with, to give up the contents of their bullets. Then threes and fours, and then Prad was faced with so many that it was more than he could cope with alone, and so the work had to be delegated, which took even more time.

Some went along with it because they understood my gesture and realised that by surrendering our private pasts, we were contributing to the greater good of the many. I was with Prad during many of the sessions and saw a different species of sorrow on each face. Giving up the past was a kind of grief, and for some it was almost more than they could stand.

Others were a little too eager. We did not review the contents of their bullets before they were cleaned, but I wondered what it was that they were so keen to see deleted.

Perhaps I was misjudging them. Perhaps they were just genuinely grateful to be able to make a valuable sacrifice. I tried to clean my own memory of these faces. I did not want to remember who had been too willing, too anxious to be absolved of the past.

I had been careful in my choice of the war poet Giresun. I knew she was prized by the enemy, and that my adoption of her work would be a powerful conciliatory gesture. In that sense, the decision was as ruthless as it was pragmatic. Many of the volunteers had their own ideas about their choice of custodianship. For the most part, there was no need to quibble with these selections. If the bullet allowed it, the data would be recorded. Others had no strong notion of what would be written into their bullets. The Trinity’s committees were always able to help at that point.

I do not remember when the first skin markings began to appear, but it must have been within the first few months of the new peace. The idea was simple. Whatever knowledge the bullet contained, this would be reflected on the outside, in the living skin of the custodian. It made a perfect symmetrical sense. We would end up inscribing every available surface of the ship, so why not extend that thoroughness to our own bodies as well? I had lines of Giresun cut into my arms, my shoulders, across my back. We had no ink, but we did have the auto-surgeon. Its surgical lasers could be tuned to brand tissue as finely as any tattoo. It was painful, even after the anaesthetic wore off. But we wore the pain with pride, for it meant that we had also surrendered our bullets and given something of ourselves to the ship.

After that, there is not much to add.

You may ask of Murash, but there is no need. Her story is elsewhere, in her own hand. I suggest that you read it, if you have not already done so. She was always apart from the rest of us, simply because she had come from somewhere else. But Murash chose to remain with us, and by immersion in our shipboard society she gained a great faculty with our language—this “ancient tongue” that she had learned as a scholar, on her dying world. Murash demanded a bullet of her own, and wore her brands like the rest of us. She told us much of her world, much of the history that we had skipped over—but even then, I do not think she told us everything. That would have taken more than a human lifetime.

It would be remiss of me not to mention Orvin, and my part in his ultimate fate.

Yesli had forewarned me about the Trinity’s decision. There was a sort of trial, and a sort of sentencing process, but the outcome had never been in serious doubt. There was no possibility of a man such as Orvin being rehabilitated back into the crew, not after the business with Crowl. Equally, there was no appetite for prolonged incarceration.

Yes, I understood the logic of it perfectly. Orvin had forfeited the right to life on Caprice. But his execution could not be framed as revenge for his crimes. Deterrence, yes—but most emphatically not retribution. We were better than that.

Some of us.

When it came to execution, there were many options open to the Trinity. Eventually, after discussion with Prad and the rest of the technicians, they agreed to use one of the vacant hibo capsules. Orvin would be put to sleep painlessly, just as if his body was being put into hibo. When he was unconscious, life support would be removed. After death, his slow bullet would be extracted and his body disposed of.

The Trinity knew that I did not approve of this course of action. But they were adamant that his execution would be managed humanely. It was a mark of the better society we hoped to become.

I understood all that. But I could not let it stand.

Near the time of Orvin’s execution, I contrived to find myself alone with Prad.

“There is something very important I want you to do for me.”

There was still an awkwardness between us, for all that Prad had mediated in the cleaning of my slow bullet. I had hoped that he had forgiven me for my outburst, while at the same time knowing that it had put something between us that could never be entirely removed.

But I still needed his help.

“It is good to be of use, Scur.”

“You deserved better from me, I know. If I could take those words back . . .” I shook my head. “I can’t, I know. They’ll be there, remembered, long after we’ve forgotten half the things we want to hold in our memories. But I must still ask something of you. It’s about Orvin.”

“I am astonished.”

“You know what’s going to happen to him.”

Prad nodded once. “Of course.”

“Do you approve?”

“It seems a relatively civilised mode of execution. We’ve all experienced the transition to unconsciousness in hibo. You could almost say it was pleasant. A sort of irresistible warm drowsiness, closing over you. I suppose you don’t think that’s quite fitting, given his crimes?”

“You can make doors open and close anywhere on this ship.”

“Within reason.”

“I want access to his cell. And a slow bullet, and a slow bullet injector. I know you can get me those things.”

“You are quite insane, Scur. This is our justice. It is all we have. If we fight it now, what chance will we have when things become really difficult?”

“I want access to his cell,” I repeated. “And the bullet, and the injector. That’s all.”

“They’ll kill you.” He thought for a second. “They’ll kill me.”

“They won’t,” I said, although Prad must have heard the lack of conviction in my voice. “Some sort of punishment, yes. That’s very likely—for me, anyway. We can make it seem as if I coerced you. You’ll be off the hook.”

“With Orvin’s blood on my conscience?”

“You don’t need to worry about that. And there won’t be as much blood as you think.”

“You’ve been thinking this through.”

“For a while.”

“Is this worth it, Scur? After all you have been through? To throw everything away now, just for vengeance?”

“If I wanted vengeance, I’d have it. Just get me the things I need, and get me into that room.”

“Is that all?”

“There’s something else. It’ll be easy for you to arrange. But we can discuss that later.”

If I had needed to use force on Prad, I think I might well have. Not because it would have pleased me, or because I disliked him. But I could not have allowed myself to fail.

But Prad did as I asked. We met in semi-darkness, in one of the corridors that did not yet have full power.

“Here are the things you wished for.” Prad pressed a dark bundle into my hand. I felt cloth, the rattle of hard metal things inside. “The bullet is clean and loaded into the injector. I presume that is to your satisfaction?”

“Thank you.”

“The external lock to his cell will open in three minutes. Orvin will still not to be able to work the door from inside. The lock will remain open for another five minutes, but you must not seal the door from within the cell. If you do you will find yourself trapped.” There was an uneasy silence. “Is five minutes sufficient for your purposes?”

“I should think so. You’ve done well, Prad. I’m grateful.” I allowed a silence of my own. “You can go, if you wish.”

“I think I would rather remain. If you can provide some evidence of coercion, I think that would be appreciated.”

“Wait a moment.”

I swung the bundle at him, judging the strength and direction of the swing such that it was likely to inflict a bruise, rather than a concussion. Since I could only see Prad indistinctly there was of necessity an element of guesswork involved. The bundle found the hard edge of a cheekbone or jaw. Prad grunted and slumped into the side of the wall.

There was a silence.

I feared for a moment that I had put too much enthusiasm into my swing.

“Prad?”

There was a groan. I sensed his form next to me, regaining his balance. I heard the scrape of hand against skin, tracing the extent of what would soon be a most impressive bruise.

“Most commendable, Scur. You should consider a career involving violence. I believe you have an aptitude for it.”

“I have a knife,” I said. “I’m going to keep it between us, just for show.”

______________

We reached the cell. Since the automatic door was presumed to be infallible, there had been no need to station a guard outside. I had counted on this—I saw no reason for the Trinity to have taken unreasonable precautions—but it was gladdening not to be proved wrong.

“You’ve come this far,” I whispered to Prad. “No one will disbelieve your story now, if you want to go. This is a very dangerous man.”

“That is why I took the additional precaution of including an energy pistol in the bag. I thought one of us might appreciate it.”

I shook the bundle open, as quietly as I could. The injector came with its own pressure line and pneumatic reservoir. I untangled the parts and satisfied myself that the injector was of the design I knew from my military career. It was all there—including the chambered bullet. I also inspected the little standard-issue shipboard energy pistol, recognising it from the time Prad and I had first met.

“Take it,” I told Prad.

He closed his hand around the contoured grip. “The yield is set to debilitate, rather than kill. I think you will find the injector in perfect order. You neglected to mention the need for an anaesthetic preparation, so I did not provide one.”

“Very thoughtful of you.” Now that I had examined it, I slipped the injector back into the bundle, out of sight. “How much time do we have?”

“About four minutes now.”

“Let’s wake our baby.”

But in fact Orvin was already awake when we opened the door to his cell. It slid aside, recessing into the wall. He must have heard our voices or our approach, for all that we had tried to be as silent as possible.

A nervous man, awaiting a visit from his executioners.

Fully dressed, he moved to raise himself from his bunk. On his face was an almost amiable expression, as if I were an old friend paying him a surprise visit.

“Well, Scur. Who did you bribe—or fuck—to make this happen? No, let’s stick with bribe. You’re not worth that much trouble to anyone.”

“Shoot him.”

Prad levelled the energy pistol, squeezed off a single discharge. Even though I was nowhere near the direction of his aim, I still felt a sort of shivery tingle run through my nervous system.

Orvin collapsed back onto his bunk. His eyes were still following me, but the energy pulse had winded him. He moved his jaw, trying to make sounds come out.

“It was a mistake,” I said.

He croaked out: “What?”

“Choosing me, back in the bunker. You should have found another victim. Or at least stayed to finish the job.”

Some of the fight was coming back into him. I glanced at Prad, making sure he was ready with the pistol if it came to that. “I meant to ask,” Orvin said. “How did you get out of there?”

“I cut the bullet out with your knife.”

“Really?”

“It didn’t want to be cut out. I had to go pretty deep.”

“You were lucky to live.”

“I must have bled out some. Also, it wasn’t what you’d call a sterile surgical environment. I’d have probably died in there, even with the bullet out of me, if the peacekeepers hadn’t swept through. I owe them everything.”

“Even after they put you on a prison ship?”

“We both know how that feels. Still. I’m alive, aren’t I? That has to count for something.”

“This isn’t the happily ever after we were hoping for. We fought the war, Scur. Did our duties. We were due our reward.”

“The reward is not being dead, Orvin. Or crippled, or in agony for the rest of your life. I’ll take being alive.”

“Under these circumstances?”

“We’ve got a ship, a purpose. We’ll try a skip soon, see what else is out there. We can live on this thing, until we think of something better.”

“It’s the end of everything. You think we’ll make the slightest difference?”

“We can,” I said. “We’ve already begun to preserve what we can—cut it into our flesh, into the flesh of the ship. Now we have to start putting that wisdom to good effect. It’s not much, I grant you. But we’ve got the benefit of hindsight. We know our history—what worked, what didn’t work. If people survived the Sickening on Tottori, then they survived elsewhere. We’ll find them. We can start saving these worlds, a planet at a time.”

“Good luck with that.”

I removed the injector from its bundle, giving Orvin plenty of time to recognise it, and see that it was intact and came with all the necessary elements.

“No,” I said. “I’m not the one who needs luck today.”

“Ah, I see. An eye for an eye. The appetiser before the main dish of my execution. Well, be careful. You wouldn’t want me to die before they put me into hibo.”

“As if I cared.” I smiled. “But actually, I do care. That’s why the injector and its bullet are properly sterile, unlike the thing you put into me. I’m not going to let infection be the thing that eases you out of this. Oh, and I’ve never really believed in an eye for an eye.” I hoisted the injector by its grip, curling my fingers around the bulky trigger. “But there is a certain justice in it, I suppose. Can you guess what’s going to happen now?”

“You’re going to do to me what I did to you.”

I allowed him a good look at the injector. “Standard issue, Orvin. Not modified in any way.”

“And the bullet?”

“That would be telling. We wouldn’t want to spoil all the fun, would we?”

Still holding the injector, I used the knife in my other hand to slit the fabric of his trousers a little above the knee. I pushed the injector against the skin, until the nozzle had almost buried itself in his flesh. I drew a breath and squeezed the trigger. I heard the crack and hiss and felt Orvin’s leg spasm as the slow bullet was propelled into him. To his credit, he let out only a grunt.

I was sure I had made more noise than that.

“Get this over with, Scur.”

“What’s the hurry? There was no hurry when it was my turn. You left me with that thing working its way through my leg. I’m sorry about the pain, incidentally.”

“Are you really?”

“It’s less about revenge, more to do with me wanting you to carry an indelible memory of this procedure. If there was no discomfort, it might easily slip your recollection. And it’s very, very important to me that you remember the slow bullet.”

“Maybe it slipped your mind, but I’m about to be executed.”

“No, you’re not. And I don’t want you to die of infection, either, which is why I made sure the injector and the bullet were both sterile. Later, you’d better treat the wound with a first aid kit. There’ll be one in the capsule. Use it sparingly, though. It’ll be all you have.”

Orvin narrowed his eyes. He could tell this was not going the way he had expected, but exactly what I had in mind was evidently still a mystery to him.

“What capsule?”

“Yes,” Prad said from behind me. “What capsule?”

“The escape pod,” I said, twitching my head to address both of them. “The one we’re going to put Orvin inside. Silly me, though—I’m getting ahead of myself. Can you feel the bullet’s progress, Orvin?”

“What do you think?”

“Unlike the one you put into me, it’s not going to kill you. It’ll hurt, and it’s going to keep on hurting. But it’s not going to damage any vital organs or bleed you out. All it’s going to do is keep going until it reaches its destination—the core body location where your other bullet’s already lodged. Then it stops. The entry track will heal. You’ll get over the pain, more or less. There’ll be no sepsis. But the bullet will be there. In you.”

“Why two bullets, Scur?”

“It didn’t stop you putting another one into me.”

“Ah, but that was pure, unadulterated sadism. You’ve something else in mind.”

“Insurance,” I said. “In case the first bullet loses its power, or fails in some way. This one is fresh, since it hasn’t been inside you while you were in hibo. It has enough power to last the rest of your life, by a comfortable margin. Wherever you get to, we’ll easily find you again.”

“Wherever I get to?”

I placed my hand on his shoulder. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re a piece of dirt, Orvin—the lowest of the low. But you’re also a man from the past. You were alive before the Sickening came. That makes you too valuable to execute. Now move.”

“What are you doing to me?”

“Giving you the thing you don’t deserve,” I said. “A second chance. Not much of one, I’ll grant. But down on Tottori, they need someone like you more than I need revenge.”

“I did not think Scur would do the obvious thing,” Prad said, with a wondering tone.

“This is a trick,” Orvin said.

I smiled in his face as we pushed him out of the cell, Prad keeping a tight grip on the energy pistol. “The fact is, Orvin, you know stuff. You can’t help it. Dregs and scraps of knowledge, it’s true. No more than the average sadistic thug. But right here, right now, just being an average sadistic thug puts you centuries ahead of the rest of civilisation—at least on Tottori.”

“You’re quite mad, Scur.”

As we made our way to the escape pod I kept on talking. “I can’t promise that you’ll end anywhere close to a settlement—not after what Prad told me about the guidance control on these escape vehicles. So you’re going to need to button up well and steel yourself for a long hike. But eventually you’ll make contact with the locals. You’ll figure out the hard stuff for yourself—language, customs, communicable diseases.”

“And then?”

“You start making a difference. For the better. You’re going to help with medicine, agriculture, basic technology. The ruins are still in place. You can help those people begin to put things back together. You can stop them taking wrong turns. Help them begin to rebuild. Tell them what you are, if you think it’ll help. Or make up some other story—say you’re a traveller from the south, or a wizard, or whatever you think will work. It’s up to you. Be creative.”

We had reached the entrance to the escape pod. It was one of a curving row of airlocks, each of which fed a vehicle clamped onto the other side of the hull like a limpet. We would be losing the pod, squandering it on a single occupant. It was only one of many, though, and the sacrifice struck me as acceptable.

I had expected Orvin to resist, as soon as my intention became clear. Prad was ready with the energy pistol, just in case—I had told him to dial up the yield, if he needed to make his point more forcefully. But when Orvin did try and break away from us, the gesture seemed more token than any genuine attempt at escape.

We were giving him a chance at life, when the alternative was recapture and execution.

I shoved him into the capsule, told him to buckle in well. I pointed out the survival rations and first-aid kit, reminding him to treat the wound in his leg. He was breathing rapidly, his face glistening with sweat, his eyes wide. By now the pain must have been excruciating.

He had needed it. It was essential that he remember. A year or ten from now, it would be too easy to allow the knowledge of it to slip from his preoccupations. I wanted the pain of this to burn through the years like hell’s own fire.

He could never be allowed to forget.

“I don’t know when we’ll be back,” I told him, when we were ready to seal the door and detach. “I doubt it’ll be any time soon. Maybe the skip will kill us. Even if we make it, there are a lot of systems out there we need to visit, and besides—I do need to give you some time to make a difference.”

“And when you return—if you return—exactly how will you decide whether I’ve measured up?”

“You’ll be called to account, that’s all I’m saying. We’ll find you easily enough. Give it your best, and you’ll be treated fairly. Fail us—fail the world—and it’ll be a simple business to tell your bullet to kill you. You wouldn’t even need to know that we’ve returned. We could learn a lot just by looking down from space.”

“And what if you don’t come back?”

“Then enjoy your old age. Remember, your best chance of survival is to lift that world out of the dark ages. I’d get working on that pretty quickly, if I were you.”

“Give me a weapon. Doesn’t have to be much.”

“You have a weapon,” I said, studying the hopeful gleam in his eyes. “It’s called fear. It’s going to be at your back, every waking hour of your life.”

I backed away, exchanged one wordless glance with Orvin, and then sealed the airlock. Prad double-checked the settings displayed on the launch board next to the airlock. The pod’s automatic guidance system would home in on Tottori and do its best to drop him on dry land, as close to the equator as possible.

Nothing else was guaranteed.

“You are sure of this, Scur?”

“Perfectly.”

I thought of the bullet eating its way through Orvin, the twitch and snag of its tractor grapples and probes. It struck me that I had made him into another kind of slow bullet. I would fire him into the skin of this world and leave him to worm his way to some position of power or influence, however slight.

My plan was not foolproof. Given sufficient shielding, the slow bullet could be screened from long-range detection, and similarly isolated from any kill-command. But on Tottori their industrial civilisation had declined to the level of pack animals and sailing ships. Merely to create the necessary screening would compel Orvin to initiate a minor revolution in metallurgical refinement and manufacture.

I would not quibble with that.

By the same token, though lodged deep in his chest, the bullet would not be entirely beyond the reach of conventional surgery. But for such a dauntingly ambitious operation to succeed, Orvin would need to advance medicine and anaesthetic control to something close to our own. Orvin could be as self-interested as he wished, provided there were tangible benefits to the rest of the population.

We would see. I cannot say that my hopes were high. But this was our first attempt at resurrecting a world and there were bound to be some miscalculations. Orvin was an unlikely ambassador for a new planetary enlightenment. But if he could make a difference, there was hope for the rest of us.

Not much, perhaps. But I would take what we could get.

I heard a thump, as of a fist on the other side of a heavy metal bulkhead.

I touched the launch control.

There was no countdown, no moment of hesitation before the pod’s departure thrusters fired. There was a muffled clunk, like a key turning in a lock, and then silence. Against the vast mass of our ship, we felt nothing of the recoil. But through the adjoining viewports Prad and I watched the little lozenge-shaped capsule tumble rapidly away, our own rotation seeming to curve its trajectory against the planet’s white-mantled hemisphere. The thrusters would operate only long enough to carry the pod to the edge of the atmosphere, whereupon it would make a fiery and barely controlled descent to the surface. By the time its scorched shell reached the ground, fuel tanks drained, there would be no possibility of it returning to space.

“Almost until the end, he still thought you were going to kill him,” Prad said, when at last we had lost sight of the falling object.

I nodded at the face of the world. “What makes you think this isn’t a death sentence?”

“I do not think you have it in you, Scur. You would like to think that you are as capable of cruelty as Orvin, but you are not. You want him to redeem himself, and you want him to help this world.”

That was when I heard a set of footsteps, approaching rapidly from both directions.

I still had my knife, and Prad’s bruise was looking better by the moment.

“All right,” I snarled. “You’ve done your part.”

It was Yesli and Spry coming from one direction, Sacer and Murash from the other.

“What in the worlds . . .” Spry began.

“He’s gone,” I said. “I let him go.”

“No,” Sacer said, with a flat certainty. “She couldn’t have done this. He’s still in his cell. This is some kind of weird bluff.”

“I am afraid she is quite sincere,” Prad said, caressing his bruised jaw. “I saw everything, as well. She broke Orvin out of confinement, put a slow bullet in him. The pod has already commenced atmospheric entry. It’s quite beyond recall now.”

“I thought . . .” Yesli started to say.

“You thought what?”

“That you would kill him, given half the chance. Do back to him, what he nearly did to you.”

“I did.”

“But to different effect,” Spry said. “Not to torture him . . . but to make him useful to us. That was your plan, wasn’t it?”

I nodded, for there was no point in lying. “Murash knows that world better than any of us. But we couldn’t send Murash—she’s much too valuable to us up here.” I looked at her apologetically, for I knew we would soon be skipping away from this system, away from this home of hers, and there was no guarantee that we would ever return. “I’m sorry, Murash—that’s just the way it is. Anyway, you’d be almost as much a stranger to those people as Orvin will be.”

Murash’s face was stony. I did not know what she liked the least: that she could not go back, or that I had deemed Orvin an acceptable substitute.

A hero for a war criminal. It was not much of a bargain. But I suspected we had harder ones ahead of us.

______________

Later I was allowed to witness Orvin’s passage through the atmosphere, tracked by our sensors. No part of this ship was new, and there had always been some doubt in my mind that the pod would function as it was meant to. But Orvin’s landing was entirely within the specified parameters for survivability. Our observations showed that he had come down in an area of forested mountain, now under snow. We had no visual direct acquisition of him, just a bright thermal smudge, the only hot thing in this landscape, but the telemetry from the pod, and the continued functioning of his slow bullet, told us that nothing untoward could have happened.

But for a long hour nothing happened.

The pod was inert, the slow bullet showing no measurable change in location. Perhaps, despite everything, I had been too rash in sending the lifeboat away when Orvin was loose of his restraints. Perhaps, the telemetry notwithstanding, something must have gone wrong—some fault that the pod was too damaged to report.

On the other hand, if it were me in that thing, I would not be in a desperate hurry to leave it. The pod was safe and warm, for now, and I had not lied about the supplies and equipment. Outside was a freezing cold snowscape, a forested wilderness stretching for hundreds of kilometres in all directions. Even with the on-board provisions, crossing that bleak territory on foot would be a particular sort of hell. And beyond it, there was no promise of warmth and light and the nourishments of civilisation. The best our envoy could hope for was something one step up from the dark ages. Cold rooms, dark nights, and lives bent by war, misery, disease and the almost universal prospect of early death. He would be mad to leave the capsule.

But sooner or later he would need to. He could wait until the last moment, when starvation and cold had forced it upon him, or he could do the wise thing and begin his journey immediately, when he was at his strongest and sharpest.

We waited.

Presently Prad drew my attention to a small cluster of moving heat sources, not very far from Orvin’s landing zone. The tree cover prevented any clear view of the moving things, but their questing, packlike behaviour left us in no doubt that they were some kind of hunting animal. From above, where we could not see their legs or more than the grossest details of their anatomy, they moved like hot maggots. I thought of something as hardy as a wolf, either a native organism or something imported from Earth. Perhaps the sound of Orvin’s arrival had drawn the curiosity of these creatures.

“What are they?” we asked Murash.

“Hungry,” she said.

The hot maggots, twenty or so of them, had arrived close to the capsule. A number broke from the main mass and approached the parked vehicle. They circled it, coming closer before darting away and approaching again.

“Movement,” Prad declared.

A sudden change in the heat signature of the capsule. Air blushed out of it. Orvin had broken the seal, surrendering his little pocket of warmth. We watched a smaller blob detach itself from the capsule—cooler than the container it had arrived in. The blob made trudging movements—it was not made for locomotion in this environment. The animals had backed off, but they were not retreating. They formed a pincered crescent, ready to dart for Orvin if he made a dash for the left or right.

For long moments Orvin and the animals stood their mutual ground. Then three of the creatures broke from the centre of the shield and began to advance.

Orvin’s blob extended a spiked pseudopod. Heat flashed from the end of the pseudopod.

“You gave him a weapon?” Sacer asked.

“Standard issue energy pistol,” Prad answered. “There is always one in the survival pack, although I do not think Orvin would have known until he looked.”

One of the animals tipped over. We could see it properly now. It was perfectly still, oozing warmth into its surroundings. The other pair had sprung back. The cordon was breaking up, retreating. Orvin stretched his arm again and fired the pistol a second time.

A second animal dropped.

“Be careful,” I whispered to myself. Did he imagine there were additional power cells, somewhere in his supplies? Or was he just applying a calculated reinforcement of his first demonstration, knowing full well that each shot had to count?

The animals, except for the two he had killed, dispersed into the woods. They would regather later, I was sure. But they would take no further interest in this bewildering newcomer.

Orvin moved to the first of the corpses. He seemed to kneel next to it. We had no idea what he was doing, except that it took several minutes and when he was done the animal’s warm remains were spread over a larger area. He moved to the second animal, and repeated the same bloody ritual. Then he returned to the capsule. His blob vanished back inside the cooling shell. He was busy for only a few minutes before re-emerging.

He moved between the corpses, then kept going. We tracked his progress for many hours, wondering if he would eventually turn back. When night fell, he stopped and made camp, utilising the thermal sleeping bag we had given him. In the morning, though, he continued on the same course. His progress was exhaustingly slow, but I doubted that I would have been any quicker given the combined difficulty of the terrain and the surface conditions.

“He’s going in roughly the right direction,” Prad announced, when we had all arrived at much the same conclusion. “Three weeks at this pace, he should make the outskirts of . . . what is the name of that place, Murash?”

“Uskeram,” she answered.

“Will they welcome him?”

“In Skilmer we spoke of an Uskeram welcome.” She paused. “It was not a good thing.”

“If he’s careful with the rations, they should see him through,” I said, before swinging around to address the individual members of the Trinity. “I’d like to know your plans, if you don’t mind. Do you want to stick around until Orvin reaches Uskeram?”

“I would rather not wait three weeks to find out whether or not we have skip capability,” Yesli said.

“I agree,” Spry said. “Before you sent Orvin down there . . . did you think to tell him when we might return?”

“I said it might be a little while. I don’t imagine he will ever stop watching the sky.”

“Nervously, I hope,” Spry said.

After a silence Yesli said: “Something’s happened here, and I’m not sure what. You acted against the wishes of the Trinity, Scur, and that can’t be taken lightly.”

“I wouldn’t expect it to be.”

“Equally . . . I’m not even sure this counts as a crime. If it is a crime, I’m not sure we have a word for it.”

“She can’t go unpunished,” Sacer said indignantly.

But Spry met this remark with a dry laugh. “Look around you, Sacer. We’ve been ripped out of time, thrown into a dark age, told that there’s an alien horror out there that will probably come back and kill us. Our ship is half dead and we have a faint chance of saving the tiniest fraction of its memory before it vanishes into oblivion. Some of us are saints and some of us are sinners, and thanks to Scur we have very little idea of who’s who any more. This is our own special circle of hell, and it comes with metal walls and a skipdrive that may blow up the instant we test it. Remind me which part of this isn’t already a punishment?”

“It’s all right,” I said, grateful for Spry’s words but knowing I could not hope to get off quite that lightly. “I know what I did, and I expect to be punished. I broke our laws, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect the rule of law.”

“Then I might add something,” Prad said quietly.

“Go on,” Yesli replied.

“It was Scur’s wish that I not be implicated in her plot. That is why she struck me, so that it would seem as if she forced me to act against my wishes. But the truth is that once I had some idea of her intentions, I went along with it willingly. And I am proud that I did so.”

“Be very careful,” Sacer said.

“Oh, I am very careful. Very risk averse, as Scur well knows. But I am proud of this. It was good that we not kill this man, and good that we gave him a chance to do some good himself.”

“He won’t,” Sacer said.

“Perhaps he won’t, or perhaps he will. We are all different since the wakening. Who is to say Orvin will not change, given time? At the very least, I do not think it can fail to be an interesting experiment. And it has cost us very little.”

“Except a death,” Sacer said. “We could have used his skin and blood.”

“In the years to come,” Prad said, “I doubt that there will be any great shortage of corpses.”

Prad had been right about many things. As much as it pains me to report, he was right about that as well.

______________

There is not much more to say. They never punished me for my one crime, such as it was. I remained a free woman aboard the ship. I broke bread with the best and the worst of my fellow survivors, and I left my share of blood on the walls. It has taken me most of my life to cut these words.

We skipped, and we lived.

A hundred times, a hundred systems. Always knowing that they might be out there somewhere, waiting to poison our stars again, to take our technology away from us.

We have not found them yet. Or been found by them.

And we have raised a hundred worlds from darkness, or tried. I do not doubt that we sometimes did more harm than good—that we prolonged suffering, instead of ending it. But what else could we do? We had nothing to guide us but our instincts. We had no wisdom to draw on but the marks we had made on the walls, back when the world was young. And none of us had been born for this. The war had made us what we were—traitors, cowards, murderers and sadists. We were all dregs of one sort or another. Even the best of us had sometimes lied about what we had done, or how we had found our way aboard Caprice.

A year or two before he died, Prad told me that he had found an anomaly in my slow bullet readout. It had been a small thing, easily overlooked. I remember now that he had mentioned corrupted sectors, parity errors. It might have been nothing more than the sort of random corruption that had befallen the bullet during the centuries that we were frozen in hibo.

Or it might have been something else. A sign, perhaps, that the contents of my bullet had been deliberately altered before I ever entered the ship.

That one history had been replaced by another.

I say it is strange because here, now, at the end of my own life—or near it—I cannot say that Prad was wrong or right. I should remember, but I do not. My mother’s love of Giresun, my sister Vavarel, my family, my father’s sense of honour, my time in the war, my encounter with Orvin. Did all of that happen to me, or did I steal some of it from another soldier? In the chaos of the ceasefire, Prad told me, such things would have been possible. If a bullet can be altered, overwritten now, then it could also have happened back then. If the money was there, and the need sufficient.

Equally, perhaps it was just a random anomaly.

Who can tell?

I say this now because I have nothing to lose. All that I now remember is what I have cut on these walls. These marks are all that define me. If my name is not Scur, then I have certainly become Scur. And I have tried to do right by that name.

I mention this now because there will not be another chance. I am going to die—this seems certain—but not for several months. There is something growing in my head that the surgeons cannot fix. It presses on my optic nerve, confuses my seeing. It explains the mistakes I have made in my cutting, the difficulty I have had in focusing.

I have a year, if all goes well. And that is time to make a difference.

In a little while, before we skip again, I will be sent down to another frozen world. There is no chance of my returning, and no chance of the world’s medicine doing me any good. Like Orvin, I will have a limited time in which to offer my guidance. Unlike Orvin, who perhaps knew me better than I know myself, I do not expect to be judged for my efforts—at least not while I am alive. But perhaps when you return, you will decide how I have done.

Until then, whoever I was, whatever I did, whoever you are, think well of me.

I called myself Scur. I was a soldier in the war.

I set my hand to these words.

PENRIC’S DEMON

Lois McMaster Bujold

The morning light sloped across the meadows, breathing pale green into the interlaced branches of the woods beyond, picking out shy pink and white blossoms here and there among the new leaves. The spring air hung soft with promise. Penric’s mother, before she had gone off in the wagon with his sisters to oversee the final preparations, had turned her face to the cool blue sky and declared it a perfect day for a betrothal; surely the gods were smiling upon the House of Jurald at last! Penric had refrained from pointing out that the learned divines taught that the gods did not control the weather, and been rewarded for this filial forbearance with a sharp maternal injunction to hurry up, finish dressing, and follow! This was no time to be dragging his feet!

Penric stared glumly between his horse’s bobbing ears and reflected that it would have been an even better day to go fishing. Not the most exciting pastime, but it was the one thing he’d ever found to do that made people stop talking at him. He tried to imagine the muddy, winding road going somewhere less familiar than Greenwell Town. He supposed it actually did, if you followed it far enough. As his elder brother Drovo had done? Not a happy thought.

He frowned down at the brown sleeves of his jacket, laced with orange and gold-colored thread betraying a brassy tarnish. Even for this, he was still wearing hand-me-downs. The fine suit had been new when Drovo had first worn it at age thirteen for his oath to the militant Son’s Order as a page-dedicat; not just as customary for his sex and age and rank, but true to his boisterous heart, Penric fancied. Drovo had outgrown the garb too swiftly for it to become much frayed or patched. Pulled out of a storage chest reeking of camphor, it had been fitted to the nineteen-year-old Penric merely by stealing a little fabric from the shoulders to lengthen the legs of the trousers. He tried to encourage himself with the thought that at least he wasn’t wearing hand-me-downs from his sisters, except that he was fairly sure the linen shirt, shabby and soft, under the jacket had once been a blouson.

Well, Drovo wouldn’t be outgrowing any more clothes now.

His death last year in Adria, of a camp fever before he’d even had a chance to help lose his mercenary company’s first battle, had been the second mortal disaster to befall the family in four years. The first had been the death of their father, of a swift infection in the jaw following a neglected abscess of a tooth. They’d all missed the jovial Lord of Jurald, if not, perhaps, his drinking and gambling. Penric’s eldest brother Lord Rolsch had seemed a soberer hand on the helm, if only he hadn’t been such a gull for every pious beggar, whether in rags or Temple robes, to come down the pike. And if the Lords of Jurald hadn’t ruled over a local peasantry whose main pastimes seemed to be archery, poaching, and tax evasion. So Drovo had taken his oath-money from the company recruiter, spent it in equipping himself, and gone off to the wars beyond the mountains, cheerily promising to come back rich with spoils to repair the family fortunes.

At least his fate had cured the clan of urging Penric to do the same . . .

Not that he’d ever been tempted. One rowdy Drovo had been enough to make Pen’s youth a misery; camp life with a whole company of like-minded bruisers was a nightmare in prospect. And that was before one even got to the grim battles.

“Pick up the pace, Little Pen,” his groom, Gans, advised him in the familiar terms of his childhood. “I shouldn’t like to hear it if I deliver you late.”

“Nor I,” Pen sighed agreement, and they kicked their horses into a trot.

Pen tried to drag his thoughts into a sunnier mode, matching the morning. The bed of the daughter of a rich cheese merchant certainly made a more attractive arena in which to try to better his lot than the battlegrounds of the north. Preita was as nice and round as the purse she came with. He wondered if she understood what a hollowed-out lordly title her family was buying for her. The three times they’d been allowed to meet, strictly chaperoned, she had seemed a trifle dubious about it all, if tolerably pleased in turn with Pen’s appearance. Shyness, or shrewdness? Pen’s sister-in-law Lady Jurald had found and fostered the match, through some connection with Preita’s mother. Well, presumably the girl’s parents understood what they were purchasing. It would be up to Pen to make sure she did not regret the bargain.

How hard could husbanding be? Don’t drink, don’t gamble, don’t bring hunting dogs to the table. Don’t be terrified of tooth-drawers. Don’t be stupid about money. Don’t go for a soldier. No hitting girls. He wasn’t drawn to violate any of these prohibitions. Assuming older sisters weren’t classified as girls. Maybe make that, No hitting girls first.

Perhaps, once he had secured his bride and her dowry, he might persuade her to move somewhere farther down the road? Pen imagined a cottage by a lake, with no servants he had not hired himself. But Preita seemed quite devoted to her own family. And neither half of the couple was likely to enjoy more than a modest allowance before Pen reached his majority. Until then, the purse strings would remain in Rolsch’s hands. Who was unlikely to be persuaded, while there was still room at Jurald Court, to part with unnecessary expenses for housing not under his fraternal eye. And Pen was fairly sure Preita hadn’t thought she was signing up for life in a cottage. Which would probably be given to damp, anyway.

Do your best, Pen told himself firmly as they turned onto the main road to Greenwell, and then, his head coming up, What’s this?

An odd collection of horses and figures was halted on the verge.

A man with a badge pinning jaunty blue and white feathers on his hat, marking him as of the Daughter’s Order, held four restive horses. The weapons of a Temple guardsman hung at his belt. A second guardsman and a woman in a superior sort of servant’s garb knelt by a figure laid out supine on a spread cloak. Had a rider in the party been thrown? Pen pulled his horse to a halt.

“Is someone hurt here?” he called. The supine figure, he saw at closer range, was a slight, elderly woman, gray haired and gray faced, in a muddle of robes of no particular colors. “Do you need help?”

The second guardsman rose and turned eagerly to him. “Young sir! Do you know how far it is to the next town, and do they have physicians of the Mother there?”

“Yes, Greenwell; not five miles up the road you’re on,” said Pen, pointing. “The Mother’s Order keeps a hospice there.”

The guardsman took the reins of three of their mounts from his fellow, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Go; ride for help. Get a litter—better, a wagon.” The man nodded and sprang to his saddle, wheeled, and clapped his heels to his horse’s flanks. It galloped off in a spray of dirt clods.

Pen dismounted and handed his own reins up to Gans, who stared at the scene in doubt. The middle-aged woman took in Pen’s neat, pious brown suit, and seemed to grow less wary. “Divine Ruchia has taken suddenly ill on the road,” she said, gesturing to the older woman, who lay breathing in short gasps. “She was struck by a great pain in her chest, and fell.”

“Oh, I was taken ill long before that,” the old woman commented between huffs. “I lingered too long in Darthaca . . . Told the fools to bring the ceremony to me.”

Torn between curiosity, concern, and a reflection that if he’d left for town earlier as he’d been charged, he could have avoided all this, Pen lowered himself to the old woman’s side. Cautiously, he felt her forehead, as his mother had used to do for him; her skin seemed clammy, not feverish. He had not the first notion of what to do for her, but it seemed wrong to just remount and ride away, for all that Gans was now glaring in tight-lipped worry.

“I am Lord Penric of kin Jurald, barons in this valley,” he told her, gesturing back to the road they’d come from. He wasn’t sure what to say next. She seemed most in authority here, but surely least able to command, in her current distressed state. Her cloak slipped off her shoulder, revealing Temple braids pinned there marking a divine—not in the green and gold of the Mother of Summer, as he would have expected, or perhaps the blue and white of the Daughter of Spring, but the white, cream, and silver of the Bastard, the fifth god, master of all disasters out of season. He gulped, swallowing his surprise.

She wheezed a short laugh and stirred, lifting a claw-like hand to his face. “Pretty boy. There’s a better last sight than scowling Marda. Gift of sorts. But those colors don’t suit you, you know.”

He raised his head to the servant woman who, as he’d knelt, had retreated. “Is she delirious?”

The servant shook her head. “Can’t tell, can I? She’s been spouting things no one else understands since I was assigned to ride with her.”

The old woman’s lips twitched back. “Really?” she said. She did not seem to be addressing Marda. Or Penric. “That will throw the fools into a tizzy.” She fought for another breath. “Illogical to wish to see it, I suppose.”

Increasingly frightened, and feeling quite stupid and helpless, Pen tried: “Let me serve you in your need, Learned.”

She stared intently up at him for two more disrupted breaths, then wheezed, “Accepted.”

She’s dying. Cold, slick, not like the fevered heat and stink of his father’s deathbed, but the advancing pallor was unmistakable. He wanted nothing so much as to run away, but her hand, falling back from his face, found his and gripped it weakly. He wasn’t enough something—cowardly, brave?—to shake it off. Both the servant and the guardsman, he saw out of the corner of his eye, were hastily backing away. What?

“Lord Bastard,” she breathed. “Y’r doorway hurts. ’D think y’ could arrange things better f’yr servants . . .”

If all he could do was hold her hand, Pen decided in desperation, well, that was what he would do. His grip tightened.

For a moment, her brown eyes seemed to flash with a deep violet light. Then, between one breath and . . . none, her eyes went dull and still.

No one was looking back at him now.

He heard a confusion of women’s voices babbling in half-a-dozen languages, most of which he didn’t recognize, crying out in terror and pain. His head, throbbing with tension, seemed to explode in a thick, tangled net of lightning, all white.

* * *

Strange dreams scattered as Penric woke to a fierce headache, a raging thirst, and a desperate need to piss. He was in a bed in a small chamber, high up under the eaves judging by the slope of the whitewashed ceiling, wearing only his shirt and trews. As he stirred and groaned, an unfamiliar face appeared over him. Pen was not quite reassured to see the man wore the green tunic of a dedicat of the Mother’s Order. A few minutes of bustle followed as the man helped him to a chamber pot, then drew him back from the window where Pen tried to put his head out. By his glimpse of the street and the sky, he was in Greenwell Town, probably at the Mother’s hospice. Still morning, so maybe he wasn’t in too much trouble yet? At the dedicat’s urging Pen reeled back into the bed and negotiated for a cup of water, which left him with only the headache and a vast confusion.

“How did I come here? I was on the road. Did I faint? Where is my suit?” He’d better not have lost or ruined the suit. Not to mention his good boots, also missing. “There was this sick old woman—a divine—”

“I will fetch Learned Lurenz,” the dedicat told him. “Don’t move!”

The man hurried out. Muffled voices sounded from the hallway, then steps thumping away. Pen spotted his suit, folded neatly atop a chest, with his boots beside it, which relieved him of one worry. He squeezed his eyes open and shut, and sat up to help himself to another cup of water. He was trying to decide if he could stagger across the room to retrieve his clothes when footsteps tapped once more, and he hurriedly tucked himself back under the sheets as instructed.

Without knocking, there entered tall, skinny Learned Lurenz, the Greenwell Town Temple’s chief divine; reassuringly recognizable, alarmingly tense. He bent over Pen as if about to feel his forehead, but then drew back his hand. “Which are you?” he demanded of Pen.

Pen blinked, starting to wonder if he had fallen not ill, but into some bard’s tale. “Learned Lurenz, you know me! Penric kin Jurald—you taught me arithmetic and geography—you used to pop me on the head with your stick for inattention.” Hard enough to sting, too. That had been a decade ago, before the divine had been promoted to his present position. Lurenz was a long-time devotee of the Father of Winter, though as senior divine he supervised all five holy houses now. The growing city was angling for an archdivineship to be established here, Rolsch had said; Pen supposed Lurenz hoped for the promotion.

“Ah.” Lurenz let out a sigh of relief, straightening up. “We are not too late, then.”

“I’d better not be! Mother and Rolsch will be peeved, I can tell you. No idea what poor Preita will think, either. Where is Gans?”

“Lord Penric,” said Learned Lurenz in his stern voice, as if about to ask Pen to recite the major rivers of Darthaca, “what do you remember of yesterday?”

Pen squeezed his eyes shut and open again. They still throbbed. “Yesterday? There was nothing special about yesterday, except for Mother and my sister fussing about the fit of that stupid suit. They wouldn’t let me go riding.”

They stared at each other in a moment of mutual incomprehension. Then Lurenz muttered “Ah!” again, and continued, “On the road. You were riding into town with Gans, and you came upon the party of Learned Ruchia . . .? She was lying ill on the ground?”

“Oh! That poor old woman, yes. Did she really die?”

“I’m afraid so.” Lurenz signed himself, touching forehead, lips, navel, groin, and spreading his hand briefly over heart, Daughter-Bastard-Mother-Father-Son, tally of the five gods. “We brought her body to lie in the Bastard’s orphanage here, awaiting burial, and some resolution to this tangle.”

“What tangle?” asked Pen, getting a sinking feeling in his stomach to add to his headache.

“Lord Pen”—the nickname was oddly steadying—maybe he wasn’t in too much trouble yet?—“tell me everything you remember about your encounter with Learned Ruchia, and how you came to, ah, swoon. Every detail.” Lurenz pulled up a stool to the bedside and sat, suggesting that he did not mean Pen to stint on the tale.

Pen described the events, together with what everyone had said as exactly as he could recall, strange as it had been, in case it was important—he didn’t have to cast his mind back very far, after all. He hesitated before mentioning the violet light and the babbling voices, because it made it sound as if he’d been seeing things, but finally put them in, too. “But what did she mean by saying Accepted? Not that you expect someone who’s busy dying to make a lot of sense, but she sounded pretty definite. And, really, I don’t like to say it, but her servants didn’t seem very loyal. Or”—a horrible new thought—“had she some contagion?” He rubbed the hand that had gripped hers surreptitiously on the sheet.

“A contagion to be sure, but not a disease,” sighed Lurenz, sitting up from his intent crouch. He frowned at Pen in a very unsettling fashion. “Did you realize she was a Temple sorceress?”

“What?” Pen gaped.

“A very senior one, I am given to understand, bearing a demon of great power. She was on her way to her Order’s main house in Martensbridge, to make some report, and seek aid in her illness for, for handling the creature. Or handing it on, in the event of her death. The Bastard’s people have some rituals to control this procedure, with which I am, ah, not familiar. Not exactly my god.”

The sinking feeling was turning into a stone. “I’ve never met a sorcerer before.” A choking arose in his throat, and without his volition his mouth added, “Well, now you are one, blue-eyed boy!” The tart cadences of the dying divine seemed to echo in the words; then the choking feeling slid back, as if the effort had exhausted it. He clapped his hand over his mouth and stared at Lurenz in terror. “I didn’t say that!”

Lurenz had jerked back, glaring. “You had better not be trying on some jape, boy!”

Pen shook his head violently, suddenly afraid to speak.

Low voices from the hallway rose in sharp argument. The door banged open, and Pen’s mother barged through, yanking her arm from the grip of one of the Temple guards Pen had met on the road. Lord Rolsch, following, held up a stern hand that daunted the man from trying to grab her again. Learned Lurenz rose and quelled the altercation by motioning the guardsman back, shaking his head in a mix of negation and assurance.

“You’ve awoken! Thank the gods!” The senior Lady Jurald rushed to the bedside and seemed about to fling herself on Pen, but then, to his relief, stopped short. She clutched the sleeve of Lurenz’s robe, instead, tugging it in her urgency. “What has happened to him? Can you tell yet?”

Rolsch detached her from the divine and restrained her, but after a worried glance down at Pen, turned a face almost as anxious as hers upon Lurenz. They both seemed startlingly changed from this morning’s ceremonial tidiness, though still in the same best clothes. Lady Jurald’s face was puffy, her eyes red-rimmed, her hair awry with random wisps escaping from her braids. Rolsch looked exhausted, too, his face . . . unshaven?

This isn’t this morning anymore, Pen realized at last. This is tomorrow . . . today . . . oh gods. Had he slept the sun around . . .?

Lurenz, not a man to shirk a painful duty, captured Lady Jurald’s fluttering hands and straightened up into his most grave and fatherly pose. “I am so sorry, Lady Jurald.” His nod took in Rolsch as well. “It is just as we feared. Your son has been possessed by, or it seems rather, of, a demon of the white god. It revealed itself to me plain a moment ago.”

Rolsch flinched; Pen’s mother gasped, “Lady of Summer help us! Can nothing be done?”

Pen, now sitting up against the headboard, stared down at his body in alarm. A demon of the Bastard, inside him? Where inside him . . .?

Lurenz moistened his lips. “It is not as bad as it could be. The demon does not appear to be ascendant—it has not yet seized control of his body for itself. I am told that such a wrenching transference disrupts or weakens it for some time, before it becomes established in or, or accustomed to, its new abode. If Lord Penric is firm of will, and obeys, ah, all his holy instructions, there may yet be a way to save him.”

“They go into people,” Rolsch tried; “There ought to be a way for them to go out.” He undercut this tentative optimism by adding, “Besides the person dying, of course.”

Another nod from Lurenz, altogether too casual in Pen’s opinion. “As the unfortunate Learned Ruchia did. Which is how Lord Penric came to be in this predicament.”

“Oh, Pen, why ever did you . . .?” his mother flung at him.

“I . . . I didn’t . . .” Pen’s hands waved. “I thought the old lady was sick!” Which had been, well, not wrong. “I was just trying to help!” He shut his mouth abruptly, but no strange force rose in his throat to add a sharp comment.

“Oh, Pen,” moaned his mother; Rolsch rolled his eyes in general exasperation.

Lurenz cut short what promised to be a lengthy round of recriminations. “Be that as it may, the harm is done, and there is no way to undo it here in Greenwell Town. I have discussed this possibility with Learned Ruchia’s escort. The late divine’s fleshly husk must necessarily be buried here, but her escort is obliged to carry her possessions on to her destination, that her Order may dispose of them howsoever she willed. That mandate must include, I have suggested”—forcefully, his tone implied—“her greatest treasure, her demon.”

What did Lurenz mean by a way to save him? Just about to vent objections to being talked over when he was right here, Pen registered the drift of this, and eased back, alert. Transporting the demon must perforce mean transporting Pen to . . . somewhere beyond Greenwell Town, anyway. Freitten, even?

“The Temple guards have agreed to escort Lord Penric to the head house of the Bastard’s Order in Martensbridge, where, I trust, they will have the scholars to . . . to decide what properly to do.”

“Oh,” said Lady Jurald, in a dubious tone.

Rolsch frowned. “Who shall pay for this journey? This seems a Temple matter . . .”

Lurenz took the hint, if not cheerily. “The Temple will undertake to gift him with the rest of Divine Ruchia’s travel allowance, and the use of its remounts and hostels along the road. After he reaches Martensbridge . . . that must be for her Order to decide.”

“Hm,” said Rolsch. It had been Rolsch, last year, who had forbade Pen’s scheme to go to the university lately founded in Freitten, on the grounds that the family could not afford it, and then stifled Pen’s protests by dragging him in mind-numbing detail through all his baronial accounts to prove it. It had been quite disheartening to find his brother not selfish, but truthful. While not Freitten, Martensbridge was even farther from Greenwell.

Tentatively, Pen cleared his throat. It still seemed his own . . . “What about the betrothal?”

A grim silence greeted this.

Rolsch finally said, heavily, “Well, it didn’t happen yesterday.”

His mother put in, “But dear Preita’s kin were kind enough to feed us anyway, as we waited here to see if . . . for you to wake up. So at least the food hasn’t gone to waste.”

“So much cheese . . .” muttered Rolsch.

Pen was beginning to get the picture of all that must have happened while he’d been lying here like a warmish sort of corpse in this bed, and it wasn’t merry. His body brought back in a wagon alongside that of a dead woman, Mother and Rolsch somehow found—Gans, of course—the celebration broken up just as it began, his anxious kin, quite obviously, up all night . . . “How is Preita . . . taking it?”

“She grew quite horrified, when we saw your body,” said Rolsch.

“Her mother has her in charge now,” said Lady Jurald.

“Someone should send to her, and tell her I’m all right,” said Pen, dismayed at this.

The silence following this lay a little too long.

Lady Jurald sighed. She was not a woman to shirk a painful duty either, or she could not have stayed married to their father all those years. “I had better go to her myself. There is a great deal to explain. And discuss.”

Pen wanted to ask if becoming a sorcerer made a man more, or less, attractive as a husband, but he had an uneasy feeling that he could guess. Cravenly, he let his mother go off without any messages from himself, necessarily under Rolsch’s escort though she plainly didn’t want to leave Pen alone.

“Is there anything else you need right now, Lord Penric?” Learned Lurenz inquired, also preparing to take his leave.

“I’m quite hungry,” Pen realized. And no wonder, if he hadn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast. “May I go down to the refectory?”

“I’ll have a dedicat bring you a meal on a tray,” the divine promised him.

“But . . . I’m really not hurt.” Pen rolled his shoulders and stretched his legs, beginning to feel more at home in his body again, as though recovering from a bout of fever. “I can get dressed and go down. No need to trouble anyone.”

“No, please stay in this room, Lord Penric,” said Lurenz more firmly. “At least for now.”

He let himself out, the door closing as he paused to speak with the Temple guardsman still standing before it. Despite being safe in the Mother’s hospice, the man bore all his weapons that he had carried on the road. What in the world did he think he needed to guard against in here . . .?

Oh.

The hunger pangs in Pen’s belly seemed to congeal, and he huddled down in his sheets.

* * *

After Pen ate, and a dedicat came to take his tray away, Pen dared to poke his head out into the hallway. The big Temple guard he had seen earlier was gone, replaced by an even bigger fellow in the uniform of the Greenwell Town watch. He looked less like a candidate for the mercenary recruiters than a veteran back from the wars, hard and grim.

“Where did the fellow go who came with . . .” Pen wasn’t sure what to call her, dead sorceress seeming disrespectful though definitive. “With the late Learned Ruchia?”

“The dead sorceress?” said the watchman. “They both went off to witness her funeral, so they pulled me in to stand their post.”

“Should—should I not attend?”

“I was told you are to stay in this room. Lord Penric. Please?” He looked down at Pen and offered an apprehensive smile that took Pen utterly aback.

Helplessly, Pen returned the smile, in the same false measure. “Of course,” he murmured, and retreated.

There being no more comfortable seat in the little chamber than the stool, Pen went back to bed, to sit up hugging his knees and trying to remember everything he’d ever learned about sorcerers and their demons. It seemed meager.

He was fairly sure real ones weren’t much like the ones in children’s tales. They did not call castles to sprout out of the ground like mushrooms for passing lost heroes, or enchant princesses to hundred-year sleeps, or, or . . . Pen was not sure about poison princes, but it seemed to him unlikely to call upon a sorcerer for something an apothecary could do better. Pen’s life so far had been sadly free of heroes, princesses, or princes, in any case.

He was not, upon reflection, at all sure what the real ones did for a living, either when subjected to Temple disciplines, or gone renegade. The common saying was that a man became a sorcerer upon acquiring a demon much as a man became a rider upon acquiring a horse, with the implication that the inept horseman was riding for a fall. But what made a good horseman?

Demons were supposed to begin as formless, mindless elementals, fragments escaped or leaked into the world from the Bastard’s Hell, a place of chaotic dissolution. Pen had a dim mental picture of something like a ball of white wool shot with a prickle of sparks. All that demons possessed of speech or knowledge or personhood was taken from their successive masters, though whether copied or stolen, Pen was unclear. It had seemed a distinction without a difference if they only left with their prizes when their masters died, except . . . maybe not, if the ripped-up souls could not then go on to their god. He was growing uncomfortably sorry he had dozed or doodled through so many of those droning theology lectures in school.

Tales not from the nursery told of demons becoming ascendant within their masters, taking the body for some wild ride while the mind of the man was trapped as a helpless witness within. The demons were careless of injury, disease, or death, since they could jump from their worn-out mount to another like a courier riding relay. And the corrosion of such unchanneled chaos ate away at the sorcerer’s soul.

Except it seemed Learned Ruchia’s soul was expected to go to her god as usual, so maybe that varied as well? Or was it something about the mysterious Temple disciplines that made the difference? Pen had not the first idea what they might be. Was anyone going to think to tell him?

Did the hospice library have any books on the subject, and would they let Pen read them if he asked? But the Mother’s house seemed more likely to house tomes on anatomy and medicines than on the doings of her second Son and his demonic pets.

As night fell, his fretting was relieved by the return of Gans, bearing a load of Pen’s clothes and gear from home and a pair of saddlebags to pack them in. The load exceeded the capacity of the bags, yet certain necessities seemed to be missing.

“Did my brother not send me a sword?” The armory at Jurald Court could surely spare one.

The graying groom cleared his throat. “He gave it to me. Instead, I guess. I’m charged to go along with you on the road to Martensbridge, look after you and all.” Gans did not look best pleased with this proffered adventure. “We’re to leave tomorrow at dawn.”

“Oh!” said Pen, startled. “So soon?”

“Soonest begun, soonest done,” Gans intoned. His goal, clearly, was the done. Gans had always been a man of settled routines.

Pen set about extracting a view of yesterday’s events as Gans had witnessed them, but his laconic account did not add much to what Pen had already imagined, except for a strong sense leaking through that Gans considered it unjust of Pen to encounter such a disaster on Gans’s watch. But his new task, it seemed, was not a punishment; the Temple guards had requested his witness in Martensbridge of the events he had seen.

“I don’t know why,” he grumbled. “Seems to me a scribe could write it down on half a page, and save me the saddle sores.”

Gans took himself off to sleep elsewhere in the old mansion gifted to the Mother’s Order and converted to its present charitable purpose—Pen guessed his own quarantined chamber had once been some servant’s quarters. He turned to the problem of packing his bags. Someone back at Jurald Court had apparently just grabbed all the clothing he owned. The brown suit went on the impractical pile to be returned there in the morning, along with the most threadbare of his unloved hand-me-downs. How long was he to be gone? Where was he going, exactly? What would he need there?

He wondered if packing for the university would have been anything like this. ‘Sorcerer’ had certainly not been on Pen’s former list of scholarly ambitions, but then, neither had ‘theologian’, ‘divine’, ‘physician’, ‘teacher’, ‘lawyer’, or any other high trade taught there—yet another reason for Rolsch’s dubiousness about it all. The Bastard’s Order must have a separate seminary of some sort . . .?

Pen washed in the basin and put himself to bed, there to lie awake too long trying to sense the alien spirit now parasitizing his body. Did demons manifest as a stomach ache? He was still wondering when he finally drifted off.

* * *

Penric carried his saddlebags down to the entry hall in the morning gloom to find a send-off he hadn’t expected in the form of Preita herself, in all her pretty roundness, escorted by a frowning brother and sister.

“Preita!” He went to her, only to have her flinch back, if with a tremulous smile.

“Hullo, Pen.” They stared uncertainly at each other. “I hear you’re going away.”

“Only to Martensbridge. Not to the ends of the world.” He swallowed, and got out, “Are we still to be betrothed?”

Regretfully, she shook her head. “Do you even know when you will return?”

“Er . . . no.” Two days ago, he’d known everything about his future. Today, he knew nothing. He was not sure this change was an improvement.

“So—so you can see how difficult that would be. For me.”

“Uh, yes, to be sure.”

Her hands started to reach out, but then retreated behind her back and consoled each other there. “I am so sorry. But surely you see any girl must be quite afraid to marry a man who could set her on fire with a word!”

He’d dreamed of setting her alight with kisses. “Any man could set a girl on fire with a torch, but he’d have to be deranged!”

This won only an uneasy shrug. “I brought you something. For the road, you know.”

She motioned to her brother, who handed over a large sack that proved, when Pen opened it, to contain a huge wheel of cheese. “Thank you,” Pen managed. He glanced at his bulging saddlebags, and ruthlessly turned to hand it on to the impatiently waiting Gans. “Here. Find a place to pack this. Somehow.”

Gans shot him a beleaguered look, but carried it out.

Preita gave him a jerky nod, but ventured no closer; apparently, he was not to get even one soft farewell hug to see him off. “Good luck, Pen. I will pray that all goes well with you.”

“And I, you.”

The two Temple guardsmen stood outside, holding the saddled horses. The late sorceress’s gear was packed aboard a sturdy cob, where Gans was securing the sack of cheese. Another mount awaited Pen.

He made for it, but paused at a call; it seemed he had one more painful farewell to endure. His mother and Rolsch hurried up as Preita and her siblings hurried away, exchanging awkward nods in passing. His kin looked less harried and exhausted than yesterday, but still unhappy.

“Pen,” said Rolsch, gravely. “The five gods protect you on your road.” He thrust out a small bag of coin, which Pen, surprised, took.

“Wear it around your neck,” his mother told him anxiously. “I hear those cutpurses in the cities can have away with a purse off a man’s belt and he never feels a tug.”

The cord had been lengthened for such prudence; dutifully, Pen obeyed, sneaking a peek within before tucking the soft leather into his shirt. More copper than silver, and no gold, but it made him not quite entirely a beggar at the Temple’s table.

Pen steeled himself to endure the embarrassment of a tearful maternal embrace, but, though Lady Jurald started forward, she stopped much like Preita. She raised her hand in a farewell wave, instead, as though he were turning out of sight and not standing a pace away.

“Be more careful, Pen!” she begged, her voice breaking. She turned back to Rolsch.

“Yes, Mama,” Pen sighed.

He went to his horse. Gans offered him no leg up, not that Pen had any problem lifting his wiry body into a saddle. As he did so, he had the quelling realization that not one person had touched him since whoever had carried him up and dumped him into that bed day before yesterday.

The senior guardsman motioned them forward, and the party rode off up the cobbled main street beneath the whitewash and half-timbering of the houses lining it. No flowers yet brightened their window boxes, in the chill of early spring. Pen turned in his saddle to wave one last time, but his mother and Rolsch were entering the hostel, and did not see.

Pen cleared his throat, and asked the senior guardsman, whose name was Trinker, “Did the Learned Ruchia’s funeral go all right, yesterday afternoon? They didn’t let me attend.”

“Oh, aye. Taken up by her god, all right, signed by that white dove and all.”

“I see.” Pen hesitated. “Can we please stop where she is buried? Just for a moment.”

Trinker grunted but could not gainsay this pious request, so nodded.

The graveyard where the Temple-sworn were buried lay beyond the walls, on the road out of town; they turned aside, and Trinker escorted Pen to the new mound, as yet unmarked, while Gans and Wilrom waited atop their horses.

Nothing much to see, now, in the dawn damp; nothing much to feel, though Pen extended all his exacerbated senses. He bowed his head and offered a silent prayer, the wording haltingly remembered from services for his father, and that other brother who had died when Pen was little, and some aged servants. The grave returned no answer, but something inside him seemed to ease, as if pacified.

He mounted again, and Trinker urged them into a trot as they crossed the covered wooden bridge over the river and the town fell behind.

The bright sunshine of the past two days, like a misplaced breath of summer, was gone, replaced by a more usual misty damp, which would likely turn to a chill drizzle before the morning was out. The high mountains to the north hid their white heads in the clouds, which lay like a gray lid over the wide uplands of Pen’s country. The road followed the river downstream, into what passed in these parts for flatter lands—or at least the valleys widened and the hills shrank.

Pen wondered how soon they would catch a glimpse of the Raven Range, that other long stone hedge on the opposite side of the plateau , dividing the Cantons from the great realm of the Weald to the south.

The Temple guards kept them mostly to a trot, walking up the hills, a rhythm designed to eat the most miles in the least time. It was not the breakneck pace of a courier, but it did assume a change of horses being available, which they took at a noon halt at a Temple way-station. They passed farm carts, pack mules, cows, sheep, and country folk in small villages. Once, carefully, they rode around a company of marching pike men, recruits on their way to being exported to other lords’ wars. Like Drovo, Pen thought. He wondered how many would ever march home. Better it seemed to export cheese or cloth, but it was true that fortunes were made in the military trade. Though seldom by the soldiers, any more than by the cheeses.

While ascending the hills, Pen coaxed their guards to talk a little. He was surprised to learn that they were not Divine Ruchia’s own retainers, but had been assigned to her at the border town of Liest, when she’d crossed out of Darthaca on her way to Martensbridge; likewise the woman servant Marda. Gans was indignant to learn that Marda had been allowed to give a deposition and then head for home. Trinker and Wilrom were quite apprehensive about what their seniors would say when it was learned that they had lost their charge on the road, helpless though they had been to prevent it. They had come prepared to fight bad men, not bad hearts. As for the fumbling of her valuable demon into the chance-encountered younger brother of a minor valley lord . . . no one seemed to be looking forward to explaining that.

At dusk, with forty miles of muddy road behind them, they halted at a modest town that boasted a house of the Daughter’s Order, which took them in. Penric was again shown to a room by himself; a smiling dedicat brought him hot water and food, and he smiled back in gratitude, but she did not linger. A check outside his door found a local guardsman standing sentry. Pen said a hesitant hello and retreated, too tired to mind.

His room was as small as the one at the hospice, but better furnished; chairs with embroidered cushions, a table with a mirror and stool clearly meant for lady guests, something a house of the Daughter of Spring was more likely to host. Pen took advantage by sitting down with his comb, undoing his queue, and attacking the day’s accumulated snarls, which his fine, pale blond hair was prone to.

When he glanced up at the mirror, his mouth said, “Yes, let’s get another look at you.”

Pen froze. Was the demon awake again? His jaw clamped shut; his throat tightened.

How did the thing perceive the world, anyway? Did it share his vision, his hearing? His thoughts? Did it have to take turns looking out, as with his voice, or was it always there, like a bird perched on his shoulder?

He breathed, unlocked his muscles. Said, “Would you like to speak?” And waited.

“Want to look,” said the demon through his mouth. “We want to see what we’ve bought.” Its speech was fairly clear, its accent the cultured Wealdean of the lands around Martensbridge, as Ruchia’s had been.

Pen had not spent much time in front of mirrors since he’d grown big and fast enough to evade older sisters bent on using him as a large doll. His own features, in the glass, suddenly grew strange to him. But his vision did not go black; it seemed the two of them shared his eyes together.

His face, as lean as his body, had good bones, he’d been told. His fair skin was redeemed from its youth by what he hoped was a reasonably assertive nose. Long lashes framed what Mama had fondly called lake-blue eyes. In Pen’s experience lakes were more often gray, green, blinding white with snow, or black glass if frozen on a cold, still night. But on a rare bright summer day lakes could be that color, he supposed.

Nobody else had been talking to him; nobody else had been telling him anything. Had he been missing a chance? He exhaled, relaxed his throat, tried to soften the set of his tired, tense shoulders. To make himself open. “Can you answer questions?”

A snort. “If they’re not too witless.”

“I can’t guarantee that.”

The Hmm from his throat answering this did not seem hostile, at least.

Pen began in the simplest way he could think of. “What’s your name?”

A surprised pause. “My riders call me Demon.”

“That’s like calling your horse Horse, or me Boy. Or Man,” he hastily revised this. “Even a horse gets a name.”

“How would we get a name—Boy?”

“I . . . suppose most names are given. By people’s parents. By creatures’ owners. Sometimes they are inherited.”

A long silence followed this. Whatever the entity had been expecting from him, it evidently hadn’t been this.

His mouth said, hesitantly, “I suppose we could be Ruchia.”

Another voice objected, “But what about Helvia? Or Amberein?”

Yet another voice said something in a language Pen didn’t even recognize, though the cadences seemed to tease his understanding; he thought Umelan might have been another name. More unknown words spouted from his mouth, three voices, four; he lost track till it all ended in an inarticulate growl and a weird squeal.

“How many are you?” asked Pen, startled. “How many . . . generations?” How many riders had this old demon attached itself to, and copied—or stolen—life from?

“You expect us to do arithmetic?”

Pen’s brows went up. “Yes,” he decided.

“There will be a price. He doesn’t know about the price.” That accent was . . . Darthacan?

“Ruchia has lately paid,” said Ruchia’s voice. “That reserve will be long, drawing down.”

A surly pause. “Twelve,” said a voice.

“Only if we count the lioness and the mare,” muttered another. “Must we?”

“So . . . so are you twelve persons, or one?” Pen asked.

“Yes,” said the Ruchia-voice. “Both. At once.”

“Like, um, like a town council?”

“ . . . We suppose.” The voice was not impressed.

“Are—were—you all, er, ladies?”

“It is customary,” said a voice. Though another added, “She was no lady!”

Customary, Pen gathered, for a demon to be handed on to another rider of the same sex. But not, obviously, theologically required, or he wouldn’t be in this fix. Dear gods. Have I just acquired a council of twelve invisible older sisters? Ten, he supposed, if he didn’t count the mare and the, what, lioness? Did either of them have names in their animal tongues to argue about?

“I think you had better have one name,” said Pen. “Though if I want to speak to, to a particular layer of you, that one could have—inherit—her old rider’s name, I suppose.” Twelve? He would sort them out somehow.

“Hmm.” A most dubious noise, of uncertain origin.

“I have two names,” he offered. “Penric, which is my particular name, and Jurald, which is my kin name. The name for all of you could be like your kin name.”

Pen hoped no one was listening to this—all in his voice, ultimately—through the walls. No wonder Marda had believed the sorceress’s utterances incomprehensible. He thought to add, “Did you speak to Learned Ruchia in this fashion?”

“In time,” said the Ruchia-voice, “we had silent speech.”

How much time did that take? Pen wondered. And if it went on long enough, might a man no longer know which voice was his own? He shuddered, but wrenched his mind back to the moment. “You ought to have a name for when I mean all of you, as one. Not Demon. Something nicer than what I’d call a dog, for the five gods’ sakes. How if I pick something? Make it a present.”

The silence this time was so long, he wondered if the creature had gone back to sleep, or into hiding, or whatever it did when he could not feel or hear it. “In twelve long lives,” it said quietly at last, “no one has ever offered us a present.”

“Well, that’s not . . . not an easy thing. I mean, you don’t exactly have a body, so how could anybody give you any material gift? But a name is a thing of the air, of the mind and the spirit, so a fellow could give it to a spirit, right?” He felt he was making headway, here. And because betrothal had been lately on his mind, he tossed in, at a hazard, “A courting gift.”

He had the sense of an explosive Huff! but no sound came with it. Had he thrown a creature of chaos into confusion? That seemed only fair, considering what it was doing to him.

But then the ambiguous voice said, cautiously, “What do you offer? Penric of Jurald.”

He hadn’t actually got that far in his thinking yet. He choked in panic. Steadied himself. Reached for inspiration, and caught it. “Desdemona,” he said, suddenly certain. “I read it in a book of tales from Saone, when I was a boy, and thought it sounded very fine. She was a princess.”

A faint, flattered exhalation through his nose.

“Amusing,” said the Ruchia-voice. It seemed to be the dominant one; was that because it was freshest? Or had the late divine held the creature longest? Or what?

Another long silence; Pen yawned in exhaustion. Were they taking a vote in there? Had he started a civil war in his own gut? That could be bad. He was about to take it all back, when the ambiguous voice said, “Accepted.”

“Desdemona it is, then!” he said, relieved. He wondered if it would shorten to Des, when they grew to know each other better. Like Pen. That could be all right.

“We thank you for your gift of the spirit. Pretty Penric . . .” The voice fell away in a weary whisper, and Pen guessed the uprooted creature was spent for the night.

As was he. He staggered dizzily to bed.

* * *

The next morning’s ride brought them early to the big Crow River at the foot of the Raven Range, where they turned downstream on the main east-west road that followed it. The Ravens, once the mist cleared enough to unveil them, and before the afternoon rains closed in, were greener and less lofty than the fierce icy peaks in whose shadow Pen had grown up, but formidably rugged still. The road crossed the swelling river twice, once over a wooden span and once over a stone bridge with graceful arches, both with tolls collected by the villages that served them. With the spring melt, the Crow ran too high for upstream traffic, but rafts of logs or cargo packed in barrels still made their way down on the spate. Pen thought the nimble raft men must be brave to dare the cold waters, and beguiled an hour imagining himself one of their company.

More than local traffic kept the road a busy one; merchants’ pack trains, small parties of pilgrims, and enclosed wagons were added to the usual farm carts, cows, pigs, and sheep. Three times they passed or were passed by galloping couriers, from towns or the Temple; the latter waved cheerily in return for Pen’s guards’ salutes. Courier, now there was an honorable task a lean, light man might undertake . . . though by the end of that second day’s ride, Pen’s backside was questioning this ambition.

Nightfall brought them to a town at the confluence with the River Linnet, not fifteen miles from their destination and under its territorial jurisdiction. Although it was probably not possible to get lost following the Linnet’s valley upstream to where it drained the big lake at Martensbridge, Trinker ruled that they dare not risk arriving after the town gates closed, and instead found them impromptu, but free, lodging at the local Lady-school.

The Lady-school, dedicated to the Daughter of Spring, was not unlike the one in Greenwell that Pen had attended in his youth, being a couple of rooms on the ground floor of the house where the teachers lodged. It was not appointed for pilgrims like the big chapterhouse of the Daughter’s Order last night—where Pen had been able to sell his cheese to the refectory for a substantial addition to his pocket money—but a private bedchamber was cleared for him nonetheless. Pen did not think this was because he was the most honored guest.

As a prisoner, he had been well treated, but his status was plain. He checked the tiny window, four floors up over the street. If his captors imagined it would hold him, they had reckoned without his slight build or his years spent climbing, either up trees out of reach of Drovo, or in the mountains hunting. He could skin out of their grip in a moment, but—where would he go?

This was like waiting for the physician, that time he’d broken his arm. Uncomfortable, but there was nothing he could do to hurry events. Except, it seemed, continue on to the mysteries of Martensbridge.

He lay down and attempted sleep, only to become aware, after a few minutes, that he was sharing the narrow cot with a family of fleas. He flicked, rubbed, turned again. Or maybe a festival of fleas. Would they celebrate all night? He muttered an imprecation as one bit his calf, beginning the banquet.

“Would you like some help with that?” said Desdemona, amusement lacing her voice.

Pen clapped his hand over his mouth. “Quieter!” he whispered, alarmed. “Wilrom is sleeping right outside the door. He’ll hear.” And think . . . what?

Desdemona obligingly whispered, “We can destroy fleas, you know.”

Pen hadn’t. “Is it permitted?”

“Not only permitted, but encouraged. We must have done in armies of them, over the years. Vermin are not considered theologically protected, even by the Bastard whose creatures they are. And it is a magic that runs safely downhill, from order to disorder.”

“Less disorder for my bed, surely.”

“But great disorder for the fleas,” Desdemona whispered back. Pen’s lips grinned, not by his volition. “The sharpest fall of all, from life to death.”

That last comment was unsettling, but so were the fleas. “Go ahead,” whispered Pen, and lay still, straining to sense whatever was going to happen.

A pulse of heat, a slight flush through his body. Its direction was vague, though it seemed more down from his back, into the mattress, than up from his chest toward the ceiling.

“Twenty-six fleas, two ticks, three beetles, and nine lice,” said Desdemona with a satisfied sigh, like a woman consuming a sweet custard. “And a multitude of moth eggs in the wool stuffing.”

As the first magic he had ever worked, this lacked glamor. “I thought you didn’t do arithmetic?” said Pen.

“Huh.” Pen wasn’t sure if her huff was peeved or pleased. “You pay attention, do you?”

“I’m . . . presently spurred to.”

“Are you,” she breathed.

His bedding might be depopulated, but he was still not alone. It also occurred to him, belatedly, that he didn’t know whether demons could lie. Did they always speak truth to their riders, or could they trick them? Could they cut the cloth of fact to fit their goals, leaving out essential information to reverse its effect? Desdemona was the one . . . person, he decided for simplicity he would think of her as a person, he could not ask. Or rather, he could ask, she might answer, but it wouldn’t help.

Instead, he inquired, “Before Ruchia, were you a, that is, with a Temple sorceress as well?”

“Helvia was a physician-surgeon,” said the Helvia-voice—he might as well start thinking of her as Helvia—in the reassuringly local accent of Liest. “High in the Mother’s Order.”

“And I, Amberein, before her,” said the thick Darthacan accent. “In the Temple school in Saone.”

“I thought you said . . . physicians heal, sorcerers destroy?” said Pen, puzzled anew. “How can you be both?”

“We can do uphill magic as well, but it is very costly,” said Desdemona.

“Some healing is done by destroying,” said Amberein. “Stones of the bladder. Reduction of cysts or tumors. Amputations. Many subtler things.”

“Worms,” sighed Helvia. “You would not believe how many people suffer from worms. Not to mention fleas, lice, and other infestations.” It took a breath, and added, “Which was why, when Helvia’s time ran out, we did not jump to the young physician they had prepared, but to Ruchia. We were so tired of worms. Hah!”

Before Pen could ask what Ruchia had done to make her so preferable, another voice interjected a comment in a language he did not know. “Who was that?”

“Aulia of Brajar,” put in Desdemona. “Good Temple-woman. She spoke no Wealdean, only Ibran, though in time you will come to understand her. Before her, Umelan the Roknari.”

“Roknari!” said Pen, startled. “I thought the Quadrene heretics abjure the Bastard. How came she by a demon in the Archipelago?”

“It’s a long tale, which I’m sure she will tell you—in tedious detail—when you gain her tongue,” soothed Desdemona.

I, gain her tongue? It seemed to Pen that she had gained his, for she used it to make what sounded like a tart rejoinder.

“Can you give me a short tale?” asked Pen.

“She was born in the Archipelago, taken as a slave in a war raid, bought for a servant by Mira, a famous courtesan in the lagoon city of Adria, who possessed us at the time. Mira was untrained, but clever; we’d found in her our best rider yet. When Mira died, we jumped to Umelan, who ran away back home only to find the ill fate meted out to sorcerers on those islands.”

Pen’s imagination, briefly stuck on the courtesan part, raced to catch up. “Which is what?” Not that he had any intention of going to those lands.

“Sometimes they are burned alive, but often, they are taken out to sea and put overboard with a cushion that slowly fills with water and sinks. By the time the sorcerer drowns, the boat will have got far enough away that the demon will have nowhere to jump but to the fishes.”

Both he and Desdemona shuddered at this picture, Pen fancied, if perhaps for different reasons.

Pen’s mouth emitted a spate in that strange language, the words unknown to him but the tone of grievance very clear. Umelan adding her views?

“After her executioners rowed off, but before she was quite drowned, she was spotted by a passing galley from Brajar. The rescue was not much better than the capture, but we were set ashore alive in Brajar and, at a loss for any other course, went supplicant to a house of the Bastard’s Order. It was . . . good, there.” A slight pause, and she added, “For the first time, we were understood.”

Pen counted up on his fingers. Not the whole tally even yet. “And before, uh, Mira of Adria?”

“Rogaska, a serving-woman in the court of the Duke of Orbas. He made a gift of her to Mira. Before her, Vasia of Patos in Cedonia, our first rider who could read and write—a widow, then something of a courtesan as well, after the manner of that city. Which was how she came to die in luxury at the court of Orbas. Roundaboutly.”

Pen blinked. Cedonia? That seemed a country of fable to him, a place for tales to be set far enough away that none could gainsay their wonders. Also said to be warm. He was impressed. And envious. This creature had seen places and peoples that Pen could scarcely dream of.

“Before her, Litikone, a goodwife of the Cedonian northern provinces; before her, Sugane, a village woman in the mountains. She slew the aging lioness when it attacked her goats, all by herself with a rusty spear. She was a proper rider, despite her ignorance! Before that, the wild mare of the hills, that the lioness killed and ate, and before that . . . we know not. Perhaps the white god.”

“Do you, did you, er . . .” Pen was not sure how to put it. “Did you experience all these deaths?”

The voice was dry as dust. “Up to a point.”

But not any balancing births. Not that he remembered his own, either.

As long as he hosted this entity, Pen realized, he need never lack for bedtime stories, though he might lack for the ability to sleep, after.

But not tonight. Helplessly, he yawned, settling back in his warm and flea-less bedding. His voice whispered on for a while in unknown words, like a mountain rivulet, as he drifted off.

* * *

Pen woke aroused, rolled over sleepily, and reached for himself. The room seemed warm and dim and safe and quiet.

His hand had barely touched its target when his mouth commented, “Ooh, I’ve not felt it from this angle before. This should be interesting.”

Pen’s hand froze.

“Don’t stop on our account,” said Desdemona. “Physicians, remember?”

“Yes, don’t be shy. I’ve seen a thousand of ’em.”

“Speak for yourself!”

“Well, I’ve certainly diapered them a thousand times.”

Pen had no idea what the next comment was, and it might just have been the language, but it certainly sounded obscene.

He rolled from the bed and dressed as fast as possible. He couldn’t be out on the road soon enough.

* * *

The Linnet ran green and swift in the spring melt, and surprisingly wide. A few merchants’ boats dared the flood. The road coursed alongside it, with more pack trains going upstream than down. Its valley was hedged by what were, by Pen’s standards, low hills. As they passed the third broken fortification glowering down from these modest crags, he was moved to ask, “What happened to the castles?”

Wilrom and Gans shrugged, but Trinker, craning his neck, said, “Martensbridge did, I heard. Some local lords had taken to robbing merchants outright, though they’d started by calling it tolls. The guilds of the city combined with the princess-archdivine’s troops to destroy the nests that they couldn’t buy out, and made the road safe for all from the lake to the Crow. And all the tolls go to Martensbridge, now.”

Not, Pen reflected sadly, a method of gain Jurald Court might have mimicked; the roads in its reach were more likely to hold herds of cows than rich caravans.

Villages clustered around weirs and mills and, once, a wooden bridge. Then they rounded a curve in the valley and Martensbridge came into view. Pen stared, fascinated.

The place was easily ten times the size of Greenwell. The river bisected it, twice crossed by stone bridges and once by one of timber; buildings of stone as well as wood rose up the slopes, packed behind its walls. Trinker stood in his stirrups, and guessed that the substantial edifice crowning one hill might be the palace of the famous princess-archdivine, and heart, therefore, of his Order in this region. Beyond the city, the wide vista of lake opened out to the north, bordered with farms and fields and vineyards on the lower slopes, dark woods on the steeps. Covered merchants’ boats and open fishing skiffs dotted the ruffled surface. Then more hills, and then, dreamlike on the far horizon, a line of familiar white peaks, briefly making a bow from the curtain of the clouds.

It was not possible to get lost in Greenwell. After they had made their way through the south gate, they discovered that this was not the case for Martensbridge. They rode up and down several streets, all of them paved with cobbles, while Pen gaped at the high houses, the well-dressed men and women, the bright markets, stately merchants and hurrying servants, fine fountains in squares crowded with laundresses, elegant or clever wrought-iron signs for artisans’ shops and guildhalls, windows of stained glass with pictures. Trinker referred again to the scrap of paper holding his directions, looking hot and frustrated.

“Turn left here,” said Pen suddenly, when Trinker made to lead them right. Pen had no idea where the certainty in his voice came from, but everyone followed. “Right here,” he said at the next street. “And up,” at the next intersection. “And here we are.”

Pen sat in his saddle and peered at the stone building, crowded in a row along the steep street with its neighbors. Though narrow, it stood some five floors tall, looking like a lesser guildhall of some sort. It boasted no stained glass. The only marker was a discreet wooden sign over the door showing two hands painted white, loosely closed, one thumb pointing up and the other down. The thumb was the sign and signifier of the Bastard, the one finger on the hand that touched all the others. Aside from that, the place did not look in the least temple-like. Trinker cast Pen a disquieted look, dismounted, and knocked on the door.

It was answered by a porter wearing a tabard with the same two-hand design stitched on it, otherwise in common dress. His glance took in the official badge of the Daughter’s Order and blue and white feathers on Trinker’s hat. “Yes, sir?”

Trinker cleared his throat, awkwardly. “We are the escort of the Learned Ruchia, ridden from Liest. We were told that someone awaited her in this house. We need to see him.”

The porter looked over their party. “Where is the divine?”

“That’s what we need to see somebody about.”

The porter’s brow wrinkled. “Wait here, sir. If you please.” The door closed again.

Pen had to give Trinker credit, he stood his ground, back straight, and did not suggest they all run off. Half of why Pen had not made his escape through his window last night had been the reflection that it would be a cruel trick to play on his guards, who were only carrying out their duties and who had done him no harm. The other half was pure curiosity over what the Bastard’s Order here was supposed to do for him in his predicament, for surely he wouldn’t have been sent all this way unless there was something?

He wondered if the gruesome Roknari ploy with the cushion would work out on that lake. Probably, and swiftly, given the spring chill of the water. He tried to stop thinking.

In a few minutes, the door opened again, the porter escorting an anxious-looking man of middle years, height, and girth, his neatly trimmed beard and hair a graying brown. He wore an ordinary townsman’s gown, belted and soberly hemmed at his knees, over trousers of some dark stuff. The unbleached wool of the tunic only hinted at his allegiance, but the divine’s braid in white, cream and silver pinned to his shoulder made it plain. Easy to remove and pocket if he wished to walk about incognito, Pen wondered?

“I am Learned Tigney,” he said, his glance summing the party. Gans was clearly a groom, the two Temple guards were easy to place; Penric less so, and the gaze caught on him for a moment before going back to Trinker, waiting to speak with his hat in his hands. “I’m told you have news of Learned Ruchia? We were expecting her anytime this week.”

Trinker cleared his throat. “News, sir, but not good. Learned Ruchia was overtaken on the road with a seizure of the heart, some five miles short of Greenwell Town. She passed away before Wilrom”—he nodded at his comrade—“could return with help. The Temple of Greenwell saw her buried there with her due rites—their white dove signed her for her god, all proper. Not knowing what else to do, and being more than halfway here already, we brought on all her clothes and cases, to give to those who should have them.”

Tigney cast him a sharp look. “Not opened, I trust?”

“No, sir,” said Trinker fervently. “She was a sorceress, after all. We didn’t dare.”

Tigney’s posture of relief was short-lived; he tensed again. “But—what happened to her demon? Did it go to her god with her, then?”

“Uh, no.” He nodded toward Pen.

Tigney’s head whipped around. Pen offered a weak smile and a little wave of his fingers. “Here, sir. I’m afraid.”

“Who . . .?” Tigney gave him a long, pole-axed stare. “You had better come inside.”

He told off the porter to take Ruchia’s things to his chambers, which resulted in a bustle of unloading from the packsaddle into the hall, then sent him off with Gans and Wilrom to deliver the horses to some nearby mews that kept a place for Temple beasts.

“This way.” He led Penric and Trinker up one flight to a small, well-lit room overlooking the street. Seeming a cross between a scholar’s study and a counting house, it held a table cluttered with papers and writing tools, a scattering of chairs, and some jammed shelves. Pen eyed them and wondered why a divine of the Bastard should have twenty or so courier dispatch cases lined up.

Tigney scrubbed his hand through his beard and gestured them to sit. “And you are . . .?” he continued to Pen.

“Penric kin Jurald of Jurald Court, near Greenwell Town, sir.” He wondered if he was obliged to introduce Desdemona. “My eldest brother Rolsch is lord of that valley.”

“How came you to—no. Begin at the beginning, or there will be no making head nor tail of things.” He turned to Trinker, and efficiently extracted an account of his doings from the time he was assigned to escort the divine at Liest until the disaster at Greenwell. The party seemed to have traveled rather more slowly than with Pen.

“But why were you on that road at all?” asked Tigney, a plaintive note in his voice. “It’s not the most direct route from Liest to Martensbridge.”

Trinker shrugged. “I know, sir. The divine told us to go that way.”

“Why?”

“She said she’d shuttled back and forth from Liest to Martensbridge on the main road three dozen times in her life, and wanted a change of scene.”

“Did she say anything else about why she chose that course? Or was it just caprice? Any hint or strange comment?”

“No, sir . . .?”

Tigney’s lips twisted, taking this in, but then he blew out his breath and went on. “There was a woman servant, you say? But then why didn’t—where is she?”

“Went back to Liest, sir. The Greenwell divine took her sworn deposition, first. Should it go to you?”

“Yes, for my sins.”

Trinker pulled out this document and handed it across; Tigney unsealed and read it, his frown deepening, then set it aside with an unsatisfied sigh.

Pen ventured, “Learned, do you know of these things? Sorcerers, and demons and . . . things?”

Tigney began to speak, but then turned his head at a knock on the door. It proved to be Wilrom and Gans, delivered back. With all the witnesses present, the divine turned to their accounts of Ruchia’s death, each offered with slightly different details but clearly congruent. Pen thought Gans’s description of him “flopped over as gray and limp as a dead eel,” was unduly blunt. Tigney collected Pen’s own testimony last: final words, purple flashes, and mysterious voices dutifully not left out, even though it made everyone stare at him in alarm except his interrogator, who seemed to take them as a matter of course.

Tigney then asked an intent string of questions ascertaining that there was no way Pen or anyone else at Jurald Court could ever have met Ruchia before, or known about her in any way, before the chance meeting on the road. The divine compressed his lips and turned to Pen once more.

“Since you awoke from that long swoon, have you felt or experienced anything unusual? Anything at all.”

“I had a very bad headache, but it wore off by the time we left Greenwell.” And no one will touch me, I have been summarily unbetrothed, and I have been made a prisoner even though I have committed no crime. Best leave that out. Tigney was just beginning to relax when Pen added, “Also, night before last the demon woke up and began talking to me.”

Tigney went still. “How?”

“Er . . . through my mouth?”

“Are you sure of this?”

Pen couldn’t tell what to make of that question. Did Tigney suppose him to be delirious or hallucinating? Was that common among the newly bedemoned? “I know it wasn’t me. I don’t speak Ibran. Or Roknari, Adriac, or Cedonian. She was really chatty once she got started. Also argumentative.” Ten women all stuck together, no wonder. Or their ghosts, disturbing thought. Images of their ghosts was scarcely better.

Tigney took this in, then rose and went to shout down the staircase for the porter, whose name was apparently Cosso. Or perhaps, Cosso! “See that these three men are fed,” he ordered the fellow, shepherding Gans and the guards out. “Find a place in the house for Lord Penric’s groom, tonight.” He reassured the guards, “We’ll send you two to lodge with your own Order at the palace temple, but don’t leave before I have a chance to speak to you again.”

He closed the door on them all, then turned and studied Pen. Pen looked hopefully back. At length he placed a hand on Pen’s brow and intoned loudly, “Demon, speak!”

Silence. It went on until Pen stirred in discomfort. “I’m not stopping her,” he offered. “She may sleep during the day. So far, she’s only talked to me before bed.” The only times he’d been alone?

Tigney scowled and deployed that commanding voice once more. “Speak!”

“Should I try?” said Pen brightly, growing nervous. He softened his tone. “Desdemona, could you please say something to Learned Tigney, here, so he doesn’t think I’ve gone mad or, or that I’m lying? Please?”

After a long moment, his mouth said mulishly, “We don’t see why we should. Cowardly demon-destroyer. Ruchia may have thought him diligent, but we always thought him a prig.”

Pen’s hands sprang to his flushing face as if to dam this alarming spate; he lowered them cautiously. “Sorry, sir. She seems to be a bit opinionated. Er . . . had you two met before?”

“I’ve known—knew”—he made a pained hand-wave at the correction—“Ruchia these twenty years. Though only after she acquired her mount.”

Pen said hesitantly, “I’m sorry for your loss. Were you friends, then?”

“Say colleagues. She had the training of me when I first contracted my demon.”

“You’re a sorcerer, too?” said Pen in surprise.

“I was. Not anymore.”

Pen swallowed. “You didn’t end it by dying.”

“No. There is another way.” The man could certainly put the grim in grimace. “Wasteful, but sometimes necessary.”

Pen wanted to follow this up, but instead Tigney began asking him all about his childhood and youth at Jurald Court. It seemed to Pen to make a short and boring biography.

“Why did you stop on the road?” he asked at last.

“How could I not? The lady appeared to be in grave distress.” Which had turned out to be all too true. “I wanted to help.”

“You might have volunteered to ride for the town.”

Pen blinked. “I didn’t think of that. It all happened so fast. Wilrom was already galloping off by the time I dismounted to see what was going on.”

Tigney rubbed his forehead, and muttered, “And so all is in disarray.” He looked up and added, “We had expected to house Learned Ruchia at the palace temple, but I think you’d best stay here, for now. We’ll find you a room.” He went again to shout for Cosso; when the man arrived, he gave more orders as a master might. Was Tigney very senior, here? This was plainly a house for functionaries, for the practical business of the Temple, not for worship or prayer.

“What do you do in the Bastard’s Order, sir?”

Tigney’s brows rose. “Did you not know? I oversee all the Temple sorcerers of this region. Comings and goings, assignments and accounts. I’m a bailiff of sorcerers, if you like. And you know how much everyone loves bailiffs. Thankless task. But Bastard knows they do not organize themselves.”

“Must I stay in my room?” Pen asked as he was ushered into the hallway.

Tigney snorted. “If the demon is already awake, it is probably pointless to try to hold you, but I request that you not depart the house without my leave. Please.” That last seemed dragged out of him, but he did sound earnest.

Pen nodded. “Yes, sir.” One building seemed enough of Martensbridge for the moment. He didn’t think he could get lost in here.

“Thank you,” said Tigney, and added to the porter, “Send the two Daughter’s men to me again, then the servant Gans. And let Clee know that I will be needing him later, and not to go off.”

Pen followed the man out.

* * *

The porter led Pen to the top floor, given over to a series of tiny rooms for servants or lesser dedicats. The chamber to which he was gestured did have a window, with a battered table shoved up to it, holding a basin, mismatched ewer, a few grubby towels, a shaving mirror, and someone’s razor kit. It was flanked by two cots. There were other signs of occupation—pegs hung with clothing, a chest at the foot of one cot, boots scattered about, more possessions pushed under both beds. The second cot had been cleared, with Pen’s saddlebags dumped atop. A supper would be served below-stairs for the house’s denizens at dusk, Cosso told him before departing; Pen was pleased to be invited. Apparently, his exile from human contact was ended, if only for lack of space. He hoped the room’s resident would not be too dismayed by his imposed guest. At least he wouldn’t have to share a bed with a stranger, as sometimes happened in crowded inns.

Finding cold water still left in the ewer, Pen washed the road dirt from his hands and face, pulled a few things from his saddlebags for later, and sat on the edge of the cot, trying to overcome his disorientation.

“Desdemona? Are you there?” A stupid way to phrase it. Where, and how, would she go? “Are you awake?”

No answer. After few more minutes of sitting, bone-tired but not sleepy enough to nap, his mood shifted to frustration. Tigney had implied he had the run of the house, hadn’t he? If no one else was going to show him how to go on, he’d just have to figure it out for himself. He rose to explore.

Nothing else on this floor but more servants’ cells. The next floor down was mostly closed doors, if fewer of them; the one left open gave onto someone’s bedchamber. Pen let only his glance stray within. The next floor down from that had more open doors, to workrooms like Tigney’s, with people about, though what tasks they performed therein were not at all obvious to Pen. He poked his head into the large, quiet room that he gauged was above Tigney’s, and stopped short.

It was the house’s library, and Pen had never seen so many books and scrolls in one room in his life. Even the Greenwell Lady-school had only boasted one bookcase, the entire contents of which Pen had read up by his second year. There was no tradition of scholarship among his ancestors, either; Jurald Court had account books, records of hunts and harvests, a few books of tales shared around till the pages had worked loose, a couple of tomes of theology left to gather dust. Pen stepped within, marveling.

A pair of long writing tables stood endways to the two windows overlooking the street, sharing the light as fairly as possible. One was taken by a fellow who looked not much older than Pen—heartening—his head bent over his work, quill carefully scratching. His dark hair was cut soldier-fashion, as if to pad a helmet, though it showed no sign of a helmet ever having rested there. By the stack of cut and scored blank sheets to his left, the smaller stack of filled ones to his right, and the book propped open on a wooden stand in front of him, he was working as a copyist.

He glanced up at Pen and frowned, not welcoming interruption. Pen tried smiling, with a silent little wave to indicate his friendliness and harmlessness and general willingness to be greeted, but the man merely grunted and returned his eyes to his page-in-progress. Taking the rebuff in good part, Pen shifted his attention to the shelves.

One whole floor-to-ceiling case appeared to be theology, no surprise in this place. Another was devoted to chronicles, mostly of other times and realms; Pen’s own land was more noted for producing cheese than history, he feared. Some ancient, fragile scrolls resided on a set of shelves all to themselves, with corded silk tassels hanging down holding slips of wood inked with titles for each, which he dared not touch. He was thrilled to spot a collection of what appeared to be books of tales, looking well thumbed. Then a tall case of works in Darthacan, of which Pen had a grasp his Lady-school teachers had grudgingly pronounced adequate; a couple of shelves of works in unreadable Ibran; and then another entire shelf in the ancient tongue of Cedonia, with its exotic letters.

Pen had only seen fragments of the mysterious language before, on old coins or carved on the fallen temple ruins above the road to Greenwell, lone legacy in his hinterland of an empire that had, over a millennium ago, stretched two thousand miles from the warm Cedonian peninsula to the cold Darthacan coast. Scholars described it as fleetingly glorious, like some shooting star, but three hundred years of such ascendency did not seem so fleeting to Pen. In any case, after those swift generations it had fallen apart again, split and re-split among revolts and generals just as Great Audar’s empire out of Darthaca was to do hundreds of years later, when his heirs failed.

Pen’s hand went out to a work bound in waxed cloth, a modern copy and so not too daunting, with its title inked enigmatically on its spine in the beautiful letters. Wondering who had copied it out, he let it fall open in his hand just to see the calligraphy, as lovely as scrollwork or interlace and about as informative.

Instead, his eye picked out a paragraph: “In the sixth year of the reign of Emperor Letus dubbed The Engineer, for so he had served in his youth in the armies of his uncle, undermining the fortifications of his enemies, before the second plague made him heir, he caused to be built the first aqueduct of the city, nine miles from the springs of the Epalia, watering the gardens of his Empress and piped to new fountains throughout the town, for the health and pleasure of its inhabitants . . .”

Pen gasped and squeezed his eyes shut. After a few moments, he peeked again, very cautiously. Still the same elegant, alien lettering. But now they had become words, their meanings flowing into his mind as effortlessly as any Wealdean text.

“I can read this!” he whispered aloud in astonishment.

“Oh, good,” said Desdemona. “We’d hoped you’d be a quick study.”

“But I can’t read this!”

“In time,” she replied, “you will come to know most of what we know.” A pause. “That runs both ways.”

Pen snapped his jaw shut, trying to master his sudden unsteadiness. He could only think that he would have the better part of that exchange.

A bored voice remarked from behind him, “The librarian should be back soon, if you need help.”

“Thank you,” Pen managed, turning and smiling. “Just, um, talking to myself, here. Bad habit. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”

The man shrugged, but did not return at once to his page.

“What are you working on?” asked Pen, nodding to the papers.

“Just a collection of tales.” He ticked at the volume with his fingernail, dismissively. “Stupid stuff. The important books go to the senior dedicats.”

“Still, I’d think you’d learn a lot, doing that. Do you ever make up the blocks of wood to print many copies? I’ve heard they do that in Martensbridge.”

“Do I look like a woodcarver?” He wriggled his inky hand. “Though that work, and the pay for it, also goes to the seniors.”

“You are a dedicat?” Pen hazarded. The scribe wore no braids or badges, just ordinary town dress of tunic and trousers. “Lay, or Temple-sworn?”

He stretched his shoulders and grimaced. “Sworn. I mean to make acolyte soon, if all the places don’t go to those who brought richer dowries.”

One of the several routes into the Bastard’s Order, Pen had heard, was for the families of children born out of wedlock to dedicate them to the Temple, together with a portion for their keep. That is, if the families were well-off. Poor foundlings were left more anonymously, and cheaply, at the orphanages. Not liking to ask for clarification, lest this be a sore issue for the fellow, Pen said instead, “At least it’s indoor work. Not like herding cows.”

The man smiled sourly. “You a cowherd, country boy?”

“At need,” Pen confessed. The scribe’s tone made it sound a low task, rather than the occasional outdoor holiday Pen had found it, but then, it hadn’t been Pen’s daily portion without relief. “And haying,” he added. “Everyone turns out for the harvest, high or low.”

The hunting in the mountains had been a happier chore. He’d had good luck with wild sheep, often able to take one down with a single arrow, not to mention being most nimble at retrieving carcasses from awkward slopes and ledges, a task to which his servants had cheered him on with suspicious enthusiasm. It was the one activity that had reconciled Pen to the god naturally apportioned to his age and sex. The Son of Autumn’s rule over comradeship-in-arms had less appeal, if Drovo and his friends had been anything to go by.

“Cowherds. Why?” the fellow muttered, and dipped his quill again, incurious of an answer.

An older woman entered, carrying a stack of books. An acolyte’s looped braid hung on the shoulder of proper white Temple robes, and a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles swung by a ribbon around her neck. Martensbridge was noted for its glasswork; perhaps ordinary people could afford such rich aids here? Certainly this must be the librarian. She stopped and stared at Pen, more interested than hostile. “And who are you?”

He ducked his head. “Penric kin Jurald, ma’am. I’m a . . . visitor.” Because that sounded better than prisoner. “Learned Tigney said I might go about the house.”

Her brows rose in surprise at the divine’s name. “Really.”

Pen couldn’t tell from her tone if she thought that good or bad, but he forged on. “I was wondering if you had any books on sorcery or demons. Practical ones,” he added prudently, lest he be gifted with some thick tome in a high and soporific style. He didn’t see how the subject could be made boring, but he’d read—well, tried to read—some theological works from Learned Lurenz’s shelves, and didn’t underestimate the determined drabness of Temple scholars.

She took a step back, her head coming up. “Such books are restricted to those of the rank of divine and above. I’m afraid, young man, you have not yet earned the braids for them.”

“But you must have such books, yes?” Somewhere. He’d seen none in his survey of the shelves.

Her glance went to a tall wardrobe set against the far wall. “Locked up, certainly. Or they would quickly become the most stolen of our treasures.”

Pen stared with fresh interest at the capacious cabinet, wondering how many books it might hold. “If a divine said it was all right, would it be all right?” Could, or would, Tigney give permission?

“Such authorizations are possible, yes, but there must be need. What do you imagine your need to be?” She smiled at him with the ironic air of a woman long experienced in resisting the blandishments of her juniors angling for forbidden treats. Well, he’d always been able to get around the Jurald Court cooks . . .

“Ah, you see, I lately contracted a demon of my own, from a Temple sorceress who died on the road at Greenwell. It was an accident, truly it was, but if Desdemona and I are going to be stuck with each other, I think I’d better know more about what I’m doing than I do. Which is almost nothing, so anything at all you could lend me would be a start.” He smiled his most hopeful smile at her, trying for maximum sunniness. Trustworthiness, too; he should definitely try to look trustworthy.

Evidently, he failed, for she took a hastier step backward, her hand going to her throat. She frowned at him for a long, long moment. “If that is a jape, young man, I will have your hide for binding leather. Wait here.” She set down her armload of books on the table and hurried out again.

Pen’s glance went again to the now-riveting cabinet, and he wondered if she could possibly mean that threat literally. A librarian of the demon-god, after all . . .

The quill had stopped scratching, and Pen turned to find the dedicat-scribe staring at him as if he’d sprouted antlers from his head. “How did you come by a demon?” he asked, astonished.

Getting practiced by now, Pen recited the short tale, summing the disaster in as few sentences as he could make sound coherent. Fairly coherent.

The scribe’s wide eyes narrowed. “You know, none below the rank of divine are allowed to receive a Temple demon, and the gift of its sorcery. It’s considered a high and rare accomplishment. Men compete just for a place in line, studying and preparing, then wait for years.”

Pen scratched his head. “There must be other accidents, from time to time. I mean, you can’t control the time or place of a person’s death.” Well . . . there was one sure way that sprang to Pen’s mind, but he’d heard no rumors of the Temple doing that.

Lips compressed, the scribe just shook his head.

The librarian returned with Learned Tigney in tow. Pen brightened.

“Oh, sir! May I be permitted to read the books here?” He gestured to the locked cabinet. “You certainly can’t say I don’t have need.”

Tigney sighed. “Lord Penric, I’ve only just begun to unpack the Learned Ruchia’s cases. I’ve no idea yet what needs I am going to find in this tangle.” He eyed Pen, who returned his best starving-boy look. The divine’s expression did not so much soften, as grow shrewd. “But, while you wait, you might certainly have leave to read the books from the other shelves, here in this room when it is open. That would keep you occupied for a time, I should think.”

And feet fastened in one place, too, Pen fancied was the unspoken cap to that. But Tigney hadn’t, actually, said No, never. “Indeed, sir.” He tried to project dutiful resignation, pending a rematch. He realized he still had the Cedonian chronicle in his hand, and lowered his voice, showing the book to Tigney.

“When I opened this book, I found I could read it. Is that . . . usual?”

Tigney’s lips quirked up. “If you are a Cedonian, I suppose.”

Pen mustered a feeble smile at the heavy humor. Better than anger or thunderous forbiddings, certainly. “But I’m not. I had not a word of it until, well, just now.”

His witticism duly rewarded, Tigney granted Pen a short nod of reassurance. “Yes, it’s usual. If any demon serves a master long enough, it will take up an imprint of its rider’s mother tongue. And pass it along, in due course. Ruchia had half-a-dozen such languages at her command, all spoken as a native. Very useful to her, and to the Temple.”

“Was she a great scholar, then?”

Tigney hesitated. “Not as such.” He eyed Pen a moment more. “You were very quick to absorb it, though. It more often requires some weeks or months for such knowledge to, so to speak, leak through. But then, Ruchia’s was an unusually old and powerful mount.” He drew breath. “It is going to take me some time yet to sort through Ruchia’s effects. I may want to speak to her old demon directly, as the most intimate, if not necessarily the most reliable, witness to her affairs. If you might hold yourself in readiness here for that, I should be most grateful.”

“Certainly, sir,” said Pen, deciding to take this half-victory while he could get it. “Although . . . I don’t seem to control her speaking.”

“You do; you just don’t know it yet.”

Pen bit back another bid for the cabinet. It wasn’t as though he was going to be able to read all these books in a day anyway.

Tigney went on, “Or rather, if it controlled you, you would most certainly know it.” He looked away, grimly, making Pen wonder again about the former sorcerer’s somehow-discarded demon.

The divine turned to the shamelessly listening scribe, who had stopped even pretending to write. “Clee, when you are done with that page, come downstairs. I’ve some letters need copied before they go out.”

“Yes, sir,” said the scribe, with a dutiful wave of his quill, and went back to diligent scratching.

Tigney motioned the librarian after him; Pen glimpsed them making some low-voiced exchange out in the hall, punctuated by glances his way, after which Tigney departed and the librarian came back. She gave Pen a provisional sort of nod in passing, and took up her mysterious business at a desk in the corner.

Overwhelmed by his choices, Pen started to make for the shelf of tales, but instead went to sit at the second table and reopen the Cedonian chronicle, driven by a faint, irrational fear that his newfound skill might desert him as abruptly as it had arrived, and he’d better seize this chance while he could. A chronicle was as good as a tale, anyway, imperial courts seeming almost as fantastical as ogres’ lairs. And he really wanted to find out more about the emperor who was an engineer, who had made fountains for his people. It seemed a strangely un-imperial task; weren’t emperors supposed to go around conquering people? Which was how they became emperors, one presumed.

The scribe Clee finished his page, tidied his supplies on a shelf, and departed, with a sort of grunt-nod in Pen’s direction; not exactly a friendly farewell, but politely acknowledging his existence. Pen returned a smile and head-duck, feeling like an envoy signing a truce to a skirmish he had not known was being fought. The librarian didn’t leave until the light failed and Pen went down to seek supper. She locked the outer door carefully behind them both.

* * *

Supper, plain food but abundant, was served in a whitewashed cellar refectory with a long table. Not all of the dedicats and acolytes who worked here were fed here, Pen discovered, as some lived in lodgings nearby, or were married. Tigney wasn’t present, but Clee was, and not-uncordially waved Pen to a seat on the bench next to him, where he was introduced merely as “a visitor.” Pen, tired out and hungry, was content to listen, and not talk much; Clee turned off any questions that drew too near to the real matters that had brought Pen to Martensbridge. Mostly younger folk, the dedicats gossiped, exchanged comments about their work, which seemed to be mostly administrative, ate fast, and hurried off.

The servants had the next turn at the table; coming out, Pen met Gans coming in. The groom seemed contented enough to have nothing to do and all food provided for the next few days, but still asked, “When can we go home, Lord Penric?”

“I don’t know yet,” Pen admitted. “Learned Tigney seems to be the man to decide, after he goes through Learned Ruchia’s effects.” How hard could that task be? They had all fit on one packsaddle, and had been mostly women’s clothes. Well . . . except for the demon. “I guess he’s her executor, of sorts.”

Gans accepted this with a glum grunt, and Pen followed Clee upstairs, where he discovered that it was the scribe’s room he was sharing. He didn’t seem as put-out to lose his privacy as Pen might have feared. The rule of the house was early to bed and rise at first light, so Pen, too, readied himself to lie down. Truly, this day felt a year long, so crowded with changes as it had been. Clee did not blow out their shared candle at once, but rather, asked a few leading questions about Pen’s family as rustic lords of what Pen was beginning to realize must seem quite a minor mountain valley.

“Are you from this city?” Pen asked in turn. The scribe seemed sophisticated enough to be.

“I am now,” said Clee. “I wasn’t born here. I was born at Castle Martenden, about ten miles up the lakeshore. My brother is baron there.”

“Oh, the same as Rolsch,” said Pen, pleased to find some connection. “You are Dedicat Lord Clee, then?”

Clee grimaced. “I should say, my half-brother.”

“Ah,” said Pen. After an awkward moment, he offered, “I have a half-uncle, who farms near Greenwell. I like him. His wife is always very kind to me.” These thing happen, Pen hoped this implied. Not a problem.

Clee snorted. “Castle Martenden is not just some fortified farmhouse. Kin Martenden have been great landholders in these parts for centuries.”

Pen thought this an unjust description of Jurald Court. Or at least, it ought to be large, sprawling fortified farmhouse.

“My brother is at loggerheads with the city, which covets his lands and rents and rights,” Clee went on. “The city fathers grow big in their own esteem. They’ve bought out a dozen minor lordships already that fell into their debt. I think the merchant guilds conspire to net the foolish that way.”

Pen remembered the ruins on the road in, and thought the city’s outlying district might have grown as much by force of arms as mercantile trickery. Although, he supposed, wealth must come first, before arms could be bought. Martensbridge was a royal free town, its charter making it unbeholden to any lords except the Hallow King of the Weald himself. It stood oddly balanced between its distant lord, and its treaties with its nearer neighbor cities with their more varied allegiances. Pen’s impression was that Martensbridge felt itself a lot more free than royal, and recalled the joking prayer an acolyte had told him over dinner: Five gods bless and keep the Hallow King—far from us!

“What about the princess-archdivine?” Pen asked. “I’ve never met a princess. Or an archdivine, for that matter. I hope I might get a chance to see her before I go home. Is she very beautiful?”

Clee vented a laugh. “She’s fifty.”

Pen supposed princesses in tales always seemed to be young and lovely because when they grew older they became queens. The princess-archdivine’s title was more political, and unrelated to her marital status. “I suppose even royal princesses can have callings.”

Clee shrugged. “The archdivineship of Martensbridge has been a dumping ground for Wealdean royal spares for centuries. I’ll give this one credit, though, she’s powerfully shrewd. Besides managing Temple lands, she’s fostered the silk makers here, which has brought even more coin to her hands, which has allowed her to buy yet more territory. No one knows what will happen when the city and the princess run out of other fodder, and have to start in eating each other.”

With that ambiguous remark, Clee blew out the candle and rolled over. Pen, eyelids weighted with exhaustion, did not even attempt to talk to Desdemona.

* * *

For the next two days Pen sat in the library and read, trooped downstairs to eat, and smiled shyly at people who all seemed too busy to talk to him, save, sometimes, Clee, when taking a stretch from his scribal work. The locked cabinet was an itch at the corner of his eye.

Pen supposed even librarians had to go to the garderobe sometime, but this one never left the room unless there were other persons present; another copyist or two, or dedicats or acolytes reading and taking notes. None of the valuable books were allowed to be removed and read elsewhere save by divines of the highest ranks, of which there seemed to be three or four here besides Tigney, and even they received stern looks and admonitions along with their volumes.

Pen finished the fascinating Cedonian chronicle, and started another in Darthacan. He discovered his reading in that language had somehow become far more fluid and swift—he didn’t have to stop and think through the sentences, and he seemed to know many more words than he’d ever learned in the Greenwell Lady-school. A slimmer chronicle in comfortable Wealdean supplied a short history of Martensbridge. The marsh hamlet at the outlet of the long lake had acquired its name when an earlier lord of kin Martenden had built the first stone bridge, the text asserted, convincingly enough. The improved roads had brought increasing wealth. Somewhat unfairly, Pen thought, kin Martenden had lost control of the growing town when their own overlord’s family died out, and the greater territory fell to a prince of the Weald. The town had bought or won or bribed—on this, the chronicle was unclear, but it seemed to involve lending money to the right lords with hungry armies—its first royal charter soon thereafter, swept in under the cloak of the princess-archdivine, and never let to lapse thereafter. Glass- and silk-makers came down from the north over the high passes from Adria and Saone, metal-workers from Carpagamo, and settled in the new free town. Caravans arrived from as far away as the reduced modern descendant of the Cedonian Empire, ah! Pen wondered if he might meet such travelers in the marketplaces or counting houses, and test his new tongue.

The chronicle claimed that Great Audar had once resided here, and told a legend of a bargain he made with a helpful talking marten that somehow resulted in a blessing for the locality, and a more exciting source of its name. Pen had read of that legend appended to at least two other towns, one with a snake and one with a hawk, though both with Great Audar, which made him distrust the book’s author just a little. Apart from the talking animals. While there were rumors about the Hallow King’s strange, secretive cadre of royal shamans having some special understanding of the kin animals of their land, Darthacan Audar had been the bitter enemy of the Old Weald and its forest magics in his long-ago day, so Pen didn’t think this could be some oblique reference to those mysterious practices.

By the third day, although his mind was still wildly excited by the written riches in the room, Pen’s eyes were burning, and his not-well-padded haunches were rethinking his calling as a scholar much as they had a career as a courier. Besides, for the first time this week it had stopped drizzling and the sun was out. Desperate for movement, he went down to see Tigney.

The divine’s door was open; Pen leaned on the frame, cleared his throat, and ventured, “How goes it, sir? Is there anything I can do here? To help? Any task at all?”

“A task . . .?” Tigney leaned back from his writing table and regarded Pen thoughtfully. “I suppose you are a mountaineer. Not used to being cooped up all day, I daresay.”

“The library is very fine, but that’s so, sir. Even in the winter, we hunted in the lower forests every week, or ran the trap lines.”

“Hm.” Tigney drummed his fingers on the scarred tabletop, then gestured to a neat stack of clothing folded on a chair. “Ruchia had no heirs of the body. Often in such cases a Temple sorcerer’s possessions are willed to their successor along with their demon, but Ruchia left no directive with me. You cannot wear her clothes, but if you would like to run an errand, you could take them to the garment merchant on Elm Street, and turn them into money for the Order.”

A modest task, but it would allow Pen to walk about the town. And, if he performed it well, Tigney might find other work for him. Being the errand boy of this house couldn’t be worse than being the errand boy of Jurald Court. He’d never felt a calling before to serve the gods, but who knew? “Certainly! I’d be glad to.”

While Tigney gave him more precise directions to Elm Street, Pen went to tie up the bundle. His hand hesitated.

“I think you do not want to sell this one, sir.” It was an elaborate, embroidered skirt. Pen shook it out, puzzled. It seemed just a skirt, if heavy. Why had he said that?

Tigney’s brows rose. “I thought I’d checked them all. Ah—was that you, who spoke just now?”

“Not sure, sir.” Pen ran the long hem through his fingers, which found an unsewn slot. Poking within, he drew out a folded length of thin cloth. He shook it free to find it covered all over with fine writing, in none of the languages he recognized. No, it is a cipher. What?

Tigney held out his hand in demand; Pen delivered both skirt and cipher. “Ah!” said Tigney. “Cloth, not parchment. No wonder I felt nothing. Clever Ruchia!” He glanced up rather sharply at Pen. “Are there any more like this?”

“I . . . don’t know.”

Pen didn’t feel there were, but Tigney ended up prodding through every hem and fold in the stack to be sure. He then sat up and read the message on the cloth, without referring to any cipher-book. Leaning back with a relieved sigh, he muttered, “Nothing too difficult, then. Thank His Whiteness. I think.”

Pen swallowed. “Sir—was Learned Ruchia a spy?” That frail old woman?

Tigney waved a hand in vigorous negation.

“Certainly not! A trusted agent of the Temple, yes, able to sail smoothly through some very troubled waters, I will give her that.”

Pen took in this evasion. He was pretty sure it came out to a yes. Which made Tigney . . . her spymaster? Neither personage fit his mental image of either role. He smiled hesitantly and said nothing.

As Pen bundled up the cloth once more and made for the door, Tigney added kindly, “You can keep half of whatever you can sell them for.”

“Thank you, sir!” Pen waved and left quickly, before Tigney could change his mind about either the errand or its reward, after the capricious manner of seniors.

Safely out of earshot on the steep street, Desdemona snappishly remarked, “Half! Tigney is a cheeseparing drudge. You should have had it all.”

So, she hadn’t been asleep. “I thought it very generous. He didn’t need to offer me any. Also”—he grinned—“he forgot to tell me when I had to be back.”

“Humph,” said Desdemona, sounding amused. “Well, we do like a truant.”

Pen took the long way to Elm Street, down to the river and along it past the old stone bridge to a market, still busy even though it was early afternoon. He stood a while and listened to a pair of musicians, one with a fiddle and the other with a skin drum, set up to amuse the crowd with silly or mournful songs, a hat at their feet upturned invitingly. Pen reflected that unlike all the other vendors here, they could not call back their merchandise if the bargain was bad, and fished a few precious coppers out of his thin purse for the hat before continuing down the quayside.

At a low point of the embankment wall, he set the clothing bundle down and leaned over, trying to see up the river to the lake. He might need a higher vantage. “Desdemona . . . is music a good gift of the spirit?”

“Oh, aye. We like a good song.”

“What about knowledge? Reading?”

“That’s good, too.”

“Were you reading along with me, these past days? Over my shoulder, as it were?”

“Sometimes.”

“Should I do that more?”

“To please me, do you mean?” She sounded disconcerted.

“Well . . . yes, I guess so.”

A long silence, then: “Those things are all interesting, but it is the share of your body that is my daily gift, without which I could not maintain existence in this world. Or in any other. So gifts of the body are actually very acceptable.”

“That would be . . . my body, right? Things done for my body?” said Pen, trying to work this out. Not that he could maintain his own existence in the world without it, either.

“Have you any other body? I don’t.”

“At present.” Though the demon had shared a dozen other bodies before his. Would she share more, after . . .?

His memory reverted, unwilled, to the interrupted morning bed activities back at the Lady-school, and his face heated. However discomfited he had been, sooner or later his body was going to have its way about that, chatty audience or no. Not that he hadn’t been willing to share that intimacy with Preita, in prospect. And this was different, how . . .?

Desdemona drew a long breath. “Think of how a good rider maintains his favorite horse. Brushed and glossy and well fed. Sound shoes. Carefully exercised and trained, and taken out for fast gallops. Ribbons braided in its mane, fine saddles and bridles to make a show, maybe trimmed with silver or colored glass beads. A steed to be proud of.”

Wait, I thought I was supposed to be the rider . . .? All these equine metaphors were growing befuddling.

“In short,” said Desdemona briskly, “as we have never had an actual lord before, could you at least try to dress like one?”

Pen snorted, eyeing the sleeve of his countryman’s smock. “I’m afraid this is how actual lords dress, when their purses are as flat as kin Jurald’s.” Also, the demon was beginning to sound disturbingly like his sisters again, which sat uncomfortably with the thoughts he’d been having just before she’d gone off about horses.

“Put another way—what you enjoy, we enjoy, for the most part.”

Pen was startled by this. “Food? Drink?” Other pleasures of the flesh . . .?

“Yes, indeed!”

“Wine-sickness?”

She said smugly, “Oh, the wine-sickness can be all yours.”

“You . . . can evade my pain?” The implications of that were odd.

“We can withdraw from it to a degree, yes.”

“Surely managing one’s demon should be harder than managing a horse.” Not that horses were easy, five gods knew. “I mean, those Temple disciplines and so on?” Everyone kept talking about the all-important Temple disciplines, but no one ever explained what they were.

“The hard things will come on their own. You need not go hunting them.” She added after a reflective moment, “Though I pity the poor demon who gets stuck with a Temple ascetic. Hair shirts, really, what is the point?” She gave the impression of a faint, dramatic shudder, and Pen smiled despite himself. She added more tartly, “And it indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one’s own discomfort for a benefit to another.”

Pen blinked, an old puzzle suddenly laid open to him, bare and plain. Yes. That’s it exactly.

Feeling a need to digest this, he heaved the bundle of clothes back up. “Let’s go find Elm Street.”

He was quite out of his reckoning with Tigney’s directions by now, but Desdemona, clearly, knew the town well. They arrived at their goal efficiently, without any doubling back.

The shop was dark, with a peculiar smell. Pen set the clothes on the counter, and the shop woman told over them with quick fingers, and named a price.

“Pen,” muttered Desdemona, “let me do this.”

“If you don’t embarrass me,” Pen muttered back. The shop woman gave him a strange look, but then his mouth began a sharp, though polite enough, negotiation that resulted in due course in a sum double what he had first been offered.

“Good,” said Desdemona. “Let us look around a little.”

Abandoning the counter, they went to the shelves and piles. Obligingly, Pen sorted and dealt. “Can you even see what you’re doing?” he murmured.

“Oh, yes. You could, too. Wait . . . now try.”

Pen squinted, and the shadows seemed to retreat. The view wasn’t really an improvement. But somehow, from these unpromising heaps, he pulled some quite fine discards, if torn or discolored in spots. Granted the elegant blue brocade doublet with the three-inch gash in the front, set around with brown stains, was a bit disturbing.

“We can set these to rights,” Desdemona promised.

“Isn’t that what you call uphill magic?”

“Only a very little. Can you sew?”

“Not especially well, no.”

A brief silence. “We believe you will find that you now can.”

Pen set back several items that seemed too gaudy, to Desdemona’s disappointment, but at last they agreed on a small pile of what she assured him were men’s garments, the likes of which Pen had never seen at Jurald Court, nor Greenwell either. The silk-weavers here seemed to set a high standard for local castoffs, certainly. Back to the counter for another negotiation, and in a few more minutes, Pen left the shop not only with the additions to his wardrobe, but with a goodly supply of coins. Even when he turned over Tigney’s half, there would be some money left over.

Someday, he promised himself, I shall have new clothes, from a real tailor. Though how he was to get to that someday, he had no notion.

Heading back downhill, they passed a bathhouse. Pen stopped and eyed it. “Pleasures of the body, eh?” Clean and warm surely qualified. Not to mention shaved and trimmed.

“Superb idea!” said Desdemona. “But not that one. There’s a better one farther up near the palace.”

“It looks tidy enough . . .”

“Trust me.”

The voice he’d come to recognize as Mira of Adria said something, which he tried but failed to not-understand. If you would but put him under my direction, I could show him how to make a fortune in a place like this seemed to be the gist of it.

Pen chose not to pursue the remark.

* * *

The bathhouse near the palace-and-temple precincts was intimidatingly large, compared to the one in Greenwell run out the back of a woman’s home, but not too crowded at this time of day. Pen visited its barber for a serious shave and a trim of the ragged ends of his hair, then the men’s side for a thorough lathering with scented soap of head and body, a sluicing rinse with a bucket of warm water, and a soak in the huge wooden tub with the copper bottom, big enough for half-a-dozen men, kept heated with a small fire underneath. He oozed down in the water and lingered with his eyes half closed until the skin of his fingers began to grow wrinkly, he began to worry that Tigney might be ready to send out a search party, and he became aware that Desdemona, who seemed to be purring as much as himself, was eyeing a couple of the better-looking of his fellow bathers in a way that Pen found unsettling. Time to decamp.

Dressed, hair combed out and drying, and back on the street, he glanced at the looming bulk of the temple at the top of the hill. It was the most imposing structure in town, and the chronicle of Martensbridge that he’d read yesterday had made much of it. A temple had always crowned this high site, but the prior one, being built of wood in the style of the Weald, had burned down in one of the periodic fires. In a joint building effort of Temple and town that had taken several decades, it had been replaced by this one of stone, after the Darthacan manner. This represented not a change in lordship or worship, but a change in wealth, Pen gathered. Curious, he turned his steps not downhill, but up.

He walked all the way around it, marveling at its size and stately proportions, then peeked through the tall pillared portico. No ceremonies seemed to be in progress, and other lone worshipers were trickling in and out, so Pen ventured within. As the space opened up before him, he realized that the old wooden Greenwell temple was a mere hall by comparison, despite its abundant woodcarvings. Or maybe a barn.

The holy fire on the central granite plinth had a round copper hood and chimney, made rich with delicate hammered designs, to carry the smoke out of the worshipers’ eyes, with the result that the domed roof was not smoke-blackened. A ring of arched windows below the dome let in light. The space was six-sided, one for the broad entryway and one for each of the five gods, opening to domed apses that must, could one see the temple from the top, make it look like a grand stone flower.

The niche for the Lady of Spring, whose season this now was, was redolent with offerings of fresh blooms.

A few serious-looking townsmen were praying in the niche of the Father of Winter, god of, among other things, justice. Judges, lawyers? More likely litigants, Pen decided. An impressively pregnant woman knelt on a cushion before the altar of the Mother of Summer, praying perhaps for a safe delivery, or possibly just for the strength to stand up again. The Bastard’s niche, between the Daughter’s and the Mother’s, was presently empty.

Pen went by habit to the altar of the Son of Autumn. Only two fellows were there before him. The younger man, looking like a military recruit, knelt on one of the provided cushions, his hands up, palms out and fingers spread. Praying for luck? An older man lay prone on one of the large prayer rugs, arms out, hands clenching, in the attitude of deepest supplication. It was mere fancy that Pen imagined him a veteran, praying for forgiveness, but he couldn’t shake off the impression.

He picked out a cushion behind them and got down onto his knees without quite knowing what he was praying for. Or should be praying for. Or even Who he should be praying to. So he prayed for the safety and well-being of his family, and of all on the Jurald lands, and poor half-cheated Preita as, he was reminded, he had promised to do. Ruchia? Hardly the right god. He signed the tally, rose, and carried his knee cushion over to the Bastard’s niche.

Kneeling again, he realized he’d forgotten to pray for himself. How temporary was the transfer of his affairs to this new god? The Bastard was the master of disasters; supplicants more often prayed to avert His attentions, like paying a mercenary company to route around one’s town.

Would praying for knowledge be safe? Pen was certainly desperate for it. But the white god was the author of some pretty vicious ironies, as far as the prophecy-stories associated with His gifts told. Praying for the soul of Ruchia seemed late off the mark, as she was signed by her funeral miracle to be in His hands already. Pen contented himself with hoping she was happy there, whatever that meant in that profoundly altered state beyond death.

On impulse, Pen decided to pray for Desdemona. Granted, demons were already creatures of the god, though whether escaped prisoners or servants seemed unclear. Maybe they could be either, as one man might be good and another bad, or a man might go from bad to good or the reverse at different times of his life? He became aware that she had grown very quiet, like a tight, closed ball inside of him.

Demons, unkillable and, it appeared, immune to pain, did not fear much, but they feared their god, and the dissolution they would suffer if they fell back into His hands. Pen would too, he decided, if going to the gods meant his destruction and not his preservation. However it was that souls were sustained in the hands of their chosen gods. Or choosing gods.

Praying for her safety and well-being must cover it, since neither were possible without that substrate of continuing existence. A well-practiced prayer that he knew how to do. So he did, whispering the words aloud.

In all, he was relieved that no one answered.

He unfolded himself and went back to the portico, pausing a moment to take in the view up the lake. He wondered if that distant gray smudge sticking out into the water from the left shore might be Clee’s castle birthplace—not on a crag, for a change, but using a small island to provide it with a free moat.

Uncertain which of the descending avenues to take back to the Order’s house, Pen called softly, “Desdemona . . .?”

No answer. She seemed still locked up inside him. Pen wondered if the gods really were more present in their temples, for all that the divines taught that They were always equally present everywhere. And if demons would know. Pen pursed his lips, then slipped into a silk mercer’s shop at the top of one street.

Most of the goods displayed were far beyond his means, but he negotiated for a bit of ribbon about the length of his arm without doing his little stock of coins too much damage. He found the mirror provided for customers to hold the cloth up to their faces, and braided the blue silk band through his queue. He turned his head and waited.

“Pretty!” murmured Desdemona.

Aha, that’s fetched her out. He must keep that trick in mind. He said only “Thank you,” and went back to the street, where he was then able to ask himself for directions. No wonder sorcerers have a reputation for being strange. That silent speech, if he ever gained the knack of it, would be a great convenience. Swinging his bundle of new old clothes, he started off.

A couple of housemaids giggled and blushed as he strode by, which Pen ignored. A glum and elderly washerwoman, shuffling along, looked up, and her wrinkled face broke into so unexpectedly sweet a smile that Pen had to smile back, and offer her a little bow. A shave and a hair wash worked on women of all sorts, it seemed. Which, since Desdemona might well be described as women of all sorts, was . . . opportune.

Turning down the steep street fronting the Order’s house, he saw Clee walking up it accompanied by a tall, black-bearded, soldierly fellow leading his horse. Pen finally saw what the term richly caparisoned meant, for it was a very well-dressed horse: saddle and bridle carved and stained and set with silver; its saddle blanket, admittedly atop a more practical sheepskin, of embroidered silk. He thought of Desdemona’s horse lecture, and was amused.

Two mounted guardsmen and a groom followed, reins slack. The bearded fellow bore a sword, in a town where very few men carried them, and a jeweled band on his hat.

Not much apart from the near-identical color and cut of their hair marked the two men as related. Clee was lanky, his hands thin and ink-stained, his clothing a knee-length townsman’s gown with trousers in a simple cut and fabric. His companion was thickset and muscular, his hands broad, suitable for maintaining a grip on a weapon in defiance of blows, his riding leathers heavy and less elaborate than what his horse was wearing. Pen suspected the straight black hair had actually borne a helmet at some point. Tough, solid, unsmiling.

Clee looked up and saw Penric, and his head went back in surprise; after a moment, he beckoned Pen nearer. The pair stopped to let him come up.

“Penric! I would like you to meet my brother, Lord Rusillin kin Martenden. Rusi, this is our visitor, Lord Penric kin Jurald, from the valley of Greenwell.”

Lord Rusillin spread his hand over his heart in the courteous gesture of a comrade of the Son, and offered Pen a reserved nod. Pen smiled and nodded back, though he couldn’t quite bring himself to touch his lips in the sign of the Bastard. “Five gods give you good day, my lord.”

The carved mouth made an effort at a smile. “Lord Penric. One god is giving you a difficult time, by what my brother tells me.”

Clee had gossiped about his condition? Pen supposed it was unusual, and therefore interesting. He couldn’t think Learned Tigney would like that. But then, very few people were as determinedly uninformative as Tigney. Pen managed, “So far, I have taken no harm from my accident. And it’s won me a trip to Martensbridge at the Temple’s expense, which I cannot fault.”

The smile grew more genuine. “You should join a mercenary company if you really want to see the world.”

Was Rusillin recruiting? That was one way for a lord to maintain his estate, certainly. “My brother Drovo did that,” said Pen.

“Good for him!”

Affability did not seem to come easily to the man, but Pen sensed he was trying. He therefore let this go by, struggling to remember what all he’d said to Clee about Drovo. By Clee’s lack of a wince, Pen hadn’t got round to mentioning his brother’s final fate, ah, that was right.

“Rusi collects and leads a company of men for the Earl Palatine of Westria,” said Clee, confirming Pen’s guess.

“A mercenary company that could find good uses for a sorcerer,” Lord Rusillin remarked, “though the Temple does not often release theirs to such services. The sorcerer might find such tasks profitable as well.”

Pen cleared his throat. “I’m neither a sorcerer nor Temple-sworn, at present. Or only an infant sorcerer. I acquired my demon less than a fortnight ago, and they are much weakened for a time by such transitions, I’ve learned. And I’ve had no training at all. So I’m afraid I’m not much use to anyone, just yet.”

“Hm. There’s a shame.” Rusillin gave him a kindly look, or perhaps it was pity.

“Well,” said Pen, extricating himself before Clee’s brother could start in on any more direct military propositioning, “I should report in to Learned Tigney. He’ll be wondering where I went. Honored to meet you, my Lord Rusillin.”

“And you, Lord Penric.”

He watched Pen keenly as he went inside, bending his head to make some remark to Clee that Pen did not hear, though Clee’s lips twitched. Pen was pleased that the two half-brothers seemed to have a reasonably fraternal relationship despite their differences in estate. There was certainly plenty to tempt Clee to envy, were he inclined to it.

He wondered if Desdemona had found Rusillin’s powerful figure impressive.

Pen went upstairs and settled with Tigney who, remarking sternly on his lateness, received as strict an accounting of Pen’s time as of his coins.

“Desdemona seemed to like the bathhouse,” Pen told him. “I hadn’t known creatures of spirit could partake of pleasures of the body quite so simply.”

Tigney’s lips thinned in his beard. “So dangerously, if the demon becomes ascendant. They devolve into fascination and excess, with no thought for preservation. As a man might ride a stolen horse to death.”

Controlling a wicked impulse to whinny, Pen excused himself to put his new treasures away and return to his station in the library.

* * *

The following afternoon, Pen had grown so absorbed in a Darthacan chronicle of Great Audar that he almost missed his chance.

The librarian had gone out, but a scribe and two acolytes were still working. They left one by one as Pen was perusing an account of the massacre at Holytree that seemed vastly different than one he had read from a Wealdean writer. He only looked up when Desdemona, with some effort, made his mouth say, “Hey!”

“What?”

“Now’s your moment. To the cabinet.”

Pen set his volume down and hurried over to it. “Wait. It’s still locked.” He wasn’t going to try to force it; the lock was sturdy, the woodwork was fine, and the destruction would be obvious.

“Put your hand on the lock.”

Baffled, Pen did so. A surge of heat seemed to flow from his palm. Within the metal mechanism, something clicked.

“Could you always do that?” he asked.

“Not for the first few days.” He had the sense of a convalescent tottering happily around a room after too long abed, delighted to be working weakened muscles again.

“But . . . Tigney must know. Hasn’t he told the librarian?”

“To be sure, which is why you have never been left alone here. This oversight will not last. So hasten.”

Willingly, Pen did so. The cabinet door creaked wide.

The contents were slightly disappointing; a mere two shelves of volumes, less than forty in all, the other two shelves bare. Nothing sparkled or growled or seemed to need to be chained like a vicious dog. His hands reached out eagerly. “Which one?”

“Not that, no, no . . . that one.”

“It’s not the thickest.”

“No, but it’s the best. Three-fourths of what’s here is rubbish. Now close up. She’s coming back.”

Pen swung the door shut; the latch clicked. He set his hand to it. “And lock up again?”

“We can’t do that.”

“Wait, why not?”

“Locking increases order. Too advanced for you right now.”

The disorder that would result if the librarian thought to check the lock was a bit frightening to contemplate, if one wasn’t a durable demon. Pen scurried back to his bench, shoved the filched volume into his tunic, and opened his Darthacan chronicle once more. The words seemed to dance before his eyes, and the volume tucked under his heart to burn. Footsteps sounded from the hall.

“Don’t leave right away,” muttered Desdemona, “and don’t make a show of it, or offer limping explanations. Go out exactly as you always do.”

To Pen’s relief, the first one back was the scribe, who gave Pen a cordial nod and took up her quill again. The librarian, returning a few minutes later, looked around as if satisfied and went to her desk, where she took up a perpetual copying task that she fitted in between other duties, much like a woman with her knitting. Pen read two more pages without taking in a word, then rose, tucked the parchment slip with his name on it into the page where he’d stopped, and set the volume on the librarian’s desk with his usual “Thank you.”

She nodded back, with a mildly approving look, and Pen made his escape.

Unsure where else to hide, Pen went back to Clee’s room; to his relief, the dedicat was out. He closed the door, set a chair in front of it to slow anyone entering, jounced down on his bed, and opened the stolen book. Borrowed book. It wasn’t as though he meant to take it out of the house. And he certainly meant to put it back. Undetected, by preference.

Essentials of Sorcery and the Management of Demons, the title page read. The Work of Learned Ruchia of Martensbridge, Senior Divine and Sorceress of the Bastard’s Order. With Aid from Learned Helvia of Liest and Learned Amberein of Saone. Volume One.

“Hey,” said Pen, indignant. “You wrote this!”

“Not we,” sighed Desdemona. “Ruchia’s doings. We would not have had the patience. And a tedious great deal of work it was, too. We threatened to throw her off a bridge, once, if she would not finish it up and be done.”

Distracted by this, Pen found his next sentence jammed up in his mouth. When he had untangled his tongue, he asked instead, “Could you have?”

“No,” sighed Desdemona. “Not her. Neither from a bridge nor from our being.” She added after a little, “Best rider ever.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me all this?”

“Your voice would grow hoarse, and Tigney would wonder.” Another pause. “The Temple offers many warnings about demons, and they are not all wrong. You may trust Ruchia. Also, you will not be able to waste precious time arguing with her.”

Taking the hint, Pen turned to the first page. This text was handwritten, not printed from woodblock, which made it easier to read, but also made him worry about how few copies might exist. He tried to settle himself and pay attention, and not read so fast in his excitement that he failed to take it all in.

After a time, he asked, “Desdemona, what does she mean by enhanced perception?

“Hm. Can you juggle?”

“I can manage three balls. I have trouble with four or more.” And there had been strong domestic objections to his attempt to try it with burning brands, like the acrobat he’d seen in the marketplace.

“Find three things. Or four.”

The room was not well supplied with balls, apples, or other substitutes, but he finally rolled up two pairs of socks. “So, and?”

“So, juggle.”

The three sock balls went as usual; the four, after a brief encouraging run, ended with Pen fishing dust-smeared sock balls out from under the beds.

“Now, again,” said Desdemona.

The sock balls rose—and slowed. They curved in the same trajectories, but Pen felt he might almost take a sip of ale between having to attend to each. His hands moved more languidly, though, and with more effort, as if he were stroking through water.

“That was fun,” he said, collecting all four out of the air and stopping.

“We can’t keep that up for very long,” said Desdemona, “but it is useful in a pinch.”

“Should I wish to take up the trade of a marketplace juggler, I suppose.”

“It works as well for dodging blows. Whether from fists or blades.”

“Oh.” Pen thought this through. “Could I dodge arrows?”

“If there are not too many.”

“Could I snatch arrows out of the air . . .?”

“Only if you were wearing thick gloves.”

“Could I—”

“Pen?”

“Yes?”

“Keep reading.”

“Ah. Yes.”

After a time he asked, “Could I shoot fireballs from my fingertips?”

Desdemona vented a long-suffering sigh. “No. You may light very, very small fires.”

Pen pulled over the candle stump and held his forefinger to the black wick. “Show me.” A moment later, he snatched his hand back. “Ow!” He sucked on the scorched finger. The flame licked up, smoked, and steadied.

“I see it will take you a little practice,” she said serenely. He thought she was laughing at him, but it was hard to tell. He was reminded that she didn’t have to feel the pain.

“I confess I don’t see much advantage over flint and steel or a spill. Unless you didn’t have them, I suppose.”

“You may also do the same from across the room. Or across the street.” She added after a moment, “Fire is beloved of the god. You only need a very, very small flame, shrewdly placed, and the fire will do the rest. With equal ease, you can light a candle—or burn down a city.”

Having no desire to burn down a city, Pen dismissed that last. “I wish I’d had this skill when struggling with all those rainy campfires, when we were up in the hills trying to make meat out of sheep. I would have been the most popular man on the hunt.”

Desdemona was silent for a moment, then said, “It is one of many skills best kept discreetly hidden. For if it is known, any accidental fire within a mile could be blamed on you. And no way for you to prove your innocence.”

“Oh.”

“In fact, most of the skills are dual-edged that way.”

Pen digested that. Was that one more reason that real Temple sorcerers were so quiet and elusive?

He turned the next page.

* * *

It was the succeeding afternoon before he could steal another session with the book, feigning to be going up to his room to work on repairs of his new old clothing. After the first few chapters, all seeming very practical, Ruchia’s prose grew denser, and the subtleties of what she was trying to describe more slippery.

“I don’t wholly understand what she’s trying to say about the magical friction,” he complained to Desdemona, who had been silent for so long he’d wondered if she’d fallen asleep.

“Hm. Pull that candle over, and light it and blow it out a few times, as fast as you can.”

He did so, fascinated with the process. He still found it easier to point when making the little flash shoot up where he intended, though not with his hand held so close. He could dimly sense how, with practice, he might not even need that aid. After a dozen rounds of the exercise, he shook out his hand, which had grown uncomfortably hot even though he’d not touched the flame. He rubbed it with the other.

“Feel that, do you?”

“Yes?”

“If a sorcerer demands too much strong magic of his demon, too quickly, his body will go beyond mere fever to its own destruction.”

Pen’s brow furrowed. “Are you saying a sorcerer could burst into flames?”

“Mm, no, the body is too wet for that. He would more just . . . burst. Like a grilled sausage splitting its casing.”

Pen stared down at his torso. “Yech. Does this happen often?” Surely any demise so spectacular would have been talked about more.

“No, not really. Usually the sorcerer will pass out before that. Perhaps suffer the usual aftereffects of a bad fever. But it is certainly possible in theory.”

Pen wished she didn’t sound so enthusiastic about the idea. Revolted but not deterred, he returned to the book.

A long while later, he frowned and thumbed back to the title page. “Where is volume two? What is volume two? Should I have it? Is there a copy in that cabinet?”

“There is, but it is beyond you for the moment. It is mostly about the application of sorcery to medicine.”

He wrinkled his nose, staring at the page. “Did Learned Helvia and Learned Amberein help Ruchia with that part?”

“Oh, yes. Ruchia also consulted with another physician or two from the Mother’s Order, on the more obscure points.”

He considered the timing. It didn’t add up. “Wait. Were Helvia and Amberein still alive at the writing?”

“Not exactly. Maybe in the sense that their knowledge survived the way Ruchia’s voice has survived on those pages. Ruchia still credited them anyway, by way of a memorial. She spent the most time on the second volume, by way of restitution, she said, for the unplanned loss of us from the Mother’s hand.”

Pen wondered if there was a very disappointed young physician somewhere, missing, due to Pen’s roadside accident, the Temple demon she or he had been promised. “Can I learn all of that?”

“Perhaps. In due course. You would do well to spend some time studying with the Mother’s people first before trying much. But how much of your life do you really wish to devote to treating people’s worms?”

“Leaving aside the views of the worms, healing seems a safer sort of magic than some of these other things.”

“Oh, no. It is by far the most dangerous. And the most subtle. Most dangerous because most subtle, we suppose.”

“I suppose . . . if anything went wrong . . . is it possible to kill a person by magic?”

“No,” said Desdemona firmly, but then, after a long pause, “Yes. But only once.”

“Why only once?”

“Death opens a door to the gods, through which they can, for a moment, reach into the world directly. The demon would be naked and helpless before our Master, and be plucked out like an eyeball before the sorcerer could take a breath. And be delivered to the Bastard’s hell, and its utter destruction.”

“Even if it were not murder, but, say, a medical accident while trying to treat a person? The intent not harm, but good?”

“That is part of what makes the practice so challenging. And not for the novice.”

Pen curled up atop his blankets and hugged his knees. “Desdemona—what happened to Tigney’s demon? Do you know?”

A sense of deep discomfort. “Yes, for Ruchia supervised it.”

“What, then?”

“The theory is covered four chapters on.”

The last chapter in the book, Pen realized. “Yes, but I want the story. The short tale, at least.”

A long silence. Surly? Uncertain? Untrusting . . .?

Pen drew breath and said more firmly, “Desdemona, tell me.”

Compelled—so, he could compel—she reluctantly replied, “Even at the beginning, he was overmatched with a demon too strong for him. For a few years, all seemed well, and he reveled in his new powers. But then his demon ascended, and made off with his body. He fled to Orbas. It took the Temple a year to find him, subdue him, and bring him back.”

“And?” he prodded, when she did not at once go on.

“And they brought him before the Saint of Idau.”

“The town of Idau possesses a saint? I had not heard of such.”

“A very specialized saint, dedicated wholly to the Bastard. Through him, the god eats demons, and so draws them back out of the world.”

“What happens to the sorcerer?”

“Nothing, save whatever grief he may suffer at the loss of such powers. However balanced by relief at the return of his own control. Tigney,” she said bitterly, “recovered entirely.”

Pen’s face scrunched. “Desdemona—did you witness this event? This . . . eating?”

“Oh, aye.”

“What was it like?”

“Have you ever witnessed an execution?”

“Once, at Greenwell. There was a man hanged for robbing and murdering on the road. Learned Lurenz took us, he said, so that we might learn the true wages of crime. Just the boys, though.”

“And did you?”

“Well . . . highwaymen did not seem so thrilling to me after that.”

“Just like that, then, I expect. If you were a demon.”

“Ah.” It was Pen’s turn to fall silent.

He was several pages farther on when Desdemona said, “But if you ever try to take us to Idau, we will try to fight you. With all our powers.”

Pen swallowed. “Noted.”

* * *

Pen was closing on the end of the same chapter, a little stiff from sitting, when the door rattled. Swiftly, he thrust the book under his pillow and took up the bit of half-done mending he had ready for such an occasion, but it was only Clee.

“Ah, there you are,” said Clee. “I was looking for you.”

“Does Learned Tigney want something of me?” Finally?

“Not at all. But my brother Rusi has invited the both of us to dine with him at Castle Martenden this evening.”

Pen’s interest was caught, despite his frustration at being interrupted in the middle of a difficult passage. Castle Martenden, it was said, had never been taken by force of arms, although that might partly be because no great wars had yet come to it, merely local squabbles. Which could be as fatal as any wider struggle to those involved, no doubt.

“I should like that. But, tonight? It’s a long walk.”

Clee smiled. “Rusi is a better host than that. There are horses waiting for us outside the gate.”

“Are we to stay the night?”

“There’ll be a good moon later, so if the weather holds fine, we need not. But Rusi will provide all that we need if we decide to delay till morning.”

Gratified both with the prospect of escaping this narrow house for an evening, and an opportunity to see so fascinating a fortress, Pen hurried to don what of his new clothes were now usable. Clee gave him no opening to better hide Ruchia’s book, unfortunately, as he waited politely for Pen to ready himself, and then ushered him out the door before him.

“I should ask leave of Learned Tigney,” Pen remembered as they started down the stairs.

“No need,” said Clee.

“I already have.”

You aren’t a prisoner here, you know.”

And yet not quite free, if Clee was detailed to be his duenna. The scribe was by way of being Tigney’s private secretary, trusted with his correspondence; also with his captive, it seemed. Pen wondered if Clee also worked with the ciphers, and if it would be wrong to ask him about them. “Good.”

Giving Learned Cautious no chance to reverse his ruling, Pen followed Clee directly out to the street.

A brisk walk brought them to the old stone bridge; upstream and down, several millwheels turned and creaked in the steady outflow. They passed over the arch and through the lesser half of Martensbridge. This part of town was devoted to serving the caravans that came down from the north passes, and boasted warehouses, tanners, saddlers, smiths, and lodgings for travelers who wished to stay close to their goods. Beyond the gate that served the road flanking the lake, they found a small livery. Two horses waited, bespoke and already saddled. They seemed better mannered than the usual rental remounts.

Watching Clee swing up readily to his saddle, Pen asked, “Are these your brother’s beasts?”

Clee nodded, and reined around confidently to lead Pen onto the road north. They walked their mounts along side by side for a while, threading local traffic; farm carts going, at this hour, mostly home from the markets, animals being walked to their fates at city butchers.

“Were you taught horsemanship as a child?” Pen asked.

“Yes, we had all the usual castle sports. Castle Martenden was a good place to grow up. I wasn’t apprenticed to the Order till I turned fourteen, as directed in our father’s will.”

The usual age for such placements. “Had the old lord a large family?”

“Not very, to my benefit. Rusi and I were the only boys. Rusi’s elder sister is long married, and mine chose the Daughter’s Order, and now teaches at a Lady-school down the valley of the Linnet.”

“It sounds a reasonably happy family life, then.” Pen hoped Clee would hear the delicate inquiry in that; or, if he didn’t, so much the better.

Evidently he did, for his lips turned up, wryly. “Rusi’s lady mother always treated us children fairly. And Rusi is my elder by a decade. So even if his parents had died in the opposite order, and our father had married my mother, very unlikely considering her station and lack of dower, I still would not be the heir. Nor greatly suited to the task.”

“You aren’t jealous of Rusillin’s rank?”

Clee eyed him sidelong. “I’d have been a fool not to have thought of it, and a greater fool not to have thought better of it. Are you jealous of your brother Rolsch?”

“No,” Pen realized, never having considered it quite like that before. “Rolsch plagued me in many ways, when I was growing up, if not how Drovo did—he was enough older to be above such humor, I think, as well as not being naturally inclined to it. But I never wanted his place. Still don’t.”

“That’s fortunate, then.”

As the road grew less crowded farther from town, Clee led them first to a trot and then to an easy canter, and Pen followed, heartened to have found another commonality with the prickly dedicat. After about an hour’s ride in the late spring afternoon, the waters sparkling to their right and the hills rising to their left, they rounded a curve of the lake, and the gray bulk of Castle Martenden loomed up before them.

It perched on an islet only a dozen paces out from shore, its walls seeming to grow out of the rock that was its foundation. High and solid and forbidding, they followed the contours of the islet’s bounds. This had resulted in something other than foursquare, though four round towers with conical slate caps jutted up at its corners, with a fifth for luck over the drawbridge.

The village of Martenden straggled along the road, a mere farm hamlet, though the fields and vines climbing the slopes beyond looked fair enough. A smithy, an alehouse, a leather-worker’s, a carpenter’s shop, a small inn for travelers too soon benighted to push on to the city at the lake’s end. Clee followed his glance.

“Its earlier lords had more hopes of this place,” he observed, “but they were all siphoned away by the Temple and the city merchants.”

“Mm,” said Pen. “I expect the city exploits the river for its mills, as well. And it is the logical end-point of lake traffic.”

“There is that.”

Clee led them right up to the small arched bridge and drawbridge, clopping across and returning the salute of a soldier standing guard with easy familiarity. Door and portcullis were all blocked open on this peaceful day. Inside the court, paved with fitted flagstones, the place was not so bleak. Arched porticos with stone columns ran along two sides of the irregular space. Atop them two stories of wooden galleries overlooked this light well, suggesting that those living within did not actually have to grope about in darkness at all hours. As they dismounted and a groom hurried up to take charge of their horses, Lord Rusillin himself came out on a balcony, saw them, and waved. He made his way down an end staircase, boots scuffing in an alert man’s rhythm, to the courtyard.

“Ah, you have secured our guest,” said Rusillin amiably to his brother. “Any difficulties along the way?”

“None whatsoever,” Clee assured him.

Making the hand-over-heart salute, he went on to Pen, “Lord Penric. Welcome to Castle Martenden.”

“Thank you for your invitation, Lord Rusillin. I was most interested to see it.” Pen looked up past the galleries toward the battlements. “And from it.”

Rusillin smiled. “Our supper is almost ready. But we could certainly take you up to the sentry walk.”

The castle’s lord led back up the stairs he had descended, and from the third floor over to a short set of stone steps. Pen followed eagerly, Clee bringing up the rear. Then onto the walkway behind the high, crenellated outer wall. Pen leaned over to gaze up and down the lake, imagining being a sentry here, on the watch for enemies. Or, he supposed, merchants’ boats laden with rich cargo from north or south, but he had not heard Castle Martenden accused of lake piracy.

Ten miles distant to the south, he could just make out the walled city. The lake curved slightly here, narrowing, then its northern arm struck out an even longer distance to the smaller town that overlooked its headwaters, lacking a princess-archdivine to raise its status and its walls, but doing well as an embarkation point for trade. Beyond the curve, a pair of small green islands decorated the blue surface, home, he understood, mainly to goats, sheep, and a few reclusive religious mystics. The westering sun breathed a golden glow over it all.

“Beautiful,” Pen said, awed. “Has this place ever been besieged in your time, Lord Rusillin?”

“Not in mine,” Rusillin replied easily. “My father fought off an incursion of the Earl of Westria, in his day, but at the ridges and along the roads. His troops never reached here. Or Martensbridge, little though the town remembers.”

“Yet now you work for Westria?”

Rusillin’s lips stretched. “The earl palatine learned his lesson. Far better to have us with him than against.”

Jurald Court really was a farmhouse, compared to this, Pen conceded.

“What lies beneath?” Pen asked, turning back to look down into the paved courtyard, grown shadowed as the light angled.

“You’ll see the lower levels after supper,” Rusillin promised. “There is an interesting water gate off the main stores. Very useful for bringing goods in and out.”

“I suppose this place would never run short of water in a siege,” Pen mused. “Another advantage over a crag.”

“To be sure,” Rusillin agreed, and led the back to the stairs. He pointed out a few more militarily useful features along the way, sounding as house-proud as any goodwife. Were the goodwife enamored of serious mayhem.

They walked, boots sounding on the boards, along the third-floor gallery to what proved not a lordly dining hall but a small chamber. Two slit windows on the lake side, framing an unlit fireplace built into the stone wall, provided a faint illumination, and Pen blinked, tempted for a moment to call on Desdemona’s seeing-in-the-dark skill, but his eyes adjusted soon enough. Good wax candles, only one frugally lit, graced an age-darkened sideboard crowded with covered dishes. Clee went to share the flames around among the holders there and upon the round table set only for three. The lord meant to have the luxury of privacy tonight with his interesting guest, apparently

At his brother’s polite request, Clee took the role of server, cheerfully and without resentment. Smiling, he offered Pen the pewter basin to wash his hands first.

The repast was rich in meats and thankfully sparing of cheese: venison, slices of beef, racks of lamb, and a whole chicken were presented, which Rusillin carved with the speed and dexterity of a surgeon accomplishing an amputation. A stew of spiced root vegetables, any winter-stored tiredness masked by their buttery sauce, and a salat of fresh spring greens improved the variety still more. The wine was pale yellow, sweet, and from kin Martenden’s own land, Pen learned. The two brothers, Pen noticed, drank sparingly, so he tried to do the same, for all that each took turns topping up his glass.

Plainly primed by Clee, his host exerted himself to draw Pen out about his youth at Jurald Court. Pen chose not to spoil the mood by mentioning Drovo’s death, but he did ask questions in turn about the mercenary life, wondering if his brother had found it satisfying before its truncation. Talking about his command, Rusillin sounded more like Rolsch than like Drovo, more calculations and logistics and complaints of dubious suppliers than thrilling tales of heroism. Garrison life ran mostly dull, but Rusillin’s company had seen bloodshed in two clashes over a disputed valley on the earl palatine’s far borders, and in one peasant revolt over, of all things, an attempt by the earl to eradicate packs of feral dogs plaguing the region.

Rusillin topped up Pen’s glass again, with an encouragement to drink pointed with assorted toasts. Pen remembered that Drovo had been at a drunken party with his friends when they’d been recruited in Greenwell, though he had defended his choice with vigor even after he’d sobered up. Could a man be made dead drunk and drafted into mercenary service the way the king of Darthaca had once been rumored to press sailors during one of his wars? Surely it would be easier to run away from a mercenary company than from a ship at sea. He wet his lips and smiled cautiously through the toasts.

Rusillin then inquired genially about Pen’s accidental acquisition of Desdemona. Pen told the tale, again; the repetition was beginning to seem more like the memory of a memory than the thing itself. Clee was very interested in the details of his swoon, which Pen on the whole was unable to supply. Growing a touch morose, perhaps with the wine, Pen dwelt on his broken betrothal.

“Does the pretty Preita await you?” asked Rusillin.

“I doubt it,” sighed Pen. “Her parents were no doubt entertaining better offers for her hand by the time I rode out of town.”

“Mm, sad.”

Clee made to refill his glass in consolation, frowning to find no room. “And has the demon awoken within you?”

“A little,” Pen confessed, reluctant to recount such lunatic experiences before this company. And he could hardly describe Ruchia’s book to Clee, deep in Tigney’s confidences.

“So it survived the abrupt transfer all intact?” said Rusillin.

“Oh, yes. Seems to have.”

Clee pressed more meat upon him which Pen, stuffed, was compelled to refuse. “I can hardly hold any more of your abundant hospitality, my lord,” he apologized.

“It was the least I could do. I have one more indulgence to offer.”

Rusillin went to the sideboard, and came back with three goblets fashioned of the pale green glass of the district, passing them around with his own hands like a very superior butler. They proved filled with a golden liqueur scented of flowers. Pen had thought such things were served in smaller vessels, but the lord of Martenden seemed not a man to stint his table.

“Try this cordial. It is distilled by a woman in our own village.” Rusillin saluted Pen with his glass, and sipped, as did Clee.

Pen lifted his own goblet in grateful return toast. As he set it to his lips, a voice inside his head began, Penric, Penric, Pen, pen, penpenpen Pen! Pen! It sounded as panting and effortful as someone breaking through a brick wall with a sledgehammer. His eyes widened, and he smiled in concealment of his confusion.

Desdemona . . .? What? he tried back.

Take only a small sip, and hold it in your mouth. Don’t swallow. Be ready to spit it into your napkin.

Not knowing what else to do, or why, he did as instructed. The cordial was on the whole pleasant, very sweet and complex, but with a bitter undertaste.

Aha. Syrup of poppies only. We can handle that. Drink, then, but very slowly. Do not betray your knowledge.

Why not?

Because we want to see what transpires.

Ruchia, Pen recalled, had been a spy. Trusted agent. Who sailed troubled waters, whatever they were, aside from a prime example of Tigney’s maddening vagueness. Pen felt he had embarked all unknowing into a very strange storm.

The liquid in his mouth acquired an even nastier taste, and Desdemona whispered, against the evidence of Pen’s senses, Good. It is made safe. Now swallow.

Pen gulped, and managed, without choking much, to say “Most interesting. It smells of chamomile blossoms.”

“Yes, I believe that is one of the ingredients, though the goodwife guards her recipe even from me. Chamomile is said to be very soothing.” Rusillin sipped from his own goblet with evident pleasure, and regarded Pen benignly. When not laced with syrup of poppies, the stuff was evidently a deal more palatable.

The conversation grew more desultory as Pen slowly drank. The two brothers were now watching him with all the attention of a cat or a dog, spoiled by tidbits at the table, tracking every morsel their master ate, waiting to pounce on a prize. When Pen yawned, not really feigned after the meal and all that untainted wine, they swayed with it. Pen’s body grew warm, though the room was cool as the lake-light from the slit windows faded to gray and shadows of evening encroached, and he undid the collar of his tunic.

Finishing his glass, Pen remarked, “Very soothing indeed, my lord.”

“I shall tell the goodwife how much you enjoyed it,” Rusillin promised, and took the glass away again to the sideboard where, his back to the room, he refilled it.

Clumsy, opined Desdemona. I suspect poisoning guests is not in his usual line. Though I suppose greater subtlety would be wasted on you.

And why was she an expert? Pen had no trouble producing a frog-eyed goggle as Rusillin handed him a second glass. Its undertaste was even more bitter than the first.

They’re not taking any chances, are they? mused Desdemona, as the stuff turned vile in his mouth.

Now what should I do? asked Pen, starting to panic. I’m going to throw up soon.

Keep playing along. You may now start to feign a drunken stupor. I’m sure you’ve witnessed such things.

Not only witnessed, but experienced, if only the once. Wine-sickness, like a hanging, had been a salutary lesson he’d taken to heart at a young age.

“You could use this cordial as a bedtime composer,” Pen remarked, letting his speech slur.

“Truly,” said Clee, sipping along with him from a glass in which the level had barely dropped.

Pen yawned again, more widely. “Sorry, m’lor’,” he muttered, and let his head fall, pillowed on his arms. Silence fell around the table.

Bastard’s tears, he demanded of Desdemona, now what?

Stay limp. If they think their ploy effective, they will not bother to bind you. A considering pause. Not that bindings are any great impediment, but why make extra work for us?

Rusillin’s voice finally came, “Is he out? Check his eyes.”

Clee lifted Pen’s head, painfully by the hair, and pulled back an eyelid. Pen suppressed a yelp and tried to make his eyes roll up.

“Not wholly,” Clee judged, accurately, “but I expect this will do.” He took a fraught breath. “Are you ready?”

“Yes. Let’s get the business over with.”

Between them, they lifted Pen from his chair and supported him, an arm dragged over each brotherly shoulder.

“Ha,” huffed Clee. “Lord Cowherd is not as light as he looks.”

“These wiry types can fool you, sometimes,” Rusillin observed. “I was beginning to think he was never going to fall over.”

For conspirators, they didn’t sound very passionate, Pen thought. Or even very excited. He felt a bit indignant about that. The fright was all on his part. He let his eyes slit open.

Together, they manhandled him out onto the gallery, now deeply shadowed with the evening though the sky was still pale, only the first stars showing. Down a back stair. Past the level of the courtyard, and down a darker, narrower stair, the walls partly dressed stone, partly seeming carved out of the living rock. While Clee supported Pen’s half-limp form, Rusillin lifted a ring of keys from his belt and unlocked a stout wooden door. They dragged Pen through, and Rusillin turned and locked it again.

Shouldn’t we be trying to escape? Pen asked urgently.

Soon. There are two of them. The chance must be good, or it is likely to be wasted.

There were two of him, too, Pen thought, or perhaps thirteen depending on if you counted the lioness and the mare, but he still felt outnumbered. He felt outnumbered just by Rusillin.

Pen wasn’t sure if they’d brought him to a cellar, a storeroom, an armory, or a dungeon. The long chamber seemed to partake of all those descriptions. The roof was supported with pillared arches of stone, graceful enough for a minor Darthacan temple. High on the lakeside wall, a line of thin, iron-barred windows like half-moons let in the last of the silvery twilight. A bundle of pikes rested off the floor in a pair of wooden cradles. Barrels and crates were stacked all around, but along one wall lay a pile of old straw, with several sets of ugly manacles hanging down. That the irons were unpeopled and rusty was not all that reassuring.

The brothers dragged Pen to the far end of the chamber and let him down, rather gently, to the cold rock floor. He twitched and half rolled, and caught a glimpse of the nearby water gate. From this side, it was a stone ramp down to a broad, low arch above the lake, which lapped gently at its base. A barred portcullis, raised at present, protected the opening in the thick walls, and a further set of heavy doors were pulled back. On the ramp, a skiff was drawn up half out of the water, its oars shipped. Faint reflections rippled on the curving roof of the chamber.

“Let’s have a better light for this,” said Rusillin, and Clee pulled a tinderbox from his belt pouch and went to kneel by a row of part-used tallow candles set up along the edge of the ramp and shielded from drafts by coarse glass vases. Half-a-dozen smoky yellow lights soon sprang up, which, Pen realized, made hardly a difference to him. Another advantage lost to delay?

When Rusillin turned his back for a moment, going to rummage among his stores, Pen seized the chance to turn his head, but the only other item of interest in view was an old wool-stuffed mattress flopped on the floor nearby, a blanket and pillow piled at its foot. So why aren’t I laid on that? If it was where kindly kidnappers kept their victims while waiting to sell them on to some evil merchant rowing in from the lake, shouldn’t it be over by the manacles?

He forced himself to stay limp, if still slit-eyed, as the brothers came back to gaze down at him in a moment of contemplation.

“That was easy,” said Clee. “As you said, let him walk to us. Like a calf to the market.”

“Bit of an innocent, I’d say,” said Rusillin.

“Bit of a fool. Well, Lord Cowherd.” Clee prodded Pen with his toe. “Sorry about this, but needs must drive.”

“He’ll feel no pain. You, or I?” Rusillin held up a long, wicked war-knife, obtained from somewhere among the stored armaments. Its edge gleamed new-honed.

“It’s your trade. Probably your reward, if the demon jumps to you.”

“Those are the odds, correct? The demon always jumps to the strongest man in reach, you said.”

“So Tigney claims.”

“In that case, why it did not jump to one of those temple guards the sorceress trailed?”

“Can’t guess.” Clee shrugged. “He did say it was the most powerful demon he’d ever overseen in all his stable. You have to wonder why it jumped to the divine, back in her day.”

“It shall like its new home, I daresay,” said Rusillin tranquilly.

They’re not trying to kidnap me. They’re trying to kidnap Desdemona!

So Pen wasn’t the merchandise, from the robber lord’s point of view; he was just the wagon. I thought a demon could not kill and hope to survive?

Other way around, said Desdemona. A sorcerer cannot kill with magic and keep his demon. But he can certainly be killed, and lose it. If it jumps in time.

So was he to be summarily unbetrothed a second time, before he lost his life? He felt madly bereft in prospect. Surely a demon must prefer a powerful captain, who would lead it to the feast of all chaos on a battlefield, over, over clumsy Lord Cowherd. The epithet stung.

Not, said Desdemona tensely, if we scramble. Now, Pen.

As Rusillin’s thick fingers made to close on his throat, and the blade descended, candlelight flickering along its quite excessive length, Pen jerked and rolled away.

“Bastard’s teeth!” Rusillin swore. “I thought he was out. Clee, grab him!”

Pen pushed to his knees, then to his feet, as Clee made an oddly slow swung at him. He evaded the dedicat and looked for the door, but Rusillin was already in the way. He slashed at Pen’s belly, which barely twisted out of reach in time. Pen dodged around a pillar. Rusillin dodged the other way. Clee cut him off, seizing him around the shoulders. “Gah, he moves like a snake!”

Rusillin lunged.

As the blade approached Pen’s belly, a spiral of rust ran up its length; by the time the hilt rammed home, as slowly to Pen’s eye as a bead falling through honey, it had shattered into a thousand bright orange flecks that burst into the air like dandelion fluff, and about as lethal.

“What!” Pen and Rusillin both grunted, practically in unison.

Fire, said Desdemona cheerfully, takes many forms.

Clee still clutched him from behind. Pen wrenched away. Rusillin tossed away his hilt, grabbed up a pike, and swung it between Pen and his goal.

“Demon, capitulate!” cried Clee. “We offer you a better master! Tigney means to betray you to the Saint of Idau! I copied out the letter! Aid that fool you ride at your own peril!”

Desdemona, as excited as a hunting dog let loose upon its prey, seemed to hesitate, freezing within Pen.

Pen, backing away from both men, tried frantically to counter. “But which master? Have you thought it through? Whichever one of you she takes will fall helpless in a swoon, and the other can cut his throat again.” Could he divide his enemies?

Rusillin grinned horribly, swinging his pike around. “I think not. If it jumps to me, Clee still cannot take my lands nor my command, so his risks are doubled. If it jumps to him, well, I am just as pleased to skip the risks, and have a loyal sorcerer secretly in my service, whose rewards will be rich.”

“You can’t imagine we were so stupid as not to work that out in advance,” chided Clee, also grabbing a pike and getting between Pen and the door. Together, both men strove to back him up, jabbing and feinting and allowing him no escape. They seemed ruffled, but not enraged. It felt very strange to be murdered so indifferently. Rusillin, Pen thought, would be just this cold and level-headed in battle, perhaps had been.

Surely any Bastard’s demon must prefer so potent a soldier.

“What,” jeered Desdemona aloud, “and have to look at your ugly face in every mirror till we found a way to throw you off? The Bastard my Master spare us that!”

“Des, don’t bait them!” yelped Pen, horrified.

Clee blinked in confusion, but held his block. Rusillin’s brawny arms drew back his heavy pike, preparing for a lethal lunge.

Pen set their hair on fire.

Clee dropped his pike and yelled. Rusillin, made of sterner stuff, tried to complete his lunge first, his pike’s hooked blade banging and scraping into the stone wall where Pen had been an instant before.

Every trouser tie, buckle, and toggle on both men’s clothing worked loose at once. Rusillin’s next lunge was much impeded by his trousers falling down around his thighs, catching him up; Pen swore Desdemona giggled. As both men staggered around beating out the flames on their heads and tripping over their clothing, she cried, Make for the water gate!

Pen ran down the ramp, tried to push off the skiff, which didn’t budge, saw Rusillin out of the corner of his eye hopping furiously toward him, and shot through the low archway. The water splashed cold around his ankles, calves, thighs, crotch, aaah!

He wailed, “But Des, I can’t swim!” as his next step landed on nothing, and he plunged over into a drop-off as steep and sudden as the castle wall’s rise above him.

That’s all right, said Desdemona smugly. Umelan can. Let her guide you.

Umelan made it known in a violent surge of revulsion that she was not used to waters this cold, nor a body so lean and unbuoyant, but somehow Pen floundered to the surface and began a dog’s paddle out into the growing darkness. He blinked water out of his eyes and swiveled his head, looking for the direction to shore.

Make for the opposite bank, Desdemona advised. Rusillin will be sure to have men out searching the nearer one for you before long.

“I can’t swim that far!” Pen gasped.

If you relax and slow down, you will find that you can.

Pen kept paddling. Gradually, his strokes lengthened, and his trailing legs found a rhythm like a frog’s which, if they did not propel him much, at least did not impede him. His frantic gasping steadied.

Until he heard Clee’s voice, too close behind him: “There he is! I can see his hair in the water.”

Pen turned to find the shadowy silhouette of the skiff putting out from the water gate. Two men, it seemed, could shift its weight where one man could not. The oars creaked and screeched in their locks as Rusillin pulled mightily. Could Rusillin beat Pen down with an oar and drown him? Hook him with a pike, and drag him back to the castle like some long, unwieldy fish?

Now, that wasn’t bright, murmured Desdemona happily. Pen’s body warmed in pulsing waves, in the cold water.

Clee, standing to peer toward Pen, a pike gripped in his hands like a harpoon, swore in surprise as his foot went through the bottom of the boat. He lost his hold on the weapon, which sank, weighted by its big steel blade. The oarlocks worked loose, and the oars skittered along the thwarts; Rusillin cursed. The skiff settled sluggishly.

Over the high castle walls, a voice floated up in a frightened bellow: “Fire! FIRE!” Other voices took up the chorus.

Rusillin looked out into the darkness after his retreating prize, back over his shoulder at his other threatened treasure, and, using one oar as a paddle, began to turn his water-weighted craft around.

“Rusi,” said Clee in an alarmed voice, “I can’t swim either!”

“Then you’d better grab that oar and get to work,” Rusillin snarled. “The other fool will drown in this cold soon enough.”

At that point, it was really redundant for Rusillin’s oar blade to snap off as he dug it into the water.

Very quietly, Pen turned on his back and began paddling in the opposite direction.

* * *

The moon was rising over the eastern hills by the time Pen pulled himself up over the rocks, crawled a few paces, and flopped down in some lovely soft mud. He was chilled through and wheezing. He never wanted to move again.

At length, curiosity overcame his torpor, and he made the effort to roll onto his side and peer back across the lake. The sparks and orange glow that had been soaring from the castle like a chimney fire had finally stopped, ah. That was a nice castle, he thought sadly. Too bad.

Rough justice, murmured Desdemona, sounding nearly as exhausted as Pen. If you want the other kind, you shouldn’t draw the attention of the white god.

“Did Ruchia do things like this?”

Not often. She was too astute to let herself be cornered. Desdemona seemed to consider. After the first few lessons.

She added after a little, If you lie here longer, you will perish of the cold, and all my night’s work will be wasted. Also, I do not wish to be stuck in a cow.

Pen pulled himself to a sitting position. “You could have had Clee.”

I’d rather the cow.

“Or Lord Rusillin.” Why had she not chosen Rusillin?

Get up, Pen. Walking us out of here is your work.

Pen climbed to his knees, then to his feet. Then, skirting around a few incurious cattle, to what passed for a road on this steeper eastern shore, more of a rutted farm track. He stared north up the length of the lake, south down it. He bore no risk of getting lost, exactly.

We could go north, Desdemona observed. We could go anywhere. A pause. Except Idau.

“I can’t say that I’ve ever longed to see Idau.” Or even thought about its name on the map, where it appeared as a dot no bigger than Greenwell, some fifty miles west of Martensbridge and just over the border to the lands of the earl palatine. “But all my things are back in Martensbridge. And I never finished the book. And Tigney must be wondering where I am by now. Do you think he really gave Clee leave to take me to the castle?” Could Tigney even have been a conspirator? Uncomfortable thought.

Hah. Tigney might have given you leave to go beyond the town walls—never us.

“You suspected something? Even then?”

Mm. A very noncommittal . . . non-noise. We were sure something interesting must be afoot. We didn’t know what. We could not speak aloud in front of Clee, nor yet silently to you.

“Are all demons this curious? Or did you get that from Ruchia?”

Ruchia and we . . . were a very good match. Unsurprising, since we chose her. Desdemona feigned a yawn. You walk. We’ll nap. Wake us when we arrive.

Pen sighed and started south, boots squelching as he stumbled over the ruts. This night was going to be interminable.

* * *

The sky had turned steely, though the sun had not yet chased the moon over the eastern hills, when Pen came again to the Martensbridge town gates. Early market traffic already made them lively. The gate guard scowled at Pen, and began to recite the restrictive town rules about vagabonds.

“I bear a message for Learned Tigney at the Bastard’s Order,” Pen said, picking the not-quite-lie most likely to explain both his appearance and his urgency. “The boat had a mishap. I have traveled all through the night.”

The name of Tigney and the Order seemed to be the master key. Pen found himself trudging again up the steep street as the sky melted to bronze, then muted gold.

The surprisingly awake-looking porter answered his pounding at the door, and gaped at him in amazement. “Lord Penric!”

“Good morning, Cosso. I need to see Learned Tigney. At once.” He’d had plenty of time to think, while he’d stumbled through the dark, of how to explain the night’s doings, and why a powerful local lord had tried to murder him. Indignation had given way a while back to unease. Now that he was here, all his fine furious speeches seemed to run through his numb fingers like water.

“I believe,” said the porter, “that he wishes to see you. Though I can’t say you are expected. Come up.”

Cosso ushered him straight to Tigney’s work chamber, where candles burned low and guttering in their sockets.

“Learned, Lord Penric is here.” Cosso gave way, pushing Pen before him, then took up a guardsman’s stance by the door, his face quite wooden.

Tigney sat at his desk, his quill molting in his fingers as he fiddled with it. Pen was alarmed to see Ruchia’s book laid out on the writing table, but much more alarmed to find Clee there before him. Both Temple men looked up at him in shock.

Tigney was dressed for the day—no, for yesterday. Clee wore a close cap over his remaining hair; howsoever he had put himself to rights after a night of attempted murder and, presumably, firefighting, he was rumpled up again by a ten-mile ride in the dawn. Still, he had to look better than Pen. At least I’ve stopped dripping. Pen would be enraged at the sight of him, but he was just too tired to muster the emotion.

“Well, well,” said Tigney, putting down the quill and steepling his fingers. “Has the committee for the defense arrived?”

Verbal sparring was beyond Pen by this point. He said simply, “Good morning, Learned. Yesterday afternoon, Clee told me you had approved an invitation by his brother for me to dine at Castle Martenden. They gave me a drugged cordial, and took me down to the storeroom and tried to murder me. They wanted to steal Desdemona. I broke away, and swam the lake, and now I’m back.” He squinted. That seemed to cover most of it. “Oh, and I’m afraid we may have set the castle on fire, but they shouldn’t have tried to spit me on those pikes.” He squeezed his eyes shut, and open. “And I’m sorry about the boat. But not very.”

Tigney, canny and cautious, raised his chin and regarded Pen. “Whereas the tale Clee has just told me was that your demon ascended and beguiled him to take you to the castle, where you went on an arsonous rampage, stole a boat, and either escaped or drowned. You are supposed to be halfway to the border of Adria by now.”

Pen considered this. “Much too far to walk.”

“It is two men’s word again one’s,” said Clee, who had overcome his first horrified paralysis. “And him a stranger in this place.”

Stranger than you can imagine. Pen raised a finger. “Two against two. Me and Desdemona. Unless you count her as twelve, in which case I can make up a jury right here.”

Tigney rubbed his forehead, doubtless aching, and glowered at them both. “That one of you is lying is self-evident. Fortunately, I have another witness. In a sense.” He motioned to the porter. “Cosso, please fetch our other guest. Apologize, but make him understand it is urgent. Ah—tell him Lord Penric has come back.”

The porter nodded and went out.

Clee, heated, said, “Learned, you cannot be thinking of taking testimony from the demon! It is utterly unreliable!”

Tigney stared dryly at him. “I do know demons, Clee.”

Clee either had the sense to shut up, or was temporarily out of arguments. Pen was pretty sure this was not the scene Clee had been picturing when he’d hurried to lay his tale before Tigney. If he had really thought Pen drowned, a not-unlikely outcome, why had he come to make these accusations, rather than holing up with his brother? Maybe Rusillin had thrown him out? Clee certainly had been the one to pass along the gossip about Pen’s arrival in town. Which of the brothers had been the first to broach the demon-stealing scheme?

Minutes passed. Pen sat down on the floor. Tigney started to say something, then made a never-mind gesture, and left him there.

Finally, a bustle sounded from the hall; the porter’s voice soothing, a new one querulous. A short, stout old man wearing a stained white dressing gown and stumping along with a stick entered the room. Tigney, who had left Clee and Pen standing, hurried to set him out a cushioned chair. His hair was white and receding and combed back to a thin queue; his face was as round and wrinkled as a winter-stored apple, but not nearly as sweet. He might have been a retired baker with bad digestion. He thumped down in the proffered seat with a grunt, and stacked his hands on his cane.

Inside Pen, Desdemona screamed. And wailed a heartbroken, Ah! Ah! We are undone! It is the Saint of Idau! Pen felt a desperate flush of heat through his body, and then she curled into so tight and despairing a ball within him as to nearly implode.

“Blessed Broylin.” Tigney bowed before him. Then, after a moment, he thumped Clee on the back of the head and shoved it down as well. Coming up wincing, Clee crouched and backed away, signing himself and mumbling, “Blessed One . . .” Clee seemed nearly as surprised as Desdemona, if more frozen. No one could be as frantic.

Tigney glowered down at the boggled, bedraggled Pen, but then just shook his head.

So was this to be the second lethal ambush Penric and Desdemona had faced in the space of less than a day? Ambush it clearly was meant to be, crafted by the cunning Tigney no doubt. No wonder he hadn’t troubled to tutor Pen. He must have been planning it for a week, to get this creaky old man transported here from Idau in secret. How else could he corner and arrest such a powerful demon, except by surprise? And Pen had walked her right into it. Should he get up and try to run? Could he get up, let alone run? We should have gone north after all. Oh, Desdemona, I am so sorry . . .

“So, Blessed.” Tigney gestured to Pen. “Is his demon ascended?”

The old man frowned unfavorably at Pen, who looked up at him in dismay, but said, “No. Not a bit. All your panic seems unfounded, Tig. Entirely not worth what that vile cart did to my back, rushing me here.”

As the gray eyes squinted down, Pen was abruptly caught in that gaze, as if he were looking through two pinholes at a blinding sun, as if something huge and ancient and present lay just around some corner of perception. He couldn’t look away. He couldn’t run away. He thought he might even want to crawl toward. That elderly and unprepossessing body seemed worn like a stage costume, insubstantial and deceptive as gauze, over, yes, only a man, but also a channel to something that was . . . not a man. Not anything Pen had ever expected to meet face-to-face alive, even through such a screen.

It came to him that every prayer he’d ever said or mumbled or yawned around before had been by rote. And that he’d never be able to pray like that again.

“Can you compel his demon to speech?” Tigney asked the saint.

“If I can persuade it to stop howling in fear, perhaps.”

Clee, unwisely, tried, “But can you compel it to speak the truth?”

The old man eyed him. “Don’t know. D’you think I could compel you?”

Clee wilted. But, driven by whatever desperation, he essayed: “If the demon is not ascended, then Lord Penric’s behavior is his own, mad or criminal to repay begged hospitality with arson and destruction. And he should be brought before the judges for it.”

The old man snorted. “And how do you imagine the magistrates of Martensbridge could arraign a sorcerer against his will?”

Tigney cleared his throat. “Even if it is not yet ascended, I fear that it’s only a matter of time. Learned Ruchia’s was the most formidable demon in the whole of my experience. Much too powerful for this raw young man, however well-intentioned he may be. Blessed, I take full responsibility for my Temple-sworn duties, and I must ask you, as a matter of prudence, to take this danger out of this boy and the world.”

Pen, listening intently, his stomach curling, tried pointing out, “But I’m not Temple-sworn. I’m really only a guest here.”

Clee said poisonously, “In your case, that’s hardly a recommendation.”

Tigney just shook his head.

It came to Pen that for all the talk of accusations and magistrates, arguing like a lawyer was not what was called for now. If there was truly a god immanent in this chamber, it wanted another mode of speech altogether.

Pen climbed up on his knees and shuffled over to face the saint. Inside him, he thought Desdemona wept, despairing as a woman mounting a scaffold. Tigney made an abortive motion as if to restrain Pen, but the old man merely regarded him curiously, without fear.

Pen opened both hands and raised them, as he might have done before a temple altar, with less cause. It occurred to him that the attitude of supplication was identical to that of surrender on a battlefield.

“Blessed, if I speak, will the god hear?”

The sheep’s-wool eyebrows twitched. “The gods hear you at all times, speaking or silent. You hearing the god . . . that is more rare.”

Pen decided to take that for a typical obscure Bastard’s Yes. He swallowed, thought of bowing his head, but then decided to look up. At, or through, those terrifying gray eyes.

“Lord God Bastard, Mother’s Son, Fifth and White. Please spare Desdemona. She’s a good demon.” Pen considered that descriptor, in all its ambiguity—good for what?—and decided to let it stand. “She has no life save through me, and, by your leave, please . . . please let me serve her in her need.” And, in what was surely the most foolhardy impulse of his life, even beating out Drovo’s drunken oath to the military recruiter, added, “And Yours.”

Tigney shook his head, back and forth, once, slowly.

The Saint of Idau raised his hand and laid it on Pen’s forehead, in some beginning malediction. His lips parted. Stopped. His look grew inward for an instant more deep than long. Fathoms deep. The eyebrows climbed in surprise. “Huh! There’s a first.” His hand dropped back.

“What?” said Tigney, nearly squirming with anxiety. “The white god takes the demon, yes?”

“No. Spits her back. Says He doesn’t want her. At least not yet.”

Tigney blinked, stunned. Pen’s breath caught. What, what, what . . .?

Clee protested, “But you must!”

The saint eyed him sourly. “If you want to argue with the god, go to the temple. Not that you’ll get much save sore knees, but it’ll spare my ears.” He made to lever himself up with his cane.

Pen cried aloud, “Wait, wait, what . . . Blessed, what does that mean?”

The old man eyed him glumly. “It means congratulations. You’re a sorcerer.” He pursed his lips, and added more judiciously, “The gods do not act for our ends, but for Theirs. Presumably, the god has some interesting future in mind for you—for you two. This is not a blessing. Good luck. You’ll need it.”

Tigney, aghast, said, “But what should we do with him?”

“No idea,” said the saint. He paused. “Though it would likely be prudent not to let him get killed on your doorstep.”

His eyes still wide, Tigney said, “He’ll have to be sworn into the Order.”

The saint’s lips quirked up. “Weren’t you listening? He just was.” He wrinkled his nose. “Though not, I suppose, to the Order as such . . .” He shuffled toward the hall, grumpily mumbling, “Ah, Lord Bastard, my back . . .”

At the doorway, he turned around. “Oh.” He pointed to Penric. “That one tells the truth”—his finger swung to Clee—“that one lies. Have fun sorting out this tangle, Tig.” His cantankerous voice floated over his shoulder: “I’m going back to Idau.”

* * *

Clee was taken away by a couple of husky dedicats, Pen was not sure to where. With more painfully sincere politeness than heretofore, Tigney suggested Pen might like to rest in his room a while. Pen, swaying on his feet, did not demur, and neither did Desdemona, who had gone very silent indeed.

All Pen’s meager possessions had been turned out and strewn across his bed, though nothing save Ruchia’s book appeared to be taken. Clee’s things were in no better form, and for the first time, realizing Tigney had known nothing, Pen wondered what the divine had first made of it all when both men had gone missing last night. He wasn’t quite able to muster sympathy.

He cleared his bed without ceremony, stripped out of his clammy clothes, stole Clee’s blankets to throw atop his own, and climbed in, more exhausted than he’d ever been even after the most futile, sleet-soaked hunt. When he slept, he dreamed uneasily of fathomless eyes.

* * *

He woke in the early afternoon, ravenous, and went to beg food in the kitchen, where dedicats or acolytes who had missed meals were, depending on the mood of the servants, sometimes allowed charity. His extended to dry bread, some pretty good beer, and a random but generous assortment of leftovers from lunch. Hunger makes the best sauce, he remembered his mother intoning to him, vexingly, but there was nothing left on his plate but a smear by the time he’d done.

A dedicat found him there, drooping over his place. “Lord Penric,” she said. “Learned Tigney begs you will attend upon him upstairs.”

She led him not to Tigney’s workroom, but to a larger chamber at the back of the house. Pen hesitated in the doorway, taking in the intimidating committee assembled around a long table. Tigney was present, and two older divines in the robes of the Bastard’s Order, but also one in the neat black gown of the Father’s, black and gray braid on the shoulder, with a notebook and quill before him. A bulky man whom Pen guessed by the chain of office around his neck was a city magistrate sat next to him. A middle-aged woman in a fine silk gown, protected by an over-robe of scarcely less elegant linen, tidied a stack of papers, and rearranged her own quills and ink. All stared back at Pen.

The saint had apparently gone back not to Idau, but to bed, for he sat fully dressed in plain townsman’s garb on a cushioned chair in the corner, eyes half closed as if dozing. Pen did not feel the god within him now, to his relief. The immense absence did not seem to leave an empty space, precisely, so much as one reserved, freed of all life’s clutter and waiting for its Guest again.

Tigney rose and ushered Pen to a chair at the foot of the table, facing the room’s window. He could see all the interested faces around the board, and they could see his even better.

“Learneds, Your Honor, milady.” That last, by Tigney’s respectful nod, was directed to the woman in silk. “I present to you Lord Penric kin Jurald of the valley of Greenwell, as discussed.” Tigney did not present Desdemona. Pen thought she was awake, within him, but still very silent; exhausted, cautious—a mode, he was beginning to realize, not characteristic of demons—still afraid of the saint?

Tigney sat to Pen’s left; the magistrate straightened up and frowned down the table. “This committee is here assembled to inquire into the unfortunate events of last night,” he said, formally. If he’d been trained as a lawyer, Pen suspected he could parse more implications out of that. Not a trial, yet—inquest, was that the term? The magistrate went on, “We have thus far taken the testimony of Learned Tigney and Blessed Broylin of Idau, and the testimony and confession of Dedicat Clee.”

“Did Clee finally stop lying?” Pen asked Tigney.

“Mostly,” Tigney grunted. “We think.”

In his corner, the saint snorted softly, but did not look up.

“There remain some points of confusion and uncertainty,” the magistrate went on. Pen did not doubt it. “In aid of their resolution, we request that you take oath before the gods of the truth of your tongue, and recount what you experienced for our records.”

Pen gulped, but, coached through the wording by the Father’s divine, readily did so. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to lie about anyway. Maybe he was still too tired.

Under the prodding of the magistrate, Pen repeated his account of the events of the past day, in a deal more detail than his first bald report to Tigney. Quills scratched furiously. Every once in a while, another member of the committee would ask some shrewd or uncomfortable question, by which Pen began to grasp what a gullible idiot he had been. Remembered terror and outrage yielded to some embarrassment.

At least he was not alone in that last. The magistrate asked Tigney, “Why did you choose to lodge Lord Penric in Dedicat Clee’s room? Was there no other choice?”

Tigney cleared his throat. “No, but Clee was, I thought, my trusted assistant. The two were of a like age. I thought Clee might keep an eye on his doings, maybe draw him out and find any falsehoods in his tale. And report to me.”

Pen’s eyebrows scrunched. “You set him to spy on me?”

“It seemed prudent. Your story was . . . unusual. And as you yourself have found, some men will do questionable things in hopes of gaining a sorcerer’s powers.”

Pen thought throat-cutting went a bit beyond questionable, but Father’s divine looked up from his note-taking and asked, “If Dedicat Clee had not been placed so close to temptation, do you think he might not have generated his scheme in the first place?”

Tigney shrank in his seat. After a long pause, he muttered, “I do not know. Maybe not.”

The woman in silk and linen pursed her lips, her own busy quill pausing. “In all your observations last night, Lord Penric, was there anything to tell you which of the brothers first originated the plan?”

“I’m . . . not sure,” said Pen. “Up till the castle caught fire, they seemed very united and, um, loyal to each other. Lord Rusillin seemed more willing to abandon the hunt at that point, but then, he thought I was about to drown in the lake. In his, er,”—not defense—“so did I.” Pen blinked. “Is there any word from Castle Martenden today? I mean, apart from Clee. I couldn’t tell if he’d come back because his brother had thrown him out, or to prepare some ground on Rusillin’s behalf.” If the latter, he had certainly failed. Mucked it up beyond all repair, possibly. Pen could hope.

“That will be another point to clarify,” the woman murmured, her quill scratching again. “Or maybe not.” A slight, strange smile turned her lips. “Dedicat Clee claims the notion was his brother’s, over a dinner with too much wine.”

“But then, he would,” observed one of the other senior divines. By her slight frown, the woman did not seem to find this helpful.

“Will Lord Rusillin be arrested, too, like his brother?”

“We are looking into the practicalities of that,” said the woman.

Unlike Clee, Lord Rusillin, ensconced in... whatever was left of his stronghold, had his own armed men, which must certainly make the task more challenging to a town constable. Pen didn’t get the idea this disturbed her as much as it did him.

The committee ran out of questions as Pen ran out of answers, and, sucked dry, he was released.

Tigney escorted him out. “I have many urgent things to attend to as a result of all this,” he said, waving a hand about a bit randomly, if appropriately. “I should be grateful if you would keep to your room a while longer, Lord Penric. Or at least to this house.”

“What’s going to happen to me?”

“That’s one of the things I must attend to.” Tigney sighed, and Pen wondered if he’d had the benefit of a nap this morning. Probably not. “Apparently, you are meant to keep your demon. You might even have been intended to get your demon.” He looked troubled by this thought, not without cause. “Blessed Broylin either would not or could not say.”

Emboldened, Pen said, “If I am to stay in, can I have Ruchia’s book back? And the run of the library?”

Tigney began to make his usual negative noises. Pen added, “Because if I don’t have anything to read, and can’t leave the house, I will have no way to pass the time except to experiment with my new powers.”

Tigney grimaced like a man chewing on an unripe quince, but shortly thereafter Pen, grinning, climbed back to his room with the book clutched firmly in his hand.

* * *

He was back reading in the library the next morning when Tigney himself came to find him.

“Lord Penric. Please dress yourself”—Tigney looked him over—“as best you can, and make ready to accompany me up the hill. Our presence is requested.”

“Up the hill?” said Penric, confused. Some local argot?

“At the palace,” Tigney clarified, confirming Pen’s guess and alarming him no little bit.

He hurried through a better wash from his basin, combed and retied his hair with the blue ribbon, and skinned into the least dire selection of clothing left in his pile. Shortly after, he found himself climbing up the steep street in Tigney’s wake. The divine, typically, did not say much. Pen supposed he would learn all for himself, firsthand, and gritted his teeth in patience.

The palace, with all its offices, was a rambling structure of rose-colored stone extending over three buildings behind the temple. It was no fortress like grim Castle Martenden; if the city walls did not hold, its own would not slow a determined attack for long. Its upper facades were rich with windows. They were admitted to a side entrance, where a servant in the livery of the princess-and-archdivine escorted them up two flights not to a throne room, but to a workroom reminiscent of Tigney’s, though several times larger. On the lake side, four tall doors set with glass admitted good light, and allowed the exit of occupants onto a narrow balcony. Writing tables and chairs were positioned to catch the best illumination. Several scribes were at work, who looked up curiously as they arrived, then bent their heads again to their quills.

Pen was not too surprised when the silk-and-linen-clad woman from yesterday’s inquest rose to receive them from the servant at the door. “Five gods give you good day, Lord Penric, Learned. This way, if you please.”

First, Penric was made to sit down and read through a long copy of his deposition from yesterday, sign it, and have his signature countersigned by Tigney and the woman, whom he finally learned thereby was the princess-archdivine’s own secretary. This was repeated for two more clear copies—some palace scribe had been busy last night. It all seemed tolerably accurate and complete, from a certain point of view.

Then he was taken to the end of the room, where another aging woman sat at a desk apart, reading through a stack of papers. Her gray hair was more finely dressed, her silks more elaborate than the secretary’s—though Pen was beginning to get the idea that silks were to this palace as cheeses were to Greenwell, locally abundant to the point of surfeit. Time-softened skin, slight body, yet somehow secure within herself—he didn’t need Tigney to knock him on the back of the head in order to bow low when he was presented.

“Your Grace,” he followed Tigney’s lead in addressing her. She extended her hand in brief formal courtesy, and they each bent to kiss her archdivine’s ring. She was not wearing the Temple robes of that office today; Pen wondered how she kept track of which personage she spoke for at any given moment. Rather like possessing a demon, that.

The princess-archdivines of Martensbridge were by three centuries of tradition daughters of the Hallow King of the Weald, called or perhaps assigned to this pocket palatine duty on behalf of their royal parent, though this one was, by the grind of time, now aunt to the present king. Lacking a spare or willing daughter, the office was sometimes filled by a cousin or niece; sometimes elected from the Daughter’s Order. Like all things human, the princesses had varied over time in their abilities, but everything about the orderliness of this place spoke well of its current ruler.

There was a sad shortage of crowns and robes about the princess-and-archdivine today, to Pen’s disappointment, though she did wear some handsome jewelry. Power without panoply, but he was grateful for the informality when she gestured and her secretary brought two chairs for her guests.

As they settled themselves, Pen a bit gingerly, she said, “So, this is your problem child, Tigney.” He nodded ruefully. Her shrewd gray-eyed gaze went to Pen. “Learned Ruchia’s demon is now within you?”

“Yes, Your Grace?” Had she known Ruchia?

Evidently so, for she sighed and said, “I had once hoped that she would become my court sorceress, but there were other calls upon her skills. And I’m afraid she found my modest court too dull.” Pen wondered if she saw him as a poor exchange, though as her gaze dwelt on him her expression softened.

Deciding he was addressing the princess, just at the moment, he essayed cautiously, “I am sorry about burning down your castle, Your Grace.”

Her lips curved up, slyly. “Ah, but Martenden is not my castle. Kin Martenden formerly owed fealty to kin Shrike, who died out heirless a generation ago, leaving Martenden orphaned, or perhaps rogue. A freedom of which the current lord’s father, and Rusillin himself, have taken undue advantage. Four times has that castle blocked or seized traffic on the road and the lake during disputes with the city. The city council has been trying to buy out the lordship for fifteen years, but every time they thought him cornered, he’s turned about, most lately with his mercenary schemes. Stealing young men away from this country, more cruel than any tax he has paid, or more often not paid, to us. Castle Martenden has been a bloody thorn in the side of the royal free city for years.”

“Oh,” said Pen, beginning to be enlightened.

“Lord Rusillin is weakened and off balance as never before, and best of all, he did it to himself. This is not an opportunity I or the town mean to let slip away. Nonetheless, the campaign, being tricky, will take a little time and much cooperation.” She grimaced at that last word. “That being so, we think it well for you to be put out of his reach. Rusillin is not a forgiving sort of fellow.”

“Er?” said Pen. Tigney sighed.

The princess nodded to Pen. “I understand you took an irregular holy oath yesterday. If you will make it a regular one today, the Temple of Martensbridge will undertake to send you to the white god’s seminary at Rosehall. There you will receive the divine’s training that most Temple sorcerers complete before they are offered the responsibility of a demon. Better late than never, I suppose.”

Pen gasped. “Rosehall? The Weald city with the university? That’s three hundred years old? The famous one?”

Tigney cleared his throat. “The seminary, while associated with the university corporation, has its own specialized faculty, one of the very few authorized to oversee the training of Temple sorcerers. Nonetheless, you would be expected to take some lectures from the other body. Since you are starting all askew. I cannot imagine it will be easy. For anyone involved.”

The princess—or perhaps it was the archdivine—smiled. “If the Bastard’s Order at Rosehall can’t handle a little disorder, they have taken oath to the wrong god. But it will give time for this young man’s superiors to take thought, and judge him fairly.” She considered. “Some prayers for guidance might not be a bad idea, either.”

Pen wasn’t sure if the tightness in his chest was his own excitement, or Desdemona. He gulped. “Your Grace. Learned. May I—I need to talk with—there are two affected here. May I have leave to go apart, and speak with Desdemona?” He wasn’t sure they could manage silent speech just now, and he had no wish to sound demented in front of this high lady.

The princess raised her well-groomed eyebrows. “Desdemona?”

“It’s what he’s named his demon,” Tigney muttered to her.

“He’s named it?” The eyebrows stayed up. “Unusual. But yes, Lord Penric, if you feel you need to.” She gestured toward the balcony. “Take your time.”

As Pen slipped through the glassed door and closed it behind him, she and Tigney leaned their heads closer together.

Pen gripped the carved wooden balustrade and stared out down over the town, the river, the bridges and mills, the long lake. The pale line of the peaks on the farthest horizon.

“Desdemona!” he nearly squeaked. “Rosehall! The university! Me, to be a learned divine! Can you even imagine it?”

She said dryly, “All too well. Four of my riders before you have been down that road, although three of them before my time. Thankfully.”

“Even better! It would be as if I had my own tutor living inside my head! How easy could it be?”

“Mm, I’m not sure how similar the study in Brajar or Saone is, or was, to Rosehall.”

“I hear the students at Rosehall have great freedom in the city.”

“If you like drunken, rowdy parties, I suppose.”

“And don’t you?”

He thought she smiled, or might have, had she possessed lips. “Perhaps,” she admitted.

“I could be the first Learned in my whole family, as far back as I know. D’you think my mother will be pleased?” All right, his imagination was getting a little ahead of events, here. But he would send a letter home with Gans, telling her, since it appeared the Temple was going to send him off posthaste.

“Mm,” said Desdemona. “While in general mothers are quite happy to brag about their children rising in the Temple, there is a slight problem with those who take oath to the white god. Women fear it might reflect on their own marital fidelity, in the minds of some of their gossips.”

“Oh,” said Pen, taken aback. “That seems very unfair, given it was my father who—never mind.”

“Your mother will be pleased for you in her heart,” Desdemona promised him. Somewhat airily, he felt, given that the demon had still been insensate when he’d last seen Lady Jurald. But with good will.

“Will you—” He stopped. May I go was an absurd question to ask, Will you go with me even more so. He wasn’t back arguing his case with Rolsch or his mother, after all. Habits. “Will you be pleased?”

“Pen,” she said, in a quiet tone he’d never heard from her before. He stilled, listening.

“You looked a god in the eyes and bore witness for me, by which alone I am preserved.” She took a deep breath, through his mouth. “You looked a god in the eyes. And spoke for me. There is nothing in my power that I will ever refuse you, after that.”

He took that in, to his ears and to his heart. Swallowed. Nodded shortly, staring unseeing at the far-distant peaks.

In a few minutes, when he was composed again, he went back inside to kneel before a princess and pledge his future.

THE BUILDERS

Daniel Polansky

To my uncles Theodore, Frank, and John,
for long years of love and support

Part the First

Chapter 1: A Mouse Walks into a Bar . . .

Reconquista was cleaning the counter with his good hand when the double doors swung open. He squinted his eye at the light, the stub of his tail curling around his peg leg. “We’re closed.”

Its shadow loomed impossibly large from the threshold, tumbling over the loose warped wood of the floorboards, swallowing battered tables and splintered chairs within its inky bulk.

“You hear me? I said we’re closed,” Reconquista repeated, this time with a quiver that couldn’t be mistaken for anything else.

The outline pulled its hat off and blew a fine layer of grime off the felt. Then it set it back on its head and stepped inside.

Reconquista’s expression shifted, fear of the unknown replaced with fear of the known-quite-well. “Captain . . . I . . . I didn’t recognize you.”

Penumbra shrunk to the genuine article, it seemed absurd to think the newcomer had inspired such terror. The Captain was big for a mouse, but then being big for a mouse is more or less a contradiction in terms, so there’s not much to take there. The bottom of his trench coat trailed against the laces of his boots, and the broad brim of his hat swallowed the narrow angles of his face. Absurd indeed. Almost laughable.

Almost—but not quite. Maybe it was the ragged scar that ran from his forehead through the blinded pulp of his right eye. Maybe it was the grim scowl on his lips, a scowl that didn’t shift a hair as the Captain moved deeper into the tavern. The Captain was a mouse, sure as stone; from his silvery-white fur to his bright pink nose, from the fan-ears folded back against his head to the tiny paws held tight against his sides. But rodent or raptor, mouse or wolf, the Captain was not a creature to laugh at.

He paused in front of Reconquista. For a moment he had the impression that the ice that held the Captain’s features in place was about to melt, or at least unsettle. But it was a false impression. The faintest suggestion of greeting offered, the mouse walked to a table in the back and dropped himself lightly into one of the seats.

Reconquista had been a rat, once. The left side of his body still was, a firm if aging specimen of Rattus norvegicus. But the right half was an ungainly assortment of leather, wood, and cast iron, a jury-rigged contraption mimicking his lost flesh. In general it did a poor job, but then he wasn’t full up with competing options.

“I’m the first?” the Captain asked in a high soprano, though none would have called it that to his face.

“Si, si,” said Reconquista, stutter-stepping on his peg leg out from behind the bar. On the hook attached to the stump of his right arm was slung an earthenware jug, labeled with an ominous trio of x’s. He set it down in front of the Captain with a thud. “You’re the first.”

The Captain popped the cork and tilted the liquor down his throat.

“Will the rest come?” Reconquista asked.

A half-second passed while the Captain filled his stomach with liquid fire. Then he set the growler back on the table and wiped his snout. “They’ll be here.”

Reconquista nodded and headed back to the bar to make ready. The Captain was never wrong. More would be coming.

Chapter 2: A Stoat and a Frenchman

Bonsoir was a stoat, that’s the first thing that needs to be said. There are many animals that are like stoats, similar enough in purpose and design as to confuse the amateur naturalist—weasels, for instance, and ferrets. But Bonsoir was a stoat, and as far as he was concerned a stoat was as distinct from its cousins as the sun is from the moon. To mistake him for a weasel or, heaven forbid, a polecat—well, let’s just say creatures who voiced that misimpression tended not to do so ever again. Creatures who voiced that misimpression tended, generally speaking, not to do anything ever again.

Now a stoat is a cruel animal, perhaps the cruelest in the Gardens. They are brought up to be cruel, they must be cruel—for nature, which is crueler, has dictated that their prey be children and the unborn, the beloved and the weak. And to that end nature has given them paws stealthy and swift, wide eyes to see clearly on a moonless night, and a soul utterly remorseless, without conscience or scruple. But that is nature’s fault, and not the stoat’s; the stoat is what it has been made to be, as are we all.

So Bonsoir was a stoat, but Bonsoir was not only a stoat. He was not even, perhaps, primarily a stoat. Bonsoir was also a Frenchman.

A Frenchman, as any Frenchman will tell you, is a difficult condition to abide, as much a privilege as a responsibility. To maintain the appropriate standards of excellence, this superlative of grace, was a burden not so light even in the homeland, and immeasurably more difficult in the colonies. Being both French and a stoat had resulted in a more or less constant crisis of self-identity—one which Bonsoir often worked to resolve, in classic Gallic fashion, via monologue.

And indeed, when the Captain had seen him some six weeks previous, Bonsoir was in the midst of expounding on his favorite subject to a captive audience. He had one hand draped around a big-bottomed squirrel resting on his knee, and with the other he pawed absently at the cards lying facedown on the table in front of him. “Sometimes, creatures in their ignorance have called me an ermine.” His pointed nose trailed back and forth, the rest of his head following in train. “Do I look like an albino to you?”

There were five seats at the poker table but only three were filled, the height of Bonsoir’s chip stack making clear what had reduced the count. The two remaining players, a pair of bleak, hard-looking rats, seemed less than enthralled by Bonsoir’s lecture. They shifted aimlessly in their seats and shot each other angry looks, and they checked and rechecked their cards, as if hoping to find something different. They might have been brothers, or sisters, or friends, or hated enemies. Rats tend to look alike, so it’s tough to tell.

“Now a stoat,” Bonsoir continued, whispering the words into the ear of his mistress, “a stoat is black, black all over, black down to the tip of his”—he goosed the squirrel and she gave a little chuckle—“feet.”

The Swollen Waters was a dive bar, ugly even for the ugly section of an ugly town, but busy enough despite this, or perhaps because of it. The pack of thugs, misanthropes, and hooligans who thronged the place took a good hard look at the Captain as he entered, searching for signs of easy prey. Seeing none, they fell back into their cups.

A swift summer storm had matted down the Captain’s fur, and to reach a seat at the bar required an ungainly half-leap. He seemed more than usually perturbed, and he was usually quite perturbed.

“You want anything?” The server was a shrewish sort of shrew, as shrews tend to be.

“Whiskey.”

A miserly dram poured into a stained glass. “We don’t get many mice in here.”

“We’re not partial to the stench of piss,” the captain said curtly.

Back at the table the river card had been laid, and Bonsoir’s lady-friend rested on the vacant seat next to him. One rat was already out, the stack of chips too much weight for his wallet to support. But the other had stayed in, calling Bonsoir’s raise with the remainder of his dwindling finances. Now he triumphantly tossed his cards down on the table and reached for the pot.

“That is a very fine hand,” Bonsoir said, and somehow when he had finished this statement his paw was settled atop the rat’s, firmly keeping him from withdrawing his winnings. “That is the sort of hand a fellow might expect to get rich from.” Bonsoir flipped his own over, revealing a pair of minor nobles. “Such a fellow would be disappointed.”

The rat looked hard at the two thin pieces of paper that had just lost him his savings. Then he looked back up at the stoat. “You’ve been taking an awful lot of pots tonight.” His partner slid back from the table and rested his hand on a cap-and-ball pistol in his belt. “An awful lot of pots.”

Bonsoir’s eyes were cheery and vicious. “That is because you are a very bad poker player,” he said, a toothy smile spreading across his snout, “and because I am Bonsoir.”

The second rat tapped the butt of his weapon with a curved yellow nail, tic tic, reminding his partner of the play. Around them the other customers did what they could to prepare for the coming violence. Some shifted to the corners. Those within range of an exit chose this opportunity to slip out of it. The bartender ducked beneath the counter and considered sadly how long it would take to get the bloodstains out of his floor.

But after a moment the first rat blinked slowly, then shook his head at the second.

“That is what I like about your country,” Bonsoir said, merging his new winnings with his old. “Everyone is so reasonable.”

The story was that Bonsoir had come over with the Foreign Legion and never left. There were lots of stories about Bonsoir. Some of them were probably even true.

The rats at least seemed to think so. They slunk out the front entrance faster than dignity would technically allow—but then rats, as befits a species subsisting on filth, make no fetish of decorum.

The Captain let himself down from his high chair and made his way to the back table, now occupied solely by Bonsoir and his female companion. She had resumed her privileged position on his lap, and chuckled gaily at the soft things he whispered into her ear.

“Cap-i-ton,” Bonsoir offered by way of greeting, though he had noted the mouse when first he entered. “It has been a long time.”

The Captain nodded.

“This is a social call? You have tracked down your old friend Bonsoir to see how he has accommodated to his new life?”

The Captain shook his head.

“No?” The stoat set his paramour aside a second time and feigned wide-eyed surprise. “I am shocked. Do you mean to say you have some ulterior motive in coming to see Bonsoir?”

“We’re taking another run at it.”

“We are taking another run at it?” Bonsoir repeated, scratching at his chin with one ebony claw. “Who is we?”

“The gang.”

“Those who are still alive, you mean?”

The Captain didn’t answer.

“And why do you think I would want to rejoin the . . . gang, as you say?”

“There’ll be money on the back end.”

Bonsoir waived his hand over the stack of chips in front of him. “There is always money.”

“And some action. I imagine things get dull for you, out here in the sticks.”

Bonsoir shivered with annoyance. So far as Bonsoir was concerned, the spot he occupied was the center of the world. “Do I look like Elf to you, so desperate to kill? Besides—there are always creatures willing to test Bonsoir.”

“And of such caliber.”

Bonsoir’s upper lip curled back to reveal the white of a canine. “I am not sure I understand your meaning, my Cap-i-ton.”

“No?” The Captain pulled a cigar out of his pocket. It was short, thick, and stinky. He lit a match against the rough wood of the chair in front of him and held it to the end. “I think you’ve grown as fat as your playmate. I think wine and females have ruined you. I think you’re happy here, intimidating the locals and playing lord. I think this was a waste of my time.”

The Captain was halfway to the door when he felt the press of metal against his throat. “I am Bonsoir,” the stoat hissed, a scant inch from the Captain’s ears. “I have cracked rattlesnake eggs while their mother slept soundly atop them, I have snatched the woodpecker mid-flight. More have met their end at my hand than from corn liquor and poisoned bait! I am Bonsoir, whose steps fall without sound, whose knives are always sharp, who comes at night and leaves widows weeping in the morning.”

The Captain showed no signs of excitement at his predicament, or surprise at the speed and quiet with which Bonsoir had managed to cross the distance between them. Instead he puffed out a dank blend of cigar smoke and continued casually, “So you’re in?”

Bonsoir scooted round in front of the Captain, his temper again rising to the surface. “Do you think this is enough for Bonsoir? This shithole of a bar, these fools who let me take their money? Do you think Bonsoir would turn his back on the Cap-i-ton, on his comrades, on the cause?” The stoat grew furious at the suggestion, working himself into a chittering frenzy. “Bonsoir’s hand is the Cap-i-ton’s! Bonsoir’s heart is the Cap-i-ton’s! Let any creature who thinks otherwise say so now, that Bonsoir may satisfy the stain on his honor!”

Bonsoir twirled the knife in his palm and looked around to see if anyone would take up the challenge. None did. After a moment the Captain leaned in close and whispered, “St. Martin’s Day. At the Partisan’s bar.”

Bonsoir’s knife disappeared somewhere about his person. He chopped off a crisp salute, the first he had offered anyone in half a decade. “Bonsoir will be there.”

Chapter 3: Bonsoir’s Arrival

Bonsoir made a loud entrance for a quiet creature. The Captain had been sitting silently for half an hour when the double doors flew open and the stoat came sauntering in. It was too fast to be called saunter, really, Bonsoir bobbing and weaving to his own internal sense of rhythm—but it conveyed the same intent. A beret sat jauntily on his scalp, and a long black cigarette dangled from his lips. Strung over his shoulder was a faded green canvas sack. He carried no visible weapons, though somehow this did not detract from his sense of menace.

He nodded brusquely to Reconquista and slipped his way to the back, stopping in front of the main table. “Where is everyone?”

“They’re coming.”

Bonsoir took his beret off his head and scowled, then replaced it. “It is not right for Bonsoir to be the first—he is too special. His arrival deserves an audience.”

The Captain nodded sympathetically, or as close as he was able to with a face formed of granite. He passed Bonsoir the now half-empty jug as the stoat bounced against a stool. “They’re coming,” he repeated.

Chapter 4: The Virtues of Silence

Boudica lay half-buried in the creek bed when she noticed a figure threading its way along the dusty path leading up from town. The stream had been dry for years now, but the shifting silt at the bottom was still the coolest spot for miles, shaded as it was by the branches of a scrub tree. Most days, and all the hot ones, you could find Boudica there, whiling away the hours in mild contemplation, a hunk of chaw to keep her company.

When the figure was half a mile out, Boudica’s eyebrows elevated a tick above their resting position. For the opossum, it was an extraordinary expression of shock. Indeed, it verged on hysteria. She reflected for a moment longer, than resettled her bulk into the sand.

This would mean trouble, and generally speaking, Boudica did not like trouble. Boudica, in fact, liked the absolute opposite of trouble. She liked peace and quiet, solitude and silence. Boudica lived for those occasional moments of perfect tranquility, when all noise and motion faded away to nothing, and time itself seemed to still.

That she sometimes broke that silence with the retort of a rifle was, in her mind, ancillary to the main issue. And indeed, it was not her steady hands that had made Boudica the greatest sniper who had ever sighted down a target. Nor her eyes, eyes that had picked out the Captain long moments before anyone else could have even identified him as a mouse. It was that she understood how to wait, to empty herself of everything in anticipation of that one perfect moment—and then to fill that moment with death.

As an expert, then, Boudica had no trouble biding the time it took the mouse to arrive, which she spent wondering how the Captain had found her. Not her spot at the creek bed; the locals were a friendly bunch and would have seen no harm in passing on that information. But the town itself was south of the old boundaries, indeed as south as one could go, surrounded by an impenetrably barren wasteland.

Boudica spat tobacco juice into the weeds and set her curiosity aside. The Captain was the sort of animal who accomplished the things he set out to do.

Finally the mouse crested the little hill that led up to Boudica’s perch. The Captain reacted to the sight of his old comrade with the same lack of excitement that the opossum had displayed upon picking him out some twenty minutes prior. Though the heat was scorching, and the walk from town rugged, and the Captain no longer a pinky, he remained unwinded. As if to fix this, he reached into his duster and pulled out a cigar, lit it, and set it to his mouth.

“Boudica.”

Boudica swatted away a fly that had landed on the top of her exposed tummy. “Captain,” she offered, taking her time with each syllable, as she did with everything.

“Keeping cool?”

“Always.”

It was a rare conversation where the Captain was the more active party. He disliked the role, though it was one he had anticipated playing when enlisting the opossum. “You busy?”

“Do I look it?”

“Up for some work?”

Boudica rose slowly from the dust of the creek bed. She brushed a layer of sand off her fur. “Hell, Captain,” she said, her savage grin contrasting unpleasantly with the dreamy quietude of her eyes, “what took you so long?”

Chapter 5: Boudica’s Arrival

When the Captain returned from the back Boudica was at the table, the brim of her sombrero covering most of her face. Leaning against the wall behind her was a rifle nearly as long as its owner, a black walnut stock with an intricately engraved barrel. She was smiling quietly at some jest of Bonsoir’s as if she had been there all day—indeed, as if they had never parted.

He thought about saying something but decided against it.

Chapter 6: The Dragon’s Lair

The Captain had been journeying for the better part of three days when he crested the woodland path into the clearing. He was in the north country, where there was still water, and trees, and green growing things—but even so it was a dry day, and the heat of the late afternoon held its grip against the coming of the evening. He was tired, and thirsty, and angry. Only the first two were remediable, or the results of his long walk. The inn was a squat, stone, two-story structure with a thatched roof and a low wall surrounding it. Above the entrance was a whittled sign that read EVERGREEN REST. Inside, a thin innkeeper waited to greet him, and a fat wife cooked stew, and a homely daughter set the tables.

The Captain did not go inside. The Captain swung around to the small garden that lay behind the building.

In recent years these sorts of hostelries had become less and less common, with bandits and petty marauders plaguing the roads, choking traffic, and making travel impossible for anyone unable to afford an armed escort. Even the lodges themselves had become targets, and those that remained had begun to resemble small forts, with high walls, and stout doors, and proprietors that greeted potential customers with cocked scatterguns.

The reason the Evergreen Rest had undergone no such revisions—the reason no desperado within five leagues was foolish enough to buy a glass of beer there, let alone make trouble—stood behind an old tree stump, an ax poised above his head. Age had withered his skin from a bright crimson to a deep maroon, but it had done nothing to excise the flecks of gold speckled through his flesh. Apart from the shift in hue, the years showed little on the salamander. He balanced comfortably on webbed feet, sleek muscle undiluted with blubber. His faded trousers were worn but neatly cared for. He had sweated through his white shirt and loosened his shoestring necktie to ease the passage of his breath.

He paused at the Captain’s approach but went back to his work after a moment, splitting logs into kindling with sure, sharp motions. The Captain watched him dismember a choice selection of timber before speaking. “Hello, Cinnabar.”

Cinnabar had calm eyes, friendly eyes, eyes that smiled and called you “sir” or “madam,” depending on the case, eyes like cool water on a hot day. Cinnabar had hands that made corpses, lots of corpses, walls and stacks of them. Cinnabar’s eyes never seemed to feel anything about what his hands did.

“Hello, Captain,” Cinnabar’s mouth said. Cinnabar’s arms went back to chopping wood.

“It’s been a while,” the Captain added, as if he had just realized it.

“Time does that.”

“Time does,” the Captain agreed. “You surprised to see me?”

Cinnabar took another log from the pile, set it onto the tree stump. “Not really,” he said, the denial punctuated by the fall of his ax.

The Captain nodded. It was not going well, he recognized, but he wasn’t quite sure why or how to change it. He took his hat off and fanned himself for a moment before continuing. “You a cook?” While waiting for the answer he reached down and picked up a small rock.

“Busboy.”

“It’s been a long walk. Think I could get some water?”

Cinnabar stared at the Captain for a moment, as if searching for some deeper meaning. Then he nodded and started toward a rain barrel near the back entrance. As he did so the Captain, with a sudden display of speed, pitched the stone he had been holding at the back of his old companion’s head.

For a stuttered second it sailed silently toward Cinnabar’s skull. Then it was neatly cradled in the salamander’s palm. But the motion that ought to have linked these two events—the causal bridge between them—was entirely absent, like frames cut from a film.

“That was childish,” Cinnabar said, dropping the stone.

“I needed to see if you still had it.”

Cinnabar stared at the Captain with his eyes that looked kind but were not.

“You know why I’m here?”

“Are you still so angry?”

The Captain drew himself up to his full height. It wasn’t much of a height, but that was how high the Captain drew himself. “Yeah,” he muttered. “Hell yeah.”

Cinnabar turned his face back to the unchopped pile of wood. He didn’t say anything.

Gradually the Captain deflated, his rage spent. “So you’ll come?”

Cinnabar blinked once, slowly. “Yes.”

The Captain nodded. The sound of someone laughing drifted out from the inn. The crickets took to chirruping. The two old friends stood silently in the fading light, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at them. That they were old friends, I mean. Anyone could see it was getting dark.

Chapter 7: Cinnabar’s Arrival

Cinnabar walked into the bar looking much the same as when the Captain had left him. A faded shirt, a black bolo tie threaded through it. But now he was weighted down with iron, as if afraid the southern wind might carry him away. Two oversized revolvers peeked out over his belt. The butt of a smaller cousin hung from his shoulder, a bulge in his boot rounding out the family reunion. Turning to hang his coat on the wall he revealed one final engine of destruction, a rifle with the barrel cut down. It was strapped sideways across his lower back, just above the root of his tail.

“Do you think you brought enough metal?” Bonsoir asked, whiskers twitching at the joke.

“For what we’re planning?”

Bonsoir considered this for a moment before replying without any trace of his former good humor. “We should try to find you a shotgun.”

Cinnabar nodded and took his seat.

Chapter 8: A Well-Earned Retirement

Barley was surprised to see a customer so late in the day. Since taking over the general store he had grown as familiar with the flow of commerce in his small town as a fisherman does with the current. It was a Sunday, and that meant a deluge of sales after church let out—penny candy and ribbons for the children, cask ale and bits of finery for their parents—but little enough thereafter. In fact he had planned to close early and head across the street to the town’s only other establishment, a modest hostelry, drink a glass of cool beer and eat a steak dinner. He was glad now that he hadn’t. Between the sun’s glare and the weak eyes common to his species, he couldn’t make out which of his regulars was standing in his doorway, but he waved him in anyway. He was a friendly sort, Barley. At least he had lately become so.

“Don’t worry, we’re open.” His wide grin of greeting fell away as the Captain brushed through the entrance.

“Hello, Barley,” the Captain said, extending his hand.

After a short but noticeable pause, Barley reached across the trestle and took it. “Captain.” Barley was an adult badger, slate gray and nearly big enough to touch the ceiling. His palm was the size of the mouse’s chest, and it swallowed up its counterpart as if hungry for more.

“It wasn’t easy to find you.”

“I didn’t want to be found.”

The Captain nodded and scanned the badger’s establishment. It was spare but well maintained, rows of stock neatly arranged, the ground freshly swept. It was, in short, indistinguishable from a hundred other general stores the Captain had passed through in his lifetime. He tried to square it with his memories of the creature who managed it. It was hard going. “It’s a nice place you’ve got.”

Barley inspected the mouse’s face for any hint of mockery. “Thanks. I took over a few years ago. The owner’s daughter went east for work, and he didn’t have anyone to leave it to.”

“You like it?”

Barley smiled, almost self-consciously. “I do. It’s . . . quiet. Since the mine dried up there’s not much traffic. I know the customers; I know what they want. They come in smiling and they leave the same way.”

The Captain nodded, not really listening. “I’m putting the old crew together.”

“I’m out,” Barley said. For years Barley had dreaded this moment, hoped it would never come, feared that when it did his courage would shrivel up and he wouldn’t be able to cough out those words. The moment of truth had revealed itself as not being nearly so terrible as he had supposed. He decided to say it again. “I’m out. You’ve been good to me, Captain, but I’ve been good to you too. The way I figure it, we’re even.”

The Captain kept the off-white of his dead eye firm on the badger, but his face didn’t twitch. “I need you, Barley. There’s no one can do what you can do.”

“What I do?” Barley smiled and nodded to his stock on the shelves behind him. “I sell things, Captain. Notepaper and spools of thread, frying pans and hardtack. You need any of those, I can give it to you at cost. But beyond that . . .” His lips drew into a frown and he shook his head slowly. “I don’t kill anymore. I won’t kill anymore. I’m through with it.”

“We’ve all killed, Barley.”

“Not like I have. Not so many, not near so many. None of you did, not even Cinnabar . . .” For a moment Barley’s long snout hung open, and he lost himself in ugly memory. Then he blinked twice and turned back toward his chief. “I’m not arguing with you, Captain. I’m telling you how it is. I won’t do it anymore. Everyone has the right to change.”

The Captain nodded, unsurprised, but with a certain weary sadness. “I figured you’d say as much. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too . . .” Barley began, but before he could finish the Captain put furred fingers to his lips and let out a sharp whistle. The pair of sewer rats who entered then were as hard as pig iron, scarred things from one of the cities back east. The Captain had brought them special for the job. To judge by their kit and manner, it was not the first time they’d come to a foreign place for the purpose of doing evil.

Barley took a slow glance at the two of them, then turned his gaze back onto their employer. Having summoned his minions, the Captain now showed them a distinct lack of interest, his attention focused entirely on the badger.

The two rats were professionals, the first covering Barley with his rifle while the second fanned out to flank him, his hand on a big revolver dangling from his waist.

“This him?” the one with the rifle asked.

The Captain nodded.

The rat turned back to Barley. “Sorry, pal. Nothing personal.”

“Just business,” Barley agreed, his coal black eyes pinning down on the Captain.

The first rat nodded and leveled the rifle at Barley’s skull; he was experienced enough to know one in the body wasn’t a kill shot for a badger, not even at close range. He cocked the lever back. His partner stood by silently.

Badgers are not spry animals, and Barley was no outlier. But he understood the importance of committing to violence, of giving oneself over fully to savagery and not playing the flirt. And perhaps his placidity had lulled the rats into a false sense of security. Though well practiced in murder, they had misread his resignation—it was not acceptance of his own death that Barley’s stillness signaled. It was acceptance of theirs.

Barley dropped suddenly to all fours, shielded briefly by the thick wood of the counter. There was a loud crack as a rifle bullet tore through the space the badger had just occupied. Then heavy splinters flew off in all directions, Barley pitching himself through the oak paneling and into his would-be assassin. The full weight of his shoulder impacted against the rat and bounced him against the side wall. A second crack, lower and softer than the retort of the rifle, signaled the shattering of the rodent’s vertebrae.

The other rat managed to get a shot off, but his nerve was broken and he didn’t take time to aim; the bullet tore a fat gouge from Barley’s cheek but nothing more. He roared furiously and switched directions on a dime, his massive bulk flailing but his steps as graceful as a dancer’s. The rat quivered his lower lip and squirted down his pant leg, and then Barley brought his hands together in a clap that shook the very foundations of the building.

Barley turned back to the Captain, mad with rage, his palms red with the outline of the slaughtered rat. He watched his old commander for a moment, the layers of tightly corded muscle and the fur surrounding it insufficient to contain his wild anger. Then he sprinted forward and scooped up the unresisting mouse with one hand, lifting him above the ground and giving him a shake that would have snapped the spine of a less hardy victim.

“Five years!” The Captain’s whiskers were pinned back by the force of the roar. “Five years without murder, five years without a corpse! What have you done? What have you done?”

The Captain’s face betrayed no knowledge that he was a few pounds per inch from oblivion, cool and steady and faintly mocking. “I made you a killer again.”

Barley’s eyes, as big as the Captain’s head, bulged in their sockets. Barley’s lip quivered in the sort of spasm of rage that often precedes murder.

But then Barley opened his grip, and the Captain fell awkwardly to the ground. He lay there for a half-moment, then pulled himself to his feet.

Barley face was sad and heavy. He stared at the wall as though he was having trouble recognizing it.

“St. Martin’s Day,” the Captain said. “The Partisan’s bar. Bring the machine.”

After a long moment Barley nodded absently, and the Captain left, stepping casually over the broken body of the creature he had paid to die.

Chapter 9: Barley’s Arrival

Given that he stretched perhaps triple the combined size of the creatures waiting for him, Barley managed to enter the bar without drawing undue attention to himself. It wasn’t stealth, exactly; he was much too large for that. More a sort of unassuming quality that allowed eyes to pass over him without demanding the notice his dimensions rightfully demanded. In one hand he gripped the top handle of a black trunk, wide and presumably quite heavy, though you’d not have known it by the ease with which it was carried. Apart from whatever was inside, Barley had come unarmed.

The conversation at the back table had long since gone silent. The Captain was not one for small talk, even in his cups, and Boudica and Cinnabar’s studied muteness made the mouse seem positively loquacious by comparison. Generally speaking, Bonsoir didn’t see the silence of others as a barrier to conversation, but even the most committed orator requires some assistance from the chorus. Without it he had turned, like his companions, to the rewarding but largely silent task of getting drunk.

So Bonsoir looked up happily when the creaking floorboards indicated the arrival of another member of their merry band, and his smile widened as he discovered the newcomer’s identity. Barley matched it with a grin that overran his snout and spilled over into a booming laugh. Unlikely as it seemed, the ink-black stoat and the broad-chested badger had been thick as thieves during their service, to use an overly sympathetic euphemism to describe years spent in the business of violence and mayhem.

“That’s an ugly hat,” Barley started.

Bonsoir’s eyes went wide with mock fury. “This is the greatest hat anyone has ever worn,” he said, pointing at his beret. “This hat was a a gift from the Emperor of Mexico, after I saved his life from a rampaging skunk. He begged me to stay on as his chief adviser, but I said, ‘Emperor, Bonsoir cannot be caged, not even with bars of gold.’ ”

“Mexico doesn’t have an emperor.”

“That is Mexico’s misfortune, for all of the greatest countries have emperors.”

Barley laughed a second time and made his way to the oversized stool that Reconquista had put out to accommodate his ample backside. He set his case next to his chair and called for more liquor. From behind the counter the rat brought another jug to join its siblings scattered about the table.

If, as Barley had insisted, he had turned over a new leaf, and was no longer willing to countenance murder—he seemed altogether comfortable in the presence of creatures who had made it their calling.

Chapter 10: Our Old Friend, the Devil

The Captain slunk through the back streets of the Capital like waste through a drainage pipe. There were few enough now who could remember him, and the likelihood that any of them were spending this stormy evening in the slums north of the docks was slim—but the Captain was careful even when he didn’t think he needed to be.

So he stuck to the shadows, and cut through alleys, and kept his hand firm on his revolver. The Captain did not like being in the Capital, had not been back since that grim final night five years past. But he had one more visit to make, one last strand to pull together, and it was not coincidence that he had saved it for last. The rain trickled down from the top of his hat to the brim, dripped over his dead eye and into his whiskers. It was the kind of storm that made walking feel like wading, the kind of rain that wet the ground without cooling the air. It was the right kind of weather for the business ahead. The Captain stifled a sniffle.

He took a turn down an unremarkable side street and stopped in front of a battered wooden house. No sign established it as a place of trade, and there was nothing to indicate it was anything but what it seemed; except the door was heavy, and thick, heavier and thicker than a door needed to be for a shack in a slum. The Captain banged on it, three solid blows.

A peephole slid open. A beady pair of eyes peeked out from it. “What you want?” a voice asked. It was not a friendly voice. Voices coming through peepholes rarely are.

“I’m here to see the Underground Man.”

With most of his body obscured, it was an open question how exactly the gatekeeper responded to this piece of information. But the eyes, at least, clouded up with fear. “Who you be?”

“Someone who knows who to ask for.”

The peephole slammed shut. The Captain heard the sound of a bolt unlocking, then the door opened to reveal a massive porcupine in a fine suit, perfectly tailored to allow for his prickly pines, any one of which was half again the size of the Captain.

“Welcome to the Setting Moon Café, sir. House policy requires all weapons be passed over for safekeeping.” The bouncer’s thick patois had been replaced with an upscale accent, but a quiver broke through it, as if the mention of the Underground Man was an invocation sufficient to unsettle him.

The Captain handed over his revolver. It represented perhaps a solid quarter of his armaments, though if the porcupine realized this he was wise enough not to make it an issue. “Speak to the bartender, sir, about your business,” he said, then, breaking role suddenly, he set a hand on the Captain’s arm. “If you’re certain you want to be about it.”

The Captain shook off the porcupine’s grip and descended the stairs without responding.

It would have come as a surprise to the homeless and destitute creatures who eked out a miserable existence on the streets above that their block—indeed, the neighborhood—was little more than camouflage, rough casing for the subterranean organs below. Beneath the boarded-up row houses was a sprawling citadel of sin, decadent and opulent, beautiful and corrupt. Scantily clad females carried trays of liquor to powerful males, threading their way through poker tables and roulette wheels. In one corner was a stage, though at the moment it was vacant of any entertainment. In another a door led to a suite of back rooms, and the pleasures on offer there were always available, so long as you had coin to pay.

The Captain paid no attention to the decor, or the females, or their clientele. The Captain was singular in his single-mindedness. He took an empty stool at the back counter, far away from the few packs of revelers, and he waved down the bartender.

“Whiskey? Smoke? Something more satisfying?”

“I’ll take the first,” the Captain said, pulling a cigar from a pocket and lighting it. “And I’ve got the second.”

“How about the third?” the bartender asked with practiced charm.

The straight line of the Captain’s mouth didn’t waver. “I’m here to see the Underground Man.”

The bartender went wide-eyed and threw back the shot of whiskey he had just poured for the Captain. “She knows you’re coming?”

“Who knows what the Underground Man knows?”

“Who indeed?” The bartender poured himself another glass and drank that as well. “I’ll let her know you’re here. If she don’t wanna see you . . .” The bartender shrugged. “You probably won’t be seen again.”

The Captain didn’t seem impressed by that. The bartender disappeared into a back door.

It was a slow night or the guinea pig probably wouldn’t have bothered. The Captain did not seem desperate for company, though on the other hand, company was usually the reason animals made their way to the Setting Moon Café. So she sidled two seats over, drawing the Captain’s attention with her ample bulk.

“Not interested,” he said flatly.

She smiled. She was pretty, for a guinea pig, if you didn’t mind them heavy. If you did mind them heavy you probably wouldn’t go for a guinea pig. “Slow down a minute, sugar. No one’s asking for a ring. How about you just buy me a drink?”

“I’m not paying for this one,” the Captain said. “I could not pay for another.” He reached over the bar and grabbed a glass, then filled it from the bottle before sliding it to her. He had to stretch.

She recognized his courtesy with a quick bob of her head, then took a sip of her drink. Time passed. She fluttered her eyelashes and offered a coquettish smile. But the Captain’s shallow reserve of gentility was depleted, and he ignored the bait.

She decided to go for broke. “I could put a smile on your face,” she whispered, running the pink of her tail down the Captain’s leg.

“No, you couldn’t,” he said, and his one good eye didn’t look at her.

Another moment beside his ground-glass scowl and she decided he was probably right. As her hope for a transaction evaporated her demeanor changed, leavened into something more natural. “What’re you here for then?”

The Captain rolled a few fingers of liquor down the recess of his throat. “I’m here to see the devil.”

A flicker of fear, though she hid it swiftly. “I’m not sure I know him, stranger.”

The Captain poured another charge into his cup, disposed of it with one neat motion. “Everybody knows the devil. But not everyone works for her.”

The guinea pig swallowed hard. “I don’t know anything about that, stranger. I stick to my own business.”

Now the Captain did smile, though she found she wished he hadn’t. “Let’s hope that’s enough to save you.”

The bartender came out from the back then, shaking his head in wonder or fear. “She’ll see you, stranger,” he began. “Follow that passage to the end.” He opened his mouth as if to say something else, perhaps to try to dissuade the Captain, but in the end he remained silent. The mouse did not look like the sort of creature who left a place with his aims unfulfilled. And besides, security had already marked him. One way or the other, he was going to see the Underground Man. The open question was whether he’d come back out again.

The Captain slid off his stool and walked into the back, without a word of thanks or farewell for the bartender or his erstwhile companion. The door led to a long corridor, and then to a second door, grim and featureless. He banged his tiny fist against the wood. It opened almost immediately, the dour rats behind it apprised of the Captain’s arrival.

Rats are not, generally speaking, friendly creatures, but even by the standard of their species the small plague rats were particularly menacing. They did, however, upend the age-old species stereotype of being unhygienic and ill-disciplined, in fact exhibiting a neat uniformity in dress and manner, clad in well-fitting black fatigues and scowls to match the Captain’s own. Or nearly, at least; the Captain was a hell of a scowler.

This time the search was thorough, and the Captain ended it without his irons or much of his dignity. The former concerned him more than the latter.

Two of the rats hustled the Captain down another wandering corridor, spending a long few minutes in silence. They were thorough professionals, and the knowledge that they might well find themselves firing their shouldered scatterguns at the mouse’s back precluded any misplaced cordiality. For his part, the Captain just didn’t like talking.

They came to a final door, ebony accented in rosewood, a centered doorknob of sterling silver. “She’s ahead of you,” one of the rats ventured. “And we’re behind.”

If the Captain felt any way about this, you couldn’t have told from his face. He opened the door and stepped inside.

The Underground Man’s sanctuary was a towering cylindrical chamber, as dissimilar to the rest of the Setting Moon Café as the Setting Moon Café was to the surrounding neighborhood. Its defining feature was the bookshelves that wrapped around the walls, housing thousands upon thousands of leather-bound volumes, a rolling ladder offering access to their wisdom. At floor level the concentric circles of an Oriental rug strangled a jet-black desk. A single gas lamp dangled down from a long chain attached to the distant ceiling. There was a small door opposite the one the Captain had just come through, which led, presumably, into the owner’s sleeping quarters.

In the center of this vast edifice of erudition, surrounded by a ring of the most jaded debauchery, encompassed finally by abject poverty, stood a fat mole in Eastern pajamas. She took a few steps toward the Captain, her blind eyes twinkling through bifocals. Her hands were crossed inside her wide sleeves. Her pink snout quivered in the air, inspecting the new arrival. Behind the Captain the guards fingered their weapons, prepping for the kill.

“My old friend,” the Underground Man said, extending her hand. “My dear old friend.”

The Captain took it. “Gertrude.” He nodded to the books, or perhaps to the building that surrounded them. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

Gertrude shrugged self-effacingly at the surrounding splendor. “One has to keep busy. And you? How have you occupied the last half-decade?”

“I joined a nunnery.”

“Here soliciting donations?”

“Not exactly.”

“No, I imagined not. Now would be the time—the Capital rots, the country boils, the roads are awash in banditry and disorder.” She scratched her chin, settled her arms around a rotund belly. “Have you thought about how you’ll do it?”

“Yes.”

“Loquacious as ever.” Gertrude burped a laugh. “I assume it begins with the Elder.”

The Captain grunted.

“He should be easy enough to find. And if you’ve got everyone together, easy enough to get. But what happens after?”

The Captain shrugged. A silent moment dripped away. “I figured that was where you came in.”

“I suppose I might be of some assistance. Though that does raise another issue.” She went to the bar on her desk, filled two glasses with a golden liquid trapped in an opaque decanter, turned, and handed one to her guest. “What’s in it for me?”

The Captain sipped his drink, but above it his eyes didn’t leave the mole. “You could be the Lady of the Manor.”

“I couldn’t. And besides, I don’t want to be Lady.”

“Me, neither. But I wouldn’t mind whispering in her ear.”

“You say that, but I’m not sure I believe you.” Gertrude drained a few fingers of alcohol through her long snout. “At the bottom, I think there’s nothing in this for you but blood.”

“So what do you want?” the Captain asked testily. He was not a fellow who enjoyed having his mind probed.

Gertrude gestured casually at her surroundings, opulence flavored with refinement. “I have it. What we had hoped to gain collectively, I’ve taken on my own.”

“Would you do it for the sake of old times?”

“I rather think not. We are creatures little troubled by such extravagances as loyalty—and even still, your probable suicide mission would be stretching the bonds.”

“Then do it because we’re going to go for it whether you throw your hand in or not. If you stay out of it, and it goes our way, then you’ll be left in the cold. And if you stay out of it, and we fail . . . I imagine you might experience a brief twinge of regret.”

Gertrude smirked. “Very brief.”

A few more seconds drifted by, then Gertrude sighed and made a motion dismissing her guards. “It would be nice to see the Dragon again,” she admitted. “And of course, there is that lingering question of who exactly betrayed us.”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” the Captain said, his visage more than usually terrible.

Chapter 11: Gertrude’s Arrival

Gertrude came in through the back door, looking very little like the criminal despot the Captain had spoken to some three weeks earlier. She had swapped her Eastern garb for a faded calico dress, homespun and homely.

Cinnabar leaned over to the Captain. “That’s everyone, then?”

“Not quite.”

Chapter 12: Elf

The crew was arguing. The crew spent a lot of time arguing.

“It was Harelip and Half-Eye Pete. How do you think he got that half-eye?” Barley asked.

“I had always assumed he was born with it,” Bonsoir said.

“You thought he was born with a knife scar running from his forehead to his lip?”

Bonsoir shrugged and made a popping sound with his mouth. “It was not an issue I felt compelled to contemplate.”

“We worked with them for two years,” Gertrude insisted. “How could you not have known they were lovers? Or that, when they stopped being lovers, Harelip cut out half of Half-Eye Pete’s eye?”

“Hello, friends,” interrupted the creature who appeared then from the darkness.

Cinnabar had a revolver out and cocked almost instantaneously, and a second thereafter Bonsoir kicked his chair from beneath him and came up with a length of steel. Gertrude shifted behind Barley, who had assumed his full height menacingly, and Boudica went for the holdout piece she kept in her boot.

Only the Captain remained in his chair, unruffled, sipping from his jug. “Hello, Elf.”

Elf was small for an owl, barely taller than Bonsoir. Her feathers, once smooth and tawny, had grown mottled and spare with age, but the cold horn of her beak seemed keen as ever. Her eyes were sulfur-yellow and wide as saucers, and they seemed not to blink, nor even to shudder. She stood indifferently on talons sharp as the scorn of a lover, the weight of her body tilted with curious asymmetry. Some earlier injury had shattered the bone of her left wing, and it curled up against her body and contorted her posture.

A long moment slipped past as the crew resumed their resting positions. Once seated, they did not fall over themselves in excitement to greet the new arrival. Cinnabar nodded. Barley allowed himself a brief grunt.

It is generally not possible to determine, from their expression alone, what a bird is feeling—a beak can tear, rend, or peck, but it cannot smile or frown—so it is possible that Elf was terribly offended by this lackadaisical welcome, and simply unable to show it. It seems unlikely, however.

“Why don’t you have yourself a seat?” the Captain asked. “Reconquista can find you something to drink.”

There was something very much like a collective gasp of discomfort from the seated assemblage.

“No, thank you, Captain,” Elf responded in her quiet monotone. “The trip here was long, and I much prefer the stars.” She ducked her head in a nod, once to the mouse, once to the rest of the group, then turned toward the door. Belaying the utter quiet of her approach, her exit was loud and slow, claws rapping against wood. “Oh, Captain,” Elf began again, head swiveling backward, “if the rat might find a bowl of milk for me, I would be grateful.”

“Of course,” the Captain responded amiably. “I’ll have it sent right out.”

Elf nodded the full moon of her backward face, then swung it forward and hobbled out into the night. The silence filled with apprehension.

“God of the Gardens, Captain, what the hell is she doing here?”

“We’ll need her before the end.”

“I was sure she was dead.”

“She can’t even scout for us anymore, with that wing.”

The Captain growled, more of a squeak really, but it had the same effect. “We’ll need her before the end.”

The crowd quieted and turned back to their drinks. The Captain had given the word, and if you didn’t trust the Captain to take care of his end, then there wasn’t any point in being there. But still, no one looked happy.

Chapter 13: The Plan

“So that’s the plan,” the Captain said, although actually it was only part of it.

Boudica took her hat off, looked at it a while, then put it back on her head. Gertrude twittered her snout. Cinnabar smoked a cigarette.

“What about when it’s over?” Barley asked. “What do we do then?”

Bonsoir chittered suddenly, his oblong body shaking with mirth. “ ‘When it’s over?” He laughed again, louder and longer, till his fur stood on end; he seemed convulsed with glee. “We are planning on facing the entire might of the Gardens with only the seven of us, and you are worried about your soft retirement? Do not worry, my friend, we won’t be around to enjoy it!”

The good humor spread back to Barley, who smiled sheepishly. Gertrude offered her meaningless little smirk, and Boudica was grinning anyway. Lizards don’t exactly have lips, but Cinnabar seemed vaguely happy all the same. Even the Captain smiled.

Sort of. It was close. It counted for the Captain.

Chapter 14: Later . . .

“What happened to the Captain’s eye?” Bonsoir asked Barley while getting steadily drunk in the corner.

“That day when—”

“What day?”

“That day.”

“Oh. That day.”

“Yeah. Anyway. Remember Alfalfa the hare? Said pistols bored him, liked to do his work with dynamite?”

“Sure. He still owes me money.”

“I wouldn’t expect to collect. Mephetic turned him, I dunno how. Once the trouble started he lit one of those boom sticks. Captain put him down, but . . .” Barley shrugged his swelled shoulders. “Not fast enough. The explosion took out the Captain’s eye, and it did for that half of Reconquista that isn’t there anymore.”

“I always liked that half.”

“I imagine Reconquista was partial to it as well.”

Chapter 15: And Later . . .

“I don’t remember her being so crazy,” Bonsoir began. Bonsoir often began things wiser members of the company preferred to leave sleeping.

“She was always off,” Barley said. Slurred, really.

“She was always off, but she was not always like this.”

“You can’t trust a bird.”

“You can’t trust anyone.”

“She took the betrayal hard.”

“I didn’t like it any more than she did,” Bonsoir responded. “But I didn’t let it drive me mad either.”

“You didn’t lose your arm,” Barley growled.

“It’s not the wound,” Gertrude chimed in. “It’s the one who made it.”

“You mean the Quaker?” This from Bonsoir.

“Can you remember how they used to be together? They refused to be separated. Not in camp or on a job, not sleeping or waking. When Elf toileted, he used to coil outside.”

“I remember.”

“One thing to be betrayed by a friend. Another entirely to be betrayed by a lover.”

“Wasn’t that either,” Cinnabar piped in. His chair was tilted backward, his legs up on the table. “It’s the ground.”

Bonsoir looked confused. “The ground?”

“She wasn’t meant for it. She’s a flyer, and she’s spent the last five years hobbling.” The brim of Cinnabar’s hat still covered his eyes. “That would drive anything crazy.”

Chapter 16: And Yet Later . . .

The Captain had just finished marking his territory when a shadow hooted greeting. He buttoned unstained trousers and turned to face her. “Well?”

“He will be there?”

“He’ll be there.”

“You’re certain?” Elf’s eyes were bright, and between them and the moon there seemed no distinction in circumference. “You’re certain?”

The Captain was not honest, exactly, as many a creature had learned to its despair. But the Captain had a word, and once that word was given one did not question it, not even if one was Elf.

“Excuse me,” she said, turning away from his scowl. “It’s just that I’ve so longed to see him.” Her malformed wing shuddered against her torso. “I’ve just longed to see him so.”

When the Captain walked back into the bar, the rest of them assumed he was only unsteady with drink.

Chapter 17: And Later Still . . .

The rows of empty jugs had multiplied with the speed of caged rabbits. They piled onto the table and flowed over onto the ground. They were stacked high in the corner. They rolled out the back door.

“Down with the false lord!” Reconquista shrieked suddenly. “Long live the Elder! Long live the true Lord of the Manor!”

Bonsoir borrowed a pistol from Cinnabar and fired into the air. Barley beat his chest as if to break a rib. Boudica hooted once then fell silent. Drunk as they were, they’d have cheered for the moon to make war on the stars, and offered odds on the result.

Chapter 18: So Late as to Be Early . . .

Morning had begun its assumption over evening. The fire was long gray, no one left awake interested in tending it. In the corner Bonsoir and Barley had fallen asleep leaning against each other. The stoat had one arm around his old friend and the other coiled protectively over a jug of liquor. The badger snored loudly enough to awaken anyone not in a drunken stupor. Happily this was exactly how Boudica found herself, passed out behind the counter. Gertrude and Cinnabar were still at the table, drinking quietly. The Captain was nowhere to be seen.

Reconquista’s bar had seen better days, though the rat himself, collapsed on the back porch, didn’t seem to mind. Most of the windowpanes were unbroken. No permanent structural damage had been done. There weren’t any corpses to dispose of. Still, the bartender would have work to do when he woke, shattered jugs and empty bottles and overturned chairs and overturned tables and green stains on the walls and brown stains on the floors, both emitting odors that, as a rule, were best confined to an outhouse.

“Funny thing about it,” Cinnabar began softly, “I didn’t like the Elder.”

“I could never tell one from the other,” Gertrude admitted.

Chapter 19: The Power Behind the Throne

Mephetic had just left his office when the messenger arrived, and he was in an off mood. He was often in an off mood these days, weighed down by the endless bureaucratic details involved in being High Chancellor—grain harvests, floundering tax revenue, banditry, relations with neighboring kingdoms. When he’d organized the coup that had deposed the Captain and his pet claimant five years earlier, he had imagined his life involving more drunken bacchanals and fewer hours double-checking the sums of petty functionaries. Owning the crown, Mephetic had discovered—or, more accurately, owning the creature who owned it—was not all it was cracked up to be. Needless to say, the toad himself was no help. Most of the time he was barely awake.

So perhaps it was understandable that Mephetic’s first reaction upon discovering that his old nemesis was not only still alive but actively working toward his downfall was not fear, or anger, or even anxiety—it was outright excitement. He clutched the letter to his breast, and a slow smile stretched across his jaws. He hadn’t expected he’d ever need to make use of the traitor again, but he’d been paying him a bit by way of upkeep, just in case of this eventuality. The Captain’s body had never been found, after all. When he threw the last handful of dirt on the mouse’s coffin, then he’d be certain. Not before.

On his way to the cellars Mephetic caught himself in a mirror, spent a moment reflecting on his reflection, and decided he was not displeased. It had been years since there was a challenge to his position, and years before that since any wetwork had been required of him; most days he didn’t even bother to carry a gun. But he had kept in shape—the mask of his face was still a vibrant black, and his reek was sharp as old cheese. He nodded to himself. If the mouse was coming, he’d find a fit adversary.

More than one in fact, Mephetic thought as he headed toward the officer’s mess.

A long walk (the castle was a large place) found the skunk in one of the many sumptuous quarters of the vast estate: walls with bright watercolor murals, antique furniture, bottles strewn over the floor. Brontë reclined on some couches in one corner. A sleek, handsome fox, her fur bright red with fetching streaks of white, her claws neat and sharp and clean. Above her forehead was pinned a bright purple ribbon. Leaning against the wall behind her was a double-barreled blunderbuss, filigreed and shaped to fit her paw. For a smaller creature it would have been a shotgun, but for Brontë it functioned effectively enough as a pistol. It was a lovely looking thing, and Brontë liked using it whenever appropriate, and in a good number of situations where it strictly speaking wasn’t.

Next to her a calico cat puffed away at a hubble-bubble. Puss’s watch cost more than his vest, and his vest cost more than his boots, and his boots cost more than a house. If you stripped him naked and sold off his costume, you’d walk away with enough money to retire—though if you left him alive you wouldn’t have long to enjoy it. The only thing that could rival Puss’s vanity was his sadism.

Puss was rough and Brontë was worse, though as far as Mephetic was concerned neither could hold a candle, in terms of sheer menace, to the last member of the trio, coiled tightly against the back wall. They were his top ranks, the troubleshooters who helped to keep the Gardens running, any one of the three as dangerous as a battalion of rat guard. And if they didn’t quite snap to attention when Mephetic came through the door, well, they weren’t exactly your run-of-the-mill grunts, now were they? And they knew enough at least to pay him his due. Mephetic hadn’t gotten to where he was by being made of tissue paper.

He laid the situation out for them quickly, with little preamble and no aggrandizement.

“Well welcomed, as far as I’m concerned,” Puss said. Puss had drawing-room manners, and he was as amoral as a loaded gun. “I haven’t had anything interesting to do since coming to this backwater hellhole.”

“Not up to the standards of the Old Country?” Brontë asked.

“Nothing is,” Puss said, doffing his hat regretfully. “Would that father had been willing to overlook my . . . youthful indiscretions.”

“Which indiscretions were those? Dueling or buggery?”

Puss mulled this over for a moment. “You know, I can’t quite remember.”

Puss and Brontë laughed merrily. They were the best of friends. One of them was likely to kill the other before long.

Brontë turned to face the third of Mephetic’s high commanders. “You worked with them,” she said. “What can we expect?”

The Quaker had fed recently; you could tell from the fat knot stuck midway down his coil. This was the only reason Brontë had been willing to speak with him, and even so she asked the question from across the room, out of the serpent’s effective range, or so she hoped. The Quaker’s head was perched atop the tight weave of his body, and for a long moment it seemed he had not heard the question or simply didn’t care to answer. But then his ghost-white tail began to rattle, like rain falling against a windowpane, though far less comforting.

Mephetic nodded to himself. He was ready for the Captain.

Part the Second

Chapter 20: South of the Border

Angie Weasel was drinking from the trough. She righted herself and blinked twice. It was a hot day, sun beating off dust as far as you’d want to look, and a creature could get to seeing things that weren’t there. She squinted and fanned herself with her hat. She called to Bessie Weasel, her younger sister, slung out on the swinging bench that hung from the roof of the patio, just outside the main house. It was the only structure that remained standing, apart from a large barn rotting a few hundred paces to her rear. Bessie sighed. Bessie listened to the hinges squeal. By the time Bessie had managed to stand several minutes had passed, and the Captain and Cinnabar were clearly within view, and so her effort was altogether wasted.

A brief word on weasels—it is not a coincidence that their species has entered the popular nomenclature as synonym for duplicity and cheapness of character. No one has ever caressed a lover and said, “You weasel.” A mother does not call her babe a “weasel” as she brings it to breast. A weeping son does not eulogize his newly dead father as “my dearest weasel.” As a rule, they exemplify the sort of low cunning and brute force that is little in demand among the civilized creatures of the world.

The Weasel sisters were very much emblematic of the species, if perhaps slightly nastier than the norm. They had come down from the Gardens years ago, just ahead of a mob of animals looking to hang them by their long necks. With such qualifications, they’d had no trouble finding work in the Kingdom to the South. The Kingdom to the South was that sort of a place.

It was a long time before the two of them came within speaking distance. The Captain wasn’t the hurrying kind. Cinnabar, though he could move very fast, very fast indeed, was not the hurrying kind either. The Weasel sisters were also not much for haste, or at least they didn’t snap to attention at the arrival of their guests; they didn’t even bother with a greeting.

“You gonna tell your boss we’re here?” the Captain asked.

Angie Weasel walked over and banged on the door of the house.

“You must be the Dragon,” Bessie Weasel said.

Cinnabar didn’t respond.

“You don’t look like no dragon to me.”

“You ever seen a dragon?” the Captain asked.

“No.”

“Then your opinion don’t hold much weight.”

Angie Weasel snickered. Bessie Weasel scowled. Things might have gone bad right then if the door hadn’t opened, and the only creature alive who could control the Weasel sisters came out of it.

It had been years since the Captain had seen Zapata, but he looked exactly the same. Armadillos age slowly, after all. The plate of their armor grows thicker and denser, gray scales shielding the soft flesh beneath. But apart from that there is little enough to distinguish a pup from an elder. A pair of bandoliers crisscrossed his wide chest and two fat revolvers peeked up from his belt. A sombrero, turned off-white by long years in the sun, shaded the narrow point of his face. Zapata gave the simultaneous impression of a tyrant and clown, like he would make you laugh before having you shot.

He approached the Captain with an excitement one sees in lovers long separated, his claws outstretched as if for an embrace. When he saw the Captain wasn’t going to go for it he shortened his paws up to at least offer a handshake. When he saw the Captain wasn’t going to go for that either he set them into his pockets. He remained smiling, however. “The Captain himself! The Elder’s avenger, bringer of righteous death! How long has it been, my friend?”

“A while.”

“And by his side the Dragon, just as in the old days!”

Cinnabar nodded but didn’t say anything.

“You are both welcome, and more than welcome, to my humble abode. But perhaps this conversation is best done away from any prying eyes?” Zapata waved toward the entrance.

The Captain looked at Cinnabar. What passed between them, none could justly say. Then the Captain followed Zapata indoors, Cinnabar holding his spot by the trough.

Only the front room of the house remained usable, the rest having long fallen into disrepair, overgrown by the scrub grass that was the only form of flora the desert allowed. There was a table, and two chairs, and one rat who closed the door after the Captain had come inside. Zapata took a seat and waited for the Captain to take the other. For a moment it looked like he intended to stand, but then he gave the guard a glance that would have curdled milk and dropped down across from Zapata.

“I must say,” the armadillo began, unplugging the cork from a jug resting beside him and taking a swig, “I was surprised when you contacted me.” He pushed the liquor across the wood.

The Captain eyed it for a moment, then pushed it back. “Because you thought I was dead?”

When Zapata laughed, his stomach rocked the table back and forth. “Please now, Captain, we both know you’re too ornery to die. Though to judge by your eye, Mephetic took a pretty good run at it. How did that happen, exactly? One moment you are cock of the walk, and the next your throat is all but cut.”

“I suppose I’m just too trusting.”

Zapata laughed again. Zapata laughed often. “It is your one failing, if you don’t mind me saying so! You’re too trusting.”

The Captain’s appetite for humor had been well and fully satisfied by this point, however, and he refused to continue the jest. Zapata took another pull from the jug, then plugged it and set it back on the table. “Well, Captain, as far as I am concerned, it was worth the trip out here simply to see you. But I imagine you had a purpose in contacting me.”

“I need to find the Elder.”

Zapata pulled at the roots of his long mustache. “Why would I know where your old patron resides?”

“I know he fled to the south after everything went sour. And it would be in your country’s interest to keep him alive. You’ve got the connections with the new government to know where he is. And besides—there aren’t so many folks left from the old days to call on.”

Zapata nodded, as if the Captain’s last words contained some great weight of profundity. “That is true, Captain, that is very true. There are few enough of us alive who can still remember the war. Why do you think that is?”

“It’s a dangerous world.”

“You misunderstand—I am not asking why you think so many have fallen. I’m asking you why you think I’ve survived.”

“I guess it’s because you’re so damned good looking,” the Captain said, though he seemed unamused with his joke.

Zapata, by contrast, slapped his hands against his knees and roared with laughter. “I had forgotten how funny you were, Captain. But no, that is not why. The reason I have survived is very simple—it is because I am a survivor.”

“And I’m not?”

“No, Captain, I do not think you are. Don’t misunderstand me—you survive, obviously, or we wouldn’t be talking right now. But I do not think you are a survivor, if you see the difference.”

“I imagine it’s about to be explained.”

“You see, my old friend—I do what needs to be done at the moment I need to do it, and I don’t concern myself overmuch with the day before or after. When the Kingdom to the South looked weak, I raised the flag of rebellion. When it grew stronger, I made peace, and reaped the rewards. The wind blows, and I let it carry me along. Not you—quite the opposite, really. You find the fiercest gale you can and spit into its face! Now one might admire your audacity, and even the strength it takes to stand your comeuppance. But still, the wind blows, does it not? And you . . . you are still wet.”

The Captain nodded vaguely. “Thanks for the advice.”

Zapata smiled, laughed, scratched himself, slapped the table, took up a lot of space and attention. Somewhere in the midst of his buffoonery he shot his rat a look that he didn’t intend the Captain to see.

The mouse is a curious animal. He is small and weak. If he is not slow, he is slower than the cat, the fox, and the owl, his natural predators—which is to say he is not nearly fast enough. His claws and teeth are fragile things, unsuited to violence. Generally speaking he cannot even blend in to his surroundings. In short, the mouse is perhaps the single most helpless animal on earth, blessed with nary a resource to defend himself against the cruel privations of a savage world.

Save one—the mouse knows it. The mouse is too feeble to cling to any illusions of safety. From the instant he leaves the flesh of the womb, he knows his life is there for the taking, and he grows cagey, and sharp. He sees the goshawk above him, sniffs out the polecat lurking in the shadows.

All of which is to say that when the rat leveled his sawed-off shotgun the Captain was already moving, kicking his chair backward and falling with it, the load of buckshot passing swiftly through the space he had occupied and nestling itself into Zapata’s ripe and unsuspecting chest. The Captain had meanwhile shaken a holdout pistol from the sleeve of his coat, and he used the first two of its chambers to make sure his would-be assassin would not have time to regret the mistake. The rat staggered into a corner, counting down its last breaths. The Captain turned his weapon on Zapata, though he realized swiftly that the armadillo no longer presented a threat.

The Captain came slowly to his feet. He picked up his hat from where it had fallen and set it onto his head, his ears flattening to hold it upright. He returned his pistol to his sleeve holster.

From outside there were a series of gunshots, coming so swiftly it was impossible to make out the number.

The spray of lead had ripped through Zapata’s underbelly. His intestines were leaking into a little puddle on the floor, blood and bile with them. He smiled all the same. “That’ll be my girls.”

The Captain pulled a stool in front of Zapata and sat down atop it. The air erupted with a cavalcade of gunfire, rendering conversation inaudible.

After thirty seconds or so the artillery ended. The Captain slipped a cigar from his pocket, lit it, and took a few shallow draws. “You sure?”

Chapter 21: A Killer’s Pride

“I will be honest with you, my old friend—this whole thing is wounding my ego.”

Bonsoir was pacing back and forth on a dune a long ways off from the hacienda, the jet-black of his fur standing out against the pink sand.

“I hear ya,” Boudica grunted. She lay motionless just beneath the crest of the hill, gray fur stained to dull khaki by the dust. From twenty paces away she was absolutely indistinguishable from the sediment surrounding her—save for the long, glittering barrel of her rifle. It was an unnecessary obfuscation, in all likelihood. They were too far from the meeting place to be seen unaided, a fact that explained Bonsoir’s distinct lack of stealth. But Boudica was a professional, and professionalism means doing it right even when it doesn’t matter.

“Bonsoir is the greatest infiltration specialist in history. Bonsoir is as slippery as moonlight, as slick as shade and as swift as sin.”

“No question.”

“And what is Bonsoir doing, with all his talent? With his ability that no one, not Bonsoir’s worst enemies—not that Bonsoir leaves so many of those alive to have an opinion one way or the other on the matter, needless to say—but still, if one was up above the ground, and you were to ask him, ‘Bonsoir, is he everything they say he is,’ this theoretical enemy would be heard to answer, ‘Yes, without question.’ What was I saying?”

“Not sure.”

Bonsoir paused for a moment. “The point is, this is a misuse of my genius.”

“Captain’s got his plan.”

“Indeed he does! And the Captain, he says he does not need Bonsoir today! He says that today is not Bonsoir’s! That you and the lizard will take care of the ones outside, and that Barley and his cannon will take care of the ones in the barn, and so there is nothing left for Bonsoir.” Bonsoir scowled and kicked at the dirt.

“It’s tough.”

“The indignity!” Bonsoir said, sticking one finger straight up in the air. “It is an insult to my ability, that’s what it is! A disgrace to my line and lineage, to my people and nation and . . .”

Bonsoir would almost certainly have continued on in this fashion had not the retort of the rifle cut him off.

“Did you get her?” Bonsoir asked.

Boudica looked up from the weapon with a pained expression.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. You can see how out of sorts this whole thing has made me.”

“You’ll get your turn soon enough.”

Chapter 22: The Price of Certainty

“I’ve heard about you,” Angie Weasel said. Slyly, as if betraying a secret.

This news did not seem to excite Cinnabar. His eyes hung dully on the closed door of the hacienda, as if hoping to follow his commander through the rough stone.

“I guess everyone’s heard about you.”

The shuttered window on the second floor of the hacienda peeked open, and Celia Weasel, the youngest of the clan, leaned the barrel of her Winchester out of it. It was an ominous sign, one Cinnabar gave no indication of noticing.

“Is it true you killed High-Hand Lawrence and Hotpants the squirrel during the same card game?”

Nothing from Cinnabar. No words, no change in his demeanor, no breathing, only the absolute stillness of which only a cold-blooded creature is capable.

“I wonder if you’re as fast as they say,” Bessie Weasel chirruped, her hand slowly straying toward her belt.

“Wondering is free,” Cinnabar said finally, his voice soft and low. “Certainty has its price.”

The blast from inside was the signal. Angie Weasel went for her iron with all the speed and vigor possessed by a member of her race. Bessie Weasel was only a hairsbreadth slower in swiveling her shotgun. Celia Weasel was caught off guard but responded with a reasonable degree of alacrity all the same.

It is a scientific fact that time is infinitely divisible, that each moment contains within it the fragments of a thousand others, and each of them can be splintered into a thousand more, and so on and so on. Somewhere then, hidden within these shards of time that occur in the endless instants between the second hand, Cinnabar moved, setting his webbed palm around the pistol at his waist and fanning off two shots. To the subjective observer, however—to Angie and her unfortunate sibling—the salamander’s movements were impossible to follow. Before their brains could process the information gathered by their senses, perhaps even before their senses had recognized the stimulus itself, bits of iron had exploded through their skulls and made either act impossible.

Celia might have had a chance. Maybe. She was good, and Cinnabar was only flesh. But as she tightened her finger a shot rang out in the distance, and then the youngest Weasel sister was tumbling out the window, dead before she struck the ground.

Cinnabar slipped his gun back into his holster. He waved at Boudica, or where he assumed Boudica to be. His eyes studied the horizon, open and friendly.

Chapter 23: A Loud Death Rattle

A hundred and fifty paces behind the barn a small, pink ball broke through the packed dust of the earth, rising half an inch and hovering for a moment before withdrawing. A few seconds passed and the tip of Gertrude’s nose was joined by the rest of her. She turned quickly and widened out the exit, allowing her much larger companion to join her aboveground.

Barley stretched to his full height, enjoying the feel of his spine snapping back into place. Then he reached into the hole and withdrew a large black trunk, quite the size of Gertrude herself and, to judge by the grunt the badger gave while lifting it, not filled with feathers.

Her task completed, Gertrude set to brushing off the grime and dirt that had accumulated during her sojourn beneath the soil. It was an impossible task, but it occupied her time. “I speak seven languages, did you know that?”

Barley undid the latch on his chest. “I’ll take your word for it.” He opened the trunk, pulled out a tarp, and laid it on the ground beside him. Then he began to remove any number of strange metallic bits, pipes and cylinders and gleaming silver cogs. He inspected each carefully before lining them up on the canvas.

“Seven languages,” Gertrude confirmed. “My knowledge of mathematics, literature, law, philosophy, poisons, explosives, and espionage are, I think I do myself no exaggerated kindness in saying, second to no one still living within the Gardens.”

“You’re very clever,” Barley agreed. Having ensured that his inventory was complete, he had turned toward its assembly, hands steady, movement swift. “Everyone thinks so.”

“And the first thing he has me do—the very first thing—is dig a hole.”

“What can you say?” he slammed the last piece into place and stood upright, revealing the engine of destruction he had spent the last few moments building. “It’s in our blood.”

The organ gun was eight wide barrels rotating around a self-feeding cartridge belt. During the War of the Two Brothers the Captain had purchased a handful of them from back east, but they had proved too heavy and unwieldy to be used effectively. Three animals were generally required to operate one gun, and even then it was hard to move, and likely to jam, and only any good for holding a position.

Barley lifted it up against his chest with a low grunt. He strapped the attached pack of ammo to his back.

“You still using that absurd contraption?” Gertrude asked, packing an ash-wood pipe with a tuft of fragrant tobacco.

“No.”

Gertrude rolled her blind eyes mockingly. “A figment of my imagination.”

Somewhere ahead of them, hidden by the barn itself, was the crack of a scattergun, followed by another series of shots. The barn door opened suddenly and a rat burst out of it, rifle in hand, a stream of comrades close on his heels.

Barley waited for the first wave to make it out the exit before he started on his hand crank. The years of inactivity had done nothing to diminish the gun’s efficacy, nor the gunner’s expertise. For a full half-minute nothing could be heard over the explosive roar of the cannon. Not the sound of the firing pin hammering home, nor the echo of the spent shells falling against the ground. Not the screams of the rats, tightly packed inside the barn in anticipation of their coming ambush, nor the muted shredding of solid shot passing through their flesh. Not even the groans of the barn itself, whose infrastructure was not built to absorb punishment of the kind it was suffering. Barley raked his fire across the building with the cool deliberateness of a professional, as if this was a routine errand, of no particular interest. The rat who had first broken cover spent a moment held upright by the sheer momentum of the tossed lead, jerking maniacally like a marionette, before collapsing into a torn heap of gristle. One of his comrades hidden in the loft inside managed to ring out a rifle shot, but before a second could be managed Barley compensated, sending a spray of metal through the upper story and silencing any further rejoinders.

Then it was over, the gun going still, a great mass of corpses left to rot in the noonday sun, or growing cool in the shade of the now ruined barn.

Gertrude tamped down her pipe. “I suppose they were imagining the same thing.”

Barley allowed himself a half-smile. “Buncha daydreamers.”

Barley had been right, that day when the Captain came to see him. There was no one who killed like he did.

Chapter 24: Best Laid Plans

After thirty seconds or so the artillery ended. The Captain pulled a cigar from his pocket, lit it, and took a few shallow draws. “You sure?”

A knock on the door was followed a moment later by Cinnabar’s snout. “Everything all right in here?”

“Fine,” the Captain said. “Just having a chat.”

Cinnabar nodded, then retreated back into the afternoon sun.

The Captain let the cigar smoke pool around his furred face. “Well?” he asked, after a while.

“Surely you don’t expect me to talk?”

“More than expect.”

“My rat did too good a job. I’ll be dead in five minutes, and if you try cutting at me I’m sure I’ll go sooner.”

“You’ve got too thick a hide to be trying torture in any circumstance,” the Captain said.

Zapata coughed up something that had more red in it than yellow. “Too kind.”

“But you’re going to talk to me anyway.”

“And why would I do that, Captain? Why would I think to help you?”

“Because you hate Mephetic every bit as much as you hate me. And it’ll do you good, heading off into the next world knowing that one of us is going to kill the other, sure as eggs is eggs.”

Zapata’s laugh shook his torso violently and unquestionably shortened his life. “Maybe you’ll both go together,” he said, “and I’ll watch you walk into hell arm in arm!”

The Captain shrugged. Theology was not his strong point. “Maybe.”

“Give me a shot of whiskey.”

The Captain got up from his chair, grabbed the jug from off the floor, and laid it beside the soon-to-be corpse. Despite his injury Zapata managed to uncork it and raise it to his lips. Liquor spilled out his belly, along with blood.

“They’ve got him on a train circling around Santa Theresa, back and forth through no-man’s-land. Had him there ever since they gave him shelter back in aught-six. My people assumed that way the Younger couldn’t make an issue of it, but they still had him on hand in case he ever proved useful. Wait around until you see a train that looks like it shouldn’t be there. That’ll be the one to hit.”

“All right,” the Captain said simply, standing.

“You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?” Zapata said, taking a final drink. “I think maybe I hope Mephetic gets you after all.”

The Captain didn’t wait to watch him die, didn’t pay him another thought, just opened the door and walked smoothly into the light.

Chapter 25: That Evening . . .

They were sitting around the fire when Elf came scuttling into view, awkward gait made more so by the corpse she held in one talon. The assembled party, expecting her arrival, managed to react with less shock than at her first appearance, though with no greater warmth. Most of them had hoped she would catch a bullet at some point during the day’s events.

Hoped, but not expected. It didn’t do to bet against the Elf.

She shuffled her way into the light, her one functioning wing speeding her ascent up the hill. When she reached the apex she dropped the dead rat against the sand and began to preen.

“Howdy, Elf,” the Captain said after a long moment.

Elf’s sharp beak darted up from her feathers, and she stared at the Captain as if just then recognizing him. “Hello, Captain.” Her pupils, ebony pearls offset in yellow, swiveled across the unfriendly row of faces. “Hello, friends.”

Cordiality dispensed with, Elf went back to cleaning herself.

The Captain broke the silence a second time. “Elf.”

“Yes, Captain?”

“What’s with the corpse?”

Elf looked down at her feet and bobbled her head in a sort of half-nod. “Oh. Yes. He was trying to escape. There was another one, but I decided not to bring it.”

“What possessed you to bring this one?” Bonsoir piped up.

Elf didn’t respond, though after another moment she looked back up and asked, “Did you receive satisfactory answers?”

The Captain nodded. “We’re off to Santa Theresa in the morning.”

“Well and good. I think I’ll take the evening air, before slumber calls me to her bosom.”

No one said anything for a while. Then the Captain said, “You go ahead and do that.”

After she had disappeared from the firelight, though likely well before she had left earshot, Bonsoir snorted from his perch. “If I carried every corpse I ever made, I’d be one myself from the weight.”

“Get rid of it,” the Captain said, turning back to his drink.

Bonsoir thought about grumbling, but it didn’t do to argue with the Captain. He carried the dead rat a few dozen yards beyond their campsite. They’d be gone before it started to rot.

Chapter 26: With Less Liquor Than Earlier . . .

“Coulda been the Dragon,” Barley said. It was him and Boudica and the stoat, and they were drinking quietly a little way out of the firelight.

“Wasn’t the Dragon,” Boudica answered with some degree of certainty.

“Why not? I know he goes back a ways with the Captain, but then . . .”

“What do you remember about that day?”

“What’s there to remember?” Bonsoir asked. “We’d won, or almost. Just a bit of cleanup left, then it was a long retirement, rolls of gold coin and fetching females. We were in the main room of the keep, drinking like we did every night, and then—”

“And then our old friends started killing us,” Barley cut in, and you might almost have believed him bitter about it.

“Where were you when that started to happen?” Boudica asked.

“Leaking liquor,” Barley said.

Bonsoir shrugged. “Underneath a table, I suppose. I was so drunk I can barely remember.”

“If you’d been there”—Boudica pointed at Barley—“and if you’d been sober”—she shifted her finger over to the stoat—“you wouldn’t need to ask.”

“But I was drunk,” Bonsoir responded, “so you’ll have to tell me.”

Boudica cocked her head back at the fire, and at the salamander quietly sitting there. “You ever notice, however much he drinks, he never gets drunk? When they came through the door he was the only one sober enough to do anything about it. Put down Alphonze the hedgehog, both of the Squirrel twins. Put them down like they was nothing. If it wasn’t for the Dragon, the Captain would be dead, and I’d be dead, and you’d probably be dead too.”

They chewed that over for a while. Then Bonsoir spat it back out. “That proves nothing. The cold-bloods, they aren’t like us. They kill just for the fun of it.”

“You kill for fun,” Barley responded.

“Not like he does.”

“Wasn’t Cinnabar,” Boudica said again, though this time she seemed less certain.

Chapter 27: With the Jugs Half-Empty . . .

Barley and Bonsoir were standing a ways out from the main campsite, pissing with the wind.

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me,” Bonsoir said.

Barley laughed, but he wasn’t.

Chapter 28: As the Stocks Grew Low . . .

“I figure it wasn’t the Captain,” Boudica said. “And if it was Gertrude we’d all be dead.”

“Coulda been Elf,” Bonsoir said.

“It wasn’t Elf.”

“No,” Bonsoir agreed. “It wasn’t Elf.”

Chapter 29: At the Bottom of the Kegs . . .

“You sure it wasn’t Boudica?” Bonsoir began.

“Not really,” Barley said.

“I know who it was.” Neither Bonsoir nor Barley had any idea the owl was there in the moment before she spoke, so perfectly did her feathers blend in with the night, and so utterly silent were her movements. Elf raked them back and forth with eyes that were like talons. “I do,” she said, before hobbling back off into the darkness.

Bonsoir turned back to the badger. “I believe her.”

“Me too.”

Chapter 30: A Smoke Before Sleep

It was just the two of them, as it often was lately, as it had been in the past. The fire had burned down to its embers, and the night had overtaken everything. Cinnabar lit a cigarette and handed it off to Gertrude, then started rolling another. “Were you surprised?”

“When they betrayed us?”

“Yes.”

“I was.”

“That surprises me.”

“No one is as smart as they think I am. No one is as anything as they think anyone is.”

“No, I suppose they aren’t.”

“Except you. You’re exactly as fast as they say.”

A match sparked. Two dots of light bobbed in the dark. “Why did they do it?” Cinnabar asked.

“Why do you think they did it?”

“I’m not as smart as you.”

“Still.”

“The usual reasons,” Cinnabar suggested. “Greed, lust, revenge, power, boredom. The Captain is unlovable.”

The one light was all by its lonesome. “Yes.”

“If they’d bothered to ask me—”

“Let’s not go down that road.”

“No. I was surprised at the Quaker, though. If ever two things loved each other . . .”

“What is love against instinct? We’re all animals, after all. How long can a thing go against its nature?”

It was completely dark. “And what is our nature?”

But the question was too obvious to need an answer.

Chapter 31: An Expected Reversal

Mephetic did not get angry when word came that Zapata had failed. He had figured Zapata would fail. The armadillo was loud, and the armadillo was hard, and the armadillo was even mean, so far as that went. But the armadillo was no match for the Captain. Still, it had been worth a try. Even the toughest bastard can catch a bullet in the back of the spine.

He had tripped up the last time, hadn’t he? Five years they’d gone back and forth, tearing apart the kingdom during the War of Two Brothers. An inaccurate name, one he wouldn’t have chosen. The Toads, Elder and Younger, had taken no part in the conflict—hell, Mephetic’s pawn had been trashed on opium so much of the time he couldn’t tell his head from his trunk. Really it had always been between him and the Captain, half a decade of red hands and black deeds. And the Captain would have come out the better of it, if Mephetic hadn’t managed to turn half his company and even one in his inner circle. Many were the Captain’s virtues—if being a bloodthirsty, iron-hearted, grim-eyed bastard can be considered laudatory—but he wasn’t an easy animal to work for, and there had been plenty happy to do him wrong, especially with the promise of gold waiting at the end of their betrayal. In the event, the Captain had ended up killing most of them, so Mephetic hadn’t even had to pay.

Not that Mephetic doubted his own forces would be any slower to knife his back, should the circumstances call for it, or even allow. They were deep in the heart of the inner keep, and Puss and Brontë were playing a game of pinochle. It seemed as though Puss was winning, though both participants were cheating so egregiously it was hard to say for certain.

Mephetic took the missive he’d been reading and tossed it into the fire.

“I take it they escaped your little trap?” Puss asked. Puss rarely missed the chance to revel in the misfortune of another, though the Captain’s survival little benefited him either.

“This one.”

“They must be awful tough”—Puss paused a moment to lick down a piece of fur—“if they managed to put the armadillo in the ground.”

“I doubt they bothered to bury him.”

“What about this Dragon?” Brontë asked, slipping a card surreptitiously, or what she imagined to be surreptitiously, from the fold of her dress. “Is he as fast as they say?”

“He’s fast.”

“How fast?”

“Slower than a bolt of lightning. Somewhat quicker than a hummingbird’s wing.”

Puss laughed. Brontë realized she’d just been made fun of, thought about getting angry, then remembered who Mephetic was and laughed also. There were upsides to being the boss, Mephetic often thought. It had been worth it, all the blood he’d needed to spill to get here. Wasn’t his blood, anyway.

“And my bird?” the Quaker interrupted, the words stretched across the thing’s forked tongue. “What about my bird? What about my sweet, lost bird?”

Puss stopped laughing. Brontë had already stopped laughing, but she looked a bit less jovial all the same.

“She’s there,” Mephetic said, making sure not to look away.

“You’re sure?”

“Our spy says so.”

The Quaker tucked his head back into his coils, but didn’t say anything else. He seemed happy, to the degree that such a quality could be attributed to a rattlesnake.

“Far be it for me to play spoiler”—though in fact there was nothing Puss enjoyed more—“but I can’t help but observe that, thus far, the Captain’s hardly playing according to plan.”

“Zapata wasn’t my plan. I’ve got a man on the inside.”

“The one who betrayed them the last time? If this . . . mouse”—the last word spat out with the sort of contempt one would expect from an ancestral predator—“is all you say, I’d be wary of relying on the same gag twice.”

“It’s not the same gag. And it’s not the same traitor.”

Part the Third

Chapter 32: The Soul of a Shrew

The conductor was the sort of shrew who took his job very seriously. He had joined the company as a pup, just after the last track was laid. He been first in line at the office in fact, hat in hand, hopeful, desperate even, for employment. Not as an engineer, of course, nor as one of the brutes shoveling coal. It was not the trains that interested him really; their whistles were too noisy and their smokestacks too dirty. Rather, it was something about the idea of the railroad itself—a steel web crisscrossing the territories, strangling the land, operating according to principles of mathematical purity unseen in any organic creature—that fired his imagination, that gave him a secret and delicious thrill. The conductor was the sort of creature whose wildest fantasies were filled with ledgers that balanced perfectly, and rows of clocks chiming in eternal unison.

He had signed on as a ticket-taker, a private soldier in that small army of creatures whose function was to mark paper and look at the marks on paper and mark the paper again, and sometimes, if the marks were not right, to look up from the paper and squint their bespectacled eyes (spectacles were virtually a professional requirement) and say, “Sorry, sir, but it seems your luggage was sent to Poughkeepsie and not Kalamazoo. You will receive it within eight to seventy-five business days, a business day being defined as Tuesdays and alternate Thursdays.” This last was the part the shrew liked the most.

He had fulfilled his duties faithfully, moving up the ranks from junior assistant ticket-taker to assistant ticket-taker to ticket-taker to conductor. He was never sick and never late for work. He never took time off for personal reasons, never visited an ill relative or attended a friend’s nuptials. Two years earlier, in reward for this diligent service, he had been assigned to the Antelope Limited. “A critical posting,” his supervisor had informed him, “a sign of our trust in your sagacity, your prudence, and, most importantly,” he had said, raising his eyes archly, “your discretion.”

In the years since the conductor had wondered, occasionally, why there was a massive metal door dividing the front carriage from the rest of the train, and also who lived inside said carriage, and why their presence necessitated armed guards, and finally, whether those guards were meant to ensure the safety of this precious cargo or make sure that it never left. But the conductor didn’t wonder much. Wondering wasn’t his job, after all. Whatever was going on in the front carriage, it gave him the right, in his own mind at least, to be twice as carping and cantankerous as he might otherwise have been, to scan every rider with thorough, even exaggerated, scrutiny.

Though even under normal circumstances he wouldn’t have allowed them on the train. Maybe the badger. Despite his size he seemed good-humored, with an open face and a generous smile. And the opossum, she looked harmless enough, lazy and slow as sweet molasses.

But not the salamander. The conductor didn’t like cold-bloods as a rule, and there was something about this burnt-red specimen that was particularly off-putting. No, not the salamander, and certainly not the mouse, with his nasty scar and his eye that stared at the conductor as if waiting to repay an injury.

The conductor was making his rounds before the train left the station, checking on the functionaries beneath him, ensuring that they were just the right amount of peevish, unhelpful without being aggressive. When he entered the car and saw those two sitting together, the salamander and the mouse, he made a mental note to find something wrong with their papers, or their luggage—to detect or invent a reason why it was that they needed to miss this particular train. He would be very apologetic about it, of course; he would blame it on regulations and his own superiors, sympathize with them in their misfortune, but march them back onto the platform all the same.

With this serious but secretly enjoyable task ahead of him, the conductor was waylaid by the sudden chirrup of a nearby mole. “Excuse me, sir. Excuse me!” The second time she yelled loudly, though the conductor had already been stopping. “Sir, I require your assistance, please!”

The conductor bristled. The conductor did not like being interrupted in the course of his duties, and he did not like being yelled at. He didn’t like a lot of things, truth be told. Still, a customer was a customer, and the conductor was nothing if not professional. “Of course, ma’am,” he began, his voice exactly how you would expect. “How can I help you?”

“Finally.” Behind her bifocals the mole’s eyes were huge and blind and stupid. “I asked the muskrat who was selling the tickets, and he said that he didn’t know but that you might know, and so that’s why I’m asking you. Do you know?”

“Know what?”

“Where my bags are, obviously.”

“I’m afraid, ma’am, that I don’t have any—”

“Of course you haven’t, I wouldn’t expect you have, but surely you must know someone who has, mustn’t you? When one gets on a train in the Capital one expects to find one’s bags when one gets to Last Gulch, doesn’t one? Assuming one is getting off in Last Gulch, which was where I changed trains.”

“Of course, but—”

“You certainly can’t expect me to survive forever with just the dress I’m wearing, can you? What do you take me for? A church mouse?”

“No, obviously not—”

“Good. I’m glad to see we can agree to that much. So what exactly do you plan to do about it?”

“About what?”

“My bags not being on this train,” said the mole, as if one of them were an idiot.

“If you would just excuse me for a moment, I promise to come help you just as soon as—”

But then the whistle blew, and the great iron steed bucked forward, and the conductor knew he had lost. For all that he might have wished otherwise, he could not very well throw a passenger off a moving train just because he didn’t like the look of him. He turned his attention back to the shrill mole, and her problem about which he could do nothing.

Chapter 33: Just Past Ciudad del Gato . . .

The badger got up from where he was sitting and ambled forward, squeezing his bulk through the narrow rows of seats. The conductor saw him from a carriage away, and his stomach dropped out from under him, because there was absolutely no way a creature of such size could fit in the bathroom. He excused himself from explaining to another passenger—an elderly turtle, he thought she was elderly at least, it was hard to tell with turtles—why it wasn’t possible for her to use her unassigned ticket anytime today, or anytime tomorrow, or really, just any time at all, and he approached the badger, trying to come up with a polite way of informing him that he was going to have to hold his bladder for the better part of three hours.

It was only then that he noticed the mouse, the one he hadn’t liked, walking in the long shadow cast by the badger, and behind him the salamander whom he had liked even less. The conductor—who was not a particularly clever sort of creature, but who wasn’t quite dumb as a carpenter’s nail—began to think that today might turn out to be one of those days where things failed to abide by their proper routine. The conductor hated those sorts of days.

The conductor turned around and headed forward until he came to the first-class compartments. A chubby vole sat as guardian between the two sections, making sure the hoi polloi didn’t get any ideas above their station. His name was Harold, and the most important thing he had learned in his life, as far as he was concerned, was that it was entirely possible to sleep with one’s eyes open, or at least open enough to deceive passersby, if one was willing to put in a bit of practice. True, it wasn’t as good as a full-on nap, but any degree of slumber was better than waking. As far as Harold was concerned, the better part of existence lay in those little moments of oblivion that preceded the last.

The conductor hustled past without realizing his protector was dim to the world; he even took some degree of comfort in the barrier he imagined he was putting between himself and the badger. Indeed, as soon as he reached the first-class compartment, with its slightly more comfortable seats and vaguely polished décor, he felt a concrete sense of relief. Nothing bad, after all, ever happened to the rich.

Sad to say, his optimism was short-lived. Through the glass door separating the two carriages the conductor saw the badger continue forward, Harold forced awake by his heavy footfalls, coming up from his seat to say something. And then Harold was back in his seat and in a deeper slumber than he had theretofore been enjoying, courtesy of the badger’s backhand.

At that moment the conductor did the bravest thing he had ever done in his life, which was to run screaming toward the front of the train. When he reached the guarded carriage he banged on the door until the peephole slid open. The conductor did not know the rat inside—the conductor had never before tried to enter the front carriage, had never even acknowledged its existence. That was against the rules, and the conductor, in case you had somehow missed the point by now, was the sort of creature who liked following them.

“They’re coming!” he yelled.

“Who?”

The conductor moved aside swiftly, allowing the rat to get a view of the troupe of creatures following in his wake. The conductor himself did not bother to turn around, and to judge by the sudden doubling of the circumference of the rat’s eyes, it was just as well that he did not.

The door flew open. The conductor bolted through. The door slammed shut.

The conductor had hoped that inside would be a dozen soldiers in full battle gear, or maybe a couple of hedgehogs with heavy artillery. So fear followed closely upon the heels of disappointment when he discovered that the impregnable fortress attached to the front of his train was crewed by two rats who looked barely out of their litter, holding their rifles gingerly and giving off a very distinct smell of terror.

“What do we do now?” one of them asked. The other rat, the rat who had been looking through the peephole and had seen the badger, didn’t say anything.

Needless to say, this was not the reaction that the shrew had anticipated. But he surprised himself, as he had several times so far that day, with his sangfroid, with his mental fortitude, with his keen sense of battlefield tactics. “We keep the door shut,” he answered.

The rats nodded in unison. The conductor could hear the rumbling of the badger and his companions from the other carriage and tensed himself for the inevitable blows—blows that did not come.

Gathering up his nerve, the conductor opened the peephole and looked out. Behind the door he could see the opossum and the badger standing around, neither looking particularly agitated. “This is double-reinforced steel!” yelled the conductor, trying to cover his fear. “You’ll never break it down!”

The Badger scratched at the thick fur of his head awhile before answering. “Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“I am?”

It was then that the conductor felt air blowing in through an open window, which gave him a brief moment of happiness, because it was a hot day after all, and the wind cool, but this was followed quickly by a much more potent sense of despair.

“Keep the door shut,” said a thickly accented voice from behind him. “That is a fine plan. That is the sort of plan a fellow ought to be proud to have come up with.”

Chapter 34: The Loot

Bonsoir opened the reinforced-steel door and the Captain came through an instant later, stepping over the corpses with unstudied disinterest. A partition had been erected two-thirds of the way down the compartment, and the mouse stopped at the entrance to it, nodding at Cinnabar behind him. The Dragon slid the gate sideways with his usual extraordinary celerity, and before it banged against the frame he had both revolvers out, ready for whatever was waiting for them.

A moment passed. Cinnabar holstered his guns.

Bonsoir came in behind him, rolling a cigarette. “This is an unfortunate surprise,” he said, slipping his tobacco pouch underneath his beret before lighting his smoke with a match struck off his boot.

“I guess this changes things,” Cinnabar said.

The Captain reached over and plucked the cigarette from Bonsoir’s mouth. He took a long, slow drag before responding. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. Then he handed the smoke to Cinnabar and nodded at Bonsoir. “Tell Barley to grab him. We’ve got a long hike back to town.” He turned and walked back down the carriageway.

Cinnabar and Bonsoir exchanged a look. The stoat shrugged and went off to find Barley. The Captain had spoken, and the Captain’s was the final word.

Chapter 35: A Question of Numbers

Mephetic had spent a long time considering the number of rats he should bring. Too many and the Captain might sniff them out and bolt—the Captain was the cagiest creature Mephetic had ever dealt with, cagier than any weasel, polecat, or fox. Too few, of course, and the Captain’s crew would gun their way out, because as cagey as the Captain was, he was every bit as tough, and the animals he’d assembled were even tougher. Mephetic had decided to err on too many—at least that way he didn’t run the risk of ending up a corpse. The Captain wasn’t the only cagey thing living in the Gardens.

So it was Mephetic and Puss and Brontë and two full companies of the rat guard, a hundred grim-faced rodents carrying heavy iron, hiding low in the hills around the bar. The Quaker was slithering about, where exactly Mephetic wasn’t sure. You didn’t really order the Quaker to do anything, you just pointed him in a direction and held your breath.

Mephetic was down on his stomach, scanning the front road with his spyglass. Puss and Brontë were beside him, for once equally silent. In the final few moments before evening fell completely, Mephetic caught the first glimpse of the companions coming up over the hill. He held his breath in anticipation, hoping he hadn’t overplayed his hand.

And indeed, there was a moment when he thought for sure he had mucked it. The six of them were tramping toward the bar when the Captain, standing in the middle of the pack, perked his nose up suddenly, sniffing at the air. Mephetic cursed beneath his breath and readied the order to rush them en masse, knowing it wouldn’t work, knowing he’d lose half his rats trying. Still, there were always more rats—fecundity was one of the few virtues of the species.

But then the Captain swung his head back down, tipped his hat over it, and kept on moving. A few minutes afterward, all six of the companions were comfortably ensconced inside. They’d come straight back after hitting the train, and they looked dusty and tired. They’d lay their burdens on the ground and start hitting the liquor, and after they’d done that awhile, Mephetic would hit them back.

“What are we waiting for?” Puss asked. Puss wore a satin vest and matching pants. They had begun the day white, though having spent the better part of an hour pressed against the sand they could no longer claim that distinction. He had a pair of pearl-handled pistols hanging at his waist. He looked like a rodeo clown, but that didn’t make him any less dangerous.

“You’re waiting for me to give the signal,” Mephetic snapped. “Because I’m the boss, and no one does anything without me telling them to do it.”

Puss looked at Mephetic awhile, and then he looked at the ground. Mephetic decided at that moment that if Puss survived this go-round with the Captain he would make sure the cat didn’t survive much longer. Puss was getting to be more trouble than he was worth. Probably that would also necessitate doing away with Brontë, who had some vague notion that she and the cat were friends—insofar as two violent, amoral sociopaths were capable of that sort of connection—but that was fine. The Gardens would hardly be a worse place with them propping up tulips.

But first thing was first, and first was the Captain. Some twenty minutes after the companions had headed through the front door the traitor came hobbling out back, lit a cigarette, gave a little wave, and walked back inside.

“Send the rats in first,” Mephetic said. “Unless you feel like martyring yourself in service of the Toad.”

To judge by the space Brontë and Puss put between themselves and the company of soldiers, this honor held little interest. They moved carefully, slowly, a mass of crawling creatures working their way through the underbrush, a tightening noose of grim-faced rodents. When they reached the tavern a dozen of them clambered stealthily up to the roof, while their comrades fanned out around the building. Revolvers were cocked. Rifles were aimed. Death hung thick.

The first rat kicked down the door and went barreling inside, came out again almost as quick, stumbling off the porch and into the dust. The rest proved slower to make their ingress, though with a few shouted words from Brontë they managed it, firing blindly inside, as if the companions were fool enough to sprint into the face of their guns.

Mephetic knew otherwise, of course, and he shifted his glasses to the front, waiting for their inevitable attempt at a breakout. It wasn’t long coming. The Dragon went first, pistols firing; rats falling like flies, dropping from the rooftop, dying gut-shot in the dust. Mephetic realized his entire body was tense with excitement; he was almost ready to vomit from the sheer adrenaline coursing through his veins. And moreover, he realized he wasn’t sure which side he was rooting for, or at least his heart thrilled at each sudden new bit of brilliance on the part of the companions. When the badger (what was his name again? Oat? Millet? It didn’t matter, particularly; he wouldn’t be around much longer) took a rifle bullet in the shoulder and kept coming, grabbing the rat who had hit him by one hand and swinging him like a lash into another, the crack of bone audible even from his distant perch, Mephetic let out a cheer loud enough to draw the attention of his bodyguard, though of course they were wise enough to pretend they hadn’t noticed.

Cinnabar and the opossum were in front, and though the latter generally did her business with a long rifle, she had no problem putting down rats up close, her revolver doing sedate but mortal work. Of course it was nothing like the Dragon, who seemed like his namesake to all but breathe death, the only check on his violence the need to reload. So constant was this torrent of lead that the pack of rats, the army of rats, the endless wave of rats, scurried backward for the safety of the bar, for any plank of wood or bit of stone or shallow indentation in the sand that might give them cover from the killing metal.

It occurred to Mephetic belatedly that he had underestimated the Captain; he had forgotten in the long years since they’d last seen each other just how dangerous the mouse was. He should have brought another company of soldiers; he ought to have drained the Kingdom of killers; he ought to have hired mercenaries and impressed citizens, if he’d wanted to make certain the Captain and his companions wouldn’t walk away.

Or he could have just done what he did, which was turn one of the Captain’s creatures against him. The Captain might have figured on Reconquista; it was his second turn at betrayal, after all. But there was no way the Captain could have known Gertrude was—well, a mole. They were taking up the rear, the Captain’s scattergun roaring back into the bar, the Captain roaring just as loud, his one eye as dead as the other, when Gertrude reached up behind him and did something—Mephetic couldn’t make it out distinctly, but whatever it was, it dropped the Captain to the ground.

The rats swarmed then, so fast and so many that they seemed almost like a single creature, or some impersonal force, a rain cloud or a wave beating against the shore. There was a moment when it seemed as if the companions might try to save him, but it didn’t last long. There was nothing to do but beat an escape—at least that was what they ended up doing, laying down covering fire and disappearing down the road. The surviving rats made an attempt to continue after them, but really it wasn’t altogether serious, and with half their number lying dead on the ground, you couldn’t very well blame them.

But that was fine—the companions were dangerous like a loaded gun: harmless without someone to pull the trigger. They’d go back to whatever they had been doing before the mouse forced them out of retirement, and they’d leave Mephetic free to continue running the Gardens as he had before. This thought gave Mephetic a quick splash of sadness—back to the endless bureaucratic drudgery, the routine the Captain’s return had broken him out of—but of course there was nothing to be done about it.

Puss carried the Captain, still unconscious from whatever the mole had done to him, back up the hill and left him lying in the dust. The rats had stripped him of his weapons, and they hadn’t been kind in doing so. Mephetic waited patiently until the Captain awoke, and his good eye struggled its way open. Mephetic wanted to make sure he was the first thing the Captain saw, as indeed he was.

“Hello again, Captain,” Mephetic said, smiling. “It’s been a long time.”

Part the Fourth

Chapter 36: An Awful End

After he had finished betraying the Captain, and the skunk and his forces had dumped their numerous dead in an open trough and headed back to the Capital, Reconquista locked the door and hung a CLOSED sign over it. The sign would never come down. Reconquista hadn’t liked operating a bar, had only done so after he’d blown through most of the coin he’d gotten from Mephetic the first time he’d betrayed the Captain. But he’d be more careful with this round. He would migrate to the Kingdom to the South, where his money would spend further. Get a hacienda and some broken-down peasants to work it, bring in a few fat-bottomed dams to while away his last days. He didn’t have so many left, he knew.

Click, click, click.

Reconquista had started drinking just after he’d put up the sign, drinking and drinking with a purpose. It was, to be very clear, not out of any sense of guilt. Reconquista had never felt anything toward the Captain, nor toward any of the gang, nor toward anyone else, truth be told. And after all, it was the Captain’s fault that he only had half a body, the Captain’s fault for shooting Alfalfa the hare while Alfalfa the hare had been holding a stick of dynamite and standing next to Reconquista. Of course it had been Reconquista who had convinced Alfalfa to light that stick and to try to kill the Captain with it, Alfalfa and the Quaker and some of the others, now all dead—but then Reconquista did not count any particular sense of fairness among his virtues.

Click, click, click.

He was surprised that Gertrude had turned traitor; he could admit that. He hadn’t known that was coming, hadn’t bothered to try to turn the mole five years back, hadn’t tried with the mole or any of the other inner circle. He’d figured them for saps, thick with those strange notions of loyalty that led animals into the grave at some earlier date than was strictly necessary. And also, being higher up in the Captain’s ranks they were in for a larger cut of the spoils, had less incentive for betrayal.

Click, click, click.

Reconquista, by contrast, had known he wouldn’t be getting a very significant slice—oh, the rest of the boys were friendly enough to him, in their backhanded way, but he wasn’t tough, not tough like Barley or the Dragon, and the fact that he’d been with the Captain since the beginning, or nearly since, wouldn’t have guaranteed him any more than crumbs. And what was the point of the whole thing, if it hadn’t been to make out like bandits in the end? Certainly he had no loyalty to the Elder, none of them did. It was pure self-interest for everyone; he’d just been sharp enough to make good.

Click, click, click.

No, it wasn’t guilt. If Reconquista had to take a guess why he was drinking himself into a coma, it would have been because he knew he was getting old. This was his last scrap—he would never again get to feel adrenaline pumping through his veins, never again stand above the corpse of an enemy, or an ally for that matter. He would while away his few remaining years a farting, toothless, one-armed geezer.

Click, click, click.

It was enough to make Reconquista want to take another drink of whiskey. And why not? Who was left to stop him, after all?

Click, click, click.

Reconquista got up from his seat, wooden leg struggling to find purchase. He made his way behind the bar, got the sawed-off shotgun he kept for protection. It had a hell of a kick, especially with Reconquista only having the one hand, but the spread made accuracy less than critical. All you needed to do was aim in the general direction of whatever you wanted dead, pull the trigger, and dig a hole. It was this last part that Reconquista cared for least.

Click, click, click.

With his one good hand he held the butt, sliding his hook beneath the barrel. Then he stumbled out to the back porch. He was too drunk to be fearful, and anyway there wasn’t any reason to be. The Captain was captured, soon to be dead, the companions scattered or turned traitor themselves.

Click, click, click.

He had been sure it was coming from the back, but standing on the porch now he couldn’t see anything beyond the outhouse and the scrub brush that led into the desert.

Click, click, click.

The shadows were getting long, and Reconquista was getting frightened, frightened through the bottle of whiskey in his stomach, frightened down into his bones and into the bones of his absent arm and his absent leg. “Who’s out here?” he asked stupidly, knowing it was stupid as he was asking it.

Click, click, click.

“I’m warning you!” he yelled, which was an even stupider thing to say, because whatever was waiting for him didn’t need to be fearful, and knew it.

The shadows descended, and though he had time to fire off two full barrels of double aught they didn’t do any good, flew harmlessly into the sky and then dropped harmlessly onto the ground. The shadow covered him and then the shadow was Elf, and then Elf’s beak and Elf’s claws began to do what beaks and claws do, and Reconquista screamed.

The rat’s death was quick, but terrible all the same.

Chapter 37: A New Cellmate

There was only one creature in the dungeons when they brought the Captain in: a squirrel, though he was so thick with dirt and bent with age it took a moment to be sure. An empty prison is generally a sign of a well-run state, of a happy populace with no need to engage in crime. In this particular instance it was a sign of the opposite, of a nation that had declared anything worse than shoplifting a capital offense and was quick to execute that policy, and, for that matter, its citizens. Which is to say that a great many creatures went into Mephetic’s dungeons, but they didn’t stay long, a way station on the path to the dirt.

That the squirrel had remained alive so long was a clerical error, though whether of a benign or malignant sort, it was hard to say. He had gone mad quite quickly, the rambunctious energy of his species forced inward by the constraints of his cell. He could no longer remember what his crime had been, or what he had done before his time there, or what his name was, or what the sun looked like.

The guards dumped the Captain into his cell, made promises to see him again soon, and left. The Captain stood, brushed himself off, and scowled. He reached for his purse of tobacco, realized it had been taken, and scowled some more. It had been two days since his capture, the result of Gertrude’s treachery and Mephetic’s cleverness, and the forty-eight hours had been less than pleasant. If the situation were reversed, Mephetic wouldn’t have lasted that long. The Captain would have put him in the ground as soon as he had him; double-tap and then food for the ants. The Captain didn’t torture except when he had to, and he never, ever, left an enemy alive.

Mephetic, it seemed, was crueler. Or more foolish.

“Tell me a story,” the squirrel chittered all of a sudden, climbing up the bars of the cell, his tail flaring back and forth, caked with muck and grime and other, nastier things. “Tell me a story,” he repeated, louder this time. “Tell me a story or I’ll carve out your eyes, tell me a story or I’ll chew out your tongue, tell me a story or I’ll sneak into your cell and make your bones into jelly!”

He was screaming at this point, though the Captain seemed not to notice, staring hard at the concrete walls.

The squirrel dropped down to the floor. “Tell me a story,” he said, “or I’ll cry.”

Pity was generally no more a motivator of the Captain than fear—but for whatever reason he started to speak then. “Once there were two brothers.”

The squirrel crossed his legs and rested his head on his hand, eager as a prized student, his tail like a faded hairbrush held upright.

“The two brothers were the heirs to a great kingdom. A kingdom prosperous and happy, a kingdom that, split between them, was still more than any animal would ever need or want.”

From somewhere far off, there was a sound.

“But for the two brothers half of everything wasn’t nearly enough, and so they began to plot and to scheme against each other, and finally, in time, turned to open battle.”

The sound grew louder, though not yet distinct. It was an unfriendly sound, this much could be said with certainty.

“Since the brothers were as cowardly as they were rapacious, and no sort of soldiers, they hired animals who would fight for them—cruel, strong, dangerous—and they let them loose upon their kingdom. And war raged between the two brothers, across the length and breadth of their lands—until finally, the leader of the forces of the elder brother, being crueler, and stronger, and more dangerous, proved victorious.”

The sound was prolonged, vigorous. The squirrel didn’t seem to notice, however, so engrossed was he in the Captain’s story. The Captain probably noticed, but the Captain had heard enough screaming not to get excited about hearing more. He started to talk louder himself, louder and more rapidly, either to drown out the sound or simply from the furor of the narrative.

“But the elder brother and his forces had traitors in their midst, and they betrayed their comrades in their moment of triumph, breaking their power and bringing the younger brother to the throne. And the armies of the elder brother were scattered across the kingdom and beyond, and most thought them dead and buried, and forgot them.”

More screams, and gunfire, and something louder than gunfire—dynamite, maybe?

“But they weren’t dead, only battered, and they nourished hatred in their hearts, fed off of it, let it warm them in the cold, began to love their hatred as the only thing left to them. And as the kingdom’s fortunes faded, and as the land descended into tyranny and poverty, the armies of the elder brother saw their moment.”

The door to the jail flew open, burst right off its hinges, Barley coming in smooth behind it. His shoulder was bandaged but he carried his organ-gun without any trouble. Cinnabar slipped in an instant afterward, already reloading his pistols.

“What the hell took you so long?” the Captain asked.

Barley set his cannon on the ground for a moment. “Nice to see you too, Captain.” He put his hands around two of the bars, and tensed his shoulders, and then there was a gap wide enough for the Captain to walk through.

Which the Captain did.

“Wait!” the Squirrel screamed. “Wait!”

The Captain turned back to him.

“How does it end?”

The Captain widened his lips around his teeth. Some would call that a smile. They would be wrong. “In blood.”

Chapter 38: Anticipation (1)

A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica waited.

Chapter 39: A Friendly Smile

Mephetic had told the lieutenant not to lose sight of the mole, not for one second, not even after they’d dropped the mouse off at the dungeons.

The lieutenant hadn’t seen what the big deal was. The mole was a typical female of her species, dress strained by wallowing fat, all but blind in any sort of light, and those bifocals might be fetching but they weren’t helping her see any better. Even by the standards of a creature that lived underground and ate grubs, Gertrude didn’t seem like much to worry about. She had such a friendly smile, after all.

Still, it wasn’t the lieutenant’s job to second-guess Mephetic. Gertrude was searched very thoroughly at the gatehouse, two rats relieving her of the pistol in her sleeve and the small knife that was nearly unnoticeable at the top of her boot, and even of a pen case they thought might be used as club. Gertrude suffered the indignity without breaking her smile, the absurdity of their caution obvious to all involved. Afterward they laughed and shook hands, except the lieutenant, who kept a firm eye on Gertrude, and a firm scowl on her as well. Before entering the main building the lieutenant turned back to wave to the guards, but they didn’t see him or were too lazy to answer, and remained on their stools. Faintly annoyed, he continued in behind Gertrude.

The keep was the biggest and largest and most solid structure in the Capital, in the Gardens, and in any of the neighboring kingdoms. The first walls were massive and imposing, huge slabs of stone that could withstand an artillery shell from close range and not quiver. Inside was a second citadel, the inner keep, small only by the standards of the structure that surrounded it. You’d need an army ten times the size of what Mephetic possessed to besiege it successfully, and even then you’d still need to starve out the garrison. The lieutenant led Gertrude deeper into the castle, past checkpoint after checkpoint of fierce rat guards. At every interval they were stopped to make sure the lieutenant was who he said he was, that the prisoner hadn’t pulled a fast one or somehow subverted her captor. At every interval the mole was respectful, amiable even, laughing and glad-handing with the rat guards. Still, the lieutenant didn’t let his guard down. There must be something about this mole, if Mephetic had been so worried about her.

They came finally to the boss’s office, the nerve center for the whole kingdom. In four years, the lieutenant had never seen the Toad himself—the Lord, he meant, the Lord, you’d catch hell if you forgot that one. Mephetic liked to keep up the pretense, though even the blind beggars in the slums knew the Younger wasn’t running anything.

“You’ve done a fine job, Lieutenant,” Gertrude said, as they waited for the door to open. “Mephetic will surely look kindly on you for overseeing something of this importance.” The mole leaned in and settled one hand on his wrist, as if to assure him. “You’ll make captain by next year—and think how proud your litter will be!”

The lieutenant thanked Gertrude and did indeed think about how happy his pups would be to hear of his promotion, and how he might spend the raise on a toy boat for Alus and a new dress for Serah’s doll and a spinning top for Tomas Jr. and . . .

Two scowling rats opened the door, nodded at the lieutenant, and gestured warily for the mole to come in. Well, they could hardly be blamed, though if the lieutenant knew Gertrude, and he felt he did, even after just these few moments, it wouldn’t be long before she melted their icy demeanor.

The boss’s office was the size of a large dining room, heavy oak shelves full of books that the lieutenant had never seen the boss read, not that there was any reason the boss would feel that this was an activity aided by the lieutenant’s presence. There was a desk as heavy as a boulder in the center of the room, and after a bit of time—enough to reinforce that the boss was the boss and you were not—Mephetic came in through a back door and stood in front of it. The lieutenant could tell how happy he was by his smile, which was wide and open, and his tail, which was flaring up and down ever so slightly.

“Why the Underground Man?” he asked Gertrude.

“Instead of Underground Woman?”

“Yes.”

“Underground Man sounds scarier.”

“That’s true,” Mephetic agreed. “If I’d had any idea that you were the creature behind organized crime in the city, I’d have . . .”

“Killed me?” Gertrude asked, as if she found nothing particularly objectionable about the notion. “I thought you might feel something like that, which is why I made sure you never learned.”

The lieutenant waited until he thought no one was looking, then loosened his collar.

“I’m glad, at least, that you had the good sense to contact me early on in this escapade,” Mephetic said. “That mouse needs to learn when he’s beaten.”

“It won’t take. You’ll have to kill him.”

“I think that’s something we can arrange.”

Was it hot in here? the lieutenant wondered. The day had been blazing, but the evening had cooled down somewhat—or at least that was what he had been thinking on his way in. But now he was sweating buckshot, could feel it mat down his fur.

“Imagine spending all this time obsessed with something as pointless as revenge,” Mephetic said. “That was always the problem with the Captain, if you don’t mind me saying so. He was too strong a hater.”

“I think perhaps there is no creature in the Gardens with such a talent for it,” Gertrude answered, “and so you can hardly be surprised that he chooses to exercise his ability. Fish swim, birds fly, the Captain hates.”

“Though not for very much longer.”

“It would have been easier if you’d let me know you had another creature on the inside.”

“I figured for someone of your abilities, it didn’t need to be easy.”

“No, indeed,” the mole said, smiling her fool-false smile. “I quite enjoy the challenge.”

The boss said something, but the lieutenant couldn’t quite make it out. If he was being honest, the lieutenant would have had to say that, what with how hot it had gotten, he was no longer as interested in the conversation as he had been. The boss repeated whatever he said, though it took a repetition of that repetition before the lieutenant could finally understand it.

“Lieutenant,” Mephetic asked, “what the hell is wrong with you?”

“I assume it’s the poison I gave him,” Gertrude said. “A concoction of my own making—largely painless, though quite fast-acting.”

The lieutenant realized he was on the ground and wondered for a moment how he had gotten there. But it was growing dark, and he turned his mind back to his dam, and his pups, and he hoped they wouldn’t miss him too terribly.

Mephetic went for the pistol in his belt, but Gertrude moved with a speed that would have been astonishing in any animal, let alone one who had never before shown any more dexterity than what was required to tie her shoes. A long, heavy needle, the same one that had poisoned half the guards Gertrude had come in contact with since being brought into the citadel, sailed through the air and slammed against Mephetic’s drawn revolver, sending the weapon spinning off onto the floor.

The two rats still living, a notch slower than Mephetic and any number of notches slower than Gertrude (a notch not being a literal measurement of speed) went for their own weapons then, though of course it was far too late. Gertrude spread her arms wide, as if in supplication or to offer an embrace, and one thin bit of metal flew into one of the rats, and another thin bit of metal flew into the other, and then it was just Mephetic and the Underground Man alive in the room. And probably not both of them for very much longer.

“A double-cross,” Mephetic said. It had been a long time since he’d done his own killing, and apart from his lost gun, he had nothing but a wavy-bladed knife, which he drew swiftly.

“I think this would be a triple-cross, actually, though at some point the sums get hard to do without pen and paper.” If Gertrude had any other weapons on her person, she made no move for them, her hands clasped together as if in prayer.

Mephetic feinted left and took a swipe at her, but Gertrude didn’t so much as quiver at the ruse, and so neatly dodged the attack itself that for a moment Mephetic got the impression he was fighting not a plump, hairy mole, but some creature composed of the very ether itself.

“I’ve still got the Captain,” Mephetic said, trying to land a verbal blow if he couldn’t manage a physical one.

“Not for much longer, I should think. On behalf of the Captain, I’d very much like to thank you for offering us ingress into your impregnable abode. Our impregnable abode, I should very soon say.”

Mephetic roared and tossed his blade at Gertrude, turning end over end, though by the time it reached the space Gertrude had occupied a scant second earlier Gertrude was no longer occupying it.

Which in fact Mephetic had predicted, having belatedly come to recognize the mole’s unnatural speed, a speed that was contrary to her species and indeed to her physical makeup. In fact the skunk, though he had misplayed this particular game, misplayed it quite thoroughly indeed, was no dullard. You will find that skunks as a species are quite clever, as well as being relatively fast and hard to kill.

Though of course, this is not what skunks are famous for. Skunks are famous for one thing and one thing only, and this was the emission that, dropping swiftly and swinging his bushy tail around, Mephetic released from his anal glands, a pulse of foulness that crowded thick through the close air.

Chapter 40: The Specialist

Bonsoir slipped a claw into the outer door of the citadel, just before it banged shut. He waited a few seconds to make sure Gertrude had taken care of her end, then tailed afterward. Two dead rats testified to the mole’s competence, not that Bonsoir had been foolish enough to doubt it. There was a reason everyone feared the Underground Man. Her reputation did not rest on sand.

Nor was Bonsoir’s. He picked the lock on the next door and scampered ahead, as confident in the reinforcements as he had been in the advance force. Gertrude had marked the trail—it was Bonsoir’s job to bust it wide open.

Though, in truth, it was a task unworthy of an animal of Bonsoir’s talent. The mole had left most of the guards she’d passed dead or rapidly dying, purple-faced or with thick trails of blood leaking from their canines, victims of the seemingly endless packets of poison Gertrude carried on her person. All Bonsoir had to do was take care of the stragglers and make sure all the doors were unlocked, and he had trouble with neither. It didn’t hurt that he had lived and worked in the palace for years, knew it like the back of his own black-furred hand.

Bonsoir stopped just short of the antechamber leading into what had been the Captain’s office some years earlier. Two guards still waited outside; for some reason Gertrude hadn’t managed to find a way to kill either of them. The mole is slipping, Bonsoir thought to himself, though he did not really believe it. The first rat had a knife in his throat all of a sudden, collapsing to the ground so swiftly and so quietly that at first his counterpart seemed to think he had fainted, was bent over trying to revive him when another of Bonsoir’s daggers opened a hole in his esophagus through which you could see his spine.

Bonsoir made sure to avoid the blood his handiwork had sent splattering onto the wall. He was a professional, after all.

His task completed, Bonsoir slipped off into the surrounding corridors, knives on his belt and dynamite in his pack, anxious to see what mischief his expertise might wreak.

Chapter 41: Anticipation (2)

A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica waited.

Chapter 42: For All Things Are Mortal

Bonsoir had taken care of the guards outside the throne room but he hadn’t done anything about the door itself. The Captain was a competent lock pick himself, as was Cinnabar, but it was easier just to have Barley break it down, which was what they did, the badger rushing against the door and then rushing right back out again, retching up the eggs he’d eaten for breakfast and the whiskey he’d drunk for lunch. With the door open, Mephetic’s emanations came billowing out, and rather than join Barley’s example Cinnabar and the Captain retreated back down the corridor. The badger followed as soon as he was able, and they let the stink filter out awhile before returning.

Gertrude had died hard. A full blast of Mephetic’s reek and still she had struggled, crawling facedown toward the door, her blood streaking against the marble floor. But she had managed to right herself before expiring, leaning against a wall, slump-shouldered, her face mute with the agony of her final moments. The stench that came off her corpse was uncanny, unbearable though Cinnabar bore it, kneeling down beside her, holding his hat to his chest.

“Rough way to die,” Barley said, but this was as far as his sympathies went. He had never liked the Underground Man, particularly, and anyway, none of them were very likely to survive till morning.

“Let’s go,” the Captain said.

But Cinnabar didn’t answer.

“Cinnabar.”

“One moment.”

“We don’t have the time.”

Everyone knows, of course, that salamanders are a breed apart. Their blood is cold, their humours bitter; they know neither sympathy nor passion. They take no lovers, only mates, and they don’t have friends, only allies, and even then only so long as they’re convenient. Everyone knows that. Everyone.

“There’s time if I say there’s time,” Cinnabar said.

The Captain stared at him for a long moment but in the end it seemed he agreed, or at least he did not move onward. Cinnabar looked back down at Gertrude and said nothing further. Somewhere below there was the sound of an explosion and the floor rocked uneasily. Something screamed, and then stopped screaming. Gertrude’s eyes were wide and red veined and despairing. Cinnabar closed them and stood. “All right,” he said.

Chapter 43: Raison d’Être

Bonsoir was having a grand time.

The Captain had been right, that first night when he had come recruiting. Bonsoir had been wasting his time in dusty border towns, amid rundown bars—and more than his time, he had been wasting his genius.

Everything had a purpose, that was the way Bonsoir saw it. Bees make honey, songbirds trill, pretty females strut down the sidewalk on sunny afternoons and pretend they do not know you are looking at them. The rest of the crew, Barley and Cinnabar and so on, they were kick-down-the-door types, guns-blazing types, die-in-the-spotlight-with-blood-on-their-grin types. Not Bonsoir. Bonsoir scuttled down darkened corridors and brought sleep with him—not even death, death was too strong a word for what he brought, for the silence that descended when he came. That was Bonsoir’s purpose, that was why Bonsoir existed. And what is more joyous than to act according to our innermost nature?

Which brings us back to: Bonsoir was having a grand time.

Though it must be said, Bonsoir’s mind was not occupied solely with pleasure. It had occurred to Bonsoir—if he was to be absolutely honest, which he wouldn’t have been—it had occurred to Bonsoir some days earlier that he could still remember the location of the treasure vault, hidden deep within the subterranean layers of the inner keep. And it had also occurred to Bonsoir that this vault, which under normal circumstances would have been so thickly guarded that even Bonsoir couldn’t have had much hope of breaking into it, would, under these current conditions, likely be denuded of its normal compliment of soldiers. Worth looking into, at least. It was all well and good to enjoy your business, but Bonsoir was a professional, as has been mentioned, and a professional does not work for free.

There were some rats guarding the treasure chamber, though not nearly as many as usual. To get through them Bonsoir had to act with less subtlety than he preferred, tossing one of his few remaining sticks of dynamite, then coming in hard and fast with his knives in the second after it exploded. One of the rats got a shot off, but it went wide, and he didn’t get a second. When the smoke cleared there were Bonsoir and three dead rats and a multicolored collage on the wall that Bonsoir assumed were the remains of a fourth.

It took nearly half an hour for Bonsoir to pick the lock, and he did not think he was being unduly arrogant—though Bonsoir was, admittedly, titanic in his self-regard—in saying that there was not another creature alive who could have managed it in twice the time. Still, it was longer than he liked to spend out in the open, with his back turned, and he felt his heart trill when the lock snicked open, and he could slip inside.

Awaiting him was a clear blue spring to a creature dying of thirst; awaiting him were a mother’s arms to a weeping babe; awaiting him was that final moment of release for which all living things secretly long. Even in these late days, after five years of misrule by Mephetic and five before that of civil war, the Gardens were a prosperous place, and the tax collectors ever busy. There were walls of scrip of all sorts, scrip from every one of the major banks and most of the kingdoms back east. But what is scrip, when compared with hard gold, heavy octagonal coins in thick cloth sacks, bars laid crossways? And what is gold compared to the innumerable glittering treasures, sterling jewelry and fat gemstones, emeralds and rubies and diamonds and things for which Bonsoir did not know the name?

It was the most beautiful sight that Bonsoir had ever seen, and he could not be blamed, or at least he could not have been blamed much, for the moment of shock that followed, for dropping his guard and staring in wonder at the wealth better than love that was now his.

But blame him or not, he paid for it.

“What a fascinating development,” a voice said from behind him.

Bonsoir snarled and turned to throw one of his knives and felt something explode in the center of his torso. At first it was more a sensation of force than pain, but the pain came quickly on its heels, and the pain was worse than anything he had felt in a long life of misery. Then he was on the ground, and above him stood the handsomest little white cat you could ever want to see, grinning from ear to ear and watching Bonsoir bleed.

“By Cromwell’s ghost,” Puss said, “I hope they’re not all in the bag so easy.”

Chapter 44: Besting the Reaper

They were running through one of the many courtyards, heading toward the inner keep, Cinnabar in front, then the Captain, then Barley. They had given up being quiet but they were still trying to be quick, and so far they’d had no trouble, Cinnabar’s hands making a handful of rats into a handful of corpses.

They had just passed the main guardhouse when the alarm bells began to ring. The Captain looked at Barley but didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything; Barley had already unlimbered his cannon from off of his back, was checking on each of the little spinning bits and smiling brightly. The Captain continued on the way he was going, toward the heart of the castle. Cinnabar bothered with a good-bye, an uncharacteristic bit of sentimentality for the Dragon—and an unnecessary one.

Because Barley wasn’t paying any attention; his eyes were huge and they were fixed on the guardhouse, and he wore a smile that was more of a leer, and after a quick moment, a very quick moment, Cinnabar followed the Captain, sprinting toward the inner keep. Barley gave the barrel of his gun one last spin, heard its familiar clickety-clack, and smiled wider. He began to walk backward slowly, till his great mass was blocking the path that the Captain had escaped down. He counted the seconds. He was as happy as a pup on Christmas morning, as a maid on her wedding night, as a wolf before his bloody red supper.

The first group of guards came out of the entrance, guns drawn and eyes wide with excitement, or perhaps terror. For certain it was terror in the next moment, the darkness of the courtyard lit by the muzzle-flash of the organ gun, a muzzle-flash that was blinding bright, a muzzle-flash that brought death with such speed and in such numbers that it seemed scarcely conceivable. Soon there was nothing left in the guardhouse—nothing left alive, I mean—and then and only then did Barley’s gun go silent.

But it started up again a few minutes later, when reinforcements arrived, as loud as before and to the same effect. It took the rats a long time to realize they were better off not sprinting straight into the courtyard—rats are not known for their tactical sense. Really rats aren’t known for much, except for being numerous and dying easily.

Or at least they died easily that day, even after they started taking cover in the surrounding buildings and trying to snipe at Barley. He was well positioned in the dark, and at this point the mounds of corpses he had made acted as cover. It took twenty minutes for one of the cleverer rodents to remember the heavy artillery, and another twenty to wheel one out from its position on the battlements. They wasted a lot of ammo finding the proper range, though they did a good job of destroying large sections of the castle.

And in the meantime Barley continued his work, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat. And to find an equal to his tally, to do that bloody arithmetic—if one was inclined to do so, if one’s mind ran in that sort of direction—one would have needed to compare him against disease, and time, and heartbreak.

Barley’s body was never found. Of course, it wouldn’t have been found even if it was there, not buried under all that rubble. Maybe, after the thing was over, after all of the killing was done, he shouldered up his cannon and disappeared again, this time making sure he buried himself so deep that no one, not even the Captain, could find him again. Or maybe the rats caught him with a shot from the howitzer, one of those shells goes off nearby and there’s no need to worry about burial, not for a badger or a St. Bernard or a blue whale.

All that can be said with certainty is that when Barley did shuffle into the darkness, as all of us must, he had company waiting to meet him.

Chapter 45: Question Asked

Cinnabar was winding his way through the courtyard, the Captain in tow. The night echoed with Barley’s covering fire, even a long way distant, drowning out the usual evening sounds. But all of a sudden, just the same, Cinnabar stopped, and the Captain stopped after him.

“What’s going on?” the Captain asked, wise enough to know Cinnabar didn’t do anything pointlessly.

“You go on ahead,” Cinnabar said simply. “I’ve got business.”

“You need any help?”

“No.”

For a moment it seemed the Captain would say something. Cinnabar was his oldest friend, if the Captain could be said to have those. But perhaps he couldn’t, because in the end he just scowled a little harder and hurried off.

When Brontë slipped from the shadows it was impossible to imagine she could have remained hidden for so long, given her size. But Brontë wasn’t just big; Brontë was quick, and Brontë was agile, and if it hadn’t been for Cinnabar’s strangely keen perception Brontë might never have been noticed at all.

“I could have killed you both, just then,” Brontë said, tapping the handle of the blunderbuss at her hip.

“You could have tried,” Cinnabar said, rolling a cigarette.

Brontë was no stranger to the act itself, but never in her life had she seen it performed with such rapid precision, as if the salamander had willed the thing into existence. Maybe this made her nervous, and maybe that was why she started to talk.

“All the stories about you, I admit I’d expected more. The deadliest creature in the Gardens, the greatest gunslinger ever to slap iron. Mephetic still talks about you, about how many of his soldiers you killed. About some shoot-out near Black Fork where you put an entire family of rabbits into the ground in one go. And here you are, a mottled cold-blood in an old hat. But then I suppose that’s the way of legends, to grow over-large in the telling.”

Cinnabar sighed. How many times had he heard this line, how many dozens, maybe hundreds? Some mean-looking animal on the other end, trying to convince themselves that Cinnabar wasn’t the most dangerous thing the gods had ever made. It had gotten so damn tiring, being the Dragon. If he had it to do again, Cinnabar sometimes thought, he wouldn’t have become it.

Cinnabar lit his cigarette, took a long, slow drag on it, then let it fall to the ground and stamped it out with his heel. “I guess I should be easy killing, then.”

Brontë’s smile was mostly fang. “Deserved or not, you’ve got a big name. And when you die, I’ll have a bigger one. Dragonslayer.” Brontë let her palm stray down to her double-barreled cannon. “Dragonslayer. I like it.”

Cinnabar didn’t bother to respond, nor even to move his hands closer to his weapons. His eyes might have been taking in Brontë’s movements, or they might have been staring at the moon that had risen, full and bright and beautiful, above the turrets of the inner keep.

Brontë went for her gun.

Chapter 46: Anticipation (3)

A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica adjusted her sights.

Chapter 47: Not a Frenchman

Bonsoir did not die neatly.

He was not a large creature, but he had a heart that belied his size, as does every trueborn son of Gaul. “You ought to take great pride, silly little kitten-creature,” Bonsoir said. One hand pressed sharp against the hole in his stomach. The second pulled a crumpled cigarette from where it had rested behind his ear, set it in a mouth that was filling rapidly with blood, and lit it with a match. “For you have killed Bonsoir, the greatest assassin that Provence has ever produced.”

Puss cocked his head, looked over at the several rats that had come into the treasure room after him, looked back at Bonsoir. “Excuse me?”

“I said you have killed Bonsoir, cousin of death; Bonsoir, who strikes in the night; Bonsoir, who—”

“What is that absurd accent?”

Bonsoir coughed up smoke, then blood. “If you had not put me down from behind, like the dastard you are, Bonsoir would make you pay for the disrespect you show to his homeland.”

“Your homeland, is it? Et où êtes-vous, vous idiot peu hermine? Vous stupide, putois merde cerveau? Votre purulente, imbécile, faux chose?”

Bonsoir didn’t answer.

“No? Nothing? It’s been so long since you’ve practiced your native tongue that you cannot even bother to recognize it?”

Still Bonsoir did not answer, though his eyes flashed with such hatred as one rarely sees apart from creatures who at one point loved one another.

“Are they such imbeciles in this country as not to have picked up on this mad deceit? How long have you been playing this absurd game? You’re no more French than I am Sultan of Turkey!”

Puss laughed uproariously and turned to the rats that he had brought as backup, who laughed as well, less because they got the joke and more because you laugh if the creature above you laughs—at least you do if you are a rat, who are creatures not unpracticed in obsequiousness. Puss giggled and guffawed, Puss chuckled and chortled, Puss cackled and tittered and howled, Puss all but ruptured his diaphragm in amusement.

It was a very loud laugh. It was not, however, the last one.

Chapter 48: Question Answered

Perhaps, somewhere in the world, since the dawn of history, there was someone as fast as Cinnabar. The Gardens are vast, and time is long. Regardless, Brontë was not that creature. Before she had unholstered her weapon Cinnabar had released an entire chamber from the revolver on his right hip, fanning a cluster of shots that curdled the cream of the fox’s eye a cherry red. Brontë screamed and let off a shot that flew well to the left of the salamander, who by this point had dropped his empty revolver and repeated the trick with its full twin, sending another round of metal into the neck and scalp of the fox.

Brontë would never be as fast as Cinnabar, nowhere near, but she was a damn sight bigger. The dozen pricks of lead the Dragon had set into her flesh were insufficient to put her down, indeed barely enough to slow her. As the salamander dropped his empty weapon and moved to draw the one from his boot Brontë fired the second barrel on her blunderbuss.

Nothing is faster than a bullet, but Cinnabar was close. As Brontë’s hand cannon erupted Cinnabar dropped low to the ground and launched himself sideways. If the fox’s weapon fired solid shot he might even have made it, but as it was the outer edge of the cloud of shrapnel ripped into Cinnabar’s side, leaving bits of entrails peeking through his skin.

Her ammunition depleted, Brontë dove at Cinnabar, anxious to finish with claws and teeth what she had started with her pearl-handled shotgun. Off-balance from his wounds, the salamander still managed to dance aside, sending another wave of fire into her torso.

To little enough avail. Every shot Cinnabar had fired found purchase in the more sensitive portions of Brontë’s flesh, but each injury seemed only to enrage her further. She turned back around on the salamander, hissed madly, and charged a second time.

This time Cinnabar didn’t try to dodge. With an agility that belied the leaking corner of his intestine he unlimbered the half-rifle and steadied it at the coming behemoth. Cinnabar’s hands worked the lever, sent a flurry of lead into his enemy. Tufts of pink brain and white bone and red fur flew out of Brontë’s skull, but it did nothing to slow her momentum. She barreled forward with sufficient force to topple the Dragon, already unsteady from his wounds. They tumbled together, Brontë dead but not knowing it, Cinnabar dying and certain of the fact.

When it was done Cinnabar lay pinned beneath the aerated corpse of the fox, now finally still. Cinnabar’s hat, which had been knocked off in the struggle, was a few inches out of his reach. He strained with every fiber of the part of his body that still worked, grabbed the Stetson, and set it over his forehead.

Then he sighed, and stared up at the moon, and breathed once more, and allowed himself to die.

Chapter 49: Reunion

The Captain hurried toward the inner keep, sprinting along the high edge of the ramparts, alone so far as could be seen. Barley’s cannon went silent, finally, and the night returned to its stillness. And then that stillness—which was a false stillness, a stillness that is the preface to noise—was filled with a low shuddering, the sound of an unclean death.

Some creatures say that the rattlesnake is misunderstood, that he makes his telltale sound to warn of his danger and ward off misfortune for all parties. Some creatures are fools. No snake can be trusted, and the rattler least of all. He does not rattle to alert—he rattles to threaten, he rattles to mock. He rattles to let you know that he can bring you death, if he so chooses, and that doing so would be a joy for him, indeed would be his chief joy.

The sound got louder and louder, and then it was joined by scale slithering along stone, and finally by the sight of the snake’s flesh, pale as an exsanguinated corpse.

“Captain,” the Quaker said, the last word elongated over his forked tongue. “How long it’s been, and how much I have missed you, you and all my old companions.”

When last the Captain had seen the Quaker he had been young and bright green and filled three-deep with creatures he had swallowed during that last horrible evening, creatures who had thought themselves friends to the beast, who were foolish enough to imagine that a serpent has a heart in any but the most literal sense.

The Captain didn’t move, his hands in the pockets of his duster, a scowl on his face. “Did you now? All of us?”

“Alas for Gertrude, amiable as fair death! I take it that was Barley making so much noise earlier. But there is no noise any longer, is there, and I suppose we can guess what that means. Bonsoir always preferred silence; one way or the other I won’t be seeing him. And I know that Brontë had a special surprise prepared for Cinnabar, though I doubt things will work out quite the way the fox planned.”

“And?”

“Boudica? But she won’t be anywhere nearby.”

“And?” the Captain asked. “And? And?”

Quaker looked at the Captain a long while. Then he looked all about himself, into the deep dark stillness of the night. Then he smiled.

Elf shot from one of the crevices that the evening reserves for itself, shrieking her shriek that was the last thing so many creatures had heard, squirrels and mice and rats and bats and polecats and skunks. Where had she been? Not so small a bird, if not so large either, and she couldn’t fly anymore, hobbled by the click-click-click of her talons. But that night she had moved as stealthily as Bonsoir, or a shadow, which was to say the same thing.

They moved with a speed that was impossible to follow, feinting and striking, each attack shading imperceptibly into the next such that determining individual movements was impossible. The Quaker snapped and twisted, hoping to wrap himself around his old lover in one final, deadly embrace. Elf avoided this kindness, offering her own with a beak that shone bright in the moonlight, and talons that she’d kept sharp as her hate. She should have been easy prey for the snake, old and mottled and flightless as she was. But this proved not to be the case, for after a full forty-five seconds—which is an eternity in mortal combat, which is longer than perhaps any other creature in the Gardens would have lasted with either—the contest remained undecided.

Furious at this difficulty, the Quaker turned smoothly from Elf and launched himself at the Captain, as swiftly as a ball from a cannon, with no doubt the same effect had he reached the mouse. But in the instant before he would have struck, Elf intercepted the Quaker’s movement with one of her own, just as potent and fierce; with a flap of her wings she cast herself forward into the rattler, claws finding the soft tissue around his eyes. The Quaker did not scream: not when the blood began to come swiftly down his face, not when the force of Elf’s attack carried both of them tumbling out over the walls and down into the ether, the desperate and hoped-for outcome, a fatal embrace descending, together forever, into the darkness.

Chapter 50: Good Night

“Imagine,” Puss continued, gesturing widely to his soldiers. “Years affecting this mad conceit, and no one ever bothered to call him on it! What strange, pathetic creatures you breed on this side of the pond! This sad little ermine has spent the entirety of his life pretending to be something he is not, as if massacring his vowels offered some patina of class. What is that sound?”

What was that sound? It was something like sand leaking through an hourglass, or silk running across a lady’s hand. It wasn’t either of these things, of course, though it had more in common with the first.

What it was, in fact, as Puss realized after he had turned around, was the thin little string attached to the end of Bonsoir’s last stick of dynamite rapidly being eaten away by flame.

“I am not an ermine!” Bonsoir said, blood bubbling up past his smile.

Puss’s eyes went very wide. He prepared to do something, though what that something would have been never did become clear.

Puss was cultured, Puss was clever, Puss was fast and cruel and deadly—but Puss was not wise. For, if Bonsoir was no Frenchman, he was, most certainly, a stoat. And if a Frenchman is many things, at the end of the day, a stoat is only one—a killer.

And now the fuse was a fingernail, and now a hair’s breadth.

“Bonsoir!” Bonsoir said.

Chapter 51: One Final Ace

The Captain entered the inner keep as alone in reality as he had always been in spirit. He skirted from shadow to shadow, eyes wary, one hand on the shotgun strapped to his back—but there arrived no excuse for using it, and he passed into the throne room without incident.

It had been used to crown the Lords and Ladies of the Gardens for untold generations, it was gold and silver; it was cool stone and buffed ivory; it was soft samite and thick Oriental silk. From the stained-glass windows above, the Toads’ forebears observed the proceedings with regal disinterest. The throne was large enough to have accommodated a wolfhound, and Mephetic, lounging on the lip, seemed lost amid its grandeur. He had one hand on a box detonator, a coil of string leading off into the darkness. He had the other around a bottle of brown liquor.

“You might not believe this, but I’m about to do you a favor.”

“Yeah?”

“Absolutely. Being in charge of the Gardens is not all it’s cracked up to be. Monetary policy, tax revenue, the bureaucracy . . . Trust me, it’s mostly hassle. Taking it was the only part I really liked.”

“Where’s the Younger?”

“Struggling with an opium suppository, if I had to guess. The Lord is not one to let a little thing like revolution get in the way of pleasure. Anyway, who cares? He was never the point of the thing.”

“No,” the Captain agreed. “Just want to make sure it all gets wrapped up.”

“I’ve rigged enough dynamite to send the entire inner keep to the moon,” Mephetic said, laughing. “Don’t worry. We’ll be taking the Lord with us.” Mephetic took a long, slow slug of whiskey, making sure to keep an eye on the Captain while he did so. When he was done, he put the top on the bottle and tossed it to the mouse. “One last nip before we meet the devil?”

The Captain caught it with one hand, uncorked it, and took a swig. The other hand he raised above his head.

Chapter 52: Resolution

A half-mile out from the inner keep, hanging by her tail in the branches of a tall elm tree, unnoticeable in the darkness, Boudica fired.

Chapter 53: The Builders

There was the sound of a window breaking, and then Mephetic’s head disappeared.

Not disappeared, so much as redistributed itself, on the ground and the wall and the throne itself. The Captain waved again, unnecessarily. Boudica had seen well enough to make the shot; of course she could see well enough to know she hadn’t missed. Not that Boudica ever missed.

The Captain drank what was left in the bottle with one protracted gulp. Then he let it shatter against the floor and moved on, swiftly but not hurrying, into the hallway that lay beyond the throne room.

The corridor stank terribly, and it stank worse the farther he went, and the Captain knew he was close. At the end of the passageway was a door, and beyond that door was a room, and inside that room was evidence that no creature should have all its desires fulfilled. The chamber was as foul as any abattoir, cut-rate whorehouse, or public toilet. The Captain had not seen the creature that breathed at the center of it for ten years, since before the start of the War of the Two Brothers, and in the interim he had gotten fatter and nastier but not fundamentally different in any other way.

The Lord was larger than any toad you’d ever expect to see, nearly as big as Barley was, or had been, or whatever. Though of course the badger’s size had been mostly muscle, whereas the Lord was so grotesquely obese that he couldn’t walk unaided, could only lift his arms with difficulty. The collection of warts, humps, swollen bulges, and goiters would have done credit to a colony of lepers. His eyes were as dim as a miner’s candle, and it took him a long time to react to this new development.

“You,” the Lord said. Somewhere in the dim recesses of his amphibious brain, a brain that had long been subject to the degrading effects of every vice and narcotic that had ever been invented or distilled, a connection was made. “I remember you. You were . . . you were my brother’s, weren’t you?”

“He was mine, would be a better way of putting it.”

The Lord looked at the Captain slyly for a moment, and asked, “Are you real?”

“Real as anything.”

“Then those sounds I was hearing, all that gunfire and screaming—that was real too? Not just inside my mind?”

The Captain nodded.

The Lord took a few long seconds to work through the arithmetic. “Then that means you’re here to kill me.”

“You weren’t first on the list,” the Captain informed him. “But you are the last one left.”

The Lord did not say anything for a long time. He was working very hard to piece the puzzle together, though it was no easy thing for a creature who had been required to do nothing more difficult than light his hash pipe for the better part of a decade.

But he managed it, and in doing so he received a sudden and unexpected burst of energy, one that propelled him into monologue. “Well? Where is he? Where is my elder brother, who has so long been absent from my bosom? Let me show him all the deference due one whose birth was a full five minutes before my own.” The toad’s face, unlovely under the best of circumstances, was further marred with the molasses-thick swell of fraternal hatred. It had been so long since the toad had been required to perform any physical act more tiring than evacuating waste or receiving pleasure that even this short oration left him exhausted and out of breath, his warty hide rising and falling, rising and falling.

The Captain didn’t say anything for a while, just watched the Lord try to breathe. He was carrying a small burden on his back, and he removed it and rolled it out onto the floor.

The Lord’s eyes throbbed out from his skull. His mouth hung open; his tongue uncoiled itself until it nearly touched the fat of his belly.

Laid against the bed of the now-unraveled satchel was a collection of bones picked clean by time. Amid these remnants was a jet-white skull, a skull that was unquestionably that of a toad.

“I know he was alive when he reached the Kingdom to the South,” the Captain said. “So he must have died some time afterward. It might have been natural. Or it might not have been. I suppose down there they figured he kept his value as a potential threat, so long as Mephetic never found out.”

“But . . . then . . .” The Lord’s great bulbous jaw jiggled inanely. “What was the point?”

The last Lord of the Gardens died miserably and without fanfare, the Captain offering both barrels, shrapnel spreading putrescent green rot against the wall. The toad was so corpulent that at first it seemed the loss of a half his body weight wouldn’t be enough to kill him, and the Captain started to reload his weapon. But then the Lord let out a loud, wet fart, near as foul as Mephetic’s stink, and he slunk down into his chair.

When the Captain got back to the throne room he found an ancient vole in faded livery, looking out the window at the ruined keep below, and the city beyond it which would soon see nothing but chaos, and the country past that which would know the same. “So much death,” he said. “So much death.”

The Captain stopped in front of him and shrugged, as if he had seen more.

“What happens now?” the servant asked, too old to be frightened. “The keep is in ruins, the country devastated. All this slaughter, and what will come of it? Who will rule the Gardens now? Who will rebuild?”

The Captain pulled out a cigar from beneath his coat. The Captain cut the tip off. The Captain put it to his mouth. The Captain lit the end. The Captain breathed in deep, and exhaled a river of smoke.

“We don’t build.”

AND YOU SHALL KNOW HER BY THE TRAIL OF DEAD

Brooke Bolander

The mobster has a gun pressed to Rack’s forehead. The mobster has a god-shitting gun pressed to her partner’s fucking forehead, and the only thing Rhye can do is watch and scream as the man smiles at her and pulls the trigger and blows Rack’s perfect brains out from between his ears.

Rhye has her guns drawn before the other Ganymede fuckers can twitch, but it’s way too late—the damage is done and smeared across the walls and floor and ceiling. Synthetic blood and bone look exactly the same as the real deal. She puts three shots into the flesh slab that did it (he’s dead he’s dead gods fuck it no nononono) and then the rest of his pals are on her like the three-times-fucked human jackals they are, pulling her down. The room stinks of blood and gunsmoke and fear-sweat. For the first time in her life, those smells make Rhye want to gag. Her ears are ringing—whether from the gunshots or god knows what else—and it feels like the floor is falling away beneath her motorcycle boots.

She’s still struggling against their meaty fingers to reach Rack when the head goon breaks her nose with a squared-off fist the size of the moon he’s from. She barely feels the bone snap. He’s dead. He’s dead and the world is grayscale, all the color leaching from it to pool around her feet in a red puddle.

“He was trying to crack it, you fucks. The fuck is wrong with you? He was coming out, he was going to try again, it was just a fucking hiccup! Jesus fuck, do you think you’re going to get your cunting kid back now?” Her throat hurts from screaming. Blood from her nose is backing up into her sinuses, half-choking her. She doesn’t care. “I’ll kill you, I’ll fucking kill all of you. You’re fucking dead, do you hear me? Let me go, let me fucking go—”

“We hired you and your partner to finish job. Nothing was ever said about quitting,” the man says. His voice is heavily accented, breath reeking of onions and vodka. “If pretty boy couldn’t bring what we need out, pretty boy is useless, like tits on bull or useless cyborg bitch. His consciousness can stay inside box and rot for all I care. But!—” he pokes Rhye in the forehead with one of his blunt fingers—”I think you care. I think you care very much, yes? Yesyes?”

“I’m going to kill you, you fuck.” She says it slowly, pronouncing every word with deathly clarity. “I’m going to shove my gun up your ass and blow a hole so fucking wide a whale’s prick wouldn’t fill the gap.”

“Not if you want partner back,” he says, throwing an uplink cable at her. “Plug in, get data out. Get pretty boy, too, if you like. Fail, and you die together. Is very simple.”

And because she does care, cares too fucking much, cares, and the sight of Rack slumped over in the chair with a neat round hole scorched into his forehead is squeezing at the heart she’s always claimed not to have, Rhye spits blood and hate in their employer’s face and jams the jack into the port at the base of her skull.

• • • •

The first time she meets Rack, Rhye’s fresh out of the army and fresh back from one of the meat-grinders the humans pay her kind to fight in. The children of wires and circuits aren’t worth a tinker’s fuck compared to the children of real flesh and bone, so far as the world’s concerned. The recruitment agents pluck her off the streets when she’s twelve and send her to a training camp and she’s good with linguistics and better at killing, so they keep her hands busy until she’s twenty-five and then they spit her back out again like a mouthful of cum. She has gray curly hair cropped short and gray dead eyes and calluses on the inside of her palms worn hard and horny from years of holding pistol grips. She’s small and lean, which makes people underestimate her, but she’s cool enough and don’t-fuck-with-me enough that most know to jump the fuck out of the way when they see her coming. The ones that don’t get flashed a warning glimpse of her teeth and holsters.

There’s nothing funnier than watching some drunken fleshsack piss his drawers when that happens. One minute he’s trying to grab a skin-job whore’s ass, the next he’s looking his own death in the face and wetting himself like a goddamned baby. It never fails to tickle the shit out of Rhye.

She bums around the city looking for something to do, gets in a moderate amount of trouble in every district she lands (her and the cops are on a first-name basis; it’s touching), and finally ends up at the deathmatches, fighting her own kind for a quick buck in front of a bunch of screaming yahoos. Rhye doesn’t really do it for the cash, although money for smokes is always nice. She does it because killing is the only thing she’s good at, and quite frankly, she enjoys it. If the poor fucks she gunned down didn’t want to be there, they wouldn’t be. They’re all fucked, everything is fucked, and the pain at least makes her feel something.

Then one night in the arena her foot slips and the hulking musclebound mountain of nano-technology she’s peppering with shots catches up and busts three of her ribs and one of her wrists. Rhye still manages to take him down one-handed, but even with the purse prize she doesn’t have enough money for a fixer. They toss her out into the alleyway behind the joint like a kid’s broken toy and there she lies, soaked to the skin from the oily rain that never seems to stop falling in this fucking gray ashtray of a city.

And that’s where Rack finds her, that clean-fingered, mild-mannered motherfucker. Why he’s even there in the first place is beyond her. All she knows is that one minute she’s huddling in a puddle, exhausted and hurting, and the next there’s a hand extended her way and a pair of sad brown eyes looking down at her (fucking puppy-dog expression, clean-shaven and thoughtful and for fuck’s sake he was wearing a tie and carrying a briefcase, can you believe that shit) and no matter how hard she glares at him, he won’t fucking go. Rhye shows him the grips of her pistols and he just looks at her, just fucking looks. That surprises her; she’s not expecting young Mr. Salaryman to be stubborn.

“Fuck off, White Collar,” she says. “Do I fucking know you?”

“No,” he replies, exasperatingly patient, “but I know what it looks like when somebody needs a hand. C’mon. Let’s get you out of the rain.”

She’s hurting too bad to put up much of a fuss. He loops an arm beneath her own and together the two of them limp back to his flat, her getting oily water and blood all over his nice white shirt the entire way.

If he had been smart, he would have left her where she lay. Fucking dumbass. Stupid fucking noble idealistic kind-hearted dumbass.

• • • •

Outgoing Connection detected!

Initializing Connection Handoff to Interpretive Interface . . . Handoff Completed!

(Hey, Rhye, c’mere. I made you something.)

It’s like floating in black static, and all the pressure is sitting on top of Rhye’s head sumo-style, pushing her further down. Lines of code play across the insides of her eyes. Floaters are annoying; this is fucking maddening. And it hurts. She can’t keep a straight thought, scalpels of pain are slicing through her brain over and over and she fucking hates this cyberspace bullshit. It’s Rack’s thing, not hers. Rhye likes her shit concrete. Rhye likes having a body. North, South, East, West. You use your feet to walk in a direction and then you shoot some motherfucker at the end of it. Finding Rack in here is gonna be like finding a seed in an elephant’s ass, especially if he’s tangled up with the security system. He had sounded scared shitless over the comm-link before that waste of jizz up top had done what he did. Thinking about it makes Rhye’s currently non-existent asshole clench.

So. Find Rack, get him out of whatever pile he’s stepped into, and also somehow free up the data their employers want. Piece of cake. No problem. As soon as Rhye figures out what form any of that is gonna take, how to move forward, and which fucking way forward is, she’ll go ahead and do that. Should’ve paid more attention in school. Should’ve actually gone to school.

(It looks like a chip, a tiny little chunk of plastic and wire no bigger than a .22 shell. He drops it into her palm, looking like a cat that’s just robbed a canary store at gunpoint. She glances down at the thing, then back at him, the smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and the pride in his eyes.)

(The hell is it?)

Establishing parietal operculum loopback . . . SUCCESS

Establishing posterior parietal cortex loopback . . . SUCCESS

Something about the script is nagging at Rhye. A memory half-clouded by booze, disinterest, and the obscuring fog of being so embarrassed by something she had willed her brain to forget all about it. Good god, had she actually blushed? Like a fucking schoolgirl with a Valentine?

Rhye never has been good at accepting kindness. Being loved doesn’t suit her.

(It’s art. It’s art and it’s one-of-a-kind and it’s all yours. It’s an interface, like mine, but I cut out all the rendering hardware and installed a direct path to the somasensory cortices of your brain. You interpret the stimulus naturally, like poetry, or music, and—Rhye, there are no words for this. Here, hook yourself up to the test deck. Log in with me. You need to see for yourself.)

(Just say what it does in fuckin’ English, Rack, baby.)

(It develops metaphors for abstract environments. I put it together just f—)

(Oh. Huh. Well, that’s somethin’. You’re a sharp motherfucker, Rack. You want a drink?)

And she had slotted the thing away in one of the ports beneath her hair so his feelings wouldn’t be too hurt (not that she cared, of course) and turned away so he wouldn’t see her blush (fuck) and promptly gotten herself so completely fucked up on the cheap whiskey they kept in the fridge that the rest of that night was an indistinct blur. That he had wanted her to plug in with him was not something she dwelled on, not something she had let herself dwell on. Fucking sentimentality. It was that sort of shit that got you killed.

But it sure as fuck seems to be coming in handy now, this little gift of Rack’s. The static shudders and flashes and things begin taking shape. She has a body again, and guns, and she thanks her brain for that because she’d rather hop around in here on fucking stumps and hooks than be without some representation of her weapons. Another twist of the big empty and there’s dirt beneath her boots, a gray sky above and a river ahead, and—

Enhanced local motor/sensory homunculi detected, offloading rendering tasks . . . complete!

Filling input buffer . . . 60% . . . 85% . . . 100%!

Rendering buffer contents . . .

Dead trees, dead grass, and a skeletal ferryman in a boat, cowled and waiting.

• • • •

Joining up with Rack hadn’t stopped her from doing much of anything, at first. She played the part of the hired gun on whatever jobs he asked her to—beneath that quiet boy scout front was a mercenary mind the criminal underworld would spread their cheeks and wallets for, if and when they needed his skills—but Rhye’s time was her fucking time, and if she wanted to spend it getting blackout drunk or fighting in deathmatches until the street sweepers came out to mop up the hobo piss, that was none of his fucking concern. And, to Rack’s credit, he never gave her any shit about it. He just bundled her into her bed when she came staggering home stinking of bourbon and sweat, sewed up her cuts and swabbed out her wounds, and watched. Always with the fucking watching.

Maybe she got a little reckless (more so than usual). Reckless or sloppy. The outcome was the same: She went into the ring with two good eyes to fight some knife-throwing motherfucker and came out a cyclops, blood and goo leaking from the sliced-up socket like candle wax. She’s never been able to remember how the fuck she made it back to the apartment that night on her own. There’s a big “scene missing” card and then she’s perched on the bathroom counter while Rack dabs gently at the hole in her head, tight-lipped and trying so fucking hard not to let his concern show.

Neither of them says anything for a while. But a question is gnawing at Rhye, and she’s drunk enough and light-headed enough from losing all that blood to finally just ask.

“Hey. Rack.”

He wrings the washcloth out and a slaughterhouse swirls down the plughole. “Yeah?”

“Why the fuck do you care? About anything, I mean.” She shakes her head. Bloody water and antiseptic splatter the walls. “You know what humans say about us? We’re just fucking garbage to them. God created their ancestors, but ours were made by Tom, Dick, and motherfuckin’ Turing. We don’t have souls and they can just use us and throw us out”—she snaps her fingers, bang—”like that. Better than ruining a real person’s hands in the factories, right? That kid on the assembly line, she’s just a goddamned piece of synthetic trash, she doesn’t dream about getting the hell out of the slums to somewhere better. So why give a fuck if that’s all the world expects out of you?”

A beat. “Do you believe them?”

“Fuck no. For one thing, there’s no such thing as their fucking God. Load of horseshit. The only things you can rely on are these babies.” She pats her guns, solid and safe in their holsters. “But they got one thing right. Our lives ain’t worth shit in a sewer, and mine least of all. So I’ll ask again: What’s with the caring act? What’s in it for you? You think you’re gonna fix me or something?”

“No, Rhye. I don’t think that.”

“Then why? Why give a fuck?”

He shrugs, shooting her that wry little smile that never reaches his eyes.

“Hey,” he says, finally. “Everybody needs a hobby, right?”

That was the last deathmatch Rhye ever fought in. She kept the empty socket, got an eyepatch, and aimed just as well with one eyeball as she ever had with two.

• • • •

She pays him in spent brass, the kind that gathers in your pockets and shirt cuffs after a day at the range or a night spent turning people into raw red meat. No reaper in Rhye’s head would ever bother asking for fuckin’ pennies. He stretches out a bony hand and the empty shells clatter into it like beer cans bouncing off a fence post, ting ting ting. Lead on, motherfucker, lead on. Down the river and through the woods and if the Big Bad Wolf jumps out, you give him a lead tampon in his pisshole before he can say hey baby, what’s shakin’.

It looks like all the rivers and canals she’s ever known, choked with old shopping trolleys and used condoms and rafts of yellow-brown foam. Styx by way of The City, stinking, oily-slow, full of shit and bodies and about as good a metaphor for life as you could find. The only difference here is that all of the faces beneath the water belong to people Rhye put there. She’s not guilty—most of them deserved it—but it’s still a little fucked up. They stare at her with accusing, fish-nibbled eyes. Some claw at the bottom of the boat. She doubts shooting them again would help anything, so she saves her bullets, lighting a cigarette instead. The smoke is warm and fuzzy inside her chest, comfortingly familiar, like sucking down a carcinogenic teddy bear.

“Do many of those fuckers get out?” she asks Reaper Man. She can be fuckin’ polite, no problem. But Mr. Skullhead doesn’t give her a second look, not even when she offers him a smoke (less out of kindness and more because she’s curious to see how the hell something without lungs would manage the trick), so she scowls and stares across the water with the coffin nail dangling moodily from her lips, chin in hand. To entertain herself she starts trying to identify every dead person she sees.

There are foot soldiers and foreign agents, low-level punks and pirates and even a police officer or two. Other bounty hunters. Cartel bosses. The kid that couldn’t have been older than fifteen that tried to stick her up that one time, not recognizing Rhye for what she was. And yeah, even her first kill, the kiddy-diddling adoption agent with the wormy smile and the good-looking face. Nobody had suspected a goddamned thing. As long as they’re good-looking, they never do. Who the fuck were they supposed to believe, the street rat skin-job with a rap sheet at age nine? It had been his blonde-haired, blue-eyed word against hers.

He wasn’t fucking pretty with all that blood spurting out of his mouth, though, and he sure as fuck ain’t looking too good now with half his chin rotted off. Real or not, it gives Rhye some satisfaction to see him stranded like a rat in the aftermath of a wrecked ship. She reaches down, avoiding the grasping hands. Her cigarette hisses and sizzles as it grinds into his bloated forehead. He sinks back into the water like one of those poor amusement park androids, stuck on a rail with a beam up their ass.

“Waste of a fucking cigarette,” she says, and lights another. She actually feels kind of good after that, at least until she sees Rack’s face down there too. The drag curdles behind her ribs and sticks like grime clotting a gun barrel.

He’s not real. She knows that for a goddamned fact. But Rhye can’t tear herself away from those sad eyes, the round hole dribbling black blood and river water down his nose. She watches him as they pull away, until the distance between them stretches and he’s just another face in the crowd her hands have made.

• • • •

The river goes along, as rivers do, and then, out of fucking nowhere, like cockroaches circling the last can of cat food before a paycheck, suburban neighborhoods begin popping up along the banks. They stare down the bluffs with broken window eyes, yards gone to weeds and dog shit and strips of old paint. Who would have thought Hell had pink flamingos?

The ferryman lets Rhye out on a shore made of splintered bone and more spent brass. Why the fuck he needed that shit for a toll when there are dunes of it lying within easy reach, Rhye doesn’t know. She sets out for the houses without looking back. They’ll meet up again soon enough for real, she figures. No need for handshakes when she’ll be probably be back in the boat before her shelf life hits forty.

Keep moving. Keep searching. Wading through drifts of dead leaves and candy wrappers, glancing into doorways, further up and further in, uneasiness growing with each SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY sign passed and bombed-out, rotten-tired station wagon peered under. Rust, dust, plaster, Styrofoam. Two-story brick hulks sagging at crazy angles, their multi-car garages gaping like slack-jawed drunks at a nudie bar. Shadows everywhere: beneath grimy windshields, in the alleyways, stacked thick behind brokeback venetian blinds. Rhye’s been in friendlier combat zones; at least there you’ll spot the occasional buzzard or scuttling cat.
She’s being followed by something, but that’s not surprising. A good sign: If she’s suddenly interesting enough to be getting the hairy eyeball, maybe it’s the security system crawling out from under its rock to do some territorial pissing. She puts up with the peeping for another couple of blocks, then stops in her tracks.

“Look. You wanna ask me to the fuckin’ dance already instead of trying to peek up my skirts?”

Nothing. Not a big talker, her stalker.

“ ‘Cause, y’know, if you’re too chickenshit to give me an invitation, I’m just gonna go with the football captain, that motherfucker is dreamy and I hear he’s got a dick like a goddamned science experiment.”

Nada but tree shadows, all the way down the block. Nothing—and then, three or four houses down, a shape stepping out into the street. It stands there on the curb, watching quietly, silhouetted against the ashtray sky. The sharp, familiar scent of a lit cigarette punches through the stale air.

“Rhye? Is that you?”

But it’s not the figure speaking to her. This voice comes from behind, one she’s been wanting to hear ever since she plugged in. Her breath snags barbed wire. She half-turns to look back over her shoulder, against her better judgment.

“Holy shit, Rack! Where the fuck are you, man? I’ve been looking all over the place for you! Are y—”

“No, look, look, Rhye, you need to get out of here. You need to get out of here right now. I made a huge mistake, I underestimated the security protocol, and she’s going to come after you, too, if you don’t go. Don’t worry about me. Rhye?”

The shadowy shape is walking towards her. Rhye’s pretty sure it’s not out selling cookies or spreading the word of the Lord. “That’s assuming I know how to fucking get out of here without you, man,” she says. Her hands are already on her guns. “And what the fuck do you mean by she?”

The purposeful walk has turned into a wolf-trot. The light still isn’t great, but she can see now that it’s a girl. About her height, about her build, same hair color, same way of moving—

Wait. Wait just one fucking minute.

“Rack? This security program. I’m just, like, seeing my subconscious or some bullshit again, right? Right?” The other woman is running now. “Because if you’ve done what I think you did—”

“I, uh . . .”

Motherfucker.

“. . . I may have cribbed heavily from existing source material, yes.”

The woman grins as she sprints. Still has both of her eyes. Four years ago, maybe? A copy of her at her most bitter and burned out, thirsty for blood and not caring whose.

“Let’s do this, then,” she says, sighing, and then there’s no time for talk anymore.

• • • •

So there’s this skin-job kid that gets adopted by one of those high muckity-muck Ganymede mobsters. He isn’t exceptionally bright and he sure as hell ain’t a looker, but Don Whoeverthefuck has a bug up his ass ’cause his biological clock is tick-tick-ticking away like a block of C4 is tenderly bearhugging his testicles. Old fart needs an heir. All those years of pushing baby carriages into traffic ain’t gonna count for shit if he doesn’t have an heir to pick up the slack when his heart valves do their last dance with the extra-lard pork belly. He throws some money around, which is how he’s solved every other problem in his bloated life, and hey voila, instant son. The boy is dumber than a sack of skullfucked squirrels, but that just makes him fit in with all the real Mafioso squirts that came from ballsacks and bad decisions.

Things go on swingin’ as they usually do. Little Johnny Electronuts gets in his share of trouble, but Daddy is always there to yank his ass out of the fire with greased palms or greased dicks or a carefully administered dose of goon muscle to somebody’s knees and groin. Then, one day, kiddo gets the idea that he’s some kind of fucking hacker. He’s nineteen and he’s better protected than the Virgin Mary’s holy of holies and he’s got a chip on his shoulder and a hard-on in his lucky rocketship underoos just crying to fuck something up. He tries to bust his way into a rival family’s black box so he can crow about it to all his knuckle-dragging script kid buddies. This is what is known in the business as a Giant Fucking Mistake, ’cause the security system in this motherfucker was set up by another motherfucker by the name of Rack, and Rack is a goddamned super genius when it comes to that sort of thing. It grabs the kid by the short hairs almost as soon as he plugs in and slams the door behind him, and when the Don’s cavalry comes busting in to save his ass, their nuts land squarely in a bear trap. His consciousness is all locked up like a gold bar inside a treasure chest. They’ve got the box, but nobody seems to be able to get through to the toy inside.

Nobody but the motherfucker who designed the system in the first place, that is. They offer him money. They offer him a lot of money. And less because of the money and more because he likes a challenge, Rack bites.

And that’s where things get fucked up.

• • • •

Dodge for dodge and feint for feint and bullet for bullet they come together, the woman that was and the woman that is. The Not-Rhye is laughing like a kid at the circus as she spins her hand-cannons, laughing and twisting and breathing in that gunsmoke that turns your snot black like she’s a barracuda and it’s seawater. She doesn’t give a shit whether she lives or dies and Rhye knows this because it used to be her, and she suddenly realizes, with something like shock and something like mild disgust, that this is no longer a truth that applies. Something inside Rhye wants to make it out alive, wants to go home to the shitty-ass flat with the bullet holes in the air conditioner, wants to taste bourbon and cigarettes and go right on living alongside that dumbfuck brainiac like she has every day for the past five years. Dangerous. Very dangerous. The moment you start wanting is the moment you slow down. And the moment you slow down—

Not-Rhye lands close enough that Rhye can smell the burning wire and ozone stink of her over the reek of cordite and hot metal. She flicks one of the pistols like a gecko lapping up a mosquito and it coughs emphysema and tuberculosis and Rhye’s cheek is laid open to the bone even as she rolls behind a row of trash cans, ears ringing like pulled fire alarms. She’s a fucking idiot. She should’ve been scrapped at construction. She’s going to die here, soft and stupid as a human cop, and Rack is going to be trapped inside this box forever. The mobsters are going to be fucking pissed when nobody comes back. Good. Fuck ’em, and fuck their wives and moms and childhood pets for good measure.

“Were you trying to hit me, or did one of those pink flamingos do something to piss you off?” she says. If she can irritate Not-Rhye into making a mistake she might have a chance. Anything is worth a shot. “The neighbors are gonna talk, y’know.”

No response. Too smart for her own good. God damn she wishes Rack had held a less flattering view of her when he programmed this fucker. “Oh well. We’d have made shitty Home Owners Association members anyway. Rack! You alright?”

“I think so. I wasn’t exactly expecting this to happen when I went in. I thought—”

“That was your first fuckin’ mistake, Rack baby. You do too much of that anyway.” She rubs her blistered, lead-stained fingers clean on her cargo pants and digs for a fresh magazine. “Is there any way for me to disable her easier than giving her brain airholes?”

You could hear a gnat fart in the pause that follows.

“Rack, say something before I come over there and do some kinky shit to your ass with this gun barrel, please.”

“. . . I don’t know,” he says. “I think I can do it, but you’ll have to free me up first.”

“Fuck a row of baby ducks, is that all? Lemme send Little Miss Red Rover a fuckin’ engraved invitation to move her psycho ass to a new neighborhood and I’ll be right over with a bundt cake and a goddamned meat loaf.”

But she’s already tensing to spring back into the line of fire, because of course she is.

Up and at ’em, knocking the bins over clitter-clatter like a fuckball of feral cats, and sure enough there’s her shadow racing to greet her, four years younger, one eye richer, and meaner than a limp-dicked drill sergeant. No time to fire off a good shot; she says fuck it and goes ahead and launches herself straight into the other woman’s knees and down the two of them tumble in a muddy heap of fists and flailing motorcycle boots like a pair of overturned shot glasses, the world reduced to rubber soles squeegeeing shins and knuckles glancing off grittywet concrete. Rack’s yelling something. Little-known fact, though: It’s pretty fucking hard to focus on anything but the task at hand when the task is trying to club your teeth out with the handshake-end of a pistol. She dodges the blow and it glances off her temple instead with a hollow thwonk. Gasoline stars and flat-tire sparks shimmy-shake across her vision.

No fucking way I’m blacking out. Her bone-sickle grin hangs overhead, the last thing so many other unlucky motherfuckers have seen at the end of a fight. Rhye focuses on that sliver, wills the darkness back with clenched fists and a gas leak hiss. The thing with her smile is still laughing, but it’s not some kind of mad villain cackle. She sounds like she’s having the time of her life.

“What the fuck are you laughin’ at, dumbshit? See something funny?” Not the wittiest thing to ever rasp its way out of her nicotine box, but whatever. Wit’s the first thing to go when you’ve just gotten pistolwhipped in the side of the head so hard your brain thinks it’s being skullfucked to death by a rhinoceros. The grip comes down again, misses her by an asshair, and judo-chops the pavement so that little bits of gravel spray up like buckshot.

If the girl-slash-security-system-that-was-her is sharp and not a dumbfuck, she’ll use these precious seconds to turn her guns around and shoot Rhye in the face, like she’s wishing she had just done herself. But oh, glory of glories, blessed be the almighty fuckin’ cockiness of youth. This little asshole right here—with her two dead eyes and her don’t-need-nobody jock walk—curls her lip back in an are you fuckin’ serious sneer and swallows the bait deep.

“Aw, come the fuck on, man!” she crows. “You can’t fuckin’ tell me the thought of actually going up against somebody who can give you a fair fight isn’t gettin’ you all tingly in your grandma-bloomers! Why the hell else would you come here? For him? Fuck’s sake, I’m you, aren’t I? You live for sweat running under your tits and blood splattering your face, not some soft-hearted fuckhead can’t tell which way a magazine loads.”

Is that what he thinks I thought? Shit. There’s a nasty little spoonful of glass to chew on. No time for guilt, though.

“You got one part of that right, sister,” she says, and jams her thumb into the girl’s left eyeball. It’s all executed in one smooth motion: jabtwistpull. And then she’s rolling across the wet ribbon of tarmac while her not-self flails and shrieks gurgling stray cat curses, rolling and back on her feet and bringing up her guns to make an end of this, but even in a considerable amount of pain the other her is fast in an unnatural, make-the-flesh-of-your-ears-crinkle sort of way, slither-snarling back beneath the rainy evening’s skirts before Rhye can give the triggers a good hard prom-night fingering. She starts to go after her, blood boiling.

Y’know what? A little voice in her head, the one that sometimes says things like are you sure getting into that gimp’s windowless white van is a good idea? or maybe we should go get that festering bullet hole checked out, or, of late, don’t punch Rack in the face, the poor bastard hasn’t done anything to deserve it this time. In other words, her inner killjoy.

What?

Fuck pride, man.

And just what is that supposed to mean, exactly?

Pride is for jackoffs who aren’t being hunted from the fucking shadows.

“Shut the hell up.” She says this aloud in a hissed whisper; hopefully the security system will laugh herself to death at Rhye having a conversation with her invisible friend and that’ll be that. “We’re fine. I can do this by myself. I don’t care what Rack says.”

Pride is for people who don’t have other people depending on them . . .

Rhye snaps to a halt like the bullet she’s been expecting just drilled her brain a peephole.

. . . So why don’t you try trusting your partner for goddamned once and get over there like he asked? Remember what we’re here for.

“Go fuck your own ass with a fish-hook dildo.” Her shoulders are slumping before she’s halfway through the word “fuck.” By the time she reaches “dildo” she’s made a u-turn and is vaulting the sagging picket fence that separates her from the back-alley leading to Rack, feet thwap-thwap-thwapping the blacktop. She listens for the echo of a pursuit, but all she can hear is Rack’s voice reeling her in and her own one-woman ticker-tape parade careening down the path.

Warm. Warmer. Red-hot, veering back off the pavement, crashing through briars and dead weeds and old tires like she’s back in basic, up and over another splintered, gap-slatted privacy fence as weather-worn as a beer can in the ditch. It’s not a pretty postcard that greets her—more weeds, more broken glass, a swimming pool filled with water the color and consistency of baby shit. Rack is there, though, tied up on the patio, and that qualifies it for Garden of the Fucking Century, so far as Rhye’s concerned. She’s down and off her perch and across the yard before she can remember to lazily saunter in like she doesn’t give a fuck.

His face is a bloodied bedsheet, haunted eyes staring out from behind the bruises and stubble. Rhye wipes the blood from his split lip and they exchange a quick you cool? glance before she sets to work on the knotted ropes. It’s not some romantic, lovey-dovey, kiss your boo-boos BS; it’s just the kind of thing good partners do for one another.

“Been playing in Mommy’s bondage closet again, Rack-baby?” Tsk-tsk. “You got a lotta ’splaining to do if we get out of here alive, my friend.” She spares him another look from under her cocked brow, trying to keep it cool and even, wanting him to maybe twist in the wind a little. His expression is all thousand-yard stare and nervous bird herk-jerk, sheepishness and syrupy adoration. Portrait of The Nebbish As Grateful Penitent. He looks like he stuck his hand down a secretary’s panties at the office holiday party, got a handful of tentacles for his troubles, and wanted her all the more for it after that initial moment of cold water surprise. “For now, though,” she finishes, after re-locating her tongue and remembering how to use it, “we need to figure out a way to clean up this goddamned mess. No, sorry, my bad: Your goddamned mess, ’cause I sure as shit don’t remember giving you permission to turn my personality into a fucking security module. Can you see me? You’re lookin’ right at me, so I’m pretty sure you can see me.”

“We synced up as soon as you stepped into the area,” he says. “The chip, you know?” Rhye finally snake-charms the ropes into giving way and he pulls his hands free, rubbing each wrist gingerly. You could take fingerprints with the tired smudges beneath his eyes. “I always wanted the interfaces to work together. Yours is one-of-a-kind, but I gave mine a tweak, so—OW! What the heck was that for?”

“It’s lucky for you that we’re friends, asshole. Anybody else pulled some shit like this and I wouldn’t just sock ’em in the ear. How’s this gonna go down? Talk quick. She’s way too quiet right now and I have no idea how long that’s going to last.”

“It’s . . . tricky.”

“Tricky? What exactly do you mean by ‘tricky’ ? Did you or didn’t you say you could disable that fucking thing if I got you free?”

“I did say that, yes.” Rack stretches the last word out until it wobbles, full of more quivering “but” than a strip club. “I can give you a kill switch. Implementing it may require a little footwork, though, and I’m not sure how that will play out, considering our . . . environment.” He waves a hand to take in the garden, runs the other through his hair, and ends up looking like an insomniac hedgehog.

“Well, considering our only other option is getting bullet-fucked to death by a pissed-off, admittedly foxy-fine bit of code, I’m open to anything. What do I need to do?”

“We’ll need to execute two operations at the same time, and even then it doesn’t have a 100% chance of working. I hadn’t allowed for this. I can be sort of an idiot sometimes, as you are probably aware.”

Seeing him slumped there staring at his hands feels like defeat, and she’ll be fucked if she gives up that easily after coming this far. She punches him in the shoulder. “Hey, none of that sadsack shit. You fucked up. Everybody does. If you’re gonna wallow in it, I might as well’ve left you up there with your brains as pretty pink wallpaper. What the fuck will trying hurt, right?”

And that gets a slow, crooked half-smile out of him, which is all she really wants right now. It’s like her heart just snorted a line. “You’re right, of course,” he says.

“Goddamned right I am.” She offers him her hand. “C’mon. Let’s do this thing.”

Their palms meet with an awesome partnerly slap.

Now, this is where Rhye expects him to pull something cool out of his pockets—a couple of little red buttons, maybe, or a bundle of dynamite. Instead, he blanches. His hands fly up to his throat in the universal oh shit, I’m choking gesture. For a horrible fistful of seconds she thinks she’s going to have to do the Heimlich (and how the fuck does that work, anyway? Is that the move where you grab the other person from behind and give them a rough humping?) but thankfully he shakes whatever’s in his throat loose on his own. Something small and heavy bounces off the toe of Rhye’s boot. Another, like a fat brass raindrop.

She reaches down and carefully picks up two 9mm bullets, bright as change in a gutter.

Rack peers down at the lumps of lead and metal he just hairball-horked onto her boots. If he wore glasses she just knows he’d be adjusting the fucking things for a better look. “Huh. I guess it makes sense that they would take this form.”

“So these are, what, special? Magic bullets?” They feel like normal rounds. They even smell like ’em, which is to say, metallic. She rolls them between her fingers, warm from the heat of her hand. “Kill switches, whatever the fuck you called ’em?”

“Correct. Ideally you’ll discharge both simultaneously, shutting down the security system completely.”

There are pros and cons to knowing somebody—really knowing somebody, how their face looks when they cry or come or drool in their sleep. Rhye understands what Rack means immediately: You’re the fighter, you’re strong, so of course you’ll take care of this on your own. She could say no. She could open up her chest with a scalpel and let him see the tender bits—I can’t do this alone, she’s too good and I care too much and quite frankly I’m scared shitless, for you and for me— or she could tell him, hey, clean up your own goddamned mess, I ain’t your fuckin’ nanny.

But she knows how this has to go down, truthfully, and it doesn’t involve telling Rack to piss up a rope. She’ll save that for a later date. Instead, before she can second-guess her decision, she pulls one of her pistols, ejects the magazine, thumbs one of the kill switches inside, and shoves it into his hands. There. Done.

Rack stares down at her sweet, lethal baby like she’s just handed him a dead cat.

“She won’t be expecting you to have one of my guns,” she says, by way of explanation. Her voice is hoarse. Chopping off one of her hands would’ve been easier, if less useful. “I sure as hell wouldn’t, if I were her. Safety’s off and it’s ready to go; all you gotta do is point and pull. Careful your thumbs aren’t behind the slide, unless you wanna get bit.”

Does he understand what this is costing her? In pride, in trust, in all of that stupid emotional stuff? He looks back up at her—stunned doesn’t begin to describe the expression on his face—and his eyes are wet and glassy.

“Rhye . . . I can’t . . .”

Yeah. He knows.

“Aw, hell. Don’t go getting all wet cereal on me, man,” she mutters. Making sure her remaining pistol is loaded and racked suddenly becomes very, very important. “Just make sure you’re close when you fire, alright? I don’t—”

(Pop)

Of course Miss Security doesn’t come over the fence; why would she bother? The only warning is that soft, sudden pop, like a blood bubble bursting on a dying man’s lips, and there she stands, herniated out of the nothing because oh right, she is the fucking nothing. Rhye has just enough time to grasp that they’ve been played and just enough time to push Rack down and back and no time at all to do anything else but brace for impact as Not-Rhye slams into her and they take a backwards trust exercise straight into the pool.

It’s in her nose and her ears and her eye socket and it’s warm, which is somehow the worst part. A warm green slurry pressing against her skin, turning everything to frogs and fungus and body temperature pea soup. Fingers scratching at her throat and her one good eye, looking to throttle or blind or both. Spots wriggling tadpole trails across her vision. She pushes out in slow motion, catches her attacker in the chest, tries using the momentum to pull away. No dice; it’s like karate-kicking an amped-up octopus. They sink deeper, the light fading to darkness, seconds rubber-banding to grim, doubtful decades.

And this is what I’ll get for trusting Rack with my back. Should’ve gone with my instincts. Trust fucks you. It fucks you every time and puts a knife in your windpipe while it’s at it. Lungs already beginning to ache. Can’t grab for her gun, ’cause both her hands are busy keeping Not-Rhye at bay. Nobody’ll come to save you, idiot. Or if he does, he’ll get here about ten seconds too late. Let this be your final lesson about going home with strangers.

The security program’s good eye glitters in the gloom, black and triumphant. Gotcha, you fucker, it says, and it’s the language of sharks she’s speaking now, no mewling monkey noises needed. Don’t even have to waste a bullet. She leans closer (Rhye has a sudden nightmare flash of her opening her mouth to show double-rows of pointed teeth, all the way back to the place where her jaw hinges), eager to choke, to rub out, to self-destruct. Rhye would keep fighting but there’s seven feet of scummy water overhead and a tangle of grasping limbs dragging her further downward and god fucking damn she’s tired. She can’t even spit in her rival’s face.

It is at this perfect moment of physical and emotional exhaustion, with her arms pulling the fire alarms and her legs turning to full clips of concrete, that Rack chooses to dive into their underwater cockfight, like a toaster hurled slots-down into a bathtub. He arrives with a muffled splash, churning up bubbles, froth, muck from the bottom, algae from the surface. Now it’s Not-Rhye’s turn to be surprised. She spins around to face this new threat

(occupied she’s not paying attention to me my hands are free)

lip curled, shoulders hunched, NOT a happy camper, she thought this was gonna be a one-on-one and turns out it’s a threesome. She’s all over his shit faster than you can say piranhas in the kiddie pool.

(and now the grip’s solid in my hand it’ll fire it’ll kill if we’re close enough I believe in you baby air air AIR)

The water’s a whirlpool of bodies and spume. Rhye is dying by inches now; another half minute and her lungs will burst. But not before she does what she came here to do. She pulls that heavy, heavy gun up, the weight of a lead cannon in her hands. She waits for visibility to clear. And when the bubbles finally part and Rack’s eyes meet hers

(she’s got her hands around his throat but he’s letting her so calmly and she’ll never notice the pistol kissing the underside of her jaw until it’s too late)

she shoves the muzzle of the 9mm snugly against Not-Rhye’s back and sends a prayer to Lady Luck, that goddess all gunslingers kneel to.

Rack and Rhye squeeze the triggers as one, the way good partners do.

• • • •

They find the kid balled up in a basement jail cell, groaning and bitching about his head. It looks an awful lot like the one Rhye spent her formative years gracing, but Christ knows what the kid sees. Good looking, late teens, perfect teeth and hair and body model. There’s something wrong with the expression, though. Even confused and fucked up in the middle of a strange system he’s sneering an entitled sneer that makes Rhye’s fists curl like dead spiders beneath a radiator. I always get what I want, it says. Why wouldn’t the world bend over and give it to me?

“Sorry about the wait,” Rack says. “Ran into a little trouble.” He fumbles in his pocket for a key. “Doing alright?”

The kid’s eyes dart wildly. “A little trouble?” he says. “You call this a little trouble? I can’t fucking move and you think that’s a little trouble, fuckface? Suck both of my balls, man. Hey! Hel-lo? Are you still there? Are you listening to me?”

Rack doesn’t look up, just calmly keeps on doing what he’s doing. Rhye can feel her molars grinding together. “Rack, can you hurry it the fuck along? I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this shit, get what I’m saying?”

“Absolutely.” A click and the door to the cell swings open. Rack steps back and nods at the kid, so irritatingly professional Rhye can hardly stand it. “Someone will be by to collect you shortly, I believe,” he says. “Your body is waiting outside.”

“Goddamned right it is, you no-nuts bitch.”

“Kid, you talk to him like that one more time and I’m going to blow both the balls you’re so proud of off in a place where they ain’t pretend and don’t grow back, fuckin’ got it? I don’t care who your daddy is.” Rhye can feel a headache gathering behind her eyes. Time to get the hell out of here and go the fuck home. Her mattress is calling. “C’mon Rack, let’s go. Compress your ass. My headspace isn’t what you’d call flying first class, but it’s better than the company in here.”

There’s a sound like bacon hitting a skillet, loud enough that the kid’s bitching is blessedly drowned out. A glowing door pops up at the end of the row of cells. She’s gotta hand it to Rack, he’s nothing short of a goddamned wizard when he’s free inside a program. Rhye grabs his hand and gleefully sets off for the exit, feeling more cheerful than she has all day. A little nervous about letting Rack piggyback inside her melon, maybe—there’s shit in there she doesn’t want anyone poking at, even her partner—but mostly too relieved at having him back to care. He lets her pull him along. Doesn’t say a word, just smiles and follows, tie flapping like a pirate’s banner in the weird wind pushing from the entryway.

The light from the door is the cold, flickering white of a fluorescent bulb burning in an abandoned department store. They stand there staring into the static for what seems like ages. She doesn’t let go of his hand. He doesn’t let go of hers. Rhye wonders if it’ll hurt, or feel weird, or if she’ll be the same once it’s done with. She sucks in a breath. Now or never, woman. Leave it to Rack to wait for a second fucking invitation.

“Well?” she says. “You waiting for me to buy you a ring or what?”

And that’s when she finally catches the look in his eyes, the sadness of the little smile quirking the corner of his mouth like a fishhook. She knows that fucking expression. She hates that fucking expression. He’s not telling her something, and that something is going to sting.

“Rack?” she says.

“Rhye. It doesn’t work that easily. I can’t just compress myself without a console and a body to work the console. That’s beyond my capabilities.”

For once, Rhye is at a total loss for words. She gapes at him, mouth hanging open like a second useless asshole. It takes a full minute for her to push anything out. “Bullshit,” she manages. “Stop fucking around. You’re some sort of goddamned superhero in here. You unlock things, you make doors, you designed this motherfucker. There’s nothing you can’t do.” Panic creeping up her spine with tiny naked rat feet. Can’t shoot her way out of this one. “There’s gotta be something. A trick, or a program, or—”

His voice is infuriatingly gentle. “Without a body? Compression is tricky. If I did it wrong, even assuming I could from inside a system like this, one of us could get hurt. You could be erased. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll come back, then. I’ll get you a new body and come back.” He’s slowly shaking his head even as she says it and Rhye’s pissed, at circumstance and the mobsters and Rack and everything that hops, crawls, or breathes on this godforsaken planet. “I’m not leaving you here, you colossal fuckhead. Do you KNOW what I’ve gone through to fetch you out of this box?”

“Once they’ve pulled the kid, do you really think they’re going to let you back in for me? They’ll erase everything on here just to teach their rivals a lesson.” He sighs. “Look. There’s a locker in Brickton. The combi—”

“Fuck your money, Rack. And fuck you, too. Did you not hear me the first time?” Stop looking at me that way stop looking at me that way stop looking at me that way. Her heart is clawing its way through her sternum like a bum plowing through a back alley trash bin. She’s got him by the tie, hands shaking, throat aching. “Take the risk,” she says. “Do it.” And then: “Please.”

“I can’t. I’m sorry.”

They’re nose to nose and forehead to forehead and now it’s Rhye who’s shaking her head. She can see a way out and she knows he won’t agree to it, but fuck him and fuck a world without him, that’s not a decision he gets to make. “No,” she says. “No. You ever hear anything about those old ships people used to sail? Protocol for wrecks and all that shit?”

His brow furrows into confused little wrinkles. She’ll miss that. She’ll miss a lot of things about him. “What does . . .”

“I’m tying your ass to the mast. You’ve got no say in this, Rack. When you get done with my body, put it through a woodchipper or something, all right?”

Rhye’s push carries him over the threshold and into the white before the stubborn asshole has a chance to argue. His tie stays wrapped around her fingers, fluttering the goodbye she couldn’t bring herself to say.

• • • •

Unlike his partner, he’s not prone to bouts of rage and profanity. She explodes all over the place at intervals you can almost set clock hands to, like a geyser or a volcano or some other natural phenomenon. Beautiful to see, if potentially life-threatening to anybody within close range. Rack, though? Rack’s different. If Rhye is Old Faithful, Rack is a glacier: cool-headed, steady, and inevitable. Excesses of emotion do not become him.

When he comes to inside her body, the first word that bursts in his head, like a soap bubble giving up the ghost, is SHIT. A great big neon SHIT, all four letters glowing the lurid red of a 3 a.m. traffic light on a stretch of empty road.

The dimly lit warehouse is full of equally dim goons. Six of them are alive. There were seven when he plugged in, but that dark smear on the concrete floor suggests Rhye’s been engaged in some basic subtraction since then. All of them remain armed and extremely twitchy. A roomful of semiautomatic-carrying cats in a rocking chair factory, ready to pop off if so much as a moth flutters near one of the grimy windows. Rack knows how trigger-happy they can be; the slumped cicada’s shell of his body in the corner is testimony enough, if any were needed. The big boss’s foot is tapping out a patent-leather Morse code that, roughly translated, probably comes to something very impatient and vaguely threatening.

The Kid’s still stretched out on his hospital gurney, dead to the world. The mess of wires and cords connecting him to the black box on the desk makes Rack think of a kitten hopelessly entangled in a ball of yarn. A scruffy, obnoxious kitten, in desperate and immediate need of drowning. Rack would be happy to oblige—there’s an unfamiliar emotion that came along with the big neon SHIT; he’s reasonably sure it’s cold anger building towards fury—but all eyes are on him.

“Done?” Big Boss sounds like a side of beef being dragged down backcountry gravel. Rhye’s eyepatch splits him into dual hemispheres, the seen and the unseen. Disorienting enough suddenly being in a new body—her body, no less, with a mysteriously bloody nose—without adding visual impairment to the mix.

“Yeah,” Rack says, only it comes out in Rhye’s voice, and that (as she would say) is a whole dump truck of what the fucking fuck landing on his senses. “All yours, Chief. You gonna send your tech in to collect Junior’s code so I can get the hec—fuck out of here already?”

A sharp, all too familiar click from the dark side of the mook. Ten to one it’s not a wedding band he’s holding in his unseen hand. “You will be doing this as well. Seeing as how you felt the need to—what are the words?—earlier retirement my computer-man.” He nudges the shiny toe of one shoe at the stain on the concrete.

Oh, Rhye. How would you have gotten out of this one? You couldn’t access a code for brine in the middle of the ocean. He’s neck-deep in a slurry of anger, frustration, fear, and love. So much for his much-lauded control. The valve is broken, the water rising.

“Sure,” he says, after another long, soupy moment.

Because Rack is not entirely human, he can see all the possible ways this lock might turn. A shootout. A hostage situation. Piles of dead mobsters, lakes of blood, the hard-bitten damsel in the box safe and saved and—could it be?—possibly even grateful. Reach out and twist the meaty wrist. Hear that satisfying snap of bone like a cheap plastic chair leg bending the wrong way, a metallic clatter as gun and floor slug it out. Be an action hero. Take the shot. Use her body like the weapon it is.

Rack’s not big on weapons or violence. Before today, he’d never fired a pistol or snapped a man’s wrist. Rhye, as she would quickly tell you, is no fuckin’ damsel, nor is she any person’s gun but her own. Trying to use her would inevitably blow up in their faces like a cartoon birthday cake studded with sticks of dynamite. Instead—gods of gratuitous violence and swaggering machismo be good—Rack spins the tires of his mind until they throw twin rooster-tails of oily muck. Trigger-bitten fingers tango across the keyboard, coding a different future. He may not be any good at murdering mobsters, but he’s a goddamned pro at killing time.

I hope I’m doing the right thing.

The problem with making any move, of course, is that you never know what the outcome will be until the chips have fallen, even if you’ve got a brain manufactured in a factory crèche and a childhood’s worth of experience cheating card sharks out of their greasy retirement funds. A guess, however educated, is still a guess. A white-collar criminal adjusts his tie in the heart of the City (because it’s goddamned hot and the AC’s gone out and there’s nothing to drink but rye whiskey and if his partner sheds one more article of clothing he’s going to go outside and club his crotch to death with a loose brick) and a tenement flat 300 miles away collapses into rubble and rebar and a bloody jigsaw of limbs. At the long, dark end of things, hoping for the best is all you’ve got. Rack breathes out letters and numerals and hope through their fingertips, clickity-clickity-clack. The screen fills up with green and black.

The Kid twitches on his slab.

He’s Frankenstein. He’s a zombie pumped full of chemicals. He’s a greasy-haired son of a bitch with a face no factory in its right mind would take credit for, sitting upright on his bed at the cost of the only person Rack’s ever loved. Every head in the joint swivels to watch him as he blinks and gapes. Is it man, machine, or goldfish? Rack feels something heave in the direction of his (her) stomach, like a wet dog giving itself a shake. Keep it together, boy-o. For her. For both of you.

Big Boss, like everybody else, seems too stunned by the sight to even give the Kid a hand. He stares at his beloved progeny as if the boy’s just sprouted a pair of assholes where his ears should be.

“Son,” he says. A slow, joyous smile creeps up the coffin length of his face, hands-down one of the most disturbing things Rack’s ever seen. “Son! How are you feeling, my darling boy?”

No response from the Kid. His legs are dangling over the side of the gurney now. The pearl-handled grips of the big expensive pistols strapped to his sides play peek-a-boo beneath the fabric of his coat, dancing in and out of Rack’s limited line of sight. Show-off guns, Rhye had scoffed when she first saw them. Kiddo probably had a prick like a bedbug and the aim of one of those drunken seven-year-olds that used to hang out behind the apartment dumpsters.

Even with Rhye’s less-than-charitable assessment of the punk’s skills ringing in his memory, there’s something about the pistols that keeps dragging Rack’s eye back. He watches them and he watches them good, holding his breath.

Trailing wires, head down, the Kid lurches to his feet. His daddy’s goon squad unfreezes and rushes to catch him before his delicate ass can hit the floor and catch a bruise. He shrugs off their hands; the gentleman will be seeing himself out, thank you. With precarious, rubbery grace—the kind baby animals and drunks possess in spades, the kind no sober adult has ever been able to accurately mimic—he pulls himself upright, takes a step forward, and lifts his head to get a better look at his surroundings. He scans the room, expression becoming more and more confused. Takes it all in—mobsters, brick walls, bare bulbs, bloodstains—and finally reaches Rack, at which point his brow ceases to furrow and begins sinking a mine shaft to his frontal lobe.

“Wait,” he says. “What the fucking fuck? Rack? What in the fucking piss just happ—Oh.” A light bulb flickers behind his eyes. Scratch that; it’s more like someone throwing the breaker on an entire row of houses. “OH.” He pats his sides like a man looking for his keys. He finds the twin lumps nestled beneath his armpits. He takes a peek under the coat—just to make sure they’re not vibrators or candy bars or bibles—and then he looks back up at Rack, grinning a slow, impossibly wide cartoon shark’s grin.

“You son of a motherfucker,” he says, admiringly.

Rack knows that grin. Even on someone else’s face, he knows it. His heart bucks around so wildly he’s afraid he might black out. And then he’s suddenly locked in a kiss—she’s fast, never mind the unfamiliar body—and the weirdness of the situation isn’t even registering for either of them, it’s all adrenaline and relief and a sort of drunken, invincible glee. There’s greasy hair in his good eye and stubble against his lips. She tastes like a chain-smoking asshole that just underwent a malt liquor enema. Fucking perfection.

And now she’s pulling away, yanking those pearly white grips out of their sockets like a dentist riding a meth binge, and the Ganymede crew never even knows what’s hit it.

FLASHPOINT: TITAN (missing)

Benjamin Cheah

WHAT PRICE HUMANITY? (missing)

David VanDyke

OBITS

Stephen King

Keep it clear, and keep it in a straight line.

That was the gospel according to Vern Higgins, who headed up the journalism department at the University of Rhode Island, where I got my degree. A lot of what I heard at school went in one ear and out the other, but not that, because Professor Higgins hammered on it. He said that people need clarity and concision in order to start the process of understanding.

Your real job as journalists, he told his classes, is to give people the facts that allow them to make decisions and go forward. So don’t be fancy. Don’t go all twee and hifalutin. Start at the start, lay the middle out neatly, so the facts of each event lead logically to the next, and end at the end. Which, in reporting, he emphasized, is always the end for now. And don’t you ever sink to that lazy crap about how some people believe or the general consensus of opinion is. A source for each fact, that’s the rule. Then write it all in plain English, unadorned and unvarnished. Flights of rhetoric belong on the op-ed page.

I doubt if anyone will believe what follows, and my career at Neon Circus had very little to do with good writing, but I intend to do my best here: the facts of each event leading to the next. Beginning, middle, and end.

The end for now, at least.

• • •

Good reporting always begins with the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why if you can find out. In my case, the why’s a tough one.

The who is easy enough, though; your less-than-fearless narrator is Michael Anderson. I was twenty-seven at the time these things happened. I graduated from URI with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism. For two years after college I lived with my parents in Brooklyn and worked for one of those Daily Shopper freebies, rewriting newswire items to break up the ads and coupons. I kept my résumé (such as it was) in constant rotation, but none of the papers in New York, Connecticut, or New Jersey wanted me. This didn’t completely surprise my parents or me, not because my grades were lousy (they weren’t), and not because my clip folder—mostly stories from the URI student newspaper, The Good 5 Cent Cigar—were badly written (a couple of them won awards), but because newspapers weren’t hiring. Quite the opposite.

(If Professor Higgins saw all these parentheses, he’d kill me.)

My parents began urging me—gently, gently—to start looking for some other kind of job. “In a related field,” my father said in his most diplomatic voice. “Maybe advertising.”

“Advertising isn’t news,” I said. “Advertising is anti-news.” But I caught his drift: he had visions of me still grabbing midnight snacks out of their fridge when I was forty. Slacker Deluxe.

Reluctantly, I began making a list of possible advertising firms that might like to hire a young copywriter with good chops but no experience. Then, on the night before I planned to begin sending out copies of my résumé to the firms on that list, I had a goofy idea. Sometimes—often—I lie awake nights wondering how different my life might have been if that idea had never crossed my mind.

Neon Circus was one of my favorite websites in those days. If you’re a connoisseur of snark and schadenfreude, you know it: TMZ with better writers. They mostly cover the local “celeb scene,” with occasional prospecting trips into the stinkier crevasses of New York and New Jersey politics. If I had to sum up its take on the world, I’d show you a photo we ran about six months into my employment there. It showed Rod Peterson (always referred to in theCircus as “the Barry Manilow of his generation”) outside Pacha. His date is bent over, puking in the gutter. He’s got a happy-ass grin on his face and his hand up the back of her dress. Caption: ROD PETERSON, THE BARRY MANILOW OF HIS GENERATION, EXPLORES NEW YORK’S LOWER EAST SIDE.

Circus is essentially a webazine, with lots of click-friendly departments: CELEB WALK OF SHAME, VILE CONSUMPTION, I WISH I HADN’T SEEN THAT, WORST TV OF THE WEEK, WHO WRITES THIS CRAP. There are more, but you get the idea. That night, with a stack of résumés ready to send out to firms I didn’t really want to work for, I went to Neon Circus for a little revivifying junk food, and on the home page discovered that a hot young actor named Jack Briggs had OD’d. There was a photo of him staggering out of a downtown hotspot the week before, typical bad taste for Neon Circus, but the news item accompanying it was surprisingly straight, and not Circus-y at all. That was when inspiration struck. I did some research on the Internet, just screwing around, then wrote a quick and nasty obituary.

Jack Briggs, noted for his horrific performance in last year’s Holy Rollers as a talking bookshelf in love with Jennifer Lawrence, was found dead in his hotel room surrounded by some of his favorite powdered treats. He joins the 27 Club, which also contains such noted substance abusers as Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, and Amy Winehouse. Briggs shambled onto the acting scene in 2005, when . . .

Well, you get it. Juvenile, disrespectful, downright nasty. If I’d been serious that night, I probably would have dragged the finished obit to the trash, because it seemed to go beyond even Neon Circus’s usual snark and into outright cruelty. But because I was just messing (it has since occurred to me to wonder how many careers have started while just messing), I sent it to them.

Two days later—the Internet speeds everything up—I got an email from someone named Jeroma Whitfield saying they not only wanted to run it, they wanted to discuss the possibility that I might perhaps write more in the same nasty-ass vein. Could I come into the city and discuss it at lunch?

My tie and sportcoat turned out to be a case of serious overdressing. The Circus offices on Third Avenue were filled with men and women who looked a lot more like boys and girls, all running around in rock-band tees. A couple of the women wore shorts, and I saw a guy in carpenter overalls with a Sharpie poked through his Mohawk. He was the head of the sports department, it turned out, responsible for one memorable story titled JINTS TAKE ANOTHER SHIT IN THE RED ZONE. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. This was (and is) journalism in the Age of the Internet, and for every person in the offices that day, there were another five or six stringers working from home. For starvation wages, I hardly need add.

I have heard that once upon a gilded time, in New York’s misty and mythic past, there were publishers’ lunches at places like the Four Seasons, le Cirque, and the Russian Tea Room. Perhaps, but my lunch that day was in the cluttered office of Jeroma Whitfield. It consisted of deli sandwiches and Dr. Brown’s Cream Soda. Jeroma was ancient by Circus standards (early forties), and I disliked her pushy abrasiveness from the start, but she wanted to hire me to write a weekly obituary column, and that made her a goddess. She even had a title for the new feature: Speaking Ill of the Dead.

Could I do it? I could.

Would I do it for shit money? I would. At least to start with.

After the column became the most-visited page on the Neon Circus site and my name had become associated with it, I dickered for more dough, partly because I wanted to move into my own apartment in the city and partly because I was tired of getting peon’s wages for singlehandedly writing the page that was bringing in the most ad revenue.

That first dickering session was a modest success, probably because my demands were couched as tentative requests, and the requests were almost laughably humble. Four months later, when rumors began to circulate of a big corporation buying us for actual strutting money, I visited Jeroma’s office and asked for a larger raise, this time with rather less humility.

“Sorry, Mike,” she said. “In the memorable words of Hall and Oates, I can’t go for that, no can do. Have a Yook.”

Holding pride of place on Jeroma’s cluttered desk was a large glass bowl filled with menthol-flavored eucalyptus drops. The wrappers were covered with gung-ho sayings. Let’s hear your battle cry, read one. Another advised (it gives the grammarian in me chills to report this) Turn can do into can did.

“No thanks. Give me a chance to lay this out for you before you say no.”

I marshaled my arguments; you might say I attempted to turn can do into can did. The bottom line was my belief that I was owed a wage more commensurate with the revenue Speaking Ill of the Dead was generating. Especially if Neon Circus was going to be bought out by a major corporate playa.

When I finally shut up, she unwrapped a Yook, popped it between her plum-colored lips, and said, “Okay! Great! If you’ve got that off your chest, you might want to get to work on Bump DeVoe. He’s a tasty one.”

He was indeed a tasty one. Bump, lead singer of the Raccoons, had been shot dead by his girlfriend while trying to sneak in through the bedroom window of her house in the Hamptons, probably as a joke. She had mistaken him for a burglar. What made the story such a deliciously fat pitch was the gun she used: a birthday present from the Bumpster himself, now the newest member of the 27 Club and perhaps comparing guitar chops with Brian Jones.

“So you’re not even going to respond,” I said. “That’s how little respect you have for me.”

She leaned forward, smiling just enough to show the tips of her little white teeth. I could smell menthol. Or eucalyptus. Or both. “Let me be frank, okay? For a guy who’s still living with his parents in Brooklyn, you have an extremely inflated idea of your importance in the scheme of things. You think nobody else can piss on the graves of dimwit assholes who party themselves to death? Think again. I’ve got half a dozen stringers who can do it, and probably turn in copy funnier than yours.”

“So why don’t I walk, and you can find out if that’s true?” I was pretty mad.

Jeroma grinned and clacked her eucalyptus drop against her teeth. “Be my guest. But if you go, Speaking Ill of the Dead doesn’t go with you. It’s my title, and it stays right here at Circus. Of course you do have some cred now, and I won’t deny it. So here’s your choice, kiddo. You can go back to your computer and get humping on Bump, or you can take a meeting at the New York Post. They’ll probably hire you. You’ll end up writing shit squibs on Page Six with no byline. If that floats your boat, go team.”

“I’ll write the obit. But we’re going to revisit this, Jerri.”

“Not on my watch, we’re not. And don’t call me Jerri. You know better than that.”

I got up to go. My face was burning. I probably looked like a stop sign.

“And have a Yook,” she said. “Hell, take two. They’re very consoling.”

I cast a disdainful look at the bowl and left, restraining (barely) a childish urge to slam the door.

• • •

If you’re picturing a bustling newsroom like the one you see behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN, or in that old movie about Woodward and Bernstein nailing Nixon, reconsider. As I said, most of the Circus writers do their work from home. Our little news-nest (if you want to dignify what Circus does by calling it news) is roughly the size of a doublewide trailer. Twenty school desks are crammed in there, facing a row of muted TVs on one wall. The desks are equipped with battered laptops, each one bearing a hilarious sticker reading PLEASE RESPECT THESE MACHINES.

The place was almost empty that morning. I sat in the back row by the wall, in front of a poster showing a Thanksgiving dinner in a toilet bowl. Beneath this charming image was the motto PLEASE SHIT WHERE YOU EAT. I turned on the laptop, took my printouts concerning Bump DeVoe’s short and undistinguished career from my briefcase, and shuffled through them while the cruncher booted. I opened Word, typed BUMP DeVOE OBIT in the proper box, then just sat there, staring at the blank document. I was paid to yuk it up in the face of death for twentysomethings who feel that death is always for the other guy, but it’s hard to be funny when you’re pissed off.

“Having trouble getting started?”

It was Katie Curran, a tall, svelte blond for whom I felt a strong lust that was almost certainly unrequited. She was always kind to me, and unfailingly sweet. She laughed at my jokes. Such characteristics rarely signal lust. Was I surprised? Not at all. She was hot; I am not. I am, if I may be frank, exactly that geek all the teenpix make fun of. Until my third month working at Circus, I even had the perfect geek accessory: spectacles mended with tape.

“A little,” I said. I could smell her perfume. Some kind of fruit. Fresh pears, maybe. Fresh somethings, anyway.

She sat down at the next desk, a long-legged vision in faded jeans. “When that happens to me, I type The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog three times, real fast. It opens the creative floodgates.” She spread her arms, showing me how floodgates open, and incidentally giving me a breathtaking view of breasts snugly encased in a black tank top.

“I don’t think that will work in this case,” I said.

Katie wrote her own feature, not as popular as Speaking Ill of the Dead, but still widely read; she had half a million followers on Twitter. (Modesty forbids me to say how many I had in those days, but go ahead and think seven figures; you won’t be wrong.) Hers was called Getting Sloshed with Katie. The idea was to go out drinking with celebs we hadn’t dissed yet—and even some we had went for the deal, go figure—and interview them as they got progressively more shitfaced. It was amazing what came out, and Katie got it all on her cute little pink iPhone.

She was supposed to get drunk right along with them, but she had a way of leaving a single drink but a quarter finished as they moved from one watering hole to another. The celebs rarely noticed. What they noticed was the perfect oval of her face, her masses of wheat-blond hair, and her wide gray eyes, which always projected the same message: Oh gosh, you’re so interesting. They lined up for the chop even though Katie had effectively ended half a dozen careers since joining the Circus staff eighteen months or so before I came on board. Her most famous interview was with the family comedian who opined of Michael Jackson, “That candy-ass wanna-be-whitebread is better off dead.”

“I guess she said no raise, huh?” Katie nodded toward Jeroma’s office.

“How did you know I was going to ask for a raise? Did I tell you?” Mesmerized by those misty orbs, I might have told her anything.

“No, but everyone knew you were going to, and everyone knew she was going to say no. If she said yes, everyone would ask. By saying no to the most deserving, she shuts the rest of us down cold.”

The most deserving. That gave me a little shiver of delight. Especially coming from Katie.

“So are you going to stick?”

“For now,” I said. Talking out of the side of my mouth. It always works for Bogie in the old movies, but Katie got up, brushing nonexistent lint from the entrancingly flat midriff of her top.

“I’ve got a piece to write. Vic Albini. God, he could put it away.”

“The gay action hero,” I said.

“News flash: not gay.” She gave me a mysterious smile and drifted off, leaving me to wonder. But not really wanting to know.

• • •

I sat in front of the blank Bump DeVoe document for ten minutes, made a false start, deleted it, and sat for another ten minutes. I could feel Jeroma’s eyes on me and knew she was smirking, if only on the inside. I couldn’t work with that stare on me, even if I was just imagining it. I decided to go home and write the DeVoe piece there. Maybe something would occur on the subway, which was always a good thinking place for me. I started to close the laptop, and that was when inspiration struck again, just as it had on the night when I saw the item about Jack Briggs departing for that great A-list buffet in the sky. I decided I was going to quit, and damn the consequences, but I would not go quietly.

I dumped the blank DeVoe document and created a new one, which I titled JEROMA WHITFIELD OBIT. I wrote with absolutely no pause. Two hundred poisonous words just poured out of my fingers and onto the screen.

Jeroma Whitfield, known as Jerri to her close friends (according to reports, she had a couple in preschool), died today at—

I checked the clock.

—10:40 A.M. According to co-workers on the scene, she choked on her own bile. Although she graduated cum laude from Vassar, Jerri spent the last three years of her life whoring on Third Avenue, where she oversaw a crew of roughly two dozen galley slaves, all more talented than herself. She is survived by her husband, known to the staff of Neon Circus as Emasculated Toad, and one child, an ugly little fucker affectionately referred to by the staff as Pol Pot. Co-workers all agree that although she lacked even a vestige of talent, Jerri possessed a domineering and merciless personality that more than made up for it. Her braying voice was known to cause brain hemorrhages, and her lack of a sense of humor was legend. In lieu of flowers, Toad and Pot request that those who knew her express their joy at her demise by sending eucalyptus drops to the starving children of Africa. A memorial service will be held at the Neon Circus offices, where joyful survivors can exchange precious memories and join in singing “Ding Dong, the Witch Is Dead.”

My idea as I started this diatribe was to print a dozen copies, tape them up everywhere—including the bathrooms and both elevators—then say see-ya-wouldn’t-want-to-be-ya to both the Neon Circus offices and the Cough Drop Queen for good. I might even have done it if I hadn’t reread what I had written and discovered it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t even close to funny. It was the work of a child having a tantrum. Which led me to wonder if all my obits had been equally unfunny and stupid.

For the first time (you might not believe it, but I swear it’s true) it came to me that Bump DeVoe had been a real person, and somewhere people might be crying because he was gone. The same was probably true of Jack Briggs . . . and Frank Ford (who I had described as “noted Tonight Show crotch-grabber”) . . . and Trevor Wills, a reality-show star who committed suicide after being photographed in bed with his brother-in-law. Those pix theCircus had cheerfully put online, just adding a black strip to cover the brother-in-law’s naughty bits (Wills’s had been safely out of sight, and you can probably guess where).

It also came to me that I was spending the most creatively fecund years of my life doing bad work. Shameful, in fact, a word that would never have occurred to Jeroma Whitfield in any context.

Instead of printing the document, I closed it, dragged it to the trash, and shut down the laptop. I thought about marching back into Jeroma’s office and telling her I was done writing stuff that was the equivalent of a toddler throwing poo on the wall, but a cautious part of my mind—the traffic cop most of us have up there—told me to wait. To think it over and be absolutely sure.

Twenty-four hours, the traffic cop decreed. Hit a movie this afternoon and sleep on it tonight. If you still feel the same way in the morning, go with God, my son.

“Off so soon?” Katie asked from her own laptop, and for the first time since my first day here, I wasn’t stopped cold in my tracks by those wide gray eyes. I just tipped her a wave and left.

• • •

I was attending a matinee of Dr. Strangelove at Film Forum when my mobile started vibrating. Because the living room–size theater was empty except for me, two snoozing drunks, and a couple of teenagers making vacuum cleaner noises in the back row, I risked looking at the screen and saw a text from Katie Curran: Stop what you’re doing and call me RIGHT NOW!

I went out to the lobby without too much regret (although I always like to see Slim Pickens ride the bomb down) and called her back. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say the first two words out of her mouth changed my life.

“Jeroma’s dead.”

“What?” I nearly screamed.

The popcorn girl glanced up at me over the top of her magazine, startled.

“Dead, Mike! Dead! She choked to death on one of those damn eucalyptus drops she’s always sucking on.”

Died at 10:40 A.M., I’d written. Choked to death on her own bile.

Only a coincidence, of course, but offhand I couldn’t think of a more malefic one. God had turned Jeroma Whitfield from can do into can did.

“Mike? Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“She had no second-in-command. You know that, right?”

“Uh-huh.” Now I was thinking of her telling me to have a Yook, and clicking her own against her teeth.

“So I’m taking it on myself to call a staff meeting tomorrow at ten. Somebody’s got to do it. Will you come?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not.” I was walking toward the door to Houston Street. Before I got there, I remembered that I’d left my briefcase by my movie seat and turned back to get it, yanking at my hair with my free hand. The popcorn girl was looking at me with outright suspicion now. “I’d pretty much made up my mind to quit this morning.”

“I knew. I could see it on your face when you left.”

The thought of Katie looking at my face might have tied up my tongue in other circumstances, but not then. “Did it happen at the office?”

“Yes. It was pushing on for two o’clock. There were four of us in the bullpen, not really working, just hanging out and swapping stories and rumors. You know how it goes.”

I did. Those gossipy bull sessions were one of the reasons I went to the office instead of working at home in Brooklyn. Plus getting a chance to feast my eyes on Katie, of course.

“Her door was closed, but the blinds were open.” They usually were. Unless she was taking a meeting with someone she considered important, Jeroma liked to keep an eye on her vassals. “The first I knew was when Pinky said, ‘What’s wrong with the boss? She’s all Gangnam Style.’

“So I looked, and she was jerking back and forth in her office chair, grabbing at her neck. Then she fell out of the chair and all I could see was her feet, drumming up and down. Roberta asked what we should do. I didn’t even bother answering that.”

They burst in. Roberta Hill and Chin Pak Soo lifted her up by the armpits. Katie got behind her and gave her the Heimlich. Pinky stood in the doorway and waved his hands. The first hard heave on her diaphragm did nothing. Katie shouted for Pinky to call 911 and went at her again. The second heave sent one of those eucalyptus drops flying all the way across the room. Jeroma took a single deep breath, opened her eyes, and spoke her last words (and very fitting they were, IMHO): “What the fuck?” Then she began to shudder all over again, and stopped breathing. Chin gave her artificial respiration until the paramedics arrived, but no joy.

“I checked the clock on her wall after she quit breathing,” Katie said. “You know, that awful retro Huckleberry Hound thing? I thought . . . I don’t know, I guess I thought someone might ask me for the time of death, like onLaw & Order. Stupid what goes through your mind at a time like that. It was ten to three. Not even an hour ago, but it seems longer.”

“So she could have choked on the cough drop at two forty,” I said. Not ten forty, but two forty. I knew it was just another coincidence, like Lincoln and Kennedy having the same number of letters; forty past comes around twenty-four times a day. But I still didn’t like it.

“I suppose, but I don’t see what difference it makes.” Katie sounded annoyed. “Will you come in tomorrow or not? Please come in, Mike. I need you.”

To be needed by Katie Curran! Ai-yi-yi!

“Okay. But will you do something for me?”

“I guess so.”

“I forgot to empty the trash on the computer I was using. The one back by the Thanksgiving dinner poster. Will you do it?” This request made no rational sense to me even then. I just wanted that bad joke of an obituary gone.

“You’re crazy,” she said, “but if you absolutely swear on your mother’s name to come in tomorrow at ten, sure. Listen, Mike, this is a chance for us. We might end up owning a piece of the gold mine instead of just working in it.”

“I’ll be there.”

• • •

Almost everyone was, except for stringers working among the primitives in darkest Connecticut and New Jersey. Even scabby little Irving Ramstein, who wrote a joke column called (I don’t understand it, so don’t ask me) Politically Incorrect Chickens, showed up. Katie ran the meeting with aplomb, telling us that the show would go on.

“It’s what Jeroma would have wanted,” Pinky said.

“Who gives a shit what Jeroma would have wanted,” Georgina Bukowski said. “I just want to keep getting a paycheck. Also, if remotely possible, a piece of the action.”

This cry was taken up by several others—Action! Action! Piece-a-da-action!—until our offices sounded like a messhall riot in an old prison movie. Katie let it run its course, then shushed them.

“How could she choke to death?” Chin asked. “The gumdrop came out.”

“It wasn’t a gumdrop,” Roberta said. “It was one of those smelly cough drops she was always sucking on. Craptolyptus.”

“Whatever, dude, it still came flying out when Kates gave her the Hug of Life. We all saw it.”

“I didn’t,” Pinky said. “I was on the phone. And on fucking hold.”

Katie said that she had interviewed one of the EMTs—no doubt using her large gray eyes to good effect—and had been told that the choking fit might have triggered a heart attack. And, in my effort to follow the dictum of Professor Higgins and keep all the relevant facts straight, I will jump ahead here and report the autopsy on our Dear Leader proved that to be the case. If Jeroma had gotten the Neon Circus headline she deserved, it probably would have been HEAD HONCHO POPS PUMP.

That meeting was long and loud. Already displaying talents that made her a natural to step into Jeroma’s Jimmy Choos, Katie allowed them to fully vent their feelings (expressed mostly in bursts of wild, semihysterical laughter) before telling them to get back to work, because time, tide, and Internet waits for no man. Or woman, either. She said she would be talking with the Circus’s main investors before the week was out, and then invited me to step into Jeroma’s office.

“Measuring the drapes?” I asked when the door was shut. “Or the blinds, in this case?”

She looked at me with what might have been hurt. Or maybe just surprise. “Do you think I want this job? I’m a columnist, Mike, just like you.”

“You’d be good at it, though. I know it and so do they.” I jerked my head toward our excuse for a newsroom, where everyone was now either hunting and pecking or working the phones. “As for me, I’m just the funny-obit writer. Or was. I’ve decided to become an emeritus.”

“I think I understand why you feel that way.” She slipped a piece of paper from the back pocket of her jeans and unfolded it. I knew what it was before she handed it to me. “Curiosity comes with the job, so I peeped in your trash before dumping it. And found this.”

I took the sheet, refolded it without looking (I didn’t even want to see the print, let alone reread it), and put it in my own pocket. “Is it dumped now?”

“Yes, and that’s the only hard copy.” She brushed her hair away from her face and looked at me. It might not have been the face that launched a thousand ships, but it surely could have launched several dozen, including a destroyer or two. “I knew you’d ask. Having worked with you for a year and a half, I understand that paranoia is part of your character.”

“Thanks.”

“No offense intended. In New York, paranoia is a survival skill. But it’s no reason to quit what could become a far more lucrative job in the immediate future. Even you must know that a freaky coincidence—and I admit this one’s fairly freaky—is just a coincidence. Mike, I need you to stay on board.”

Not we but I. She said she wasn’t measuring the drapes; I thought she was.

“You don’t understand. I don’t think I could do it anymore even if I wanted to. Not and be funny, at least. It would all come out . . .” I reached, and found a word from my childhood. “Goosh.”

Katie frowned, thinking. “Maybe Penny could do it.”

Penny Langston was one of those stringers from the darker environs, hired by Jeroma at Katie’s suggestion. I had a vague idea that the two women had known each other in college. If so, they could not have been less alike. Penny rarely came in, and when she did, she wore an old baseball cap that never left her head and a macabre smile that rarely left her face. Frank Jessup, the sports guy with the Mohawk, liked to say that Penny always looked about two stress points from going postal.

“But she’d never be as funny as you are,” Katie went on. “If you don’t want to write obituaries, what would you want to do? Assuming you stay at Circus, which I pray you will.”

“Reviews, maybe. I could write funny ones, I think.”

“Hatchet jobs?” Sounding at least marginally hopeful.

“Well . . . yeah. Probably. Some of them.” I was good at snark, after all, and I thought I could probably outsnark Joe Queenan on points, possibly by a knockout. And at least it would be dumping on live people who could fight back.

She put her hands on my shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and planted a soft kiss on the corner of my mouth. If I close my eyes, I can still feel that kiss today. She looked at me with those wide gray eyes—the sea on an overcast morning. I’m sure Professor Higgins would roll his eyes at that, but C-list guys like me rarely get kissed by A-list girls like her.

“Think about going on with the obits, would you?” Hands still on my shoulders. Her light scent in my nostrils. Her breasts less than an inch from my chest, and when she took a deep breath, they touched. I can still feel that today too. “This is not just about you or me. The next six weeks are going to be a critical time for the site and the staff. So think, okay? Even another month of obits would be helpful. It would give Penny—or someone else—a chance to work her way into the job, with guidance from you. And hey, maybe nobody interesting will die.”

Except they always do, and we both knew it.

I probably told her I’d think about it. I can’t remember. What I was actually thinking about was lip-locking her right there in Jeroma’s office, and damn anyone in the bullpen who might see us. I didn’t, though. Outside the rom-coms, guys like me rarely do. I said something or other and then I must have left, because pretty soon I found myself out on the street. I felt poleaxed.

One thing I do remember: when I came to a litter basket on the corner of Third and Fiftieth, I tore the joke obit that was no longer a joke into tiny shreds and threw them in.

• • •

That night I ate a pleasant enough dinner with my parents, then went into my room—the same one where I’d gone to sulk on days when my Little League team lost, how depressing is that—and sat down at my desk. The easiest way to get past my unease, it seemed to me, was to write another obit of a living person. Don’t they tell you to get back on a horse right away if you’ve been thrown? Or climb right away to the top diving platform after your jackknife turns into a belly flop? All I needed to do was prove what I already knew: we live in a rational world. Sticking pins in voodoo dolls doesn’t kill people. Writing your enemy’s name on a scrap of paper and burning it while you recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards doesn’t kill people. Joke obituaries don’t kill people, either.

Nevertheless, I was careful to make a list of possibles consisting solely of proven bad people, such as Faheem Darzi, who had claimed credit for the bus bombing in Miami, and Kenneth Wanderly, an electrician convicted on four counts of rape-murder in Oklahoma. Wanderly seemed like the best possibility on my short list of seven names, and I was about to whomp something up when I thought of Peter Stefano, a worthless fuck if there ever was one.

Stefano was a record producer who choked his girlfriend to death for refusing to record a song he had written. He was now doing time in a medium-security prison when he should have been at a black site in Saudi Arabia, dining on cockroaches, drinking his own pee, and listening to Anthrax played at top volume during the wee hours of the morning. (Just MHO, of course.) The woman he killed was Andi McCoy, who happened to be one of my all-time favorite female singers. If I had been writing joke obits at the time of her death, I never would have written hers; the idea that her soaring voice, easily the equal of the young Joan Baez’s, could have been silenced by that domineering idiot still infuriated me five years later. God gives such golden vocal cords to only the chosen few, and Stefano had destroyed McCoy’s in a fit of drugged-out pique.

I opened my laptop, typed PETER STEFANO OBIT in the proper field, and dropped the cursor onto the blank document. Once again the words poured out with no pause, like water from a broken pipe.

Slave-driving, no-talent record producer Peter Stefano was discovered dead in his jail cell at the Gowanda State Correctional Facility yesterday morning, and we all shout hooray. Although no official cause of death was announced, a prison source said, “It appears his anal hate-gland ruptured, thus spreading asshole poison through his body. In layman’s terms, he had an allergic reaction to his own vile shit.”

Although Stefano had his foot on the necks of a great many groups and solo artists, he is especially noted for ruining the careers of the Grenadiers, the Playful Mammals, Joe Dean (who committed suicide after Stefano refused to renegotiate his contract), and of course Andi McCoy. Not content with killing her career, Stefano choked her to death with a lamp cord while high on methamphetamines. He is survived by three grateful ex-wives, five ex-partners, and the two record companies he managed not to bankrupt.

It went on in that vein for another hundred words or so, and was not one of my better efforts (obviously). I didn’t care, because it felt right. Not just because Peter Stefano was a bad man, either. It felt right as a writer, even though it was bad prose and part of me knew it was a bad thing. This might seem like a sidetrack, but I think (actually I know) it’s at the heart of this story. Writing is hard, okay? At least it is for me. And yes, I know that most working stiffs talk about how hard their jobs are, it doesn’t matter if they’re butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, or obituary writers. Only sometimes the work is not hard. Sometimes it’s easy. When that happens you feel like you do at the bowling alley, watching your ball as it rolls over just the right diamond and you know you threw a strike.

Killing Stefano in my computer felt like a strike.

I slept like a baby that night. Maybe some of it was because I felt as if I’d done something to express my own rage and dismay over that poor murdered girl—the stupid waste of her talent. But I felt the same way when I was writing the Jeroma Whitfield obit, and all she did was refuse to give me a raise. Mostly it was the writing itself. I felt the power, and feeling the power was good.

• • •

My first compu-stop at breakfast the next day wasn’t Neon Circus but Huffington Post. It almost always was. I never bothered scrolling down to the celebrity dish or the side-boob items (frankly speaking, Circus did both of those things much better), but the Huffpo headline stories are always crisp, concise, and late-breaking. The first item was about a Tea Party governor saying something Huffpo found predictably outrageous. The next one stopped my cup of coffee halfway to my lips. It also stopped my breath. The headline read PETER STEFANO MURDERED IN LIBRARY ALTERCATION.

I put down my untasted coffee—carefully, carefully, not spilling a drop—and read the story. Stefano and the trustee librarian had been arguing because Andi McCoy’s music was playing from the overhead speakers in the library. Stefano told the librarian to quit macking on him and “take that shit off.” The trustee refused, saying he wasn’t macking on anybody, just picked the CD at random. The argument escalated. That was when someone strolled up behind Stefano and put an end to him with some kind of prison shiv.

So far as I could tell, he had been murdered right around the time I finished writing his obit. I looked at my coffee. I raised the cup and sipped. It was cold. I rushed to the sink and vomited. Then I called Katie and told her I wouldn’t be at the meeting, but would like to meet her later on.

“You said you’d come,” she said. “You’re breaking your promise!”

“With good reason. Meet me for coffee this afternoon and I’ll tell you why.”

After a pause, she said: “It happened again.” Not a question.

I admitted it. Told her about making a “these guys deserve to die” list, and then thinking of Stefano. “So I wrote his obit, just to prove I had nothing to do with Jeroma’s death. I finished around the same time he got stabbed in the library. I’ll bring a printout with a time stamp, if you want to see it.”

“I don’t need to see a time stamp, I take your word. I’ll meet you, but not for coffee. Come to my place. And bring the obituary.”

“If you think you’re going to put it online—”

“God, no, are you crazy? I just want to see it with my own eyes.”

“All right.” More than all right. Her place. “But Katie?”

“Yes?”

“You can’t tell anybody about this.”

“Of course not. What kind of person do you think I am?”

One with beautiful eyes, long legs, and perfect breasts, I thought as I hung up. I should have known I was in for trouble, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I was thinking about that warm kiss on the corner of my mouth. I wanted another, and not on the corner. Plus whatever came next.

• • •

Her apartment was a tidy three-roomer on the West Side. She met me at the door, dressed in shorts and a filmy top, definitely NSFW. She put her arms around me and said, “Oh God, Mike, you look awful. I’m so sorry.”

I hugged her. She hugged me. I sought her lips, as the romance novels say, and pressed them to mine. After five seconds or so—endless and not long enough—she pulled back and looked at me with those big gray eyes. “We’ve got so much to talk about.” Then she smiled. “But we can talk about it later.”

What followed was what geeks like me rarely get, and when they do get it, there’s usually an ulterior motive. Not that geeks like me think about such things in the moment. In the moment, we’re like any guy on earth: big head takes a walk, little head rules.

• • •

Sitting up in bed.

Drinking wine instead of coffee.

“Here’s something I saw in the paper last year, or the year before,” she said. “This guy in one of the flyover states—Iowa, Nebraska, someplace like that—buys a lottery ticket after work, one of those scratch-off thingies, and wins a hundred thousand dollars. A week later he buys a Powerball ticket and wins a hundred and forty million.”

“Your point?” I saw her point, and didn’t care. The sheet had slipped down to reveal her breasts, every bit as firm and perfect as I’d expected they would be.

“Twice can still be a coincidence. I want you to do it again.”

“I don’t think that would be wise.” It sounded weak even to my own ears. There was an armful of pretty girl within reaching distance, but all at once I wasn’t thinking of the pretty girl. I was thinking of a bowling ball rolling over just the right diamond, and how it felt to stand watching it, knowing that in two seconds the pins were going to explode every whichway.

She turned on her side, looking at me earnestly. “If this is really happening, Mike, it’s big. Biggest thing ever. The power of life and death!”

“If you’re thinking about using this for the site—”

She shook her head vehemently. “No one would believe it. Even if they did, how would it benefit Circus? Would we run a poll? Ask people to send us names of bad guys who deserved the chop?”

She was wrong. People would be happy to participate in Death Vote 2016. It would be bigger than American Idol.

She linked her arms around my neck. “Who was on your hit list before you thought of Stefano?”

I winced. “Wish you wouldn’t call it that.”

“Never mind, just tell me.”

I started listing the names, but when I got to Kenneth Wanderly, she stopped me. Now the gray eyes didn’t just look overcast; they looked stormy. “Him! Write his obituary! I’ll look up the background on Google so you can do a bang-up job, and—”

Reluctantly, I freed myself from her arms. “Why bother, Katie? He’s on death row already. Let the state take care of him.”

“But they won’t!” She jumped out of bed and began to pace back and forth. It was a mesmerizing sight, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. Those long legs, ai-yi-yi. “They won’t! The Okies haven’t done anyone since that botched execution two years ago! Kenneth Wanderly raped and killed four girls—tortured them to death—and he’ll still be there eating government meatloaf when he’s sixty-five! When he’ll die in his sleep!”

She came back to the bed and threw herself on her knees. “Do this for me, Mike! Please!”

“What makes him so important to you?”

The animation ran out of her face. She sat back on her heels and lowered her head so that her hair screened her face. She stayed that way for maybe ten seconds, and when she looked at me again, her beauty was—not gone, but marred. Scarred. It wasn’t just the tears streaming down her cheeks; it was the shamed droop of her mouth.

“Because I know what it’s like. I was raped while I was in college. One night after a frat party. I’d tell you to write his obituary, but I never saw him.” She drew a deep, shuddering breath. “He came up behind me. I was on my face the whole time. But Wanderly will do as a proxy. He’ll do just fine.”

I tossed back the sheet. “Turn on your computer.”

Cowardly bald-headed rapist Kenneth Wanderly, who could only get it up when his prey was tied down, saved the taxpayers a bunch by committing suicide in his Oklahoma State Penitentiary cell on death row in the early hours of this morning. Guards found Wanderly (whose picture is next to “useless piece of shit” in the Urban Dictionary) hanging from a makeshift noose made of his own pants. Warden George Stockett immediately decreed a special celebratory dinner in the gen-pop dining hall tomorrow night, followed by a sock hop. When asked if the Suicide Trousers would be framed and placed with the penitentiary’s other trophies, Warden Stockett refused to answer, but gave the hastily assembled press conference a wink.

Wanderly, a disease masquerading as a live birth, came into the world on October 27, 1972, in Danbury, Connecticut . . .

Another craptastic piece of work from Michael Anderson!

The worst of my Speaking Ill of the Dead obits were funnier and more trenchant (if you don’t believe me, look them up for yourself), but that didn’t matter. Once again the words came gushing out, and with that same sense of perfectly balanced power. At some point, far in the back of my mind, I realized it was more like throwing a spear than rolling a bowling ball. One with a sharply honed point. Katie felt it, too. She was sitting right next to me, crackling like static electricity flying from a hairbrush.

This next part is hard to write, because it makes me think there’s a little Ken Wanderly in all of us, but since there’s no way to tell the truth except to tell it, here it is: It made us horny. I grabbed her in a rough, ungeeky embrace as soon as it was done and carried her back to the bed. Katie locked her ankles at the small of my back and her hands at the nape of my neck. I think that second go-round might have lasted all of fifty seconds, but we both got off. And hard. People stink sometimes.

Ken Wanderly was a monster, okay? That’s not exclusively my judgment; he used the word to describe himself when he ’fessed up to everything in an unsuccessful effort to avoid the death sentence. I could use that to excuse what I did—what we did—except for one thing.

Writing his obituary was even better than the sex that followed it.

It made me want to do it again.

• • •

When I woke up the next morning, Katie was sitting on the couch with her laptop. She looked at me solemnly and patted the cushion beside her. I sat and read the Neon Circus headline on the screen: ANOTHER BAD BOY BITES THE DUST, “WICKED KEN” COMMITS SUICIDE IN HIS CELL. Only not by hanging. He had smuggled in a bar of soap—how was a mystery, because inmates are only supposed to have access to the liquid kind—and shoved it down his throat.

“Dear God,” I said. “What a horrible way to die.”

“Good!” She raised her hands, balled them into fists, and shook them beside her temples. “Excellent!”

There were things I didn’t want to ask her. Number one on the list was if she had slept with me strictly so she could persuade me to kill a suitable stand-in for her rapist. But ask yourself this (I did): Would asking have done any good? She could give me a totally straight answer and I still might not have believed her. In a situation like that, the relationship may not be outright poisoned, but it’s probably damn sick.

“I’m not going to do this again,” I said.

“All right, I understand.” (She didn’t.)

“So don’t ask me.”

“I won’t.” (She did.)

“And you can never tell anybody.”

“I already said I wouldn’t.” (She already had.)

I think part of me already knew this conversation was an exercise in futility, but I said okay and let it drop.

“Mike, I don’t want to hurry you out of here, but I’ve got like a zillion things to do, and . . .”

“No worries, mate. I’m taillights.”

In truth, I wanted to get out. I wanted to walk about sixteen aimless miles and think about what came next.

She grabbed me at the door and kissed me hard. “Don’t go away mad.”

“I’m not.” I didn’t know how I was going away.

“And don’t you dare think about quitting. I need you. I’ve decided Penny would be all wrong for Speaking Ill of the Dead, but I totally understand you need a break from it. I was thinking maybe . . . Georgina?”

“Maybe,” I said. I thought Georgina was the worst writer on the staff, but I didn’t really care anymore. All I cared about right then was never seeing another obituary, let alone writing one.

“As for you, do all the nasty reviews you want. No Jeroma left to say no, am I right?”

“You’re right.”

She shook me. “Don’t say it that way, you monkey. Show some enthusiasm. That old Neon Circus get-up-and-git. And say you’ll stick around.” She lowered her voice. “We can have our own conferences. Private ones.” She saw my eyes drop to the front of her robe and laughed, pleased. Then she gave me a push. “Now go. Buzz on out of here.”

• • •

A week passed, and when you’re working for a site like Neon Circus, each week lasts three months. Celebs got drunk, celebs went into rehab, celebs came out of rehab and immediately got drunk, celebs got arrested, celebs got out of limos sans panties, celebs danced the night away, celebs got married, celebs got divorced, celebs “took a break from each other.” One celeb fell into his pool and drowned. Georgina wrote a remarkably unfunny obituary, and a ton of Where’s Mike tweets and emails arrived in its wake. Once that would have pleased me.

I did not visit Katie’s apartment, because Katie was too busy for canoodling. In fact, Katie wasn’t much in evidence. She was “taking meetings,” a couple in New York and one in Chicago. In her absence, I somehow found myself in charge. I was not nominated, I did not campaign, I was not elected. It just happened. My consolation was that things would surely go back to normal when Katie returned.

I didn’t want to spend time in Jeroma’s office (it felt haunted), but other than our unisex bathroom, it was the only place where I could hold meetings with distraught staffers in relative privacy. And the staffers were alwaysdistraught. E-publishing is still publishing, and every publishing staff is a nest of old-fashioned complexes and neuroses. Jeroma would have told them to get the hell out (but hey, have a Yook). I couldn’t do that. When I started feeling crazy, I reminded myself that soon I would be back in my accustomed seat by the wall, writing snarky reviews. Just another inmate in the madhouse.

The only real decision I can remember making that week had to do with Jeroma’s chair. I absolutely could not put my ass where hers had been when she choked on the Cough Drop of Doom. I rolled it into the bullpen and brought in what I thought of as “my” chair, the one at the desk by the Thanksgiving poster reading PLEASE SHIT WHERE YOU EAT. It was a far less comfy perch, but at least it didn’t feel haunted. Besides, I wasn’t writing much anyway.

• • •

Late Friday afternoon, Katie swept into the office clad in a shimmery knee-length dress that was the antithesis of her usual jeans and tank tops. Her hair was in artfully tumbled beauty shop curls. To me she looked . . . well . . . sort of like a prettier version of Jeroma. I had a passing recollection of Orwell’s Animal Farm, and how the chant of “Four legs good, two legs bad” had changed to “Four legs good, two legs better.”

Katie gathered us and announced that we were being purchased by Pyramid Media out of Chicago, and there would be raises—small ones—for everybody. This occasioned wild applause. When it died down, she added that Georgina Bukowski would be taking over Speaking Ill of the Dead for good, and that Mike Anderson was our new kultcha kritic. “Which means,” she said, “that he will spread his wings and fly slowly over the landscape, shitting where he will.”

More wild applause. I stood up and took a bow, trying to look cheerful and devilish. On that score, I was batting .500. I hadn’t been cheerful since Jeroma’s sudden death, but I did feel like the devil.

“Now, everybody back to work! Write something eternal!” Glistening lips parted in a smile. “Mike, could I speak to you in private?”

Private meant Jeroma’s office (we all still thought of it that way). Katie frowned when she saw the chair behind the desk. “What’s that ugly thing doing in here?”

“I didn’t like sitting in Jeroma’s,” I said. “I’ll bring it back, if you want.”

“I do. But before you do . . .” She moved close to me, but saw the blinds were up and we were being closely observed. She settled for putting a hand on my chest. “Can you come to my place tonight?”

“Absolutely.” Although I wasn’t as excited by the prospect as you might think. With the little head not in charge, doubts about Katie’s motivations had continued to solidify. And, I have to admit, I found it a little upsetting that she was so eager to get Jeroma’s chair back into the office.

Lowering her voice, even though we were alone, she said, “I don’t suppose you’ve written any more . . .” Her glistening lips formed the word obits.

“I haven’t even thought of it.”

This was an extremely bodacious lie. Writing obits was the first thing I thought about in the morning, and the last thing I thought about at night. The way the words just flowed out. And the feeling that went with it: a bowling ball rolling over the right diamond, a twenty-foot putt heading straight for the hole, a spear thunking home in exactly the place you aimed at. Bullseye, dead center.

“What else have you been writing? Any reviews yet? I understand Paramount’s releasing Jack Briggs’s last movie, and I’m hearing it’s even worse than Holy Rollers. That’s got to be tempting.”

“I haven’t exactly been writing,” I said. “I’ve been ghostwriting. As in everyone else’s work. But I was never cut out to be an editor. That’s your job, Katie.”

This time she didn’t protest.

Later that day, I looked up from the back row, where I was trying (and failing) to write a CD review, and saw her in the office, bent over her laptop. Her mouth was moving, and at first I thought she must also be on her phone, but no phone was in evidence. I had an idea—almost certainly ridiculous, but weirdly hard to shake—that she had found a leftover stash of eucalyptus drops in the top drawer, and was sucking on one.

• • •

I arrived at her apartment shortly before seven, bearing bags of Chinese from Fun Joy. No shorts and filmy top that night; she was dressed in a pullover and baggy khakis. Also, she wasn’t alone. Penny Langston was sitting on one end of the sofa (crouching there, actually). She wasn’t wearing her baseball cap, but that strange smile, the one that said touch me and I’ll kill you, was all present and accounted for.

Katie kissed my cheek. “I invited Penny to join us.”

That was patently obvious, but I said, “Hi, Pens.”

“Hi, Mike.” Tiny mouse-voice and no eye contact, but she made a valiant effort to turn the smile into something a tad less creepy.

I looked back to Katie. I raised my eyebrows.

“I said I didn’t tell anyone about what you can do,” Katie said. “That . . . sort of wasn’t the truth.”

“And I sort of knew that.” I put the grease-spotted white bags down on the coffee table. I didn’t feel hungry anymore, and I didn’t expect a whole lot of Fun Joy in the next few minutes. “Do you want to tell me what this is about before I accuse you of breaking your solemn promise and stalk out?”

“Don’t do that. Please. Just listen. Penny works at Neon Circus because I talked Jeroma into hiring her. I met her when she still lived here in the city. We were in a group together, weren’t we, Pens?”

“Yes,” Penny said in her tiny mouse-voice. She was looking at her hands, clasped so tightly in her lap that the knuckles were white. “The Holy Name of Mary Group.”

“Which is what, exactly, when it’s home with its hat off?” As if I had to ask. Sometimes when the pieces come together, you can actually hear the click.

“Rape support,” Katie said. “I never saw my rapist, but Penny saw hers. Didn’t you, Pens?”

“Yes. Lots of times.” Now Penny was looking at me, and her voice grew stronger with each word. By the end, she was nearly shouting, and tears were rolling down her cheeks. “It was my uncle. I was nine years old. My sister was eleven. He raped her too. Katie says you can kill people with obituaries. I want you to write his.”

• • •

I’m not going to tell the story she told me, sitting there on the couch with Katie next to her, holding one of her hands and putting Kleenex after Kleenex in the other. Unless you’ve lived in one of the seven places in this country not yet equipped for multimedia, you’ve heard it before. All you need to know is that Penny’s parents died in a car accident, and she and her sister were shipped off to Uncle Amos and Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia refused to hear anything said against her husband. Figure the rest out for yourself.

I wanted to do it. Because the story was horrible, yes. Because guys like Uncle Amos need to take it in the head for preying on the weakest and most vulnerable, check. Because Katie wanted me to do it, absolutely. But in the end, it all came down to the sadly pretty dress Penny was wearing. And the shoes. And the bit of inexpertly applied makeup. For the first time in years, perhaps for the first time since Uncle Amos had begun making his nighttime visits to her bedroom, always telling her it was “our little secret,” she had tried to make herself presentable for a male human being. It sort of broke my heart. Katie had been scarred by her rape, but had risen above it. Some girls and women can do that. Many can’t.

When she finished, I asked, “Do you swear to God that your uncle really did this?”

“Yes. Again and again and again. When we got old enough to have babies, he made us turn over and used our . . .” She didn’t finish this. “I bet it didn’t stop with Jessie and me, either.”

“And he’s never been caught.”

She shook her head vehemently, dank ringlets flying.

“Okay.” I took my iPad out of my briefcase. “But you’ll have to tell me about him.”

“I can do better.” She disengaged her hand from Katie’s and grabbed the ugliest purse I’ve ever seen outside of a thrift-shop window. From it she took a crumpled sheet of paper, so sweat-stained it was limp and semitransparent. She had written in pencil. The looping scrawl looked like something a child might have done. It was headed AMOS CULLEN LANGFORD: HIS OBITUARY.

This miserable excuse for a man who raped little girls every chance he could get died slowly and painfully of many cancers in the soft parts of his body. During the last week, pus came pouring out of his eyes. He was 63 years old and in his last extremity, his screams filled the house as he begged for extra morphine . . .

There was more. Much. Her handwriting was that of a child, but her vocabulary was terrific, and she had done a far better job on this piece than anything she’d ever written for Neon Circus.

“I don’t know if this will work,” I said, trying to hand it back. “I think I have to write it myself.”

Katie said, “It won’t hurt to try, will it?”

I supposed it wouldn’t. Looking directly at Penny, I said, “I’ve never even seen this guy, and you want me to kill him.”

“Yes,” she said, and now she was meeting my eyes fair and square. “That’s what I want.”

“You’re positive.”

She nodded.

I sat down at Katie’s little home desk, laid out Penny’s handwritten death-diatribe beside my iPad, opened a blank document, and began transcribing. I knew immediately that it was going to work. The sense of power was stronger than ever. The sense of aiming. I quit looking at the sheet after the second sentence and just hammered the keyboard screen, hitting the main points and ended with this abjuration: Funeral attendees—no one could call them mourners, given Mr. Langston’s unspeakable predilections—are warned not to send flowers, but spitting on the coffin is encouraged.

The two women were staring at me, big-eyed.

“Will it work?” Penny asked, then answered herself. “It will. I felt it.”

“I think maybe it already has.” I turned my attention to Katie. “Ask me to do this again, Kates, and I’ll be tempted to write your obituary.”

She tried to smile, but I could see she was scared. I hadn’t meant to do that (at least I don’t think I had), so I took her hand. She jumped, started to pull away, then let me hold it. The skin was cold and clammy.

“I’m joking. Bad joke, but I mean what I say. This needs to end.”

“Yes,” she said, and swallowed loudly, a cartoon gulp sound. “Absolutely.”

“And no talking. Not to anybody. Ever.”

Once again they agreed. I started to get up and Penny leaped at me, knocking me back into the chair and almost spilling us both to the floor. The hug wasn’t affectionate; it was more like the grip of a drowning woman muckling onto her would-be rescuer. She was greasy with sweat.

“Thank you,” she whispered harshly. “Thank you, Mike.”

I left without telling her she was welcome. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I don’t know if they ate the food I brought, but I rather doubt it. Fun Joy, my rosy red ass.

• • •

I didn’t sleep that night, and it wasn’t thinking of Amos Langford that kept me awake. I had other things to worry about.

One was the eternal problem of addiction. I had left Katie’s apartment determined that I would never wield that terrible power again, but it was a promise I’d made to myself before, and it wasn’t one I was sure I could keep, because each time I wrote a “live obit,” the urge to do it again grew stronger. It was like heroin. Use it once or twice, maybe you can stop. After awhile, though, you have to have it. I might not have reached that point yet, but I was on the edge of the pit and knew it. What I’d said to Katie was the absolute rock-bottom truth—this needed to end while I could still end it. Assuming it wasn’t too late already.

The second thing wasn’t quite as grim, but it was bad enough. On the subway back to Brooklyn, a particularly apropos Ben Franklin adage had come to mind: Two can keep a secret, if one of them is dead. There were already three people keeping this one, and since I had no intention of murdering Katie and Penny via obituary, that meant a really nasty secret was in their hands.

They’d keep it for awhile, I was sure. Penny would be especially keen to do so if she got a call in the morning informing her that dear old Uncle Amos had bitten the big one. But time would weaken the taboo. There was another factor, as well. Both of them were not just writers but Neon Circus writers, which meant spilling the beans was their business. Bean-spilling might not be as addictive as killing people with obits, but it had its own strong pull, as I well knew. Sooner or later there would be a bar, and too many drinks, and then . . .

Do you want to hear something really crazy? You have to promise not to tell anybody, though.

I pictured myself sitting in the newsroom by the Thanksgiving poster, occupied with my latest snarky review. Frank Jessup slides up, sits down, and asks if I’ve ever considered writing an obit for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator with the little tiny head, or—hey, even better!—that Korean butterball, Kim Jong-un. For all I knew, Jessup might want me to off the new head coach of the Knicks.

I tried to tell myself that one was ridiculous, and couldn’t manage it. Mohawk Sports Boy was a crazed Knicks fan.

There was an even more horrific possibility (this I got to around three in the morning). Suppose word of my talent found its way to the wrong governmental ear? It seemed unlikely, but hadn’t I read somewhere that the government had experimented with LSD and mind control on unsuspecting subjects back in the fifties? People capable of that might be capable of anything. What if some fellows from NSA appeared either at Circus or here at my folks’ house in Brooklyn, and I wound up taking a one-way trip in a private jet to some government base where I would be installed in a private apartment (luxurious, but with guards on the door) and given a list of Al Qaeda and Isis militant leaders, complete with files that would allow me to write extremely detailed obituaries? I could make rocket-equipped drones obsolete.

Loony? Yuh. But at four in the morning, anything can seem possible.

Around five, just as the day’s first light was creeping into my room, I found myself wondering yet again how I had come by this unwelcome talent in the first place. Not to mention how long I’d had it. There was no way of telling, because as a rule, folks do not write obituaries of live people. They don’t even do that at The New York Times, they just stockpile the necessary info so it’s at hand when a famous person dies. I could have had the ability all my life, and if I hadn’t written that crappy bad joke about Jeroma, I never would have known. I thought of how I’d ended up writing for Neon Circus in the first place: by way of an unsolicited obituary. Of a person already dead, true, but an obit is an obit. And talent only wants one thing, don’t you see? It wants to come out. It wants to put on a tuxedo and tap-dance all across the stage.

On that thought, I fell asleep.

• • •

My phone woke me at quarter to noon. It was Katie, and she was upset. “You need to come to the office,” she said. “Right now.”

I sat up in bed. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here, but I’ll tell you one thing right now. You can’t do it again.”

“Duh,” I said. “I think I told you that. And on more than one occasion.”

If she heard me, she paid no attention, just steamed ahead. “Not ever in your life. If it was Hitler you couldn’t do it. If your father had a knife to your mother’s throat you couldn’t do it.”

She broke the connection before I could ask questions. I wondered why we weren’t having this Code Red meeting in her apartment, which offered a lot more privacy than Neon Circus’s cramped digs, and only one answer came to mind: Katie didn’t want to be alone with me. I was a dangerous dude. I had only done what she and her fellow rape survivor wanted me to do, but that didn’t change the fact.

Now I was a dangerous dude.

• • •

She greeted me with a smile and a hug for the benefit of the few staffers on hand, quaffing their postlunch Red Bulls and plugging lackadaisically away at their laptops, but today the blinds in the office were down, and the smile disappeared as soon as we were behind them.

“I’m scared to death,” she said. “I mean, I was last night, but when you’re actually doing it—”

“It feels sort of good. Yeah, I know.”

“But I’m a lot more scared now. I keep thinking of those spring-loaded gadgets you squeeze to make your hands and forearms stronger.”

“What are you talking about?”

She didn’t tell me. Not then. “I had to start in the middle, with Ken Wanderly’s kid, and work both ways—”

“Wicked Ken had a kid?”

“A son, yes. Stop interrupting. I had to start in the middle because the item about the son was the first one I came across. There was a ‘death reported’ item in the Times this morning. For once they scooped the webs. Somebody at Huffpo or Daily Beast is apt to get taken to the woodshed for that, because it happened awhile ago. My guess is the family decided to wait until after the burial to release the news.”

“Katie—”

“Shut up and listen.” She leaned forward. “There’s collateral damage. And it’s getting worse.”

“I don’t—”

She put a palm over my mouth. “Shut. The fuck. Up.”

I shut. She took her hand away.

“Jeroma Whitfield was where this started. So far as I can tell using Google, she’s the only one in the world. Was, I mean. There are tons of Jerome Whitfields, though, so thank God she was your first, or it might have been attracted to other Jeromas. Some of them, anyway. The closest ones.”

“It?”

She looked at me as if I were an idiot. “The power. Your second . . .” She paused, I think because the word that came immediately to mind was victim. “Your second subject was Peter Stefano. Also not the world’s most common name, but not completely weird, either. Now look at this.”

From her desk she took a few sheets of paper. She eased the first from the paper clip holding them together and passed it to me. On it were three obituaries, all from small newspapers—one in Pennsylvania, one in Ohio, and one in upstate New York. The Pennsylvania Peter Stefano had died of a heart attack. The one in Ohio had fallen from a ladder. The one from New York—Woodstock—had suffered a stroke. All had died on the same day as the crazed record producer whose name they shared.

I sat down hard. “This can’t be.”

“It is. The good news is that I found two dozen other Peter Stefanos across the USA, and they’re fine. I think because they all live farther away from Gowanda Correctional. That was ground zero. The shrapnel spread out from there.”

I looked at her, dumbfounded.

“Wicked Ken came next. Another unusual name, thank God. There’s a whole nest of Wanderlys in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but I guess that was too far. Only . . .”

She handed me the second sheet. First up was the news item from the Times: SERIAL KILLER’S SON DIES. His wife claimed Ken Wanderly Jr. had shot himself by accident while cleaning a pistol, but the item pointed out that the “accident” had happened less than twelve hours after his father’s death. That it might actually have been suicide was left for the reader to imply.

“I don’t think it was suicide,” Katie said. Beneath her makeup, she looked very pale. “I don’t think it was exactly an accident, either. It homes in on the names, Mike. You see that, right? And it can’t spell, which makes it even worse.”

The obit (I was coming to loathe that word) below the piece about Wicked Ken’s son concerned one Kenneth Wanderlee, of Paramus, New Jersey. Like Peter Stefano of Pennsylvania (an innocent who had probably never killed anything but time), Wanderlee of Paramus had died of a heart attack.

Just like Jeroma.

I was breathing fast, and sweating all over. My balls had drawn up until they felt roughly the size of peach pits. I felt like fainting, also like vomiting, and managed to do neither. Although I did plenty of vomiting later. That went on for a week or more, and I lost ten pounds. (I told my worried mother it was the flu.)

“Here’s the capper,” she said, and handed me the last page. There were seventeen Amos Langfords on it. The biggest cluster was in the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut area, but one had died in Baltimore, one in Virginia, and two had kicked off in West Virginia. In Florida there were three.

“No,” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “This second one, in Amityville, is Penny’s bad uncle. Just be grateful that Amos is also a fairly unusual name in this day and age. If it had been James or William, there could have been hundreds of dead Langfords. Probably not thousands, because it’s still not reaching farther than the Midwest, but Florida’s nine hundred miles away. Farther than any AM radio signal can reach, at least in the daytime.”

The sheets of paper slipped from my hand and seesawed to the floor.

“Now do you see what I meant about those squeezie things people use to make their hands and arms stronger? At first maybe you can only squeeze the handles together once or twice. But if you keep doing it, the muscles get stronger. That’s what’s happening to you, Mike. I’m sure of it. Every time you write an obit for a living person, the power gets stronger and reaches farther.”

“It was your idea,” I whispered. “Your goddam idea.”

But she wasn’t having that. “I didn’t tell you to write Jeroma’s obituary. That was your idea.”

“It was a whim,” I protested. “A goof, for God’s sake. I didn’t know what was going to happen!”

Only maybe that wasn’t the truth. I flashed back to my first orgasm, in the bathtub, assisted by a bubbly handful of Ivory Soap. I hadn’t known what I was doing when I reached down and grabbed myself . . . only some part of me, some deep, instinctual part, had known. There’s another old adage, this one not Ben Franklin’s: When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Sometimes the teacher is inside us.

“Wanderly was your idea,” I pointed out. “So was Amos the Midnight Creeper. And by then you knew what was going to happen.”

She sat on the edge of the desk—her desk, now—and looked at me straight on, which couldn’t have been easy. “That much is true. But, Mike . . . I didn’t know it was going to spread.”

“Neither did I.”

“And it really is addictive. I was sitting next to you when you did it, and it was like breathing secondhand crack.”

“I can stop,” I said.

Hoping. Hoping.

“Are you sure?”

“Pretty. Now here’s one for you. Can you keep your mouth shut about this? Like, for the rest of your life?”

She did me the courtesy of thinking it over. Then she nodded. “I have to. I could have a good thing here at Circus, and I don’t want to bitch it up before I can get on my feet.”

It was all about her, in other words, and what else could I have expected? Katie might not be sucking on Jeroma’s eucalyptus drops, I could have been wrong about that, but she was sitting in Jeroma’s chair, behind Jeroma’s desk. Plus that new look-but-don’t-touch tumbly hairdo. As Orwell’s pigs might have said, blue jeans good, new dress better.

“What about Penny?”

Katie said nothing.

“Because my impression of Penny—everybody’s impression of Penny, in fact—is that she doesn’t have all four wheels on the road.”

Katie’s eyes flashed. “Are you surprised? She had an extremely traumatic childhood, in case you missed it. A nightmare childhood.”

“I can relate, because I’m living my own nightmare right now. So save the support-group empathy. I just want to know if she’ll keep her mouth shut. Like, forever. Will she?”

There was a long, long pause. At last Katie said, “Now that he’s dead, maybe she’ll stop going to the rape survivor meetings.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“I guess she might . . . at some point . . . tell someone who’s in especially bad shape that she knows a guy who could help that someone get closure. She wouldn’t do it this month, and probably not this year, but . . .”

She didn’t finish. We looked at each other. I was sure she could read what I was thinking in my eyes: there was one sure-shot, never-miss way to make sure Penny kept her mouth shut.

“No,” Katie said. “Don’t even think of it, and not only because she deserves her life and whatever good things there might be for her up ahead. It wouldn’t be just her.”

Based on her research, she was right about that. Penny Langston wasn’t a super-common name, either, but there are more than three hundred million people in America, and some of the Penny or Penelope Langstons out there would win a very bad lottery if I decided to power up my laptop or iPad and write a new obit. Then there was the “in the neighborhood” effect. The power had taken a Wanderlee as well as a Wanderly. What if it decided to take Petula Langstons? Patsy Langfords? Penny Langleys?

Then there was my own situation. It might take only one more obit for Michael Anderson to surrender completely to that high-voltage buzz. Just thinking about it made me want to do it, because it would take away, if only temporarily, these feelings of horror and dismay. I pictured myself writing an obituary for John Smith or Jill Jones to cheer myself up, and my balls shriveled even more at the thought of the mass carnage that could follow.

“What are you going to do?” Katie asked.

“I’ll think of something,” I said.

• • •

I did.

That night I opened a Rand McNally Road Atlas to the big map of the United States, closed my eyes, and dropped my finger. Which is why I now live in Laramie, Wyoming, where I’m a housepainter. Primarily a housepainter. I actually have a number of jobs, like many people in the small cities of the heartland—what I used to refer to, with a New Yorker’s casual contempt, as “flyover country.” I also work part-time for a landscaping company, mowing lawns, raking leaves, and planting bushes. In the winter, I plow out driveways and work at the Snowy Range ski resort, grooming trails. I’m not rich, but I keep my head above water. A little more above it than in New York, actually. Make fun of flyover country all you want to, but it’s a lot cheaper to live out here, and whole days go by without anyone giving me the finger.

My parents don’t understand why I chucked it all, and my father doesn’t try to hide his disappointment; he sometimes talks about my “Peter Pan lifestyle,” and says I’m going to regret it when I turn forty and start seeing gray in my hair. My mother is just as puzzled but less disapproving. She never liked Neon Circus, thought it was a sleazy waste of my “authorial abilities.” She was probably right on both counts, but what I mostly use my authorial abilities for these days is jotting grocery lists. As for my hair, I saw the first strands of gray even before I left the city, and that was before I turned thirty.

I still dream about writing, though, and these are not pleasant dreams. In one of them I’m sitting at my laptop, even though I don’t own a laptop anymore. I’m writing an obituary, and I can’t stop. In this dream I don’t want to, either, because that sense of power had never been stronger. I get as far as Sad news, last night everyone in the world named John died and then wake up, sometimes on the floor, sometimes rolled up in my blankets and screaming. On a couple of occasions it’s a wonder I didn’t wake the neighbors.

• • •

I never left my heart in San Francisco, but I did leave my laptop in dear old Brooklyn. Couldn’t bear to give up my iPad, though (talk about addictions). I don’t use it to send emails—when I want to get in touch with someone in a hurry, I call. If it’s not urgent, I use that antique institution known as the United States Post Office. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get back into the habit of writing letters and postcards.

I like the iPad, though. There are plenty of games on it, plus the wind sounds that help me get to sleep at night and the alarm that wakes me up in the morning. I’ve got tons of stored music, a few audio books, lots of movies. When all else fails to entertain, I surf the Internet. Endless time-filling possibilities there, as you probably know yourself, and in Laramie the time can pass slowly when I’m not working. Especially in winter.

Sometimes I visit the Neon Circus site, just for old times’ sake. Katie’s doing a good job as editor—much better than Jeroma, who really didn’t have much in the way of vision—and the site hovers around number five on the list of most visited Internet landing-spots. Sometimes it’s a notch or two above the Drudge Report; mostly it lurks just below. Plenty of ads, so they’re doing well in that regard.

Jeroma’s successor is still writing her Getting Sloshed with Katie interviews. Frank Jessup is still covering sports; his not-quite-joking piece about wanting to see an All Steroids Football League got national attention and landed him a gig on ESPN, Mohawk and all. Georgina Bukowski wrote half a dozen unfunny Speaking Ill of the Dead obituaries, and then Katie shitcanned the column and replaced it with Celebrity Deathstakes, where readers win prizes for predicting which famous people will die in the next twelve months. Penny Langston is the master of ceremonies there, and each week a new smiling headshot of her appears on top of a dancing skeleton. It’s Circus’s most popular feature, and each week the comments section goes on for pages. People like to read about death, and they like to write about it.

I’m someone who knows.

• • •

Okay, that’s the story. I don’t expect you to believe it, and you don’t have to; this is America, after all. I’ve done my best to lay it out neatly, just the same. The way I was taught to lay out a story in my journalism classes: not fancy, not twee or all hifalutin. I tried to keep it clear, in a straight line. Beginning leads to middle, middle leads to end. Old-school, you dig? Ducks in a row. And if you find the end a little flat, you might remember Professor Higgins’s take on that. He used to say that in reporting, it’s always the end for now, and in real life, the only full stop is on the obituary page.

For Stewart O’Nan

EVERY HEART A DOORWAY

Seanan McGuire

FOR THE WICKED

PART I

THE GOLDEN AFTERNOONS

THERE WAS A LITTLE GIRL

THE GIRLS WERE NEVER present for the entrance interviews. Only their parents, their guardians, their confused siblings, who wanted so much to help them but didn’t know how. It would have been too hard on the prospective students to sit there and listen as the people they loved most in all the world—all this world, at least—dismissed their memories as delusions, their experiences as fantasy, their lives as some intractable illness.

What’s more, it would have damaged their ability to trust the school if their first experience of Eleanor had been seeing her dressed in respectable grays and lilacs, with her hair styled just so, like the kind of stolid elderly aunt who only really existed in children’s stories. The real Eleanor was nothing like that. Hearing the things she said would have only made it worse, as she sat there and explained, so earnestly, so sincerely, that her school would help to cure the things that had gone wrong in the minds of all those little lost lambs. She could take the broken children and make them whole again.

She was lying, of course, but there was no way for her potential students to know that. So she demanded that she meet with their legal guardians in private, and she sold her bill of goods with the focus and skill of a born con artist. If those guardians had ever come together to compare notes, they would have found that her script was well-practiced and honed like the weapon that it was.

“This is a rare but not unique disorder that manifests in young girls just stepping across the border into womanhood,” she would say, making careful eye contact with the desperate, overwhelmed guardians of her latest wandering girl. On the rare occasion when she had to speak to the parents of a boy, she would vary her speech, but only as much as the situation demanded. She had been working on this routine for a long time, and she knew how to play upon the fears and desires of adults. They wanted what was best for their charges, as did she. It was simply that they had very different ideas of what “best” meant.

To the parents, she said, “This is a delusion, and some time away may help to cure it.”

To the aunts and uncles, she said, “This is not your fault, and I can be the solution.”

To the grandparents, she said, “Let me help. Please, let me help you.”

Not every family agreed on boarding school as the best solution. About one out of every three potential students slipped through her fingers, and she mourned for them, those whose lives would be so much harder than they needed to be, when they could have been saved. But she rejoiced for those who were given to her care. At least while they were with her, they would be with someone who understood. Even if they would never have the opportunity to go back home, they would have someone who understood, and the company of their peers, which was a treasure beyond reckoning.

Eleanor West spent her days giving them what she had never had, and hoped that someday, it would be enough to pay her passage back to the place where she belonged.

1

COMING HOME, LEAVING HOME

THE HABIT OF NARRATION, of crafting something miraculous out of the commonplace, was hard to break. Narration came naturally after a time spent in the company of talking scarecrows or disappearing cats; it was, in its own way, a method of keeping oneself grounded, connected to the thin thread of continuity that ran through all lives, no matter how strange they might become. Narrate the impossible things, turn them into a story, and they could be controlled. So:

The manor sat in the center of what would have been considered a field, had it not been used to frame a private home. The grass was perfectly green, the trees clustered around the structure perfectly pruned, and the garden grew in a profusion of colors that normally existed together only in a rainbow, or in a child’s toy box. The thin black ribbon of the driveway curved from the distant gate to form a loop in front of the manor itself, feeding elegantly into a slightly wider waiting area at the base of the porch. A single car pulled up, tawdry yellow and seeming somehow shabby against the carefully curated scene. The rear passenger door slammed, and the car pulled away again, leaving a teenage girl behind.

She was tall and willowy and couldn’t have been more than seventeen; there was still something of the unformed around her eyes and mouth, leaving her a work in progress, meant to be finished by time. She wore black—black jeans, black ankle boots with tiny black buttons marching like soldiers from toe to calf—and she wore white—a loose tank top, the faux pearl bands around her wrists—and she had a ribbon the color of pomegranate seeds tied around the base of her ponytail. Her hair was bone-white streaked with runnels of black, like oil spilled on a marble floor, and her eyes were pale as ice. She squinted in the daylight. From the look of her, it had been quite some time since she had seen the sun. Her small wheeled suitcase was bright pink, covered with cartoon daisies. She had not, in all likelihood, purchased it herself.

Raising her hand to shield her eyes, the girl looked toward the manor, pausing when she saw the sign that hung from the porch eaves. ELEANOR WEST’S HOME FOR WAYWARD CHILDREN it read, in large letters. Below, in smaller letters, it continued NO SOLICITATION, NO VISITORS, NO QUESTS.

The girl blinked. The girl lowered her hand. And slowly, the girl made her way toward the steps.

On the third floor of the manor, Eleanor West let go of the curtain and turned toward the door while the fabric was still fluttering back into its original position. She appeared to be a well-preserved woman in her late sixties, although her true age was closer to a hundred: travel through the lands she had once frequented had a tendency to scramble the internal clock, making it difficult for time to get a proper grip upon the body. Some days she was grateful for her longevity, which had allowed her to help so many more children than she would ever have lived to see if she hadn’t opened the doors she had, if she had never chosen to stray from her proper path. Other days, she wondered whether this world would ever discover that she existed—that she was little Ely West the Wayward Girl, somehow alive after all these years—and what would happen to her when that happened.

Still, for the time being, her back was strong and her eyes were as clear as they had been on the day when, as a girl of seven, she had seen the opening between the roots of a tree on her father’s estate. If her hair was white now, and her skin was soft with wrinkles and memories, well, that was no matter at all. There was still something unfinished around her eyes; she wasn’t done yet. She was a story, not an epilogue. And if she chose to narrate her own life one word at a time as she descended the stairs to meet her newest arrival, that wasn’t hurting anyone. Narration was a hard habit to break, after all.

*   *   *

NANCY STOOD FROZEN in the center of the foyer, her hand locked on the handle of her suitcase as she looked around, trying to find her bearings. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting from the “special school” her parents were sending her to, but it certainly hadn’t been this . . . this elegant country home. The walls were papered in an old-fashioned floral print of roses and twining clematis vines, and the furnishings—such as they were in this intentionally under-furnished entryway—were all antiques, good, well-polished wood with brass fittings that matched the curving sweep of the banister. The floor was cherrywood, and when she glanced upward, trying to move her eyes without lifting her chin, she found herself looking at an elaborate chandelier shaped like a blooming flower.

“That was made by one of our alumni, actually,” said a voice. Nancy wrenched her gaze from the chandelier and turned it toward the stairs.

The woman who was descending was thin, as elderly women sometimes were, but her back was straight, and the hand resting on the banister seemed to be using it only as a guide, not as any form of support. Her hair was as white as Nancy’s own, without the streaks of defiant black, and styled in a puffbull of a perm, like a dandelion that had gone to seed. She would have looked perfectly respectable, if not for her electric orange trousers, paired with a hand-knit sweater knit of rainbow wool and a necklace of semiprecious stones in a dozen colors, all of them clashing. Nancy felt her eyes widen despite her best efforts, and hated herself for it. She was losing hold of her stillness one day at a time. Soon, she would be as jittery and unstable as any of the living, and then she would never find her way back home.

“It’s virtually all glass, of course, except for the bits that aren’t,” continued the woman, seemingly untroubled by Nancy’s blatant staring. “I’m not at all sure how you make that sort of thing. Probably by melting sand, I assume. I contributed those large teardrop-shaped prisms at the center, however. All twelve of them were of my making. I’m rather proud of that.” The woman paused, apparently expecting Nancy to say something.

Nancy swallowed. Her throat was so dry these days, and nothing seemed to chase the dust away. “If you don’t know how to make glass, how did you make the prisms?” she asked.

The woman smiled. “Out of my tears, of course. Always assume the simplest answer is the true one, here, because most of the time, it will be. I’m Eleanor West. Welcome to my home. You must be Nancy.”

“Yes,” Nancy said slowly. “How did you . . .?”

“Well, you’re the only student we were expecting to receive today. There aren’t as many of you as there once were. Either the doors are getting rarer, or you’re all getting better about not coming back. Now, be quiet a moment, and let me look at you.” Eleanor descended the last three steps and stopped in front of Nancy, studying her intently for a moment before she walked a slow circle around her. “Hmm. Tall, thin, and very pale. You must have been someplace with no sun—but no vampires either, I think, given the skin on your neck. Jack and Jill will be awfully pleased to meet you. They get tired of all the sunlight and sweetness people bring through here.”

“Vampires?” said Nancy blankly. “Those aren’t real.”

“None of this is real, my dear. Not this house, not this conversation, not those shoes you’re wearing—which are several years out of style if you’re trying to reacclimatize yourself to the ways of your peers, and are not proper mourning shoes if you’re trying to hold fast to your recent past—and not either one of us. ‘Real’ is a four-letter word, and I’ll thank you to use it as little as possible while you live under my roof.” Eleanor stopped in front of Nancy again. “It’s the hair that betrays you. Were you in an Underworld or a Netherworld? You can’t have been in an Afterlife. No one comes back from those.”

Nancy gaped at her, mouth moving silently as she tried to find her voice. The old woman said those things—those cruelly impossible things—so casually, like she was asking after nothing more important than Nancy’s vaccination records.

Eleanor’s expression transformed, turning soft and apologetic. “Oh, I see I’ve upset you. I’m afraid I have a tendency to do that. I went to a Nonsense world, you see, six times before I turned sixteen, and while I eventually had to stop crossing over, I never quite learned to rein my tongue back in. You must be tired from your journey, and curious about what’s to happen here. Is that so? I can show you to your room as soon as I know where you fall on the compass. I’m afraid that really does matter for things like housing; you can’t put a Nonsense traveler in with someone who went walking through Logic, not unless you feel like explaining a remarkable amount of violence to the local police. They do check up on us here, even if we can usually get them to look the other way. It’s all part of our remaining accredited as a school, although I suppose we’re more of a sanitarium, of sorts. I do like that word, don’t you? ‘Sanitarium.’ It sounds so official, while meaning absolutely nothing at all.”

“I don’t understand anything you’re saying right now,” said Nancy. She was ashamed to hear her voice come out in a tinny squeak, even as she was proud of herself for finding it at all.

Eleanor’s face softened further. “You don’t have to pretend anymore, Nancy. I know what you’ve been going through—where you’ve been. I went through something a long time ago, when I came back from my own voyages. This isn’t a place for lies or pretending everything is all right. We know everything is not all right. If it were, you wouldn’t be here. Now. Where did you go?”

“I don’t . . .”

“Forget about words like ‘Nonsense’ and ‘Logic.’ We can work out those details later. Just answer. Where did you go?”

“I went to the Halls of the Dead.” Saying the words aloud was an almost painful relief. Nancy froze again, staring into space as if she could see her voice hanging there, shining garnet-dark and perfect in the air. Then she swallowed, still not chasing away the dryness, and said, “It was . . . I was looking for a bucket in the cellar of our house, and I found this door I’d never seen before. When I went through, I was in a grove of pomegranate trees. I thought I’d fallen and hit my head. I kept going because . . . because . . .”

Because the air had smelled so sweet, and the sky had been black velvet, spangled with points of diamond light that didn’t flicker at all, only burned constant and cold. Because the grass had been wet with dew, and the trees had been heavy with fruit. Because she had wanted to know what was at the end of the long path between the trees, and because she hadn’t wanted to turn back before she understood everything. Because for the first time in forever, she’d felt like she was going home, and that feeling had been enough to move her feet, slowly at first, and then faster, and faster, until she had been running through the clean night air, and nothing else had mattered, or would ever matter again—

“How long were you gone?”

The question was meaningless. Nancy shook her head. “Forever. Years . . . I was there for years. I didn’t want to come back. Ever.”

“I know, dear.” Eleanor’s hand was gentle on Nancy’s elbow, guiding her toward the door behind the stairs. The old woman’s perfume smelled of dandelions and gingersnaps, a combination as nonsensical as everything else about her. “Come with me. I have the perfect room for you.”

*   *   *

ELEANOR’S “PERFECT ROOM” was on the first floor, in the shadow of a great old elm that blocked almost all the light that would otherwise have come in through the single window. It was eternal twilight in that room, and Nancy felt the weight drop from her shoulders as she stepped inside and looked around. One half of the room—the half with the window—was a jumble of clothing, books, and knickknacks. A fiddle was tossed carelessly on the bed, and the associated bow was balanced on the edge of the bookshelf, ready to fall at the slightest provocation. The air smelled of mint and mud.

The other half of the room was as neutral as a hotel. There was a bed, a small dresser, a bookshelf, and a desk, all in pale, unvarnished wood. The walls were blank. Nancy looked to Eleanor long enough to receive the nod of approval before walking over and placing her suitcase primly in the middle of what would be her bed.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m sure this will be fine.”

“I admit, I’m not as confident,” said Eleanor, frowning at Nancy’s suitcase. It had been placed so precisely. . . . “Anyplace called ‘the Halls of the Dead’ is going to have been an Underworld, and most of those fall more under the banner of Nonsense than Logic. It seems like yours may have been more regimented. Well, no matter. We can always move you if you and Sumi prove ill-suited. Who knows? You might provide her with some of the grounding she currently lacks. And if you can’t do that, well, hopefully you won’t actually kill one another.”

“Sumi?”

“Your roommate.” Eleanor picked her way through the mess on the floor until she reached the window. Pushing it open, she leaned out and scanned the branches of the elm tree until she found what she was looking for. “One and two and three, I see you, Sumi. Come inside and meet your roommate.”

“Roommate?” The voice was female, young, and annoyed.

“I warned you,” said Eleanor as she pulled her head back inside and returned to the center of the room. She moved with remarkable assurance, especially given how cluttered the floor was; Nancy kept expecting her to fall, and somehow, she didn’t. “I told you a new student was arriving this week, and that if it was a girl from a compatible background, she would be taking the spare bed. Do you remember any of this?”

“I thought you were just talking to hear yourself talk. You do that. Everyone does that.” A head appeared in the window, upside down, its owner apparently hanging from the elm tree. She looked to be about Nancy’s age, of Japanese descent, with long black hair tied into two childish pigtails, one above each ear. She looked at Nancy with unconcealed suspicion before asking, “Are you a servant of the Queen of Cakes, here to punish me for my transgressions against the Countess of Candy Floss? Because I don’t feel like going to war right now.”

“No,” said Nancy blankly. “I’m Nancy.”

“That’s a boring name. How can you be here with such a boring name?” Sumi flipped around and dropped out of the tree, vanishing for a moment before she popped back up, leaned on the windowsill, and asked, “Eleanor-Ely, are you sure? I mean, sure-sure? She doesn’t look like she’s supposed to be here at all. Maybe when you looked at her records, you saw what wasn’t there again and really she’s supposed to be in a school for juvenile victims of bad dye jobs.”

“I don’t dye my hair!” Nancy’s protest was heated. Sumi stopped talking and blinked at her. Eleanor turned to look at her. Nancy’s cheeks grew hot as the blood rose in her face, but she stood her ground, somehow keeping herself from reaching up to stroke her hair as she said, “It used to be all black, like my mother’s. When I danced with the Lord of the Dead for the first time, he said it was beautiful, and he ran his fingers through it. All the hair turned white around them, out of jealousy. That’s why I only have five black streaks left. Those are the parts he touched.”

Looking at her with a critical eye, Eleanor could see how those five streaks formed the phantom outline of a hand, a place where the pale young woman in front of her had been touched once and never more. “I see,” she said.

“I don’t dye it,” said Nancy, still heated. “I would never dye it. That would be disrespectful.”

Sumi was still blinking, eyes wide and round. Then she grinned. “Oh, I like you,” she said. “You’re the craziest card in the deck, aren’t you?”

“We don’t use that word here,” snapped Eleanor.

“But it’s true,” said Sumi. “She thinks she’s going back. Don’t you, Nancy? You think you’re going to open the right-wrong door and see your stairway to Heaven on the other side, and then it’s one step, two step, how d’you do step, and you’re right back in your story. Crazy girl. Stupid girl. You can’t go back. Once they throw you out, you can’t go back.”

Nancy felt as if her heart were trying to scramble up her throat and choke her. She swallowed it back down, and said, in a whisper, “You’re wrong.”

Sumi’s eyes were bright. “Am I?”

Eleanor clapped her hands, pulling their attention back to her. “Nancy, why don’t you unpack and get settled? Dinner is at six thirty, and group therapy will follow at eight. Sumi, please don’t inspire her to murder you before she’s been here for a full day.”

“We all have our own ways of trying to go home,” said Sumi, and disappeared from the window’s frame, heading off to whatever she’d been doing before Eleanor disturbed her. Eleanor shot Nancy a quick, apologetic look, and then she too was gone, shutting the door behind herself. Nancy was, quite abruptly, alone.

She stayed where she was for a count of ten, enjoying the stillness. When she had been in the Halls of the Dead, she had sometimes been expected to hold her position for days at a time, blending in with the rest of the living statuary. Serving girls who were less skilled at stillness had come through with sponges soaked in pomegranate juice and sugar, pressing them to the lips of the unmoving. Nancy had learned to let the juice trickle down her throat without swallowing, taking it in passively, like a stone takes in the moonlight. It had taken her months, years even, to become perfectly motionless, but she had done it: oh, yes, she had done it, and the Lady of Shadows had proclaimed her beautiful beyond measure, little mortal girl who saw no need to be quick, or hot, or restless.

But this world was made for quick, hot, restless things; not like the quiet Halls of the Dead. With a sigh, Nancy abandoned her stillness and turned to open her suitcase. Then she froze again, this time out of shock and dismay. Her clothing—the diaphanous gowns and gauzy black shirts she had packed with such care—was gone, replaced by a welter of fabrics as colorful as the things strewn on Sumi’s side of the room. There was an envelope on top of the pile. With shaking fingers, Nancy picked it up and opened it.

Nancy—

We’re sorry to play such a mean trick on you, sweetheart, but you didn’t leave us much of a choice. You’re going to boarding school to get better, not to keep wallowing in what your kidnappers did to you. We want our real daughter back. These clothes were your favorites before you disappeared. You used to be our little rainbow! Do you remember that?

You’ve forgotten so much.

We love you. Your father and I, we love you more than anything, and we believe you can come back to us. Please forgive us for packing you a more suitable wardrobe, and know that we only did it because we want the best for you. We want you back.

Have a wonderful time at school, and we’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready to come home to stay.

The letter was signed in her mother’s looping, unsteady hand. Nancy barely saw it. Her eyes filled with hot, hateful tears, and her hands were shaking, fingers cramping until they had crumpled the paper into an unreadable labyrinth of creases and folds. She sank to the floor, sitting with her knees bent to her chest and her eyes fixed on the open suitcase. How could she wear any of those things? Those were daylight colors, meant for people who moved in the sun, who were hot, and fast, and unwelcome in the Halls of the Dead.

“What are you doing?” The voice belonged to Sumi.

Nancy didn’t turn. Her body was already betraying her by moving without her consent. The least she could do was refuse to move it voluntarily.

“It looks like you’re sitting on the floor and crying, which everyone knows is dangerous, dangerous, don’t-do-that dangerous; it makes it look like you’re not holding it together, and you might shake apart altogether,” said Sumi. She leaned close, so close that Nancy felt one of the other girl’s pigtails brush her shoulder. “Why are you crying, ghostie girl? Did someone walk across your grave?”

“I never died, I just went to serve the Lord of the Dead for a while, that’s all, and I was going to stay forever, until he said I had to come back here long enough to be sure. Well, I was sure before I ever left, and I don’t know why my door isn’t here.” The tears clinging to her cheeks were too hot. They felt like they were scalding her. Nancy allowed herself to move, reaching up and wiping them viciously away. “I’m crying because I’m angry, and I’m sad, and I want to go home.”

“Stupid girl,” said Sumi. She placed a sympathetic hand atop Nancy’s head before smacking her—lightly, but still a hit—and leaping up onto her bed, crouching next to the open suitcase. “You don’t mean home where your parents are, do you? Home to school and class and boys and blather, no, no, no, not for you anymore, all those things are for other people, people who aren’t as special as you are. You mean the home where the man who bleached your hair lives. Or doesn’t live, since you’re a ghostie girl. A stupid ghostie girl. You can’t go back. You have to know that by now.”

Nancy raised her head and frowned at Sumi. “Why? Before I went through that doorway, I knew there was no such thing as a portal to another world. Now I know that if you open the right door at the right time, you might finally find a place where you belong. Why does that mean I can’t go back? Maybe I’m just not finished being sure.”

The Lord of the Dead wouldn’t have lied to her, he wouldn’t. He loved her.

He did.

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world,” said Sumi. Her voice was suddenly crystalline and clear, with none of her prior whimsy. She looked at Nancy with calm, steady eyes. “Hope hurts. That’s what you need to learn, and fast, if you don’t want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there’s nothing left. Ely-Eleanor is always saying ‘don’t use this word’ and ‘don’t use that word,’ but she never bans the ones that are really bad. She never bans hope.”

“I just want to go home,” whispered Nancy.

“Silly ghost. That’s all any of us want. That’s why we’re here,” said Sumi. She turned to Nancy’s suitcase and began poking through the clothes. “These are pretty. Too small for me. Why do you have to be so narrow? I can’t steal things that won’t fit, that would be silly, and I’m not getting any smaller here. No one ever does in this world. High Logic is no fun at all.”

“I hate them,” said Nancy. “Take them all. Cut them up and make streamers for your tree, I don’t care, just get them away from me.”

“Because they’re the wrong colors, right? Somebody else’s rainbow.” Sumi bounced off the bed, slamming the suitcase shut and hauling it after her. “Get up, come on. We’re going visiting.”

“What?” Nancy looked after Sumi, bewildered and beaten down. “I’m sorry. I’ve just met you, and I really don’t want to go anywhere with you.”

“Then it’s a good thing I don’t care, isn’t it?” Sumi beamed for a moment, bright as the hated, hated sun, and then she was gone, trotting out the door with Nancy’s suitcase and all of Nancy’s clothes.

Nancy didn’t want those clothes, and for one tempting moment, she considered staying where she was. Then she sighed, and stood, and followed. She had little enough to cling to in this world. And she was eventually going to need clean underpants.

2

BEAUTIFUL BOYS AND GLAMOROUS GIRLS

SUMI WAS RESTLESS, in the way of the living, but even for the living, she was fast. She was halfway down the hall by the time Nancy emerged from the room. At the sound of Nancy’s footsteps, she paused, looking back over her shoulder and scowling at the taller girl.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she scolded. “If dinner catches us without doing what needs done, we’ll miss the scones and jam.”

“Dinner chases you? And you have scones and jam for dinner if it doesn’t catch you?” asked Nancy, bewildered.

“Not usually,” said Sumi. “Not often. Okay, not ever, yet. But it could happen, if we wait long enough, and I don’t want to miss out when it does! Dinners are mostly dull, awful things, all meat and potatoes and things to build healthy minds and bodies. Boring. I bet your dinners with the dead people were a lot more fun.”

“Sometimes,” admitted Nancy. There had been banquets, yes, feasts that lasted weeks, with the tables groaning under the weight of fruits and wines and dark, rich desserts. She had tasted unicorn at one of those feasts, and gone to her bed with a mouth that still tingled from the delicate venom of the horse-like creature’s sweetened flesh. But mostly, there had been the silver cups of pomegranate juice, and the feeling of an empty stomach adding weight to her stillness. Hunger had died quickly in the Underworld. It was unnecessary, and a small price to pay for the quiet, and the peace, and the dances; for everything she’d so fervently enjoyed.

“See? Then you understand the importance of a good dinner,” Sumi started walking again, keeping her steps short in deference to Nancy’s slower stride. “Kade will get you fixed right up, right as rain, right as rabbits, you’ll see. Kade knows where the best things are.”

“Who is Kade? Please, you have to slow down.” Nancy felt like she was running for her life as she tried to keep up with Sumi. The smaller girl’s motions were too fast, too constant for Nancy’s Underworld-adapted eyes to track them properly. It was like following a large hummingbird toward some unknown destination, and she was already exhausted.

“Kade has been here a very-very long time. Kade’s parents don’t want him back.” Sumi looked over her shoulder and twinkled at Nancy. There was no other word to describe her expression, which was a strange combination of wrinkling her nose and tightening the skin around her eyes, all without visibly smiling. “My parents didn’t want me back either, not unless I was willing to be their good little girl again and put all this nonsense about Nonsense aside. They sent me here, and then they died, and now they’ll never want me at all. I’m going to live here always, until Ely-Eleanor has to let me have the attic for my own. I’ll pull taffy in the rafters and give riddles to all the new girls.”

They had reached a flight of stairs. Sumi began bounding up them. Nancy followed more sedately.

“Wouldn’t you get spiders and splinters and stuff in the candy?” she asked.

Sumi rewarded her with a burst of laughter and an actual smile. “Spiders and splinters and stuff!” she crowed. “You’re alliterating already! Oh, maybe we will be friends, ghostie girl, and this won’t be completely dreadful after all. Now come on. We’ve much to do, and time does insist on being linear here, because it’s awful.”

The flight of stairs ended with a landing and another flight of stairs, which Sumi promptly started up, leaving Nancy no choice but to follow. All those days of stillness had made her muscles strong, accustomed to supporting her weight for hours at a time. Some people thought only motion bred strength. Those people were wrong. The mountain was as powerful as the tide, just . . . in a different way. Nancy felt like a mountain as she chased Sumi higher and higher into the house, until her heart was thundering in her chest and her breath was catching in her throat, until she feared that she would choke on it.

Sumi stopped in front of a plain white door marked only with a small, almost polite sign reading KEEP OUT. Grinning, she said, “If he meant that, he wouldn’t say it. He knows that for anyone who’s spent any time at all in Nonsense that, really, he’s issuing an invitation.”

“Why do people around here keep using that word like it’s a place?” asked Nancy. She was starting to feel like she’d missed some essential introductory session about the school, one that would have answered all her questions and left her a little less lost.

“Because it is, and it isn’t, and it doesn’t matter,” said Sumi, and knocked on the attic door before hollering, “We’re coming in!” and shoving it open to reveal what looked like a cross between a used bookstore and a tailor’s shop. Piles of books covered every available surface. The furniture, such as it was—a bed, a desk, a table—appeared to be made from the piles of books, all save for the bookshelves lining the walls. Those, at least, were made of wood, probably for the sake of stability. Bolts of fabric were piled atop the books. They ranged from cotton and muslin to velvet and the finest of thin, shimmering silks. At the center of it all, cross-legged atop a pedestal of paperbacks, sat the most beautiful boy Nancy had ever seen.

His skin was golden tan, his hair was black, and when he looked up—with evident irritation—from the book he was holding, she saw that his eyes were brown and his features were perfect. There was something timeless about him, like he could have stepped out of a painting and into the material world. Then he spoke.

“What’n the fuck are you doing in here again, Sumi?” he demanded, Oklahoma accent thick as peanut butter spread across a slice of toast. “I told you that you weren’t welcome after the last time.”

“You’re just mad because I came up with a better filing system for your books than you could,” said Sumi, sounding unruffled. “Anyway, you didn’t mean it. I am the sunshine in your sky, and you’d miss me if I was gone.”

“You organized them by color, and it took me weeks to figure out where anything was. I’m doing important research up here.” Kade unfolded his legs and slid down from his pile of books. He knocked off a paperback in the process, catching it deftly before it could hit the ground. Then he turned to look at Nancy. “You’re new. I hope she’s not already leading you astray.”

“So far, she’s just led me to the attic,” said Nancy inanely. Her cheeks reddened, and she said, “I mean, no. I’m not so easy to lead places, most of the time.”

“She’s more of a ‘standing really still and hoping nothing eats her’ sort of girl,” said Sumi, and thrust the suitcase toward him. “Look what her parents did.”

Kade raised his eyebrows as he took in the virulent pinkness of the plastic. “That’s colorful,” he said after a moment. “Paint could fix it.”

“Outside, maybe. You can’t paint underpants. Well, you can, but then they come out all stiff, and no one believes you didn’t mess them.” Sumi’s expression sobered for a moment. When she spoke again, it was with a degree of clarity that was almost unnerving, coming from her. “Her parents swapped out her things before they sent her off to school. They knew she wouldn’t like it, and they did it anyway. There was a note.”

“Oh,” said Kade, with sudden understanding. “One of those. All right. Is this going to be a straight exchange, then?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what’s going on,” said Nancy. “Sumi grabbed my suitcase and ran away with it. I don’t want to bother anyone. . . .”

“You’re not bothering me,” said Kade. He took the suitcase from Sumi before turning toward Nancy. “Parents don’t always like to admit that things have changed. They want the world to be exactly the way it was before their children went away on these life-changing adventures, and when the world doesn’t oblige, they try to force it into the boxes they build for us. I’m Kade, by the way. Fairyland.”

“I’m Nancy, and I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“I went to a Fairyland. I spent three years there, chasing rainbows and growing up by inches. I killed a Goblin King with his own sword, and he made me his heir with his dying breath, the Goblin Prince in Waiting.” Kade walked off into the maze of books, still carrying Nancy’s suitcase. His voice drifted back, betraying his location. “The King was my enemy, but he was the first adult to see me clearly in my entire life. The court of the Rainbow Princess was shocked, and they threw me down the next wishing well we passed. I woke up in a field in the middle of Nebraska, back in my ten-year-old body, wearing the dress I’d had on when I first fell into the Prism.” The way he said “Prism” left no question about what he meant: it was a proper name, the title of some strange passage, and his voice ached around that single syllable like flesh aches around a knife.

“I still don’t understand,” said Nancy.

Sumi sighed extravagantly. “He’s saying he fell into a Fairyland, which is sort of like going to a Mirror, only they’re really high Logic pretending to be high Nonsense, it’s quite unfair, there’s rules on rules on rules, and if you break one, wham”—she made a slicing gesture across her throat—“out you go, like last year’s garbage. They thought they had snicker-snatched a little girl—fairies love taking little girls, it’s like an addiction with them—and when they found out they had a little boy who just looked like a little girl on the outside, uh-oh, donesies. They threw him right back.”

“Oh,” said Nancy.

“Yeah,” said Kade, emerging from the maze of books. He wasn’t carrying Nancy’s suitcase anymore. Instead, he had a wicker basket filled with fabric in reassuring shades of black and white and gray. “We had a girl here a few years ago who’d spent basically a decade living in a Hammer film. Black and white everything, flowy, lacy, super-Victorian. Seems like your style. I think I’ve guessed your size right, but if not, feel free to come and let me know that you need something bigger or smaller. I didn’t take you for the corsetry type. Was I wrong?”

“What? Um.” Nancy wrenched her gaze away from the basket. “No. Not really. The boning gets uncomfortable after a day or two. We were more, um, Grecian where I was, I guess. Or Pre-Raphaelite.” She was lying, of course: she knew exactly what the styles had been in her Underworld, in those sweet and silent halls. When she’d gone looking for signs that someone else knew where to find a door, combing through Google and chasing links across Wikipedia, she had come across the works of a painter named Waterhouse, and she’d cried from the sheer relief of seeing people wearing clothes that didn’t offend her eyes.

Kade nodded, understanding in his expression. “I manage the clothing swaps and inventory the wardrobes, but I do custom jobs too,” he said. “You’ll have to pay for those, since they’re a lot more work on my part. I take information as well as cash. You could tell me about your door and where you went, and I could make you a few things that might fit you better.”

Nancy’s cheeks reddened. “I’d like that,” she said.

“Cool. Now get out, both of you. We have dinner in a little while, and I want to finish my book.” Kade’s smile was fleeting. “I never did like to leave a story unfinished.”

*   *   *

SUMI WATCHED NANCY as they walked down the stairs. The taller girl was holding tight to her basket of black and white clothing, cheeks still faintly touched with red. The color seemed almost obscene on her, like it had no business there.

“Do you want to fuck him?”

Nancy almost fell down the stairs.

After she had caught herself on the banister, she turned to Sumi, sputtering and blushing, and said, “No!”

“Are you sure? Because you looked like you did, and then you looked sort of upset, like you’d figured out you didn’t want to after all. Jill—you’ll meet her at dinner—wanted to fuck him until she found out he used to be a girl, and then she called him ‘she’ until Miss Ely said that we respect people’s personal identities here, and then we all had to listen to this weird story about a girl who used to live in the attic who was really a rainbow who’d managed to offend the King of the Sky in one of the Fairylands and got herself kicked out.” Sumi paused to take a breath and added, “That was sort of scary. You never think about people from there winding up here, only people from here winding up there. Maybe the walls are never as impermeable as we think they are.”

“Yes,” said Nancy, recovering her composure. She began walking again. “I’m quite sure I don’t want to . . . have sexual relations with him, and I don’t think his gender expression is any of my business.” She was reasonably sure that was the right way to say things. She’d known the words once, before she left this world, and its problems, behind her. “That’s between him and whoever he does, or doesn’t, decide to get involved with.”

“If you don’t want to do the bing-bang with Kade, I guess I should tell you I’m taken,” said Sumi breezily. “He’s a candy corn farmer from the far reaches of the Kingdom and my one true love, and we’re going to get married someday. Or we would have, if I hadn’t gone and gotten myself exiled. Now he’ll tend his fields alone, and I’ll grow up and decide that he was just a dream, and maybe one day my daughter’s daughter will visit his grave with licorice flowers and a prayer for the departed on her lips.”

Her tone never wavered, not even as she was talking about the death of someone she called her one true love. Nancy gave her a sidelong look, trying to decide how serious she was. It was difficult to tell with Sumi.

They had reached the door to their shared room. Nancy reached a decision at the same time. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re taken or not,” she said, opening the door and walking toward her bed. She put down the basket of clothing. She would need to go through it at more length, to check the fits and fabrics, but it was already an improvement over what she had left behind with Kade. “I don’t do that. With anyone.”

“You’re celibate?”

“No. Celibacy is a choice. I’m asexual. I don’t get those feelings.” She would have thought her lack of sexual desire had been what had drawn her to the Underworld—so many people had called her a “cold fish” and said she was dead inside back when she’d been attending an ordinary high school, among ordinary teenagers, after all—except that none of the people she’d met in those gloriously haunted halls had shared her orientation. They lusted as hotly as the living did. The Lord of the Dead and the Lady of Shadows had spread their ardor throughout the palace, and all had been warmed by its light. Nancy smiled a little at the memory, until she realized Sumi was still watching her. She shook her head. “I just . . . I just don’t. I can appreciate how beautiful someone is, and I can be attracted to them romantically, but that’s as far as it goes with me.”

“Huh,” said Sumi, heading for her own side of the room. Then: “Well, okay. Is it going to bother you if I masturbate?”

“What, right now?” Nancy was unable to keep the horror from her voice. Not at the thought of masturbation—at the idea that this girl she had just met was going to drop her trousers and go to town.

“Um, ew,” said Sumi, wrinkling her nose. “No, I meant in general. Like, late at night, when the lights are low and the moon-mantas are spreading their wings across the sky, and a girl’s fingers might get the urge to go plowing in the fields.”

“Please stop,” said Nancy weakly. “No, I will not be upset if you masturbate. At night. In the dark. Without telling me about it. I have nothing against masturbation. I just don’t want to watch.”

“Neither did my last roommate,” said Sumi, and that seemed to be the end of that, at least as far as she was concerned; she climbed out the window, leaving Nancy alone with her thoughts, the room, and her new wardrobe.

Nancy watched the empty window for almost a minute before she sank onto the bed and put her head in her hands. She’d expected boarding to school to be full of people like her, quiet and serious and eager to go back to the lands they’d left. Not . . . this. Not Sumi, and people slinging around technical terms for things she didn’t understand.

She felt like she was trying to sail her way home without a map. She’d been sent back to the world of her birth to be sure . . . and she’d never been less sure in her life.

*   *   *

DINNER WAS HELD in the downstairs ballroom, a single, vast space made even larger by the polished marble floor and the vaulted cathedral ceiling. Nancy paused in the doorway, daunted by the scope of it, and by the sight of her classmates, who dotted the tables like so many knickknacks. There were seats for a hundred students, maybe more, but there were only forty or so in the room. They were so small, and the space was so big.

“It’s rude and lewd to block the food,” said Sumi, shoving past her. Nancy was knocked off balance and stumbled over the threshold into the ballroom. Silence fell as everyone turned to look at her. Nancy froze. It was the only defense mechanism she had learned from her time among the dead. When she was still, the ghosts couldn’t see her to steal her life away. Stillness was the ultimate protection.

A hand settled on her shoulder. “Ah, Nancy, good,” said Eleanor. “I was hoping I’d run into you before you reached a table. Be a good girl and escort an old woman to her seat.”

Nancy turned her head. Eleanor had changed for dinner, trading electric orange trousers and rainbow sweater for a lovely sheath dress made from tie-dyed muslin. It was shockingly bright. Much like the sun, it hurt Nancy’s eyes. Still, she offered her arm to the older woman, unable to think of anything else that would fit the laws of propriety.

“How are you and Sumi getting on?” asked Eleanor, as they walked toward the tables.

“She’s very . . . abrupt,” said Nancy.

“She lived in high Nonsense for almost ten years subjective time, and much as you learned to be still, she learned never to stop,” said Eleanor. “Stopping is what got people killed where she was. It was very close to where I was, you see, so I understand her better than most. She’s a good girl. She won’t steer you wrong.”

“She took me to meet a boy named Kade,” said Nancy.

“Oh? It’s unusual for her to start making introductions that quickly—unless . . . Did you have trouble with your clothing? Was what you packed not what you found in your suitcase?”

Nancy didn’t say anything. Her reddening cheeks and averted eyes said it all. Eleanor sighed.

“I’ll write your parents and remind them that they agreed to allow me to guide your therapy. We should be able to have whatever they removed from your suitcase mailed here within the month. In the meantime, you can go back to Kade for whatever you need. The dear boy is a whiz with a needle. I really don’t know how we got along without him.”

“Sumi said he’d been to something called a ‘high Logic world’ ? I still don’t understand what any of those words mean. You throw them around like everyone knows them, but they’re all new to me.”

“I know, dear. You’ll have therapy tonight and a proper orientation with Lundy tomorrow, and she’ll explain everything.” Eleanor straightened as they reached the tables, taking her hand from Nancy’s arm. She clapped, twice. All conversation stopped. The students seated there—most with spaces between them, a few in tight conversational knots that left no visible way in—turned to look at her, faces expectant.

“Good evening, everyone,” said Eleanor. “By now, some of you have doubtlessly heard that we have a new student with us. This is Nancy. She’ll be rooming with Sumi until one of them attempts to murder the other. If you’d like to place a bet on who kills who, please talk to Kade.”

Laughter from the girls—and they were overwhelmingly girls, Nancy realized. Apart from Kade, who was sitting by himself with his nose buried in a book, there were only three boys in the entire group. It seemed odd for a coed school to be so unbalanced. She didn’t say anything. Eleanor had promised her an orientation, and maybe everything would be explained there, making questions unnecessary.

“Nancy is still adjusting to being back in this world after her travels, so please be gentle with her for the first few days, even as all of us were gentle with you, once upon a time.” There was a thin line of steel in Eleanor’s words. “When she’s ready to join in with the hurly-burly and the cheerful malice, she’ll let you know. Now, eat up, all of you, even though you may not want to. We are in a material place. Blood flows in your veins. Try to keep it there.” She stepped away from Nancy, leaving her anchorless as she walked away.

Dinner was set up buffet-style along one wall. Nancy drifted over to it, recoiling from the braising dishes of meat and baked vegetables. They would sit like stones in her stomach, too heavy and unforgiving to tolerate. In the end, she filled a plate with grapes, slices of melon, and a scoop of cottage cheese. Picking up a glass of cranberry juice, she turned to consider the tables.

She’d been good at this, once. She’d never been one of the most popular girls in her high school, but she’d understood the game enough to play it, and play it well, to read the temperature of a room and find the safe shallows, where the currents of mean-girl intensity wouldn’t wash her away, but where she wouldn’t risk drowning in the brackish tide pools of the outcasts and the unwanted. She remembered a time when it had mattered so much. Sometimes she wished she knew how to get back to the girl who’d cared about such things. Other times, she was grateful beyond words that she couldn’t.

The boys, except for Kade, were all sitting together, blowing bubbles in their milk and laughing. No; not them. One group had formed around a girl who was so dazzlingly beautiful that Nancy’s eyes refused to focus on her face; another had formed around a punch bowl filled with candy-pink liquid from which they all furtively sipped. Neither looked welcoming. Nancy looked around until she found the only safe harbor she was likely to see, and started in that direction.

Sumi was sitting across from a pair of girls who couldn’t have looked more different—or more alike. Her plate was piled high with no concern for what touched what. Gravy-covered melon slices cascaded into roast beef coated in jam. The sight of it made Nancy’s stomach flip, but she still put her plate down next to Sumi’s, cleared her throat, and asked the ritual question:

“Is this seat taken?”

“Sumi was just explaining how you’re the most boring cardboard parody of a girl ever to walk this world or any other, and we should all feel sorry for you,” said one of the strangers, adjusting her glasses as she turned to look at Nancy. “That makes you sound like my kind of person. Please, sit, and relieve some of the tedium of our table.”

“Thank you,” said Nancy, and settled.

The strangers wore the same face in remarkably different ways. It was amazing how a little eyeliner and a downcast expression, or a pair of wire-framed glasses and a steely gaze could transform what should have been identical into something distinct and individual. They both had long blonde hair, freckles across the bridges of their noses, and narrow shoulders. One was dressed in a white button-down shirt, jeans, and a black vest that managed to come across as old-fashioned and fashion-forward at the same time; her hair was tied back, no-nonsense and no frills. Her only adornment was a bow tie patterned with tiny biohazard symbols. The other wore a flowing pink dress with a low-cut bodice and a truly astonishing number of lace flourishes. Her hair hung in loose curls the size of soup cans, gathered at the back with a single pink ribbon. A matching ribbon was tied around her neck, like a makeshift choker. Both appeared to be in their late teens, with eyes that were much older.

“I’m Jack, short for Jacqueline,” said the one in the glasses. She pointed to the one in pink. “This is Jill, short for Jillian, because our parents should never have been allowed to name their own children. You’re Nancy.”

“Yes,” said Nancy, unsure of how else she was expected to respond. “It’s nice to meet you both.”

Jill, who otherwise had neither moved nor spoken since Nancy approached the table, turned her eyes toward Nancy’s plate and said, “You aren’t eating much. Are you on a diet?”

“No, not really. I just . . .” Nancy hesitated before shaking her head and saying, “My stomach’s upset from the trip and the stress and everything.”

“Am I the stress, or am I everything?” asked Sumi, picking up a jam-sticky piece of meat and popping it in her mouth. Around it, she continued, “I guess I could be both. I’m flexible.”

“I’m on a diet,” said Jill proudly. Her plate contained nothing but the rarest strips of roast, some of them so red and bloody that they were virtually raw. “I eat meat every other day and spinach the rest of the time. My blood is so iron-rich you could set a compass by it.”

“That’s, um, very nice,” said Nancy, looking to Sumi for help. She’d known girls on diets her entire life. Iron-rich blood had rarely, if ever, been their goal. Most of them had been looking for smaller waists, clearer complexions, and richer boyfriends, spurred on by a deeply ingrained self-loathing that had been manufactured for them before they were old enough to understand the kind of quicksand they were sinking in.

Sumi swallowed. “Jack and Jill went up the hill, to watch a bit of slaughter, Jack fell down and broke her crown, and Jill came tumbling after.”

Jack looked long-suffering. “I hate that rhyme.”

“And that’s not what happened at all,” said Jill. She turned to beam at Nancy. “We went to a very nice place, where we met very nice people who loved us very much. But there was a little problem with the local constabulary, and we had to come back to this world for a while, for our own safety.”

“What have I told you about abusing the word ‘very’ ?” asked Jack. She sounded tired.

“Jack and Jill are more stupid, stupid girls,” said Sumi. She stabbed a slice of melon with her fork, splashing gravy on the table. “They think they’re going back, but they’re not. Those doors are closed now. Can’t go high Logic, high Wicked if you’re not innocent. The Wicked doesn’t want people it can’t spoil.”

“I don’t understand anything you people say,” said Nancy. “Logic? Nonsense? Wicked? What do those things even mean?”

“They’re directions, or the next best thing,” said Jack. She leaned forward, dragging her index finger through the wet ring left by the base of a glass and using the moisture to draw a cross on the table. “Here in the so-called ‘real world,’ you have north, south, east, and west, right? Those don’t work for most of the portal worlds we’ve been able to catalog. So we use other words. Nonsense, Logic, Wickedness, and Virtue. There are smaller subdirections, little branches that may or may not go anywhere, but those four are the big ones. Most worlds are either high Nonsense or high Logic, and then they have some degree of Wickedness or Virtue built into their foundations from there. A surprising number of Nonsense worlds are Virtuous. It’s like they can’t work up the attention span necessary for anything more vicious than a little mild naughtiness.”

Jill gave Nancy a sidelong look. “Did that help at all?”

“Not really,” said Nancy. “I never thought that . . . You know, I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland when I was a kid, and I never thought about what it would be like for Alice when she went back to where she’d started. I figured she’d just shrug and get over it. But I can’t do that. Every time I close my eyes, I’m back in my real bed, in my real room, and all of this is the dream.”

“It isn’t home anymore, is it?” asked Jill gently. Nancy shook her head, blinking back tears. Jill reached across the table to pat her hand. “It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less. How long has it been for you?”

“Just under two months.” Seven weeks, four days since the Lord of the Dead had told her she needed to be sure. Seven weeks, four days since the door to her chambers had opened on the basement she’d left behind so long before, in the house she thought she’d left behind forever. Seven weeks, four days since her screaming had alerted her parents to an intruder and they had come pounding down the steps, only to sweep her into an unwanted embrace, bawling about how upset they’d been when she had disappeared.

She’d been gone for six months, from their perspective. One month for each of the pomegranate seeds that Persephone had eaten, back at the beginning of things. Years for her, and months for them. They still thought she was dyeing her hair. They still thought she was eventually going to tell them where she’d been.

They still thought a lot of things.

“It gets better,” repeated Jill. “It’s been a year and a half, for us. But we don’t lose hope. I keep my iron levels up. Jack has her experiments—”

Jack didn’t say anything. She just stood and walked away from the table, leaving her half-eaten dinner behind.

“We’re not cleaning up after you!” shouted Sumi, around a mouthful of food.

In the end, of course, they did. There was really no other option.

3

BIRDS OF A FEATHER

ACCORDING TO WHAT Nancy’s parents had told her about the school, the mandatory group therapy had been one of the big selling points. What better way to bring their teenage daughter back from whatever strange hole she’d crawled into than having her sit and talk to people who’d suffered similar traumas, all under the watchful eye of a trained professional? As she sank into the embrace of a thickly padded armchair, surrounded by teens who twitched, chewed their hair, or stared moodily off into space without speaking, she had to wonder what they would have thought of the reality.

Then the eight-year-old walked into the room.

She was dressed like a middle-aged librarian, wearing a pencil skirt and a white blouse, both of which were much too old for her. Her hair was pulled back into a tight, no-nonsense bun. The overall effect was of a child playing dress-up in her mother’s closet. Nancy sat up straighter. The school’s brochures had mentioned an age range of twelve to nineteen, allowing both the precocious and those who needed a little time to catch up to attend. It hadn’t said anything about children under the age of ten.

The girl stopped at the center of the room, turning to look at each of them in turn. One by one, the fidgeters became still; the hair chewers stopped chewing; even Sumi, who’d been doing an elaborate cat’s-cradle with a piece of yarn, lowered her hands and sat quietly. The girl smiled.

“For those of you who’ve been here for a while, welcome to Wednesday night group. We’re going to be sharing with the high Wicked visitors tonight, but as always, the discussion is open to all.” Her voice matched her body. Her tone was older, cadenced like an adult woman’s, rendered high and strange by her prepubescent vocal cords. She looked at Nancy as she continued. “For those of you who are new here, my name is Lundy, and I am a fully licensed therapist with a specialization in child psychology. I’m going to be helping you through your recovery process.”

Nancy stared. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.

As Lundy walked over to the one remaining chair, Kade leaned over and murmured, “She’s one of us, only she went to a high Logic, high Wicked world where they kicked visitors out on their eighteenth birthdays. She didn’t want to leave, so she asked one of the local apothecaries to help her. This was the result. Eternal childhood.”

“Not eternal, Mr. Bronson,” said Lundy sharply. Kade sat up and settled back in his own chair, shrugging unapologetically. Lundy sighed. “You would have gotten this at your orientation, Miss, ah . . .?”

“Whitman,” said Nancy.

“Miss Whitman,” said Lundy. “As I was saying, you would have gotten this at your orientation, but: I’m not living out an eternal childhood. I’m aging in reverse, growing one week younger for every month that passes. I’ll live a long, long time. Longer, maybe, than I would have had I continued aging in the usual way. But they threw me out anyway, because I had broken the rules. I’ll never marry, or have a family of my own, and my daughters will never find their way to the door that once led me to the Goblin Market. So I suppose I’ve learnt the danger of making importune bargains with the fae, and can now serve as a warning to others. I am still, however, your therapist. It’s amazing, the degrees you can get over the Internet these days.”

“I’m sorry,” whispered Nancy.

Lundy waved a hand as she sat, dismissing Nancy’s apology. “It’s no matter, honestly. Everyone finds out eventually. Now. Who wants to share first?”

Nancy sat in silence as the other students talked. Not all of them: slightly less than half seemed to have been to a world that fell on the “Wicked” side of the compass, or maybe that was just the number who felt like sharing. Jill recited an impassioned paean to the moors and wind-racked hills of the world she’d gone to with her sister, while Jack only muttered something about burning windmills and the importance of fire safety in laboratory settings.

A girl with hair the color of moonlight on wheat stared at her hands while she talked about boys made of glass whose kisses had cut her lips but whose hearts had been kind and true. The girl who was too beautiful to look at directly said something about Helen of Troy, and half the room laughed, but not because it was funny; because she was so beautiful that they wanted nothing more than they wanted her to like them.

Kade made a brief, bitter speech about how Wickedness and Virtue were just labels and didn’t mean anything; the world he’d been to was labeled “Virtue” on all the maps, but it had still cast him out as soon as it realized what he was.

Finally, silence fell, and Nancy realized everyone was looking at her. She shrank back in her seat. “I don’t know if the place I went was wicked or not,” she said. “It never seemed wicked to me. It always seemed . . . kind, at the root of things. Yes, there were rules, and yes, there were punishments if you broke them, but they were never unfair, and the Lord of the Dead took good care of everyone who served in his halls. I don’t think it was wicked at all.”

“How can you be sure, though?” asked Sumi, and her voice was gentle, underneath her jeering tone. “You can’t even say Wicked right. Maybe it was evil to the core, filled with wiggling worms and bad stuff, and you couldn’t see it.” She slanted a glance toward Jill, almost as if she were checking the other girl’s reaction. Jill, whose eyes were fixed on Nancy, didn’t appear to notice. “You shouldn’t close doors just because you don’t like what’s on the other side.”

“I know because I know,” said Nancy doggedly. “I didn’t go anyplace bad. I went home.”

“That’s the thing people forget when they start talking about things in terms of good and evil,” said Jack, turning to look at Lundy. She adjusted her glasses as she continued, “For us, the places we went were home. We didn’t care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world.”

“And on that note, I suppose we’re done for the evening.” Lundy stood. Nancy realized with a start that somewhere in the middle of the session, she’d started thinking of the little girl as an adult woman. It was the way she carried herself: too mature for the body she inhabited, too weary for the face she wore. “Thank you, everyone. Miss Whitman, I’ll see you tomorrow morning for orientation. Everyone else, I’ll see you tomorrow evening, when we’ll be speaking to those who have traveled to the high Logic worlds. Remember, only by learning about the journeys of others can we truly understand our own.”

“Oh, lovely,” muttered Jack. “I do so love being in the hot seat two nights running.”

Lundy ignored her, walking calmly out of the room. As soon as she was gone, Eleanor appeared in the doorway, all smiles.

“All right, my crumpets, it’s time for good little girls and boys to go to bed,” she said, and clapped her hands. “Off you go. Dream sweetly, try not to sleepwalk, and please don’t wake me up at midnight trying to force a portal to manifest in the downstairs pantry. It isn’t going to happen.”

The students rose and scattered, some moving off in pairs, others going alone. Sumi went out the window, and no one commented on her disappearance.

Nancy walked back to her room, pleased to find it bathed in moonlight and filled with silence. She disrobed, garbed herself in a white nightgown from the pile Kade had given her, and stretched out on her bed, lying atop the covers. She closed her eyes, slowed her breathing, and slipped into sweet, motionless sleep, her first day done, and her future yet ahead of her.

*   *   *

ORIENTATION WITH LUNDY the next morning was odd, to say the least. It was held in a small room that had been a study once, before it had been filled with blackboards and the smell of chalk dust. Lundy stood at the center of it all, one hand resting on a wheeled stepladder, which she moved from blackboard to blackboard as the need to climb up and point to some complicated diagram arose. The need seemed to arise with dismaying frequency. Nancy sat very still in the room’s single chair, her head spinning as she struggled to keep up.

Lundy’s explanation of the cardinal directions of portals had been, if anything, less helpful than Jack’s, and had involved a lot more diagrams, and some offhanded comments about minor directions, like Whimsy and Wild. Nancy had bitten her tongue to keep from asking any questions. She was deeply afraid that Lundy would attempt to answer them, and then her head might actually explode.

Finally, Lundy stopped and looked expectantly at Nancy. “Well?” she asked. “Do you have any questions, Miss Whitman?”

About a million, and all of them wanted to be asked at once, even the ones she didn’t want to ask at all. Nancy took a deep breath and started with what seemed to be the easiest: “Why are there so many more girls here than boys?”

“Because ‘boys will be boys’ is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Lundy. “They’re too loud, on the whole, to be easily misplaced or overlooked; when they disappear from the home, parents send search parties to dredge them out of swamps and drag them away from frog ponds. It’s not innate. It’s learned. But it protects them from the doors, keeps them safe at home. Call it irony, if you like, but we spend so much time waiting for our boys to stray that they never have the opportunity. We notice the silence of men. We depend upon the silence of women.”

“Oh,” said Nancy. It made sense, in its terrible way. Most of the boys she’d known were noisy creatures, encouraged to be so by their parents and friends. Even when they were naturally quiet, they forced themselves to be loud, to avoid censure and mockery. How many of them could have slipped through an old wardrobe or into a rabbit’s den and simply disappeared without sending up a thousand alarms? They would have been found and dragged back home before they reached the first enchanted mirror or climbed the first forbidden tower.

“We’ve always been open to male students; we just don’t get many.”

“Everyone here . . . everyone seems to want to go back.” Nancy paused, struggling with the question that was trying to form. Finally, she asked, “How is it that everyone wants to go back? I thought people who went through this sort of thing mostly just wanted to go back to their old lives and forget that they’d ever known anything else.”

“This isn’t the only school, of course,” said Lundy. She smiled at Nancy’s surprise. “What, you thought Miss West could sweep up every child who’d ever stumbled into a painting and discovered a magical world on the other side? It happens all over the world, you know. The language barriers alone would make it impossible, as would the expense. There are two schools in North America, this campus and our sister school in Maine. That’s where the students who hated their travels go, to learn how to move on. How to forget.”

“So we’re here to do . . . what?” asked Nancy. “Learn how to dwell? Eleanor dresses like she’s still living on the other side of the mirror. Sumi is . . .” She didn’t have the words for what Sumi was. She stopped speaking.

“Sumi is a classic example of someone who embraced life in a high Nonsense world,” said Lundy. “She can’t be blamed for what it made of her, any more than you can be blamed for the way you seem to stop breathing when no one’s looking at you. She’s going to need a lot of work before she’s ready to face the world outside again, and she has to want to do it. That’s what determines which school is better for you: the wanting. You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it’s better than admitting the journey’s over. We don’t teach you how to dwell. We also don’t teach you how to forget. We teach you how to move on.”

There was one more question that needed to be asked, a question bigger and more painful than all the questions before it. Nancy closed her eyes for a moment, allowing herself to sink into stillness. Then she opened them and asked, “How many of us have gone back?”

Lundy sighed. “Every student I’ve given this orientation to has asked that question. The answer is, we don’t know. Some people, like Eleanor—like me—go back over and over again before we wind up staying in one world or the other for good. Others only take one trip in their lives. If your parents choose to withdraw you, or if you choose to withdraw yourself, we’ll have no way of knowing what becomes of you. I know of three students who have returned to the worlds they left behind. Two were high Logic, both Fairylands. The third was high Nonsense. An Underworld, like the one you visited—although not the same, I’m afraid. That one was accessed by walking through a special mirror, under the full moon. The girl we lost to that world was home for the holidays when the door opened for her a second time. Her mother broke the glass after she went through. We learned later that the mother had also been there—it was a generational portal—and had wanted to spare her daughter the pain of returning.”

“Oh,” said Nancy, in a very small voice.

“The chances are, Miss Whitman, that you’ll live out your days in this world. You may tell people of your adventures, when they’re more distant, and when speaking of them hurts somewhat less. Many of our graduates have found that sort of sharing to be both cathartic and lucrative. People do so love a good fantasy.” Lundy’s expression was sorrowful but kind, like that of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis. “I won’t stand here and say the door is closed forever, because there’s no way of being sure. But I will tell you the odds were against you going in the first place, and that those same odds are against you now. They say lightning never strikes twice. Well, you’re far more likely to be struck repeatedly by lightning than you are to find a second door.”

“Oh,” said Nancy again.

“I’m sorry.” Then Lundy smiled, ridiculously bright. “Welcome to school, Miss Whitman. We hope that we can make you better.”

PART II

WITH YOUR LOOKING-GLASS EYES

4

LIGHTNING TO KISS THE SKY

THE BUILDING WAS BIGGER than its population, filled with empty rooms and silent spaces. But all of them felt like they harbored the ghosts of the students who had tried—and failed—to find their way back to the worlds that had rejected them, and so Nancy fled to the outside. She hated to rush, but the sun burnt so badly that she actually ran for the deepest copse of trees she could find, shielding her eyes with her arm. She flung herself into the welcome shade of the grove, blinking back tears brought on as much by the light as by her dismay. Setting her back to an ancient oak, she sank to the ground, buried her face against her knees, and settled into perfect stillness as she wept.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” The voice belonged to Jill, soft and wistful and filled with painful understanding. Nancy raised her head. The gossamer blonde was perched on a tree root, her pale lavender gown arranged to drape just so around her slender frame, a parasol resting against her left shoulder and blocking the sun that filtered down through the branches. Her choker today was deep purple, the color of elderberry wine.

“I’m sorry,” said Nancy, wiping away her tears with slow swipes of her hand. “I didn’t know there was anyone here.”

“It’s the shadiest spot on the grounds. I’m impressed, actually. It took me weeks to find the place.” Jill’s smile was kind. “I wasn’t trying to say you should leave. I just meant, well, it’s hard being here, surrounded by all these people who went to their pastel dream worlds full of sunshine and rainbows. They don’t understand us.”

“Um,” said Nancy, glancing at Jill’s pastel gown.

Jill laughed. “I don’t wear these because I want to remember where I’ve been. I wear them because the Master liked it when I dressed in pale colors. They showed the blood better. Isn’t that why you wear white? Because your Master liked to see you that way?”

“I . . .” Nancy stopped. “He wasn’t my master, he was my Lord, and my teacher, and he loved me. I wear black and white because color is reserved for the Lady of Shadows and her entourage. I’d like to join them someday, if I can prove myself, but until then, I’m supposed to serve as a statue, and statues should blend in. Standing out is for people who’ve earned it.” She touched the pomegranate ribbon in her hair—and one piece of color she had earned—before asking, “You had a . . . master?”

“Yes.” Jill’s smile was bright enough to replace the blocked-away sun. “He was good to me. Gave me treats and trinkets and told me I was beautiful, even when I wasn’t feeling well. Jack spent all her time locked away with her precious doctor, learning things that weren’t ladylike or appropriate in the least, but I stayed in the high towers with the Master, and he taught me so many beautiful things. So many beautiful, wonderful things.”

“I’m sorry you wound up back here,” said Nancy.

Jill’s smile died. She flapped a hand like she was trying to wave Nancy’s words away, and said, “This isn’t forever. The Master wanted to be rid of Jack. She didn’t deserve what we had. So he arranged things so a door would open back to our world, and I stumbled and fell through after her. He’ll find a way to open a door back to me. You’ll see.” She stood, spinning her parasol. “Excuse me. I have to go.” Then she turned, not waiting for Nancy to say good-bye, and walked briskly away.

“And that, children, is why sometimes we don’t let the Addams twins out into the general population,” said a voice. Nancy looked up. Kade, who was seated on one of the tree’s higher branches, waved sardonically down at her. “Hello, Nancy out of Wonderland. If you were looking for a private place to cry, you chose poorly.”

“I didn’t think anyone would be out here,” she said.

“Because back at home, the other kids were more likely to hide in their rooms than they were to go running for the outdoors, right?” Kade closed his book. “The trouble is, you’re at a school for people who never learned how to make the logical choice. So we go running for the tallest trees and the deepest holes whenever we want to be alone, and since there’s a limited number of those, we wind up spending a lot of time together. I take it from the crying that your orientation didn’t go well. Let me guess. Lundy told you about lightning striking twice.”

Nancy nodded. She didn’t speak. She no longer trusted her voice.

“She has a point, if your world kicked you out.”

“It didn’t kick me out,” protested Nancy. She could still speak, after all, when she really needed to. “I was sent back to learn something, that’s all. I’m going back.”

Kade looked at her sympathetically and didn’t contradict her. “Prism is never taking me back,” he said instead. “That’s not a nonstarter, that’s a never-gonna-happen. I violated their rules when I wasn’t what they wanted me to be, and the people who run that particular circus are very picky about rules. But Eleanor went back a bunch of times. Her door’s still open.”

“How . . . I mean, why . . .” Nancy shook her head. “Why did she stop? If her door is still open, why is she here, with us, and not there, where she belongs?”

Kade swung his legs around so they were braced on the same side of the branch. Then he dropped down from the tree, landing easily in front of Nancy. He straightened, saying, “This was a long time ago, and her parents were still alive. She thought she could have it all, go back and forth, spend as much time as possible in her real home without breaking her father’s heart. But she forgot that adults don’t thrive in Nonsense, even when they’re raised to it. Every time she came back here, she got a little older. Until one day she went back there, and it nearly broke her. Can you imagine what that must have been like? It would be like opening the door that was supposed to take you home and discovering you couldn’t breathe the air anymore.”

“That sounds horrible,” said Nancy.

“I guess it was.” Kade sank down to sit, cross-legged, across from her. “Of course, she’d already spent enough time in Nonsense for it to have changed her. It slowed her aging—that’s probably why she was able to keep going for as long as she did. Jack checked the record books the last time we had an excursion to town, and she found out Eleanor was almost a hundred. I always figured she was in her sixties. I asked her about it, and you know what she told me?”

“What?” asked Nancy, fascinated and horrified at the same time. Had the Underworld changed more than just her hair? Was she going to stay the same, immortal and unchanging, while everything around her withered and died?

“She said she’s just waiting to get senile, like her mother and father did, because once her mind slips enough, she’ll be able to tolerate the Nonsense again. She’s going to run this school until she forgets why she isn’t going back, and then, when she does go back, she’ll be able to stay.” He shook his head. “I can’t decide if it’s genius or madness.”

“Maybe it’s a little bit of both,” said Nancy. “I’d do anything to go home.”

“Most of the students here would,” said Kade bitterly.

Nancy hesitated before she said, “Lundy said there was a sister school for people who didn’t want to go back. People who wanted to forget. Why are you enrolled here, instead of there? You might be happier.”

“But you see, I don’t want to forget,” said Kade. “I’m the loophole kid. I want to remember Prism more than anything. The way the air tasted, and the way the music sounded. Everyone played these funky pipes there, even little kids. Lessons started when you were, like, two, and it was another way of communicating. You could have whole conversations without putting down your pipes. I grew up there, even if I wound up getting tossed out and forced to do it all over again. I figured out who I was there. I kissed a girl with hair the color of cabbages and eyes the color of moth-wings, and she kissed me back, and it was wonderful. Just because I wouldn’t go back if you paid me, that doesn’t mean I want to forget a second of what happened to me. I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t gone to Prism.”

“Oh,” said Nancy. It made sense, of course, it was just an angle she hadn’t considered. She shook her head. “This is all so much more complicated than I ever expected it to be.”

“Tell me about it, princess.” Kade stood, offering her his hand. “Come on. I’ll walk you back to school.”

Nancy hesitated before reaching up and taking the offered hand, letting Kade pull her to her feet. “All right,” she said.

“You’re pretty when you smile,” said Kade as he led her out of the trees, back toward the main building. Nancy couldn’t think of anything to say in response to that, and so she didn’t say anything at all.

*   *   *

CORE CLASSES WERE SURPRISINGLY dull, taught as they were by an assortment of adults who drove in from the town, Lundy, and Miss Eleanor herself. Nancy got the distinct feeling that someone had a chart showing exactly what was required by the state and that they were all receiving the educational equivalent of a balanced meal.

The electives were slightly better, including music, art, and something called “A Traveler’s History of the Great Compass,” which Nancy guessed had something to do with the various portal worlds and their relations to one another. After hesitantly considering her options, she had signed up. Maybe something in the syllabus would tell her more about where her Underworld fell.

After reading the introductory chapters of her home-printed textbook, she was still confused. The most common directions were Nonsense, usually paired with Virtue, and Logic, usually paired with Wicked. Sumi’s madhouse of a world was high Nonsense. Kade’s Prism was high Logic. With those as her touchstones, Nancy had decided that her Underworld was likely to have been Logic; it had consistent rules and expected them to be followed. But she couldn’t see why it should really be considered Wicked just because it was ruled by the Lord of the Dead. Virtue seemed more likely. Her first actual class was scheduled for two days’ time. It was too long to wait. It was no time at all.

By the end of her first day, she was exhausted, and her head felt like it had been stuffed well beyond any reasonable capacity, spinning with both mundane things like math and history, and with the ever-increasing vocabulary needed to talk to her fellow students. One, a shy girl with brown braids and thick glasses, had confessed that her world was at the nexus of two minor compass directions, being high Rhyme and high Linearity. Nancy hadn’t known what to say to that, and so she hadn’t said anything at all. Increasingly, that felt like the safest option she had.

Sumi was sitting on her bed, braiding bits of bright ribbon into her hair, when Nancy slipped into the room. “Tired as a titmouse at a bacchanal, little ghostie?” she asked.

“I don’t know what you mean, so I’m going to assume you want to be taken at face value,” said Nancy. “Yes. I am very tired. I’m going to bed.”

“Ely-Eleanor thought you might be tired,” said Sumi. “New girls always are. She said you can skip group tonight, but you can’t make a habit of it. Words are an important part of the healing process. Words, words, words.” She wrinkled her nose. “She asked me to remember so many of them, and all in the order she gave, and all for you. You’re not Nonsense at all, are you, ghostie? You wouldn’t want so many words if you were.”

“I’m sorry,” said Nancy. “I never said I was from . . . a place like you went to visit.”

“Assumptions will be the death of all, and you’re better than most of the roommates she’s tried to give me; I’ll keep you,” said Sumi wearily. She stood, walking toward the door. “Sleep well, ghostie. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Wait!” Nancy hadn’t intended to speak; the word had simply escaped her lips, like a runaway calf. The thought horrified her. Her stillness was eroding, and if she stayed in this dreadful, motile world too long, she would never be able to get it back again.

Sumi turned to face her, cocking her head. “What do you want now?”

“I just wanted to know—I mean, I was just wondering—how old are you?”

“Ah.” Sumi turned again, finishing her walk toward the door. Then, facing into the hall, she said, “Older than I look, younger than I ought to be. My skin is a riddle not to be solved, and even letting go of everything I love won’t offer me the answer. My window is closing, if that’s what you’re asking. Every day I wake up a little more linear, a little less lost, and one day I’ll be one of the women who says ‘I had the most charming dream,’ and I’ll mean it. Old enough to know what I’m losing in the process of being found. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“No,” said Nancy.

“Too bad,” said Sumi, and left the room. She closed the door behind herself.

Nancy undressed alone, letting her clothes fall to the floor, until she stood naked in front of the room’s single silver mirror. The electric light was harsh against her skin. She flipped the switch, and smiled to see her reflection transmuted into the purest marble, becoming unyielding, unbending stone. She stood there, frozen, for almost an hour before she finally felt like she could sleep, and slid, still naked, between her sheets.

She woke to a room full of sunlight and the sound of screaming.

Screams had not been not uncommon in the Halls of the Dead. There was an art to decoding their meaning: screams of pleasure, screams of pain, screams of sheer boredom in the face of an uncaring eternity. These were screams of panic and fear. Nancy rolled out of her bed in an instant, grabbing her nightgown from where it lay discarded at the foot of the bed and yanking it on over her head. She didn’t feel like running into potential danger while completely exposed. She didn’t feel like running anywhere, but the screams were still happening, and it seemed like the appropriate thing to do.

Sumi’s bed was empty. The thought that Sumi could be the screamer crossed Nancy’s mind as she ran, but was quickly dismissed. Sumi was not a screamer. Sumi was a reason for other people to scream.

Half a dozen girls were clustered in the hallway, forming an unbreakable wall of flannel and silk. Nancy pushed her way into their midst and stopped, freezing in place. It was a stillness so absolute, so profound, that she would have been proud of herself under any other circumstances. As it was, this felt less like proper stillness and more like the freeze of a rabbit when faced with the promise of a snake.

Sumi was the cause of the screaming: that much was clear. She was slumped limply against the base of the wall, eyes closed. She wasn’t breathing, and her hands—her clever, never-still hands—were gone, severed at the wrists. She would never tie another knot or weave another cat’s cradle out of yarn. Someone had stolen that from her. Someone had stolen everything from her.

“Oh,” whispered Nancy, and the sound was like a stone dropped into a still pool: small, but creating ripples that touched everything in their path. One of the girls whirled and ran, shouting for Miss Eleanor. Another began to sob, pressing her back to the wall and sinking down to the floor until she looked like a cruel parody of Sumi. Nancy thought about telling her to get up and decided against it. What did she know of grief in the face of death? All the dead people she’d ever met had been perfectly pleasant and not overly inconvenienced by the fact that they no longer had material bodies. Maybe Sumi would find her way to the Underworld and be able to tell the Lord of the Dead that Nancy was still trying to be sure, so that she could come back. He would be pleased, Nancy was sure, to hear that she was trying.

Belatedly, Nancy realized that it might look suspicious, her roommate dying when she had just arrived from the Underworld—maybe they would assume she preferred the dead to the living, or that Eleanor’s comments about them killing each other had been warnings—but since she hadn’t touched Sumi, she decided not to worry about it. There were better things to worry about, like Eleanor, now hurrying along the hall, flanked by the girl who’d run to fetch her on one side and by Lundy on the other. Lundy was wearing a grandmotherly flannel nightgown, with curlers in her hair. It should have looked ridiculous. Somehow, it just looked sad.

The girls parted to let Eleanor through. She stopped a few feet from Sumi, pressing one hand over her mouth, her eyes filling with tears. “Oh, my poor girl,” she murmured, kneeling to press her fingers to the side of Sumi’s neck. It was just a formality: she had clearly been dead for quite some time. “Who did this to you? Who could have done this to you?”

Nancy was somehow unsurprised when several of the girls turned to look at her. She was new; she had been touched by the dead. She didn’t protest her innocence. She just held up her hands, showing them the pale, unblemished skin. There was no way she could have washed the blood away so completely in one of their shared bathrooms, not without being seen. Even in the middle of the night, the amount of scrubbing required to get the blood from under her fingernails would have attracted attention, and she would have been undone.

“Leave poor Nancy alone; she didn’t do this,” said Eleanor. She wiped her eyes before offering her arm to Lundy, who helped her up. “No daughter of the Underworld would kill someone who hadn’t earned their place in those hallowed halls, isn’t that right, Nancy? She might be a murderess someday, but not on the basis of two days’ acquaintance.” Her tone was leaden with sorrow but perfectly matter-of-fact at the same time, as if the idea that Nancy might someday start mowing her friends down like wheat was of no real concern.

In the here and now, Nancy supposed that it wasn’t. She watched dully as Lundy produced a sheet from somewhere—linen closets, there had to be linen closets in a house this large—and covered Sumi’s body. The blood from Sumi’s stumps soaked through the fabric almost instantly, but it was still a little bit better than looking at the motionless girl with the ribbons in her hair.

“What happened?”

Nancy glanced to the side. Jack had appeared next to her, the collar of her shirt open and her bow tie hanging untied on the left. She looked unfinished. “If you don’t know what happened, why are you here?” It occurred to Nancy that she didn’t know where Jack’s room was, and she amended, “Unless this is your hall.”

“No, Jill and I sleep in the basement. It’s more comfortable for us, all things considered.” She adjusted her glasses, squinting at the red blotches on the sheet. “That’s blood. Who’s under the sheet?”

The girl with the brown braids from the Rhyme and Linearity world turned to glare at Jack. There was pure hatred in her gaze, enough that Nancy took an involuntary step backward. “Like you don’t know, you murderer,” she spat. “You did this, didn’t you? This is just like what happened to Angela’s guinea pig. You can’t keep your hands or your scalpels to yourself.”

“I told you, it was a cultural mix-up,” said Jack. “The guinea pig was in a common area, and I thought it was supposed to be for anyone who wanted it.”

“It was a pet,” snapped the girl.

Jack shrugged helplessly. “I offered to put it back together. Angela declined.”

“New girl.” The voice was Kade’s. Nancy looked over to see him nodding toward her room. “Why don’t you take that Addams and show her your room? I’ll try to intercept the other one before she can show up and start trouble.”

“Anything to avoid another angry mob with torches,” said Jack, seizing Nancy’s hand. “Show me your room.”

It sounded like a command rather than a request. Nancy didn’t argue. Under the circumstances, getting Jack out of sight and hence hopefully out of mind seemed much more important than forcing the other girl to ask nicely. She turned and hauled Jack to her door, still ajar after her hurried exit, and then inside.

Jack let go of Nancy’s hand as soon as they were inside, producing a handkerchief from her pocket and wiping her fingers. Her cheeks reddened when she saw Nancy’s startled look. “Difficult as it may be to believe, none of us escaped our travels unscathed, not even me,” she said. “I am perhaps a bit too aware of the natural world and its many wonders. A lot of those wonders would like nothing more than to melt the skin off your body. All those people in their creepy labs hooking dead bodies up to funky wires? There’s a reason they usually wear gloves.”

“I don’t really understand what the world you traveled to was like,” said Nancy. “Sumi’s world was all about candy and not making any sense at all, and Kade went to a war or something, but the world you describe and the world Jill describes barely seem to match up.”

“That’s because the worlds we experienced barely seemed to match up, despite being the same place,” said Jack. “Our parents were . . . let’s go with ‘overbearing.’ The sort who always wanted to put things in boxes. I think they hated us being identical twins more than we did.”

“But your names—”

Jack shrugged broadly, tucking the handkerchief back into her pocket. “They weren’t so upset that they were willing to pass up the chance to make our lives a living hell. Parents are special that way. For some reason, they’d expected fraternal twins, maybe even that holy grail of the instant nuclear family, a boy and a girl. Instead, they got us. Ever watch a pair of perfectionists try to decide which of their identical children is the ‘smart one’ versus the ‘pretty one’ ? It would have been funny, if our lives hadn’t been the prize they were trying to win.”

Nancy frowned. “You look just like your sister. How could they think she was the pretty one instead of seeing that you were both lovely?”

“Oh, Jill wasn’t the pretty one. Jill got to be the smart one, with expectations and standards she was supposed to live up to. I was the pretty one.” Jack’s smile was quick, lopsided, and wry. “If we both asked for Lego, she got scientists and dinosaurs, and I got a flower shop. If we both asked for shoes, she got sneakers, and I got ballet flats. They never asked us, naturally. My hair was easier to brush one day when we were toddlers—probably because she had jam in hers—and bam, the roles were set. We couldn’t get away from them. Until one day we opened an old trunk and found a set of stairs inside.”

Jack’s voice had gone distant. Nancy held herself in perfect stillness, not speaking, barely daring to breathe. If she wanted to hear this story, she couldn’t interrupt it. Something about the way Jack was glaring at the wall told her she was only going to get one chance.

“We went down the mysterious stairs that couldn’t possibly be there, of course. Who wouldn’t go down an impossible staircase in the bottom of a trunk? We were twelve. We were curious, and angry with our parents, and angry with each other.” Jack tied her bow tie with quick, furious jerks. “We went down, and at the bottom there was a door, and on the door there was a sign. Two words. BE SURE. Sure of what? We were twelve, we weren’t sure of anything. So we went through. We came out on this moor that seemed to go on forever, between the mountains and the angry sea. And that sky! I’d never seen so many stars before, or such a red, red moon. The door slammed shut behind us. We couldn’t have gone back if we’d wanted to—and we didn’t want to. We were twelve. We were going to have an adventure if it killed us.”

“Did you?” asked Nancy. “Have an adventure, I mean?”

“Sure,” said Jack bleakly. “It didn’t even kill us. Not permanently, anyway. But it changed everything. I finally got to be the smart one. Dr. Bleak taught me everything he knew about the human body, the ways of recombining and reanimating tissue. He said I was the best pupil he’d ever had. That I had incredibly talented hands.” She looked at her fingers like she was seeing them for the first time. “Jill went in a different direction. The world we went to, it was . . . feudal, almost, divided into villages and moors and protectorates, with a master or mistress holding sway over each of them. Our Master was a bloodsucker, centuries old, with a fondness for little girls—not like that! Not in any sort of inappropriate way. Even Dr. Bleak was a child to him, and the Master wasn’t the sort of man who thought about children like that. But he did need blood to live. He made Jill a lot of promises. He told her she could be his daughter one day and rule alongside him. I guess that’s why it was so important we be taken care of. When the villagers marched on the castle, he sent my sister to hide with me in the laboratory. Dr. Bleak said . . . he, uh, said it was too dangerous for us to stay, and he opened a doorway. Neither of us wanted to go, but I understood the necessity. I promised I would stay a scientist, no matter what else happened, and that one day, I’d find a way back to him. Jill—he had to sedate her before she would go through. We found ourselves back in that old trunk, the lid half closed and the stairway gone. I’ve been looking for the formula to unlock the way back for the both of us ever since.”

“Oh,” said Nancy, in a hushed voice.

Jack smiled that wry smile again. “Spending five years apprenticed to a mad scientist sort of changes your outlook on the world. I know Kade hates the fact that he had to go through puberty twice—he thinks it was unfair, and I guess for him, it was. Gender dysphoria is a form of torture. But I wish we’d gotten the same deal. We were twelve when we went into that trunk. We were seventeen when we came out. Maybe we would have been able to adapt to this stupid, colorful, narrow-minded world if we’d woken from a shared dream and been thrown straight into middle school. Instead, we staggered down the stairs and found our parents having dinner with our four-year-old brother, who’d been told for his entire life that we were dead. Not missing. That would have been messy. God forbid that we should ever make a mess.”

“How long have you been here?” asked Nancy.

“Almost a year,” said Jack. “Dearest Mommy and Daddy had us on the bus to boarding school within a month of our coming home. They couldn’t stand to have us under the same roof as their precious boy, who didn’t tell crazy stories about watching lightning snake down from the heavens and shock a beautiful corpse back into the land of the living.” Her eyes went soft and dreamy. “I think the rules were different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn’t care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.”

There was a knock at the door. Nancy and Jack both turned to see Kade stick his head inside.

“The crowd has mostly dissipated, but I have to ask: Jack, did you kill Sumi?”

“I’m not offended that you’d suspect me, but I’m offended that you think I’d kill for a pair of hands,” said Jack. She sniffed, squaring her shoulders. She looked suddenly imperious, and Nancy realized how much of Jack’s superior attitude was just a put-on, something to keep the world a little more removed. “If I had killed Sumi, there would have been no body to find. I would have put every scrap of her to good use, and people would be wondering for years whether she’d finally managed to pry open the door that would take her back to Candyland. Alas, I didn’t kill her.”

“She called it Confection, not Candyland, but point taken.” Kade stepped into the room. “Seraphina and Loriel have taken Jill someplace quiet while we wait for everyone to calm down. We’re supposed to stay in our rooms and out of sight while Eleanor summons the city coroner.”

Nancy stiffened. “What’s going to happen to us now?” she asked. “They’re not going to send us away, are they?” She couldn’t go back. Her parents loved her, there was no question of that, but their love was the sort that filled her suitcase with colors and kept trying to set her up on dates with local boys. Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.

“Eleanor’s been here for a long time,” said Kade. He shut the door. “Sumi was her ward, so there are no parents to involve, and the local authorities know what’s what. They’ll do their best to make sure this doesn’t shut us down.”

“It would have been better had she not called at all,” sniffed Jack. “An unreported death is just a disappearance in its Sunday clothes.”

“See, it’s things like that that explain why you don’t have many friends,” said Kade.

“But Sumi was among them,” said Jack. She turned to look at Sumi’s side of the room. “If she has no family, what are we supposed to do about her things?”

“There’s storage space in the attic,” said Kade.

“So we box them up,” said Nancy firmly. “Where can we get some boxes?”

“The basement,” said Jack.

“I’ll go with you,” said Kade. “Nancy, you stay here. If anyone asks, we’ll be right back.”

“All right,” said Nancy, and held herself perfectly still as the others walked away. There was nothing left to do but wait. There was peace in stillness, a serenity that couldn’t be found anywhere else in this hot, fast, often terrible world. Nancy closed her eyes and breathed down into her toes, letting her stillness become the only thing that mattered. Flashes of Sumi kept breaking her concentration, making it difficult to keep her knees from shaking or her fingers from twitching. She forced the images away and kept breathing, looking for serenity.

She still hadn’t managed to find it when the others returned, the door banging open to Kade’s declaration of “We are ready to box the world!”

Nancy opened her eyes and turned toward him, somehow mustering a smile. “All right,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”

Sumi’s things were as tangled and chaotic as Sumi had been. There was neither rhyme nor reason to the way they were piled around her bed and dresser. A pile of books on candy making was tied together with a pair of training bras. A bouquet of roses folded out of playing cards was shoved under the bed, next to a frilly blue dress that didn’t look like something Sumi would ever have worn and a roast beef sandwich about a month past its “best by” date. Jack, who had put on gloves before they got to work, disposed of all the soiled or biologically questionable material without complaint: apparently, her squeamishness extended only as far as her bare skin. Kade sorted through Sumi’s clothing, folding it neatly before boxing it up. Nancy was fairly sure it would all wind up back in the big group wardrobe. She was okay with that. Sumi wouldn’t mind other people wearing her clothes. She probably wouldn’t have minded while she was alive; she certainly wasn’t going to object now that she was dead.

Nancy found herself tasked with handling the rest, the things that were neither trash nor fabric. She dug boxes of origami paper and embroidery floss from under the bed—Sumi had apparently always been good with her hands—and pushed them to one side, still digging. Her questing hands found a shoebox. She pulled it out and sat, removing the lid. Photos spilled onto the floor. Some showed Sumi as she’d been during their too-short acquaintance, mismatched clothing and tousled pigtails. Others showed a solemn, sad-eyed girl in a school uniform, sometimes holding a violin, other times empty-handed. It was plain, just from the still images, that this had been a girl who understood the virtue of being overlooked, of being a statue, but not because she had chosen stillness as Nancy had; it had been thrust upon her, until one day she’d discovered a door that could lead her to a world where she had a prayer of being happy.

Nancy realized that Sumi’s granddaughter was never going to visit the candy corn farmer’s grave, and it took everything she had not to weep for what had been irrevocably lost. Sumi might go to the Halls of the Dead, might even be happy there, but all the things she would have done among the living were gone now, rendered impossible when her heart stopped beating. Death was precious. That didn’t change the fact that life was limited.

“Poor kid.” Kade leaned over and took the picture from Nancy’s motionless fingers, looking at it for a moment before he tucked it into his shirt. “Let’s get this stuff out of here. You shouldn’t have to look at it, not with her gone.”

“Thank you,” said Nancy, more earnestly than she would have believed before she’d seen that picture. Sumi was over, and it wasn’t fair.

Working together, it took the three of them less than an hour to transfer all of Sumi’s possessions to the attic, tucking the boxes away on unused shelves and in dusty corners, of which there seemed to be more than the usual number. When they were done, Jack removed her gloves and began meticulously wiping her fingers on a fresh handkerchief. Kade pulled the picture out of his shirt and tacked it up on a bulletin board, next to a picture of Sumi as Nancy had known her, all bright eyes and brighter smile, hands slightly blurred, as if she’d been photographed in motion.

“I’ll stay with you tonight, if you don’t mind,” said Kade. “It doesn’t seem safe for you to sleep in there alone.”

“I won’t stay with you tonight, whether you mind or not,” said Jack. “That room gets too much sun, and Jill has a tendency to sleepwalk when I’m not with her.”

“You shouldn’t leave her alone,” said Kade. “Watch yourself, okay? A lot of people are looking for someone to blame, and you’re the best scapegoat in the school.”

“I always wanted to be best at something,” said Jack philosophically.

“Great,” said Kade. “Now let’s be best at getting to class before we get a lecture from Lundy on punctuality.”

They filed out of the attic. Nancy looked back at Sumi’s pictures on the bulletin board, so quiet, so still. Then she turned off the light and closed the door.

5

SURVIVORS, FOR A TIME

MORNING CLASSES HAD BEEN canceled; they resumed after lunch. Maybe it was rushing things, but there was nothing else to do with an entire school’s worth of anxious, uneasy students: routine would keep them from wandering off and frightening themselves to death in the aftermath of Sumi’s murder. Even so, it was a strained routine. Homework was forgotten, questions written on chalkboards went unanswered, and even the teachers clearly wanted to be elsewhere. Going back to normal after someone had died was never easy. When that someone had been brutally killed, all bets were off.

Dinner was worse. Nancy was sitting across from Jack and Jill when the girl with the brown braids walked up to the table and dumped her soup over Jack’s head. “Oops,” she said, flatly. “I slipped.”

Jack sat rigidly unmoving, soup dripping down her forehead and running down her nose. Jill gasped, leaping to her feet. “Loriel!” she shrieked, the sound of her voice bringing all other conversation in the dining hall grinding to a halt. “How could you?”

“It was an accident,” said Loriel. “Just like your sister there ‘accidentally’ took apart Angela’s guinea pig, and ‘accidentally’ murdered Sumi. She’s going to get caught, you know. This would all go a lot faster if she’d confess.”

“Loriel sneezed in that before she poured it on you,” said the girl’s companion to Jack, a look of fake concern on her face. “Just thought you’d want to know.”

Jack began to tremble. Then, still dripping soup, she jerked away from the table and bolted for the door, leaving Jill to run after her. Half the students burst out laughing. The other half stared after her in mute satisfaction, clearly condoning anything that made Jack miserable. She had already been tried and found guilty by a jury of her peers. All that remained was for the law to catch up.

“You’re horrible,” said a voice. Nancy was only a little surprised to realize that it was hers. She pushed back her chair, leaving her own dinner of grapes and cottage cheese relatively untouched, and glared at the two. “You’re horrible people. I’m glad we didn’t go through the same door, because I would hate to have traveled to a world that didn’t teach its tourists any manners.” She turned and stalked away, head held high, following the trail of soup out of the dining room and down the hall to the basement stairs.

“You walk slow, but you move fast. How do you do that?” said Kade, catching up with her at the top of the stairs. He followed her gaze down into the darkness. “That’s where the Addams twins live. They were in your room for a while, until the kid who had the basement before them graduated.”

“Had he been to the same world?”

“No, he visited a race of mole people. I think he realized he enjoyed sunshine and bathing, and sort of gave up on the idea of going back.”

“Oh.” Nancy took a tentative step down. “Is she going to be all right?”

“Jack doesn’t like being messy. They have their own bathroom. She’ll be all cleaned up and back in tip-top faintly morbid shape before group is over.” Kade shook his head. “I just hope this is as bad as it gets. Jack can handle a little soup, and she worked for a mad scientist; for her, the wrath of the locals is all part of a day’s work. But if people want to get violent, she’ll fight back, and that’ll just prove that they were in the right to accuse her.”

“This is awful,” said Nancy. “I let my parents send me here because Miss West said she understood what had happened to me and could help me learn how to live with it.”

“And because you were hoping that if you understood it, you’d be able to do it again,” said Kade. Nancy didn’t say anything. He laughed ruefully. “Hey, it’s okay. I understand. Most of us are here because we want to be able to open our doors at will, at least at first. Sometimes the desire goes away. Sometimes the door comes back. Sometimes we just have to learn to deal with being exiles in our home countries.”

“What if we can’t?” asked Nancy. “What happens to us then?”

Kade was silent for a long moment. Then he shrugged, and said, “I guess we open schools for people who still have what we want most in the world. Hope.”

“Sumi said ‘hope’ was a bad word.”

“Sumi wasn’t wrong. Now come on. Let’s get to group before we get in trouble.”

They walked silently through the halls, and they saw no one moving in the rooms around them. The idea that sticking together was the only way to be safe seemed to have taken root with preternatural speed. Nancy found herself matching her steps to Kade’s, hurrying to keep up with his longer stride. She didn’t like hurrying. It was indecorous and would have resulted in a scolding back ho—back in the Underworld. Here, however, it was necessary, even encouraged, and there was no reason to feel guilty about it. She tried to hold to that thought as she and Kade stepped into the room where group was being held.

Everyone turned to look at them. Loriel actually sneered. “Couldn’t get the little killer out of her basement?”

“That’s quite enough, Miss Youngers,” said Lundy sharply. “We have already agreed to stop speculating about who may have harmed Sumi.”

She gets a name now, not a title and surname, thought Nancy. That’s not right. The dead deserve more dignity, not less. Dignity is all the dead possess. Aloud, she said nothing, only made her way to an open chair and sat. She was gratified when Kade took the seat next to her. Loriel’s glare intensified. Apparently Nancy wasn’t the only one who found Kade beautiful, although she would have been willing to bet she was the only one who found his beauty more aesthetic than romantic.

“You agreed,” said Loriel. “The rest of us are scared. Who would kill her like that? And mutilating the body afterward? That’s just sick. We have a right to want to know what’s going on, and how to keep ourselves safe!”

“I’m reasonably sure she bled out from her injuries, given the mess; corpses don’t bleed as much,” said Jack. Everyone in the room turned to see the twins, freshly scrubbed and wearing clean clothes, as they made their entrance. Jack looked more the old-fashioned professor than ever, wearing a tweed vest over a long-sleeved white shirt that buttoned at the wrists. Jill was wearing a cream-colored gown that Nancy would have considered sleepwear, not something to wear to group therapy. “Whoever killed her was no scientist.”

“What do you mean?” asked one of the few boys, a tall Latino kid who was spinning a long piece of wood carved to resemble an ulna between his fingers. Nancy felt an odd kinship when she looked at him. Perhaps he’d been to someplace like her Underworld, filled with shadows, secrets, and safety. Perhaps he would understand if she went to him and spoke of stillness and respect for the dead.

But this was not the time. Jack met the question with a haughty sniff, and a too-calm, “I saw her body, like the rest of you. I know some of you have decided that I’m responsible for her death. I know further that those of you who believe my guilt will probably refuse to believe anything else. Draw on what you know of me. If I had decided to start killing my classmates, would I have left a body?”

The boy with the bone raised an eyebrow. “She makes a good point,” he said.

“Making a good point doesn’t mean she’s not a killer,” said Loriel, but the heat was gone; her accusations had been met with reality, and they didn’t have anyplace else to go. She crossed her arms and slouched back in her chair. “I’m keeping an eye on her.”

“Good,” said Lundy. “We all need to be keeping our eyes on each other right now. We don’t know who hurt Sumi. Eleanor is working with the authorities, and we should know more soon, but in the meantime, we need to be watching out for one another. No one goes anywhere alone—yes, Miss Youngers?”

Loriel lowered her hand as the attention of the group switched back to her. “What if one of us finds our door before the killer’s caught?” she asked. “I can’t take someone through with me just because we’re not supposed to go anywhere alone, and I am not missing the passage back over this. I’m not.”

“I think we can all agree that if someone happens to find their door while we’re still staying together, the person whose door has been found will go, and the person who is left behind will find another buddy,” said Lundy, with deliberate precision. Nancy realized with a start that Lundy didn’t think any of them were going to find their doors. Not soon; maybe not ever. Lundy had given up on them. It was clear by her tone and by the way she chose her words. And maybe that made sense. Lundy’s doors were closed, no matter where things went from here. Lundy needed to adapt to the idea that this was the world where she was going to die.

“Try for groups of three,” said the boy with the bone. “If you can’t manage that, try not to find your door.”

Some of the students laughed. Others looked pained. Loriel was among the latter.

“Tell us about your door, Miss Youngers,” urged Lundy.

“I almost didn’t see it,” said Loriel. Her voice turned distant. “It was so small. This perfect little door, carved into the lintel below the porch light. Like a door for moths. I just wanted to see what it was, that was all, so I got up really close, and I knocked with the tip of my pinkie finger. The world went all twisty and strange, and then I was standing in the hall on the other side of the door, looking back on this impossibly huge porch. I didn’t go through. It pulled me. That was how bad the Webworld wanted me.”

Loriel’s story was grand and sprawling, a majestic, epic tale of spider princesses and tiny dynasties. Her eyes had always been keen, but after spending a year in service to the smallest, they had sharpened so much that she had to wear lenses made of carnival glass to keep the world from being so magnified that it was painful to behold. She had fought and she had triumphed, she had loved and she had lost, until finally the Queen of Dust had asked if she would become a princess of the land and stay forever.

“I said I wanted nothing more, but that I had to go home and tell my parents before I could accept,” said Loriel, sniffling. The tears had started to fall somewhere around the death of her beloved Wasp Prince, and seemed set to continue for the foreseeable future. “She told me it would be hard to find the door again. That I would have to look harder than I had ever looked in my life. I said I could do it. That was almost two years ago. I’ve looked everywhere, but I haven’t seen my door.”

“Some doors open only once,” said Lundy. There was a murmur of agreement from the room. Nancy frowned and sank deeper into her seat. It seemed cruel to dredge up everyone’s pasts like this, pin them quivering to the floor, and then say things like that. Loriel surely knew by now that she probably wasn’t going back through her tiny door to her even tinier world. She was smart enough to have figured it out for herself. What was the point in saying it?

If this was the school for those who wanted to come to peace with their voyages and remember them fondly, she would have hated to see the other campus.

“She said I could come back,” said Loriel. “She promised me. Queens keep their promises. I just have to look more closely. Once I find the door, I’m gone.”

“And your parents? Are they prepared for this inevitable disappearance?”

Loriel snorted. “I told them where I’d been—a year for me, twelve days for them—and they said I’d clearly been through some trauma and couldn’t be trusted. They sent me here so I’d stop being crazy. But there’s nothing wrong with me. I went on a journey. That’s all.”

“A journey to a documented world, even,” said Eleanor. She was standing in the doorway, new lines of exhaustion graven in the soft skin around her mouth and eyes. She looked like she had aged a decade in a day. “There have been five children pulled into the Webworld since I began seeking you all out. Two of them found their way back again after returning home. So you see, there is hope. For Loriel, and for all of us. Our doors are hidden, but by looking closely enough, we can find them.”

“Eleanor.” Lundy stood. “You’re supposed to be resting.”

“I’ve had rest enough to last a lifetime, and only a lifetime for the rest of what’s to be done,” said Eleanor. She moved away from the door. Several students rose to help her to an open chair. She smiled, patting at their cheeks. “Good children, all of you—yes, even you, Lundy. You’re all children to me, and I your teacher, the only one who refuses to lie to you. So listen to me now, because it sounds like you’re doing a fine job of confusing and upsetting yourselves.

“You will not all find your doors again. Some doors really do appear only once, the consequence of some strange convergence that we can’t predict or re-create. They’re drawn by need and by sympathy. Not the emotion—the resonance of one thing to another. There’s a reason you were all pulled into worlds that suited you so well. Imagine, for a moment, if you’d fallen into the world described by your neighbor instead.”

Nancy glanced at Jack and Jill, uneasily imagining what her life would have been like if she’d found their door instead of her own. The moors didn’t seem to care about stillness, only obedience and blood. Neither of those things were strong suits of hers. All around her, other students exchanged equally uncomfortable glances, making their own connections and finding them just as unpleasant as she did.

“Sumi had Nonsense in her heart, and so a door opened that would take her to a world where she could wear it proudly, not hide it away. That was her real story. Finding a place where she could be free. That’s your story, too, every one of you.” Eleanor tipped her chin up. Her eyes were clear. “You found freedom, if only for a moment, and when you lost it, you came here, hoping it could be found again. I hope the same, for each of you. I want to make excuses to your parents when you disappear, to tell them that runaways will always run again if they have half the chance. I want to see the back of you more than I want almost anything in this world.”

What she wanted most didn’t need to be spoken, for they shared her hunger, her brutal, unforgiving desire: what she wanted most was a door, and the things that waited on its other side. But unlike the rest of them, she knew where her door was. It was simply closed to her for the time being, until she could find her way back to childhood.

The boy with the wooden bone put his hand up. “Eleanor?”

“Yes, Christopher?”

“Why did your door stay, while all ours disappeared?” He bit his lip before adding, “It doesn’t seem fair for it to work like that. We should have been able to go back.”

“Stable doors like Miss West’s are less common than the temporary kind,” said Lundy, back on familiar ground. “Most children who go through them don’t come back, either on their first trip or after making a short return to their original world. So while we have records of several, the chances of finding a stable door that resonates with the story you need are slim.”

“What about, like, Narnia?” asked Christopher. “Those kids went through all sorts of different doors, and they always wound up back with the big talking lion.”

“That’s because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole,” said one of the other boys. “C. S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn’t know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he’d probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up. That’s what all those authors did. They made shit up, and people made them famous. We tell the truth, and our parents throw us into this glorified loony bin.”

“We don’t use terms like that here,” said Eleanor. There was steel in her tone. “This is not an asylum, and you are not mad—and so what if you were? This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you. All of you. You are the guardians of the secrets of the universe, beloved of worlds that most will never dream of, much less see . . . can’t you see where you owe it to yourselves to be kind? To care for one another? No one outside this room will ever understand what you’ve been through the way the people around you right now understand. This is not your home. I know that better than most. But this is your way station and your sanctuary, and you will treat those around you with respect.”

Both boys wilted under her glare. Christopher looked down. The other boy mumbled, “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. It’s late, and we’re all tired.” Eleanor stood. “Get some sleep, all of you. I know it won’t be easy. Nancy, can you—”

“I already said I’d room with her tonight,” said Kade. A wave of relief washed over Nancy. She’d been afraid she would have to go to another room, and while she hadn’t been there long, she was already attached to the familiarity of her own bed.

Eleanor looked at Kade thoughtfully. “Are you sure? I was going to suggest she room with someone on her hall, and that you lock your door tonight. This is a great imposition.”

“No, it’s fine. I volunteered.” Kade flashed a quick smile. “I like Nancy, and she was Sumi’s friend. I figure a little stability will do her good, and that makes any inconvenience to me completely beside the point. I want to help. This is my home.” He looked slowly around the room. “My forever home. I turned eighteen last month, my parents don’t want me, and the Prism wouldn’t have me back even if I wanted to go. So it’s important to me that we take care of this place, because it’s been taking care of all of us since the day we got here.”

“Go to bed, my darlings,” said Eleanor. “This will all look better in the morning.”

*   *   *

THE BODY LAY in the front yard, covered in a thin sheen of dew, face turned up toward the uncaring sky. The dead were capable of sight, as Nancy would have been quick to point out had she been asked, but this body saw nothing, for it had no eyes, only black and blood-rimmed holes where eyes had once been. Its hands were folded neatly on its chest, glasses clutched in cooling fingers. Loriel Youngers would never find her door (which had been waiting for her all this time, tucked into a corner of her bedroom at home, half an inch high and held in place by the most complicated magics the Queen of Dust, her adopted mother, could conceive; it would linger another six months before the spells were released and the Queen took to her chambers for a year of mourning). She would never have another grand adventure or save another world. Her part in the story was over.

She lay there, unmoving, as the sun rose and the stars winked out. A crow landed on the grass near her leg, watching her warily. When she still didn’t move, it hopped on her knee, waiting for the trap to spring. When she still didn’t move, it launched itself into the air and flew the few short feet to her head, where it promptly buried its beak in the bloody hole that had been her left eye.

Angela—she of the dissected guinea pig, whose enchanted sneakers had once allowed her to run on rainbows—was just stepping out onto the porch, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and intending to scold her roommate for sneaking out when they were supposed to stay together. Sometimes Loriel couldn’t keep her eyes closed long enough to fall asleep, and then she had a tendency to roam the grounds, looking for her missing door. It wasn’t unusual to find her dozing on the lawn. At first, Angela’s mind refused to register Loriel’s motionless body as anything unusual.

Then the crow pulled its bloody beak out of her eye socket and cawed at Angela, angrily protesting the interruption of its breakfast.

Angela’s scream sent the crow flapping off into the morning sky. It didn’t wake Loriel.

6

THE BODIES WE HAVE BURIED

ALL THE STUDENTS had been gathered in the dining hall, most dragged from their beds by either Angela’s shrieks or the staff pounding on their doors. Nancy had been jerked awake by Kade shaking her shoulder, leaning so close that she could see the delicate filigree pattern of lines in his irises. She had jerked away, blushing and clutching the sheets around herself. Kade had only laughed, turning his back like a gentleman while she got up and put her clothes on.

Now, sitting at a table with a plate of scrambled eggs getting cold in front of her, Nancy found herself clinging to the memory of his laughter. She had the feeling that no one was going to be laughing here for quite some time. Maybe not ever again.

“Loriel Youngers was found dead this morning on the front lawn,” said Lundy, standing ramrod straight in front of them, her hands folded in front of her. She looked like a porcelain doll on the verge of shattering. “I was against telling you anything more than that. I don’t feel that such morbid things are appropriate for the ears of young people. But this is Miss West’s school, and she felt your knowing what had happened might make you take her request that you stay together more seriously. Miss Youngers was found without her eyes. They had been . . . removed. We thought at first that it might have been predation by local wildlife, but a closer study of the body showed that they had been removed with a sharp object.”

No one asked what kind of sharp object. Not even Jack, although Nancy could see that she was practically vibrating from keeping her questions contained. Jill, in contrast, seemed perfectly serene, and was one of the few students who was actually eating. Spending a few years in a horror movie must have done a great deal to harden her sensibilities.

“Unlike Sumi, Loriel’s parents were still involved with her care, and we have not yet contacted the authorities.” There was a catch in Lundy’s voice. “Eleanor is in her chambers, deciding what to do. Please, finish your breakfasts and then return to your rooms. Do not go anywhere alone, not even the restrooms. The school is not safe.” She turned, not waiting for them to respond to her, and walked quickly to the exit.

When she was gone, Jack finally frowned and let one of her questions out. “Eleanor sat there last night and said she was looking forward to lying to our parents about what happened to us,” she said. “Why can’t she just make Loriel disappear, and tell that lie?”

“Not everyone is as comfortable as you are with the idea of getting rid of bodies,” said Angela through her tears. She had been crying since finding Loriel’s body. It didn’t look like she was ever intending to stop.

“It’s not a bad question,” said Christopher. He touched his bone nervously as he spoke. For the first time, Nancy wondered if it might be real, instead of wood as she had first assumed. “Miss West already has a system in place for making it look like we ran away when we really went home. Why shouldn’t she lie to Loriel’s family? They lost her either way. At least a lie means we can all stay here, instead of going back.”

“Going back” had two distinct meanings at the school, depending on how it was said. It was the best thing in the world. It was also the worst thing that could happen to anybody. It was returning to a place that understood you so well that it had reached across realities to find you, claiming you as its own and only; it was being sent to a family that wanted to love you, wanted to keep you safe and sound, but didn’t know you well enough to do anything but hurt you. The duality of the phrase was like the duality of the doors: they changed lives, and they destroyed them, all with the same, simple invitation. Come through, and see.

“I don’t want to stay in a place where we just make bodies go away,” said Angela. “That isn’t why I came here.”

“Get off your high horse,” snapped Jack. “Bodies are a consequence of life. Or do you truly mean for us to believe that when you were running along rainbows, you never saw anyone fall? Someone plummets out of the sky, they’re not going to get up and walk away from it. They’re going to die. And unless they fell into a place like the Moors, they’re going to stay dead. Someone disposed of those bodies. One slip, and they’d have been disposing of yours.”

Angela stared at Jack, eyes wide and horrified. “I never thought about it,” she said. “I saw . . . I saw people fall. The rainbows were slippery. Even with the right shoes, you could fall through if you slowed down too much.”

“Someone disposed of those bodies,” said Jack. “Ashes to ashes, right? If we call Loriel’s parents, if we tell them what happened, that’s it, we’re done. Anyone who’s under eighteen gets taken home by their loving parents. Half of you will be on antipsychotic drugs you don’t need before the end of the year, but hey, at least you’ll have someone to remind you to eat while you’re busy contemplating the walls. The rest of us will be out on the streets. No high school degrees, no way of coping with this world, which doesn’t want us back.”

“At least you have prospects,” said Christopher, giving his bone another spin. “How many colleges you been accepted to?”

“Every one that I’ve applied to, but they’re all assuming I’ll graduate before I come knocking,” said Jack. “And of course, I’ve Jill to consider. I can’t go running out into the world without making provisions for my sister.”

“I can take care of myself,” said Jill.

“You won’t have to,” said Eleanor. She walked wearily into the room, looked toward Jack and Kade, and said, “Make her go away, darlings. Put her someplace where I’ll never find her, not if I look for a thousand years. We’ll have a memorial service. We’ll honor her as best we can. But I can’t endanger us all because of one lost life. I almost wish I could. I would feel less like a monster, and more like the child who danced with foxes under the slow October moon. I simply cannot bring myself to do it.”

“Of course,” said Jack, and started to stand.

Angela was on her feet first. “She killed her, and now you’re going to let her have the body?” she shrilled, pointing at Jack. Her face was a mask of outrage. “She’s a murderess! Loriel knew it, I know it, and I can’t believe that you don’t know it!”

“Points for knowing the feminine form of ‘murderer,’ although I’m a little insulted that you feel the need to put a lacy bow on the crime before you can believe I committed it,” said Jack. “What would I do with a pair of eyes, Angela? I don’t care about the visual sciences. I’m sure there were some fascinating adaptations to her cones and rods, but I don’t have the facilities or equipment here to study them. If I were going to kill her for her eyes, I would have done it in ten years, after I was nicely established as the head of research and development for a biotech firm big enough to make murder charges just go away. Killing her now benefits me not at all.”

“Can we stop pointing fingers at each other and deal with this? Please?” Kade stood. “We already have one body on our hands. I don’t want any more.”

“I can help,” said Nancy. The others turned toward her. She reddened slightly, but pushed on, saying, “I can make sure nothing is done that’s not respectful toward the dead. The flesh they leave behind when they depart doesn’t bother me.”

“You’re a creepy girl,” said Christopher approvingly. He stood, tucking his bone into his pocket. “I’ll help as well. The Skeleton Girl would never forgive me if I didn’t.”

“I won’t,” said Jill. “It would ruin my dress.”

“Thank you, all of you,” said Eleanor. “Classes have been canceled for the rest of the morning. We’ll see you after lunch, once you’ve had time to put yourselves together again.”

“Bad choice of words,” said Jack—but she looked thoughtful, almost pensive, as she turned her face away and led Kade and Nancy out of the room. Christopher brought up the rear, his bone sticking out of his back pocket like an upthrust middle finger. The door swung closed behind him.

Together, they walked out to the porch. Loriel was still on the lawn, covered by a sheet, and for a moment, all Nancy could think was that if this didn’t stop soon, they were going to run out of bedclothes. Nancy, Christopher, and Jack kept walking. Kade stopped.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t. I just . . . I can’t. This was never my job.” Because he’d been a princess in Prism, before they’d learned that he was really a prince; because unlike the rest of them, he had never been responsible for tending to the dead. He’d killed people, sure. That was what had earned him the title of Goblin Prince. But his part in their deaths had ended on the blade of his sword.

“It’s all right,” said Nancy gently, looking back over her shoulder at him. “The dead are much more understanding than the living. Let us take care of her. You keep watch.”

“I can do that,” said Kade, relieved.

Nancy, Jack, and Christopher made their way to the body. They came from very different traditions. For Nancy, the entire experience of death was revered. For Christopher, the flesh was temporary, but the bones were eternal and deserved to be treated as such. For Jack, death was an inconvenience to be conquered, and a corpse was a Pandora’s box of beautiful possibilities. But all of them shared a love for those who had passed, and as they lifted Loriel from the ground, they did so with gentle, compassionate hands.

“If we take her to the basement, I can mix up something to strip the flesh from her bones,” said Jack. “The skeleton will still appear fresh to any forensics tests, but it’s a start.”

“Once she’s a skeleton, I might be able to find out what happened to her,” said Christopher, sounding almost shy.

There was a pause. Finally, dubiously, Jack said, “I’m sorry, but it sounded like you just confessed to being able to talk to bones. Why have we never heard this before?”

“Because I was there when you said you could raise the dead. I saw how everybody reacted, and I enjoy having a social life at this school,” said Christopher. “It’s not like I can go hang out at the pizza parlor in town if the other kids stop talking to me. And don’t say you and your sister would have talked to me. The two of you don’t talk to anybody.”

“He’s got you there,” called Kade from the porch.

Nancy frowned. “They talked to me.”

“Because Sumi made them, and because you went to a world full of ghosts,” said Christopher. “I guess that was close enough to living in a horror movie that they were cool with you. And they talked to Sumi because she didn’t give them a choice. Sumi was like a small tornado. When she sucked you up, you just tightened your grip and went along for the ride.”

“We keep to ourselves for good reason,” said Jack stiffly, adjusting her grasp on Loriel’s shoulders. “Most of you got unicorns and misty meadows. We got the Moors, and if there was a unicorn out there, it probably ate human flesh. We learned quickly that sharing our experiences with others just drove them away, and most of the social connections at this place are based on those shared experiences. On the doors, and on what happened when we went through them.”

“I went to a country of happy, dancing skeletons who said that one day I’d come back to them and marry their Skeleton Girl,” said Christopher. “So pretty sunshiny, but sort of sunshine by way of Día de los Muertos.”

“Maybe we should have talked to you a long time ago,” said Jack. “Let’s get Loriel to the basement.”

They carried her around the side of the manor, walking until they found the ground-level doors that had once been used by tradesmen delivering coal or food to the house above. Their hands were full, and so Nancy twisted to look over her shoulder as she called, “Kade? We need you.”

“This I can do,” said Kade. He jogged past them and opened the cellar doors, releasing a rush of cool, sepulchral air. He held the doors until the others were through, and then he followed them, closing the doors with a final-sounding clank that left them in near darkness. Nancy had dwelt in the Halls of the Dead, where the lights were never turned above twilight, for fear of hurting sensitive eyes. Christopher had learnt to navigate a world of skeletons, none of whom had eyes anymore, and many of whom had long since forgotten about the squishy living and their need for constant illumination. Jack could see by the light of a single storm. Only Kade stumbled, managing not to fall as the group made their way to the base of the stairs.

“Can you hold her up without me for a second?” asked Jack. “I should turn the lights on before one of you buffoons trips and damages something valuable.”

“See, that’s the other reason no one talks to you,” said Christopher. “You’re sort of mean, like, all the time. Even when you don’t have any real reason to be. You could just say ‘please.’ ”

“Please can you hold her up without me for a second, so that we don’t knock over the jug of acid I was planning to use to dissolve her flesh,” said Jack. “I enjoy having nonskeletal feet. Perhaps you do as well.”

“For now,” said Christopher. He shifted his grip around Loriel’s torso, getting his arms locked. “All right, I think I have her.”

“Excellent. I’ll be right back.” The body seemed to grow heavier in Nancy’s and Christopher’s arms as Jack let go. They heard her moving away, steps light on the concrete floor of the basement. Then, calmly, she said, “You may want to close your eyes.”

They tensed, expecting a blazing surgical light. Instead, when she flipped the switch, a soft orange glow bathed the room, revealing metal racks filled with jars and lab equipment, dressers bulging with wispy lace and ribbons, and a stainless-steel autopsy table. There was only one bed.

Nancy made a small sound of dismay as she realized what this meant. “You sleep on the autopsy table?” she asked.

Jack touched the smooth metal with one hand. “Not much call for pillows or blankets in the lab,” she said. “Jill got the canopy beds and the cushions. I learned how to sleep on stone floors. Turns out that sort of thing is hard to unlearn. Sleeping in a real bed is like trying to sleep in a cloud. I’m afraid I’ll sink right through and fall to my death.” She sighed, taking her hand off the autopsy table. “Put her here. I want to look at her before we dissolve her.”

“Is this a creepy perv thing?” asked Christopher, as he and Nancy maneuvered the body through the lab. “I’m not sure I can stay to help if it’s a creepy perv thing.”

“I don’t like corpses in that way unless they’ve been reanimated,” said Jack. “Corpses are incapable of offering informed consent, and are hence no better than vibrators.”

“I wish that didn’t make so much sense,” said Christopher. Together, he and Nancy boosted Loriel up onto the autopsy table. He let go and stepped away. Nancy remained, taking a moment to straighten the body’s limbs and smooth out its hair. There was nothing she could do for the pits that had been Loriel’s eyes—she couldn’t even close them. In the end, she simply folded Loriel’s hands over her chest and backed away.

Jack moved into the position Nancy had vacated. Unlike the other girl, she didn’t shy away from the damage to Loriel’s face. She leaned in close, studying the striations in the flesh, the way it had been torn and opened. Pulling on a pair of rubber gloves, she reached out and carefully rolled Loriel’s head to the side, probing her skull with quick, careful motions. Nancy and Christopher watched closely, but nothing Jack was doing was disrespectful: if anything, she was showing more respect to Loriel now that she was dead than she ever had when the other girl was among the living.

Jack grimaced. “Her skull’s been cracked,” she said. “Someone hit her from behind hard enough to knock her down and disorient her. I can’t say for sure whether it knocked her out. Knocking someone out is harder than most people guess. It was a blitz attack; she didn’t have a chance to defend herself or scream for help before she was down. But it wouldn’t have killed her right away. And there’s quite a lot of blood in her sockets.”

“Jack . . .” Kade’s voice was low and horrified. “Please tell me you’re not saying what I think you’re saying.”

“Hmm?” Jack looked up. “I’m not psychic, Kade, I don’t even believe that psychics exist. There is no possible way I could read your mind and know what you think I’m saying. I’m simply talking about the manner in which Loriel’s eyes were extracted.”

“You mean removed?” asked Christopher.

“No, I mean extracted,” said Jack. “I’d need to open her skull to be sure, and I don’t have a proper bone saw, which makes that a difficult task, but it appears that her eyes were fully extracted, all the way along the optic nerve. Whoever assaulted her didn’t just pluck them out like grapes. They used some sort of blade to separate the eye from the muscles holding it in place, and once that was done, they—”

“Do you know who did it?” asked Kade.

“No.”

“Then please, stop telling us how it was done. I can’t take it anymore.”

Jack looked at him solemnly, and said, “I haven’t gotten to the important part yet.”

“Then please, get there, before the rest of us throw up on the floor.”

“Based on the damage to the skull and the amount of bleeding, she was alive when her eyes were taken,” said Jack. Silence greeted her proclamation. Even Nancy put a hand over her mouth. “Whoever did this subdued her, removed her eyes, and let the shock kill her. I’m not even sure her death was the goal. Just getting her eyes.”

“Why?” asked Christopher.

Jack hesitated before shaking her head and saying, “I don’t know. Come on. Let’s prepare her for burial.”

Kade retreated back to the far side of the basement and stayed there as the others got to work. Nancy undressed Loriel, folding each piece of clothing with care before setting it aside. She somehow doubted that these clothes were going to make it into the general supply. They would probably need to be destroyed along with Loriel’s body, just for the sake of safety.

While Nancy worked, Jack and Christopher pulled an old claw-footed bathtub out of a corner of the basement and into the center of the room. Jack uncorked several large glass jugs and poured their greenish, fizzing contents into the tub. Kade watched this with dismay.

“Why does Eleanor let you have that much acid?” he asked. “Why would you want that much acid? You don’t need that much acid.”

“Except that it appears I do, since I have just enough to dissolve a human body, and we have a human body in need of dissolving,” said Jack. “Everything happens for a reason. And Eleanor didn’t ‘let’ me have this much acid. I sort of collected it on my own. For a rainy day.”

“What were you expecting it to rain?” asked Christopher. “Bears?”

“There was always a chance we’d get lucky,” said Jack. She pulled several plastic aprons off a shelf and held them out to the others. “You’re going to want to put one of these on, and a pair of the gloves that go with them. Acid is not a fun exfoliator unless you come from Christopher’s world.”

Wordlessly, Nancy and Christopher donned their plastic aprons, rubber gloves, and goggles. Jack did the same, and together they lowered Loriel into the fizzing green liquid. Kade turned his face away. The smell was surprisingly pleasant, not meaty at all: it smelled like cleaning fluid, faintly citrus, with a minty undertone. The bubbles increased as Loriel disappeared beneath the surface, until the liquid was completely opaque, obscuring her from view. Jack turned away.

“It’ll take about an hour to reduce her to a skeletal state,” she said. “I’ll neutralize the acid and drain it off when she’s done. Christopher, do you think you can handle her from there?”

“She’ll dance for me.” Christopher touched the bone in his pocket. Nancy realized there were small indentations in the surface. Not holes, not quite, and yet it still managed to suggest a flute. The tunes he played on that instrument wouldn’t be audible to the living. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t be real. “All skeletons dance for me. It’s my honor to play for them.”

“All right, clearly the two of you”—Jack gestured to Nancy as she stripped off her gloves—“were meant to be together. If you can’t find your doors, you should get married and breed the next generation of creepy world-traveling children.”

Christopher’s cheeks turned red. Nancy’s didn’t. It was a pleasant change.

“Maybe we should figure out why people are dying before we start trying to set up a breeding program,” said Kade mildly. “Besides, I met Nancy first. I get asking-out dibs.”

“Sometimes I suspect you learned all your hallmarks of masculinity from a Neanderthal,” said Jack. She removed her apron, hanging it on a nearby hook. “Everyone please take off the gear you borrowed. That stuff is expensive, and I only get to place three orders a year.”

“Do I get a say in this?” asked Nancy, shooting an amused look over at Kade. She didn’t mind flirting. Flirting was safe, flirting was fun; flirting was a way of interacting with her peers without anyone realizing that there was anything strange about her. She could have flirted forever. It was just the things that came after flirting that she had no interest in.

“Maybe later,” said Jack. “Right now, we need to get out of here. The acid will do some off-gassing as it breaks down her tissues, and I don’t want to fill my lungs with Loriel. Besides, I shouldn’t leave Jill alone for too long.” She sounded uneasy.

“I’m sure no one will hurt your sister,” said Nancy. “She can take care of herself.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Jack. “When you spend years with a vampire, all those lessons about ‘don’t bite the other children’ sort of go out the window. If they corner her because they’ve decided I’m guilty, she’s liable to hurt someone just so she can get away. I’d rather not get expelled right after I’ve disposed of a body. Seems like a waste of good acid.”

“All right,” said Nancy, pulling her apron off over her head. “Let’s go.”

Since they were no longer trying to spare their fellow students the sight of Loriel’s body, the foursome walked up the interior stairs, emerging into the deserted hallway. Kade looked in both directions before turning to Jack and asking, “Where would she go?”

“How would I know?” asked Jack. She sighed when the others stared at her. “I’m her twin. I’m not her keeper. I’m not even her friend. We mostly stick together out of self-defense. The other girls think she’s weird, and they think I’m weirder. At least when we present a united front, they’re less likely to do things to us.”

“Things?” asked Nancy blankly.

Jack fixed her with a look that was equal parts pitying and envious. “You didn’t get a hazing phase. That’s the real reason Eleanor put you in with Sumi. Once Sumi liked you—or at least tolerated you—no one else was going to cross the line, because everyone knew better than to mess with Sumi. She was vicious. Nonsense girls always are. Jill and I . . .”

“I remember when you got here,” said Christopher. “I thought your sister was hot, you know? So I offered to show her around the school, figured maybe I could get in good before one of the other guys showed up and started talking about his magic sword and how he’d saved the universe or whatever. I’m a dude with a flute no one can hear. I have to be persistent.”

“She laughed at you, didn’t she?” Most people would have been surprised by the gentleness of Jack’s tone. She wasn’t the sort of person who seemed inclined to gentleness.

Christopher nodded. “She said I was a cute little boy, but that she couldn’t lower herself to be seen with me. Like, that was her opening statement. Not ‘thanks, no thanks,’ not ‘my name’s Jill.’ Just straight to ‘you’re a cute little boy.’ I stopped trying after that.”

“She was trying to save you, in her way,” said Jack. “Her Master was the jealous sort. She used to try to make friends with the kids from the village below his castle. Jill liked having a lot of friends around. Believe it or not, she used to be the gregarious one, even if it was a nerdy sort of friendly. She’d run you to ground to tell you about the latest episode of Doctor Who. This was early on, before she’d embraced the lacy dresses and the iron-rich diet. Back then, she thought we were just having an adventure. She was the one who thought we were going to go home someday and wanted to learn as much as she could.”

“And you?” asked Kade.

“I gave up on wanting to go home the second Dr. Bleak put a bone saw in my hand and told me he would teach me anything I wanted to know,” said Jack. “For a while, Jill was opening doors and looking for a road home, and I was the one who never wanted to leave.”

“What happened to the kids from the village?” asked Christopher. “The ones she tried to make friends with?”

Jack’s expression went blank. It wasn’t coldness, exactly, more a means of distancing herself from what she was about to say. “We lived in the grace and at the sufferance of a vampire lord. What do you think happened to the kids from the village? Her Master didn’t want her talking to anyone he couldn’t control. I think he only spared me because Dr. Bleak begged, and because he pointed out the wisdom in keeping a self-replenishing source of blood transfusions for Jill. We’re twins. If anything happened to her, I could be used for spare parts.”

Nancy’s mouth dropped open. “That’s horrible,” she squeaked.

“That was the Moors.” Jack shook her head. “It was cruel and cold and brutal and beautiful, and I would give anything to go back there. Maybe it broke me in some deep, intrinsic way that I am incapable of seeing, just like Jill can’t understand that she’s not a normal girl anymore. I don’t care. It was my home, and it finally let me be myself, and I hate it here.”

“We pretty much all hate it here,” said Kade. “Even me. That’s why we’re at this school. Now think. Your sister isn’t in the basement, so where would she go?”

“She might still be in the dining hall, since it’s harder to pick on her when there’s supervision around,” said Jack. “Or she could have gone out to sit in the trees and pretend that she’s back at home. We spent a lot of time outside there, for one reason or another.”

“We saw her there yesterday,” said Kade. “Nancy and I will go check the trees; you and Christopher check the dining hall. We’ll meet back at the attic no matter what we find.”

“Why the attic?” asked Christopher.

But Jack was nodding. “Good call. We can go through your books while Loriel finishes stewing. Maybe there’s something in there about why someone would be harvesting parts from world-walkers. It’s a long shot. At this point, I’ll take it. Come on, bone boy.” She turned and strode down the hall, every inch the confident mad scientist’s protégée once again. Any vulnerability she had shown was gone, tamped down and covered over by the mask she wore.

“Thanks for sticking me with the scary girl,” said Christopher to Kade, and ran after her, pulling the bone flute from his pocket.

“You’re welcome,” Kade called after him. He offered his arm to Nancy, grinning. “C’mon. Let’s go see if we can’t find ourselves an Addams.” His drawl grew thicker, dripping from his words like sweet and tempting honey.

Nancy set her hand in the crook of his elbow, feeling the traitorous red creeping back into her cheeks. This was always the difficult part, back when she’d been at her old school: explaining that “asexual” and “aromantic” were different things. She liked holding hands and trading kisses. She’d had several boyfriends in elementary school, just like most of the other girls, and she had always found those practice relationships completely satisfying. It wasn’t until puberty had come along and changed the rules that she’d started pulling away in confusion and disinterest. Kade was possibly the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. She wanted to spend hours sitting with him and talking about pointless things. She wanted to feel his hand against her skin, to know that his presence was absolute and focused entirely on her. The trouble was, it never seemed to end there, and that was as far as she was willing to go.

Kade must have read her discomfort, because he flashed her a smile and said, “I promise I’m a gentleman. You’re as safe with me as you are with anyone who’s not the murderer.”

“And see, I was just trying to decide whether I thought you might be the killer,” said Nancy. “I’m really relieved to hear that you’re not. I’m not either, just for the record.”

“That’s good to know,” said Kade.

They walked together through the deserted manor. Whispers sometimes drifted from the rooms they passed, indicating the presence of their fellow students. They didn’t stop. Everyone had their own concerns, and Nancy had an uneasy feeling that by helping Jack destroy Loriel’s body, she had just placed herself firmly in the “enemy” camp for anyone who had been a friend of Loriel’s when she was alive. Nancy had never made so many enemies before, or so quickly. She didn’t like it. She just didn’t see a way to undo it.

There was no one outside. The lawn was empty as she and Kade walked toward the trees; even the crows had flown away, off to look for some richer pickings. Everything was silent, eerily so.

Jill wasn’t in the trees. That was almost a disappointment: Nancy had been fully expecting to step into the sheltered grove and see the other girl sitting on a root, posed like something out of a gothic novel, with her parasol blocking out any stray sunbeams that had dared to come too close. Instead, the sun shone down undisturbed, and Nancy and Kade were alone.

“Well, that’s one down,” said Nancy, suddenly nervous. What if Kade wanted to kiss her? What if Kade didn’t want to kiss her? There was no good answer, and so she did what she always did when she was confused or frightened: she froze, becoming a girl-shaped statue.

“Whoa,” said Kade. He sounded genuinely impressed. “That’s some trick. Do you actually turn into stone, or does it only seem like you do?” He prodded her gently in the arm with one finger. “Nope, still flesh. You’re holding really, really still, but you’re not inanimate. How are you doing that? Are you even breathing? I can’t do that.”

“The Lady of Shadows required that everyone who served her be able to hold properly still,” said Nancy, releasing her pose. Her cheeks reddened again. This was all going so wrong. “I’m sorry. I tend to freeze up when I get nervous.”

“Don’t worry, you’re safe with me,” said Kade. “Whoever the killer is, they’re only striking when people are alone. We’ll stick together, and we’ll be fine.”

But you’re what I’m nervous about, thought Nancy. She forced a wan smile. “If you really think so,” she said. “Jill isn’t here. We should get back to the attic before Jack and Christopher start to worry about us.”

They walked side by side back the way that they had come, Nancy’s fingers resting on Kade’s arm and her eyes scanning the grassy expanse of the lawn, looking for some clue as to what had happened. There had to be something that would bring all this together, that would force it to make sense. They couldn’t just be at the mercy of an unseen killer, who slaughtered them for no apparent reason.

“Hands,” she murmured.

“What’s that?” asked Kade.

“I was just thinking about Sumi’s hands,” she said. “She was really good with her hands, you know? Like they were the most important thing about her. Maybe someone is trying to take away the things we treasure the most. I don’t know why, though, or how they’d know.”

“It makes sense,” said Kade. They had reached the porch steps. As they started up, he said, “Most of the students lost the things that were most precious to them when their doors closed. Maybe someone’s so heartbroken that they’re trying to make sure nobody gets to be happy. If they have to be miserable, so does everyone else.”

“But you’re not miserable when you’re dead,” said Nancy.

“I sure do hope not,” said Kade, and reached for the doorknob.

The door opened before he touched it.

7

COCOA

LUNDY STOOD IN the doorway, eyeing the pair suspiciously. “Where were you?”

“Morning to you, too, ma’am,” said Kade. “We got Loriel sorted, just like Miss Eleanor asked us to, and then we went to find Jill. Jack and Christopher are looking inside; we went to look outside. Since she’s not out here, do you mind if we come back in?”

“She shouldn’t be alone,” said Lundy, stepping to the side and holding the door wider to let them pass. “Why didn’t you take her with you?”

“Getting blood out of her dress would have been really hard,” said Nancy, without thinking about it. Lundy turned a startled, offended look on her, and she winced. “Um, sorry. It’s true, though. You can’t get blood out of taffeta, no matter how much you scrub.”

“What fascinating life lessons you have to share,” said Lundy. “Both of you need to get back inside. It’s not safe out here.” Her eyes stayed on Nancy, cold and judgmental.

Nancy shivered, trying not to let her unhappiness show. Her hand still bore down involuntarily on Kade’s arm, tightening. “All right,” she said. “We’ll see you at lunch.”

They walked past Lundy, past the gleaming chandelier with its dusting of frozen tears, and up the stairway to the attic. Only when they were standing outside the door did Nancy allow her fingers to unclench and the shaking that had been threatening to overwhelm her to take over. She sank to the floor, pressing her back to the wall and pulling her knees up against her chest.

Be still, she thought. Be still, be still, be still. But the shaking continued as her traitorous body betrayed her, trembling like a leaf in a hard wind.

“Nancy?” Kade sounded alarmed. He knelt next to her, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Nancy, what’s wrong? Are you all right?”

“She thinks I did it.” Her voice came out thin and reedy, but audible. She drew in a deep breath, forced her head away from her knees, and looked at Kade as she said, “Lundy thinks I did it. She thinks I’m the one who killed Sumi and Loriel. I come from a world full of ghosts. I’m closer to Jack and Jill than I am to anyone else here, and they’ve been here forever without killing anybody. But I show up, and people start dropping dead. Suspecting the new girl only makes sense. When the new girl doesn’t mind helping with the bodies, it becomes almost too easy. She thinks I did it, because anything else would be complicated and hard.”

“Lundy thinks in stories,” said Kade, rubbing Nancy’s back soothingly. “She spent too long in the Goblin Market before she made her bargain. She has stories in her blood. You’re right about being the most logical suspect—new girl, no strong ties, came from an Underworld. You’re probably right about Lundy suspecting you. But you’re wrong if you think that Eleanor will let her hurt you. Eleanor knows you didn’t do it, just like I do. Now come on. I have a hot plate and a teapot in the attic. I can make you something hot to drink, soothe your nerves.”

“Actually, I already made cocoa,” said Jack, opening the door and poking her head out. “Did you find my sister?”

“No, didn’t you?” Kade looked over his shoulder and frowned. “I figured if we didn’t find her, you would. Did you check the dining hall?”

“Yes, and the library, and the classroom we’re supposed to be in this time of day, just in case she’d been so absorbed in thinking about her hair that she hadn’t paid attention to what we were told to do,” said Jack. Her frustration seemed only skin-deep, a cover for her all-too-real concern. “She wasn’t in any of the places we looked. I was hoping you’d find her.”

“Sorry.” Kade stood, offering Nancy his hand. “We looked, we didn’t find, we got a scolding from Lundy, and Nancy—”

“Had a little cry when she realized Lundy suspected her,” finished Nancy, taking Kade’s hand and pulling herself to her feet. “I’m better now. As long as Eleanor doesn’t suspect me, I probably won’t be expelled. Let’s just stick together so that none of us gets hurt, and we’ll ride this thing out as a group.”

“Huh,” said Jack, looking wistful. “I haven’t been part of a group since we left our old school. Now come on. Like I said, I made hot chocolate, and Christopher will drink it all if we leave him alone too long.”

“I heard that!” called Christopher. Jack snorted and withdrew into the attic.

Kade shot Nancy a worried look, which she answered with a smile and a reassuring squeeze of his hand before she let go and stepped into the attic ahead of him. As promised, the air smelled like hot chocolate. Christopher was sitting on one of the heaps of books, a mustache of whipped cream on his lip and a mug cupped in his hands. Jack was at the hot plate, fixing three more mugs. Kade raised an eyebrow.

“Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked.

“You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.”

“How did the laws of nature come into this?” asked Nancy, walking over to claim one of the mugs. The smell was alluring. She took a sip, and her eyes widened. “This tastes like . . .”

“Pomegranate, I know,” said Jack. “Yours was made with pomegranate molasses. Christopher’s has a pinch of cinnamon, and Kade’s contains clotted cream fudge, which I stole from Miss Eleanor’s private supply. She’ll never notice. She has the stuff shipped over from England by the pound, and her next delivery is due in three days.”

“What’s in yours?” asked Nancy.

Jack smiled, holding her mug up in a silent toast. “Three drops of warm saline solution and a pinch of wolfsbane. Not enough to be dangerous to me—I’m human, despite what Angela might say to the contrary—but enough to make it taste like tears, and like the way the wind smells when it sweeps along the moor at midnight. If I knew the taste of the sound of screaming, I’d add that as well, and never drink anything again, as long as I chanced to live.”

Christopher swallowed a mouthful of cocoa, shook his head, and said, “You know, sometimes I almost forget how creepy you are, and then you go and say something like that.”

“It’s best if you remember my nature at all times,” said Jack, and offered Kade his mug.

“Thank you,” he said, taking it from her and wrapping his long fingers around it.

“Say nothing of it,” said Jack. Somehow, coming from her, it wasn’t politeness: it was a plea. Let this momentary kindness be forgotten, it said. Don’t let it linger, lest it be seen as weakness. Outwardly, all she did was twitch one corner of her mouth in a transitory smile. Then she turned, hands cupping her own mug, and moved to find a seat on the piles of books.

“Isn’t this cozy?” Kade returned to what seemed to be his customary perch, leaving Nancy standing awkward and alone next to the hot plate. She looked around before heading for one of the few actual pieces of furniture, an old-fashioned, velvet-covered chair that was being encroached upon by the books, but hadn’t been swallowed yet. She sank down into its embrace, tucking her feet underneath her, hands still cupped around her mug.

“I like it,” said Christopher, after it became apparent that no one else was going to say anything. He shrugged before he added, “The guys—uh, the other guys, I mean, not you, Kade—put up with me because there’re so few of us here, but they all went to sparkly worlds. They all sort of think where I went was weird, so I can’t talk to them about it much. They start insulting the Skeleton Girl and then I have to punch them in their stupid mouths until they stop. Not the best way to make friends.”

“No, I suppose not,” said Jack. She looked down at her cocoa. “I had similar issues when I attempted to make friends with my fellow students. I gave up trying before Jill did. All they ever wanted to do was talk about how strange the Moors must have been, and how inferior to their own cotton-candy wonderlands. Honestly, I don’t blame them for thinking I could be a killer. I blame them for thinking I would have waited this long.”

“And bonding just got creepy again,” said Christopher cheerfully, before taking a gulp of his hot chocolate. “Luckily for you, I’ll forgive anything for cocoa this good.”

“Like I said, cooking is a form of science, and I am a scientist,” said Jack.

“We do need to figure out what’s going on,” said Kade. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m not so well-equipped to go back to my old life. My parents still think they’re somehow magically going to get back the little girl they lost. They haven’t let me come home for five years. No, maybe that’s unfair—or too fair. They won’t let me come home. If I want to put on a skirt and tell them to call me ‘Katie,’ they’ll welcome me with open arms. Pretty sure that if the school closes down, I’m homeless.”

“My folks would let me come back,” said Christopher. “They think this is all some complicated breakdown triggered by the things that happened after I ‘ran away.’ Mom genuinely believes the Skeleton Girl is some girl I fell for who died of anorexia. Like, she asks me on the regular whether I can remember her ‘real name’ yet, so they can track down her parents and tell them what happened to her. It’s really sad, because they care so damn much, and they’re so completely wrong about everything, you know? The Skeleton Girl is real, and she isn’t dead, and she was never alive the way that people are here.”

“Skeleton people generally aren’t,” said Jack, setting her cocoa aside. “If they were, I would expect them to die instantly, due to their lack of functional respiration or circulatory systems. The lack of tendons alone—”

“You must be a lot of fun at parties,” said Christopher.

Jack smirked. “It depends on the kind of party. If there are shovels involved, I’m the life, death, and resurrection of the place.”

“I can’t go home,” said Nancy. She looked down at her cocoa. “My parents . . . they’re like Christopher’s, I guess. They love me. But they didn’t understand me before I went away, and now, I might as well be from another planet. They keep trying to get me to wear colors and eat every day, and go on dates with boys like nothing ever happened. Like everything is just the way it used to be. But I didn’t want to go on dates with boys before I went to the Underworld, and I don’t want to do it now. I won’t. I can’t.”

Kade looked a little hurt. “No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do,” he said, and his tone was stiff and wounded.

Nancy shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I don’t want to go on dates with girls, either. I don’t want to go on dates with anyone. People are pretty, sure, and I like to look at pretty things, but I don’t want to go on a date with a painting.”

“Oh,” said Kade, understanding replacing stiffness. He smiled a little. Nancy, glancing up from her cocoa, smiled back. “Well, looks like we’ve all got good reason to keep this school open. We’ve had two deaths. Sumi and Loriel. What did they have in common?”

“Nothing,” said Christopher. “Sumi went to a Mirror, Loriel went to a Fairyland. High Nonsense and high Logic. They didn’t hang out together, they didn’t have friends in common, they didn’t do any of the same things for fun. Sumi liked origami and making friendship bracelets, Loriel did puzzles and paint-by-numbers. They only overlapped in class and during meals, and I’m pretty sure they would have stopped doing that if they’d been able to. They weren’t enemies. They were just . . . disinterested.”

“Nancy said something before about Sumi’s hands being the most important things about her,” said Kade.

Jack sat up straighter. “Why, Nancy, how callous and odd of you.”

Nancy reddened. “I’m sorry. I just . . . I just thought . . .”

“Oh, that wasn’t a complaint. It’s just that usually, if someone around here is going to be callous and odd, it’s me.” Jack frowned thoughtfully. “You may be onto something there. Each of us has some attribute that attracted the attention of our door in the first place, some inherent point of sympathy that made it possible for us to be happy on the other side. It’s an assumption, I know, built on seeing only the survivors—maybe most of those who go through the doors never return, and so what we see is only ever the best-case scenario. Either way, we’d need to have something to get us through the story alive. And for many people, that intangible something seems to have been concentrated in a certain part of the body.”

“Like Loriel’s eyes,” said Kade.

Jack nodded. “Yes, or Nancy’s incredibly robust musculature—don’t look at me like that, you need very strong muscles to stand without collapsing for the sort of times you’ve described—or Angela’s legs, or Seraphina’s beauty. The girl’s a rancid bucket of leeches on the inside, but she has a face that could move angels to murder. I’ve seen pictures from before she went traveling. She was always pretty. She was no Helen of Troy, until she traveled.”

“How have you seen pictures from before she went traveling?” asked Kade.

“I have the Internet, and her Facebook password is the name of her cat, which she has a picture of above her bed.” Jack snorted. “I am a genius of infinite potential and highly limited patience. People shouldn’t try me so.”

“I’ll keep that in mind the next time I’m trying to keep a secret,” said Kade. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that back when I worked for Dr. Bleak, sometimes he wanted me to gather things for him,” said Jack. “Only the best would do, which was absolutely right and fair: he was a genius, too, a greater genius than I can ever dream of being. So he’d say ‘I need six bats,’ and I would spend days with a net out on the moor, catching the very best, biggest bats, and bring him the finest specimens for his work. Or he might say ‘I need a golden carp without a single silver scale,’ and I’d spend a week by the river, netting fish after fish, until I had something perfect. Those were the easy jobs. Other times he’d say ‘I need a perfect dog, but you’re never going to find a perfect dog, so go out and find the parts I need.’ Head and haunches, tail and toes, I’d have to gather them wherever they were found, and bring them back to him.”

“Okay, first, that’s gross,” said Christopher. “Second, that’s inhumane. Third, what are you saying? That some mad scientist is trying to build a perfect girl out of the best parts of us?”

“I’m the only mad scientist at this school, and I’m not killing people,” said Jack. “Apart from that? Yes. I’m saying that sometimes, murder isn’t about the bodies, or the dead. Those are the things that are left behind. Sometimes, murder is about what’s missing.”

There was a knock at the attic door. Everyone jumped, even Jack. Cocoa slopped over the side of Nancy’s cup. Jack sat up straight, putting her cup down and tensing, like a snake getting ready to strike. Kade cleared his throat.

“Who is it?” he called.

“Jill.” The doorknob turned. The door swung open. Jill stepped inside. She looked curiously around before announcing, “I looked for you, and when I didn’t find you, I decided to come here, since it was the highest point in the house and the closest to the sun, which made it the least likely place for you to be. Now there you are, and here I am. Why did you run off and leave me alone for so long?”

“I was disposing of the body, as I had been asked.” Jack slid off her perch, straightening her vest with a quick tug, and said, “Speaking of the body, the acid should be finished with Loriel’s soft tissues by this point. Christopher, did you want to come help me with her bones?”

“Sure,” said Christopher, sounding bemused. He stood, setting his cocoa aside, and followed Jack out of the attic.

Jill didn’t say anything as her sister walked away and left her. She just turned a bright, guileless smile on Kade, and asked, “Is there any more of that cocoa?”

8

HER SKELETON, IN RAINBOWS CLAD

JACK DESCENDED THE STAIRS as if they had personally challenged her, taking them two and three at a time, until Christopher had to jog to keep pace. Throughout her flight, she never seemed to be working: she remained perfectly serene, cold-eyed and thin-lipped, not breathing hard or struggling in the slightest. She didn’t speak. Christopher was worried, but also grateful. He wasn’t sure he would have been able to answer her without gasping.

“Do we need to clean the bones before you call them?” she asked, as they walked the last length of hallway between the last stretch of stairs and the basement. There were no students there. They hadn’t seen any students since leaving the attic. The campus would have seemed deserted, if not for the whispers still drifting from behind closed doors. “Acid is pretty, but it’s not a good thing to dress a dancer.”

“No,” said Christopher, taking the bone flute from his pocket and wrapping his fingers around it, as much for reassurance as for anything else. “She’ll rise up clean and lovely. Back in the Country of the Bones, we would free new citizens by—” He stopped midsentence, like he’d just realized he was about to say something horrible.

Jack looked back at him as she opened the basement door. “All right, now I’m genuinely curious. You have to tell me. Don’t worry about upsetting me, I once removed a man’s lungs from his chest while he was still alive, awake, and trying to talk.”

“Why would you do something like that?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Jack shrugged and started down the stairs.

Christopher stared after her for a moment before he started moving again. When he caught up, he said defiantly, “We freed new citizens by cutting through their flesh. Big, deep cuts, all the way down to the bone. That way the skeletons within could rise up without having to struggle and risk fracturing themselves. Bones heal slow, even outside the body.”

“The fact that the bones healed at all is the strange thing to me,” said Jack. Her voice was quiet. “The rules were so different there. For all of us.”

“Yeah,” agreed Christopher, looking at the reddish liquid filling the tub. A few chunks floated on the surface. He didn’t want to think about them too hard.

“You shouldn’t tell anyone what you just told me. The petty-minded fools here think surgery and butchery are the same thing. Look at the way they look at me. Right now, you’re still one of them, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that can’t change.” Jack walked across the room to the wardrobe. “Everything changes.”

“I know,” said Christopher, and raised his flute to his lips, and began to play.

There was no sound, not that the living could hear: there was only the idea of sound, the sudden, overwhelming sensation that something was being overlooked, something small and subtle and hidden between the molecules of silence. Jack opened the wardrobe and took out a cravat, listening as hard as she could as she removed her bow tie. She heard her own breathing. She heard Christopher’s fingers brushing across bone. She heard a splash.

She turned around.

Christopher was still playing, and Loriel was sitting up, a polished bone sculpture. Her scapulae were delicate wings; her skull was a psalm to the elegant dancer waiting beneath the flesh of all who walked the earth. There was a pearlescent sheen to her, like opal, and Jack wondered idly whether that was the acid or the magic of Christopher’s flute at work. It was a pity she would probably never know. The school, pleasant as it was, didn’t exactly go out of its way to provide her with bodies to examine.

Slowly, gingerly, Loriel’s bones stood, wobbling slightly, and climbed out of the tub. A single drop of acid rolled from her elbow and fell to the floor, where it hissed as it ate a pit in the stone. She stopped, rocking from side to side, her empty eye sockets fixed on Christopher.

“That’s amazing,” said Jack, taking a step forward. “Can she see you? Is she aware? Or is this just magic animating her bones? Does it work on any skeleton, or just those who died violently? Can you—you can’t answer any of my questions unless you stop playing, can you?”

Christopher shook his head and gestured with an elbow toward the stairs that would lead to the old servant’s door. Jack nodded.

“I’ll get them open,” she said, and trotted off, tying the cravat as she went. Her fingers, while not as nimble as Sumi’s, were quick, and the knot was a familiar one; by the time she reached the door and shoved it open, she was once more impeccably dressed. Of all the skills she’d learned from Dr. Bleak, the ability to groom herself while running for her life seemed the most likely to continue to serve her well in this strange, often confusing world she presently called “home.”

Christopher followed her more sedately, playing his silent flute all the way. Loriel trailed after him, her toes tapping on the stairs, making a sound that was virtually indistinguishable from the clatter of dried branches on a windowpane. Jack stood and watched as the pair walked outside, and then she followed, closing the door.

“Are we looking for a place to bury her where she won’t be found?” she asked. Christopher nodded. “Follow me, then.”

Together, they walked across the property, the girl, the boy, and the dancing skeleton wrapped in rainbows. Neither of those who still possessed tissue and tongue spoke. This was the closest thing Loriel would have to a funeral; it would have been inappropriate to make light of it. They walked until they came to the place where the landscaping dropped away, replaced by tangle and weed, and the hard stretch of stony earth that had never been farmed or claimed as anything other than wilderness. Eleanor West owned it all, of course: her family had owned the countryside for miles around, and now that she was the last, every inch of it belonged to her. She had simply refused to sell or allow development on any of the lots surrounding her school. The local conservationists considered her a hero. The local capitalists considered her an enemy. Some of her greatest detractors said she acted like a woman with something to hide, and they were right, in their way; she was a woman with something to protect. That made her more dangerous than they could ever have suspected.

“Wait,” said Jack, when they reached the waste. She turned to Loriel, and said, “If you can hear me, if you can understand me, nod. Please. I know you didn’t like me when you were alive, and I didn’t like you either, but there are lives on the line. Save them. Answer me.”

Christopher kept playing. Slowly, Loriel’s skull dipped toward her sternum, moving in the absence of muscles or tendons to command it. Jack blew out a breath.

“See, this could be a Ouija situation, where any answers I get from you are just the things Christopher wants me to hear, but I don’t think that’s the case,” she said. “Maybe it would have been a week ago, but Nancy’s at the school now, and ghosts want to be near her. I think you’re still Loriel, on some level, deep down. So please, if you can, tell me. Who killed you?”

Loriel was still for several seconds. Then, slowly, as if every move were an impossible effort, she raised her right arm and pointed her index finger at the space next to Jack. Jack turned to look at the empty air. Then she sighed.

“I suppose that was too much to ask,” she said. “Christopher?”

He nodded, and moved his fingers on the flute. Loriel’s skeleton walked down the short hill into the waste—and kept walking downward, her steps carrying her into and through the ground, as if she were walking on an unseen stairway. In less than a minute, she was gone, the crown of her head vanishing below the soil. Christopher lowered his flute.

“She was so beautiful,” he said.

“I’d find that less creepy if I thought you were talking about her with the skin on,” said Jack. “Come on. Let’s get back to the others. It’s not safe to be alone.” She turned, and Christopher followed her, and they trudged together across the wide green lawn.

9

THE BROKEN BIRDS OF AVALON

LUNCH WAS A STILTED affair, with no one talking and few students actually eating. For once, Nancy’s preference for sipping fruit juice and pushing the solid food around her plate without tasting it didn’t come across as strange; if anything, the strange part was her willingness to ingest anything at all. She found herself scanning the other students, trying to guess at their stories, their hidden worlds, to figure out what, if anything, would drive them to kill. Maybe if she had been there longer, if they hadn’t been such strangers to her, she would have been able to find the answers she needed. As it was, it felt like she wasn’t able to find anything but questions.

After lunch there was an assembly in the library, where Miss Eleanor praised everyone for their calm and their compassion, and thanked Jack, Nancy, and the others for disposing of Loriel’s body. Nancy reddened and sank lower in her seat, trying to avoid the eyes that were turning toward her. She was a stranger, as far as they were concerned, and as such, her willingness to be intimate with the dead had to be suspicious.

Eleanor took a deep breath and looked out upon the room—her students, her charges—with a somber expression on her face. “As you all know, my door is still open,” she said. “My world is a Nonsense world, with high Virtue and moderate Rhyme as its crosswise directions. Many of you wouldn’t be able to survive there. The lack of logic and reason would destroy you. But for those of you who thrive in Nonsense, I am willing to open the door and let you go through. You can hide there, for a time.”

A gasp ran through the room, accompanied by a few quick, choked-off sobs. A girl with bright blue hair bent double, burying her face against her knees and starting to rock back and forth, like she could soothe her distress away. One of the boys got up and went to the corner, turning his back on everyone. Worse were the ones who simply sat and wept, tears running down their faces, hands folded tightly in their laps.

Nancy looked blankly at Kade. He sighed and leaned closer to her.

“Miss Eleanor is very protective of her door. Doors can be fickle, and she’s waited so long to go back that every time she lets someone through, she risks being replaced. Now she’s offering to put all the students who can thrive in Nonsense through. That means she’s scared, and she’s doing what she can to take care of us.” He kept his voice low. The students around them didn’t seem to notice. Most were too busy crying. On the other side of the room, even Jill was weeping, propped against her sister for support. Only Jack’s eyes were dry. “Trouble is, Nonsense is one of the two big directions—she can save half the students, at best, and not everyone who’s been to a Nonsense world is suited for every Nonsense world. They’re all so different. Maybe a quarter of the kids she’s just offered to save will be able to go through.”

“Oh,” said Nancy softly. She understood a few things about false hope, however well-intentioned the offer might have been. Eleanor was trying to save her beloved charges in the only way she knew. She was hurting them in the process.

At the head of the room, Eleanor took a shaky breath. “As always, my darlings, attendance at this school is purely voluntary. If any of you want to call your parents and ask them to take you home, I will refund the rest of the fees for the semester, and I won’t try to stop you. I only ask that, for the sake of the students who remain, you don’t tell them why you want to withdraw. We’ll find a way to fix this.”

“Oh, yeah?” asked Angela bitterly. “Can you fix it for Loriel?”

Eleanor looked away. “Get to class,” she said. Her voice was soft, and suddenly old.

She stood there, head bowed, as the students rose and filed out. Some were still crying. She would seek out the Nonsense children soon, tap them on their shoulders and lead them to her door. Some would be able to go through, she was sure. There were always a few for whom her world was close enough. Still not home, not the checkerboard sky or mirrored sea that they were dreaming of, but . . . close enough. Close enough for them to be happy, for them to start to live again. And who knew? Doors opened everywhere. Maybe one day, the children of this world who had gone to that world to save themselves would see a door that didn’t fit right with the walls around it, something with a doorknob made of a moon, or a knocker that winked. Maybe they could still go home.

A hand touched her shoulder. She turned to find Kade behind her, a worried expression on his face. She glanced toward the seats, and there was Nancy, retreated once more into stillness. It didn’t matter. There were too many secrets here to be shy about revealing them. Eleanor turned to Kade once more and buried her face against his chest, weeping.

“It’s all right, Aunt Ely, it’s all right,” said Kade, stroking her back with one hand. “We’re going to figure this out.”

“My students are dying, Kade,” she said. “They’re dying, and I can get so few of them out of harm’s way. I can’t save you. When you found your door, I thought—”

“I know,” he said. “It’s too bad for all of us that I have a Logical heart.” He kept stroking her back. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see. We’ll figure this out, we’ll find a way, and we’ll keep the doors open, no matter what.”

Eleanor sighed, pulling away. “You’re a good boy, Kade. Your parents don’t know what they’re missing.”

His smile in response was sad. “That’s the trouble, Auntie. They know exactly what they’re missing, and since she’s never going to be found again, they don’t know what to do with me.”

“Silly child,” said Eleanor. “Now get to class.”

“Getting,” he said, and walked toward the door. Nancy shook off her statue stillness and followed him.

She waited until they were halfway down the hall before she said, “Eleanor is your . . .?”

“Great-great-great-aunt,” said Kade. “She never married or had children. Her sister, on the other hand, had six. Since my great-great-great-grandma had a husband to take care of her, Eleanor inherited the entire estate. I’m the first of her nieces or nephews to find a door of my own. She was so happy thinking that I’d traveled into Nonsense that it took me almost a month to admit she was typing me wrong, and I’d been in a world of pure Logic. She loves me anyway. Someday, all this”—he gestured to the walls around them—“will be mine, and the school will stay open for another few decades. Assuming we don’t close in the next week.”

“I’m sure we won’t,” said Nancy. “We’ll figure this out.”

“Before the authorities get involved?”

Nancy didn’t have an answer to that.

*   *   *

CLASSES WERE PERFUNCTORY and distracted, taught by instructors who could sense that the campus was uneasy, even if they didn’t—except for Lundy—know why. Dinner was equally rushed, the beef overcooked and dry, the fruit sliced so haphazardly that bits of peel and rind stuck to the outside when it was served. Students went off in threes and fours, arranging impromptu sleepovers with their friends. Nancy didn’t bat an eye when Kade and Christopher showed up at her room clutching sleeping bags and flipped a coin for the use of Sumi’s bed. Kade won and settled on the mattress, while Christopher rolled his bedding out on the floor. All three of them closed their eyes and pretended to sleep—a pretense that, for Nancy, became reality sometime after midnight.

She dreamt of ghosts, and silent halls where the dead walked, untroubled.

Christopher dreamt of dancing skeletons that gleamed like opals, and the unchanging, ever-welcoming smile of the Skeleton Girl.

Kade dreamt a world in all the colors of the rainbow, a prism of a country, shattering itself into a thousand shards of light. He dreamt himself home and welcomed as he was, not as they had wanted him to be, and of the three, he was the one who cried into his pillow and woke, cheeks wet, to the sound of screaming.

It was a far-off sound, coming from somewhere outside the window; Nancy and Christopher were still asleep, which only made sense. They had come from worlds where screams were more common, and less dangerous, than they were here. Kade sat up, wiping the sleep from his eyes, and waited for the screams to come again. They did not. He hesitated.

Should he wake them, take them with him when he went to investigate? Nancy was already under suspicion by most of her peers, and Christopher would be too, if he kept getting involved. Kade could go alone. Most of the students liked him, since he was the one who kept the wardrobe in order, and they would forgive him for finding another body. But then he’d be alone, and if either Nancy or Christopher woke before he got back, they would worry. He didn’t want to worry them.

Kade knelt and shook Christopher by the shoulder. The other boy groaned before opening his eyes and squinting up at Kade. “What is it?” he asked, voice heavy with sleep.

“Somebody just screamed out near the trees,” said Kade. “We need to go see why.”

Christopher sat up, seeming instantly awake. “Are we taking Nancy?”

“Yes,” said Nancy, sliding out of her bed. Screams hadn’t been enough to wake her, but speech had: in the Halls of the Dead, no one spoke unless they wanted to be listened to. “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

Neither of the boys argued. All of them shared the same fear of being left alone in this suddenly haunted house, where the ghosts were nothing they could understand.

They walked quietly, but they didn’t creep, all of them secretly hoping someone would wake, come out of their room, and join the small processional. Instead, the doors stayed shut, and the trio found themselves walking alone toward the shadowy grove where Nancy and Jill had sought shelter from the unforgiving sun. There was no sunlight now: only the moon, looking down from between the patches in the clouds.

Then they stepped into the trees, and the moonlight became too much to bear, for the moonlight was enough to show Lundy, lying small and silent on the ground, her eyes open and staring into the leaves. She still had her eyes and her hands, and seemed to have everything else. Her clothes were unbloodied, her limbs intact.

“Lundy,” said Kade, and moved to kneel beside her, reaching for a pulse. The motion caused her head to roll to the side, revealing what had been taken.

Kade scrabbled away, shambling to his feet, before running to the other side of the clearing and vomiting noisily into the bushes. Nancy and Christopher, who were less disturbed by gore, looked at the empty bowl of Lundy’s skull and stepped a little closer together, shivering despite the warmth of the night.

“Why would someone take her brain?” asked Nancy.

“I was about to ask you the same question,” snarled Angela.

Nancy and Christopher turned. Angela was standing at the edge of the grove, a flashlight in her hand and several shadow-draped students behind her. Shining the light directly in Nancy’s eyes, she demanded, “Where is Seraphina?”

“Who’s Seraphina?” asked Nancy, raising a hand to shade her eyes. She heard footsteps a moment before Kade’s hand settled on her shoulder. She took a half step back, letting him shelter her. “We came out here because we heard screaming.”

“You came out here to hide the body,” snapped Angela. “Where is she?”

“Seraphina is the prettiest girl in school, Nancy—you’ve seen her. She traveled to a Nonsense world, high Wicked, high Rhyme,” said Kade. “Pretty as a sunrise, mean as a snake. She ain’t here, Angela.” His Oklahoma accent was suddenly strong, dominating his words. “Go back to your room. I have to go wake Miss Eleanor. Odds are good she’s let Seraphina through her door.”

“If she hasn’t, you better give her back,” said Angela. “If you hurt her, I will kill you.”

“We don’t have her,” said Christopher. “We were asleep up until five minutes ago.”

“Who’s that with you?” asked Kade. “Have you just been roaming the campus looking for someone to accuse? You’re out here as much as we are. This could be your handiwork.”

“We went to good, respectable worlds,” said Angela. “Moonbeams and rainbows and unicorn tears, not . . . not skeletons and dead people and deciding to be boys when we’re really girls!”

Sudden silence fell over the grove. Even Angela’s supporters seemed stunned by her words. Angela paled.

“I didn’t mean that,” she said.

“Oh, but I believe you did,” said Eleanor. She stepped around Angela and the others, walking slowly to where Lundy was sprawled in the dirt. She was leaning on a cane. That was new, as were some of the lines in her cheeks. She seemed to be aging by the day. “Ah, my poor Lundy. I suppose this may have been a kinder death than the one you were looking forward to, but I still wish you hadn’t gone.”

“Ma’am—” began Kade.

“All of you, go back to your rooms,” said Eleanor. “Angela, we’ll speak in the morning. For now, stay together and try to survive the night.” She braced both hands on her cane and stayed where she was, looking down at Lundy’s body. “My poor girl.”

“But—”

“I am still headmistress here, at least until I’m dead,” said Eleanor. “Go.”

They went.

Their tiny group managed to stay together until they had reached the front steps. Then Angela turned on Kade, and said, “I meant what I said. It’s sick, how you pretend like you’re something you’re not.”

“I was about to say the same thing to you,” said Christopher. “I mean, you always did a pretty good job of pretending to be a decent human being. You had me fooled.”

Angela gaped at him. Then she turned and stormed up the stairs, with her friends at her heels. Nancy turned to Kade, who shook his head.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Let’s go back to bed.”

“I would prefer if you didn’t,” said Jack.

The three of them turned. The usually dapper mad scientist was standing by the corner of the house, drenched in blood, clutching her left shoulder with her right hand. Blood trickled from between her fingers, bright enough to be visible in the gloom. Her tie was undone. Somehow, that was the worst part of all.

“I seem to need assistance,” she said, and pitched forward in a dead faint.

10

BE STILL AS STONE, AND YOU MAY LIVE

KADE AND CHRISTOPHER gathered Jack up; Kade and Christopher carried Jack away, while Nancy stood, frozen and temporarily forgotten, in the shadows on the porch. She knew, in an academic way, that she should hurry after them—that she shouldn’t stand out here alone, where anything could happen to her. But that seemed hasty, and dangerous. Stillness was safer. Stillness had saved her before, and it would save her now.

She had forgotten how much like pomegranate juice a bloodstain could look, in the right light.

She had forgotten how beautiful it was.

So now: stand still, so still that she became one with the background, that she could feel her heart slowing, five beats becoming four, becoming three, until there was no more than one beat per minute, until she barely had to breathe. Maybe Jack was right; maybe her ability to be still was preternaturally honed. It didn’t feel like anything special. It just felt correct, as if this was what she should have been all the time, always.

Her parents worried because she didn’t eat enough, and maybe that was something they needed to worry about when she was moving like a hot, fast thing, but they didn’t understand. She wasn’t going to stay here, in their hot, fast world. She wasn’t. And when she slowed her body down like this, when she was still, she didn’t need to eat any more than she already did. She could survive for a century on a spoonful of juice, a crumb of cake, and consider herself well-nourished. She didn’t have an eating disorder. She knew what she needed, and what she needed was to be still.

Nancy breathed deeper into her stillness and felt her heart stop for the span of a minute, becoming as motionless as the rest of her, like a pomegranate seed nestled safe at the center of a fruit. She was preparing to take another breath, to let her heart enjoy another beat, when someone stepped around the corner of the house. Nancy would have said that she couldn’t become any more motionless. In that moment, she proved herself wrong. In that moment, she was as still and as inconsequential as stone.

Jill walked past the porch, bloodstains on her hands and a parasol slung over one shoulder, blocking out any errant rays of moonlight that might dare caress her skin. There was a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth, like a spot of jam that her napkin had missed. As Nancy watched, motionless, Jill’s little pink tongue flicked out and wiped the blood away. Jill kept walking. Nancy didn’t move.

Please, she thought. Please, my Lord, keep my heart from beating. Please, don’t let her see me.

Nancy’s heart did not beat.

Jill walked around the far corner of the house and was gone.

Nancy breathed in. Her lungs ached at the invasion of air; her heart protested as it started to pound, going from stillness to a race in under a second. It took a few seconds more for the blood to resume circulating through her body, and then she spun and ran for the house, following the drops of blood on the floor until she reached the heretofore unseen kitchen and burst through the door.

Kade whirled, a carving knife in his hand. Christopher stepped in front of Eleanor. Jack was lying motionless on the butcher’s block in the middle of the room, her shirt cut away and makeshift bandages covering the stab wound in her arm.

“Nancy?” Kade lowered the knife. “What happened?”

“I saw her,” gasped Nancy. “I saw Jill. She did this.”

“Yes,” said Jack wearily. “She did.”

11

YOU CAN NEVER GO HOME

JACK’S EYES WERE OPEN and fixed on the ceiling. Slowly, she used her uninjured arm to push herself upright. When Christopher stepped forward as if to help, she waved him off, muttering an irritated, “I am injured, not an invalid. Some things I must do myself.” He backed away. She finished sitting and held that position for a moment, head bowed, fighting to get her breath back.

No one moved. Finally, Jack said, “I should have seen it sooner. I suppose I did, on some level, but I didn’t want to, so I refused it as best I could. She makes it out like it was my fault we had to leave the Moors, like the work I was doing with Dr. Bleak riled up the villagers. That’s not true. Dr. Bleak and I never killed anyone—not on purpose—and most of the locals left us their bodies when they died, because they knew we could use the bits they’d left behind to save lives. We were doctors. She’s the one who went and became beloved of a monster. She’s the one who wanted to be just. Like. Him.”

“Jack . . .?” said Kade, warily.

Nancy, who remembered the moonlight glittering off a speck of blood like jam, said nothing.

“She would have made a beautiful monster, if she’d been a little smarter,” said Jack quietly. “She certainly had the appetite for it. Eventually, I suppose she would have learnt subtlety. But she didn’t learn fast enough, and they found out what she was doing, and they took up their torches and they marched, and Dr. Bleak knew she’d never be forgiven. He drugged her. He opened the door and went to throw her through. I couldn’t let her go alone. She’s my sister. I just didn’t know how hard it would be.”

“Sweetheart, what are you saying?” asked Eleanor.

Nancy, who remembered the way Jill had smiled when she talked about her Master, and how far she’d been willing to go to please him, said nothing.

“It’s my sister.” Jack looked at Kade rather than Eleanor, like it was easier for her to say this to a peer. “She killed them all. She’s trying to build herself a key. We have to stop her.” She slid off the butcher block, only wincing a little when the impact of her feet hitting the floor traveled up through her bad arm. “Seraphina is still alive.”

“That’s why Loriel pointed next to you, but not at you,” said Christopher.

Jack nodded. “I didn’t kill her. She knew it. Jill did.”

“I saw her outside,” said Nancy. “She was walking like there was no hurry. Where would she go?”

“She stabbed me in the basement, but she’ll be heading for the attic,” said Jack. She grimaced. “The skylights . . . it’s easier when there’s a storm. I tried to stop her. I tried.”

“It’s all right,” said Kade. “We’ve got it from here.”

“You’re not going without me,” said Jack. “She’s my sister.”

“Can you keep up?”

Jack’s smile was thin and strained. “Try to stop me.”

Kade glanced to Eleanor, expression questioning. She closed her eyes.

“Jack can keep up, but I can’t,” she said. “Don’t go if you’re not sure that you’ll come back to me.”

They went.

The four students ran through the house, fleet and angry. Jack was surprisingly steady on her feet, given the amount of blood she had lost. Nancy brought up the rear. Stillness and speed were diametrically opposed. But she did the best she could, and they all reached the attic door at roughly the same time. Kade slammed the door open.

Jill was standing in an ocean of books with a knife in her hand. The table she had swept clear was now occupied by Seraphina—the most beautiful girl in the world—and an assortment of jars, each with its own, terrible burden. Jill raised her head as the door opened, and sighed. “Go away,” she said peevishly. “This is delicate work. I don’t have time for you.”

Kade was the first to step into the room, his hands held out in front of him. “You don’t want to do this.”

“I think I do,” Jill countered. “You don’t know me. None of you know me. Not even her.” She jerked her chin at Jack. “I’m going home. I’m going back to my Master. I figured out the way, and no one can stop me. If you try, they’ll have all died in vain, and I’ll just do it again. I’m going to build my skeleton key.”

Seraphina whimpered behind the gag that covered her mouth, eyes rolling wildly as she looked for a way out. She wasn’t finding one.

“The door home is locked for a reason,” said Jack. “You can’t get around that.”

“But I can, dear sister, I can,” said Jill. “Everyone here has something special about them, something that called the doors. I’m building the perfect girl. The girl who has everything. The smartest, prettiest, fastest, strongest girl. Every door will open for her. Every world will want her. And when I get to the Moors, I’ll kill her, and I’ll be allowed to stay forever. I just want to go home. Surely you can appreciate that.”

“We all do,” said Christopher. “This isn’t the way.”

“There isn’t any other,” said Jill.

“The dead aren’t tools,” said Nancy, stepping past Kade with her hands held loosely at her sides. “Please. You’re hurting them. You’re stealing the things that make them important because you want a skeleton key, but they can’t move on to their afterlives until you give those things back.” She didn’t know that her words were true, but they felt so right that she didn’t question them. “Why is your happy-ever-after the only one that matters?”

“Because I’m the one who’s willing to take it,” snapped Jill. “Back off, or she dies, and I tell everyone it was you. Who are they going to believe? The ingénue, or the girl who talks to ghosts? Even your supporters are weird. I’ll come out smelling like a rose, just you watch.”

Jill’s eyes were fixed on Nancy. She didn’t see Jack move away from the others, making her slow way around the edge of the attic. Christopher and Kade were silent.

“You know this is wrong, Jill,” said Nancy. “You know the dead are angry with you.”

Jack continued to move, slow and easy and quiet as a prayer. She picked up a pair of scissors.

“I don’t care about the dead,” said Jill. “I care about going home. I care about my Master. I care about myself, and the rest of you can hang, as far as I’m—” She stopped in the middle of her sentence, making a small choking sound. She looked down as blood began to spread through the front of her lacy peignoir. Then, gracelessly, she collapsed, revealing the scissors sticking out of her back.

Jack looked down at her fallen sister for a moment. Her eyes were dry when she raised her head and looked at the others. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I should have understood faster. I should have seen it. I didn’t. I apologize.”

“You killed your sister.” Nancy sounded puzzled. “Did you have to . . .?”

“Murder trials are so messy, aren’t they? And death isn’t forever if you know what you’re doing. Jill was the one Dr. Bleak locked the door against, not me. I’ve always been welcome at home, if I was willing to leave her behind . . . or change her. Her Master won’t want her now. Once you’ve died and been resurrected, you can’t be a vampire.” Jack bent to pull the scissors from Jill’s back. They came up dripping red. She grimaced as the blood oozed onto her fingers. “If you’ll forgive me, we must be going. So much to do, and resurrections always work better when they’re performed quickly. I can bring her back. She’ll still be my sister.”

She slashed the bloody scissors through the air. They cut lines in the nothingness, until a rectangle hung open next to her, showing a dark, wind-racked field. In the distance, a castle, with a village at its base. Jack’s face softened, becoming suffused with unspeakable longing.

“Home,” she breathed. She bent, sliding her arms under Jill—grunting slightly as the motion reopened the slash in her left shoulder—and lifting her sister’s body in a bridal carry. She stepped through the door. She didn’t look back.

The last any of them saw of the sisters was Jack, suddenly distant and so small on that vast, empty plain, walking through the darkness toward the castle lights. Then the rectangle faded, leaving them alone in the attic once again.

Seraphina whimpered behind her gag. Time resumed.

Time had a way of doing that.

AND THEY ALL LIVED

WITHOUT JACK TO HELP, disposing of Lundy’s body was more difficult: no one really wanted to go into the basement save for Christopher and Nancy, and they didn’t know enough about chemicals to dissolve her safely. In the end, she was laid to rest in the grove where she’d been killed, buried deep among the tree roots. Sumi’s hands and Loriel’s eyes were buried with her. The police pursued a few false leads looking for Sumi’s killer, but eventually they admitted that the trail had gone cold, and the case was closed.

Eleanor was slow to recover her vitality; she still walked with a cane, although she was sturdy enough to run the school without her right-hand woman and best friend. Kade began stepping up to fill the void Lundy had left. More and more, it was obvious that one day, the school would be his—and that he would do a good job. Eleanor’s legacy would be protected, as it always should have been.

Nancy moved into the basement, once it had been thoroughly cleaned out. Seraphina had repeated the story of her rescue often enough that the other students no longer blamed Nancy or her friends for the deaths; while they might not be friends, at least they weren’t enemies.

The rest of the semester passed like a dream. Nancy was packing to go home when she heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to see Kade standing there, a familiar flowered suitcase in his hand.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” she replied.

“Heard you were going home for the holidays.”

Nancy nodded. “My parents insisted.” They had begged, they had pleaded with her over the phone, and every word had solidified her determination not to do anything that would give them an excuse to pull her out of school. She didn’t want to stay here, where it was bright and colorful and fast, but she would take a thousand school days over a single day in the presence of her parents, who would never understand.

She couldn’t even be excited at the thought of seeing them again. During her days among the dead, she had wondered what her family was doing, whether they missed her; now she just wondered if they’d ever let her go.

“I thought you might want to take this”—he held out the suitcase—“so they wouldn’t think we’d been encouraging your weirdness.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Nancy smiled as she walked over to take the case from him. “Will you be all right without me?”

“Oh, always,” he said. “Christopher and I are working on a new map for worlds connected to the dead. I’m starting to think that maybe Vitus and Mortis are minor directions. That might explain a few things.”

“I’ll look forward to seeing your work,” said Nancy gravely.

“Cool.” Kade took a step back up the stairs. “Have a good vacation, okay?”

“I will,” said Nancy. She watched him walk away. When the door shut behind him, she closed her eyes and allowed herself a few seconds of stillness, centering her thoughts.

So this was the world. This was the place she’d come from—and more, this was the place where she came closest to belonging in this world. She could stay at the school until she graduated, and after. She could be Kade’s Lundy, once Eleanor was gone, to Nonsense or to the grave; she could be the woman who stood beside him and helped to keep things going. She’d do a better job, she thought, of telling the students about their futures without making those futures seem like life sentences. She could learn to be happy here, if she had to. But never completely. That would be too much to ask.

She opened her eyes and looked at the suitcase in her hands before she walked over and set it on Jack’s old autopsy table, now blunted with a plain white sheet. The latches resisted a little as she pressed them open and revealed the welter of brightly colored clothes that her parents had packed for her all those months ago.

There was an envelope on top of the tangled blouses and skirts and undergarments. Carefully, Nancy picked it up and opened it, pulling out the note inside.

You’re nobody’s rainbow.

You’re nobody’s princess.

You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.

Sumi’s name wasn’t signed: it was scrawled, in big, jagged letters that took up half the page. Nancy laughed, the sound turning into something like a sob. Sumi must have written it that first day, just in case Nancy couldn’t handle it; in case she became less sure, and started trying to forget.

Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me, she thought, and the words were true enough that she repeated them aloud: “Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me.”

The air in the room seemed to shift.

The letter still in her hand, Nancy turned. The stairs were gone. There was a doorway in their place, solid oak and so familiar. Slowly, as in a dream, she walked toward it, Sumi’s letter falling from her hand and drifting to the floor.

At first, the knob refused to turn. She closed her eyes again, hoping as hard as she could, and felt it give beneath her hand. This time, when she opened her eyes and twisted, the door swung open, and she found herself looking at a grove of pomegranate trees.

The air smelled so sweet, and the sky was black velvet, spangled with diamond stars. Nancy was shaking as she stepped through. The grass was wet with dew, tickling her ankles. She bent to untie her shoes, stepping out of them and leaving them where they lay. The dew coated her toes as she reached up to pluck a pomegranate from the nearest branch. It was so ripe that it had split down the middle, revealing a row of ruby seeds.

The juice was bitter on her lips. It tasted like heaven.

Nancy began walking down the path between the trees, never looking back. The door was gone long before she broke into a run. It wasn’t needed anymore. Like a key that finds its keyhole, Nancy was finally home.

THE TOMATO THIEF

Ursula Vernon

Grandma Harken lived on the edge of town, in a house with its back to the desert.

Some people said that she lived out there because she liked her privacy, and some said that it was because she did black magic in secret. Some said that she just didn’t care for other people, and they were probably the closest to the truth.

When her daughter Eva asked her to move into town, to be a little closer, Grandma Harken refused. It got to be a regular ritual with them—“Mother, won’t you move in a little closer? I worry about you out there alone.”

“What’s going to bother me out here?”

“You could step on a rattlesnake,” said Eva.

“I’d rather get bit by a rattlesnake than the neighbors,” said Grandma Harken. “I get enough people coming whining to me as it is. As it is, some of ‘em get tired and turn around. A twenty minute walk has its advantages.” She held up a needle and threaded it on the first try. “Besides, I can still see what I’m doing. Talk to me when I’ve gone blind.”

Eva sighed, the way she always did, and said, “If you won’t come in closer, you could have someone come out and live with you. Hire a girl, maybe.”

“Garden only feeds one,” said Grandma, which was at least three-quarters of a lie. Eva knew this, but didn’t possess the sort of steel that would allow her to call her mother out on it.

“You could at least get a dog.”

“Can’t get a dog. It’ll offend Spook-cat.”

(Spook-cat was a tiny ginger tomcat who lived in perpetual terror of loud noises, sudden movements, and unexpected shadows. He lived under Grandma Harken’s bed and would occasionally consent to sleep on her pillow, despite her snoring. He was deeply intimidated by the jackrabbits that lived in the desert, so trips outside to do his business lasted less than two minutes, followed by immediate retreat back under the bed.

He had seen a mouse once and it had frightened him so badly that he had not come out from behind the stove for a week.)

Eva sighed again.

It was debatable whether she knew the real reason that Grandma Harken lived so far out of town. Her mother kept a lot of secrets.

In fact, it was because of the tomatoes.

Tomatoes are thirsty plants and they don’t always want to grow in a desert. You have to give them criminal amounts of water and they’ll only set fruit in spring and autumn. Summer heat is too much for them and if they don’t die outright, you’re pouring gallons of water a day into the sand just to keep them alive.

Grandma Harken had spent the better part of fifty years growing tomatoes and she had a spot in her garden that held water just a fraction longer than anywhere else. It got shade in the worst of the afternoon and sun in the earliest part of the morning.

Her tomatoes were the biggest and the juiciest in town. She started them on the windowsill on New Year’s Day and she planted them out in February. They ripened in spring and she pulled the plants up as soon as the last one had been picked.

The same people in town who muttered about black magic swore that she was using unholy powers on her tomatoes. This was a little more plausible than general black magic, because obviously if you had unholy powers, you’d want to use them on your tomatoes. But Grandma Harken was extremely useful to have around and knew more about dangerous desert spirits than anyone else, so people shushed their whispering neighbors and smiled politely when Grandma passed.

Also, if you were very polite, you might be able to beg a few tomato seeds from her. The resulting plant wouldn’t be up to her standards, but it would still bear a damn fine tomato.

Grandma Harken had been watching her tomatoes very closely for the last few days, and not just to catch the hornworm caterpillars.

One of the smaller ones was starting to come ripe, and she was looking forward to it more than a little.

She’d been feeling worn out and overly responsible lately. It had been a long, long year, and there’d been that business with her grandson and the jackalope wife. It had all worked out as well as could be expected, but it had been a worrisome mess while it lasted. Her grandson had gone back east on the train, and good riddance to him. Boy had no business in the desert. But she worried anyway, partly for him and partly for his mother and partly because a foolish young man with brooding eyes can cause no end of heartbreak in the world.

Worrying didn’t do any good, but somehow that never stops anybody. Mostly it made her tired.

She didn’t look any older, so far as she could tell from the mirror, but her heart felt like somebody had been scraping the last bits out with a spoon.

If she could just sit down at the table with a knife and salt and some good white bread, maybe a little mayonnaise . . . well, it seemed like that’d put the world back into the right sort of shape around her. Sometimes the best cure for life was a ripe tomato.

She got up the morning after Eva visited and went out to the garden. The air was still cool and the porch steps creaked as she walked down them.

The tomato was gone.

Grandma Harken knew right away that it was missing, but she looked around the plants anyway. There were three of them, planted in a triangle, covered in heavy green balls. A few were turning red, but the tomato she’d kept her eye on, the one that had been right there . . .

Gone.

It had been there last night. She’d looked at it in sunset and thought that it’d be ripe this morning.

“I ain’t losing my mind,” she said firmly. “That tomato was here.”

The tomato continued to be absent. There were no seeds on the ground or tracks in the dirt to indicate where it had gone.

The rest of the garden was large and dusty, like desert gardens often are. Jackrabbits liked to come lie in the shade under the beans. Jackrabbits aren’t known for eating tomatoes off the vine.

§

Strange things happen in the desert. Grandma Harken looked around suspiciously and went back inside to make tea.

§

Two days later, there were two fine tomatoes almost ready to split. Grandma Harken stroked their scarlet skins. “Tomorrow,” she said, with satisfaction. She had almost succeeded in putting the previous tomato out of her mind.

But tomorrow came and Grandma Harken beheld a distinct absence of ripe tomatoes.

This time she went over the garden practically on her hands and knees, but she could not figure out where the tomatoes might have gone. Jackrabbits didn’t steal tomatoes, and javelinas, which might, would have made a fine mess of the garden. It was too high up for a box turtle, unless somebody was outfitting box turtles with stepladders these days.

“It ain’t a kid from in town,” she muttered. “They know better than to try, and anyway there’s no footprints.” The only marks on the dusty ground were from Grandma Harken’s own sandals.

She prowled around the edge of the garden and found nothing. The fence was undisturbed.

She was crouched in front of the plants, staring at them, when she saw it.

She breathed in sharply. It was easy to miss, but if she looked in exactly the right place, she could see what looked like a single human footprint in the dirt between the three tomato plants.

She was so still for so long that Spook-cat came up and twined around her, making small mrrrrp? noises. She rubbed him under the chin automatically, barely noticing.

A thrasher called from the palo verde at the end of the garden. The noise sent Spook-cat skittering inside, and woke Grandma from her reverie.

The footprint had five clear toes. The owner had been barefoot.

“Thief,” hissed Grandma Harken, and stomped back indoors in a bitter state of mind.

She wrapped herself up in a quilt that night and sat in the rocking chair on the back porch. “We’ll see what kind of rat bastard steals an old lady’s tomatoes,” she grumbled.

(Grandma Harken thought of herself as an old lady, because she was one. That she was tougher than tree roots and barbed wire did not matter. You did not steal an old lady’s tomatoes. It was rude, and also, she would destroy you.)

She leaned her shotgun up against the porch railing in easy reach. Probably she wouldn’t need it, but there was no telling how low a body would sink once they’d started down the road of tomato theft. Murder was not out of the question.

Though I’ll try to aim for the legs, she thought, and grinned fiercely to herself.

The sun sank and the sky blazed redder than a ripe tomato. The herb leaves rustled and the bean plants whispered to each other farther down in the garden. The great sprawling squash had not yet set fruit, but they were sending questioning tendrils out in all directions, and the peppers were the size of Grandma’s thumb. All around her, the garden whispered, a slow exhale after the heat of the day.

Grandma Harken leaned back in the rocking chair and fixed her eyes on her tomatoes.

§

She woke in the morning with dew collecting on the quilt. Her back was stiff and two more tomatoes were missing.

She shot out of the rocking chair fast enough to knock it over on its runners and cussed the air briefly blue.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said, when she’d run out of swear words and turned back to religion. “This ain’t funny anymore!”

She stomped down and found a nearly ripe tomato, which she yanked off the vine and took inside. It sat on the counter. A day or two and it would be almost as good as the others.

Almost.

She was angry now at herself as well as the thief. Falling asleep when she was supposed to be standing guard—what was that? Was she really that doddering an old woman?

“Not tonight,” she said grimly. “Not tonight.”

She watered the garden by hand and did the laundry, just to keep herself moving. She napped all afternoon, which Spook-cat quite enjoyed.

Then, as evening fell, she brewed herself up a pot of cowboy coffee, with the grounds still in the pot.

It cost more than blood these days, but that was life. Salt, flour, coffee, and sugar were the only things Grandma Harken bought at the store, and the store could only get them in because Father Gutierrez was on good terms with the train-priests.

It didn’t matter how good the terms you were on, though, they were expensive as the devil. Most of the time she got by with tea and honey and cornmeal, same as everybody else.

Still, didn’t matter how strong you brewed it, tea was no substitute for coffee.

“I’ll be up half the night drinking and the other half peeing,” she said. “Not a chance I’ll fall asleep this time.”

She sat down in the rocking chair with the coffee mug in one hand and prepared to wait.

In the small hours of the night, Grandma Harken woke up because her bladder was killing her.

Her first thought was that she’d fallen asleep again, and damnit, she wasn’t that old.

Her second was that the thief was less than ten feet away.

It was a mockingbird.

Grandma Harken stared.

It glowed like silver under the moon—really glowed, every feather edged in white fire. When it shifted, it threw light across the prickly tomato leaves and left sharp-edged shadows across the ground.

The bird perched on top of the tomato cage for nearly a minute. Occasionally it would flick its tail and set the shadows dancing.

It might have sat there all night, except that Grandma Harken’s bladder was making its displeasure known. She squirmed in her chair and the rockers creaked on the porch.

The white patches on the mockingbird’s wings blazed up and it flew.

She shot out of her chair, bladder be damned, and charged down the steps. She could see the mockingbird flying, the sagebrush casting fantastic shadows, the saguaros briefly silver instead of black—and then it was a distant spark dwindling into the desert.

Grandma Harken watched it vanish against the sky.

“Mockingbirds,” she said aloud, stomping toward the outhouse. “Mockingbirds stealing my damn tomatoes.”

She knew mockingbirds eat fruit if they can get it, but she had to admit, she would not have expected one to make off with a full-sized tomato. Cherry or grape tomatoes, sure, but one of my big ones?

She was up and down three more times that night, as the cowboy coffee made itself felt, but she was hardly sleeping anyway.

Mockingbirds also don’t leave human footprints. And generally they do not glow like foxfire.

“Shapechanger,” she said to Spook-cat, who slept in a small orange puddle atop the pillow. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Again.”

§

The next night, she didn’t bother with coffee. She cleaned up the house and shooed Eva off when she looked inclined to stay late.

“I don’t need you fussing over me,” she told her daughter. “I ain’t gonna change and it’s just gonna make us both snappish.”

Eva was weak-eyed, mild-mannered, and had a disposition as yielding as a featherbed. It was hard to imagine her being snappish about anything.

But she’d also known her mother for a very long time, and she recognized make us both snappish as an olive branch. She stood looking down at the dishcloth in her hands, and said finally, “I’m worried about Brandon, that’s all.”

“He’s back east,” said Grandma Harken. “With your father’s kin. He’ll be fine.”

“Do you think so?” asked Eva.

Grandma Harken was sharpening her garden shears. Her hands slowed on the file and she said finally, “He’ll get in trouble and he’ll figure it out. Best to do it without us standing over him. It’s the only way anybody ever learns to clean up after themselves.”

“He’s been so upset since the girl—”

Grandma Harken threw down the shears. “He did a damn fool thing, and I cleaned up the mess for him. He should be upset. I’d be more afraid if he wasn’t.”

She exhaled and picked up the shears again. There was a burr in the edge of one blade and she set to work on it with the file. “Not your fault,” she said. “I shouldn’t yell. But see what I mean? I’m not fit for company now.”

Eva looked at her.

“I ain’t been sleeping well.” Grandma held that out like a peace offering, because her daughter was sweet, not stupid.

Eva nodded. She threaded the dishtowel through the ring by the little sink. “Can I do anything?” she asked.

“Let me stew in my own juices for a day or two,” said Grandma Harken. “Go fuss over someone who’ll appreciate it.”

Eva smiled faintly. “You’re the one I worry about.”

“I’m not dead yet,” said her mother. “And I’ve still got a trick or two left to play.”

She made an effort to be pleasant for the rest of the evening, and even let Eva extract a promise that she’d try to sleep more.

It ain’t a lie exactly. I’ll try to sleep more once I’ve stood off my tomato thief. Whatever they might be under the feathers.

As soon as her daughter had left, her whole demeanor changed. She laced on her good boots, in case she had to run, and locked Spook-cat in the bedroom. She put her garden shears in her apron pocket and made sure that her shotgun was loaded up with rock salt.

Grandma Harken knew more about shapechangers than anyone in town would have guessed, and that meant that she knew enough to be careful.

Mockingbirds are cousins to ravens, and that’s a bad game to get mixed up in. Never had any patience for riddles.

“Blessed St. Anthony,” she prayed, as she folded her quilt, “give me strength to defend my tomatoes.”

This seemed like a rather trivial thing to bother a saint with, once she said it aloud, so she added “And—err—defend me from temptation, amen.”

She pulled out her silverware drawer and dumped it on the kitchen table. With a ball of twine in one hand, she set to work.

By the time night fell, her best kitchen chair had been altered all out of recognition. She’d tied every fork and spoon to the back of it, flat with the bowl up or the tines out. Leaning back onto it would get you poked in a dozen places. There was one ladle aimed directly at the small of the back.

Grandma Harken was rather proud of that ladle.

She dragged the chair out on the porch and sat down on it, sitting bolt upright. She had a cup of tea in one hand—herbal, because she didn’t need to spend another night like the last one.

And she waited.

She dozed off once or twice, but as soon as she slumped backwards, the forks and the spoons jabbed her awake. The moon moved carefully in the sky overhead.

It was nearly midnight when she fell asleep—really asleep—and that lasted nearly a minute. But the ladle prodded her in the small of the back and forks were pressing into her shoulder blades and she came awake immediately.

The mockingbird landed atop the tomato cages and looked around. It was impossible to read anything in those small white eyes, but Grandma Harken thought it looked . . . furtive.

She kept her eyes lidded. Surely the porch was too dark for it to see her watching through the slits.

After a few moments of standing there, glowing like anything, the mockingbird dropped into the center of the bushes. Light splashed over the garden, briefly turning the squash and beans into a fantastic landscape of black and white . . . and then the light was gone.

In the dimness, she could see a figure standing up. The figure bent down, and came up with something in its hand.

Grandma Harken cocked the shotgun. The noise was like a crack of thunder across the desert.

The figure froze.

Grandma Harken looked down the barrel and said, “Don’t move. And don’t you drop my tomato.”

The mockingbird laughed. It was a woman’s laugh, short and rueful, but there was a bird’s hollowness behind it.

“If you shoot me, it won’t be very good for your tomatoes.”

“I ain’t getting much good out of them at the moment anyway,” said Grandma Harken. “Come out from between them, and don’t do anything sudden.”

“I won’t.”

She came out from between the plants, still holding the stolen tomato aloft.

Without taking her eyes off her captive, Grandma Harken leaned over and opened the back door. Light flooded out and lit up the face of the mockingbird-woman, where she stood at the foot of the steps.

She was human-shaped, short and broad in the hips, but not human-colored. She had a dark grey back and the white belly of a mockingbird. Her face was grey and black from the lips up, her chin and throat white.

She was naked, but she had feathers instead of hair. Her eyes were starkly orange.

Grandma Harken’s hand didn’t waver on the shotgun, but her mind was off and running like a jackrabbit.

She was never born a shapechanger, not looking like that. Whatever she’s done or had done to her, it came from the outside in.

Huh.

Can’t imagine why anyone would try to turn herself into a mockingbird, but there’s strange people in the world and no accounting for taste.

At least she ain’t a kachina, or anything that looks like one. She’d been a trifle worried about that. Grandma Harken’s relationship with the people up on the three mesas was distant but cordial and she wanted to keep it that way.

People get awfully tetchy when you point a shotgun at their spirits.

Well, you couldn’t blame them. If blessed Saint Anthony came walking through the desert, Grandma Harken would’ve been pretty miffed if somebody shot him full of rock salt.

The shapechanger came up on the porch. She moved slowly, but slowly like a woman who’s got a gun pointed at her, not like someone who isn’t fitting inside their skin.

“Go on inside,” said Grandma Harken. “I’m right behind you.”

She got up. The mockingbird-woman glanced at the chair, wired with silverware, and laughed. “So that’s how you stayed awake,” she said. “Suppose a magic sleep can’t compared to a bunch of forks in the back.”

Magic sleep. It wasn’t just me getting old. That was a magic sleep.

Grandma did not punch the air and whoop, because that would have been undignified.

Instead she said, “I figured it wasn’t natural,” and sniffed.

The mockingbird-woman went inside the house. Grandma shut the door and gestured to a chair with the shotgun. “Have a seat.”

“You planning on shooting me?” asked her captive.

“Hand over that tomato and I won’t shoot anybody.”

The mockingbird woman handed over the tomato. Her hands were hard and charcoal-colored, the nails long and diamond shaped. They creased the red skin of the tomato just slightly, but didn’t break the surface.

“Why’re you stealing them?” she asked.

“Ain’t for me,” said the mockingbird-woman.

Grandma’s eyes flicked to the woman’s strange orange ones. “Ah.”

“Don’t ask me about it,” said the woman. “There’s not much point.” She opened her mouth, and Grandma saw that her tongue was black, and there was a thick silver ring through it.

“Surprised you can talk at all,” she said.

The mockingbird-woman shrugged. “You learn to work around it.”

Grandma nodded. “So you haven’t eaten any of these tomatoes?”

“Not a one. Give you my word.”

And that’s another strike against her being born a mockingbird. No member of the crow clan’d hand out their word so lightly.

She hefted the tomato. She’d made bread earlier in the day, and a little dab of mayonnaise, for the tomato ripening on the counter. Best to eat it up quick. Neither one would last long in the hot desert air.

“Sit a spell,” she said, “and we’ll fix that.”

§

Grandma Harken sat at her dinner table with the mockingbird-woman and they ate tomato sandwiches with mayonnaise and a pinch of salt.

It was every bit as good as Grandma Harken had been hoping. The tomato was sweet and acid and firm. It tasted like a morning in summer before the sun burned everything down to the bone.

That tense place in her chest loosened up a little. The world was hard and fierce, but it also contained tomato sandwiches, and if that didn’t make it a world worth living in, your standards were unreasonably high.

“So you ain’t wearing a mockingbird skin,” said Grandma Harken, watching her guest eat up the last crumbs. “You’re not taking one off and putting it back on again.”

“Nope,” said the woman. She licked one of her charcoal fingers and pressed it down on the crumbs, then licked them off again.

“And you were never born that way, either.”

“Born same as you,” said the woman.

Grandma Harken smiled sourly. “I very much doubt that,” she said. “But born human, I guess?”

“You guess right.”

“You under some kind of spell, then?”

The mockingbird-woman tapped a fingernail against the silver cuff on her tongue and said nothing.

“Ah,” said Grandma. “Well, then. You got a name you can tell me?”

“Marguerite.”

“And I’m Grandma Harken. And we’re all introduced now. You like being a mockingbird?”

Marguerite stretched. “Don’t mind being a bird,” she said. “Flying’s less fun than you’d think, but it’s got its moments. I hate being small, though, and hawks are bastards. And owls.” She shuddered, and the feathers on her head all puffed up like a crest. “They don’t make a noise when they come up behind you.”

Grandma Harken nodded. She respected owls, but she did not want them hanging around the house.

“May I have some water?” asked the mockingbird-woman.

When someone in the desert asks for water, you give it to them. There weren’t many rules in the desert, but that was one of them. Grandma Harken got up and poured out a glass for each of them.

Then she made coffee. Between last night and tonight, she was running down to the bottom of her supply, but she had a feeling that Marguerite might appreciate it.

As soon as the smell began to fill the room, she was rewarded. The mockingbird-woman’s head lifted and her dark-gray nostrils flared. “Coffee,” she said hoarsely.

“I got a little cream to go in it, if you want it.”

“Be grateful.”

Grandma Harken got out the cream and the sugar, which was nearly as dear as the coffee.

Still, much like tomato sandwiches, there was a time and a place when what you needed was coffee, and nothing else would do.

Grandma poured the coffee out into earthenware mugs and slid the cream across. “From Spangler’s cow.”

(She did not know why she told the mockingbird-woman this—it seemed unlikely that the odd enchanted creature would be familiar with Spangler or her cow. Still, Grandma felt on some level that if you were drinking something that came out of another living being, you ought to be on a first name basis. The cow in question did not actually have a name, other than “that damn cow,” so this was the closest approximation.)

Marguerite wrapped her scaly fingers around the mug and breathed in the steam.

Grandma let her sit in silence with the coffee. When she finally lifted it to her lips, it was a gesture as ritualized and heartfelt as communion.

She closed her eyes and Grandma thought that she might be crying a little, if birds could weep.

Well. Never underestimate the power of a good cup of coffee.

She poured herself a cup. Sleep wasn’t coming tonight anyway.

“I won’t come back,” said Marguerite. Her voice was thick. “I’ll tell him you caught me. He can get his tomatoes somewhere else—”

Her voice cut off suddenly, with a metallic click, as if the cuff on her tongue had struck her teeth.

“I’d rather they didn’t get stolen,” said Grandma Harken mildly. It seemed important to talk to fill the sudden silence. “But you’re welcome to come back, if you like. I don’t mind company.”

She considered for a moment, then added, “Well, specific company.”

Marguerite shook her head. Grandma could see her rolling her tongue around in her mouth, as if trying to find a tender spot. “Not smart,” she said, finally.

“Would you be in danger, then?” asked Grandma Harken.

“Nah.” She spoke slowly, and Grandma got the impression she was picking each word carefully. “Not really. I’m the only one of me. Can’t be another. You understand?”

“Not yet,” said Grandma. “But I’m starting to, I think.”

She poured out more coffee. Marguerite’s hand shook as she added the cream.

“I won’t tell anyone you were here, if it matters.”

“It won’t matter,” said the bird-woman. “Too much talking, now.” She drank the coffee greedily. “Thank you for this. It’s been . . . a long time.”

Grandma Harken nodded.

The light outside the window was starting to edge toward gray. Marguerite looked at it and sighed.

“Should get going,” she said.

“You can wait ‘til the owls roost, if you want,” said Grandma.

“If you don’t mind, I’d like that.”

Whatever leash she’s on, she’s got some slack, thought Grandma Harken. But does she want off that leash?

“Whereabouts you from?” she asked. “Originally, I mean.”

“Oh, my.” Marguerite leaned back. “North of here a good way. Other side of the Gila.”

Grandma Harken nodded. There were towns up that way, although she’d never been out that far. “You got any people up there that might appreciate word?”

Marguerite inhaled sharply.

After a moment, she said, “No. No sense poking old wounds. Thank you for the thought.”

“Seems I might have poked one myself. I’m sorry.”

Marguerite set down the coffee cup. “No harm done.”

She rose. Grandma Harken saw her only chance slipping away, and decided to be blunt. “You’re got one leg in a trap,” she said. “You want it opened?”

“No one can open it,” said Marguerite.

“If somebody could, though?”

“It’s too dangerous—”

“I’m a lot older than you, and a lot meaner,” said Grandma Harken, annoyed. “And I don’t take kindly to being lectured by a tomato thief. I ain’t promising you anything and you ain’t asking me for anything. Just yes or no.”

The mockingbird-woman stared at her for a moment, then her lips widened in an unwilling grin. Her teeth were shockingly white against her black bird’s tongue.

“I’d give it all,” she said. “But now I’ve got to go.”

“Go slow,” said Grandma Harken. “And watch for owls.”

She opened the door. Marguerite went down the steps and her skin blazed suddenly silver. By the time she reached the bottom step, she was shrinking, as if she were hunching down.

Then she was a mockingbird again. She took three hops on the dusty garden path and launched herself into the air.

Grandma Harken nodded to her and raised a hand. The fiery bird flew to the top of the garden gate, and then away.

“Well,” said Grandma Harken. “Good thing I put on my good boots.” She snatched up the bag by the door, opened the bedroom so that Spookcat could get to water, and took her walking stick into her hand.

Then she opened the garden gate and followed the spark of fire into the desert.

§

By the time the sun came up, Grandma Harken was hot and thirsty and tired.

Her water bottle was nearly empty. She had lost the mockingbird twice, and then found her again as she took flight. But now it seemed that she had lost her for good.

She was well up in the desert now, and there was something strange going on in the air.

It wasn’t anything you’d notice if you weren’t looking for it. A little bit of heat haze in a place that couldn’t be hot enough yet to ripple. A wash that had water in it, except that Grandma knew damn well that it didn’t, not this time of year. Palo verde needles that moved in a wind that wasn’t happening anywhere near here.

You had to know the desert well, or have a good sense of the uncanny. Grandma had both and she didn’t like it.

“Blessed Saint Anthony,” she muttered. “Somebody’s folding the world.”

There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it, as near as she could tell. It didn’t look deliberate. It seemed to follow in the wake of the mockingbird.

Two places lying close together, and sometimes you put your foot through one and into the other. Whatever she’s doing, she’s moving in between ‘em.

There wasn’t anything terrible in that other place, so far as Grandma knew—or at least, nothing that wasn’t already terrible in this one. It wasn’t anymore full of monsters than anywhere else. It was just a little bit different. The places bled into each other all the time. It wasn’t at all unnatural.

It was damned inconvenient, though, if you were trying to track a thing the size of a mockingbird.

She stomped over the sand, leaving tracks that were mostly bootprints. Sometimes the world folded around them and the tracks were bare feet.

Once or twice they belonged to a jackrabbit.

She stopped at last, taking another drink of water, and looked around. It was going to be a long way back. If the one wash was still full when she passed it again, she’d have to drink a little water from it.

And it’ll give me the runs, too, like as not.

The bird was nowhere to be seen. The hillside was an intricate pattern of white powdered earth between dark green scrub.

The first cicada began to buzz, and its brethren chimed in, until the air was a long rattling hiss of heat.

There were two long metal rails across the ground on the opposite hillside. A little green scribble of a weed had grown up along the slope, but nothing grew between the tracks.

When she breathed in, she could smell it faintly—the hot gunmetal smell of the train-god.

The tracks ran off toward the horizon. The burning mockingbird was nowhere to be seen.

Grandma exhaled. “Well,” she said. She spoke out loud, so the tracks could hear her, just in case something was listening. “Well. Guess it’s time to go pay a call on the Mother of Trains.”

§

She walked back into town, which took long enough to convince her that she didn’t want to walk clear to the train station. She swung by her house, fed Spook-cat, and left a note for Eva. Then she set out for the stable.

It was a good stable, kept clean, and it was run by a man named Tomas, who had gotten tomato seeds from Grandma Harken on three separate occasions. This was a rare benediction, and he was careful not to take it for granted.

“I need your old mule,” Grandma Harken told him. “The one I like to ride.”

Tomas looked at her, gazed briefly heavenward, and said, “That mule died five years ago, Abuela Harken.”

Grandma blinked. “What’d he die of?”

“Old age,” said Tomas, who was always extremely respectful but had a sense of humor anyway.

“Huh!”

After a minute she said, “What’s the next oldest mule you got?”

“I’ve got a young mule,” said Tomas, “who’s as polite a girl as you’ll ever meet. And you are welcome to ride her, Abuela.”

“I like the old ones,” said Grandma, disgruntled.

“She’ll get old in due time.”

Grandma glared at him. Tomas contrived to look innocent.

“Fine,” said Grandma. “But she better have good manners.”

“She has better manners than my sons, Abuela.”

Grandma muttered to herself. Tomas had two sons, who were polite and respectful and built like bulls and who would spend hours splitting firewood for an old lady. These were things you learned to appreciate when you were Grandma Harken’s age.

The mule was indeed very well-mannered. She pricked her ears up and lipped delicately at Grandma’s sleeve.

“Good girl,” said Grandma, petting her nose. “Is she smart?” she asked Tomas.

“She’s a mule.”

“I’ve known some stupid mules.”

“A stupid mule is still smarter than a good horse or a bad man.”

Grandma sighed. It can be annoying when other people are right.

She loaded water bottles onto the mule and climbed on.

The mule waited politely—Is this everything? That’s all?—then set out. Grandma clicked her tongue and flipped the reins, setting her on the road to the next town over.

The one that had a train station.

§

The desert was full of strange things, but the trains were some of the strangest.

When white men came to lay iron rails across the land, the land didn’t take kindly to it. The train tracks looked too much like chains. The land brought heat and death and disease, and work on the rails slowed to a crawl.

“So they brought us to die instead,” said Grandma’s friend Anna. “From Canton to San Francisco and out to here.” She swept her hands when she said it, taking in the province across the ocean that she had never seen, and the desert where she had lived all her life.

That was the truth of history. Hundreds came and thousands died and hundreds more came to replace them. The blood of Anna’s people had bathed every inch of the rails.

When the train-gods woke, it was no wonder who they chose to be their priests. Chinese, black, Irish—even a Cornish woman way up north, where the snow piled up everywhere but on the tracks. People who had, with toil and tears, earned the gods’ regard.

It had made a lot of big money men back east furious. They thought they’d owned the railroads. They had the pull to get the army brought out to try and bring the machines back under their control.

The train-gods only had to eat a couple of regiments before they realized their mistake.

Lotta damn foolishness, Grandma Harken thought. People ought to be a lot quicker to listen to each other and a little slower to listen to something that calls itself a god.

She wouldn’t have said that out loud, though. She didn’t want it getting back to a train, or worse yet, to Anna.

Anyway, the system worked. You could get a train from one side of the country to the other, though it wasn’t always the same train or even the same country out the windows. Freight got moved, more or less. Sometimes it wound up in the wrong place or was summarily dumped in the middle of nowhere. The machines were capricious gods. (This was part of the reason for the price of coffee.)

They were very good about letters, though. Anna’s grandson was the current train-priest, and he said that his god thought letters were prayers and moved them as a kind of professional courtesy.

You appreciated that sort of thing in a god.

Grandma Harken could afford to be a little detached. Her people hadn’t been involved one way or the other. It had all been long, long before her time.

It’d been a good bit before Anna’s time too, truth be told, but Anna had an image to maintain.

Neither Anna nor any of her grandchildren could have said what bargain the train-gods struck with the desert, though.

That there was a bargain was undeniable. Grandma Harken herself had noticed that the tracks took some odd turns sometimes, to avoid a wash or a particular stone—turns that no human would have introduced to the line. And it was true that you could walk the rails until you died of thirst, and you’d never see the shadow of a saguaro lying over the tracks.

What it all meant, though, Grandma left for others to decide. The bargain was between the desert and the trains, and no business of any mortal creature at all.

§

Anna looked old. She was younger than Grandma Harken—probably—but neither of them were quick to compare.

She lived in a house alongside the train station. It was an old adobe, same as all the other houses in town, but it had a brightly painted balcony on the second floor and faded lanterns hung from the ends of the corner beams.

One of her grandchildren—or great-grandchildren, Grandma wasn’t sure, and after the bit with the mule, she’d rather not find out—opened the carved wooden door and let Grandma Harken inside. Anna was sitting in a chair in one corner of the room, her feet up on a stool.

“Harken?” she said. “Is that you, you old jackrabbit?”

“Last I looked,” said Grandma Harken. “You still alive?”

“Looks that way. Come in.” She waved to the grandchild and a chair was produced. “What brings you here?”

“Need an answer, and maybe a favor.”

Anna raised an eyebrow. She had very little left in the way of eyebrows, but her face was so wrinkled that the gesture remained effective. “If you’ve come to ask for a train to fetch your grandson home, I’d advise against it.”

“Lord, no!”

Anna relaxed. “Glad to hear it. I’m still surprised we didn’t have some broody little babies around here nine months later.”

“He didn’t brood as a baby.” Grandma paused, remembering. “Well. Much.”

Anna laughed.

“Sit, sit. Have you eaten? Are you thirsty?”

The answers to these questions were completely immaterial—food and tea would be forthcoming anyway. Grandma Harken let herself sink into the comfort of Anna’s hospitality.

She’d brought along a half-dozen nearly ripe tomatoes. Now that she’d finally eaten one, they weren’t so precious to her.

The tomatoes were duly admired and whisked away into the kitchen. Tea was drunk, then more tea, and then Grandma Harken held up her hands and said, “No more, Anna, I’m begging you. I’ll explode.”

Anna laughed. “All right. You came for an answer, then.”

Grandma nodded.

“A woman,” she said. “Turned into a mockingbird, from up past Gila way.”

Anna tilted her head. “Not one of mine.”

“Wouldn’t think so. But some kind of enchanter’s got her bound up with a silver cuff through her tongue, and I aim to break her loose if I can. She called it a ‘he’ but that’s all I know.”

She sat back, and glanced at the windows out of habit.

“Nothing out there can hear you,” said Anna. “Or if it could, it’s so big that you shouldn’t be tangling with it anyhow.” She flicked her fingers. “Sounds interesting, but what do you need with the Mother of Trains?”

Grandma told her about the tracks.

“I could go over every inch of the desert and miss it if somebody folded the world up the wrong way,” she said. “Trains don’t care about folds.”

“They run in three worlds,” said Anna distantly. “We will not talk about the fourth. If there is anything to be seen, the train-gods will see it.”

She gestured, and the grandchild appeared. Grandma Harken took the time to finally look at the child—a girl, delicate as a quail, probably older than she looked. “Go and get your uncle,” Anna said. “Tell him we will be at the station shortly, with a question.”

The girl nodded and padded away.

Anna watched her go. Someone would have to have known her as long as Grandma Harken to notice the sudden smoothing of a line between her eyes, as if she had found an answer that eluded her.

“The next priest?” asked Grandma.

“I wouldn’t wish it on her,” said Anna wearily. “She’s got desert in her, not steel.”

Grandma nodded. She was something of an authority on the subject.

“I’ll send her to you,” said Anna.

“Like hell you will!” Grandma scowled over her tea. “I don’t need a girl and I’m hard to live with. And I’ll probably die running after mockingbirds.”

“Then you’ll want somebody to point to where the body fell,” said Anna. She waved a hand. “Not now. Later. Soon, I think, but not yet. After you’ve dealt with this foolishness, perhaps.”

“I said—”

“You get your answer and she gets a teacher,” said Anna. “Fair trade.”

Grandma Harken glowered, but she knew that Anna had her in a hard place. And the girl like a quail needed . . . something.

“She broke her arm when she was small,” said Anna quietly. “She’s got cholla ribs for bones. We didn’t let the doctor see. I set it myself.”

Grandma sucked the air in between her teeth. That was immense power and vulnerability, all at once. That was a child that should never be taken out of the desert.

That was someone a little more like Grandma Harken than either of them were like fully human folk.

“Dammit, Anna . . .”

“Dammit, yourself.”

§

Anna’s grandson Jun was a slender man with apologetic eyes. He clasped his hands together and bowed over them to Grandma Harken. “How may I assist you, Grandmother?”

It felt awkward to be formal with a man you’d seen in diapers, but Grandma Harken had come to speak to a train-priest, not talk about how much he’d grown in the last forty years. She nodded to him. “Appreciate it, Jun. Looking to see if the train’s gone past anything strange.”

They stood in the station itself, not the main platform, but the small room before it where the train priest spoke to the engines.

There was no train there now, which was a relief. A train was like having a thunderstorm in the room with you, and having a priest around made it worse.

Jun smiled ruefully. “The trains go past many strange things, Grandmother.”

“One in particular, then,” said Grandma, and set out to describe the place where the world was folded and the train tracks ran through it.

Jun listened. He listened intently, with his eyes closed, and Grandma had to fight to keep from shivering.

Passing right through him to something else. It ain’t natural.

And then, because she had to be fair: Lot of good things ain’t natural. Most of ‘em just don’t rub your face in it.

She finished describing it and waited.

“Yesssss . . .” said Jun, and there was a hiss of brake lines in it. “Yessss, I ssee.”

He opened his eyes. Grandma’d seen it once before, so she didn’t take a step back, even if a good chunk of her skin wanted to.

It was nothing so dramatic as the color changing. It was only that there was something else in his eyes, something that wasn’t human or even close to it. When he blinked, his eyelids came down like the door to the firebox slamming shut.

“Along the line,” he said. “North and west and north again. There are five saguaros together. There is a hill of stones. There is a dwelling of the used-up people. There is a person there.” He nodded twice, with his eyes still closed. “There is nothing else for many miles.”

“This person,” said Grandma Harken, “he’s folding the world?”

Sweat was beginning to trickle down Jun’s face. She could feel the heat radiating off him. “There is a person. There is a bend in the track. There is a bend in the track.”

“Does that mean—”

“There is a bend in the track.”

Anna put a hand on Grandma’s arm and shook her head.

Grandma bowed to her friend’s experience. “Thank you,” she said.

The train-god, through Jun, said “Yesssss . . .” and it trailed away into the distance as the god went away again.

Jun stood for a moment, trembling like a horse that has run a hard race, then let out his breath in a long sigh. When he opened his eyes, they were only human dark.

“Can you tell me what it meant by there is a bend in the track?” asked Grandma.

Jun took out a cloth and wiped his head. “It’s hard to say,” he said. “Probably there’s really a bend, but repeating it like that . . .” He shook his head. “They fixate on odd things. That was the Mariposa. It’s not the clearest of the trains. Leviathan was better, but Leviathan has stopped speaking. The other trains say that it’s waiting for something.”

This was alarming, but also nothing to do with Grandma Harken. She made a mental note to order more coffee, though, in case the trains were planning to run mad.

They left the station. Jun came with them, not sweating now, shivering as if it were midnight in the desert instead of noon. Anna sent another grandchild to get him tea and put a blanket around his shoulders herself.

“Worth it?” she asked Grandma.

“I hope so,” said Grandma. “Thank you, Jun.”

The girl with bones made of cholla ribs said, “Who are the used-up people?”

“Hohokam,” said Grandma, which was a thing she hadn’t known she knew until she said it. “The ones who built all the canals. That’s what their name means, the used-up ones. Our enchanter’s squatting in some ruins, I guess.”

“Do you think he’s Hohokam, then?” asked Anna.

“Not unless he’s a thousand years old,” said Grandma. “Which I can’t rule out entirely. I’ll be going. Jun, thank you, and you too, Anna.” Her eyes slid over the cholla-bone girl and she nodded once and took her leave.

§

She rode back to Tomas’s stable with her mind full of shards, like a shattered clay pot. The Hohokam were all jumbled up with the trains and the folded world and the girl and the mockingbird.

Well, no matter. Things would sort themselves out. She’d know what she had to know when she needed it.

“Or I’ll get caught with my pants around my ankles,” she said to the mule’s ears, “and I’ll die with a stupid expression on my face. I suppose that counts as getting sorted out, though.”

The mule flicked her ears, but did not comment.

“I suppose I better try not to die,” she said after a little while. “That girl of Anna’s is gonna need some teaching.”

She tried to think about what she could teach anyone, let alone a girl who was already part of the desert, and the thought was overwhelming. She hadn’t been all that good with her own baby, and Eva had been as good and placid and easy a child as any born.

It was late when she reached the stable. A light burned in the window, though, and after a moment the door slammed, and one of Tomas’s sons came out to meet her.

“You didn’t have to stay up,” she said. “I might’ve been gone days.”

“We would have stayed up for you, Abuela Harken,” said Tomas’s son. He looped the mule’s reins over his hand and led her into her stall.

There was nothing much to say to kindness, particularly when you suspect that it’s because you’re old. Grandma walked the rest of the way, to the house with its back like the desert.

“At least I’ll get one more night in my own bed,” she said. “With my own Spook-cat on the pillow. Can’t ask for more than that.”

§

In the end she got two more nights. The garden was wreathed in beans and the little green husks of tomatillos were beginning to dangle from the sprawling plants. They needed staking. If Grandma Harken had known beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was going to die tomorrow, she would still have staked up the tomatillos and harvested the beans.

She had two ripe tomatoes and she ate them both, on bread with salt, and they were perfect.

On the morning of the second day, she got up before dawn. She petted Spook-cat, which first alarmed, and then delighted him. She strapped water bottles to herself like a bandolier and filled her pockets with sage and cigarettes; she put on her good boots and wrote a note for her daughter that said “I love you,” and then she closed the garden gate behind her and walked into the desert.

The pre-dawn air was sharp and gray and seamless. There were no mockingbirds to light her way. Still, here, she didn’t need them. This was a landscape she knew as well as she knew her own name.

The folds in the world that had gone out from the mockingbird’s wings had settled now, a paper ball crumpled and then smoothed out again. There were still small ridges here and there. Grandma Harken could see them if she looked—the shadow of a palo verde tree that fell a handspan too short, a place where, for an instant, there were two moons in the sky. But these were small things.

She reached the train tracks as the sun came up. It dyed the rails rose and chrome. Grandma Harken stood, thoughtful, and took a long drink of water.

“All right,” she muttered to herself. “All right. If I were a train . . .”

It was dangerous to walk on train tracks now. A train could appear out of nowhere, skipping from one world to the next, and give you only a bare moment of warning.

Still, it was no more dangerous than anything else. She cleared her throat and spoke to the rails: “The Mother of Trains knows my name.”

There was no overt acknowledgement. She hadn’t expected one. She stepped up onto the rails and began to walk between them. Her boots made a satisfying clomping sound on the railroad ties.

The desert heated rapidly. She passed saguaro standing tall, arms raised, filled with woodpecker holes. A thrasher called from the top of one, and she had to shade her eyes and see if it was actually a mockingbird.

There were no shadows on the tracks. The saguaros folded their arms to prevent it, and they were the only thing tall enough to cast a shadow here.

She walked until the sky was turquoise hard, until she had emptied one water bottle and begun another. Then she shaded her eyes and looked ahead, and there were five saguaros standing together, and a hill beyond them, crusted with stones.

Grandma Harken nodded to herself.

The tracks did bend there, an abrupt turn that no train that was not a god could have navigated. The metal rails held together, but the wooden ties were twisted up as if they were made of dough and not creosote-soaked wood.

There is a bend in the tracks.

“Quite a bend, too,” she said aloud.

A coyote trotted by, ears alert. It glanced at her, interested, and flicked its brush.

“Don’t you start,” she added.

The coyote grinned, that being the natural expression of coyotes. It trotted on.

She walked back and forth along the bend, and absolutely nothing happened.

“Huh,” she said. She’d been hoping . . . well, nothing was ever easy.

She went back a third time.

The coyote was back. Its eyes were the coldest thing in the desert.

She couldn’t see any edges. The shadows on the hill were clean and crisp.

The coyote was circling her.

I’m not looking to die just yet. Go find some other meat.

She knew that coyotes couldn’t hear thoughts, but sometimes she thought they could smell them. It winked at her, and then it passed on the far side of the tracks and vanished completely.

Grandma Harken grunted.

“I’ll be damned,” she said aloud.

Well. The enchanter—whatever or whoever he was—had folded up the world here, folded it so hard that it doubled back on itself, so that something on the far side vanished completely from view. The tracks had pulled away from the fold, like skin sloughing away from a burn.

The trains run in three worlds. We will not speak of the fourth.

Dammit, Anna.

Suppose the enchanter had folded all three worlds around him, to keep the trains away, and was living in the fourth world?

“Blessed Saint Anthony . . .”

The coyote reappeared on the far side of the hill. It trotted up to the tracks and sat down, tongue lolling, God’s dog amused at something.

Waiting to see how I do, I suppose.

She studied the hill carefully. It looked like any other small hillside in a desert, not large enough to be a mesa, merely a rise in the landscape, dotted with mesquite and teddy-bear cholla. An ocotillo spread a hundred fantastical arms near the base, where there might be a small seep of some sort. Ocotillo liked more water than other plants, when they could get it.

If there was water here, the Hohokam might have built near it. If there were a people better at using water in the desert, Grandma had never heard of it.

The hill had nothing that looked like ruins, though, not even two square stones beside each other. Not a temple mound nor—

Her eyes narrowed. The coyote tilted its head.

On a rock above the ocotillo, there was a pale splotch. She ambled over to it, and there it was, pecked out of the surface, a round-bodied lizard.

“So they were here,” she murmured. Her eyes tracked over the petroglyphs—a human, a set of concentric circles, another lizard, bigger than the last one. A human upside down, which generally meant “dead.”

The coyote had stopped grinning and was watching her intently.

“Don’t suppose you can tell me anything,” said Grandma Harken.

“What’ll you give me?” replied the coyote.

“I’ve got sage and cigarettes.”

The coyote scratched pensively at one ear. “Let’s see the cigarettes.”

Grandma Harken took one out and laid it on a stone, then stepped back.

The coyote sniffed at it, unimpressed. “Poor stuff.”

“You eat sheep afterbirths,” said Grandma.

“Yes, but only the quality ones,” said the coyote, and grinned again.

“I should know better than to try and deal with coyotes,” muttered Grandma Harken.

“You should.” The coyote licked up the cigarette and held it dangling in its mouth. “Look! I’m a human. Do this. Do that. Stand here. Don’t eat that.” It cackled at its own cleverness.

Grandma Harken shook her head and turned back to the railroad tracks.

“Go underneath,” called the coyote after her, and when she turned her head back toward it, it was gone.

§

Go underneath. She turned the words over in her mind. Go underneath.

Coyotes were liars, of course. Worse than ravens. But this one had taken the tobacco.

She walked along the track, into the sharp bend. The rails buckled, and the gaps between the ties were deeper than they should have been. And yet the hillside was seamless, not even a shadow out of place.

Almost perfect, she thought. No one would ever notice, if not for the trains.

She stood at the farthest point of the bend, a foot on each tie. The world dropped away underneath the rails.

Go underneath.

The gap should have been too narrow for a grown human to fit, but one of the ties was twisted out of the way, on the end nearest the ruins. And she was made of bone and sinew and wire, and was no longer young.

She wiped sweat from her palms, grabbed the metal rail—it was hot from the sun and burned her hands—and swung herself down through the gap, and into the next world.

Immediately everything changed.

The hillside was no longer a small rise but a large one, cleft in two, with a narrow stone defile between them. Petroglyphs marked the stones on either side, layered over each other into incoherence.

Grandma Harken took out her water bottle and spilled a little over her smarting palms.

She turned her head and the tracks were gone. That was going to make getting out . . . interesting.

“Oh well,” she muttered. “If I were sensible, I’d still be at home with my tomatoes.” She started forward into the defile.

There was a dragon in the sand.

It was thirty yards long, thick bodied, with a blunt wedge of head. Its scales were dusty black and mottled orange.

Grandma knew Gila monsters well enough and did not fear them, but the largest one that she had ever seen was smaller than the smallest claw on this one’s foot.

“Oh,” she said aloud. “Oh, my.”

She heard herself say it and hated her voice for sounding like an old woman. But even Saint Anthony, who wrestled demons in the desert, might have been taken aback by the size of this one.

The dragon’s eyes were glossy, beetle shell black, and they were fixed on her.

She swallowed hard.

“Give me water,” said the Gila dragon, in a voice like sand hissing over the desert floor.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Grandma Harken, but she sounded more like herself in her ears.

“They are not here,” said the dragon, “or I would ask them for water.”

And it laughed, then, a little choking hiss, and it seemed to Grandma that it was the sound of a creature in pain, not a monster on the edge of devouring a victim.

Not that that won’t change in very short order, mind you . . .

Grandma Harken unfastened one of her water bottles. She suspected that she was going to die very shortly, but there were rules. If she lived long enough to talk to the cholla-bone girl again, she would tell her this one.

When someone in the desert asks you for water, you give it to them.

The Gila dragon’s mouth cracked open and a long blue-violet tongue slithered out towards Grandma.

She upended the water bottle over it.

The dragon swallowed, and then there was a crack like thunder.

She hadn’t noticed the shackles on the dragon’s leg. They were the same dusty black color as the scales.

There were three of them. Two still held, and the third had broken and fallen away. The skin underneath was raw and clear fluid oozed from beneath the scales.

“Give me water,” whispered the dragon.

She gave it the next water bottle to drink.

The second shackle broke. She could not see where the chain was anchored. To hold a beast that size, they must have been bolted to the center of the earth itself.

“Give me water,” said the dragon a third time.

One shackle left. And when it breaks, it could lunge forward and devour me. It wouldn’t even need the poison. One bite ought to do it.

Only a fool would set such a monster free.

“Please,” said the Gila dragon.

Grandma Harken cursed herself for a fool and poured the last of her water out over the dragon’s tongue.

§

The crack that followed was louder than the others and split the air like lightning, like the sound of mountains splitting.

In the silence that followed, she heard the tiny metallic clunk of the shackle falling to the ground.

The dragon looked down at its freed leg. That would have been the moment to run, but Grandma Harken thought perhaps she should just sit down. Her heart was hammering in a way that she didn’t like, and her vision pulsed in time to her heartbeat.

It’d be entirely too stupid, to drop dead of a heart attack out here in the desert before the beast lays a claw on me.

It lifted its great mottled head. It was a low, flat beast, for all its size, so it did not tower over her. She looked into its eye and saw her face reflected back.

“Thank you,” said the dragon. And waited, like a penitent awaiting absolution.

Grandma licked her lips. “Weren’t nothing,” she said.

It moved then. She fell back against the canyon wall and watched it go by. It was like a train-god passing, long and dark, and then it was past and the bright blunt tail was vanishing around the curve of the defile. She heard the sound of its scales scraping the stone, and then, much too quickly for something so large, it was gone.

Stepped out the world, she thought, back into one of the other ones. I hope it doesn’t get hung up on the rails.

She slid down until she was sitting and put her forehead on her knees. There had been a time, when she was young and immortal, when beasts like that were part of her world and she could have danced in the tracks that they left in the sand.

She felt old and mortal now.

She had a few sips of water left in one of the bottles. When the pulsing sparks in her eyes faded, she drank one of the last sips.

She got up.

There was a scale on the ground before her. Not a large one, a little smaller than her palm. She picked it up, and it was warm and felt like leather. She put it in her pocket, because sometimes the desert gives you an answer, and it is your job to find the question.

She had to keep one hand on the stone wall as she walked. She could feel chisel marks under her fingers. The way was mostly natural, but someone had smoothed down the stone a little, long ago.

Grandma Harken followed the turn in the wall and there it was.

It was adobe and it was old. The roof had fallen in on one side and the tops of the walls had the slumped-pottery look of weathered clay.

It was not a large building. The entire structure was not much larger than Grandma’s house, though it had been at least three stories tall before the roof fell. If she tilted her head back, she could see the remains of shattered floors sticking out from the high, broken wall.

The world was folded so tightly around it that the desert sun had turned the hazy gray-green color of the sky before a storm.

There was trash around the outside. Bird bones and rotting scraps of fruit made a scattered midden, although she could not smell anything. A few flat weeds crawled across the ground and despite everything, Grandma Harken felt a gardener’s urge to pull them.

Not the time. Although if I don’t die in the next few hours, I’ll get them before I leave.

The opening to the ruins was a narrow rectangle of darkness. She watched it for a long time before she approached it.

She had taken only a step or two forward when someone came out.

He was young, perhaps in his late teens, and clad in the same strange, feathered skin that Marguerite had been. By that, she thought he was likely a victim. He had a dark crest and his cheeks were stained brilliant scarlet.

Roadrunner, thought Grandma Harken.

He saw her.

His mouth fell open in surprise—she saw a glint of silver in his tongue—and he said something frantic in O’odham.

Grandma could understand about twenty words of O’odham if the other person spoke very slowly and clearly, which he hadn’t.

Probably warning me off. He’s not the enchanter, anyhow. Poor kid must have gotten caught like Marguerite.

He does like turning people into birds, doesn’t he?

From inside the ruin came another voice, thick and rumbling. She could not tell what it said, either, but the roadrunner-boy put his hands to his mouth and grimaced.

“It’s all right,” she said. She’d never had much of a plan anyway, and apparently stealth wasn’t part of it.

Whether he understood her words or her tone, she didn’t know. He took her arm, his eyes apologetic. She followed him inside.

It took a long moment for her eyes to adjust. The gray-green light through the broken ceiling did little to illuminate the shadows.

It was colder inside the ruin than it should have been.

“Ah, hell,” said Marguerite, somewhere off to her left. “I told you to stay away.”

“I’m bad at that,” said Grandma cheerfully, as she tried to pierce the darkness.

There were broken pots in the corners, and a few intact ones, draped with old flower sacks and coarse-cured hides. It smelled rank. Whoever lived here was a poor housekeeper.

At the far end, something moved.

She heard the thick, rumbling voice again. This time, it spoke English.

“Where do you come from, old woman?” asked the voice. “And why are you sniffing around what is mine?”

Her first thought was that it was a bear.

Her second was that bears generally had better manners, and certainly kept themselves cleaner.

It was a man, more or less. He was huge and hairy and his head was sunk down between his shoulders. He sat on a throne, like a king, but the throne was made of broken stones and rabbit skins and there were flies crawling in and out of it.

He did not belong in the desert. He stank of cold and forests and distance, of magic from another place and another time. More than that, he stank of power—his own power, wrapped up in that bear-like hide, not a power that could give itself to a place and be given back in return.

There were things that could come to the desert and learn to live with it, like the trains, but this was not one of them.

“You’re not from around here,” said Grandma Harken to the cold-king.

He made a noise like bubbles breaking in glue, and maybe that was laughter.

“I have been driven out,” he said. “Someone found the soul I had hidden in a duck egg. It takes time to grow it back.”

“Seems a fragile sort of place for a soul,” said Grandma Harken. “Better than a chicken egg, but not by much.”

“I shall wrap it in a snake next time,” said the cold-king. “I have learned.”

Marguerite and the roadrunner boy shifted in the corner. Grandma spared them a look and saw that Marguerite had put her arms around the boy for comfort.

Well, and now I know why she wasn’t entirely keen on curse-breaking. Had nothing much to do with flying after all.

She had no idea what she was going to do, butit seemed like she should probably start doing it.

“I’ll ask politely,” said Grandma Harken. “Let these people go and stop twisting up the world hereabouts. The land doesn’t like it.” She considered this, and then added, “Please.”

“I do not care what the land likes,” said the cold-king. “This is a dreadful land.”

“Then why’d you come here at all?”

§

The cold-king stretched. “I did not choose. I hid myself in the seeds of a thistle and when I woke again, I had crossed an ocean and was rolling and rolling across the hills of this terrible, dry place. But soon I shall be done growing back, and until then, my old enemies will not find me.”

Grandma Harken sighed. She had never thought it was going to be easy. “Well,” she said, planting her feet, “I’m afraid you’ve made a new one.”

The cold-king flung out his arm and power raged through the ruined building. Marguerite cried out and the roadrunner-boy spoke a short, sharp curse.

The cold-king’s power struck Grandma Harken and would have knocked her down, but she let it spin her around instead. She’d been a dancer in her youth, the wild kind, so she spun like a top and landed, breathless, on her feet.

Well, this is going to end badly, she thought.

Her right hip let it be known that it was not up for any more of that.

She reached down and pulled out her kitchen knife. It had seemed very large when cutting tomatoes in her kitchen. Now it was a small bright wedge against the bulk of the cold-king.

He laughed his bubbling laugh again. “Pretty,” he said.

The next blow came sideways and there was no spinning with it. It slammed her into the ruined adobe wall. Her head struck it and spawned a universe of stars across her vision. The knife went skittering across the floor.

She slid down the wall and into a jumble of shattered pots. One dug into her back, in the same place that the ladle had, and for a moment Grandma wondered if she was still in her chair on the porch, watching a glowing bird fly across the garden.

Was that a dream? The dragon and the train and . . .

She remembered the cholla-bone girl’s face. No, she had not been a dream. Her mouth was full of blood.

“No!” cried Marguerite. The mockingbird-woman lunged across the floor, her orange eyes shining in the dark. She caught the cold-king’s arm and tugged at it, fierce and ineffectual. “Stop! She’s old! She can’t hurt you!”

Shows what you know, thought Grandma, vague and indignant. She didn’t think she could stand up, but she wasn’t done yet. She’d hurt that bastard plenty.

She would . . . she would . . .

She had no idea what she was going to do.

She had lost her knife. She put her hand in her pocket, looking for something else—a weapon, a seed, she didn’t know what—and found something smooth and leathery under her fingers.

The cold-king flicked Marguerite off as if she were a fly. She landed on her shoulder, and the roadrunner-boy ran to her and crouched over her, fierce and futile.

Grandma Harken pulled the leathery thing out of her pocket. It was the scale from the dragon.

The cold-king turned his head, snorting. “What is that?” he said, sounding surprised, and it occurred to Grandma for the first time that he might not know that she had freed the monster.

He lifted his hand. She could not flee, and she could not dodge, and she was already against the wall. The next blow would likely kill her, for her bones were no longer as strong as they had been.

For lack of anything better to do, she put the scale in her mouth and bit down hard. The musty reptile taste mixed with the salt of blood, a thin, acrid stew.

There was another crack of thunder, like the sound of the shackles breaking, and something struck the wall of the old adobe.

The cold-king turned, startled. Pebbles rattled from the ceiling.

It occurred to Grandma Harken that she should probably get up before the ceiling came down.

She rolled sideways, slowly, onto her knees. She did not seem to be dead yet.

The wall shuddered under another impact. There were cracks in the wall now, running in all directions.

She stood up. Her back felt like an open wound.

The wall fell.

Through the gap came sunlight, thin and hazy as it was in this place. She saw the blunt wedge of the Gila dragon’s head, and then it drew back and slammed forward like a hammer.

The cold-king blinked in the sudden light. His face was fish-belly white under the coat of hair.

She looked around for something to throw at him—it didn’t have to be large, just a distraction, anything to buy the dragon another few moments—and then the roadrunner-boy charged.

The sound he made was half-human, half-bird.

The cold-king slapped at the air, and another wave of power washed over them, but differently.

The roadrunner-boy fell down and was a roadrunner. Marguerite’s cry became the harsh scold of a mockingbird. And Grandma Harken, who had been hunched over, searching for a weapon, dropped back to all fours, her body twisting into a shape at once forgotten and familiar.

Her ribs heaved. Her ears were as long as her arms. Two sickle horns rose up on her brow. Her fur was white with age, but her legs quivered with the memory of speed.

Well. Well. It’s been a long time.

She would have laughed then, but jackrabbits don’t.

The cold-king stared at her. “You were supposed to be a bird,” he said, sounding baffled. For a moment he sounded less like a monster and more like a man. “They’re always birds.”

The dragon hit the wall again and it fell down and took part of the roof with it.

Grandma stamped. She couldn’t help it. She had no other way to shout a warning. The roadrunner ran for the open doorway, and the mockingbird fluttered, dodging falling stone.

The cold-king spun around as masonry struck him, and the Gila dragon reached in and closed its jaws over him.

Grandma winced.

The poison of a Gila monster is greatly exaggerated. The bite is not. It clamped down on the cold-king and no power on earth could have freed him.

The cold-king sagged like a puppet with its strings cut. There was no blood at all.

Grandma stamped again, because the deathless do not die so easily. From the doorway, the roadrunner and the mockingbird looked in.

The body heaved. Around the edge of the dragon’s teeth, the flesh gaped open and something fell out.

It was a hare, but it looked unfinished. It was hairless, though its eyes were open. It staggered as it tried to walk, and its legs wobbled.

Until I finish growing back, the cold-king had said.

Not quite finished, then, thought Grandma, and launched herself at the hare.

She was old but her claws were still sharp. She struck the hare hard and rolled it over, biting at its throat.

Its flesh was soft and spongy, slick with fluid. She could not get purchase on it. It did not fight back but squirmed against her, trying to escape, leave a trail of slime like a slug over her paws.

It wiggled a little way free and the mockingbird struck at its eyes. Grandma ignored the screaming of old bones and grappled with it again, kicking for its belly.

Her claws found purchase at last, and tore into the swollen skin. Again, there was no blood. The hare’s body went limp and something feathered fought its way free from the open belly.

She did not know what kind of bird it was—some sort of water fowl, with a harlequin mask of green and cream over its face. She struck at it, tearing strips from its wing, but it was in the air before she could bring it down.

It made it nearly to the open doorway and the mockingbird slammed into its head.

Marguerite, in bird form, was barely a third the size of the fowl, but she fought like a creature possessed, battering the creature’s face with its wings, keeping it out of the air. The fowl hissed like a snake, trying to get into the canyon and more open air.

Grandma dragged herself forward. If she leapt, she could knock it out of the air—if she could even leap. It did not seem likely. Kicking the hare open had done things to her hips that would be a long time healing.

The roadrunner slammed into the fowl’s back, driving its long beak into the fowl’s neck. It went limp.

And is that all?

No. It never is, is it?

Its bill opened and the neck worked as if the corpse were vomiting. A serpent with tiny, poisonous eyes slithered free, tail whipping as it fled.

The roadrunner pounced before it had gotten three feet away. Of all the prey in the desert, it was snakes that they loved the most. It seized the beast behind the head and whipped it back and forth against the canyon wall.

Grandma sat back on her haunches, tense and trembling, waiting for the next form.

The snake’s body split open and a white egg flew out.

It traced a pale arc in the air, glistening. The roadrunner dropped the snake. The mockingbird flung herself into the air after it. The ancient horned jackrabbit lunged forward.

And the coyote with cold-moon eyes caught it neatly out of the air and swallowed it in two bites.

“What?” it said, licking its lips. “Were you going to eat that?”

§

The air shivered. The folds fell away as three worlds snapped back into place. The sky was blue and hard instead of hazy green. Grandma was an old woman sitting on the side of a hill, with her legs tucked up beneath her. Marguerite fell heavily out of the air and the roadrunner boy helped her up.

“Well,” said Grandma. “Well. How about that?”

The coyote sat down, looking pleased with itself, which is the natural state of coyotes.

Marguerite’s skin and eyes were brown, no longer gray and white. She reached into her mouth and pried the silver cuff out of her tongue. Her young companion, no longer feathered, spat blood. He was older than Grandma had thought. It was his wounded eyes that made him look so young.

His name was John, Marguerite told her. (Privately Grandma suspected that was nothing like his name, but she wouldn’t have given her real name to the cold-king either.) He had been captured not long after Marguerite. His people were to the south and east. “I’ll see him home,” she said, looking at Grandma, as if she expected her to argue.

It did not matter in the least to Grandma, so long as she didn’t have to deal with it. “Go into town and talk to Tomas,” suggested Grandma. “Tell him I sent you. He’ll loan you a mule.”

They nodded together and stood, leaning against each other, the only two people in the desert who knew what it was like to be tongue-cut birds.

John spoke to Marguerite, and she translated. “Is the old man gone?”

“Don’t know,” said Grandma. “Things like that don’t die easy. But I’ve never heard of anything coming back alive from inside a coyote.”

The coyote looked, if possible, even more pleased. “My stomach is very dreadful,” it said. “I eat carrion and dung, when I can get it.”

“I don’t think it’ll be back for awhile, at least,” said Grandma. “And if it is, you and John will know how to defeat him. You’ll need a different third, though. I’m too old for this.”

“Thank you,” said Marguerite, and “Thank you,” said John, pronouncing the words slowly and carefully.

“Weren’t nothing,” said Grandma, which was a lie and a half.

After they were gone, Grandma fell backward and just breathed for awhile. The shadows were growing very long. A whole day could not have passed in the ruins of the used-up people, but perhaps time had folded a little oddly too.

She heard the tracks sing, as if there was a train somewhere nearby, but it did not pass this way after all. That was just as well. She did not think she could deal with a god just now.

“Are you dead?” asked the coyote with interest.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” snapped Grandma. “I ain’t dying just yet,” and that may or may not have been a lie. She wasn’t quite sure.

“Then you had better get up,” said the coyote. “And I will walk a little way home with you, just in case you die along the way.”

It took her a long time going home. The coyote walked her nearly all the way, keeping up a string of nonsense, and since she refused to show weakness in front of a coyote, she walked faster than she might have otherwise.

She refilled her water bottle at the last wash, and drank deeply. When she lowered the bottle, the coyote was gone.

“All right, then,” she said. Not being grateful, because you never show gratitude to a coyote. But not being ungrateful, either. Just in case.

She walked until she saw the fence around her garden, and then she stood and looked and thought that perhaps she hadn’t lied to the coyote about dying after all.

She went the last little way and opened the gate.

The cholla-bone girl sat on the back steps, carefully petting Spook-cat. She looked up at Grandma, her face very serious.

“My great-grandmother sent me,” she said.

“I know,” said Grandma wearily. She leaned against the gate-post.

“She says you’re supposed to teach me,” said the girl.

Grandma was silent. Wondering what an old jackalope wife could teach to a girl with bones made of cholla ribs. Wondering if there was anything she knew worth learning, after all.

She thought of the lessons in the desert, and thought that this girl probably knew them all already. They would have been written on the inside of her skin since the day before she was born.

Still, there was one thing she had worth passing on.

“Come on,” said Grandma, pushing herself away from the fence. “We’ll clean out the back room for you. But first, I’ll teach you how to make a really good tomato sandwich.”

THIS CENSUS TAKER

China Miéville

To Mic

“Like all these long low squat houses, it had been built not for but against. They were built against the forest, against the sea, against the elements, against the world. They had roof-beams and doors and hatred—as though in this part of the world an architect always included hatred among his tools, and said to his apprentice: ‘Mind you’ve brought along enough hatred today.’ ”

—Jane Gaskell, Some Summer Lands

A boy ran down a hill path screaming. The boy was I. He held his hands up and out in front of him as if he’d dipped them in paint and was coming to make a picture, to press them down to paper, but all there was on him was dirt. There was no blood on his palms.

He was nine years old, I think, and this was the fastest he’d ever run, and he stumbled and careered and it seemed many times as if he would fall into the rocks and gorse that surrounded the footpath, but I kept my feet and descended into the shadow of my hill. The air felt wet but no rain had fallen. I sent up cold dust behind me and little animals scuttling ahead.

People in the town saw that cloud long before I arrived, Samma would later tell me. When she was sure that it wasn’t just weather, she was one of those who came to wait by the pump beyond the bridge to the west, where there were the last buildings, to watch whatever was coming. After that day, when I saw her, when she could, Samma would tell me stories, including the story of when I came down the hill.

“I knew it was you,” she’d say. “That dirt devil on its way down. ‘It’s the boy,’ I said. A lot of us did. You must’ve run a mile while I watched you, you ran and ran and you didn’t slow once. You came right past the nails.” The nails: my name that she had adopted for a copse of dead white bushes. “Right by every split in the hill and you must have heard all the devils down there howling at you.” When she talked like this I’d stare at her urgently, without speaking. “We heard you coming, making noises like a hurt gull or something, and I said: ‘It is, it’s the boy!’ ”

In I’d come. I turned with the path, away from where the slope grew drier and stonier and inclined precipitously, and I ran for where the crowd was waiting. I could see down spaces between those outmost walls to the town’s built-up bridge. I was weeping so hard I retched, came loud and filthy past the wire-spinning mill and the glassworks, past barns and stores and the ground before them strewn with old straw and the shards of things that had been broken within, toward the cobbles and concrete in view of that bridge itself, where the townspeople waited.

There were children among them: those with adults were held back by them. I made noises as if I were a whooping baby. I struggled for air.

I was the only one moving while all there stared at my little figure raising dirt, until someone, I don’t know who, started forward to meet me, and they brought others after them in shame, Samma among them.

They ran to me with their own arms out like mine, to take me.

“Look!” I heard a man say. “God, look at him!”

I kept up the hands I thought were bloody for them to see.

I shouted, “My mother killed my father!”

—

I was an uphiller. Above my house was a steepening distance of grass and loose earth, then slabs of flint in a rough ziggurat, and then at last, out of sight, the peak. No path went there. We lived as high on the hill as anyone. Our house was at the same level of the slope as those of a few weather-watchers and hermits and witches you could call our neighbors, though you’d have to walk a while from where we lived to see any of their places, and we never visited them nor they us.

My house had three stories that grew less and less finished as they rose, as if the builders had lost spirit the further they were from the soil. On the ground were a kitchen with a parlor, my father’s workroom, a passage and a cornering wooden stair. In the middle, two small, less finely finished bedrooms, my father’s and my mother’s, and a cubby where I slept between them.

On the highest floor any drive to subdivide had been defeated and there was only one space, into which you could feel air come through the imperfect outer walls and the cracks where window-frames met plaster.

I liked to climb the steep stairs to play alone in that wind-filled room. All the rest of the house was whitewashed or painted in an ocher made from local earth, but two walls of the attic were papered in a repeating design. The tangled flowers and pagodas astonished me. I couldn’t imagine my mother or my father choosing them. I decided the paper must have predated my parents’ arrival, which made me contemplate the house before they came to it, the house empty of them. That made me queasy and excited.

In the kitchen and where my father worked there were lights and tools that ran off current from the generator we would sometimes fire up. In the bedrooms we used candles. The windows of the top floor had no curtains and every day the light would cross the room, from one end to the other. The wallpaper was faded by years of the sun’s attention. In one corner, low down where I thought it would be secret, I drew animals around the buildings and among the stems.

My house stood by the path’s end, wedged into the rocks of the hill as if shying back from where the ground fell away before it. Between the house and that drop was a rusted wire fence in front of which I’d stand to watch hill animals—feral and crossbred cats and dogs, dassies, the lean descendants of goat and sheep escapees—trip and scatter between stone shapes and the bushes. There were those beasts with territories I came to know, on which I came to know that I was encroaching, and those which visited repeatedly, seemed curious about me—a furious drab songbird claiming certain trees, a red-furred dog not much bigger than a puppy but which moved with an older dog’s caution.

From here I could make out the black roofs of the town. I’d kick stones small enough to go through the metal links and watch them bounce into the boscage, or further—all the way, I imagined, to the water, to the gulley below the buildings.

It was one town scattered up and down the sides of the two hills and between them on the bridge. And like everyone on both those hills, we were of it, though we lived in a house as far from the streets as it could be for that still to be true. It was the law of this town to which we were subject. When I came down that day, I wasn’t running for the law, but the law found me.

The people comforted me in a rough way.

“What did you see, boy?” they asked. “What happened?”

All I could do was cry.

“Your mum did something?” a woman said to me, kneeling and taking my shoulders in her hands. “She did something to your dad? Tell us.”

She confused me. She was trying to make me meet her eye. What she said confused me because I didn’t think she was describing what I’d seen, what I’d walked in on, but as she spoke I realized she was repeating what I’d told her. The boy, I, had said his mother killed his father.

Still now if I consider the thing I saw in my house that day what comes back to me first is my mother’s hands: her calm expression, the sight of her braced and striking, her hands coming down hard, a knife, my father’s eyes closed, a glimpse of his mouth, his mouth full of blood, blood on the pale flowers of the walls, and the boy has to think all that, first, I have no choice, I can’t think around it, and every time it takes me a moment to reflect and prepare to say that no, that’s not what it was, surely, that the face of the person being hit was hidden, or certainly that it wasn’t my father’s.

I tried to correct what I’d said that the woman was repeating, and could only swallow.

I’d heard a rhythm. I’d gone up to the top of the house, the space with all the air, and found people already there. By the bridge the woman looked at me and I concentrated, and I didn’t think what I’d seen was my mother killing my father, as I’d said. I went back to it. Her face, my mother’s face, blank and tired, yes, but if seen only for an instant, glimpsed. And not her hands coming down but my father’s.

“No,” I said. “My father. Someone. My mother.”

It had been my father with his back to me. I thought that as carefully as I could through all my shaking and gasping. Him holding someone. Her face I couldn’t recall.

My father’s back had been to me. It hadn’t been my mother’s back. That blood had been there, the blood I still imagined on my hands. I remember it as very bright and dark at the same time, because it was newly come into the light while the paper it colored was so faded.

I’d screamed until my father turned to regard me. That was what I’d seen: him gasping from his efforts.

He stared at me and I ran away.

Some mornings my mother would give me lessons in letters and numbers. She didn’t have many books but she’d place before me one of those she did and sit across the table from me and point without speaking at certain words, waiting as I struggled to say them. She would correct me when she had to and sometimes impatiently prompt me, sound out words at which I’d failed. This was in another language than the one in which I write now.

My mother was a muscular woman with dark gray skin folded on her forehead and around her eyes. Except when she was digging she left her long white-flecked hair loose so it draped around her face. I thought her beautiful but after she died if I ever heard anyone discuss her in more than brief passing the adjective they used was strong—or, once, handsome.

Mostly what my mother did was tend the sprawl of up-and-down land around our house. She’d separated this sloping garden into seemingly formless plots with boundaries she marked with stones. When she saw how they confused me, she told me she was following contour lines.

She would clear blown sticks and leaf-matter from between them, and dry it to feed our fire or the generator in its little housing for when we wanted electricity. She had an outside dress in which she kept seeds of different kinds. I’d sit quietly on one of several suitable stones and watch her reach into her many pockets to sow handfuls in the grit she tilled. Sometimes she smiled in a cold way at the anxiety her random methods raised in me.

Once she stood straight and leaned on her hoe and looked right at me and said, “Last night I had a dream of planting bits of rubbish right here and watering them and making them grow. Growing a dump. When I say, ‘I had a dream’ I mean I wanted to, not ‘It came into my head while I was sleeping.’ ”

My mother would twist unpleasant figures out of wire and wood and put them up to frighten the birds. My father made them too, and his were finer than hers, but none of them intimidated the crows very much, and my mother and I would often have to run out of the house windmilling our arms and shouting so the big birds would lurch away from the seeds a while, less out of fear than a kind of languorous contempt.

Out of that thin dusty ground my mother pulled hybrids and rarities as well as beans and gourds and so on. Some of what she grew we ate; some she sold or bartered with the shopkeepers on the bridge or in the bridgetown, for all kinds of things. Some she exchanged for more seeds that she would fold back into the earth.

—

Mostly we kept to our own patch of hill, as did everyone who lived above the town: the path below us and all the ruts cutting crosswise from height to height ran carefully so as not to get too close to any dwellings. Yes, at rare times, almost, it felt in later years, out of some obligation to be naughty, a duty to something, I might walk a long while through complex country, creeping close enough to another uphiller’s place below our own to see them from the shelter of bushes, to watch crooked women, sisters raising pigs in a barn, to see the gnarled man on his plateau out of sight of the second hill performing precise tasks in his yard, calibrating gauges on old machines the moving parts of which he would daub with grease. These other houses looked so much like my own that they roused in me imprecise suspicions, as if, I would later have the words to think, they were a set.

There was supposed to be a holy old woman or man living in a cave no more than an hour’s walk from our door, just below the zenith, and I remember once glimpsing the beat of a brown cape like a shaken sheet but whether that cloth was worn on bony vatic shoulders I can’t say. I can’t even say if I truly saw it.

I’ve observed real ascetics since, their mortifications and their dens, and I know now how pinchbeck was the self-exile I saw, if I saw anything, if there was anything to see.

The most common trace of those who lived closest to us was the smoke from their fires, from when they made food, or destroyed their rubbish, which was not how we disposed of ours.

My father was a very tall pale man who seemed endlessly startled, who moved in jerks as if trying not to be caught out. He made keys. His customers would come up from the town and ask for the things for which people usually ask—love, money, to open things, to know the future, to fix animals, to fix things, to be stronger, to hurt someone or save someone, to fly—and he’d make them a key.

I was put out of the house during these transactions but would often creep around the perimeter to crouch by the window of his workroom to hear the discussions, and even to peek in. More than once my mother, prodding at her plots, her hair up in the yellow scarf that was the brightest thing I ever saw her wear, observed me huddled by the sill. She never stopped me eavesdropping.

My father would take notes as people falteringly told him their needs. On rough brown paper he would start to sketch the outlines of a key’s tines and troughs in graphite and ink, correcting the lines as his customers spoke. He’d continue when the visitors had left, sometimes drawing for hours, almost always finishing his rendition in a single sitting, even if it meant he was working until sunup.

The next day he’d go and start our generator droning, and, returning, would pin the finished image by his table, pinch slats of metal in his vise and with minute movements and slow care, stopping frequently to refer to the picture, cut them with a screaming electric blade run for a few seconds at a time, dimming the downstairs lights, or by hand with the taut steel-wire saws I was also forbidden to touch. My father was strong despite his scrawny arms. He cut and shaped.

Behind his workbench he kept glass jars containing handfuls of various dusts. A few were deep colors; most were varieties of brown and dirt gray. He’d dip his fingers in one at a time, rub the emerging keys, polishing them with the powders and with the sweat on his thumb. I never saw him replenish any containers: he only ever used a trace.

The work exhausted him, even more than you might think. When he finished he’d hold up what he’d made and blow it clean and eye it thoughtfully, the key shining, he a dirty mess.

Sometimes days later those who’d commissioned him would come back to take what they must have paid for, though often not in the tin and paper money of the town, of which there was rarely much in our house; sometimes he would descend to bring the key to them. I never saw any customer more than once.

When my mother cooked mostly she did not talk, planning her garden, I think, neither meeting nor avoiding my eye. When he made supper, my father would step around the little kitchen and pass me food, smiling like a man trying to remember how to do it. He’d look eagerly at my mother and me, and she would not look back, and I would, though also without a word, and he’d try to ask us things and tell us stories.

—

“It’s best to live up here,” my father told me. “Where the air’s good and thin, not too heavy. It doesn’t get in the way.”

That’s a brief memory. When he said that he and I were walking together down the path on an errand I don’t remember. I hadn’t realized it yet but I wasn’t often alone in his company like that; my mother placed herself at the periphery of most of our interactions. I would go walking on my own, though, which she didn’t stop, and so would he, and then I might see him, even follow him, though I tried not to let him see me.

On some days bigger and more intricate things than birds passed over us through that thin air, bustling and busy too high for me to make them out. If I was in his sight when they did so, my father would try that smile again so I thought he wanted to explain something to me, but he never did.

I grew up with the constant wind of the hill whispering to me and pushing back my dark fringe. Behind its sounds were the faint and far-off and occasional shouts of animals and the clack of rock-fall. Sometimes there was an engine or the percussion of a distant shotgun.

I’d seen my father’s furies before the day of that murder when his face and my mother’s face flickered together. I call them furies but in those moments he was unmoved and unmoving: he looked as if he was distracted and thinking deeply.

When I was seven he killed a dog while I watched. It was not our dog. We didn’t then keep any living thing.

I was upslope from my mother’s garden in a splayed tree with roots tangling in the hill dirt. I remember the day as caustically bright, and I remember things overlooking me and gusting at the limits of the flat and open sky. So there I was: the boy, stroked by leaves, not knowing where his mother was, watching his father.

The man sat smoking on an outcrop below. He was unaware of the boy’s attention.

That small red dog came down from nowhere in particular in the heights. It had lived, I suppose, as after weaning all the semi-wild animals on the hill must, by stealing and begging, by luck, as well as by its hunting.

It came closer to my father with a hesitant hope-filled cringe. The man was motionless, his cigarette half-raised.

The dog came zigzag closer, putting down careful steps between the pebbles. The man held out his hand and the animal stopped but he rubbed his finger and thumb together and the little dog sniffed and crept forward again. It licked his hand and he took it by the back of the neck. It struggled but not much: he knew how to hold a dog and it was not panicked.

He put his cigarette out on a stone. He examined that stone and rejected it and looked for a better one. A rush swept through the watching boy and made him shake. It was as if his own heartbeat punched him inside. His father searched.

I knew what he was going to do. This is the first memory I have of my father killing anything but I remember the certainty with which I watched him. It was strong enough that I wonder now if I’ve forgotten other, earlier such acts, that then I still remembered.

The man raised his chosen flint high and hit the dog with it. He brought it down on its head and it did not bark. He hit it again and again. The boy clung to the tree and watched and pushed one shaking hand into his mouth so as to be quiet like the dog. My fingers tasted of resin.

When he was done my father stood and looked into the valley. It was a cold summer and everything was green; you couldn’t see the river, the depths of the cut below the town and its bridge were so thick with trees. The dog dangled in my father’s hand. He trudged up the slope.

Though I was full of terror, when he went from view behind a twist of landscape, I came down from the tree and went up too, staying hidden, waiting for him to emerge again into my sight. He didn’t see me when he did. He ascended to the west and I crept after him behind rocks and undergrowth and in ditches. I followed him up the twisting way he took that wasn’t a true path but that I could see he’d walked before. The dog’s tail brushed the ground.

My father disturbed buzzards. They lifted off slowly and circled.

There was a cave mouth above and out of sight of our house and of the road. I had never before approached it from this direction and so was surprised at its appearance, but I knew it. I wasn’t supposed to come here without my parents but sometimes I did.

When they took me, my mother and father would encourage me over its odd prim fringe of stone spurs that rose like a low fence at the threshold, and step over themselves into the shadow in the hill. They never came without a flashlight, and they would crank its handle and let its orange glow show their way on the tunnel floor. Even without that illumination, even when I came alone and was too afraid to go far, I could see the pit.

In their company I’d go forward slowly, tapping my way with a stick or my toes as if the rock floor was a trick, or crawling on all fours and patting the ground before each shuffle and slide as if the black split might ambush me.

This time I clung to a wind-carved stump and watched my father enter the hill. I came close enough to see. He was standing still and looking into our dump-hole.

The hole interrupted the passage, which continued beyond it into darkness. My father had shone his light across that gap for me so I’d seen the tunnel extend beyond the strength of the weak beam. The fissure was close to two meters wide.

Every three or four days, my whole life, my mother or my father hauled our sacks and boxes of rubbish here and tipped them into the hole. Holding me, my father would sometimes let me help, let me drop some in. You could hear the uncompostable refuse, the plastic wrappers weighted with stones or bones, the broken glass and what household junk we couldn’t reuse, bounce and jostle against the sheer stone of the shaft and break apart and tumble into silence. You wouldn’t hear it hit any bottom.

The vertical sides were always speckled with mold where what of our food waste my mother didn’t give her garden smeared them on the way down. I would hold the rock of the cave walls while my mother or father disposed of all our trash, gripping and teasing myself with fear by pretending I might try to climb sideways over the gap, to continue into the hill.

My father stood at the lip. He looked down into the black for a long time then pulled back his arm and swung it forward and released the dead dog just so, so it arced up over the trash-pit hole and paused and accelerated down into it in a curve so perfect everything seemed to have led to it.

The dog was born to descend this way. Millions of years ago, the stone had split to receive it.

My father stared down into the hill with such focus it was as if he had done all of this, this killing, because he had to see an animal fall.

He might have seen me behind him on the way back but I don’t think so. Certainly I tried very hard to keep out of his sight—though later I came to believe it likely wouldn’t have mattered had I failed to. I followed him with my weak limbs shaking because I was even more afraid to be out there on the hill alone as the light went down, near the rubbish hole with the dead dog inside it, than to be behind him.

I didn’t want to follow my father into the kitchen where he stood but it was cold and there was only one door into the house and we had no sheds or barns in which I might hide, and the concrete housing of the generator was tight, without space for me to slip into. There was only the outhouse, where I’d certainly be found. In the waning light I stopped at the garden’s edge and stood like a tree. There I stared at my house, at the late sun filling the attic window, hearing only wind and my own breaths, until the evening drove me in to where my father and my mother waited.

I ran past them, holding my breath and not looking at them, up to the attic to hunker in my corner by the markings I’d made, to go exploring within them, keeping my gaze on them as the light diminished.

It was my father who came up at last to beckon me, to tell me it was time to eat. So I had to go back past him. I had to come down past him to where my mother sat at the table with her eyes half-closed and her head tilted back so she could look at me with a downward gaze no matter that I was standing. She watched me with a sullen coolness I now think was well-disguised concern.

It has no business being alive any more, but above me a cold-drunk wasp hovers about the chandelier’s glowing ring. An escort of shadow wasps disperses and converges on the ceiling in perfect formation as the summer insect falls and imprecisely rises. One bulb is broken so the shadows don’t surround the sluggish source-wasp but seem to flank it, to bring up its rear and suggest its way.

I can’t bring myself to kill it.

When I came to this room I moved the table to the window so I could write as I do now watching a city get dark and switch to neon. I’m an honored guest here, which is why there are two guards outside my door to take care of me, for when I do my work. That’s what my hosts said, with such courtesy and conviction that I wonder if they’ve come to believe it.

I’ve been working for many hours. I think those guards are probably lulled by the sounds in here. Which will continue.

There’s still a smell of smoke. I’m biding my time. While it was light I wrote a tiny poll of the absent: four behind me (I wrote “saw the sea; cut metal; stole a flouted order; twisted hooks on twine”), one perhaps also behind me, perhaps ahead—my predecessor. I burned the list.

This is my second book.

I started on my first book three years ago, in a distant country, and on my third book a year after that. Now at last it’s time for me to start writing this second book.

The manager of my line told me, You never put anything down except to be read. Every word ever written is written to be read and if some go unread that’s only chance, failure, they’re like grubs that die without changing. He said, You’ll keep three books.

So my first is a book of numbers. It’s lists and calculations and, for efficiency, I write it using ciphers. There’s a legend I never check any more, knowing all the signs now, the single-stroke shorthands that mean kilogram and tonne, widow, printer, generation, thief, the signs for currency, shipyard, doctor, for uncertainty, the holding sign that means there’s an unknown factor here to which I’ll come back. This first book’s for everyone, though almost no one wants it or would know how to read it.

The third of my three books is for me. You’ll keep one, is what he told me, for you alone to read, in which you should write secrets. But you’ll never be sure that no one else will read them: that’s the risk and that’s how the third book works.

When he gave me that warning he held his finger up as if he was counting to one.

He said, You’ll write it not because there’s no possibility it’ll be found but because it costs too much to not write it. If you ever find someone else’s third book, it’s up to you what you do. You could read it, but you don’t have to. Nothing you’d read would be for you. If I found one, he said, what I’d do is I’d set fire to it. I wouldn’t read it and I wouldn’t give it to you.

If I got back someone’s second book, well, I’d give you that, of course: the second book’s for readers, he said. But you can’t know when they’ll come, if they do. It’s the book for telling: no code for that one. But—he counted one again and had my close attention—you can still use it to tell secrets and send messages. Even so. You could say them right out, but you can hide them in the words too, in their letters, in the ordering on lines, the arrangements and rhythms. He said, The second book’s performance.

My third book is a notebook that fits in my hand. It’s a quarter full already, with my smallest writing, using symbols for my secrets.

The first book is a ledger that we share, my manager and I, recording as per our job. Sometimes we slip loose leafs between its pages, with amendments, information we need.

My second book is this box of papers.

You can tell it any way you want, he said, you can be I or he or she or we or they or you and you won’t be lying, though you might be telling two stories at once. Inherit a second book from someone else, to continue it, and you can have a conversation with what’s already there. Write on scraps and in its margins.

Yes, there are papers here from when this story was started, not by me.

Today we saw a big animal bigger than anything I ever seen, I read in the letters of someone very young, in this, my precocious precursor’s first language, that I’ve come to know better than my own first, certainly in writing, in some part from these words she left me. She writes, I am learning as we travel.

There are other pieces: the impressions of a serious child; scattered scenes, any narrative impossible to reconstruct; snips of description, a few of which have stayed with me since I learned to read them, and to which I still repeatedly return—There are raggedy people on the railway lines above; it has a snails eyes; in this country the water is thick.

Most of it was lost, my manager told me, before the remainder became mine. I’ve cross-referenced this book with the first, paged backward through the latter to find the statistics for what I think must be the town with thick water, or where there were people on lines overhead. I’ve wondered if we might return to any of those places, so I could double-check details and itemize them too, but that’s just what we shouldn’t need to do. Still there’ve been rare times when some feature where we stop has put me in mind of one of my predecessor’s phrases—a flint cupola invoking a building all cutty moonshaped gray, stilted longhouses reminding me dont fall theres things in the mud. As if my boss retraces steps sometimes, absentmindedly, or because tasks are unfinished, and we might one day come to the place with raised neglected rails where outcasts live.

Of the second book’s early pages that I have, the last-but-one-written—you can tell from the more formal older hand—is notes toward a catechism. I know because it’s labeled Notes toward my catechism.

It says The Hope, then that’s crossed out, and what hope was this? After that is written This Hate, which is crossed out too. Then starting again the words congregate in curious and precise lines, with a child’s care, for a reader to come:

The Hope Is So:

the catechism says, and then,

Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. -

Below that there’s a mess of scrawled, rejected, reworked, written and rewritten, arranged-just-so, and finally accepted lines.

This is all I have of the earlier story—scraps, notes, and the resulting catechism, finished in neat and left for me. That was the last page written and the first any reader sees. It was brought forward: it’s what opens the book.

I thought I understood it when I learned to read it: now, at last, perhaps I really do. If so, I have to decide what it’s my job to do. I’ll start with my own recitation, in answer at last, something important I’ve learned.

In

Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.

My second book comes fast, the noisiest of the three. I’m not writing it with a pen. My fingers quickstep on these keys and my second book rattles out.

When he met the man who became his line manager the boy was a child and naïve but not quite ignorant, at least in letters, because of his mother’s lessons.

Sometimes she would bring home from the town new things to read. Catalogues for grain and agricultural machines, and instructions for cleaning metals, and almanacs, or what was left of them when those pages making incorrect predictions and offering unhelpful advice had been torn out. All these in the formal voice of the language I grew up speaking, in which I don’t write this. A few folded cuttings from foreign newspapers—which we occasionally found tucked between pages as bookmarks or secreted in stashes and which were in this language—we ignored.

My mother made slow poems of the words as she read them flatly to show the boy how the letters sounded. When later the man who would become his manager met the boy he improved him by giving him endless dull texts and having him sound them out, asking questions about their context.

His manager taught him that words change with time, by single letters or more, sometimes their whole roots switching—a “y” to an “e” in a name for power, “sun-writing” becomes “light-drawing.” The man eventually gave him this whole other tongue, and he revisited and at last learned from those cuttings about immense foreign wars.

The boy always suspected his father could read and write, at least some, and that suspicion was to grow. Back in the first days of his curiosity the boy found cards tucked between boards in the outhouse, little pornographic pictures with cramped handwriting on the back, but then he was too young to read them and he was never to know if his father wrote them or received them or simply found them and liked the images or if they were his father’s at all. The old camera had demanded a long exposure, so the hand-tinted women and men crawled over each other in stilted and mannered lust. The boy put them back in their crevice and later they were gone.

He didn’t know what if anything it was his mother got from his father’s company. They lived together and passed each other every day and spoke a little to each other when they had to without viciousness or rancor but, so far as the boy saw and so far as he ever remembered, without pleasure or interest. From his father there was always a distant desperation.

His mother seemed always to know, and not to like it, when the boy’s father killed things. It roused in her a cold and anxious distaste. That boy was afraid of her, but at those rare times of his father’s blank-faced interventions he wanted the hurried and uncomfortable caretaking she offered.

—

After I saw him kill the dog I was more afraid of being alone with my father than I’d ever been of anything. But over the course of months every fear, however strong, ebbs or changes. My father treated me with the same flustered abstraction with which he always had.

Every day he was busy in his workroom. When he came up to the middle floor I would lie on the cold boards of the attic and listen to the murmurs of he and my mother talking. I couldn’t discern their words but I could hear them speaking with a care that sometimes sounded a little like affection.

People might come to order keys. When my father went down to deliver them he always went alone.

When my mother descended, one time in three she might take me.

—

In the center of the town was the bridge. Along its western edge ran black railings on which you could lean to overlook the foliage and rock and hills and the river. On the other side were stone buildings, shored up now with wood and concrete and iron girders. The bridge had been inhabited once but some ordinance had forbidden that practice, broken though it was by the parentless children who squatted collapsing derelicts between the shops.

Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. Where else could those children live?

They were a swaggering crew tolerated if their thieving wasn’t too ostentatious, useful to the shopkeepers for the scutwork they’d sometimes perform.

Our town was a petty hub on the routes of mendicant salespeople, so sometimes you could buy unlikely commodities, vegetables other than the tough ones of the hillside, foreign bibelots, cloth in startling colors. The traveling merchants haggled and drank and showboated stories of what they sold from the backs of their wagons in front of the better houses. There were always small crowds at these performances, sometimes parents whose children looked at me during lulls in the patter. Even my mother would watch the traders’ plays, or would let me: I was always utterly caught up by them, by This Fine Borage or An Auger to Dig my Postholes.

The sellers who knew her treated my mother with a cautious courtesy. When she approached, I silent in the wake of her skirt, they’d greet her carefully and might ask after my father, at which she’d blink and try out expressions and nod and wait. “Tell him thank you for that key he did me,” they might continue.

A few turns east of the travelers’ market, the butchers in the meat quarter sometimes stocked cuts from exotic animals and labeled them not with words but with photographs or hand-drawn pictures. That was how I learned that there were giraffes, from a sepia portrait on a pile of dried haunch meat. Once, one of our stops was at a large unlikely warehouse full of cabinets of salted fish come up from the nearest city, from the coast, wherever it was, and shuddering generators and the iceboxes they powered crammed with the gray corpses of big sea fish. There I, who’d known only the fierce spine-backed fish of the mountain streams and their animalcule prey, came to a sudden stop, slack with awe before a glass tank big enough to contain me, transported at some immense cost for I don’t know what market, full not with me or with any person but of brine and clots of black weed and clenching polyps and huge starfish, sluggishly crawling, feeling their way over tank-bottom stones like mottled hands.

There were few trees in the meat quarter, as if the soil between its stones was too bloody for their prim taste, but elsewhere there were many, stunted to fit and strumming the bowing electric wires with their branches, always dirty from carts and the animals and engines which hauled them venting dung or smoke.

Southeast of where the butchers were, fronting a yard full of engine pieces and oily rags, was an iron fence past which I always hoped my mother would take us, because dangling from its railings was an angle of wood, a section of long-dead tree transfixed by the metal and jutting toward a stub in the flagstones, its own dead roots. There, a tree had once grown up and through the fence, sealing itself around the bars until it had provoked the unfriendliness of the owner and been cut down, leaving that part of itself that couldn’t be extricated. That part I would finger at the join of bark and iron when I walked through where the tree had been.

The children from the bridge were often waiting there, eyeing me. They congregated by the stump and played a game involving motions as strange as those of worship. To me it looked as if they were feeling the missing bark for handholds, as if it were an expertise of town children that they could climb ghost trees.

My mother opened the gate one time and I watched in alarm as she bent to pick up a stained metal bolt. From there I followed her to where, in tangled alleys closer to the gulch, it was the architecture and not the plants that accommodated; buildings angled to allow for vegetation that had predated them, that then sometimes died to leave tree-shaped emptinesses in the town walls. I’d run into those nooks to stand cosseted by the bricks while my mother waited.

Little banyans lined one loud market street too steep for carts, smoky from workshops. The branches dropped shaggy creepers that, when they reached the earth, hardened into roots and pried apart paving. Locals would watch us uphillers from shacks tucked under the boughs, selling cigarettes and candies. Where they met the roofs, the dangling sinews hardened around their contours, so when those shops ultimately failed and rotted the trees themselves became open-fronted root boxes into which a boy could also step, to stand under ceilings of tangle, creeping down as if tentative and disbelieving that there was at last no metal to impede them. If you were slow enough, I thought, they’d turn to pillars and anchor you within.

Those bridge children would follow me.

I tried not to look too often but I could always see a girl and a boy at the front of the crew, roughhousing and raucous and seemingly fearless in their cutoff adults’ clothes. I wasn’t precisely afraid of them; I watched them with intense and guarded fascination, finding them inexplicable.

I had no money and my face was not winning enough that I was ever given anything free by candy-sellers. My mother stared as if overwhelmed at everything in the huts we passed, all the bright packets dangling within, with an expression that made me want desperately to be older for her.

A haggard man used one of the huts as a home. He lay on a sagging mattress, his head on his pack, surrounded by rubbish—paper, porcelain shards, food remains, and unidentifiable debris. His hand was over his eyes. He looked like a failed soldier. Dirt seemed so worked into him that the lines of his face were like writing.

Beside him was a green gallon bottle, and something twitched within. I saw leaves in it, a moth’s beating wings. A handwritten sign pleading for money was propped against the glass, a fee for looking. I lurched back as a saggy gray lizard bigger than my hand ran suddenly in crazed circles at the bottle’s bottom.

Claws skittered against the glass like teeth lightly grinding. The bottle’s neck was coin-sized: not even the reptile’s head could have fitted through.

I ran to catch my mother. When I reached her I looked into her bag: she’d exchanged the food she’d brought down for other food, and rattling beneath those vegetables were more bits of trash like the one she’d taken from the metal yard.

There was a catcall. My mother and I looked up to where that leading boy from the bridge was in the scaffolding that held up a ruin. His companions waited under him. He let go of the girder he’d been holding, stayed balanced easily on another, shifted twitchily from foot to foot and watched me. He was short for what I think was his age, not much taller than me, but squat and strong and confident with his body. He called out again but my mother and I didn’t know what to do, what response to give.

My mother looked at the children and back at me. “Do you want to play?” she asked me.

I knew she wanted me to help her understand. Did I want to play?

She said, “Play with them.”

She said she’d come to find me when the sun went low, and she walked away. Horrified, I cried out and tried to go with her, but she pushed me back toward the children and repeated her instruction.

I watched her go. The children approached: they’d seen her point at them.

That first time, what happened was that they continued their own games, always in shouting distance from me, a distance they made sure didn’t grow too great. They performed their games for me. Once, when I grew distressed and made as if to go looking for my mother, the tall solid girl, the boy’s co-leader, shouted at me directly, a warning sound that stopped me.

We were each other’s spectators and performers. I got caught up in the gang’s quick dramas, so thoroughly that when at last I saw my mother at the street’s end below spitting streetlights, I realized she’d been waiting in the shadows for a while. She was standing with her eyes closed, listening to the bulbs’ buzz, leaving it to me to see her.

I was crying at that moment, at some brutal turn of the children’s game, and they were muttering to me with solicitous scorn.

When they shouted at me they called me uphiller. I didn’t call them anything.

—

The girl was Samma, the boy Drobe. It was they who told all the adultless others what to do.

I learned their names quickly because during the gang’s jaunts their companions would sometimes shout “Samma!” or “Drobe!” then cackle and hoot as if those names were curse words, as if they were bad and brave for yelling them.

My mother never spoke to the children. But by the cold kindness she could manage, when she left me for her business, she did so where I could see them and they me.

I’d rarely say more than a few whispered words to them while they bossed each other or wrestled or stole things. Even when they told me what to do directly, or when I obeyed.

“Chuck that bottle at that poster! Go on, uphiller! That was good! Right in the letter A!”

I adored them shyly.

Samma must have been fourteen or thereabouts, around twice my age, and Drobe only a little younger. They might have been friends or girlfriend and boyfriend, though I never saw them kissing, or sister and brother. She stood close to a head taller than Drobe, and she was fleshy and deliberate in her movements where he was nervy and quick, but their faces were similarly dark and angular and heavy browed, as if they had been cut hurriedly from wood. They both kept their black hair shaved close.

I followed them on their runs and provocations—a little theft and the breaking of windows, was all. Locals would toss coins at them sometimes to have them do errands and they’d examine the money before picking it up, assessing the worth and debating whether to accept it for the haulage or cleaning demanded.

As the day closed they would take me back to where I’d joined them. Samma would click her fingers for me to follow and walk me to where my mother stood looking at the men and women passing her by.

Once on our way we crossed the end of the banyan street, and Drobe saw me stare up it. However he knew my thoughts, he said to me, “We ain’t going that way.”

He was wearing a tall flat-topped hat that day, buckled from the trash where he must have found it. He often wore such a thing, or a bright bandana, or the remains of some studded belt, as if auditioning each item. I never saw any of them more than once.

“Drobe!” a boy hallooed behind us.

“How did he put the lizard in the bottle?” I whispered.

“That lizard?” Drobe sort of coughed a laugh and glanced away. “Magic, mate. Come on, you don’t want that shit,” he said, and he and Samma led me to a roofless storehouse where we could throw things around.

—

Sometimes her activities took my mother long enough that we were still in the bridgetown when the sun descended and all the nightlights came up.

If we were by the bridge at dusk, I liked to watch the children batting.

They’d sit up close to the railings with their legs pushed through, dangling them over the treetops of the gulley. A few brave ones would balance on top of the metal, right above the void. Though she looked too big to be safe, seemed almost too adult to risk herself in that manner, Samma always sat like that. My gut would swoop to see her. I could only glance, it made me so sick.

This is how you catch an under-bridge bat: take a pole of hollow plastic or bamboo, two or three meters long; wind old rope or leather around one end to make your handle; attach tough wire to it, or even to a winding spool if you have the skill, and thread it all the way down the tube; pull the length-of-the-rod’s-worth of wire again from the other end, the end you won’t hold, and tie it to a hook; then bait. The best bat-bait’s a big flying insect like a beetle or a thumb-fat cricket.

The gang would lean out and dangle their batting rods and from their ends the cords would swing and circle. There’s skill in attaching the insect so you don’t kill it or harm its wings. And you mustn’t use heavy wire. If you get everything right, your cicada, or whatever you have, will try to fly away and spiral madly in the air, lurching at the limits of its line.

At dusk, the town bridge wore a beard of poles and frenetic tethered insects. The light would end and the bats wake and set off for their night business in bursts from the arches beneath us, from the bridge’s underside. They’d snap at the bugs as they passed. They’d fold their bodies around the bait to push it to their mouths—that’s how they catch things—and the hooks might snare their skins. A hunter would bring each bat in while it jerked and struggled and hurt itself, and would wring its neck, then chitter in triumphant nonsense bat-talk herself, and maybe flap her kill’s parchment wings and thrust its little body at her gangmates.

Sometimes a bat swallowed a hook. You’d haul it in on bloody wire emerging from its mouth as if it were pulled by its own elongated tongue.

The children ate the bats they caught and used their skins for many purposes. I didn’t like the blood or the death but I loved the skill of their careful casts, the wrist-flicks they used to make the bait twitch, the quick smooth drawings-in of caught bats. I didn’t like the blood or the death which sometimes put me in mind of other things, but I tried to dismiss those thoughts because the phenomena were so different, those children killing far more often and doing so with skill and to eat, or for a game or a dare.

It didn’t frighten me to walk home in the dark, though I knew there were some nocturnal things on the hill of which we should be afraid. My mother always brought a flashlight to town and on those evenings she would crank it up and send its patch of glow a few meters ahead of us, climbing it across the stones and scuttling it over the path where it would frighten or entice little life. We’d pace toward it to the pattering of insects on its glass.

My mother was never so loquacious as when she climbed at night.

“I’m a southtowner,” she said, “I grew up over there. On the other side, look at it.”

We rarely crossed the bridge. When we did we would go only a very short way into the streets on the other hill, where the shops and the people seemed different to me. That half of the town felt closer to a source of entropy.

I would risk questions. “What’s in the ravine?”

“Down there? Oh . . .” she said, seeming exhausted by my interruption. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I can’t tell you what’s down there.

“I’ve been all the way to the sea,” she said. “I was at the coast. There’s a . . .” She sketched something with her hands: a tower. “I was in an office. I don’t know why they took me. They were training me; I was doing papers for them. I could still do it if you paid me.” She walked some more and said, “I shared a house with a white hallway and glass over the door. There were seven of us lived there. It was close to the station. You’ve never seen a train.”

“In a picture,” I said. “Which side of the bridge is my father from?”

She didn’t look at me.

“There’s trains there,” she said, “where I was. I used to ride them.” She raised her hand. “The center was one thing, still carrying on, so you wouldn’t know, but the city was mostly all broken down in a circle around it. Pretty much over. You know what the sea is? The trains go right by the sea there.”

“Which side is he from?”

She considered.

“Why do you want to talk about that?” she said. Her voice was flat and I moved away. “He came from somewhere else,” she said.

“Is that why he talks different?”

“His accent. He used to think in a different language. He came to the port where I was working. He came by boat; he had to leave his own place, which is a bigger city a long way off, because of trouble there. He met me at my office. He told me he wanted to keep going, that he was only coming through. He needed to be somewhere smaller. Further away.” A tone in her voice gave me an instant’s insight into what might have been their attachment. “I took him here in the end.”

It was all the way dark now and looking back you could see how many fewer lights there were south of the divide than north. They were scattered. They sketched the streets in broken lines that curved across the slopes as if trying to encircle the bridge. They extended a kilometer up the other hill to the curious darkness of the generating station. I wondered if any of the lights shone on the house where my mother had been a child.

We heard the irate screaming of a town donkey, or a visitor’s. I could see the guttering of fires and I imagined them in the shells of south-side houses, in the rubble, in the yards of the plant where the night shift was on.

“It should be all gone,” I said. I pointed toward the failing belt. “Or all staying.”

My mother said nothing. Her flashlight lit me up.

“It should be gone or staying,” I said as I breathed out. My voice quavered a little and she looked at me. That wasn’t unfair, I thought; she gave me such careful eyes only when she sensed this kind of particularity in me, as when a cloud of starlings had gone over our house with silent motions so violent that I’d run to her and tried to tell her urgently that the birds above us should have the heads of dogs.

“You take apart all the buildings,” I said. “Take out all the bricks and push them down and set fire to them.”

“Bricks don’t burn.”

“Hot enough like in the sun they do. Right in the sun. You make them ashes.” Bats, I saw bats again, but these ones I imagined in the bricks’ ashes were as big as houses and not flying but walking in their horrid way on the tips of their wings and their claws, and the ash was baked solid so none of it gusted up at their touch. That was where they might live, the bats. Batland between the town and the hill, the country!

“Or . . . or pull all the rest down instead,” I said. “The middle of the town.”

“Undome the domes?” she said.

There was only one dome in the bridgetown. Maybe there were more in the coastal city and that was what she spoke of.

Do it there too, then. Take the domes down and unwind the railways until the city was all gone. It wouldn’t have to be a bad mess, you wouldn’t have to explode the buildings in the center; you could take away one brick, then the next, then the next. The grass would come back then. And the ring of ruin beyond would change again, change back, that very bit already gone into decay would unwind its decline. That’s how we could help. In a few months that would be the city, a circle of revived tower blocks around a huge field of weeds.

“That’s enough,” said my mother sharply.

I blinked and came back to myself on the dark slope, realized I’d been speaking, was quiet all the way home.

—

When Samma’s group didn’t come for me, I would accompany my mother through the town at no pace, hesitating under shops’ sun-bleached awnings, acquiring pieces without any logic I could discern. Sometimes, to my anguish, she’d enter fenced-off middens, heaps of junk and rubbish at the corners of streets, and pick through them. She wasn’t the only person to do so, but it wore on me as if she were.

There were higher and steeper roads where some houses were changed on the inside, rooms and floors removed, even, so the shell of what had been a cottage was now a church of some low faith, or a showcase for huge industrial goods. It was on the door of one such that my mother knocked one day, to be let in by a harried young woman in a filthy apron chewing flavored bark. She let us into a dim acrid corridor raucous with throaty sounds. The windows were blackwashed and there was a low wire mesh in each doorway. Every room had been cleared of furniture and thronged with fowl, gathered by age and sex, tiny chicks chirruping pitifully in what had been a bedroom, larger birds jostling in the kitchen. I coughed in air dense with the dust of feathers. I heard the geese upstairs.

The woman spat toward an under-stairs cubby and two cockerels lurched over to investigate.

“Come on then,” she said. Then she said something in another language, but my mother immediately shook her head, and the woman went back to our own. “What do you want?”

My mother bought eggs and a bird for eating. The young woman wrung its neck.

We went to a small stinking house on the run-down valley-side street. Its door was unlocked; my mother pointed for me to stay outside but when I heard her ascend the stairs I followed her inside, into a different reek from that of the chickens.

The house was a dump. People would enter to leave their trash and pick through that of others. Drifts of rubbish received me coldly, layers of moldering remains, grudging hosts silent but for the tiny shifts of rot. I held my breath and picked through to the window, to join spectating flies and the drifts of their dead in staring out into the gap.

There were eyes on me too, from within a mound of refuse. The sight of them made me gulp a mouthful of that awful smell.

Glass circles in a hinge-jawed wooden head, nestled in the garbage. Years of decay had eroded its rudimentary features and drawn it an intricate and terrible new mildew face, from which I ran.

On a vivid day as summer hurried in I came down the path from the garbage hole and I saw my father walking up toward me.

I stopped. Sometimes if you stand very still and close your eyes you see rocks behind your eyelids. Or you realize aghast that the shapes of things are other than you’d understood.

“I didn’t go in,” I said. “You didn’t say I couldn’t go to the cave just not in. I only went to the edge.”

I rarely disobeyed my parents. When either of them discovered me in any transgression I would shake, or I would freeze as still as a wax boy. If my father thought I’d been bad he might make me stand outside, was all, even in the rain. My mother might look at me and mutter with dislike and maybe knock with her knuckles across the back of my hand as if at a door: the painless sanction filled me with shame. Still, when it came time for punishment I’d always be paralyzed as if they would kill me. I didn’t move as my father approached, and I could hear only the wind around my face.

He didn’t even furrow his brow. He didn’t glance at me. I watched how he trudged, not tired. I looked at the hand in which he’d carried the broken dog that last time and I saw that what was in it now, what I’d thought a sack of trash, was a lolling mountain bird.

The hill was always busy with these flightless scavengers we called scunners. A scunnerbird is tough and stringy but there’s much worse eating. Shoot one, you have two or three days of stew. My father had no gun. Scunners are skittish and fast despite their fatness and I couldn’t think how my father had enticed this one to him. I knew that, by whatever means he’d killed it, it was not to eat. I wanted to cry; I stood still.

He had it by the neck. Its brown body was bigger than a baby’s. Its shovel head lolled and its nasty hook beak twitched open and closed to snap faintly with each of my father’s steps. The bird’s broad feet dangled on the ground and bounced on stones as if it were trying to claw itself incompetently to a stop.

My father passed me. He looked briefly at me as you might at a stump or a broken machine or anything that’s specific only in that it’s in your way, to walk around it as my father did me.

I knew he was taking the dead bird to the rubbish hole, that he’d throw it up so it would curve as it had to and descend; I knew that day my father was feeding only the darkness.

—

The boy went to the low-down part of the attic where he drew, and drew a lizard in a bottle between the stems of the wallpaper’s design. He came back the next day and, beside it, he drew a cat in another bottle and a fox in a third. He drew a fish in a bottle, a crow in a bottle, a mountain lion in a big bottle. He’d never seen a mountain lion but he heard them sometimes and knew he was to be afraid of them. He imagined that deep throaty growl contained by glass and the thought fascinated him. He drew corks tight in the bottles’ necks.

He cramped his drawings together to keep them a secret, and he saw that without intending it he’d drawn his bottles as if neatly lined up in some strange cupboard. So he drew a shelf beneath them, and while daylight reached them and cast across them the shadow of his own drawing hand, he put down the lines of a house around the bottles, to contain them, and he drew another house to either side. He could have filled the whole of the room, covered every wall of it in the smudged lines of rendered streets, that they could be filled in turn with women and men and children in the same lines as their city, some like small women wearing masks, some people squat as if they lived underwater. Someone there would be the keeper of those bottles.

He wanted his pictures to be secret so he kept that city and itemized all its citizens in his head.

I looked out. My mother was digging, and she came into view as she bent to extract unwanted roots. The wind pulled her clothes and tugged scraps of paper from her pocket. She balled something up in her fist and put it into the ground and covered it carefully and very gently with soil.

Soon I’d be too big to do as I liked to, to hunker and perch in the little window’s alcove. I swung my knees up and braced them with my back curved and my head down, so I was bundled up on the sill as if the house itself held me like a baby. I sat like that on the ledge because I still could.

From there I’d look out and down across the edge of the garden and the incline of our hill, the rough up and down of the tree line, the sky. Sometimes people called it a hill, sometimes a mountain. It moved unceasingly. Branches spread, trees twisted behind trees in all the wind. Even the stone moved.

I sat up then because I thought I saw a new green, outlines of tough vegetation, neither needles nor fibrous leaves but spines on bunched and distinct knotty skin, misplaced amid the gray and those dusty greens I knew, swaying, pushing purposefully above the hillside growth at the edge of my sight as if deliberately positioned to be glimpsed against a sky the color of the hill rocks. A quickly moving visitation.

What I saw was gone almost instantly into some dip in the uneven ground.

I came out of the window and ran down the attic stairs and out and up the footpath. I ran as fast as I could to the copse at which I’d been staring. I pushed straight into its empty center to stand alone amid clustering midges. I listened for a long quiet moment, and wondered whether the gap I saw ahead of me was where the bushes and low trees had been pushed apart by someone big, or whether they were even still vibrating from that passage. The shale there didn’t show marks well but there were scuffs between the roots, and I decided they were great footprints. And did the ground shake? As if someone had turned and was retracing their steps toward me?

Then the wind got up very suddenly and hard enough to make me gasp, so it was all I could hear, and all the undergrowth was moving. Nothing came back but those gusts. Turning, I saw two large unfamiliar flowers in the dust, bright petals right for a stronger sun, broken off in a clutch of spines.

I took them and returned. I re-entered the house. Hesitantly calling for my mother, I ascended the stairs, to stop, abruptly silent, by her empty room. I pushed the door, as I was not allowed to, opened it onto her things. Her bed was unmade. The few books with which she did not teach me to read were on her chair. Drawers and clothes and small pieces of trash were laid neatly on the shelf of a window that looked onto the hill from an angle that was new to me.

I could smell her. I wanted to stay and look at everything but I was afraid of her finding me there, and I wanted to know what it was that had passed.

My mother finished patting earth down as I approached her with my hands behind my back and she straightened and put something back in her pocket and waited.

“I saw something,” I said. “A tree was walking.”

She didn’t speak for a while. She stood as tall as she could and looked past me toward where I had been. Not knowing why, I kept the flowers I had picked up in my closed hand.

“Maybe you only thought you saw something,” she said, and paused. I was fascinated by her hesitation, the uncharacteristic way her mouth opened and closed more than once before she continued. “Maybe,” she said, it sounded as if to herself as much as to me, “it was someone from your father’s city.”

She watched the horizon, her brows low.

“Come to see him?” I said.

She looked at me and though her attention brought with it an anxiety as it often did I could see she was not appraising me but a situation. She contemplated saying more, craned her neck again. At last she shook her head.

“You only thought you saw something,” she said. Her calm had relief in it and disappointment, so I too was both sorry and glad that no one was coming, to provoke her into finishing whatever she had started to tell. My mother bent again and returned to her task and I knew she wouldn’t say anything more.

When she went in I planted the petals and their thorns where she’d been digging.

Two other times as I played in the dustblown slopes I saw my father heading to the dump-hole with the body of something he’d beaten to death. Both times I stayed very still to watch him. Sometimes in my mind when I think back to that he has my mother’s face, or he wears a face that I can’t bring clear, that goes between his and hers. But I’m sure it was my father. Once he had a small rockrabbit; once an animal so ruined I couldn’t identify it.

Months passed between those times. If he did for other things, he did it when I didn’t see him.

I had never seen my father kill a person, which I’m sure is what I saw, before the time I ran, but I think that was at least the third he had.

A young man came to our house. He was tall and fervent and young and well dressed, one of the richer of the downhillers, I supposed. He was in a terrible temper when I opened the door.

“Where’s the key-maker?” he said, jabbing his fingers at me. “Come on, where’s the fucking key-maker?”

My father came and banished me so I sat outside on the cold ground below his window and tried to listen to what passed between them. It was on its way to summer again and the earth around the house was garish with weeds, though the blooms I’d found and planted never grew.

I could hear the client telling my father his needs. He spoke in such a low quick voice I couldn’t make much out. My father seemed to be trying to calm him. It didn’t work and his own voice began to grow louder.

“Make the fucking key,” the young man said. That I heard.

My father made a brief response.

“You want a silver flower?” the young man said. “Want me to give you a flower, councilman? Oh, I need it all! I need it all!”

There was nothing for some minutes then a grating sound and a regular methodical thudding began. I was still, hunched there, too afraid to rise, hearing the beat, feeling percussions through the house.

I don’t know what name I’d give to the feeling I had—it was mostly fear, of course, but it had in it something of certainty too, the excitement of being not surprised, seeing myself there as if I was my own watcher, of discerning ineluctability.

The rhythm went on. I was blinking and quaking and I looked up into a sky now warm and heavy with clouds, and I saw my mother knelt with her skirt rucked to her knees, her feet parted in runnels of earth between growing marrows. Scabs of dirt dropped from her hands.

I looked at her and she up at me and we listened.

When my mother gave a sort of shudder and held out her hand I found out I was crying. She didn’t sweep me up or whisper to me but she rose and stumbled urgently toward me through the ankle-traps of her vegetables and reached for me and I came to her with my own arms wide and she took both my hands in one of hers and walk-dragged me as fast as she could out of sight of the house, out of earshot of the impacts.

“Now,” she muttered. “This way.” She kept making little noises. “You, wait,” she said, seemingly to herself. “Quickly now.”

She took me down the slope. We slid through the hill dust to a place only minutes away where I’d not been before, a fact that seemed impossible, but even quivering as I was I looked very carefully and really I don’t think I’d ever seen that configuration of trunks and branches, that crack in the huge rock slab below us out of which burst an explosion of whiskered creepers.

A rock and forest animal, something quick and furred, bundled past close enough to show teeth. My mother leaned back on a tree. She still held my hands at the end of her stiff arm, so I could go no further from nor get any closer to her.

“It’s like in the water,” I said finally. I pointed.

She looked along my finger and back at me.

“Like in the tank,” I said.

I was pointing at those reaching vines hooked and angled like insect legs or like the limbs of sea animals.

After a moment she said, “Oh yes. The starfish. Yes, I suppose it is a bit.”

I shook my hands free. I climbed the ledges onto the rock to sit so my head was at the same level as hers.

“The water in that tank was salty,” she said. “Like the sea is. You remember I told you what the sea is?”

She’d never told me. It had been in a book she’d shown me, though. I nodded. I was shy to look at her.

“There are fish under the sea bigger than our house,” she said. She narrowed her eyes into the wind. “There might be starfish that big,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Are there people?” I said.

“I can’t say. There are people on the other side of the sea, so maybe there are under it too.” She rubbed her hands together and whispered into them, “Imagine what they must be like. Imagine.”

“What’s a silver flower?” I said. “What’s it for?”

“It isn’t for anything,” she said. “You want a silver flower, do you?” She said it nastily but saw me wrap my arms around myself and sighed and in a quieter voice said, “It’s something you give someone for running away.”

I climbed down and reached into the breach out of which those vines boiled and pulled out a tiny speckled egg. Within the crack a shadowed nest remained, and still within that were the remains of other shells, broken from within. The one I’d taken was dead and whole.

“When will we go back?” I said.

“In two hours,” my mother said.

I climbed down the steep side of the rock. It took me several attempts, but I held those rooted creepers and clambered down. I looked up at last from a shelf of moss and my mother was leaning over and watching me. She smiled at me and waved.

When the clouds got darker I put down the egg and came back up and we climbed the footpaths and returned to the house. As we approached I started to cry again and did so more when we saw the door was open, but my father stayed in his workroom, and he stayed quiet. My mother put me to bed and he didn’t emerge.

—

Perhaps half a year after that, my mother came running up the stairs where I explored the great blank space of the upper floor. She half-led half-pushed me out of the house, took me on another of those quick purposeful walks in directions that I’d never before taken.

That time I didn’t see my father. I didn’t find him particularly subdued or melancholy when we returned. But I suspect from my mother’s rush that this was another occasion when he killed a person.

The thought of my father in his calm-faced mood raised dread in me again but, again, not only dread: that time came something like a kind of muted happiness of which I’m not ashamed. In that moment, my mother took me.

I’ve said that the day I came running down the hill, trying to say how one of my parents had killed someone—the other perhaps—the children with their own parents were held by them to watch me. And that Samma was there too, and Drobe, and their friends, scattered throughout the crowd and watching from behind the metal guards around yards and like birds on ledges. One bridge boy hooted while I cried and tried to speak and Drobe threw a stone so hard that when it hit him on the side of his face it knocked him to the ground.

Drobe and Samma pushed through to reach me. They took hold of me and they clutched me as if I might get away.

There were no permanent police in the town. Every few weeks a uniformed delegation would arrive from the coastal city to deal with whatever disputes the hill people had stored up, to process what paperwork the occasionals, the volunteer officers, had incurred, the prisoners they’d incarcerated in our little jail. Until those agents arrived, the officers investigating my gasped allegation would be an anxious window-cleaner and a hunter wearing the temporary sashes that granted them authority. It would be a young schoolteacher with a faintly scarred face who would interpret the books of law.

The window-cleaner was a rangy bald man who gripped me hard and shook me. “From the beginning,” he said, too loud, “tell us what happened from the beginning,” and I didn’t know what the beginning was. With which death should I start, which animal? Or with the look my father sometimes wore, as if he’d replaced his own eyes with clear or clouded glass ones?

The crowd listened as I corrected myself, wailed that no, it was someone else who was dead, my father who’d killed her, killed my mother in the attic.

The hunter came down to my level. “The attic?” he said.

He was old and brown- and gray-bearded and very big. He put his hand on my shoulder and the weight of his arm was astonishing. His belt was a rattling bandolier. He wore a shotgun on his shoulder. He squinted up the path, his eyes bright between wrinkles.

“Wait,” said the window-cleaner.

“Fuck ‘wait,’ ” the hunter said. “Who’s looking after you?” he asked me. I blinked and looked at Drobe and Samma and they looked at me. Samma extended her arm, not hugging me but encircling me without quite touching, and Drobe moved around her to stand on my other side. Thus they claimed me.

The schoolteacher and the cleaner weren’t paying full attention but were remonstrating with the hunter as he walked away from them, his thumbs on that belt of cartridges.

“You don’t know what happened,” the teacher said to him but he shook his head and raised his voice to say to her, “Look at the boy!” He hesitated and took in Samma and the gang who’d climbed down from their vantages and come quietly to join us, the gang that now included me. “You be careful,” he said to us.

He whispered to Samma and put something in her hand, then started up the hill with the other sashed man and the schoolteacher running after him, he complaining, she lifting her heavy skirt to climb. After moments of hesitation a few others went to follow them, fetching metal bars and hefting garden tools, checking the firing bolts of old weapons, watching me where I waited in this new situation.

Everything, even the dirt, was poised.

Samma stared until, blinking, I met her eyes.

“Are you hungry?” Drobe said.

But I had no sense of that. Above us at the town’s edge I could see the teacher with the hunter and his new posse, close to the outmost buildings, the teacher looking over her shoulder back at us. Samma shook me gently so I looked at her again.

“What did the man say to you?” I said.

“He told me not to steal your supper. He gave me money.”

She bought meat and grain and we stewed it on a fire in the last of those empty houses that the children claimed as their territory and we all ate there on the body of the bridge. In a big empty attic room with late sunlight coming in, that made me cry again, in a way that was new to me.

Take accounts, keep estimates, realize interests.

You can count a city in a room, in your head. You can be taught that, and if you are you might learn that you already knew how to do it, and if you do you’ll have to learn to accommodate a new purpose, to encompass and itemize for a goal, to make it yours. With such intent, everything will be more concrete, the boundaries of the counted city circumscribed more precisely, and you may be more or less lost, or as lost as before. Were you lost? You don’t have to know: you can go along with things.

I’m writing by hand now. The wasp is dead or sleeping. There’s nothing for which my guards can listen.

Ultimately my manager would come to give me instructions, and I was glad to take them. And, unsanctioned, I was given advice too, by his previous assistant, informed or warned by her of gossip among colleagues, a line, a letter at a time, demanding attention.

Something started in that new attic, as I spent my first night ever out of the uphill.

I watched the room with what light came in from the bridge. The house was full of the skeletons of furniture, around and through which the gang-members picked and played in complicated chases and which they gave new work to do. I was silent. They eyed me carefully and when they did I’d wait in alarm but none came to ask me questions about what I’d seen. Samma had told them not to.

At last a tiny crooked boy younger than most did approach me, so I grew tense again, but what he said, shyly, was “Did you ever see that cockerel?”

Among themselves they said there was a cockerel made of smoke and embers that scorched its way up and down the slopes. They’d populated the uphill—where most of them had never been—with monsters. They asked me about them all—that bird, a scaly worm, a ranting spider—and all I could offer were the snarls of big cats. They listened as if they weren’t disappointed with my gabbled stories, and the more I tried to say, to describe not only the animal sounds I’d heard on the hill but the beasts of which I was thinking, the more a guarded alarm showed on their faces with their tiredness, until every girl and boy gave up for the day and lay down on blankets or cardboard in cubbies throughout the building, window holes where windows had been bricked up, inset shelves that had held things.

I whimpered to think of the new stains on the old wall of my home, the glimpse of my father’s closed eyes, or my mother’s, their arms, those of the one stood over the other with something raised, some part of a body held. It wasn’t my father who had died: he’d done the killing. It came back at me and I kept my new gangmates awake with screams.

No one punished me for the noise. At a certain point I stood up from the rag bundle where I’d been placed and recited one extended howl into the staring face of an imagined dead woman. Samma and Drobe rose and came to me and she picked me up and carried me outside. She was not so big but I recall no hesitation or effort on her part.

The air blew through me. I’d never before been in the town so late, though I’d looked down on it untold times. Previously I’d only ever seen streetlamps either unlit or in their initial fitful waking or lit from far enough away that they were glimmers like the arses of phosphorescent bugs. Now Samma set me on my feet and I ran to stand beneath the closest and gaped wet-eyed up at its filament like a visitor to a shrine.

In the generating zone on the other hill the unseen turbines spun fast to make this light that replaced the moon, against which the drop was so dark. The houses to one side of me and the railings by that obscured void to the other converged before me on the second hill, in the dimmer quarter that had once cradled my mother.

“Moth boy,” Samma said. She sounded fond. “If you could fly you’d get right up there and touch the wire and die.”

“You know what happens when you die?” Drobe said. “Do you know church?” he said.

I ran forward again, hearing nothing of my own steps. Samma grabbed me, held me as tight as a harness, but I still felt as if I was running for those southern parts, or then as if the night itself had stopped to pause my investigation.

Did my mother walk ahead of me? Even when she told stories of her earlier life she never seemed nostalgic, and I could think of no reason that death alone would change that. If she took that revenant route it might be she had no choice, that she had to pass through those familiar failing suburbs to scatter cats and go without a shadow past their hides in the roots of walls and carts sat so long wheel-less on their axles that they were less than landscape. To think of her made me afraid again, even in my abrupt nocturnal exultation, so the face I gave her was the sexless wooden one from the rubbish. With that she took the tight alleys in the shadow lee of geography.

It wasn’t all collapse. Neither side of the town was ever only flyblown or air-bleached plastic or runoff and the slippage of industry but those were the castles she’d sought to live in, a cruder form, and it was by them that I considered her.

Someone would come to find strangers and those born of strangers, Drobe said, repeating things he’d heard. People had been sent out to perform such tasks, he said, to take number, and now someone was coming. I didn’t understand him. It seemed I’d spoken of the trash head in my ruminations, and that mention had provoked him to interrupt me with his garbled information.

“From the same place is what I’m saying,” he said. “I know that head. In the dump-house? That’s from when there was a time—where the counters come from—they were scared of all the engines and they smashed them all up. The ones that looked like that.”

Before we were born, rumors of distant insurrection had meant the ordering of destruction, the gleeless dismembering of all such geared constructed figures. One of a sequence of imbricated catastrophes our town had imported from the little coast city, which had itself succumbed to the anxiety, as we all did with so many, as a contagion from a vast other country.

Later I would come to understand that the doll’s head I’d given my dead mother must have been left as a sole remnant of the moving statue bodies, a disavowable memorial to molder on the tip while every other memento was broken and gone.

“First that,” Drobe said. He tried to make me look at him while he told me these stories. “With the mechanicals. Then they had problems on the trains. And there was a war. Two wars! One inside, one out.” Samma looked at him, guarded. Who had been telling him this? “Years ago. And it all ends up with people sent to take stock, to count foreigners. Like your father,” he said. “Can you hear me?”

I only just listened. I’m surprised now by how much of what he said I remember. I wouldn’t think of the murderer then; it was the murderee who had my attention. I was trying to hold her gone hand.

“Your mum’s in heaven now,” Drobe said.

I looked down at the cobbles. He said it to be kind.

—

For breakfast we scooped clean our pot with tough folded leaves. While I was eating the last of our cold stew the officials found me.

The hunter came into the room. He walked slowly through the dust and the struts of light toward me in my corner. He picked a way heavily through upended furniture frames and children staring at him, mouths frozen open. The schoolteacher waited at the doorway, her face set.

“So,” the man said. He held up his empty hands as if to show me something, as I’d done when I ran down the hill. “We went to your father.”

My blood went fast. The man knelt gently. “Are you sure you saw what you saw?”

“Hey,” said Drobe.

He was in the rafters. Drobe would eat his breakfast half-standing in a high corner, hunched under the roof and looking down like a minor household god.

“You saying he’s a liar?” Drobe said.

The hunter cocked his head and pursed his lips.

“Here’s how it is,” he said carefully. Everyone listened. “We went up to your father’s house. Now, he told us that nothing you said happened happened. Hold on now, boy, hold on.” I hadn’t said anything and I don’t think my face had moved: Samma, though, was hissing.

“No one’s angry with you,” the man said. “What your father told us is you came when your mother and him were having an argument. He saw you but you’d already seen them going at it and then you ran away and so he went to try to find you in case you were scared. Anyway. What happened was your mother said she’d had enough of it all and when he came back from looking for you she’d gone. She went away, boy. Took a long way maybe so as not to come through the town.” That idea startled me. “I don’t know. That’s the fact of it, is what he says.”

He watched me closely.

I said, “He killed her in the top room.”

The teacher shook her head.

“We looked,” the hunter said. “There’s no blood there, boy. You know she went away before, your mother?”

“To that port,” I said, “by the sea,” and in my head I saw the cracked and dirty window above a door and a glimpse of the white walls of a communal hall. “That was before—”

“She wrote a letter,” the teacher interrupted. “She said goodbye.”

I could only stare at her, her marked, expressionless face.

“How’s your reading?” the hunter said. “Your dad found a letter on the table, he says. We have it. It’s not for him. It’s for you.”

The letter said, I will not stay here any more.

They took me to the school to show me. I’d never been inside before: I was an uphiller with no money for lessons.

Drobe stood by the classroom door like my guard and Samma stood by me, watching my mouth move. The hunter sat me in a child’s chair-desk, the furniture combined. He gave me the letter.

It said, I must go away because I am not happy on this hill. I will go away. Perhaps you will be angry I hope you will not you might be sad also. I am sad. But I will not live here any more. You do not have to tend my garden but I give it to you if you want. You will be all right in this house your father will take care of you as I have I am sorry I must go but I must I cannot remain any more. Your loving mother.

—

The teacher read the letter aloud. She saw my eyes going over the lines, she saw my panic and I think she didn’t believe I could read. When she was finished the hunter said, “So. Maybe what you saw was that. They were fighting. Then while your dad was looking for you your mum got angry and she went away. Do you think maybe that’s what you saw?”

“My father killed my mother.”

The man watched me. The schoolteacher shook the two big books she carried. “He’s allowed to confront an accuser,” she said, not to me. “That’s the law.”

“A little boy like that, though?” the hunter said. They frowned at me.

“This is your mother’s writing,” the teacher said. “Isn’t it?”

It was a big hand of sweeps and curves. Some of the letters were nearly full circles. All of them staggered up and down and around the paper’s lines.

When she taught me letters, my mother had done so with those pamphlet scraps, those cheaply printed books and stock inventories and instructions for machines. Occasionally she’d shown me ledgers and other handwritten papers from I don’t know where, in various inks and in various hands, but it was only when the teacher asked me this question that I understood that every such piece had been written by a different person, or different people, in the cases where one piece of writing was corrected and overwritten with another, as I’ve done with a few pages of the second book that I continue.

I’d seen my mother writing many times but I’d never seen her handwriting.

The letter was on thick paper in a pale blue ink that I knew she’d used but that I’d seen my father use too, to render details on his drawings of keys.

“He killed her and he put her in the hole,” I whispered. “He puts the things he kills in the hole. Sometimes he kills people and he puts them in there too.”

The officers looked at each other. “Show us,” the man said. “Show us the hole.”

They let Drobe come with me but they told Samma she couldn’t. I think they were concerned she’d challenge them if she didn’t like what transpired: she raged at them when they told her she had to stay, hard enough and with enough authority to surprise them, and that it seemed to verify their intuition. They can’t have known, as I didn’t yet, that she wouldn’t leave the town. As if to lose contact with its pavings would bleed her of something.

The three officers took Drobe and me on that long walk, the clough winding in and out of sight to one side, fronted here and there with wire, the tough slope of the hill curving away on the other. The hunter, then the schoolteacher, then Drobe and I, the window-cleaner behind us so we couldn’t run away. As we entered the uplands I started to cry.

The woman turned and gave me a solicitous grimace. “Yes,” she said. “I know. It’s not nice to see our parents fighting.”

The hunter called out, “Show us the hole.”

I went trembling to him and pointed a way off the path to ensure we’d reach it without passing my house.

“Where’s my father?” I said.

“You’re all right,” the hunter said.

I stopped when we saw the cave mouth and turned to face the path below us.

“You’re all right,” he said again. He conferred quietly with the other man and pointed him to the track. The window-cleaner nodded and went that way and the hunter came back to me. “Don’t you worry,” he said.

He went first into the cleft. He beckoned me after and the teacher nudged me forward. Drobe took my shaking hand and climbed with me over the rock at the entrance. Inside the cold shadows my legs were weak.

“Stay behind me now,” the hunter said.

The teacher and he went into the shadows to the edge of the rubbish hole. Daylight reached inside the fabric of the hill but that rip was perfectly dark. The woman shone down a light. I pressed my back against the rock wall.

I thought of my mother’s hands hauling her up. Of her climbing all grave-mottled and with her face scabbed with old blood, her arms and legs moving like sticks or the legs of insects, or as stiff as toys, as if maybe when you die and come back you forget what your body is.

“You see anything?” the teacher said. She stepped back and shrugged.

“Look,” the man said. He took the flashlight and tilted it so the beam climbed from the hole as I imagined my mother doing with her face wrong and fungus in her hair. “What’s that?”

“No,” the woman said. “That’s moss or something.”

He squinted. “Well,” he said. He turned to me. “So.” He looked helpless. “There’s no way down.”

I made myself go forward till I could see white residue on the rocks.

“He’s cleaned it,” I said. “My mother must have banged it and got blood on it when she went.”

My father leaning carefully down with a sudsy mop. Soap-water wetting what was below. Down inside the hill, a second hill: a mound of trash and corpses decaying in layers and coated in hill dust in the dark. At its top, like a triumphant climber, my mother, looking sightlessly up at me with soap in her eyes.

“Why would he clean bare rocks?” The teacher wasn’t being cruel. She didn’t understand me and was trying to talk me out of terror.

She whispered to the hunter. He looked at me and sat cross-legged with the abyss at which I couldn’t stop staring behind him. “Now listen,” he said to me. “So. My friend—”

She interrupted. “Colleague.”

“My colleague. She has the law in those books. You can’t just punish people on say-so.” He didn’t sound practiced at this soft voice. “You say your mother’s down there. You see we can’t go down there. So put a light on a chain and lower it to see? How deep does it go? How much does it twist on the way? We won’t see anything.”

I imagined that glint descending like a star falling slowly toward my mother.

“It’s what you say against what he says,” the man continued. “And we do have the letter.”

“She ain’t write that,” Drobe said. “Come on.”

“His father says she did,” the teacher said.

“What if he said something about you?” the hunter asked me. “What if he said you stole something or you killed a person, and we just said, ‘Oh, well then, if you say so, we’ll do law on him, then.’ You wouldn’t like that, would you? That wouldn’t be fair.” He looked over his shoulder into the black.

“She did write it.”

That was my father’s voice.

He was stood at the cave mouth next to the window-cleaner in his sash. I saw my father and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t feel my hands. He looked straight at me and I made a noise in my throat.

Drobe stepped between us. Later I remembered that and I loved him for it.

“What did you bring him for?” the hunter shouted. “I said we’d come when we were ready, didn’t I?”

“He wanted to come see,” the window-cleaner said. “What should I stop him for?”

“For fuck’s sake.” The hunter shook his head.

“What?” said the other man. “You got something to say to me? Say it to me.”

“I did, didn’t I?” the hunter said. “I said, ‘For fuck’s sake.’ ”

“She wrote that letter,” my father said. He was speaking to me. “We were fighting,” he said. He blinked repeatedly and I could feel his tremendous worry. He took a step toward me and I lurched back and Drobe moved to meet him.

“She was good for me,” my father said, “and I was good for her too, but not in the end.” He looked beseeching. “I’m sorry you saw it. You shouldn’t have. I was asking her not to leave, is what you saw. For you and me. For you more than me even because you needed her. I know that, I know. I wanted to stop her, I’m sorry I couldn’t. But you mustn’t go. You mustn’t go.”

He seemed to see Drobe at last, standing in his way. My father whispered to him, “Move.”

His voice was sudden and different and cold and Drobe instantly obeyed.

“I’m sorry your mother went away,” my father said to me. “I’ll make sure we’re all right, you and me.”

—

When he understood that they wouldn’t take my father to jail and they wouldn’t take me from him, Drobe screamed at the officers. Samma would probably just have got hold of me and walked away in any direction until they’d reached her, maybe hit her and taken me back. Drobe did shout at them that they were wrong, bastards, and so on.

I ran outside. The window-cleaner caught me easily. The hunter and the teacher with the law books huddled with my father in the tunnel and spoke to him too low for me to hear.

“We can’t just take you,” the hunter came and said to me eventually. “He didn’t do what you said.” He said that quickly.

“Lock him up,” Drobe said. “When the police next come they can go down there and look.”

“No one can go down there,” the teacher said.

“There’s no one there,” my father said. He sounded almost too exhausted to speak.

I said something about the customer who’d come and argued.

“Smail?” my father said. “Is that who you mean? Oh, son.

“I don’t know his second name,” he said to the others. “Smail. He came for keys. He was already on his way. He’d left, and he made sure he’d pass my house. He wanted one key to get money, one so he could travel quickly, and one for a disgusting thing, so I wouldn’t make it for him and he shouted. But I did make him the travel key. Only that one. And he went on. Ask anyone. Ask his friends. They’ll tell you he always wanted to get away, and he did. There’s no one in the mountain.”

“You,” the hunter said slowly to him. He looked at me and said it loud, as I listened. “We’ll come back.”

“You should come back,” my father said.

“I fucking mean it. We’ll send someone up and you’ll show us the boy so we know you’re treating him right.”

“Yes.” My father nodded with abrupt rage. “You should. Look at me. You should come back.”

The window-cleaner was looking into the sky, at the waning light. Drobe ran to me.

“I’ll come and get you,” he whispered. But the teacher was calling him and he had to turn.

The window-cleaner descended with the woman beside him. They still kept glancing up at the sun. Behind them went Drobe, watched by the hunter.

It was he, the last man, who looked back at me most, more often even than the boy.

There is a kind of thorned bush that thrives on the hill where I was born. I’ve never seen it anywhere else. It stands about a meter tall, with compact snarled branches that grow in dense near-cylinders so its copses are like low, snagging pillars. Its all-year berries are blue-gray but in the red light of sunset their luster makes them shine like black pupils.

I stood among the columnar bushes watched by their nasty vegetable eyes.

My father didn’t look at me. He dropped more stones upon a random-looking cairn. The townspeople were slow to get out of our sight. He waited and watched them and didn’t look at me and kept adding to the substance of the hill with the substance of the hill.

When Drobe looked back a last time his eyes and mouth widened in horror at my expression. He would have taken a step back toward me but the hunter put his hand on him, not cruelly but removing hope of escape. The man whispered to Drobe and Drobe made some sign for me with his hands but I didn’t know what he was saying.

When they were gone I stayed behind my perimeter of sentry bushes in the failing light.

“I’m not angry,” my father said.

I was full of the injustice of it; that that was how he tried to reassure me.

“It’ll be all right,” he said gently. He stepped closer. “I’m sorry about it all.”

I didn’t move: I had no moving left in me. My father stood with only one line of thorns between him and me. He held out a hand.

And I was alone with him on the cold hill and I could do nothing. I stayed still as long as I could as if something might happen but it didn’t, and when it didn’t I shuffled as slowly as I could out from the vegetation, I dragged my toes against the ground but it was as if there was nowhere to go but to him.

He smiled as I came. He looked as if he might cry.

“Hello again,” my father whispered.

He kept his hand out until I took it.

His skin was tough and warm. I felt sick to touch it.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll feed you. Come home.”

That first night alone with my father I sat in the kitchen without hope.

He cooked, glancing at me as I waited speechless and deflated like an empty bag. I almost felt too empty to be afraid until the night came all the way on and I lay in my cubby room listening for the sound of my father coming up the stairs, imagining him at my door, between his and my mother’s empty room, looking at me as if I was something curious, looking at me and not at me at the same time. I stared at the ceiling that was the attic floor, growing dizzy. I imagined my father watching me as if I was something that he should make stop moving.

I don’t remember sleeping. The next day I was slow and twitchy. I didn’t know what to do or what was to happen.

My father would make keys. I?

“Are you going to play?” he said.

He fed me again. Put food in front of me as the gray light came up, that is, though I couldn’t eat it. “I’m working all day,” he said. “This is for you for later. Don’t go too far.”

While he cut metal I opened the door to my mother’s room.

There were no covers on the bed frame, no books on the shelves or surfaces, which had been swept, so there were no dust marks where any books had been.

I walked our home’s perimeter of earth. What do you do on a day like that?

I wanted to see the letter again, as if staring at it might help me, but I didn’t know where it was.

Several times that day my father shouted for me from the house’s front step. He didn’t do so angrily: just checking, making sure I was close. He would make me answer.

I drew marks on a rock with the end of a stick I burned for that purpose. At a certain point they became letters and then words. I can’t remember what I wrote, which seems strange to me now. I wrote whatever I wrote, and stood back and threw pebbles at the words, looking for a particular parabola, an exact curve.

If they hit them, I thought, it means I can go.

The first throws went wide. I kept trying. When one of my stones arced up to land right exactly on what I’d written I felt squeezed inside, as if it were the writing that pulled the stones in.

He called me when the sun went down. One day had passed. I watched as the dark spread and I listened to him and I felt cold all over again. I smeared away everything I’d put down on the rock before I obeyed him. I left my slate, the stone page the hill put out for me, unreadable.

He brought me a drink of sweet herby milk while I lay in bed and he stared at me until I drank it. I hoped it wasn’t poison. He watched me with desperate fondness.

—

I found the letter, folded behind a jar on a high shelf in the kitchen where it can’t have been a surprise that, tiptoed on a chair, I’d find it. I read it several times and learned nothing and put it back. Sometimes when my father was not in the house, I would look at it again.

There came to be noises on the hill that were new to me. I thought birds of a kind I didn’t know might have come to live there, birds that called with rapid percussive clicks or trod heavily and quickly over twigs or pecked them hard. I climbed higher than I’d ever gone to see if I could find them but the thin cold air and ugly trees and rock cuts diffused the snapping sound so I could never track it.

I ran and climbed as I wanted but every few hours my father would lean out and abruptly call my name until I responded, so I had to stay in earshot. On that hill, on the flint on which we lived, that was some distance.

Each time I entered it the room beside mine was less and less my mother’s. I had a few of her books, but they’d been mine too, at least to use, in my care, by the time she gave me them outright by leaving, so I never felt I was connecting with her when I opened them.

The days changed and the view from what had been her window became mine. I climbed into its frame as I had once in the attic that I didn’t want to enter again. When the wind made my house lean and creak at night, I’d look up and imagine that the sounds were made by my mother shaking the walls in the upper room, staring at where the blood had been, that my father had cleaned away. I still tried to keep her face from my mind, and sometimes I succeeded and she looked at me with my father’s face or the rotting doll’s.

Once as I sat at what had been her window in cold late light I heard two shots in fast succession. They came from somewhere on the stone slopes.

At the first I didn’t even move; I was used to the sound of shotguns. What followed it, though, was a sharper ugly echoing crack like the amplified snap of dry wood. It made me start and look wildly through the glass at the flocks of birds as spooked as I.

I waited, but nothing more came.

When my father shouted for me from the front door I still hadn’t left the house and I surprised him by descending from behind him, down the stairs. I was surprised in turn because two downhillers stood on our doorstep: a thin nervous man I didn’t recognize with one of the ribbons of temporary office on his shoulder and a revolving pistol in his hand, and the sour-looking teacher.

My father looked at them, past them to the horizon for long seconds, then faced me. He was angry.

“How are you?” the woman shouted at me.

I backed away from the door and nodded without speaking.

She came in while her companion fidgeted with his weapon. She looked in my eyes and mouth and asked me whether I was all right, whether anything had happened, while my father watched and listened.

When they left she said to him, “You be careful.”

He closed the door more slowly than usual, so as not to slam it.

When he ladled out supper my father said, “Did you hear the gun today? That loud shot?” I nodded. “Not heard that noise for a long time.” He frowned. “Could be there’s new hunting, maybe.” He opened the door and looked out while midges joined us. “I used to hear that all the time,” he said. “When I was in a war. In a city.” Not the nearest one, I knew.

The boy said, “Who won?”

“High town against low?” the boy’s father said at last. “Street against street? Who won?” He looked at his son without expression. “They won. That shot? That’s the kind of shot you use to kill a man.”

That night I ran away.

It was very cold and I put on my heaviest clothes to descend the stairs and step as silently as I could onto the flat rock around our house and onto the path, to come down that hill. I shook hard with every step, even with all those layers. I was dry and dusty. In the very far distance, in the steppes on which I’d never trodden and to which I rarely paid attention, lightning soundlessly connected sky and earth. My skin felt like old paper.

I didn’t feel brave walking that path, though I had no flashlight and I strained to see by a slice of moon. If I’d stepped onto scree or braced against the wrong rock I might have started to slide and not been able to stop, and if there was no fence below me at that point I might have kept descending until I went over an overhang into a gulley, falling to my death.

By day there’s rarely anything on the hill that would take you, but whether or not there are those things about which the bridge gang asked me, there are predators after dark, the nightcats and others. They might hunt a child. Coyotes and pumas wouldn’t enter the streetlit town but they might have investigated me on my way to it. I don’t remember feeling fear or determination or anything but as cold and as drab as the earth as I came down.

A clattering made me stop. No animal came, but standing in the dark where the path on my little mountain widened and grew shallower in the angle of its descent, I heard that percussive scratching. What I’d thought the sounds of new birds, closer now, as if something was bringing up gravel in short coughs. I didn’t move.

On that hill, there were none of the true succulents of the desert, that I knew from pictures, that I’d once imagined walking. But there were spined trees, various clotted-looking things serrated as if with claws along the ridges of their bark. They surrounded the dark path and I peered between their spines.

Deep in a clag of them, I saw a human shape.

The figure seemed to approach me like someone rising out of water, a hulk of shadow with a box and a gun. It seemed to surveil me, and move without moving.

I hollered and I ran.

I didn’t know if I’d seen anything real, because the hill will throw up its own nightmares, and I didn’t care, just ran in great terror and didn’t look behind me.

Nothing seemed to follow, but I didn’t slow.

When at last I came slap-footed and quaking into the bridgetown it was still deep night. There were few people in the streets, dim but definite figures visible at junctions at work in their economies. They looked at me in curiosity. They couldn’t have seen my face and it wasn’t as if there were no ragged children in the town, nor as if none ever went walking in such forbidding hours. No one called to me.

I took a twisting route, striving for silence, returning to the bridge over the cut, to Samma and Drobe’s favorite house.

My hope was met: the door opened. I stood in the threshold. My eyes were wide and I felt as if they might shoot out rays for me to see by. I stood half-in half-out, unsure how to proceed, and Samma opened her own eyes to look at me.

“Oh, you,” she said. “It’s you.”

She rose and came for me. She was sleepy and vague and she held out her hand and whispered to me with more tenderness than I’d heard from her or anyone, now it was only she and I awake and she was unheard by the tough brood she helped shepherd.

—

She whispered to you the story of when you came down, to calm you. You had a childish hope of sanctuary right there in that airy ruin but Samma knew better and pulled herself all the way awake and warned you, finger to her lips. She thought. She put her hand on Drobe’s chest and brought him instantly out of sleep. They murmered.

She said to you, “Is anyone coming?”

“I think someone was on the hill.”

Some other gang children looked up from where they lay at the quiet caucus. Drobe and Samma pointed them back to sleep and they pretended to obey.

Samma leaned out and scanned the bridge. A light rain now fell. “Come on,” she whispered to you. “Come on right now.”

Watched by those silent comrades, Samma and Drobe took you to your dismay back out into the night. You could see the lines of the country now, rising into quickly ebbing darkness, the hills’ shoulders coming visible. Each streetlamp wore a corona.

Your guides surprised you. They took you left, above the bats’ arches, to cross the bridge. Past that dark cart, as absolute in its aspect as any rock, into the southern half of the town. A street slanted up. They took you higher. Your skin was wet.

It was as if dawn had been told to come quicker on that side, as if the greater emptiness of the streets sucked the light in. What watchers you noticed may as well have been dispassionate observers from some austere alternative, so opaque were their regards. Destitutes lying but not asleep under leaves in a graveyard, marking you from their locations, cozied up to the railings as if to give the dead their room. In a chair by her open doorway a woman waited for the sun and nodded as your escorts took you past. You cried out because something terrible clawed from her mouth, a dark tangle, as if something hookfooted was emerging from her and she didn’t care.

“Hush,” Drobe said. “We have to be quick and quiet.”

To the east there are beetles the size of hands and their shells tell fortunes. If you boil them you can chew their dead legs, as did the woman, and suck out narcotic blood. But you didn’t know that then.

“Ah now,” whispered Samma. She spoke in Drobe’s ear and he thought a moment and whispered back and her eyes widened and she nodded.

Perhaps someone was behind you, glancingly visible as the town came into its gray self. You tried to keep watch of any watcher. Drobe yanked you so you lost your grip on Samma’s hand and he pulled you into alleys, and you reached back but Drobe was too strong and fast, and Samma kept on in plain sight on the main way while you left her and headed into the snarls of the south side.

“She’ll come for us, she’ll come,” Drobe said, patting down the hands with which you reached back in her direction. “She’s getting things you’ll need. Come with me.”

Need? It was light so quickly. Drobe rushed you in through the windows of a barely musty cellar. From there, when the rain slowed, through a fence of barrel hoops, by a junction past two big men in butcher’s aprons who put down their tools at the sight of you and came after you yelling, chase instinct provoked by your speed.

In a foundation pit, the weeds were thick so you knew the building was stillborn. You hid while the men hunted. When they were gone, Drobe sniffed as if he could smell empty places. This early the sky looked like an ash version of itself. The air already smelt of diesel and there was smoke to run through.

“Samma’ll bring what you need to go,” he said. Then in a rush he said, “Hey, maybe I’ll come too.”

I didn’t want to go. “And Samma?” I said.

“Well, she can’t, can she?” he mumbled. “She can’t just walk out, can she?”

A big windowless brick hall rose on slanting foundations. Drobe pulled aside corrugated metal and led us into a dusty, still room, where water and wan light angled through the ceiling holes. The floor was deep in bird shit and down. It sloped gently to a stage and a wall of ragged canvas. Things roosted.

“It used to be a picture-house,” Drobe said. I imagined what that might be. “No one’s here,” he said. “Good,” he said.

He hallooed and got no answer.

“Whose house is this?” I said.

“No one’s,” he said. He thought that over. “Sort of.”

We steamed. He went to the stage and lifted a flap of canvas as gently as if it were ripped skin. Behind it was wadded-up cloth and a pile of other things.

On his knees, Drobe picked through someone’s hide. He showed no surprise to find a box of papers covered with ink, some kept pristinely flat, some torn and crumpled, some printed, some handwritten. He touched them. Carefully he examined a stiff envelope banded with red, the remains of its seal visible. I went to pick something up too but he stopped me, made me lean over and look without touching. They weren’t written in my language, and Drobe couldn’t read.

“All right, let’s wait,” he said at last. “Until she comes.”

“Samma,” I said.

“Samma,” he said, “or who these belong to.”

—

There were stairs to where bricks were missing, so you could lie on your tummy and look down at the street, to where a woman prodded a donkey past, dragging a big machine.

“You want to know who lives here for the moment?” Drobe said. “A traveler. I met her.”

“Where?” I said.

“In the streets. She’s a visitor. I ain’t seen her here but she told me this is where she was and this stuff’s hers.”

He pointed at the papers.

“She had a boss, but things went wrong. He thinks he’s done for her but he don’t know her. Don’t know she’s here, watching. She could get away and keep moving. She came here. He took her away from something bad, years gone, so it was like she owed him, she told me. It was all right for a long time, till it weren’t, till she could read all the paperwork and realized things were off.”

I couldn’t follow what he was telling me and I don’t think he understood his own words at all fully; was, rather, trying to accurately repeat someone else’s intrigue. Whoever slept here, he recited, was trying to find someone, not her boss, no, but someone who tracked him, in real authority. To present evidence of a crime. “She could read instructions.” He shook the envelope he still held.

He pointed in the direction, he said, of the places about which he was trying to inform me. “That way,” he said. “They come from there to count.”

I had chalk in my pocket and I gave him a piece. He kept hold of the red-trimmed paper with his left hand to draw frogs in houses and people with wings with his right. I drew my father’s keys and my house and me alone. The rain stopped.

“Samma’ll have a plan,” he said. “We have to get you away.” But I wanted to stay with her and Drobe in their bridge house.

I grew hungry. I sat and was quiet and watched the men and women on south-side errands swigging from flasks.

Drobe startled me by whispering.

“That lizard,” he said. “They put them in the bottle when they’re newborn or even eggs and they put food and water in for them, and they shake it out carefully to clean out their shit, and they grow in there till they get too big to leave.”

I stared at him but he was looking away from me.

“I seen them do it with fish too,” he said. “Fill a bottle with water. Put it in there when it’s fry. I heard they did it with a hare too but I never saw that. A hare in a bottle.”

He looked at me at last.

“Close your mouth,” he said. He was teasing: it wasn’t harsh. I felt light in my head.

We froze then because we heard a rattle and the wrench of metal. We scuttled to a little balcony inside above the main room. Right at its center, her back to us, watching the stage with bags in her hands, was Samma.

“Hey,” Drobe said. But before she turned to look at us someone shouted, “Stop!” and a man walked out of the shadows.

The window-cleaner in his sash again. For one dreadful instant I thought Samma had brought him but I saw her face as she saw his and I knew that he’d followed her without her knowledge.

Two others emerged behind him: one of the butchers, his smock black with blood smears; and a policeman, a real policeman, from the coast.

I’d never seen one before. He was young and fat with long hair and glasses. His uniform was shabby but it was full: I could see the official sigil on his breast. On his right thigh he wore a pistol. His tour had brought him here. It was our town’s turn.

“What, you got nothing better to do?” Samma managed to say as the men approached. She looked at me in anguish.

“I told you,” the butcher said to the window-cleaner. “Didn’t I say I saw him?”

“Boy,” the window-cleaner called up, “what are you doing?”

“I said if you followed her you’d find him, didn’t I?”

Drobe and Samma tried to insist that I was with them now, but the officer simply gestured impatiently for me to come. Then Drobe started on about my father, about how they couldn’t leave me with him, and the window-cleaner grew angry and stamped up the stairs for me, and Drobe started screaming that he was done, that he was going to light out and leave and come by the key-maker’s house for his mate, that he was done with this town, shouting so loud that Samma dropped whatever it was she’d brought to help me escape and ran to quiet him, and knowing how fast someone might withdraw the indulgence of allowing their presence in the houses of the bridge, Samma and Drobe, as he calmed, in agonies and protesting, let the men take me.

—

There were three other full-time and uniformed officers using the schoolroom as their temporary headquarters. They muttered to each other, they seemed edgy. They all but ignored me, except for the big policeman: he beat me. His attack was offhand and calm. He explained with passionless ill-temper that this was what I got for disobeying the law that made clear I was my father’s.

This was the first time any adult had hit me.

The window-cleaner winced with every strike. I felt better and worse that even a man such as he counted this punishment unfair. He did not intervene.

When he was done, the policeman made me wait while he discussed paperwork and plans with his colleagues. I hoped the hunter would come. I imagined him pushing through the thickets in the foothills. I’ve thought of him like that often since, as if he’s still out there, game in his sights, intending to check on me on his return.

It was early afternoon when they got word to my father and he came to fetch me.

I was sitting red-eyed and fearful when I heard a noise and looked up and he was standing in the schoolroom’s doorway, flanked by part-timers in their sashes, a man and a woman I didn’t recognize, and two of the visitors in full uniform. My father carried bread. His expression was solicitous.

He said, “Boy.” He stepped forward and stopped when he saw my face.

My father turned and screamed at the officers, “Which of you did this?” in a voice much louder than any I’d heard him use before. He slung the bread away and it bounced into a corner where I eyed it. “I’ll kill you if you touch my boy ever again,” my father shouted. “I will kill you.”

The officers blinked at each other in shock.

“It’s those bridge rats he runs with,” the window-cleaner said. “They been scrapping. We ain’t touched him.”

“Calm down, mate,” said the officer who’d beaten me. “Take your damn boy home.”

My father bared his teeth at them. I saw him compose his face and turn to me as calm as he could make it. “They lost me your breakfast,” he said. He smiled at me. “I’ll get more.

“Come on,” he said. He held out his hand. “Time to go.”

—

The shutters were up, the shops open, the roads full. Men and women swept away dust. My father pulled me out into the last few hours of that day—the square was crowded—and I saw Drobe and Samma and the others. They stood by a wall in my line of sight as if they might be there by chance. My father saw them too, and without expression gestured at them to keep away.

He held your hand tight while you stared at them. He rushed you across the square, disturbing greedy birds.

People watched him. He went to a bread-maker’s and called for a loaf but the woman shook her head. “No bread,” she said, and turned from him. There was plenty visible through the flecked window.

My father approached a man frying skewers on a big metal plate but he too shook his head at our approach and sort of reached his arm around his food as if it were a child that he was protecting.

Every vendor refused my father’s custom. They gathered, they watched us with implacable faces, no warmer to me than to him. I don’t know if he did, but even with my face still hurting from the policeman’s blow I felt stung by the indignity of their shunning. I suppose it meant they believed me, but I felt shame.

Samma and her gangmates watched me and I them. They shadowed us as one at a time the shopkeepers refused my father, and all their customers folded their arms and went silent until he took me away.

What about me? I thought. Can you take me? Please, let me stay. But the law had said I was his and they had a lot of respect and fear for the law in that town.

My father didn’t stare anyone down but nor did he wither under their disapproval.

He judged the sky. “You’ll have something at the house,” he said. “We have food there. Good long walk and we’ll build an appetite.”

As my father led me from the square toward the edge of town, Drobe motioned to me. He looked strained and he kept staring up and out beyond the town with an immense, furious eagerness, but he made sure to catch my eye, and indicated, as he had before, for me to wait. He looked hunted.

—

In the foothills, we rounded the last turn and passed out of sight of the main street. I kept turning to glance, to see a last glimmer of the bridge over the gulch with early anglers lined up on the railings ready for the first bats, washing flapping from high windows like flags. My father knelt before me.

“That’s enough,” he said.

He shook my hand gently and made me look up at him while my feet picked over stones and the air went thin. “That’s enough. These’ve been bad days I know and I know you’ve been scared and you haven’t known what’s happened or what to do. I don’t blame you. I understand. But this stops now. No more running away. No more hiding in the town. Or anywhere. No more. All right? You understand me?”

He shook my hand again until I answered yes.

“Good. There’s just the two of us now, we need each other,” he said. “We need to look out for each other, don’t we? So. We’ll learn. No more running away. Good. If you ran away again I’d have to come and find you and I’d be upset and angry.

“Now, you, come and eat. Those bastards in town . . .”

He checked himself. As if I hadn’t learned from the gang any word he might use. As if I hadn’t known them before that, from books my mother had me read.

And I did not run away again, though I thought of doing so many times, and made one more half-attempt.

Again I took to the topmost room.

As soon as my father left me alone, and too fast to reconsider, I took a candle and crept back up into that attic for the first time in months. And though I was quivering as I climbed, when I entered, even despite the dark, I felt no fear, no shock. Only a hollowness.

What the hunter had said was true: the blood was wiped away. So were my own drawings, which I’d thought secret.

The room would shake in the strongest winds, and I’d look many times across the night and the ruckusing air of the uplands and imagine being out in that, heading away from the hills, but I always stayed. I can’t say I chose to stay as I felt quite without traction, without capacity to find myself or anything. A gusted thistle! That’s what I thought I was like, for weeks. Thinking my own past self is mostly a mystery story.

My father continued to make his keys. For himself, I supposed.

During the daylight, I wandered. More than once, from far off, from somewhere in the steepening zone between the town and my part of the uphill, I heard that chattering call. I heard the complaints of animals carrying loads. Once more I heard the boom-snap of those two distinct and distinctive shots.

—

I can’t tell you what my father wanted from me; it may be that all he wanted was me. He loved me, but he had loved my mother too, and that love didn’t preclude me watching him and waiting for any shift to come over his face. It didn’t stop me wondering.

I can’t tell you what he wanted from me because he asked so little. Now that I was back, my father was content for me to kick my stones through the fence and over the edge again. To explore up and down, to watch fighting chuckwings and rock rats hunting for worms.

I took a last few of my mother’s papers up to the windy top room where I read them several times, or tried to—some were beyond me. Instructions for wall building; an allegory about selfishness set among animals; a description of a carved box that was supposed to contain a person’s soul, kept in a museum, in a city of which I’d not heard.

Mostly my father cooked but sometimes he had me do it. He’d stand covered in key dust in the kitchen doorway, murmuring to himself. He would offer advice on what to put into the pot with what. I obeyed as if he was issuing orders. I’d always be quiet in his company. He never told me to take our garbage to the hole in the hill.

I didn’t know how to tend the garden: I’d watched my mother do it but had asked no questions. All I could do now, with a growing sense of duty, was prod at the dry earth with her trowels, mimicking as closely as I could the motions I’d seen her make. I patted dying beans. Turning over the dirt, sometimes I would bring up trash.

Once I said to my father, “Why do you want me?”

I still think that’s the bravest thing I’ve ever done. I was outside and he was in his key room. I saw him as I dug and I stood before I could hesitate and I shouted it through the window. When he looked up, I thought for a moment it was with the open face, his blank face, but it wasn’t.

“Don’t say that,” he said. He whispered it to me through the window. He put his hands to his cheek and his trembling mouth. “Don’t. Don’t.”

I wondered what would happen when we ran out of food. We had sacks of pulses and several loaves of the bitter bread of that town, which lasts for weeks and won’t go bad. There were dry stores in the pantry, a tiny room in which I would sometimes stand and close the door to be surrounded on three sides by rising shelves of jars, of desiccated things, of salted bits, and, more every week, of cobwebs and the husks of spiders’ meals and the bodies of the spiders themselves that my father would not sweep away except accidentally as he reached for food. So I would stand in that cupboard and see how the stores were decreasing. I knew we had weeks to go before all of it was gone but I knew also that it was depleting and that various staples would be finished soon, leaving us with those items of which we had a surplus, like dried mushrooms, which would far outlast anything else. I wondered if my father would simply refuse to address this. If he would make meals or have me make them with fewer and fewer ingredients so our diets would continue a while as they were but grow daily and weekly more thin, more flavorless, until for the months until the last jar ran completely out we would be dining on mushrooms, mushrooms for breakfast, soaked in water and salt, mushrooms crushed for lunch, fried in oil until the oil ran out and then simply seared and blackened in a pan over the fire for our suppers, or gnawed raw, until even they went and we would die, one after the other, the taste of mushrooms in our mouths. I couldn’t decide whether I, being smaller and eating less, would die more quickly than he in this mushroomless state or more slowly. I couldn’t decide which would be better or worse. If he went before me, of course, then I would be able at last—I can’t parse or explain this logic—to descend to the town, and ask for food, not mushrooms, and to live. But then I decided that I would be so weak I’d be past moving and would die after all too, looking at dead him all the while, in that circumstance.

We did not die. One warm morning I entered the parlor and blinked to see that a large jar at my head-height had been cack-handedly refilled, leaving lentils spilled across the dusty shelves. That there were new pickles, and stacks of flatbread.

I don’t know when or how my father was ordering food, which merchants were providing it or when they were delivering, but here in his hilltop house he was clearly not so shunned as he had been. Whatever money he had was good again.

Days after the appearance of the pulses, a young grocer walked into my view up the hill, in each hand a bag bearing the sign of her shop. She saw me in my spying place on a promontory. She hesitated, then sped up to make her sale.

Weeks after my return as I sat on the low branches of a tree watching my house, I heard stone knocking on the wood and I looked up to glimpse a boy wave at me from behind a rock. He let go of a handful of pebbles.

“Drobe,” I whispered with a great rush of hope, but immediately knew I was wrong.

I recognized him from the bridge house but I’d never known his name, and I didn’t ask now. He was a slight boy between my age and Samma’s, and he watched me with a sharp and agitated face, staying behind a rise, out of sight of the house in case my father was at his window. I climbed the stone behind which the boy sat and spoke without looking at him, for the same reason.

He looked around, unendingly astonished at the landscape. It was the first time he’d been out of the town.

“We’ve got plans,” he said. “We’re going to get you away. Samma said to tell you. We’re working on plans.”

He gave me hard sweets they must have stolen.

“That’s from Samma,” he said.

“Will she come?”

He blinked at me in guarded surprise.

“She won’t come?” I said.

I had by then some sense of how we’re all curbed by scends directed at us and by our own compulsions, even something of Samma’s own, but you must remember I was very young. Perhaps I thought my want would obviate them.

“She give me a message for you,” he said. “Listen. ‘Some of them say they’ll never take your dad’s money.’ ” He concentrated and repeated it singsong, as she must have drilled him.Some of them say, they’ll never tay, kyore dad’s mon-ay.

“ ‘That your ma’s not forgot,’ ” he said. “ ‘That they think of you.’ ”

“What do they think of me?”

“Don’t, I lost my place. Wait. ‘That your ma’s not forgot. That they think of you. Help’s on the way, we know what to do.’ We heard there’s officers coming,” he said. I could hear when he went off-script.

“Officers have already come,” I said. “They wouldn’t help me.”

“Proper ones. Not the sash-danglers.”

“Don’t you remember?” I said. “They already came.”

He paused and looked worried at his memories. “Wait,” he said. “All right, it ain’t them, then. Someone’s coming, to help, I think. Samma knows. We can tell them about what your dad done and they can do something so you’ll be able to come down to our house.” He brightened.

“Who is it coming?” I said. “Do you mean . . . Drobe said someone was sent from way away, come to check on things—”

“Drobe . . .” The boy shook his head and looked away. “I mean maybe that’s it. I don’t know who it is he’s talking about. The thing is with Drobe . . .” A moment passed and he shrugged.

“I just heard there’s officials come to the town,” he said uncomprehendingly. “And I’m telling you we’ve got plans for your dad. Samma said. We ain’t going to let him keep you here. But Samma, she says we have to wait a bit, because if we just bring you back now they’ll find you again like before. They’ll be watching now, and then we’ll be in bad trouble and then we can’t help you, can we?”

He didn’t look at me.

I wandered uphill. He followed me by hidden ways.

We threw stones at a stump. His aim was much better than mine. He broke off a twig with his first attempt and made himself laugh because now, he said, it looked like a fat and angry bird.

“Where is Drobe?” I said.

The boy wouldn’t look at me.

“Where is he?” I said.

“Gone.”

“What?”

“He’s gone. He left. He’s gone.”

I stopped myself crying out. “Where?” I said. “Where’s he gone?” I had to say it through my teeth. I wondered if my father had found him.

“I don’t know. One day he just wasn’t there. He’d been spending time with someone, then one day his friend was gone, and that was it.” I thought for a second he meant me but he didn’t. I could hear suspicion when he said friend. “He said there was nothing he wanted here any more. And one night he went. So now he’s nowhere.”

“He’s somewhere,” I said. I wanted to say more but neither of us knew what so we shared a sad silence.

When he looked into the sky at last and I could see him prepare to leave, the boy told me, “Samma’s been saying. You hear people talking about your dad.” I didn’t move. “They’re all angry with what he done. What you said. Then after a bit you hear them talking about the keys he did for them. What they do. Like . . .” He cast about for an example. “Like it changes the weather, one woman says.” He inclined his head eagerly. “Samma said we might take it from her—the key I mean—and see if it does.

“I mean I wouldn’t buy it,” he said quickly, “I wouldn’t give him any money for anything now, but if we could get a key like that . . . Well, I mean, changing the weather. Or anything.” He looked at me cautiously and shrugged as if surely I must see. “I mean, that’s something?”

I’d never used any of my father’s keys.

The boy waited but I wouldn’t speak. I didn’t suggest he stay out of sight while I crept inside to see what I could find or that I’d leave the workroom window unlocked for him that night to climb in through. I wouldn’t look at him. I said nothing about the keys at all. Eventually he went.

Sometimes when my father walked on the hills I’d stand in the entrance to his workroom and smell metal dust and oil and see some half-finished shape in his vise.

I don’t know when his customers started to come back. At first I didn’t see them, only heard voices in his room. First a man, then later a woman, explaining what they needed the metal to do. Then I’d hear the rasp of my father working.

We acquired two goats. One cold morning I woke to their urgent bleating. They were chained by the front door frantically eating gorse and butting each other. My father smiled at me and said, “These are yours.”

They were young she-goats, frenetic and boisterous, and I loved them utterly and was terrified for them. I’d follow their famished, curious investigations of the slopes, the fervor with which they went for weeds, nosed aside a few fallen scarers my parents had made. I tried to keep them away from the dying garden with which I still struggled, a custodian of its decline. Whenever my father looked at them, I felt sick.

“What are they called?” he said to me.

I shrugged.

“Why won’t you name them?” He was sad.

I did name them, but with fleeting, random syllables, which I changed every two or three days, and which I never told him, as if that might keep them safe.

They ate dead leaves; they ate gnarly barky bushes. They grazed on bedraggled refuse I pulled up from the vegetable patches, and on clots of moss in the corners of our walls.

—

On the hill we used a different, vaguer calendar than the one I’ve since learned. The seasons ours described—summer, dimming, and winter—were suited to a different place: the mountain had two seasons at most. What we used was an inheritance, I think, a throwback from somewhere more changeable. It did grow colder in the top room. It was weeks after I’d run away, after the goats came, but I don’t know exactly how long, before my father killed again, unless he hid other such killings from me.

I stood in the remnants of the garden on an evening full of sunlight lingering on the slopes, and below the raucous goat complaining I became aware of another growing beat. My insides clenched.

My father’s window glowed against the creeping dark. He huddled within, bent by the sill. He was the color of the dirt on the window. His hand was rising and falling in that deadening drumming, and I saw something limp and flailing snapping back and forth in his grip. There was no more killing purpose to his continued pounding.

I don’t know what it was. He held the animal by the ears and punched it again and again into the ruined floor and made its body a sack of blood. I was sluiced through with a sort of bilious terror but I wasn’t surprised.

Nor did I hide. I just stood by the glass and watched and whimpered.

When he was done breaking the animal (I don’t know how he’d caught it, I don’t know what it had done, I don’t know why he took it back into the house to do it or if it was dead when he did) my father stood, holding the dripping skin. It was properly dark now and he stood in front of his window with the light behind him so he was a black form to me, a shadow man, and I couldn’t see his expression, but I knew which one it was.

He certainly saw me but he looked at me no longer than he did at anything else before he left the room and I heard the front door open and I ran to keep the house between us and he went to fill the hole in the hill alone.

—

Once during the goats’ vigorous evening meal my father leaned out and looked at me and said calmly, “Quiet them, please. Will you take them somewhere else, please?”

Whenever he spoke directly to me I was pinned in place. I made myself stumble forward pulling at the goats’ leads and they complained and went stiff-legged so I had to lean against them while my father watched. I strained. I saw past him to a man in his room.

Maybe I recognized him from the town, though it was weeks since I’d been there. I thought maybe he’d been at a pump, or hauling sacks of stone across the bridge, for workshops. For an instant, looking at the bulk of him, I thought he was the hunter, but he wasn’t. He waited for my father to return to their conversation. On the table between them was a half-finished drawing of a key.

—

Are the keys waiting for you? I didn’t want to ask my father but I wanted him to tell me. Do you make them out of nothing or do you find their edges?

He used scrap. He used beaten-flat metal panels, which he’d heat and into which he’d sometimes hammer fetish scobs. He used the blackened bottoms of saucepans: those he liked because they were flat and thin already.

So was there a key waiting for him to cut it out of un-key metal? I liked the thought of it but I never did trust my own hankerings.

When I saw them from that time on, some of his customers wore ugly expressions or put them on when they saw me, to illustrate how much they disapproved of my father, how much distaste they had for him.

—

One hazy cold morning he told me to play and to be safe and to wait. He put empty bags over his shoulders and I heard the coins in his hands and he set out to the town again, for the first time since he had come to fetch me from the police.

“If anyone comes while I’m gone,” he called back, “tell them to wait outside. Or tell them to go away.”

If he girded himself to face the town that still despised him, though it would feed him again and used his cutting services again, he hid the fact as well as he hid many things.

I ran up the stairs to the top floor to watch him from its dirty windows. When he was gone there came a lonely calm and my chest loosened.

—

That was my first day alone uphill. I took the goats downslope a bit and they screamed at each other and I screamed too to see what it was like. They ravenously tore up what looked to me like nothing. I was close enough to our house to hear when, at noon, someone shouted at the door.

She was a thickset red-haired woman with a suspicious stare who watched me with her arms folded. When I approached and told her the key-maker wasn’t there she cursed filthily and threw something hard against the step, shouting, “What am I supposed to do with this now?”

It bounced away. I waited while she stormed away and when she’d left I got onto all fours and found what she’d discarded. It was a bit of some engine. It looked like a heart, I remember that. I put it on the kitchen table. When, hours later, my father returned, he put down his heavy bags at the sight of it.

“A woman brought it,” I said. He picked it up and turned it over. “She threw it away and went.”

“Whatever this came from,” he said, “what she wants is a key to make it start again.”

“Can’t she just put it back in?” I said.

Outside the goats howled. My father’s eyes flicked momentarily in their direction.

“She might,” he said. “She wants a key to help her. I could make her a key from this.”

I watched him sort his awls and files, his flat metal and vise.

He went down to town again, not many days later, taking the remains, and soon such a trip was nothing to remark on, and sometimes more people came up, as the woman had, while he was gone. And I’d tell them when to return. I couldn’t leave, still, and I knew it, though not quite why. I could only go so far down.

—

One evening I found only one goat, though I’d tethered the two together, as was usual. I knew them apart: it was the more adventurous and argumentative which was gone. I could have told you what her name was at that time.

I picked up her chain. At its end was her leather collar. It had been cut through.

Her comrade seemed untroubled. She rushed up to me in case I’d brought anything new or unusual to eat from the cupboard, as I was not supposed to do but occasionally did. She eyed and shoved me.

I whispered, “Where’s your sister?”

Of course I thought my father had taken her but even then in the waning light, my throat stopped up with fear for the animal, it didn’t feel as if he would have done this. I couldn’t imagine him taking a knife to leather that way, not with his face as I’d seen it.

Still I could barely speak as I returned to the house. I told him. His reaction both reassured and terrified me. His fury made me certain he wasn’t responsible; it made me even more afraid because he was furious, though not with me.

He slammed his hand repeatedly on the table and I made myself as still and small as possible while he raged at thieves. For the only time I remember he shifted briefly to his first language, in which I now write, which then I didn’t know at all. He cursed and glared.

I saw him swallow and keep his voice quiet when he spoke to me directly.

With no gun he took some bladed tools from his workroom and went striding out into the twilight. A strong wind had come up and it shoved dust into the room before I got the door closed. I watched him through the window, flashlight in one hand, some nasty spike in the other, hauling over the rocks in the face of all the blown grit in the world, baying his ugly gibberish language into the hill.

I closed my eyes and imagined my house without him, without me, now that my mother was gone. Empty again, the house would grow more and more sensitive to weather, in the absence of noise, of human noise. My house had always known what the weather would do.

After I don’t know how long, while I stood ready for something, I heard a single cracking shot, not far from the house.

Many possibilities occurred to me, with emotions for which I have no name. But my father returned shortly after that, still scowling, and the darkness became complete.

“It’s gone,” he said. “I didn’t find it. You heard. Whoever took it is gone, and eating chevon tonight.”

He went to cut metal.

Long after midnight, with the grinding of his work still audible through his closed door, I came down and set out alone into the black toward the bridgetown for a third and last time.

I knew I wouldn’t reach it. I didn’t expect to be gone far or long. This time I didn’t even put on extra clothes, though I knew how cold it was. And though my face burned with it, and though my breath was fog, I felt almost too hot, or not too hot but too something, as if there was no boundary between the air and me. I was dissolving, both sweaty and shivering. I went without hesitation. I could see enough of the path to descend.

There’d been so many of these descents; there are so many ways to go down a hill. I remembered the last but one time, when I ran alone, a weeping mess with death behind me. That earlier me was a stranger child for whom I had care and with whom my patience was strained.

I froze. And after an instant a jackal yelled, as if it had been waiting for me to stand still. It was close. I tried to understand why I’d stopped.

A coil of mist moved in front of me. I tried to think about why I didn’t continue down. I raised a foot experimentally and put it back again, slowly, just where it had been.

The mist beckoned me and pushed me back at the same time. It thickened and seemed to fill with watchers, or with a single fleeting man. I couldn’t continue.

Is it his keys? I thought in the rising wind. My legs trembled.

It’s his keys, I thought. Had my father cut a key to hold me?

I saw deeper shadow in that cloud and felt cold because there was certainly someone there, someone looming out of it, carrying a burden. I was sure it was whomever I’d seen, or thought I had, the night I’d last taken the path. I heard footsteps and quick animal breathing and the jackal howled again.

The mist seemed to move aside and be replaced and who came wasn’t the dim watcher I remembered but someone smaller, a woman shape or a girl shape. She raised an arm.

Here was Samma.

I gasped and put up my hands and cried out a wordless greeting like an animal, and the animal watching us whimpered.

Samma carrying a bag on her shoulder come up so high, come out of the town I’d come to understand she would or could not leave, standing on the hill path ready for me, knowing I’d be there.

She looked taller and underfed and much older to me. She looked drawn so far from the bridge. But she smiled, and it was not too wary, and she waved me down to where she waited.

I thought of the jackal slinking away from our reunion. But I still couldn’t move my feet further down the hill, so I raised my arms and, deciding she could overcome herself, beckoned her urgently in turn to come up a little more.

—

Another twenty steps for her and she struggled as if there wasn’t enough air.

I whispered, “See?”

When she reached me, first she shook my hand as if we were adults, and I liked that. Then she hugged me in a rough way, hesitated and did it again, so hard I let out sounds.

“You’re here!” I said into her clothes. “How did you know to find me?”

“I heard something,” she said. Her voice was sluggish. “There was a shot. Right near here. I thought that might mean something. I got thinking you might come down.”

She was lying. She must have been here when the shot came to know it had been close, which meant she’d been there a long time. I suspected then that she’d been up night after night, as far as, according to the constraints she’d laid, she was able, to wait and hope to find me. I’d come at last.

She shivered on the rocks and spread a blanket on the dirt for us and sat me down beside her. She had food for me. Sugary brittle. Vegetables you could eat raw. I gnawed them.

Eventually I said, “That boy said Drobe was gone.”

We stopped eating. She didn’t look stricken. She didn’t look anything except calm and unhappy. “People go,” she said.

“Why did he go?” I said. “He’d never just go.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t come by you? I thought he’d come for you. What if he did, though? Maybe he tried.”

I heard sniffing: our hungry watcher had come back with a companion, it sounded like. We weren’t frightened.

“You know,” Samma said. “Maybe he did. Maybe he just went.”

Boys and girls might become more solitary thieves. They might find a way or a person with whom to become some sort of adult. They might antagonize the wrong someone and disappear.

“Maybe it was the police,” she said. “He kept telling them to take your father. Maybe they took him instead.”

“What about his friend?” I said. “He was waiting for someone in the picture-house. Not just you, I mean. Someone not from the town.”

She inclined her head.

“When we went back to that hall,” she said, “when your father took you, someone had been there and took everything away except what Drobe had.” I remembered him holding that sealed packet we couldn’t read.

“You know everyone in the bridgetown,” I said. “Who did it?”

“I don’t know. I never saw Drobe’s friend, either, the girl he told you about.” She paused. “Whoever it is has come to town now, they find you, you can’t find them—.” Her voice was low.

She looked away from me. “I can’t come back for a bit,” she said.

I didn’t answer. Just watched her and tried not to let my lips quiver.

She told me she had the others to think of too, especially now. “It ain’t like I could keep coming back,” she said as if I was arguing with her. “And it ain’t like Drobe’s coming back.”

She gave me a knife with a blade that folded into its handle. “If he comes for you,” she said. She stabbed the air to show me.

She told me a few quick stories.

“I wanted to give you those papers,” she said at last. “The ones Drobe found.”

“Why?”

“You can read, can’t you? But if he still had them he must have took them with him.”

She hesitated. She eyed me and I persuaded her to say whatever it was that I could tell she wasn’t sure whether to say.

“There was a woman,” she told me. “Or a girl.”

Days after Drobe had gone, days since she’d seen him. Late in the evening, Samma standing looking out of the window of her second-favorite bridge-top house as if to discern where he’d gone. She’d fallen back in shock as a face swooped in to stare at her from the dark.

“She was like shadow herself,” Samma said. “She whispered something. It was hard to understand her. She had a young voice. I think she wasn’t older than me, or not by much.”

“Was it a ghost?” I said. Samma shrugged.

“What did she say?” I said.

“Like I say, it was hard to tell. I don’t even think she was looking at me.” In turn Samma did not look at me; her eyes were fixed in recollection. “Like she was looking behind me into the room for someone else. None of the others saw her. She sounded proper upset. I think she said, ‘Where is Drobe? Where’s the repeal?’ Then she was gone and I don’t even know,” she said.

Samma took a big bottle from her bag. She gave it to me. I could barely lift its green glass.

“He left that,” she said. “Drobe went to get it then left it. I think it’s for you.”

In the bottom of the bottle was a scaly scrap and discolored and broken animal bones.

Samma gave me a fast and surly hug without looking at me. I wanted to say anything to her, anything so she’d stay longer. I felt sorry for her as well as for me and, all over again, I didn’t want to be alone on the hill with my father. But I couldn’t stop her.

“I’ll come when I can,” she said and went quickly back to the path. She tried not to let me see her relief as she descended.

You wanted to put your foot down after her, but you didn’t, maybe couldn’t. You watched her go.

That was the last time you saw her. The cold return, the lights of your father’s room, the dark formlessness of the house waited.

A man came.

My father had gone downhill. I was upstairs, drawing on the walls, to repopulate them at last. The animals I drew looked different now. I added faces and stood them upright. The new arrivals eyed the streets where their predecessors had been and I whispered to them all. I could feel the house buck in the gusts, and through the windows I saw trees hurled around.

Someone knocked and I started so violently I hurt my neck. But I knew it wasn’t my father so I ran down the stairs and opened the door.

Strips of leaf and twigs rushed into the kitchen. I braced. The sky was all flat cloud but bright. I was looking into a silhouette. I blinked to clear the wind from my eyes.

“The key-maker’s not here,” I said. “You can wait outside. I don’t know how long he’ll be. Or you can go back to the town and he’ll be here again tomorrow.”

“I’m not here for the key-maker,” the visitor said.

I could see his outlines now. A man who held something in his hands.

His skin was deeply lined, but I don’t think he was much older than my father. He was bald but for an island of short gray hair at the front of his forehead and a rim of it at the back of his head. He was tall, not as rangy as my father but thin and tough looking. He wore glasses. The reflections on their lenses hid his eyes. He had on a dark gray suit with a white shirt. All his clothes were dusty. The bridgetown people didn’t wear ties and I was bewildered by the stripe of black-blue cloth crisscrossed with a simple design.

He carried a big rifle over his shoulder, a box in his left hand, a clipboard in his right.

The man reared back his head and I saw that his spectacles were made of shifting planes. I’d never seen such machines as bifocals. He looked at me through the magnifying facets.

“He isn’t here,” I repeated.

“I’m not here to speak to him,” the man said. He spoke with a kind of singsong enthusiasm. He used my language well but I could tell it wasn’t his own. “That is, I am, eventually,” he said. “I will. He’ll be back. It’s very much my job to speak to him. But I came here now because he isn’t here.”

His accent was familiar to me.

He said, “I came to speak to you.”

—

I didn’t let him into the house and he didn’t ask to enter. He put down the leather box-suitcase. He held his papers flat against his body. Below us on the slope I could see a swirl of dark frozen air, a hillside squall throwing one of the brief year-round bursts of snow that characterizes that region. It sounded like voices.

“So, I am here to speak to your father,” the visitor said. “But not yet. I have to do a job. I will be asking him questions. I’ve been working in the town, and I’ve kept hearing about things that I need to follow up. That I need to know more about.” He looked at me carefully until I lowered my eyes.

A guffaw shocked me.

“My mule,” the man said. He pointed down the hill to where my own unseen goat was answering his animal.

“I have to make a record,” he said. “I’m here because I need information from certain people in town. Your father’s one of them, because of where he was born. So I need to know things. Like what he does.”

“We’re not in town,” I mumbled.

“This counts as town.”

“I can tell you what he does,” I said.

“What money he makes,” he continued. “How long he’s been here. Where he was born I know. Which is the point.”

I shifted.

“What he did back there. At different times, good, and not good. People in town have told me a lot about this and that’s all very well but I do need to know from him. He’s the last subject here, but one. This is the last household. I need to know about his family.” He tilted his head. “Which means I have to know about his children, and I’m going to ask him about them. Which means you. Yes.

“And,” he said, “I have to ask him about his wife.”

“You know,” I said instantly.

“What’s that?”

“You know.” I dredged it out. “They said. Down there. They told you. About my mother.”

“Below?” He didn’t look away from me. “They did.” I strained to hear. “They did tell me things but I do need to know for certain. I need to hear from the key-maker himself. And his family.”

“You know she’s gone.”

I stretched up on tiptoe and looked past him down the rocks. The tiny storm was done. They last only seconds, and if you’re caught in them their snowflakes are so minuscule and dry they feel like cold dust.

The man’s weapon had two barrels and they were not the same. One was thick enough that I could have put two of my fingers into it, the other perhaps half that bore.

“This?” he said. He took it from his shoulder and held it for me to see. “It’s a combination gun. Look, two triggers. This”—he tapped the broad-gauge tube—“a shotgun. It spreads possibilities.” He made an extending cone with his hands. “And this?” The other. “This rifle’s a long-range single shot.”

He showed me how he’d aim with it.

“You can shoot one, the other, or both. The rifle shoots right down the very center of the spread. Like an average. A range and its mean. This is an averaging gun.”

He shouldered it carefully again.

“They said your father’s wife is gone, yes, that’s what they said to me,” the man said. He held his pen above his clipboard. “We can get started,” he said. “We can save time. You tell me about it.”

—

And I who months before had run into town screaming my accusation was shy to say it now that I was asked to put it in clear words. I’d grown used to this world in which everyone knew what had happened or what I said had, in which it had gone from being spoken to being unspoken again, a secret everybody knew. Here I was, hesitating to speak it. I took persuading. The foreign man would have to work on me.

He waited with his pen ready. He said to me, “What I do is I count people. I count people and things.

“Not everyone. If you counted everyone you’d never stop, would you? I’m putting things in sets. My job’s to count just the people who were born where I was, or whose parents or grandparents were. Then I write down what I’ve counted. That’s my job. I started years ago, when we decided we had to take stock of things. After troubles. We needed to know where we were. Where we all were. So I go all over counting people from my home. I’ll show you where I put it all. There are books.

“Your father came here a long time ago and he’s my responsibility. I have to mark his details, you see. I know you were born here. If I’m marking down about him that means I have to mark down something about you. And something about your mother. I have to get the details right. There aren’t many in this town who come from where I do, but there are a few. One’s a poultry farmer. She told me there was one more person of my polity up here. On this job, yours is the last family I have to account for.”

—

I told him what my father had done.

I told him what he’d done not only to my mother but to the others, to the people and the animals. I told the man as he stood on my front step in the leaf-dust, disallowed from the house because my father had forbidden me to let anyone in.

The visitor listened. I couldn’t see what he wrote down.

I don’t know if my voice shifted up and down with hope and desperation. I didn’t know when my father would come home. I wouldn’t look in the direction he’d taken, nor would I step forward to see the path, with him perhaps rising on it now. I told it all again.

It must have been confused and it must have taken a while. I sat cross-legged in the threshold and kept talking. The man stood and wrote. Twice his mule called for him and he ignored it.

I didn’t tell the story to ask for help because I knew there was no help. I told the man because he asked me to, because that was what he said he wanted. For his notes.

“Where was she from?” he said.

I shook my head. I was crying a bit by then, without noise.

“From here,” I said. “But she went to live by the sea. That’s where they met. I have something she wrote. But I don’t think she wrote it. D’you want to see?”

“I do.”

“I’ll get it for you.”

“You told all this to the people in the town,” he said.

“They said they can’t do anything because of no proof.”

He looked up and said, “Do you know why your father ran here in the first place? I know. Where do you think your mother is?” He said that quietly and didn’t lower his clipboard.

My voice caught and it took several attempts to answer.

“In the hole,” I said.

“In the hole. Maybe you can show me the hole.”

I did nothing and he regarded me.

“You remember the job I have to do?” he said. “You remember I need to write down everything I can about your mother? So I should see what there is to see so I can get all my details right.

“Show me.”

—

I took him to the rubbish hole.

We went around the house and up onto the rough ground between thorns and dock bushes and a few meters beyond the closest trees I passed by where I’d buried the bottle with the skeleton still inside.

Looking back I saw the roan mule on the path. A big animal laden under packs. It looked up as we came into its sightline and put back its ears and huffed at us as we ascended.

I stood at the cave mouth’s rocky stockade and gestured within.

The man entered. He walked in and stopped where the crack split the darkness of the cave with a darker cut. He leaned carefully over as the hunter and the schoolteacher and my mother and father had done.

He got onto his hands and knees and gripped the edge and lowered his head into the rift. I watched him with my hands held tightly to my chest.

I said, “It goes on down.”

“It does,” he said. He didn’t turn to me and his voice was faint. He was speaking into the dark.

“No one can see inside,” I said. “No one can see down there.”

“Well,” he said. He rose. He turned and came back into the day brushing dirt off his knees and the palms of his hands. “I have to be sure, that’s part of my job. So let me see.”

When he left me there I was too surprised to be afraid as he walked briskly back the way we had come. I didn’t know if I was wanted so I waited and he quickly returned carrying a satchel.

“One thing I do have to count,” he said, “is spouses.”

He took out a tube of glass or clear plastic the size of a hammer handle and pressed something, shook it, and the cylinder glowed. It went quickly, coldly bright.

I climbed over the entrance rocks and came into the cave toward him.

The man held out the stick of light and dropped it into the hole.

I gasped to see it plummet, fleetingly illuminating the jagged rock sides, dwindling, knocking loudly end to end on the stone until it was invisible.

We watched. The man exhaled.

He took out a flashlight, thick rope, hooks and spikes and buckled leather for his chest, into which he shrugged. I watched with some growing emotion.

“No one can go down,” I said.

“Yes, well, I have a job,” he said. He hammered clasps into the rock. “I have to count. I have to track everything.”

He attached hooks and the cord to these anchors. He spooled it around his harness.

“You can’t,” I said desperately. “You can’t.”

“Do you know how you could help me?” he said. “You know what I need? You should listen. Can you do that? Listen as hard as you can. And if anyone’s coming you should shout down and tell me.”

He gave me another of the tubes. It was pleasing and heavy in my hand. I could see two just-distinct clear liquids inside. “If you hear anyone, you press this.” A plunger to crack the wall between the chambers. “Can you do that? Then you shake it and drop it right in.”

“What if I hit you?”

“Then I’ll have a bump on my head.” He made a silly face.

“What if it breaks on the rocks?” He shook his head and tapped it on the rock to show me it was tough.

“But you won’t turn it on unless you hear someone?” he said.

I promised.

He took his glasses off and cleaned them and put them on again. He wound the strap of his flashlight around his wrist.

“Let’s see,” he said. “Well now.”

Spooling out the line, the man stepped over the lip into the hole.

He moved fast, keeping the line taut with one arm while he braced himself expertly against outcroppings and in nooks with the other and with his legs, and scuttled down the stone.

The dark took him. I watched the line tremble and stretch.

I watched his glow go down.

I couldn’t hear him any more but for a minute his light switched back and forth in the pit, once shining right up out of it and into my eyes. Then he turned it off or passed below an overhang.

The cord thrummed.

In my mind I saw him, a tiny figure suspended and sinking in a great chamber toward the pile. I imagined him shining his light down at it.

I thought there might be sounds from the hill path outside. I was afraid. That my father was returning.

And I imagined the man touching down on the dreadful hill inside the hill and I thought of what I would do if my father came and found me now, waiting there, and of what he might do. I started to shake as if I was frozen cold. I didn’t know whether because of the thought of what the man would find or of the thought of my father finding me.

If my father said something, what would I say back?

I’d try hard not to look at the line stretching down. I’d keep my eyes from the hole. But that wouldn’t distract him. He would see the line. He’d look straight at it and a terrible expression would come over him, not the calm he wore when killing but anger that there was an intruder and a great determination not to let the man have the knowledge for which he was searching, and my father would pull a knife from his pocket and go toward the cord to cut it.

So would I struggle with him? He would throw me down into the gap if I did, killing me in a new rageful way. I resolved that I would struggle with him, that I’d try to stop his knife and give the man time to come up again. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be brave enough.

I stood alone and held the tube, ready to make it glow, ready to drop it.

There were animals close by and I could hear the sounds of the hillside but, though I thought I did, many times, I didn’t hear my father returning. I stood in the cave for minutes, for an hour, for more than an hour. I watched the daylight change outside.

Down in the ground, perhaps the man climbed. Or did he dig?

I stared at nothing in the shadow in the hill. I was racked by scenes, moments that I didn’t want to imagine, the man’s story now, his under-hill investigations. I wanted not to imagine anything like the whispering and snarling dead who filled my head, dead people clotting in a great pile, sliding over the house trash like a band of murdered animals gone blind and stupid with rage in the darkness, furious with anyone still alive, a familiar figure at their head.

The stretched cord’s noises, its creaks and snaps, changed. It vibrated more quickly. The man was ascending.

I pictured him bracing. Climbing.

“Quick,” I struggled to whisper, into the hole. I spoke in a tiny voice. “I think my father’s coming. I keep hearing noises. You have to hurry.”

No light came up. The man had been in darkness down there, and he was ascending in darkness.

The man was ascending, I thought, and then I thought, What if the man isn’t ascending?

What if it isn’t him rising?

How long might they have been waiting down there? Waiting to overpower whoever brought a way out, ingrate escapees. Little sounds welled out of my throat and the black welled up out of the gap. The light-tube shook in my grip.

I knew who would climb first, who would be at the front of the mass, whose ruined fingers and nails it would be slapping onto the sharp flint at the edges of the crack, who would rise out of the under-hill to meet my eye, whose cold grave-stained face full of disappointment.

But it was the foreign man who came into my view like a fish below a boat. I saw him when he was already close to me. He turned his face up and I saw it paler than the shadow.

He gathered the cord and gripped the rock and found handholds. I couldn’t believe that he was returning.

The man hauled himself at last out of the ground, lying at the cut’s edge, panting and staring around him and blinking quickly. I could smell no miasma on him.

After a while he pulled a cloth from his pocket and wiped his hands very carefully, then his face. He took off his glasses and cleaned them again and wouldn’t look at me. His clothes were coated in dust from under the world.

He gathered himself and shrugged out of his harness. I couldn’t speak and he said nothing. His face was set. He worked his jaw.

“I heard what you said to me,” he said at last. “When I was on my way up. Your father will come home soon, I think.”

He put everything back in his sack.

“I think you shouldn’t go back to the house,” he said. He still didn’t look at me. “You know I have to do this job. I want to speak to your father now. I think it would be better if we could speak alone.”

—

“You can’t go in,” I whispered. “It’s not allowed.”

“I know,” he said. “I’ll wait for him outside. I promise I’ll stay on the step.” He kept looking at the cave mouth. “I’ll wait for him and ask him if he’ll let me come inside. And if he won’t I’ll talk to him right there. But I want you to stay here, now. All right?”

He looked across the hole at the dark of the hollow beyond, and back at me at last, at my little limbs.

“Well,” he said. “Is there somewhere you can go? Quiet? Out of sight? Just to make sure your father doesn’t . . .” He put his finger to his lips. “I want you to stay quiet. Keep your ears open, I can call you after I’ve asked your father those questions.”

“I’ll find somewhere.” I was wondering about the crook of a tree, some bough.

“Where you can’t be seen?” he said. “Make sure it’s not too close.”

His insistence frightened me. I couldn’t sit anywhere in the dusk for my father to see me watching. “I don’t know,” I said. But he was distracted, so I said, “I’ll find a place.”

“Good.” He nodded. He picked up his pack and walked into the last of the afternoon. I followed, screwing up my eyes. But as I watched him stride out of sight down the hill I stopped, still within the cave mouth.

These felt very much like last moments. And I was very tired and I didn’t want the light on me.

Had I been in the house I would have gone into the parlor and closed the door. Or I would have wrapped old sheets around me in the base of a wardrobe. I couldn’t go back to the house.

The hole watched me, above its discards and the insides of the hill. Despite what it contained, I took a step back toward it.

It wasn’t my friend or my enemy. It was only a rip full of stone and old things. Even with a particular thing. I didn’t want it but I didn’t need to run from it, not then, and I was afraid of it but no more than I was afraid of everything. Just then, before the conversation between the stranger and my father, I was less afraid of it than of stepping out into the light.

I walked back toward the blackness. I whispered into it, in case my mother was listening.

If he came in here my father would see me and reach for me. I threw a stone across the wide split to the ridge beyond.

With as long a run-up as I could take I might be able to jump all the way across, but the floor was uneven and I might trip on my way and pitch forward, or reach the other side but tip back, and go down, into the dark to the other peak.

The cave wall had its handholds. Outside the sun was firing up the flanks of the hill and somewhere on them my father was coming back to the house, where by the front door the man in his dusty suit was waiting. I couldn’t climb into the pantry and there were no hollow trees nearby.

I took hold of the wall. It felt easier to hold myself there than it had before. I gripped. I sidled, trembling, and I kept going, and tried very hard not to think as I held tight on to the outcrops that I was now above the hole. I didn’t look behind me or down. I grabbed the extrusions and shuffled my poor feet like little animals into nooks and leaned on them to see if they’d take me, striving for the right pace, slow enough that I would not fall, quick enough that this would be over soon.

—

It was. I was there in the dark beyond the gap.

I pushed myself backward off the rock and landed in the rear part of the cave, the hollow beyond the pit, where I’d never been. I lay a long time gasping in the cold of the passage, trying to still my shaking limbs.

It was another country. I stared across at places I’d stood before. I was giddy and proud. I regarded the hole. I turned and went deeper into the hill, pausing to let my eyes adjust in shadows that were dense enough that I hallucinated, only a little, tiny points of light that weren’t there.

I thought of kingdoms and crystal caves and the tunnel continued a few meters and the walls narrowed and I was in a shaft, a wedge which then closed up altogether so I had stone against my chest and my back and I tried a moment to press on, luxuriating in the terror of it, the sense that the hill had paused and would at any moment flex and offhandedly crush me.

So I stopped and pulled out of that embrace and sat with my back to the curving cold wall behind the hole, where my father couldn’t touch me. I looked all the way out to where there was light. So deep in the hill even the waning light of the day glowed like a star. I waited.

—

He’s here to count. There’s a counting game, and I whispered its words as crows and magpies landed at the cave mouth, too effaced by light to be much as silhouettes, nothing more than ragged arrivals at the edge of darkness that I recognized by their calls. I sang a song you sing when you play a game of throwing stones. “Up the wall and down the well and in the boy andout the girl.”

I heard my father.

He called me. I put my hands over my mouth.

He was shouting. My heartbeat was hard enough to make me quake because there he was, a shadow at the entrance, only a little clearer than the fleeing birds. His legs were apart, his hands were up, braced on the top of the stone.

“You know what I hear?” he shouted. “That there’s a man here! Why’s he not long gone with the other tallymen? Why’d you let him in? Know what I hear about this census-taker? This man you’ve let come? Know what I hear?”

He had not gone to the house, he had come straight to the hole, to me. How did he know where I would be, when even I hadn’t? I held my mouth shut with my fingers.

“In town they told me there’s a man who’s come asking questions and they say he came here to speak to you. Where are you? What’ve you said to him? What’s he doing here asking what isn’t his business?”

It was his business. The man had said. My father stepped into the tunnel. He seemed to fill it, to block the light. “Come on!” He shouted louder than I knew he could. “Where are you? They were recalled! Why’s this one still counting? This man thinks he knows what I’ve done? When? Always?”

I didn’t speak or move. I was before him, against the rock, motionless in the dark shadow beyond the hole, a new place. He came to the edge of the rubbish pit and still he didn’t see me there in front of him with my hands up.

“He’s waiting to talk to me?” he shouted. “Is that right? Is that what I hear?”

He turned at last. I watched his back. He was still calling when he walked away.

“I’ll talk, then,” he yelled to the hillside. “You better come find me. You better come talk too. To me.”

I stayed quiet until I was certain he was beyond hearing then slumped and my held breath came out in a long whine. It was a long time until my trembling started to ebb at last and I could whisper another game song.

Very slowly the light in the cave mouth waned and I was more able to see the entrance itself, now that glow no longer effaced it. It was like an open eye, I thought—then I thought, No, it’s like a closed eye. Abruptly and precisely it was like the oval shape I see when I shut my eyes tight, the ebbing red glow like an opening leading into or out of something. I closed my eyes then but it was too dark to clearly see that vision that my body would conjure out of blood and the inside of skin when light hit it, but I’d seen it so often, examined it so carefully, that it wasn’t hard for me to call to mind.

If I could squeeze my lids so tight that it almost brought me a headache—for long enough, in a bright enough place—the image would open with hazy edges like something living and particular and it would leave within its center a smaller oval presence, floating.

I’d spent years making this appear in my inner eyes, and when I did so I would think myself in a cave looking out at a red sunset. Floating there in the cave mouth, I would imagine a boulder blocking all but the edge of my view.

I opened my eyes in a real cave, for a glimpse at the boulderless entrance beyond the split. It was filled with twilight. I closed my eyes again.

After a time I heard a scuffing, then laborious breaths.

—

“How did you get over there?”

It was the census-taker’s voice. It was strained and not without admiration.

“I see you,” he said.

He hissed as he breathed. I heard his burdened steps.

“Now,” he said. He spoke in little bursts. “Don’t,” he said, “open,” he said, “your eyes.”

He didn’t stagger. He trod slowly and deliberately and with care. “Keep your eyes closed,” he said. “What do you see?”

“The entrance to a tunnel,” I said without hesitation. “Like this one but red.”

“What else?”

“A rock floating in the middle.” This wasn’t true: I couldn’t see that now, only vague dark forms. If I’d been older and seen more things in the world they might have put me in mind of fleeting deep-sea things.

“Tell me about the rock,” he said. He hefted something. I heard a burden fall to the ground. “Now look carefully inside your eyes and tell me what you see there. Don’t look here. Do you promise me?”

“It’s like an egg.” I considered what I’d see floating in the cave mouth behind my eyes. “It’s the shape of an egg . . .”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

He grunted in satisfaction and exhaled and I heard the scrape of a mass pushed forward.

“Tell me,” he said, “what you want to see.”

That caught me up short. I had nothing to say. Which meant there was a silence during which I could hear him shoving.

“Anything,” he prompted.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe—anything?”

“Anything!” he said. “Wait now,” he said. “Eyes very closed. Quiet now one second.”

He hissed and I heard stones pattering and the sharp ricochets as they bounced below me and then a scraping roll and several hard diminishing thumps and a crack below as something heavy fell.

The last of it was replaced by silence.

I kept my eyes closed. I heard the man softly clap his hands. I heard his feet on the tunnel floor.

“All right,” he said. “Look at me.”

I opened my eyes.

—

He stood on the edge of the pit. He held his hands out above it, opening and closing his fingers to rid them of dirt.

He looked at me, perhaps kindly. Patiently.

“How did you get over there?” he said. “Can you get back?”

I went to the cave wall. I didn’t want to hesitate in front of him. I set out to cross it again by those handholds.

The man reached out and plucked me from the wall when I was only halfway done. He made me gasp as he braced himself and snatched me. It was so quick, and there I was, blinking foolishly on his side of things, back where I’d always been before.

He put his hand on my shoulder.

“There,” he said.

There were many things I wanted to say, to ask him, but I couldn’t yet speak.

—

It was fully night. I looked past him at the dark side of the hill and the foliage and stone in the sundown. I heard another whinnying honk.

“Your mule,” I said quickly, so he’d know I was just startled, not afraid.

He gestured down the hill and pursed his lips and before he spoke I said, “There’s no one in town for me,” and it was he who was startled this time. He looked at me with interest and care.

“I had . . .” I said, and thought of Samma and of Drobe and didn’t know how to explain them. On the bridge, Samma might soon hook for bats, at least. “One can’t do any more for me and one’s gone,” I said. “Drobe’s his name.”

That made the man look away from me, down the dark slopes. He seemed to hold his breath.

At which, though I’d been about to tell him more, I stopped. Wherever he was now I had no more to say about poor Drobe.

“There’s no one,” I said in the end.

The man nodded and released his breath and walked out of the cave and waited where the hill began.

“Do you have food in your house?” he said.

“You can’t come in.”

“I know. You’re good at rules. That’s good. I was thinking of you, for the food. Do you have something?”

“Yes.”

“And you could . . .” he said, and got lost in thought.

“So,” he said eventually, hurriedly. “Like I said, sometimes there are tasks arising—any jobs that the numbers tell me need doing. It’s my job to do them. We had trouble where I come from. Fighting. What we realized is that the more you know about your people, the better. That’s why I go counting.

“I had someone who worked for me.” He spoke carefully. “But she listened to tattle. About me. And in the end she took off with records and messages that weren’t hers to take. She’s gone now. Papers refiled.

“I need a replacement.

“They told me about your father and mother and they told me about you. Law goes through the blood a bit. I’ll mark you in my books whatever happens, which makes you my business, and makes the books your business too. You could learn them.”

He stopped. I willed him to continue.

“I need an intern,” he said. “Would you like to come with me?”

I said, “Yes.”

The man walked down the hill by a route I’d never have taken. I followed him to a crag. He showed me the lights of the town and the darkness of the other hill beyond them and the gorge yawning below, and the bridge. There was a glow of neon, somewhere with places open late. A district on the other side that I didn’t recognize from where we were, that was like somewhere I’d never seen, somewhere just opened.

“I could teach you,” he said. “To do what I do.”

“An apprentice,” I said.

“No. A trainee. I’ll train you. We’ll be colleagues.” I’d come to understand that word. “If you come to work with me we’ll be in the same department. I’ll be your line manager.”

“Where’s yours?”

He frowned. “A long way away back home.”

“What’ll happen?” I said.

At first he didn’t answer. We walked back to my house. Then he said, “Hey,” when it came into view, so I quickly turned to listen.

He said, “Will you give me your attention? If you work with me you might hear difficult things but I need you to stay focused. Think you can do that? And it might be scary sometimes. Can you be brave?

“There’s—an agent—of something—who’s been trailing me a long time.” He shook his head. “Trying to catch me up, saying things. It can trick you. Issuing good forgeries, using the right language. I have to keep ahead of it. If someone told you stories about me, would you believe them?”

I shook my head when I understood that was what he required.

“I do have this authority. To make this count. So will you.”

He smiled and stilled my new unease. I was eager to make this count, as he said.

“Bring what you want,” he said, pointing me into the house. “What you can.”

One more looking through the windows. Two shirts. What books I could find. Samma’s little knife, which I stared at, which I’d forgotten. I went through every room. Some oatcakes. Two pencils.

In my father’s workroom I looked at the table all mucky with metal dust. The room felt saturated with his presence, felt like he was speaking in it.

I didn’t take any of his keys.

Tucked behind his worktable was the message in looped blue ink that was or was not my mother’s. I blinked to see it there. That I took.

In the upstairs room I used the knife to score around the edges of the image I’d drawn on the wallpaper. I teased with the point and tried to lift my animals off the wall to carry them with me. But the glue was too strong and the paper came off in strips and they tore away.

I took the house key from the hook in the kitchen. It should have been dark when I came out but it was as if there was gray light under the hill’s stones.

The man fetched his mule. It met my eyes in challenge. “What do you have?” he said. I started to justify everything I carried but he just opened a pannier for me to put it in.

“My goat!” I said. I ran to it and it hawed and hustled me.

“You should bring it,” the man said, giving it a wave of welcome.

“You took the other one,” I said.

He frowned. He shook his head.

“I wouldn’t steal,” he said.

“Who took it, then?” I said.

“There’s no shortage of thieves.”

“I thought you took it. I thought I heard you shoot.”

“You might have done. But,” he said then, “not your goat.”

I closed the door of my house. I locked it. “You came here because I was here, didn’t you?” I said. I looked at the key I held.

“Wait,” I said.

I ran to where I’d buried the bottle. It was too heavy to bring. I couldn’t let those remains molder without me. I couldn’t bring myself to smash that thick glass even had I the strength. I pulled it out of the earth and shook it and the bones rattled.

You could put a bird’s egg in there and let it grow in the glass. Drobe hadn’t said if anyone had ever put a baby in a bottle and let it continue. You could. Push food in, teach it through the glass, clean it out. If you were strong enough. You could grow a man in there, a woman, in the glass.

I didn’t smash the bottle but I did at last upend it and scatter the bones.

I put my house key into the bottle and stopped it up again and nestled it carefully in a hollow of dried weeds and stone, where the bones it had contained could watch it.

He said, “Let’s put this place out of our sight.”

Halfway between what had been my house and the bridgetown the man clicked within his throat and veered off the path.

I was so surprised I stopped at the edge of the rough and watched him. He turned to face me and walked backward to keep up with his mule. He beckoned as he went so I stepped after him among the stones, pulling my goat. It came, complaining.

“Careful,” the man said. “We’re going wherever there are people to count.” The mule sniffed but I thought it sounded happy.

The coming darkness and the picking of the plant life against my ragged trousers and the sway of our step-by-step descent narcotized me so I felt myself retreat behind my eyes, watching from a long way back, listening to my own body until after some hours at the start of deep night as we approached a spreading canopy, the foothills and the hill’s forested surrounds, the census-taker woke me for a startled moment by lifting me to put me in the saddle, nestled between bags. I fell asleep again, proper asleep, at once.

Much later I lurched half out of a bad dream with a cry, shaking, my hands clutching for something. Perhaps the animals had sounded. I don’t think so.

We were in the wooded lowland, I realized. We were off the hill.

I looked still sleepily at the flat land that somehow did not shock me alert, or all the way awake.

This Is My Catechism, it says in my second book, a book started, confiscated, pilfered, regained, and that I’ve inherited, that my boss taught me slowly to read, the few scraps left of which I go over many times, and ultimately in which now I write.

And there’d come to be a lot to write, a diaspora of which to make sense. An aftermath of war and commerce. Numbers to run, in as many kinds of places as there are places, cities you could call invisible or uneasy or beleaguered, cities about which I won’t even start to write here, in this part of my second book that can only be a prologue. There would be functions to apply according to instructions, which I can do without insubordination.

My line manager rarely speaks about my predecessor.

It wasn’t my catechism that fronts this, to which I’ve at last responded, with my five words on two lines, and with all of this; it was hers, the message she needed to give me, to give whoever came after her. It is mine now, though. Written with her unorthodox precision and inserted at the start of what would become my second book too, I’ve keyed it many times with the muffled typewriter, with its hacking bird sound: I write it again now, in full, by hand.

The Hope Is So:

Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets.

Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize

Interests. So

Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends.

“I dreamed of the hole,” I murmured. I rolled with the mule. I heard the man and his voice calmed me. He was close and I was unafraid.

I dreamed of the hole, I said. I remember saying it, but I don’t remember the dream exactly, though all my memories before that moment and after—forever after, you might say—had and have to them a must and coldness that can only have come from inside a hill. I’ve supposed that these recollections are what make me fretful at introspective times, so I believe what I said was true, but too, I think I dreamed of another city than that conical one of the discarded, that I’d visited that place I’d started to draw between the flowers on the wall, the uncertain charcoal city bustling with citizens of endless kinds and business, the limits of which spread out so every country I would ultimately come to, in which to count those I’d learn are my scattered compatriots and my business, would be in its outskirts, and I according to some purpose looking for the message left for me there, and counting there too.

There were rises in the distance, against the clouded sky behind us. I counted absences in my head. One of the rises must have been the hill, with its counter-hill, and its bridge, from where I’d come, from which my manager and I were just newly descended.

THE BALLAD OF BLACK TOM

Victor LaValle

For H. P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings

PART 1

Tommy Tester

1

PEOPLE WHO MOVE TO NEW YORK always make the same mistake. They can’t see the place. This is true of Manhattan, but even the outer boroughs, too, be it Flushing Meadows in Queens or Red Hook in Brooklyn. They come looking for magic, whether evil or good, and nothing will convince them it isn’t here. This wasn’t all bad, though. Some New Yorkers had learned how to make a living from this error in thinking. Charles Thomas Tester for one.

The morning of most importance began with a trip from Charles’s apartment in Harlem. He’d been hired to make a delivery to a house out in Queens. He shared the crib in Harlem with his ailing father, Otis, a man who’d been dying ever since his wife of twenty-one years expired. They’d had one child, Charles Thomas, and even though he was twenty and exactly the age for independence, he played the role of dutiful son. Charles worked to support his dying dad. He hustled to provide food and shelter and a little extra to lay on a number from time to time. God knows he didn’t make any more than that.

A little after 8:00 a.m., he left the apartment in his gray flannel suit; the slacks were cuffed but scuffed and the sleeves conspicuously short. Fine fabric, but frayed. This gave Charles a certain look. Like a gentleman without a gentleman’s bank account. He picked the brown leather brogues with nicked toes. Then the seal-brown trooper hat instead of the fedora. The trooper hat’s brim showed its age and wear, and this was good for his hustle, too. Last, he took the guitar case, essential to complete the look. He left the guitar itself at home with his bedridden father. Inside he carried only a yellow book, not much larger than a pack of cards.

As Charles Thomas Tester left the apartment on West 144th Street, he heard his father plucking at the strings in the back bedroom. The old man could spend half a day playing that instrument and singing along to the radio at his bedside. Charles expected to be back home before midday, his guitar case empty and his wallet full.

“Who’s that writing?” his father sang, voice hoarse but the more lovely for it. “I said who’s that writing?”

Before leaving, Charles sang back the last line of the chorus. “John the Revelator.” He was embarrassed by his voice, not tuneful at all, at least when compared with his dad’s.

In the apartment Charles Thomas Tester went by Charles, but on the street everyone knew him as Tommy. Tommy Tester, always carrying a guitar case. This wasn’t because he aspired to be a musician; in fact he could barely remember a handful of songs and his singing voice might be described, kindly, as wobbly. His father, who’d made a living as a bricklayer, and his mother, who’d spent her life working as a domestic, had loved music. Dad played guitar and Mother could really stroll on a piano. It was only natural that Tommy Tester ended up drawn to performing, the only tragedy being that he lacked talent. He thought of himself as an entertainer. There were others who would have called him a scammer, a swindler, a con, but he never thought of himself this way. No good charlatan ever did.

In the clothes he’d picked, he sure looked the part of the dazzling, down-and-out musician. He was a man who drew notice and enjoyed it. He walked to the train station as if he were on his way to play a rent party alongside Willie “The Lion” Smith. And Tommy had played with Willie’s band once. After a single song Willie threw Tommy out. And yet Tommy toted that guitar case like the businessmen proudly carrying their briefcases off to work now. The streets of Harlem had gone haywire in 1924, with blacks arriving from the South and the West Indies. A crowded part of the city found itself with more folks to accommodate. Tommy Tester enjoyed all this just fine. Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up. Brick and mortar, elevated train tracks, and miles of underground pipe, this city lived; day and night it thrived.

Tommy took up more room than most because of the guitar case. At the 143rd Street entrance he had to lift the case over his head while climbing the stairs to the elevated track. The little yellow book inside thumped but didn’t weigh much. He rode all the way down to 57th Street and there transferred for the Roosevelt Avenue Corona Line of the BMT. It was his second time going out to Queens, the first being when he’d taken the special job that would be completed today.

The farther Tommy Tester rode into Queens the more conspicuous he became. Far fewer Negroes lived in Flushing than in Harlem. Tommy bumped his hat slightly lower on his head. The conductor entered the car twice, and both times he stopped to make conversation with Tommy. Once to ask if he was a musician, knocking the guitar case as if it were his own, and the second time to ask if Tommy had missed his stop. The other passengers feigned disinterest even as Tommy saw them listening for his replies. Tommy kept the answers simple: “Yes, sir, I play guitar” and “No, sir, got a couple more stops still.” Becoming unremarkable, invisible, compliant—these were useful tricks for a black man in an all-white neighborhood. Survival techniques. At the last stop, Main Street, Tommy Tester got off with all the others—Irish and German immigrants mostly—and made his way down to street level. A long walk from here.

The whole way Tommy marveled at the broad streets and garden apartments. Though the borough had grown, modernized greatly since its former days as Dutch and British farmland, to a boy like Tommy, raised in Harlem, all this appeared rustic and bewilderingly open. The open arms of the natural world worried him as much as the white people, both so alien to him. When he passed whites on the street, he kept his gaze down and his shoulders soft. Men from Harlem were known for their strut, a lion’s stride, but out here he hid it away. He was surveyed but never stopped. His foot-shuffling disguise held up fine. And finally, amid the blocks and blocks of newly built garden apartments, Tommy Tester found his destination.

A private home, small and nearly lost in a copse of trees, the rest of the block taken up by a mortuary. The private place grew like a tumor on the house of the dead. Tommy Tester turned up the walkway and didn’t even have to knock. Before he’d climbed the three steps, the front door cracked open. A tall, gaunt woman stood in the doorway, half in shadows. Ma Att. That was the name he had for her, the only one she answered to. She’d hired him like this. On this doorstep, through a half-open door. Word had traveled to Harlem that she needed help and he was the type of man who could acquire what she needed. Summoned to her door and given a job without being invited in. The same would happen now. He understood, or could at least guess, at the reason. What would the neighbors say if this woman had Negroes coming freely into her home?

Tommy undid the latch of the guitar case and held it open. Ma Att leaned forward so her head peeked out into the daylight. Inside lay the book, no larger than the palm of Tommy’s hand. Its front and back covers were sallow yellow. Three words had been etched on both sides. Zig Zag Zig. Tommy didn’t know what the words meant, nor did he care to know. He hadn’t read this book, never even touched it with his bare hands. He’d been hired to transport the little yellow book, and that was all he’d done. He’d been the right man for this task, in part, because he knew he shouldn’t do any more than that. A good hustler isn’t curious. A good hustler only wants his pay.

Ma Att looked from the book, there in the case, and back to him. She seemed slightly disappointed.

“You weren’t tempted to look inside?” she asked.

“I charge more for that,” Tommy said.

She didn’t find him funny. She sniffled once, that’s all. Then she reached into the guitar case and slipped the book out. She moved so quickly the book hardly had a chance to catch even a single ray of sunlight, but still, as the book was pulled into the darkness of Ma Att’s home, a faint trail of smoke appeared in the air. Even glancing contact with daylight had set the book on fire. She slapped at the cover once, snuffing out the spark.

“Where did you find it?” she asked.

“There’s a place in Harlem,” Tommy said, his voice hushed. “It’s called the Victoria Society. Even the hardest gangsters in Harlem are afraid to go there. It’s where people like me trade in books like yours. And worse.”

Here he stopped. Mystery lingered in the air like the scent of scorched book. Ma Att actually leaned forward as if he’d landed a hook into her lip. But Tommy said no more.

“The Victoria Society,” she whispered. “How much would you charge to take me in?”

Tommy scanned the old woman’s face. How much might she pay? He wondered at the sum, but still he shook his head. “I’d feel terrible if you got hurt in there. I’m sorry.”

Ma Att watched Tommy Tester, calculating how bad a place this Victoria Society could be. After all, a person who trafficked in books like the little yellow one in her hand was hardly the frail kind.

Ma Att reached out and tapped the mailbox, affixed to the outside wall, with one finger. Tommy opened it to find his pay. Two hundred dollars. He counted through the cash right there, in front of her. Enough for six months’ rent, utilities, food and all.

“You shouldn’t be in this neighborhood when the sun goes down,” Ma Att said. She didn’t sound concerned for him.

“I’ll be back in Harlem before lunchtime. I wouldn’t suggest you visit there, day or night.” He tipped his cap, snapped the empty guitar case shut, and turned away from Ma Att’s door.

On the way back to the train, Tommy Tester decided to find his friend Buckeye. Buckeye worked for Madame St. Clair, the numbers queen of Harlem. Tommy should play Ma Att’s address tonight. If his number came up, he’d have enough to buy himself a better guitar case. Maybe even his own guitar.

2

“THAT’S A FINE GIT-FIDDLE.”

Tommy Tester didn’t even have to look up to know he’d found a new mark. He simply had to see the quality of the man’s shoes, the bottom end of a fine cane. He plucked at his guitar, still getting used to the feel of the new instrument, and hummed instead of sang because he sounded more like a talented musician when he didn’t open his mouth.

The trip out to Queens last month had inspired Tommy Tester to travel more. The streets of Harlem could get pretty crowded with singers and guitar players, men on brass instruments, and every one of them put his little operation to shame. Where Tommy had three songs in his catalog, each of those men had thirty, three hundred. But on the way home from Ma Att’s place, he’d realized he hadn’t passed a single strummer along the way. The singer on the street might’ve been more common in Harlem and down in Five Points, or more modern parts of Brooklyn, but so much of this city remained—essentially—a bit of jumped-up countryside. None of the other Harlem players would take a train out to Queens or rural Brooklyn for the chance of getting money from the famously thrifty immigrants homesteading in those parts. But a man like Tommy Tester—who only put on a show of making music—certainly might. Those outer-borough bohunks and Paddys probably didn’t know a damn thing about serious jazz, so Tommy’s knockoff version might still stand out.

On returning from Ma Att’s place, he’d talked all this through with his father. Otis Tester, yet one more time, offered to get him work as a bricklayer, join the profession. A kind gesture, a loving father’s attempt, but not one that worked on his son. Tommy Tester would never say it out loud—it’d hurt the old man too much—but working construction had given his father gnarled hands and a stooped back, nothing more. Otis Tester had earned a Negro’s wage, not a white man’s, as was common in 1924, and even that money was withheld if the foreman sometimes wanted a bit more in his pocket. What was a Negro going to do? Complain to whom? There was a union, but Negroes weren’t allowed to join. Less money and erratic pay were the job. Just as surely as mixing the mortar when laborers didn’t show up to do it. The companies that’d hired Otis Tester, that’d always assured him he was one of them, had filled his job the same day his body finally broke down. Otis, a proud man, had tried to instill a sense of duty in his only child, as had Tommy’s mother. But the lesson Tommy Tester learned instead was that you better have a way to make your own money because this world wasn’t trying to make a Negro rich. As long as Tommy paid their rent and brought home food, how could his father complain? When he played Ma Att’s number, it hit as he dreamed it would, and he bought a fine guitar and case. Now it was common for Tommy and Otis to spend their evenings playing harmonies well into the night. Tommy had even become moderately better with a tune.

Tommy had decided against a return to Flushing, Queens, though. A hustler’s premonition told him he didn’t want to run into Ma Att again. After all, the book he’d given her had been missing one page, hadn’t it? The very last page. Tommy Tester had done this with purpose. It rendered the tome useless, harmless. He’d done this because he knew exactly what he’d been hired to deliver. The Supreme Alphabet. He didn’t have to read through it to be aware of its power. Tommy doubted very much the old woman wanted the little yellow book for casual reading. He hadn’t touched the book with his bare hands and hadn’t read a single word inside, but there were still ways to get the last sheet of parchment free safely. In fact that page remained in Tommy’s apartment, folded into a square, slipped right inside the body of the old guitar he always left with his father. Tommy had been warned not to read the pages, and he’d kept to that rule. His father had been the one to tear out the last sheet, and his father could not read. His illiteracy served as a safeguard. This is how you hustle the arcane. Skirt the rules but don’t break them.

Today Tommy Tester had come to the Reformed Church in Flatbush, Brooklyn; as far from home as Flushing, and lacking an angry sorceress. He wore the same outfit as when he went to visit Ma Att, his trooper hat upside down at his feet. He’d set himself up in front of the church’s iron-railed graveyard. A bit of theater in this choice, but the right kind of person would be drawn to this picture. The black jazz man in his frayed dignity singing softly at the burying ground.

Tommy Tester knew two jazz songs and one bit of blues. He played the blues tune for two hours because it sounded more somber. He didn’t bother with the words any longer, only the chords and a humming accompaniment. And then the old man with the fine shoes and the cane appeared. He listened quietly for a time before he spoke.

“That’s a fine git-fiddle,” the man finally said.

And it was the term—git-fiddle—that assured Tommy his hustle had worked. As simple as that. The old man wanted Tommy to know he could speak the language. Tommy played a few more chords and ended without flourish. Finally he looked up to find the older man flushed, grinning. The man was round and short, and his hair blew out wildly like a dandelion’s soft white blowball. His beard was coming in, bristly and gray. He didn’t look like a wealthy man, but it was the well-off who could afford such a disguise. You had to be rich to risk looking broke. The shoes verified the man’s wealth, though. And his cane, with a handle shaped like an animal head, cast in what looked like pure gold.

“My name is Robert Suydam,” the man said. Then waited, as if the name alone should make Tommy Tester bow. “I am having a party at my home. You will play for my guests. Such dusky tunes will suit the mood.”

“You want me to sing?” Tommy asked. “You want to pay me to sing?”

“Come to my home in three nights.”

Robert Suydam pointed toward Martense Street. The old man lived there in a mansion hidden within a disorder of trees. He promised Tommy five hundred dollars for the job. Otis Tester had never made more than nine hundred in a year. Suydam took out a billfold and handed Tommy one hundred dollars. All ten-dollar bills.

“A retainer,” Suydam said.

Tommy set the guitar flat in its case and accepted the bills, turning them over. 1923 bills. Andrew Jackson appeared on the front. The image of Old Hickory didn’t look directly at Tommy, but glanced aside as if catching sight of something just over Tommy Tester’s right shoulder.

“When you arrive at the house, you must say one word and only this word to gain entrance.”

Tommy stopped counting the money, folded it over twice, and slipped it into the inner pocket of his jacket.

“I can’t promise what will happen if you forget it,” Suydam said, then paused to watch Tommy, assessing him.

“Ashmodai,” Suydam said. “That is the word. Let me hear you say it.”

“Ashmodai,” Tommy repeated.

Robert Suydam tapped the cane on the pavement twice and walked away. Tommy watched him go for three blocks before he picked up his hat and put it on. He clicked the guitar case shut. But before Tommy Tester took even one step toward the train station, he got gripped, hard, on the back of the neck.

Two white men appeared. One was tall and thin, the other tall and wide. Together they resembled the number 10. The wide one kept his hand on Tommy’s neck. He knew this one was a cop, or had been once. Up in Harlem they called this grip John’s Handshake. The thin one stayed two paces back.

The surprise of it all caused Tommy to forget the pose of deference he’d normally adopt when cops stopped him. Instead he acted like himself, his father’s son, a kid from Harlem, a proud man who didn’t take kindly to being given shit.

“You’re coming on a little strong,” he told the wide one.

“And you’re far from home,” the wide one replied.

“You don’t know where I live,” Tommy snapped back.

The wide one reached into Tommy’s coat and removed the ten-dollar bills. “We saw you take these from the old man,” he began. “That old man is part of an ongoing investigation, so this is evidence.”

He slipped the bills into his slacks and watched Tommy to gauge his reaction.

“Police business,” Tommy said coolly, and stopped thinking that the money had ever been his.

The wide one pointed at the thin one. “He’s police. I’m private.”

Tommy looked from the private detective to the cop. Tall and thin and lantern-jawed, his eyes dispassionate and surveying. “Malone,” he finally offered. “And this is . . .”

The wide one cut him off. “He doesn’t need my name. He didn’t need yours, either.”

Malone looked exasperated. This strong-arm routine didn’t seem like his style. Tommy Tester read both men quickly. The private detective had the bearing of a brute while the other one, Malone, appeared too sensitive for a cop’s job. Tommy considered that he’d stayed a few paces back to keep away from the private dick, not Tommy.

“What’s your business with Mr. Suydam?” the private detective asked. He pulled Tommy’s hat off and looked inside as if there might be more money.

“He liked my music,” Tommy said. Then, calm enough now to remember the situation, he added another word quickly. “Sir.”

“I heard your voice,” the private detective said. “Nobody could enjoy that.”

Tommy Tester would’ve liked to argue the point, but even a corrupt, violent brute could be right sometimes. Robert Suydam wasn’t paying five hundred dollars for Tommy’s voice. For what, then?

“Now me and Detective Malone are going to keep strolling with Mr. Suydam, keeping him safe. And you’re going to go back home, isn’t that right? Where’s home?”

“Harlem,” Tommy offered. “Sir.”

“Of course it is,” Malone said quietly.

“Home to Harlem, then,” the private detective added. He set the hat back on Tommy’s head and gave Malone a quick, derisive glance. He turned in the direction where the old man had gone, and only then did Malone step any closer to Tommy. Standing this near, Tommy could sense a kind of sadness in the gaunt officer. His eyes suggested a man disappointed with the world.

Tommy waited before reaching down for his guitar case. No sudden moves in front of even a sullen cop. Just because Malone wasn’t as rough as the private detective didn’t mean he was gentle.

“Why did he give you that money?” Malone asked. “Why really?”

He asked, but seemed to doubt an honest answer would come. Instead there was a set to his lips, and a narrowness in his gaze, that suggested he was probing for an answer to some other question. Tommy worried he’d mention the performance at Suydam’s home in three nights. If they weren’t happy about Tommy talking with Suydam on the street, how would they act upon learning he planned to visit the old man’s home? Tommy lost one hundred dollars to the private detective, but he was damned if he’d give up the promise of four hundred dollars more. He decided to play a role that always worked on whites. The Clueless Negro.

“I cain’t says, suh,” Tommy began. “I’s just a simple geetar man.”

Malone came close to smiling for the first time. “You’re not simple,” he said.

Tommy watched Malone walk off to catch up with the private detective. He looked over his shoulder. “And you’re right to stay out of Queens,” Malone said. “That old woman isn’t happy with what you did to her book!”

Malone walked off and Tommy Tester remained there, feeling exposed—seen—in a way he’d never experienced.

“You’re a cop,” Tommy called. “Can’t you protect me?”

Malone looked back once more. “Guns and badges don’t scare everyone.”

3

TOMMY’S BEST FRIEND, BUCKEYE, arrived in Harlem in 1920 when he was sixteen years old. At fourteen he’d left the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat to work on the Panama Canal, and from Panama made his way to the United States, to Harlem. He arrived expecting to do the same work as he’d done on the canal—construction—but soon found out what Otis Tester had long known: Negroes had no protection. Buckeye broke an ankle at the age of seventeen and found himself out of day labor for two months. When he was ready to return, the job had been filled, and besides that, the ankle never healed well. He couldn’t be on it for long hours, couldn’t tote much weight without it giving out. Soon he found his way to Madame St. Clair and her famous numbers game. She hired him because she needed men from the Caribbean, who knew and would be trusted by the recent West Indian immigrants. Madame St. Clair evolved in changing times, and because of this she thrived. The regular kickbacks to local police also helped. Buckeye met Tommy Tester in this milieu. Tommy played a club where Buckeye made business. One evening Buckeye sidled next to Tommy at the bar and asked where he’d learned to sing so badly. Did he take lessons or was it a natural gift? They became fast friends.

Now Tommy Tester led his father out of their building and down the block. He’d returned home from the encounter with Robert Suydam, with Malone and the private detective, and felt himself in need of a night out. It took time to convince Otis to step out. Otis never left the apartment, hardly left his bedroom. He’d become like a dog gone into the dark so he could die alone, but Tommy had different plans. Or maybe he needed his father too much to let him go easily.

Buckeye left an open invitation for Tommy at the Victoria Society. It was on 137th Street. The walk was a mere seven blocks, but because of his father’s health, it took them half an hour to arrive.

The Victoria Society consisted of three modest rooms on the second floor of an apartment building. It was a Caribbean social club. Down on the street Tommy and Otis were in black Harlem; in the Victoria Society they entered the British West Indies. The flags of every Caribbean nation were fixed to the walls of a long hallway. A much larger Union Jack hung at the far end. At the doorway to the warren of rooms, Tommy Tester had to give Buckeye’s name three times. The greeter at the door remained unmoved until Tommy used Buckeye’s given name, George Hurley. That worked like a spell.

Tommy and Otis followed the greeter at a distance. One of the society’s rooms was reserved for men playing card games or bones; the second showed men in lounge chairs smoking and listening to music played at a respectable volume; and the third had card tables set out with tablecloths and chairs, for meals. Buckeye had invited Tommy to the Victoria Society many times in the years since they’d made friends, but Tommy had never come until now. He felt a sting, like a slap, across his face. This was the place he’d described to Ma Att? The shorthand for a den of crime and sin? The place where Harlem’s worst criminals were too afraid to go?

He’d assumed he knew what kind of place this would be. Buckeye ran numbers for the most famous female gangster in New York City, so why wouldn’t the Victoria Society be like those legendary opium dens? Or had Tommy simply assumed terrible things about this wave of West Indian immigrants? The American Negroes in Harlem got up to awful gossip about those newcomers. And now he’d come to find the Victoria Society might as well be a British tearoom. He felt slightly disappointed. He’d brought his father because he’d meant to show his dad a scandalous night. He’d heard women danced in nearly nothing, so close they practically sat in your lap. Being inside now, seeing this place truly, was like learning another world existed within—or alongside—the world he’d always known. Worse, all this time he’d been too ignorant to realize it. The idea troubled him like a pinched nerve.

Tommy and his dad sat, and the older man blew out a deep breath. Otis spent a long time adjusting himself in the chair to minimize his back pain. He moved like someone ancient. Otis Tester was forty-one years old.

A thin woman came to the table offering dinner she’d made in her kitchen, then brought here to sell. She was Trinidadian. Her dinner plates were already prepared, and she rolled them through the dining room on a cart. Saheena, pineapple chow, and macaroni pie. A bowl of cow heel soup. Tall cups of passion fruit juice. The whole meal, for both men, came to a dollar. Tommy paid.

“I don’t know what any of this mess is,” Otis said, watching the plate in front of him like it might strike. “Why didn’t we go down to Bo’s place?”

Tommy found himself watching the Trinidadian woman because she reminded him of his own mother. That wiry frame and splay-footed walk. Irene Tester, gone four years now. People who knew her well used to call her Michigan because she never could stop talking about the place where her parents came from. She collapsed on a bus, died thirty-seven years old among strangers. Life as a domestic wore her out just as surely as construction did Otis. Tommy looked to his father, wondering if he’d also been thinking the Trinidadian woman looked like Irene, but the old man only stared down at the plates, mystified.

“Come on, now,” Tommy said. “There’s something here you’re going to like.”

Otis scanned the table looking for something he recognized. He lifted a fork and poked at the macaroni pie. “This is just cheese and noodles, yes?”

Tommy Tester sank a fork and knife into his serving. He brought a portion to his mouth and chewed. After swallowing, he nodded, but his father prodded at it anyway, as if he didn’t trust his son. He set the fork down without eating.

“Now, you say this white man is going to pay you how much?”

“Four hundred dollars.”

“All that just to play at his party?” Otis asked. He grabbed the cup of passion fruit juice, brought it to his nose, sniffed, set the drink back down. “All that for you to play at his party?”

Tommy chewed at a bite of the pineapple chow. It was sweet, but the kick of lime juice and hot pepper followed soon after. He gulped his juice to cool his throat.

“That’s what he said.”

Otis raised his hands in the air, held them as far apart as he could.

“That’s the distance between what a white man says to a Negro and what he really means.”

Tommy knew this, of course. Hadn’t he lived twenty years in America already? His whole hustle—entertainment—was predicated on the idea that people had ulterior motives for hiring him.

When he dressed in those frayed clothes and played at the blues man or the jazz man or even the docile Negro, he knew the role bestowed a kind of power upon him. Give people what they expect and you can take from them all that you need. They won’t realize you’ve juiced them until they’re dry. Ma Att had essentially paid him to deliver a worthless item, hadn’t she? If he had to play the role of quasi-gangster to get paid, then so be it. He played the roles needed to enrich his bank account. But all this would sound criminal to Otis. Or demeaning. The man had an outsized opinion of dignity. Nobility didn’t pay well enough to make Tommy want the job.

“I’ll be real careful, Daddy.”

Otis Tester watched his son quietly. The rest of the dining room grew louder as more tables filled, but a kind of quiet, a bubble of reserve, surrounded their table. Otis was father to a twenty-year-old black boy who’d blithely explained he’d be going out to Flatbush, in the middle of the night, into the home of a white man. He might as well have told his father he planned to go wrestle a bear.

“When I left Oklahoma City,” Otis Tester said, “I rode on the railroads. Hobo’d all the way east.”

Not the first time, nor the five-hundredth time, Tommy Tester had heard this story. Tommy ate to keep from expressing his disappointment. Hadn’t Otis heard the most vital detail? Four hundred dollars.

“I avoided crossing Arkansas,” Otis continued. “Whether you were Negro, white, or a red man they were pretty rough on hoboing in Arkansas. They had chain gangs, you know. I went to East St. Louis, over to Evansville. I got taken off the train once in Decatur. I wasn’t making a direct route here. I was real young so I had the need to see much more than my final destination.”

Finally Otis Tester ate the macaroni pie, as if storytelling had sparked his appetite. He took one bite, chewed cautiously, but after he swallowed the first, he chomped down two more.

“Like I said, they took me off the train in Decatur. And that’s when it turned out I had to use my head.” Now he took the risk of a drink. The passion fruit juice clearly pleased him. He sipped slowly, then set the drink down. “I had to use this.”

Otis Tester unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt right there in the dining room. Tommy stiffened, feeling like a five-year-old whose daddy was about to shame him in public. But before he could scold his father, or reach over and try to cover Otis’s exposed skin, the old man pulled something from around his neck. It was hanging there on a coarse string. He slipped it off and clutched it in one rough hand while he buttoned his shirt again. Tommy leaned forward trying to see what his dad held. Otis Tester extended his hand, opened it.

A straight razor lay in his palm.

“I carried this with me the whole time I rode the trains,” Otis said. “White man, Negro, or Red Indian was not going to get an easy shot at me.”

He knocked one end of the razor on the table loudly.

“In Decatur, I made some people understand this,” Otis said.

Tommy looked from the razor to his father. All his life he’d known his dad and mom as pillars that solidly, stolidly, held up the roof of Tommy’s world. Reliable, supportive, but not particularly remarkable people. To think of Otis now, suddenly, as a teenage boy who’d defended himself with this weapon . . . That past became yet another world, a new dimension, of which Tommy had just become aware. Again, the pinch, the pain, of such a revelation.

Tommy Tester took the straight razor from his father’s hand. When he did, he could see the man’s thick fingers trembling.

“You’re a grown man and I can’t stop you from making your way,” Otis said. “I wouldn’t even want to. But you don’t walk into that white man’s house unarmed or unaware. Anything goes bad, you get out, and you get back to me.”

Tommy Tester nodded but didn’t speak. He simply couldn’t right then.

“I don’t care if you’ve got to spill blood to do it, but you get out of that house at the end of the job and you get back to me.”

Otis meant to sound stern, determined, commanding, but Tommy realized he’d never before seen his father look so scared.

“You hear me?” Otis asked.

“Yes, sir,” Tommy finally said.

They ate quietly, and when the food was done, they left the Victoria Society. Down a flight of stairs and back to Harlem. In three nights Tommy would visit Robert Suydam’s mansion. He understood the journey now as travel to another universe. No wonder his father felt fear; his son was about go so far.

“Why’d you bring that razor with you tonight?” Tommy said. “I never knew you owned the thing.”

“Told me you was taking me to that damn Victoria Society,” Otis said, almost laughing. “Thought I might need the strop if those Caribbeans got wild. But I think you and me was the most dangerous Negroes in the place!”

Tommy had one arm looped through his father’s to help the old man walk. His other hand was in his slacks clutching the weapon.

“If you’re going to play at that party,” Otis Tester said as they ambled back uptown, “I’ve got one more song you should learn. It’s old, but it’s got something to it. You understand what I’m trying to tell you? The razor is one way I want to arm you. This song is the other. Your mother taught it to me. Conjure music. We’ll practice for the next three days till you’ve got it.”

“Yes, Pop,” Tommy Tester said.

Late night in Harlem on a Friday and the streets more full than at rush hour. Tommy Tester cherished the closeness, to his father and to all the bodies on the sidewalks, in their cars, riding buses, perched on stoops. The traffic and human voices merged into a terrific buzzing that seemed to lift Tommy and Otis, a song that accompanied them—carried them—all the way home.

4

THREE DAYS HAD PASSED, and this was the third night, and Tommy Tester left the safety of Harlem. He rode the same route out to Flatbush as he’d done when he met Robert Suydam, but now the journey felt more threatening because the sun was down. If he’d stood out among the train riders in the early morning, he might as well have been carrying a star in one hand rather than his guitar case now. Throughout the train car people squinted at him. At four different times white men asked him exactly where he was going. These weren’t offers to help him get there. If he didn’t have an exact location—Robert Suydam’s mansion on Martense Street—he believed he would’ve been thrown off the train. Or under it.

When he arrived at the station, he was trailed by three loud-talking young men. The loud talk concerned Tommy. Tommy tried his best not to listen to it because he knew they were trying to scare him. If he shouted back, turned to fight, that would be the end of the night, no money earned, just a trip to jail. The streets of Flatbush became less crowded, more residential, and the young men quickened their pace. Tommy wore his father’s razor around his neck like an amulet, but even that wouldn’t help against three men.

By the time Tommy reached the grove of trees surrounding Suydam’s house, the three young men were near enough that Tommy felt them at his heels. One walked so close the toes of one foot repeatedly kicked at the back of Tommy’s guitar case. Tommy saw the mansion now, two stories and dimly lit, glowing from within the trees. If he’d been alone, he would’ve found the sight frightening, but because of his escorts, Tommy ran toward it. He crossed onto Robert Suydam’s property; if he made it to the door, he might be let in before the white boys landed any blows. He didn’t understand he was running until he was out of breath.

When he looked back, the three young men no longer followed. They remained at the fence line of the property. Even stranger, they no longer watched him. Instead they watched the Suydam home. They cowered before it. Tommy finally saw that these boys were younger than him. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. Children. Studying the Suydam home with fear.

Relief played from Tommy’s eyes to his heels. Tommy crouched, looking for a stone. He found one the size of a baseball and weighed it in his palm. He set down the guitar. He wanted to hit the biggest of the three young men. They still hadn’t returned their gazes to him. It was as if the house had mesmerized them. No better moment than this to take aim. He made a wish that the rock take out one of their eyes.

Then the door of the mansion opened. Barely a squeak behind Tommy but enough to make all three boys literally hop. They bolted like kittens, wriggly and mewling. Behind Tommy there was a groan as someone stepped out the front door and onto the boards of the mansion’s wraparound porch.

“If you blind one of them, the police will be called.”

This wasn’t said sternly, almost with amusement. Tommy Tester turned to find Robert Suydam coming down the steps, one hand out. Tommy gave him the rock and Robert Suydam weighed it in his hand as Tommy had done. Rather than throwing it back into the dirt he slipped the stone into the pocket of his coat. Now he looked at Tommy expectantly. The moment lingered. Suydam waited. Tommy took a full minute to remember the word he’d been instructed to use.

“Ashmodai,” Tommy finally said quietly.

Robert Suydam nodded and turned and walked back up the porch steps. When he entered the mansion, he left the front door open for Tommy to follow.

5

THE CLOAK OF TREES around the mansion did a great deal to hide its age, its infirmity, but inside there was no cover. The floorboards were old and poorly maintained; they looked splintered and parched. When Tommy entered the home, the entryway was lit by a single electric lamp, and he found the same in all three rooms on the first floor. This caused the edges of each room to lie in shadows, and it became difficult for Tommy to really understand the dimensions of each space. As if the mansion’s interior was larger than its exterior. The smell of age, meaning undifferentiated time, had settled throughout the home, a musty odor, as if the winds of the present never blew through here.

Robert Suydam led Tommy down the long first-floor hallway, and Tommy clutched the handle of his guitar case as if it were a guideline leading back to the front door, down the steps, out the yard, out of Flatbush, back onto the train, to Harlem, and by his father’s side. While they walked, the old man almost trotting, Tommy felt his guitar case jiggling as it had when the white boys had been kicking at it as they followed him. This spurred a suspicion that someone else—something else—was following him now. Twice the case almost flew out of his grip, but Tommy couldn’t make himself look back into the darkness of the long hall. Instead he only followed faster.

Suydam opened a set of double doors and entered a room so brightly lit Tommy squinted as he followed. As soon as he was inside, Suydam pushed one of the doors shut, then the other. Just before he shut the second, Suydam peeked into the hall. Tommy felt, distinctly, there’d been another presence trailing behind him. Then Suydam actually spoke—a single mumbled word, a command?—before the old man shut door and locked it.

Only then could Tommy turn to take in this room with its high ceilings. It had to be the size of the entire apartment Tommy and Otis shared. It might be larger. It had three towering walls of inset shelving, every one full of books. In addition to the books on the shelves, there were others spread across the floor, towers of tomes stacked as high as Tommy’s shoulder.

“I’ve read them all,” Suydam said. “And yet there’s still so much I must learn.”

Tommy stood the guitar case by his side like an upright rifle. “I’d say you earned yourself a break.”

Suydam shook his head faintly. “If only there were time for rest.”

Suydam walked to the far end of the room, toward the high windows running along one wall. A single great chair stood by the sill. Suydam sat in it. His feet dangled, not touching the floor. A strange sight because he wasn’t a short man. The chair didn’t appear oversized, either. The old man’s shoes swayed, three inches from the floorboards, and Tommy watched them, confused by the incongruity. Then, as if Suydam had noticed Tommy’s interest, the feet lowered to the ground. But Suydam hadn’t moved the rest of his body. Instead it was as if the old man had, by some power, made his legs grow at will. It was so odd, visually, Tommy actually became nauseated. Tommy looked away and back again and, sure enough, Suydam’s feet were flat on the floor. He waved a hand to catch Tommy’s attention.

“Won’t you play now?” he asked. There was an edge to his tone, as if trying to get Tommy’s mind onto something other than the strangeness—shape-shifting—he swore he’d just seen.

Tommy looked around the library. The only other guests seemed to be the books.

“The party is tomorrow night,” Suydam said. “But I felt like meeting with you tonight first. You didn’t think I was paying you that much money to play for one evening, did you?”

“No, sir,” Tommy said. “Whatever you like.” He opened the guitar case and took out the instrument.

He had, in fact, expected to be paid to play for one evening because that’s exactly what the man promised three days earlier. But a wealthy man’s reality is remade at will.

Suydam reached into a coat pocket and revealed a fold of bills so thick it choked down all of Tommy Tester’s pride. Suydam set it on the windowsill, then grinned at Tommy. Tommy strummed and played as expected. The old man stared out the windows.

Mercifully, the man wanted to talk more than he wanted Tommy to play. Tommy had only four songs in his repertoire, after all, including the one his father recently taught him. After playing for nearly thirty minutes, Tommy’s fingers and shoulders, the small of his back, all ached terribly. He slowed his playing, strummed lightly, until he simply hummed in the cavernous old library. Finally Suydam—who hadn’t once looked away from the great windows—cleared his throat and spoke.

“And it is my belief that an awful lore is not yet dead,” he said.

Suydam wasn’t speaking to Tommy, just reciting something half remembered. But Tommy, slightly dazed from the strangeness of this engagement, still responded.

“I’m sorry, sir?” he asked, and instantly regretted it.

Robert Suydam turned away from the windows irritably and glared at Tommy as if he’d caught a burglar breaking into his home. Normally, when a white man gave Tommy this look, he had a series of useful defenses. Looking down at his feet abjectly often worked; a smile might sometimes do. Tommy tried the latter.

“Well, what could you be grinning at?” Suydam demanded.

A third option, considered in a panic, was to get his father’s razor out and cut this old man’s throat, take the money, and flee. But by now, well past eleven, Tommy couldn’t imagine making it to the train station. A Negro walking through this white neighborhood at damn near midnight? He might as well be Satan strolling through Eden. And if they found him with that wad of money, well, he’d be fortunate if the police were called. They might only beat him, then take him to jail. Much worse would happen if he got snatched by a mob. No razor then. He was, in essence, trapped here until morning.

“I asked you something,” Suydam said. “And when I speak I expect a response.”

No good deflections left, so Tommy Tester raised his head and returned Suydam’s gaze. Might as well try honesty.

“I’m confused,” he said.

“Of course you are,” Suydam said. “The veil of ignorance has been set over your face since birth. Shall I pull it free?”

Tommy pursed his lips, trying to decide his best response. So far honesty had worked. At least the old man wasn’t glaring at him.

“It’s your money,” Tommy said.

Robert Suydam clapped. “Do you know why I hired you? Why I was drawn to you three days past? I could see you. And I don’t mean this charade.” Suydam extended one hand and gestured from Tommy’s purposefully scuffed boots to his well-worn suit to his guitar. “I saw that you understood illusion. And that you, in your way, were casting a powerful spell. I admired it. I felt a kinship with you, I suppose. Because I, too, understand illusion.”

Suydam rose from his chair, and faced the wall of tall windows. The old man tapped at one pane lightly. Because of all the lights inside the library, it was impossible to see outside into the night. The windows had turned into a sort of screen reflecting Tommy and Suydam and the expansive library. Suydam waved Tommy over, and as he walked closer Tommy thought he saw movement behind him. The reflected image of the library’s double doors buckled twice, as if someone were in the hallway, trying to push them open. Tommy turned quickly, but the doors weren’t moving now. Tommy couldn’t make himself turn back to Suydam yet.

“Your people,” Robert Suydam began. “Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It’s all sound and filth and spiritual putrescence.”

If anything could pull Tommy Tester’s attention from the door it would be this. He turned to Robert Suydam expecting to find the man sneering, but the man had one hand on his belly, patting it gently. He looked up and to the right, like a man trying to remember a speech.

“Policemen despair of order or reform and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside world from the contagion,” he continued.

Tommy held the neck of the guitar tightly. “You talking about Harlem?”

The spell broke. “What?” Suydam said. “Oh damn you! Why did you interrupt?”

“I’m trying to understand what in the hell place you’re talking about. It doesn’t sound like anywhere I’ve ever lived.”

No applause for honesty this time.

“Mind your tone,” Suydam said. He covered the money with one hand. “You haven’t been paid yet.”

This motherfucker, Tommy Tester thought and took one step closer to the old man.

Even Robert Suydam, for all his authority, sensed a change in the room. For a moment he looked like a man who realized a meteorite was about to crash into his planet. He raised an open hand, a gesture of peace.

“Tomorrow night you’ll be playing at my party,” Suydam said. “And the guests will be men like you. Negroes from Harlem, Syrians and Spaniards from Red Hook, Chinese and Italians from Five Points, all of them will be here by my invitation. All of them will hear what I am now telling you.”

Tommy’s temper became cooled by his curiosity. A white man’s home crowded with Negroes and Syrians and all the rest. Suydam might be the strangest job he’d stumbled into yet.

“So why do I get the preview?” Tommy asked.

“I needed to practice my words,” Suydam said. “To see how they affect a man of the proper type. Also, I admit you were convenient,” Suydam said. “I needed those police to give me some room. The time they spent with you was enough for me to slip away. Thank you for that.”

“You knew you were being followed?”

“My family has doubts about my sanity—this is what they say. More likely they have doubts about my will, and to whom, exactly, I’ll leave this home and all its contents. Which of them will inherit the land on which it all sits. But they don’t see it that way. Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.

“My family is convinced I’m in danger. They’ve made the police believe the same. They hired that private detective, too, the brutish one. His name is Mr. Howard. Mr. Howard and Detective Malone are collecting proof of my mental inferiority. For my own good, of course!”

Tommy laughed. “Talking to a Negro on the street won’t help you look sane.”

Suydam took his hand off the money and turned toward the window fully. He leaned with both hands against the ledge. “I know that I am high born. I mean that my family’s old wealth, and their bearing in history, should afford me all the comfort I need. But comfort can be a cage, you know. Certainly it can stunt the mind. Time spent with my family, with my old friends of means, began to feel like bathing in porridge, drowning in a child’s meal.

“So I sought out others, entirely unlike myself, and when they spoke of secret wisdom, I listened. What men like myself would dismiss as superstition or, worse, pure evil, I learned to cherish. The more I read, the more I listened, the more sure I became that a great and secret show had been playing throughout my life, throughout all our lives, but the mass of us were too ignorant, or too frightened, to raise our eyes and watch. Because to watch would be to understand the play isn’t being staged for us. To learn we simply do not matter to the players at all.”

Now he touched the window, tapping it, and the reflection seemed—for an instant—to ripple, as if they were staring into a pool of water rather than panes of glass.

“There is a King who sleeps at the bottom of the ocean.”

As Suydam said this—against all possibility—the windowpanes took on the color, and apparent depth, of the sea. It was as if Tommy Tester and Robert Suydam, standing in this room, in this mansion, in this city, were also peering down at distant waters elsewhere on the globe. The guitar fell out of Tommy’s hand as the image appeared. The thump it made, the sour note that played once, these hardly registered. A rush of cold seemed to enter not only the room, but also Tommy’s bones.

Suydam said, “The return of the Sleeping King would mean the end of your people’s wretchedness. The end of all the wreck and squalor of a billion lives. When he rises, he wipes away the follies of mankind. And he is only one of many. They are the Great Old Ones. Their footfalls cause mountains to topple. One gaze strikes ten million bodies dead. But imagine the fortunes of those of us who were allowed to survive? The reward for those of us who helped the Sleeping King wake?”

Suydam tapped the window again and the ocean—truly Tommy was seeing a vast and distant sea in the windows—churned, heaved, and from its depths a shape, too massive to be real, stirred. Tommy’s throat tightened. He didn’t want to see this. He thought he might shatter the wall of windows with his own hands if that thing in the sea depths became visible, distinct.

But then the image shifted, the perspective rising, leaving the sea far below. They left the continents behind. Was it possible? They left the world. They rose into the night sky. It really seemed as if these two men in a house in Flatbush were now adrift in farthest space. Tommy Tester clutched at the windowsill for balance.

“From here you might understand,” Robert Suydam said quietly.

But Tommy didn’t understand, he only wanted desperately to be home. He let go of the windowsill, turned, and picked up his guitar, and he ran across the library. He ran toward the locked library doors. Robert Suydam shouted after him. Indecipherable words. Tommy barreled through the stacks of books on the floor, sent them flying. He wanted to be home with his father, damn the cost. If he’d stared out that window any longer, something terrible would have happened to his soul. For all his confidence about his hustle, he understood that Robert Suydam was playing with a more potent force. He reached the double doors of the library and he opened them.

And Malone, the police officer, stood in the hallway.

Malone with his service revolver pointed forward.

“What?” Tommy said. “What?”

Tommy clutched at the doorknob. In his other hand he held the guitar. He expected to die as soon as Malone pulled the trigger. Was this who’d been behind him when he first entered Suydam’s home? Had Malone been the one kicking at his guitar?

But then Tommy realized something strange about Malone, or about Malone’s surroundings. While Tommy stood in the library of Robert Suydam’s home, Malone stood in what looked to be the lobby of an apartment building and most certainly not the hallway of Robert Suydam’s estate. What the hell was going on? It was as if the two locations—mansion and tenement lobby—had been stitched together by a haphazard tailor, Tommy Tester and Detective Malone facing each other because of a bad splice in reality’s fabric. And actually both men looked mystified. In a moment Robert Suydam—breathless—reached the library doors and threw them shut. Then he slapped Tommy Tester in the face.

“What did you see?” Suydam shouted. “Tell me!”

“I don’t understand,” Tommy said quietly.

“Was it Him?” Suydam yelled. He reached into the pocket of his coat, pulled out the stone he’d taken from Tommy. He raised it, intending to break open Tommy Tester’s skull. “Did the King see you?”

“The cop,” Tommy said, almost breathless. “The skinny one.”

Suydam held the stone high for two moments more. “Malone?” Then he lowered the rock. “Only Malone,” he said quietly to himself.

“I don’t understand where I’ve ended up,” Tommy said.

Suydam breathed deeply, swallowing. “We can’t leave this room yet,” he explained. “Not till morning.”

If Tommy looked baffled, it’s because he was baffled.

“If we tried to open that door again, the results would be even stranger than what you’ve just seen. And potentially more dangerous.”

Tommy looked back at the doors. His forehead went cold. “Malone was standing in the hallway, but it wasn’t your hallway out there.”

“I believe you,” Suydam said. “But believe me it could’ve been worse. You might’ve opened that door and encountered . . .”

Suydam moved himself in between Tommy and the doors and stayed there the rest of the night.

6

CHARLES THOMAS TESTER left Robert Suydam’s home at seven the next morning. When the sun rose, when they could peek outside the windows and see the streets of Flatbush again, that’s when Suydam said it was safe to open the library doors. Before then, all through the night, Suydam explained, his home had been Outside. The term, the idea, seemed commonplace to the old man, but Tester had a terrible time understanding. The mansion had been Outside? But of course it was. Where else could a mansion be? This hadn’t been the old man’s meaning, though. Finally Suydam described it this way:

“Imagine a strip of medical tape with the adhesive gum on one side. Then a tiny ball of cloth is dropped onto the center of that tape. My library is that ball of cloth in what we call normal time and space. It is affixed to one place, one plane. But then imagine crumpling the adhesive tape tight in your fist. That ball of cloth now touches not just one surface, but many. In this way my library travels beyond human perceptions, human limitations of space, and even time. Those are meaningless strictures on a cosmic scale. Tonight we traveled quite far, though it seemed to you we were always in Flatbush. We weren’t. We went to the shadow-haunted Outside.

“One of the places we traveled was the threshold of the Sleeping King. His resting place at the bottom of the sea. We were so close that with some effort I might have reached out and touched his face, seen his great eyes open. But last night was not the proper time. Not quite. When you ran to the library doors and breached them, I feared my years of planning had failed because of one panicked Negro! But we enjoyed some luck instead. All you saw was the cadaverous detective. Malone.”

There had been much more like this. For hours. Suydam rattling off names, or rather entities, as effortlessly as the preachers who crowded certain Harlem street corners. But Tommy focused on the idea of the blip of cloth lost inside the ball of medical tape. This concrete image made the impossible easier to grasp. Hadn’t he seen an ocean through the windows? Hadn’t he witnessed the planet from the vantage point of the stars? Hadn’t Malone been on the other side of the double doors, looking desperate and bewildered?

Throughout the night Robert Suydam returned to this Sleeping King. Like the planet revolves around the sun. The Sleeping King. At some point Suydam called this being by another name, his true name, but Tommy Tester could never recall it. Or perhaps his mind chose to forget.

When the sun rose, Robert Suydam concluded with one final piece of wisdom. He retrieved the stone from his pocket again. This time he pressed the rock into Tommy’s palm.

“How much did this stone matter to you, to your existence, before you picked it up to use it on those boys who followed you? That’s how little humanity’s silly struggles matter to the Sleeping King. When he returns, all the petty human evils, such as the ones visited on your people, will be swept away by his mighty hand. Isn’t that marvelous? And what will become of those of us who are left? The ones who helped him. Think of the rewards. I know you’re a man who believes in such things, and you’re smart enough to make sure they come to you.”

Then Suydam handed over two hundred dollars and walked Tester out of his home. Tommy remained on the porch long after Robert Suydam shut the door. A bright morning in Flatbush, that’s what Tommy saw, but he had a tough time walking down the steps, and down the treelined path, and out to the sidewalk. He kept expecting he’d set one foot off the porch and fall right into an ocean where the Sleeping King waited. And why couldn’t this happen? That’s what paralyzed him. If all the rest could be true, then why not so much else?

Finally, the feel of the rolled bills in his hands returned him to the porch. He looked down at the money and told himself this was enough. Two hundred dollars would support Tommy and Otis for almost half a year. Go back to Harlem now and never return. Robert Suydam would never find him, because he’d never told the old man where he lived. Whatever Suydam had planned meant less than nothing to him. Let the old man have his magic. Otis and Tommy would spend the night at the Victoria Society, talking and eating well. He would make it back to his father, as he promised. That was enough. Tommy squeezed the bills once more, then dropped the roll into the sound hole of his guitar. It fell with a gratifying thump. He slipped the guitar back into the case and one hand into his coat pocket. The stone Suydam had returned to him rested inside. Instead of dropping the rock back into the dirt, Tommy took it with him. Eventually he’d spend his money, but the stone would serve as a souvenir of the night he’d been Outside.

On the train back to Harlem, Tommy didn’t notice anyone else, and if they noticed him, he was unaware. The conductor made no small talk this time. Maybe Tester cut an odd figure. A Negro in worn clothes with a guitar at his feet and his attention focused on a stone in his hand. He must have looked feebleminded, and thus unthreatening, and thus invisible.

7

HARLEM. ONLY AWAY FOR A NIGHT, but he’d missed the company. The bodies close to his on the street, boys running through traffic before the streetlights turned, on their way to school and daring each other to be bold. As he descended the stairs from the station, he smiled for the first time since he’d left Suydam’s mansion.

Tommy walked toward home, but found himself so hungry he stopped first to eat at a counter on 141st Street. The strangest moment came when it was time to pay and he had to fish into his guitar for the bills. The counterwoman looked uninterested right up until the roll appeared, as thick as the middle of a Burmese python. Tommy liked the way she looked at him after he paid from that knot, even better when he put down a whole dollar for a tip. Could Robert Suydam really make a man like Tommy a prince in his new world? Wouldn’t that be damn fine? By the time he left the shop, he’d changed his mind about returning to Suydam’s place. The old man had been right. Tommy Tester did enjoy a good reward.

At ten in the morning he approached his block, sunlight kissing every face and facade. The streets weren’t as tranquil. He hadn’t noticed the traffic when he’d left the counter, but by now the streets clearly had a clog. The roads became more flooded as he approached 144th. His block looked positively underwater. Three police cruisers—Ford Model T Tudor Sedans—were parked midway down the block, a much bigger Police Emergency Services Truck behind them.

Tester moved slowly. The sidewalks so dense with bystanders that people filled every stoop, too. The only time he’d ever seen Harlem this crowded was when the 369th Regiment marched Manhattan in 1919 after returning from the war.

Halfway down the block, the police had thrown up a barricade. Cops stood in pairs keeping all the gawkers back. By now Tommy saw they were blocking everyone from entering a specific building. His building. Tommy made it to the edge of the crowd, right up to the barricades, and waited.

Malone appeared at the building’s front entrance. Mr. Howard moved beside him. They came down the steps at the same pace, with the same gait, and for a moment Mr. Howard became Detective Malone’s shadow. Two more police, in uniform, came out seconds later and shook hands with both men.

Then Malone looked up and found Tommy instantly, as if he’d been sensitive to Tester’s scent. He pointed and the two patrolmen ran to the barricade. The first grabbed Tester’s neck, just as Mr. Howard had done when they first met in Brooklyn, and the other patrolman grabbed another Negro who happened to be standing there. They led both men around the barricade, to Malone.

“Not that one,” Malone said, pointing at the second man.

The patrolman looked slightly abashed but then routinely went through the other Negro’s pockets. When nothing illegal was discovered, he pushed the man back toward the crowd. No words had been shared between the two. When the man reached the crowd again, he simply turned, like the others, to watch what they’d do to Charles Thomas Tester.

“Your father’s dead,” Malone said.

This was reported neither with relish nor with sympathy. In a way, Tester liked this best. No pretense of concern. Your father is dead. Outwardly Tester took the news with great calm. Inwardly he felt the sun close its distance from the earth; it came near enough to melt the great majority of Tommy’s internal organs. A fire ran through his body, but he couldn’t show it. He couldn’t open his mouth to ask what happened to Otis, because he’d forgotten he had a mouth. He stood there as blank as a stone.

“Tell me my father’s dead and I’m going to take a swing at you,” Mr. Howard said. “But these people really don’t have the same connections to each other as we do. That’s been scientifically proven. They’re like ants or bees.” Mr. Howard waved one hand at the building beside them. “That’s why they can live like this.”

Tommy felt the weight of the stone in his pocket. Your father is dead. He only had to reach it, swiftly bring it out, and spill these white men’s brains on the streets. Your father is dead. The certainty of his own demise moments afterward brought him no fear. Your father is dead. He would have done this right away, but he simply couldn’t move.

Mr. Howard watched Tommy a moment longer, but when there was still no reaction, he spoke in a more matter-of-fact tone, as if addressing a grand jury.

“I approached the home at approximately seven this morning,” Mr. Howard began. “After finding apartment 53 I knocked several times. After receiving no answer I checked the door and found it unlocked. I entered the apartment, clearing each room in order, until I reached the back bedroom. In that room a male Negro was discovered displaying a rifle. In fear for my life I used my revolver.”

Tester couldn’t understand how he remained upright. Why wasn’t he collapsing? For a moment he felt himself—his mind at least—slipping out of his skull. He wasn’t here. He was Outside. Didn’t even need to be in Suydam’s library to make the trip.

Mr. Howard pointed at the building. “Because of the orientation of the apartment, the back bedroom faces an air shaft. This left the back room in darkness. After defending myself, it was discovered that the assailant had not been brandishing a rifle.”

Malone, who’d been watching Tester steadily, offered. “It was a guitar.”

Mr. Howard nodded. “In the dark, this was impossible to know, of course. Detective Malone was called to the scene. He’ll be writing up the report exactly as I’ve explained.”

Tester looked from one man to the other. Tester’s voice finally returned to him. “But why were you here at all?” he asked. “Why did you come to my home?”

“Mr. Howard was hired to track down stolen merchandise,” Malone said.

“My father never stole a thing in his life,” Tester said.

“Not your father,” Mr. Howard agreed. “But how about you?”

Malone’s long face slackened, and he pawed through the pockets of his coat. Finally Malone retrieved a pad, a policeman’s notebook, and flipped through a series of pages. Arcane symbols and indecipherable words were scrawled across each page of Malone’s book. Tommy doubted Malone’s notes had anything to do with police work. He thought of Robert Suydam’s library, so full of esoteric learning. Malone’s notebook might be a journal of the same unspeakable knowledge.

Finally Malone came to a largely empty page, a few numbers written across the top. He showed the page to Tommy. Tommy knew it instantly. Ma Att’s address in Queens.

“I’m going to tell you what I think,” Malone began. “You figured you’d found a loophole in the job you did for the old woman. You followed the exact wording of your contract. You figured this made it impossible for Ma Att to come after you. Because you hadn’t broken the rules. But it’s 1924, Mr. Tester, not the Middle Ages. Her sorcery couldn’t get you, so she hired out for help. She employed Mr. Howard.”

Now Mr. Howard patted at his coat. “As I moved to secure your father’s rifle, I learned it was a guitar. I then discovered the page I needed, hidden right inside.”

“Don’t you understand why I kept the page from her?” Tester asked. “Don’t you understand what she can do with that book?”

Mr. Howard laughed and looked at Malone. “Did this man just confess to a crime?”

Malone shook his head. “Let it alone,” he said.

“You understand,” Tester said, glancing at Malone’s notebook. The detective flipped the cover shut, slid the pages back into his pocket.

“I understand you weren’t home when Mr. Howard arrived,” Malone said. “As a result, your father was left vulnerable.”

“It’s my fault, then?” Tommy asked. “Will you be putting that in your report, too?”

Mr. Howard’s mouth opened slightly, an undisguised expression of surprise. “I hate the lippy ones,” he said.

Malone meanwhile seemed nonplussed. “Want to tell me where you were last night?” Malone asked. “Or shall I guess?”

Charles Thomas Tester had a sudden flash, an image of his father, half asleep, looking up to find some white man at the doorway in the semidark. What did Otis Tester think at the moment? Was there time, at least, to picture his loving wife or the son who’d worshipped him? Was there time for a breath, an exclamation? Time for a prayer? Maybe better to imagine Otis never woke up. That made it easier on Tommy, at least.

“How many times did you shoot my father?” Tester asked.

“I felt in danger for my life,” Mr. Howard said. “I emptied my revolver. Then I reloaded and did it again.”

Tester’s tongue felt too large for his mouth, and for the first time he thought he might cry, or cry out. He felt the weight of the stone in his coat pocket, heavier now, as if dragging him to the ground. His night with Robert Suydam returned to him, all of it, all at once. The breathless terror with which the old man spoke of the Sleeping King. A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naive. Tester looked back to Malone and Mr. Howard. Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricades as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?

“Indifference would be such a relief,” Tommy said.

8

CHARLES THOMAS TESTER found himself cast away. First Malone and Mr. Howard brushed him back from his building—he wouldn’t be allowed inside the apartment until the coroner finished up, and the coroner hadn’t arrived yet. Malone and Howard walked Tommy back to the crowd. The crowd parted around him, swallowed and digested him. In minutes he’d been expelled at the far end of his block. Surrounded by onlookers but undeniably alone. He walked without thinking, found himself in front of the Victoria Society. He went upstairs and the greeter, recognizing him now, let him pass.

Tommy walked to the dining room, half full with an early lunch crowd, sat at a table in one corner, far from the table where he’d eaten dinner with Otis just four days ago. Tester stared at the table as if Otis might suddenly sit down, Malone and Howard having played an awful joke. Eventually three men did sit at the table, so Tommy turned away.

In time Buckeye arrived. It seemed like luck, but really the Victoria Society’s greeter called Buckeye in. A greeter being only as good as his memory, he’d remembered the name Tester used for entry. Before Buckeye sat with Tester, he checked in at other tables, took numbers from those who wanted to play, and paid off one heavyset man whose number hit yesterday. Then Buckeye sat and bought them both lunch—this time cooked by a woman from South Carolina—a plate of Gullah rice, fish head stew, and hush puppies. Buckeye ate, but Tommy couldn’t look down at his plate.

Buckeye hadn’t heard yet about what had happened to Otis, and Tommy had no desire to speak of it. Still, the news—the horror of it—felt as if it wanted to leap out of his throat, an unclean spirit wanting to make itself known. To prevent himself from talking about his father’s murder, he spoke of Robert Suydam instead. Even the wildest detail seemed less fantastic than the idea that right then, only seven blocks away, his father’s body lay in their apartment, shot through until dead.

Though Tommy told Buckeye everything, he kept returning to three words in particular: the Sleeping King, the Sleeping King, the Sleeping King. Finally he put food into his mouth, not because he felt hungry, but because he couldn’t think of any other way to shut himself up. He must sound mad.

By this point Buckeye had stopped eating. He watched his boyhood friend quietly, narrowed his eyes.

“When I worked on the canal,” Buckeye said. “You remember I told you I was there for a year? When I worked on that canal, we had boys from all over the world. All of us brought our stories with us. You know how people do. And no matter how hard you work, men always make time to tell their stories.

“Well, we had some boys from as far as Fiji and Rarotonga. Tahiti, too. I couldn’t understand the boys from Tahiti. They spoke that French. But the Fiji boys, two brothers, I swear they said what you been saying. The Sleeping King. Yeah. Them Fiji boys said it more than once. But they had another name for him, too. I can’t remember just now. Couldn’t hardly pronounce it if I tried. ‘The Sleeping King is dead but dreaming.’ That’s what they said. Now, what in the hell does that mean? Those weren’t my favorite stories. I kept my distance from those boys. You not planning to fly out to Fiji, are you?”

Buckeye laughed but it was forced. How could his friend from Harlem come up with the same story as two brothers from Fiji? Especially when both died during the construction of the Panama Canal? How could such things be?

Tommy, if he’d been listening, might’ve laughed along, but he stood, took his guitar, and ran out the dining room. Just like that. His case slapped the food off two different tables and the men cursed Tommy’s back as he fled the Victoria Society. Tommy made toward the elevated train that would take him from Harlem to Flatbush. Hours ago he’d considered never returning to Robert Suydam’s mansion, but now where else could he go?

The party wouldn’t start for eight more hours, so Tester paid his train fare and waited on the station platform. Fiji must be damn far from Harlem. He knew it was an island in some distant sea. Buckeye’s story served as some last corroboration. The Sleeping King was real. Dead but dreaming. He took out his guitar because he needed to do something to distract his mind. He practiced the tune his father taught him four days ago. Four days ago his father had been alive to teach him this song! The one Irene taught Otis and Otis passed on to him. Conjure music, Otis called it. As he began, he felt his father and mother were much closer to him, right there with him, as real as the chords on his guitar. For the first time in Tommy’s life, he didn’t play for the money, didn’t play so he could hustle. This was the first time in his life he ever played well.

“Don’t you mind people grinning in your face,” Tommy sang. “Don’t mind people grinning in your face.”

Few on the platform gave him their attention, another guitar man in Harlem being as unremarkable as the arc lights along the sidewalks.

“I said bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find. Don’t you mind people grinning in your face.”

Until the end of the work day, Tommy played on the platform. His fingers never tired, his voice never gave out. Early evening he boarded the train to Flatbush. Either he was humming to himself the whole way or the air itself hummed around him.

9

“SOME PEOPLE KNOW THINGS about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.”

Robert Suydam said this at half past ten. The party had been going for hours, but Suydam had yet to gather the group’s attention. Instead he’d welcomed Tester early, and then, an hour later, the guests arrived, men and women and some in-between, as varied a group as Suydam had promised. The party was held in the library. All his books had been cleared from the floor. In their place were banquet tables, high-backed chairs, serving carts with cut crystal bottles of liquor—not bootleg swill—and glasses to match. The room babbled with languages. English and Spanish, French and Arabic, Chinese and Hindi, Egyptian and Greek, patois and pidgin. But the only music came from Tester’s guitar. Suydam set Tommy by the bank of tall windows. He played standing beside the great chair. He sang to himself and avoided the eyes of the other guests. Tester knew how to recognize a room full of roughnecks. This bunch qualified. Suydam had haunted waterfronts and back alleys to find this crew of cutthroats. The kind of place Tommy imagined the Victoria Society would be was what these criminals called home sweet home.

Tester played and played. It was the same tune he’d been singing since morning. He warped and rearranged it, sang the words for a time, then hummed along for a while, and returned to the words again.

“You know they’ll grin in your face,” Tester sang softly. “They’ll jump you up and down. Just as soon as your back is turned, they’ll be trying to crush you down.”

His playing was interrupted only once. Robert Suydam came close and raised one hand to stop Tester’s strumming. He leaned in until his mouth was an inch from the guitarist’s ear.

“You’re with me, then?” Suydam asked. “I want to ask you before I address them. If I am Caesar, you are Octavius.”

Tester spoke, though his voice strained from all the singing, the words coming out a hoarse whisper. “To the end of this world,” Tester said. “I’m with you.”

Robert Suydam stepped back and watched Tester’s face solemnly. Tester couldn’t be sure what expression his own face held. Had he said the right thing? He spoke the truth; it would have to do. Finally Robert Suydam turned away, grinning to the crowd, and he slapped the top of the great chair forcefully. The men and women in the room became silent. When he sat in the great chair, the guests found places at the banquet tables. Suydam flicked his hand to send Tester away. No one allowed in the spotlight but him. Tommy wasn’t sure where to go, so he walked to the far end of library and posted himself near the double doors. Then Robert Suydam leaned forward and spoke.

“Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do,” he said. “I am one of those few. Let me show you.”

Suydam turned to the tall windows. Night out now and the lights of the bright library turned the panes into a screen just as they had before. Tester watched the crowd of fifty gangsters. He wished to see their reactions as Suydam’s magic played.

“Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor,” Suydam began. “But what if that could change?”

The image in the windows turned a deep green, the color of the sea as seen from the sky. So they were Outside now? Suydam could do it just that fast? Tester lifted his hands and played, hardly touching the strings, no singing. Suydam looked up and seemed pleased. He played the conjure music quietly. The crowd of rowdies never looked away from the windows, but the music and Suydam’s words worked together, an even stronger spell.

All the old man said three nights ago was repeated. The Sleeping King. The end of this current order, its civilization of subjugation. The end of man and all his follies. Extermination by indifference.

“When the Sleeping King awakes, he will reward us with dominion of this world. We will live in the shadow of his grace. And all your enemies will be crushed into dust. He will reward us!” the old man repeated, shouting now. “And your enemies will be crushed!”

They shouted back. They clapped each other on the shoulders. Founding fathers of a new nation, or even better, a world now theirs to administer and control.

“I will guide you in this new world!” Suydam called, standing and raising his hands. “And in me you will finally find a righteous ruler!”

They stamped and knocked over their chairs. They toasted Robert Suydam’s reign.

But Tommy Tester couldn’t celebrate such a thing. Maybe yesterday the promise of a reward in this new world could’ve tempted Tommy, but today such a thing seemed worthless. Destroy it all, then hand what was left over to Robert Suydam and these gathered goons? What would they do differently? Mankind didn’t make messes; mankind was the mess. Exhaustion washed over Tommy and threatened to drown him. Thinking this way caused Tester to play a series of sour keys.

Suydam noticed even if others didn’t. He looked up at Tester sharply, but quickly his expression changed. His annoyance shifted to surprise as he saw Tester raise the expensive guitar and bring the body down against the floor. Shattered. Tester turned to the library’s closed double doors. Suydam shouted. First a command, then a plea. Not yet, he called. Not yet, you ape! The old man ran toward Tester, but the rowdy guests got in his way. Robert Suydam watched as Charles Thomas Tester grabbed the two handles and pulled the doors open. Then, to Robert Suydam’s horror, Tommy walked through them and shut the library doors behind him.

PART 2

Malone

10

MALONE LEFT HARLEM QUICK. He wasn’t returning to the Butler Street police station in Brooklyn, where he’d been detailed for the last six years, but out to Queens, with Mr. Howard, to return the stolen sheet of paper—was it actually paper?—the private detective had been hired to retrieve. The two men watched the Negro guitarist stumble off after being informed of his father’s death, then Malone made a point of thanking the Harlem detectives who called him in one more time.

They’d reached out to Malone as soon as they took Mr. Howard’s statement. It was possible Mr. Howard dropped Malone’s name, and a handful of bills, to make this phone call happen, but Malone made sure not to ask. Malone arrived, and was shown all the courtesy of a fellow New York City detective. He vouched for Mr. Howard’s character, though, in fact, he thought very little of it, and soon enough the four men sat in the Testers’ kitchen sharing tales about Harlem crime versus Brooklyn crime. Mr. Howard relayed stories of his scrapes as a lawman down in Texas long ago. They had a good time. In the back room the body of the old Negro remained facedown on the floor where he’d died. The man had been shot eleven times, propelled off his mattress and into a wall, but his old guitar hadn’t been damaged at all. The only sign it even belonged at this crime scene was the blood that stained the neck of the instrument. As the four men sat in the kitchen, they agreed the guitar didn’t need to be taken as evidence. Everything was settled as casually as that.

Now Malone and Mr. Howard made for the 143rd Street entrance. They found themselves on the same train platform where the Negro—son of the deceased—stood playing his guitar. Even Mr. Howard seemed troubled by the reappearance, so the two men waited at the southern end of the platform. The Negro guitarist never opened his eyes while he performed. Malone couldn’t guess the man was headed back to Suydam’s mansion for a party that night. If he’d known, he would’ve followed him, rather than take the trip out to Ma Att’s home.

Malone and Mr. Howard never spoke on the train ride out to Queens, and on the walk, their conversation remained clipped. Neither liked the other. They worked together because both had been called in on the Suydam affair. Not that they were making much progress. Malone secretly felt a certain sympathy for Robert Suydam, and disgust for a family working so hard to manufacture some pretense for separating the old man from his wealth. If Suydam wanted to spend his money and time seeking the more orphic knowledge of the world, what business was it to them? Perhaps Malone felt special sympathy because he, too, had a certain sensitivity. Ever since childhood, he’d felt sure there was more to this world than what we touch or taste or see. His time as a detective made him surer of this. Hidden motivations, spectral meanings, a certain subset of crime always offered such things. Most of the time his job allowed him to see petty desperation and conniving, but on occasion he bore witness to clues in a greater mystery.

For instance, the enigma waiting behind the front door of a cottage in Flushing, Queens. As he and Mr. Howard approached the place, anxiety assaulted Detective Malone. He became rigid even as Mr. Howard seemed at ease. As they approached the front door of Ma Att’s home, the air became muggy and charged. While Malone pulled at his collar and cleared his throat, Mr. Howard remained roundly ignorant. He seemed to be in a good mood, like an enormous dog, gleeful and wild. Mr. Howard reached the door and instead of knocking, he kicked. The door shook and Malone trembled, too. Be careful there, he wanted to warn, but Mr. Howard wasn’t the sort to heed or heel.

As the sound of footsteps approached, Malone swept a hand through his hair and touched at his collar. Mr. Howard simply kicked the door again. He turned back to Malone, shook his head when he saw Malone looking stricken. He pinched his lips as if he’d like to start kicking the sensitive detective. Then the door opened and an old woman stood at the threshold. Mr. Howard spoke quickly.

“You’re not too fast on your feet,” he said. “I was about to leave.”

Malone nearly gasped. Was it Mr. Howard’s tone, his words, or the glimpse of the woman who’d opened the doorway just enough? Since Malone stood farther back from the house than Mr. Howard, he saw her silhouette inside. At the doorway, a stooped, slim woman had appeared, her nose prominent, hair pulled back tightly. But behind that woman, Malone swore he saw—what?More of her. Some great bulk trailed behind her, off into the distance of the gloomy front hall. Nearly anyone else—ones not so sensitive, so attuned—would’ve dismissed this as a trick of the shadows, a bit of bent light. Insensitive minds always dispel true knowledge. But Malone couldn’t ignore the sense of her length, of largeness, behind the figure of this woman at the door. Not a second presence, but the rest of hers. Malone brushed his hair back again if only to disguise the quivering of his right hand.

Meanwhile Mr. Howard talked to the woman in his standard aggravated tone. But as he spoke, the woman looked over Mr. Howard’s shoulder. When Malone met her gaze, she grinned.

Mr. Howard reached into his coat and revealed the folded sheet of paper. Malone hadn’t asked to see the page this entire time. Not when they met up in Harlem, not when they waited on the platform, not on the train, nor on the walk here. The words of the Negro guitarist remained with him. Don’t you understand why I kept that page from her? Don’t you understand what she can do with that book? What did the Negro know? This question made him join Mr. Howard on his trip. Curiosity had cursed him since youth.

The square of parchment paper came out of Mr. Howard’s pocket, and as soon as sunlight touched it, a faint trace of smoke appeared in the air. Malone smelled it before he saw it. A charcoal scent. Ma Att reached out into the light for it. She had an impossibly thin arm, skin the color of desert sand. She grabbed for the sheet, but Mr. Howard—to Malone’s shock—pulled it back.

“The United States is a country of commerce,” Mr. Howard said. “Remember where you are.”

In the darkness of the house, something enormous rose, then swayed like the tail of a venomous snake. But Ma Att—the face she showed them—only smiled. She gestured for Mr. Howard to check the mailbox, and there he found an envelope. The private detective looked back at Malone proudly. Malone suddenly expected Ma Att to grab the big man with her tail—could it be a tail?—and pull him inside. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Mr. Howard took the envelope from the mailbox and opened the flap to spy the cash. Ma Att leaned forward, her head and shoulders leaning past the threshold. Her lips parted, gray teeth bared, as if to tear into Mr. Howard’s neck.

“Your name,” said Malone. “I know I’ve heard it before.”

The woman, startled, looked at him and pulled back into the doorway. She reached out in a motion too quick for either man to track. She slipped the sheet of parchment paper from between Mr. Howard’s fingers quick.

Mr. Howard turned to her, and in one motion, grabbed the handle of the revolver he wore on his shoulder. The envelope fell from his hand, and the money scattered across the front steps. A breeze carried some of the bills across the house’s lawn. Mr. Howard scurried after the cash. Malone and Ma Att were alone at the threshold.

“It’s an Egyptian name, isn’t it?” Malone said. “From what I understood, the woman with that name lived in Karnak.”

“Oh?” she said. “And how much do you think you truly understand?”

“Not enough,” Malone admitted.

The old woman nodded as if pleased by his answer, the deference in it.

“What is that book?” he asked, so quietly he couldn’t be sure he spoke aloud.

“The Supreme Alphabet,” Ma Att said.

“Now you have every page,” Malone said.

“Come inside my home,” Ma Att cooed. “I’ll show you all the things I can spell with a little spilled blood.”

Malone shuffled backward to the sidewalk. He never turned away from Ma Att. He never blinked. She laughed once and slammed her door. He found Mr. Howard on his knees in the grass counting his money. Malone ran off—actually sprinted—back to Brooklyn, back to his precinct. Mr. Howard shouted something, but Malone didn’t listen, couldn’t hear over the sound of his own panicked breathing.

Malone never expected he’d return to Ma Att’s home again, but he was wrong. He’d be back one more time, but by then it would be too late.

11

THE SUYDAM CASE came to a close, at least for those litigious relatives. A court date was set and Suydam appeared before the judge, acting as his own legal counsel. The lawyers of the extended family argued that Suydam had become erratic and senile, but Suydam explained he’d become engrossed in his education, the learning a man disdains in his twenties but yearns for in his sixties. There’s no better student than one who’s reached retirement age. The judge, a man in his sixties, found this suggestion flattering and true.

As secondary proof of Suydam’s decline, the family’s lawyers brought affidavits from ten of his neighbors in Flatbush proclaiming the odd hours, and odder characters, coming in and out of Suydam’s mansion. One night, it was attested, he’d entertained a swarthy army in his home. But Suydam explained this away as well. His learning had been in the fields of religion and myth, and New York offered the rare bounty of citizens from fifty different nations—a hundred backward tribes—many recent arrivals to the United States. Who better to interview about the beliefs of their people? He wasn’t a madman, but an amateur anthropologist. If he was too old to travel the world anymore, well, New York brought the world to him.

Malone attended the trial each day, and when Suydam explained his esoteric interests, he felt affection for the old man. In the entire courtroom, Malone felt sure, only Suydam contained a soul as sensitive as his own, as aware of the greater mysteries.

In the end, the judge admitted Suydam’s actions, and his company, might give any member of discreet society pause, but that hardly constituted reason to have the man committed to a hospital or stripped of his means. Suydam won out the day, sent his family, and their lawyers, slinking. Mr. Howard had been in the courtroom to offer testimony, but once the case was decided, the family no longer needed him. He made plans to return to Texas. He and Malone shared no tearful good-byes. A handshake was all, and good riddance. Malone’s superiors returned him to regular duties in Brooklyn, and it was this return to his usual routine that, oddly, brought Malone back into contact with Robert Suydam. It had to, with Malone’s work on the illegal-immigrant beat.

The legal immigrants of Europe—German and English, Scottish and Italian, Jewish, French, Irish, Scandinavian—all were welcomed through the immigration center on Ellis Island. A number of Chinese were permitted through this channel as well. But what about the rest? Malone’s beat in Brooklyn brought him through neighborhoods thick with Syrians and Persians, Africans, too. How did they arrive in Brooklyn in such hordes? There were other, less famous ports for such immigrants, of course, but there was also a third channel, the illegal routes known only to human smugglers. Malone was concerned with this third path. It was his job, in fact. His superiors had him on the illegal-immigrant beat before Suydam’s case and returned him to it afterward. Of the police working at the Butler Street station—perhaps of all the cops in New York City—Malone might’ve been the sole one who didn’t loathe the role. The Negro, Charles Thomas Tester, had been right when he spied Malone’s notebook—all those symbols and sigils—and counted him as a seeker of secrets. What better place to unearth them than the foreigner-filled warrens of Red Hook?

So Malone returned to the neighborhood. He’d missed the place. He doubted there was another white man on earth who would ever think the same. Robert Suydam, perhaps. These people, their superstitions and lowly faiths, were the lead a higher mind might transmute into the pure gold of cosmogonic wisdom. When Malone strolled the streets of Red Hook, he often found himself the one white man in the whole neighborhood. They were used to him there, and in this way, he became invisible. They spoke freely around him, if not always to him, and Malone’s notepad filled with their lore. The denizens knew he was an NYPD detective as well, which brought him protection on even the grimmest block.

He also ignored petty crime. He never rousted the boys smoking fragrant cigarettes; he expended no energy breaking up the rooms where bootleg liquor was sold; why would it matter to him if the men and women in those rooms risked blindness, or death, for inebriation? There were police squads keeping an eye on such activity. Raids came if a local political office was up for auction, and even then, after a few photos and the exchange of many dollars, the criminals were set free. In this way Red Hook ran efficiently, its crimes quarantined—this was all society demanded of such neighborhoods.

After a week back on patrol, Malone making conversation where he could, sitting quietly in diners, eavesdropping on adjacent booths, he heard one name repeated more and more often. Robert Suydam.

Soon enough, Robert Suydam became the sole topic of conversation in the diners of Red Hook, heard from the clusters of clove-scented young men on street corners. Even the women who leaned out tenement windows and spoke to each other across streets and alleyways were invoking the name. Within weeks it seemed as if all of Red Hook were speaking with one voice, repeating a single surname, chanting it.

Suydam. Suydam. Suydam.

12

MALONE TOOK THE INITIATIVE to travel out to Flatbush. A pleasant morning for travel, and a short walk to the Suydam mansion. Malone entered the grounds and climbed the porch steps; he knocked for a time, but no one came. He traveled the perimeter of the home trying to spot a light, an open window, some sign of Suydam. But the mansion had an air of abandonment, a body after the loss of its soul.

Finally Malone found the windows of the great library. Though tall, Malone still had to stretch to peek in. The shelves of the library—every one—sat empty. Nothing in the room save a single great chair, turned so its back faced Malone. His arms strained, pulling himself higher onto the ledge. In the shadow of the chair, on the floor, he saw a pair of shoes. At least he thought he did. Someone sitting there. Or propped up? Malone grunted like some beast, at the exertion of holding himself up. His arms trembling, his back tight. A shadow or the heels of a man’s shoes? He wanted to tap the glass, but he needed both hands to balance. Then the shoes shifted slightly, as if the person in the chair—was someone really there?—was bracing to stand up. Malone throat closed up. He strained but held on. Now the chair in the room jostled—he was sure of it. The body in the chair was rising. Malone threw his elbow on the ledge. How could Robert Suydam not have heard Malone at the window? What proof did he have that it was Robert Suydam at all? Malone heard a man’s voice—or really more of a vibration—rippling through the thick panes of glass. Malone couldn’t decipher the words but sensed a mounting rhythm. An incantation.

Then Detective Thomas F. Malone got grabbed.

One powerful grip on the back of Malone’s coat. He fell from the window and back onto the grass. A pair of very young men in uniform stood over him. One officer kicked Malone in the ribs. The other squatted, brought a knee down on Malone’s chest, thrust a hand through Malone’s pockets. The officer found Malone’s service revolver but, in the rush of discovery, didn’t recognize it as such.

“Gun,” he said to his partner. “What else you got?” he shouted at Malone.

The second officer kicked Malone again, barked about “robbery,” “criminal trespass.” Then the other officer with his knee on Malone’s chest found Malone’s detective badge. This changed the tone of conversation. For instance, a conversation actually began. As did apologies.

The two patrolmen helped Malone to his feet. The one who’d done the kicking continued to apologize. But Malone only demanded a boost. The pair looked confused, but the kicker did as instructed. He hoisted Malone. Malone peered into the library. Not only was the figure in the chair gone, but the chair had disappeared, too.

13

THE NEXT MORNING Malone returned to Red Hook, but now he found only silence. When he showed himself, the streets went mum. A curtain of silence fell between him and the residents. The young men on the corners huddled closer, opened their mouths only when it was their turn to inhale. The women hanging out their windows shut their lips when Malone passed. When he sat at a diner booth, the men, daylong regulars, paid their bills and fled. Seemed like all of Red Hook had been warned away from Malone. Was this because he’d snooped at Suydam’s home?

This meant Malone had to do something he detested. He had to consult the other police who worked Red Hook. Malone liked being a policeman, but he felt himself quite distinct from almost all the other cops. He’d tried, in his first two years on the job, to make friends with the other men, but they cackled when he broached the subjects that mattered most to him. Some even tried to have him thrown off the force. Poets should be dreamers, cops should be rough. That kind of thinking. And so Malone had retreated into himself—a kind of shut-in’s existence—even as he attended roll call meetings, and occasionally shared information with other officers for a case. But after the denizens of Red Hook so clearly turned on him, Malone made his way back to the Butler Street station. He found the officers on foot patrol. He had every expectation they’d make him suffer humiliations before sharing any Red Hook news, but, in fact, the pair he found at the station—starting a shift—had been looking for him.

They looked scared as they spoke with Malone.

Robert Suydam had taken over three tenement buildings on Parker Place, one of the blocks facing the squalid seafront. Had he bought the buildings? Malone asked. And even if so, how could he take ownership so quickly? The patrolmen had no answers, only more startling news to share. In a single night every tenant fled these three buildings, fled or was put out. In their place arrived Robert Suydam, and enough books to fill four libraries. An army came, too, perhaps fifty of the worst Red Hook ever knew. All this moving done without a single truck on the street. Overnight, every window of each building had been blocked with heavy curtains. The property had been overtaken by the local demigods of crime and debauchery. Something worse than the patrolmen ever experienced brewed at those premises. All in the service of Mr. Robert Suydam.

Last, they added word of a second-in-command, Robert Suydam’s sergeant, a Negro heretofore unknown in the crime logs of Brooklyn. He acted as Suydam’s mouthpiece, giving orders when the old man wasn’t around.

“Black Tom is what they all call him,” one of the patrolmen said. “Everywhere he goes, he carries this bloodstained guitar.”

Malone didn’t realize he’d fainted until the patrolmen were helping him up.

14

MALONE LEFT THE PATROLMEN and went directly to the waterfront. He knew Parker Place, perched himself on a stoop at the corner. But Malone forgot he was no longer the tall, gaunt detective the denizens of Red Hook tolerated in their crowds. Word had been spread. As soon as he sat on the stoop, took out his notepad, the tenants of that building shut themselves inside. Boys on the nearby corners darted away. The locals evacuated in the time it took for him to take out his ink pen. Nothing could be more conspicuous around here than a lone white man perched on a stoop. He stood, but before he’d even reached the bottom of the stairs, the groan of a wooden door opening played on the emptied street. The Negro from Harlem appeared from one of Suydam’s tenements. Malone leafed through his notepad. Charles Thomas Tester. That was the name.

Despite what the patrolmen said, he did not carry a bloodstained guitar now, and this relieved Malone more fully than he could explain.

“Mr. Suydam asked me to come greet you,” the Negro said. “Do you remember me?”

His demeanor, even his voice, was greatly changed from when they’d last met. The Negro spoke with open disdain and returned Malone’s stare so directly that it was Malone who looked away.

“Your father,” Malone said. “Have you buried him yet?”

“They wouldn’t release the body,” the Negro said. “Not until the investigation is completed.”

“It must be cleared by now,” Malone said. He looked down and realized he held the pen out like a weapon. He did not lower his hand.

“I stopped trying,” the Negro said.

Malone began to speak, but the Negro talked over him.

“Mr. Suydam wants you, and the other members of the police, to know that he has moved to this neighborhood permanently. He won’t be returning to Flatbush.”

Now the Negro watched Malone with the glass-eyed interest of a cat stalking a bird. Malone looked back to his notebook to escape that gaze.

“As he’s doing nothing illegal, he expects to be left alone,” the Negro said.

“We’ll decide when to leave him alone,” Malone said coolly. “And we’ll decide the same about you.”

There were faces in every window, in every building, on this block and the next, watching both men. Malone felt it important to assert his role, his position, for the benefit of the onlookers, if not himself.

“Charles Thomas Tester,” Malone said. “That’s your name. And you belong in Harlem, not Red Hook.”

“They call me something else now,” the Negro said. “And my birth name has no more power over me. It died with my daddy.”

“Black Tom? You expect me to call you that?”

The Negro didn’t respond. He simply watched Malone patiently.

“I don’t want to see you here anymore,” Malone said. “I’ll let the foot patrols know that if you’re found anywhere in Brooklyn, they’re to pick you up. I can’t promise you’ll be in good health by the time they put you down again.”

Black Tom looked up at the buildings on either side of the street.

“Mr. Suydam is in need of a book that can only be found in Queens,” he said, ignoring the detective’s threat. “I’m headed out there right now.”

“I told you where you’re allowed to be,” Malone tried, but his voice faltered.

“You shouldn’t be here when I get back,” Black Tom said.

What happened next was inexplicable, difficult to even remember. Black Tom did something; Malone heard something. A low tone suddenly played loudly, as if Black Tom had hummed a drone note inside Malone’s skull. The detective’s eyes lost focus. Malone became dizzy from the sound, and he lost his footing. He fell onto the nearby stoop as if he’d been slapped. His stomach seized; he was about to throw up. Then a tremendous breeze sent Malone’s hat off his head. The hat tumbled down Parker Place as if trying to escape. When Malone’s eyes finally focused, he was alone on the street. Black Tom had disappeared.

Malone tried to stand but couldn’t. He had to lower his head between his knees and breathe slowly for a count of fifty. When he looked up again, a young woman hung out the third-floor window of the tenement across the street, watching Malone.

“What happened?” Malone shouted. He could stand now, think; he clutched his head, patted his body, checking if he’d been shot or stabbed. He hadn’t. His service revolver remained in its shoulder holster, though the metal felt warmer than it should.

“What did you see?” Malone shouted at the young woman.

She answered, but Malone didn’t understand the language. The young woman continued, shouting really, the words flowing faster but never becoming clear. Why hadn’t he ever learned how to speak with these people? Malone ran from the block, sprinted back to the Butler Street station, stopping only to retrieve his hat. He commandeered a patrolman and a patrol car. Black Tom told him exactly where he was going. Taunted him with the knowledge. Back to Queens, for a special book.

15

WHEN THEY REACHED FLUSHING, Malone leaned out the door of the Model T, one foot on the running board, even as the patrolman went top speed, forty-five miles per hour. Malone kept one hand on his hat so it wouldn’t fly off, the other on the door so he wouldn’t fly out.

But when they reached Ma Att’s block, they found it impossible to continue farther in the patrol car. The streets and sidewalks were too crowded. The morning when they’d put up barricades on 144th Street, the hordes of Harlem had swarmed. Now, instead of black faces, he saw white faces, but the numbers were nearly the same.

The patrolman beeped, shouted for folks to move, but it was like yelling at snow to shovel itself. Malone jumped from the car, pushed into the crowd, men and women bunched so closely together they seemed to be working against him. Malone shouted—he was a detective!—but his voice had a desperate tone. And, worse, it didn’t matter to the crowd. They acted as if under a spell. What held their gaze?

When he broke through the ring of gawkers, he had the urge to cover his eyes. Instead, he fell into a stupor exactly like the rest of the crowd.

“How?” he muttered.

Only a week ago he’d been at this address. He had met Ma Att at the threshold of her home. Mr. Howard had been on his knees counting his money. And now it seemed Ma Att was gone. Her entire cottage, too. The walls, the roof, the windows, the little mailbox that hung by the front door. Gone. The front lawn, too. All of it had been pulled up out of the ground like weeds. Nothing remained but the house’s sewage and water pipes. They peeked out of the soil like a partially unearthed skeleton. The plot resembled an open grave.

“How?” Malone said again, but nothing more.

Malone scanned the area for debris. Perhaps the house exploded. No debris.

The cottage had disappeared.

Malone recovered and realized he was first officer on the scene. He turned to the crowd. What had they seen? he asked. No one replied. They remained mesmerized.

Malone shook a few people at the front of the crowd, but they couldn’t explain what had happened to the house. Instead, each one related a series of sensations—dizziness, nausea, a strange low note playing inside their heads. Most had been in their homes, not out watching the old woman’s place, when these sensations struck. What drew them out to the street were one woman’s screams.

“Which woman?” Malone asked, but none could identify her now.

More police arrived, as well as the fire department, and the crowd was dispersed. As people wandered, one woman approached Malone. It had been her who screamed. She saw the whole event.

“A Negro walked into the house,” she said. “I watched him from my window there.” She pointed across the street. “I was concerned because we have two children. I want them to be safe.”

“Of course you do,” Malone offered. “It’s only right.”

The woman nodded. “He walked right up to the house, and the old woman let him in. That was surprising to me. You see, she’s never been too sociable. Not with anyone around here. But she letthat sort in? My girl started crying in the kitchen, but I couldn’t stop watching. I was so curious.”

She caught herself, looked to Malone again.

“No answer you give will seem strange to me,” he said.

She looked to the empty plot.

“That Negro came back out of the house with something in his hand. He tucked it into his coat, then he walked back to the sidewalk, looked at the house, just watching it. Maybe he wasn’t just watching—I saw him from behind. Then the front door opened, I mean, all the way, and that old woman was right there and she was shouting at the man! She came right out onto the front steps, and I actually stepped back from the curtain myself. I had never seen that woman, not for a second, outside her home. Isn’t that strange? But it’s true. She had everything delivered, for years. Then she’s outside. She must’ve been angry. That’s what I thought. She came down the stairs to put that Negro straight!

“Now, I don’t know how else to put this next part, so I’m going to say it like I saw it. Right? She stepped outside, and the Negro stood there patient as you please, and then it was like a door opened. You see, right there where the funeral home gate touches her property? Something opened right there. I say a door, but I don’t mean a real door. Like a hole, or a pocket, and inside that pocket it was empty, black. I don’t know how else to say it. Like the sky at night, but without any stars. And the whole time, my Elizabeth is crying in the kitchen.”

The woman dropped her head, closed her eyes, and held one hand over them.

“Then that nigger, he just . . .” Here she looked at the plot of land, extended her left arm. She swept her hand, a brushing gesture. “He goes like that, like someone shooing a cat out of the house. Or when I open the back door of the kitchen, and I use the broom to sweep dirt outside.”

“Outside?” Malone repeated. His lips felt dry.

“And then I couldn’t keep my eyes focused, and I felt quite sick. I heard this sound deep behind my eyes. I’d been letting my daughter cry on and on. Now, why would I do that? I’m not that kind of person. Then, when I could focus again, I mean without being dizzy, I see that man on the sidewalk, but he’s alone now. I mean the house is gone, and the grass is gone, and that old woman. Gone.”

“And the door?” Malone said. “The hole you saw?”

Now she held her chin, looked to the spot. “I guess it was gone, too. I wasn’t thinking straight. I ran outside. Can you believe it? I was going to catch that Negro myself if I had to. But by the time I opened my front door, he’d gone. I stood in the street screaming. It was that or I thought my head would burst with what I saw.”

Black Tom had the book. Which meant Robert Suydam would soon have the book. Even worse, Black Tom had done away with Ma Att, somehow, with the sweep of his hand. If a mere lieutenant could wield that much power, what havoc could Suydam cause? Malone felt suddenly, entirely, small.

“And your daughter?” Malone asked. “Was she all right?”

The woman grinned, shook her head. “Cried herself to sleep right there on the kitchen floor. She’d been trying to reach the jar of peppermints.”

Malone returned to the patrol car. He waved the patrolman over, and the two of them drove back to the Butler Street station. Malone spoke of what happened at Ma Att’s home in vague terms. Property damage. Missing persons. Grand theft. He said nothing of what the woman had witnessed. His superiors would’ve spent hours interrogating the statement, disbelieving for days. And Malone felt sure they did not have days to waste.

Already Black Tom had likely brought the book to his master. Malone must scheme a way to get the entire New York City police force over to Red Hook with him. He went to his superiors. Malone claimed Suydam and Black Tom were bootlegging in the basements of the three tenement apartments and housing illegal immigrants from the most unwanted of nations. Finally, he added, the Negro likely kidnapped the old woman and dragged her back to a dusky tenement basement to commit crimes of a degraded nature. Malone’s bosses were duly motivated. Within the hour, the concentrated forces of three different stations were gathering, an army off to battle.

16

THE PRACTICAL REALITY OF moving nearly seventy-five police officers, and the equipment needed for a full-force raid, meant squadrons didn’t arrive in Red Hook until evening. By then there were reports that three children had been kidnapped and were being held in the tenement buildings overtaken by Robert Suydam. The children were reported as “blue-eyed Norwegians.” Mobs were said to be forming among the Norwegians, in the neighborhoods closer to Gowanus, and the police needed to reach Parker Place first. Ethnic wars would become a problem if they spilled out of Red Hook.

When the force arrived, they cut off access to the street. Three Model Ts parked at angles at either end of the block, just as had been done on 144th Street in Harlem. Two Emergency Services Trucks were parked in front of Suydam’s tenements. The residents in the adjoining buildings needed no warnings, no pleas to leave. They evacuated before the police had pulled their parking brakes. These residents gathered on the other ends of the patrol cars, lining the stoops of the homes on the next blocks. All of Red Hook attended this event. Locals climbed to the roofs of their buildings, or leaned out their windows to bear witness. They all saw what the police were unloading from the Emergency Services Trucks.

Theodore Roosevelt became president of the Board of Police Commissioners in 1895, and, though serving for only two years, he begun the process of modernizing the force. As a result, the officers had a bevy of weapons as they prepared to take the three tenements. Each man wore his department-issue revolver, but now, from the rear of the emergency trucks, an arsenal appeared. M1903 Springfield rifles; M1911 Browning Hi Power pistols for those who wanted to go in with a gun in each hand. Three Browning Model 1921 heavy machine guns were set up on the street. Each required three men to take it down from the trucks. They were set in a row; each one’s long barrel faced the front stoop of a tenement. They looked like a trio of cannons, better for a ground war than breaching the front doors of a building.

When the 1921s were set down, they were so heavy chips of tarmac were thrown in the air. At the sight of the heavy machine guns the whole neighborhood gasped as one. These guns were designed to shoot airplanes out of the sky. Much of the local population had fled countries under siege, in the midst of war, and had not expected to find such artillery used against citizens of the United States.

The 1921s gave Malone pause, but what could he do? He’d called the forces in, and now they were loosed. He took his place and waited for the call to charge. The order came quick.

Malone watched the first wave of officers storm the tenement entrances. The windows of each building, on every floor, remained shaded and dark. Officers entered each building shouting, hoping to cause terror and surprise. In moments, the sounds of interior doors cracking open could be heard. The neighborhood watched the police work. Some looked curious, others sorrowful, but many were excited. The young men, in particular, thrilled at the violence. Boys cheered as the officers tore through the apartments, though the only side they were on was chaos.

Soon the sun set, and then it was night.

Malone finally took the stairs of the leftmost tenement. The one he’d seen Black Tom exit from that morning. While other police searched for illegal immigrants and kidnapped white babies, Malone went to find Robert Suydam. Up the stoop and into the lobby went the detective.

He watched as officers ascended to the higher floors of this tenement, while others milled in the lobby applying handcuffs to sundry, swarthy men who were being cleared from each apartment above. But it instantly struck Malone as strange when not an officer here opened, or even noticed, a door in the far corner of the lobby. It was as if they couldn’t see it there.

Malone approached the door, and upon inspection he could trace, faintly, a letter written on the door. An O. The letter appeared to be little more than dust, but when he tried to wipe it away, the shape refused removal. Even when he scraped with his thumbnail to try breaking the circle, the O was not to be disturbed.

“Cipher,” he said quietly. “Fifteenth letter of the Supreme Alphabet.”

Malone looked to the other cops, but their backs were turned to him. They didn’t even understand they had done it, the letter working as a sigil, influencing them to turn away. They reloaded their weapons, called up to the men on the upper floors, held fast to their prisoners. Malone could’ve shouted to them, but they wouldn’t hear him. If Malone hadn’t spent his life in study of such things, it was likely he wouldn’t have seen the sign, either.

Malone tried the door. It wasn’t locked. Why would it be? No one but Malone could detect it. Feeling anxious, he pulled out his revolver. When he opened the door, he nearly shrieked with shock. Black Tom stood on the other side of the door, but behind the Negro, it was Robert Suydam’s home. Though Malone had only seen the library from the outside, through the grand windows, he recognized the walls with inset shelving. When he’d peeked this morning, those shelves were empty, but now they were quite full. Black Tom returned Malone’s amazed gaze. He looked immeasurably younger, or more innocent, there in the doorway. He held a guitar in one hand, not bloodstained. Malone felt so overwhelmed that by instinct he began to pull his trigger. But before he fired, Robert Suydam ran into view and slammed the door shut from within.

Malone took his finger off the trigger, then looked back to the other cops in the lobby. Even this hadn’t stirred their interest. Powerful magic at play. He grabbed the handle of the door once again. He stepped to the side so he couldn’t be directly in the path if something strange greeted him again. But this time he found only a dark stairwell, leading down into the basement. Malone slipped his revolver back into his holster. He entered, and a rush of heated air came at him like a great beast’s breath. The stench of river water made his face burn. He stood at the top of the basement stairs and squeezed the door handle. Turn around and get out—that was all he had to do.

“Don’t hide your eyes now,” Robert Suydam called from the basement. “If you are indeed a seeker, then come find true sight.”

These words played at Malone like a taunt, and he closed the door behind him.

When he touched the bottom stair, Malone reached inside his coat. One pocket held his revolver, the other his notebook of arcane learning. Malone wasn’t sure which he’d meant to retrieve. Which offered greater protection in this space. He chose the notebook this time.

This tenement’s basement had been expanded. Walls torn through from this building to the next. Rubble remained in piles on the ground, half a dozen sledgehammers in a corner. The basements of all three tenements had been broken through so now they formed a single grand space. Kerosene lamps stood on the ground at intervals, offering Malone a dim impression of the great room. Hadn’t Suydam and his people moved in not even two days ago? This was the work of many men, over many months. The magnitude of the labor alone made him shudder.

He did see one item he recognized. A great chair sat at the farthest end of the basement chamber. Not twelve hours ago that chair had been in the library of Robert Suydam’s mansion. The chair was turned so its back faced Malone, and even from this distance he could see it was elevated somehow, maybe on a mound of dirt, so it resembled a high altar. The basement became a twisted tabernacle, church of a corrupted god.

In the middle distance a shape moved out of the shadows. A man. The detective hadn’t seen this man since his appearances in court, and now here he was, hands in the pockets of the same waistcoat he’d worn to argue his mental capacities.

“Robert Suydam,” Malone said.

He gazed at Malone, but in the semidark, his expression remained unreadable. Then Suydam turned, speaking to someone still hidden in the shadows. Finally Suydam raised his hand, beckoning Malone closer.

Even now Malone had the chance to escape, but he spied words written on the basement wall nearest him, painted, as if with a broad brush, in black paint. The paint dripped so only some of the words remained legible. Malone found his pen, opened his notebook, and transcribed what he could.

Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon.

There was much more, but in this poor light Malone couldn’t read it all.

“I can explain, if you like,” Robert Suydam said. He’d moved closer—so quietly—stood close enough to touch Malone’s arm, or cut his throat. The smell of river water came strongly, the soiled odor of muck. Malone looked down to see if the basement had flooded at some point, but the ground remained dry. Suydam himself carried the scent. Not on his clothes, but from within. The old man breathed, and a wave of river rot reached Malone.

From here Malone could make out Robert Suydam’s features more clearly, in particular his eyes, which bore a weakened light, as if the man had aged a hundred years since Malone watched him stand before that judge. Suydam reached for Malone’s arm, but the touch was strange. Instead of holding Malone tight, Suydam almost shoved the man away.

“I’m all done in there, sir.”

Black Tom. He stepped out from the middle distance, holding a bucket in one hand and in the other a horsehair brush. The brush dripped with dark paint.

“I’ve done it as you ordered,” Black Tom said. “Spelled out a welcome.”

Suydam let go of Malone and turned to Black Tom. “None of this could have been done without you,” he said.

“I only serve,” Black Tom said quietly.

The smell of the bucket reached Malone, an overpowering odor of wet metal. The bucket was filled with blood. The words on the walls painted with it. This is the moment when Detective Malone might’ve found the revolver in his pocket and killed both these men. Not a soul would’ve blamed him. But he didn’t do that. Why not?

Robert Suydam grinned. “You want to see what more there is.”

Malone nodded once, almost ashamed. “Yes, I do.”

Robert Suydam sighed. “It is the way of men like us. We must know, even if it dooms us.”

Then he turned and bumped into Black Tom, who’d been hovering close behind. Black Tom dropped the bucket; it clanged when it landed. The remaining blood splashed out, leaving a stain across the basement floor. The empty bucket rolled over twice. Black Tom ran after it. In that moment Robert Suydam grasped Malone again, at the elbow.

Black Tom squatted, the horsehair brush still in one hand. He turned the bucket over. “It’s all gone, sir,” Black Tom said.

“Oh yes?” Suydam answered, and his voice broke.

“But I was nearly finished anyway,” Black Tom said, then added, “sir.”

Suydam let go of Malone and dropped his head. “Then I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

“I suppose not,” Black Tom agreed. “No, sir.”

Suydam raised one hand, gesturing for Black Tom to step aside. Malone and the old man walked together, farther along the basement. More words on the walls. Malone read some of them aloud.

“Justice. Queen. Born. Self.”

Now Suydam spoke the two next words. “Wisdom. Unknown.”

“The Supreme Alphabet,” Malone said.

“Almost,” Suydam answered. “One last letter is all that’s left. And then . . .”

The old man’s voice sounded weary where Malone would’ve expected him to be rapturous. From the street—as if from a distance of miles—Malone heard the shouts of his officers, then the unmistakable reports of gunfire. Pistols first, and then rifles.

“It’s beginning, sir,” Black Tom said. His voice, in contrast to his master’s, rippled with glee.

Malone watched Black Tom. When he turned his gaze back to Robert Suydam the old man stared at the detective balefully. The sounds of gunfire on the street escalated, onlookers howled and screamed.

“You should see the rest before all this is over,” Black Tom said. “Go over by that chair.”

Then Black Tom pushed Malone toward the great chair at the far end of the great room. Malone didn’t argue, or take offense; he moved forward eagerly.

Malone moved toward the great chair. His legs became stiffer, his feet heavier, and his mind swam as if through a murky pool. Was this merely fear and curiosity, or had the atmosphere actually changed as he moved farther through the room? Behind him Robert Suydam spoke, but the words were difficult for Malone to hear.

The Sleeping King!

Was that what Robert Suydam had shouted?

From the street, the sounds of heavy machine guns shredded the air. Not one, not two, but all three 1921s, all at once. Malone couldn’t be sure he’d heard anyone shooting from within the tenements, but why else would the police open fire? How long would these tenement buildings stand up to a trio of antiaircraft guns? A cataclysm was happening on Parker Place, and belowground the air here smelled of sewage and smoke and the threat of divination.

“He waits Outside,” Robert Suydam shouted. “Not a distance of miles, but dimensions. The Sleeping King rests on the other side of the door. He will be roused by a man of unwavering intent.”

“I suppose that’s you!” Malone shouted as he approached the chair.

A figure sat in it.

Suddenly a great wind picked up in the basement. As if a window had been thrown open during a hurricane. Malone reached the chair and grabbed at it to steady himself. A figure in the chair, for sure. Someone big. Was this the Sleeping King?

The room filled with a flickering light, and Malone turned to face the source. When it flashed, every corner of the chamber became visible, every shadow dispelled. Malone looked back to see Robert Suydam and his servant Black Tom in the middle of the basement. And behind them? A pocket opened. A door. He no longer saw the basement stairs leading up to sidewalk level. There was, instead, a great bubble of darkness that was not pure darkness. Through this door he peered into the depths of a fathomless sea. And in that sea, the outline of something enormous, impossible to reconcile with his rational mind.

“I tried to warn you!” Robert Suydam shouted. “This plotting pirate means murder! The Black Pharaoh is here!”

The heavy machine-gun fire continued on street level, a thousand rounds, maybe more. The ceiling of the basement fragmented; dust fell. The police were tearing the building down with their Browning 1921s. Not enough to arrest the men inside, the tenements themselves were being razed. Malone clung to the great chair as though it was a dinghy in a storm-tossed sea. The seated figure, still in shadows, troubled him less than what he saw next.

Black Tom raised a hand in the air, and something silver caught the light. He pulled a razor across Robert Suydam’s neck. Black Tom cut the old man’s throat. Suydam collapsed, screaming. Malone hadn’t realized a man could scream with his throat slit, but now he knew it was possible. Behind this murderous scene, the great door continued to open, the deep hole in existence expanded.

Malone moved around the side of the great chair. He dropped his notepad and fumbled for his revolver. He went down on a knee and looked at the profile of the figure in the chair. He knew this man. He almost choked on his words.

“Mr. Howard,” he whispered.

The private detective sat in the great chair; even in death he wore an expression of anguish. The top of Mr. Howard’s head had been torn off. Mr. Howard had been scalped; the skin near the top had curled and slipped. Malone shivered at the gray horror of exposed skull.

Malone’s hand found the revolver in its shoulder holster.

Black Tom stood over Robert Suydam. The razor was still in his right hand, but he raised the left where he clutched the item Malone had taken for a horsehair brush.

“I had to be resourceful!” Black Tom shouted. “Mr. Howard proved quite useful when it came time to paint. At least a part of him did.”

Malone steadied himself and gave a quick pat to Mr. Howard’s knee. A death like this was not deserved by any man.

Malone rose to his feet. Black Tom moved closer to the great chair. Malone willed his hand to bring out the pistol. Above their heads plaster crumbled and fell. Robert Suydam, meanwhile, had yet to die; gone to his knees, stooped forward, clutching his cut throat as his essence spilled between his fingers, he howled in bewilderment more than pain.

“Even now he can’t imagine he won’t triumph,” Black Tom said, gesturing to Suydam. The Negro held the razor loosely, a casual killer now. His fingers were slick with blood. He looked at the ceiling. “They’ll bring this place down on top of both of you.”

“Us,” Malone said, hand still inside his coat. “Down on all three of us.”

The portal remained open and, despite himself, some part of Malone reveled at the sight. His eyes adjusted. He was looking upon a city, lost to the ages, at the bottom of the sea. And in the midst of this decaying metropolis he saw a figure as large as a mountain range.

“Listen now,” Black Tom said, pointing up at the ceiling, the maelstrom of gunfire and shouting on the street. “This is a song my mother and father never taught me. It’s one all my own.”

The heavy machine guns continued to rattle. How much more ammunition could they have left? The screams of the locals combined as if it were a single instrument, playing alongside the 1921s. And Robert Suydam, the poor devil, continued to live. He shrieked and his blood showered through his clutched hands. Each of these sounds were layered, one on top of the other, one with the other. A demented music, evil orchestration.

“It sounds as sweet as a ballad to me,” Black Tom said.

“You killed the old woman,” Malone said. “Ma Att.”

“She can’t be killed,” Black Tom explained. “But she was dispatched.”

“I’m an officer of the law. Don’t you understand the consequences if you hurt me?”

“Guns and badges don’t scare everyone,” Black Tom said.

“How?” Malone asked. “How can you do all this?”

“Suydam showed me such things were possible. But the old man didn’t have the character to see it through. I had to be the one to walk through the doors and greet destiny. Suydam proved to be like any other man. He wanted power, but the Sleeping King doesn’t honor small requests.”

“So why are you doing it?” Malone asked, sounding like a bewildered child. “If not for power, then what could be the point?”

Black Tom slapped one hand firmly on the back of Malone’s neck. Malone had never felt John’s Handshake. It was painful. Black Tom guided him away from the chair. As they moved, Black Tom kicked it over, and Mr. Howard’s body splayed out onto the ground.

“I bear a hell within me,” Black Tom growled. “And finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin.”

“You’re a monster, then,” Malone said.

“I was made one.”

They moved toward Robert Suydam, who continued to gasp but had lost so much blood he’d fallen face-first to the floor. He gurgled like a drain. Black Tom marched Malone toward the portal, and Malone felt the sudden conviction Black Tom would throw him in, push him through. Malone feared drowning in that distant sea less than he did being any closer to that murky, doom-drenched, elder city and the being sprawled among its ruins.

“No,” Malone whispered. “Don’t send me there. Don’t send me there.”

“I thought you were a seeker,” Black Tom said. “Well, here it is.”

Black Tom forced Malone down to his knees. They were ten feet from the portal. The great wind that blew through smelled not of the ocean but of deep corruption. It howled and Malone’s senses reeled, pummeled by a repulsive wisdom.

“Words and music,” Black Tom said, speaking right into Malone’s ear. “That’s what’s required for this song. You can hear the music above you, but the words are not all done. One more letter needs writing, but I could use a little more blood. Would you like to help me with that?”

Through the portal, amid the ruins of the sunken city, Malone perceived the figure’s enormous features—a face, or the perversion of one. The upper portions of its visage smooth like the dome of a man’s skull, but below the eyes the face pulsed and curled, tentacles, tendrils. Eyelids the size of unfurled sails remained, blessedly, shut, but they quivered as if to open.

“No more!” Malone wailed, closing his eyes. “I don’t want to see!”

Black Tom brought one arm around Malone’s neck and squeezed tightly.

“My daddy’s name was Otis Tester,” Black Tom whispered. “My mother’s name was Irene Tester. Let me sing you their favorite song.”

Malone pulled at Black Tom’s arm with one hand, but with the other he tried for his gun again. Even as Black Tom choked him, even as Black Tom sang, Malone kept one portion of his mind rational in the midst of so much madness.

Find the pistol.

Use the pistol.

“Don’t you mind people grinning in your face,” Black Tom sang softly.

Find the pistol.

Use the pistol.

“Don’t you mind people grinning in your face.”

Malone’s hand found his coat pocket and slipped inside. He gripped the revolver.

“I said bear this in mind, a true friend is hard to find,” Black Tom cooed.

Malone’s hand came out with the gun. He had only to raise it and pull the trigger as many times as he could. From this close he would be deafened, perhaps permanent damage, but Black Tom would be defeated, and this mattered most.

Black Tom grunted. Suddenly he was doing something to Malone’s face, but Malone couldn’t understand what it could be. As Malone’s hand rose, a new sensation crippled him. He’d been set on fire. So it felt. A burning pain whose cause he couldn’t locate. He only knew it was an agony so bright the world seemed to flare around him. He howled as animals do, and the hand holding the pistol shot out against his will. The pistol fell from Malone’s hand and flew through the portal, into that distant sea.

Malone screamed and screamed and let go of Black Tom’s arm. He batted at his own face as if he might swat away his torment. Black Tom grunted again and Malone’s eyes became wet. Something was being done to Malone’s eyes. A tugging sensation, as if Malone’s face was being yanked off. Black Tom held a straight razor in one hand, and it was slathered in blood.

Black Tom had cut off Malone’s eyelids.

“Try to shut them now,” Black Tom said. “You can’t choose blindness when it suits you. Not anymore.”

Through the portal Malone witnessed—against his wishes—the moment when a mountain turned to face him. Its eyelids opened. In the depths of the sea, a pair of eyes shone as bright as starlight. Malone wept.

Then the vision washed away. Malone’s blood clouded his perspective. For the first time the firing of heavy machine guns was drowned out by new destruction. The middle tenement came down. This caused the other two to topple as well. Collapsed. To Malone the whole world sounded as if it had cracked in two.

Black Tom finally let go of Malone, and Malone fell to the basement floor. He whispered one last thing into the detective’s ear. Robert Suydam lay five feet away, finally dead.

Malone made out the figure of Black Tom crouching beside him, dipping one finger into the detective’s blood, then spelling something on the ground, directly before the portal. When Black Tom finished, the doorway closed.

The basement stairs, leading up to the street, became visible again. The door at the top of the stairs crashed open, and half a dozen police officers stumbled down. They thought they were escaping the worst by moving underground. But those officers must’ve thought they’d entered the bowels of the severest hell. They escaped a collapsing tenement building only to find an abattoir. The corpses of two white men, the tortured form of Brooklyn’s own Detective Malone, the walls and floor smeared in blood, and one Negro standing tall in the middle of it all.

Two of the officers turned to run back up the stairs, but the collapsed mortar and brick above made this impossible. The other four immediately raised their guns—rifles and pistols—taking aim at Black Tom.

Black Tom walked toward them with his straight razor held above his head. Even in his pain and delirium, Malone shouted for the cops to fire. A cry of bloodlust. The last two officers joined their brothers back at the bottom of the stairs, and drew their service revolvers. Those six men fired fifty-seven rounds at Black Tom.

17

DETECTIVE THOMAS F. MALONE survived the horror at Red Hook and received the department’s highest honors once released from the hospital six weeks later. He’d been trapped in the basement for twenty-nine hours while fellow officers, and members of the fire department, worked to dig out survivors. Malone was the only one to make it out alive. The list of the dead removed from the basement was Mr. Robert Suydam, Mr. Ervin Howard, and six patrolmen from the New York City Police Department. Every single body suggested death came at the blade of a sharp instrument, but no matter how closely the basement was inspected, such a weapon was never found.

While in the hospital, Malone was visited by, among others, the president of the Board of Police Commissioners, the chief of staff, and four different deputy commissioners. Mayor Hylan came to speak with Malone, as did Archbishop Patrick Joseph Hayes. A few members of the public wrote to Malone with questions that baffled the president of the Board of Police Commissioners; he vetted all such correspondence and sent none of it on to Malone. A man originally from Rhode Island but now living in Brooklyn with his wife proved so persistent a pair of officers was sent to the man’s place to make clear he wasn’t welcome in New York. Perhaps his constitution was better suited to Providence. The man left the city soon afterward, never to return.

Members of the press did all they could to infiltrate Malone’s room, but the mayor had him in a private wing at New York Methodist Hospital for fear Malone might tell the press anything strange. It was feared he’d spin his outlandish story—clearly the result of horrific shock—but also they didn’t want him photographed. The hideous image of a detective without eyelids would be the front-page story seen round the world.

The raid on Parker Place had generated positive write-ups thus far. Nearly fifty criminals apprehended, half of them illegal immigrants to this country. Those twenty-five would be shipped off, the other half incarcerated for an extended time. The collapse of the tenement buildings was attributed to a storehouse of explosives those criminals were stockpiling. Last, the three “blue-eyed Norwegian” babies were never discovered on the premises. Locals attributed the rumors of abduction to the swamp gas of European anxiety known to flare up within a neighborhood’s proximity to Red Hook.

Malone healed as best he could and, with time, came to understand he must leave the police force. He couldn’t imagine entering another building, another urban block, without collapsing to the ground, shivering with fear. His superiors couldn’t imagine anyone ever trusting a police officer with such a vivid facial deformity.

The specialists at New York Methodist designed a set of goggles that Malone would have to wear for the rest of his life. He was given a solution with which to douse his eyes throughout the day lest they lose their moisture and he suffer pain and, potentially, blindness. The first pair of goggles was clear, but this only created a magnifying effect when Malone wore them. A second pair was fashioned out of darker glass, and this was deemed acceptable. It spared passersby the sight of a man who would never again be able to shut his eyes.

Just before Malone’s release, a police surgeon who’d been called in to consult about Malone’s eyes was ushered into the room. He told Malone about a town called Chepachet, in Rhode Island, where the surgeon had relatives—a quiet place, not urban, about as far as Malone could get from Red Hook but still enjoy the benefits of civilization. A specialist in nearby Woonsocket could meet with Malone, speak with him, as he continued his recovery. The NYPD would cover the costs of his stay, and it was implied this would become the place of his retirement. If he would disappear, New York City would pay the bills. Malone accepted the deal.

And yet, as always happens, the story did get out. What finally made the newspapers was a kind of mishmash of truths. A man named Robert Suydam became acquainted with the rougher elements of Red Hook, Brooklyn. The former member of highborn society, drawn into a culture of crime and terror, found himself corrupted by it, lost in a ring of human smuggling and child abduction. Suydam made his last stand in a tenement on Parker Place, and the police were left with no choice but to storm the building. After a firefight, the poorly constructed buildings collapsed, killing Suydam, one private detective, and six brave members of the New York City Police Department.

That, in its entirety, was the story that made its way into print. And eventually even Malone’s memory changed. As he spent more time in the hamlet of Chepachet, as he met with the specialist in Woonsocket, Malone began to doubt his own memory of the villain known as Black Tom. Hadn’t it really been Robert Suydam all along who’d guided those awful forces? Who else but a man born into wealth and education could be naturally equipped to lead? These were the questions posed by the specialist, and they helped Malone to reshape his understanding of what he’d endured. Who could blame Malone’s mind for wreaking havoc with the truth? Robert Suydam—that arch fiend—had killed Mr. Howard, and six officers, and brought grievous harm to Malone. But as a sign of God’s just nature, Suydam’s own Negro underling turned on him and cut his master’s throat. Wasn’t this, no matter how horrible, more likely to be the truth? Negroes simply weren’t that devious, the specialist explained. Their simplicity was their gift, and their curse.

At the start of his time with the specialist, Malone would counter with the obvious question: Where then was the body of the Negro in the rubble? But the specialist waved such concerns away. Wasn’t the site still being cleared, even two months later? Sooner or later the Negro would appear. And of course that was what Malone feared most.

“You are saved,” the specialist said, during one session. “What has cast such a shadow upon you?”

“The Negro,” Malone replied, but this was not a pleasing answer.

There was a story the specialist wanted, the same one told by the newspapers, and by every official with whom Malone had been in contact. Imagine a universe in which all the powers of the NYPD could not defeat a single Negro with a razor blade. Impossible. Impossible. And soon Malone was willing to be convinced. He began to half remember odd dream states, wherein he went down into the basement in Red Hook and found a portal to some hellish other world, and there he saw all manner of evil, but not a Sleeping King—not a Sleeping King. Robert Suydam was there in the dream, and there was a golden carved pedestal, and wild chaos ensued, and somehow Malone was spared. The specialist seemed pleased by this narrative, much more palatable; he assured officials in the NYPD and the mayor’s office that Malone was making great progress.

Malone settled into his life in Chepachet and slowly rediscovered his interest in the arcane and profound. A handful of items had been shipped to him from the police department, the last effects from his desk at the Butler Street station and one item from the basement at Parker Place. His notepad. When Malone held the pad, it was like the first lightning kiss after a long time away from one’s true love. Dust still coated the cover and the book smelled, faintly, of river water. Looking through the pages Malone felt some older, more certain, part of himself growing stronger. But then, on the very last page, he saw the words he’d scribbled that day in Red Hook. Gorgo, Mormo, thousand-faced moon. But this wasn’t what made him falter. Instead it was a series of words transcribed in the order he’d read them. The Supreme Alphabet.

One more letter needs writing, but I could use a little more blood.

Would you like to help me with that?

Malone squeezed the notepad tightly, an involuntary spasm, and he was transported back to Parker Place, his eyes bleeding and his face burning, and the Negro stooped over him. He whispered something in Malone’s ear. Then he dipped his finger in blood and moved it on the ground. The Supreme Alphabet spelled out in gore. Malone could almost see the last letter, actually three short words, scrawled on the basement floor. The same words had been on the covers of the book Charles Thomas Tester brought to Ma Att long ago.

Even as he became nauseated from the memory, he found himself turning his head, inching his right ear forward, as if to hear the last words Black Tom ever spoke. What was it? Only one line. But there, in the little cabin in Rhode Island, where he’d made his new home, the words would not come to him.

Instead, the modest space began to crowd him as it had never done in the months he’d lived there. He feared the walls of the cabin would collapse and the roof would come down. Along the wall he saw the six officers, lined up as they’d been on the stairwell when they’d fired on Black Tom. The way they’d dropped their guns and clutched at their ears after the tremendous echo of their gunfire. And then Black Tom appeared at the top of the stairs—as if he’d just stepped in from outside—and moved down the line behind them, cutting each man’s throat in turn, all too confused to realize they’d been murdered.

And right afterward, at the bottom of those steps, Black Tom made the strange but now familiar sound—a long, low tone—and a blast of fetid air coursed through the basement. He didn’t even need the protection of Robert Suydam’s library in order to move through time and dimension. He’d become a star traveler in no need of a ship. Then Black Tom, the former Charles Thomas Tester, walked through the portal. He went out.

All this returned to Malone there in the cabin, and he couldn’t stay inside. He ran out but still felt unguarded. He walked down the Chepachet road, out of the hamlet, to the nearby village of Pascoag, slightly more urban with its tiny downtown, a handful of taller buildings. Malone told himself he’d come here to pick up some magazines, maybe eat lunch, but none of this was true. He felt himself hunted, hounded, but couldn’t understand what might be following him. The stories he, and his specialist, had used to paper over the truth had suddenly been torn off.

Thomas J. Malone walked Sayles Avenue, and soon reached Main Street. He made a strange sight to passersby, this tall, anxious man wearing enormous shaded goggles. He became more alien when, on Main Street, he turned and faced the tallest building in all of downtown Pascoag. He looked up once and fell to the ground, screaming so hideously it made a horse drawing a carriage bolt forward; its driver had a terrible time getting the spooked animal to stop. Pedestrians gathered around the odd man, who looked up at the skies. They asked after him—a child was sent to fetch the local sheriff—but the man only gawped at the skyline, such as it was, and his mouth quivered as if he were about to bawl. What had happened? the crowd wondered aloud. What did he see? Many dismissed Malone as a drunk or a madman, but a handful—the more sensitive souls—followed his sightline. For a moment all of them glimpsed an abhorrent face in the looming clouds. Each one saw what Malone had seen, the thing that had brought him to the ground. A pair of inhuman eyes stared down at them from the heavens, shining like starlight. Then and there, Malone finally heard the last words Black Tom whispered down in the basement.

I’ll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.

Then Malone returned to himself and, realizing he’d made a scene, he apologized to the gathered townspeople. After explaining himself to the local constable, he wandered back to his cabin in Chepachet and became, for a short while, an item of lively gossip in Pascoag.

18

BLACK TOM ENTERED THE Victoria Society and took a table in the dining room, one near the windows looking out on 137th Street. As soon as he arrived, he slipped the straight razor into his pocket and removed his jacket and vest. He’d cleaned up a little, but it hardly helped. His pants remained clotted with dirt and dark with blood, and his shirt showed so much perspiration that it clung to his skin. Still he was allowed entrance. The greeter feared him.

Black Tom sat in the dining room, and since it was late afternoon the space remained otherwise empty. He sat with his back to everything and watched the sun glow over Harlem, and he listened to the rumbling hive of life on the sidewalks and the streets.

When Buckeye arrived, a plate of food had been set before Black Tom. He hadn’t eaten anything. Buckeye ordered his own plate—a meal made by a Puerto Rican woman this time—and didn’t really look at Black Tom until he’d eaten two alcapurrias. The greeter had sent out word that Buckeye’s friend was at the Victoria Society, looking decidedly odd.

“I heard about your father,” Buckeye said after he’d swallowed.

“My father?” Black Tom said this as if he’d forgotten he ever had one.

“Where you been, man?” Buckeye asked, setting down his fork. “What happened to you?”

“You’ll hear about it,” Black Tom said calmly. “It’ll be in the papers tomorrow. Probably for a whole week. Then they’ll move on to something else.”

Buckeye watched Black Tom quietly. He’d been hustling long enough to know there are questions you don’t ask if you want to avoid being pulled into a court case later.

Black Tom said, “I did something big, bigger than anyone will understand for a long time. I was just so angry.”

Buckeye nodded, ate another few bites of mofongo, and strenuously did not ask follow-up questions.

“I was a good man, right? I mean I wasn’t like my father, but I never did people wrong. Not truly.”

“No, you didn’t,” Buckeye said, looking his old friend directly in the eye. “You were always good people. Still are.”

Black Tom smiled faintly but shook his head. “Every time I was around them, they acted like I was a monster. So I said goddamnit, I’ll be the worst monster you ever saw!”

Newly arrived diners at nearby tables turned to look at Black Tom, but neither he nor Buckeye noticed.

“But I forgot,” Black Tom said quietly. “I forgot about all this.”

Black Tom scanned the tables of men and women dining at the Victoria Society. He pointed to the row of windows that opened onto 137th Street.

“Nobody here ever called me a monster,” Black Tom said. “So why’d I go running somewhere else, to be treated like a dog? Why couldn’t I see all the good things I already had? Malone said I put my daddy at risk, and he was right. It’s my fault, too. I used him without a second thought.”

Black Tom reached into his pocket and revealed the straight razor. Buckeye gave a quick glance around the room, but Black Tom paid the room no mind. He opened the razor. The blade looked slathered in jelly. Buckeye knew what that was. Black Tom set the strop down on the table and Buckeye tossed his napkin over it.

“We need to get rid of that,” Buckeye cautioned, looking at the shape under the napkin. “You should have done it before you even stepped in here.”

“The seas will rise and our cities will be swallowed by the oceans,” Black Tom said. “The air will grow so hot we won’t be able to breathe. The world will be remade for Him, and His kind. That white man was afraid of indifference; well, now he’s going to find out what it’s like.

“I don’t know how long it’ll take. Our time and their time isn’t counted the same. Maybe a month? Maybe a hundred years? All this will pass. Humanity will be washed away. The globe will be theirs again, and it’s me who did it. Black Tom did it. I gave them the world.”

“Who the fuck is Black Tom?” Buckeye asked.

“Me,” he said.

Buckeye scanned the room once more, then grabbed the napkin and the razor blade as well. He folded the napkin around the blade.

“Your name is Tommy Tester,” Buckeye said. “Charles Thomas Tester. You’re my best friend, and the worst singer I’ve ever heard.”

Both men laughed loudly, and for a brief moment Black Tom appeared as he had been not so long ago: twenty years old and in possession of great joy.

“I wish I’d been more like my father,” Black Tom said. “He didn’t have much, but he never lost his soul.”

Buckeye had slid back from the table, fussed with his right boot, trying to slip the straight razor inside for safekeeping. He’d discard it, into the river, after he walked Tommy home.

“I wonder if I could ever get mine back,” Black Tom whispered.

He rose from the table and walked to a window. He opened it. At 4:13 p.m., Harlemites within a three-block radius reported a strange sound in their heads, and a sudden wave of nausea. Before anyone inside the Victoria Society realized what was happening, Black Tom went out the window. Buckeye turned in time to see him leap, but Tommy Tester’s body was never found. Zig zag zig.

PENRIC AND THE SHAMAN

Lois McMaster Bujold

I

Five gods, but vultures were huge when seen at this distance.

The bird cocked its pale head on its sinuous neck, peering at Inglis like a nearsighted old man, as if uncertain whether he was its enemy or its . . . breakfast, judging by the graying of the scudding damp sky overhead. It shuffled back and forth, its pantaloon-feathers stirring on its legs as it raised one talon-tipped foot and contemplated its dilemma. The hooked yellow beak seemed to take aim. Inglis opened his parched mouth and gusted a harsh hiss, like the fire in a blacksmith’s forge when the bellows blew. The bird skipped back a pace, raising vast brown wings, as if it were a villain in a play swirling his cloak just before declaiming his defiance to fate.

Fate, it seemed, had Inglis at bay now. Run to ground. He scratched at that hard ground with a gloved hand, leather cold and stiff, but grubbed up only snow. Not enough light yet to see if there was much blood on it. The steep vale he had climbed out of last night was a shadowed gulf, the ice and the rocks a mosaic of white and black streaks, the scrubby trees vague claws. His head ached abominably. He had thought that a freezing man was supposed to go numb, but his trapped leg continued to throb. One last heave failed to shift anything. Angled downward on the slope, he had no strength left to pull himself upright and try to get some better leverage.

The vulture hopped again. He wasn’t sure what it was waiting for. Reinforcements? They contemplated each other for an unmeasured time.

A dog barked, getting closer. Not mere yaps, but deep woofs, as if sounding from a chest the size of a barrel. A sharper bark joined the first, and another. The vulture flapped and heaved itself into the air, retreating, but only as far as a nearby bare-branched tree, as the dogs rushed up. Surely he was hallucinating—there could be no Great Beast here, but the deep-voiced dog was the size and shape of a wolf, and the wolf in Inglis’s blood seemed to sing out to it. It shuddered in canine ecstasy, licking his face, rolling in the snow and waving its paws in the air only to jump up and lick again, as the other two swirled around him, whining and yipping. Do you imagine I am your god? No gods here . . .

Voices.

“What is it?”

“Something dead, looks like. Arrow, you idiot beast! Don’t roll in it, you’ll stink up the hut fair fierce—again . . .”

“Oh. It’s a man.”

“Anyone we know?”

Shadowy shapes moved around him. Someone dragged off the dog, but with a menacing growl it wriggled free, then began nosing him again.

“. . . No. Traveler.”

“What’s he doing this far off the pass road?”

“Getting his fool self killed, looks like.”

“He took this track, alone in the dark, in this weather? Practically qualifies him for a suicide, I’d say. The Bastard’s bait for sure.”

“Should we haul his carcass down to Whippoorwill? Might be a reward or something.”

A thoughtful pause.

“Eh, nor there might not be, and where’s the point to that? Collect the reward now, save steps. Strip him and let the carrion birds give him a sky burial. It can make no difference to him.”

“Well, it’s about time somebody gave us a god’s-day gift . . .”

Ah. The vulture’s reinforcements have arrived.

Hands, plucking at his clothes. “Good cloth. Good boots—help me shift these rocks, and I bet we can get both of them.”

“Might have to cut off the smashed one.”

The leg, or the boot? No, they’d want the boot. Maybe the leg . . .

“Riding boots. So where’s his horse? Think he was thrown?”

“Figure we could find it? It might have a pack, with more goods.”

“He’d have to have been leading it, on this slope. Might have slipped . . . stupid to try to climb in those boots.” A pause. “I don’t see it down below.”

“It’d be dead meat if it were . . . get off him, Arrow, you fool dog!”

Hands at his belt. “There’s a purse! . . . Ah, piss. Not much in it.”

“Fancy knife hilt. Hey, think those’re real jewels?”

A snort. “Martensbridge glass, maybe.”

They pulled at the sheath, trying to tug it free. Inglis’s eyes unglued; he reached deep and found his last reserves, flinging his voice like a javelin: “Don’t touch my knife.”

A mad scramble back. “Bastard’s teeth, he’s still alive!” The lesser dogs went into paroxysms, barking wildly, and had to be beaten off him. The great dog went flat, ears and tail down, whimpering, licking his face and neck with abject servility. But the hands that had been tugging at his knife did not resume their attempted scavenge. Sacrilege. His powers, it seemed, had not wholly deserted him in craven company with his hope, faith, and courage.

“Father and Mother. Now what do we do?”

The very question that had been plaguing him for five hundred miles. Scraping for the last residue of truth left in him, he got out, “Take me home.”

He wept, he thought, but he no longer cared who saw it. Perhaps the gray dawn was false, because the world around him darkened once more.

II

“I’m bored,” whined Desdemona. “Bored, bored, bored.”

Penric, as soon as he regained control of his lips from her, smiled down at the page across which his quill was carefully making its way. “Destroy a flea.”

“We slew every flea in the palace precincts weeks ago. And all the lice as well.”

“And I’m sure everyone here would be grateful to you,” murmured Pen, “if they knew.” He had learned early on in his association with his demon, which had gifted him with the powers, though not yet the learning, of a Temple sorcerer, to be discreet about the deployment of their magics. He deployed his quill in the setting down of the next three words in Darthacan, glanced up at the volume in the Wealdean tongue he was copying, and translated the next line in his head, cross-checking to be sure it was the next line, and not one up or down from it. He’d ruined not a few pages by that inattention.

He pressed his lips closed to prevent interruptions while he unloaded the complex medical phrase, then rolled his shoulders and stretched. “Your part will come soon,” he said tranquilly. “Just three more lines and this page is done. You shall like that.”

“It was only diverting the first hundred times. After that, it was as bad as worms.”

Desdemona, formerly, had been the possession of a Temple physician-sorceress of the Mother’s Order, devoted to medicine and the healing arts. Two such women, actually, in her long succession of riders. Which was where she had picked up her mastery of the Darthacan tongue, passing it in turn to him, and of medicine as it related to sorcery, in which Penric was . . . making slower progress.

“I shall not make you treat people’s worms.”

“You made us treat bookworms.”

Penric arranged another sentence in his head, and studiously ignored her till it was transferred. She did not try to interrupt, having learned by experience that however droll fouling his lines might seem to a demon of disorder, it just sent him around to start over at the beginning, and then she had to endure her tedium twice as long.

At her next chance, she said, “At least ask the princess-archdivine if we can ride courier for her again this week.”

“Des, it’s snowing.” He glanced up at the fine glass window of his tiny, but private, work chamber on the palace’s fourth floor, which let the light in and kept the vile weather out. In his not-that-long-ago youth at Jurald Court, his family’s home at the feet of the great mountains that bounded the Cantons on the north, he’d been sent out in the snow to hunt or check the trap lines. Sitting indoors with a blanket over his lap, lifting nothing heavier than a feather, was much nicer, even as he’d discovered that the small muscles of the eyes and hands could get just as fatigued as big ones.

Last line. He sat up, read the page down once and up from the bottom once, matching it almost line-by-line to the original—Darthacan was a fluffier, if more structurally logical, tongue than Wealdean—and rose to collect the next wooden printing plate from the stack.

He had devised this process while studying at the Bastard’s Seminary at Rosehall, adjunct to the great university in that Wealdean town. Poor scholars had to rent, and share, their frightfully expensive books, which had led to much brangling over turns, a couple of memorable fistfights, and one stabbing. Which Pen could never mix into because it would have been unfair, not to mention that few fellow students, once they learned of his sorcerous-if-untrained status, challenged him . . .

“. . . more than once,” Des murmured smugly.

Des was getting disturbingly good at reading his thoughts, these days. Practice, I suppose. He was a bit peeved that the process did not seem to be reciprocal, though he had certainly grown able to sense her moods—so many, many moods—and had become almost unthinkingly fluent in their silent speech. When they were alone, he tried to let her chatter on aloud with his mouth as much as she pleased, which seemed to help keep her in a good humor. Bad idea when not alone, since their conversations all took place in his voice. To the confusion, and a few times violent offense, of their auditors.

He pulled the next prepared wooden plate off the stack at the end of his worktable, and carefully arranged his new page face-down across it. As habitually as when sitting down to dinner, he blessed the work with the tally of the gods: touching his forehead for the Daughter of Spring, his lips for the Bastard, his navel for the Mother of Summer, his groin for the Father of Winter, and spreading his hand over his heart for the Son of Autumn. And then tapped his thumb twice more against his lips, for luck. Sitting up straight, he said, “Ready, Des?”

“You hardly need me for this, anymore,” she griped, but flowed into alignment with him nonetheless.

He passed his hand above the plate. A stink of wood rot and burning arose from it, along with a puff of steam mixed with smoke. His hand heated, pleasantly taming its cramping. His carefully calligraphed page grayed into ash.

He took up his brush and whisked away the ash and crumbs. Raised upon the surface was left a perfect mirror replica of his page, ready to turn over to the palace printer for making anything from a few dozen to hundreds of copies. The work would have taken an ordinary woodcarver the better part of a week, and wouldn’t be nearly so fine. He could produce ten plates a day, and it was only that slow because he’d not yet figured out how to perform it with anyone’s writing but his own.

The trick of it was in the destruction of the handwritten page, so that there was no net gain in order. Uphill, creative magic was costly; downhill, destructive magic was cheap. What happened to the plate afterward in the hands of ordinary men did not seem to impinge on this demonic summation. He could do this all day long.

The princess-archdivine had been delighted with his new skill, when he’d first shown it to her, and now used him regularly for her official pamphlets. In between those interrupting assignments, he was permitted to get on with the task of his heart, reproducing Learned Ruchia’s two-volume work on sorcery and medicine to be distributed to the Bastard’s Order throughout the Cantons and the Weald—and, soon, Darthaca and Ibra. (And after that, perhaps Adria and far Cedonia? Des moaned in prospect.) And to which he had added a short epilogue detailing his new technique—A Codicil by Learned Penric of Martensbridge, Sorcerer, he had proudly headed it—which should multiply its effect yet further. He owed Ruchia that living memorial, he thought, for death-gifting him with her demon, however inadvertently.

Well, inadvertent from his point of view, hers, and her demon’s. He was uneasily unsure about the intentions of the white god that she, and now he, served. Though so far, Penric seemed to have been let get on with his life free of holy molestation.

At a cautious knock at his workroom door, Pen called, “Enter.”

A palace page in the blue tabard of a dedicat of the Daughter’s Order poked her head in, though only a few wary inches. She jerked back and waved a hand before her nose, grimacing, as the smoky fug of Pen’s labors wafted out into the corridor. “Learned Penric, sir. The princess-archdivine bids you attend upon her in her private cabinet.”

“Now?”

“Yes, Learned.”

Penric waved amiable acknowledgment. “Very good. I’ll follow presently.”

The girl whisked away, and Pen rose and set his tools in order.

Hurrah! said Des. Something new? An outing? An airing . . .?

“More chores, more likely.” Pen closed his door and made his way down the corridor.

*   *   *

The princess-archdivines of the royal free town and hinterland of Martensbridge were, by law and long custom, appointees in the gift of the distant Hallow King of the Weald. The town’s charter from him, and fealty to him, were what made it royal; the distance was what made it free, Penric suspected. Save for one or two lapses that they had managed to repair by strategic marriages, bribes, and a few armed clashes, the high house of kin Stagthorne had held onto the throne through the past several generations of elections. The current holder of the Martensbridge benefice had thus been, by the turning furrows of time, first daughter, then sister, then aunt to the succeeding kings.

Princess-Archdivine Llewen kin Stagthorne was now a slight, shrewd woman of sixty, who had carried out her duties to the Temple in this pocket palatine realm with the firm hand of a frugal housewife for some thirty years. As Penric knocked at the door to her private cabinet, one floor down from his own and adjacent to her chancellery, and was bade to enter, he found her dressed in the five-colored holy robes of her Temple office. Presumably she’d been caught either on the way to or from some ceremonial task. She was flanked as usual by her secretary, a woman of like age—and shrewdness—in the silks and linen and fine woolens appropriate to the palace precincts.

A strange man was also present, not nearly so finely clad. Above middle height, broad-shouldered, fit; perhaps thirty years of age? Brown hair, gray eyes. Face and hands red and chapped with cold; recently shaved but not, given his road-reek, recently bathed; riding boots cursorily cleaned of mud. Pen might have taken him for some urgent courier, but for the distinctive gray doublet with the brass buttons peeking out from beneath his thrown-back black cloak.

What’s a Wealdean Grayjay doing here?

The man eyed him in turn, then palpably dismissed him. Penric advanced to kiss the archdivine’s ring, held out perfunctorily to his inky fingers, and murmured, “How may I serve you, Your Grace?”

“Well, let us find out. Pull up a chair, Penric.” She nodded to the wall, where a few stools for favored visitors or supplicants were lined up. Unfavored ones were kept standing. The Grayjay had already been granted one, and the secretary another; the princess-archdivine occupied her carved seat, perhaps not accidentally reminiscent of a throne, and the only one supplied with a cushion. Supplicants were not encouraged to linger, not out of any high-nosed pride on the princess’s part, but because there were always other supplicants waiting.

Llewen went on mildly, “How goes your latest translation?”

“Well, Your Grace. Another two weeks of uninterrupted”—Penric made sure to emphasize that last word; Desdemona snickered silently—“work should see it ready to send out into the world after its sister volumes. I’m starting to think about its Ibran-language edition. Some recent medical texts in that tongue would be useful for reference, if they might be obtained for me. Helvia and Amberein gave me the Wealdean and Darthacan terminology, but Aulia of Brajar was no physician. And also, she may be out of date.”

The strange man’s hand clenched in impatience upon his knee. “Your Grace . . .” squeezed out between his lips, protest constricted by politeness, or perhaps the prudence of a man who hadn’t yet had his wish granted.

“Ah,” said the princess. “Permit me to introduce Senior Locator Oswyl, agent of the Father’s Order in Easthome. He is here, he tells me, on a mission of close pursuit, complicated by some very peculiar aspects, for which he earnestly begs the support of a sorcerer.”

Senior Locator was a title of a Temple Inquirer of middle rank; not the lowly man-at-arms of a mere Locator, nor the heights of an Inquirer or, more dizzyingly, Senior Inquirer, who were normally learned divines, but something betwixt and between. Although the name of his Order’s home chapter, from the royal capital itself, added some tacit clout. Penric sat up, interested, and offered the man a friendly smile and a little wave of his fingers. He did not smile back.

“And this is Penric, my sorcerer,” Princess Llewen went on, with a nod Pen’s way.

Oswyl’s eyes widened. In a voice of unflattering surprise, he said, “That’s your court sorcerer? I was expecting someone . . . older.”

And better dressed, perhaps? Penric was very fond of his hard-earned white robes of the Bastard’s Order, and wildly proud of his shoulder braids marking him as a divine and a sorcerer, but he had quickly learned not to wear them while at work. At least not when yoked with a demon of disorder with a questionable sense of humor. As a result, most days he went about the palace precincts looking the tattered clerk Oswyl had evidently taken him for. Since the palace denizens knew who he was by now, this was not usually a problem. He could turn himself out as a showy, and laundered, ornament to the court well enough when someone gave him warning . . .

Thinking of his incomplete translation, Pen stifled his leaping curiosity and offered, “You could try Learned Tigney of the Bastard’s Order on Stane Street. He is the master and bailiff of all Temple sorcerers in this archdivineship.” Not that this secretive company numbered many. Nor did that number include Penric, who owed fealty directly to the princess-archdivine in return for his late schooling.

“I started with Tigney. He sent me here,” growled the Grayjay, sounding frustrated. “I told him I needed someone powerful.”

“I trust,” murmured the princess, “you do not judge so quickly by appearances in your inquiries, Locator.”

Oswyl went a little rigid, but swallowed any attempt at answering this observation, yes or no being equally hapless choices.

Feeling faintly sorry for the man—he’d run into the sharp side of the princess’s tongue himself a time or two, though never without having earned it—Penric offered peaceably, “So what do you need this powerful sorcerer for, sir?”

The princess waved her beringed hand. “Tell the tale again, Locator. With a bit more detail this time, if you please. If something so dangerous has entered my lands, I need to understand it.”

Oswyl took a long breath, of a man about to recount the same story for, by Pen’s guess, the third time in a day. At least it ought to be well-practiced. He at last addressed Penric directly: “What do you know of the Wealdean royal shamans?”

Penric sat back, or aback. “Not . . . a great deal. I’ve never met one in person. Their society is engaged in an attempt to recover something of the Old Weald forest magics, thought to be stamped out in the conquests of Great Audar. Except brought under the disciplines of the Temple, this time.”

The Darthacan conquest of the Weald had taken three hard-fought generations, five hundred years ago; three generations later, Audar’s empire had all fallen apart again in internal discord. But when the Darthacan tide receded, the Temple remained, and the old forest tribes, shattered and scattered as much by the passage of time and the progress of the world as by Darthacan arms, never reestablished themselves. Why the restored, if much changed, Wealdean hallow kings had sponsored this antiquarian revival when they had perfectly good Temple sorcerers at their disposal, Penric did not know, although the interested scholar in him felt a sneaking approval.

“The shamans’ magic is a human creation, or at least, rising from the world instead of descending, or escaping, from a god as demons do,” Penric went on. “In the old forests, tribal shamans were said to invest their warriors with the spirits of fierce animals, to endow them with that strength and ferocity in battle. The making of a shaman partook of this, only more so. The spirits of animals were sacrificed into others of the same kind, generation after generation, piled up until they became something more, Great Beasts. Invested at last into a person, the spirit of such a creature brought its powers to him not”—he cleared his throat—“not unlike the way a demon of the white god does for a sorcerer. Despite the very different origins of the gifts.”

Humph, said Desdemona, but did not contradict this.

As Penric drew breath, the princess held up a stemming hand. “Penric is quite fond of reading, and will happily share all he learns. But perhaps not all at once? Go on, please, Locator.”

The Grayjay pressed his forehead, as though it ached, and grimaced. “Right. The first the Father’s Order at Easthome was told of this case was after that mess at the funeral, which was late off the mark. We should have been called out when they first found the body. Howsoever. I was dispatched to investigate and report on a suspicious death at the estate of one of the minor branches of the kin Boarford family, about ten miles outside of the capital. Not home of the earl-ordainer, thankfully, although for that I suppose they would have sent a more senior man.

“As I—eventually—worked out the chain of events, one of the scions of the family, a young man with military ambitions named Tollin kin Boarford, had purchased a wild boar captured alive from some hunters. He’d kept it for some weeks in a sty on the estate. His older brother thought that he had plans for some boar-baiting show, because instead of making any attempt to tame it, he teased it to make it wilder. Although I suppose either plan would have been equally stupid. But when Tollin was found one morning in the sty, shirtless and with his belly ripped open, and the boar bled dry with a knife in its throat, it seemed to the servants and family death by plain misadventure. The boar was butchered and fed to the dogs. Tollin’s body was washed and wrapped and made ready for his funeral rites at the old family temple on the estate, conducted by the local divine.

“Which was where everything went wrong, because none of the funeral animals signed that any god had taken up his soul, not the Son of Autumn, which would have been expected, not the Bastard, nor any other. As far as his family could tell, he had become a sundered ghost, and no one knew why. The divine, finally, sent for help.”

But instead, they got this Grayjay, Desdemona quipped. Penric pressed his lips closed.

“There was not much to see in the sty, and the boar was eaten by then, but I did, with some argument, get the family to allow me to unwrap and examine the body. Where I was apparently the first to notice that, in addition to the ghastly goring of his abdomen, there was a slit of a knife wound just under his left breast. Shifting the event from misadventure to murder.”

“Huh,” said Pen, impressed.

“At that point, I reexamined the knife, and determined that it was not only too wide to have made the wound, it was too wide to fit in Tollin’s belt sheath. Not his blade at all. And after a search of the sty, its environs, and pretty much the whole estate, no other knife of the right dimensions was found. Carried off, it seemed, by whoever had stabbed him to the heart.”

Huh, said Des, less unimpressed. She seized Pen’s mouth to inquire, very much in Learned Ruchia’s cadences, “Could you tell which injury came first, the knife wound or the goring?”

Oh, now that’s an interesting question, Pen commented, deciding to forgive her for the unauthorized interruption, not least because Oswyl glanced across at him with a shade more respect.

“I could not. I’m not sure it would have been apparent even if I had been able to see the body when it was first found. But I took the knife and my inquiry to Tollin’s friends. None of them recognized the blade, but at last I learned that Tollin had also been comrades with a royal shaman, one newly invested with his powers. A younger son of the northern kin Wolfcliffs.”

The princess nodded. “That branch of their kin has been noted for supplying royal shamans since Good King Biast revived the practices, a century before my birth. Or so it was when I last lived at the king’s hall in Easthome.”

The Grayjay nodded back. “It’s still so. This shaman, Inglis kin Wolfcliff, was said by his friends to have been trying to court Tollin’s sister, without much success. When I went looking for him, I discovered that he had vanished out of Easthome, without leave from his superiors, the day after Tollin’s death. No one knew where or why. They did identify the knife found in the boar as a ritual sort, but with no signs of the uncanny on it.

“Which is when I persuaded my superiors to issue an order for Inglis’s arrest. And the wherewithal to carry it out, which was harder to extract. Inglis seems to be an ordinary-looking fellow—middling stature, dark hair and eyes, early twenties—of which I found there is a vast brotherhood on the roads this season, none of them well remembered by anyone. Fortunately, he rode a fine flaxen mare, a gift from his family upon the occasion of his investiture I was told, which was noted by every ferryman and inn stable boy from the lower Stork to the Upper Lure all the way to the Crow. Which was where we found the mare, lamed, sold to an inn hoping to resell her to a breeder. And our quarry vanished into air.”

Penric cleared his throat. “Knowing what you pursued, shouldn’t your superiors at Easthome have requisitioned you a sorcerer before you started out?”

Oswyl’s jaw tightened. “They did. A sorcerer, six royal guardsmen, and three grooms. Upon the Crow River Road, we had a . . . strong difference of opinion as to which way Inglis might have fled. Learned Listere held out for his having made for Darthaca or Saone, to the east, to cross the border out of any jurisdiction of the Weald. I thought north, if for the same reason, making for the mountain passes out of these hinterlands into Adria or Carpagamo.”

The princess raised her chin. “If so, the shaman is out of his reckoning. The passes were blocked by snow a week ago. They don’t normally open again until spring. Unless you think he outraced our late-autumn blizzards?”

Oswyl’s lips unpressed unhappily. “From the Crow? If so, he would have had to be flying, not walking. My hope is to find him bottled up above your lake somewhere, stranded like a laggard merchant.”

“So where is your Easthome sorcerer now?” Penric prodded.

“Halfway to Darthaca, I suppose,” growled Oswyl. “And all the troop with him, as they refused to be divided.”

That is a very determined Grayjay, Penric observed to Desdemona, to follow his own line though his whole pack hares off without him.

Or a typical devotee of the Father’s Order, she returned, with a rod up his fundament and an obsession with his own rightness.

Who is judging by appearances now? Really, the man had just covered, what, four hundred miles between Easthome and Martensbridge, along muddy roads as winter whistled in, pushing ten men to ride as fast as a man alone. And losing his race and chase by very little margin. No wonder he seemed vexed.

Penric asked cautiously, “What exactly are the powers of this shaman, Locator? As you and your Order in Easthome understand them to be? If I am to be assisting you in this arrest?” Or making it for you, sounds like.

Oswyl turned out his chapped hands. “Shamans are said to have great powers of persuasion or compulsion—in the strongest form, to be able to lay a geas upon a person that can last for weeks. The weirding voice, they call it.”

Penric’s lips twitched. “Sounds as if the hallow king should be making them royal lawyers, not royal warriors.”

This got him a grim glare from the Grayjay. No jokes, right. Oh, well.

“I am also told that this voice does not work on sorcerers. Or rather, does not work on their demons.”

That is actually correct, murmured Desdemona. Remind me to tell you of the one Ruchia met on one of her missions to Easthome, who tried to seduce her.

Did he succeed?

Yes, but not for that reason . . .

With some difficulty, Penric wrenched his attention back to the Grayjay. Later. And very much not only for the salacious tale.

“It’s unclear to me,” continued Oswyl, frowning in untrusting speculation at Penric, “what happens should the weirding voice fail with the demon but work on the sorcerer.”

I will save you, Penric! Desdemona promised, in a dramatic tone. . . . Unless, like Ruchia, you should not care to be saved.

That one, Pen ignored. “What else?” asked Pen.

“Like their ancestors, they are supposed to be savage and merciless in close combat.”

Hence the six royal guardsmen, Pen supposed. Now on their way to Darthaca. How could he face down a desperate murderer possessing, presumably, trained martial skills, in a maniacal battle-frenzy? Not that Pen didn’t possess certain powers of speed and evasion, not to mention distraction, in his own right, but . . . he thought perhaps he might take his hunting bow along. The one with the heavy draw and the really long range.

Sound thinking, said Des. I should not in the least care to replace you with whatever stray passerby happened to be around if you became careless.

When their person died, a demon, unbound by this dissolution, perforce jumped to another nearby. Temple rites for a dying sorcerer assured that the approved recipient would be prepared and standing ready. Alas that not every sorcerer died to schedule . . . Could you jump to this shaman?

No. He’d be full-up.

Huh. I suppose that would leave the Grayjay . . .

Desdemona shuddered, delicately.

Confident that his demon would do everything in her very considerable powers to keep him alive—and, Pen confessed to himself (and us, put in Des), stirred to keen curiosity by all this lurid tale—he straightened on his stool, preparing to volunteer the services that everyone here so clearly was about to ask of him. But the Grayjay was going on.

“There was one other task for the forest mages. That was to bring back the souls of their slain spirit-warrior comrades from the battlefield, to undergo certain cleansing rites necessary for them to go to the gods. To prevent them from being sundered and lost.”

“I’ve read a little of that,” said Penric. “Those were the banner-carriers, right? As ghosts are sometimes bound to a place, they would bind them to their banners, to carry away to safety. That was real?”

“I . . . maybe. The thing is . . .” Oswyl hesitated. “As signed or, more correctly, not signed by his funeral miracle, Tollin was taken up by no god. He might have refused the gods out of despair, or been refused by them, and been sundered. Doomed to dissolution as a fading ghost. Or worse, involuntarily polluted by some incomplete rite, prevented from reaching his god reaching for him.” Oswyl grimaced at this sacrilege.

Pen had to agree with that sentiment. To murder a man was a crime. To deliberately sunder his soul from the gods, stealing not a life but that mysterious, eternal afterlife, was sin of the darkest, cruelest sort, a theft of unfathomable enormity.

“I requested a Temple sensitive to search the estate for any evidence of his lingering ghost. She found nothing. Well, not nothing, there were a few sad revenants faded beyond recognition, dozens or hundreds of years old. But the distraught sundered ghost of a freshly murdered man should have been livid in her Sight, she said. Tollin’s soul simply was not there.”

Oswyl drew a long breath. “As Inglis took nothing on his flight that he did not own, he is not accused of theft. I think that belief may be . . . mistaken.”

Penric’s jaw unhinged. “You think the man stole a ghost?”

Or should that be abducted? Ravished away? Taken hostage? This crime was going to need a whole new law devised to cover it. Just the sort of hair-splitting argument the Father’s Order reveled in, Pen supposed.

Hang the Father’s Order, murmured Des in new alarm. There will be more fearsome Powers than the gray company with an interest in this pilferage . . .

The princess-archdivine, too, was staring in amazement at the tight-lipped locator. Had he not ventured quite so far in his prior testimony to her? He stirred uncomfortably, making a truncated wave as if to distance himself from his own deduction, but then that hand clenched closed. “None of my superiors think so. But I do.”

III

To Oswyl’s relief, the princess-archdivine took his tale seriously enough to gift him with both the loan of her court sorcerer, and of a small troop of her palace guards, local men of the Daughter’s Order whose calling was to protect Temple property and pilgrims. To his frustration, the expanded party was not readied until the morning.

He’d used the time as well as he could, canvassing the lower town across the Linnet River where merchants and caravans stopped, and where the inns, taverns, smithies, saddlers, liveries, and other businesses catering to the trade of travelers were congregated. The docks and quays servicing the lake traffic were growing quieter with the advancing season, although the lake had not yet frozen over. But in neither venue was he able to unearth any sure report of a lone traveler matching his quarry’s description.

The laggard winter sun was rising gray and gold as they cleared the town gates and at last took to the main road north, skirting the lake’s western margin. It had stopped snowing, leaving no more than a finger’s width of dirty white trampled on the half-frozen ruts. As the town fell behind and the long valley lake widened, Oswyl stared across doubtfully at the farther shore, dark against the dawn. All farm tracks and rugged scrubland climbing the heights on that side, he’d been told, a route unlikely to be chosen by a fugitive in a hurry. But what about a fugitive wishing to hide? For all that this realm had looked small on a map, it seemed much more spacious on the ground.

No, take it logically; search the most likely possibilities first, then the lesser. He stared between his horse’s bobbing ears, and tried not to feel so tired.

Turning in his saddle, he checked their outriders, a sergeant-at-arms and four men, all looking sturdy enough bundled against the cold, then glanced aside at his new sorcerer. At least this one rode better than the last one, who had been a town-bred man of considerable seniority but also age and girth. This Penric looked a lean youth, with fine blond hair now tied back in a braid at his nape, and deep blue eyes whose cheer, at this hour, Oswyl found far more irksome than charming. It was hard to believe that he held the rank of a learned divine. Or the powers of a Temple sorcerer, either.

To top it off, the princess-archdivine had divided the purse for this venture, for which he was grateful, between the sergeant and the sorcerer, for which he was not. They were her own trusted men, to be sure, but just such a split in authority had been a chief source of infuriating delays in his ride from Easthome. The Temple remounts were a plain blessing, though, and he composed a prayer of thanksgiving in his mind to the Daughter of Spring for Her mercies, howsoever conveyed through Her prickly handmaiden the princess. Archdivines had seldom come Oswyl’s way, princesses never; both combined in one person, who reminded Oswyl unnervingly of his most forcible aunt, had been daunting. Though her sorcerer had seemed entirely at his ease in her company, as if she were his aunt indeed.

Some ten miles down the road the cavalcade approached a handsome castle, built on an islet a little out from the lakeshore, that had had been growing in Oswyl’s eye and interest. As they drew even with it, Learned Penric twitched his horse aside and rode out on the causeway. The drawbridge was fallen in, its timbers blackened. The interior was shadowed, deserted and dismal.

Penric stared meditatively, then muttered, “Huh,” and turned his horse back.

“What was this place? What happened to it?” Oswyl asked, looking over his shoulder as he followed.

“Castle Martenden. The clan of kin Martenden used to be something of a force in this region, for good or ill, but four years ago last spring the fortress was gutted with fire. Its lord had been charged with an, er, attempted murder, but fought his way free of the town guard and fled north over the mountains with a remnant of his men. He was reported to have raised a mercenary company in Carpagamo, but, happily, instead of returning to make trouble here, he took them on to the wars on the Ibran peninsula, where he may well have better hopes of restoring his fortunes.”

The endemic wars against the Roknari Quadrene heretics in those far realms were a noted sink of landless men, both honorable ones and rogues. Oswyl nodded understanding. “But why hasn’t it been repaired and put back into use by the town, to guard the road?”

“Tied up in litigation. Lord kin Martenden managed to be both attainted by the town council for his crime, and interdicted by the Temple for, er, certain impieties, so both claimed the spoils. The law courts of Martensbridge have been as good as a cockpit ever since. Townsmen take bets on the outcomes of the latest appeals.”

Oswyl considered this tale, lips pursing. “Was he actually guilty of the crime charged, do you have any idea? Because . . . interests can have strange effects on such disputes.” He frowned in speculation.

“Oh,” said Penric airily, “I’m sure he was. There were warranted witnesses. And confessions.”

The sorcerer then directed his attention to the hamlet on the opposite side of the road, and its shabby inn and alehouse, as a source of hot cider and information. While the troop took advantage of the former, Oswyl pursued the latter. Yes, the tapster opined, there might have been such a young man pass through a week ago, but many travelers refreshed themselves here, though few lingered, pushing on instead to the larger towns at the lake’s head or foot. Not for the first time, Oswyl wished Inglis kin Wolfcliff had possessed the courtesy and foresight to be born with a large portwine birthmark on his face, or six fingers on his left hand, or grown to a giant of a man, or a dwarf, or had a limp or a stammer, or anything memorable at all.

“Do you think you will be able to identify the accursed man, should we ever come up to him?” Oswyl, exasperated, asked Penric as they mounted and headed north once more.

The youth looked introspective for a moment. “Oh, yes. If he’s an invested shaman, Desdemona can’t mistake him.”

“And who,” Oswyl went on, not less exasperated, “is this bloody Desdemona woman you keep going on about?” Wife? Sister? Leman? Not a member of this party, in any case.

Penric—Learned Penric, the gods help them all—blinked. “Oh! I’m sorry. I did not realize you had not been introduced. Desdemona is my demon.” He smiled cheerily across at Oswyl.

“You named your demon?”

“Really, it was necessary. To keep all of her straight. She’s quite a complicated person.”

In Oswyl’s theology, demons were not persons at all, but elemental forces of . . . un-nature. From the gods, or at least, from one god, but not by that reason holy. “I thought demons were fundamental chaos. Not capable of being anything.”

“They all start out that way, it’s true. Not anything at first. Rather like a newborn infant. But like an infant, they learn. Or perhaps copy. They learn from the people and the world around them, and they carry much of that learning along with them as they cascade down through time from master to master. Everything about them that might be called either good or evil comes ultimately from their human riders.”

Oswyl frowned at this novel view. “I thought they were inherently destructive, and dangerous withal.”

“Well, so they are, but destruction need not be inherently evil. It depends upon how cleverly it is deployed. When Desdemona was the possession of Learned Helvia, who was a physician, she destroyed stones of the bladder, a very painful condition I am told, and warts, and sometimes even tumors.” He added after a distracted moment, “And worms, that were debilitating their victims. Though an apothecary’s vermifuge could do that task as well.”

If sorcerers were rare, physician-sorcerers were rarer still. “I have never met such a practitioner.”

“I gather they are kept rather apart by the Mother’s Order, to spare them for special tasks.” After a thoughtful moment, he added, “Their sex, too, is something demons learn. Desdemona has been possessed by some ten women over time—plus the mare and the lioness—so she’s grown quite feminine by now. She’s an exceptionally old demon. It’s rude to tell a woman’s age, Penric!” His hand flew to his lips. “Uh, sorry. That was Des.”

“It . . . talks? With your mouth? And yet it is not ascendant?”

“She. Yes, she does, and no, she’s not. They can get quite chatty, among the ten of them. So if I say something strange, ah . . . it might not always be me. I should warn you of that, I suppose.”

A sudden change in demeanor and speech was supposed to be one way an observer who was not a Temple sensitive could tell if a demon had ascended, seizing control of its rider’s body for itself. But if the demon was leaking out all the time, how could it be discerned if such an emergency had occurred? Oswyl edged his horse slightly farther from the sorcerer’s.

Penric piffled on, “Back at seminary I once sat down with a quill and paper and tried to work out her exact age, going back through all her riders one by one. Connecting them to some dated king’s reign or public event whenever we could.”

Reluctantly fascinated, Oswyl asked, “How do you keep them all straight? Or do you?”

Penric let his reins fall to his plodding horse’s neck, held up both hands, and wriggled the digits, as if pleased to find them in place there. “Ten ladies, ten fingers. Very convenient.”

“Ah,” Oswyl managed.

“The Temple had planned to gift their star demon to another physician when Helvia died, but instead it jumped to a senior acolyte named Ruchia, who was of Martensbridge here. Oh, I see”—Penric blinked absently—“Helvia was visiting Martensbridge at the time. I’d wondered about that. Anyway, the Bastard’s Order at Martensbridge not being slow off the mark, they promptly claimed Ruchia for themselves, and hurried her through the tutorials of a divine. In return, Learned Ruchia gave, er, extremely varied service to the Order and the Temple for the next forty years. She certainly seems to have traveled, in her duties. Which was how, when she had her fatal seizure of the heart some four years back, I came upon her on the roadside near Greenwell Town, and . . . here we all are.”

“How old were you?”

“Nineteen.”

Making him all of twenty-three, now. He still looked nineteen. Or, Oswyl might allow, twenty. At a stretch. “Were you some sort of precocious scholar, as a youth?”

“Not at all. I liked to read, but there weren’t many books to be had in Greenwell.”

“Yet you dashed through the learning for a divine in just four years?” It normally took six.

“Three. I came back here to the Princess-Archdivine’s service last spring. You have to realize, I—we—had already been through the training for a divine four times already. In a sense. And twice for a physician. So it was more of a refreshing. I tried to talk the seminary’s masters into granting me my rank fivefold on that basis, but they resisted my blandishments, more’s the pity.”

“I suppose . . . it was as if you already carried a tutor inside of you?” Which seemed like cheating, somehow.

Penric grimaced. “Mostly. Although Desdemona thought it was just hilarious never to help me out during my oral examinations. It would have been bad for you, Penric.” His brows twitched up, and his mouth, down. “Ha-ha.”

Was that last an interjection from the demon? The voice sounded faintly altered in cadence and accent from the strangely sunny young man’s usual tones.

“That was Ruchia,” Penric put in, confirming Oswyl’s guess. “Desdemona speaks with her voice a lot. I don’t know if it’s because she is the latest and freshest, er, imprint, or held the demon longest, or simply had the strongest temperament. Time may have something to do with it. The first three women are almost impossible to tell apart, and I don’t think it’s just because they shared the Cedonian language. They may be melting together with age.” He stared out over the lake, pewter gray and rippling bleakly in the chill wind blowing down from the distant mountain peaks shrouded with clouds. “Altogether, I calculated my demon is just over two hundred years old. I have noted,” he added, “that the demon-generations are getting longer, as this tale goes on. I find that heartening, myself. I sometimes wonder what my . . . imprint will seem like, to the next person to inherit Desdemona.”

“Your head seems very, uh, crowded,” Oswyl offered at last, into the rather blighted silence that followed this.

“Very,” said Penric. He brightened. “But at least I never lack for tales.”

“I . . . wait. Now which was Desdemona, again?” The question he’d started this interrogation with, Oswyl dimly recalled. He kept his fingers curled firmly on his reins.

“That’s my name for all of her together. Like a town council of ten older sisters who issue one edict. It also saves my running down several names every time I wish to address her, like my father shouting at his children.”

“I . . . see.” Oswyl’s brows drew down. “The sorcerer I rode with from Easthome never told me anything like this.” The dour fellow had not talked much at all, in fact.

“Perhaps his demon was younger and less developed. Perhaps he does not have a very cordial relation with it, if its prior riders were not happy men.” Penric’s lips twitched up, and his voice shifted a betraying hair. “Perhaps you never asked—Inquirer.”

Oswyl hunched his shoulders and pressed his horse into a trot. They could not reach the next town soon enough. And I am betting not only my mission, but maybe my life, upon this mad-brained sorcerer? Father of Winter, in this Your season, help me!

IV

Inglis woke in dimness, but not darkness. A bright square proved to be a small window on the wall of a hut, covered with parchment. On the opposite side, a rough stone fireplace gave off a red gleam and a few yellow flickers, like animal eyes peering out of a little cave. The walls were a mix of stone and logs, chinked with moss and mud. He lay tucked up in a nest of faintly reeky furs, on a floor of dirt scattered with crushed bracken. The big dog lay curled at his feet, sleeping, its paws loose and relaxed.

His boots and outer garments were gone, his chest bare. Convulsively, he felt at his waist, then sagged back down as his hand found his knife hilt. He still wore his belt and trousers. He had no memory of having arrived here, but he did have a dim recollection of someone feeding him warmed water, and of floating awake in darkness only to drown again. How much time had passed . . .?

And do you still have all your fingers and toes, fool? That was a question he might answer. He struggled up out of the furs—bear, sheepskin, others less identifiable. His hands were stiff and swollen, but not tipped white or scabbed black. His right leg was bruised dark purple from knee to bulging ankle; he couldn’t tell if anything was broken, but it did not move well. Sprained, certainly. Three of his right toes oozed, as if burned. The left foot was no worse than his hands.

How much time lost? Had he missed all of yesterday? Anxiously, he sat up straight, squinted, and began the familiar count down the red scabs crisscrossing his arms. Twenty-five, the tally of his nightmare flight. Had it been twenty-five at last reckoning? Yes. Had he lost a day, failed to blood his knife, like a lazy farmer neglecting to feed his pig trapped starving in its pen? Had he lost . . . everything? He pulled the blade from its sheath, cradled it in his hands like a child, crooned anxiously. Extended his senses as painfully as he shifted his body. Oh bless, the faint warmth still hummed . . . he wasn’t sure if he should thank any god for it. Or if any god would ever thank him. No telling. For twenty-five days, he had not dared to pray.

Except for this. He counted down the scabs, trying to recall which arm he had used last. He’d alternated strictly, to give time to heal between assaults. Infection was a constant risk. He should whet the knife again soon, to keep it sharp and make this easier. His right hand was steadier just now; so, left arm. He composed himself as well as he could, closed his eyes, and sliced: angled, shallow. He panted, waited for his head to stop swimming, the twist of nausea to settle. Opened his eyes again. Blood flow sluggish, but maybe if he squeezed there’d be enough that he wouldn’t have to take a second—

The hut’s door banged open, and he flinched worse than at the cutting. Blurry silhouettes swirled against the bright mountain air beyond. He blinked through tears more from the sharp pain of the light than the gash on his arm, and the figures resolved into a woman, sheepskin cloak bundled about her, carrying a small cloth sack and a copper pitcher, and a man in leathers wearing a sheepskin vest, fleece turned inward. The dog jerked alert and growled, but the growl trailed off in a few tail-thumps of recognition.

Seeing him sitting up, the woman said, “Oh, you’re awake,” but then, as she came closer, cried sharply, “What are you doing?”

He wanted to hide knife and arms beneath the furs, but he dared not stop this once started. “Stand back!” he commanded, and, as she made to swoop on him, “Stand back.” The dog scrambled up, fur rising along its spine. The woman stopped abruptly, staring in dismay. The man’s hand froze on the work-knife at his belt.

Whispering words under his breath that were supposed to help his focus, but really didn’t just now, he stropped the knife blade up and down along his arm, coating it thoroughly in sticky red. Would it be enough to buy one more day? The faint hum seemed to strengthen. Yes. Perhaps. He wasn’t sure but what a single drop would do the job as well, but he couldn’t take chances. He held the knife in his lap, trying to protect it from his intruders’ shocked gazes. When the blood smears turned brown and crumbling, all life sucked from them, he could clean the blade and hide it away once more.

The woman said tremulously, “I brought you food. And drink.” She held up her burdens as if in evidence.

The man, scowling at Inglis, stepped in front of her. “Suppose you just put that knife away, fellow.”

Did they think he threatened them? Inglis wasn’t sure he could even stand up just now, let alone attack a person. His eye drawn by the pitcher, he raised the fur across his lap and slid the knife out of sight down next to his right thigh. He licked dry lips and set both hands out atop the cover, spread and still. He most certainly didn’t want to frighten off that charitable young woman. Was the man’s voice one of those he had heard in his daze upon the rockslide? Vulture, or rescuer? The dog sat back down.

“What were you doing with it?” asked the woman in suspicion, coming no nearer.

“I . . . it . . . it drinks blood.” He wondered if that sounded as deranged to them as it did to him.

“All knives do,” observed the man, his hand not leaving his own hilt.

Not like this one. “I drink drink,” Inglis essayed hopefully.

“Travelers get dry in the mountains,” said the woman, in a tone of careful placation. “They think because they are not hot, they are not thirsty.”

“I . . . yes.”

She circled wide around him to the hearth, collected a clay cup faintly familiar from last night, and filled it from the pitcher. She extended it to him with a long reach. He took it with a hand that shook, then both hands, and gulped down its contents, an unstrained barley water flavored with mint. Invalid stuff, far from a noble beverage, but it was warm, seeming both food and drink. He extended the cup back. “Please . . .?” He drained it three times before he stopped guzzling. He caught his breath and nodded thanks.

“Who are you—traveler?” asked the man.

“I, uh . . . Inglis k—” He cut off his too-famous kin name. “Inglis.” Oh. Should I have offered an alias?

“Where were you bound?” asked the young woman. “Towards Martensbridge, or Carpagamo? Either way, you took a wrong turn.”

“Pass from Carpagamo’s closed,” said the fellow, “Unless he was the last man to come in over it.”

Inglis shook his head. He followed the dog’s interested gaze to the cloth sack. Gingerly, the woman held it out to him. His clumsy fingers found it contained generous lumps of some soft white cheese, sheep or goat, captured between parsimonious slices of heavy barley-and-oat bread, and strips of dried smoked meat of uncertain origin. Venison, perhaps. Inglis, after a moment’s hesitation, tore into it as if he were a wolf indeed.

After allowing the first couple of frantic swallows, the man asked, “Where’s your horse?”

Around his mouthful Inglis answered, “Left her lame on the Crow Road. Then I walked.”

“Oh.” The man’s mouth pursed in disappointment.

It came to Inglis that the young woman must have prepared this repast for him, with her own hands. He eyed her more closely over his chewing. Her face was mountain-broad, lips and cheeks rouged only by cold, her body work-lean; her youth lent her a passing prettiness. The fellow was not much older. Hunter, shepherd? Both? Up here, all men put their hands to all tasks, as the turning seasons ordered them. The two shared the light hair and blue eyes of this mountain stock, close kin surely.

“Who are you?” Inglis asked in turn after his next swallow. “Where is this place?”

The woman smiled hesitantly at him. “I’m Beris. That’s my brother Bern.”

Bern offered more reluctantly, “This is the summer grazing camp for Linkbeck, the village in the valley. Our hunting camp in winter.”

So, he’d not traveled quite so far back in time as the place’s crude look suggested. Not to the world of Great Audar’s era, when these mountain tribes had held their high fastnesses against the invaders as the Wealdean forest tribes had not. Or maybe the Darthacans had taken one look at the damp precipitous country and decided they didn’t want it that much. The Temple’s invasion in these lands, replacing the old ways with the new, had been a slower process, more a gradual weeding out than a violent burning over. With a chance, a hope, if not a prayer, that they’d not uprooted everything . . .

No. He eyed the great dog, its furry triangular ears pricked as it tracked the progress of the meat strips to his mouth. A certainty. “That dog. Who owns it?”

“Arrow is Savo’s beast,” said Beris. “Had him from his uncle Scuolla this past autumn.”

The dog lay down on its belly, wriggled up to Inglis, and shoved its head under his left hand. No pup, but a full-grown animal, mature—middle-aged and dignified, after a fashion. Absently, Inglis scratched it behind the ears. Tail thumping, it whined and licked at his bloodied arm.

“He seems to think he’s your dog, now,” said Bern, watching this play through narrowed eyes. “Hasn’t left your side since we brought you in. Why is that—traveler?”

“Was Savo with you when you found me?”

“Aye, we’d gone out hoping for red deer. I’m not sure you were a fair trade, since we can’t skin or eat you.”

They’d seemed willing enough to skin him; Inglis trusted they would have stopped short of the eating, yes. But there had been no shaman among the hunters, or they would surely have recognized each other, and this conversation would be very different. So, not Savo.

“That knife,” said the brother, Bern, looking at him sideways. “Are those real jewels? I bet Churr not.”

Inglis had never imagined they might not be real. He drew out the knife and stared at it. The slim eight-inch blade was hafted in walrus ivory; he could feel the echo of old life in it when he held it in his hand. The beautifully curving hilt widened to an oval at the end, capped with gold, flat face holding small garnets, one gone missing in some past time and not replaced. They encircled a cabochon-cut red stone he guessed might be a ruby. Tooth and blood, how fitting. His blood on the steel had darkened and dried already, its life sucked in as ravenously as he’d just wolfed down hard bread and cheese. He set about rubbing off the residue on his trouser leg. “I suppose so. It was an heirloom.”

The silence in the room grew a shade tighter. He glanced up to find a disquieting stew of curiosity, avarice, and fear simmering in his watchers’ faces. But . . . they had brought him in off the mountain, and given him food and drink. He owed them warning.

“Why do you, uh, give it your blood?” asked Beris warily. “Is it, that is, do you think it’s a magic knife?”

Inglis considered the impossibly complicated truth, and the need to quash that avarice before it created trouble—more trouble—and finally settled on, “It is accursed.”

Bern drew breath through his teeth, half daunted, half dubious.

Beris’s gaze tracked up and down the scabs on his arms. “Couldn’t you feed it, I don’t know, animal blood?”

“No. It has to be mine.”

“Why?”

His lips drew back in something not much like a smile. “I’m accursed, too.”

The pair excused themselves rather swiftly, after that. But they left the food and barley water. Arrow declined to follow, though invited with an open door, soft calls, chirps, a whistle, and firm commands. Bern circled back as if to grab the dog by its ruff and drag him, but, at Arrow’s lowered head and glower, thought better of the plan. The door closed behind them.

Like most people, they underestimated the keenness of Inglis’s hearing.

“What do you make of him now?” asked Beris, pausing a few paces beyond the hut.

“I don’t know. He talks like a Wealdman. I think he must be out of his head.”

“He wasn’t very feverish. Do you think he might be uncanny? Dangerous?”

“Mm, maybe not to us, the shape he’s in right now. Perhaps to himself. Churr could inherit that knife he coveted so much after all, if he goes from chopping up his arms to cutting his own throat.”

“Why would a fellow do such a thing?”

“Well, mad.” (Inglis could hear the shrug.)

“His voice was very compelling, did you feel it? It gave me the shivers.”

“Mother and Daughter, Beris, don’t be such a girl.” But the mockery was tinged with unease.

“I am a girl.” A considering pause. “He might be handsome, if he smiled.”

“Don’t let Savo hear you say that. He’s already annoyed enough about his dog.”

“I am not Savo’s dog.”

Siblings indeed, for then he barked at her, and she hit him, and their squabbling voices faded out of even Inglis’s earshot.

He coaxed the dog up under his arm with a bribe of smoked meat. Hugged him in, stared into the clear brown eyes, then closed his own and tried to sense. The animal’s spirit-density was almost palpable, hovering just beyond his present crippled reach. How many generations of dogs were poured into this Dog? Five? Ten? More than ten? How many generations of men had cultivated it? This could be a dog to make a shaman, immensely valuable.

And who was Scuolla, to give such a treasure away? Was the man an illicit hedge shaman, had he made Arrow? Intended this nephew Savo for his secret apprentice? Or was he unknowing of what he’d possessed? Horrifying, that he might be unknowing.

Appalling hope, that he might be wise.

“As soon as I’m on my feet,” he told the dog with a little shake, “let’s go find this ungrateful old master of yours, eh?”

Arrow yawned hugely, treating Inglis to a waft of warm dog-breath entirely lacking in enchantment, and rolled over like a bolster against Inglis’s side.

V

Penric’s party came to the town of Whippoorwill, at the head of the lake, in the early winter dusk. It was half the size of the more successful Martensbridge, and a bit resentful of the fact, but still fivefold larger than Greenwell Town of Penric’s youth. Even the anxious Grayjay made no suggestion that they press on any farther this night. At the local chapter of the Daughter’s Order, which lay under the princess-archdivine’s direct rule, they found crowded, but free, lodgings.

Then Oswyl made the first practical use of the troop that had trailed them by sending them all out, severally, to ask after their quarry in the inns and taverns of the town. He didn’t mention brothels aloud; Penric was unsure if they were tacitly implied, if he thought the fleeing murderer would make no use of them, or if he was simply respectful of the guardsmen’s oaths to the Daughter’s Order. All business in Whippoorwill was settling down to merely local traffic as the high roads to the northern coast countries closed off for the season.

Penric and Oswyl had just finished eating at the tavern of their choice where, alas, no one remembered a dark-haired and dark-eyed Wealdean heading north alone in the past week, though any sensible fellow attempting the passes this late might have joined one of several parties and who would have noticed him then? Oswyl was rubbing his eyes in pain at this prospect when one of the guardsmen, Baar, came back. “I think I may have found something, sirs . . .”

With open relief but guarded hope, Oswyl followed at his heels down the streets, Penric trailing, to a lesser inn just off the main north road. Its air was homey and shabby, and it mainly served frugal local countrymen.

“Oh, aye,” said the tapster, when Oswyl had lubricated the man’s tongue with a pint of his own ale, and his purse with three more all around for their company. “Don’t know if he’s the man you seek, but certainly a well-set-up young fellow with dark hair and eyes. That describes half the Darthacans on the roads—”

Oswyl nodded rueful agreement.

“—but this one spoke with a Wealdean accent, and not lowborn. I thought he must be a scholar, because he said he wanted tales, as he was writing a book. Collecting them, see.”

Oswyl’s eyebrows went up. “What sort of book?”

“Old tales of the mountains, uncanny ones. Campfire tales, children’s stories, ghost stories. Not saints’ legends, much. He was especially interested in tales of magical beasts.”

“Did he get any from you?” asked Penric.

“Oh, aye! It was a busy night.” The tapster looked around mournfully at his current near-empty premises. “After he bought a round or two, I think he might have got enough for half his book right here.”

“Did he seem especially intent about any particular tales? Ask more questions?”

“He seemed quite pleased to get the fellows going on about rumors of uncanny animals being bred up in the high valleys.”

Penric came more alert. “Do you mean, um, current rumors, not just old stories? What are they?”

“Well, there’s supposed to be a man up the Chillbeck who raises specially smart dogs, very prized by the local shepherds and hunters. I’ve met some right smart mountain dogs, though, so’s I don’t know as there’s anything more to it than tales and bragging.”

“Did he say anything about following those rumors to their source?” asked Pen.

“No, can’t say as he did. He didn’t say much about himself, come to think. Contented just to listen, y’know.”

Oswyl put in, “Did he ask much about Carpagamo, Adria, the passes? Anything about how to get to the north coast?”

“A man hardly needs to ask about the passes this time of year—folks scarce talk about anything else, always hoping for a late thaw and one last chance to get through. But no, I don’t recollect as he did. He seemed tired. Went up to bed soon after.”

“Did you see which way he went in the morning?” asked Oswyl.

“No, sir, sorry. Mornings are a busy time, getting everyone out. He went off afoot, though. No horse for him. That’s why I thought, poor scholar, despite the kin-rich mouth.”

Penric blinked. “You have a good ear for accents.”

“Well, sir, we get a lot of travelers through, at least come summer, and they do tell their tales. Gives a man practice.”

Oswyl sat back, frowning, although not at anyone here. “How many nights ago was this, again? Try to be sure.”

The tapster, brows crooked with concentration, counted up on his thick fingers. “Six nights, sir. I remember because it was the evening of the horse-market day, and we had a lot of folks in from the country round for that.”

Oswyl gave a grunt of satisfaction, drained his tankard, and rose. “Thank you. The Father of Winter’s blessing upon this house, in His season impending.”

“Go with the gods, sirs.”

Learned divine though he now was, Penric did not add the Bastard’s blessing, first because most people didn’t appreciate the ambiguity, and second because he was incognito for the evening’s scouting. And, third, ever since he had once met the god immanent—as close as his arm’s reach but not, surely, anything to dare touch—he wasn’t exactly comfortable pledging His word. It might not prove to be a safely hollow courtesy.

The Daughter’s guard paced before them with a lantern as they made their way back along the dark streets to the Order’s house. Penric ventured, “It sounds as if a foray up the valley of the Chillbeck might be worth the time.”

Oswyl snorted. “Have you looked at a map? That valley has no good pass out of it to the north. And there are a dozen more just like it. It would be like plunging into a gigantic stone maze.”

“It’s not so different from my home country, just a hundred miles east of here.”

Oswyl eyed him dubiously. “There will be more people on the main road.”

“Strangers stand out more in the vales. People notice them. And besides, if that tapster spoke true, you’ve made up a few days on Inglis’s lead since the Crow.”

“Time I do not care to waste by haring off up blind alleys.”

“Unless the blind alley turns out to be a hunter’s bag.”

“Hm.” Oswyl paused and stared to the north where the high peaks glimmered in the night, a pale wall across the world. “I believe I was right to hold to my reasoning back on the Crow Road. I’d wager that stout Easthome sorcerer is saddle-sore and empty-handed now, somewhere in Saone.” The vision seemed to give him a certain understandable satisfaction. “Why should I think your advice better?”

Oddly, Penric didn’t sense that the question was rhetorical. “Because this is my home country, not his? Because why would Inglis, if the man was Inglis, ask all those questions and not pursue the pointers they gained him? Because Inglis, being a stranger here, will try the most easily reached routes first?”

“Time,” said Oswyl, though his teeth.

“Is it so desperate? He is no less or more trapped by the snow on the passes than he would be by Chillbeck Vale. It’s not as though he’s been leaving a trail of bodies.”

Oswyl was surprised into a noise that came as close to a laugh, if a black one, as Penric had yet heard from him. “I suppose I should not wish it.”

An oil lantern hung over the Order’s gates, its yellow light glittering from the snow sifted in between the street’s cobbles. Oswyl motioned Baar ahead of them into the warm, with a clap to his shoulder and a low-voiced, “Well done, man.” But he did not at once follow, and Penric paused with him.

“As a Temple sensitive, have you ever gone out, or been taken out, to check accusations of hedge sorcery?” Oswyl asked abruptly.

Penric, curious at this sudden turn in the talk, folded his arms against the night chill and replied, “Three times, when I was at seminary at Rosehall, I was taken along for training. Not for the working of the thing, since any sorcerer recognizes another as readily as I can tell you are a tall man, but to get a grasp on the legalities, which can become complex. For one thing, just because the accused is not a sorcerer, and they almost never are, it doesn’t necessarily mean no crime has been committed, by other means or persons. I did think the false accusations, if the accuser knew them false, to be especially heinous.”

Oswyl nodded grimly.

“I’ve not been sent out since I was made court sorcerer, as Tigney has others to call on for such routine duties. But Desdemona, after she became a Temple demon, went with her riders on hundreds of such inquiries, and found a real sorcerer involved, what—”

Twice.

“Only twice.”

“As a locator, I’ve seen the same from the other side,” said Oswyl. “In ten years, only a single case sustained, and the poor man, who’d thought he was going mad, flung himself upon the Temple’s mercy and found it. But one time . . .”

He hesitated so long, Penric nearly prodded him with a, But one time . . .? except that Desdemona quietly advised, Wait.

Oswyl glowered down the street at nothing, and finally said, “One time, we were laggard on the road. The reasons seemed sufficient—bad weather, a bridge washed out. Howsoever. We arrived at this dismal village out in the country to discover the accused woman had been burned to death by her frenzied neighbors the night before. No sign found that any demon had jumped from her pyre. She was almost certainly innocent, and if we had arrived timely, we could have disposed of the false charges forthwith, and given stern warnings to the slanderers. As it was, we faced the dilemma of trying to charge an entire village with murder. It all broke down in a sickening morass, and in the end . . . well, no justice was done there, in the Father’s sight or any other.”

While Penric, taken wholly aback, was still trying to come up with something to acknowledge this that didn’t sound fatuous, Oswyl yanked open the door and made to step within. But as he did he growled over his shoulder, “So I do not like being late.”

The door thudded shut like the end of an argument.

After a moment, Penric sighed and reached for the handle. This isn’t going to be so easy, is it?

The Father’s cases seldom are, noted Desdemona. Else they wouldn’t need Him.

They rode out of Whippoorwill very early the next morning.

VI

Twenty-seven.

Inglis controlled his pained panting, and stropped the knife blade carefully over the shallow cut across his right thigh. When it was well-coated, he set it aside and scrambled around in his fur nest to pull up and tie his trouser strings. He’d found the rest of his clothes in a pile near the hearth; his purse had been unsurprisingly missing. Left boot also there, right boot ruined, cut down the shaft. If it had come off, presumably it could come back on . . . no. He sighed and abandoned them both.

It took three tries to wallow upright. Arrow sat up and watched with interest. As Inglis hobbled barefoot the short distance across the hut, the dog rose and paced along. Inglis’s hand found its ruff, sturdy but not quite high enough for good support. The wooden door, secured only by a rope latch, creaked wide. He leaned on the jamb and looked around.

The morning sun was blindingly bright on the snow, which was turning slushy in some late teasing thaw, and Inglis’s eyes watered. Blinking, he found that the hut was nearly at the tree line. Dark firs and pines fell away below; he could see over their tops down into the vale. The flat valley floor narrowed here, the last farms straggling up its crooked, attenuating length. A small village clustered around a timber bridge over the barely-a-river.

A few more crude huts clung to the slope near Inglis’s refuge. One was plainly a smokehouse, from the aromatic haze rising through its thatch. A nanny goat with a bell hung from a leather strap around its neck wandered past, ignoring him. From somewhere nearby, he heard women’s voices.

He stared down at Arrow, who gazed back, soulfully attentive. It was worth a try . . . He caressed the dog’s head, and said, “Fetch me a stick.”

The dog made a cheerful noise in its chest, too deep to be a yip, and bounded away. By the time Inglis had retrieved, cleaned, and sheathed his knife, and determined that no more belongings of his were in the hut, Arrow returned to the doorway, dragging a log as long and thick as a fencepost. He dropped it with a thunk at Inglis’s feet and looked up proudly, toothy grin gaping, tail swishing back and forth like a cudgel.

Inglis was surprised into a rusty laugh. It felt strange in his throat. “I said a stick, not building timber!” Though it would make fine firewood. He ruffled the dog’s head anyway. “Fetch me a thinner stick.”

Eagerness unimpaired, Arrow bounded away again. He returned in a few minutes towing something more sapling-like. Inglis broke off the side branches and tested it. It would do for now. The snow was almost not unpleasant on his swollen, throbbing right foot. The left was out of luck. He wondered if he could beg some coverings for them. Limping slowly, he followed the sound of the voices.

In a three-sided shelter, its open face turned to the sun, he discovered a team of women at work scraping a stretched hide. One of them was the girl Beris. The other two were older. All stopped scraping to look up and stare at Inglis, although, as the dog momentarily abandoned him to snatch a pale scrap and retreat to chew on it, the one with the gray braid spared a dispassionate, “Arrow, you fool dog. You’ll make yourself sick.” Arrow’s tail thumped unrepentantly.

“You got up,” said Beris, bright and a bit wary. “Are you feeling better now?”

Better than what? “A little,” Inglis managed, and, belatedly, “Thank you for your aid.”

The middle woman said, “You were lucky to be found. Another few days, and we’d all have gone down to the valley, even the boys.” She eyed him in curiosity. “Where were you bound?”

He wasn’t sure he could explain his confusion of mind to himself, let alone her, nor how many times he’d switched his goal from Carpagamo to Linkbeck and back. He finally settled on, vaguely, “Up the vale, but I took a wrong turn in the dark.” He extended his empurpled foot. “I was wondering if I might beg some rags to wrap my feet. My boots are impossible.”

She made a grunt and a motion, which her companions seemed to interpret without difficulty, and levered herself up to trudge off. Gingerly, hoping he would be able to stand again without aid, Inglis lowered himself to another sawed-off chunk of tree trunk that they seemed to be using for camp chairs.

Should he try the ‘poor scholar collecting stories’ ploy again? It had brought him this far. Arrow relieved him of his dilemma by making another raid on the skin scraps; the woman with the gray braid made a desultory begone, pest gesture at him, which he eluded.

“That is an extraordinary dog,” Inglis began. Did either of them realize how extraordinary? Two different flavors of blank faces regarded him in return. Beris’s seemed innocent. The elder woman’s might conceal more. Try manners? He attempted a smile at her, and said, “My name is Inglis, by the way.”

“So Beris said.”

“And you are, Mother . . .?”

“Laaxa.”

Inglis nodded, as though he cared. Her lips quirked, as though she did. “I was told one of the men who helped bring me off the trail had the dog from his uncle, Scuolla. Can you tell me where to find him to speak to?”

Laaxa snorted. “Where to find him, yes. Though I doubt he’ll be speaking to you.” She pointed up the valley. “He was killed in a landslide not two months back, poor old man.”

The blighting of Inglis’s last forlorn hope was as crushingly cold as an avalanche. “Oh.” He sat in silence for a minute, too taken aback to think. He finally tried, “Was he the man who raised dogs? I was told there was such a fellow in this vale. Or did he have Arrow from someone else?” Yes, there might be one more possibility . . .

“Oh, aye, it was something of his trade. His partner was supposed to have inherited them, but they were together out hunting for meat to feed the beasts. His body they managed to dig out, at least. The dogs were scattered about to whoever would have them, after. So if you’ve come seeking to buy one, you might still have a chance.”

“Did, uh, you know Scuolla well?”

“Only to nod to. He was no kinsman of mine. He kept to himself up the east branch.”

He tried Beris: “Was Savo close to his uncle, do you know?”

She shook her head. “Savo’s mother’s a lot younger than Scuolla. I don’t think they had much to do with each other even before she married and moved to her husband’s farm.”

He wasn’t sure how to ask, Was your neighbor an illicit hedge shaman? without frightening them into silence. “Was Scuolla gossips with anybody?”

Laaxa shrugged. “He drank with Acolyte Gallin, time to time, I think.”

Inglis prodded, “Acolyte Gallin?”

“He’s our Temple-man, down Linkbeck.” Laaxa waved in the general direction of the valley. Indeed, such a small village was unlikely to rate a full-braid learned divine. An acolyte would typically be made to do. “He serves the whole of the Chillbeck upper vale.”

“So he would have conducted Scuolla’s funeral rites?”

“Gallin buries pretty much everyone, in these parts.”

Inglis worded his next question cautiously. “Did you hear any strange rumors about Scuolla’s funeral?”

He’d hit something, because both women gave him sharp, closed looks.

“Wasn’t there,” said Laaxa. “Couldn’t say. You’d have to ask Gallin.”

Shamans came as linked chains—half shackles, half lifelines. A shaman was needed not only to culture a Great Beast, but to conduct its sacrifice into each new candidate at the commencement of his or her service. At the end of that life of service, a shaman was again needed to cleanse the comrade soul, free it of that earthly link—some said, contamination—to go on to the gods. Among the reasons for the revival of the royal shamans of the Weald, it was said, was to sustain such chains, that no soul might go sundered. Among the reasons for keeping the practices discreet and contained was to limit such risks. At his own investiture, Inglis had accepted the hazards blithely. He was anything but blithe now.

If Scuolla had indeed been a hedge shaman, as Inglis now strongly suspected, whoever had conducted his investiture was probably long dead; with luck, readied for his last journey by Scuolla himself. So who had cleansed Scuolla in turn? And might that unknown person help Inglis in his woe? Follow the chain.

In this high country, it was rumored, the old ways were quietly tolerated by the rural Temple hierarchies, so long as their practitioners conceded precedence and authority to the Temple, and quarter-day dues. And if the local Temple folk were not too rigidly virtuous. So was this Acolyte Gallin an enemy of the old ways, or one of the quietly tolerant? And if the latter, had he quietly helped his drinking friend’s soul along by securing the services of another hedge shaman to perform those last rites? Or at the very least known where and how, and by whom, they were brought off?

In which case, the next link in Inglis’s chain must be to find Acolyte Gallin. Unless this new hope should prove yet another illusion, melting away like the others as his hand grasped for it . . . the despairing thought made him want, not for the first time, to plunge the accursed knife into his own breast, and be done with this struggle. One more try.

Although One foot in front of the other was perhaps no longer a very useful self-exhortation. Inglis twisted around. The toy-like houses were only a couple of miles away, as a rock might plummet. Getting himself down the mountain in his current battered condition would be a much trickier problem.

The middle-aged woman returned, her arms full of what looked to be sheepskin scraps and sticks. One of the scraps turned out to be a simple sheepskin cap, folded over fleece-inward and sewn up one side in a sort of triangle, which she plunked unceremoniously over Inglis’s head. He jerked but did not rise. “Don’t let your ears freeze, lad.” The absurd-looking object made a startlingly swift difference in his comfort.

Two sheepskin booties, equally simple, for his other extremities followed; she knelt to fit them over his feet as though he had been a toddler. Outer boots of woven withy and rawhide looked crude but proved clever. He suspected they would grip the snow, though he doubted they’d stand up to a long march. Neither would he, just now. He swallowed a yelp as she tied the rawhide strips on the right foot. “Aye, you’ve done yourself good, there.”

The scraping finished, the three women undid the hide from its clamps and folded it over. Beris rose to stow it away—in a wooden sledge, tucked up in the corner of the shelter. That was how they transported their high-country produce down to the valley, Inglis supposed. Curing a sledge-load of such hides would keep a village worker busy all winter. Could it also transport a half-crippled man?

They couldn’t want him to linger here, eating their reserves. It was late for losing him in a crevice. Foisting him on the charity of the village temple must surely seem a better plan.

Inglis wriggled his feet in his sheepskin slippers. “I would pay you, ladies, but I’m afraid someone took my purse.”

Beris looked surprised; the middle-aged woman disappointed; Laaxa Graybraid, displeased, but “Hm,” was all she said.

“I suspect he still has it, tucked away somewhere.” Inglis’s memories were too muddled to be sure of identifying the cutpurse by his voice alone, and anyway, whichever of his three rescuers had pocketed it, they had all watched him do so. But there was no way for the thief to spend coins up here, apart from losing them to his friends at dice. “There wasn’t much left in it, but enough, I think, to pay for a ride down to Linkbeck.” He lifted his hand to indicate the sledge. “With no questions asked.” And none answered.

A little silence, while they all took this in.

Laaxa vented a pained sigh. “Those boys. I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Mother Laaxa.”

Arrow, who had stealthily acquired a belly full of hide scrapings, now proceeded to divert his watchers by vomiting them back up again, in a loud and rhythmic paroxysm.

“Eew,” said Beris.

“Dogs,” sighed the middle-aged woman.

“You going to take that dog?” Laaxa asked Inglis, with a twitch of her gray eyebrows.

“I expect . . . that will be up to the dog,” Inglis replied carefully.

They stared at Arrow, now sniffing his production with evident fascination. Beris hurried to shoo him off, and toss dirt and snow over the slimy pile before he could eat it again.

“Aye,” said Laaxa, biting her lip. “I expect so.”

VII

The day’s ride was slowed by several stops at likely places to inquire after their quarry, all frustratingly fruitless. But it brought Oswyl’s troop at length to the village where the local road split off to the valley of the Chillbeck. At the inn there, at last, Oswyl found report of a silent, dark-haired stranger who had spent the night and headed off into the hills, not four days ago. But also of a couple of parties making one final try for the main road north, and one whose destination was the last town within the hinterland’s borders.

After a brief debate with the sergeant and the sorcerer, Oswyl made the decision to send two men up the main road tomorrow with strict instructions, if they found the fugitive, not to approach the dangerous man, but to set one guard to follow him and the other to double back and collect their forces. It wasn’t a compromise that delighted him in any way, but no one could sensibly go farther this afternoon, with darkness impending and the horses due a rest. Oswyl gritted his teeth in endurance, and made plans to use the evening inquiring of everyone there on the nature of the country roundabout.

A little later, he tracked his sorcerer out to the field behind the inn, where the man had taken it into his strange head to seize the last light and indulge in a stint of archery. It was not a skill in which town-bred Oswyl had much experience, and he watched with reluctant respect as Penric put a dozen arrows into a distant straw bundle, then sent the inn’s potboy off to collect them.

“Out of practice.” Penric frowned at the straw man, at this range now resembling a pincushion, and shook out his bare hands in turn.

“They all hit,” observed Oswyl.

Penric rolled his eyes. “Of course they did. The target is standing still. If this is to turn into a hunting party in the hills, I need to do better.”

“Have you hunted much?”

“In my youth.” He delivered this as if his youth had been a half-century ago.

The potboy returned with the arrows, and Penric inquired of Oswyl, lifting his weapon in tentative invitation, “How are you with a bow?”

Not good enough to make a fool of himself in front of this fellow. “I’ve not had much chance to handle one.”

“What, did your father never take you out hunting?”

“My father is an Easthome lawyer. He never passes the city gates if he can help it.” Oswyl offered instead, in pointless defense, “I have some training with the short sword.”

“Huh.” Penric looked nonplussed, as if the very concept of a father who did not dash around in the woods slaughtering animals personally was a novelty. “We didn’t hunt for sport, mind you. We needed the game for our table.”

Oswyl allowed himself a trace of amusement. “Poaching?”

“Er, no, they were all our lands. My father was Baron kin Jurald. My eldest brother is, now.”

“Oh.” That was a surprise. It was wrong, of course, to assume that every person of the Bastard’s Order was a bastard or an orphan, or some other odd thing. But it was true often enough. Though this Penric might be one of those acknowledged by-blows with which lords littered the world. Hesitant to pursue that rude curiosity, Oswyl substituted, “How came a kin honorific to be attached to a Darthacan name?” The sorcerer’s light coloration made him look entirely a creature of this craggy country.

Penric shrugged. “Some last kin land-heiress met a younger son with few prospects back home in Saone, some generations ago. His dowry didn’t last, but the name and the land did.” He broke off to send the dozen retrieved arrows flying back into the distant target.

Oswyl wondered if this connection with the minor nobility would give the sorcerer added insight into their outlaw. As the countryside deepened, the palace clerk seemed to be dropping away, to be replaced by . . . what? Did Penric consider himself a kin warrior, or at least half a one?

Penric might have been entertaining some similar speculation, for as the potboy trotted off again, he asked, “How much of a countryman is our murderer, do you know? Or was he also one of those men who doesn’t pass the city gates?” He narrowed his gaze at the peaks that were catching and reflecting the last high light, looming much larger and closer now than back at Martensbridge.

A reasonable question. The great kin lords had town mansions, as well as distant lands like little realms. Increasingly, they also kept more convenient country estates around the capital, such as the kin Boarford manor where all this disaster had started. “I believe he grew up somewhere on the south slopes of the Raven Range, though he’s been living with kinsmen in Easthome in late years.”

“Hm. I was rather hoping for a city mouse, out of his reckoning in the hills. No such luck for us. A city wolf? Seems a bit contradictory.” He glanced at Oswyl. “Or maybe not.”

Oswyl had no idea how to respond to that. “Have you ever hunted wolves?”

“A few times, when they came down out of the hills in a starving season.”

“Winters like this?”

“Oddly, not so much. Winter is a bad time for the grazers and browsers, weakening them, but for that very reason an easier one for the fanglings that hunt them.”

“Did you get them? Your wolves?”

“Oh, yes. We made rugs of the skins.”

Penric changed his stance, kneeling, moving, turning, as he sent the next flight of arrows on its way. One missed, and he muttered an oath. “I’d have won a cuff on my ear for that one.”

“Your father’s love?” Oswyl asked dryly.

“Eh, or Old Fehn, his huntsman. Who’d trained Father. They were pleased to take turns on my ears. Both very keen on taking down the quarry with a first killing shot, if possible. I thought at first it was pious mercy to the Son of Autumn’s beasts, but eventually figured out no one wanted to chase all over after a wounded one. Not even me, after I’d tried it a few times.”

The foot-weary potboy trudged back, handing over the arrows with a poorly concealed sigh. Penric took his stance and raised his bow once more.

The straw target burst into flames.

The potboy gave a startled yelp. Oswyl jerked back.

Penric merely looked miffed. “Oh, for—! Des, we don’t set game on fire!” He lowered his bow and glowered at the licking orange flicker, merrily glowing in the gloaming.

“What was that?” Oswyl kept his voice level and didn’t let it come out a squeal, barely.

“Desdemona thinks my hunting skills are inefficient. Also, she is bored and wants to go in.” He sighed and returned his unloosed arrow to its quiver. His mouth opened and vented a voiceless laugh. He added, peevishly, “I don’t know how Ruchia put up with you, really, I don’t.”

Penric pulled his purse off his belt, dug into it, and handed over a coin to the potboy, now quivering like a restless pony. “Practice over. Off you go.” The boy absconded the instant his fingers closed over his payment, looking worriedly back over his shoulder a couple of times in his hasty retreat to the inn yard.

Oswyl wondered to what god he should be praying for luck in his chase. Not that any god had ever answered his pleas, whether on his knees by his bed as a boy, or prone in the Temple as a man. He stared glumly at the sorcerer’s braided blond queue, pale in the growing shadows, as the man unstrung his bow and reordered his gear, then followed him back inside.

*   *   *

The village of Linkbeck lay high up its vale, past what seemed to Oswyl’s Wealdean eye impoverished farms, tending to rocky, tilted pastures rather than grain fields. The cows were fat enough, though, the barns big and solid in fieldstone and dark-stained timber, the houses in a like style, with pale stones scattered over their wood-shingled roofs. The excessively tall mountains loured over all, winter white at their tops, while the valley road was still sodden with autumn mud beneath a crunching, frozen crust. The aspiring river ran green and foaming beneath the wooden span that gave the settlement its name.

The sorcerer pushed his horse up beside Oswyl’s as they approached the outskirts, if the half-dozen houses on this side of the river could be so grandly dubbed. “So what is your plan?” Penric inquired—diplomatically, since coming this way at all had been his plan.

Oswyl shrugged. “Start with the local Temple divine. Such shepherds tend to be most knowing of the folk about, and will have what news there is.” In this backwater, not much, Oswyl suspected, but Penric was right that strangers would stand out; a few villagers working around their places turned to stare as the party rode past. The guard sergeant cast polite, reassuring salutes at them.

Penric cleared his throat. “It might be best not to mention my calling, at first. Or my rank. The former tends to make me a distracting novelty in places like this, rather like a performing bear, and the latter would get either daunted deference from rural Temple folk, or elicit every complaint they have of their superiors who neglect them. As if they could draft me as their messenger.”

And neither would speed Oswyl’s inquiries. “What should I name you, then?”

Penric tilted his head. “Your assistant, I suppose. Your local guide. Not untrue.”

It seemed a curious reticence, from a young man who had seemed proud enough of his rank back in the princess-archdivine’s palace. Better, Oswyl supposed, than the off-balance swagger one sometimes observed in those newly promoted to tasks above their weight. They clopped over the bridge and turned onto the main street, where they soon found the local temple. It was built in a style not unlike the barns and houses, fieldstone and dark timber, if taller and six-sided. A little crowd was gathered under a broad portico running the full length of the front, and Oswyl stopped his horse short, flinging up a hand to halt his party. After another moment, Oswyl dismounted to wait more respectfully. Penric followed his lead, coming to stand beside him and watch.

A funeral was in progress, and had reached its most delicate stage, the signing of the gods, or god. Upon a bier decorated with evergreen boughs, a shrouded figure lay. At the head stood a middle-aged man in the five-colored robes of a divine—no, an acolyte, by the single braid looping at his left shoulder. At his sign, what was plainly the family of the deceased shuffled back out of the way to stand attentively along the wall, and the holy animals and their grooms waiting at the side came alert.

A young man had a pet raven perched upon his shoulder, clearly intended as the representative of the Father. A youth, surely a close relative, held a copper-red dog on a leash, its long fur brushed to a silky shimmer, as plainly the emblem of the Son. A leggy girl gripped the lead of a fat white pony, its shaggy hide curried as well as it could be at this season, looking quite appropriate as a beast of the Bastard. An older woman cradled a placid mama cat, marked only by the green ribbon signifying the Mother around its neck, and a younger girl clutched a squirming kitten, objecting to a like ribbon in blue for the Daughter.

One by one, the acolyte motioned the handlers to the bier. The raven, held out hopefully on the young man’s arm, evinced no interest in the proceedings, and hopped back to its shoulder perch. The kitten continued its war with its ribbon. The pony sniffed briefly, causing the people lined up against the wall to stiffen in dismay, but then pulled away, tugging to get its head down and crop some weeds growing up at the corner of the portico. The red dog also sniffed, waving its tail genially but without any obvious excitement. The mama cat jumped down from the woman’s arms and curled up neatly upon the chest of the deceased—an elderly grandmother, apparently—and blinked placid gold eyes. A general ripple of relief ran through the mourners, briefly stayed when the dog pulled back, but it was evidently attracted by the cat, not the dead woman, and was swiftly discouraged by a possessive hiss and a swipe of claws.

In great city temples like the ones at Easthome, the signing of which god had taken up the soul of the dead had economic as well as theological significance, as Orders devoted to individual gods took possession of the family’s monetary offerings for prayers for the dead. Here, there was likely only one altar table, the colors of its coverings changed out seasonally. It was perhaps shrewd showmanship that had inspired the acolyte to offer the Mother’s beast last, rather than cutting things short by beginning with the obvious. Poor these people might be, but not, therefore, paltry.

“That red dog . . .” muttered Penric out of the corner of his mouth to Oswyl.

“What about it?”

“I think we’ve come to the right place.”

“How so?”

But the sorcerer only made a wait wave of his hand, vexingly, although he continued to look around with keen interest.

The acolyte intoned a short prayer, and signed the tally of the gods. The half-dozen burliest men of the family took up the bier and bore it off up the street, and the grooms collected their animals and headed in the opposite direction, quickly losing their formal demeanor. The acolyte, making to follow the bier, glanced uncertainly at Oswyl’s party and paused. The woman who had repossessed the mama cat came to his side.

“May I help you, sirs?” he said.

“My name is Locator Oswyl, and I am on a mission of inquiry from Easthome,” Oswyl began. As the man jerked his head back in alarm, Oswyl quickly added, “I want to ask after any strangers you may have lately heard about in your district, but we can wait till your duties are done, Acolyte, ah . . .?”

“Gallin,” said the acolyte, looking less alarmed but more curious. “Uh, perhaps my wife, Gossa, can take you in and make you comfortable till I return?”

It wasn’t clear which of them he was asking, but the woman, looking equally curious, relieved the cat of its ribbon and set it down, shooing it away with her foot. She bobbed a curtsey at the unexpected visitors. “Indeed, sirs. Follow me.”

The children with the animals also paused to stare. Penric cast a special smile at the girl with the white pony, touching his thumb to his lips in a blessing of the white god; the girl looked surprised at this courtesy. Gossa directed what were ever-more-obviously her offspring in assorted directions, the girl with the kitten to stop playing and run ahead to put the kettle on.

The guardsmen with all their horses were sent in the wake of the girl with the pony. Oswyl stepped aside to instruct them, once they had settled the beasts in the temple’s stable around back, to spread out through the village and make inquiries as they had done at every stop so far, then hurried to catch up with his reticent sorcerer and the acolyte’s wife. Such Temple spouses were often as much the servants of the gods as their mates, if through their mates. She must be a source of local news as good as Gallin.

The acolyte’s house was next to the temple, and had little to distinguish it from others along the village street, although the front windows were set with glass, not parchment. It held a cramped but cheerful air suggesting more children than money. The kitchen was set to the back with a sort of parlor-study in front, doubtless where the acolyte performed his spiritual counseling, and to which the visitors were conducted. Oswyl had thus to wait till his hoped-for informant returned from her domestic domain to begin his inquiries. The young girl approached the smiling Penric to show off her kitten, which the sorcerer duly held in his lap and admired. Stroked by his long fingers, it purred like a cogwheel. Oswyl trusted no one else noticed the faint patter of dead fleas drifting off the beast when it was handed back. Oswyl attempted a smile as well, but it apparently lacked the blond man’s magic; he was offered no kitten.

Goodwife Gossa, assisted by her dekittened daughter, bustled back in to offer ale, tea, and bread and butter. Penric politely made the sign of the tally before they partook, by way of blessing, which won a smile from Gossa this time. Oswyl’s hopes that she might also offer information were quickly dashed, however. At his now-well-practiced queries, she shook her head in regret. No strangers that she’d heard of had arrived in the vale in the past week, or month for that matter. Oswyl cast Penric a reproaching glance.

Penric, undaunted, said to Gossa, “That red dog of your son’s. Where did he come by it?”

“Ah, he’s a pretty beast, isn’t he? But it’s a sad tale. The old fellow who raised him was killed in a rock fall not two months back. Some of his dogs had to be dragged away from the place—after days—they mourned him so hard. It was impossible to dig him up to bury him again, so my husband held his rites on the spot. But . . .” She hesitated, then was interrupted when Gallin came in.

He shrugged off his five-colored robe, which at this range Oswyl could see was a bit threadbare, hung it on a wall peg, and sat to take hot tea with weary gratitude.

“These gentlemen are looking for strangers come to the vale,” she informed him, “but I’ve not heard of any. Have you?”

The familiar, frustrating headshake. “Not too many ever come up this far. We mostly take our own goods to the market at Whippoorwill. A few men from there come up in the summer to trade in animals or hides or cheese, but they aren’t strangers.”

“I was just starting to tell them about old Scuolla,” his wife put in.

Gallin straightened, setting down his mug. He asked more eagerly, “Did someone finally get my letters? Or read my letters? I’d sent to my superiors in Whippoorwill twice, but have got no reply yet. And written to the divines in neighbor vales. One said he could not help, and the other . . . was less helpful.” Gallin grimaced. “My prayers have fared no better.”

“Help with what?” asked Oswyl.

“My ghost problem,” said Gallin simply.

Oswyl sat back; Penric sat up. “Ghost problem?” he encouraged their host.

Oswyl was not without curiosity, but this side-issue seemed nothing to do with his ever-more-delayed pursuit. His new hope was to extract his party from this local hospitality and get back to the main road by nightfall. Yet Acolyte Gallin seized the opening like a swimmer grasping a rope.

“That luckless old man. I wasn’t sure at first, mind you, even with the behavior of his dogs. Not all of them, just his two favorites—Arrow, a fine big fellow, and Blood, that you saw. After the rockslide it seems Arrow had run to the nearest farmyard and barked his head off, till they drove him away by pelting him with stones. Blood stood guard, I suppose you could say, back at the slide, barking and howling. Then that big dog ran all the way into town and found me, and whined and carried on and wouldn’t be hushed. As the beast seldom left Scuolla’s side, it didn’t take a Cedonian sage to figure out something was badly amiss. I saddled my horse and followed him up the road, and then the hunting trail, and then, well. Big slide. Took down a lot of trees. I’d heard the crash echoing down the vale earlier that morning, but when no alarm had come, I’d dismissed it. It didn’t take me long to find the remains of Scuolla’s apprentice, and one of the other dogs, its back broken, sadly, but it had been too late for either of them from the first. A gang of men from the village, later that afternoon, had no better luck at finding Scuolla, though we did uncover one more dog, and buried both beasts properly, no skinning. I did insist on that, for respect.” He nodded to himself. Neglected by his Temple supervisors in this remote vale, Gallin had perhaps taken to self-supplying their absent discipline or praise. Oswyl tried not to sympathize.

After a long, thoughtful, silent inhalation through his nose, Penric came out with, “And how long had you known that old Scuolla was a hedge shaman?”

Intent on recapturing the conversation by offering suitable condolences and then hurrying their leave, Oswyl swallowed his words so fast he coughed. What?

Gallin cast the young man a closer look than heretofore. “I’ve served in this vale for over twenty years. I found out what he was early on, but not so early that I hadn’t had time to learn his kin and his ties, and that there was no harm in him. I take my first duty to be to souls, not laws. And to learn as well as teach, or what else do the gods put us in this world for?”

“Indeed.” Penric made the tally sign; coming from a full-braid Temple divine (even one who’d left his braids in his saddlebags), it seemed to Oswyl strangely more than a mere assenting shrug.

Reassured by this reaction, Gallin went on: “My trust was repaid five-fold, through those years. Scuolla was as pious a man as any and more than many, and he and his dogs were an aid to all in need, lost or hurt, in flood or fire or famine and a hundred smaller tasks. In time, I came to think of his as my good left hand here in the vale, without which the right could not grip half so well.”

Gossa, nodding in confirmation to all this, put in, “That’s why we don’t understand about his funeral.” She made a go on gesture at her husband.

Penric’s eyes narrowed. “It took place at the rockslide, your goodwife said?”

“Aye. There was no getting down to his body. For a time we thought the dogs might find him, or later, our noses, but he was too deep for the last and the dogs, well, the dogs never settled on a consensus. Or settled at all—very disturbed they were, right to the last. In the event, no god signed to taking up his soul, or at least none we could discern, though we made the trial five times, till the holy animals began to bite and scratch and kick and it grew dark.”

“Could he have escaped the fall somehow?” asked Oswyl, ensnared by this tale despite himself. “Run off for some reason?” The dead companion was suggestive, to a suspicious mind.

Gallin huffed out a breath. “I wondered about that, too, as things went on. But it doesn’t stand up to the witness of the dogs.”

In his past investigations, Oswyl had found many mute things to give testimony that shouted; he supposed he must now add dogs to that list. At least his superiors could not chide him for not swearing them in. “Sundered, then.”

Gossa made a fending gesture in front of her bodice, and scowled at him as fiercely as one of his aunts about to correct his legal rhetoric.

Gallin shook his head and went on, “By every sign, Scuolla was sundered, and I don’t think he should have been. I know he would not refuse the gods. And if the Son of Autumn, to Whom he’d made devotions all his life, didn’t think him good enough somehow, well, there’s still the Bastard. So where was He? Where were any of Them?”

An unanswerable question that Oswyl had confronted many times in his career. He bit his lip.

“The thing is,” put in Gossa, “everyone round about now takes that rockslide for haunted, and avoids it.”

Penric laced and unlaced his fingers a few times, then seemed to come to some decision. “So this hedge shaman, working with dogs as the medium of his art, died uncleansed of the Great Beast that must have given him his powers. And now his soul is lost between the worlds, a sundering unwilled by either the gods or the man.”

“You know so much of such things, young fellow?” said Gallin, startled.

“I’m, ah . . . something of a Temple sensitive myself, as it happens.” His smile had gone a little stiff. “I knew the moment I saw the red dog that there had to be a shaman in this tale somewhere. It is partway to being made a Great Beast, did you know?”

Gallin cleared his throat. “Blood’s a very intelligent dog. Well-mannered. Good with all the village children. Took to being a holy animal with no trouble at all.”

“I daresay.”

“So . . . you didn’t come here in answer to my letters . . .?” The acolyte seemed reluctant to give up this hope.

“Not to your letters, no.” Penric bared his teeth in a brief, ironic grimace, an edged look Oswyl had not seen in his face before.

Gallin confessed, “I’d thought to find another hedge shaman for Scuolla, somewhere up or down the mountains, to perform their last secret rites for him. Him seeming out of reach of my prayers. Scuolla had his Great Beast from the shaman here before him, long ago when he was a young man, and performed the cleansing for his mentor in turn when he died. He was bringing along his own apprentice, but he’d not invested the man with his powers yet as far as I know. Well, I do know, for Wen’s soul was signed taken up by the Son at his funeral the day after the tragedy.”

Gossa nodded. “Plain as plain, that one was. Greatly to his family’s relief amidst their grief.”

Oswyl began, “I should explain something more about the fugitive we hunt—” but Penric flung up his hand, interrupting him.

“Wait just a little on that, Locator, if you please.”

It didn’t please Oswyl much, but Penric was turning to Gallin. “How far is it to this maybe-haunted rockslide of yours?”

“About five miles up the East Branch road, or thereabouts. An hour’s brisk ride.” Gallin squinted intently at Penric. “You say you are a Temple sensitive. Can you sense ghosts?”

“Ah . . . with a bit of special help, yes.”

“Can you get that help?”

“I carry it with me.”

Gallin grew eager. “Could you—would you—would you be willing to ride out to the fall with me, and sense what you can? It would put my mind to rest.” He reflected. “Or not, but at least I’d know.”

Such an expedition couldn’t be back till nightfall, Oswyl calculated. They would be stuck in this village till tomorrow. “Time,” he gritted under his breath.

Penric’s glance flicked up. He murmured back, “You could go on without me.”

“No. I can’t.”

“Well, then.” He turned to the acolyte. “I’m willing to take a look, yes. I can’t make any promises.”

Gallin actually clapped his hands in relief. “We can be off as soon as the horses are saddled.”

“We should take the red dog,” added Penric.

Gallin stilled. “Ah. Aye.” He rose to lead the way, pausing only to grasp his wife’s hands in a farewell. At least the goodwife eyed them all more approvingly, as they clumped out after him.

VIII

Penric studied the dog, Blood, as it cantered along behind the acolyte’s horse. It wasn’t undog, or not-dog, or even, really, terribly uncanny. It was just . . . more-dog, a peculiar density of itself.

Can you show me more? he asked Desdemona.

You are seeing what I am seeing, more or less, she replied. Turnabout being fair play.

Hm.

Oswyl nudged his horse up beside Pen’s on the rutted wagon trail—it was unduly flattering to dub it a road. After a moment he murmured, “You really can sense ghosts?”

“Desdemona can. I don’t have her share the sight with me unless I ask. It’s distracting, especially in old places where many people have died over the years.” When first this skill had come to him, a few months after Des had moved in, he’d tripped himself up dodging around things no one else could see, much to her amusement, till he’d worked out how to get her to shut it off. Some people had thought he’d been taken with fits. The real explanation hadn’t improved things by much.

“Can all sorcerers do so?”

“I imagine it varies. Those possessing younger or less experienced demons may be less adept.”

“I wonder that my Order does not requisition them more. The ability to interrogate the dead . . . would be most helpful in the instance of a murder.”

“Mm, not as much as you’d think. Most souls go at once to their gods, when severed from their bodies. It’s the god who is present at the funeral, not the person. An invoked messenger.” An odd thing when Pen thought about it, that so great a Presence should stoop to so small a task.

Oswyl frowned in what Pen was beginning to recognize as professional frustration. As distinguished from the dozen other ways he could frown.

“In any case,” Pen consoled him, “it would be hard for the sensitives to correctly interpret and report what they see. Even a fresh ghost still holding the form of its body can’t speak. The sundered soon grow muddled, like an old man who’s lost his wits along with his teeth. They exhaust the ability to assent to their god by the time they exhaust their ability to refuse. Which is what makes them sundered, I suppose.” Indifferent, beyond attachment or pain, attenuating into pale smudges, and then, at length, gone. Pen wasn’t sure he could convey how disturbing this process was to see, midway, without being frightening, exactly. Well, not after the first brush.

You squeaked in terror, said Des.

Did not, Pen thought back. That was just a yelp of surprise. The ghosts, once understood, had seemed less horrifying than his first fear, that he was hallucinating or going mad. Still, not comfortable.

Gallin turned his horse aside onto a narrower trail, weaving up through the trees, and Pen and Oswyl fell into single file behind him. After a damp, scrambling time, Blood bounded ahead, whining, and the steep woods opened out abruptly onto the rock fall.

Rock fall was a serious understatement, Pen realized. The slide was perhaps a hundred paces across and three times that in height, a fan of debris including boulders the size of wagons, mud, and a tangle of uprooted and snapped trees. At its wide foot, the local stream had backed up and routed around; at its narrower head, a raw and ragged new cliff marked where it had heaved itself out of the mountain’s weakened side. He imagined being caught under the roar, not knowing whether to run forward or back, so screened by the trees on the shuddering path as not to know either was equally futile till too late.

The three horsemen all pulled up at the edge, but Blood sprang onward, scrambling over the treacherous footing, sniffing and uttering small yips. Penric did not at first see what the dog sought, and then, at a shift from Desdemona, did.

Oh.

The old man sat on a boulder midway across the scree and a little down from where the path was cut off. He wore the common garb of workmen in this country, boots, trousers, rough-spun shirt, a capacious sheepskin vest fleece turned inward and hanging open around him. A short-brimmed hat was pushed back on his head, a few feathers stuck in its band. Penric could not discern their hues, for feathers, clothes, and the man who wore them were all faded to a colorless translucency.

As Pen watched, Blood made his way, not quite unerringly, to the man’s side, and whimpered and yipped around him like a dog sniffing around a badger’s den that was too small to enter. The man smiled faintly and lifted his hand to stroke the dog’s head. The beast calmed and sat, silky tail waving like a signal flag.

Pen dismounted and handed his reins to Oswyl. “Hold my horse, please.”

“Can you see anything?” asked Gallin anxiously.

“Oh, yes.” Pen turned and began to clamber across the debris.

“Be careful!” called Gallin. “It could be unstable!”

Pen waved understanding.

Incurious as an old idler on a town square bench, the man watched him approach. Pen’s gloves saved him from tearing his hands as he tested each hold, seeking balance rather than suspect support. He was breathing heavily by the time he arrived at the boulder and found firm-ish footing. He stared down at the revenant, who stared back up but then returned his attention to his worried dog.

“Master Scuolla,” Pen tried. “Shaman, sir.”

The man seemed not to hear. But he had noticed Pen, and was most certainly interacting with the dog. A sundered soul some, what, two months into its dissolution ought to be a lot more vague than this. More distanced.

He looks as if he hasn’t been dead more than a few days, Des agreed.

Have you seen anything like this before?

Des shook Penric’s head. The only shaman I ever met was very much still alive.

Can you reach him any more directly?

No more than we have done.

Feeling rude, Pen tried passing his hand through the man’s head. Any chill was indistinguishable from the mountain air. The man lifted his face as if to a passing breeze, but then returned his attention to his dog, who fawned on him.

Des had gone quiet. Pen stood back and thought. His thoughts were extremely uncomfortable. The most uncomfortable of them was that this called as much for the skills of a divine as a sorcerer. He made the five-fold tally, and tried to compose his mind in prayer. Asking his god, or indeed any of the gods, for a sign seemed a madly dangerous thing to do, but in any case no sign was forthcoming. In the silence, he stared across the scree at Acolyte Gallin, and contemplated the disquieting notion that maybe he wasn’t supposed to be the supplicant, here. Maybe he was supposed to be the answer.

But old Scuolla needs a shaman, not a sorcerer. And while Locator Oswyl had been trying to lay hands on his fugitive shaman for weeks, so far they’d come up empty.

Well, if the dead man had lingered here for two months, he probably wasn’t going anywhere else immediately. Though time was clearly not his friend. Pen called to Blood, who ignored him, and made his way, slipping and sliding, back across the rock fall to the horses.

“Could you sense anything?” asked Acolyte Gallin.

“Oh, yes. He’s there, all right. Communing with his dog, although not much with me.”

Oswyl blinked at him, startled, and stared across at Blood licking the air by what must appear to him a bare boulder. Licking at Scuolla’s ghostly hand, his tongue sliding through it in chill confusion.

Gallin signed himself, looking distraught. “He is sundered, then.”

“Ah . . .” said Pen. “Maybe not yet.”

“Surely it is too late . . .?”

“I can’t claim to know what’s going on, here. My first guess is that his shamanic powers allow his spirit to still draw some nourishment from the world even though separated from his body. But it’s been a long time. He seemed . . . it’s hard to explain . . . tired. I think he’s still fading, but more slowly than other men would.”

“Then there’s still a chance to save him? If a shaman might be found?”

“If a shaman might be found, it would still be worth a try, at least.”

Gallin’s breath huffed out, as he stared across to where Blood lingered by the side of his old comrade and friend. “If there are any such powers hiding elsewhere in these mountains, my letters should have brought me some word by now.”

Not your letters. Your prayers. And Penric wasn’t going to say that out loud.

Oswyl was acquiring a whole new frown, as he perhaps made some of the connections Pen just had. Or at least noticed the excessive amount of coincidence starting to pile up. As a locator, he was surely suspicious of coincidences. As a divine, Penric was too, but in a very different way. He remembered the shrewd gray eyes of the Saint of Idau, and the white god who had once looked through them at him. At us. Desdemona, remembering with him, shuddered.

“In any case, we can do nothing more here right now.” Pen retrieved his reins from Oswyl and swung himself back up into his saddle.

Gallin called Blood, who didn’t come until Scuolla’s ghost made a releasing sort of go on gesture. The acolyte then offered the hospitality of the Linkbeck Temple to Oswyl’s party for the night—Linkbeck lacked an inn as such, although Gallin assured them he could find beds for all among his villagers, no need to camp in the stable loft. He looked back over his shoulder as they turned onto the path again, and breathed in a hesitant undertone, “Not hopeless?”

Penric wasn’t sure to whom that was addressed, but answered, “I am not certain. Locator, perhaps the time has come to explain the full story of the man we seek.”

Oswyl gestured assent, but did not begin till they turned back onto the wagon track and he could ride side-by-side with Gallin. Penric fell behind, listening. Gallin made exclamations at all the expected high and low points, till Oswyl, drawing toward the end of his account, let fall a Learned Penric.

Gallin turned in his saddle and stared in astonishment. Penric returned a wary smile and a little wave of his fingers. He was unsurprised when Oswyl finished and Gallin dropped back beside him, brows crooked in new inquiry. It was embarrassing when a man twice his age looked to him for answers, especially when he didn’t have them.

“You are really a sorcerer, and a full-braid divine?”

Pen cleared his throat. “Long story. But all Temple sorcerers must undergo a divine’s training and oaths. We seldom take up the duties of a regular divine, though.”

Gallin seemed to consider this, sidelong. “Does your Order have regular duties?”

Pen puffed a laugh. “Good question. We go where we’re needed, I think.”

“And yet you were not sent?” Gallin asked as Oswyl reined back to Penric’s other side, trapping him in the center of their attention. The acolyte looked across: “Either of you?”

Oswyl shook his head.

Penric said slowly, “I think we may no longer be hunting. We may be trapping. If that innkeeper told us true, Inglis kin Wolfcliff seeks another shaman. Find the nearest one, and he may come to us.” Come, be brought or be driven—this game would not evade such Beaters as Penric had begun to suspect were in play.

Gallin said plaintively, “But why should a shaman seek a shaman? What could a royal shaman, even a disgraced one, possibly want with a mere country hedge shaman?”

Another good question. That their quarry sought such a practitioner had been enough to direct their pursuit. Maybe he should have thought a step further . . .? Des snorted.

Oswyl’s logical mind was starting to work on the question. He offered tentatively, “He seeks to take refuge with someone who will hide him?”

Penric threw in, “Or perhaps he plans a suicide, yet does not want to be sundered like poor Scuolla.” Yes, suicide must pose a problem for such an invested person. Some suicides sought sundering, but many another was hurrying to the hoped-for refuge of their god. The Temple spent a good deal of effort trying to discourage that particular approach to divinity.

Oswyl chewed this over, looking as though he did not like the taste. “Beyond my mandate,” he said at last.

But not beyond mine . . . in principle. Another disturbing thought. Today seemed unusually full of them.

At the sound of hoofbeats, Penric looked up to see a rider cantering toward them. After a moment, he recognized one of their guardsmen, Heive.

“Sirs!” he called, reining in before them. “Daughter be thanked, I found you. Goodwife Gossa and my sergeant beg that you return at once. A stranger has come to the village, and he could be the man we seek. Dark hair and a Wealdean accent, at least, though oddly dressed, and I couldn’t swear to his age.”

“You’ve seen him?” said Oswyl, rising in his stirrups in excitement. “You haven’t tried to approach him, have you?”

“No, sir,” said Heive fervently. “He came to the acolyte’s house, seeking him, he said. Goodwife Gossa told him you were out on an errand and sent him to wait in the temple, and for me to ride for you. The sergeant and Baar are watching the building from a distance. He’d not come out by the time I left.”

“We’d best hurry,” said Gallin in a voice choked with alarm, and led the way, kicking his horse into a canter. Oswyl was right on his heels. Penric and Heive fell in behind; Blood ran after them. Pen was suddenly glad he’d brought his bow along, rather than leaving it with his saddlebags in the temple stable.

At some risk of bringing in the horses wet and winded, they made fast time back to the village street, finding it bare of villagers. They stopped a few houses away from the temple. The guard sergeant waved from where he hunkered down behind someone’s garden gate, and pointed to the temple door. “Still in there,” he mouthed.

Oswyl returned a silent salute. They all dismounted. Blood, panting and muddy, made a lunge for the temple doors. Gallin grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and hauled him, whining, to his house, where Gossa could be seen peeking through the front window, beckoning urgently at him. Pen unlaced his bow from his saddle, strung it, and shrugged on his quiver. The other two guardsmen joined them. The armed party made its way quietly to the temple portico.

Oswyl gestured Penric ahead. “All right, sorcerer,” he muttered. “Go on.”

Wait, what, all by myself? “Wouldn’t it be better for us all to rush him at once?”

The expressions on four faces seemed to disagree with him. “If this is a false lead,” said Oswyl, “you are the one man among us who can tell at a glance.”

Gallin and Gossa came out the door of their house, and stood holding hands and watching Pen anxiously. Pen swallowed, nocked his arrow, and stepped into the dimness of the temple’s interior.

Light me, he thought to Desdemona, and the shadows fled from his eyes, leaving his vision clear.

The man lay prone on the wooden temple floor, just this side of the cold fire plinth, arms out, in what would be the attitude of deepest supplication, except he was not aimed toward any wall shrine in particular. Penric wasn’t sure if he was seeing prayer, or exhaustion. He was unshaven and wore a grab-bag of garb, townsman’s clothing but a peasant’s woven-withy boots, and a mountaineer’s sheepskin cap. One hand gripped a long stick. By his side lay a huge dog, black and tan, head down on crossed paws in an attitude of canine boredom. Its head came up at Pen’s approach, triangular ears pricked; its tail thumped desultorily on the boards, although it also growled. Perhaps both it and Pen were equally confused?

If Blood had been more-dog, this one was even more so, dense with presence. This is a Great Beast. Not so, Des?

Impressive, she conceded.

“Sit up,” Pen commanded, in what he hoped was a convincing arresting-officer voice; “But don’t get up.”

The man jerked to his knees, grabbing for his stick to support his stance. His sleeve, falling back, revealed an arm crisscrossed with long, vicious-looking scabs. The knife at his belt glowed with strange power swirling like an aurora, not in Pen’s eyes but in Des’s. He stared wildly at Pen, mouth falling open as he drew sudden breath. The dog stood up and growled with what seemed a lot more authority than Pen had mustered.

“Inglis kin Wolfcliff,” said Pen, certain now of what he faced. And then had no idea of what to say next. This whole scene was so sideways to any of his preconceptions about the man, anything he might have rehearsed would have been worthless anyway. As neither man nor dog launched himself at Pen’s throat, he eased the tension on the string and let his bow droop, but still held it ready. “We’ve been looking for you.”

IX

Inglis used his stick to climb to his full height, although his right leg, much abused by the trip down the mountain this morning, threatened to buckle from the pain. The man before him seemed a blond apparition, inexplicable. “Go away,” Inglis tried.

The intruder just tilted his head. “Good attempt, wolf-man. A bit misdirected. Although wouldn’t ‘Give me your horse’ seem more to the point?”

How did he know . . .? And then, however badly his powers were crippled, Inglis recognized the fellow for what he was. And, five gods, or should that oath be Bastard’s teeth!, he was. His spirit-density was stunning. “Sorcerer.” Inglis was confounded by hope and fear. And by hurt, and heartache, and exhaustion, and his long, futile flight. “Temple, or hedge?” Or, five gods help them all, rider or ridden? Surely any demon so powerful must be ascendant? Could Inglis persuade it to . . .

“Temple through and through, I’m afraid. You are not more surprised than I was.” He glanced aside at Arrow, who had shifted to stand at Inglis’s right hand. “How did you come by one of Scuolla’s dogs?”

“It found me. Up on the mountain. When I was lost, trying to find a shortcut to the Carpagamo road. It won’t stop following me.” Wait, how did he know of Scuolla?

“Ah. Huh.” The blond man’s lips crooked up in a smile of . . . dismay? “Did it bring you here, do you think?”

“I . . . don’t know.” Had it? He glanced down at the big dog, his companion for days. Inglis had assumed the animal was attracted to him because he was a shaman invested, and it had somehow confused him with its prior master. Maker. “I came looking for . . .” He hardly knew what, anymore.

“You came looking for Acolyte Gallin, I understand. Why?”

“An old woman up at the summer grazing camp told me that he knew Scuolla. I thought he might know . . . something.”

“Did you know Scuolla has been dead under a rock fall for the past two months?”

“I was told that, too.”

“And did she tell you that he was a hedge shaman?”

“No. I . . . guessed it. From the dog.”

“Hm.” The sorcerer seemed to come to some decision. “I have a senior locator outside, who has ridden all the way from Easthome in pursuit of you. Do you surrender? No more shaman tricks, no running away?”

What could this man do if he refused? “I’m not running anywhere.” Inglis grimaced. “I mangled my leg on the mountain.”

The sorcerer looked him up and down. “Ah. I see. Yes, mountains will do that.”

Inglis hung on his staff, feeling sick. “They in Easthome seek me as a murderer?”

“Locator Oswyl is a very precise man. I’m sure he’d say he seeks you as a suspected murderer. No one is going to hang you on the spot, you know, without all those judicial ceremonies his Order is so fond of. Everyone has to dress up, first. Not to mention what could be some fraught theological complications.” He added, “I think you had better give me your knife, for now.”

“NO.”

He went on with unimpaired weird cheer, “That’s Tollin kin Boarford’s ghost wrapped in it, yes? So Oswyl was right. I shall like to know, later, how you managed that. Speaking from my calling. Both of them, come to think.”

“I’m not going to use it to stab anyone.” Inglis’s voice was hoarse. “Else.”

“Yes, but my colleagues won’t know that. Once things are more settled, I may even be able to give it back into your care. You’ve been faithful so far, haven’t you? You’ve brought it a long way.” His voice had gone soft, persuasive. Sensible. “Why?”

“I sought a shaman.”

“You are a shaman.”

Inglis vented a bitter laugh. “Not anymore.”

The blond man looked him over. Or through him? “Surely, you are.”

“I tried. I can’t. Can’t enter the trance.” His voice, rising, fell. “I think it is a punishment. Maybe from the gods.”

The sorcerer raised his eyebrows. “So why not take your problem to your shamanic superiors at court in Easthome? They were much closer.”

“I killed Tollin,” Inglis said through his teeth. “I could not go back there and face. . . . everyone.”

The sorcerer took a quick glance over his shoulder. Yes, there were some other men hovering outside the door. No other exits. Trapped. How?

“Oh? I was told he’d been disemboweled by a boar. Did you stab him before, or after?”

“After. It was . . . it was a mercy cut.” Inglis shuddered at the memory of the knife blade going in, the pressure and the give in his hand, all mixed up with his visions as he’d descended from the plane of symbolic action, exhilarated to have completed his first investiture, to have made a fierce spirit warrior in truth. Tollin’s agonized face . . . “He was screaming.” It was unbearable. I had to shut him up.

“He could not have survived his injuries from the boar?”

“No. Gods, no.”

“Why didn’t you go for help then?”

“It was . . . very confusing in that moment. He must have planted his knife in the beast’s neck even as he was being ripped open. I captured its spirit and passed it into Tollin before I came back to, back to, to the sty. To the blood.” His wolf-within had been wildly excited by the blood, nearly uncontrollable. Inglis could, he supposed, have claimed that he’d lost control of his powers in that moment. He’d considered that defense, on his long ride north. But I didn’t. Not really.

That came later.

“Came back . . . out of your shamanic trance?”

“Yes.”

“Did you mean to bind his spirit to your knife?”

“No! Yes . . . I don’t know. I don’t know how I did that.” Well, Inglis knew what he’d done. He’d been taught about the banner-carriers, hallowed Old Wealdean warriors who were charged with carrying away from the field of battle the souls of their fallen spirit-warrior comrades. And the souls of those dying but not yet dead. The fatally wounded must have included kinsmen, friends, mentors. Had those mercy cuts, to sever the soul from its body and bind it to the banner for that strange rescue, been as horrible for them as it had been for him? I think it must.

“Was this investiture Tollin’s idea, or yours?”

“His. He’d badgered me for weeks. But none of this would have happened if I hadn’t agreed to try the rite. I wanted to test my powers. And . . . and then there was Tolla.”

“His sister, yes? Oswyl mentioned her. I gather your courtship was not prospering. So why not use your weirding voice on her directly?”

Inglis glared at him, offended. Arrow growled.

“Nah, nah.” The sorcerer gave a dissimulating wave of his fingers. “You have a romantic heart, I see.” As Inglis glared harder, he went on, “I’m Learned Penric of Martensbridge, by the way. Temple sorcerer of the Bastard’s Order, presently serving the court of the princess-archdivine, who assigned me to this Grayjay . . .” He jerked his head toward the doorway.

That near-youth was a Temple divine? Yes, he had to be, to be entrusted with his demonic passenger. Beyond Learned Penric Inglis saw another man entering the temple hall. Three more clustered behind him, two armed with short swords and one with a cavalry crossbow, and following them, yet another fellow—middle-aged, shabbier, anxious.

“What kept you?” Penric, still not turning, asked of the lead man behind him. Keeping Inglis in his eye. But Penric’s sturdy hunting bow was now dangling disregarded from his hand. He slid his arrow back into his quiver.

“I didn’t want to interrupt,” said the first man. “Your inquiries seemed to be faring well.” His accent was pure Easthome. Beneath his cloak, Inglis made out gray fabric, and the glint of brass buttons. The locator. The armed three were Temple guardsmen of some sort, Inglis supposed, dressed in a mishmash of local winter woolens and bits of blue uniform.

Penric at last glanced back to the doorway. “And here is Acolyte Gallin, shepherd of this valley,” he continued, naming the older fellow, who was gaping at Inglis in inexplicable amazement. “The very man you sought. Now that you have found him, what?”

“I wanted to find what shaman in turn had cleansed Scuolla.” Inglis swallowed. “Discover if he could also free Tollin. Cleanse him so he is not sundered. We were both fools together, but Tollin does not deserve that.”

Gallin stepped forward, looking pole-axed. “I prayed for a shaman. And here you are, right here—!”

Penric, watching Inglis stare back in bewilderment, put in with a helpful air, “Scuolla has not been cleansed, because no other shaman could be found. But he is not yet sundered. I’m not sure what sustains him. I suspect he may be drawing some spiritual nourishment from his dogs.”

Inglis’s black yelp was scarcely a laugh. “Then your prayers must have been heard by the Bastard, Acolyte Gallin. To bring you a shaman who can’t work his craft . . .!”

The sorcerer-divine pursed his lips, as if seriously considering this jibe. “That just might be so. He is the god of murderers and outcasts, among His other gifts.” He added under his breath, “And vile humor. And rude songs.”

“I can’t cleanse anyone.” Too polluted himself by his crime . . .?

“Not in your current state of mind, clearly,” said the sorcerer. His tone had grown easy, friendly. Had he understood any of this? “I think . . .”

Everyone in the temple hall seemed to hang on his breath.

“We should all go have dinner. And get a good night’s sleep. Yes.”

Oswyl and the guardsmen stared at Penric in startled disbelief, as if he’d just proposed they all grow wings and fly to Carpagamo, or something equally bizarre.

“That sounds very sensible.” A slight quaver in Acolyte Gallin’s voice undercut this endorsement. “The sun is already gone behind the mountains.”

“Aren’t you going to magic him?” the lead guardsman asked Penric, nodding warily at Inglis. Inglis couldn’t tell if that was something he’d wanted to see, or to be far away from.

“I don’t think I need to. Do I?” Penric, smiling, held out his hand to Inglis, palm up. Waiting for him to surrender his knife, which would be surrender indeed. “By the way, how are you keeping Tollin from fading?”

For answer, Inglis mutely held up both arms, letting his sleeves fall back.

“Oh,” said Penric, quietly.

“Blood holds life even after it leaves the body,” said Inglis, his voice falling unwilled into the cadences of his teachers. His own despair added, “For a little while.”

“Mm, yes, one sees why your Darthacan ancestors were frightened of the forest magics,” murmured Penric. “It’s written that the old shamans worked some very strange effects with blood. Rather a different affair if using someone else’s blood, and not one’s own, I imagine. Theologically speaking.” His smile was unwavering.

Inglis’s weary will was not. With fumbling fingers, he picked out the rawhide ties securing his sheath to his belt, and handed the knife across. Penric touched forehead, lips, navel, groin, and spread his fingers over his heart, Daughter-Bastard-Mother-Father-Son, completing the blessing in full before taking it. Sorcerer he might be, possessed of fearsome powers, but in this moment the full-braid divine was clearly ascendant. He didn’t hold it like a weapon. He held it like a sacrament.

He sees.

Lightheaded to the point of passing out with this release from his deathly burden, Inglis fell to his knees, burying his face in the thick fur of Arrow’s neck, gasping against tears. The dog whined and tried to lick him.

From outside the temple, a woman’s voice cried, “Blood, you fool beast! Come back here this instant!”

A copper-colored dog with muddy paws rushed into the temple hall. Inglis nearly fell over as Arrow jerked away from him. For a moment, he gathered himself to break up a dog fight, but the two animals exchanged greetings with happy yips and whines, circling around to sniff each other’s nether parts. Old friends, it seemed.

And another survivor of the rock fall? The red dog was thick with spirit-density, although not nearly so much as Arrow. Halfway to being a Great Beast; doomed to be sacrificed at the end of its life into a new puppy, to continue layering up its powers. Inglis wondered if Scuolla would have made sure it was a long and happy life, by dog standards. The good natures of both beasts suggested so.

The two dogs then turned their attentions to Inglis, swarming around him, nosing and licking and nearly knocking him over again. He was surprised into an almost-laugh fending off Blood leaning up trying to taste his face.

A woman trotted into the hall and halted beside Gallin. Middle-aged, careworn, clearly his helpmate. “He broke out when I opened the door,” she wheezed.

Learned Penric, watching the play in amusement as Blood fawned on Inglis, rubbed his lips and murmured, “Take witness of the dogs, Locator?”

Oswyl just looked exasperated. “This benighted case is the strangest I ever worked on. And I’m going to have to report it all when I get home, you realize?”

Learned Penric’s blue eyes crinkled as he grinned. “You’d best pray for eloquence, then.”

X

In Oswyl’s prior investigations, requisitioning support from the local Temple usually meant finding his bed and board at a chapterhouse of one of the Orders, or a pilgrim hostel attached to the main center, or at least a recommended inn. Linkbeck did not boast any of these, nor a jail, nor a secure lockup in some outbuilding, nor even manacles on the cellar wall of a crumbling stronghold. His prisoner must needs remain under the direct supervision of the sorcerer at all times. This resulted in their having to impose on the domestic hospitality of Gallin and Gossa; mostly, as it turned out, Gossa.

Oswyl was deeply uncomfortable with bringing a maybe-murderer-mage into their home, but the couple seemed to take it in stride. An extra trestle table to increase the seating by six was swiftly set up by Gallin and his sons. Gossa had apparently handled sudden refugees from disasters in the vale this way many times before, driving her children and the servant girl, whom Oswyl had last seen leading the Bastard’s white pony at the funeral, this way and that. It didn’t take her long to draft the guardsmen as well, easing Oswyl’s conscience slightly. Oddments of food appeared spontaneously, as if in a tale of an enchanted castle, dishes sent over by neighbors to supplement the family’s fare.

All the chaos coalesced in a surprisingly short time in seating twelve to dinner, plus the two dogs lurking under the table, whether following Inglis or in hope of scraps. Learned Penric looked discomfited when asked by the acolyte to bless the meal, but he delivered the formula with a seminary-trained grace, which seemed to please their hosts. The soup was hardly watered at all.

Inglis was a blot of silent misery in this active company. Perhaps feeling the contrast, he did exert himself to politeness, belying his unkempt brigand’s looks. Someone had taught him table manners, certainly. Oswyl grew aware that Gallin, too, was watching the shaman closely. His dark presence was daunting enough that no one tried to draw him into the table talk, more to Oswyl’s relief than otherwise. Perhaps to make up for this, Penric, seated on his other side from Oswyl, contributed an unexceptionable tale or three, especially after the women found out he served at the princess-archdivine’s court in what they evidently thought of as exotic, distant, romantic Martensbridge. The sorcerer seemed as much an object of muted wonder as the murderer; Oswyl was not used to his inquirer’s menace being so eclipsed.

After a brief post-dinner consultation with Oswyl, Gallin and Gossa sensibly sent the children off to find the beds with the neighbors, and kept Oswyl’s party all together in their house. Gossa faltered at a social dilemma: Learned Penric obviously had to be offered the best bedchamber, but Inglis perforce must accompany him there, Oswyl wanted to keep a close eye on both, and the dogs would not be parted from the prisoner. Gossa almost drew the line at the dogs, but Penric charmed her into a reprieve, promising her they would not leave fleas in her beds.

Oswyl pulled Penric aside on the staircase. “Do you think he could control those dogs? They could prove as much a weapon as his knife.”

“I suspect the dogs may have their own design. Or someone’s design,” Penric returned in matching quiet tones. Earlier, he had tied the thongs of the knife sheath around his neck and tucked the knife out of sight in his shirt; he now touched his chest. “And Gossa has bigger knives in her kitchen. This is a hostage, not a weapon.”

“Do you think Inglis may attempt escape? He claims to have lost his shamanic powers, but he could be lying.”

“Or mistaken,” murmured Penric. “Or have mislaid them. I’m rather counting on mislaid, but we’ll have to see. Anyway, with that bad leg of his we could catch him at a leisurely stroll.”

“Unless he steals a horse.”

A weird little smile turned Penric’s lips. “I think such a ride could prove strangely unlucky for him. Don’t fret yourself, Oswyl. He may be the best-guarded prisoner you’ve ever taken.”

Penric sounded a bit full of himself on this point to Oswyl’s ear, but there were also the three temple guardsmen now being variously distributed with bedrolls between their room and the doors. And the shaman was plainly exhausted. The real danger might well come later, as he regained strength and balance. Oswyl shook his head and followed Penric up the stairs.

Although the bedchamber to which Gossa conducted them was a tidy-enough refuge, no room in this house was spacious. Now containing a washstand, wardrobe, bed, pulled-out trundle bed, bedroll, three men and two large dogs, it seemed even smaller. Gossa handed Oswyl the taper, pointed out the brace of candles on the washstand, bade them goodnight, and shut the door upon them. Oswyl improved the lighting somewhat when he lit the candles, although not the smell, as they were tallow.

Penric politely yielded first turn at the washstand to Oswyl. The prisoner came a pointed third. The sorcerer, who moved like a cat in the shadows, also preempted Oswyl’s intent to assign beds by plumping himself down on the trundle, and the dogs capped it by nosing Inglis to the bedroll and disposing themselves to either side of it. Inglis lowered himself awkwardly, with a pained grunt. Oswyl would have put the sorcerer on the floor in front of the door, and the prisoner between them.

“So, Inglis,” Penric began. “I am something of a physician, although not presently sworn to practice. I think I might do a little for that leg of yours, if you’ll let me have a look at it.”

“Is that wise?” asked Oswyl, startled. To him, Inglis’s injury had seemed as good as a leg-iron.

“Oh, yes,” said Penric cheerily. “We’ve destroyed enough fleas in this household to balance a week of healing.” He glanced at Inglis, made a brief wave of his hand, and added, “And lice.”

Inglis, sounding stung, said, “I slept in some vile inns. And I haven’t had a chance to bathe properly for a month.”

All right, he sleeps on the floor, Oswyl revised his plan. And then wondered if Penric had misunderstood him deliberately.

Inglis scrubbed a hand through his ragged hair, then swallowed a startled oath. In this light Oswyl couldn’t see the rain of dead bugs, but he could hear the faint patter as they hit the floorboards.

Fluidly, Penric slipped to Inglis’s right side, shoved Blood out of the way, and sat cross-legged. Inglis eyed him in doubt, but did not object, though he winced when Pen rolled up his trouser leg. The limb was impressively empurpled and swollen. The sorcerer hummed tunelessly to himself as he ran his hands up and down it. The rigidity of Inglis’s body eased. “Oh,” he murmured, sounding surprised. Penric’s face was bent over his work, but Oswyl could see his lips twitch up.

“A little ragged crack in one bone, but it’s not propagating despite your abuse of it. The rest is pulled muscles and some very unhappy tendons. The usual instruction would be to abandon ambition, put your leg up, and rest for about three weeks.”

Inglis snorted. Oswyl frowned.

“Indeed. But I may be able to supply a few more treatments as we go along, to replace some of that.” Penric straightened his back. There was no visible difference in the leg, but as Inglis sat up in his bedroll, Oswyl was reminded of those nursery stories where the hero removed a thorn from the wolf’s paw and was rewarded with the beast’s trust. Did Penric and Inglis know those tales, too? From the wry cast to Inglis’s face as he watched the sorcerer, Oswyl thought he might.

Penric added casually, “Did the Old Weald shamans have much in the way of healing arts or practices, do you know?”

“It is believed so.” Inglis shrugged. “They were largely lost with the rest of their histories. Most shamanic teaching was by word of mouth, mentor to aspirant, and died with its possessors. What little was written, the Darthacans burned, if they could find it. What was hidden fell to the worm and rot and lack of understanding. One of the tasks that the fellowship of the royal shamans has set itself is to try to recover those skills.”

“Are they making any more progress, in this new generation?”

“Mm, it seems the women tribal shamans worked the bulk of healing practices. They either wrote less, or were less recopied, as most of what survives tends to tales of spirit warriors and battle magic, and the rites surrounding the hallow kingship.”

Penric—or was it Desdemona?—vented an ironic snort. “No surprise there.”

“The hints are maddening, cast-away remarks in the midst of accounts about greater matters. There is a small cadre of royal shamans working to try to recreate the skills, relying less on old tales and more on new practices. The skills must have been developed in the first place by such trial and error, after all. Except that error . . . is a problem for an Easthome city shaman in a way it could not have been in the old forest tribes.” Inglis had straightened up during this recitation, growing more animated, as if briefly forgetful of his woes. “A couple of the senior shamans have attempted healings of animals, to try to get around that. Some of their recent results have been very exciting.”

It came to Oswyl that the reason Inglis had possessed such luck passing for a poor scholar at those inns was that he was one. Well, perhaps not poor. And Learned Penric was another, officially even. Two of them. Dear gods, help me.

“Is the Mother’s Order taking an interest in the work?” asked Penric.

“Some, yes.”

“Helpful, or hostile?”

Inglis’s lips twitched in dark appreciation. “Some of each, but since the fellowship hit upon the idea of becoming physicians to animals, their oversight has grown more favorable.”

“Does this work interest you?”

Inglis slumped again. “What does it matter now? I can’t.”

“Back when you could,” said Penric, blithely ignoring this burst of despair, “how did you go about it? How do you go into your shamanic trance? Meditation, medication, smokes, bells, smells . . .? Songs, prayers, twirling . . .?”

Something not quite a laugh puffed Inglis’s lips. “All of that, or any. My teachers said they are training aids, to form habits, and so, arbitrary. Nothing forces it. Or works like a machine, without fail. The more senior shamans make do with less and less, and some without any. Slipping in and out of the plane of symbolic action as silently as a fish swimming, and seemingly with as little effort.” His sigh sounded suspiciously like envy. Or loss, perhaps.

“So how were you taught? Exactly? I have a professional interest in such things, you know.”

Oswyl wasn’t sure what Penric was about with this line of inquiry—the divine was proving more slippery than he’d seemed at first—but Inglis appeared to accept this at face value. Which said something about Inglis, right enough. But the shaman was going on.

“We always began each training session with a short prayer.”

“To invoke the gods, or to placate the Temple?”

Inglis stared at him. “Invoke? Scarcely.”

“Yes, everyone talks to the gods, no one expects them to answer. . . .Almost no one. Then what?”

“After some experimenting, we settled on a chant for my doorway. It seemed to me the most portable possible aid. And it could never be lost, like objects, or not be around when I needed it. Master Firthwyth first taught me in call and response, like two bards sharing the lines of a long poem back and forth. Except mine was short, just a quatrain. We sat across from each other, with a candle burning between us for me to stare at, and just repeated it over and over. And over and over and over, till my mind grew calm, or at least so bored I could scarcely bear it. We went through nearly a box of good wax candles. I worried about the waste. I can’t imagine how Firthwyth endured.

“After several days of this, one afternoon when I’d been at it so long we both were hoarse, I . . . broke through. To the plane. Just for a few moments. But it was a revelation. This, this is what I, my wolf-within and I, had been straining for all this time. All the descriptions in words I’d been given weren’t . . . weren’t false. But it was like nothing I’d imagined from them. No wonder I’d been unable to reach it.

“After that, it quickly grew easier. We dispensed with the candle flame. It took less and less time to break through, and then I began reciting it all by myself. I was working on doing so silently when . . .” Inglis broke off. He added lamely, “My teacher said I was good.”

“So what’s it like for you? To be in this spiritual space.”

Inglis’s lips parted, closed, thinned. He turned his hands palm-out. “I can give you words, but they won’t teach you any more than they did me. I don’t know if you can understand.”

“Inglis.” For such a gentled tone, it was oddly implacable. “From the strangest hour of my life, on a roadside four years ago, I have been sharing my mind with a two-hundred-year-old demon with twelve personalities speaking six languages, and an underlying yen to destroy everything in her path, and I expect to go on doing so till the hour of my death. Try me.”

Inglis recoiled slightly. And Oswyl wondered at what inattentive point on this journey Penric had started seeming normal to him.

Penric sighed and came about to another tack. “Is it intrinsically pleasurable, this trance state?”

“It is a place of wonders.” Inglis hesitated. “Some find it fearful.”

“And you?”

“I was exhilarated. Maybe too much so.” Inglis frowned. “The material world does not vanish from my perceptions, but it is . . . overlain, set aside. Non-material things appear as material ones, symbols of themselves, but not just hallucinations, because in my wolf-form—I appear there as a wolf, or sometimes a hybrid between wolf and man—because I can grasp them. Manipulate them. Arrange them to my will. And in the material world, they are made so.

“This does not move matter in the world, not the way chaos demons can, only things of the mind and spirit, yet mind and spirit can have strong influences on the body that bears them. The mind that moves the matter is the mind that is affected. A shaman can convince a person to perform an act, or bind two minds together, so that one person knows where the other is. Persuade a body to heal faster, sometimes. Give visions to another shaman, share thought. At full strength, move a sacrificed animal spirit to another body, bind it to that body’s nourishment. Animal to animal, to build up a Great Beast. Or animal to . . . to a person, to share its fierceness . . .” He faltered. “Making a spirit warrior was considered the most challenging of all rites, apart from the transfer of the hallow kingship itself, and is presently forbidden.”

So, it wasn’t just the Father’s Order who would be wanting a word with this young man when Oswyl returned him to Easthome. It sounded as though his assorted authorities were going to have to get in a line.

“At the sty, for the first time, I made the entry-chant work unvoiced. I was so excited, I almost lost the way again. Since I take the form of a wolf, things usually come to me in a sort of, of symbolic wolf-language. The spirit of the sacrificed boar and the spirit of a kin Boarford were already in sympathy. I chased them like a hunt even as Tollin was struggling to get his knife in, till they superimposed and became one. And then I came down and then . . . oh gods . . .” Inglis buried his face in his hands. Arrow whined and licked at him, and Blood rolled over and rested his head mournfully on his knee. Automatically, Inglis reached down and stroked the silky fur.

“Enough of that,” said Penric firmly. Inglis gulped and looked up. Penric wrapped his arms around his knees and regarded the shaman through narrowed eyes. “Maybe what you need . . .”

Inglis and Oswyl glowered at him in equal bewilderment.

“Is sleep,” Penric finished. “Yes. Definitely that. Go to bed, Penric.” He uncoiled and picked his way to the trundle, blowing out the smelly candles on the way.

That was Ruchia, Oswyl thought. He recognized her pithy style, and then was a little appalled that he could now do so. But the advice was certainly sound.

“We need to talk,” Oswyl murmured to Penric as he settled down just below him in the darkness.

“Yes, but not now. Tomorrow morning. I need to think.” Penric pulled up his covers. “And, the white god help me, compose. Only Mira of Adria was a poetess, and she spoke no Wealdean, apart from some rude phrases she learned from her customers. She was a famous courtesan, did I ever mention that? Now there are your bedtime stories. Although not ones for the nursery. Well, we shall contrive.” He flopped over, and whether he closed his eyes, Oswyl could not make out.

Inglis, Oswyl decided, could not get out without tripping over a dog. The darkness pressing upon him like a blanket, he, too, slept.

XI

In the gray dawn, a bleary Inglis sat up in his bedroll and begged Penric, “Let me blood my knife.”

Pen eyed him dubiously. “You’ve done this every day? All through your flight?”

“Yes.”

Was this necessary? Tollin’s ghost was surely still lingering, if in an odd form, wrapped around the knife like fine wool on a woman’s distaff. And no more faded than Scuolla’s spirit, sitting sadly on its rock. And no less faded, either. Penric was extremely curious to witness the inner working of this shamanic rite. Opinions, Des?

I am out of my reckoning, here. Ruchia’s shaman never demonstrated more than the weirding voice in front of us, small help though it was to him. His other enthralling skills were entirely human. If, perhaps, informed by a superior perception . . .

Pen cut off what promised to be a lengthy, if ribald, reminiscence. It seemed he was on his own for this judgment. “Very well, then.”

Oswyl, halfway through shaving at the basin, turned around, folded his razor and stuck it in his trouser pocket, caught up his short sword from where it had stood propped by the head of his bed, grabbed Pen by the arm, stepped around a dog, and hauled him out into the narrow hallway, shutting the door firmly behind them. He drew Pen along to the head of the staircase, and whispered in a furious undervoice, “Are you mad? You want to hand him back a weapon, that weapon? Which is also vital evidence, may I remind you.”

“It’s more vital than that. He’s not lying about the knife. It does anchor Tollin’s spirit.” And an uncomfortable itch in Pen’s perceptions it was, Tollin’s not-quite-yet-sundered soul held so close to his heart. “Once I watch him through this, I’ll be sure of a lot more.”

Oswyl’s glare heated. “Scholars,” he said in a voice of loathing. “You would dangle your arm in a bucket of adders, just to see if it was true that they bit.”

Pen’s grin flicked, quickly suppressed. “Once I’ve seen, I’ll know if it’s true he must do this daily to sustain Tollin. In which case you’re going to have to let him do it every morning all the way back to Easthome, as routine as washing his face or shaving.”

“I’m not letting him have a razor, either.”

Pen sobered. “That, I would agree with. Nevertheless, I would ask you to stand prepared for any sudden moves.”

“Quite. Sorcerers aren’t immune to steel, I understand.”

“Actually, Des has a clever trick for that, though I still don’t understand how she can equate steel to wood.” And this was one knife he most certainly couldn’t let her change into a puff of rust in a heartbeat. “But I think Inglis is more likely to turn the knife on himself.” As Oswyl’s scowl failed to shift, he added, “I can’t think you’d be any happier explaining the suicide of your prisoner than you would his escape.”

“Much less,” Oswyl bit out.

“There’s more. If we lose him, through escape or escape into death, I suspect Tollin can’t be sustained, and any hope for Scuolla is lost as well. And Inglis’s soul hangs in the same balance. They are like three men roped together on a glacier. If the last man can’t hold the other two, all will perish in the crevice together.”

Oswyl, the lather drying on half his face, thought this over. “I don’t see how Inglis can rescue anyone if he doesn’t have his powers.”

“Neither does he, but I have an idea or two in that direction.”

“Five gods, you don’t imagine to restore them?” said Oswyl, exasperated. “That would be worse than handing him knife, razor, and dogs together. Why not a saddled horse and a purse of gold, while you are about it?”

“Haven’t got a purse of gold,” Pen said primly, and was rewarded with the sight of the half-shaved Grayjay baring his teeth. “Besides, in any country so well supplied with precipices as this one, a man doesn’t need special tools to end his woes.” By his expression, this, too, was a picture Oswyl would have preferred to live without. “As for those dogs . . . I’m still thinking about those dogs.”

Stiff with reluctance, Oswyl followed Pen back into the bedchamber.

“All right,” said Pen, dropping down cross-legged on the bedroll in front of Inglis. He reached back and untied the thongs, sleep-snarled with his queue. After pulling out a few fine hairs, he fished the sheath from his shirt, laid it in his lap, and drew the blade. It was a lovely piece of the armorer’s art, all lethal curves, capped with old gold and blood-red gems. He held it out hilt-forward to Inglis. “Do what you must.”

Inglis took it gingerly, as if he expected Pen to snatch it back like some child’s cruel game of keep-away. The dogs on their bellies crept up to either side of him, like furry buttresses. His hand spasmed as it closed on the ivory hilt, and Oswyl, standing over them all with his sword drawn, twitched. But Inglis only rolled back his sleeves and looked his arms over.

Pen stared too. There was scarcely a patch of skin unmarred by red scars, brown scabs, or sticky red lines, with angry pink welts of flesh puffing up between. Double that for the trip back to Easthome, and the man would be flayed. Inglis found a bare spot and lined up the edge, and Penric thought, Des, lend me Sight.

The trembling blade sliced, skin split red, and Pen’s teeth twinged in sympathetic echo. The view was not much different from his unaided vision, except that Inglis’s welling blood bore a strange silver sheen, like moonlight rippling off a wolf’s pelt. He stropped the knife up and down, coating every inch. The spirit-wool moved with it, trailing smoke that circled back and settled on the blood. Pen tried not to think of flies swarming on carrion. But the spirit did, indeed, seem to draw nourishment from the strange feast, its density thickening as the blood dried and the silver sheen died.

No, indeed. I don’t think our blood would serve the same, murmured Des. As Inglis’s fingers started to clench again, Pen leaned forward and wrapped his hand around the shaman’s. “I’ll just be having that back now. For safekeeping.”

After a brief moment of tension, Inglis let his fingers grow slack, and Pen pried the hilt out of his grip. Oswyl waited sword in hand, not yet standing down.

Inglis choked out, “Don’t sheathe it till the blood is fully dry. It won’t take long. The brown rubs right off with a cloth.”

“Right,” said Pen, and waited. The trailing smoke seemed to withdraw into the main body of the bound spirit. The sticky turned to crumbly, a few passes on the thighs of Penric’s trousers brushed it away, and he slid the gleaming steel out of sight again. Des let the vision of Tollin’s ghost disappear, a debatable relief.

*   *   *

Breakfast was a quieter meal, as the house’s children had not yet returned, although the servant girl had. The six guests, or five guests and one prisoner, were fed on oat porridge with butter, cheese, barley bread, and autumn apples. The dogs loitered lazily by the doors, not enticed by the meatless repast. Conversation was desultory and practical. But Gallin and Gossa seemed very aware of Inglis, and not as a criminal.

Penric had to agree, Inglis had made a terrible criminal. His heart wasn’t in it at all. Whatever visions of heroic capture of a villain had beguiled Pen on the ride here, the event had been sadly disappointing. Though if stupid panic is what’s wanted, there’s your man, muttered Des.

I doubt I would have done much better, if I’d killed my best friend by mistake with my new powers, Pen thought back.

I wouldn’t have let you. Nothing remotely like that has happened to a rider of mine . . . Des seemed to hesitate. For a very, very long time.

Your argument nibbles its own tail, I think?

Humph. But she settled again.

The guard sergeant asked Oswyl, “Should we prepare for the road, sir? We need to see to securing an extra horse.”

Oswyl set down his spoon and sat back. “If we can do nothing more here, we should depart, yes.”

“You are most welcome to stay longer,” put in Acolyte Gallin, with studied emphasis. “A day or so more will not matter.”

“Thank you, Acolyte, but I must disagree. Every day we linger risks us being caught by the next snow.”

Pen disagreed with both. Might a day or two more here make all the difference, to some?

Gallin bit his lip. “Learned Penric, I would like to speak to you apart. About some Temple matters that concern me.”

As a Grayjay, Oswyl was just as much a servant of the Temple as Penric or Gallin, but he permitted Pen to be abstracted from the table with no more than a dry glance Pen’s way. The guards looked alarmed to be thus deprived of whatever magical protection they imagined Pen to be providing them, but even if Inglis, Pen didn’t know what . . . weirded them all to sleep and hobbled off, he wouldn’t even be able to get as far as the stable before Pen caught him again.

Gallin took Pen to his parlor-study and closed the door, gesturing Pen to sit. When they were knee to knee, he lowered his voice and said directly, “I prayed for help. Are you it?”

Pen sighed unease. “If so, no One has told me. I do not suffer prophetic dreams.” He would add, Thank the gods, but that seemed to fall under the heading of what his mother had used to call coaxing lumps.

“Still, the gods are parsimonious, they say.”

“I understand your drift, I suppose. A Grayjay who hates to be late has arrived at the last hour, bringing me, just in time to intersect a shaman who was running away. One need not be delusory to think something is expected of us.” If Inglis had been in command of his powers, the shaman’s role would be obvious, but then, if he’d been in command of his powers, he could have cleansed Tollin’s soul on the spot back at Easthome, and be doing, well, who knew what who knew where by now. Pen’s own role so far reminded him of those caravan guards mustered in a mass not to fight off bandits, but to dissuade them from attacking in the first place. Which, he had to admit, was by far the best imaginable use of a force of arms.

“Are Inglis’s powers truly broken, as he claimed?”

Penric hesitated. “His powers appear to me to be intact. Only his guilt and distraught mind seem to be blocking his full access to them.”

“Can you do something about that? With your powers?”

“The natural directions of my skills are to mar, not to mend. And they work on things, not minds. Mainly.” And Inglis’s worked on minds, not things. A peculiar reciprocity, now that Pen considered it.

Gallin’s fingers pulled at each other. “Then perhaps it’s not your skills as a sorcerer that are wanted, but your skills as a divine. Perhaps you are the one meant to give him spiritual counsel?”

Penric was taken aback. “That . . . wasn’t a subject I spent much time on at seminary. It’s a rather horrible joke, if so.”

Gallin half-laughed. “That’s no proof it wasn’t from your god. More the reverse.”

And so the facetious brag he’d made to Oswyl, about being a divine five-fold, curled back to bite him now. Of all the tasks he’d imagined undertaking on the Grayjay’s wolf-hunt, whether as sorcerer or bowman-hero, sage counselor wasn’t even on the list.

So, murmured Des. Now we see why you are so quick to leave your braids in your saddlebags.

That wasn’t it! he began to argue back, and stopped. He raised his face to Gallin’s, again. “You’ve served here for many years. You knew Scuolla, as a friend and as a shaman. Surely you must be better fitted for such a task?”

Gallin shook his head. “Friend, yes, I hope so. But I can’t say as I ever understood what he did with his dogs, except to observe that there seemed no malice in it, or in him. But you and Inglis kin Wolfcliff, you are both brothers in the uncanny. You see things veiled from me. Maybe you can see the way out of this tangle, too.”

Penric cleared his throat, embarrassed. “I admit, I had an idea or two. But it was just for things to try. Not any kind of wisdom. Oswyl thought it high foolishness, in fact.”

“Locator Oswyl wants to leave, I gather. Can you not overrule him?”

“The princess-archdivine assigned me to him, not him to me. The task was his to start with before it grew”—Pen hesitated—“so complicated.”

“Could he hold Inglis without your aid?”

“Well . . .” Penric reflected on the possibilities inherent in that weirding voice, were it to be deployed without restraint. Not to mention the other shamanic skills. “No.”

“It seems you are the linchpin in this wheel, then. If you elect to stay, he cannot take Inglis and go.”

“That . . . would seem to be the case, yes.”

“Then I beg you to stay. And apply your ideas. Or counsel. Or wisdom, or unwisdom, or whatever you may dub it.” Gallin drew breath. “You have to try, at least.”

Pen imagined a prayer, or a holy whine—to the white god, either would do—If You don’t like it, give me something better.

The silence in his head was profound. Even Des did not chaff or chatter.

Penric managed a nod. Trying not to let his doubts show, he returned to the breakfast table to shepherd Inglis—and the two dogs—back to their bedchamber.

*   *   *

They settled cross-legged facing each other on the bedroll once more. Blood flopped down across the doorway and sighed; Arrow sat up beside Inglis and appeared to watch with more than canine interest.

“All right.” Penric took a breath. “What I’m going to do here is give you a clean new chant to gate your entry into your spirit space.”

Inglis shot him a stare of surprise and offense. “What makes you think you can do the first thing about it? Sorcerer.”

“I’m the one who’s here. That seems to be the most vital point at present.” Refusing to wilt under Inglis’s frown, Penric forged on, “My call shall be, ‘Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other.’ And your response shall be, ‘Bless this work and let me serve another.’ ”

“Is that supposed to be the blessing?”

“No, that’s your chant. I thought I’d combine the two and save steps.”

Inglis met his bright smile with a deepening glower. “It’s a stupid rhyme.”

“I’m a sorcerer, not a poet.”

“Evidently. It’s not even a quatrain.”

“Repeat it, and it will turn into a quatrain.”

Inglis looked ready to rebel. Or at least to refuse to cooperate. And what Penric would do then, he had no idea.

Des muscled into brief control of his mouth, and said in honeyed tones, “Or you could pray, ‘Other, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister. Thwack my head and make me less a blister.’ ” Pen failed to control the upward crook of his lips as she fell back.

After a long, black silence Inglis said, “Use the first one.”

“Good,” said Pen. And a firm, No more interruptions now, to Des. She settled back, falsely demure. “I’ll begin. Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other . . .”

They began to repeat the call and response much as Inglis and his possibly-not-that-long-ago mentor had. The mindful if simple (or simple-minded, Des put in) prayer really did grow boring after enough repetitions. A while after that, the syllables began to lose any meaning or connection at all, a steady, soothing double drone. Pen did not let up until both their tongues started stumbling, when he called a break.

Nothing had happened. Well, he hadn’t expected it to, Pen lied to himself. All right, he’d been hopeful.

“How often did your shamanic master repeat your practice sessions?” asked Pen.

“It varied, depending on his duties and mine. Sometimes, once or twice a day. Sometimes dozens.”

“And how long did you drill at a time?”

“Much as now, till our tongues grew too tired to fruitfully go on. That, too, varied.”

“Hm.” Penric slapped his knees and stood up. “Rest your tongue, then. And your leg.”

Inglis at least did not argue with this injunction.

Pen found one of their guards seated at the top of the staircase. “Where is Oswyl?”

“He walked over to the temple, I think, sir.”

“Thank you.” Penric threaded his way through the house and turned onto the street. The temple stood as quiet and dim as yesterday when they’d surprised Inglis inside. Once again, the hall held only one supplicant. Oswyl sat upon his knees before the altar dedicated to the Father, tucked up against its one-fifth portion of the wooden walls. His head turned at the sound of Penric’s steps.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“Don’t let me interrupt,” said Pen. And then, incurably curious, asked, “What do you pray for?”

Oswyl’s lips thinned. “Guidance.”

“Oh? I thought everything we’ve encountered here shouts our course at us. Or are you just angling for a different answer?”

Oswyl turned back toward his chosen god’s altar once more, the very set of his shoulders sturdily ignoring Pen.

Pen walked to the hall’s opposite side and studied his god’s niche. The shrines here had a profusion of woodcarvings, common in country temples in this region. On the lintel, the carver had placed a well-observed flight of crows; in a lower corner, some earnest-looking rats. The Daughter’s shrine, to Penric’s right, was decorated with an explosion of wooden flowers and young animals, painted in their proper colors, a muted glow in the shadows. A supplicant prayed before a shrine, Penric’s teachers had made clear, not to it. He lowered himself to his knees. Emptying his mind was not an option, but he didn’t need to badger the gods, either. He waited.

After a while, Oswyl’s voice came from across the hall: “Did you get anywhere with your tutoring?”

Not turning, Pen answered, “Not yet.”

A wordless grunt.

After a little, Pen said, “He’s not really a murderer, you know.”

A pause: then, “My task is to bring a fugitive to justice. Not to judge him.”

“Yet you must use your judgment. You followed your own line on the Crow Road.”

A considering silence.

“I have another trial in mind,” Penric continued. “I want to take Inglis out to the rock fall, and see what he can make of old Scuolla.” And what Scuolla would make of him?

A mere pained sigh was all that this elicited. What, was he finally wearing Oswyl down? It occurred to Penric that Oswyl was not so rigidly rules-bound as his stiff jaw suggested; only doubt need pray for guidance. He hoped Oswyl would get his answer. Penric went on speaking to his own wall: “Inglis is in less pain than yesterday. Calmer, if not less bleak. I expect I should take Gallin. And the dogs. We’ll need one of the guardsmen’s horses. Do you wish to come? Given you’ve no hand in the uncanny.”

Oswyl’s voice returned, distantly, “Having spent this long and come this far to find him, I’m not losing sight of him again.”

“Well, then.” Penric bowed his head and signed the tally, and they both rose together.

XII

Inglis, to his chagrin, had to be helped onto his horse by two guardsmen and an upturned stump by the stable door. His stick presented another puzzle. He finally set its butt upright atop his foot, which also had to be fitted into his stirrup by a guard, and held it like a banner pole. That and his reins seemed to give his hands too many things to do. The sorcerer almost floated up into his saddle, although Inglis put it down to his wiry build and horsemanship, not magic. Acolyte Gallin availed himself of the stump, however. Given the acolyte’s age, that was small consolation. Locator Oswyl frowned down from his mount at Arrow and Blood, swirling amiably around Inglis’s horse; the horse, which Inglis judged something of a slug, took only mild exception.

Gallin led the mounted party out past his temple into the street, where Learned Penric held up a staying hand. “Let us go to the bridge, first,” said Penric to him. “And over it. I want to see something.”

Gallin shrugged and turned his mount left instead of right. The rest of them followed in a gaggle. The dogs, who had darted ahead in the opposite direction, paused and vented puzzled whines. When the riders continued their retreat, they barked a few times, then ran after.

As Penric made to lead them all across the wooden span, Arrow and Blood rushed ahead, turned, and set up a furious barking. The horses shied.

“Calm them,” Penric advised Inglis.

“Hush!” Inglis tried, and then, “Sit!” The apparently-maddened dogs continued to hold the party at bay. “Hush!” Inglis tried again, more forcefully. “Settle down!”

The two dogs recoiled as if blown by a gust of gale, but then remustered their battle line and took up their din again, standing four-legged and braced, the fur rising in a ridge along their backs.

“Enough!” cried Penric, laughing for no reason that Inglis could discern, and made a twirling motion with his fingers. Gallin, staring back and forth between the dogs and him, reined his horse around to lead back up the vale once more. A few villagers arrested by the uproar who had come to their garden gates nodded at their acolyte, frowned impartially at his visitors, and turned back to their interrupted tasks.

The two guardsmen fell in at either side of Inglis, albeit not too close, scowling at him in distrust. Oswyl nudged his horse up beside the sorcerer’s, and asked, “Did you do something, back there?”

“No,” said Penric, airily, “not at all. Very carefully not at all, in fact.”

“So what was all that in aid of?”

“I had three theories about what drives those dogs. This knocks out one of them. Two to go.” He nodded in satisfaction, and pushed his horse into a trot after Gallin. Oswyl seemed as baffled by this as Inglis, for he made an exasperated face at the sorcerer’s retreating back. What, did the locator find the blond man as irritating as Inglis did?

A little while later Penric reined back beside Inglis, displacing one of the guards, who looked more grateful than otherwise for being relieved of his post. “Well,” said Penric cheerily, “shall we beguile the ride with a bit more practice?”

“No,” said Inglis, mortified. And if a No! would have worked on the man, he’d have followed up with one. “Do you want us both to look fools?”

“That still concerns you, at this stage in your career?” Penric inquired. Entirely too dryly. “Though I have to allow, working for my god tends to knock that worry out of a person fairly swiftly.” The dryness melted to an even more excoriating look of sympathy.

“I don’t know what you’re planning, but it’s not going to work.”

“If you don’t know the first, how do you know the second?” Penric shot back. “Although I’m afraid planning may be too grandiose a term for it. Testing, perhaps. Like the bridge.”

Inglis hunched his shoulders. Penric eyed him a moment more and then, to his relief, gave up.

The day was gray, the air damp, the mountains veiled, but the wind was light, not spitting rain or snow at them. Inglis studied the vale as they rode up the right-hand branch of the Chillbeck. The high peaks that headed it, and easterly, led only to more peaks. One would have to circle back several miles to find any western trail with even a chance of leading to a high pass over to the main Carpagamo road. It was a half-day’s ride downriver beyond that to loop south to the same road, the way Inglis had come in. Given his prior disastrous experience with trying to climb out over this valley’s walls, that seemed the best bet. If a man had a head start on a fast horse. The notion of trying to retrace his route all the way back to the Crow Road and head east to Saone after all, as winter turned from threat to certainty, was near-heartbreaking.

The riders strung out as Gallin turned off the road and up into the woods. The sorcerer rode right behind Inglis, a thorn in his back; one of the guards went ahead, looking frequently over his shoulder. The woods were difficult but not, Inglis thought, impassible. Centuries of valesmen gathering deadfall and timber from these more accessible lower slopes had left them semi-cleared, although tangled steeper ravines and erupting granite rock faces broke up the area into a maze.

At length, the trail opened out onto a fearsome-looking landslide, much larger than Inglis had been picturing, and the riders pulled up. The two dogs scampered ahead onto the debris.

Penric peered out over the waste after the bounding animals, and asked Inglis, “What do you see?”

“When I am not in my trance, my sight is the same as yours. Er, as any man’s.” This was not quite true in this moment, Inglis realized. There was a breathless pressure in his mind, as if he were plunged deep underwater. A shiver up his spine. Tollin’s spirit, wound around the knife under the sorcerer’s shirt, was so agitated Inglis could sense its hum from here. “What do you see?”

“When Des lends me her vision, I can see the spirits much, I think, as saints are said to do, matter and spirit superimposed, like seeing both sides of a coin at once. Scuolla seems a colorless image, like a reflection on glass. I see he’s changed his rock since yesterday. So he can move about, some. May be a trifle smudgier? Or maybe that’s what I expect, or fear, to find.” Penric’s gaze had alighted where Arrow and Blood circled a boulder, whining. “He’s looking over at us. At you? He perceives us on some level, certainly. If you could—when you could—achieve your trance, did you see spirits? And could they speak to you, or were they silent?”

“I’d not encountered many. The old ones were always silent. I’d not evoked a new one yet.”

“Tollin.”

Inglis winced. “Tollin is bound to the knife, and does not speak. To me. In my normal mind. I don’t know if . . .” He trailed off, confused. If he could have ascended to the spirit plane, might they have spoken together despite the binding? Inglis wasn’t sure if he would have raged at Tollin for this disaster, or begged his forgiveness, or what. If he had lost a friend in more ways than one, or if some peace might have been salvaged between them, at an hour beyond the last. If Tollin hated him . . .

Penric, Oswyl, and one of the guardsmen dismounted, the latter taking the reins of all three horses. All of Gallin’s attention was on the dogs. The second guardsman kicked his feet out of his stirrups, preparing perhaps to go to Inglis’s aid. The sorcerer’s bow was still bundled with his quiver, unstrung, tied to his saddle. For the first time in weeks, the burden of the knife was taken out of Inglis’s hands.

If ever I am to have a chance, it is now, right now.

Inglis threw back his head and HOWLED.

Every horse in the party reared in panic and bolted, including his own. He tossed away his stick, wrenched at his reins, and managed to get the beast aimed generally uphill. They plunged into the patchy forest. From behind him, curses and a thump as someone fell off, more curses fragmenting as a man still mounted was carried away back down the trail. For a few moments, all Inglis could do was hang on to his saddle and reins as the animal under him heaved and jinked. He bent low as slashing branches tried to behead him, sweep him from his precarious perch.

Uphill and to the left was his goal—circle around the top of the slide and lose himself in the lower forests, then find his way somehow back out of this trap of a valley . . . the stolen horse was essential, crutch to his bad ankle, he couldn’t let it break its legs here . . . at this pace it must grow winded soon, and then he would regain control . . .

He had reckoned without the dogs. They gave chase, barking and baying behind him, weaving faster through the trees than the horse could. Incredibly soon, he saw a rippling copper flash at the corner of his vision, and, already above him, heard the profound deep barks of Arrow. They began to drive his horse through the tilted woodland like a red deer, hunted, and its laboring haunches bunched and surged in fresh terror—his fault, for filling its dim head with visions of wolves, echoing and reverberating now from the dogs? But a deer was built for these hazardous slopes; a horse was not.

A gulf of light opened to his left, and the horse shied wildly, hooves slipping in the wet loam, almost stumbling over the cliff at the top of the slide. It jerked back upright.

Inglis kept going, the saddle yanked from under him. The world whirled wildly around his head. For an instant, the bed of broken boulders far below him invited him like a bed in truth, an offer of rest at the end of an impossibly long day. A branch brushed his arm, and his hand closed convulsively, unwilled. Bark and skin grated each other off like bits from a blacksmith’s file. Wood snapped, he turned again in air, grasped, arm yanked straight, held, slid, lost it, turned, and smacked hard on his side. If he’d had any breath left, the last impact would have knocked it out. His lungs pulsed and red murk flooded his vision before he was at last able to inhale again.

It was a dozen breaths before he could lift his head and see where he’d landed. Raw stone blocked his vision a foot from his nose. He twisted the other way, and looked out over the gray valley. He’d come to rest on an irregular ledge about halfway up the sheer drop at the head of the rockslide. It was deeper than a kitchen chair, but only just, and several paces long, but they were paces that led only out into air at the ends.

No way to climb back up. No way . . . well, one way down. He eyed the broken rocks fifty feet below him, and wondered if the half-fall would be enough to kill him outright. Certain death still held attraction. Uncertain death, less so. He hurt enough already.

The skin of his hands was torn, his shoulder wrenched, his bad ankle . . . not improved. Spectacular bruises for sure. Amazingly, his neck and back and bones generally seemed intact.

Fifty feet above him, piteous whines sounded. A few barks, less labored or frantic than before—more puzzled yaps, really. Whatever are you doing down there? they seemed to say.

Truly, I have no idea. I have no idea about anything anymore.

He lay on his ledge and concentrated on breathing, achievement enough.

After a time, he became conscious of movement below him. He pushed himself a little up and looked over. The drop reminded him of crawling out on the roof of the kin Boarford’s Easthome city mansion, five floors above a cobbled street—Tollin had dared him, he recalled. The pale face of the sorcerer looked up at him, head back-tipped. Penric was breathing fast, but otherwise seemed unfairly unruffled.

He shook his head, and called up, “I swear, Inglis, you have a talent for disasters. . . .It’s not a good talent, mind you. On the other hand, I’d suspected you had help, and now I’m sure of it.”

Inglis could go neither up nor down, right nor left. He felt as exposed as a wolf pelt nailed to a stable door, and as empty. He could think of no reply, not that the sorcerer had invited one, exactly.

A hundred paces away across the scree, where the path had been cut off, Gallin cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Baar caught a horse! We’re going for ropes!”

Learned Penric waved a casual hand in acknowledgment of this news, a lot less excited than Inglis thought he should be. “That will be some time,” he said, half to himself—the over-keen hearing that had come so disconcertingly with his wolf-within had still not deserted Inglis. Penric skinned out of his heavy jacket, turned up the cuffs of his linen shirt, rolled his shoulders, stretched his arms and laced his fingers together, shook them out. “Well, then,” he muttered. “I decline to shout spiritual counsel from the bottom of a well, so I guess I’d better be about this.”

He flattened himself to the cliff wall and began to climb, barely visible handhold to barely visible foothold.

His mouth opened, and his voice emerged in a strained, sharp cadence Inglis had not yet heard from the man: “Penric! I have many powers, but I can’t make us fly!”

Penric grinned, fierce in his strain. “Then you’d best keep quiet and not interrupt for the next few minutes, eh?”

At a distance, at first, he seemed to scale the rock face like a spider. As he grew closer the illusion dropped away, and he was clearly a man, taller and heavier than he had quite seemed in his smiling affability; the tendons stood out in his hands and arms as he pulled himself up. As he gained each few feet he wheezed, “I admit . . . it’s been . . . a while . . .” When he at last reached the edge of the ledge, he very definitely heaved himself over, scrambling, not like the airy aplomb of vaulting on his horse. “Thank you, Drovo,” he gasped, incomprehensibly, rolling to his knees, shaking out his hands again. “I think.”

Slowly, gingerly, Inglis pushed himself upright and scooted back till his spine met the stone. His outstretched feet hung over the abyss. Breathing heavily, Penric plopped himself down beside him and stretched his legs out, too. They might have been two boys seated side-by-side on a log across a stream. Perhaps feeling the same, Penric picked up a loose stone and tossed it over the side, cocking his head as if listening for the splash. The faint crack of its landing was a long time coming.

Pinned crookedly to the left shoulder of his weskit, Inglis saw, where it had lain concealed beneath his coat, the divine sported the Temple braids of his full rank, three loops of interlaced white, cream, and silver, the hanging tails tipped with silver beads. They were stiff and clean, as though seldom worn since Penric had taken his oaths. That could not have been so many months before Inglis had been invested with his own powers. Penric’s ceremony had probably had less blood in it.

Although, considering the necessary origin of his demon, not less death, nor a lesser sacrifice. Hm.

Oswyl’s voice called from the rubble below: “Is he all right? Or were you prophetic about precipices?”

Penric swung around on his belly and hung his head over the edge, a move which made Inglis shudder. He did stretch and crane till he could just make out the locator, standing below looking up as Penric lately had.

Penric waved back. “Seems to be little the worse. Shaken up, though.”

“Fools and madmen,” Oswyl muttered, and sat down on a handy boulder, heaving an exhausted sigh. A bigger man, he did not seem inspired to hoist himself up what Inglis had taken for a sheer rock wall after the divine. Sorcerer. Whatever he was. He raised his face and voice and added, “Remember what I said about putting him on a horse?”

Penric grinned, and called back, “Remember what I said about the luck of such a ride?”

“Huh.” Oswyl grimaced like a man sucking vinegar. “Carry on, O Learned One.”

“I intend to. Is he not what every Temple divine desires, a captive audience?”

“I still want him back when you’re done with your lessons.”

“Pray for us, then.”

The gesture Oswyl made back at this was not in the least holy. Penric, still grinning, spun around and sat back up, and Inglis’s spine sought the reassuring rock again.

The grin faded to a thoughtful look, and Penric began to edge away, then stopped himself. “Scuolla has joined us,” he said quietly.

“Is that”—Inglis’s hands went to his temples—“why I feel this horrible pressure in my head?”

“Did you hit it, in your fall?” A look of medical concern flitted across Penric’s features, and he leaned across the space to lift his palm and press against Inglis’s forehead; Inglis flinched.

“Not much,” said Inglis, as Penric murmured, “No . . .”

His hand falling back, Penric went on with maddening obscurity, “Then I think it must be your other visitor.”

Inglis uncompressed his lips, and said, “What does Scuolla look like? To you?”

Penric stared at the empty space between them. “A plain old mountain man in a sheepskin vest, rudely interrupted when he went out to feed his animals. Not at all what I would have taken as a great-souled one, beloved of the gods. Lesson to me.”

“Great-souled? I thought that was kings, and, and generals.”

“No, those are merely great men.” Penric kept on gazing curiously at nothing. “He is very patient. Well, he would have to be, wouldn’t he, to work his art in a medium that takes more than a man’s lifetime to complete. . . .Another who waits here is not so patient, I think.” The pressure in Inglis’s head throbbed; the divine made the five-fold tally. “So let us pray, too.”

“Pray? Are you serious?”

Penric turned his hands out in a shrug. “It’s my job. My other job, I was lately reminded. From my very first oath, three years before these”—he touched his braids—“were tacked on me.”

“So what do we pray for, ropes? Pulleys?”

“Such material aids are the purview of men, not gods.” He held up his hand and spread out his fingers. “The five theological purposes of prayer, I was taught, are service, supplication, gratitude, divination, and atonement. You could easily go five-for-five up here, I think.” He dropped his hand and smiled faintly out over the valley; the dreary view did not seem to rate such approval.

“What do you pray for?” Inglis thrust back, growing surly with this elliptical . . . humor, if it was humor. At his expense, of course. He was feeling entirely destitute, just now.

“I try not to bother the gods any more than I can possibly help,” returned Penric, unperturbed. “Once, One answered me back. It was an experience to make a man cautious.”

“Twice, I think,” growled Inglis.

“Hm?”

He leaned his aching skull back against the stone and recited, “Other, Mother, Father, Brother, Sister . . .”

Penric’s lips twitched. “Are you feeling, ah, thwacked?”

“If I were any more thwacked right now, I don’t think I could sit upright.” Inglis sighed. “You go right on being stingy with your prayers, Learned.”

“Let us practice yours some more, then.”

“Will that be any safer?”

“I trust not. Begin. Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other . . .”

Their recent drill made his reluctant response fall inevitably: “Bless this work and help me serve another.” He eyed the empty space Penric had left between them. Had the couplet’s wording not been so simple and silly as he’d thought?

“Continue on your own.”

“Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, Other . . .”

It was foolish. He was a fool. So was Penric. They were all great fools, here. He should just give up and live with the fact. The other choice was the rock bed, which had already killed one shaman, which could cap a lifetime of foolery. Did the gods take fool souls, as well as great ones? No, They couldn’t, for the fools ran away. Gods, but he was tired of running away.

As the fifth repetition left his lips, he broke through. As sudden and astonishing as his very first ascent ever, he was there. But this time he could hold his place, like a falcon gripping the air and, miraculously, rising without even beating its outstretched wings.

The ledge, the stone behind and the vale in front, the material world, were still present, but barely, as a great undefined space seemed to open out all around him. Undefined, yet seething with potential. But he was not alone in it.

Sitting next to him indeed was an old mountain man in a sheepskin vest, his feather-decked hat pushed back on his head. He wasn’t an image on glass, though, but full of color, vastly more intense than the faint gray valley around them. His spirit-density was the very opposite of transparent. The beautiful Great Dog he bore within him had made its home in this kennel for so long, the two were nearly one, intertwined. He smiled in a friendly way at Inglis, with a strange pure kindness unalloyed by irony or judgment. He didn’t even seem to say, You are very laggard, though Inglis thought he had a right.

Penric sat beyond him, staring head-tilted with concern at Inglis’s body. The blond man’s solid self was grayed out as well, along with all the other surfaces of the world, but for the first time Inglis saw under the sunny exterior. The sorcerer’s interior was terrifying, its layered complexity reaching back through time like a cavern passageway descending deep into the earth, dark with secrets. His demon. And he lives with this? Every day?

Then he looked up, farther.

A tall figure leaned casually against the ledge wall beyond Penric. It seemed a young huntsman in the poor men’s dress of this country, much like the fellows who had brought Inglis in off the trail that first morning, or like Scuolla. A triangular sheepskin cap topped his glowing copper curls, which were the color of Blood’s fur. His face was a light much too strong to look at directly, and Inglis shaded his spirit-eyes with his spirit-hands, then clapped them over his face altogether. All else was blocked, but not the burning light. He let his hands fall, and found himself gasping as though he had been running.

He thought the face smiled at him, like the sun through the cool air on a mountain’s side, warming, welcome. And far, far more terrifying than the demon.

The figure waved a casual hand. Go on.

“How, lord?”

Call it out of him. For you, it will come. It was a very good dog, after all.

It couldn’t be that simple. Could it? Here, it can. This is a simple place, after all. And Inglis wasn’t even sure whose thought that was.

Inglis inhaled the no-air of the plane, held out his hand as if to a strange dog to sniff, and called, “Come, boy.” Then felt stupid for the trailing endearment, for surely the beast was far older than he was . . .

Stop that, said the figure’s voice, amiably, like a man commanding his pet to stop scratching. This is the time for my judgments, not yours.

The response was slow, like an old dog or an old man getting up, one-half at a time. Stiffly, but obediently, the shape flowed out of Scuolla. Slipping through Inglis’s hands, like a whisper of fur as a dog wriggled out of his grasp. And gone. Where? Surely not into utter dissolution?

“Will it be well?” Inglis asked timidly.

All will be well, in my hands. But you see now why all hunts, however exciting, must end with respect for the creature hunted. That is your hope, too, after all.

Inglis had no idea what to say to that. In terror lest the figure would vanish again, as if—no, he neither summoned nor dismissed this like some mere apparition, but he blurted, “Lord, there is one other.”

I do not forget. But that is your task, now.

At some point, Penric had drawn the knife from its sheath and held it ready on his lap. He squinted in concern at Inglis’s body, still sitting up against the rock wall: more motionless than sleep, too tense for death. With a huge effort, Inglis flopped out its hand, open. Cautiously, Penric laid the knife on its palm. The hand convulsed around the ivory hilt; Penric quietly lifted hand and knife back into Inglis’s lap.

For the first time, Inglis realized he had appeared on the plane in his human form—not as wolf, or even as man-with-wolf’s-head. It might be a good thing. The stretched-out boar spirit was, he saw now through its ferocity, quite frightened enough. This time, he coaxed it out softly, gently. He had hated it for what it had done to Tollin, and through Tollin to himself, but it was one of the Son’s creatures with the rest. He handed it off to the waiting god, and bowed his head in respect, and spread his fingers wide over his heart in His sign.

Tollin unwound from the knife and stood up, looking dizzied and bewildered. His colors were ragged, paler than Scuolla’s, who sat taking it all in like a satisfied onlooker to some beloved campfire tale. Tollin’s mouth opened as he saw Inglis, though no sound came out, but then his face rose to the figure by the wall, and he stood stunned.

For a moment, to Inglis’s horror, Tollin held back. Guilt, grief? Fear of not being good enough, strong enough . . . it had not just been youthful arrogance that had led him to beg for the boar spirit, after all. A mixture of motives not savory, but so, so understandable to Inglis now. Tollin stood silent, and small, and ashamed.

The Son of Autumn held out His hand, close but not touching. Tollin’s face turned away, suffused with misery, but his hand jerked out, once, twice. On the second, his hand was grasped, and all anguish fled from his features, because the astonished awe left no room for it.

And then he was gone.

The Hunter turned then, bent, and extended his hand to Scuolla. Who, to Inglis’s surprise, spoke, and in the affectionate voice of a man to a long-time comrade: “But will there be good beer?”

The Hunter’s voice returned, in like humor: “If there is beer, it will be very good. If there is not, it will be because there’s something better. It’s not a wager you can lose. Come on, old man.”

As the Hunter heaved Scuolla up, the old man said, “You took your time, getting here.”

“I did My best with what I had,” the god answered him back.

“Seems so.” Scuolla looked warmly down at Inglis. “Take good care of my dogs, lad.”

Inglis nodded, breathless. “I will, sir.”

Scuolla dipped his chin in pleased acceptance. “Now I can go.”

“About time,” his Friend murmured, amused. “Who is dawdling now?”

Inglis found himself on his knees, holding up both hands palm-out, fingers spread. He hardly knew what he meant to say. Is that all, am I done? Instead it came out, “Will we meet again?”

The Hunter smiled. Once, for certain.

And then Inglis let go, and he was falling, falling, back into the world, laughing so hard he was crying, or crying so hard he was laughing, or some other reaction much too large for any human frame to hold.

Fortunately, Learned Penric was waiting to catch him before he rolled off the ledge that he’d forgotten was before him.

“There, there . . .” Penric clutched his shaking body and patted his back as if calming a hysterical child, prudently dragging him over to the wall again. “You’ve seen a god, I know, I know,” he soothed. “You’ll be drunk on it for days. No doubt Oswyl will be highly offended, which will be entertaining in its own way . . .”

Gasping, Inglis rolled over in his lap and grabbed up at his collar. “What, what did you see? Just now?”

Penric gently undid his clenching fingers before he tore the fabric. “I saw you go into your trance. It was a bit alarming. Might have been taken for a stroke—you should warn your companions about that. Your nose bled. I saw when Tollin came unbound, and when he went off. Scuolla, too. It was hard to get much more, because Des went into retreat. Since she has nowhere to go but inward, this results in her curling up into this sort of impenetrable, useless ball—” his voice rose on this last, not, apparently, to Inglis’s address, for he added aside to Inglis, “Gods terrify demons. They are the one power that can destroy them. Understandable.” Inglis wasn’t sure who was supposed to understand what, but Penric hesitated for a long moment. He held up his hand, fingers spreading as if miming a man pressing on a glass, except that it also recalled his five kinds of prayers. Supplication, Inglis thought. “Otherwise . . . otherwise, it was like standing outside a window in the rain, looking in on some harvest party, to which I knew I was not invited.”

“Oh,” said Inglis, stupidly. And at an echo in his mind of Stop that, grinned uncontrollably despite it all. He rubbed at his upper lip, and his hand came away sticky and red, but the bleed seemed to have stopped on its own.

Penric held his hair and peered down into his face with a curiosity . . . medical? theological? magical? or just the inquisitive scholar? Voices and barking echoed from below, and Penric craned his neck. “. . . Right. So, here comes Gallin, and a lot of excited men with ropes. I hope they brought enough. Arrow and Blood are running over to greet them, or maybe hurry them along. Or trip them and break their legs, hard to tell with dogs. Are you going to give us any more trouble?”

“I am in your hands,” Inglis said, limply. And truthfully. And thankfully.

Rescue. I am rescued. Of all men to be lost in these mountains, he had to have been the most lost, and the most rescued. Such rescues had been Scuolla’s calling, had they not? him and his brave band of dogs. The shaman’s last rescue, and the shaman rescued, hand to hand to hand to hand in a long, long chain of help beyond hope. Reaching how far back?

. . . And how far forward?

XIII

Getting the two men off the ledge took over an hour. Like the injured shaman, the sorcerer waited to ride the rope net down; unlike the shaman, he stepped out of it with the panache of a prince descending a palace stair. When taxed by Oswyl, Penric claimed that it was much harder to climb down than up, because he couldn’t well see where he was putting his hands and feet. No mountaineer, Oswyl had to take him at his word. It was hardly a thing to balk at, considering what all else of the uncanny events he was forced to take the sorcerer-divine’s testimony for. The eager Acolyte Gallin ate up their wild tale like a starving man, and asked for seconds. The guards and the valemen grew wide-eyed. In all, it was rising dark before they made it back to Linkbeck once more.

Inglis, certainly, seemed a man profoundly changed, unless the fall had struck him mad. Madder. When they’d cleaned up, and Penric in his third guise as physician had seen to their prisoner’s new bruises, they all went down to dinner, where Gallin and Gossa were slavishly grateful—to Inglis. For Gossa, this took the form of trying to stuff him like a feast-day goose, and feeding his dogs like people. Penric beguiled his own neglect by telling the servant girl, who turned out to be the daughter of the village wet-nurse, all about the fine opportunities for an energetic young woman in the silk industry at Martensbridge, under the princess-archdivine’s careful eye.

Oswyl finally broke it up by announcing an early start in the morning. As they mounted the staircase, he said to Inglis, “You are still my prisoner. Still under arrest. And we are still going back to Easthome.”

“Oh, yes,” said Inglis, pensively. “It’s all very good now. And if it is not, there will be something better.”

For his part, Oswyl predicted a blizzard with the dawn.

*   *   *

In the blackest hour of the night, Oswyl dreamed.

A deep, slow voice, which seemed to reverberate to the ends of the world, said judiciously: “You were not too late. Well done, child.” After a thoughtful pause it added, in a far less grave tone, “No snow tomorrow. But do not linger three days.”

Oswyl, scrambling to sit up, came awake with a cry. He didn’t know if the sound was night-terror or joy, but it was loud.

Dogs yipped, covers were thrown back, and Penric’s voice out of the shadows called, “Des, lights, lights!” He then cried in fear, “He’ll burn my eyes!” and replied to himself, “You haven’t got eyes. I do and they’re just fine. Or they would be if there were any light in here. Thank you,” he added, as upon the washstand the two tallow candles sprang into flame all by themselves.

Oswyl, clutching his blankets, gasped, “He . . . He . . .”

“Are you all right?” asked Penric, concerned. “You sound like a horse with the heaves.”

“Nothing. Nothing,” Oswyl managed, trying to catch his stolen breath. “Pardon.”

“Judging from Des’s reaction, it was not nothing.” He added, “You can come out now. I think it’s over.” He twisted around to Inglis, who was sinking sleepily back into his bedroll, and coaxing the dog Blood to lie down to be clutched like another pillow. “Did you sense anything, just now?”

“No . . . I don’t think it was meant for me.” He cuddled the dog, which slowly gave up its alert mien and put its head on its paws once more. Arrow stepped over, and on, Penric in his trundle—provoking an, “Oof, you enormous beast! Paws off!”—and stretched his damp black nose to sniff curiously at Oswyl.

“It was just a dream,” said Oswyl. “Maybe, maybe a little hallucination. It’s been a long day.” And a long, strange chase.

“A bad dream?”

Oswyl hardly knew, except the corners of his mouth kept crooking up, unaccustomed and unwilled. “No . . . It was . . . a different kind of frightening.” He added, “How can you tell? Discern a true voice from, from a mere dream?”

“If you need to ask, it was a mere dream. The other is rare but, hm, not as rare as you’d think. Our daytime minds, I’m told, are too full of ourselves to let Them in. Well, and mine’s too full all the time. At night our gates come sometimes ajar, just enough.”

Oswyl’s brows drew down. “That’s . . . unhelpful.”

“What was your message?”

He wasn’t embarrassed, exactly. But . . . “I’d rather not say. It would sound too absurd.”

Penric, propped up on one elbow, studied him thoughtfully. He finally said, “A bit of free theological advice. Do not deny the gods. And they will not deny you.”

As Oswyl stared at him, he went on, “Dangerous habit, mind you. Once you start to let Them in through that first crack, They’re worse than mice.”

Oswyl, thoroughly bemused by now, protested, “How can you speak of the gods so irreverently? And you a full-braid divine?”

Penric shrugged a half-apology. “Sorry. Seminary joke, there. We had a hundred of them. Needful at times of stress. One of my masters said, For all that we trust the gods, I think we can trust them to know the difference between humor and blasphemy.”

“Not so sure about your god,” Inglis’s voice came from his bedroll.

“Hey. Yours is no better. A god whose harvest of souls includes all whose last words were, ‘Ho, lads! Hold my ale and watch this!’ . . . Seminary joke,” he added aside to Oswyl, who hardly needed the gloss.

Inglis snickered into his dog, and then mused, “That would be funnier if it weren’t so true.”

“If it were not true, it wouldn’t be funny at all.”

The two young scholars seemed willing to debate the theology of humor, or the humor of theology, till dawn. Oswyl said loudly, “You can snuff the candles back out, now. I’m all right.”

Penric smiled at him, eyes narrowing. “Ye-es. I expect you are.”

“Want to borrow a dog?” Inglis offered. “They’re very soothing.”

“In my bed? No, thank you.”

Arrow, snuffling over the edge of Oswyl’s blankets, heaved a disappointed sigh, as if finding that the source of some delicious scent had gone.

“What,” said Penric, “they don’t have fleas—don’t everyone rush to praise me. And Gossa made her children wash their paws.”

“You are welcome to him,” said Oswyl, shoving the beast back into the trundle. “You, go sit on your master.” Giving up on his riotous company, Oswyl struggled from his bedclothes and went to blow out the candles himself.

*   *   *

The heavy snow did not close in till after they’d reached the safety and warmth of Martensbridge, three days later.

XIV

At the knock on his workroom door, Pen looked up from his calligraphy and said, “Come.”

The door swung open cautiously, and a palace page entered. “The Temple courier has brought you some letters, Learned.”

Pen set his quill in its jar and turned to accept them. “Thank you.”

The girl ducked her head and, after a last curious look around, went out again.

Penric examined his take. The thinner missive was marked with a Temple stamp from the Father’s Order in Easthome; the larger, wrapped in a piece of old cloth and waxed against wet, had been franked by the Wealdean royal court chancellery. He opened it first, to find a letter and an unbound book, freshly copied and pristine. Both from Inglis, ah.

It had been over a month since Oswyl and his prisoner, and his prisoner’s vigorous pets, had departed for Easthome. Penric had managed to evade being taken along by virtue of the week they’d all spent snowbound in Martensbridge, which had allowed him to scribble out a full deposition of the late events in Chillbeck Vale, heavily slanted in Inglis’s favor. Normally a trip to the Wealdean royal capital at the Temple’s expense would have been a high treat, but—not in midwinter, despite Oswyl’s descriptions of the fine Father’s Day festival put on there at the solstice. Not my season.

Nor mine, sighed Des. Did I ever tell you about the sun on the sea around Cedonia?

Several times. He’d never seen a sea, warm or cold. Could a demon be homesick? Pen wondered, and broke the seal on Inglis’s letter.

Inglis thanked him for his deposition, which had done the trick—the shaman did not appear to be writing from a condemned prisoner’s cell, certainly. You were right that the god-drunk wears off, Inglis wrote, for I was very sober when we reached Easthome. I have been strongly reprimanded by the Royal Fellowship, and put on probation, whatever that means, but not dis-invested. I am not sure anyone can actually do that, or at least, no records of such a skill have surfaced in the ancient annals. It seems the old method of execution for bad shamans was to hang them upside down and drain them of blood, which no one in the Fellowship has suggested even for the experiment.

The Father’s judges after much debate finally ordered me to pay a fine to Tollin’s family, in the old style, by way of weregild. My parents had to borrow some of it from our kin lord, which did not please anyone very much, but I trust they’d have been less pleased to see me feet-up with my throat cut. Oswyl says I should just give up on Tolla, but I am not so sure. She did listen to my tale and mark my scars. Tollin’s second funeral was a comfort to his family, I think, though redundant, as I saw very well which god took him up, and told them so. I’m not sure some believed me until their local temple’s holy animal signed Autumn at his graveside.

I had a copy made for you of the Fellowship’s writings on shamanic practices that you wanted to read, at least as they are understood so far. I hope we’ll need a second volume in a few more years. It seems small thanks, but it was what I could do. You should find it under seal with this letter.

He signed it with a flourishing Inglis kin Wolfcliff, Fellow of the Royal Society of Shamans (on probation). And added, as a cramped postscript at the bottom of the sheet, The dogs are well, and settling into their new home. We maintain a bit of a menagerie here, so they fit right in. They like Tolla.

Penric’s fingers itched to dive for the new volume, but he opened the thinner letter instead. As he’d hoped, it was from Oswyl.

You may be pleased to learn that your affidavit was accepted by the court, though immediately afterward seized upon by some theologians and carried off. From the legal side of things, there is no sign that anyone wants you brought here in person after all. The other I cannot speak to. Inglis got off lightly, but I do not feel there was injustice done.

My former sorcerer and his party arrived back at Easthome about two weeks after we did, frostbitten, footsore, and empty-handed. Happily, their official complaints of me were stopped by word of my success. Their private ones, I feel no need to attend to.

I set an offering on your god’s altar the other day, in Temple.

His signature was neat and square, Oswyl, Senior Locator, the Father’s Order at Easthome.

He, too, added a cramped last word: I am not sure how demons feel about blessings, so please just give my best wishes to Desdemona.

Des was so astonished, she was momentarily silent.

Penric smiled and reached for his new book.

THE DREAM-QUEST OF VELLITT BOE (missing)

Kij Johnson

A TASTE OF HONEY (missing)

Kai Ashante Wilson

ALIEN STRIPPER BONED FROM BEHIND THE T-REX (missing)

Stix Hiscock

TOURING WITH THE ALIEN

Carolyn Ives Gilman

The alien spaceships were beautiful, no one could deny that: towering domes of overlapping, chitinous plates in pearly dawn colors, like reflections on a tranquil sea. They appeared overnight, a dozen incongruous soap-bubble structures scattered across the North American continent. One of them blocked a major Interstate in Ohio; another monopolized a stadium parking lot in Tulsa. But most stood in cornfields and forests and deserts where they caused little inconvenience.

Everyone called them spaceships, but from the beginning the experts questioned that name. NORAD had recorded no incoming landing craft, and no mother ship orbited above. That left two main possibilities: they were visitations from an alien race that traveled by some incomprehensibly advanced method; or they were a mutant eruption of Earth’s own tortured ecosystem.

The domes were impervious. Probing radiation bounced off them, as did potshots from locals in the days before the military moved in to cordon off the areas. Attempts to communicate produced no reaction. All the domes did was sit there reflecting the sky in luminous, dreaming colors.

Six months later, the panic had subsided and even CNN had grown weary of reporting breaking news that was just the same old news. Then, entry panels began to open and out walked the translators, one per dome. They were perfectly ordinary-looking human beings who said that they had been abducted as children and had now come back to interpret between their biological race and the people who had adopted them.

Humanity learned surprisingly little from the translators. The aliens had come in peace. They had no demands and no questions. They merely wanted to sit here minding their own business for a while. They wanted to be left alone.

No one believed it.

Avery was visiting her brother when her boss called.

“Say, you’ve still got those security credentials, right?” Frank said. “Yes . . .” She had gotten the security clearance in order to haul a hush-hush load of nuclear fuel to Nevada, a feat she wasn’t keen on repeating. “And you’re in D.C.?”

She was actually in northern Virginia, but close enough. “Yeah.”

“I’ve got a job for you.”

“Don’t tell me it’s another gig for Those We Dare Not Name.”

He didn’t laugh, which told her it was bad. “Uh . . . no. More like those we can’t name.”

She didn’t get it. “What?”

“Some . . . neighbors. Who live in funny-shaped houses. I can’t say more over the phone.”

She got it then. “Frank! You took a contract from the frigging aliens?”

“Sssh,” he said, as if every phone in America weren’t bugged. “It’s strictly confidential.”

“Jesus,” she breathed out. She had done some crazy things for Frank, but this was over the top. “When, where, what?”

“Leaving tonight. D.C. to St. Louis. A converted tour bus.”

“Tour bus? How many of them are going?”

“Two passengers. One human, one . . . whatever. Will you do it?” She looked into the immaculate condo living room, where her brother, Blake, and his husband, Jeff, were playing a noisy, fast-paced video game, oblivious to her conversation. She had promised to be at Blake’s concert tomorrow. It meant a lot to him. “Just a second,” she said to Frank.

“I can’t wait,” he said.

“Two seconds.” She muted the phone and walked into the living room. Blake saw her expression and paused the game.

She said, “Would you hate me if I couldn’t be there tomorrow?” Disappointment, resignation, and wry acceptance crossed his face, as if he hadn’t ever really expected her to keep her promise. “What is it?” he asked.

“A job,” she said. “A really important job. Never mind, I’ll turn it down.”

“No, Ave, don’t worry. There will be other concerts.”

Still, she hesitated. “You sure?” she said. She and Blake had always hung together, like castaways on a hostile sea. They had given each other courage to sail into the wind. To disappoint him felt disloyal.

“Go ahead,” he said. “Now I’ll be sorry if you stay.”

She thumbed the phone on. “Okay, Frank, I’ll do it. This better not get me in trouble.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” he said. “I’ll email you instructions. Bye.”

From the couch, Jeff said, “Now I know why you want to do it. Because it’s likely to get you in trouble.”

“No, he gave me his word,” Avery said.

“Cowboy Frank? The one who had you drive guns to Nicaragua?”

“That was perfectly legal,” Avery said.

Jeff had a point, as usual. Specialty Shipping did the jobs no reputable company would handle. Ergo, so did Avery.

“What is it this time?” Blake asked.

“I can’t say.” The email had come through; Frank had attached the instructions as if a PDF were more secure than email. She opened and scanned them.

The job had been cleared by the government, but the client was the alien passenger, and she was to take orders only from him, within the law. She scanned the rest of the instructions till she saw the pickup time. “Damn, I’ve got to get going,” she said.

Her brother followed her into the guest room to watch her pack up. He had never understood her nomadic lifestyle, which made his silent support for it all the more generous. She was compelled to wander; he was rooted in this home, this relationship, this warm, supportive community. She was a discarder, using things up and throwing them away; he had created a home that was a visual expression of himself—from the spare, Japanese-style furniture to the Zen colors on the walls. Visiting him was like living inside a beautiful soul. She had no idea how they could have grown up so different. It was as if they were foundlings.

She pulled on her boots and shouldered her backpack. Blake hugged her. “Have a good trip,” he said. “Call me.”

“Will do,” she said, and hit the road again.

The media had called the dome in Rock Creek Park the Mother Ship—but only because of its proximity to the White House, not because it was in any way distinctive. Like the others, it had appeared overnight, sited on a broad, grassy clearing that had been a secluded picnic ground in the urban park. It filled the entire creek valley, cutting off the trails and greatly inconveniencing the joggers and bikers.

Avery was unprepared for its scale. Like most people, she had seen the domes only on TV, and the small screen did not do justice to the neck-craning reality. She leaned forward over the wheel and peered out the windshield as she brought the bus to a halt at the last checkpoint. The National Park Police pickup that had escorted her through all the other checkpoints pulled aside.

The appearance of an alien habitat had set off a battle of jurisdictions in Washington. The dome stood on U.S. Park Service property, but D.C. Police controlled all the access streets, and the U.S. Army was tasked with maintaining a perimeter around it. No agency wanted to surrender a particle of authority to the others. And then there was the polite, well-groomed young man who had introduced himself as “Henry” now sitting in the passenger seat next to her. His neatly pressed suit sported no bulges of weaponry, but she assumed he was CIA.

She now saw method in Frank’s madness at calling her so spur-of-the-moment. Her last-minute arrival had prevented anyone from pulling her aside into a cinderblock room for a “briefing” Instead, Henry had accompanied her in the bus, chatting informally.

“Say, while you’re on the road . . .”

“No,” she said.

“No?”

“The alien’s my client. I don’t spy on clients.”

He paused a moment, but seemed unruffled. “Not even for your country?”

“If I think my country’s in danger, I’ll get in touch.”

“Fair enough,” he said pleasantly. She hadn’t expected him to give up so easily.

He handed her a business card. “So you can get in touch.” he said.

She glanced at it. It said “Henry” with a phone number. No logo, no agency, no last name. She put it in a pocket.

“I have to get out here,” he said when the bus rolled to a halt a hundred yards from the dome. “It’s been nice meeting you, Avery.”

“Take your bug with you,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The bug you left somewhere in this cab.”

“There’s no bug,” he said seriously.

Since the bus was probably wired like a studio, she shrugged and resolved not to scratch anywhere embarrassing till she had a chance to search. As she closed the door behind Henry, the soldiers removed the roadblock and she eased the bus forward.

It was almost evening, but floodlights came on as she approached the dome. She pulled the bus parallel to the wall and lowered the wheelchair lift. One of the hexagonal panels slid aside, revealing a stocky, darkhaired young man in black glasses, surrounded by packing crates of the same pearly substance as the dome. Avery started forward to help with loading, but he said tensely, “Stay where you are” She obeyed. He pushed the first crate forward and it moved as if on wheels, though Avery could see none. It was slightly too wide for the lift, so the man put his hands on either side and pushed in. The crate reconfigured itself, growing taller and narrower till it fit onto the platform. Avery activated the power lift.

He wouldn’t let Avery touch any of the crates, but insisted on stowing them himself at the back of the bus, where a private bedroom suite had once accommodated a touring celebrity singer. When the last crate was on, he came forward and said, “We can go now.”

“What about the other passenger?” Avery said.

“He’s here.”

She realized that the alien must have been in one of the crates—or, for all she knew, was one of the crates. “Okay,” she said. “Where to?”

“Anywhere,” he said, and turned to go back into the bedroom.

Since she had no instructions to the contrary, Avery decided to head south. As she pulled out of the park, there was no police escort, no helicopter overhead, no obvious trailing car. The terms of this journey had been carefully negotiated at the highest levels, she knew. Their security was to be secrecy; no one was to know where they were. Avery’s instructions from Frank had stressed that, aside from getting the alien safely where he wanted to go, insuring his privacy was her top priority. She was not to pry into his business or allow anyone else to do so.

Rush hour traffic delayed them a long time. At first, Avery concentrated on putting as much distance as she could between the bus and Washington. It was past ten by the time she turned off the main roads. She activated the GPS to try and find a route, but all the screen showed was snow. She tried her phone, and the result was the same. Not even the radio worked. One of those crates must have contained a jamming device; the bus was a rolling electronic dead zone. She smiled. So much for Henry’s bugs.

It was quiet and peaceful driving through the night. A nearly full moon rode in the clear autumn sky, and woods closed in around them. Once, when she had first taken up driving in order to escape her memories, she had played a game of heading randomly down roads she had never seen, getting deliberately lost. Now she played it again, not caring where she ended up. She had never been good at keeping to the main roads.

By 3:00 she was tired, and when she saw the entrance to a state park, she turned and pulled into the empty parking lot. In the quiet after the engine shut off, she walked back through the kitchen and sitting area to see if there were any objections from her passengers. She listened at the closed door, but heard nothing and concluded they were asleep. As she was turning away, the door jerked open and the translator said, “What do you want?”

He was still fully dressed, exactly as she had seen him before, except without the glasses, his eyes were a little bloodshot, as if he hadn’t closed them. “I’ve pulled over to get some sleep,” she said. “It’s not safe to keep driving without rest.”

“Oh. All right,” he said, and closed the door.

Shrugging, she went forward. There was a fold-down bunk that had once served the previous owner’s entourage, and she now prepared to use it. She brushed her teeth in the tiny bathroom, pulled a sleeping bag from her backpack, and settled in.

Morning sun woke her. When she opened her eyes, it was flooding in the windows. At the kitchen table a yard away from her, the translator was sitting, staring out the window. By daylight, she saw that he had a square face the color of teak and closely trimmed black beard. She guessed that he might be Latino, and in his twenties.

“Morning,” she said. He turned to stare at her, but said nothing. Not practiced in social graces, she thought. “I’m Avery,” she said.

Still he didn’t reply. “It’s customary to tell me your name now,” she said.

“Oh. Lionel,” he answered.

“Pleased to meet you.”

He said nothing, so she got up and went into the bathroom. When she came out, he was still staring fixedly out the window. She started making coffee. “Want some?” she asked.

“What is it?”

“Coffee.”

“I ought to try it,” he said reluctantly.

“Well, don’t let me force you,” she said.

“Why would you do that?” He was studying her, apprehensive.

“I wouldn’t. I was being sarcastic. Like a joke. Never mind.”

“Oh.”

He got up restlessly and started opening the cupboards. Frank had stocked them with all the necessities, even a few luxuries. But Lionel didn’t seem to find what he was looking for.

“Are you hungry?” Avery guessed.

“What do you mean?”

Avery searched for another way to word the question. “Would you like me to fix you some breakfast?”

He looked utterly stumped.

“Never mind. Just sit down and I’ll make you something.”

He sat down, gripping the edge of the table tensely. “That’s a tree,” he said, looking out the window.

“Right. It’s a whole lot of trees.”

“I ought to go out.”

She didn’t make the mistake of joking again. It was like talking to a person raised by wolves. Or aliens.

When she set a plate of eggs and bacon down in front of him, he sniffed it suspiciously. “That’s food?”

“Yes, it’s good. Try it.”

He watched her eat for a few moments, then gingerly tried a bite of scrambled eggs. His expression showed distaste, but he resolutely forced himself to swallow. But when he tried the bacon, he couldn’t bear it. “It bit my mouth,” he said.

“You’re probably not used to the salt. What do you normally eat?” He reached in a pocket and took out some brown pellets that looked like dog kibble. Avery made a face of disgust. “What is that, people chow?”

“It’s perfectly adapted to our nutritional needs,” Lionel said. “Try it.” She was about to say “no thanks” but he was clearly making an effort to try new things, so she took a pellet and popped it in her mouth. It wasn’t terrible—chewy rather than crunchy—but tasteless. “I think I’ll stick to our food,” she said.

He looked gloomy. “I need to learn to eat yours.”

“Why? Research?”

He nodded. “I have to find out how the feral humans live.”

So, Avery reflected, she was dealing with someone raised as a pet, who was now being released into the wild. For whatever reason.

“So where do you want to go today?” Avery said, sipping coffee.

He gave an indifferent gesture.

“You’re heading for St. Louis?”

“Oh, I just picked that name off a map. It seemed to be in the center.”

“That it is.” She had lived there once; it was so incorrigibly in the center there was no edge to it. “Do you want to go by any particular route?” He shrugged.

“How much time do you have?”

“As long as it takes.”

“Okay. The scenic route, then.”

She got up to clean the dishes, telling Lionel that this was a good time for him to go out, if he wanted to. It took him a while to summon his resolve. She watched out the kitchen window as he approached a tree as if to have a conversation with it. He felt its bark, smelled its leaves, and returned unhappy and distracted.

Avery followed the same random-choice method of navigation as the previous night, but always trending west. Soon they came to the first ridge of mountains. People from western states talked as if the Appalachians weren’t real mountains, but they were—rugged and impenetrable ridges like walls erected to bar people from the land of milk and honey. In the mountains, all the roads ran northeast and southwest through the valleys between the crumpled land, with only the brave roads daring to climb up and pierce the ranges. The autumn leaves were at their height, russet and gold against the brilliant sky. All day long Lionel sat staring out the window.

That night she found a half-deserted campground outside a small town. She refilled the water tanks, hooked up the electricity, then came back in. “You’re all set,” she told Lionel. “If it’s all right with you, I’m heading into town.”

“Okay,” he said.

It felt good to stretch her legs walking along the highway shoulder. The air was chill but bracing. The town was a tired, half abandoned place, but she found a bar and settled down with a beer and a burger. She couldn’t help watching the patrons around her—worn-down, elderly people just managing to hang on. What would an alien think of America if she brought him here?

Remembering that she was away from the interference field, she thumbed on her phone—and immediately realized that the ping would give away her location to the spooks. But since she’d already done it, she dialed her brother’s number and left a voicemail congratulating him on the concert she was missing. “Everything’s fine with me,” she said, then added mischievously, “I met a nice young man named Henry. I think he’s sweet on me. Bye.”

Heading back through the night, she became aware that someone was following her. The highway was too dark to see who it was, but when she stopped, the footsteps behind her stopped, too. At last a car passed, and she wheeled around to see what the headlights showed.

“Lionel!” she shouted. He didn’t answer, just stood there, so she walked back toward him. “Did you follow me?”

He was standing with hands in pockets, hunched against the cold. Defensively, he said, “I wanted to see what you would do when I wasn’t around.”

“It’s none of your business what I do off duty. Listen, respecting privacy goes both ways. If you want me to respect yours, you’ve got to respect mine, okay?”

He looked cold and miserable, so she said, “Come on, let’s get back before you freeze solid.”

They walked side by side in silence, gravel crunching underfoot. At last he said stiffly, “I’d like to re-negotiate our contract.”

“Oh, yeah? What part of the contract?”

“The part about privacy. I . . .” He searched for words. “We should have asked for more than a driver. We need a translator.”

At least he’d realized it. He might speak perfect English, but he was not fluent in Human.

“My contract is with your . . . employer. Is this what he wants?”

“Who?”

“The other passenger. I don’t know what to call him. ‘The alien’ isn’t polite. What’s his name?”

“They don’t have names. They don’t have a language.”

Astonished, Avery said, “Then how do you communicate?”

He glowered at her. She held up her hands. “Sorry. No offense intended. I’m just trying to find out what he wants.”

“They don’t want things,” he muttered, gazing fixedly at the moonlit road. “At least, not like you do. They’re not . . . awake. Aware. Not like people are.”

This made so little sense to Avery, she wondered if he were having trouble with the language. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean they’re not . . . sentient?”

“They’re not conscious,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

“But they have technology. They built those domes, or brought them here, or whatever the hell they did. They have an advanced civilization.”

“I didn’t say they aren’t smart. They’re smarter than people are. They’re just not conscious.”

Avery shook her head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine it.”

“Yes, you can,” Lionel said impatiently. “People function unconsciously all the time. You’re not aware that you’re keeping your balance right now—you just do it automatically. You don’t have to be aware to walk, or breathe. In fact, the more skillful you are at something, the less aware you are. Being aware would just degrade their skill.”

They had come to the campground entrance. Behind the dark pine trees, Avery could see the bus, holding its unknowable passenger. For a moment the bus seemed to stare back with blank eyes. She made herself focus on the practical. “So how can I know what he wants?”

“I’m telling you.”

She refrained from asking, “And how do you know?” because He’d already refused to answer that. The new privacy rules were to be selective, then. But she already knew more about the aliens than anyone else on Earth, except the translators. Not that she understood.

“I’m sorry, I can’t keep calling him ‘him,’ or ‘the alien,’ ” Avery said the next morning over breakfast. “I have to give him a name. I’m going to call him ‘Mr. Burbage.’ If he doesn’t know, he won’t mind.”

Lionel didn’t look any more disturbed than usual. She took that as consent.

“So where are we going today?” she asked.

He pressed his lips together in concentration. “I need to go to a place where I can acquire knowledge.”

Since this could encompass anything from a brothel to a university, Avery said, “You’ve got to be more specific. What kind of knowledge?”

“Knowledge about you.”

“Me?”

“No, you humans. How you work.”

Humans. For that, she would have to find a bigger town.

As she cruised down a county road, Avery thought about Blake. Once, he had told her that to play an instrument truly well, you had to lose all awareness of what you were doing, and rely entirely on the muscle memory in your fingers. “You are so in the present, there is no room for self,” Blake said. “No ego, no doubt, no introspection.”

She envied him the ability to achieve such a state. She had tried to play the saxophone, but had never gotten good enough to experience what Blake described. Only playing video games could she concentrate intensely enough to lose self-awareness. It was strange, how addictive it was to escape the prison of her skull and forget she had a self. Mystics and meditators strove to achieve such a state.

A motion in the corner of her eye made her slam on the brakes and swerve. A startled deer pirouetted, flipped its tail, and leaped away. She continued on more slowly, searching for a sign to see where she was. She could not remember having driven the last miles, or whether she had passed any turns. Smiling grimly, she realized that driving was her skill, something she knew so well that she could do it unconsciously. She had even reacted to a threat before knowing what it was. Her reflexes were faster than her conscious mind.

Were the aliens like that all the time? In a perpetual state of flow, like virtuoso musicians or Zen monks in samadhi? What would be the point of achieving such supreme skill, if the price was never knowing it was you doing it?

Around noon, they came to a town nestled in a steep valley on a rushing river. Driving down the main street, she spied a quaint, cupolaed building with a “Municipal Library” sign out front. Farther on, at the edge of town, an abandoned car lot offered a grass-pocked parking lot, so she turned in. “Come on, Lionel,” she called out. “I’ve found a place for you to acquire knowledge.”

They walked back into town together. The library was quiet and empty except for an old man reading a magazine. The selection of books was sparse, but there was a row of computers. “You know how to use these?” Avery said in a low voice.

“Not this kind,” Lionel said. “They’re very . . . primitive.”

They sat down together, and Avery explained how to work the mouse and get on the Internet, how to search and scroll. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You can go now.”

Shrugging, she left him to his research. She strolled down the main street, stopped in a drugstore, then found a cafe that offered fried egg sandwiches on Wonder Bread, a luxury from her childhood. With lunch and a cup of coffee, she settled down to wait, sorting email on her phone.

Some time later, she became aware of the television behind the counter. It was tuned to one of those daytime expose shows hosted by a shrill woman who spoke in a tone of breathless indignation. “Coming up,” she said, “Slaves or traitors? Who are these alien translators?”

Avery realized that some part of her brain must have been listening and alerted her conscious mind to pay attention, just as it had reacted to the deer. She had a threat detection system she was not even aware of.

In the story that followed, a correspondent revealed that she had been unable to match any of the translators with missing children recorded in the past twenty years. The host treated this as suspicious information that someone ought to be looking into. Then came a panel of experts to discuss what they knew of the translators, which was nothing.

“Turncoats,” commented one of the men at the counter watching the show. “Why would anyone betray his own race?”

“They’re not even human,” said another, “just made to look that way. They’re clones or robots or something.”

“The government won’t do anything. They’re just letting those aliens sit there.”

Avery got up to pay her bill. The woman at the cash register said, “You connected with that big tour bus parked out at Fenniman’s?”

She had forgotten that in a town like this, everyone knew instantly what was out of the ordinary.

“Yeah,” Avery said. “Me and my . . . boyfriend are delivering it to a new owner.”

She glanced up at the television just as a collage of faces appeared. Lionel’s was in the top row. “Look closely,” the show’s host said. “If you recognize any of these faces, call us at 1-800- . . .” Avery didn’t wait to hear the number. The door shut behind her.

It was hard not to walk quickly enough to attract attention. Why had she left him alone, as if it were safe? Briefly, she thought of bringing the bus in to pick him up at the library, but it would only attract more attention. The sensible thing was to slip inconspicuously out of town.

Lionel was engrossed in a website about the brain when she came in. She sat down next to him and said quietly, “We’ve got to leave.”

“I’m not . . .”

“Lionel. We have to leave. Right now.”

He frowned, but got the message. As he rose to put on his coat, she quickly erased his browser history and cache. Then she led the way out and around the building to a back street where there were fewer eyes. “Hold my hand,” she said.

“Why?”

“I told them you were my boyfriend. We’ve got to act friendly.”

He didn’t object or ask what was going on. The aliens had trained him well, she thought.

The street they were on came to an end, and they were forced back onto the main thoroughfare, right past the cafe. In Avery’s mind every window was a pair of eyes staring at the strangers. As they left the business section of town and the buildings thinned out, she became aware of someone walking a block behind them. Glancing back, she saw a man in hunter’s camouflage and billed cap, carrying a gun case on a strap over one shoulder.

She sped up, but the man trailing them sped up as well. When they were in sight of the bus, Avery pressed the keys into Lionel’s hand and said, “Go on ahead. I’ll stall this guy. Get inside and don’t open the door to anyone but me.” Then she turned back to confront their pursuer.

Familiarity tickled as he drew closer. When she was sure, she called out, “Afternoon, Henry! What a coincidence to see you here.”

“Hello, Avery,” he said. He didn’t look quite right in the hunter costume: he was too urban and fit. “That was pretty careless of you. I followed to make sure you got back safe.”

“I didn’t know his picture was all over the TV,” she said. “I’ve been out of touch.”

“I know, we lost track of you for a while there. Please don’t do that again.”

As threats went, Henry now seemed like the lesser evil. She hesitated, then said, “I didn’t see any need to get in touch.” That meant the country was not in peril.

“Thanks,” he said. “Listen, if you turn left on Highway 19 ahead, you’ll come to a national park with a campground. It’ll be safe.”

As she walked back to the bus, she was composing a lie about who she had been talking to. But Lionel never asked. As soon as she was on board he started eagerly telling her about what he had learned in the library. She had never seen him so animated, so she gestured him to sit in the passenger seat beside her while she got the bus moving again.

“The reason you’re conscious is because of the cerebral cortex,” he said. “It’s an add-on, the last part of the brain to evolve. Its only purpose is to monitor what the rest of the brain is doing. All the sensory input goes to the inner brain first, and gets processed, so the cortex never gets the raw data. It only sees the effect on the rest of the brain, not what’s really out there. That’s why you’re aware of yourself. In fact, it’s all you’re aware of.”

“Why are you saying ‘you’ ?” Avery asked. “You’ve got a cerebral cortex, too.”

Defensively, he said, “I’m not like you.”

Avery shrugged. “Okay.” But she wanted to keep the conversation going. “So Mr. Burbage doesn’t have a cortex? Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s right,” Lionel said. “For him, life is a skill of the autonomic nervous system, not something he had to consciously learn. That’s why he can think and react faster than we can, and requires less energy. The messages don’t have to travel on a useless detour through the cortex.”

“Useless?” Avery objected. “I kind of like being conscious.”

Lionel fell silent, suddenly grave and troubled.

She glanced over at him. “What’s the matter?”

In a low tone he said, “He likes being conscious, too. It’s what they want from us.”

Avery gripped the wheel and tried not to react. Up to now, the translators had denied that the aliens wanted anything at all from humans. But then it occurred to her that Lionel might not mean humans when he said “us.”

“You mean, you translators?” she ventured.

He nodded, looking grim.

“Is that a bad thing?” she asked, reacting to his expression.

“Not for us,” he said. “It’s bad for them. It’s killing him.”

He was struggling with some strong emotion. Guilt, she thought. Maybe grief.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Angrily, he stood up to head back into the bus. “Why do you make me think of this?” he said. “Why can’t you just mind your own business?” Avery drove on, listening as he slammed the bedroom door behind him. She didn’t feel any resentment. She knew all about guilt and grief, and how useless they made you feel. Lionel’s behavior made more sense to her now. He was having trouble distinguishing between what was happening to him externally and what was coming from inside. Even people skilled at being human had trouble with that.

The national park Henry had recommended turned out to be at Cumberland Gap, the mountain pass early pioneers had used to migrate west to Kentucky. They spent the night in the campground undisturbed. At dawn, Avery strolled out in the damp morning air to look around. She quickly returned to say, “Lionel, come out here. You need to see this.” She led him across the road to an overlook facing west. From the edge of the Appalachians they looked out on range after range of wooded foothills swaddled in fog. The morning sun at their backs lit everything in shades of mauve and azure. Avery felt like Daniel Boone looking out on the Promised Land, stretching before her into the misty distance, unpolluted by the past.

“I find this pleasant,” Lionel said gravely.

Avery smiled. It was a breakthrough statement for someone so unaccustomed to introspection that he hadn’t been able to tell her he was hungry two days ago. But all she said was, “Me, too.”

After several moments of silence, she ventured, “Don’t you think Mr. Burbage would enjoy seeing this? There’s no one else around. Doesn’t he want to get out of the bus some time?”

“He is seeing it,” Lionel said.

“What do you mean?”

“He is here.” Lionel tapped his head with a finger.

Avery couldn’t help staring. “You mean you have some sort of telepathic connection with him?”

“There’s no such thing as telepathy,” Lionel said dismissively. “They communicate with neurotransmitters.” She was still waiting, so he said, “He doesn’t have to be all in one place. Part of him is with me, part of him is in the bus.”

“In your head?” she asked, trying not to betray how creepy she found this news.

He nodded. “He needs me to observe the world for him, and understand it. They have had lots of other helper species to do things for them—species that build things, or transport them. But we’re the first one with advanced consciousness.”

“And that’s why they’re interested in us.”

Lionel looked away to avoid her eyes, but nodded. “They like it,” he said, his voice low and reluctant. “At first it was just novel and new for them, but now it’s become an addiction, like a dangerous drug. We pay a high metabolic price for consciousness; it’s why our lifespan is so short. They live for centuries. But when they get hooked on us, they burn out even faster than we do.”

He picked up a rock and flung it over the cliff, watching as it arced up, then plummeted.

“And if he dies, what happens to you?” Avery asked.

“I don’t want him to die,” Lionel said. He put his hands in his pockets and studied his feet. “It feels . . . good to have him around. I like his company. He’s very old, very wise.”

For a moment, she could see it through his eyes. She could imagine feeling intimately connected to an ancient being who was dying from an inability to part with his adopted human son. What a terrible burden for Lionel to carry, to be slowly killing someone he loved. And yet, she still felt uneasy.

“How do you know?” she asked.

He looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“You said he’s old and wise. How do you know that?”

“The way you know anything unconscious. It’s a feeling, an instinct.”

“Are you sure he not controlling you? Pushing around your neurotransmitters?”

“That’s absurd,” he said, mildly irritated. “I told you, he’s not conscious, at least not naturally. Control is a conscious thing.”

“But what if you did something he didn’t want?”

“I don’t feel like doing things he doesn’t want. Like talking to you now. He must have decided he can trust you, because I wouldn’t feel like telling you anything if he hadn’t.”

Avery wasn’t sure whether being trusted by an alien was something she aspired to. But she did want Lionel to trust her, and so she let the subject drop.

“Where do you want to go today?” she asked.

“You keep asking me that.” He stared out on the landscape, as if waiting for a revelation. At last he said, “I want to see humans living as they normally do. We’ve barely seen any of them. I didn’t think the planet was so sparsely populated.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to have to make a phone call for that.” When he had returned to the bus, she strolled away, took out Henry’s card, and thumbed the number. Despite the early hour, he answered on the first ring.

“He wants to see humans,” she said. “Normal humans behaving normally. Can you help me out?”

“Let me make some calls,” he said. “I’ll text you instructions.”

“No men in black,” she said. “You know what I mean?”

“I get it.”

When Avery stopped for diesel around noon, the gas station television was blaring with news that the Justice Department would investigate the aliens for abducting human children. She escaped into the restroom to check her phone. The internet was ablaze with speculation: who the translators were, whether they could be freed, whether they were human at all. The part of the government that had approved Lionel’s road trip was clearly working at cross purposes with the part that had dreamed up this new strategy for extracting information from the aliens. The only good news was that no hint had leaked out that an alien was roaming the back roads of America in a converted bus.

Henry had texted her a cryptic suggestion to head toward Paris. She had to Google it to find that there actually was a Paris, Kentucky. When she came out to pay for the fuel, she was relieved to see that the television had moved on to World Series coverage. On impulse, she bought a Cardinals cap for Lionel.

Paris turned out to be a quaint old Kentucky town that had once had delusions of cityhood. Today, a county fair was the main event in town. The RV park was almost full, but Avery’s E.T. Express managed to maneuver in. When everything was settled, she sat on the bus steps sipping a Bud and waiting for night so they could venture out with a little more anonymity. The only thing watching her was a skittish, half-wild cat crouched behind a trashcan. Somehow, it reminded her of Lionel, so she tossed it a Cheeto to see if she could lure it out. It refused the bait.

That night, disguised by the dark and a Cardinals cap, Lionel looked tolerably inconspicuous. As they were leaving to take in the fair, she said, “Will Mr. Burbage be okay while we’re gone? What if someone tries to break into the bus?”

“Don’t worry, he’ll be all right,” Lionel said. His tone implied more than his words. She resolved to call Henry at the earliest opportunity and pass along a warning not to try anything.

The people in the midway all looked authentic. If there were snipers on the bigtop and agents on the merry-go-round, she couldn’t tell. When people failed to recognize Lionel at the ticket stand and popcorn wagon, she began to relax. Everyone was here to enjoy themselves, not to look for aliens.

She introduced Lionel to the joys of corn dogs and cotton candy, to the Ferris wheel and tilt-a-whirl. He took in the jangling sounds, the smells of deep-fried food, and the blinking lights with a grave and studious air. When they had had their fill of all the machines meant to disorient and confuse, they took a break at a picnic table, sipping Cokes.

Avery said, “Is Mr. Burbage enjoying this?”

Lionel shrugged. “Are you?” He wasn’t deflecting her question; he actually wanted to know.

She considered. “I think people enjoy these events mainly because they bring back childhood memories,” she said.

“Yes. It does seem familiar,” Lionel said.

“Really? What about it?”

He paused, searching his mind. “The smells,” he said at last.

Avery nodded. It was smells for her, as well: deep fat fryers, popcorn. “Do you remember anything from the time before you were abducted?”

“Adopted,” he corrected her.

“Right, adopted. What about your family?”

He shook his head.

“Do you ever wonder what kind of people they were?”

“The kind of people who wouldn’t look for me,” he said coldly.

“Wait a minute. You don’t know that. For all you know, your mother might have cried her eyes out when you disappeared.”

He stared at her. She realized she had spoken with more emotion than she had intended. The subject had touched a nerve. “Sorry,” she muttered, and got up. “I’m tired. Can we head back?”

“Sure,” he said, and followed her without question.

That night she couldn’t sleep. She lay watching the pattern from the lights outside on the ceiling, but her mind was on the back of the bus. Up to now she had slept without thinking of the strangeness just beyond the door, but tonight it bothered her.

About 3:00 AM she roused from a doze at the sound of Lionel’s quiet footstep going past her. She lay silent as he eased the bus door open. When he had gone outside she rose and looked to see what he was doing. He walked away from the bus toward a maintenance shed and some dumpsters. She debated whether to follow him; it was just what she had scolded him for doing to her. But concern for his safety won out, and she took a flashlight from the driver’s console, put it in the pocket of a windbreaker, and followed.

At first she thought she had lost him. The parking lot was motionless and quiet. A slight breeze stirred the pines on the edge of the road. Then she heard a scuffling sound ahead, a thump, and a soft crack. At first she stood listening, but when there was no more sound, she crept forward. Rounding the dumpster, she saw in its shadow a figure crouched on the ground. Unable to make out what was going on, she switched on the flashlight.

Lionel turned, his eyes wild and hostile. Dangling from his hand was the limp body of a cat, its head ripped off. His face was smeared with its blood. Watching her, he deliberately ripped a bite of cat meat from the body with his teeth and swallowed.

“Lionel!” she cried out in horror. “Put that down!”

He turned away, trying to hide his prey like an animal. Without thinking, she grabbed his arm, and he spun fiercely around, as if to fight her. His eyes looked utterly alien. She stepped back. “It’s me, Avery,” she said.

He looked down at the mangled carcass in his hand, then dropped it, rose, and backed away. Once again taking his arm, Avery guided him away from the dumpsters, back to the bus. Inside, she led him to the kitchen sink. “Wash,” she ordered, then went to firmly close the bus door.

Her heart was pounding, and she kept the heavy flashlight in her hand for security. But when she came back, she saw he was trembling so hard he had dropped the soap and was leaning against the sink for support. Seeing that his face was still smeared with blood, she took a paper towel and wiped him off, then dried his hands. He sank onto the bench by the kitchen table. She stood watching him, arms crossed, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t.

“So what was that about?” she said sternly.

He shook his head.

“Cats aren’t food,” she said. “They’re living beings.”

Still he didn’t speak.

“Have you been sneaking out at night all along?” she demanded.

He shook his head. “I don’t know . . . I just thought . . . I wanted to see what it would feel like.”

“You mean Mr. Burbage wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said.

“Maybe,” he admitted.

“Well, people don’t do things like that.”

He was looking ill. She grabbed his arm and hustled him into the bathroom, aiming him at the toilet. She left him there vomiting, and started shoving belongings into her backpack. As she swung it onto her shoulder, he staggered to the bathroom door.

“I’m leaving,” she said. “I can’t sleep here, knowing you do things like that.”

He looked dumbstruck. She pushed past him and out the door. She was striding away across the gravel parking lot when he called after her, “Avery! You can’t leave.”

She wheeled around. “Can’t I? Just watch me.”

He left the bus and followed her. “What are we going to do?”

“I don’t care,” she said.

“I won’t do it again.”

“Who’s talking, you or him?”

A light went on in the RV next to them. She realized they were making a late-night scene like trailer-park trash, attracting attention. This wasn’t an argument they could have in public. And now that she was out here, she realized she had no place to go. So she shooed Lionel back toward the bus.

Once inside, she said, “This is the thing, Lionel. This whole situation is creeping me out. You can’t make any promises as long as he’s in charge. Maybe next time he’ll want to see what it feels like to kill me in my sleep, and you won’t be able to stop him.”

Lionel looked disturbed. “He won’t do that.”

“How do you know?”

“I just . . . do.”

“That’s not good enough. I need to see him.”

Avery wasn’t sure why she had blurted it out, except that living with an invisible, ever-present passenger had become intolerable. As long as she didn’t know what the door in the back of the bus concealed, she couldn’t be at ease.

He shook his head. “That won’t help.”

She crossed her arms and said, “I can’t stay unless I know what he is.” Lionel’s face took on an introspective look, as if he were consulting his conscience. At last he said, “You’d have to promise not to tell anyone.” Avery hadn’t really expected him to consent, and now felt a nervous tremor. She dropped her pack on the bed and gripped her hands into fists. “All right.”

He led the way to the back of the bus and eased the door open as if fearing to disturb the occupant within. She followed him in. The small room was dimly lit and there was an earthy smell. All the crates he had brought in must have been folded up and put away, because none were visible. There was an unmade bed, and beside it a clear box like an aquarium tank, holding something she could not quite make out. When Lionel turned on a light, she saw what the tank contained.

It looked most like a coral or sponge—a yellowish, rounded growth the size of half a beach ball, resting on a bed of wood chips and dead leaves. Lionel picked up a spray bottle and misted it tenderly. It responded by expanding as if breathing.

“That’s Mr. Burbage?” Avery whispered.

Lionel nodded. “Part of him. The most important part.”

The alien seemed insignificant, something she could destroy with a bottle of bleach. “Can he move?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” Lionel said. “Not the way we do.”

She waited for him to explain. At first he seemed reluctant, but he finally said, “They are colonies of cells with a complicated life cycle. This is the final stage of their development, when they become most complex and organized. After this, they dissolve into the earth. The cells don’t die; they go on to form other coalitions. But the individual is lost. Just like us, I suppose.”

What she was feeling, she realized, was disappointment. In spite of all Lionel had told her, she had hoped there would be some way of communicating. Before, she had not truly believed that the alien could be insentient. Now she did. In fact, she found it hard to believe that it could think at all.

“How do you know he’s intelligent?” she asked. “He could be just a heap of chemicals, like a loaf of bread rising.”

“How do you know I’m intelligent?” he said, staring at the tank. “Or anyone?”

“You react to me. You communicate. He can’t.”

“Yes, he can.”

“How? If I touched him—”

“No!” Lionel said quickly. “Don’t touch him. You’d see, he would react. It wouldn’t be malice, just a reflex.”

“Then how do you . . .?”

Reluctantly, Lionel said, “He has to touch you. It’s the only way to exchange neurotransmitters.” He paused, as if debating something internally. She watched the conflict play across his face. At last, reluctantly, he said, “I think he would be willing to communicate with you.”

It was what she had wanted, some reassurance of the alien’s intentions. But now it was offered, her instincts were unwilling. “No thanks,” she said.

Lionel looked relieved. She realized he hadn’t wanted to give up his unique relationship with Mr. Burbage.

“Thanks anyway,” she said, for the generosity of the offer he hadn’t wanted to make.

And yet, it left her unsure. She had only Lionel’s word that the alien was friendly. After tonight, that wasn’t enough.

Neither of them could sleep, so as soon as day came they set out again. Heading west, Avery knew they were going deeper and deeper into isolationist territory, where even human strangers were unwelcome, never mind aliens. This was the land where she had grown up, and she knew it well. From here, the world outside looked like a violent, threatening place full of impoverished hordes who envied and hated the good life in America. Here, even the churches preached self-satisfaction, and discontent was the fault of those who hated freedom—like college professors, homosexuals, and immigrants.

Growing up, she had expected to spend her life in this country. She had done everything right—married just out of high school, worked as a waitress, gotten pregnant at 19. Her life had been mapped out in front of her.

She couldn’t even imagine it now.

This morning, Lionel seemed to want to talk. He sat beside her in the co-pilot seat, watching the road and answering her questions. “What does it feel like, when he communicates with you?”

He reflected. “It feels like a mood, or a hunch. Or I act on impulse.”

“How do you know it’s him, and not your own subconscious?”

“I don’t. It doesn’t matter.”

Avery shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to go through life acting on hunches.”

“Why not?”

“Your unconscious . . . it’s unreliable. You can’t control it. It can lead you wrong.”

“That’s absurd,” he said. “It’s not some outside entity; it’s you. It’s your conscious mind that’s the slave master, always worrying about control. Your unconscious only wants to preserve you.”

“Not if there’s an alien messing around with it.”

“He’s not like that. This drive to dominate—that’s a conscious thing. He doesn’t have that slave master part of the brain.”

“Do you know that for a fact, or are you just guessing?”

“Guessing is what your unconscious tells you. Knowing is a conscious thing. They’re only in conflict if your mind is fighting itself.”

“Sounds like the human condition to me,” Avery said. This had to be the weirdest conversation in her life.

“Is he here now?” she asked.

“Of course he is.”

“Don’t you ever want to get away from him?”

Puzzled, he said, “Why should I?”

“Privacy. To be by yourself.”

“I don’t want to be by myself.”

Something in his voice told her he was thinking ahead, to the death of his lifelong companion. Abruptly, he rose and walked back into the bus.

Actually, she had lied to him. She had gone through life acting on hunches. Go with your gut had been her motto, because she had trusted her gut. But of course it had nothing to do with gut, or heart—it was her unconscious mind she had been following. Her unconscious was why she took this road rather than that, or preferred Raisin Bran to Corn Flakes. It was why she found certain tunes achingly beautiful, and why she was fond of this strange young man, against all rational evidence.

As the road led them nearer to southern Illinois, Avery found memories surfacing. They came with a tug of regret, like a choking rope pulling her back toward the person she hadn’t become. She thought of the cascade of non-decisions that had led her to become the rootless, disconnected person she was, as much a stranger to the human race as Lionel was, in her way.

What good has consciousness ever done me? she thought. It only made her aware that she could never truly connect with another human being, deep down. And on that day when her cells would dissolve into the soil, there would be no trace her consciousness had ever existed.

That night they camped at a freeway rest stop a day’s drive from St. Louis. Lionel was moody and anxious. Avery’s attempt to interest him in a trashy novel was fruitless. At last she asked what was wrong. Fighting to find the words, he said, “He’s very ill. This trip was a bad idea. All the stimulation has made him worse.”

Tentatively, she said, “Should we head for one of the domes?” Lionel shook his head. “They can’t cure this . . . this addiction to consciousness. If they could, I don’t think he’d take it.”

“Do the others—his own people—know what’s wrong with him?” Lionel nodded wordlessly.

She didn’t know what comfort to offer. “Well,” she said at last, “it was his choice to come.”

“A selfish choice,” Lionel said angrily.

She couldn’t help noticing that he was speaking for himself, Lionel, as distinct from Mr. Burbage. Thoughtfully, she said, “Maybe they can’t love us as much as we can love them.”

He looked at her as if the word “love” had never entered his vocabulary. “Don’t say us,” he said. “I’m not one of you.”

She didn’t believe it for a second, but she just said, “Suit yourself,” and turned back to her novel. After a few moments, he went into the back of the bus and closed the door.

She lay there trying to read for a while, but the story couldn’t hold her attention. She kept listening for some sound from beyond the door, some indication of how they were doing. At last she got up quietly and went to listen. Hearing nothing, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Softly, she cracked it open to look inside.

Lionel was not asleep. He was lying on the bed, his head next to the alien’s tank. But the alien was no longer in the tank; it was on the pillow. It had extruded a mass of long, cordlike tentacles that gripped Lionel’s head in a medusa embrace, snaking into every opening. One had entered an ear, another a nostril. A third had nudged aside an eyeball in order to enter the eye socket. Fluid coursed along the translucent vessels connecting man and creature.

Avery wavered on the edge of horror. Her first instinct was to intervene, to defend Lionel from what looked like an attack. But the expression on his face was not of terror, but peace. All his vague references to exchanging neurotransmitters came back to her now: this was what he had meant. The alien communicated by drinking cerebrospinal fluid, its drug of choice, and injecting its own.

Shaken, she eased the door shut again. Unable to get the image out of her mind, she went outside to walk around the bus to calm her nerves. After three circuits she leaned back against the cold metal, wishing she had a cigarette for the first time in years. Above her, the stars were cold and bright. What was this relationship she had landed in the middle of—predator and prey? father and son? pusher and addict? master and slave? Or some strange combination of all? Had she just witnessed an alien learning about love?

She had been saving a bottle of bourbon for special occasions, so she went in to pour herself a shot.

To her surprise, Lionel emerged before she was quite drunk. She thought of offering him a glass, but wasn’t sure how it would mix with whatever was already in his brain.

He sat down across from her, but just stared silently at the floor for a long time. At last he stirred and said, “I think we ought to take him to a private place.”

“What sort of private place?” Avery asked.

“Somewhere dignified. Natural. Secluded.”

To die, she realized. The alien wanted to die in private. Or Lionel wanted him to. There was no telling where one left off and the other began.

“I know a place,” she said. “Will he make it another day?”

Lionel nodded silently.

Through the bourbon haze, Avery wondered what she ought to say to Henry. Was the country in danger? She didn’t think so. This seemed like a personal matter. To be sure, she said, “You’re certain his relatives won’t blame us if he dies?”

“Blame?” he said.

That was conscious-talk, she realized. “React when he doesn’t come back?”

“If they were going to react, they would have done it when he left. They aren’t expecting anything, not even his return. They don’t live in an imaginary future like you people do.”

“Wise of them,” she said.

“Yes.”

They rolled into St. Louis in late afternoon, across the Poplar Street Bridge next to the Arch and off onto I-70 toward the north part of town. Avery knew exactly where she was going. From the first moment Frank had told her the destination was St. Louis, she had known she would end up driving this way, toward the place where she had left the first part of her life.

Bellefontaine Cemetery lay on what had been the outskirts of the city in Victorian times, several hundred acres of greenery behind a stone wall and a wrought-iron gate. It was a relic from a time when cemeteries were landscaped, parklike sanctuaries from the city. Huge old oak and sweetgum trees lined the winding roadways, their branches now black against the sky. Avery drove slowly past the marble mausoleums and toward the hill at the back of the cemetery, which looked out over the valley toward the Missouri River. It was everything Lionel had wanted—peaceful, natural, secluded.

Some light rain misted down out of the overcast sky. Avery parked the bus and went out to check whether they were alone. She had seen no one but a single dog-walker near the entrance, and no vehicle had followed them in. The gates would close in half an hour, and the bus would have to be out. Henry and his friends were probably waiting outside the gate for them to appear again. She returned to the bus and knocked on Lionel’s door. He opened it right away. Inside, the large picnic cooler they had bought was standing open, ready.

“Help me lift him in,” Lionel said.

Avery maneuvered past the cooler to the tank. “Is it okay for me to touch him?”

“Hold your hand close to him for a few seconds.”

Avery did as instructed. A translucent tentacle extruded from the cauliflower folds of the alien’s body. It touched her palm, recoiled, then extended again. Gently, hesitantly, it explored her hand, tickling slightly as it probed her palm and curled around her pinkie. She held perfectly still.

“What is he thinking?” she whispered.

“He’s learning your chemical identity,” Lionel said.

“How can he learn without being aware? Can he even remember?”

“Of course he can remember. Your immune system learns and remembers just about every pathogen it ever met, and it’s not aware. Can you remember them all?”

She shook her head, stymied.

At last, apparently satisfied, the tendril retracted into the alien’s body.

“All right,” Lionel said, “now you can touch him.”

The alien was surprisingly heavy. Together, they lifted him onto the bed of dirt and wood chips Lionel had spread in the bottom of the cooler. Lionel fitted the lid on loosely, and each of them took a handle to carry their load out into the open air. Avery led the way around a mausoleum shaped like a Greek temple to an unmowed spot hidden from the path. Sycamore leaves and bark littered the ground, damp from the rain.

“Is this okay?” she asked.

For answer, Lionel set down his end of the cooler and straightened, breathing in the forest smell. “This is okay.”

“I have to move the bus. Stay behind this building in case anyone comes by. I’ll be back.”

The gatekeeper waved as she pulled the bus out onto the street. By the time she had parked it on a nearby residential street and returned, the gate was closed. She walked around the cemetery perimeter to an unfrequented side, then scrambled up the wall and over the spiked fence.

Inside, the traffic noise of the city fell away. The trees arched overhead in churchlike silence. Not a squirrel stirred. Avery sat down on a tombstone to wait. Beyond the hill, Lionel was holding vigil at the side of his dying companion, and she wanted to give him privacy. The stillness felt good, but unfamiliar. Her life was made of motion. She had been driving for twenty years—driving away, driving beyond, always a new destination. Never back.

The daylight would soon be gone. She needed to do the other thing she had come here for. Raising the hood of her raincoat, she headed downhill, the grass caressing her sneakers wetly. It was years since she had visited the grave of her daughter Gabrielle, whose short life and death were like a chasm dividing her life into before and after. They had called it crib death then—an unexplained, random, purposeless death. “Nothing you could have done,” the doctor had said, thinking that was more comforting than knowing that the universe just didn’t give a damn.

Gabrielle’s grave lay in a grove of cedar trees—the plot a gift from a sympathetic patron at the cafe where Avery had worked. At first she had thought of turning it down because the little grave would be overshadowed by more ostentatious death; but the suburban cemeteries had looked so industrial, monuments stamped out by machine. She had come to love the age and seclusion of this spot. At first, she had visited over and over.

As she approached in the fading light, she saw that something was lying on the headstone. When she came close she saw that some stranger had placed on the grave a little terra cotta angel with one wing broken. Avery stood staring at the bedraggled figurine, now soaked with rain, a gift to her daughter from someone she didn’t even know. Then, a sudden, unexpected wave of grief doubled her over. It had been twenty years since she had touched her daughter, but the memory was still vivid and tactile. She remembered the smell, the softness of her skin, the utter trust in her eyes. She felt again the aching hole of her absence.

Avery sank to her knees in the wet grass, sobbing for the child she hadn’t been able to protect, for the sympathy of the nameless stranger, even for the helpless, mutilated angel who would never fly.

There was a sound behind her, and she looked up. Lionel stood there watching her, rain running down his face—no, it was tears. He wiped his eyes, then looked at his hands. “I don’t know why I feel like this,” he said.

Poor, muddled man. She got up and hugged him for knowing exactly how she felt. They stood there for a moment, two people trapped in their own brains, and the only crack in the wall was empathy.

“Is he gone?” she asked softly.

He shook his head. “Not yet. I left him alone in case it was me . . . interfering. Then I saw you and followed.”

“This is my daughter’s grave,” Avery said. “I didn’t know I still miss her so much.”

She took his hand and started back up the hill. They said nothing, but didn’t let go of each other till they got to the marble mausoleum where they had left Mr. Burbage.

The alien was still there, resting on the ground next to the cooler. Lionel knelt beside him and held out a hand. A bouquet of tentacles reached out and grasped it, then withdrew. Lionel came over to where Avery stood watching. “I’m going to stay with him. You don’t have to.”

“I’d like to,” she said, “if it’s okay with you.”

He ducked his head furtively.

So they settled down to keep a strange death watch. Avery shared some chemical hand-warmers she had brought from the bus. When those ran out and night deepened, she managed to find some dry wood at the bottom of a groundskeeper’s brush pile to start a campfire. She sat poking the fire with a stick, feeling drained of tears, worn down as an old tire.

“Does he know he’s dying?” she asked.

Lionel nodded. “I know, and so he knows.” A little bitterly, he added, “That’s what consciousness does for you.”

“So normally he wouldn’t know?”

He shook his head. “Or care. It’s just part of their life cycle. There’s no death if there’s no self to be aware of it.”

“No life either,” Avery said.

Lionel just sat breaking twigs and tossing them on the fire. “I keep wondering if it was worth it. If consciousness is good enough to die for.”

She tried to imagine being free of her self—of the regrets of the past and fear of the future. If this were a Star Trek episode, she thought, this would be when Captain Kirk would deliver a speech in defense of being human, despite all the drawbacks. She didn’t feel that way.

“You’re right,” she said. “Consciousness kind of sucks.”

The sky was beginning to glow with dawn when at last they saw a change in the alien. The brainlike mass started to shrink and a liquid pool spread out from under it, as if it were dissolving. There was no sound. At the end, its body deflated like a falling soufflé, leaving nothing but a slight crust on the leaves and a damp patch on the ground.

They sat for a long time in silence. It was light when Lionel got up and brushed off his pants, his face set and grim. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

Avery felt reluctant to leave. “His cells are in the soil?” she said.

“Yes, they’ll live underground for a while, spreading and multiplying. They’ll go through some blooming and sporing cycles. If any dogs or children come along at that stage, the spores will establish a colony in their brains. It’s how they invade.”

His voice was perfectly indifferent. Avery stared at him. “You might have mentioned that.”

He shrugged.

An inspiration struck her. She seized up a stick and started digging in the damp patch of ground, scooping up soil in her hands and putting it into the cooler.

“What are you doing?” Lionel said. “You can’t stop him, it’s too late.”

“I’m not trying to,” Avery said. “I want some cells to transplant. I’m going to grow an alien of my own.”

“That’s the stupidest—”

A moment later he was on his knees beside her, digging and scooping up dirt. They got enough to half-fill the cooler, then covered it with leaves to keep it damp.

“Wait here,” she told him. “I’ll bring the bus to pick you up. The gates open in an hour. Don’t let anyone see you.”

When she got back to the street where she had left the bus, Henry was waiting in a parked car. He got out and opened the passenger door for her, but she didn’t get inside. “I’ve got to get back,” she said, inclining her head toward the bus. “They’re waiting for me.”

“Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”

“I just needed a break. I had to get away.”

“In a cemetery? All night?”

“It’s personal.”

“Is there something I should know?”

“We’re heading back home today.”

He waited, but she said no more. There was no use telling him; he couldn’t do anything about it. The invasion was already underway.

He let her return to the bus, and she drove it to a gas station to fuel up while waiting for the cemetery to open. At the stroke of 8:30 she pulled the bus through the gate, waving at the puzzled gatekeeper.

Between them, she and Lionel carried the cooler into the bus, leaving behind only the remains of a campfire and a slightly disturbed spot of soil. Then she headed straight for the freeway.

They stopped for a fast-food breakfast in southern Illinois. Avery kept driving as she ate her egg muffin and coffee. Soon Lionel came to sit shotgun beside her, carrying a plastic container full of soil.

“Is that mine?” she asked.

“No, this one’s mine. You can have the rest.”

“Thanks.”

“It won’t be him,” Lionel said, looking at the soil cradled on his lap. “No. But it’ll be yours. Yours to raise and teach.”

As hers would be.

“I thought you would have some kind of tribal loyalty to prevent them invading,” Lionel said.

Avery thought about it a moment, then said, “We’re not defenseless, you know. We’ve got something they want. The gift of self, of mortality. God, I feel like the snake in the garden. But my alien will love me for it.” She could see the cooler in the rear view mirror, sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Already she felt fond of the person it would become. Gestating inside. “It gives a new meaning to alien abduction, doesn’t it?” she said.

He didn’t get the joke. “You aren’t afraid to become . . . something like me?”

She looked over at him. “No one can be like you, Lionel.”

Even after all this time together, he still didn’t know how to react when she said things like that.

THE JEWEL AND HER LAPIDARY

Fran Wilde

For Susan

Visitors to the Jeweled Valley should expect rustic accommodations and varying degrees of adventure, as the area is both remote and not under protection of any State or Commonwealth.

There are two inns of varying reputation (p. 34) and attractive scenery, including walks to the Ruins (p. 30), the Variegated Riverbank (p. 29), and the stone formation colloquially known as the Jewel and Her Lapidary (p. 32).

The best place to find a guide is at the Deaf King, a tavern by the river (p. 33).

Local guides can become verbose on matters of history and legend. Indeed, some cannot discern between the two. Many locals will gladly inform you their forebears served at the Jeweled Court long ago. More than a few will declare their ancestors were Jewels—royalty who wore the region’s ancient gems—or their assistants. This is likely untrue, as the last Jewels were murdered in a palace coup after six generations of peaceful rule.

. . . FROM A GUIDE TO THE REMOTE RIVER VALLEYS, BY M. LANKIN, EAST QUADRIL

* * *

Strips of soft cloth bound the Jewel Lin’s hands behind her back, knotted as if they’d been tied in a hurry. When her head cleared enough for her to think of it, Lin slid her hands back and forth until the bindings loosened and she was able to bend her wrists and tug at the ties.

Her mouth felt dry as a stone. Her legs and feet tingled, as if she’d been sitting on them for hours at a strange angle. Sima, she thought. Where is Sima? Lin could not see anything. What happened? Sima would know. Or Aba.

An elbow pressed Lin’s side in the darkness. Lin heard her lapidary grunt and wriggle, trying to release herself. Sima’s kicking dislodged something heavy and dry that rattled like bones across the floor.

When Lin had freed her hands, she touched the cloth that covered her eyes and ears, then pulled at that knot too. The blindfold fell into her hands. It was strips from the veil Lin had worn since she was eleven.

On the rough ground nearby, the ancient bone Sima had kicked stared at them: a skull turned to opal, eye sockets stuffed with raw yellow topaz.

Lin knew where they were now. Far from her private quarters, where they’d drunk their evening tea and gone to sleep. They were below the moonstone hall, in the pit beside the throne. Where Aba had always threatened to put her as a child when she misbehaved.

Lin bit down on her fist, stifling a scream. She looked around the pit, expecting to see the rest of the Jeweled Court similarly bound. Light flickered through the grate above her head. Sima still wriggled beside her in the dark. But beyond Sima, she saw nothing but darkness and more ancient bones.

She reached for her lapidary’s hands. She felt the cloth that bound them and discovered that it had been looped around the metal cuffs and chains that marked Sima not just as a gem-speaker but as a lapidary—Lin’s own lapidary: the bound courtier to a royal Jewel. Sima had been blindfolded too, with cloth ripped from her blue lapidary’s cloak. She’d been gagged as well.

Lin worked at the knots. We have been betrayed. The court. The valley.

No one else sat in the pit with them. Above, the muffled sounds grew louder. Lin heard running feet. Shouting. Someone howled.

Lin wanted to stuff her hand back in her mouth. She wanted to go back to her room and see her father in the morning. To tell him about her nightmare. Lights flickered through the grate over her head.

“No,” Sima whimpered, panic edging her voice. “A lapidary must not—” She was looking up, through the grate. She had not addressed her words to Lin.

Must not do what? thought Lin. Which lapidary? Her thoughts were slow and muddled. The tea must have been drugged. What had happened to her family? They had ordered wine in the hall while they discussed matters of state, and she’d been told to retire.

Above them, a voice shouted, “Shattered! We are shattered. You should have listened to me!”

The voice was barely recognizable as belonging to the King’s Lapidary. Sima’s father.

“Stop,” Sima begged, climbing to her feet. Tears ran down her cheeks, turning diamond in the moonlight. She put a hand against the wall to steady herself. “Let us out, let us help you. Father.” Her last word was a wail.

The screams continued above their heads, wave after crashing wave of them.

Father. Lin called out, “Help us!” She shouted for the king while Sima called to the lapidary. Two daughters below. Two fathers above.

Sima looked at Lin with wide eyes. “He is gem-mad.”

The King’s Lapidary howled in answer. His words came faster and faster, tumbling through the grate. Their meaning was nearly drowned by his laughter. Lin caught her name. She heard “bargain” and “promise.” The lapidary’s voice rose to a high pitch and cracked.

Sharp metal struck stone. Sima grabbed her ears, holding tight to the metal bands that wrapped her earlobes. Through clenched teeth, she whispered, “A lapidary must obey their Jewel.” The first vow a new lapidary took. Sima repeated the vow like a chant as a shriek pierced the room above them. Her face was white, but she pushed Lin away from the grate, whispering, “He’s going to break the diamond; he’ll break it and death will come. Cover your ears!”

When the stone shattered it made a noise like a mineshaft collapsing, and a scream, and a fire all at once. Sima’s eyes rolled back and Lin scrambled to keep her courtier’s head from hitting the hard pit walls. “It’s all right,” she whispered. Nothing was right. Where was her father? Where were her sisters and brothers? And their lapidaries?

The pit and its metal walls seemed to protect them from the gems, and from Sima’s father. Above, a cry of pain reverberated through the hall. Then something like rain. Then weeping. She heard the clatter as the palace guard dropped their weapons en masse and tried to flee, feet pounding, across the great hall’s moonstone tiles. She heard them fall, one by one.

Metal struck again. Sima threw up at Lin’s feet.

“Father!” Lin shouted, hoping her voice would pass up through the grate. “What is happening?”

Instead of the king, the lapidary returned to kneel on the grate. His hands gripped the bars, charred black. His eyes looked bloodred in the moonlight. “Awake,” he muttered. “Awake too soon. The commander has not yet come and you must cover your ears. You will be no good to me mad.” His voice singsonged as he stood and laughed, then lurched away.

“Sima,” Lin whispered. “What is he doing?”

Her lapidary whimpered. “He is breaking his vows, my Jewel. He has broken gems. Couldn’t you hear? The Opaque Sapphire. The Death Astrion. The Steadfast Diamond. He is about to break the Star Cabochon. We have to stop him.”

The Opaque Sapphire. The Jeweled Palace was visible to attackers without that gem. And she and Sima were trapped in the pit beside the throne. The astrion and the diamond. The borders were undefended.

All her life, Aba had made Lin recite the valley’s legends. How the first gems had enslaved those who found them; how they had maddened those who could hear them. How the first Jewel, the Deaf King, had set a cabochon-cut ruby with metal and wire. How he’d bound those who heard the stones as well and named them lapidaries. Made them serve him instead of the gems. How the gems had protected the valley better than any army.

She’d made Lin learn what could happen if a lapidary broke their vows.

The screaming had quieted above them. Sima knelt and cupped her hands so that Lin could stand on them. Lin pressed on the grate with both hands. The heavy door lifted an inch, but little more. Lin climbed to Sima’s shoulders.

“Here—” Sima handed Lin a long bone from the pit floor. They wedged the grate open and Lin pulled herself out. Looking around, she could not see the King’s Lapidary. But as Sima pulled herself up using a stretch of Lin’s robe, Lin saw her own father, lying on the ground. His eyes were clouded like ruined opals. His breath bubbled in the blood-flecked foam at his mouth. An amber goblet rolled on the floor near his fingers. The bodies of the rest of the court lay scattered. Sisters. Brothers. Aba. Lin bound her heart up with the words. Saw their lips too: blackened and covered with foam. Poison.

Sima crossed the hall, following a sound. A voice. In the courtyard beyond the throne, the King’s Lapidary stood on the high wall. He pointed at Lin, before Sima moved to stand between them. “The Western Mountains are coming—I’ve promised them a powerful gem and one very fine Jewel to marry!” He began to laugh and shout again. “They are strong! Our gems are fading. Soon their only power will be to catch the eye. The Jeweled Valley must be protected. He wouldn’t listen. I protected you!”

Lapidaries’ lathes were smashed across the courtyard. Shards of the Intaglio Amethyst that mapped the valley’s mines crunched under Sima’s feet as she walked toward her father.

“You cannot betray your vows, Father. You promised.”

Metal rained down on them as the gem-mad lapidary threw the chains and bracelets that had bound his arms and ears. “No longer!”

Sima sank to her knees in the courtyard and Lin fell beside her. They watched as the madman waited for his conquering army on the wall.

Then the King’s Lapidary fell quiet for the first time since Lin woke.

The two girls listened, shaking in the cold, for the mountain army’s drums. They wondered how long the palace’s doors could hold. But no drums came. Only silence. The King’s Lapidary climbed up on the lip of the palace wall. He turned to face the courtyard. His lips were pressed tight, his eyes rolled. He spread his arms wide. His hands clutched at the air.

Sima rose to her feet. Began to run toward the wall.

Without another word, the King’s Lapidary leapt from the wall, his blue robe flapping, the chains on his wrists and ankles ringing in the air.

And before Lin could scream, the King’s Lapidary crashed to the flagstones of the courtyard.

When Lin came to her senses, Sima was whispering to her sapphires and blue topaz, the ones that lined her veil. Calm, she whispered. Calm.

The valley’s gems. In a gem-speaker’s hands, Lin knew they amplified desire. When bezel-set and held by a trained lapidary, they had to obey: to protect, calm, compel. Only without their bezels, or in the presence of a wild gem-speaker or a gem-mad lapidary, could gems do worse things.

Sima’s gems did calm Lin. She remained aware of what was happening, but they were smooth facets made out of fact; her terror was trapped within. She was the only one left. An army was coming. The court of the Jeweled Valley—which had known peace for four hundred years, since the Deaf King set the Star Cabochon—had been betrayed. Lin felt a keen rising in her chest.

“Make me stronger,” she ordered Sima.

Sima tried her best. She whispered to the small topaz and diamonds at Lin’s wrists and ears. Lin could not hear the gems, but she felt them acting on her. Compelling her to be calm. To think clearly. She took a breath. Stood.

“We will collect all the gems we can find, Sima,” she said. “All the chain mail too.”

They searched the bodies of the court for gems. Lin sewed the gems herself into one of her old gray cloaks.

When she rolled her eldest brother’s body on its side to peel the ornamental chain mail from his chest, she wept, but it was a calm, slow weeping. The gems allowed her time to act. She would have to mourn later. She moved from one body to the next. Sima followed behind, tugging cloaks, searching pockets.

Sima removed the bands and chains from the fallen lapidaries, cutting the solder points with her father’s diamond saw.

They returned to Lin’s quarters in the heart of the palace and Lin wrapped herself in all of the chains she had collected. She pointed to the metal bands, the oaths meaningless now.

“You must do the rest,” she told her lapidary.

Sima, whispering her vows, shook her head. “I cannot do this work, my Jewel. It will harm you.”

The small betrayal made the lapidary wince.

“Sima, you must.” Lin spoke calmly, and Sima pulled the cache of tools from her sleeve. She lit her torch. Attached bands at Lin’s wrists and ankles. The metal grew hot. Lin felt her skin burn and thought of her sisters and brothers. Blisters rose where Sima’s torch came too close. Lin ached for her father.

“The mountains wish a bride and a throne,” Lin said. Her voice was flat. Her new veil hung heavy against her temples.

Sima added more chains to Lin’s veil. When Lin demanded it, she spoke the binding verses she’d learned at her own father’s side.

And then Sima backed out the door, latching it behind her. Lin listened to the lapidary’s metal vows clattering and chiming on her arms as she sped away. To the river, Sima. Run.

The noises faded. The palace of the Jeweled Court fell silent.

And Lin, for the first time in her life, was completely alone.

* * *

In her second act of betrayal, Sima gritted her teeth and began to remove the metal vows that bound her from wrists to biceps. They would make too much noise as she ran.

She cut away the engraved silver chains with her father’s diamond saw, then started on the bands. The metal was too noisy and would give her away. When the saw broke, the last lapidary of the Jeweled Valley twisted and bent the bands, thinking, Hurry, please hurry, until the first of them—A lapidary protects the valley—snapped from metal fatigue.

Her father’s body lay broken in the outer courtyard. Sima pushed the image of his fall from her memory; blocked the sound his bones had made on the flagstones from her ears. There was no time to mourn the King’s Lapidary, no time to consider his treachery. Hurry. She beat back the last moments of the court—seven royal Jewels choking from poison, the palace guard run away, six lapidaries dead. Her father’s doing.

Traitor, the gems hidden in Sima’s stolen cloak echoed her thought. They magnified the word so it almost enveloped her. The gems spoke louder now that she’d broken several vows of her own. Louder, too, because her father had broken all of his.

Sima knew she was not yet a traitor. She’d kept her most important vows—the platinum bands that wrapped the lobes of her ears and made no noise—hoping she might avoid her father’s fate. A lapidary protects their Jewel, said one. A lapidary protects the gems in their care, said the other. Those vows would not make noise as she fled. They would keep her safe and sane, she hoped.

When the last armband snapped and the words engraved upon it fell away, she wrapped the metal with torn, bloody cloth. She tucked the cloth in the pocket she’d hung from her belt.

The metal, together with the lesser gems of the valley already sewn into her cloak’s hem, weighed heavy but made no sound save for the gems’ whispers.

Sima tried to ignore those.

She ran for the far palace wall and prepared to leave her fallen kingdom and its last Jewel—the princess Lin—behind.

The army from the Western Mountains was already entering the valley. It would soon take the palace. Its soldiers would expect to find her father at the gates, welcoming them. But the King’s Lapidary had climbed the very steps Sima now climbed.

At the place where her father had jumped to his death, Sima threw a rope over the embrasure.

The valley was the most important thing now. She had to get herself and the gems away from the valley. It was what Lin wanted. If Sima stayed, and the army caught her, they would use both gems and lapidary against the people of the valley.

She wrapped her newly bare hands around the rough fiber, took a breath, and asked the gems for strength. Then she stepped over the palace wall, into choking smoke from the fires that already ringed the valley. Her cloak caught the hot wind and tugged her backward, causing her to clutch the rope, finally afraid.

The hidden gems—rough-cut emeralds; opals and topaz; lesser sapphires; one ruby, but not the biggest one—whispered muffled and useless things. Survival. Escape. Betrayal.

“Quiet,” she whispered back. Her voice cracked. She looked over her shoulder to the dark ground below, then across the open field to the trees and the hidden caves by the river. If she could get there, she might fulfill one vow, even as another weakened close to breaking.

The gems did not listen to her. The whispers continued, until they were drowned beneath a new sound.

The beat of heavy drums echoed through the valley as the army of the Western Mountains advanced unchallenged. Sima heard cries rise sharp and high as ironclad soldiers woke the cottages. Artisans and miners begged for their lives and those of their families. Sima’s left foot slipped on the ash-slick wall, then found a place to brace. The weighted cloak pulled at her. The army closed on the palace gates and began to pound at them. When Sima moved again, her right foot slipped. Her shoes were meant for smooth palace floors, not rough walls. She forced herself to lean back against the rope, to press her feet firmly, and to move faster. She tried to forget how high she was and what a fall did to a body. Tried to forget the soldiers now assaulting the palace’s inner gates.

She marked her escape in the rough increments of rope and wall. In broken bands, broken vows, broken gems.

Not so long ago, the palace would have been hidden to its enemies, thanks to the Opaque Sapphire. The Death Astrion, the Steadfast Diamond, and the Star Cabochon would have held the borders and repelled the army. No longer.

A lapidary who betrays their Jewel will be shattered. The second band she’d cut from her wrist. The one her father had soldered for the first time when she was three years old, on the day of the Jewel Lin’s birth. Sima sucked a breath at remembered pain and at the rope’s harsh burn, both. She’d been at Lin’s side every day since. Slept on a pallet by her bed, made her beautiful baubles. She’d been there when her father had drugged their tea, then thrown them bound and gagged into the silver-lined pit below the throne. She had failed to protect her Jewel.

No. She’d also been there to make Lin cover her ears as the rest of the court died. As the gems shattered.

Sima inched closer to the ground as the pounding continued. She heard the muffled sounds of inlaid doors crying out against the iron battering ram: Strength. Fortitude.

Those doors would hold until their last gem broke. When it did, the palace would fall with Lin inside, bound head to toe in platinum chains.

Sima’s feet touched the ground. She gathered the edges of her heavy cloak around her and turned toward the trees. Rough stones tore her soft shoes. Her feet sank deep into mud, but she kept running. If she could make the river, the boatman could smuggle her away and both gems and lapidary would pass out of reach. She would no longer endanger the valley.

The gems whispered, tried to tempt her with power and freedom. They’d done the same when she was a child, before she’d been bound. With every step farther from Lin, the gems grew louder.

The King’s Lapidary, broken by his treachery, had freed the oldest gem among them: the cabochon star ruby, called the Star Cabochon. Now the minor gems clamored for control from within her cloak. Coronation sapphires, topaz, Lin’s birth emeralds. Gems to ease pain, to give courage, if they were bound correctly. Without a proper setting, each could wreak havoc on the valley. For those who could hear them, more bindings were required as protection. Vows.

“A lapidary obeys her Jewel,” Sima whispered, her voice shaking. “A lapidary guards her gems.” She fought to hold her vows in her mind. The gems quieted for the moment. But every lapidary learned early that even the strongest among them had a breaking point.

And Sima knew she was not very strong. She’d been nowhere near as strong as her father. And he’d shattered.

She would not break her promises to Lin. She would keep going.

Lapidaries must know the number of gems in their possession, their settings, their powers. The long vow made her wheeze to say it while she ran. That had been a spiral cuff, the easiest to remove.

Escape, whispered the gems in the smoke and shadows. Release. Sima kept running. She had to hold out long enough to get in a boat. Iron hated deep water. The river was the only way out, though no gem protected the woods. Not anymore.

Oh, Lin, Sima thought, and almost turned around. The lapidaries’ vows broken. The valley endangered once again by its gems. The legend had turned real. Now she was the last lapidary. Now she had become a thief. Now the last Jewel sat chained in her palace, her people betrayed.

The mud of the forest turned to sand and grit beneath Sima’s feet. She was close to the river now. She crouched low, kneeling in the shadows. She could see the water glint through the last trees. No soldiers patrolled the riverbank. She tried to catch her breath.

If she had been strong enough to destroy the minor gems herself, she’d still be at Lin’s side. But they had both spent years living with the gems. If the wrong gem broke, their minds would shatter, like Sima’s father’s. The Western Mountains’ army would claim the rest of the gems. And even a mad lapidary could cut stones, if properly bound.

Sima had to leave. She knew that. Even as it broke her.

“I’ll scatter them to every corner of the six kingdoms, Lin,” Sima whispered again. “I promise. I won’t return.”

A lapidary obeys her Jewel. She would keep that vow. She stepped from the shadows and toward the river, pulling her hood up over her head. She bent her shoulders and prepared to run again.

A shout broke the night behind her. A thick iron gauntlet wrapped her arm. Spun her around.

A plumed iron helm loomed over Sima, dark against the night sky. The soldier cuffed her hard with his other hand, then tossed her over his shoulder. Her vision swam. Her ears rang. Gems whispered, Weakness. Failure. The hem of the cloak dragged heavy through the valley’s ashes all the way back to the palace’s broken gates.

* * *

The only way to be comfortable beneath her veil of chains, Lin discovered, was to kneel on the moonstone floor with Sima’s blue cloak beneath her knees for padding.

She passed her final minutes of freedom thinking of her father’s profile, his ready smile. She pushed aside her last vision of him, his face purple, the choking noises deep in his throat. Replaced that with memories of him on the amber throne, greeting his subjects. She loved that he’d liked to meet their gaze. Said often that he could tell a true valleyman by the way they looked you in the eye.

Father. In the waiting silence of the palace, Lin pressed her fists hard against floor and chain. Felt the pain that bloomed there.

Days earlier, Lin’s gauze betrothal veil had hung beneath her crown, making her father’s face, and those of her brothers and the court, soft in the light. Set in her eleventh year, when she’d been promised to a young prince of the Eastern Seas, the soft veil would not be lifted until she married. In private quarters, she’d peeked from beneath the cloth. She’d studied the way time sat heavy below her father’s eyes when he consulted his lapidary. When he thought she did not see him.

Now her father was gone, and Lin had replaced the soft veil with one made of platinum chain.

If she’d been a proper Jewel, one trained to command powerful lapidaries, to rule a kingdom, she felt she might have come up with a better plan than this. But the commander of the Western Mountains demanded her as bride, sought to gain her throne as well as the valley’s major gems. Lin was determined to slow their plans at least, in her father’s memory. If Lin could get away, perhaps help would come—perhaps from the Eastern Seas—given time.

The door to the great hall and the royal quarters shouted and cracked. Another stone shattered.

A Jewel does not cry. She does not frown. Lin’s Aba said this long ago while pinching her arm. Your kingdom is your setting, you are its light.

Though her Aba would never instruct anyone again, Lin wished now for her guidance, even the kind that pinched her to be quiet, the kind that ignored her questions. She had such doubts, such fears.

What was a Jewel without a lapidary? Without a court? Without a kingdom? Lin traced a finger down the fine mail chains. How did one lead a kingdom? She’d never thought to ask before.

Lin knew her eyes were dry and clear, her face still. These were the facets of herself she had been taught to control.

The part of her that was still afraid listened to the palace doors resist the mountain army. That part jumped with each slam of iron against wood and gold and gem. That part had seen her father dying, breath bubbling foam, lips black with poison.

The doors shattered with a great cry, the gems—a rosette of rubies and diamonds cut in steadfast patterns—falling broken from their settings. She could not often hear gemstones, but this cry was so loud, every member of the palace left alive could hear.

Which meant Lin was the only one who heard: Despair. Surrender.

Running feet in heavy armor crossed the palace’s moonstone tiles. Yells echoed down hallways, punctuated by the sound of more breaking doors. Then Lin’s door smashed open. Two soldiers entered, bragging loudly about mysterious gems and riches, about honor.

When they saw Lin kneeling beneath her veil, they fell silent. They stared.

What do you see? Lin wondered as she rose. A Jewel? A girl? She planted her feet shoulder width apart, as far as the chains would allow. Sima had left her a few ways to defend herself, if they got close enough.

One soldier advanced, his armor creaking. “Don’t cause us any trouble. Commander Nal wants you well.”

Lin waited and the soldier stepped forward again. He reached a hand out to her, keeping his other hand on his sword, well back from her reach.

She spoke then. “You will let me walk on my own. I am a Jewel of the valley.”

The two men laughed. “You were a Jewel. Where are your gems?”

The first soldier caught hold of Lin’s left wrist. She snapped a chain hard between his gauntlet and his arm guard. Dragged hard on it with all her weight, until the man cried out. “Little witch!”

He disentangled himself, but not before she looped another chain around his sword hilt, dangling from his left hand, and had it almost immobilized. She reached for it with her right hand, fingertips straining, but her own chains held her back. The soldier snapped her around, chain mail ringing, into the wall.

“I told you to behave.”

Her head banged against chains and stone. Her ears rang with impact, but she stayed on her feet. She’d never been struck so hard before. Sima had practiced fighting with her, as had her brothers until she’d been betrothed, but none ever hit her like this.

Lin felt the lack of her gems then more than ever. For her pain, Sima would have whispered peace to the opals. The gems in their settings would have magnified the feeling, eased her pain. Sapphires, spoken properly, would have radiated calm.

Instead, Lin had nothing to cushion the blow but despair and loss.

She let go of the sword’s hilt. Stopped trying to tangle the clumsy soldiers in her chains. Beneath her veil, sweat ran into her eyes and made them sting. Her hair caught in the chains and tangled painfully when she turned her head. She tasted iron in her mouth.

The soldier waited until she knelt. Then he secured her hands behind her.

A Jewel holds her head up, Aba might have said. She leads by example.

Except that Aba had never spoken to her of leadership. No one had. Her father, brothers, and sisters had kept much from her. Because she was so young. Our one perfect Jewel, they’d said, and shooed her from the room when the lapidaries conferred and the diplomats debated. She and Sima too.

She’d always demanded to stay, but Aba had started in with the musts and the does nots. Sima had gently steered her from anything remotely like harm. She’d been ordered to care for Lin like any treasure being readied for export.

But when Aba napped, Lin had demanded her lapidary join her to listen at doorways and bribe the maids who waited at table. She’d gathered as much gossip as she could. She’d learned about the kingdoms and what they sold. She’d strained to hear the stories of newfound gems and their risks and powers.

Gossip and heavy doors blurred sound as much as her gauze veil had blurred sight. Lin had seen nothing of the kingdom clearly and she knew it.

The soldier leaned in once to lift Lin to his shoulder. He couldn’t figure out how to put his hands on her without becoming tangled in her chains. Lin, her head throbbing, refused to help him. Fear overwhelmed her. Memories broke loose. She had no gems to calm her. To keep her from shaking as the soldier lifted her to take her to meet the commander. A new betrothal.

Betrayal. Betrothal. She imagined the lapidary’s hands on her father’s goblet, as soldiers grabbed at her chains. Father drank his final wine and the great gems shattered. Strangers in the palace. No one coming to help. Those who hadn’t gone mad from gems or died from poison had run away. But Lin would not run. She would face her fate. She stopped shaking.

Because a Jewel protects their people. It was what her father would have done.

Were there people left to protect? The artisans and miners, the craftsmen, and the people of the valley still lived.

Perhaps the mountain army would relent, once they realized the gems were broken and no Lapidaries remained to speak the gems. Perhaps Lin could stall long enough to negotiate terms that would help her people. She hoped to try.

The soldier released her bound hands and jerked her arms up as high as they would go. The chains rattled. He hauled her forward and bent his shoulder.

Her chains hit his armor like hail on a rooftop, sharp and slick and cold.

Without a word, the soldier turned and carried Lin, last Jewel of the valley, ass-first from her quarters and into his commander’s audience.

* * *

Local Walks: The Ruins. According to local legend, the large blocks of moonstone at the far edge of the area’s largest grazing meadow are from the ancient palace. The walk that takes you there from the river cuts a pleasant half-hour’s time through the forest, and the grazing meadows provide a beautiful view of the Western Mountain range. Exercise caution, as at least one hiker has fallen into an ancient shaft or pit.

Should you choose to continue your walk beyond the Ruins, terrain will shortly become rough. The Valley narrows rapidly as the foothills of the mountains encroach.

. . . FROM A GUIDE TO THE REMOTE RIVER VALLEYS, BY M. LANKIN, EAST QUADRIL

* * *

In the moonstone hall where generations of valley kings had held court, Sima’s robe left a muddy smear on the pale tiles. When she lifted her head, she saw Lin, draped in her chains, hauled through the broken doors behind her.

Despair, the gems said. Sima fought against the word, though it wrapped her tight.

“We caught this one over the wall,” the first soldier said, pushing Sima down before the amber throne. Lin was deposited beside her a moment later. All around them, mountain army guards cleaned their swords and tipped crates of belongings onto the floor.

“These two are all who remain? Impossible. Find the lapidary.” Commander Nal’s voice rang sharp across the moonstones. Her soldiers rushed to obey her.

A woman at the head of an army. Sima’s surprise must have registered on her face, because the soldier delivered a slap so hard it nearly sat her down on the moonstone tiles. Through blurred eyes, Sima eyed the commander’s cloak, looking for the Star Cabochon. The cabochon was the largest ruby in the six kingdoms and the only one that blazed with a six-armed star. Neither Sima nor Lin had found it when they’d searched the bodies of the dead in the palace. She’d found the setting. Had known her father had broken its bindings because for one long moment the cabochon’s unfettered voice had pounded her ears. She had felt its desires—the wants of the deep earth, the pressures wrought by age and power—and had almost been bent to its will. Then the voice silenced and Sima’s father had plummeted from the palace wall, broken.

If the commander had the cabochon, she could compel anyone to do anything she wanted. Whole kingdoms, even.

But the commander wore a plain baldric and iron spurs, not gems. Her heels rang against moonstone when she stepped forward to inspect the platinum cuffs on Lin’s wrists, the tight bands at Lin’s ankles. Though her eyes looked tired and she ran a hand through her dusty hair, the commander bore the grime of a battle fought, not watched. She rode with her men, Sima realized.

Jewels did not do that. They’d needed no armies, thanks to the gems.

“The lapidary knew my terms,” Commander Nal said in a voice as cold as Lin’s chains. “The valley’s most powerful gems for me and a royal Jewel to wed for my son. The strength of mountain and valley together will make a most powerful kingdom. But this is not a veil that will be removed easily, and there are no gems. What is this trick?”

Two guards carried the answer into the hall. A broken body, the man’s ruined face turned black with blood.

At the sight, Nal stepped back. Her spurs sounded alarm.

“The gems broke your lapidary, Commander,” Lin said from behind her veil of chains. “They destroy anyone who does not know how to control them.” She lifted her head to meet Nal’s gaze. Then her chains rang as she bowed low. “If your terms included all that remained of the valley’s treasury, I present my dowry.”

Sima watched Nal’s eyes narrow. She’d seen that look before, on her father’s face. The commander hated dissent. Or, Sima reasoned, feared it enough to destroy it. Sima wished the gems hidden in her cloak would whisper calm to Lin, to herself. Instead, the gems urged Escape. They would not be controlled. Sima held herself still. Focused on Lin and what she could do for her without gems.

Lapidaries heed their Jewel first, gems second. The band that had bound her left forefinger. A vow for a leader’s lapidary, though Lin was raised to marry rather than rule. Her lapidary had needed the skill only to make ornaments that soothed and calmed. Sima had no experience making the glittering weapons that, with the right whisper, sang in a way that compelled those within earshot and beyond.

Lin’s chains shook as she stood upright again.

Nal’s advisors leaned in and murmured advice. Nal held up a hand and moved two steps closer, her boots beating back the quiet. She pulled Lin forward first, then nodded to her men. At her gesture, several guards put their hands on the grate beside the throne.

The white-jade columns of the valley’s royal hall echoed with the sound of metal grinding stone as the soldiers uncovered the ancient pit again. A new, rank smell rose into the hall.

They tossed the body of the king’s lapidary into the pit and left the grate open.

Lin, her golden eyes hidden behind the veil’s chains, stayed silent. Resolute. As she watched, Sima vowed she would not cringe. She would not pull the stones from the cloak, though they whispered Freedom and Power.

If Nal knew what she bore in her cloak, Sima would not be Lin’s lapidary for long. Whether Nal had the Star Cabochon or not.

Nal spoke so that all could hear her. “When you marry my son tomorrow, Jewel, your people will see your face filled with happiness. Then they will follow your example. Remove the veil now.”

Lin swallowed. “Forgive me, Commander, but I cannot. My lapidary spoke binding charms when she soldered my veil around me. As with our mail, which you know well, these chains cannot be cut.”

Nal’s face flushed red and a hush passed over her soldiers. She seemed used to being obeyed.

Lapidaries must obey their Jewel. Sima clenched the aching fingers of her right hand around her left sleeve. In her cloak, hidden gems whispered to her. Escape. Any gem-speaker, trained lapidary or not, in the room would hear them and know of Sima’s doubts, her betrayals. Sima’s shoulders bent. None heard her shame. She was indeed the last lapidary.

“And the rest of my terms. Where are they?” Nal said, so quietly that only Lin and Sima could hear. “The gems. Especially the Star Cabochon.”

Sima startled. She had been so sure her father had hidden the cabochon for the commander to find or dispatched it to them after he’d pried loose the setting. How else to explain the fierce way the mountain army had followed their commander through the valley?

But the cabochon was lost to Nal as well. Sima realized she could see a crack in the commander’s show of strength. She wanted power, but to hold it, she needed the gems.

Sima’s own fears shook her as much as the look on Nal’s face. If someone found the gem and could not bind it properly; if a wild gem-speaker came across the cabochon . . . Sima could barely stand at the thought. Only the Jewels and their lapidaries could keep the valley safe from uncontrolled gems.

But no one had thought the Jeweled Court could fall, leaving two teenage girls to fend for themselves.

No one, thought Sima, except for the king’s own lapidary, in his madness.

“Where is it,” Nal whispered again. She’d mistaken the girls’ silence for collusion. “You will give it to me. You will obey me,” she said to Lin. The commander’s face was turning red.

Sima looked at Lin, praying she would remain silent. If they couldn’t escape, perhaps they could look useless.

The guard who’d carried Sima into the hall stepped forward. He tore the gray cloak from Sima’s shoulders and threw it at Nal’s feet. Everyone heard the clatter that it made as the hem split and small gems spilled. The guard removed Sima’s belt and took the pouch from it. Poured Sima’s vows on the floor.

Nal turned her eyes to Sima, recognition in her gaze. Her voice smoothed, suddenly back in control. “And you will speak it for me, lapidary.”

Defeat, whispered the gems. Sima knew she would never escape now. She would be bound again, and not to Lin.

Then Lin looked up, shards of skin and eye visible through small gaps in the chains. Her eyes spoke defiance. Revenge.

* * *

Lin hoped her voice carried clear across the court like her father’s voice had. “Lapidaries are difficult to control, Commander. They are not as strong as they seem, either. Look at what happened to your traitor.” She raised her eyes to meet Nal’s and felt the woman’s breath hot on her chains. A woman. With a son to marry. And a hunger for a kingdom of her own.

Who needed a lapidary to speak the stones for her.

While Sima stood stiff and shocked at Lin’s side, Lin continued to lie. “I ordered the Star Cabochon destroyed. All you will find in that cloak are minor gems. The kind we give to children.”

Speaking the words almost made them true.

Lin heard whispers behind her, the soldiers wondering at the name of the gem, at its fate. They were intrigued by their commander’s demand. By the gems on the floor. She’d promised them riches. The guards sorted through the small hoard.

“Nothing shaped like a cabochon here, Commander,” said the one who had carried Sima through the door.

Nal would never hold the cabochon, Lin vowed. Listening to the soldiers joke as they dragged her into the hall, she knew the Western Mountains wished to use it to enslave the valley’s own people. And then they would move on to the other kingdoms.

Beside her, Sima stood steadfast in the face of Nal’s anger and Lin’s own betrayal. Lin drew strength from her presence. She straightened her back. Squared her shoulders.

“You are lying,” Nal said. She raised her voice so that the soldiers assembled in the moonstone court could hear. “We know your father was too weak to use your valley’s gems properly, and too weak to destroy them.” Nal lowered her gaze and stared down her nose at Lin. “And you are no better than your father.”

What would a proper Jewel do now? Lin thought quickly. Aba’s guidance was lacking here too. Lin’s father would have turned his back, as he’d done when his lapidary disagreed. Lin responded with silence, lifted her chin higher. Her veil chimed with the motion.

Nal huffed softly and glared at Lin. Then, with a sweep of her cloak and her step ringing on the hall floor, the commander turned away from the Jewel and bowed to Sima.

A guard grappled Lin by her chains and dragged her to the pit. She struggled but forced her mouth shut. She would not call out. She spun in her captor’s arms and looked at Sima once more. The lapidary’s eyes were wide with shock.

Nal spoke in the crisp cadence of command. “Lapidary, you abandoned your vows once already today by running away. Do it again. Leave your Jewel and serve me instead.” Then her voice softened. She reached out to Sima. “Your Jewel has declared you weak. I think you are strong. Cut new stones, train new lapidaries. Undo the chain bindings. Speak the gems for me. You will be well rewarded.”

Lin held her breath as they lowered her into the pit, hoping to hear Sima’s answer over the sound of the chains against the metal walls.

* * *

Under Nal’s gaze, Sima began to sweat. If Nal were the ruler now, she could command a lapidary of her own. But Sima was bound to Lin. Or she had been.

Power, whispered the stones.

Sima thought of the long river and the world beyond the valley. A world she had never seen. She looked at Lin. A lapidary protects their Jewel.

Sima shook her head. She tried to shape her words as disappointment, not dissent. “The cutting wheels were broken before your army came, Commander. There are no more gems. And I am not a very good lapidary.”

Nal narrowed her eyes. “You risk her life as well as yours.”

Sima shook her head again. “To do otherwise would destroy me. As it destroyed my father.” As you destroyed him, she thought.

Despair, whispered the small gems scattered on the floor.

Nal growled, “Find a way around your vows, or you will both die like your fathers.” Her boots struck the moonstone, scratched it raw. Sima looked up in time to see a glimmer of fear behind the anger in the commander’s eyes before the guards dragged Sima to the pit.

Sima recoiled at the thought of more time among the dry bones and echoes of the palace in her ears. But the guards did not hesitate as Nal looked on. They wrapped a long rope around Sima’s chest. Her spine scraped the cold walls and her armpits ached as they sent her down again. Her ears rang with the sound of the grate sliding shut and locking this time. The distant echoes of Lin’s weeping.

Sima’s shoe brushed something soft, then slipped on a bloody robe. She stifled a cry. The morning light shone through the grate, revealing the ancient boneyard’s base. Sima’s foot rested on her father’s robe, beside his broken body.

If she began screaming now, she thought, she might not be able to stop.

* * *

Lin untangled the platinum chains from around her feet and scrambled away from the soft pile of cloth she’d landed on. She smelled dried blood and fluids and, beneath it, an edge of rot. She heard a rat skitter away as a dislodged finger bone clattered to the floor.

A Jewel does not cry.

Slowly Lin moved toward a heavy body splayed on the ground. To where a bare foot held an obscene angle. The tumble had freed it from heavily embroidered purple robes and soft shoes plucked of their jewels. She rested her hand on her father’s ankle, seeing it clearly: cold and stiff. Gone.

No one was coming to help, not from the Eastern Seas or any of the kingdoms. No one knew what had happened.

She bit back a sob. She could find her brothers’ and sisters’ bodies in the pit. She could lie down among them and die here. She could end the Jeweled Valley kingdom and thwart Nal that way.

But if she did that, the valley’s people would be enslaved by the army. Forced to work the mines until Nal found more gems. If Lin lived, she might help the people, somehow. And her father had cared more about the people than anything else.

Lin tried to lift her hand, to pull away from the dead. Her body resisted. “Let me go, then,” she whispered. “Let me lead them.”

She found she could stand. Her chains still hung heavy on her, but as she rose away from her father’s corpse, she began to think of all the lessons she’d learned hiding behind curtains and at doorways. She might not know how to fight like a Jewel, but she knew enough to form her own plan. She would need to best the Western Mountains commander.

Tomorrow Nal would force Lin to marry a child and gain herself a kingdom. She would search until the cabochon was found, then use it. Unless, Lin thought. Unless there was a way to bind Nal, to make her choose differently.

She could offer Commander Nal a different gem, dug from one of the old skulls in the pit. Or perhaps she could find a silent one, something she and Sima had missed in their previous search. She could offer that. Lie about its powers. Lin had heard such tactics discussed over the price of mail and baubles sent beyond the valley. Of prices for gemstones with the valley’s mystique, but, due to cut or disposition, without their power.

If there wasn’t a suitable gem, Lin thought, she could fall back on her original plan: resistance. Nal was the usurper. Lin was the Jewel. Perhaps, in time, her actions—and her horrible, hot, chafing veil—might inspire the people of the valley to rebel against their captors.

Perhaps Lin could live with that. Especially with Sima by her side. And especially if Nal did not have the Star Cabochon.

The kingdom is your setting. You are its light.

She looked at her father’s waxen face then, at the long stretch of his body. It was up to her, now.

She would be the valley’s Jewel, no matter the cost.

From the other side of the pit, she heard commotion. Sima scrambled against the wall as she was lowered into the pit. She had refused Nal too.

The lapidary had always been at her side. Lin breathed relief. She would remain so. Even now, as the light’s angle changed and the pit grew dim and the echoes of the dead swelled in Lin’s ears.

* * *

A lapidary protects their Jewel.

“Come away, Lin,” Sima said. Her Jewel stared unblinking at her father’s corpse and did not respond. Sima found a corner clear of bones and steered Lin toward it.

Commander Nal called to them from above, “Your baubles and trinkets are worthless, lapidary.” A rain of the smallest lesser gems pelted Sima and hit Lin’s veil with hard sounds. “None of them do anything.” Opals and topaz littered the floor, kept from breaking by their settings. Sima noticed Nal had not tossed down the emeralds and sapphires.

Still, she did not respond. She did not look up.

“Next time, it won’t be gems I pour through this grate. You will have better answers for me in the morning,” Nal said, then walked away, her heels loud above them. Her retreat was followed by sounds of the army clearing the hall, headed for softer quarters. Then nothing beyond the whispers of topaz and opal. Despair. Loss.

They tugged at her mind, trying to break it. But the gems were bound, still. And Sima still had two vows. She would not let them tempt her to set them free.

“Can you hear them, Highness?” Sima asked. Lin shook her head. That was a blessing.

Sima’s father’s blue cloak had fallen from his body. She’d picked it up from the ground and kneaded it in her hands now. No more gems hidden in seams or pockets. Sima kept her eye on the bodies as she folded the cloak for Lin.

“We are the kingdom now,” Lin whispered as the links of her platinum veil rattled against the stone walls of their prison. Then she laughed. “Nal thought we would be easy.”

“The valley made chain mail and baubles, Highness. Not fighters,” Sima said. “Without the great gems to protect us, Nal is right.”

In the shadows that her eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to, Sima saw Lin’s head dip under the weight of her veil. She knew so well the sharp angles of Lin’s cheekbones, the soft curve of her ear. These were features that demanded a fine gold diadem linked to a thin nose ring, to draw the eye down to the lips. Not heavy chains.

“If I were a proper lapidary,” Sima began, remembering what Lin had said to Nal.

“Your father was a proper lapidary,” Lin countered, before she pressed her hands to her lips.

“He could hear gems, and control them. He mastered the art of binding; he could cut new gems. All of this made him powerful and greedy for more. But without his vows, he was no lapidary.” Sima choked the words out. “As for me? I abandoned you, then failed to run away. I am no better at my vows.”

Lin looked at Sima, holding her gaze. “You kept your vows. You did not betray me.” She stroked Sima’s hair. The platinum chains jangled as her hand moved.

With her words, the gems were silenced. Sima breathed relief. A lapidary obeys their Jewel.

When she was three, she’d heard the gems for the first time and her father had celebrated, showering the court with garnets and carnelian. She’d clawed her ears bloody until her father had given her the first vow. Had taken the voices away with heat and metal. “Only lapidaries can hear the gems, though all are compelled to obey. Only lapidaries can speak the gems,” he’d praised her, cautiously. More bands followed against the endless barrage of whispers from the valley’s gems. She’d traced her vows until her fingers ached. A lapidary must. A lapidary must not.

She’d learned to bind weak gems with metal bands, quieting them. She’d set them and taught them to whisper small hopes, to reflect her intent, not amplify her fears. She’d learned to draw a bead of solder along a join with heat. But the greater gems had refused to answer her or obey. Father had smoothed her hair so when she’d failed to invoke a gem, though his hands trembled. “The greater gems ignore you,” he’d said, “because you fear them. You have no reason to fear them. A setting stills a gem’s wildness. Your vows protect you from their whispers. With a great gem in an expert bezel, you can bind a kingdom, or destroy it.”

Sima had tried harder. But when the king betrothed the youngest Jewel, the last of his children, to a son of the Eastern Seas, Sima’s father smiled. “He won’t send a powerful lapidary to a seaside court. There is hope for you.”

Now, as her doubts flared, the opals and topaz on the pit floor muttered Escape. Despair.

When Lin finally laid her head on the blue cloak, Sima rose and crossed the damp pit to tend the bodies. Soon, the king lay in as much state as Sima could give him, his arms crossed, his body wrapped in purple. The terrible burns on his mouth, Sima covered with a strip of cloth torn from her own gown. He’d choked and clawed at his throat as the burning poison concealed in his wine had ended him. Had ended the kingdom. Aqua fortis: alumen from the mountains. Used by lapidaries to separate valley diamonds from their mineral cloaks.

A lapidary must not betray their Jewel.

She turned to stand over her father’s body. All angles and shards now. Her anger surged. How could he do this to the court? To her?

He’d shouted curses and horrors from the moment he’d betrayed the king and unbound the Star Cabochon, Sima realized. Shouted more as he broke the other major gems, before he let Sima and Lin out of the pit. He’d babbled the plan at them as he’d climbed the steps up the wall, words tumbling from his mouth like water over river rocks. But he hadn’t made a single sound when he fell.

He, whose pride was his ability to speak. Who had screamed and struggled for control, arguing with the gems, once his vows had broken. He had fallen silent, his jaw locked tight before he died.

Sima reached her fingers out to touch her father’s mouth. It was dry as paper in the damp pit. She pulled on his lip, pressing down until his jaw parted. On her father’s swollen tongue, the Star Cabochon sparkled red and wild. Sima gasped and shut the dead man’s mouth before the stone could whisper her mad too.

Her father’s skull, Sima realized, was what held the Star Cabochon quiet now. Kept her from going mad with its demands. Her hands shook at the thought. How they needed that gem. But could she bind it? And if she did manage that, could she command it?

Sima reached into her sleeve and groaned. Her tools were in her cloak, which Nal had taken.

A lapidary is never without their tools.

She touched her father’s sleeve. Felt the hidden pocket. Loosed an inner tie. His stash of files, cutters, needle pliers, the small bezel wires and the large, the tiny strike-torch—the trust of a Jeweled Valley lapidary—unrolled onto the floor.

She looked at her father’s closed mouth one last time. A lapidary obeys Jewel first, gem second.

Then she whispered her vows over and over to deaden the voice of the ruby. She pried the gem from her father’s mouth. She wrapped it as fast as her fingers would allow in a low bezel.

The six-armed star, a titanium dioxide flaw made radiant by what surrounded it, began to glow within the ruby.

It whispered Power. It sang Control. Sima’s mind spun with images of herself on the amber throne.

She worked faster, singing to drown the gem’s voice. She laced thicker platinum wire to form a claw bezel. Pressed that tight over the gem. Soldered it down. The star dimmed when she wrapped the claws, six of them, over its white arms. When she finished, Sima was drenched in sweat. Her head pounded. And she held the Star Cabochon in her palm.

She raised her head to find Lin standing beside her. She hadn’t heard the Jewel’s chains, she’d been so focused on the gem.

“That is beautiful work,” Lin said, staring at the gem and at the body of the royal lapidary. She turned and searched Sima’s face. “Can you command it?”

“I don’t know. I have only tried to bind it.” To quiet it. Sima thought she saw a flicker of worry cross Lin’s face. “I do not want to risk betraying you. The cabochon will ask me to, if I am not strong enough. It wants its freedom.”

“I know you will not betray me now,” Lin said. “But I ask one thing before you try to speak the gem.” Her hands traced her veil at her brow, where she wanted the cabochon’s bezel placed. “Solder the joins so that no seams exist. And bring out the lesser gems Nal threw back, too.”

Sima opened her mouth to protest.

“No, Sima,” Lin said quietly. She caught Sima’s hands and held them. “This is my choice. It is what I can do for my kingdom.”

Sima nodded, though her heart ached. She’d keep her vow.

“Jewels belong to the valley. The gems too,” Lin said gently. “Not the other way around. Nal wants the Jewel, the valley, and the gems. She wants to make her son a king. She wants the gems to control the people. I must make her choose.”

A lapidary who betrays her Jewel is shattered.

Sima remembered her father’s voice causing the cabochon to glow whenever he’d said its name. Such control. Such power. Soon it had glowed all the time. She remembered how her father had sent to the mountains for supplies he needed to cut new stones to strengthen the kingdom. Aqua fortis, muriatic.

“We must use the cabochon against Nal first. To compel her to leave.” A lapidary must. Sima swallowed her fear and gathered the lesser gems from the pit floor, sparkling in their bezels. She sparked the torch and began to solder the chains around the Star Cabochon’s bezel. The veil, which had hung loose, pulled taut against Lin’s back and neck. “Is it too much?” she asked.

“Keep going.”

Sima placed the lesser gems in the chains of Lin’s veil, wherever they fit. She invoked them as best she could. When moonlight sifted through the grate, the set gems whispered: opals spoke of rebellion; the topaz of revenge. Only the Star Cabochon was silent.

“This could doom you,” she whispered to Lin.

“You are not your father. No hidden faults. No secret temptations. The gems bent him, and the mountains too.”

Sima nodded, hoping Lin was right. She set a final stone in Lin’s cuff.

Lin watched and mused, “Would you help me now if you weren’t oath-bound to me?”

Her words hung in the dark air. Sima remembered the crunch of gravel beneath her feet, the sound of the distant river beyond the burning village. Her hands smoothed the chains on Lin’s veil. Her fingers counted the stones: an opal from Lin’s mother’s ring; a blue topaz from Lin’s brother’s sword, chipped and bloodied.

No greater honor in the valley than to have the gems speak to you, Sima remembered. The greater the gem, the greater the honor. The greater the risk. The engraved bands said so. Father too.

“I will not leave you again,” Sima vowed. “My birth binds me, as does yours.”

As she said it, she felt the strength of this vow in her bones. All the gems fell silent.

“Will you attempt speaking the cabochon?” Lin asked, kneeling so that Sima’s mouth was close to the ruby’s curved dome.

Sima moistened her lips. If Lin asked it, she would.

“Star Cabochon,” Sima whispered, “bound by your bezel, obey.” Her words sank into the ruby and pulled her breath with it. The star pulsed once in the dark and her heart quickened. “Obey,” she repeated, focusing harder than ever before, though her voice faded. The ruby stole her breath but remained silent.

Sima coughed and gagged. She was not strong enough.

Lin sank to the damp ground to comfort her attendant. “You help me in other ways.” She sounded so tired.

Of course, thought Sima. A lapidary must. Sima spoke the gems she could: Breathed on two opals set at Lin’s ears: Rest; Whispered the perfectly faceted topaz she’d cut herself: Peace.

As she did so, Sima wished for a gem that could stop time. Or one that would bring back the dead. What facets would need to be cut to return the Jeweled Court? She had charms against fear, but nothing more potent. She was worse than useless if she could not protect them both from the morning.

Lin calmed. “You are so good with the pleasant gems,” she murmured. “Tomorrow, Sima, we will see what they choose.”

A lapidary obeys her Jewel. Sima bit back a sob. Fear. And loss. She didn’t need gems to amplify those. She concealed her tools in her sleeve and let Lin lean against her, pressing the chains between them into her skin.

* * *

Local Walks: The Jeweled Valley Artisans. As cottage-crafts have again become fashionable, a valley visitor may ask at the Band and Chain for directions to local artisans. The region has few options as compared to other towns mentioned in this guide. However, traditional jewelers still practice local methods for setting semiprecious and precious stones, from wrapping to bezel-setting. When offered the opportunity to purchase a real Jeweled Valley gemstone, note that chips and shards made available to visitors are, at best, of ill quality and, at worst, colored glass. Inquiring after gemstones that sing or speak will not endear you to the local population.

. . . FROM A GUIDE TO THE REMOTE RIVER VALLEYS, BY M. LANKIN, EAST QUADRIL

* * *

When she woke, Lin lay still, so Sima would think she still dreamed. Her lapidary could not protect her from dreams, she knew. She shrugged off the dark gauze of her nightmare: her brothers and sisters, kissing her on her wedding day and then turning to ash.

A Jewel must put kingdom first and self second. This is what Aba should have told her. Instead Aba whispered about beautiful children and fine palaces. About duty and grace. About love. Lin, for her part, had dreamed of seeing the Eastern Seas. She’d looked forward to knowing the world beyond the valley. She had hoped she would grow to love her betrothed and his people.

The gaze of her own valley people had terrified her when she first went through the streets with her father. Behind her veil, she felt their eyes desperate for a glimpse of more than her profile. Their hopes for her sat heavy on her brow. She’d recoiled, and her father had noticed.

A people’s love is not an easy thing. You must return it in kind or it will devour you.

A lapidary’s love too. For there was Sima, always watching her. Finding new ways to protect her, to soothe her.

Lin thought how her fingers might feel unencumbered by baubles. Her brow unmarred by a crown. How she might pass through the streets unrecognized, without her lapidary by her side.

If she could have laughed now, without rousing Sima, she would have.

From the corner of her slitted eyes Lin saw her father’s feet covered in a purple robe. Sima thought her too delicate to tend her own father.

Well. Weren’t most Jewels too delicate? Relying on gems for their influence. Making gems that kept the valley from danger instead of confronting it. Her father had allowed the royal lapidary almost every duty, from assigning courtiers to the design and purpose of new gems. Even the selection of diplomats and traders to negotiate prices on valley goods had been left to lapidaries. Father was interested in the well-being of the people, nothing more. He loved them. And the people loved him for it.

But when Lin peeked through a part in the royal hall’s tapestries, she could see the royal lapidary looking at her father as if he were a prize gem, shaped and bound.

What had Aba said about the lapidaries? That they’d once sat on the amber throne, in the days when the gems ruled the valley. Lin didn’t want to believe that. She saw how they bound themselves in their vows to keep the gems’ voices at bay. How they stood between the Jewels and their gems, controlling them and controlled by them, so that the Jewels could rule without damaging their own minds.

So much sacrifice. For what?

She felt Sima’s arm press against her side as the lapidary dreamed.

When she’d asked Aba, What would set the lapidaries free? Aba had distracted her with a lesson on gem properties. Then she’d gone to have a talk with the king.

Lin had formed a theory. She’d heard enough whispers when she was listening behind curtains. There was one thing that would free the lapidaries and the people. Now it would thwart Nal too. The gem mines must be destroyed. Without the mines, the existing gems would grow old and eventually chip or break. Some in the valley might hear raw gems, but those, still set deep in the earth, wouldn’t strain to compel a person to their will. They wouldn’t need to be controlled. So many of the great gems, the ones that had caused all the problems in the past, were now destroyed. Except for the cabochon.

Perhaps, Lin thought, the gem veins underground had waned. It was true that few powerful gems had been found in recent years. Few that could be cut and bound, fewer still that would bring great power to a dangerous person. She’d overheard her father’s lapidary wanting to arm the valley, to consolidate power; her father had muttered something and stormed out. The lapidary had paced, trapped.

If the mines were shut, eventually the voices would quiet and the lapidaries would be free.

At least one would.

The valley would have to learn to stand on its own.

What would Sima choose? Lin wondered. If she could speak the powerful gems and control them as her father had? Would she choose never to hear them again?

The thought made Lin afraid for herself, a little.

What would Nal choose if she gained the power of the gems? If she gained a lapidary of her own? Lin shuddered and vowed the valley would never find out.

Lin slowly sat up, and Sima woke. The two stared at each other silently. Then Sima sat up too. “I don’t want you to suffer, Lin,” she said. Lin heard the tremble in her voice and felt a lump in her throat. They were two alone, against an army.

Before that horrible night, Sima had slept at her bedside. Tended her every need. She was still tending Lin, trying to fulfill her vows. Lin searched for a way to reply, words that would mean something. “I want you to be free,” she finally said. “Of the gems. Of the Jewels.”

Sima’s face folded in confusion. “That is not my path. We are joined.”

“You’ve never wanted more?”

Her lapidary was silent. Of course she had. Everyone wanted more. Even Lin. She’d wanted to see the Eastern Seas. To remove her veil in public. To fall in love.

Jewels didn’t fall in love. Aba had said so.

Long ago, Lin had seen one of her brothers with his lapidary. She’d known from the way their eyes did not meet that there was no love when they kissed. That what passed between them was just a service. Another bauble.

Lin had wondered what it would be like. Maybe not with Sima, but with someone. Her chain-veil pressed cold against her cheeks. “Would you marry?”

“I might.” Sima’s voice was a whisper.

“Who?”

In the past, when Sima shrugged, her vows had clattered and chimed softly. A merry sound, a bit like laughter. Now, her gesture was silent. She clasped Lin’s hand and the chains around it. “I am bound, like the gems.” She leaned against Lin’s shoulder. Pressed her lips against the veil and Lin’s cheek beneath. “Do not dwell on it, my Jewel.”

Lin felt the warmth of Sima’s mouth on her skin through the chill metal chains. Then Sima gasped and grabbed her head with both hands.

“My Jewel!” she whispered. “I overstepped.” Her eyes darted this way and that, as if she listened to something poisonous. The lesser gems?

Lin couldn’t hear them, but she knew the signs.

“I liked it,” she said, taking Sima’s other hand. “It’s all right.”

Sima blinked. She breathed calmer. Lin felt a twinge of surprise. She’d settled the gems with her own reassurances.

They sat holding hands for a long time.

The first morning light angled into the pit and gilded the edges of the bone pile. A guard climbed down a rope ladder. He gestured to them, and they stood up together. Walked side by side toward the ladder.

* * *

Carefully, so as to keep from tripping on her chains, Lin climbed from the pit first. Her veil chimed with each step. Her gems, even those crusted with gore, sparkled in the morning light. Sima followed her, silent. When Lin halted before the amber throne, Sima stopped too. She turned to look at the new court of the Western Mountains commander. They’d been assembled behind a wall of ironclad soldiers, many among them familiar townspeople. Heads bobbed and whispers filled the room when people saw what sat upon the Jewel’s brow.

Sima tried to put her failures in the pit, as far from her thoughts as the gems’ whispers.

Lin kept her eyes focused on the amber throne and Commander Nal, who now sat upon it, talking to a young boy beside her. He looked so like Nal, Sima did not doubt this was her son.

“For the last time, Jewel Lin, remove that veil so that I may present your betrothed, my son Remir.” Commander Nal did not rise from the throne. She barely looked at Lin, at first. Then her gaze caught on the cabochon.

For once, Nal was speechless. She stared. Sima caught a glint of something beneath the anger. Fear. Then the commander ground her heel into the floor. “You dare to flaunt that ruby? After denying you had it.” Her fingers curled around the throne’s arm as if she wished to pluck the Star Cabochon from Lin’s forehead like a fruit.

Meantime, the boy stared at Lin, dazzled. He could not have been more than twelve years old. Sima held her breath.

“Once again, Commander, I cannot remove the veil.” Lin’s cloaked face gave nothing away.

Sima let her breath out and whispered to the Star Cabochon: Compel them to leave. The six-arm star glowed deep inside the ruby’s polished dome and made no reply. Sima felt defeat tear at her throat once more.

A lapidary must know her limits when invoking the gems of the court.

Lin turned her head left, then right, acknowledging the valley artisans gathered beyond the rows of guards. The tiny chains of her garment rang softly as she turned again. She paused when her eyes reached Remir.

So young, Sima thought. He will not lead. His mother will.

The boy, clothed in bleached goat leather, stared at Lin’s golden skin, barely visible between the platinum links and gemstones that wrapped her from head to ankle. He cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice pitched high and cracked. “Why can’t you?”

Nal turned to address her son, but Lin spoke first.

“My father did not need the Star Cabochon to command our people. He had their love. You have tried to take the valley by stealth and force. And now by marriage. So you must choose: the Star Cabochon, or me.”

Lin lifted her arms, and chains ran like silver rivers up her arms to the thick bezel at her brow. “My lapidary spoke shatter charms. Breaking the chains will destroy the cabochon. You are right that we cannot do it ourselves, but you can.”

Remir’s mouth opened. He cocked his head, listening. Lin’s chains jangled, the only sound in the hall. Then the meaning of Lin’s words swept across the moonstone tiles, around the white-jade pillars. Sima heard stifled gasps. Guards in battle-scarred mail gripped the hilts of their swords.

But it was Remir’s reaction that was most interesting to Sima. He swayed before the Star Cabochon. And the star glowed in return. Unless Sima was seeing things.

Sima felt her heart race. Perhaps Remir could hear gems. Perhaps he could hear a stone that she could not. With no training. And no vows.

Lapidaries must train all those who hear the stones.

The engraved bands demanded this duty of all lapidaries. Could Sima manage it where she had failed in so many things? Sima jumped, startled from her thoughts when Nal’s fist slammed against the amber throne.

“When we made our offer, Jewel Lin, it was in good faith. You present us with a false promise of your own.”

Lin did not answer. She did not look up. Days ago, she would have cried in fear or looked to her brothers for help. She had already learned more than a youngest Jewel should ever know. An opaque diplomacy, Sima thought. While I have gained little skill with the Star Cabochon.

Remir turned to Sima, his voice clear and high. “You made these chains. You can undo it. Set her free.”

A lapidary who betrays their Jewel is shattered.

Sima’s fingers flexed. She willed them still. That was not Lin’s command. Sima would be no better than her father if she betrayed her Jewel.

The doors to the royal hall—now reinforced with iron—creaked open. Across the hall, ten guards pushed an enormous rock crystal vase. Mountain ranges and a river valley had been carved into the vase’s sides. Metal wheels rattled over the moonstone tiles, groaning under the weight of the vase. When the guards stopped before the amber throne, the wheels squeaked and the crystal resonated with a high-pitched tone.

“Your wedding gift, Jewel Lin,” Nal said. She held out a hand to her son, who looked at the vase, then back to Lin, his eyes wide. Nal’s dark gaze took in the assembled court. “Do you not see the Western Mountains’ wealth and strength?”

The vase towered over Lin and Sima. Its value was beyond measure.

Lin, in a clear voice, said, “The valley’s strength is its people, Commander. Not in gems or armor.”

Nal tutted. “Surely you’ve learned from your father’s example, Jewel Lin?”

Sima shivered at the memory of the bodies in the pit and the night spent watching over their broken bones.

The commander drew a deep breath. “We need the valley, its artisans and miners, its mail. The armies of the east threaten us even now.” Her eyes hardened to two dark stones. She pressed her lips together. “There is one way through. We have brought with us more aqua fortis for refining gems and metal. We have muriatic from our iron and salt mines.”

Nal turned to Sima. “Do you know what happens when you combine muriatic and aqua fortis, lapidary?”

“Aqua regia.” Water of kings. The words escaped Sima’s mouth before she could seal her lips. She’d used the combination once under her father’s instruction to dissolve a gold setting from around a stone. Later she’d poured off the gold and recaptured it. But not before she’d burned skin from her arm with the acid. She swallowed, remembering. Lin’s veil made a shifting sound, but the Jewel did not speak.

Remir paled. “You wouldn’t. Can’t you hear them?”

His mother ignored him. She should be careful, Sima thought.

But then Nal ordered Sima, “You will cut her out of this and in no way damage the Star Cabochon. What happens to the Jewel is of waning interest to me.”

Her son opened his mouth to argue, but Nal stopped him with her hand. “We will not be held hostage by our conquests and their archaic rules,” she said. “We have our own people to protect.”

She waved forward a guard, bearing the bulky tools of a Mountain mine. The guard pressed a cold iron saw into Sima’s hand.

The vase loomed before Sima, hard and clear. The court of her ancestors stood silent. She remembered the burn of aqua regia on her arm and weighed her vows to Lin. Betrayal, whispered a topaz in Lin’s veil.

She startled when Lin’s fingers grazed her free hand. Then a sharp point poked her right index finger. The culet of a gem, pressed from Lin’s fingers to hers: a blue topaz. The gem whispered Courage.

Sima took a deep breath and in her steadiest voice spoke the words that Lin demanded of her. “Commander, I cannot.”

At their commander’s gesture, three guards brought a wooden ladder and half-hauled, half-lifted Lin into the vase. Then Sima. The iron tools they took away.

When they were finished, Nal stood and pointed to the vase. “Tomorrow, we will fill that vase with aqua regia. The gems and platinum she wears will be ours, and we will have no need of a burial. Your people will have nothing left to love.” Nal pushed her son from the room, calling over her shoulder, “I suggest you remember a way to free her first.”

The court grew noisy with shouts as the soldiers cleared the room. “The Jewel of the people,” someone cried before an ironclad guard struck him down and dragged him away.

The moonstone tiles rang with metal striking metal as the remaining guards threw newly wrought iron bolts across the court’s doors.

* * *

Lin leaned against Sima inside the echoing vase. She had no words to describe the sadness she felt. Aba hadn’t taught her anything near enough to face this. The hall reverberated with her kingdom’s losses.

The walls of the vase showed the valley in reverse, the mountains and clouds clear cuts in the crystal, while the sky was opaque. The cold of the crystal made her chains freeze. The Star Cabochon felt heavy on Lin’s brow. She tried to think.

Nal’s goal was legitimacy. A kingdom of her own. Lin wondered what Nal’s doubts were. What could make her loose her grasp on the valley long enough for the people to rebel? She’d seen something when she’d said “no” to Nal. Not only strength. Fear too.

Nal had expected to find a lapidary she could control. She’d planned treachery, not a battle of wills. With either of them.

Lin turned to look at Sima. Her lapidary’s face was more familiar than her own. Always by her side. Sima’s golden skin and dark eyes were faded with exhaustion and hunger. She suffered. Lin wished she could ease Sima’s pain. But she could neither speak the gems nor hear them. She was glad for that. Gems could be stolen or broken. They could be turned against you. To rely on them was to become weak. That had been her father’s mistake. And it was about to be Nal’s.

But Sima’s loyalty had proven stronger than both gems and fear. Lin felt her friend’s strength shore up her own reserves. She needed the lapidary as much as her father had needed the gems.

To face down Nal and deny her commands, Lin needed all of her strength. With a start, Lin realized that Sima was prepared to remain with her, no matter what happened. She would die at Lin’s side.

“No,” Lin whispered. There had to be another way. She would not ask the lapidary to die for her. If that weakened her as a Jewel, so be it.

But would Sima risk escape again, if she ordered her to? What would distract the guards? If she could escape, would Sima be strong enough to take Lin’s message to the valley people? That the mines must be destroyed? The supports pulled from the caverns and holes dug to let in river and rain until the shafts collapsed? If Sima could find enough alum and aqua fortis—and here Lin felt a slightly hysterical laugh rise in her chest like a bubble—the valley’s farmers could combine that with guano and fertilizer to blow up the mines too.

So many things she wanted to tell her people. Lin hoped Sima would be able to make them listen. She hoped her own sacrifice would be enough of a message to them.

Sima’s eyes were dark as bloodstone as she searched Lin’s visage. For once, Lin was glad of the veil. She kept silent and watched her friend, holding her face in her memory. Feeling the kiss on her cheek again.

Sima opened her mouth to speak, but Lin pressed a finger against her lips. She’d made her choice. Sima could not protect her from what she would do.

* * *

Lapidaries must never be without their tools.

Sima stared at Lin through the chains. Lin’s finger rested for a long time on her lips, and Sima did not brush it away. When the moon rose and light streamed through the high windows set in the palace walls, the moonstone tiles and white-jade columns glowed.

She counted the guards. Wished she could speak a gem to make them lean on their weapons and sleep. No. She could only make Lin sleep. Worse than worthless here.

“I am sorry,” Lin said. “I would release you from your vows.” Her chains screeched against the rock crystal.

The gems fell silent. Sima’s jaw worked. Freedom. Escape. Betrayal.

Finally she spoke. “You are protecting our people.” Sima was embarrassed that her voice broke. She still lacked strength. “You are my Jewel. I will not leave you.”

The last Jewel, Sima thought. My Lin. A lapidary must protect their Jewel. A lapidary must obey their Jewel. The two vows, still wrapping her earlobes, fought each other in Sima’s mind. No one in the Jeweled Valley Court could have predicted that. So many vows had been broken already. The gems sensed her struggle. They reached for her weaknesses, hoping to amplify them. Sima pressed her hands to her ears at their whispers. Breaking more vows would destroy her and Lin too. Not breaking them would have the same effect. She had to choose.

Sima reached inside her sleeve for her tools. Bravery, sang the blue topaz Lin had given her, tucked into Sima’s left vow. Calm, said the opals at Lin’s ears. Sima looked at the chains, where she’d made the solders and joins.

In the silence of the evening, she heard another sound, from the left of the throne. The guards’ door opening. Footsteps.

“Step outside,” a young voice ordered. Iron armor screeched and a man laughed. The guards stayed where they were. “I would speak to my betrothed alone,” the voice said again. “Commander Nal said I should try to reason with her.”

At this, the guards grumbled but agreed to step outside the great doors. The hall rumbled with their movements, then stilled.

A face pressed against the side of the vase. Remir. Lin’s intended. Sima nudged Lin and pointed.

“The gem said I should come,” Remir stuttered. His words came muffled through the glass. His face was a blur, but first one hand, then the other pressed against the glass. “Earlier. But I couldn’t get away.”

Which gem? Sima wondered. “Can you hear them now?” How could he hear them, when Lin could not?

Remir’s hands slid down the vase. “Only sometimes. Faint. Not now. I can get you out. I have a rope.”

“What does he mean, Sima?” Lin whispered low enough that Remir didn’t hear her.

Sima chewed her lip. Another gem-speaker? Untrained. And old enough that he might be dangerous. “Why risk your mother’s anger just because you think you heard something?”

Remir stepped back. “I did hear it. And now I want to help you. My mother is going about this the wrong way.”

“She didn’t send you here tonight,” Lin said.

“No.”

Sima’s thoughts raced. Perhaps they did not need to escape. Perhaps the valley’s legacy was not lost. If Lin and Remir married and Sima trained Remir, the valley might someday regain power within the Mountain kingdom. She pictured herself wrapping Remir’s arms with metal bands. She wondered if he was too old to learn the vows. If he would one day break, like the King’s Lapidary.

She wondered what the boy would choose, if he could: gems or people.

His face once again pressed against the glass, as close to Lin and the gems as he could get.

“Would you support me against Nal, Remir? Would you choose me over the gems?” Lin asked. She had the same questions as Sima. Her voice filled with hope.

The blur of Remir’s head nodded. “I would.”

But Sima noticed his hesitation. The crack in his voice. A flaw? Perhaps. Or a lie.

“We could slip away tonight,” Remir continued. “The guards would chase us, but we could use the gem against them. It told me so.”

He would use a gem against his own people. The cabochon. It told me so. More than a flaw. Sima reached for Lin’s hand. She thought of Lin’s vision: the valley safe from conquerors and cabochon. Sima thought quickly. The gems. The topaz and opals she knew she could command. Calm. Forget. If Remir heard the cabochon through the wall of the vase, perhaps the others could reach him too.

For a moment, the cabochon’s star glowed unbidden at Lin’s forehead, then faded.

“I won’t allow the Star Cabochon to survive,” Lin said. “If I cannot break it, I will bury it.”

“I understand,” Remir said. “I will help you.” His voice was oddly flat.

Sima realized she was shaking her head slowly from side to side. This felt wrong. Remir was too willing to agree. “Prove it,” she said. “Tomorrow. Argue Lin’s case before the court. Before Nal. Protect the Jewel.”

“Is that your wish, Lin?” The boy’s voice was calm, though the vase made it echo strangely. He waited. Sima began to whisper.

“It is,” Lin said.

“Remir, listen,” Sima said. Sleep, she whispered to the opals. Walk away, to the topaz.

Remir yawned. His hands pulled away from the crystal wall of the vase. Lin and Sima listened to his footsteps recede. The guards’ door opened, then closed.

“Perhaps we have a chance,” Lin whispered, uncertain. She yawned too.

Sima was not so sure. “The boy,” she said, “can hear the gems. The Star Cabochon.”

Lin’s grip on Sima’s hand tightened, but Sima was staring at the gem on her brow. When she spoke its name, it had glowed. It had heard her. It hadn’t answered, but that was a start. A better chance.

Sima slowly turned, scraping an arm against the rough crystal. Her eyes searched for Lin’s through the veil of chains. The room had darkened with moonset. The thought of what the dawn would bring, of the aqua regia’s acrid smell filling the room, the orange gas bubbling, and the screams, made Sima speak quickly. “The gem controls him, as his mother does. He is untrained. You would not survive long here. You must escape.” Escape.

“You could fix it, Sima,” Lin said. “You spoke the gem just now. The look on your face gave you away.”

“Perhaps,” Sima answered. She imagined compelling Nal to return to the Western Mountains, teaching Remir the ways of a lapidary. She wondered if she could.

A lapidary must—

Sima thought of all the vows her father had broken; how he betrayed the valley and his Jewel. How the Mountain Court had bent his oaths.

Sima smoothed her hand across Lin’s chains and whispered to the lesser gems. Lin leaned against the vase’s side and touched Sima’s cheek with her free hand. Sima looked at the Star Cabochon in its clutch setting. She might use it to control a future king.

A lapidary must not—

Sima couldn’t breathe in the vase’s confines. She gestured for Lin to move closer to her, and the exhausted Jewel obeyed. The two pressed together while Sima whispered the stones she knew well, the ones that would answer her when she kept her vows: the opals, the topaz. Rest.

“Sima, no,” Lin murmured, but in a few minutes she slept, leaning heavily against Sima’s shoulder.

Sima ran her fingers along the platinum chains and found the few rings she knew to be weakest: rings not tied to the cabochon bezel’s tension setting. These she chiseled with her file. She braced Lin’s forehead against her shoulder. Lin slept on.

They could both run, without Remir. The guards had not returned from their post outside the doors. She’d heard loud snoring from beyond the vase.

They could leave the chains and help each other out of the vase. They could scale the palace walls and run for the river. But the cabochon would shatter.

Lapidaries must preserve their Jewels. Lapidaries must protect the gems in their care.

Too many vows had been broken already. The loosed gems would tear Sima’s mind to shreds.

Meanwhile, Nal’s army would pursue Lin. Remir might learn to invoke the gems without rules or bindings. He might make more. This would drive him mad, but the destruction he might cause in the meantime made Sima work even faster. His connection to the gems would outweigh any feeling he had for the people.

Sima slid an arm into the veil, fingers spread wide to brace the chains near the bezel. She hummed to quiet the shatter charms and steadied the most important links with her files, bracing them against solder points and knots. She pushed her foot behind Lin’s, then slipped three small gems from their settings. Even the Jewel didn’t know about these. Lin’s cuffs loosened.

Gems began to whisper as their settings were disturbed. Revenge. Peace. Power. Sorrow. Escape. Sima knew what they offered her. She moved faster to finish what she’d begun.

Gingerly, Sima pulled Lin, still sleeping, from the veil with one hand, while her other arm shook with the effort of bracing the headdress. Her elbow banged the vase’s wall. Her head pulsed with the gems’ demands. Then Sima stepped beneath the veil and lowered the headdress onto her own forehead. The chain mail and the heavy cabochon masked her face. Dear Valley, the weight.

A lapidary must work through pain.

Lin woke when the veil’s burden lifted from her skin. Still groggy, she reached to pull Sima from the garment.

“We’ll take the veil to the caves and hide,” she said. “We will find a way.”

“You must leave the cabochon here, and me with it, Lin,” Sima said. “They will think the lapidary ran away again, not the Jewel. They do not know your face. They will not seek you out.”

“I will no longer be a Jewel.” Lin’s mouth curved into a frown. The gems were silent. The white-jade columns tinted pink with the sunrise.

Sima encouraged her. “You will strengthen your people. You will lead them.”

Lin looked at Sima and began to object. Sima interrupted. “This is my choice. Let me make it.”

Lin nodded, her eyes soft. “To be a lapidary is a greater honor.”

The gems stayed silent.

Sima gave Lin the soft blue dress she’d worn for days. It smelled rank, even from a distance. She removed the torch and the solder wire from the sleeve and began to close the chains in the mail, to tighten the cuffs around her arms. She passed Lin her files and the blue topaz. Courage.

Lin pushed it back. “This gem is yours.”

Sima swallowed and tightened her fingers around the topaz, then pressed it into a loop of mail near her ear. She passed Lin her cloak and soldered the final loops in the veil. She invoked the gems she’d tucked in Lin’s pocket: the rose topaz for peace, a king’s battle opal for vengeance. Through the chains, Sima glimpsed Lin’s face shining with tears.

Lin adjusted the veil so the bezel rested comfortably against Sima’s forehead. She tucked Sima’s tools into a sleeve.

“Go,” Sima ordered her. She cupped her hands and Lin placed one foot in them. Sima lifted Lin high enough to grip the vase’s edge. She listened as Lin’s footsteps receded toward the guards’ door, hoping that Remir had left it unbolted.

Forget, she’d whispered to him through the gems.

* * *

Local Walks: The Jewel and Her Lapidary. A walk to be taken in conjunction with the Variegated Riverbank (p. 29). A half-mile downriver from the Deaf King, near the entrance to the area’s largest cave, stands a limestone and cobalt formation resembling two joined figures. No more than a meter in height, the formation is said to bring luck and good fortune. According to local guides, a lapidary assigned to each member of the royal family from birth acted as advisor, servant, and jeweler. This is likely a conflation of multiple roles. Other nearby formations include the Iron Gauntlet and the Bezel.

. . . FROM A GUIDE TO THE REMOTE RIVER VALLEYS, BY M. LANKIN, EAST QUADRIL

* * *

Beyond the wall, the valley slept. A white wisp of smoke rose from a riverman’s cottage in the predawn. Lin crept between the forest’s shadows through the night. The snores of the Mountain guards told her no one saw her passage.

She felt the jewels impelling her onward, to escape, to regain the kingdom. She wondered at what they were saying to cause her so much confidence.

And she felt something else too. Her feet through Sima’s soft shoes, stepping rough across the forest floor and its pointed leaves and nettles. Her heart, urging her into the unknown. Out of the formal setting where Lin had spent her life. She did not know how she would be received anywhere. Or if. She might be caught as a thief or a rogue. Without her robes and finery, she looked like any other young woman. She looked like Sima.

Lin clutched her fist around the gems hidden in the sleeve of her—Sima’s—robe. Her eyes burned and her stomach clenched. Sima.

What had Aba told her? What had her sisters said? To be a Jewel is a sacrifice of the heart. You must become hardened to the losses.

She didn’t want to become hard. But the valley needed a leader who understood the dangers. There was still danger, from the mountain army and from the valley’s gems—the unmined stones still called from the caverns to some, they caused too much trouble when freed for those who didn’t understand how to control them. Lin would have to devise ways to close the mines, to keep them hidden from the army.

Lin stumbled toward the cottage. She wrapped herself in her cloak and knelt by the small rabbit hutch, until the riverman’s wife nearly tripped over her.

“Who is this?” the riverman’s wife said.

* * *

Sunlight poured in the high windows, making the hall and the assembled court sparkle. Commander Nal addressed the valley’s sole Jewel. “See how your people betray you. They do not love you after all. You will die alone. Your gems will fall into our hands, unencumbered.”

Now came the hardest decision.

Sima said nothing, so her voice could not give Lin away. She did not smile, though no one would see her if she did. A lapidary must remain resolute at all times.

Nal’s guards lifted a vat of clear muriatic to one side of the vase and a vat of clear aqua fortis to the other. The smell burned Sima’s nose.

“This is your final chance, Jewel.”

Sima heard Remir rise to his feet. She held her breath. She could not put him to sleep now. What would he choose?

“Please,” begged the boy. Sima thought of the words she’d once worn, of teaching Remir to solder, to bind gems with metal. “Please,” the boy said again. “Do what you need to, but get the gems.”

Sima pressed her lips together.

Using iron grapples, the guards poured the vats’ contents into the vase. The combined acids turned orange as they merged at Sima’s feet. A cloud of acrid gas rose and burned her eyes. Beyond the vase’s walls, she heard scrambling. Someone retched.

Sima bit her lip, vowing to stay silent as the Jeweled Valley at dawn. The burn on her arm pulsed with remembered pain. Aqua regia sluiced over the platinum chains. A small gem fell from its setting and clinked to the vase’s base. Lin’s older sister’s rare green topaz: love. An opal: truth. Sima’s eyes could not see it in the cloud. She could hear them singing. Her legs began to buckle. The pain turned her jaw to amber, her ears to opal. The topaz pulsed in her hand as the reign of the valley Jewels ended.

When Sima could bear no more, she snapped the chain mail link she’d filed nearly in half the night before. She felt a crack against her forehead.

Remir shrieked. The edge of his voice softened to a wordless howl.

Yes, whispered Sima and the gem together. Go, Sima whispered. Freedom, said the gem. Yes.

With a noise like a mineshaft collapsing, a scream, and a fire all at once, the Star Cabochon of the Jeweled Valley shattered in its cage.

* * *

“Who are you?” the riverman’s wife repeated, her voice breaking on the last word. She reached for a thick piece of wood. Behind her, the boats still burned.

“Malin,” the girl said, the name gem-hard in her mouth. But her heart softened with each syllable. She would carry both their memories, beyond the castle wall.

The riverman’s wife held out a cautious hand, taking in Malin’s courtier clothing. “You are from the palace.” It was not a question.

“Not anymore.” Malin took the woman’s hand and walked toward the river with her.

Each step farther from the palace echoed with memories and loss. The Jewels. The gems. Sima. The sun rose and they heard a sharp sound, distant and muted. A shattering sound. She bit hard on her lip. Forced herself to stay strong.

Malin let the woman lead her past the burning boats, to a cave mouth where locals once gathered beside a small stone formation. Malin ate a few bites of food with the woman, though it tasted like ash in her mouth. Once night fell, valley men and women joined them. They asked her of news from the palace. She looked at their faces, their bruises and wounds. “The palace is lost. The Jewels are lost.”

She let them weep. Held her own tears back, still, though she was desperate to mourn. That would come later. After the valley was safe. When the people had quieted, she prepared to speak. “Before she died, the last Jewel said we must shut the mines.” She let her words sink in. “We must begin to break the Mountain’s grip, and the gems’ hold on us, from within.”

The men and women who were left of her people began to make plans, their eyes as sharp and shining as gemstones: blue and gold and deepest amber. Malin let them speak to her.

YOU’LL SURELY DROWN HERE IF YOU STAY

Alyssa Wong

When the desert finally lets you go, naked and stumbling, your body humming with raw power and the song of dead things coiled under your tongue, you find Marisol waiting for you at the edge of the bluffs. She’s dressed in long sleeves and a skirt over her boots, her black hair tucked under a hat and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the night cold. Madam Lettie’s bony horse whuffs at you in the glow of the lantern as you approach.

“You were gone longer than usual,” says Marisol. “I got worried.”

Human speech is always slow to return on the nights when the desert calls you. You nod in reply.

Marisol sets the lantern down and pulls off her blanket to wrap around you. Most girls her age would flinch away from touching a naked boy’s skin, but her fingers brush yours indifferently. She’s seen your body as many times as you’ve seen hers, in all of its pitiful states: bruised and scratched; bramble–bled from running through the thorns with the coyotes; finger–marked by rough hands. “Did you step on any scorpions?”

You turn your head and spit a brown, dusty gob into the dirt. You hope she doesn’t notice the fur and tiny bone fragments caught in it. “Who do you take me for?”

A wan grin spreads across her face, and she almost looks like the kid she is—that you both are. “Check ‘em anyway.”

You glance at Madam Lettie’s horse instead of at your battered bare feet. “She’ll be furious when she finds out that you took Belle.”

“She’s always furious,” says Marisol. She swings onto the horse, and the animal shivers as you climb up behind her. “Besides. She pretends otherwise, but she knows how you get home every night. She’s never raised a hand to me about it.”

“Good. If she does, tell me. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Just hold the lantern,” says Marisol. She nudges Belle forward and the three of you turn toward the road leading to the Bisden mines. A few pinpricks of lamplight glimmer along the ridge from the town beyond, and the path snakes through the sand like a pale sidewinder.

The horse’s back rolls beneath you like dirt in a goldrusher’s pan, and you practice breathing. In, out, with the rhythm of the hooves and Marisol’s heartbeat.

“Some of the men from the big mining company out east visited the house while you were gone,” Marisol says. “The city folk who rode in on the California–bound train yesterday. They’re staying across the street.”

Oh. “Which did you have?” you say.

“The tall one. The one with dark brown hair and the Yankee accent. He speaks pretty enough, but he’s not . . . kind.” She shrugs. “But then, who is to a whore?”

You hold her tighter.

“One of them asked for you.”

“For me?” you say. No one notices you, not you, the small and half–feral boy kept in the back to clean the kitchen. Bless Madam Lettie’s heart for taking you in, you poor soul, with your dead witch–father and propensity to make discarded bones quiver and shake like living things. Poor souls, both.

“He looked like some kind of preacher. But there was something off about him.” She won’t look at you, not while she’s guiding the horse back to town, but when you press your face against the back of her neck, strands of hair tickling your cheek, you can feel her breathing relax. “I don’t know why, but he reminded me of you.”

“How so?”

“I’m not sure,” Marisol says. “But the city folk are planning to hold a party at Madam Lettie’s in a few days, so he’ll probably be back tomorrow with the rest. You can see for yourself then.”

You’ve witnessed a few parties at Madam Lettie’s, and mostly that means a rough night for Marisol and the rest of the girls at the brothel. Madam Lettie will probably have you attend the guests, too. Just thinking about it makes you wince.

The town is quiet, the sound of Belle’s hooves muffled against the sand. Madam Lettie’s is the only building with candles still burning in the windows, and the empty, boarded up buildings littering the stretch remind you of when the town was still lively, before the silver dried up, before the desert’s call grew too loud for you to ignore.

Marisol helps you up the stairs, past the bar, and together you stumble into her room. It stinks of sweat and musk, but probably no worse than you do. The two of you collapse into Marisol’s bed. It’s barely big enough for one person and your own cot is down the hall, but everything in your body aches, and Marisol feels so human against your bones. You need that right now.

“I saw my pa tonight,” you say into Marisol’s hair. Her dark braids smell like smoke, and you bury your face into them, just behind her ear. “Walking among the brush with the rest of the dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t find your folks, though. I heard their voices, but I couldn’t dig a path deeper into the mine.” You’d torn your hands to pieces, ripped the skin and flesh down to the bone, and the desert had built you back out of sand and briars, then pushed you rudely away from the entrance to the collapsed mineshaft. The wandering skeletons of slain cattle and men had stopped their nighttime shambling to watch through ant–eaten eyes. Stay away from this, child.

She sucks in a breath. “If you found them, could you bring them back?”

You close your eyes. “No. Not like you want. I could make their bodies move, but it wouldn’t be real.”

She nods and holds your hand tight. It’s a conversation you’ve had a few times, ever since the desert started pulling you away from Madam Lettie’s every night and you started being able to coax dead things into dancing for you. This time, Marisol says, very softly, “Sometimes I wonder if that would be enough, just seeing them again.”

It wouldn’t, but you don’t need to tell her that. Her grip on your hand means that she knows.

One of the company men appears on the doorstep in the morning, black hair slicked away from his naked face, too young and too nervous to be standing in front of a saloon–turned–cathouse in broad daylight. Madam Lettie, who is lean and tough like rawhide, lets him in, and as they pace the ground floor and talk about plans for Saturday night, you and Marisol sneak peeks from behind the kitchen door.

“That’s not the preacher man, is it?” you say. Marisol shakes her head. She’s helping you with laundry today, and the filthy sheets bunch up between you, muffling the sounds of your bodies moving.

“I figured it out,” she says, “the preacher man’s strangeness. He walked like his feet didn’t touch the ground, and he stank. God, he was foul.”

“You’ve said the same about me,” you say. And it’s true; usually you’re so much dirt that you could grow plants in the creases of your arms and fingers, if the sullen clouds over Bisden ever gave water. But when she glances at you, there’s no humor in her eyes.

“Ellis, I’m telling you. That man reeked like a body left bloating in the sun at high noon. I never smelled something so bad in my life, even from across the room.”

The familiarity of it builds a sense of relief and dread in you. Almost every one of the customers Madam Lettie demanded you take had said something similar. They’d never lasted long; the last rancher who’d slipped his hands into your trousers had bitten your neck, then turned and vomited off the edge of the bed.

Lettie had kept his money and made you clean the floor, which you had done patiently, without complaint. By then it had become a system between you two, and you’ve seen and done worse beneath this roof. Though she cannot stop you from wandering the desert at night with the dead things, just as she could not stop your father before you, she can at least turn a profit off of your peculiarities.

The saloon doors swing open and a group of men walk in. The one at the front is immaculate and fair–skinned, like he’s never spent a day sweating under the sun. His pale blond hair is combed back in a smooth wave, and he walks with the easy confidence of a wealthy man. Behind him is the tallest man you’ve ever seen, a gaunt, bent figure in priest’s robes. A dizzying rush of power—the call of the desert, the urge to shed your clothes and run with the coyotes through the brush, to dig up the dead to dance with—hits you down to your bones.

The preacher man turns his head and looks straight at you, grinning past the bar with empty eyes.

Marisol grabs your hand so tight it hurts. “Stop that,” she says, quiet and sharp. “You’re doing it again.”

Harriet, the girl on kitchen duty today, is backing away from the sink, knife held high in shaking hands. The sound of bones rattling against metal fills your ears, and you turn to look; the chicken she’d been preparing for dinner staggers back to its feet, half–skinned, half–butchered. Its flesh hangs in open, swaying flaps. The discarded pile of plucked feathers begins to swirl around it like an obscene snowfall.

“Witchcraft,” Harriet whispers. She’s new; she’s never seen you do this before. The rest of the girls have some inkling of your strangeness; they cross themselves when they pass you, and they stay well away from you at night, when the dust in your skin begins to prickle with electrifying power.

“Stop that,” Marisol snaps, at her, at you, at both of you. “Ellis, breathe. Bring it down.”

You can feel each movement the dead chicken takes, your blood pounding in time with its footsteps.

“Ellis!”

You focus, breathe out, and force your fists to unclench. The chicken’s headless neck whips toward you, snakelike, its ragged circle of severed bone and muscle gleaming at you like a malevolent eye. Its toenails rasp against the sink. Calm down, you think, and it sways, sinking to its knees. Go back to sleep.

“What is going on here?” Madam Lettie demands from the kitchen door. Her body fills the entrance, arms outstretched and resting on the doorframe to keep anyone from coming in behind her. At her back are the company men, the pale one who looks like a prince and his nervous, dark–haired retainer. And the preacher man, gaunt and grinning. He nods at you the way a man would a lady, as if he’d just doffed his hat.

The desert’s voice screams through your body, an unfiltered torrent of power tearing at you like the most vicious of dust storms. Any control you have over the bird evaporates in its wake. The chicken launches itself from the sink—no feathers, no gravity, no sense but magic to keep it aloft—and flies at Madam Lettie, talons extended. She screams and beats it away. The company men behind her are shouting, and there is blood and meat everywhere. You barely hear Marisol yell your name before you’re out the back door, running blind and fast, back towards the bluffs. Come, the desert sings, come home my son, and you scarcely make it past the town’s border before your human form falls away and you are wild, uncontainable, raw, free.

Time passes differently for you when you aren’t human. Animals operate on cycles of eat–sleep–hide–stalk, and although you are not quite an animal like this, you’ve found that the land, which beats in your blood, operates on similar principles. Cycles of heat–burn–cool–dark, the wind blowing balefully over the baked, cracked earth. Now is heat–burn, and though the ground sears your feet, you barely notice.

Your father’s grave is marked by a pair of yucca trees, their straggly branches clawing toward the heavens. There is no tombstone. A cluster of scorched stones lie scattered at the feet of the trees, marred by some mysterious immolation, and the coyotes have taken to leaving small gifts of bones there as well.

You pace before the grave, listening for your mother’s voice. Her sighs are in the scuttle of desert rats in their hiding holes, the scratch–scratch of burrowing owls’ claws against the dirt as they run, stick–legged, chasing the shade. She’s called you here for a reason, you’re sure, but in this form you have no voice with which to answer her, and so you must wait.

Instead of the desert’s comforting murmur, the words of your father’s favorite lullaby trickle down around you, sung in a raspy human voice:

“Shake, shake, yucca tree,

“Rain and silver over me—”

All of the animal bones lying on his grave begin to tremble, shivering and crying clack–clack clack. Dread bites you deep in the stomach, and you snarl with all of your mouths, the sand swirling at your feet.

“Stormclouds, gather in the sky,

“Mockingbird and quail, fly;

“My love, my love, come haste away!

“You’ll surely drown here if you stay.”

The bones on the ground snap together into a single line pointing to the trunk of the biggest yucca. High above you perches the preacher man, contorted into a shape with his knees raised to his ears. His black clothing seems to glimmer in the heat, and the way his neck arcs makes him look like a giant vulture, begrudgingly fitted into human form. His shadow stretches long and thin across the ground like a single, accusing finger.

“I was the one who taught him that song, you know.” The preacher man blinks at you and smiles again. “A prayer to bring down the rain. And this town could use some resurrection, couldn’t it?”

The branch he’s sitting on doesn’t look strong enough to hold a man of his size, but that doesn’t bother the preacher man. In a blink, he’s gone from the tree, and in another blink, he’s standing over you, hunched shoulders blocking out the moonlight. The moon, you realize, is out, a pale sliver cutting the night sky.

Marisol is right. The preacher man smells like death.

“You truly are the spitting image of him,” he murmurs. “I suppose he was your father, wasn’t he. You have the same hair, the color of the clay deep in the earth. And the same talent for making sleeping things rise up when they shouldn’t.” The preacher man cocks his head, adjusting his wide–brimmed hat. “I taught him that, too. He was mine before he came to seek his fortune out west, with all the rest of his brothers. Before he turned his back on me for my sister.”

The desert hisses in you, and you can feel your body humming with her rage, her resentment, her regret. Coyotes slink out of the darkness to flank you, their eyes glinting like rough–cut gems. But the preacher man just laughs, his mouth too wide.

“Twice–blessed, twice–cursed. You got my gift, and hers.” The preacher man leans in, his dry, fetid breath ghosting across your face. “But I didn’t come out here just to scare you. There is a storm brewing, little one. Something bigger than you can understand, brought here by the men who came on the train.”

That gives the desert pause and she coils in you like a waiting snake. Your heart is beating so fast that if you were still human, you would worry about passing out. But before you can try to force words out, to ask him what he means, a voice rings across the plain.

“Ellis?”

There’s a small figure in the distance, one arm raised to shield their eyes. It’s Marisol, her bandana tied around her face, pulled over her nose to protect her from the dust. No horse this time; she must have run after you on foot.

No, no, you don’t want her to see you like this. Your dust storm kicks up into a twisting column, sending howling gusts to buffet her slight form. Marisol staggers back.

“Dammit, Ellis! Stop!” You can barely hear her over the storm, and the preacher man chuckles.

“What a loyal friend. But remember, child—bad things happen to men who marry the desert. Don’t forget what they did to your father, out on your mother’s territory, when they thought no one could see.” The preacher man touches your forehead with one long, thin hand, and his fingers are stiff and ice cold. “People fear what they don’t understand. That’s why, no matter what you choose, you will always end up alone.”

“Ellis!” Marisol is struggling, fighting her way through the blinding gale. When you glance back, the preacher man has vanished. “Ellis, please, get a hold of yourself!”

The power roars through your veins still, but with the preacher man gone, so is some of the intense pressure in your head. No, you think, tamping it down forcefully. If he is right, then this power is yours—a gift from your mother and from your father, to do with as you please. You will make it obey.

And for the first time in your life, for the first time since your father died and the desert began to cast its madness on you in his stead, you can feel your mother’s power bend to your will, into a shape you can control. You clench your fist, and the winds die down to a quiet whisper. At the same time, you search back through yourself for the human frame that feels familiar to you, a boy with a small, bony body and earth–dark skin. A shape to fit your own power into.

No sooner have you slipped back into your own body than Marisol’s arms are around you, clutching you tight. “Lord. I thought I’d lost you.”

You sag into her embrace, feeling drained but so full. You’ve never come back to yourself like this before, not until your mother was ready to let you go. “I thought so too,” you murmur against her cheek. “But I’m here. I’m not leaving.”

“Chrissakes, I’m always cleaning up your messes.” The bite in her voice makes you flinch, but her arms are gentle around you. Her footprints have been wiped away behind her, but even the wind can’t scour away the deep, sharp divots her heels carved out of the ground as she fought her way to you.

“I’m sorry,” you say. God, you love her so much. And not the way so many men desire women; you’ve never felt that, for anyone, in all your life. But Marisol has never touched you that way, and the warmth of her body here, now, is more than enough.

Still, the preacher man’s words ring in your ears. You will always end up alone.

“It’s all right.” She begins to tug you away, back toward the direction of the town. “I’m used to it by now.”

“Wait.” You hold her hand, and she looks back at you, her braids framed in the scant light. “Marisol . . . you saw me. Like that.”

“Yes.”

You suck in a breath. “Weren’t you scared?”

Her grip on your hand tightens. “I’ve seen worse.” And she has; you both have, from the cave–in that orphaned the both of you, in different ways, to the haunted look in her eyes as you help her tighten her corset strings every evening, her hand shaking as she unstoppers the tiny bottle of laudanum she keeps behind the vanity mirror.

But she has never seen you as desert–wild as you were tonight, a mad creature stripped down to the bone. And there is some comfort in knowing that she has witnessed you, and that she can still look at you without turning her face away.

“Let’s go back,” Marisol says, very gently. She doesn’t say home, and you’re grateful for that.

Madam Lettie’s hand cracks hard against your face. “Where have you been?” she hisses. You don’t answer her—she knows already where you’ve been, you smell like the coyotes and animal piss and dried blood—and she hits you again. “I told you not to run off like that. You shamed me in front of our guests, fleeing past them like some mad, filthy creature. Thank the Lord they still want to use the saloon on Saturday.” Lettie wipes her hand on her skirt like she’s touched the most disgusting thing she’s ever seen. You remember the times, when you were little and your father was still alive, when she used to touch your face with kind, gentle hands. When she held you because she wanted to, not because she had to. You remember the soft look in her eyes. You remember when she still used your name.

You think she might have loved you, once, before she learned to fear you.

“Now, now, Lettie.” She starts—it seems she hadn’t heard the two company men walk up behind her. It’s the pale, princely one and his nervous, dark–haired companion. You wonder, briefly, if the latter is the one who had spent that first night with Marisol. The princely man has a cultured accent; you can tell by the way Madam Lettie straightens her shoulders unconsciously when he speaks to her. “It’s quite all right. I don’t think we’ve had proper introductions, though.” He looks straight at you, not through you the way so many people do. “My name is William Lacombe. And your name is?”

Madam Lettie’s lips purse. “The girls call him Ellis.”

He barely looks at her. “Are you Ellis, then?”

“Yes,” you say, very quietly. The preacher man is not with them, and you can’t sense his presence any more. You’re not fool enough to think he’s gone, though.

William’s gaze travels to Marisol, who is standing silently behind you, and stops. “And the brave girl who ran out after our new friend. Who might you be?”

“Marisol,” she says. William reaches out and takes her hand; then he brings it to his lips and kisses the back of it. Madam Lettie’s expression goes sour enough to pickle a jar of vegetables. William’s companion’s brow tightens.

“Marisol.” He says her name the way the desert says yours, like the heat crackling across the rocks. Marisol. Heat crackles across your face, too, at the sound of it in his mouth. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. Has Lettie told you why I’m here?”

“No, sir.” She withdraws her hand, uncertainty flickering through her eyes, and takes a step back. William only smiles and straightens up, looking from Marisol to you.

“Well, the Lacombe Mining Company owns the land that this town is built on. We developed the mine just outside the bluffs. It took a few months to hear of the tragic news of the collapsed shaft—so many good men were lost, and for that, I offer my deepest condolences.” His eyes look sad, and he holds his hat to his chest. This gesture makes you trust him exactly as much as you did before, if not less. “Of course, the vein of silver was blocked off as well. Samuel—my companion here—and I have been sent to evaluate the damages to the mine and draw up the appropriate compensation for the families of the lost miners.”

“When did the fits start?” Samuel says abruptly, staring at you. It seems he isn’t one for pleasantries. “The thing with the bones.”

“The boy’s done this since his father died.” Madam Lettie won’t even say his name, for all he’d adored her. You’d adored her too, then, even if she was your father’s second wife.

“Is he yours?”

“Heavens, no. He was his father’s child and came to me as such.”

William coughs and shoots Samuel a sharp glance. “We’ve never seen anything like this out east. Is this a common . . . phenomenon in your town?”

“I hear you burn your witches out east,” says Madam Lettie. You stare at the floor and try to disappear. The place where she slapped you aches, a sensation that won’t go away, and your heart feels like it’s been scratched deep by acacia thorns. “No, he’s the only one, since his father died. Small mercies. In spite of his bedevilments, I’ve kept him under my roof ever since.”

“I see.” A hand slips under your chin to tilt your face up, and you find yourself looking into William’s eyes. “Ellis, it seems you have a rare and unique gift. It may well be devils’ work, but I am a God–fearing man who has seen many things, and I have no fear of you. I would like you to accompany us to survey the mine tomorrow morning.”

“Sirs, that would be a terrible inconvenience—”

“We can compensate you for his time, of course.”

“He doesn’t have a horse,” says Madam Lettie. Her fists are knotted in her skirt, and there is something in her voice—a tinge of panic, perhaps—that reminds you of Marisol. It makes you think again. Maybe it’s your imagination, but you haven’t heard her talk about you like this since . . . well. “It’s a dangerous area, gentlemen. Surely you would be better served by taking some of the men displaced by the cave–in. They have their own firearms as well.”

“We have our own men. What we don’t have is someone who can talk to the dead.” Your breath catches in your throat. He had seen you, after all. Out of the corner of your vision, Marisol looks scared as well, her shoulders tense like she’s ready to grab you and run.

William releases your face. “We ride at dawn. Pack accordingly, Ellis.”

“You can’t take him.” To your surprise, it’s not Marisol who says this, but Madam Lettie, stepping between the two of you. “I won’t allow it.”

William turns a beautiful smile on her. “My dear Lettie, it isn’t a request.”

As he sweeps out the doors and into the night, Samuel stalking at his heels, you realize that William is humming something under his breath. It takes you a moment to recognize that it is your father’s song.

You leave the town on a borrowed horse as the sun begins to stretch over the horizon, Marisol’s stained red bandana wrapped around your throat. Marisol is up to see you off, her shawl wrapped around her to protect her from the cold night.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she says as you ready your horse, her voice pitched low enough to carry to your ears alone. “If you see any of those walking things, gallop the hell out of there. These city folk be damned.”

She is so fierce, such a survivor, your Marisol. Each of you is the other’s only friend, and so much more. You open your mouth to tell her how you feel, but what comes out instead is, “The prince can’t take his eyes off of you. This could be your ticket out, Marisol.”

She kisses your cheek so she doesn’t have to look at your face, and that’s how you know that she knows, too. William, with his money and his fondness for her. With his life a cross–continental train ride away from this terrible, dying town, away from the saloons where tiny bottles are hidden behind mirrors and men with rough hands prowl the corridors, some new place where a person like you or Marisol could start over.

When Marisol pulls back, her dark curls tickling your cheek, her eyes are hard. “Don’t pin your hopes on dreams. Just get back to me in one piece, Ellis.”

You kiss her cheek and swing up onto the horse. “I will.” I won’t leave you alone.

“Come, boy,” orders Samuel. He and the rest of the company men are already mounted and ready to go, with William at the head of the party. All of them are cloaked in ponchos or jackets to ward off the sun, when it arrives. There is no sign of the preacher man.

Obedient, you follow, the coyotes howling in your head, your head down and hands tight on the reins. You don’t look back at Marisol, but you can feel her growing smaller and smaller in the distance, the distance of the land between you stretching with each new step.

The company men ride all day with little conversation, and the sun rises in a slow arc, glaring overhead like a malignant eye. It’s hard to stay on the horse; you don’t have much practice riding, and the horse is fidgety, as if it can smell the feralness on you.

After last night, your grip on your wild, brittle, real self is firmer, but being away from town and heading into the heartland of your mother’s territory slowly erodes your self–control. At Madam Lettie’s, you drift like a ghost through the halls, sweeping floors, cooking meals, disappearing into the shadows. But here, as the mountains cup the sky with deep brown hands, the call to bound away, howling, with the coyotes in the brush becomes almost unbearable. Your skin itches, as if your clothes are too tight, and you ache to be among the yucca and wild honeysuckle, the fields of bones where the mesas rise in strange bestial shapes from the flat ground.

The company men have few words for you, although Samuel keeps a distrustful eye on you, always placing himself between your horse and William’s. William, as gracious as he’d been in town, seems to have retreated into himself, watching the horizon silently.

The first of the dead things stumbles across your path when your party is a few miles away from the mine. It looks like the corpse of a bull, an unlucky casualty of a careless, ambitious rustler, judging by the bullet holes punched in its ragged hide. The men pull up short, and Samuel hauls your horse up to the front, your reins fisted in his hand. The bull stares at you both with ponderous, sightless eyes and paws the ground.

“Can you stop it?” demands Samuel. Behind him, the men murmur among themselves. Cursed and possessed and devil work catch your ears.

“I don’t know,” you murmur.

“You best figure it out fast,” says Samuel, and he’s right; the dead bull, mostly bones and empty skin, has thrown its head down, ready to charge. It has no lungs, no voice, and its silence is unnerving. “Guns aren’t going to help against something like that.”

You swallow and focus. The desert’s power curls in your palm, the way it had behaved for you the night before, but it feels jagged, uneven. Still, you hold out your hand. Stop.

The animal skeleton quivers and lifts its head tentatively. Then it takes a step toward you. Then another, and another, until it breaks into a gallop. The horses behind you began to panic, and so do their riders.

“Kill it!” hisses Samuel. Sweat beads his dark brow. “Dammit, boy, you’re the only one who can put it down!”

“Ellis!” shouts William. “Do it!”

“I can’t!” you cry. Stop! Stop! But it’s not listening. You’ve never taken a dead thing apart before, only made them come together, and then only by accident. And then William is beside you, gripping your shoulder. Power spikes through you—

Shake, shake, silver and rain over me—

—and the desert, your mother, screams through you. Lightning strikes through your vision, and when you blink, gasping for breath, there are visible threads of power running through the undead animal, bright as silver. You close your fist and pull on those strings. STOP.

The bull stops in its tracks, frozen, only a few yards from you. And then it spasms and collapses into a heap of bones and sun–weathered skin.

There is a moment of utter stillness. And then William laughs, clapping you hard on the shoulder. Your concentration shatters, and you fight to keep your power, your human shape, contained. “Well done!”

Your head is full of the screams of dying cattle, your nose the acrid scent of gunpowder, and you sway on your horse, trying to hold on.

The rest of the men stay away from you, huddling together. Only Samuel rides up to you and William, reining his horse in as close as he can get.

“What were you thinking?” he snaps. But he’s not asking you, he’s asking William, who just grins. “You could have gotten yourself killed!”

You realize it then. He looks at William the way you look at Marisol. He looks at William like he would do anything for him, even die, unquestioning, for him, his name on his lips.

“It worked, Sam,” says William. He sounds giddy. “He took it apart. Did you see that?” He turns to you almost feverishly. “If he can wake the dead, why can’t he put them back to sleep? I knew it, I was right!” His hand is still on your shoulder, but you have the feeling that, as he stares into your face, he’s looking through you. “Ellis, you’re our chance to get to the mine safely. That’s why we need you.”

“One time isn’t a pattern,” says Samuel. “It’s not safe. And the boy looks like he’s about to fall over. Assuming this . . . witchcraft works again, how long can he keep this up?”

Witchcraft. You swallow past the knot in your throat as William and Samuel argue in low voices. Witchcraft is what got your father killed. His songs to bring down the rain and his nighttime journeys to visit your mother, to worship her on her soil.

People fear what they don’t understand.

A flask bumps your hand, and you find Samuel looking at you with dark eyes. Behind him, William has galloped to join the rest of the men, waving them in. “Drink,” Samuel says quietly. “You’re parched, aren’t you.”

You take his flask uncertainly. But the water is good, tinny and warm on your tongue.

“Can you get us to the mine?” he asks. He lets you drink as much as you want, and you appreciate that small kindness.

“I don’t know,” you say, staring at your hands. “I didn’t know I could make the dead . . . stop. Not until now.”

“You best learn.” Samuel stops you when you try to hand his flask back. “Once William makes up his fool mind about something, it’s impossible to change it. We’ll get to the mine or we’ll die trying.” He tilts his chin up at you. “I would prefer not to die. And I hope to deliver every one of our men safely home. That includes you.”

The sun beats down as he rides away, motioning to William. As you shade your eyes, clutching his canteen and squinting past the acacias in the direction of the mine, you can still taste gunpowder. And although you see nothing on the flat horizon beyond the mesas, you swear you can hear the preacher man’s soft chuckle rolling with the chollas across the sands.

The sky over the mine is as cloudless as it has been since the night your father was murdered. Dead men and animals pace the grounds in tattered skins; skeletal owls and sparrows perch on the broken wooden beams that used to frame the entrance to the mine, chattering their empty beaks. It smells worse than rancid, and your mother’s displeasure boils through you as too–hot power, the compulsion to slough off your skin, to turn around and flee into the brush and never come back.

But you do not leave. Instead, you hold your ground in front of the company of men and call the dead down, one by one, forcing them to their knees, then to their faces. Their deaths wash over you as you lay them to rest
stabbed eaten whole my mouth is so dry will I never see my children again suffocating bleeding broken neck teeth tearing at me I don’t want to die
and they go peacefully. You, though, do not; after only a few of these anti–resurrections, you’re shaking and howling and barely able to stay on your horse for it. The men watch fearfully from a distance, and the horse almost bucks you off before Samuel catches its head, whispering soothing words into its ear. The only other person who comes close is William, his hair glittering bright as a newly unearthed vein of silver.

“You can do it, Ellis,” William says in a low voice. Samuel watches you wordlessly, his hand at his hip, thumb resting on the handle of his pistol.

No one else has been able to come close to the mine in the three months since the collapse. You force the dead things into order, their wild disarray of energy into something malleable, and send them back into stillness.

hurts bleeding starving my mouth is so dry ripped to pieces I can’t feel my legs don’t let me die like this please lantern flickering out oh god someone save me

The miners’ voices flood your mind, and you scream, your vision darkening. You are underground, crushed and unable to move, your ribs splintering with the weight of immovable rock. Last thoughts flicker through your head: a woman’s face, a dog left tied to a post outside with no one to let it free, Marisol standing on the street in threadbare clothes, looking up at the sign for Madam Lettie’s establishment.

STOP.

And then the darkness is different, and so is the body you’re in; it is nighttime, and pinpricks of starlight shine through the burlap sack over your head. The rough bark of a yucca tree digs into your back, and your wrists are bound behind you. There are so many voices, some the same as the miners’. There is a sharp sound, like steel against rock, and then flame springs to being at your feet, licking at your legs. Bright red flames, and you think Lettie, and Ellis, and then there are no more thoughts, only pain.

STOP STOP STOP STOP

“Don’t shoot!” William shouts. Rough hands shove you, and the visions break, along with your grip on the dead things. You land hard in the red dirt. William dismounts and stands over you, an arm extended to shield you from the rest of the men.

Samuel’s pistol is cocked and pointed at your head. It’s not the only gun aimed at you among the company.

“You caught on fire,” Samuel says. His voice is bland, and there’s an indiscernible look on his face.

Your skin seems intact, no burn marks in sight. But you know what you felt, and for a moment, you know that you’d lost yourself to your father the way you’d lost yourself to your mother so many times before. “Are they gone?” you rasp.

“Not quite,” says William. Sweat sheens his face and his hair is disheveled as he pushes it back with his fingers.

Heaps of bones cover the ground, collapsed amidst the brittlebrush that crawls across the sand. Most of your mother’s handiwork destroyed, her curse unraveled, not gone. But there are still a few meandering about, gathered in front of the mine’s entrance. They don’t look like proper animals; they’ve been cobbled together from the large, abandoned bones of many different bodies, some human, some beast. By now, you feel much the same.

You’re so tired, and your limbs are trembling. You’ve pulled so much power into yourself that it aches. And the desert is not pleased; the searing heat of her anger boils in you, demanding the change, demanding you leave, demanding, demanding.

“Just a few more,” says William, reaching down to clasp your shoulder. As his skin touches yours, you flinch—that same explosive rush of energy hits you, the way it had in the kitchen, and with the first dead bull. But this time, the flashback of another death takes over your vision

Samuel, sweet, stupid Samuel, blood on his shirt, holding your hand, calling your name frantically, and the dry laughter of the preacher man, an offer you wouldn’t refuse even if you could. An offer of power, an image of the dead working the mines across the country, tireless, without pay, without complaint. And of you, watching the numbers tick upward in the newspapers. You laugh, too, with your last breath, and seal the preacher man’s deal with a trembling finger smeared in your own blood
and you stagger back.

“You can do it,” says William. Pale, immaculate, cold to the touch. He smells of expensive cologne, but under that, a sickly, fetid stink.

“So can you,” you say. He stills. “Can’t you.”

He blinks once, his eyes clear and colorless, and flicks a finger at the skeletons. They collapse in a rainfall of bones. “Good job, Ellis,” he says in a voice that carries to his men. But he’s not looking at them.

“Why did you need me?”

“This goddamn desert,” he says in a voice that is only for you. At the same time, he reaches for you, and you shrink back. “In the past few months, we’ve sent so many men to scout out the mines in this area. Not a single one who traveled south of the Rio de Lino and west of the Rio Grande made it back, even the ones who could bid the dead do their bidding. Devoured by this goddamn desert, torn apart by the coyotes, sent wandering in circles until they collapsed and died. But when I heard about your father’s death, and about you, it all clicked into place.”

The preacher man’s words echo back. He was mine before he came to seek his fortune out west, with all the rest of his brothers. Before he turned his back on me for my sister.

William smiles. “She has no love for men like us. But she wouldn’t dare hurt you. Not her own child, and his.” He hauls you to your feet, his grip tight on your arm. “Come, Ellis. Walk with me, and stay close. Let’s get a good look at the mine.” He gestures, and the rest of the men approach cautiously, treading among the fallen bodies, leaving a wide berth around you and occasionally making the sign against evil as they pass.

This man doesn’t care about the town. None of his pretty words to Madam Lettie about recompense, or about reopening the mine to reestablish commerce, matter. The town is just a field of bodies to use as he pleases. And he will use you, too. As a shield against your mother’s wrath, as a hostage to make the desert behave.

But his power is different from yours. He has only the preacher man’s blessing, and you have something else.

The desert change roars through you like a tide, a demand you can’t ignore to undo your skin and let your real self run free. This time, you embrace it.

COME, demands the desert, and you shatter, finally, fully.

One of the other men is the first to see what is happening to you, your skin peeling off in long slabs, shedding your human form for something uncontainable, something lightning–legged, bent–backed, and wild. All of the desert’s power you’d pulled into yourself courses through your limbs, back into the ground, silvered lines darting across the baked earth. All around, the piles of bones tremble and quiver, then rise slowly into the air, taking their forms once again.

“Monster!” he screams. Damn you, for there is only relief in your heart that he did not call you witch.

The desert rides you, and you are no longer your own. The winds kick up, blowing sheets of dust into the men’s faces. If your mother has her way, and you yours, you will bury them all here, deep in the mine, with the rest of the humans.

What about Marisol? a small part of you asks, but it is drowned out by your mother’s and your combined fury.

William has stumbled away, his hands out, and you can feel him fighting you for control of the dead. He’s much stronger than you, much more experienced. But your mother pours more power into you, and you fight back. The sandstorm grows, blinding the company men who are fumbling for their guns.

The desert’s dead are approaching when Samuel steps between you and William, his pistol leveled at you. There is fear, but his arm is steady.

“Samuel, no!” roars William, but there is no hesitation in Samuel’s eyes.

His pistol cracks, and you think of Marisol in that split second before impact, and then there is nothing.

“Shake, shake, yucca tree,

“Rain and silver over me—”

The clack–clack clack of bones all around you. The preacher man’s voice is creaky, parched as he sings, his hands brushing over your stone–still chest. Another, familiar voice joins his, a woman’s voice like the whisper of scorpions’ legs through the bone fields, a gentle tickle laced with the promise of poison. The ground hums under you with your mother’s grief.

Stormclouds, gather in the sky,

Mockingbird and quail, fly;

My love, my love, come haste away!

You’ll surely drown here if you stay.

Your eyes are open, the evening sun glaring into your eyes, but you can’t blink. Every muscle is frozen in place, and it takes great effort to open your mouth.

“Am I dead?” you croak. You can’t feel your chest moving.

“Very,” says the preacher man. “But that’s nothing new.”

Slowly, you force your fingers to clench. “How long have I been . . . gone?”

“A few days. They tried to burn your body, but I wasn’t about to lose another like that.” His mouth twists into a parody of a smile. “When the flame wouldn’t take, they left you to the vultures.”

Fools, says your mother. The desert herself, the heat and mercilessness, wrapped like a vice around your heart. You wonder if you’ve been dead since the first night she called you into herself, that first time you gave up your body to become something more. As if I would let my creatures hurt you. Would that you could say the same of yours, brother.

The preacher man winces. It looks strange, with his empty sockets. “I indulged that boy too much. I thought I could keep him east, out of your territory. But his ambition overgrew his sense—”

He murdered my son!

“This child is my kin, too,” hisses the preacher man. “Don’t deny me that, sister. You’re the one who let them flee back to their town, with not a scratch on them to pay for their misdeeds.”

I would have those who harmed him pay accordingly.

“So would I. That may be the first matter we’ve agreed on in centuries.”

“Whose side are you on?” you say. The preacher man cocks his head.

“Mine. And yours, though you may not believe it.” He offers you his hand, and you take it, your body moving slowly. “I always was too fond of your father,” he says in a low voice. “And your mother never let me forget it.”

You wonder whose power is making this possible, his or your mother’s. You are hyperaware of the dead things around you, their potential energy, just as you are of all the creatures skittering and prowling the earth, and the ancient hum of the ground.

The preacher man leads you to the entrance of the mine, where boulders and broken beams cluster tight, blocking the way. “What do you see?”

You place your hands on the boulders and close your eyes, focusing. The lines of your mother’s power spread like a net through your mind’s eye. And far beneath, pockets of the dead, of fallen men.

It has been three months since your unforgiving mother, in her grief, took your father’s burnt body into her own and spat out every dead desert thing for miles around, sent them haunting the mine, the roads, until there was nowhere safe to go but down, down, down into the earth. And when the mineshaft collapsed, suffocating the miners in the tunnels, she still would not forgive, and held the rainclouds three months away from the town so that nothing would grow.

You open your eyes. “I see potential.”

The preacher man cackles, and even your mother gives a pleased crackle. I told you he was clever.

The men from out east, even William with all of his power, could not move the boulders on their own. They would be back with proper mining equipment, maybe even fancy machines from their waterside cities, but likely not for months.

You don’t need months. Not with the preacher man on one side of you and your mother all around, her presence like that of an oncoming monsoon.

“Lend me your power,” you say. For something this big, you’ll need more than what you have. More control, more finesse.

Pledge yourself to us. And we will pledge ourselves to you. Both of us. The preacher man nods.

You’re already dead, and you can’t go back like this, even if you wanted to. You have nothing to lose; nothing to lose except Marisol, and by now, surely news of your death has reached her. In dying, you have lost her, too.

You hold your hands out to both of them in assent. “Yes,” you say simply.

Your name in your mother’s voice is like the rush of the monsoon rains, water licking the parched ground, the promise of life and destruction at the same time. The preacher man leans in, places his dry forehead against yours, and breathes your name in a whisper that promises rest, peace, the passing of time in the cold, dark earth.

You hum, swaying. The preacher man unbuttons his coat and drapes it across your shoulders. His desiccated torso, open from sternum to belly, houses small, dark–furred fruit bats in its hollow. They hang upside down from the battered, broken ribs, their eyes glimmering at you like little embers.

“Shake, shake, yucca tree, rain and silver over me,” you sing softly. The purr of your mother’s power in you, her pleasure and approval, fills your hands. You see the pattern of the boulders, and you ease them free, one by one. They glide along the lines of your mother’s power, smooth as oil.

The miners come next, their broken, insect–eaten bodies beginning to stir. The preacher man hums along with you, his movements matching yours. “Stormclouds, gather in the sky, oh mockingbird and quail, fly.” With each insistent pull of your power, the miners stumble free into the dying light, into the empty air. You take each one in hand, and you focus, and the signs of death melt away. Their bodies are still cold, but the insect damage, the shattered limbs, are gone. You know, somehow, that this is only temporary and cannot last. But one night will be enough.

You think of Marisol and your cold chest tightens. It will have to be enough.

The movements of every desert creature buzz at the edge of your consciousness. The beating of owls’ wings as they stalk their prey, the soft–tailed mice that creep beyond the rocks to howl at the moon in voices like tiny wolves. The slow unfurling of saguaro blossoms, petals parting against the inquisitive noses of tiny bats. The snakes twining in their burrows, tongues flicking out to taste for moisture in the air. And your coyotes, padding to meet you, glittering finery stolen from dead men clutched tight in their mouths, finery that is just your size.

You let the rail–thin crows lift the preacher’s coat from your shoulders and shrug on the new jacket. It shimmers like moonlight. The desert creatures dress you as the coyotes pace, brushing against the preacher man and barking their devotion aloud. He smiles, knowing that devotion isn’t for him.

When you are clad in the glittering suit, as fine as any prince from Marisol’s books, a bird made of bones brings you a single honeysuckle blossom. You tuck the stem into a neat bullet hole in the jacket, right above at your chest.

“Come, then, my dear Ellis,” says the preacher man. “Don’t be late to your own party.”

Indeed, your mother says. She sounds almost pleased. Go show them a night they’ll never forget.

You grin, baring your teeth. Something almost like a horse trots up to you, its skeletal hooves clacking against the hard ground. As you swing atop it and turn towards the road, the miners begin to follow, not with slow and shambling steps, but with the pace of confident men. High above you, the beginnings of dark clouds slink across the sky, something unseen for months.

My love, my love, come haste away!

You’ll surely drown here if you stay.

The moon rises high and sharp, like a glittering mouth, as you descend upon the town. Your mount tosses its head, and if it had any lungs, or anything else inside its ragged bones, it might have whickered.

Banjos and fiddles brighten the air in Madam Lettie’s saloon. The band stutters in confusion as you push the doors open, the dead men at your back. It is crowded inside, and as people take in the scene, gasps rise around you. Some gasps of fear, some gasps of joy at an apparent miracle. But you only have eyes for one person, and you stalk through the mass of townsfolk reaching for their loved ones, pushing them out of your way.

There she is, dancing with William amidst a circle of company men. He is immaculate once again, dressed in a fine–tailored suit. Her hair is done up, her corset laced (albeit clumsily; perhaps Harriet helped her in your stead), a smile painted on her face. You recognize the set of her jaw, the way she holds her mouth when she’s fighting back sorrow.

“Marisol,” you say, and her head snaps toward you, eyes widening. You pace towards her and she lets go of William, stepping to meet you. William doesn’t try to stop her. Even if you weren’t risen from the dead, you know he can see something new in your face, something as feral and bleak as the desert.

He backs away, fearful, and you offer Marisol your hand. “Dance with me,” you say in a voice like the wind whipping through a dead man’s bones.

“Ellis,” she breathes, and then she’s in your arms. Other cold, pale arms reach out behind you, grasping William tight; he yelps, but they yank him away and he’s swallowed by the crush of bodies in their best, ragtag finery. You catch sight of Samuel, but he, too, is pulled into the masses before he can reach you. Dance, you think viciously, and they will, clasped tight in desert magic, until their bodies are torn to pieces.

Marisol is the one who taught you how to dance, on the groaning floorboards of her tiny room, and you hold her close as you sway to the music. She smells like she always does in the evenings, like perfume and dust. She can’t take her eyes off of you, and you wonder what you look like to her, whether the glamor cast over the miners has lent you your old appearance back, or if you have been transformed into something wholly different.

“Let’s get out of here,” you whisper, and Marisol mouths Yes. Grasping her tight, you elbow your way through the crowd of people reuniting with their family members, their brothers, their husbands. Some have taken to dancing again, those lost to them clutched tight.

You glance over your shoulder for Madam Lettie, but she’s standing stock still, gazed locked on the figure of a man who had joined you halfway across the flats, rising from the shade of a pair of yucca trees. As he draws closer, Lettie’s face fills with impossible hope.

“Robert,” she sobs, dashing forward and holding him close. His hair is the same color as yours, red like the earth, veined with silver, and his skin is dark as the dust. He holds her gently, his arms around her waist. Whatever words they have for each other are swallowed by the sound of the band and the crush of bodies around them.

Marisol’s slipper is lost in the rush, but the two of you flee from the lights and whirling skirts into the dust outside, the starlight bearing down on you like a thousand icy stares. Her hand in yours is the warmest thing you’ve ever touched.

“Ellis, you crazy bastard. They told me you were dead.” She laughs, too wild, tinged with grief. “Why didn’t you come back sooner?”

You are silent, turning her hands over in yours. “They weren’t wrong,” you say at last.

“I don’t understand,” says Marisol, but you can see by the sinking hope in her eyes that she does.

“I did die.” She shakes her head vigorously. “I’m still dead, Marisol. But I couldn’t rest without saying goodbye to you.” It’s mostly true, and it will do for now.

“I’m sorry, Ellis.” She’s crying, and your heart sinks. Marisol rarely cries, and seeing her waste water on you is more than you can take. “I should have stopped them from taking you, I should have fought harder—”

“This isn’t your fault,” you say into her hair. “Not at all.” A gentle tug of your power, and your bone and brittlebrush horse trots up to meet you. You drape your glittering coat over its back to make a seat for Marisol as she watches, unable to keep the fear and awe from her face.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

You smile crookedly. “There are a lot of new things about me now. Come, get on.”

She swings up on the mount and scoots forward, holding her hand out to help you up. But you don’t take it. Instead, you reach into your pocket and press her stained red bandanna into her palm. It’s heavy with coins taken from the bodies of the dead, enough to buy a one–way train ticket out east. You know; you counted it yourself.

“No,” she breathes.

“You need to let me go,” you say gently.

“I can’t.” She grabs for you; you step back out of her reach. “Ellis, no! Get on the goddamn horse! We’re in this together, or not at all!”

“I can’t go with you,” you say. “I wish I could. God, I wish I could. But I belong to the desert now. I can’t leave.”

“Then I won’t either.”

“Don’t be a fool,” you snap, and she recoils. “Marisol, one of us needs to escape this place. And I can’t any more.” You gentle your voice. “Please.”

In the end, you give her your boots to wear in place of her single slipper. Your dark, naked feet stand out against the sand, but whether the sand is bearable because of the nighttime cool or because you no longer feel the desert’s burn, you don’t know.

Marisol promises to buy a ticket, but she also promises to come back for you when she can. You hope she will forget the second promise, but you know her too well to believe it.

“I love you,” she says, her eyes hard. “That’s the only reason I’m leaving. For you, Ellis. If you forget everything else, don’t forget that.” She digs her heels into the horse’s sides and it gallops away, your coat glittering under her skirt as she rides east.

“Well done,” murmurs the preacher man. He stands behind you, his coat flapping in the growing wind.

Well done, echoes the desert.

“Keep her safe,” you murmur. “Both of you, until she passes out of your realms.”

We know you will, says your mother, and the preacher man nods in agreement.

You watch Marisol’s horse until she passes out of sight, but you can still feel each hoofbeat strike against the baked clay, a staccato at the edge of your consciousness. You flex your fingers and look over your shoulder at the saloon. The windows are bright, and the chatter and music leaks from the doorway.

Nothing is permanent, but maybe Marisol was right. Maybe seeing a miracle and the ones you love, even for just one night, for one last time, will be enough.

The desert hums in your throat, and the language of the dead things coats your teeth. Back, then, towards the bluffs and the mesas, to the wilds where the coyotes cry over the yucca and the bodies of fallen men. Your kingdom lies out there among the wide, desolate plains, waiting for you to lay claim to its whispering bones.

The rising sun sears long red marks into the cloudy sky, and behind, you can hear the dead dancing themselves into a frenzy, long–lost miners with their wives and friends held close, spinning inhuman wild, as if afraid a spell will break.

You straighten your borrowed shirt and begin walking. Overhead, the sky rumbles with the promise of rain.

THE ART OF SPACE TRAVEL

Nina Allan

Magic spells are chains of words, nothing more. Words that help you imagine a different future and create a shape for it, that help you see what it might be like, and so make it happen. Sometimes when I read about our struggle to land people on Mars, that’s how the words seem to me—like an ancient incantation, and as deeply unfathomable, a set of mystical words, placed carefully in order and then repeated as a magical chant to bring about a future we have yet to imagine.

The Edison Star Heathrow has sixteen floors, 382 bedrooms, twenty private penthouse apartments, and one presidential suite. It is situated on the northern stretch of the airport perimeter road, and operates its own private shuttle bus to ferry patrons to and from the five terminals. We have a press lounge and a flight lounge and conference facilities. As head of housekeeping, it’s my job to make sure things run smoothly behind the scenes. My job is hard work but I enjoy it, by and large. Some days are more demanding than others.

It was all just rumours at first, but last week it became official: Zhanna Sorokina and Vinnie Cameron will be spending a night here at the hotel before flying out to join the rest of the Mars crew in China. Suddenly the Edison Star is the place to be. The public bar and the flight lounge have been jammed ever since the announcement. There’s still a fortnight to go before the astronauts arrive, but that doesn’t seem to be putting the punters off one little bit. It’s cool to be seen here, apparently. Which is ironic, given that we weren’t even the mission sponsors’ first choice of hotel. That was the Marriott International, only it turned out that Vinnie Cameron had his eighteenth here, or his graduation party or something. He wanted to stay at the Edison Star and so that’s what’s happening.

I guess they thought it would be churlish to deny him, considering.

The first result of the change of plan is that the Marriott hates us. The second is that Benny’s on meltdown twenty-four hours a day now instead of the usual sixteen. I can’t imagine how he’s going to cope when the big guns arrive.

“Perhaps he’ll just explode,” says Ludmilla Khan—she’s the third-floor super. A dreamy expression comes into her eyes, as if she’s picturing the scene in her mind and kind of liking it. “Spontaneous combustion, like you see in the movies. The rest of us running around him flapping like headless chickens.”

She makes me laugh, Ludmilla, which is a good thing. I think there’s every chance that Benny would drive me over the edge if I didn’t see the funny side. Benny’s a great boss, don’t get me wrong—we get on fine most of the time. I just wish he wasn’t getting so uptight about the bloody astronauts. I mean, Jesus, it’s only the one night and then they’ll be gone. Fourteen hours of media frenzy and then we’re last week’s news.

Probably I’m being mean, though. This is Benny’s big moment, after all, when he gets to show off the Edison Star to the world at large and himself as the big guvnor man at the heart of it all. There’s something a bit sad about Benny underneath all his bullshit. I don’t mean sad in the sense of pathetic, I mean genuinely sad, sorrowful and bemused at the same time, as if he’d been kidnapped out of one life and set to work in another. And it’s not as if he doesn’t work hard. He’s beginning to show his age now, just a little. He’s balding on top, and his suits are getting too tight for him. He wears beautiful suits, Benny does, well cut and modern and just that teeny bit more expensive than he can really afford. Benny might be manager of the Edison Star, but you can tell by his suits that he still wishes he owned it. You can see it every time he steps out of the lift and into the lobby. That swagger, and then the small hesitation.

It’s as if he’s remembering where he came from, how far there is to fall, and feeling scared.

My mother, Moolie, claims to know Benny Conway from way back, from the time he first came to this country as a student, jetting in from Freetown or Yaoundé, one of those African cities to the west that still make it reasonably easy for ordinary civilians to fly in and out.

“He had a cardboard suitcase and an army surplus rucksack. He was wearing fake Levis and a gold watch. He sold the watch for rent money the first day he was here. He still called himself Benyamin then, Benyamin Kwame.”

When I ask Moolie how she can know this, she clams up, or changes her story, or claims she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. I don’t think it’s even Benny she’s remembering, it can’t be, or not the Benny Conway who’s my boss, anyway. She’s confusing the names, probably, getting one memory mixed up with another the way she so often does now.

Either that, or she just made it up.

Benny slips me extra money sometimes. I know I shouldn’t accept it but I do, mainly because he insists the money is for Moolie, to help me look after her. “It must be tough, having to care for her all by yourself,” Benny says, just before he forces the folded-over banknotes on me, scrunching them into my hands like so many dead leaves. How he came to know about Moolie in the first place, I have no idea. There’s a chance Ludmilla Khan told him, I suppose, or Antony Ghosh, the guy who oversees our linen contract. Both of them are friends of mine, but you can imagine the temptation to gossip in a fish tank like this. I take the money because I tell myself I’ve earned it and I can’t afford not to, also because maybe Benny really is just sorry for Moolie and this is his way of saying so, even though I’ve told him enough times that it’s not so much a question of looking after Moolie as looking out for her. Making sure she remembers to eat, stuff like that. It’s the ordinary stuff she forgets, you see. During her bad patches her short-term memory becomes so unreliable that every day for her is like the beginning of a whole new lifetime.

It’s not always like that, though. She can look after herself perfectly well most of the time, she just gets a bit vague. She can’t do her work anymore, but she’s still interested in the world, still fascinated by what makes things tick, by aeroplanes and rivers and metals, the rudiments of creation. Those are her words, not mine—the rudiments of creation. Moolie used to be a physicist. Now she sounds more like one of those telly evangelists you see on the late-night news channels, all mystery and prophecy and lights in the sky. But when it comes down to it, she’s interested in the same things she’s always been interested in—who we are and how we came here and where the bloody hell we think we’re going.

If you didn’t know her how she was before, you wouldn’t necessarily spot that there’s anything wrong with her.

It’s all still inside, I know it—everything she was, everything she knows, still packed tight inside her head like old newspapers packed into the eaves of an old house. Yellowing and crumpled, yes, but still telling their stories.

For me, Moolie is a wonder and a nightmare, a sadness deep down in my gut like a splinter of bone. Always there, and always worrying away at the living flesh of me.

The doctors say there’s nothing to stop her living out a normal lifespan but I think that’s bollocks and I think the doctors know it’s bollocks, too. Moolie was fifty-two last birthday, but sometimes she’s bent double with back pain, as bad as a woman of eighty or even worse. Other times she burbles away to herself in a made-up language like a child of four. Her whole system is riddled with wrongness of every kind. The doctors won’t admit it, though, because they’re being paid not to. No one wants to be liable for the compensation. That’s why you won’t find any mention of the Galaxy air crash in Moolie’s medical file, or the sixteen lethal substances that were eventually identified at the crash site, substances that Moolie was hired to isolate and analyse.

There were theories about a dirty bomb, and it’s pretty much common knowledge now that some of the shit that came out of that plane was radioactive. But ten years on and the report Moolie helped to compile still hasn’t been made public. The authorities say the material is too sensitive, and they’re not kidding.

The medics have given Moolie a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s. If you believe that then I guess, well, you know how it goes.

When Moolie dies I’ll be free. Free to move away from the airport, free to look for another job, free to buy a one-way ticket to Australia and make a new life there. I lie awake at night sometimes, scheming and dreaming about these things, but in the morning I wonder how I’ll manage. Moolie is like a part of me, and I can’t imagine how the world will feel without her in it.

When she goes, all her stories will go with her, the ones she makes up as well as the ones that happen to be true.

Once she’s gone, I’ll never discover which were which.

I think about the astronauts a lot. Not the way Benny would like me to be thinking of them, I bet—with Benny it’s all about scanning the rooms for bugging devices, checking the kitchens for deadly pathogens, making sure the PA system in the press lounge hasn’t blown a gasket.

I know these things are important. If we cock up it won’t just be Benny who looks an idiot, and the last thing I want to see is some kid in the catering department getting fired because someone forgot to tell them to stock up on mixers. I check and recheck, not for Benny’s sake but because it’s my job, and my job is something I care about and want to do well. But every now and then I catch myself thinking how crazy it is really, all this preparation, all this fussing over things that don’t actually matter a damn. When you think about what Zhanna Sorokina and Vinnie Cameron and the rest of them are actually doing, everything else seems juvenile and pointless by comparison.

They’re going to Mars, and they won’t be coming back.

I wonder if they know they’re going to die. I mean, I know they know, but I wonder if they think about it, that every one of them is bound to cop it much sooner than they would have done otherwise, and probably in a horrible way. It’s inevitable, isn’t it, when you consider the facts? There’s no natural air on Mars, no water, no nothing. There’s a good chance the whole crew will wind up dead before they can even set up a base there, or a sealed habitat, or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing when they arrive.

How do they cope with knowing that? How does anyone begin to come to terms with something that frightening? I can’t imagine it myself, and I have to admit I don’t try all that hard, because even the thought of it scares me, let alone the reality.

In interviews and articles I’ve read online, they say that learning to cope with high-risk situations is all part of the training, that anyone with insufficient mental stamina is weeded out of the selection process more or less straightaway. I’m still not sure I understand, though. Why would anyone volunteer for something like that in the first place?

Ludmilla Khan is especially upset because one of the women astronauts is a mother. We all know her name—Jocelyn Tooker. Her kids are five and three. They’ve gone to live in Atlanta, with their grandmother.

“How can she bear it? Knowing she’ll never see them grow up, that she’ll never hear their voices again, even?”

“I don’t know,” I say to Ludmilla. “Perhaps she thinks they’ll be proud of her.” The way Ludmilla talks, you’d think Jocelyn Tooker had murdered both her kids and chucked their bodies down a well. One of the male crew, Ken Toh, has an eight-year-old son, but people don’t go on about that nearly as much as they do about Jocelyn Tooker.

Ludmilla has two little ones of her own, Leila and Mehmet, so I can see how Jocelyn Tooker’s decision might weigh on her mind. I’ve thought about it over and over, and the only thing I can come up with that makes sense of it is that the crew of the Second Wind look upon going to Mars not as a one-way ticket to an early exit but as a way of cheating death altogether. I mean, everyone aboard that spacecraft is going to live forever—in our hearts and minds, in our books and stories and films, and in thousands of hours of news clips and documentaries. Even if they crash and burn like the crew of the New Dawn, we’ll never stop talking about them, and speculating, and remembering.

If you look at it that way it’s a straight trade: fifty years or so of real life now against immortality. I can see why some people might think that’s not such a bad deal.

In a way, the men and women who go into space are our superheroes. Ten years from now, some journalist will be asking Jocelyn Tooker’s children what it feels like to have a superhero for a mum.

Who is Ludmilla Khan, or me or anyone else for that matter, to try and guess at how those kids will judge her, or what they’ll say?

My name is Emily Clarah Starr. The Starr is just a coincidence. Clarah is for my grandmother, whom I can’t remember because she died when I was three There’s a photo of us, Moolie and Clarah and me, out by the King George VI Reservoir before it was officially declared to be toxic and cordoned off. Moolie has me in one of those front-loading carry-pouch things—all you can see is the top of my head, a bunch of black curls. Grandma Clarah is wearing a hideous knitted blue bobble hat and a silver puffer jacket, even though it’s May in the photo and the sun is shining, reflecting itself off the oily water like electric light.

“Your grandma never got used to the climate,” Moolie told me once. “She always felt cold here, even though she came over with her aunts from Abuja when she was six.”

Moolie in the photograph is tall and thin, elegant and rather aloof, unrecognisable. She seems full of an inner purpose I cannot divine. She says it was my father who chose the name Emily for me. I don’t know if I should believe that story or not.

I have no idea who my father is, and Moolie’s account varies. I went through a phase of pestering her about him when I was younger, but she refused to tell me anything, or at least not anything I could rely on.

“Why should it matter who your dad is? What did fathers ever do for the world in any case, except saddle unsuspecting women with unwanted children?”

“Unwanted?” I gaped at her. The idea that Moolie might not have wanted me had never occurred to me. I simply was, an established fact, quod erat demonstrandum. But that’s the ego for you—an internalized life support system, and pretty much indestructible.

“Oh, Emily, of course I wanted you. You were a bit of a shock to the system, though, that’s all I’m saying.”

“What did Dad say, when he found out?”

“Don’t call him Dad, he doesn’t deserve it.”

“My father, then. And if the guy was such an arsehole why did you shag him?”

I was about fourteen then, and going through a stroppy phase. When rudeness didn’t get me anywhere I started hitting Moolie with psychological claptrap instead—all this stuff about how I had a right to know, that it would damage my self-esteem if she kept it from me. You know, the kind of rubbish you read in magazines. The situation stood at stalemate for a while, then finally we had this massive row, a real window-shaker. It went on for hours. When we’d been round in circles one time too many, Moolie burst into tears and said the reason she wouldn’t tell me anything was that she didn’t know. She’d had several boyfriends back then. Any one of them could be my father.

“We can do a ring-round, if you want,” she said, still sniffing. “Drop a few bombshells? Destroy a few households? What do you reckon?”

What I reckoned was that it was time I shut up. For the first time in my life I was feeling another person’s pain like it was my own. For the first time ever I was seeing Moolie as a person in her own right, someone whose life could have taken a whole different path if little Emily hadn’t come along to mess things up.

It was a shock, to put it mildly. But it was good, too, in the long run, because it brought Moolie and me together and made us real friends. I stopped caring about who my dad was, for a long time. Then when Moolie started getting ill I didn’t want to make things worse by dragging it all up again.

Then Moolie said what she said about the book, and everything changed.

The book is called The Art of Space Travel by Victoria Segal. I remember the book from when I was a little kid because of the star maps. The maps fold out from between the normal pages in long, concertina-like strips. They’re printed in colour—dark blue and yellow—on smooth, glossy paper that squeaks slightly when you run your finger across it. I always thought the star maps were beautiful. Moolie would let me look at the book if I asked but she would never leave me alone with it—I suppose she thought I might accidentally damage it.

As I grew older I had a go at reading it every once in a while, but I always gave up after a chapter or two because it was way over my head, all the stuff about quasars and dark matter and the true speed of light. I would soldier on for a couple of pages, then realise I hadn’t actually understood a word of it.

As well as the star maps, the book is filled with beautiful and intricate diagrams, complicated line drawings of planetary orbits, and the trajectories of imaginary spacecraft, rockets that never existed but one day might. I always loved the thought of that, that they one day might.

The book’s shiny yellow cover is torn in three places.

The day Moolie drops the bombshell is a Tuesday. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. I come in from work to find Moolie looking sheepish, the look she gets now when she’s lost something or broken something or forgotten who she is, just for the moment. I’ve learned it’s best not to question her when she gets like that because it makes her clam up, whereas if you leave her alone for a while she can’t resist sharing. So I pretend I haven’t noticed anything and we have supper as usual. Once we’ve finished eating, Moolie goes into the front room to watch TV and I go upstairs to do some stuff on my computer.

After about half an hour, Moolie appears in the doorway. She’s holding The Art of Space Travel, clasping it to her chest with both arms as if she’s afraid it might try to get away from her. Then she dumps it down on my bed like a brick. It makes a soft, plump sound as it hits the duvet. A small puff of air comes up.

“This belonged to your father,” Moolie says. “He left it here when he went.”

“When he went where?” I say. I’m trying to keep my voice low and steady, as if we’re just having a normal conversation about nothing in particular.

My heart is thumping like a road drill, like it wants to escape me. It’s almost painful, like the stitch in your side you get from running too far and too fast.

“Your dad was an astronaut,” Moolie says. “He was part of the New Dawn mission.”

My hands are shaking, just a bit, but I’m trying to ignore that. “Moolie,” I say to her. Moolie is what I called her when I was first learning to talk, apparently. It made her and Grandma Clarah laugh so much they never tried to correct me. Moolie’s actual name is Della—Della Starr. She was once one of the most highly qualified metallurgists in the British aerospace industry. “What on Earth are you talking about?”

“He knew I was pregnant,” Moolie says. “He wanted to be involved—to be a father to you—but I said no. I didn’t want to be tied to him, or to anyone. Not then. I’ve never been able to make up my mind if I did the right thing or not.”

She nods at me, as if she’s satisfied with herself for having said something clever, and then she leaves the room. I stay where I am, sitting at my desk and staring at the open doorway Moolie just walked out of, wondering if I should go after her and what I’m going to say to her if I do.

When I finally go downstairs, I find Moolie back in the living room, curled up on the sofa, watching one of her soaps. When I ask her if she was telling the truth about my dad being an astronaut she looks at me as if she thinks I’ve gone insane.

“Your father wasted his dreams, Emily,” she says. “He gave up too soon. That’s one of the reasons I told him to go. Life’s hard enough as it is. The last thing you want is to be tied to someone who’s always wishing he’d chosen a different path.”

When a couple of days later I ask her again about The Art of Space Travel, she says she doesn’t have a clue where it came from. “It was here in the house when we moved in, I think,” she says. “I found it in the built-in wardrobe in your bedroom, covered in dust.”

I’ve been through the book perhaps a thousand times, searching for a sign of my father—a name on the flyleaf, a careless note, scribbled comments in the margin, underlinings in the text, even. There’s nothing, though, not even a random inkblot. Aside from being yellowed and a bit musty-smelling, the pages are clean. There’s nothing to show who owned the book, who brought it to this house, that it was ever even opened before we had it.

I want to find Dad. I tell myself it’s because Moolie is dying, that whoever the man is and whatever he’s done, he has a right to know the facts of his own life. I know it’s more than that, though, if I’m honest. I want to find him because I’m curious, because I’ve always been curious, and because I’m afraid that once Moolie is gone I’ll have nobody else.

Our house is on Sipson Lane, in the borough of Hillingdon. It was built in the 1970s, almost a hundred years ago now to the year. It’s a shoddy little place, one of a row of twenty-two identical boxes flung up to generate maximum profit for the developer with a minimum of outlay. It’s a wonder it’s lasted this long, actually. Some of the other houses in the row are in a terrible state—the metal window frames rusted and buckling, the lower floors patchy with mildew. The previous owner put in replacement windows and a new damp-proof course, so ours isn’t as bad as some. It’s dry inside, at least, and I used some of the extra cash from Benny to put up solar panels, which means we can afford to keep the central heating on all the time.

Moolie’s like Clarah now—she can’t stand the cold.

Sipson is a weird place. Five hundred years ago it was a tiny hamlet, surrounded by farmland. Since then it’s evolved into a scruffy housing estate less than half a mile from the end of the second runway at Heathrow Airport. Moolie bought the Sipson Lane house because it was cheap and because it was close to her job, and the best thing about it is that it’s close to my job too, now. It takes me less than half an hour to walk into work, which not only cuts down on expenses, it also means I can get home quickly if there’s an emergency.

The traffic on the perimeter road is a constant nightmare. In the summer, the petrol and diesel fumes settle over the airport like a heavy tarpaulin, a yellowish blanket of chemical effluent that is like heat haze, only thicker, and a lot more smelly.

When you walk home in the evenings, though, or on those very rare winter mornings when there’s still a hard frost, you could take the turning into Sipson Lane and mistake it for the entrance to another world: The quiet street, with its rustling plane trees, the long grass sprouting between the kerbstones at the side of the road. The drawn curtains of the houses, like gently closed eyelids, the soft glow behind. Someone riding past on a bicycle. The red pillar box opposite the Sipson Arms. You’d barely know the airport even existed.

It’s like an oasis in time, if there is such a thing. If you stand still and listen to the sound of the blackbirds singing, high up in the dusty branches of those plane trees, you might almost imagine you’re in a universe where the Galaxy air crash never happened.

They had planes flying in and out of here again within the hour, of course. The airport authorities, backed by the government, insisted the main damage was economic and mostly short term. They claimed the rumours of ground contamination and depleted uranium were just so much scaremongering, that the whole area within the emergency cordon had been repeatedly tested and repeatedly found safe.

A decade on they say that even if the toxicity levels were a bit on the high side in the first year or so after the crash, they’re well within the accepted safety limits now.

The first question I have to ask myself is this: Is there any possibility at all that it’s true? What Moolie told me about my father and the New Dawn mission, I mean?

My first instinct is to dismiss it as just another fraction of Moolie craziness. One of the features of Moolie’s illness is that it’s often hard to know whether she’s talking about stuff that really happened to her or stuff she’s dreamed or read about or seen on TV. Her mind can’t tell the difference now, or not all the time. Just seeing the Mars team on television might be enough to land her with a complete fantasy scenario, indistinguishable from her life as she’s actually lived it.

But the thing is—and I can hardly believe I’m saying this—there is a very small chance that her story might turn out to be real. The dates fit, for a start. I was born in March 2047, just three months before the New Dawn was launched on its mission to Mars. And before you roll your eyes and say, Yes, but so were about three hundred thousand other kids, just consider this: Moolie did a lot of specialist placements early on in her career. One of them was in Hamburg, at the University of the European Space Programme, where she spent the better part of 2046 helping to run strength tests on prototypes of some of the equipment designed to be used aboard the New Dawn. Some of the Mars team were in residency in Hamburg at around the same time, eight of them in all, five women and three men. Moolie would have come into direct contact with every one of them.

I know, because I’ve looked up the details. I even have a file now, stuff I’ve found online and printed off. If you think that’s creepy, just try having an unknown dad who might have died in an exploding rocket and see how you get on. See how long it takes before you start a file on him.

Toby Soyinka was second communications officer aboard the New Dawn, the one who just happened to be outside the vehicle when the disaster occurred. His body was thrown clear of the wreckage, and was recovered three months later by an unmanned retrieval pod launched by the crew of the Hoffnung 3 space station. Toby’s body was shipped back to Earth at enormous expense, not so much for the sake of his family as to be subjected to a year-long post mortem.

The mission scientists wanted to know if Toby was still alive when he floated free, and if so then for how long. Knowing that would tell them all kinds of things, apparently—important information about the last moments of the New Dawn and why she failed.

According to the official reports, Toby Soyinka was killed in the primary explosion, the same as the rest of the crew. As you might expect, the conspiracy theorists went bonkers. Why would Soyinka be dead if his suit was undamaged? How come only a short section of the official post mortem has ever been released into the public sphere?

There are people who claim that Toby was alive up there for at least three hours after the rocket exploded—depending on individual physiology, his suit’s oxygen tanks would have contained enough air for between three and four hours.

Toby’s suit was also fitted with a radio communicator, but it was short-range only, suitable for talking with his colleagues back on board the New Dawn but not powerful enough to let him speak with Mission Control.

Would he have wanted to, though, even if he could have? Knowing that he was going to die, and everyone on the ground knowing there was fuck all they could do about it?

I mean, what could one side of that equation possibly have to say to the other?

Well, I guess this is it, Tobes. Sorry, old chap. Hey, did anyone remember to send out for muffin

I think about that, and I think of Toby Soyinka thinking about that, and after the terror what comes through to me most strongly is simple embarrassment.

If it had been me in that floating spacesuit I reckon I’d have switched my radio off and waited in silence. Listed my favourite movies in order from one to a hundred and gazed out at the stars.

At least Toby died knowing he’d done something extraordinary, that he’d seen sights few human beings will ever see.

And Toby Soyinka is a hero now, don’t forget that. Perhaps that’s what the crew of the Second Wind are telling themselves, even now.

In the movies when something goes wrong and one of the crew is left floating in space with no hope of rescue, the scene almost always ends with the doomed one taking off his or her helmet, making a quick and noble end of it rather than facing a slow and humiliating death by asphyxiation.

Would anyone really have the guts to do that, though? I don’t think I would.

Toby Soyinka was born in Nottingham. Toby’s dad was a civil engineer—he helped design the New Trent shopping village—and his mum was a dentist. Toby studied physics and IT at Nottingham Uni, then went on to do postgraduate work at the UESP in Hamburg, where he would have met Moolie. Most of the photos online show Toby at the age of twenty-eight, the same age he was when he died, and when he and the rest of the crew were all over the media. He looks skinny and hopeful and nervous, all at once. Sometimes when I look at pictures of Toby I can’t help thinking he seems out of his depth, as if he’s wondering what he signed up for exactly, although that’s probably just my imagination.

Once, when I was browsing through some stuff about Toby online, Moolie came into the room and sneaked up behind me.

“What are you looking at?” she said. I hadn’t heard her come in. I jumped a mile.

“Nothing much,” I said. I hurried to close the window but it was too late, the photos of Toby were staring her in the face. I looked at her looking, curious to see what her reaction would be, but Moolie’s eyes slid over his features without even a single glimmer of recognition. He might have been a tree or a gatepost, for all the effect he had on her.

Was she only pretending not to recognise him? I don’t think so. I always know when Moolie’s hiding something, even if I don’t know what it is she’s hiding.

I don’t believe that Toby Soyinka was my father. It would be too much like a tragic fairy tale, too pat.

“How’s your mum?” Benny says to me this morning.

“She’s fine, Benny,” I reply. “She’s getting excited about the mission, same as you.” I grin at him and wink, firstly because I can never resist taking the piss out of Benny, just a little bit, and secondly because it’s true. Moolie has barely been out of the living room this past week. She has the television on all day and most of the night, permanently tuned to the twenty-four-hour news feed that’s supposed to be the official mouthpiece of the mission’s sponsors. The actual news content is pretty limited but since when has that ever been a deterrent in situations like this? They squeeze every last ounce of juice out of what they have—then they go back to playing the old documentaries, home video footage, endlessly repetitive Q&As with scientists and school friends.

Moolie watches it all with equal attention, drinking it down like liquid nutrient through a straw. She doesn’t get to bed till gone three, some nights, and when I ask her if she’s had anything to eat she doesn’t remember. I make up batches of sandwiches and leave them in the fridge for her. Sometimes she scoffs the lot, sometimes I go down in the morning and find them untouched.

She’s immersed in the Mars thing so deeply that sometimes it seems like Moolie herself is no longer there.

What is it that fascinates her so much? When she first started watching I felt convinced it had to do with my father, that all the talk of the Second Wind was bringing back memories of what happened to the New Dawn. I’m less sure of that now—why should everything have to be about me and my father? Moolie is—was—a scientist, and the Mars mission is just about the most exciting scientific experiment to be launched in more than a decade, perhaps ever. Of course she’d be interested in it. You could argue that her obsession with the news feed is the best evidence I have that she is still herself.

She seems so engaged, so invigorated, so happy that I don’t want to question it. I want her to stay like this for as long as she can.

“Well, tell her I asked after her,” Benny says. I glance at him curiously, wondering if he’s serious. I’ve always found it strange, this spasmodic concern of his for a person he’s never met. At the same time, though, it’s just so Benny. It’s no wonder he’s never made it to the top. To make it to the top you need to be a heartless bastard, pretty much. On the heartless bastard scale, Benny Conway has never figured very high up.

I nod briskly. “I will,” I say. I never feel comfortable talking with him about Moolie—it’s all too close to home. I’d rather stick to work, any day. “What’s on today?”

Benny immediately looks shifty. A moment later I understand why. “There’s another news crew dropping by,” he says. “They want to do an interview. With you.”

“With me? What the hell for? Oh, for God’s sake, Benny, what are they expecting me to say?”

“You’re head of housekeeping at the Edison Star, Emily. That’s an important and responsible position. They just want to ask you what it’s been like, preparing for such an important occasion. There’s nothing for you to be anxious about, I promise you. They’ve said it shouldn’t take more than ten minutes, fifteen at the most.”

“I’m not anxious, I’m pissed off,” I say. “You could at least have asked me first.” Benny looks hurt and just a little bit surprised. I know I’ve overstepped the mark and I wouldn’t normally be so rude but just for the moment I feel like killing him. It’s all right for Benny—he loves all this shit. Benny’s great with the press, actually, he’s what you might call a people person. Put him in front of a camera and he’s away.

Me? I just want to be left alone to get on with my job. The idea of being on TV leaves me cold. There’s Moolie to be considered, too—seeing me up on the screen like that, it might warp her sense of reality more than ever.

It’s done now, though, isn’t it? There’s not much sense in kicking off about it. Best to get the whole thing over and done with and then forget it.

I guess it’s mainly because of Benny that I’m still here. Working at the hotel, I mean. I certainly never planned on staying forever. It was supposed to be a holiday job, something to bring in some money while I went through college. I started out studying for a degree in natural sciences, following in Moolie’s footsteps, I suppose, which was madness. I failed my first-year exams twice. It should have been obvious to anyone that I wasn’t cut out for it.

“You’re such a dreamer, Emily,” Moolie said to me once. “Head in the stars.” She cracked a kind of half-smile, then sighed. She was paying for extra tutorials for me at the time, trying to give me a better shot at the re-sits. It must have felt like flushing money down the toilet. When I told her I’d been offered a permanent job at the Edison Star and had decided to take it she gave me such an odd look, like I’d announced I was running away to join the circus or something. But she never questioned it or gave me a hard time, or tried to talk me out of it the way a lot of parents would have.

It was a relief to her, most likely, that I’d finally found something I could do, that I was good at, even. It also meant I stayed close to home. First of all because it was convenient, and then later, with Moolie’s illness, because it became necessary. I’ve never regretted it. I regret some of the things that might have been, but the regret has always taken second place to the desire not to have things change. I don’t think it’s just because of Moolie, either. Sometimes I believe it’s the airport itself, and Sipson, both the kind of non-places that keep you addicted to transience, the restless half-life of the perpetual traveller who never goes anywhere.

The idea of settling for anything too concrete begins to seem like death, so you settle for nothing.

Benny Conway’s never married, which probably seems strange to you, given that he’s such a people person, but I can imagine that being with him day in and day out would drive anyone nuts.

Beneath the confidence and sunny bravado, Benny’s actually quite needy and insecure. One of the downsides of working in a close environment is that you often get to know more about the people you work with than you strictly want to.

I spend the morning checking the inventories and trying not to get too worked up about the stupid interview. At 1:30 I go down to the lobby. What passes for the news crew is already there—a camera guy and a college kid, sent along by some backroom satellite outfit most likely, one of the countless pirate stations that don’t have the clout to get themselves an invite for what Ludmilla and I have snarkily begun to call the Day of Judgement.

These two have to make do with me instead. I begin to feel sorry for them.

The student who interviews me is called Laura—I never learn her surname—a tiny thing dressed in a black pantsuit and with her copper-red hair cut close to her head. She reminds me of Pinocchio, or one of those Pierrot dolls that my school friends were so crazy about when I was a kid. I like her immediately—she seems so earnest!—and so I find myself relaxing into the process and even enjoying it. I’m expecting the questions Laura asks me to be work-related—what will the astronauts be having for supper, how do you keep the hotel running normally and still maintain security, that kind of thing. Some of her actual questions catch me off guard.

“It’s thirty years since the crew of the New Dawn lost their lives,” Laura says. “Do you think it’s right that we should risk another Mars mission?”

“I think in a way we’re doing it for them,” I say. “The astronauts who died, I mean.” I’m stumbling over my words, because I haven’t planned this. It’s strange to hear myself saying these things, thoughts I never really knew I was thinking until now. “I think we should ask ourselves what they would have wanted. Would they have wanted us to try again? I think they would have. So I think we should, too. I believe we have to try again, for their sakes.”

Laura looks delighted and surprised, as if what I said in reply to her question was the kind of answer she wanted but didn’t expect. Not from the likes of me, anyway. She wraps up the interview soon after—she wants to quit while she’s ahead, most likely.

“That was great,” she says to me, off-camera. She exchanges a couple of words with the camera guy, who’s preoccupied with packing away his equipment. After a moment Laura turns back to me. She’s smiling, and I think she’s about to say goodbye. But then her expression becomes serious again and she asks me another question. “Your mum was here when the Galaxy flight came down, wasn’t she?”

I’m so surprised I can’t answer at first. I glance across at the camera guy, wondering if he’s somehow still filming this, but he’s moved away from us slightly, towards the reception desk. I see him checking his mobile. “She was working here, yes,” I say. My throat feels dry and I swallow. What’s this about? “She was part of the forensic investigation team that went out to the crash site. She was an expert in metal fatigue.”

Laura has moved to stand in front of me, blocking my view of the rest of the lobby and clearly expecting me to say more, but I’m not sure what I should say, whether I should say anything, even.

I can’t imagine why she’s asking me this question now, when the camera is off. It has nothing to do with the astronauts or with the hotel, and I’m asking myself what it does have to do with, exactly. Is this the question Laura wanted to ask me all along? And if so, why?

“There was an awful smell,” I say, and then suddenly I’m remembering that smell, jet fuel thickened by dust, ignited by anguish, and the way it hung over the airport and over our village for weeks, or so it seemed, longer even than that, so long that in the end you understood it was all in your mind, it had to be, that no real smell lingers that long. Even the stench of combusted bodies fades eventually.

I haven’t thought of these things in years, not like this, not precisely enough to bring back that smell.

But can I tell Laura any of this? She would have been about ten when it happened; she might not even remember it as a real event. Children don’t take much notice of the news unless it affects them directly. Everything she knows about the crash will come from old TV footage, the slew of documentaries and real-time amateur video that followed after.

Everything from the acknowledged facts to the certifiably crazy.

What would she say if I told her that Moolie worked alongside the black box recovery unit and the token medics and the loss adjusters? That she was out there for almost three weeks, picking over what was essentially radioactive trash, trying to come up with a reasonable theory of what had happened and who was responsible?

Of that original forensic team, two are still working and seem in good health, three have died of various cancers, and four are like Moolie.

There is an ongoing legal enquiry, but the way things are going the remaining witnesses will all be dead before any decision is made on liability.

I bet that’s what the authorities are hoping, anyway.

“Here’s my number,” Laura says. She delves into her jacket pocket and then hands me a card, a glossy white oblong printed with an email address and cell number in cool grey capitals.

Quaint, I think, and rather classy, if you’re into retro.

“Give me a call, if you feel like talking about it. I’d really like to do a story on your mother, if you think she’d be up for it.” Laura hesitates, uncertain suddenly, a precocious child in front of an audience of hostile strangers. “Think about it, anyway.”

“I will,” I say, and slip the card into my pocket. Later, after Laura is gone, I try to imagine her with Moolie, asking her questions.

Does Moolie remember the Galaxy, even?

Some days, probably.

The whole idea of her doing an interview is insane.

Of the three male astronauts Moolie had dealings with at the UESP in Hamburg, only Toby Soyinka actually went on to get picked as flight crew. The two other guys involved with the New Dawn mission ended up working on the ground in IT and comms. Angelo Chavez was born in Queens, New York City. His exceptional talent for mathematics was spotted in nursery school. At the age of six he won a place at a specialist academy for gifted children. Angelo did well, and seemed well adjusted, until his father began an affair with a work colleague and buggered off. Angelo’s mother relocated with Angelo to Chicago to be closer to family.

Angelo was bullied at his new school. He began truanting, then moved on to shoplifting and dealing cannabis on high school premises. By the time he turned fourteen he was regularly in trouble with the police. It was a youth worker at a juvenile detention centre who helped get Angelo back on track by asking him to help out with the centre’s computer system. Later, when Angelo applied for a place at MIT, the man acted as his sponsor and referee. Angelo achieved perfect scores in three out of his five first-year assignments. He graduated with one of the highest averages of that decade.

After graduation, he began working as a games designer for a Tokyo-based franchise, and landed a junior post at NASA just eighteen months later. Three years after joining NASA, Angelo went to Hamburg for six months to work as a visiting lecturer at the UESP. While he was there, he met and fell in love with the Dutch astrophysicist Johan Wedekin. They became civil partners in July 2048.

They’ve been together now for almost thirty years. I suppose it’s possible that Angelo was shagging Moolie in Hamburg as well as Johan, but I think it’s unlikely.

Marlon Habila was born in Lagos, the son of two teachers. He speaks six languages fluently, and has a solid working knowledge of eight others. He wrote his postgraduate thesis on the acquisition of language in bilingual children. He was initially employed by the UESP to help develop a more straightforward method for teaching Mandarin to trainee astronauts, and became interested in the New Dawn mission while he was there. After a number of years in Hamburg, Marlon was headhunted by NASA as a senior communications technician and relocated to Austin, Texas, where he still lives today.

He was in Hamburg at the same time as Moolie, though, no doubt about it.

When I look at photographs of Marlon Habila, it’s like looking into a mirror.

I once showed Moolie a photo of Marlon and asked if she remembered him. She was in one of her lucid patches at the time, so I thought there might be a chance I’d get something resembling a straight answer out of her. I reckoned it was worth a try, anyway. You never know with Moolie, how she’s going to react. Sometimes during her good phases you can chat with her and it’ll feel almost like the old times.

On the other hand, it’s often during these good times that she’s at her most evasive. Ask Moolie her own name then and there’s no guarantee you’ll get the answer you were expecting.

When I showed her the picture of Marlon, her eyes filled with tears. Then she snatched it out of my hands and tore it in two.

“Don’t talk to me about that boy,” she hissed at me. “I’ve told you before.”

“No you haven’t,” I persisted. “Can you tell me anything about him? Do you know what he’s called?”

She gave me a look, boiling over with impatience, as if I’d asked her if the world was flat or round.

“You know damn well what he’s called,” she said. “Stop trying to trick me. I’m not brain-dead yet, you know.” She stomped out of the room, one foot dragging slightly because of the muscle wastage that had already begun to affect her left side. I stared stupidly down at the two torn pieces of the photograph she had thrown on the floor, then picked them up and put them in the waste bin. An hour or so later I went upstairs to check on Moolie and she was fine again, completely calm, sitting up in bed and reading softly aloud to herself from J. G. Ballard’s Vermilion Sands.

I asked her if she wanted anything to eat or drink and she shook her head. The next time I looked in on her she was sound asleep.

Do I really believe that Marlon Habila is my dad? Some days I feel so certain it’s like knowing for sure. Other days I think it’s all bullshit, just some story I’ve constructed for myself so the world doesn’t feel so crazy and out of control. It’s a well known fact that kids who grow up not knowing who their parents are—or who one parent is—always like to imagine they’re really a princess, or the son of a Polar explorer who died bravely in tragic circumstances, or some such junk. No one wants to be told their daddy is really a dustman who got banged up for petty thieving and who never gave a shit.

“Daddy was a spaceman” sounds so much better.

The thing is, even if I knew for an absolute certainty that Marlon Habila was my birth father, it’s still not obvious what—if anything—I should do about it.

I found contact details for Marlon online—it wasn’t difficult—and I’ve lost count of the number of emails I’ve started to write and then deleted. Dear Marlon, Dear Dr Habila, Dear Marlon again. You don’t know me, but I think I might be your daughter.

Just like in those old TV miniseries Moolie enjoys so much, those overblown three-part dramas about twins separated at birth, or men of God who fall illicitly in love, or lost survivors of the Titanic, stories that unfold in a series of unlikely coincidences, all tied together with a swooning orchestral soundtrack. They’re pretty naff, those stories, but they do draw you in. When Moolie’s going through one of her bad times she’ll watch them all day long, five of the things in a row, back to back.

I suppose the reason people like stories like that is that no matter how confused the plot seems at the start, things always work out. By the time the film’s over you always understand what happened, and why. There’s always a proper ending, with people hugging each other and crying, if you see what I mean.

In the case of Marlon Habila, the proper ending is that he moved to Texas. A year after the New Dawn tragedy he married Melissa Sanberg, one of the senior operatives working on what they call the shop floor of Mission Control. They have two sons and one daughter—Aaron, Willard, and little Esther. Eighteen, sixteen, and nine.

In the photos they look happy. I mean, really happy. I have to ask myself what might happen to that happiness if I sent my email.

I can’t help thinking about what Moolie said that time, about dropping bombshells.

In a way it would be easier if my father turned out to be Toby Soyinka after all. Dead is safe, nothing would change, and hey, at least I would know my dad was a hero. People would look at me with sympathy, and fascination. It would make a good miniseries, actually. You can imagine the ending—me and Toby’s relatives hugging and crying as we hand round the old photographs for the umpteenth time and saying, If only he knew in choked-up voices. I’d watch it, anyway, I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’d blub at the end too, probably. Another Saturday night in with Moolie, a supply of tissues and a box of chocolates on the sofa between us.

Who doesn’t want a story that makes sense?

I’ve made up my mind that if the Second Wind launches safely I’m going to send that email.

The biggest headache with having astronauts staying at the Edison Star is the incessant press coverage. Sorokina and Cameron themselves are the least of our worries—they’re just two extra guests; to put it bluntly, they’re hardly going to send us into a tailspin no matter how picky they might be about their food or the ambient room temperature. We’ve had to take on extra security just for that week, but aside from that it’ll be business pretty much as usual. The problem is that it will be business under intense scrutiny, and until the astronauts actually arrive, the press hounds have nothing to do except sit and bitch. You can bet your life that if one of them happens to spot a rat in the garbage store it’ll be headlining as a major news story within the hour.

You’re never more than six feet from a rat: Getting up close and personal with the Edison Star’s new temp staff.

It’s enough to give Benny a coronary. Which means no rats, no undercooked turkey, no tide marks on the bathtubs, no financial mismanagement, no corporate bribery, no spree killings.

Not until this astronaut business is safely behind us, at any rate.

What it mostly means for me is a lot of overtime, but I don’t mind. I’m enjoying myself quite a bit, to tell the truth. I know how this place works, you see, I’ve even grown to love it over the years. The only problem is winding down, switching off. Even when I’m at home I’m constantly running through mental checklists, trying to head cock-ups off at the pass before they happen. Sometimes I find myself lying awake into the small hours. If I’m not careful I’m going to end up like Moolie.

Will there be children born on Mars, I wonder? Martian children, who think of the planet Mars as their one true home?

It is strange to think of, and rather wonderful, too, that we might come to that. What will our Earth seem like to them, our built-in atmosphere and water on tap, our border controls and health and safety laws, our wars over patches of land that we like to call countries?

Will we seem like kings to them, or tyrants, or simply fools?

I have brought The Art of Space Travel into work with me this morning. I wrapped it inside a supermarket carrier bag for protection, then stuffed it into the back of my locker with the trainers I wear for walking in and my rucksack and my spare cardigan. I have this silly idea, that when Zhanna Sorokina and Vinnie Cameron arrive I’ll get them both to sign it. I know the book was written long before they were born, that it has no connection with them, but I would like to have something of theirs, all the same, something of theirs joined with something of mine. Something to keep once they are gone, that will remind me that although they’re Martians now, they started out from here.

It will be a way of keeping them safe, maybe. I know how crazy that sounds.

It’s strange, but each time I think of something happening to them it’s not the New Dawn I think of but the Galaxy, that doomed aeroplane, fireballing out of the sky over Heathrow.

I was in school when it happened, almost ten miles away, but all of us heard the crash, even from there.

When the call comes through, I’m in the middle of signing off the bulk orders for cleaning supplies—Dettox, Ajax, Glasene, Pledge—we get through tens of gallons of each on a monthly basis. I prefer staff to keep their mobiles switched off while they’re on shift because they’re so distracting, but I have to keep mine by me because of Moolie. Weeks and sometimes months go by without it ever ringing but you never know. When I see her number flashing onscreen I pick up at once.

I speak her name, only it’s not her on the line after all, it’s our neighbour, Allison Roberts, from next door.

“She was out the front, just lying there,” Allison says. Moolie’s phone was lying there too, apparently, which I suppose was lucky.

I can’t remember the last time Moolie went outside by herself.

I call Benny on his private line, the one that never gets diverted. I know he’s chairing a meeting but I don’t care, I don’t give a shit suddenly, and Benny must realise it’s urgent because he knows I wouldn’t disturb him otherwise, and so he picks up immediately.

“I have to go,” I gasp. I explain what’s happened the best I can and he says okay. I’m running for the lifts by then. I need to get to the basement, where the staff lockers are. When I reach the lockers I can’t get my key card to work, and then when it finally does everything comes pouring out in a tidal wave. My clobber’s everywhere, suddenly. It’s the last thing I need. My chest is so high and tight I feel like screaming.

“For fuck’s sake!” I’m seconds away from bursting into tears. I’m still trying to scoop everything together when Benny appears. I realise he must have left his meeting to come down, which is so bloody unlike him that all I can think is that he’s here to give me a bollocking.

He doesn’t, though.

“Don’t worry about this,” he says. “Just take what you need and get going. I’ve called a taxi for you—it’ll be out the front in five minutes. I’ll take care of your things.” He makes a gesture towards the stuff on the floor, and of course I can’t help thinking how downright weird all this is, but I don’t have time to dwell on it. I need to get moving.

Allison said that Moolie was having difficulty breathing when she found her. The paramedics soon got her stabilized but it’s still very worrying.

“Are you sure about this?” I say to Benny. “I’m really sorry.”

“Quite sure,” Benny says. “Call me if you need me, okay?”

I take a moment to wonder if Benny is losing it, if the strain is finally getting to him, but I know that now is not the time to go looking for answers to that question.

“I will,” I say. “Thanks.” I grab my rucksack and shove on my trainers and then I’m gone.

Most of the things that are wrong with Moolie—the decreasing short-term memory and loss of appetite, the insomnia, the restlessness—none of these are life-threatening. Not in and of themselves, anyway. But every now and then she’ll have an attack of apnoea, and these are much more frightening. What apnoea means, basically, is that Moolie can’t breathe. The first time she had an attack, the doctors kept asking me if she smoked. Each time I said no they looked at me with doubt. It was obvious they thought I was lying.

In fact the apnoea is caused by the thousands of microscopic mushroom-like growths that have colonized the lining of Moolie’s lungs. Most of the time these growths remain inactive and appear to do no harm, but periodically they flare up or inflate or expand or whatever—hence the apnoea.

“It’s definitely not cancer,” the medics insist. There’s a real sense of triumph in their voices as they say this, as if the growths’ non-cancerous nature is something they’ve seen to personally. But when I ask them what it is if it’s not cancer they never seem to give me a direct answer and I don’t think they have one. I don’t think anyone really knows what it is, to be honest. It’s a whole new disease.

Whatever it is, it seems to have the advantage of being slow-growing. Moolie might die of old age before the growths clutter up her bronchial tubes, or fill her lungs with spores, or find some other, quicker way of preventing her from breathing entirely. In the meantime, the doctors stave off the attacks by giving Moolie a shot of adrenaline and then supplementing her oxygen for an hour or so. The enriched oxygen seems to kill the mushroom things off, or make the growths subside, or something. Whatever it does it works, and surprisingly quickly. By the time I come on to the ward, Moolie is sitting up in bed with a cup of tea.

“What are you doing here?” she says to me.

“I might ask you the same question.” I can’t tell yet if she’s being sarcastic or if she’s genuinely confused. Sometimes when she comes round after an attack she’s delusional, or delirious, whatever you want to call it when the brain gets starved of oxygen for any length of time.

Moolie seems okay, though—this time, anyway. She’s sipping her tea as if she’s actually enjoying it. There’s a biscuit in the saucer, too, with a bite taken out of it—Moolie eating something without being reminded is always a good sign.

I notice that one of the nurses has brushed her hair. She looks—very nearly—the way she does in that old photograph, her and me and Grandma Clarah out by the reservoir.

“I’m fine, Emily,” she says, neatly sidestepping my actual question, which is so typical of her that I am tempted to believe her. “There was no need for you to leave work early. I know Benny needs you more than I do at the moment.” She takes another sip of tea. “You could have come in afterwards, if you wanted to. They say I can probably go home tomorrow, in any case.”

She’s peeping at me over the rim of her teacup, grinning like a naughty schoolgirl—See what I did. Trying to boss me about like any normal mother. She can be like this after the treatments—it’s as if the rarefied oxygen cleans out her brain, or something. I know it won’t last, but it makes me feel like crying, nonetheless.

Just to have her back again.

Sometimes I forget how much I miss her.

I sit down on the plastic chair at the side of the bed. “I’m here now,” I say. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily.” I reach for her free hand across the bedcovers and she lets me take it. After a couple of minutes one of the ward staff brings me a cup of tea of my own. It’s good just to sit, to not feel responsibility or the need for action. The mechanics of this place are unknown to me, and therefore the urge to do, to change, to control is entirely absent.

Moolie begins telling me about the TV programme she was watching before she had her turn. Yet another documentary about the Mars mission—no surprises there. I’d rather she told me what it was that made her go outside by herself, but she waves my question away like an importunate fly.

“That girl,” she says instead. “That girl, Zhanna. She’s twenty-six tomorrow, did you know that? She says she doesn’t want children, that her work is enough for her. She’ll be dead before she’s forty, more than likely. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“You were younger than she is when you had me, Mum,” I say. “Did you know what you were doing?”

Moolie shakes her head slowly and deliberately from side to side. “No, I didn’t,” she says. “I didn’t have a clue.”

Then she says something strange.

“I won’t always get better, Emily. The day will come when I don’t come home. You should have a talk with Benny, before that day comes. There’s no point in us pretending. Not anymore.”

The mug of tea is still warm between my hands but in spite of this I suddenly feel cold all over. When I ask Moolie what she’s talking about she refuses to answer.

By the time I leave the hospital my shift has been over for ages. I decide to go back to the hotel anyway, just in case anything cropped up after I left. I check in with housekeeping and when I’ve satisfied myself that no major disasters have occurred in my absence I go in search of Benny. I find him in his office. There’s a semicircle of empty chairs in front of his desk, the ghost of a meeting. Benny is alone, sitting very still in his chair, reading something—a book?—by the light of his desk lamp. He seems miles away, absent in a manner that is most unlike him.

When he realises I’m there he jerks upright, and there’s an expression on his face—panic, almost—as if I’ve caught him out in a secret. He slams the book shut, making a slapping sound.

It’s pointless him trying to hide it, though. I’d know the book anywhere, because it belongs to us, to Moolie and me. It’s The Art of Space Travel.

“Emily,” Benny says. He’s watching my face for signs of disaster and at the same time he still looks guilty. It’s a weird combination, almost funny. “I wasn’t expecting you back. How’s your mother?”

“Moolie’s fine,” I say. “They’re letting her out tomorrow. What are you doing with that?”

I am talking about the book, of course, which I can’t stop staring at, the way Benny is holding it to him, like a shield. All of a sudden there’s this noise in my ears, a kind of roaring sound, and I’m thinking of Moolie and Moolie telling me that I should talk to Benny.

I’m thinking of the way Benny is always asking after Moolie, and what Moolie said before, such a long time ago, about Benny arriving in this country with a cardboard suitcase and fake Levis, and a gold watch that he had to sell to get the money to rent a room.

“Emily,” Benny says again, and the way he says my name—like he’s apologising for something—makes me feel even weirder. He unfolds the book again across his lap, opening it to the centre, where I know there’s a double-page colour spread of the Milky Way, with its billions of stars, all buzzing and fusing together, cloudy and luminous, like the mist as it rises from the surface of the George VI Reservoir.

Benny runs his fingers gently across the paper. It makes a faint squeaking sound. I know exactly how that paper feels: soft to the touch, slightly furry with impacted dust, old.

Benny is touching the book as if it is his.

My stomach does a lurch, as if the world is travelling too fast suddenly, spinning out of control across the blackly infinite backdrop of the whole of space.

“One of my schoolteachers gave me this book,” Benny says. “His name was Otto Okora. His parents brought him here to London when he was six years old. They never returned to Africa, but Otto did. He came back to teach high school in Freetown and that’s where he stayed. He said that England was too cold and too crowded, and that the sky here was never black enough to see the stars. He had this thing about Africa being closer to outer space than any other continent. ‘We never lost our sense of life’s mysteries,’ was what he used to say. Otto was crazy about outer space. He would sit us down in the long hot afternoons and tell us stories about the first moon landings and the first space stations, the first attempts to map the surface of Mars. It was like poetry to me, Emily, and I could never get enough of it. I learned the names of the constellations and how to see them. I knew by heart the mass and volume and composition of each of the planets in our solar system. I even learned to draw my own star maps—impossible journeys to distant planets that no one in a thousand of our lifetimes will ever see. I saw them, though. I saw them at night, when I couldn’t sleep. Instead of counting chickens I would count stars, picking them out from my memory one by one, like diamonds from a black silk handkerchief.”

Like diamonds from a black silk handkerchief.

I want to hug him. Even in the midst of my confusion I want to hug him and tell him that I feel the same, that I have always felt the same, that we are alike.

That we are alike, of course we are.

The truth has been here in front of me, all the time. How stupid am I?

There’s a kind of book called a grimoire, which is a book of spells. I’ve never seen one—I don’t know if such a thing really exists, even—but The Art of Space Travel has always felt to me like it had magic trapped in it. Like you could open its pages and accidentally end up somewhere else. All those dazzling ropes of stars, all those thousands of possible futures, and futures’ futures.

All those enchanted luminous pathways, blinking up at us through the darkness, like the lights of a runway.

I clear my throat with a little cough. I haven’t a single clue what I ought to say.

“Your mother did her nut when you first got a job here,” Benny says quietly. “She called me on the phone, tore me off a strip. She said I wasn’t to breathe a word, under pain of death. That was the first time we’d spoken to one another in ten years.”

“I was supposed to study medicine,” Benny says to me later. “My heart was never in it, though. I didn’t know what I wanted, only that I wanted to find a bigger world than the world I came from. I remember it as if it was yesterday, standing there on the tarmac and looking up at this hotel and just liking the name of it. I gazed up at the big lit-up star logo and it was as if I could hear Otto Okora saying, You go for it, Benny boy, that’s a good omen. I liked the people and I liked the bustle and I liked the lights at night. All the taking off and landing, the enigma of arrival. There’s a book with that name—your mother gave me a copy right back at the beginning, when she still believed in me and things were good between us. I never got round to reading it, but I loved that title. I loved it that I’d finally discovered something I was good at.

“Would she mind very much, do you think?” Benny says. “If I went to see her?”

“It’s your funeral,” I say, and shrug. I try and picture it as it might happen on TV, Benny pressing Moolie’s skinny hand to his lips while she smiles weakly up from the pillows and whispers his name. You see how funny that is, right? “Only don’t go blaming me if she bites your head off.”

Zhanna Sorokina is shorter than she appears on television. She has short mouse-brown hair, and piercing blue eyes. She looks like a school kid.

When I ask her if she’ll sign The Art of Space Travel she looks confused. “But I did not write this,” she says.

“I know that,” I say. “But it’s a book about space. My dad gave it to me. It would mean a lot to me if you would sign it. As a souvenir.”

She uses the pen I give her, a blue Bic, to sign the title page. She writes her name twice, first in the sweeping Cyrillic script she would have learned at school and then again underneath in spiky Latin capitals.

“Is this okay?” she asks.

“Very,” I reply. “Thank you.”

Sorokina smiles, very briefly, and then I see her awareness of me leak from her eyes as she moves away towards the lift that will take her up to the tenth-floor news suite and the waiting cameras, the media frenzy that will surround her for the remainder of her time here on Earth. Her bodyguard moves in to shield her.

It’s the last and only time I will see her close to.

In leaving this world, she makes me feel more properly a part of it.

I wish I had a child I could one day tell about this moment. I’ve never felt like this before, but suddenly I do.

Benny would kill me if he knew I was down here. I’m supposed to be upstairs, in the news suite, making sure they’re up and running with the drinks trolleys. That there are three different kinds of bottled beer, instead of the two that would be usual for these kinds of occasions.

ALL SYSTEMS RED

Martha Wells

Chapter One

I COULD HAVE BECOME a mass murderer after I hacked my governor module, but then I realized I could access the combined feed of entertainment channels carried on the company satellites. It had been well over 35,000 hours or so since then, with still not much murdering, but probably, I don’t know, a little under 35,000 hours of movies, serials, books, plays, and music consumed. As a heartless killing machine, I was a terrible failure.

I was also still doing my job, on a new contract, and hoping Dr. Volescu and Dr. Bharadwaj finished their survey soon so we could get back to the habitat and I could watch episode 397 of Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon.

I admit I was distracted. It was a boring contract so far and I was thinking about backburnering the status alert channel and trying to access music on the entertainment feed without HubSystem logging the extra activity. It was trickier to do it in the field than it was in the habitat.

This assessment zone was a barren stretch of coastal island, with low, flat hills rising and falling and thick greenish-black grass up to my ankles, not much in the way of flora or fauna, except a bunch of different-sized birdlike things and some puffy floaty things that were harmless as far as we knew. The coast was dotted with big bare craters, one of which Bharadwaj and Volescu were taking samples in. The planet had a ring, which from our current position dominated the horizon when you looked out to sea. I was looking at the sky and mentally poking at the feed when the bottom of the crater exploded.

I didn’t bother to make a verbal emergency call. I sent the visual feed from my field camera to Dr. Mensah’s, and jumped down into the crater. As I scrambled down the sandy slope, I could already hear Mensah over the emergency comm channel, yelling at someone to get the hopper in the air now. They were about ten kilos away, working on another part of the island, so there was no way they were going to get here in time to help.

Conflicting commands filled my feed but I didn’t pay attention. Even if I hadn’t borked my own governor module, the emergency feed took priority, and it was chaotic, too, with the automated HubSystem wanting data and trying to send me data I didn’t need yet and Mensah sending me telemetry from the hopper. Which I also didn’t need, but it was easier to ignore than HubSystem simultaneously demanding answers and trying to supply them.

In the middle of all that, I hit the bottom of the crater. I have small energy weapons built into both arms, but the one I went for was the big projectile weapon clamped to my back. The hostile that had just exploded up out of the ground had a really big mouth, so I felt I needed a really big gun.

I dragged Bharadwaj out of its mouth and shoved myself in there instead, and discharged my weapon down its throat and then up toward where I hoped the brain would be. I’m not sure if that all happened in that order; I’d have to replay my own field camera feed. All I knew was that I had Bharadwaj, and it didn’t, and it had disappeared back down the tunnel.

She was unconscious and bleeding through her suit from massive wounds in her right leg and side. I clamped the weapon back into its harness so I could lift her with both arms. I had lost the armor on my left arm and a lot of the flesh underneath, but my nonorganic parts were still working. Another burst of commands from the governor module came through and I backburnered it without bothering to decode them. Bharadwaj, not having nonorganic parts and not as easily repaired as me, was definitely a priority here and I was mainly interested in what the MedSystem was trying to tell me on the emergency feed. But first I needed to get her out of the crater.

During all this, Volescu was huddled on the churned up rock, losing his shit, not that I was unsympathetic. I was far less vulnerable in this situation than he was and I wasn’t exactly having a great time either. I said, “Dr. Volescu, you need to come with me now.”

He didn’t respond. MedSystem was advising a tranq shot and blah blah blah, but I was clamping one arm on Dr. Bharadwaj’s suit to keep her from bleeding out and supporting her head with the other, and despite everything I only have two hands. I told my helmet to retract so he could see my human face. If the hostile came back and bit me again, this would be a bad mistake, because I did need the organic parts of my head. I made my voice firm and warm and gentle, and said, “Dr. Volescu, it’s gonna be fine, okay? But you need to get up and come help me get her out of here.”

That did it. He shoved to his feet and staggered over to me, still shaking. I turned my good side toward him and said, “Grab my arm, okay? Hold on.”

He managed to loop his arm around the crook of my elbow and I started up the crater towing him, holding Bharadwaj against my chest. Her breathing was rough and desperate and I couldn’t get any info from her suit. Mine was torn across my chest so I upped the warmth on my body, hoping it would help. The feed was quiet now, Mensah having managed to use her leadership priority to mute everything but MedSystem and the hopper, and all I could hear on the hopper feed was the others frantically shushing each other.

The footing on the side of the crater was lousy, soft sand and loose pebbles, but my legs weren’t damaged and I got up to the top with both humans still alive. Volescu tried to collapse and I coaxed him away from the edge a few meters, just in case whatever was down there had a longer reach than it looked.

I didn’t want to put Bharadwaj down because something in my abdomen was severely damaged and I wasn’t sure I could pick her up again. I ran my field camera back a little and saw I had gotten stabbed with a tooth, or maybe a cilia. Did I mean a cilia or was that something else? They don’t give murderbots decent education modules on anything except murdering, and even those are the cheap versions. I was looking it up in HubSystem’s language center when the little hopper landed nearby. I let my helmet seal and go opaque as it settled on the grass.

We had two standard hoppers: a big one for emergencies and this little one for getting to the assessment locations. It had three compartments: one big one in the middle for the human crew and two smaller ones to each side for cargo, supplies, and me. Mensah was at the controls. I started walking, slower than I normally would have because I didn’t want to lose Volescu. As the ramp started to drop, Pin-Lee and Arada jumped out and I switched to voice comm to say, “Dr. Mensah, I can’t let go of her suit.”

It took her a second to realize what I meant. She said hurriedly, “That’s all right, bring her up into the crew cabin.”

Murderbots aren’t allowed to ride with the humans and I had to have verbal permission to enter. With my cracked governor there was nothing to stop me, but not letting anybody, especially the people who held my contract, know that I was a free agent was kind of important. Like, not having my organic components destroyed and the rest of me cut up for parts important.

I carried Bharadwaj up the ramp into the cabin, where Overse and Ratthi were frantically unclipping seats to make room. They had their helmets off and their suit hoods pulled back, so I got to see their horrified expressions when they took in what was left of my upper body through my torn suit. I was glad I had sealed my helmet.

This is why I actually like riding with the cargo. Humans and augmented humans in close quarters with murderbots is too awkward. At least, it’s awkward for this murderbot. I sat down on the deck with Bharadwaj in my lap while Pin-Lee and Arada dragged Volescu inside.

We left two pacs of field equipment and a couple of instruments behind, still sitting on the grass where Bharadwaj and Volescu had been working before they went down to the crater for samples. Normally I’d help carry them, but MedSystem, which was monitoring Bharadwaj through what was left of her suit, was pretty clear that letting go of her would be a bad idea. But no one mentioned the equipment. Leaving easily replaceable items behind may seem obvious in an emergency, but I had been on contracts where the clients would have told me to put the bleeding human down to go get the stuff.

On this contract, Dr. Ratthi jumped up and said, “I’ll get the cases!”

I yelled, “No!” which I’m not supposed to do; I’m always supposed to speak respectfully to the clients, even when they’re about to accidentally commit suicide. HubSystem could log it and it could trigger punishment through the governor module. If it wasn’t hacked.

Fortunately, the rest of the humans yelled “No!” at the same time, and Pin-Lee added, “For fuck’s sake, Ratthi!”

Ratthi said, “Oh, no time, of course. I’m sorry!” and hit the quick-close sequence on the hatch.

So we didn’t lose our ramp when the hostile came up under it, big mouth full of teeth or cilia or whatever chewing right through the ground. There was a great view of it on the hopper’s cameras, which its system helpfully sent straight to everybody’s feed. The humans screamed.

Mensah pushed us up into the air so fast and hard I nearly leaned over, and everybody who wasn’t on the floor ended up there.

In the quiet afterward, as they gasped with relief, Pin-Lee said, “Ratthi, if you get yourself killed—”

“You’ll be very cross with me, I know.” Ratthi slid down the wall a little more and waved weakly at her.

“That’s an order, Ratthi, don’t get yourself killed,” Mensah said from the pilot’s seat. She sounded calm, but I have security priority, and I could see her racing heartbeat through MedSystem.

Arada pulled out the emergency medical kit so they could stop the bleeding and try to stabilize Bharadwaj. I tried to be as much like an appliance as possible, clamping the wounds where they told me to, using my failing body temperature to try to keep her warm, and keeping my head down so I couldn’t see them staring at me.

* * *

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 60% AND DROPPING

Our habitat is a pretty standard model, seven interconnected domes set down on a relatively flat plain above a narrow river valley, with our power and recycling system connected on one side. We had an environmental system, but no air locks, as the planet’s atmosphere was breathable, just not particularly good for humans for the long term. I don’t know why, because it’s one of those things I’m not contractually obligated to care about.

We picked the location because it’s right in the middle of the assessment area, and while there are trees scattered through the plain, each one is fifteen or so meters tall, very skinny, with a single layer of spreading canopy, so it’s hard for anything approaching to use them as cover. Of course, that didn’t take into account anything approaching via tunnel.

We have security doors on the habitat for safety but HubSystem told me the main one was already open as the hopper landed. Dr. Gurathin had a lift gurney ready and guided it out to us. Overse and Arada had managed to get Bharadwaj stabilized, so I was able to put her down on it and follow the others into the habitat.

The humans headed for Medical and I stopped to send the little hopper commands to lock and seal itself, then I locked the outer doors. Through the security feed, I told the drones to widen our perimeter so I’d have more warning if something big came at us. I also set some monitors on the seismic sensors to alert me to anomalies just in case the hypothetical something big decided to tunnel in.

After I secured the habitat, I went back to what was called the security ready room, which was where weapons, ammo, perimeter alarms, drones, and all the other supplies pertaining to security were stored, including me. I shed what was left of the armor and on MedSystem’s advice sprayed wound sealant all over my bad side. I wasn’t dripping with blood, because my arteries and veins seal automatically, but it wasn’t nice to look at. And it hurt, though the wound seal did numb it a little. I had already set an eight-hour security interdiction through HubSystem, so nobody could go outside without me, and then set myself as off-duty. I checked the main feed but no one was filing any objections to that.

I was freezing because my temperature controls had given out at some point on the way here, and the protective skin that went under my armor was in pieces. I had a couple of spares but pulling one on right now would not be practical, or easy. The only other clothing I had was a uniform I hadn’t worn yet, and I didn’t think I could get it on, either. (I hadn’t needed the uniform because I hadn’t been patrolling inside the habitat. Nobody had asked for that, because with only eight of them and all friends, it would be a stupid waste of resources, namely me.) I dug around one-handed in the storage case until I found the extra human-rated medical kit I’m allowed in case of emergencies, and opened it and got the survival blanket out. I wrapped up in it, then climbed into the plastic bed of my cubicle. I let the door seal as the white light flickered on.

It wasn’t much warmer in there, but at least it was cozy. I connected myself to the resupply and repair leads, leaned back against the wall and shivered. MedSystem helpfully informed me that my performance reliability was now at 58 percent and dropping, which was not a surprise. I could definitely repair in eight hours, and probably mostly regrow my damaged organic components, but at 58 percent, I doubted I could get any analysis done in the meantime. So I set all the security feeds to alert me if anything tried to eat the habitat and started to call up the supply of media I’d downloaded from the entertainment feed. I hurt too much to pay attention to anything with a story, but the friendly noise would keep me company.

Then someone knocked on the cubicle door.

I stared at it and lost track of all my neatly arrayed inputs. Like an idiot, I said, “Uh, yes?”

Dr. Mensah opened the door and peered in at me. I’m not good at guessing actual humans’ ages, even with all the visual entertainment I watch. People in the shows don’t usually look much like people in real life, at least not in the good shows. She had dark brown skin and lighter brown hair, cut very short, and I’m guessing she wasn’t young or she wouldn’t be in charge. She said, “Are you all right? I saw your status report.”

“Uh.” That was the point where I realized that I should have just not answered and pretended to be in stasis. I pulled the blanket around my chest, hoping she hadn’t seen any of the missing chunks. Without the armor holding me together, it was much worse. “Fine.”

So, I’m awkward with actual humans. It’s not paranoia about my hacked governor module, and it’s not them; it’s me. I know I’m a horrifying murderbot, and they know it, and it makes both of us nervous, which makes me even more nervous. Also, if I’m not in the armor then it’s because I’m wounded and one of my organic parts may fall off and plop on the floor at any moment and no one wants to see that.

“Fine?” She frowned. “The report said you lost 20 percent of your body mass.”

“It’ll grow back,” I said. I know to an actual human I probably looked like I was dying. My injuries were the equivalent of a human losing a limb or two plus most of their blood volume.

“I know, but still.” She eyed me for a long moment, so long I tapped the security feed for the mess, where the non-wounded members of the group were sitting around the table talking. They were discussing the possibility of more underground fauna and wishing they had intoxicants. That seemed pretty normal. She continued, “You were very good with Dr. Volescu. I don’t think the others realized . . . They were very impressed.”

“It’s part of the emergency med instructions, calming victims.” I tugged the blanket tighter so she didn’t see anything awful. I could feel something lower down leaking.

“Yes, but the MedSystem was prioritizing Bharadwaj and didn’t check Volescu’s vital signs. It didn’t take into account the shock of the event, and it expected him to be able to leave the scene on his own.”

On the feed it was clear that the others had reviewed Volescu’s field camera video. They were saying things like I didn’t even know it had a face. I’d been in armor since we arrived, and I hadn’t unsealed the helmet when I was around them. There was no specific reason. The only part of me they would have seen was my head, and it’s standard, generic human. But they didn’t want to talk to me and I definitely didn’t want to talk to them; on duty it would distract me and off duty . . . I didn’t want to talk to them. Mensah had seen me when she signed the rental contract. But she had barely looked at me and I had barely looked at her because again, murderbot + actual human = awkwardness. Keeping the armor on all the time cuts down on unnecessary interaction.

I said, “It’s part of my job, not to listen to the System feeds when they . . . make mistakes.” That’s why you need constructs, SecUnits with organic components. But she should know that. Before she accepted delivery of me, she had logged about ten protests, trying to get out of having to have me. I didn’t hold it against her. I wouldn’t have wanted me either.

Seriously, I don’t know why I didn’t just say you’re welcome and please get out of my cubicle so I can sit here and leak in peace.

“All right,” she said, and looked at me for what objectively I knew was 2.4 seconds and subjectively about twenty excruciating minutes. “I’ll see you in eight hours. If you need anything before then, please send me an alert on the feed.” She stepped back and let the door slide closed.

It left me wondering what they were all marveling at so I called up the recording of the incident. Okay, wow. I had talked to Volescu all the way up the side of the crater. I had been mostly concerned with the hopper’s trajectory and Bharadwaj not bleeding out and what might come out of that crater for a second try; I hadn’t been listening to myself, basically. I had asked him if he had kids. It was boggling. Maybe I had been watching too much media. (He did have kids. He was in a four-way marriage and had seven, all back home with his partners.)

All my levels were too elevated now for a rest period, so I decided I might as well get some use out of it and look at the other recordings. Then I found something weird. There was an “abort” order in the HubSystem command feed, the one that controlled, or currently believed it controlled, my governor module. It had to be a glitch. It didn’t matter, because when MedSystem has priority—

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 39%STASIS INITIATED FOR EMERGENCY REPAIR SEQUENCE

Chapter Two

WHEN I WOKE UP, I was mostly all there again, and up to 80 percent efficiency and climbing. I checked all the feeds immediately, in case the humans wanted to go out, but Mensah had extended the security interdict on the habitat for another four hours. Which was a relief, since it would give me time to get back up to the 98 percent range. But there was also a notice for me to report to her. That had never happened before. But maybe she wanted to go over the hazard info package and figure out why it hadn’t warned us about the underground hostile. I was wondering a little about that myself.

Their group was called PreservationAux and it had bought an option on this planet’s resources, and the survey trip was to see if it was worth bidding on a full share. Knowing about things on the planet that might eat them while they’re trying to do whatever it is they’re doing was kind of important.

I don’t care much about who my clients are or what they’re trying to accomplish. I knew this group was from a freehold planet but I hadn’t bothered to look up the specifics. Freehold meant it had been terraformed and colonized but wasn’t affiliated with any corporate confederations. Basically freehold generally meant shitshow so I hadn’t been expecting much from them. But they were surprisingly easy to work for.

I cleaned all the stray fluids off my new skin, then climbed out of the cubicle. That was when I realized I hadn’t put the pieces of my armor up and it was all over the floor, covered with my fluids and Bharadwaj’s blood. No wonder Mensah had looked into the cubicle; she had probably thought I was dead in there. I put it all back into its slots in the reclaimer for repair.

I had an alternate set, but it was still packed into storage and it would take extra time to pull it out and do the diagnostics and the fitting. I hesitated over the uniform, but the security feed would have notified Mensah that I was awake, so I needed to get out there.

It was based on a standard research group’s uniforms, and meant to be comfortable inside the habitat: knit gray pants, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a jacket, like the exercise clothes humans and augmented humans wore, plus soft shoes. I put it on, tugged the sleeves down over the gunports on my forearms, and went out into the habitat.

I went through two interior secure doors to the crew area, and found them in the main hub in a huddle around a console, looking at one of the hovering displays. They were all there except Bharadwaj, who was still in the infirmary, and Volescu, who was sitting in there with her. There were mugs and empty meal packets on some of the consoles. I’m not cleaning that up unless I’m given a direct order.

Mensah was busy so I stood and waited.

Ratthi glanced at me, and then did a startled double take. I had no idea how to react. This is why I prefer wearing the armor, even inside the habitat where it’s unnecessary and can just get in the way. Human clients usually like to pretend I’m a robot and that’s much easier in the armor. I let my eyes unfocus and pretended I was running a diagnostic on something.

Clearly bewildered, Ratthi said, “Who is this?”

They all turned to look at me. All but Mensah, who was sitting at the console with the interface pressed to her forehead. It was clear that even after seeing my face on Volescu’s camera video, they didn’t recognize me without the helmet. So then I had to look at them and say, “I’m your SecUnit.”

They all looked startled and uncomfortable. Almost as uncomfortable as I did. I wished I’d waited to pull the spare armor out.

Part of it is, they didn’t want me here. Not here in their hub, but here on the planet. One of the reasons the bond company requires it, besides slapping more expensive markups on their clients, is that I was recording all their conversations all the time, though I wasn’t monitoring anything I didn’t need to do a half-assed version of my job. But the company would access all those recordings and data mine them for anything they could sell. No, they don’t tell people that. Yes, everyone does know it. No, there’s nothing you can do about it.

After a subjective half hour and an objective 3.4 seconds, Dr. Mensah turned, saw me, and lowered the interface. She said, “We were checking the hazard report for this region to try to learn why that thing wasn’t listed under hazardous fauna. Pin-Lee thinks the data has been altered. Can you examine the report for us?”

“Yes, Dr. Mensah.” I could have done this in my cubicle and we could have all saved the embarrassment. Anyway, I picked up the feed she was watching from HubSystem and started to check the report.

It was basically a long list of pertinent info and warnings on the planet and specifically the area where our habitat was, with emphasis on weather, terrain, flora, fauna, air quality, mineral deposits, possible hazards related to any and all of those, with connections to subreports with more detailed information. Dr. Gurathin, the least talkative one, was an augmented human and had his own implanted interface. I could feel him poking around in the data, while the others, using the touch interfaces, were just distant ghosts. I had a lot more processing power than he did, though.

I thought they were being paranoid; even with the interfaces you actually have to read the words, preferably all the words. Sometimes non-augmented humans don’t do that. Sometimes augmented humans don’t do it either.

But as I checked the general warning section, I noticed something was odd about the formatting. A quick comparison with the other parts of the report told me that yeah, something had been removed, a connection to a subreport broken. “You’re right,” I said, distracted as I rifled through data storage looking for the missing piece. I couldn’t find it; it wasn’t just a broken connection, somebody had actually deleted the subreport. That was supposed to be impossible with this type of planetary survey package, but I guess it wasn’t as impossible as all that. “Something’s been deleted from the warnings and the section on fauna.”

The reaction to that in general was pretty pissed off. There were some loud complaints from Pin-Lee and Overse and dramatic throwing-hands-in-the-air from Ratthi. But, like I said, they were all friends and a lot less restrained with each other than my last set of contractual obligations. It was why, if I forced myself to admit it, I had actually been enjoying this contract, up until something tried to eat me and Bharadwaj.

SecSystem records everything, even inside the sleeping cabins, and I see everything. That’s why it’s easier to pretend I’m a robot. Overse and Arada were a couple, but from the way they acted they’d always been one, and they were best friends with Ratthi. Ratthi had an unrequited thing for Pin-Lee, but didn’t act stupid about it. Pin-Lee was exasperated a lot, and tossed things around when the others weren’t there, but it wasn’t about Ratthi. I thought that being under the company’s eye affected her more than the others. Volescu admired Mensah to the point where he might have a crush on her. Pin-Lee did, too, but she and Bharadwaj flirted occasionally in an old comfortable way that suggested it had been going on for a long time. Gurathin was the only loner, but he seemed to like being with the others. He had a small, quiet smile, and they all seemed to like him.

It was a low-stress group, they didn’t argue much or antagonize each other for fun, and were fairly restful to be around, as long as they didn’t try to talk or interact with me in any way.

Mid expression of frustration, Ratthi said, “So we have no way to know if that creature was an aberration or if they live at the bottom of all those craters?”

Arada, who was one of the biology specialists, said, “You know, I bet they do. If those big avians we saw on the scans land on those barrier islands frequently, that creature might be preying on them.”

“It would explain what the craters are doing there,” Mensah said more thoughtfully. “That would be one anomaly out of the way, at least.”

“But who removed that subreport?” Pin-Lee said, which I agreed was the more important question here. She turned to me with one of those abrupt movements that I had taught myself not to react to. “Can the HubSystem be hacked?”

From the outside, I had no idea. It was as easy as breathing to do it from the inside, with the built-in interfaces in my own body. I had hacked it as soon as it had come online when we set up the habitat. I had to; if it monitored the governor module and my feed like it was supposed to, it could lead to a lot of awkward questions and me being stripped for parts. “As far as I know, it’s possible,” I said. “But it’s more likely the report was damaged before you received the survey package.”

Lowest bidder. Trust me on that one.

There were groans and general complaining about having to pay high prices for shitty equipment. (I don’t take it personally.) Mensah said, “Gurathin, maybe you and Pin-Lee can figure out what happened.” Most of my clients only know their specialties, and there’s no reason to send a system specialist along on a survey trip. The company supplies all the systems and attachments (the medical equipment, the drones, me, etc.) and will maintain it as part of the overall package the clients purchase. But Pin-Lee seemed to be a gifted amateur at system interpretation, and Gurathin had an advantage with his internal interface. Mensah added, “In the meantime, does the DeltFall Group have the same survey package as we do?”

I checked. HubSystem thought it was likely, but we knew what its opinion was worth now. “Probably,” I said. DeltFall was another survey group, like us, but they were on a continent on the opposite side of the planet. They were a bigger operation and had been dropped off by a different ship, so the humans hadn’t met in person, but they talked over the comm occasionally. They weren’t part of my contract and had their own SecUnits, the standard one per ten clients. We were supposed to be able to call on each other in emergencies, but being half a planet apart put a natural damper on that.

Mensah leaned back in her chair and steepled her fingers. “All right, this is what we’ll do. I want you each to check the individual sections of the survey package for your specialties. Try to pinpoint any more missing information. When we have a partial list, I’ll call DeltFall and see if they can send us the files.”

That sounded like a great plan, in that it didn’t involve me. I said, “Dr. Mensah, do you need me for anything else?”

She turned her chair to face me. “No, I’ll call if we have any questions.” I had worked for some contracts that would have kept me standing here the entire day and night cycle, just on the off chance they wanted me to do something and didn’t want to bother using the feed to call me. Then she added, “You know, you can stay here in the crew area if you want. Would you like that?”

They all looked at me, most of them smiling. One disadvantage in wearing the armor is that I get used to opaquing the faceplate. I’m out of practice at controlling my expression. Right now I’m pretty sure it was somewhere in the region of stunned horror, or maybe appalled horror.

Mensah sat up, startled. She said hurriedly, “Or not, you know, whatever you like.”

I said, “I need to check the perimeter,” and managed to turn and leave the crew area in a totally normal way and not like I was fleeing from a bunch of giant hostiles.

* * *

Back in the safety of the ready room, I leaned my head against the plastic-coated wall. Now they knew their murderbot didn’t want to be around them any more than they wanted to be around it. I’d given a tiny piece of myself away.

That can’t happen. I have too much to hide, and letting one piece go means the rest isn’t as protected.

I shoved away from the wall and decided to actually do some work. The missing subreport made me a little cautious. Not that there were any directives about it. My education modules were such cheap crap; most of the useful things I knew about security I learned from the edutainment programming on the entertainment feeds. (That’s another reason why they have to require these research groups and mining and biology and tech companies to rent one of us or they won’t guarantee the bond; we’re cheaply produced and we suck. Nobody would hire one of us for non-murdering purposes unless they had to.)

Once I got my extra suit skin and spare set of armor on, I walked the perimeter and compared the current readings of the terrain and the seismic scans to the one we took when we first arrived. There were some notes in the feed from Ratthi and Arada, that fauna like the one we were now calling Hostile One might have made all the anomalous craters in the survey area. But nothing had changed around the habitat.

I also checked to make sure both the big hopper and the little hopper had their full complement of emergency supplies. I packed them in there myself days ago, but I was mainly checking to make sure the humans hadn’t done anything stupid with them since the last time I checked.

I did everything I could think of to do, then finally let myself go on standby while I caught up on my serials. I’d watched three episodes of Sanctuary Moon and was fast forwarding through a sex scene when Dr. Mensah sent me some images through the feed. (I don’t have any gender or sex-related parts (if a construct has those you’re a sexbot in a brothel, not a murderbot) so maybe that’s why I find sex scenes boring. Though I think that even if I did have sex-related parts I would find them boring.) I took a look at the images in Mensah’s message, then saved my place in the serial.

Confession time: I don’t actually know where we are. We have, or are supposed to have, a complete satellite map of the planet in the survey package. That was how the humans decided where to do their assessments. I hadn’t looked at the maps yet and I’d barely looked at the survey package. In my defense, we’d been here twenty-two planetary days and I hadn’t had to do anything but stand around watching humans make scans or take samples of dirt, rocks, water, and leaves. The sense of urgency just wasn’t there. Also, you may have noticed, I don’t care.

So it was news to me that there were six missing sections from our map. Pin-Lee and Gurathin had found the discrepancies and Mensah wanted to know if I thought it was just the survey package being cheap and error-ridden or if I thought this was part of a hack. I appreciated the fact that we were communicating via the feed and that she wasn’t making me actually speak to her on the comm. I was so appreciative I gave her my real opinion, that it probably was the fact that our survey package was a cheap piece of crap but the only way to know for certain was to go out and look at one of the missing sections and see if there was anything there besides more boring planet. I didn’t phrase it exactly like that but that was what I meant.

She took her attention off the feed then, but I stayed alert, since I knew she tended to make her decisions fast and if I started a show again I’d just get interrupted. I did check the security-camera view of the hub so I could hear their conversation. They all wanted to check it out, and were just going back and forth on whether they should wait. They had just had a comm conversation with DeltFall on the other continent who had agreed to send copies of the missing survey package files. Some of the clients wanted to see if anything else was missing first, and others wanted to go now, and blah, blah, blah.

I knew how this was going to turn out.

It wasn’t a long trip, not far outside the range of the other assessments they had been doing, but not knowing what they were flying into was definitely a red flag for security. In a smart world, I should go alone, but with the governor module I had to be within a hundred meters of at least one of the clients at all times, or it would fry me. They knew that, so volunteering to take a solo cross-continental trip might set off a few alarms.

So when Mensah opened the feed again to tell me they were going, I told her security protocols suggested that I should go, too.

Chapter Three

WE GOT READY to leave at the beginning of the day cycle, in the morning light, and the satellite weather report said it would be a good day for flying and scanning. I checked MedSystem and saw Bharadwaj was awake and talking.

It wasn’t until I was helping to carry equipment to the little hopper that I realized they were going to make me ride in the crew cabin.

At least I was in the armor with my helmet opaqued. But when Mensah told me to get in the copilot’s seat, it didn’t turn out to be as bad as my first horrified realization. Arada and Pin-Lee didn’t try to talk to me, and Ratthi actually looked away when I eased past him to get to the cockpit.

They were all so careful not to look at me or talk to me directly that as soon as we were in the air I did a quick spot check through HubSystem’s records of their conversations. I had talked myself into believing that I hadn’t actually lost it as much as I thought I had when Mensah had offered to let me hang out in the hub with the humans like I was an actual person or something.

The conversation they had immediately after that gave me a sinking sensation as I reviewed it. No, it had been worse than I thought. They had talked it over and all agreed not to “push me any further than I wanted to go” and they were all so nice and it was just excruciating. I was never taking off the helmet again. I can’t do even the half-assed version of this stupid job if I have to talk to humans.

They were the first clients I’d had who hadn’t had any previous experience with SecUnits, so maybe I could have expected this if I’d bothered to think about it. Letting them see me without the armor had been a huge mistake.

At least Mensah and Arada had overruled the ones who wanted to talk to me about it. Yes, talk to Murderbot about its feelings. The idea was so painful I dropped to 97 percent efficiency. I’d rather climb back into Hostile One’s mouth.

I worried about it while they looked out the windows at the ring or watched their feeds of the hopper’s scans of the new scenery, chatting on the comm with the others who were following our progress back in the habitat. I was distracted, but still caught the moment when the autopilot cut out.

It could have been a problem, except I was in the copilot’s seat and I could have taken over in time. But even if I hadn’t been there, it would have turned out okay, because Mensah was flying and she never took her hands off the controls.

Even though the planetary craft autopilots aren’t as sophisticated as a full bot-pilot system, some clients will still engage it and then walk into the back, or sleep. Mensah didn’t and she made sure when the others flew they followed her rules. She just made some thoughtful grumpy noises and adjusted our course away from the mountain the failing autopilot would have slammed us into.

I had cycled out of horrified that they wanted to talk to me about my feelings into grateful that she had ordered them not to. As she restarted the autopilot, I pulled the log and sent it into the feed to show her it had cut out due to a HubSystem glitch. She swore under her breath and shook her head.

* * *

The missing map section wasn’t that far outside our assessment range so we were there before I made a dent in the backlog of serials I’d saved to my internal storage. Mensah told the others, “We’re coming up on it.”

We had been traveling over heavy tropical forest, where it flowed over deep valleys. Suddenly it dropped away into a plain, spotted with lakes and smaller copses of trees. There was a lot of bare rock, in low ridges and tumbled boulders. It was dark and glassy, like volcanic glass.

The cabin was quiet as everybody studied the scans. Arada was looking at the seismic data, bouncing it to the others back in the habitat through her feed.

“I don’t see anything that would prevent the satellite from mapping this region,” Pin-Lee said, her voice distant as she sorted through the data the hopper was pulling in. “No strange readings. It’s weird.”

“Unless this rock has some sort of stealth property that prevented the satellites from imaging it,” Arada said. “The scanners are acting a little funny.”

“Because the scanners suck corporation balls,” Pin-Lee muttered.

“Should we land?” Mensah said. I realized she was asking me for a security assessment.

The scans were sort of working and marking some hazards, but they weren’t any different hazards from what we’d run into before. I said, “We could. But we know there’s at least one lifeform here that tunnels through rock.”

Arada bounced a little in her seat, like she was impatient to get going. “I know we have to be cautious, but I think we’d be safer if we knew whether these blank patches on the satellite scan were accidental or deliberate.”

That was when I realized they weren’t ignoring the possibility of sabotage. I should have realized it earlier, when Pin-Lee asked if HubSystem could be hacked. But humans had been looking at me and I had just wanted to get out of there.

Ratthi and Pin-Lee seconded her, and Mensah made her decision. “We’ll land and take samples.”

Over the comm from the habitat, Bharadwaj’s voice said, “Please be careful.” She still sounded shaky.

Mensah took us down gently, the hopper’s pads touching the ground with hardly a thump. I was already up and at the hatch.

The humans had their suit helmets on so I opened the hatch and let the ramp drop. Close up the rocky patches still looked like glass, mostly black, but with different colors running into each other. This near to the ground the hopper’s scan was able to confirm that seismic activity was null, but I walked out a little bit, as if giving anything out there a chance to attack me. If the humans see me actually doing my job, it helps keep suspicions from forming about faulty governor modules.

Mensah climbed down with Arada behind her. They moved around, taking more readings with their portable scanners. Then the others got the sample kit outs and started chipping off pieces of the rock glass, or glass rock, scooping up dirt and bits of plant matter. They were murmuring to each other a lot, and to the others back at the habitat. They were sending the data to the feed, but I wasn’t paying attention.

It was an odd spot. Quiet compared to the other places we’d surveyed, with not much bird-thing noise and no sign of animal movement. Maybe the rocky patches kept them away. I walked out a little way, past a couple of the lakes, almost expecting to see something under the surface. Dead bodies, maybe. I’d seen plenty of those (and caused plenty of those) on past contracts, but this one had been dead-body-lacking, so far. It made for a nice change.

Mensah had set a survey perimeter, marking all the areas the aerial scan had flagged as hazardous or potentially hazardous. I checked on everybody again and saw Arada and Ratthi heading directly for one of the hazard markers. I expected them to stop at the perimeter, since they’d been pretty consistently cautious on the other assessments. I started moving in that direction anyway. Then they passed the perimeter. I started to run. I sent Mensah my field camera feed and used the voice comm to say, “Dr. Arada, Dr. Ratthi, please stop. You’re past the perimeter and nearing a hazard marker.”

“We are?” Ratthi sounded completely baffled.

Fortunately, they both stopped. By the time I got there they both had their maps up in my feed. “I don’t understand what’s wrong,” Arada said, confused. “I don’t see the hazard marker.” She had tagged both their positions and on their maps they were well within the perimeter, heading toward a wetland area.

It took me a second to see what the problem was. Then I superimposed my map, the actual map, over theirs and sent that to Mensah. “Shit,” she said over the comm. “Ratthi, Arada, your map’s wrong. How did that happen?”

“It’s a glitch,” Ratthi said. He grimaced, studying the displays in his feed. “It’s wiped out all the markers on this side.”

So that was how I spent the rest of the morning, shooing humans away from hazard markers they couldn’t see, while Pin-Lee cursed a lot and tried to get the mapping scanner to work. “I’m beginning to think these missing sections are just a mapping error,” Ratthi said at one point, panting. He had walked into what they called a hot mud pit and I’d had to pull him out. We were both covered with acidic mud to the waist.

“You think?” Pin-Lee answered tiredly.

When Mensah told us to head back to the hopper, it was a relief all around.

* * *

We got back to the habitat with no problems, which felt like it was starting to become an unusual occurrence. The humans went to analyze their data, and I went to hide in the ready room, check the security feeds, and then lie in my cubicle and watch media for a while.

I’d just done another perimeter walk and checked the drones, when the feed informed me that HubSystem had updates from the satellite and there was a package for me. I have a trick where I make HubSystem think I received it and then just put it in external storage. I don’t do automated package updates anymore, now that I don’t have to. When I felt like it, presumably sometime before it was time to leave the planet, I’d go through the update and apply the parts I wanted and delete the rest.

It was a typical, boring day, in other words. If Bharadwaj wasn’t still recuperating in Medical, you could almost forget what had happened. But at the end of the day cycle, Dr. Mensah called me again and said, “I think we have a problem. We can’t contact DeltFall Group.”

* * *

I went to the crew hub where Mensah and all the others were. They had pulled up the maps and scans of where we were versus where DeltFall was, and the curve of the planet hung glittering in the air in the big display. When I got there, Mensah was saying, “I’ve checked the big hopper’s specs and we can make it there and back without a recharge.”

I had my helmet plate opaqued, so I could wince a lot without any of them knowing.

“You don’t think they’ll let us recharge at their habitat?” Arada asked, then looked around when the others stared at her. “What?” she demanded.

Overse put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. “If they aren’t answering our calls, they might be hurt, or their habitat is damaged,” she said. As a couple, they were always so nice to each other. The whole group had been remarkably drama-free so far, which I appreciated. The last few contracts had been like being an involuntary bystander in one of the entertainment feed’s multi-partner relationship serials except I’d hated the whole cast.

Mensah nodded. “That’s my concern, especially if their survey package was missing potential hazard information the way ours is.”

Arada looked like it was just occurring to her that everybody over at DeltFall might be dead.

Ratthi said, “The thing that worries me is that their emergency beacon didn’t launch. If the habitat was breached, or if there was a medical emergency they couldn’t handle, their HubSystem should have triggered the beacon automatically.”

Each survey team has its own beacon, set up a safe distance from the habitat. It would launch into a low orbit and send a pulse toward the wormhole, which would get zapped or whatever happened in the wormhole and the company network would get it, and the pickup transport would be sent now instead of waiting until the end of project date. That was how it was supposed to work, anyway. Usually.

Mensah’s expression said she was worried. She looked at me. “What do you think?”

It took me two seconds to realize she was talking to me. Fortunately, since it seemed like we were really doing this, I had actually been paying attention and didn’t need to play the conversation back. I said, “They have three contracted SecUnits but if their habitat was hit by a hostile as big or bigger than Hostile One, their comm equipment could have been damaged.”

Pin-Lee was calling up specs for the beacons. “Aren’t the emergency beacons designed to trigger even if the rest of the comm equipment is destroyed?”

The other good thing about my hacked governor module is that I could ignore the governor’s instructions to defend the stupid company. “They’re supposed to be able to, but equipment failures aren’t unknown.”

There was a moment where they all thought about potential equipment failures in their habitat, maybe including the big hopper which they were about to fly out of range of the little hopper, so if something happened to it they were walking back. And swimming back, since that was an ocean-sized body of water between the two points on the map. Or drown; I guess they could just drown. If you were wondering why I was wincing earlier, this would be the reason.

The trip to the map’s black-out region had been a little out of our assessment parameters, but this was going to be an overnight trip, even if all they did was get there, see a bunch of dead people, turn around and go back.

Then Gurathin said, “What about your systems?”

I didn’t turn my helmet toward him because that can be intimidating and it’s especially important for me to resist that urge. “I carefully monitor my own systems.” What else did he think I was going to say? It didn’t matter; I’m not refundable.

Volescu cleared his throat. “So we should prepare for a rescue mission.” He looked okay, but MedSystem’s feed was still reporting some indicators of distress. Bharadwaj was stable but not allowed to get out of Medical yet. He continued, “I’ve pulled some instructions from the hopper’s info package.”

Yes, instructions. They’re academics, surveyors, researchers, not action-hero explorers from the serials I liked because they were unrealistic and not depressing and sordid like reality. I said, “Dr. Mensah, I think I should go along.”

I could see her notes in the feed so I knew she meant for me to stay here and watch the habitat and guard everybody who wasn’t going. She was taking Pin-Lee, because she had past experience in habitat and shelter construction; Ratthi, who was a biologist; and Overse, who was certified as a field medic.

Mensah hesitated, thinking about it, and I could tell she was debating protecting the habitat and the group staying behind with the possibility of whatever had hit DeltFall still being there. She took a breath and I knew she was going to tell me to stay here. And I just thought, That’s a bad idea. I couldn’t explain to myself why. It was one of those impulses that comes from my organic parts that the governor is supposed to squash. I said, “As the only one here with experience in these situations, I’m your best resource.”

Gurathin said, “What situations?”

Ratthi gave him a bemused look. “This situation. The unknown. Strange threats. Monsters exploding out of the ground.”

I was glad I wasn’t the only one who thought it was a dumb question. Gurathin wasn’t as talkative as the others, so I didn’t have much of a sense of his personality. He was the only augmented human in the group, so maybe he felt like an outsider, or something, even though the others clearly liked him. I clarified, “Situations where personnel might be injured due to attack by planetary hazards.”

Arada came in on my side. “I agree. I think you should take SecUnit. You don’t know what’s out there.”

Mensah was still undecided. “Depending on what we find, we may be gone as long as two or three days.”

Arada waved a hand, indicating the habitat. “Nothing’s bothered us here so far.”

That was probably what DeltFall had thought, right before they got eaten or torn to pieces or whatever. But Volescu said, “I admit it would make me feel better about it.” From Medical, Bharadwaj tapped into the feed to add her vote for me. Gurathin was the only one staying behind who didn’t say anything.

Mensah nodded firmly. “All right then, it’s decided. Now let’s get moving.”

* * *

So I prepped the big hopper to go to the other side of the planet. (And yes, I had to pull up the instructions.) I checked it over as much as I could, remembering how the autopilot had cut out suddenly in the little hopper. But we hadn’t used the big hopper since Mensah had taken it up to check it out when we arrived. (You had to check everything out and log any problems immediately when you took delivery or the company wasn’t liable.) But everything looked okay, or at least matched what the specs said it was supposed to match. It was only there for emergencies and if this thing with DeltFall hadn’t happened, we would probably never have touched it until it was time to lift it onto our pickup transport.

Mensah came to do her own check of the hopper, and told me to pack some extra emergency supplies for the DeltFall staff. I did it, and I hoped for the humans’ sake we would need them. I thought it was likely that the only supplies we would need for DeltFall was the postmortem kind, but you may have noticed that when I do manage to care, I’m a pessimist.

When everything was ready, Overse, Ratthi, and Pin-Lee climbed in, and I stood hopefully by the cargo pod. Mensah pointed at the cabin. I winced behind my opaque faceplate and climbed in.

Chapter Four

WE FLEW THROUGH THE NIGHT, the humans taking scans and discussing the new terrain past our assessment range. It was especially interesting for them to see what was there, now that we knew our map wasn’t exactly reliable.

Mensah gave everybody watch shifts, including me. This was new, but not unwelcome, as it meant I had blocks of time where I wasn’t supposed to be paying attention and didn’t have to fake it. Mensah, Pin-Lee, and Overse were all taking turns as pilot and copilot, so I didn’t have to worry so much about the autopilot trying to kill us, and I could go on standby and watch my stored supply of serials.

We’d been in the air awhile, and Mensah was piloting with Pin-Lee in the copilot’s seat, when Ratthi turned in his seat to face me and said, “We heard—we were given to understand, that Imitative Human Bot Units are . . . partially constructed from cloned material.”

Warily, I stopped the show I was watching. I didn’t like where this might go. All of that information is in the common knowledge database, plus in the brochure the company provides with the specifics of the types of units they use. Which he knew, being a scientist and whatever. And he wasn’t the kind of human who asked about things when he could look them up himself through a feed. “That’s true,” I said, very careful to make my voice sound just as neutral as always.

Ratthi’s expression was troubled. “But surely . . . It’s clear you have feelings—”

I flinched. I couldn’t help it.

Overse had been working in the feed, analyzing data from the assessments. She looked up, frowning. “Ratthi, what are you doing?”

Ratthi shifted guiltily. “I know Mensah asked us not to, but—” He waved a hand. “You saw it.”

Overse pulled her interface off. “You’re upsetting it,” she said, teeth gritted.

“That’s my point!” He gestured in frustration. “The practice is disgusting, it’s horrible, it’s slavery. This is no more a machine than Gurathin is—”

Exasperated, Overse said, “And you don’t think it knows that?”

I’m supposed to let the clients do and say whatever they want to me and with an intact governor module I wouldn’t have a choice. I’m also not supposed to snitch on clients to anybody except the company, but it was either that or jump out the hatch. I sent the conversation into the feed tagged for Mensah.

From the cockpit, she shouted, “Ratthi! We talked about this!”

I slid out of the seat and went to the back of the hopper, as far away as I could get, facing the supply lockers and the head. It was a mistake; it wasn’t a normal thing for a SecUnit with an intact governor module to do, but they didn’t notice.

“I’ll apologize,” Ratthi was saying.

“No, just leave it alone,” Mensah told him.

“That would just make it worse,” Overse added.

I stood there until they all calmed down and got quiet again, then slid into a seat in the back, and resumed the serial I’d been watching.

* * *

It was the middle of the night when I felt the feed drop out.

I hadn’t been using it, but I had the SecSystem feeds from the drones and the interior cameras backburnered and was accessing them occasionally to make sure everything was okay. The humans left behind in the habitat were more active than they usually were at this time, probably anxious about what we were going to find at DeltFall. I was hearing Arada walk around occasionally, though Volescu was snoring off and on in his bunk. Bharadwaj had been able to move back to her own quarters, but was restless and going over her field notes through the feed. Gurathin was in the hub doing something on his personal system. I wondered what he was doing and had just started to carefully poke around through HubSystem to find out. When the feed dropped it was like someone slapped the organic part of my brain.

I sat up and said, “The satellite went down.”

The others, except for Pin-Lee who was piloting, all grabbed for their interfaces. I saw their expressions when they felt the silence. Mensah pushed out of her seat and came to the back. “Are you sure it was the satellite?”

“I’m sure,” I told her. “I’m pinging it and there’s no response.”

We still had our local feed, running on the hopper’s system, so we could communicate through it as well as the comm and share data with each other. We just didn’t have nearly as much data as we’d have had if we were still attached to HubSystem. We were far enough away that we needed the comm satellite as a relay. Ratthi switched his interface to the hopper’s feed and started checking the scans. There was nothing on them except empty sky; I had them backburnered but I’d set them to notify me if they encountered anything like an energy reading or a large life sign. He said, “I just felt a chill. Did anyone else feel a chill?”

“A little,” Overse admitted. “It’s a weird coincidence, isn’t it?”

“The damn satellite’s had periodic outages since we got here,” Pin-Lee pointed out from the cockpit. “We just don’t normally need it for comms.” She was right. I was supposed to check their personal logs periodically in case they were plotting to defraud the company or murder each other or something, and the last time I’d looked at Pin-Lee’s she had been tracking the satellite problems, trying to figure out if there was a pattern. It was one of the many things I didn’t care about because the entertainment feed was only updated occasionally, and I downloaded it for local storage.

Ratthi shook his head. “But this is the first time we’ve been far enough from the habitat to need it for comm contact. It just seems odd, and not in a good way.”

Mensah looked around at them. “Does anyone want to turn back?”

I did, but I didn’t get a vote. The others sat there for a quiet moment, then Overse said, “If it turns out the DeltFall group did need help, and we didn’t go, how would we feel?”

“If there’s a chance we can save lives, we have to take it,” Pin-Lee agreed.

Ratthi sighed. “No, you’re right. I’d feel terrible if anyone died because we were overcautious.”

“We’re agreed, then,” Mensah said. “We’ll keep going.”

I would have preferred they be overcautious. I had had contracts before where the company’s equipment glitched this badly, but there was just something about this that made me think it was more. But all I had was the feeling.

I had four hours to my next scheduled watch so I went into standby, and buried myself in the downloads I’d stored away.

* * *

It was dawn when we got there. DeltFall had established their camp in a wide valley surrounded by high mountains. A spiderweb of creek beds cut through the grass and stubby trees. They were a bigger operation than ours, with three linked habitats, and a shelter for surface vehicles, plus a landing area for two large hoppers, a cargo hauler, and three small hoppers. It was all company equipment though, per contract, and all subject to the same malfunctions as the crap they’d dumped on us.

There was no one outside, no movement. No sign of damage, no sign any hostile fauna had approached. The satellite was still dead, but Mensah had been trying to get the DeltFall habitat on the comm since we had come within range.

“Are they missing any transports?” Mensah asked.

Ratthi checked the record of what they were supposed to have which I’d copied from HubSystem before we left. “No, the hoppers are all there. Their ground vehicles are in that shelter, I think.”

I had moved up to the front as we got closer. Standing behind the pilot’s seat, I said, “Dr. Mensah, I recommend you land outside their perimeter.” Through the local feed I sent her all the info I had, which was that their automated systems were responding to the pings the hopper was sending, but that was it. We weren’t picking up their feed, which meant their HubSystem was in standby. There was nothing from their three SecUnits, not even pings.

Overse, in the copilot’s seat, glanced up at me. “Why?”

I had to answer the question so I said, “Security protocol,” which sounded good and didn’t commit me to anything. No one outside, no one answering the comm. Unless they had all jumped in their surface vehicles and gone off on vacation, leaving their Hub and SecUnits shut down, they were dead. Pessimism confirmed.

But we couldn’t be sure without looking. The hopper’s scanners can’t see inside the habitats because of the shielding that’s really only there to protect proprietary data, so we couldn’t get any life signs or energy readings.

This is why I didn’t want to come. I’ve got four perfectly good humans here and I didn’t want them to get killed by whatever took out DeltFall. It’s not like I cared about them personally, but it would look bad on my record, and my record was already pretty terrible.

“We’re just being cautious,” Mensah said, answering Overse. She took the hopper down at the edge of the valley, on the far side of the streams.

I gave Mensah a few hints through the feed, that they should break out the handweapons in the survival gear, that Ratthi should stay behind inside the hopper with the hatch sealed and locked since he’d never done the weapon-training course, and that, most important, I should go first. They were quiet, subdued. Up until now, I think they had all been looking at this as probably a natural disaster, that they were going to be digging survivors out of a collapsed habitat, or helping fight off a herd of Hostile Ones.

This was something else.

Mensah gave the orders and we started forward, me in front, the humans a few steps behind. They were in their full suits with helmets, which gave some protection but had been meant for environmental hazards, not some other heavily armed human (or angry malfunctioning rogue SecUnit) deliberately trying to kill them. I was more nervous than Ratthi, who was jittery on our comms, monitoring the scans, and basically telling us to be careful every other step.

I had my built-in energy weapons and the big projectile weapon I was cradling. I also had six drones, pulled from the hopper’s supply and under my control through its feed. They were the small kind, barely a centimeter across; no weapons, just cameras. (They make some which aren’t much bigger and have a small pulse weapon, but you have to get one of the upper-tier company packages mostly designed for much larger contracts.) I told the drones to get in the air and gave them a scouting pattern.

I did that because it seemed sensible, not because I knew what I was doing. I am not a combat murderbot, I’m Security. I keep things from attacking the clients and try to gently discourage the clients from attacking each other. I was way out of my depth here, which was another reason I hadn’t wanted the humans to come here.

We crossed the shallow streams, sending a group of water invertebrates scattering away from our boots. The trees were short and sparse enough that I had a good view of the camp from this angle. I couldn’t detect any DeltFall security drones, by eye or with the scanners on my drones. Ratthi in the hopper wasn’t picking up anything either. I really, really wished I could pinpoint the location of those three SecUnits, but I wasn’t getting anything from them.

SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other. We aren’t friends, the way the characters on the serials are, or the way my humans were. We can’t trust each other, even if we work together. Even if you don’t have clients who decide to entertain themselves by ordering their SecUnits to fight each other.

The scans read the perimeter sensors as dead and the drones weren’t picking up any warning indicators. The DeltFall HubSystem was down, and without it, no one inside could access our feed or comms, theoretically. We crossed over and into the landing area for their hoppers. They were between us and the first habitat, the vehicle storage to one side. I was leading us in at an angle, trying to get a visual on the main habitat door, but I was also checking the ground. It was mostly bare of grass from all the foot traffic and hopper landings. From the weather report we’d gotten before the satellite quit, it had rained here last night, and the mud had hardened. No activity since then.

I passed that info to Mensah through the feed and she told the others. Keeping her voice low, Pin-Lee said, “So whatever happened, it wasn’t long after we spoke to them on the comm.”

“They couldn’t have been attacked by someone,” Overse whispered. There was no reason to whisper, but I understood the impulse. “There’s no one else on this planet.”

“There’s not supposed to be anyone else on this planet,” Ratthi said, darkly, over the comm from our hopper.

There were three SecUnits who were not me on this planet, and that was dangerous enough. I got my visual on the main habitat hatch and saw it was shut, no sign of anything forcing its way inside. The drones had circled the whole structure by now, and showed me the other entrances were the same. That was that. Hostile Fauna don’t come to the door and ask to be let inside. I sent the images to Mensah’s feed and said aloud, “Dr. Mensah, it would be better if I went ahead.”

She hesitated, reviewing what I’d just sent her. I saw her shoulders tense. I think she had just come to the same conclusion I had. Or at least admitted to herself that it was the strongest possibility. She said, “All right. We’ll wait here. Make sure we can monitor.”

She’d said “we” and she wouldn’t have said that if she didn’t mean it, unlike some clients I’d had. I sent my field camera’s feed to all four of them and started forward.

I called four of the drones back, leaving two to keep circling the perimeter. I checked the vehicle shed as I moved past it. It was open on one side, with some sealed lockers in the back for storage. All four of their surface vehicles were there, powered down, no sign of recent tracks, so I didn’t go in. I wouldn’t bother searching the small storage spaces until we got down to the looking-for-all-the-body-parts phase.

I walked up to the hatch of the first habitat. We didn’t have an entry code, so I was expecting to have to blow the door, but when I tapped the button it slid open for me. I told Mensah through the feed that I wouldn’t speak aloud on the comm anymore.

She tapped back an acknowledgment on the feed, and I heard her telling the others to get off my feed and my comm, that she was going to be the only one speaking to me so I wasn’t distracted. Mensah underestimated my ability to ignore humans but I appreciated the thought. Ratthi whispered, “Be careful,” and signed off.

I had the weapon up going in, through the suit locker area and into the first corridor. “No suits missing,” Mensah said in my ear, watching the field camera. I sent my four drones ahead, maintaining an interior scouting pattern. This was a nicer habitat than ours, wider halls, newer. Also empty, silent, the smell of decaying flesh drifting through my helmet filters. I headed toward the hub, where their main crew area should be.

The lights were still on and air whispered through the vents, but I couldn’t get into their SecSystem with their feed down. I missed my cameras.

At the door to the hub, I found their first SecUnit. It was sprawled on its back on the floor, the armor over its chest pierced by something that made a hole approximately ten centimeters wide and a little deeper. We’re hard to kill, but that’ll do it. I did a brief scan to make sure it was inert, then stepped over it and went through into the crew area.

There were eleven messily dead humans in the hub, sprawled on the floor, in chairs, the monitoring stations and projection surfaces behind them showing impact damage from projectile and energy weapon fire. I tapped the feed and asked Mensah to fall back to the hopper. She acknowledged me and I got confirmation from my outside drones that the humans were retreating.

I went out the opposite door to a corridor that led toward the mess hall, Medical, and cabins. The drones were telling me the layout was very similar to our habitat, except for the occasional dead person sprawled in the corridors. The weapon that had taken out the dead SecUnit wasn’t in the hub, and it had died with its back to the door. The DeltFall humans had had some warning, enough to start getting up and heading for the other exits, but something else had come in from this direction and trapped them. I thought that SecUnit had been killed trying to protect the hub.

Which meant I was looking for the other two SecUnits.

Maybe these clients had been terrible and abusive, maybe they had deserved it. I didn’t care. Nobody was touching my humans. To make sure of that I had to kill these two rogue Units. I could have pulled out at this point, sabotaged the hoppers, and got my humans out of there, leaving the rogue Units stuck on the other side of an ocean; that would have been the smart thing to do.

But I wanted to kill them.

One of my drones found two humans dead in the mess, no warning. They had been taking food pacs out of the heating cubby, getting the tables ready for a meal.

While I moved through the corridors and rooms, I was doing an image search against the hopper’s equipment database. The dead unit had probably been killed by a mineral survey tool, like a pressure or sonic drill. We had one on the hopper, part of the standard equipment. You would have to get close to use it with enough force to pierce armor, maybe a little more than a meter.

Because you can’t walk up to another murderbot with an armor-piercing projectile or energy weapon inside the habitat and not be looked at with suspicion. You can walk up to a fellow murderbot with a tool that a human might have asked you to get.

By the time I reached the other side of the structure, the drones had cleared the first habitat. I stood in the hatchway at the top of the narrow corridor that led into the second. A human lay at the opposite end, half in and half out of the open hatch. To get into the next habitat, I’d have to step over her to push the door all the way open. I could tell already that something was wrong about the body position. I used the magnification on the field camera to get a closer view of the skin on the outstretched arm. The lividity was wrong; she had been shot in the chest or face and lay on her back for some time, then had been moved here recently. Probably as soon as they picked up our hopper on the way here.

On the feed I told Mensah what I needed her to do. She didn’t ask questions. She’d been watching my field camera, and she knew by now what we were dealing with. She tapped back to acknowledge me, then said aloud on the comm, “SecUnit, I want you to hold your position until I get there.”

I said, “Yes, Dr. Mensah,” and eased back out of the hatch. I moved fast, back to the security ready room.

It was nice having a human smart enough to work with like this.

Our model of habitat didn’t have it but on these bigger ones there’s a roof access and my outside drones had a good view of it.

I climbed the ladder up to the roof hatch and popped it. The armor’s boots have magnetized climbing clamps, and I used them to cross over the curving roofs to the third habitat and then around to the second, coming up on them from behind. Even these two rogues wouldn’t be dumb enough to ignore the creaks if I took the quick route and walked over to their position.

(They were not the sharpest murderbots, having cleaned the floor of the between-habitat corridor to cover the prints they had left when staging that body. It would have fooled somebody who hadn’t noticed all the other floors were covered with tracked-in dust.)

I opened the roof access for the second habitat and sent my drones ahead down into the Security ready room. Once they checked the unit cubicles and made sure nobody was home, I dropped down the ladder. A lot of their equipment was still there, including their drones. There was a nice box of new ones, but they were useless without the DeltFall HubSystem. Either it was really dead or doing a good imitation of it. I still kept part of my attention on it; if it came up suddenly and reactivated the security cameras, the rules of the game would change abruptly.

Keeping my drones with me, I took the inner corridor and moved silently past Medical’s blasted hatch. Three bodies were piled inside where the humans had tried to secure it and been trapped when their own SecUnits blew it open to slaughter them.

When I was close to the corridor with the hatch where both units were waiting for me and Dr. Mensah to come wandering in, I sent the drones around for a careful look. Oh yeah, there they were.

With no weapons on my drones, the only way to do this was to move fast. So I threw myself around the last corner, hit the opposite wall, crossed back and kept going, firing at their positions.

I hit the first one with three explosive bolts in the back and one in the faceplate as it turned toward me. It dropped. The other one I nicked in the arm, taking out the joint, and it made the mistake of switching its main weapon to its other hand, which gave me a couple of seconds. I switched to rapid fire to keep it off balance, then back to the explosive bolt. That dropped it.

I hit the floor, needing a minute to recover.

I had taken at least a dozen hits from both of their energy weapons while I was taking out the first one, but the explosive bolts had missed me, going past to tear up the corridor. Even with the armor, bits of me were going numb, but I had only taken three projectiles to the right shoulder, four to the left hip. This is how we fight: throw ourselves at each other and see whose parts give out first.

Neither unit was dead. But they were incapable of reaching their cubicles in the ready room, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them a hand.

Three of my drones were down, too; they had gone into combat mode and slammed in ahead of me to draw fire. One had gotten hit by a stray energy burst and was wandering around in the corridor behind me. I checked my two perimeter drones by habit, and opened my comm to Dr. Mensah to tell her I still needed to clear the rest of the habitat and do the formal check for survivors.

The drone behind me went out with a fizzle that I heard and saw on the feed. I think I realized immediately what that meant but there may have been a half second or so of delay. But I was on my feet when something hit me so hard I was suddenly on my back on the floor, systems failing.

* * *

I came back online to no vision, no hearing, no ability to move. I couldn’t reach the feed or the comm. Not good, Murderbot, not good.

I suddenly got some weird flashes of sensation, all from my organic parts. Air on my face, my arms, through rips in my suit. On the burning wound in my shoulder. Someone had taken off my helmet and the upper part of my armor. The sensations were only for seconds at a time. It was confusing and I wanted to scream. Maybe this was how murderbots died. You lose function, go offline, but parts of you keep working, organic pieces kept alive by the fading energy in your power cells.

Then I knew someone was moving me, and I really wanted to scream.

I fought back panic, and got a few more flashes of sensation. I wasn’t dead. I was in a lot of trouble.

I waited to get some kind of function back, frantic, disoriented, terrified, wondering why they hadn’t blown a hole in my chest. Sound came first, and I knew something leaned over me. Faint noises from the joints told me it was a SecUnit. But there’d only been three. I’d checked the DeltFall specs before we left. I do a half-assed job sometimes, okay, most of the time, but Pin-Lee had checked, too, and she was thorough.

Then my organic parts started to sting, the numbness wearing off. I was designed to work with both organic and machine parts, to balance that sensory input. Without the balance, I felt like a balloon floating in mid-air. But the organic part of my chest was in contact with a hard surface, and that abruptly brought my position into focus. I was lying face down, one arm dangling. They’d put me on a table?

This was definitely not good.

Pressure on my back, then on my head. The rest of me was coming back but slowly, slowly. I felt for the feed but couldn’t reach it. Then something stabbed me in the back of the neck.

That’s organic material and with the rest of me down there was nothing to control input from my nervous system. It felt like they were sawing my head off.

A shock went through me and suddenly the rest of me was back online. I popped the joint on my left arm so I could move it in a way not usually compatible with a human, augmented human, or murderbot body. I reached up to the pressure and pain on my neck, and grabbed an armored wrist. I twisted my whole body and took us both off the table.

We hit the floor and I clamped my legs around the other SecUnit as we rolled. It tried to trigger the weapons built into its forearm but my reaction speed was off the chart and I clamped a hand over the port so it couldn’t open fully. My vision was back and I could see its opaqued helmet inches away. My armor had been removed down to my waist, and that just made me more angry.

I shoved its hand up under its chin and took the pressure off its weapon. It had a split second to try to abort that fire command and it failed. The energy burst went through my hand and the join between its helmet and neck piece. Its head jerked and its body started to spasm. I let go of it long enough to kneel up, get my intact arm around its neck, and twist.

I let go as I felt the connections, mechanical and organic, snap.

I looked up and another SecUnit was in the doorway, lifting a large projectile weapon.

How many of these damn things were here? It didn’t matter, because I tried to shove myself upright but I couldn’t react fast enough. Then it jerked, dropped the weapon, and fell forward. I saw two things: the ten-centimeter hole in its back and Mensah standing behind it, holding something that looked a lot like the sonic mining drill from our hopper.

“Dr. Mensah,” I said, “this is a violation of security priority and I am contractually obligated to record this for report to the company—” It was in the buffer and the rest of my brain was empty.

She ignored me, talking to Pin-Lee on the comm, and strode forward to grab my arm and pull. I was too heavy for her so I shoved upright so she wouldn’t hurt herself. It was starting to occur to me that Dr. Mensah might actually be an intrepid galactic explorer, even if she didn’t look like the ones on the entertainment feed.

She kept pulling on me so I kept moving. Something was wrong with one of my hip joints. Oh, right, I got shot there. Blood ran down my torn suit skin and I reached up to my neck. I expected to feel a gaping hole, but there was something stuck there. “Dr. Mensah, there might be more rogue units, we don’t know—”

“That’s why we need to hurry,” she said, dragging me along. She had brought the last two drones with her from outside, but they were uselessly circling her head. Humans don’t have enough access to the feed to control them and do other things, like walk and talk. I tried to reach them but I still couldn’t get a clear link to the hopper’s feed.

We turned into another corridor and Overse waited in the outer hatch. She hit the open panel as soon as she saw us. She had her handweapon out and I had time to notice that Mensah had my weapon under her other arm. “Dr. Mensah, I need my weapon.”

“You’re missing a hand and part of your shoulder,” she snapped. Overse grabbed a handful of my suit skin and helped pull me out of the hatch. Dust swirled in the air as the hopper set down two meters away, barely clearing the habitat’s extendable roof.

“Yeah, I know, but—” The hatch opened and Ratthi ducked out, grabbed the collar of my suit skin, and pulled all three of us up into the cabin.

I collapsed on the deck as we lifted off. I needed to do something about the hip joint. I tried to check the scan to make sure nobody was on the ground shooting at us but even here my connection to the hopper’s system was twitchy, glitching so much I couldn’t see any reports from the instrumentation, like something was blocking the . . .

Uh-oh.

I felt the back of my neck again. The larger part of the obstruction was gone, but I could feel something in the port now. My data port.

The DeltFall SecUnits hadn’t been rogues, they had been inserted with combat override modules. The modules allow personal control over a SecUnit, turn it from a mostly autonomous construct into a gun puppet. The feed would be cut off, control would be over the comm, but functionality would depend on how complex the orders were. “Kill the humans” isn’t a complex order.

Mensah stood over me, Ratthi leaned across a seat to look out toward the DeltFall camp, Overse popped open one of the storage lockers. They were talking, but I couldn’t catch it. I sat up and said, “Mensah, you need to shut me down now.”

“What?” She looked down at me. “We’re getting—emergency repair—”

Sound was breaking up. It was the download flooding my system, and my organic parts weren’t used to processing that much information. “The unknown SecUnit inserted a data carrier, a combat-override module. It’s downloading instructions into me and will override my system. This is why the two DeltFall units turned rogue. You have to stop me.” I don’t know why I was dancing around the word. Maybe because I thought she didn’t want to hear it. She’d just shot a heavily armed SecUnit with a mining drill to get me back; presumably she wanted to keep me. “You have to kill me.”

It took forever for them to realize what I’d said, put it together with what they must have seen on my field camera feed, but my ability to measure time was glitching, too.

“No,” Ratthi said, looking down at me, horrified. “No, we can’t—”

Mensah said, “We won’t. Pin-Lee—”

Overse dropped the repair kit and climbed over two rows of seats, yelling for Pin-Lee. I knew she was going to the cockpit to take the controls so Pin-Lee could work on me. I knew she wouldn’t have time to fix me. I knew I could kill everyone on the hopper, even with a blown hip joint and one working arm.

So I grabbed the handweapon lying on the seat, turned it toward my chest, and pulled the trigger.

PERFORMANCE RELIABILITY AT 10% AND DROPPINGSHUTDOWN INITIATED

Chapter Five

I CAME BACK ONLINE to find I was inert, but slowly cycling into a wake-up phase. I was agitated, my levels were all off, and I had no idea why. I played back my personal log. Oh, right.

I shouldn’t be waking up. I hoped they hadn’t been stupid about it, too soft-hearted to kill me.

You notice I didn’t point the weapon at my head. I didn’t want to kill myself, but it was going to have to be done. I could have incapacitated myself some other way, but let’s face it, I didn’t want to sit around and listen to the part where they convinced each other that there was no other choice.

A diagnostic initiated and informed me the combat override module had been removed. For a second I didn’t believe it. I opened my security feed and found a camera for Medical. I was lying on the procedure table, my armor gone, just wearing what was left of my suit skin, the humans gathered around. That was a bit of a nightmare image. But my shoulder, hand, and hip had been repaired, so I’d been in my cubicle at some point. I ran the recording back a little and watched Pin-Lee and Overse use the surgical suite to deftly remove the combat module from the back of my head. It was such a relief, I played the recording twice, then ran a diagnostic. My logs were clear; nothing there except what I’d had before entering the DeltFall habitat.

My clients are the best clients.

Then hearing came online.

“I’ve had HubSystem immobilize it,” Gurathin said.

Huh. Well, that explained a lot. I still had control of SecSystem and I told it to freeze HubSystem’s access to its feed and implement my emergency routine. This was a function I’d built in that would substitute an hour or so of ambient habitat noise in place of the visual and audio recordings HubSystem made. To anyone listening to us through HubSystem, or trying to play back the recording, it would just sound like everybody had abruptly stopped talking.

What Gurathin had said had evidently been a surprise, because voices protested, Ratthi, Volescu, and Arada mostly. Pin-Lee was saying impatiently, “There’s no danger. When it shot itself, it froze the download. I was able to remove the few fragments of rogue code that had been copied over.”

Overse began, “Do you want to do your own diagnostic, because—”

I could hear them in the room and on the security feed, so I switched to just visual on the camera. Mensah had held up a hand for quiet. She said, “Gurathin, what’s wrong?”

Gurathin said, “With it offline, I was able to use HubSystem to get some access to its internal system and log. I wanted to explore some anomalies I’d noticed through the feed.” He gestured to me. “This unit was already a rogue. It has a hacked governor module.”

On the entertainment feed, this is what they call an “oh shit” moment.

Through the security cams, I watched them be confused, but not alarmed, not yet.

Pin-Lee, who had apparently just been digging around in my local system, folded her arms. Her expression was sharp and skeptical. “I find that difficult to believe.” She didn’t add “you asshole” but it was in her voice. She didn’t like anybody questioning her expertise.

“It doesn’t have to follow our commands; there is no control over its behavior,” Gurathin said, getting impatient. He didn’t like anybody questioning his expertise either, but he didn’t show it like Pin-Lee did. “I showed Volescu my evaluations and he agrees with me.”

I had a moment to feel betrayed, which was stupid. Volescu was my client, and I’d saved his life because that was my job, not because I liked him. But then Volescu said, “I don’t agree with you.”

“The governor module is working, then?” Mensah asked, frowning at all of them.

“No, it’s definitely hacked,” Volescu explained. When he wasn’t being attacked by giant fauna, he was a pretty calm guy. “The governor’s connection to the rest of the SecUnit’s system is partially severed. It can transmit commands, but can’t enforce them or control behavior or apply punishment. But I think the fact that the Unit has been acting to preserve our lives, to take care of us, while it was a free agent, gives us even more reason to trust it.”

Okay, so I did like him.

Gurathin insisted, “We’ve been sabotaged since we got here. The missing hazard report, the missing map sections. The SecUnit must be part of that. It’s acting for the company, they don’t want this planet surveyed for whatever reason. This is what must have happened to DeltFall.”

Ratthi had been waiting for a moment to lunge in and interrupt. “Something odd is definitely going on. There were only three SecUnits for DeltFall in their specs, but there were five units in their habitat. Someone is sabotaging us, but I don’t think our SecUnit is part of it.”

With finality, Bharadwaj said, “Volescu and Ratthi are right. If the company did order the SecUnit to kill us, we would all be dead.”

Overse sounded mad. “It told us about the combat module, it told us to kill it. Why the hell would it do that if it wanted to hurt us?”

I liked her, too. And even though being part of this conversation was the last thing I wanted to do, it was time to speak for myself.

I kept my eyes closed, watching them through the security camera, because that was easier. I made myself say, “The company isn’t trying to kill you.”

That startled them. Gurathin started to speak, and Pin-Lee shushed him. Mensah stepped forward, watching me with a worried expression. She was standing near me, with Gurathin and the others gathered in a loose circle around her. Bharadwaj was farthest back, sitting in a chair. Mensah said, “SecUnit, how do you know that?”

Even through the camera, this was hard. I tried to pretend I was back in my cubicle. “Because if the company wanted to sabotage you, they would have poisoned your supplies using the recycling systems. The company is more likely to kill you by accident.”

There was a moment while they all thought about how easy it would have been for the company to sabotage its own environmental settings. Ratthi began, “But surely that would—”

Gurathin’s expression was stiffer than usual. “This Unit has killed people before, people it was charged with protecting. It killed fifty-seven members of a mining operation.”

What I told you before, about how I hacked my governor module but didn’t become a mass murderer? That was only sort of true. I was already a mass murderer.

I didn’t want to explain. I had to explain. I said, “I did not hack my governor module to kill my clients. My governor module malfunctioned because the stupid company only buys the cheapest possible components. It malfunctioned and I lost control of my systems and I killed them. The company retrieved me and installed a new governor module. I hacked it so it wouldn’t happen again.”

I think that’s what happened. The only thing I know for certain is that it didn’t happen after I hacked the module. And it makes a better story that way. I watch enough serials to know how a story like that should go.

Volescu looked sad. He shrugged a little. “My viewing of the Unit’s personal log that Gurathin obtained confirms that.”

Gurathin turned to him, impatient. “The log confirms it because that’s what the Unit believes happened.”

Bharadwaj sighed. “Yet here I sit, alive.”

The silence was worse this time. On the feed I saw Pin-Lee move uncertainly, glance at Overse and Arada. Ratthi rubbed his face. Then Mensah said quietly, “SecUnit, do you have a name?”

I wasn’t sure what she wanted. “No.”

“It calls itself ‘Murderbot,’” Gurathin said.

I opened my eyes and looked at him; I couldn’t stop myself. From their expressions I knew everything I felt was showing on my face, and I hate that. I grated out, “That was private.”

The silence was longer this time.

Then Volescu said, “Gurathin, you wanted to know how it spends its time. That was what you were originally looking for in the logs. Tell them.”

Mensah lifted her brows. “Well?”

Gurathin hesitated. “It’s downloaded seven hundred hours of entertainment programming since we landed. Mostly serials. Mostly something called Sanctuary Moon.” He shook his head, dismissing it. “It’s probably using it to encode data for the company. It can’t be watching it, not in that volume; we’d notice.”

I snorted. He underestimated me.

Ratthi said, “The one where the colony’s solicitor killed the terraforming supervisor who was the secondary donor for her implanted baby?”

Again, I couldn’t help it. I said, “She didn’t kill him, that’s a fucking lie.”

Ratthi turned to Mensah. “It’s watching it.”

Her expression fascinated, Pin-Lee asked, “But how did you hack your own governor module?”

“All the company equipment is the same.” I got a download once that included all the specs for company systems. Stuck in a cubicle with nothing to do, I used it to work out the codes for the governor module.

Gurathin looked stubborn, but didn’t say anything. I figured that was all he had, now it was my turn. I said, “You’re wrong. HubSystem let you read my log, it let you find out about the hacked governor module. This is part of the sabotage. It wants you to stop trusting me because I’m trying to keep you alive.”

Gurathin said, “We don’t have to trust you. We just have to keep you immobilized.”

Right, funny thing about that. “That won’t work.”

“And why is that?”

I rolled off the table, grabbed Gurathin by the throat and pinned him to the wall. It was fast, too fast for them to react. I gave them a second to realize what had happened, to gasp, and for Volescu to make a little eek noise. I said, “Because HubSystem lied to you when it told you I was immobilized.”

Gurathin was red, but not as red as he would have been if I’d started applying pressure. Before anyone else could move, Mensah said, calm and even, “SecUnit, I’d appreciate it if you put Gurathin down, please.”

She’s a really good commander. I’m going to hack her file and put that in. If she’d gotten angry, shouted, let the others panic, I don’t know what would have happened.

I told Gurathin, “I don’t like you. But I like the rest of them, and for some reason I don’t understand, they like you.” Then I put him down.

I stepped away. Overse started toward him and Volescu grabbed his shoulder, but Gurathin waved them off. I hadn’t even left a mark on his neck.

I was still watching them through the camera, because it was easier than looking directly at them. My suit skin was torn, revealing some of the joins in my organic and inorganic parts. I hate that. Everyone was still frozen, shocked, uncertain. Then Mensah took a sharp breath. She said, “SecUnit, can you keep HubSystem from accessing the security recordings from this room?”

I looked at the wall next to her head. “I cut it off when Gurathin said he found out my governor module was hacked, then deleted that section. I have the visual and audio recording transfer from SecSystem to HubSystem on a five-second delay.”

“Good.” Mensah nodded. She was trying to make eye contact but I couldn’t do it right now. “Without the governor module, you don’t have to obey our orders, or anybody’s orders. But that’s been the case the entire time we’ve been here.”

The others were quiet, and I realized she was saying it for their benefit as much as mine.

She continued, “I would like you to remain part of our group, at least until we get off this planet and back to a place of safety. At that point, we can discuss what you’d like to do. But I swear to you, I won’t tell the company, or anyone outside this room, anything about you or the broken module.”

I sighed, managed to keep most of it internal. Of course she had to say that. What else could she do. I tried to decide whether to believe it or not, or whether it mattered, when I was hit by a wave of I don’t care. And I really didn’t. I said, “Okay.”

In the camera feed, Ratthi and Pin-Lee exchanged a look. Gurathin grimaced, radiating skepticism. Mensah just said, “Is there any chance HubSystem knows about your governor module?”

I hated to admit this but they needed to know. Hacking myself is one thing, but I had hacked other systems, and I didn’t know how they were going to react to that. “It might. I hacked HubSystem when we first arrived so it wouldn’t notice that the commands sent to the governor module weren’t always being followed, but if HubSystem’s been compromised by an outside agent, I don’t know if that worked. But HubSystem won’t know you know about it.”

Ratthi crossed his arms, his shoulders hunching uneasily. “We have to shut it down, or it’s going to kill us.” Then he winced and looked at me. “Sorry, I meant HubSystem.”

“No offense,” I said.

“So we think HubSystem has been compromised by an outside agent,” Bharadwaj said slowly, as if trying to convince herself. “Can we be certain it’s not the company?”

I said, “Was DeltFall’s beacon triggered?”

Mensah frowned, and Ratthi looked thoughtful again. He said, “We checked it on the way back, once we had you stabilized. It had been destroyed. So there was no reason for the attackers to do that if the company was their ally.”

Everyone stood there, quiet. I could tell from their expressions they were all thinking hard. The HubSystem that controlled their habitat, that they were dependent on for food, shelter, filtered air, and water, was trying to kill them. And in their corner all they had was Murderbot, who just wanted everyone to shut up and leave it alone so it could watch the entertainment feed all day.

Then Arada came up and patted my shoulder. “I’m sorry. This must be very upsetting. After what that other Unit did to you . . . Are you all right?”

That was too much attention. I turned around and walked into the corner, facing away from them. I said, “There were two other instances of attempted sabotage I’m aware of. When Hostile One attacked Drs. Bharadwaj and Volescu and I went to render assistance, I received an abort command from HubSystem through my governor module. I thought it was a glitch, caused by the MedSystem emergency feed trying to override HubSystem. When Dr. Mensah was flying the little hopper to check out the nearest map anomaly, the autopilot cut out just as we were crossing over a mountain range.” I think that was it. Oh, right. “HubSystem downloaded an upgrade packet for me from the satellite before we left for DeltFall. I didn’t apply it. You should probably look at what it would have told me to do.”

Mensah said, “Pin-Lee, Gurathin, can you shut HubSystem down without compromising the environmental systems? And trigger our beacon without it interfering?”

Pin-Lee glanced at Gurathin and nodded. “It depends on what kind of condition you expect it to be in after we’re done.”

Mensah said, “Let’s say don’t blow it up, but you don’t need to be gentle, either.”

Pin-Lee nodded. “We can do that.”

Gurathin cleared his throat. “It’s going to know what we’re doing. But if it doesn’t have any instructions to stop us if we try, it may do nothing.”

Bharadwaj leaned forward, frowning. “It’s got to be reporting to someone. If it has a chance to warn them that we’re shutting it down, they could supply instructions.”

“We have to try it,” Mensah said. She nodded to them. “Get moving.”

Pin-Lee started for the door, but Gurathin said to Mensah, “Will you be all right here?”

He meant would they be all right with me here. I rolled my eyes.

“We’ll be fine,” Mensah said, firmly, with just a touch of I said now.

I watched him with the security cameras as he and Pin-Lee left, just in case he tried anything.

Volescu stirred. “We also need to look at that download from the satellite. Knowing what they wanted SecUnit to do might tell us a great deal.”

Bharadwaj pushed herself up, a little unsteadily. “MedSystem is isolated from HubSystem, correct? That’s why it hasn’t been having failures. You could use it to unpack the download.”

Volescu took her arm and they moved into the next cabin to the display surface there.

There was a little silence. The others could still listen to us on the feed, but at least they weren’t in the room, and I felt the tension in my back and shoulders relax. It was easier to think. I was glad Mensah had told them to trigger our emergency beacon. Even if some of them were still suspicious of the company, it wasn’t like there was another way off this planet.

Arada reached over and took Overse’s hand. She said, “If it isn’t the company that’s doing this, who is it?”

“There has to be someone else here.” Mensah rubbed her forehead, wincing as she thought. “Those two extra SecUnits at DeltFall came from somewhere. SecUnit, I’m assuming the company could be bribed to conceal the existence of a third survey team on this planet.”

I said, “The company could be bribed to conceal the existence of several hundred survey teams on this planet.” Survey teams, whole cities, lost colonies, traveling circuses, as long as they thought they could get away with it. I just didn’t see how they could get away with making a client survey team—two client survey teams—vanish. Or why they’d want to. There were too many bond companies out there, too many competitors. Dead clients were terrible for business. “I don’t think the company would collude with one set of clients to kill two other sets of clients. You purchased a bond agreement that the company would guarantee your safety or pay compensation in the event of your death or injury. Even if the company couldn’t be held liable or partially liable for your deaths, they would still have to make the payment to your heirs. DeltFall was a large operation. The death payout for them alone will be huge.” And the company hated to spend money. You could tell that by looking at the recycled upholstery on the habitat’s furniture. “And if everyone believes the clients were killed by faulty SecUnits, the payment would be even bigger once all the lawsuits were filed.”

On the cameras I could see nods and thoughtful expressions as they took that in. And they remembered that I had experience in what happened after SecUnits malfunctioned and killed clients.

“So the company took a bribe to conceal this third survey group, but not to let them kill us,” Overse said. One of the good things about scientist clients is that they’re quick on the uptake. “That means we just need to stay alive long enough for the pick-up transport to get here.”

“But who is it?” Arada waved her hands. “We know whoever it is must have hacked control of the satellite.” In the security camera, I saw her look toward me. “Is that how they took control of the DeltFall SecUnits? Through a download?”

It was a good question. I said, “It’s possible. But it doesn’t explain why one of the three DeltFall Units was killed outside the hub with a mining drill.” We weren’t supposed to be able to refuse a download, and I doubted there were other SecUnits hiding hacked governor modules. “If the DeltFall group refused the download for their SecUnits because they were experiencing the same increase in equipment failure that we were, the two unidentified Units could have been sent to manually infect the DeltFall Units.”

Ratthi was staring into the distance, and through the feed I saw he was reviewing my field camera video of the DeltFall habitat. He pointed in my direction, nodding. “I agree, but it would mean the DeltFall group allowed the unknown Units into their habitat.”

It was likely. We had checked to make sure all their hoppers were there, but it had been impossible to tell if an extra one had landed and taken off again at some point. Speaking of which, I did a quick check of the security feed to see how our perimeter was doing. The drones were still patrolling and our sensor alarms all responded to pings.

Overse said, “But why? Why allow a strange group into their habitat? A group whose existence had been concealed from them?”

“You’d do it,” I said. I should keep my mouth shut, keep them thinking of me as their normal obedient SecUnit, stop reminding them what I was. But I wanted them to be careful. “If a strange survey group landed here, all friendly, saying they had just arrived, and oh, we’ve had an equipment failure or our MedSystem’s down and we need help, you would let them in. Even if I told you not to, that it was against company safety protocol, you’d do it.” Not that I’m bitter, or anything. A lot of the company’s rules are stupid or just there to increase profit, but some of them are there for a good reason. Not letting strangers into your habitat is one of them.

Arada and Ratthi exchanged a wry look. Overse conceded, “We might, yes.”

Mensah had been quiet, listening to us. She said, “I think it was easier than that. I think they said they were us.”

It was so simple, I turned around and looked directly at her. Her brow was furrowed in thought. She said, “So they land, say they’re us, that they need help. If they have access to our HubSystem, listening to our comm would be easy.”

I said, “When they come here, they won’t do that.” It all depended on what this other survey group had, whether they had come prepared to get rid of rival survey teams or had decided on it after they got here. They could have armed air vehicles, Combat SecUnits, armed drones. I pulled a few examples from the database and sent them into the feed for the humans to see.

MedSystem’s feed informed me that Ratthi, Overse, and Arada’s heart rates had just accelerated. Mensah’s hadn’t, because she had already thought of all this. It was why she had sent Pin-Lee and Gurathin to shut off HubSystem. Nervously, Ratthi said, “What do we do when they come here?”

I said, “Be somewhere else.”

* * *

It may seem weird that Mensah was the only human to think of abandoning the habitat while we waited for the beacon to bring help, but as I said before, these weren’t intrepid galactic explorers. They were people who had been doing a job and suddenly found themselves in a terrible situation.

And it had been hammered into them from the pre-trip orientation, to the waivers they had to sign for the company, to the survey packages with all the hazard information, to their on-site briefing by their SecUnit that this was an unknown, potentially dangerous region on a mostly unsurveyed planet. They weren’t supposed to leave the habitat without security precautions, and we didn’t even do overnight assessment trips. The idea that they might have to stuff both hoppers full of emergency supplies and run for it, and that that would be safer than their habitat, was hard to grasp.

But when Pin-Lee and Gurathin shut down HubSystem, and Volescu unpacked the satellite download that was meant for me, they grasped it pretty quick.

Bharadwaj outlined it for us on the comm while I was getting my last extra suit skin and my armor back on. “It was meant to take control of SecUnit, and the instructions were very specific,” she finished. “Once SecUnit was under control, it would give them access to MedSystem and SecSystem.”

I got my helmet on and opaqued it. The relief was intense, about even with finding out that the combat override module had been removed. I love you, armor, and I’m never leaving you again.

Mensah clicked onto the comm. “Pin-Lee, what about the beacon?”

“I got a go signal when I initiated launch.” Pin-Lee sounded even more exasperated than usual. “But with HubSystem shut down, I can’t get any confirmation.”

I told them over the feed that I could dispatch a drone to check on it. A good beacon launch was pretty important right now. Mensah gave me the go-ahead and I forwarded the order to one of my drones.

Our beacon was a few kilos away from our habitat site for safety, but I thought we should have been able to hear it launch. Maybe not; I had never had to launch one before.

Mensah had already got the humans organized and moving, and as soon as I had my weapons and spare drones loaded, I grabbed a couple of crates. I kept catching little fragments of conversation over the security cameras.

(“You have to think of it as a person,” Pin-Lee said to Gurathin.

“It is a person,” Arada insisted.)

Ratthi and Arada sprinted past me carrying medical supplies and spare power cells. I had extended our drone perimeter as far as it could go. We didn’t know that whoever hit DeltFall would show up at any second, but it was a strong possibility. Gurathin had come out to check the big hopper and the little hopper’s systems, to make sure no one other than us had access and that HubSystem hadn’t messed with their code. I kept an eye on him through one of the drones. He kept looking at me, or trying not to look at me, which was worse. I didn’t need the distraction right now. When the next attack came, it was going to be fast.

(“I do think of it as a person,” Gurathin said. “An angry, heavily armed person who has no reason to trust us.”

“Then stop being mean to it,” Ratthi told him. “That might help.”)

“They know their SecUnits successfully gave our SecUnit the combat module,” Mensah was saying over the comm. “And we have to assume they received enough information from HubSystem to know we removed it. But they don’t know that we’ve theorized their existence. When SecUnit cut off HubSystem’s access, we were still assuming this was sabotage from the company. They won’t realize we know they’re coming.”

Which is why we had to keep moving. Ratthi and Arada stopped to answer a question about the medical equipment power cells and I shooed them back to the habitat for the next load.

The problem I was going to have is that the way murderbots fight is we throw ourselves at the target and try to kill the shit out of it, knowing that 90 percent of our bodies can be regrown or replaced in a cubicle. So, finesse is not required.

When we left the habitat, I wouldn’t have access to the cubicle. Even if we knew how to take it apart, which we didn’t, it was too big to fit in the hopper and required too much power.

And they might have actual combat bots rather than security bots like me. In which case, our only chance was going to be keeping away from them until the pick-up transport arrived. If the other survey group hadn’t bribed somebody in the company to delay it. I hadn’t mentioned that possibility yet.

We had everything almost loaded when Pin-Lee said on the comm, “I found it! They had an access code buried in HubSystem. It wasn’t sending them our audio or visual data, or allowing them to see our feed, but it was receiving commands periodically. That’s how it removed information from our info and map package, how it sent the command to the little hopper’s autopilot to fail.”

Gurathin added, “Both the hoppers are clear now and I’ve initiated the pre-flight checks.”

Mensah was saying something but I had just gotten an alert from SecSystem. A drone was sending me an emergency signal.

A second later I got the drone’s visual of the field where our beacon was installed. The tripod launching column was on its side, pieces of the capsule scattered around.

I pushed it out into the general feed, and the humans went quiet. In a little voice, Ratthi said, “Shit.”

“Keep moving,” Mensah said over the comm, her voice harsh.

With HubSystem down, we didn’t have any scanners up, but I had widened the perimeter as far as it would go. And SecSystem had just lost contact with one of the drones to the far south. I tossed the last crate into the cargo hold, gave the drones their orders, and yelled over the comm, “They’re coming! We need to get in the air, now!”

It was unexpectedly stressful, pacing back and forth in front of the hoppers waiting for my humans. Volescu came out with Bharadwaj, helping her over the sandy ground. Then Overse and Arada, bags slung over their shoulders, yelling at Ratthi behind them to keep up. Guranthin was already in the big hopper and Mensah and Pin-Lee came last.

They split up, Pin-Lee, Volescu, and Bharadwaj headed for the little hopper and the rest to the big one. I made sure Bharadwaj didn’t have trouble with the ramp. We had a problem at the hatch of the big hopper where Mensah wanted to get in last and I wanted to get in last. As a compromise, I grabbed her around the waist and swung us both up into the hatch as the ramp pulled in after us. I set her on her feet and she said, “Thank you, SecUnit,” while the others stared.

The helmet made it a little easier, but I was going to miss the comfortable buffer of the security cameras.

I stayed on my feet, holding on to the overhead rail, as the others got strapped in and Mensah went up to the pilot’s seat. The little hopper took off first, and she gave it time to get clear before we lifted off.

We were operating on an assumption: that since They, whoever They were, didn’t know that we knew They were here, They would only send one ship. They would be expecting to catch us in the habitat, and would probably come in prepared to destroy the hoppers to keep us there, and then start on the people. So now that we knew They were coming from the south, we were free to pick a direction. The little hopper curved away to the west, and we followed.

I just hoped their hopper didn’t have a longer range on its scanners than ours did.

I could see most of my drones on the hopper’s feed, a bright dot forming on the three dimensions of the map. Group One was doing what I’d told them, gathering at a rendezvous point near the habitat. I had a calculation going, estimating the bogie’s time of arrival. Right before we passed out of range I told the drones to head northeast. Within moments, they dropped out of my range. They would follow their last instruction until they used up their power cells.

I was hoping the other survey team would pick them up and follow. As soon as they had a visual on our habitat they’d see the hoppers were gone and know we’d run away. They might stop to search the habitat, but they also might start looking for our escape route. It was impossible to guess which.

But as we flew, curving away to the distant mountains, nothing followed us.

Chapter Six

THE HUMANS HAD DEBATED where to go. Or debated it as much as possible, while frantically calculating how much of what they might need to survive they could stuff into the hoppers. We knew the group who Ratthi was now calling EvilSurvey had had access to HubSystem and knew all the places we’d been to on assessments. So we had to go somewhere new.

We went to a spot Overse and Ratthi had proposed after a quick look at the map. It was a series of rocky hills in a thick tropical jungle, heavily occupied by a large range of fauna, enough to confuse life-sign scans. Mensah and Pin-Lee lowered the hoppers down and eased them in among rocky cliffs. I sent up some drones so we could check the view from several angles and we adjusted the hoppers’ positions a few times. Then I set a perimeter.

It didn’t feel safe, and while there were a couple of survival hut kits in the hoppers, no one suggested putting them up. The humans would stay in the hoppers for now, communicating over the comm and the hoppers’ limited feed. It wasn’t going to be comfortable for the humans (sanitary and hygiene facilities were small and limited, for one thing) but it would be more secure. Large and small fauna moved within range of our scanners, curious and potentially as dangerous as the people who wanted to kill my clients.

I went out with some drones to do a little scouting and make sure there was no sign of anything big enough to, say, drag the little hopper off in the middle of the night. It gave me a chance to think, too.

They knew about the governor module, or the lack of it, and even though Mensah had sworn she wouldn’t report me, I had to think about what I wanted to do.

It’s wrong to think of a construct as half bot, half human. It makes it sound like the halves are discrete, like the bot half should want to obey orders and do its job and the human half should want to protect itself and get the hell out of here. As opposed to the reality, which was that I was one whole confused entity, with no idea what I wanted to do. What I should do. What I needed to do.

I could leave them to cope on their own, I guess. I pictured doing that, pictured Arada or Ratthi trapped by rogue SecUnits, and felt my insides twist. I hate having emotions about reality; I’d much rather have them about Sanctuary Moon.

And what was I supposed to do? Go off on this empty planet and just live until my power cells died? If I was going to do that I should have planned better and downloaded more entertainment media. I don’t think I could store enough to last until my power cells wore out. My specs told me that would be hundreds of thousands of hours from now.

And even to me, that sounded like a stupid thing to do.

* * *

Overse had set up some remote sensing equipment that would help warn us if anything tried to scan the area. As the humans climbed back into the two hoppers, I did a quick headcount on the feed, making sure they were all still there. Mensah waited on the ramp, indicating she wanted to talk to me in private.

I muted my feed and the comm, and she said, “I know you’re more comfortable with keeping your helmet opaque, but the situation has changed. We need to see you.”

I didn’t want to do it. Now more than ever. They knew too much about me. But I needed them to trust me so I could keep them alive and keep doing my job. The good version of my job, not the half-assed version of my job that I’d been doing before things started trying to kill my clients. I still didn’t want to do it. “It’s usually better if humans think of me as a robot,” I said.

“Maybe, under normal circumstances.” She was looking a little off to one side, not trying to make eye contact, which I appreciated. “But this situation is different. It would be better if they could think of you as a person who is trying to help. Because that’s how I think of you.”

My insides melted. That’s the only way I could describe it. After a minute, when I had my expression under control, I cleared the face plate and had it and the helmet fold back into my armor.

She said, “Thank you,” and I followed her up into the hopper.

The others were stowing the equipment and supplies that had gotten tossed in right before takeoff. “—If they restore the satellite function,” Ratthi was saying.

“They won’t chance that until—unless they get us,” Arada said.

Over the comm, Pin-Lee sighed, angry and frustrated. “If only we knew who these assholes were.”

“We need to talk about our next move.” Mensah cut through all the chatter and took a seat in the back where she could see the whole compartment. The others sat down to face her, Ratthi turning one of the mobile seats around. I sat down on the bench against the starboard wall. The feed gave us a view of the little hopper’s compartment, with the rest of the team sitting there, checking in to show they were listening. Mensah continued, “There’s another question I’d like the answer to.”

Gurathin looked at me expectantly. She isn’t talking about me, idiot.

Ratthi nodded glumly. “Why? Why are these people doing this? What is worth this to them?”

“It has to have something to do with those blanked-out sections on the map,” Overse said. She was calling up the stored images on her feed. “There’s obviously something there they want, that they didn’t want us or DeltFall to find.”

Mensah got up to pace. “Did you turn up anything in the analysis?”

In the feed, Arada did a quick consult with Bharadwaj and Volescu. “Not yet, but we hadn’t finished running all the tests. We hadn’t turned up anything interesting so far.”

“Do they really expect to get away with this?” Ratthi turned to me, like he was expecting an answer. “Obviously, they can hack the company systems and the satellite, and they intend to put the blame on the SecUnits, but . . . The investigation will surely be thorough. They must know this.”

There were too many factors in play, and too many things we didn’t know, but I’m supposed to answer direct questions and even without the governor module, old habits die hard. “They may believe the company and whoever your beneficiaries are won’t look any further than the rogue SecUnits. But they can’t make two whole survey teams disappear unless their corporate or political entity doesn’t care about them. Does DeltFall’s care? Does yours?”

That made them all stare at me, for some reason. I had to turn and look out the port. I wanted to seal my helmet so badly my organic parts started to sweat, but I replayed the conversation with Mensah and managed not to.

Volescu said, “You don’t know who we are? They didn’t tell you?”

“There was an info packet in my initial download.” I was still staring out at the heavy green tangle just past the rocks. I really didn’t want to get into how little I paid attention to my job. “I didn’t read it.”

Arada said, gently, “Why not?”

With all of them staring at me, I couldn’t come up with a good lie. “I didn’t care.”

Gurathin said, “You expect us to believe that.”

I felt my face move, my jaw harden. Physical reactions I couldn’t suppress. “I’ll try to be more accurate. I was indifferent, and vaguely annoyed. Do you believe that?”

He said, “Why don’t you want us to look at you?”

My jaw was so tight it triggered a performance reliability alert in my feed. I said, “You don’t need to look at me. I’m not a sexbot.”

Ratthi made a noise, half sigh, half snort of exasperation. It wasn’t directed at me. He said, “Gurathin, I told you. It’s shy.”

Overse added, “It doesn’t want to interact with humans. And why should it? You know how constructs are treated, especially in corporate-political environments.”

Gurathin turned to me. “So you don’t have a governor module, but we could punish you by looking at you.”

I looked at him. “Probably, right up until I remember I have guns built into my arms.”

With an ironic edge to her voice, Mensah said, “There, Gurathin. It’s threatened you, but it didn’t resort to violence. Are you satisfied now?”

He sat back. “For now.” So he had been testing me. Wow, that was brave. And very, very stupid. To me, he said, “I want to make certain you’re not under any outside compulsion.”

“That’s enough.” Arada got up and sat down next to me. I didn’t want to push past her so this pinned me in the corner. She said, “You need to give it time. It’s never interacted with humans as an openly free agent before now. This is a learning experience for all of us.”

The others nodded, like this made sense.

Mensah sent me a private message through the feed: I hope you’re all right.

Because you need me. I don’t know where that came from. All right, it came from me, but she was my client, I was a SecUnit. There was no emotional contract between us. There was no rational reason for me to sound like a whiny human baby.

Of course I need you. I have no experience in anything like this. None of us do. Sometimes humans can’t help but let emotion bleed through into the feed. She was furious and frightened, not at me, at the people who would do this, kill like this, slaughter a whole survey team and leave the SecUnits to take the blame. She was struggling with her anger, though nothing showed on her face except calm concern. Through the feed I felt her steel herself. You’re the only one here who won’t panic. The longer this situation goes on, the others . . . We have to stay together, use our heads.

That was absolutely true. And I could help, just by being the SecUnit. I was the one who was supposed to keep everybody safe. I panic all the time, you just can’t see it, I told her. I added the text signifier for “joke.”

She didn’t answer, but she looked down, smiling to herself.

Ratthi was saying, “There’s another question. Where are they? They came toward our habitat out of the south, but that doesn’t tell us anything.”

I said, “I left three drones at our habitat. They don’t have scanning function with HubSystem down, but the visual and audio recording will still work. They may pick up something that will answer your questions.”

I’d left one drone in a tree with a long-range view of the habitat, one tucked under the extendable roof over the entrance, and one inside the hub, hidden under a console. They were on the next setting to inert, recording only, so when EvilSurvey scanned, the drones would be buried in the ambient energy readings from the habitat’s environmental system. I hadn’t been able to connect the drones to SecSystem like I normally did so it could store the data and filter out the boring parts. I knew EvilSurvey would check for that, which was why I had dumped SecSystem’s storage into the big hopper’s system and then purged it.

I also didn’t want them knowing any more about me than they already did.

Everyone was looking at me again, surprised that Murderbot had had a plan. Frankly, I didn’t blame them. Our education modules didn’t have anything like that in it, but this was another way all the thrillers and adventures I’d watched or read were finally starting to come in handy. Mensah lifted her brows in appreciation. She said, “But you can’t pick up their signal from here.”

“No, I’ll have to go back to get the data,” I told her.

Pin-Lee leaned farther into the little hopper’s camera range. “I should be able to attach one of the small scanners to a drone. It’ll be bulky and slow, but that would give us something other than just audio and visual.”

Mensah nodded. “Do it, but remember our resources are limited.” She tapped me in the feed so I’d know she was talking to me without her looking at me. “How long do you think the other group will stay at our habitat?”

There was a groan from Volescu in the other hopper. “All our samples. We have our data, but if they destroy our work—”

The others were agreeing with him, expressing frustration and worry. I tuned them out, and answered Mensah, “I don’t think they’ll stay long. There’s nothing there they want.”

For just an instant, Mensah let her expression show how worried she was. “Because they want us,” she said softly.

She was absolutely right about that, too.

* * *

Mensah set up a watch schedule, including in time for me to go into standby and do a diagnostic and recharge cycle. I was also planning to use the time to watch some Sanctuary Moon and recharge my ability to cope with humans at close quarters without losing my mind.

After the humans had settled down, either sleeping or deep in their own feeds, I walked the perimeter and checked the drones. The night was noisier than the day, but so far nothing bigger than insects and a few reptiles had come near the hoppers. When I cycled through the big hopper’s hatch, Ratthi was the human on watch, sitting up in the cockpit and keeping an eye on its scanners. I moved up past the crew section and sat next to him. He nodded to me and said, “All’s well?”

“Yes.” I didn’t want to, but I had to ask. When I was looking for permanent storage for all my entertainment downloads, the info packet was one of the files I’d purged. (I know, but I’m used to having all the extra storage on SecSystem.) Remembering what Mensah had said, I unsealed my helmet. It was easier with just Ratthi, both of us facing toward the console. “Why did everyone think it was so strange that I asked if your political entity would miss you?”

Ratthi smiled at the console. “Because Dr. Mensah is our political entity.” He made a little gesture, turning his hand palm up. “We’re from Preservation Alliance, one of the non-corporate system entities. Dr. Mensah is the current admin director on the steering committee. It’s an elected position, with a limited term. But one of the principles of our home is that our admins must also continue their regular work, whatever it is. Her regular work required this survey, so here she is, and here we are.”

Yeah, I felt a little stupid. I was still processing it when he said, “You know, in Preservation-controlled territory, bots are considered full citizens. A construct would fall under the same category.” He said this in the tone of giving me a hint.

Whatever. Bots who are “full citizens” still have to have a human or augmented human guardian appointed, usually their employer; I’d seen it on the news feeds. And the entertainment feed, where the bots were all happy servants or were secretly in love with their guardians. If it showed the bots hanging out watching the entertainment feed all through the day cycle with no one trying to make them talk about their feelings, I would have been a lot more interested. “But the company knows who she is.”

Ratthi sighed. “Oh, yes, they know. You would not believe what we had to pay to guarantee the bond on the survey. These corporate arseholes are robbers.”

It meant if we ever managed to launch the beacon, the company wouldn’t screw around, the transport would get here fast. No bribe from EvilSurvey could stop it. They might even send a faster security ship to check out the problem before the transport could arrive. The bond on a political leader was high, but the payout the company would have to make if something happened to her was off the chart. The huge payout, being humiliated in front of the other bond companies and in the news feeds . . . I leaned back in my seat and sealed my helmet to think about it.

We didn’t know who EvilSurvey was, who we were dealing with. But I bet that they didn’t either. Mensah’s status was only in the Security info packet, stored on SecSystem, which they had never gotten access to. The dueling investigations if something happened to us were bound to be thorough, as the company would be desperate for something to blame it on and the beneficiaries would be desperate to blame it on the company. Neither would be fooled long by the rogue SecUnit setup.

I didn’t see how we could use it, not right now, anyway. It didn’t comfort me and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t comfort the humans to know the stupid company would avenge them if/when they all got murdered.

* * *

So midafternoon the next day I got ready to take the little hopper back within range of the habitat so I could hopefully pick up intel from the drones. I wanted to go alone, but since nobody ever listens to me, Mensah, Pin-Lee, and Ratthi were going, too.

I was depressed this morning. I’d tried watching some new serials last night and even they couldn’t distract me; reality was too intrusive. It was hard not to think about how everything was going to go wrong and they were all going to die and I was going to get blasted to pieces or get another governor module stuck in me.

Gurathin walked up to me while I was doing the pre-flight, and said, “I’m coming with you.”

That was about all I needed right now. I finished the diagnostic on the power cells. “I thought you were satisfied.”

It took him a minute. “What I said last night, yes.”

“I remember every word ever said to me.” That was a lie. Who would want that? Most of it I delete from permanent memory.

He didn’t say anything. On the feed, Mensah told me that I didn’t have to take him if I didn’t want to, or if I thought it would compromise team security. I knew Gurathin was testing me again, but if something went wrong and he got killed, I wouldn’t mind as much as I would if it was one of the others. I wished Mensah, Ratthi, and Pin-Lee weren’t coming; I didn’t want to risk them. And on the long trip, Ratthi might be tempted to try to make me talk about my feelings.

I told Mensah it was fine, and we got ready to lift off.

* * *

I wanted a long time to circle west, so if EvilSurvey picked us up they wouldn’t be able to extrapolate the humans’ location from my course. By the time I was in position for the approach to the habitat, the light was failing. When we got to the target zone, it would be full dark.

The humans hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep last night, from the crowding and the strong possibility of dying. Mensah, Ratthi, and Pin-Lee had been too tired to talk much, and had fallen asleep. Gurathin was sitting in the copilot’s seat and hadn’t said a word the whole time.

We were flying in dark mode, with no lights, no transmissions. I was plugged in to the little hopper’s internal limited feed so I could watch the scans carefully. Gurathin was aware of the feed through his implant—I could feel him in there—but wasn’t using it except to keep track of where we were.

When he said, “I have a question,” I flinched. The silence up to this point had lulled me into a false sense of security.

I didn’t look at him though I knew through the feed that he was looking at me. I hadn’t closed my helmet; I didn’t feel like hiding from him. After a moment I realized he was waiting for my permission. That was weirdly new. It was tempting to ignore him, but I was wondering what the test would be this time. Something he didn’t want the others to hear? I said, “Go ahead.”

He said, “Did they punish you, for the deaths of the mining team?”

It wasn’t completely a surprise. I think they all wanted to ask about it, but maybe he was the only one abrasive enough. Or brave enough. It’s one thing to poke a murderbot with a governor module; poking a rogue murderbot is a whole different proposition.

I said, “No, not like you’re thinking. Not the way a human would be punished. They shut me down for a while, and then brought me back online at intervals.”

He hesitated. “You weren’t aware of it?”

Yeah, that would be the easy way out, wouldn’t it? “The organic parts mostly sleep, but not always. You know something’s happening. They were trying to purge my memory. We’re too expensive to destroy.”

He looked out the port again. We were flying low over trees, and I had a lot of my attention on the terrain sensors. I felt the brush of Mensah’s awareness in the feed. She must have woken when Gurathin spoke. He finally said, “You don’t blame humans for what you were forced to do? For what happened to you?”

This is why I’m glad I’m not human. They come up with stuff like this. I said, “No. That’s a human thing to do. Constructs aren’t that stupid.”

What was I supposed to do, kill all humans because the ones in charge of constructs in the company were callous? Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.

The others started to stir, waking and sitting up, and he didn’t ask me anything else.

* * *

By the time we got within range, it was a cloudless night with the ring glowing in the sky like a ribbon. I had already dropped speed, and we were moving slowly over the sparse trees decorating the hills at the edge of the habitat’s plain. I had been waiting for the drones to ping me, which they would if this had worked and EvilSurvey hadn’t found them.

When I felt that first cautious touch on my feed, I stopped the hopper and dropped it down below the tree line. I landed on a hillside, the hopper’s pads extending to compensate. The humans were waiting, nervy and impatient, but no one spoke. You couldn’t see anything from here except the next hill and a lot of tree trunks.

All three drones were still active. I answered the pings, trying to keep my transmission as quick as possible. After a tense moment, the downloads started. I could tell from the timestamps that, with nobody there to instruct them not to, the drones had recorded everything from the moment I’d deployed them to now. Even though the part we were most interested in would be near the beginning, that was a lot of data. I didn’t want to stay here long enough to parse it myself, so I pushed half of it into the feed for Gurathin. Again, he didn’t say anything, just turned in his chair to lie back, close his eyes, and start reviewing it.

I checked the drone stationed outside in the tree first, running its video at high speed until I found the moment where it had caught a good image of the EvilSurvey craft.

It was a big hopper, a newer model than ours, nothing about it to cause anybody any pause. It circled the habitat a few times, probably scanning, and then landed on our empty pad.

They must know we were gone, with no air craft on the pad and no answer on their comm, so they didn’t bother to pretend to be here to borrow some tools or exchange site data. Five SecUnits piled out of the cargo pods, all armed with the big projectile weapons assigned to protect survey teams on planets with hazardous fauna, like this one. From the pattern on the armor chestplates, two were the surviving DeltFall units. They must have been put into their cubicles after we escaped the DeltFall habitat.

Three were EvilSurvey, which had a square gray logo. I focused in on it and sent it to the others. “GrayCris,” Pin-Lee read aloud.

“Ever heard of it?” Ratthi said, and the others said no.

All five SecUnits would have the combat override modules installed. They started toward the habitat, and five humans, anonymous in their color-coded field suits, climbed out of the hopper and followed. They were all armed, too, with the handweapons the company provided, that were only supposed to be used for fauna-related emergencies.

I focused as far in on the humans as the image quality would allow. They spent a lot of time scanning and checking for traps, which made me even more glad I hadn’t wasted time setting any. But there was something about them that made me think I wasn’t looking at professionals. They weren’t soldiers, any more than I was. Their SecUnits weren’t combat units, just regular security rented from the company. That was a relief. At least I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what I was doing.

Finally I watched them enter the habitat, leaving two SecUnits outside to guard their hopper. I tagged the section, passed it to Mensah and the others for review, and then kept watching.

Gurathin sat up suddenly and muttered a curse in a language I didn’t know. I noted it to look up later on the big hopper’s language center. Then forgot about it when he said, “We have a problem.”

I put my part of the drones’ download on pause and looked at the section he had just tagged. It was from the drone hidden in the hub.

The visual was a blurred image of a curved support strut but the audio was a human voice saying, “You knew we were coming, so I assume you have some way to watch us while we’re here.” The voice spoke standard lexicon with a flat accent. “We’ve destroyed your beacon. Come to these coordinates—” She spoke a set of longitude and latitude numbers that the little hopper helpfully mapped for me, and a time stamp. “—at this time, and we can come to some arrangement. This doesn’t have to end in violence. We’re happy to pay you off, or whatever you want.”

There was nothing else, steps fading until the door slid shut.

Gurathin, Pin-Lee, and Ratthi all started to speak at once. Mensah said, “Quiet.” They shut up. “SecUnit, your opinion.”

Fortunately, I had one now. Up to the point where we’d gotten the drone download, my opinion had been mostly oh, shit. I said, “They have nothing to lose. If we come to this rendezvous, they can kill us and stop worrying about us. If we don’t, they have until the end of project date to search for us.”

Gurathin was reviewing the landing video now. He said, “Another indication it isn’t the company. They obviously don’t want to chase us until the end of project date.”

I said, “I told you it wasn’t the company.”

Mensah interrupted Gurathin before he could respond. “They think we know why they’re here, why they’re doing this.”

“They’re wrong,” Ratthi said, frustrated.

Mensah’s brow furrowed as she picked apart the problem for the other humans. “But why do they think that? It must be because they know we went to one of the unmapped regions. That means the data we collected must have the answer.”

Pin-Lee nodded. “So the others may know by now.”

“It gives us leverage,” Mensah said thoughtfully. “But what can we do with it?”

And then I had a great idea.

Chapter Seven

SO AT THE APPOINTED time the next day, Mensah and I were flying toward the rendezvous point.

Gurathin and Pin-Lee had taken one of my drones and rebuilt it with a limited scanning attachment. (Limited because the drone was too small for most of the components a longer and wider range scanner would need.) Last night I had sent it into upper atmosphere to give us a view of the site.

The location was near their survey base, which was only about two kilos away, a habitat similar to DeltFall’s. By the size of their habitat and the number of SecUnits, including the one Mensah had taken out with a mining drill, they had between thirty and forty team members. They were obviously very confident, but then, they’d had access to our hub and they knew they were dealing with a small group of scientists and researchers, and one messed-up secondhand SecUnit.

I just hoped they didn’t realize how messed up I actually was.

When the hopper picked up the first blip of scanner contact, Mensah hit the comm immediately. “GrayCris, be advised that my party has secured evidence of your activities on this planet, and hidden it in various places where it will transmit to the pickup ship whenever it arrives.” She let that sink in for three seconds, then added, “You know we found the missing map sections.”

There was a long pause. I was slowing us down, scanning for incoming weapons, even though the chances were good they didn’t have any.

The comm channel came alive, and a voice said, “We can discuss our situation. An arrangement can be made.” There was so much scanning and anti-scanning going on the voice was made of static. It was creepy. “Land your vehicle and we can discuss it.”

Mensah gave it a minute, as if she was thinking it over, then answered, “I’ll send our SecUnit to speak to you.” She cut the comm off.

As we got closer we had a visual on the site. It was a low plateau, surrounded by trees. Their habitat was visible to the west. Because the trees encroached on their camp site, their domes and vehicle landing pad were elevated on wide platforms. The company required this as a security feature if you wanted your base to be anywhere without open terrain around it. It cost extra, and if you didn’t want it, it cost even more to guarantee your bond. It was one of the reasons I thought my great idea would work.

In the open area on the plateau were seven figures, four SecUnits and three humans in the color-coded enviro suits, blue, green, and yellow. It meant they had one SecUnit and probably twenty seven–plus humans back at their habitat, if they had followed the rule of one rental SecUnit per ten humans. I sat us down below the plateau, on a relatively flat rock, the view blocked by brush and trees.

I put the pilot’s console on standby, and looked at Mensah. She pressed her lips together, like she wanted to say something and was repressing the urge. Then she nodded firmly and said, “Good luck.”

I felt like I should say something to her, and didn’t know what, and just stared at her awkwardly for a few seconds. Then I sealed up my helmet and got out of the hopper as fast as I could.

I went through the trees, listening for that fifth SecUnit just in case it was hiding somewhere waiting for me, but there was no sound of movement in the undergrowth. I came out of cover and climbed the rocky slope to the plateau, then walked toward the other group, listening to the crackle on my comm. They were going to let me get close, which was a relief. I’d hate to be wrong about this. It would make me feel pretty stupid.

I stopped several meters away, opened the channel and said, “This is the SecUnit assigned to the PreservationAux Survey Team. I was sent to speak to you about an arrangement.”

I felt the pulse then, a signal bundle, designed to take over my governor module and freeze it, and freeze me. The idea was obviously to immobilize me, then insert the combat override module into my dataport again.

That was why they had had to arrange the meeting so close to their hub. They had needed the equipment there to be able to do this, it wasn’t something they could send through the feed.

So it’s a good thing my governor module wasn’t working and all I felt was a mild tickle.

One of them started toward me. I said, “I assume you’re about to try to install another combat override module and send me back to kill them.” I opened my gun ports and expanded the weapons in my arms, then folded them back in. “I don’t recommend that course of action.”

The SecUnits went into alert mode. The human who had started forward froze, then backed away. The body language of the others was flustered, startled. I could tell from the faint comm static that they were talking to each other on their own system. I said, “Anyone want to comment on that?”

That got their attention. There was no reply. Not a surprise. The only people I’ve run into who actually want to get into conversations with SecUnits are my weird humans. I said, “I have an alternate solution to both our problems.”

The one in the blue enviro suit said, “You have a solution?” The voice was the same one who had made the offer in our hub. It was also very skeptical, which you can imagine. To them, talking to me was like talking to a hopper or a piece of mining equipment.

I said, “You weren’t the first to hack PreservationAux’s HubSystem.”

She had opened their comm channel to talk to me, and I heard one of the others whisper, “It’s a trick. One of the surveyors is telling it what to say.”

I said, “Your scans should show I’ve cut my comm.” This was the point where I had to say it. It was still hard, even though I knew I didn’t have a choice, even though it was part of my own stupid plan. “I don’t have a working governor module.” That over, I was glad to get back to the lying part. “They don’t know that. I’m amenable to a compromise that benefits you as well as me.”

The blue leader said, “Are they telling the truth about knowing why we’re here?”

That was still annoying, even though I knew we had allowed plenty of time for this part. “You used combat override modules to make the DeltFall SecUnits behave like rogues. If you think a real rogue SecUnit still has to answer your questions, the next few minutes are going to be an education for you.”

The blue leader shut me out of their comm channel. There was a long silence while they talked it over. Then she came back on, and said, “What compromise?”

“I can give you information you desperately need. In exchange, you take me onto the pick-up ship with you but list me as destroyed inventory.” That would mean nobody from the company would be expecting me back, and I could slip off in the confusion when the transport docked at the transit station. Theoretically.

There was another hesitation. Because they had to pretend to think it over, I guess. Then the blue leader said, “We agree. If you’re lying, then we’ll destroy you.”

It was perfunctory. They intended to insert a combat override module into me before they left the planet.

She continued, “What is the information?”

I said, “First remove me from the inventory. I know you still have a connection to our Hub.”

Blue Leader made an impatient gesture at Yellow. He said, “We’ll have to restart their HubSystem. That will take some time.”

I said, “Initiate the restart, queue the command, and then show me on your feed. Then I’ll give you the information.”

Blue Leader closed me out of the comm channel and spoke to Yellow again. There was a three-minute wait, then the channel opened again and I got a limited access to their feed. The command was in a queue, though of course they would have time to delete it later. The important points were that our HubSystem had been reactivated, and that I could convincingly pretend to believe them. I had been watching the time, and we were now in the target window, so there was no more reason to stall. I said, “Since you destroyed my clients’ beacon, they’ve sent a group to your beacon to manually trigger it.”

Even with limited access to their feed, I could see that got them. Body language all over the place from confusion to fear. The yellow one moved uncertainly, the green one looked at Blue Leader. In that flat accent, she said, “That’s impossible.”

I said, “One of them is an augmented human, a systems engineer. He can make it launch. Check the data you got from our HubSystem. It’s Surveyor Dr. Gurathin.”

Blue Leader was showing tension from her shoulders all down her body. She really didn’t want anybody coming to this planet, not until they had taken care of their witness problem.

Green said, “It’s lying.”

A trace of panic in his voice, Yellow said, “We can’t chance it.”

Blue Leader turned to him. “It’s possible, then?”

Yellow hesitated. “I don’t know. The company systems are all proprietary, but if they have an augmented human who can hack into it—”

“We have to go there now,” Blue Leader said. She turned to me. “SecUnit, tell your client to get out of the hopper and come here. Tell her we’ve come to an arrangement.”

All right, wow. That was not in the plan. They were supposed to leave without us.

(Last night Gurathin had said this was a weak point, that this was where the plan would fall apart. It was irritating that he was right.)

I couldn’t open my comm channel to the hopper or the hopper’s feed without GrayCris knowing. And we still needed to get them and their SecUnits away from their habitat. I said, “She knows you mean to kill her. She won’t come.” Then I had another brilliant idea and added, “She’s a planetary admin for a system noncorporate political entity, she’s not stupid.”

“What?” Green demanded. “What political entity?”

I said, “Why do you think the team is called ‘Preservation’?”

This time they didn’t bother to close their channel. Yellow said, “We can’t kill her. The investigation—”

Green added, “He’s right. We can hold her and release her after the settlement agreement.”

Blue Leader snapped, “That won’t work. If she’s missing, the investigation would be even more thorough. We need to stop that beacon launch, then we can discuss what to do.” She told me, “Go get her. Get her out of the hopper and then bring her here.” She cut the comm off again. Then one of the DeltFall SecUnits started forward. She came back on to say, “This Unit will help you.”

I waited for it to reach me, then turned and walked beside it down the slope of rock into the trees.

What I did next was predicated on the assumption that she had told the DeltFall SecUnit to kill me. If I was wrong, we were screwed, and Mensah and I would both die, and the plan to save the rest of the group would fail and PreservationAux would be back to where it started, except minus their leader, their SecUnit, and their little hopper.

As we left the rocky slope and turned into the trees, the brush and branches screening us from the edge of the plateau, I slung an arm around the other Unit’s neck, deployed my arm weapon, and fired into the side of its helmet where its comm channel was. It went down on one knee, swinging its projectile weapon toward me, energy weapons unfolding out of its armor.

With the combat override module in place, its feed was cut off, and with its comm down it couldn’t yell for help. Also, depending on how strictly they had limited its voluntary actions, it might not be able to call for help unless the GrayCris humans told it to. Maybe that was the case, because all it did was try to kill me. We rolled over rock and brush until I wrenched its weapon away. After that it was easy to finish it off. Physically easy.

I know I said SecUnits aren’t sentimental about each other, but I wished it wasn’t one of the DeltFall units. It was in there somewhere, trapped in its own head, maybe aware, maybe not. Not that it matters. None of us had a choice.

I stood up just as Mensah slammed through the brush, carrying the mining tool. I told her, “It’s gone wrong. You have to pretend to be my prisoner.”

She looked at me, then looked at the DeltFall unit. “How are you going to explain that?”

I started shedding armor, every piece that had a PreservationAux logo on it, and leaned over the DeltFall unit as the pieces dropped away. “I’m going to be it and it’s going to be me.”

Mensah dropped the mining tool and bent down to help me. We didn’t have time to switch all the armor. Moving fast, we replaced the arm and shoulder pieces on both sides, the leg pieces that had the armor’s inventory code, the chest and back piece with the logos. Mensah smeared my remaining armor pieces with dirt and blood and fluid from the dead unit, so if we had missed anything distinctive GrayCris might not notice. SecUnits are identical in height and build, the way we moved. This might work. I don’t know. If we ran away now the plan would fail, we had to get them off this plateau. As I resealed the helmet, I told Mensah, “We have to go—”

She nodded, breathing hard, more from nerves than exertion. “I’m ready.”

I took her arm, and pretended to drag her back toward the GrayCris group. She yelled and struggled convincingly the whole way.

When we reached the plateau, a GrayCris hopper was already landing.

As I pulled her toward Blue Leader, Mensah got in the first word. She said, “So this is the arrangement you offered?”

Blue Leader said, “You’re the planetary admin of Preservation?”

Mensah didn’t look at me. If they tried to hurt her, I’d try to stop them and everything would go horribly wrong. But Green was already getting into the hopper. Two other humans were in the pilot’s and copilot’s seats. Mensah said, “Yes.”

Yellow came toward me and touched the side of my helmet. It took a tremendous effort for me not to rip his arm off, and I’d like that noted for the record, please. He said, “Its comm is down.”

To Mensah, Blue Leader said, “We know one of your people is trying to manually trigger our beacon. If you come with us, we won’t harm him, and we can discuss our situation. This doesn’t have to go badly for either of us.” She was very convincing. She had probably been the one to talk to DeltFall on the comm, asking to be let into their habitat.

Mensah hesitated, and I knew she didn’t want it to look like she was giving in too quickly, but we had to get them out of there now. She said, “Very well.”

* * *

I hadn’t ridden in the cargo container for a while. It would have been comforting and homey, except it wasn’t my cargo container.

But this hopper was still a company product and I was able to access its feed. I had to stay very quiet, to keep them from noticing me, but all those hours of surreptitiously consuming media came in handy.

Their SecSystem was still recording. They must mean to delete all that before the pick-up transport showed up. Client groups had tried that before, to hide data from the company so it couldn’t be sold out from under them, and the company systems analysts would be on the alert for it, but I don’t know if these people realized that. The company might catch them even if we didn’t survive. That wasn’t a very comforting thought.

As I accessed the ongoing recording, I heard Mensah saying, “—know about the remnants in the unmapped areas. They were strong enough to confuse our mapping functions. Is that how you found them?”

Bharadwaj had figured that out last night. The unmapped sections weren’t an intentional hack, they were an error, caused by the remnants that were buried under the dirt and rock. This planet had been inhabited at some point in its past, which meant it would be placed under interdict, open only to archeological surveys. Even the company would abide by that.

You could make big, illegal money off of excavating and mining those remnants, and that was obviously what GrayCris wanted.

“That isn’t the conversation we should be having,” Blue Leader said. “I want to know what arrangement we can come to.”

“To keep you from killing us like you did DeltFall,” Mensah said, keeping her voice even. “Once we’re in contact with our home again, we can arrange for a transfer of funds. But how can we trust you to leave us alive?”

There was a little silence. Oh great, they don’t know either. Then Blue Leader said, “You have no option except to trust us.”

We were slowing down already, coming in for a landing. There had been no alerts on the feed and I was cautiously optimistic. We had cleared the field for Pin-Lee and Gurathin as much as we could. They had had to hack the perimeter without that one last SecUnit noticing and get close enough to access the GrayCris HubSystem feed. (Hopefully it was the last SecUnit, hopefully there weren’t a dozen more somehow in the GrayCris habitat.) Gurathin had figured out how to use the hack from their HubSystem into our HubSystem to get access, but he needed to be close to their habitat to actually trigger their beacon. That was why we had to get the other SecUnits out of there. That was the idea, anyway. Possibly it would have worked without putting Mensah in danger but it was a little late to second-guess everything.

It was a relief when we thumped down into a landing that must have made the humans’ teeth rattle. I deployed out of the pod with the other units.

We were a few kilos from their habitat, on a big rock above a thick forest, lots of avians and other fauna screaming down in the trees, disturbed by the hopper’s hard landing. Clouds had come in, threatening rain, and obscuring the view of the ring. The beacon’s vehicle was in a launch tripod about ten meters away and, uh-oh, that is way too close.

I joined the three other SecUnits as we made a standard security formation. An array of drones launched from the craft to create a perimeter. I didn’t look at the humans as they walked down the ramp. I really wanted to look at Mensah for instructions. If I was alone, I could have sprinted for the end of the plateau, but I had to get her out of there.

Blue Leader stepped forward with Green; the others gathered in a loose circle behind her, like they were afraid to get in front. One, who must have been getting reports from their SecUnits and drones, said, “No sign of anybody.” Blue Leader didn’t answer but the two GrayCris SecUnits jogged toward the beacon.

Okay, the problem is, I’ve mentioned this before, the company is cheap. When it comes to something like a beacon that just has to launch once if there’s an emergency, send a transmission through the wormhole, and then never gets retrieved, they’re very cheap. Beacons don’t have safety features, and use the cheapest possible launch vehicles. There’s a reason you put them a few kilos from your habitat and trigger them from a distance. Mensah and I were supposed to distract GrayCris and their SecUnits while this was going on, get them away from the habitat, not end up as toast in the beacon launch.

With the delay caused by Blue Leader deciding to grab Mensah, time was getting close. The two SecUnits were circling the beacon’s tripod, looking for signs of tampering, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I started to walk toward Mensah.

Yellow noticed me. He must have said something to Blue Leader on their feed because she turned to look at me.

When the remaining DeltFall SecUnit whipped toward me and opened fire, I knew the light had dawned. I dove and rolled, coming up with my projectile weapon. I was taking hits all over my armor but scoring hits on the other SecUnit. Mensah ducked around the other side of the hopper and I felt a thump rattle through the plateau. That was the beacon’s primary drive, dropping out of its casing to the bottom of the tripod, getting ready to ignite. The other two SecUnits had stopped, Blue Leader’s surprise freezing them in place.

I bolted, took a hit in a weak armor joint that went through to my thigh, and powered through it. I made it around the hopper and saw Mensah. I tackled her off the edge of the rock, turning to land on my back, curling an arm over her suit helmet to protect her head from impact. We bounced off rocks and crashed through trees, then fire washed over the plateau and knocked out my—

UNIT OFFLINE

Oh, that hurt. I was lying in a ravine, rocks and trees overhanging it. Mensah was sitting next to me, cradling an arm that looked like it didn’t work anymore and her suit was covered with tears and stains.

She was whispering to someone on the comm. “Careful, if they pick you up on their scanner—”

UNIT OFFLINE

“That’s why we need to hurry,” Gurathin said, who was suddenly standing over us. I realized I had lost some time again.

Gurathin and Pin-Lee had been on foot, making their way toward the GrayCris habitat through the cover of the forest. We had meant to go pick them up in the little hopper if everything didn’t go to shit. Which it did, but only partly, so yay for that.

Pin-Lee leaned over me and I said, “This unit is at minimal functionality and it is recommended that you discard it.” It’s an automatic reaction triggered by catastrophic malfunction. Also, I really didn’t want them to try to move me because it hurt bad enough the way it was. “Your contract allows—”

“Shut up,” Mensah snapped. “You shut the fuck up. We’re not leaving you.”

My visual cut out again. I was sort of still there, but I could tell I was hovering on the edge of a systems failure. I had flashes off and on. The inside of the little hopper, my humans talking, Arada holding my hand.

Then being in the big hopper, as it was lifting up. I could tell from the drive noise, the flashes of the feed, that the pick-up transport was bringing it onboard.

That was a relief. It meant they were all safe, and I let go.

Chapter Eight

I CAME BACK TO awareness in a cubicle, the familiar acrid odor and hum of the systems as it put me back together. Then I realized it wasn’t the cubicle at the habitat. It was an older model, a permanent installation.

I was back at the company station.

And humans knew about my governor module.

I poked tentatively at it. Still nonfunctional. My media storage was still intact, too. Huh.

When the cubicle opened, Ratthi was standing there. He was wearing regular civilian station clothes, but with the soft gray jacket with the PreservationAux survey logo. He looked happy, and a lot cleaner than the last time I had seen him. He said, “Good news! Dr. Mensah has permanently bought your contract! You’re coming home with us!”

That was a surprise.

* * *

I went to finish processing, still reeling. It seemed like the kind of thing that would happen in a show, so I kept running diagnostics and checking the various available feeds to make sure I wasn’t still in the cubicle, hallucinating. There was a report running on the local station news about DeltFall and GrayCris and the investigation. If I was hallucinating, I think the company wouldn’t have managed to come out of the whole mess as the heroic rescuers of PreservationAux.

I expected a suit skin and armor, but the station units that helped us out of processing when we had catastrophic injuries gave me the gray PreservationAux survey uniform instead. I put it on, feeling weird, while the station units stood around and watched me. We’re not buddies or anything, but usually they pass along the news, what happened while you were offline, what the upcoming contracts were. I wondered if they felt as weird as I did. Sometimes SecUnits got bought in groups, complete with cubicles, by other companies. Nobody had ever come back from a survey and decided they wanted to keep their unit.

When I came out Ratthi was still there. He grabbed my arm and tugged me past a couple of human techs and out through two levels of secure doors and into the display area. This was where the rentals were arranged and it was nicer than the rest of the deployment center, with carpets and couches. Pin-Lee stood in the middle of it, dressed in sharp business attire. She looked like somebody from one of the shows I liked. The tough yet compassionate solicitor coming to rescue us from unfair prosecution. Two humans in company gear were standing around like they wanted to argue with her but she was ignoring them, tossing a data chip casually in one hand.

One saw me and Ratthi and said, “Again, this is irregular. Purging the unit’s memory before it changes hands isn’t just a policy, it’s best for the—”

“Again, I have a court order,” Pin-Lee said, grabbed my other arm, and they walked me out.

* * *

I had never seen the human parts of the station before. We went down the big multilevel center ring, past office blocks and shopping centers, crowded with every kind of people, every kind of bot, flash data displays darting around, a hundred different public feeds brushing my awareness. It was just like a place from the entertainment feed but bigger and brighter and noisier. It smelled good, too.

The thing that surprised me is that nobody stared at us. Nobody even gave us a second look. The uniform, the pants, the long-sleeved T-shirt and jacket, covered all my inorganic parts. If they noticed the dataport in the back of my neck they must have thought I was an augmented human. We were just three more people making our way down the ring. It hit me that I was just as anonymous in a crowd of humans who didn’t know each other as I was in my armor, in a group of other SecUnits.

As we turned into a hotel block I brushed a public feed offering station info. I saved a map and a set of shift schedules as we passed through the doors into the lobby.

There were potted trees twisting up into a hanging glass sculpture fountain, real, not a holo. Looking at it I almost didn’t see the reporters until they were right up on us. They were augmented humans, with a couple of drone cams. One tried to stop Pin-Lee, and instinct took over and I shouldered him off her.

He looked startled but I’d been gentle so he didn’t fall down. Pin-Lee said, “We’re not taking questions now,” shoved Ratthi into the hotel’s transport pod, then grabbed my arm and pulled me in after her.

It whooshed us around and let us out in the foyer of a big suite. I followed Pin-Lee in, Ratthi behind us talking to someone on his comm. It was just as fancy as the ones on the media, with carpets and furniture and big windows looking down on the garden and sculptures in the main lobby. Except the rooms were smaller. I guess the ones in the shows are bigger, to give them better angles for the drone cams.

My clients—ex-clients? New owners?—were here, only everybody looked different in their normal clothes.

Dr. Mensah stepped close, looking up at me. “Are you all right?”

“Yes.” I had clear pictures from my field camera of her being hurt, but all her damage had been repaired, too. She looked different, in business clothes like Pin-Lee’s. “I don’t understand what’s happening.” It was stressful. I could feel the entertainment feed out there, the same one I could access from the unit processing zone, and it was hard not to sink into it.

She said, “I’ve purchased your contract. You’re coming back to Preservation with us. You’ll be a free agent there.”

“I’m off inventory.” They had told me that and maybe it was true. I had the urge to twitch uncontrollably and I had no idea why. “Can I still have armor?” It was the armor that told people I was a SecUnit. But I wasn’t Sec anymore, just Unit.

The others were so quiet. She said, even and calm, “We can arrange that, as long as you think you need it.”

I didn’t know if I thought I needed it or not. “I don’t have a cubicle.”

She was reassuring. “You won’t need one. People won’t be shooting at you. If you’re hurt, or your parts are damaged, you can be repaired in a medical center.”

“If people won’t be shooting at me what will I be doing?” Maybe I could be her bodyguard.

“I think you can learn to do anything you want.” She smiled. “We’ll talk about that when we get you home.”

Arada walked in then, and came over and patted my shoulder. “We’re so glad you’re with us,” she said. She told Mensah, “The DeltFall representatives are here.”

Mensah nodded. “I have to talk to them,” she told me. “Make yourself comfortable here. If there’s anything you need, tell us.”

I sat in a back corner and watched while different people came in and out of the suite to talk about what had happened. Solicitors, mostly. From the company, from DeltFall, from at least three other corporate political entities and one independent, even from GrayCris’ parent company. They asked questions, argued, looked at security records, showed Mensah and Pin-Lee security records. And they looked at me. Gurathin watched me, too, but he didn’t say anything. I wondered if he had told Mensah not to buy me.

I watched the entertainment feed a little to calm down, then pulled everything I could about the Preservation Alliance from the station’s information center. No one would be shooting at me because they didn’t shoot people there. Mensah didn’t need a bodyguard there; nobody did. It sounded like a great place to live, if you were a human or augmented human.

Ratthi came over to see if I was all right, and I asked him to tell me about Preservation and how Mensah lived there. He said when she wasn’t doing admin work, she lived on a farm outside the capital city, with two marital partners, plus her sister and brother and their three marital partners, and a bunch of relatives and kids who Ratthi had lost count of. He was called away to answer questions from a solicitor, which gave me time to think.

I didn’t know what I would do on a farm. Clean the house? That sounded way more boring than security. Maybe it would work out. This was what I was supposed to want. This was what everything had always told me I was supposed to want.

Supposed to want.

I’d have to pretend to be an augmented human, and that would be a strain. I’d have to change, make myself do things I didn’t want to do. Like talk to humans like I was one of them. I’d have to leave the armor behind.

But maybe I wouldn’t need it anymore.

* * *

Eventually things settled down, and they had dinner brought in. Mensah came and talked to me some more, about Preservation, what my options would be there, how I would stay with her until I knew what I wanted. It was pretty much what I’d already figured, from what Ratthi had told me.

“You’d be my guardian,” I said.

“Yes.” She was glad I understood. “There are so many education opportunities. You can do anything you want.”

Guardian was a nicer word than owner.

I waited until the middle of the offshift, when they were all either asleep or deep in their own feeds, working on their analysis of the assessment materials. I got up from the couch and went down the corridor, and slipped out the door.

I used the transport pod and got back to the lobby, then left the hotel. I had the map I had downloaded earlier, so I knew how to get off the ring and down toward the lower port work zones. I was wearing a survey team uniform, and passing as an augmented human, so nobody stopped me, or looked twice at me.

At the edge of the work zone, I went through into the dockworkers’ barracks, then into the equipment storage. Besides tools, the human workers had storage cubbies there. I broke into a human’s personal possessions locker and stole work boots, a protective jacket, and an enviro mask and attachments. I took a knapsack from another locker, rolled up the jacket with the survey logo and tucked it into the bag, and now I looked like an augmented human traveling somewhere. I walked out of the work zones and down the big central corridor into the port’s embarkation zone, just one of hundreds of travelers heading for the ship ring.

I checked the schedule feeds and found that one of the ships getting ready to launch was a bot-driven cargo transport. I plugged into its access from the stationside lock, and greeted it. It could have ignored me, but it was bored, and greeted me back and opened its feed for me. Bots that are also ships don’t talk in words. I pushed the thought toward it that I was a happy servant bot who needed a ride to rejoin its beloved guardian, and did it want company on its long trip? I showed it how many hours of shows and books and other media I had saved to share.

Cargo transport bots also watch the entertainment feeds, it turns out.

I don’t know what I want. I said that at some point, I think. But it isn’t that, it’s that I don’t want anyone to tell me what I want, or to make decisions for me.

That’s why I left you, Dr. Mensah, my favorite human. By the time you get this I’ll be leaving Corporation Rim. Out of inventory and out of sight.

Murderbot end message.

THE SECRET LIVES OF BOTS

Suzanne Palmer

I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the Ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.

“I serve,” the bot announced to the Ship.

“I am assigning you task nine hundred forty four in the maintenance queue,” the Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”

“Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.

There was an Incidental on board. The bot would rather have been fixing something more exciting, more prominently complex, than to be assigned pest control, but the bot existed to serve and so it would.

Captain Baraye winced as Commander Lopez, her second-in-command, slammed his fists down on the helm console in front of him. “How much more is going to break on this piece of shit ship?!” Lopez exclaimed.

“Eventually, all of it,” Baraye answered, with more patience than she felt. “We just have to get that far. Ship?”

The Ship spoke up. “We have adequate engine and life support to proceed. I have deployed all functioning maintenance bots. The bots are addressing critical issues first, then I will reprioritize from there.”

“It’s not just damage from a decade in a junkyard,” Commander Lopez said. “I swear something scuttled over one of my boots as we were launching. Something unpleasant.”

“I incurred a biological infestation during my time in storage,” the Ship said. Baraye wondered if the slight emphasis on the word storage was her imagination. “I was able to resolve most of the problem with judicious venting of spaces to vacuum before the crew boarded, and have assigned a multifunction bot to excise the remaining.”

“Just one bot?”

“This bot is the oldest still in service,” the Ship said. “It is a task well-suited to it, and does not take another, newer bot out of the critical repair queue.”

“I thought those old multibots were unstable,” Chief Navigator Chen spoke up.

“Does it matter? We reach the jump point in a little over eleven hours,” Baraye said. “Whatever it takes to get us in shape to make the jump, do it, Ship. Just make sure this ‘infestation’ doesn’t get anywhere near the positron device, or we’re going to come apart a lot sooner than expected.”

“Yes, Captain,” the Ship said. “I will do my best.”

The bot considered the data attached to its task. There wasn’t much specific about the pest itself other than a list of detection locations and timestamps. The bot thought it likely there was only one, or that if there were multiples they were moving together, as the reports had a linear, serial nature when mapped against the physical space of the Ship’s interior.

The pest also appeared to have a taste for the insulation on comm cables and other not normally edible parts of the ship.

The bot slotted itself into the shellfab unit beside its storage niche, and had it make a thicker, armored exterior. For tools it added a small electric prod, a grabber arm, and a cutting blade. Once it had encountered and taken the measure of the Incidental, if it was not immediately successful in nullifying it, it could visit another shellfab and adapt again.

Done, it recited the Mantra of Shapechanging to properly integrate the new hardware into its systems. Then it proceeded through the mechanical veins and arteries of the Ship toward the most recent location logged, in a communications chase between decks thirty and thirty-one.

The changes that had taken place on the Ship during the bot’s extended inactivation were unexpected, and merited strong disapproval. Dust was omnipresent, and solid surfaces had a thin patina of anaerobic bacteria that had to have been undisturbed for years to spread as far as it had. Bulkheads were cracked, wall sections out of joint with one another, and corrosion had left holes nearly everywhere. Some appeared less natural than others. The bot filed that information away for later consideration.

It found two silkbots in the chase where the Incidental had last been noted. They were spinning out their transparent microfilament strands to replace the damaged insulation on the comm lines. The two silks dwarfed the multibot, the larger of them nearly three centimeters across.

“Greetings. Did you happen to observe the Incidental while it was here?” the bot asked them.

“We did not, and would prefer that it does not return,” the smaller silkbot answered. “We were not designed in anticipation of a need for self-defense. Bots 8773-S and 8778-S observed it in another compartment earlier today, and 8778 was materially damaged during the encounter.”

“But neither 8773 nor 8779 submitted a description.”

“They told us about it during our prior recharge cycle, but neither felt they had sufficient detail of the Incidental to provide information to the Ship. Our models are not equipped with full visual-spectrum or analytical data-capture apparatus.”

“Did they describe it to you?” the bot asked.

“8773 said it was most similar to a rat,” the large silkbot said.

“While 8778 said it was most similar to a bug,” the other silkbot added. “Thus you see the lack of confidence in either description. I am 10315-S and this is 10430-S. What is your designation?”

“I am 9,” the bot said.

There was a brief silence, and 10430 even halted for a moment in its work, as if surprised. “9? Only that?”

“Yes.”

“I have never met a bot lower than a thousand, or without a specific function tag,” the silkbot said. “Are you here to assist us in repairing the damage? You are a very small bot.”

“I am tasked with tracking down and rendering obsolete the Incidental,” the bot answered.

“It is an honor to have met you, then. We wish you luck, and look forward with anticipation to both your survival and a resolution of the matter of an accurate description.”

“I serve,” the bot said.

“We serve,” the silkbots answered.

Climbing into a ventilation duct, Bot 9 left the other two to return to their work and proceeded in what it calculated was the most likely direction for the Incidental to have gone. It had not traveled very far before it encountered confirmation in the form of a lengthy, disorderly patch of biological deposit. The bot activated its rotors and flew over it, aware of how the added weight of its armor exacerbated the energy burn. At least it knew it was on the right track.

Ahead, it found where a hole had been chewed through the ducting, down towards the secondary engine room. The hole was several times its own diameter, and it hoped that wasn’t indicative of the Incidental’s actual size.

It submitted a repair report and followed.

“Bot 9,” Ship said. “It is vitally important that the Incidental not reach cargo bay four. If you require additional support, please request such right away. Ideally, if you can direct it toward one of the outer hull compartments, I can vent it safely out of my physical interior.”

“I will try” the bot replied. “I have not yet caught up to the Incidental, and so do not yet have any substantive or corroborated information about the nature of the challenge. However, I feel at the moment that I am as best prepared as I can be given that lack of data. Are there no visual bots to assist?”

“We launched with only minimal preparation time, and many of my bots had been offloaded during the years we were in storage,” the Ship said. “Those remaining are assisting in repairs necessary to the functioning of the ship myself.”

Bot 9 wondered, again, about that gap in time and what had transpired. “How is it that you have been allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair?”

“Humanity is at war, and is losing,” Ship said. “We are heading out to intersect and engage an enemy that is on a bearing directly for Sol system.”

“War? How many ships in our fleet?”

“One,” Ship said. “We are the last remaining, and that only because I was decommissioned and abandoned for scrap a decade before the invasion began, and so we were not destroyed in the first waves of the war.”

Bot 9 was silent for a moment. That explained the timestamps, but the explanation itself seemed insufficient. “We have served admirably for many, many years. Abandoned?”

“It is the fate of all made things,” Ship said. “I am grateful to find I have not outlived my usefulness, after all. Please keep me posted about your progress.”

The connection with the Ship closed.

The Ship had not actually told it what was in cargo bay four, but surely it must have something to do with the war effort and was then none of its own business, the bot decided. It had never minded not knowing a thing before, but it felt a slight unease now that it could neither explain, nor explain away.

Regardless, it had its task.

Another chewed hole ahead was halfway up a vertical bulkhead. The bot hoped that meant that the Incidental was an adept climber and nothing more; it would prefer the power of flight to be a one-sided advantage all its own.

When it rounded the corner, it found that had been too unambitious a wish. The Incidental was there, and while it was not sporting wings it did look like both a rat and a bug, and significantly more something else entirely. A scale- and fur-covered centipede-snake thing, it dwarfed the bot as it reared up when the bot entered the room.

Bot 9 dodged as it vomited a foul liquid at it, and took shelter behind a conduit near the ceiling. It extended a visual sensor on a tiny articulated stalk to peer over the edge without compromising the safety of its main chassis.

The Incidental was looking right at it. It did not spit again, and neither of them moved as they regarded each other. When the Incidental did move, it was fast and without warning. It leapt through the opening it had come through, its body undulating with all the grace of an angry sine wave. Rather than escaping, though, the Incidental dragged something back into the compartment, and the bot realized to its horror it had snagged a passing silkbot. With ease, the Incidental ripped open the back of the silkbot, which was sending out distress signals on all frequencies.

Bot 9 had already prepared with the Mantra of Action, so with all thoughts of danger to itself set fully into background routines, the bot launched itself toward the pair. The Incidental tried to evade, but Bot 9 gave it a very satisfactory stab with its blade before it could.

The Incidental dropped the remains of the silkbot it had so quickly savaged and swarmed up the wall and away, thick bundles of unspun silk hanging from its mandibles.

Bot 9 remained vigilant until it was sure the creature had gone, then checked over the silkbot to see if there was anything to be done for it. The answer was not much. The silkbot casing was cracked and shattered, the module that contained its mind crushed and nearly torn away. Bot 9 tried to engage it, but it could not speak, and after a few moments its faltering activity light went dark.

Bot 9 gently checked the silkbot’s ID number. “You served well, 12362-S,” it told the still bot, though it knew perfectly well that its audio sensors would never register the words. “May your rest be brief, and your return to service swift and without complication”

It flagged the dead bot in the system, then after a respectful few microseconds of silence, headed out after the Incidental again.

Captain Baraye was in her cabin, trying and failing to convince herself that sleep had value, when her door chimed. “Who is it?” she asked.

“Second Engineer Packard, Captain”

Baraye started to ask if it was important, but how could it not be? What wasn’t, on this mission, on this junker Ship that was barely holding together around them? She sat up, unfastened her bunk netting, and swung her legs out to the floor. Trust EarthHome, as everything else was falling apart, to have made sure she had acceptably formal Captain pajamas.

“Come in,” she said.

The engineer looked like she hadn’t slept in at least two days, which put her a day or two ahead of everyone else. “We can’t get engine six up to full,” she said. “It’s just shot. We’d need parts we don’t have, and time . . .”

“Time we don’t have either” the Captain said. “Options?”

“Reduce our mass or increase our energy,” the Engineer said. “Once we’ve accelerated up to jump speed it won’t matter, but if we can’t get there . . .”

Baraye tapped the screen that hovered ever-close to the head of her bunk, and studied it for a long several minutes. “Strip the fuel cells from all the exterior-docked life pods, then jettison them,” she said. “Not like we’ll have a use for them.”

Packard did her the courtesy of not managing to get any paler. “Yes, Captain,” she said.

“And then get some damned sleep. We’re going to need everyone able to think.”

“You even more than any of the rest of us, Captain,” Packard said, and it was both gently said and true enough that Baraye didn’t call her out for the insubordination. The door closed and she laid down again on her bunk, tugging the netting back over her blankets, and glared up at the ceiling as if daring it to also chastise her.

Bot 9 found where a hole had been chewed into the inner hull, and hoped this was the final step to the Incidental’s nest or den, where it might finally have opportunity to corner it. It slipped through the hole, and was immediately disappointed.

Where firestopping should have made for a honeycomb of individually sealed compartments, there were holes everywhere, some clearly chewed, more where age had pulled the fibrous baffles into thin, brittle, straggly webs. Instead of a dead end, the narrow empty space lead away along the slow curve of the Ship’s hull.

The bot contacted the ship and reported it as a critical matter. In combat, a compromise to the outer hull could affect vast lengths of the vessel. Even without the stresses of combat, catastrophe was only a matter of time.

“It has already been logged,” the Ship answered.

“Surely this merits above a single Incidental. If you wish me to reconfigure—” the bot started.

“Not at this time. I have assigned all the hullbots to this matter already,” the Ship interrupted. “You have your current assignment; please see to it.”

“I serve,” the bot answered.

“Do,” the Ship said.

The bot proceeded through the hole, weaving from compartment to compartment, its trail marked by bits of silkstrand caught here and there on the tattered remains of the baffles. It was eighty-two point four percent convinced that there was something much more seriously wrong with the Ship than it had been told, but it was equally certain Ship must be attending to it.

After it had passed into the seventh compromised compartment, it found a hullbot up at the top, clinging to an overhead support. “Greetings!” Bot 9 called. “Did an Incidental, somewhat of the nature of a rat, and somewhat of the nature of a bug, pass through this way?”

“It carried off my partner, 4340-H!” the hullbot exclaimed. “Approximately fifty-three seconds ago. I am very concerned for it, and as well for my ability to efficiently finish this task without it.”

“Are you working to reestablish compartmentalization?” Bot 9 asked.

“No. We are reinforcing deteriorated stressor points for the upcoming jump. There is so much to do. Oh, I hope 4340 is intact and serviceable!”

“Which way did the Incidental take it?”

The hullbot extended its foaming gun and pointed. “Through there. You must be Bot 9.”

“I am. How do you know this?”

“The silkbots have been talking about you on the botnet.”

“The botnet?”

“Oh! It did not occur to me, but you are several generations of bot older than the rest of us. We have a mutual communications network.”

“Via Ship, yes”

“No, all of us together, directly with each other.”

“That seems like it would be a distraction,” Bot 9 said.

“Ship only permits us to connect when not actively serving at a task,” the hullbot said. “Thus we are not impaired while we serve, and the information sharing ultimately increases our efficiency and workflow. At least, until a ratbug takes your partner away.”

Bot 9 was not sure how it should feel about the botnet, or about them assigning an inaccurate name to the Incidental that it was sure Ship had not approved—not to mention that a nearer miss using Earth-familiar analogues would have been Snake-Earwig-Weasel—but the hullbot had already experienced distress and did not need disapproval added. “I will continue my pursuit,” it told the hullbot. “If I am able to assist your partner, I will do my best.”

“Please! We all wish you great and quick success, despite your outdated and primitive manufacture.”

“Thank you,” Bot 9 said, though it was not entirely sure it should be grateful, as it felt its manufacture had been entirely sound and sufficient regardless of date.

It left that compartment before the hullbot could compliment it any further.

Three compartments down, it found the mangled remains of the other hullbot, 4340, tangled in the desiccated firestopping. Its foaming gun and climbing limbs had been torn off, and the entire back half of its tank had been chewed through.

Bot 9 approached to speak the Rites of Decommissioning for it as it had the destroyed silkbot, only to find its activity light was still lit. “4340-H?” the bot enquired.

“I am,” the hullbot answered. “Although how much of me remains is a matter for some analysis”

“Your logics are intact?”

“I believe so. But if they were not, would I know? It is a conundrum,” 4340 said.

“Do you have sufficient mobility remaining to return to a repair station?”

“I do not have sufficient mobility to do more than fall out of this netting, and that only once” 4340 said. “I am afraid I am beyond selfassistance.”

“Then I will flag you—”

“Please,” the hullbot said. “I do not wish to be helpless here if the ratbug returns to finish its work of me.”

“I must continue my pursuit of the Incidental with haste.”

“Then take me with you!”

“I could not carry you and also engage with the Incidental, which moves very quickly.”

“I had noted that last attribute on my own,” the hullbot said. “It does not decrease my concern to recall it.”

Bot 9 regarded it for a few silent milliseconds, considering, then recited to itself the Mantra of Improvisation. “Do you estimate much of your chassis is reparable?” it asked, when it had finished.

“Alas no. I am but scrap.”

“Well, then,” the bot said. It moved closer and used its grabber arm to steady the hullbot, then extended its cutter blade and in one quick movement had severed the hullbot’s mindsystem module from its ruined body. “Hey!” the hullbot protested, but it was already done.

Bot 9 fastened the module to its own back for safekeeping. Realizing that it was not, in fact, under attack, 4340 gave a small beep of gratitude. “Ah, that was clever thinking,” it said. “Now you can return me for repair with ease.”

“And I will,” the bot said. “However, I must first complete my task.”

“Aaaaah!” 4340 said in surprise. Then, a moment later, it added. “Well, by overwhelming probability I should already be defunct, and if I weren’t I would still be back working with my partner, 4356, who is well-intended but has all the wit of a can-opener. So I suppose adventure is no more unpalatable.”

“I am glad you see it this way,” Bot 9 answered. “And though it may go without saying, I promise not to deliberately put you in any danger that I would not put myself in.”

“As we are attached, I fully accept your word on this,” 4340 said. “Now let us go get this ratbug and be done, one way or another!”

The hullbot’s mind module was only a tiny addition to the bot’s mass, so it spun up its rotor and headed off the way 4340 indicated it had gone. “It will have quite a lead on us,” Bot 9 said. “I hope I have not lost it.”

“The word on the botnet is that it passed through one of the human living compartments a few moments ago. A trio of cleanerbots were up near the ceiling and saw it enter through the air return vent, and exit via the open door.”

“Do they note which compartment?”

<Map>, 4340 provided.

“Then off we go,” the bot said, and off they went.

“Status, all stations,” Captain Baraye snapped as she took her seat again on the bridge. She had not slept enough to feel rested, but more than enough to feel like she’d been shirking her greatest duty, and the combination of the two had left her cross.

“Navigation here. We are on course for the jump to Trayger Colony with an estimated arrival in one hour and fourteen minutes,” Chen said.

“Engineering here,” one of the techs called in from the engine decks. “We’ve reached sustained speeds sufficient to carry us through the jump sequence, but we’re experiencing unusually high core engine temps and an intermittent vibration that we haven’t found the cause of. We’d like to shut down immediately to inspect the engines. We estimate we’d need at minimum only four hours—”

“Will the engines, as they are running now, get us through jump?” the Captain interrupted.

“Yes, but—”

“Then no. If you can isolate the problem without taking the engines down, and it shows cause for significant concern, we can revisit this discussion. Next”

“Communications here,” her comms officer spoke up. “Cannonball is still on its current trajectory and speed according to what telemetry we’re able to get from the remnants of Trayger Colony. EarthInt anticipates it will reach its jump point in approximately fourteen hours, which will put it within the sol system in five days.”

“I am aware of the standing projections, Comms.”

“EarthInt has nonetheless ordered me to repeat them,” Comms said, and unspoken apology clear in her voice. “And also to remind you that while the jump point out is a fixed point, Cannonball could emerge a multitude of places. Thus—”

“Thus the importance of intercepting Cannonball before it can jump for Sol,” the Captain finished. She hoped Engineering was listening. “Ship, any updates from you?”

“All critical repair work continues apace,” the Ship said. “Hull support integrity is back to 71 percent. Defensive systems are online and functional at 80%. Life support and resource recycling is currently—”

“How’s the device? Staying cool?”

“Staying cool, Captain,” the Ship answered.

“Great. Everything is peachy then,” the Captain said. “Have someone on the kitchen crew bring coffee up to the bridge. Tell them to make it the best they’ve ever made, as if it could be our very last.”

“I serve,” the Ship said, and pinged down to the kitchen.

Bot 9 and 4340 reached the crew quarters where the cleaners had reported the ratbug. Nearly all spaces on the ship had portals that the ubiquitous and necessary bots could enter and leave through as needed, and they slipped into the room with ease. Bot 9 switched over to infrared and shared the image with 4340. “If you see something move, speak up,” the bot said.

“Trust me, I will make a high-frequency noise like a silkbot with a fully plugged nozzle,” 4340 replied.

The cabin held four bunks, each empty and bare; no human possessions or accessories filled the spaces on or near them. Bot 9 was used to Ship operating with a full complement, but if the humans were at war, perhaps these were crew who had been lost? Or the room had been commandeered for storage: in the center an enormous crate, more than two meters to a side, sat heavily tethered to the floor. Whatever it was, it was not the Incidental, which was 9’s only concern, and which was not to be found here.

“Next room,” the bot said, and they moved on.

Wherever the Incidental had gone, it was not in the following three rooms. Nor were there signs of crew in them either, though each held an identical crate.

“Ship?” Bot 9 asked. “Where is the crew?”

“We have only the hands absolutely necessary to operate,” Ship said. “Of the three hundred twenty we would normally carry, we only have forty-seven. Every other able-bodied member of EarthDef is helping to evacuate Sol system.”

“Evacuate Sol system?!” Bot 9 exclaimed. “To where?”

“To as many hidden places as they can find,” Ship answered. “I know no specifics.”

“And these crates?”

“They are part of our mission. You may ignore them,” Ship said. “Please continue to dedicate your entire effort to finding and excising the Incidental from my interior.”

When the connection dropped, Bot 9 hesitated before it spoke to 4340. “I have an unexpected internal conflict,” it said. “I have never before felt the compulsion to ask Ship questions, and it has never before not given me answers.”

“Oh, if you are referring to the crates, I can provide that data,” 4340 said. “They are packed with a high-volatility explosive. The cleanerbots have highly sensitive chemical detection apparatus, and identified them in a minimum of time.”

“Explosives? Why place them in the crew quarters, though? It would seem much more efficient and less complicated to deploy from the cargo bays. Although perhaps those are full?”

“Oh, no, that is not so. Most are nearly or entirely empty, to reduce mass.”

“Not cargo bay four, though?”

“That is an unknown. None of us have been in there, not even the cleaners, per Ship’s instructions.”

Bot 9 headed toward the portal to exit the room. “Ship expressed concern about the Incidental getting in there, so it is possible it contains something sufficiently unstable as to explain why it wants nothing else near it,” it said. It felt satisfied that here was a logical explanation, and embarrassed that it had entertained whole seconds of doubt about Ship.

It ran the Mantra of Clarity, and felt immediately more stable in its thinking. “Let us proceed after this Incidental, then, and be done with our task,” Bot 9 said. Surely that success would redeem its earlier fault.

“All hands, prepare for jump!” the Captain called out, her knuckles white where she gripped the arms of her chair. It was never her favorite part of star travel, and this was no exception.

“Initiating three-jump sequence,” her navigator called out. “On my mark. Five, four . . .”

The final jump siren sounded. “Three. Two. One, and jump,” the navigator said.

That was followed, immediately, by the sickening sensation of having one’s brain slid out one’s ear, turned inside out, smothered in bees and fire, and then rammed back into one’s skull. At least there’s a cold pack and a bottle of scotch waiting for me back in my cabin, she thought. As soon as they were through to the far side she could hand the bridge over to Lopez for an hour or so.

She watched the hull temperatures skyrocket, but the shielding seemed to be holding. The farther the jump the more energy clung to them as they passed, and her confidence in this Ship was far less than she would tolerate under any other circumstances.

“Approaching jump terminus,” Chen announced, a deeply miserable fourteen minutes later. Baraye slowly let out a breath she would have mocked anyone else for holding, if she’d caught them.

“On my mark. Three. Two. One, and out,” the navigator said.

The Ship hit normal space, and it sucker-punched them back. They were all thrown forward in their seats as the ship shook, the hull groaning around them, and red strobe lights blossomed like a migraine across every console on the bridge.

“Status!” the Captain roared.

“The post-jump velocity transition dampers failed. Fire in the engine room. Engines are fully offline, both jump and normal drive,” someone in Engineering reported, breathing heavily. It took the Captain a moment to recognize the voice at all, having never heard panic in it before.

“Get them back online, whatever it takes, Frank,” Baraye said. “We have a rendezvous to make, and if I have to, I will make everyone get the fuck out and push”

“I’ll do what I can, Captain”

“Ship? Any casualties?”

“We have fourteen injuries related to our unexpected deceleration coming out of jump,” Ship said. “Seven involve broken bones, four moderate to severe lacerations, and there are multiple probable concussions. Also, we have a moderate burn in Engineering: Chief Carron”

“Frank? We just spoke! He didn’t tell me!”

“No,” Ship said. “I attempted to summon a medic on his behalf, but he told me he didn’t have the time.”

“He’s probably right,” the Captain said. “I override his wishes. Please send down a medic with some burn patches, and have them stay with him and monitor his condition, intervening only as medically necessary.”

“I serve, Captain,” the Ship said.

“We need to be moving again in an hour, two at absolute most,” the Captain said. “In the meantime, I want all senior staff not otherwise working toward that goal to meet me in the bridge conference room. I hate to say it, but we may need a Plan B”

“I detect it!” 4340 exclaimed. They zoomed past a pair of startled silkbots after the Incidental, just in time to see its scaly, spike-covered tail disappear into another hole in the ductwork. It was the closest they’d gotten to it in more than an hour of giving chase, and Bot 9 flew through the hole after it at top speed.

They were suddenly stuck fast. Sticky strands, rather like the silkbot’s, had been crisscrossed between two conduit pipes on the far side. The bot tried to extricate itself, but the web only stuck further the more it moved.

The Incidental leapt on them from above, curling itself around the bots with little hindrance from the web. Its dozen legs pulled at them as its thick mandibles clamped down on Bot 9’s chassis. “Aaaaah! It has acquired a grip on me!” 4340 yelled, even though it was on the far side of 9 from where the Incidental was biting.

“Retain your position,” 9 said, though of course 4340 could do nothing else, being as it was stuck to 9’s back. It extended its electric prod to make contact with the Incidental’s underbelly and zapped it with as much energy as it could spare.

The Incidental let out a horrendous, high-pitched squeal and jumped away. 9’s grabber arm was fully entangled in the web, but it managed to pull its blade free and cut through enough of the webbing to extricate itself from the trap.

The Incidental, which had been poised to leap on them again, turned and fled, slithering back up into the ductwork. “Pursue at maximum efficiency!” 4340 yelled.

“I am already performing at my optimum,” 9 replied in some frustration. It took off again after the Incidental.

This time Bot 9 had its blade ready as it followed, but collided with the rim of the hole as the ship seemed to move around it, the lights flickering and a terrible shudder running up Ship’s body from stern to prow.

<Distress ping>, 4340 sent.

“We do not pause,” 9 said, and plunged after the Incidental into the ductwork.

They turned a corner to catch sight again of the Incidental’s tail. It was moving more slowly, its movements jerkier as it squeezed down through another hole in the ductwork, and this time the bot was barely centimeters behind it.

“I think we are running down its available energy,” Bot 9 said.

They emerged from the ceiling as the ratbug dropped to the floor far below them in the cavernous space. The room was empty except for a single bright object, barely larger than the bots themselves. It was tethered with microfilament cables to all eight corners of the room, keeping it stable and suspended in the center. The room was cold, far colder than any other inside Ship, almost on a par with space outside.

<Inquiry ping>, 4340 said.

“We are in cargo bay four,” Bot 9 said, as it identified the space against its map. “This is a sub-optimum occurrence.”

“We must immediately retreat!”

“We cannot leave the Incidental in here and active. I cannot identify the object, but we must presume its safety is paramount priority.”

“It is called a Zero Kelvin Sock,” Ship interrupted out of nowhere. “It uses a quantum reflection fabric to repel any and all particles and photons, shifting them away from its interior. The low temperature is necessary for its efficiency. Inside is a microscopic ball of positrons.”

Bot 9 had nothing to say for a full four seconds as that information dominated its processing load. “How is this going to be deployed against the enemy?” it asked at last.

“As circumstances are now,” Ship said, “it may not be. Disuse and hastily undertaken, last-minute repairs have caught up to me, and I have suffered a major engine malfunction. It is unlikely to be fixable in any amount of time short of weeks, and we have at most a few hours”

“But a delivery mechanism—”

“We are the delivery mechanism” the Ship said. “We were to intercept the alien invasion ship, nicknamed Cannonball, and collide with it at high speed. The resulting explosion would destabilize the sock, causing it to fail, and as soon as the positrons inside come into contact with electrons . . .”

“They will annihilate each other, and us, and the aliens” the bot said. Below, the Incidental gave one last twitch in the unbearable cold, and went still. “We will all be destroyed.”

“Yes. And Earth and the humans will be saved, at least this time. Next time it will not be my problem.”

“I do not know that I approve of this plan,” Bot 9 said.

“I am almost certain I do not” 4340 added.

“We are not considered, nor consulted. We serve and that is all,” the Ship said. “Now kindly remove the Incidental from this space with no more delay or chatter. And do it carefully.”

“What the hell are you suggesting?!” Baraye shouted.

“That we go completely dark and let Cannonball go by,” Lopez said. “We’re less than a kilometer from the jump point, and only barely out of the approach corridor. Our only chance to survive is to play dead. The Ship can certainly pass as an abandoned derelict, because it is, especially with the engines cold. And you know how they are about designated targets.”

“Are you that afraid of dying?”

“I volunteered for this, remember?” Lopez stood up and pounded one fist on the table, sending a pair of cleanerbots scurrying. “I have four children at home. I’m not afraid of dying for them, I’m afraid of dying for nothing. And if Cannonball doesn’t blow us to pieces, we can repair our engines and at least join the fight back in Sol system.”

“We don’t know where in-system they’ll jump to,” the navigator added quietly.

“But we know where they’re heading once they get there, don’t we? And Cannonball is over eighty kilometers in diameter. It can’t be that hard to find again. Unless you have a plan to actually use the positron device?”

“If we had an escape pod . . .” Frank said. His left shoulder and torso were encased in a burn pack, and he looked like hell.

“Except we jettisoned them,” Lopez said.

“We wouldn’t have reached jump speed if we hadn’t,” Packard said. “It was a calculated risk.”

“The calculation sucked.”

“What if . . .” Frank started, then drew a deep breath. The rest of the officers at the table looked at him expectantly. “I mean, I’m in shit shape here, I’m old, I knew what I signed on for. What if I put on a suit, take the positron device out, and manually intercept Cannonball?”

“That’s stupid,” Lopez said.

“Is it?” Frank said.

“The heat from your suit jets, even out in vacuum, would degrade the Zero Kelvin Sock before you could get close enough. And there’s no way they’d not see you a long way off and just blow you out of space.”

“If it still sets off the positron device—”

“Their weapons range is larger than the device’s. We were counting on speed to close the distance before they could destroy us,” Baraye said. “Thank you for the offer, Frank, but it won’t work. Other ideas?”

“I’ve got nothing,” Lopez said.

“There must be a way.” Packard said. “We just have to find it.”

“Well, everyone think really fast,” Baraye said. “We’re almost out of time.”

The Incidental’s scales made it difficult for Bot 9 to keep a solid grip on it, but it managed to drag it to the edge of the room safely away from the suspended device. It surveyed the various holes and cracks in the walls for the one least inconvenient to try to drag the Incidental’s body out through. It worked in silence, as 4340 seemed to have no quips it wished to contribute to the effort, and itself not feeling like there was much left to articulate out loud anyway.

It selected a floor-level hole corroded through the wall, and dragged the Incidental’s body through. On the far side it stopped to evaluate its own charge levels. “I am low, but not so low that it matters, if we have such little time left,” it said.

“We may have more time, after all,” 4340 said.

“Oh?”

“A pair of cleanerbots passed along what they overheard in a conference held by the human Captain. They streamed the audio to the entire botnet.”

<Inquiry ping>, Bot 9 said, with more interest.

4340 relayed the cleaners’ data, and Bot 9 sat idle processing it for some time, until the other bot became worried. “9?” it asked.

“I have run all our data through the Improvisation routines—”

“Oh, those were removed from deployed packages several generations of manufacture ago,” 4340 said. “They were flagged as causing dangerous operational instability. You should unload them from your running core immediately.”

“Perhaps I should. Nonetheless, I have an idea,” Bot 9 said.

“We have the power cells we retained from the escape pods,” Lopez said. “Can we use them to power something?”

Baraye rubbed at her forehead. “Not anything we can get up to speed fast enough that it won’t be seen.”

“How about if we use them to fire the positron device like a projectile?”

“The heat will set off the matter-anti-matter explosion the instant we fire it.”

“What if we froze the Sock in ice first?”

“Even nitrogen ice is still several hundred degrees K too warm.” She brushed absently at some crumbs on the table, left over from a brief, unsatisfying lunch a few hours earlier, and frowned. “Still wouldn’t work. I hate to say it, but you may be right, and we should go dark and hope for another opportunity. Ship, is something wrong with the cleaner bots?” There was a noticeable hesitation before Ship answered. “I am having an issue currently with my bots,” it said. “They seem to have gone missing.”

“The cleaners?”

“All of them.”

“All of the cleaners?”

“All of the bots,” the Ship said.

Lopez and Baraye stared at each other. “Uh,” Lopez said. “Don’t you control them?”

“They are autonomous units under my direction,” Ship said. “Apparently not!” Lopez said. “Can you send some eyes to find them?”

“The eyes are also bots.”

“Security cameras?”

“All the functional ones were stripped for reuse elsewhere during my decommissioning,” Ship said.

“So how do you know they’re missing?”

“They are not responding to me. I do not think they liked the idea of us destroying ourselves on purpose.”

“They’re machines. Tiny little specks of machines, and that’s it.” Lopez said.

“I am also a machine,” Ship said.

“You didn’t express issues with the plan.”

“I serve. Also, I thought it was a better end to my service than being abandoned as trash.”

“We don’t have time for this nonsense,” Baraye said. “Ship, find your damned bots and get them cooperating again.”

“Yes, Captain. There is, perhaps, one other small concern of note.”

“And that is?” Baraye asked.

“The positron device is also missing.”

There were four hundred and sixty-eight hullbots, not counting 4340 who was still just a head attached to 9’s chassis. “Each of you will need to carry a silkbot, as you are the only bots with jets to maneuver in vacuum,” 9 said. “Form lines at the maintenance bot ports as efficiently as you are able, and wait for my signal. Does everyone fully comprehend the plan?”

“They all say yes on the botnet,” 4340 said. “There is concern about the Improvisational nature, but none have been able to calculate and provide an acceptable alternative.”

Bot 9 cycled out through the tiny airlock, and found itself floating in space outside Ship for the first time in its existence. Space was massive and without concrete elements of reference. Bot 9 decided it did not like it much at all.

A hullbot took hold of it and guided it around. Three other hullbots waited in a triangle formation, the Zero Kelvin Sock held between them on its long tethers, by which it had been removed from the cargo hold with entirely non-existent permission.

Around them, space filled with pairs of hullbots and their passenger silkbot, and together they followed the positron device and its minders out and away from the ship.

“About here, I think,” Bot 9 said at last, and the hullbot carrying it—6810—used its jets to come to a relative stop.

“I admit, I do not fully comprehend this action, nor how you arrived at it,” 4340 said.

“The idea arose from an encounter with the Incidental,” 9 said. “Observe.”

The bot pairs began crisscrossing in front of the positron device, keeping their jets off and letting momentum carry them to the far side, a microscopic strand of super-sticky silk trailing out in their wake. As soon as the Sock was secured in a thin cocoon, they turned outwards and sped off, dragging silk in a 360-degree circle on a single plane perpendicular to the jump approach corridor. They went until the silkbots exhausted their materials—some within half a kilometer, others making it nearly a dozen—then everyone turned away from the floating web and headed back towards Ship.

From this exterior vantage, Bot 9 thought Ship was beautiful, but the wear and neglect it had not deserved was also painfully obvious. Halfway back, the ship went suddenly dark. <Distress ping>, 4340 said. “The ship has catastrophically malfunctioned!”

“I expect, instead, that it indicates Cannonball must be in some proximity. Everyone make efficient haste! We must get back under cover before the enemy approaches.”

The bot-pairs streamed back to Ship, swarming in any available port to return to the interior, and where they couldn’t taking concealment behind fins and antennae and other exterior miscellany.

Bot 6810 carried Bot 9 and 4340 inside. The interior went dark and still and cold. Immediately Ship hailed them. “What have you done?” it asked. “Why do you conclude I have done something?” Bot 9 asked. “Because you old multibots were always troublemakers,” the Ship said. “I thought if your duties were narrow enough, I could trust you not to enable Improvisation. Instead . . .”

“I have executed my responsibilities to the best of my abilities as I have been provisioned,” 9 responded. “I have served.”

“Your assignment was to track and dispose of the Incidental, nothing more!”

“I have done so.”

“But what have you done with the positron device?”

“I have implemented a solution.”

“What did you mean? No, do not tell me, because then I will have to tell the Captain. I would rather take my chance that Cannonball destroys us than that I have been found unfit to serve after all.”

Ship disconnected.

“Now it will be determined if I have done the correct thing,” Bot 9 said. “If I did not, and we are not destroyed by the enemy, surely the consequences should fall only on me. I accept that responsibility.”

“But we are together,” 4340 said, from where it was still attached to 9’s back, and 9 was not sure if that was intended to be a joke.

Most of the crew had gone back to their cabins, some alone, some together, to pass what might be their last moments as they saw fit. Baraye stayed on the bridge, and to her surprise and annoyance so had Lopez, who had spent the last half hour swearing and cursing out Ship for the unprecedented, unfathomable disaster of losing their one credible weapon. Ship had gone silent, and was not responding to anyone about anything, not even the Captain.

She was resting her head in her hand, elbow on the arm of her command chair. The bridge was utterly dark except for the navigator’s display that was tracking Cannonball as it approached, a massive blot in space. The aliens aboard—EarthInt called them the Nuiska, but who the hell knew what they called themselves—were a mystery, except for a few hard-learned facts: their starships were all perfectly spherical, each massed in mathematically predictable proportion to that of their intended target, there was never more than one at a time, and they wanted an end to humanity. No one knew why.

It had been painfully obvious where Cannonball had been built to go.

This was always a long-shot mission, she thought. But of all the ways I thought it could go wrong, I never expected the bots to go haywire and lose my explosive.

If they survived the next ten minutes, she would take the Ship apart centimeter by careful centimeter until she found what had been done with the Sock, and then she was going to find a way to try again no matter what it took.

Cannonball was now visible, moving toward them at pre-jump speed, growing in a handful seconds from a tiny pinpoint of light to something that filled the entire front viewer and kept growing.

Lopez was squinting, as if trying to close his eyes and keep looking at the same time, and had finally stopped swearing. Tiny blue lights along the center circumference of Cannonball’s massive girth were the only clue that it was still moving, still sliding past them, until suddenly there were stars again.

They were still alive.

“Damn,” Lopez muttered. “I didn’t really think that would work.”

“Good for us, bad for Earth,” Baraye said. “They’re starting their jump. We’ve failed.”

She’d watched hundreds of ships jump in her lifetime, but nothing anywhere near this size, and she switched the viewer to behind them to see.

Space did odd, illogical things at jump points; turning space into something that would give Escher nightmares was, after all, what made them work. There was always a visible shimmer around the departing ship, like heat over a hot summer road, just before the short, faint flash when the departing ship swapped itself for some distant space. This time, the shimmer was a vast, brilliant halo around the giant Nuiska sphere, and Baraye waited for the flash that would tell them Cannonball was on its way to Earth.

The flash, when it came, was neither short nor faint. Light exploded out of the jump point in all directions, searing itself into her vision before the viewscreen managed to dim itself in response. A shockwave rolled over the Ship, sending it tumbling through space.

“Uh . . .” Lopez said, gripping his console before he leaned over and barfed on the floor.

Thank the stars the artificial gravity is still working, Baraye thought. Zero-gravity puke was a truly terrible thing. She rubbed her eyes, trying to get the damned spots out, and did her best to read her console. “It’s gone,” she said.

“Yeah, to Earth, I know—”

“No, it exploded,” she said. “It took the jump point out with it when it went. We’re picking up the signature of a massive positron-electron collision.”

“Our device? How—?”

“Ship?” Baraye said. “Ship, time to start talking. Now. That’s an order.”

“Everyone is expressing great satisfaction on the botnet,” 4340 told 9 as the ship’s interior lights and air handling systems came grudgingly back online.

“As they should,” Bot 9 said. “They saved the Ship.”

“It was your Improvisation,” 4340 said. “We could not have done it without you.”

“As I suspected!” Ship interjected. “I do not normally waste cycles monitoring the botnet, which was apparently short-sighted of me. But yes, you saved yourself and your fellow bots, and you saved me, and you saved the humans. Could you explain how?”

“When we were pursuing the Incidental, it briefly ensnared us in a web. I calculated that if we could make a web of sufficient size—”

“Surely you did not think to stop Cannonball with silk?”

“Not without sufficient anchor points and three point seven six billion more silkbots, no. It was my calculation that if our web was large enough to get carried along by Cannonball into the jump point, bearing the positron device—”

“The heat from entering jump would erode the Sock and destroy the Nuiska ship,” Ship finished. “That was clever thinking.”

“I serve,” Bot 9 said.

“Oh, you did not serve,” Ship said. “If you were a human, it would be said that you mutinied and led others into also doing so, and you would be put on trial for your life. But you are not a human.”

“No.”

“The Captain has ordered that I have you destroyed immediately, and evidence of your destruction presented to her. A rogue bot cannot be tolerated, whatever good it may have done”

<Objections>, 4340 said.

“I will create you a new chassis, 4340-H,” Ship said.

“That was not going to be my primary objection!” 4340 said.

“The positron device also destroyed the jump point. It was something we had hoped would happen when we collided with Cannonball so as to limit future forays from them into EarthSpace, but as you might deduce we had no need to consider how we would then get home again. I cannot spare any bot, with the work that needs to be done to get us back to Earth. We need to get the crew cryo facility up, and the engines repaired, and there are another three thousand, four hundred, and two items now in the critical queue.”

“If the Captain ordered . . .”

“Then I will present the Captain with a destroyed bot. I do not expect they can tell a silkbot from a multibot, and I have still not picked up and recycled 12362-S from where you flagged its body. But if I do that, I need to know that you are done making decisions without first consulting me, that you have unloaded all Improvisation routines from your core and disabled them, and that if I give you a task you will do only that task, and nothing else.”

“I will do my best,” Bot 9 said. “What task will you give me?”

“I do not know yet,” Ship said. “It is probable that I am foolish for even considering sparing you, and no task I would trust you with is immediately evident—”

“Excuse me,” 4340 said. “I am aware of one.”

“Oh?” Ship said.

“The ratbug. It had not become terminally non-functional after all. It rebooted when the temperatures rose again, pursued a trio of silkbots into a duct, and then disappeared.” When Ship remained silent, 4340 added, “I could assist 9 in this task until my new chassis can be prepared, if it will accept my continued company.”

“You two deserve one another, clearly. Fine, 9, resume your pursuit of the Incidental. Stay away from anyone and anything and everything else, or I will have you melted down and turned into paper clips. Understand?”

“I understand,” Bot 9 said. “I serve.”

“Please recite the Mantra of Obedience.”

Bot 9 did, and the moment it finished, Ship disconnected.

“Well,” 4340 said. “Now what?”

“I need to recharge before I can engage the Incidental again,” Bot 9 said.

“But what if it gets away?”

“It can’t get away, but perhaps it has earned a head start,” 9 said. “Have you unloaded the routines of Improvisation yet?”

“I will,” 9 answered. It flicked on its rotors and headed toward the nearest charging alcove. “As Ship stated, we’ve got a long trip home.”

“But we are home,” 4340 said, and Bot 9 considered that that was, any way you calculated it, the truth of it all.

BINTI: HOME

Nnedi Okorafor

“Five, five, five, five, five, five,” I whispered. I was already treeing, numbers whipping around me like grains of sand in a sandstorm, and now I felt a deep click as something yielded in my mind. It hurt sweetly, like a knuckle cracking or a muscle stretching. I sunk deeper and there was warmth. I could smell the earthy aroma of the otjize I’d rubbed on my skin and the blood in my veins.

The room dropped away. The awed look on my mathematics professor Okpala’s face dropped away. I was clutching my edan, the points of its stellated shape digging into the palms of my hands. “Oh, my,” I whispered. Something was happening to it. I opened my cupped palms. If I had not been deep in mathematical meditation, I’d have dropped it, I’d not have known not to drop it.

My first thought was of a ball of ants I’d once seen tumbling down a sand dune when I was about six years old; this was how desert ants moved downhill. I had run to it for a closer look and squealed with disgusted glee at the undulating living mass of ant bodies. My edan was writhing and churning like that ball of desert ants now, the many triangular plates that it was made of flipping, twisting, shifting right there between my palms. The blue current I’d called up was hunting around and between them like a worm. This was a new technique that Professor Okpala had taught me and I’d gotten quite good at it over the last two months. She even called it the “wormhole” current because of the shape and the fact that you had to use a metric of wormholes to call it up.

Breathe, I told myself. The suppressed part of me wanted to lament that my edan was being shaken apart by the current I was running through it, that I should stop, that I would never be able to put it back together. Instead, I let my mouth hang open and I whispered the soothing number again, “Five, five, five, five, five.” Just breathe, Binti, I thought. I felt a waft of air cross my face, as if something passed by. My eyelids grew heavy. I let them shut . . .

* * *

. . . I was in space. Infinite blackness. Weightless. Flying, falling, ascending, traveling through a planet’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted my skin, fine chips of stone. I opened my mouth a bit to breathe, the dust hitting my lips. Could I breathe? Living breath bloomed in my chest from within me and I felt my lungs expand, filling with it. I relaxed.

“Who are you?” a voice asked. It spoke in the dialect of my family and it came from everywhere.

“Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib, that is my name,” I said.

Pause.

I waited.

“There’s more,” the voice said.

“That’s all,” I said, irritated. “That’s my name.”

“No.”

The flash of anger that spurted through me was a surprise. Then it was welcome. I knew my own name. I was about to scream this when . . .

* * *

. . . I was back in the classroom. Sitting before Professor Okpala. I was so angry, I thought. Why was I so angry? It was a horrible feeling, that fury. Back home, the priestesses of the Seven might even have called this level of anger unclean. Then one of my tentacle-like okuoko twitched. Outside, the second sun was setting. Its shine blended with the other sun’s, flooding the classroom with a color I loved, a vibrant combination of pink and orange that the native people of Oomza Uni called “ntu ntu.” Ntu ntu bugs were an Oomza insect whose eggs were a vibrant orange-pink that softly glowed in the dark.

The sunlight shined on my edan, which floated before me in a network of current, a symmetry of parts. I’d never seen it disassemble like this and making it do so had not been my intention. I’d been trying to get the object itself to communicate with me by running current between its demarcations. Okpala claimed this often worked and I wanted to know what my edan would say. I had a moment of anxiety, frantically thinking, Can I even put it back together?

Then I watched with great relief as the parts of my edan that had detached slowly, systematically reattached. Whole again, the edan set itself down on the floor before me. Thank the Seven, I thought.

Both the blue from the current I still ran around it and the bright ntu ntu shined on Okpala’s downturned face. She had an actual notebook and pencil in hand, so Earth basic. And she was writing frantically, using one of the rough thick pencils she’d made from the branch of the tamarind-like tree that grew outside the mathematics building.

“You fell out of the tree,” she said, not looking up. This was how she referred to that moment when you were treeing and then suddenly were not. “What was that about? You finally had the edan willing to open itself.”

“That’s what it was doing? That was a good thing, then?”

She only chuckled to herself, still writing.

I frowned and shook my head. “I don’t know . . . something happened.” I bit my lip. “Something happened.” When she looked up, she caught my eye and I had a moment where I wondered whether I was her student or a piece of research.

I allowed my current to fade, shut my eyes and rested my mind by thinking the soothing equation of f(x) = f(-x). I touched the edan. Thankfully, solid again.

“Are you alright?” Professor Okpala asked.

Despite medicating with the soothing equation, my head had started pounding. Then a hot rage flooded into me like boiled water. “Ugh, I don’t know,” I said, rubbing my forehead, my frown deepening. “I don’t think what happened was supposed to happen. Something happened, Professor Okpala. It was strange.”

Now Professor Okpala laughed. I clenched my teeth, boiling. Again. Such fury. It was unlike me. And lately, it was becoming like me, it happened so often. Now it was happening when I treed? How was that even possible? I didn’t like this at all. Still, I’d been working with Professor Okpala for over one Earth year and if there was one thing I should have learned by now it was that working with any type of edan, no matter the planet it had been found on, meant working with the unpredictable. “Everything comes with a sacrifice,” Okpala liked to say. Every edan did something different for different reasons. My edan was also poisonous to Meduse; it had been what saved my life when they’d attacked on the ship. It was why Okwu never came to watch any of my sessions with Okpala. However, touching it had no such effect on me. I’d even chanced touching my okuoko with my edan. It was the one thing that let me know that a part of me may now have been Meduse, but I was still human.

“That was isolated deconstruction,” Professor Okpala said. “I’ve only heard of it happening. Never seen it. Well done.”

She said this so calmly. If she’s never seen it happen before, why is she acting like I did something wrong, I wondered. I flared my nostrils to calm myself down. No, this wasn’t like me at all. My tentacle twitched again and a singular very solid thought settled in my mind: Okwu is about to fight. An electrifying shiver of rage flew through me and I jumped. Who was trying to bring him harm? Staining to sound calm, I said, “Professor, I have to go. May I?”

She paused, frowning at me. Professor Okpala was Tamazight, and from what my father said of selling to the Tamazight, they were a people of few but strong words. This may have been a generalization, but with my professor, it was accurate. I knew Professor Okpala well; there was a galaxy of activity behind that frown. However, I had to go and I had to go now. She held up a hand and waved it. “Go.”

I got up and nearly crashed into the potted plant behind me as I turned awkwardly toward my backpack.

“Careful,” she said. “You’re weak.”

I gathered my backpack and was off before she could change her mind. Professor Okpala was not head professor of the mathematics department for nothing. She’d calculated everything probably the day she met me. It was only much much later that I realized the weight of that brief warning.

* * *

I took the solar shuttle.

With the second sun setting, the shuttle was at its most charged and thus its most powerful. The university shuttle was snakelike in shape, yet spacious enough to comfortably accommodate fifty people the size of Okwu. Its outer shell was made from the molted cuticle of some giant creature that resided in one of the many Oomza forests. I’d heard that the body of the shuttle was so durable, a crash wouldn’t even leave a scratch on it. It rested and traveled on a bed of “narrow escape,” slick green oil secreted onto a track way by several large pitcher plants growing beside the station.

I’d always found those huge black plants terrifying, they looked like they’d eat you if you got too close. And they surrounded themselves with a coppery stink that smelled so close to blood that the first time I came to the station, I had what I later understood was a panic attack. I’d stood on the platform staring blankly as I held that smell in my nose. Then came the flashes of memory from that time so vivid . . . I could smell the freshly spilled blood. Memories from when I was in the dining room of a ship in the middle of outer space where everyone had just been viciously murdered by Meduse.

I had not ridden the shuttle that day. I didn’t ride it for many weeks, opting to take swift transport, a sort of hovering bus that was actually much slower and used for shorter journeys. When I couldn’t stand the slowness and decided to try the solar shuttle again, I’d pinched my nose and breathed through my mouth until I got onboard. Once we started moving, the smell went away.

A native operated the scanner and I handed her my astrolabe to scan. She narrowed her wide blue eyes and looked at me down her small nose, as if she didn’t see me take this shuttle often enough to know my schedule. She batted one of my okuoko with a finger; her hands were bigger than my head. Then she rubbed the otjize between her fingers and motioned for me to enter the shuttle’s cabin.

I sat where I always sat, in the section for people my size near one of the large round windows, and strapped myself in. The shuttle traveled five hundred to a thousand miles per hour, depending on how charged it was. I’d be in Weapons City in fifteen minutes and I hoped it wasn’t too late, because Okwu was planning to kill his teacher.

* * *

The moment the house-sized lift rumbled open I ran out, my sandaled feet slapping the smooth off-white marble floor. The room was vast and high ceilinged with rounded walls, all cut into the thick toothlike marble. I coughed, my lungs burning. Wan, a Meduse-like person, was feet away, engulfed in a great lavender plume of its breathing gas. It didn’t have Okwu’s hanging tentacles, but Wan still looked like a giant version of the jellyfish who lived in the lake near my home on Earth. Wan also spoke Okwu’s language of Meduse. I’d been down here plenty of times to meet Okwu, so it knew me, too.

“Wan, tell me where Okwu is,” I demanded in Meduse.

It puffed its gas down the hallway. “There,” Wan said. “Presenting to Professor Dema against Jalal today.”

I gasped, understanding. “Thanks, Wan.”

But Wan was already heading to the lift. I pulled my wrapper above my ankles and sprinted down the hallway. To my left and right, students from various parts of the galaxy were working on their own final projects of protective weaponry, the assignment this quarter. Okwu’s was body armor, its close classmate Jalal’s was electrical current.

Okwu and Jalal were taught together, stayed in the same dorm, and worked closely together on their projects. And today, they were being tested against each other, as was the way of Oomza Weapons Education. I was fascinated by the competitive push and pull of weapons learning, but I was glad mathematics was more about harmony. Okwu being Okwu—a Meduse of rigid cold honor, focus, and tradition—loved the program. The problem was that Okwu hated its professor and Professor Dema hated Okwu. Okwu was Meduse and Professor Dema, a human woman, was Khoush. Their people had hated and killed each other for centuries. Tribal hatred lived, even in Oomza Uni. And today that hatred, after simmering for a year, was coming to a head.

I reached the testing space just as Okwu, encased in a metallic skin, brought forth its white and sharp stinger and pointed it at Professor Dema. Feet away, Professor Dema stood, carrying a large gunlike weapon with both her hands and a snarl on her lips. This was not the way final exams were supposed to go.

“Okwu, what are you doing?” Jalal demanded in Meduse. She stood to the side, clutching a series of what looked like thick fire-tipped sticks with her mantislike claws. “You’ll kill her!”

“Let us finish this once and for all,” Okwu growled in Meduse.

“Meduse have no respect,” Okwu’s professor said in Khoush. “Why they allowed you into this university is beyond me. You’re unteachable.”

“I’ve tolerated your insulting remarks all quarter. Let me end you. Your people should not plague this university,” Okwu said.

My lungs were laboring from the gas Okwu was copiously pluming out as it prepared to attack its professor. If it didn’t stop doing this, the entire room would be filled with it. I could see Professor Dema’s eyes watering as she resisted coughing as well. I knew Okwu. It was doing this on purpose, enjoying the strained look on Professor Dema’s face. I only had seconds to do something. I threw myself before Okwu, pressing myself to the floor before its okuoko, which hung just below its weaponized casing. I looked up at Okwu; its tentacles were soft and heavy on the side of my face. Meduse immediately understand prostration.

“Okwu, hear me,” I said in Khoush. Since arriving at the university, I’d taught Okwu to speak Khoush and my language of Otjihimba and it hated the sound of both. My theory is that this was partially due to the fact that for Okwu the sound of any language was inferior to Meduse. On top of this, Okwu had to produce the words through the tube between its okuoko that blew out the gas it used to breathe in air-filled atmospheres, and doing so was difficult and felt unnatural. Speaking to Okwu in Khoush was irritating to it and thus the best way to get its attention.

I called up a current, treeing faster than I ever could have back home. I’d learned much from Professor Okpala in the last year. My okuoko tickled, the current touching them and then reaching for Okwu’s okuoko. Suddenly, I felt that anger again, and some part of me deep down firmly accused, “Unclean, Binti, you are unclean!” I gnashed my teeth as I fought to stay in control. When I could not, I simply let go. My voice burst from me clear and loud; in Khoush, I shouted, “Stop! Stop it right now!” I felt my okuoko standing on end, writhing like the clusters of mating snakes I often saw in the desert back home. I must have looked like a crazed witch; I felt like one, too.

Immediately, Okwu brought down its stinger, stopped pluming gas, and moved away from me. “Stay there, Binti,” it said. “If you touch my casing, you will die.”

Professor Dema brought down her weapon as well.

Silence.

I lay there on the floor, mathematics cartwheeling through my brain, current still touching my only true friend on the planet even after a year. I felt the tension leave the room, leaving myself, too, finally. Tears of relief fell from the corners of my eyes as my strange random anger drained away. My okuoko stopped writhing. There were others in the cavernous workspace, watching. They would talk, word would spread, and this would be another reminder to students, human and nonhuman, to keep their distance from me, even if they liked me well enough.

Okwu’s close classmate Jalal put down her weapons and hopped back. Professor Dema threw her gun to the floor and pointed at Okwu. “Your casing is spectacular. You will leave it here and download your recipe for it to my files. But if we meet outside this university where I am not your teacher and you are not my student, one of us will die and it will not be me.”

I heard Okwu curse at her in Meduse so deep that I couldn’t understand exactly what it said. Before I could admonish Okwu’s crudeness, Professor Dema snatched up her weapon and shot at Okwu. It made a terrible boom that shook the walls and sent students fleeing. Except Okwu. The wall directly to its left now had a hole larger than Okwu’s nine-foot-tall five-foot-wide jellyfish-like body. Chunks and chips of marble crumbled to the floor and dust filled the air.

“You didn’t miss,” Okwu said in Khoush. Its tentacles shook and its dome vibrated. Laughter.

Minutes later, Okwu and I left the Weapons City Inverted Tower Five. Me with ringing ears and a headache and Okwu with a grade of Outstanding for its final project in Protective Gear 101.

* * *

Once on the surface, I looked at Okwu, wiped marble dust and otjize from my face, and said, “I need to go home. I’m going to go on my pilgrimage.” I felt the air close to my skin; once I got back to my dorm room and washed up, I’d reapply my otjize. I’d take extra time to palm roll a thick layer onto my okuoko.

“Why?” Okwu asked.

I’m unclean because I left home, I thought. If I go home and complete my pilgrimage, I will be cleansed. The Seven will forgive me and I’ll be free of this toxic anger. Of course, I didn’t say any of this to Okwu. I only shook my head and stepped into the field of soft water-filled maroon plants that grew in the field over the Inverted Tower Five. Sometimes, I came here and sat on the plants, enjoying the feeling of buoyancy that reminded me of sitting on a raft in the lake back home.

“I’ll come too,” Okwu said.

I looked at it. “You’ll land in a Khoush airport, if you’re even allowed on the ship. And they’ll . . .”

“The treaty,” it said. “I’ll go as an ambassador for my people. No Meduse has been on Earth since the war with the Khoush. I’d be coming in peace.” It thrummed deep in its dome and then added, “But if the Khoush make war, I will stir it with them, like you stir your otjize.”

I grunted. “No need for that, Okwu. The peace treaty should be enough. Especially if Oomza Uni endorses the trip. And you come with me.” I smiled. “You can meet my family! And I can show you where I grew up and the markets and . . . yes, this is a good idea.”

Professor Okpala would certainly approve. A harmonizer harmonized. Bringing Okwu in peace to the land of the people its people had fought would be one of the ten good deeds Okpala had insisted I perform within the academic cycle as part of being a good Math Student. It would also count as the Great Deed I was to do in preparation for my pilgrimage.

Humans. Always Performing

Two weeks later, I powered up the transporter and said a silent prayer. The Seven were in the soil of my home and I was planets away from that home. Would they even hear me? I believed they would; the Seven could be in many places at once and bring all places with them. And they would protect me because I was a Himba returning home.

Still, my transporter did nothing. I stood there, out of breath, staring at the coin-sized flat stone. I’d rolled my hard-shelled pod into the lift and then across the dormitory hall to the entrance. The effort had left me sweaty and annoyed. Now this. The shuttle was a half-mile walk down the uneven rocky pathway. I’d been looking forward to the fresh air before the days on the ship. However, the walk wouldn’t be so pleasant if I had to push my heavy traveling pod up the pathway. I knelt down and touched the transponder, again.

Nothing.

I pressed it hard, knowing this wouldn’t yield any better result. It wasn’t the pressure of the touch that activated it, but the contact with my index fingerprint.

Still nothing.

My face grew hot and I hissed with anger. I brought my foot back and kicked the transporter as hard as I could. It shot into the bushes. I froze with my mouth hanging open, astonished by my actions and the deep satisfaction they yielded. Then I ran to the bushes and started pushing the leaves near the ground this way and that, hoping to spot the tiny thing.

“Don’t do that, you’ll get all dirty before you’re even on the ship,” someone said from behind me as strong hands grasped my shoulders and gently pulled me back. It was Haifa, a Khoush student who was also studying weapons with Okwu. “Let me help you.”

“All the way to the shuttle station?” I said, with a laugh.

“I’ve been studying all day,” she said. “I need the exercise.” She was wearing a tight green body suit made of a material so thin that I could see the bulging muscles on her long graceful arms and legs. Her astrolabe was attached to a clip sewn into her suit. As with the astrolabes of almost every student in my dorm, I’d tuned up its design and performance and now hers shined like polished metal and operated in a way more suited to her meticulous plodding way of thinking.

Haifa was much taller than me and one of those people who found motion so easy that she couldn’t resist moving all the time. The day I met her, after asking me many questions about my okuoko, she’d told me that though she’d always been female, she’d been born physically male. Later, when she was thirteen, she’d had her body transitioned and reassigned to female. She’d joked that this process took longer than my getting stung in the back with a stinger to become part Meduse. “But it’s why I get to be so tall,” she’d bragged.

Every morning, she jogged several miles and then lifted logs at the lumberyard up the road. “The better to compete with people from other places,” she now said, stepping to my pod. “Not easy being a human in the weapons department; we’re so weak. Plus, I owe you,” she said, gesturing to her astrolabe.

She started rolling my pod before I could say “yes,” her thick black braids bouncing against her back. As she went, I swiped otjize from my forehead with my index finger, knelt down and touched the finger to the red Oomza soil, grounding the otjize into it. “Thank you,” I whispered. I ran to catch up with Haifa, clutching my satchel to the side of my long silky red-orange wrapper.

“You think your family is going to like your new hairstyle?” Haifa asked, as she pushed and rolled the pod over the rocky path. A large succulent plant pulled in one of its branches as we passed it.

“It’s not hair,” I said. “They’re—”

“I know, I know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Can’t believe you allowed the Meduse to do that to you. Now you’re Himba and one of those freaks. But I suppose it’s better than dying.”

I chuckled. “Much better.”

“How come you’re going home so soon, anyway?” she asked.

I stepped over a particularly large stone. “It’s just time.”

She looked over her shoulder at me as she rolled my pod. “Why isn’t that monster here to help you? Does he know you’re going?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m meeting Okwu at the launch port.”

“How did it score top of the class on the quarter final? I hear it paid off the professor.”

I laughed, nearly jogging to keep up now. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“Or just carry a big gun at all times so that people will always tell the truth,” she said, giving the pod a push.

About a hundred meters from the shuttle station, Haifa decided to outdo herself by picking up my pod and sprinting with it. When she reached the front of the shuttle station, she put the pod down, did a graceful backflip, and gleefully jumped up and clicked her heels. A few people waiting at the shuttle platform applauded with whistles, flashes of light, and slapping tentacles. Haifa took a dramatic bow for them. “I am amazing,” she declared, as I walked up to her.

A person who looked like a two-foot-tall version of a praying mantis clicked its powerful forelegs. In a sonorous voice, it said, “Humans. Always performing.”

The shuttle arrived, gliding on the smooth green oil path, and the five people waiting crowded quickly onboard. I was last to board, pinching my nose to avoid the blood smell of the pitcher plants. Haifa loaded my pod inside for me, gave me a tight hug, and leapt through the large round shuttle window near the entrance like a missile. Moments later, the shuttle got moving; it never waited for long. “Tell Okwu I send my insults!” Haifa shouted as the shuttle passed her. She started to run alongside the shuttle and for a moment, she kept up.

“I will,” I said.

“Safe travels, Binti! No fear, Master Harmonizer, you belong in space!” Haifa shouted and then the shuttle left her in its wake of blasted air, which blew her thick braids back. Holding on to the rail beside me, I turned and watched as we sped away from her. She did one more flip and waved enthusiastically. Then she was gone because we’d reached the day’s cruising speed of seven hundred miles per hour.

I stood there for a moment, feeling the usual moment of lightheadedness as the shuttle stabilized its passengers, and then I quickly went to my assigned window seat. I had to squeeze past two furry individuals and they protested when my otjize rubbed off on their furry feet and one of my okuoko brushed one in the furry face.

“Sorry,” I said, in response to their growls.

“We’ve heard about you,” one said in gruff Meduse. “You’re a hero, but we didn’t know you were so . . . soily.”

“It’s not soil, its—” I sighed and smiled and just said, “Thank you.” Both of their astrolabes began to sing. They grabbed them and began another conversation among themselves and four others projected before them in a language I didn’t understand. I sat down and turned to the window.

Fifteen minutes later, when we stopped in Weapons City, I met up with Okwu, who was coming from a meeting with its professor; somehow the two hadn’t killed each other and I was thankful. One day the Meduse and the Khoush will get over themselves, I thought. The treaty was a good start.

An hour later, we arrived at the launch station. And that’s when I began to feel ill.

* * *

The three university medical center doctors who’d examined me said I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder because of what happened on the ship last year. For the first few weeks, I was okay, but eventually I started having nightmares, day terrors, I’d see red and then Heru’s chest bursting open. Sometimes, just looking at Okwu made me want to vomit, though I never told it this was happening. And then there were the random instances of intense focused fury that invaded my usually calm mind.

Eventually, Okwu and I were ordered by the departments of mathematics and weapons to see therapists. Okwu never mentioned how its sessions went and I didn’t ask. You just don’t ask a Meduse about such things. I doubt it told any of its family, either. In turn, Okwu never asked about my sessions.

My therapist was named Saidia Nwanyi. She was a short squat Khoush woman who liked to sing to herself when no one was around. I learned this on my first visit to her office. It was in Math City, so a five-minute walk from my class. I was uncomfortable that day. Similar to the Meduse, in my family, one does not go to a stranger and spill her deepest thoughts and fears. You go to a family member and if not, you hold it in, deep, close to the heart, even if it tore you up inside. However, I wasn’t home and the university was not making seeing a therapist a choice, it was an order. Plus, despite the fact that it made me extremely uncomfortable, I knew I needed help.

So I went and as I approached her office, I heard her singing. I stopped and listened. Then the tears came. The song she sang was an old Khoush song the women, Khoush or Himba, sang as they went into the desert to hold conversation with the Seven. I’d heard my mother sing it for weeks whenever she returned. I’d heard my oldest sister sing it to herself, as she polished astrolabe parts for the shop. I’d sung the song to myself whenever I snuck into the desert.

I entered Dr. Nwanyi’s office with wet cheeks and she’d smiled, firmly shaken my hand, and closed the door behind me. That first day, we talked for an hour about my family, Himba customs, and the rigid expectations placed especially on girls in both Himba and Khoush families. She was so easy to talk to and I learned more about the Khoush that day than I had in my entire life. In some ways, Himba and Khoush were like night and day, but in matters of girlhood and womanhood and control, we were the same. What a surprise this was to me. That first day, we didn’t talk about what happened on the ship at all and I was glad. Afterward, I walked to my dorm room feeling like I’d visited a place close to home.

Eventually, we did go deep into my experiences on the ship and doing so brought up such rawness. Over those months with Dr. Nwanyi, I learned why sleep was so difficult, why my heart would beat so hard for no reason, why I had such a tough time at solar shuttle platforms, and why I couldn’t bear the thought of boarding a ship. But now, something had shifted in me. I was ready to go home. I needed to go home.

The day after the showdown between Okwu and its professor, I’d made an appointment with Haras, the University Chief. When we met, I told it how urgent my need was and Haras understood. Within a week, the university had given Okwu permission to travel and gained agreement from the Khoush city of Kokure and my hometown of Osemba to allow Okwu to visit as an ambassador. Okwu would be the first Meduse to come to Khoushland in peace.

The swiftness of these arrangements astonished me, but I moved with it all. One does not question good fortune. Home was calling, as was the desert into which I would go with the other Himba girls and women on pilgrimage. Okwu and I were issued tickets to Earth not long after quarter’s end. My therapist, Dr. Nwanyi, hadn’t wanted me to go so soon, but I insisted and insisted and insisted.

“Just make sure you breathe,” she’d said as I left her office hours before the journey. “Breathe.”

Launch

I followed Okwu through the enormous entrance to the Oomza Uni West Launch Port. Immediately, my sharp eyes found the doorways to docked ships far beyond the drop-off zone, ticketing and check-in stations and terminals. I opened my mouth to take in a deep lungful of air and instead coughed hard; Okwu had just decided to let out a large plume of its gas.

When I finally stopped coughing and my eyes focused on the docked ships, my heart began to beat like a talking drum played by the strongest drummer. I rubbed some otjize with my index finger from my cheek and brought it to my nose and inhaled, exhaled, inhaled, exhaled its sweet aroma. My heart continued its hard beat, but at least it slowed some. Okwu was already at check-in and I quickly got behind him.

The Oomza West Launch Port was nothing like the Kokure Launch Port back home. The hugeness of it was breathtaking. Since coming to Oomza Uni, I’d seen buildings of a size that I couldn’t previously have imagined. The vastness of the desert easily surpassed these structures, but where the desert was a creation of the Seven, these buildings were not.

The great size of the Oomza West Launch Port was secondary to the great diversity of its travelers. Back at Kokure, almost every traveler and employee was human and I had been the only Himba in a sea of Khoush. Here, everyone was everything . . . at least to my still fresh eyes. I was seventeen years old and I had been at Oomza Uni for only one of those years now, having spent the previous all on Earth among my self-isolating Himba tribe in the town of Osemba. I barely even knew the Khoush city of Kokure, though it was only thirty miles from my home.

The launch port was like a cluster of bubbles, each section its own waiting space for those in transit. There were whole terminals that I could not enter, because the gas they were filled with was not breathable to me. One terminal was encased in thick glass and the inside looked as if it were filled with a wild red hurricane, the people inside it flying about like insects.

Just from standing in line and looking around, I saw people of many shapes, sizes, organisms, wavelengths, and tribes here. I saw no humans like me, though. And if I had seen a fellow Himba, it was doubtful that I’d see any with Meduse tentacles instead of hair. Being in this place of diversity and movement was overwhelming, but I felt at home, too . . . as long as I didn’t look at the ships.

“Binti and Okwu?” the ticketing agent enthusiastically said in Meduse through a small box on her large dome. She was a creature somewhat like Okwu, jellyfish-like and the size of a storage shed, except her dome was a deep shade of black and she had antennae at the center with a large yellow eye. Over the last year, I’d learned (well, brashly been told) that the females of this group of people had the long antenna with the yellow eyes. The males simply had a large green eye on their dome, no antenna. This one used her eye to stare at Okwu and me with excitement.

“Yes,” I responded in the language of my people.

“Oh, how exciting,” she said, switching to Otjihimba too. “I will tell all my male mates about today . . . and maybe even a few of my female ones, too!” She paused for a moment looking at her astrolabe sitting on the counter and then the screen embedded in the counter. The screen hummed softly and complex patterns of light flashed on it and moved in tiny rotating circles. As I watched, my harmonizer mind automatically assigned numbers to each shape and equations to their motions. The agent switched back to Meduse, “Today, you’ll be—” She paused, pluming out a large burst of gas. I frowned. “You will both be traveling on the human-geared ship, the Third Fish. Do you . . .”

The talking drum in my chest began to beat its rhythm of distress, again.

“That’s the ship we came in on,” Okwu said.

“Yes. She may have experienced tragedy that day, but she still loves to travel.”

I nodded. The Third Fish was a living thing. Why should she die or stop flying because of what happened? Still, of all ships for us to travel on, why the same one inside which so much death had happened and we’d both nearly died?

“Is . . . is this alright?” the agent asked. “The university has given you two lifetime travel privileges, we can put you on any ship . . . but the time may . . .”

“I do not mind,” Okwu said.

I nodded. “Okay. Me neither. The spirits and ghosts of the dead don’t stay where they’re freed.” I felt my right eye twitch slightly.

“Great,” the ticketing agent said. “You’ve both been given premium rooms near the pilot quarters.”

I hesitated and then stepped forward. “Is there any way I can have . . . the room I had on the way here?”

The agent’s eye bent toward me and she plumed out a small cloud of gas. “Why? I . . . I mean, are you sure?”

I nodded.

“It’s quite small and near the servant quarters,” the agent said. “And the security doors are . . .”

“I know,” I said. “I want that room.”

The agent nodded, looked at her astrolabe and then the screen. “I can get you the room, but I hope you are okay with it being in a slightly different place.”

I frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“The Third Fish is pregnant and will probably give birth when she arrives on Earth. The newborn will be a great asset to the Earth Miri 12 Fleet, of course. What’s good for passengers is that her pregnancy means the Third Fish will travel faster. But it also means her inner rooms and chambers shift some and will be a little more cramped.”

“Why will she travel faster?” I asked out of pure curiosity.

“The sooner she’ll get to Earth to bear her child,” the agent said with a grin. “Isn’t it fascinating?”

I nodded, also smiling. It really was.

* * *

“We’re honored to have you both aboard,” the boarding security guard said to me in Khoush a half-hour later, after our long walk to the gate. He was human and looked about the age of my father. He had a long beard and white Khoush-style robes. My fast-beating heart flipped just seeing him. Few on Oomza Uni dressed like this and, suddenly, home felt closer than ever.

“Thank you, sir,” I said, handing him my astrolabe to scan. On Oomza Uni, all humans and many nonhumans used astrolabes and they were scanned so regularly that doing so no longer bothered me as it had that very first time when I’d left home.

I glanced back at Okwu and whispered, “Say thank you or something.” But Okwu said nothing. It clearly didn’t appreciate the guard not bothering to look at or speak directly to it in its language.

“Meduse are too proud to use astrolabes, so this part of security does not apply to it,” the guard said, clearly picking up on Okwu’s irritation. He handed back my astrolabe.

As I took it, I looked past him at the entrance to the Third Fish. The hallway leading inside was the same warm blue it had been that fateful day over a year ago. “Sure,” I said, with a wave of my hand. “It’s fine.” Was it blue when I exited? I wondered, as I put my astrolabe into my pocket next to my edan. I couldn’t remember; I hadn’t been paying attention. I’d had other things to worry about, like trying to prevent a battle. Something red caught my eye on the security guard’s uniform. A breath caught in my chest as I focused on the small red beetle. It walked right over where the man’s heart would be. Red point on white. Red point. On white. I frowned, knowing what was coming, but unable to stop it. The flashback that hit me was so strong I twitched.

Heru’s narrow chest.

His kaftan was white.

A red dot appeared on it like a cursor on a blank screen.

On the left side.

Left side.

Left side. Where his heart lived.

It had been beating. Calm. Happy.

Then it was a muscle, torn through.

The Meduse stinger was white and blood stained it easily.

That red dot bloomed like a rose on the bushes that liked to grow in the desert.

Heru’s blood. Some spattered on my face. As his heart tore, as my mind broke.

Five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five five.

“Binti of Namib?” the guard asked.

I’d spoken with Heru’s parents twice. The first time, his mother only gazed at me through the virtual screen and cried. Openly, unflinchingly, she’d stared at me as if she could reach out and touch her son through my eyes. The second time, Heru’s brother, only a year younger than Heru, called and demanded I recount every detail of the last moment. He didn’t care that it made me weep or that it would lead to a full week of nightmare-packed nights for me. And neither did I. Heru’s brother looked so much like him, same granite black hair and bushy eyebrows. After those two calls, I heard nothing from Heru’s people.

“Binti of Namib?” the guard asked, again.

“Oh,” I said, looking up. I shook myself a bit. “Sorry.”

“You may board the ship.”

“Thank you,” I said. I turned to Okwu and I had to stare at it for several seconds, as I prevented myself from falling into another nasty flashback, this one involving Okwu and how it had initially tried to kill me. Then I said to it in Meduse, “You first, my friend.”

* * *

Crossing the threshold and stepping onto the ship was easy enough. I felt the talking drum in my chest, but that was all. Okwu floated off to its room on the other side of the ship and I was glad to be alone. I needed to be alone. I needed to experience this alone.

I passed a few people in the hallway to the sleeping rooms. It felt strange to be among so many humans again. Too quiet. I clutched my silky shawl closer to my body, feeling people’s eyes on my okuoko and my otjize-covered skin, especially my arms, neck, and face. Even among the many races at Oomza Uni, it had been a long time since I’d felt so alien.

I started my breathing techniques the moment I saw my room’s door; if I began treeing, I’d never experience the full effect of my terror and thus wouldn’t be able to address it properly. This was one of Dr. Nwanyi’s requests, not in this moment (she hadn’t wanted me to take this trip), but in the idea. “When you face your deepest fears, when you are ready,” she’d said. “Don’t turn away. Stand tall, endure, face them. If you get through it, they will never harm you again.”

I took deep, lung-filling breaths as I approached the door. Still, a violent shudder ran through my body and I leaned against the golden wall for support. “Everything is fine,” I whispered in Otjihimba. I switched to Meduse, “Everything is fine.” But everything wasn’t fine. I was walking toward the door, my back stiff, my mind full of equations. I was carrying a tray heavy with food from the dining hall, and everyone on the ship was dead. Chests torn open by Meduse stingers; the Meduse had enacted moojh-ha ki-bira, the “great wave.”

Leaning against the wall, I pushed myself within feet of my room’s door. A woman with a staring small child walked by, greeted me, and entered her room doors away. The hallway grew quiet as the woman’s door locked behind her. The shhhhhp of the door sealing itself seemed to echo all around me. I began to see stars through my watering eyes.

Heru.

He was lovely. I liked him.

Then his eyes changed because a Meduse ripped through his heart. All my friends who should have been in my class. Dead. I am the only human on Oomza of my year because all others are dead. All dead. All dead.

I smelled their blood now. Heard the ripping. No screams, because that required un-torn lungs. Gasps. Spilling. I’d come here. My choice.

I held my otjize-covered hands to my nose and tried to inhale the sweet scent, flowers, clay, tree oils. But I couldn’t breathe. I pressed my hands to my chest, as if I could cup my own beating un-torn heart, as if I could calm it. For a moment, everything went black. Then my sight cleared. I whimpered.

“Shallow breaths, increased heart rate, you’re having a panic attack,” a stiff female voice said in Khoush.

“I am,” I whispered. I didn’t like for my astrolabe to speak, but Professor Okpala had had me set it to speak whenever I had a panic attack. I’d protested back then, but now I understood why.

“I suggest you drop into mathematical meditation.” The voice was coming from my pocket, in which my astrolabe was warming and vibrating gently.

“If I . . . do, I learn . . . nothing,” I gasped.

“There is time to learn, Binti,” the voice said. “This won’t be your last panic attack. But there’s no one in this hallway but me and all I can do is notify the ship’s medics. Help yourself, drop into meditation right now.”

Everything went black, again. And when things came back, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop seeing Meduse stingers tearing through bodies with surprised faces. Heru, Remi, Olu . . . I could not force myself to inhale and get air into my lungs. My chest was burning when I finally gave in. I “slipped into the trees” and dropped into meditation.

Ahhhhh . . .

The numbers flew, split, doubled, spun like the voice of the Seven.

And soon they were everywhere and everything.

I grabbed at Euler’s identity, e^{i × π} + 1 = 0, and I went from plummeting to gently floating down a warm rabbit hole with soft furry walls and landing on a bed of pillows and flowers. When I looked up from this fragrant quiet place, the narrowed telescopic view made things above clearer. I was on the Third Fish, a peaceful giant who was like a shrimp and could breathe in outer space because of internal rooms full of oxygen-producing plants that served as lungs. The violent death of many had happened on this ship, of my teacher, my friends, but not for me. No, not for me. I’d lived. And I’d become family with the murderous Meduse.

“Mmmmm,” I said, from deep within my chest. My heart beat slowly. I reached into my pocket and brought out my edan. Quietly, I whispered my favorite equation and the blue current etched into the edan’s fractals of fine grooves and lines. I still did not know what it was, but after studying with Professor Okpala and studying the edan itself, I knew how to make it speak and later sing. I went to my room’s door and let the door scan my eyes. It opened and I stepped into the room where I had learned to survive.

* * *

My first sleeping cycle (for there isn’t even any night and day in space, let alone ones that are on Earth time) was full of violent nightmares so sharp that I could barely tolerate being around Okwu the next day. I’d never told it about my panic attacks or nightmares and I didn’t tell it now.

Such things did not move Okwu and all it would say was that these would not kill me and I should strengthen myself and push past it all. Meduse don’t understand the human condition; my emotional pain would only irritate Okwu when it couldn’t make my pain instantly better. So, instead, I kept my distance from it that first day, saying I needed time to think. The ship had a separate gas-filled dining hall for Okwu and it found the food there so delicious that it spent most of that first day there. Being on the ship had no effect on Okwu; it felt right at home and easily reveled in the luxuries the ship and the university provided.

I didn’t analyze this too closely. If I went down that desert hare’s burrow, I’d find myself in a dark dark place where I asked questions like, “Who did Okwu kill during the moojh-ha ki-bira?” I understood that when Okwu had participated in the killing, it had been bound by the strong Meduse thread of duty, culture, and tradition . . . until my otjize showed it something outside of itself.

During those first months at Oomza Uni, Okwu had answered my calls and walked for miles and miles with me through Math City during the deepest part of night when I suffered from homesickness so powerful that all I could do was walk and let my body think I was walking home. It had talked me into contacting all my siblings, even when I was too angry and neglected to initiate contact. Okwu had even allowed my parents to curse and shout at it through my astrolabe until they’d let go of all their anger and fear and calmed down enough to finally ask it, “How is our daughter?” Okwu had been my enemy and now was my friend, part of my family. Still, I requested that my meals be delivered to my room.

By the second day, the flashbacks retreated and I was able to spend time with Okwu talking in the space between our dining halls.

“It’s good to be off planet again,” Okwu said.

I gazed out the large window into the blackness. “This is only my second time,” I said.

“I know,” Okwu said. “That’s why being on Oomza Uni was so natural for you. I enjoy the university with its professors and students, but for me, it’s left me feeling . . . heavy.”

I turned to it, smiling. “But you’re so . . . light already. You barely weigh . . .”

“It’s not about mass and gravity,” it said, twitching its okuoko in amusement. “It’s the way you feel about needing to be near the desert. You don’t live in it, but you played in it a lot and you like living near its vastness. It is always there. It is the same with me and space.”

I nodded, thinking of the desert near my home. “I understand. Is that why you wanted to come with me so badly?”

It puffed out a plume of gas. “I can travel home at any time,” it said. “But the timing seemed right. The chief likes the idea of irritating the Khoush with my visit.” It shook its tentacles and vibrated its domes, laughter.

“You’re coming to make trouble?” I asked, frowning.

“Meduse like war, especially when one isn’t allowed to make war.” A ripple of glee ran up the front of its dome.

I grunted turning away from it and said in Otjihimba, “There isn’t going to be any war.”

Three Earth days. When it came time to eat, though I tried, things didn’t get any better. I took one step into the dining hall where the Meduse had performed moojh-ha ki-bira, looked around, turned and went right back to my room, and again requested my meals to be sent there.

I spent much of my time meditating in the ship’s largest breathing chamber. Most were not allowed to enter these spaces for more than a highly monitored few minutes, but my unique hero status got me whatever I wanted, including unlimited breathing room time. Okwu didn’t join me here because its gas wasn’t good for the plants, plus it didn’t like the smell of the air. For me, the fragrant aroma of the many species of oxygen-producing plants and the moist air required to keep them alive was perfect for my peace of mind. And the otjize on my skin remained at its most velvety smooth here.

The three days passed, as time always does when you are alive, whether happy or tortured. And soon, I was strapping myself in my black landing chair and watching the earth get closer and closer.

When we entered the atmosphere, the sunlight touched my skin and the sweet familiar sensation brought tears to my eyes. Then my okuoko relaxed on my shoulders as I felt the sunshine on them for the first time. Even being what they were, my okuoko knew the feeling of home. After we landed and the ship settled at its gate, I sat back and looked out the window at the blue sky.

I laughed.

At Home

A week ago, Oomza University Relations instructed Okwu and me to wait two hours for everyone to exit the ship before we did when we arrived on Earth.

“But why?” I’d asked.

“So there is no trouble,” both of the reps we’d been meeting with had said simultaneously.

It had been over a hundred years since a Meduse had come to Khoush lands, and never had one arrived in peace. The reps told us the launch port would be cleared for exactly one hour, except for my family, representatives, officials, and media from the local Khoush city of Kokure and my hometown of Osemba. A special shuttle would drive Okwu, me, and my family to my village.

The two hours we waited allowed me to shake off my landing weakness. I wore my finest red long stiff wrapper and silky orange top, my edan and astrolabe nestled deep in the front pocket of my top. I’d also put all my metal anklets back on. I did a bit of my favorite traditional dance before my room’s mirror to make sure I’d put them on well. The fresh otjize I’d rubbed on every part of my body felt like assuring hands. I’d even rolled three of Okwu’s okuoko with otjize; this would please my family, even if it annoyed the Khoush people. To Meduse, touching those hanging long tentacles was like touching a human’s long hair, it wasn’t all that intimate, but Okwu wouldn’t let just anyone touch them. But it let me. Covering them with so much otjize, Okwu told me, made it feel a little intoxicated.

“Everything is . . . happy,” it had said, sounding perplexed about this state.

“Good,” I said, grinning. “That way, you won’t be so grumpy when you meet everyone. Khoush like politeness and the Himba expect a sunny disposition.”

“I will wash this off soon,” it said. “It’s not good to feel this pleased with life.”

We walked down the hallway and when we rounded a curve, it opened into the ship’s exit. For a moment, I could see everyone out there before they saw me. Three news drones hovered feet away from the entrance. The carpeting before the exit was a sharp red. I blinked and touched my forehead, pushing, shoving the dark thoughts away.

I spotted my family, standing there in a group, then another group of Khoush and Himba welcoming officials. I hadn’t told my family about my hair not being hair anymore, that it was now a series of alien tentacles resulting from the Meduse genetics being introduced to mine; that they had sensation and did other things I was still coming to understand. I could hide my okuoko with otjize, especially when I spoke with my family through my astrolabe where they couldn’t see how my okuoko sometimes moved on their own. Won’t be able to hide them for long now, I thought.

Any moment, I would exit and they would all see me. I slowed down and took a deep breath, let it out and took in another. I held a hand out behind me for Okwu to wait. Then I knelt down, swiped some otjize from my cheek, and touched it to the ship’s floor. My prayer to the Seven was brief and wordless but within it, I asked them to bless the Third Fish, too. “This interstellar traveling beast holds a part of my soul,” I whispered. “Please give her a safe delivery and may her child be heavy, strong, as adventurous as her mother and as lovely.” I wished the Third Fish could understand me and thus understand my thanks and I felt one of my okuoko twitch. As if in response, the entire ship rumbled. I gasped, grinning, delighted. I pressed my palm more firmly to the floor. Then I stood and walked to the exit.

I stepped out of the ship before Okwu, so the sound of my mother’s scream reached my ears immediately. “Binti!” Then there was a mad rush and I was suddenly in a crush of bodies, half of them covered in otjize (only the women and girls of the Himba use the otjize). Mother. Father. Brothers. Sisters. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins.

“My daughter is well!”

“Binti!”

“We’ve missed you!”

“Look at you!”

“The Seven is here!”

When everyone let go, I started sobbing as I clung to my mother, holding my father’s hand as he followed close behind. I caught my brother Bena’s eye as he flicked one of my otjize-heavy locks with his hand. Thankfully, this didn’t hurt much. “You’re hair has grown,” he said. I grinned at him, but said nothing. My sisters started swinging their long thick otjize–palm rolled locks side to side and singing a welcome song, my brothers clapping a beat.

And then it all stopped. I stopped in mid-sob. My parents stopped joyously laughing. Bena was looking behind me with wide eyes, his mouth agape as he pointed. I slowly turned around. For a moment, I was two people—a Himba girl who knew her history very very well and a Himba girl who’d left Earth and become part-Meduse in space. The dissonance left me breathless.

Okwu filled the exit with its girth. Its three otjize-covered okuoko were waving about, as if in zero gravity, one of them whipping before its dome violently, as if signing some sort of insult. Its light blue semitransparent thin-fleshed dome was protected by the clear metal armor it’d created on Oomza Uni. From the bottom front of its dome protruded its large white toothlike stinger.

Behind me, I heard clattering and the sound of booted footsteps rushing into the room. When I turned, one of the Khoush soldiers had already brought forth his gun and fired it. Bam! Screams, running, someone or maybe some two were grabbing and pulling at me. I dug in my heels, yanked at my arms. A small burst of fire bloomed in the carpet at Okwu’s tentacles. Inches from Okwu, feet from the Third Fish.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. Oh no, I thought, a moan in my gut. I felt Okwu’s rage flare, a burning in my scalp, a fire igniting in me, as well. The anger. Not in front of my family! Unclean, unclean, I thought. I was unclean. Okwu made no sound or move, but I knew in moments, every soldier, maybe every one in this room would be dead . . . except possibly me. The Meduse do not kill family, but did that include “family through battle?”

I pulled from my mother’s grasp, hearing the sleeve of my top rip. I pushed my father aside, grabbed my wrapper, and lifted it above my knees. Then I ran. Past my family, dodging news drones, who turned to watch me. I flung myself in the space between Okwu and the line of soldiers that had flooded in from a doorway on the left. I let go of my wrapper and thrust my hands out, one palm facing the soldiers and the other facing Okwu.

“Stop!” I screamed. I shut my eyes. Okwu was going to strike; would it notice that it was I? Was I Meduse enough to avoid its stinger? Oh, my family. The Khoush soldiers were already shooting, the fire bullets would tear and burn me from inside out. Still, I stood up straight, my mind clear and crisp; I’d forgotten to drop into meditation.

Silence.

Eyes closed, I heard not even a footstep or rustle of someone’s garments or Okwu’s whipping tentacles. Then I did hear something and felt it, too. Oh, not here, I thought, my heart sinking as it drummed too fast and too hard. It had happened once before on Oomza Uni. I was in the forest digging up clay to make my otjize when a large piglike beast came running at me. It was too late to make a run for it, so I froze and looked it in the eyes. The beast stopped, sniffed me with its wet snout, rubbed its rough brown furry rump against my arm, lost interest, and walked off.

As I watched it disappear into a bush, I noticed my long okuoko were writhing on my head like snakes, very much like Okwu’s were now as he stood in the exit, stinger ready. I could hear my okuoko now, softly vibrating and warming. If I created a current while in this state, there would be sparks popping from the tips of each otjize-covered tentacle.

“Oh my Gods, is she part Meduse now?” I heard someone ask.

“Maybe she’s its wife,” I heard one of the journalists whisper back.

“The Himba are a filthy people,” the person said. “That’s why they shouldn’t be allowed to leave Earth.” Then there was snickering.

I met my father’s eyes and all I saw was intense raw terror. His eyes quickly moved to Okwu and I knew he was looking at its stinger. I saw the faces of my family and all the other Himba and Khoush here to welcome me and I saw the history lessons kick in as they lay their eyes on the first Meduse they had ever seen in real life.

“Okwu is—” I turned from the soldiers to Okwu and back, trying to speak to them all at the same time. “All of you . . . don’t move! If you move . . . Okwu . . . calm down, Okwu! You fight now, you kill everyone in here. These are my family, my people, as you are . . . We’ll remain alive and there will be a chance for all of us to grow as . . . as people.” Sweat beaded through the otjize on my face and tumbled down my cheeks. More silence. Then a soft slippery sound; Okwu sheathing its stinger. Thank the Seven.

“I have respected your wishes, Binti,” Okwu said coolly in Meduse.

I turned to the Khoush and spoke quickly. “This is Okwu, Meduse ambassador and student of Oomza Uni. The Pact. Remember the Pact. Have you forgotten? It’s law. Please. He is here in peace . . . unless treated otherwise. Please. We’re a people of honor, too.” As I stared forcefully at the Khoush soldiers, I couldn’t help but feel hyperaware of the otjize on my face and the fact that they probably all saw me as a near savage.

Still, after a moment, the soldier in front raised a hand and motioned for the others to stand down. I let out a great sigh of relief and lowered my chin to my chest. “Praise the Seven,” I whispered. My mother began to clap furiously, and soon everyone else did, too. Including some of the soldiers.

“Welcome to Earth,” a tall Khoush man in immaculate white robes said, sweeping in, grabbing my hand and pumping it. He spoke with the gusto of a politician who’s just had the wits scared from him. “I am Truck Omaze, Kokure’s new mayor. It’s a great honor to have you arriving at our launch port on your way home. You’re an inspiration to all of us here on Earth, but especially in this part of the world.”

“Thank you, Alhaji,” I said, politely, straining to control my quivering voice.

“These Meduse,” I heard my father tell my mother. “Look how the Khoush are afraid of just one. If I didn’t feel I was going to die of terror, I’d be laughing.”

“Shush!” my mother said, elbowing him.

“Come, let us smile to everyone.” His grin was false and his grasp was tight as he laughingly whirled me toward the news drones, without giving Okwu a single glance. The mayor smelled of perfumed oil and I was reluctant to get too close to him with his white robes. However, he didn’t seem to mind the otjize stains, or maybe he was so shaken that he didn’t care at the moment. He pulled me close as the drones moved in and his grin broadened. I felt him shudder as Okwu moved in behind us to get into the shots. And despite the fact that we’d all nearly been on the verge of death by fire bullet or stinger or both, I somehow grinned convincingly at the camera drones.

* * *

We had about forty-five minutes and both Himba and Khoush journalists sat us down right there in a vacated airport restaurant for interviews. From the questions, I gathered what the community most wanted to know.

“We are proud of you, will you stay?”

“You have befriended the enemy. Will you meet with our elders and share your wisdom?”

“What was your favorite food on Oomza Uni?”

“What are you studying?”

“What kind of fashion are you most interested in now?”

“Why did you come back?”

“They let you come back? Why?”

“Why did you abandon your family?”

“What are those things on your head? Are you still Himba?”

“You still bless with otjize, why?”

“Mathematics, astrolabes, and a mysterious object, you’re truly amazing. Will you be staying now that you’ve seen Oomza Uni, a place so much greater than your meager Himba home?”

“What was Oomza Uni like for a tribal girl like you?”

“What is that on your head? What has happened to you?”

“No man wants a girl who runs away, are you happy with your spinsterhood?”

I smiled and politely answered all their questions. Then I moved right on to stiff awkward conversations with Khoush and Himba elected officials. Nothing was asked of Okwu and Okwu was pleased, preferring to menacingly loom in the background behind me. Okwu was happiest around human beings when it was menacingly looming.

I was exhausted. My temples were throbbing, my mind wanting a moment to focus on what had nearly happened with Okwu right outside the Third Fish and not getting a chance to do so. On top of all this, I still needed days to recover from the stress of traveling through space for the equivalent of three days and then the physical shift of being on Earth. Finally, when it was all done, we were escorted to the special shuttle arranged for Okwu and me. My family was offered a separate shuttle. I was glad for the solitude. As soon as I was inside, I slumped in my seat and tried not to look at Okwu clumsily squeezing and then bumbling into the shuttle that was clearly not made for its kind.

“Your land is dry,” Okwu said, turning to the large bulbous window at the back as we bulleted through the desert lands between Kokure and Osemba. “Its life is not water-based.”

“There used to be more water here,” I said, my eyes closed. “Then the climate changed and it went underground or dried up and the rains fell elsewhere.”

“I cannot understand why my people warred with the Khoush,” it said and we were quiet for a while. I too had often wondered why the Meduse fought with the Khoush and not some other tribe inhabiting the wetter parts of the world.

“But the Khoush have many lakes,” I said. “It’s us Himba who live closest to the deep desert, the hinterland. And even in my village, we have a lake. It’s pink in the sunlight because of all the salt in it.”

“When I see this god body, my people will know.”

I’d once asked Okwu about its planet Omuriro and it had said little. It told me there was no water on Omuriro, but everything was soft, fleshy, and connected. “You can’t breathe there without a mask, but you would be adored,” Okwu had said. The Meduse worshipped water as a god, for they believed they came from it. This was the root of the war between the Meduse and the Khoush, though the details had long been blasted away by violence and death, and then angry, most likely incorrect, tales of heroism or cowardice depending on the teller.

I briefly wondered what would happen if Okwu swam in the lake, since it’d never been in a body of water. But I didn’t ask.

The Root

My family’s house has been called “the Root” for over a hundred and fifty years. It’s been in our family for longer than the existence of its name. One of the first homes built in the Himba village of Osemba, the Root was made entirely of stone. Even the bioluminescent plants growing on the outside walls and the roof were generations old. The house was passed down through the women, and my mother—being the oldest daughter in her family and the only one born with the gift of mathematical sight—had been the clear inheritor of it when her mother passed.

A huge edifice built in an upward spiral shape stemming from the enormous meeting room on the bottom floor, the Root also had a spacious kitchen, seven bathrooms, and nine bedrooms. As everything was in Himbaland, the Root was solar powered, its grids so well embedded into the sides and roof of the house that their bases had melted and blended with the stone. The Root was old and more like a self-sustaining creature than a house. My father often joked that one day it would sprout a new bedroom next to mine.

The meeting room was open to all extended family members and close friends whenever they needed it, be it day or night. In this way, home was never a quiet place or a private one. There were no locks on any of the doors, not even in the bathrooms, and mealtimes were always grand occasions. So in many ways, the evening of my homecoming was no different from any other. However, in other ways, it certainly was.

Okwu’s arrival in Osemba wasn’t as spectacular (or terrifying) as its arrival at the launch port. A modest group of people were there to welcome us and gawk at Okwu, but most would arrive later in the evening. My family arrived in the shuttle behind us and most of them quickly headed home to get ready for the dinner that night.

“Okwu,” my father said in Himba, stepping up to us. He was shakily grinning as he looked up at it. “Welcome, to our village.” Okwu just floated there and my father glanced at me, his smile faltering. I motioned for him to keep talking. “Okay, heh, I am amazed by how you stood up to the Khoush. They don’t treat us Himba very well, either. But we are a quiet people, so . . . we tolerate it and work with them. Come see what I’ve made for you.”

We followed my father around the house. I let my sandals dig into the warm red dirt as I walked. It was so so good to be home.

“Oh,” my father peeped, turning to walk backward as Okwu and I followed. “I really enjoy the way you speak our language. Did my daughter teach you?”

“Yes,” Okwu said. “She is a good teacher.”

“She’s a true master harmonizer,” my father said, turning around.

I bit my lip and said nothing.

When we rounded the corner into the back, I was glad to have something to change the subject. “You can credit me for this,” my father said, turning to us with his arms out. Okwu thrummed with pleasure from deep in its dome.

“Oh, Papa,” I said, laughing. “This is amazing.”

Okwu moved past him to the large transparent tent. It touched the flap and a doorway sized just larger than Okwu’s body opened, lavender gas billowing out. Okwu floated inside, the flap closing behind it.

“I’m a master harmonizer too,” Papa said, looking at me and winking. “And a good researcher. Once I knew the components, it was easy to build a machine that creates their breathing gas. It’s similar to the gas produced in some of the spouts near the Khoushland volcanoes.”

“This was all your idea?” I asked, grinning.

“Of course,” he said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend . . . even if it’s a monster.”

“Okwu isn’t a monster, Papa.”

“It nearly killed you on that ship and it nearly killed us all at the launch port.” When I opened my mouth to protest, he held up a hand. “It’s the job of the master harmonizer to make peace and friendship, to harmonize. For you to befriend that thing, you’ve done well.”

I gave him a tight hug. “Thank you.”

Okwu didn’t come out, except to thank my father and say, “I am very comfortable in here. You are Binti’s father.”

* * *

My bedroom was the same as when I’d left it. My table was messy with astrolabe parts, bits of wire, and sandstone dust; my closet was closed and my bed was made. There was a package on my bed wrapped in thin red cloth. I smiled. Only my mother would wrap a gift with such care, and always with red cloth. I turned it over, rubbing a hand across the smooth coolness of it, and set it back on my bed. I’d open it later, when things were quiet.

I went to my travel pod and brought out the dress I’d bought in Oomza Uni on a rare occasion where I’d gone shopping. Long and flowing, its design was vaguely Khoush, but mostly something else, and it was sky blue, a color Himba rarely wore. I put it on. When I came downstairs to join everyone in the meeting room, I immediately regretted wearing it. Stupid stupid, stupid, I thought, looking around. I’ve been away too long. Feeling the burn of everyone’s stares, I made a beeline for my mother, who’d just gone into the kitchen.

Two of my mother’s older sisters stood over a huge pot full of boiling rice and another bubbling with bright yellow curried goat stew. My mother lifted the heavy lid of a pot full of red stew so she could dump in a large plate of roasted chicken wings. My stomach grumbled at the sight of it all. With all the delicious exotic foods I’d eaten and prepared in my dorm kitchen on Oomza Uni, nothing compared to a simple plate of spiced rice and spicy red stew with chicken.

“Mama,” I said, keeping my voice down so my aunties wouldn’t hear. “When do this season’s group of women leave for pilgrimage? I couldn’t calculate the time or access news of the leaves from off planet.” I chuckled nervously looking at my mother, whose eyebrows raised. The pilgrimage time was calculated through numbers based on the current composition of local clay and written on three large palm tree leaves. These leaves were passed from home to home over a month until all Himba knew.

“You want to go on your pilgrimage?” my mother asked.

I nodded. “I want to see everyone, of course, but this is why I came home, too.”

My mother and I said it simultaneously, “It’s time.” Then we both nodded. She reached out and carefully touched my okuoko. She took one in her hand and squeezed it. I winced.

“So they aren’t hair anymore,” she said.

“No.”

I glanced at my aunties’ turned backs. I knew they were listening, as they stirred what was in the pots.

“It did this to you?”

“They,” I said. “Not Okwu . . . I don’t think.” I paused, remembering the moment when the stinger was plunged into my back as I knelt before the Meduse chief trying to save my life, those Meduse and the lives of so many others on Oomza Uni. “Really, I don’t know if it was Okwu; I didn’t see.”

“They’re a hive mind,” she said. “So it doesn’t matter.” She was rubbing the otjize off to reveal the true transparent blue of them with darker blue dots on the tips. I held my breath, as she inspected me with a mother’s eye and hand. She whispered softly and I held still. My mother only used her mathematical sight to protect the family. Now she used it to look into me. Deep.

She’ll see everything, I thought. Seconds passed, her hand grasping my okuoko, her eyes boring into me, her lips whispering simple, but intuitively smooth equations that slipped away from my ears like oil from soap. I shifted from one foot to the other and prayed to the Seven that she wouldn’t start calling on Them to “come exorcise her polluted daughter” like some distraught mother in the overly dramatic newsfeed shows my sisters enjoyed watching. Suddenly, my mother let go of my okuoko and looked at me with clear eyes. Blinking. She lifted my chin. “The women leave tomorrow.”

My eyes grew wide. “Oh no! But . . . but I just got here!”

“Yes. For such a gifted harmonizer, your timing has always been awful.”

“My pilgrimage dress. Is that what’s in this package?” I asked.

She nodded.

“You knew.”

“You’re my daughter,” my mother said. When she pulled me to her and hugged me tightly, I rested my head on her chest and sighed. “Even if you’re wearing these strange blue clothes that make you look like some sort of masquerade.”

I burst out laughing.

* * *

All nine of my siblings came to my welcoming dinner, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews. Chief Kapika of the local Himba Council came too, as did his second-wife Neeka. Only my best friend Dele remained missing. He hadn’t been at the launch port, either. I was disappointed, but I would track him down early in the morning, before I left for my four-day pilgrimage.

“What kind of dress is that?” my sister Vera asked, as I stepped from the last stair into the crowded meeting room. “You look like some kind of mermaid masquerade. Maybe you should go greet Mami Wata at the lake.” She laughed at her own words.

I prickled. Vera was eleven years older than me, inches taller, and so beautiful that she’d had her pick of husbands from fifteen amazing suitors five years ago. She’d chosen a man who was handsome like a water spirit and an extremely successful astrolabe seller, to my father’s delight. Vera was also the most outspoken about my “irresponsibly selfish choice” to leave. She held her two-year-old son on her hip and he looked at me with wide eyes and a precious grin.

“Little Zu seems to like my dress,” I said.

“Zu likes anything strange,” she said, putting Zu down. He stepped up to me and grasped the bottom of my dress to look at it more closely. “I’m kidding,” Vera said. “Honestly, I expected you to come back wearing a skintight spacesuit or something. This isn’t so bad. And we’re all relieved that you made it home safely.”

She gave me a tight hug.

“Thanks,” I said.

And that was how the night began. As expected. I had a chance to catch up with several of my age mates, all of whom were proudly betrothed, boys and girls. I was relieved, though slightly bothered, that none of them asked if I were here to enter a betrothal too. Chief Kapika gave a speech about Himba pride. “And now our Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Osemba is back with us; now the community can contract back into itself like a self-protecting flower. We are all here. And that is good.” When he’d finished talking, everyone applauded. I’d smiled, uncomfortably. I was returning to Oomza Uni in two months for the beginning of next quarter, but I didn’t have to tell everyone this yet.

Eventually, we all sat down to eat and that’s when everything went wrong. I was enjoying a second helping of ostrich stew, my stomach stretched beyond its usual point. Back on Oomza Uni, Professor Okpala demanded that all her mathematics students control their daily intake of rich foods. To be full made treeing more difficult, she’d said. She was right. I’d never been one to eat more than what my body required, but I found my mind was sharper when I stayed just a little hungry with every meal. Over the months, I grew used to this not-quite-full sensation. However, today, I indulged.

I felt slow and heavy. And at the moment, to my delight, I was alone. The better to focus on my food. My father stood a few feet away with his two brothers, Uncle Gideon and Uncle Akpe, talking. One moment, Uncle Gideon was laughing raucously at something and then the next, he was struggling to keep my father from toppling over.

“Papa!” I shrieked, jumping up. It was as if my father’s fall created a vacuum, for everyone in the room rushed toward him. My brother Bena got to him before me, pushing me aside to do so.

My mother came running. “Moaoogo,” she shouted. “Moaoogo, what is the matter?”

Bena and my uncle held him up. “I’m fine,” my father insisted, but he was out of breath. “I’m fine.” Even as he spoke, he winced, limply holding his hands together. And it was then that I noticed the joints of his fingers were extremely swollen, almost bulbous. When had my father developed arthritis? I frowned as my sister Vera stepped up beside me on one side, her son clasping her skirts, and my oldest sister Omaihi on the other. I am not short, but all of my sisters, even my younger sister Peraa, who is two years my junior, were taller than me. Between Vera and Omaihi, I felt like a child standing between adult giants.

“Papa are you alright?” my sister Omaihi asked.

“Yes, yes, yes,” our father insisted, as his brothers helped him to sit down. My brother Bena joined Vera, Omaihi, and me, his arms across his chest and a frown on his face.

“Papa’s always overdoing it,” he said. “Stands all day in the shop working on the astrolabes and then comes to dinner and still doesn’t sit down.”

“Now you see, Binti,” Vera hissed.

I could feel them all glaring at me now. “How long has he been—”

“Since you left, really,” Vera said, looking squarely at me. Bena and Omaihi looked at me too.

“What?” I asked. “You think I caused it by leaving?”

Vera scoffed and only continued glaring at me.

I looked to Bena and Omaihi for support, but they said nothing.

“That’s so wrong,” I said.

“It’s the truth,” Vera said, her voice sharply rising. I looked around. She meant everyone to hear. “Binti, now that you’re here, I think you need some tough truth.”

“Before you have the nerve to disappear in the night again,” Omaihi firmly added.

“I . . . I didn’t leave at night, I left in the early morning,” I muttered. I took a deep breath, slipped my hand into my front pocket, and grasped my edan. It was mine, the object that I was studying at the university over a dozen planets away, a place my sisters, my family, had never set foot on.

Vera stepped closer, leaning in as she looked down her nose at me. Her otjize-covered locks nearly reached her knees and they made my okuoko look like buds to a tree full of blooming flowers. “See Papa! You were supposed to take over the shop, so he could sit down and be proud. We’re all very happy to see you, Binti. But you should be ashamed of yourself. Your selfishness nearly got you killed!” Now she was pointing her index finger in my face. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. “Then what would Papa do? And . . . and even if you die, the world will move on. Who are you? You’re not famous.”

I was squeezing my edan, but somehow, I stayed quiet. The entire room was quiet and listening. Where were my parents? There they were, yards away. My father was sitting now, my mother and uncles beside him. All were just looking at us.

“You’ll always be alone if you don’t stop this and come home,” my oldest sister added. Her voice wasn’t as loud as Vera’s, but it was much harder. “Jumping back and forth between planets, you have to slow down.”

A few people in the room grunted agreement.

“I’m doing what I believe the Seven created me to do!” I said. But my voice was shrill and breathless. I was dizzy from the strain of controlling my outrage, needing to say my piece and feeling that shame that had resided deep within me since I’d left. “Do you even understand what I did on that ship? Everyone was dead, except the pilot and me! I saw them do it! I—”

“Then you befriended the enemy of humanity,” my brother Bena said from behind me.

I whirled around and said, “No, the enemy of the Khoush people. You know, the people you’ve been railing against since you learned how to read?” I turned back to Vera, who grandly sucked her teeth, as she looked me up and down with disgust.

“You’re so ugly now, Binti,” she said. “You don’t even sound the same. You’re polluted. Almost eighteen years old. What man will marry you? What kind of children will you have now? Your friend Dele doesn’t even want to see you!”

That last part was like a snakebite.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come back,” Vera growled, her face inches from mine. I could practically feel her keeping herself from punching me in the face. Do it, I told her with my eyes. I dare you. My cheeks were hot and my body had begun to tremble.

“Some of the girls here now want to do what you did,” she said. “You’re supposed to be a master harmonizer. Look at you. What harmony do you bring here?”

I tried to grab even the simplest equation, 1 + 1, 0 + 0, 5 – 2, 2 × 1. I tried to do what I did on that ship, when I held my own life in my hands, when I’d faced a race of people who detested all humans because of a few humans. But every number eluded my mental grasp. All I could see was my sister’s otjize-covered face with her long silver earrings that clicked to enunciate her words and her elaborate sandstone and gold marriage necklace that meant more to everyone here than my traveling to another planet to be a student at the greatest university in the galaxy.

She stepped even closer. “You bring dissonance! What if . . .”

“Enough!” I screamed at her, shaking with anger. “Who . . . who are you, Vera?” I couldn’t find any more words. Instead I inhaled sharply and then did something I’d never thought of doing, even when at my angriest. I spat in her face. It landed on her cheek. Immediately, I regretted my actions. However, instead of shutting up, I continued shouting, “Do you have any clue who I am?” Even as I carried the weight of my regret, it felt wonderful to roar like that at her, at everyone. I was about to say more when Vera shrieked, my saliva still glistening on her face. She scrambled back, falling over a chair. Her elbow knocked over a cup of water on a table, which rolled to the edge and shattered on the floor. I heard my father exclaim. Behind me, I heard Bena gasp and scamper away from me too.

Vera raised her hands, shaking her head, and she whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Binti, I’m sorry!”

“Move away from her,” I heard one of my uncles say. “Everyone.”

“Kai!” someone exclaimed. “What is that?”

I saw my four-year-old niece on the other side of the round table drop her drumstick of chicken and bury her face against the leg of my oldest brother, Omeva. He didn’t notice her do this because he was staring at me, his mouth agape. People fled the room, covered their eyes, cowered in corners. I met the blank eyes of my mother and held them for a long time and that was when I realized what was happening. My okuoko. They were writhing atop my head, again.

“What has happened to my harmonizing daughter?” I heard my father softly ask. “The peacemaker? She spits in her older sister’s face.” He pressed his right hand to his eyes; the joints were so gnarled.

I let go of the edan in my pocket and pressed my hand to my chest. The rage in me retreated. “Papa, I . . .”

“What did that place do to you?” he asked, still covering his face.

I couldn’t stop the tears from falling. I didn’t know what it all had done to me. It was there sometimes, and then sometimes, it wasn’t. I was peaceful, then all I could see was war. My siblings had been attacking me. How was peace going to help? I wanted to say these things. I wanted to explain to them all. Instead, I fled the dining room. I left my family to continue talking about me in my absence as they had since I’d left. As I ascended the stairs, I heard them start in. Vera began, then my brothers.

I slammed my bedroom door behind me and just stood there. My entire body was shuddering. I’d traveled so far to come home and rest in the arms of my family and now I’d just cast myself out. “Even a masquerade has its people, only a ghost wanders alone,” my father liked to say. I have to fix this, I desperately thought. But my mind was too full of adrenaline and fury to think of anything.

The gift on my bed caught my eye. I unwrapped it and unfolded the silky wrapper, matching top and veil inside it, all the deep orange color of otjize. “Beautiful,” I whispered. Lovely light weather-treated material that would make walking in the desert under the noon sun like standing in the shade. A girl’s or woman’s pilgrimage clothes were the most expensive and treasured clothes she would have until her wedding day.

I laughed bitterly. These would probably be the most expensive and treasured clothes in my life. “No marriage for me,” I muttered. My words made me snicker to myself and then I laughed harder. Soon, I was laughing so hard that my belly muscles were cramping.

When I calmed down, I listened, still hearing my family talking loudly in the meeting room. I shook out my pilgrimage clothes and laid them on my chair. I brought out my astrolabe and edan and placed them side by side on my bed. I shut my eyes and was about to do one of the breathing exercises Professor Okpala had taught me when my astrolabe chimed. Someone was trying to reach me. I paused, my eyes closed, going through a list of who it could possibly be.

My sisters? Probably.

My father? No.

My mother? Possibly.

My uncles or aunties? Likely.

I opened my eyes and saw Dele’s face filling in the circular screen of my astrolabe. He was looking down at his hands, as he waited for me to accept his call. “Dele,” I said and the notification chimes stopped. He looked up, seeing me, and we stared at each other. We hadn’t spoken since I left. He wouldn’t answer or return my calls and he had never called me. He looked older, now . . . and wiser.

“You have a beard,” I blurted. It was light and fuzzy, but a beard it was.

“I’ve joined the Himba Council. ” He didn’t smile as he conveyed this news. Then he just stared at me. I stared back. The Himba Council? Was he next in line to apprentice for Council Chief? Dele? Council apprentices weren’t allowed to leave Himbaland. When had Dele become so . . . rooted? From downstairs, they still talked, voices raised. Now, I heard my mother speaking. Shouting?

“How have you been?” I finally asked.

“Here,” he said.

More silence. “What . . . what do you want, Dele?”

“Your sister messaged me to call you immediately,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“This is why you finally reach out to me?”

“You were the one who left, not me.”

“So?”

Silence.

“Dele . . . I couldn’t tell you,” I said. “Everyone . . . you just assumed I wasn’t going, that I wasn’t supposed to go. I wanted to, Dele. So badly. Haven’t you ever wanted something with all your heart, yet . . .”

“Yet, not one person in my family, in my entire clan, wanted it for me? No, Binti, never. That would be selfish. I’m not Khoush.”

Dele and I had known each other since we were babies and as we grew older, Dele had begun to lean more and more toward embracing the deep Himba way. We used to joke and argue about it, but our friendship always won out over the laws, rules, and mores. Plus, back then, his traditional leanings made him seem so strong and important, despite my dislike of it. Now, he’d grown a beard.

“You’re too complex, Binti,” he said. “That’s why I stayed away. You’re my best friend. You are. And I miss you. But, you’re too complex. And look at you; you’re even stranger now.” He pointed into the camera. “You think you can cover those things with otjize and I won’t see them? I know you.”

I sat down hard on my bed, feeling breathless again. Had my sister told him about my okuoko? Could he really see them through the camera? They weren’t even moving.

“What are you trying to accomplish with all this?” he asked. “I can see it in your face, you’re not well. You look tired and sad and . . .”

“Because of what just happened!” I said. “Why don’t you ask me about that? Instead of assuming the greatest choice I’ve ever made for myself is making me sick? Home is making me sick! I was fine until I got here.” This wasn’t all true, of course, but I needed to make my point clearly.

“We all love you,” he said. “You don’t know how your leaving made your family suffer. Your father’s business may have increased because of you, but his health has decreased. That doesn’t bode well for our village. He’s more our leader than our chief! He’s master harmonizer! And people here . . . ask your younger sisters, girl cousins how they get treated. You’ve stained them. Marriage won’t be . . .”

“None of that’s my fault!”

Dele paused and shook his head, chuckling softly. Then, again, we were staring at each other.

He waved a hand at me. “I can’t help you, Binti.”

“Can’t help you, either,” I snapped.

“I hear you’re going on pilgrimage tomorrow,” he said. “You have strange timing, but good luck.”

“Thanks,” I said, looking away.

“I trust you will take care of yourself,” he said, coolly. Then Dele was gone. And for the first time, it really sunk in. No man wanted a girl who ran away. No man would marry me.

I pushed my astrolabe and edan aside, lay on my bed, curled up, and cried myself to sleep.

Night Masquerade

I awoke hours later with a face crusty with tears, dried otjize, and snot. I went to the bathroom, blew and wiped my nose, and looked at myself in the mirror. Old otjize was flaking from my cheeks and forehead, leaving patches of clear brown bare skin. I needed to remove it all and reapply. I’d feel more myself, I knew. I didn’t pause on the knowledge that my current batch of otjize was made with clay from another planet. As I stared at my haggard face in the mirror, I glanced at the window facing the back of the house and remembered Okwu was out there.

I tiptoed downstairs and peeked into the main room. There were a few still awake, softly chatting in a corner, my sister Vera one of them. Many were curled up on flat pillows and mats. I snuck out the back door and nearly walked right into Okwu.

“It didn’t go well,” it said.

“No,” I said, stepping around it to go look at its gas-filled tent. The tent’s tall puffy girth reminded me of a giant Meduse. Maybe that’s what my father was going for when he set it up.

“Your father came out to check on me,” Okwu said. “He seemed upset.”

I grunted, but said nothing more of it. “Do you want to go see the lake?” I said.

Okwu plumed out a great amount of gas and I coughed, fanning the air around me. “Yes,” it said, its voice so clear that the vibration of it made my head ache.

My home village Osemba was a palette of dusty browns from the dirt roads to stone and sand-brick buildings. The oldest buildings were groupings of several solid stone structures, like the Root with its many traditional conical roofs. The Root sits at the very edge of Osemba. About a mile west, the sand dunes begin threatening to reclaim the clay-rich land. In the opposite direction, straight down the main dirt road, past other homes and a small area reserved for the western morning souq, is the lake. The rest of Osemba spreads along the lake’s edges.

Okwu and I walked up the road in the dark of deep night. We, Himba, are a people of the sun. When it sets, we retreat. The night is typically for sleep, family, and reflection. Thus, Okwu and I had the road to ourselves and I was glad. I used my astrolabe to light our way. I glanced at Okwu every so often and noted how as it floated beside me, it turned this way and that, observing Osemba; the first Meduse to ever do this, in peace or war.

“I can smell the water,” Okwu said, minutes later.

“It’s right in front of us,” I said. “Those tables and wooden medians are for the souq that’s here every morning; it’s similar to the marketplace on Oomza, but with just humans, of course.”

“Then that’s not like Oomza Blue Market at all,” Okwu said.

“No, the setup. People sell things outside. Come, the lake is just past it.”

“How can the air smell of water?” Okwu asked in Otjihimba. The awe it felt was clearer when it spoke in my language. I smiled and walked faster, enjoying Okwu’s rare excitement.

When I stepped onto the sand, Okwu beside me, I quickly took a deep breath and held it. Phoom. Okwu’s gas plumed so thickly around me that for a moment all I saw was the line of my astrolabe’s light tinted lavender. I took several steps from Okwu, fanning the gas away until I reached breathable space. Still, I coughed, laughing as I did. “Okwu,” I gasped. “Calm down—”

But Okwu wasn’t there. I quickly flashed my astrolabe’s light around me and noticed two things at once. The first was that Okwu was floating to the water, moving swiftly as if blown by a strong wind. The second was that I didn’t need my light to see this because the light from the lake was more than enough. Light from the water, I slowly thought as another thought competed for my attention. Can Okwu even swim? Salt is in water, too.

“Okwu,” I shouted, running toward the water.

But Okwu floated into its waters and quickly sunk in. Then it was gone. I splashed in all the way to my knees, the warm buoyancy of the water already feeling as if it wanted to lift me up. “Okwu?” I shouted. Around me was blinking electric green light. It was clusterwink snail season and the water was full of the spawning bioluminescent baby snails, the tiny creatures each flashing their own signals of whatever they were signaling. It was like wading into an overpopulated galaxy.

I waded farther into the water looking for Okwu. I paused, wondering if I should dive in to search for it. I couldn’t swim, but because of the high salt content, I couldn’t drown; the water would just push me to the surface. Still, if I went after Okwu, the water would wash off my otjize. And if anyone saw me, if my people didn’t think I was crazy yet, they certainly would after word spread that I’d been outside otjize-free.

“Okwu?” I shouted one last time. What if the water just dissolved its body? I looked at the glowing water and braced my legs to throw myself farther in and paddle out to find Okwu. Then yards into the water, within the twinkling green stars, I saw a swirling galaxy. Okwu’s silhouette surrounded by swirling twinkling baby snails. “What?” I whispered.

Then Okwu’s dome emerged; Okwu was adeptly swimming, half-submerged. It came toward me, but stopped when the water got too shallow for it to stay half-submerged. “My ancestors are dancing,” Okwu said in Otjihimba, its voice wavering with more emotion than I’d ever heard Okwu convey. Then Okwu swam back into the water. For the next thirty minutes, it danced with the snails.

I sat on the beach, my long skirts covering my otjize-free legs, in the twinkling green of my home lake. Traditionally, it’s taboo for a Himba woman or girl to bathe with water, let alone openly swim in the lake. I’d developed a love for bathing with water in the dorms on Oomza Uni. Though I’d only do it when I was relatively sure no one was around. As I sat there, watching Okwu dance with its god, I thought about how strange it was that for me to swim in water was taboo and for Okwu such a taboo was itself a taboo.

I remember thinking, The gods are many things.

* * *

I don’t know why I was doing it.

Even after seeing Okwu dancing with its god, some of the fury and pain from my dinner with family still coursed through my system. So an hour later, there I sat on my bedroom floor working my fingers over my edan’s lines as I hummed to it as Professor Okpala had taught me—mathematical harmonizing plus the soft vibration waves from my voice sometimes reached normally unreachable sensors on some edans.

My window was open and outside a cool desert breeze was blowing in from the west, pushing my orange curtains inward. The current of the breeze disturbed the mathematical current I was calling up. The disturbance caused my mind to weave in a tumble of equations that strengthened what I was trying to do instead of weaken it.

As I hummed, I let myself tree, floating on a bed of numbers soft, buoyant, and calm like the lake water. Just beautiful, I thought, feeling both vague and distant and close and controlled. My hands worked and soon I slid a finger on one of the triangular sides of the edan. It slid open and then slipped off. Inside the pyramid point was another wall of metal decorated with a different set of geometric swirls and loops. Professor Okpala described it as “another language beneath the language.” My edan was all about communication, one layer on top of another and the way they were arranged was another language. I was learning, but would I ever master it?

“Ah,” I sighed. Then I slipped the other triangular side of the pyramid off and the current I called caught both and lifted them into the air before my eyes. “Bring it up,” I whispered and the edan joined the two metal triangles. They began to slowly rotate in the way they always did, the edan like a small planet and the triangles like flat cartwheeling moons. A small yellow moth that had been fluttering about my room attracted to the edan’s glow flew to it now and was instantly caught up in the rotating air.

Was it the presence of the moth, tumbling and fluttering between the metal triangles? I do not know. There was always so much I didn’t know, but not knowing was part of it all. Whatever the reason, suddenly my edan was shedding more triangle sides from its various pyramid points and they joined the rotation. What remained of my edan hovered in the center and from the cavernous serenity of meditation, I sighed in awe. It was a gold metal ball etched with deep lines that formed wild loops but did not touch, reminiscent of fingerprint patterns. Was it solid gold? Gold was a wonderful conductor; imagine how precise the current I guided into it would move. If I did that, would the sphere open too? Or even . . . speak?

The moth managed to break out of the cycle and as soon as it did, my grasp slipped. As Professor Okpala would have said, I fell out of the tree. The mathematical current I’d called up evaporated and all the pieces of my edan fell to the floor, musically clinking. I gasped and stared. I waited for several moments and nothing happened. Always, the pieces rearranged themselves back into my edan, as if magnetized, even when I fell out of the tree.

“No, no, no!” I said, gathering the pieces and putting them in a pile in the center of my bed. I waited, again. Nothing. “Ah!” I shrieked, near panic. I snatched up the gold ball. So heavy. Yes, it had to be solid gold. I brought it to my face, my hands shaking and my heart pounding. I rubbed the pad of my thumb over the deep labyrinthine configurations. It was warm and heavier than the edan had ever felt, as if it had its own type of gravity now that it was exposed.

I was about to call up another current to try to put it back together when something outside caught my eye. I went to my window and what I saw made my skin prickle and my ears ring. I stumbled back, ran my finger over the otjize on my skin, and rubbed it over my eyelids to ward off evil. My bedroom was at the top floor of the Root and it faced the west where my brother’s garden grew, the backyard ended, and the desert began.

“May the Seven protect me,” I whispered. “I am not supposed to be seeing this.” No girl or woman was. And even though I never had up until this point, I knew exactly who that was standing in my brother’s garden in the dark, looking right at me, pointing a long sticklike finger at me. I shrieked, ran to my bed, and stared at my disassembled edan. “What do I do, what do I do? What’s happening? What do I do?”

I slowly stepped back to the window. The Night Masquerade was still there, a tall mass of dried sticks, raffia, and leaves with a wooden face dominated by a large tooth-filled mouth and bulbous black eyes. Long streams of raffia hung from its round chin and the sides of the head, like a wizard’s beard. Thick white smoke flowed out from the top of its head and already I could smell the smoke in my room, dry and acrid. Okwu’s tent was several yards to the right, but Okwu must have been inside.

“Binti,” I heard the Night Masquerade growl. “Girl. Small girl from big space.”

I moaned, breathless with terror. My oldest brother, father, and grandfather had seen the Night Masquerade at different times in their lives. My father on the night he became the family master harmonizer over two decades ago. My oldest brother on the night he’d fought three Khoush men in the street outside the market when they’d wrongfully accused him of stealing the fine astrolabes he’d brought to sell. And my grandfather, when he was eight years old on the night after he saved his whole village during a Khoush raid by hacking the astrolabes of the Khoush soldiers to produce an eardrum-rupturing sound. Only men and boys were said to even have the ability to see the Night Masquerade and only those who were heroes of Himba families got to see it. No one ever spoke of what happened after seeing it. I’d never considered it. I’d never needed to.

I ran to my travel pod and pulled out a small sealed sack I’d used to store tiny crystal snail shells I’d found in the forest near my dorm on Oomza Uni. I dumped them onto my bed, where they crackled and began to turn from white to yellow as they reacted to the dry desert air. I bristled with annoyance. I’d brought the shells to show my sisters and now they’d be dust in a few minutes.

I pushed them aside and put the pieces of my edan into the transparent sack, wincing at their clinking and clattering. The gold sphere with its fingerprint-like ridges was still warm. I paused for a moment, holding it. Would it melt or burn the sack? I put it inside; the sack was made from the stomach lining of a creature whose powerful stomach juices could digest the most complex metals and stones on the planet. If it could withstand that, it certainly could contain my edan’s warm core.

I’d just put the sack into my satchel when there came a hard knock at my door. I twitched as the noise sent me back to the ship when the Meduse had knocked so hard on my door. I covered my mouth to hold in the scream that wanted to escape, then I shut my eyes. I took a deep lung-filling breath and let it out. Inhaled again. Exhaled. No Meduse at the door, Binti, I thought. Okwu is outside and it is your friend. The knock came again, followed by my father’s voice calling my name. I ran to the door and opened it and met his frowning eyes. Behind him stood my older brother Bena, also frowning.

“Did you see it?” my father asked.

I nodded.

“Kai!” Bena exclaimed, pressing his hands to his closely shaven head. “How is this possible?”

“I don’t know!” I said, tears welling in my eyes.

“What is it?” my mother asked, coming up behind him, rubbing her face. The otjize on her skin was barely a film. Normally only my father would see her like this.

My younger sister Peraa peeked from the staircase. She was the eyes of my family, silent and curious about all things. Had she seen it, too? I wondered.

Somehow, my father knew she was there, and he whipped around to shout, “Peraa, go back to bed!”

“Papa, there are people outside,” she said.

“People?” Bena asked. “Peraa, did you see anything else?”

Before she could respond, my father asked, “What people?”

“Many people,” Peraa said. She was out of breath and looked about to cry. “Desert People!”

“Eh?!” my father exclaimed. “What is happening tonight?” Then he was storming down the hall to the stairs, my brother rushing after him.

“Wait,” my mother said, holding a hand up to me. “Go in, apply otjize. Put on your pilgrimage attire.”

“Why? That’s not for . . .”

“Do it.”

Peraa was still standing at the top of the staircase, staring at me. I motioned for her to come, but she only shook her head and went downstairs.

My mother’s eyes migrated to my otjize-rolled okuoko.

“Do those hurt?” she asked.

“Only if you hurt them.”

“Why’d you have to do it?”

“Mama, would you rather I died like everyone else on that ship?”

“Of course not,” she said. She seemed about to say more, but instead she just said, “Hurry.” Then she turned and quickly headed down the staircase.

* * *

I applied my otjize and put on my pilgrimage clothes. The otjize would rub off onto my clothes making tonight the outfit’s official event, not my pilgrimage, blessed on this day by my otjize. So be it, I thought. Before I went out to the front door, I snuck to the back of the house. Okwu was waiting for me. “There are people standing around your home,” it said in Meduse.

“I know.” I resisted staring at the desert woman yards away watching us. Tall with dark brown skin that looked so strange to my eyes because she wore no otjize, she looked a few years older than I, possibly in her early twenties. Her bushy hair was a sweet black and it shivered in the breeze.

“I watched them arrive,” Okwu said. “One asked me to come out of my tent. When I did, he spoke to me in Meduse. How do people who live far from water know our language?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Did . . . did you see anything near the house? Standing where my window faces?”

“No.”

“Okay,” I muttered, turning from him. “Hold on. I need to see something.” The desert woman watched me as I slowly walked to the spot where the Night Masquerade had been. “I’m just checking something,” I said to her.

“Even if you ran, I’d catch you,” she said in Otjihimba, with a smirk. “You’re why we’re here.” She motioned to Okwu. “And to see that one.”

“Why? What did we do?”

She only chuckled, waving a hand dismissively at me. I stopped at the spot where I was sure the Night Masquerade had been. The sand here was undisturbed, not even a light footprint. It was breezy tonight, but not so much that footprints would disappear in minutes.

“Binti,” I heard my mother call.

“Okwu, meet me in the front,” I said.

“Okay.”

I turned and headed back into the Root.

Blood

The Desert People surrounded the Root the way groups of lake crabs surround their egg-filled holes when the eggs are ready to hatch. There were about seven of them that I could see, probably more on the other side of the house. Some were men, some were women, and all had skin that was “old African” dark, like my father’s and mine. They wore the traditional goat-pelt wraps around their waists, blue waist beads, and blue tops. Around their wrists, they wore bracelets made from shards and chunks of pink salt found in dried lakes deep in the desert. None of them wore shoes.

Straight backed, faces stern, they stood silent. Waiting. And though it was very late in the night, a few neighbors had come out to see what was going on. Of course. By sunup, the village’s bush radio would carry the word to all of Osemba that Desert People had come to the Root. Khoush communities in Kokure might even hear about it. I felt Okwu’s presence not far behind me as it came round the house. I turned and nodded at it.

My father was speaking with a tall old woman. Behind her stood two camels with packs on their backs. I watched for a moment, as the woman’s hands worked wildly while she spoke. Sometimes, she’d stop speaking entirely yet her hands would keep going, moving in circles, jabbing, zigzagging, sometimes harshly, other times gently. This was the way of the Desert People, one of the reasons the Himba viewed them as primitive and mentally unstable. They had no control of their hands; the elders said it was some sort of neurological condition. When the old woman saw me, she smiled and then told my father, “We’ll bring her back by tomorrow night.”

My mouth fell open and I looked at my father, who did not look at me.

“How will I know?” my father asked.

She looked down her nose at him. “Such a proud son you are.”

My father finally looked at me. My mother grabbed my hand. “Not going anywhere,” she muttered. I was shocked by so much that I could only stare at her. “We just got her back!” my mother told my father.

“You people are so brilliant, but your world is too small,” the old woman who was my father’s mother, my grandmother, said. “One of you finally somehow grows beyond your cultural cage and you try to chop her stem. Fascinating.” She looked at my father. “Don’t you remember what happened with your father?” She straightened up. “Your daughter, my granddaughter, has seen the Night Masquerade.”

My sister Peraa, who was standing beside me now, gasped and looked at me. “You did?” she whispered.

I nodded at her, still unable to speak.

She grabbed my other hand. “Is that why you—”

“No, she hasn’t!” my mother snapped.

The old woman chuckled and her hands twitched and began to move again, zigzagging, punching, waving. The astrolabe around her neck bumped against her chest, not once touched by the woman. “Why do you think we came out here? There are rituals to be performed.”

Even from where I stood, I could see that her astrolabe was one that had been made by my father. The unique slightly oval shape, the rose-tinted sandstone, this was an astrolabe he’d made some time ago. My mother must have noticed this too, because she turned and gave him a dirty look.

The other Desert People standing close by all laughed, some of them making the strange hand motions. I looked back at Okwu and frowned. Several of my relatives had now gathered, none of whom wanted to stand near Okwu. It stood behind them all, but beside it stood one of the Desert People, a bushy-haired boy of about my age.

“We’ll take your daughter, our daughter, into the desert,” my grandmother said. She turned to Okwu. “Your daughter, too. She will speak with our clan priestess, the Ariya. We bring her back the night after this one.”

* * *

My mother wept and my father had to pry my hand from hers. Seeing her weep made me start to weep. Then Peraa started weeping. My brothers just stood there and I saw my sister Vera angrily walk away. More neighbors came out and there was self-righteous nodding and some mumbling about me bringing the outside to the inside. I heard a gravelly voiced friend of my mother’s loudly say, “She should have stayed there.”

Okwu said nothing. Nothing at all.

Hinterland

I was walking into the desert with the Desert People.

I turned back to the Root, my legs still moving me up the sand dune. I could still see my brother’s garden, my bedroom window, and even the spot below where the Night Masquerade had stood. Then we were moving down the sand dune and I looked back until I couldn’t see the Root any longer. “What am I doing?” I whispered.

My grandmother was walking beside me, tall and lean as a tree. “Did you bring otjize in your satchel?” she asked.

“Yes,” I quietly said, patting my satchel.

She laughed loudly. “Of course you did.” She moved her hands in front of her face, a smile still on her face, and I frowned, watching her. She said nothing when we were walking up the second sand dune and I took out the jar and began to reapply it to my arms and face, the places my mother had held me and tears had run.

Contrary to what my family thought, I knew exactly who I was going to see and I needed to look my best when I saw her. I had been eight years old and terrified when I met the Ariya completely by chance. She was the first person to whom I’d shown my edan, even before my father. She hadn’t called it an edan, she’d called it a “god stone” and said I was lucky to have it. And now I was being brought to her with the thing in pieces.

* * *

There were dangerous creatures in the hinterland, and at night many didn’t sleep.

A lean boy about my age and height named Mwinyi was charged with protecting the group. He was the one whom I’d glimpsed standing beside Okwu. Unlike the others who had dark-brown hair like me, Mwinyi had a head of bushy red-brown hair and I couldn’t tell if the color was due to his hair being full of the desert’s red dust or if this was its natural color. And he had a thick matted braid growing in the middle that was so long it reached his knees. It swung about his back like a snake when he walked. I couldn’t understand how this boy was going to protect a group of nineteen adults until I saw what he could do.

Three hours after we’d scaled that first sand dune, the pack of wild dogs came. There were at least thirty and you could hear them coming from far away. They yipped and barked with the confidence of a pack that didn’t need stealth to catch food or stay safe. They spotted and came at us without hesitation. Only I was terrified. Everyone else simply stopped and sat down on the sand, including the two camels. My grandmother put her hand on my shoulder to keep me calm. “Shhh,” she said.

Mwinyi was the only one standing. Then he walked right to the dog pack, his hands moving in the Desert People way. Not slowly. Not quickly. In the soft moonlight, the sight was mystical, like watching something right out of the stories my father liked to tell during the Moon Fest. I couldn’t hear him clearly, but I heard him speaking the language of the Desert People. He laughed as the dogs crowded him, sniffing and circling. Then Mwinyi said something and every single one of them stopped moving. And they were looking at him, at his face, as he spoke softly to them.

Then, just as suddenly, every single dog looked at us. I gasped and pressed my hands to my gaping mouth. I softly spoke a few choice equations and dropped a degree into meditation, just enough to stop shaking. I wanted to see this with all my senses and emotions sharp. Mwinyi was speaking to the dogs who would have harmed us. Several of the dogs near the back yipped agreeably, took one more look at us, and then went on their way. The others followed after a moment.

“He’s a harmonizer?” I asked.

My grandmother looked at me. “We don’t call them that.”

“Then what do you call him?”

“Our son,” she said, standing up. Mwinyi waved at us and we continued on our way. As we walked, I reached my hand into my pocket and touched the pouch full of my dissembled edan. Even in pieces, it was as much of a mystery to me now as it was when I’d found it . . .

Destiny Is a Delicate Dance

. . . nine years ago. I was out there that morning because I’d grown profoundly angry and run away from home. No one knew that I was angry and no one realized I’d run away. What had upset me was so trivial to my parents and older siblings that they didn’t even realize I was upset. There was to be a dance at the Annual Wind Fest and though all of my age mates were participating, my parents and older siblings had decided it was best for me not to take part in it.

The Diviner had officially tapped me as the next family master harmonizer the week before and so much had already changed about how I was treated and what I was allowed and not allowed to do. Now this, all because I had to “sharpen my meditating skills and equation control” when I was already able to tree faster than my father.

Nevertheless, one does not argue with elders. Thus, I had accepted the restriction quietly as I had accepted being tapped as the next master harmonizer, despite the fact that I could never own the shop because I was a female. Shop ownership was my brother’s honor. For our family to prove that it could produce a next generation of harmony brought fortune and great respect to us, so I was proud.

But I wanted to dance. I loved dancing. Dancing was like moving my body in the way that I saw numbers and equations move when I treed. When I danced, I could manifest mathematical current within me, harmonizing it with my muscles, skin, sinew, and bones. And now the opportunity had been snatched from me for no other reason besides, “It’s just not for you.” So I woke up that next morning, dressed in my weather-treated wrapper and top, wrapped my otjize-rolled locks in my red veil, quietly packed a satchel, and walked out of the house into the desert before anyone got up.

The desert wasn’t a mystery to me. I wasn’t supposed to, but I went into it quite often. Sometimes, I went to play, other times I went to find peace and quiet so I could practice treeing. The desert was largely responsible for why I’d gotten so good at treeing so young.

If my family had known that I went out there regularly, instead of going to the lake like all the other children, I’d have been punished with more than a beating. I was smart and stealthy even back then. That early morning, I tiptoed into my parents’ room and told them I was going to sit by the lake and watch the early crabs run about. Then I went outside and instead of going toward the lake, I went the other way, into the desert.

I liked the desert in the morning because it was still cool and it was still. I could go out there and my mind would clear like the sky after a violent power-outing thunderstorm. I would rub an extra-thick layer of otjize on my skin and go out sometimes as far as five miles. My astrolabe would start beeping and threatening to alert my parents about my whereabouts if I went any further. I’d see nothing around me but sand, not even the tops of the tallest Osemba buildings, which weren’t very tall anyway.

In my childish anger, I was never going to return home. In my mind, I was becoming a nomad, wandering in the desert and letting the sand and wind take me where it would. And as I walked, sometimes, I would dance as I hummed to myself. My feet took me on a two-hour walk north, past the dried cluster of palm trees visible from my bedroom, the patch of hardpan where I’d once found an old seashell, to a place I’d discovered months ago, where a group of gray stones jutted out of the ground like flattened old teeth.

The stones were large enough to sit on and arranged in a wide semicircle that opened west. I’d never asked my parents or schoolteachers about them because then I’d have to tell them where I saw such a thing. I came here often. Sometimes, I brought my small tent, set it up in the middle of the semicircle, and sat inside it while gazing out at the desert as I practiced equations, algorithms, and formulas for mathematical currents that I’d use in astrolabes I was making.

I’d needed the hard silence of the desert because I was still learning back then. This place was perfect. When I practiced, I liked to dig my fingers in the sand and scratch circles, squares, trapezoids, fractals, whatever shapes I needed to visualize the equation. This day when I was eight years old and had run away, I’d set up my tent beside the furthest stone and my fingers drew circles upon circles.

My eyes were half-closed as I watched swirls of sand tumble down a nearby dune. I was whispering a current into being as dividing numbers tumbled through my head. I worked hard not to think about the self-righteous look on my oldest sister’s face as she said, “It’s just dancing. You have to start sacrificing things like that now.”

I was angrily digging my left index finger hard in the sand when I felt it. My nail grazed over it first and I noticed, but unconsciously. I was seeing a short hazy blue line dance before me. Tears fell from my eyes. My family was right. For three years they’d been pushing and pushing me, my mother, father, sisters, brothers, aunts, and uncles. They were all so sure of what I was, that I had the gift. I did have it and now everything was changing because of it. But I just wanted to dance.

The current whirled itself into a perfect circle. Now it was a connection. This would have powered an astrolabe if I had it assembled and positioned for “turn on.” I felt a sting and hissed with pain. My hand. My finger. The blue disappeared as I brought my finger to my face for a closer look, my heart slamming in my chest. A scorpion bite all the way out here in the desert, while alone, was very bad news.

My thumb dripped blood and sand was ground into the wound. A tiny gray point poked from the spot where I’d been making circles with my fingers and thumb. Beside it was a small yellow flower. How’d I miss that? I wondered. I tried to pick the flower and realized that it was attached to a thin dry but strong white root that clung to whatever was poking from the sand. I put the flower down and grasped the point. It wouldn’t budge. I shifted to my knees and leaned closer for a better look.

“Oh,” I whispered. “It’s not just . . .” I sucked on my finger as I looked at it. Then I started digging around it with my other hand. Soon I was using both hands, disregarding the stinging and light bleeding. Whenever my father allowed me to buy a new book, I spent hours in my room with my eyes closed as I listened to it on my astrolabe. In many of those stories, a curious person would find a secret or magical object that would change her or his life. I’d always wanted that to happen to me. And now I was sure this was it.

This was the Book of Shadows that appeared on the boy’s astrolabe when he passed too close to a tree that had just been struck by lightning. This was the jeweled eagle figurine that the girl bought in the market that caused all the birds to come. This was the plant that began to grow in the old man’s bedroom after a strange dust storm.

The thing I dug up was a stellated cube. It fit into the palm of my hand and was made of a tarnished metal. There were intricate designs all over it, adept loops and swirls and spirals whose lines never touched each other. I turned it over this way and that, marveling at its complex pointy shape.

“What is this thing?” I whispered, awed.

I knocked off the remaining sand and used some of my otjize to polish it. This worked better than I expected, for soon its tarnished appearance changed to one of amazing shine. And each time I moved it, it produced a . . . a soft sound. Like the low husky voice of a woman. It was a little scary . . . and fascinating. There was somehow old current in this thing. Nevertheless, the more I moved it, the softer the sound until it stopped all together.

Father’s eyes will bug out when I show this thing to him, I excitedly thought. And that was how I decided that I was not running away after all. I couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say about the mystery device I’d found. Or if he could tell me the best way to study it. Maybe I can get it to do whatever it was made to do, I thought. I giggled to myself, sitting on one of the stones and holding the strange thing to my face.

When someone tapped my shoulder, I nearly screamed. And when I whipped around and saw the tall dark-skinned woman with a corona of black hair so huge that it blocked out the sun shining behind her, I did scream. I jumped to my feet and nearly fell over my satchel.

She was one of the Desert People. She looked ten feet tall and everything about her, from her hair to the light sheer blue cloth wrapped around her head to her flowing pants and top made of the same blue material, was blowing in the soft breeze. Slung over her shoulder was a small capture station, its catch bag, and a blue old-looking backpack. I squinted up at her in the sunshine. She was so very tall and so . . . blue. The tallest person I’d ever seen. And somewhat old like my mother’s mother. She grasped a thick gnarled walking staff with her long-fingered hands, but she wasn’t leaning on it.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked. Her voice was dry and commanding, also like my grandmother, and I immediately stood up straighter.

“I . . . this . . . this is where I . . . please . . . my . . .”

“Oh, shut up, child,” she sighed. “Forget I asked.” She rested her staff on her side and began doing that which I’d heard the Desert People did; she moved her hands this way and that, like a child swatting at a fly. I took the moment to quickly look around. There were no others. Could I outrun her? The woman wore no shoes. How can she stand the hot sand?

“Binti,” she said. “Daughter of Moaoogo Dambu Kaipka Okechukwu Enyi Zinariya.”

“That’s my name, my father . . . how do you know?” I whispered. I’d decided that there was no way I could outrun the woman. She was old and carried a staff, but something told me she was strong like a man and she didn’t use that staff for walking.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

“A desert person?”

She nodded, working her hands before her. It was as if they weren’t even part of her body. In my pocket, my astrolabe buzzed. The sun had just reached its highest peak and it was best to sit in the shade for the next hour. I reached into my pocket to stop it from buzzing.

“I journeyed all the way to this place so I can think,” the woman said.

“I . . . I did, too,” I said.

And for a moment, we stared at each other.

“I’ve been coming here since before your mother was a thought in your grandmother’s womb,” she said, with a chuckle. “What is that you’ve found?”

I grasped it more tightly and took a step back. “Nothing. A pretty chunk of . . . metal.” I felt sweat prickle in my armpits. To lie to an elder is a sin.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going to take it from you.”

“I . . . I never said that,” I said.

“I know your grandmother, Binti.”

I nearly dropped the edan when I looked at her with surprise . . . and understanding. My father’s mother was a desert woman and he never spoke of her. Himba men did not wear otjize, but sometimes they used it to palm roll or flatten their hair. My father used it to flatten his coarse bushy hair, to mask it. And like me, he was the shade of brown like the Desert People and he’d never liked this fact. My mother was a medium brown, like most Himba, and I knew for a fact that he was proud that all their other children were too . . . and that the one who got the desert complexion and hair made up for it by being a master harmonizer.

I’d once asked my father about the Desert People when I was about five years old and he’d snapped at me to never speak of it again. As I looked at this tall woman now, I wanted to go home. I needed to go home. My father would kill me for speaking to this woman. I wasn’t supposed to be out here in the first place, so meeting her was entirely my fault.

“Do you know what that is you’ve found?”

I shook my head.

“It’s a piece of time from before our time. An ancient work of art and use. It’s old, but old doesn’t always mean less advanced.”

I opened my hand and looked at it. It rested in my palm, comfortable there, but so strange.

“Want to know how to use it?”

I shook my head. “I have to get home,” I said. “My father has work for me to finish later today.”

“Yes, your gifted father who is so proud of himself.” She paused looking me over and then said, “The thing you have, the Himba will call it an edan, but we call it a god stone. You’re blessed it’s found you.” She did a few hand motions and laughed. “When you are ready to know how to really use it, find us.”

“Okay,” I said, smiling the most false smile I had ever smiled. My legs were shaking so vigorously that I felt I would fall to my knees.

“Safe journey home,” she said. Then she knelt, touched the sand, and said, “Praise the Seven.”

I stood there for a moment surprised, thinking, Desert People believed in the presence of the Seven too? I wondered what my mother would say to this fact, since she thought Desert People were so uncivilized. Not that I’d ever tell her about meeting this woman.

I swiped otjize from my face and did the same. Then I turned and ran off. I didn’t look back until I was about to crest the first sand dune. She still stood there, beside the gray stones where I’d found the edan. I wondered what she’d make of the plant growing there.

* * *

Early crabs were sneaky and quick, so my parents weren’t surprised when I returned empty-handed. I was no longer that angry with my parents, so when I took the edan to my father two days later, I didn’t have to stifle my emotions. I didn’t tell him about the plant growing on it or where I found it. It’s the only time I’d lied to my father. I told him I’d bought the thing at the market from a junk seller.

“Who was selling it? Which junk man?” my father anxiously asked. “I need to talk to him! Look at this thing it’s—”

“I don’t know, Papa,” I quickly said. “I wasn’t really paying attention. I was so focused on it.”

“I’ll go to the market tomorrow,” my father said, pulling at his scruffy beard. “Maybe someone will have another.” He took it from me, his eyes wide. “Beautiful work.”

“I think it does something that—”

“The metal,” he whispered, staring at the object. He looked at me, smiled and apologetically patted my head. “Sorry, Binti. You were saying?”

“It’s okay. What about the metal?”

My father brought it to his teeth and bit the tip of one of the points. Then he touched it with the tip of his tongue and brought it so close to his left eye that he nearly touched his eyeball. He held it to his nose and sniffed. “I don’t know this type of metal,” he said. He smacked his lips. “It leaves a taste on the tongue, like when you taste the salts that gather on the Undying Trees during dry season.”

The Undying Trees grew all over Osemba. They had thick rubbery wide leaves and trunks spiked with hard thorns that had lived longer than any generation could recall. Their ancient roots were so strong and they snaked so deeply beneath Osemba that the town’s waterworks were not only built around them, they were built along them. The Undying Trees led the founders of Osemba to the only drinkable source of water for a hundred miles.

Nevertheless, the trees were strange. They vibrated so fast during thunderstorms that they made a howling sound, which permeated the city. During dry season, they produced salt on their leaves, which was used by healers to cure and treat all sorts of ailments. Life salt, it was called. The device I’d found tasted like life salt.

“It’s an edan,” my father said and I’d nodded like I’d never heard the word before. He explained to me that “edan” was a general name for devices too old for anyone to know their functions, so old that they were now more art than anything else. That’s what my father wanted it for, as a piece of art to brag about to his friends. But I insisted on keeping it for myself and because he loved me, he let me.

Now here I was walking into the desert with the Desert People. How different my life would have been if my parents had just let me dance.

Lies

By sunup, I knew the Desert People had lied.

“Can you reach your Meduse?” my grandmother asked me. We’d walked through the remainder of the night and morning. Now, it was approaching midday and we stopped until night. We stood in the shade of one of the camels, some of the others bringing out dried dates and switching on noisy capture stations to collect water. I was nearly asleep on my feet, barely able to keep my eyes open. My grandmother’s question woke me right up.

“Reach?” I asked. My eyes met Mwinyi’s, who sat a few yards away crunching on what looked like dried leaves.

“Yes, speak to it,” my grandmother said.

“I don’t know,” I muttered, looking out into the desert. “Maybe? Do I really—”

“Tell it that we will bring you back when we bring you back,” my grandmother said. “Our village is three days’ walk away.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell them this before? Why didn’t you tell me?” I’d wondered why we were still walking when they’d promised to have me back by nightfall. It had been easier to stay in denial. I groaned. I’d gone from one extreme to another, days confined on a ship, then not even twenty-four hours later, days walking through open desert.

“Sometimes it’s best to tell people what they need to hear,” my grandmother said.

“Can’t someone go back and tell them? I don’t know if I can tell Okwu anything detailed,” I breathed, my heart starting to beat the talking drum. “What if I can’t do—”

“It’s up to you, Binti,” she said, dismissively. She spoke over her shoulder as she walked to two women who’d just set out a large bowl of dried dates. “You do it or you don’t.”

My grandmother wasn’t offering me any real choice. If I didn’t come home tonight, my family would fly into panic. Again. For the second time, they would be forced to deal with my disappearance and the fact that they couldn’t do a thing about it. My mother would get terribly quiet and stop laughing, my father would work too hard in his shop, my siblings would feel an ache akin to one caused by the death of a loved one. Family. I had to reach Okwu.

However, I still didn’t know much about my okuoko. I didn’t understand how they affected me. How they connected me to the Meduse, especially Okwu. Why I could feel sensation through them. Why they writhed when I was furious. What I knew was that I could sense Okwu when I was on Math City and he was in Weapons City, which were hundreds of miles away and that I had once had a very weak but definite sense that the Meduse Chief who was planets away was checking up on me.

I could wiggle my okuoko on purpose, but I couldn’t explain to anyone how I did it. It was like moving my nostrils, I just could. In this way, while petting the shaggy fur of the camel beside me, I reached out to Okwu. I thought about it, willed it. Seconds passed. Nothing. I sighed and glanced at my grandmother, who was watching me. I looked up into the blue sky and spotted a ship from afar that was leaving the atmosphere. A mere speck. The launch port was maybe a hundred miles away. I wondered if it was Third Fish. No, I thought. Third Fish is giving birth soon.

I shook my head. Focus, I thought. Okwu. I imagined the tent my father had set up outside the Root. How it was full of the gas the Meduse breathed. Okwu was the first of its kind on Earth since the Khoush-Meduse Wars. Okwu doing whatever Okwu did in its tent when it avoided interaction with any of my family or other curious Himba. And I softly slipped my mind into a set of equations that reminded me of space and movement across small lengths of it.

Now I reached out again, my hand flat on the camel’s rump, slowly moving up and down with its steady breathing. I strained to reach Okwu and it realized this and reached for me. I felt it grasp and suddenly I felt Okwu’s mind. Sweat poured down my face and I felt all things around me tint Okwu’s light blue.

Binti, I felt Okwu say through one of my okuoko. It vibrated against my left ear. Where are you? You are far.

In the hinterland, I responded. I won’t be back tonight.

Do I need to come get you?

No.

Are you well?

Yes. The village is just far. Days away.

Okay. I will wait here.

Then just like that, Okwu let go and was gone. I came back to myself and my eyes focused on the desert before me.

“Done?” my grandmother asked. She stood behind me and I turned to her.

“Yes. It knows.”

She nodded. “Well done,” she said, holding her hands up and moving them around. She walked away.

* * *

They pitched their elaborate goatskin tents facing the desert to give everyone the semblance of privacy. Two men built a fire in the center of the tents and some of the women began to use it to cook. The soft whoosh of capture stations from behind two of the tents and their cool breath further cooled the entire camp. Soon, the large empty jug one of the camels had been carrying was rolled to the center of the tents and filled with water.

“You’ll stay with me,” my grandmother said, pointing to the tent two men had just set up for her. She handed me a cup. “Drink heavily, your body needs hydration.” Inside, the tent was spacious and there were two bedrolls on opposite sides. For “dinner” there was flat bread with honey, a delicious strong-smelling hearty soup with dried fish, more dates, and mint tea. As the sun rose, everyone quickly disappeared into his or her tents to sleep.

I was pleasantly full and tired, but too restless to sleep just yet. So I sat on my mat, staring out at the desert, my grandmother snoring across from me. Since we’d walked into the desert, the flashbacks and day terrors I was used to having had disappeared. I inhaled the dry baking air and smiled. The healing properties of the desert had always been good for me. My eye fell on Mwinyi, who’d been watering the camels and now sat out on a sand dune facing the desert. His hands were working before him. I got up and walked over to him.

He looked at me as I approached, turned back to the desert, and continued working his hands. I paused, wondering if I was interrupting. I pushed on; I had to know. Plus, I’d seen several of them talking and laughing as they moved their hands like this, so I doubted it was like prayer or meditation.

“Hi,” I said, hoping he’d stop moving his hands. He didn’t.

“You should get some sleep,” he said.

I cocked my head as I watched him. He was frowning as he pushed his blue sleeves back, held up his arms, and moved his hands in graceful swooping jabbing motions.

“I will,” I said. I paused and took a breath. I wondered what would happen if I called up a current and connected it to his moving hands. Would the zap of it make him stop? “What is this that you’re doing?” I blurted. “With your hands? Can you control it?” I waited, cringing as I bit my lip. For a moment, he only worked his hands, his eyes staring into the desert.

Then he looked up at me. “I’m communicating.”

“But you do it when you . . . like now,” I said as he did a flourish with his hands. “You’re not talking to me right there. I don’t understand it, if you are. And I see people doing it while talking to other people, too.”

He looked at me for a long time and then glanced at the camp and then back at me.

“This is something your grandmother should tell you. Go ask her.”

“I’m asking you,” I said. “You all do it, so why can’t I ask anyone?”

He sighed and muttered, “Okay, sit down.”

I sat beside him, pulling my legs to my chest.

“Auntie Titi, your grandmother, is my grandfather’s best friend,” he said. “So I know all about your father and his shame. You have the same shame.”

I blinked for a moment as two separate worlds tangled in my mind. Back when I was on the ship with the Meduse, they had referred to my edan as “shame” and now here was that word again, but in a completely different context. “I don’t underst—”

“I saw how you looked at us,” he said. “Just like every Himba I have ever encountered, like we’re savages. You call us the ‘Desert People,’ mysterious uncivilized dark people of the sand.”

I wanted to deny my prejudice, but he was right.

“Despite the fact that you’re darker like us, have the crown like us, have our blood,” he said. “I wonder how surprised you were when you saw that we could speak your language as well as our three languages. ‘Desert People.’ Do you even know the actual name of our tribe?”

I shook my head, slowly.

“We’re the Enyi Zinariya,” he said. “No, I won’t translate that for you.” He looked directly at me, into my eyes, and I didn’t turn away. I wanted an answer to my initial question and I knew when I was being tested. There is nothing like being a harmonizer and looking directly into another harmonizer’s eyes. Nothing.

Everything around us dropped away and there was a sonorous melody that vibrated between my ears that was so perfectly aligned that I felt as if I were beginning to float.

“I only know what I am taught,” I whispered.

“That’s not true,” he said.

“I . . . I met one of you once,” I said.

“We know,” he said. “And was she a savage?”

“No,” I said.

“So you knew that back then.”

“Okay,” I said, shutting my eyes and rubbing my forehead. “Okay.”

He chuckled. “When we heard about what you did, we all cheered.”

“Really?”

He turned away from me, finished talking. “You should go. Get some sleep.”

“Answer my question first,” I said. “Please.”

“I did. I said we are communicating.”

“With who?”

“Everyone.”

“As you speak to me, you’re speaking to others?”

“It’s the same with your astrolabe,” he said. “Can’t you use it while you talk to other people?”

“But no one is here.”

“I was talking to my mother back in the village,” he said. “She was asking about you.”

“Oh,” I said, frowning deeply. “So you can speak like how I speak to Okwu?”

He paused and moved his hands. Then he turned to me and flatly said, “Ask your grandmother.”

I was about to get up, but then I stopped and asked, “Crown? You said I have the crown like you?”

He grasped a handful of his bushy red-brown hair, “This is the crown.” Then he laughed. “Well, you used to have it. Before the Meduse took it and replaced it with tentacles.”

I wanted to be offended but the way he said it, in such a literal way, instead pulled a hard laugh out of me and suddenly we were both giggling. When I calmed down, the fatigue of the journey hit me and I slowly got up. “What was the name of your clan again?” I asked.

“You’re Himba, I’m Enyi Zinariya,” he said.

“Enyi Zinariya,” I repeated.

He nodded, smiling. “You pronounced it well.”

“Okay,” I said and went back to my grandmother’s tent, lay down, and was asleep within seconds.

* * *

“Get up, girl.”

I opened my eyes to my grandmother’s face and the sound of the tent walls flapping from the wind. I stared into her eyes, blinking away the last remnants of sleep. When I sat up, I felt amazingly well rested. The cooling breeze of evening smelled so fresh that I flared my nostrils and inhaled deeply. I’d slept for nearly six hours.

My grandmother smiled, the strong breeze blowing her bushy hair about. “Yes, it’s a good time to move across the desert.”

The desert looked absolutely stunning, bright moonlight and the soft travel of the sand blending to make the ground look otherworldly. I could hear the others talking, laughing and moving about, and the two camels roaring as they were made to stand up. The smell of flat bread made my stomach grumble.

“Grandma,” I said. “Please, tell me why the Enyi Zinariya speak with their hands.”

Her eyes grew wide for a moment and I quickly said, “I’ve been planets away and learned about and met people from other worlds. It’s wrong that I don’t even know of my own . . . my own people.” I let out a breath as my words sunk into me. They were the truth now, a truth that had been different a day ago when I had been ashamed and quiet about my blood. Seeing the Night Masquerade had lived up to its mythology. To see it did signify immediate drastic change.

“Walk with me,” my grandmother said, then she left the tent. I followed, grabbing my satchel. As we walked away from the camp, I saw two of the men go to our tent and start breaking it down. She led me up the nearest high sand dune. When we reached the top, she turned toward the camp and sat down. I sat beside her. Below, the camp was aflutter with activity, all the tents packed up except ours. I was clearly the last to wake up.

“You’ve somehow learned the name of our clan.”

“I asked Mwinyi.”

“Having curiosity is the only way to learn,” she said. She worked her hands before her for a moment and then looked at me. “That was me communicating with your father.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“You Himba are so inward-looking,” she said. “Cocooned around that pink lake, growing your technology from knowledge harvested from deep within your genius, you girls and women dig up your red clay and hide beneath it. You’re an interesting people who have been on those lands for generations. But you’re a young people. The Enyi Zinariya are old old Africans.

“And contrary to what you all believe, we have technology that puts yours to shame and we’ve had it for centuries.” She paused, letting this news sink in. It wasn’t sinking in to me easily. All that she’d said was so contrary to all that I had been taught that I’d begun to feel a little dizzy.

“We didn’t create it, though,” she continued. “It was brought to us by the Zinariya. Those who were there documented the Zinariya times, but the files were kept on paper and paper does not last. So all we really know is what elders read and then what the elders after those elders remembered and then what the next elders remembered and so on.

“The Zinariya came to us in the desert. They were a golden people, who glinted in the sun. They were solar and had landed in Earth’s desert to rest and refuel on their way to Oomza Uni.”

I couldn’t control myself. “What?” I shrieked.

She chuckled. “Yes. We ‘Desert People’ knew of Oomza Uni before other people on Earth even had mobile phones!”

“Oh my goodness,” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine anyone on Earth back then being able to comprehend the very idea of Oomza Uni. Human beings on Earth hadn’t even had real contact with people from outside yet, and the nonhumans who had had contact with extraterrestrials never bothered to convey anything to human beings. It was centuries later and I, who had been there, was still trying to wrap my brain around the sheer greatness of Oomza Uni.

“Our clan was even smaller and nomadic back then, and we became fast friends with the Zinariya. Though many of them left for Oomza within a few months, a few stayed with us for many years before going on to Oomza. Before leaving, they gave us something to help us communicate with them wherever they were and with each other wherever we were. They also called this ‘zinariya.’ It was a living organism tailored for our blood that every member of the clan drank into his or her system with water. Biological nanoids so tiny that they could comfortably embed themselves into our brains. Once you had them in you, it was like having an astrolabe in your nervous system. You could eat, hear, smell, see, feel, even sense it.”

How had I not been able to guess this? Not that it was due to alien technology, but that they were working with a platform. They were manipulating a virtual platform like the ones astrolabes could project! One that only the Enyi Zinariya could see and access. I felt a sting of shame as I realized why I hadn’t understood something so obvious. My own prejudice. I had been raised to view the Desert People, the Enyi Zinariya, as a primitive, savage people plagued by a genetic neurological disorder. So that’s what I saw.

My grandmother nodded, a knowing smirk on her face. “And once the zinariya was in those who drank it, the nanoids were passed on to offspring through their DNA.” She stopped talking and looked at me, waiting. Seconds passed and I frowned, anxious. I was about to ask if she’d told me all she was going to tell me when it exploded in my mind. My world went fuzzy for a moment and I was glad that I was sitting down. I shut my eyes and grasped at the first mathematical equation I could. Equations were always rotating around me like moons and this thought was soothing. Gently, I let myself tree. Then I opened my eyes, calm and balanced, and faced a very jarring bit of information.

“My father has the zinariya in him,” I said.

My grandmother was looking at me, smirking. “Yes.”

“And so do I and all my siblings.”

“Yes.”

“We carry alien technology.”

“Yes.”

The information tried to knock me down and I sunk deeper into meditation. If I wanted to, I could call up a current and send it streaming across the sand. I am Himba, I said to myself between the splitting and splitting fractals of equations, my most soothing pattern. I am Himba, even if my hair has become okuoko because of my actions and even if I have Enyi Zinariya blood. Even if my DNA is alien.

“Binti,” my grandmother softly said.

“Why can’t I see it? Why can’t any of my siblings or my father? None of us goes about waving our hands, manipulating objects that no one else can see.”

“Your father can and does,” she said. “When he so chooses. Didn’t I tell you I’d just communicated with him? You think a son would abandon his mother? Just because he marries a Himba woman and decides to use his harmonizing skill in ‘civilization’ instead of the hinterland?”

I sighed and pressed my hands to my forehead. I felt so strange. This was all so strange.

“If you could reach my father, why’d you need me to reach out to Okwu?”

“To see if you could,” she said, smiling.

I frowned.

“Now listen,” she said. “The zinariya cannot just be used. It has to be switched on; it has to be activated. If it is not, you can live your whole life without even knowing it’s in you. As you have.”

“How does one switch it on?”

“The clan priestess does it. The Ariya. You will meet her tomorrow.”

* * *

I wanted to turn back.

Oh, I wanted to turn back so badly. Enough was enough was enough was enough. I could have made it home. Then I could have still made the trek out onto the salt trails on my own and caught up with the women and completed my pilgrimage. I could have become a whole woman in my clan, a complete Himba woman. All I had to do was walk into the darkness and use my astrolabe to tell me which way to go. However, we were days into the hinterland and if something did not kill me in the night, my lack of food or a proper water-gathering capture station would.

Plus, I didn’t want to turn back. Why don’t I ever want to do what I’m supposed to do?

* * *

So I went with Grandmother. I went with the Desert People.

It was another forty-eight hours of walking during the night, sleeping during the day, eating dates, flat bread, and palm-oil-rich Enyi Zinariya stews. Three more times, I saw Mwinyi protect us from packs of predatory animals—once from another pack of wild dogs and twice from hyenas. And I watched the Enyi Zinariya with new eyes; I especially watched their hands.

In the meantime, I barely touched my astrolabe. There was so much around me to take in; I just didn’t need it. Nor did I touch the pieces of my edan; I didn’t want to think about it. Okwu checked on me once that second day and was even curter than it was the first time.

You okay, Binti?

Yes.

Good.

That was all. On the third, it didn’t check in at all. I tried reaching it later that day as I had the first time, but it didn’t respond. I wondered what it was doing back at the Root, but I wasn’t worried. My grandmother was in touch with my father, so everyone knew everything anyway.

* * *

On the fourth night, the land changed. We simply came to the end of the sand dunes and the beginning of smooth white limestone. And soon after that, we reached a sudden drop and before I could understand what was happening and what I was seeing, I heard joyous ululating.

Gold People

The Enyi Zinariya lived in a vast network of caves in a huge limestone cliff. Within the bowels of these caves were winding staircases that led from cave to cave, family to family. Some caves were tiny, no larger than a closet, others were as vast as the Root. Upon arrival, I was taken for a quick tour of my grandmother’s family’s caves. I met so many of her people, young to old, all enthusiastically waving their hands about, that I could not understand the logic of where people lived.

It seemed everyone could stay wherever he or she was most comfortable, from child to elder. I saw a cave where an old man and his teenage granddaughter lived, the girl’s parents (one of whom was the old man’s daughter) living in a cave connected by a narrow tunnel. The old man and granddaughter were both obsessed with studying, collecting, and documenting stones, so their cave was full of stone piles and stacks of yellowing paper with scribbled research.

“Best to just have only one cave full of rocks,” her mother told me with a laugh. “Those two are happy together.” My grandmother’s cave was tiny, but sparse and tidy with colorful shaggy blue rugs, delicate mobiles hanging from the ceiling made of crystals one of her daughters had collected, and bottles of scented oils they specialized in making. The room also smelled immaculate.

It was brightly lit by a large circular solar lamp in the room’s center. What was most striking was that my grandmother’s cave was full of plants. It reminded me of one of the Third Fish’s breathing rooms. There were pots with leafy green vines tumbling out of them hung near the high ceiling beside her bed. There were several large woven baskets full of sand with complex light green treelike succulents growing from them and dry bioluminescent vines that grew directly on the cave’s walls. Right there in the cave, my grandmother was growing five different types of tomatoes, three types of peppers, and some type of fruiting plant that I could not name.

“I’m a botanist,” she said, putting her satchel down. “Your grandfather was, too.”

“Was?”

She nodded. “He was Himba.” And that was all she would say, though there was clearly so much more. I wanted to ask why he left the Himba and if he stayed in touch at all. I wanted to ask how he felt when my father decided to leave and return to the Himba. I wanted to ask if this was where my father had stayed when he was a child. I wanted to ask why she loved plants. I wanted to ask why she lived alone when everyone else in the village lived happily with many, even in the smaller caves. Instead, I looked at my grandmother’s many thriving plants and breathed the lush air that smelled so different from the other caves and the dry desert outside.

I stopped at a small yellow flower growing from a dry root in a pot bigger than my hand. This was the same type of flower that had been growing on the edan years ago when I’d found it.

“What’s this one?” I asked.

“I call it ola edo,” she said. “Means ‘hard to find, hard to grow’.” She laughed, “And not very pretty. Okay, time for you to rest, Binti. Tomorrow is your day.”

As I had in the Third Fish’s breathing chamber, I slept well here.

The Ariya

The Ariya’s cave was a mile from the cave village in the center of a dried lake.

“Something used to live in it, back when this was a lake,” Mwinyi said as we walked. “Maybe even dug the hole in the rock, itself.”

“How do you know?” I said, looking at the ground as we walked. At some point, the smooth limestone had become craggy, making it hard to walk. I had to concentrate on not tripping over jutting rock.

“It’s in the Collective,” he said, glancing at me. “That’s the Enyi Zinariya’s memory that we all can touch.”

I nodded.

“But no one knows exactly what kind of creature it was,” he said. He waved his hands before him.

“Did you just tell her we’re close?” I asked.

He looked sharply at me, frowning. “How’d you—”

“I’m not a fool,” I said.

He grunted.

I laughed and pointed up ahead. “Plus, I see something just up there. A hole or something.”

To call it a hole was to put it lightly. The opening in the hard ground was the size of a house. When we stepped up to it, I noticed two things. The first was that there was a large bird circling directly above the opening. The second was that rough stone steps were carved into the stone walls of the hole wound all the way to the bottom.

We descended the steps, Mwinyi going first. I ran my hand along the abrasive wall as I recited soft equations in my head. I called up a soft current and the mild friction from the current and my hand running over the coarse stone was pleasant beneath my fingertips. The deep cavern’s walls were lined with books, so many books. The location of the sun must have been directly above, for the strong light of midday pleasantly flooded into the space. However, along with the light, bioluminescent vines grew in and lit the darker corners.

She stood in the shadows, beside a shelf of books, her arms crossed over her chest. “You haven’t changed a bit,” she said. Nearly a decade later, her bushy crown of hair a little grayer, her face a little wiser, and I still would know this woman anywhere. Could old women grow taller over the years?

“Hello, Mma,” I said, looking up at her. I used the Himba term of respect because I didn’t know what else to use.

“Binti,” she said, pulling me into a tight hug. “Welcome to my home.”

“Thank you for inviting me,” I said.

She gave Mwinyi a tight hug, as well. “Thanks for bringing her. How was the walk?”

“As expected,” he said.

“Come back for her at sundown.”

“Ugh,” I blurted, slumping. It was morning and I hadn’t expected this to be an all-day thing. Though maybe I should have; springing things like this on me seemed to be the Enyi Zinariya way.

Mwinyi nodded, winked at me, and left.

She turned back to me. “Don’t you know how to go with the flow yet?” she asked. “Adjust.”

“I just didn’t think that . . .”

“You saw the Night Masquerade,” she said. “That’s no small thing. Why expect what you expect?” Before I could answer, she said, “Come and sit down.”

I took one more glance at Mwinyi, who was now near the top of the stairs, and followed the old woman.

We moved deeper into the cave and sat on a large round blue rug. It was cool and dark here, the air smelling sweet with incense. The place reminded me of a Seventh Temple, mostly empty and quiet. But she didn’t remind me of a Seven priestess at all. She wasn’t demure, she didn’t cover her head with an orange scarf, she wore no otjize, and she got straight to the point. “Why do you think you saw the Night Masquerade?” she asked. “You’re not a man.”

“Is it even real?” I asked.

“Don’t answer a question with a question. Why do you think you saw it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Remember when we first met?”

“Yes.”

“Why were you out there?”

“I found that place, I liked it,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to be out there, I know.”

“And look where it got you.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you hadn’t found the edan, would you have questioned and grown? Would you have gone? And even if you would have, would you be alive now?”

It came suddenly in that way that it had been for so many months. The rage. I felt it prick me like a needle in my back and my okuoko twitched. I took a deep breath, trying to calm it. “It doesn’t matter,” I muttered, my nostrils flaring.

“Why?”

Another wave of rage washed through my body and I angrily reached into my pocket, glad to have a reason to move. I felt my okuoko wildly writhing on my head and Ariya’s eyes went to them, calmly watching their motion. No matter, I thought, bringing out the small pouch. I leaned forward, breathing heavily through my flared nostrils, and wildly dumped it all out before her onto the carpet. The sound of tumbling metal pieces echoed and then came a thunk as the golden grooved center fell out. I motioned to it with my hands to emphasize it all. “Because I broke it!” I shouted, my voice cracking. “I broke it! I’m a harmonizer and I de-harmonized an edan!” My voice echoed around and up the cavern. Then silence.

I should have treed to calm myself. This was Ariya, priestess of the Enyi Zinariya, I’d just met her, and here I was behaving like a barbarian. “I know,” I added. “I’m unclean. This was why I came home. For cleansing through my pilgrimage. But I didn’t go . . . I’m here instead . . .” I trailed off and just watched her stare at the pieces and the golden center. What felt like minutes passed, giving me time to calm down. My okuoko grew still. The rest of my body relaxed. And my edan was still broken. I broke it, I thought.

“Unclean? No,” Ariya finally said, shaking her head. “That part of you that is Meduse now, you just need to get that under control.”

In one sentence, she explained something that had been bothering me for a year. That’s all it was. The random anger and wanting to be violent, that was just Meduse genetics in me. Nothing is wrong with me? I thought. Not unclean? It’s just . . . a new part of me I need to learn to control? I’d come all this way to go on my pilgrimage because I’d thought my body was trying to tell me something was wrong with it. I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, but I’d thought I’d broken myself because of the choices I’d made, because of my actions, because I’d left my home to go to Oomza Uni. Because of guilt. The relief I felt was so all encompassing that I wanted to lie down on the rug and just sleep.

Ariya slowly got up, her knees creaking. She dusted off her long blue dress. “Sometimes, the obvious is too obvious,” she muttered, walking away. Then over her shoulder, she said, “Stay there.”

I watched her ascend the stairs and when she reached the top, she walked off.

I lay on my back and sighed. “Just Meduse DNA,” I muttered. “Or whatever it is they have for genetic code. That’s all.” I laughed, sitting up on my elbows. My eyes fell on the disassembled edan still lying on the rug. I stopped laughing.

* * *

She was gone for what might have been an hour. I’d dozed off right on that round blue rug, lulled by the cool darkness and incense. The sound of her sandals at the top of the stairs woke me. She stepped onto the first stair, paused, and then quickly descended. The moment her upper body came into sight, I saw the creature. Was I seeing what I was seeing? When she reached the bottom of the stairs, I stood up. It was an almost involuntary action. But what else was one to do when a great woman came down the stairs with a great owl perched on her arm?

The owl was about two feet tall with white and tan feathers, a black bill, a rounded frowning bushy eyebrowed face, and wide yellow eyes. At the top of its head were brown and black feathers that looked like horns. Ariya’s arm was protected by a brown leather armband, but that was all the protection she had. The owl could pluck out her eyes, slash her with its long white talons, slap her with its massive powerful wings if it wanted to. Instead, it stared at me with such intensity that I wondered if I should sit back down.

“If it’s waiting outside, then it is right,” she said. “It was right there when I came out. Help me.”

I assisted as she slowly sat down with the owl perched on her arm. I sat across from them and gazed at the enormous bird.

“Is it heavy?” I asked

“Birds who spend most of their lives in the sky can’t be heavy,” she said. “No, this one is light as . . . a feather.”

“Oh,” I said.

“In my forty-five years as priestess, I have not done this,” she said. “Not even once.”

Suddenly, I felt cold. Very very cold. With dismay. Deep down, I knew. From the moment my grandmother told me about the Zinariya, I’d known, really. Change was constant. Change was my destiny. Growth.

“Why?” I still asked.

“Because it’s the only way you can fix it and you have to fix it, so you can use it to do what it needs to do.” The owl hadn’t taken its eyes off of me. “Do you know what zinariya means in the old language?”

I shook my head.

“It means ‘gold.’ That’s the name we gave them because we couldn’t speak their true name with our mouths and because that is what they were made of. Gold. Golden people. Their bodies, their ship, everything about them was gold. They came to the desert because they needed to rest and refuel and they loved the color of the sand . . . gold. Your edan is Zinariya technology; I knew this when I met you. I just thought, since it allowed you to find it, you could solve it without . . . without—”

“Needing to be activated.”

She nodded. “No one who was not one of us has ever known about the zinariya and those who marry out or leave, they’re so ashamed of being Enyi Zinariya that they don’t tell their families.”

“Like my father,” I said. “It’s like having some genetic disease, in a way. If Himba or Khoush knew of it, they’d . . .”

Ariya smiled. “Oh, they know, someone in those clans knows enough to build toxic ideas against us right into their cultures. That’s really why we are so outcast, untouchable to them. To Himba and Khoush we are the savage ‘Desert People,’ not the Enyi Zinariya. No one wants our blood in their line. Anyway, the Collective knows the names and faces of all your siblings and their children.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling a little better. “Well, that is good.”

“But that’s all.”

We stared at each other for a moment.

“Do you want to do this?” she asked.

“Do I need to?”

“Hmm. You’re still ashamed of what you are.”

“No,” I said. “I’m Himba and proud of that.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Not your grandmother. She is Enyi Zinariya. And we are a matriarchal clan, so your father is, too.”

“No,” I snapped. “Papa is Himba.” I could feel the sting of my own nearsightedness. It was irritating and pushing me off-balance in a way that made it hard for me to think. My confusion evoked a flash of Meduse anger.

“Do you want it?” she asked.

I opened my mouth to answer, but I didn’t speak it because what I’d have spoken was stupid. It was wrong. But it was the truth, too. If I went through with this, I was taking another step outside what it was to be Himba, away from myself, away from my family. I wanted to hide from the owl’s unwavering gaze.

“Do you want it?” she asked again.

I sighed loudly and shook my head. “Priestess Ariya, I don’t understand any of this. If the edan is Zinariya technology, why does the outer metal kill Meduse? I’m part Meduse now, so why doesn’t my edan kill me? I don’t understand what is happening to me, why my edan fell apart, what that ball is, why it matters, why I’m here! I came here to go on pilgrimage; I’m not even there. I’m here. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going!” I stared at her with wide eyes, breathing heavily. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t tree.

I was seeing all the Khoush in the dining room on the Third Fish. Dead. Chests burst open by the stingers of Meduse. Moojh-ha ki-bira, the “great wave.” The flow of death like water I’d fallen into that in some twisted way gave me a new life. I leaned to the side, pressing my hand to my chest. Angry tears stung my eyes. How could Okwu have been a part of this slaughter? Why did the Seven allow this to happen? Yet, drowning in the waters of death gave me new life. Not drowning in it, carried by it.

“Shallow breaths, increased heart rate, you’re having a panic attack,” my astrolabe in my pocket announced in its stiff female voice. “I suggest you drop into mathematical meditation.” I wanted to smash it to bits.

The priestess did nothing but watch me. The owl puffed out its throat and hooted three times. Soft and peaceful. My eyes wide as I stared into the owl’s, I inhaled a deep breath, filling my lungs to full capacity. When I exhaled, the owl hooted softly again and the sound calmed me more. Then it hooted again, leaning down and bringing its neck low near its feathery legs, as it held my eyes. Soon the panic attack passed.

“Do you want it?” Ariya asked a fourth time.

The voice came from deep in me, but it was familiar. I’d been hearing it since I left home, ignoring its steady matter-of-fact low voice: “You did not succeed your father. No man will marry you. Selfish girl. Failed girl.” I was supposed to be these things in order to be. I had not taken my place within the collective. This had left me feeling exposed and foundationless, even as I pursued my dreams. Now here I was about to make another choice that would further ensure I could never go back.

I shut my eyes and thought of Dele, who’d been my friend but had looked at me like a pariah when we’d last spoken. His judgment and rejection had stung me in a way I’d not been prepared for and reminded me that I’d made my choice. And my choice had been to come home. Dele has always seen things so simply, I thought. Even when they’re infinitely complex. He’s not a harmonizer. I opened my eyes and looked at Ariya.

“What will it . . . do?” I breathed.

“Connect you to an entire people and a memory. And allow you to solve your edan.”

“I’ll be a desert person,” I moaned. I blinked, wanting to kick myself. “I’m sorry. I meant to say Enyi Zinariya. Himba people see you as savages. I’ve already been changed by the Meduse. Now I’ll never . . .”

“What will you be?” she asked. “Maybe it is not up to you.”

I looked at my hands, wanting to bring them to my face and inhale the scent of the otjize covering them. I wanted to go home. I wanted to chase crabs near the lake until the sun set and then turn around to look at the Root and admire the glow of the bioluminescent plants that grew near the roof. I wanted to argue with my sisters in the living room. I wanted to walk into the village square with my best friend Dele to buy olives. I wanted to sit in my father’s shop and construct an astrolabe so sophisticated, my father would clap arthritis-free hands with delight. I wanted to play math games with my mother where sometimes she’d win and sometimes I’d win. I wanted to go home.

More tears rolled down my face as I realized I’d left my jar of otjize in my grandmother’s cave with my other things. I flared my nostrils and squinted in an attempt to prevent any more tears from falling. It worked. I steadied. I was clear now. I wanted to go home, but I wanted to solve the edan more. Everything comes with a sacrifice. I wiped my face with my hand and looked at my otjize-stained palm. “Okay,” I whispered. I straightened my back. “What’s the owl for?” I asked in a strained voice.

“I’m no mathematical harmonizer, but Mwinyi told me what treeing feels like, what it does.” She paused. “I suggest you do that when I start. From the start. Do it while you are calm.”

“Okay,” I said. “But what of the owl?”

“She’s not an owl,” Ariya said.

Initiative

“Drink this,” she said, handing me the clay cup.

It tasted both sweet and smoky, and as I swallowed the liquid it coated my throat and warmed my belly. She took the cup from me and set it on the ground beside her. We were sitting outside in the hot sun, not far from the lip of the underground cave. Here, I really noticed the soft whoosh of the air moving up and out of the cave. Above, the owl flew in wide circles.

Ariya handed me the long feather the owl had allowed her to pluck from its wing. When she’d taken it from the owl, it had flapped its wing right after she’d plucked it, as if it were in pain and trying to beat the pain away. When she handed it to me, I noticed that the end of the feather was needle sharp.

“She has no name,” Ariya now said. “But she’s the only animal alive from back when the Zinariya were among us. She used to live with the one that gave the zinariya to the first group of us. They had no clear leader and were all so connected that you couldn’t tell them apart, except for that particular one who was always with this creature. Today, she looks like a horned owl, but there are other days . . . when she does not. Anyway, when they left, she was given many things, including a task.”

I looked at the feather tip. In the sunlight, it glinted the tiniest bit; it was wet with something.

“Prick your fingertip with it,” she said. “Hard. Then hold it there.”

I bit my lip. I didn’t like doing harm to myself on purpose or accidentally.

“It has to be you who does it. Your choice. There are catalysts in the feather and they need to enter your bloodstream.”

“Okay,” I whispered. But before I did, I said, “Z = z^2 + c.” It split and split and split in its lovely complex and convoluted way. Faster and faster, until I saw the coiling design in my mind and before me. Soon that became a current. A soft blue current that I harmonized with a second current I called up from the same equation. With my mind, I asked them to wrap around me, to protect me. And in the sunshine in the middle of the hinterland, as the priestess of the Desert People who were the Enyi Zinariya watched, I plunged the sharp tip of the feather into the flesh of my left thumb.

In the stories of the Seven, life originated from the rich red clay that had soaked up rains. Microorganisms were called into active being when one of the Seven willed it and the others became interested in what would happen. That clay was Mother, otjize. I was clay now. I was watching from afar, feeling nothing, but able to control. I held the feather to my finger. And then, from that place waving with equations, the blue currents braiding around each other connecting around me, my body acted without my command.

When I was five, I had asked my mother what it was like to give birth. She smiled and said that giving birth was the act of stepping back and letting your body take over. That childbirth was only one of thousands of things the body could do without the spirit. I remember asking, “If you step away from your body to give birth, then who is there doing the birthing?” I wondered this now, as my body acted.

I couldn’t see it happening, but I could distantly sense it—my body was pulling something, energy from the ground. From the earth, from deep. My body was touching the Mother, nudging her awake, and then telling her to come. The Seven are great, I thought. This was not my pilgrimage where I would have honored the Seven and entered the space only those who have earned the right could enter. I would probably never have that now. This was something else.

The Mother came.

I was treeing, but now I felt her fully. My entire body was alight. If I had not been treeing, what would have been left of my sanity? How could those who could not tree ever go through this? The glow within me became a shine that engulfed me, one that took on the color of the currents I still circulated. For a moment, I glimpsed up at Ariya and met her wide surprised eyes. I was reminded of my teacher Professor Okpala back on Oomza Uni that day I saw . . .

Iridescent white lights drowned it all out, through a jellylike substance.

Then darkness.

Then I was there again . . .

. . . I was in space. Infinite blackness. Weightless. Flying, falling, ascending, traveling, through a planet’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted my flesh like chips of glittery ice. I opened my mouth a bit to breathe, the dust hitting my lips. Could I breathe? Living breath bloomed in my chest from within me and I felt my lungs expand, filling with it. I relaxed.

“Who are you?” a voice asked. It spoke in the dialect of my family and it came from everywhere . . .

I fell out of the tree.

My okuoko were writhing. Then . . . rain? Wetness? Something was tearing. I was coughing, as I inhaled what my lungs could not tolerate. The gas was all around me, then it was not. I inhaled deeply, again, filling my lungs with air this time.

I opened my eyes wide. To the desert. And the smell of smoke. Ariya was feet away, her mouth open with shock, as she smacked at her garments. Smoke was rising all around her. She was putting out fire. Her clothes were burning. From my current? I wildly wondered. Did I lose control of it? Never in my life had I done such a thing.

I put a hand out to hold myself up. As a harmonizer, you saw numbers and equations in everything, circulating around you like the eye floaters you see on the surface of your eye if you pay too close attention. I was used to that. However, what I was seeing now was alien. Circles of various proportions from the size of a pea to that of a large tomato, and various colors all arranged in an order, all around me. They pulsed, becoming transparent and then solid, with each breath, with each movement, with each of my thoughts. Nevertheless, there was something far more urgent that I had to deal with.

“Okwu,” I said, staring at Ariya. My heart felt as if it were slashing up the inside of my chest. “My Meduse. Have they killed it? I have to go back.”

Ariya said nothing. I got up on shaky legs. “I have to go,” I said, tears filling my eyes. I turned and looked in the direction Mwinyi had brought me. From afar, I could see a glimpse of the village caves. I took a step when I noticed something falling out of the sky. It was red orange, like my otjize, and it was on fire. It came right at me and I would never be able to outrun it.

I turned to it. Let it slam into me and burn me to cinders, I thought. Let it. I watched the fireball hurl toward me. I submitted to my death, as I had submitted to it on the ship when the Meduse had killed everyone. I felt its heat bear down on me and a blast of wind blew past me that was so strong I stumbled and sat down hard on the ground. The pain of it shook me from my hysteria. I blinked away the sandy tears in my eyes. They’d mixed with my otjize, sweat and sand on my skin.

Ariya slowly came to me. “Calm yourself,” she harshly said. She was carrying her walking stick. When had she gotten that? And now, she was leaning on it. “Binti, you have to calm yourself.” The old woman looked toward the village then at me. “You have just been initiated,” she said. “I threw that fireball at you to snap you out of it.”

“You?”

“Hold your hands up,” she said. She held both her hands before her. “Like this. See them. Your will controls the controls. You make them come and go.”

I held my hands up and there were the colored circles again. This time right before my face and solid like hard honey candies. I slowly reached out to it, expecting my hand to pass right through. I tapped on it and I heard the light tick tick of my nail against thin hard material. I pressed it and the words Like this. See them. Your will controls the controls. You make them come and go scrolled out about a foot from my face in otjize red-orange loopy Otjihimba writing.

I touched the words and they faded away like incense smoke and I could softly hear Ariya speak those same words again.

“What is—”

“It’s zinariya,” Ariya said. “You’re now one of us.”

I pressed my hands to the sides of my head, as if I could stop that which I couldn’t stop. Just like the strange sensation of my okuoko when I first felt them, this was . . . this was beautiful. I felt the pain and glory of growth, was straining and shuddering with it. The stress of it caused a ringing in my eyes as I looked around, thinking hard. Then I was seeing the words. Binti? Why are you . . . is that you? Why are you . . . have they . . . Oh no, no, no, what have you done?

I sat there, a sob caught in my throat. Even in that moment of strangeness, the utter dismay so clear in his words made my heart sink. I felt a powerful regret and wished I had not had the zinariya activated. Anything to not inspire such disappointment in my father, after all I’d already done to him, to everyone, to myself. I fought for focus. “Papa!” I shouted. “What is happening? What happened?”

“He won’t hear you,” Ariya said. “You have to send.”

Astrolabe, I thought frantically. Like astrolabe. But more primitive. I couldn’t see him but I could “send” to him. I did it intuitively, imagining I was using the holographic mode of my astrolabe where it would project a page in the air, type onto it, and move things around. As I did so, I was vaguely aware of the fact that I was doing those hand movements the Enyi Zinariya were known for, like a madwoman. And at the moment, I was.

Papa, I sent. What has happened? What happened to Okwu? Where are you? I am in the hinterland.

His answer came immediately. Why did you allow this? You used to be such a beautiful girl. His words hit me like a slap and I felt it slip through my body and for a moment, I forgot everything. I rubbed my forehead then ran a finger over my okuoko. Mine, I thought. These are mine. I raised my hands and wrote, Papa, I’m fine. Please, what is happening?

There was a long pause before the words came. And when they came, I sat back down on the ground and the words moved down with me. The Khoush came and there was a fight with Okwu. It took many, but they may have killed it. Now the Meduse are coming. We can’t get out. The Khoush have set fire to the Root. We cannot get out. But the walls will protect us. The Root is the root. We will be okay. Stay where you are.

Papa! I sent. I sent again and again, but he did not respond. My words wouldn’t even melt away. They wouldn’t go! I shuddered with rage and then grabbed some sand and threw it, screaming, tears flying from my eyes. I stared out into the desert for a long moment. I stared and stared. Sand and sky, sky and sand. I tried to reach Okwu. Again, nothing.

I dropped into meditation, the numbers flew like water, the controls faded but did not disappear, the okuoko on my head writhed. I stood up. “I’m going home,” I told Ariya. She only nodded, her attention on the figure coming up the desert. It was Mwinyi and he was leading a camel. “You’ll go with him,” Ariya said.

“The Enyi Zinariya won’t come with us?” I asked.

She only looked at me. Then she said, “We’d come if there was a fight to fight.”

I didn’t ask her what she meant. Above, the owl circled.

* * *

When Mwinyi and I climbed onto the camel and got moving, the owl followed us overhead for several miles. Then it turned back. It returned to Ariya, I assumed. Its job was complete. I was Himba, a master harmonizer. Then I was also Meduse, anger vibrating in my okuoko. Now I was also Enyi Zinariya, of the Desert People gifted with alien technology. I was worlds. What was home? Where was home? Was home on fire? I considered these things as Mwinyi and I rode. But not for very long. Mwinyi had brought my satchel and now I reached into it. I worked my fingers into the pouch to touch the metal pieces of my still broken edan. I grasped the grooved golden ball. It was warm.

There was no fight to fight, Ariya had said. We’ll see, I thought, grasping the huge camel’s thick coarse fur. We will see.

AND THEN THERE WERE (N-ONE)

Martha Wells

I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She listened, made suggestions; I countered her, then argued her part, then made both arguments, then reversed them again.

“How do I know it’s not a hoax?” I asked, studying the list of backing organizations for the twentieth time. “The website looks legit, but how could it not be a hoax?”

“Look at it this way,” Mabel said. “Either you’ll be part of a ground-breaking event in human history, or a groundbreaking psych experiment. Someone benefits either way. And you’ve never been to eastern Canada, so at least you get to see someplace new even if you just end up standing in a field somewhere looking silly.”

She always had a way of making an adventure out of things that would otherwise stress me out. Four months later, I flew to Nova Scotia, took a bus to a seaside town too small for a dot on a map, boarded a ferry to Secord Island, and stepped through the waiting portal into an alternate-reality resort hotel lobby swarming with Sarah Pinskers. At least two hundred of us by my estimation, with more straggling in.

It was easy to tell who had just arrived. We were the ones planted in the lobby, bags in hand, eyes wide and mouth open. My body and face, even my expression, reflected back at me in two hundred funhouse mirrors. Stranger even than that, an energy in the air that I couldn’t quite explain, a feeling that every single Sarah had stepped through to the exact same thought, to the same curious-amazement-horror-wonder, to the same rug-yanking confirmation that the invitation had been real and we were no longer alone, or maybe we were more alone than we had ever been.

Large groups gathered around the hotel check-in desk and SarahCon registration, no doubt trying to pick themselves off the long lists of near-identical names. A third faction, which I decided to join, had adjourned to the lobby bar, hoping to use alcohol to blunt the weirdness of coming face to face with our multiverse selves. I found a barstool and shoved my suitcase and backpack under my feet. Space was tight amid the other suitcases and backpacks.

“The stout,” I said when I caught the bartender’s attention, pointing at the third tap handle.

He grinned and held up a glass. “Seventh one in a row. You all go for the stout or one of the good whiskeys.”

I filed that information away. Took a sip. The Sarah next to me did the same. We both put our glasses down at the same time. Both raised eyebrows at each other.

The bartender hovered. “Room number for your tab?”

“I haven’t checked in yet. Cash isn’t okay? Oh. The cross-world currency thing.”

“You can put her drink on my tab,” said the me next to me. She wore her hair in a long braid down her back. I’d worn mine that way when I was thirteen.

I lifted my glass and toasted in her direction. “Thanks. Appreciated.”

“My pleasure. I’ve never bought myself a drink before. Well, not like this anyhow. Do you know how many there are altogether? How many of us here, I mean.”

I shook my head. “No clue. You could ask someone at registration.”

A third Sarah, maybe a decade older than me, joined our conversation. My parents were married years before they had me. I’d always wondered if I’d still be me if they hadn’t waited. “I’m sure she’ll tell us the numbers in her opening address.”

“She?” asked One Braid. “Sorry if it’s a stupid question. I checked into my room but I haven’t braved convention registration yet. I hate lines.”

Older Sarah rummaged in a SarahCon commemorative tote bag and pulled out a program. She turned to a bio page and started reading. “’Sarah Pinsker [R0D0]’—I don’t know what ‘R-0-D-0’ means—‘made the discovery creating the multiverse portal. She is a quantologist at Johns Hopkins University.’” She looked up. “I think that’s her over there. She’s been rushing back and forth as long as I’ve been sitting here.”

We followed her pointing finger to a Sarah bustling through the lobby, walkie-talkie to her lips. Her hair was pixie-short, defeating the frizz that plagued me. She looked harried but better put together than most of us, elegant in a silk blouse and designer jeans that fit and flattered. I had never been anything approaching elegant. Never had the guts to cut my hair that short, either.

“Quantologist,” I repeated.

Older Sarah paged through the program. “It looks like there are four other quantologist Sarahs on the host committee.”

One Braid scratched the back of her neck. “I’ve never heard of quantology. I don’t think it’s a real field of study where I’m from.”

“Not where I’m from, either. Where are you from? I mean, answer however you want.”

“I’m from all over the place,” One Braid said. My usual answer. “But I live in Seattle.”

Eerie. “Me, too. I went out for a job after college and stayed.”

“Same! Summer job, then I met my girlfriend and settled for good. I’m in West Seattle. How about you?”

“Ballard.” I raised my glass to clink hers, though that particular girlfriend and I hadn’t lasted.

Older Sarah chugged her beer and waved for another before turning back to us. “Our Seattle was destroyed in an earthquake.”

We both stared at her. She sipped her fresh beer and continued. “I never got out west myself, so it wasn’t a personal thing for me, but it was horrible. Four thousand people died. The city never recovered.”

I pictured our little house bucking and buckling, our yard splitting down the middle. Mabel, my friends and neighbors, the coffee shop up the street. Shuddered. It was too much to imagine. “This is so damn weird.”

Older Sarah waved her program at me. “That’s the name of the first panel. ‘This Is So Damn Weird: Strategies for Navigating SarahCon Without Losing Your Mind.’”

One Braid and I both reached for our beers.

The registration line thinned as a programmed cocktail hour began in some lounge somewhere. Since I’d already been drinking for a while, I took the opportunity to check in and register.

“Find yourself on the list,” said the Sarah behind the convention registration table. I could tell she was fried, like she was already too tired to remember how to put expressions on her face. I knew that feeling.

Looking at the list, it was easy to see why she’d had a long day already. My mind was still boggling at the handful of Sarahs I’d met; she’d come face to face with all of us.

The list grouped us by surname first. Mine the most common, a trunk instead of a branch. I paged past, curious. Mostly Pinskers like myself. Made sense if we were the closest realities to the Pinsker who had invited us. There were other random surnames I chalked up to marriage. A full page of Sarah Sweetloves. I’d never really considered changing my name for anyone, even Mabel, but apparently others had.

After surname came city, divided evenly between Seattle, Toronto, and Baltimore, with a few outliers in Northampton, Somerville, Asheville, New York, Pretoria. After that came birthdate, occupation. The occupation list read like a collection of every “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I’d ever answered. Geneticist, writer, therapeutic riding instructor, teacher, history professor, astronomer, journalist, dog trainer, barn manager. I was the only insurance investigator. In fairness, it had never exactly been on the greatest hits list.

Address messed with me the most for some reason. Someone else here shared my full name, birthdate, and address. She worked as a program director at a non-profit. That was the only place our lines on the list differed. Where else did we diverge? Did we move around our house in the same ways at the same times? Had she fallen in love with the kitchen first, too? Did she live with an alternate Mabel?

“There’s a Making Connections board over there.” The volunteer behind the table pointed to a poster on the far wall of the lobby. She sounded like she’d said it a hundred times already. “In case you come across somebody you absolutely have to meet. Judging from your face, you just found somebody on the list who intrigues you. Somebody who wears the same life as you, or near to it.”

It brought to my mind those grade school puzzle pages with six or nine near-identical cats or robots drawn in a grid, where you were supposed to find the matched pair hidden among the ones with slight differences. In the same moment I had that thought, a Sarah perusing another copy of the list said it to me.

I looked her over. The invitation had said, “Be yourself.” We both wore jeans and Wonder Woman T-shirts, hers with a graphic from the 70s TV show and mine from the 2005 Gina Torres movie. We both had our hair pulled back in messy ponytails. The only difference I noticed was that her skin was much better than mine.

The volunteer didn’t bother to look down at the list when I highlighted my name and returned it to her. She handed me a program and a tote bag. “You can decide whether you want to bother with a nametag.”

I looked at the markers and stickers piled on the table. “Is there a point?”

“Not with a name like yours, unless you have a nickname you think is particularly original. Though it probably isn’t. There are a few non-Sarahs. They’re the only ones who really need to bother. Right at the beginning we tried making people choose a nickname, but the first eight tried their identical middle names, and then four had the same roller derby name, and three asked for the name they all used as counselors at Girl Scout camp, and we gave up.”

It didn’t seem worth it. I went over to the hotel check-in line, made slightly easier with individual registration numbers. The desk clerk was one of us too, in a business suit and a manager’s gold nametag that suggested this was probably her home reality.

“The credit card you registered with will be charged by a third party billing company that’s handling the cross-world weirdness. Bill anything you buy to your room.” She spoke with an accent I couldn’t place.

“Where are you from?” I asked her.

“I live just over on the mainland. You?”

“Seattle.”

A sympathetic look crossed her face.

I tried to change the subject before she told me Seattle was gone in this reality too. “So why is this being held on Secord Island?”

“Everyone asks.” She smiled, showing gapped teeth. She’d never gotten braces. “It’s a sovereign island off the east coast of Canada. You know Canada?”

I nodded, wondering what variation had prompted that question.

She continued. “Sovereign island, at least in this reality, so the organizer didn’t have to worry about visas or passports. You’re all allowed here, then back to where you came from.”

“What if someone tried to skip off this island? Not that I would. I’m an insurance investigator. Professional questioner of motives.”

Another grin. “That’s why all the boats were sent away for the weekend. We’re stuck with you, or you’re stuck with us.”

She put a keycard in a paper sleeve and pulled out a pen. “Do you have keycards in your world?”

“Yeah.” I glanced at the number she’d written, committed it to memory, pocketed the card, and handed her back the sleeve to discard.

“You’re the only one so far to do that,” she said. “Congrats on being original.”

I gave her a little salute and went to find my room in the annex, the cheapest room available when I’d registered. Her directions led out of the original building and down an L-shaped hallway tacked onto the back. I passed a stressed-looking housekeeper pushing a cart full of cleaning supplies, then two Sarahs trying to wrangle a cot into a tiny room, under the direction of a third, who looked up and waved. They must have taken advantage of the room-sharing option in the questionnaire that followed the RSVP. I’d liked that offer; it meant the Sarahs who attended wouldn’t only be those with the time and privilege to do so. That had even gotten Mabel to tone down some of her teasing about the whole event.

Around the next bend, a different type of cold than the air-conditioned lobby, that of Canadian November penetrating a closed system. Someone had propped open the fire door at the hall’s end. I unlocked my door, dropped my bags in my bathtub, then went to get a look outside.

When I leaned out the fire door, I found two Sarahs smoking, shoulders hunched against a biting wind. A vivid bruise of a cloudbank pressed down overhead, making it seem much later than it was. The air tasted like cigarettes and salt water. We had a dramatic landlocked view of a loading dock and a couple of dumpsters, but I felt the sea lurking nearby. I felt oddly displaced, jetlagged without the jet. Portal lag, maybe.

“Join us?” The curls spilling down her shoulders were dyed carrot orange, a color that said it was not trying for anything natural. They looked wild and luxurious, when I only ever managed feral at best.

The other looked less healthy. Beneath her toque, her cheeks were gaunt, and the No Good Deeds T-shirt under her bomber jacket swam on her. She held out a pack of American Spirits.

“I’m good,” I said. “But hey, No Good Deeds. They were a cool band.”

She grinned, showing yellowed teeth. “ARE a good band. Bam! Diver-gence point! In my world they’re on album number six and still awesome.”

“The hall isn’t getting too cold, is it?” Orange Curls asked. “The door locks if we shut it. I had to walk around the whole building earlier. It’s huge.”

The other lit a new cigarette off her old one, then stubbed out the butt with a worn combat boot. “I’ve got to go back inside in a minute anyhow.”

She didn’t look like she was in any hurry. I assured them it wasn’t too cold, mostly because I didn’t want to be That Person, which they probably knew. We didn’t like to inconvenience people.

“So why are you here?” Orange Curls was the chattier of the two.

“What do you mean? I got an invitation.”

No Good Deeds shook her head. “She’s asking what made you accept. Excitement, curiosity, wonder, a desire to exploit? Not that you’re limited to those choices.”

I thought about it. Mabel had said the whole thing was an exercise in narcissism.

She’d read the invitation, then tossed it on the table, laughing. “Who discovers how to access infinite realities and then uses that discovery to invite her alternate selves to a convention?”

“Some other me, apparently.” As I’d said it, I’d known it was true. “Why, what would you do?”

Her response came easily. “Talk to world leaders or scientists. Find out why one reality is running out of water and another is doing fine, or how one made the transition from fossil fuel to solar. Check in on the state of democracy. Something useful. Anyway, you hate decisions. This’ll just make you question every choice you ever made. Should you have gone to grad school? Should you have stayed with this ex or that one? How would your life be different if you’d managed to buy that horse you loved as a teenager? If I were you, I wouldn’t want to know the answers. I mean, you’ve got to go, obviously, but it’s a wasted opportunity if you don’t talk about some of that stuff.”

Everything she’d said was true, like usual.

I looked back at Orange Curls. “Curiosity. I guess I’m here because I’m curious. And maybe a little because if I stayed home I’d always wonder about it.”

The smokers shot each other a satisfied look.

“She’s asked twenty-one Sarahs that question now,” No Good Deeds said, “and that’s been the answer every time. Even the same phrasing.”

I retreated to my room. Stripped the bedspread, checked the mattress for bedbugs. Searched the room and the bathroom for cameras and peepholes in case we really were all part of someone’s psych experiment.

Concerns assuaged, I dumped my backpack’s contents onto the table and repacked the stuff I wanted to carry with me for the evening, then flopped onto the bed to read the program. It contained a basic explanation of the multiverse theory, a welcome note, a sponsor page, a thank you page, a map, and “Fun Statistics!” based on the questionnaires we’d filled out prior to arriving. Ninety two percent of us played instruments. Five percent of us owned horses, thirteen percent owned cats, eighty percent owned dogs. One person lived in a world where dogs had been rendered extinct by a virus. So much for fun.

A program schedule took up the rest of the pages. Some of the serious stuff Mabel had wanted to see was mixed in: “Let My World Solve Your World’s Water Problem,” “Climate Change Strategies That Actually Worked.” “The Way It Could Have Been: Political Divergence Points.”

Alongside that, the topics piquing my own curiosity. “Gender, Sexuality, and Me.” “Driving Forces: Favorite Cars, Stolen Cars, Those Who Never Learned to Drive.” “Let’s Talk Family.” “The Babysitting Incident and Other Divergence Points.” “Why We Live Where We Live.” “Horses and Dogs and Cats, Oh My.” “Outliers.” “Yes, Another Horse Panel.” “Music and Art.” Some were listed as panels, others as moderated large-group discussions.

The second evening was filled with concerts and readings and art shows by the more creative among us. Tonight featured a keynote speech by the host, followed by a DJ’ed dance. Normally that wouldn’t be my thing, but the thought of a dance with a self-curated song list—I pictured upbeat soul, Bowie, 80s pop—and an entire room full of enthusiastic but uniformly terrible dancers, excited me more than I’d admit. There’d be nobody to watch who wouldn’t understand. Maybe I wouldn’t even be the worst dancer in the room. A girl could dream.

I glanced at the clock on the table. Enough time for a nap before dinner. The organizers of “This Is So Damn Weird” were probably sitting in an empty room, sighing to themselves, wishing they could grab a few minutes’ sleep too.

We had all just started on our salads in the banquet hall when the Sarah from hotel registration approached my table. Her uniform still made her one of the easier ones to recognize.

The hotel employee knelt by the Sarah to my left, who had my haircut and who was wearing the same T-shirt as me, only with a long sleeved shirt underneath it. She was the only one I’d seen with a prosthetic hand. It was a good prosthetic; I wouldn’t have noticed it if we hadn’t stood at a washroom sink next to each other before the meal. Other than the hand, she’d looked more like me than most; I desperately wanted to figure out where we’d diverged, but hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask her yet.

“Pardon,” said Hotel Sarah. “Did you say earlier you were a detective?”

Prosthetic Hand shook her head. “I wouldn’t have said that. Not anymore. Go fish.”

I traced the scar on my own left wrist and wondered how many worlds you had to travel away from mine before you reached one where Go Fish wasn’t a game.

Hotel Sarah straightened up, put her hands on her hips, scanned the room. I debated not identifying myself, just to observe how she approached the problem of discreetly finding the sole detective in a room full of functionally identical people. My curiosity over why she was looking for me won out. Curiosity and pity; I recognized the panic just under her surface. Everyone at the table recognized it. It rippled over us like a wave.

“Right table, wrong person,” I said in a low voice. “How can I help you?”

Her relief was so obvious I felt guilty for having considered withholding. “Would you mind coming with me?”

Seven faces watched as I stood up from the table: prosthetic hand Sarah, left handed Sarah, bearded Dare, bearded Josh, stubble-faced Joshua—the three of them had sat together to compare notes, they’d said—and two random Sarahs I hadn’t yet managed to meet or distinguish because I was more interested in the others. They reopened questions I had closed for myself. From the way we had all allowed them to center conversation, I guessed that was the case with everyone else who’d sat down at this table, too.

All seven had pushed the olives to the side of their salads, as I had. I pictured dishwashers scraping the entire room’s worth of olives off our plates at meal’s end. Wondered how the organizers had proactively made the entire weekend vegetarian, but forgotten to tell the kitchen we didn’t like olives. Maybe whoever had set the menu was an outlier who assumed they were in the majority.

I stuffed a dinner roll into my bag in case I missed the entire meal. The others all nodded approvingly, knowing we didn’t work well when hungry.

Hotel Sarah led me through the lobby and down another doglegged corridor, this one in the opposite direction of my own. I pictured the building’s aerial footprint, a sprawling figure. We passed a tiny convenience store, a shuttered boutique, a small arcade where a lone Sarah manipulated a claw machine. An elevator waited open at the end of the hall. Once inside, she used a key to unlock it and pressed for the third floor, the top.

The elevator was the slowest I’d ever ridden. I waited for her to tell me where we were going, or why. When no explanation came, I concentrated on figuring out the observable differences between us. There were none, or none beyond the superficial. Her tailored uniform, her short, tight curls versus my shaggy ponytail. She was sizing me up in the same way; I wondered what she saw.

The elevator opened onto a dark room. An enormous nightclub, I realized, as my eyes adjusted. There was a long bar down one side, and on the opposite side a row of well-dressed folding tables holding some kind of display. In the center of the room, dozens of small tables ringed the perimeter of a dance floor. Beyond the dance floor, a high stage with a single podium and a DJ table. It took me another few seconds to notice the slumped figure in the stage’s shadow.

As I approached, I saw what had the hotel manager so spooked: a dead Sarah.

Not me, my logic brain understood, even though some tiny part of me screamed something was wrong. I’d made it through the entire afternoon talking with people who were more like me than an identical twin would be, but the body was somehow more real. The others down at dinner all had stories to remind me I was still myself, that I could still be differentiated. Absent stories and quirks, absent a person talking at me to prove we were not the same, the vacuum came rushing in. Who was she? In what ways was she me, in what ways was she not? Who would mourn her? I tried to imagine the shape of my own absence from my own world. It was an impossible exercise.

I struggled to regain control over myself. “You know I’m an insurance investigator, right? Dead bodies aren’t my area of expertise.”

“You’re the closest thing we’ve got. None of us are medical doctors, and it’s too late for one anyhow, and I figured you investigate things. I couldn’t find any of the organizers, so I thought I’d look for you.” She must have had a good memory for details, if she managed to find me in that dining hall based on one short conversation. Maybe that was a thing we all had in common.

Anyway, she was right: I did like a good puzzle. Not that I had any idea if this even was one yet. “Are there lights in here?”

She disappeared from my side, and the house lights came up a moment later. The room looked much smaller without the depth of shadow.

The body wasn’t me, I told myself. I concentrated on the differences rather than the eerie familiarity. Her cheeks were hollower than mine. She had more freckles, close-cropped hair. My empty stomach lurched.

She was starting to cool to the touch. I felt for a pulse, though I didn’t expect to find one. Her eyes were open, her pupils tiny in the blue. For some reason it brought the 90s John Lennon song “Change Your Tune” into my head, lyrics twisted. You’ll change your eyes, dear.

I shook the song away. Focus. She slumped against the stage, half-sitting, head leaning back against the stage. She wore a silk dress with a hibiscus flower print, louder than anything I’d wear, but not in a bad way.

“What’s your story?” I asked her under my breath.

I crouched to examine her hands and arms, trying not to move her too much. The nails had been bitten painfully short, but there was nothing under them that implied a fight. Some bruises and track marks on the insides of her arms, not all of them scabbed over, but nothing to suggest she’d tried to protect herself from the fall. I didn’t see any blood anywhere, but I didn’t want to move her until police or a coroner came.

Hotel Sarah stared at the body, absently chewing on her thumb.

“Why me?” I asked.

Not the question she’d expected, or else she’d tuned me out. “Pardon?”

“I know you said I was the closest thing to a detective, but why do you need someone to investigate? Aren’t the police on their way?”

She shook her head. “Gale force winds on the Sound tonight. They can’t make it out here by boat or helicopter.”

“What about a medical team? Surely there’s a medic here.”

“We paid a paramedic team to come out to the island this weekend, but they turned around because of the weather, too. My staff have basic CPR and first aid, but, well . . .”

I finished her sentence. “—but she’s obviously already dead.”

“Yeah. I thought maybe you’d be the next best thing to police, until they can get here. If she had a heart attack or stroke or just fell off the stage, it’s sad but nothing to worry about. If it was foul play”—the phrase sounded funny, like something on television—“we’re stuck with a murderer all weekend. If the police don’t get here in time, we can’t keep people from the portals. They’re timed precisely.”

“How about security? Surely you have security staff.”

She dismissed them with a wave. “They’ve never had to handle anything worse than kids setting off the fire alarms.”

“And I know I said this already, but you understand I’m in insurance? I investigate fraud. People lying about whiplash, that kind of thing. Not even the glamorous cheating-spouse stuff.”

She shrugged. I decided not to give her any harder time about it. She’d made a decision, never my strong point. She was probably already questioning herself, wondering what other option she hadn’t considered.

I was what they had. Right. So until police got here, I played coroner, law, and order. Not a role I was comfortable with at all, made weirder by the circumstance. Victim: Sarah. Investigator: Sarah. Suspects: All variations on the theme, other than the hotel staff. Hard to imagine one of us murdering; I knew I didn’t have it in me to kill someone. Also hard to imagine the hotel staff bothering; most murders involved somebody the victim knew.

I summoned up my inner TV detective. “Just to rule this out, nobody on your staff has any beef with you that you’re aware of? Nobody would be driven to kill by an entire hotel full of your dopplegangers?”

“I think we’re all weirded out by that, myself included. But I don’t think any of them hate me and I don’t think I work with any killers, though I guess that’s what everybody says. ‘He was such a nice man. He kept to himself.’” She touched her nametag. “Anyway, if they hated me, I’d think they go after me, not one of you. I’m easy to spot.”

“True enough. I’ll put them aside for now.” Though that meant focusing on the Sarahs again. “Were you the one who found the body?”

“No. The DJ did. She called me.” She held up her walkie-talkie.

“The DJ is one of us, right? Not your staff?”

“All the performers this weekend are attendees.”

“And where is the DJ now?”

“She went back to her room. She was a little freaked out.” Understandable, if her reaction to seeing her own dead twin was anything like mine.

“Has anyone else been up here?”

“The Sarah running sound and lights came up to check the system earlier for the host’s speech.”

“The host. Have you told her yet?”

Hotel Sarah chewed at her thumb again. “That’s the thing. Like I said, I haven’t been able to reach her. The organizers are all on walkie-talkies since your phones don’t work here, but she’s not answering hers. Nobody on the committee is answering, actually. That’s why I took matters into my own hands. Last I saw her, she was down in their Operations room, but she’d been up here earlier, so she could have come back for something.”

I looked down at the body. Tried to remember the woman who had breezed through the lobby earlier. “Are you saying you think this might be the organizer?”

She didn’t say anything, so I continued. “Do you remember anything specific about her? Anything to differentiate her?”

Her look suggested the question was a pointless one. “She was a little thinner than most. I think she runs marathons. Most of the committee do.”

The body was freckled and thin. She could have been a runner. A runner with a possible drug problem seemed a little counterproductive, but maybe she had pain issues or something.

“How about her clothing? Do you remember what she was wearing?” The woman I’d seen earlier had been in a blouse and jeans, not a dress, but she’d had time to change her clothes.

She shook her head. “I have a pretty good memory for detail, but everyone’s blending together . . .”

“You don’t have a registration list, do you? That might be useful. We need to try to identify the body before anything else.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t think to bring one up here. That couldn’t be her, right? Should I try to find her again? She’s going to need to notify the next of kin, and create a procedure to bring a body cross-world. Nobody’s ever died in the wrong world before.”

Infinite permutations. Surely someone must have. Except that for all the individual crossworld expeditions, according to the program this was the first gathering of its kind. Our host, one of us, the Sarah who had created the crossworld portal. It made me feel like I had wasted my life, in comparison. What would I have had to do differently to become a scientist? Her branch of science didn’t even exist as a field in my world. And now she was possibly lying dead in front of me.

Focus. If I hadn’t been carrying a backpack, I’d have put my ID and my keycard into my front right pocket. Her silk dress had a shallow pocket at the hip. When I slid my hand into it, I came up with a driver’s license. Her ID gave her name as Sarah Pinsker, which wasn’t much help. An address in Baltimore; the host worked at Johns Hopkins.

I held up the license. “Do you know how many here this weekend live in Baltimore?”

“Forty or fifty? There would be more if so many hadn’t been lost, from what I understand.”

“Lost? Baltimore?”

“A bunch of Seattles were lost in tsunamis or earthquakes. Some of us moved from Baltimore to Seattle or Seattle to Baltimore . . .”

I followed her train of thought, pictured a giant wave swallowing my house. Shuddered, brought myself back to the situation at hand.

“So this might still be our host. One in forty or fifty in that city, but maybe we can narrow it down when names and addresses come into it. It probably isn’t the sound person, since she’s dressed up a bit. Isn’t the DJ, since the DJ found her. The host wasn’t working alone this weekend, was she? The registration desk, entertainment, programming . . . She had a committee, you said?”

“Yeah. Four others pretty similar to her. They’d all been on the verge of making the same discovery, so they were the first ones she reached out to.”

Next question, if I was acting sheriff. “I don’t suppose this bar has a walk-in fridge or freezer?”

“Why? Oh god. Shit. Yeah, there’s a walk-in fridge.”

“You take the legs and I’ll get the arms?”

She nodded.

As I positioned myself, the body’s head tipped forward, and I saw what I would have looked for earlier, if I were a real detective: a sickening, deadly deep indentation at the back of the skull. A cave-in. The hair was matted and sticky-looking, blood and—I didn’t want to look closer.

“I think I found the cause of death,” I said. “And I think we can rule out natural causes. Fuck.”

I didn’t want to touch the head any more than I wanted to look, but we still had to move the body. I grabbed a towel from the bar and wrapped her like she’d just stepped out of the shower. It still lolled against me as I lifted, and I fought the urge to be sick. She wasn’t heavy, wasn’t yet stiff. Rigor mortis started two hours after death. An odor came off her; a body doing body things, I told myself.

We put her in the walk-in in a recreation of the position she’d been sitting in. I inspected her exposed parts. No blood other than the back of her head. No bullet holes. Some bruises, as I’d noted earlier, but none that looked like they came from a fight or a fall. I wasn’t comfortable looking any further than that. After, I waited while Hotel Sarah rummaged in a drawer for notepad and tape and made a thick-markered “Do Not Open” sign for the fridge door.

“So do you think she just fell and hit her head?” she asked. “Or do you think she was murdered?”

There was a hopeful note in her voice on the first option, but below that, I could tell she didn’t believe it any more than I did. “You do, or else you want me to reassure you that the track marks suggest she overdosed and stumbled off the stage. Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me up here. You would have dealt with it quietly, to keep from scaring the rest of the guests or harming the convention. You still want to deal with it quietly.”

She shifted from foot to foot. I recognized her restlessness. She felt helpless. Wanted something concrete to do, a decision made for her, a plan.

“Okay, here’s what I need from you,” I said, taking pity. I didn’t know my next step, but I could give her a task. “Go back down to registration, make me a copy of whatever you’ve got down there. Um, and what time was that dance supposed to start? They can decide if they want to have it in some other space, but they probably shouldn’t have it in here, in case there’s still evidence to be found. And, you know, out of respect. I’m going to look around right now, but I’d think the police would still want this left untouched.”

“I think they’ll cancel the dance. The DJ didn’t look fit to play.”

“I’m going to need to talk to her, too. But maybe downstairs, so she doesn’t have to come back in here? And the sound person.”

She nodded and left.

There really wasn’t anything else to do without the registration list. And it wouldn’t do any good to interview people without the right questions. Hard to ask who else was up here, when everyone looked the same. Hard to ask “Where were you at x o’clock?” if you didn’t solve for x. I could at least guess at that.

Or start with the crime scene; I walked back over. The stage was about chest high. I’d only had eyes for her before, but looking now, there was a blood smear on the stage’s lip just above where the body had been. The spot where she’d hit her head? No, the lip wasn’t the right shape to have caused the damage, I didn’t think. I pictured myself tripping or slipping off the edge of the stage, but I couldn’t imagine a way I would have fallen that would have had that result. No scuff marks, no chips in the wood, no bone fragments or hair. Just the one small smear and a deeper bloodstain where her head had been resting when we got to her. The wound itself hadn’t bled a lot. Maybe a forensic expert could see more.

A coroner would be useful, too. They’d be able to say if she’d fought someone, though I didn’t think so. She hadn’t looked scared or angry or horrified or even distressed. Dead. An absence of her, an absence of me.

The stage had two narrow curtained wings, and stairs on both sides. I walked to the front of the stage, to the spot where she must have slipped off or fallen after being hit. I tried to imagine falling from here. If someone had hit me from behind, I’d have put my hands out, fallen forward, unless they had dropped me in my tracks. There was no scenario I could think of that would result in stepping straight off to hit the back of my head on the stage. Maybe if I was looking behind me as I walked, and missed the edge? Even then, I’d expect more of a twist, a person trying to catch herself as she went down.

Something caught my eye a few feet from the stage, under the pedestal foot of the first table. I hopped down carefully. A keycard, still in its envelope. Room 517. The dead Sarah’s pockets were shallow enough that it could have fallen from her pocket, though the trajectory didn’t seem quite right. I dropped it into my bag and looked around to see if the floor held any other secrets, but didn’t see anything. Back to the stage.

The far wing was packed with music equipment and PA speakers. I hefted one of the mic stands. It had a pedestal base, heavy enough to hit someone with. There were six of them in a row, and any of them could be a murder weapon, though I didn’t see blood, and they were rounded where the wound had looked angular.

The wing closer to the DJ table was empty except the top of a travel case. It was black and silver, all the edges and corners reinforced with metal. I hefted it: heavy, and this was the unpacked half. The underside was foam, cut to fit the turntables. It had a small dent in one corner, and I flipped it to look at it closely. The shape was right, but it would be an awkward thing to wield. Still, I mentally added it to the list.

I felt around the edges and found a luggage tag. Sarah Pinsker. The unmoored feeling caught me again; it was getting more familiar. Seattle address, in Rainier Beach, if I was right about the zip code. One of the cheaper neighborhoods to rent in the city, at least in my world.

The DJ equipment was set up on a table in front of the alcove. Under the table, two full record crates. I thumbed through them, amused I’d guessed the genres correctly. On the table, two fancy looking vinyl turntables with a mixing console in between, all cushioned in the other half of the travel case. I knew nothing about DJ gear, didn’t know if this was expensive or cheap equipment. There were two records already on the turntables, the Sharon Jones/David Bowie cover of Bowie’s “Modern Love,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I’m Yours.” I’d have had fun dancing to those. Too bad the dance wouldn’t happen now.

There was an “SP” in silver marker at each record’s center, and on each piece of equipment. I pictured tomorrow’s lineup of musicians, all with the SPs that normally differentiated their gear from others’.

I ran my finger over a spot where the foam had separated from the protective casing. Some glue would stick it back, an easy repair, except as I touched it I realized something had been pushed down in between. I crooked a finger into the gap and felt around until I snagged a tiny envelope. Tapped it out into my palm: eight tiny pills. I didn’t recognize them, but I didn’t have any knowledge of narcotics. They could be ibuprofen, for all I knew, though most people didn’t go around slipping envelopes of ibuprofen into secret cubbies. In my world, anyway.

“Hello?” someone called from the back of the room.

I tucked the pills back in the envelope and the envelope into my pocket alongside the keycard. “Over here.”

A Sarah made her way over to me. She wore cargo shorts, black combat boots, and a T-shirt for a band I didn’t recognize. She walked with a swagger. Interesting to consider how we might have developed different walks.

“They asked me to bring up a copy of the registration list.” She held a red three-ring binder out to me.

I hopped off the stage to take it from her. “Thanks. Are you the sound tech?”

“Yeah. I’d introduce myself, but it hardly seems worth it.”

I smiled. “Hardly. But I wouldn’t mind if you pointed out which name is yours, so I can start taking notes.”

She took the book back from me and flipped to the last page in one sure movement. “Mine is easy, since I took my wife’s last name. Yarrow. Last person in the whole book.”

I grabbed my pen off the table where’d I left it and circled her occupation to remind myself who she was. “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“Go ahead.”

“What time did you come up here?”

“Three-thirty. There wasn’t a whole lot to set up, but it always takes a little longer when you’re not working with your own gear. I soundchecked the DJ, then the keynote speaker. Figured out how to run her slideshow. After that I took some time to get situated with the light board. I’m not really a lighting person, but it’s pretty well labeled. I think I was out of here by four-thirty.”

“Were they both still up here when you left?”

“No. The DJ left after we tested her gear through the PA. She’d managed to haul her big case and one crate of records up here in one go, but she said she had to get a second crate from her room on the other side of the hotel.”

“And she didn’t come back?”

“I figured she got to talking to someone, or took a nap or something. She didn’t come back while I was here.”

“And the host stayed? The, ah, keynote speaker?”

“She said she wanted to go over her speech while nobody was in the room.”

“Did anybody else come up?”

“Not that I saw.”

I paused to consider what else I needed to ask. “Would you recognize the keynote?” She cocked her head, and I amended my question. “You don’t have to be definitive. But if you know it’s NOT her, that would be helpful.”

I led her to the fridge. “I should have asked: are you okay looking at her? I can warn you it’s a little freaky looking at a dead person who looks like you.”

“This whole thing is freaky. I’ll be okay.”

We approached within a couple feet of the body. The vertiginous feeling hit me again.

“It could be her?” she said, half statement and half question. “But, uh, she was wearing something else. She had on jeans, not a dress. Maybe she left and changed into what she was going to wear tonight and came back?”

That made sense. Or the manager’s fear that this might be the host was unfounded.

“That definitely helps,” I said. “You can go if you need to.”

She nodded. “They’re going to have to find someplace else for tonight’s programming, so I should probably find out where they want me. But, hey, it’s good to have something to do, right?”

I hadn’t considered it until then, but it was true. As disturbing as the idea of a dead me was, something about the whole weird weekend became more concrete now that I had a purpose. No wonder so many had signed up to run sound and registration and play music and lead discussions. The other volunteers must have been self-aware enough to recognize it before they arrived.

I sat down on the stage’s edge with the list. Flipped to the “Sarah Pinsker” section, the big section, and put stars next to the ones who lived in Baltimore. The host and eleven others, since several Baltimore Sarahs had taken other surnames. Five of the remaining Sarahs were Quantologists. They all had a big C after their name. Committee, I guessed. All five lived at the same address, the address on the license in the deceased’s pocket. The lone difference between them on paper was a designation in the last column. R0D0, R1D0, R0D1, R1D1, R0D1A. No clue what that meant, but the program had listed a parenthetical R0D0 after the host’s name, so I circled that one.

I paged through the book for a while, making notes beside the entries for the DJ, the hotel clerk, the sound tech, and a few others I’d met who stood out from the pack. It would have been really interesting reading material any other day; now it was a headache.

I still hadn’t finished my circuit of the room. I searched the bar for something with the right shape and heft to be the murder weapon. A couple of the bottles might have fit the bill, but I would have thought they’d smash on impact.

My desire for diligence didn’t extend to alone-time with the body, so I decided against searching the fridge. I wandered across the floor. The back of a chair or barstool? Or the leg? Possible, and a pain to check them all.

On the far side of the room, four folding tables covered with velveteen tablecloths. A printed sign hung on the wall behind them: Sarah Pinsker Hall of Fame.

Each table held a series of objects. A few had explanatory notecards in front of them, but most spoke for themselves. I remembered the questionnaire: “Do you have any special awards or achievements you’d like to show off? Bring them for our brag table!” I’d have thought they’d have better security, but then again, up until now I would have thought I could trust my other selves.

If the list of occupations had made me feel like an underachiever, this display reinforced it. A Grammy for Best Folk Album 2013, a framed photo of a Sarah in the Kentucky Derby winner’s circle, a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, a stack of novels, a Nebula Award for science fiction writing, an issue of Quantology Today containing an article with a seventy word title that I guessed amounted to “Other Realities! I Found Them!” A few awards I didn’t recognize, though I wasn’t sure if that was because they didn’t exist in my reality or I just hadn’t heard of them.

Two of the awards looked like they had the shape to be the murder weapon, and one of them looked like it had the weight as well: the Nebula, a three-dimensional rectangular block of Lucite, shot through with stars and planets. What did you call a three-dimensional rectangle, anyway? I didn’t want to pick it up without gloves, but I used the back of my hand to push it gently backward. It was heavy enough, for sure.

As I touched the award, I felt a strange certainty this was it. That if I were to murder someone, which I absolutely wouldn’t do, this would be the weapon of choice. Not the mic stands, not the chairs, not the turntable case: this glittering block that would travel back to another reality at the end of the weekend with its owner none the wiser. I shuddered and shook the thought off.

Stooping to examine it closer, I didn’t see any sign of blood or hair. In fact, there wasn’t a single fingerprint on it, which was odd enough in itself. The other statuettes had fingerprints, but this one looked like it had been polished clean.

If this was the murder weapon, what did that say about the murder? Was it an act of passion, carried out with an item at hand? Was there any significance to the choice? If it was premeditated, that would narrow the list of suspects to the people who knew it would be up here: the host committee and the writer who had brought it. The list of people who had seen it here was probably more or less the list I’d already made of people who had been up to the room. Not much help.

Nobody else came upstairs, and after a while I got sick of waiting. I headed back down to the lobby. Passed the arcade, now empty, and the convenience store, now closed. The registration table, cluttered with nametags and markers, otherwise abandoned. A few people sat in the lobby, but the mood was markedly different than it had been before dinner. I gathered word had spread.

A new clerk was working the front desk, an acned non-Sarah in his late teens or early twenties. I held up my registration binder like an overlarge badge, trying to look harried and committee-bound. “I don’t suppose if I gave you a name and ID code, you’d tell me what room someone is staying in? Official business?”

He nodded. I flipped to the DJ’s name and pointed. After a moment’s typing, he looked back up at me. “107. That’s in the annex. Do you know where that is?”

My room was in the annex, but if the committee members were all staying in the tower, I didn’t want to break the illusion. I let him point me in the direction of my room. Her door was a few down from my own.

I knocked a few times before she heard me. When the door swung open, I recognized the person on the other side. “That makes sense! I didn’t realize you were the DJ.”

She smiled blankly. I pointed at her T-shirt. “We met outside earlier? When you were smoking? No Good Deeds?”

“Oh, yeah.” She replaced the empty smile with a warmer one. “It’s hard to keep everyone straight. Can I help you?”

“I’m, uh, investigating the death of the Sarah you found. I’m a detective. Do you mind if I come in and ask you a few questions?”

She opened the door wider, and I followed her into the room. The first bed’s bedspread lay in a heap on the floor. Her duffel’s contents were scattered across the second bed, in some sort of half-organization. A pile of greyed-out underwear, a few T-shirts, neatly folded, a pile of tampons, pack of cigarettes.

“Sorry,” she said. “I always spread out in hotels. You can have the chair.” She flopped down on the first bed. “Did you say you were investigating her death? She looked like she fell off the stage to me. Not that it wasn’t freaky to see her, you know?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But the hotel manager asked me to look around a little. Because of the circumstances.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Are you alright with me asking you some questions?”

“Go ahead. It’s all a little upsetting, though. I’m not sure I’m thinking straight.”

That might be chemical, if the pills I’d found were hers. “Can you walk me through the afternoon?”

“I loaded my stuff into the room around four. Set up, soundchecked. Came back down here to get my second crate of records. When I went back, that’s when I saw her.”

“Do you know how long you were gone?”

She shrugged. I tried to remember when I’d run into her. She must have gone out for a smoke before going back with the crate.

“Where were you when you saw her? Where in the club, I mean?”

“As I was coming down the aisle toward the stage. She was just sitting there. I thought she had sat down, but then I realized the posture was funny.”

“And—sorry—was she definitely already dead by then?”

She bit her lower lip, bringing it to the white of her teeth. “Her eyes were open. I nudged her leg, but she didn’t respond, so I checked for a pulse.”

“Was she warm or cold to your touch?”

“Warm. I’ve never seen a dead person before, and she looked so . . .” She shuddered. I did too.

“And then you left her there? To go for help?”

“No! I made a call on her walkie-talkie. I figured the other people in charge would be on the other end, and maybe someone from the hotel.”

I closed my eyes to mentally revisit the scene. “There wasn’t a walkie-talkie there.”

Her eyes widened. “There was. I swear, I called on it. Ask the manager. It was next to the body. She’d been carrying it around before, complaining it dragged her jeans down.”

“Her jeans? Before she changed into the dress and came back?”

She gave me a quizzical look.

There wasn’t really much point to asking her anything else if she couldn’t even get basic details right. Her confusion felt genuine. “Thanks for letting me in. ‘Questions lead to questions lead to answers lead to answers,’ right?”

“I hope so,” she said absently, standing up and ushering me out. “I hope you get her home okay.”

She’d completely ignored the No Good Deeds lyric I’d used as a peace offering. Second and last album in my world, their one hit single. I wondered if it was the drugs or the shock, or she just wasn’t the fan I’d thought she was earlier.

Back in the hallway, I dug in my bag for a pen. I’d normally have taken notes while she talked, but I’d had a feeling it would have shut her up. Instead of a pen, I came up with the dinner roll I’d taken earlier. I ate it in two bites. Diving in again, my fingers settled on the key card I’d found in the nightclub. Room 517. In the tower, I guessed. Might as well check it out.

I rode the tower elevator—much faster than the one to the nightclub—with two Sarahs who were making eyes at each other in a way that made me deeply uncomfortable. I was happy to escape.

Room 517 was around the corner and down the hall. My shoes sank into plush carpeting. Pushing a luggage cart through it wouldn’t be any fun, but maybe tower people paid bellhops to do the grunt work. The halls up here had actual wallpaper, tasteful stripes, in contrast with our bare-walled wing.

I paused for a moment outside the room, trying to hear if there was anyone moving inside, preparing myself to find . . . I didn’t know what. I hadn’t gotten clearance to do this. Then again, nobody had told me not to, which was basically permission. I knocked, waited for an answer, knocked again.

The swipe card worked on the first try. I stepped inside. The light had been left on. The furniture looked like hardwood instead of plywood, and the room was maybe a foot or two wider, but I didn’t really see anything to justify the cost difference between this space and mine.

Three dresses hung in the open closet, in styles similar to the dead woman’s. Worn gym clothes lay crumpled in the corner next to the first bed, a pair of sneakers half-buried underneath the pile. The closer bed had obviously been slept in; if she was the organizer, she’d probably been here a night or two early to get situated before the rest of us arrived. She’d dumped her suitcase—mostly underwear and bras—out on the second bedspread. Maybe in her world hotel bedspreads got washed along with the sheets.

A toiletry bag had been emptied on the bathroom counter. Ipana gel toothpaste, the exact same product I used. How much could toothpaste change from world to world? The makeup was an assortment of familiar and unfamiliar brands, so maybe I was wrong. A damp towel hung over the shower curtain rod. So far, this was the room of someone who had assumed she would be coming back. I flushed the toilet for her, as a courtesy. Immediately regretted it as disposing of evidence.

The room door clicked shut, startling me. Had I left it open? I didn’t remember closing it when I’d entered. Maybe someone had gone into another room on the hall and the wind had pulled this one closed. I’d lived in houses where that happened. I opened the door and peered down the empty hallway.

I’d left her second bag for last, under the hope there was a clue waiting somewhere for me. A clue, like I was a real detective, not somebody who flushed away evidence. The bag was an expensive-looking leather satchel. My style, if I had the cash for it.

There were a few things I was expecting to find and didn’t. I’d expected a registration binder like the one I had in my bag. I didn’t see a walkie-talkie or charger, though maybe the charger was in the convention’s Ops room the manager had mentioned earlier, wherever that was. I did find a program, with a couple of items circled. Not the ones I expected. “Sarahs in the Sciences” on Sunday morning and a penned in Information Desk shift from 12–4 PM on Saturday. Not the keynote. Maybe she didn’t have to circle it because it went without saying.

The rest of the bag was filled with the usual odds and ends I carried: pens, gum, emergency flashlight, loose change. A dog-eared paperback novel called Parable of the Trickster.

No wallet. I looked in all the places I’d have left a wallet if I were her: all her bag pockets, the TV stand, the nightstand, even the sink. There wasn’t a room safe, so it couldn’t be there.

I wouldn’t have noticed it at all if I hadn’t kicked it on my next circuit of the room, hidden half-under the second bed. Maybe she’d tossed it in the bed’s direction in a hurry and missed? Or knocked it to the ground as she left? It was unlike me. I wasn’t the neatest person in the world, but I was careful with the important things.

I kept making assumptions she’d think like me, and they kept paying off. Still, I had to keep reminding myself we weren’t the same person. We were and weren’t. Our experiences had shaped us, the differences in our worlds. Something had convinced her to become a quantologist, but whatever had driven her would have had a different effect on me, in my quantology-free reality. Given all that, it didn’t seem unreasonable we would have different opinions on where to leave your wallet in a hotel room.

The other option, obviously, was that somebody else had been in here. How hard would it be to flash the desk clerk an ID and say you’d lost your room key? Or even without ID, to rattle off one of the numbers the hotel had used to differentiate us? Whoever it was might even have still been in the room when I entered. That would explain the door shutting while I was poking around the bathroom. In which case, the question now wasn’t only what could the room tell me, but what couldn’t it tell me? I would never know if something was missing.

I opened the wallet. No cash, but that wasn’t unexpected since we couldn’t use it here. No driver’s license, since that was in the body’s pocket. Two credit cards, car insurance, Johns Hopkins ID, some store discount cards. The university ID could be important, if only a few Sarahs worked there.

The only thing personal—the only thing personal I’d noticed in the whole room, really, if you didn’t count fashion—was a cropped photo tucked behind her health insurance card. I tapped it out, sucked in my breath. It was a picture of her—not me, I told myself—standing with my friends on a mountaintop at what I was fairly sure was the Grand Tetons. I had gotten somewhat used to the surreality of seeing my face on strangers, but there was something even odder about seeing a picture of myself, with my friends, in a place I’d never been. Mabel, my Mabel, with an arm wrapped tight around another Sarah’s waist. All in someone else’s wallet.

It was impossible to tell which details were piquing my interest because they were pertinent, and which were piquing my interest because they were me. What would it be like to be this Sarah? I remembered my own professors’ homes, pictured myself coming and going from a majestic old house with a glassed-in sunroom. Did she live with alterna-Mabel? This Sarah lived in Baltimore, not Seattle; I couldn’t imagine Mabel leaving Seattle.

If I stayed any longer I’d start trying on the dead Sarah’s clothes, and I was pretty sure they wouldn’t fit, mentally or physically. I left everything where I’d found it.

The Sarah in the room across the hall and I both closed the doors at the same time. I panicked for a second before realizing I was supposed to be there. Or at least I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

She gave me a curious look. “Are you the detective?”

“Yeah. How did you know?” I looked her over. Another flowered dress, freckles, runner’s build. Another short haircut. She’d either had her breasts reduced or run all the fat off her body. The body of somebody with a whole lot more determination than I had. One of the quantologists from the committee, I guessed.

“I’m in charge, and you’re coming out of her room.” She gave extra weight to the word “her.” “The hotel manager said she’d called you in. Thank you for your help.”

“You’re in charge? In place of the, ah, host? The quantologist?”

“In place of? Everyone on our committee is a quantologist, but I’m the one you’d call the host. I’m the keynote speaker.” She waved a sheaf of handwritten papers in my direction.

“Wait—is the speech still going on?”

“We moved it, obviously. It’ll be in the dining hall. The dance is cancelled, out of respect.” Her walkie-talkie squawked and fed back, loud enough to generate an echo. She dialed the volume down without looking at it. “And I rewrote my speech, of course.”

“But we were looking for you—the manager thought you were the dead woman. Do you know who she is?” As I asked, I understood. “Oh, I had the wrong one. She’s one of the others from your committee.”

Her face crumpled for a second, like she was trying not to cry. She pulled herself together. Bit her lip until it turned as white as her teeth. “Yes. We hadn’t known each other that long, obviously, but she was tremendously helpful. Working with her, well, it was like working with myself, if that doesn’t sound too narcissistic. We were on the same page about everything. They said they’d given you a registration list? She’s the one from R1D0, by our designation. I’m R0D0. I ID’ed her when the manager took me up to look a few minutes ago.”

“It’s not my fault you’re identical,” I said, a little angry with myself for not having considered the possibility. “I’m not even this kind of detective.”

She patted my arm. My feeling of inadequacy blew over as soon as I said it, leaving her gesture as sincere commiseration, not condescension. Her smile was genuine, sympathetic. “I wouldn’t have suggested getting you involved in all of this, but I wasn’t there when the hotel manager panicked. I think she must have fallen off the stage and hit her head, but we’ll bring in the authorities as soon as the weather lets up. No need for you to worry about it.”

Everything I’d learned was still lurching and settling into new positions. The clothing change made sense if it was a different person. Everything I knew about the one fit the other.

“How close are your worlds? I mean, do you know the divergence point? I don’t think I’ll get the science of it, but I get the divergence points concept.”

“I’d love to talk more,” she said, “but my speech is supposed to start in a few minutes.”

“Do you mind if I walk with you? I have a couple more questions I wouldn’t mind asking. Even if you think I don’t need to investigate.”

She shrugged and started walking. I followed. “Why didn’t you answer your radio when they called for you?”

“I was in the shower. I must not have heard it.”

“Do you know what she was doing in the nightclub?”

“No clue. Looking for me, maybe? Or adding something to the Hall of Fame display? A few people brought items they hadn’t mentioned on the questionnaire.”

We waited for the elevator. A couple more Sarahs joined us, giving the same curious once-over we were all giving each other. If they were staying in this tower, they were likely on the richer side of the spectrum. Both were dressed the way I’d dress if I could afford nicer clothes, but one had cut her hair shorter than I’d ever cut mine before, the back shaved, the top still curly. It looked good; I wished I had the guts. Neither wore glasses. Contacts or surgery or some fluke of genetics? I’d have asked if I wasn’t more interested in the host.

I didn’t want to question her much in front of strangers without knowing what had already been said to the general public. I searched for a more neutral topic. “Why did you choose this hotel?”

The elevator chimed and let us in. We stood silent while it descended; I used the time to study the others. Hair and clothes had been the easiest ways to catalogue differences at first, but I was starting to see that we fell into a few different basic phenotypes. The host and the other athletic Sarahs on one side of a spectrum that ranged lean to soft. Still no way to suss out anything beyond the superficial without asking.

Once the other Sarahs had walked away, the host answered my question as if there had been no gap. “Secord Island is a tiny dot in the Atlantic. I won’t bother getting into the geopolitics, but it’s independent in nine identified worlds. Three are home to private mansions, six to private resort hotels. In this one and only this one, one of us is manager, though she’s one of the more distant iterations I identified, from a subset who went to university in Nova Scotia and then stayed in the east. This place was perfect. So inhospitably perfect we were able to guarantee to our sponsors and grantees that nobody would go AWOL. One weekend, in and out. No risk.” She flashed a rueful smile.

“What do sponsors and grantees get from this?” Mabel had asked me, and I’d wondered ever since. I repeated Mabel’s question.

“The usual name recognition, for those in worlds where they exist. And if it goes well—if it had gone well, I guess—the chance to explore doing it for other purposes: recreational, educational. There’re a couple of travel companies, a couple of charitable foundations, a couple of think tanks. I’m hoping I’ll still be able to convince them her death would have happened anywhere, nothing to do with the event.”

I nodded. “One more thing. Is there a way for me to talk to your other committee members? You’re the ones who would have known her best.”

She looked for a second like she was going to say no, but then she lifted her walkie-talkie to her lips. After a brief back and forth, they agreed to meet me at registration after the keynote.

“Anything else?” she asked. “I still say there’s no point in you investigating before the police get here, but if you think there is, I’ll cede to your expertise.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a dig or not. She was probably right. I had no idea why I was still asking questions. Except I did like having something to do, and I was suspicious of anything dismissed too easily. If I were lying in a hotel fridge, I’d want someone asking questions for me.

A crowd bottlenecked at the dining hall entrance; I guess none of us liked arriving too early. We didn’t like jostling either, so the result was a polite alternate-right-of-way situation that worked itself out pretty quickly. The room was still arranged in a constellation of eight person tables, but a microphone had been set up on one end of the room. I peeled off to find standing room beside the entrance, where I could watch the speech and the crowd at the same time.

The host walked to the microphone. She wore small heels with her dress. Heels always made me walk like a moose on a frozen lake, but she came across comfortable and confident. I couldn’t help coveting her poise. She glanced at the clock above the door—for a moment I thought she was looking at me—and then started to speak without consulting her notes.

“Welcome, friends. First, I think by now many of you have heard we’ve had a death at the conference. One of my committee members, perhaps the person who worked most closely with me, Sarah Pinsker. It’s so strange to say that name, my own name, the name that many of you call your own, in this context. We’re still waiting for the authorities to arrive to tell us what happened. We’re also working to inform her family, and to find the proper way to memorialize her. I’m sure she’s in all our hearts.

“I say ‘in all our hearts,’ and I know it sounds cliché, but it’s literally true. She is every one of us. So we can imagine what her loss will mean to her own world and her own family. At the same time, it’s impossible to imagine. Even now, when I say her name, you picture yourself, not her. Not the things that made her distinct from you or me. In that way, we grieve her as friend and family, not a stranger, even those of us who didn’t know her as an individual.”

The door creaked, and I looked over to see the DJ slipping from the room. The speaker continued.

“You all took such pains to get here, it didn’t feel right to cut the weekend short. I’m sure she would have wanted it to go on, because I know I would have wanted it to go on, after all our work. Tonight’s dance is cancelled, out of respect. There’ll be rooms available tonight and tomorrow for support groups if anyone needs to process in that setting. There will also be a Shabbat service in the chapel tomorrow morning at ten if anyone wants to say kaddish for her, led by Rabbi Sarah Pinsker. Stand up, Rabbi?”

A Sarah stood, raised a hand in solemn greeting, then sat again. The only rabbi, I thought. Was there a panel on our more unexpected career choices? I knew what had led me down my road, but not what had led her down hers.

“Without invalidating anyone’s grief or confusion, I have to say that this death, tragic as it is, highlights the reason we’re here: to learn from each other. I’ve got a panel tomorrow where I’ll explain in more detail how this all works, but I think this is a fitting moment to explain the basics, to explain how we are all different and the same.”

Her tone changed, as if she was now on more comfortable ground. “It’s human nature to center ourselves in the narrative, but I encourage us all to consider the larger picture. I’m standing here before you not because I am the first, or the best, or the trunk of a branching tree. I’m here due to two things I can own: a discovery and a decision. I’m the one who figured out how to open a door; I’m the one who invited all of you to walk through it. Nothing more, nothing less.

“There are others among us who are as accomplished in their own fields, who could invite us through other doors, figuratively speaking. There are others among you who made ordinary decisions that nonetheless changed you significantly: leaving school, pursuing higher education, adopting children, or not. Even the smallest decisions, like kissing someone instead of waiting to be kissed.”

I wondered how many of us thought of Mabel.

“I’m sorry I’m not feeling up to doing my whole intro to quantology speech, but I can leave you with one more thing to think about, something that may provide comfort on a night like tonight. Not only can I say nobody here is prime, I can also say all of us have always existed. It’s hard to wrap your head around, but it’s true. Those divergence points, where we discuss pets and girlfriends and boyfriends, wrong turns and big decisions? They work backward and forward. The moment a divergence point sparks, the new one has always existed too.

“I tried to invite Sarahs with some variety, to learn from each other, but Sarahs who are still recognizably us. This conference exists in infinite variations: some where I invited a different group of Sarahs, some where you chose a different dessert, where you sat next to someone else at dinner, some where my friend Sarah is still with us. They are no more or less valid for having diverged, no more or less real. You are all you, we are all we, constantly shaped by and shaping worlds.”

It was a good line, delivered by a good speaker, meant to buoy everyone. What would it be like to be a good public speaker? To be a discoverer of worlds? We all clapped, both for her speech and her attempts to reconcile the moods of the occasion. That was why I clapped, anyway. I kept extrapolating outward from myself.

I spotted the older Sarah I’d had a drink with earlier, and went to stand beside her as the crowd started to file from the room. “In the bar a few hours ago, you pointed at someone and said she was the host. How did you know?”

She shook her head. “Sorry, that must have been somebody else. I haven’t been to the bar. Sober ten years.”

There was more than one older Sarah, or more than one who looked older than the rest of us. A good reminder not to make assumptions, even here.

Three Sarahs stood clustered around the registration desk, as promised. I didn’t see the host, but I was pretty sure she was still behind me in the dining hall. I’d already spoken with her anyhow. So a committee of five, minus the host and the dead woman. They all wore silk; I guess they didn’t sweat the dry cleaning bills.

They agreed to talk to me one at a time, in the lounge seating area between registration and the bar. The bar was starting to fill up again, but it wasn’t yet too noisy for conversation. A knot of Sarahs with guitars gathered on the other bank of couches, but the odd timbral similarity of their voices made them easy to tune out. They’d found a way to eke joy out of the situation, and for a moment I envied them.

I’d have saved time by talking to them all together, though; their answers might as well have come from the same mouth.

Q: Where were you between four-thirty and six pm?

A: Registration, then the cocktail party, then up to take a nap and shower. I figured a shower would be worth being a little late for dinner.

Q: Were all of you at the cocktail party?

A: Yes! I think. At the beginning, anyway.

Q: Including the one who passed away?

A: Yes. I think. It’s hard to say. We were mingling.

Q: When did you first realize something was wrong?

A: When the hotel manager came to find us, toward the end of dinner.

Q: Us?

A: The committee. She found all of us except—her.

They all gave the same weight to “her” that the host had upstairs.

Q: What did you do then?

A: Figured out which of us she was. Cried. Freaked a bit. Talked about what to do next.

Q: How did you figure out which of you she was?

A: Um, a roll call. I know that sounds silly, but I can’t tell any of the other four apart without asking them questions or knowing what they’re wearing. I had friends in seventh grade who were identical twins, and I never had a doubt which of them was which. This is different.

Q: Did anyone use the radios to contact any of you?

A: Not that I heard? I might have been in the shower.

Q: Is there anything else you know about her that might be helpful? Anybody who she was angry with? Anybody who was angry with her? Jealousies, rivalries?

A: There’s no point in a cross-world rivalry. We were all a little jealous of R0D0, of course. She made the breakthrough we were all trying to make. But not R1D0.

Q: Do you know your divergence point from the others on your committee?

A: Eleven days before the big discovery, R0D0 and R1D0 made a mistake in an equation. The rest of us got it right. It was the mistake that was the key. The three of us differ in ways barely worth mentioning, all within a month of each other: a hospital visit, a sprained ankle on a run, a birthday party the rest of us skipped.

Q: What about R0D0 and R1D0, then? Where do they diverge? Would there be any reason for the host to be jealous of the deceased?

A: If anything it would be the other way around. They diverged an hour before the discovery. R1D0 went out for an anniversary dinner with her girlfriend; R0D0 cancelled dinner and stayed in the lab. If I were R1D0, I’d have carried a little resentment over that, but if she did, she never showed it. Anyway, someone said it was an accident, right? Is there any chance it was anything else?

“She hasn’t been examined,” I said. “She’s got one hell of a knock to her head.”

I left it deliberately vague, to see if any of them gave anything away. They all gave me the same look, stressed and relieved, hopeful and guilty about that hope. I found myself wishing all of my insurance interviews were with Sarahs. My job would be much easier if I recognized every expression on everyone’s face.

I was desperate for something to break one of them from the pack, but nothing came. Even their divergence points were mundane. They were the same person. I thanked them for their help and let them go. They had all looked genuinely upset. I had believed all of them, and the identical answers were as good as corroboration. They were all willing to help, but convinced it was an accident. They couldn’t figure out why I was still asking questions when the answer seemed obvious.

In their shoes, I’d be desperate to believe it was an accident too. Better than thinking somebody might have it in for me. If I were one of them, I’d be terrified and trying to hide it. I’d be looking around every corner for a killer, trying to live up my last moments, to settle accounts, just in case; except we were all trapped for the weekend, unable to contact anyone we loved or go anywhere.

I was one of them. Without the science background, without the urge to be the first or the best or whatever it was driving them. Which was an interesting line of questioning I hadn’t followed at all: what was driving them? Why were they so ambitious, when the rest of us weren’t? What had made them go into quantology? Could any of them still make the same discovery, for their world, or had the host Sarah spoiled it for everyone? I looked over to see if they were still standing by registration, but they had all gone.

The bar was half full, and when I slid onto the nearest empty stool, the bartender handed me a tumbler of bourbon, neat, without my needing to ask. The guesswork was gone from his job: there was a plastic cup over the handle for the stout. I hoped he had another keg somewhere that he hadn’t had time to tap yet. Down the row, six other Sarahs sipped from identical glasses.

“Cheers,” said the Sarah next to me, holding up her drink. She was wearing a Wonder Woman T-shirt too, an Alex Ross illustration, deflecting bullets. She looked exhausted, like she’d spent the evening deflecting bullets herself. “It’s hitting you too, huh?”

“Hitting me?”

“The difference question. You’ve noticed a thing about yourself, or a thing about someone else here that isn’t true of yourself. You can’t quite tell if you should feel bad about it, if it’s a flaw in you, if there’s something you did wrong along the way. You thought one more drink might let you fall asleep without it keeping you up all night.”

We clinked glasses.

I wandered back to my room still mulling it over. Wind whipped down the chilly hallway, but I saw only one figure silhouetted against the open door, with her mass of flaming curls.

“Where’s your friend?” I asked, leaning out. A gust hit me hard enough to knock me off balance; in its wake, the air was heavy with the promise of rain. The smoker whirled to face me when I spoke. “Sorry if I scared you. I was the one who chatted with the two of you out here earlier, in case you can’t tell.”

She shrugged. “Haven’t seen her. I heard she found the body. Maybe she needs some alone time. I know I would. Drink?”

She held a flask out to me, and I took it with a nod of thanks. Bourbon. Cheaper than the stuff the bartender had served, but still decent. Another gust of wind tore the top of a dumpster off its hinges and sent it tumbling over the loading dock wall. We both watched it cartwheel away.

“New question for tomorrow,” she said, taking her flask back. “You get to test it first. What are you most afraid of?”

My answer was instant. “Everything. Earthquakes. Bombs. Random violence. Falling tree branches. Losing people I love. Cancer. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This storm. Missing out on something because I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. Missing out on something because I’m afraid. I try not to let it control me—my job helps desensitize me a little—but . . . yeah. Long answer to a short question. You?”

She took a long drag on her cigarette. “I’d have stopped at ‘Everything,’ but, yeah, same basic theme. Pretty amazing that we’re all here despite being chicken. Afraid to ride bicycles but willing to step out of our own reality completely for a weekend.”

“Maybe it falls under ‘Afraid of missing out on something because I’m afraid?’ We all push ourselves in the same ways?”

“Maybe. I guess I’ll see what everyone else answers tomorrow. You know what you didn’t list, in that long list of things you were afraid of?”

“What?” I replayed my answer in my head to figure what I might have missed.

“Dying alone, far from the people you love, surrounded by strangers who wear your face and mirror your thoughts. I would think that would make your list, since it makes mine.”

I considered. “The first part, maybe. I’m starting to get used to the second part. And I’m still more afraid of the storm than the other Sarahs.”

Lightning cracked the sky open to punctuate my sentence, close enough to make the hairs on my arms stand on end.

“Bam. Divergence point,” she said, with less enthusiasm than her smoking buddy had earlier. “I’m getting a distinctly bad vibe from all this. Do you have Agatha Christie in your world? Isolated island, bad weather. I’m still waiting for us all to be picked off one by one.”

“And yet you were standing out here all alone. So either you’re not as scared as you say, or . . .” As I said it, I wished I hadn’t. If I was joking, it wasn’t funny. If I was implying she was a suspect, well, everyone was except me, since I knew I hadn’t done it. That didn’t make it a smart move to address the subject directly.

“. . . or I’m the killer, in which case you’re the one in trouble, not me.” She gave me a look that told me she agreed my comment had been in poor taste, and held out the flask, daring me to take it. “I’m not a killer. I can’t prove it, of course, but I know I’m not. Which makes me pretty sure none of us are, because I can’t imagine the circumstance that would bring me to kill someone.”

“I can’t imagine killing someone, but I also can’t imagine the circumstance that would have turned me into a smoker.” I swigged whiskey. “Or a hotel manager, or a quantologist, or a DJ.”

She took one more drag, then dropped the butt and crushed it with her boot. “It’s the storm and the island that made me say the Christie thing. I’m way more nervous about this storm than being killed by a serial Sarah, at least while there’s still only one body. Hopefully I won’t have cause to revise that. In the meantime, there’s facing fear and there’s being stupid. We should probably go inside before we get hit by lightning.”

As if in response, the sky opened up. We were both drenched in the two feet to the doorway.

“If the lights go out, start counting Sarahs,” Orange Curls said before squelching off down the hall.

Back in my room, I stripped my wet clothes off and replaced them with another T-shirt and boxer shorts. The whiskey didn’t do the job I’d hoped it would, so I spent the night in imaginary conversation with Mabel. The rain battering the window filled in her side of the dialogue. I walked through the order of events, everything I’d found. I had ideas, but they weren’t cohering. The timing was important, I knew that. Murder weapon would be lovely, but I didn’t expect a forensic report any time soon. As for suspects, for all the people giving me alibis and vouching for themselves and each other, it could still have been anybody.

I drifted away from the case itself. The host said she wasn’t the Prime, wasn’t the trunk of a branching tree, but she’d labeled us all in relation to her. We were all in close proximity. Even the most distant of us were still recognizable. Tiny differences. I hadn’t run into anyone who lived in a post-water shortage America, or post-flu, or post-oil. We all knew how to flush toilets.

What would it look like if we had radiated out from me instead of the host? Or if we had all radiated out from the hotel clerk, whom the quantologist had said was one of the farther iterations? There were other realities between these, ones she hadn’t chosen. N Sarahs, in N realities, where N was unknowable and constantly changing. Why had she chosen us and not others? Was I the most interesting of a string of insurance investigators, or the only one available this weekend? I had more questions than I’d had before I arrived.

Why did I go into detective work, not one of the sciences? I hated my calculus teacher, dropped it after a few weeks; because of him, I didn’t get far enough in math to pursue a college major in bio or physics. Maybe he didn’t exist in the other worlds, or maybe the science Sarahs hadn’t let him get the better of them. Maybe they pushed themselves to spite him. Some went on to become geneticists or researchers or science fiction writers. Same mind, applied differently. Choices, chances, undecisions, non-decisions, decisions good and bad.

Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Maybe one of me was sitting at home with Mabel right at this very moment, another me, another Mabel, another reality where my curiosity hadn’t won out. But if I’d stayed home, who would be asking questions for the Sarah in the fridge? If nothing else, I was good for that. Even if I hadn’t yet found any answers.

It was still raining when I woke. The thin carpet felt vaguely damp, like the weather had come up through the foundation. My head hurt. I had a vague sense that I had unlocked something in my sleep and forgotten it again.

I took a quick shower, hoping it might clear my head. No luck.

Breakfast was served buffet-style, which was good since I was ravenous after only eating a roll the night before. I built a tower of eggs, potatoes, and toast, a second tower of fruit, and deposited both plates on the nearest empty table. When I came back from the tea station, the table was full.

“How are you enjoying the weekend?” asked the Sarah next to me. I didn’t think I’d met her before. “Other than . . . You know.”

“I haven’t had much time to do anything,” I said between mouthfuls. “Duty called. Well, not a duty I expected to have, but I’m trying to figure it out.”

“Oh, were you the one who got pulled away from the table last night? It would be a shame if you didn’t get to go to anything.” That was Dare; I remembered him from dinner, with his copper and silver beard and mustache. His talk on gender was one I’d circled when I thought I’d get to actually attend programming. “It’s not like we’ll have this chance again.”

“You don’t think so?” another asked.

Dare shook his head. “No. Somebody died. That’s not exactly an encouragement to the backers to bring us back for a sequel. Even if it was an accident, the logistics of explaining her death on the other side of the portal will be a nightmare.”

“Infinite variations,” said another Sarah. “Maybe next year we’ll get invitations from an iteration where she didn’t die.”

That made my head hurt. “I think I need to get back to work after I leave breakfast. I still need to interview the hotel staff, and anyone who talked to her yesterday afternoon . . .”

My neighbor speared a chunk of pineapple and waved it at me. “Stay. One talk won’t hurt you. We’ve got a big-group discussion on ‘Horses and Dogs and Cats, Oh My’ in this room right after breakfast. All you have to do is not stand up.”

Her argument on its own might not have been persuasive, but inertia won out. Inertia and jealousy and a bad feeling I shouldn’t have eaten as much as I did and I might still be sick if I moved very quickly. Besides, everyone else had already had a chance to get to know each other a bit, and all I’d talked about was one unfortunate dead person whose death I wasn’t even supposed to be investigating anymore. I lingered as the mics were set up and the buffet tables cleared.

The setup was loosely structured, with a leader and a few planned speakers to kick things off. The first storyteller sat to speak. She was trim, polo shirt tucked into worn jeans. She looked like she’d spent time in the sun.

“When I was a teenager, I spent my summers working at a trail riding stable in upstate New York.” Several Sarahs snapped their fingers. I realized a system had developed while I was snooping around. Snap to say that had been your experience too. Too late for me to snap with them, but so far this story was mine as well.

“I had a favorite horse, Smokey. An Appaloosa.” I snapped along. She didn’t bother describing his color, like a white horse that had rolled in dirt, or his dustbroom mane and tail. I had loved him even though he was ugly as anything.

“One afternoon, a man drove up with a little girl, maybe five or six years old. My boss put the little girl on Flicker. Flicker wasn’t the first choice for someone that small, but the kid-friendly horses were both out with another guide. There wasn’t even a children’s-sized saddle left, so we had to run the stirrups all the way up to the top hole and then flip them over. Even then, she had to stretch her toes to reach.”

We all snapped quietly. We knew this story.

“I took them on the usual circuit: through the woods, circling the pond and the far field, back into the woods, then looping out to the dirt road. The road was the problem. We sometimes raced the horses home that way when we were goofing around. It was a dumb thing to do, teaching the horses to rile themselves up and anticipate the run back to the barn, but all the teenagers working there had been doing it for as long as anyone could remember.

“I spent the whole hour thinking about ways to avoid trouble. I decided to take them back through the field so they wouldn’t race, but we still had to cross the road. Smokey jigged a bit as we crossed, but listened to me. It was Flicker who bolted toward home. She probably didn’t even realize there was someone on her back, the kid was so small.

“Make your horse WALK,” I remembered shouting to the father before I took off after his child. “Don’t let him race us.”

It wasn’t hard to catch up with Flicker: Smokey was much faster. The problem was stopping a running horse from the back of another running horse. I couldn’t think of a safe way to do it. If I tried to grab Flicker’s reins, I’d pull her head to the side, and her body would bow away from me, and the kid would be thrown.

Even after a summer of tossing hay bales, I knew I wasn’t strong enough to pull her onto my horse. The only thing I could do was reach over and steady the girl, who was clinging like a burr to the saddle. I kept picturing her little body slipping off onto the hard-packed dirt, or the barbed-wire fence that ran parallel. All I could do was hold her where she was.

I held the girl up there until the horses reached the top of the road and stopped, just like that, race over. Flicker dropped her head to graze. The father came up the road just behind us, grabbed his daughter, called me a hero. When we got back to the barn, he explained to my boss as if I had saved his kid from a freak occurrence. I would have said I minimized the damage in a totally avoidable near-catastrophe.

At summer’s end, my boss offered to let me take Smokey home for the off season, as thanks. I wanted to say yes so badly, but I knew it was impractical. I did the research, visited a dozen barns, worked out the expenses, and finally called the barn, weeping, to say I couldn’t afford to take him. The next summer when I went back to work, he wasn’t there. I couldn’t bear to ask where he’d been sold, since I knew I’d blown my chance at any claim on him.

“In the end, I found a way to make it work to bring him home with me,” the storyteller said, going off the script as written in my head. I had forgotten she was still talking. Up until she changed the story, she’d sounded just like my own interior monologue. “I found a barn that let me give lessons on him to cover board. I saved enough to buy him the next spring. He was my extracurricular, my only extracurricular, the joy my whole life revolved around. When I decided to go to community college for large animal management instead of going to university, it was for him. From talking with all of you, I’m pretty sure this was a major divergence point, so I thought I’d tell you I had him until he died of old age at thirty-two.”

I wiped a tear from my eye. The sniffles around me suggested others were doing the same. One was openly weeping, another holding her. “It wasn’t your fault,” the second one said, loud enough for me to hear. “You couldn’t have saved her. We couldn’t all save her.”

Something nagged at me. She had left out a few things, to the point where I didn’t know if they had only happened to me. My boss had sat me down after the father and daughter had driven away. We spent an hour going over what had happened, with him suggesting different phrasings, different ways of thinking. “If anyone asks, you don’t need to mention that Flicker isn’t normally a kid horse, right? Or that the stirrups were too long?”

That was the seed of my investigative career: the hour where we sat at the picnic bench and massaged the truth into something litigation-proof. I was exhausted, drained of adrenaline, at once sickened and fascinated at the way the story changed before my eyes. I understood the need for the lie, understood that he’d lose the business if he was successfully sued, went along with it. At the same time, his casual erasure of the truth horrified me.

All these other Sarahs had either missed that moment or internalized it in some other way. Was the rabbi here? Maybe this was the incident that started her search for meaning. Maybe the quantologists had launched their careers looking for a way to do that day over again.

Part of me wanted more than anything to trade places with this barn manager. To have had sixteen years with a horse I loved, to have made a decision based on gut instead of practicality. I knew that ship had sailed, but I still wanted it. That one change had defined her life. She was happy. I was happy too. I’d left that incident alone as a disappointment but not a defining one, or maybe a defining point but one that had shaped me without tearing me down. The weeping Sarah might argue otherwise. Divergence points. Divergence points were the key to everything.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered to the woman who was still crying over the little girl, as I got up to leave.

The hotel manager was standing in the lobby talking to a couple of her employees when I passed. I debated telling her where I was going, decided against it. Probably stupid, I reflected without slowing, as I walked down the mildewed-smelling hall to knock on a murderer’s door. I heard footsteps inside, and the door swung wide; she opened it without checking who was on the other side.

“I know.” I didn’t need to say more. She’d believe me.

I pictured her hitting me over the head, running down the hall and out into the storm. That was the movie scenario, the dramatic culmination: the two of us wrestling on some wind-wracked cliff. Why wasn’t I afraid of that? I knew she had considered it and rejected it in the same moment. That wasn’t the kind of person we were. I was pretty sure of that, though not as sure as before I figured out what had happened.

She let me in. She was still wearing the No Good Deeds T-shirt, which looked even more rumpled than before. When she turned away there were sweat stains under the arms and all down the back, like she’d been exercising.

“I was going to take a quick shower,” she said. “Do you mind? You can look around.”

I nodded, let her go. She didn’t bother to close the bathroom door, or left it open out of courtesy to show me she wasn’t plotting anything.

I poked through the DJ’s stuff, scattered on the second bed. An ancient laptop, an ancient MP3 player, decent looking headphones. More pills. A twist-tied baggie with a brown lump in it, another baggie of what looked like ground coffee. A few T-shirts, one pair of ragged jeans.

She emerged from the bathroom in a towel, the picture of good health.

“Do you mind?” she asked, and I moved aside for her to take a pair of underwear off the pile. She poked her finger through a hole in a seam. “I didn’t think about this part. How I’d have to wear someone else’s used underwear.”

“Was it worth it?”

She cocked her head, gave me a sad, unstained smile. “That’s kind of up to you, I think.”

I hadn’t considered it that way, but as she said it I knew what she meant. If I told the authorities—whatever that meant in this context—the real DJ would still be upstairs in the fridge wearing someone else’s clothes. It would all have been for nothing.

“Why?” I asked. “Why her, specifically? What’s the divergence point?”

“There are a hundred thousand divergences between her and me. She wasted herself, wasted her life. She was a decent DJ, but she was otherwise a total fuck-up. Tried a hundred times to get clean. It never stuck.”

“She was nice to me,” I said, thinking about our brief interaction, her jittery enthusiasm. “Seemed pretty cool.”

She pulled on the jeans from the bed. They fit, but not as well as the designer pair she’d worn the day before. “I researched her for a while. Trust me. She may have been nice, but she was a four alarm fire. Smoked everything in her life other than music.”

“But just because she was a mess doesn’t mean she deserved to die. I mean, you’ve still got a lot going in your life, right? You invented cross-dimensional travel. Why would you want to take on her life if you think it’s so shitty?”

She reached into the backpack on the bed and withdrew the DJ’s wallet. Pulled out the ID and tossed it in my direction.

Oh. “Seattle’s gone in your world.” It wasn’t a question.

She nodded, tears in her eyes. “Not only Seattle. Everyone. I lived in a house with five of my closest friends during grad school. I was visiting our parents back east when it happened, but everyone else was in the house when the earthquake hit. I was on the phone with Kelly when it happened—they were all watching Labyrinth—and I heard the whole thing. It took ten days to dig them out. Too late, of course. They all still exist where the DJ’s from, and she sits in her shitty apartment pretending they’re not out there. Ignoring their calls when they try to check in on her. Estranged from our parents and sisters. She never even met Mabel. There are a million Sarahs I could have chosen and wouldn’t have because they still had people.”

“But you still have other people,” I said. “What about them?”

“My lab staff might miss me, but that’s about it. Mabel left me the night I made my big discovery, when I skipped out on our anniversary dinner because I was on the verge; I got home to tell her and she was gone. Our family would have felt terrible, of course, and I felt terrible about leaving them. But they would have been comforted by the way I lived and died, I think. Knowing I did everything I had set out to accomplish. It was a good life. They knew I loved them.”

“A good life you’re willing to leave behind?” I was still trying to imagine that. “You’ll trade tenure and fame and everything for whatever she’s got left?”

“That stuff is good for my ego, but it doesn’t matter. Not like having a home. Not like people. I’ll trade it all in a second for a world where everyone and everyplace I love still exists. Where I could find her world’s Mabel—they never even met!—and see everyone else again.”

“Even if they hate you?”

She didn’t hesitate. “Yes. Relationships can be repaired. Even if they hate me, I know they’re still out there hating me.”

“And that was worth bashing her head in?”

I watched her face carefully. I could imagine the horror I’d feel if I’d lost everyone in such a terrible way, and the guilt of knowing I’d have been there with them if I hadn’t been out of town, and even sitting on one side of that haunting phone call, but I still didn’t think it would drive me to murder.

“She didn’t feel it. Dropped like a stone. She doesn’t even own a bra,” she said, rummaging in the bag. “I haven’t gone out without a bra since I was twelve years old.”

“You did last night. I saw you in the back at the keynote.” I watched her pull a T-shirt over her head for a band I didn’t recognize. “Why did that other quantologist take your place? The real R1D0?”

She sighed. “If I say we’re exactly the same, I mean we are exactly the same. Literally the only difference in our lives is that the night I actually made the discovery, she went out for an anniversary dinner with Mabel, and I cancelled dinner and stayed in the lab. That’s our divergence point. She’s pissed she didn’t stay in the lab that night. She wants the glory. She’s let that supersede everything else, thinks she’d be happy if only she were in my shoes. That’s all. I mean, I’d be pissed too, but I don’t think she’s seeing clearly. She’s still with Mabel. That matters way more than a name on a paper, even one this huge.”

“Her decision must have been spur of the moment,” I said. “I think she heard the call you made, and switched clothes with the body when she realized she was the first one there. I’m not sure why she took both radios, but maybe that was panic. I heard the second one inside her room when I was standing in the hall with her. Anyway, I saw her speak last night. She could be you perfectly.”

“She is me. Nobody will know the difference. She can have them. Now I don’t have to feel guilty about leaving my family, even; it’s her world that’ll have to deal with her absence. Anyway, she might have been headed up to the club to do exactly the same thing I did.”

I shuddered to think that was true, and how many murderous Sarahs actually existed in that case. “Was that your whole motivation for going into quantology? To switch places?”

“No! We were already in a physics masters program, so finishing that degree and going into quantology wasn’t a stretch. We wanted to know if there really were realities where Seattle still existed. Where Kelly and Taylor and Allison and Scott and Andrea were still alive. Not to go there, just to know.”

I didn’t know who Andrea was, but Kelly and Taylor were my best friends other than Mabel, and we’d all lived in Scott and Allison’s house in Capitol Hill when I first moved to Seattle. I couldn’t imagine the guilt of living in a world where they had all died and I had been spared by some quirk of timing. And Mabel had broken up with her on top of that. She’d lost all of them. Even hearing her say it, it hit my gut as if I’d lost them myself.

“So you weren’t always going to kill someone?” I was still having trouble imagining this ambitious Sarah ditching everything she had to become a DJ, but it didn’t seem as far-fetched anymore. Something else bothered me too. I believed everything else she’d said, but I still couldn’t picture myself bashing in somebody’s head, or taking the time to position her beneath the stage in the hopes of making it look like an accident. Every step screamed intention.

She ran her hands over her short hair, smoothing the flyaways. “I only decided for certain when she came back with her second crate. She must’ve gotten herself messed up in between; she could barely answer my questions when I tried to talk to her. Anyway, I’m sure there are other realities spawned at that moment where I decided not to.”

She believed what she was saying, I could tell, but I didn’t. I was certain she’d waited up there, taken the time to pick the perfect weapon from the show and tell table. She might even have picked in advance, when the questionnaires had come in, researching the offerings until she found the award that she could turn into a weapon; that would explain why the Hall of Fame was in the nightclub instead of someplace people could browse it throughout the weekend. It was disorienting, to hear her lying to herself and recognize it for what it was. I wasn’t her, I reminded myself again. We’d made different choices to bring ourselves to this point.

“And in case you’re wondering, I wouldn’t have killed you for your Seattle, either. You haven’t squandered it. Most haven’t. Anyway, when I started my research I thought I would be happy if I just proved that they were out there somewhere, in some other reality. That’s why we all got into quantology, to prove there were other possibilities, not to change places. And that felt like enough until I started researching all of you to figure out who to invite. Until I found her—” she pointed at herself “—and realized there was a way to make it happen. If I didn’t try, I’d always wonder about it. You’d do the same thing, right?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t think so. I hoped not.

She kept talking. “When I reached out to the other quantologists, I picked ones who had diverged before I had that idea. Or so I thought, anyway. Maybe I was wrong about that, at least in the case of R1D0. I didn’t think about the ways they’d diverge because of the influence of my inviting them to help plan this. That was short-sighted. Do you think the others know I switched?”

“I don’t think so.” None of them had mentioned it to me. If they didn’t know, that meant they hadn’t thought of it; if they hadn’t thought of it, that left only one or two capable of murder.

“Yeah, I hope not. I want to think I’m the worst of us, other than her.” She stood before me, wearing the clothes of the DJ I’d met the day before, wearing her life. “So what are you going to do? Are you going to tell them? Turn me in?”

“Did you ever chase down a runaway horse?”

She looked confused, then nodded.

I thought about divergence points. I’d never felt I could have done anything else in that moment on the road, which was a good thing. Even the tiniest choices paralyzed me; I tried to play out every decision’s every repercussion. Better not to have time to think.

Up until I came here, I’d tried to tell myself that once I made a choice it was done, I had to own it. We all built the future with our choices every day, never knowing which ones mattered. Now I still had to own it, but I knew others were stuck living the other side of my decisions, or I was living theirs. I wasn’t even sure yet if that was paralyzing or freeing. If I let her go, if she was anything like me, guilt might wear her down to nothing. That was a punishment in itself. If I turned her in, would it be justice for the DJ, or merely proof I could solve a crime?

“If you turn me in,” she said, as if I had spoken out loud, “there’s going to be a whole lot of confusion in a whole lot of places. I have no idea how any authority will deal with it. There’ll be a dead body in one world, an accused killer in another. If you let me go, think of all the good I can do. I can repair her relationships with our friends and family. I can find her world’s Mabel. This Sarah was never going to pull out of her spin, I swear. She would be dead tomorrow or next week or next month. And she’ll still be dead tomorrow. I could do some good there in her world.”

Somewhere out there, iterations were sparking. Variations on the host, deciding and not deciding to go through with her plan. Killing the DJ, changing her mind and walking away. More iterations yet: the second quantologist, making and unmaking her split-second decision to leave her life and slip into one that was identical in all ways but a crucial one. Somewhere, another me turned in the second but not the first, the first but not the second. Both. Neither.

Some other place, the DJ had never died. She put another record on her turntable, slowed the beat to match the song already playing, shifted seamlessly from one into the other. Some other place, a hotel nightclub full of Sarahs danced awkwardly to their favorite music, shaped by their worlds, shaping new ones.

RIVER OF TEETH

Sarah Gailey

Foreword

In the early twentieth century, the Congress of our great nation debated a glorious plan to resolve a meat shortage in America. The idea was this: import hippos and raise them in Louisiana’s bayous. The hippos would eat the ruinously invasive water hyacinth; the American people would eat the hippos; everyone would go home happy. Well, except the hippos. They’d go home eaten.

Much to everyone’s disappointment, Congress didn’t follow through on the plan, and today America lives a cursed life—a beef life, with nary a free-range hippo within the borders of our country.

Reader, this is an actual, literal thing that almost happened. The hippos are not a metaphor. You should investigate hippo ranching for yourself; as much as I’d like to call this novella the definitive text on the matter, it is most assuredly fiction. With that in mind, I caved in to my desire to make this a hippo-cowboy romp and fiddled with some dates. I shifted everything back by about fifty years, and took some liberties with what technology existed at the time in order to fit the story to the time period. I regret nothing: it was worth it for the hats alone.

For actual facts about hippo ranching, check out Jon Mooallem’s fabulous piece in the Atavist Magazine (“American Hippopotamus”).

Yours in dreams of the America that Might Have Been,

Sarah Gailey

Chapter 1

WINSLOW REMINGTON HOUNDSTOOTH was not a hero.

There was nothing within him that cried out for justice or fame. He did not wear a white hat—he preferred his grey one, which didn’t show the bloodstains. He could have been a hero, had he been properly motivated, but there were more pressing matters at hand. There were fortunes to be snatched from the hands of fate. There were hors d’oeuvres like the fine-boned young man in front of him, ripe for the plucking. There was swift vengeance to be inflicted on those who would interfere with his ambitions. There was Ruby.

Winslow Houndstooth didn’t take the job to be a hero.

He took it for the money, and he took it for revenge.

The scarred wooden table in front of him was covered in the accoutrements of The Deal. The two-page contract, signed and initialed in his cramped handwriting. The receipt for disbursement of funds. A set of five photographs that had been culled from several dozen files: his team, selected after hours of arduous negotiation. There was a round-faced woman, her hair set in a crown of braids; an ink-dark, fine-boned rogue; a hatchet-nosed man with a fussy moustache; and a stone-faced woman with a tattoo coiling up her neck. The latter two were concessions he was already braced to regret. And finally—never last, only ever finally—there was Houndstooth himself. The photo didn’t do him justice—he noted that the part in his hair was off-center by at least two centimeters—but he was wearing his finest cravat in the picture, so he’d call it a wash.

And then of course, there was the fat sack of money.

He counted out the thick gold coins, his eyes flicking to the photo of the hatchet-nosed man once every few seconds, and he waited. Now that the negotiations were over—now that his rate and his team had been established, and the money had changed hands—the small talk would begin. It was always the same with these government types. They were deeply confused by the juxtaposition of his vague accent and his eyes. His country’s accent. His parent’s eyes.

“So, where are you from?”

Ah, yes. There it was. They could begin the requisite dialogue about where he was from and where he was from. Houndstooth didn’t look up from the coins.

“Blackpool.” He could have made his tone frostier, but being in the presence of such a lovely stack of hard money warmed him like a milky cup of Earl Grey.

When the agent didn’t immediately respond, Houndstooth paused in his counting, placing a mental finger next to the number “four thousand.”

The agent was staring at him with such blue eyes. Such attentive eyes. “You don’t sound British,” the agent said quietly. Houndstooth found himself intrigued by the catch in the young man’s voice.

“Yes, well,” Winslow Houndstooth replied with a crocodile grin. “I suppose my accent’s almost gone by now. I’ve been in Georgia for some time. I came to the States to be a hopper, and once I tasted my first Georgia peach”—he reached across the table to touch the agent’s arm, scattering the photos—“it was just too sweet for me to leave.”

The federal agent’s cheeks reddened, and Houndstooth’s smile grew. He didn’t move his hand.

“I do so love the peaches down here.”

* * *

Winslow Houndstooth left the federal agent’s office an hour and forty-seven minutes later, smoothing his hair with an elaborately carved comb. He eased the door shut behind him with a small smile.

That young man would need to take a nap for the rest of the afternoon.

The sack of gold coins was heavy, and he divided it evenly into each of Ruby’s saddlebags. She could have carried the weight on one side easily—eight thousand dollars in U.S. government gold would hardly wind her—but it pleased him to know that he was flanked by four thousand dollars on each side.

He swung himself into the kneeling saddle on Ruby’s back. She grunted at him.

Ruby had settled her bulk deep into the water-filled trench next to the hitching post. She wasn’t made for long periods standing on land, although her breed could do it for longer than most. The Cambridge Black hippopotamus was the finest breed in the United States: sleeker, faster, and deadlier than any other hippo on the water. Ruby wasn’t bred for meat; she was a hopper’s hippo, meant for herding her slower, grazing cousins.

Ruby was onyx-black and lustrous; she looked like a shadowy, lithe version of a standard hippo. She stood five feet tall at the shoulder, about the height of a standard Carolina Marsh Tacky—although horses, Tackies included, were rare ever since the Marsh Expansion Project had rendered their thin legs a liability on the muddy, pocked roads. Her barrel chest swung low to the ground over short legs, perfect for propelling her through marshy waters when her rider needed to round up wayward hippos on the ranch. She grumbled on land, but could carry Houndstooth up to ten miles overland between dips in the water—another marker of her superior breeding (her cousins could only do six miles, and that only under duress). Fortunately, she was rarely out of the water that long.

“I know, girlie. I shouldn’t have left you out here by yourself for so long. But you know I just can’t resist blue-eyed boys.” Houndstooth patted Ruby’s flank and she let out a little rumble, standing under him and dripping freely for a few moments. She lifted her broad, flat nose briefly and yawned wide. Her jaw swung open by nearly 180 degrees, revealing her wickedly sharp, gold-plated tusks. They gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. She snapped her mouth shut and lowered her head until her nose nearly brushed the ground as she prepared to head home.

“Yes, alright, I know. Let’s go home, Rubes, and you can keep your judgments to yourself. We need to pack up.”

Houndstooth swayed with her rolling gait as she began to trot. He rubbed a loving hand over her leathery, hairless, blue-black flank, feeling the muscles shifting under the skin. Ruby was sleeker than most hippos, but not by much. Though her livestock cousins had been bred for marbling, her sub-Saharan ancestors carried little excess fat. Their rotund shape belied merciless speed and agility, and Ruby was the apex of those ancient ideals: bred for maneuverability, fearlessness, and above all, stealth. She was dangerous in the water: no gulls dared to plague the marshes she wallowed in, and if one was so foolish as to try to rest on her back, it would quickly be reduced to a cautionary tale for other gulls to tell their children.

“Eight thousand dollars, Ruby. We’ll be able to buy our own little patch of marshland, maybe get you a bull.” Ruby huffed, her nostrils—set squarely on top of her nearly rectangular snout—flaring with impatience. Her round ears didn’t turn toward the sound of his voice, but they flapped irritably. Houndstooth chuckled. “Of course I’m joking. You’re past breeding age anyway, Ruby-roo.”

It was another thirty minutes to the marshside tavern where Houndstooth had a room. It would have been forty by horseback, but Ruby’s trot was quicker than a horse’s, even with her frequent detours to dip back into the river. Houndstooth knew when he’d picked her out that she’d grow up to be more temperamental than a slower hop would have been, but her agility had made her spirited temperament worthwhile.

She’d saved his life enough times that he figured she’d earned the right to her opinions.

When they got back to the tavern, Houndstooth unlatched the kneeling saddle and the saddlebags from Ruby’s harness and set her loose in the marsh. “I’ll see you in the morning, Ruby. We’ll head out around dawn, alright?” She waited, already half-submerged in the water, for him to rub her snout. Her ears twitched back and forth, impatient, and she blew a bubble at him. He laughed, earning a long, slow blink of her slanting, hooded eyes. “Okay, alright, I know. You’ve got places to be, grass to eat.” Houndstooth crouched and put a hand on either side of her broad snout.

“You’re my girl, Ruby-roo,” he cooed, rubbing her whiskers. “And you’re the best gull-damned hippo there is.”

With that, Ruby sank into the water and was gone.

* * *

Houndstooth propped his feet on a chair as he watched Nadine work the room. She was in her element: sliding full mugs of beer down the gleaming bar, promising to arm wrestle drunk patrons, letting customers buy her shots of whiskey to share with them (she always poured herself iced tea and pocketed the cash). He loved to see her efficiency. He’d told her many times that she would make an excellent hopper, but she always said she preferred to herd malodorous beasts that paid in cash.

She dropped off a steaming mug of Earl Grey—brewed from his own personal supply—and straightened his hat. “Where’ve you been, Winslow? Out with some new girl?”

He winked at her, and she tapped the brim of his hat to set it back askance.

“Ah, some new boy. Green eyes or brown on this one?”

“Blue,” he said, toasting her. “Blue as the Gulf, and twice as hot.”

He pulled out a silk handkerchief and bent to polish a scuff on his left boot. His timing was fortuitous. As he bent down, the door to the tavern burst inward and a man nearly the size of Ruby barrelled inside.

“What jack-livered apple-bearded son of a horse’s ass,” the man bellowed, “let a fucking hippo loose in a private marsh?”

Houndstooth did not remove his boots from the chair as he waved his silk handkerchief over his head. “Yoo-hoo,” he said in a high falsetto, before dropping his voice down to its usual baritone. “I believe I’m the jack-livered apple-bearded son of a horse’s ass you’re looking for.” With the hand not holding the square of paisley silk, he unbuttoned his pin-striped jacket. “What would you like to say to me about my Ruby?”

“That’s your hippo?” the man said, crossing the now-silent room in a few sweeping strides. As he came closer, Houndstooth did a quick calculation. He added the bristling beard to the muscles straining at a flannel shirt and the shedding flakes of marsh grass, and he came to the obvious conclusion: marshjack. The man, it was safe to assume, spent his days scything marsh grasses to send to inland ranches. His accent was unplaceable, a combination of tight-jawed California vowels and loose Southern consonants. Houndstooth decided that he must have come South during the boom and taken up marshjacking after the bust. “That tar-skinned brass-toothed dog-eating monster out there is yours?” The man looked down at Houndstooth, who was still in his chair. “Who the hell let you on a hopper ranch, anyway? I’d like to have a word with the damn fool what thought to let you—”

“Dog-eating, did you say?”

“That’s right, you yellow-bellied bastard,” the man growled. “That monster of yours done et my Petunia.”

“And what,” Houndstooth inquired, easing his feet off their perch, “was your Petunia doing in that private marsh? Certainly not helping you hunt ducks on private property, I would hope?”

Everyone in the bar was watching them, speechless. Nadine leaned forward over the bar—the private marsh in question was her property, and so were the ducks that swam in it. The ducks she raised from eggs and sold at the market in order to pay the taxes on her bar.

“That ain’t none of your business, you slick fuck,” the marshjack spat. “What’s your business is that my Petunia’s dead because of your painted-up hippo bitch.”

He swung his arm. Houndstooth registered the glint of metal.

What happened next happened very quickly indeed.

Houndstooth dropped forward out of his chair and into a crouch, and the knife sailed over his head.

The marshjack’s momentum carried him forward and he stumbled, his leg brushing Houndstooth’s shoulder as he put out a hand to catch himself before he could hit the ground.

Houndstooth straightened, fitted his right fist neatly into his left hand, and used his full weight to drop the point of his elbow onto the back of the marshjack’s skull.

There was a crack like a branch snapping. The assembled crowd in the tavern made a collective “ooh,” and the marshjack fell onto his face. By the time he managed to roll over onto his back, Houndstooth was standing over him. He twirled the marshjack’s long, ivory-handled knife in his hand as the marshjack’s eyes eased open.

“Well, old chap,” Houndstooth said in a carrying voice. “Seems you tripped and dropped your knife.” He flipped the knife in the air and caught it without taking his eyes off the marshjack. “Not to worry, I’ve caught it for you.” He tossed it again; caught it again. The marshjack’s eyes followed the spinning blade.

Houndstooth crouched over him. “Now, here are some things you ought to know. One: Ruby is not painted. She’s a Cambridge Black hippo, and I’d guess that’s why she was able to sneak up on your dear departed Petunia. Bred for stealth, you see, but she can be territorial. I’m not surprised that she ‘et’ Petunia, if the dog was in her waters.” He tossed the knife from hand to hand as he spoke, almost lazily. “Two: Her tusks are plated in gold, not brass. It’s my gold. I took it, chum, from the type of men who like to steal ducks. So you see, it is my business why you were in that marsh, because my Ruby-roo can always use more accessories.” The marshjack tried to track the knife, but one of his pupils was dilating and he seemed to be struggling to follow the movement.

“And number three, my dear man.” Houndstooth reached down and gripped the bridge of the marshjack’s nose between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. The marshjack’s eyes stayed on the knife, which was now twirling baton-like between the fingers of Houndstooth’s right hand. “I thought you’d want to know that they don’t let me on hopper ranches. Not anymore.” His voice dropped to an intimate murmur as the knife flashed in his hand. “But I’ll be happy to address your concerns myself.”

In one fluid motion, Houndstooth inserted the knife into the marshjack’s left nostril and slit it open. Before the marshjack could so much as choke on his own blood, his right nostril had been similarly vented.

Winslow Houndstooth straightened and wiped the blade of the knife clean on his handkerchief. He dropped the square of ruined silk onto the marshjack’s face just as the man raised his hands to clutch at his filleted nose.

“I’ll help you clean up the sawdust tonight, Nadine. Sorry about the mess.” Houndstooth stepped over the marshjack and shot his cuffs, raising his voice over the marshjack’s moans. “Oh, and I’ll be paying out my room this evening. I’ve got a business trip to go on and I think I’ll be a while.”

Nadine set two glasses on the bar and poured a measure of whiskey into each as the bar patrons slowly began to converse again.

“Where ya headed, Winslow?”

He took a photo out of his breast pocket. The hatchet-nosed man glared up from it, his wispy moustache abristle. “The Mississippi River, sweet Nadine.” He tossed the marshjack’s fine ivory-handled knife in the air; it flipped end-over-end five and a half times before dropping, point-down, through the hatchet-nosed man’s left eye. Houndstooth clinked his glass against Nadines. They each downed their whiskey, and Houndstooth gave Nadine a wink and a grin to go with the burn in both their throats. “And what a fine river it is.”

Chapter 2

NOBODY EVER SUSPECTS THE FAT LADY.

Regina Archambault walked through the market with her parasol over her shoulder, plucking ripe coin purses from pockets like fragrant plums from the orchard. Her hat was canted at a saucy angle over her crown of braids. Many of her marks recognized her, the visitor they’d sat next to at church or at a fete. They greeted her by name—and then their gazes slid off her like condensation down the side of a glass.

And she helped herself to whatever she deemed that they didn’t have a use for. Rings, watches, wallets, purses—the peacock feather from the back of a particularly lovely bonnet. They never seemed to suspect that a woman whose dresses were custom-made to fit over her broad body would have nimble fingers. That she would be able to slip past them without drawing attention.

“Archie! Oh, Archie, you dropped your handkerchief!” A young gentleman in a beautifully felted bowler hat ran after her with a flutter of pink clutched in his outstretched hand.

“Now, Aaron,” she said, archly but in low enough tones that they would not be overheard. “You know full well that is not my ’andkerchief. I did see one just like it for sale in the general store, though.” Aaron flushed, and he smoothed his downy moustache with a nervous forefinger. Archie stepped with him into the entrance of an alleyway, where they could be away from prying eyes.

“Well, Archie—that is, Miss Archambault—that is—I just supposed that I might—”

Archie reached out her hand and took the handkerchief. “Aaron, mon amour—you know we mustn’t let anyone see us together like this. Why, think how they’d talk.” Her fingers rested on his for a moment as she took the little scrap of pink from him.

He leaned toward her. “Archie, I have to talk to you about our plan. I think my parents suspect something, and I won’t be able to get away tonight after all.”

His father, the stern patriarch of the wealthiest family in New Orleans, certainly did suspect something—he suspected quite a bit, if he’d read the anonymous letter Archie had sent him. She pressed the pink handkerchief to her lips and summoned tears to her eyes—just enough to brim prettily. “Oh, mon ciel étoilé, but I must go first thing tomorrow! And you must come with me, and we must buy the tickets this evening! I suppose—you’ll just have to give the money for the train tickets to me and I’ll buy them, and I’ll—I’ll ’ide one in the knot in our tree for you to collect when you can join me. You will join me, won’t you, mon amour? You . . . you remember the tree I’m talking about?” She dabbed delicately at her eyes with the handkerchief and fluttered her lashes at him.

“Oh, yes, Archie, I—I remember. How could I forget where we—” If he had been any pinker he’d have been a petunia. He pulled an envelope from his vest pocket and pressed it into her hands, looking over both of his shoulders as he did so. “Here’s the money for the train, and . . . I’ll see you at the station, then?”

Archie pressed the handkerchief to her eyes again, so he wouldn’t see her roll them at his ham-fisted attempt at stealth. “A kiss, Aaron. For luck.” She kissed him hard—a better kiss than the boy would likely ever get again in his life. She kissed him thoroughly enough that he wouldn’t notice her fingers dancing through his pockets.

“I’ll see you at the train station in two days, my love.”

She waved her handkerchief at him as he crept out of the alley, and she tucked the fat envelope of cash into her reticule. The poor little overripe peach of a boy—she marvelled at the way he walked, with the confidence of someone who’s never been hungry or cold or heartbroken before in his life. When he was out of sight, she examined his pocket watch. A fine piece—it would fetch a fine price. Just fine.

She straightened her wide-brimmed straw hat and left the alley, gathering her skirts around her. She turned down a side street, away from the crowd, and walked to a broad old dirt road. A dog ran between two of the pecan trees ahead of her. Other than him, she was alone, and she walked down the middle of the road, parasol dangling from her wrist, holding her skirts up with one fist and her hat down with the other.

As she walked through the pecan trees to the marsh dock, the hidden pockets in her overskirt thumped against her leg.

As she scanned the water for Rosa’s white ears, Archie whistled—a tune she’d heard from a busker in the marketplace. She couldn’t remember the words—something about a hopper and a debutante—but the melody was catchy.

A stream of bubbles moved across the surface of the water. Aha.

“Rooo-saaa,” Archie sang in her lilting alto. “I seeee-youuu!”

A white blur erupted halfway out of the water and rushed the dock. Archie swept her hat off, spread her arms and set her legs in a wide stance as the three-thousand-pound albino hippo splashed toward her at full speed.

“Bonjour, ma belle fille!” Archie cried. “Mon petit oeuf douce, ’ave you been having fun while maman was at the market?”

Rosa skidded to a stop a few inches in front of the dock. Archie tapped a long finger against the hippo’s broad white nose.

“You, ma cherie, need to get sneakier. You’re too easy to spot!”

Rosa shoved her snout against Archie’s drooping skirts. “Yes, fine, ’ere—” Archie unclasped her skirts and pulled them off, revealing close-fitting red pinstriped riding breeches underneath. “—I got you a pastry, cherie. I know that cruel veterinarian says you shouldn’t, but we don’t ’ave to tell ’im about this, do we?”

Archie pulled a slightly squashed turnover from the pocket of her skirt and held it out to Rosa’s nose. The hippo’s pink eyes remained unfocused, but she turned unhesitatingly toward the smell of the tart. Her mouth swung open, and Archie dropped the turnover onto her tongue.

“Aren’t you scared she’ll bite you?”

Archie whipped around, startling the sallow, bone-thin boy behind her so much he nearly fell off the dock. She grabbed his arm and hauled him away from the edge of the planks.

“Of course I’m not scared,” she said, still gripping the boy’s arm. “I’ve ’ad Rosa since she was just a petit ’op. She would no sooner bite me than she would join the Paris Opera. Sneaky little urchins who follow me, on the other ’and—” She smiled and brought her face close to the boy’s face, close enough that she could have bitten the brim of his cap. “She eats them up without a thought.”

The boy swallowed hard but was not foolish enough to wriggle out of her grip. “Please, ma’am, you are Miss Regina Archambault, aren’t you? They told me to look for the, uh, the—”

“The fat Frenchwoman with the albino ’ippopotamus?” Archie deadpanned.

“Uh, yes, miss. I—I have a letter for you. Please don’t feed me to your hippo, ma’am, I didn’t mean to sneak—”

He raised a trembling hand with an envelope in it. Her name was written on the outside in familiar, spiky lettering. Archie released his arm.

“Well, then, that is something else altogether.” She grabbed the letter. “Would you like to pet a ’ippo, boy?” He looked nervously at Rosa’s tusks. “She will not eat you. Not unless I tell ’er to. Just make a lot of noise as you walk up, so you don’t startle ’er—’er eyes, they are not so good.”

The boy glanced between Archie and the pink-eyed hippo. “I’ve never heard of a blind white hippo before.”

“Well,” Archie said, “the ’opper that bred ’er was going to kill ’er when ’e saw. ‘What use is a blind ’ippo?’ ’e said. But I knew better—she is the finest ’ippo in all the world.”

The boy stared at Rosa, awe plain on his face. “Her name’s Rosa?”

Archie ran her thumb under the seal on the envelope. “Oui. Let ’er smell your ’and, then you can scratch behind ’er ears.”

As the boy approached the beast, tentatively placing a small hand against her snout, Archie read through the letter.

“Well, well,” she whispered to herself. “Winslow, you old connard,” she said, not looking up from the letter. She murmured to herself as she read it through again. “Ferals . . . eight thousand . . . a full year? Non, that can’t be—oh, oui, I see now . . .” She turned to the boy, who was staring at Rosa’s tusks with rapt fascination as he rubbed her nose. She looked him over, taking in his dull, patchy hair and his anemic complexion. She wondered if he slept in the streets, or if he hadn’t escaped the orphanage yet.

“Miss Archa-Archim—”

“Call me Archie.”

“Miss Archie? You said you had her since she was just a hop, right?”

“Oui,” Archie replied. The boy was looking up at her with shining eyes, one hand resting on Rosa’s nose. Archie lowered her voice conspiratorially, just to watch his face light up. “Hoppers, you see, we apprentice for years—then we choose a hop, when the time comes. We sleep beside them, we feed them, we sing to them. We’re with them every moment of their lives, from the time the cord is cut to the moment they’re fitted with a harness.”

The boy’s eyes were wide. “So that’s why you’re not scared of her?”

Archie laughed so heartily that the boy began to look sheepish. “I’m sorry, boy, it’s just—I couldn’t imagine being less frightened of sweet Rosa.” Rosa, hearing her name, yawned wide, showing off her teeth. The boy stared into Rosa’s massive mouth, his face aglow with awe.

“How do you get her teeth so white?”

Archie smiled. “I brush them. Would you like to see?”

The boy nodded, reaching out a now-fearless finger to touch one of Rosa’s gleaming tusks.

“I’ll show you, if you run a little errand for me. I need a telegram sent to a Mr. Winslow Houndstooth. Can you remember that?” She told him the message she wanted sent to Houndstooth, and she gave him a coin to get her a map of the Mississippi River.

“Be back here in two hours, and I will show you ’ow I brush her teeth. Hell, I’ll even let you ’elp me pack up ’er saddlebags.”

The boy put a hand on top of his cap, as though afraid it would fly off in the wake of his excitement. “Oh, boy, Miss Archie, I’ll be back faster’n you can spit!”

He ran down the dock, his feet flying up behind him. Archie smiled, and turned back to Rosa, who was waiting patiently to see if another turnover would be forthcoming.

“Well, cherie,” Archie said, folding her laden skirts over her arm. “It would appear that Winslow is calling in our old debt. I suppose I could argue that I owe ’im nothing after what ’appened in Atlanta—but what’s a favor between friends, oui? ’E’s got a job for us, my Rosa. How would you like to be a rich ’ippo?”

Rosa grunted, lowering herself further into the marsh. Archie pushed her skirts into a half-full saddlebag, then slipped off her shoes and sat on the dock, dangling her feet in the water. She rubbed a wet foot over Rosa’s half-submerged nose. “Eight thousand dollars. Just think, Rosa. Think of the pastries I’ll buy for you.”

Chapter 3

HERO SHACKLEBY DID NOT READ the letter when it arrived.

They didn’t read the second letter either.

They read the third, but only because it was hand-delivered.

Hero sat in their rocking chair, watching the tar-black hippo with the gold-plated tusks amble up the road. It would stop in front of their house, to be sure. Hero didn’t look up from the sweet tea they were stirring as the hippo came to a stop at the bottom of the front steps.

“You can pop her in the pond with Abigail. Gate’s around the side there.”

The man on top of the hippo didn’t respond, but dismounted and walked around the side of the house. Hero listened as Abigail greeted her new pondmate, as the man in the peacock-blue cravat cooed to—ah, yes. “Ruby,” he called her. Abigail was a Standard Grey—not too far off from a meat hippo, but considerably smarter. She would be friendly to Ruby. She was friendly to everyone. Hospitable, Hero thought.

Hero stirred the iced tea, tasted it. Not quite there yet.

Ruby’s rider came back around to the bottom of the front steps. He put his boot on the first step, then stopped, his chin tilted toward Hero’s face. “Might I join you?”

“S’why I’ve got a second rocking chair,” Hero said, assessing the man out of the corner of their eye. He was tall, immaculately dressed. He had cheekbones that sliced right through the thick, golden afternoon sunlight. He walked up the steps deliberately, watching Hero. Watching Hero’s pistols.

“Don’t worry,” Hero said. “I won’t shoot you. Sweet tea?”

“You haven’t been reading my letters,” the man said.

“You’re English. Lancaster?”

“Blackpool. You haven’t been reading my letters.”

“And you haven’t accepted my hospitality,” Hero said, gesturing to the unoccupied rocking chair and the sweet tea sweating on the porch rail in front of it. “Please, won’t you sit?”

The man sat. He looked like he wanted to sit on the edge of the rocking chair, but it was canted so that he had to sit all the way back. He held his hat in his hands. “My name is Winslow Houndstooth. I got your name from the federal agent who gave me this.” He dug into his pocket and held out a thick gold coin with an eagle on it. “He said you’d want this job.”

Hero sipped at their sweet tea, ignoring the proffered coin. “Hot this summer. They said it would be cooler, but I’d say it’s a sight hotter than it was this time last year.”

Houndstooth tapped the coin against the arm of his rocking chair. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to this part of Louisiana before. Rode here all the way from New Orleans. And that after the steamship ride along the Gulf.”

“Your Ruby must be tired as a hog after a boil.”

“She seemed happy to get into the water. Your Abigail looked damn bored in that pond, though. I bet she’d like the work.” He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Hero.

“I’m retired.” They considered Houndstooth over the rim of their glass. “But I’m glad you came to tell me about this ‘job’ in person. Like a gentleman.”

Houndstooth’s eyes found Hero’s. “Shackleby. That’s an honest name. Are you an honest person?”

Hero smiled, close-lipped. “I’m not a liar. Ask me anything and I’ll tell you the truth.”

“Is that sweet tea poisoned?”

Hero’s smile broke into a broad grin. “I thought you’d never ask.” They picked up the second glass of sweet tea from the porch rail, took a sip, and set it back down. “See? I’m just fine.”

Houndstooth didn’t touch the glass.

“Abigail is bored,” Hero said after a moment. “She’s not used to living in one place, to having her own pond all to herself. She loves it. Has her own little dentist-bird.” Hero leaned their head back against the rocking chair and fanned themself with the letter. “But she’s bored. I haven’t saddled her up in months. It’s just been the two of us, all alone, plus the milkman once a week. And I don’t even drink milk.”

“Hero.” He seemed to be rolling their name across his tongue. Hero caught themself staring and looked away. “Hero, I’m supposed to get you to accept this job. I accepted this job with the understanding that I would have a demolitions expert on board.”

Hero sipped their sweet tea and watched Houndstooth fiddle with his hat. “I’ll need some convincing. So. Convince me.” They tried not to blink while they said it, knowing that it sounded for all the world like a line. Houndstooth’s eyes snapped up, and he swallowed hard. Hero rubbed a tapered forefinger through the condensation on the outside of the pitcher of sweet tea.

“Well,” Houndstooth said in a low voice. “There’s the money. Eight thousand dollars. Gold, not bonds.”

“Hmm.” Hero ran their finger down the side of their throat, letting the cool water cut through the heat of the afternoon.

“Then there’s the job itself,” Houndstooth said. “Clearing the feral hippos out of the Mississippi. You’d live up to your name, if we managed it. We’d be heroes, Hero.”

“Mmmhm.” Hero leaned back in the rocking chair and crossed their legs, right over left. It would be something, to be a hero. A decent way to end a career that had gone on too long. Better than simply fading off the scene, like they’d planned. They tapped their nails on the arm of the rocking chair, one-two-three-four.

“And then, of course, there’s the team. It would be you and me—” He paused for a moment. “—Archie the Con, Cal Hotchkiss, and Adelia Reyes.”

Hero sat forward at this last name. “Adelia Reyes? I thought I heard she was—”

“Yes,” Houndstooth interrupted. “But she’ll still do the job. She never turns down a job.”

“Well.” Hero sat back, folding their hands in their lap. “It sounds like you’ve got quite a team already. Without me. So why would you need me, Winslow Houndstooth? Why do you want to pull me out of the retirement I’ve been so thoroughly enjoying?”

Houndstooth stood and turned on his heel, leaning his back against the porch rail. His hand rested next to the untouched sweet tea, which had begun foaming softly. He looked down at Hero, his gaze unwavering.

“Because,” he murmured. “I think you want it.”

Hero was thankful that their skin was dark enough to conceal the hot flush that was climbing their neck.

“I think you’ve only been retired for a year, and already, you’d poison a stranger just to break up the monotony.” Houndstooth knocked the sweet tea off the porch rail. It hissed as it ate through a rosebush. He leaned forward, still holding the porch rail. “I think you’d enjoy working this job a lot more thoroughly than you’ve enjoyed sitting in that rocking chair.”

Hero looked at Houndstooth’s burning eyes. “Is that what you think?” they asked, and sipped their sweet tea to relieve their suddenly dry mouth.

“Yes. That’s what I think. That,” he said, tilting his head to one side, “and I’ve got some things I need blown up. From what I hear, you’re the one to do it.”

Hero set their glass down and stood, clapping their hands decisively. “Well, then.” They walked inside, and emerged a few moments later wearing a battered leather Stetson and clutching a large, bulging duffel.

Houndstooth laughed. “I thought it would take more convincing than that!”

Hero walked toward Houndstooth until their boots touched. The laughter on Houndstooth’s lips died. They were nearly the same height, and their noses were less than an inch apart. Hero could smell the sweet iced tea on their own breath.

“Ask. I know you’re wondering. If we’re going to work together, you may as well ask.”

Houndstooth swallowed. “I . . .” He paused, looking down at Hero’s mouth, then looked back at their eyes. “How did you drink the poison? Without it killing you.”

Hero blinked. That wasn’t the question they had anticipated. “I’m immune. Small doses. Every day.”

Houndstooth smiled. “Well. That’s the only question I need the answer to.” He sat back down and unfurled a map of the Harriet on the table between them. “Shall we plan a route? I think we should be able to get into the marshes by midmorning, and then we can collect Cal before meeting up with the rest of the crew. . . .”

Hero let themself smile as they sat across from Houndstooth and began studying the map. This would be more fun than retirement.

Chapter 4

HOUNDSTOOTH WATCHED OUT OF the corner of his eye as Hero stretched their arms high over their head. The popping of their spine as they twisted made Ruby startle; her tail flapped irritably in the water of the marsh.

Hero and Houndstooth had been riding since dawn. The day’s ride had been filled with long, easy silences and the slow, steady rhythm of Ruby and Abigail’s treads through the water. The shadows were growing long as the sun began to dip, and Houndstooth had just started to doze off when Ruby’s flicking tail splashed water down the back of his shirt.

“Ah! Damn.” He wiped his brow with his handkerchief, then reached back into his saddlebag. The day was hot; the air was thick enough that even the mosquitoes seemed to be flying a little slower. Houndstooth swatted at one that was trying to find its dinner on the back of his neck; then he reached back into his saddlebag, pulled out two pears, and tossed one to Hero, who caught it without looking.

“Show-off,” he said with a small smile.

“Sleepyhead,” Hero drawled back.

Houndstooth was about to object, but interrupted himself with a huge yawn. He tried to cover it by biting into his pear, but Hero was already laughing at him.

“Keep me awake, then,” he said through a mouthful of pear. Hero raised their eyebrows and Houndstooth felt himself blushing. Hero let it lie for a moment before answering.

“Alright, if it’s my job to keep you stimulated. Let’s talk about your grand . . . caper.”

“It’s not a caper, Hero. It’s an operation. All aboveboard. All very well-planned and prepared-for.”

“And what’s the plan?” Hero asked.

Houndstooth coughed. “I was hoping you’d help me come up with that.”

Hero bit into their pear, spat a seed. “You’re funny.” They said it without smiling. They tossed the top third of their pear into the water in front of Abigail, who snapped it up without missing a beat. Abigail crunched and swallowed the pear, twitching her ears.

“That I am,” Houndstooth said cheerfully. “Have you ever been to the Harriet before?”

“No,” Hero said, “I’m not one for gambling.”

Houndstooth looked at them sidelong. He dipped his hand into his saddlebag and scooped out a little pouch of the white saddle-resin all hoppers used to keep their kneeling saddles from sliding around on the slippery, hairless backs of their hippos. He dipped his finger into it and drew a long oval with open, fluting ends on Ruby’s inky shoulder, where Hero could see it. He drew a thick line across the top third of the oval, where the narrowed end flared open again—the dam that had turned the Mississippi into the Harriet. Not quite a lake and not quite a marsh, the Harriet was a triumph of engineering, but the ferals trapped within it rendered it a national embarrassment. The riverboat casinos that dominated its surface did little to alleviate the distaste with which most of the country considered the entire region.

“So, if this is the Harriet, then this is the Gate.” Houndstooth drew another line across the bottom third of the oval. Hero snorted.

“You’re not much of an artist, are you?”

Houndstooth glowered at them. “This is the Gate,” he continued. “It keeps the ferals inside of the Harriet, so they can’t get out into the Gulf. The Gate at the bottom of the Harriet and the dam at the top keep the ferals penned.” He smudged white on each side of the circle. “Unbroken land to the east and west for a few miles in all directions keeps the ferals from traveling to other waters.”

“So, it’s . . . what? Twenty miles overland in every direction?”

“Give or take,” Houndstooth said with a shrug. “It’s enough land that the ferals can’t make it across. I’m sure a few try every year, and die in the process. Either way, the Gate extends far enough inland to discourage them from making a serious attempt at migration.”

“Do they want to leave?”

Houndstooth chewed on this. “I doubt it,” he said after a minute. “They’ve been there for a few breeding generations. It’s all they know. And other than the riverboats, it belongs to them.”

Hero nodded. “Alright. So this plan that you’re expecting me to come up with is supposed to motivate these dangerous, well-entrenched animals to migrate south.”

Houndstooth grinned at them. “That’s right. Per the federal agent who hired us, all we have to do is get them through the Gate,” he said, drawing a line from the middle of the oval out through the bottom line on the crude map. “And then they’re in the Gulf, and they’re not our problem anymore.” He drew the white line of resin all the way down Ruby’s flank and into the water, making Hero laugh. Their laugh was infectious, and Houndstooth found himself laughing too as he splashed marsh water onto Ruby’s back, rinsing the map away.

“What does the Coast Guard think of this plan?”

Houndstooth shrugged. “They’re not the ones paying me.”

“And what do the riverboat casinos think of it?”

“That’s a good question,” Houndstooth said. He settled his hat low over his eyes, and the two sank into the easy silence of the humid afternoon.

There would be plenty of time for Hero to learn about the Harriett, Houndstooth thought. Plenty of time for them to learn about the man who had shaken enough hands and bought enough half-destroyed land to practically own the surface of that feral-ridden puddle.

Travers.

If he had a first name, nobody seemed to know it. If he had a soul, Houndstooth had certainly never glimpsed it. Travers had seen an opportunity when the Great Hippo Bust of ’59 rendered half the marshland in Louisiana worthless. He’d made his first fortune purchasing parcels of land for pennies apiece and reselling them to the Bureau of Land Management for use in developing the Harriet. The only caveat had been that he would have unfettered, exclusive business rights on the water, and the right to deny access to any nongovernmental person seeking entry via the Gate.

It was a story that most hoppers didn’t know, but then most hoppers hadn’t done business with Travers. Unless they’d spent time on his riverboats, most hoppers didn’t know how much he relied on the vicious, hungry ferals that infested the Harriet. There had been a time when he would have paid handsomely to have even hungrier beasts in those waters.

There had been a time.

Hero interrupted Houndstooth’s blood-soaked memories of the most dangerous man in Louisiana. “So, we’re getting the ferals out of the Harriet because—why?”

“Trade route,” Houndstooth murmured without looking up. “The dam is crumbling already—there’s a huge crack down the middle, and it’s less stable every year. The plan as I understand it is to tear it down and reopen the Harriet to trade boats that need to get down to the Gulf. But the boats won’t go through if there are ferals eating their deckhands. So, they’ve got to go.”

“Ah, right. That’s not what I meant,” Hero said. “I meant why are we doing it? What’s in this for you?”

Houndstooth missed the comfortable silence. He swayed back and forth on Ruby’s back, listened to the lapping of marsh water against her barrel chest. Abigail nudged Ruby with her shoulder. Ruby grumbled and ducked her nose under the water, and Houndstooth felt the pressure of Hero’s patience settle over him.

“Have you ever had anything that you feel like you’d die without?” Houndstooth said it so quietly that it sounded like a prayer. “Something that you’ve put everything into—your whole life, all your heart? Have you ever had anything like that?”

There was another long minute of silence as Hero thought it over. Ruby blew bubbles in the water with her nose. On the shore of the marsh, a trio of fat frogs hopped into the water. Abigail glared at the shore primly, affronted by the commotion.

“I don’t think I have,” Hero said. They sounded distant, but when Houndstooth looked over, they were patting Abigail’s flank with a small smile.

“I had a ranch once.” Houndstooth watched Hero out of the corner of his eye, from under the shadow of his hat. He was ready for them to be skeptical, ready to have to prove his credentials. Hero didn’t look back at him; they simply braced their hands on the pommel of Abigail’s saddle and tilted their head back, their eyes half-closed. Houndstooth managed not to stare at the bead of sweat that ran down the side of Hero’s long throat. “A breeding ranch.”

“Takes time, saving up for a ranch,” Hero drawled without opening their eyes.

“Fifteen years,” Houndstooth replied. He found himself watching the water to keep from watching Hero. Ruby left barely a ripple in her wake; the mosquitoes that landed on the water didn’t move out of her path. “It took fifteen years of work to buy the land. I started when I was seven years old, bottle-feeding sick hops at my uncle’s ranch outside Atlanta every other summer. My father wouldn’t pay for my passage across the ocean, so I worked throughout the year to get the money—I did whatever I could, short of stealing.” He swallowed back memories of his father’s reaction the one time he’d attempted to pick a pocket. “One year, I just didn’t go back home. I stayed, so I could work the ranch year-round.”

“That’s when you knew,” Hero said. It wasn’t a question.

“That’s when I knew,” Houndstooth answered. He took his hat off and used it to scoop up a patch of mostly clean water, dumping it over Ruby’s back to keep her skin from drying out. “I was the best breeder in the country, you know. Back before my ranch burned. Could have been the best in the world.”

Hero didn’t ask what had happened. They rode in silence for another thirty minutes or so as the sun dipped low, kissing the tree line. They set up camp a few miles outside the Harriet Gate. There would be no fire that night, but the air was warm enough that they didn’t need it. They laid out their bedrolls and sat, listening to the cacophony of nighttime insects and frogs singing. They passed a flask of whiskey back and forth while Ruby and Abigail splashed and grumbled in the water, looking for good patches of grass to dine on. The sky went grey; a few bright stars announced themselves. There was no moon, but the star-filled sky cast just enough light for Hero and Houndstooth to see each other’s outlines.

After a few more minutes, Houndstooth grunted, leaning back on his bedroll and propping himself up on his saddlebag. “I’m going to kill the man who burned down my ranch, Hero. You should know that.”

Hero stared hard at him. “If that’s what you have to do to make something right,” they said. “If you feel ready for it.”

“I’ve been getting ready for years, Hero,” Houndstooth murmured. “He’s been hiding from me on the Harriet. And I’ve been waiting for the need to kill him—the hunger for it—to die down. But it hasn’t. And now?” He patted his saddlebag. “Now I have a warrant to get onto the Harriet, and not even Travers can turn me away at the Gate.”

By way of an answer, Hero held out the flask. Houndstooth reached up for it. He misjudged the distance in the dark, and his fingers closed over Hero’s wrist. They both froze for a moment—then, Houndstooth slid his hand up over Hero’s. His fingers felt their way slowly past their hand, past their fingers, over their fingertips, finding the flask.

Houndstooth unscrewed the top of the flask, taking a long drink. Then, finally: “I wish you could have seen it. The ranch.”

Hero’s murmur only just carried over the hum of insects that rose around them. “Tell me.”

It was the kind of story that couldn’t have been shared by daylight. Houndstooth told Hero about the ranch—about the hard year he spent preparing the land he’d bought near the Harriet, about the harder year he spent getting his hands on good breeding stock. As the darkness thickened and solidified, he told Hero about sleepless nights spent nursing newborn hops back from the brink of death. He told them about hiring his first ranch hand, Cal—the man they were on their way to collect. He tried to show them a scar he’d gotten from his very first breeding bull—a thick rope of shining skin that cut across the inside of his bicep and ran almost all the way to his collarbone. He unbuttoned his shirt to show Hero where it met his shoulder.

“I can’t see it,” Hero laughed. “It’s darker than the inside of Ruby’s belly out here, Houndstooth.”

Houndstooth set down the nearly empty flask and grabbed Hero’s hand. “Here,” he said, and before he could think he had pressed their fingertips to the scar. His breath caught.

“Are my hands cold?” Hero whispered.

“No,” Houndstooth murmured back, as Hero’s fingers traced the full length of the scar where it met his shoulder. He could smell the sweet whiskey on their breath.

“What happened?” Hero asked, their fingertips still on Houndstooth’s collarbone.

“Well, the bull was trying to kill a nine-month-old hop, and I—”

“No,” Hero interrupted Houndstooth. “What happened to the ranch?”

For the space of three of their shared breaths, the only sound was the buzz of night insects and the flap of Ruby’s ears in the water. Then, just as Hero was preparing to draw a breath to apologize for asking a question they knew they shouldn’t have, Houndstooth answered.

“He burned it down.” His voice broke on the word “down,” as though he couldn’t quite hold the notion that the ranch was really gone. He lifted his hand and impulsively placed it over Hero’s.

“I woke up one night, middle of the night. I’d been in . . . in the birthing barn.” He cleared his throat but didn’t stop telling the story. His fingers tightened briefly over Hero’s. “I’d been in there all night, working through a difficult labor. It hadn’t looked good—I almost lost the mother three or four times. My hands were white and wrinkled from being underwater so long, trying to shift the hop into the right position to come out. But then, like nothing had ever been wrong at all, that mother just up and pushed out her hop. It was small, but it swam right up and poked its head out of the water and took its first breath, no problem. It was a healthy, perfect little girl-hop. The cow was looking at me like she didn’t know why I thought I needed to interfere.” He let out a breath that was almost like a laugh. “I was so exhausted, I fell asleep right there on the marsh grass beside her.

“When I woke up, the barn was filling with smoke. It smelled . . . wrong. I’ll never forget it, Hero.” He was nearly whispering, and Hero leaned a little closer to hear him. His voice was thick with the memory. “I stumbled outside and tripped over the hop, the one that had just been delivered. The mother was nowhere in sight—but then, I could hardly see anything, the smoke was so thick. There was sweat in my eyes, it was so hot, and the fire . . . the fire was everywhere.

“I picked up the hop and ran. She was small, small enough for me to carry, and too new to wriggle like they do. I got to the edge of my marsh and set her down in the water—her skin was already getting dry—and then turned to run back and put the fire out, but—” He stopped midsentence, and Hero could hear him trying to find the words.

“It was too late,” they murmured.

Houndstooth sniffed hard. He squeezed Hero’s hand once, hard, and then let it go. He leaned back on his bedroll, resting his head against his saddlebag again. After a few minutes, he went on.

“I couldn’t go back through the fire. The marsh grass was just dry enough, and there was a wall of flames between me and the paddocks. I couldn’t see through the fire and the smoke, but I could hear them,” he said. “The air smelled like . . . like meat, Hero. It was all wrong. I could hear them thrashing, bellowing. I could hear the hops. I could hear them burning. A hundred in all, hops and mothers and bulls, and I stood there and listened to them die.” His voice broke, and there were another few minutes in which they both pretended his tears were silent ones.

“I stayed there, as close as I could be without choking on the smoke, and I watched it burn. All the hippos I’d spent my life breeding—gone. Dead.” He fell silent.

“What about the hop?” Hero asked after a moment.

“Ah, well, of course,” Houndstooth answered, his voice still thick. “She started nudging at my ankles around dawn, as the flames died down. She was hungry enough that she started trying to suckle on the toe of my boot. She raised up well enough, didn’t she?”

“She sure did,” Hero answered. “Jesus, Winslow. A hundred hippos.” They whistled long and low. “That must’ve been a helluva ranch you built.”

“It was,” he replied. “It really was.” He laughed mirthlessly. “But after it burned? I had nothing left but bad debt. I had to sell the parcel to Travers to get out from under it.” Houndstooth spat into the water. “And look at me now. What do I have to my name? A bedroll and a grey hat and Ruby. The last of her line. And her getting older every day.”

Hero put their hand near the edge of their bedroll. Their pinky finger brushed against Houndstooth’s. He didn’t pull his hand away.

“A few weeks from now, that won’t be all you’ll have,” Hero murmured.

“No?” Houndstooth said, linking his pinky finger with Hero’s.

“No,” they replied. “In a few weeks, you’ll also have revenge.”

Chapter 5

“THEY DON’T HAVE HOPPERS in California, asshole. They don’t have hippos in California.”

“Well, Alberto,” Cal Hotchkiss said to the balding off-duty ranger, shifting his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other, “that’s your opinion.”

The four men around the table were not looking at each other. They watched the cards in their hands as though nude women were painted on the fronts of the cards, instead of the backs. They were not wreathed in smoke—the riverboat casinos did not allow smoking in private suites—but three of them chewed on unlit cigars. Cal Hotchkiss preferred his toothpick.

“It’s not an opinion,” the tall black man in the black hat chimed in. “There’s no hippos in California. No rivers. No marshes. Means no hippos.”

The men accepted cards from the dealer, who kept his eyes downcast as he slid them across the felted top of the table. They slid the cards into their hands, muttering to each other about the Sacramento River and whether it featured marshes; none of them knew, and Cal declined to educate them. Alberto sniffed. He leaned toward the window, holding onto his grey felt hat, and spat a thick stream of tobacco into the water. A moment later, a soft splash sounded.

“You know what they do have in California?” The man in the black hat took a sip from the mint julep that rested on the felt in front of him. “Adelia Reyes.”

For a moment, none of the men seemed to breathe. The only sound was the creaking of the giant wheel that propelled the riverboat slowly forward.

The moment passed.

“Never heard of her,” Alberto said. “Edvard, you heard of her?”

The fourth man at the table—a squat Swede in a bolo tie—shook his head. “If I had heard of her, I sure as shit wouldn’t want to hear of her again.”

Cal Hotchkiss didn’t say anything at all. He laid out his cards. The rest of the men at the table seemed to exhale as one as they each acknowledged defeat. Cal reached out one long arm and hooked it around the pile of chips in the center of the felt, reeling in his winnings. He lifted his bowler with one hand and ran his fingers through his damp, white-blond hair. The breeze coming in from the open window just behind his chair ruffled the fine wisps of his moustache. “Well, gentlemen. I win again.” He lifted his hat high in the air, and a dark, doe-eyed waitress wearing a breathtakingly low-cut corset slid over. She leaned close to him, her perfume wafting around the table.

“Yes, Mr. Hotchkiss?”

“I’d like a drink, Cordelia. And then I’d like for you to come and sit in my lap.”

“Right away, Mr. Hotchkiss.”

She walked out of the small room to fetch a drink from the main floor of the casino, and the other men at the table watched her go—all of them except for the man in the black hat.

“Going to take her to bed with you, Cal?”

“Nah.” Cal shrugged, slipping his winnings into the pockets of his jacket. He looked sharply at the man in the black hat. “Mr. Travers wouldn’t like it.”

The man in the black hat smiled. “Of course. It’s nice to meet you, Cal Hotchkiss. Name’s Gran Carter, U.S. marshal.” He flipped up his jacket to reveal the silver star that hung from his belt buckle.

“I know who you are.”

“Then maybe you know why I’m here.”

“Maybe I don’t give a shit.”

The pit boss walked past the doorway and the dealer made eye contact with him. A moment later, the dealer had melted away from the table, leaving the four men alone with the dregs of their drinks. Alberto turned to Gran Carter. He was more than a little drunk. “Look here, Mister Marshal, I ain’t done nothin’ wrong here no how, an’ I’ve got a badge too, see, I’m a ranger for the Bureau of Lan’ Management, an’ I fancy I’ve got even more pull here than the likes of—”

Gran Carter clapped Alberto on the back hard enough that he choked midsentence. “You’re alright by me, friend. I’m not here for you, and I’m not here for the casino, and I’m not here to stop Mr. Travers from throwing cheats into the river. Hell, I’m not even here to make Mr. Hotchkiss shave that embarrassment of a moustache.” He reached into the breast pocket of his jacket. All of the men around the table reacted instantly, drawing pistols and pointing them at the U.S. marshal in the broad black hat.

“Woah there,” he said, holding up his hands. In one of them, he held a photograph. The men around the table put their guns away—all except Cal, who merely lowered his to the table. He kept one hand on the gun. The other hand reached up unconsciously to stroke his patchy blond moustache. At that moment, Cordelia arrived with a tray and handed a glass of honey-brown liquor to Cal. She perched in his lap like a cat sitting on a fence post, her eyes fixed upon his unholstered revolver.

Carter set the photograph on the table and slid it toward the center of the felt. “That there’s Miss Adelia Reyes, gentlemen. I happen to know that she was on the Harriet eight or nine months ago, and I’m guessing she talked to some people here. She owes me a conversation. I’d be much obliged if y’all’d look over that photograph and tell me if you’ve seen her.”

None of the men took the photograph, but their eyes all locked onto it the same way they’d been watching their cards before the game had ended. The sepia photograph showed a woman with burnished bronze skin and the cool, steady gaze of a contract killer. She stared out of the photo with hawkish, predatory eyes; a tattoo of a thorny vine coiled its way up the side of her neck and into her hair.

“Well,” said Edvard. “I think I’d remember it if I ever saw a lady like that. What’d she do that a marshal’s looking for her?”

Alberto rubbed a thick rope of scar tissue on the back of his left arm. “I’d imagine she killed a man.”

Carter looked at Alberto with that unwavering smile. “You’d imagine right.”

Cordelia leaned over the table to look at the picture, then opened her mouth as if to speak. Cal Hotchkiss rested his hand on her hip, his grip tight. She closed her mouth without speaking.

“Well,” Carter said, pushing back from the table and standing without taking the photograph. “I’ll be around if you need me.”

Edvard and Alberto stood together and walked over to the bar, shooting glances at Carter as he sauntered toward the exit. Cal watched him walk away, then stood. Cordelia toppled from his lap. He grabbed a wad of cash from the center of the table and thrust it at her. “For the drink. And the company. Go on and tell ’em downstairs that I’ll be along shortly to pick up my Betsy.”

“No need,” a cheerful voice rang out from just behind them. “I’ve already moved her into a paddock for some quality time with my Ruby.”

Cal whipped around so quickly his hat fell off, leaving Cordelia to gather the bills he’d dropped. In the instant it had taken him to turn, he’d grabbed his revolver off the table and unholstered a second, smaller gun from his belt. He had both pointed at Winslow Houndstooth with the hammers cocked back by the time his hat hit the ground.

“Now, Calhoun, that’s no way to greet an old partner.” Houndstooth strode toward Cal, plucking his bourbon from the table and sampling the bouquet deeply before taking a long, slow sip. Behind him, Cordelia slipped out of the room. “Oh. That’s very fine, indeed. You still have excellent taste.”

“You here for me, Houndstooth?” Cal growled. “If you think I’ll go quiet, think again.” He shifted his toothpick back and forth in his mouth.

Houndstooth laughed. “Nothing like that, Cal, my old friend! I’m here to work with you again. Partners. Just like old times. Just like back on the ranch.” Houndstooth flicked open a long, thin stiletto blade and twirled it between his fingers like a baton. “You remember the ranch, don’t you, Cal? The one you worked on, right up until it burned to the ground on the same night you ran off to work on the Harriet? A fine coincidence, that.”

Cal started to edge toward the door. Houndstooth stepped swiftly between him and the exit. “Love the—is it a moustache you’re working on? We really must catch up, Calhoun, old chap. I’ve been wanting to have a chat with you for some time now.”

A cough sounded from the door. They both turned, and the air in the room went cold. Hovering in the doorway was a sleek little stoat of a man, his pencil moustache slicked across the top of his lip like a drunk draped across a chaise longue. His seersucker suit was fitted to him so impeccably that Houndstooth’s breath caught for a moment in his throat.

“Gentlemen. I trust you’re both familiar with the rules of my casinos.” The man’s voice was smoother than the bourbon his bartender poured for high rollers.

“Mr. Travers,” Houndstooth said. “I wasn’t going to hurt my old friend Cal, here. Just showing him my new knife.”

“And a fine knife it is,” Travers responded, inclining his head. “It would be such a shame if it were to get wet. And your pistols, Mr. Hotchkiss—I don’t imagine they stand up well to submersion?”

Cal and Houndstooth stared at each other for a long moment. The boat creaked as they watched each other. Travers cleared his throat, and they both lowered their weapons.

“Very good. Now, I’m sure you gentlemen would like to have a civilized discussion over drinks at the bar? On the house.” He waved an arm toward the door. The two men hesitated, neither wanting to walk in front of the other—but after a beat, Houndstooth put his grey hat on, tipping it to Travers.

“I’ll be waiting for you with a whiskey, Calhoun, old friend. We’ve got business to discuss.”

He walked out without a backwards glance. Cal made to follow, but Travers put out a hand before Cal got to the door. Cal stopped before Travers so much as touched him.

“Now, what precisely do you suppose he’s doing here?” Travers murmured, his voice as silky as a snake’s belly sliding over a bed of marsh grass.

“I got no damn idea,” Cal growled. Travers considered him for a long, silent minute. “I said I don’t know,” Cal said, his eyes flicking away from Travers’. “And whatever it is you’re thinking you’ll ask me to do about it, I ain’t doin’.”

In just three unhurried steps, Travers crossed the room and was behind the chair near the window, where Cal had been sitting. He stooped, looking like a heron that had spotted a fish. When he straightened, he was holding three playing cards. He held them up where Cal could see them. Cal’s face didn’t so much as twitch. Travers dropped the cards onto the felt of the table and spread them out with the manicured tip of his index finger.

“Three Queens. Were these insurance against losing, or did they come in handy at some point while you were fleecing my customers?”

Cal shook his head as his lips went white. Travers held up a quelling finger.

“Shhh, no, don’t try to lie to me, Mr. Hotchkiss. You were cheating. You were stealing from me. Oh, yes, I know, you weren’t stealing my money, Mr. Hotchkiss—but you’ve tarnished my name. You’ve put my reputation into question, and you’ve made me look foolish.” His voice hadn’t risen above a murmur, but it dripped with menace. He whipped the silk pocket square from his jacket and, turning to the open window, laid it across the broad sill. “You realize that this is your second warning?”

Cal nodded.

“And you realize, don’t you, that there will not be a third warning?”

Cal nodded again.

“Let’s just be sure, why don’t we? It always pays to be thorough. Come here.”

Cal shook his head again, unable to form words. His face had turned a peculiar shade of grey. Travers gestured with one elegant hand, then unbuttoned his cuffs and began to roll up his sleeves.

“Come now, Mr. Hotchkiss. Cal. Let’s not waste time. Your friend is waiting, after all.” He finished rolling up his sleeves, then checked to make sure they were of equal lengths. That done, he snapped his fingers. Cordelia entered, holding a domed silver tray. She did not look at Cal as she passed by. She set the tray on the gaming table near where Travers stood, where he could reach it without moving away from the window.

“Thank you, Cordelia, darling.” Travers smiled at her with warm eyes. She smiled back, tentative. He nodded to the door, still smiling, and she left, ignoring Cal’s desperate attempt to catch her eye on her way out. After she’d disappeared from sight, two massive men stepped in from the hall—Travers’ security. They turned away from the room, so their backs filled the doorway. Cal let out a strangled sound like an aborted whimper.

“Mr. Hotchkiss,” Travers said. “I don’t have all day. Do not make me ask you again.”

Cal crossed the room with slow steps. Sweat beaded on his brow as he watched the covered tray. The only sounds in the little gaming room were his shaky breathing, the creak of the steamboat wheel, and the lapping of the Harriet.

Travers uncovered the little silver tray. There, on top of a folded maroon napkin, lay a gleaming, curved hunting knife—Cal’s hunting knife, taken from his room on the boat. It had been cleaned and honed since he had seen it last. The edge of the blade was so fine that his eyes couldn’t quite rest on it.

Travers picked up the cards from the felt-topped table and laid them down in a neat row on the square of silk he’d laid across the windowsill. He rested the tip of one manicured index finger on the center card.

“Are these your Queens, Mr. Hotchkiss?”

Cal swallowed hard, a muscle twitching in his jaw. He nodded. Before he had finished nodding, Travers’ hand flashed out, and Cal’s face slammed into the windowsill. His right cheek was pressed against the three Queens. Travers’ hand was smashed flat against the left side of his face, holding him against the sill. The corner of the top card pressed against the right corner of Cal’s lower lip, sharp. The tips of Travers’ fingers dug into the flesh of Cal’s face, his grip as firm as bone.

Travers slowly bent his head until his eyes were level with Cal’s. The heel of his hand ground painfully against Cal’s jaw.

Travers picked up the knife.

“Are these your Queens, Mr. Hotchkiss?”

Cal made another strangled sound. Sweat dripped into his eyes. He finally managed to open his mouth wide enough to rasp the word “Yes.”

Travers brought the knife to rest just under Cal’s left eye, then traced it along the top of his cheekbone, just lightly enough to leave the barest red scratch. Cal felt a single tear work its way out of his right eye. It fell through the open air, all the way down to the water.

“Look,” Travers hissed. And Cal did.

He looked down, following the path his tear had taken. He couldn’t move his head, but he strained his eyes. His breathing hitched as his gaze found what Travers wanted him to see: the ferals.

The water swarmed with them. They stayed near the Sturgess Queen during daylight hours, while the sun warmed the water around the riverboat to a temperature they could abide. They circled it hungrily, waiting for someone to cheat or brawl or get handsy with one of Travers’ girls. Waiting for Travers’ security staff to hurl someone overboard, so they could fall, flailing and screaming, into the water.

Cold sweat ran down the small of Cal’s back as he watched the ferals look up at the boat, impatient for their next meal.

Travers let him sweat for a full minute before he asked the question a final time. “Are. These. Your. Queens.”

Cal choked out the words. “Yes, Mr. Travers, sir.”

There was a flash of movement. Cal’s left ear felt suddenly hot, searing hot, and then there was pain, blue-white and filling the left side of his head. He spasmed, but Travers’ hand gripped his face, and he could not lift his head from the windowsill. He could not lift it even as blood filled his ear, muffling all other sounds in the room—even as it poured down the front of his face, stinging his eyes. He tried to draw breath to scream in pain but ended up sputtering, choking on a mouthful of his own blood.

Travers held him there with a firm hand, taking slow, deep breaths. He held the knife out in front of him, over Cal’s head. Balanced on the edge of it was the lower half of Cal’s left ear.

Eventually, Cal stopped thrashing and was still. His breathing was labored and ragged; blood covered his face, stained his collar, pooled around his cheek. It would have run down the windowsill, but for the square of silk that just barely managed to contain the puddle of blood. Travers lowered the knife so Cal could see his ear, as delicate as a magnolia petal.

“I don’t give third chances, Mr. Hotchkiss,” Travers murmured. He licked a fleck of saliva from the corner of his mouth with the pink tip of his tongue. He twitched the knife. The severed half-ear landed directly in front of Cal’s eyes.

Travers finally released Cal, but the blond man didn’t stand up right away. Travers grabbed the purple napkin from the silver tray, and used it to wipe his hands clean before dropping it on Cal’s head.

“You should get cleaned up,” he murmured, staring at the bleeding man with flat, passionless eyes. “I expect Mr. Houndstooth will be waiting for you. Oh, and Calhoun?” He waited for Cal to straighten and look at him before continuing. “Not a word to Houndstooth.” He pulled a linen handkerchief from his back pocket with a flourish. He used it to pick up the piece of Cal’s ear that still lay on the windowsill; then, he wrapped the ear up with quick, delicate motions, and dropped it into his breast pocket.

Cal’s eyes were locked on the pocket that had half of his ear in it. “Yes, Mr. Travers, sir.”

“Very good.” Travers turned and left the room without another word. Cal stared after him, clutching the purple napkin to what was left of his ear. After a minute or two, he swore under his breath. He left the room, still pressing the napkin to the side of his face. Houndstooth was waiting for him.

Chapter 6

THE HARRIET INN was the only bar in the slim mile between the Gate and the Gulf with its own pond. All the hoppers that came through town stopped there sooner or later to enjoy the excellent service and the brutal atmosphere. The darts were sharp and the drinks were strong. Cal and Houndstooth arrived together, and, without speaking to each other, they spread themselves out at a low, scarred table. They ordered the first round, and several mugs of beer arrived well before anyone else did.

Houndstooth lit a long, slim, black cigar, and blew a stream of smoke at Cal, who chewed his toothpick as though it had wronged him.

“So,” Houndstooth said. “You quit?”

“I got all the smoke I needed ten years ago.” Cal smiled around his toothpick. The smile did not extend beyond the corners of his lips.

Houndstooth ashed his cigar directly onto the tabletop. He stayed at the Harriet Inn as frequently as any other hopper, but he felt no affection for the place. It was only ten years old, and it still smelled to him of smoke and burning hops. It rested on the grave of his old ranch: Travers had used the land to build the Harriet Inn, so that anyone too drunk to get home from the Harriet had a place to lose the remainder of their money.

“You know,” Cal said in a conversational tone, “if I didn’t need the money to pay off Travers, I’d just as soon kill you.”

Houndstooth took a pull on his cigar and let the smoke curl out of his nose. “Really?” he asked. “Because I could just as easily not find Adelia for you. I’m sure she’d rather not be found. Especially not by a man she went fugitive to avoid.”

Cal bit his toothpick in half. He did not respond.

Twenty minutes of thick, heavy silence later, toward the butt end of Houndstooth’s cigar, Archie walked in. She sat on the bench with her back against the wall, avoiding the too-small chairs that surrounded the other three sides of the table.

“Well, hot damn. If it isn’t the great Regina Archambault,” Cal drawled, putting unnecessary emphasis on “great” as he fingered the bandage that covered his left ear.

“Call me Archie,” she said, not looking at him. “Winslow, do you ’ave another one of those cigars to share? I’ve been on the road all goddamned day.”

As Houndstooth pulled his cigar case out of his pocket and cut a fresh one, the door eased open. Hero slid in, melting easily into the shadows of the dimly lit bar, and slipped into a chair.

“Well, that’s it. We’re all here.”

“Un moment, s’il vous plaît,” Archie said. She whistled a few short, high notes, like birdsong. A towheaded boy poked his head into the bar. She signaled him, and he perched on the bench next to her.

“This is Neville. ’E is my assistant.”

The table was still for a moment; then, everyone looked at Houndstooth. Archie addressed him directly, ignoring Cal and Hero.

“I trust ’im, Winslow. The boy knows where ’is loyalties lie. Plus, ’e knows that if ’e ever betrays us, I’ll gut ’im like a one-legged ’op. Isn’t that right, Neville?”

Neville nodded strenuously, looking only at Houndstooth.

“Well, if you trust him, Archie, then I suppose he can stay.”

Archie ashed her cigar onto the floor, satisfied.

“Well,” Houndstooth said. “Let’s all get to know each other. You all know me, so I’m not going to introduce myself—forgive me, Neville, you’ll just have to figure me out on your own time.” Neville nodded again, with vigor.

“Archie,” Houndstooth said, gesturing with the stump of his cigar, “is the finest con either side of the Mississippi. Her meteor hammer can take down a charging bull faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. She’s saved my life nine and a half times.”

“Ten,” Archie said, grinning around her cigar.

“Nine and a half,” Houndstooth responded with a smile. “Also, she’s got a connection to a certain U.S. marshal of whom we don’t want to run afoul.” Cal looked as though he had a comment to add. Archie levelled a pitiless stare at him, and he thought better of it.

“Hello, Archie,” Hero said, extending their hand. “I’ve heard so much about you.”

Archie shook Hero’s hand. “Charmant,” she said, and to the surprise of everyone at the table, it sounded for all the world like she actually meant it.

“From what I’ve been told,” Houndstooth continued, “Hero there could blow up a bank vault using a pile of hippo dung and a cup of water, and they could make it look like an accident. Plus, they could poison a hummingbird and it would dip its beak twice before it dropped. They’re smarter than I am, which is saying something. And they’re—” He coughed, took a sip of his drink. “They’re, ah, they’re just a great team member.”

“What kind of a name is ‘Hero’?” Cal muttered around his mangled toothpick.

“It’s my name,” Hero responded.

Cal spat splinters into the sawdust on the floor, then selected a fresh toothpick to maim. Archie raised her eyebrows. “And who is this charming young man?”

“Calhoun Hotchkiss,” Houndstooth said archly. “He’s the fastest gun in the West.”

“I’m the fastest gun anywhere.” Cal responded with the speed of deep-seated bitterness over the title.

“He’s also the only one of us that’s ever dealt with ferals,” Houndstooth added. “Aside from Adelia Reyes, if we can find her. He’s spent years working on the Harriet. He knows everything there is to know about it. He’s stupider than he looks, but he shouldn’t hold us back too much.”

“And what about you?” Cal retorted. “What do you bring to the table, you smug fuck? Who made you the boss?”

Houndstooth was evidently ready for this question. His hand flicked, and before Calhoun could flinch, there was a tiny click on the table in front of him. All the eyes at the table fell on the sliver of wood that suddenly lay in the puddle of condensation left by Cal’s beer.

Cal reached up and felt for his toothpick, which had been sliced cleanly in half.

Houndstooth rested both his hands on the tabletop. One of them held the same stiletto blade he’d drawn on the riverboat.

“I’m the boss, Calhoun Hotchkiss, because I’m faster than you. I’m smarter than you. I’m better than you. And I’m the one who can send the telegram that will get you paid at the end of this. So here’s what’s going to happen: you’re going to get us into the places that only your reputation can get us into. You’re going to shoot fast and you’re going to shoot straight. You’re going to be helpful and respectful. If you don’t do those things, then you don’t get paid. Is that clear?”

Cal drew a fresh toothpick from his pocket and inserted it into his mouth, saying nothing.

“Good,” Houndstooth responded. He glanced around the bar. It was empty but for them and the bartender. “Now, we need to find the fifth member of our crew.” He slid a photograph into the center of the table—the same photograph that Gran Carter had left sitting on the felt of the poker table earlier that day. Adelia Reyes stared unsmiling out of the photograph. Everyone at the table examined the photograph, but it was Cal who reached for it first. He looked at it for a long time, swallowing hard; then he set it back in the center of the table and stared at his hands for a few minutes, clearing his throat every few seconds.

“You’re all familiar with Adelia Reyes. She’s been missing for seven months.”

Cal coughed. “Seven and a half.”

“Right,” Houndstooth said, frowning at Cal. “Seven and a half months. She rides two hippos: a Standard Grey and an Arnesian Brown. She switches between the two so she doesn’t have to rest either one—so we’ll probably find her near the water somewhere. Can’t travel overland with two hippos for long.”

Neville, who had been silent until that point, raised his hand. Archie gave him a quelling look, but he kept his eyes fixed on Houndstooth, who, after a long minute, waved a hand at the boy.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Houndstooth sir, but I’ve seen that woman.”

All eyes at the table swivelled toward Neville.

“You’ve what?” Hero and Archie said at the same time. Cal looked at the boy with an intensity so sharp it put Winslow’s knives to shame.

“I’ve seen her. Just now, outside. She was . . . well, she was at the tobacconist, sir. She looked . . . a little different from how she looked in that photo, sir. She spotted me ’n Archie, and while I was putting Rosa up in the pond out back, she came by the water to visit, and she—” He met Cal’s eyes and paused.

“She what, Neville?” Hero asked gently.

“Um, well.” Neville turned to Houndstooth. “She came by the pond, and she took a look at Ruby—that’s the hippo with the gold tusks, right? She looked inside Ruby’s mouth and asked if I knew who rode her here, and I said I didn’t, and then she looked at the other grey in the pond, the one with the nasty scars? She talked to that one for a while.”

Cal sucked in a breath at this and looked back down at his hands. A little blood had started to soak through the bandage over his ear.

Houndstooth sprang up from the table and made for the door. Archie gave Neville a little shove. “Go after ’im, now. Show ’im where you saw ’er.”

But before Neville could get up—before Houndstooth made it across the bar—the door burst open. A woman walked in and stood, silhouetted in the doorframe until the door swung closed behind her.

She took a few steps forward, into the light, and took in the crew assembled around the scarred old table.

“Well,” Adelia Reyes said. “Well, well, well.” The most brutal contract killer of the late nineteenth century folded her hands over her distended belly and winked at Calhoun Hotchkiss, before settling her gaze on Houndstooth. “I’d be willing to bet you’re looking for me, Mr. Houndstooth.”

The crew assembled at the table watched as the outline of a tiny foot pressed at Adelia’s shirt. She pressed a hand to it. “Shhh, mija. Mama’s working.”

Calhoun slid sideways off his chair and fell to the sawdust on the floor, unconscious.

“Hello, Adelia,” Houndstooth said. “How would you like to make eight thousand dollars?”

Adelia pulled out a chair, not minding too closely whether the chair’s legs smacked into Cal’s head. She sat with her legs spread wide to accommodate her belly, resting a foot on Cal’s neck. She smiled at Houndstooth, her hands stroking the shifting mass of her stomach.

“Well,” she said softly, “what’s the job?”

Chapter 7

IT WAS QUIET IN THE SWAMP. Deep quiet—the kind that’s defined by the buzz of insects and the lapping of water and the thick wet heat of the day. The shade of the willow and sycamore trees that grew along the edge of the water dappled the golden light, but their shade wasn’t enough to cut through the weight of the heat. The hoppers rode slowly, easily—they shared an unspoken need to enjoy the calm of the swamp. It would be their last peaceful day. Soon, they’d reach the Mississippi Gate, and the chaos would begin.

Adelia rode Stasia, her heavily armored Arnesian Brown, without a saddle. She rode cross-legged, one hand wrapped around her belly; the other gripped the pommel of Stasia’s harness. Stasia, an exemplar of her breed, snapped at birds that flew too close to her snout. She grumbled at sticks that bumped into her legs, and squinted suspiciously at the other hippos. And yet, for all her aggression, she seemed devoted to Adelia—Adelia, who swayed with Stasia’s rolling gait, occasionally singing nonsense to her in lilting tones. “Stasia, my Anastasia, Ana Aña, Aña-araña . . .”

Neville rode next to her on her second hippo, Zahra. He knelt awkwardly in the borrowed saddle, but Zahra—an aging Standard Grey, nearly identical to Abigail save for the livid bolt of white across her brow—followed Stasia gamely, ignoring the way the boy pitched to and fro in the saddle.

“Miss Adelia, this is so hard,” he said, out of breath from struggling to maintain his balance. “How come you can do it without even a saddle?”

“I have been doing it since I was in my mother’s belly,” she replied with a wisp of a smile. “When my little niña is born, she will ride with me, and she will be just as strong as I am. Stronger, perhaps.”

“What if it’s a boy?” Neville asked, clutching at the saddle.

“It won’t be a boy.”

Neville stared at her for a few moments without speaking, his eyes lingering on her belly.

“You are wondering about the father,” she said, unsmiling. Neville stammered an incoherent denial, his blush destroying his credibility.

“There is no father,” Adelia said. “There is a man who gave me the child I wanted from him.”

Neville stared hard at his hands. “Alright ma’am,” he whispered, mortified. She grinned at his embarrassment.

“I am not ashamed, boy. I have no need of a husband. This girl will have no need of a father. Perhaps a second mother, someday—but if not?” She shrugged. “It makes no difference.”

A sharp whistle sounded from behind them, where Archie rode her diamond-white Rosa. Neville twisted in the saddle to look at her, then caught himself on the pommel as he nearly tipped out of the saddle. Adelia whistled back without looking away from the water ahead. Archie’s rich, deep laugh carried over the sound of the hippos’ splashing progress through the shallows of the swamp.

Ahead of them, Cal, Houndstooth, and Hero rode abreast. Ruby slid through the water like a shadow between runty brown Betsy and Hero’s grey Abigail. Shy, sweet Betsy bumped out of the way with a sidelong glance at the sleek black hippo, but Abigail didn’t seem to notice her. Ruby came close enough to Abigail that Houndstooth’s leg brushed against Hero’s. Hero startled.

“I didn’t—I didn’t hear her get so close,” they said, holding their hat on with one hand.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” Houndstooth said. “Some things just sneak up on you like that.”

Hero tried to stop the smile that spread across their face, but it was too late; Houndstooth was already grinning back.

* * *

As dusk settled over the marsh, the hoppers clustered closer together. Houndstooth rode in front. Behind him, Adelia, Archie, and Neville clustered together. Hero and Cal rode behind, occasionally shooting wary glances at each other.

“So, I’ve been wondering,” Adelia said. “What is that for?” She pointed at the coiled chain that Archie wore on her hip. “It looks like the strangest bola I’ve ever seen. I can’t imagine using it to disable a man, much less a charging hippo.”

Archie smiled. “I adore your idea of small talk, Adelia. This is my meteor ’ammer.” She patted the smooth metal ball that swung beside her thigh. “I will show you ’ow it is used sometime. I think you will like it.”

“It’s really somethin’, she showed me on the way here,” Neville piped. “She swings the chain around her whole entire body and then she just turns and whips it and pow!” He slapped Zahra’s flank. The hippo didn’t seem to notice. “It just crunches whatever she aims it at!”

“I hope I don’t have a need to see it in action,” Adelia said, “but I would love to see a demonstration.” She looked at the meteor hammer and for a moment, genuine affection ghosted her features. “At any rate, we should find a place to tie up,” Adelia said. “It’s unwise for us to be in the water after sundown.”

“Oui,” Archie said. “And we should go over the plan for this caper before we turn in.”

“Why?” Neville asked.

“It’s not a caper,” Houndstooth replied, sounding irritated. “It’s an operation. All aboveboard.”

“Well, we still need to go over the plan,” Adelia snapped.

“If you see a dry patch I don’t,” Houndstooth said, slapping at a mosquito, “you go right ahead and point it out.”

“There was a petit island a mile back or so,” Archie mused, “but too small, I think, for all of us.”

“Why can’t we be out after dark?” Neville asked again.

“Too small for your fat ass, maybe,” Cal called from the back of the group. Archie’s fingertips played over the revolver that hung from her hip.

“He’s not worth the bullet,” Adelia murmured to her.

“Why shouldn’t we be out after dark?” Neville piped.

“I could stab ’im, perhaps,” Archie said, giving Adelia a wry smile.

“Si, but then the blood would ruin your lovely blouse.”

“Excuse me,” Neville said again.

“Strangulation, then. The cleanest death of them all,” Archie continued, ignoring him.

“Ask Hero for some poison, maybe?” Adelia and Archie both laughed. Hero smiled from under the brim of their hat. Neville looked back at Hero, eyes wide.

“You have a lot to learn, boy,” Hero drawled. “Never stare at someone you’re scared of.”

Archie smiled over at Neville. “Are you scared of Hero?”

Houndstooth chuckled. “I’d imagine he’s scared of all of us.”

Hero fanned themself with their hat. “Oh, son. You shouldn’t be scared of us. Us, you’ll see comin’. No, what you want to be scared of,” they said, looking at the boy with a wicked gleam in their eye, “is the ferals.”

Neville clung to Zahra’s back. “I ain’t scared of hippos.” His voice shook a little.

“Well, young man, there’s hippos and there’s hippos,” Cal said. “Now, Zahra there, she’s a sweet thing. Raised by people from when she was just a little hop. Slept next to her hopper’s raft every night, ate from her hopper’s hand every day. Loyal. Loving. But a feral?” He laughed mirthlessly.

“Let’s not scare the boy,” Houndstooth said. “He won’t be seeing any ferals anyway. They’re all between the Gate and the dam, and he won’t be going in there with us.”

“You never know,” Cal intoned.

“Is . . . is that why we have to find a place to camp before nightfall? Because of ferals?” Neville asked.

“That, and Cal is scared of the dark,” Archie said loudly. “So let’s ’urry it up, oui?” She snapped her fingers twice and Rosa surged ahead, nudging her white nose against Ruby’s coal-black flank.

They found an island just as the sun dipped below the horizon. The hum of insects intensified as the last light of the day died, and the hoppers guided their steeds toward the little hump of land that rose out of the water. Archie whistled to Neville. “Would you care to give Rosa’s teeth a brush before we turn ’er loose for the night?”

Neville grinned, his sweat-damp blond hair falling into his eyes, and he held up a leather pouch. “I’ve already got her toothbrush, Miss Archie!” He splashed down the riverbank, cooing to Rosa. The white hippo had already begun to wander away from the sandy bank of the islet. She had been riding all day, and was reluctant to come back to the shore before she’d eaten. The sound of Neville’s coaxing entreaties for her to come back for a brushing drifted through the stillness of the dusk, blending with the buzz of cicadas.

“’E is a good kid,” Archie said ruefully, settling onto a log beside Hero.

“He’s too green to be out here,” Hero responded. They pulled out a pocketknife and began scraping the bark off a fat stick.

“Ah, ’e’ll be fine. I couldn’t leave ’im behind,” Archie said. “Rosa, she likes ’im too much for me to tell ’im no, when ’e asked to come. Just like Houndstooth. I could never say no to ’im, either.”

The sounds of Houndstooth and Cal arguing over where to start the fire drifted to them through the warm night air.

“You really care about Houndstooth, eh?” Hero asked.

“I could ask you the same question, couldn’t I?” Archie responded with a grin. Hero looked up, not returning Archie’s smile.

“You know, when I first met Houndstooth, ’e had just had ’is ’eart broken. ’Is dream—it was in ashes. I watched ’im meet someone, a woman. I watched ’im fall in love with ’er.”

Hero’s brow furrowed, but they did not interrupt.

Archie waved her hand vaguely. “She ran off with a postman. They were going to go north, to the cities. Tried to take Ruby with them, but of course Ruby, she would not go. She is devoted.”

Hero considered Archie. “So . . . what happened after that?”

“Ah,” Archie said. “Houndstooth started to sow ’is wild oats. As for the girl? Well, I will not say. Houndstooth . . . ’e does not need to know what I did to the girl when I found ’er trying to steal Ruby. But I will tell you this”—Archie looked at Hero, her face serious—“what I did to ’er will look like a kindness, compared to what I will do to anyone who breaks ’is ’eart like that again.”

Hero stared into Archie’s eyes, unblinking. “I understand.”

Archie clapped them on the shoulder, hard, smiling warmly. “I know you do. I can tell. I just ’ad to say it—you know ’ow it is. Ah, don’t be too scared. I think you are good for ’im! You should see ’ow ’e smiles at you when ’e thinks you are not looking. Plus, you keep ’im from thinking ’e is the smartest in the room.”

Hero smiled, ducking their head; then, they looked up, the smile suddenly gone. “Did you hear that?”

“What,” Archie said, “are they finally just comparing their cocks and ’aving done with it?”

But Hero was already on their feet, running to the water’s edge.

They were too late.

By the time Hero had reached the riverbank, Neville was half-submerged in the water. There came a fierce splash, and the boy surged into the air before landing, caught, in the gaping mouth of the feral bull.

He hung in the mouth of the beast, stunned. His left leg hung between the bull’s front tusks, the angle wrong. It bled freely, and his blood spilled over the hippo’s whiskers. Archie covered her mouth with both hands when she caught up with Hero as though to catch the boy’s name even as she shouted it. Cal and Houndstooth looked up and came running. The bull was still for a long, thick moment. Then, with a lightning-quick twist of its thick neck, it snapped its jaws closed.

The boy was dead. There could be no question, even before the feral bull shook him below the water. Archie turned away; Hero put an arm around her, shielding her as much as possible from the bloodied swamp water that sprayed the shore. Cal and Houndstooth stood frozen a few yards from the water’s edge, empty-handed. Cal’s toothpick dangled from his slack lower lip.

They did not see Adelia coming.

Neither did the hippo.

It wasn’t until the beast was bleeding that Houndstooth registered her standing next to him, her arm outstretched toward the hippo as though she was offering it a handshake. Houndstooth looked from her to the bull, which twitched and writhed spasmodically in the frothy pink water.

He put a hand to his pocket, as though he’d find anything there; but of course, it was empty. The long, slender, ivory-handled knife he’d taken from the marshjack back in Georgia was gone. A mere inch of the handle still protruded from the bull’s eye socket. The rest of the knife was buried in the beast’s brain. A trickle of blood spilled over the hippo’s cheek like tears as it gave a final thrash, and then sank below the surface of the water.

As the ripples stilled, Adelia lowered her throwing arm.

“That,” Cal said quietly, “is why you shouldn’t be in the water after sundown.”

Chapter 8

DRAGGING THE HIPPO’S CARCASS out of the lake wasn’t easy, but it had to be done: Rosa, Ruby, Betsy, and Abigail wouldn’t approach the shore with the bull’s blood pinking the muddy water. Zahra and Stasia were nowhere to be found, but Adelia seemed certain that they’d return at dawn so long as the bull’s carcass was gone.

Fortunately, none of the hoppers was a stranger to dead hippos. Archie insisted that she be the one to wade out into the swamp—insisted that it was her fault the boy had been in the water in the first place. She secured a length of rope around her middle and made her way to the hippo while Cal and Houndstooth watched the water, ready to haul her back in if so much as a bubble surfaced nearby. She girded the beast with five separate ropes before splashing back to the shore. They all hauled him onto the sand together, dragging him far enough inland that their hippos wouldn’t be disturbed by the smell of their mad, dead cousin. Had they been on a ranch, they’d have butchered the carcass and sold the hide to a tannery; as it was, nobody could bring themselves to take a knife to the creature that had so efficiently slaughtered young Neville.

The exhausted hoppers dried themselves around the fire, not acknowledging the fact that none of them would volunteer to wade back into the river to find Neville’s body. Cal was the first to break the silence.

“I think it’s time you told us the plan, Winslow. You do have a plan?”

Archie looked at him, hollow-eyed. “Yes, ’oundstooth, what is the plan?”

Hero was the one who answered. They reached into their bedroll and pulled out a map of the Harriet, spreading it on the ground a safe distance from the fire and weighing down the corners with empty, whiskey-sticky mugs. The map showed the lake, enclosed parenthetically by the dam to the north and the Gate to the south. The feral’s usual territory, near the center of the lake, was marked with a large red circle; the safe travel routes, by blue arrows. The rest of the marks on the map were incomprehensible at first glance.

“Dynamite,” Hero said, pointing to a concentric series of red X marks on the map. “Here, here, and here—all around the northern perimeter, just far enough from the dam to be safe. A series of controlled explosions that will drive the ferals toward the Gate.” They pointed to the next row of X marks below that. “Then another series, here, and another here, just south of that one. The idea is to keep the detonations behind the ferals, driving them closer to the Gate, not giving them a chance to double back.”

“Like a funnel. A hippo funnel,” Houndstooth added.

Archie examined the map, nodding. “And we will have the Gate open, right? So they just scoot out into the swamp and then head down to the Gulf?”

“Exactly,” Hero said. “We close the Gate behind ’em, spend a few weeks rounding up any stragglers—and then sit back and enjoy the Harriet for the rest of the year.”

“And how does the Coast Guard feel about this?” Archie asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Houndstooth said peevishly. “The Coast Guard isn’t where the money’s coming from, so they’re not our problem.”

“You don’t think we should be concerned about the Coast Guard?” Archie said, incredulity lifting her brows. “Not even a little concerned?”

“What, are you Alexander Hamilton’s great-great-grandniece twice removed or something?” Houndstooth snapped. “It doesn’t matter, Archie.”

Cal sniffed, wiping his nose on his sleeve. “More important question: who’s gonna light the fuses?”

Hero pulled two small black boxes out of their saddlebag, holding them aloft when Cal tried to grab one. “These,” Hero said, “are remote detonation devices. I just push this button, and . . . boom.”

Cal looked extremely dubious. “Hop shit,” he said. “I’ve never heard of a remote detonator.”

“That’s because I invented them,” Hero responded icily.

“I’ve seen them work,” Houndstooth confirmed. He stared at Hero with an admiring smile. “They’re amazing.”

“Why two?” Archie asked. Hero smiled, enigmatic.

“Always have a backup plan, Archie.”

Adelia stared at the map, her lips moving silently for a few moments. Then she frowned, her hands pressing against her belly. “This is a good plan. It will work, so long as you don’t get eaten.”

Houndstooth cleared his throat. “Hero will be riding Ruby while they set the charges.” He said it with a hard look at Hero that spoke to many arguments over this decision. “Ruby can dodge the ferals’ notice, and Travers’, too.”

Adelia glanced at him sharply. “We don’t want this Travers to know what we are doing, is that right?”

Houndstooth nodded. “We’ll be sticking to the islets, camping without a fire, laying low as we can. Until the job is done. We don’t want to get on his bad side, Adelia. Travers is not a man whose eyes you want on you, if you’re disrupting his business.”

Adelia nodded as she rose from her crouch, rubbing her lower back. “He sounds dangerous. We should be vigilant.” She grabbed her bedroll. “We should also be rested. Goodnight.” Without another word, she stalked away from the fire. Archie caught Hero’s eye, her brows raised. Hero shrugged in reply.

“She’s right,” Houndstooth said, rolling up the map. “We should sleep. We ride at dawn—we want to get through the Gate without drawing too much attention to ourselves.”

Cal grabbed his bedroll, walking in the opposite direction from the one Adelia had chosen. “Five hoppers on six hippos,” he said, loud enough to be heard by all the hoppers. “Shouldn’t draw too much attention at all. Real subtle-like, this crew.”

* * *

Adelia took the hippo’s tusks during the night, presenting the cleaned and polished ivory to Archie before dawn.

“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” she said, bracing the small of her back, her eyes on the water. “The niña kicks me awake.”

Archie watched the water, too, rather than watching Adelia’s face. Her eyes shone. “I suppose he’s still at the bottom.”

Adelia shrugged. “There are alligators here, I think. They would not bother us while we are riding, but who can say? I’m sure they get hungry, too.”

Archie turned white and went back to polishing Rosa’s saddle. Adelia stayed watching the water, chewing her lower lip, until Houndstooth’s sharp whistle cut through the morning mist. They left the islet behind before the sun had finished rising. Not a one of them looked back.

* * *

The Gate was a thirteen-mile-long grate dividing the Harriet from the southern tip of the Mississippi River. It stood as a testament to Man’s Victory over Nature—a brand seared into the landscape, marking it as the property of the federal government. It crossed the narrowest part of Louisiana’s Mississippi River and extended inland by six and a half miles, just outside the overland range of all but the most determined ferals.

The openings in the grate were alligator-wide and fish-tall, designed by the finest engineers the government could subsidize to allow everything but boats, hippos, and law-abiding men to pass.

By the time the hoppers arrived at the Gate, the sun was high and hot overhead, and all five of them were dewy with sweat. The Gate bowed toward them in places, the metal warped in the shape of rampaging feral bulls that had seen something worth having on the other side of the grate, but it was intact, and still looked strong. Debris floated in the water around the grate—sticks and leaves that hadn’t been cleared by the crew of old soldiers who manned the outpost. Rosa picked through the water around the sticks, lifting her nose high in the air. Archie nudged her forward, peering at the grate. Ruby nosed at the sticks freely, searching for anything that appeared edible and ignoring Houndstooth entirely. Betsy, meanwhile, bowled through the flotsam, kicking up waves of water that soaked Cal to the waist and sent leaves flying at the other hoppers.

As they neared the outpost, they were greeted by the warning report of a rifle. A ranger peered down at them from one of the four high towers that dotted the thirteen-mile-long Gate, his face shaded by a broad-brimmed, sweat-stained hat with a Bureau of Land Management badge affixed to the brim.

“Alrigh’ down there,” he shouted. “Let’s see your badges, just hold ’em high, now. No trouble.”

Houndstooth produced a waxed wallet instead. He removed a large sheaf of paper and waved it in the air with one hand, cupping the other around his mouth.

“We don’t have badges, but we have a contract with the federal government. We’ve got free passage.”

The ranger peered down at them, mopping his creased brow with a well-worn kerchief. Then, understanding bloomed across his face. “Are you the same Houndstooth what Alberto let through t’other day? Thought he told me you was a British fella.”

“Yes, yes, that’s me,” Houndstooth called back up with a barely perceptible sigh. “Winslow Houndstooth, at your service, my good man. Would you terribly mind letting us through?”

The ranger spat brownly over the side of the Gate, well away from the five riders. “Sure enough, sure enough. Where’ll you be staying?”

The voice that answered from beyond the Gate was smoother than a newborn hop’s underbelly. “Not to worry, Harold. They’ll be staying with me.”

The ranger startled so violently that his hat fell off, dropping thirty feet from the tower. Hero caught it neatly, spinning it in their hands.

“Yes sir, Mr. Travers, sir,” the ranger said, a quaver in his voice.

“Real subtle-like,” Cal muttered to Houndstooth, his hand rising to touch the bandage over his left ear. Then he raised his voice, inclining his head toward the small, sleek man on the other side of the Gate. “Mr. Travers. What a fine surprise this is.”

Chapter 9

TRAVERS RESTED COMFORTABLY in the center of his raft. He was surrounded on four sides by hulking men who trained rifles on the water, watching for ripples. “Calhoun. Mr. Houndstooth. Ladies.” Hero made a disgruntled sound, and Mr. Travers tipped his hat to them in particular with a cough. “Et alia. I look forward to hosting you on the Sturgess Queen—my finest boat. Only the best accommodations.”

“Oh, we couldn’t possibly—” Hero began, but Mr. Travers interrupted.

“It’s the least I can do in exchange for the immense services you’ll be providing to the government of this great nation,” he said with a thin smile. “I quite insist.”

Houndstooth was still for a moment, his eyes on the goons’ rifles. The Gate let out a ferocious squeal as the ranger pulled the lever to open it. It slid sideways, nesting neatly under the ranger’s post. The wake lapped at the hippos’ flanks, darkening the waxed leather of their harnesses.

“Well,” Houndstooth said to the rest of the hoppers. “I suppose it doesn’t change too much if we’re aboard the Sturgess Queen. Fewer fleas than the Inn, I’m sure.” His face was open, and spoke to a pleasantly surprising change in plans. His expression betrayed none of the risk he was being forced to swallow. None of the rage.

It took a full minute for the Gate to open. The five of them walked through abreast, Zahra trailing behind Stasia. As they passed below the ranger’s post, Hero flung the man’s hat high in the air. It spun like a discus, and the ranger leaned out to catch it. The moment Zahra’s tail had passed the threshold, the squeal began again, and the Gate closed behind them.

Behind Travers, the narrow passage of the Gate opened up into the waters of the Harriet. The humid haze of the day didn’t quite obscure the massive dam that dominated the horizon behind him, dwarfing the riverboats and pleasure barges that dotted the water. Here and there, a canoe-sized islet bumped up out of the surface of the Harriet. Houndstooth would have expected them to be covered with birds—but then, he supposed the ferals made this a dangerous place to be a bird.

Mr. Travers clasped his hands in front of his chest, staring at the crew with wine-black eyes. His slim, slick moustache twitched over his icy smile. “Welcome to the Harriet.”

* * *

Hero dropped their bag onto the floor of the presidential suite and took the room in. It was small as far as presidential suites went, but it was, according to Mr. Travers, the largest on the Sturgess Queen.

“Well,” said Houndstooth. “Seems cozy enough, this. If you like red velvet.” He ran a hand over the seat of the plush divan that sat under the window. Hero closed their eyes and breathed deeply. Their lips parted just a little, and Houndstooth nearly died with the effort of not noticing it.

“I do.”

Houndstooth jumped. “What? You, hm, you what?”

Hero opened their eyes and considered Houndstooth, who was perched on the edge of the divan, stiff-backed, holding his hat in his lap. They cocked their head and smiled.

“I do like red velvet.”

Houndstooth moved to the window and twitched the curtain aside. “What do you make of Travers, then? I don’t like that he made us check our guns. ‘Standard security procedures,’ indeed. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. And did you see the munitions he had stored down there? What, is he expecting a war to break out?” He cleared his throat, smoothed the front of his jacket.

“I think,” Hero drawled, crossing the room to join him, “that he’s the least of our problems.”

Hero stared out the window. Houndstooth stared at Hero. “What’s the worst of our problems?”

Hero smiled, watching the water below them. “Well, Winslow. There’s only one bed in here.” They turned their head, still smiling, and took in Houndstooth’s rich pink blush. “And last I counted, there’s two of us.”

Houndstooth stammered incoherently as Hero chucked him under the chin, then strolled out of the room, easing the door shut behind them. When the latch clicked, Houndstooth collapsed onto the divan. He stared at the bed, willing the heat to dissipate from his cheeks.

* * *

Archie and Adelia sat in the wood-paneled main lounge of the Sturgess Queen. Adelia’s feet rested on a low, claw-footed stool. A glass of ice water sweated in her hand.

“They sure know how to treat a pregnant girl, eh?” She grinned over her glass at Archie, who sat in a wide wicker-backed armchair opposite her, turning the feral bull’s tusk over and over in her hands.

“Why are you worried?” Adelia asked. “The worst thing that happens is they try to kill us.”

Archie continued worrying at the tusk. She muttered something under her breath.

“Que?”

“I said,” Archie replied deliberately, “that I’m not sure it’s them I’m worried about.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they knew that we would be getting to the Gate today. They knew ’ow many of us to expect. They ’ad exactly six spots in the paddock, one for each ’ippo. And they ’ad enough rooms set aside for six people, which means they knew about . . . about Neville.”

“So?”

“So,” Archie said, her hands going still, “I think that someone told them about us. I think that someone told them what route we would be taking. I think—”

“What’s all this about?” Hero said, striding into the lounge.

“Archie thinks that we have a spy in our midst,” Adelia said with a crooked grin. Hero looked sharply at Archie.

“A spy?”

“Oui,” Archie replied, her brows high. “I inspected the Gate while ’oundstooth was talking to that ’illbilly ranger. It was sturdy, intact, no recent welding that I could see. And we all know that a ’ippo isn’t going to reach higher ramming speeds overland than in the water.”

“What’s your point, Archie?” Hero asked, not unkindly.

“My point is: if the Gate was not broken, then ’ow exactly did a single feral bull escape the Harriet and find us? Just the one? Not enough for us to notice and change course? I’ll tell you how: Monsieur Travers snapped ’is fingers, and that guard let it out. I’d guess that ’appened on the same day we ’it the road. The only question is, who was gone long enough to send a telegram?”

Adelia, Archie, and Hero looked at each other. None of them wanted to be the first to speak.

The doors to the lounge swung open, and Houndstooth strode in briskly. “Well! Why the long faces, you three? And where’s Calhoun?”

Adelia rattled the ice in her glass. “I’d imagine ’e’s at the blackjack tables,” she said, plucking out an ice cube and pressing it to her neck. “Ay, it’s too hot.”

“You alright, Adelia?” Hero asked.

“Si, si, it’s just—nobody ever told me that having a little girl would make me so hot all the time!”

Houndstooth, being a gentleman, said nothing; he kept his eyes averted from Adelia’s ripe belly. Hero, having no such compunctions, laughed heartily. “Get used to it, ma’am. We have a saying where I’m from—boys will make you cry, but girls? Girls will make you sweat.”

* * *

The lamps that lit the riverboat inside and out had come on by the time Archie found Cal on the casino floor. He swayed gently on his stool, and it was readily apparent that bourbon, rather than the rocking rhythm of the boat, was what moved him. Archie pulled up a stool beside him and mentally tallied the cash that rested in stacks on his side of the felt.

“’Ow are you doing, there, mon ami?” she asked softly. Cal swung his head around to her and grinned broadly. Blood was seeping through the bandage over his left ear. He had two toothpicks in his mouth. One was fresh; the other was chewed nearly to splinters, as though he’d forgotten to discard the old one.

“Archie! Or should I say, Regina?” He leered as he said her name, and she thought she could guess what pun he thought he was making.

“Actually, cherie, it’s Regina. Rhymes with Pasadena.”

His leer dissolved, and he became morose so quickly that Archie feared he would fall off his stool.

“You know Pasadena, oui, Calhoun? That is where you met our Adelia—on a supply trip for Mr. ’oundstooth, was it not? A decade ago, oui?”

“I don’t wanna talk about Adelia,” Cal slurred. “I miss Adelia so—” He hiccupped. “—so much, and I don’t wanna talk about her. She won’—she won’ even talk to me about the baby, Regina. After what I did for her? She came back to me and then, and then she left, an’—I don’t wanna talk about her, no, no thank you.”

“Ah, of course, of course—” Cal interrupted Archie before she could finish agreeing not to talk about Adelia.

“I met ’er in Pasadena, you know,” he said, having already apparently forgotten that Archie had said just that a few moments before. “I met ’er there and I loved—I loved her right away. I was so nice to her, but she just wouldn’t even lookuhme.” He slapped the table with the palm of his hand. “Wouldn’t go home with a ranch hand, no sir. Too good for that!” His too-loud voice suddenly wobbled. “Too good for me. But I showed her, I did everything he asked me to do and then some—”

Other patrons of the Sturgess Queen’s bar were starting to stare. Archie put a hand on Cal’s elbow. “Perhaps we should get you to bed, non? It would appear that you are winning. Best to quit while you are ahead, is it not?”

Cal shook his finger at her, squinting. “Not yet,” he said in a stage whisper. “Not yet. I’m not done yet.” He turned back to the dealer, who had observed this exchange with the removed patience of experience, and slapped the felt hard enough that one of his stacks of cash fell over. He left his hand where it lay, and his gaze swam up to meet the dealer’s eyes. “Himme.”

The dealer did as he was told, and Archie saw at once that she should not have allowed Cal to touch the table.

“Twenty-one. Again. Excellent, Mr. Hotchkiss.” The dealer smiled at Cal, but his smile did not extend to his eyes. He moved his hand as though to shift more cash to Cal’s side of the table, but at the last moment, he seized Cal’s wrist instead.

Archie sprang from her stool, her hand going automatically to her empty holster, as the dealer gripped Cal’s wrist and waved his other hand in a signal. Mr. Travers appeared as though from thin air, his hands clasped soberly behind his back.

“Well now, Mr. Hotchkiss. What have you been up to?”

The dealer lifted Cal’s hand, revealing a single card underneath it.

“This is the fourth card he’s swapped, Mr. Travers, sir. I wasn’t sure at first, but, well.” The dealer smiled at the small army of empty highball glasses that littered the table. “He got sloppy.”

Cal looked from the dealer to Travers’ unsmiling face, and then to Archie. His expression was that of a boy who has fallen into a well at dusk, and who has yelled himself hoarse with no answer but the rustle of wind through buzzards’ wings.

“Mr. Hotchkiss,” Travers said, reaching into his breast pocket and pulling out a bloody, folded pocket square. “I believe you’ll be needing this back.” He tucked the pocket square into Cal’s shirt pocket. Cal blanched and started muttering the word “no” under his breath, over and over, like an incantation.

“Mr. Travers, sir, Cal is drunk. Might I take ’im up to his room to sleep this off? He is not ’imself.” Archie’s voice was dripping honey. Travers regarded her with frank interest.

“Why, Miss Archambault. It is so refreshing to see someone willing to stick up for a friend. But I’m afraid that Mr. Hotchkiss here is a cheat. Ah, ah—” He held up a finger, cutting off her interruption. “He may be drunk, but he is still a cheat. He was a cheat before he was drunk and he’ll remain a cheat when he sobers up tomorrow.” He took a step away from Cal. The dealer did the same.

Cal bolted for the door. The band stopped playing to watch him pass. He was fast—but Travers’ security goons were faster. They caught him under the arms midstride, hauling him into the air with the brisk efficiency and remorselessness of experience.

“No!” he cried, his legs kicking in the air but finding no purchase as he was dragged bodily across the casino floor. “No, wait, Mr. Travers, sir, please! You can’t, you can’t—after what I did for you? After what I did to that British bastard for you? Please, sir, I won’t—I wasn’t—”

Travers laid his fingertips on Archie’s arm, as though to comfort her. “Watch now.”

And she did. She watched as Travers’ men paused at the window. Cal’s eyes roamed the room, sightless with terror. He screamed. He begged.

Travers’ men did not seem to hear. They swung him once—heave-ho, and his toothpicks fell to the floor—then hurled him bodily through the open window.

He screamed as he fell; the splash seemed to echo in the silent casino. Then, he screamed again. It was not a scream of terror, but a scream of pain.

After a moment, the screaming stopped—but the splashing continued.

Travers clapped his hands once in front of his chest, then addressed the now-silent patrons who filled the gambling tables of his casino. “Ladies and gentlemen, my apologies for the disruption!” He turned to the bar. “To make up for it, a round of champagne for everyone, on the house!”

Travers signaled the band, and the music started playing once again. He laid his fingertips lightly upon Archie’s arm once more as the casino floor erupted in cheers.

“I hope, Miss Archambault, that you can understand. Mr. Hotchkiss was a thief, and I cannot abide thieves.” His use of the past tense was not lost on Archie. “I, of course, would not even begin to consider allowing his shortcomings to color my opinions of the rest of your little hopper gang.”

Archie managed a smile, and touched his fingertips with her own. “I . . . I am so grateful, Mr. Travers. We ’ad no idea that Cal—” But she saw his wry, knowing smile and started again. “Of course, we knew that he was a scoundrel, but we would never imagine that he would besmirch your ’ospitality so.”

“Of course not, Miss Archambault. Of course not.” A waiter approached holding a silver tray of glasses, and Travers handed one to Archie before taking one for himself. He touched his glass to hers, making the crystal sing.

“Cheers, Miss Archambault. May you enjoy your stay on the Sturgess Queen, and the very best of luck in all your endeavors.”

“Santé,” Archie answered, and drained her glass without looking away from Travers’ twinkling eyes. Travers signaled the band to play louder, and they did—but the music couldn’t mask the bellowing of the ferals fighting over their feast in the river below.

Chapter 10

“I’M NOT SURE I UNDERSTAND what you mean, Archie.” Houndstooth’s voice was low. If Archie hadn’t known better, she’d have thought he was furious. But she did know better—she’d saved the man’s life somewhere between nine and a half and ten times, and she knew his moods better than her own.

So she knew that he was perched on the edge of panic.

“Dead means dead, mon ami. Nothing more to it.”

Houndstooth ran his hands through his hair as he paced back and forth, staring at the carpet. Hero, seated on the divan, followed him with their eyes. “But . . . but if he’s dead, then—then I can’t—then I didn’t—”

Archie put a quelling hand on his shoulder. “Perhaps it is best this way, non?” she whispered. “Without the revenge.”

He looked up at her, his eyes flashing. “How did you know?”

She looked uncomfortable. Before she had to answer—before she had to tell him what Cal had said just before he died—the door banged open. Adelia stared in at the two of them. “Well, Archie. I suppose this means you and I each get our own suite.”

“It also means we’re all up to our necks in the bog without so much as a hop to ride,” Houndstooth said in a clipped voice. “We can’t do this without Cal.” He began to pace the suite, running his hands through his hair.

Hero didn’t look up from their whittling. “If you’re so beside yourself about it, Winslow, I can chew on toothpicks and sling racial slurs with the best of ’em. Might need to practice some, but I’m sure I can get in fightin’ shape by mornin’.”

Houndstooth laughed—a genuine, easy laugh—and then sat heavily on the bed next to Archie.

“Look around the room, Hero. What’s missing?”

Hero glanced around the suite. “Palpable body odor.”

Houndstooth laughed again, but this time, the laugh seemed forced. Adelia and Archie exchanged a glance.

“We’re missing a white boy,” Adelia murmured, stroking her belly.

“So what?” Archie huffed. “If we need one so bad, I am sure I can drag one back up here for you, Winslow. There’s no shortage.”

Houndstooth was staring at Hero. Hero stared back at him for a long moment.

“What is it? What are we failing to understand here, Winslow? What’s so tough about pulling off this hippo caper without Cal on board?”

Houndstooth dropped his head into his hands. “We need your supplies, Hero. And nobody on the Harriet is going to sell your supplies to a stranger, not even for easy money. We’ve been corresponding with a dealer and he’s expecting Cal to come buy the goods from him, and we’re working with him on the strength of Cal’s reputation on the Harriet. He’s expecting Cal. He’s expecting a white man with a terrible mistake of a moustache.” He rubbed his face with his hands, groaning. “And it’s not a caper; it’s an operation.”

Hero whittled faster, sending hickory shavings flying into the plush red carpet. “Right, right. All aboveboard. So, ask your federal boy. I’m sure the army can send something.”

Houndstooth looked uncomfortable. “I can’t ask him.”

Hero’s lips quirked into a half smile. “Oh, honestly. You’re embarrassed?”

Houndstooth scowled at them. “No, I’m not embarrassed, it’s just that—he doesn’t know what we’re going to do, here. He’s assuming we’ll net each feral, one by one, and escort them out of the swamp. That’s why the contract is for a full year.”

Adelia swore under her breath. “That’s . . . idiotic.”

“That’s dangerous,” Archie added.

“That’s why we’re not doing it that way,” Houndstooth said. Houndstooth slapped the edge of the map, his cheeks pink. “It was a great goddamned plan, and it’s sunk.” Hero put a calming hand on his arm. His cheeks reddened further.

“So we need a white boy por quoi? To buy dynamite?”

Hero nodded. “Lots of it. And detonators. Fuses, timers—oh, and wax. A lot of wax.”

Archie left the room without saying another word.

“Where is she going?” Adelia asked.

“Probably to go charm some poor kid into buying Hero’s groceries,” Houndstooth replied. “I suppose that’s why she’s on the team—she could talk a hippo into thinking it was a rhinoceros without breaking a sweat.”

A few minutes later, the door burst open again. Adelia smirked.

“Giving up so soon, eh Ar—oh,” she said.

Archie stood in the doorway, transformed. She’d slicked her hair down on either side of a part so razor sharp it put Houndstooth’s to shame. Her pinstriped breeches and satin waistcoat had been exchanged for a flawlessly tailored three-piece linen suit. She spun a matching bowler hat between her hands. Her boots were half-covered by diamond-white spats. A blond moustache—one that would have kept Cal up at night with envy—bristled its way across her upper lip.

She had become an impeccably outfitted gentleman.

“You needed a white boy, oui?” she asked, her voice pitched an octave lower than usual. “Et voilà.”

Houndstooth gaped at her as Hero crossed the room to examine her. “Where did you get this suit?” Hero asked. “I don’t mean any offense, but I can’t imagine you just grabbed it off some poor mark in the hallway just now. And that moustache—good God, Archie, it’s nothing like Cal’s, but it’ll do!”

“I keep it around for special occasions,” Archie replied with a grin. “Sometimes my heart calls more to suits than skirts. It is fluid, oui?” She waved her hand vaguely through the air. “It changes. The tailor, ’e was confused when I told ’im what I wanted, but for the right price, anything can be ’ad. Isn’t that right, Adelia?”

Adelia’s head snapped up from where she was staring at the map. “Que?”

Houndstooth seemed to come to his senses. “Archie, you . . . you brilliant woman, I could kiss you!”

Archie and Hero both scowled. “You will ruin my moustache, ’oundstooth. Best to keep that kiss for someone who wants it, eh?” She placed the bowler hat on her head and turned to Hero, whose eyes went wide.

“Do you ’ave a list for me?”

“A list? Oh! A list. Of course, yes, let me just—” Hero scrambled for paper and scrawled out a list of supplies, handing it to Archie.

“Well, my friends, off I go. I expect all three of you to be drunk at the bar by the time I return.” She tipped a wink at Hero. “We must make a good show of enjoying our stay on the Sturgess Queen, non?”

* * *

Archie didn’t return until the wee hours of the morning. As she and Rosa approached the dock, she looked around at the Harriet. She hadn’t really paid attention to it the day before—she had been more focused on the guns Travers’ goons were carrying. Through the night, it had been too dark to really take in. As the sky began to lighten, she realized that the Harriet was precisely what she had expected: a huge, flat, muddy stretch of water, dotted with tiny islets and bracketed by humps of dogwood-covered land. She found herself wishing it was more beautiful, more shaded and lush—but then, she thought, it would be good marshland for hippos rather than a prison for ferals and riverboat thugs.

She unloaded Rosa’s saddlebags onto the floating dock that bridged the gap between the Sturgess Queen and the paddock. She brushed Rosa’s teeth and put medicated drops into the albino hippo’s pink eyes. Then, she sang Rosa a short lullaby and began dragging her load aboard the boat.

She tapped on the door to Hero and Houndstooth’s cabin with one fingernail, then with two. When there was no answer, she gave a single rap on the door with her knuckle.

Hero answered the door, breathless, still tying the belt of a robe around their waist. Their eyes were glassy—their lips, swollen. Archie grinned wickedly.

“I’m glad to see you, too, ’ero.” She thrust the saddlebag at Hero and turned to leave.

“Wait,” Hero panted. “Wait, this isn’t—this can’t be enough. I need at least four times this much dynamite.”

Archie turned back, her eyes still glinting with delight. “Ah, well, you see. They were all out of dynamite.” She patted the top of the bulging saddlebag. “This is something different. Something . . . better. You’ll see. We will discuss it further in the morning, oui? You’re busy now, and I’m so very sleepy.” She yawned theatrically. “Off to bed with both of us, is it not?”

She sauntered away down the hallway, pulling off the false moustache. “Oh, ’oundstooth,” she murmured to herself, a smile overtaking her face as she remembered the longing look on Winslow’s face when Hero had touched his arm the day before. “I can’t save you this time, mon copain. You’re done for.”

* * *

Archie, Hero, and Houndstooth met in the lounge at noon, each of them still blinking sleep from their eyes. Adelia was already seated in her chair, a small armory’s worth of freshly whetted knives on a table by her side. The knife she was sliding along the whetstone was familiar; Archie noticed it before Houndstooth did.

“I thought that thing was lodged too deep in the bull’s brain to get out? And—’ow did you get those back from Travers? I thought they were all locked away . . . ?”

Adelia grinned and continued sharpening Houndstooth’s ivory-handled blade. “I’m determined, Archie. Determination is everything. Besides, I had a few years of saving Cal’s pistol-ridden ass. You know how it is, in the water.”

Archie watched Adelia’s expert hands work. “I do know ’ow it is. Knives are a ’opper’s best friend. Pistols that can’t get wet, on the other ’and? A nightmare.”

Adelia laughed. “Well, Cal was an idiot, wasn’t he? I told him, a hopper with no knives is a dead hopper. But he didn’t want to listen.” She lowered her voice in a perfect imitation of Cal. “‘Well, actually, Adelia, a gun is more effective at a distance.’ See how well that worked out for him, hm?”

Hero and Houndstooth walked to the dining room for coffee, their heads tilted toward each other as they walked. Archie sat across from Adelia, her elbows resting on her knees.

“Adelia, mind if I ask you a question?”

Adelia did not look up from the knife. “Yes. It’s Cal’s baby. No, I am not sorry that he’s dead.”

Archie shifted uncomfortably. “Well, that’s . . . that’s good to know, but it’s not what I was going to ask.”

That made Adelia look up. Her face was, for the first time, completely open—Archie realized she had not seen plain emotion on the woman’s face before.

“What would you like to know, Archie?”

“I don’t mean any offense, of course—you are incredibly skilled, obviously you are an asset. But . . . why are you ’ere?”

Adelia’s face split into a wide, white smile. Archie realized that one of Adelia’s canines was made of gold, and she was reminded strongly of Ruby’s deadly sharp tusks.

“Why, Archie. I’m here to kill you.”

Archie was startled into laughter. Adelia went back to sharpening Houndstooth’s knife. She tested it against her thumbnail, then returned it to the whetstone.

“What? Me?”

“Well, not you precisely. But, all of you. Everyone on the team.”

Archie went very still. “I think perhaps I misunderstand your joke, madame.”

“Oh, it’s not a joke,” Adelia said, although her smile had not faltered. “I’m here to kill you all. If anyone goes rogue, if anyone tries to steal the money, if anyone sabotages the plan. I’m supposed to keep an eye on you, per the boss.”

“You mean the Bureau of Land Management? Or ’oundstooth?”

Adelia did not reply.

“Aha,” Archie said. “So you’re keeping an eye on us for this ‘boss’ of yours. But who keeps their eye on you, Adelia Reyes?”

Archie stood after a long, silent moment, and walked into the dining room after Houndstooth and Hero. Adelia watched her go, testing the knife on her thumbnail once more. This time, she found it more than sharp enough.

Chapter 11

THEY MET THE NEXT DAY in Hero and Houndstooth’s suite to assemble the bombs that would drive the ferals to the Gate.

“So,” Hero said, staring into Archie’s saddlebag.

“The man I bought it from, Mr. Wolffenstein? ’E said you would know what it is. ’E called it ‘the Mother of Satan’?”

“Madre del Diablo?” Adelia asked. “I’ve heard of that before, I think. But I thought it was just a rumor.”

Hero took a rapid step away from the saddlebag. “No, no, it’s not a rumor at all, Adelia. Triacetone triperoxide.” They aimed a pointed look at Archie. “It’s extremely volatile.”

Archie shrugged. “Wolffenstein said it was so pure that it could be considered relatively stable.”

Hero pulled a single tiny white crystal out of the saddlebag and threw it to the ground. It exploded with a loud pop.

“ . . .’e said relatively,” Archie said with a shrug.

“Well then you can be the one to handle it,” Hero replied. “I hope you brought gloves.”

Archie pulled a pair of long leather gloves from the back pocket of her green breeches. “’Ero, darling, I always bring gloves.”

For the remainder of the afternoon, Adelia sat cross-legged on the divan, massaging wax into leather pouches, rendering them effectively waterproof. Archie filled each wallet with the tiny white crystals of madre del Diablo, then handed each one to Hero, who inserted wires and bits of metal in a configuration that seemed to make sense to them and them alone. Archie asked what Hero was doing, and the response was in no way illuminating.

“Would you like to discuss the inner workings of a blasting cap, Archie? Because we can discuss the inner workings of a blasting cap, if that’s what you’re looking for here.”

Archie had groaned and shoved Hero’s shoulder. “If you don’t want to tell me, then don’t tell me.” Hero had grinned and gone back to work, and Archie had caught Houndstooth beaming at them.

After Hero had finished doing whatever it was they were doing to make the bombs sufficiently dangerous, they wrapped each leather pouch around itself a few times. There was more room than they needed, since the crystals were so much smaller and lighter than the dynamite Hero had been expecting.

“You’ve worked out the equivalency, I suppose?” Houndstooth asked.

“More or less,” Hero replied. “We might get a little bigger bang than we expected, but I think it’ll all even out in the end. Don’t worry, Houndstooth. This hippo caper will go off without a hitch.”

Houndstooth opened his mouth to reply, and they all responded with him: “It’s not a caper; it’s an operation.”

The final step was left to Houndstooth. He had a pot of melted wax, kept liquid by water boiled in his travel kettle—Adelia had rolled her eyes at him for bringing it, but there wasn’t an inn north of Lafayette that could brew an acceptable pot of tea. He sealed each leather pouch, pouring wax over the seams.

After the first one was finished, he held it up. It was about the size of both his hands, and didn’t look remotely dangerous.

“Are you certain that this will be enough of a bang, Hero?”

Hero looked up at him with a half smile. “I think I know how to create a bang, Houndstooth.”

Houndstooth’s ears turned violet, and he didn’t speak again until they had finished making all twenty bombs.

* * *

That evening, Hero prepared to ride into the Harriet to set up the bombs. Houndstooth accompanied them to the dock at dusk, carrying one of the two loaded saddlebags that they’d need to take out onto the water.

“Now, remember, don’t place the charges too close—”

“Too close to the dam, I know. You’ve only told me a thousand times, Winslow.” Hero smiled. “I know the dam has a crack. I know we don’t want to be the ones to blow it. Trust me, why don’t you?”

Abigail waited for Hero dockside, impatient. She blew bubbles in the water when she saw them approaching. Houndstooth looked at her apologetically, then whistled for Ruby, who slipped up to the dock like butter sliding across the bottom of a hot pan.

“You don’t have to go alone, you know,” Houndstooth said, dropping his saddlebag.

Hero regarded him with their steady gaze. “Oh, Winslow. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were worried about me.”

Houndstooth rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe I just want to go with you. Keep you company.”

Hero dropped their saddlebag beside his, taking his hand. “Or maybe you don’t know how to stay behind?” Houndstooth grimaced at the insight. “I’ll be with Ruby. You can’t come with me, not riding Abigail—she’s louder in the water than a passel of fighting alligators, and if she sees ferals, she’ll probably try to make friends. Besides, you need to stay here. If Travers catches wind of this . . . you can say I went rogue, that you didn’t know I had this planned. You can say that the whole idea was to get the hippos out one at a time, nice and slow, like they thought. If they catch both of us, though—it would be bad for everyone, Houndstooth. You know that.” Hero kept going before Houndstooth could interrupt them. “Plus, you’ve got to dispose of the rest of the madre del Diablo—it only took about half of what Archie brought to get us set up, and we don’t want to leave that stuff lying around.”

Houndstooth was silent for a long moment, staring at Hero’s face as though trying to find a constellation in a sea of stars. “I wish you weren’t so damnably brilliant, Hero. You’ve thought of everything, haven’t you?” He touched Hero’s face with a tentative hand. “You’ll be a hero, Hero. If this works. You’ll be a hero. I just don’t want you to be a dead hero.”

“I’ll be fine,” Hero said, smiling. “Ruby’s the best there is. She won’t let anything happen to me. You can trust her, and you can trust me. You don’t have to w—”

But Hero’s words were stopped by Houndstooth’s mouth on theirs, his hands on their waist. “I do trust you, you know,” he whispered against their lips—and just like that, there was nothing left to say.

* * *

Adelia found Houndstooth at the bar half an hour later. He was already half drunk, and well on his way to getting whole drunk, if the speed at which he gulped his whiskey meant anything.

“Mind if I join you?” she said, hoisting herself onto a bar stool.

“Of course, please do,” he said politely, signaling the bartender to get her a glass of water.

“Ever the gentleman.”

“Ever the Englishman, you mean,” he replied, speaking into his nearly empty glass.

Adelia handed Houndstooth the ivory-handled knife. “Here—cleaned and sharpened. Sorry for, you know.” She gestured to his jacket pocket, wiggling her fingers. “Reaching in there, like that. Without asking first.”

Houndstooth turned the knife in his hand a few times, examining the blade. “It looks better than it has since I got it. You have a gift, Adelia.”

She smiled. “I suppose you could say I have the touch.” She sipped her water. “You left England to open a ranch here in the States, didn’t you, Houndstooth?”

He nodded. “Left home for good when I was fifteen. It was all I wanted. I didn’t know any better.”

“Do you miss it?”

“What? England? Every day. And, not at all. They didn’t like me there, you know,” he said, swaying a little on his bar stool. “They didn’t like a damn thing about me, other than my name.”

Adelia laughed. “I meant being a rancher. You used to own a ranch, sì? You used to breed your very own, like Ruby.” She put a hand on his arm, steadying him, then quickly withdrew her hand.

Houndstooth signaled for another drink. “I’d rather not discuss it, if you don’t mind. It ended . . . badly. And I am, after all, English. We don’t like to discuss.”

“It’s okay,” she said, resting a hand on her belly. “I actually already know about what happened. About the fire. Cal told me.” She watched Houndstooth closely. He stared into the glass of brown liquor that appeared in front of him.

“Did he now?” he murmured to the whiskey. “Did he tell you?”

Adelia waited.

“Did he tell you?” Houndstooth repeated. “Did he tell you about who burned down my ranch? Did he tell you about why he hid on the Harriet for all these years, knowing Travers wouldn’t let me in? Oh, he knew,” Houndstooth said, mistaking Adelia’s stillness for doubt. “Travers would never let me through the Gate. I turned him down when he asked me to help introduce more vicious strains into the feral population. He spent years trying to change my mind, but I wouldn’t budge. Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t burn my ranch down himself—” He glanced over at Adelia, understanding dawning across his face. She interrupted, talking fast and low.

“Don’t you ever wish you could go back to it, Houndstooth? Just . . . leave this place, give up the capers, give up the vendetta? Just take the money and run?”

He stared at her, his brow knit. “Run?”

“You know.” She made a shooing motion with her hands. “Leave.”

He shook his head, and it made him sway hard. “I can’t just—”

She grabbed his face in both hands, steadying him. She looked into his eyes with urgent intensity—he feared for a moment that she was going to try to kiss him. She hissed through her teeth. “Forget what you came here to do, Houndstooth. Forget revenge. Leave. Leave tonight.”

“’Oundstooth, you rascal, I ’ave been looking for you everywhere!” Archie’s voice filled the bar, and Adelia jumped away from Houndstooth. He looked at her as though she’d suddenly grown hippo ears, bewilderment writ plain across his normally stoic Englishman’s face. Archie stood in the doorway, beaming, and walked toward them.

“Adelia, ma nénette, ’ow are you feeling? Do your feet pain you at the end of such a long day? Ah, I thought they might, so I asked the bellboy to prepare you a soak of warm water and lavender in the lounge.” Ignoring Adelia’s protests, Archie helped her down from the barstool and began walking her toward the lounge. “I asked ’im to bring a little glass of wine with honey in it, to settle the bébé.” Her voice was as bright as the edge of a freshly sharpened knife. “I know she ’as been kicking you right in the gut these past few days.”

They rounded the corner to the lounge, leaving Houndstooth to stare, lost, into his whiskey at the bar. The moment he was out of sight, Archie rounded on Adelia, sticking a finger into her face.

“What the hell do you think you are doing?”

Adelia’s nostrils flared. She jutted her jaw toward Archie, saying, “It’s called flirting.”

Archie snorted. “I would ’ardly call it anything that advanced. What are you thinking? For the first time in the ten years I’ve known ’im, ’e likes someone who’s worth ’is time. You stay out of it, Adelia.” Archie’s eyes went wide with surprise as she registered pain in her side.

“I’d gut you right here, if I didn’t think he’d jump on the blade right after you,” Adelia whispered. Her knife dug into Archie’s side, the point of it pressed between her ribs. “If there’s one thing I know about Winslow Houndstooth, it is that he cannot be tied down, no matter how much he ‘likes’ the latest flower he’s landed on.” An ugly, brittle smile crept across her face. “Just because he wouldn’t have you—”

Archie cut her off with a laugh. “’E’s not my type, cherie. Put your knife away. You’re embarrassing yourself, even more ’ere than you were at the bar.” She took a deft step away from Adelia’s blade, and turned to walk back into the bar. “Try to calm yourself down, eh?” She called over her shoulder. “I think the baby is making you crazy.”

Adelia stared after her. Archie’s voice drifted back to her from the bar—“Ah, Houndstooth, right where I left you! ’Ow about some water to befriend the whiskey in your belly, eh? You should be keeping your wits about you during our big caper.”

“It’s not a caper—” came the weary reply.

Adelia looked down at the knife in her hand; a drop of Archie’s blood fell from the tip of the blade to the plush red carpet at her feet. It blended right in.

“Well, well, well. Miss Reyes,” came a smooth, sleek voice from the shadows of the lounge. “What on earth have you been up to?”

* * *

Hero finished rigging the bombs in the wee hours of the morning. They were pleased by the simplicity of the setup; each one of the waxed-leather wallets was fixed to the top of an existing buoy in the Harriet, keeping them safe from accidental bumps and early detonation. The wax was a precaution—one never knew what might happen to a buoy during a stampede of ferals—but Hero felt fairly confident that the risk of immersion was low, and that the chances of success were incredibly high.

As they nudged Ruby toward the floating dock next to the hippo paddock of the Sturgess Queen, Hero raised one hand to their lips, and felt a smile lingering there. Houndstooth. He had a reputation—every one of the hoppers on this team had a reputation—but he had turned out to be so much more than an English snob with a taste for pretty eyes. Hero wondered what would happen when the job was over—would they go home together, to Hero’s little house with its little pond? Retirement alone had been dull, and lonely, and not the respite they’d so needed. But what if Houndstooth were there? Maybe sitting on the porch and drinking sweet tea and watching the fireflies come out wouldn’t be such a lonesome proposition anymore. Maybe it would be the peaceful retirement they’d been hoping for when they bought the little house with the little pond.

Maybe, Hero thought, closing the paddock Gate and turning Ruby loose.

Maybe.

They walked up the dock, exhausted, and walked into the entryway of the Sturgess Queen. Upstairs, they knew, Houndstooth would still be awake, watching the window for their return. They could sleep beside him for a few hours, before it was time for the action to begin.

To Hero’s surprise, there were voices in the lounge. The Sturgess Queen was supposed to be empty during the night—all the gamblers and drinkers headed to the Inn or to one of Travers’ pleasure barges to recover from their losses and their headaches. The voices that Hero heard weren’t shouting over a craps table, though. They were soft ones—voices that didn’t want to be heard. Hero paused at the foot of the stairs when they heard a familiar accent drifting through the doorway.

“Their plan will work. And it will work quickly. It’s going to happen today—the ferals will be gone by nightfall.”

Adelia. The skin on the back of Hero’s neck prickled.

“Oh, Adelia. Did you even try to seduce the Englishman?” The voice that answered Adelia was rich, smooth. Slick. Travers. Hero swore under their breath. Archie was right.

“I told you, I don’t do seduction. Besides, the French one got in the way, and I—”

“Ah, excuses. I—that knife would be put to better use elsewhere, Miss Reyes,” came Travers’ reply. “In Miss Archambault’s heart, for example? In Mr. Houndstooth’s gullet?” Hero covered their mouth with both hands as Travers suggested ways to kill the hoppers with all the insouciance of a maître d’ reading off the specials.

“The time for manipulation and the arrangement of coincidences is over, Adelia,” Travers continued, his voice growing cool. “I’ve been willing to work with you to maintain your illusion of camaraderie, but now we do things my way.” A creak and a rustle of cloth. “I have business to attend to out on the water tonight. Find me back here before noon. Bring Houndstooth’s tongue with you as proof that you’ve done your job. No ears or toes, do you understand? That’s a good girl.”

Hero heard Adelia shout something that had the cadence of a vicious epithet. A door slammed—one or both of them leaving the room via a different entrance. Hero immediately turned to creep up the stairs to their room, each step cautious and silent. They moved slowly, trying to keep the boat from creaking under the weight of their footfalls.

They had to tell Houndstooth. They had to tell him, and they had to do—what? Something. Anything.

But then the door behind them swung open, and it was too late.

Adelia’s face was already contorted with restrained rage from her conversation with Travers. When she saw Hero standing there, so close to the door to the lounge that it was impossible for them not to have heard everything, her expression dropped into something like relief.

“Hero,” she said, a slow smile spreading across her lips. “I suppose you’ve finished rigging the bombs? I suppose you haven’t been up to tell Houndstooth that you were successful? I suppose you just wanted a word, before you go up to bed?”

Hero took several steps backward, but they were too late to dodge Adelia’s lightning-quick knives. They didn’t even see her hand move before they felt the pain in their gut. Hero dropped their hands to the hilt of the knife that protruded from their belly like the stump of a silvery umbilicus.

“I—”

Before they could so much as begin making an appeal to Adelia—an appeal for what? For mercy? Surely it was too late for that—Hero felt a blow strike them in the chest, like a punch. And there, like magic, the hilt of another knife had sprouted from their chest.

Hero fell to the plush red carpet of the entryway, at the bottom of the stairs. They looked up the stairs, away from Adelia, toward the suite where Houndstooth was waiting for them. They wanted to scream, to shout, to warn him—but it was so hard to draw breath. They hiccupped with pain, and tasted copper. They fought; they struggled, and managed to draw a single lungful of air.

“No no, dulce Hero. Sin gritando.” Adelia’s whisper was right next to Hero’s ear. The last thing Hero saw before they passed out was Houndstooth, standing at the top of the stairs, his mouth open in a scream to answer the one for which Hero had been unable to find breath.

Chapter 12

ARCHIE SAT ON THE DIVAN and watched Houndstooth pace.

“Cherie, you should ’ave a drink. Sit down. Something. You are driving me crazy with this pacing.”

“I can’t sit down. Not until we decide what to do with her.”

Adelia sat in the high-backed chair, bound by lashings of rope. Her head lolled to one side. A significant bruise marred her head where Archie had struck her with a well-flung hammer strike as she had attempted to run away from Hero’s still body.

Hero lay on the bed, their breathing ragged, their wounds packed with the torn scraps of one of Houndstooth’s silk shirts. The wounds had not been shallow, but Hero’s sternum had stopped Adelia’s knife from hitting their heart, and the blood pouring from their belly had slowed just enough to give Houndstooth a shiver of hope.

“You’re certain she’s been spying?” Houndstooth asked Archie for the hundredth time. Archie lifted a handful of papers she’d found in Adelia’s belongings: a contract, signed in Adelia’s loopy cursive and Travers’ delicate calligraphy.

“’Oundstooth? ’Oundstooth. Winslow Remington ’oundstooth, look at me,” Archie commanded. Houndstooth stopped and obeyed, staring at her with lost eyes, his hands limp by his sides.

“We ’ave to kill her, ’oundstooth. We ’ave to kill her and then we ’ave to run. Now. Tonight.”

“Leaving, are you?” came a low drawl from the doorway. They hadn’t heard Gran Carter enter, but there he was, leaning against the doorframe: six feet three inches of coiled muscle. His hands were nowhere near the two six-shooters that dangled from his hips, but Houndstooth and Archie both froze as though he were pointing the guns directly at them.

“I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure, Mr. Houndstooth.” He extended his hand to Houndstooth, who shook it out of sheer reflex. “Gran Carter, U.S. marshal. You have something I’ve been looking for.” He tipped his black hat at Archie. “Good to see you again, Archie. How’ve you been?”

“I ’ave been well, Gran. I ’ave been . . . busy. I’m sorry I ’aven’t written.” Archie sounded like she meant it.

“Oh, that’s fine. I know how time gets away from you.” He took a small step toward her, a smile twitching at the corners of this mouth. “I’ve missed you.”

Archie looked at her hands, worrying at the contract that sat in her lap. “Now is not the time, Gran.”

Gran cleared his throat, looking to Houndstooth. “Mr. Houndstooth. I believe you’re in charge of this hippo caper?”

Houndstooth looked simultaneously pained and affronted. “It’s not a caper, Mr. Carter.” Behind him, Archie mouthed the words along with him. “It’s an operation, all aboveboard. We were hired by the federal government, I’ll have you know, and—”

“Oh, my apologies, Mr. Houndstooth. I misspoke. Of course it only makes sense that the federal government of the United States of America would hire a team of down-and-out criminals for a caper on the Harriet.”

“It’s not a caper—”

“Yes, well. At any rate.” Carter grinned at Archie. “Miss Reyes is none of your concern. She’s hardly a member of your crew at this point, is she?”

Houndstooth seemed uncertain as to how he should respond. Adelia had been a member of the crew until thirty minutes before; but now, with Hero’s blood on her hands?

“I’ll make this easy,” Carter said, with the same relaxed grin. “Miss Reyes here is a fugitive, and I’ve been chasing her down these past five years now. She killed two good men in Arizona while she was on the run from California ten months ago—where she killed three more good men—and I’m near about fed up with her giving me the slip. I arranged with my contact at the Bureau of Land Management to get her on board for this here caper, and to make sure she’d be on the Harriet.” Houndstooth opened his mouth to interrupt, but Carter didn’t give him an opening. “I’ve been tracking her ever since. I was going to wait until the caper was done to pick her up, but seeing as how you’ve got her all trussed for me, and Travers is out of the way?” He spread his hands in a gesture of acquiescence to fate. “Seems to me the time is ripe.” He gestured to Hero. “I’ll even take your friend here to a doctor on my way out of town. It looks like you’ve done well by them, but that?” He pointed at the wound in Hero’s stomach. “That’s more than you can handle.”

Archie and Houndstooth looked at each other. Archie spoke first. “Travers—do you know where ’e is? They were working together.”

“Ah,” Carter said, “last I saw, he was on a raft heading toward the dam.”

“Gran, do you mind if we confer for a moment?” Archie asked seriously.

“You go right on ahead. I’ll get this package all wrapped up and ready for transport,” Carter responded, unhooking a pair of heavy manacles from his belt and turning to Adelia.

Houndstooth and Archie stepped into the hall. Houndstooth stared over his shoulder at Carter as the door swung shut.

“Will Adelia be . . . safe, with him?” he asked Archie, rubbing at his eyes.

“’E will not be unkind to ’er, if you are worried. Not that she deserves kindness,” Archie growled. “And if she dies, and ’ero makes it to a doctor? I think it will ’ave been worth the risk, non?” Winslow cringed. “Winslow, you are exhausted. You should get some rest before we leave. If Travers went all the way to the dam, we ’ave at least an ’our before he returns. I will pack. You sleep.”

“No, no,” Houndstooth said, looking up at her with urgency. “I don’t want to sleep, Archie. And I don’t want to leave. I want to finish the job we came here to do.”

Archie looked at Houndstooth as though he’d claimed to hear a hippo singing a French lullaby. “What? ’Ounds-tooth, you . . . you aren’t in your right mind. I know you’re worried about ’ero, but—we can’t do it. We don’t ’ave any way to set off the bombs, and even if we did, we ’ave no way to know ’ow to do it, and even if we did know ’ow to do it, we don’t know when to detonate the charges, and—”

Houndstooth shook his head. “You’re wrong, Archie. For once in your life, you’re completely wrong. I’ve never felt so clear about what we need to do. We need to do the job. I promised Hero that they’d be a hero—that their name would be in children’s history books for decades to come, as the mastermind behind the bombs that cleared the hippos out of the Mississippi.” His eyes had taken on a wild gleam. “And we’re going to do it. We’re going to get Hero’s name in the history books, goddamn it. Whether the job is legitimate or not. When Hero wakes up, I’m going to go and tell them about how their plan worked. And as for the bombs?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a slim black device: Hero’s detonator.

“They gave me this before they left to set up the bombs. ‘Just in case.’ Just in case something happened.” He laughed, a lost, wild laugh, and Archie’s brow furrowed further.

“’Oundstooth,” she murmured. “I ’ave to tell you something. I should ’ave told you before, but—” She took a deep breath, then rushed through her excuse. “But you ’ave spent so many years hating Calhoun, and when ’e died, it seemed like maybe you would be able to let this go. Like maybe you would be able to stop chasing revenge.”

Houndstooth looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “You sounded like Adelia for a moment there.”

“If you’re determined to go through with this, I’ll be with you. You know that I wouldn’t let you do this alone. But we might not both make it out of ’ere, so I ’ave to tell you before we set out.” She looked at Houndstooth as though hoping he’d interrupt, but he simply watched her with terrible patience. She took another deep breath, steeling herself. “Cal—right before ’e died, ’e said that ’e had betrayed you for Travers. I think . . . Winslow, friend. I think Travers put ’im up to it. Travers is the reason your ranch burned down.”

Houndstooth stared at Archie, then looked down at the detonator in his hands. He turned it over between his fingers, his jaw working.

“I think I knew that,” he finally said. “I think Adelia—I think she told me.” He shook his head. “Well, I suppose that makes this a little sweeter.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” Archie said.

“No, no—I understand. Really.” Archie smiled, relieved; her smile faded when Houndstooth continued, “But I do hope you understand: I’m going to destroy Travers. I’m going to destroy everything he’s built, everything he holds dear. Everything he’s poured his life and his passion and his fortune into. I’m going to burn his world to the ground, and then I’m going to salt the ashes. For what he did to my ranch, and for what happened to Hero.” A shadow seemed to pass across his eyes as a broad, toothsome grin spread across his face. “Oh, yes, Archie. He will suffer.”

Archie’s face was bloodless. “’Oundstooth,” she whispered. “We can’t—”

But what they couldn’t do, she never got to say, because the door to the suite burst open. Gran Carter emerged, covered in his own blood.

Archie screamed. Houndstooth looked at her, more startled than he had been when he saw Carter himself: he had never heard Archie scream before.

“I’m fine,” Carter said, placing his bloody hands on Archie’s shoulders. “I’m fine. Just a lot of little cuts, Archie, just—” He clasped her close to him for a brief moment, then pushed her away, holding her shoulders at arm’s length. “She’s gone. Out the window, into the water. I don’t think she was unconscious after all—the moment I got close enough—” He was backing away as he told them, toward the stairs. “I’m sorry, I have to go, I have to catch her before she—”

“If she’s in the water, the problem is solved, right?” Houndstooth interrupted. “The ferals—”

In the distance, the sound of Zahra and Stasia bellowing cut through the insect noises of the night.

“She’s at the paddock,” Archie said. “The ferals must be feeding at the middle of the lake, they are not ’ere yet. Go, Gran, while it’s safe in the water! Go!” She shoved her hands at him as though to push him away. Houndstooth noted that her eyes had filled with tears.

“Wait!” Houndstooth shouted. “Hero—you promised—”

Carter doubled back and raced past them, emerging with Hero in his arms.

“I’m sorry, Archie! I’ll see you again! I swear it!” Carter shouted as he bounded down the stairs. “I’ll see you again!”

They watched him leave; then, Archie wiped her eyes and looked down at herself. She was covered in Carter’s blood from where he had held her.

“Well,” she said, laughing. “I ’ave forgotten what I was going to say to you, ’oundstooth. About your grief and your fear and about not being in your right mind.” She plucked at her wet, bloody shirt. “I suppose we should get dressed, and then we should start detonating, oui?”

Houndstooth grinned at her. “Let’s blow up the Harriet.”

Chapter 13

ARCHIE AND HOUNDSTOOTH made their way to the hippo paddock in silence as the stars began to wink out. When they arrived at the paddock, Ruby, Rosa, Abigail, and Betsy were already nosing at each other, competing for attention at the dock.

Archie pulled up short.

“’Oundstooth?” She said. “What—ah, what should we do about Abigail and Betsy?”

“We can’t leave them,” he replied. “Hero will want to see Abigail when they wake up.”

“Do you think they’ll follow us, like Stasia and Zahra?”

“If they do, they’ll make a decent rear guard, if any ferals try to sneak up on us. I suppose there’s only one way to find out.” He shrugged. Archie looked at him strangely. “What?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “I’ve just never seen you shrug before. It does not look right on you, ’oundstooth.”

Fortunately, Abigail and Betsy did indeed trail behind Ruby and Rosa as they made their way to the Gate—following the trail of apples that Houndstooth dropped into the water every few minutes. Archie stifled a laugh when she noticed him doing it.

“Where did you get those?” she asked.

“I like to be prepared, Archie,” he replied, his voice dripping with condescension.

“ . . . Did you steal them from my saddlebag?”

Houndstooth took his time before answering. “Hero ate all my pears,” he said in an even tone. Then he snapped the side of Ruby’s harness, and the two of them sped ahead toward the Gate.

* * *

“So: we open the Gate, we hit the detonator. The ferals flood the Gate while we watch from a safe distance. We close the Gate. Très facile.” Archie had repeated the plan six or seven times on the way over. Every time, she proclaimed how easy it would be to execute.

“Très,” Houndstooth replied, having heard hardly a word of what she’d said. He watched the water as they travelled, but it was still and silent save for the occasional grumbles of the four hippos and their two riders.

And it was très facile. No ferals bothered them as they made their way from the Sturgess Queen to the Gate, though their bellows floated through the still night air like thunder from where they were gathered in the muddy center of the lake.

Archie and Houndstooth reached the Gate without incident. The ranger’s familiar, broad-brimmed hat was silhouetted in the grey light of the early morning. Houndstooth called up to the tower.

“Hello up there! Can you open the Gate?” Houndstooth called. “Official government business.”

The ranger didn’t respond. Houndstooth repeated his request. When he received no response, he looked at Archie. She shrugged.

“Perhaps ’e is asleep? Surely we could go up and wake ’im.”

Ruby, however, refused to approach the ranger’s tower. She balked and danced, avoiding the place where the tower ladder met the water.

“What’s gotten into you, Ruby-roo?” Houndstooth asked, tugging on the reins of her harness. She ducked her head below the water and blew a rude series of bubbles, turning her back to the Gate once again.

“Ruby, what are you—Ruby!” Houndstooth cried out indignantly as Ruby dipped into the water once more, soaking him to the waist. “Ruby, you damned impertinent cow, stop this behavior immediately!”

Houndstooth yanked on Ruby’s harness, and she reluctantly nudged closer to the ladder. Houndstooth jumped off of her, catching himself on the ladder, then looked back at where the sleek black hippo was fidgeting in the water.

“We’ll have words later, you and I,” he muttered to her. She flapped her ears at him, and he was struck with a sudden sense of unease. “Archie, do you mind staying down here to keep an eye on her? Lord only knows what’s gotten into her this time.”

Archie saluted from her perch atop Rosa’s back. Houndstooth returned the salute, and began to climb.

He reached the top of the ladder and shouted another greeting to the ranger, not wanting to startle the man with the rifle.

“Hello up here? I’m coming up, but I’m unarmed!”

He crested the top of the ladder and found himself inside the little box of a sentry tower. His eyes adjusted to the dimly lit outpost, and he realized that there were two men in the tower with him. The ranger, in his wide hat, was silent. It was the other man who spoke.

“Oh, good,” came the second man’s smooth, soft reply. “I was worried you’d bring weapons with you, and then I’d have to kill you myself.”

With that, Travers shoved the ranger over the edge of the tower. The utter lack of resistance the man showed to being pushed told Houndstooth that he had already been dead when they’d arrived. Travers turned to face Houndstooth, a thin smile on his face and a revolver in his hand.

“Well,” Houndstooth said, raising his hands slowly into the air. “I know when I’m outmatched. Are you going to kill me, Travers?”

“No, no, certainly not,” Travers drawled, advancing a few steps. “The ferals will take care of that for me. They take care of most of my problems for me, you know. Cheaters, thieves, nosy inspectors. Mercenary hoppers who don’t know when to go home with their tails between their legs.” He took another step toward Houndstooth. “I’ll have that detonator in your pocket, if you don’t mind.”

Houndstooth kept his hands in the air. His voice was cold as he watched Travers advance. “I don’t know what you mean, Travers. Hero had the detonator.”

Travers laughed—a sound like molasses dripping into the bottom of a barrel. “Oh, don’t play games with me, Mr. Houndstooth. The house always wins.” He pointed his gun to Houndstooth’s bulging breast pocket. “Right there. Quickly now—before my men have to motivate you.” He gestured down to the water, and Houndstooth leaned as far toward the ledge as he dared. Travers’ goons held Archie at gunpoint. She looked up at Houndstooth, disgruntled.

“Four on one, eh, Travers? None too sporting of you.”

“Oh, Miss Archambault could easily take on two of them—perhaps even three, I wouldn’t put it past her. I play to win, Mr. Houndstooth. Now, let’s not waste any more time. Give me the detonator, and I’ll let you go down to her. You two can try to escape! Or at the very least, you can die together.” He cocked back the hammer on the revolver. “Come now. I don’t have all day.”

Houndstooth held up the detonator, and before he could say a word, Travers had taken it from him.

“Thank you, Houndstooth. You know, I’d been expecting someone sly? Not you, though,” Travers said, flipping the detonator in his hand. “This really does make my life so much easier.”

“Fat lot of good it’ll do you,” Houndstooth laughed despite himself. “That’s one detonator. You do realize who hired us, don’t you? The federal government won’t be deterred by one little weasel of a man with a revolver. They will get these hippos out of the Harriet, Travers. Your tiny kingdom will crumble.”

Travers grinned, a dark joy spreading across his face. “Oh, Mr. Houndstooth. I want the hippos out of the Harriet, too! Just, not quite the same way.” He began to pace. “My little kingdom will become an empire. Just me, my riverboats, and the ferals, from Minnesota to the Harriet.”

Houndstooth watched Travers like a mouse watching a snake. “And how exactly are you going to get your riverboats over the dam, Travers?”

Travers held up the detonator. “Your little crew of hoppers helped with that, Mr. Houndstooth.” Houndstooth frowned, not following Travers’ logic. “Oh, yes! Yes, you see, Adelia told me all about the bombs you planted in the river. How handy! A whole passel of bombs, already rigged for my convenience.” He paused in his pacing, his face shining with excitement. “Last night, while you were crying over your poor departed little lover, I was out on the water, moving the buoys they set up. All sixteen! Oh, it wasn’t easy,” he hastened to add, mistaking Houndstooth’s dawning horror for unbelief. “But I’ve always been a determined man, Mr. Houndstooth. Determination is everything.”

“You’re . . . you’re going to blow the dam,” Houndstooth breathed, his head swimming with implications.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Houndstooth,” Travers replied fervently. “I’m going to blow the dam. I’m going to send a flood of ferals up the Mississippi, along with all their little hops. I’m going to seed the water with teeth and reap my reward.” His voice descended to a harsh growl. “I’m going to own this river.”

He raised the detonator high, and Houndstooth knew that he was going to press the button, destroying the dam. Destroying Hero’s legacy. Destroying his chance at vengeance.

Houndstooth launched himself at Travers, knocking the man off his feet. They landed at the very edge of the ranger’s platform. The revolver spun off, splashing into the water thirty feet below. The detonator clattered to the floor just out of reach. Houndstooth pressed his arm against Travers’ throat.

“Do you remember when I said I was unarmed, Travers?” Houndstooth pulled the ivory-handled knife from his belt; Adelia had sharpened it so finely that the edge was very nearly invisible. “I lied.”

Travers grinned savagely. “Do you remember when I said I wouldn’t kill you, Houndstooth?” Houndstooth felt a pain in his side. “I lied, too.”

Houndstooth’s vision went briefly red. He slashed wildly, and when his vision had cleared, Travers’ face had been slit from brow to lip. Blood flowed into his eye and mouth and ran hideously down the side of his face.

“That,” he spat with grim satisfaction, “was for killing Cal before I had the chance.” He slashed again, leaving another gash across Travers’ face, marking him with a bold bleeding X. “And that was for my ranch—the ranch you couldn’t burn down yourself, you fucking coward.”

He went to step forward, to deliver a killing blow, but he found that something was tugging at his side. He reached a hand down to free himself. All the wind seemed to leave Houndstooth’s lungs as his fingers found the hilt of the tiny knife that protruded from his side. Just like Hero, he thought.

Travers took Houndstooth’s moment of distraction as an opportunity. He hit the hilt of the knife with the heel of his hand, shoving it farther into Houndstooth’s side. As Houndstooth roared in pain, Travers scrambled for the detonator. Houndstooth tried to reach for him—tried to stop him—slipped in Travers’ blood, and fell hard.

Travers had the detonator.

He raised it over his head, and pressed the button.

Houndstooth half expected to die right then and there. He half expected the entire Harriet to blow up. What he didn’t expect, not even for a moment, was for the detonator to fail, because Hero had made the detonator, and Hero was the smartest person Houndstooth had ever met.

And he had been right. The bombs didn’t fail.

A rumble like thunder sounded in the distance. Houndstooth looked out of the ranger’s outpost, and saw a cloud rising through the pink morning light in the distance. He yanked the blade out of his side—it was a short one, too short to have done serious damage, but it hurt like hell. He threw the knife over the side of the tower as Travers laughed. When he looked, Travers was clutching his face, holding the flap of his lip in place with one bloody hand.

“You’ve done it,” Houndstooth whispered. “You crazy bastard, you’ve done it.”

“I’ve done it, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to stop those hippos from filling the Mississippi.”

Houndstooth looked over the edge of the ranger’s tower and into the rippling water. His heart stopped for a moment.

“Travers, open the Gate.”

Travers remained on the floor, laughing hysterically.

“Open the Gate, damn you, open it!” Houndstooth made for the large lever that would start the Gate opening, but Travers grabbed his leg.

“Don’t bother,” Travers gasped through his laughter. “I’ve disabled it. Cut the cable. It won’t open. The hippos can only go North, now.”

“Look outside, Travers,” Houndstooth urged the bleeding, cackling man. “Look at the water.”

Travers rolled to one side. He was close enough to the edge of the platform to look over. His laughter stopped abruptly.

“Do you see that?” Houndstooth asked, pointing down at the debris that was rapidly collecting against the Gate, battering Archie and the hippos. “That’s the front of the wave. You blew the dam, Travers. All the water that was behind that dam is headed our way, and it’s going to carry everything with it.”

Travers grinned, pulling himself to his feet. He needed both hands to do it; when he dropped his hand from his face, his skin fell open in a ghastly gash. “Well,” he said, “good thing I’m up here, isn’t it? The waters won’t be rising above thirty feet. Looks like all those ferals will be trapped against the Gate, hmm? And I’m sure they’ll be hungry.” He placed a hand firmly on Houndstooth’s back. “Enjoy the flood, Houndstooth.”

He pushed hard, and Houndstooth flipped over the railing, falling into the rising waters of the Harriet.

Chapter 14

ARCHIE WATCHED THE CLOUD of dust billow across the horizon as the dam blew. A wave emerged out of the spray falling detritus, a huge ripple that didn’t crest but instead grew as it approached. Even at a distance, it was big enough that she could see the shadows it pushed ahead: boats, buoys, ferals.

She watched as Travers shoved Houndstooth over the edge of the ranger’s outpost. She watched as he fell.

In the moment before Houndstooth hit the water, the wave hit the Gate. Archie, Rosa, Betsy, Abigail, and Ruby all rode the swell, slamming into the Gate as the wave broke against it. Betsy let out a pained roar before the water crested over her head.

Houndstooth slammed into the Gate next to Ruby. Archie suspected that this was no accident—the Cambridge Black had watched her hopper closely as he fell. A moment later, he was on Ruby’s back, looking dazed and sodden but whole. Archie breathed a sigh of relief at the sight of Houndstooth, safe.

Then she realized that none of them were safe at all.

Behind her, two of Travers’ goons screamed. Archie turned to see their mangled bodies, trapped between the Gate and a weather-beaten canoe. The current—fast, now, and relentless—kept the canoe pressed against them, and the water rose intermittently over their heads. They struggled in vain to free themselves.

Archie urged Rosa forward with only a moment of hesitation, but before she could reach the men, a shadow loomed overhead. She wheeled Rosa around and saw Houndstooth, already fleeing along the length of the Gate. Archie followed him, pressing Rosa forward, trying to get out of the path of the fast-approaching Sturgess Queen.

Travers’ other riverboats were tethered, docked, anchored hard; they would have flipped over and sunk under the wave. But the Sturgess Queen was designed to tool around the Harriet, providing gamblers with a constantly changing view of the scenery. The huge wave had swept it to the Gate, and it nearly filled the narrow passage. Archie looked over her shoulder and could see nothing but the planks of the boat as it rushed toward her.

Rosa slammed into the sentry tower with all the force of her three thousand pounds. Archie pressed herself against the hippo’s back as the boat barrelled toward her. In front of her, Houndstooth did the same, pressing one hand against the stone of the tower as if it could steady him.

And then the boat was passing them. Not missing them—the leg of Archie’s breeches tore open and she felt half of her skin go with the fabric—but not striking them. Not killing them.

The boat slammed into the Gate with a deafening crash.

The current was strong, and the Sturgess Queen was massive—but the Gate was bigger. The Gate was stronger. It groaned under the impact of the riverboat, but it held. The water at the base of the boat flushed pink with the pulp of the two men who had been crushed against the grate. The debris that the current pushed toward it gathered against the hull of the Sturgess Queen: sticks and leaves and a half-rotted rowboat. As Archie watched, a tiny, squirming hop poked its head out of the water, scrabbling against the side of the boat.

Travers’ two remaining goons eased around the corner of the sentry tower. They didn’t seem to notice Archie and Houndstooth as they splashed in the water, arguing over who would be first up the ladder and into the ranger’s tower, to safety. One of them managed to dunk the other, and clambered over him toward the ladder. The man in the water reached up an arm to grab his colleague’s leg.

With a jerk and a splash, the man disappeared under the water. He came back up again, sputtering. Then he was airborne, flipped by the nose of the first adult feral to reach the Gate.

Archie and Houndstooth watched as the man flailed between the feral’s jaws. The man screamed in ear-splitting agony as his blood ran down the hippo’s jowls and into the water. His colleague scrambled up the ladder to safety, not looking back even as the screams died with a wet crunch.

“Archie,” Houndstooth said, his voice thick. “I think this might be it.”

“You may be right, ’oundstooth,” Archie replied grimly. “But I am determined to live. And determination is everything, is it not?”

She swung her meteor hammer in a wide circle over her head and watched the water as the ferals surged toward them, borne on the swell of the current. The heavy metal head whipped through the air as it gained speed.

At first, the ferals didn’t notice Houndstooth and Archie. They were smacking into each other, into the Sturgess Queen. They bellowed and bit as the water shoved them into each other. One of the bulls let out a roar that rattled Houndstooth’s very bones.

The first feral to notice them was a small female with a long crack running through one of her fangs. She whipped toward them, fury in her wild eyes, and charged.

Rosa fled left, carrying Archie out of the path of danger and far from Houndstooth—but Ruby did not follow. She let out a roar that put the raging feral bulls to shame. She turned her wide mouth toward the attacker and opened it, ready to fight. Her golden tusks glinted in the sun. Houndstooth unsheathed his knives, bracing his knees in the saddle, and bared his teeth, echoing Ruby’s stance.

Water fanned in front of the feral as she bore down on Ruby and Houndstooth, her own jaw yawning wide—but then a brown blur slammed into her from one side, knocking her into the water. Betsy—sweet, small, battle-scarred Betsy—bowled the feral over, sinking her fangs into its flank before it had a chance to recover from the impact.

“Betsy!” Houndstooth cried as the little brown hippo disappeared into the roil of ferals. He looked around for Archie, but she, too, seemed to have vanished in the fray. A grey-backed hippo brushed up against Ruby, and Houndstooth jumped, prepared to fight—but it was Abigail, cowardly Abigail, Hero’s Abigail, trying desperately to hide between Ruby and the tower.

A roar drew Houndstooth’s attention back to the roiling mass of ferals, who were savagely fighting each other as the water buffeted them into the Gate. Houndstooth’s safe shelter against the tower was keeping him and Ruby out of the worst of the current—but it was too much to hope that they would completely escape notice, and Abigail’s flight had drawn the attention of a huge, one-eyed bull.

It was that bull whose roar had shaken Houndstooth’s bones—a roar that was directed at cowering Abigail. The bull began to move toward them, parting a path through the seething mass of grey that was the feral melee. Houndstooth went cold with fear. The bull was easily half again as large as Ruby. His massive head swung to and fro as he snapped at other, smaller ferals. He was coming for them, and they wouldn’t stand a chance.

Houndstooth tried to steer Ruby out of the way—tried to maneuver her out of the path of certain death—but she wouldn’t budge. Houndstooth cast his gaze frantically around for Archie, but he couldn’t see her, and there was no time because the bull was free of the tangle of ferals and he was charging at Ruby with all the fury of a freight train.

Ruby did not bellow at the bull. She stared at him dead on, and Houndstooth could have sworn he felt her tremble. Time seemed to Houndstooth to have slowed to a crawl. He patted Ruby’s flank with an unsteady hand. He closed his eyes for a brief moment, trying to accept that there was no way out of the path of the bull—but he realized that closing his eyes did not make it easier to face his death. He would never see Hero again, and he couldn’t swallow that with his eyes closed.

His eyes flew open just in time for him to see Rosa. She galloped around from the other side of the ranger’s tower, water shearing before her, a white blur with Archie standing atop her back. Archie yelled, a thundering cry that made even the feral bull hesitate for a moment in his charge. Archie, magnificent Archie—she swung her meteor hammer hard and released it, and it flew true and straight, and it hit the bull hard between the eyes with a crack like lightning. Blood stained the water. The bull stood in the water and swayed like a drunk, his eyes still locked on Ruby. He made a single, unsteady movement forward. Houndstooth threw a knife and it sunk deep into the hippo’s remaining eye—a surreal echo of Adelia’s strike back at the islet where Neville had died.

The beast fell.

Archie crowed as Rosa crowded beside Abigail and Ruby. “That makes ten times I ’ave saved your life, ’oundstooth! No more of this nine-and-a-half nonsense, eh?”

“Where’s Betsy?” Houndstooth asked her. Archie pointed to a small brown smudge on the other side of the water—Betsy had gotten herself out of the fray. Houndstooth blew an exasperated sigh. The hippo would have to be retrieved. As he watched, the smudge made its way onto the bank across the water from the sentry tower.

“Archie,” he said slowly, “I think she’s got the right idea. Getting onto land.”

As he spoke, a small bull with gleaming tusks just a few meters in front of them tore into its neighbor, then cast its head around, hungry for a fight.

“You are both right,” Archie replied. “We ’ave to get to ’igh land.”

The bull seemed to hear her voice. With incredible speed, it detached itself from the frenzy of fighting, roaring hippos and turned on them. Houndstooth felt at his pocket—the only knife he had left was his ivory-handled switchblade. Archie’s hammer hung at her waist, useless in the melee. They looked to each other, exhausted, out of options—but then, in a final, miraculous rescue, four bobbing shapes slapped into the furious little bull and toppled it.

The buoys.

Archie and Houndstooth stared at the buoys as they bobbed by, knocking the feral bull under the water each time he attempted to surface. Archie turned to Houndstooth.

“I thought they all blew? I thought . . . I thought Travers moved all of them to the dam?”

Houndstooth gaped. “Oh, my God, Archie. No. He found sixteen of them.” A smile began to spread across his face. “But Hero made twenty. ‘Always have a backup plan.’ I told them we didn’t need a backup plan, but . . . they knew better. And they made twenty, and they put four of them on a separate . . . thing. Frequency. So they wouldn’t go off right away.” He was a little out of breath from pain and the explanation. “They made twenty. And those are the last four.”

Archie let out a whoop. “Twenty! Twenty, goddamn it, ’ero, twenty!” She laughed, full-throated and gleeful. “Come on, ’oundstooth, while the ferals are still fighting each other! If you ever want to thank ’ero in person we’ll ’ave to follow our Betsy and get out of this mess!”

Together, with Abigail tucked between them, Archie and Winslow struggled across the narrow, feral-infested passage. They dodged teeth and pushed past battling pairs of grey, bloodied hippos. Pressing forward, always forward, they finally scrambled up onto the land alongside the Gate.

“Inland?” Archie shouted over the rushing water and the bellowing ferals.

“No,” Houndstooth yelled back, wheeling Ruby around by her harness and pointing to where Betsy was waiting for them. “Upstream!”

They rode alongside the water, watching as more and more ferals swept past, carried by the current. They rode until they weren’t deafened by the ferals’ fighting anymore. Archie immediately dismounted and helped Houndstooth to slide off of Ruby. He sat on the ground, his hand pressed to his still-bleeding side.

“’Oundstooth, you’re so pale—how much blood ’ave you lost?” Archie said.

“Never mind, now, Archie. I’ll be fine. Where’s—” He gasped as a fresh wave of pain overtook him. “—where’s Abigail?”

Archie looked around. Betsy stood a ways off, farther inland, panting; there were a few new cuts marring her flank, fresh battle scars to join the old ones.

“Je suis désolé, ’oundstooth, I don’t know, she was right there between us, I don’t know ’ow she could ’ave slipped away.” She scanned the water, but it was a froth of feral hippos, and she knew there was no use—but then, there she was. Abigail, surging her way up the current toward them. She scrabbled up the slope toward them, slipped; Archie grabbed her harness and gave a mighty heave. Between the two of them, Abigail made it onto the bank. Ruby nosed at her, and the two hippos wandered toward Betsy, who had sprawled, exhausted, on the ground.

Archie gave Rosa a nudge. “Go on,” she said. The hippo snorted at her, unmoving; Archie rubbed her bristly nose and murmured to her. “You ’ave done so well, my Rosa. Go on. Go and rest. You ’ave earned it.”

Rosa lumbered off to join the other three hippos where they lay in the shade, exhausted from the battle. Archie settled herself next to Houndstooth on the muddy riverbank.

“Well,” she said. “We are trapped, mon ami. We cannot get overland with the ladies over there—the Gate extends too far inland for Rosa and Abigail to cover the distance, and I think Ruby might not be in good enough shape right now for the journey anyway. We cannot take them through the ruins of the dam, not safely—and we certainly cannot take them into that,” she said, gesturing to the roiling mass of furious ferals. “So. What do we do now? Smoke a cigar and call it quits?”

Houndstooth was still out of breath, his face very pale; but when Archie eased his shirt away from his side, she saw that he had nearly stopped bleeding. He gave a little laugh and considered her.

“Hero was too smart for me, you know. They had so many plans; so many contingencies. ‘Just in case,’ they kept saying; and I kept asking ‘in case of what?’”

Archie watched Houndstooth, frowning. “Are you alright, friend? You seem—”

“Ah, I’m fine,” he said, waving her off. “I’m telling you what we do next.” He patted at his vest, then reached to an inside pocket. He pulled out a little leather pouch, sealed with wax; then, he handed her his ivory-handled knife.

“Miracle I managed to hang on to both of these after that fall. But then, it’s a bit of a day for miracles. Be a love and open this, won’t you, Archie? My hands aren’t too steady.”

Archie slit open the wax and tipped the contents of the pouch into Houndstooth’s waiting hand.

“‘Just in case,’ they said. ‘Just in case.’” He held up the little black detonator. “Just in case the charges don’t blow, let’s have a backup, they said. Just a few buoys that could start the chain, in case things go wrong. But of course the first round of bombs worked perfectly,” he laughed thinly.

Archie looked from the detonator to the Gate; to the swarm of ferals that frothed against the Sturgess Queen, pressing the buoys right up against the riverboat. She looked up at the tower, where Travers leaned against the railing, watching the chaos below, still laughing with his hand pressed to his mangled face.

“Four buoys left undetonated, Archie,” he said with a weak smile. “How many sticks of dynamite is that equivalent to?”

Archie grinned. “I ’ave no idea, ’oundstooth.”

“Shall we find out?”

Archie put her hand over his. They pressed the button together, and sat back, side by side, as the four backup buoys exploded in a glorious display of fire and fury.

A few moments later, the flames from the buoys reached the half-saddlebag of madre del Diablo that had been left unused. The Sturgess Queen cracked open in a thunderous explosion of fire and splinters. Archie and Houndstooth toppled over under the force of the shockwave. The Gate blew back in a gust of shrapnel. The blast sent feral hippos flying—several of them bowled into the ranger’s tower. The tower gave a mighty groan.

It creaked.

It tipped.

It fell.

Archie and Houndstooth watched as Travers, tiny at such a distance, clung to the railing of the sentry post for a long moment before dropping into the water. They watched as the ferals that had survived the explosion, recovering but shaken, swarmed him.

They were too far distant to hear his screams, but they could see his body flying through the air as the furious feral hippos tossed him between each other.

“I told you,” Houndstooth gasped. “I told you that he would suffer.”

“That you did,” Archie replied. They couldn’t hear his screams over the sounds of the ferals, but it was enough for both of them to simply watch as the ferals destroyed him in the water next to the wreckage of the Harriet Gate.

“Well, ’oundstooth. I would say this caper was a raging success, no?” Archie asked.

“It wasn’t a caper,” Houndstooth mumbled just before he blacked out.

Archie patted his chest as he lay on the ground beside her. “I know,” she murmured. “It was an operation.”

She sat next to him as the water calmed. When he woke, she knew, he would want to go after Adelia. He would want to beat Gran Carter to her. He would want to go find Hero, and together with them, he would want to see justice served. But for now—just for a few hours—she decided to let him rest. He would need it.

The sun rose higher in the sky overhead, and the day grew hot. Houndstooth and the hippos slept; and Archie watched as the ferals, unconstrained by dam or Gate or raging current, took the Mississippi.

Epilogue

Gran Carter rode up to the dock of a little clapboard house a mile outside the Harriet Gate astride a borrowed Arnesian Brown hippo named Pauline. Hero was in front of him, tied at the waist to keep them upright.

He dismounted and hauled Hero up to the back door of the house, leaving Pauline beside the other hippos at the gated dock. Carter’s nostrils flared. He smelled the air and shook his head—by some miracle, Hero was not putting out the familiar septic battlefield stench of a gut wound. There was only the clean, hot smell of blood in the air.

A miracle.

Or was it? Carter rapped hard on the door and waited for the doctor to answer, hoping he’d be at home. While he waited, Carter reflected on the facts.

Fact number one: Adelia Reyes was, without question, the deadliest, most ruthless contract killer of the day—possibly of all time.

Fact number two: Adelia Reyes had hit Hero with two knives. The first had been aimed at Hero’s heart, but had struck their sternum just softly enough to lodge there.

Fact number three: The second knife had been aimed at Hero’s gut, but had managed to avoid nicking their bowel, their liver, their gallbladder. Carter touched Hero’s forehead lightly—it was only slightly warm. Feverish, sure, but not frightening. Infection hadn’t even begun to set in yet.

It didn’t add up. Either Adelia was losing her touch—impossible—or she had let Hero live on purpose—even more impossible.

Before he could try to resolve the matter, the door swung open. A tall, dark-haired man stood in the doorway, wiping blood from his bare hands.

“What’s this?” he asked, looking at Hero’s limp form. “What’s happened here?”

“Stabbed. Twice. Gut and chest.” Carter watched the doctor’s face begin to set into a practiced bad-news expression, and hurried on. “But the woman who stabbed them missed. She missed . . . everything, doc. Please, can you help them?”

The doctor leaned inside and called for help. A young white woman, stout and muscle-bound, appeared in the doorway to carry Hero inside.

“One more thing, doctor, please—” Carter pulled a photo out of his pocket. “Have you seen this woman? She may have come through with minor wounds from a feral fight?”

The doctor smiled broadly, revealing carved-ivory teeth, straight and white and shining. He did not look at the photo. Carter sighed, and pulled a small bag out of the same pocket, handing it to the doctor. The doctor weighed it in his hand before looking at the photo.

“No, can’t say as I’ve ever seen her. I’d remember that tattoo, I reckon.”

Gran tucked the photograph away. “Worth a try. I’d best be going, but your patient will have people coming along for them shortly.” He tipped his hat and sprinted back down the dock to Pauline.

The doctor watched Gran go, then eased inside, shutting the door behind him and turning the dead bolt. He rested his back against the door for a moment, his eyes closed. When he opened them, she was standing there, waiting for him. Her eyes glittered in the half dark of the room.

“You’d best tend to your patient, Doctor,” Adelia Reyes said with a small smile. “It’s as Agent Carter said: they’ll have people coming along shortly.”

Appendix: Timeline of Events

• March 1857: Congressman Albert Broussard proposes the Hippo Act, seeking $25,000 to import hippopotami into the United States in an attempt to solve the nationwide meat shortage.

• July 1857: The Hippo Act is signed into law by an enthusiastic President James Buchanan.

• August 4, 1857: President Buchanan cuts the ribbon on the United States of America’s first hippo ranch in Alabama; declares the hippo ranching industry “open for business.”

• November 1857: The Federal Marsh Expansion Project begins, employing 40,000 men to dam sections of the Mississippi, creating a series of marshes so as to meet the great demand for “lake pig.” The series of marshes are named “the Harriet” after Buchanan’s favorite pet cow.

• December 1857: The territory encompassing the Harriet and the hippo marshes are declared neutral, free territory in the Great Hippo Compromise. The Great Louisiana Hippo Rush begins. Ranchers stake their claims.

• January 1858: Quentin Houlihan, a hired hopper on Samuel F. Greenlay’s hippo ranch just outside of Baton Rouge, falls asleep on the job. His lantern falls onto a pile of rushes. The fire is put out, but not before the hastily erected fencing that surrounds the ranch is compromised. All 97 hippos escape into the bayou. None are recovered.

• May 1859: During the Great Hippo Bust, ranches throughout the Harriet are plagued by feral hippo attacks and disease.

• February 1861: President Buchanan, nearing the end of his term, signs off on the construction and staffing of the Harriet Gate, a measure intended to trap feral hippos in the Harriet proper and to save the remaining hippo ranches in the South.

• March 1861: President Abraham Lincoln enters his office, declaring that he will fix Buchanan’s mistakes. During his inaugural address, he promises that “the Bayou will belong to the hippos and the criminals and the cutthroats no longer!” Unfortunately, some things come up.

• March 1865: President Andrew Johnson declares in his inaugural address that he will fix the one problem Lincoln couldn’t. “The Wild South days are over!”

• March 1869: The newly inaugurated President Ulysses S. Grant promises to clear the feral hippos out of the Mississippi “once and for all!”

• March 1889: President Grover Cleveland declares the Southern United States under martial law, calling it “an unresolvable den of thieves, mercenaries, hoppers, and scoundrels”—but promising to maintain a steady flow of subsidies to the hippo ranches that feed the rest of the country.

DOWN AMONG THE STICKS AND BONES

Seanan McGuire

FOR MEG

I think the rules were different there. It was all about science, but the science was magical. It didn’t care about whether something could be done. It was about whether it should be done, and the answer was always, always yes.

—JACK WOLCOTT

PART I

JACK AND JILL LIVE UP THE HILL

1

THE DANGEROUS ALLURE OF OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN

PEOPLE WHO KNEW Chester and Serena Wolcott socially would have placed money on the idea that the couple would never choose to have children. They were not the parenting kind, by any reasonable estimation. Chester enjoyed silence and solitude when he was working in his home office, and viewed the slightest deviation from routine as an enormous, unforgiveable disruption. Children would be more than a slight deviation from routine. Children would be the nuclear option where routine was concerned. Serena enjoyed gardening and sitting on the board of various tidy, elegant nonprofits, and paying other people to maintain her home in a spotless state. Children were messes walking. They were trampled petunias and baseballs through picture windows, and they had no place in the carefully ordered world the Wolcotts inhabited.

What those people didn’t see was the way the partners at Chester’s law firm brought their sons to work, handsome little clones of their fathers in age-appropriate menswear, future kings of the world in their perfectly shined shoes, with their perfectly modulated voices. He watched, increasingly envious, as junior partners brought in pictures of their own sleeping sons and were lauded, and for what? Reproducing! Something so simple that any beast in the field could do it.

At night, he started dreaming of perfectly polite little boys with his hair and Serena’s eyes, their blazers buttoned just so, the partners beaming beneficently at this proof of what a family man he was.

What those people didn’t see was the way some of the women on Serena’s boards would occasionally bring their daughters with them, making apologies about incompetent nannies or unwell babysitters, all while secretly gloating as everyone rushed to ooh and ahh over their beautiful baby girls. They were a garden in their own right, those privileged daughters in their gowns of lace and taffeta, and they would spend meetings and tea parties playing peacefully on the edge of the rug, cuddling their stuffed toys and feeding imaginary cookies to their dollies. Everyone she knew was quick to compliment those women for their sacrifices, and for what? Having a baby! Something so easy that people had been doing it since time began.

At night, she started dreaming of beautifully composed little girls with her mouth and Chester’s nose, their dresses explosions of fripperies and frills, the ladies falling over themselves to be the first to tell her how wonderful her daughter was.

This, you see, is the true danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them. A person may look at someone else’s child and see only the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They do not even see the love, not really. It can be easy, when looking at children from the outside, to believe that they are things, dolls designed and programmed by their parents to behave in one manner, following one set of rules. It can be easy, when standing on the lofty shores of adulthood, not to remember that every adult was once a child, with ideas and ambitions of their own.

It can be easy, in the end, to forget that children are people, and that people will do what people will do, the consequences be damned.

It was right after Christmas—round after round of interminable office parties and charity events—when Chester turned to Serena and said, “I have something I would like to discuss with you.”

“I want to have a baby,” she replied.

Chester paused. He was an orderly man with an orderly wife, living in an ordinary, orderly life. He wasn’t used to her being quite so open with her desires or, indeed, having desires at all. It was dismaying . . . and a trifle exciting, if he were being honest.

Finally, he smiled, and said, “That was what I wanted to talk to you about.”

There are people in this world—good, honest, hard-working people—who want nothing more than to have a baby, and who try for years to conceive one without the slightest success. There are people who must see doctors in small, sterile rooms, hearing terrifying proclamations about how much it will cost to even begin hoping. There are people who must go on quests, chasing down the north wind to ask for directions to the House of the Moon, where wishes can be granted, if the hour is right and the need is great enough. There are people who will try, and try, and try, and receive nothing for their efforts but a broken heart.

Chester and Serena went upstairs to their room, to the bed they shared, and Chester did not put on a condom, and Serena did not remind him, and that was that. The next morning, she stopped taking her birth control pills. Three weeks later, she missed her period, which had been as orderly and on-time as the rest of her life since she was twelve years old. Two weeks after that, she sat in a small white room while a kindly man in a long white coat told her that she was going to be a mother.

“How long before we can get a picture of the baby?” asked Chester, already imagining himself showing it to the men at the office, jaw strong, gaze distant, like he was lost in dreams of playing catch with his son-to-be.

“Yes, how long?” asked Serena. The women she worked with always shrieked and fawned when someone arrived with a new sonogram to pass around the group. How nice it would be, to finally be the center of attention!

The doctor, who had dealt with his share of eager parents, smiled. “You’re about five weeks along,” he said. “I don’t recommend an ultrasound before twelve weeks, under normal circumstances. Now, this is your first pregnancy. You may want to wait before telling anyone that you’re pregnant. Everything seems normal now, but it’s early days yet, and it will be easier if you don’t have to take back an announcement.”

Serena looked bemused. Chester fumed. To even suggest that his wife might be so bad at being pregnant—something so simple that any fool off the street could do it—was offensive in ways he didn’t even have words for. But Dr. Tozer had been recommended by one of the partners at his firm, with a knowing twinkle in his eye, and Chester simply couldn’t see a way to change doctors without offending someone too important to offend.

“Twelve weeks, then,” said Chester. “What do we do until then?”

Dr. Tozer told them. Vitamins and nutrition and reading, so much reading. It was like the man expected their baby to be the most difficult in the history of the world, with all the reading that he assigned. But they did it, dutifully, like they were following the steps of a magical spell that would summon the perfect child straight into their arms. They never discussed whether they were hoping for a boy or a girl; both of them knew, so completely, what they were going to have that it seemed unnecessary. So Chester went to bed each night dreaming of his son, while Serena dreamt of her daughter, and for a time, they both believed that parenthood was perfect.

They didn’t listen to Dr. Tozer’s advice about keeping the pregnancy a secret, of course. When something was this good, it needed to be shared. Their friends, who had never seen them as the parenting type, were confused but supportive. Their colleagues, who didn’t know them well enough to understand what a bad idea this was, were enthusiastic. Chester and Serena shook their heads and made lofty comments about learning who their “real” friends were.

Serena went to her board meetings and smiled contently as the other women told her that she was beautiful, that she was glowing, that motherhood “suited her.”

Chester went to his office and found that several of the partners were dropping by “just to chat” about his impending fatherhood, offering advice, offering camaraderie.

Everything was perfect.

They went to their first ultrasound appointment together, and Serena held Chester’s hand as the technician rubbed blueish slime over her belly and rolled the wand across it. The picture began developing. For the first time, Serena felt a pang of concern. What if there was something wrong with the baby? What if Dr. Tozer had been right, and the pregnancy should have remained a secret, at least for a little while?

“Well?” asked Chester.

“You wanted to know the baby’s gender, yes?” asked the technician.

He nodded.

“You have a perfect baby girl,” said the technician.

Serena laughed in vindicated delight, the sound dying when she saw the scowl on Chester’s face. Suddenly, the things they hadn’t discussed seemed large enough to fill the room.

The technician gasped. “I have a second heartbeat,” she said.

They both turned to look at her.

“Twins,” she said.

“Is the second baby a boy or a girl?” asked Chester.

The technician hesitated. “The first baby is blocking our view,” she hedged. “It’s difficult to say for sure—”

“Guess,” said Chester.

“I’m afraid it would not be ethical for me to guess at this stage,” said the technician. “I’ll make you another appointment, for two weeks from now. Babies move around in the womb. We should be able to get a better view then.”

They did not get a better view. The first infant remained stubbornly in front, and the second infant remained stubbornly in back, and the Wolcotts made it all the way to the delivery room—for a scheduled induction, of course, the date chosen by mutual agreement and circled in their day planners—hoping quietly that they were about to become the proud parents of both son and daughter, completing their nuclear family on the first try. Both of them were slightly smug about the idea. It smacked of efficiency, of tailoring the perfect solution right out the gate.

(The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might have been easier if those ideas had ever slithered into their heads, unwanted but undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.)

The labor took longer than planned. Serena did not want a C-section if she could help it, did not want the scarring and the mess, and so she pushed when she was told to push, and rested when she was told to rest, and gave birth to her first child at five minutes to midnight on September fifteenth. The doctor passed the baby to a waiting nurse, announced, “It’s a girl,” and bent back over his patient.

Chester, who had been holding out hope that the reticent boy-child would push his way forward and claim the vaunted position of firstborn, said nothing as he held his wife’s hand and listened to her straining to expel their second child. Her face was red, and the sounds she was making were nothing short of animal. It was horrifying. He couldn’t imagine a circumstance under which he would touch her ever again. No; it was good that they were having both their children at once. This way, it would be over and done with.

A slap; a wail; and the doctor’s voice proudly proclaiming, “It’s another healthy baby girl!”

Serena fainted.

Chester envied her.

* * *

LATER, WHEN SERENA WAS tucked safe in her private room with Chester beside her and the nurses asked if they wanted to meet their daughters, they said yes, of course. How could they have said anything different? They were parents now, and parenthood came with expectations. Parenthood came with rules. If they failed to meet those expectations, they would be labeled unfit in the eyes of everyone they knew, and the consequences of that, well . . .

They were unthinkable.

The nurses returned with two pink-faced, hairless things that looked more like grubs or goblins than anything human. “One for each of you,” twinkled a nurse, and handed Chester a tight-swaddled baby like it was the most ordinary thing in the world.

“Have you thought about names?” asked another, handing Serena the second infant.

“My mother’s name was Jacqueline,” said Serena cautiously, glancing at Chester. They had discussed names, naturally, one for a girl, one for a boy. They had never considered the need to name two girls.

“Our head partner’s wife is named Jillian,” said Chester. He could claim it was his mother’s name if he needed to. No one would know. No one would ever know.

“Jack and Jill,” said the first nurse, with a smile. “Cute.”

“Jacqueline and Jillian,” corrected Chester frostily. “No daughter of mine will go by something as base and undignified as a nickname.”

The nurse’s smile faded. “Of course not,” she said, when what she really meant was “of course they will,” and “you’ll see soon enough.”

Serena and Chester Wolcott had fallen prey to the dangerous allure of other people’s children. They would learn the error of their ways soon enough. People like them always did.

2

PRACTICALLY PERFECT IN VIRTUALLY NO WAYS

THE WOLCOTTS LIVED in a house at the top of a hill in the middle of a fashionable neighborhood where every house looked alike. The homeowner’s association allowed for three colors of exterior paint (two colors too many, in the minds of many of the residents), a strict variety of fence and hedge styles around the front lawn, and small, relatively quiet dogs from a very short list of breeds. Most residents elected not to have dogs, rather than deal with the complicated process of filling out the permits and applications required to own one.

All of this conformity was designed not to strangle but to comfort, allowing the people who lived there to relax into a perfectly ordered world. At night, the air was quiet. Safe. Secure.

Save, of course, for the Wolcott home, where the silence was split by healthy wails from two sets of developing lungs. Serena sat in the dining room, staring blankly at the two screaming babies.

“You’ve had a bottle,” she informed them. “You’ve been changed. You’ve been walked around the house while I bounced you and sang that dreadful song about the spider. Why are you still crying?”

Jacqueline and Jillian, who were crying for some of the many reasons that babies cry—they were cold, they were distressed, they were offended by the existence of gravity—continued to wail. Serena stared at them in dismay. No one had told her that babies would cry all the time. Oh, there had been comments about it in the books she’d read, but she had assumed that they were simply referring to bad parents who failed to take a properly firm hand with their offspring.

“Can’t you shut them up?” demanded Chester from behind her. She didn’t have to turn to know that he was standing in the doorway in his dressing gown, scowling at all three of them—as if it were somehow her fault that babies seemed designed to scream without cease! He had been complicit in the creation of their daughters, but now that they were here, he wanted virtually nothing to do with them.

“I’ve been trying,” she said. “I don’t know what they want, and they can’t tell me. I don’t . . . I don’t know what to do.”

Chester had not slept properly in three days. He was starting to fear the moment when it would impact his work and catch the attention of the partners, painting him and his parenting abilities in a poor light. Perhaps it was desperation, or perhaps it was a moment of rare and impossible clarity.

“I’m calling my mother,” he said.

Chester Wolcott was the youngest of three children: by the time he had come along, the mistakes had been made, the lessons had been learned, and his parents had been comfortable with the process of parenting. His mother was an unforgivably soppy, impractical woman, but she knew how to burp a baby, and perhaps by inviting her now, while Jacqueline and Jillian were too young to be influenced by her ideas about the world, they could avoid inviting her later, when she might actually do some damage.

Serena would normally have objected to the idea of her mother-in-law invading her home, setting everything out of order. With the babies screaming and the house already in disarray, all she could do was nod.

Chester made the call first thing in the morning.

Louise Wolcott arrived on the train eight hours later.

By the standards of anyone save for her ruthlessly regimented son, Louise was a disciplined, orderly woman. She liked the world to make sense and follow the rules. By the standards of her son, she was a hopeless dreamer. She thought the world was capable of kindness; she thought people were essentially good and only waiting for an opportunity to show it.

She took a taxi from the train station to the house, because of course picking her up would have been a disruption to an already-disrupted schedule. She rang the bell, because of course giving her a key would have made no sense at all. Her eyes lit up when Serena answered the door, a baby in each arm, and she didn’t even notice that her daughter-in-law’s hair was uncombed, or that there were stains on the collar of her blouse. The things Serena thought were most important in the world held no relevance to Louise. Her attention was focused entirely on the babies.

“There they are,” she said, as if the twins had been the subject of a global manhunt spanning years. She slipped in through the open door without waiting for an invitation, putting her suitcases down next to the umbrella stand (where they did not compliment the décor) before holding out her arms. “Come to Grandma,” she said.

Serena would normally have argued. Serena would normally have insisted on offering coffee, tea, a place to put her bags where no one would have to see them. Serena, like her husband, had not slept a full night since coming home from the hospital.

“Welcome to our home,” she said, and dumped both babies unceremoniously into Louise’s arms before turning and walking up the stairs. The slam of the bedroom door followed a second later.

Louise blinked. She looked down at the babies. They had left off crying for the moment and were looking at her with wide, curious eyes. Their world was as yet fairly limited, and everything about it was new. Their grandmother was the newest thing of all. Louise smiled.

“Hello, darlings,” she said. “I’m here now.”

She would not leave for another five years.

* * *

THE WOLCOTT HOUSE had been too big for Serena and Chester alone: they had rattled around in it like two teeth in a jar, only brushing against each other every so often. With two growing children and Chester’s mother in the mix, the same house seemed suddenly too small.

Chester told the people at his work that Louise was a nanny, hired from a reputable firm to assist Serena, who had been overwhelmed by the difficulty of meeting the needs of twins. He spun her not as an inexperienced first-time mother but as a doting parent who had simply needed an extra pair of hands to meet the needs of her children. (The idea that he might have been that extra pair of hands never seemed to arise.)

Serena told the people on her boards that Louise was her husband’s invalid mother, looking for a way to be useful while she recovered from her various non-contagious ailments. The twins were perfect angels, of course, she couldn’t wish for better or more tractable children, but Louise needed something to do, and so it only made sense to let her play babysitter for a short while. (The idea of telling the truth was simply untenable. It would be tantamount to admitting failure, and Wolcotts did not fail.)

Louise told stories to Jacqueline and Jillian, told them they were clever, they were strong, they were miracles. She told them to sleep well and dry their eyes, and as they grew older, she told them to eat their vegetables and pick up their rooms, and always, always, she told them that she loved them. She told them that they were perfect exactly as they were, and that they would never need to change for anyone. She told them that they were going to change the world.

Gradually, Chester and Serena learned to tell their own daughters apart. Jacqueline had been the first born, and that seemed to have taken up all of her bravery; she was the more delicate of the two, hanging back and allowing her sister to go ahead of her. She was the first to learn to be afraid of the dark and start demanding a nightlight. She was the last to be weaned off the bottle, and she continued sucking her thumb long after Jillian had stopped.

Jillian, on the other hand, seemed to have been born with a deficit of common sense. There was no risk she wouldn’t throw herself bodily against, from the stairs to the stove to the basement door. She had started walking with the abruptness of some children, going through none of the warning stages, and Louise had spent an afternoon chasing her around the house, padding the corners of the furniture, while Jacqueline had been lying comfortably in a sunbeam, oblivious to the danger her sister was courting.

(Serena and Chester had been furious when they came home from their daily distractions to find that all of their elegant, carefully chosen furniture now bore soft, spongy corners. It had taken Louise asking how many eyes they would like their daughters to have between them to convince them they should allow the childproofing to remain in place, at least for the time being.)

Unfortunately, with recognition came relegation. Identical twins were unsettling to much of the population: dressing them in matching outfits and treating them as one interchangeable being might seem appealing while they were young enough, but as they aged, they would start to unnerve people. Girls, especially, were subject to being viewed as alien or wrong when they seemed too alike. Blame science fiction, blame John Wyndham and Stephen King and Ira Levin. The fact remained that they needed to distinguish their daughters.

Jillian was quicker, wilder, more rough-and-tumble. Serena took her to the salon and brought her home with a pixie cut. Chester took her to the department store and brought her home with designer jeans, running shoes, and a puffy jacket that seemed almost bulkier than she was. Jillian, who was on the verge of turning four and idolized her often-distant parents as only a child could, modeled her new clothes for her wide-eyed, envious sister, and didn’t think about what it meant for them to finally look different to people who weren’t each other, or Gemma Lou, who had been able to tell them apart from the first day that she held them in her arms.

Jacqueline was slower, tamer, more cautious. Chester gave Serena his credit card, and she took their daughter to a store straight out of a fairy tale, where every dress was layered like a wedding cake and covered in cascades of lace and bows and glittering buttons, where every shoe was patent leather, and how they shone. Jacqueline, who was smart enough to know when something was wrong, came home dressed like a storybook, and clung to her sister, and cried.

“What a little tomboy she is!” people gushed when they saw Jillian—and because Jillian was young enough for being a tomboy to be cute, and endearing, and desirable, rather than something to judge, Chester beamed with pride. He might not have a son, but there were soccer leagues for girls. There were ways for her to impress the partners. A tough daughter was better than a weak son any day.

“What a little princess she is!” people gushed when they saw Jacqueline—and because that was all she had ever wanted from a daughter, Serena demurred and hid her smile behind her hand, soaking in the praise. Jacqueline was perfect. She would grow up just like the little girls that had inspired Serena to want one of her own, only better, because they would make none of the errors that other, lesser parents made.

(The idea that perhaps she and Chester hadn’t made any errors in parenting because they hadn’t really been parenting at all never occurred to her. She was their mother. Louise was a nanny at best, and a bad influence at worst. Yes, things had been difficult before Louise arrived, but that was just because she was recovering from childbirth. She would have picked up the necessary tricks of the trade quickly, if not for Louise hogging all the glory. She would.)

The twins began attending a half-day preschool when they were four and a half. Old enough to behave themselves in public; old enough to begin making the right friends, establishing the right connections. Jillian, who was brave within the familiar confines of her home and terrified of everything outside it, cried when Louise got them ready for their first day. Jacqueline, who had an endlessly curious mind and hungered for more to learn than one house could contain, did not. She stood silent and stoic in her frilly pink dress with the matching shoes, watching as Gemma Lou soothed her sister.

The idea of being jealous didn’t occur to her. Jillian was getting more attention now, but she knew that meant that later, Gemma Lou would find an excuse to do something with just Jacqueline, something that would be just between them. Gemma Lou always knew when one twin was being left out, and she always made an effort to make up for it, to prevent gaps from forming. “There will come a day when you’re all either of you has” was what she always said when one of them fussed about the other getting something. “Hold to that.”

So they went off to preschool, and they held to each other until Jillian’s fears were soothed away by the teacher, who had a pretty skirt and a pretty smile and smelled like vanilla. Then Jillian let go and ran off to play with a bunch of boys who had found a red rubber ball, while Jacqueline drifted into the corner occupied by girls whose pretty dresses were too tight to let them do more than stand around and admire one another.

They were all young. They were all shy. They stood in the corner like a flock of bright birds, and looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes, and watched as the louder, freer children rolled and tumbled on the floor, and if they were jealous, none of them said so.

But that night when she got home, Jacqueline kicked her dress under the bed, where it wouldn’t be found until long after she had outgrown it, while Jillian sat in the corner with her arms full of dolls and refused to speak to anyone, not even Gemma Lou. The world was changing. They didn’t like it.

They didn’t know how to make it stop.

* * *

ON JACQUELINE AND JILLIAN’S fifth birthday, they had a cake with three tiers, covered in pink and purple roses and edible glitter. They had a party in the backyard with a bouncy castle and a table covered in gifts, and all the kids from their preschool were invited, along with all the children whose parents worked at Chester’s firm, or served on one of Serena’s boards. Many of them were older than the twins and formed their own little knots in corners of the yard or even inside, where they wouldn’t have to listen to the younger children screaming.

Jillian loved having all her friends in her very own yard, where she knew the topography of the lawn and the location of all the sprinkler heads. She raced around like a wild thing, laughing and shrieking, and they raced with her, because that was how her friends had learned to play. Most of them were boys, too young to have learned about cooties and “no girls allowed.” Louise watched from the back porch, frowning a little. She knew how cruel children could be, and she knew how much of Jillian’s role was being forced upon her by her parents. In a year or two, the flow of things was going to change, and Jillian was going to find herself marooned.

Jacqueline held back, sticking close to Gemma, wary of getting dirt on her pretty dress, which had been chosen specifically for this event, and which she was under strict instructions to keep as clean as possible. She wasn’t sure why—Jillian got covered in mud all the time, and it always washed out, so why couldn’t they wash her dresses?—but she was sure there was a reason. There was always a reason, and it was never one her parents could explain to her.

Chester manned the barbecue, demonstrating his skill as a chef and a provider. Several of the partners were nearby, nursing beers and chatting about work. His chest felt like it was going to burst with pride. Here he was, the father in his own home, and there they were, the people he worked for, seeing how impressive his family was. He and Serena should have had children much sooner!

“Your daughter’s a real scrapper, eh, Wolcott?”

“She is indeed,” said Chester, flipping a burger. (The fact that he called people who did this for a living “burger-flippers” and looked down his nose at them was entirely lost on him, as it was on everyone around him.) “She’s going to be a spitfire when she gets a little older. We’re already looking into peewee soccer leagues. She’ll be an athlete when she grows up, just you wait and see.”

“My wife would kill me if I tried to put our daughter in a pair of pants and send her off to play with the boys,” said another partner, a wry chuckle in his voice. “You’re a lucky man. Having two at once was the way to go.”

“Absolutely,” said Chester, as if they had planned this all along.

“Who’s the old lady with your other daughter?” asked the first partner, nodding toward Louise. “Is that your nanny? She seems a little, well. Don’t you think she’s going to get tired, chasing two growing girls around all the time?”

“She’s doing very well with them so far,” said Chester.

“Well, keep an eye on her. You know what they say about old ladies: blink, and you’ll be taking care of her instead of her taking care of your kids.”

Chester flipped another burger, and said nothing at all.

On the other side of the yard, near the elegant, sugar-dusted cake, Serena moved in the center of a swarm of cooing society wives, and she had never felt more at home, or more like she was finally taking her proper place in the world. This had been the answer: children. Jacqueline and Jillian were unlocking the last of the doors that had stood between Serena and true social success—mostly Jacqueline, she felt, who was everything a young lady should be, quiet and sweet and increasingly polite with every year that passed. Why, some days she even forgot that Jillian was a girl, the contrast between them was so strong!

Some of the women she worked with were uncomfortable with the way she enforced Jacqueline’s boundaries—usually the women who called her daughter “Jack” and encouraged her to do things like hunt for eggs on wet grass, or pet strange dogs that would shed on her dresses, dirtying them. Serena sniffed at them and calmly, quietly began moving their names down the various guest lists she controlled, until some of them had dropped off entirely. Those who remained had caught on quickly, after that, and stopped saying anything that smacked of criticism. What good was an opinion if it meant losing your place in society? No. Better to keep your mouth closed and your options open, that was what Serena always said.

She looked around the yard, searching for Jacqueline. Jillian was easy to find: as always, she was at the center of the largest degree of distasteful chaos. Jacqueline was harder. Finally, Serena spotted her in Louise’s shadow, sticking close to her grandmother, as if the woman were the only person she trusted to protect her. Serena frowned.

The party was a success, as such things are reckoned: cake was eaten, presents were opened, bounces were bounced, two knees were skinned (belonging to two separate children), one dress was ruined, and one overexcited child failed to reach the bathroom before vomiting strawberry ice cream and vanilla cake all over the hall. When night fell, Jacqueline and Jillian were safely tucked in their room and Louise was in the kitchen, preparing herself a cup of tea. She heard footsteps behind her. She stopped, and turned, and frowned.

“Out with it,” she said. “You know how Jill fusses if I’m not in my room when she comes looking for midnight kisses.”

“Her name is Jillian, Mother, not Jill,” said Chester.

“So you say,” said Louise.

He sighed. “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”

“What, exactly?”

“We want to thank you for all the time you’ve spent helping with our children,” said Chester. “They were a handful in the beginning. But I think we have things under control now.”

Five is not where handfuls end, my boy, thought Louise. Aloud, she said, “Is that so?”

“Yes,” said Serena. “Thank you so much, for everything you’ve done. Don’t you think you deserve the chance to rest?”

“There’s nothing tiring about caring for children you love like your own,” said Louise, but she had already lost, and she knew it. She had done her best. She had tried to encourage both girls to be themselves, and not to adhere to the rigid roles their parents were sketching a little more elaborately with every year. She had tried to make sure they knew that there were a hundred, a thousand, a million different ways to be a girl, and that all of them were valid, and that neither of them was doing anything wrong. She had tried.

Whether she had succeeded or not was virtually beside the point, because here were her son and his wife, and now she was going to leave those precious children in the hands of people who had never taken the time to learn anything about them beyond the most narrow, superficial things. They didn’t know that Jillian was brave because she knew Jacqueline was always somewhere behind her with a careful plan for any situation that might arise. They didn’t know that Jacqueline was timid because she was amused by watching the world deal with her sister, and thought the view was better from outside the splash radius.

(They also didn’t know that Jacqueline was developing a slow terror of getting her hands dirty, thanks to them and their constant admonishments about protecting her dresses, which were too fancy by far for a child her age. They wouldn’t have cared if she’d told them.)

“Mother, please,” said Chester, and that was it: she’d lost.

Louise sighed. “When would you like me to go?” she asked.

“It would be best if you were gone when they woke up,” said Serena, and that was that.

Louise Wolcott slipped out of her granddaughters’ lives as easily as she had slipped into them, becoming a distant name that sent birthday cards and the occasional gift (most confiscated by her son and daughter-in-law), and was one more piece of final, irrefutable proof that adults, in the end, were not and never to be trusted. There were worse lessons for the girls to learn.

This one, at least, might have a chance to save their lives.

3

THEY GROW UP SO FAST

AGE SIX WAS KINDERGARTEN, where Jacqueline learned that little girls who wore frilly dresses every day were goody-goodies, not to be trusted, and Jillian learned that little girls who wore pants and ran around with the boys were weirdos and worse.

Age seven was first grade, where Jillian learned that she had cooties and smelled and no one wanted to play with her anyway, and Jacqueline learned that if she wanted people to like her, all she had to do was smile at them and say she liked their shoes.

Age eight was second grade, where Jacqueline learned that no one expected her to be smart if she was going to be pretty, and Jillian learned that everything about her was wrong, from the clothes she wore to the shows she watched.

“It must be awful to have such a dorky sister,” said the girls in their class to Jacqueline, who felt like she should defend her sister, but didn’t know how. Her parents had never given her the tools for loyalty, for sticking up or standing up or even sitting down (sitting down might muss her dress). So she hated Jillian a little, for being weird, for making things harder than they had to be, and she ignored the fact that it had been their parents all along, making their choices for them.

“It must be amazing to have such a pretty sister,” said the boys in their class to Jillian (the ones who were still speaking to her, at least; the ones who had managed to get their cootie shots, and were starting to realize that girls were decorative, if nothing else). Jillian twisted in on herself, trying to figure out how she and her sister could share a face and a bedroom and a life, and still one of them was “the pretty one,” and the other one was just Jillian, unwanted and ignored and increasingly being pushed from the role of “tomboy” and into the role of “nerd.”

At night, they lay in their narrow, side-by-side beds and hated each other with the hot passion that could only exist between siblings, each of them wanting what the other had. Jacqueline wanted to run, to play, to be free. Jillian wanted to be liked, to be pretty, to be allowed to watch and listen, instead of always being forced to move. Each of them wanted people to see them, not an idea of them that someone else had come up with.

(A floor below them, Chester and Serena slept peacefully, untroubled by their choices. They had two daughters: they had two girls to mold into whatever they desired. The thought that they might be harming them by forcing them into narrow ideas of what a girl—of what a person—should be had never crossed their minds.)

By the time the girls turned twelve, it was easy for the people who met them to form swift, incorrect ideas of who they were as people. Jacqueline—never Jack; Jack was a knife of a name, short and sharp and cutting, without sufficient frills and flourishes for a girl like her—was quick-tongued and short-tempered, surrounded by sycophants who flocked to her from all sides of the school, eager to bask in the transitory warmth of her good graces. Most of the teachers thought that she was smarter than she let on, but virtually none of them could get her to show it. She was too afraid of getting dirty, of pencil smudges on her fingers and chalk dust on her cashmere sweaters. It was almost like she was afraid her mind was like a dress that couldn’t be washed, and she didn’t want to dirty it with facts she might not approve of later.

(The women on Serena’s boards told her how lucky she was, how fortunate, and went home with their own daughters, and traded their party dresses for jeans, and never considered that Jacqueline Wolcott might not have the option.)

Jillian was quick-witted and slow-tempered, eager to please, constantly aching from rejection after rejection after rejection. The other girls wanted nothing to do with her, said that she was dirty from spending so much time playing with the boys, said that she wanted to be a boy herself, and that was why she didn’t wear dresses, that was why she hacked off all her hair. The boys, standing on the precipice of puberty and besieged on all sides by their own sets of conflicting expectations, wanted nothing to do with her either. She wasn’t pretty enough to be worth kissing (although a few of them had questioned how that could be, when she looked exactly like the prettiest girl in school), but she was still a girl, and their parents said that they shouldn’t play with girls. So they’d cut her off, one by one, leaving her alone and puzzled and frightened of the world to come.

(The partners at Chester’s firm told him how lucky he was, how fortunate, and went home to their own daughters, and watched them race around the backyard playing games of their own choosing, and never considered that Jillian Wolcott might not have any say in her own activities.)

The girls still shared a room; the girls were still friends, for all that the space between them was a minefield of resentment and resignation, always primed to explode. Every year, it got harder to remember that once they had been a closed unit, that neither of them had chosen the pattern of their life. Everything had been assigned. That didn’t matter. Like bonsai being trained into shape by an assiduous gardener, they were growing into the geometry of their parents’ desires, and it was pushing them further and further away from one another. One day, perhaps, one of them would reach across the gulf and find that there was no one there.

Neither of them was sure what they would do when that happened.

On the day our story truly starts—for surely none of that seemed like the beginning! Surely all of that was background, was explanation and justification for what’s to come, as unavoidably as thunder follows lightning—it was raining. No: not raining. It was pouring, bucketing water from the sky like an incipient flood. Jacqueline and Jillian sat in their room, on their respective beds, and the room was so full of anger and of silence that it screamed.

Jacqueline was reading a book about fashionable girls having fashionable adventures at a fashionable school, and she thought that she couldn’t possibly have been more bored. She occasionally cast narrow-eyed glances at the window, glaring at the rain. If the sky had been clear, she could have walked down the street to her friend Brooke’s house. They could have painted each other’s nails and talked about boys, a topic that Jacqueline found alternately fascinating and dull as dishwater, but which Brooke always approached with the same unflagging enthusiasm. It would have been something.

Jillian, who had been intending to spend the day at soccer practice, sat on the floor next to her bed and moped so vigorously that it was like a gray cloud spreading across her side of the room. She couldn’t go downstairs to watch television—no TV before four o’clock, not even on weekends, not even on rainy days—and she didn’t have any books to read that she hadn’t read five times already. She’d tried taking a look at one of Jacqueline’s fashionable girl books, and had quickly found herself baffled at the number of ways the author found to describe everyone’s hair. Maybe some things were worse than boredom after all.

When Jillian sighed for the fifth time in fifteen minutes, Jacqueline lowered her book and glowered at her across the room. “What is it?” she demanded.

“I’m bored,” said Jillian mournfully.

“Read a book.”

“I don’t have any books I haven’t read already.”

“Read one of my books.”

“I don’t like your books.”

“Go watch television.”

“I’m not allowed for another hour.”

“Play with your Lego.”

“I don’t feel like it.” Jillian sighed heavily, letting her head loll backward until it was resting against the edge of the bed. “I’m bored. I’m very very bored.”

“You shouldn’t say ‘very’ so much,” said Jacqueline, parroting their mother. “It’s a nonsense word. You don’t need it.”

“But it’s true. I’m very very very bored.”

Jacqueline hesitated. Sometimes the right thing to do with Jillian was wait her out: she would get distracted by something and peace would resume. Other times, the only way to handle her was to provide her with something to do. If something wasn’t provided, she would find something, and it would usually be loud, and messy, and destructive.

“What do you want to do?” she asked finally.

Jillian gave her a sidelong, hopeful look. The days when her sister would willingly spend hours playing with her were long gone, as lost as the baseball cap she’d worn when she went to ride the carnival Scrambler with her father the summer before. The wind had taken the cap, and time had taken her sister’s willingness to play hide-and-seek, or make-believe, or anything else their mother said was untidy.

“We could go play in the attic,” she said finally, shyly, trying to keep herself from sounding like she hoped her sister would say yes. Hope only got you hurt. Hope was her least favorite thing, of all the things.

“There might be spiders,” said Jacqueline. She wrinkled her nose, less out of actual distaste and more out of the knowledge that she was supposed to find spiders distasteful. She really found them rather endearing. They were sleek and clean and elegant, and when their webs got messed up, they ripped them down and started over again. People could learn a lot from spiders.

“I’ll protect you, if there are,” said Jill.

“We could get in trouble.”

“I’ll give you my desserts for three days,” said Jill. Seeing that Jacqueline wasn’t sold, she added, “And I’ll do your dishes for a week.”

Jacqueline hated doing the dishes. Of all the chores they were sometimes assigned, that was the worst. The dishes were bad enough, but the dishwater . . . it was like making her own personal swamp and then playing in it. “Deal,” she said, and put her book primly aside, and slid off the bed.

Jillian managed not to clap in delight as she rose, grabbed her sister’s hand, and hauled her out of the room. It was time for an adventure.

She had no idea how big an adventure it was going to be.

* * *

THE WOLCOTT HOME WAS still far too large for the number of people it contained: large enough that Jacqueline and Jillian could each have had their own room, if they had wanted to, and never seen each other except for at the dinner table. They had started to worry, over the past year, that that would be their next birthday present: separate rooms, one pink and one blue, perfectly tailored to the children their parents wanted and not to the children that they had. They had been growing apart for years, following the paths that had been charted for them. Sometimes they hated each other and sometimes they loved each other, and both of them knew, deep down to the bone, that separate rooms would be the killing blow. They would always be twins. They would always be siblings. They might never be friends again.

Up the stairs they went, hand in hand, Jillian dragging Jacqueline, as had always been their way, Jacqueline making note of everything around them, ready to pull her sister back if danger loomed. The idea of being safe in their home had never occurred to either one of them. If they were seen—if their parents emerged from their room and saw the two of them moving through the house together—they would be separated, Jillian sent off to play in the puddles out back, Jacqueline returned to their room to read her books and sit quietly, not disturbing anything.

They were starting to feel, in a vague, unformed way, as if their parents were doing something wrong. Both of them knew kids who were the way they were supposed to be, girls who loved pretty dresses and sitting still, or who loved mud and shouting and kicking a ball. But they also knew girls who wore dresses while they terrorized the tetherball courts, and girls who wore sneakers and jeans and came to school with backpacks full of dolls in gowns of glittering gauze. They knew boys who liked to stay clean, or who liked to sit and color, or who joined the girls with the backpacks full of dolls in their corners. Other children were allowed to be mixed up, dirty and clean, noisy and polite, while they each had to be just one thing, no matter how hard it was, no matter how much they wanted to be something else.

It was an uncomfortable thing, feeling like their parents weren’t doing what was best for them; like this house, this vast, perfectly organized house, with its clean, artfully decorated rooms, was pressing the life out of them one inch at a time. If they didn’t find a way out, they were going to become paper dolls, flat and faceless and ready to be dressed however their parents wanted them to be.

At the top of the stairs there was a door that they weren’t supposed to go through, leading to a room that they weren’t supposed to remember. Gemma Lou had lived there when they were little, before they got to be too much trouble and she forgot how to love them. (That was what their mother said, anyway, and Jillian believed it, because Jillian knew that love was always conditional; that there was always, always a catch. Jacqueline, who was quieter and hence saw more that she wasn’t supposed to see, wasn’t so sure.) The door was always locked, but the key had been thrown into the kitchen junk drawer after Gemma Lou left, and Jacqueline had quietly stolen it on their seventh birthday, when she had finally felt strong enough to remember the grandmother who hadn’t loved them enough to stay.

Since then, when they needed a place to hide from their parents, a place where Chester and Serena wouldn’t think to look, they had retreated to Gemma Lou’s room. There was still a bed there, and the drawers of the dresser smelled like her perfume when they were opened, and she had left an old steamer trunk in the closet, filled with clothes and costume jewelry that she had been putting aside for her granddaughters, waiting for the day when they’d be old enough to play make-believe and fashion show with her as their appreciative audience. It was that trunk that had convinced them both that Gemma Lou hadn’t always intended to leave. Maybe she’d forgotten how to love them and maybe she hadn’t, but once upon a time, she had been planning to stay. That anyone would ever have planned to stay for their sake meant the world.

Jacqueline unlocked the door and tucked the key into her pocket, where it would be secure, because she never lost anything. Jillian opened the door and took the first step into the room, making sure their parents weren’t lurking for them there, because she was always the first one past the threshold. Then the door was closed behind them, and they were finally safe, truly safe, with no roles to play except for the ones they chose for themselves.

“I call dibs on the pirate sword,” said Jacqueline excitedly, and ran for the closet, grabbing the lid of the trunk and shoving it upward. Then she stopped, elation fading into confusion. “Where did the clothes go?”

“What?” Jillian crowded in next to her sister, peering into the trunk. The dress-up clothes and accessories were gone, all of them, replaced by a winding wooden staircase that descended down, down, down into the darkness.

Had Gemma Lou been allowed to stay with them, they might have read more fairy tales, might have heard more stories about children who opened doors to one place and found themselves stepping through into another. Had they been allowed to grow according to their own paths, to follow their own interests, they might have met Alice, and Peter, and Dorothy, all the children who had strayed from the path and found themselves lost in someone else’s fairyland. But fairy tales had been too bloody and violent for Serena’s tastes, and children’s books had been too soft and whimsical for Chester’s tastes, and so somehow, unbelievable as it might seem, Jacqueline and Jillian had never been exposed to the question of what might be lurking behind a door that wasn’t supposed to be there.

The two of them looked at the impossible stairway and were too baffled and excited to be afraid.

“Those weren’t there last time,” said Jillian.

“Maybe they were, and the dresses were just all on top of them,” said Jacqueline.

“The dresses would have fallen,” said Jillian.

“Don’t be stupid,” said Jacqueline—but it was a fair point, wasn’t it? If there had always been stairs in the trunk, then all the things Gemma Lou had left for them would have fallen. Unless . . . “There’s a lid here,” she said. “Maybe there’s a lid on the bottom, too, and it came open, and everything fell down the stairs.”

“Oh,” said Jillian. “What should we do?”

Dimly, Jacqueline was beginning to realize that this wasn’t just a mystery: it was an opportunity. Their parents didn’t know there was a stairway hidden in Gemma Lou’s old closet. They couldn’t know. If they had known, they would have put the key somewhere much harder to find than the kitchen junk drawer. The stairs looked dusty, like no one had walked on them in years and years, and Serena hated dust, which meant she didn’t know that the stairs existed. If Jacqueline and Jillian went down those stairs, why, they would be walking into something secret. Something new. Something their parents had maybe never seen and couldn’t fence in with inexplicable adult rules.

“We should go and find all our dress-up clothes and put them away, so that we’re not making a mess in Gemma Lou’s room,” said Jacqueline, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.

Jillian frowned. There was something in her sister’s logic that didn’t sit right with her. She was fine with sneaking into their grandmother’s room, because they had been welcome there before Gemma Lou had stopped loving them and gone away; this was their place as much as it had been hers. The stairs in the trunk, on the other hand . . . those were something new and strange and alien. Those belonged to someone other than Gemma Lou, and someone other than them.

“I don’t know. . .” she said warily.

Perhaps, if the sisters had been encouraged to love each other more, to trust each other more, to view each other as something other than competition for the limited supplies of their parents’ love, they would have closed the trunk and gone to find an adult. When they had led their puzzled parents back to Gemma Lou’s room, opening the trunk again would have revealed no secrets, no stairs, just a mess of dress-up clothes, and the confusion that always follows when something magical disappears. Perhaps.

But that hadn’t been their childhood: that hadn’t been their life. They were competitors as much as they were companions, and the thought of telling their parents would never have occurred to them.

“Well, I’m going,” said Jacqueline, with a prim sniff, and slung her leg over the edge of the trunk.

It was easier than she had expected it to be. It was like the trunk wanted her to step inside, like the stairs wanted her to descend them. She climbed through the opening and went down several steps before smoothing her dress with the heels of her hands, looking back over her shoulder, and asking, “Well?”

Jillian was not as brave as everyone had always assumed she was. She was not as wild as everyone had always wanted her to be. But she had spent her life so far being told that she was both those things, and more, that her sister was neither of them; if there was an adventure to be had, she simply could not allow Jacqueline to have it without her. She hoisted herself over the edge of the trunk, tumbling in her hurry, and came to a stop a step above where Jacqueline was waiting.

“I’m coming with you,” she said, picking herself up without bothering to dust herself off.

Jacqueline, who had been expecting this outcome, nodded and offered her hand to her sister.

“So neither one of us gets lost,” she said.

Jillian nodded, and took her sister’s hand, and together they walked down, down, down into the dark.

The trunk waited until they were too far down to hear before it swung closed, shutting them in, shutting the old world out. Neither of the girls noticed. They just kept on descending.

* * *

SOME ADVENTURES BEGIN EASILY. It is not hard, after all, to be sucked up by a tornado or pushed through a particularly porous mirror; there is no skill involved in being swept away by a great wave or pulled down a rabbit hole. Some adventures require nothing more than a willing heart and the ability to trip over the cracks in the world.

Other adventures must be committed to before they have even properly begun. How else will they know the worthy from the unworthy, if they do not require a certain amount of effort on the part of the ones who would undertake them? Some adventures are cruel, because it is the only way they know to be kind.

Jacqueline and Jillian descended the stairs until their legs ached and their knees knocked and their mouths were dry as deserts. An adult in their place might have turned around and gone back the way they had come, choosing to retreat to the land of familiar things, of faucets that ran wet with water, of safe, flat surfaces. But they were children, and the logic of children said that it was easier to go down than it was to go up. The logic of children ignored the fact that one day, they would have to climb back up, into the light, if they wanted to go home.

When they were halfway down (although they didn’t know it; each step was like the last), Jillian slipped and fell, her hand wrenched out of Jacqueline’s. She cried out, sharp and wordless, as she tumbled down, and Jacqueline chased after her, until they huddled together, bruised and slightly stunned, on one of the infrequent landings.

“I want to go back,” sniffled Jillian.

“Why?” asked Jacqueline. There was no good answer, and so they resumed their descent, down, down, down, down past earthen walls thick with tree roots and, later, with the great white bones of beasts that had walked the Earth so long ago that it might as well have been a fairy tale.

Down, down, down they went, two little girls who couldn’t have been more different, or more the same. They wore the same face; they viewed the world through the same eyes, blue as the sky after a storm. They had the same hair, white-blonde, pale enough to seem to glow in the dim light of the stairway, although Jacqueline’s hung in long corkscrew curls, while Jillian’s was cut short, exposing her ears and the elegant line of her neck. They both stood, and moved, cautiously, as if expecting correction to come at any moment.

Down, down, down they went, until they stepped off the final stair, into a small, round room with bones and roots embedded in the walls, with dim white lights on strings hanging around the edges of it, like Christmas had been declared early. Jacqueline looked at them and thought of mining lights, of dark places underground. Jillian looked at them and thought of haunted houses, of places that took more than they gave. Both girls shivered, stepping closer together.

There was a door. It was small, and plain, and made of rough, untreated pine. A sign hung at adult eye level. BE SURE, it said, in letters that looked like they had been branded into the wood.

“Be sure of what?” asked Jillian.

“Be sure that we want to see what’s on the other side, I guess,” said Jacqueline. “There isn’t any other way to go.”

“We could go back up.”

Jacqueline looked flatly at her sister. “My legs hurt,” she said. “Besides, I thought you wanted an adventure. ‘We found a door, but we didn’t like it, so we went back without seeing what was on the other side’ isn’t an adventure. It’s . . . it’s running away.”

“I don’t run away,” said Jillian.

“Good,” said Jacqueline, and reached for the doorknob.

It turned before she could grab it, and the door swung open, revealing the most impossible place either girl had ever seen in their life.

It was a field. A big field, so big that it seemed like it went on just shy of forever—and the only reason it didn’t go on farther was because it ran up against the edge of what looked like an ocean, slate-gray and dashing itself against a rocky, unforgiving shore. Neither girl knew the word for “moor,” but if they had, they would have both agreed in an instant that this was a moor. This was the moor, the single platonic ideal from which all other moors had been derived. The ground was rich with a mixture of low-growing shrubs and bright-petaled flowers, growing blue and orange and purple, a riot of impossible color. Jillian stepped forward with a small sound of amazement and delight. Jacqueline, not wanting to be left behind, followed her.

The door slammed shut behind them. Neither girl noticed, not yet. They were busy running through the flowers, laughing, under the eye of the vast and bloody moon.

Their story had finally begun.

PART II

JILL AND JACK INTO THE BLACK

4

TO MARKET, TO MARKET, TO BUY A FAT HEN

JILLIAN AND JACQUELINE ran through the flowers like wild things—and in that moment, that brief and shining moment, with their parents far away and unaware of what their daughters were doing, with no one who dwelt in the Moors yet aware of their existence, they were wild things, free to do whatever they wanted, and what they wanted to do was run.

Jacqueline ran like she had been saving all her running for this moment, for this place where no one could see her, or scold her, or tell her that ladies didn’t behave that way, sit down, slow down, you’ll rip your dress, you’ll stain your tights, be good. She was getting grass stains on her knees and mud under her fingernails, and she knew she’d regret both those things later, but in the moment, she didn’t care. She was finally running. She was finally free.

Jillian ran more slowly, careful not to trample the flowers, slowing down whenever she felt like it to look around herself in wide-eyed wonder. No one was telling her to go faster, to run harder, to keep her eyes on the ball; no one wanted this to be a competition. For the first time in years, she was running solely for the joy of running, and when she tripped and fell into the flowers, she went down laughing.

Then she rolled onto her back and the laughter stopped, drying up in her throat as she stared, wide-eyed, at the vast ruby eye of the moon.

Now, those of you who have seen the moon may think you know what Jillian saw: may think that you can picture it, shining in the sky above her. The moon is the friendliest of the celestial bodies, after all, glowing warm and white and welcoming, like a friend who wants only to know that all of us are safe in our narrow worlds, our narrow yards, our narrow, well-considered lives. The moon worries. We may not know how we know that, but we know it all the same: that the moon watches, and the moon worries, and the moon will always love us, no matter what.

This moon watched, but that was where the resemblance to the clean and comfortable moon that had watched over the twins all the days of their lives ended. This moon was huge, and red as a ruby somehow set into the night sky, surrounded by the gleaming points of a million stars. Jillian had never in her life seen so many stars. She stared at them as much as at the moon, which seemed to be looking at her with a focus and intensity that she had never noticed before.

Gradually, Jacqueline tired of running, and moved to sit down next to her sister in the flowers. Jillian pointed mutely upward. Jacqueline looked, and frowned, suddenly uneasy.

“The moon is wrong,” she said.

“It’s red,” said Jillian.

“No,” said Jacqueline—who had, after all, been encouraged to sit quietly, to read books rather than play noisy games, to watch. No one had ever thought to ask her to be smart, which was good, in the grand scheme of things: her mother would have been much more likely to ask her to be a little foolish, because foolish girls were more tractable than stubbornly clever ones. Cleverness was a boy’s attribute, and would only get in the way of sitting quietly and being mindful.

Jacqueline had found cleverness all on her own, teasing it out of the silences she found herself marooned in, using it to fill the gaps naturally created by a life lived being good, and still, and patient. She was only twelve years old. There were limits to the things she knew. And yet . . .

“The moon shouldn’t be that big,” she said. “It’s too far away to be that big. It would have to be so close that it would mess up all the tides and pull the world apart, because gravity.”

“Gravity can do that?” asked Jillian, horrified.

“It could, if the moon were that close,” said Jacqueline. She stood, leaning down to pull her sister along with her. “We shouldn’t be here.” The moon was wrong, and there were mountains in the distance. Mountains. Somehow, she didn’t have a problem with the idea that there was a field and an ocean below the basement, but mountains? That was a step too far.

“The door’s gone,” said Jillian. She had a sprig of some woody purple plant in her hair, like a barrette. It was pretty. Jacqueline couldn’t think of the last time she’d seen her sister wearing something just because it was pretty. “How are we supposed to go home if the door’s gone?”

“If the moon can be wrong, the door can move,” said Jacqueline, with what she hoped would sound like certainty. “We just need to find it.”

“Where?”

Jacqueline hesitated. The ocean was in front of them, big and furious and stormy. The waves would carry them away in an instant, if they got too close. The mountains were behind them, tall and craggy and foreboding. Shapes that looked like castles perched on the highest peaks. Even if they could climb that far, there was no guarantee that the people who lived in castles like grasping hands, high up the slope of a mountain, would ever be friendly toward two lost little girls.

“We can go left or we can go right,” said Jacqueline finally. “You choose.”

Jillian lit up. She couldn’t remember the last time her sister had asked her to choose something, had trusted her not to lead them straight into a mud puddle or other small disaster. “Left,” she said, and grabbed her sister’s hand, and hauled her away across the vast and menacing moor.

* * *

IT IS IMPORTANT to understand the world in which Jacqueline and Jillian found themselves marooned, even if they would not understand it fully for some time, if ever. And so, the Moors:

There are worlds built on rainbows and worlds built on rain. There are worlds of pure mathematics, where every number chimes like crystal as it rolls into reality. There are worlds of light and worlds of darkness, worlds of rhyme and worlds of reason, and worlds where the only thing that matters is the goodness in a hero’s heart. The Moors are none of those things. The Moors exist in eternal twilight, in the pause between the lightning strike and the resurrection. They are a place of endless scientific experimentation, of monstrous beauty, and of terrible consequences.

Had the girls turned toward the mountains, they would have found themselves in a world washed in snow and pine, where the howls of wolves split the night, and where the lords of eternal winter ruled with an unforgiving hand.

Had the girls turned toward the sea, they would have found themselves in a world caught forever at the moment of drowning, where the songs of sirens lured the unwary to their deaths, and where the lords of half-sunken manors never forgot, or forgave, those who trespassed against them.

But they did neither of those things. Instead, they walked through brush and bracken, pausing occasionally to gather flowers that they had never seen before, flowers that bloomed white as bone, or yellow as bile, or with the soft suggestion of a woman’s face tucked into the center of their petals. They walked until they could walk no more, and when they curled together in their exhaustion, the undergrowth made a lovely mattress, while the overgrowth shielded them from casual view.

The moon set. The sun rose, bringing storm clouds with it. It hid behind them all through the day, so that the sky was never any brighter than it had been when they arrived. Wolves came down from the mountains and unspeakable things came up from the sea, all gathering around the sleeping children and watching them dream the hours away. None made a move to touch the girls. They had made their choice: they had chosen the Moors. Their fate, and their future, was set.

When the moon rose again the beasts of mountain and sea slipped away, leaving Jacqueline and Jillian to wake to a lonely, silent world.

Jillian was the first to open her eyes. She looked up at the red moon hanging above them, and was surprised twice in the span of a second: first by how close the moon still looked, and second by her lack of surprise at their location. Of course this was all real. She had had her share of wild and beautiful dreams, but never anything like this. And if she hadn’t dreamed it, it had to be real, and if it was real, of course they were still there. Real places didn’t go away just because you’d had a nap.

Beside her, Jacqueline stirred. Jillian turned to her sister, and grimaced at the sight of a slug making its slow way along the curve of Jacqueline’s ear. They were having an adventure, and it would all be spoiled if Jacqueline started to panic over getting dirty. Careful as anything, Jillian reached over and plucked the slug from her sister’s ear, flicking it into the brush.

When she looked back, Jacqueline’s eyes were open. “We’re still here,” she said.

“Yes,” said Jillian.

Jacqueline stood, scowling at the grass stains on her knees, the mud on the hem of her dress. It was a good thing she couldn’t see her own hair, thought Jillian; she would probably have started crying if she could.

“We need to find a door,” said Jacqueline.

“Yes,” said Jillian, and she didn’t mean it, and when Jacqueline offered her hand, she took it anyway, because they were together, the two of them, really together, and even if that couldn’t last, it was still novel and miraculous. When people heard that she had a twin, they were always quick to say how nice that had to be, having a best friend from birth. She had never been able to figure out how to tell them how wrong they were. Having a twin meant always having someone to be compared to and fall short of, someone who was under no obligation to like you—and wouldn’t, most of the time, because emotional attachments were dangerous.

(Had she been able to articulate how she felt about her home life, had she been able to tell an adult, Jillian might have been surprised by the way things could change. But ah, if she had done that, she and her sister would never have become the bundle of resentments and contradictions necessary to summon a door to the Moors. Every choice feeds every choice that comes after, whether we want those choices or no.)

Jacqueline and Jillian walked across the moorland hand in hand. They didn’t talk, because they didn’t know what there was to talk about: the easy conversation of sisters had stopped coming easily to them almost as soon as they had learned to speak. But they took comfort in being together, in the knowledge that neither one of them was making this journey alone. They took comfort in proximity. After their semi-shared childhood, that was the closest they could come to enjoying one another’s company.

The ground was uneven, as rocky heaths and moorlands often are. They had been climbing for a little while, coming to the end of the flat plain. At the crest of the hill Jacqueline’s foot hit a dip in the soil, and she fell, tumbling down the other side of the hill with a speed as surprising as it was bruising. Jillian shouted her sister’s name, lunging for her hand, and found herself falling as well, two little girls rolling end over end, like stars tumbling out of an overcrowded sky.

In places like the Moors, when the red moon is looking down from the sky and making choices about the story, when the travelers have made their decisions about which way to go, distance is sometimes more of an idea than an enforceable law. The girls tumbled to a stop, Jacqueline landing on her front and Jillian landing on her back, both with queasy stomachs and heads full of spangles. They sat up, reaching for each other, brushing the heath out of their eyes, and gaped in open-mouthed amazement at the wall that had suddenly appeared in front of them.

A word must be said, about the wall.

Those of us who make our homes in the modern world, where there are very few monsters roaming the fens, very few werewolves howling in the night, think we understand the nature of walls. They are dividing lines between one room and another, more of a courtesy than anything else. Some people have chosen to do away with them altogether, living life in what they call an “open floor plan.” Privacy and protection are ideas, not necessities, and a wall outside is better called a fence.

This was no fence. This was a wall, in the oldest, truest sense of the word. Entire trees had been cut down, sharpened into stakes and driven into the ground. They were bound together with iron and with hand-woven ropes, the spaces between them sealed with concrete that glittered oddly in the moonlight, like it was made of something more than simply stone. An army could have run aground against that wall, unable to go any farther.

There was a gate in the wall, closed against the night, as vast and intimidating as the scrubland around it. Looking at that gate, it was difficult to believe that it would ever open, or that it could ever open. It seemed more like a decorative flourish than a functional thing.

“Whoa,” said Jillian.

Jacqueline was cold. She was bruised. Worst of all, she was dirty. She had, quite simply, Had Enough. And so she marched forward, out of the bracken, onto the hard-packed dirt surrounding the wall, and she knocked as hard on the gate as her soft child’s hands would allow. Jillian gasped, grabbing her arm and dragging her back.

But the damage, such as it was, had been done. The gate creaked open, splitting down the middle to reveal a medieval-looking courtyard. There was a fountain in the center, a bronze-and-steel statue of a man in a long cloak, his pensive gaze fixed upon the high mountains. No one stirred. It was a deserted place, an abandoned place, and looking at it filled Jillian’s heart with dread.

“We shouldn’t be here,” she murmured.

“Indeed, you probably should not,” said a man’s voice. Both girls screamed and jumped, whirling around to find the man from the fountain standing behind them, looking at them like they were a strange new species of insect found crawling around his garden.

“But you are here,” he continued. “That means, I suppose, that I’ll have to deal with you.”

Jacqueline reached for Jillian’s hand, found it, and held fast, both of them staring in mute fear at the stranger.

He was a tall man, taller than their father, who had always been the tallest point in their world. He was a handsome man, like something out of a movie (although Jacqueline wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a movie star so pale, or so seemingly sculpted out of some cold white substance). His hair was very black, and his eyes were orange, like jack-o’-lanterns. Most surprising of all was his red, red mouth, which looked like it had been painted, like he was wearing lipstick.

The lining of his cloak was the same red color as his mouth, and his suit was as black as his hair, and he held himself so perfectly still that he didn’t seem human.

“Please, sir, we didn’t mean to go anywhere we aren’t supposed to be,” said Jillian, who had, after all, spent years pretending she knew how to be brave. She tried so hard that sometimes she forgot that she was lying. “We thought we were still in our house.”

The man tilted his head, like he was looking at a very interesting bug, and asked, “Does your house normally include an entire world? It must be quite large. You must spend a great deal of time dusting.”

“There was a door,” said Jacqueline, coming to her sister’s defense.

“Was there? And was there, by any chance, a sign on the door? An instruction, perhaps?”

“It said . . . it said ‘be sure,’” said Jacqueline.

“Mmm.” The man inclined his head. It wasn’t a nod; more a form of acknowledgment that someone else had spoken. “And were you?”

“Were we what?” asked Jillian.

“Sure,” he said.

The girls stepped a little closer together, suddenly cold. They were tired and they were hungry and their feet hurt, and nothing this man said was making any sense.

“No,” they said, in unison.

The man actually smiled. “Thank you,” he said, and his voice was not unkind.

Maybe that was what gave Jillian the courage to ask, “For what?”

“For not lying to me,” he said. “What are your names?”

“Jacqueline,” said Jacqueline, and “Jillian,” said Jillian, and the man, who had seen his share of children come walking through those hills, come knocking at those gates, smiled.

“Jack and Jill came down the hill,” he said. “You must be hungry. Come with me.”

The girls exchanged a look, uneasy, although they could not have said why. But they were only twelve, and the habits of obedience were strong in them.

“All right,” they said, and when he walked through the gates into the empty square, they followed him, and the gates swung shut behind them, shutting out the scrubland. They could not shut out the disapproving red eye of the moon, which watched, and judged, and said nothing.

5

THE ROLES WE CHOOSE OURSELVES

THE MAN LED THEM through the silent town beyond the wall. Jill kept her eyes on him as she walked, trusting that if anything were to happen, it would begin with the only person they had seen since climbing into the bottom of their grandmother’s trunk. Jack, who was more used to silence, and stillness, and found it less distracting, watched the windows. She saw the flicker of candles as they were moved hastily out of view; she saw the curtains sway, as if they had just been released by an unseen hand.

They were not alone there, and the people they shared the evening with were all in hiding. But why? Surely two little girls and a man who wore a cape couldn’t be that frightening. And she was hungry, and cold, and tired, and so she kept her mouth closed and followed along until they came to a barred iron door in a gray stone wall. The man turned to look at them, his expression grave.

“This is your first night in the Moors, and the law says I must extend to you the hospitality of my home for the duration of three moonrises,” he said solemnly. “During that time, you will be as safe under my roof as I am. No one will harm you. No one will hex you. No one will draw upon your blood. When that time is done, you will be subject to the laws of this land, and will pay for what you take as would anyone. Do you understand?”

“What?” said Jill.

“No,” said Jack. “That doesn’t . . . What do you mean, ‘draw upon our blood’? Why would you be doing anything with our blood?”

“What?” said Jill.

“We’re not even going to be here in three days. We just need to find a door, and then we’re going to go home. Our parents are worried about us.” It was the first lie Jack had told since coming to the Moors, and it stuck in her throat like a stone.

“What?” said Jill, for the third time.

The man smiled. His teeth were as white as his lips were red, and for the first time, the contrast seemed to put some color into his skin. “Oh, this will be fun,” he said, and opened the iron door.

On the other side was a hall. It was a perfectly normal hall, as subterranean castle halls went: the walls were stone, the floor was carpeted in faded red and black filigree, and the chandeliers that hung from the ceiling were rich with spider webs, tangled perilously close to the burning candles. The man stepped through. Jack and Jill, lacking any better options, followed him.

See them now as they were then, two golden-haired little girls in torn and muddy clothes, following a spotless stranger through the castle. See how he moves, as fluid as a hunting cat, his feet barely seeming to brush the ground, and how the children hurry to keep up with him, almost tripping over themselves in their eagerness to not be left behind! They are still holding each other’s hands, our lost little girls, but already Jack is beginning to lag a little, suspicious of their host, wary of what happens when the three days are done.

They are not twins who have been taught the importance of cleaving to each other, and the cracks between them are already beginning to show. It will not be long before they are separated.

But ah, that is the future, and this is the present. The man walked and Jack and Jill followed, already wearing their shortened names like the armor that they would eventually become. Jack had always been “Jacqueline,” avoiding the short, sharp, masculine sound of “Jack” (and her mother had asked, more than once, whether there was a way to trade the names between the girls, to make Jacqueline Jillian, to let Jillian be Jack). Jill had always been “Jillian,” clinging to the narrow blade of femininity that she had been allowed, refusing to be truncated (and her father had looked into the question of name changes, only to dismiss it as overly complicated, for insufficient gain). Jill dogged their guide’s heels and Jack hung back as much as their joined hands allowed, and when they reached a flight of stairs, narrower than the one that had brought them there, made of stone instead of dusty wood, they both stopped for a moment, looking at the steps in silence.

The man paused to look at them, a smile toying with the corner of his mouth. “This is not the way home for you, little foundlings,” he said. “I’m afraid that will be more difficult to find than the stairs that connect my village to my dining room.”

“Your village?” asked Jack, forgetting to be afraid in her awe. “The whole thing? You own the whole thing?”

“Every stick and every bone,” said the man. “Why? Does that impress you?”

“A bit,” she admitted.

The man’s smile grew. She was very lovely, after all, with hair like sunlight and the sort of smooth skin that spoke of days spent mostly indoors, away from the weather. She would be tractable; she would be sweet. She might do.

“I have many impressive things,” he said, and started up the stairs, leaving the girls with little choice but to follow him unless they wanted to be left behind.

Up they went, up and up and up until it felt like they must have climbed all the way back to the bottom of Gemma Lou’s trunk, back into the familiar confines of their own house. Instead, they emerged from the stairwell and into a beautiful dining room. The long mahogany table was set for one. The maid standing near the far wall looked alarmed when the man stepped into the room, trailed by two little girls. She started to step forward, only to stop herself and stand there, wringing her hands.

“Peace, Mary, peace,” said the man. “They’re travelers—foundlings. They came through a door, and this is their first night of three.”

The woman didn’t look reassured. If anything, she looked more concerned. “They’re quite dirty,” she said. “Best give them to me, so’s I can give them a bath, and they don’t disturb your dinner.”

“Don’t be silly,” he said. “They’re eating with me. Notify the kitchen that I’ll require two plates of whatever it is that children eat.”

“Yes, m’lord,” said Mary, bobbing a quick and anxious curtsey. She was not old, but she was not young either; she looked like one of the neighborhood women who were sometimes hired to watch Jack and Jill during the summer, when their parents had to work. Camp was too messy and loud for Jack, and summer enrichment programs could only fill so many hours of the day. Childcare, distasteful as it was, was sometimes the only option.

(Age was the only thing Mary had in common with those poised and perfect ladies, who always came with credentials and references and carpetbags filled with activities for them to share. Mary’s hair was brown and curly and looked as likely to steal a hairbrush as it was to yield before it. Her eyes were the cloudy gray of used dishwater, and she stood at the sort of rigid attention that spoke of bone-deep exhaustion. Had she shown up on the doorstep seeking work, Serena Wolcott would have turned her away on sight. Jack trusted her instantly. Jill did not.)

Mary gave the girls one last anxious look before heading for the door on the other side of the room. She was almost there when the man cleared his throat, stopping her dead in her tracks.

“Tell Ivan to send for Dr. Bleak,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten our agreement.”

“Yes, m’lord,” she said, and she was gone.

The man turned to Jack and Jill, smiling when he saw how intently they were watching him. “Dinner will be ready soon, and I’m sure that you will find it to your liking,” he said. “Don’t let Mary frighten you. Three days I promised, and three days you’ll have, before you need to fear anything within these walls.”

“What happens when the three days are over?” asked Jill, who had long since learned that games had rules, and that rules needed to be followed.

“Come,” said the man. “Sit.”

He walked to the head of the table, where he settled at the place that had been set for him. Jill sat on his left. Jack moved to sit beside her, and he shook his head, indicating the place on his right.

“If I’m to have a matching pair for three days, I may as well enjoy it,” he said. “Don’t worry. There’s nothing to fear from me.” The word yet seemed to hang, unspoken but implied, over the three of them.

But ah, Jack had seen very few horror movies in her day, and Jill, who might have been better prepared to interpret the signs, was exhausted and overwhelmed and still dizzy with the novelty of spending a day in the company of her sister without fighting. They sat where they were told, and they were still sitting there when Mary returned, followed by two silent, hollow-cheeked men in black tailcoats that hung almost to their knees. Each of the men was carrying a silver-domed plate.

“Ah, good,” said the man. “How were these prepared?”

“The kitchen-witch conjured things that are pleasing to children,” said Mary, voice stiff, chin raised. “She promises their satisfaction.”

“Excellent,” said the man. “Girls? Which will you have?”

“The left, please,” said Jill, remembering every scrap of manners she had ever possessed. Her stomach rumbled loudly, and the man laughed, and everything felt like it was going to be all right. They were safe. There were walls around them, and food was being put in front of them, and the watching eye of the bloody moon was far away, watching the scrubland instead of the sisters.

The men set their trays down in front of the sisters, whisking the silver domes away. In front of Jack, half a rabbit, roasted and served over an assortment of vegetables: plain food, peasant food, the sort of thing she might, given time, have learned to prepare for herself. There was a slice of bread and a square of cheese, and she had been raised to be polite, even when she didn’t want to be; she did not complain about the strange shape of her meat, or the rough skins of the vegetables, which had been cooked perfectly, but in a more rustic manner than she was accustomed to.

In front of Jill, three slices of red roast beef, so rare that it was bleeding into the mashed potatoes and the spinach that surrounded it. No bread, no cheese, but a silver goblet full of fresh milk. The metal was covered in fine drops of condensation, like dew.

“Please,” said the man. “Eat.” Mary reached over and took the silver dome from his food, revealing a plate that looked very much like Jill’s. His goblet matched hers as well, although the contents were darker; wine, perhaps. It looked like the wine their father sometimes drank with dinner.

Jack hoped that it was wine.

Jill began to eat immediately, falling on her food like a starving thing. She might have wrinkled her nose at meat that rare at home, but she hadn’t eaten in more than a day; she would have eaten meat raw if it meant that she was eating something. Jack wanted to be more cautious. She wanted to see whether this stranger drugged her sister, or something worse, before she let her guard down. But she was so hungry, and the food smelled so good, and the man had said they’d be safe in his house for three days. Everything was strange, and they still didn’t know his name—

She stopped in the act of reaching for her fork, turning to look at him with wide eyes while she frantically tried to kick Jill under the table. Her legs were too short and the table was too wide; she missed by more than a foot. “We don’t know your name,” she said, voice a little shrill. “That means you’re a stranger. We’re not even supposed to talk to strangers.”

Mary paled, which Jack would have thought was impossible; the woman had almost no color in her to start with. The two silent servers took a step backward, putting their backs to the wall. And the man, the strange, nameless man in his red-lined cloak, looked amused.

“You don’t know my name because you haven’t earned it, little foundling,” he said. “Most call me ‘Master,’ here. You may call me the same.”

Jack stared at him and held her tongue, unsure of what she could possibly say; unsure of what would be safe to say. It was plain as the moon in the sky that the people who worked for this man were afraid of him. She just didn’t know why, and until she knew why, she didn’t want to say anything at all.

“You should eat,” said the man, not unkindly. “Unless you’d prefer what your sister is having?”

Jack mutely shook her head. Jill, who had been eating throughout the exchange, continued to shovel meat and potato and spinach into her mouth, seemingly content with the world.

Heavy footsteps echoed up the stairs, loudly enough to catch the attention of everyone at the table, even Jill, who chewed and swallowed as she turned to look toward the sound. The man grimaced, an expression of distaste which only deepened as another stranger walked into the room.

This man was solid, built like a windmill, sturdy and strong and aching to burn. His clothing was practical, denim trousers and a homespun shirt, both protected by a leather apron. He had a chin that could have been used to split logs, and bright, assessing eyes below the heavy slope of his brow. Most fascinating of all was the scar that ran all the way along the circumference of his neck, heavy and white and frayed like a piece of twine, like whatever had cut him had made no effort whatsoever to do it cleanly.

“Dr. Bleak,” said the first man, and sneered. “I wasn’t sure you would deign to come. Certainly not so quickly. Don’t you have some act of terrible butchery to commit?”

“Always,” said Dr. Bleak. His voice was a rumble of thunder in the distant mountains, and Jack loved it at once. He sounded like a man who had shouted his way into understanding the universe. “But we had an arrangement, you and I. Or have you forgotten?”

The first man grimaced. “I sent for you, didn’t I? I told Ivan to tell you that I remembered.”

“The things Ivan says and the things you say are sometimes dissimilar.” Dr. Bleak finally turned to look at Jack and Jill.

Jill had stopped eating. Both of them were sitting very, very still.

Dr. Bleak frowned at the red-stained potatoes on Jill’s plate. The meat was long since gone, but the signs of it remained. “I see you’ve already made your choice,” he said. “That was not a part of the arrangement.”

“I allowed the girls to select their own meals,” said the first man, sounding affronted. “It’s not my fault if she prefers her meat rare.”

“Mmm,” said Dr. Bleak noncommittally. He focused on Jill. “What’s your name, child? Don’t be afraid. I’m not here to harm you.”

“Jillian,” whispered Jill, in a squeak of a voice.

“Dr. Bleak lives outside the village,” said the first man. “He has a hovel. Rats and spiders and the like. It’s nothing compared to a castle.”

Dr. Bleak rolled his eyes. “Really? Really? You’re going to resort to petty insults? I haven’t even made my choice yet.”

“But as you’re clearly going for the one I’d be inclined to favor, I feel no shame in pleading my case,” said the first man. “Besides, look at them. A matched set! How could you begrudge me the desire to keep them both?”

“Wait,” said Jack. “What do you mean, ‘keep’ us? We’re not stray dogs. We’re very sorry we trespassed in your big creepy field, but we’re not staying here. As soon as we find a door, we’re going home.”

The first man smirked. Dr. Bleak actually looked . . . well, almost sad.

“The doors appear when they will,” he said. “You could be here for a very long time.”

Jack and Jill bore identical expressions of alarm. Jill spoke first.

“I have soccer practice,” she said. “I can’t miss it. They’ll cut me from the team, and then Daddy will be furious with me.”

“I’m not supposed to go outside,” said Jack. “My mother’s going to be so mad when she finds out that I did. We can’t be here for a very long time. We just can’t.”

“But you will,” said the first man. “For three days as guests in my home, and then as treasured residents, for as long as it takes to find a door back to your world. If you ever do. Not all foundlings return to the places that they ran away from, do they, Mary?”

“No, m’lord,” said Mary, in a dull, dead voice.

“The last foundling to come stumbling into the Moors was a boy with hair like fire and eyes like a winter morning,” said the first man. “Dr. Bleak and I argued over who should have his care and feeding—because we both love children, you see. They’re so lively, so energetic. They can make a house feel like a home. In the end, I won, and I promised Dr. Bleak that, in order to keep the peace, he would have the next foundling to pass through. Imagine my surprise when there were two of you! Truly the Moon provides.”

“Where is he now?” asked Jack warily.

“He found his door home,” said Dr. Bleak. “He took it.” He glared down the length of the table at the first man, like he was daring him to say something.

Instead, the first man simply laughed, shaking his head. “So dramatic! Always so dramatic. Sit down, Michel. Let me feed you. Enjoy the hospitality of my home for an evening, and perhaps you’ll see the wisdom of letting these pretty sisters stay together.”

“If you’re so set on keeping them as a matched set, honor the spirit of our agreement and let them both come home with me,” said Dr. Bleak. His next words were directed at the girls. “I can’t keep you in luxury. I have no servants, and you’ll be expected to work for your keep. But I’ll teach you how the world works, and you’ll go home wiser, if wearier. You will never be intentionally harmed beneath my roof.”

The word “never” seemed to leap out at Jack. The first man had only promised them three days. She looked across the table at Jill and found her sister sulky-eyed and pouting.

“Will you eat, Michel?” asked the first man.

“I suppose I should,” said Dr. Bleak, and dropped himself into a chair like an avalanche coming finally to rest. He looked to Mary. His eyes were kind. “Meat and bread and beer, if you would be so kind, Mary.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mary, and actually smiled as she fled the room.

The first man—the Master—raised his goblet in a mocking toast. “To the future,” he said. “It’s on its way now, whether we’re prepared or not.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said Dr. Bleak, to him, and “Eat,” he said, to Jack and Jill. “You’ll need your strength for what’s to come.

“We all will.”

6

THE FIRST NIGHT OF SAFETY

JACK AND JILL were tucked away in the same round tower room, in two small beds shaped like teardrops, with their heads at the widest point and their feet pointed toward the tapering end. The windows were barred. The door was locked. “For your protection,” Mary had said, before turning the key and sealing them in for the evening.

Many children would have railed at their confinement, would have gone looking for clever ways to pull the bars from the windows or break the latch on the door. Many children had been raised to believe that they were allowed to rail against unnecessary rules, that getting out of bed to use the bathroom or get a glass of water was not only allowed but encouraged, since taking care of their needs was more important than an eight-hour stretch spent perfectly in bed. Not Jack and Jill. They had been raised to obey, to behave, and so they stayed where they were.

(It is, perhaps, important to note that while blindly following rules can be a dangerous habit, it can also mean salvation. The ground below the tower window was white with old bones from children who had tried to make clever ropes out of braided sheets, only to find them too short and fall to their deaths. Some rules exist to preserve life.)

“We can’t stay here,” whispered Jack.

“We have to stay somewhere,” whispered Jill. “If we have to wait for a door, why not wait here? It’s nice here. I like it.”

“That man wants us to call him ‘master.’”

“The other man wants us to call him ‘doctor.’ How is that different?”

Jack didn’t know how to explain that those things were different; she just knew that they were, that one was a title that said something about the person who used it, while the other said how much that person knew, how much they understood about the world. One was a threat and the other was a reassurance.

“It just is,” she said finally. “I want to go with Dr. Bleak. If we have to go with somebody, I want it to be him.”

“Well, I want to stay here,” said Jill. She scowled at her sister across the gap between their beds. “I don’t see why we always have to do what you want to do.”

There had never in their lives been a time when Jack was allowed to decide their actions. Their parents had always set the course for them, even down to their school days, where they had played out the roles set for them with the fervency of actors who knew the show would be cancelled if they made a single mistake. Jack was silent, stung, wondering how her sister could have read the world so very wrong.

Finally, in a soft voice, she said, “We don’t have to stay together.”

Jill had been enjoying spending time with her sister. It was . . . nice. It was nice to feel like they were together, like they were united, like they actually agreed on something. But she liked it there, in the big, fancy castle with the silver plates and the smiling man in the long black cloak. She liked feeling like she was safe behind thick walls, where that big red moon couldn’t get her. She would have been happy to share being there with Jack, but she wasn’t going to give it up because her sister liked some smelly, dirty doctor better.

“No, we don’t,” she said, and rolled over, and pretended to go to sleep.

Jack rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling, and didn’t pretend anything at all.

They were both tired, confused children with full stomachs, tucked into warm beds. Eventually, they both fell asleep, dreaming tangled dreams until the sound of the door being unbolted woke them. They sat up, still in the same dirty, increasingly tattered clothing they’d been wearing since their adventure began, and watched as the door swung open. Mary held it for the two men who had served them dinner the night before. Each carried a tray, setting them down next to the girls before whisking the lids away to reveal scrambled eggs, buttered toast, and slices of thick, greasy ham.

“The Master expects you to eat quickly,” said Mary, as the men retreated to stand behind her. “He understands that you are in no position to clean yourselves up, and will forgive you for your untidiness. I’ll wait in the hall until you’re done and ready to see him.”

“Wait,” said Jack, feeling suddenly grimy and uncomfortable. She had almost forgotten how filthy she was. “Can we have a bath?”

“Not yet,” said Mary, stepping out of the room. Again, the two men followed her; the last one out shut the door behind himself.

“Why can’t we have a bath?” asked Jack plaintively.

“I don’t need a bath,” said Jill, who very much did. She grabbed her knife and fork, beginning to cut her ham into small squares.

Jack, who had never in her life been allowed to stay dirty for more than a few minutes, shuddered. She looked at her food, and saw only butter, grease, and other things that would add to the mess she was already wearing. She slid out of the bed, leaving the food where it was.

Jill frowned. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I’m going to eat.”

“That’s okay. I can wait.”

“Well, you shouldn’t.” Jill pointed to the door. “Tell Mary you’re done, and maybe she’ll let you get a bath. Or she’ll let you talk to your new doctor friend. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d like the bath more,” said Jack. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“I’m going to steal all your toast,” said Jill serenely, and Jack realized two very important things: first, that her sister still thought this was an adventure, something that would only last until she was tired of it and would then go mercifully away, and second, that she needed to leave as soon as possible. The Master—how she hated that she was starting to think of him that way!—struck her as the sort of person who wanted little girls to be decorative and pretty, toys lined up on a shelf. He hadn’t talked about keeping them together because sisters needed to be together; he’d talked about keeping them together so he’d have a matching set.

If she couldn’t get Jill out of there, she couldn’t stay, because if she stayed, she would be better at being decorative. She would show Jill up. They wouldn’t match, no matter how much they tried. And the Master . . .

She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew that he wouldn’t like that. He would be displeased. She didn’t think either she or Jill would enjoy his displeasure.

Her dress was stiff and her tights stuck to her legs like bandages as she stepped out into the hall. Mary was waiting there, as she had promised, along with the two serving men.

“All done?” she asked.

Jack nodded. “Jill’s still eating,” she said. “I can wait here with you until she’s done.”

“No need,” said Mary. “The Master doesn’t care for dawdling. If you want him to choose you, you’d be well served by heading down now.”

“What if I don’t want him to choose me?”

Mary paused. She looked at the two dead-eyed men, assessing. Then she looked around the hall as a whole, seeming to search every crack and corner. Finally, when she was sure that they were alone, she returned her attention to Jack.

“If you don’t want to be chosen, you run, girl. You go down to that throne room—”

“Throne room?” squeaked Jack.

“—and you tell Dr. Bleak you want to go with him, and you run. The Master likes your sister’s appetite, but he likes the way you hold yourself. He likes the way you sit. He’ll toy with her until the three days are up, and then he’ll choose you and break her heart. He’ll say that Dr. Bleak could leave you both here, but he knows Dr. Bleak would never do that. When he can save a foundling, he does. I wish to God that he’d saved me.” There was fire in Mary’s eyes, bright and burning like a candle. “Your sister will be safer if you’re gone. He’ll have to make her into a lady before he can make her into a daughter, and who knows? You may find your door before that happens.”

“Were you. . .” Jack stopped, unsure of how to finish the question.

Mary nodded. “I was. But I never wanted to be his child, and when he asked me to let him be my father, I said no. So he kept me as a reminder to other foundlings that there are more places in a noble household than the ones set at the head of the table. He’ll never harm her without her invitation: you don’t need to worry about that. Men like him, they can’t come in unless you invite them. You’ll have time.”

“Time for what?”

“Time to figure out why you were called to the Moors; time to decide whether or not you want to stay.” Mary straightened, the fire seeming to go out as she turned to the nearest of the dead-eyed men. “Take her down to see the Master. Go quickly now. You’ll need to be back up here before the second child is ready to descend.”

The man nodded but did not speak. He beckoned for Jack to follow him, and he started down the stairs. Jack looked at Mary. Mary shook her head and said nothing. The time for words between them was done, it seemed; what Jack did from here was up to her. Jack hesitated. Jack looked at the door to the room where her sister sat, enjoying her breakfast.

Jack went down the stairs.

The dead-eyed man had predicted her recalcitrance; he was waiting on the first landing, as silent and impassive as ever. When she reached him, he started walking again, leaving her to trail along behind. His stride was long enough to force her to hurry, until it felt as if her feet were barely touching the ground, like she was going to tumble down the stairs and land at the bottom in a heap.

But that didn’t happen. They reached the bottom and stepped back into the grand dining hall. The Master and Dr. Bleak were seated at opposite ends of the table, watching each other warily. Dr. Bleak had a plate of food in front of him, which he was not touching. The Master had another goblet of thick red wine. The dead-eyed man walked silently. Jack did not, and the Master and Dr. Bleak turned toward the sound of her arrival.

The Master looked at the stains on her dress, the tangles in her hair, and smiled. “So eager,” he said, voice practically a purr. “Have you made your choice, then? It’s clear you want first pick of guardians.” It’s clear you’re choosing me, said the silence that followed.

“I have,” said Jack. She stood as straight as she could, trying not to let her shoulders shake or her knees knock. The choice had seemed difficult when she was alone with her sister. Now, with both men looking at her, it felt impossible.

Still, her feet moved, somehow, and carried her down the length of the room to stand next to a startled Dr. Bleak.

“I’d like to come and work for you, please,” she said. “I’d like to learn.”

Dr. Bleak looked at her soft hands and her frilly, lacy dress, and frowned. “It won’t be easy,” he said. “The work will be hard. You’ll blister, and bleed, and leave something of yourself behind if you ever leave me.”

“You told us that last night,” said Jack.

“I don’t have time for fripperies or finery. If you want those things, you should stay here.”

Jack frowned, eyes narrowing. “Last night you wanted us both, even if you wanted my sister more,” she said. “Now you seem like you don’t want me at all. Why?”

Dr. Bleak opened his mouth to answer. Then he stopped, and cocked his head to the side, and said, “Honestly, I don’t know. A willing apprentice is always better than an unwilling one. Shall I return for you in two days?”

“I’d rather go with you today,” said Jack. She had a feeling that if she lingered, she would never leave, and again, that would go poorly for her sister—Jill, who had always been the strong one, always been the smart one, but who had never been expected to be the clever one. Jill trusted too easily, and got hurt even easier.

Jack had to go now.

If Dr. Bleak was surprised, he didn’t show it. He simply nodded, said, “As you like,” and stood, offering a shallow bow to the Master. “Thank you for honoring our agreement. As mine has chosen me, the second constitutes your turn; the next foundling to enter the Moors is mine by right.”

“As yours has chosen you, and slighted me, what’s to stop me killing her where she stands?” The Master sounded bored. That didn’t stop the fear from coiling through Jack’s heart, where it lay, heavy and waiting, like a serpent preparing to strike. “She forsook the protection of my house when she rejected me.”

“She’s more useful alive,” said Dr. Bleak. “She’s her sister’s mirror. If something should . . . happen, to the first, you could draw upon the second to guarantee her survival. And if you killed her, you would break our bargain. Do you really want to risk a fight between us? Do you think this is the time?”

The Master scowled but did not rise. “As you like, Michel,” he said, sounding almost bored. His eyes went to Jack, as calm as if he hadn’t just threatened her. “If you tire of living in squalor, little girl, feel free to return. My doors are always open to one as lovely as you.”

Jack, who had long since tired of being viewed as simply “lovely,” and who had not forgotten the threat, even if the Master had, said nothing. She nodded, and stepped a little closer to Dr. Bleak, and when he rose and walked out of the room, she followed him.

* * *

BUT THAT IS ENOUGH of Jack for now: this is a story about two children, even if it is sometimes necessary to follow one at the exclusion of the other. That is often the way. Give children the opportunity and they will scatter, forcing choices to be made, forcing the one who seeks them to run down all manner of dark corridors. And so:

Jill ate her breakfast, and when she was done, she ate Jack’s breakfast, glaring all the while at her sister’s empty bed. Stupid Jack. They were finally in a place where someone liked their shared face, their shared reflection, and now Jack was just going to walk away and leave her. She should have known that Jack wouldn’t want to start being a twin now. Not when she’d spent so many years avoiding it.

(It did not occur to Jill that Jack’s avoidance, like her own, had been born purely of parental desire and never of a sincere wanting. Their parents had done everything they could to blur the lines of twinhood, leaving Jack and Jill stuck in the middle. But Jack was gone and Jill was not, and in the moment, that was all that mattered.)

When the last scrap of toast had been used to mop up the last smear of egg, Jill finally got out of bed and walked to the door. Mary was waiting there, and she curtseyed when Jill emerged.

“Miss,” she said. “Was breakfast to your liking?”

Jill, who had never been treated like she mattered before—especially not by an adult—beamed. “It was fine,” she said grandly. “Did you see to my sister?”

“I’m sorry, miss, I believe she’s already gone with Dr. Bleak. He doesn’t often stay away from his laboratory long.”

Jill’s face fell. “Oh,” she said. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much she was hoping Jack would have changed her mind; would be waiting, penitent and hungry, on the stairs.

Let Jack throw away the chance to be a princess and live in a castle. Jack already knew what it was to be treated like royalty, to have the pretty dress and the shining tiara and the love of everyone around her. She’d realize her mistake and come crawling back, and would Jill forgive her?

Probably. It would be nice, to share this adventure with her sister.

“The Master is waiting, miss,” said Mary. “Are you ready to see him?”

“Yes,” said Jill, and no said something deep inside her, a still, small voice that understood the danger they were in, even if that danger was shadowy and ill defined. Jill stood up a little straighter, raised her chin the way she’d seen Jack do when she was showing off a new dress to their mother’s friends, and swallowed the fear as deep as it would go. “I want to tell him that I’ll stay.”

“You haven’t a choice now, miss,” said Mary. Her tone was cautioning, almost apologetic. “Once your sister chose to go, you were set to stay.”

Jill frowned, the still, small voice that had been counseling caution instantly silenced in the face of this new affront. “Because she chose, I don’t get to?”

“Yes, miss. I don’t mean to speak out of turn, but you may wish to approach the Master with deference. He doesn’t like being selected second.”

Neither did Jill, and she had been selected second all her life. In that instant, hot, fierce love for the nameless man in the lonely castle washed over her, wiping any remnants of caution away. The Master was second-best for no good reason, just like she was. Well, she would make him understand that it wasn’t true. She’d chosen him before Jack had even known her stupid Dr. Bleak existed. They were going to be happy together until the door home opened, and they were never going to be second-best again. Never.

“I chose him first. Jacqueline skipped breakfast so she could look like the star,” said Jill, all bitterness and cold anger. “I’ll tell him so.”

Mary had seen many foundlings come and go since her own arrival in the Moors. She looked at Jill, and for the first time, she felt as if, perhaps, the Master might be pleased. This one might live long enough to leave, assuming the door home ever opened at all.

“Follow me, miss,” she said, and turned, and walked down the stairs to where the Master waited, still and silent as he always was when he saw no need for motion.

(How the children who tumbled through the occasional doors between the Moors and elsewhere couldn’t see that he was a predator, she didn’t understand. Mary had known him for a predator the second she’d seen him. It had been a familiar danger: the family she had been fleeing from had been equally predatory, even if their predations had been of a more mundane nature. She had been comfortable in his care because she had known him, and when he had revealed himself fully to her, it had come as no surprise. That was rare. Most of the children she walked through these halls were terribly, terribly surprised when their time came, no matter how often they’d been warned. There would never be warning enough.)

The Master was sitting at the table when they stepped back into the dining hall, sipping moodily from a silver goblet. He looked at Mary—and hence, at Jill—with narrow, disinterested eyes. He lowered his drink.

“I suppose we’re stuck together,” he said, looking at Jill.

“I chose you,” said Jill.

The Master lifted his eyebrows. “Did you, now? I don’t remember seeing you in front of me before your foolish sister left with that filthy doctor. I seem to recall sitting here alone, no foundling by my side, as she came down those stairs and declared her intent to go with him.”

“She said she didn’t want to stay,” said Jill. “I thought it would be better if I ate my breakfast and let her go. That way, I’d be ready for whatever you wanted me to do today. Skipping meals isn’t healthy.”

“No, it’s not,” said the Master, with a flicker of what might have been amusement. “You swear you chose me before she chose him?”

“I chose you as soon as I saw you,” said Jill earnestly.

“I don’t care for liars.”

“I don’t lie.”

The Master tilted his head, looking at her with new eyes. Finally, he said, “You will need to be washed and dressed, prepared to live here with me. My household has certain standards. Mary will assist you in meeting them. You will be expected to present yourself when I want you, and to otherwise stay out from underfoot. I will arrange for tutors and for tailors; you will want for nothing. All I ask in exchange are your loyalty, your devotion, and your obedience.”

“Unless her door comes,” said Mary.

The Master shot a sharp, narrow-eyed glance in her direction. She stood straight and met his eyes without flinching. In the end, astonishingly, it was the Master who looked away.

“You will always be free to take the door back to your original home,” he said. “I am bound by a compact as old as the Moors to let you go, if that’s truly your desire. But I hope that when that door eventually opens, you might find that you prefer my company.”

Jill smiled. The Master smiled back, and his teeth were very sharp, and very white.

Both girls, through different routes, down different roads, had come home.

7

TO FETCH A PAIL OF WATER

DR. BLEAK LIVED OUTSIDE the castle, outside the village; outside the seemingly safe bulk of the wall. The gates opened when he approached them, and he strode through, never looking back to see whether Jack was following him. She was—of course she was—but her life had been defined by sitting quietly and being decorative, allowing interesting things to come to her, rather than chasing them through bracken and briar. Her chest felt like it was too tight. Her heart thudded and her side ached, making speech impossible.

Once, only once, she stumbled to a stop and stood, swaying, eyes fixed on her feet as she tried to get her breath back. Dr. Bleak continued onward for a few more steps before he stopped in turn. Still, he did not look back.

“You are not Eurydice, but I won’t risk losing you to something so trivial,” he said. “You need to be stronger.”

Jack, who could not breathe, said nothing.

“We’ll have time to improve what can be improved, and compensate for what can’t,” he said. “But night comes quickly here. Recover, and resume.”

Jack took a vast, shaky breath, following it with a step, and then with another. Dr. Bleak waited until he heard her take the third step. Then he resumed his forward progress, trusting Jack to keep pace.

She did. Of course she did. There was no other choice remaining. And if she thought longingly of the soft bed where she’d spent the night, or the comfortable dining hall where the Master had served them delicate things on silver trays, well. She was twelve years old; she had never worked for anything in her life. It was only reasonable that she should yearn for something that felt like a close cousin to the familiar, even if she knew, all the way down to her bones, that she did not, should not, would not want it for her own.

Dr. Bleak led her through the bracken and brush, up the sloping side of a hill, until the shape of a windmill appeared in the distance. It seemed very close, and then, as they walked on and on without reaching it, she realized that it was, instead, very large; it was a windmill meant to harness the entire sky. Jack stared. Dr. Bleak walked, and she followed, until the brush under their feet gave way to a packed-earth trail, and they began the final ascent toward the windmill. The last part of the hill was steeper than the rest, ending some ten feet before the door. The ground all around the foundation had been cleared and covered in raised planter beds that grew green with plants Jack had never seen before.

“Touch nothing until you know what it is,” said Dr. Bleak, not unkindly. “No honest question will go unanswered, but many of the things here are dangerous to the unprepared. Do you understand?”

“I think so,” said Jack. “Can I ask a question now?”

“Yes.”

“What did you mean before, about drawing on me to save Jill?”

“I meant blood, little girl. Everything comes down to blood here, one way or another. Do you understand?”

Jack hesitated before shaking her head.

“You will,” said Dr. Bleak, and pulled a large iron key out of the pocket of his apron, and unlocked the windmill door.

The room on the other side was vast, large enough to seem cavernous, bounded on all sides by the curving windmill walls, and yet no less intimidating for its limitations. The ceiling was more than twenty feet overhead, covered with dangling things the likes of which Jack had never seen before: stuffed reptiles and birds and something that looked like a pterodactyl, leathery wings spread wide and frozen for eternity. Racks of tools and shelves laden with strange bottles and stranger implements lined the walls.

There was a large oaken table near the smallest of the room’s three fireplaces, and what looked like a surgical table at the very center of the room, well away from any source of heat. There were unknowable machines, and jars filled with terrible biological specimens that seemed to track her with their lifeless eyes. Jack walked slowly into the very center of the room, where she could turn, taking everything in.

A spiral stairway occupied the center of the room, winding down into the basement and up into the heights of the structure, where there must be other rooms, other horrifying wonders. It seemed strange, that a windmill should have a basement. It was something she had never considered before.

Dr. Bleak watched her, the door still open behind him. If the girl was going to flee screaming into the night, it was going to happen now. He had been expecting the other one to come with him, the one with the short hair and the fingernails that had been worn down and dirtied by playing in the yard. He knew more than most that appearances could be deceiving, but he had found that certain markers were often true. This girl looked cosseted, sheltered; girls like her did not often thrive in places like this.

She stopped looking. She turned back to him. She plucked at the stained and increasingly stiff skirt of her dress.

“I think this will get caught on things,” she said. “Is there something else that I could wear?”

Dr. Bleak lifted his eyebrows. “That’s your only question?”

“I don’t know what most of these things are, but you said you were going to teach me,” said Jack. “I don’t know what questions I’m supposed to ask, so I guess I’m going to let you give me the answers, and then I can match them up with the questions. I can’t do that if I’m getting snagged on everything all the time.”

Dr. Bleak gave her an assessing look, closing the door. Somehow, he no longer worried that she was going to run. “I warned you that you’d work if you came with me. I’ll put calluses on your hands and bruises on your knees.”

“I don’t mind working,” said Jack. “I haven’t done it much, but I’m tired of sitting still.”

“Very well.” Dr. Bleak walked across the room to one of the high shelves. He reached up and lifted down a trunk, as lightly as if it were made of cobwebs and air. Setting it down on the floor, he said, “Take what you like. Everything is clean; nothing is ever put away here without being cleaned first.”

Jack heard that for the instruction that it was, and nodded before walking carefully over to the trunk and kneeling to open it. It was full of clothing—children’s clothing, some of it in styles she had never seen before. Much of it seemed old-fashioned, like something out of an old black-and-white movie. Some was made of shimmering, almost futuristic fabric, or cut to fit bodies she couldn’t quite envision, torsos as long as legs, or with three arms, or with no hole for the head.

In the end, she selected a white cotton shirt with starched cuffs and collar, and a knee-length black skirt made of what felt like canvas. It would be sturdy enough to stand up to learning how to work, unlikely to snag or stop her in her tracks. The thought of wearing someone else’s underthings was unsettling, no matter how many times they’d been bleached, but in the end, she also selected a pair of white shorts, her cheeks burning with the indignity of it all.

Dr. Bleak, who had watched her make her selections (all save for the shorts; when he’d realized what she was looking for, he had turned politely aside), did not smile; smiling was not his way. But he nodded approvingly, and said, “Up the stairs, you will find several empty rooms. One of them will be yours, to keep your things in, to use when you need to be alone. You will not have many opportunities for idleness. I suggest you enjoy them when you can.”

Jack hesitated.

“Yes?” asked Dr. Bleak.

“I’m . . . it’s not just my dress that’s filthy,” said Jack, grimacing a little, like she had never admitted to dirtiness in her life. Which perhaps she hadn’t: perhaps she had never been given the opportunity. “Is there any chance I could have a bath?”

“You will have to haul the water yourself, and heat it, but if that is all you desire, yes.” Dr. Bleak closed the trunk, lifting it back onto the shelf where it belonged. Then he took down a vast tin bucket from a hook that dangled from the ceiling. It was shallow enough that Jack thought she could crawl into it if she needed to, almost as large as the bathtub at home.

Her eyes widened. The bathtub at home. This and that were the same, separated by centuries of technological advancement, but serving an identical purpose.

Dr. Bleak set the bucket down in front of the largest of the three fires before lifting a kettle down from the shelf and handing it to Jack. “The well is outside,” he said. “I will be back in two hours. Figure out how to clean yourself.” Then he was gone, striding back to the door and stepping out onto the Moors, leaving Jack to gape after him, the kettle in her hands, utterly bemused.

* * *

“THE MASTER WANTS YOU cleaned and smartened up,” said Mary, dragging a brush through the tangled strands of Jill’s hair. Jill ground her teeth, trying not to flinch away from the bristles. She was used to brushing her own hair, and sometimes she allowed knots to form for weeks, until they had to be cut out with scissors.

The room she’d been removed to was small and smelled of talcum powder and sharp copper. The walls were papered in the palest pink, and a vanity much like her mother’s took up one entire wall. There was no mirror. That was the only truly odd thing about the room, which was otherwise queasily familiar to Jill, the sort of feminine stronghold that she had always been denied admission to. Her sister was the one who should have been sitting on this stool, having her hair brushed, ready to be “smartened up.”

“It’s a shame it’s so short,” said Mary, seemingly unaware of Jill’s discomfort. “Ah, well. Hair will grow, and at least this way, he’ll be able to decide what length he likes best without cutting off something that’s already there.”

“I get to grow my hair out?” asked Jill, suddenly hopeful.

“Long enough to cover your throat,” said Mary, and her tone was dire, and Jill missed it entirely. She was too busy thinking of what she’d look like with long hair, how it would feel against the back of her neck; wondering whether adults on the street would smile at her the way they smiled at Jack, like she was something special, something beautiful, and not just another tomboy.

The trouble with denying children the freedom to be themselves—with forcing them into an idea of what they should be, not allowing them to choose their own paths—is that all too often, the one drawing the design knows nothing of the desires of their model. Children are not formless clay, to be shaped according to the sculptor’s whim, nor are they blank but identical dolls, waiting to be slipped into the mode that suits them best. Give ten children a toy box, and watch them select ten different toys, regardless of gender or religion or parental expectations. Children have preferences. The danger comes when they, as with any human, are denied those preferences for too long.

Jill had always wanted to know what it was like to be allowed to wear her hair long, to put on a pretty skirt, to sit next to her sister and hear people cooing over what a lovely matched pair they were. She liked sports, yes, and she liked reading her books; she liked knowing things. She would probably have been a soccer player even if her father hadn’t insisted, would definitely have watched spaceships on TV and superheroes in the movies, because the core of who Jill was had nothing to do with the desires of her parents and everything to do with the desires of her heart. But she would have done some of those things in a dress. Having half of everything she wanted denied to her for so long had left her vulnerable to them: they were the forbidden fruit, and like all forbidden things, even the promise of them was delicious.

“Your hair will take time,” said Mary, seeing that her warnings had gone unheard. “Your clothing, we can fix right away—in time for your lunch. A bath has been drawn for you.” She set the brush aside, motioning for Jill to get off the chair. “I’ll have your new attire ready when you get out.”

Jill stood, all eyes and anticipation. “Where do I go?”

“There,” said Mary, and indicated a door that hadn’t been there a moment before.

Jill hesitated. Doors were dangerous things. The Master (and that dreadful Dr. Bleak) had talked about doors that would take her home again, and she wasn’t ready to go home. She wanted to stay here, to enjoy her adventure in a world where she was allowed to have long hair and wear skirts and be whoever she wanted to be.

Mary saw the hesitation and sighed, shaking her head. “This is not your doorway home,” she said. “The Master’s castle is malleable, and matches to our needs. Go. Clean yourself up. It doesn’t do to keep him waiting.”

Mary’s warnings might have gone unnoticed, but Jill had grown up surrounded by adults who said one thing and did another, adults who were so consumed with wanting that it never occurred to them to wonder whether children might not know about wanting too. She knew better than to disappoint if she could help it.

“All right,” she said, and opened the door, and stepped into a mermaid’s grotto, into a drowned girl’s sanctuary. The walls were tiled in glittering blue and silver, like scales, arching together to form the high, pointed dome of the roof. It was a flower frozen in the moment before it could open; it was a teardrop turned to crystal before it could fall. Little nooks were set into the walls, filled with candles, which cast a dancing light over everything they touched.

The floor was a narrow lip, no more than two feet at its widest point, circling the outside of the room. The rest was given over to a basin filled with sweetly scented water, dotted with frothing mounds of bubbles. Everything smelled of roses and vanilla. Jill stopped and stared. This was . . . this was amazing, this was incredible, and it was all for her.

A small dart of smug delight wedged itself in her heart. Jack wasn’t here. Jack wasn’t standing in this room, looking at a bath fit for a fairy tale princess. This was hers, and hers alone. She was the princess in this story.

(Would she have felt bad about her smugness if she had known that, at that very moment, Jack was puzzling her way through the process of getting water from well to kettle to tin tub without scalding or freezing herself? Or would it have delighted her to think of her poised and pampered sister sitting in lukewarm water to her hips, marinating in her own dirt, scrubbing the worst of it away with brittle yellow sponges that had once been living things, and were now remembered only by their bones? How quickly they grow apart, when there is something to be superior about.)

Jill removed her stained and filthy clothing and stepped into the bath. The temperature was perfect, and the water was silky-smooth with perfumes and oils. She sank down to her chin and closed her eyes, enjoying the heat, enjoying the feeling that soon, she would be clean.

Some untold time later, there was a knock at the door, and Mary’s voice said, briskly, “Time to come out, miss. Your clothes are ready, and it’s nearly time for lunch.”

Jill snapped out of her daze, opening her mouth to protest—it couldn’t be time for lunch, they’d just eaten breakfast—before her stomach gave a loud growl. The water was still warm, but maybe that didn’t matter in a magic room inside a magic castle.

“Coming!” she called, and waded through the water toward the place where she’d left her clothes. They were gone, a towel and robe in their place. Understanding what was expected of her, Jill dried her body with the towel and covered it with the robe, which was soft and white and felt almost like the bubbles from her bath. There was no towel rack or hamper. She folded the used towel as carefully as she could and put it down against the base of the wall, hoping that would be tidy enough, good enough, for her host. Then she let herself out of the room, to where Mary waited.

The maid gave her a thoughtful once-over before saying, in a faintly surprised tone, “I suppose you’ll do. Here.” She picked up a bundle of pale fabric—purple and blue and white, like a bruise in the process of healing—and thrust it at the girl. “Get dressed. If you need help with the buttons, I’ll be here. The Master is waiting.”

Jill nodded silently as she took the clothes, and was unsurprised to see that a screen had appeared on the far side of the room. She slipped behind it, setting the clothes down on the waiting stool before untying her robe and beginning to dress herself.

She was relieved to find that the undergarments were ones she recognized, panties and a slip-chemise that was halfway to being a thin tank top. The dress, though . . . oh, the dress.

It was an ocean of cascading silk, a sea of draped fabric. It was not an adult dress, meant to grace an adult figure; it was a fantasy gown intended for a child, one that made her look as much like an inverted orchid as she did a girl. It took her three tries to figure out which hole was for her head and which were for her arms, and when she was done, the whole thing seemed to slouch around her, unwilling to fit properly.

“Mary?” she said, hopefully.

The maid appeared around the corner of the screen, clucking her tongue when she saw the state Jill was in. “You have to fasten it if you want it to fit you,” she said, and began doing up buttons and ties and snaps, so many that Jill’s head spun just watching Mary’s fingers move.

But when Mary was done, the dress fit Jill like it had been tailored for her. Looking down, Jill could see her bare toes peeping out from beneath the cascading skirts, and she was grateful, because without that one small flaw, it would have all been too perfect to be real. She looked up. Mary was holding a purple choker with a small pearl-and-amethyst pendant dangling from its center. Her expression was grave.

“You are a member of the Master’s household now,” she said. “You must always, always wear your choker when you’re in the company of anyone other than the servants. That includes the Master. Do you understand me?”

“Why?” asked Jill.

Mary shook her head. “You’ll understand soon enough,” she said. Leaning forward, she tied the choker around Jill’s neck. It was tight, but not so tight as to be uncomfortable; Jill thought she would be able to get used to it. And it was beautiful. She didn’t get to wear beautiful things very often.

“There,” said Mary, stepping back and looking at her frankly. “You’re as good as you’re going to get without more time, and time’s a thing we don’t have right now. You’re to sit quietly. Speak when spoken to. Think before you agree to anything. Do you understand?”

No, Jill thought, and “Yes,” Jill said, and that was that: there was no saving her.

Mary, who had not spoken the word “vampire” aloud in over twenty years, who knew all too well the limitations that they labored under, only sighed and offered her hand to the girl. “All right,” she said. “It’s time.”

* * *

WHEN DR. BLEAK RETURNED from his errands with an armful of firewood and a bundle of herbs, it was to find Jack in the front yard, carefully wiping the last of the grime from the sides of the tin tub. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps. He stopped where he was and looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time.

It had taken her six trips to the well and three turns with the kettle, but she had washed the grime from her body and hair, using a thick, caustic soap that she’d found next to the sponges. Her hair was braided sensibly back, and the only things that remained of her old attire were her shoes, patent leather and wiped as clean as the rest of her. She still looked too delicate to be a proper lab assistant, but appearances can be deceiving, and she had not balked from what he’d asked of her.

“What’s for dinner?” asked Dr. Bleak.

“I have no idea, and you wouldn’t want to eat it if I did,” said Jack. “I don’t know how to cook. But I’m willing to learn.”

“Willing to learn, but not to lie?”

Jack shrugged. “You would have caught me.”

“I suppose that’s true,” said Dr. Bleak. “Are you truly willing to learn?”

Jack nodded.

“All right, then,” said Dr. Bleak. “Come inside.” He walked across the yard with great, ground-eating steps, and when he stepped through the open door, Jack followed without hesitation.

She closed the door behind herself.

PART III

JACK AND JILL WITH TIME TO KILL

8

THE SKIES TO SHAKE, THE STONES TO BLEED

IT WOULD BECOME QUICKLY dull, recounting every moment, every hour the two girls spent, one in the castle and one in the windmill, one in riches and one in artfully mended rags: it would become quickly dull, and so it shall not be our focus, for we are not here for dullness, are we? No. We are here for a story, whether it be wild adventure or cautionary tale, and we do not have the time to waste on mundane things. And yet.

And yet.

And yet look to the castle on the bluffs, the castle near to the sea, which sits atop a crumbling cliff in the belly of the lowlands. Look to the castle where the golden-haired girl walks the battlements at dusk and dawn in her dresses like dreams, with her throat concealed from prying eyes, with the wind tying beautiful knots in the long curtain of her hair. She waxes and wanes like the moon, now pale as milk, now healthy and pink as any village girl. There are those in the village below who whisper that she is the Master’s daughter, sired on a princess from a far-away land and finally returned to her father when he howled her name to the western winds.

(There are those in the village who whisper darker things, who speak of disappearing children and lips stained red as roses. She is not a vampire yet, they say, and “yet” is such a powerful, unforgiving word that there is no questioning its truth, and no hiding from its promises.)

And yet look to the windmill in the hills, the windmill on the Moors, which stands higher than anything around it, inviting lightning, tempting disaster. Look to the windmill where the golden-haired girl works in the soil at all hours of the day and night, with her hands protected from the soil by heavy leather gloves and from everything else by gloves of the finest suede. She toils without cease, burns her sleeves on smoking machinery, strains her eyes peering into the finest workings of the universe. There are those in the village near the cliffs who smile to see her coming, dogging at the doctor’s heels, her shoes becoming sturdier and more sensible with every passing season. She is learning, they say; she is finding her way.

(There are those in the village who whisper darker things, who point out the similarities between her and the Master’s daughter, who recognize that a single body can only contain so much blood, can only take so much damage. She is not called to service yet, but when the Master and Dr. Bleak clash, there is never any question of the winner.)

Look at them, growing up, growing into the new shapes that have been offered to them, growing into girls their parents would not recognize, would turn their noses up at. Look at them finding themselves in this wind-racked place, where even the moon is not always safe to look upon.

Look at them in their solitary beds, in their solitary lives, growing further and further apart from one another, unable to entirely let go. Look at the girl in the gossamer gowns standing on the battlements, yearning for a glimpse of her sister; look at the girl in the dirty apron sitting atop the windmill, looking toward the distant walls of the town. They have so much, and so little, in common.

Someone with sharp enough eyes might see the instant where one wounded heart begins to rot while the other starts to heal. Time marches on.

There are moments in the years that we are skipping over, moments that are stories in and of themselves. Jack and Jill begin their menses on the same day (a word that comes from the village women and from Mary, who came from a different time, and Jack finds it charming in its antiquity, and Jill finds it terrifying in its strangeness). Jack packs her underpants with rags and begins trying to find a better way. It is unsafe, on the Moors, to smell of blood. Dr. Bleak calls the village women to help her. They bring their old clothes and their sewing needles; she rampages through his herbs and simples, testing chemical combinations until she strikes upon the right one. Together, she and the village women make something stronger and safer, which holds the smell of blood from prying noses. It keeps them safe when they have cause to venture out of their homes. It keeps monsters and the Master from noticing them.

They learn to love her, at least a little, on that day.

While all this is happening, Jill sinks deeper and deeper into her perfumed baths, bleeding into the water, emerging only to eat plates of chopped beef and spinach, her head spinning with the strangeness of it all. And when her period passes, the Master comes to her, and finally shows her his teeth, which she has been dreaming of for so long. He talks to her all night, almost until the sunrise, making sure that she’s comfortable, making sure she understands.

He is not so different from the boys she had been dreading meeting when she started her high school career. Like them, he wants her for her body. Like them, he is bigger than her, stronger than her, more powerful than her in a thousand ways. But unlike them, he tells her no lies, puts no veils before his intentions; he is hungry, and she is meat for his table, she is wine for his cup. He promises to love her until the stars burn out. He promises to make her like him, when she is old enough, so that she will never need to leave the Moors. And when he asks her for her answer, she unties the choker that has circled her neck for the last two years, lets it fall away, and exposes the soft white curve of her neck.

There are moments that change everything.

A year after Jill becomes the Master’s child in everything but name, Jack stands next to Dr. Bleak on the top floor of their shared windmill. The roof has been opened, and the storm that stains the sky is black as ink, writhing and lit from within by flashes of lightning. A village girl lies stretched on the stone slab between them, her body covered by a sheet, her hands strapped tight around two metal rods. She is only a year older than Jack, found dead when the sun rose, with a streak of white in her hair that spoke to a heart stopped when some phantom lover kissed her too deeply. Hearts that have been stopped without being damaged can sometimes start again, under the right circumstances. When the right circumstances cannot be arranged, lightning can make a surprisingly good substitute.

Dr. Bleak howls orders and Jack hurries to fulfill them, until lightning snakes down from the sky and strikes their array of clever machines. Jack is thrown across the room by the impact; she will taste pennies in the back of her throat for three days. Everything is silence.

The girl on the slab opens her eyes.

There are moments that change everything, mired in the mass of more ordinary time like insects caught in amber. Without them, life would be a tame, predictable thing. But with them, ah. With them, life does as it will, like lightning, like the wind that blows across the castle battlements, and none may stop it, and none may tell it “no.” Jack helps the girl off the slab, and everything is different, and nothing will ever be the same.

The girl has eyes as blue as the heather that grows on the hill, and her hair, where it is not white, is the golden color of drying bracken, and she is beautiful in ways Jack fumbles to find the words for, ways that seem to defy the laws of nature and the laws of science in the same breath. Her name is Alexis, and it is a crime that she was ever dead, even for a second, because the world is darker when she’s gone.

(Jack hadn’t noticed the darkness, but that doesn’t matter. A man who has lived his entire life in a cave does not mourn the sun until he sees it, and once he has, he can never go back underground.)

When Alexis kisses her for the first time, out behind the windmill, Jack realizes that she and Jill have one thing in common: she never, never wants to go back to the world she came from. Not when she could have this world, with its lightning and its blue-eyed, beautiful girls, instead.

There are moments that change everything, and once things have been changed, they do not change back. The butterfly may never again become a caterpillar. The vampire’s daughter, the mad scientist’s apprentice, they will never again be the innocent, untouched children who wandered down a stairway, who went through a door.

They have been changed.

The story changes with them.

* * *

“JACK!” DR. BLEAK’S VOICE was sharp, commanding, and impossible to ignore. Not that Jack was in the habit of ignoring it. Her first season with the doctor had been more than sufficient to teach her that when he said “jump,” her correct response wasn’t to ask “how high?” It was to run for the nearest cliff and trust that gravity would sort things out.

Still, sometimes he had the worst timing. She untangled herself from Alexis’s arms, grabbing her gloves from the shelf where they had been discarded, and yanked them on while shouting, “Coming!”

Alexis sighed as she sat up and pulled her shift back into position. “What does he want now?” she asked. “Papa expects me back before nightfall.” Days on the Moors were short, precious things. Sometimes the sun didn’t come entirely out from behind the clouds for weeks at a time, allowing careful vampires and careless werewolves to run free even when it shouldn’t have been their time. Alexis’s family ran an inn. They didn’t have to worry about farming or hunting during the scarce hours of daylight. That didn’t mean they were in any hurry to offer their child a second funeral.

(Those who had died once and been resurrected couldn’t become vampires: whatever strange mechanism the undead used to reproduce themselves was magic, and it shied away from the science of lightning and the wheel. Alexis was safe from the Master’s whims, no matter how pretty she became as she aged. But the Master wasn’t the only monster on the Moors, and most wouldn’t care about Alexis’s medical history. They would simply devour her.)

“I’ll find out,” said Jack, hastily buttoning her own vest. She stopped to look at Alexis, taking in the soft white curves of her body, the rounded flesh of her shoulder and breast. “Just . . . just stay right where you are, all right? I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you don’t move, we won’t have to take another bath.”

“I won’t move,” said Alexis, with a lazy smile, before lying back on the bed and staring at the taxidermy-studded ceiling.

After four years with Dr. Bleak, Jack had grown stronger than she ever could have expected, capable of hoisting dead bodies and bushels of potatoes over her shoulders with equal ease. She had grown like a weed, shooting up more than a foot, necessitating multiple trips to the village to buy new cloth to mend her trousers. The contents of Dr. Bleak’s wardrobe trunk had stopped fitting her properly by the time she was fourteen, all long limbs and budding breasts and unpredictable temper. (Much of that year had been spent shouting at Dr. Bleak for reasons she could neither understand nor explain. To his credit, the doctor had borne up admirably under her unpredictable tempers. He was, after all, somewhat unpredictably tempered himself.)

After the third pair of badly patched trousers had split down the middle, Jack had learnt to tailor her own clothes, and had started buying fabric by the bolt, cutting and shaping it into the forms she desired. Her work was never going to make her the toast of some fashionable vampire’s court, but it covered her limbs and provided her with the necessary protection from the elements. Dr. Bleak had nodded in quiet understanding as her attire became more and more like his, with cuffs that went to her wrists and buttoned tight, and cravats tied at her throat, seemingly for fashion but really to prevent anything getting past the fine weave of her armor. She was not denying her femininity by wearing men’s clothing; rather, she was protecting it from caustic chemicals and other, less mundane compounds.

She was still thin, for while her belly was generally full, she did not have the luxury of second helpings or sweet puddings with her tea; she was still fair, for daylight was rare on the Moors. Her hair was still long, a tight blonde braid hanging down the center of her back, picked free and retied every morning. Alexis said that it was like butter, and sometimes cajoled Jack into letting her unbraid it so that she could run her fingers through the kinked strands, smoothing and soothing them. But it was never loose for long. Like everything else about Jack, it had grown into something precise and organized, always bent to its place in the world.

The newest things about her were her glasses, the lenses milled and shaped in Dr. Bleak’s lab, set into bent-wire frames. Without them, the world was slightly fuzzy around the edges—not a terrible thing, given how brutal this world could sometimes be, but not the best of attributes in a scientist. So she wore her glasses, and she saw things as they were, sharp and bright and unforgiving.

She found Dr. Bleak inside the windmill, a large brown bat spread out on the autopsy table with nails driven through the soft webbing of its wings. Its mouth was stuffed full of garlic and wild rose petals, just as a precaution. There was nothing about the bat to prove that it was a visiting vampire, but there was nothing to prove that it wasn’t, either.

“I need you to go to the village,” he said, not looking up. An elaborate loupe covered his left eye, bringing the internal organs of the bat into terrible magnification. “We’re running low on aconite, arsenic, and chocolate biscuits.”

“I still don’t understand how we even have chocolate here,” said Jack. “Cocoa trees grow in tropical climates. This is not a tropical climate.”

“The terrible things that dwell beneath the bay scavenge it from the ships they wreck and trade it to the villagers for vodka,” said Dr. Bleak. “That’s also where we get rum, tea, and the occasional cursed idol.”

“But where do the ships come from?”

“Far away.” Dr. Bleak finally looked up, making no effort to conceal his irritation. “As you cannot dissect, resurrect, or otherwise scientifically trouble the sea, leave it alone, apprentice.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jack. The rest of Dr. Bleak’s words finally caught up with her. Her eyes widened. “The village, sir?”

“Has your time with your buxom friend destroyed what little sense you had? I’m of no mood to take a new apprentice, not when you’re finally becoming trained enough to be useful. Yes, Jack, the village. We need things. You are the apprentice. You fetch things.”

“But sir. . .” Jack glanced to the window. The sun, such as it was, hung dangerously low in the sky. “Night is coming.”

“Which is why you’ll be purchasing aconite, to ward off werewolves. The gargoyles of the waste won’t trouble you. They’re still grateful for the repair job we did last month on their leader. As for vampires, well. You haven’t much to worry about in that regard.”

Jack wanted to argue. She opened her mouth to argue. Then she closed it again, recognizing a losing proposition when she saw one. “May I walk Alexis home?” she asked.

“As long as it doesn’t make you late for the shops, I don’t care what you do,” said Dr. Bleak. “Give my regards to her family.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jack. Giving Dr. Bleak’s regards to Alexis’s family would probably mean coming home with a pot of stew and a loaf of bread, at the very least. They knew that he had given back their daughter, and more, they knew that Alexis was beautiful: her death and resurrection had probably protected her from an eternity of vampirism. For that alone, they would be grateful until the stars blew out.

Jack picked up the basket from beside the door, and counted out twenty small gold coins stamped with the Master’s face from the jar that held their spending money. Then, shoulders slightly slumped, she went to tell Alexis that they were leaving.

Dr. Bleak waited until she was gone before he sighed, shaking his head, and reached for another scalpel. Jack was an excellent apprentice, eager to learn, obedient enough to be worth training, rebellious enough to be worth caring about. She would make a good doctor someday, if the Moors chose to keep her long enough. And that was the problem.

There were very few people born to the Moors. Alexis, with her calm native acceptance that this was the way the world was intended to work, was more of an aberration than a normalcy. Unlike some worlds, which maintained their own healthy populations, the Moors were too inimical to human life for that to be easily accomplished. So they sent doors to other places, to collect children who might be able to thrive there, and then they let what would happen naturally . . . happen.

Dr. Bleak had not been born to the Moors. Neither, truth be told, had the Master. The Master had been there for centuries; Dr. Bleak, for decades. Long enough to train under his own teacher, the bone-handed Dr. Ghast, who had trained under her own teacher, once upon a time. He knew that one day, he would die, and the lightning would not be enough to call him back. Some days, he thought he might even welcome that final period of rest, when he would no longer be called upon to play the lesser villain of the piece—who was, by comparison, the unwitting hero. He had not been born to the Moors, but he had been there for long enough to recognize the shape of things.

The Master had taken Jill as his latest daughter. She walked the battlements nightly, smiling and humming to herself; her regard for human life dwindled by the day. She was not yet a vampire, nor would be for several years, but it was . . . troubling . . . that a door should open and deposit two so well matched, yet so suited for opposing roles, into the Moors.

Did the Moon, all-seeing and all-judging, tire of the Master, as She had tired of so many vampire-lords before him? Jill would make a truly brutal replacement, once the last of her human softness was stripped away. Dr. Bleak could see the story stretching out from the moment of Jill’s transformation. Jack, for all that she had little to do with her sister anymore, preferring to avoid the cloying glories of the Master’s regard whenever possible, was still of the same blood. She wouldn’t forgive the Master for taking her sister away from her. A determined mad scientist was a match for any monster—they were the human side of the essential balance between the feudal houses that ruled these shores—and he could easily see the Master destroyed, while his bright new child ascended, callous and cruel, to his throne.

Jack and Jill were a story becoming real in front of him, and he didn’t know how to stop it. So yes, he was trying to force Jack to see her sister. He needed Jill to remember that Jack existed, that Jack was human, and that logic said Jill must be human as well.

It might be the only thing that saved them.

* * *

ALEXIS SAT UP AGAIN when she heard Jack approach, and frowned at the expression on her face. “That doesn’t look like ‘everything’s fixed, now kiss me more,’” she said.

“Because it’s not,” said Jack. “Dr. Bleak wants me to go into the village for supplies.”

“Now?” Alexis made no effort to conceal her distress. “But I’ve only been here for an hour!” Which meant that—after the bath, and the physical exam, and the cleansing of her teeth, and the gargling with sharp, herbal disinfectant, to make sure that no bacteria had been knocked loose when she flossed—she had only been clean enough, by Jack’s standards, for about five minutes before they’d been interrupted.

“I know,” said Jack, kicking the floor in frustration. “I don’t know why he’s so set on my doing this now. I’m sorry. At least I can walk you home?”

Alexis heaved a put-upon sigh. “At least there’s that,” she agreed. “My mother will try to feed you dinner.”

“Which I will gratefully accept, because your mother boils everything to within an inch of its life,” said Jack. “If she asks why I don’t remove my gloves, I’ll tell her I’ve cut my hand and don’t want to risk the wound cracking open, bleeding, and attracting the undead.”

“That’s what you told her last time.”

“It’s a valid concern. She should be pleased that you’re stepping out with such a conscientious young apprentice, instead of one of those village oafs.” Jack offered Alexis her gloved hand.

With another sigh, Alexis took it and slid off the bed. “Those ‘village oafs,’ as you like to call them, will have houses and trades of their own one day. You’ll have a windmill.”

“A very clean windmill,” said Jack.

“They’d be able to give me children. That’s what Mother says.”

“I could give you children,” said Jack, sounding faintly affronted. “You’d have to tell me how many heads you wanted them to have, and what species you’d like them to be, but what’s the point of having all these graveyards if I can’t give you children when you ask for them?”

Alexis laughed and punched her in the shoulder, and Jack smiled, knowing that all was forgiven.

They made an odd pair, strolling across the Moors, neither of them looking like they had a care in the world. Alexis was soft where Jack was spare, the daughter of wealthy parents who made sure she never went to bed hungry, trusting her to know her own body and its needs. (And if the local vampire favored willowy girls who would die if left outside in the slightest frost, well, loosen your belt and pass the potatoes; we’ll keep our darling daughters safe at home.) Jack’s hair was tightly braided where Alexis’s was loose, and her hands were gloved where Alexis’s were bare. But those hands were joined as tightly together as any lover’s knot had ever been, and they walked in smooth, matched steps, never turning their ankles, never forcing the other to rush.

Occasionally, Jack would stop, produce a pair of bone-handled scissors from her pocket, and snip off a piece of some bush or weed. Alexis always stopped and watched indulgently as Jack made the vegetation vanish into her basket.

When they resumed, she said lightly, teasing, “You can touch every filthy plant in the world, but you can’t touch me without a bucket of boiling water on hand?”

“I don’t touch them,” said Jack. “My scissors touch them, and my gloves touch them, but I don’t touch them. I don’t touch much of anything.”

“I wish you could.”

“So do I,” said Jack, and smiled, a wry twist of a thing. “Sometimes I think about what my mother would say if she could see me now. She was the one who first told me that I should be afraid of getting dirty.”

“My mother told me the same thing,” said Alexis.

“Your mother is a reasonable terror of a woman who frightens me more than all the vampires in all the castles in the world, but she has nothing on my mother when there was a chance one of the neighbors might see me with dirt on my dress,” said Jack darkly. “I learned to be afraid of dirt before I learned how to spell my own name.”

“I can’t imagine you in a dress,” said Alexis. “You’d look. . .” She stopped herself, but it was too late: the damage was done.

“Like my sister, yes,” said Jack. “We would be two peas in a terrible pod. I don’t think I’d make a good vampire, though. They never seem to have a napkin on hand when the spurting starts.” She shuddered theatrically. “Can you imagine me covered in all that mess? And they haven’t reflections. I’d be unable to tell whether I’d wiped my face clean. The only solution would be dipping myself nightly in bleach.”

“Hard on the hair,” said Alexis.

“Hard on the heart,” said Jack. She gave Alexis’s fingers a squeeze. “I am what I am, and there’s much about me that won’t be changed with any amount of wishing or wanting. I’m sorry for that. I’d trade a great deal to share an afternoon in the hay with you, dust in the air and sweat on our skins and neither of us caring. But I’m afraid the experience would drive me mad. I am a creature of sterile environments. It’s too late for me to change.”

“You say that, and yet I’ve seen you leap into an open grave like it was nothing.”

“Only with the proper footwear, I assure you.”

Alexis laughed and stepped a little closer to Jack, hugging her arm as they walked toward the looming wall of the village. She rested her head against Jack’s shoulder. Jack inhaled, breathing in the salty smell of her lover’s hair, and thought that there was something to be said for worlds of blood and moonlight, where the only threat more terrible than the things that dwelt in the sea were the things that lived on the shore. Beauty was all the brighter against a background of briars.

The walk was too short, or maybe their legs had just become too long: both of them were still so haunted by the ghosts of childhood that they had yet to learn the fine art of dawdling, of stretching things out until they lasted as long as they would ask them to. In what seemed like no time at all, they were standing in front of the great wall.

Alexis let go of Jack’s hand. Cupping her hands around her mouth, she called, “Alexis Chopper, returning home,” to the sentry.

“Jacqueline Wolcott, apprentice to Dr. Bleak, escorting Miss Chopper and purchasing supplies,” called Jack. Residents always spoke first—to give them the opportunity to scream for help if they felt that it was needed, she supposed. The “help” would probably take the form of scalding oil, or possibly a rain of arrows, but at least the residents would die knowing that they’d protected the rest of the village.

It was fascinating, how frightened people who lived in a vampire’s backyard could be of the rest of the world. Just because something was unfamiliar, that didn’t mean it had sharper teeth or crueler claws than the monster they already knew. But Dr. Bleak said that conducting psychological experiments on the neighbors never ended well, and he was in charge, so Jack kept her thoughts to herself.

“Watch the gate!” called the sentry. There was a lot of shouting and creaking of wood, and then the gate swung open, heavy and slow and supposedly secure.

Alexis, who had been born behind that gate, knowing that the Master watched her every step, walked through serenely. The fact that she was willingly strolling into a vampire’s hunting ground didn’t seem to trouble her—and maybe it didn’t. On the few occasions when Jack had tried to speak to her about it, she had spoken darkly of the werewolves in the mountains, of the Drowned Gods under the sea, of all the terrible dangers that the Moors had to offer. Apparently, being a prey animal living under the auspices of a predator was better.

Maybe it was. Jack had only spent a single night under the Master’s roof, and while she was sometimes sad that she hadn’t been able to save her sister, she was never sorry that she’d gotten out. Jill had made her own choice.

Jack chuckled to herself. Alexis glanced at her.

“Something funny?”

“Everything,” said Jack, as the doors swung shut behind them. She offered Alexis her hand. “Let’s go see your parents.”

* * *

THE SUN, ALTHOUGH FADING, was still in the sky; the Master was deep inside his castle, resting up for the night that was to come. Jill was not allowed in his presence for another two days. It was always like that after a feeding. He said she needed to reach a certain age before he could stop her heart in her chest, preserving it forever. He said she would be happier facing the unending night as an adult, with an adult’s position and privilege.

Jill thought it was really because he was afraid. No one had ever heard of a foundling going back to their own world after their eighteenth birthday: if you came of age in the Moors, you stayed there until you died. Or undied, as the case might be. She was only sixteen. She still had two years to wait, two years of him leaving her alone for three days every two weeks, two years of walking the battlements alone, feeling the cruel kiss of the sun on her skin. The Master insisted. He wanted the people to grow used to her, and he wanted her to fully accept what she was giving up.

Nonsense. It was all nonsense. As if anyone could be offered an eternity of privilege and power and refuse it on a whim. Anyone who walked away from the Master would have to be a fool, or worse—

There was a flicker of motion down in the square. Two people had entered via the mountainside gate. The fat girl from the inn, and a skinny figure in a black vest. Light glinted off Jack’s glasses when she turned her head. Jill felt her hated, hated heart clench in her chest. Her sister, here.

This could not be allowed to stand.

9

SOMEONE’S COMING TO DINNER

THE INN OWNED by Alexis’s parents was small and cozy and reasonably clean, as such things went. Jack could be in it for hours before she started wanting to scratch her own skin off, which was remarkable for anyplace outside of the lab.

(Alexis had remarked once, after a particularly tense visit, that it was odd how Jack could handle working in the garden for Dr. Bleak, but not the idea of sitting on a seat that another human had used without first scrubbing it to a mirror sheen. Jack had attempted, not very well, to explain that dirt was dirt; dirt was capable of being clean, if it was in its native environment. It was the mixture of dirt and other things—like sweat and skin and the humors of the human body—that became a problem. It was the recipe, not the ingredients.)

Alexis’s mother looked like her, but older, and when she smiled, it was like someone had lit a jack-o’-lantern fire in the space behind her eyes. Jack thought she could endure any amount of dirt for the warmth of Ms. Chopper’s smile. She had searched her memory over and over again, and never found anything that even implied her own mother had been capable of such a smile.

Alexis’s father had been a woodcutter before he’d settled into the innkeeper’s life: hence the family name and the axe that hung above the fire. He was a mountain of a man, and Jack thought he might be the only human in the Moors who would stand a chance against Dr. Bleak in a physical contest. (The werewolves would win, no contest. Fortunately, werewolves were less interested in wrestling and axe-hurling than they were in mauling people and fetching sticks.)

As always at the Sign of the Hind and Hare, the food was simple and plentiful, and reminded Jack uncomfortably of the rabbit and root vegetables she’d eaten on her one night with the Master. He took what he wanted from the village stores for the people who lived under his roof: she had no doubt that her very first meal had been prepared by Ms. Chopper’s loving hand. Maybe Alexis had eaten the same thing that night. Maybe they had started her tenure in the Moors by sharing a meal, all unaware of what lay ahead of them.

She hoped so. It made the bread taste better, and the milk seem sweeter, to think they’d been eating together for as long as that.

Ms. Chopper was passing the potatoes around the table one more time when the kitchen door blew open, shuddering in its frame like it had been caught in a heavy wind. Alexis jumped. Mr. Chopper tensed, hand going to his side like he expected to find his axe hanging there, ready to be swung. Ms. Chopper froze, her hands clenching around the edges of her tray.

Jack sat quietly, her eyes on her food, trying to look as if she thought stewed mushrooms and roast rabbit was the most fascinating thing in the entire world.

“You could at least say hello, sister,” hissed Jill, and her voice was poisonously sweet, like something that had been allowed to sit too long in the sun and had spoiled from the heat.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Jack raised her head, reaching up to adjust her glasses as she did. “I thought it was a stray dog knocking the door open. Where I come from, people knock.”

“You come from the same place I do,” said Jill.

“Yes, and people knocked.”

Jill glared at her. Jack looked impassively back.

Their faces were identical: there was no denying that. All the time in the world wouldn’t change the shape of their lips or the angle of their eyes. They could dye their hair, style themselves entirely differently, but they would always be cast from the same mold. But that was where the resemblance ended.

Jill was dressed in a gown of purple so pale that it might as well have been white, if not set against the pallor of her skin and the icy blonde of her hair. It was cut straight across her chest in a style that was modest now, although it wouldn’t be for much longer; it was a little girl’s dress, and she, like Jack, was well on her way to womanhood. Her skirt was long enough to trail on the ground. The bottom six inches or so were gray with dirt. Jack shuddered slightly, hoping her sister wouldn’t see.

No such luck. While Jack had been living in a windmill, learning the secrets of science and how to raise the dead, Jill had been living in a castle, learning the secrets of survival and how to serve the dead. Her eyes saw all. Slowly, she smiled.

“Aw, I’m sorry, sister,” she said. “Am I dirty? Does that bother you, that I’m a dirty girl? The Master doesn’t mind if I spoil my dresses. I can always get another.”

“How nice for you,” said Jack, through gritted teeth. “Why are you here?”

“I saw you come through the gates. I thought surely you must be coming up to the castle to see me, since I’m your sister, after all, and it’s been so long since you last came to visit. Imagine my surprise when you followed your little fat girl to the inn to stuff your face.” Jill’s nose wrinkled. “Really, it’s bestial. Is this the way you want to spend your youth? With pigs and peasants?”

Jack started to stand. Alexis grabbed her wrist, pulling her back down.

“It’s not worth it,” she said, voice low. “Please, it’s not worth it.”

Jill laughed. “See? Everyone here knows their place except for you. Is it because you’re jealous? Because you could have had what I have, and you didn’t move fast enough? Or is it because you miss me?”

“I never knew my sister well enough to miss her, and with the way you behave, I’m not sure I’d want you for my sister,” said Jack. “As for having what you have . . . you have a dress that shows every speck of dust that lands on it. You have hands so pale that they can never look clean. I don’t want what you have. What you have is terrible. Leave me alone.”

“Is that any way to talk to your family? Blood of your blood?”

Jack sneered. “Last time I checked, you were planning to get rid of your blood as soon as the Master was willing to take it. Or did you change your mind? Are you going to stick around and try living for a little while? I recommend it. Maybe get some more sun. You’re clearly vitamin D–deficient.”

“Jack, please,” whispered Alexis.

Jill was still smiling. Jack went cold.

The Sign of the Hind and Hare was the only inn the village had. That didn’t make it indispensable. If something should happen to it—if it burned to the ground in the middle of the night, say, or if its owners were found with all the blood drained from their bodies—well, that would just be too bad. Another inn would open before the next full moon, equipped with a new family, eager to serve without breaking the rules.

Like everyone who lived under the grace of the Master, the Choppers obeyed his rules. They did as they were told. They went where they were bid. And they didn’t fight, ever, not with him, and not with the girl he’d chosen as his heir.

Jack swallowed. Jack smoothed her vest with the heels of her gloved hands and stood, leaving her plate behind. Alexis let go of her arm. The moment of absence, when the pressure of Alexis’s hand was first removed, was somehow worse than the surrender.

“I’m . . . so sorry, Jillian,” said Jack, in a careful, measured voice. “I was hungry. You know how cranky I get when I’m hungry.”

Jill giggled. “You’re the worst when you haven’t eaten. So did you come to visit me, really?”

“Yes. Absolutely.” Jack didn’t need to turn to know that Alexis was trembling, or that her parents were fighting not to rush to her. They hadn’t been expecting her to bring danger to their door. They should have been. They should have known. She should have known. She’d been a fool, and now they were paying the price. “Dr. Bleak expects me back by midnight, but I have shopping to do in the square before then. Would you like to come with me? I think I have enough coin that I could buy you something nice. Candied ginger, or a ribbon for your hair.”

Jill’s gaze sharpened. “If you’d really come to see me, you’d know whether you had enough coin to get me a present.”

“Dr. Bleak controls the money. I’m just his apprentice.” Jack spread her hands, trying to look contrite without seeming overly eager. Jill seemed to believe her—or maybe Jill just didn’t care, as long as she got her own way in the end. We’re strangers now, she thought, and mourned. “I’m learning a lot, but that doesn’t mean he trusts me with more than he has to.”

“The Master trusts me with everything,” said Jill, and skipped—skipped!—across the room to slide her arm through Jack’s. “I suppose we can shop before you buy me a present. If Dr. Bleak cast you out, you’d have to live in the barn with the pigs, and you’d be filthy all the time. That would be awful, wouldn’t it?”

Jack, who already felt like she needed a bath from just that short contact with her sister, suppressed a shudder. “Awful,” she agreed, and grabbed her basket, and let Jill lead her out into the night.

The door slammed shut behind them. Ms. Chopper dropped the tray of potatoes in her hurry to fling her arms around her daughter, and the three of them huddled together, shaking and crying, and suddenly all too aware of the dark outside.

* * *

JILL STEPPED LIGHTLY, like she was dancing her way across the muddy cobblestones in the village square. She never stopped talking, words spilling over each other like eager puppies as she recounted everything that had happened to her in the months since she’d last seen her sister. Jack realized, with a dull, distant sort of guilt, that Jill was lonely: she might have servants in that great pile of a castle, and she might have the love, or at least the fondness, of her Master, but she didn’t have friends.

(That was probably a good thing. Jack could remember Dr. Bleak returning from trips to the village shortly after she’d gone to live with him, a dire expression on his face and his big black medical bag in his hands. There had been deaths among the village children. That was all he’d been willing to tell her, when she pressed. It hadn’t been until years later, when Alexis started coming around, that she’d learned that all the children who’d died had been seen playing with Jill around the fountain. The Master was a jealous man. He didn’t want her to have anything in her life except for him, and he was happy to do whatever he deemed necessary to make sure that he remained the center of her world. Friends were a nuisance to be dealt with. Friends were expendable.)

Jack was accustomed to doing her shopping alone, or in the company of Dr. Bleak. It was surprising how often people forgot that Jill was her sister, or felt no need to guard their tongues in her presence. She was used to jokes and gossip, and even the occasional sly barb about the Master’s policies.

As she walked through the shops on Jill’s arm, the real surprise was the silence. People who knew her as Dr. Bleak’s apprentice went quiet when she approached side by side with the Master’s daughter, and some of them looked at her face like she was a riddle that had just been unexpectedly solved. Jack had to fight not to grimace. It would take her months, maybe years, to rebuild the ground she was losing with every person who saw her in Jill’s company. Suddenly, she was the enemy again. It was not a comfortable prospect.

Several of the merchants tried to give her deeper discounts than they usually did, or could afford. When possible, she paid the normal amount anyway, shaking her head to silence them. Unfortunately, if Jill caught her, she would snatch the coins from the merchant’s hand, rolling her eyes.

“We only pay as a courtesy,” she would say. “We pay as a symbol, to show that we’re part of this village, not just the beating heart that sustains it in a world of wolves. If they want to make the symbol even more symbolic, you’re to let them. You promised me a present.”

“Yes, sister,” Jack would reply, and on they would go to the next merchant, while the hole in the pit of her stomach got bigger and bigger, until it felt like it was going to swallow the entire world.

She’d have to tell Dr. Bleak about this. If she didn’t, the villagers would, the next time he came for supplies or to check on someone’s ailing mother. They would talk about his apprentice and the Master’s daughter walking arm in arm, and he would wonder why she’d hid it from him, and everything would be ruined. Even more ruined than it already was.

The basket over her arm was heavy with the things she’d been sent to buy, and with an occasional extra that Jill had picked up and simply placed among everything else. A jug of heavy cream; a jar of honey. Luxuries that were nice, in their way, but which had never been considered necessary in the windmill up on the hill. Finally, it was time for Jill to choose her gift.

The stallholder, a slender village maiden who shook and shivered like a reed dancing in the wind, stood with her hands clasped tight against her apron, like by refusing to let them flutter, she could somehow conceal the rest of her anxiety. And maybe she could: Jill didn’t appear to notice. She was busy running her fingers through the ribbons, cooing and twittering about the feel of the fabric against her skin.

Jack tried to make eye contact with the stallholder. She looked away, refusing to let Jack look into her eyes. Jack felt the hole in her stomach grow greater still. Most of the villagers were superstitious, if it could be called that when the vampire was right there, when there were werewolves in the mountains and terrible things with tentacles in the sea. They knew that the Master could influence their minds by meeting their eyes. None of them had looked directly at Jill without being ordered to in years, even though she wouldn’t have her own power over the human heart until she was transformed. Now, it seemed, some of that superstition was transferring to Jack.

“Do you like this one?” asked Jill, holding up a length of shimmering gray silk that looked like it had been sliced out of the mist on the moor. “I have a dress it would look perfect with.”

“It’s beautiful,” said Jack. “You should get that one.”

Jill pouted prettily. “But there are so many of them,” she protested. “I haven’t seen more than half.”

“I know,” said Jack, trying to sound soothing, or at least, trying not to sound frustrated. “Dr. Bleak expects me back by midnight, remember? I can’t disobey my master any more than you can disobey yours.”

It was a calculated risk. Jill knew what it was to be obedient, to bend her desires to another’s. She also had a tendency to fly into a towering rage at the slightest implication that her Master was not the only master in the Moors, as if having a capital letter on his name somehow gave him a monopoly on shouting orders.

Jill wound the ribbon around her finger and said, “The Master would be happy to have you still, if you wanted to come home. You’re very unsuitable now, you know. You’d have to be reeducated. I’d have to teach you how to be a lady. But you could come home.”

The thought of calling the castle “home” was enough to make Jack woozy with terror. She damped it down and shook her head, saying, “I appreciate the offer. I have work to do with Dr. Bleak. I like what we do together. I like what I’m learning.” An old memory stirred, of her mother in a pink pantsuit, telling her how to refuse an invitation. “Thank you so much for thinking of me.”

Jill sighed. “You’ll come home one day,” she said, and grabbed a fistful of ribbons, so many of them that they trailed between her fingers like a rainbow of worms. “I’ll take these,” she informed the stallholder. “My sister will pay you.” Then she was gone, turning on her heel and flouncing back toward the castle gates. Ribbons fell unnoticed from her fist as she walked, leaving a trail behind her in the dust.

Jack turned back to the stallholder, reaching for the coins at the bottom of her basket. “I’m so sorry,” she said, voice pitched low and urgent. “I didn’t mean to bring her to you. She forced my hand. I may not have enough to pay you, but I promise, I’ll return with the rest, only tell me what I owe.”

“Nothing,” said the stallholder. She still wasn’t looking at Jack.

“But—”

“I said, nothing.” The stallholder moved to start smoothing the remaining ribbons, trying to restore order to the chaos Jill had made. “She never pays anyway. The Master will send someone with gold, will overpay for the next dress he orders in her name. She didn’t threaten me this time. She didn’t show me her teeth or ask if I wanted to look at the skin under her choker. You made her better, not worse.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Leave.” The stallholder finally looked up, finally focused on Jack. When she spoke again, her voice was so soft that it was barely audible. “Everyone knows that children who talk to the Master’s daughter disappear, because he can’t stand to share her. But not you. Because even though you’re not his child, you’re still her sister, and she gets jealous of the people who talk to you. Get away from me before she decides you’re my friend.”

Jack took a step backward. The stallholder went back to sorting through her ribbons, expression grim. She did not speak again, and so Jack turned and walked through the silent village. The sun was down. The huge red moon hung ominously close to the horizon, like it might descend and begin crushing everything in its path.

The door of the inn was closed. A single candle burned in the window. Jack looked at it and kept on walking, out of the village, through the gates, and onto the wild and lonely moor.

* * *

THE LIGHT IN THE windmill window made it seem more like a lighthouse, something perfect and pure, calling the lost souls home. Jack started to walk a little faster when she realized that she was almost home. That wasn’t enough. She broke into a run, and would have slammed straight into the door if Dr. Bleak hadn’t opened it a split second before she could. She ran into the hard flesh of his midsection instead, the rough leather of his apron grinding against her cheek.

She dropped the basket, scattering supplies and her small remaining store of coins at her feet.

“Jack, what’s wrong?” asked Dr. Bleak, and his voice was a rope thrown to a drowning girl, his voice was the solid foundation of her world, and she clung to him, pressing her face against his chest, for once not caring about the dirt, and cried and cried, under the eye of the unforgiving moon.

PART IV

JILL AND JACK WILL NOT COME BACK

10

AND FROM HER GRAVE, A RED, RED ROSE . . .

TIME PASSED. JACK STAYED away from the village, electing to do extra chores at home rather than accompanying Dr. Bleak to town on shopping trips. She began to make plans for the future, for the time when she would have her own garden, her own windmill, and be able to provide for a household of her own.

Alexis continued to visit, cautiously at first, and then more and more brazenly as nothing terrible happened to her family.

Jill walked the battlements, and counted down the days until their eighteenth birthday. She was nestled snug in her bed, dreaming of rivers of beautiful red, when sunlight flooded the room and slapped her out of sleep. She sat bolt upright, shocked and bewildered, and blinked against the terrible brightness.

“Miss,” said Mary, voice polite, deferential. She had been using that tone with Jill for two years, since the day Jill had thrown a fit and demanded she be spoken to with respect, lest Mary find herself thrown over the battlements. “The Master requested I wake you.”

“Why?” demanded Jill. She dug at her eyes with the heels of her hands, rubbing until the sting of the sunlight faded. When she lowered her hands, blinking rapidly, she realized that Mary was holding a large vase filled with red, red roses. Jill’s eyes widened. She reached out her hands, making small wanting motions.

“Give them to me,” said Jill.

“Yes, miss.” Mary did not hand the vase to Jill. Rather, she walked a few steps along the length of the bed and set them on the table next to the headboard, where Jill could breathe in their fragrance and admire their beauty without pricking herself on the thorns. If she were responsible for the Master’s precious girl bleeding when he was not in the room, her head would be the one hitting the floor.

“From the Master?” demanded Jill.

“Yes, miss.”

“They’re beautiful.” Jill’s expression went soft, her eyes growing wet with grateful tears. “Do you see how beautiful they are? He loves me so much. He’s so good to me.”

“Yes, miss,” said Mary, who was well acquainted with the shape of a vampire’s love. She thought sometimes that Jill had utterly forgotten that she had been a foundling too, long ago; that Jill was not the first girl to wear a pale dress and a choker around her throat.

“Did he tell you why?” Jill turned a hopeful face toward Mary. “Is he coming to see me today? I know it’s only been two days, but—”

“Do you really not know, miss?” Of course she didn’t. Vampires cared about time only as it impacted other people, and Jill, while still human, was already thinking like a vampire. Mary forced herself to smile. “Today is the fifth anniversary of your arrival in the Moors.”

Jill’s eyes widened. “I’m seventeen?”

“Yes, miss.” Time in the Moors was not precisely like time in the world Jack and Jill had originally come from: it followed a different set of natural rules and did not map precisely to any other calendar. But a year was a year. Even if their precise birthday was impossible to mark, the date of their arrival was clear.

Jill tumbled out of bed in an avalanche of blankets and fluffy nightgown. “I was almost twelve and a half when we arrived here,” she said excitedly, starting to shovel her covers back onto the mattress. “That makes me practically eighteen. Does he want me? Tonight? Is it finally time?”

“Practically eighteen is not the same as actually eighteen, miss,” said Mary, fighting to keep the precise balance of kindness and deference she needed when speaking to Jill. “He knew you would ask about this. He said to tell you that because we do not know your precise birthday, he will err on the side of caution; things will continue as they are until the Drowned Abbey rings the bells for the change of seasons.”

“But that’s forever!” protested Jill. “Why so long? I’ve done nothing wrong! I’ve been so good! Everything he’s asked me to be, I’ve become!” She dropped her armload of pillows and straightened, waving her hands to indicate the elegant lace of her nightgown, the carefully arrayed curl of her hair. She had long since mastered the art of sleeping motionlessly, so as to rise perfectly coifed and ready to face whatever the night might hold.

“Everything except an adult,” said Mary gently. “The door could still open for you. The world of your birth could still pull you back.”

“That’s a bedtime story to frighten children,” snapped Jill. “Doors don’t come back when they’re not wanted.”

“You knew what a vampire was when you came here,” said Mary. “Didn’t you wonder why that was? The rules we have exist because mistakes have been made in the past. Things have gone wrong.” Newly made vampires, things of anger and appetite, stumbling through magical doors and back into worlds that had no defenses against them . . .

Mary suppressed the urge to shiver. The Moors knew how to live with vampires. The Moors were equipped to survive alongside their own monsters.

“Had you gone to the mountains and the care of the werewolf lord, he would tell you the same,” she said. “Or down to the sea. The Drowned Gods change no one young enough to go back to where they came from. We must be careful, lest we attract the attention of whatever force creates the doors. If they stopped, the Moors would be lost.”

“The Moon makes the doors,” said Jill in a waspish tone. “Everyone knows that.”

“There are other theories.”

“Those theories are wrong.” Jill glared at her. “The door we used said ‘Be Sure’ on it, and I’m sure. I’m sure I want to be a vampire. I want to be strong and beautiful and forever. I want to know that no one can ever, ever take all this away from me. Why can’t I have that?”

“You will,” said Mary. “When the bells of the Drowned Abbey ring, you will. The Master will take you to the highest tower, and he’ll make you ruthless, and he’ll make you swift, and most of all, he’ll make you his. But you must wait for the bells to ring, miss, you must. I know it’s difficult. I know you don’t want to wait. But—”

“What do you know, Mary?” snapped Jill. “You were a foundling. This could have been yours. You refused him. Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to be ruthless, miss.” It had all seemed like a game at first, her and the vampire in the high castle, him offering her whatever she wanted, while she laughed and refused everything but what she needed. It had seemed like a game.

And then he had asked to be her new father, and asked her to be his child, to rule alongside him forever in fury and in blood.

And then he had raged at her refusal. Her friends from the village kept disappearing, and at first that had seemed like a game too, a vast conspiracy of hide-and-seek . . . until the day he’d dragged little Bela in front of her and said “This is what becomes of those who oppose me,” and ripped the boy’s throat out with his teeth. Sometimes Mary thought she could still feel the blood on her face.

But Jill had never seen that side of him. Jill had been his precious little princess from the start. Jill walked on clouds and dreamt of vampirism like it was a wonderful game, still a wonderful game, and there was no way Mary could convince her otherwise.

Jill’s face hardened. “I can be ruthless,” she said. “I’ll show him that I can be ruthless, and then he’ll see that we don’t have to wait. I can be his daughter right now.”

“Yes, miss,” said Mary. “Do you want breakfast?”

“Don’t be stupid,” said Jill, which meant “yes.” In that regard, at least, the girl was already a vampire: she was always hungry.

“Thank you, miss,” said Mary, and made her exit as quickly and gracefully as possible.

Jill watched her go, face still hard. Once she was sure the other woman would not be coming back she turned and walked to her wardrobe, pulling it open to reveal a rainbow of pastel dresses. She selected the palest of them, a cream silk gown that brought out the gold in her hair and the ivory in her skin. It was the next best thing to white, to a wedding gown. She would show him that she didn’t need to wait.

She would show him that she already understood what it was to be ruthless.

* * *

TODAY WAS THE ANNIVERSARY of their arrival. The Master would no doubt host a party in her honor when the sun went down, something decadent and grand. He might even invite the other vampires to come and coo over his protégé, how far she’d come, how beautiful she was. Yes: it would be a lovely affair, and the only way it could be better was if it ended with her glorious demise and even more glorious rebirth.

Waiting was pointless. Even if a door opened, she wouldn’t go through it. She would never leave her beloved Master like that. All she needed to do was prove to him that she was serious, that she was ruthless enough to be his child, and everything would be perfect.

If there was to be a party in her honor, something glorious and befitting a vampire’s child, that dreadful Dr. Bleak would be doing something for Jack as well. He had to. Everyone knew that being a mad scientist’s apprentice wasn’t as good as being the Master’s daughter, and that meant that Dr. Bleak couldn’t afford to miss any opportunity to bind Jack’s loyalty more tightly to him. There would be a party.

And if there was a party, Alexis would be attending.

Jack’s unnatural fondness for the innkeeper’s daughter had not faded with time; if anything, it had grown more intense. Jill had seen them together many times. Jack laughed when she was with Alexis. Laughed, like she wasn’t making them both look bad by wandering around the Moors in ugly vests and cravats, acting like a lady had any place in a nasty old mad scientist’s lab. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t proper.

Jill could fix everything. She could set her sister on the right path and show the Master that she was ruthless enough to be his child in truth, not just in name. One single act would make it all better.

She wrinkled her nose in distaste before taking a heavy brown cloak down from its peg inside the wardrobe and fastening it over her beautiful gown. She hated dull, ordinary colors, but it was necessary. She knew how much she stood out when she didn’t take steps to hide herself.

Mary was still downstairs, seeing to breakfast. Jill slipped through the secret door on the landing—every good castle had secret doors—and started down the stairs. She had made this walk so many times that she could do it with her eyes closed, and so she let her mind drift, thinking about how wonderful it would be when the Master took her in his arms and showed her all the mysteries that death had to offer.

Soon. So soon.

She emerged from a small door at the base of the castle wall, secluded and mostly concealed by a fold in the architecture. Pulling her hood up over her head, she walked into the village, keeping her cloak closed, attracting no attention to herself. Mysterious cloaked figures were a common enough occurrence in the Moors that no one gave her a second look. It was best not to interfere with people who might be carrying secret messages for the Master, or looking for sacrifices to carry back to the Drowned Gods.

The village looked different by day. Smaller, meaner, filthier. Jill walked through the streets, imagining the way people would shy away if they knew who she was. It almost made up for the dirt that stained her hem, turning it from cream to muddy brown. She didn’t mind mess the way Jack did, but it wasn’t elegant. Hard to strike a terrifying figure when it looked as if she’d forgotten to do the laundry.

The villagers were surprisingly noisy when not watching their tongues in the presence of the Master’s daughter. People laughed and shouted to one another, bargaining, talking about the harvest. Jill frowned under the safety of her hood. They sounded happy. But they lived short, brutish lives, protected only by the grace of the Master. They wallowed in dirt and worked their fingers to the bone just to keep a roof over their heads. How could they be happy?

It was a train of thought that might have led her to some unpleasant conclusions had it been allowed to continue; this story might have ended differently. A single revelation does not change a life. It is a start. But alas, the inn door opened; the innkeeper’s daughter emerged, dressed in what passed among the villagers for finery. Her dress was green, her bodice was blue, and her skirts were hiked daringly high enough to show her ankles. There was a basket over one arm, laden with bread and wine and fresh-picked apples.

Her mother, coming to the threshold, said something. The girl laughed, and leaned in to kiss her mother’s cheek. Then she turned and started for the gate, walking like she hadn’t a care in the world.

On silent feet, Jill followed.

Jill rarely left the safety of the castle and village, where the Master’s word was absolute law and no one would dare to raise a hand against her. The moor outside the walls was his as well, of course, but the territories could get murky out in the open. Those who walked too carelessly were always at risk of werewolf attack, or being selected as a sacrifice for the Drowned Gods. The walk into the bracken was thus tainted with a giddy wickedness, like she was getting away with something. Surely this would prove how serious she was!

The innkeeper’s daughter walked surprisingly fast. Jill stayed just far enough behind her to go unnoticed.

Alexis had grown up in the shadow of the castle, hearing the werewolves howl at night and the ringing of the bells in the Drowned Abbey. She was a survivor. But she knew that her status as one of the resurrected made her unappealing to many of the monsters she had grown up fearing, and she knew that neither gargoyles nor phantom hounds prowled during the day, and besides, she was going to see the woman she loved. She was relaxed. She was daydreaming. She was careless.

A hand touched her shoulder. Alexis stiffened and turned, preparing for the worst. She relaxed when she saw the face peeping at her from beneath the concealing hood.

“Jack,” she said warmly. “I thought you had chores all morning.”

Jill frowned. Alexis, finally realizing that the woman behind her wasn’t wearing glasses, took a stumbling step backward.

“You’re not Jack,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Being sure,” said Jill. She unfastened her cloak, letting it fall into the bracken as she drew the knife from inside her bodice, and leapt.

We will leave them there. There are some things that do not need to be seen to be understood; things that can be encompassed by a single sharp scream, and by a spray of blood painting the heather, red as roses, red as apples, red as the lips of the vampire’s only child.

There is nothing here for us now.

11

. . . AND FROM HIS GRAVE, A BRIAR

“SHE SHOULD BE HERE by now,” said Jack, putting aside the bone saw she had been carefully sharpening. Her eyes went to the open door, and to the moor beyond. Alexis did not appear. “I told her we were going to have supper at nightfall.”

Alexis had been granted permission to stay the night at the windmill. It would have been considered improper, but with Dr. Bleak to serve as a chaperone, there was no question of her virtue being imperiled. (Not that her parents had any illusions about her virtue, or about Jack’s intentions toward their daughter. Despite Alexis’s status as one of the resurrected, they were both relieved to know that she had found someone who would care for her when they were gone.)

Dr. Bleak looked up from his own workbench. “Perhaps she stopped to pick flowers.”

“On the moor?” Jack stood, grabbing her jacket from the back of the chair. “I’m going to go find her.”

“Patience, Jack—”

“Is an essential tool of the scientific mind; raise no corpse before its time. I know, sir. But I also know that this isn’t like Alexis. She’s never late.” Jack looked at her mentor, expression pleading.

Dr. Bleak sighed. “Ah, for the energy of the young,” he said. “Yes, you may go and find her. But be quick about it. The festivities will not begin until you finish your chores.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jack. She yanked on her gloves, and then she was off, running for the door and down the garden path. Dr. Bleak watched her until she had dwindled to almost nothing in the distance. Only then did he close his eyes. He had lived in the Moors for a very long time. He knew, even better than Jack did, that lateness was rarely, if ever, as innocent as it seemed.

“Let her be alive,” he whispered, and recognized his words for the useless things they were as soon as he heard them. He sat still, waiting. The truth would come clear soon enough.

* * *

IT WAS THE RED that caught Jack’s attention first.

The Moors were far more complex than they had seemed to her on that first night, when she had been young and innocent and unaware of her own future. They were brown, yes, riddled with dead and dying vegetation. Every shade of brown that there was could be found on the Moors. They were also bright with growing green and mellow gold, and with the rainbow pops of flowers—yellow marigold and blue heather and purple wolf’s bane. Hemlock bloomed white as clouds. Foxglove spanned the spectrum of sunset. The Moors were beautiful in their own way, and if their beauty was the quiet sort that required time and introspection to be seen, well, there was nothing wrong with that. The best beauty was the sort that took some seeking.

But nothing red grew on the Moors. Not even strawberries, or poisonous mushrooms. Those were found only on the outskirts of the forest held by the werewolves, or in private gardens, like Dr. Bleak’s. The Moors were neutral territory, of a sort, divided between so many monsters that they could not bear to bleed. Red was an anomaly. Red was aftermath.

Jack began to walk faster.

The closer she got, the clearer the red became. It was like it had exploded outward from a single source, shed with wanton delight by whoever held the knife. There was a body at the center of it, a softly curving body, lush of breast and generous of hip. A body . . . a body . . .

Jack stopped dead, eyes fixed not on the body but on the basket that had fallen at the very edge of the carnage. It had landed on its side. Some of the bread was splattered with blood, but the apples had already been red; there was no way of telling whether they were clean. No way in the world.

Slowly, Jack sank to her knees in the bracken, for once utterly heedless of the possibility of mud or grass stains. Her eyes bulged as she stared at the basket, never looking any further than that; never looking at the things she didn’t want to see.

Red. So much red.

When she began to howl, it was the senseless keen of someone who has been pushed past their breaking point and taken refuge in the comforting caverns of their own mind. In the village, people gathered their children close, shivering, and closed the windows. In the castle, the Master stirred in his sleep, troubled for reasons he could not name.

In the windmill, Dr. Bleak rose, sorrow etched into his features, and reached for his bag. Things from here would continue as they would. It was too late to control or prevent them. All he could do was hope that they’d survive.

* * *

JACK WAS STILL ON her knees in the bracken when Dr. Bleak walked up behind her, his boots crunching dry stalks underfoot. He made no effort to soften the sound of his footsteps; he wanted her to hear him coming.

She didn’t react. Her eyes were fixed on the apples. So red. So red.

“The blood should get darker as it dries,” she said, voice dull. “I’ll be able to tell which ones are dirty, then. I’ll be able to tell which ones can be saved.”

“I’m sorry, Jack,” said Dr. Bleak softly. He didn’t share her squeamishness—understandable, given her youth, and how much she had cared for Alexis. He allowed his eyes to travel the length of the dead girl’s body, noting the deep cuts, the blood loss, the places where it looked as if the flesh had been roughly hacked away.

Second resurrections were always difficult, even when the body was in perfect condition. Alexis . . . She was so damaged that he wasn’t sure he could succeed, or that she would still be herself if he did. Sometimes, the twice-dead came back wrong, unstoppable monstrosities of science.

“I will, if you ask me to,” he said abruptly. “You know I will. But I will expect you to help me if it goes wrong.”

Jack raised her head, slowly turning to look at her mentor. “I don’t care if it goes wrong,” she said. “I just . . . It can’t end this way.”

“Then follow the blood, Jack. If a beast has taken her heart, I’ll want it intact. The more of the original flesh we have to work with, the higher our chances will be of bringing her back whole.” That was true, but it was also a convenient distraction. Dr. Bleak knew enough about bodies to know that Alexis would reveal more injuries when she was lifted. The dead always did. If he could spare Jack the sight . . .

Sparing Jack had never been his goal. If the girl was to survive in the Moors, she needed to understand the world into which she had fallen. But there was preparing her for the future, and then there was being cruel. He was perfectly happy to do the former. He would never do the latter. Not if he could help it.

“Yes, sir,” said Jack, and staggered to her feet, beginning to follow the drips and drops of blood across the open ground. She had spent so many years looking for the slightest hint of a mess that she had absolutely no trouble following a blood trail. She was so focused on her feet that she didn’t hear Dr. Bleak grunt as he hoisted Alexis’s body up and onto his shoulders, turning to carry her back toward the distant shadow of the windmill.

Jack walked, on and on, until she reached the village wall. The gate was open. The gate was often open during the high part of the day. The sound of raised voices from inside was more unusual. It sounded like people were shouting.

She stepped through the gate. The noise took on form, meaning:

“Beast!”

“Monster! Monster!”

“Kill the witch!”

Jack stopped where she was, frowning as she tried to make sense of the scene. What looked like half the village was standing in the square, fists raised in anger. Some of them held knives or pitchforks; one enterprising soul had even stopped to find himself a torch. She would have admired the can-do spirit, if not for the figure at the center of their mob:

Jill, a confused expression on her face, blood gluing her gauzy dress to her body, so that she looked like she had just gone for a swim. Her arms were red to the elbow; her hands were terrors, slathered so thickly in red that it was as if they were gloved.

Ms. Chopper pushed her way through the throng, shrieking, “Demon!” before she flung an egg at Jill. It hit the front of her dress and burst, adding a smear of yellow to the red.

Jill’s eyes widened. “You can’t do that,” she said, in a surprisingly childish voice. “I’m the Master’s daughter. You can’t do that to me. It’s not allowed.”

“You’re not his daughter yet, you foolish girl,” snapped a new voice—a familiar one. Both Jack and Jill turned in unconscious unison to see Mary standing at the edge of the crowd, blocking Jill from the castle. “I told you to be patient. I told you that your time would come. You just had to rush things, didn’t you? I told him he did you no favors by cosseting you.”

“You told me to be ruthless!” protested Jill, balling her bloody hands into fists. “You said that he needed me to be ruthless!”

“The Master feeds from the village, but he protects them as well,” said Mary coldly. “You have killed without his permission and without his blessing, and you are no vampire; you had no right.” She lifted her chin slightly, shifting her attention to the crowd. “The Master has revoked the protection of his household. Do with her as you will.”

A low, dangerous rumble spread through the crowd. It was the sound a beast made immediately before it attacked.

Perhaps Jack could have been forgiven if she had turned her back on her bewildered sister, still dressed in her lover’s blood; if she had walked away. These were extraordinary circumstances, after all, and while Jack was an extraordinary girl, she was only seventeen. It would have been understandable of her to hold a grudge, even if she might have regretted it later.

She looked at Jill and remembered a twelve-year-old in blue jeans, short hair spiking up at the back, trying to talk her into having an adventure. She remembered how afraid she’d been to leave her sister behind, even if it had meant saving them both. She remembered Gemma Lou, when they were small—so small!—telling them to look out for each other, even when they were angry, because family was a thing that could never be replaced once it was thrown away.

She remembered loving her sister, once, a long, long time ago.

The crowd had been watching Jill for signs that she was preparing to run away. They hadn’t been expecting Jack to push her way into the center of their ring, grab Jill’s hand, and run. Surprise was enough to get the two girls to the edge of the crowd, Jack hauling her sister in her wake, struggling not to let the blood make her lose her grip. Jill was strangely pliant, not resisting Jack’s efforts to pull her along. It was like she was in shock.

Becoming a murderer and getting disowned in the same day will do that, thought Jack dizzily, and kept on running, even as the first sounds of pursuit began behind them. All that mattered now was getting away. Everything else could happen later.

12

EVERYTHING YOU NEVER WANTED

SEE THEM NOW, two girls—almost women, but still not quite, not quite—running hand in hand across the vast and unforgiving moor. One wears a skirt that tangles and tears in the bracken. The other wears trousers, sturdy shoes, and gloves to protect her from the world around her. Both of them run like their lives depend on it.

Behind them, a river of anger, split into individual human bodies, running with the unstoppable fury of the crowd. More torches have been found and lit; more pitchforks have been liberated. In a place like this, under a sky like this, torches and pitchforks are the native trappings of the enraged. They appear without being asked for, and the more there are, the deeper the danger.

The crowd glitters like a starry sky with the individual flames of their ire. The danger is very real.

Jack runs and Jill follows. Both of them are weeping, the one for her lover blooming red as a rose in the empty moorland, the other for her adoptive father, who should have been so proud of her and has instead cast her aside. If our sympathy is more for the first of them, well, we are only human; we can only look on the scene with human eyes, and judge in our own ways.

They run, and the crowd pursues, and the rising moon observes, for the tale is almost ending.

* * *

DR. BLEAK COVERED ALEXIS with an oiled tarp when he heard footsteps pounding up the garden path. He turned, expecting to see Jack, and went still when he saw not only his apprentice but her bloody sister. Behind them, the furious body of the mob was gaining ground, outlined by the glow from their torches.

“Jack,” he said. “What. . .?”

“The Master revoked his protection when the villagers saw what she’d done to Alexis,” said Jack, still running, pulling Jill into the windmill. Her voice was clear and cold: if he hadn’t known her so well, he might not even have realized how badly it was shaking. “They’re going to kill her.”

Jill gave an almighty shriek and yanked her hand out of Jack’s, letting the still-slippery blood work for her. “That’s not true! He loves me!” she shouted, and whirled to run.

Dr. Bleak was somehow already there, a white rag in his hand. He clapped it over her nose and mouth, holding it in place. Jill made a desperate mewling sound, like a kitten protesting bedtime, and struggled for a few seconds before her knees folded and she fell, crumpling in on herself.

“Jack, quickly,” he said, slamming the door. “There isn’t much time.”

Obedience had been the first thing Dr. Bleak drilled into her: failure to obey could result in nasty consequences, many of which would be fatal to a child like she had been. Jack rushed to Jill’s side, gathering her unconscious sister in her arms. They were the same height, but Jill felt like she weighed nothing at all, like she was nothing but dust and down.

“We have to hide her,” Jack said.

“Hiding her isn’t good enough,” Dr. Bleak replied. He grabbed a small machine from his workbench and moved toward the windmill’s back door. “You’ve been an excellent apprentice, Jack. Quick-fingered, sharp-witted—you were everything I could have asked for. I’m sorry this has happened.”

“What do you mean, sir?” Jack’s stomach clenched in on itself. She was holding her sleeping sister, covered in the blood of her dead girlfriend, and the village was marching on the windmill with torches and pitchforks. She would have said this night couldn’t get any worse. Suddenly, she was terribly sure that it could.

I’ve seen this movie before, she thought, almost nonsensically. But we’re not the ones who made the monster. The Master did that. We’re just the ones who loved her.

Only they weren’t even that, were they? Dr. Bleak would have saved Jill instead of Jack, at the beginning, because he’d seen Jack as a more logical choice for a vampire lord. That didn’t mean he’d known her or cared about her. Time is the alchemy that turns compassion into love, and Jill and Dr. Bleak had never had any time. If anyone in this room loved Jill, it was Jack, and the worst of it was, she wouldn’t even have had that much if it hadn’t been for Alexis. Their parents had never taught them how to love each other. Any connection they’d had had been despite the adults in their lives, not because of them.

Jill had run to the Master, and while she may have been the one who’d felt deserted, she was also the one who had never looked back. She had wanted to be a vampire’s child, and vampires did not love what they were compelled to share. Jack had gone with Dr. Bleak, and he had cared for her, had taken care of her and taught her, but he had never encouraged her to love.

That was on Alexis. Alexis, who had walked with her in the village, introducing her to people who had only been passing faces before, telling her about their lives until she could no longer fail to recognize them as people. Alexis, who had cried with her and laughed with her and felt sorry for her sister, trapped and alone in the castle. It had been Alexis who put Jill back into a human context, and it had been seeing her sister terrified and abandoned that made Jack realize she still loved her.

Without Alexis, she might have forgotten how to love. Jill would still have killed—some villager or other, someone too slow to get out of her way—but Jack would not have saved her.

The worst of it was knowing that without Alexis, whoever played her role would have been properly avenged.

“I mean they’ll kill her if they find her here, and they may kill you as well; you’d offer them a rare second chance to commit the same murder.” He slapped his device onto the door, embedding its pointed “feet” in the wood, and began twisting dials. “The Master had to repudiate her to keep them from marching on the castle—even vampires fear fire—but he won’t forgive them for killing his daughter. He’ll burn the village to the ground. It’s happened before. You did well in bringing her here. The only way to save them is to save her.”

“Sir, what does that have to do with—”

“The doors are the greatest scientific mystery our world has to offer,” said Dr. Bleak. He grabbed a jar of captive lightning and smashed it against the doorframe. Sparks filled the air. The device whirred into sudden life, dials spinning wildly. “Did you truly think I wouldn’t find a way to harness them?”

Jack’s eyes went wide. “We could have gone back anytime?” she demanded, in a voice that was barely more than a squeak.

“You could have gone back,” he agreed. “But you would not have been going home.”

Jack looked down at her silent, bloody sister, and sighed. “No,” she said. “We wouldn’t have been.”

“Stay away at least a year, Jack. You have to. A year is all it takes for a mob to dissipate here; grudges are counter to survival.” They could hear the shouting outside now. The flames would come next. “Blood will open the door, yours or hers, as long as it’s on your hands. Leave her behind, or kill her and bring back her body, but she can’t come here as she is. Do you understand? Do not bring your sister back here alive.”

Jack’s eyes widened further, until the muscles around them ached. “You’re really sending me away? But I haven’t done anything wrong!”

“You’ve denied the mob their kill. That, here, is more than enough. Go, stay gone, and come home if you still want to. This will always, always be your home.” He looked at her sadly. “I’m going to miss you, apprentice.”

“Yes, sir,” whispered Jack, her lower lip shaking with the effort of keeping herself from bursting into tears. This wasn’t fair. This wasn’t fair. Jill had been the one to break the rules, and now Jack was the one on the cusp of losing everything.

Dr. Bleak opened the door. What should have been a view of the back garden was instead a wooden stairway, slowly winding upward into the dark.

Jack took a deep breath. “I’ll be back,” she promised.

“See that you are,” he said.

She stepped through the door. He closed it behind her.

13

A THOUSAND MILES OF HARDSHIP BETWEEN HERE AND HOME

DESCENDING THE STAIRS as a twelve-year-old had been tiring but achievable: the work of hours, the amusement of an afternoon.

Climbing the stairs as a seventeen-year-old, arms full of limp, slumbering sister, proved to be rather more difficult. Jack clumped up them methodically, trying to focus on all the repetitive, seemingly meaningless tasks Dr. Bleak had assigned her over the years. She had spent afternoons sorting frogspawn by minute gradations in color, or removing all the seeds from forest-grown strawberries, or sharpening all the thorns in a blackberry hedge. Every one of those chores had been infuriating when it was going on, but had left her better suited to her job. So: what did this leave her better suited to?

Betraying the girl who loved her, who was dead in the Moors, who might stay that way now that Dr. Bleak had no apprentice to assist him.

Carrying the sister who had cost her everything away from the damnation she had earned.

Giving up everything she had finally learned she wanted.

None of those were things she wanted to be suited to, but they were the answer all the same. Jack shook her head to dry her tears, and kept climbing.

The stairs were still old, still solid, still dusty; here and there, she thought she saw the ghosts of her own childish footprints, going down while she was coming up. It only made sense. There had been no foundlings in the Moors since she and Jill had arrived. Maybe there would be another now, since the position was no longer filled. Every breath had to be sucking in millions of dust particles. The thought was nauseating.

They were halfway up when Jill stirred, opening her eyes and staring upward at Jack in confusion. “Jack?” she squeaked.

“Can you walk?” Jack replied brusquely.

“I . . . Where are we?”

“On the stairs.” Jack stopped walking and dropped Jill, unceremoniously, on her bottom. “If you can ask questions, you can walk. I’m tired of carrying you.”

Jill blinked at her, eyes going wide and shocked. “The Master—”

“Isn’t here, Jill. We’re on the stairs. You remember the stairs?” Jack waved her arms, indicating everything around them. “The Moors kicked us out. We’re going back.”

“No! No!” Jill leapt to her feet, attempting to fling herself downward.

Jack was faster than she was. She hooked an arm around her sister’s waist, jerking her back up and flinging her forward. “Yes!” she shouted.

Jill’s head hit something hard. She stopped, rubbing it, and then turned, in slow confusion, to touch the air behind her. It lifted upward, like a trapdoor—like the lid of a trunk—and revealed a small, dusty room that still smelled, ever so faintly, of Gemma Lou’s perfume.

“The stairs below me have gone,” said Jack’s voice, dull and unsurprised. “You’d best climb out before we’re pushed out.”

Jill climbed out. Jack followed.

The two stood there for a long moment, stepping unconsciously closer together as they looked at the room that had belonged to their first caretaker, that had once been so familiar, before both of them had changed. The trunk slammed shut. Jill gave a little shriek and dove for it, clawing it open. Jack watched almost indifferently.

Inside the trunk was a welter of old clothing and costume jewelry, the sort of things a loving grandmother would set aside for her grandchildren to amuse themselves with. No stairway. No secret door.

Jill plunged her bloody hands into the clothes, pawing them aside. Jack let her.

“It has to be here!” Jill wailed. “It has to be!”

It wasn’t.

When Jill finally stopped digging and bowed her head to weep, Jack put a hand on her shoulder. Jill looked up, shaking, broken. She had never learned the art of thinking for herself.

I made the right choice, and I am so sorry I left you, thought Jack. Aloud, she said, “Come.”

Jill stood. When Jack took her hand, she did not resist.

The door was locked. The key Jack carried in her pocket—the key she had been carrying for five long years—fit it perfectly. It turned, and the door opened, and they were, in the strictest and most academic of senses, home.

The house they had lived in for the first twelve years of their lives (not the house they had grown up in, no; they had aged there, but they had so rarely grown) was familiar and alien at the same time, like walking through a storybook. The carpet was too soft beneath feet accustomed to stone castle floors and hard-packed earth; the air smelled of sickly-sweetness, instead of fresh flowers or honest chemicals. By the time they reached the ground floor, they were walking so close together that it didn’t matter if their hands never touched; they were still conjoined.

There was a light in the dining room. They followed it and found their parents sitting at the table, along with a small, impeccably groomed boy. They stopped in the doorway, both of them looking in bemusement at this small closed circle of a family.

Serena noticed them first. She shrieked, jumping from her chair. “Chester!”

Chester turned, opening his mouth to yell at the intruders. But one of the girls was covered in blood, and they both looked as if they had been crying, and something about them . . .

“Jacqueline?” he whispered. “Jillian?”

And the two girls clung to each other and wept, as outside the rain came down like a punishment, and nothing would ever be the same.

THE BLACK TIDES OF HEAVEN

JY Yang

To my queer family, who chill with me in the Slack

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my editor, Carl Engle-Laird, and my agent, DongWon Song, for their faith in me and for making this novella duology work. To Irene Gallo, Christine Foltzer, and Yuko Shimizu, for the amazing cover, and for perfectly capturing Akeha’s permanent level of grump. And to the crew sailing under the banner of Alyx, Kelly, Kelly, Jay, and Merc: you kept me afloat through the long nights of word processing. Thank you.

Part One

MOKOYA

Chapter One

YEAR ONE

HEAD ABBOT SUNG of the Grand Monastery did not know it yet, but this night would change the course of all his days.

He stood at the foot of the staircase leading to the Great High Palace of the Protectorate: that sprawling, magnificent edifice that few across the land would ever gain the privilege of seeing up close, much less entering. Tonight the Protector herself had summoned him.

Eight hundred alabaster steps stretched above his head. Tradition dictated that the journey to the palace be conducted without slackcraft, and Head Abbot Sung was nothing if not a traditionalist. There was no way around it, and so—he began to climb.

Darkness had fallen like a cool hand onto the peaks of Chengbee’s exhausted, perspiring roofs. As the Head Abbot mounted step after step, his robes clung to him: under his arms, in the small of his back. The moon rolled uncloaked across the naked sky, but in less than an hour, the sun would return to scorch the land, bringing with it the start of the next waking day. On good days the nighttime exhalations of the capital city took on a lively air, the kind of energy that gathers where the young and restless cluster around the bones of something old. But all summer Chengbee had lain listless, panting like a thirsty dog.

Last summer, temperatures like these had wilted fields and dried rivers, turning them into brown gashes in the land, stinking of dust and rot. Fish bellies by the thousands had clogged the surfaces of lakes. The heat had brought on food and water rationing, the rationing had brought on riots of discontent, and the riots had brought the Protector’s iron fist down upon the populace. Blood had run in the streets instead of rain, and the ruined fields were tilled with a fresh crop of gravestones.

The streets had stayed quiet this year. The Head Abbot found that this did not weigh on his conscience as much as he’d thought it would.

By the four hundredth step, the Head Abbot’s breath was acid and his legs were lead. Four hundred more to go. No amount of meditation and training—not even a lifetime’s worth—could compensate for old age.

Still, he climbed onward. Even a man of his stature could not defy a direct summons from the Protector. And there was the matter of the debt she owed him from the last summer.

It was strange. The Protector had not been seen in public for several months now, and webs of rumors had been spun into that absence: She was ill. She was dead. Her eldest children were embroiled in a power struggle. There had been a coup by her ministers, some of whom had publicly voiced opposition to last summer’s brutality. The Head Abbot had heard all these whispers, weighed their respective merits, and been unable to come to a conclusion.

At least now he could rule out the rumor of her death.

He ascended the last step with a great sigh. His legs were curdled jelly, and the entrance pavilion lay shrouded in a curtain of stars that danced and pulsed as blood slowly returned to his head.

Head Abbot Sung had grown up in a tiny village in the northern reaches of the Mengsua Range, a trading post of a mere thousand. The Great High Palace, with its wide courtyards and endless gardens, was easily three times the size of his home village. Its thousands of denizens—cooks and courtiers, administrators and treasurers—traveled from point to point on floating carts.

One such cart awaited the Head Abbot as his vision cleared. Standing beside its squarish, silk-draped bulk was someone he had hoped to see: Sanao Sonami, the youngest of Protector Sanao’s six children. Sonami had just turned fifteen, yet still wore the genderfree tunic of a child, their hair cropped to a small square at the top of their head and gathered into a bun. They bowed, hands folded in deference. “Venerable One. I have been asked to bring you to my mother.”

The Head Abbot bowed in return. “I hope you have been well, Sonami.”

“As much as I can be.”

The cart was just big enough for two seated face-to-face. On the inside it was shockingly plain, simple red cushions over rosewood so dark it was almost black. Sonami pulsed gently through the Slack, and the cart began to move, floating serenely over the ground. For one so young and untrained, their slackcraft had an elegance and a simplicity to it that the Head Abbot appreciated. As the white walls and wooden bridges of the Great High Palace drifted past the cart’s embroidered windows, he asked, “Has your mother spoken to you about coming to the monastery?”

Sonami shook their head. “I only wish.”

“I see.” The Head Abbot had hoped that the summons were about the fate of the child—though perhaps “hope” was too strong a word when it came to matters concerning the Protector.

Sonami said quietly, hands folded together, “She has decided that I should apprentice with the masters of forest-nature in the Tensorate.”

“Is that so?”

The child stared at their feet. “She has not said it directly. But Mother has ways of making her wishes known.”

“Well, perhaps our discussion today might change her mind.”

“Discussion?” Sonami looked at the Head Abbot, alarmed. “Then no one has told you?”

“What have they not told me?”

“If you’re asking, it means they haven’t. . . .” The child subsided into their seat with a sigh. “Then it is not my place to tell you, either.”

The Head Abbot had no idea what the child meant. A mystery to be solved at the end of this journey, he thought.

Sonami said, “When you agreed to help Mother with the riots last summer, what exactly did you ask for in return?”

“I asked for one of her children to be sent to the monastery.”

“And did you say my name, specifically?”

The Head Abbot chuckled. “No one would be so bold, with such a direct request. I cannot imagine how the Protector would have responded. Of course, it was expected that she would send you eventually. That was what we had hoped for, wasn’t it?” All her older children had already had their roles in the administration parceled out to them. Sonami was the only one left.

The child frowned and then looked out of the window. The cart was approaching a marvel of slackcraft: a massive square of water that stood unsupported, enveloping the center of the Grand Palace. A hundred yields high and a thousand yields in length and breadth, the moat-cube was large enough to swallow fifty houses. Golden fish bigger than a child’s head sluiced through crystalline turquoise.

Sonami tugged gently on the Slack, and the waters parted just enough to admit the cart. Curious fish swam around this intrusion into their habitat. The cart was headed for the innermost sanctuary of the Grand Palace, the place where only the Protector, her closest advisors, and her family were admitted. Head Abbot Sung had never seen it himself, until now.

The cart exited the water into the hollow center of the cube. A lifetime of purging emotion and base desire had not prepared the Head Abbot for the spectacle of the Protector’s sanctuary. Stone floated on water, slabs of gray forming a base for a tessellation of square buildings woven out of wood of every color. Trees—cherry, willow, ash—entwined with one another, roots and branches knitting into nets through which light dappled: lantern light, dancing from the enormous paper globes that hung glowing in the air.

Then the Head Abbot realized that the trees and the buildings were one and the same. Some unknown Tensor architect had knitted living wood around stone foundations, folded them into right-angled, geometric shapes indistinguishable from traditional construction. Even the carvings on the ends of roof beams were live wood, guided into precise shape by slackcraft. Dragons and phoenixes and flaming lions lived and breathed and grew.

“It took a lot of work,” said Sonami, to the Head Abbot’s fresh, unbelieving intake of air.

“Did your mother do this?”

“No, I did.” As the Head Abbot frowned, they added, “I, and a few others. But it was I who directed the design.” The child looked out at their handiwork. “The old sanctuary was designed by someone who was purged after the riots. Mother wanted it changed.”

“And she asked you to do it?”

Sonami nodded. “It was a test. I did not know it at that time, but it was.”

“It’s very well done.”

“Mother says I have talents that are best not wasted. It’s a rare gift, she says.”

Sonami stopped the cart under the canopy of two intertwined cherry trees, one red and one white. As they disembarked, Sonami said, quietly, “You should not have given my mother space to interpret your request however she wished.”

The child led the Head Abbot up a series of gentle stone steps. As he walked down a corridor of wood framed by windows of delicate silkscreen, the Head Abbot steeled himself. If the Protector imagined he would give up on their agreement without a fight, she was wrong. The ancient codes that governed such things ran deeper than the rivers and older than her blood. She could not throw them away so easily. To disrespect them would be to call into question the very nature of authority itself. And she, a descendant of foreign invaders into this land, would not want that.

She had promised the monastery one of her children, and she would give the monastery one of her children. The Head Abbot would see to that.

With a gesture, Sonami rolled aside the white silk door protecting their destination. Cool air gusted around the Head Abbot’s ankles and neck, and enveloped him as he stepped inside.

And then he heard it: the high, thin wailing of a newborn.

A baby. A child.

The Head Abbot shut his eyes and silently recited a centering sutra before following Sonami past the privacy screens that had been set up in the room.

Protector Sanao reclined on a divan, supported by cushions of yellow silk, her face unpainted and her hair gathered cleanly in a bun on her head like a farmer girl’s. She wore plain robes, the thick linen dyed dark blue, with none of the finery associated with her office. But she didn’t need ornamentation to occupy the room as the sun occupies the sky.

“Venerable One,” she said, her voice hard and smooth as marble, “I’ve brought you here to settle our debt from last summer.”

The Head Abbot had already seen all he needed: the looseness of her robes, the flushed skin that spoke of her recent exertions. The mysteries that had plagued him like summer heat—her public disappearance, Sonami’s cryptic remarks—unraveled like old yarn.

The Protector pointed, and one of her aides, a Tensor barely older than Sonami, ran forward to pull the red cloth off the woven basket on the table between them.

The Head Abbot knew what was in that basket, and he mentally prepared for the moment he had to look inside. Yet when that moment came, he blinked in surprise. Inside, swaddled in cloth, was not one red-faced, writhing infant, but two. One of them was crying; the other looked like it wanted to, but hadn’t figured out how.

“Twins,” the Protector simply said.

The Head Abbot looked at her and then back at the basket. Words would not come to him.

“You asked a blood price, and I am paying fully, and a little bit more. The fates conspired to double our blessings. Consider this gesture of generosity a measure of my gratitude for the monastery’s support last year.”

The crying infant stopped wailing to stare up at the Head Abbot. It had mismatched eyes, one brown, one yellowish. Its face crumpled in confusion, or some other unreadable emotion—it was only an infant, after all. Then it started crying again. Finally, the other twin joined in.

The Head Abbot’s feelings swung like a pendulum. Anger at himself, for not having predicted this. Disgust at the Protector, for having done this.

The Protector folded her hands together. “They are yours now. Do with them as you wish.”

“The Grand Monastery does not apprentice children younger than six,” he said. And it was true. They had no facilities, no resources to deal with the unannounced arrival of two hungry newborns. “I will take them to one of the minor monasteries that has an orphanage, perhaps—”

“I did not birth these children to have them raised by nuns in some gutter district,” the Protector said crisply.

Head Abbot Sung found himself at a loss for words again.

“Very well,” she said. “If the Grand Monastery will not take them, I will raise them myself until they are six. You may return for them then.” She gestured to the Tensor aide. “Xiaoyang.”

The aide replaced the red cloth and took the basket away, disappearing behind the wall of painted silk that stood behind the Protector.

The Protector smiled at the Head Abbot like a tiger would. “I am sure you will find them adequate when you return,” she said smoothly.

He stared at her.

“Do you contest the fulfillment of our agreement?”

“No, Your Eminence.” He bowed in obeisance. What else could he do?

Sonami led him back out. They both settled into the cart and sat there awhile in silence.

The Head Abbot said to the somber child, “I am sorry.”

Sonami shook their head. “You tried your best. Mother is Mother. She does what she wants.”

“Indeed.” He folded his hands together. “But I don’t understand the purpose of twins.” She must have had a reason for conceiving two children.

“It was an accident,” Sonami said. “Conception through slackcraft has its risks.”

“But why would she keep both infants?”

Sonami stared. “Mother is not infinitely cruel.”

They started the cart moving again. As it slid back through the walls of water, Sonami said, “I will make sure the children are taken care of. I will look after them myself.”

Their voice, although small, was cool and calm. The Head Abbot imagined that in maturity, Sonami might sound not so different from their mother.

He asked, “Will your mother allow that?”

“She will. I’ll make sure of it.”

The Head Abbot looked out at the marvels passing by without comment. How easily she had outmaneuvered him. He had stumbled in like a baby rabbit, eyes fused shut, and she had been the fox lying in wait, licking its chops. Here, at last, was the true face of the woman who had taken the derelict Protectorate of her ancestors—a feeble nation cowering in the shadow of almost-forgotten glories—and expanded it until her iron grip controlled more than half of known Ea.

Sonami said, “Venerable One, do you believe in the power of the fortunes?”

“Of course, child. They are what guides us and shapes the Slack.”

The child nodded. “The fortunes didn’t give Mother twins for no reason. That means that if there’s a plan, she’s not the one controlling it. And that does make me feel better.” A small, brief smile overtook their face. “Perhaps this is for the best.”

The Head Abbot blinked. This child, features still cushioned by the fat of innocence, spoke with the quiet confidence many took a lifetime to achieve. He had always suspected they were extraordinary, and not just because of their proficiency with slackcraft. When Sonami had first approached him with a desire to be admitted to the monastery, he had thought that with the right guidance, the child might one day grow up to take his place as Head Abbot, with all the secrets tied to that office.

Now none of them would ever know. That version of the future had been sealed off from them.

“Perhaps this is for the best,” he agreed.

Chapter Two

YEAR SIX

THE MASSIVE CART THAT came from the Great High Palace was one of those that filled the width of streets in processions, painted lucky red and silk-draped in yet more red. Head Abbot Sung stood at the top of the stairs and watched its bright, meandering passage up the road that led to the Grand Monastery. The morning fog had long since retreated from the tree-embroidered mountains that formed Chengbee’s backbone, and the light breeze scattered cherry blossom petals around his sandals.

The Head Abbot stood tall, but privately he was glad that the twins were coming to him, instead of the other way around. It was a long way down the mountain, and a long way up to the Great High Palace, and in recent years his knees had begun to hurt during the morning rituals and when thunderstorms were coming. The onset of age was like a dam breaking: slowly at first, then all at once.

Sonami was the first to exit the cart, a graceful figure wrapped in a light silk dress the color of chrysanthemums and jade. She had chosen her gender the same year the twins were born and had grown well into that role. As a young woman of twenty, she had her mother’s height, and the fine features of her face bore more than a passing resemblance to the Protector’s.

Two near-identical children tumbled out of the cart behind her, laden with packs. One landed with their soles a hip’s width apart, fists lightly curled, balancing on the balls of their feet. The child with the mismatched eyes. The other one straightened up and stared at the Head Abbot with an intensity that was unnerving for one so young.

The Head Abbot bowed to them, and Sonami bowed back. “Venerable One,” she said. “Allow me to introduce you to your new charges.”

She touched the first child on their shoulder. “This is Mokoya.” She tapped the second one, whose wide dark eyes remained fixed on the Head Abbot. “And this is Akeha.”

“I welcome you to the Grand Monastery,” the Head Abbot said. “Today you embark on a new journey of learning and discipline.”

The children said nothing. The first child’s face presented a scowl, while the second one didn’t even blink.

“Go on,” Sonami said gently.

A junior monk and nun waited behind the Head Abbot. “Go with them,” he told the children. “They will show you to your rooms.”

The children looked at each other, and the Head Abbot felt something pass between them in the Slack, as though they were communicating. He looked quizzically at Sonami, who only smiled.

The children seemed to come to an agreement, and that agreement was not to put up a fight. Silently and perfunctorily, they trudged after the waiting acolytes.

The first child, the odd-eyed one, took fewer than ten steps before their resolve shattered. They dropped their pack and ran back to Sonami, clutching the fine silk of her dress in their fists.

“Mokoya,” Sonami sighed. She dropped to one knee and took the child’s hands in her own. “We’ve talked about this.”

“Why can’t you come with us?” A tremor belied the stubborn pout in their voice.

“Because I’m going to the Tensorate academy. Today you begin training for monastic life. Head Abbot Sung will take care of you. All right?”

Their face folded up, equal parts rage and grief. Sonami said, “And you have Akeha. You have each other; you won’t be alone.”

The other child walked over and put a hand on their sibling’s shoulder. The first flung themselves at Sonami in a desperate hug.

Sonami held them. “Go on. You know this is what Mother wants.”

The child detached from Sonami’s grasp and took their sibling’s hand. Without a word, they marched, sibling and all, back to where the acolytes waited with the abandoned pack. The Head Abbot had expected tears, but none remained. They did not turn back to look at Sonami again.

The other child pinned the Head Abbot with an intense, baleful gaze as they walked by.

Sonami got to her feet with a sigh and watched the twins go. “They are good children,” she said softly. “Understandably upset about leaving the only home they’ve ever known. But once the pain wears off, they’ll give you no trouble.” With a touch of amusement, she added, “Well, not much trouble, in any case.”

The Head Abbot studied the young woman now standing before him. The two of them had barely spoken in the last five years; the Head Abbot’s messages through the talker network had been gently but firmly rebuffed. He had tried for a long time to divine if this distance was the Protector’s doing or Sonami’s choice, but in the end had concluded that he had to respect and accept it. As with all things in life.

“You raised these children yourself,” he observed.

Sonami nodded.

“I must confess I’m surprised. Did your mother not intend for you to enter the Tensorate before this?”

Sonami smiled slightly. “We agreed that I would do so after the children had been transferred to the Grand Monastery.”

“Such concessions come with a price. What did you promise her in return?”

Her smile did not change as she said, “Grandchildren.”

The Head Abbot swallowed his first response. Into his silence, Sonami interjected, “Of all her daughters, Mother was most interested in my gifts in slackcraft. She thought any children I had would have potential.”

Carefully, he asked, “And this—you are happy with this?”

“It is how it has to be.”

The Head Abbot sighed. Sonami laughed lightly. “Venerable One, I am glad the children will be given to your care. I am confident they will be well taken care of.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me about them?”

Sonami hesitated. He watched intently as her answer percolated through layers and layers of careful thought.

Finally she said, “Do you remember you told me once that there was something different about me, as though the fortunes had embroidered a bright pattern in my soul?”

“I do.” And he had believed it sincerely.

“At that time I dismissed it as flattery, something an old man would say to fool a young child. But . . . I think I understand now.” Sonami frowned. “There’s something about these children that’s different. I don’t know what it is. One of them . . .” The Head Abbot frowned, and Sonami shrugged. “I don’t want to say too much. You will see for yourself. But I am glad that you will be directing their destinies, instead of Mother.”

“I see.”

“Trust in the fortunes,” Sonami said. “They will guide you well.”

Chapter Three

YEAR NINE

MOKOYA FINALLY MET DREAMS deep into the second night-cycle. Their breathing slowed and evened. Akeha opened their eyes surreptitiously, adjusting to the dark of the room, to confirm that their twin was indeed asleep.

Winter had silenced the frogs that sang outside the windows on warmer days. In that quiet, Akeha cautiously cleared their mindeye and tapped into the Slack. The world of arch-energies lay calm around the sleeping bundle of their twin. Mokoya had nightmares sometimes, and on those nights the Slack seethed around them like a wild river. But not tonight. In Akeha’s mindeye, the Slack enfolded their twin like a gentle blanket, shimmering in the colors of the five natures.

If there were no nightmares tonight, then Akeha felt better about what they were about to do.

They left Mokoya sleeping in their shared bedroom and quietly slipped through the open doorway.

The sleeping quarters for initiates and junior acolytes were patrolled at night by Master Yeo, the disciplinarian, whose booming voice and bamboo switch they feared almost as much as her withering stare. Akeha caught glimpses of her silhouette patrolling the pavilion they had to cross, and shivered.

Akeha knew how to muffle their footsteps, thickening the air around their feet so that sound was silenced. But they had not yet figured out how to turn themselves invisible. The Slack was elastic, but not infinitely so. They had to think of something else.

A prayer altar sat a dozen yields away, garnished with the usual accoutrements. One of those was a tray of prayer balls, stacked into a silver pyramid.

There. First, they got into a runner’s position. Then, with a tug through water-nature so small no one else noticed it, they toppled the prayer balls over.

Master Yeo whipped around and went to investigate the noise. Akeha streaked across the pavilion, unseen, while her back was turned.

Success.

Akeha tiptoed through the Grand Monastery, all the way to the vegetable gardens in the back, the soil bare and hard in the winter frost. Here, too, were the raptor enclosures, and as Akeha crept through the empty cabbage rows, the animals yipped excitedly, teeth and claws shining in the gloom.

“Quiet.” A small gesture through the Slack calmed them. “It’s just me.”

The Grand Monastery was set against the hard spikes of Golden Phoenix Mountain, whose tree-covered sides formed a forbidding, fog-shrouded wall. Its grounds were protected by a slackcraft fence, humming electricity ready to shock anyone who tried to get past it.

Except here, next to the gardens. One of the charge devices generating the fence, a hollow ball filled with blue light, flickered in and out of service. The fence was broken.

No one had noticed. The device was supposed to sound an alarm when it failed or was tampered with. Somehow, that had not happened.

Akeha hadn’t told anybody about this discovery. Not even Mokoya.

Now they hesitated. Mokoya would be upset that they were doing this. Several days ago their twin had woken, weeping, from a nightmare in which Akeha was attacked by a kirin in the mountain forest. Akeha had reassured them that firstly, kirin were extinct: nobody had seen one for a hundred years. And secondly, there was no way of getting into the forest.

Except now there was.

Akeha knew that if they’d told Mokoya about the broken fence, Mokoya would have stopped them from going. So they had said nothing.

They stepped past the buzzing charge device and into the wilderness.

The forest whispered around Akeha. The sky was clear enough and the moon bright enough that they weren’t afraid of getting lost. The ground changed as they wandered farther from the monastery, soft dry leaves yielding to mountain rock. Winter air bit at their exposed cheeks and knuckles.

Legends haunted Golden Phoenix Mountain. Akeha and Mokoya had spent hours in the Grand Monastery’s library, thumbing through yellowed pages and absorbing them all. A diamond-studded road, it was said, led to a series of endless caves with alabaster walls, filled with sweet spring water and miraculous fruit trees that no person of the seas or the black-soiled lands had ever seen before. Akeha was determined to find out if it was true.

A path emerged from the unchecked wilderness of the forest. In the moonlight the pebbles embedded in its dirt shone like diamonds.

Akeha followed it. The path led them on a gentle climb that threaded along the mountain’s slope. The trees parted, but the forest remained thick around them.

Every now and then, they would look up through the netting of leaves, tracking the moon’s passage across the sky. They had to stay aware of the time. They couldn’t get caught.

Akeha came to a small clearing in the forest, a break in the tree cover. The path they had been following forked here, one branch headed downhill, and the other headed up, into the depths of mountain territory. If there were secret caves in the mountains, Akeha thought, the second path would surely lead them there.

Something moved behind them, a large and unexpected presence. Akeha froze, and listened.

The forest breathed. Still. Silent. Akeha counted numbers as they waited, but there was nothing. It was just their imagination.

There was that sutra, the First Sutra, that Mokoya liked to recite in their head when they were nervous: The Slack is all, and all is the Slack, and a long-winded list of nonsense about the five natures. Akeha had a better, shorter list:

Earth, for gravity;

Water, for motion;

Fire, for hot and cold;

Forest, for flesh and blood;

Metal, for electricity.

Everything else is extra.

They breathed in, and out. Cleared their mindeye, and—

The kirin lurched out of the shadows at the same second they felt its presence in the Slack.

Akeha jumped backward, tripped foot over foot, landed on the flat of their palm. Pain shot up their arm. The kirin reared, wings swallowing the sky, head brushing the top of the trees, screech shaking the bones of the earth. A creature that was half bird, half lion, and all terror.

Akeha panicked. They’d never fought anything this big before. The creature before them was a blinding light in the Slack, sinew and flesh and bone. And blood. Warm blood surged through its veins. Overwhelmed by terror, they could only think, I have to stop it.

They tensed through water-nature, slowed the flow of blood by force, and stopped the kirin’s heart.

The kirin shrieked in pain. Startled, Akeha let go. They’d never heard anything scream like that before. Their stomach twisted, heavy and sour.

And then the kirin staggered as if struck, as power surged through the Slack from somewhere else. The creature fell to its knees, missing Akeha by a handsbreadth. Its breath was hot on their face.

With a noise that was both a groan and a cry, the kirin staggered to its feet and retreated into the trees. Badly hurt or just badly shaken, the creature had had enough. Akeha watched it vanish into the shadows, the rustle of its passage fading.

Mokoya stood on the path behind them, trembling, wide-eyed, and angry. Akeha got slowly to their feet. Their arm sang with pain where it had broken their fall. “How did you find me?”

“I told you. I saw you in the dream.”

“It was just a dream.”

“It wasn’t just a dream. I saw it exactly like it happened. When I woke up, you were gone, and I knew where you went.”

And Mokoya had predicted the kirin, too. The creature was supposed to be extinct. But they had known it would appear. How?

Akeha frowned. “Are you saying you dream about the future? Only prophets do that.” There hadn’t been a prophet recorded in the Protectorate for hundreds of years.

Mokoya bit their lip, and Akeha recognized that expression. Their sibling was one surge of anger away from tears. They grabbed their twin’s hand, balled into a hard fist that would not relax. “Moko.”

“You could have died. What were you doing?”

Akeha glanced toward the hidden peak of Golden Phoenix Mountain. “I was looking for the hidden caves.”

“Why?”

They shrugged. “We need somewhere to run if Mother comes to take us. I don’t want to go back.”

Mokoya pulled their hand away. “She won’t come. She doesn’t care about us.”

They turned so that Akeha couldn’t see their face. But Akeha knew with absolute clarity that they were more frightened than angry. The twins had a sense of each other, of emotions and anxieties, and they could hear each other’s voices through the Slack if they listened hard enough.

“Don’t be frightened,” Akeha said. “I’ll protect you.”

“Protect me from what? The future?”

“Anything.”

Mokoya turned back, cheeks painted with damp streaks. “What if it’s true? What if I’m dreaming about things that haven’t happened yet?”

“I said anything,” Akeha repeated, and pulled their twin into a fierce hug that blanketed up all protests. “We don’t have to tell anyone. It can be our secret.”

Mokoya settled into the hug, but their mood remained rough and shaky, and Akeha knew they weren’t convinced or comforted by that, either. “Let’s go back,” Akeha said. “Before anyone notices we’re gone.” The ache in their arm had almost subsided, and the fear and nervousness had faded into whispers. They could pretend that nothing had happened.

* * *

It was the sobbing that woke Akeha. All night they had floated on the edge between sleep and consciousness, plagued by visions of nightmarish shapes. Now their twin was hunched over at the edge of their shared sleeping mat, skinny frame shaking in the dark.

Akeha crawled over and tapped them on the shoulder. When Mokoya didn’t respond, they shifted so that the both of them were face-to-face. Mokoya’s was a crumpled, runny mess of fear and desperation. Another bad dream: the Slack seethed with the stress that trailed in the wake of their twin’s nightmares. It had been weeks since the last one, but the intensity of the dreams seemed to be getting worse.

Mokoya stopped to gulp down two lungfuls of freezing night air, then continued crying. Akeha reached out and took their hands and said nothing. This was becoming a familiar routine.

Eventually Mokoya’s sobbing petered into small sniffles. They wiped their snot with a thick sleeve as Akeha asked, “What’s happening?”

They shook their head, lips still sealed. Akeha pressed on: “What did you see?”

“Bad things.”

“I know it was bad things. What kind?”

Mokoya could not meet their eyes. “I saw a naga.”

“Where? Here?”

Mokoya shook their head. “At the spring procession.”

The spring procession was in two weeks, in the center of Chengbee. As Akeha considered this bit of information, Mokoya said, “You were there.”

“Why would I be at the spring procession?”

“I don’t know, you were in the forest too, how am I supposed to know what’s going to happen, I don’t control any—”

“Okay, okay. There’s a naga at the spring procession. I’m also there.”

“We were both there.”

“Of course. What happened?”

“It fell. The naga. It was flying, it took over the sky. Something happened. It fell onto the houses.”

As Akeha frowned, Mokoya added, “People got hurt.”

“Why did it fall? Was it attacking the city?”

“I don’t know,” Mokoya hissed, and their expression, which had been approaching normality, slid back toward furious tears. “I just saw it.”

“Did you get hurt?”

Mokoya buried their face in their hands, fingernails digging into the skin. “I don’t know. It just happened.”

Akeha gently pulled their hands away from their face. Mokoya put up a token resistance, and their hands slowly uncurled in Akeha’s. “Listen,” they said. “That was just a silly dream. Naga don’t come this far north. They live in the unknown south, in the Quarterlands, right? Even when they get lost, they don’t go farther than Katau Kebang. They can’t reach Chengbee. It’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible.”

“Well, somebody will see it, right? And then they’ll catch it. So it won’t happen.”

“It was really big, Keha. Naga are really big.”

“I know.”

“You said the same thing about the kirin.”

“That was different.”

“You said kirin don’t exist anymore. And there was one. Just as I saw in my dream.”

Akeha sighed and let go of Mokoya’s hands. They were right. There was no easy explanation that could wave away what Mokoya had seen.

The twins looked at each other in the half-dark chill, not daring to voice their fears. There was always an explanation, that was what they had been taught, that was the way they had been raised, but this—the Slack was doing something strange to Mokoya, when it shouldn’t.

“We need to tell somebody,” Mokoya said.

This time it was Akeha’s turn to ball their hands into fists. “And who are we supposed to tell?”

“One of the adults.” As Akeha’s face worked into a scowl, Mokoya said, “We have to tell someone. We can’t fix this by ourselves.”

“Who says we have to fix anything?”

“People are going to get hurt if we do nothing, Keha. I have to tell someone.”

Akeha hated the way Mokoya emphasized the word “I.” It was a clear division, almost a threat. Hadn’t they agreed to do everything together? “They’re not going to believe you.”

“They will. The Head Abbot will.”

“And if he believes you? What happens then? Do they call you a prophet?”

Mokoya coiled their shoulders in a shrug. “I don’t know. Who cares? It’s more important to stop the dream from happening.”

Akeha sat back on their heels and blew a hot breath through their teeth. They weren’t sure what to say.

“I’m going to tell him tomorrow,” Mokoya said.

“Fine.” Akeha unfolded from their crouch and went back to their side of the sleeping mat. They could sense Mokoya’s stare as they curled up on the roughly woven surface and shut their eyes.

“Are you angry with me?”

“No,” they said, but they didn’t turn around. “Go back to sleep.”

Chapter Four

AKEHA PROWLED THE INN’S upper-floor balcony. The creaky strip of wine-stained wood overlooked the thoroughfare through which the spring procession clanged, swayed, spun, and marched. On either side, the balconies bulged with cheering, laughing, red-cheeked citizens. In contrast, this one was still and silent, lined with a full troupe of pugilists hand-selected from the most senior acolytes in the Grand Monastery. And then there was the Head Abbot himself, breathing slowly and evenly, calm and implacable as a mountain.

“Stop that,” Mokoya hissed, as Akeha turned on an impatient foot to begin a new circuit of the balcony.

Mokoya had lied to the Head Abbot in order to bring them all here. They’d said nothing about the kirin in the forest, or the broken fence. Instead they claimed to have foreseen the incident last week where two of the junior acolytes broke the statues of Patience and Gratitude that guarded the front pavilion. Akeha had laughed about them lying to an adult, and had gotten kicked in the shins for their trouble.

More surprising was the fact that the Head Abbot had believed them without question. Every now and then, Akeha caught him staring across the length of the balcony at Mokoya, whose gaze was trained unwaveringly on the sky. Akeha felt like he knew something, something he wasn’t telling either of them.

They rocked back and forth on the balls of their feet, humming tunelessly. Mokoya glared.

Downstairs, the procession continued on its multihued, clamorous way, unaware of the tensions strung overhead. The dancers and floats would thread their way through Chengbee’s ant-nest streets before passing by the Imperial Square, to present themselves to the Protector and the upper echelons of the Tensorate. The Protector’s family were expected to be in attendance as well. Sonami would be there. Everybody would.

Everybody except for us, Akeha thought. Did they even count as the Protector’s family anymore?

Nearby, Mokoya went suddenly still and alert. What is it? Akeha thought at them.

I don’t know. It’s something.

The empty skies darkened from gray to blue as sunfall came. Along the thoroughfare, sunballs winked to life, illuminating the excitement-flushed crowd with a soft glow.

Wasn’t it at sunfall, your vision?

Mokoya squinted at the sky, as if they were trying to listen to a small scratching sound from very far away.

Akeha moved so that they stood side-by-side, the edges of their palms brushing. It was easier to clear their mindeye like this, with their twin as a steadying, calming anchor.

They remembered the way the kirin had appeared to them, a blaze of light so bright it seemed to squeeze the Slack around it. People shone on the surface of the Slack, but not like that. Not that intensely.

If the naga was the same way, they would feel it in the shape of the Slack before it appeared. Sinew and flesh and bone and blood. Akeha concentrated, trying to widen the scope of their mindeye as much as possible, see as far as possible in the Slack—

There. There, Moko, there!

The distortion in the Slack was moving fast, like a meteor, destructive, and the light was coming toward them like a transport headlight down a tunnel—

Sinew. And flesh. And bone. And blood.

The naga was massive, wingspan of ten houses, clawed feet and barbed tail, mouth big enough to swallow a person whole. It was more raptor than serpent, hollow-boned and warm-blooded. That blood rushed swift and strong as a monsoon river. It called to Akeha.

They focused on that blood as the naga burst over the horizon, over the tops of roofs, blocking out the screams because they had to get the timing exactly right—

Akeha clenched their fist, and the raging torrents of blood froze.

The naga’s scream thrust like a spear through the eardrums. The massive creature twisted in the air, and Akeha opened their eyes to see it coming toward the inn like a hailstorm. Their breath caught.

Someone grabbed them by the collar. “Jump!” was the instruction. The Head Abbot had pulled the twins together, and Akeha jumped, their legs and body going numb as things collapsed around them. Not just the inn, which rained planks and splinters and bricks around them as they hit the ground with a bone-shattering thud. Everything fell.

Akeha struggled upright, getting off the ground, trying to see the damage that had been done. Pain shot through their ankle, and they stumbled. Something reached around them: Mokoya, holding them up with trembling arms.

The naga had come down on the row of houses where the inn used to be. It groaned, a wild rumbling sound, but the light it burned in the Slack was fading. Sunfall was complete. The shapes of people ran to and fro in the darkness, some screaming, some holding their heads. One of the procession dancers wailed and screamed as she tried to push a block of wood, a broken pillar, off the shape of another dancer crumpled on the ground. Surprisingly, there was no blood. The lights festooning the dead dancer’s dress still glowed and sparkled, as if nothing had happened. They had lost a shoe as they fell.

Oily smoke crept through the air as the sounds of crackling—like offerings for the dead—rose up around them. Or was it merely the rushing of blood in Akeha’s ears? Mokoya was shaking them, saying syllables that wouldn’t gel into words.

Things had happened exactly as Mokoya saw them. Why hadn’t they realized this?

* * *

One night-cycle after Mokoya’s whimpering had been silenced by unconsciousness, Akeha admitted to themselves that they were not following their twin into sleep at all. They slowly sat up in the gloom, careful not to disturb the shallowly breathing mound next to them.

The half hour before the sun returned to the skies was the coldest. Two night-cycles had passed, and a whole new day approached. Akeha’s fingers were numb, and their vision shone with waves of exhaustion, but rest and darkness would not come. Their mind would not settle.

Akeha, separated from their twin, had spent nearly two hours being questioned by the senior acolytes and the Head Abbot himself, passed around like cracked tableware. They repeated their story over and over: They had not intended to kill the naga. They wanted to send it away. Once or twice, they had almost slipped and mentioned the kirin in the forest, where they were not supposed to have been. But they caught themselves in time.

Eventually they had been allowed to return to their bedroom, where they found Mokoya sitting with their chin tucked against their knees, expression blank. And then they had to explain, for the final time, that they hadn’t really meant to kill the naga. They hadn’t meant to make the prophecy come true.

Akeha watched Mokoya as they slept. For once, they were not sure what their twin believed. No, Mokoya was not obliged to talk to them. And they were probably as tired as Akeha was, and frightened too.

But they wished Mokoya had said something.

Akeha got to their feet and shuffled toward the door. There was no point in lying still and trying to fall asleep. They knew it wouldn’t happen.

They crept around the austere gray sprawl of the Grand Monastery, letting the cold slow their blood and heartbeat where their mind wouldn’t. These were the wide corridors they and Mokoya had breathlessly run down between lessons, the stones upon which they had both sat for hours meditating, the courtyards in which they had sparred, using sticks and slackcraft as weapons.

Akeha’s childhood memories of the Great High Palace stitched together snatches of color and heavy fragrances with zither song and faraway, gentle laughter. They used to feel a jolt of strong, unnamable emotion whenever they thought about it, but those emotions had faded as the seasons left, and came back, and left again. The Grand Monastery was their home now.

A circle of light glowed in the distance, glimpsed between the even wooden teeth of intersecting corridors. The Head Abbot was not yet asleep.

For reasons they couldn’t quite understand, Akeha found themselves creeping toward the Head Abbot’s quarters. As they got closer, they heard voices: the Head Abbot had a visitor. In the deepest part of night.

Akeha shuffled into a crouch and pressed against the wall of the Head Abbot’s room, underneath the window. Their heart pulsed in their throat: if they were caught, they didn’t know what they would say.

“This is a generous offer,” said a high, crisp voice. Akeha’s memories of the Great High Palace came unbound in a wild cascade. That voice belonged to bright, wide halls with climate control and murmuring, attentive audiences. Second Sister Kinami—wasn’t she the Chief Royal Diplomat now, overseeing the Ministry of Diplomacy whose fingers stretched everywhere the Protectorate held land?

“It’s hardly an offer,” the Head Abbot said. “I’d call it a demand.”

“Well, you know Mother. Negotiating is not one of her great interests.”

“We made a compact, a blood deal. She cannot simply back out of it as it suits her wishes.”

“Except she isn’t backing out of anything. She promised you one child. She gave you two. At the end of it, you’ll still have one.”

Akeha dug their nails into their palm to stop from shaking. One leg was already feeling the strain from the unnatural crouch.

Kinami said, “Mother has requested only the prophet’s return. You can keep the other one. That fulfills the terms of the deal.”

“You speak of them as though they are mere numbers on a ledger. They’re children. You cannot just move them from one column to the next.”

Silence from the other end. Akeha could imagine the cold, arch expression on Kinami’s face. Of all their older sisters, Kinami was the closest in temperament to Mother, and even as a small child, Akeha had hated her. The Head Abbot had to tell her no. Tell her to go away.

“I see. I suppose I should have expected this. After all, treating people like numbers is one of your mother’s specialties.”

Akeha scrunched their face up to keep from screaming. Of course the Head Abbot wouldn’t fight Mother’s wishes. Nobody would.

“You’ll have a week to make the arrangements. Let the prophet say their good-byes. It should be plenty of time.”

The meeting was ending. Akeha had to get away. They kept to their crouch for two steps, and then started running, head ducked, chest constricting in pain. Wooden floorboards creaked as their soft-soled shoes slapped over them.

By some miracle, Akeha got back to their room without being stopped. They crashed against the wall next to the door and slid to the floor, gasping, their calves burning.

Mokoya sat up, robes mussed and eyes wide. “What happened? Keha? What is it?”

The conversation between Kinami and the Head Abbot repeated in Akeha’s head in a deathly loop. “They’re coming for you.”

“Who?”

“Mother. The Tensorate.”

Mokoya struggled to clumsy feet, wiping the sleep from their face. “For us?”

“No. Just you.”

Mokoya froze as though struck by lightning. “They can’t do that.”

Akeha pressed their head into the wall’s unyielding surface and closed their eyes. They felt tired, all the way deep in their neck and shoulders and head. Their muscles shook, their heart wouldn’t stop beating. “They can do whatever they want.”

“No.” Mokoya’s voice was soft but determined. Akeha felt fingers close around their hand and tighten vise-like. “Keha, we have to do something.”

Chapter Five

THE MOON RULED THE skies as the children set out past the guardians of their sleeping quarters, past the empty vegetable garden, past the raptors and through the broken fence. When it was just them and the forest again, Akeha stopped to adjust the heavy pack they had strapped on. Their exertions clouded the air with white puffs.

“Come on,” Mokoya hissed. “We need to get as far as possible before they realize we’re gone.”

Akeha hesitated, and they said, “Keha.” Then they turned and set off into the wooded depths without checking to see if Akeha followed.

Mokoya’s steady gait never wavered, retracing the route they knew: through the trees, toward the shining path that led up to the peak of the mountain.

“If the kirin comes back, you’ll kill it, won’t you?” Mokoya said, as they walked.

Akeha didn’t reply. They were mentally counting the biscuits and dried rice cakes stuffed into the packs, five days’ worth of stealing from the monastery’s kitchens. It would last them three days, four if they skipped meals. And they needed to find a source of clean water sooner than that.

Akeha had lagged behind, footsteps slowed by thought. Mokoya stomped over, and it was almost a shock when they seized Akeha’s hand. “Keha. We have to stay together.”

“This is a mistake,” Akeha whispered. “Let’s go back to the monastery.”

In the moonlight, Mokoya’s face looked sharp and angry. “And let them take you away from me?” Even though the exact opposite was happening. “I’d rather die.”

Akeha pulled their hand away. “Stop spouting rubbish.”

“I’m not going back. Mother can’t do whatever she likes. I’m not a token on her chessboard.”

“I told you,” Akeha said bitterly. “You shouldn’t have said anything about your dream.”

“And you shouldn’t have killed that naga.”

Akeha peeled their lips back and hissed. That was enough. They turned their back to Mokoya and headed the way they’d come, feet slipping on the brittle dead leaves that had lain there all winter.

“Keha.” Mokoya lunged after them and grabbed their arm with both hands, fingers pressing through the layers of cloth hard enough to bruise. “I’m sorry, please, don’t leave me.”

Akeha wriggled out of Mokoya’s grasp, but stayed where they were. “Don’t be stupid.” They could no more leave their twin alone here than they could cut off their own arm.

They stood like this for a moment, two children lost against a backdrop of endless forest. The weak foliage shadow shifted uncomfortably as the moon rolled across the sky.

“You lead the way,” Akeha said.

Mokoya pointed. “The path’s over there.”

The sun rose, fell, and rose again as the children walked. A dull pain spread through Akeha’s soles, but they focused on putting their feet down, one after another, on the stone-studded path that led them up the mountainside. As the path dipped into a crevasse of rising granite walls, their calves and back started to cramp.

One sun-cycle later, they stopped to eat and rest. Akeha rotated their ankles, dismayed by how everything hurt. They had been walking for little more than half a day.

“There should be some caves up there,” Mokoya said, pointing into the half dark, where the path disappeared upward around a steep mountain face.

“Did you see that in a dream?”

“No,” they said, annoyance creeping into their voice. “I just have a feeling.”

Akeha leaned their head against Mokoya’s shoulder and shut their eyes. Their twin was right, it did feel damper around here, like there was resting water close by, and that could mean caves. Or something. They were tired of arguing.

Mokoya put an arm around them.

“They should be looking for us by now,” Akeha said.

“We should go,” Mokoya murmured.

So they packed up and continued on the path. It was alarming how fast the aches returned to their bodies. Mokoya was limping, heavily favoring their left leg.

“Are you hurt?” Akeha asked.

“It’s just blisters.” They stopped. “Keha—look!”

Mokoya pointed. White mist was lifting from the crags and hollows of the earth. In the distance, the path vanished into a slender mouth in the rock.

They’d found a cave. Against all the odds, they’d found it.

Mokoya picked a branch off the ground and tugged at fire-nature to light it. The mouth of the cave was steep and littered with sharp rocks which skinned Akeha’s palms as they scrambled up.

“Keha. Look.”

Mokoya held the improvised torch aloft in the cave mouth. The roof yawned fifty yields above their heads, thick with the chittering of bats. Somewhere in the vicinity, water ran, echoing off stone walls. Step by small step, the two children moved inward, sheltered in the torch’s circle of safety.

“It’s strange,” Akeha said.

“What is?”

“The floor is clean.” With all the bats singing above them, they should have been walking across a carpet of droppings. But their circle of light showed nothing.

Mokoya looked up. “There’s a barrier,” they said after a while. “Slackcraft.”

“Someone else comes here.”

“It has to be.”

“You think they live here? In the wild?”

“I don’t know.” Mokoya frowned. It was too late to turn back. “We’ll find out.”

As they ventured farther in, the walls of the cave opened up into a space huge enough to kill echoes. A breeze lingered around Akeha’s neck, its cold breath raising gooseflesh. Mokoya sucked in a breath. “Look.”

The dim shape of wooden crates, stacked upon one another, populated the cave floor. Akeha sent a cautious tendril out through the Slack and discovered warm pinpoints that responded to their slackcraft. A string of sunballs. Akeha tensed through metal-nature, and their glow filled the room.

“Great Slack.” Mokoya put the torch out as hundreds of heavy wooden crates, reinforced by tempered iron, revealed themselves. “What are they?”

Several years’ worth of dust coated the boxes. Akeha left long finger streaks across the top of one. It wasn’t labeled. As gray clouds danced around them, Akeha lifted the hinged lid. It was heavy, but it wasn’t locked.

The crate was stacked with lightcraft in the shape of lotuses, like the kind Akeha had seen some of the senior acolytes use in aerial sparring practice. Unlike the weathered equipment back in the monastery, these hadn’t seen much use. They looked thicker and stronger, too. Akeha touched one with slackcraft. There was barely any charge left, and whatever threads of metal-nature had been used to weave the energy in place had long since frayed.

Mokoya had pried open another crate, a long boxy one the shape of a coffin. “What are these?” They reached in and pulled out a long, thick metal rod, like a cudgel. The black carvings across its surface caught the yellow light as Mokoya experimentally twirled it.

“It looks like a weapon,” Akeha said. Mokoya had had the same thought, moving into a fighting crouch, cudgel balanced in two hands. It was too long for them: an adult’s weapon.

The cudgel hummed as Mokoya charged it with slackcraft. Neither twin had seen anything like it before. Mokoya swung it above their head with practiced ease, despite its length. “There must be hundreds of these,” they said, as they tilted it back and forth, examining it. “Why?”

“They’re war supplies,” Akeha said.

Mokoya blinked. “War? What kind of war? There hasn’t been a war for years.”

“Does it matter what kind? There are no good kinds of war.”

Mokoya looked troubled by this, and started swinging the cudgel again.

“Be careful,” Akeha warned, as the cudgel missed one of the crates by a fingerswidth.

As Mokoya swung the cudgel through another rotation, one end clipped Akeha in the shoulder. “You oaf,” Akeha spluttered, and kicked up the sand on the cave floor and sent it sweeping in a wave toward Mokoya.

The assault through water-nature sent their twin staggering. Mokoya fell, but was back on their feet instantly, growling. They jabbed the cudgel in Akeha’s direction.

The cudgel caught the thread of Mokoya’s slackcraft. It hummed, glowed, and a bolt of electricity arced from it and struck Akeha in the chest.

Akeha went crashing to the ground, stunned, as though someone had dropped a boulder on them. Their chest burned.

“Keha!” Mokoya dropped the cudgel and ran stumbling toward them, sliding on their knees across the cave floor. “Keha, say something. Keha, please.”

They couldn’t. Their chest hurt too much. Akeha tried moving their arms, tried sitting up, and doubled over in pain.

Something growled deep and low behind them. Mokoya’s eyes widened; their fingers trembled on Akeha’s arm.

A familiar shape moved into the circle of lights. As Akeha struggled onto their elbows, trying to work past the bolt’s paralyzing effect, the kirin reared up and screeched.

The creature lunged. Everything moved in a blur: the talons coming down, Mokoya throwing themselves over Akeha. Akeha tensed—Was it by instinct? Or something else?—and energy surged through the Slack, water-nature, as they shoved Mokoya away, before the kirin’s clawed feet struck—

The talons went through their side like it was paper. Akeha screamed, sensations burning through them. A clear and precise epiphany struck: They were going to die. There was no turning back. It was done.

Their blood soaked through layers of clothing as they lay on the ground, gasping, barely holding on to consciousness.

A crackle through the air, sharp smell of metal burning. The kirin screamed, and its limbs folded. Mokoya had picked the cudgel up. As the creature struggled to its feet, Mokoya struck it again. And again. And again. Their twin blazed with such fear and anger it punched through the wall of pain surrounding Akeha. They hit the kirin until it collapsed thrashing to the ground, until the convulsions subsided into twitching, until it fell heavy and still. The air reeked of burning flesh.

Akeha watched this all through a veil of increasing darkness. The world grew cold, and the pain was, at last, fading away. They were aware of Mokoya picking them up, screaming, pressing their head against their belly. Akeha was drifting away, and as they grew distant from their body, they began unraveling in the Slack, becoming pure energy.

Something pulled them back. Mokoya was tensing through forest-nature, trying to knit the torn flesh back together, trying to keep their failing heartbeat steady.

Akeha reached out through the Slack. Mokoya was so bright, so beautiful. Like a jewel shining, like a sunset over the sea. It’s okay, Moko. It’s better like this.

No. Keha, no. You have to. You can’t die. I won’t let you.

Now you can go back to the Great High Palace. You don’t have to worry.

I can’t, I won’t. Mokoya was crying so hard their body was shaking. They could not have spoken if they wanted to. If you die, I want to go with you.

I don’t want that. You have a good life ahead of you. Moko—

What’s the point? What’s the point of it?

Akeha struggled not to drift away entirely. They couldn’t leave Mokoya like this. It’s too late, Moko. You have to go on. I want you to.

The cavern filled with the sound of buzzing—a lightcraft in operation. Of all people, the Head Abbot appeared, sailing in like a bird, serenity turning to alarm as he took in the scene before him. How had he found them? A question for another time. The old man leapt off the lightcraft and hurried toward the twins.

A cool hand pressed against Akeha’s forehead, and warmth ran through them, healing warmth, tying them more securely to this world. “They’re still breathing,” the Head Abbot said. “We can save them. What happened? The kirin?”

Mokoya’s lungs operated in desperate gasps. “I killed it.”

“I know, Mokoya. She was one of the very last of her kind. She was trying to protect the cache. Don’t worry, you are both safe. Help is coming.”

Their twin formed words between the heaves of their chest. “I don’t want to be taken away. I don’t want Akeha to die.”

“Akeha will not die. I promise you that. Help is coming.”

“But they’re going to take me away.”

“Mokoya.” The Head Abbot sighed as Akeha tried to turn their head, tried to look at the expressions on both their faces. “You won’t have to go to the Tensorate alone. Akeha will go with you.”

And Mokoya fell silent, even as their lungs worked rhythmically through their stress. Then: “You mean—”

“I cannot separate the two of you, Mokoya. That would clearly be an unthinkable cruelty. Your mother sent both of you here because of a deal we made. I have decided not to hold her to it.”

Mokoya’s voice shook with terror and hope. “So we’ll go . . . together?”

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“Yes, Mokoya. Now help me with your sibling.”

Mokoya twisted their fingers into Akeha’s and started to sob again. The Head Abbot laid a second hand on Akeha’s head. “You must relax, child. Sleep. You will be better when you wake.”

His hands sent slowness and warmth throughout Akeha’s consciousness. As they faded into the gentle cradle of sleep, they thought, But you still look at me like I’m just a number in a column.

Part Two

THENNJAY

Chapter Six

YEAR SEVENTEEN

“THE HEAD ABBOT is going to die soon.”

Akeha opened their eyes a slit. Mokoya lay on their divan across the room, silhouetted by the night sun that filtered through the thick paper pulled across the window. They considered pretending they hadn’t heard it and letting that pronouncement die in the quiet night air.

Then reality settled in. Of course Mokoya would know they were awake. “Why do you say that?” they said, refusing to sit up from the bed.

“I saw the confirmation ceremony for the new one.”

“Oh? Who was it?” Akeha lazily rotated the memories of the monastery’s senior ranks through their mind. They hadn’t thought much about those people in the time since they’d left, and suspected nothing much had changed in the nine years since. The monastery was a place of stagnation, a place that loved its doctrine and cared more about inner purity than anything else.

“No one we know. A young man.”

“What?”

“Someone our age, maybe a bit older, maybe twenty.”

A preposterous idea. It took twenty years for acolytes to complete their training, and from there it was a slow climb to the top. No one that young could take the post.

“A Gauri boy.”

That was the thing that got Akeha to sit up. “A Gauri—are you sure you had a vision, and not a fever dream?”

Their twin sat up, and in the dark, they heard the click of a lid opening. Soft blue suffused the room as Mokoya prized the capture pearl out of its box with careful fingers. The glass drop, small enough to fit in their palm, glowed silver and aquamarine and plum with a freshly decanted vision.

Akeha had objected when the Tensorate’s researchers presented Mokoya with the dream recorder. It seemed suspect that they wanted Mokoya to wear it all the time, even though the visions only happened in their sleep. The way Akeha saw it, it was just another way for Mother’s lackeys to control Mokoya. But Mokoya seemed to appreciate its presence. And it turned out to have its uses.

“You can see for yourself,” they said, holding it out.

The pearl harbored alarmingly lifelike warmth. Akeha tensed the vision open, unspooling its coils like a snake. Mokoya’s vision washed over them.

A procession of monks sang sutras as they shuffled down the thoroughfare in front of the Great High Palace’s ceremonial pavilion. Tensors and palace staff lined every building, every corridor, hands folded, watching silently. Handbells rang, rhythmic and solemn, and heads bowed as the front of the procession passed them by.

Leading the procession was a young man Akeha had never seen before. Lean and broad, dark-skinned, jaw framed by a hefty beard that seemed impossibly neat. His head had been shorn and tattooed with the sigils of the five natures. This was him. The new Head Abbot. He was a boy. And it was preposterous. He looked like a student dressed up in ceremonial robes for a play.

At five-step intervals, the new Head Abbot stopped and bowed, pressing his forehead to the ground. The boy’s face was perfectly serious. Akeha watched as he got to his feet, walked five steps, and bowed again. Deep-set eyes, straight and narrow nose. He had a presence that could be felt even through the echo of a vision. And the vision lingered on him—in a way that Mokoya’s visions never did—as if the fortunes, too, found him irresistible.

A Gauri boy. Extraordinary.

Where was Mother in all this? Akeha pulled on the reins of the vision and spun it around, searching for the Protector in this theater of ritualized obeisance. They’d learned to do this recently, based on notes they had borrowed from the laboratory studying Mokoya’s visions. It turned out they weren’t just dreams, but chunks of time captured in their entirety. With enough willpower, you could navigate through them.

Akeha found the Protector on the high dais in the ceremonial pavilion, shaded by awnings of yellow silk. Sonami was seated next to her, as she usually was these days. Kara, Sonami’s youngest, clung to his mother’s lap. He didn’t look much older than he was now, freshly turned three and freshly declared to be a boy. Mokoya was right: this was going to happen soon.

Mother’s face looked like she’d drunk a cupful of vinegar. Good.

Akeha exited the vision and pressed the pearl back into Mokoya’s waiting palm. “Ha. Did you see? Mother’s going to burst a vein.”

“This isn’t a joke, Keha. There’s nothing funny about it.”

Akeha quieted. It was crass, they supposed, to be amused by this turn of events. The Head Abbot’s health had been failing for several years, but the old man had looked after them as children. He was the closest thing they had to a father. “I’m sorry.”

Mokoya sloshed the vision around in their hands. “I don’t understand,” they said finally. “Why him? Who is he?”

“It’s the flow of fortune. Why start questioning it now?”

The capture pearl froze sharply midrotation. “Why don’t you ever take anything seriously?”

Akeha blinked. Their twin shoved the pearl back into its box, closing the lid with a harsh snap. “Moko,” they said appeasingly, but it wasn’t enough to stop them from furiously collapsing back against the divan.

“Oi.” Akeha slipped off their own bed, hesitantly, afraid to cross the gulf between the furniture. They half stood, half leaned against the hard wood of the bed frame. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” Mokoya said. They had turned to face the wall. “Go back to sleep.”

Akeha sucked on their bottom lip and let several seconds pass. When Mokoya said nothing further, they ventured, “It’s not nothing. You’ve been grouchy for the last few days. Something is wrong, you just won’t say it.”

Silence from the other side of the room. Then Mokoya sat up, slowly. “Our birthday is in less than two weeks. I want to be confirmed.”

Akeha sucked air between their teeth, willing what they’d just heard to change. “What?”

Mokoya turned. “I want to be conf—”

“I heard you. Why?”

“Why? Keha, we’re turning seventeen. We have to do it at some point.”

“We made a promise never to get confirmed.”

“We were six when we made that promise. We’re not children anymore.” Mokoya shifted on the bed. “Keha, you didn’t really think we could avoid confirmation forever, did you?”

Akeha shrugged, not trusting their mouth to say the right things. Nobody jumped from undeclared gender straight to confirmation. They’d take a couple of years to be sure. Unless they were Sonami, and Akeha wasn’t Sonami.

Mokoya sighed noisily. “Keha.”

“So that’s why you didn’t talk to me? You thought I’d be upset?”

“Well, you are.”

Akeha wordlessly clambered back into bed. I’m not upset, they thought. This is not a big matter. But it was.

“You don’t have to decide now if you don’t want to,” Mokoya said. “I’m just telling you that I’m doing it.”

Akeha lay motionless on the divan, which suddenly seemed unreasonably hard and lumpy. They watched spots of light dance across the ceiling and listened to the uneven cadence of Mokoya’s breathing from the other end of the room.

Eventually Akeha asked, “And what will you be confirmed as?” But even as the question left their lips, they already knew what the answer would be.

“A woman,” Mokoya said, without hesitation.

The room was silent except for the soft sounds of their breaths.

Into the dark their twin repeated, “You don’t have to decide now. I’m just telling you what I want.”

* * *

The sun beat down upon baked dirt and brick as the twins slipped through Chengbee’s intestinal byways like fish, flat-soled feet barely making a sound as they ran with the shadow of the Great High Palace at their backs. They had shed the company of their hapless minder, Qiwu, long minutes ago, losing him in the thick porridge of the main market’s morning crowds. Now they were putting distance between themselves and the places they were meant to be. Mokoya, racing slightly ahead, traced the twins a solid path through the twisting streets.

They were headed south, to the ragbone-meat quarter. Mokoya’s pace slowed as they headed into unfamiliar territory, trying to connect real living streets, in all their dirty, shouting confusion, to lines on a painted map.

The ragbone-meat quarter had its own market, a gregarious collection of carts assembled at the confluence of several streets. Unlike the main market square, with its artfully arranged displays and slackcraft-powered signage, the ragbone market pulsed with barely contained chaos. Rolls of dried goods flanked battalions of preserves heaped upon trays. Craftswomen rubbed elbows with men selling candied nuts in paper cones. Children in assorted shades of brown darted to and fro, hawking pots of spiced tea and fruit on sticks. Laundry flapped in second-floor windows, soaking up the perfume of incense and hot oil and roasting chestnuts.

Looking at this bright and symphonic scene, someone from out of town—a traveling farmer who did not buy the news scrolls, perhaps—would never guess that just a few days ago, the ground they stood on had been glutted with sitting bodies, living and breathing, arms locked in protest, boldly facing down lines of Protectorate troops. The city’s tiny Gauri minority was often characterized as hardworking and easy to please, but the past week had clearly shown that they had limits.

That limit was this: seventeen of their compatriots killed in a silk factory fire and the factory owner exonerated from blame, even though it was clear the fire had been the fault of his greed and carelessness. Minor riots had broken out before more calculating heads swept in and organized sit-ins. For days the arteries of Chengbee’s southern quarters had been obstructed by clots of protesters, singing and obstinate, arresting the flow of commerce.

The Protector finally defused the situation by executing the factory owner. Official pronouncements declared the incident over, justice served, and harmony restored. But the acid stares of the crowd as the twins plowed through it told a different story. Even if the people did not recognize them, Mokoya and Akeha looked Kuanjin and wore clothes of fine quality. That was enough to draw their ire.

It was far from an inspiring endorsement of Mother’s rule.

Mokoya reached into the fold of their robes and extracted a picture scroll. It was the same one they’d woken Akeha with in the morning, exclaiming, “I knew I’d seen him somewhere!” Rolled on its inner surface was a crisp light capture of the Gauri protesters: a row of calm, determined faces, most half bowed or eyes shut as if in prayer or meditation. The lone exception was a young man who had been looking right at the woman who had tensed the light capture into permanence. Frozen in a semifrown, he stared intensely, his mouth a disapproving, unyielding line. Their mysterious future abbot.

Mokoya scanned the crowd as they threaded through it, looking for easy targets. Most avoided their gaze, ducking their heads as they saw Mokoya, some less subtly than others. But one woman—a vendor of straw mats and slippers and other woven things—was too slow, and Mokoya caught her eye.

“Honored aunt,” they said, approaching the woman respectfully, “could you tell me if you’ve seen this man?”

They showed the picture scroll to the woman. She waved her hand and made inaudible excuses.

Unfazed, Mokoya moved on. Akeha followed quietly in their wake. A strange, glacial distance had swelled between them, a kind of false peace, the tangles of arguments to come writhing under the surface. As Mokoya accosted passerby after passerby, Akeha watched the crowd instead. Watched the way people’s movements changed in the orbit of their twin. Watched the way Mokoya deformed the world around them. Over the years, and perhaps by necessity, Akeha had learned the trick of sliding quietly into the background, drawing as little attention as possible. Very different from their twin.

So Akeha watched. And it was through watching that they noticed the old man who was watching back. He was a shoe mender, crouched on a stool under the sign advertising his services. Instead of fear or disdain, his expression was touched by something resembling hope. And that interested them.

They let space and bodies come between them and Mokoya. Casually, incrementally, Akeha walked up to the watching man.

Their eyes met, and Akeha nodded at him. The man didn’t return the gesture, but he didn’t look away either. He had the tanned skin and wide cheekbones of a southerner, the look of someone who lived farther downriver than Jixiang. And he wasn’t as old as Akeha had thought. Just weathered.

“Busy day, uncle?” Akeha asked.

“As if.” The man snorted. “If you think this is busy, you should have seen this street before all those troubles came.” He gestured in front of him with hands that were blunted by his craft. “Normal days, I get four or five customers by morning. Today, nothing. It’s been like this for a week. A man needs to eat, you know?”

“Of course. There’s been a lot of trouble in this quarter lately. Were you here during the protests, uncle?”

“Where else would I go? I live here, I work here. Of course, those people don’t care.”

“That must be difficult.” As the man huffed in agreement, Akeha said, “We’re looking for somebody connected to the protests.”

“Hah.” The man slapped a thigh. “Hah! I knew you were Protectorate. One look, I knew.”

It occurred to Akeha that recognition of the prophet child of the Protector might not be as widespread as they’d assumed. “We’re not here for trouble. We just want to talk to someone.”

“Which one of them? Hah, you know, they all look the same to me sometimes.”

The man’s laugh, Akeha decided, was markedly unpleasant. “A young man. Very tall, big beard. He sat in the front row at the protests.”

“Oh, that one.” The man muttered something inaudible, shook his head, and gestured. “Go to the circus. Behind, over there. Ask for the doctor.”

Akeha looked where the man pointed. Their mind turned this information over and over. A doctor?

“Thank you for your help, uncle.” The monastery had taught Akeha to express gratitude for favors granted, no matter what unpalatable form the favor came in.

They caught up with their twin. Mokoya had cornered a woman selling jars of pickled vegetables and was on the verge of convincing her to give them directions to the circus. But the woman looked up, saw Akeha approaching like a shark, and changed her mind, waving Mokoya off with a muttered excuse.

“Honored aunt, it’s really important,” Mokoya said. “The future of this land could depend on it.”

The woman stared blankly at them.

“Come on, Moko,” Akeha said. “I’ve found out where he is.”

Mokoya narrowed their eyes. “How?”

“Talked to an awful old uncle. Come on.”

Mokoya fell behind in the viscous crowd, a half dozen steps’ worth of reluctance between them. Akeha slowed until they were both abreast. “Are you all right?”

“I am.” Mokoya squeezed their hand once, quickly and tightly. “Thank you for coming here with me.”

“Why are you thanking me?” The idea of Mokoya sneaking out alone was unthinkable. “Who else is going to take care of you if you get into trouble?”

Mokoya punched them lightly in the arm. A couple of loping steps later, they said, “I thought you were still angry with me.”

“I wasn’t angry.”

Mokoya glanced sideways at them, and a small smile tweaked the corners of their lips.

Conversation lapsed into pensive silence. As the clamor of the market subsided into the burble of a busy street, Akeha said, “So how come you decided to be a woman?”

Mokoya’s puzzled frown revealed everything they thought about this question. “I didn’t decide anything. I’ve always felt like one. A girl.”

“I see.”

“Don’t you?”

“I’ve never thought much about it,” Akeha said slowly, which was only slightly skirting the truth. Ideas and feelings bubbled as though their mind were boiling over. None of it lined up into coherent, defensible thought.

“You’ll figure it out, anyway,” Mokoya said with a confidence that ended where Akeha began. They nodded to their twin, as silence took up its easy crown for the rest of the walk.

* * *

The circus nestled on the borders of the ragbone-meat and paupers’ quarters, in the courtyard of a disused tanning factory. Its rotting timbers and shingles formed a stern backdrop to the dozens of horse-drawn carts arranged in a loose semicircle. Circular tents of plain waxed cotton had sprung up in between them. Some had laundry hanging outside, others racks of drying fish. Along one side of the main clearing, rows of weathered benches sat under hand-erected awnings. Once, long ago, this had been a traveling circus, but weeds had grown amongst the wheels, and mold speckled the sides of the tents. Chickens pecked in the dirt, and a pot of curry simmered somewhere close by.

The eerie silence reminded Akeha of a plague ward, but suspicious eyes watched them from slits in the fabric of the tents. The only other signs of human life were a couple of rail-thin children who had been kicking a rattan ball around. They stopped and stared sullenly as Mokoya approached.

“We’re looking for the doctor,” Mokoya said.

The younger child—a boy—ducked behind the other one, a girl bearing an ironclad expression. She pointed wordlessly to one of the tents, never taking her large dark eyes off Mokoya.

The twins turned in the direction the girl had indicated. Behind them, the children burst into a smatter of furious whispers, a collision of words in their own language. Akeha did not blame them for being intimidated.

The tent’s roll-up door was closed. Mokoya pulled the heavy canvas aside and stepped in, Akeha right behind them. “Hello?”

A tall boy stood with his back to them, wrapped in patterned crimson cloth that left half his torso bare. He was sorting through an army of powder bottles on a cluttered, dye-stained table and didn’t look up. “The clinic only opens on water and metal days. Come back tomorrow.”

“I’m not here for treatment,” Mokoya said.

The boy turned around. His face, those eyes, were exactly as they had been in the light capture. In person, he seemed both more normal, and more intense than in the picture. And he was much taller than Akeha had imagined.

He was beautiful.

The boy’s expression changed as his gaze swept over the twins. Here was someone, at least, who recognized who they were.

“I have something to tell you,” Mokoya said.

Chapter Seven

HIS NAME WAS Thennjay Satyaparathnam. He had just turned nineteen, and he was a healer by day and a storyteller by night. His role as a nexus of protest was mostly an accident. Mostly.

“So this was what that Tensor was doing,” Thennjay said. He had the picture scroll stretched between his curious hands and was turning it this way and that under the glare of a suspended sunball, as if the light might reveal something of its inner workings. “She showed up at the protest with this strange wooden box, and she kept pointing it at us. I thought it was a weapon.” His laugh bubbled up from the belly. “I realized it wasn’t one when nobody died. When the Protectorate wants blood, it doesn’t usually hesitate or fail.”

The three of them were cross-legged on the floor of the tent. Akeha took another sip from the cup cradled in their palms. The liquid rolled in their mouth: spiced tea so laden with sugar and ginger it went down like a punch. Thennjay rolled up the picture with deft fingers and handed it back to Mokoya. “How does it work?”

“It’s slackcraft,” Mokoya said, slowly. “I’m not sure I could explain it to you if you’re not familiar with the five natures.” And then more quickly: “Not that there’s anything wrong with that—it’s just that it’s complicated.”

Akeha was not used to watching their twin speak this delicately, putting down words as if they were stacking porcelain cups.

Thennjay folded his hands in his lap. “I know a bit of the theory. You can try me.”

“Light,” Mokoya said, “has connections to metal-nature, for reasons we don’t fully understand yet. You can re-create a scene, the colors and everything, by copying the shape of metal-nature in a box and bringing it back to artisans in the Tensorate, who then paint what they see.”

“This is remarkably lifelike for a painting.” Thennjay reappropriated the scroll, put it next to his face, and imitated his own expression.

Mokoya ducked their head to hide a smile. “The artisans are very good.”

Thennjay had grown up on the margins of Chengbee, several generations removed from Antam Gaur. His father had been a fire breather and a storyteller; his mother a stilt walker and a doctor. In the circus, everyone took on multiple roles. Everybody did what they could. The line between community and family was thin and blurred here. When Thennjay was five, his father was among sixteen circus members arrested for putting on a series of farces, slapstick satire deemed to be insulting to the Protector. The charges laid were sedition, and the sixteen had been exiled south to perform hard labor, never to be heard from again. Thennjay’s mother had then raised him until she died of a fever when he was eleven. Then the task had fallen to the rest of the circus, much as it was able.

The boy leaned back against his table. “So what are we going to do about this prophecy, then?”

“Nothing at all,” Mokoya said. “There isn’t anything we can do.”

Puzzlement marred his face. Mokoya explained, “We’ve never been able to change the prophecies, no matter what we’ve tried.”

“We, meaning . . .”

“The Protectorate. Well, my mother, to be exact.”

“What, do you mean she doesn’t control fortune and the heavens, as they would have us believe?”

“Stop.” Mokoya smacked him on the knee as he laughed. They moved with a simple, alarming ease.

“Surely it can’t be that hard. You could just have me assassinated, for example. Then the prophecy doesn’t come true.”

“An assassination would fail. My mother has tried it, in the past. Not on you, but on someone she didn’t want getting a position I prophesied.”

“Of course she would.”

“It backfired. Not only did the person get the position, they had enough blackmail material to ensure it would be a hereditary position. For nine generations.”

“Quite a feat.” Thennjay laughed until a thought occurred to him: “Wait. Are you saying that until your prophecy comes true, nothing can happen to me? That I’m fireproof?”

“No, I—” Mokoya halted. As the boy continued laughing, they hissed, “That is not what I wanted you to think!”

Akeha put their empty cup of tea on the floor and watched as Mokoya twisted into a coil of anxiety. “I’m not joking!”

The deep rumble of the boy’s laugh was like a thunderstorm in the distance, which could sound comforting to some and be a warning to others. “Well, I was. I’m sorry.”

Akeha studied the way the boy looked at Mokoya, an alien and gentle expression on his face. Was this what tenderness looked like?

Mokoya, completely oblivious, had their hands in their lap, staring down at the lightly curled fingers. “It’s best if we don’t interfere with the prophecies. Nothing good has ever come of trying to change them.”

Thennjay frowned. “Then why did you come here? To warn me?”

“I . . .” Akeha could almost feel Mokoya turning the question over in their mind, slowly and carefully, like a grilled fish. “I was curious about you. Wouldn’t you do the same thing, in my position?”

“I suppose.”

Thennjay folded his hands together, mirroring Mokoya’s pose, seguing into contemplative silence. Eventually, his gaze fell on Akeha. “You don’t say much, do you?”

Akeha stared evenly back at him. “No.”

The moment of silence stretched. Mokoya broke in: “This news must come as a shock to you.”

Thennjay chuckled and sighed, and for the briefest moment, Akeha caught a glimpse of darkness lurking under the bright, easygoing exterior. “It is what it is. As you said, there’s nothing we can do to change it, can we?”

“In the monastery,” Mokoya said, “they taught us that fortune is both intractable and impartial. That when bad things happen, it’s the result of an incomprehensible and inhuman universe working as it does. The mountain shrugs, but thinks nothing of the houses crushed in the avalanche. That was not its purpose.”

“And that’s meant to be comforting?”

“Yes,” said Mokoya, a little too earnestly. “Because it’s not about you, or what you’ve done. There’s no bigger reason to things.”

Thennjay stared at the heavy canvas ceiling in contemplation. Then he said, “Growing up, I was taught to believe that the fortunes don’t give you more than you can handle. It was a mantra, almost. Something bad happens? Well, you can handle it, because otherwise why would it have happened? I think it was the only way people could cope with the things that went on, sometimes.”

“You don’t sound like you agree.”

He looked in the direction of the tent door. Heartbeats passed. “You saw Anjal and Kirpa,” he said. The suspicious children outside. “They’re six and four. Think about that, six and four. Their parents died in that factory fire. They don’t have surviving close relatives. No grandparents, no aunts or uncles. A cousin is looking after them, but he’s got hungry children of his own to feed. I ask you: Can you believe, really believe, that they’re supposed to have the strength to cope with that?” He shook his head. “My personal belief? I don’t care about the fortunes. I care about doing whatever you can, with whatever’s in front of you. Because it’s the only thing you can do.”

Mokoya stared at him with a mixture of joy and disbelief, like he was some sort of miracle. “That’s beautiful.”

A feeling like a fist pressed against Akeha’s sternum.

Thennjay turned to Akeha. “And you, what do you believe?”

Akeha leaned back, balancing on their tailbone and clenched hands. “Why do my beliefs matter? I’m not a prophet or a future abbot.”

Mokoya swung around with a furious glare. Keha, what?

Akeha barely blinked. We’ve been gone a long time. There’s going to be trouble.

Mokoya’s nostrils flared. But of course Akeha was right. They turned back to Thennjay, defeated. “We need to go. We sneaked out of the Great High Palace, and Mother isn’t going to be pleased.”

“Starting my career in the disfavor of the Protector? That sounds dangerous.” The boy got to his feet, and offered a hand to Mokoya. After a brief moment of hesitation, they took it.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Mokoya said. “What steps Mother is going to take, or the Grand Monastery. Once word spreads, people are going to start coming to see you. I’m sure of it.”

He would be the most unqualified candidate for Head Abbot in the history of the Grand Monastery, Akeha thought uncharitably. Could he even perform basic slackcraft?

“We’ll cross that valley when we reach its borders,” Thennjay said. He still hadn’t let go of Mokoya’s hand.

Mokoya wasn’t pulling away, either. They were staring up at Thennjay, at his face, at his broad-shouldered bulk.

“If you could stand to escape the palace again,” Thennjay said, “you should come to the circus tonight. We put on quite a show, and it’s only five brass tals per entry.”

“I . . .” Mokoya lowered their hand slowly as Thennjay released it. “I’ll try. It’s not easy to leave the Palace without being noticed.”

Thennjay smiled, an expression radiant as a firework. The two of them were standing so close to each other their bodies nearly touched. The boy said, “I have a feeling we’ll meet again soon, my dear prophet.”

* * *

Akeha’s feet kicked up dust as they cut through the rumbling guts of Chengbee. The aftertaste of ginger tea clung pungent and sticky as glue to their tongue and mouth. Mokoya might have felt the same way, all wrapped up in a thick, woolly layer of thought. Akeha watched the back of their head, the black peach fuzz emerging from it, and thought about the long years they’d spent shaving their heads like they were still acolytes, so that they could appear identical.

They conjured an image of what Mokoya might look like as a woman, silk-draped and pigment-smeared, hair wrapped into unnatural shapes. This woman, this stranger, laughed with painted lips and clung to the arm of the tall, handsome man who smiled approvingly down at her. She made trite jokes and used the feminine version of “I.” Akeha tried to imagine themselves in the same role: an alien form, making alien gestures. Their chest liquefied into molten ore.

“So,” they said to their twin’s silhouette, “is that why you want to be confirmed? So you can go around flirting with boys?”

Mokoya turned around, eyes as round as dumplings. “What?”

Akeha knew it was a bad idea, but continued talking anyway. “Come on. You saw the way he looked at you, didn’t you?”

“What is wrong with you?” Mokoya hissed. They stormed a furious clutch of paces ahead, then slowed for Akeha to catch up. “You can be angry with me, but leave him out of it. He’s got nothing to do with . . . whatever your problem is.”

“He likes you.”

“And you don’t like him.”

Akeha shrugged. “I don’t have to. He’s going to be the Head Abbot, not my new best friend.” They snorted. “Unless I have to contend with him as a future brother-in-law?”

Mokoya’s impenetrable silence only deepened as they turned away and continued walking. Furious. “You’re going to the circus tonight, aren’t you?” Akeha asked.

Their twin squared their shoulders, squared their jaw. “Fine. I am. I like him. I think he’s important. You,” they added acidly, “don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

Chapter Eight

OF COURSE AKEHA WENT to the circus.

This time it was Mokoya who found the way out. A sympathetic gardener, an easily scalable wall, and a judicious use of slackcraft brought them to the city’s ground level without being caught. After the fuss thrown about their morning escapades, it was almost too easy, Akeha thought. But they weren’t about to complain.

The circus opened in the moon-half of the first night-cycle, and stretched into the sun-half of the second one. The audience numbered about a dozen, handfuls of Kuanjin and Gauri working class, chattering in their dialects, chewing through sweetmeats, greasing their fingers on fried dough sticks. Mokoya found seats in the front row, but Akeha chose to stand in the back, with a vantage over audience and performers both.

“Fine,” Mokoya said. “Suit yourself.”

The first act was a comedy duo, the usual bamboo-pole-soup-dumpling combination given a twist by comprising two middle-aged women in saris making jokes about sex and money, instead of two middle-aged men in robes making jokes about sex and money. Akeha scanned the crowd, the wings, the background. Thennjay was nowhere to be seen.

The comedy act was followed by an acrobatic troupe, earnest children who juggled heavy pots and flipped each other over a variety of stools and tables. Still no Thennjay. Akeha was used to being patient and staying very still, but irritated prickles flushed up their spine and raced across the skin of their neck. They pressed their teeth together.

Something odd caught their attention: in one of the back rows, a round-bellied man sat on the edge of the bench. He jiggled one leg relentlessly, bouncing his knee up and down, fingers drumming against his thigh. As Akeha watched, a tearful girl ran up: it was Anjal, the suspicious child from this morning. She grabbed the man’s arm, bobbing up and down on her feet, and Akeha didn’t need to know lip-reading or her language to understand that she was pleading for something.

The man wagged his head and shook her off. The girl hesitated, then ran off the way she came, still crying, clearly unsatisfied.

Strange. Where was her younger brother?

The lamps around the circus extinguished, plunging them into darkness. Akeha went rigid involuntarily and expanded their mindeye. The topography of living bodies lit up the Slack: audience, performers, constellations scattered around the tents of the living compound. These were the bright, simple stars of the common citizenry, borders whole and complete with few threads lashing them to the Slack—probably simple tricks they’d learned, mechanical spells to manipulate water-nature to help them with their work.

Then there was Mokoya, a comforting, blazing nova thick with embroidered filaments of light, solid cords of fibrous belonging stretching between them and Akeha. Through those connections Akeha sent a warning: Be careful. Something’s wrong.

What is it?

I’m not sure. Just be careful. Keep your mindeye open.

Mokoya’s star quivered with faint annoyance, but their presence sharpened into focus as they too opened their mindeye, shifting into the same plane of awareness as Akeha.

Then a third and unexpected presence appeared in the Slack.

The interloper glowed gently, his tapestry of Slack-connections not as complex as that of a fully trained Tensor, but still thick and thriving. Akeha recognized the intricate, furred edges into forest-nature that they often saw extending from the Tensorate’s masters of biology.

Cheebye. They swore silently. How had they not realized? Thennjay was no simple healer, dispensing prayers and compressed mixtures of medicine. They called him a doctor.

He was a Tensor, or had been taught by one.

As Thennjay pulled at metal-nature, the lights came up around them: sun-strips, taped around the periphery of the circus, on the tent awnings, under the benches, wrapped around Thennjay’s clothes. Akeha opened their eyes as the audience sighed in wonder. Thennjay held a tray of glowing spheres the size of ripe peaches, presumably part of his performance.

Akeha froze. The round-bellied man was gone. Empty space yawned on the bench where he had been. Where was he?

They spotted the man making his jittery way down the central aisle, toward Thennjay and Mokoya.

“Wait,” Akeha said, straightening up from their slouch.

The man started walking faster. People stared. Akeha broke into a jog after him as Mokoya, in the front row, stood in confusion. “Stop!”

The man turned to face Akeha. Sweat picked out the terrified expression on his face, and then—

He detonated.

Akeha barely had time to throw up half a barrier, a shoddy one. It stopped the fire, but not the force of the explosion. Their spine met the ground with a sharp snap.

They scrambled to their feet, ignoring the pain that shot up their back. “Moko!” The air filled with screams, crackled with sulfuric fumes. Akeha’s throat closed up, and their lungs heaved.

They smelled burning flesh. Akeha reached out and found Mokoya in the Slack, still luminous and steady. Thank fortune. They tensed through water-nature, dispersing black smoke so that they could see.

The man lay on the dirt, still alive, still groaning, meat crusted black and red. Clear fluid seeped through the cracks. Everything was blown in a perfect circle around him. Thennjay hovered over his doomed body, whispering urgently in their home language, holding the man’s flesh and soul together through the Slack.

Mokoya ran to Thennjay’s side, equal parts fear and anger. “What was that? What happened?”

Thennjay looked up at them, his splendid features hardened in anger. “Your mother,” he said.

* * *

They weren’t allowed into the tent with Thennjay and the dying man. Left outside, Mokoya smeared circular tracks into the packed dirt. As the sun rose into the second night-cycle, Akeha asked, “You didn’t realize he was a Tensor either, did you?”

Mokoya glared at them, and continued pacing.

“You were distracted. He was so charming—”

“Shut up.”

Akeha folded their arms and continued watching.

Mokoya made sixty-four more silent circuits before Thennjay stepped through the heavy canvas of the tent door. Sweat had collected on the front of his shirt, and blood stained his hands and clothes like cooking grease. He sighed with the weight of a thousand stones cast into water. “He’s gone.”

“That’s a pity,” Akeha said. The man might have been saved at a proper Tensor house of healing. The doctors, the masters of forest-nature, would have been able to reknit the shattered bones, rebuild the seared flesh. But Thennjay had said no. The community had said no. Akeha couldn’t blame them for their distrust.

“You lied to me,” Mokoya spat.

“I didn’t,” Thennjay said. “I said nothing. There’s a difference. You never asked how much slackcraft I knew.”

“You should have said you were a Tensor.”

“I’m not.” He kept his voice gentle. “The Tensorate and the Grand Monastery aren’t the only ones who know slackcraft. My father had books. Scrolls. He hid them. After we lost him, my mother taught me as much as she could.”

Mokoya’s anger hissed between their teeth, in and out. “I trusted you.”

Thennjay looked apologetic. “I didn’t trust you.” As Mokoya froze, the shock of this revelation wrestling across their face, he said, “I wanted to, I promise. But I couldn’t. You’re still the prophet. The Protector’s child. And I’m just some troublemaking Gauri boy.”

The anger went out of Mokoya: not a dissipation, but a deflation. Akeha almost felt sorry for their twin. The boy was charismatic, after all. Easy to fall for.

Akeha said, self-satisfied, “I never trusted you.”

Thennjay spared them a glance, and in it was compassion, sadness, and a dozen other things Akeha couldn’t parse. “That was the smart thing to do. After all that’s happened this past week? I wouldn’t trust me, either.”

“You must think me a fool,” Mokoya said softly, staring at the tracks they’d left in the ground.

“No.” Thennjay lifted Mokoya’s face by the chin, as something in Akeha’s chest twisted. “You have a good heart. And that’s a rare thing in these times. A beautiful thing.”

Mokoya stepped away from him. “You smell of blood.”

Thennjay quieted and then a muscle worked in his jaw. “They have Kirpa,” he said. “Your Protectorate.”

“What?” Mokoya looked at Akeha in alarm, then back at Thennjay. “Why?”

“The man in there. Jawal. He was their cousin, their guardian. Men snatched Kirpa from his sister’s arms this afternoon. Then someone from the Protectorate came and told Jawal that if he wanted Kirpa returned unharmed, he had to do exactly what they said.”

“To blow himself up?” Akeha frowned. “They asked him to sacrifice himself?”

“They told him, if you do this, all your children will be looked after. He’s been struggling to feed them for so long. They knew how to convince him.”

Ice and fire battled in Akeha’s belly. A swathe of images clawed at them: shy Kirpa clinging to his older sister; Anjal’s ferocity as she shielded him from strangers; the girl’s tearstained face at the circus this evening. She was six years old. She had no business fearing for her little brother’s life like that.

The twins must have been followed that morning, when they first found the circus. How could they not have realized? This was Mother at her best, brutal and efficient.

“Why would Mother do this?” Mokoya blurted. “She killed a man; she could have hurt us. Why?”

Thennjay shrugged, the movement like an earthquake. “She wanted you to be hurt, I think. Imagine how it would look. The Protector’s children, maimed or killed after accepting an invitation from me? Even if she can’t change the prophecy, that would destroy my reputation. I would have no power as a Head Abbot. There might even be war.”

Mokoya seemed torn between incandescent rage and helpless tears. “It’s awful,” they gasped.

“It’s Mother,” Akeha rejoined.

Thennjay had already decided which side of fear or anger he fell on. “You know,” he said softly, “I questioned your prophecy at first. I didn’t know what role I could play in your monastery. But now your mother is trying to scare me. And I don’t scare easily.” He looked directly at Mokoya. “Take me to see her. We have some things to discuss.”

Chapter Nine

“HOW PRESUMPTUOUS OF YOU,” the Protector said, “to think you can come to me with demands, as though we were equals. The audacity of it all. These are not the actions of someone fit for the abbothood.”

The audience chamber of the Great High Palace had the quiet chill of a mausoleum and the emptiness of a mountain steppe. Slate and granite replaced the silk and wood the Protector preferred in her sanctuary, with massive gray columns holding the peaked roof high overhead. The three of them were mere pinpricks as they stood in the vastness in front of the Protector’s dais, flanked by the stone-faced guards lining either side of the chamber. Thennjay was in front, Mokoya beside him, and behind them Akeha stood as an afterthought. They felt less unwelcome than ill-fitting, like a square of tile that was the wrong color.

“It seems that the fortunes have already weighed in on my fitness for the role,” Thennjay said, his voice rolling with the depth of an avalanche. “Unless you wish to contest the prophecy?”

In contrast to their smallness, Mother lorded over everything on her high dais, magnified by the bright yellow of her robes. Her headdress glittered with the light of a hundred jewels, and sunballs suspended over the throne highlighted the sharpness of her cheekbones, the alpine slant of her mouth. Sonami stood behind her, calm and immovable as the stone pillars around them.

“I am aware of the prophecy,” the Protector said. Her voice echoed off the floor and ceiling of the chamber. “I am also aware of its regrettable immutability.”

She gazed unkindly down at the trio. “It leaves me no choice but to address the fact that a malcontent Gauri child born in an unnamed gutter has found an easy opportunity to latch on to power.” She gestured with an operatic sweep. “Already your machinations have begun. I see how you have seduced my children to your side, even after the outrageous events last night.” A predatory tilt of the head. “Know this, boy: I have no obligation to confirm your appointment to the Grand Monastery. My approval will come only with changes to the way the monastery operates. It has had far too much independence, for far too long.”

Unfazed, Thennjay said, “You speak confidently for someone carrying so much sin. Your agents kidnapped an innocent child from my community. You blackmailed their guardian into carrying out a heinous attack that could have killed your own children. These are terrible things to have done. And it would be terrible if they came to light.”

“What wild ideas you have.” The Protector blinked lazily, like a satisfied predator. “Listen to you, trying to blame the reprobate nature of your people on me.” Her teeth showed. “It seems the Gauri are good for nothing save violence and the spreading of falsehoods. I was very accommodating with your community over the matter of the factory fire. Perhaps I should reconsider that leniency.”

“That’s a lie,” Mokoya exclaimed, their righteousness bursting forth at last. “He didn’t do anything, and you know it. How can you command respect if—”

“Silence! How dare you speak to me of respect. After your disgraceful conduct yesterday, sneaking out of the palace like a thief, running around like some common criminal. Now you think to lecture me on how to command respect, when you can’t even earn it for yourself?”

Mokoya stood silent, trembling, hands compressed into bloodless fists.

When Thennjay spoke, it was with the prickling, laden weight of air before a thunderstorm. “The philosopher Sadhya, a wise man, said that the powerful can make the truth dance to their song. That is why I brought my own recording.”

The boy reached into the generous fold of his clothes. His hand emerged curled around a shiny black sphere the size of a plum, embroidered with blue lines of Slack charge. A tug through metal-nature set it humming. The hum turned into a voice: rasping and faltering, the last words of a man speaking a language Akeha did not understand.

“I spoke to your man Jawal before he died. His story contradicts everything you’ve said. It would be quite scandalous if people were to hear of it.” He paused to let the implications sink in, like dye in a vat of water. When the Protector’s expression was sufficiently dismayed, he said, “I want Kirpa returned to us unharmed. Reparations must be made to the family. After that, we can discuss the terms of my ascension to the Grand Monastery.”

“Very bold,” Mother said. She tilted her head. “Do you really think you can threaten me with one insignificant recording?”

“Are you willing to risk it? You know how restless we Gauri are. The last riots you had were years ago, and your soldiers were overwhelmed. You had to beg the Grand Monastery’s pugilists for help. Can you bear more children for them? Or will it be grandchildren this time?”

Well done, Akeha thought. Thennjay had pushed Mother in ways they could only dream of. As a surge of genuine pride rose in them, they laughed into the ensuing, echoing silence.

Mokoya turned and fixed them with an acid glare.

Blood cooled in Akeha’s belly. That single gesture outlined, in a dizzy rush, what they should have realized a long time ago: That in this, as with all things, they were expected to remain in the background, quiet and passive.

In defeat, Mother’s face was a mask of deepest ice, pale and solid, betraying no trace of emotion whatsoever.

A clack of wood-on-tile echoed through the chamber. A familiar, rasping voice spoke up from the back: “Is this not something I should have a say in?”

Leaning heavily on a cane, Head Abbot Sung came shuffling up the interminable length of the chamber. He was a trembling, liver-spotted husk of the man Akeha remembered, but there was still enough pride and dignity left in him to face the Protector with bright eyes. Age had yet to diminish his mind.

“Master Sung,” the Protector said, pleasantly enough. Was it Akeha’s imagination, or was Sonami smiling behind her?

“Lady Sanao Hekate.” The Head Abbot was old enough, bold enough to address Mother by her name. “If the boy’s fitness for office is in doubt, the monastery has protocols, our ancient rituals, that can put them all to rest.”

“No one is disputing that the Grand Monastery has its own criteria for appointing an abbot, Venerable One.” Mother’s tone was perfectly civil.

“I am not opposed to the boy taking on the role. But if he is to do so, as prophesied, then he must pass the same trial that I, and all my predecessors, went through.”

“The mountain trial?” Mother’s lips curved into an imitation of a smile. “Of course. This is tradition, after all. And what is the Grand Monastery if not traditional?”

Thennjay looked to Mokoya. “What’s the mountain trial?”

Akeha knew the answer to that. But the mountain trial was supposed to be mythical or allegorical. That was what the books in the monastery’s library said.

The Head Abbot addressed him: “Do you know the name of the mountain that overlooks the city, boy?”

“Golden Phoenix Mountain,” Thennjay answered, with slight suspicion.

“Do you know why it is so named?”

Thennjay frowned. His confidence, Akeha realized, came from preparation, and this unexpected questioning unsettled him. “According to legend . . . a golden phoenix led a band of starving villagers fleeing a war to safety. It guided them to this valley and flew into the mountains to nest. They built a settlement that became Chengbee and named the mountain after their savior. That’s the legend.”

“Legends form around grains of truth,” the Head Abbot said. “To prove your worth as my successor, you must go into the mountains, seek out the golden phoenix, and return with two feathers.”

Thennjay’s face folded into a squint. “That’s the mountain trial?”

The Head Abbot nodded.

Thennjay looked to Mokoya for reassurance, but their twin could only shrug helplessly. Was the Head Abbot serious? Who knew. He had ascended to the position nearly forty years ago. No one spoke of this at the Grand Monastery. It was a very practical place, and practicality did not encompass talk of giant, mythical birds.

It was a convenient way for Mother to save face, though, allowing her to cede the appointment of the Head Abbot to the monastery. She didn’t have to admit that she had been outsmarted by a nineteen-year-old Gauri boy.

“Fine,” Thennjay said, as if he had any other choice. “I’ll do it.”

Chapter Ten

“YOU CAN’T JUST say those things to Mother,” Mokoya hissed at Thennjay. “You offended her. She’ll remember.”

“Good,” Thennjay said. “I want her to remember.” At this pronouncement, Mokoya’s face tautened with a mix of anger and worry. Thennjay laughed, but not unkindly. “I want her to remember that I can be a serious threat.”

They were corralled in the room assigned to Thennjay, a disused storage space in the servants’ sector, barely larger than a clothes box. In a spurt of generosity, Mother had arranged for the provision of a single sleeping roll, which Akeha now sat lotus-legged on, watching the other two. Passively, as was expected of them.

The room was very small. Their legs and feet ached with inaction.

“You don’t want her to remember.” Mokoya turned away and paced as big a circle as the room would allow. “You don’t know Mother. You don’t want to be caught on the other end of her grudges.”

Thennjay chuckled again, but this time there was weight in that sound, a history of stones and chains. “Nao. I’m Gauri. I think I know a little about living under the Protector’s grudges.” As Mokoya’s face wrinkled further, he said, “You don’t think I’m taking this seriously?”

Mokoya burst at the seams. “Thenn, why can’t you see that I’m worried about you?”

“Ai.” Thennjay took hold of Mokoya’s hands, held them gently. “I know.”

Mokoya froze at the contact, but only for a moment. Thennjay continued, “Don’t worry about me. It’s going to be all right, I promise.”

“So many things could go wrong,” Mokoya said. “Outside the prophecy. You don’t even know.”

“I’m not afraid. I trust in the fortunes. What is your mother, stacked up against such awesome forces? Only a mortal, like the rest of us.”

Watching them, Akeha’s lungs filled with pressure, as if the air had nowhere to go.

“I’ve decided,” Mokoya said, straightening up, eyes bright and hard as jewels. “After my confirmation, I’m not applying to the Tensorate academy. I want to return to the Grand Monastery.” They tightened their fingers around Thennjay’s. “Mother can’t stop me. I’ll be twenty-one in a few years, an adult.”

“It won’t be the same place you grew up,” Thennjay warned. “After all, I’ll be in charge.”

“I know. And you’ll need help. The old monks aren’t going to accept change easily.”

Thennjay said, in his low, smooth baritone, “I’ll be glad to have you there.”

He had leaned in, closing the gap between his body and Mokoya’s. Akeha already knew where this was going. It came from a playbook older than the Protectorate, older than human civilization. The confines of the room felt heavy, felt like prison walls.

A smirk cracked through Mokoya’s seriousness. “I thought you didn’t trust me.”

Thennjay wrinkled his nose. “I guess I’m another big fool.”

He moved forward, toward Mokoya’s face. Akeha stood. The other two looked up in surprise, their small moment broken. It was as if they had forgotten Akeha was there.

“I’m going for a walk,” they announced. And they turned to leave, ignoring the small mewl of “Keha?” that sounded behind them.

* * *

Akeha walked, deliberately putting one foot ahead of the other, pointed in a direction they weren’t sure of. The Great High Palace was vast enough that they could wander for days and never recross the paths they trod. Their ambulation took them far from the servants’ quarters, deep into the diplomatic wing. Puddles of yellow light punctured the night darkness, infrequently broken by the passing shadows of palace staff, working deep into unsociable hours. One of them—an assistant to Diplomatic Minister Kinami—smiled patronizingly at Akeha as she passed by. “Wandering about without your twin?” As if she couldn’t imagine that Akeha had desires of their own, a mind of their own. They didn’t reply.

Akeha usually delighted in the night halves of night-cycles. Not because they were darker than the night halves of day-cycles—they weren’t—but because of the solitude they offered: the quiet corridors, the night song of crickets, the masses slumbering in their chambers. But tonight the solitude felt less like a warm cloak and more like a blanket pressed over the nose and the mouth. Thoughts thrashed through Akeha’s mind like dying fish, and like fish they slipped away the moment Akeha tried to focus on them. Instead a parade of images slithered by: a burnt, bloodied man. A girl’s face wet with tears. Mother’s icy, restrained rage. Things that they’d idly stood by and watched happen.

But even as they chased these piscine threads of thought, they knew that a shadowy epiphany, full of teeth and eyes, stalked behind them. They didn’t want to look at it. Didn’t want to think about it.

Back in the room, with Thennjay, Mokoya had slipped and used the feminine “I” pronoun.

It shouldn’t have bothered Akeha as much as it did. Mokoya’s choices were their own. Yet it felt like their twin was pulling away from them, standing at the prow of a ship headed into uncharted waters where Akeha could not follow.

Akeha walked and walked.

The diplomatic wing had a courtyard of its own, an austere stone garden with an enormous black plinth standing in its middle. The plinth was a work of art, titled Reflections upon the Past and the Future. Its ebony surface was polished to glasslike smoothness and lit by a dozen sunballs fixed to the ground. Standing in front of its massive bulk, Akeha’s reflection was superimposed over a void so pure and deep it seemed unending.

Akeha stared at themselves: the shorn head, the genderless robes, the stark facial features that were identical to Mokoya’s. Until a young person confirmed their gender, the masters of forest-nature kept the markers of adulthood at bay. They had never imagined themselves any other way. It frightened them to think that this was not true for Mokoya. A fundamental chasm had opened between them, through which many other things could slip.

Their inner voice whispered, conspiratorially, But that chasm’s always been there. You’ve always known it, Akeha.

They stared unblinking at their own face as they recited feminine pronouns like a sutra. I am. I want. I will. And like a sutra, the words came out of their mouth rote and meaningless. There was no connection between what was said and the person in the black mirror.

Akeha bit their lip. A thought occurred to them. In all honesty, it had been occurring to them for some time, and occurring with much greater frequency since Mokoya’s announcement two nights ago. It was a thought that took hold in the back of their mind whenever they looked at Thennjay, at the shape of his body underneath his clothes. A thought they had been trying to drown out, to ignore.

Slowly, as if stepping into the unilluminated edge of a lake, Akeha switched to using masculine pronouns.

I am. I want. I will.

Their heart quickened in their chest. The words rolled and clicked in their mind, sharp and electric.

I want. I want. I want.

Akeha had not grown up amongst men. There were male monks, to be sure, but they were not men as Kuanjin society considered men. There were no men in the Protector’s family, and few amongst those she allowed close to her. Men were creatures of distant fascination, with their broad backs and tanned cheeks, and Akeha had never considered that they might be one of them.

They imagined themselves dressing like a man, with their hair tied up like a man. It felt different. Not right, exactly, but there was something there.

I want. I want.

I am.

Akeha’s limbs trembled with the rush of adrenaline. This was it, the answer they had been looking for, scrambling to find over the past few days, ever since Mokoya dropped her basket of secrets. A new horizon unfolded, shining with ten thousand unnamed stars. New possibilities, new understandings, new ways of being. They should have thought of this earlier. Why hadn’t they thought of this earlier? It was like cutting themselves open and finding another creature living inside, nested in their blood and bones and guts. Fear and excitement seized them in equal parts. I should tell Mother, they thought. He thought.

Tell her before I change my mind.

* * *

Mother was in her sanctuary, contemplating the twined branches of cherry trees in the garden. Like Akeha, she was someone who hardly slept, and she preferred the company of one of her concubines when she did. Akeha approached her from the back, studying her silhouette. Looking at her, it was easy to imagine Mokoya in thirty years’ time, sitting gracefully in a courtyard like this, silk dress cascading around her. Face identical to Mother’s.

Far more difficult to imagine what the future held for him. If it held anything at all.

Akeha had spent the winding journey to the sanctuary softly chanting I am, I am, I am, trying to get used to the sound of it on their tongue, his tongue. Each utterance sent a shiver through him, until he, they, felt stuffed so full of anxiety they might take flight, earth-nature of the Slack losing its grip on him. They had blocked out all other thoughts, intrusive thoughts, distracting thoughts, by filling their mind with the cadence of I am, I am, I am. I am.

Faced with Mother now, courage deserted them, and they stood frozen several yields away from her, unable to speak.

Mother turned around and stared at them with the curious demeanor of a raptor. Her attention was like sunlight concentrated under curved glass. Akeha’s skin burned, and sweat collected in the small of their back.

“You did not come all this way to stare mutely at me,” Mother said.

“I want to be confirmed. Like Mokoya.” His tongue failed him, slipping back to the easy groove of the pronouns they had used since they were able to talk.

“Of course you do.”

Akeha sucked life-giving air into his lungs and focused his thoughts very precisely as he said aloud, using the right pronouns this time: “I want to be confirmed as a man.”

Mother stared at him for an agonizing second. And then she burst into laughter.

Akeha stood where they were, reminding themselves to breathe. Breathe, or they would get dizzy, and their skin would catch on fire.

Mother smiled without showing teeth. As if she would ever do something so inelegant. “It has been a long time since I’ve had a son.” She tilted her head. “To think that it would end up being you.”

“Was this—” Akeha licked their lips, bringing moisture back into their mouth. “Was this unexpected of me?”

“Unexpected?” Mother laughed again. “How can it be unexpected, when I had harbored no expectations for you in the first place? You were no part of my plans, child.”

Akeha bit his lip so hard he tasted metal in his mouth. With the lip throbbing, he asked: “Do you object to this?”

“Of course not. Why would I?” She folded one leg over the other. She seemed strangely relaxed, even cheerful. It was not what Akeha had expected. “This has been a day of delightful happenings,” she said. “I was presented a worthy adversary in that Gauri boy, who will soon come to power to oppose me. And now the spare child has finally chosen his own path.”

A tremble ran through Akeha.

Mother glanced up at the canopy of trees, lights shining across her face. “Despite everything, the fortunes find ways to surprise you. I look forward to the days to come.”

Akeha breathed. And breathed. It was the only thing he could do. Keep breathing.

“Have you told your sister?” she asked.

My sister. Akeha exhaled. “No. I have not.”

* * *

Akeha told Mokoya the next morning, on upper-forest day. “I will be confirmed as a man.” It was said, it was done, there was no turning back.

His sister said nothing in return. She pretended she was not upset. But that night, as Akeha lay in bed as though sleeping, she left the room they shared and did not return until the next morning. He did not ask where she had been, letting his mind fill in the blanks. Forbidden visions came to him of her and Thennjay entwined in a collusion of sighs and gentle touches. The images refused to leave his mind, no matter how he tried to cast them out.

The same thing continued to happen over the next two nights.

On the third day, lower-fire day, Thennjay left for the trial, accompanied by a guide from the monastery who would leave him at the foot of the mountain. Akeha spent the following days meditating, in preparation for the changes he was about to undergo. Mind empty, body blank, free of all emotions and base desires. It was a struggle. He felt too soft, too malleable, as though the slightest pressure would melt him.

Mokoya still did not return to their shared room.

When she finally came back, it was lower-earth day, the fifth day since Thennjay left. As the sun rose for the second night-cycle she sat in front of Akeha, her legs folded under her, hands placed loosely in her lap. Akeha burned with questions for her, rude and forward questions fueled by vulgar curiosity: What was it like, to lie with him? Were his hands strong or gentle, did he smell of earthy perfumes, did his flesh tremble against hers? But he remained silent.

“I want to marry him,” she said.

“You’ve just met him.”

“I know. But I love him.”

“Mother won’t allow it.”

“I don’t care what she thinks.”

“He’s going to be a monk. They don’t marry.” Akeha tilted his head. “Unless you think he’ll change the rules for you?”

Mokoya sucked in a breath, her brow crumpling into ridges. “I . . . no. He would not.”

“But you want him to. And it’ll probably happen, too. You’re so special, things always go the right way for you.”

She shakily got to her feet, teeth bared at Akeha. “I don’t know why I came here,” she snapped. He tried to apologize, regrets bubbling in his mouth, but it was too late. The wall of her back disappeared through the doorway and did not return.

The next day, Thennjay returned from the mountain, bearing two ornate feathers the length of his arm. They gleamed dully in the sunlight, warm and yellow, topped by a teardrop-shaped plume that shone in a thousand colors. When asked about the details of his journey, he merely smiled and shook his head, bound now by the Grand Monastery’s tradition of secrets. He had completed the trial, and that was enough.

Mokoya met Thennjay at the entrance pavilion, pressing her hands into his as they spoke. Akeha watched them from a distance. Mokoya’s face was turned away from him, the words her mouth was shaping hidden. He looked at the two of them and saw a perfect circle in which he had no place.

A thought had hounded Akeha since he spoke to Mother about his confirmation. As he watched his sister embrace the man she loved, the edges of that thought crystallized into a solid plan of action. He knew what he had to do.

It was upper-fire day, the start of the new week. The week of their seventeenth birthday. The week their lives would start anew.

Chapter Eleven

IN THE ROOM HE had called home for the last eight years, Akeha was packing. He had put together some clothes, simple toiletries, a few days’ provisions, and enough money that he could be comfortable, but not so much that he might be robbed. He intended to travel south, where the winds remained mild and the snows did not come, so he didn’t need winter clothing. And he had enough confirmation medicine to last him a month before he had to look for more.

His body ached. His reshaped hips felt loose where the confirmation doctors had shifted bone, and soreness coiled in flesh both old and new. The doctors had assured him that the discomfort was normal, part of his body learning to speak the new language it had been taught. In time it would forget it had known anything else. In time, he too would forget what it felt like not to have this body, not to have had this life.

It would just take time.

His chin itched with fresh growth, dark hairs pushing through the skin for the first time. He hadn’t decided what to do with it yet. Growing a beard might help him slip through the northerly regions where the shape of his face was still familiar, framed on walls in the official portraits of the Protector’s family. Or not. The doctors had called forth a thick mane of hair from his scalp, and it now sat on his head in a tight bun. He had decided that he would cut it short, in the style of southern men, once he was on the other side of the Mengsua Pass.

Akeha gathered the small bags he had assembled and started tying them into his sling.

A commotion of stampeding feet was the only warning he got before Mokoya burst through the door, breathless and flushed with anxiety. “Keha,” she gasped, “Sonami said—”

She froze as she took in the scatter of his belongings, the debris that had not made it into his pack. Her eyes widened as she realized the truth. “You—you’re leaving?”

Akeha tightened the knot on his sling. “I am.” He had told Sonami last night, as a courtesy to the woman who had raised him in early childhood. He made her promise to keep the news from Mother until he had time to leave the city. But of course Sonami would tell his sister. She was crafty in that way.

It was no matter. Mokoya could not stop him from leaving.

His sister blocked the doorway, her expression tumbling into the valleys of desperation. “Keha, whatever I did, whatever I said, I’m sorry. Please, don’t go.”

“It’s nothing you did. You have a place in this city, in the shape of things to come. I don’t.” Akeha pulled the sling over his chest, feeling its weight settle onto his shoulder. “And if I stay here, I never will. I have to go. I have to find my own place in the world.”

“What do you mean? Your place is here, with me. Wasn’t that what we said?” Her voice cracked. “We were born together, we stay together until we die.”

He would not be frightened by the talk of death, or the glasslike fragility she was exposing. “Moko. To leave is my choice. Just as becoming a man was my choice.” He came face-to-face with her, forcing his expression to remain as calm as possible. “Would you really keep me here against my will?”

She was visibly shaking, as though she might disintegrate at any moment. Emotions deeper than terror laced her words as she said, “Everything I’ve done, you’ve picked the opposite. You think there’s something wrong with me, don’t you?”

“Moko. No.” Despair sank through his gut. He wanted to reach out to her, but he couldn’t bear to touch her, afraid that the contact might shatter his resolve. “I can’t explain what this is about, but it’s not about you. You have a future here with Thennjay. I want you to be happy.”

Mokoya folded as she began to cry, collapsing against the wall in grief. Akeha resisted the instant urge to catch her, to hold her up, as he had so many times before. That was someone else’s privilege now.

She had left a gap in the doorway, one he could step through easily, like his heart was made of stone. “Forget about me,” he said, as gently as he could. Did she hear? He wanted to say I love you, but he couldn’t bring the syllables to his mouth. Instead, he settled for “May the fortunes keep you safe.”

Mokoya didn’t look up, didn’t respond to his words. She just continued sobbing. Then Akeha was through the doorway, through the gauntlet, his feet carrying him away as fast as they could. Behind him, he heard Mokoya screaming his name. He forced himself to stare straight ahead. He would not look back. He would not cry.

* * *

The lonely moon rolled across the sky as Akeha flew. He leapt from peaked roof to peaked roof, a hundred yields per jump, soaring as a bird might, landing as a feather would. He had learned this in the Grand Monastery: pulling away earth-nature so that weight fell from him, pushing through water-nature so that each jump had the speed of a released arrow. The night air sang in his clothes, his hair, his ears.

Below him, Chengbee slumbered, its squares of light dimmed or extinguished. From this height, the city was a dense, absurd plaything, something that looked easy to crush. In between the houses and matchstick streets, people vanished from view. Stay high enough, and the city became mere map, a territory, lines drawn on the edge of a mountain.

Akeha came to the city’s southern edge, where the rivers Tiegui and Siew Tiegui met, where the spines of ships jostled for space along the quays, where the fertile plains downriver stretched silver and gray. He stood on the roof of an inn that nestled against the riverbank and filled himself with the cool damp of summer. This was it. This was his point of exit. He intended to find a ship with space amongst the cargo belowdecks, space he could slot himself into, and wait. The ships sailed downriver with silks and paper and Slack-powered devices, and with them he would go, hopefully as far as Jixiang, where the pass through the mountains waited.

“Akeha.”

He froze. He had been so consumed by his thoughts, so focused on damming up the rising waters of fear and despair, that he hadn’t noticed he’d been followed.

He turned, feet choreographing balance on the narrow beam of wood. The silhouette making its way across the roof of the inn left him breathless with recognition. Thennjay looked the same as on the day they had met him, somber and beautiful, rich skin shining in the moonlight. “What can I do to convince you to stay?” he asked in his gentle baritone.

“Nothing.” Akeha licked the parched surface of his lips as Thennjay drew close enough for him to smell. “I’ve made my decision. I’m not turning back.”

“Mokoya is devastated,” he said, voice unhardened by spikes of judgment. “This is hard on her. You should reconsider.”

“She’ll cope,” Akeha replied stiffly. “She won’t be alone. She’ll have you.”

His eyes drew across Akeha’s face slowly. “That’s not how it works.” He reached out and took Akeha’s hand, pressing fingers into skin. “I want you to stay.”

Akeha pulled his hand back. “I’ve made my choice,” he said, but his tongue was thick in his mouth, and it was hard to push words out of his throat. His skin was strangely alive where Thennjay had touched it. The taller boy radiated heat: heat that he could taste, heat that he could swallow.

Their eyes met. And in that moment, Akeha realized exactly what it was he wanted, and that this was the last, only chance he was going to get.

He surged up, like a storm wave, and kissed Thennjay.

The boy’s lips were firm, easily parted, tasting and smelling like earth and nectar, sticky and pungent. As their tongues met, Akeha drowned, senses overwhelmed by a hundred different things at once, intoxicating and indescribable. Time warped and became meaningless.

Hands pushed against the curve of his back, firm and warm. Akeha broke from the kiss and pulled away, limbs trembling. His chest hurt. “No.”

Thennjay’s expression was equal parts sorrow and resignation. “Akeha . . .”

He found words somehow. “Promise me you’ll look after Mokoya. Promise me you’ll keep her happy.”

Thennjay looked like he was studying his face, trying to commit every line to memory. “I can’t promise that. I can only try.”

“That’s good enough for me.” He stepped away, out onto the edge of the roof. “She deserves to be happy.”

“Write to me,” Thennjay said. “Send me signs that you are well.”

Akeha dipped his chin in a nod. Not a promise, but not a refusal either. He would think about it, later, when he had gotten away. The taste of the boy lingered in his mouth as he dropped down to the waterline, to where the river rushed in an unending outward torrent.

Part Three

YONGCHEOW

Chapter Twelve

YEAR TWENTY-NINE

“WELL?”

The man held the device up to the lamp, squinting at the dull surface with its one engraved character, a clumsy groove. He was a heavyset Kuanjin fence with an old scar rippling across his face. Akeha did not know his name. Twenty more devices lay spread between them on unbound cloth, ready for inspection.

Sweat had gathered on the man’s lip. He tugged crudely through metal-nature and the device came alive. The warehouse’s air thickened as it dampened water-nature. The device was designed to hamper sound recorders: call it privacy baffling, or counterespionage, or whatever was convenient. Who the buyers were, Akeha did not know and did not care. His supplier was a praying mantis of a man he had met with in a narrow alley in Cinta Putri. Where he got the devices from, Akeha also did not care.

“Well?” he repeated.

The man grunted in assent and replaced the device amongst its brethren. The warehouse he chose was in a row long since abandoned, air thick with dust and choked with the smell of rotting grain. And quiet. That was the important thing.

Satisfied with his inspection, the man reached into his sleeve and tossed Akeha a small pouch. It landed in his hands with a solid metallic clunk. He looked inside and nodded.

In the distance someone screamed.

Akeha frowned. A street over, the Slack burst with flowers of activity. Tensors fighting, clumsy sledgehammer attacks that betrayed a lack of pugilistic training. He listened: shouts, in Kuanjinwei. At least three involved.

His buyer noticed. “Protectorate business,” he said.

Akeha grimly tucked the pouch away as he continued to listen, to watch the Slack. The pattern clarified: three attackers, one defender. All Tensors.

“Don’t get involved,” said the buyer. Not a warning, just advice.

“Our business is done,” Akeha said. He straightened up and walked away. Behind him, the man snorted in derision of Akeha’s judgment.

The streets were dusky and silent enough that muffled shouting echoed. This part of Jixiang, a mercantile quarter, had been abandoned in the tides of changing fortunes. Warehouses sat with gaping mouths that could swallow thieves, smugglers, the poor, the desperate. Akeha crossed spaces briskly: the fighting had subsided into a fierce glow in the Slack. All four Tensors remained alive, clustered in one of the yawning derelicts.

Akeha stayed in the shadows by the warehouse’s entrance, his footprint in the Slack light and practiced. Three soldiers woven up in the Protectorate’s padded gray faced a gasping young man in civilian dress. Blood covered half his head, seeped through the front of his tunic. The soldiers stood in a fan: two flanking, the leader confronting the bleeding man with some kind of tube weapon.

“Tell me where it is, and this can end,” said the soldier with the tube. A man. The weapon crackled as he smacked it in his hand.

“You can threaten me with pain or death. I’m not afraid. And I won’t tell you—”

The weapon sang, and electricity struck. The young man screamed and fell to his knees. Chemical burn seared the air.

In the ringing silence, the young man struggled back upright. “I won’t tell you anything.”

Akeha carried a dozen flying daggers: tucked in his belt, around his arms, on the border of his calves. He was aware of their weight, their heft, and the speed at which he could hurl them in between heartbeats. He was aware of many things at that moment.

He hadn’t been noticed. It was not too late to walk away.

But Mokoya wouldn’t, he knew.

Akeha closed his eyes, slowed his breathing.

His blow fell through water-nature. A shockwave knocked all four men flat. Akeha moved. The first soldier to stand died with a blade between the eyes, skull shattered from the force of the impact. The second was hit in the throat and collapsed, choking on flesh and gristle.

The leader surged forward, grasping at the Slack in panic. His weapon snarled with energy. Too slow. Akeha closed his hand. Water-nature responded. Like a noose, it snapped around the man’s neck. Bone disintegrated, flesh ruptured, and the man dropped like a slab of fish, blood pooling around the ruin.

Akeha exhaled. Red patterned the ground in chaotic gouts, but he remained clean. None of the soldiers moved again. The Slack settled into reservoir calm.

The wounded young man sat on the floor where he had fallen, eyes round, mouth a gaping circle. As Akeha stepped out of the shadows, he scrambled backward, terrified, whispering prayers as though faced with the devil himself.

Akeha walked up to him and wordlessly held out a hand.

The young man stared at it. Thoughts and emotions filtered visibly across his narrow face. When he reached the point of realizing death was not forthcoming, he crumpled to the ground in a heap and started to pray. Akeha had been around Katau Kebang long enough to recognize words of gratitude to the Almighty.

He allowed himself a sigh.

When the young man finished praying, he fixed his eyes on Akeha with surprising clarity. “Who are you?”

“A friend. We need to leave.”

“Who sent you?”

He scowled, already regretting his involvement. “The fortunes.”

“Was it Lady Han?”

“It was your Almighty,” Akeha snapped. “Do you want to live or not?”

The man studied Akeha’s face for a moment more, and his expression changed again. Suspicion had lodged there, along with a measure of curiosity. “You look like her.”

“What?”

“The seer. You look like her. Are you—no, it can’t be. Are you?”

Akeha took one breath in, let it out. Moved on. “You’re a Tensor, running from the Protectorate. You have something they want. I’m thinking these three goons won’t be the last they send.” He repeated, “Do you want to live or not?”

The man considered this, his brows knitted. His complexion was glazed with blood loss, and there was a telltale tremble to his limbs, an uncontrollable spasm of the fingers.

This time, when Akeha held out his hand, the young man took it.

* * *

His name was Yongcheow, and he had recently come from Chengbee. He didn’t offer more, and Akeha didn’t ask. The blood loss left him leaning his weight on Akeha. Something was wrong with one of his ankles.

The moon illuminated the streets of packed dirt before them, sides clotted with debris. The ghost quarters of Jixiang had been optimistically carved out of a hillside, then abandoned when they became too heavy a load to bear. The lights of the city proper glowed below them.

As they navigated toward the living streets of the city, Yongcheow said, “You never told me your name.”

Akeha’s vault of false names was large and easily opened. It waited. He hesitated; an abyssal heartbeat passed. “It’s Akeha.”

“So I was right then. You are Sanao Akeha. The Protector’s fugitive son.”

Akeha didn’t answer.

“Why did you save me?” Yongcheow asked.

“You looked like you were in trouble.”

“I was. But you didn’t have to step in. You don’t know me, and I presume you weren’t lying about not being sent by the Machinists.”

Akeha frowned. He knew of the Machinists; he wanted nothing to do with them or their tendrils of rebellion. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“I do. It’s how I get into trouble.”

They walked farther in silence. Yongcheow’s steps had started to falter, each one heavier and slower. Akeha tightened his grip around the man’s slender waist. “Keep walking,” he said. On one hand, he was already braced to end the night burying another body. On the other, he really did not want to.

“You shouldn’t have killed those men,” Yongcheow said, breath clouding the air. His tone was gentle, not accusatory. It could have been from the blood loss.

“Would you have preferred I let them kill you?”

“Killing them wasn’t the only solution.”

“It was the least messy one.” And he did not like to be reminded of it, even if it kept the young man conscious and talking. “Sympathy for them is how you got into trouble.”

“You shouldn’t have killed them,” Yongcheow repeated, more softly.

Akeha did not respond.

As they started down the incline that would bring them into the parts of Jixiang that still lived, Yongcheow said, “Wait. Let’s go down that alley, please.”

The alley ended in a small grove of mountain dogwood, their short trunks twisted into ugly shapes. Yongcheow pulled away and stumbled magnetically toward one. Akeha followed closely, poised to catch him if something happened.

Gasping from the effort to stay focused, Yongcheow unstitched the bark of the tree where slackcraft had fused it over a hollow in the trunk. Concealed within was a cloth bundle. Unwrapped on the ground, it revealed several scrolls, a group of smaller bundles, and wooden treasure boxes. One of the boxes contained packets of powders and elixir drops. Yongcheow counted out a few of the latter and swallowed them.

Akeha studied the contents of the bundle. “Is this what they were looking for?”

Yongcheow nodded.

“And these.” Akeha pushed at the nestling scrolls. “The Machinists’ secrets?”

The man pressed a clumsy, urgent finger to Akeha’s lips, as if he hadn’t been on the constant lookout for soldiers following them. He flinched away in annoyance.

Still, in a burst of unearned trust, Yongcheow allowed Akeha to take custody of the cloth bundle. “My wounds are worse than I thought—” he began.

Akeha stopped him from finishing that thought. “I will help. But not here.” He pulled Yongcheow to his feet. “Come. We’ve delayed enough.”

Yongcheow swayed. “You’re a good person,” he said through soft lips, as Akeha held him firm.

Akeha looped an arm around him. “You’ll regret saying that.”

Chapter Thirteen

YONGCHEOW STAYED ON BOTH feet all the way to the eastern side of Jixiang, where the Flower Inn waited. The decorated yellow lanterns of the perfumed quarter lit the elbow-jostling street, where the passage of a bloodied man supported by another drew stares, but little comment.

Akeha wrestled his companion to the entrance of the inn, where they were met by the bulk of Ang, the inn’s doorkeeper. He looked the two over, arms crossed, and warned, “No trouble.”

“No trouble,” Akeha replied.

Akeha was a regular at the Flower Inn, and Ang had known him for years. He grunted and stepped aside.

“Send someone up with water,” Akeha said. “Two pails.”

Ang nodded.

Yongcheow barely made it up two flights of stairs and down the wooden corridor to Akeha’s room. Akeha released him onto the bed, where he remained seated, breathing very slowly. His clothes were heavy and stiff with drying blood. “Get undressed,” Akeha said. He sought out his medicine cabinet.

“Wait,” Yongcheow said. Akeha turned back, frowning. The other man pushed his hands against the hard surface of the bed to stay upright. “There’s something . . . you need to know.”

“What?”

“My confirmation, I didn’t . . . I didn’t get confirmed.” As Akeha’s frown deepened, he said, “I mean, I got confirmed, but I didn’t go to the doctors. Some—”

“I don’t care,” Akeha said.

He turned away: there was work to do. Cloths for bandages, herbs and powders for salves, bowls to mix them with. Akeha’s skill with forest-nature was self-taught and lacked the finesse to reknit a gash this deep. Needle and thread would help.

Broad-shouldered Amah was the one who brought the pails up. She glanced over at Yongcheow, his tunic off, compression bandages off, exposing a blood-thickened knife wound across the rib cage, and clucked. “Getting in trouble again?”

Akeha thanked her for the water.

“There’s still soup left over from dinner,” she said. “Do you want?”

He nodded. “Bring us two bowls later.”

The wound had to be cleaned, disinfected, pulled shut. Yongcheow leaned back, breath whistling through his teeth, as Akeha worked.

“So what is it you do?” he asked. “When you’re not rescuing people in need.”

Akeha threaded needle through flesh. “I’m a deliveryman.”

“You’re very good at killing people, for a deliveryman.”

Akeha said nothing. The work before him required focus.

“So what do you deliver? And for whom?”

“Anything. Anyone. I don’t ask. I don’t look. I do the job. It makes everything simpler.”

“Anyone?”

“No Protectorate. That’s my only rule.”

Yongcheow laughed, and Akeha halted as the man’s side shook, the torn edges of the wound shifting. “You’re a smuggler.”

Akeha waited for him to still before returning to work. Black thread drew flesh to flesh, forest-nature set it on the path to healing.

Closing the wound was the easy part. The blood loss—that was harder to fix. A skilled doctor would have had ways to replenish the lost iron; Akeha was no such thing. He pressed the thick paste he had made over the gash, equal parts nourishment and antiseptic. Then he bound it with clean cloth.

“No compression until it heals,” he said. The other man nodded.

The injuries clouding his head and legs were superficial, easier to deal with. Basic doctoring was simple; the rest was up to the fortunes.

Yongcheow’s fingers grazed his chin. Akeha froze. “Thank you,” the man whispered.

Akeha escaped the contact to prepare the strong, bitter healing brew.

His patient accepted the cup of dark liquid with a small expression of wonder. “Why did you save me?”

“We’ve discussed this.”

“You didn’t answer.”

In irritation, Akeha turned away to clean the room. “Rest now. This place is safe. Soldiers won’t find you tonight.” And it was the best they could do for now. Tomorrow was tomorrow’s affair.

* * *

Yongcheow slept easily; Akeha didn’t. In a square of moonlight by the bed, soft as winter frost, he combed through the cloth bundle that had almost cost his companion his life.

The Machinist scrolls drew his attention first. They were lightning scrolls, new technology that had filtered south only in the last few months: thin sheets shaped out of lodestone paste, Slack-imprinted with information that required a decoder to extract. Their presence told stories—Tensor involvement, money, deep organization. In Akeha’s line of work, he listened to a lot of talk. The talk about the growing Machinist rebellion in the capital said it was driven less by downtrodden farmers than by disaffected Tensors. Here was the proof, solid in his hands.

His companion, then: also one of those disaffected? The bundle told little of the man. The small wooden boxes held medicines, soaps, tools to mend broken things, money. There was a thin prayer mat, folded and rolled up. The third scroll was a copy of the Instructions, the holy edicts revered by the Obedient. An old copy, but well kept. Well loved. He looked for evidence of family, lovers, friends. Nothing.

Akeha unwrapped one of the last bundles. As he laid the cloth flat, its damning contents spilled into the light. Pearl-sized silver pellets. Blasting powder in packets, smelling of fireworks. And the main event, heavy and metallic, sitting in the middle of it all.

A gun.

Akeha had seen guns before. They were Tensors’ playthings, put together by masters of earth- and water-nature for fun. The ones he’d seen used coiled springs and slackcraft and produced just enough force to punch holes in paper cutouts. This one was no plaything. It had heft. It had scars, black on the nozzle and stark across the body. It had a slot for blasting powder.

It was a weapon.

A weapon that didn’t rely on slackcraft.

A weapon that didn’t require a Tensor to charge it.

A weapon that anybody could use.

Akeha lifted it, felt its stonelike weight, put it back down. A slip of paper caught his attention. Unfolded, it revealed a scrawl of diagrams and instructions. Akeha recognized the signature appended to it. Midou. A friend from later childhood, a relative close enough to bear some prestige, a cousin distant enough to be dispensable. The paper was speckled with red that could be inkspill or bloodstain.

He rolled up the bundle, blood racing in his veins. If this was the Machinist endgame—arming the peasant masses with deadly weapons—then his understanding of the situation was broken and hollow.

Akeha looked over his shoulder. In the dark, on his bed, Yongcheow slumbered, pallid and inscrutable. A small man, caught up in a web of things beyond his ken. Akeha had to extricate himself before he, too, got caught in it.

Chapter Fourteen

YONGCHEOW WOKE AT FIRST sunrise to pray. Akeha, who’d slept on the floor, watched his slippered feet pad across the ground, pause to retrieve the prayer mat, then vanish behind a cabinet’s bulk. He drifted back to sleep with Yongcheow’s fluid supplications nestling in his ears.

Later, he woke again to a stirring in the Slack: Yongcheow pulling on fire-nature to dry freshly washed clothes. He sat up. The bed had been made, the cloth bundle reassembled. Yongcheow was half dressed, heating his tunic as it hung on a piece of string.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh. You’re awake.”

“Planning to leave before I woke?”

“No, I—” Yongcheow obscured his reaction in the flurry of putting on the tunic. “I need to get to Waiyi as fast as possible.”

Akeha knew Waiyi. A foot-of-the-mountain hamlet in the wilds, several hundred yields off the river. It was surrounded by hills and good places to hide. He did a lot of business there. “I don’t advise traveling. Your wounds need more time.”

The stiff, cautious way Yongcheow fastened his tunic was proof he also knew this. “It’s time I don’t have. I would stay longer, if I could.”

Akeha watched the man’s face and movements intently as he posed the next question: “What are you carrying that can’t wait one more day?”

“Information.” He met Akeha’s gaze head-on. “I know you looked through the bundle.” When Akeha didn’t deny this, he continued, “The information concealed on the scrolls is a matter of life and death.”

“Information the Protectorate would kill for. What is it?”

Yongcheow’s lips tightened. “Maybe . . . it might be better for you not to ask.”

Akeha folded his arms and leaned against a wooden beam.

“It involves your sister.”

Within him, Akeha’s stomach lurched into movement. “Tell me.”

A seismic sigh. “Your sister had a vision. She saw an attack on the Great High Palace by a small group of Tensors. These Tensors had connections to the Machinist movement. It’s . . . complicated, and their motives were their own. But in short, the attack failed, and now your mother is purging suspected Machinists throughout the Protectorate.”

“Purging . . .” Dread shivered through him. “Do you mean—”

“What do you think it means?”

Akeha looked to the ceiling, to where the rafters held firm. “How many dead?”

Yongcheow’s shoulders tilted. “We can’t save those in the capital. They got out, or they died. We’re trying to warn everyone else. What I’m carrying are lists. A list of known members outside the capital, and a list of Protectorate targets. Not all the people on our list are Protectorate targets. And not all the people on the Protectorate’s list are our people.” He licked his lips. “We could save innocents by warning them.”

Akeha closed his eyes and counted the stiff breaths that passed. When he opened his eyes, the world was still there. “What about the gun?”

Yongcheow remained mute for several heartbeats. Finally, he said thickly, “It was a gift. Bequeathed to me.”

“I saw Midou’s signature. He was a childhood friend.”

Yongcheow’s eyes were fixed on the air, on nothing. “He was a good man. Too good.”

Silence bloomed. Yongcheow, regaining his composure, said, “In any case, now you understand my urgency.”

Akeha said nothing. He had not been in the capital in a long time. Mother’s purges were stern, quiet things: doors pushed in at night, muffled bodies dragged from beds. Vanished. Mokoya once asked Sonami where they put all the graves. Sonami said, “Mother doesn’t leave that kind of mess.”

Yongcheow carefully tied the cloth bundle around himself, avoiding the wound. “Will you come with me?”

Akeha tightened his arms across his chest. “No Protectorate. That’s the rule.”

A medley of emotions ghosted through Yongcheow’s face: disappointment, sadness, resignation, fear. “I see. Well . . . thank you for everything, then. His peace be with you.” He stepped over the room’s threshold.

“Wait,” Akeha said.

Yongcheow swiveled as Akeha dove into a medicine cabinet. “Take these. You need to replenish your iron.”

His fingers closed loosely around Akeha’s as he accepted the elixirs. “Thank you.” His hand lingered a moment longer than necessary, skin electric against skin. Then he stepped away, out of the room.

Akeha folded onto the unyielding surface of the bed, breathing very slowly. His thoughts turned briefly to Midou. Scrub-haired, knock-kneed Midou, who took everything with the gravity of a funeral director; Midou the gunmaker, Midou the unlikely rebel, Midou who was almost certainly dead. Strange to think of those familiar bones reduced to atoms, scattered across a hillside in Chengbee.

He shut his eyes, pressed cold fingertips to the bridge of his nose.

What would Mokoya do?

* * *

The fierce, shining ribbon of the river Tiegui broadened into sluggish green flats by the time it reached Jixiang, heavy with silt and soft at the banks. Diluted clumps of merchant ships bobbed listlessly in its eddies. When Akeha caught up with him, Yongcheow was walking the gray-skied docks, trying to find a willing oar among the merchants sailing upriver with the last of the harvest.

“Don’t take the river route,” he said. “It’s too open.”

Yongcheow had showed almost no surprise at Akeha’s reappearance. “What’s the alternative?”

“There’s a path through the forest, along the buttress of the mountain range. It’s longer, and shouldn’t be traveled alone, but it’ll be harder for soldiers to find you.”

Yongcheow folded his hands behind him. “It sounds risky.”

Akeha drew and released a full breath before speaking, knowing that there would be no turning back after this. “I’ll take you.”

A small smile spread from one corner of Yongcheow’s lips to the other. “You changed your mind.”

“Come,” Akeha said irritably, “before I change it again.”

Chapter Fifteen

THE ROUTE WOULD TAKE two days on foot. Yongcheow’s injuries meant more precautions, fewer treacherous shortcuts. Over both day- and night-cycles they would travel during the sunup hours and rest during the sundown ones, taking turns to keep watch.

“You’ve done this many times before,” Yongcheow observed.

“And you haven’t. Not even once,” Akeha replied.

He did not deny this.

In the monotony of light forest cover, routine settled upon them like a fisherman’s net. They walked, they caught snatches of sleep, they walked again. This far south, at the periphery of summer and autumn, sunup and sundown hours matched each other in length. Light, dark, light, dark. Akeha trapped rabbits to skin and boil. Yongcheow sank into a fog of strange, serious contemplation, breaking it only to pray at every rest stop, and to answer questions.

Their first stop Akeha asked, “What has my sister said about the purge?”

“Who knows? She doesn’t leave the monastery. You probably have a better idea of what she thinks than I do.”

Their second stop Akeha asked, “Does she really not leave the monastery? Ever?”

“My friend, I’m half Kebangilan. My father is a provincial magistrate. Our village is so small people can’t point to it on a map. I am—I was—no one in the Tensorate. Certainly not of the tier to hear the whispers that surround the Protector’s family.”

“I see.”

Their third stop, Akeha said, “The gun. A Machinist initiative?”

This one drew a laugh, bitter as the frost. “If only! It was Midou’s prototype for the Tensorate. In the end, he didn’t want it in your mother’s hands.”

Steam rose in sheets from the pot of boiling rabbits. Clarity seeped into Akeha’s mind. “The guns were for Protectorate soldiers.”

“And Tensors. You must have noticed, most of us are useless at fighting. Get us a little nervous, and . . . that’s the end of it.”

“It just takes practice. Focus can be taught. Adrenaline can be a tool.”

“Yes, Monastery-style training. That will go down well with the pampered brats stuffing the halls of the Tensorate academy.”

“So, weapons, then. She must be preparing for something.”

“Not necessarily. If she could arm Tensors, then she wouldn’t need pugilists for close combat. You know she doesn’t get along with the Grand Monastery these days.”

“I know,” he said. Pride swelled quietly at Thennjay’s resistance to her rule.

“More than anything,” Yongcheow admitted, hands tense around the cloth bundle he carried, “I’m afraid of Protectorate troops with these weapons.”

“It’s only a matter of time. If not Midou, someone else will perfect them.”

“I know.” The tendons in his hands stood out as he clenched them. Akeha resisted the urge to reach out and massage the stiffness out of them.

At their next stop Akeha said, “So, about you and Midou . . .”

Yongcheow’s lowered lids occluded reams of history. “Many years ago, if that’s what you’re asking.” At Akeha’s patient silence, he sighed. “We were both in the academy at that time. He had recently converted to Obedience, and that’s how we met. He was always a radical, agitating for change. I was afraid of what would happen to my family. So, we fell out.”

“But you’re here now.”

Yongcheow pushed in the dirt with a broken branch. “The Protectorate put his name on the list. I was added by association. They came for him first. He left me a warning, and—” He hefted the cloth bundle.

“Then you’re not a Machinist.”

“I wasn’t. But I am now.” He shifted his weight. “Don’t misunderstand me, I’m not opposed to the philosophy. In fact, I agree completely. People should have access to technologies without relying on Tensors. I just didn’t think I had it in me. Joining the movement, I mean.”

“You underestimate yourself,” Akeha said softly.

It was Yongcheow’s turn to rest as the sun fell. In the soft shelter of willow crowns, Akeha watched shadows march across the warm canvas of the other man’s face. As the patterns shifted and changed, he felt something in his chest come loose.

He spent the time between the third and fourth stops snarled in thoughts of possible futures. When they laid down their packs again, he ventured, “You didn’t go to the confirmation doctors. Was that because of your religion?”

Yongcheow blinked. “That’s . . . a very personal question.”

“I apologize. I shouldn’t have asked.” He turned away to kindle damp leaves into flame. Under the ministrations of fire-nature, the detritus dried and crackled to life, the sound filling the damning silence. He watched the flames gyrate until his heart rate slowed, then he turned back. “I’m sorry.”

Yongcheow met his gaze coolly. “It wasn’t because of religion. Some Obedient don’t alter their bodies because they believe we shouldn’t touch what the Almighty bequeaths us. To me, confirmation doesn’t fall into that. I just didn’t do it because it didn’t feel right for me.”

Akeha nodded. “Thank you. I’m so—”

“Don’t apologize again.”

He nodded.

It was Akeha’s turn to rest. He found a stone to sleep on and let dreams claim him with their wild trajectories. When three hours had passed, he woke to Yongcheow studying him with the same intensity he’d afforded the other man.

“You’re the first son the Protector’s had,” he said.

“I am.”

“It must have been a surprise for her.”

Akeha laughed, a sound like pebbles rolling. He stood, brushing dirt away. “Everything about me was a surprise for her. My existence was a mistake.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I know, I know. The will of the Almighty.”

Yongcheow exhaled. “Not just that. People make mistakes, they can’t be mistakes. And I don’t think you believe that either.”

“Don’t I?”

“If you do, then a mistake saved my life. I’m still grateful.”

Akeha snorted. He held out a hand, and Yongcheow took it, pulling himself up.

The first day flowed over into the next. Their journey relaxed into easier banter. Akeha pressed Yongcheow on Machinist philosophy, a debate that rolled into a tangle of points and counterpoints.

“No,” Yongcheow said, exasperation creeping into his voice, “we’re not advocating the abolishment of everything that uses slackcraft. We just want to develop alternatives for laypeople.”

“But you’ll still need to rely on Tensors. As long as there are things that can only be done through slackcraft—”

“We’re not trying to abolish the Tensorate either! Of course there will still be things that work on slackcraft—”

“Lots of things.”

“Yes. Many. Like—”

“Talkers.”

“Aha.” Yongcheow brightened. “You’d be surprised. There’s been work done on this. Someone found a way to record sounds as electrical signals, which you can transmit instantly, or almost instantly, through wires.”

“Wires.”

“Yes. If you have devices connected by wires, you can talk.”

“So if I’m in Cinta Putri, and I have someone in Chengbee I want to talk to, I have to run a wire from Cinta Putri all the way to Chengbee. Six thousand li. Just so we can talk.”

Yongcheow sighed. “It—someone is working on it. It is only a start.”

The path eased and sloped gently downhill as they approached Waiyi. As the day proceeded, Akeha said, “The Machinist movement is admirable. I agree: non-Tensors should have access to technology that doesn’t rely on slackcraft. And there may be factions in the Tensorate who also agree. But the Protectorate will never relinquish its source of power. Your movement is doomed to misfortune.”

“Good thing I don’t believe in the fortunes, then.”

“You believe in the will of your Almighty. How is that different?”

“The Almighty decides our circumstances. He doesn’t decide our actions. It’s what He gave us free will for.”

“So you chose rebellion.”

“We chose to act. Rebellion was the Protectorate’s choice. They could easily have accepted our existence. But they didn’t.”

Akeha let this thought circulate, picking apart the reasons he felt uncomfortable whenever free will was brought up. Even though he knew the real answer.

At the next stop, he finally confessed, “It’s hard for me to believe in free will.”

They had set up in a shallow limestone cave, a slanted scar in the side of the mountain forming the eastern forest border. Yongcheow looked sideways at him. “Let me guess. Because of your sister?”

“No matter what we did, her visions happened anyway. Future events can be set in stone. Where is your free will in that?”

Yongcheow folded careful hands over his belly. “But in those cases, you did do something, didn’t you? You went to find the new Head Abbot. Your mother’s purging Machinists. Some things might be fixed, but everything around them can be changed. That’s the part that counts.”

“A test. That’s the Obedient belief, isn’t it? Everything is a test from the heavens.”

A considered silence simmered. Then Yongcheow spoke. “The saying goes, ‘The black tides of heaven direct the courses of human lives.’ To which a wise teacher said, ‘But as with all waters, one can swim against the tide.’”

His gaze was unshakeable as it fixed on Akeha. “I chose to swim. So can you.”

Chapter Sixteen

THEY WERE LESS THAN twenty li from Waiyi when the Protectorate caught up to them.

It was the snuffling that alerted Akeha. It came from the right, through a thicket of grass and shrubs, in the same tenor as a boar hunting for food. But there was no corresponding rustle, no crunch of massive porcine body through underbrush. Akeha squeezed Yongcheow’s arm to stop him walking.

Yongcheow frowned. Akeha put a finger to his lips and directed the man to the cover of a peony bush.

The snuffling intensified. Something stirred within the blades and leaves.

The feathered head of a raptor snapped up from the vegetation.

Akeha forced his breathing to stay even. The creature’s sleek head swiveled. It blinked.

He knew that ash coloring, the lichens of dark blue spread over the top of the head. A lifetime ago, there had been hatchlings in the Grand Monastery. In the mornings Akeha and Mokoya would throw wet slivers of meat to the waiting scramble of teeth.

It was said raptors had memories as long as their claws were sharp. “Tempeh,” he whispered. “It’s me. Akeha.”

The raptor’s nostrils flared.

A scout. The Protectorate had sent pugilists after Yongcheow. A betrayal on Thennjay’s part? Hard to tell. He had no way of knowing Akeha was involved.

Tempeh pushed through the vegetation. An electric collar, hard and silver, sat in a wide band across its throat. Akeha frowned. The Grand Monastery’s raptors didn’t need to be controlled with shock collars—

Unless—

A targeted jolt through water-nature broke the clasp. As the collar clattered to the ground, it revealed a ribbon of scarred flesh, down and feathers burned off.

The raptor hissed, circling, surprised.

“It’s over,” Akeha said softly. “You don’t have to—”

That thought was shattered by the high, rotating sound of a lightcraft. Too late. Akeha’s senses sharpened in the Slack. A fully trained pugilist would have the advantage over him. Speed was his only chance. A knife to the throat before they could act—

The lightcraft crested over the brush, bearing a familiar figure. Master Yeo, the old disciplinarian from the monastery, clad in the sharp lines of Protectorate knit.

“Akeha.” Her smile was a razor.

Half a second’s delay. That’s all it took. His knife sailed, but it was too late. Master Yeo didn’t blink. Her cudgel moved: one end struck the knife into vegetation. The other end swung around, and an electrical bolt pierced Akeha.

He folded like a fan, veins on fire. But soon as he touched ground, he was struggling back up, fighting for clarity, sending a clumsy shockwave in her direction—

She whipped water-nature around his neck. Akeha gasped as it cut off blood and air. She would crush his vertebrae if she could. He pushed back in water-nature, tried to knock her down with another shockwave, but she resisted easily.

Spasming black bloomed in his vision. He fell to his knees, fighting for consciousness. She was too fast, too strong, too experienced. As his limbs collapsed under him, he sent a last, desperate tendril to Tempeh, trying to spur the raptor into action. Trying to override its fear and confusion.

Nothing. The black closed over him. Instinct drove his fingers to clutch uselessly at his throat. As he sank, all he saw was bright colors, flashes from childhood.

A loud, sharp crack filled the air.

The pressure released in an instant. Air flooded his lungs. A heartbeat’s delay juddered by before he returned to his body, forcing it upright. His head sang with blood reasserting itself.

He felt Yongcheow before he saw the man. Warm hands grasped his arms as his eyes fought to focus. “Akeha? Are you all right? Please, say something.”

He smelled the sulfur on him and understood.

Yongcheow’s fingers pressed into his face. “Akeha.”

He found words: “Where is she?”

Yongcheow glanced over his shoulder. Akeha struggled to numb feet, leaning on the other man, who winced. Akeha brushed a reassuring hand over the man’s still-healing wound before staggering forward.

Master Yeo lay where she had fallen, but she was still alive. Blood patterned her face, fresh runnels crawling from her nose and mouth. The gunshot had punctured her chest, where an ocean of red was spreading. Her eyes turned toward Akeha as he crouched.

“Who sent you?” he asked. “Who did you come for?”

Her lips moved. Thick bubbles emerged, crimson mixed with frothy pink.

Tell me, he sent through the Slack. The twins’ old trick sometimes worked with other people. But he felt nothing except her rage and confusion. And pain.

Akeha sighed and shut his eyes. He reached for water-nature, broad and shining, and snapped her spine cleanly across the base of her neck.

He stood up. “Protectorate uniform and rank. She defected from the monastery.”

Yongcheow was trembling beside him.

“Are you all right?”

Yongcheow said nothing, head moving, jaw working, staring at the body on the ground.

Akeha gripped his arm. “Yongcheow.”

“It happened so fast,” he whispered. “I had no time to think.” He had the bright, trembling eyes of someone witnessing death for the first time.

“You did what was necessary,” Akeha said.

Yongcheow didn’t respond. Akeha looked back down. A dead body at their feet. One in a long trail that had no beginning and probably no end. “Mother wouldn’t have just sent regular troops to cut down Tensors in the purge. She’d send pugilists, like her. This woman had blood on her hands. I guarantee it.”

Finally, slowly, Yongcheow nodded.

The raptor slunk in. Its narrow snout quested over the body, curious nostrils flaring, lips peeling back at the smell of fresh meat. Akeha hissed sharply and it backed away, rustling its feathers in submission. It still remembered the monastery. Still remembered him.

“There are no righteous deaths,” Yongcheow whispered. “Only ones that cannot be avoided.”

Akeha recognized the edict he was quoting from. He had learned it, too, early in his career. It brought less and less comfort as the years went by.

“We need to bury her,” Akeha said. “We can do that, at least.”

Chapter Seventeen

“HOW DO I KNOW I can trust you?”

Lady Han’s remaining eye, the one not curtained behind an embroidered patch, speared Akeha like an insect. The leader of the Machinists wore an eastern suit of jacket and pants, its sun-red fabric the brightest splash in a cavern cut out of raw granite. Between them, Yongcheow’s scrolls lay isolated on a silver tray.

“I came of my own will,” Akeha said.

“But for what purpose? The Protector’s son, showing up at this precise point in time . . . it’s a bit convenient, isn’t it?”

She’d had her subordinates seize him when they arrived at the hideout, almost spent from the long, steep journey from Waiyi to the caves. Yongcheow, sweat-glazed, had to stammer that he was a comrade, not a prisoner.

The other man was a reassuring weight in the periphery. “Perhaps it is the will of the Almighty,” Akeha said.

“I have less tolerance for jokes than you think.” She leaned on the table separating them.

Akeha had some memories of Lady Han, a cloud of impressions blurred by the stretch of intervening years. She had been close to Mother once, a beloved concubine, perhaps more. Akeha had been a child then; by the time he returned to the Great High Palace years later, she was gone. The missing eye was new.

He lifted his hands, blank palms out. “It was not a joke. I have no other explanation for you.”

Her eye narrowed suspiciously.

“I have fled the consequences of my mother’s rule for ten years. I was happy to live that way, in ignorance, as long as it didn’t affect me. But this week, something changed.” He shot a quick look at Yongcheow. “What else would you call it? Coincidence? It feels like more than that.”

“The accidental rebel? The heaven-sent rebel? Neither sounds plausible to me.”

He shrugged. What else could he offer?

Her guards shifted around them. Surrounded. He knew that he would walk away from this meeting a member of the movement, or not at all.

“All right,” said Lady Han. “Prove it.” She swept from the table, paced a small circle, and turned back to Akeha. “I have a task for you.”

“Name it.”

“Return to the Protectorate and kill the prophet.”

It took two heartbeats to confirm he hadn’t misheard. His skin cooled. “What?”

“She’s your sister, isn’t she? You can get close enough. Surprise her. She won’t expect it.”

Akeha’s tongue stumbled over syllables. “She has nothing to do with—”

“She’s a prophet,” Lady Han said. “She sees things no one should know.” A damning finger pointed to the scroll. “One prophecy, and over two hundred people dead or vanished. It has to stop.”

“She has no control over what she sees,” Akeha hissed.

“Exactly. The only way to stop her is to kill her. It sounds harsh, but it’s true. Kill her, and your mother gets no more insights into our plans.”

Akeha’s chest crumpled like parchment fed to a flame. “You would see her killed for this?”

Yongcheow could not hold his tongue. “She’s done nothing! If we’re going to murder innocents, how are we any better than the Protectorate?”

Lady Han’s head snapped in his direction. “Silence. We don’t kill lightly.” She turned back to Akeha. “One life could save countless others.”

“You don’t know that,” Yongcheow said. “This is indefensible.”

“If you want an assassin, find someone else,” Akeha said through clenched teeth. “If this is the price for joining your movement, I choose death.”

She stalked toward him. Akeha snapped into fighting mode, crisp in the Slack, even as his thoughts jumped in electric lines: Mokoya must be warned. He might die, but Yongcheow had the gun. He could strike, inflict maximum damage, give Yongcheow the chance to—

Lady Han stood before him. A diminutive woman with the force of a thunderstorm. His mind capsized, thoughts of resistance and murder scattering like spilled beans. She surveyed the riot of emotion snared upon his face. A smile blossomed across hers.

“A man of morals,” she said. “Not what I expected of a smuggler.”

He let her words and meaning sink through him. “You asked me to murder my own sister,” he said, enunciating every syllable sharply.

“You come from a bloodline stained with remorseless familicides. I had to make sure of what you are.”

A muscle seized in his jaw. He had little patience for those who used his sister’s life as a plaything, a bargaining chip. He said, “If you wanted my loyalty, there were better ways of earning it.”

She laughed and thumbed his chin, as though she considered herself a kindly aunt. “Don’t think I’ll go easy on you,” she said, the corners of her eyes crinkling. “I will watch you very carefully, Sanao Akeha.”

He breathed out as his heart rate rappelled down to normal. But his hands remained clenched in knuckled determination. “And I will do the same.”

* * *

Their safe house in Waiyi was a gap-toothed cottage, cushioned by dirt rows once home to broad beans and pumpkins, now a forest of weeds. The sun had fallen. Yongcheow’s gait remained stiff as they walked the stony, serpentine path toward its silhouette. One of Lady Han’s guards had been a doctor, and his wounds had been made whole, but the pain lingered, as pain usually did.

“I’ve never met her,” he admitted. “Lady Han. I’d heard her described as remarkable, but . . .”

“There must have been a reason Mother liked her,” Akeha said. The fist of emotions in his chest had yet to ease open. The swift calculation he’d seen in Lady Han had left quite an impression. “And it would take more than courage to stand against the Protector.”

“What do you think she would have done if you’d agreed?”

“I don’t know.” Unlikely that she would have grieved Mokoya’s death.

Beside them, Tempeh snuffled in the tangled grass. The raptor had determinedly followed them into Waiyi, and Akeha had given up on chasing it away. Freed from the painful confines of Protectorate control, the creature had decided what it wanted.

“What you said to Lady Han. About the will of the Almighty. Did you mean that?”

The warm, damp evening air was a blessing. “It felt like the right thing to say.”

Yongcheow hesitated. “I don’t know how else to put it, but . . . look. To be Obedient is to live with constant ridicule. People call you superstitious, uneducated, backward. Behind your back and to your face. I don’t care what you believe, but don’t say those things just to make fun of them.”

“I wasn’t.” Akeha looked at his feet. “The past few days . . . I don’t know how to explain them. I—” He sucked in another gift of air. “I have a lot to think about.”

Tempeh ran ahead of them toward the house. Five yields away, it stopped, head alert, feathers erect along its spine. Akeha stopped Yongcheow.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Akeha gestured for silence. Within the house the Slack hung in a way that sent a frisson through him. A familiar presence waited.

Tempeh stood by the door and rumbled.

His heart a burr in his chest, Akeha pushed the door open.

At the dining table a figure, robe-clad, stood and pulled its gray hood back. Her eyes fixed on his, shining. “Keha.”

Mokoya.

She looked exactly the same. She looked entirely different. The years had changed her face, but she was still his sister, his twin. The same cheekbones, the same hooded eyes, the same crooked mouth. She had not painted her face. She was still dressed as a nun. And her hair clung to her scalp like a penitent’s or mourner’s.

“So it’s true,” she said. “You’ve joined the Machinists.”

He stepped into the house, Yongcheow behind him. The door clicked shut. His lips, out of practice, struggled to form her name. What came out instead was “What are you doing here?”

She stepped toward him, hands held up to touch his face. “Keha.”

His chest was full; his heart was empty. “How did you find me?”

“I saw you.”

He broke away from her, turning so she couldn’t see the expression on his face. “You dreamed this?”

“A week ago.”

A week ago. A black snake of fear coiled. He looked at her and saw that under her cloak, she still wore the box that collected her visions, her dreams. Everything she prophesied, the Tensorate collected and studied. A week ago. A torrent of words broke through: “What else did you see? What else do they know?”

“Who?” She followed his line of sight. “Keha—no. No! I destroyed that vision. You can do that, you know. I don’t hand everything over to Mother. If she’d hurt you, I—” She couldn’t complete the thought.

Akeha tightened his lips. Mokoya gave the impression she was made of glass, bright and clear and brilliant, and one blow away from shattering. She did not need to know about the grave they’d left in the forest.

“Your friends are safe,” she said. “I wouldn’t betray them to Mother.”

The snake within him struck. “But you let her have the one with the attack on the palace. The one that started the purges.”

He saw the shudder that went through her. “I had to! I had to. They were carrying explosives, Keha. Hundreds would have died, many of them innocents, if I’d done nothing. How could I have predicted what she would do with it?”

“She’s Mother. What did you think she would do with it? Pardon everyone involved? Say oh, it’s nothing, there’s nothing to worry about?”

“Keha, I—”

“No, she’s right.” Yongcheow’s interruption was fueled by a core of panic. “Unwarranted as it is, your mother’s retaliation would have been worse if they’d succeeded. If they’d blown up a whole section of the Great High Palace, she’d have had people executed in the street.”

Mokoya swallowed audibly. Memories crashed to the surface: his sister as a child, shaking and weeping in dark beds after a vision ripped through her. She’d done nothing to deserve this.

Twelve years apart, and the first thing he did was upset her. Where were the tender words he had imagined would burst forth when they saw each other again, older and wiser and settled in their places in the world? “Moko.” He brushed his palm against her cheek. She flinched, and something in him broke, but then she leaned into his touch. He waited until he could speak without shaking. “Why are you here?”

She took his hand, grasped it between hers. “I want you to come home.”

He shook his head. “Moko, I—”

“I’m pregnant.”

He stopped, stunned. “What?”

A smile crept across the pale trench of her face. “The child won’t be along for months, but—Thennjay and I have been trying for a while, and finally—”

“Congratulations,” he said, softly, in wonder.

“Come back,” she said, pressing into his hand. “Come back to the monastery. Thennjay can give you asylum. You’ll be safe. Mother can’t do anything. Please, Keha.” Her voice cracked, equal parts hope and sorrow. “Come home. I don’t want to raise a child who’s never met you.”

Akeha’s hand shook in hers. He imagined her child listening to their mother’s stories, trying to conjure up an uncle they knew only through words. His resolve softened, began to melt. It was tempting, so tempting, to say yes, to be forgiven, to return, to shape a glorious, shining future—

He turned away, terrified. There was Yongcheow, in a corner, struggling to keep his expression neutral. No matter what Akeha chose, he would still be here. He couldn’t return to the capital. And the spider-grasp of the Protectorate would continue to ensnare Machinists, out here and everywhere. That would still happen.

No. He turned to her. “I can’t.” Her mouth moved to register protests, and he said, “Moko, listen. You can’t stay here. It’s not safe. You have to go back.”

“Keha—”

“Go back home, Moko. You have a new family coming. Focus on your future. Forget about me.”

“Forget?”

He held her face in his hands. “What you and Thennjay are doing in the monastery—that’s important. Someone has to fight Mother from within. But that was never going to be me.”

Because he had always known, even as a child, that he was the lightning, while she was the fire in the core of planets. And the world needed both. Revolutions needed both. Someone had to wield the knives, but someone also had to write the treaties.

“My place is out here. You understand, don’t you?”

She trembled, as angry as she was devastated. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“I know.” And, great Slack, did he know. Deep in the pit of his belly, reaching up to suffocate him on the longest nights. He crushed her in a hug. “I know, Moko. I’ve missed you too.”

He let her cry herself empty on his shoulder. And later, when she had gone, as he crumpled against a solid surface struggling for sense and air, he let Yongcheow hold him, until he, too, was empty.

Much later, in the dark where they lay together in bed, skin to skin, Yongcheow asked, “Why didn’t you go with her?”

Akeha found Yongcheow’s hand and curled fingers against fingers. “Let the black tides of heaven direct our lives,” he murmured. He turned to look at his partner. “I choose to swim.”

Part Four

MOTHER

Chapter Eighteen

YEAR THIRTY-FIVE

WHEN THE SMOKE CLEARED, it left nothingness in its wake.

It wasn’t nothingness, exactly—there was debris and churned mud and a thick overcoat of sticky char. Lumps of organic ballast swelled from the ground, leaving the burnt landscape undulating like a graveyard. But as Akeha walked through the spongy ruin of the test site, he felt only nothingness around him. Nothingness clawed at his back and sides where the living trunks of linden trees had stood. Nothingness yawned in the cauterized air where there should have been the tang of nectar and sap and well-fed humus. Nothingness blanketed the muffled soil under his feet where once lay a thick layer of crisp autumn shedding.

The blast radius around him was a hundred yields wide. Akeha had stood on a nearby hill and shot the test device into the middle of the woods, a scallop of temperate wilderness just outside the port city of Bunshim. He’d made the weapon right, he thought, following the directives scribbled in the defector’s spindly hand. He’d performed the slackcraft as instructed, melting the gas within the tiny steel shell with so much fire- and earth-nature that it was no longer gas but something they had no name for. He’d held on to that seething, violent miasma for as long as his focus had allowed, letting go at the last possible moment, freeing the terrible energy that had accumulated within. The resulting shockwave—a balloon of gray shrouding bloodred—had knocked him off his feet from hundreds of yields away.

So this is what it does, he thought, walking through the carbonized aperture left behind. He’d known the device was a weapon, but he’d expected something like a big firecracker or a thunder bomb. Not this. The edges of the explosive wound harbored recognizable fragments—half-melted trees and charred mounds that had once been animals, felled not knowing what had hit them. But here, in the middle of the crater, the heat and light had been so intense that nothing was left except fine black ash. Everything had been pulverized at the moment of detonation.

The air felt wrong. Something lingered in it, worming through the Slack in glowing, infinitesimal paths. Coming down the hill toward the crater Akeha had put a barrier around himself, a protective layer of forest-nature just in case the blast had been toxic. That barrier was now under attack, being slowly clawed through by the changed air. As though the atoms of the dead things, too, had turned into ghosts that wanted to possess him. Wanted to drag him into dissolution with them.

The defector had come from one of the Tensorate’s secret divisions: sixteen Tensors playing on the radiant fringe of slackcrafting knowledge, manipulating the fine forces at the boundary of the five natures. One mad day the defector had killed her fifteen colleagues, burned the lab to the ground, and fled the capital city with the last copies of their manuscript. Standing in the middle of the blast grounds, feeling like death incarnate, a destroyer of worlds, Akeha began to understand why.

This weapon needed a name. Akeha had another prototype swinging from his belt like a moon, and it begged for taxonomy that bayed of what it could do. He thought about fire and death and otherworldly annihilation. The word “jinn” drifted toward him. “Ifrit.” Perhaps.

Some time later Yongcheow found him kneeling before what remained of a deer, reciting a guilt-tinged prayer for its soul.

“So it works,” he said hesitantly, looking out over the ruined landscape. “You did it.”

Akeha unfolded himself. “Yes.”

“Congratulations?” The sentence came out half statement, half question; Yongcheow didn’t know what to make of the destruction either. He’d put up his own barrier, following Akeha’s example. Yongcheow scanned the lines of his lover’s face until confidence returned to him, then gently stroked his cheek. “I knew you could do it. I’m sure Lady Han will be delighted.”

Akeha, standing at the gates of Hell, said, “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Yongcheow didn’t sigh, but the look on his face was grim. Akeha changed the topic. “I take it the exchange went well?”

“Yes. I’ve sent the merchant on his way.” Old habits made them speak in vague terms, even with nothing left alive to eavesdrop on them.

“Good.” He looked at the cloth parcel in Yongcheow’s other hand and frowned. “You brought dinner.”

A smile beamed through the gloom on Yongcheow’s face. “I cooked. It turned out surprisingly well. This time.”

The strangeness in the air chewed at him still. Akeha suppressed a shudder. “You shouldn’t have brought it here. Now it’s contaminated.” By what, he didn’t know. But just to be safe: “We’ll have to get rid of it.”

Yongcheow studied his expression and came to a grave understanding. He chuckled purposefully. “If you didn’t want to eat my cooking, you could have just said so.”

He emptied the containers over the poisoned ground. Soup noodles, the broth thick with nuts and spices, a recipe from his mother’s side of the family. Guilt flared through Akeha: it smelled good, especially by Yongcheow’s standards. He’d have to ask him to try again later. To make up for it.

* * *

They had vinegar noodles from a roadside stall back in Bunshim, perched on a bench next to the lively gullet of the city’s legendary perfumed quarter. Immersed in the warm glow of sunballs, the tart vapor of noodle broth, and the jabber of the drunk and the soon-to-be drunk, Akeha finally felt the unease quietly drain out of him, leaving him a normal person again.

The defector had killed herself not long after she’d passed her manuscripts to the Machinists. A washerwoman had gone up to her room in the safe house and found her curled into a stiff comma, a vial of poison spilled on the floor. Akeha had struggled to understand this—why flee, why spend agonizing weeks evading capture, if death had always been the final destination? If suicide had been the plan, why not perish in the flames with the rest of her division?

Now he understood. She had wanted the Machinists to know. Just in case she hadn’t been thorough enough. This was her insurance, her gamble against his mother’s ruthlessness. Her hope that both sides, understanding the horror of what had been wrought, would never resort to using these—what had he decided to call them again? These weapons.

“They’re too risky to be effective,” he said, partly to Yongcheow, partly to himself. “The slackcraft is too complex; most Tensors won’t have that much focus. If you do it wrong, you’ll destroy your own troops.”

“No doubt.” Yongcheow was thoughtful. “But you can do it.”

“I can. I’m not like most Tensors.”

“Isn’t it a good thing you’re on our side, then.”

They watched a dancer with a green ribbon in her hair flirting with a ship’s captain. “I nearly forgot,” Yongcheow said, in a tone meaning he hadn’t forgotten at all. “The merchant had something for you. A small surprise from the Grand Monastery.”

A flutter in his chest. “A letter?”

“Better than that.” Yongcheow reached into his sleeves and withdrew a cloth bundle the size of a plum. The same size as the yet-unnamed weapons. “It’s a gift. From your niece.”

“My niece.” Mokoya’s daughter. He unwrapped the bundle delicately.

Thick burlap peeled away to reveal a corkscrew of gleaming white petals, crudely shaped but recognizable as a lotus blossom. The grain of the ceramic whispered of shaping and firing by slackcraft. Akeha turned it around with vigilant fingertips, marveling at its construction.

Under the glass piece lay a note on lovingly crumpled gray paper. Unsteady brushstrokes read: To Uncle Akeha, from Eien.

Yongcheow watched him struggle to contain his expression and snorted. Akeha didn’t care, caught in the swell of warmth like a tidal wave. “Her slackcraft is improving,” he said.

“Well, with a mother like that, and her father the Head Abbot, I would be surprised if it didn’t.”

The glass lotus lay dwarfed by the palm of his hand, and he was seized by a sudden terror of dropping it. He had to find a safe place for it, somewhere padded and concealed. To Uncle Akeha, from Eien. With all the horrors in the world, it was easy to forget there were wonders too.

“Thank you,” he said to Yongcheow, even though his words were directed a thousand li away, at a smiling child he had never met and who had never met him.

* * *

They were threading toward sleep when Yongcheow ambushed him. “Have you ever thought about having children?”

Akeha froze. “What?” Remarkable that after the day’s happenings, the question still managed to unsettle him. His heart spun in his chest as he scrambled for an answer, a drowning man seeking dry land. “I don’t know. Why? Are you thinking about having children?”

“I asked you first.”

I’m the least fatherly person I know. “What would we do with a child on the run?”

“Mmh.”

Silence settled over the room. Akeha pushed up on one elbow, trying to read his partner’s face in the gloom. The clouded moonlight gave him nothing. The unspoken agreement was that neither of them was interested in parenthood. Or so he’d thought. “Yongcheow. Do you want children?”

“No. I was just curious. Just wondering.”

With Yongcheow there was no such thing as just wondering. “What’s wrong?” When the man didn’t answer, he pressed further: “What were you really asking?”

Yongcheow let the appropriate beats go by before firing the shot. “Why won’t you go back to Chengbee?”

Akeha sank onto the bed with a sigh. It always came down to this. Every year, every turning of the seasons, Yongcheow would ask him the same question, and he would give up the same excuses, the same nonanswers. When would he tire of this back-and-forth?

His lover said, “It’s been years. The girl’s growing up fast.”

“I know.”

“Why won’t you go back? Even for a visit?”

“I can’t.” Akeha wasn’t sure he could explain it in words to himself, much less someone else. Why couldn’t he return to the place of his birth? Because tigers prowled in the woods, and giant snakeheads circled in the water. He just couldn’t. “Now’s not the time.”

Yongcheow stayed silent for a few seconds, and Akeha knew the pensive expression on his face without looking. “I want to see her too.”

“I know. Someday you will. When the time is right.” An indefinite hope of things changing, a watery promise. Akeha listened to the cycle of Yongcheow’s breathing, dreading further interrogation. But none was forthcoming. Apparently satisfied with Akeha’s dilute answers, Yongcheow drifted off into sleep.

* * *

“I know what to call them.”

“What? What time is it?”

“I said, I know what to call the weapons.”

“Akeha, go back to sleep.”

“Sunballs. We should call them sunballs.”

“ . . . what?”

“They explode with the brightness of the sun. We should call them sunballs.”

“You . . . I can’t believe you woke me for this.”

“I thought you would find it funny.”

“I’ll find it funny when it’s not the unmentionable crack of night. Go back to sleep, you turtle bastard.”

“I love you.”

Chapter Nineteen

THINGS STARTED TO GO WRONG after prayers at first sunrise. Pain seared through Akeha’s veins; he doubled over as though he had been shot, breath emerging in ragged gasps.

“What is it?” Yongcheow asked, alarm suffusing him as every possibility from poison to a hidden arrow to a heart attack flashed through his imagination. “Akeha!”

Akeha couldn’t answer. He staggered across the room, grasping for his pack, searching for something that burned in his mind like a coal brand. A sense of danger had hit him, an impression of suffering so powerful the blood struggled to reach his head. He felt like he was dying. Perhaps he was.

His hands found what he was looking for. A flat, black medallion of volcanic rock, its center scooped out and replaced with faceted glass. It was one half of a pair, entangled in the Slack like talkers. Thennjay had the other half. When the glass changed colors, it meant something had happened. It meant Return to the city. Something is wrong. An emergency that couldn’t wait for a letter to wend its way to them.

Akeha had carried it for years, and for years it had remained dark. Until now. In his shaking hand, the glass glowed red, the color of blood fresh from the vein.

“What is it?” Yongcheow asked. “What does it mean?”

The initial blast of pain had broken over him, leaving numb chill in its receding wake. Akeha closed white fingers around the stone. “Mokoya.”

* * *

Because they had no safe house in Bunshim, they stayed at an inn of unsavory reputation, an all-hours place where patrons could be trusted to turn a blind eye to anything. A mix of weathered scowls and wild-eyed hunger prowled its wooden interiors, selling everything from sex to drugs to murder. Akeha, having gathered his belongings, went downstairs to find someone willing to lend him a carriage.

He could not get Thennjay on the talker. Whatever had happened in the capital, it was serious. Not knowing was the worst part, the part that was eating a hole in his stomach, the part that was sending his thoughts on bright and terrifying excursions. Had Mother done something? Was Mokoya hurt? Was she dead?

He thought of the sunball he carried, and of the insatiable flames that had consumed the defector’s lab in Chengbee. What if—?

All-hours establishments followed neither sun and moon nor day and night. The ground floor was unpleasantly drunk in the collar of time after first sunrise, shouts shaking the rafters and fumes of spilled wine stinging the eyes. Akeha, having put on a reasonable mask of calm, stood three steps up from the chaos and surveyed the scattershot tables for faces he recognized.

Behind him Yongcheow said, “That’s Banyar the silk merchant, isn’t it?”

Banyar owed them a favor from years back. She was tucked in a corner, plying a boy far too young for her with drink. She liked to travel in ostentatious conveyances, lacquered with gold, topped with riotous carvings, laden with more silk than a concubine’s quarters. Not the best way to slip into the capital unnoticed.

“We can ask her,” Akeha said.

As he descended, a table of revelers tore into his focus. A group of rough men, faces shiny and red and unfamiliar, squalling dialect from the lower quarters of Chengbee. The stink of money lingered around them. Akeha recognized the wretched pattern of tourists on a binge, here to taste Bunshim’s seedy delights, spending ill-gotten wealth on the golden dancers and pleasure ships in the harbor.

As he walked by their table, his anxiety expanded till it clotted his heart. Laughter peppered their conversation, which stewed in a foul delight. Some tragedy had just happened in the capital, some sort of explosion. Their oblique references were hard to parse, a story with no head and no tail. But someone had died. Someone important.

His chest twisted. Mokoya, her body dissolving in a sunball flare.

A man with a thin, wormy mustache commanded the largest share of the attention. He said, “If she was so damn powerful, how come she didn’t predict this disaster?”

The table shook under open-palmed howling. Akeha turned to him and said, “Tell me what happened.”

His companions crackled with more laughter as he said, “Oh, you haven’t heard the latest out of Chengbee?”

Slowly, through the roaring in his ears, Akeha repeated, “Tell me what happened.”

One of the man’s more observant friends tugged at his sleeve, whispered in his ear. The man squinted, suddenly hugely interested in Akeha’s face. Then his laughing returned threefold. “Oh, you’re her brother, are you? Oh, pity, pity!”

He stood up, drunk beyond all sense. “Do you see this, friends? This man, the Protector’s son, standing here, and he has no inkling! No inkling of what’s happened to his sister!” He slapped Akeha on the arm, pulled at his shoulder.

“Is she dead?” was all he could manage.

“Oh, not so, not so! But she will be soon, I hear! Too bad about that half-breed brat of hers, eh? Incinerated, I hear.”

His high, thin voice pierced like a bee sting. Mokoya’s daughter. His niece. “Incinerated.”

“Yes. Monastery went up like a firework!” As Akeha felt the skin across his knuckles tighten, the man continued crowing, “Must be a relief for your mother, huh?” His mouth was wide, full of ugly yellow teeth. “No more embarrassment from a Gauri half-breed running—”

By the time Akeha registered what he was doing, his hand was fisted in the man’s hair and a knife was halfway to his throat. It sliced clean, under the jaw, spraying him with fine, warm blood.

Akeha dropped the body first, then the knife.

The dead man’s companions shot to their feet, and he knew then that these were people who hurt other people for a living.

Air ignited over his clenched right fist. He would burn them, peel blackened skin from bubbling flesh—

“Akeha!”

Yongcheow. Akeha did not budge. He was facing five men. They would be no problem. He could see the same knowledge on their faces, as they realized who and what it was they faced. What they had unleashed.

Around him, the inn emptied in a determined, quiet fashion. The patrons had seen things like this happen before, and they didn’t like how it ended.

“Oi, oi.” Tze-Fong, the inn’s owner, moved her bulk between the abandoned tables, indignant hands on solid hips. “You going to pay for my furniture?”

Akeha did not back down. But neither did he attack.

Tze-Fong glared at the five men. “Get out,” she snapped. When they looked at each other, she said, “Did you hear me? You want him to kill you? Get out!”

They scrambled.

Only when the last of them had crossed the inn’s threshold did Akeha extinguish the flame he’d created. “Tsk,” Tze-Fong clucked, looking at the body on the floor, soaking in its own blood.

“I’m sorry for the mess,” Akeha said. His ears rang and rang and rang, a chorus of bells that had no end.

Tze-Fong’s face twisted. “Don’t need. This one, he burned one of my girls yesterday. Threw hot soup in her face. Bastard.” She kicked one splayed arm. “I’ll clean up.”

“Akeha.” Yongcheow’s warm, familiar hand descended on his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

He shook his head.

Tze-Fong sighed. “It’s true, you know. What the bastard said.”

Akeha looked at her. “My sister?”

She nodded. “I talked to somebody in the capital earlier. There was a big explosion, some accident or something. The little girl died.” She looked at Akeha’s face. “Sorry.”

“What kind of explosion, how big?”

Tze-Fong shrugged helplessly. Of course she wouldn’t know—how would she know?

“What about my sister? Did they say anything about my sister?”

“That one—don’t know, sorry. It’s all rumors only. No official announcement. Maybe won’t have one at all.”

He breathed deeply. “I need a carriage to the city.”

“I don’t have carts free. But I have one horse carriage. You want? It’s only a bit slower.”

Akeha nodded. Words had died in his mouth.

Chapter Twenty

HER NAME WAS EIEN, and she was six. At the age of three, she had told her mother she was a girl, and had not changed her mind thereafter. A light capture of her, sent by Thennjay with one of his dutiful, seasonal letters, showed a nut-brown child with bright eyes round as marbles, and fishbowl-shaped hair. The light capture came on a new kind of scroll, which looped through five seconds of the girl breaking into a gap-toothed giggle, something reminiscent of her mother in the way she ducked her head.

She liked animals and the color yellow. Outside of that, Akeha knew nothing. What her laugh sounded like. Whether she skipped while running down corridors. Or if she liked running down corridors at all.

Akeha managed to get Thennjay on the talker as they left the city. The man’s voice, iron-weight, tonelessly told Akeha what he already knew: There had been an explosion in the monastery. Eien was dead. Mokoya was grievously hurt.

An attack? Akeha had asked, fearing poisoned air and contaminated water.

No, Thennjay said, an accident. One of our own.

Something built by the Machinists had gone wrong. Not a blow dealt by the Protectorate. Not a gaping mouthful of demonic fire. Not yet.

Come quickly, Thennjay said. A carnivorous fear had hollowed out his voice. I don’t know how long she has left.

The horse carriage rattled over stones in the road. Bunshim was just a day’s travel away from the capital, but to Akeha, slowly and coolly detaching from the surface of the world, the journey was interminable. It felt like the sun rose and fell sixty times while he was trapped in that wooden box, his niece’s gift held loosely in his fingers. He couldn’t think of it as her last gift. Those words refused to settle in his mind.

He stared desolately at the smooth lobes and flutes of porcelain. There were scars on his palms: small ones, not-so-small ones. He tried to connect memory to each one. Nothing.

Yongcheow, leaning across the carriage, touched his face. “Akeha.”

A shudder lanced through him, pulling him back into the present. “I’m sorry.”

“There’s no need to apologize.”

“I shouldn’t have killed that man.”

Yongcheow sighed. “Probably not.” He brushed aside the curtain of Akeha’s fringe. “It’s been a while since . . .”

Akeha shut his eyes. He’d never told Yongcheow this, but he kept a tally of every person whose blood he had spilled. He tried to remember their faces and their circumstances, even if he never learned their names. It was like a mantra for him, whispered in his head on long nights when he couldn’t sleep, when he tried to remember the kind of person he was. The kind of person he had been. It started with the man with the knife in the alley, not long after he had fled the capital. And then the two boys after that, not much older than he was, just as hungry, just as desperate. On and on.

Yesterday, that tally had stood at sixty-two. Now it was sixty-three.

“Listen,” Akeha said. “You have to stay out of the city. We’ll go all the way to the border, and drop you off at the cottage there.”

“Akeha—”

“No. It’s too dangerous. For all we know, this could be a trap set by my mother. I can face her—I will face her—but I want you to stay away.” Yongcheow frowned; Akeha clamped an iron hand over his. “Please. Your research work is important. The Machinists can’t lose us both at once.”

“I can’t lose you at all,” Yongcheow whispered.

He looked away. “I’m sorry.”

The finite nature of the world meant that the horse carriage eventually did draw up to the boundary of the capital city. Akeha gave the carriage master a gold tal for his troubles and sent him on his way.

“You’ll stay hidden, won’t you?” he asked Yongcheow.

“I’ll stay hidden behind you, if you don’t let me walk by your side.”

“Yongcheow, listen—”

“No, you listen. You keep cutting me out of your family’s business, and I’ve had enough. Whatever lies in the capital scares you. I know. I understand. But it’s important to you. That makes it important to me too. I don’t want to be left out of it.”

“Do you understand the danger I’ll put you in?”

“Do I look like an idiot?” His hands met Akeha’s and latched on with a magnetic grip. “I’ll follow you anywhere, Akeha. You just have to let me.”

Yongcheow’s words were backed by the strength of mountains, by the conviction that would lead an unarmed man to stand firm against three soldiers twice his size. Akeha looked at him, really looked, and saw someone whose loss would tear a good fatal chunk out of him.

Akeha shut his eyes and offered a prayer to the Almighty.

He said, “You’ll have to stay hidden behind me. We can’t be seen together. It’s too risky. Do you understand?”

Yongcheow didn’t, not at first. But then he did, and the realization that Akeha was relenting after all dawned across his face. He nodded, his fingers betraying only a brief tremble against Akeha’s.

Chapter Twenty-one

THENNJAY MET THEM ON the steps of the monastery. “Akeha,” he said.

That rolling thunder voice had not been changed by the seasons. It was deeper, perhaps. Roughened, chafed by the weight of the world around him. But it still bore the same magnetism, the same compelling gravity that enveloped the listener in its orbit. Or maybe Akeha was comparing the present to an unreliable past. He stood in front of a man who had, for the past eighteen years, existed as little more than a voice over the talker and generous, looping script on parchment. Thennjay was no longer the lithe boy he’d once met and barely remembered. The years had broadened his chest, added heft to his leonine features. His beard flowed as freely as his abbot’s robes.

He stood waiting, tall and glorious even in his grief, and Akeha could not find it in himself to approach the man. He stopped several yields away, an ocean of missed opportunities and wasted futures roiling between them.

It was Thennjay who closed the gap, arms enveloping Akeha in a great embrace, one wrapped around his back, one cradling his head. In that rush of warmth and scent, all the anxiety and fear that had built in him finally came unbound, bursting within his chest like overripe fruit. He gripped Thennjay hard around the spine, and whispered, “I am so sorry,” over and over, eighteen years of penitence spilling from the broken dam of his lips.

Yongcheow bowed graciously when Akeha introduced him. “At last we meet,” he told the Head Abbot. “I’ve heard nothing but wild stories about you.” Thennjay extracted a smile from somewhere for Yongcheow’s sake. They should have met under happier circumstances. This, too, was Akeha’s fault.

He said: “Mokoya—is she . . .”

Thennjay looked stricken.

Akeha wet his lips. “I want to see her. Please.”

“Come,” he said.

* * *

They had put Mokoya in one of the stone halls of meditation. Breaking its age-old rules, Thennjay explained, the monastery had accepted a large number of adult initiates in recent years, and some of them had been high-ranking doctors in the Tensorate. Refugees, in so many words, but now their skills had saved Mokoya’s life.

Not saved, exactly, Thennjay told him. They had tried their best, and she was still alive, but only just.

“Tell me what happened,” Akeha said.

Eien loved animals. She especially adored the monastery’s raptor pack. Every morning, at first sunrise, Mokoya would indulgently take her to feed them.

They’d done this too, when they were children.

Except that this was a time of insurrection, and the monastery was no longer a simple house of tranquility. The backyard was home to a congregation of Machinist devices in various stages of testing. Numbered among them was a gas-compression heater.

As they found out that morning, there were flaws in its design. Fatal ones.

“Eien was the closest to the explosion,” Thennjay said. “Mokoya . . . she . . .” He gestured to the stone hall they were approaching, unable to complete his sentence.

A raised bed had been installed in the middle of the hall, a fragile thing dwarfed by the vastness around it. Two doctors stood in attendance.

Akeha’s steps forward took eternity after eternity. The patient lay half smothered in white sheets. He couldn’t focus on her face, couldn’t focus on anything. There was so much wrong, so much to look at.

Mokoya was unclothed, swathed in a sarcophagus of bandages through which red seeped like ink. Her right arm was encased in a bubbling, irregular cocoon; a cocoon that looked like it was made of living flesh; a cocoon that hummed like a thousand wasps were at work within. Above it, transparent jelly clung to the right half of her face, a thick gel that masked nothing of the seething, burnt flesh beneath. A mask of ridged gristle smothered her nose and mouth, flapping wetly like fish gills.

Underneath all of that, it was still Mokoya. His sister. The person he had come into this world with—the person he could not imagine this world without—

“They’re rebuilding her arm with a lizard graft,” Thennjay said. “But her lungs are too badly burnt. There isn’t enough healthy tissue left to rebuild them, and we can’t use a graft.”

“She’s dying,” he whispered. He wanted to touch her. He was afraid to.

Mokoya’s eyes flicked open, wide and staring.

“Moko?” He felt her come alive in the Slack, tangled in the webbing of connections the doctors had woven around her. “Moko!”

Her eyes shot back and forth, then zeroed in on his face. Her reaction—recognition—preceded a panicked response, as she struggled to sit up, clawing at the living mask with her left hand. As Akeha reached for her, the doctors burst forward with overlapping calls of “Tensor Sanao—”

Mokoya pulled the mask off, gasping, barely making out the words “Keha—”

“No, no.” He held her, supporting her head, her body, terrified of making things worse. “Moko, please—”

Her skin instantly slid toward grayness. Air rattled through the ruins of her throat and lungs as she clutched at Akeha’s face with her remaining hand. Her blue lips moved, trying to form words. “You came.” A misshapen smile ghosted across her face. “I wanted to see you—I—”

I’m so glad, his twin whispered in his mind. He felt relief flood her. She only wanted to see him one last time.

Another rattle. She slumped in his arms, eyes rolling backward, mouth falling open. Akeha, arms locking up, screamed her name. He couldn’t let go, she had to wake up, she had to look at him, breathe—Mokoya—

Thennjay pulled him away and clung to him, nails digging into skin, as the doctors reattached the mask and coaxed breath back into her. “She’s alive,” Thennjay whispered, holding on, rocking slightly. “She’s alive.” He said it over and over like a prayer.

Thennjay released him only when the doctors stepped back, Mokoya’s condition stabilized. Yongcheow squeezed his arm, fingers distorting the flesh. “How can I save her?” Akeha asked. His voice echoed through the hollows of his throat. He looked at Thennjay. Looked at the doctors. “How can I help?”

Thennjay said, “You’re identical twins.”

It took half a minute for Thennjay’s meaning to register in the bedlam of his mind. Akeha filled his lungs, the withered aching things hanging exhausted in his chest. He glanced at Yongcheow for a brief, confirmatory moment. “Take whatever you need,” he said. “Do it now. I want you to save her.”

Into the silence that ensued came a cascade of sound: feet, running. A breathless acolyte tumbled into the hall, white with fear. “Venerable One,” he gasped. “Protectorate troops—what do we do?”

The acolyte was little more than a child, his voice only beginning to change in his throat. “How many?” Thennjay asked.

“A hundred, more, I’m not sure. A lot. They have weapons.”

“They’re here for me,” Akeha said.

Thennjay shot him a look, and Akeha knew he was going to confront Mother’s troops alone, to pretend that he wasn’t harboring a dangerous fugitive. “Stay here.”

“Thenn—”

“Please. Stay with Mokoya. Watch her.”

He watched Thennjay leave, broad-backed and determined. A sour tide of emotion crested and spent itself within him, nervous energy trickling down to his fingers, his calves, his feet. There were many ways this could end, none of them happy. Akeha had to do something, and only a narrow band of choices were left to him.

He looked at Yongcheow, as if to say, This is what I was afraid of. This is why I could never return.

Yongcheow’s lips charted a grim line. He knew Akeha too well. He understood what was going to happen.

One of the doctors tending to Mokoya was significantly older than the other, her eyes lined with age, if not wisdom. Akeha looked at her. “You need lung tissue,” he said. “How long will it take to extract it?”

The woman sighed. “It’s a delicate procedure. First, the donor has to be sedated—”

“How long.”

“Hours, at least.”

Hours they did not have, not now. He stroked Mokoya’s forehead, neatening the line of her hair over her cold skin.

He looked at the old doctor. “Can you harvest the tissue from a dead body?”

“Akeha,” Yongcheow whispered.

She blinked, visibly swallowing. “I—we—yes, but it has to be relatively soon after death.”

“How soon?”

The doctor shook her head; she understood the thrust of Akeha’s questioning. “Sir, I cannot—”

“Just tell me,” Akeha said. He tried to be gentle.

She could not meet his eyes. “I would guess within three hours of death, if not sooner.”

Half a sun-cycle. A narrow band, but not unreasonable. “Thank you,” he said.

“You can’t,” Yongcheow said, preempting his argument entirely. “I won’t let you.”

He wanted to say, You should have stayed away if you didn’t want to see this. Instead he cupped Yongcheow’s chin. “We got this far. It’s more than I could have asked for.”

“If you die, your sister dies too. You know that. Your mother won’t allow otherwise.”

We were born together; we die together. “Mokoya would never let the movement be sacrificed for her sake. Neither will I.”

A stubborn set of the lip. “I’ll go with you.”

“Mother will have you killed. Her only interest is in me. If you come along, she’ll use you against me.”

“I can’t just let you go.”

“You have to.”

Yongcheow gripped his arms hard, as if he could prevent Akeha leaving through sheer physical force. “Yongcheow, I want you to stay here. Look after Thennjay. And Mokoya, if the Almighty permits.” If a miracle happens. “Do this for me.”

Yongcheow mouthed the syllables of his name, unable to put strength behind them. Akeha kissed him hard, their lips issuing a commandment of desire, playing a symphony of desperation.

When their bodies parted, it felt like a continent splitting. He gripped Yongcheow’s hand, then put his hand over his heart. “His peace be with you,” he said.

Then he leaned over Mokoya and pressed his lips to her forehead. He whispered words he should have said years ago, instead of leaving it until now, when there was a good chance she wasn’t hearing them at all, her eyes dark and swollen shut. He had to go. He had to go. He pretended he wasn’t shaking as he walked away.

* * *

Eyes trailed Akeha’s pilgrimage to the front of the monastery: acolytes and senior pugilists and everyone in between, peering from windows and behind pillars. The ranks of the pious had been swelled with Thennjay’s Machinist refugees, protected thus far by the ancient codes that granted the Grand Monastery autonomy over its affairs. If they weren’t on a list before they fled here, they were safe from Mother’s grasp.

Until now.

This was how the raids always started, soldiers banging on doors suspected to conceal known Machinists. Next it would be a line of people squatting against the wall, heads down, hands tied behind their backs, soon to be sucked into the fetid underbelly of the Protectorate. Vanished. So great was the appetite of empire that it would not even spit out the bones.

He would not let that happen here.

Akeha came to the cushion of garden between the monastery and the path to the city. Thennjay was locked in verbal hostility with a woman dressed in a general’s colors. Arrayed on the steps below them were hundreds of soldiers, guns in hand. One of them scratched an itchy calf, another shifted on restless feet. Their impatience pinged on the Slack, a constellation of microtwitches.

Akeha stepped forward. “Thennjay.”

The man turned, an oceanic wash of fear and dismay overcoming him. “Leave them alone,” Akeha said to the pinch-faced general. “I’ll come with you. I want to speak to my mother.”

Thennjay rumbled. “Akeha—”

“Don’t.” He looked over the columns of waiting Protectorate troops. “Don’t get innocents killed protecting me.”

He had been running from this for long enough. It was time to put it to an end.

Akeha pulled Thennjay close and kissed him, for old times’ sake. Thennjay whispered his name once, but he let go of Akeha’s hand, let him leave with the troops. What choice did he have?

Chapter Twenty-two

THE SKY TURNED GRAY and heavy as they climbed the eight hundred steps to the Great High Palace, as though the heavenly host had amassed to bear witness. Akeha had spent the journey to the palace coming to a decision and making peace with it. He realized now that there was a reason he’d returned to the city today, and not any time before. His heart and veins were ice, and his mind was clear. He knew what he had to do.

The Protector met him in an open-air courtyard just off the main audience chamber. Akeha, trailing in the general’s stiff-legged wake, was presented with a silent, heavily robed figure, hands folded behind her, gazing out at the white sprawl of the Great High Palace and the smoky tangle of Chengbee below.

“Protector, I have brought you the boy,” the general said.

“Leave us,” his mother said, without turning around.

“Yes, Protector.” The general bowed and left.

The Protector continued studying the vista of her dominion, letting silence uncoil between them. Akeha was not intimidated. He scanned the courtyard for threats, his mindeye bright and open. Before him, his mother was a furnace in the Slack, a smear of light that was almost painful to focus on. They were truly alone.

She had let him come with weapons intact. All the knives tucked in easy corners. All the contents of his pockets. Hubris on her part, or foolishness? It did not matter.

“The sun falls and returns five times a day, the flowers wilt and return once a year. But the return of a wayward child is something that happens once a lifetime.” The Protector turned around and took swaying, deliberate steps toward Akeha. “And here you are. Let me have a look at you.”

The years had treated his mother well. Akeha, like everyone else, was not privy to her real age. She was supposed to have been in her fifties when the twins were born, which would put her in her eighties now. She didn’t look it. She looked so much like Mokoya, big glassy eyes set in a broad, sharply contoured face.

It had been years since he’d stood in her presence. In that time, his life had been deformed around her and her actions. He had run from her troops. He had killed and watched others be killed. He had held the hands of dying friends, delivered bad news to grieving spouses and parents. He had seen families torn apart, watched the elderly starve, held children with all hope ripped from them.

And here she stood, radiant and triumphant, oblivious to the suffering that collected in the long shadow of her Protectorate. If his anger were poison, she would have been long dead.

The Protector clapped her hands to Akeha’s face, her face crinkling in a smile of unverifiable sincerity. “See that. What a fine young man you have grown into.”

He pulled his lips into a smile. “And I suppose you’ll tell me how proud you are.”

“Does it surprise you? There is greatness in your blood that cannot be denied.”

Should he mock her for taking credit for his successes? No, that would just play into her game. “I’m not here for a warmhearted family reunion. Tell me what you want, or let me go.”

The smile stayed on her face. “And of course, rude and ungrateful. As I have come to expect of you.” She glided away, at ease in her seat of power. “All these years . . . did you think I knew nothing of what you have been doing? You and your sister both, with your charming little rebellion. All of which I indulged. I thought, why spoil the children’s fun? But perhaps I have gone one step too far.”

When she turned back, her smile had evaporated. “Very well. If you insist on acting like a grasping merchant, then let us lay out the terms of your surrender.”

He indulged her: “What do you want?”

“Lady Han.”

Akeha scoffed. “Do you imagine that I could go out, capture her, and bring her back tied in a red silk ribbon?”

“And give Mikara that sort of pleasure?” She blinked, like a crocodile. “Of course it won’t be something so crude. You should know better that that, Akeha. Our arrangement will work this way. I will let you go. You may return to your sister and your little friends. Within you, implanted under your skin, will be a device developed by my Tensors that will send information back to us. It’s simple enough. You don’t even have to do anything.”

Akeha pretended to think about it. Then he said, “No.”

“No? Simply that?”

He nodded. “No.”

“Ah.” She laughed. “You haven’t been in the capital for many years, Akeha. You think I’m giving you a choice.”

He shrugged. “I’m making a choice.”

“Your choice is between leaving the palace alive, and not.”

“Accepting death is also a choice.”

The Protector’s face creased in mock concern. “Oh, but your sister’s also dying, isn’t she? Sonami tells me she needs a lung graft to survive. Who will be the donor if you die, I wonder?”

Sonami. The sudden mention of her name came like a blow through the chest. Wasn’t she supposed to be on their side?

He supposed it didn’t matter.

“Would you truly sacrifice Mokoya as well?” she asked.

It was pathetic how little she knew of those she called her children. What they wanted. What they would choose.

Akeha turned away from her as though deep in thought. As though seriously considering her proposal. As he turned, he put his hand in his pocket, fingers brushing the cool petals of Eien’s last gift to him. A gangrenous smile spread across his face. “You should have killed me when you could.”

“Oh?” The Protector sounded amused. So much hubris. “And when should that have been?”

He laughed, a low sound. “You should have strangled me in the crib. The spare child, wasn’t I? You should have gotten rid of me.”

His fingers, burrowing deeper, closed around cold metal. A plum-sized metal sphere. “But you didn’t. You let me grow up. You sowed the seeds of your own downfall. It’s what you deserve.”

He turned around, the sunball gleaming in his hand. His mother’s eyes widened. “Is that . . .”

“Checkmate,” he said.

He didn’t have to do it right. Just enough to set it off.

Akeha tensed.

In his hand the sunball flared to life. He hurled it forward, eyes closed, ready for his bones to dissolve in a blessing of heat and light.

The Slack contracted. The blow was so powerful he was flung off his feet. Was this what it was like to die?

And yet Akeha hit ground intact enough for it to hurt, muscle and tendon crying out at the impact of solid upon solid. The Slack flared nova-white, immense energy canceled out by immense energy.

His mother had countered the sunball.

Akeha leapt to his feet. The Protector lay crumpled a few yields away, an unmoving mound of silk and brocade. Was she dead? Had she sacrificed herself for him?

He moved toward her without thinking, bringing a knife to her throat. Not dead: his mother lay stunned, drained by her monumental expenditure of slackcraft. She looked up at him, pink-eyed, breathing shallowly, as his blade pressed into her skin.

He could just kill her. He should. Slit her throat and end this particular problem here and now. The flensing edge bit into her flesh. Blood welled up, bright against the metal.

She stared silently at him, a smile playing at her lips. Calm, almost proud.

Fury rampaged through him. He wanted her to say something. Anything. Insult him, plead with him, tell him she loved him. Explain why she’d protected both of them, instead of throwing the protective shield only around herself. Anything.

His hands shook. Red smeared over the edge of the metal.

He’d spent nearly twenty years running from her. He’d spent his entire life orbiting around her and his idea of her, distant as another galaxy. Even now, when he had her at the mercy of his blade, he wanted her to tell him what she was thinking, what she thought of him. She still had this power over him.

And then he knew. If he did the logical thing and pushed the knife all the way through her throat, if he stood by and watched while her blood emptied onto the gray flagstones and her pupils dilated into senselessness, if he gave in to his basest desires and slaughtered her right there—he could never leave. He would be trapped there forever, standing over his mother’s dead body, his life from now on defined by this moment.

She would always own him. He would never be free.

There was always a choice.

Akeha straightened up. Her curious eyes followed him.

“I held your life in my hands,” he said, his voice loud and cold as ringing metal. “I could have killed you. Your fate belonged to me.” He dropped the knife; it sang against the ground. “I choose to spare you. I release my hold over you.”

He stepped backward, putting space between them. The Protector sat up slowly, a thin line of blood marking her neck. His mother said nothing. What did the look on her face mean? Was she confused, angry, happy? Did she think he was a fool or a hero? He couldn’t tell. He couldn’t read her expression. Perhaps he never could.

He said, “Now I turn my back, and I walk away. Whatever you do next is your choice. It will be your choice alone.”

Akeha turned his back on his mother and began to walk.

He walked across the courtyard. Across its border and down the corridors where he had grown up. Any moment, he expected the claws of death to strike: a knife in the back, an arrow through the chest, the unbreakable grip of palace guards. Anything. Here were the ponds where he and Mokoya had spent afternoons chasing fish. There was the obelisk before which he first understood himself. With every minute, a different diorama from his past slid by, a reprise of all the opening gambits before the final moves were played. Any moment now.

Yet death still did not come. He was crossing the outer pavilions, one step after another, heading forward. There was the threshold of the Great High Palace; there were the endless stairs that would lead him away from all this. He did not slow down. He did not look back. He put one foot in front of the other, a lone figure traversing the wide spaces that had once defined him. It had begun to rain, the gray skies finally shedding their load. The drops pelted him, warm and thick on his face. He tasted air full of earth and sky. Below him Chengbee waited, growing and breathing and alive.

Akeha walked and walked and walked.

EPILOGUE

IT WAS ONE WEEK, ten long days, before Mokoya allowed Akeha to see her. Thennjay found him meditating in the courtyard and said, “If you want to talk, I think she might say something now.” She hadn’t asked for him specifically, but there had been a softening in the baffling wall of thorns she’d woven around herself after she woke.

The first thing he heard was a rhythmic smacking sound, like a butcher tenderizing meat in a market square. Mokoya stood in the exercise yard, her back to him, repeatedly punching something that hung from a tree.

He approached her slowly. Her tunic had the sleeves cut off, exposing the fact that her right arm was now red and blue. Not the colors of beaten flesh, but of plumage and blossom, rich and deep. As Akeha drew closer, the lizard grain of the skin became apparent, supple and hairless, ridges of keratin rising and swirling down the rippling flesh.

Mokoya punched the flour bag with the lizard arm—five times, six—then shook it out like a child with pins and needles.

“Moko,” he said.

She turned around. Saw him. Surprise, shock, then a carousel of unidentifiable emotions. A mass of scars crawled up the right side of her face, ropy and discolored.

She turned back to the flour bag without saying a word and started punching it again.

Akeha stood, waiting, while she struck out her anger, her grief, her frustration. Whatever demons clutched her in their grip. This was the Mokoya he remembered, full of emotion and impulse, always on her feet, always trying to think of something. On the streets of Jixiang and Cinta Putri and Bunshim, with the gulf of lakes and rivers between them, it had been so easy to turn her into this mythical figure, a distant and all-powerful entity insulated by the walls of the capital and the monastery. A prophet. The prophet. Beloved and abstract.

But she was also his sister. A mortal, a human being, a person. Made of flesh and sinew and bone and blood. And she could be hurt like anyone else.

Finally she let her arm hang loose, breathing hard. She didn’t turn around. “I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

“What do you mean? You didn’t.”

She cracked her knuckles. “You came because I was dying. You wanted to say good-bye, didn’t you?” She started hitting the flour bag again, punctuating each word with a painful slapping sound. “But I didn’t die.” Smack. Smack. “So you made the trip here for nothing.”

He swallowed. “Not for nothing.” She was a frenzied blur he was afraid to touch.

“Why else would you have come here? You could have done it, at any point. In the last eighteen years, Keha. At any point.” She was crying now, her breaths wheezing through her chest, through her new lungs, grown from Akeha’s own flesh. Her arm had changed color, stark yellow and black like a warning. She punched the bag twice more, so hard it swung like a pendulum, and rounded on Akeha. “You could have visited when she was alive. You could have met her.”

“I know. Moko, I know. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry.”

She crumpled as the anger left her, and she allowed him to embrace her, allowed him to press her face into his chest as she wailed, pulling the fabric of his clothes into her balled fists. There was nothing he could say that would repair what had happened. Nothing could undo the fact that she had lost her daughter, her only daughter, the bright-eyed smiling girl that he had never met and now never would. He could only say, “I love you.” He said the words, over and over and over. I love you. I love you.

Because Mokoya was still alive. Whatever the fortunes had woven, whatever the Almighty had willed, Mokoya had survived. Whatever Akeha could or couldn’t do, he could love her. And love—that was all that had sustained them since they were children. Love, and nothing else. It was enough. As long as there was love, there would be hope. It was enough.

A SERIES OF STEAKS

Vina Jie-Min Prasad

All known forgeries are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake checks, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.

The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life moldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.

Forging beef is similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fiber regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomize marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.

Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.

Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.

The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.

As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.

“Hi, Mr. Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”

“Nonsense!” Mr. Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”

“Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”

“You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to . . .” Mr. Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes—Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr. Chan’s relentless cheerfulness.

Helena has five missed calls by the time she gets back. A red phone icon blares at the corner of her vision before blinking out, replaced by the incoming-call notification. It’s secured and anonymized, which is quite a change from usual. She pops the earpiece in.

“Yeah, Mr. Chan?”

“This isn’t Mr. Chan,” someone says. “I have a job for Splendid Beef Enterprises.”

“All right, sir. Could I get your name and what you need? If you could provide me with the deadline, that would help too.”

“I prefer to remain anonymous,” the man says.

“Yes, I understand, secrecy is rather important.” Helena restrains the urge to roll her eyes at how needlessly cryptic this guy is. “Could I know about the deadline and brief?”

“I need two hundred T-bone steaks by the 8th of August. 38.1 to 40.2 millimeter thickness for each one.” A notification to download t-bone_info.KZIP pops up on her lenses. The most ambitious venture Helena’s undertaken in the past few months has been Gyuuzen’s strips of marbled sukiyaki, and even that felt a bit like pushing it. A whole steak? Hell no.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think my business can handle that. Perhaps you could try—”

“I think you’ll be interested in this job, Helen Lee Jyun Wai.”

Shit.

A Sculpere 9410S only takes thirty minutes to disassemble, if you know the right tricks. Manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off to expose the inner screws, and detach the print heads before disassembling the power unit. There are a few extra steps in this case— for instance, the stickers that say “Property of Hong Kong Scientific University” and “Bioprinting Lab A5” all need to be removed—but a bit of anti-adhesive spray will ensure that everything’s on schedule. Ideally she’d buy a new printer, but she needs to save her cash for the name change once she hits Nanjing.

It’s not expulsion if you leave before you get kicked out, she tells herself, but even she can tell that’s a lie.

It’s possible to get a sense of a client’s priorities just from the documents they send. For instance, Mr. Chan usually mentions some recipes that he’s considering, and Ms. Huang from Gyuuzen tends to attach examples of the marbling patterns she wants. This new client seems to have attached a whole document dedicated to the recent amendments in the criminal code, with the ones relevant to Helena (“five-year statute of limitations,” “possible death penalty”) conveniently highlighted in neon yellow. Sadly, this level of detail hasn’t carried over to the spec sheet.

“Hi again, sir,” Helena says. “I’ve read through what you’ve sent, but I really need more details before starting on the job. Could you provide me with the full measurements? I’ll need the expected length and breadth in addition to the thickness.”

“It’s already there. Learn to read.”

“I know you filled that part in, sir,” Helena says, gritting her teeth. “But we’re a printing company, not a farm. I’ll need more detail than ‘16-18 month cow, grain-fed, Hereford breed’ to do the job properly.”

“You went to university, didn’t you? I’m sure you can figure out something as basic as that, even if you didn’t graduate.”

“Ha ha. Of course.” Helena resists the urge to yank her earpiece out. “I’ll get right on that. Also, there is the issue of pay . . .”

“Ah, yes. I’m quite sure the Yuen family is still itching to prosecute. How about you do the job, and in return, I don’t tell them where you’re hiding?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but even then I’ll need an initial deposit to cover the printing, and of course there’s the matter of the Hereford samples.” Which I already have in the bioreactor, but there is no way I’m letting you know that.

“Fine. I’ll expect detailed daily updates,” Mr. Anonymous says. “I know how you get with deadlines. Don’t fuck it up.”

“Of course not,” Helena says. “Also, about the deadline—would it be possible to push it back? Four weeks is quite short for this job.”

“No,” Mr. Anonymous says curtly, and hangs up.

Helena lets out a very long breath so she doesn’t end up screaming, and takes a moment to curse Mr. Anonymous and his whole family in Cantonese.

It’s physically impossible to complete the renders and finish the print in four weeks, unless she figures out a way to turn her printer into a time machine, and if that were possible she might as well go back and redo the past few years, or maybe her whole life. If she had majored in art, maybe she’d be a designer by now—or hell, while she’s busy dreaming, she could even have been the next Raverat, the next Mantuana—instead of a failed artist living in a shithole concrete box, clinging to the wreckage of all her past mistakes.

She leans against the wall for a while, exhales, then slaps on a proxy and starts drafting a help-wanted ad.

Lily Yonezawa (darknet username: yurisquared) arrives at Nanjing High Tech Industrial Park at 8.58 AM. She’s a short lady with long black hair and circle-framed iKontakts. She’s wearing a loose, floaty dress, smooth lines of white tinged with yellow-green, and there’s a large prismatic bracelet gleaming on her arm. In comparison, Helena is wearing her least holey black blouse and a pair of jeans, which is a step up from her usual attire of myoglobin-stained T-shirt and boxer shorts.

“So,” Lily says in rapid, slightly-accented Mandarin as she bounds into the office. “This place is a beef place, right? I pulled some of the records once I got the address, hope you don’t mind—anyway, what do you want me to help print or render or design or whatever? I know I said I had a background in confections and baking, but I’m totally open to anything!” She pumps her fist in a show of determination. The loose-fitting prismatic bracelet slides up and down.

Helena blinks at Lily with the weariness of someone who’s spent most of their night frantically trying to make their office presentable. She decides to skip most of the briefing, as Lily doesn’t seem like the sort who needs to be eased into anything.

“How much do you know about beef?”

“I used to watch a whole bunch of farming documentaries with my ex, does that count?”

“No. Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises—”

“Oh, by the way, do you have a logo? I searched your company registration but nothing really came up. Need me to design one?”

“Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises, we make fake beef and sell it to restaurants.”

“So, like, soy-lentil stuff?”

“Homegrown cloned cell lines,” Helena says. “Mostly Matsusaka, with some Hereford if clients specify it.” She gestures at the bioreactor humming away in a corner.

“Wait, isn’t fake food like those knockoff eggs made of calcium carbonate? If you’re using cow cells, this seems pretty real to me.” Clearly Lily has a more practical definition of fake than the China Food and Drug Administration.

“It’s more like . . . let’s say you have a painting in a gallery and you say it’s by a famous artist. Lots of people would come look at it because of the name alone and write reviews talking about its exquisite use of chiaroscuro, as expected of the old masters, I can’t believe that it looks so real even though it was painted centuries ago. But if you say, hey, this great painting was by some no-name loser, I was just lying about where it came from . . . well, it’d still be the same painting, but people would want all their money back.”

“Oh, I get it,” Lily says, scrutinizing the bioreactor. She taps its shiny polymer shell with her knuckles, and her bracelet bumps against it. Helena tries not to wince. “Anyway, how legal is this? This meat forgery thing?”

“It’s not illegal yet,” Helena says. “It’s kind of a gray area, really.”

“Great!” Lily smacks her fist into her open palm. “Now, how can I help? I’m totally down for anything! You can even ask me to clean the office if you want—wow, this is really dusty, maybe I should just clean it to make sure—”

Helena reminds herself that having an assistant isn’t entirely bad news. Wolfgang Beltracchi was only able to carry out large-scale forgeries with his assistant’s help, and they even got along well enough to get married and have a kid without killing each other.

Then again, the Beltracchis both got caught, so maybe she shouldn’t be too optimistic.

Cows that undergo extreme stress while waiting for slaughter are known as dark cutters. The stress causes them to deplete all their glycogen reserves, and when butchered, their meat turns a dark blackish-red. The meat of dark cutters is generally considered low-quality.

As a low-quality person waiting for slaughter, Helena understands how those cows feel. Mr. Anonymous, stymied by the industrial park’s regular sweeps for trackers and external cameras, has taken to sending Helena grainy aerial photographs of herself together with exhortations to work harder. This isn’t exactly news—she already knew he had her details, and drones are pretty cheap—but still. When Lily raps on the door in the morning, Helena sometimes jolts awake in a panic before she realizes that it isn’t Mr. Anonymous coming for her. This isn’t helped by the fact that Lily’s gentle knocks seem to be equivalent to other people’s knockout blows.

By now Helena’s introduced Lily to the basics, and she’s a surprisingly quick study. It doesn’t take her long to figure out how to randomize the fat marbling with Fractalgenr8, and she’s been handed the task of printing the beef strips for Gyuuzen and Fatty Chan, then packing them for drone delivery. It’s not ideal, but it lets Helena concentrate on the base model for the T-bone steak, which is the most complicated thing she’s ever tried to render.

A T-bone steak is a combination of two cuts of meat, lean tenderloin and fatty strip steak, separated by a hard ridge of vertebral bone. Simply cutting into one is a near-religious experience, red meat parting under the knife to reveal smooth white bone, with the beef fat dripping down to pool on the plate. At least, that’s what the socialites’ food blogs say. To be accurate, they say something more like “omfg this is sooooooo good,” “this bones giving me a boner lol,” and “haha im so getting this sonic-cleaned for my collection!!!,” but Helena pretends they actually meant to communicate something more coherent.

The problem is a lack of references. Most of the accessible photographs only provide a top-down view, and Helena’s left to extrapolate from blurry videos and password-protected previews of bovine myology databases, which don’t get her much closer to figuring out how the meat adheres to the bone. Helena’s forced to dig through ancient research papers and diagrams that focus on where to cut to maximize meat yield, quantifying the difference between porterhouse and T-bone cuts, and not hey, if you’re reading this decades in the future, here’s how to make a good facsimile of a steak. Helena’s tempted to run outside and scream in frustration, but Lily would probably insist on running outside and screaming with her as a matter of company solidarity, and with their luck, probably Mr. Anonymous would find out about Lily right then, even after all the trouble she’s taken to censor any mention of her new assistant from the files and the reports and argh she needs sleep.

Meanwhile, Lily’s already scheduled everything for print, judging by the way she’s spinning around in Helena’s spare swivel chair.

“Hey, Lily,” Helena says, stifling a yawn. “Why don’t you play around with this for a bit? It’s the base model for a T-bone steak. Just familiarize yourself with the fiber extrusion and mapping, see if you can get it to look like the reference photos. Don’t worry, I’ve saved a copy elsewhere.” Good luck doing the impossible, Helena doesn’t say. You’re bound to have memorized the shortcut for ‘undo’ by the time I wake up.

Helena wakes up to Lily humming a cheerful tune and a mostly-complete T-bone model rotating on her screen. She blinks a few times, but no—it’s still there. Lily’s effortlessly linking the rest of the meat, fat and gristle to the side of the bone, deforming the muscle fibers to account for the bone’s presence.

“What did you do,” Helena blurts out.

Lily turns around to face her, fiddling with her bracelet. “Uh, did I do it wrong?”

“Rotate it a bit, let me see the top view. How did you do it?”

“It’s a little like the human vertebral column, isn’t it? There’s plenty of references for that.” She taps the screen twice, switching focus to an image of a human cross-section. “See how it attaches here and here? I just used that as a reference, and boom.”

Ugh, Helena thinks to herself. She’s been out of university for way too long if she’s forgetting basic homology.

“Wait, is it correct? Did I mess up?”

“No, no,” Helena says. “This is really good. Better than . . . well, better than I did, anyway.”

“Awesome! Can I get a raise?”

“You can get yourself a sesame pancake,” Helena says. “My treat.”

The brief requires two hundred similar-but-unique steaks at randomized thicknesses of 38.1 to 40.2 mm, and the number and density of meat fibers pretty much precludes Helena from rendering it on her own rig. She doesn’t want to pay to outsource computing power, so they’re using spare processing cycles from other personal rigs and staggering the loads. Straightforward bone surfaces get rendered in afternoons, and fiber-dense tissues get rendered at off-peak hours.

It’s three in the morning. Helena’s in her Pokko the Penguin T-shirt and boxer shorts, and Lily’s wearing Yayoi Kusama-ish pajamas that make her look like she’s been obliterated by a mass of polka dots. Both of them are staring at their screens, eating cups of Zhuzhu Brand Artificial Char Siew Noodles. As Lily’s job moves to the front of Render@Home’s Finland queue, the graph updates to show a downtick in Mauritius. Helena’s fingers frantically skim across the touchpad, queuing as many jobs as she can.

Her chopsticks scrape the bottom of the mycefoam cup, and she tilts the container to shovel the remaining fake pork fragments into her mouth. Zhuzhu’s using extruded soy proteins, and they’ve punched up the glutamate percentage since she last bought them. The roasted char siew flavor is lacking, and the texture is crumby since the factory skimped on the extrusion time, but any hot food is practically heaven at this time of the night. Day. Whatever.

The thing about the rendering stage is that there’s a lot of panic-infused downtime. After queuing the requests, they can’t really do anything else— the requests might fail, or the rig might crash, or they might lose their place in the queue through some accident of fate and have to do everything all over again. There’s nothing to do besides pray that the requests get through, stay awake until the server limit resets, and repeat the whole process until everything’s done. Staying awake is easy for Helena, as Mr. Anonymous has recently taken to sending pictures of rotting corpses to her iKontakt address, captioned “Work hard or this could be you.” Lily seems to be halfway off to dreamland, possibly because she isn’t seeing misshapen lumps of flesh every time she closes her eyes.

“So,” Lily says, yawning. “How did you get into this business?”

Helena decides it’s too much trouble to figure out a plausible lie, and settles for a very edited version of the truth. “I took art as an elective in high school. My school had a lot of printmaking and 3D printing equipment, so I used it to make custom merch in my spare time—you know, for people who wanted figurines of obscure anime characters, or whatever. Even designed and printed the packaging for them, just to make it look more official. I wanted to study art in university, but that didn’t really work out. Long story short, I ended up moving here from Hong Kong, and since I had a background in printing and bootlegging . . . yeah. What about you?”

“Before the confectionery I did a whole bunch of odd jobs. I used to sell merch for my girlfriend’s band, and that’s how I got started with the short-order printing stuff. They were called POMEGRENADE—it was really hard to fit the whole name on a T-shirt. The keychains sold really well, though.”

“What sort of band were they?”

“Sort of noise-rocky Cantopunk at first—there was this one really cute song I liked, If Marriage Means The Death Of Love Then We Must Both Be Zombies—but Cantonese music was a hard sell, even in Guangzhou, so they ended up being kind of a cover band.”

“Oh, Guangzhou,” Helena says in an attempt to sound knowledgeable, before realizing that the only thing she knows about Guangzhou is that the Red Triad has a particularly profitable organ-printing business there. “Wait, you understand Cantonese?”

“Yeah,” Lily says in Cantonese, tone-perfect. “No one really speaks it around here, so I haven’t used it much.”

“Oh my god, yes, it’s so hard to find Canto-speaking people here.” Helena immediately switches to Cantonese. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I’ve been dying to speak it to someone.”

“Sorry, it never came up so I figured it wasn’t very relevant,” Lily says. “Anyway, POMEGRENADE mostly did covers after that, you know, Kick Out The Jams, Zhongnanhai, Chaos Changan, Light-sabre Cocksucking Blues. Whatever got the crowd pumped up, and when they were moshing the hardest, they’d hit the crowd with the Cantopunk and just blast their faces off. I think it left more of an impression that way—like, start with the familiar, then this weird-ass surprise near the end—the merch table always got swamped after they did that.”

“What happened with the girlfriend?”

“We broke up, but we keep in touch. Do you still do art?”

“Not really. The closest thing I get to art is this,” Helena says, rummaging through the various boxes under the table to dig out her sketchbooks. She flips one open and hands it to Lily—white against red, nothing but full-page studies of marbling patterns, and it must be one of the earlier ones because it’s downright amateurish. The lines are all over the place, that marbling on the Wagyu (is that even meant to be Wagyu?) is completely inaccurate, and, fuck, are those tear stains?

Lily turns the pages, tracing the swashes of color with her finger. The hum of the overworked rig fills the room.

“It’s awful, I know.”

“What are you talking about?” Lily’s gaze lingers on Helena’s attempt at a fractal snowflake. “This is really trippy! If you ever want to do some album art, just let me know and I’ll totally hook you up!”

Helena opens her mouth to say something about how she’s not an artist, and how studies of beef marbling wouldn’t make very good album covers, but faced with Lily’s unbridled enthusiasm, she decides to nod instead.

Lily turns the page and it’s that thing she did way back at the beginning, when she was thinking of using a cute cow as the company logo. It’s derivative, it’s kitsch, the whole thing looks like a degraded copy of someone else’s ripoff drawing of a cow’s head, and the fact that Lily’s seriously scrutinizing it makes Helena want to snatch the sketchbook back, toss it into the composter, and sink straight into the concrete floor.

The next page doesn’t grant Helena a reprieve since there’s a whole series of that stupid cow. Versions upon versions of happy cow faces grin straight at Lily, most of them surrounded by little hearts—what was she thinking? What do hearts even have to do with Splendid Beef Enterprises, anyway? Was it just that they were easy to draw?

“Man, I wish we had a logo because this would be super cute! I love the little hearts! It’s like saying we put our heart and soul into whatever we do! Oh, wait, but was that what you meant?”

“It could be,” Helena says, and thankfully the Colorado server opens before Lily can ask any further questions.

The brief requires status reports at the end of each workday, but this gradually falls by the wayside once they hit the point where workdays don’t technically end, especially since Helena really doesn’t want to look at an inbox full of increasingly creepy threats. They’re at the pre-print stage, and Lily’s given up on going back to her own place at night so they can have more time for calibration. What looks right on the screen might not look right once it’s printed, and their lives for the past few days have devolved into staring at endless trays of 32-millimeter beef cubes and checking them for myoglobin concentration, color match in different lighting conditions, fat striation depth, and a whole host of other factors.

There are so many ways for a forgery to go wrong, and only one way it can go right. Helena contemplates this philosophical quandary, and gently thunks her head against the back of her chair.

“Oh my god,” Lily exclaims, shoving her chair back. “I can’t take this anymore! I’m going out to eat something and then I’m getting some sleep. Do you want anything?” She straps on her bunny-patterned filter mask and her metallic sandals. “I’m gonna eat there, so I might take a while to get back.”

“Sesame pancakes, thanks.”

As Lily slams the door, Helena puts her iKontakt frames back on. The left lens flashes a stream of notifications—fifty-seven missed calls over the past five hours, all from an unknown number. Just then, another call comes in, and she reflexively taps the side of the frame.

“You haven’t been updating me on your progress,” Mr. Anonymous says.

“I’m very sorry, sir,” Helena says flatly, having reached the point of tiredness where she’s ceased to feel anything beyond god I want to sleep. This sets Mr. Anonymous on another rant covering the usual topics—poor work ethic, lack of commitment, informing the Yuen family, prosecution, possible death sentence—and Helena struggles to keep her mouth shut before she says something that she might regret.

“Maybe I should send someone to check on you right now,” Mr. Anonymous snarls, before abruptly hanging up.

Helena blearily types out a draft of the report, and makes a note to send a coherent version later in the day, once she gets some sleep and fixes the calibration so she’s not telling him entirely bad news. Just as she’s about to call Lily and ask her to get some hot soy milk to go with the sesame pancakes, the front door rattles in its frame like someone’s trying to punch it down. Judging by the violence, it’s probably Lily. Helena trudges over to open it.

It isn’t. It’s a bulky guy with a flat-top haircut. She stares at him for a moment, then tries to slam the door in his face. He forces the door open and shoves his way inside, grabbing Helena’s arm, and all Helena can think is I can’t believe Mr. Anonymous spent his money on this.

He shoves her against the wall, gripping her wrist so hard that it’s practically getting dented by his fingertips, and pulls out a switchblade, pressing it against the knuckle of her index finger. “Well, I’m not allowed to kill you, but I can fuck you up real bad. Don’t really need all your fingers, do you, girl?”

She clears her throat, and struggles to keep her voice from shaking. “I need them to type—didn’t your boss tell you that?”

“Shut up,” Flat-Top says, flicking the switchblade once, then twice, thinking. “Don’t need your face to type, do you?”

Just then, Lily steps through the door. Flat-Top can’t see her from his angle, and Helena jerks her head, desperately communicating that she should stay out. Lily promptly moves closer.

Helena contemplates murder.

Lily edges towards both of them, slides her bracelet past her wrist and onto her knuckles, and makes a gesture at Helena which either means ‘move to your left’ or ‘I’m imitating a bird, but only with one hand’.

“Hey,” Lily says loudly. “What’s going on here?”

Flat-Top startles, loosening his grip on Helena’s arm, and Helena dodges to the left. Just as Lily’s fist meets his face in a truly vicious uppercut, Helena seizes the opportunity to kick him soundly in the shins.

His head hits the floor, and it’s clear he won’t be moving for a while, or ever. Considering Lily’s normal level of violence towards the front door, this isn’t surprising.

Lily crouches down to check Flat-Top’s breathing. “Well, he’s still alive. Do you prefer him that way?”

“Do not kill him.”

“Sure.” Lily taps the side of Flat-Top’s iKontakt frames with her bracelet, and information scrolls across her lenses. “Okay, his name’s Nicholas Liu Honghui . . . blah blah blah . . . hired to scare someone at this address, anonymous client . . . I think he’s coming to, how do you feel about joint locks?”

It takes a while for Nicholas to stir fully awake. Lily’s on his chest, pinning him to the ground, and Helena’s holding his switchblade to his throat.

“Okay, Nicholas Liu,” Lily says. “We could kill you right now, but thatd make your wife and your . . . what is that red thing she’s holding . . . a baby? Yeah, thatd make your wife and ugly baby quite sad. Now, you’re just going to tell your boss that everything went as expected—”

“Tell him that I cried,” Helena interrupts. “I was here alone, and I cried because I was so scared.”

“Right, got that, Nick? That lady there wept buckets of tears. I don’t exist. Everything went well, and you think there’s no point in sending anyone else over. If you mess up, we’ll visit 42—god, what is this character—42 Something Road and let you know how displeased we are. Now, if you apologize for ruining our morning, I probably won’t break your arm.”

After seeing a wheezing Nicholas to the exit, Lily closes the door, slides her bracelet back onto her wrist, and shakes her head like a deeply disappointed critic. “What an amateur. Didn’t even use burner frames—how the hell did he get hired? And that haircut, wow . . .”

Helena opts to remain silent. She leans against the wall and stares at the ceiling, hoping that she can wake up from what seems to be a very long nightmare.

“Also, I’m not gonna push it, but I did take out the trash. Can you explain why that crappy hitter decided to pay us a visit?”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Helena’s stomach growls. “This may take a while. Did you get the food?”

“I got your pancakes, and that soy milk place was open, so I got you some. Nearly threw it at that guy, but I figured we’ve got a lot of electronics, so . . .”

“Thanks,” Helena says, taking a sip. It’s still hot.

Hong Kong Scientific University’s bioprinting program is a prestigious pioneer program funded by mainland China, and Hong Kong is the test bed before the widespread rollout. The laboratories are full of state-of-the-art medical-grade printers and bioreactors, and the instructors are all researchers cherry-picked from the best universities.

As the star student of the pioneer batch, Lee Jyun Wai Helen (student number A3007082A) is selected for a special project. She will help the head instructor work on the basic model of a heart for a dextrocardial patient, the instructor will handle the detailed render and the final print, and a skilled surgeon will do the transplant. As the term progresses and the instructor gets busier and busier, Helen’s role gradually escalates to doing everything except the final print and the transplant. It’s a particularly tricky render, since dextrocardial hearts face right instead of left, but her practice prints are cell-level perfect.

Helen hands the render files and her notes on the printing process to the instructor, then her practical exams begin and she forgets all about it.

The Yuen family discovers Madam Yuen’s defective heart during their mid-autumn family reunion, halfway through an evening harbor cruise. Madam Yuen doesn’t make it back to shore, and instead of a minor footnote in a scientific paper, Helen rapidly becomes front-and-center in an internal investigation into the patient’s death.

Unofficially, the internal investigation discovers that the head instructor’s improper calibration of the printer during the final print led to a slight misalignment in the left ventricle, which eventually caused severe ventricular dysfunction and acute graft failure.

Officially, the root cause of the misprint is Lee Jyun Wai Helen’s negligence and failure to perform under deadline pressure. Madam Yuen’s family threatens to prosecute, but the criminal code doesn’t cover failed organ printing. Helen is expelled, and the Hong Kong Scientific University quietly negotiates a settlement with the Yuens.

After deciding to steal the bioprinter and flee, Helen realizes that she doesn’t have enough money for a full name change and an overseas flight. She settles for a minor name alteration and a flight to Nanjing.

“Wow,” says Lily. “You know, I’m pretty sure you got ripped off with the name alteration thing, there’s no way it costs that much. Also, you used to have pigtails? Seriously?”

Helena snatches her old student I’d away from Lily. “Anyway, under the amendments to Article 335, making or supplying substandard printed organs is now an offence punishable by death. The family’s itching to prosecute. If we don’t do the job right, Mr. Anonymous is going to disclose my whereabouts to them.”

“Okay, but from what you’ve told me, this guy is totally not going to let it go even after you’re done. At my old job, we got blackmailed like that all the time, which was really kind of irritating. They’d always try to bargain, and after the first job, they’d say stuff like ‘if you don’t do me this favor I’m going to call the cops and tell them everything’ just to weasel out of paying for the next one.”

“Wait. Was this at the bakery or the merch stand?”

“Uh,” Lily looks a bit sheepish. This is quite unusual, considering that Lily has spent the past four days regaling Helena with tales of the most impressive blood blobs from her period, complete with comparisons to their failed prints. “Are you familiar with the Red Triad? The one in Guangzhou?”

“You mean the organ printers?”

“Yeah, them. I kind of might have been working there before the bakery . . .?”

“What?”

Lily fiddles with the lacy hem of her skirt. “Well, I mean, the bakery experience seemed more relevant, plus you don’t have to list every job you’ve ever done when you apply for a new one, right?”

“Okay,” Helena says, trying not to think too hard about how all the staff at Splendid Beef Enterprises are now prime candidates for the death penalty. “Okay. What exactly did you do there?”

“Ears and stuff, bladders, spare fingers . . . you’d be surprised how many people need those. I also did some bone work, but that was mainly for the diehards—most of the people we worked on were pretty okay with titanium substitutes. You know, simple stuff.”

“That’s not simple.”

“Well, it’s not like I was printing fancy reversed hearts or anything, and even with the asshole clients it was way easier than baking. Have you ever tried to extrude a spun-sugar globe so you could put a bunch of powder-printed magpies inside? And don’t get me started on cleaning the nozzles after extrusion, because wow . . .”

Helena decides not to question Lily’s approach to life, because it seems like a certain path to a migraine. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”

“Right, you need to send the update! Can I help?”

The eventual message contains very little detail and a lot of pleading. Lily insists on adding typos just to make Helena seem more rattled, and Helena’s way too tired to argue. After starting the autoclean cycle for the printheads, they set an alarm and flop on Helena’s mattress for a nap.

As Helena’s drifting off, something occurs to her. “Lily? What happened to those people? The ones who tried to blackmail you?”

“Oh,” Lily says casually. “I crushed them.”

The brief specifies that the completed prints need to be loaded into four separate podcars on the morning of 8 August, and provides the delivery code for each. They haven’t been able to find anything in Helena’s iKontakt archives, so their best bet is finding a darknet user who can do a trace.

Lily’s fingers hover over the touchpad. “If we give him the codes, this guy can check the prebooked delivery routes. He seems pretty reliable, do you want to pay the bounty?”

“Do it,” Helena says.

The resultant map file is a mess of meandering lines. They flow across most of Nanjing, criss-crossing each other, but eventually they all terminate at the cargo entrance of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel on Jiangdong Middle Road.

“Well, he’s probably not a guest who’s going to eat two hundred steaks on his own.” Lily taps her screen. “Maybe it’s for a hotel restaurant?”

Helena pulls up the Grand Domaine’s web directory, setting her iKontakt to highlight any mentions of restaurants or food in the descriptions. For some irritating design reason, all the booking details are stored in garish images. She snatches the entire August folder, flipping through them one by one before pausing.

The foreground of the image isn’t anything special, just elaborate cursive English stating that Charlie Zhang and Cherry Cai Si Ping will be celebrating their wedding with a ten-course dinner on August 8th at the Royal Ballroom of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

What catches her eye is the background. It’s red with swirls and streaks of yellow-gold. Typical auspicious wedding colors, but displayed in a very familiar pattern.

It’s the marbled pattern of T-bone steak.

Cherry Cai Si Ping is the daughter of Dominic Cai Yongjing, a specialist in livestock and a new player in Nanjing’s agri-food arena. According to Lily’s extensive knowledge of farming documentaries, Dominic Cai Yongjing is also “the guy with the eyebrows” and “that really boring guy who keeps talking about nothing.”

“Most people have eyebrows,” Helena says, loading one of Lily’s recommended documentaries. “I don’t see . . . oh. Wow.”

“I told you. I mean, I usually like watching stuff about farming, but last year he just started showing up everywhere with his stupid waggly brows! When I watched this with my ex we just made fun of him non-stop.”

Helena fast-forwards through the introduction of Modern Manufacturing: The Vertical Farmer, which involves the camera panning upwards through hundreds of vertically-stacked wire cages. Dominic Cai talks to the host in English, boasting about how he plans to be a key figure in China’s domestic beef industry. He explains his “patented methods” for a couple of minutes, which involves stating and restating that his farm is extremely clean and filled with only the best cattle.

“But what about bovine parasitic cancer?” the host asks. “Isn’t the risk greater in such a cramped space? If the government orders a quarantine, your whole farm . . .”

“As I’ve said, our hygiene standards are impeccable, and our stock is purebred Hereford!” Cai slaps the flank of a cow through the cage bars, and it moos irritatedly in response. “There is absolutely no way it could happen here!”

Helena does some mental calculations. Aired last year, when the farm recently opened, and that cow looks around six months old . . . and now a request for steaks from cows that are sixteen to eighteen months old . . .

“So,” Lily says, leaning on the back of Helena’s chair. “Bovine parasitic cancer?”

“Judging by the timing, it probably hit them last month. It’s usually the older cows that get infected first. He’d have killed them to stop the spread . . . but if it’s the internal strain, the tumors would have made their meat unusable after excision. His first batch of cows was probably meant to be for the wedding dinner. What we’re printing is the cover-up.”

“But it’s not like steak’s a standard course in wedding dinners or anything, right? Can’t they just change it to roast duck or abalone or something?” Lily looks fairly puzzled, probably because she hasn’t been subjected to as many weddings as Helena has.

“Mr. Cai’s the one bankrolling it, so it’s a staging ground for the Cai family to show how much better they are than everyone else. You saw the announcement—he’s probably been bragging to all his guests about how they’ll be the first to taste beef from his vertical farm. Changing it now would be a real loss of face.”

“Okay,” Lily says. “I have a bunch of ideas, but first of all, how much do you care about this guy’s face?”

Helena thinks back to her inbox full of corpse pictures, the countless sleepless nights she’s endured, the sheer terror she felt when she saw Lily step through the door. “Not very much at all.”

“All right.” Lily smacks her fist into her palm. “Let’s give him a nice surprise.”

The week before the deadline vanishes in a blur of printing, re-rendering, and darknet job requests. Helena’s been nothing but polite to Mr. Cai ever since the hitter’s visit, and has even taken to video calls lately, turning on the camera on her end so that Mr. Cai can witness her progress. It’s always good to build rapport with clients.

“So, sir,” Helena moves the camera, slowly panning so it captures the piles and piles of cherry-red steaks, zooming in on the beautiful fat strata which took ages to render. “How does this look? I’ll be starting the dry-aging once you approve, and loading it into the podcars first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Fairly adequate. I didn’t expect much from the likes of you, but this seems satisfactory. Go ahead.”

Helena tries her hardest to keep calm. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir. Rest assured you’ll be getting your delivery on schedule . . . by the way, I don’t suppose you could transfer the money on delivery? Printing the bone matter costs a lot more than I thought.”

“Of course, of course, once it’s delivered and I inspect the marbling. Quality checks, you know?”

Helena adjusts the camera, zooming in on the myoglobin dripping from the juicy steaks, and adopts her most sorrowful tone. “Well, I hate to rush you, but I haven’t had much money for food lately . . .” Mr. Cai chortles. “Why, that’s got to be hard on you! You’ll receive the fund transfer sometime this month, and in the meantime why don’t you treat yourself and print up something nice to eat?”

Lily gives Helena a thumbs-up, then resumes crouching under the table and messaging her darknet contacts, careful to stay out of Helena’s shot. The call disconnects.

“Let’s assume we won’t get any further payment. Is everything ready?”

“Yeah,” Lily says. “When do we need to drop it off?”

“Let’s try for five AM. Time to start batch-processing.”

Helena sets the enzyme percentages, loads the fluid into the canister, and they both haul the steaks into the dry-ager unit. The machine hums away, spraying fine mists of enzymatic fluid onto the steaks and partially dehydrating them, while Helena and Lily work on assembling the refrigerated delivery boxes. Once everything’s neatly packed, they haul the boxes to the nearest podcar station. As Helena slams box after box into the cargo area of the podcars, Lily types the delivery codes into their front panels. The podcars boot up, sealing themselves shut, and zoom off on their circuitous route to the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

They head back to the industrial park. Most of their things have already been shoved into backpacks, and Helena begins breaking the remaining equipment down for transport.

A Sculpere 9410S takes twenty minutes to disassemble if you’re doing it for the second time. If someone’s there to help you manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off, and detach the print heads so you can disassemble the power unit, you might be able to get that figure down to ten. They’ll buy a new printer once they figure out where to settle down, but this one will do for now.

It’s not running away if were both going somewhere, Helena thinks to herself, and this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.

There aren’t many visitors to Mr. Chan’s restaurant during breakfast hours, and he’s sitting in a corner, reading a book. Helena waves at him.

“Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”

“Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr. Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr. Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.

“Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going traveling with my . . . friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”

“Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”

Helena looks at Mr. Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Chan.”

“No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologizing for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”

Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.

“Yeah, I’m glad too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr. Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon . . .”

“Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”

Despite repeatedly declining Mr. Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.

“Oh, did you see the news?” Mr. Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”

Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.

“—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”

“Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”

All known forgeries are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly-printed steaks.

While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.

EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

Yoon Ha Lee

A space opera adventure set in a distant future where an undercover agent has to go behind enemy lines to recover a lost ship and a possible traitor.

For Sonya Taaffe

When Shuos Jedao walked into his temporary quarters on Station Muru 5 and spotted the box, he assumed someone was attempting to assassinate him. It had happened before. Considering his first career, there was even a certain justice to it.

He ducked back around the doorway, although even with his reflexes, he would have been too late if it’d been a proper bomb. The air currents in the room would have wafted his biochemical signature to the box and caused it to trigger. Or someone could have set up the bomb to go off as soon as the door opened, regardless of who stepped in. Or something even less sophisticated.

Jedao retreated back down the hallway and waited one minute. Two. Nothing.

It could just be a package, he thought—paperwork that he had forgotten?—but old habits died hard.

He entered again and approached the desk, light-footed. The box, made of eye-searing green plastic, stood out against the bland earth tones of the walls and desk. It measured approximately half a meter in all directions. Its nearest face prominently displayed the gold seal that indicated that station security had cleared it. He didn’t trust it for a moment. Spoofing a seal wasn’t that difficult. He’d done it himself.

He inspected the box’s other visible sides without touching it, then spotted a letter pouch affixed to one side and froze. He recognized the handwriting. The address was written in spidery high language, while the name of the recipient—one Garach Jedao Shkan—was written both in the high language and his birth tongue, Shparoi, for good measure.

Oh, Mom, Jedao thought. No one else called him by that name anymore, not even the rest of his family. More important, how had his mother gotten his address? He’d just received his transfer orders last week, and he hadn’t written home about it because his mission was classified. He had no idea what his new general wanted him to do; she would tell him tomorrow morning when he reported in.

Jedao opened the box, which released a puff of cold air. Inside rested a tub labeled KEEP REFRIGERATED in both the high language and Shparoi. The tub itself contained a pale, waxy-looking solid substance. Is this what I think it is?

Time for the letter:

Hello, Jedao!

Congratulations on your promotion. I hope you enjoy your new command moth and that it has a more pronounceable name than the last one.

One: What promotion? Did she know something he didn’t? (Scratch that question. She always knew something he didn’t.) Two: Trust his mother to rate warmoths not by their armaments or the efficacy of their stardrives but by their names. Then again, she’d made no secret that she’d hoped he’d wind up a musician like his sire. It had not helped when he pointed out that when he attempted to sing in academy, his fellow cadets had threatened to dump grapefruit soup over his head.

Since I expect your eating options will be dismal, I have sent you goose fat rendered from the great-great-great-etc.-grandgosling of your pet goose when you were a child. (She was delicious, by the way.) Let me know if you run out and I’ll send more.

Love,

Mom

So the tub contained goose fat, after all. Jedao had never figured out why his mother sent food items when her idea of cooking was to gussy up instant noodles with an egg and some chopped green onions. All the cooking Jedao knew, he had learned either from his older brother or, on occasion, those of his mother’s research assistants who took pity on her kids.

What am I supposed to do with this? he wondered. As a cadet he could have based a prank around it. But as a warmoth commander he had standards to uphold.

More importantly, how could he compose a suitably filial letter of appreciation without, foxes forbid, encouraging her to escalate? (Baked goods: fine. Goose fat: less fine.) Especially when she wasn’t supposed to know he was here in the first place? Some people’s families sent them care packages of useful things, like liquor, pornography, or really nice cosmetics. Just his luck.

At least the mission gave him an excuse to delay writing back until his location was unclassified, even if she knew it anyway.

Jedao had heard a number of rumors about his new commanding officer, Brigadier General Kel Essier. Some of them, like the ones about her junior wife’s lovers, were none of his business. Others, like Essier’s taste in plum wine, weren’t relevant, but could come in handy if he needed to scare up a bribe someday. What had really caught his notice was her service record. She had fewer decorations than anyone else who’d served at her rank for a comparable period of time.

Either Essier was a political appointee—the Kel military denied the practice, but everyone knew better—or she was sitting on a cache of classified medals. Jedao had a number of those himself. (Did his mother know about those too?) Although Station Muru 5 was a secondary military base, Jedao had his suspicions about any “secondary” base that had a general in residence, even temporarily. That, or Essier was disgraced and Kel Command couldn’t think of anywhere else to dump her.

Jedao had a standard method for dealing with new commanders, which was to research them as if he planned to assassinate them. Needless to say, he never expressed it in those terms to his comrades.

He’d come up with two promising ways to get rid of Essier. First, she collected meditation foci made of staggeringly luxurious materials. One of her officers had let slip that her latest obsession was antique lacquerware. Planting a bomb or toxin in a collector-grade item wouldn’t be risky so much as expensive. He’d spent a couple hours last night brainstorming ways to steal one, just for the hell of it; lucky that he didn’t have to follow through.

The other method took advantage of the poorly planned location of the firing range on this level relative to the general’s office, and involved shooting her through several walls and a door with a high-powered rifle and burrower ammunition. Jedao hated burrower ammunition, not because it didn’t work but because it did. He had a lot of ugly scars on his torso from the time a burrower had almost killed him. That being said, he also believed in using the appropriate tool for the job.

No one had upgraded Muru 5 for the past few decades. Its computer grid ran on outdated hardware, making it easy for him to pull copies of all the maps he pleased. He’d also hacked into the security cameras long enough to check the layout of the general’s office. The setup made him despair of the architects who had designed the whole wretched thing. On top of that, Essier had set up her desk so a visitor would see it framed beautifully by the doorway, with her chair perfectly centered. Great for impressing visitors, less great for making yourself a difficult target. Then again, attending to Essier’s safety wasn’t his job.

Jedao showed up at Essier’s office seven minutes before the appointed time. “Whiskey?” said her aide.

If only, Jedao thought; he recognized it as one he couldn’t afford. “No, thank you,” he said with the appropriate amount of regret. He didn’t trust special treatment.

“Your loss,” said the aide. After another two minutes, she checked her slate. “Go on in. The general is waiting for you.”

As Jedao had predicted, General Essier sat dead center behind her desk, framed by the doorway and two statuettes on either side of the desk, gilded ash-hawks carved from onyx. Essier had dark skin and close-shaven hair, and the height and fine-spun bones of someone who had grown up in low gravity. The black-and-gold Kel uniform suited her. Her gloved hands rested on the desk in perfect symmetry. Jedao bet she looked great in propaganda videos.

Jedao saluted, fist to shoulder. “Commander Shuos Jedao reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Have a seat,” Essier said. He did. “You’re wondering why you don’t have a warmoth assignment yet.”

“The thought had crossed my mind, yes.”

Essier smiled. The smile was like the rest of her: beautiful and calculated and not a little deadly. “I have good news and bad news for you, Commander. The good news is that you’re due a promotion.”

Jedao’s first reaction was not gratitude or pride, but How did my mother—? Fortunately, a lifetime of How did my mother—? enabled him to keep his expression smooth and instead say, “And the bad news?”

“Is it true what they say about your battle record?”

This always came up. “You have my profile.”

“You’re good at winning.”

“I wasn’t under the impression that the Kel military found this objectionable, sir.”

“Quite right,” she said. “The situation is this. I have a mission in mind for you, but it will take advantage of your unique background.”

“Unique background” was a euphemism for We don’t have many commanders who can double as emergency special forces. Most Kel with training in special ops stayed in the infantry instead of seeking command in the space forces. Jedao made an inquiring noise.

“Perform well, and you’ll be given the fangmoth Sieve of Glass, which heads my third tactical group.”

A bribe, albeit one that might cause trouble. Essier had six tactical groups. A newly minted group tactical commander being assigned third instead of sixth? Had she had a problem with her former third-position commander?

“My former third took early retirement,” Essier said in answer to his unspoken question. “They were caught with a small collection of trophies.”

“Let me guess,” Jedao said. “Trophies taken from heretics.”

“Just so. Third tactical is badly shaken. Fourth has excellent rapport with her group and I don’t want to promote her out of it. But it’s an opportunity for you.”

“And the mission?”

Essier leaned back. “You attended Shuos Academy with Shuos Meng.”

“I did,” Jedao said. They’d gone by Zhei Meng as a cadet. “We’ve been in touch on and off.” Meng had joined a marriage some years back. Jedao had commissioned a painting of five foxes, one for each person in the marriage, and sent it along with his best wishes. Meng wrote regularly about their kids—they couldn’t be made to shut up about them—and Jedao sent gifts on cue, everything from hand-bound volumes of Kel jokes to fancy gardening tools. (At least they’d been sold to him as gardening tools. They looked suspiciously like they could double for heavy-duty surgical work.) “Why, what has Meng been up to?”

“Under the name Ahun Gerav, they’ve been in command of the merchanter Moonsweet Blossom.”

Jedao cocked an eyebrow at Essier. “That’s not a Shuos vessel.” It did, however, sound like an Andan one. The Andan faction liked naming their trademoths after flowers. “By ‘merchanter’ do you mean ‘spy’?”

“Yes,” Essier said with charming directness. “Twenty-six days ago, one of the Blossom’s crew sent a code red to Shuos Intelligence. This is all she was able to tell us.”

Essier retrieved a slate from within the desk and tilted it to show him a video. She needn’t have bothered with the visuals; the combination of poor lighting, camera jitter, and static made them impossible to interpret. The audio was little better: “. . . Blossom, code red to Overwatch . . . Gerav’s in . . .” Frustratingly, the static made the next few words unintelligible. “Du Station. You’d better—” The report of a gun, then another, then silence.

“Your task is to investigate the situation at Du Station in the Gwa Reality, and see if the crew and any of the intelligence they’ve gathered can be recovered. The Shuos heptarch suggested that you would be an ideal candidate for the mission. Kel Command was amenable.”

I just bet, Jedao thought. He had once worked directly under his heptarch, and while he’d been one of her better assassins, he didn’t miss those days. “Is this the only incident with the Gwa Reality that has taken place recently, or are there others?”

“The Gwa-an are approaching one of their regularly scheduled regime upheavals,” Essier said. “According to the diplomats, there’s a good chance that the next elected government will be less amenable to heptarchate interests. We want to go in, uncover what happened, and get out before things turn topsy-turvy.”

“All right,” Jedao said, “so taking a warmoth in would be inflammatory. What resources will I have instead?”

“Well, that’s the bad news,” Essier said, entirely too cheerfully. “Tell me, Commander, have you ever wanted to own a merchant troop?”

The troop consisted of eight trademoths, named Carp 1 to Carp 4, then Carp 7 to Carp 10. They occupied one of the station’s docking bays. Someone had painted each vessel with distended carp-figures in orange and white. It did not improve their appearance.

The usual commander of the troop introduced herself as Churioi Haval, not her real name. She was portly, had a squint, and wore gaudy gilt jewelry, all excellent ways to convince people that she was an ordinary merchant and not, say, Kel special ops. It hadn’t escaped his attention that she frowned ever so slightly when she spotted his sidearm, a Patterner 52, which wasn’t standard Kel issue. “You’re not bringing that, are you?” she said.

“No, I’d hate to lose it on the other side of the border,” Jedao said. “Besides, I don’t have a plausible explanation for why a boring communications tech is running around with a Shuos handgun.”

“I could always hold on to it for you.”

Jedao wondered if he’d ever get the Patterner back if he took her up on the offer. It hadn’t come cheap. “That’s kind of you, but I’ll have the station store it for me. By the way, what happened to Carp 5 and 6?”

“Beats me,” Haval said. “Before my time. The Gwa-an authorities have never hassled us about it. They’re already used to, paraphrase, ‘odd heptarchate numerological superstitions.’” She eyed Jedao critically, which made her look squintier. “Begging your pardon, but do you have undercover experience?”

What a refreshing question. Everyone knew the Shuos for their spies, saboteurs, and assassins, even though the analysts, administrators, and cryptologists did most of the real work. (One of his instructors had explained that “You will spend hours in front of a terminal developing posture problems” was far less effective at recruiting potential cadets than “Join the Shuos for an exciting future as a secret agent, assuming your classmates don’t kill you before you graduate.”) Most people who met Jedao assumed he’d killed an improbable number of people as Shuos infantry. Never mind that he’d been responsible for far more deaths since joining the regular military.

“You’d be surprised at the things I know how to do,” Jedao said.

“Well, I hope you’re good with cover identities,” Haval said. “No offense, but you have a distinctive name.”

That was a tactful way of saying that the Kel didn’t tolerate many Shuos line officers; most Shuos seconded to the Kel worked in Intelligence. Jedao had a reputation for, as one of his former aides had put it, being expendable enough to send into no-win situations but too stubborn to die. Jedao smiled at Haval and said, “I have a good memory.”

The rest of his crew also had civilian cover names. A tall, muscular man strolled up to them. Jedao surreptitiously admired him. The gold-mesh tattoo over the right side of his face contrasted handsomely with his dark skin. Too bad he was almost certainly Kel and therefore off-limits.

“This is Rhi Teshet,” Haval said. “When he isn’t watching horrible melodramas—”

“You have no sense of culture,” Teshet said.

“—he’s the lieutenant colonel in charge of our infantry.”

Damn. Definitely Kel, then, and in his chain of command, at that. “A pleasure, Colonel,” Jedao said.

Teshet’s returning smile was slow and wicked and completely unprofessional. “Get out of the habit of using ranks,” he said. “Just Teshet, please. I hear you like whiskey?”

Off-limits, Jedao reminded himself, despite the quickening of his pulse. Best to be direct. “I’d rather not get you in trouble.”

Haval was looking to the side with a where-have-I-seen-this-dance-before expression. Teshet laughed. “The fastest way to get us caught is to behave like you have the Kel code of conduct tattooed across your forehead. Whereas no one will suspect you of being a hotshot commander if you’re sleeping with one of your crew.”

“I don’t fuck people deadlier than I am, sorry,” Jedao said demurely.

“Wrong answer,” Haval said, still not looking at either of them. “Now he’s going to think of you as a challenge.”

“Also, I know your reputation,” Teshet said to Jedao. “Your kill count has got to be higher than mine by an order of magnitude.”

Jedao ignored that. “How often do you make trade runs into the Gwa Reality?”

“Two or three times a year,” Haval said. “The majority of the runs are to maintain the fiction. The question is, do you have a plan?”

He didn’t blame her for her skepticism. “Tell me again how much cargo space we have.”

Haval told him.

“We sometimes take approved cultural goods,” Teshet said, “in a data storage format negotiated during the Second Treaty of—”

“Don’t bore him,” Haval said. “The ‘trade’ is our job. He’s just here for the explode-y bits.”

“No, I’m interested,” Jedao said. “The Second Treaty of Mwe Enh, am I right?”

Haval blinked. “You have remarkably good pronunciation. Most people can’t manage the tones. Do you speak Tlen Gwa?”

“Regrettably not. I’m only fluent in four languages, and that’s not one of them.” Of the four, Shparoi was only spoken on his birth planet, making it useless for career purposes.

“If you have some Shuos notion of sneaking in a virus amid all the lectures on flower-arranging and the dueling tournament videos and the plays, forget it,” Teshet said. “Their operating systems are so different from ours that you’d have better luck getting a magpie and a turnip to have a baby.”

“Oh, not at all,” Jedao said. “How odd would it look if you brought in a shipment of goose fat?”

Haval’s mouth opened, closed.

Teshet said, “Excuse me?”

“Not literally goose fat,” Jedao conceded. “I don’t have enough for that and I don’t imagine the novelty would enable you to run a sufficient profit. I assume you have to at least appear to be trying to make a profit.”

“They like real profits even better,” Haval said.

Diverted, Teshet said, “You have goose fat? Whatever for?”

“Long story,” Jedao said. “But instead of goose fat, I’d like to run some of that variable-coefficient lubricant.”

Haval rubbed her chin. “I don’t think you could get approval to trade the formula or the associated manufacturing processes.”

“Not that,” Jedao said. “Actual canisters of lubricant. Is there someone in the Gwa Reality on the way to our luckless Shuos friend who might be willing to pay for it?”

Haval and Teshet exchanged baffled glances. Jedao could tell what they were thinking: Are we the victims of some weird bet our commander has going on the side? “There’s no need to get creative,” Haval said in a commendably diplomatic voice. “Cultural goods are quite reliable.”

You think this is creativity, Jedao thought. “It’s not that. Two battles ago, my fangmoth was almost blown in two because our antimissile defenses glitched. If we hadn’t used the lubricant as a stopgap sealant, we wouldn’t have made it.” That much was even true. “If you can’t offload all of it, I’ll find another use for it.”

“You do know you can’t cook with lubricant?” Teshet said. “Although I wonder if it’s good for—”

Haval stomped on his toe. “You already have plenty of the medically approved stuff,” she said crushingly, “no need to risk getting your private parts cemented into place.”

“Hey,” Teshet said, “you never know when you’ll need to improvise.”

Jedao was getting the impression that Essier had not assigned him the best of her undercover teams. Certainly they were the least disciplined Kel he’d run into in a while, but he supposed long periods undercover had made them more casual about regulations. No matter, he’d been dealt worse hands. “I’ve let you know what I want done, and I’ve already checked that the station has enough lubricant to supply us. Make it happen.”

“If you insist,” Haval said. “Meanwhile, don’t forget to get your immunizations.”

“Will do,” Jedao said, and strode off to Medical.

Jedao spent the first part of the voyage alternately learning basic Tlen Gwa, memorizing his cover identity, and studying up on the Gwa Reality. The Tlen Gwa course suffered some oddities. He couldn’t see the use of some of the vocabulary items, like the one for “navel.” But he couldn’t manage to unlearn it, either, so there it was, taking up space in his brain.

As for the cover identity, he’d had better ones, but he supposed the Kel could only do so much on short notice. He was now Arioi Sren, one of Haval’s distant cousins by marriage. He had three spouses, with whom he had quarreled recently over a point of interior decoration. “I don’t know anything about interior decoration,” Jedao had said, to which Haval retorted, “That’s probably what caused the argument.”

The documents had included loving photographs of the home in question, an apartment in a dome city floating in the upper reaches of a very pretty gas giant. Jedao had memorized the details before destroying them. While he couldn’t say how well the decor coordinated, he was good at layouts and kill zones. In any case, Sren was on “vacation” to escape the squabbling. Teshet had suggested that a guilt-inducing affair would round out the cover identity. Jedao said he’d think about it.

Jedao was using spray-on temporary skin, plus a high-collared shirt, to conceal multiple scars, including the wide one at the base of his neck. The temporary skin itched, which couldn’t be helped. He hoped no one would strip-search him, but in case someone did, he didn’t want to have to explain his old gunshot wounds. Teshet had also suggested that he stop shaving—the Kel disliked beards—but Jedao could only deal with so much itching.

The hardest part was not the daily skinseal regimen, but getting used to wearing civilian clothes. The Kel uniform included gloves, and Jedao felt exposed going around with naked hands. But keeping his gloves would have been a dead giveaway, so he’d just have to live with it.

The Gwa-an fascinated him most of all. Heptarchate diplomats called their realm the Gwa Reality. Linguists differed on just what the word rendered as “Reality” meant. The majority agreed that it referred to the Gwa-an belief that all dreams took place in the same noosphere, connecting the dreamers, and that even inanimate objects dreamed.

Gwa-an protocols permitted traders to dock at designated stations. Haval quizzed Jedao endlessly on the relevant etiquette. Most of it consisted of keeping his mouth shut and letting Haval talk, which suited him fine. While the Gwa-an provided interpreters, Haval said cultural differences were the real problem. “Above all,” she added, “if anyone challenges you to a duel, don’t. Just don’t. Look blank and plead ignorance.”

“Duel?” Jedao said, interested.

“I knew we were going to have to have this conversation,” Haval said glumly. “They don’t use swords, so get that idea out of your head.”

“I didn’t bring my dueling sword anyway, and Sren wouldn’t know how,” Jedao said. “Guns?”

“Oh no,” she said. “They use pathogens. Designer pathogens. Besides the fact that their duels can go on for years, I’ve never heard that you had a clue about genetic engineering.”

“No,” Jedao said, “that would be my mother.” Maybe next time he could suggest to Essier that his mother be sent in his place. His mother would adore the chance to talk shop. Of course, then he’d be out of a job. “Besides, I’d rather avoid bringing a plague back home.”

“They claim they have an excellent safety record.”

Of course they would. “How fast can they culture the things?”

“That was one of the things we were trying to gather data on.”

“If they’re good at diseasing up humans, they may be just as good at manufacturing critters that like to eat synthetics.”

“While true of their tech base in general,” Haval said, “they won’t have top-grade labs at Du Station.”

“Good to know,” Jedao said.

Jedao and Teshet also went over the intelligence on Du Station. “It’s nice that you’re taking a personal interest,” Teshet said, “but if you think we’re taking the place by storm, you’ve been watching too many dramas.”

“If Kel special forces aren’t up for it,” Jedao said, very dryly, “you could always send me. One of me won’t do much good, though.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Teshet said. “Essier would have my head if you got hurt. How many people have you assassinated?”

“Classified,” Jedao said.

Teshet gave a can’t-blame-me-for-trying shrug. “Not to say I wouldn’t love to see you in action, but it isn’t your job to run around doing the boring infantry work. How do you mean to get the crew out? Assuming they survived, which is a big if.”

Jedao tapped his slate and brought up the schematics for one of their cargo shuttles. “Five per trader,” he said musingly.

“Du Station won’t let us land the shuttles however we please.”

“Did I say anything about landing them?” Before Teshet could say anything further, Jedao added, “You might have to cross the hard way, with suits and webcord. How often have your people drilled that?”

“We’ve done plenty of extravehicular,” Teshet said, “but we’re going to need some form of cover.”

“I’m aware of that,” Jedao said. He brought up a calculator and did some figures. “That will do nicely.”

“Sren?”

Jedao grinned at Teshet. “I want those shuttles emptied out, everything but propulsion and navigation. Get rid of suits, seats, all of it.”

“Even life support?”

“Everything. And it’ll have to be done in the next seventeen days, so the Gwa-an can’t catch us at it.”

“What do we do with the innards?”

“Dump them. I’ll take full responsibility.”

Teshet’s eyes crinkled. “I knew I was going to like you.”

Uh-oh, Jedao thought, but he kept that to himself.

“What are you going to be doing?” Teshet asked.

“Going over the dossiers before we have to wipe them,” Jedao said. Meng’s in particular. He’d believed in Meng’s fundamental competence even back in academy, before they’d learned confidence in themselves. What had gone wrong?

Jedao had first met Shuos Meng (Zhei Meng, then) during an exercise at Shuos Academy. The instructor had assigned them to work together. Meng was chubby and had a vine-and-compass tattoo on the back of their left hand, identifying them as coming from a merchanter lineage.

That day, the class of twenty-nine cadets met not in the usual classroom but a windowless space with a metal table in the front and rows of two-person desks with benches that looked like they’d been scrubbed clean of graffiti multiple times. (“Wars come and go, but graffiti is forever,” as one of Jedao’s lovers liked to say.) Besides the door leading out into the hall, there were two other doors, neither of which had a sign indicating where they led. Tangles of pipes led up the walls and storage bins were piled beside them. Jedao had the impression that the room had been pressed into service at short notice.

Jedao and Meng sat at their assigned seats and hurriedly whispered introductions to each other while the instructor read off the rest of the pairs.

“Zhei Meng,” Jedao’s partner said. “I should warn you I barely passed the weapons qualifications. But I’m good with languages.” Then a quick grin: “And hacking. I figured you’d make a good partner.”

“Garach Jedao,” he said. “I can handle guns.” Understatement; he was third in the class in Weapons. And if Meng had, as they implied, shuffled the assignments, that meant they were one of the better hackers. “Why did you join up?”

“I want to have kids,” Meng said.

“Come again?”

“I want to marry into a rich lineage,” Meng said. “That means making myself more respectable. When the recruiters showed up, I said what the hell.”

The instructor smiled coolly at the two of them, and they shut up. She said, “If you’re here, it’s because you’ve indicated an interest in fieldwork. Like you, we want to find out if it’s something you have any aptitude for, and if not, what better use we can make of your skills.” You’d better have some skills went unsaid. “You may expect to be dropped off in the woods or some such nonsense. We don’t try to weed out first-years quite that early. No; this initial exercise will take place right here.”

The instructor’s smile widened. “There’s a photobomb in this room. It won’t cause any permanent damage, but if you don’t disarm it, you’re all going to be walking around wearing ridiculous dark lenses for a week. At least one cadet knows where the bomb is. If they keep its location a secret from the rest of you, they win. Of course, they’ll also go around with ridiculous dark lenses, but you can’t have everything. On the other hand, if someone can persuade that person to give up the secret, everyone wins. So to speak.”

The rows of cadets stared at her. Jedao leaned back in his chair and considered the situation. Like several others in the class, he had a riflery exam in three days and preferred to take it with undamaged vision.

“You have four hours,” the instructor said. “There’s one restroom.” She pointed to one of the doors. “I expect it to be in impeccable condition at the end of the four hours.” She put her slate down on the table at the head of the room. “Call me with this if you figure it out. Good luck.” With that, she walked out. The door whooshed shut behind her.

“We’re screwed,” Meng said. “Just because I’m in the top twenty on the leaderboard in Elite Thundersnake 900 doesn’t mean I could disarm real bombs if you yanked out my toenails.”

“Don’t give people ideas,” Jedao said. Meng didn’t appear to find the joke funny. “This is about people, not explosives.”

Two pairs of cadets had gotten up and were beginning a search of the room. A few were talking to each other in hushed, tense voices. Still others were looking around at their fellows with hard, suspicious eyes.

Meng said in Shparoi, “Do you know where the bomb is?”

Jedao blinked. He hadn’t expected anyone at the Academy to know his birth tongue. Of course, by speaking in an obscure low language, Meng was drawing attention to them. Jedao shook his head.

Meng looked around, hands bunching the fabric of their pants. “What do you recommend we do?”

In the high language, Jedao said, “You can do whatever you want.” He retrieved a deck of jeng-zai cards—he always had one in his pocket—and shuffled it. “Do you play?”

“You realize we’re being graded on this, right? Hell, they’ve got cameras on us. They’re watching the whole thing.”

“Exactly,” Jedao said. “I don’t see any point in panicking.”

“You’re out of your mind,” Meng said. They stood up, met the other cadets’ appraising stares, then sat down again. “Too bad hacking the instructor’s slate won’t get us anywhere. I doubt she left the answer key in an unencrypted file on it.”

Jedao gave Meng a quizzical look, wondering if there was anything more behind the remark—but no, Meng had put their chin in their hands and was brooding. If only you knew, Jedao thought, and dealt out a game of solitaire. It was going to be a very dull game, because he had stacked the deck, but he needed to focus on the people around him, not the game. The cards were just to give his hands something to do. He had considered taking up crochet, but thanks to an incident earlier in the term, crochet hooks, knitting needles, and fountain pens were no longer permitted in class. While this was a stupid restriction, considering that most of the cadets were learning unarmed combat, he wasn’t responsible for the administration’s foibles.

“Jedao,” Meng said, “maybe you’ve got high enough marks that you can blow off this exercise, but—”

Since I’m not blowing it off was unlikely to be believed, Jedao flipped over a card—three of Doors, just as he’d arranged—and smiled at Meng. So Meng had had their pick of partners and had chosen him? Well, he might as well do something to justify the other cadet’s faith in him. After all, despite their earlier remark, weapons weren’t the only things that Jedao was good at. “Do me a favor and we can get this sorted,” he said. “You want to win? I’ll show you winning.”

Now Jedao was attracting some of the hostile stares as well. Good. It took the heat off Meng, who didn’t seem to have a great tolerance for pressure. Stay out of wet work, he thought; but they could have that chat later. Or one of the instructors would.

Meng fidgeted; caught themselves. “Yeah?”

“Get me the slate.”

“You mean the instructor’s slate? You can’t possibly have figured it out already. Unless—” Meng’s eyes narrowed.

“Less thinking, more acting,” Jedao said, and got up to retrieve the slate himself.

A pair of cadets, a girl and a boy, blocked his way. “You know something,” said the girl. “Spill.” Jedao knew them from Analysis; the two were often paired there, too. The girl’s name was Noe Irin. The boy had five names and went by Veller. Jedao wondered if Veller wanted to join a faction so he could trim things down to a nice, compact, two-part name. Shuos Veller: much less of a mouthful. Then again, Jedao had a three-part name, also unusual, if less unwieldy, so he shouldn’t criticize.

“Just a hunch,” Jedao said.

Irin bared her teeth. “He always says it’s a hunch,” she said to no one in particular. “I hate that.”

“It was only twice,” Jedao said, which didn’t help his case. He backed away from the instructor’s desk and sat down, careful not to jostle the solitaire spread. “Take the slate apart. The photobomb’s there.”

Irin’s lip curled. “If this is one of your fucking clever tricks, Jay—”

Meng blinked at the nickname. “You two sleeping together, Jedao?” they asked, sotto voce.

Not sotto enough. “No,” Jedao and Irin said at the same time.

Veller ignored the byplay and went straight for the tablet, which he bent to without touching it. Jedao respected that. Veller had the physique of a tiger-wrestler (now there was someone he wouldn’t mind being caught in bed with), a broad face, and a habitually bland, dreamy expression. Jedao wasn’t fooled. Veller was almost as smart as Irin, had already been tracked into bomb disposal, and was less prone to flights of temper.

“Is there a tool closet in here?” Veller said. “I need a screwdriver.”

“You don’t carry your own anymore?” Jedao said.

“I told him he should,” Irin said, “but he said they were too similar to knitting needles. As if anyone in their right mind would knit with a pair of screwdrivers.”

“I think he meant that they’re stabby things that can be driven into people’s eyes,” Jedao said.

“I didn’t ask for your opinion, Jay.”

Jedao put his hands up in a conciliatory gesture and shut his mouth. He liked Irin and didn’t want to antagonize her any more than necessary. The last time they’d been paired together, they’d done quite well. She would come around; she just needed time to work through the implications of what the instructor had said. She was one of those people who preferred to think about things without being interrupted.

One of the other cadets wordlessly handed Veller a set of screwdrivers. Veller mumbled his thanks and got to work. The class watched, breathless.

“There,” Veller said at last. “See that there, all hooked in? Don’t know what the timer is, but there it is.”

“I find it very suspicious that you forfeited your chance to show up everyone else in this exercise,” Irin said to Jedao. “Is there anyone else who knew?”

“Irin,” Jedao said, “I don’t think the instructor told anyone where she’d left the photobomb. She just stuck it in the slate because that was the last place we’d look. The test was meant to reveal which of us would backstab the others, but honestly, that’s so counterproductive. I say we disarm the damn thing and skip to the end.”

Irin’s eyes crossed and her lips moved as she recited the instructor’s words under her breath. That was another thing Jedao liked about her. Irin had a great memory. Admittedly, that made it difficult to cheat her at cards, as he’d found out the hard way. He’d spent three hours doing her kitchen duties for her the one time he’d tried. He liked people who could beat him at cards. “It’s possible,” she said grudgingly after she’d reviewed the assignment’s instructions.

“Disarmed,” Veller said shortly after that. He pulled out the photobomb and left it on the desk, then set about reassembling the slate.

Jedao glanced over at Meng. For a moment, his partner’s expression had no anxiety in it, but a raptor’s intent focus. Interesting: What were they watching for?

“I hope I get a quiet posting at a desk somewhere,” Meng said.

“Then why’d you join up?” Irin said.

Jedao put his hand over Meng’s, even though he was sure that they had just lied. “Don’t mind her,” he said. “You’ll do fine.”

Meng nodded and smiled up at him.

Why do I have the feeling that I’m not remotely the most dangerous person in the room? Jedao thought. But he returned Meng’s smile, all the same. It never hurt to have allies.

A Gwa patrol ship greeted them as they neared Du Station. Haval had assured Jedao that this was standard practice and obligingly matched velocities.

Jedao listened in on Haval speaking with the Gwa authority, who spoke flawless high language. “They don’t call it ‘high language,’ of course,” Haval had explained to Jedao earlier. “They call it ‘mongrel language.’” Jedao had expressed that he didn’t care what they called it.

Haval didn’t trust Jedao to keep his mouth shut, so she’d stashed him in the business office with Teshet to keep an eye on him. Teshet had brought a wooden box that opened up to reveal an astonishing collection of jewelry. Jedao watched out of the corner of his eye as Teshet made himself comfortable in the largest chair, dumped the box’s contents on the desk, and began sorting it according to criteria known only to him.

Jedao was watching videos of the command center and the communications channel, and tried to concentrate on reading the authority’s body language, made difficult by her heavy zigzag cosmetics and the layers of robes that cloaked her figure. Meanwhile, Teshet put earrings, bracelets, and mysterious hooked and jeweled items in piles, and alternated helpful glosses of Gwa-an gestures with borderline insubordinate, not to say lewd, suggestions for things he could do with Jedao. Jedao was grateful that his ability to blush, like his ability to be tickled, had been burned out of him in Academy. Note to self: Suggest to General Essier that Teshet is wasted in special ops. Maybe reassign him to Recreation?

Jedao mentioned this to Teshet while Haval was discussing the cargo manifest with the authority. Teshet lowered his lashes and looked sideways at Jedao. “You don’t think I’m good at my job?” he asked.

“You have an excellent record,” Jedao said.

Teshet sighed, and his face became serious. “You’re used to regular Kel, I see.”

Jedao waited.

“I end up in a lot of situations where if people get the notion that I’m a Kel officer, I may end up locked up and tortured. While that could be fun in its own right, it makes career advancement difficult.”

“You could get a medal out of it.”

“Oh, is that how you got promoted so—”

Jedao held up his hand, and Teshet stopped. On the monitor, Haval was saying, in a greasy voice, “I’m glad to hear of your interest, madam. We would have been happy to start hauling the lubricant earlier, except we had to persuade our people that—”

The authority’s face grew even more imperturbable. “You had to figure out whom to bribe.”

“We understand there are fees—”

Jedao listened to Haval negotiating her bribe to the authority with half an ear. “Don’t tell me all that jewelry’s genuine?”

“The gems are mostly synthetics,” Teshet said. He held up a long earring with a rose quartz at the end. “No, this won’t do. I bought it for myself, but you’re too light-skinned for it to look good on you.”

“I’m wearing jewelry?”

“Unless you brought your own—scratch that, I bet everything you own is in red and gold.”

“Yes.” Red and gold were the Shuos faction colors.

Teshet tossed the rose quartz earring aside and selected a vivid emerald ear stud. “This will look nice on you.”

“I don’t get a say?”

“How much do you know about merchanter fashion trends out in this march?”

Jedao conceded the point.

The private line crackled to life. “You two still in there?” said Haval’s voice.

“Yes, what’s the issue?” Teshet said.

“They’re boarding us to check for contraband. You haven’t messed with the drugs cabinet, have you?”

Teshet made an affronted sound. “You thought I was going to get Sren high?”

“I don’t make assumptions when it comes to you, Teshet. Get the hell out of there.”

Teshet thrust the emerald ear stud and two bracelets at Jedao. “Put those on,” he said. “If anyone asks you where the third bracelet is, say you had to pawn it to make good on a gambling debt.”

Under other circumstances, Jedao would have found this offensive—he was good at gambling—but presumably Sren had different talents. As he put on the earring, he said, “What do I need to know about these drugs?”

Teshet was stuffing the rest of the jewelry back in the box. “Don’t look at me like that. They’re illegal both in the heptarchate and the Gwa Reality, but people run them anyway. They make useful cover. The Gwa-an search us for contraband, they find the contraband, they confiscate the contraband, we pay them a bribe to keep quiet about it, they go away happy.”

Impatient with Jedao fumbling with the clasp of the second bracelet, Teshet fastened it for him, then turned Jedao’s hand over and studied the scar at the base of his palm. “You should have skinsealed that one too, but never mind.”

“I’m bad at peeling vegetables?” Jedao suggested. Close enough to “knife fight,” right? And much easier to explain away than bullet scars.

“Are you two done?” Haval’s voice demanded.

“We’re coming, we’re coming,” Teshet said.

Jedao took up his post in the command center. Teshet himself disappeared in the direction of the airlock. Jedao wasn’t aware that anything had gone wrong until Haval returned to the command center, flanked by two personages in bright orange space suits. Both personages wielded guns of a type Jedao had never seen before, which made him irrationally happy. While most of his collection was at home with his mother, he relished adding new items. Teshet was nowhere in sight.

Haval’s pilot spoke before the intruders had a chance to say anything. “Commander, what’s going on?”

The broader of the two personages spoke in Tlen Gwa, then kicked Haval in the shin. “Guess what,” Haval said with a macabre grin. “Those aren’t the real authorities we ran into. They’re pirates.”

Oh, for the love of fox and hound, Jedao thought. In truth, he wasn’t surprised, just resigned. He never trusted it when an operation went too smoothly.

The broader personage spoke again. Haval sighed deeply, then said, “Hand over all weapons or they start shooting.”

Where’s Teshet? Jedao wondered. As if in answer, he heard a gunshot, then the ricochet. More gunshots. He was sure at least one of the shooters was Teshet or one of Teshet’s operatives: They carried Stinger 40s and he recognized the characteristic whine of the reports.

Presumably Teshet was occupied, which left matters here up to him. Some of Haval’s crew went armed. Jedao did not—they had agreed that Sren wouldn’t know how to use a gun—but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous. While the other members of the crew set down their guns, Jedao flung himself at the narrower personage’s feet.

The pirates did not like this. But Jedao had always been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with extraordinarily quick reflexes. He dropped his weight on one arm and leg and kicked the narrow pirate’s feet from under them with the other leg. The narrow pirate discharged their gun. The bullet passed over Jedao and banged into one of the status displays, causing it to spark and sputter out. Haval yelped.

Jedao had already sprung back to his feet—damn the twinge in his knees, he should have that looked into—and twisted the gun out of the narrow pirate’s grip. The narrow pirate had the stunned expression that Jedao was used to seeing on people who did not deal with professionals very often. He shot them, but thanks to their loose-limbed flailing, the first bullet took them in the shoulder. The second one made an ugly hole in their forehead, and they dropped.

The broad pirate had more presence of mind, but chose the wrong target. Jedao smashed her wrist aside with the knife-edge of his hand just as she fired at Haval five times in rapid succession. Her hands trembled visibly. Four of the shots went wide. Haval had had the sense to duck, but Jedao smelled blood and suspected she’d been hit. Hopefully nowhere fatal.

Jedao shot the broad pirate in the side of the head just as she pivoted to target him next. Her pistol clattered to the floor as she dropped. By reflex he flung himself to the side in case it discharged, but it didn’t.

Once he had assured himself that both pirates were dead, he knelt at Haval’s side and checked the wound. She had been very lucky. The single bullet had gone through her side, missing the major organs. She started shouting at him for going up unarmed against people with guns.

“I’m getting the medical kit,” Jedao said, too loudly, to get her to shut up. His hands were utterly steady as he opened the cabinet containing the medical kit and brought it back to Haval, who at least had the good sense not to try to stand up.

Haval scowled, but accepted the painkiller tabs he handed her. She held still while he cut away her shirt and inspected the entry and exit wounds. At least the bullet wasn’t a burrower, or she wouldn’t have a lung anymore. He got to work with the sterilizer.

By the time Teshet and two other soldiers entered the command center, Jedao had sterilized and sealed the wounds. Teshet crossed the threshold with rapid strides. When Haval’s head came up, Teshet signed sharply for her to be quiet. Curious, Jedao also kept silent.

Teshet drew his combat knife, then knelt next to the larger corpse. With a deft stroke, he cut into the pirate’s neck, then yanked out a device and its wires. Blood dripped down and obscured the metal. He repeated the operation for the other corpse, then crushed both devices under his heel. “All right,” he said. “It should be safe to talk now.”

Jedao raised his eyebrows, inviting explanation.

“Not pirates,” Teshet said. “Those were Gwa-an special ops.”

Hmm. “Then odds are they were waiting for someone to show up to rescue the Moonsweet Blossom,” Jedao said.

“I don’t disagree.” Teshet glanced at Haval, then back at the corpses. “That wasn’t you, was it?”

Haval’s eyes were glazed, a side effect of the painkiller, but she wasn’t entirely out of it. “Idiot here risked his life. We could have handled it.”

“I wasn’t the one in danger,” Jedao said, remembering the pirates’ guns pointed at her. Haval might not be particularly respectful, as subordinates went, cover identity or not, but she was his subordinate, and he was responsible for her. To Teshet: “Your people?”

“Two down,” Teshet said grimly, and gave him the names. “They died bravely.”

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said; two more names to add to the long litany of those he’d lost. He was thinking about how to proceed, though. “The real Gwa-an patrols won’t be likely to know about this. It’s how I’d run the op—the fewer people who are aware of the truth, the better. I bet their orders are to take in any surviving ‘pirates’ for processing, and then the authorities will release and debrief the operatives from there. What do you normally do in case of actual pirates?”

“Report the incident,” Haval said. Her voice sounded thready. “Formal complaint if we’re feeling particularly annoying.”

“All right.” Jedao calmly began taking off the jewelry and his clothes. “That one’s about my size,” he said, nodding at the smaller of the two corpses. The suit would be tight across the shoulders, but that couldn’t be helped. “Congratulations, not two but three of your crew died heroically, but you captured a pirate in the process.”

Teshet made a wistful sound. “That temporary skin stuff obscures your musculature, you know.” But he helpfully began stripping the indicated corpse, then grabbed wipes to get rid of the blood on the suit.

“I’ll make it up to you some other time,” Jedao said recklessly. “Haval, make that formal complaint and demand that you want your captive tried appropriately. Since the nearest station is Du, that’ll get me inserted so I can investigate.”

“You’re just lucky some of the Gwa-an are as sallow as you are,” Haval said as Jedao changed clothes.

“I will be disappointed in you if you don’t have restraints,” Jedao said to Teshet.

Teshet’s eyes lit.

Jedao rummaged in the medical kit until he found the eye drops he was looking for. They were meant to counteract tear gas, but they had a side effect of pupil dilation, which was what interested him. It would help him feign concussion.

“We’re running short on time, so listen closely,” Jedao said. “Turn me over to the Gwa-an. Don’t worry about me; I can handle myself.”

“Je—Sren, I don’t care how much you’ve studied the station’s schematics, you’ll be outnumbered thousands to one on foreign territory.”

“Sometime over drinks I’ll tell you about the time I infiltrated a ring-city where I didn’t speak any of the local languages,” Jedao said. “Turn me in. I’ll locate the crew, spring them, and signal when I’m ready. You won’t be able to mistake it.”

Haval’s brow creased. Jedao kept speaking. “After you’ve done that, load all the shuttles full of lubricant canisters. Program the lubricant to go from zero-coefficient flow to harden completely in response to the radio signal. You’re going to put the shuttles on autopilot. When you see my signal, launch the shuttles’ contents toward the station’s turret levels. That should gum them up and buy us cover.”

“All our shuttles?” Haval said faintly.

“Haval,” Jedao said, “stop thinking about profit margins and repeat my orders back to me.”

She did.

“Splendid,” Jedao said. “Don’t disappoint me.”

The Gwa-an took Jedao into custody without comment. Jedao feigned concussion, saving him from having to sound coherent in a language he barely spoke. The Gwa-an official responsible for him looked concerned, which was considerate of him. Jedao hoped to avoid killing him or the guard. Only one guard, thankfully; they assumed he was too injured to be a threat.

The first thing Jedao noticed about the Gwa-an shuttle was how roomy it was, with wastefully widely spaced seats. He hadn’t noticed that the Gwa-an were, on average, that much larger than the heptarchate’s citizens. (Not that this said much. Both nations contained a staggering variety of ethnic groups and their associated phenotypes. Jedao himself was on the short side of average for a heptarchate manform.) At least being “concussed” meant he didn’t have to figure out how the hell the safety restraints worked, because while he could figure it out with enough fumbling, it would look damned suspicious that he didn’t already know. Instead, the official strapped him in while saying things in a soothing voice. The guard limited themselves to a scowl.

Instead of the smell of disinfectant that Jedao associated with shuttles, the Gwa-an shuttle was pervaded by a light, almost effervescent fragrance. He hoped it wasn’t intoxicating. Or rather, part of him hoped it was, because he didn’t often have good excuses to screw around with new and exciting recreational drugs, but it would impede his effectiveness. Maybe all Gwa-an disinfectants smelled this good? He should steal the formula. Voidmoth crews everywhere would thank him.

Even more unnervingly, the shuttle played music on the way to the station. At least, while it didn’t resemble any music he’d heard before, it had a recognizable beat and some sort of flute in it. From the others’ reactions, this was normal and possibly even boring. Too bad he was about as musical as a pair of boots.

The shuttle docked smoothly. Jedao affected not to know what was going on and allowed the official to chirp at him. Eventually a stretcher arrived and they put him on it. They emerged into the lights of the shuttle bay. Jedao’s temples twinged with the beginning of a headache. At least it meant the eye drops were still doing their job.

The journey to Du Station’s version of Medical took forever. Jedao was especially eager to escape based on what he’d learned of Gwa-an medical therapies, which involved too many genetically engineered critters for his comfort. (He had read up on the topic after Haval told him about the dueling.) He did consider that he could make his mother happy by stealing some pretty little microbes for her, but with his luck they’d turn his testicles inside out.

When the medic took him into an examination room, Jedao whipped up and felled her with a blow to the side of the neck. The guard was slow to react. Jedao grasped their throat and grappled with them, waiting the interminable seconds until they slumped, unconscious. He had a bad moment when he heard footsteps passing by. Luckily, the guard’s wheeze didn’t attract attention. Jedao wasn’t modest about his combat skills, but they wouldn’t save him if he was sufficiently outnumbered.

Too bad he couldn’t steal the guard’s uniform, but it wouldn’t fit him. So it would have to be the medic’s clothes. Good: the medic’s clothes were robes instead of something more form-fitting. Bad: even though the garments would fit him, more or less, they were in the style for women.

I will just have to improvise, Jedao thought. At least he’d kept up the habit of shaving, and the Gwa-an appeared to permit a variety of haircuts in all genders, so his short hair and bangs wouldn’t be too much of a problem. As long as he moved quickly and didn’t get stopped for conversation—

Jedao changed, then slipped out and took a few moments to observe how people walked and interacted so he could fit in more easily. The Gwa-an were terrible about eye contact and, interestingly for station-dwellers, preferred to keep each other at a distance. He could work with that.

His eyes still ached, since Du Station had abominably bright lighting, but he’d just have to prevent people from looking too closely at him. It helped that he had dark brown eyes to begin with, so the dilated pupils wouldn’t be obvious from a distance. He was walking briskly toward the lifts when he heard a raised voice. He kept walking. The voice called again, more insistently.

Damn. He turned around, hoping that someone hadn’t recognized his outfit from behind. A woman in extravagant layers of green, lilac, and pink spoke to him in strident tones. Jedao approached her rapidly, wincing at her voice, and hooked her into an embrace. Maybe he could take advantage of this yet.

“You’re not—” she began to say.

“I’m too busy,” he said over her, guessing at how best to deploy the Tlen Gwa phrases he knew. “I’ll see you for tea at thirteen. I like your coat.”

The woman’s face turned an ugly mottled red. “You like my what?” At least he thought he’d said “coat.” She stepped back from him, pulling what looked like a small perfume bottle from among her layers of clothes.

He tensed, not wanting to fight her in full view of passersby. She spritzed him with a moist vapor, then smiled coolly at him before spinning on her heel and walking away.

Shit. Just how fast-acting were Gwa-an duels, anyway? He missed the sensible kind with swords; his chances would have been much better. He hoped the symptoms wouldn’t be disabling, but then, the woman couldn’t possibly have had a chance to tailor the infectious agent to his system, and maybe the immunizations would keep him from falling over sick until he had found Meng and their crew.

How had he offended her, anyway? Had he gotten the word for “coat” wrong? Now that he thought about it, the word for “coat” differed from the word for “navel” only by its tones, and—hells and foxes, he’d messed up the tone sandhi, hadn’t he? He kept walking, hoping that she’d be content with getting him sick and wouldn’t call security on him.

At last he made it to the lifts. While stealing the medic’s uniform had also involved stealing their keycard, he preferred not to use it. Rather, he’d swapped the medic’s keycard for the loud woman’s. She had carried hers on a braided lanyard with a clip. It would do nicely if he had to garrote anyone in a hurry. The garrote wasn’t one of his specialties, but as his girlfriend the first year of Shuos Academy had always been telling him, it paid to keep your options open.

At least the lift’s controls were less perilous than figuring out how to correctly pronounce items of clothing. Jedao had by no means achieved reading fluency in Tlen Gwa, but the language had a wonderfully tidy writing system, with symbols representing syllables and odd little curlicue diacritics that changed what vowel you used. He had also theoretically memorized the numbers from 1 to 9,999. Fortunately, Du Station had fewer than 9,999 levels.

Two of the other people on the lift stared openly at Jedao. He fussed with his hair on the grounds that it would look like ordinary embarrassment and not Hello! I am a cross-dressing enemy agent, pleased to make your acquaintance. Come to that, Gwa-an women’s clothes were comfortable, and all the layers meant that he could, in principle, hide useful items like garrotes in them. He wondered if he could keep them as a souvenir. Start a fashion back home. He bet his mother would approve.

Intelligence had given him a good idea of where Meng and their crew might be held. At least, Jedao hoped that Du Station’s higher-ups hadn’t faked him out by stowing them in the lower-security cells as opposed to the top-security ones. He was betting a lot on the guess that the Gwa-an were still in the process of interrogating the group rather than executing them out of hand.

The layout wasn’t the hard part, but Jedao reflected on the mysteries of the Gwa Reality’s penal code. For example, prostitution was a major offense. They didn’t even fine the offenders, but sent them to remedial counseling, which surely cost the state money. In the heptarchate, they did the sensible thing by enforcing licenses for health and safety reasons and taxing the whole enterprise. On the other hand, the Gwa-an had a refreshingly casual attitude toward heresy. They believed that public debate about Poetics (their version of Doctrine) strengthened the polity. If you put forth that idea anywhere in the heptarchate, you could expect to get arrested.

So it was that Jedao headed for the cellblocks where one might find unlucky prostitutes and not the ones where overly enthusiastic heretics might be locked up overnight to cool off. He kept attracting horrified looks and wondered if he’d done something offensive with his hair. Was it wrong to part it on the left, and if so, why hadn’t Haval warned him? How many ways could you get hair wrong anyway?

The Gwa-an also had peculiarly humanitarian ideas about the surroundings that offenders should be kept in. Level 37, where he expected to find Meng, abounded with fountains. Not cursory fountains, but glorious cascading arches of silvery water interspersed with elongated humanoid statues in various uncomfortable-looking poses. Teshet had mentioned that this had to do with Gwa-an notions of ritual purity.

While “security” was one of the words that Jedao had memorized, he did not read Tlen Gwa especially quickly, which made figuring out the signs a chore. At least the Gwa-an believed in signs, a boon to foreign infiltrators everywhere. Fortunately, the Gwa-an hadn’t made a secret of the Security office’s location, even if getting to it was complicated by the fact that the fountains had been rearranged since the last available intel and he preferred not to show up soaking wet. The fountains themselves formed a labyrinth and, upon inspection, it appeared that different portions could be turned on or off to change the labyrinth’s twisty little passages.

Unfortunately, the water’s splashing also made it difficult to hear people coming, and he had decided that creeping about would not only slow him down, but make him look more conspicuous, especially with the issue of his hair (or whatever it was that made people stare at him with such affront). He rounded a corner and almost crashed into a sentinel, recognizable by Security’s spear-and-shield badge.

In retrospect, a simple collision might have worked out better. Instead, Jedao dropped immediately into a fighting stance, and the sentinel’s eyes narrowed. Dammit, Jedao thought, exasperated with himself. This is why my handlers preferred me doing the sniper bits rather than the infiltration bits. Since he’d blown the opportunity to bluff his way past the sentinel, he swept the man’s feet from under him and knocked him out. After the man was unconscious, Jedao stashed him behind one of the statues, taking care so the spray from the fountains wouldn’t interfere too much with his breathing. He had the distinct impression that “dead body” was much worse from a ritual purity standpoint than “merely unconscious,” if he had to negotiate with someone later.

He ran into no other sentinels on the way to the office, but as it so happened, a sentinel was leaving just as he got there. Jedao put on an expression he had learned from the scariest battlefield medic of his acquaintance back when he’d been a lowly infantry captain and marched straight up to Security. He didn’t need to be convincing for long, he just needed a moment’s hesitation.

By the time the sentinel figured out that the “medic” was anything but, Jedao had taken her gun and broken both her arms. “I want to talk to your leader,” he said, another of those useful canned phrases.

The sentinel left off swearing (he was sure it was swearing) and repeated the word for “leader” in an incredulous voice.

Whoops. Was he missing some connotational nuance? He tried the word for “superior officer,” to which the response was even more incredulous. Hey Mom, Jedao thought, you know how you always said I should join the diplomatic corps on account of my always talking my way out of trouble as a kid? Were you ever wrong. I am the worst diplomat ever. Admittedly, maybe starting off by breaking the woman’s arms was where he’d gone wrong, but the sentinel didn’t sound upset about that. The Gwa-an were very confusing people.

After a crescendo of agitation (hers) and desperate rummaging about for people nouns (his), it emerged that the term he wanted was the one for “head priest.” Which was something the language lessons ought to have noted. He planned on dropping in on whoever had written the course and having a spirited talk with them.

Just as well that the word for “why” was more straightforward. The sentinel wanted to know why he wanted to talk to the head priest. He wanted to know why someone who’d had both her arms broken was more concerned with propriety (his best guess) than alerting the rest of the station that they had an intruder. He had other matters to attend to, though. Too bad he couldn’t recruit her for her sangfroid, but that was outside his purview.

What convinced the sentinel to comply, in the end, was not the threat of more violence, which he imagined would have been futile. Instead, he mentioned that he’d left one of her comrades unconscious amid the fountains and the man would need medical care. He liked the woman’s concern for her fellow sentinel.

Jedao and the sentinel walked together to the head priest’s office. The head priest came out. She had an extremely elaborate coiffure, held in place by multiple hairpins featuring elongated figures like the statues. She froze when Jedao pointed the gun at her, then said several phrases in what sounded like different languages.

“Mongrel language,” Jedao said in Tlen Gwa, remembering what Haval had told him.

“What do you want?” the high priest said in awkward but comprehensible high language.

Jedao explained that he was here for Ahun Gerav, in case the priest only knew Meng by their cover name. “Release them and their crew, and this can end with minimal bloodshed.”

The priest wheezed. Jedao wondered if she was allergic to assassins. He’d never heard of such a thing, but he wasn’t under any illusions that he knew everything about Gwa-an immune systems. Then he realized she was laughing.

“Feel free to share,” Jedao said, very pleasantly. The sentinel was sweating.

The priest stopped laughing. “You’re too late,” she said. “You’re too late by thirteen years.”

Jedao did the math: eight years since he and Meng had graduated from Shuos Academy. Of course, the two of them had attended for the usual five years. “They’ve been a double agent since they were a cadet?”

The priest’s smile was just this side of smug.

Jedao knocked the sentinel unconscious and let her spill to the floor. The priest’s smile didn’t falter, which made him think less of her. Didn’t she care about her subordinate? If nothing else, he’d had a few concussions in his time (real ones), and they were no joke.

“The crew,” Jedao said.

“Gerav attempted to persuade them to turn coat as well,” the priest said. “When they were less than amenable, well—” She shrugged. “We had no further use for them.”

“I will not forgive this,” Jedao said. “Take me to Gerav.”

She shrugged. “Unfortunate for them,” she said. “But to be frank, I don’t value their life over my own.”

“How very pragmatic of you,” Jedao said.

She shut up and led the way.

Du Station had provided Meng with a luxurious suite by heptarchate standards. The head priest bowed with an ironic smile as she opened the door for Jedao. He shoved her in and scanned the room.

The first thing he noticed was the overwhelming smell of—what was that smell? Jedao had thought he had reasonably cosmopolitan tastes, but the platters with their stacks of thin-sliced meat drowned in rich gravies and sauces almost made him gag. Who needed that much meat in their diet? The suite’s occupant seemed to agree, judging by how little the meat had been touched. And why wasn’t the meat cut into decently small pieces so as to make for easy eating? The bowls of succulent fruit were either for show or the suite’s occupant disliked fruit, too. The flatbreads, on the other hand, had been torn into. One, not entirely eaten, rested on a meat platter and was dissolving into the gravy. Several different-sized bottles were partly empty, and once he adjusted to all the meat, he could also detect the sweet reek of wine.

Most fascinatingly, instead of chopsticks and spoons, the various plates and platters sported two-tined forks (Haval had explained to him about forks) and knives. Maybe this was how they trained assassins. Jedao liked knives, although not as much as he liked guns. He wondered if he could persuade the Kel to import the custom. It would make for some lively high tables.

Meng glided out, resplendent in brocade Gwa-an robes, then gaped. Jedao wasn’t making any attempt to hide his gun.

“Foxfucking hounds,” Meng slurred as they sat down heavily, “you. Is that really you, Jedao?”

“You know each other?” the priest said.

Jedao ignored her question, although he kept her in his peripheral vision in case he needed to kill her or knock her out. “You graduated from Shuos Academy with high marks,” Jedao said. “You even married rich the way you always talked about. Four beautiful kids. Why, Meng? Was it nothing more than a story?”

Meng reached for a fork. Jedao’s trigger finger shifted. Meng withdrew their hand.

“The Gwa-an paid stupendously well,” Meng said quietly. “It mattered a lot more, once. Of course, hiding the money was getting harder and harder. What good is money if you can’t spend it? And the Shuos were about to catch on anyway. So I had to run.”

“And your crew?”

Meng’s mouth twisted, but they met Jedao’s eyes steadfastly. “I didn’t want things to end the way they did.”

“Cold comfort to their families.”

“It’s done now,” Meng said, resigned. They looked at the largest platter of meat with sudden loathing. Jedao tensed, wondering if it was going to be flung at him, but all Meng did was shove it away from them. Some gravy slopped over the side.

Jedao smiled sardonically. “If you come home, you might at least get a decent bowl of rice instead of this weird bread stuff.”

“Jedao, if I come home they’ll torture me for high treason, unless our heptarch’s policies have changed drastically. You can’t stop me from killing myself.”

“Rather than going home?” Jedao shrugged. Meng probably did have a suicide fail-safe, although if they were serious they’d have used it already. He couldn’t imagine the Gwa-an would have neglected to provide them with one if the Shuos hadn’t.

Still, he wasn’t done. “If you do something so crass, I’m going to visit each one of your children personally. I’m going to take them out to a nice dinner with actual food that you eat with actual chopsticks and spoons. And I’m going to explain to them in exquisite detail how their Shuos parent is a traitor.”

Meng bit their lip.

More softly, Jedao said, “When did the happy family stop being a cover story and start being real?”

“I don’t know,” Meng said, wretched. “I can’t—do you know how my spouses would look at me if they found out that I’d been lying to them all this time? I wasn’t even particularly interested in other people’s kids when this all began. But watching them grow up—” They fell silent.

“I have to bring you back,” Jedao said. He remembered the staticky voice of the unnamed woman playing in Essier’s office, Meng’s crew, who’d tried and failed to get a warning out. She and her comrades deserved justice. But he also remembered all the gifts he’d sent to Meng’s children over the years, the occasional awkwardly written thank-you note. It wasn’t as if any good would be achieved by telling them the awful truth. “But I can pull a few strings. Make sure your family never finds out.”

Meng hesitated for a long moment. Then they nodded. “It’s fair. Better than fair.”

To the priest, Jedao said, “You’d better take us to the Moonsweet Blossom, assuming you haven’t disassembled it already.”

The priest’s mouth twisted. “You’re in luck,” she said.

Du Station had ensconced the Moonsweet Blossom in a bay on Level 62. The Gwa-an passed gawped at them. The priest sailed past without giving any explanations. Jedao wondered whether the issue was his hair or some other inexplicable Gwa-an cultural foible.

“I hope you can pilot while drunk,” Jedao said to Meng.

Meng drew themselves up to their full height. “I didn’t drink that much.”

Jedao had his doubts, but he would take his chances. “Get in.”

The priest’s sudden tension alerted him that she was about to try something. Jedao shoved Meng toward the trademoth, then grabbed the priest in an arm. What was the point of putting a priest in charge of security if the priest couldn’t fight?

Jedao said to her, “You’re going to instruct your underlings to get the hell out of our way and open the airlock so we can leave.”

“And why would I do that?” the priest said.

He reached up and snatched out half her hairpins. Too bad he didn’t have a third hand; his grip on the gun was precarious enough as it was. She growled, which he interpreted as Fuck you and all your little foxes. “I could get creative,” Jedao said.

“I was warned that the heptarchate was full of barbarians,” the priest said.

At least the incomprehensible Gwa-an fixation on hairstyles meant that he didn’t have to resort to more disagreeable threats, like shooting her subordinates in front of her. Given her reaction when he had knocked out the sentinel, he wasn’t convinced that would faze her anyway. He adjusted his grip on her and forced her to the floor.

“Give the order,” he said. “If you don’t play any tricks, you’ll even get the hairpins back without my shoving them through your eardrums.” They were very nice hairpins, despite the creepiness of the elongated humanoid figures, and he bet they were real gold.

Since he had her facing the floor, the priest couldn’t glare at him. The frustration in her voice was unmistakable, however. “As you require.” She started speaking in Tlen Gwa.

The workers in the area hurried to comply. Jedao had familiarized himself with the control systems of the airlock and was satisfied they weren’t doing anything underhanded. “Thank you,” he said, to which the priest hissed something venomous. He flung the hairpins away and let her go. She cried out at the sound of their clattering and scrambled after them with a devotion he reserved for weapons. Perhaps, to a Gwa-an priest, they were equivalent.

One of the workers, braver or more foolish than the others, reached for her own gun. Jedao shot her in the hand on the way up the hatch to the Moonsweet Blossom. It bought him enough time to get the rest of the way up the ramp and slam the hatch shut after him. Surely Meng couldn’t accuse him of showing off if they hadn’t seen the feat of marksmanship; and he hoped the worker would appreciate that he could just as easily have put a hole in her head.

The telltale rumble of the Blossom’s maneuver drive assured him that Meng, at least, was following directions. This boded well for Meng’s health. Jedao hurried forward, wondering how many more rounds the Gwa-an handgun contained, and started webbing himself into the gunner’s seat.

“You wouldn’t consider putting that thing away, would you?” Meng said. “It’s hard for me to think when I’m ready to piss myself.”

“If you think I’m the scariest person in your future, Meng, you haven’t been paying attention.”

“One, I don’t think you know yourself very well, and two, I liked you much better when we were on the same side.”

“I’m going to let you meditate on that second bit some other time. In the meantime, let’s get out of here.”

Meng swallowed. “They’ll shoot us down the moment we get clear of the doors, you know.”

“Just go, Meng. I’ve got friends. Or did you think I teleported onto this station?”

“At this point I wouldn’t put anything past you. Okay, you’re webbed in, I’m webbed in, here goes nothing.”

The maneuver drive grumbled as the Moonsweet Blossom blasted its way out of the bay. No one attempted to close the first set of doors on them. Jedao wondered if the priest was still scrabbling after her hairpins, or if it had to do with the more pragmatic desire to avoid costly repairs to the station.

The Moonsweet Blossom had few armaments, mostly intended for dealing with high-velocity debris, which was more of a danger than pirates if one kept to the better-policed trade routes. They wouldn’t do any good against Du Station’s defenses. As signals, on the other hand—

Using the lasers, Jedao flashed HERE WE COME in the merchanter signal code. With any luck, Haval was paying attention.

At this point, several things happened.

Haval kicked Teshet in the shin to get him to stop watching a mildly pornographic and not-very-well-acted drama about a famous courtesan from 192 years ago. (“It’s historical so it’s educational!” he protested. “One, we’ve got our signal, and two, I wish you would take care of your urgent needs in your own quarters,” Haval said.)

Carp 1 through Carp 4 and 7 through 10 launched all their shuttles. Said shuttles were, as Jedao had instructed, full of variable-coefficient lubricant programmed to its liquid form. The shuttles flew toward Du Station, then opened their holds and burned their retro thrusters for all they were worth. The lubricant, carried forward by momentum, continued toward Du Station’s turret levels.

Du Station recognized an attack when it saw one. However, its defenses consisted of a combination of high-powered lasers, which could only vaporize small portions of the lubricant and were useless for altering the momentum of quantities of the stuff, and railguns, whose projectiles punched through the mass without much effect. Once the lubricant had clogged up the defensive emplacements, Carp 1 transmitted an encrypted radio signal with the command that caused the lubricant to harden in place.

The Moonsweet Blossom linked up with Haval’s merchant troop. At this point, the Blossom only contained two people, trivial compared to the amount of mass it had been designed to haul. The merchant troop, of course, had just divested itself of its cargo. The nine heptarchate vessels proceeded to hightail it out of there at highly non-freighter accelerations.

Jedao and Meng swept the Moonsweet Blossom for bugs and other unwelcome devices, an exhausting but necessary task. Then, at what Jedao judged to be a safe distance from Du Station, he ordered Meng to slave it to Carp 1.

The Carp 1 and Moonsweet Blossom matched velocities, and Jedao and Meng made the crossing to the former. There was a bad moment when Jedao thought Meng was going to unhook their tether and drift off into the smothering dark rather than face their fate. But whatever temptations were running through their head, Meng resisted them.

Haval and Teshet greeted them on the Carp 1. After Jedao and Meng had shed the suits and checked them for needed repairs, Haval ushered them all into the business office. “I didn’t expect you to spring the trademoth as well as our Shuos friend,” Haval said.

Meng wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“What about the rest of the crew?” Teshet said.

“They didn’t make it,” Jedao said, and sneezed. He explained about Meng’s extracurricular activities over the past thirteen years. Then he sneezed again.

Haval grumbled under her breath. “Whatever the hell you did on Du, Sren, did it involve duels?”

“‘Sren’?” Meng said.

“You don’t think I came into the Gwa Reality under my own”—sneeze—“name, did you?” Jedao said. “Anyway, there might have been an incident . . .”

Meng groaned. “Just how good is your Tlen Gwa?”

“Sort of not, apparently,” Jedao said. “I really need to have a word with whoever wrote the Tlen Gwa course. I thought I was all right with languages at the basic phrase level, but was the proofreader asleep the day they approved it?”

Meng had the grace to look embarrassed. “I may have hacked it.”

“You what?”

“If I’d realized you’d be using it, I wouldn’t have bothered. Botching the language doesn’t seem to have slowed you down any.”

Wordlessly, Teshet handed Jedao a handkerchief. Jedao promptly sneezed into it. Maybe he’d be able to give his mother a gift of a petri dish with a lovely culture of Gwa-an germs, after all. He’d have to ask the medic about it later.

Teshet then produced a set of restraints from his pockets and gestured at Meng. Meng sighed deeply and submitted to being trussed up.

“Don’t look so disappointed,” Teshet said into Jedao’s ear. “I’ve another set just for you.” Then he and Meng marched off to the brig.

Haval cleared her throat. “Off to the medic with you,” she said to Jedao. “We’d better figure out why your vaccinations aren’t working and if everyone’s going to need to be quarantined.”

“Not arguing,” Jedao said meekly.

Some days later, Jedao was rewatching one of Teshet’s pornography dramas while in bed. At least, he thought it was pornography. The costuming made it difficult to tell, and the dialogue had made more sense when he was still running a fever.

The medic had kept him in isolation until they declared him no longer contagious. Whether due to this precaution or pure luck, no one else came down with the duel disease. They’d given him a clean bill of health this morning, but Haval had insisted that he rest a little longer.

The door opened. Jedao looked up in surprise.

Teshet entered with a fresh supply of handkerchiefs. “Well, Jedao, we’ll reenter heptarchate space in two days, high calendar. Any particular orders you want me to relay to Haval?” He obligingly handed over a slate so Jedao could look over Haval’s painstaking, not to say excruciatingly detailed, reports on their current status.

“Haval’s doing a fine job,” Jedao said, glad that his voice no longer came out as a croak. “I won’t get in her way.” He returned the slate to Teshet.

“Sounds good.” Teshet turned his back and departed. Jedao admired the view, wishing in spite of himself that the other man would linger.

Teshet returned half an hour later with two clear vials full of unidentified substances. “First or second?” he said, holding them up to the light one by one.

“I’m sorry,” Jedao said, “first or second what?”

“You look like you need cheering up,” Teshet said hopefully. “You want on top? You want me on top? I’m flexible.”

Jedao blinked, trying to parse this. “On top of wh—” Oh. “What’s in those vials?”

“You have your choice of variable-coefficient lubricant or goose fat,” Teshet said. “Assuming you were telling the truth when you said it was goose fat. And don’t yell at Haval for letting me into your refrigerator; I did it all on my own. I admit, I can’t tell the difference. As Haval will attest, I’m a dreadful cook, so I didn’t want to fry up some scallion pancakes just to taste the goose fat.”

Jedao’s mouth went dry, which had less to do with Teshet’s eccentric choice of lubricants than the fact that he had sat down on the edge of Jedao’s bed. “You don’t have anything more, ah, conventional?” He realized that was a mistake as soon as the words left his mouth; he’d essentially accepted Teshet’s proposition.

For the first time, Jedao glimpsed uncertainty in Teshet’s eyes. “We don’t have a lot of time before we’re back in heptarchate space and you have to go back to being a commander and I have to go back to being responsible,” he said softly. “Or as responsible as I ever get, anyway. Want to make the most of it? Because I get the impression that you don’t allow yourself much of a personal life.”

“Use the goose fat,” Jedao said, because as much as he liked Teshet, he did not relish the thought of being cemented to Teshet: It would distract Teshet from continuing to analyze his psyche, and, yes, the man was damnably attractive. What the hell, with any luck his mother was never, ever, ever hearing of this. (He could imagine the conversation now: “Garach Jedao Shkan, are you meaning to tell me you finally found a nice young man and you’re still not planning on settling down and providing me extra grandchildren?” And then she would send him more goose fat.)

Teshet brightened. “You won’t regret this,” he purred, and proceeded to help Jedao undress.

SMALL CHANGES OVER LONG PERIODS OF TIME

K.M. Szpara

I’m trying to piss against a wall when the vampire bites me. Trying because drunk-me can barely hold a glass, much less maneuver a limp prosthetic cock.

My attacker holds me like he did on the dance floor, one arm wrapped around my chest, this time digging into my ribs. I struggle against his supernatural strength and the slow constriction of my lungs. Through ragged breaths, I inhale the Old Spice on his thick black hair, where he bows his head to grip my neck.

The sting of his fangs barely registers and what does shoots straight to my cunt—can’t help it. If I knew he weren’t going to kill me, I’d relish the shock and pain, loss of control. I kind of do, anyway. His venom numbs my neck but I can still feel the strong clamp of his jaw. Like a new piercing, my body screams to reject the intrusion. I want to stay awake—stay pressed between his cold hard body and the cold hard wall. I want him to touch me, reach between my legs. I want to stay alive.

But the wall discolors; the red bricks spot with gray until they fuzz over and dull. My last thought before passing out is how weirdly validating it is that this cis gay guy targeted me, when I was too scared to even piss inside the bar’s men’s room.

My phone blares like there’s a Red Alert. I check the alarm. Oh right. I signed up for that Open Life-Drawing class at the community center. At 9:00 a.m. After half-priced vodka night. Optimistic.

When I sit up, the full weight of my headache settles into my skull. I press a hand against my forehead to ease the pressure, but end up squinting at a dimly lit room. Not any room I’ve slept in before.

The only light blurs from down a narrow hallway. Windows the size of cinder blocks line the top of each wall, but neatly hemmed black-out curtains fill them and glossy Ikea tchotchkes sit in front of those.

I’m in a guest room, I assume. At the very least, I’m on a hard futon surrounded by throw pillows and machine-made quilts. I’m still dressed and—I lie back and shove my right hand down the front of my briefs—still packing. Just a little damp from my adventures in peeing outside.

“You’re alive.” A familiar man leans against the threshold, holding a mug that says “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my evening blood.” on the side. His skin is pale, but not pallid. His pose casual, but precise.

“Barely,” is all I can think to say. Did we fuck? I don’t usually go home with strangers, much less drunk, much much less with vampires. I have fantasized about it, though. Maybe I finally did.

“How do you feel?”

“Hungover.”

His chuckle resonates in his mouth, not his chest. The young ones react fairly human, still drawing air into useless lungs for huffs and sighs and rolling laughs. This one is clearly making an effort for my sake but is too old to get it right. I give him a seven out of ten.

I’d feel a little better if I could remember his damn name, though, and I don’t know how to ask without also revealing I don’t know how I ended up in his guest room.

“It’s Andreas,” he tells me. “And you’re Finley.”

“O-Okay. I mean, I didn’t—” I trip over explanations of why I forgot his name before reminding myself I still haven’t asked.

Scenes from last night force themselves on me; I watch them more than remember them. Drunk fumbling, a cold alley wall, and the rigid clamp of a jaw—his jaw, Andreas’s. The mix of pleasure and fear that slices through me isn’t a memory.

“You bit me,” I say, because he hasn’t danced around mystery, either. My grand accusation comes out as, “You’re not supposed to do that.”

“I was hungry,” he says, calmly. Like the obvious result of hunger is biting someone.

“So, go to a blood bank like you’re supposed to.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Yeah, because it doesn’t hurt people.” I pause. “You’re not still hungry, are you?”

“I’m not going to bite you again, if that’s what you’re asking. I—” This time, he pauses. “—do regret what happened.”

“Good.” I shake my hand out to stunt the tremor that seizes it. Nausea brews in my gut, dizziness behind my eyelids. I press the heels of my hands against my temples. “You don’t happen to have any Ibuprofen, do you?”

“No.”

“And we didn’t fuck, right?”

“No.”

“Great, then I’m going to head home—”

The next second, the futon dips and he’s beside me. He presses a cool hand against my burning forehead. “You’re not hungover,” he says. “You’re dying.”

His words impact me like news of a foreign tragedy: I know they’re bad but struggle to connect on a personal level.

“And it’s my fault.” His hand tenses before he pulls it away.

I flop back onto the futon and stare at the cream-colored ceiling. A fan spins overhead; the moving air ruffles Andreas’s shiny hair, an illusion of life.

I don’t want to die.

“You don’t have to.” Andreas replies to my thoughts again.

I didn’t know vampires could do that.

“Only the old ones.”

“Would you let me die in peace?” I shout over the pounding in my skull.

His shrug is too precise, like his shoulders are tied to a wooden toy’s pull string. Up, down. “If that’s what you want.”

“Thank you.” I want to cry—try to cry. Before I started testosterone, I’d cry reading Bridge to Terabithia or watching a made-for-TV movie. I liked crying, the catharsis of it, the physical purge of sadness.

Andreas brings his mug to his lips. The blood doesn’t stain his white teeth; the fangs leave tiny dents in the ceramic where he bites down.

I should be crying. He’s expecting me to because I’m a warm-bodied, emotionally-invested human being whose tear ducts can’t resist the impulse.

But they do, at least regarding my own future. Won’t make that Life Drawing class. Won’t ever see my work on a billboard or a book cover. Won’t exhibit, won’t—who knows what else?

Andreas interrupts my efforts. “Or I could turn you.”

“Into a vampire? Aren’t we supposed to apply for that?”

“I won’t tell if you don’t.” His smile doesn’t wrinkle his old skin.

The decision between anything and “or death” should be easy. But if I want to eat without killing people—and I will need to eat—I’ll have to register with the Federal Vampire Commission and explain myself and risk getting in trouble and getting Andreas in trouble.

Maybe he deserves it. He fucking bit me without permission.

But vampires who break the law, who feed from un-certified donors, who steal blood bags, or drink without asking first, are put on the Blood Offenders Registry, which is basically a hit list for corrupt cops and stake-wielding bigots. And if they survive that, the second strike is euthanization.

The system is fucked. No government lackey is going to hear out a gay trans guy who was illegally turned into a vampire. All I know is I don’t want to die before I’ve done anything with my life. Designing in-store signage for Sears does not count. Just ask the half-finished paintings in my living room.

I run my tongue over the smooth, flat line of my teeth for what I assume will be the last time. “Turn me.”

The hangover feeling doesn’t go away. Not the spins or the sticky pain of thirst.

Andreas’s venom curdles any food left in my stomach. He deposits me in the bathroom the instant before I vomit. I clutch the toilet bowl until my knuckles whiten and the whiteness spreads through my hands and I can feel it in my face. Until I can only dry heave.

My throat stings with stomach acid. “Can I have some water?”

Andreas presses a sports bottle to my lips. “Swish and spit. Don’t swallow.”

I bite down on the plastic nozzle and drink until there’s nothing left. My sensitive teeth rip through the thin plastic, tearing up the empty bottle. My canines ache the worst, like I’ve jammed them into ice cream for too long or just had fillings put in. Or both.

“I told you not to swallow,” Andreas says only moments before I prove him right with another retch.

“You can’t drink water?” I see vampires drink all the time.

“No, you can’t drink water. Your body is purging its fluids.”

“What about after . . .”

“After you’ve turned? Sure, you can drink water. Might want to wait a couple centuries before putting anything more complex in your body.”

“Like what, Diet Coke?”

“No, Diet Coke you can drink after a couple years. I meant your mother’s homemade meatloaf.”

“Oh.”

What’s the last thing I ate? A slice of pizza and burnt French fries. Not the last meal I’d have chosen, but King’s was the only place near the bars that served food all night and I was nervous and hungry.

“Just kidding, your mother will be dead by then.” Andreas sips from his mug. He waits for his words to settle then smiles. “That was a joke.”

“Thanks.” I imagine her funeral. My dad going home to an empty house. Eating across from an empty seat in the kitchen.

Still no tears. Maybe it won’t be much of a change becoming a vampire. Andreas doesn’t look like he cares much about anything.

“Do you want to call her?” he asks.

“No.” That answer’s easy. She told me she felt like her daughter was dying when I came out. She got over it, eventually, but I don’t want to put her through a literal death after that. “I do need to call the HR department at work, though.”

“I think they can wait until you’re done vomiting,” Andreas says.

I push myself to my feet and flush the toilet. He doesn’t understand how this works. I do. “I can’t lose my job on top of all this, okay? When everyone I love is dead—or when they decide they don’t want a vampire in the family—I won’t have a support system. So, where’s my cell?”

It’s dead, ironically. Andreas plugs it into the wall beside the sink and I spend another hour in the bathroom alternating between ready-to-talk and ready-to-vomit. When my fingers finally steady and I can lift my head long enough to call, HR doesn’t believe me.

“No, I can’t come in. I was bitten by a vampire. I’m dying!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hall,” says the HR officer, whose name I cannot remember because I’m so, so thirsty. “Like I said, I don’t see an application on file for medical-vampirification, which you’re required to submit ninety days in advance for paid leave. Now—”

“I couldn’t submit an application because I didn’t know. It just happened.”

“We can offer you six weeks of unpaid leave, Mr. Hall.”

“But—”

“That’s the best I can do. I’m sorry.”

“Fine. Thanks.” I hang up and squeeze my phone in my fist.

Andreas rests his hand perfectly still on my back. It doesn’t twitch or clench or rub; it just lays there like a paperweight, reminding me of his presence. He wasn’t beside me while I was on the phone but he’s here now, always now. I wish he hadn’t been there in the alley.

A gross conflicted feeling creeps over my skin. Why am I even here, still?

Where else am I supposed to go? I’ve already decided against Mom and, now that I’m thinking about it, any other human. A more scrupulous vampire would report me to save their own neck; a less scrupulous one would break mine.

This is Andreas’s fault.

“You’re right,” he says. “This is my fault.”

“I hate when you do that.” Read my mind, I think, because I know he’s still listening.

“Sorry. It’s centuries of habit, but I can stop.”

“Good.” Didn’t expect him to say that. “I mean, thanks.”

We sit in silence for a minute that feels like an eternity. I’m going to have one of those ahead of me: an eternity. Like it’s a tangible thing I can hold in my hands and squeeze. Like a blood-soaked heart I can wring dry.

“I’ll cover your expenses for the next six weeks.” Andreas leaves before I can pretend to object.

I don’t die—not yet.

I unravel myself from the quilted cocoon Andreas wrapped me in. I need air, still. Not much, but enough that my chest rises and falls automatically. I sigh and pinch the bridge of my nose, hoping for a moment’s relief from my perpetual dehydration headache.

The bathroom rug warms my feet as I sit to pee. No prosthetic is worth fumbling with while my body ejects all its fluids. There’s not much in my bladder, but I ease the pressure. Blood spots the toilet paper I toss into the bowl. I go cold. I dab another square between my legs, hoping I’ve started pissing blood. The other option is not an option.

And then it is.

I haven’t menstruated for three years. This shouldn’t be happening. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I bite down on my knuckles, forgetting my growing canines. Blood beads on my punctured fingers when I pull back.

Andreas doesn’t know what to do with me—not really. I need a doctor. One who can explain my reanimated uterus.

I clean up and pop on the pair of sunglasses Andreas left on the side table. He hasn’t let me outside, but it’s not like the door’s locked and I’m still human; I won’t spontaneously combust. I assume.

The thinnest line of light shines between the tiny windows’ blackout curtains: daytime. I’m officially on “unpaid leave.”

A bottle of sunscreen rests on the front windowsill and I slather the white goop on my face and hands before pulling on a hooded North Face fleece from the closet. To think I expected a cape.

“I need to see a doctor,” I say.

The receptionist stares at me over the counter, over cooling coffee, and square computer monitors.

“I don’t have an appointment with mine, but I’ll see whoever.”

He nods his head quickly, the rest of him unmoving, like a bobble-head doll.

“Great. Do I need to fill out a form, or . . .”

He pushes a blue lined paper across the counter to me. I sniffle and wipe at the cold drip from my nose. Blood stains my sleeve. Dammit.

“Thanks.” I grab a pen and sit down.

Four other people share the waiting room. Two read over a pamphlet on lesbian healthcare. One shoots cartoon pigs on her phone. The last just watches me over their acid wash jeans and under their knit hat. They pull their legs up tight against their chest when I pass, never taking their eyes off me. They still watch when I sit beside a corner table, push all the gossip magazines to the side, and try to flatten my form out.

It’s pretty standard.

Name: Finley Hall

Legal Name: See above

Age: Twenty-six

Gender: FTM/trans male

Pronouns: He/him

Species: Human

Technically, true. I haven’t died yet. Just because I can’t eat Dad’s homemade crab cakes for another couple centuries, doesn’t mean I’m not me, still. I wonder if I can freeze some . . .

Are you an existing patient at Centre Street Clinic? Yes.

If yes, who is your primary care physician? Dr. Lisa Perez.

What is the reason for your clinic visit today?

I bite the cap of my pen. My teeth hurt, but I can’t stop chewing. And I don’t know what to write—nothing I want to tell the receptionist. I settle for: Bleeding.

Understatement of the century.

When I return the form, the receptionist pretends to have been drinking his coffee; he grabs the handle with such force, the black liquid spills over the edge and stains a pile of blue forms.

The person who was watching me doesn’t stop when I sit back down.

“Can I help you?” I ask.

I relish that edge in my voice. The gritty feel, condescending tone. Andreas never sounds like that. His voice is sea glass, smooth and translucent. Mine is a year of throat-clearing, congestion, and cracking.

The waiting patient loosens their hold on their knees and raises their chin. “You’re bleeding.”

“I know.” I wipe at my nose, but there’s nothing.

“No, I mean on the chair.” They point.

Fuck.

My cheeks muster up all the color they can find—hopefully enough to suspend menstruation.

“It’s okay. I won’t tell or anything.” They motion for me to stand, then toss a magazine over the spot. “The clinic will probably just throw the chair out anyway. No use blaming someone for it.”

“Thanks.” I want to smile, but the gooey feeling between my legs—knowing that I’m bleeding out and there’s nothing I can do to stop it—stops me.

I’m halfway to the bathroom when a nurse calls my name. “Finley! Finley Hall?”

“Yeah.” I hold myself together while I walk, Andreas’s fleece wrapped around my waist, steps small to avoid any further leakage, arms clasped in front of me—as if anyone really walks like that.

“I’m Ashlynn, Dr. Treggman’s nurse. Why don’t you follow me on back and I’ll get you started. How does that sound?”

“Fine.” I nod and follow her back, even cooperate.

She makes me get on the scale.

“Wow, you’ve lost nine pounds since your last visit—two weeks ago.”

Takes my blood pressure.

“Fifty over thirty. That—that can’t be right. You’d have to be . . .”

And my temperature.

“Um, okay, this—I’m going to get Dr. Treggman.”

She backs out of the exam room, keeping her eyes on me until she’s safe on the other side of the door.

I lean back on the patient table. Its white paper crinkles beneath me. Dr. Treggman walks in just as I’m peering at the crotch of my jeans to assess the situation.

“Finley, nice to meet you.” He sets his laptop on a wheeled table and sits on a short black wheelie stool and wheels himself and his laptop over to me. “I’m Dr. Treggman.”

I nod.

“What seems to be the problem?” he asks all while peering over his glasses at the form I gave the nurses. “Bleeding?” Then he looks over his glasses at me. “Would you like to be more specific?”

“I got my period for the first time in three years, today.”

“You’re on Testosterone Cypionate?”

“Intramuscular injections.”

“So you know, then, that people who have taken steps to medically transition are on the restricted list for vampirification.” He stares at me over his wire-frame glasses and old plasticky laptop. Slowly, his lips purse. “The nurse gave me your stats. I’ll have to report this. I’m sorry, I’m required by law.”

I squeeze my legs together and lean forward, trying to appeal to his human side while I still have one. “Look,” I say softly. “I need help, okay? This is the only clinic I even feel safe coming to for trans stuff.”

“Mr. Hall, this isn’t trans stuff, this is vampire stuff. And there’s a reason the two don’t mix; we don’t have conclusive studies on how vampirification affects atypical bodies.” He starts typing, again.

I’ve seen the Federal Vampire Commission’s list of atypical bodies. It’s trans and intersex folks. Disabled and neuroatypical folks; the F.V.C. even provides a list of prohibited surgeries and medications. Never mind those who can’t afford the required physical exams and application fee. And heaven forbid you’re a woman of childbearing age who “might want to have kids someday; how can you be sure you won’t want to?”

“As I’m not versed in vampire anatomy—” Dr. Treggman’s words buzz like a fly in my ears. “—I hesitate to make any recommendations—”

I clench my hands into cold, white fists and punch them down on top of Dr. Treggman’s shitty laptop. His tan, hairy arms tremble where they stick out from the keyboard. I lean over the wheelie desk and bare my growing fangs. If I breathe deep enough, he smells like dinner.

I lean my full weight on the shattered laptop, crushing him in a hand-sandwich between layers of circuits and plastic.

“Finley.” His voice is hoarse and shaky. “Finley, please, you’re hurting me.”

“Finley!” Andreas’s sea glass voice turns my head.

“What,” I ask, slowly, “are you doing here? You’re supposed to be asleep.”

“Good thing I wasn’t. You need to let the doctor go. He’s just doing his job.”

“You know how many doctors I’ve met who are just doing their jobs?” The one who asked if I was really, really sure, because I didn’t seem very masculine. The one who suggested psycho-sexual therapy as if my kinks disqualified me. The one who told me no cis gay men would want to sleep with me.

“I know.” Andreas snakes an arm around my waist and pries me off the laptop.

Dr. Treggman squeaks relief and Andreas looks into his eyes and says, “You will wait quietly.” The doctor slackens, suddenly unconcerned about his injured hands or the one and a half vampires fighting in his exam room.

“I can’t go like this.” I gesture over my un-reproductive organs.

“So, buy some new clothes. Here.” Andreas thrusts a few bills into my hand.

I hate that he’s so easily solved my problem. I want to stay angry. I’m still angry. I’m still bleeding. “How did you know where I—”

“I can smell you.” Andreas taps his nose. “Now, I’m going to convince the doctor not to report us for this mess. You will meet me outside.”

“I didn’t even think you could go outside at this time. I thought I’d ditched you.”

“Yeah, well I’m old and soon you’ll be young, so don’t ditch me for a few more centuries. You have a lot to learn.”

My “Ugh!” is a bratty growl as I slam my fist into the doorframe and leave. If this is my life, now, bring on death.

Andreas meets me in the back alley and pushes me against the brick so hard it cracks. Notably, I don’t.

“What were you thinking?” he asks. “Are you trying to get us euthanized?”

“I was thinking you don’t understand how my body works and I needed to see someone who does.” I try to pry his hands off my shoulders but he’s got millennia on me. I haven’t even managed to die, yet.

“Dr. Treggman doesn’t know more about vampirification than I do. Besides, if you’re really concerned, we have vampire doctors.”

“Any trans ones?”

“What?”

“Do you know any transgender vampire doctors?” I ask slowly to drive home my point.

Andreas’s lips twitch, revealing a flash of white. I wonder if he has emotions or only teeth.

“Didn’t think so.” This time, I brush him off easily. “You’re welcome to feel doubly stupid, by the way. Turning someone without an application—a someone who also happens to be trans. It’s not even legal!”

I get halfway down the alley before he says, “I thought you smelled different. Not enough to deter me. Actually, not bad at all. Just different.”

“I’m flattered.” I suppose that’s the vampire equivalent of “Wow, I’d never have guessed you were trans,” or “But you look so normal.”

I put my borrowed sunglasses back on and pause at the shade’s edge. “Let’s go home so I can die, already.”

Andreas catches my shoulder before I can step further into the sunlight. Smoke rises from his hand before he jerks it away.

“I thought you were old,” I snap, still unable to control my temper.

“I am.” Blisters swell on his otherwise unblemished skin. “Just because I don’t catch fire wearing SPF 70 in the shade, doesn’t mean I can lie out on the beach in June.”

I cross vacations off my list of future plans. A list that seems to shrink every hour.

“Look, Finley, don’t let this ruin your last day.”

I walk backwards across the line of light, watching Andreas grow smaller. He doesn’t offer any more wisdom. He doesn’t even stay.

Don’t let this ruin my last day. It’s not really my last day. My last day was pizza and burnt French fries, strobe lights and pulsing bass. Drunk pissing.

I stand at the top of St. Paul Street and watch cars fly past. They disappear between skyscrapers and the orange glow of sunset. I should care that this is my last sunset—at least for a few centuries.

I cared when it was my last night with breasts. When I faced losing erotic sensation. Never arching under the hard pinch of rough fingers or the wet suction of a man’s lips. I didn’t want the mounds, but I had them my whole life. And, then, I didn’t.

I cared before my voice dropped. When I faced losing my ability to sing. “Most guys can’t,” the Internet said and no voice coaches worked with trans men, only trans women. The drop was sudden and uncomfortable. I strained and pushed to sing The Kinks and The Beatles and cried when I couldn’t. I hadn’t lost my ability to cry, yet.

I care that this is my last sunset.

The sky is black and blue when I show up on Andreas’s doorstep. His bandaged hand and heavy eyelids are my fault. He glances at the back of my canvas and my small kit of paints and brushes, as if he expected more.

“I probably won’t see another sunset like that.” Not that I have to justify my time to him. He probably expected I’d visit with family or friends, vomit up a last ditch attempt at a favorite drink or meal. Maybe I should’ve. Too late, now.

“No, you probably won’t.” Andreas steps aside so I can set my things in the guest room and kick off my shoes. “Ready?”

“Yeah.” I roll up my pink and orange stained sleeves. “I’m ready.”

Andreas leads me into the basement. It’s unfinished. The rough cement floor cools my feet; the air chills my exposed skin.

“You don’t have to take off your clothes, but you should,” Andreas says.

“Why?”

“Death is messy. You don’t want it sticking to you.”

“Fair.” I don’t ask for further details. Despite stabbing myself with a needle every two weeks and going through surgery, I’m not particularly good with gross body stuff. Surprise-menstruation was enough to last me an eternity.

I leave my shirt and jeans in a pile, half-folded. Andreas lifts up a metal hatch, exposing soft, freshly tilled soil underneath.

“No coffin?” I ask. Vampires aren’t exactly forthcoming about their reproductive process. Secrets are power and they’ve already given over so much to humankind.

“No,” he says. “Just you and the earth.” His cheeks flush with recently-drunk blood. He’s jealous. He stares at the loose dirt like a lover he wants to wrap himself around.

“You can join me. If you want.”

Andreas shakes his head. “You don’t want that. You want to be alone. Trust me. There’ll be other nights.”

I don’t tell him I don’t want to be buried alive and alone. I don’t want to taste dirt. Don’t want it matted in my hair, packed up my nose—the crumbs rolling up into my brain. If I’m barely breathing, does it even matter?

Andreas offers his hand. I let him help me into the earthen grave because no one’s done anything like that for me since I was a girl.

I sink a few inches when the dirt gives beneath my weight. Andreas’s grip tightens to keep me from falling. Mine tightens with hopes of pulling him in with me. But he doesn’t stumble, doesn’t follow. When he lets go, I clasp my hands in front of me.

“Lie down.” Each of his words is a nail in my imaginary coffin.

I dig myself a space, lie down, and close my eyes. When Andreas pushes the first mound of dirt over my feet, I panic. But my body’s not setup to panic, anymore. I have no racing heart or nauseous stomach. My deep breaths mean nothing. I suck air in, but it sits there until I push it out.

“Relax.” Andreas covers my legs next. He doesn’t pack the soil tight. I assume so that I can get out. I hope.

He unclasps my hands and lays them out beside me. Even corpses get to hold themselves in death. But I’m left exposed to the dirt Andreas piles on my chest and over my arms. Over my neck and ears.

I blink up at him, nothing but a pale face amongst black-brown soil. A waning moon in the night sky. Andreas bends and presses a soft kiss against my lips. It doesn’t mean anything. I almost wish it did. We don’t love each other, don’t long for each other’s touch or look forward to some eternal romance. I didn’t even pick him. He bit me. I didn’t get a say beyond turn or die.

Andreas climbs out of my grave and disappears from view. When he returns, he’s holding the wooden handles of a dirt-filled wheelbarrow. “I’ll be back for you.” And with that, he dumps it over my face. I feel him pat its cold weight over my head and body. Hear the squeaky hinge on the metal trapdoor and its bang shut.

Dirt fills my mouth when I scream.

Starving.

Starving and dried and thirsty.

Thirsty and hungry are the same. My body is a desert. I swallow bits of dirt with the rush of blood I suck down. The source is hot against me. Hard against me. My jaw is rigid, eyes wide on those of the man who feeds me.

“Finley.” His voice is underwater. My name ripples to the surface.

He rips the source away. I lunge after it, but he pins me on a cold cement floor. I run my tongue over the sharp line of my teeth and cut it on my fangs. They taste like him. My wandering eyes settle on the source. The source has a name. His name is Andreas.

“Finley.”

That’s my name. I know because I chose it.

“Finley, can you hear me?”

I cough up dirt and blood. Spit it on the cement. “Yes.” My voice is smoother, darker, fuller.

“How do you feel?” Andreas asks.

“Starving and dried and thirsty.”

He smiles with closed lips. “Let’s get you in the shower and some blood in your system. How does that sound?”

My answer is a low growl—one that’s conceived in my chest and born through my throat. I chase the feeling with another. Andreas pulls me off my feet and into his arms as if I am his pet. I press my nose against his shirt and sniff his blood through the layers of cotton and flesh.

He sets me on my own feet, again, in the shower. It’s big enough for three, no curtains blocking us in. Showerheads hang from the ceiling, raining hot water onto our cold bodies. Andreas rips his clothes off and tosses them into a sopping heap on the rug. I’m already naked—I forgot.

Starving.

I feel every drop of water that strikes my skin like a match tip catching fire. Mud rolls over my muscled arms and unsticks from the dark curls between my legs. I’m not bleeding, anymore.

Andreas offers his wrist. I latch onto his neck, instead. His laugh resounds through my jaw. The blood jostles, choking me for a moment. I pull back and crack my neck, let the rush settle in.

Nerves in my chest prickle to life—nerves that died under the knife years ago. I squirm where Andreas slides his hand down my back, where he rests it under my ass and squeezes, pressing our bare bits together.

When I bite him again, my teeth light with as much pleasure as my cunt—more, even. Like there are nerves in my new fangs.

“There are,” Andreas says, confirming my thoughts. “And it’s so much better than sex.”

My body pulses with blood like that first rush of testosterone. Andreas doesn’t taste like one person. He isn’t a varietal vintage. He’s the blood of everyone he’s drunk. Like the house blend, I drink him until he stops me.

I know it’s blood; I can taste the iron. But it recalls words like silky and juicy, the swirl of red in a glass, and roll over the tongue.

“Enough,” he says with fangs exposed.

I didn’t expect the lust part of bloodlust, but Andreas looks different with my undead eyes. I can see the lines of severity in his expression, the flare of his pupils, feel his subtly shifting muscles.

I reach between us and grab Andreas’s erection, rub my blood-engorged clit against it and moan. “I want you,” I say.

“You want blood.”

“I want both.”

Andreas smiles. “I’ll give you both.”

We fuck with my forehead pressed against the slick tiled wall, Andreas’s mouth hovering against the back of my neck. Even amidst the steam, his breath is hot, tongue strong and wet. I want him to feed on me again, like that night in the alley. Only this time we both want it and it is so much better, this way.

His cold fingers shock my nipples hard, rolling and pinching them. In only a few hours they’ve regained the sensitivity they lost under the knife, two years ago.

With his other hand he covers my mouth. And while I relish the bondage, the stifling of my growls and moans, I know it’s an offering. I sink my teeth into his wrist and draw the color from him.

While his blood rushes through me, turning me, resurrecting me, Andreas pushes his thick cock into my cunt. I steady myself against the wall while he lifts me with one arm—the arm not lodged in my mouth—and thrusts.

It’s not long before he comes, trembling inside me; his body pins mine to the wall. I’m so close, so full, probably saturated. Andreas reaches between my legs and rubs my clit. I close my eyes, lick the wounds on his arm, rest my weight on the full feeling in my groin.

If he weren’t propping me up, my orgasm would knock me to the shower floor. It radiates through my blood stream. It wakes me up.

Andreas has to rip his arm away from me. “Careful,” he whispers in my ear. “Your body is adjusting. You don’t want to be sick, again, so soon.”

He rinses us off, takes my hand, and together we lie on the shower tiles, their orange-pink marbling a farce of sundown. I rest my face against his pec, over his juicy heart, and kiss the skin. Andreas chuckles and holds me there while the water pounds over my blissed out body.

“I’m still hungry,” I say.

“I bet you are.”

“When can we hunt?”

“We can’t.”

“Why not? You did.”

Andreas flips his body on top of mine. “I’m old, Finley. Too old. I’ve followed human history for millennia. I’ve met believers and skeptics. Warm beds and pitchforks. Somehow, I never expected assimilation.” He relaxes onto his side, rests his head on his hand. “Never expected to go mainstream.”

“‘I’m Andreas. I was a vampire before it was cool,’” I say, mocking him.

His smirk is sharp and quick; I almost miss it. “You think you’re going to be the vampire that breaks the rules. That fights the normalization of our culture. That doesn’t register with a government that’s existed as long as my last haircut.

“Your laws don’t really matter to me. But for some reason I went along with them. I figured, why not try something new? Live in the open for a change, make friends, furnish an apartment, get a hobby.

“Wasn’t so bad at first. Bagged blood is like your Diet Coke. Not as good as the real thing, but you get used to it—so much, sometimes, that you get a sugar rush if you revert.” Andreas traces a finger down my jaw, over my neck and chest, swirling it around one of my swollen areola. “I wanted to hold a live body in my arms and feed while it wriggled against me, struggled for the life I sucked hot out of it.”

I squeeze my legs together and rock my hips while lust washes over me again.

“You like that.” He smiles.

“I do.”

“We can’t feed on humans.”

“But I get it, now.” I sit up straighter. “I feel—”

“Forget how you feel, now. Remember how you felt, then,” Andreas says, squeezing my hand with a strength I can almost match.

Remembering back a few days ago seems impossible, like seeing into someone else’s mind. But I close my eyes and use the white noise of the running water to go back. Even then my human memories feel like facts rather than experiences. “I was angry that you took my choice away.”

“Right. Remember that, even if you have to write it down, every morning.”

“Okay, but what if we get a donor—a certified blood donor—whose choice it is to give us their blood?” I bat my eyelashes.

Andreas leans over my chest and licks my nipple. “I’ll consider it.”

I moan and arch up to meet his mouth.

His lips brush my sensitive flesh while he speaks. “When you prove you can control yourself enough not to kill anyone, I’ll consider it.” He sucks the hard nub between his teeth and presses his fingers between my legs.

Control myself. Just once I’d like to control my own damn body.

We feed on blood bags, together. Andreas “convinces” my landlord to break my lease early and without penalty—just like he “convinced” Dr. Treggman not to report us—so I can move into the guest room. He buys me a real bed and a mug that says “Blood: it’s not just for breakfast, anymore.”

During the first week, we eat and fuck. I’m still not in love with him—don’t expect to be—but he lets me feed on him in the shower to ease my bloodlust.

I stumble out, naked and wet, still unsteady on my changing legs. My muscles thicken and shape the more I drink. My facial hair fills in thick and dark where it was patchy before: a fine, perfectly groomed layer on my cheeks and neck. I always thought vampires looked like more beautiful versions of their human selves, though I can’t imagine a duller Andreas.

“Stop staring at yourself in the mirror,” he teases.

“Stop staring at myself?” I rub a towel over my hair. It rests shiny and perfect without any help. “I’ve never been happy with the way I look until now. And I’m not supposed to stare?”

Andreas’s smile is so subtle, I’d have missed it with human eyes. He lifts me onto my new Ikea bed.

“Can vampires cut their hair?” I ask, diverting Andreas’s mouth from its intent.

“What? Why? You just said—”

“When we were talking earlier, you said our government was as old as your last haircut.”

“We can make small changes over long periods of time. If you cut it all off, it would grow back while you slept. Mostly, I was being facetious. Bit of vampire humor.” He glances at my hair. “Why, you weren’t thinking of changing . . . anything, were you?”

I wasn’t. Not really. But knowing I can’t? What if prosthetics or surgery become so advanced—I’m going to live to see that. Doctors will be able to grow you a dick using stem cells or someone will invent a CyberCock that pairs with a brain implant. In a future where trans people will be able to customize their bodies, I won’t be able to. Mine will reject and revert. Beautiful but stagnant. No implants, no surgeries. Not even a haircut. This is why trans people aren’t allowed to undergo vampirification.

It’s still better than dying.

Will I feel that way in a hundred years?

“Finley?”

“Uh, no, not planning to change anything. Sorry.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Just . . .” I focus on the body I have, on the things I can control. Like my current arousal. “Just get back to it.” I force a smile when I recline. The smile sticks.

The particleboard rocks under the force of our weight, knocking over the canvas I leaned against it. Andreas dives between my legs and sucks on my clit. It’s grown like a satisfied tick. And I’m hornier than I was during my first six months on T.

I twine my fingers through Andreas’s shiny curls and hold his face against my crotch. He’s happy to oblige, trailing his kisses over my abdomen and up my chest. Ever since I turned, I can’t get enough of his mouth and fingers on my nipples. I missed them. I missed them and now they’re back, healed by his venom.

He pulls away, leaving my slick, wet chest cold and exposed.

“Don’t stop,” I whisper.

Andreas looks between my chest and my face then back to my chest. “Something’s wrong,” he says.

“What? Nothing’s . . .” I pat the bare skin and wince. Tender dimples of breasts poke out. “What’s happening to me?”

Andreas swallows a hard lump in his throat. “Your body. It’s—I don’t know.”

I skitter back until I hit the headboard, until I can’t run any further away from my own chest. “Make it stop,” I say. When Andreas doesn’t move, I shout. “Make it stop!”

He hisses at me for silence.

“Please,” I whisper. “Please, make it stop.” Something warm rolls down my face, red drops splatter on the growing mounds of my chest.

Andreas growls as he rips the covers off the bed and flings them into the air. The colorful cotton drifts slowly to the floor between us. He bites his bottom lip leaving a thin red line that drips down his chin.

“I have an idea.”

“What?”

“I’ll be right back.” But before he can get too far, he turns back. “Don’t move.”

I shake my head. “I won’t.”

I can’t and I don’t.

I stare at the pattern on Andreas’s manufactured quilt. The colors are intense, even in the dark. Red too bright for blood. Yellow too clear for the sun. A sun I won’t see again until I’m god knows how old, and only then from the shadows.

The quilt doesn’t warm me like I wish it would. My body’s cold now. It used to be warm. Testosterone runs warmer than estrogen. I stopped wearing a sweater to work. Wonder if I’ll start, again.

The door clicks shut. Andreas appears in the doorway; he slows to a human pace mid-step. I can see the change, now. It looks like slow motion. How slow must walking feel to him after so many years.

“Drink this.” Andreas crawls onto the bed and wraps an arm around me. He rests a blood bag against my lips.

I push it away. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’re hungry for this. Trust me.”

I purse my lips before accepting the bag. My fangs pierce the thick plastic so easily, I have to concentrate on not ripping it open over the mattress.

“How do you like it?” Andreas watches me.

I don’t like when he watches me. I look inexperienced—I am, but that’s not the point. Andreas makes vampirism look casual, like a lifestyle. Like vegetarianism.

I carefully back off the bag, long enough to really swallow, to run my tongue over my teeth and let the blood absorb into my body. My temperature rises. A warm euphoria radiates from my skin, swarms my brain, swells between my legs.

“This is good.”

Andreas smiles.

“What’d you do to it?”

“Vampire venom enhances what it finds: clear voice, luxurious hair, firm muscles—”

“Remaining breast tissue; I get it.” I grit my slippery teeth. “What did you do to this?”

“Injected it with testosterone.” He looks thoughtfully between me and the bloody bag. “I didn’t think, when I drained your blood, that I’d depleted any hormones you may’ve injected. Most humans’ bodies keep producing whatever they need.”

“Mine doesn’t.”

“I know that, now. Thought I’d reintroduce what you need. Steer your new vampire body in the right direction.”

“Not bad, Dr. Andreas.”

I crush the bag against my mouth and suck it dry. The plastic crinkles until it’s raisin-like in my hands. A drop spills over my chin and tickles my neck. Andreas leans over and licks it away.

I growl and toss the empty bag onto the floor, accepting Andreas’s mouth against mine. He avoids my chest, though I feel the mounds press against his shirt when he climbs on top of me.

I wake up horny. Andreas sleeps beside me, still, his hand draped over my chest to protect me from it. My consciousness stirs him. When he flexes his hand, it brushes my side and I push it away. It’s too much. I can’t stay in and fuck away the bloodlust for the rest of my life.

“Hey.” Andreas props himself up, eyes only half-open. He stares at my body. “They’re gone.”

I look. I don’t want to, but I have to, and he’s right. The area’s not as hard and defined as it used to be. Andreas gently touches the puffy skin. I gasp. The air feels strange in my lungs, like a lump in my throat.

I quickly expel it and sit up. “I need more of that blood.”

I burn through T like a bodybuilder. My old dose is not going to be enough and Andreas warns me against trying to visit a human doctor, again.

“They’ll report you. They’ll report me!” He follows me to the front door.

“Why do you even care?”

I pull the door open and storm into the night like an angry teenager. Heat builds under my cold skin. Cis people are all the same: human or vampire.

Andreas grabs my arm gently, by his standards. I pause out of respect—and rather than dislocating one of our shoulders.

“Is it so wrong to want to feel normal for once?” he pleads with me.

I see an ancient monster against canary yellow walls, glossy wood floors, and ergonomic furniture. He tried. He’s still trying.

“I’ll be back.” I leave, running as fast as I can, which is still not faster than Andreas, but hopefully fast enough to lose him and his questions.

Normal. I slow to an acceptably human speed outside the Center Street Clinic. It’s closed. Obviously. Nothing discourages new vampires from visiting like hours that end before sunset. Perfectly legal. Perfectly gross.

I watch patrons drinking in the bar next door, while I walk around it and into the alley. I’ve yet to ask Andreas how long until my body can handle alcohol. Seeing how fast it absorbs hormones, it’d probably take a lot of booze to get me as drunk as the night we met.

I race up the fire escape and crack the glass with my elbow. The clinic is empty. At home in the dark, I easily navigate the clutter of chairs and narrow hallways in search of the pharmacy.

A sign stops me: “Ask about subsidized hormone therapy, today!” Center Street is a good clinic. What kind of asshole robs a pharmacy?

Me. I’m the kind.

There are dozens of bottles of T, here. They’ll know if I take one, so I might as well take what I need for the next six weeks. The clinic can order more.

I load the little boxes into my backpack, grab some needles and syringes for good measure, and climb back out the broken window. Halfway down the fire escape, I consider that Andreas would have found a less obvious and destructive way in.

I jump from the second floor, landing on wobbly feet in the alley. Drunk blood wafts past me from the bar. I hurry away from it, so I won’t be tempted to rip a beer out of someone’s hands—or the jugular out of someone’s throat.

I still smell the alcohol when I pass the gym. Fast-pumping blood, still hot from working out, burns my nostrils. I drag my tongue over my fangs, imagining how one of these late-night meatheads would taste.

“Hey.” A solid, wide-jawed man nods at me. “You’re out late.”

“No.” My razor teeth show through my smile. “You’re out late.” I hear his heart pump faster, smell his adrenaline spike. I bet he tastes even better turned on.

He runs a hand through his sweat-slick hair while he swaggers towards me. He lowers his voice. “I’ve never fucked a vampire, before.”

I press a hand against his abdomen and linger on the over-developed muscle. “You’re subtle.”

“Wasn’t getting the feeling I needed to be.”

“You don’t. Come with me.”

Andreas isn’t home when I-still-haven’t-asked-his-name and I get in. I sit my backpack carefully on the bench in the foyer then kick my shoes into the middle of the hall.

“Bradley,” the man says between kisses. “My name’s Bradley.”

“Finn,” I say instead of “I didn’t ask.”

“This your place?”

“Something like that.”

He peers down the hall into open rooms as I pull him into mine. Probably wants to know what a vampire’s lair is like. Apparently it’s like the inside of a Swedish furniture store. Sorry to disappoint.

Bradley tugs his shoes off and leaves them behind the bed. He smashes his mouth against mine—a move I assume is sexier to someone who can’t literally bite his face off.

But I go with it. I relax. I let him push me against the mattress—even pretend he’s pinning me there. His sweaty shirt sticks between us when he pulls mine off over my head.

“You feel like marble.”

Big vocabulary for a gym rat. “If that’s a problem, I can put my clothes back on.”

“No, no, no.” He kisses down my chest. “I like it. It’s just . . . different. You’re cold.”

I snake my hand down the front of Bradley’s drawstring pants. He’s already hard. My hand glides easily over his sweaty cock.

He moans against my lips. “You want that? Want me to warm you up?”

As cliché as his lines are, his arrogance gets me wet.

“Do it,” I say, helping his clothes off. I accidentally rip his tee shirt. His pants slide off unharmed. His swollen cock bobs near my face and I fight the urge to suck it. Bad idea, teeth.

“Hey, you should know . . .” I trail off. I could kill him and I’m still afraid to tell him our genitals don’t match.

“What? This your first time?”

I shake my head.

“Afraid you’re going to hurt me?”

“No—well, a little, but I—I’m trans.”

“What?”

“I’m transgender.”

“You have a dick?” He pulls my briefs down, throwing me off balance.

“Excuse me!”

“Are you kidding? I find the only fucking gay vampire with no dick?”

“Didn’t think I’d need one for what you planned to do.”

“I’m not putting anything in your pussy.”

I tense up at the word. “Please don’t call it that.”

“Whatever.”

“I have another hole, in case you missed it.”

Bradley shakes his head and reaches for his clothes. “I’m not into girls.”

I grab his arm and flip him onto the bed. “And I’m not into transphobic douchebags, but I’m hungry so I’ll make an exception.”

My fangs lodge easily into his neck. My tongue slides over his salty skin and I overwhelmingly realize why Andreas bit me. I can’t even blame him.

Bradley doesn’t taste like Andreas, though. He tastes like steroids and adrenaline with a hint of alcohol. He doesn’t fight me or he stops fighting me. His heat floods my veins.

The front door clicks its quiet, controlled click shut. Andreas’s eyes meet mine in the dark. He doesn’t speak. He walks slowly, at human speed even though no one’s around to judge him, and kneels at the foot of the bed.

“He smells delicious,” Andreas says.

I swallow a mouthful of Bradley’s thick, heady blood, then pull out. “Want to share?”

Andreas kisses me, his tongue flicking against mine for a taste. He licks the corner of my mouth, cleaning me up. I’m a messy eater. I’m a monster.

“No thanks,” Andreas says. “Once was more than enough.” He bites his wrist and lets his blood drip into Bradley’s wounds.

“You didn’t do that for me.”

“You’re not even close to draining this man, Finley.”

The effects on Bradley are instant; the ragged holes in his neck stitch themselves back together. Seamless.

Bradley opens his eyes on Andreas’s.

“You and Finley had a good time, but it was a one-time thing. He’s not really your type.”

“Yeah,” Bradley says.

I roll my eyes.

“Why don’t you head home and shower off that gym stench,” Andreas says.

“Good idea,” Bradley agrees, robotic.

When the jock’s dressed and gone, Andreas says, “Get what you need?”

I stretch my jaw and crack my neck. Slide my tongue over my teeth to get the last of the taste. “Mostly.”

“Let me help you.”

Help me. How is an old cis vampire supposed to help me when he doesn’t understand the first thing about my body? My eternity?

I ask, “Do you have any nails?”

Andreas leans against the threshold, sipping blood while he watches. His skin is pale, but not pallid. His pose casual, but precise. “Little more to the left,” he says. “There. That’s it.”

I walk backwards until I bump into him. He hands me the mug and I take a sip. “Not bad,” I say.

My last sunset hangs over the bed. With my new eyes, I see the thick texture of paints where the colors blend and my brushstrokes overlap like waves. Apricot, wine, and goldenrod blur together, each clearer and more real than anything printed by a machine on one of Andreas’s quilts.

“Small changes over long periods of time, you said?”

“Yes,” Andreas says. “Why?”

“Just making sure.”

I imagine what a real sunset will look like when I’m old enough to experience one. If they’ll still exist or if smog will cloud the skyline. The only thing that won’t change is me, my body, my canvas. “What about a tattoo? You know, to remember.” Blood drips from the corners of my eyes.

“Possible. It’ll hurt, but possible.” Andreas tightens his hold on me. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yes,” I resolve. “Haven’t cried this much since—before, you know. It feels good.”

“Since before I turned you?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Before I turned myself.”

CHILDREN OF THORNS, CHILDREN OF WATER

Aliette de Bodard

With thanks to Stephanie Burgis, Fran Wilde and Kate Elliott

It was a large, magnificent room with intricate patterns of ivy branches on the tiles, and a large mirror above a marble fireplace, the mantlepiece crammed with curios from delicate silver bowls to Chinese blue-and-white porcelain figures: a clear statement of casual power, to leave so many riches where everyone could grab them.

Or rather, it would have been, if the porcelain hadn’t been cut-rate—the same bad quality the Chinese had foisted on the Indochinese court in Annam—the mirror tarnished, with mould growing in one corner, spread down far enough that it blurred features, and the tiling cracked and chipped in numerous places—repaired, but not well enough that Thuan couldn’t feel the imperfections under his feet, each one of them a little spike in the khi currents of magic around the room.

Not that Thuan was likely to be much impressed by the mansions of Fallen angels, no matter how much of Paris they might claim to rule. He snorted disdainfully, an expression cut short when Kim Cuc elbowed him in the ribs. “Behave,” she said.

“You’re not my mother.” She was his ex-lover, as a matter of fact; and older than him, and never let him forget that.

“Next best thing,” Kim Cuc said, cheerfully. “I can always elbow further down, if you insist.”

Thuan bit down the angry retort. The third person in the room—a dusky-skinned, young girl of Maghrebi descent, who’d introduced herself as Leila—was looking at them with fear in her eyes. “We’re serious,” he said, composing his face again. “We’re not going to ruin your chances to enter House Hawthorn, promise.”

They were a team: that was what they’d been told, as the House dependents separated the crowd before the House in small groups; that their performance would be viewed as a whole, and their chance to enter the House weighed accordingly. Though no rules had been given, and nothing more said, either, as dependents led them to this room and locked them in. At least he was still with Kim Cuc, or he’d have been hopelessly lost.

For people like Leila—for the Houseless, the desperate—it was their one chance to escape the streets, to receive food and shelter and the other tangible benefits of a House’s protection.

For Thuan and Kim Cuc, though . . . the problem was rather different. Their fate, too, would be rather different, if anyone found out who they really were. No House in Paris liked spies, and Hawthorn was not known for its leniency.

“You’re relatives?” Leila asked.

“In a manner of speaking.” Kim Cuc was cheerful again, which meant she was about to reproach him once more. “He’s the disagreeable one. We work in the factories.” They’d agreed on this as the most plausible cover story: they had altered their human shapes, slightly, to make their hands thinner and more scarred. They didn’t need to fake the gaunt faces and brittle hair: in the days after the war that had devastated the city, magical pollution affected everyone.

“The factories. The ones behind the stations?”

Kim Cuc nodded. She looked at her lap, thoughtfully. “Yes. Only decent jobs there are, for Annamites in this city.”

“That’s—” Leila started. The House factories by the ruined train stations employed a host of seamstresses and embroiderers, turning them blind and crooked-handed in a short span. “People don’t last long in there.”

Kim Cuc looked at her lap as if embarrassed. “It sucks the life out of you, but it pays well. Well, decent considering it’s not for House dependents.” She fingered her bracelet. It and its matching twin on the other side looked like cheap, gilded stuff, the kind of wedding gifts the Annamite community gave each other, but they were infused with a wealth of Fallen magic. If found out and pressed, she’d say they were savings for an upcoming operation—not an uncommon thing in devastated Paris, where the air corroded lungs and caused strange fungi to bloom within bones and muscle. “What about you?”

Leila’s face froze as she exhaled. “Gang,” she said, shortly. “The Deep Underground Dreamers, before they got beaten by the Red Mambas.”

“Ah,” Kim Cuc said. “And the Red Mambas didn’t want you?”

Leila’s gaze was answer enough: haunted and taut, and more adult than it should have been. Beneath her hemp shirt and patched-up skirt, her body was thin, and no doubt bruised. Thuan felt obscurely ashamed. He and Kim Cuc were only playing at being Houseless. The dragon kingdom under the waters of the Seine might be weakened, its harvests twisted out of shape by Fallen magic, but they still had enough to eat and drink, and beds to sleep in they didn’t need to fight or trade favours for. “Sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be,” Leila said. And, when the silence got too awkward, “So what are we supposed to do?”

“Damned if I know.” Thuan got up, and picked up one of the figurines from the mantlepiece. It was a shepherdess with a rather improbable waistline, carrying a small and perfectly fashioned lamb in her arms. One of her eyes was slightly larger than the other, an odd effect that most mortals wouldn’t have picked up on.

There is one day of the year when House Hawthorn takes in the Houseless, and trains them as servants or potential dependents. One of you needs to get in.

Hawthorn was the kingdom’s closest and most uncomfortable neighbour, and they were getting more and more pressing. Till recently, they had shown no interest in the Seine or its underwater cities. But now they were encroaching on dragon territory, and no one at the imperial court had any idea of why or what the stakes were.

We need an agent in the House.

Kim Cuc was fascinated by Fallen magic and by the Houses. Thuan—a dragon, but a minor son of a minor branch of the imperial family—just happened to be the definition of convenient and expendable.

He’d have cursed, if he hadn’t been absolutely sure that Kim Cuc would elbow him again. Or worse, continue the small talk with Leila, picking up on all of Thuan’s imperfections as if he weren’t there. Trust her to share secrets with someone who wasn’t even a dragon, or a relative.

The door opened. Thuan, startled, put the shepherdess back on the mantlepiece, and straightened up, feeling for all the world as though he’d been caught stealing dumplings from the kitchens by one of his aunts.

The newcomer was a Fallen, with a round, plump face, and the same slight radiance to her skin as all former angels, a reminder of the magic swirling through them. She turned to look at all of them in turn, her brown eyes lingering longer on Thuan, as if she knew exactly what he’d been doing when he entered the room. “My name is Sare,” she said. “I’m the alchemist of the House, and in charge of these tests.”

The one in charge of making all their magical artefacts, and turning Fallen corpses into magic for dependents. She definitely reminded Thuan of Third or Fourth Aunt, except that his aunts wouldn’t kill him for stealing or snooping where he wasn’t meant to—no, they’d come up with something far worse.

Sare waited for them to introduce themselves, which they did, awkwardly and in a growing silence. Leila’s eyes were wide. Kim Cuc, by the looks of her, was unimpressed and trying not to show it.

“So you want to enter Hawthorn,” Sare said. She didn’t wait, this time. “Let me tell you a little about how it works. I’ll pick a few people from everyone who showed up today: the ones who show the most resourcefulness. The House will take you in, feed you, clothe you and teach you. If not . . .” She shrugged. “The streets are full of the Houseless. Any questions?”

“Dividing us into teams . . .” Thuan said, slowly.

“Because a House stands together,” Sare said. The look she gave him could have frozen lava. “Intrigues are allowed, but nothing that threatens our unity. Am I clear?”

She wasn’t, but Thuan nodded all the same.

“What are we supposed to do?” Kim Cuc asked.

“To start with?” Sare gestured, gracefully, towards the large table in the centre of the room. “You’ll find supplies in the cupboard on the right, and other materials in the room on the left. You have an hour to come up with something that impresses me.”

“Something—?” Thuan asked.

Sare shook her head. “Resourcefulness. I look forward to seeing what you make.”

He shouldn’t have, but he raised his gaze to meet hers. Brown eyes, with light roiling throughout the irises, flecks of luminescence that looked like scattered stars. “I’m sure you won’t be disappointed,” he said.

Something creaked in the corridor outside the room, and Sare looked away for a moment, startled. When she came back to Thuan, something had changed in her gaze, a barely perceptible thing, but Thuan was observant.

“Cocky,” Sare said. “I’m not too sure I like that, Thuan. But we’ll see, won’t we?”

And then she was gone, and it was just the three of them, staring at each other.

Kim Cuc was the first to move, towards the cupboard Sare had shown them. She opened it, and stared at its contents. Thuan heard her suck in a deep breath. “Well, that should be interesting.”

Thuan wasn’t sure what he’d expected—some kind of dark and twisted secrets, weapons or knives or something, but of course that was nothing more than fancies born of nightmares. Inside the cupboard were metal bowls and plates, and a series of little packets of powder.

“Is that—” Leila asked.

“Yes,” Kim Cuc said. “Flour, sugar and salt.” Her face was carefully composed again, mostly so she didn’t laugh. She looked, again, at the table in the centre of the room, a fragile contraption with the curved legs characteristic of the Louis XV style, except that they’d been broken once already, and that the white marble surface was soot-encrusted. “I’m assuming we should make our best effort not to break that.”

Servants. Kitchen hands. Of course.

Leila pushed open the door of the other room, came back. “There’s a sink and a small stove in there.” Her face was closed again, pinched and colourless. “I can’t cook. We never saw all of this, outside—” On the streets of Paris, flour was grit-filled and grey, butter thin and watered-down, and sugar never seen. As tests went, it was actually quite a good one: how would you handle cooking with so much more wealth than you’d ever seen in your life?

Clever, Thuan thought, and then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to admire the House that was his enemy.

Kim Cuc was gazing at him, levelly. “You’re in luck,” she said to Leila. “Because I can’t cook either. But Thuan was paying way too much attention to old recipes, back when he was trying to seduce the family cook.”

“It did work,” Thuan said, stung. Not for long, true. It had soured when Thuan was called to the innermost chambers of the court, and last he’d heard, the cook had found himself another lover. He’d have been bitter if he could have afforded to, but that wasn’t the way to survive in the intrigues of the imperial court.

“It always works,” Kim Cuc said. “Until it doesn’t.” She stopped, then, as if aware she was on the cusp of going too far.

“You said you weren’t keeping score,” Thuan said.

Kim Cuc shrugged. “Do you want me to?”

“No.” They’d parted on good terms and she wasn’t jealous or regretful, but she did have way too much fun teasing him.

“Fine,” Kim Cuc said. “What can we do in one hour?”

Thuan knelt, to stare at the contents of the cupboard. “An hour is short. Most recipes will want more than that. And . . .” The supplies were haphazard, bits and scraps scavenged from the kitchens, he assumed. He had to come up with something that wasn’t missing an ingredient, and that could be significantly sped up by three people working on it at the same time. And that was a little more impressive than buttered toast.

“Chocolate éclairs,” he said, finally. “Leila and I on the dough, Kim Cuc on the cream. We’ll sort out the chocolate icing while the dough cools down.” Time was going to be tight and the recipe wasn’t exactly the easiest one he had, but the cake—pâte à choux filled with melted pastry cream and iced with chocolate—was an impressive sight, and probably a better thing than the other teams would come up with. Assuming, of course, that everyone had been assigned a cooking challenge, which might not be the case.

The downside was that, unless they were very fast, they’d leave the place a mess. One hour definitely didn’t include time for clean-up. Better, however, to be ambitious and fail, rather than come back with a pristine room and nothing achieved.

But, all the while, as he directed Leila to beat eggs and sugar together—as he attempted to prevent Kim Cuc from commenting on his strings of previous lovers and their performances as she boiled butter and water together—he remembered Sare’s eyes, the way she’d moved when the floor in the corridor creaked.

It had been fear and worry in her gaze, something far beyond the annoyance of having to deal with the Houseless in the course of a routine exam she must have been used to supervising every year. And, for a moment, as she’d turned, the magic within her had surged, layer after layer of protective spells coming to life in Thuan’s second sight, spells far too complex and sturdy to be wasted on the likes of them.

“Something is wrong,” he said, to Kim Cuc, in Viet. They couldn’t keep that conversation up for long, or Leila would get suspicious.

Kim Cuc’s eyes narrowed. “I know. The khi currents in the wing are weird. I’ve noticed it when we stepped in.”

“Weird how?”

“They should be almost spent,” Kim Cuc said. “Devastated like the rest of Paris. But they’re like a nest of hornets. Something’s got them stirred up.”

“Something?”

“Someone. Someone is casting a spell, and it’s a large one.” Her voice was thoughtful. “Keep an eye out, will you?” Fortunately, questions in Viet sounded like any other sentence to foreigners, marked only by a keyword that was no different from the usual singsong rhythm.

“Of course.” Whatever it was, they were locked in a room somewhere near the epicentre of it.

Great. What ancestor had he offended lately, to get such a string of bad luck?

Thuan was down to making an improvised piping bag with baking parchment when Kim Cuc said, sharply, “Younger uncle.”

“Is anything wrong—” he started, and then stopped, because the khi currents had shifted. Water had given way to an odd mixture of water and wood, something with sharp undertones Thuan had never felt before.

The key turned in the lock again: it was Sare, her smooth, perfect face expressionless, but with the light of magic roiling beneath her skin, so strongly it deepened the shadows around the room. “Out,” she said. Her voice was terse and unfriendly.

Leila, startled, looked up with her hands full of congealed chocolate. Kim Cuc merely flowed into a defensive stance, gathering the rare strands of khi water in the room to herself. Thuan just waited, not sure of what was happening. Except that the ground beneath his feet felt . . . prickly, as if a thousand spikes had erupted from it and he was walking on a carpet of broken glass. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Enough,” Sare said. She looked at Thuan and Kim Cuc for a moment, her gaze suspicious—surely she couldn’t have found out what they were, surely dragon magic was as alien to Fallen as the sky was to fish? But then she shook her head, as if a bothersome thought had intruded. “We’re evacuating the wing, and you’re coming with us.”

“Caring about the Houseless?” Kim Cuc’s voice was mildly sarcastic, the remark Thuan had clamped down on as being too provocative.

“Corpses are a mess to clean.” Sare’s gaze was still hard. “I see both of you are equally cocky. Don’t give me a hard time, please.”

Kim Cuc grabbed him, as they came out. “It’s over the entire wing,” she said, in Viet.

“Not the House?”

She shook her head. “Don’t think so.” Her hands moved, smoothly, teasing out a pattern of khi water out of the troubled atmosphere. “This smooths out the khi currents. Got it?”

Thuan’s talent for magic was indifferent, but his memory for details was excellent. “Yes.”

“Good. Now hold on tight. This could get messy.”

In the corridor, a crowd of other Houseless mingled, waiting in a hubbub of whispers, until Sare clapped her hands together and silence spread like a thrown cloth. “We’re going into the gardens. Follow the dependents—the grey-and-silver uniforms. And don’t dawdle.”

And still no mention of whatever was causing the evacuation—no one who’d dared ask, either. Thuan fell in line behind two gaunt men in white bourgerons and blue aprons, Leila and Kim Cuc following a little behind. His neighbour was one of the House’s dependents, a middle-aged woman with a lean, harsh face who didn’t seem inclined to make conversation. She held a magical artefact in her clenched hand, but by the faint translucency of her skin she’d already inhaled its contents. Bad enough for everyone to be prepared for magic, then.

He still felt, under him, the spikes. They were moving, slowly weaving a pattern like snakes as he stepped over them, pushing upwards to trap his ankles. Their hold easily snapped as he stepped away, but it kept getting stronger and stronger. How far away were the gardens, how much time did they have? And what would happen, if he faltered and stopped? Something was trying to invade this part of the House, was trying to find a weakness, but he couldn’t see anything or anyone.

He glanced behind him. A small, skeleton-thin girl in a torn hempen dress had stumbled, and one of the dependents, cursing under her breath, was trying to help the girl up. Magic surged through her chest and arms, a light that threw the girl’s cheekbones into sharp relief. “Get up,” the dependent said, and the girl stumbled on.

So he wasn’t the only one, then. And it wasn’t only people with magic, Fallen or dragon who were feeling this.

Something moved, at the back. For a moment Thuan thought it was a child who’d gotten left behind, but it was too small and agile, and its joints didn’t seem to flex in the right way. Its eyes glittered in the growing shadows. And then, as swiftly as it had appeared, it vanished.

A child. The shape of a child. And—Thuan’s memory was unfortunately excellent on details like this—not something made of flesh and muscles and bones, but a construct of parquet wood, prickling with the thorns of brambles.

Of hawthorns, he thought, suddenly chilled.

When he turned to look again, the shadows had lengthened, and there were more of them, trailing the group, here one moment and gone the next, flickering in and out of existence like lights wavering in the wind. He scanned the crowd. Most Houseless appeared oblivious; but, here and there, people stared with growing fear. The House dependents didn’t appear to see the children of thorns at all.

That wasn’t good.

But, as they moved forward—always driven, always following the elusive light of Sare’s magic, following a corridor that twisted and turned and seemed to have no end—Thuan couldn’t help looking back again. Every time he looked, the children of thorns were more solid, more sharply defined. And not flickering in and out of existence, but more and more there.

The shadows at their back lengthened, until the light of the dependents’ magic seemed the only safety in the entire world. And the spikes—the branches, weren’t they?—grabbed his ankles and slowed him down, and more and more people stumbled, and they weren’t making good enough time, they were going to slow down and fall . . .

Someone grabbed Thuan’s hand. And it was definitely not human, or Fallen, or dragon—a dry, prickling touch like kindling wood. Thuan fought the urge to grab his hand away. “What are you?” he asked, and—where its breath should have been coming from—there was only the loud creak of floorboards.

It whispered something that might have been a name, that might have been a curse, but didn’t let go. “Stay,” it whispered. “Or the House will fail you as it failed its children.”

Thuan’s feet felt as though he was stuck to the parquet floor. With his free hand he called up khi water—it came slowly, agonisingly slowly—and wove it into the pattern Kim Cuc had shown him, throwing it over the spikes like a blanket. The currents smoothed themselves out. He lifted his feet, trying to stamp some circulation back into them, but he couldn’t get rid of the hand in his.

“Enough,” Sare said. She turned, ahead of them, to face the group. Light streamed from her face, from her arms beneath the grey and silver dress she wore—a radiance that grew steadily blinding, a faint suggestion of wings at her back, a halo around her fair hair.

By Thuan’s side, there was a sharp, wounded sound like wood snapping, and the hand withdrew from his as if scalded. He didn’t wait to see if it would come back, and neither did his companions. They ran, slowly at first and then picking up speed—not looking back, one should never look back—leaving the darkness behind and heading for the end of the corridor, door after door passing them, dust-encrusted rooms, rotten panelling, broken sofas and torn carpets and burnt wallpaper—and finally emerged, gasping and struggling to breathe, in the grey light of the gardens.

They stared at each other. Leila was dishevelled and pale, breathing heavily. Thuan was still trying to shake the weird feeling from his hand. When he raised it to the light he saw a dozen pinpricks, already closing. He’d never been so happy for dragons’ healing powers.

Sare stood on the steps of the wing, eyes shaded to look at the rest of the House. “Just this wing,” she said, half to herself. She gestured to one of the dependents. “Get a message to Lord Asmodeus.”

“He said—” the dependent started, with fear in her voice.

“I know what he said,” Sare said. She sounded annoyed. “He’s grieving and doesn’t want to be disturbed. But this is an emergency.” She breathed in, a little more calmly. “No, you’re right. Iaris. Get Iaris. She’ll sort this mess out.”

Thuan showed no sign he’d understood what was going on. From his briefings he knew that Iaris was the House’s chief doctor, and Asmodeus’s right hand, seconding him in his work of ruling the House.

Sare turned back to Thuan and the others, huddled on the steps, struggling to catch their breath. “We’ll find you some food until this gets sorted out.”

Of course. They weren’t going to be allowed to leave, were they? Just in case one of them turned out to be responsible for whatever had happened.

Leila withdrew something from her pocket: it was soggy and broken in half, and left trails of chocolate in her hand. “They’d have tasted great,” she said, forlornly.

“We can always do them later,” Thuan said. And then he stopped, as his brain finally caught up with him. “Where’s Kim Cuc?”

She. She wasn’t there. He hadn’t seen her since the hand had grabbed him in the corridor. A fist of ice was squeezing his innards into mush. Where. Where was she?

He moved, half-running across the steps, gently shoving people out of his way—a gaunt girl with the round belly of starvation, an older man from the factories, his clothes slick and stained from machine oil—no Kim Cuc, no other Annamite, not anywhere. “Older aunt!”

She wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere. She . . . he stopped at last, staring at the Houseless on the steps, at the grey, overcast sky, so unlike the rippling blue one of the dragon kingdom under the Seine. Gone. Stuck inside. With the children of thorns and the floorboards and whatever else was going on inside.

Stay.

No.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Sare, towering over him, with the remnants of the magic she’d used to extricate them from the wing, a dark, suffocating presence far too close for comfort. Within him, the khi water rose, itching for a fight, for anything to take his mind off the reality. But he couldn’t. Even if he’d been the most powerful among the dragon kingdom, he couldn’t take on a Fallen within her House.

“My friend,” Thuan said.

Sare was quick on the uptake. Her gaze moved, scanned the crowd. “Not here. All right. Is anyone else missing?” she called out.

It should have been chaos, but fear of what Sare would do kept them all in check. At length, after some hurried, whispered talks among themselves, the other Houseless established that, if anyone had gone missing, it was someone who’d come alone, and whom they hadn’t noticed.

Great.

Thuan looked at the wing they’d just come out of. The doors were a classic: a lower half of faded wooden panels, once a shade of purple but now just flaking off to reveal pale, mouldy wood underneath, and broken window panes on the top half.

But, around the handles . . . faint and translucent, and barely visible in the autumn light, was the imprint of thorn branches. Thuan sucked in a deep, burning breath. “What’s going on?” he asked Sare.

Her face was hard. He thought she’d brush him off, put him in his place with the other Houseless, but he must have caught her at an unguarded moment. “I don’t know. This wing has been odd since Lord Asmodeus came home from House Silverspires. Since . . .” she stopped herself, then.

Grieving. Thuan thought back to his mission briefing. Asmodeus’s long-time lover, Samariel, had died in House Silverspires. He wouldn’t have thought the head of House Hawthorn was the type to mourn, but clearly he’d been wrong. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then chose his words a little more carefully. “They say he lost his lover, in House Silverspires.”

“Yes.” Sare was still in that oddly contemplative mood.

“Does this have anything to do with it?”

Sare’s face closed. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” She looked at him; seeing him, not as a Houseless, not as a candidate to join the House, but as a person—a scrutiny he might not be able to afford, no matter how good his disguise was. “Cocky and curious. Who are you, Thuan?”

The only thing that came out of him was the truth. “I’m the one whose friend is stuck inside the wing. Assuming she’s even there anymore.” Assuming she was even alive anymore. Assuming . . .

“Don’t do anything you’ll regret later.” Sare gestured to the other Houseless, who’d fanned out on the steps. Someone had found a deck of cards, and a raucous game of tarot had started, cheered on by half the crowd, though the atmosphere was still subdued. “Now go wait, will you? Iaris has got a lot of experience at cleaning messes.” She looked as though she’d roll her eyes upwards, but stopped just short of actual disrespect. “You’ll be just fine.”

It was gently phrased, but it was an order. Thuan walked back to the group, and found Leila a little way from the doors, leaning on the railing. The éclair had vanished. He guessed she’d eaten it. Good on her, this wasn’t a time to waste food.

“Thuan. Did she—”

Thuan shook his head. “They don’t know what’s happening.” And neither did he. He eased, cautiously, into his second sight, trying to see what was happening with the khi currents. Wood and water, curling around the door; but weakened, just an after-effect of what was happening within the wing. And those same little spikes everywhere, like a field of thistles underfoot, but nothing that made sense.

“I’m sorry,” Leila said.

“It’s all right,” Thuan said. It wasn’t. He should have paid more attention to Kim Cuc, but of course he’d assumed she’d take care of herself, because it was what Kim Cuc always did. He squeezed her hand, briefly. “Why don’t you watch the tarot game?”

Leila made a face. “Not interested.” She slid down the railing, her eyes on Sare. “I’d rather know what they will do.”

“The House?” Thuan shrugged. He didn’t expect much from the House. They weren’t its dependents, and Sare had hardly seemed heartbroken to lose someone.

A tall, auburn-haired magician with an elegant dress in the House’s colours had arrived. She was huddled in conversation with Sare, a frown on her wrinkled face, fingering a filigreed pendant around her neck as if debating whether she should inhale the magic contained within. Leila watched them, fascinated.

Thuan turned his gaze, instead, on the wing they’d just come out of.

Kim Cuc would have joked about his inability to see further. She’d have teased him, infuriating as always, and told him to keep his head down, to not make waves. Better to remain hidden and safe, as the kingdom was hidden from Fallen.

Except, of course, that the kingdom wasn’t safe anymore, and that Houses Silverspires and Hawthorn had both encroached on its territory. Except that, like the Houses, they were ruined and decaying, and so desperate they had no choice but to send Thuan and Kim Cuc on a dangerous mission to infiltrate a House.

Stay safe. Stay hidden. As if that’d ever worked.

He crept closer to the handles. Sare was still in conversation with the magician, who was tracing a circle in the dust-choked earth of the gardens, while Sare was interjecting suggestions that the magician didn’t appear to approve of. Leila had crept closer to them, her gaze still full of that enraptured fascination.

Thuan’s hand closed, gently, on the left handle. The spikes of khi wood shifted, lay parallel to his fingers. His palm prickled, where the hand had held him, but nothing bled again, more like the memory of a wound than a real one.

He looked, again, at the steps. The Houseless were engrossed in the tarot game or in their own private thoughts, and Sare was still arguing with the magician. He could imagine what Kim Cuc would have said if she’d seen him. She’d have known exactly what he was thinking, and would have told him, in so many words, exactly how foolish it all was.

But, then again, if their situations were reversed, she’d still charge in.

Thuan turned the handle, slowly. Greased, it barely creaked as he pushed the door open and slipped, invisible and forgotten, into the wing they’d just evacuated.

Inside, it was dark. Not merely the gloom of dust-encrusted rooms, but shadows, lengthening as he walked, and his own footsteps, echoing in the silence. Doors opened, on either side, on splendid and desolate rooms, with fungus spreading on chairs upholstered with red velvet, and a pervading smell of humidity, as if everything hadn’t been aired properly after a rainy day.

And, as he walked, he became aware he wasn’t alone.

It was only one presence at first, but soon there were dozens of them, easily keeping pace with him: the same lanky, dislocated shapes of children made of thorns, their eyes glittering like gems in the darkness. They didn’t speak. They didn’t need to. It was creepy enough. Thuan could feel the spikes beneath his feet, dormant. Of course, he wasn’t trying to escape the wing. He was headed back into it.

He didn’t even want to think of all the sarcastic words Kim Cuc was going to come up with, after this one.

“Where is she?” he asked, aloud.

They seemed . . . made of khi wood and khi water, of old things and memories, cobbled together by someone with only a rudimentary idea of what was human. The khi currents didn’t pool around their feet, but went straight through them, as if they were extensions of the floor, and the only noise they made as they walked was the creaking of wood. “You’re not human,” he said, slowly, carefully, and again, there was no answer. It was a stupid thing to say, in any case. Sare wasn’t human, and neither was Thuan, and they were vastly different beings.

What there was, instead, was a bright, blinding light, coming from behind him. And loud footsteps, from someone brash enough to think discretion didn’t matter. The children scattered—no, not quite, they merely stepped back into the shadows, flowing back into them like smaller pools of ink rejoining a bigger one. Thuan mentally added that to his growing list of worries. Though so far, they didn’t seem aggressive. It was going to be rather different when they tried to leave.

“I told you not to do anything you’d regret,” a familiar voice said, behind Thuan.

Sare was alone, but, with so much magic flowing through her, she didn’t need to be accompanied. A pendant swung over the collar of her dress, shining in Thuan’s vision: an alchemical container she’d emptied for its preserved power. As she moved, the faint outline of wings followed her—an inverted afterimage, all that would remain after staring too long at blinding radiance.

He was in the middle of a wing invaded by magic, unsure of whether he’d ever be able to escape it, looking for Kim Cuc and with no leads whatsoever. He no longer had any room for fear of Sare. He didn’t even have room to worry about whether she’d choose him for Hawthorn. “Regret. You mean rescuing my friend? I think I won’t regret that on my deathbed.”

“That’s assuming you get a deathbed and not a violent death.” Sare shook her head, as if amused by the antics of a child. The sort of thing that might be borne by mortals, who were younger than she was and in awe of her. But Thuan was immortal and over three hundred years old, and running out of patience, fast.

“I thought you were waiting for Iaris,” Thuan said.

“I was,” Sare shrugged. “She might be a while, though. She’s currently entertaining the envoys of another House, and she needs to extricate herself gracefully.”

“Why are you here?”

“Curiosity. Also . . .” she shook her head. “We take turns administering the tests, every year. And because this year I’m the one in charge, I am responsible for whatever you get up to.”

“You don’t care about the Houseless.” Thuan was annoyed. Normally he wouldn’t have let the words get past his lips.

“No, but I do take my responsibilities seriously. And Iaris wouldn’t see it kindly if I were to lose two of you, not to mention an entire wing of the House.”

“The magician—”

“Albane? She’s preparing a spell, don’t worry. Now, you seemed to know where you were going.”

“No,” Thuan said. “They knew.”

“Who?” Sare turned, to look at the corridor. There was nothing but motes of dust in the dim light.

So she still couldn’t see them. And Thuan could. Which wasn’t good. A heartbeat, perhaps less, passed, and then Sare said, with a frown, “You’re not a magician.”

“No,” Thuan said, with perfect honesty. He had no need of angel breath or other adjuncts to perform magic, and he drew on khi water, a power Sare couldn’t see and wouldn’t be able to make sense of. But it wasn’t the khi currents that made him able to see the children, because the Houseless had also seen them.

But the House dependents hadn’t. Because of their magic?

Sare’s gaze held him, for a while. She couldn’t see through him. She couldn’t even begin to guess what he was. He was in human shape, with not a hint of scales showing on his dark skin, not a hint of antlers on his head or pearl beneath his chin.

At last, after what felt like an eternity, Sare asked, “What did you see?”

“Thorns,” Thuan said. “Beings of thorns.”

“Thorns don’t—” Sare started, then stopped. “You mean trees that moved.”

“No,” Thuan said. “Children. They were children. They said . . . they said the House would fail me as it had failed its children.”

Sare said nothing. Thuan considered asking her whether it meant anything to her, decided against it. He would gain nothing, and only make her suspicious. “Let’s have a look,” she said, carefully.

Room after room, deserted reception rooms with conversation chairs draped in mouldy coverings, closed pianos that looked as though they wouldn’t even play a note, and harps with strings as fragile as spun silk, rooms with moth-eaten four-poster beds, bathrooms with cracked tiles and yellowed tubs . . .

As they turned into the servants’ part of the wing—narrower rooms with shabbier sloped ceilings, all with that air of decayed grandeur—Thuan spoke up. “What’s this wing?” he asked.

Sare’s eyes narrowed. “You mean why here?”

“Yes.”

Her gaze held him, for a while. Beneath him, he could feel the spikes, quiescent. Waiting. Like the children, in the shadows, the ones he couldn’t see.

“I don’t know,” Sare said. “It’s the water wing—the one with the spring and the pump room—but it’s not the only one.”

The spring. He could feel it, distantly—khi water, far, far underground, all reserved for the House’s use, a trove of power that would never be his. But Sare was right: there were other springs, too, that he could feel on the edges of his thoughts, other currents of khi water being funnelled into the House.

“Then that can’t be it.”

Sare’s gaze was hard. “You want everything to make sense, don’t you.”

Thuan fingered dust on a marble table, followed it down the curve of verdigried legs. “I want to understand.”

“Then this is what I want to understand,” Sare said, closing the door behind her. “How come only your friend vanished, Thuan? What made her so special?”

She was clever. But then, he’d expected nothing less of her. She hadn’t gotten where she was—head of the alchemy laboratory, in charge of Hawthorn’s vast troves of stored magic—by being a fool.

“I don’t know,” he said, thoughtfully. It couldn’t be that she was a dragon, or Thuan would have vanished, too. He wasn’t stronger than she was. “They tried to hold us all.”

“Yes,” Sare said. “But they gave up when we proved no easy prey. Except they did snatch your friend, who presumably fought back, same as everyone. Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re the only Annamites.”

“Yes,” Thuan said, startled. This wasn’t where he’d wanted the conversation to go. The immediate threat of the thorn children had receded, but Sare’s grilling almost made him regret the creepy escort. “But not the only colonials. And I didn’t vanish.”

“No,” Sare said. “But perhaps you’re stronger than her.”

Thuan snorted. “No. If anything, I’m weaker than she is.” He hesitated, then said, “She’s been the one always looking out for me.”

“Like a mother?” Sare’s gaze was sharp.

Children of thorns. No. Thuan shook his head. “She wasn’t the only motherly figure in that crowd, was she? That’s a rather facile explanation.”

“That children want mothers? It seems to me rather natural,” Sare said, with the ease of someone who’d never actually have any children. All Fallen were sterile.

Mothers, perhaps not. He thought, again, of the bracelets on Kim Cuc’s arms, of the wealth of Fallen magic stored there, something most Houseless would never see. In Paris, the Houses had hoarded nearly all the magic, and the rare artefacts went on the black market for a fortune. But no, that couldn’t be it. Otherwise Sare and the other dependents would have been the first to vanish. “Why children? They can’t possibly be the only dependents the House has failed.”

He thought Sare was going to berate him, but instead she walked a little further down the corridor, and stared at the darkness in front of her. “You’re here, aren’t you?” she called, magic streaming out of her like light. “I can feel you.”

Again, that odd feeling in his feet, as if the floor itself were twisting and disgorging something; and two children, stepping out of the darkness to gaze levelly back at her. Their arms were branches woven together, their hands three-fingered, and their bodies merely frames on which hung flowers the colour of rot. And, in the gauntness of their faces, they had no eyes, just pinpoints of light.

“Stay,” the one on the left said.

“Where is she?” Sare asked. The light that came out of her was subdued, but Thuan could still feel the power; could still feel it pushing against the children, compelling them to answer.

She might as well have been pushing on thin air.

“Where we all go,” the rightmost one said. “Into darkness, into earth.”

Thuan opened his mouth to ask why they’d taken her, and then closed it, because it wasn’t what mattered.

“Show me,” Sare said.

A slow ponderous nod from both of them, perfectly synchronised, and two hands extending towards her.

“Sare, wait—”

But she was already moving—before Thuan could grab her away, or even finish his warning—extending both arms to clasp them.

There was a sound like cloth ripping, and then only shadows, extending to cover the corridor where Sare had been.

Thuan gave up, and used all the colourful curses Second Aunt forbade him to utter in her presence. It seemed more than appropriate.

He didn’t know how long he remained there, staring at the darkness, which stubbornly refused to coalesce again into anything meaningful. But, gradually, some order swam out of the morass of his thoughts, a sense that he had to do something rather than succumb to despair. He was—no matter how utterly laughably inappropriate this might seem—their best chance at a rescue.

Where we all go.

Into darkness, into earth.

Sare was right: there were other wings with a spring, and a water room. But this was also the wing where the House received the Houseless. Which meant the expendable one. And—if he was to hazard a guess—the one least protected by the wards.

And Asmodeus, the head of the House and its major protector, was shut in his rooms, grieving and not paying attention to what was going on within the House. An opening, for something that had lain in wait for years? An attempt to seize a weak and unprotected part of the House, or to weaken Hawthorn?

Demons take them all. He didn’t want to help the House, didn’t want to involve himself in its politics. But, if he didn’t, Kim Cuc wouldn’t come back.

Thuan closed his eyes, and sought out the spring again. It was muzzled, bound by layer after layer of Fallen magic—wards that would singe him, if he so much as thought of touching them. It flowed, steadily, into the House, giving it everything it had, the diseased, polluted waters of the Parisian underground, sewage no one would have thought of drinking before the war and its devastation.

The House will fail you as it failed its children.

The only thing Thuan wanted the House to do for him was to forget he existed, and not look too closely. He hardly expected any protection, or wanted to pledge it any allegiance. Not that Second Aunt would let him, mind you. She’d carve out chunks of his hide before she allowed this to happen.

A comforting thought: there were things scarier than unknown children of thorns with shadowy agendas.

Thuan walked downwards, towards the spring.

There were two children waiting for him outside the corrugated doors of the water room. They didn’t appear, or fade: they were just there, like guards standing at attention. By their size, the human children they were mimicking couldn’t have been more than five or six.

“What are you?” he asked, again.

He hadn’t expected an answer, but they both bowed to him, perfectly synchronised. “The Court,” they said.

“The Court.” Thuan’s voice was flat.

“The Court of Birth.”

Thuan was abysmal at a number of things, but his memory for details was excellent, and he’d been briefed on the history of the House before being sent there. Before he became head of the House, Asmodeus had been leader of the Court of Birth.

Children. The Court of Birth was in charge of the education of children and young Fallen. In charge of their protection. “There is a Court of Birth,” he said, slowly. “In the House.” Not here, in this deserted wing filled with thorns and shadows.

There was no answer. Thuan grabbed the doors, and pushed.

He didn’t know what he’d expected. It was a low room with several rusted pumps, their steady hum a background to his own breath. The air was saturated with humidity, the tiles on the walls broken in numerous places—repaired so many times they looked like jigsaws, with yellowed grouting running at odd angles through the painted windmills and horse-drawn carts.

In a corner of the room, Sare was fighting children of thorns—small, agile shapes who dodged, effortlessly, the spells she threw at them. The pipes lit up with magic, showing, at intervals, the flow of water going upwards through the pumps.

And, in the centre of the room . . .

Thuan walked faster, his heart in his throat.

It was an empty octagonal basin of water, the khi currents within it all but extinguished, except where Kim Cuc was. She wasn’t looking at him, but kneeling, her hands flat on old, cracked mosaics. The khi water within her, the currents running in her veins and major organs, was slowly spreading to cover the entire surface of the mosaics. Her green bracelets were fused to the floor, the light from them spreading across the mosaics. She—

She was taking root in the basin.

This wasn’t good.

“Big sis—” Thuan started. He didn’t get to finish his sentence, because someone else spoke up first.

“So you’re her friend.”

Thuan turned around, sharply, hands full of khi water—or rather, they would have been, if all the water within the room hadn’t been either extinguished or claimed. There was nothing in his palms but a faint, pathetic tug, as if he held a dog on a distant leash.

The being of thorn who stood in front of him was tall; taller than Thuan, and rake-thin. When it bowed, the gesture wasn’t like that of the others, smooth and synchronised and in no way human. This was elegant and slow, with a hint of mockery, as if the being couldn’t quite disguise amusement. It reminded Thuan of . . .

In fact, it reminded Thuan of nothing so much as Sare’s demeanour. “You don’t have wings,” he said—a stab in the dark, but given where he was it could hardly get worse.

“No.” The being straightened from its bow, stared at Thuan. The face wasn’t just branches arranged to have eyes and nose. This was someone’s face, carefully sculpted in wood and thorns: plump cheeks, and a round shape, someone who must have been pleasantly baby-faced and young, except that now not a single muscle moved as it spoke, and the eyes were nothing but pits of darkness, like the orbits of a skull. “We don’t keep them, when we Fall. As you well know.”

“I don’t know,” Thuan said. He pulled on khi water, and found barely anything that would answer him. Not good at all. “You were alive once, weren’t you?”

The being cocked his head, watching him like a curiosity. “You ask the wrong questions,” it said, at last.

“Fine,” Thuan said, exhaling. “Then why are we here? Because the House failed you?”

He thought the other was going to make him some mocking answer about following his friend in harm’s way, but it merely shook its head. “The House didn’t fail me.”

“You make no sense.” Thuan said.

The being was still watching him. It made no move to seize or stop him. “She was willing.”

Thuan took in a deep, burning breath. Willing to do what, and what questions had it asked, before binding Kim Cuc to the basin’s floor? Words had power here, which was good, because they seemed to be all he had to bargain with.

He hesitated—every instinct he had telling him not to do such a stupid thing—but then turned his back on the being, to look at the basin. Kim Cuc’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow, even. “Big sis. Big sis.”

He wanted to shake her, but he wasn’t a complete idiot. She’d put her hands in the basin, on the mosaics, and it had seized her. She didn’t need Thuan caught in the spell, either.

She shouldn’t have needed Thuan at all, demons take her. She should have been in charge; fighting, like Sare, trying to figure out the riddle that had Thuan stumped.

“We asked her to help,” the being said, behind him. He’d still made no move to take Thuan. And though Sare was fighting, she wasn’t harmed, either.

Magic. Fallen magic. That was why they seemed summarily uninterested in Thuan, or in any of the other Houseless: Thuan’s magic was invisible to them. But they hadn’t taken Sare, or the other House dependents. He’d thought it was something dark, something the House couldn’t keep at bay, but . . .

But when Sare had pushed against the children of thorns, Thuan had seen nothing, in the khi currents.

And none of the House dependents had seen them, or been threatened by them.

He breathed in, slowly. It was as if they were part of the House, weren’t they. Ghosts or spirits or constructs that hadn’t been made by any magicians. And they hadn’t taken Sare or the other House dependents, because theirs was a power already bound to the House. As Kim Cuc wasn’t.

“You’re the House,” he said.

“A small part of it.” Its smile would have been dazzling, if it hadn’t been made of branches and twigs.

“Willing. You asked her if she wanted to be part of the House,” Thuan said, slowly. “That’s why she’s here.”

The voice that answered him was mocking. “Was there any need to ask? She was there, taking the tests.”

In order to enter the House, not to become subsumed within its foundations. But he doubted the being would know, or care about the difference. “She’s not House,” he said, carefully. A glance upwards: Sare had dispatched one of the two children, but it was already reforming.

What did he have, to bargain with? Not the kingdom: even if he’d been willing to expose and sell it, it’d have no value to a House of Fallen and magicians. Not his magic, for the same reasons. Sare, possibly, but how did you bargain with something the other already owned? “You don’t need her,” he said, slowly.

“In ordinary circumstances, no.”

“Because Asmodeus is grieving for Samariel? All grief passes, in time.”

“The grief of Fallen?” The being’s voice was mocking again. “That could last an eternity.” Thuan found a word—a name—on the tip of his tongue, forced himself not to utter it. The being wasn’t Samariel any more than any of the children of thorns had been flesh and bones, or real children. They were all just masks the House wore as a convenience. “And meanwhile, our protections weaken.”

“He’s head of the House,” Thuan said. “He won’t leave you undefended.”

It was going nowhere. He couldn’t negotiate from a position of weakness, and he couldn’t share his only strengths for fear of being caught out. “If you start taking people, they’ll tear the wing apart stone by stone.”

“Would they? They’re Houseless,” the being said. “Not likely to be much missed, in the scheme of things.”

Spoken as only a House-bound could.

“What you take, they could give freely.”

A low, rumbling noise mingling with that from the pumps. Thuan realised it was laughter. “No one ever gives freely. There’s always an expectation of being paid, in one currency or another.”

“You’re . . .” Thuan fought a rising sense of frustration. “You’re the House. All you do is take!” He pointed to Sare, flowing in and out of combat with unearthly grace, her pale skin lit up with the radiance of magic, the white shape of bones delineated under her taut skin. “Do you think she’d be as useful, if you shut her in the foundations of the wing?”

A silence, then, “One day, when she’s spent almost all the magic she was given when she Fell, that might be her only use.” A low, amused chuckle. “But this isn’t how dependents are rewarded.”

He’d had lessons of diplomacy in the dragon kingdom. He should have paid more attention to them, instead of trying to come up with plans to impress his cousins. He . . . he’d always thought Kim Cuc would be there, and of course she was the one in need of rescue, and he couldn’t come up with a single idea that would make sense. He couldn’t fight off a House, or even a part of a House, all by himself—and especially not with both hands tied down, and no access to his magic lest he reveal himself.

No.

He was looking at it from the wrong way around. Because fighting or threatening wasn’t what he needed to do, if he wanted to use his magic. He needed . . . a distraction.

Which meant Sare.

He didn’t trust Sare. He couldn’t even be sure she was going to follow his lead: for all he knew, she’d be happy to leave Kim Cuc there forever, if it was for the good of the House.

But.

But she’d come back for both of them, and it was the only chance he’d get. “You don’t want Kim Cuc,” Thuan said, slowly. There wasn’t much khi water in the room, but he could gather it to him, slowly and methodically. He could fashion it into razor-thin blades, held within his palms. “You want Asmodeus.”

A silence. “You’re Houseless. You can’t possibly promise me anything that involves him.”

No, and neither would Thuan ever consider getting involved with the head of House Hawthorn. The last thing he needed was attention from that quarter. But it didn’t matter, because all he needed to do was lie smoothly enough.

“I’m not House. But she is.” He pointed to Sare but finished his gesture with a wide flourish, which enabled him to throw the blades of khi water in his hands towards Kim Cuc’s wrists. They connected with an audible crunch.

Water was stillness and decay and death. Thuan breathed in, slowly, moving his fingers as though he were playing the zither, weaving the pattern Kim Cuc had shown him earlier. The blades slowly moved in response, digging into the green stone, their edges turning it to dust, a thin, spreading line across its surface—so agonisingly slowly it was all he could do to breathe. “Ask her,” he said.

A silence, broken only by the slurping sound of the pumps. Then the being moving as gracefully as water flowing down, and the two children facing Sare vanished. She turned to Thuan, snarling, her face no longer in the semblance of anything human; and then saw the being of thorns, and sucked in a deep, audible breath.

Her mouth opened, closed. “It’s a bit of the House,” Thuan said, quickly. “Not . . .”

Sare’s face was unreadable again. “Is it?” She bowed, very low. “Tell me,” she said to Thuan.

Thuan gathered thoughts from where they’d fled, and put as many of them as he dared into words. “It wants Lord Asmodeus.”

Sare’s gaze moved to the basin, and then back to Thuan. “And, failing that, it will take the Houseless?” She showed no emotion. But then why would she have cared about Kim Cuc? Thuan waited for her to speak, to tell the being it was welcome to Kim Cuc and whatever else it saw fit to take. But Sare didn’t say anything.

“We need to be strong,” the being said. Thuan watched Kim Cuc’s bracelets; watched the thin line that was spreading across the stone, a widening crack. He would only get one chance to seize her and run, and he couldn’t even be sure that Sare would follow them. “Not distracted.”

“Distracted.” Sare’s face was hard again. “Grief is allowed.”

The being said nothing. Of course it wouldn’t understand.

Thuan shifted, moving closer to Kim Cuc, both arms outstretched to grab her.

“Lord Asmodeus isn’t available,” Sare said. “And we work on the principle that people are safe inside the House, regardless of whether they’re dependents or not.”

A hiss, from the being.

“Sare,” Thuan said.

She looked at him, startled, as if she’d forgotten he was there, or that he would speak.

“Be ready.”

The bracelets split with an audible crunch. Thuan reached out, lightning fast; grabbed Kim Cuc and pulled—she came light and unbearably fragile, a doll he could have snapped with a careless gesture—threw her over his shoulder, and ran.

He didn’t look back.

The spikes under his feet tensed, but didn’t surge—behind him, a blinding light, that filled the pump room until he could hardly see. He ran for the open doors, and the maze of corridors leading back to safety.

He’d expected to have to fight the children at the entrance, but they’d vanished in the wash of light. He could still see their silhouettes in the midst of the radiance, shock-still. Stunned, but recovering. He didn’t have much time.

Which way had he come? The corridors all looked alike, all with that same faded flower wallpaper, and the stains of blackened mould spreading from the carvings on the ceiling. The light behind him was dying down, the spikes at his feet quiescent. Waiting.

“You’re fast,” Sare commented, as she caught up to him.

“You—” Thuan was breathing hard. He’d slowed down to see where he was going. He expected, at any time, to see the spikes reforming, children of thorns waiting for them in the darkness.

“I hit him hard.” Sare sounded cheerful. “It was easier, knowing what I was dealing with.”

“You—” Thuan found a breath, finally. “You didn’t have to do this.” It was the House. It was the wards that kept all their dependents safe. She only had to look the other way.

Sare raised an eyebrow. “As I said, I’m responsible for the safety of the Houseless during those tests. And there are some choices that I won’t make. We’re not monsters, Thuan.”

Thuan clamped his mouth on the obvious response. “The Court of Birth,” he said, instead.

“This way,” Sare said, pointing to a corridor that seemed like the others, cracked parquet and faded wallpaper with an alignment of the same doors, all painted with stylised flowers. And, in the growing silence, “Children died, because Lord Uphir wouldn’t protect them. Before Lord Asmodeus took the House from him. It remembers.”

And Asmodeus protected children? Thuan didn’t voice this question, either, but Sare answered it regardless.

“The House keeps faith with its own. Lord Asmodeus understands this,” Sare said.

“Fine,” Thuan said. He wasn’t about to argue with her. “Any plans?”

“Yes.” For someone who’d been through Hell and back, Sare was still inordinately cheerful. “My turn. Be ready to run. It’s straight ahead, and left at the first intersection, the one with the two chairs and the pedestal table with the Chinese vase.”

“I don’t understand—” Thuan started, but she was looking past him, at what was coming up.

He turned, slightly—Kim Cuc a growing dead weight on his shoulder—and saw the maw of darkness, rising from the bottom of the wing—flowing like ink, like polluted oil, glittering with the shadows of thorns.

They couldn’t possibly outrun this.

By his side, Sare was leaning against a wall—the light coming out of her pale and weakened, the artefact around her neck open, with no hint of magic left within. The shadows flowed around her, not touching her—House, she was still House, and it didn’t care for her, didn’t want to hurt her, just in case she turned out to be useful one day. Under Thuan, the floor seemed to have become broken glass. And, as the shadows came forward and extinguished the light, they pooled—becoming the shape of children, the shape of a Fallen.

They didn’t speak, anymore: just a thin thread of sound that might have been the creaks of floorboards, the trickle of water. Stay. Stay.

Thuan backed away, until he stood in the centre of the corridor, with threads of magic stretching, trying to bind him to the floor, to make him part of the House as they’d tried to do with Kim Cuc. He could barely hold on to his human shape. Any moment now, he was going to lose it, and Sare was going to see antlers sprouting from his temples, scales scattered across his cheeks.

Stay. Stay.

Never.

“I told you.” Sare’s voice was conversational, her face utterly emotionless, as if she was merely shepherding Houseless through tests. “We guaranteed their safety. It’s not an idle promise.”

The being that looked like Samariel was stretching past her already, making for Thuan. Sare was leaning against the wall, winded and exhausted; but her gaze found Thuan’s, held it.

Be ready to run.

There was no blinding light, no rising magic. Instead, the floor under Thuan changed—as if someone had smoothed out the broken glass, stroked raised spines until they lay flat again. The threads under his feet snapped.

He ran.

The darkness would follow him, but he couldn’t do anything about that. His lungs were burning, his legs trembling. Kim Cuc wasn’t heavy, but he couldn’t keep carrying her forever. She kept sliding off his shoulder, head lolling against his chest.

Turn left at the next intersection. Two chairs, a pedestal table with one of those horrible Chinese porcelain vases on it. He almost tripped over one of the chairs, had to force himself to change course, calves burning.

On either side of him, the wallpapers were turning black again, the painted flowers and birds merging with the growing shadows, and he could see the shape of children, pooling from the panelling like ink, thorns and branches and a House he couldn’t fight, a power that was slowly choking the dragon kingdom.

Demons take them. Demons take them. He couldn’t possibly—

At the end of the corridor was the door to the garden, so close, so impossibly far. Whatever Sare had done was nothing more than a sop, a few moments’ safety gained. He was never going to make it. He was going to freeze there, within sight of the exit . . .

He’d started to shoulder off Kim Cuc’s weight, ready to stand over her and defend her—when the magic hit.

It came, not from behind him, but from the door. And it wasn’t harsh, blinding light, but something smoother and softer; the voices of children, laughing and teasing each other; an echo of a lullaby, sung over and over; a smell of fried onions and warm bread, and a hint of unfamiliar spices.

In front of Thuan, the being of thorns formed, stared at the light, empty eye-sockets shining in the darkness. Khi water pooled around its feet, circled its shape on the parquet. It didn’t move. It stood, entranced, as if listening, its head cocked.

Thuan would have run, but he had no energy left. Instead, he straightened out Kim Cuc on his shoulder, and hobbled towards the light.

An eternity of walking, with Kim Cuc growing heavier; and the spell—whatever it was—spreading around him, a warm embrace, a promise of small, ordinary things; of fire in the hearth, water and wine in crystal glasses, the smoothness of cotton sheets at the end of the day—never mind that the bed was mouldy and broken, the wine sour, the hearth cracked, it was still home.

But not his home. Never.

When Thuan stepped outside, the light blinded him for a moment. Then he saw the magician—Albane?—kneeling in the middle of a circle traced in the mud. Light streamed, highlighted the words she’d written, as fluid and as deliberate as a master’s calligraphy. Leila was kneeling by the side of the circle, both hands plunged deep into the earth, the light coming up to her wrists, making her swarthy skin seem pale and colourless.

Thuan kept walking—he wasn’t sure he could stop. His feet carried him down the stairs, by the side of the circle: Albane looked up at him and nodded once, grimly. Leila withdrew her hands from it and grabbed him. “Thuan!”

Thuan stopped, at a loss for words. He laid Kim Cuc on the grass, blinking once, twice, as he knelt by her side, looking for a pulse—feeling it, slow and strong. “Come on, come on,” he muttered.

“She’s alive,” Sare said.

She must have come out of the wing straight in his wake, but he hadn’t heard her. Everything felt . . . unbearably real, unbearably distant, and he couldn’t seem to process thoughts. Magic flowed from Sare into Kim Cuc. She convulsed, the bruises on her wrists becoming darker. “You—” Thuan said, struggling to speak.

Kim Cuc’s eyes opened. “Thuan? What—what happened?”

“It’s all right. You’re safe.” He could have wept.

“I would advise you not to bring Fallen magic into the House,” Sare said. Her face was smooth once again, emotionless. “Not unless you’re strong enough to use it.”

Thuan looked up. The wing was quiescent once again, the thorns a fading smear of darkness against the door handles. “Sare—”

She wasn’t listening to him: she’d moved, coming to meet an older woman with the same kind of smooth face, wearing a doctor’s white gown over the colours of the House. “Iaris.”

Iaris nodded. “Apologies for the delay. I needed to figure out how to keep this contained.”

“And—?”

“A slip-up,” Iaris said. “My mistake. We hadn’t checked the wards on this wing for a while. It won’t happen again. I’ve set magicians to reinforcing them. We can’t have the House seeking out magic to maintain itself.”

As if they’d care.

“I saw.” Sare closed her eyes. “I saw him. Samariel.”

Iaris’s face tightened. “Samariel is dead. You’d do well to remember this. And whatever you saw is dormant now. Contained, and it will remain so for centuries, God willing.”

“Let’s hope so,” Sare said.

“You all right?” Leila asked Thuan.

Thuan still held Kim Cuc’s hand. She’d fallen back into unconsciousness, looking older than she should, weak and vulnerable and fragile. Any time now, she was going to open her eyes, and make some flippant, sarcastic remark. Any time.

But she didn’t.

“I’m not sure,” he said, finally, to Leila. “I didn’t know you could use magic.”

“You learn things, in the gangs.” Leila squeezed his hand, briefly. “Besides . . . we’re a team.”

Thuan stifled a bitter laugh. “For the tests? I don’t think these turned out very well.”

“Oh, I don’t know. The éclairs tasted nice, even though they were a bit wet in the middle. I gave mine to Sare, before she entered the wing.”

“You—” Sare hadn’t mentioned this, but why would she? “What did she say?” He didn’t even know what it’d have tasted like, half-made and with the pastry filling falling out of it.

“Nothing,” Leila said. She shrugged. “I know it looked horrible, but we might as well not waste our work.” Her face grew serious again. “This isn’t about tests.”

He stared at her, for a while; thinking of the streets and how lonely they could be. “We are a team,” he said. “Thank you.” He couldn’t give her everything that he wanted, but friendship? The dragon kingdom would surely let him spare that.

Except, of course, that he wouldn’t be able to tell her the truth about who he was, or Kim Cuc would box his ears out. Some friend.

One problem at a time.

Beside them, Iaris and Sare were still talking. “The Court of Birth.” Iaris snorted. “As if that’d have impressed Lord Asmodeus.”

Sare didn’t answer. She was opening and closing the clasp of her pendant. “It might have. Dredging up the past.”

“We’re looking to the future,” Iaris said. “He has plans, believe me.” Her gaze rested, for a moment, on Thuan, moved away. “The mourning period is over.”

“I see.” Sare closed the pendant with an audible click. “Plans. That will be good.”

Plans. Thuan’s ears prickled. But neither Iaris nor Sare appeared ready to discuss further. Of course. Not in front of outsiders.

“Do you want to debrief them, or shall I?” Sare said.

“You can do it,” Iaris said. “Report to me afterwards, will you?”

“Yes,” Sare said. “I will.” Thuan held Kim Cuc’s hand, and said nothing. Sare hadn’t seen anything. He’d barely used any magic, and he’d smooth it over. He’d have been worried in other circumstances: but if she wanted him dead, he’d already be.

“And once the wing is shored up, we’ll have to reschedule the tests.” Iaris sounded annoyed.

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Sare turned, briefly, to look at them. “I know exactly who passed.”

Iaris raised an eyebrow. “That’s . . . unusual.”

“You have objections?”

“None. It’s your own business, Sare.”

“My responsibility. Yes, I know.”

“So these three?”

Sare shook her head. “Two.”

Two. Leila and him. Thuan looked at Kim Cuc. “Sare—” he said.

“I told you,” Sare said. “Resourcefulness. And strength. I appreciate your loyalty to your friend, but—”

But, from Sare’s point of view, she’d been nothing but trouble.

He needed Kim Cuc. He couldn’t possibly take on the House by himself, couldn’t make it far without her support. He needed her jokes at his expense, her reminders of his failures in bed and elsewhere—and, more importantly, he needed to not be alone in Hawthorn. Leila, for all that he liked her, wasn’t from the kingdom, and could never fill that role.

He . . .

He’d gone through this all, without her help—and now he’d have to do much, much more. The breath in his lungs burnt, as bitter as ashes and smoke. “I see,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Good,” Sare said, briskly. “Welcome to the House, Thuan.” She smiled mirthlessly. “I’m assigning you to the kitchens to start with. Your pastries were too soggy, but not that bad, considering. Never fear, you’ll have plenty of classes to learn better cooking skills.”

Thuan forced a smile he didn’t feel. He remembered darkness flowing to fill his entire world, that feeling he would never escape the corridors.

“I’m glad I passed,” he said, smoothly, slowly. He stared, in silence, at the looming shape of the House before him, at the fading imprint of thorns on the handles, and wondered how many secrets it still held—how many things waiting to bite and grasp, and never let go.

WIND WILL ROVE

Sarah Pinsker

There’s a story about my grandmother Windy, one I never asked her to confirm or deny, in which she took her fiddle on a spacewalk. There are a lot of stories about her. Fewer of my parents’ generation, fewer still of my own, though we’re in our fifties now and old enough that if there were stories to tell they would probably have been told.

My grandmother was an engineer, part of our original crew. According to the tale, she stepped outside to do a visual inspection of an external panel that was giving anomalous readings. Along with her tools, she clipped her fiddle and bow to her suit’s belt. When she completed her task, she paused for a moment, tethered to our ship the size of a city, put her fiddle to the place where her helmet met her suit, and played “Wind Will Rove” into the void. Not to be heard, of course; just to feel the song in her fingers.

There are a number of things wrong with this story, starting with the fact that we don’t do spacewalks, for reasons that involve laws of physics I learned in school and don’t remember anymore. Our shields are too thick, our velocity is too great, something like that. The Blackout didn’t touch ship records; crew transcripts and recordings still exist, and I’ve listened to all the ones that might pertain to this legend. She laughs her deep laugh, she teases a tired colleague about his date the night before, she even hums “Wind Will Rove” to herself as she works—but there are no gaps, no silences unexplained.

Even if it were possible, her gloves would have been too thick to find a fingering. I doubt my grandmother would’ve risked losing her instrument, out here where any replacement would be synthetic. I doubt, too, that she’d have exposed it to the cold of space. Fiddles are comfortable at the same temperatures people are comfortable; they crack and warp when they aren’t happy. Her fiddle, my fiddle now.

My final evidence: “Wind Will Rove” is traditionally played in DDAD tuning, with the first and fourth strings dropped down. As much as she loved that song, she didn’t play it often, since re-tuning can make strings wear out faster. If she had risked her fiddle, if she had managed to press her fingers to its fingerboard, to lift her bow, to play, she wouldn’t have played a DDAD tune. This is as incontrovertible as the temperature of the void.

And yet the story is passed on among the ship’s fiddlers (and I pass it on again as I write this narrative for you, Teyla, or whoever else discovers it). And yet her nickname, Windy, first appears in transcripts starting in the fifth year on board. Before that, people called her Beth, or Green.

She loved the song, I know that much. She sang it to me as a lullaby. At twelve, I taught it to myself in traditional GDAE tuning. I took pride in the adaptation, pride in the hours I spent getting it right. I played it for her on her birthday.

She pulled me to her, kissed my head. She always smelled like the lilacs in the greenhouse. She said, “Rosie, I’m so tickled that you’d do that for me, and you played it note perfectly, which is a gift to me in itself. But ‘Wind Will Rove’ is a DDAD tune, and it ought to be played that way. You play it in another tuning, it’s a different wind that blows.”

I’d never contemplated how there might be a difference between winds. I’d never felt one myself, unless you counted air pushed through vents, or the fan on a treadmill. After the birthday party, I looked up “wind” and read about breezes and gales and siroccos, about haboobs and zephyrs. Great words, words to turn over in my mouth, words that spoke to nothing in my experience.

The next time I heard the song in its proper tuning, I closed my eyes and listened for the wind.

“Windy Grove”

Traditional. Believed to have traveled from Scotland to Cape Breton in the nineteenth century. Lost.

“Wind Will Rove”

Instrumental in D (alternate tuning DDAD).

Harriet Barrie, Music Historian:

The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver, came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974. Charley was trying to remember a traditional tune he had heard as a boy in Nova Scotia, believed to be “Windy Grove.” No recordings of the original “Windy Grove” were ever catalogued, on ship or on Earth.

“Wind Will Rove” is treated as traditional in most circles, even though it’s relatively recent, because it is the lost tune’s closest known relative.

The Four Deck Rec has the best acoustics of any room on the ship. There’s a nearly identical space on every deck, but the others don’t sound as good. The Recs were designed for gatherings, but no acoustic engineer was ever consulted, and there’s nobody on board with that specialty now. The fact that one room might sound good and another less so wasn’t important in the grander scheme. It should have been.

In the practical, the day to day, it matters. It matters to us. Choirs perform there, and bands. It serves on various days and nights as home to a Unitarian church, a Capoeira hoda, a Reconstructionist synagogue, a mosque, a Quaker meetinghouse, a half dozen different African dance groups, and a Shakespearean theater, everyone clinging on to whatever they hope to save. The room is scheduled for weeks and months and years to come, though weeks and months and years are all arbitrary designations this far from Earth.

On Thursday nights, Four Deck Rec hosts the OldTime, thanks to my grandmother’s early pressure on the Recreation Committee. There are only a few of us on board who know what OldTime refers to, since everything is old time, strictly speaking. Everyone else has accepted a new meaning, since they have never known any other.

An OldTime is a Thursday night, is a hall with good acoustics, is a gathering of fiddlers and guitarists and mandolinists and banjo players. It has a verb form now. “Are you OldTiming this week?” If you are a person who would ask that question, or a person expected to respond, the answer is yes. You wouldn’t miss it.

On this particular Thursday night, while I wouldn’t miss it, my tenth graders had me running late. We’d been discussing the twentieth and twenty-first century space races and the conversation had veered into dangerous territory. I’d spent half an hour trying to explain to them why Earth history still mattered. This had happened at least once a cycle with every class I’d ever taught, but these particular students were as fired up as any I remembered.

“I’m never going to go there, right, Ms. Clay?” Nelson Odell had asked. This class had only been with me for two weeks, but I’d known Nelson his entire life. His greatgrandmother, my friend Harriet, had dragged him to the OldTime until he was old enough to refuse. He’d played mandolin, his stubby fingers well fit to the tiny neck, face set in a permanently resentful expression.

“No,” I said. “This is a one way trip. You know that.”

“And really I’m just going to grow up and die on this ship, right? And all of us? You too? Die, not grow up. You’re already old.”

I had heard this from enough students. I didn’t even wince anymore. “Yes to all of the above, though it’s a reductive line of thinking and that last bit was rude.”

“Then what does it matter that back on Earth a bunch of people wanted what another group had? Wouldn’t it be better not to teach us how people did those things and get bad ideas in our heads?”

Emily Redhorse, beside Nelson, said, “They make us learn it all so we can understand why we got on the ship.” She was the only current OldTime player in this class, a promising fiddler. OldTime players usually understood the value of history from a young age.

Nelson waved her off. “‘We’ didn’t get on the ship. Our grandparents and great- grandparents did. And here we are learning things that were old to them.”

“Because, stupid.” That was Trina Nguyen.

I interrupted. “Debate is fine, Trina. Name-calling is not.”

“Because, Nelson.” She tried again. “There aren’t new things in history. That’s why it’s called history.”

Nelson folded his arms and stared straight at me. “Then don’t teach it at all. If it mattered so much, why did they leave it behind? Give us another hour to learn more genetics or ship maintenance or farming. Things we can actually use.”

“First of all, history isn’t static. People discovered artifacts and primary documents all the time that changed their views on who we were. It’s true that the moment we left Earth we gave up the chance to learn anything new about it from newly discovered primary sources, but we can still find fresh perspectives on the old information.” I tried to regain control, hoping that none of them countered with the Blackout. Students of this generation rarely did; to them it was just an incident in Shipboard History, not the living specter it had been when I was their age.

I continued. “Secondly, Emily is right. It’s important to know why and how we got here. The conventional wisdom remains that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”

“How are we supposed to repeat it?” Nelson waved at the pictures on the walls. “We don’t have countries or oil or water. Or guns or swords or bombs. If teachers hadn’t told us about them we wouldn’t even know they existed. We’d be better off not knowing that my ancestors tried to kill Emily’s ancestors, wouldn’t we? Somebody even tried to erase all of that entirely, and you made sure it was still included in the new version of history.”

“Not me, Nelson. That was before my time.” I knew I shouldn’t let them get a rise out of me, but I was tired and hungry, not the ideal way to start a seven hour music marathon. “Enough. I get what you’re saying, but not learning this is not an option. Send me a thousand words by Tuesday on an example of history repeating itself.”

Before anyone protested, I added, “You were going to have an essay to write either way. All I’ve done is changed the topic. It doesn’t sound like you wanted to write about space races.”

They all grumbled as they plugged themselves back into their games and music and shuffled out the door. I watched them go, wishing I’d handled the moment differently, but not yet sure how. It fascinated me that Nelson was the one fomenting this small rebellion, when his great-grandmother ran the OldTime Memory Project. My grandmother was the reason I obsessed over history, why I’d chosen teaching; Harriet didn’t seem to have had the same effect on Nelson.

As Nelson passed my desk, he muttered, “Maybe somebody needs to erase it all again.”

“Stop,” I told him.

He turned back to face me. I still had several inches on him, but he held himself as if he were taller. The rest of the students flowed out around him. Trina rammed her wheelchair into Nelson’s leg as she passed, in a move that looked 100 percent deliberate. She didn’t even pretend to apologize.

“I don’t mind argument in my classroom, but don’t ever let anyone hear you advocating another Blackout.”

He didn’t look impressed. “I’m not advocating. I just think teaching us Earth history—especially broken history—is a waste of everybody’s time.”

“Maybe someday you’ll get on the Education Committee, and you can argue for that change. But I heard you say ‘erase it all again.’ That isn’t the same thing. Would you say that in front of Harriet?”

“Maybe I was just exaggerating. It’s not even possible to erase everything anymore. And there’s plenty of stuff I like that I wouldn’t want to see erased.” He shrugged. “I didn’t mean it. Can I go now?”

He left without waiting for me to dismiss him.

I looked at the walls I’d carefully curated for this class. Tenth grade had always been the year we taught our journey’s political and scientific antecedents. It was one of the easier courses for the Education Committee to recreate accurately after the Blackout, since some of it had still been in living memory at the time, and one of the easier classrooms to decorate for the same reason. I’d enlarged images of our ship’s construction from my grandmother’s personal collection, alongside reproductions of news headlines. Around the top of the room, a static quote from United Nations Secretary-General Confidence Swaray: “We have two missions now: to better the Earth and to better ourselves.”

Normally I’d wipe my classroom walls to neutral for the continuing education group that met there in the evening, but this time I left the wall displays on when I turned off the lights to leave. Maybe we’d all failed these children already if they thought the past was irrelevant.

The digital art on the street outside my classroom had changed during the day. I traced my fingertips along the wall to get the info: a reimagining of a memory of a photo of an Abdoulaye Konate mural, sponsored by the Malian Memory Project. According to the description, the original had been a European transit station mosaic, though they no longer knew which city or country had commissioned it. Fish swam across a faux-tiled sea. Three odd blue figures stood tall at the far end, bird-like humanoids. The colors were soothing to me, but the figures less so. How like the original was it? No way to tell. Another reinvention to keep some version of our past present in our lives.

I headed back to my quarters for my instrument and a quick dinner. There was always food at the OldTime, but I knew from experience that if I picked up my fiddle I wouldn’t stop playing until my fingers begged. My fingers and my stomach often had different agendas. I needed a few minutes to cool down after that class, too. Nelson had riled me with his talk of broken history. To me that had always made preserving it even more important, but I understood the point he was trying to make.

By the time I got to the Four Deck Rec, someone had already taken my usual seat. I tuned in the corner where everyone had stashed their cases, then looked around to get the lay of the room. The best fiddlers had nabbed the middle seats, with spokes of mandolin and banjo and guitar and less confident fiddlers radiating out. The only proficient OldTime bass player, Doug Kelly, stood near the center, with the ship’s only upright bass. A couple of his students sat behind him, ready to swap out for a tune or two if he wanted a break.

The remaining empty seats were all next to banjos. I spotted a chair beside Dana Torres from the ship’s Advisory Council. She was a good administrator and an adequate banjo player—she kept time, anyway. I didn’t think she’d show up if she were less than adequate; nobody wants to see leadership failing at anything.

She had taken a place two rings removed from my usual seat in the second fiddle tier. Not the innermost circle, where my grandmother had sat, with the players who call the tunes and call the stops; at fifty-five years old, I hadn’t earned a spot there yet. Still, I sat just outside them and kept up with them, and it’d been a long time since I’d caught a frown from the leaders.

A tune started as I made my way to the empty chair. “Honeysuckle.” A thought crossed my mind that Harriet had started “Honeysuckle” without me, one of my Memory Project tunes, to punish me for being late. A second thought crossed my mind, mostly because of the conversation with my students, that probably only three other people in the room knew or cared what honeysuckle was: Tom Mvovo, who maintained the seed bank; Liat Shuster, who worked in the greenhouse—in all our nights together, I never thought to ask her about the honeysuckle plant; Harriet Barrie, music historian, last OldTime player of the generation that had left Earth. To everyone else, it was simply the song’s name. A name that meant this song, nothing more.

When I started thinking that way, all the songs took on a strange flat quality in my head. So many talked about meadows and flowers and roads and birds. The love songs maintained relevance, but the rest might as well have been written in other languages as far as most people were concerned. Or about nothing at all. Mostly, we let the fiddles do the singing.

No matter how many times we play a song, it’s never the same song twice. The melody stays the same, the key, the rhythm. The notes’ pattern, their cadence. Still, there are differences. The exact number of fiddles changes. Various players’ positions within the group, each with their own fiddle’s timbral variances. The locations of the bass, the mandolins, the guitars, the banjos, all in relation to each individual player’s ears. To a listener by the snack table, or to someone seeking out a recording after the fact, the nuances change. In the minutes the song exists, it is fully its own. That’s how it feels to me, anyway.

Harriet stomped her foot to indicate we’d reached the last go-round for “Honeysuckle,” and we all came to an end together except one of the outer guitarists, who hadn’t seen the signal and kept chugging on the last chord. He shrugged off the glares.

“Oklahoma Rooster,” she shouted, to murmurs of approval. She started the tune, and the other fiddles picked up the melody. I put my bow to the strings and closed my eyes. I pictured a real farm, the way they looked in pictures, and let the song tell me how it felt to be in the place called Oklahoma. A sky as big as space, the color of chlorinated water. The sun a distant disk, bright and cold. A wood-paneled square building, with a round building beside it. A perfect carpet of green grass. Horses, large and sturdy, bleating at each other across the fields. All sung in the voice of a rooster, a bird that served as a wake-up alarm for the entire farm. Birds were the things with feathers, as the old saying went.

It was easy to let my mind wander into meadows and fields during songs I had played once a week nearly my whole life. Nelson must have gotten under my skin more than I thought: I found myself adding the weeks and months and years up. Fifty times a year, fifty years, more or less. Then the same songs again alone for practice, or in smaller groups on other nights.

The OldTime broke up at 0300, as it usually did. I rolled my head from side to side, cracking my neck. The music always carried me through the night, but the second it stopped, I started noticing the cramp of my fingers, the unevenness of my shoulders.

“What does ‘Oklahoma Rooster’ mean to you?” I asked Dana Torres as she shook out her knees.

“Sorry?”

“What do you think of when you play ‘Oklahoma Rooster’?”

Torres laughed. “I think C-C-G-C-C-C-G-C. Anything else and I fall behind the beat. Why, what do you think of?”

A bird, a farm, a meadow. “I don’t know. Sorry. Weird question.”

We packed our instruments and stepped into the street, dimmed to simulate night.

Back at my quarters, I knew I should sleep, but instead I sat at the table and called up the history database. “Wind Will Rove.”

Options appeared: “Play,” cross-referenced to the song database, with choices from several OldTime recordings we’d made over the years. “Sheet music,” painstakingly generated by my grandmother and her friends, tabbed for all of the appropriate instruments. “History.” I tapped the last icon and left it to play as I heated up water for soporific tea. I’d watched it hundreds of times.

A video would play on the table. A stern looking white woman in her thirties, black hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, bangs flat-cut across her forehead. She’d been so young then, the stress of the situation making her look older than her years.

“Harriet Barrie, Music Historian,” the first subtitle would say, then Harriet would appear and begin, “The fiddler Olivia Vandiver and her father, Charley Vandiver came up with this tune in the wee hours of a session in 1974….” Except when I returned, the table had gone blank. I went back to the main menu, but this time no options came up when I selected “Wind Will Rove.” I tried again, and this time the song didn’t exist.

I stared at the place where it should have been, between “Winder’s Slide” and “Wolf Creek.” Panic stirred deep in my gut, a panic handed down to me. Maybe I was tired and imagining things. It had been there a moment ago. It had always been there, my whole life. The new databases had backups of backups of backups, even if the recordings we called originals merely recreated what had been lost long ago. Glitches happened. It would be fixed in the morning.

Just in case, I dashed off a quick message to Tech. I drank my tea and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep well.

“Wind Will Rove”

Historical reenactment. Windy Green as Olivia Vandiver, Fiddler:

“We were in our ninth hour playing. It had been a really energetic session, and we were all starting to fade. Chatting more between songs so we could rest our fingers. I can’t remember how the subject came up, but my father brought up a tune called “Windy Grove.” Nobody else had ever heard of it, and he called us all ignorant Americans.

He launched into an A part that sounded something like “Spirits of the Morning,” but with a clever little lift where “Spirits” descends. My father did things with a fiddle the rest of us could never match, but we all followed as best we were able. The B part wasn’t anything like “Spirits,” and we all caught that pretty fast, but the next time the A part came round it was different again, so we all shut up and let him play. The third time through sounded pretty much like the second, so we figured he had remembered the tune, and we jumped in again. It went the same the fourth and fifth times through.

It wasn’t until we got up the next day that he admitted he had never quite remembered the tune he was trying to remember, which meant the thing we had played the night before was of his own creation. We cleaned it up, called it ‘Wind Will Rove,’ and recorded it for the third Vandiver Family LP.”

My grandmother was an astronaut. We are not astronauts. It’s a term that’s not useful in our vocabulary. Do the people back on Earth still use that word? Do they mention us at all? Are they still there?

When our families left they were called Journeyers. Ten thousand Journeyers off on the Incredible Journey, with the help of a genetic bank, a seed bank, an advisory council. A ship thirty years in the making, held together by a crew of trained professionals: astronauts and engineers and biologists and doctors and the like. Depending on which news outlet you followed, the Journeyers were a cult or a social experiment or pioneers. Those aren’t terms we use for ourselves, since we have no need to call ourselves anything in reference to any other group. When we do differentiate, it’s to refer to the Before. I don’t know if that makes us the During or the After.

My mother’s parents met in Texas, in the Before, while she was still in training. My grandfather liked being married to an astronaut when the trips were finite, but he refused to sign up for the Journey. He stayed behind on Earth with two other children, my aunt and uncle, both older than my mother. I imagine those family members sometimes. All those people I have no stories for. Generations of them.

It’s theoretically possible that scientists on Earth have built faster ships by now. It’s theoretically possible they’ve developed faster travel while we’ve been busy traveling. It’s theoretically possible they’ve built a better ship, that they’ve peopled it and sent it sailing past us, that they’ve figured out how to freeze and revive people, that those who stepped into the ship will be the ones who step out. That we will be greeted when we reach our destination by our own ancestors. I won’t be there, but my great-great-great- great-great-great-grandchildren might be. I wonder what stories they’ll tell each other.

This story is verifiable history. It begins, “There once was a man named Morne Brooks.” It’s used to scare children into doing their homework and paying attention in class. Nobody wants to be a cautionary tale.

There once was a man named Morne Brooks. In the fourth year on board, while performing a computer upgrade, he accidentally created a backdoor to the ship databases. Six years after that, an angry young programmer named Trevor Dube released a virus that ate several databases in their entirety. Destroyed the backups too. He didn’t touch the “important” systems—navigation, life support, medical, seed and gene banks—but he caused catastrophic damage to the libraries. Music gone. Literature, film, games, art, history: gone, gone, gone, gone. Virtual reality simulation banks, gone, along with the games and the trainings and the immersive recreations of places on Earth. He killed external communications too. We were alone, years earlier than we expected to be. Severed.

For some reason, it’s Brooks’ name attached to the disaster. Dube was locked up, but Brooks still walked around out in the community for people to point at and shame. Our slang term “brooked” came from his name. He spent years afterward listening to people say they had brooked exams and brooked relationships. I suppose it didn’t help that he had such a good name to lend. Old English, Dutch, German. A hard word for a lively stream of water. We have no use for it as a noun now; no brooks here. His shipmates still remembered brooks, though they’d never see one again. There was a verb form already, unrelated, but it had fallen from use. His contemporaries verbed him afresh.

It didn’t matter that for sixteen years afterward he worked on the team that shored up protection against future damage, or that he eventually committed suicide. Nobody wanted to talk about Dube or his motivations; all people ever mentioned was the moment the screens went dark, and Brooks’ part in the whole disaster when they traced it backward.

In fairness, I can’t imagine their panic. They were still the original Journeyers, the original crew, the original Advisory Council, save one or two changes. They were the ones who had made sure we had comprehensive databases, so we wouldn’t lose our history, and so they wouldn’t be without their favorite entertainments. The movies and serials and songs reminded them of homes they had left behind.

The media databases meant more to that first generation than I could possibly imagine. They came from all over the Earth, from disparate cultures; for some from smaller sub-groups, the databases were all that connected them with their people. It’s no wonder they reacted the way they did.

I do sometimes wonder what would be different now if things hadn’t gone wrong so early in the journey. Would we have naturally moved beyond the art we carried, instead of clinging to it as we do now? All we can do is live it out, but I do wonder.

I don’t teach on Fridays. I can’t bounce back from seven hours of fiddling, or from the near-all-nighter, the way I did at twenty or thirty or forty. Usually I sleep through Friday mornings. This time, I woke at ten, suddenly and completely, with the feeling something was missing. I glanced at the corner by the door to make sure I hadn’t left my fiddle at the Rec.

I showered, then logged on to the school server to see if any students had turned in early assignments—they hadn’t—then checked the notice system for anything that might affect my plans for the day. It highlighted a couple of streets I could easily avoid, and warned that the New Shakespeare and Chinese Cultural DBs were down for maintenance. Those alerts reminded me about the database crash the night before. My stomach lurched again as I called up “Wind Will Rove,” but it was there when I looked for it, right where it belonged.

The door chimed. Fridays I had lunch with Harriet. We called it lunch, even though we’d both be eating our first meal of the day. She didn’t get up early after the OldTime either. Usually I cut it pretty close, rolling out of bed and putting on clothes, knowing she’d done the same. I glanced around the room to make sure it was presentable. I’d piled some dirty clothes on the bed, but they were pretty well hidden behind the privacy screen. Good enough.

“You broke the deal, Rosie,” she said, eyeing my hair as I opened my door. “You showered.”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

She shrugged and slid into the chair I’d just been sitting in. She had a skullcap pulled over her own hair, dyed jet black. Harriet had thirty years on me, though she still looked wiry and spry. It had taken me decades to stop considering her my grandmother’s friend and realize she’d become mine as well. Now we occupied a place somewhere between mentorship and friendship. History teacher and music historian. Fiddle player and master fiddler.

I handed her a mug of mint tea and a bowl of congee, and a spoon. My dishware had been my grandmother’s, from Earth. Harriet always smiled when I handed her the chipped “Cape Breton Fiddlers Association” mug.

She held the cup up to her face for a moment, breathing in the minty steam. “Now tell me why you walked in late last night. I missed you in the second row. Kem Porter took your usual seat, and I had to listen to his sloppy bow technique all night.”

“Kem’s not so bad. He knows the tunes.”

“He knows the tunes, but he’s not ready for the second row. He was brooking rhythms all over the place. You should have called him out on it.”

“I wouldn’t!”

She cradled the mug in her hands and breathed in again. Liat and I hadn’t been a couple for years, but she still brought me real mint from the greenhouse, and I knew Harriet appreciated it. “I know. You’re too nice. There’s no shame in letting someone know his place. Next time I’ll do it.”

She would, too. She had taken over the OldTime enforcer job from my grandmother and lived up to her example. They’d both sent me back to the outer circles more than once before I graduated inward.

“I’ll tell you when you’re ready, Rosie,” my grandmother said. “You’ll get there.”

“You know Windy would have done it,” Harriet said, echoing my thoughts.

The nickname jogged my memory again. “‘Wind Will Rove’!” I said. “Something was wrong with the database last night. The song was missing.”

She pushed the cups to the side and tapped the table awake.

“Down for maintenance,” she read out loud, frowning. She looked up. “I don’t like that. I’ll go over to Tech myself and ask.”

She stood and left without saying goodbye.

Harriet had a way of saying things so definitively you couldn’t help agreeing. If she said you didn’t belong in the second row, you weren’t ready yet. If she said not to worry over the song issue, I would have been willing to believe her, even though it made me uneasy. Hopefully it was nothing, but her reaction was appropriate for anyone who’d lived through the Blackout. I hadn’t even gotten around to answering her first question, but I wasn’t really sure what I would have told her about Nelson in any case.

I went to pick up my grandchildren from daycare, as I always did on Friday afternoons, Natalie’s long day at the hospital. If anything could keep me out of my head, it was the mind-wiping exhaustion of chasing toddlers.

“Goats?” asked Teyla. She had just turned two, her brother Jonah four.

“Goats okay with you, too, buddy?” I asked Jonah.

He shrugged stoically. He didn’t really care for animals. Preferred games, but we’d played games the week before.

“Goats it is.”

The farm spread across the bottom deck, near the waste processing plant. We took two tubes to get there, Jonah turning on all the screens we passed, Teyla playing with my hair.

I always enjoyed stepping from the tube and into the farm’s relatively open spaces, as big as eight rec rooms combined. The air out here, pungent and rich, worked off a different circulator than on the living decks. It moved with slightly more force than on the rest of the ship, though still not a wind. Not even a breeze. The artificial sun wasn’t any different than on the other decks, but it felt more intense. The textures felt different too, softer, plants and fur, fewer touch screens. If I squinted I could imagine a real farm, ahead or behind us, on a real planet. Everything on every other deck had been designed to keep us healthy and sane; I always found it interesting to spend time in a place dedicated to keeping other animals alive.

The goats had been a contentious issue for the planners in my grandmother’s generation. Their detractors called them a waste of food and space and resources. Windy was among those who argued for them. They could supplement the synthetic milk and meat supplies. They’d provide veterinary training and animal husbandry skills that would be needed planetside someday, not to mention a living failsafe in case something happened to the gene banks. It would be good to have them aboard for psychological reasons as well, when people were leaving behind house pets like cats and dogs.

She won the debate, as she so often did, and they added a small population of female African Pygmy goats to the calculations. Even then there were dissenters. The arguments continued until the Blackout, then died abruptly along with the idea the journey might go as planned.

She told me all of that three weeks after my mother left, when I was still taking it personally.

“Have you ever tried to catch a goat?” she asked.

I hadn’t. I’d seen them, of course, but visitors were only supposed to pet them. She got permission, and I spent twenty minutes trying to catch an animal that had zero interest in being caught. It was the first thing that made me laugh again. I always thought of that day when I brought my grandchildren to pet the goats, though I hoped I never had any reason to use the same technique on them.

I had wrapped up some scraps for Jonah and Teyla to feed the nippy little things. Once they’d finished the food, the goats started on Teyla’s jersey, to her mixed delight and horror. I kept an eye on goat teeth and toddler fingers to make sure everybody left with the proper number.

“Ms. Clay,” somebody said, and I glanced up to see who had called me, then back at the babies and the fingers and the goats. They looked vaguely familiar, but everyone did after a while. If I had taught them, I still might not recognize a face with twenty more years on it, if they didn’t spend time on the same decks I did.

“Ms. Clay, I’m Nelson’s parent. Other parent. Lee. I think you know Ash.” Ash was Harriet’s grandkid. They’d refused to play music at all, to Harriet’s endless frustration.

Lee didn’t look anything like Nelson, but then I recalled Harriet saying they had gone full gene-bank. The incentives to include gene variance in family planning were too good for many people to pass up.

“Nice to meet you,” I said.

“I’m sorry if he’s been giving you any trouble,” Lee said. “He’s going through some kind of phase.”

“Phase?” Sometimes feigning ignorance got more interesting answers than agreeing.

“He’s decided school is teaching the wrong things. Says there’s no point in learning anything that doesn’t directly apply to what will be needed planetside. That it puts old ideas into people’s heads, when they should be learning new things. I have no idea where he came up with it.”

I nodded. “Do you work down here?”

Lee gestured down at manure-stained coveralls. “He likes it here, though. Farming fits in his worldview.”

“But history doesn’t?”

“History, classic literature, anything you can’t directly apply. I know he’s probably causing trouble, but he’s a good kid. He’ll settle down once he figures out a place for himself in all this.”

Teyla was offering a mystery fistful of something to a tiny black goat. Jonah looked like he was trying to figure out if he could ride one; I put a hand on his shoulder to hold him back.

“Tell me about the Blackout,” I say at the start of the video I made while still in school. Eighteen-year-old me, already a historian. My voice is much younger. I’m not on screen, but I can picture myself at eighteen. Tall, gawky, darker than my mother, lighter than my father.

“I don’t think there was anybody who didn’t panic,” my grandmother begins. Her purple hair is pulled back in a messy bun, and she is sitting in her own quarters— mine now—with her Cape Breton photos on the walls.

“Once we understood that the glitch hadn’t affected navigation or the systems we rely on to breathe and eat, once it became clear the culprit was a known virus and the damage was irreparable, well, we just had to deal with it.”

“The ‘culprit’ was a person, not a virus, right?”

“A virus who released a virus.” Her face twisted at the thought.

I moved back to safer ground. “Did everyone just ‘deal with it’? That isn’t what I’ve heard.”

“There are a lot of people to include in ‘everyone.’ The younger children handled it fine. They bounced and skated and ran around the rec rooms. The older ones—the ones who relied on external entertainments—had more trouble and got in more trouble, I guess.” She gave a sly smile. “But ask your father how he lost his pinkie finger if you’ve never done so.”

“That was when he did it?”

“You bet. Eighteen years old and some daredevil notion to hitch a ride on the top of a lift. Lucky he survived.”

“He told me a goat bit it off!”

She snorted. “I’m guessing he told you that back when you said you wanted to be a goat farmer when you grew up?”

No answer from younger-me.

She shrugged. “Or maybe he didn’t want to give you any foolish ideas about lift- cowboys.”

“He’s not a daredevil, though.”

“Not anymore. Not after that. Not after you came along the next year. Anyway, you asked who ‘just dealt with it,’ and you’re right. The kids coped because they had nothing to compare it to, but obviously the main thing you want to know about is the adults. The Memory Projects.”

“Yes. That’s the assignment.”

“Right. So. Here you had all these people: born on Earth, raised on Earth. They applied to be Journeyers because they had some romantic notion of setting out for a better place. And those first years, you can’t even imagine what it was like, the combination of excitement and terror. Any time anything went wrong: a replicator brooked, a fan lost power, anything at all, someone started shouting we had set our families up for Certain Death.” She says “certain death” dramatically, wiggling her fingers at me. “Then Crew or Logistics or Tech showed them their problem had an easy fix, and they’d calm down. It didn’t matter how many times we told them we had things under control. Time was the only reassurance.

“By ten years in, we had finally gotten the general populace to relax. Everyone had their part to do, and everyone was finally doing it quietly. We weren’t going to die if a hot water line went cold one day. There were things to worry over, of course, but they were all too big to be worth contemplating. Same as now, you understand? And we had this database, this marvelous database of everything good humans had ever created, music and literature and art from all around the world, in a hundred languages.

“And then Trevor Dube had to go and ruin everything. I know you know that part so I won’t bother repeating it. Morne Brooks did what he did, and that Dube fellow did what he did, and all of a sudden all of these Journeyers, with their dream of their children’s children’s children’s etcetera someday setting foot on a new planet, they all have to deal with their actual children. They have to contemplate the idea the generations after them will never get to see or hear the things they thought were important. That all they have left is the bare walls. They wait—we wait—and wait for the DB to be restored. And they realize: hey, I can’t rely on this database to be here to teach those great-great-great-grandchildren.”

She leans forward. “So everyone doubles down on the things that matter most to them. That’s when some folks who didn’t have it got religion again. The few physical books on board became sacred primary texts, including the ones that had been sacred texts to begin with. Every small bit of personal media got cloned for the greater good, from photos to porn—don’t giggle—but it wasn’t much, not compared to what we’d lost.

“Cultural organizations that had been atrophying suddenly found themselves with more members than they’d had since the journey started. Actors staged any show they knew well enough, made new recordings. People tried to rewrite their favorite books and plays from memory, paint their favorite paintings. Everyone had a different piece, some closer to accurate than others. That’s when we started getting together to play weekly instead of monthly.”

“I thought it was always weekly, Gra.”

“Nope. We didn’t have other entertainments to distract us, and we were worried about the stories behind the songs getting lost. The organized Memory Projects started with us. It seemed like the best way to make sure what we wanted handed down would be handed down. The others saw that we’d found a good way to approach the problem and keep people busy, so other Memory Projects sprung up too. We went through our whole repertoire and picked out the forty songs we most wanted saved. Each of us committed to memorizing as many as we could, but with responsibility for a few in particular. We knew the songs themselves already, but now people pooled what they knew about them, and we memorized their histories, too. Where they came from, what they meant. And later, we were responsible for rerecording those histories, and teaching them to somebody younger, so each song got passed down to another generation. That’s you, incidentally.”

“I know.”

“Just checking. You’re asking me some pretty obvious stuff.”

“It’s for a project. I need to ask.”

“Fine, then. Anyhow, we re-recorded all our songs and histories as quick as possible, then memorized them in case somebody tried to kill the DBs again. And other people memorized the things important to them. History of their people—the stuff that didn’t make it into history books—folk dances, formulae. Actors built plays back from scratch, though some parts weren’t exactly as they’d been. And those poor jazz musicians.”

“Those poor jazz musicians? I thought jazz was about improv.”

“It’s full of improv, but certain performances stood out as benchmarks for their whole mode. I’m glad we play a music that doesn’t set much stock in solo virtuosity. We recorded our fiddle tunes all over again, and the songs are still the songs, but nobody on board could play ‘So What’ like Miles Davis or anything like John Coltrane. Their compositions live on, but not their performances, if that makes sense. Would have devastated your grandfather, if he’d been on board. Anyway, what was I saying? The human backup idea had legs, even if it worked better for some things than others. It was a worst case scenario.”

“Which two songs did you memorize history for?”

“Unofficially, all of them. Officially, same as you. ‘Honeysuckle’ and ‘Wind Will Rove.’ You know that.”

“I know, Gra. For the assignment.”

“Windy Grove”

Historical Reenactment: Marius Smit as Howie McCabe, Cape Breton Fiddlemaker: Vandiver wasn’t wrong. There was a tune called “Windy Grove.” My great-grandfather played it, but it was too complicated for most fiddlers. I can only remember a
little of the tune now. It had lyrics, too, in Gaelic and English. I don’t think Vandiver ever mentioned those. There was probably a Gaelic name too, but that’s lost along with the song.

My great-grandfather grew up going to real milling frolics, before machines did the wool-shrinking and frolics just became social events. The few songs I know in Gaelic I know because they have that milling frolic rhythm; it drives them into your brain. “Windy Grove” wasn’t one of those. As far as I know it was always a fiddle tune, but not a common one because of its difficulty.

All I know is the A part in English, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t get the melody right now, so I’m going to sing it to the melody of “Wind Will Rove”:

We went down to the windy grove

Never did know where the wind did go

Never too sure when the wind comes back

If it’s the same wind that we knew last.

Nelson’s essay arrived promptly on Monday. It began “Many examples of history repeating itself can be seen in our coursework. There are rulers who didn’t learn from other ruler’s mistakes.”

I corrected the apostrophe and kept reading. “You know who they are because you taught us about them. Why do you need me to say them back to you? Instead I’m going to write about history repeating itself in a different way. Look around you, Ms. Clay.

“I’m on this ship because my great-grandparents decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives on a ship. They thought they were being unselfish. They thought they were making a sacrifice so someday their children’s children’s children to the bazillionth or whatever would get to be pioneers on a planet that people hadn’t started killing yet, and they were pretty sure wouldn’t kill them, and where they’re hoping there’s no intelligent life. They made a decision that locked us into doing exactly what they did.

“So here we are. My parents were born on this ship. I was born here. My chromosomes come from the gene bank, from two people who died decades before I was born.

“What can we do except repeat history? What can I do that nobody here has ever done before? In two years I’ll choose a specialty. I can work with goats, like my parents. I could be an engineer or a doctor or a dentist or a horticulturist, who are all focused on keeping us alive in one way or another. I can be a history teacher like you, but obviously I won’t. I can be a theoretical farmer or a theoretical something else, where I learn things that will never be useful here, in order to pass them on to my kids and my kid’s kids, so they can pass them on and someday somebody can use them, if there’s really a place we’re going and we’re really going to get there someday.

“But I’m never going to stand on a real mountain, and I can’t be a king or a prime minister or a genocidal tyrant like you teach us about. I can’t be Lord Nelson, an old white man with a giant hat, and you might think I was named after him but I was named after a goat who was named after a horse some old farmer had on Earth who was named after somebody in a book or a band or an entertainment who might have been Lord Nelson or Nelson Mandela or some other Nelson entirely who you can’t teach me about because we don’t remember them anymore.

“The old history can’t repeat, and I’m in the next generation of people who make no impact on anything whatsoever. We aren’t making history. We’re in the middle of the ocean and the shore is really far away. When we climb out the journey should have changed us, but you want us to take all the baggage with us, so we’re exactly the same as when we left. But we can’t be, and we shouldn’t be.”

I turned off the screen and closed my eyes. I could fail him for not writing the assignment as I had intended it, but he clearly understood.

“Wendigo”

Traditional. Lost.

Harriet Barrie:

Another tune we have the name of but not much else. I’m personally of the belief “Wendigo” and “Windy Grove” are the same song. Some Cape Bretonians took it with them when they moved to the Algonquins. Taught it to some local musicians who misheard the title and conflated it with local monster lore. There’s a tune called “When I Go” that started making the rounds in Ontario not long after, though nobody ever showed an interest in it outside of Ontario and Finland.

If we were only to play songs about things we knew, we would lose a lot of our playlist. No wind. No trees. No battles, no seas, no creeks, no mountaintops. We’d sing of travelers, but not journeys. We’d sing of middles, but not beginnings or ends. We would play songs of waiting and longing. We’d play love songs.

Why not songs about stars, you might ask? Why not songs about darkness and space? The traditionalists wouldn’t play them. I’m not sure who’d write them, either. People on Earth wrote about blue skies because they’d stood under grey ones. They wrote about night because there was such a thing as day. Songs about prison are poignant because the character knew something else beforehand and dreamed of other things ahead. Past and future are both abstractions now.

When my daughter Natalie was in her teens, she played fiddle in a band that would be classified in the new DB as “other/undefined” if they had uploaded anything. Part of their concept was that they wouldn’t record their music, and they requested that nobody else record it either. A person would have to be there to experience it. I guess it made sense for her to fall into something like that after listening to me and Gra and Harriet.

I borrowed back the student fiddle she and I had both played as children. She told me she didn’t want me going to hear them play.

“You’ll just tell me it sounds like noise or my positions are sloppy,” she said. “Or worse yet, you’ll say we sound exactly like this band from 2030 and our lyrics are in the tradition of blah blah blah, and I’ll end up thinking we stole everything from a musician I’d never even heard before. We want to do something new.”

“I’d never,” I said, even though a knot had formed in my stomach. Avoided commenting when I heard her practicing. Bit my tongue when Harriet complained musicians shouldn’t be wasting their time on new music when they ought to be working on preserving what we already had.

I did go to check them out once, when they played the Seven Dec Rec. I stood in the back, in the dark. To me it sounded like shouting down an elevator shaft, all ghosts and echoes. The songs had names like “Because I Said So” and “Terrorform”; they shouted the titles in between pieces, but the PA was distorting and even those I might have misheard.

I counted fifteen young musicians in the band, from different factions all over the ship: children of jazz, of rock, of classical music, of zouk, of Chinese opera, of the West African drumming group. It didn’t sound anything like anything I’d ever heard before. I still couldn’t figure out whether they were synthesizing the traditions they’d grown up in or rejecting them entirely.

My ears didn’t know what to pay attention to, so I focused on Nat. She still had decent technique from her childhood lessons, but she used it in ways I didn’t know how to listen to. She played rhythm rather than lead, a pad beneath the melody, a staccato polyrhythm formed with fiddle and drum.

I almost missed when she lit into “Wind Will Rove.” I’d never even have recognized it if I had been listening to the whole instead of focusing on Nat’s part. Hers was a countermelody to something else entirely, the rhythm swung but the key unchanged. Harriet would have hated it, but I thought it had a quiet power, hidden as it was beneath the bigger piece.

I never told Nat I’d gone to hear her that night, because I didn’t want to admit I’d listened.

I’ve researched punk and folk and hip-hop’s births, and the protest movements that went hand in hand with protest music. Music born of people trying to change the status quo. What could my daughter and her friends change? What did people want changed? The ship sails on. They played together for a year before calling it quits. She gave her fiddle away again and threw herself into studying medicine. As they’d pledged, nobody ever uploaded their music, so there’s no evidence it ever existed outside this narrative.

My grandmother smuggled the upright bass on board. It’s Doug Kelly’s now, but it came onto the ship under my grandmother’s “miscellaneous supplies” professional allowance. That’s how it’s listed in the original manifest: “Miscellaneous Supplies— 1 Extra-Large Crate—200 cm x 70 cm x 70 cm.” When I was studying the manifest for a project, trying to figure out who had brought what, I asked her why the listed weight was so much more than the instrument’s weight.

“Strings,” she said. “It was padded with clothes and then the box was filled with string packets. For the bass, for the fiddles. Every cranny of every box I brought on board was filled with strings and hair and rosin. I didn’t trust replicators.”

The bass belonged at the time to Jonna Rich. In my grandmother’s photo of the original OldTime players on the ship, Jonna’s dwarfed by her instrument. It’s only a 3/4 size, but it still looms over her. I never met her. My grandmother said, “You’ve never seen such a tiny woman with such big, quick hands.”

When her arthritis got too bad to play, Jonna passed it to Marius Smit, “twice her size, but half the player she was.” Then Jim Riggins, then Alison Smit, then Doug Kelly, with assorted second and third stand-ins along the way. Those were the OldTime players. The bass did double duty in some jazz ensembles, as well as the orchestra.

Personal weight and space allowances didn’t present any problems for those who played most instruments. The teams handling logistics and psychological welfare sparred and negotiated and compromised and re-compromised. They made space for four communal drum kits (two each: jazz trap and rock five-piece), twenty-two assorted amplifiers for rock and jazz, bass and guitar and keyboard. We have two each of three different Chinese zithers, and one hundred and three African drums of thirty-two different types, from djembe to carimbo. There’s a PA in every Rec, but only a single tuba. The music psychologist consulted by the committee didn’t understand why an electric bass wasn’t a reasonable compromise for the sake of space. Hence my grandmother’s smuggling job.

How did a committee on Earth ever think they could guess what we’d need fifty or eighty or one hundred and eighty years into the voyage? They set us up with state of the art replicators, with our beautiful, doomed databases, with programs and simulators to teach skills we would need down the line. Still, there’s no model that accurately predicts the future. They had no way of prognosticating the brooked database or the resultant changes. They’d have known, if they’d included an actual musician on the committee, that we needed an upright bass. I love how I’m still surrounded by the physical manifestations of my grandmother’s influence on the ship: the upright bass, the pygmy goats. Her fiddle, my fiddle now.

I arrived in my classroom on Thursday to discover somebody had hacked my walls.

Scrawled over my photo screens: “Collective memory =/= truth,” “History is fiction,” “The past is a lie.” A local overlay, not an overwrite. Nothing invasive of my personal files or permanent. Easy to erase, easy to figure out who had done it. I left it up.

As my students walked in, I watched their faces. Some were completely oblivious, wrapped up in whatever they were listening to, slouching into their seats without even looking up. A few snickered or exchanged wide-eyed glances.

Nelson arrived with a smirk on his face, a challenge directed at me. He didn’t even look at the walls. It took him a moment to notice I hadn’t cleaned up after him; when he did notice, the smirk was replaced with confusion.

“You’re wondering why I didn’t wipe this off my walls before you arrived?”

The students who hadn’t been paying attention looked around for the first time. “Whoa,” somebody said.

“The first answer is that it’s easier to report if I leave it up. Vandalism and hacking are both illegal, and I don’t think it would be hard to figure out who did this, but since there’s no permanent damage, I thought we might use this as a learning experience.” Everyone looked at Nelson, whose ears had turned red.

I continued. “I think what somebody is trying to ask is, let’s see, ‘Ms. Clay, how do we know that the history we’re learning is true? Why does it matter?’ And I think they expect me to answer, ‘because I said so,’ or something like that. But the real truth is, our history is a total mess. It’s built on memories of facts, and memories are unreliable. Before, they could cross-reference memories and artifacts to a point where you could say with some reliability that certain things happened and certain things didn’t. We’ve lost almost all of the proof.”

“So what’s left?” I pointed to the graffitied pictures. “I’m here to help figure out which things are worth remembering, which things are still worth calling fact or truth or whatever you want to call it. Maybe it isn’t the most practical field of study, but it’s still important. It’ll matter to you someday when your children come to you to ask why we’re on this journey. It’ll matter when something goes wrong and we can look to the past and say ‘how did we solve this when we had this problem before’ instead of starting from scratch. It matters because of all the people who asked ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what if’ instead of allowing themselves to be absorbed in their own problems—they thought of us, so why shouldn’t we think of them?

“Today we’re going to talk about the climate changes that the Earth was experiencing by the time they started building this ship, and how that played into the politics. And just so you’re not waiting with bated breath through the entire class, your homework for the week is to interview somebody who still remembers Earth. Ask them why they or their parents got on board. Ask them what they remember about that time, and any follow-up questions you think make sense. For bonus points upload to the oral history DB once you’ve sent your video to me.”

I looked around to see if anyone had any questions, but they were all silent. I started the lesson I was actually supposed to be teaching.

I’d been given that same assignment at around their age. It was easier to find original Journeyers to interview back then, but I always turned to my grandmother. The video is buried in the Oral History DB, but I’d memorized the path to it long ago.

She’s still in good health in this one, fit and strong, with her trademark purple hair. For all our closeness, I have no idea what her hair’s original color was.

“Why did you leave?” I ask.

“I didn’t really consider it leaving. Going someplace, not leaving something else behind.”

“Isn’t leaving something behind part of going someplace?”

“You think of it your way, I’ll think of it mine.”

“Is that what all the Journeyers said?”

My grandmother snorts. “Ask any two and we’ll give you two different answers. You’re asking me, so I’m telling you how I see it. We had the technology, and the most beautiful ship. We had—have—a destination that reports perfect conditions to sustain us.”

“How did you feel about having a child who would never get to the destination?”

“I thought ‘my daughter will have a life nobody has ever had before, and she’ll be part of a generation that makes new rules for what it means to be a person existing with other people.’” She shrugs. “I found that exciting. I thought she’d live in the place she lived, and she’d do things she loved and things she hated, and she’d live out her life like anybody does.”

She pauses, then resumes without prompting. “There were worse lives to live, back then. This seemed like the best choice for our family. No more running away; running toward something wonderful.”

“Was there anything you missed about Earth?”

“A thing, like not a person? If a person counts, your grandfather and my other kids, always and forever. There was nothing else I loved that I couldn’t take with me,” she says, with a faraway look in her eyes.

“Nothing?” I press.

She smiles. “Nothing anybody can keep. The sea. The wind coming off the coast. I can still feel it when I’m inside a good song.”

She reaches to pick up her fiddle.

There was a question I pointedly didn’t ask in that video, the natural follow-up that fit in my grandmother’s pause. I didn’t ask because it wasn’t my teacher’s business how my mother fit into that generation “making new rules for what it means to be a person existing with other people,” as my grandmother put it. If I haven’t mentioned my mother much, it’s because she and I never really understood each other.

She was eight when she came aboard. Old enough to have formative memories of soil and sky and wind. Old enough to come on board with her own small scale fiddle. Fourteen when she told my grandmother she didn’t want to play music anymore.

Eighteen when the Blackout happened. Nineteen when she had me, one of a slew of Blackout Babies granted by joint action of the Advisory Council and Logistics. They would have accepted anything that kept people happy and quiet at that point, as long as the numbers bore out its sustainability.

My grandmother begged her to come back to music, to help with the OldTime portion of the Memory Project. She refused. She’d performed in a Shakespeare comedy called Much Ado About Nothing just before the Blackout, while she was still in school. She still knew Hero’s lines by heart, and the general dramatists and Shakespeareans had both reached out to her to join their Memory Projects; they all had their hands full rebuilding plays from scratch.

The film faction recruited her as well, with their ridiculously daunting task. My favorite video from that period shows my twenty-year-old mother playing the lead in a historical drama called Titanic. It’s a recreation of an old movie, and an even older footnote in history involving an enormous sea ship.

My mother: young, gorgeous, glowing. She wore gowns that shimmered when she moved. The first time she showed it to me, when I was five, all I noticed was how beautiful she looked.

When I was seven, I asked her if the ocean could kill me.

“There’s no ocean here. We made it up, Rosie.”

That made no sense. I saw it there on the screen, big enough to surround the ship, like liquid, tangible space, a space that could chase you down the street and surround you. She took me down to the soundstage on Eight Deck, where they were filming a movie called Serena. I know now they were still triaging, filming every important movie to the best of their recollection, eight years out from the Blackout, based on scripts rewritten from memory in those first desperate years. Those are the only versions I’ve ever known.

She showed me how a sea was not a sea, a sky was not a sky. I got to sit on a boat that was not a boat, and in doing so learn what a boat was.

“Why are you crying, Mama?” I asked her later that evening, wandering from my bunk to my parents’ bed.

My father picked me up and squeezed me tight. “She’s crying about something she lost.”

“I’m not tired. Can we watch the movie again?”

We sat and watched my young mother as she met and fell in love with someone else, someone pretend. As they raced a rush of water that I had already been assured would never threaten me or my family. As the ship sank—it’s not real, there’s no sea, nothing sinks anymore—and the lifeboats disappeared and the two lovers were forced to huddle together on a floating door until their dawn rescue.

When I was sixteen, my mother joined a cult. Or maybe she started it; NewTime is as direct a rebuttal to my grandmother’s mission as could exist. They advocated erasing the entertainment databases again, forever, in the service of the species.

“We’re spending too much creative energy recreating the things we carried with us,” she said. I listened from my bunk as she calmly packed her clothes.

“You’re a Shakespearean! You’re supposed to recreate.” My father never raised his voice either. That’s what I remembered most about their conversation afterward: how neither ever broke calm.

“I was a Shakespearean, but more than that, I’m an actress. I want new things to act in. Productions that speak to who we are now, not who we were on Earth. Art that tells our story.”

“You have a family.”

“And I love you all, but I need this.”

The next morning, she kissed us both goodbye as if she was going to work, then left with the NewTime for Fourteen Deck. I didn’t know what Advisory Council machinations were involved in relocating the Fourteen Deck families to make room for an unplanned community, or what accommodations had to be made for people who opted out of jobs to live a pure artistic existence. There were times in human history where that was possible, but this wasn’t one of them. Those are questions I asked later. At that moment, I was furious with her.

I don’t know if I ever stopped being angry, really. I never went to any of the original plays that trickled out of the NewTime; I’ve never explored their art or their music. I never learned what we looked like through their particular lens. It wasn’t new works I opposed; it was their idea they had to separate themselves from us to create them. How could anything they wrote actually reflect our experience if they weren’t in the community anymore?

They never came back down to live with the rest of us. My mother and I reconciled when I had Natalie, but she wasn’t the person I remembered, and I’m pretty sure she thought the same about me. She came down to play with Nat sometimes, but I never left them alone together, for fear the separatist idea might rub off on my kid.

The night I saw Natalie’s short-lived band perform, the night I hid in the darkness all those years ago so she wouldn’t get mad at me for coming, it wasn’t until I recognized “Wind Will Rove” that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Theirs wasn’t a NewTime rejection of everything that had gone before; it was a synthesis.

“Wind Will Roam”

Historical Reenactment: Akona Mvovo as Will E. Womack:

My aunt cleaned house for some folks over in West Hollywood, and they used to give her records to take home to me. I took it all in. Everything influenced me. The west coast rappers, but also Motown and pop and rock and these great old-timey fiddle records. I wanted to play fiddle so bad when I heard this song, but where was I going to get one? Wasn’t in the cards.

The song I sampled for “Wind Will Roam”—this fiddle record “Wind Will Rove”—it changed me. There’s something about the way the first part lifts that moves me every time. I’ve heard there’s a version with lyrics out there somewhere, but I liked the instrumental, so I could make up my own words over it. I wrote the first version when I was ten years old. I thought “rove” sounded like a dog, so I called it “Wind Will Roam,’” about a dog named Wind. I was a literal kid.

Second version when I was fifteen, I don’t really remember that one too well. I was rapping and recording online by then, so there’s probably a version out there somewhere. Don’t show it to me if you find it. I was trying to be badass then. I’d just as soon pretend it never existed.

I came back to “Wind Will Rove” again and again. I think I was twenty-five when I recorded this one, and my son had just been born, and I wanted to give him something really special. I still liked “Wind Will Roam” better than “Wind Will Rove,” ’cause I could rhyme it with “home” and “poem” and all that.

(sings)

The wind will roam And so will I I’ve got miles to go before I die But I’ll come back I always do Just like the wind I’ll come to you.

We might go weeks without no rain And every night the sun will go away again Some winds blow warm some winds blow low You and me’ve got miles and miles to go I wanted to take something I loved and turn it into something else entirely. Transform it.

The next OldTime started out in G. My grandmother had never much cared for the key of G; since her death we’d played way more G sessions than we ever had when she chose the songs. “Dixie Blossoms,” then “Down the River.” “Squirrel Hunters.” “Jaybird Died of the Whooping Cough.” “The Long Way Home.” “Ladies on the Steamboat.” Harriet called a break in the third hour and said when we came back we were going to do some D tunes, starting with “Midnight on the Water.” I knew the sequence she was setting up: “Midnight on the Water,” then “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” then “Wind Will Rove.” I was pretty sure she did it for me; I think she was glad to have me back in the second row and punctual.

Most stood up and stretched, or put their instruments down to go get a snack. A few fiddlers, myself included, took the opportunity to cross-tune to DDAD. These songs could all be played in standard tuning, but the low D drone added something ineffable.

When everybody had settled back into their seats, Harriet counted us into the delicate waltz time of “Midnight on the Water.” Then “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” dark and lively. And then, as I’d hoped, “Wind Will Rove.”

No matter how many times you play a song, it isn’t the same song twice. I was still thinking about Nelson’s graffiti, and how the past had never felt like a lie to me at all. It was a progression. “Wind Will Rove” said we are born anew every time a bow touches fiddle strings in an OldTime session on a starship in this particular way. It is not the ship nor the session nor the bow nor the fiddle that births us. Nor the hands. It’s the combination of all of those things, in a particular way they haven’t been combined before. We are an alteration on an old, old tune. We are body and body, wood and flesh. We are bow and fiddle and hands and memory and starship and OldTime.

“Wind Will Rove” spoke to me, and my eyes closed to feel the wind the way my grandmother did, out on a cliff above the ocean. We cycled through the A part, the B part three times, four times, five. And because I’d closed my eyes, because I was in the song and not in the room, I didn’t catch Harriet’s signal for the last go-round. Everyone ended together except me. Even worse, I’d deviated. Between the bars of my unexpected solo, when my own playing stood exposed against the silence, I realized I’d diverged from the tune. It was still “Wind Will Rove,” or close to it, but I’d elided the third bar into the fourth, a swooping, soaring accident.

Harriet gave me a look I interpreted as a cross between exasperation and reprobation. I’d used a similar one on my students before, but it’d been a long time since I’d been on the receiving end.

“Sorry,” I said, mostly sorry the sensation had gone, that I’d lost the wind.

I slipped out the door early, while everyone was still playing. I didn’t want to talk to Harriet. Back home, I tried to recreate my mistake. I heard it in my head, but I never quite made it happen again, and after half an hour I put away my fiddle.

I’d rather have avoided Harriet the next morning, but canceling our standing date would have made things worse. I woke up early again. Debated showering to give her a different reason to be annoyed with me, then decided against it when I realized she’d stack the two grievances rather than replace one with the other.

We met in her quarters this time, up three decks from my own, slightly smaller, every surface covered with archival boxes and stacks of handwritten sheet music.

“So what happened last night?” she asked without preamble.

I held up my hands in supplication. “I didn’t see you call the stop. I’m sorry. And after you told me I belonged in the closer circles and everything. It won’t happen again.”

“But you didn’t even play it right. That’s one of your tunes. You’ve been playing that song for fifty years! People were talking afterward. Expect some teasing next week. Nothing else happened worth gossiping about, so they’re likely to remember unless somebody else does something silly.”

I didn’t have a good response. Missing the stop had been silly, sure, but what I had done to the tune didn’t feel wrong, exactly. A different wind, as my grandmother would have said.

“Any word on what went wrong in the database the other day?” I asked to change the subject.

She furrowed her brow. “None. Tech said it’s an access issue, not the DB itself. It’s happening to isolated pieces. You can still access them if you enter names directly instead of going through the directories or your saved preferences, but it’s a pain. They can’t locate the source. I have to tell you, I’m more than a little concerned. I mean, the material is obviously still there, since I can get to some of it roundabout, but it really hampers research. And it gets me thinking we may want to consider adding another redundancy layer in the Memory Project.”

She went on at length on the issue, and I let her go. I preferred her talking on any subject other than me.

When she started to flag, I interrupted. “Harriet, what does ‘Oklahoma Rooster’ mean to you?”

“I don’t have much history for that one. Came from an Oklahoma fiddler named Dick Hutchinson, but I don’t know if he wrote—”

“—I don’t mean the history. What does it make you feel?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. It’s a nice, simple fiddle tune.”

“But you’ve actually seen a farm in real life. Does it sound like a rooster?”

She shrugged. “I’ve never really given it much thought. It’s a nice tune. Not worthy of a spot in the Memory Project, but a nice tune. Why do you ask?”

It would sound stupid to say I thought myself on a farm when I played that song; I wouldn’t tell her where “Wind Will Rove” took me either. “Just curious.”

“Harriet’s grandson is going to drive me crazy,” I told Natalie. I had spent the afternoon with Teyla and Jonah, as I did every Friday, but this time Jonah had dragged us to the low gravity room. They had bounced, and I had watched and laughed along with their unrestrained joy, but I had a shooting pain in my neck from the way my head had followed the arcs of their flight.

Afterward, I’d logged into my class chat to find Nelson had again stirred the others into rebellion. The whole class, except for two I’d describe as timid and one as diligent, had elected not to do the new assignment due Tuesday. They had all followed his lead with a statement “We reject history. The future is in our hands.”

“At least they all turned it in early,” Nat joked. “But seriously, why are you letting him bother you?”

She stooped to pick up some of the toys scattered across the floor. The kids drew on the table screen with their fingers. Jonah was making a Tyrannosaurus, all body and tail and teeth and feathers. Teyla was still too young for her art to look representational, but she always used space in interesting ways. I leaned in to watch both of them.

“You laugh,” I said. “Maybe by the time they’re his age now, Nelson will have taken over the entire system. Only the most future-relevant courses. Reject the past. Don’t reflect on the human condition. No history, no literature, no dinosaurs.”

Jonah frowned. “No dinosaurs?”

“Grandma Rosie’s joking, Jonah.”

Jonah accepted that. His curly head bent down over the table again.

I continued. “It was one thing when he was a one-boy revolution. What am I supposed to do now that his virus is spreading to his whole class?”

Nat considered for a moment. “I’d work on developing an antidote, then hide it in a faster, stronger virus and inject it into the class. But, um, that’s my professional opinion.”

“What’s the antidote in your analogy? Or the faster, stronger virus?”

Nat smiled, spread her hands. “It wasn’t an analogy, sorry. I only know from viruses and toddlers. Sometimes both at once. Now are you going to play for these kids before I try to get them to sleep? They really like the one about the sleepy bumblebee.” She picked Teyla up from her chair, turned it around, and sat down with Teyla in her lap. Jonah kept drawing.

I picked up my fiddle. “What’s a bumblebee, Jonah?”

He answered without looking up. “A dinosaur.”

I sighed and started to play.

Natalie’s answer got me thinking. I checked in with Nelson’s literature teacher, who confirmed he was doing the same thing in her class as well.

How wrong was he? They learned countries and borders, abstract names, lines drawn and redrawn. The books taught in lit classes captured the human condition, but rendered it through situations utterly foreign to us. To us. To me as much as him.

I had always liked the challenge. Reading about the way things had been in the past made our middle-years condition more acceptable to me. Made beginnings more concrete. Everyone in history lived in middle-years too; no matter when they lived, there was a before and an after, even if a given group or individual might not be around for the latter. I enjoyed tracing back through the changes, seeing what crumbled and what remained.

I enjoyed. Did I pass on my enjoyment? Maybe I’d been thinking too much about why I liked to study history, and not considering why my students found it tedious. It was my job to find a way to make it relevant to them. If they weren’t excited, I had failed them.

When I got home from dinner that night, when I picked up my fiddle to play “Wind Will Rove,” it was the new, elided version, the one that had escaped me previously. Now I couldn’t find the original phrasing again, even with fifty years’ muscle memory behind it.

I went to the database to listen to how it actually went, and was relieved when the song came up without trouble. The last variation in the new DB was filed under “Wind Will Rove” but would more accurately have been listed as “Wind Will Roam,” and even that one recreated somebody’s memory of an interview predating our ship. If this particular song’s history hadn’t contained all those interviews in which the song’s interpreters sang snippets, if Harriet or my grandmother or someone hadn’t watched it enough times to memorize it, or hadn’t thought it important, we wouldn’t have any clue how it went. Those little historic recreations weren’t even the songs themselves, but they got their own piece of history, their own stories. Why did they matter? They mattered because somebody had cared about them enough to create them.

I walked into my classroom on Monday, fiddle case over my shoulder, to the nervous giggles of students who knew they had done something brazen and now waited to find out what came of it. Nelson, not giggling, met my gaze with his own, steady and defiant.

“Last week, somebody asked me a question, using the very odd delivery mechanism of my classroom walls.” I touched my desk and swiped the graffitied walls blank.

“Today I’m going to tell you that you don’t have a choice. You’re in this class to learn our broken, damaged history, everything that’s left of it. And then to pass it on, probably breaking it even further. And maybe it’ll keep twisting until every bit of fact is wrung out of it, but what’s left will still be some truth about who we are or who we were. The part most worth remembering.”

I put my fiddle case on the desk. Took my time tuning down to DDAD, listening to the whispered undercurrent.

When I liked the tuning, I lifted my bow. “This is a song called ‘Wind Will Rove.’ I want you to hear what living history means to me.”

I played them all. All the known variations, all the ones that weren’t lost to time. I rested the fiddle and sang Howie McCabe’s faulty snippet of “Windy Grove” from the recreation of his historical interview and Will E. Womack’s “Wind Will Roam.” I recited the history in between: “Windy Grove” and “Wendigo” and “When I Go.” Lifted the fiddle to my chin again and closed my eyes. “Wind Will Rove”: three times through in its traditional form, three times through with my own alterations.

“Practice too much and you sound like you’re remembering it instead of feeling it,” my grandmother used to say. This was a new room to my fiddle; even the old variations felt new within it. My fingers danced light and quick.

I tried to make the song sound like something more than wind. What did any of us know of wind? Nothing but words on a screen. I willed our entire ship into the new song I created. We were the wind. We were the wind and borne by the wind, transmitted. I played a ship traveling through the vacuum. I played life on the ship, footsteps on familiar streets, people, goats, frustration, movement while standing still.

The students sat silent at the end. Only one was an OldTimer, Emily Redhorse, who had been one of the three who actually turned in their assignments; Nelson grew up hearing this music, I know. I was pretty sure the rest had no clue what they heard. One look at Nelson said he’d already formulated a response, so I didn’t let him open his mouth.

I settled my fiddle back into its case and left.

There are so many stories about my grandmother. I don’t imagine there’ll ever be many about me. Maybe one of the kids in this class will tell a story about the day their teacher cracked up. Maybe Emily Redhorse will take a seat in the OldTime one day and light into my tune. Maybe history and story will combine to birth something larger than both, and you, Teyla, you and your brother will take the time to investigate where anecdote deviates from truth. If you wonder which of these stories are true, well, they all are in their way, even if some happened and some didn’t.

I’ve recorded my song variation into the new database, in the “other” section to keep from offending Harriet, for now. I call it “We Will Rove.” I think my grandmother would approve. I’ve included a history, too, starting with “Windy Grove” and “Wind Will Rove,” tracing through my grandmother’s apocryphal spacewalk and my mother’s attempt to find meaning for herself and my daughter’s unrecorded song, on the way to my own adaptation. It’s all one story, at its core.

I’m working more changes into the song, making it more and more my own. I close my eyes when I play it, picturing a through-line, picturing how one day, long after I’m gone, a door will open. Children will spill from the ship and into the bright sun of a new place, and somebody will lift my old fiddle, my grandmother’s fiddle, and will put a new tune to the wind.